CINCUS

ARMY & NAVY

(See front cover)

Foamy bones in their fresh grey teeth, 90 U. S. men-o'-war rolled out of the sunswept Gulf of Gonaives last week, skirted the heat-hazy shores of Haiti, furrowed their way up toward the Atlantic Coast. Far out in the empty sea, bos'ns' whistles suddenly piped all hands to the rails. Drums ruffled, trumpets flourished and while junior officers manned bridges with stadimeters to keep the vast armada precisely in line, bands crashed out the national anthem. Twenty-one times gunners tripped the breech blocks of the 6-pounders. These lonely pomps were a rehearsal for the huge crew of 3,.000. Within a week the same show would be put on, two miles south of Ambrose Lightship, for President Roosevelt, standing on the flag bridge of the cruiser Indianapolis. It would be the first time a President had ever reviewed the Fleet off New York Harbor, the first time the combined Battle and Scouting Forces had been massed in those waters since the Fleet came home in 1918. Hampton Roads is the Navy's traditional parade ground. There in 1907 another Roosevelt dispatched his "Great White Fleet" on its first world cruise. There in 1927 seasick Calvin Coolidge received the Fleet's salutes slumped in a chair on the deck of the Mayflower. There in 1930 Herbert Hoover gloomily watched a gloomy and debilitated flotilla go by. Exercise M. Behind the Fleet, as it steamed toward its New York review, lay long weeks of hard work and intensive maneuver. Ever since it hove out of San Diego April 9. hustling, pink-cheeked Admiral David Foote Sellers, its Commander-in-Chief, had put it through almost continuous strategic and tactical exercises. All the way down the Mexican coast it played at war games. A mimic attack had struck at the Pacific entrance to the Panama Canal. Then, to everyone's surprise, Admiral Sellers had suddenly decided on a forced fleet march across Panama, putting his 111 vessels through the canal in the record time of 48 hr. (TIME, May 7). Climax to the maneuvers was Exercise M, a problem whose stake was control of the Caribbean. From the flagship Pennsylvania, Commander-in-Chief Sellers and grey, bespectacled Admiral William Harrison Standley, Chief of Navy Operations, had watched Vice Admiral Frank Hardeman Brumby of the Scouting Force fight it out with Admiral Joseph Mason Reeves of the Battle Force. Admiral Brumby's lighter Grey Fleet was assumed to have the Caribbean under guard. Admiral Reeves's Blue force, with 1,200 marines on four troop ships, was out to take one or all of these strategic points: Ponce, San Juan, Culebra, St. Thomas. To an extent never before attempted, the fog of war enveloped the Caribbean. All communications were restricted, running lights extinguished. With Very rockets, destroyers torpedoed battleships. Battleships fired back with searchlights. Overhead the dirigible Macon droned along at 80 m.p.h. On the fifth and last day of the exercise, Admiral Reeves managed to land a strong detachment of marines at Culebra. The sea-soldiers went shouting up the bluffs, brandishing their bayonets, occupied the island and, temporarily at least, Admiral Reeves appeared to be in command of all Central American waters. The mock destruction and slaughter had been terrific. Actually, the Fleet maneuvers had not been carried out without some real losses. One man had fallen overboard from the aircraft carrier Lexington, drowned. Another had been electrocuted while working near high voltage wires in the darkness. Also in the darkness the cruiser Milwaukee had collided with the destroyer Simpson, smashing in the latter's bow and sending her to drydock. And while the fighting was fiercest, Captain William Woods Smyth, commanding the battleship Tennessee, had died of a sinus infection on the hospital ship Relief. Significance-- Naval maneuvers have a way of firing the imagination of otherwise level-headed journalists and Exercise M proved to be no exception. "The most impressive and important maneuvers ever conducted by the U. S. battle fleet," breathlessly reported a United Press correspondent, "have demonstrated that the Panama Canal can be captured or destroyed by an enemy fleet and that a Japanese-American naval war under present conditions is virtually impossible. ... In demonstrating that the canal could be taken, it was proven also that the cost would be so terrible as to make it actually impracticable because the attacking nation would be left crippled. It was demonstrated again, also, that the battleship remains the Gibraltar of naval warfare." What Exercise M demonstrated, neither the United Pressman nor any other civilian will ever precisely know. To prove the Panama Canal vulnerable or invulnerable or the battleship a Gibraltar or not, was certainly not the purpose of the Office of Naval Operations, which set the problem. The Navy's tactical and strategic exercises, staged almost monthly, are shaped to a more practical end. Their objective is not to develop some grand strategy for the next war but to whet the minds and strengthen the bodies of Navy personnel, to indicate the condition of material, the efficiency of its operation. When, sometime next month, the Chief of Naval Operations receives reports on Exercise M, he will collate them, then subdivide them according to their interest to the various naval divisions. The engineering bureau may find something to correct or adjust after it reads how the Fleet's power plants functioned in the Caribbean. The communications, navigation and ordnance staffs may do likewise. Who won the battle of the Caribbean is not regarded by the Navy as important. A different set of officers, under actual war conditions, might successfully play an entirely different gamut of strategy.

