"Mr. Pacific"

(See Cover)

Rifle fire crackled on the road from Vientiane to Luangprabang as pro-Western Laotian forces made desultory trouble for pro-Communist rebels. Soviet transports droned out of North Viet Nam parachuting supplies to the rebels, and Communists in the air or on the ground shot up an unarmed U.S. observation plane that was taking pictures of the airdrop.

Civil war in the steamy Laotian corner of Southeast Asia last week, confined at first to brief scraps and total confusion, now blossomed into the prospect of a fullblown crisis. From Premier Prince Boun Oum came a terse communique: five heavily armed battalions of Communist North Vietnamese soldiers had crossed the border into northeast Laos and had attacked the town of Nonget. It was, cried Boun Oum, nothing less than a case of "flagrant aggression"--another Communist stab along the Asian front, the cold war's broadest and busiest.

Last week in Washington President Eisenhower summoned an emergency White House meeting, followed promptly by an announcement that the U.S. would take "the most serious view" of any Communist intervention in Laos.

Halfway around the world, midway between the red mud of Vientiane and the white marble of Washington, in an ugly mustard-colored building squatting above the U.S. Naval Station at Pearl Harbor, the Laotian skirmishes became new red dots on a vast, well-dotted map of the Pacific frontier. In a windowless basement room that once served as a hospital morgue, Admiral Harry Donald Felt, U.S. Commander in Chief Pacific (CINCPAC), met with his staff for their briefing. Officers of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines mulled over the latest intelligence reports. Then the little man with the four stars and the weight of half a world on his shoulders issued orders that soon spanned the Pacific.

Free World Heir. As CINCPAC, Admiral Felt heads the largest military command in the world, capably fills a job that demands a readiness for the violent arts of war and the gentle arts of diplomacy.

His joint force includes 81,000 soldiers of the U.S. Army, two U.S. air forces (Fifth and Thirteenth) of 61,000 men and 1,000 aircraft, two fleets (the First and Seventh) of 400 ships, 1,800 aircraft and 231,000 men. He is responsible for 85 million square miles of the earth's surface.

The geographical boundaries of his command (see map, overleaf) roam south and west from the Burma-East Pakistan border to the South Pole, north along the coastline to Asia to the North Pole, and east to the continental edge of the U.S.

As CINCPAC, the compact (5 ft. 6 in., 153 lbs.) Kansan is also U.S. military representative to ANZUS (Australia, New Zealand and U.S. defense pact). He is senior military adviser to SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization), the six-year-old federation fathered by John Foster Dulles, which has kept the peace despite the sneering Communist epithet, "Paper Tiger" (its eight members include only two on the Asian mainland: Thailand and Pakistan). He is in charge of all U.S. military aid and assistance groups in Asia. And behind all these organizations and treaties, he is the free world heir to a defensive doctrine as old as the Navy's famed theorist, Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914): To maintain order and build prosperous trade in a free world, the U.S. must control the seas and be guardian of the land areas along the shores.

One Umbrella. Before World War II the Pacific was a strategic no man's land, sprinkled with small islands of several sovereignties, controlled by no single power, connected by no satisfactory communications system. U.S. influence ex tended thinly to Hawaii, to Midway and Wake, and beyond that to Guam and the Philippines. The Dutch, English, French and Japanese all jealously guarded their own territories. Knowing their Mahan, the Japanese struck first at the U.S. Fleet in Pearl Harbor before beginning their conquest of Southeast Asia. When Allied forces destroyed Japan's expansionist dreams, they united the Pacific for the first time. Achieved under the umbrella of U.S. power, that unity carried U.S. responsibility to a new frontier along the rimland of Asia.

