Seven Seas

The U.S. Navy is going to be bigger than the combined navies of the rest of world.

Red-white-&-blue thrills ran up & down backs of Congressmen when Carl Vinson of Georgia, chairman of the House Naval Affairs Committee, told this fact to his colleagues. He was just explaining how unconquerably large the U.S. Navy will be when 1,900,000 tons of warships (see p. 45) provided in a bill which last week unanimously passed the House, have been completed.

Congressmen on the floor of the House did their best to realize what a historic announcement had issued from Carl Vinson's prosaic lips. He had, in effect, announced that some time between 1944 and 1946 the U.S. would emerge as a world power fabulously more dominant than Britain ever was.

Like it or not, the U.S. --if that Navy comes to pass, even if it be a Navy that is mainly air force with seagoing auxiliaries --will have the major say in world affairs. Then the U.S. will no longer be the nation of the county fair and the little red schoolhouse. It will be the nation that has the power by yea or nay to open the seas and widen economic frontiers to all peaceful peoples, to close them as readily to aggressors.

As little as two years ago the nation would have been shocked at Carl Vinson's announcement. Last week Congressmen applauded. But Americans had not yet fully understood --if, indeed, he had fully understood himself --the fateful, the far-reaching, the now inevitable implications of what he said.

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