One Hundred Years of U.S. Navy Air Power (32 page)

Thus, on the eve of the Battle of France in May–June 1940, the various appropriations came to a total of five new aircraft carriers. But, illustrating the continued dominance of the battleship as the main capital ship type, the same legislation called for twenty-one new dreadnoughts. By 1940, however, only the two
North Carolina
–class battleships had been launched, with all other existing battleships rapidly nearing the end of usable service life. However, the fleet had in commission five carriers of relative youth, though of more or less capability. A far-sighted observer in spring
1940, aware of the Japanese carrier-building program, might easily conclude that the ascendancy of the aircraft carrier and power projection through the air was at hand.

On 19 May 1940, the headline in the
Washington Post
announced the German capture of Antwerp, Belgium, one of Europe's busiest ports.
²⁵
With the collapse and surrender of France and evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk, it became clear that the United States' future security relied upon an immediate and profound armed forces expansion. In a classified memorandum dated 22 May 1940, Major Matthew B. Ridgeway, future United Nations commander in Korea, analyzed in stark language the dangerous security situation facing the country: “It is not practicable to send forces to the Far East, to Europe, and to South America all at once, nor can we do so to a combination of any two of these areas without dangerous dispersion of force . . . we cannot conduct major operations either in the Far East or in Europe due . . . to a lack of means at present.” Copies of the memorandum went to the president, the Chief of Naval Operations, the Secretary of the Navy, and to the Chief of Staff of the Army who expressed his “complete agreement with every word of it,” according to an annotation added 23 May 1940 as a NOTE FOR RECORD.
²⁶
The fall of France and the realization that the United States lacked the means and resources to fight a multi-front war against the fascist powers jolted Congress and the administration into action, with Vinson leading the charge.

On 2 May, Vinson introduced a bill calling for increasing Navy aircraft from 3,000 to 10,000 air frames and pilots from 2,602 to 16,000 along with the required training facilities as well as a further 11 percent increase in hulls, which included an additional carrier.
²⁷
In early June, he ramrodded the bill through Congress (known as the 3rd Vinson Act).
²⁸
Events moved swiftly as German
Wehrmacht
panzers charged across a hapless France; the new Navy authorization became law on 14 June, the day following the fall of Paris.
²⁹

After the success of the June bill, the new CNO, Admiral Harold Stark, testified before Vinson's committee that the Navy required a 70 percent increase in fleet assets to meet the two-ocean challenge. In dramatic but understated fashion, the chairman asked the CNO: “In view of world conditions, you regard this expansion as necessary?” Stark responded directly and crisply: “I do, Sir, emphatically.”
³⁰
Vinson upped the ante with an increase of a previous proposal for a $1.2 billion authorization to an over $4 billion bill to meet the 70 percent expansion goal. Although it bore the name of Senator David I. Walsh (D-MA), Chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, the key instigator of what came to be called the Vinson-Walsh Act or Two-Ocean Naval Expansion Act was the Georgia congressman. Recognizing that the threat lay in two seaward directions, the bill proposed a massive naval building program that allowed the United States to fight a two-ocean maritime struggle against Germany and Italy in the Atlantic and Japan in the Pacific. Admiral Mahan had argued for a concentration of forces. The Two-Ocean Navy Act sought to create
such an overwhelming force that the U.S. Navy could bring to bear Mahan's concept of decisive concentration in both theaters simultaneously—a bold move. Admiral Stark, at an executive session of the Naval Affairs Committee, argued for 439,000 tons of new construction, but Representative Vinson pushed the amount further to 1,250,000 tons. The proposed bill grew larger by the hour. The committee added a further 75,000 tons for additional aircraft carriers, patrol boats, shipbuilding facilities, and improvements to the factories and foundries that manufactured armor plate and naval artillery. The committee unanimously approved the bill and it moved quickly to the House floor. The Vinson-Walsh Act (H.R. 10100) passed with only two hours of debate in the House of Representatives on 22 June and an hour in the Senate on 11 July without a single “nay” vote.
³¹
On 22 June, the government of France signed an armistice amounting to a complete capitulation to Hitler's Germany, underscoring the dramatic change in U.S. security needs.

