MEN AT WAR: Waiting for the Second Alarm

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If the lithe, handsome, four-star U.S. admiral who holds the job of CINCPAC (Commander in Chief, Pacific) were to write a geography primer for children, he would probably start with these simple facts: three-fourths of the earth’s surface is ocean. One-third of the earth’s surface is the Pacific. Above this vast reach of blue water, above its coasts and islands, is the three-dimensional ocean of the air.

If he were to write a modern history primer, he might put down this: it has become the business of the U.S. to make the Pacific, in the words of General MacArthur, a peaceful lake. The Pacific actually became a U.S. responsibility when Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853 opened the Pandora’s box of Japan; the U.S. began to recognize its responsibility when it took the Philippines from Spain in 1898, helped to quell the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, helped to settle the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. In World War II, it cost the U.S. a painful, bloody, island-to-island struggle to make the Pacific a peaceful lake. The U.S. never intends to be forced to fight that kind of war again.

And for a primer on naval power, this: historically, sea power is the most mobile and therefore the most economical form of military force. For 3,000 years or more, navies fought on the two-dimensional ocean surface. The carrier-based plane gave navies the third dimension of the air. It has even given them a sort of fourth dimension—a sweep of 500 miles or more inland from any coast. Nearly all the economic and political power centers of the world lie within 500 miles of deep water.

Tireless Crusader. The CINCPAC who shrewdly broods over these matters is Arthur William Radford, 54, who has been a red-hot airman, a resourceful administrator, a crack staff man and a fighting carrier admiral. Above all, he has been a tireless crusader for Navy air—first against “battleship admirals” and later, in the great postwar unification controversy, against those who, Radford was convinced, were trying to nibble Navy aviation out of existence.

Radford brought to this fight much more than narrow departmental esprit de corps, more than the questionable methods that were used by the Navy in its desperate attempt to make its points. At Annapolis he absorbed the great U.S. tradition of sea power—the tradition that led U.S. Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan to explain to the British how they won and held their empire, the tradition which explains Winston Churchill’s grasp of strategic problems.

When the Army and the Air Force were preparing for “The War” and training for the Sunday punch, the better minds in the Navy, trained in an older philosophy of power politics, were aware that “The War” with Russia might never come, or might be postponed until the odds were heavily against the U.S. The Navy sensed the danger that lay in the Kremlin’s ability to start a series of brush fires (a la Korea) which might have to be quenched one by one. They knew that Britain had kept order along the coasts of the world by flying the Union Jack and dispatching naval power when that symbol of order was flouted. This was why Radford & Co. in their basic philosophy were closer than their Army or Air Force colleagues to the subtle interaction of prestige, politics and physical force. The Korean war is a weirdly pertinent example of the warning that Radford & Co. were trying to give the U.S. For their case, it was unfortunate that in their zest to make it, they got sidetracked in an assault on the Air Force’s long-range bomber (the B-36).

Man with Three Hats. Radford is generally regarded by his friends and admirers as one of the two most brilliant men in the active Navy. The other is 53-year-old Forrest Sherman, who, as CNO (Chief of Naval Operations), holds the Navy’s top job. Sherman is also a carrier admiral—in fact, the first Navy flyer to become CNO.

It is said that Radford wears “three hats,” which means that he has three commands. As CINCPAC, he commands the Pacific Fleet. As CINCPOA (Commander in Chief, Pacific Ocean Area), he is theater commander of an area which reaches from the North to the South Pole, from the continental shores of the Americas to the Bay of Bengal. Radford is also High Commissioner for the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, which means that he must look after the welfare of inhabitants of islands put in U.S. trust by the United Nations. This is the least important of the admiral’s three hats, but until midsummer he visited the islands frequently, once taking his wife with him to give an informal air to his call. Since Korea, he has left it all to his full-time deputy administrator, Rear Admiral Leon S. Fiske.

One of Radford’s most important present responsibilities is to keep the supply lines from the U.S. to the Far East open and smoothly flowing. By last week the Navy had put down more than a million tons of arms and supplies in Korea.

Frontier Question. In Radford’s command is the Navy’s far-flung string of Pacific bases, from Pearl Harbor to the projected new base at Camranh Bay in Indo-China. Pearl and Guam are the main bases for repair and service of warships, as well as for staging land-based air. Okinawa, a major base for the Air Force’s B-29s, is not now being used by the Navy but is on standby status. So is Kwajalein. Two bases in Japan (Yokosuka and Sasebo) are capable of handling large naval forces, and a twin base in the Philippines (Subic Bay plus nearby Sangley Point) will take small ones.