The emergent power of Communist China gave all its neighbors a common enemy, even if their response has been unequal -- some wanted to come to terms with it, some to hold it off, some to avoid thinking about it. With the British, French and Dutch fading fast as Far Eastern powers, help for those who would resist could come only from the U.S. In Korea, the U.S. proved its readiness to defend its new frontier. In the Formosa Strait crisis of 1958, during Red China's bombardment of Quemoy, the Seventh Fleet swung its power behind the beleaguered Chinese Nationalists -- and made its presence felt without firing a shot.

Merciless Statistics. Today, from Korea to East Pakistan, Felt's frontier is a continuous troublespot, plagued by unfamiliar riddles, bottomless problems and ancient rivalries. Daily, Felt faces the chance of having to deal with anything from a minor riot to the beginning of World War III. Korea still smolders in an atmosphere of demi-war; Thailand wrangles with Burma over border problems, bickers with Cambodia next door; Pakistan worries about its disconnect ed, unprotected eastern sector. The only unifying factors in the area are the Chinese threat, the presence of U.S. power, and a wish to stay out of trouble.

The logistics that complicate Felt's problems are swollen by merciless statistics. (Korea is 5,500 miles and 45 supply-ship days from San Francisco; Bangkok, main staging point for any operation in Laos, is 9,000 miles and 60 supply-ship days.) To make sense of it all, Don Felt leans heavily on a staff of 240 officers. A carefully chosen political adviser is always at his elbow. But from the carrier ready rooms in the South China Sea to the humming headquarters above Pearl Harbor, there is no doubt about who is "Mr. Pacific." "Mean as Hell." Don Felt starts the day at full throttle ("mean as hell," says an ex-aide), and never slows down. Traffic flows in and out of his office to the tune of his shouts. For a change of pace he sometimes punches at a panel of buzzers (a rash of buzzing means coffee).

He is a bear for facts and figures, probes relentlessly for details of minor operations and files them away in his Univac memory. He works, as one sad assistant puts it, "as though there were no holidays, Saturdays and Sundays, and expects others to do the same." One staff officer, returning from a long flight at midnight, was met at the airport by a messenger who handed him a foot-high stack of homework and told him the admiral wanted it done by morning. Once, in a moment of rare relaxation, Felt, a crack poker player, summed up his basic attitude in a paraphrase from Mister Dooley: "Trust everybody, but always cut the cards." Hunting & Homework. Don Felt learned the beginnings of his furious discipline from his mother. Through most of his boyhood she beat down the familiar pattern of juvenile revolt--his preference for hunting rather than homework, athletics instead of afternoon classes. Under her watchful eye young Don got good, if not spectacular, grades. The pattern continued after the family moved from Kansas to Washington, D.C., and when there was no money for college, Mother Felt had an answer for that too. Don entered a cram school for the Naval Academy, went to Annapolis with the class of 1923.

Away from home, he began to enjoy minor heresies. He got good marks at the Academy from force of habit, but he was too busy trying (unsuccessfully) to make the varsity baseball team, too busy having a good time, to excel. He sneaked forbidden smokes, wore uniforms with well-concealed nonregulation pockets, eventually earned just about as many demerits as anyone in his class. Scholastically, he ranked in the middle brackets--breeding ground of most U.S. generals and admirals.

Combat &Command. His first years as a junior officer in a battlewagon and destroyer of the surface Navy did nothing to change Felt. Then, out of sheer boredom, he put in for flight training. From the start, flying became the focus of his life. And with his new enthusiasm he recovered the old drive that his mother had tried so hard to nurture. At Pensacola he met a pretty Alabama girl named Kathryn Cowley, and next day he wrote his mother that he had found the woman he was going to marry. A few weeks later he let Kathryn in on his plans. That little matter attended to. he turned back to aviation with single-minded zeal. Even as a newlywed, says Kathryn, Felt's life was "just fly, fly, fly." And he brooked no complaint. Before the wedding vows, the future admiral had already spelled out the rules: there was never to be any suggestion that he give up flying, never any request that private life interfere with his devotion to naval aviation.

