Army & Navy – One Hundred Years

Almighty God . . . look with favor, we beseech thee, upon this school.

Some 3,000 midshipmen will march from their grey stone barracks at Annapolis next week to hear handsome, ur bane Vice Admiral Aubrey Fitch open the ceremonies celebrating the U.S. Naval Academy’s 100th year. There will be light moments, a “hop” in Dahlgren Hall. But essentially it will be an occasion for prayer ful thought both in the Chapel and the Administration Building next door.

Upon no other group of young men (outside the U.S. Military Academy) does the security of the nation rest so heavily. Not since the Civil War has the Naval Academy had such a stirring up or been confronted with a ‘future so uncertain.

The sacred reservation itself was threatened with dismemberment. From various practical and spiritual positions, Congress men, airmen, scientists stared at the Academy with such critical eyes that officers were covered with embarrassment.

A host of reserves, leaving the Navy, were returning to influential civilian life with a well-developed scunner against the “trade school,” to which they sometimes also referred as the “prig factory.” Gazing earnestly inward, the Academy asked itself: “What’s wrong?”

The Mission. In the fundamentals of its teachings in the last 15 years there had been little change. Its “mission,” as set forth in document, directive and memoranda, was still the same: to develop military character, physical fitness, and give a broad professional education. To this the current Secretary of the Academic Board, Captain Robert Morris, added tentatively: “And a thirst for knowledge of cultural subjects.”

Military character, as the Academy teaches it, includes discipline, gentlemanliness, courage and pride.

Few midshipmen get through four years without being “frapped” (reported for some infraction). For a long list of Class B offenses (from “hair not properly cut” to “window, throwing articles from”) midshipmen sweat out hours of extra duty drills. For a shorter list of Class A offenses (malingering, obscenity, scandalous conduct, etc.) midshipmen brood in confinement in their rooms. Midshipman quip that there are still men from the classes of the ’30s gathering dust in forgotten corners of Bancroft Hall.

Candidates are rejected for everything from “offensive or indecent tattooing” to “lack of serviceable occlusion.” In four years of education, 186 hours must be spent swimming, boxing, steeplechasing. etc., besides (by moral compulsion) three hours a week in intramural sports.

For varsity men the schedule is even more strenuous. Footballers labor six afternoons a week, generally watched by “Jake” Fitch himself, who has never forgotten his own athletic undergraduate days. Not counted in any of this are hours of regular marching and drilling, and the hours of extra duty.

Midshipmen learn that “the fingerbowl is provided as an assistance in cleansing one’s lips and fingertips,” and emerge with the old-fashioned polish that marks their profession.

“Go Tell the Bashaw.” They learn pride bordering on arrogance. Daily they are reminded of the words and deeds of the U.S. Navy—words like those of Lieut. Andrew Sterett, posted for their edification in Luce Hall: “Go tell the Bashaw of Tripoli and the people of your country that in the future they may expect only a tribute of powder and ball from the sailors of the United States.” They get the idea.

The best they learn is implicit in the vow they take, “that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same … so help me God.” The history of World War II is filled with the names of men who died in fulfillment of that solemn oath.

The Academy still turns out iron men. gentlemen and heroes.

In these matters Academy men felt no embarrassment last week. It was in the field of academics and of professional training for the future defense of the U.S. that they worried. Even before the atomic bomb, World War II had changed things.

Lock Step. The faculty had been strengthened with topnotch men drafted from civilian colleges. In 1941 the Academy had gathered unto itself J. Buroughs Stokes, a young educator with a doctor’s degree from Harvard, had given him a commission and made him Assistant Secretary of the Academic Board.

As the draft hooked other educators, J. B. Stokes gaffed them and landed them on the Academy staff. Heads of departments remained, as always, regular Navy officers. But reserves and civilians took over the heaviest teaching load. The effect was refreshing. The difficulty the Academy now faces is keeping them on its staff. Many of them will go back to civilian colleges at the first chance.

One reason: the Academy’s lock-step method of teaching. Daily, across the Yard, in & out of Luce, Dahlgren, Isherwood, Maury Halls, squads of midshipmen march to get their marks, file into class, sit down, open books, stand up, recite, sit down, stand up, march to the next class. The question (said Annapolis’ critics on the inside) is not what they know but what they momentarily remember.

How Broad Is “Broad”? The Academy’s rationalization of the system is that in no other way could midshipmen be crammed with all that is thought necessary. In four years of about 3,200 hours they are required to get satisfactory marks in seamanship, navigation, ordnance and gunnery, marine engineering, electrical engineering, mathematics, one language (the only chance for an elective) and an abbreviated course called English, History & Government.

