Digitizing Proceedings
Realizing an important strategic goal, the U.S. Naval Institute has just completed digitizing every issue of Proceedings published over 140 years. With the contents preserved electronically, they will be available to Members now and in the years to come to access, use, and enjoy.
The May 1940 issue of Proceedings contained a list of the new U.S. Navy vessels then under construction. Their names, as yet free of a modern legacy, would be written indelibly in naval annals within a few short years—Hornet, Wasp, Washington, South Dakota, Atlanta, Juneau, and others. The fleet fielded 243 surface combatants at the time. By August 1945, when hostilities ceased, 932 combat ships were the pulse of a victorious armada that stood astride the world. Four years along, demobilization would cut the register to 192 ships. In 1949, as a Cold War with an erstwhile ally loomed, the cycle of naval bust-boom-bust was beginning anew. Contributors to Proceedings told the story of this explosive growth and retrenchment, producing a record of a decade that is an epic for the ages.
In his prize-winning April 1940 essay “A Threat and an Opportunity,” Franklin G. Percival called for a surface fleet and air arm capable of waging a two-ocean war. It seemed prescient even as it neglected to examine Japan as an opponent in particular. Adolf Hitler was moving into France when Brockholst Livingston appeared in the May issue, articulating the stakes for America: “Call it a phony war if we will, it is war, nevertheless. . . . Come what may, are we ready for the future? That is a question which should be on our minds constantly. Are we ready should the wars of Europe and Asia extend to our shores or circumvent our interests?”
Japan’s strike on Pearl Harbor took several months to register in the pages of the journal. The January 1942 issue seemed removed from the existential challenge at hand: “Physical Fitness,” “Landlocked Waters in War,” “Improvement in Star Finding.” The next issue carried President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s message to the nation and Congress’ War Resolution. Thereafter, Albert T. Church and his staff regained pace with the spinning world. The February 1942 issue reprinted in “Professional Notes” a British sailor’s account of the sinking of HMS Prince of Wales and Repulse. What happened on Oahu was too hot to touch.
Because the fight against Japan was mainly a naval war, our western ocean would get more ink than others. But in his prize-winning essay, “How Shall We Win?” (April 1942) E. M. Eller looked beyond geography, weapons, training, and morale. “In every fateful period of history the ultimate balance of strength (and usually the largest component in it) has come from the integrity of purpose, resolution, and energy of men in posts of high responsibility.”
Theory versus bloody practice was a theme in the 1940s, and their stepchild, doctrine, advanced in fits and starts. Isaiah Olch, in “Future Naval Forces” (May 1942), likened naval surface task forces to armored divisions and suggested that Nazi Germany’s style of land warfare should shape naval doctrine. “Break out the game board!” he concluded. Well, no. The Battle of Midway, forcing a rewrite of all the manuals, was just around the corner. Naval aviation got a savvy assessment in William H. Hessler’s “The Carrier Task Force in World War II” (November 1945). Amphibious warfare was no less important or complex, as suggested by R. D. Heinl Jr.’s “Naval Gunfire: Scourge of the Beaches” (November 1945), Harold Bradley Say’s “They Pioneered a Channel to Tokyo,” on the underwater demolition teams (November 1945), and Maynard M. Nohrden’s “The Amphibian Tractor, Jack of All Trades” (January 1946). The vital discipline of ship repair got shored up in “You Can’t Beat ’Em If You Can’t Sink ’Em,” by R. E. Williams (March 1946), and Homer N. Wallin covered the raising and salvage of the Nevada, California, and West Virginia in “Rejuvenation at Pearl Harbor” (December 1946).
First-person narratives gave life to Proceedings during the 1940s (and would carry through the decades ahead): Its editors gave us T. C. Parker on the siege of Corregidor (January 1943); J. J. Southerland on dogfighting over Guadalcanal (April 1943—“I am deeply grateful to the manufacturer of our armor plate. . .”); and a trio of accounts by William P. Mack on the battles of Balikpapan (May 1943), Badung Strait (June), and Java Sea (August). V. A. Sherman covered the Battle of Vella Gulf (January 1945), John L. Chew recalled the sinking of the Helena (August 1945), J. Periam Danton testified to the Marianas Turkey Shoot (September 1945), and J. M. Carnes described a run into Leyte on an LCI mortar boat (September 1945). The European theater got its due in Walter Karig’s account of Navy landing craft on the Rhine (October 1945) and James E. Arnold’s report on the port of Le Havre (February 1947). The journal changed things up from time to time with valuable technical histories (“The Story of the Self-Sealing [Fuel] Tank,” February 1946) and curios from the intelligence bureaus (“A Captured Japanese Diesel,” April 1945).
The Navy’s fondness for nostalgia was reflected in the April 1946 issue, the entirety of which commemorated the 100th anniversary of the Naval Academy. The 200th birthday of John Paul Jones prompted an appreciation of the Navy’s founding father (July 1947). The supervisor of shipbuilding at the Fore River Shipyard celebrated the productive feats of America’s yardbirds in “Building Major Combatant Ships in World War II” (May 1947). For pride of service, none rivaled Marine Corps Commandant Alexander Vandegrift, who appraised his beloved cadre as new missions loomed (February 1948). A future Commandant, Robert E. Cushman, argued the need of a Navy and Marine Corps in the Atomic Age (March 1948). Reviews of foreign fleets were a staple, as was respectful treatment of our enemies’ top commanders (Isoroku Yamamoto, October 1949), service branches (the German U-boat fleet, June 1947), and individual vessels (the IJN Akagi, May 1948).
The question facing America during the Cold War was the same one that vexed E. M. Eller in April 1942: How shall we win? The answer did not seem to change. In the age of the atomic bomb, John Phillips Cranwell wrote (October 1946) that sea power was still relevant. The Navy had far more to fear from atrophy from within, including the postwar drawdown of experienced personnel (“Our Vanishing Petty Officers,” June 1948). Victory was a function of people and their will to action. The bomb, meanwhile, was not the answer to every security threat, argued H. B. Seim (April 1949).
The discipline of geopolitics was the pole star of our naval thinkers of the 1940s. At the height of the war, as plans to seize the island bases for the world’s first atomic striking force were about to unfold, William H. Hessler codified “A Geopolitics for America” (March 1944), urging that the fledgling superpower look to Alfred Thayer Mahan to shape its aspirations and responsibilities. Animating Proceedings through all the decades has been the notion that we can prepare for the future through discerning retrospect.
Enforcing peace in a world burned by total war required hope, but more than that, firm pursuit of the national interest, unblinkered by airy ideals. “In Utopian sunshine there would be no more Fascists or Nazis, no more nations hungry for growth and the fat lusciousness of lands drunk with the softness of their own richness, no more ambition and wolves,” Eller had written. “How similarly some of our citizens dream in this country today; how similar will be the end should their views prevail.”