Fleet Ready?

Into the sunny bays at San Pedro and San Diego last week stood 24 ships of the U. S. Fleet, back from Honolulu to give officers and men shore leave in California. At the docks their women waited--wives with babies their husbands had not yet seen, wives whose honeymoons had been cut short when the Fleet sailed to Pearl Harbor six months ago, sailors' girls, sailors' mothers. The air jangled with the familiar sounds of "the Fleet's in"--the rattle of anchor chains, the shrill of boatswains' pipes--finally the lilting bugle notes of liberty call. Over the sides of the stern grey ships, up from the bowels of four submarines poured officers and men, into motor launches, gigs, barges. Ashore they disappeared like snow in spring. The grey ships, manned by skeleton crews, quieted down.

High above the battleship New Mexico still floated the four-starred flag of the CINCUS. And below decks, for the next five days, tall, slow-spoken Admiral James Otto Richardson, Commander in Chief U. S. Fleet, worked at his desk, writing, reading, conferring. At week's end the blue flag came down and the CINCUS, in mufti, went over the side. That day he took a plane for Washington, this week sat down to talk with Secretary of the Navy Frank William Knox.

What SECNAV and CINCUS had to say to each other they kept to themselves. They had plenty to talk about. Across the Pacific the clouds massed darkly. Japan, junior member of the Axis, was talking of war if the U. S. didn't like her idea of running the Orient (see p. 40). What goat-faced Fleet Admiral Prince Hiroyasu Fushimi had up his Oriental sleeve, neither Frank Knox nor Jo Richardson knew. But Frank Knox had talked tough too, had said that "if a fight is forced upon us we shall be ready." At week's end he called up the naval reserve.

Theoretically, the Fleet is always ready, but for 1940 warfare its readiness had qualifications. On the credit side, the Fleet had never before had the top-flight personnel that now man its ships. A majority of its enlisted men are high-school graduates. Its officers are well educated, carefully selected, bear down hard on training. It has a substantial sprinkling of oldtime sailormen, does a crack job of gunnery, engineering, flying, seamanship. In tonnage and gun power it is superior to anything Japan can put on the seas.

On the debit side, the Navy was undermanned by 15%. Jo Richardson needed men faster than the training stations can turn them out. Although officers say that new Navy men learn in three months what took oldtimers three years, the Fleet needs more training--for its gun crews, its engineering forces, even for the hard-eyed, diligent young officers that Navy expansion promoted to the command of battleship and cruiser gun turrets long before their time. With an expansion of 70% ahead of it for the two-ocean Navy, it will need intensive training for a long time to come.

Navy aviators are good, but the Navy's air equipment is largely obsolescent; so far there has been only a trickle of replacements from the aircraft orders placed in the past year. Naval fliers think their old planes are as good as or better than anything Japan has. But the Navy's air equipment will not be better than the best until the patrol squadrons and carriers are fitted with such planes as the new Consolidated patrol boat, the Grumman "Sky Rocket" fighter, the Navy model Bell "Airacobra," the Vought-Sikorsky's gull-wing single-seater, which Navy Air Chief Jack Towers last week called the fastest thing in U. S. fighters. Meanwhile, Navy deck officers, though they are horrified at talk of a separate Air Force, know less about flying than flying officers know about seamanship, gunnery, boilers. On aircraft carriers, deck officers sit at table on one side of the wardroom, flying officers on the other. The shop talk of the specialized airmen at mess is an education in flying, but ship's company men do not hear it.

That the rulers of the Navy have not yet waked up to aviation is also shown by the armoring of their ships. Few of them have splinter protection, i.e., armor-steel plate around signal bridges, deck establishments, to protect personnel from bomb fragments, aircraft machine-gun fire. Antiaircraft crews, with a few exceptions, serve their guns out in the open (see cut), have no protection from the attack of enemy aircraft that get past their own fighters. Except on the newest ships, antiaircraft, pom-pom and machine-gun equipment is slimmer than it should be. And under present design, the ships' superstructure cuts off part of the anti-aircraft guns' field of overhead fire.

Like most of U. S. defense, anti-aircraft protection for the Navy is still on order. Splinter protection has been installed in a few of the older ships; designers are mapping out more gun installations. Whether the threat of air bombing may radically change the design of new ships such as the two 45,000-ton battleships laid down this year, only the Navy knows.

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