by James Philip
The disasters of 1964 were behind the Service which again, probably not since the glory days of the Second War, was at least in appearance, what it always ought to have been, the great shining sword of American global power. Strategic Air Command might have won the October War in less than a day but the US Navy was what was going to keep the peace in the years to come.
Alabama-born Moorer was a naval aviator who had been serving with Patrol Squadron 22 at Pearl Harbour on that fateful day in December 1941. In February 1942, wounded and then shipwrecked during the fighting in the Dutch East Indies, he had survived to win a Distinguished Flying Cross only months later for his part in flying in supplies and rescuing wounded men from beleaguered Timor. Appointed CINCPAC, Commander in Chief Pacific Command in 1965, he – like many others - had half-expected John McCain, briefly his counterpart in the Atlantic to succeed James Russell as CNO, and been as surprised as most when his old friend had suddenly been dispatched to Australia as Ambassador eighteen months ago. Since then, rumours of a ‘drinking problem’ had circulated, that and gossip that he had fallen out with ‘people at the Pentagon’ and ‘Administration insiders’.
Confidentially, Moorer had sought clarity from Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, the one man close to President Nixon whose whole-hearted respect he retained, on this and other matters pertinent to the Navy.
‘What the Hell is going on, Mister Secretary?’
Laird, a man still grieving for the tragedy which had befallen his beloved Wisconsin in the Civil War, had politely deflected his inquiries, replying: ‘Let’s just say, John just wasn’t considered to be the right man for the CNO job at a time like this, Tom.’
At a time like this…
In other words, ‘Mister Sea Power’ would have told the President – and presumably, his friends on the Hill - that a Navy was more than just a collection of ships with crews lining the side when he visited the Fleet.
Not that Moorer had not told the President exactly that; except, he had probably employed more diplomatic language than John McCain might have!
Emperors tended not to react positively to the news that they were less than wholly clothed…
Moorer had been a dare-devil fighter jock in his twenties – you had to be to fly Grumman F4F Wildcats off the decks of the Lexington (CV-2) and the old Enterprise (CV-6) – and riding in the back seat of an F-4 as it thumped down on the deck of the Big E had been a real thrill.
Fortunately, he had learned more than a little about how to get things done without causing a ruckus since his younger, reckless days.
Welcoming the President aboard was, whatever his qualms about the man’s mettle, a uniquely proud moment. In the Service one saluted the rank, not the man, and standing on the armoured flight deck of the flagship of Task Force 136 – shortly destined to sail for the disputed waters of the China Sea and the Strait of Taiwan – was one of those memories he knew would live in his true, patriot’s soul, to the day he died.
Despite the disasters at home, both in the Midwest and politically, ethically within the machinery of the US State over which Richard Nixon had presided, and seemed, against all odds, to have survived, Moorer gave the man credit where it was due. The putative peace deal with the Soviets promised to bookend the old Cold War, possibly even to largely eliminate the still real threat of another even more dreadful second thermonuclear exchange.
Moreover, in keeping the United States out of the war in France last year, and thereby limiting its involvement on the ground in Europe to a limited air and sea presence around the periphery, the Administration had given the Navy a chance to get all its big ships recommissioned, and to finally re-establish manpower and training programs disrupted by the October War.
Nonetheless, the peace dividend cuts of 1963, the recruitment and retention problems of 1964 and 1965, not to mention the disruption caused by the war in the Midwest, had left the Navy’s one critical, irreplaceable resource, its people, woefully under-strength and unprepared for combat. Tens of thousands of its most qualified, highly trained non-commissioned – and to a lesser degree, commissioned – personnel had never returned to the colours and practically every ship in Task Force 136, was worryingly short of experience and technical expertise in key departments. Back in mid-1964 the Navy had begged, borrowed and stolen the men it needed to man the Kitty Hawk and the battle group which had been gutted in the Battle of Kharg Island, and huge as it was, the Service had still not really recovered from that singular disaster.
