ARMY & NAVY: Second to None

ARMY & NAVY

“As Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States it is my Constitutional duty to report to the Congress that our national defense is, in the light of the increasing armaments of other nations, inadequate for purposes of national security and requires increase for that reason.” With these words—the meat of his long-awaited Rearmament message —Franklin Delano Roosevelt last week called upon the country for the greatest naval construction program since the days when he was Woodrow T. Wilson’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy. The rest of his message was given over to the hows and whys of Rearmament.

How. To grease the way in Congress for the launching of a huge naval program the President shrewdly proposed to hand the Army some small change at the same time—$17,000,000 besides its regular appropriation. This would be used for ammunition, antiaircraft equipment, tools and dies for future conversion of industrial plants to munitions manufacture and for building up the enlisted reserve to 75,000 men.

To the Navy he proposed to give nearly $800,000,000. Part of this would go toward boosting the Naval Air Force from 1,900 planes to a thundering 3,000. Some would go toward increasing personnel by 1,200 officers, 20,000 men. The bulk of it would go into the most expensive and complicated machines ever devised, modern warships.

In his message the President set forth both specific recommendations and a broad Big Navy Policy for future construction. He urged that two more battleships be laid down this year—in addition to the two now abuilding at a cost of $70,000,000 each. He also recommended that work be started immediately on two more light cruisers. And to keep abreast of the mile-a-minute torpedo motor boats developed abroad, notably in Italy, he asked for a special $15,000,000 appropriation for experimental construction of “small vessels.”

The President’s Big Navy Policy was summed up in the short recommendation for a flat 20% increase in the “existing authorized building program for increases and replacements.” Since the U. S. never built up to limits imposed by the 5-5-3 naval treaties, and since the program already underway was designed merely to catch up with the treaties, what the President asked for last week was a Navy 20% bigger than allowed by the expired treaties, a Navy second to none of the big navies now building. (Most up-to-date naval figures, compiled by FORTUNE for its March issue, are shown in the table below, left.)

This means a Navy as big as Britain’s. Indeed, the President delayed writing his Rearmament message while he awaited the result of a secret powwow in London between U. S. and British navies. For under the terms of the three-way agreement concluded at the 1936 naval conference, the U. S., France and Britain are to exchange information on their building plans. Presumably, they also exchanged what little information they had about Japan’s plans, which are supposed despite denials to include monster 46,000-ton capital ships writh 18-inch guns.

Why. Well aware that a big Navy is bound to arouse loud if not effective Congressional opposition, President Roosevelt informed Congress: “It is with the deepest regret that I report to you that armaments increase today at an unprecedented and alarming rate. It is an ominous fact that at least one-fourth of the world’s population is involved in merciless, devastating conflict. . . . Tension throughout the world is high.” For support of his program he appealed to almost all apathetic or opposition groups except pacifists.

To the inland States, with dark hints of air raids: “Adequate defense means that for the protection not only of our coasts but also of our communities far removed from the coast we must keep any potential enemy many hundreds of miles from our continental limits.”

To each seaboard: “We cannot assume that our defense would be limited to one ocean and one coast and that the other ocean and the other coast would with certainty be safe.”

To liberals: “I believe that the time has come … to enact legislation aimed at the prevention of profiteering in time of war and the equalization of the burdens of possible war.”

To isolationists: “It is our clear duty to further every effort toward peace but at the same time to protect our nation. . . . Such protection is and will be based not on aggression but on defense.”

What For? The Commander in Chief of the U. S. Army and Navy prepared, if necessary, to dispatch aides to rostrum and microphone to sell Rearmament to the country. For the question immediately asked, by both Republicans and Democrats was: What for?

Michigan’s Senator Vandenberg thought the President should disclose “the justifying facts, if any, for the biggest regular budget for arms in our history.” Congressman Maury Maverick, the liberal Texan, declared: “We must also decide what national defense is—whether it means battleships 600 miles up the Yangtze River in China or no farther than Hawaii.” California’s Senator Johnson wanted to know what the “foreign policy of this Government is. I don’t know what it is. You don’t know what it is.”

One of the President’s reasons was pretty well demolished last week by none other than Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Naval Operations. In hearings on the regular Navy Bill, the biggest in 16 years, he was asked whether the Atlantic Coast could be defended with almost the entire fleet in the Pacific. Looking and speaking like the Navy’s No. 1 Admiral, which he is, the Chief of Naval Operations replied frankly: “I can only answer that by saying that in the event of an attack being made on the United States coast on the Atlantic side the fleet could be brought to the Atlantic Ocean in sufficient time to prevent any real success on the part of an enemy. . . .” Admiral Leahy backed the President’s program to the hilt, and incidentally added a new reason of his own for a Big Navy—”Possible exploitation or seizure of the Republics of Central and South America.” But he knew as well as the President that a Big Navy means a Big Navy in the Pacific and nowhere else.

As a Recession measure to create employment, the construction program has little immediate significance, for it will be spread over a period of years. What isolationists, who have dominated U. S. foreign policy since the War, feared most was that the President wanted men and ships to carry out the collective security policy he enunciated in his Chicago speech last October.

The conversations between the U. S. Navy and the British Admiralty certainly involved no definite commitments, but it is known that the President with traditional interest in naval affairs has displayed a lively curiosity on how the U. S. and British fleets would maneuver in case of trouble in the Pacific—meaning with Japan. The Navy Department never speaks of a second-to-none fleet, which implies rivalry with Britain, but of one equal to the combined navies of any two Fascist powers—meaning Japan and an ally.

Apparently the super-grand strategy is that if Britain is to police Europe, the U. S. must help police the Far East. The four cruisers recently dispatched to Australia, ostensibly to help celebrate the sesquicentennial of Botany Bay, will actually be on permanent station in the South Pacific. From London a New York Times correspondent reported the reaction to the President’s Big Navy message: “It was almost as if Britain had won a war victory.”*

* That obedient arm of Josef Stalin’s foreign policy, the U. S. Communist Party, is so enthusiastic about Franklin Roosevelt’s foreign policy that Earl Browder described the U. S. line of defense in the New Republic last week as “Manila, Honolulu and Nome.” Indeed, the No. 1 U.S. Communist let down his hair to the extent of declaring that only courageous action on the part of the President could save from catastrophe ”our country and all the capitalist world.”