Stormy Man, Stormy Weather

(See Cover)

Last week, from the mists of the North Atlantic, naval guns roared a message to the U.S. The guns belonged to the ill-fated German battle cruiser Bismarck, and hapless H.M.S. Hood (see p. 21).

Their simple, terrible message was that one set of the guns might almost as well have belonged to a warship of the U.S. Navy. For on that day, as for many a day past, U.S. naval headquarters in Washington was both surprised and relieved when another 24 hours went by with no news that a U.S. ship had fatally brushed with a Nazi surface raider, submarine or patrolling warplane.

It was altogether possible that U.S. naval vessels were within hearing of the Hood's last blast. The U.S. Atlantic Fleet keeps a regular (although, in those northern waters, a scattered) patrol on behalf of the British. It was even possible (though unlikely) that some patrolling U.S. ship tipped off the British to the Nazi rovers' whereabouts. Certainly, if the U.S. patrol had spotted the Bismarck and her escorts beforehand, the tip-off would have been quickly given--that is what the U.S. patrol is for.

In any event, once the U.S. Navy had heard of the Hood's destruction, certainly one of the first men to be advised was Admiral Ernest Joseph King, Commander in Chief, Atlantic Fleet.

Wherever he was, Admiral King was in dangerous waters. If there was any doubt about the danger, the Nazis' Grand Admiral Erich Raeder in Berlin removed it when he defied Ernie King's fleet to pass from patrol to all-out convoy, and said: "Nobody can expect a German warship to look on while an American warship communicates the position of a German man-of-war to the British Admiralty. Such procedure must be regarded as an act of war. . . ."

Nitroglycerin. In the Navy, there are only two opinions of Ernest Joseph King.

One: that he is a great fellow and a great sailorman. The other: that he is a no-good, ring-tailed son-of-the-bilge. Some of his colleagues take a bit of both judgments, granting that he would probably be at least as unpleasant to an enemy in war as he seems to be to people who dislike him. If that estimate did not now prevail, he would not be commander of the Atlantic Fleet.

"Temper? Don't fool with nitroglycerin," the Naval Academy's Lucky Bag recorded of Ernie King when he graduated in 1901 (after a mid-school interlude of active duty during the Spanish-American War, on patrol off the Atlantic Coast). That temper subsequently hindered his Navy career, made enemies, often saddened friends who had the utmost faith in his capacities. Testifying before Congressional committeemen, he has been known to fly into ugly, inarticulate rage. Such incidents did him no good, either with Congress or with the Navy command.

Yet on occasion he can be graceful and charming: there is a Navy saying that 62-year-old, egg-bald Admiral King can outdance any young ensign at night, outwork him next day.

There is a storm within him, and at sea he is at his best. For his staff service in the Atlantic during World War I, he won the Navy Cross. For his brilliant salvage of the sunken submarine S-51 (lost with 33 lives) in 1925, he got the Distinguished Service Medal. When the S-4 was rammed and lost with 40 men in 1927, he was again called to salvage duty, had the rare Gold Star added to his D.S.M.

At 49, when he had been a captain for five years, he qualified as a naval aviator, then had a series of air commands until he was given the new Atlantic Patrol Force last year. Characteristically, he did not fare so well on shore duty, when he was first Assistant Chief, and later Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics (after famed Rear Admiral William Adger Moffett went down with the dirigible Akron).

When the Navy reorganized its combat forces into three fleets last February, and Ernest King was put in command of the Atlantic Fleet, he joined a distinguished pair: Admiral Husband Edward Kimmel with the main Fleet in the Pacific, and Thomas Charles Hart in command of the Asiatic Fleet. Last week the Navy recognized Admiral Hart's success in his job, and its critical importance, by extending his tour beyond the normal retirement age of 64.

Congressmen, the President, the Secretary of the Navy, the Chief of Naval Operations and kibitzers in his office generally have a hand in choosing subordinate commanders for duty with the fleets.

Admirals King, Kimmel and Hart had all but complete discretion in selecting their key officers. In battle order of succession to the Fleet command, Admiral King's topmost subordinates are: Rear Admiral David McDougal Le Breton, 56, a greying, bandy-legged bantam who holds six decorations. He is generally rated one of the Navy's ablest tacticians, by his partisans is considered a coming CINCUS (Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet). His disparagers say that he is adept at polishing topside apples. He commands the Atlantic Fleet's single division of three old battleships (Arkansas, Texas, New York),* whose 12-and 14-in. guns were so short of range that Congress last year authorized their elevation to a point where they could at least match modern cruisers.

Rear Admiral Arthur Byron ("Cookie") Cook, 59, commands an unannounced number of shore-based aircraft which patrol with the Fleet, at least two carriers (Ranger, the recently added Wasp), and perhaps a third (the Saratoga). Like his chief, he switched to air duty after more than 20 years in surface vessels, had a tour as Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics.

In a Navy where two suits of civvies is considered affectation, "Cookie" is a double-breasted dandy when he is ashore.