Policy. As erroneous as the Press's interpretation of the Fleet's exercises is the public conception of the reason for the Fleet's recall from the Pacific to the Atlantic. To most laymen, Naval Policy is a secret code formulated by a few admirals in Washington who spend their days hankering for war. There is nothing mysterious or alarming about U. S. Naval Policy. Any citizen, if he likes, can have a copy of it, signed by Secretary Swanson, and printed in bold type on a single sheet of paper 2 ft. square to hang on his wall. Gist: ''Naval policy is the system of principles, and the general terms of their application, governing the development, organization, maintenance, training and operation of a navy. It is based on and is designed to support national policies and national interests." The admirals do not make those national policies and national interests or the wars each may beget. That is the political job of civilian statesmen. The admirals pull the trigger after the gun has been aimed for them.

As a matter of national policy, President Hoover sent the Fleet to the Pacific when war loomed in the Orient three years ago. The Navy was glad to go, not because it was itching for a fight, but because the Fleet trains better on the Pacific where the climate is milder and exercise grounds superior. Also for training purposes the Navy prefers to keep the Scouting and Battle Forces together no matter where they are based. No football coach works the backfield out on one field, the line on another. During the remainder of the Hoover regime the Fleet was kept on the West Coast on the grounds of "economy." Any paper savings from this mass formation, however, were offset by the necessity of sending ships back through the Canal to East Coast yards for repair to keep those yards in operation.

The Fleet was returned to the Atlantic largely because President Roosevelt wanted the East to get the commercial benefit at least until late autumn of its $1,000,000 monthly payroll. As Commanders-in-Chief, most Presidents run the Navy only nominally, mak-ing appointments and issuing orders only as their Secretaries of the Navy may require. President Roosevelt, however, runs the Navy in fact. At first his election was viewed by the Navy with alarm. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels came close to wrecking the service's esprit and morale with his politics and naval men recalled that Assistant Secretary Roosevelt had also played a rattling good political game. He is wiser now than he was 14 years ago, and his naval building program, undertaken after the Navy had laid down no new battleships, no destroyers since the W:ar, has endeared him to all hands. Not only does the President hold ultimate control of the Navy, but he appoints its entire hierarchy: Secretary and Assistant Secretary, Chief of Naval Operations (No. 1 professional ashore), Commander-in-Chief of the Fleet (No. 1 professional afloat) and all the Commander-in-Chief's subordinate flag officers. Commander-in-Chief, Its political officers can make or break the Navy. Its Chief of Operations, who corresponds to the Army's Chief of Staff, can, if he is capable, key the whole service up to a zestful pitch of efficiency. But it often remains for the Commander-in-Chief of the Fleet, as the nation's first seaman, to leave the most memorable stamp on the Navy. Admiral Richard Henry Leigh's regime as Commander-in-Chief (1932-33) is remembered for the mass operations around Hawaii at a critical time in the Far East (TIME, Feb. 13, 1933).* Admiral Sellers' term (1933-34), will be recalled for the forced fleet march across Panama, undertaken on his own initiative. And the man already selected to run the Fleet in 1934-35 is so unique, so vital a personality that his term of command is sure to be memorable. On June 15, two days before the Fleet ends its 17-day visit to New York, all hands will be called on the quarter-deck of the Fleet's flagship, the band will be paraded, high officers will turn out in their gold braid and cocked hats. Admiral Sellers will step forward, read an order appointing him commandant at Annapolis. Then lean, bearded Joseph Mason Reeves will read an order making him master of all U. S. warships. "Bull"' Reeves has been an outstanding naval figure since that autumn afternoon in 1894 when, injured, he saved the day for Annapolis on the football field, spurred the Midshipmen to victory over Army, 6-4. After graduation he entered the engineering division, was in the belly of the U. S. S. Oregon, crowding steam into her old boilers to drive her at destroyer speed around Cape Horn from San Francisco in time for the battle of Santiago. For that deed well done Joseph Reeves was advanced four numbers in rank.

