The North Coast times-eagle., August 01, 1995, Page 8, Image 8

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FROM PAGE 7
in the Pacific between the U.S and Japan, and the pitiless no-
quarter submarine wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45 in the North
Atlantic were fought around this principle.
The U.S. Navy of World War 2 was built around aircraft
carriers and their war planes. Naval airpower as the main thrust
of strategy was initially rejected by battleship admirals wrio were
themselves principal reformers of a moribund Navy a generation
earlier. Although the Navy pioneered the use of ironclads during
the Civil War, by 1880 it was an obsolete force smaller than the
Navy of Chile. But young officers like Mahan forced moderniza­
tion on the Navy and provided the impetus and strategy for an
American "naval renaissance." Using the long maritime struggle
between England and France as his historical case, Mahan
argued in a series of lectures (published under the title The
Influence o f Sea Power Upon History) that command of the sea
depends on concentrated operations to defeat an opposing fleet.
The Spanish American War of 1898 gave the U.S. its chance to
carry out Mahan's concept w th its brand new battleships, and by
destroying two Spanish fleets, in the Philippines and Cuba, the
nation emerged as a v o id power.
But the era of the battleship Navy was short. Two
inventions ordained their displacement as the fleet's main
weapon: the submarine and the airplane. By the time the U.S.
entered World W ar 1 in 1917 the major surface engagement of
dreadnaughts had been fought to an inconclusive decision by
British and German fleets at Jutland in 1916. (The U.S. Navy
engaged in no major battles in World W ar 1, generally escorting
troop and supply convoys and minelaying.) In 1922 the Navy's
first aircraft earner, the Langley, was commissioned, almost a
dozen years after an American civilian flier, Eugene Ely, took off
from and landed on a ship for the first time in 1911. (The British
built the first aircraft carrier during World W ar 1 but its use was
limited and primitive.)
Throughout the 1920s and ’30s an internal struggle
between the battleship admirals and advocates of naval air-
power divided the Navy. Traditionalists wished to subordinate
airpower for surface purposes such as patrolling and recon-
aissance. The famous demonstration of divebombers sinking a
former German battleship in 1921 in 21/2 hours off the Virginia
coast and the bombing of two obsolete American ships from the
air in tests off Cape Hatteras two years later (both shows put on
by Army General Billy Mitchell, who was court martialed for his
insistent advocacy of military airpower) contributed to the Navy's
beginning to build its fleets around the aircraft earner.
The attack on Pearl Harbor by aircraft from Japanese
carriers ended the debate. By then the Navy was already con­
centrating its power around large aircraft carriers that started
construction in the late 20s. As early as 1929 Saratoga,
America's first fleet carrier, showed that a sea launched air
attack could destroy the Panama Canal; in 1932, nine years
before the Japanese assault, two U.S. Navy carriers made a
simulated raid on Pearl Harbor and annihilated the surprised
Pacific Fleet. (Even then, and much earlier, Japan was
considered the future enemy - perhaps as far back as 1854
when American warships forced the Tokugawa Shogunate
out of a two century isolation; Japan's response was to build a
military machine wriich was comparable to any.) 'Salthorse'
admirals might ding to monster battleships as the destiny of
naval warfare, but air-minded radicals foresaw airy navies grap­
pling in the central blue.They were convinced that command of
the sea in both Atlantic and Pacific Oceans (in which the U.S.
had extensive property acquired in the 19th century) depended
upon a pattern o f naval operations in which any clash of dread­
noughts would be preceded by a battle for command o f the air
by its fleet's aircraft. (Keegan) In other words, command of the
sea was only possible by command of the air above it, which in
modem times has seriously weakened Mahan's hold on strategy.
In the first year of the war the U.S. Navy lost four of its
six big carriers —but Navy divebombers from three of them stop­
ped the impetuous Japanese advance across the Pacific six
months after Pearl Harbor by sinking four Japanese carriers at
Midway. The long war of attrition that pushed the Japanese back
to their homeland was led by American fast carriers, the nation's
second generation of large fleet carriers that began to reinforce
the battered U.S. Pacific fleet in 1943.
The Pacific War was an relentless slaughter that
covered more than half of the planet, centered on its largest
~ ocean, and was fought by gargantuan fleets of titanic ships and
flocks of warplanes and armies of amphibious troops carried on
their decks and in their holds.As a naval war it was unparalleled.
