To the memory of James Hornfischer.
One
A brilliant Friday afternoon in San Francisco, visibility unlimited, and as the Blue Angels dart overhead in a sonic romp, rehearsing their Fleet Week grand finale, the native son, away too long, returns to his old haunts, to contrast boyhood reverie with graybeard lament. For this fourth generation San Franciscan The City is now a memory palace, the boyhood home relinquished long ago, not a relative to be found this side of San Bruno Mountain, infrequent visits the valedictory of a family saga that dates back to the great grandfather who sailed through the Gate in 1849.
The last of the indigenous ones. As I watch, from the parking lot at Lands End, the Angels vault the Golden Gate Bridge I am—split screen—ten years old and romping through the thick monterey cypress just below the USS San Francisco Memorial, eager to secure a cliffside vantage to witness the Victory at Sea Fleet arrive in force, all those destroyers heralding the pass-in-review of the cruiser Helena and the carrier Essex, bluejackets manning the rail on an overcast morning. There must be thirty ships lined up outside the Gate. A thrilling sight. They will tie-up along The Embarcadero, Pier 45 near Fisherman’s Wharf all the way to Pier 50 at Mission Bay, three miles of gray ships pierside, including a couple of diesel submarines, with their World War II Japanese tonnage still on prominent display. We will make the best of visiting hours, racing from one ship to the next, transfixed by the majesty and might of the United States Navy, transported by the prospect of one day coming through the Gate in triumphant procession as well.
Fleet Week in 1955 and Fleet Week in 2017 tell us how far San Francisco, and the Navy, have come in the intervening decades. In 1955 San Francisco was a blue-collar paradise, a working port and manufacturing maze, still basking in the afterglow of World War II, the Bay littoral dominated by the Navy of Victory at Sea. All that saltwater showcasing all those bases. Indeed, Fleet Week was a 21 gun salute to the other fifty-one. When was it not Fleet Week? The Navy was ubiquitous, on Market Street for Frisco liberty; at Treasure Island for headquarters and training; at Mare Island and Hunter’s Point for ship repair; at Moffett Field and Alameda Naval Air for squadron basing; at Alameda Naval Station for ship berthing and aircraft carrier homeporting; at Concord for weapons loading; in Suisan Bay with the mothball fleet; at the Naval Hospital in Oakland; even at Fairmount Elementary, blue buses daily ferrying students from base housing at Hunter’s Point. The notion that a treasure like Treasure Island—supper at the Chief’s Club, with its matchless view of San Francisco, was an eagerly awaited treat—would ever be vacated was simply unfathomable.
From the prized boyhood perch overlooking the Pacific I saw the gray ships come and go, so many that I could never imagine the Navy relinquishing its suzerain claim on San Francisco Bay. Unless the Gate shut by seismic diktat those ships would always be a given, as much a part of the Bay as its tricky currents and slack tides. But of course, that is just what happened, the Big One, as the Navy overnight evacuated the Bay north to south, slammed the Gate behind it, never to return save for Fleet Week.
Monumental disruption was visited upon a reeling Bay Area. The economy took a hard hit, especially since the Port Of San Francisco had become superannuated, all those empty piers cargo cult lore. The Fleet could have berthed there in perpetuity. Instead, the early 90s saw the pell-mell abandonment of bases from Moffett Field to Mare Island. No quarter. Save for the superfund sites San Francisco Bay was scrubbed clean of a naval presence that dated back to Commodore Sloat and the American Conquest. Warships no more.
Strike the colors. Welcome to the demilitarized zone. Iron in war becomes irony in peace. Gold is rediscovered. In the City of Destiny that is the San Francisco of the 21st century it is difficult to remember a time when the Bay Area was not an irenic enclave. The San Francisco Conference of 1945 proved a harbinger of urban fate. From total war to total peace. The birthright of baby billionaire. Today Silicon Valley’s favorite city is pacific in its suzerain reach. A bastion of social media. A force for high-tech goods.
The World War II submarine and liberty ship trapped in a time-warp at Pier 45 seem doubly incongruous in the light of the void across the waters of the Bay. The Blue Angels overflew a San Francisco that basks in ultima Thule, enjoys an exemption—call it a memory hole—from its storied naval past. No flower drop from the Golden Gate Bridge on America’s Navy returning from the high seas. The Fleet remnant that entered the alien shore is effectively offshored, a “global force for good” deemed at best a necessary evil. Out of sight out of mind, the invisible hand guarding the shipping lanes. A paltry eight ships comprised Fleet Week in October 2017. The Navy could spare but three for 2019.