H.R. 10100 provided for 385,000 tons in new battleship construction, but only 200,000 tons in aircraft carriers. But, in the post–Pearl Harbor environment, as it became obvious that the maritime struggle in the Pacific would be an airman's war, the battleship appropriation over time transferred to carrier construction. A single-line memorandum from Navy Budget Officer Captain E. G. Allen, of 20 July 1940 to all Navy bureaus and offices, the Navy Department, and Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, announced in dry and understated comment the most overarching and dramatic expansion of the United States Navy in history. Captain Allen simply stated that “Bill H.R. 10100 (the 70 percent Naval Expansion Bill) was approved by the President on 19 July 1940.”
³²
The impact of that statement on the Navy, the United States, and the world's future would be dramatic. On the 30th, Admiral Stark advised the Secretary of the Navy that based on a meeting on the evening of 25 July with the president, negotiations for contracts for two battleships, six large-gun heavy cruisers, ten light cruisers, and three fleet carriers of the
Essex
class could begin. Interestingly, the remaining five battleships included in the 70 percent bill were “not cleared and no contracts are to be negotiated for them.”
³³
The statement could be interpreted as indicating that as early as a year and a half prior to Pearl Harbor, the Navy realized that the carrier had arrived as the primary fleet capital ship. However, despite the advancements in aviation and carrier technology as pioneered in the interwar period, most senior officers in 1940 still viewed the airplane as an adjunct to the battleship. Pearl Harbor would change all of that.

PART III—THE NEW VINSON NAVY

Based on the legislation from early June (11 percent expansion) and H.R. 9822, which streamlined the contracting process, the Navy proceeded without hesitation to order new construction at the beginning of July. Within two hours of the president signing
the legislation, the Navy Department let contracts for forty-five warships.
³⁴
Pursuant to the Two-Ocean Navy Act, the Navy contracted for seven additional carriers, all of which eventually reached the fleet for war service in the Pacific.
³⁵
Construction numbers starkly illustrate the power of the naval appropriations legislation. By early September 1940, American shipyards had 201 naval vessels under construction.
³⁶
In January 1941, multiple shipyards had under construction 17 battleships, 12 carriers, 54 cruisers, 80 submarines, and 205 destroyers.
³⁷
Despite this rapid increase in shipbuilding activity, Navy leaders worried that the potential Axis threat could not be met based on the established two-ocean timetable. Then Commander of the Atlantic Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, in a 30 July 1941 letter to the Navy Board chairman pointed out that while
Hornet
was due to be completed by the end of 1941, follow-on CVs would not be commissioned until early 1944 based on the thirty-six-month construction cycle. King further and forcefully advised that the “current scheduled rate [of construction] is wholly inadequate and requires to be expedited . . . [and] considering the accelerating importance of air power, the conversion of suitable and available ships to carriers should be undertaken at once.”
³⁸
Not only did American shipyards respond with an expedited schedule, but accelerated hull conversion programs spurred further acquisition of two critically important carrier types, the
Independence
-class light carriers and multiple escort carrier classes.

Carrier construction contracts went out to major shipyards, including Bethlehem Steel's Quincy, Massachusetts, shipyard, Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia, and the New York Navy Yard in Brooklyn, New York. For example, on 1 October 1940, Bethlehem Steel accepted the contract offered by the Navy on 9 September 1940 for carriers CV-16, CV-17, CV-18, and CV-19 (USS
Lexington
, USS
Bunker Hill
, USS
Wasp
, and USS
Hancock
)—all to be built at the company's Fore River Yard in Quincy, Massachusetts, for a price of $191,200,000, or $47,800,000 per ship. All four carriers eventually saw Pacific service. USS
Lexington
, the first of the group when launched in September 1942, saw action beginning with the Gilbert Islands Campaign that initiated the Central Pacific thrust of the overall multipronged strategy against Japan (other prongs included the Southwest Pacific (SOWPAC) thrust under General Douglas MacArthur, the South Pacific (SOPAC) prong under Admiral Chester Nimitz, the B-29 strategic bombing campaign, the unrestricted submarine maritime interdiction campaign, and the China-Burma-India (CBI) Campaign under Lord Louis Mountbatten with U.S. forces in a supporting role). USS
Hancock
, launched in January 1944, reached Pacific Fleet in time for the Philippines and Iwo Jima campaigns.
³⁹