As soon as he got his wings, Don Felt seemed to get more than his share of combat and command posts--experience that built the basis of his skill as CINCPAC.

In the early days of World War II, he had command of the Air Group on the aircraft carrier Saratoga, won a Distinguished Flying Cross for leading the first U.S. carrier strike of the war. A couple of weeks later he got a Navy Cross when his planes sank some Japanese ships in Torpedo Junction off the eastern Solomons. To ward the end of the war, he had com mand of the escort carrier Chenango when the ship earned a Navy Unit Commendation for operations off Okinawa.

In 1943 Felt was promoted to captain.

Next year he became the first naval aviator named to the U.S. Military Mission to Moscow, and there he got a good look at his future enemy. "I think we have the Japanese beaten," he wrote to Kathryn at the time of the Yalta Conference. "I hope we don't let the Russians in. We don't need them." (And in they came, ultimately to turn over Manchuria to the Chinese Communists.) Grand Strategy. Don Felt's peacetime posting to the National War College worked a great change in his outlook.

There, among fellow officers who had been selected for training in the advanced responsibilities of senior commands, he dug with enthusiasm into the study of grand strategy.

After that, Felt's rise to admiral was rapid and steady. At sea he commanded the carrier Franklin D. Roosevelt, later bossed Naval Forces Middle East, and finally spent six months in command of the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. In all these jobs he tightened his reputation as a demanding skipper, an arrogant, caustic perfectionist who let his subordinates know exactly what he wanted, and who got just that. Ashore, his big break came when he went to work for Rear Admiral Arleigh Burke, then chief of the Navy's Strategic Plans Division. Burke was already under way toward his present job as Chief of Naval Operations, and he towed Felt with him toward the top.

When Felt was jumped over the heads of a score of seniors to four-star rank and went to work as Burke's Vice CNO, Felt had a rare pang of misgiving: Would the leapfrogged officers really work for him? He went to Burke for advice. "If you do what you think is right for the Navy," said Burke, "you will be all right, and they will be on your side. If you don't do that and do it firmly, they will be all over you." Felt took the advice. No one yet has been all over him.

As Vice CNO, Felt's most important decision concerned his own career. In the summer of 1958, when that austere Pacific veteran, Admiral Felix B. Stump, was slated for retirement, Felt was offered his job as CINCPAC. As an alternative, Felt could have stayed on in Washington, probably with a sure shot at the Navy's top job. Rather than stay desk-bound for the rest of his time, he unhesitatingly chose CINCPAC.

"Advise ASAP." Felt's new command waited for him with some misgivings. "He had a reputation for eating admirals for breakfast, lunch and dinner," remembers his ace political adviser, Sterling J. Cottrell. And to no one's surprise, Felt lived up to his reputation. He read every dispatch and cable except the most routine, delved into petty details of his subordinate commands.

In an effort to slash paper work, Felt outfitted his staff with colored pencils--Cottrell's is green, the Army Deputy Chief of Staff got purple--asked for brief, informal answers to his written requests.

("You write in the margin if there is any room left," says one staffer.) Soon everyone got accustomed to Felt's own black-pencil "Feltgrams"--abbreviated scribbles that invariably end "Advise me ASAP [as soon as possible]. What do you think? Why? No? Resp'y, F." But all the time, with his affection for detail, he stored up an unparalleled knowledge of the most frustratingly detailed military theater in the world. Within weeks of taking over, Felt was stowing away in his safes detailed plans for any Far Eastern emergency that might affect his command.

Felt was in Japan for a security meeting in the last week of August 1958, when Communist artillery cut loose at Quemoy.

His Tokyo hotel room immediately became CINCPAC headquarters. Orders went out to get carriers into position, Marine and Air Force squadrons were moved, a Nike installation was set up on Formosa, and reserves were alerted all the way back to California. Thanks to CINCPAC's deployment of his forces, the crisis never got to a point where it could not be handled by the Chinese Nationalist troops, with active advice and assistance from the U.S. There were no U.S. battle casualties.