The politicians looked at the size of the Navy, remembered how it had doubled, tripled and kept on growing in size and offensive power during the Second War, continually gaining in operational effectiveness despite inducting well over two million men before hostilities ended in 1945. The problem was that the days when simply filling crew rosters equated to adding fully operational warships to the order of battle were gone forever.
The number one priority for the surface fleet had been getting the big carriers back to sea but even that had proven to be a poisoned chalice. Yes, the US Navy had acquitted itself honourably in the Korean debacle in 1965, and in the last two years it had returned to the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf, nowadays, as bosom buddies with the Brits. Unfortunately, the ‘political’ need to deploy ships as they became available, often an ocean, or half the world away from their home bases, had exacerbated the pressure on the over-stretched pool of trained, qualified manpower to the very limit, and delayed, time and again, the implementation of the long-term training programs required to sustain such major global operations.
Moorer’s predecessor, James Russell had cavilled at the mismatch between the dockyard and logistical support available to recommission ships – which was massive and, in some respects, exceeded the Navy’s practical requirements - with the availability of experienced and trained men to crew all the ships being rushed back to sea.
The crisis point had been reached, and passed and the CNO was losing a lot of sleep over the readiness for combat of at least half of the ships under his command. That was not to say that any individual US warship would not acquit itself well, with all due honour in battle if it came to it; just that he knew that not all his ships were capable of fighting to anywhere near what his staff euphemistically described as ‘their design capability’. Worse, despite his pleading, the Nixon Administration had done nothing to stop older, immensely experienced men leaving the Service when their twenty-five year commissions and enlistments ended. This had never been an issue before so many of the ‘old sweats’ were prematurely ‘retired’, callously cast out in 1963 and 1964 Peace Dividend cutbacks lottery. Remembering the way so many of their friends and comrades had been treated, nowadays, men simply took their pensions when they became due and went ashore, knowing their skills and experience were much sought after, and highly valued by private industry, and defence contractors desperate for ‘high-end’ workers and managers.
Back in October 1962 the system had been in a kind of – albeit uneasy – balance. Long-established recruitment and training programs had been approximately fit for purpose for a Navy of approximately seven hundred thousand men. The Kennedy Administration had salami-sliced the Navy to a mid-1964 projected manpower level of three-hundred and fifteen thousand men, and in the carnage, while some of the infrastructure underpinning fleet operations had been mothballed rather than eradicated, the active surface fleet had been slashed to less than a third of its pre-war size, with all bar two of the big carriers immediately taken out of commission. Although some of the cuts had been reversed by then, at the time of the Kitty Hawk disaster in July 1964, the Service had been gutted. LBJ, to his credit, had recognised the problem; but Nixon had turned a blind eye to the manpower crisis.
The fact of the matter was that the Navy had been rebuilding itself from far too damned near ground zero in the last three-and-a-half years, and anybody who claimed it was not going to take three, four or maybe, five or six years, for it to get back to being the wholly professional, efficient fightin
g machine it had been in 1962, frankly, did not know what they were talking about.
James Russell had started to rebuild the US Navy, now Moorer was continuing his work but, whether the Administration wanted to hear it or not, this Navy – leastways, the surface fleet - was not ready to fight a serious war. Especially, not one that might last more than a few days, or weeks.
The President did not get it. He kept asking what the surface fleet’s problem was; the Submarine Service was fine! He was unreceptive to the reality of the situation, in denial about this as he was about most of the problems afflicting his White House.
The Submarine Service was a different beast, it had never been hollowed out; the temporary hold placed on new construction under JFK’s and LBJ’s Presidencies had actually, enabled it to straighten out bottlenecks in research and development, and to resolve the engineering and construction problems identified with the Thresher class SSNs. Having avoided significant manpower cuts, its pool of experienced men and entire officer cadre had survived the madness of 1963 and 1964 intact.