More battles were waged at sea and more warships sunk (in the
Pacific War) than in all other 20th century naval campaigns
combined, Ronald H. Spector wrote in his book Eagle Against
the Sun: The American War With Japan: (The war) began with a
stunning display o f airpower by the Japanese and ended with the
most deadly airraids in history by the Americans.The U.S. strat­
egy of a two-pronged advance across the Pacific was probably a
result of conflict and mistrust between the Navy and the Army,
but the major problem of defeating Japan (and also Germany in
Europe) was, Spector writes, less a matter o f choosing the
correct strategy than o f breaking the logistical bottlenecks —
devising means o f getting critical items, whether amphibious
craft, cargo ships, Tighter planes, engineer battalions, or trans­
port aircraft — to the right portions o f the battlefronts on time and
‘ in sufficient numbers. Many of the debates about strategy within
the councils o f the Joints Chiefs o f Staff and between the Ameri­
cans and British were, in essence, debates about the allocation
o f resources.
An excellent depiction of the U.S. Navy in the Pacific
W ar was written by Herman Wouk in his famous novel, The
Caine Mutiny. He described the Naval attack force that invaded
Kwajalein Atoll, the main Japanese base of operations in the
Central Pacific in early 1944:
On a bright warm January day, a horizon-spanning
horde o f ships swarmed out o f the harbors o f Hawaii, formed
itself into a vast circular pattern, and set course for Kwajalein...
The armada moved peacefully over the wastes of the sea,
through quiet days and nights. There was no sign o f the enemy;
nothing but rolling waters, blue by day and black by night, an
empty sky, and ships o f war in every direction as far as the eye
could see, steaming in a great majestic diagram under the stars
and the sun Radar, the ghostly measuring rod, spanning empty
space accurately to within a few yards, made the preservation of
the formation a simple matter. This vast formation, so precise
and so rigid, yet so quick to change course or rearrange itself,
a seagoing miracle surely beyond the dreams o f Nelson himself,
was maintained with careless ease by hundreds o f officers of the
deck, not one in ten o f whom was a professional seaman:college
boys, salesmen, school teachers, lawyers, clerks, writers, drug­
gists, engineers, farmers, piano players - these were the young
men who outperformed the veteran officers o f the fleets of
Nelson.
BILL CRAWFORD (USA, 1944)
The Caine was placed on the right flank o f the formation,
in the inner anti-submarine screen. Two belts o f destroyers sur­
rounded the troop transports, carriers, cruisers, battleships, and
landing craft Each destroyer constantly searched a narrow cone
of water for echoes, and the cones overlapped. No submarine
could approach the formation without causing telltale pings
aboard one o f the destroyers A single screen would have been
enough; the double screen was an instance o f the American
taste for generous safety factors The Caine was. . . a safety
factor added to a safety factor For an American man o f war her
combat role lacked something of the dash of the Bonhomme
Richard attacking the Serapis. Nevertheless she was sailing
into the waters of the foe, pinging. Had John Paul Jones been
(officer of the deck) . . .he could have done no more.
Wouk compared the size of the battleship New Jersey
(which was blocked from going up the Columbia River by Green
Peace activists dangling from the Astoria Bridge 45 years after
World W ar 2 ended) with the destroyer/minesweeper Caine of
his novel. The vast flat steel wall o f the battleship's side...
towered like a skyscraper and stretched away, on either side,
seemingly for blocks... .It was another world; and yet, somehow,
the same world transfigured , a forecastle (had) anchor chains,
wildcat, pelican hooks, and bitts, with ventilators and lifelines.
But the New Jersey's pelican hook was as big as the Caine's
main guns; one link o f the battleship's anchor chain would have
stretched across the minesweeper's entire bow; and the main
battery, the long, cannons with their turrets seemed bigger than
the whole Caine.. . The great central citadel o f bridge and stacks
jutted out o f the deck skyward, a pyramid of metal, nervous with
anti-aircraft batteries and radars; the deck dwindled aft beyond it
for hundreds o f feet. The New Jersey was awesome. (Earlier he
wrote that a passing battleship was a steel cliff going by.)
Here is Wouk describing an American fleet at Ulithi Atoll
in which more than 1,000 ships assembled in the spring of 1945
for the invasion of Okinawa (Picture a famous photograph of
aircraft carriers, battleships and dozens of escorts and supply
ships at Ulithi): Giant after giant, the new battleships and carriers
were ranked in Ulithi Lagoon, an orderly multitude o f floating iron
sky-scrapers, incongruously bordered by a delicate ring o f palm
trees. The Navy had gathered its main striking force in the atoll
...and it was the most formidable seaforce the planet has ever
borne. ..All the brute energy of human history seemed. ..to be
concentrated and made visible at Ulithi. (When Wouk wrote that
the sinking of that entire fleet at once would not have raised the
level o f the sea by the thousandth of the breadth o f a hair, he
anticipated the Bikini atomic tests of 1946.)