Rear Admiral Ferdinand Louis Reichmuth, 57, is an even-tempered foil to his boss. Admiral Reichmuth (pronounced Rike-muth) has in his destroyer command 60 to 75 destroyers (in two flotillas), at least 25 fewer than there were when the U.S. turned 50 destroyers over to Great Britain last year.

Rear Admiral Randall Jacobs, 55, commands the train of tankers, transports, tenders which any fleet needs for extended operations. Admiral Jacobs is one of three officers for whom Admiral King reached far down the seniority list, promoting them over the heads of many an older captain. The others (also in command succession):

Rear Admiral Richard Stanislaus Edwards, 56, commands 20 to 24 submarines (two squadrons) which have been added since last June.

Rear Admiral Robert Carlisle Giffen, 55, is the tall (6 ft. 2 in.) buckarooly commander of the Fleet's one division of four heavy cruisers. Last though he is in battle succession, "Ike" Giffen thus has a command second only in importance to that of Admirals King and Le Breton.

How to Use a Fleet. Rear Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, who is in charge of naval personnel, told a House Committee last week:

". . . Naval fleets probably never again will fight in full force. . . . No government today can afford to run the risk of staking its entire naval force on a single battle. Therefore, it is probable that in the future fighting will be done by special units. These will be organized according to the special requirements of the tasks assigned to them. One mission might require only a few cruisers, a number of destroyers, an aircraft carrier and some submarines. Another might require a battleship or two."

In plotting what its present and future fleets can do, the Navy thus no longer thinks in terms of complete battle lines opposing each other, as the British and the Germans did at Jutland. Around the battleship Bismarck the Germans had created a force whose job was to raid convoys or to hunt down such naval units as the Hood was leading.

First and biggest task of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet last week was one which required all its strength, left it no surplus for special forces. The task: to patrol the Atlantic from Greenland's southern tip, outward and eastward to the Azores, then south and westward to Trinidad (see map). South of the Equator, there is no regular U.S. patrol. In the extreme North Atlantic, where the Hood and Bismarck met. the U.S. has only a thin and intermittent sea watch to augment the British strength. If the Wasp and Ranger were far at sea, carrier-based aircraft could roam at least up to if not beyond the eastern bounds of surface patrol. Westward, along the Atlantic coastline, land-based air patrol was much stronger. Possible Reinforcements. For any special tasks which he may have to take on, Admiral King can either weaken his regular convoy-patrol, or draw additional strength from Admiral Kimmel's Pacific Fleet. The second course would dangerously upset the balance of Japanese-U.S. naval power, would therefore be chanced only in extreme emergency. Yet the Navy has that chance continuously in mind.

At the maximum, extreme need in the Atlantic (subject always to the perhaps more expansive views of the President), the Navy conceivably might withdraw from the Pacific a division of three battleships, a carrier, some cruisers and destroyers. Even that limited transfer would amount to a fourth of the battleship strength in the Pacific, would seriously thin the winning bulge which the Navy now thinks it has on the Japanese. Thus Admiral King can hardly count on any such reinforcement of his Atlantic forces. Instead, he undoubtedly looks to New York City and Philadelphia.

In harbor there last week, almost ready for service, were the Navy's newest, biggest, fastest, mightiest battleships: the 35,000-ton North Carolina and Washington. Manhattanites last week got a good look at the North Carolina in the East River (see cut, p. 17), could judge that she was almost ready for duty. The Washington should be ready for sea by July.

Neither had been actually assigned to the Atlantic Fleet. But so long as they were on the Atlantic coast, Admiral King did not have to fret about paper designations.

Their speed (27 knots or better), heavy armor (better than the Hood's), their 16-in. batteries (more gun power than the Bismarck's or the Hood's) would make them ideal for Atlantic tasks. In every naval respect they are vastly superior to such model-T battleships as the Texas, New York, Arkansas. Given the two new battleships, if for only a few months, Admiral King could face tough naval tasks with a good deal more confidence than he is now entitled to.

Jobs In the Atlantic. Aside from all-important, ever-perilous patrol, the Atlantic Fleet's principal function last week was to exist. For the small fleet in the Atlantic was essentially playing the familiar game of the bigger one in the Pacific.

By being everywhere and nowhere--so far as public knowledge went--the Fleet has to act as a "containing force," a constant deterrent to enemy action against the U.S. or its spheres in the Western world. The Fleet was just big enough to patrol, to contain, to threaten. If it has to do more on an all-out, all-ocean scale, the U.S. will be in a pickle.

For the U.S., the main Battles of the Atlantic were still being fought last week by 1) diplomacy, 2) the British. In a very real sense, Admiral King's first battle had already been lost--at Vichy. From his staff experience in the Atlantic during World War I, Admiral King knew his ocean, did not have to get out his maps to understand what Nazi encroachment upon the French Empire could mean to the U.S.

Dakar on the western hump of Africa is just 1,800 miles from Brazil's eastern hump. Planes can fly from Vichy's colonial city to Natal in Brazil more easily than they now fly from Newfoundland to Ireland and England. Naval vessels based there could command the main route from Cape Horn to western Europe--which would mean the command of trade routes vital to the U.S. Nazi Germany, strongly entrenched at Dakar, would immediately be a military as well as economic and diplomatic threat to Latin America--and to the U.S.

