Advance to the Atlantic?

See Cover) The U. S. people have long supposed that they were keeping their Navy in the Pacific to prevent an imperial Japanese grab--for French Indo-China, The Netherlands East Indies, British Malaya, the Philippines, all of remote Oceania. Last week it seemed that if the grab was to be stopped, the time for action was the pres ent; the place was the Pacific. It also seemed that the time and the place be longed to Japan.

With the surrender of France, naval men waited the imminent seizure of French Indo-China by the Japanese (see p. 28). But the U. S. Fleet made no move to prevent it. On the contrary, the WThite House began to prepare the U. S. people for the momentous opposite: withdrawal of their Fleet from the Pacific.

For given the choice between the Atlantic and the Pacific, the U. S. Fleet has no trouble making up its mind. In the Pacific it protects U. S. interests far over the horizon; if withdrawn from the Pacific it abandons not only its own but other people's territory to the Japanese.

If the British Fleet ceases to control the Atlantic, the U. S. Fleet cannot stay away without endangering the security of the U. S. itself.

Admiral Distance. The Pacific Ocean is 68,634,000 square miles of blue, dun and yellow water; of wastes where almost no life exists; of islands where life, riches, poverty are all superabundant. Biggest of oceans, it is big enough to swallow all the land in the world and still have room to spare. Its distances dwarf any that even big-minded Yankees are used to thinking about: New York is 3,132 miles from San Francisco; Manila is 6,238 miles from San Francisco, 9,393 miles west of Panama.

Pacific distances are important to the U. S. Navy. A naval officer who knows them and their meaning better than the lines in his palm is Admiral James Otto Richardson. As a young midshipman, Texas-born "Joe" Richardson got his naval baptism charting the waters around the Philippines; not the least of the qualities which speeded his rise to high command was his thorough knowledge of Pacific oceanography and topography. At 61, homely, unofficious, friendly Joe Richardson is Commander in Chief, U. S.

Fleet--and, by Navy verdict, the best CINCUS since showy, well-loved Rear Admiral Joseph Mason Reeves (1934-36).

Last week Admiral Richardson was somewhere in the Pacific with the Fleet.

Just where, was a Navy secret. Also a secret was the number and nature of the ships he had with him. He probably had: twelve battleships (including his flagship Pennsylvania)--a main battle line which has no match in the world for gun power; 13 light cruisers, twelve heavy cruisers, about 70 destroyers, 25 submarines, four aircraft carriers and a highly efficient air force to screen and precede the dreadnoughts. Wherever Joe Richardson was, he was sure to be smoking his pipe, playing penny-a-point cribbage. And it was a safe bet that he was maneuvering his formidable armada at some place nearer his base at Pearl Harbor (see map, pp. 14-75) than to the South China Sea, where Japan was up to no good.

From "Uncle Joe" down to the rawest gob, the men and officers of the U. S. Fleet swear they could lick Japan's Navy. In full-dress sea fight they ought to. But in the quiet watches, the bravest must remember Alfred Thayer Mahan's dictum: that a Navy is composed of men, ships, bases. (Admiral Mahan, the high priest of modern navies, died before air power began to confuse sea power.) What the U. S. Navy lacks in the western Pacific, Japan has: a sufficient line of bases.

And the key to bases is distance. Mightily fortified Pearl Harbor in Hawaii is the only U. S. base west of San Diego where the main fleet could be sheltered, fueled, repaired in wartime. The waters where the U. S. would have to fight an offensive war in the Pacific are Japan's waters -- 4,500 to 6,000 perilous miles beyond Pearl Harbor. That is too far for the main fleet to go, fight, return: its practicable battle radius (with due allowance for cruising and combat maneuvers) is 2,500 to 2,700 miles from its base.* Such is the elemental, geographic rule which Navy minds have to ponder. By such rules, John Paul Jones in his inferior Bon Homme Richard could not possibly have whipped England's Serapis in 1779.

He did. His successors venerate both him and his luck, but they know what the rule of Pacific distance means for them. They cannot count on the kind of war for which their fleet is designed: one in which the tremendous line of battleships has a fair chance to meet and crush the enemy.

Another kind of war would be more likely. Cruisers, aircraft, submarines would use the main fleet as a floating base, raid Japan's trade and naval lanes (see map, pp. 14-15}. That would be a long, negative and costly war, would require a stupendous naval effort. If it chose, the U. S. could certainly make the effort, in the end would probably win.

Counting the Cost. The political strategy of the U. S. has not been, however, to beat Japan at sea. It has been to keep the fleet in position so that Japan could not risk overseas adventure. Withdraw the fleet to the Atlantic and the U. S. may soon begin to see the conquests that its fleet has hitherto forestalled without fighting. Already the costs of that withdrawal have been counted. The U. S. with its half-based fleet in the Pacific might have to pay the costs anyhow. Japan well knows that with the U. S. Fleet in the Atlantic, the U. S. would have to pay off:

> It will not be possible to defend the Philippines. Japan wants French Indo-China and The Netherlands East Indies first, can afford to wait until the Philippines become independent in 1946.

