Mantauk Maneuver

ARMY & NAVY

Twenty-seven warships, like large grey mice, crept out of Narragansett Bay early last week and headed southwest into a grey squall. At their head was the new cruiser Chester flying the three-starred flag of Vice Admiral George Ralph Marvell. Aboard the 27 ships of the Navy's scouting force were 5,000 officers and men. Also aboard was gloom, for behind them in Newport were their wives and many a sweetheart. Forty miles to Long Island's tip slowly steamed the fleet, to drop anchor in Fort Pond Bay, sheltered by the curve of Montauk Point, where dimly through fog and rain could be seen the bulk of the Montauk Manor hotel above the cottages of the tiny fishing village of Montauk.

Sponsor of the fleet's visit to Montauk was Congressman Fred Albert Britten of Illinois, the blocky, florid chairman of the House Naval Affairs Committee. Congressman Britten summers at Montauk. He was there to welcome the fleet. So was his good friend Carl Graham Fisher, board chairman of Montauk Beach Development Corp. Mr. Britten had outlined a gay, busy week for the Navy. The hostesses of swank East Hampton and Southampton nearby would entertain the officers at many a bright party. For the men there would be a carnival at more distant Patchogue, where they could race bicycles, pitch horseshoes, swim, or dance in the street. There would be tennis, golf, swimming, baseball; the Gold Cup race for speedboats, and, dear to the heart of Mr. Britten who was once an able boxer himself, the finals of the scouting force boxing matches. James Joseph Tunney, retired Marine, would referee and give to the heavyweight winner the statue of James J. Corbett which Mr. Britten won as U. S. amateur lightweight champion back in 1894. To Mr. Britten everything looked bright except the weather.

The dirty night the fleet anchored, Seaman Francis Barnes fell overboard from a ship's boat and was drowned. Next day it rained hard. Grumblings began to be heard. The grumblings became open complaints: there was nothing to do in Montauk, nothing to look at but the fishermen's cottages and the hotel, at which prices were too high even for captains; rain kept all but a few sailors from the carnival at Patchogue; it would cost $5 for a round-trip ticket to New York. The complaints grew louder, settled into an insistent charge of "logrolling."

"Logrolling?" said Mr. Britten. "Log-rolling?"

Officers & men and the newspapers put together two--unusual visits to Montauk this year by the Los Angeles, the scouting fleet, the U. S. S. Constitution--and two-- Mr. Britten's friendship for Mr. Fisher and his financial interest in Mr. Fisher's development corporation--and considered the sum self-evident. Mr. Britten denied they made four.

"I own three and a half acres here, and you wouldn't give me a dollar and a half for it right now," he declared.

He said that "politics" had had nothing to do with the fleet's visit, and that no one could have been more surprised than Carl Graham Fisher when he learned that Montauk had been chosen. "Why, Fred Libby, the pacifist, has been paid to come out here on Long Island in the last year and make speeches. I simply suggested to Admiral Pratt that the fleet might pay a visit over here and pointed out what a fine harbor there is here. 'Mr. Britten.' he said, 'I'm surprised that we hadn't thought of that ourselves. When I was a boy we used to operate from Gardiners Bay.' The bringing of the scouting fleet to Montauk is for the good of the Navy. Montauk Harbor will stand on its own bottom.

"I am strongly in favor of having the fleet operate in places where they won't always have sunshine--of sending them to San Francisco instead of to San Diego. If I had my way both the Pacific and Atlantic fleets would be making a tour of South America right now, putting in at various ports and standing out to sea in all kinds of weather for target practice and torpedo practice. It would cost little more than a summer at Newport."

He said he believed in a roving, cruising, operating navy and that separation of officers from their wives and children is one of the hardships of naval life.

In Montauk, A. Robert Snyder, promotion manager for the development corporation, admitted: "If it hadn't been for the fleet and those other things, frankly, I don't know what we would have done with the hotel." Unabashed, Mr. Britten declared he intended to urge Montauk as a permanent summer base. Immediately came loud, vehement protests from Newport's Representative Clark Burdick, Mayor Mortimer Sullivan and the Chamber of Commerce.

Stocky Mr. Britten then turned on Newport's "bejeweled dowagers and debutantes." With a cheerful grin he said: "I see no harm in letting the people of Newport know that, after all, this is the United States Navy and not the Newport Navy. I suppose we have a few butterflies in the Navy, but I wonder what they'd do if we had a war and they had to leave their families for a year instead of a week?" As for the men, "they can engage in sports or go fishing--or else stay in bed."

When the sun finally came out for a while, the sailors, grumbling less, went ashore for their twice delayed athletic tournament. Crowds of them flocked to the bus station, waited for busses to take them to the fields. No busses came. Finally appeared Promoter Snyder, acting secretary of the bus line, to explain that the line had lost $1,000 in two days because nobody used it, so the busses rolled out of town. Sailors piled in taxicabs, paid as high as $1.25 a mile. As the week wore on the social columns carried more & more news of teas, dinners, receptions, dances for the officers. Long Island hostesses were pleased--until an enterprising newshawk discovered the fact that so few officers had volunteered to attend the social affairs to which they had been invited that the commanding officers had had to pick out the required number of guests and order them to go.

Early in the century, when speed first became a dominating factor in transatlantic travel, proposals were advanced to dock ocean liners at Montauk Point, in Fort Pond Bay. The Vanderbilt interests, vitally tied up with the New York Central railroad, acquired a 45-mile strip of land through Nassau, Suffolk and Queens Counties which might be used for a railroad if the proposals ever took definite form. Later they built the Motor Parkway, continued to hold it, though the Parkway makes little money. No more was heard of the harbor plan until five years ago when Laurence Russell Wilder, representing New York Shipbuilding Corp., proposed that the Government loan money to construct two four-day liners to dock at Montauk, thereby saving twelve hours between English Channel ports and New York. This plan provided for construction of two 1,000-foot docks and possibly a breakwater across the entrance to the bay for protection against north-east gales. Nothing came of it, though Montauk continues as leading candidate for a new New York harbor.

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