Military aviation policy did not suffer from official neglect, but the consensus within Congress and the executive branch—argued most vehemently by the General Staff—was that the aviators had not discovered an independent mission for themselves. The only concession to aviators came in 1920 when an Army reorganization elevated the Air Service to coequal status with the other combat arms of the Army. The Navy Department created a Bureau of Aeronautics the following year, with Admiral Moffett as its first chief. The Navy also accelerated its tests of bomb damage to warships, begun in 1920. Exercising his contempt for organizational discipline and his flair for publicity, Mitchell challenged the Navy to let the Air Service participate in its tests. The chief of the Air Service, Major General Charles T. Menoher, a nonaviator, found himself trapped between Mitchell and his disciples and a public clamor to test Mitchell’s theories about battleship vulnerability. Confident that Mitchell’s claims were exaggerated, the Navy allowed a special Army bombardment force to join its 1921 test program. Mitchell grasped the opportunity, sure that at the least he could make his case that land-based bombers could destroy “unsinkable” battleships and thus enlarge the Army air role in coastal defense.
The bombing tests of 1921 off Chesapeake Bay gave Mitchell his public relations coup, but under circumstances that hardened official opinion against his own leadership and radical reforms. Disregarding Navy rules for the experiments, Mitchell’s pilots dropped eleven 1,000- and 2,000-pound bombs on and around the former German battleship Ostfriesland and sent it to the bottom. Mitchell crowed over the act and then leaked his own analysis of the tests to the press. Unfortunately, several admirals had implied that bombs would not sink even an anchored, undefended battleship, and Mitchell seized upon their statements to discredit the Navy’s leadership and assert that bombers could also sink enemy warships in real combat. Naval aviators had mixed reactions to Mitchell’s air theatrics. Although they appreciated the boost to their own cause—that fleet aviation needed increased attention—they did not share Mitchell’s enthusiasm for either organizational autonomy or the future of bombing. The Navy position was amply stated in the Washington Conference negotiations: Naval aviation development should not be curbed in international agreement. Congress approved this position in 1922 by authorizing a five-year program to modernize and increase naval aviation to 1,000 modern airplanes and by funding the completion of Lexington and Saratoga.
Within the War Department Mitchell’s insurgency had wide impact. When the exhausted Menoher requested reassignment, General Pershing replaced him with Major General Mason M. Patrick, who had already curbed Mitchell once when they had served in the AEF. Patrick immediately learned to fly (at the age of sixty) and broke up Mitchell’s cabal in Washington. He also brought new order and discipline to Air Service affairs. Mitchell himself departed on a tour of Europe, where he renewed his friendship with General Sir Hugh Trenchard of the RAF and may have met General Giulio Douhet, the Italian air chief and author of Command of the Air (1921). Mitchell and his disciples understood Douhet’s theory that heavy bombers could defeat an enemy by bombing urban civilian populations into demoralization and political upheaval. They did not think that Douhet’s strategy suited America’s needs, since they still thought largely of the coast defense mission. They agreed with the Europeans, however, that air force autonomy would bring the optimal utilization of military aviation.
If the War Department thought that Mitchell’s crusade for an independent air force had slackened, it was mistaken, for even Patrick and other moderates in the Air Service urged the accelerated development of Army aviation. A General Staff study of air power in 1923 found no justification for severing air war from land campaigns or creating an independent air force, but it acknowledged aviation’s future importance. The following year a special congressional investigating committee reviewed air policy and reached similar conclusions. Although unhappy over official refusal to allow the creation of an air force freed from the control of field army commanders, Patrick accepted the current belief that air power still served the land campaign. Mitchell did not, and he said so publicly. Patrick transferred Mitchell to a field post, which meant that Mitchell also lost his brigadier generalship. Mitchell continued to charge that the government’s inattention to air power bordered on “treason.” In the face of Mitchell’s continued agitation and public interest in his charges, President Calvin Coolidge ordered another review in 1925, led by Dwight W. Morrow. The Morrow Board also rejected air force independence but urged increased attention to aviation development. The board’s findings overlapped Mitchell’s court-martial conviction for insubordination and stole some of the aviator’s public impact. Disgusted, Mitchell left the Army in 1926 rather than be suspended from duty.