For that, at least, the new Chief of Naval Operations, would be eternally grateful; likewise, his Service’s ever-firmer rapprochement with the Royal Navy, confirmed by the routine installation of inter-service liaison teams and officers on board each other’s major squadrons and larger surface ships.
This latter, had come out of one of the supposedly ‘failed’ post-Civil War Camp David summits. In fact, a great deal of positives had come out of those meetings. The White House nonsense about ‘failures’ was simply a blowback from the President’s inner circle – a bunch of jerks, in Tom Hinman’s opinion – who construed anything other than absolute agreement on everything, as in some way an insulting rebuff, and therefore felt justified in rubbishing and belittling their allies at every opportunity.
The ‘Operations Liaison Officer’ initiative – regularly castigated by Administration outsiders to deflect attention from their own shortcomings - had actually come out of the pre-United Nations summit last year, an event trumpeted as a near complete, and very acrimonious waste of time in private briefings by former White House Press Secretary, Ronald Ziegler.
Well, right now that little shit was looking at five to ten years in a Federal Penitentiary for his part in the cover-up of the Warwick Hotel Scandal. He had been caught lying to Judge Earl Burger, the Special Council appointed by Nixon’s own Justice Department to investigate the whole, sordid affair. He had lied and then perjured himself in front of a Grand Jury about his relationship with the three ‘plumbers’ already convicted of actually bugging the Warwick Hotel, and other properties in Manhattan and Queens.
Tom Moorer suspected that Ziegler’s culpability and self-evident unfitness to be anywhere near the White House, was probably just the thin end of a very long wedge that, as the media claimed – with an oddly united voice – allegedly went straight to the Oval Office. The only thing that was holding back the dam of indictments was the President’s repeated, increasingly hysterical assertion of executive privilege, behind which his closest henchmen had now been sheltering from Judge Burger’s investigators for over a year.
Tom Moorer eyed his Commander-in-Chief.
The man might have been impeached, or even in jail by now if the GOP did not have such an unchallengeable stranglehold on both Congress and the Senate; if he lost the election in November the Democrats were surely going to declare open season on him. That cannot have been a good thing to have been carrying around the last couple of years, and yet you had to hand it to the man, whatever his failings, he was not a quitter.
“It’s good to be out here with you, Admiral,” Richard Nixon declared, smiling broadly as he looked around. Momentarily, the worry lines had gone.
Moorer introduced the President to Task Force 136’s Royal Navy OLO, thirty-nine-year-old Commodore William Doveton Minet Staveley, the latest in the long line of impressively competent, uniformly personable and immensely diplomatic officers the British Admiralty had assigned to the US Navy.
Staveley was a grandson of an Admiral of the Fleet, the victor of the Battle of the Falklands in December 1914, and clearly a man marked for high command. As the captain of the destroyer HMS Cavendish, he had played a key part in Operation Manna, and for much of the last three years he had been the man masterminding the naval element of managing the French refugee crisis, then the logistics of war, and latterly, the restoration of freedom of navigation in the English Channel. He freely confessed that one of the reasons he had been sent to America was: ‘To learn how to do carrier operations the best way!’
Whereas, until last fall the US Navy had treated OLO appointments with a casual disregard for putting square pegs in round holes, from the outset the Royal Navy had treated the exercise as a priceless opportunity to re-establish intimate relations between the two navies; and harking back to the way things were in the Second War in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean in ‘the good old days’ of the pre-October 1962 era. Tom Moorer had taken rapid steps to ensure that his OLO’s were men similarly enthused with the right spirit.
It was an oddity of the new arrangements, that other than in the as yet, small Polaris Joint Nuclear Strike Force operating out of bases on the Clyde in Scotland, the US Navy Submarine Service had been excluded from the OLO regime. An oddity, because the same protocols which had been developed and tested, very successfully, in that Clyde-based joint force had since become the established operational model for the surface fleets of both nations.
