1940. Once in the early going, off Bilbao, a Nationalist bomber mistakenly attacked the Kane, dropping six bombs in the water nearby; the destroyer fired two 3-inch antiaircraft rounds at the plane, but missed. Both the Forty Tares and the Banana sailors generally enjoyed cushy duty, but the former, amid the European glitter, were expected to maintain a spit-and-polish image.
In July 1937, Training Squadron became Training Detachment, and the force received reinforcement. The battleships Texas and New York joined the Arkansas and Wyoming, and the number of four-stackers was increased to seventeen: Flagship Decatur and Destroyer Division 28 (the Roper, Dickerson, Leary, Herbert, and Schenck), DesDiv 29 (the Tattnall, Badger, Jacob Jones, Tillman, and J. Fred Talbott), and DesDiv 30 (the Manley, Fairfax, Taylor, Babbitt, Claxton, and Hamilton).1
From May through September, the ships carried out midshipmen’s practice cruises, ROTC cruises, merchant marine training cruises, and Reserve cruises; from January through March, they conducted the annual Fleet Landing Exercises, known as Flex, in the Caribbean. The rest of the time, the ships carried out individual battle practices, participated in division and squadron tactical exercises, went into the yards for upkeep and refitting, and showed the flag in East Coast and Caribbean ports.
Rear Admiral Alfred W. Johnson commanded Training Detachment. He was a solid, able officer, but somewhat lacking in dynamism. His force’s connection with the Flex problems convinced him of the usefulness of amphibious warfare, and he was one of the few naval officers of the thirties who gave much thought to the complexities of landing assault troops on hostile beaches and supporting them with gunfire and supplies. He worked to expand the scope of the Flex practices and helped to secure patrol planes and submarines for them. The Flex landings off Puerto Rico did much to demonstrate the feasibility of the amphibious theories being developed by the Marines, but lack of suitable assault craft, vital transports, tankers, and auxiliaries, necessary communications equipment, and other important gear meant that the state of the art still lagged well behind the hopes of the Marines.
In the Flex 4 exercises of 1938, lack of transports resulted in the assault troops being crowded into the battleships, cramping the infantrymen and hampering the ships in their delivery of effective gunfire support. The shortage of cargo ships hampered the landing of artillery and other heavy equipment. Ship-to-shore communications were inadequate to permit necessary control and coordination of the battle. The lack of landing craft meant that the assault troops had to use ships’ boats, which were fragile, exposed, difficult to handle in the surf, and too small to accommodate sufficient men to allow a rapid buildup of firepower and momentum on the beaches; because less than two battalions could be landed simultaneously, assaults were not formidable, and invariably the piecemeal commitment of troops caused dispersion and confusion ashore. Although in shore bombardment practices against bunkers and other beach-defense targets, the Training Detachment battleships and destroyers scored a hit factor of 31 percent, some observers felt that conventional naval gunfire produced imposing explosions and deep craters but did little real damage to soundly built installations. Nevertheless, little was done to provide the necessary ships, equipment, and research to master amphibious techniques, as only the Marines and the Training Detachment were seriously interested in the problem.2 This inertia later cost the lives of riflemen on bloody beaches, and was perhaps the darkest sin of the peacetime Navy.
The training cruises succeeded in giving useful, if cursory, shipboard experience to greenhorns, but more important, they helped to instill in the youngsters who joined the Fleet in more parlous times a sense of accomplishment and a feeling of responsibility assumed and mastered. The sailors of the forties proved well satisfied with the reservists who fought in the Atlantic, and it would be kind to think that the humble steaming of the old battleships and destroyers of Training Detachment in peaceful days had a little to do with it.3
Then there were the port visits, called Flower Shows ever since a Florida senator requested that a “battleship or other suitable vessel” visit his state in connection with a flower show. New Orleans needed a destroyer to make its Mardi Gras complete; Brunswick, Georgia, could count on a destroyer for local ceremonies. One California congressman futilely but insistently demanded that the annual Fleet Problem be cancelled so that large ships could be provided for the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge. Sometimes the nature of the event did not warrant the attendance of a warship; for instance, the four-stacker Bernadou was sent in July 1940 to the Cambridge (Maryland) Regatta, but it turned out that only nine members of a private yacht club visited the ship, to the chagrin of the skipper. In July 1939, the old Leary was sent on a highly successful visit to seafaring New Bedford because the local Democratic organization needed a popular diversion to blunt the impact of the mayor having been indicted for corruption in the grand manner. The bigger cities got the battleships.a
The port visits made planning of operating schedules difficult, and for the sailors they entailed a spit-and-polish performance, but usually also a compensating liberty. The crews enjoyed the functions in proportion to the number and interest of the visitors to their ship. Few men were so lost to tradition as not to accept as obvious the superiority of their ship over all others of similar type.4
For old and undermanned vessels, the Detachment’s operating schedule was murderous; the midshipmen’s cruise alone entailed a voyage of ten thousand miles. The busy schedule did not leave time for adequate upkeep. The deck- and side-plating of the destroyers became badly rusted, and their old power plants required more and more attention. As Admiral Johnson suggested, “. . . the material condition of these old ships brings up the problem of balancing their usefulness as against the usefulness of the new ships which might be bought with the money now expended on vessels that are obsolescent.” The destroyers lacked torpedoes and antiaircraft machine guns, and Johnson warned that they were “practically defenseless” against air attack. The old battleships lacked modern guns and antiaircraft weapons.5 In February 1939, the Arkansas’ skipper was surprised to find his ship scheduled for a practice with .50-caliber AA machine guns during the midshipmen’s cruise; he wrote the Navy Department that if he was to comply “it is felt that .50 caliber anti-aircraft machine guns should be installed.”6
Serving prosaically in an ocean devoid of a tradition of romance and without a formidable potential enemy, Training Detachment was regarded as a noncombatant command, “out of Fleet,” and outside the mainstream of promotion. The Bureau of Navigation considered it a seagoing replacement center to be bled for special drafts of manpower, and considered its personnel assigned on a temporary basis while awaiting reassignment to other commands; in 1938, the personnel turnover in the Detachment was 700 percent! The turnover made complicated tactical training impossible, for as the crews became sufficiently well trained to carry out tactical exercises with other ships they were decimated by transfers, and the training process had to start all over again at a simpler level.7 It seems likely that Johnson was given more than his share of hard cases and mediocre people; good officers developed a tendency to deem Atlantic commands second-rate or even injurious to their careers, and they longed for the major fleet units and “sunny, starched-white pageantry” of the Pacific. Some felt that the Atlantic received the capable administrators, the competent plodders, while the most dynamic officers were assigned to the Pacific.8
Because of the turnover, material defects, and its rigorous operating schedule, which deprived it of important tactical exercises, the Detachment was not ready to carry out major offensive combat operations. Nevertheless, perhaps because it acquired the stubborn, you-be-damned pride of the subtly despised, it performed its mechanical tasks well. Its gunnery compared favorably with that of better-endowed ships, and engineering performance, despite the limitations of the equipment, was “satisfactory.” In the face of reduced personnel levels, its damage-control practices remained “very satisfactory” and communications were “excellent.” Indeed, after Flex 4, the ships of Destroyer Squadron 10 were rated excellent in maneuvering and gunnery, and one inspecting officer reported, “I consider these vessels to be in a high state of readiness for battle.” The ships
