Word: fleetly
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...cruisers would have a displacement of 10,000 tons each, as permitted in unlimited numbers by the disarmament treaty of 1922. Each cruiser, armed and ready for battle, would represent an investment of $17,000,000. The Navy has argued that it needs this new auxiliary fleet to replace obsolete vessels still in service, some of them 30 years...
According to Senate debaters, the time-limit would mean ships of steel; its removal, ships of paper. Complaint was made that if the three-year provision were dropped the new fleet would remain at the blue-print stage indefinitely. To bolster this argument it was recalled that in 1924 Congress authorized eight cruisers, none of which is yet completed, due to slow White House action...
Most important trumps in the game were the aircraft carriers Lexington and Saratoga. The Lexington, part of the defending Blue fleet, was put out of action early, partly owing to a freak of the weather. Black Admiral William Veazie Pratt shrewdly detached the Saratoga from his fleet, sent it hundreds of miles to the south and west. Not until it was ready to attack did the Blue scouting cruisers and destroyers discover the whereabouts of the Black fleet's chief threat. By then it was too late. In the early morning the Saratoga pushed her bow into the wind...
Theoretically, the Saratoga might have been sunk before its planes returned, when at last it fell under the guns of the searching Blues, but the damage would have been done; the Canal was "destroyed;" the supporting fleet must have circled the Horn to have reached the Pa cific...
Conjecture was not the only result of the war games, nor was the death (by drowning) of six naval men. The defeat of the scouting fleet and "destruction" of the Canal added point and pith to the arguments of two vociferous groups at Washington. Obvious was the boost given the Navy's cruiser program now before Congress (see p. 10). Less obvious, equally welcome, was the boost given to the proposed second interoceanic canal through Nicaragua by a sea-level route requiring few if any locks. As the war-game neared its final phase, New Jersey's Senator...