While guns and bombs in the Pacific were thunderously underlining the formidable fact last week, mimeograph machines in Washington were grinding out the impressive story behind the fact: how the U.S. in four years had become the greatest naval power in the world.
The story was prosaically entitled Annual Report, Fiscal Year 1944, from Navy Secretary Forrestal to the President of the U.S. More than any one thing, the report made this point: America’s naval force was built and manned not by Annapolis-trained professionals but by civilian amateurs.
Citizen Forrestal, ex-Wall Street broker, took no credit away from the admirals who occupy key planning and combat jobs, the other Academy men who season the Navy and hold its most important fighting commands. But his account of how the present fleet came into being and how it is run was one of civilian accomplishment—and the final answer to those Governments who miscalculated the willingness of the U.S. to make war.
80,000,000 H.P. To the already well-known achievements of U.S. industry, Secretary Forrestal added some breath-taking addenda. At the end of fiscal 1944 (June 30) the Navy owned 1,108 warships, 60,191 other craft, powered by 80,000,000 horsepower; 34,000 planes; 220,000 guns. In six months U.S. industry built and armed 250 destroyer escorts alone—nearly three warships every two days.
Peorias in the Pacific. To keep its fleets operating across 3,000 miles of ocean in one direction, 7,000 miles in another, the civilian Navy has set up 900 shore establishments, including 300 advance bases, some as large as Peoria, Ill. Problems of logistics are vast. Equipment for the base at Kwajalein was ordered 17 months before the island was actually taken from the Japs. By the time the Kwajalein units were under way, preparations had begun for bases in the Marianas.
While Halsey’s Third Fleet was rampaging through Far Eastern seas in the late summer of 1944, engaging in 21 combat actions, his carriers also had to undertake 26 logistic (i.e., supply and troop movement) operations. But as a result of logistics successfully carried out, when the Jap fleet was sighted on Oct. 23, Halsey’s fast carrier task force, which had been away from its base for almost two months and had fought 16 actions in that time, was able to engage and smash a Jap fleet in the battle for Leyte Gulf.
The Schoolboys. Forrestal unveiled for the first time a committee of businessmen who have been helping the Navy to unravel its problems. Committee heads are Thomas P. Archer, yachting enthusiast and vice president of General Motors; George Wheeler Wolf, Naval Academy graduate and president of U.S. Steel Export Co. The Archer-Wolf group surveyed the whole logistics field, functioned in the Navy Department as efficiency experts.
Except in top command jobs, regulars among the Navy’s personnel are now far outnumbered. “When our big new warships put to sea for a shakedown, as much as 87% of their crews have never been to sea before. Of the 2,981,365 persons in the Navy at the close of the 1944 fiscal year, 88% were schoolboys, farmers, or businessmen at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack.”
Formerly, before an officer was allowed to stand a deck watch under way, he had to have two years at sea in addition to his four years’ training at the Naval Academy. Now men stand watch after six months’ training as deck officers.
Amphibious Medicine. To care for the sick and wounded the Navy has created “amphibious medicine” to go with its amphibious warfare. First in line are medical corpsmen, “the real heroes of our medical organization,” who land on the beaches with assault troops. From the corpsmen stretches a chain of medical facilities—aid stations, field hospitals, hospital ships, advance base hospitals—which have saved the lives of 98 out of every 100 wounded.
Peaceful Hands. These were some of the reasons—along with constant research by Navy and civilian scientists into new weapons—why the fleets of Admiral Ernest J. King are able to dominate two oceans. There was another reason to which Forrestal paid his respects: “The attitude of the men who have fought and who are still fighting our battles on the sea. . . . No man can stand in the presence of these young men on the eve of battle without a deep humility. . . .”
The cost in dollars has been astronomical: $86.8 billion since 1940, by the Secretary’s accounting, but the investment has paid off and will continue to pay off if the U.S. maintains it; a great Navy can be America’s contribution to world peace. Said Citizen Forrestal: “The means to conduct war must be in the hands of those who hate war. . . . At an appropriate time the Navy Department will present for your consideration the possible composition of a postwar fleet.”
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