The American love affair with military aviation flowered in 1925–1926 and set both Army and Navy aviation on a stable course. In 1926 Congress passed the Air Corps Act, which changed the Air Service to the Air Corps and gave it equal access to the Chief of Staff. It also provided for a force of 1,514 officers, 16,000 men, and 1,800 planes, which would be modernized by a five-year expansion and modernization program. The War Department would also add an assistant secretary of war (air), a post duplicated in the Department of the Navy. Faced with lessened resistance to aviation within its own ranks, the Navy in 1925 and 1926 adopted policies designed to integrate naval aviation into the mainstream of Navy affairs. By law only naval aviators could henceforth command carriers, seaplane tenders, naval air stations, air squadrons, and aviation training commands. Naval Academy graduates would receive compulsory aviation training after an initial tour of sea duty. In both the Army and Navy, aviation duty no longer carried a stigma, and ambitious officers more eagerly sought certification as pilots. The first phase in the development of postwar military aviation closed with the Army and Navy committed to giving their pilots a chance to prove their separate theories about air operations.
Naval Arms Limitations and War Plan ORANGE
Much to the amusement of the audience—and the irritation of the naval officers present—the male chorus of the 1929 Washington Gridiron Club variety show lampooned the military and its travails with disarmament. Taking their melody from HMS Pinafore’s “Little Buttercup,” the chorus lamented:
I’m off to the Conference
That London Conference
Though I can scarcely tell why;
Sadder and wiser, of
Diplomats I’m very shy
Our ships they are slighting,
They say, “No more fighting.”
We scarcely dare think what it means;
The Navy they’re sinking
The Army they’re shrinking—
Thank God, we still have the Marines.
Caught between the shoals of budget cutting and the storms of international diplomacy, the “treaty” Navy steered a delicate course into the 1930s. Although still skeptical about the friendship of Great Britain, the Navy deployed the weight of its battleline along the Pacific coast in accordance with the assumptions of War Plan ORANGE. Annual fleet exercises, however, brought the battleships into the Caribbean and Atlantic through the Panama Canal, demonstrating the fleet’s flexibility. Small squadrons of light cruisers, destroyers, and gunboats protected American interests in the Far East and Caribbean. When Lexington and Saratoga joined the fleet in 1928, they went to home ports on the west coast.
Still seeking a margin of offensive superiority that would overcome Japan’s geographic advantages in case of war, the Navy Department, especially the General Board, advocated modernization of its battleships and the construction of a balanced fleet within the constraints of the Five Power Treaty. Congress in 1929 approved the construction of a small carrier (14,500 tons) to replace Langley, which still allowed three more 23,000-ton carriers within treaty limits. The major concern, however, was the state of the cruiser force. Navy planners argued that the ten light cruisers on duty did not meet the long-range requirements of a war with Japan. Congress approved a
force of eight heavy or “treaty” cruisers (8-inch guns, 10,000 tons) in 1924. After another naval disarmament conference at Geneva failed to set any tonnage limits on other naval powers’ cruiser forces, Congress again responded to the Navy’s pleas for more ships and authorized fifteen more cruisers.
The Great Depression, the Hoover administration, Great Britain, and Japan came between the Navy and its cruiser-building program. As the nation’s economic crisis worsened in 1930, the Hoover administration asked the Bureau of the Budget to review the Navy’s plans. Exercising the budget-setting powers it had wielded since 1921, the bureau estimated that the Navy’s current building program to expand the cruiser force and modernize the rest of the fleet would cost $1.1 billion over a twelve-year period. In annual terms this meant a Navy Department budget around $450 million a year, or at least $100 million a year more than the Navy was already spending. When Britain and Japan reported they were ready for another round of negotiations, the Hoover administration promptly sent a pliant delegation to London to solve the cruiser problem on paper.