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Two
America’s Navy, the downsized successor of the Cold War Navy and the Reagan Navy, is found these days over-the-horizon, far from America’s shore, engaged in a warm war with the Chinese Navy, and a cold one with a Russian Navy once given up for dead. In the South China Sea rises the Great Wall of Sand, USN stay out, in the Atlantic and Mediterranean an equally unnerving fait accompli, bring back the Second Fleet, in the guise of a resurgent Russian Navy showcasing a doomsday torpedo. Chernobyl gifted to San Francisco Bay. Suddenly America’s Navy is being targeted tout l’azimuth.
Too few ships, too many deployments, too many adversaries, too much grim and bear it. No wonder shiphandling has suffered. Cutting too many corners to meet readiness demands. Tempo is a killer. Strapped for downtime in quick turnaround, America’s Navy finds itself at sea. Off-shored and sequestered from civilian life, the bluejackets of today man the rail far from the adulation of a grateful nation. Those Victory at Sea Days, which enjoyed a Hollywood encore under the bastion-busting aegis of the six hundred ship Reagan Navy, are long gone. Staving off Defeat at Sea is now the primary mission, as the Chinese and Russians, the North Koreans and Iranians all gun for the United States Navy.
While the public eagerly awaits Top Gun II the adversary rollout of the best of their best, crack cyberwarriors, puts the Navy on notice that it could be taken down by the malware-bearing ether. Not a missile fired. Short of shanghaiing the well-compensated coders of Silicon Valley the Navy is increasingly in harm’s way. One can only hope that our cyberwarriors, pace the World War II example of Joe Rochefort, are the equal of the challenge. The Chinese Navy in particular is endlessly practicing for its version of Pearl Harbor. Eighteen war games in the Pentagon show the Seventh Fleet at the bottom of the East China Sea.
Of course, none of this registers on the public radar, especially since the Navy is regularly touted as the world’s most powerful. The next shock to the American Psyche may well occur in the Western Pacific, leaving the Pax Americana, already in extremis no little thanks to the grounding of the ship-of-state on the Trump Shoals by the Great Helmsman, in mortal jeopardy of disappearing beneath the waves. The Navy, whose stealth presence in the Forever War came at too high a price, has come full circle to another day of reckoning. At sea indeed.
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Three
If America’s Navy hopes to stave off that day as long as possible, to say December 7, 2041, put the marplot of the past decade behind it and reclaim supremacy on the high seas, the Fleet of 2022, showing major rust, soldiers on, set Condition Zebra, crewed by the face of America. The bluejackets of today represent a sea change in institutional identity. The male bastion has fallen, thirty years of the Navy as female proving ground, while likewise a color-blind Fleet becomes a feat of naval engineering. E pluribus unum. All races federated on one keel. Like it or not—and too many verdigrised ones don’t, as the virulence directed at Task Force 180 shows—this sea change is a fact of life as Millennials and Gen Z man the rail, the fate of the Fleet now in their gender fluid transracial hands.
Ever since Admiral Zumwalt severed the gordian knot of race with his CNO sword the knives have been out. The champions of a hidebound Navy have put up a fierce resistance to the forced march of time. A fifth of the Fleet is female, another fifth is black. Until the arrival of the unmanned armada carrying DARPA wonder weapons the Navy will draw its crews from both genders and all faiths and hues. Tout l’azimuth. Recruiting reality requires it; social justice demands it; the future of American democracy hinges on it. The days when white-jacketed stewards served the white officers consomme are long gone. The days when women “lacked the necessities” to man the rail of a warship are also gone. Tidewater Tradition and the Male Bastion have been deepsixed. The Navy of the 21st century is indeed a 180-course correction. Enter the Doris Miller into the Fleet.
Doris Miller was a shipmate of my uncle Harold. Torpedoed, the Liscome Bay went down with nearly all hands off Makin Island in 1943. My uncle survived, miraculously. Miller didn’t. So, I have a personal stake in a Navy that honors Miller’s memory. That redresses the racial profiling that sent Miller to the galley and my uncle to the flight deck. For too much of its 20th-century history the Navy was known as the other N word. The lathered warfighters who regurgitate Fox News talking points about the nefarious woke culture of America’s Navy constitute the best argument for its newfound identity.
Having served in the Navy of negro menials and black labor, of women reduced to the sum of their private parts, counting coup, I fathom the siren song of naval yore, when white men were he-men, blacks knew their place, and the Playboy Centerfold airbrushed the female body. That Navy of the good, the bad, and the ugly has been decommissioned and sent downriver. The Navy of the 21st century is very much a work in progress. But progress has been achieved, and those who would denigrate that social maturity have airbrushed the heroic days of their I&I youth, when badmouthing the USN was a naval tradition. Now it is a blood sport conducted by aggrievance professionals.