The U.S., in short, cannot afford to let Hitler have Dakar. Yet, according to most naval opinion, the U.S. cannot now take the naval risk of attempting a preventive seizure of Dakar. Naval men, in fact, believed so strongly in the hazards that they considered the whole thing academic. But they also had to consider the possibilities.

Admiral King could probably assemble a task force of cruisers and destroyers, a couple of battleships, perhaps an aircraft carrier, which could break past the fortified, rocky Isle of Goree at the harbor entrance. He could probably overpower the recently repaired French battleship Richelieu, the two or three cruisers and a few destroyers in the harbor. With a division of Marines he probably could take hot, humid Dakar itself. But holding the town, making the attempt more than a reckless, fruitless demonstration, would be another matter.

At the probable minimum, the Army would have to support the Navy with an armored division, a motorized infantry division, land planes to put on the five airports near Dakar. Enormous problems of transocean supply (when the U.S. and Britain are already short of sea transport) would immediately develop. The Navy remembers what happened to General Charles de Gaulle and the British when they approached Dakar with an insufficient force. And Dakar's defenses--even without probable German reinforcements--are stronger today than they were last fall.

Martinique is Vichy's Caribbean hinge, equidistant (about 1,400 miles) from the Panama Canal and Key West, Fla. The U.S. has no particular reason to be in Martinique--but it has every reason to keep an enemy out. Once strongly based there, hostile naval and air power would be an effective, intolerable menace to the Canal, the Caribbean, the U.S. and its sea and airlanes to Latin America.

Getting there first is one job the Navy could successfully take on. Only deterrent to preventive occupation last week was not Navy realism, but the U.S. State Department. For any such blow at Vichy would destroy the last diplomatic threads between Washington and Petain, might even commit the U.S. to fighting where the Navy would have a harder time.

In the War of 1812 the British had a lively sense of Martinique's importance to the U.S., temporarily wrested Fort de France from the French to keep the U.S.

from doing the same. Until November a British containing force cruised outside the spacious (15 sq. mi.), deep harbor of Fort de France, bottling up the French warships inside: the old, waddly carrier Bearn, the cruiser Emile Bertin, a few lesser ships, and U.S. warplanes--now partly dismantled, salt-bitten, obsolescent but still useful if they were overhauled--which the Bearn had brought.

French sailors have gone ashore, started gardens on the hills above the harbor. The genial Governor, Admiral Georges Robert, regularly aims soothing nothings at the U.S., politely swears to fight at Vichy's order. Rather than risk an ugly incident, the British last November gave up their watch outside the harbor, left the patrol to two U.S. destroyers. Whether Admiral King sends a stronger task force to Fort de France is strictly up to Vichy's Admiral Darlan, Hitler, and the patience of Franklin Roosevelt.

The Azores belong to Portugal, which means that they will be within Hitler's grasp whenever he wants to reach. That fact can be gravely important to the U.S.

for reasons that Franklin Roosevelt touched on last year; "You and I think of Hawaii as an outpost of defense in the Pacific. And yet the Azores are closer to our shores on the Atlantic than Hawaii is on the other side." He might have added that the Azores lie at a pivotal position in the Eastern Atlantic, whence the U.S. Navy could control the approaches to the Mediterranean, do much to neutralize any Nazis at Dakar.

(Still better for the latter purpose, but less attainable, would be Portugal's Cape Verde Islands, 1,000 miles nearer Dakar, and athwart the straightest line from Africa to South America.) New England whalers used to sail to the Azores, recruit their crews from the wanderlusty Portuguese who inhabited the islands. Today, probably a third of the 254,000 Portuguese islanders have visited the U.S. at one time or another. In New Bedford, Mass., where some 20,000 transplanted Azoreans live, the newspapers are more interested in news from Horta and Ponta Delgada than from Germany.

So the Navy would find a certain understanding, if not a hearty welcome, if ever the U.S. moved into Horta and the islands' second-best port, Ponta Delgada, where the U.S. had a base during World War I. The Navy would also find practically no local defenses, but it would be in historic waters.

During the War of 1812, Captain Samuel Chester Reid of the U.S. privateer General Armstrong (nine guns, 90 men) put into Fayal for provisions. British Commodore Edward Lloyd followed with strong flotilla; the 74-gun Plantagenet, the 38-gun Rota, the 18-gun Carnation. In Fayal's harbor, at midnight, British, boarding the tiny General Armstrong, were driven off or thrown into the harbor. Overwhelmed at last, Captain Reid scuttled his ship, retired with his men to a stonewalled convent. Still afloat but damaged by the General Armstrong's gunfire, the British ships had to put back to England for repairs instead of proceeding immediately to Louisiana to reinforce the British expedition attacking New Orleans.

Navy men of today, remembering Captain Reid, keep him and John Paul Jones as reminders that naval victories do not always go to the merely strong.

*These and subsequent figures on the Fleet's strength are as reported up to last week.

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