Where Is the Fleet?

Last week U.S. citizens-usually with an air of don't-look-now-but-don't-get-excited--asked an astonishing question. They said: "Where is the Fleet?"

That was a whopper. The U.S. Fleet is not just something somebody leaves in the pocket of another pair of pants. The U.S. was a troubled nation last week, but at least part of its trouble came because it felt like a man who has mislaid a bass drum in a taxicab. The 17 battleships, seven aircraft carriers, 37 cruisers, 172 destroyers, 113 submarines and some 1,100 smaller vessels that made up the Fleet on Dec. 7 made a sizeable total to place when you were trying to remember exactly where you had been the night before.

Even Senators joined in the questioning. Congressmen, specialists in naval affairs, asked with quiet fury: "Where is the Navy? Tell me that? Do you know? What's it doing?" There was a widespread ripple of emotion throughout the country last week at the fall of Manila (see p. 19). But the U.S. can expect stronger waves of emotion in this war-grief, rage, hate and elation. Last week a dominant emotion was bewilderment.

Other, lesser U.S. possessions seemed to have been mislaid also. Where were the rubber tires? (see p. 15). Westbrook Pegler solemnly proposed death--the treatment for horse thieves in the Old West--for such U.S. curs as stole tires. Liberal journals thundered at Jesse Jones: "Where are our tin factories?" The Auto Workers Union thundered (in half-page advertisements) at "Mr. OPM." One thunderclap: "Where is the Reuther Plan?" Samuel Grafton, most belligerent columnar thunderer for the New Deal, thundered at the State Department (for protesting the Free French seizure of St. Pierre and Miqueloa): "Where Is Our Foreign Policy?"

The symbol of U.S. confidence was Senator Alben Barkley. Said he, with majestic self-control: "We have steeled ourselves to expect some temporary reverses. . . ." The image of the strange, W. C. Fields-like dignity which gripped much of the U.S. was Senator Tom Connally. Said he, transcending the headlines of the week: "Experts for years have regarded the Philippines as a military liability. . . ."

Bewildered or not, the U.S. was also working. A symbol of its working attitude was Robert Price (see cut), a lathe operator for Allis-Chalmers, who rushed to the factory in his full dress and topper from a New Year's party. In a huge Packard factory in Detroit, making parts for Rolls-Royce Merlin aircraft engines, one good union man, tuxedo-clad, ran his machine through the dawn of the New Year.

On Whidby Island in Puget Sound, the farmers' beach patrol was on watch, night after night, regardless of Senatorial questions and military reverses, with "an eye to the sky and an ear to the ground." The volunteer harbor patrol at Seattle, run by the man who was once the fastest tap dancer on the Pantages circuit, cruised over Lake Washington. In the immense structural shop at the Charleston Navy Yard the work went on: the steel plates rumbled through the press rolls in surging roars, the hydraulic presses crunched down, the giant shears clamped through metal, the brilliant blue glare from the arc welders shot up through the steeple-high cranes that crawled overhead. There the men with boilermakers' ears said things to each other that involved no questions about the fleet:

"Plane that STS before you burn it."

"Check on that raft stowage."

"Leave your shop cut on the margin plate."

What was the work like? What did it mean to the people who did this, that, and a million other things?--the people who need not fear reverses nor discouragement, who wondered where the fleet was, who were told about tires and horse thieves, who went on working whether or not the Philippines were a military liability, and who wondered where they would be this time next year. The work went on, for defense, or democracy, or survival, or home--or for something that had not yet been put into words but which meant an organization of all the human efforts that are known as America, for some cause that represented the best of what the country could be.

It was hard, building mine layers in a Portland, Ore. shipyard. Said Riveter Leonard Johnson: "I had a tough time, to tell you the truth. I was working on second platform inside ship, riveting angle bars through the wing tank and deck. They didn't have the size rivets I wanted, and there was a new bucker on the other end of them. I never knew when New Year's came. Down in the locker room when we went off shift everyone said 'Happy New Year.' I didn't go out and celebrate. I went home and went to bed. These days I usually sleep from about two o'clock till noon."

The hours dragged at times, making airplanes. Said Harold Wilson, who installs pipes in hydraulic landing gears, twelve hours a day: "Good dough, but you never have time to spend it. I don't even dance or bowl much any more like I used to."

It was confused, making parts for airplane engines in one Detroit plant. On New Year's Eve the men took compressed air hoses, squirted air into bottles to make whistles. This so offended one union man that he walked out. Said he: "The men have got seniority and they know the union is behind them so they take everything they can get and put out as little as they can."

Said an electrician: "It's as if we were in a boat that was leaking bad and everybody wanted to play instead of bailing out."

It was drudgery, guarding a stretch of the California coastline. Said Private Gerald Reynolds: "[On New Year's Eve] I went on watch at 6 that evening, with a complete outfit-tin hat, gas mask, canteen, rifle and bayonet and nothing but water in the canteen either. Me and another guy were out with a Doberman dog patrolling a section of Terminal Island shoreline. Everything was completely blacked out and it was raining to beat the band. We had raincoats on but even then after six hours of it we got pretty wet. You could hear harbor waters swishing on one side of us and just barely make out a high wire fence on the other. Just at midnight I looked at my watch and my buddy and I said 'Happy New Year' to each other and then to the dog. ..."

Where, O Where? The purpose of the work, the overwork, the exasperation of hammering the wrong-sized rivets, was made no clearer as long as the big question remained: "Where is the Fleet?"

The New York Times's military expert Hanson Baldwin set himself to answer. "The Pacific Fleet," said he, "is not capable of conducting a major foray today against Japan." He added guardedly: "Of one thing we can be sure--the Navy is not idle." This reassurance would have carried more force if Mr. Baldwin had not promptly followed it with another: "We can lose this war. . . . Far too few of us understand that. . . ." Confusion was confounded when the Navy posted a bulletin in Pearl Harbor. It read: "The United States Navy is still supreme."

Part of the confusion came because Where is the Fleet? was not the right question. Wherever it was, a navy as big as the U.S. Navy had not been suddenly whisked from the face of the seas. The question meant: Where is the attacking power of the U.S.? The answer was that it was being built--by work on a scale big enough to make up all its losses, in an industry big enough to rebuild it entirely if that should ever be necessary, and by the people who were building it even while they asked the question.

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