Conspicuous Deterrent. The defense of Formosa's offshore islands followed the basic outlines of present U.S. strategy in the Pacific. That strategy is currently tailored to limited-war situations, to an enemy that is still conceived to have limited objectives and limited resources. It is a strategy of deterrence.

Ideally, the U.S. would like to see Communist China ringed by nations with stable, anti-Communist governments, effective defense forces and good advance bases for U.S. use if needed. The defense forces should be strong enough to 1) maintain internal security, deter any land invasions until U.S. forces can be brought to bear if necessary; 2) provide an air defense and early warning system that will serve as an effective screen between China and the U.S. forces in the Pacific; and 3) provide small local navies for coastal patrol and antisubmarine warfare. The ideal is far from realization.

"We are the fire brigade," says Felt.

"Our job is to provide the mobility and flexibility.'' Operating from airfields and naval bases in Japan, Okinawa and the Philippines, Felt's regular U.S. forces can swiftly apply conspicuous deterrent force whenever the Pacific pot begins to boil.

As the Communists take any overt action, the fleet, the Marines, the Army and the Air Force, moving up like cavalry to positions along the island chain from the Philippines to Japan, may serve their purpose merely by their presence.

But to be effective, the threat must be no mere bluff. While the "forward strategy" forces move up, the plan calls for a major movement of men, planes and ships to advance bases, where supplies are already stockpiled.

Northern Threat. Felt's major full-scale threat lies to the north. In the north, from its Maritime province, the U.S.S.R.

operates its fleet of more than 100 submarines in the Pacific. Red planes, armed with nuclear weapons, can reach out to Korea and Japan or beyond to other U.S.

bases. North Korean armies--this time backed by aircraft operating from a fine complex of North Korean airfields--stand ready to sweep down the Korean peninsula.

In opposition, the South Koreans now field a large (535,000-man), effective army, U.S.-trained, U.S.-equipped, and led by U.S. General Carter Magruder (whose own First Cavalry and Seventh Infantry Divisions are manned 15% by Koreans).

The small Korean coastal navy is efficient.

In Japan, under the new Ikeda government, the 200,000-man self-defense force is steadily growing in capability. The Japanese navy, its biggest vessels destroyer-sized, is training toward the day when it will be able to seal the Sea of Japan against Russian subs from Vladivostok.

Japan's air defense radar system, with new U.S. equipment, is now 90% manned by Japanese. Japan is turning out Lockheed F-104 Starfighters in a large step toward self-sufficiency in air defense. Only the imponderables of political upheaval might upset the timetable.

Farther south. Okinawa (residually Japanese but U.S.-held) is an indispensable base and an integral part of the coastal radar screen. In any Communist offensive from the north, Okinawa would be a certain target of Red bombers. Okinawa's defense against high-flying bombers is excellent, and holes in its low-level defenses are being plugged.

From Felt's military standpoint, Formosa--where the threat is from land, sea and air--approaches the ideal in rock-like anti-Communist strength. The crack, U.S.-trained Nationalist air force is, for its particular mission, as good as any in the world. The U.S. could move air support swiftly into Formosa's big, excellent airfields. Chiang Kai-shek's 450,000-man army has been pared down and streamlined. And the 32,000-man navy is constantly drilling and redrilling in methods of supplying Quemoy and Matsu.

Southern Sector. The Philippines provide a powerful and friendly base from which the U.S. can mount its defense of Southeast Asia. At the big naval base at Subic Bay and at Clark Field, supplies predestined for Southeast Asian forward bases are already packed and labeled, loaded aboard the trucks that will roll them into the yawning mouths of C-124s and C-130s if the whistle blows.

