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This time, Navymen wet their fingers and gazed anxiously aloft. The clamor for immediate demobilization and the complaints of reserves whistled through the rigging. The drive to merge the services (see below) might blow either fair or foul. The Navy no longer had such a great and loving friend in the White House as a Roosevelt (T. or F.D.). Onetime Artilleryman Harry Truman went out of his way last week to give the men in blue and gold the back of his hand. Praising General of the Army George Marshall the President wisecracked: "He [Marshall] succeeded in getting the Navy to cooperate with the Army." All these were bad signs.
The Power of Attack. In this worsening weather, a fog of national policy had been settling ever since V-J day and now obscured all vision.
How big a U.S. fleet is needed in the postwar world? What kind of ships? What will they be used for? Both the Army and the Navy thought they knew. Franklin Roosevelt had laid out the course in his speech to the Congress in January, 1945: "We can fulfill our responsibilities for maintaining the security of our own country only by exercising our power and our influence. . . ." George Marshall translated this into practical, military terms: "The only effective defense a nation can now maintain is the power of attack." Navymen put it this way: "Our mission is to wage the peace around the world." Not even Theodore Roosevelt had suggested such a manifest destiny. It was a reversal of the traditional U.S. policy —never to attack until attacked — which culminated in the Pearl Harbor disaster and the destruction of Douglas MacArthur's army and air force in the Philippines. It implied a nation ever on the alert, ready to strike before it was struck.
Did the Administration understand U.S. policy that way? If it did, it had never dared say so. No one yet—outside the military leaders, who are listened to less attentively in times of peace—had made it clear. And so the Navy had to grope its way.
No Target, No Need. There were main and secondary problems of person nel, training, procurement. Compared to the problems of peace, the problems of war were simple. How big a fleet? There was no yardstick, such as a comparable foreign navy, by which to determine a peacetime U.S. Navy's size. There was no comparable foreign navy. There was no specific target. There was no apparent, imminent need.
Navymen recently marched up the Hill to tell Congressmen what they wanted. This was the postwar force which the Big Brass outlined:
A force of 558,000 men, an active fleet of eleven battleships, 36 large-to-jeep air craft carriers, 49 large-to-light cruisers, 175 destroyers, 40 destroyer escorts, 90 submarines, a "laid-up reserve" of 681 warships, 5,002 active and laid-up auxiliary vessels, 8,000 aircraft, 40 big & little Atlantic and Pacific bases, 97 air stations, air-material centers and air-gunnery schools in the U.S. The whole would cost the U.S. an estimated $3,525,000,000 a year, exclusive of new shipbuilding or shore works. It was a "very substantial" sum indeed, but in terms of the price of victory, said the Navy, it was "cheap."