> In China, before Japan moved in, the U. S. had a $250,000,000 investment, an annual trade worth about as much. This is already largely lost in fact and the rest of it would doubtless soon go.

> From British Malaya and The Netherlands East Indies the U. S. gets 85.9% of its crude rubber (plus 4.5% from French Indo-China), 78.4% of its tin. The U. S.

must have rubber and tin, has nowhere else to go for the amount it needs, has failed to lay in stockpiles. If Japan takes The Indies, the supply might still be open to the U. S. on Japan's terms. Basis for this hope is: 1) Japan's desperate need of foreign exchange, which has always come largely from trade with the U. S.; 2) Japan's mortal fear of a war with the U. S.

--which the U. S. might have to fight, willy-nilly, if its rubber-&-tin lifeline were actually cut. Nobody would dislike that war more than the Japanese officers under genial Vice Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto; they have a great liking and respect for the U. S. Navy.

> Australia might well fall within the Japanese sweep. Annual profit to the U. S.

from trade with Australia: $45,000,000.

> Best U. S. customer in the Pacific, only one worth fighting for in a dollar war, is Japan. In three years (1937-38-39), the U. S. sold Japan $769,538,000 worth of goods, bought $492,217,000 worth from Japan.* However, this lopsided trade is not normal; of what the U. S. sold to Japan, more than half was war material (oil, scrap iron, other metals) for its Chinese war.

> At stake is more than money: the obligations of the U. S. to its Filipino dependents, its dedication to an independent China, its selfish interest in keeping the Axis out of the Pacific.

Pacific Policy. All that U. S. diplomacy could do in the Pacific was to wage a rearguard action. Originator of that action was Herbert Hoover's Secretary of State Henry Lewis Stimson, who will not want to scuttle it now that he is recalled to the Cabinet (see p. 11). First Mr. Stimson and then his friend Cordell Hull had to use a strategy which was delicate, complex, in the circumstances, reasonably effective. They played as best they could on the enormous respect in which the Japanese people (but not the Japanese rulers) hold U. S. opinion. They denounced every stage of Japanese aggression in China.

They applied what trade restraints they safely could, short of final embargo or tariff boosts which might have driven a desperate Japan to desperate measures--and might have forced the U. S. into war or precipitous retreat.

Net result: Japan's advance was slowed, its cost in money and men was immeasurably increased; the U. S. in slow retreat surrendered nothing in principle, up to last week had lost remarkably little in substance.

Moving of the U. S. Fleet to the Atlantic means rear-guard tactics have played out. One form of action remains for the U. S.: to invite Japan to a round-table examination of the Pacific problem. Thus the U. S. might lump all its Pacific eggs, bargain on behalf of the Philippines, of The Netherlands East Indies, and even Australia, perhaps win for China better terms than are now in sight. The U. S. has much to offer hard-pressed, sorely drained Japan. The U. S. also has much to gain, including insurance of U. S. supply sources in the Pacific Indies.

The flaw in the picture--as Neville Chamberlain might perhaps explain--is that appeasement is apt not to work. To sacrifice China might well prove no more fruitful than was the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia, and when the U. S. had its Fleet in the Atlantic Japan might, like Hitler, forget her pledges.

Half-Ocean Navy? Whatever the answers, the naval scene last week changed swiftly and darkly. To the U. S. a Brown Peril across the Atlantic looked bigger than any Yellow Peril in the West. The U. S. Navy's Chief of Naval Operations Harold Raynsford Stark (undoubtedly at Franklin Roosevelt's instance) recommended and the House passed a $4,000,000,000 Naval Expansion Bill--adding upwards of 200 warships, 70% in tonnage to the huge Navy already planned. The press hailed a U. S. "two-ocean Navy" at last, in the same breath pointing out that, with U. S. shipyards already crowded, the additional warships would be seven years abuilding.

Significantly, there was nothing in the new bill for the additional Fleet bases without which no U. S. Navy of any size could ever be a far-Pacific Navy. A fact the U. S. still had to wake up to was that its "one-ocean Navy" was really only a half-ocean Navy: its real job was only to defend approaches to U. S. Pacific coasts and the Panama Canal, while the British Navy policed the Atlantic.

President Roosevelt did his dramatic best last week to drive that fact home. At Hyde Park, White House correspondents were handed a bellywhacking tabulation, frankly intended to draw the blackest possible picture: the Nazi, Italian, French, British Fleets in combination in the Atlantic, would outweight the U. S. Navy 2.3-to-41. The prospect, whether it was an imminent possibility or a far-off contingency, made Atlantic defense the immediate U. S. defense problem.

The U. S. people began to rub their eyes and wonder whether they had even a half-ocean Navy, for either ocean.

* Great Britain's formidable Singapore base might be made available to the U. S. Fleet. But Singapore was designed for a British fleet which last week was fully occupied elsewhere; the repair shops, ammunition, spare parts, even the fuel stored at Singapore would be of limited use to the U. S. Navy, even if U. S. ships miraculously got there ahead of the Japanese.

* For Japanese gold the U. S. Treasury in the same years paid $580,816,000, substantially bolstering Japanese finances and the war against China.

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