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Four
State-of-the-art vitriol steers clear of outright racist and misogynist screed. Nothing so crude. Rather it advances the flanking argument that the Navy, in its zeal to address the agenda of social justice warriors, has allowed its warfighting prowess to dangerously atrophy. Indeed, by putting the trigger sensibility of its enlisted ranks first and foremost the Navy is increasingly ill-equipped to pull the trigger when it comes to a showdown with the Chinese Navy, now the world’s largest. In other words, social justice warriors have subverted the will to fight. Bring back the warfighting spirit of the Reagan Navy.
Make the Navy male (and white) again. There is every reason to fear the outcome of a naval war with China but the raft of boneheaded negligences and scandals that have left America’s Navy vulnerable to Tsushima-like defeat is constructed of such non-woke materials as gran mal arrogance and cupidity. Old Navy. The Swedish submarine that penetrated the ASW screen of the Carrier Task Group and repeatedly sank the Ronald Reagan should have been a wake-up call. Call that blindsiding a legacy of the Reagan Navy. And the Seventh Fleet engorgement by Fat Leonard—officers gone wild before early retirement—owes its brazen nature to the Forever War, which gave it cover, de-facto sanction. While the Chinese were building the Great Wall of Sand in the South China Sea the senior leadership of the Seventh Fleet was busy partying. Starring in Fat Leonard’s stash of sex tapes, attention Chinese kompromat. Making the Nine Dash Line a lethal reality.
Indeed, the scandal of woke culture is a red herring. A slander of the first order. The bluejackets who man the rail of the Fleet today are the equal of those who came before. Moreover, the egalitarian ethos that pervades the berthing compartments is a force multiplier, a why we fight
propellant. At a time when American democracy is in real danger of going under the achievement of a democratic Navy is a cause for a 21-gun salute. Those looking for analogies to the plight of America’s Navy need look no further than the example of the Athenian Fleet at Salamis. Their miracle at Midway. Our inspiration for the dark days to come in the Pacific.
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Five
Warfighting is too serious a business to be left to the cultural warfighters. The Russian Navy at Tsushima; the Spanish Navy at Santiago and Manila Bay; the Italian Navy at Taranto; the British Navy at Singapore; the US Navy at Pearl Harbor; the Japanese Navy at Midway; the French Navy at Oran: the PLAN doesn’t lack for inspiration when it comes to drawing up its plans for blindsiding the US Navy. When it comes time to invest Taiwan will the PLAN go big shock-and-awe, taking out the Seventh Fleet all the way to Guam, or will it go small, blockading the island-nation and daring the Seventh Fleet to come to the rescue. Either way the PLAN now calls the shots in the Western Pacific. Indeed, thanks to the Liberty Ship zeal of Chinese shipyards, frigates and corvettes galore, the Chinese Navy could run the table all the way to the third island chain (Pearl).
This is no drill. As the fate of the Imperial Japanese Navy showed there is not room enough in the Pacific for the two largest navies. Especially when the ever burgeoning one is all about the offensive outrance. An homage to the bellicose Reagan Navy. The squandering of supremacy on the high seas has to rank as a scandal of the first magnitude, dwarfing even the debacle of the Forever War. No wonder Nimitz is turning in his grave. Hope for Salamis but prepare for Tsushima. Not since 1942 has the Navy faced so dire a prospect.
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Six
The view from the Memorial is spellbinding, tonic in its bosky prospect from on high, looking out on the surging Pacific all the way to Guadalcanal. All the more powerful for its understated command of the elements. The perforated memorial attests to the point-blank range of that November night in 1942. Large caliber shells from the Japanese battleship riddled the flying bridge wings, on port and starboard display. That the San Francisco, which gave as good as it got, made it out alive—albeit with the deaths of Admiral Callaghan and Captain Young and over a hundred sailors and marines—and made it back under the Golden Gate Bridge is something of a miracle. She survived to fight another day.
The Navy fought five major battles for control of the island, losing twenty-four ships to Iron Bottom Bay. Losing five thousand men in no quarter combat against a foe who had mastered night fighting, as the Battle of Savo Island proved, the Navy’s worst defeat in World War II. Neptune’s Inferno all right. James Hornfischer’s masterful history of those sanguinary waters shows just what a near-thing it was for a Navy at the end of its rope, do or die with the three carriers still afloat, several thousand miles from Pearl, in the enemy’s backyard. The Tokyo Express night after night.
Fortune’s Arrow favored the US Navy, which scaled-up to Ulithi Lagoon size. If the self-inflicted disasters of the last decade are any portent America’s Navy will have to fight off Nemesis should the near-war with the PLAN become the real thing. The sanguinary flag has been preparing the battle “space” in its expansive home waters for two decades now. Snuffing out democracy in Taiwan has become a ruling obsession of the People’s Republic, and short of a diplomatic miracle the Seventh Fleet confronts the Taiwan Strait conundrum, whether to risk it all for the sake of an island-nation it cannot defend short of World War III or retire to the second island chain (Guam) and kowtow to the Chinese suzerain, FON given a not so fond farewell.