The London Conference of 1930 produced the last set of diplomatic constraints upon the U.S. Navy before World War II, but its limitations only ratified the Hoover administration’s reluctance to support the 1929 building program. Neither Great Britain nor Japan wanted to match the American heavy-cruiser program. Preferring investments in more numerous light cruisers, they agreed to tonnage limitations that they were already predisposed to follow unilaterally. The United States agreed to cut its heavy-cruiser program to eighteen ships within a 180,000-ton ceiling. Light-cruiser ceilings were set at around 140,000 tons for Great Britain and the United States and 100,000 tons for Japan, figures that could accommodate British and Japanese building plans. In addition, the conferees limited submarine tonnage to 52,700 tons and extended the “holiday” on capital-ship construction to 1937. Carrier limitations went unmodified—as the United States wished. The cruiser limitations did not satisfy Navy planners but still allowed some expansion should Congress choose to provide the funds for new heavies and lights. On an extended schedule, Congress authorized the heavy cruisers. It did not fund the light cruisers during the life of the Hoover administration. It also declined to modernize the aging destroyer force, approving only eight of the twenty-eight destroyers the Navy wanted to replace the eighty-seven four-stackers authorized during World War I. In summary, the surface Navy made limited progress toward a balanced fleet structured for the special problems of a Pacific war.
Budgetary constraints affected the fleet in other ways. Funding for manning the fleet, operations, maintenance, and modernization fell well below the recommended levels and dropped about 20 percent below the funds actually authorized in 1922. The Navy’s enlisted strength hovered around 80,000 sailors, or 20 percent less than 1922 projections. As new ships joined the fleet—despite some vessel retirements—the manning problem worsened. The Navy attacked both the manning and operations problems by proposing to eliminate a number of marginal bases, but Congress proved reluctant to close bases that provided constituents employment. It also refused to appropriate adequate funds for the development of a major fleet base at Pearl Harbor.
Nevertheless, the “treaty” Navy could point to some bright signs of progress. After Lexington and Saratoga participated for the first time in fleet maneuvers in 1929, some farsighted battleship admirals could see the potential of air strikes against enemy vessels and land targets. Whether carrier aircraft should strike the enemy’s fleet, especially his carriers, or simply protect the American battleline from air attack divided naval tacticians, but the evidence of consecutive fleet exercises pointed inexorably toward the carriers’ offensive potential. (The Navy also began to appreciate the importance of rapid-fire antiaircraft batteries and fire direction systems aboard ship.) In addition to the steady development of new types of carrier aircraft, the Navy won an increase of its air forces to 1,625 aircraft in 1933 and ensured a broader appreciation of air power by requiring all lieutenant commanders of the line to take ten hours of flying instruction and to then win wings if they could. Some of the latecomers, like Ernest J. King and William F. Halsey, proved marginal pilots but unlimited enthusiasts for naval aviation.
Below the ocean’s surface and the public’s general awareness, the “treaty” Navy also created a submarine force designed to participate in fleet operations against Japan. As part of the postwar reassessment of the details of War Plan ORANGE, the Navy started building and experimenting with submarines designed for other than coast defense. Ironically, the submarines the Navy built were admirably suited for commerce raiding, although Navy doctrine declared that long-range or “fleet” submarines fought in support of the battlefleet by scouting and attacking enemy warships. The first fleet boats or “S” Class submarines started a decade-long trend to larger boats whose surface speed, habitability, and fuel capacity would allow them to accompany the surface fleet across the central Pacific. The initial results were not promising. The first trans-Pacific cruise in 1921 took seven months; the subs’ surface speed did not reach the required levels; underwater speeds and handling problems discouraged submariners when they submerged and practiced torpedo attacks. Submarine service also proved dangerous. The crews risked substantial dangers even without enemy action. Faulty diesel engines offered carbon monoxide poisoning during surface cruising; saltwater and electric batteries produced deadly chlorine gas when a sub submerged; and propulsion and diving control difficulties sent several subs to the bottom. Rescue and escape procedures—real and simulated—took up a considerable portion of submarine operations.