The object of the exercise was to ensure that there could never be another disaster such as that which had befallen both of the old and refound allies in the Persian Gulf in July 1964. Americans tended to remember only the dead of the Kitty Hawk and the other US Navy ships sunk or crippled in the terrible battles of those awful days; but the British, Australian and New Zealand Navies had suffered, proportionally, equally catastrophic losses. The whole thing had been an unmitigated disaster and whatever else one said about President Nixon, in international affairs he had, thus far, demonstrated that he was a hard-headed pragmatist and frankly, that was exactly what the country, and the planet, needed right now.
Just so nobody could be in any doubt about this, the World’s press had been ferried out to the Big E to witness the send-off – to the Far East – of the mightiest single fleet to depart US waters since the Second War. Further, there was absolutely no secret about the fact that what the media was here to see, was but a small part of the great armada gathering to face down the Chinese menace, now perceived to be threatening the peace of Taiwan and the whole of South East Asia.
Less well-publicised was the apparent throwaway note in the draft of the US-Soviet Sverdlovsk communiques which spoke of both parties taking steps to quote: ‘mutually reduce and where practical, to deter aggression by third parties to undermine the objectives jointly agreed by the parties of the first part…’
Tom Moorer was not alone in observing that neither the United Kingdom, nor the Royal Navy had signed up to any part of that!
But then politics and diplomacy were about blurring differences and accentuating the positive, and the navies of real democracies did not do politics.
The governments of the United States and the Soviet Union had concluded that they needed peace more than they needed conflict; therefore, if as they both feared, the People’s Republic of China was not yet ready to concede that the struggle was, for the moment, if not over then in abeyance to permit human kind to recover from the catastrophe of the October War, something had to be done to deter the Chongqing regime from shaking the boat.
In other words, things were not as the parties to the Sverdlovsk peace process wished but as they were in the real world, wishful thinking was not going to do the business.
Axiomatically, the Chinese communists viewed both the US and the Russians as its enemies and therefore, in consequence, it had become an imperative of US geopolitical strategic doctrine to inhibit Chinese ambitions in its own, perceived sphere of interest – Tai
wan and parts of South East Asia – and in respect its de facto ally’s, or leastways, co-signatory to the Sverdlovsk communiques, Manchurian and Far Eastern ‘interests’. Specifically, the strategic calculus was that while the Chinese might be prepared to provoke a US response to aggression at some unspecified future date over Taiwan, or vie for control of, for example, the South China Sea, it was inconceivable that they would act against, say, the territorial integrity of the Vladivostok Oblast at one and the same time, thereby risking a war on two fronts.
Hence, the Administration had determined that now was the moment for a demonstration of crushing naval power; an unmistakable, intimidating statement of deterrence in the Far East.
The Navy had choreographed every minute, every step of the Commander-in-Chief’s planned twenty-seven-hour stay on board the Enterprise with its customary attention to detail.
Even as Richard Nixon was being guided inside the island bridge and led up to the Task Force Commander’s flag bridge, the flight deck was clearing of all non-essential personnel.
Marine One’s rotors were folded back along the length of its fuselage, the Sea King was rolled to the starboard elevator aft of the box-like superstructure to be stowed below, and the modernised Gearing class destroyer USS George K. Mackenzie (DD-836), took up station a thousand yards off the carrier’s port quarter.
The Mackenzie was one of three Gearing class FRAM1 conversions in the fleet off California; gunboat destroyers converted for oceanic anti-submarine roles, and equipped with the latest radar and fire control suites. In common with many of the ships escorting the Enterprise that day, she was relatively newly commissioned an had, in effect, ‘shaken down’ on her trip from the Brooklyn Naval Yard, where her conversion had been signed off as recently as the end of the third week of January, down the East Coast, across the Caribbean, through the Panama Canal and up the Pacific coast of Mexico. Until two days ago, the three-thousand ton destroyer – with a crew comprising two-thirds green horns and reservists, many of whom had not been to sea for ten to fifteen years, or at all – had been in dock at San Diego where the yard, had been struggling to work its way through the Mackenzie’s long list of FRAM1 conversion defects.