ARMY & NAVY: Biggest Day

ARMY & NAVY

Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays are holidays but Theodore Roosevelt’s is Navy Day. Last week Franklin Roosevelt sent a wreath to be placed on Theodore Roosevelt’s grave at Oyster Bay, L. I. Celebrations were held at Navy stations over the U. S. In the rain at Washington Navy Yard a party of Marines landed from Anacostia, staged a smoky mock battle with a party of sailors dressed in straw sombreros and checkered shirts to suggest Central American Insurrectos. At Philadelphia Navy Yard visitors clambered over Admiral Dewey’s old, grey flagship, the Olympia. Preparedness messages were delivered on Boston Common by James Roosevelt, at the Navy Department by droopy-mustached Secretary Claude A. Swanson, in Atlanta by the Navy’s Chief of Naval Operations, Iowa-born Admiral William D. Leahy. But seadogs old & young, already convinced that Roosevelt II is Navy’s best Presidential booster since Roosevelt I, last week had a better reason to rejoice in their biggest Navy Day.

At New York Navy Yard in Brooklyn, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Charles Edison, son of the inventor, grasped the controls of a pneumatic riveting machine, shot a flaming bolt into a 70-ft. section of the keel of the North Carolina, first battleship the U. S. has built since the West Virginia was commissioned in 1923. North Carolina’s proud Lieutenant Governor Wilkins P. Horton shot the second rivet and the Yard’s new commandant, Rear Admiral Clark H. Woodward, dispatched the third. Before newsreel cameramen had picked up their equipment to depart, a battery of professional riveters was at work. When the North Carolina is completed some time in 1941, along with its sister ship the Washington, whose keel will be laid at Philadelphia Navy Yard next spring, the Navy will have the two biggest (35,000 tons), fastest (27 knots), best-armed (nine 16-in. guns) and most expensive ($60,000,000 apiece) battleships ever built in the U. S.

When the quotas of the 1922 Washington Conference and 1930 London Naval Treaty expired at the end of last year without ever having been fulfilled by the U. S., the U. S. Navy consisted of 325 fighting ships, 212 of which, including 158 destroyers, were classified as “over age.” Now abuilding or appropriated for in the present push to reach the quotas are 87 vessels, including besides the North Carolina and Washington three aircraft carriers, ten cruisers, 55 destroyers and 17 submarines, the keel for one of which, the Swordfish, was laid last week at the Navy’s yard in Mare Island, Calif. Only nation to admit to bigger naval rearmament is Great Britain, whose 285 vessels are being increased by 96, including five battleships.

In charge of the new construction program is shy, greying Assistant Secretary Edison, who has already announced the Navy’s intention of asking Congress for two more battleships at the next regular session. Taking his cue from Franklin Roosevelt’s fondness for quoting from other philosophers, Mr. Edison last week quoted him: [“It is] entirely consistent with our continuing readiness to limit armaments to maintain a defense at sea sufficient to insure the preservation of our democratic ideals and the maintenance of a righteous peace.”