In 1940 the American shipbuilding industry, buffeted by a decade of economic depression, stood ready, able, and willing to ramp up on a massive scale. As a further inducement to speed construction, Congress suspended the profit-limiting provisions of the Vinson-Trammell Act in legislative action on 8 October 1940, a feature
that had roiled relations between the Roosevelt administration and the manufacturers to the point that no company would agree to begin construction or manufacture of ships or aircraft until the restriction had been modified.
⁴⁰
In the contract acceptance letter from Bethlehem Steel, Vice President A. B. Homer pointed out to the Secretary of the Navy that “execution of the contracts in question will be postponed until that Act [profit limitations clause included in the 1934 Vinson-Trammel Act] shall have been repealed.”
⁴¹
Additionally, the issue of new plant facilities required by Bethlehem Steel to accommodate not only the four new carriers, but the additional cruisers included in the contract, became a source of contention. The company required over $10 million to construct these facilities within the specified time frame; without these upgrades at Fore River, the ships could not be started. A new welding building; transportation equipment; cranes; sheet metal, paint, and machine shops as well as an additional wet basin and so forth all had to be constructed to accommodate the rapid shipyard expansion. For accelerated wartime construction, the normal amortization and depreciation of new facilities and plant expansion over an extended period could not be relied upon. Clearly, Congress needed to grant protection to manufacturers from rapid postwar drawdowns and other costs that would not be part of the normal, peacetime business cycle. Indeed, Admiral Towers had been able to let only a single contract with the Stearman Company for training biplanes, such was the reticence of companies to accept contracts without financial protections. With German forces occupying Paris and Great Britain under air siege in autumn 1940, no one in Congress, the Roosevelt administration, or the Navy desired any delays. An old saying in naval aviation goes, “maximum speed, minimum drag, speed is life.” Clearly, Congress understood this imperative with war imminent and responded accordingly with the Internal Revenue Act of 1940, passed on 8 October, that repealed the profit ceilings on ships and aircraft, established a five-year plant amortization schedule, and set up a tax structure to guarantee sufficient manufacturer profits.
⁴²

The contract for the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company of Newport News, Virginia, went out from the Secretary of the Navy on 11 September. Similar to that awarded to Bethlehem Steel, the contract called for the construction of CVs 12–15 (USS
Hornet
[originally
Kearsarge
, but renamed
Hornet
after the loss in action of the original
Hornet
(CV-8) at the Battle of Santa Cruz on 27 October 1942], USS
Franklin
, USS
Ticonderoga
, and USS
Randolph
). The contract award also specified that each ship had to “conform substantially to the contract plans and specifications to be furnished by the Navy Department for Aircraft carrier CV-9.” Since USS
Essex
(CV-9, launched in July 1942) and USS
Yorktown
(launched January 1943 and originally USS
Bon Homme Richard
, but renamed
Yorktown
following the loss of the original
Yorktown
(CV-5) at Midway in June 1942) were then under construction at Newport News, the shipyard stood ready from a technical viewpoint
to construct the new class of carriers. In fact, Newport News had constructed the earlier
Yorktown
and
Enterprise
, both launched in 1936 and
Hornet
, which would be launched in December of that year. Thus, their expertise in large-carrier construction stood at a pinnacle by late 1940. It is interesting to note that the cost per unit for the Newport News carriers came in at $42,090,060, a substantial reduction compared to the Bethlehem Steel price. However, considering that the cost of living in 1940 in Hampton Roads/Tidewater, Virginia, compared to that in the Boston, Massachusetts, area probably was considerably less, the relative costs per ship seem reasonable. Additionally, the more heavily unionized Boston area might also explain a higher per unit cost. Keeping in accordance with the need for rapid delivery, the Navy offered the shipyard an incentive bonus of $3,000 per day under the contractual time of delivery. The Navy also allowed $7 million for acquisition of additional plant facilities required to upgrade the Quincy yard. From a cost and budgetary viewpoint, clearly the carriers built in Virginia made better economic sense. However, the need to build as rapidly as possible to the 70 percent fleet expansion as called for in the Two-Ocean legislation meant that the Navy could not rely upon a single company or yard. Bethlehem Steel did have considerable large-hull construction capability and experience. For example, that yard had built the carrier USS
Lexington
(CV-2) in the 1920s, USS
Wasp
(CV-7) launched in April 1939, and also the battleship USS
Massachusetts
(BB-59) laid down in July 1939. The same dynamic justified the higher costs of building ships in New York at the New York Naval Shipyard in Brooklyn or New York Shipbuilding in Camden, New Jersey, which constructed the USS
Saratoga
(CV-3) and eventually all nine of the
Independence-
class light carriers (CVL 22–30). The New York Naval Shipyard, better known as the Brooklyn Navy Yard, constructed the later
Essex
-class carriers
Bennington
(CV-20),
Bon Homme Richard
(CV-31),
Kearsarge
(CV-33),
Oriskany
(CV-34), and the late-war USS
Franklin D. Roosevelt
(CVB-42) of the
Midway
class launched in April 1945.