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March 1921 Proceedings—Billy Mitchell, son of a U.S. senator, is on a roll that began as a teenager when he enlisted to fight in Cuba and the Philippines, during the Spanish-American War. Jn 1912, he becomes the youngest member of the Army’s General Staff. He wins his wings in 1916, leads a 1,500-plane bombing attack in World War I, and comes home to be appointed the Army’s Director of Military Aviation. In 1920, his book, Our Air Force—The Keystone of National Defense, puts him on a collision course with his opposite number, Captain T. T. (“Turn To”) Craven, Director of Naval Aviation.
Mitchell’s claim that airplanes can sink battleships is unsettling enough, but what really draws T. T.’s fire is Mitchell’s call for a single air service.
In “Naval Aviation and a United Air Service” and his accompanying book review of Our Air Force..., Craven explains why the apples and oranges of military and naval aviation won’t fit in the same crate. Mitchell, he concedes, knows his apples—but doesn’t know zilch about the airplanes that need to be floatable, foldable, cat-launchable and retrievable. The last word, however, belongs to Naval Institute President Bradley Fiske. In the Discussion section, Fiske writes that Craven’s article “is so moderate, complete, convincing, and sound that no way of discussing it occurs to me.”
March 1941 Proceedings—Anybody for the good old days? Commander J.
H. Skillman takes us back to the idyllic time of our founding fathers in “Eating Through the Ages.” He is not concerned with the cuisine of Mount Vernon or Monticello. Instead, he invites us out to sea to witness the Sunday meal of a typical general mess. The 15-20 sailors squatting on their haunches around a square tarpaulin look like they’ll eat anything that doesn’t eat them first. In the center of the tarpaulin is the cracker hash—-bits of hardtack, chunks of salt beef and salt pork, potatoes, turnips and any other available vegetables—the whole well-seasoned with fat.
Acrid spruce beer and distilled spirits took the sailorman’s mind off the menu until the Act of July 1862 outlawed spirits on board vessels-of-war, except for medical purposes. To compensate for the loss the daily commuted ration was increased by five cents. Paymaster Casper Schenk eulogized the loss of the spirit-room key in “A Farewell to Grog:”
“Jack’s happy days will soon be past,”
To return again — No! Never!
For they’ve raised his pay five cents a day,
And stopped his grog forever.”
March 1961 Proceedings—Captain H. B. Seim, U.S. Navy, winner of the Gold Medal in 1949, knows that his Prize Essay this year, if published, will make him just about as popular as a rat in a mess hall. Nevertheless, his paper not only wins a prize—it wins another Gold Medal. Thus, “Are We Ready to Wage Limited War?” demands our careful study. Seim begins: “The subject of this essay is an unpopular one: not winning. This is not the same as losing. It means fighting a limited war to a draw.” Seim says that the United States was introduced to “no-win” warfare in Korea when the Chinese intervened in 1950 and, as General Douglas MacArthur recalled, he was required to “soften our blows and to send men into battle with neither promise nor hope of victory.”
The essay is uncannily prescient in the way it lists many of the salient characteristics of the Vietnam War, which the United States would enter directly in four short years: Shadowy, undefined enemies; self-imposed restrictions on the area and scope of conflict; limited political objectives, with the national survival of the opponent not directly at stake; indecisive fighting and uneasy truces with the issues still unresolved; and safe havens where the enemy can fall back and regroup.
These, of course, proved to be some of the major errors of Vietnam, compounded over the years into a failure of Seim’s final criterion: the will to act. Was this in reality a self-fulfilling prophesy?
Clay Barrow
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Proceedings / March 1991