Forward base for Southeast Asia defense is Thailand. It is through Bangkok that the U.S. has funneled millions of dollars' worth of aid for Laos, and it is from Bangkok that the U.S. would operate its defense of that chaotic country. The Thai forces are shaky but improving rapidly. This year Thailand's air force got its first North American F-86s (graduating from ancient F-84s). The 90,000-man army is weak in communications and plagued by spare-parts shortages, but its intrepid front-line troops are equipped with M-1 rifles. Five good airfields stand ready as front-line bases for incoming jets from Clark Field.

In South Viet Nam, U.S. money and U.S. leadership have slowly begun to wean the Vietnamese defense forces away from the "Let's spend the night in the fort" concept of guerrilla fighting that they learned from the French. But the whole establishment is threatened by 350,000 well-armed Viet Minh Communists from north of the 17th parallel. Cambodia, citadel of Southeast Asian neutralism, and Laos are the weakest spots in the defense chain.

Chain of Command. As Felt maneuvers his fire brigade in support of these difficult and divergent outposts on his frontier, he is in close touch with Washington, which must decide at all times how far he should commit his forces (unlike NATO membership, where an attack on one is automatically an attack on all, SEATO asks for a U.S. response under "its constitutional processes"). Felt's forces report to three commands whose headquarters are in Honolulu: P: PACAF (Pacific Air Forces), bossed by able, flamboyant old SACman General Emmett O'Donnell Jr., organizes its 650 combat planes into 35 squadrons--fewer than those of the combined totals of the U.S.'s Far East allies. "Rosie" O'Donnell keeps his planes and his men in a superb state of readiness. Not for him the promises of the other services about next year's capabilities. "They are always saying, 'Let me tell you what I'm going to do to Philadelphia Jack O'Brien when I get in the ring with him,' " says O'Donnell.

"With a small force." he says, "the Air Force has to be proficient in every respect." O'Donnell's Air Force is; yet it is still uncomfortable in its role. All its atomic capabilities are next to useless in countries like Laos. "It's like knocking an ant off a bicycle," says O'Donnell. But the Air Force notes that Red China, if it cares to ask for trouble, offers a number of atom-sized military targets.

P: USARPAC (U.S. Army Pacific), ramrodded by a dapper New England tactician, General Isaac Davis White, chafes under the knowledge that, for all its experience gained in Korea, it is still the orphan of the Pacific. In an area that demands a maximum of mobility, the Army must make its plan without any guarantee that it will get the ships or aircraft to move it where it has to fight. Army soreheads grouse that Felt would never use a soldier while there was a marine left in the Pacific. In the Pacific, perhaps the Army's most significant contribution is the fact that it supplies 70% of the Military Assistance Advisory Groups, and all the MAAG commanders.

P: CINCPACFLT (Commander in Chief Pacific Fleet) is Admiral John H. ("Savvy") Sides, whose exceptionally flexible and mobile carrier striking force is best adapted of all the services to the varied challenges of the new Asian frontier. Sides's big problem is ships. He needs more--more big carriers, more guided-missile cruisers, more modernized destroyers--to furnish Vice Admiral Charles ("Don") Griffin's Seventh Fleet with the firepower it needs. Vice Admiral Charles L. Melson's First Fleet, based in San Diego, is responsible for overhaul and training of units which may be assigned to Don Griffin's Seventh Fleet.

Eventually all the lines of Pacific command, all the responsibilities of the joint command, come back to Don Felt. Felt the diplomat must preserve the momentum that is leading to SEATO's improvement. Felt the politician must get sufficient support from Congress for the U.S. military aid program. Felt the military commander must know about Communist military threats before they are full-blown so that he can back up national armies against external threats, give them time to train up to the skills of Chinese Communist or local guerrillas.

Time was running short. Laos, where events tumbled forward with sweep-second hand relentlessness, was perhaps the least attractive theater in which Don Felt would want to apply his talents. But as the hour of necessity arises, he is prepared to keep the peace if possible, to win a war if necessary.

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