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Their speed (27 knots or better), heavy armor (better than the Hood's), their 16-in. batteries (more gun power than the Bismarck's or the Hood's) would make them ideal for Atlantic tasks. In every naval respect they are vastly superior to such model-T battleships as the Texas, New York, Arkansas. Given the two new battleships, if for only a few months, Admiral King could face tough naval tasks with a good deal more confidence than he is now entitled to.
Jobs In the Atlantic. Aside from all-important, ever-perilous patrol, the Atlantic Fleet's principal function last week was to exist. For the small fleet in the Atlantic was essentially playing the familiar game of the bigger one in the Pacific.
By being everywhere and nowhere—so far as public knowledge went—the Fleet has to act as a "containing force," a constant deterrent to enemy action against the U.S. or its spheres in the Western world. The Fleet was just big enough to patrol, to contain, to threaten. If it has to do more on an all-out, all-ocean scale, the U.S. will be in a pickle.
For the U.S., the main Battles of the Atlantic were still being fought last week by 1) diplomacy, 2) the British. In a very real sense, Admiral King's first battle had already been lost—at Vichy. From his staff experience in the Atlantic during World War I, Admiral King knew his ocean, did not have to get out his maps to understand what Nazi encroachment upon the French Empire could mean to the U.S.
Dakar on the western hump of Africa is just 1,800 miles from Brazil's eastern hump. Planes can fly from Vichy's colonial city to Natal in Brazil more easily than they now fly from Newfoundland to Ireland and England. Naval vessels based there could command the main route from Cape Horn to western Europe—which would mean the command of trade routes vital to the U.S. Nazi Germany, strongly entrenched at Dakar, would immediately be a military as well as economic and diplomatic threat to Latin America—and to the U.S.
The U.S., in short, cannot afford to let Hitler have Dakar. Yet, according to most naval opinion, the U.S. cannot now take the naval risk of attempting a preventive seizure of Dakar. Naval men, in fact, believed so strongly in the hazards that they considered the whole thing academic. But they also had to consider the possibilities.
Admiral King could probably assemble a task force of cruisers and destroyers, a couple of battleships, perhaps an aircraft carrier, which could break past the fortified, rocky Isle of Gorée at the harbor entrance. He could probably overpower the recently repaired French battleship Richelieu, the two or three cruisers and a few destroyers in the harbor. With a division of Marines he probably could take hot, humid Dakar itself. But holding the town, making the attempt more than a reckless, fruitless demonstration, would be another matter.