National Affairs: Navy Day

President John Goefield of the United Association of Plumbers and Steamfitters heated a rivet into a glowing thing of beauty. Frank Morrison, Secretary of the A. F. of L., passed it to some workmen. William Green, President of the A. F. of L., picked up a riveting hammer, sank the glowing thing into the keel of what is to be the 10,000-ton Pensacola, first of the U. S. “treaty cruisers.” Thus organized labor demonstrated that it knew Oct. 27 was Navy Day, and not merely the opening of Apple Week. The host, Admiral Charles P. Plunkett, Commandant of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, looked on proudly, benevolently; arose to a superlative: “The Navy is probably the most democratic organization on the face of the earth.”

Multitudinous were the symptoms of Navy Day. In Washington, Secretary of the Navy Curtis D. Wilbur preached dogma: “A first-class Navy requires a first-class merchant marine. And a first-class merchant marine is absolutely dependent upon a first-class Navy.” At Port Washington, L. I., Lieutenant Frank H. Conant* sped to an unofficial world’s seaplane record (251.5 miles per hour). At Lakehurst, N. J., thousands touched the silvery hide of the dirigible Los Angeles and said, “Gee!” In Honolulu and Shanghai, brown-skinned and yellow-skinned populace looked at brawny necks emerging from glistening white U. S. uniforms. . . . Navy Day was no myth.

Neither is the U. S. Navy the heroic myth of the days of John Paul Jones and the Bonhomme Richard, of Farragut in Mobile

Bay, of the Monitor and Merrimac, of Dewey in Manila Bay. It was President Roosevelt in 1907 when he sent the fleet around the world who first demonstrated that the Navy was a potent organization instead of a few glamorous names, a few precocious children of Fate. The Navy today lacks immortals, but is big with efficiency.

If the Navy were in the habit of indulging in spectacles, it might well exhibit its efficiency and potency by assembling en masse for a stupendous steam through the Panama Canal. Imagine President Coolidge and Secretary Wilbur “silent on a peak in Darien,” watching the flagship West Virginia poke its prow into the sun-kissed Pacific. Completed in 1924, at a cost of nearly $23,000,000, it is the last battleship which the U. S. can build until 1934, according to the Naval Limitations Pact agreed upon at the Washington Conference in 1923. The West Virginia, Colorado (the most expensive: $25,000,000) and Maryland are the three largest ships in the Navy (each 32,600 tons). Behind these in single file would come the 15 other battleships, stretching back six miles to the Pedro Miguel locks where the Florida (oldest and fastest of them all) would be chafing to get put. Then about one mile of light cruisers; then the submarines—almost a hundred of them—with their vanguard creeping midget-like through the yawning Gaillard Cut;* then another five miles of 106 pert destroyers impatient for the open sea; finally the submarine chasers, the mine sweepers, the airplane carriers, the colliers, the oilers, the cargo ships, and the last hospital ship struggling in the Gatun Locks. And up above 234 airplanes would frolic around the Los Angeles. Undoubtedly Rear Admiral William Adger Moffett would be on board the dirigible, would look down upon the 40-mile ribbon, would say: “Ah What a Navy!”† echoing the quarter-deck thought of Admiral Samuel S. Robison who, this year, commands the Navy.

*Three, days later Lieutenant Conant was killed when his seaplane crashed off the coast of Mathews, Va., while he was on his way to Norfolk to practice for the Schneider Cup races. Next morning, his body was found strapped to the seat of the wrecked plane; his hand was clutching the control levers; his parachute was untouched. Naval officers, viewing the disaster, said that he must have been flying low, about 160 miles per hour, when one of the pontoons of his airplane hit a fish net stake.

At 27, Lieutenant Conant was one of the most brilliant aviators in the service. He had flown 1,300 hours in 38 different types of airplanes; he had been shot from a catapult; he was one of the first 25 men to operate from the deck of an airplane carrier. The Navy mourned him, remembered that only two months before another courageous aviator, Commander John Rodgers, had crashed to his death in the Delaware River.

*Formerly called Culebra Cut.

†8,353 officers, 86,643 men.