Shakedown

The Navy was playing at war in two oceans last week. This was no cunningly timed cutlass-rattling. It was simply that both the fleet and the Marine Corps had green personnel who needed shaking down.

In the Pacific, the admirals wanted to know how Pearl Harbor would fare if an enemy tried to repeat the Japanese coup of five years ago. From the decks of three aircraft carriers, 230 planes were flown against Oahu.* The defense was alerted and did its best in mock dogfights, but the attackers won by "destroying" the vital airfields which ring the great naval base, leaving it virtually defenseless.

The reason was easy to read in the sorry figures of Hawaii's weakness. In all the islands there are only 75 fighter planes --many obsolete or obsolescent. The Army has no night fighters, the Navy only a handful. Half the radar stations are useless because there are not enough men to operate them. There are only two antiaircraft battalions operating with modern (radar) fire control near Pearl Harbor.

As in 1941, Pearl Harbor's best defense is distance--it lies 3,000 miles from Kamchatka.

The Rockets Hail. Six thousand miles away from Oahu, amphibious tactics were being dusted off for the benefit of boot sailors and marines. Against the uninhabited part of Culebra Island, near Puerto Rico, the Missouri fired one-ton shells from its 16-inch rifles, and landing craft loosed a hail of rockets. Marine Corps planes strafed the beach when 5,000 leathernecks "storming" it called for aid.

In both oceans, submarines scored outstanding successes, "sinking" the flagship of the Atlantic force, and a capital ship (battleship or carrier) in the Pacific. To many a Navy man who sees the submarine as the best warship of the future, this was the most significant result of the mock warfare.

*The Japanese used 350 planes from six carriers.

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