In 1907 he returned to the Naval Academy to teach chemistry and physics. He also became head football coach, and the brains and aggressiveness which marked him as a fast, rangy end helped "sink" the Army again. 6-0. For his kindness to luckless midshipmen about to be "bilged." the class of 1909 dedicated its year book to him. His consideration was only natural, since Joseph Reeves can think of no more unhappy fate than not being in the Navy.

Few bearded men have wings, but Admiral Reeves wears above his bright garden of decorations the insignia of a naval aviation observer. During the War, when he was convoying on the battleship Maine (for which he got the Navy Cross), Admiral Reeves first interested himself in the air arm. In 1919 he was sent to Rome as naval attache. There he went up in one of the dirigibles General Nobile designed for the Italian Government. Back home he was assigned to the Bureau of Aeronautics in Washington, went to Pensacola to learn flying. As a captain he won his wings at the age of 53. Not long after he was made aircraft commander of the Battle Force, with his flag flying from the Langley. It was during this tour of duty on the West Coast that the effective and unconventional Admiral found himself without a car one Sunday evening when he had a dinner engagement at a fashionable Coronado hotel. He solved this difficulty by driving off in a Navy truck, so startling the marine sentry that he saluted with both hands.

Biggest political battle Admiral Reeves ever got into was the struggle between Los Angeles and San Francisco for the West Coast lighter-than-air base. He is a native of San Rafael, near San Francisco, and his wife owned property adjacent to the projected site at Sunnyvale. Nevertheless. Admiral Reeves urged that the base go farther south. When Sunnyvale was selected by political powers in Washington Admiral Reeves was the most displeased man on the West Coast.

Admiral Reeves's wife has for years been invalided by asthma, is now living in Switzerland for her health. One son, Joseph Jr., is a capable California artist. The other, William Cunningham, was graduated from West Point last year, is an Army flyer.

Not by design but largely by chance, Admiral Reeves becomes the first air man to command the Fleet. Usually the Battle Force commander, who will be Admiral Brumby when Admiral Reeves moves up, succeeds to the post of Commander-in-Chief. But Admiral Reeves's appointment does demonstrate the new cohesion between the Navy's air force and its sea fleet. During the Hoover Administration naval aviation was constantly being thrust forward as a unique fighting arm by ambitious, energetic David Sinton Ingalls, just as military aviation was being spotlighted by F. Trubee Davison. President Roosevelt abolished these young zealots' jobs as assistant secretaries for air in the two departments. Today a Navy airman is first of all a sailor, though the Army flyer still thinks of himself as a different breed from other soldiers. But naval aviators did not disguise their delight when word went round that "Reeves is coming in." If there is any petting done, the air force will get petted while Admiral Reeves is in command.

Specialized air knowledge is only one of many qualifications the admiral brings to his new job. He is acknowledged a major tactician, superior to his famed bearded predecessor, Wartime Admiral Sims. The tradition of the U. S. Navy is that the best defense is an offense. The enemy must be struck long before he can reach the long U. S. coastline. Admiral Sampson fought at Santiago. Admiral Dewey fought 7,000 mi. away from home at Manila Bay. The Navy hopes it will never have to battle with its back to the shore, but Admiral Reeves is taking no chances. Just as von Hindenburg prepared for his great victories against the Russians in 1914-15 by painstakingly studying the topography of the Masurian swamps, so Admiral Reeves has long concentrated on the "triangular strategic area" of Hawaii-Puget Sound-Panama.

An admiral's life at sea is not a gregarious one, lacking the close fellowship of the ward room of his younger days. As he steamed north last week to salute his President and take command of the fleet, Admiral Reeves had plenty of time for reflection. In his mind's eye, already he could see his red Battle 'Force flag changed for the blue four-starred ensign of the Commander-in-Chief. Already he could anticipate the ceaseless naval communications on onion skin paper addressed not to COMBATFOR. his old title, but to CINCUS, his new one. Already he could hear the crash of the 17-gun salute that will be his due. Already he could taste the exultation, feel the awful responsibility of being his country's first officer afloat.

*Last autumn the Japanese grand fleet maneuvered in the Caroline and Marshall Islands, between Guam and the Philippines. The U. S. Navy ruefully admits it has "never had the nerve" to exercise in Far Eastern waters.

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