By the 1930s the fleet submarine program had dropped from fifty-one boats to twenty-six, but design and technological advances had made a true fleet submarine possible. With policy largely set by a conference of aggressive submarine officers, the Navy Department adopted a fleet boat of 1,400 tons with six to ten torpedo tubes. The fleet boats should be capable of patrols lasting seventy-five days and a cruising range of 12,000 miles. Although submarine numbers dropped from a 1930 high of ninety-three to forty-two in 1935, the smaller force was far more capable. Moreover, naval planners and Congress viewed the submarine as an important naval weapon, at least in part because it was cheaper to build and man than surface vessels.
Of all the problems presented by War Plan ORANGE, none proved more troublesome than the absence of a defensible American base system in the Pacific. Even though the fleet retained technical and numerical superiority over the Imperial Japanese Fleet, it could not operate for long beyond its west coast bases, let alone beyond Pearl Harbor. The fleet’s appetite was large for spare parts, fresh water, oil, ammunition, food, and repair facilities. In theory the Navy found a solution: To create a “fleet train” of auxiliary vessels capable of mobile support, even underway. In reality, the fleet depended upon an auxiliary force inadequate in numbers (fifty-one ships in 1939) and most notable for its advanced age. For example, it had only two ammunition ships, seventeen oilers, three repair ships, and four stores ships. Only one of these vessels had been commissioned after 1922. Naval planners, who chose to build warships with their limited funds, assumed that the American shipbuilding industry could produce the necessary auxiliaries once war began.
One part of the naval establishment, however, committed itself with enthusiasm to solving the basing problem: The U.S. Marine Corps. During the postwar review of War Plan ORANGE, Major General Commandant John A. Lejeune ordered his erratic protégé, Major Earl H. Ellis, to study the implications of a war with Japan. Casting aside the conventional wisdom that amphibious assaults upon defended positions were impossible, Ellis wrote a study—Operation Plan 712D, or “Advanced Base Force Operations in Micronesia”—which Lejeune endorsed in 1921. With a brilliant fusion of faith and realism, Ellis thought he had identified and solved the fundamental problems of seizing a defended island. Naval gunfire and air strikes would provide the fire superiority that conventional artillery could not, while waves of landing craft brought infantry, ma
chine guns, light artillery, and tanks to the beaches. The concentrated violence of the beach assault should carry the Marines through the beach defenses, provided the Navy could keep the reinforcements and supplies coming in the ship-to-shore movement. Henceforth the Marine Corps would make the impossible amphibious assault possible, since the Navy could not advance across the central Pacific without the bases the Marine Corps would seize for it.
As part of the fleet exercises in 1924 and 1925, small Marine air and ground units tested some of Ellis’s theories and found them woefully theoretical, since the Navy did not have the transports and landing craft and the Marine Corps the specialized equipment to make an amphibious landing a bearable risk. The Navy’s General Board wanted an amphibious capability, but the available funds did not allow the development of ready forces. Nevertheless, the Army-Navy Joint Board in 1927 declared that the Marine Corps had the basic responsibility for developing amphibious techniques and providing the forces for the base-seizure portion of a naval campaign. With most of its field forces deployed to Nicaragua and China to support American diplomacy in the midst of two civil wars, the Marine Corps reduced its work to more theoretical studies, centered at the Marine Corps Schools, Quantico. By 1934 the Corps had produced a doctrinal publication, Tentative Manual for Landing Operations, which in 1938 became the basic Navy guidance for landings. The appearance of the Tentative Manual coincided with two other important developments: The return of most of the Marine field forces from abroad and the official announcement that these forces would become the Fleet Marine Force (FMF). Although a new commandant, John H. Russell, was firmly committed to developing the FMF, he reported that a total Marine Corps of 16,405 officers and men could provide only about 3,000 Marines for a projected wartime FMF of 25,000. Materiel development, largely dependent upon Navy and Army commitments, lagged as well. Nevertheless, the concepts that proved so important in all theaters in World War II had been created.
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