How well “broad professional skills” are developed is a question. Whether the content of courses is realistic in a modern day of atomic power is still another question. Even in its self-searching, the Academy, for the moment at least, rests its case with these words: “When you’re climbing rigging you don’t let go one handhold until you’ve got another.”

One Week for Air. In aviation, the Academy said, its mission is not to teach men to fly. Its mission is simply to familiarize midshipmen “with the potentialities and limitations of air power.”

To that end it now has an intense but makeshift, one-week course in aviation at the nearby Naval Air Facility. Next year, under Jake Fitch, who once commanded carriers and was Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Air before he became Academy “Supe,” a more ambitious program will be launched: for second classmen, instead of the usual summer cruise, a six weeks’ training period at a naval air station and four weeks at sea on carriers. In their last year, midshipmen will get a refresher course of a week, mostly flying.

At that time they will be screened; possibly as many as 50% of them will be picked for postgraduate specialization in naval aviation.

The Quality of Officers. These were all matters of deep concern this week at the great institution which began its history only a century ago in a round fort on the Severn River with three plebes, six instructors and a superintendent—and once taught such necessary skills as use of the cutlass. There were other problems, over which the Academy had little control, which required immediate solution.

One was the method of selecting candidates, most of whom are appointed by their Congressmen. Prescribed entrance requirements only insure a minimum standard. As a result, almost 15% “bilge” oat for scholastic failure. A board of naval officers noted wryly: “The quality of officer personnel obtained by the present method of appointment . . . is not the best obtainable.”

Dream of Size. The Academy has to expand. The enormous Navy which Washington contemplates may require some 50,000 officers. The Navy, retreating from a classic position, admits that less than half of these need be Academy men. But to supply even that many officers would mean more than doubling the Academy enrollment. The Academy’s new dream: 7,000 midshipmen.

The reservation is already bursting at the seams. Bancroft Hall, where midshipmen live and eat, is jammed. Junior officer instructors are quartered in Quonset huts. The reservation’s 224 acres are filled to capacity. The Academy’s high white walls (put up more to keep midshipmen in than to keep visitors out) press against the brick sidewalks and pretty colonial houses of old Annapolis town. Only by acquiring ten available residential acres of the town and 32 acres of neighboring St. John’s College could the Academy expand. That idea was angrily opposed by St. John’s president, Stringfellow Barr.

The alternative under discussion in Congress is to establish another naval school on the West Coast. That idea the Academy opposes: 1) a second school would engender sectionalism and rivalries, already too emphatic in the armed services; 2) administration would be difficult; 3) the great traditions of the Navy officer class could not be transplanted.

Another problem which has to be solved is how to keep and train more than 25,000 reserve officers and to convince them they would get an even chance with Annapolis men. Congress has not set up any machinery by which reserves could become regulars.

“I Shall Do My Best.” Yeasty social changes are also fermenting. Plebes have a new, downright and often cynical attitude towards the Academy old-school tie. They are older than prewar plebes, many more of them have come from colleges, many are enlisted men who have been with the fleet and wear campaign ribbons on their jumpers. In this year’s plebe class is 18-year-old Negro Wesley Anthony Brown, who wrote grimly to Harlem’s Negro Congressman Adam Clayton Powell: “I shall do my best to successfully complete the prescribed course. . . . In 100 years of service to the American people the Academy has not produced one Negro graduate.” Midshipman Brown, not the first to try, has had high marks, has made one of the highest in the German Placement Test. He rooms alone.

The next 100 years lie partly in the hands of the Academy’s alumni. They are a powerful group and most of them have spiritually never left the reservation. Of 18,000 who have graduated since the Academy’s founding, 15,000 are still alive (only some 2,400 had graduated by 1900). Among them are the commander in chief, U.S. Fleet, the chief of the Navy’s Bureau of Personnel, who are directly responsible for Academy policies. (Jake Fitch only administers.) Academy alumni are admirals and captains—the holders of almost all the worthwhile jobs in the Navy—who have learned new doctrines fighting World War II, whose ideas directly and indirectly influence U.S. naval policy. They are also, in group, the men who studiously kept the Navy command plums for Annapolismen, who must now, if the Navy is to remain great, realize that Navy top talent can come from other schools.

Next week, as he has for many years, the chaplain will intone his special prayer for the Academy: “Almighty God . . . give thy grace to all those to whom the management of its affairs and the instruction of its members are confided.”