Radford admires Douglas MacArthur and sees eye-to-eye with him on most points of Pacific strategy, including the question of America’s Pacific frontier. In their view, the frontier is a barrier from the foggy, smoking Aleutians on the north to the Philippines. Part of this line is Formosa (see BACKGROUND FOR WAR), the key to the Western Pacific. MacArthur, Radford and most Navy men believe that Formosa can and must be denied to the enemy, and therefore cheered President Truman’s order to defend it. If Formosa is not held, the U.S. positions in Japan and the Philippines will be outflanked and half the Pacific will be lost.

Admiral Radford lines up with those who believe that Moscow’s men will not start a general war so long as they augment their domain by proxy wars. Said he last week: “All evidence points to the unpleasant fact that the U.S. must maintain a strong national defense organization for an indefinite period. This force must contain mobile elements that can be quickly dispatched to future Koreas. We can’t hope to compete with the Communists on a manpower basis, but we can build up an organization that can apply superior power at the right time and place. Naval and Marine forces are designed for just such eventualities.”

Admiral Radford was back last week in his Pearl Harbor headquarters—where a huge wall map locates every merchantman and warship in the Pacific—from a conference with MacArthur in Tokyo and a flying visit to the Korean front with Brigadier General Thomas J. Cushman, commander of the Fleet Marine Force. Radford was well pleased. He has no command responsibility for the fighting ships off Asia’s coast. Vice Admiral Arthur Struble, who commands the Seventh Fleet, takes his orders from Vice Admiral Charles Joy, who is MacArthur’s Far East naval commander, and MacArthur takes his from the Chiefs of Staff. The carriers are commanded by folksy, twinkling Rear Admiral John (“Uncle John”) Hoskins, who in World War II lost a foot in a Jap attack on the light carrier Princeton. Every Navy officer in the Pacific knows that Radford’s appraising blue eye is on him.

Said one last week: “You can bet that Raddy knows what’s going on on his ship and every other ship.”

Prowess with Drags. Radford’s class at Annapolis—1916—produced more carrier admirals in World War II than any other. They, and others of their times, were a group of mavericks, individualists and innovators. A few of them tried for West Point—and took Annapolis because appointments there were easier to get from Congressmen. Radford (born in Chicago in 1896) was one of these. It was a matter of considerable surprise to Radford’s father—a Canadian-born civil engineer who had moved on from Chicago to Grinnell, Iowa—when young Arthur told him, one fine day, that he was headed for the Naval Academy.

To help the boy pass his entrance exams, Radford’s father sent him to a naval prep school in Annapolis. Arthur cut morning classes to cross the Severn and watch a group of the Navy’s air pioneers fly their 1912-model crates. He did not realize that he was missing a 9 o’clock roll call until his father wrote a chiding letter about his truancy.

When he entered the Naval Academy he was 16, and younger than most of his classmates. His grades, mediocre at first, got better every year. The 1916 Lucky Bag (Academy yearbook) said: “Raddy came to us as a child—a pink-cheeked Apollo; since then he has been fooling people.” The yearbook entry mentioned Radford’s prowess with “drags” (i.e., girls), and sketched a disaster that happened in his second year—”he got a smoking pop with a hop only a week off”—which means that he was disciplined for out-of-bounds smoking and missed a dance.

Oil on the Decks. Radford’s first duty after graduation was on the battleship South Carolina, which had only one Atlantic convoy job and was otherwise used for training. When the Navy sent out its first postwar call for academy graduates to take flight training at Pensacola, Radford jumped at the chance, and might have gotten into the first Pensacola class if his ship had not been in Honduras. He made the second class, and got his “bird” (pilot’s wings) as Naval Aviator No.2896.

He flew for a while at Pensacola as an instructor, then got a two-year tour of duty in the Bureau of Aeronautics at Washington. There he first demonstrated his ability for administration and staff work, and began his long war against the battleship admirals (as late as World War II he was still cursing them in his quiet, emphatic voice). As a scout plane pilot attached to the Colorado and later the Pennsylvania, he learned what the old-time battlewagon skippers were generally like. Most of them hated the airplanes they were forced to carry, because 1) they splashed oil on the ship’s clean decks; 2) it was a nuisance when pilots, dead or alive, had to be pulled out of the water; and 3) it seemed absurd to the admirals that aviators should get extra pay for doing what they liked to do—fly.

The first carriers built as such were the old Lexington and Saratoga* Radford got duty on the Sara in 1929, within a year was skipper of the carrier’s Fighting Squadron One. This outfit became known as the High Hat Squadron, and astounded the country with virtuoso exhibitions of precision acrobatics. Radford was a superbly confident and skillful pilot by that time, but he was more than a mere stunter. He was interested in precision flying, precision machines, precision methods of making war.

