Ike Reviews the Fleet

As Dwight Eisenhower boarded the cruiser Des Moines at Naples, the Mediterranean was frothing into a bad storm. His green & gold SHAPE flag, flying over a naval vessel for the first time, was whipped to shreds by 60-mile winds. Ike himself skittered across rolling decks, disappeared into admiral's country and stayed there, confining himself to light reading and chats with his NATO commander for southern Europe, U.S. Admiral Robert B. ("Mick") Carney.

Turbulent seas almost washed out the show Eisenhower had come to witness, featuring some 30 warships of the U.S. Sixth Fleet and five Dutch ships. Marine amphibious landings on Malta, mine-laying off Sicily by Navy bombers from French Morocco, and practice landings by French navy pilots on the 45,000-ton carrier Franklin D. Roosevelt were all canceled. But at the end of two days, a helicopter windmilled through grey, moist skies and gingerly deposited a grinning Eisenhower on the flight deck of the Roosevelt. There he watched the Navy's Corsairs, Skyraiders and twin-jet Banshees bombing and strafing a ten-foot-square wooden target floating abeam of the carrier. "Damn, that's shooting," Eisenhower muttered admiringly.

As a military test, the storm-hampered maneuvers were inconclusive. But Eisenhower, in a shipboard press conference before flying back to his Paris headquarters, took a longer view. He spoke with an optimism that would have seemed merely wishful two years ago. What he sees ahead, now that the West is able to confront Russia with growing strength, is a military standoff, without war, in which the West ("unless a lot of us are pretty stupid") could sustain forces on a maintenance basis, without an endless series of $60 billion annual U.S. defense budgets. When military parity is reached, he said, the world would enter a higher, "ten dollar" kind of struggle--between opposing economic, moral and intellectual ideas. "It will be long, dreary and expensive," Ike admitted, but "far better than having to fight a long, exhaustive global war--make no mistake about that."

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