• U.S.

DEFENSE: The Steel-Grey Stabilizer

7 minute read
TIME

The gleaming weapon that makes the new Eisenhower Middle East policy more than words is the U.S. Navy’s Sixth Fleet. This is the big stick that the U.S. carries in that troubled area while the President talks softly; it is the Middle East’s steel-grey stabilizer, a powerful force of aircraft carriers and atom-armed planes, missile ships, cruisers, destroyers and a Marine amphibious unit that unobtrusively patrols—and controls—that ancient and vital waterway, the Mediterranean Sea.

Day and night the Sixth Fleet is kept in a state of “instant readiness” to handle its many and unpredictable assignments. It is poised to inhibit Soviet volunteers in the Arab world, to provide air cover (if sought) for the armies of a dozen friendly nations, to support and guard the southern flank of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, to land marines anywhere that they are needed, and even to reinforce the U.S. Air Force (if called upon) in a strategic bombing northward over the Black Sea to Moscow. It is uniquely fitted to move in on crises ranging from local riot to local war without setting off a big global bang. “We can exert flexible force tailored to fit any situation,” says Vice Admiral Charles Randall (“Cat”) Brown, 57, the weathered combat-carrier veteran who has commanded the Sixth Fleet since last August. “We can raise our voice without shouting. And without firing a shot we can create terrific repercussions.”

“Very Unsettling.” Admiral Brown’s Sunday punch is Task Force 60, built around the 45,000-ton attack carrier Coral Sea with some 100 planes, the 40,000-ton Randolph with 80 planes, the heavy cruisers Salem and Macon, and about twelve destroyers. Task Forces 61 and 62 are amphibious groups that can put ashore a reinforced Marine battalion that will soon be equipped with atomic rocket weapons. Task Force 66, recently detached, but on constant call, is a submarine hunter-killer group led by Antietam, a 30,000-ton attack carrier with 80 planes. All together, this taut and lethal fleet consumes more than 50,000 tons of fuel per month. Although NATO supply bases are available for emergencies, the U.S. Navy expects that they will be easy enemy targets in wartime; the Sixth Fleet, therefore, brings most of its supplies all the way over from the Eastern U.S.

In the Sixth Fleet every carrier pilot is “special-weapons qualified,” meaning that he is trained to handle atomic bombs. As of now, Admiral Brown’s attack squadrons, paced by prop-driven Douglas AD Skyraiders, can deliver a low-level atomic attack at ranges up to 1,000 miles. Late this month the 60,000-ton Forrestal will relieve Coral Sea, bringing to the Mediterranean the Douglas A3D Skywarrior, a 600-m.p.h. twin-jet bomber with a range that can reach all the way to Moscow, if necessary, from anywhere in the Eastern Mediterranean.

“When we saw your grey destroyers slip into Trieste,” said a less-than-friendly Yugoslav Communist, recalling the tense Yugoslav-Italian crises over Trieste in 1952-53, “we always knew that somewhere over the horizon you had air flotillas ready to strike. It was very unsettling.” A friendly Greek leader once described Admiral Brown’s ships as “strong grey diplomats . . . the guarantee of independence for small peoples.”

Exchanged Sarcasms. Such respectful words have beauty of a sort for Charles Randall Brown, a heavy-set and hard-boiled Southerner who reads the Bible in the King James version nightly, revels in discussing the Koran with Turks and writes round-robin letters to his friends back home about his visits to foreign ports. Admiral Brown is both sensitive and salty. “You can’t put a martini in a refrigerator,” he says, “any more than you can put in a kiss”; and he sums up his 1921 wedding to Marylander Eleanor Green in a quaint, jazz-age way: ”We exchanged sarcasms and fell in love, a well-known fad.”

He was born and raised in Tuscaloosa, Ala. (pop. then: 9,000), grandson of a Civil War veteran and son of a respected lawyer and Democratic bigwig. At the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, he was awarded so many demerits for drinking, practical joking and all-round roistering that he was expelled, was reinstated only on his father’s plea and on probation. This shocked him into hard work and he finally graduated—far, far down the list—in 1921. After an assignment in 1924 to the Navy’s first aircraft carrier Langley, he turned to naval aviation. Not long afterwards Fighter Pilot Brown won Navy fame by scoring 60 hits out of 60 shots on a towed sleeve in five passes, a Navy gunnery record, and he advanced with the Navy from the old Liberty-engined torpedo plane (“It could make 70 m.p.h. going downhill”) to the dive bombers and fighters of World War II. On his last scheduled carrier landing aboard the old Saratoga in 1941, his plane hook skipped over the arresting gear, and he crashed into the landing barrier at high speed. Badly shaken up, he climbed into another plane, took off, and came back in for a perfect landing.

In Two Hot Hands. During World War II, Brown served notably as 1) a member of Fleet Admiral Ernest King’s staff in Washington, 2) commander of the escort carrier Kalinin Bay in the Pacific, 3) chief of staff of Carrier Division One from Leyte Gulf to the shores of Japan. Eleven more years of staff work and carrier command in the Pentagon and Mediterranean won him his third star and command of the Sixth Fleet, which he immediately began running his own way. “I cannot tell you how exciting it is,” he wrote to his close friends, “to hold in my two hot hands a large part of the striking power of the Navy. Others may pull the strings and add to or lessen my frustrations, strengthen or weaken, sharpen or blunt the weapon before it is handed to me; but it is I who have it. It is mine to shape and polish, inspire or confound, instruct or confuse, ready or sheathe, and employ wisely or foolishly.”

On the night of Oct. 29, when Israel attacked Egypt, the Sixth Fleet was busy with a complex landing exercise in Suda Bay, Crete. It speedily reboarded its marines and beached equipment overnight and headed east. Soon its destroyer groups and attack transports were slipping into Haifa, Gaza and Alexandria to pick up U.S. citizens and U.N. workers while the sleek grey carriers maneuvered in battle formations below the horizon. At one point, combat-ready marines were all set to storm through to Cairo just in case the Egyptians tried to prevent Americans from leaving, but the marines relaxed when the Egyptians did not interfere with the evacuation.

The Big Question. Amid the continuing echoes of the crisis, the 40,000 men of the Sixth Fleet were back last week on their arduous routine patrolling—up to twelve hours a day on watch broken by chow lines, snatched sack time, ships’ movies, and mail brought in almost daily by helicopter and high-line—with a high level of discipline and a low level of petty offenses that reflected superb morale. “This,” said one ensign, comparing the salad days of Mediterranean duty to the present paucity of ports, “is no all-expense tour.”

The officers and men of the Sixth Fleet know from experience that the Mediterranean lies at the heart of the most volatile, least predictable region in the world. But beyond all local questions hovers the big one: Can the Sixth Fleet survive if the Russians turn their high-flying bombers against the easily radar-spotted targets in the middle of the all but landlocked Mediterranean?

Brown’s answer is tough and honest. “The first few hours out here might be pretty lonely. If they do make a major effort against us, we’ll at least serve a useful purpose in diverting them. If I can survive the first blows, I’ll be able to do a lot of hitting myself. Wars are won by remnants, and the Sixth Fleet is going to be a pretty sturdy remnant. All I have to do is survive the first 48 hours. And I’m going to do it.”

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