The prospect is not a sanguine one. Even if scuttled container ships don’t block the West Coast channels and the undersea trans-Pacific cables are not severed (and satellites blinded) the Fleet is on its own, the logistical trail is a Savo Island take two, good luck in finding safe harbor so far from the American littoral. Ulithi lagoon has room for a lot more ships flying the stars and stripes.
Back on the American littoral naval war with China looks to be a fever dream of latter-day cassandras. The commerce that flows through those cables, the flotilla of container ships plying the supply chain routes, the sheer volume of traffic in the ether and on the seas argues against a naval showdown in the Pacific. A Pacific Ocean. Yes, the PLAN is only getting bigger, and more bluewater adventurous. And yes, the FON transits through the South China Sea bring the risk of crashback collision. But both navies know enough now to stay in their respective sea lanes. The dragon may not like FON forays, consider them taunting, but he does not fear an out of the blue missile attack.
But America’s Navy does. The Scenario Sea invites novelists and numerologists and war gamers to think the unthinkable. Will war come in 2034 or 2024? Will the Seventh Fleet withstand the onslaught or does the Ronald Reagan have a bullseye painted on its flight deck? Even if you could factor Taiwan out of the Big Picture in the Pacific the fact remains a rising naval superpower long aggrieved of the Seventh Fleet and brandishing irredentist ambitions is a very dangerous China notwithstanding the ties that bind East to West. Indeed, it is precisely because of those economic bonds that China is emboldened to strike first, out of the blue. Factor the causus belli—Taiwan—into the Sun Tzu calculus and you have the worst-case scenario, that China, having made the South China Sea its own, watched the Seventh Fleet devolve into the Asian Fleet of 1941, can now believe it can strike with impunity.
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Seven
There is no naval presence in San Francisco Bay. No shipyards. No bases. No sailors. Save for the liberty ship parked at Pier 45 nothing to remind of the time when the Bay Area turned out these ships in record time. That zeal is now made in China. Fleet Week arrives in October as a nautical-themed Octoberfest. Blue Angels darting overhead, an exotic subspecies in bell bottoms flooding the tourist traps.
The void is felt most acutely at the Memorial, a memento mori of superannuation tout l’azimuth. The memory hole is now gaping, a great circle route to elsewhere. Cast off the mooring lines. The Navy has an elsewhere problem. Save for a few enclaves it has no place in American life. Out of sight out of mind. Outsourced to the antipodes.
If it was impossible to ignore when San Francisco was a great Navy town, it is now possible to think the Navy a relic of the past. For the other fifty-one weeks navel-gazing—the fratricidal micropolitics of the megalopolis—roils the waters of the Bay. An irony in peacetime all right. At a time when the Navy becomes an enlightened institution, a cynosure of social cohesion and justice, it should find no homeport in the city that once boasted that democratic credo. The Sales Force tower dominates now. It is a measure of how far the Navy has fallen off the national radar that it should be in need of a PR campaign. America, meet your Navy.
The Navy has a Taiwan Problem and an America Problem. The two are linked by undersea cable. In the Western Pacific War, in the Eastern Pacific Peace. One doesn’t have to read Thucydides to realize naval war looks to be all but inevitable. Those he-men beating the drum for war with China should be press-ganged into manning a trireme in the South China Sea. Row for freedom in jingo lockstep valiant warfighters. Naval war would be a near Armageddon experience. A catastrophe of the first magnitude. Yet its avoidance is one scenario that avoids peaceful resolution. There’s the PLAN, there’s Taiwan, there’s the Seventh Fleet, and there’s fight or flight. Couldn’t be more fortune-cookie prophetic than that. MacArthur learned the hard way the Chinese don’t bluff when it comes to vital national interest. The Chinese have talked the talk ad nauseam when it comes to Taiwan, now comes the time to walk the walk. They have shown every sign of preparing to do just that. Deploy the numerologists.
On the other side of the Pacific the Navy runs up against total peace. America First circa 1941. Not our fight. The Forever War weaponized hell no we won’t go. NIMBY with a vengeance, U.S. Navy stay out of the Bay. Send the USS San Francisco elsewhere. No flower drop from the Golden Gate Bridge. Octoberfest is one thing; the missiles of October take two something else. Over Taiwan? Get real. Peace is now our profession. The Bay Area led the way. Pay any price to keep it that way. Which leaves America’s Navy at sea, turning circles, confronting the sanguinary flag of conflict on the one hand, the sanguine flag of convenience on the other.