John Keegan wrote in The Price of Admiralty that carrier
flight during World War 2 was conducted at the extreme limits
o f practicality Steam catapults and angled decks lay far in the
future. Aircraft were launched under their own power from as far
aft as aircraft parking allowed; departure from the flight deck
usually entailed a sickening lurch towards the sea as the aircraft
cleared the flight deck's end, and crashes under the bows,almost
JULIE & VJ DAY
You might have been named
Victoria Jane
You knew a girl who was
Poor girl, you said
You are 50
VJ Day
the day you were bom
the World War ended
Millions dead
gone
Nevermore forever
You are new life
born admidst burial
a sad world you make warm
You unconditional mother
You wonderful woman
I love you always
-MPMc
inevitably fatal, were a perpetual hazard o f take-off. Safe return
to the flight deck depended on picking up one o f a succession
o f arrester-wires stretched across the ship's beam, and missing
resulted either in the returning aircraft's falling over the bows, as
in a bad take-off, or its crashing into aircraft already landed but
not yet 'struck below'. Flying skill was therefore at a premium.
Keegan waxes lyrical depicting the lot of Navy pilots
wrio flew over an ocean that looked like a dish o f wrinkled
cream. Small consolation, to be sure, for these young men
who were to fall... in flames or drown in the broad ocean whose
mastery they would win for their country. Yet, if a sailor must die,
the air way is the fairest. The tense, crisp briefing in the ready
rooms; the warming up o f the planes which the devoted 'ground
crews' have been checking, arming, fueling and servicing; the
ritual o f the take-off, as precise and ordered as a ballet. Planes
swooping in graceful curves over the ships while the group
assembles; hand-signaling and waving to your wingman, whom
you may never see again; a long flight over the superb ocean;
first sight of your target and the sudden catch at your heart when
you know that they see you, from the black puffs o f anti-aircraft
bursts that suddenly appear in the clear air; the wriggling and
squirming o f the ships, followed by wakes like the tails o f white
horses; the dreaded Zeros o f combat air patrol swooping down
on you apparently out o f nothing; and suddenly the tight, incred­
ibly swift attack, when you forgot everything but the target so
rapidly enlarging, and the desperate necessity o f choosing the
exact moment -th e right tenth o f a second— to release (torpedo
or bomb) and pull out.
As for World War 2’s extraordinarily large and costly
amphibious campaigns, Spector writes that never before had
such great armies been projected across hundreds, even thou­
sands o f miles o f oceans to land on hostile shores, supported
only by air cover and warships. The savage head-on American
assaults upon Japanese held islands have been described as
one army of insects crawling ashore from the ocean in large
metal monsters to obliterate wthout mercy or pity another insect
army that resisted in hopeless fury. Leon Uris in his novel
Battlecry depicted the carnage at Tarawa wrien a later wave of
Marines approached the island's beach on the third day of the
assault through a lagoon filled with bodies of the first waves that
had waded half a mile to shore under murderous machinegun
and artillery fire:
There were hundreds o f them. Marines o f the 2nd and
8th regiments....They were bloated and distorted beyond recog­
nition. Many lay face down, their hair weaving up and down on
small ripples. Others lay on their backs stiff with rigor mortis.
Their faces were slick from the washing o f water and their eyes
stared with the wild expressions they had worn when the bullets
cut them down. And others, whose eyes had been eaten away
by the salt, had running, jellied masses over their faces and
holes where their eyes had been...Hundreds o f rubber boats
were moving in the opposite direction towards the landing craft
that awaited them at the edge o f the barrier reef. In the rubber
boats lay bloody moaning boys: the wounded. Behind the boats,
in the water, shaggy (medical) corpsmen and stretcher bearers
from the division band passed us by the hundreds ... The stink
was rancid as we set foot on Blue Beach... We jum ped to the
seawall and saw devastation to defy description. Rubble on
rubble, a junkyard o f smoldering brimstone. Every yard. . . a dead
Marine or a dead (Japanese) lying In stiff grotesque pose.
The great war correspondent Ernie Pyle wrote of a
similar beach scene when he came ashore at Omaha Beach
a few days after D-Day at Normandy, 6 June 1944;
The wreckage was vast and startling. The awful waste
and destruction o f war, even aside from the loss o f human life
has always been one of its outstanding features to those who
are in it...For a mile out from the beach there were scores o f
tanks and trucks and boats that were not visible, for they were at
the bottom o f the water - swamped by overloading, or hit by
shells, or sunk by mines. Most o f their crews were lost. There
were trucks tipped half over, and the angled up comers o f jeeps,
and small landing craft half submerged. And at low tide you
could still see those vicious six-pronged iron snares that helped
snag and wreck them. On the beach itself, high and dry, were all
kinds o f wrecked vehicles. There were tanks that had only just
made the beach before being knocked out. There were jeeps
that had burned to a dull gray. There were big derricks on cater­
pillar treads that didn't quite make it. There were half-tracks
carrying office equipment that had been made into a shambles
by a single shell hit still holding the useless equipage o f
smashed typewriters, telephones, office files. There were LCTs
turned completely upside down, and lying on their backs, and
how they got that way I don't know. There were boats stacked