Word: fleetly
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Small Navy. The Pacific concentration incident to Fleet Problem No. 14 emptied other U. S. territorial waters of first-line fighting craft. The only battleships left on the Atlantic coast were the New Mexico, Idaho and Mississippi and they were at navy yards being modernized. The brand new cruiser Indianapolis was to have joined the fleet in the Pacific after its shakedown run. Last week she was ordered to Philadelphia Navy Yard for repairs when it was found that her 8-in. gun fire had jarred loose some of her plates...
...condition rather than the disposition of the U. S. Fleet that makes Big-Navy men wring their hands in despair. Again & again has Secretary of the Navy Adams complained of "our already seriously impaired position relative to other signatories to the naval treaties." Fortnight ago the Navy Department reported to the Senate that 135 ships would have to be built in less than four years to bring the U. S. up to treaty limits. Last week Chairman Vinson of the House Naval Affairs Committee announced preparation of a naval building bill which would require $600,000,000 in ten years...
Last week Britain announced that she is building cruisers as fast as the naval treaty allows-three per year. In the U. S. Navy's mind, the "Black" fleet of Problem No. 14 that sweeps east this week from Hawaii to the mainland, represents no fleet but Japan's. U. S. sea-dogs frankly expect to see a real Japanese fleet sail the same course, some day, trying to strike the same blow on the Pacific coast. All plans for defense are predicated upon that possibility-including the presence of the Scouting Force west of the Panama Canal...
Naval strategists outside the U. S. are inclined to think that Fleet Problem No. 14 is largely academic as a simulation of what a Japanese-American war would actually bring. Few can visualize a Japanese fleet capturing and holding Hawaii as a base after steaming 3,374 mi. from Yokosuka, much less driving on from there another 2,100 mi. to reach the U. S. and the teeth of a potent Battle Force. The Pacific seems too large and bases too far apart for such action...
...been my aim to keep well within the bounds of reasonable possibility and not to sacrifice reality for dramatic effect. It would have been easy, for example, to bring the Japanese battle fleet to Hawaii or even to the American seaboard. I might even have conveyed whole Japanese Army corps to San Francisco and allowed them to overrun the Pacific slope. But to do so would have been to expose the narrative to the well-merited ridicule of informed critics...