Mass & Quality. About this time, a more than usually friendly battlewagon officer said to the bold young pilot: “Raddy, you guys are crazy to fly those airplanes like that. You’re going to kill yourself one day with an engine failure.” Raddy replied: “Look, sir, if we’re going to accomplish anything in naval aviation, we can’t reckon on engine failure. We have to think of these planes as being good enough to stay in the air.”

In the ’30s Radford had a variety of sea and shore duty, doing what he could all the while to improve the technique of carrier flying. In the autumn of 1941 he was called back from a base command at Trinidad to take charge of the Navy’s air training program, a job which got him a rear admiral’s two stars. Radford took over the training program a week before Pearl Harbor. His problem was to combine mass production with high quality.

He began a program of rigorous preflight training in a handful of universities, with ground studies and physical conditioning. He set up a number of inland centers for primary training, most of them hundreds of miles from tidewater. Some of his airmen got their first carrier practice on the Great Lakes, on bizarre training carriers converted from paddle-wheel steamers. In two years he was turning out 20,000 superbly trained pilots annually.

“Emergency Turn 9.” In 1943, with the training program running like a watch, Radford persuaded his superiors to send him to sea, fought his first major action as commander of a carrier group in the U.S. invasion of the Gilberts (Tarawa-Makin). He had a prescient hunch that the Jap carriers, fed up with heavy daytime losses, would launch an attack at night. With Lieut. Commander Edward H. (“Butch”) O’Hare, famed Congressional Medal winner, Radford worked out a radar-equipped night fighter system. When —sure enough—Jap torpedo planes were reported approaching after dusk, O’Hare took off with his bat team. Two of the approaching Japs were splashed (shot down) and the others, disconcerted, turned back. O’Hare never came back from the mission.

Radford was called back to Washington to straighten out Navy air administration —particularly in the matter of getting combat-equipped planes from the factories to the fighting areas. When that had been satisfactorily attended to, he went to sea again, this time commanding Carrier Group 58.4—a component of wizened, brilliant Marc Mitscher’s Task Force 58. His group joined the first carrier strikes— after Doolittle—on the Japanese home islands.

On one occasion when “bogies” (unidentified and presumably enemy planes) were reported only 18 miles off, an excited officer in the flag-plot cabin reached for the ship-to-ship radio telephone and dropped it. Another excited officer darted to pick it up, and upset the transmitter. Radford, who had been watching, picked up the telephone, quietly gave an order: “Emergency Turn 9,” and turned away. No one ever heard him raise his voice in the stress of battle.

Four Stars. Since Radford was a man of charm and an able, forceful lobbyist, he was persuaded by the late James Forrestal, then Secretary of the Navy, to stay in the CNO’s office to negotiate the service merger which Forrestal saw was inevitably coming.

After the separate Air Force was created and the three services merged in a Department of Defense, Radford remained one of the diehards. In integration he saw dire possibilities of damage to the Navy, its air arms and to the Marine Corps. He was sent out of Washington to command a peacetime task fleet, brought back again as Vice Chief of Naval Operations (as a vice admiral), sent out again in the spring of 1949, as a full admiral, to be CINCPAC.

Sticks & Tear Gas. Above Pearl Harbor’s gleaming, silver-painted fuel tanks, on the hillside Makalapa Drive, Radford and his wife of 14 years (both were previously married) live in a big house with a green awning, nestled among palms and tropical shrubbery. Two hundred yards away, at the end of a walk called “Admiral’s Alley,” is his four-story, white stucco headquarters building. The admiral’s Scotty accompanies him to work every day, then goes home. The Radfords go for a swim every day before lunch. In the evening when they are not entertaining or dining out, they read, or talk while the admiral fiddles with his cameras. Radford is a great reader of newspapers and magazines, much more so than most Navy officers, and gets caught up on world events every morning before breakfast.

Two years ago, in a lecture at Chautauqua, N.Y., Radford said: “In backing up our diplomacy the Navy, with its possibilities for local precise action, can break up small incidents before they mushroom into catastrophic size. It is similar to the handling of a mob. Policemen with sticks and tear gas have a definite advantage over a Sherman tank. They can do the job just as well and without causing a massacre. This consideration is what motivates much of the activities of our restless Mediterranean fleet.”

The Korean war turned out to be just such a police action as Radford had in mind. The U.S. cannot use its figurative “Sherman tank” (the atom bomb) in Korea, and it could have used a lot more “sticks and tear gas” (ordinary weapons for fighting small-scale wars) a lot sooner than it got them. Radford expects to be called on to use his sticks and tear gas in the not-distant future. He is waiting for the second riot alarm.

*The Langley, first U.S. carrier, was a converted collier.