On the eve of World War II, the U.S. government began construction of warships that would come to dominate both the Atlantic and the Pacific.
The goal of establishing a two-ocean fleet was a powerful, if elusive, force in determining the nature of the U.S. Navy before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor plunged the United States into war in 1941. In the late 1930’s, the two-ocean standard became the latest in a succession of rallying cries designed to gain support for naval expansion among the American public. Its appeal originated in a growing recognition that vital U.S. interests were being threatened simultaneously by Germany and Japan. This two-ocean focus was an extension of threat perceptions and arguments dating back to the 1890’s and made more pressing with the Anglo-Japanese alliance of 1902 and Japan’s victory over Russia in the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War. With the collapse of naval arms limitations in 1936, the rearmament of National Socialist (Nazi) Germany, and the naval buildup and military adventurism of Japan, the necessity of creating fleets capable of fighting independently in widely separated theaters seemed evident. The U.S. Congress, responding to the change in popular attitude, passed legislation between 1938 and 1941 designed to translate the ideal of a two-ocean fleet into reality.
U.S. naval policy in general has mirrored national ambition. In the 1890’s, and especially after the Spanish-American War, the horizon of that ambition increased measurably. At a single stroke, the United States became both a Caribbean and a Pacific power. U.S. control of the Philippines was perplexing for many people in the United States but exciting for navalists and imperialists. Together with Hawaii, which was annexed in 1898, the Philippines provided U.S. commerce with a toehold in the fabled China trade. Distant possessions seemed to mandate an increased fleet, and an increased fleet required overseas bases, setting the foundation for a self-perpetuating expansion of the military and naval establishment.
For better or worse, expanded interests called for expanded responsibilities, and President Theodore Roosevelt,
By the time of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, Japan and especially Germany were seen as the most important potential threats to U.S. commerce and possessions. Tension caused by the treatment of Japanese nationals living in the United States was the primary reason for congressional approval of the last six new battleships authorized during Roosevelt’s administration. The attention of most U.S. naval experts was fixed on Germany, where an ambitious twenty-year naval construction program had been announced in 1900. Whereas the German fleet law was intended as a challenge to British naval supremacy, it was also perceived as a threat to U.S. interests by a host of U.S. congressmen and naval authorities. That traditional German concerns were continental and that the German navy had a nearer rival in Great Britain seemed to make no difference. Those guiding U.S. naval policy believed that it would be a mistake for the United States to allow itself to be surpassed in naval power by any nation that also maintained a great standing army. This growing American fear of Germany was also reflected in the concentration of the fleet. Long a dictum of the most distinguished U.S. naval strategic synthesizer, Captain A. T. Mahan, the concentration of naval forces was adopted by Roosevelt as a cardinal principle of fleet deployment. Throughout his presidency, and that of William Howard Taft as well, the main fleet remained posted in the Atlantic Ocean.
After 1914, the prewar desire to improve the U.S. Navy to second place behind the British fleet was replaced by a determination to build a navy second to none. This challenge to British naval superiority, the first ever by the United States, was engendered by British arrogance toward neutral U.S. shipping and a fear of the naval landscape in the postwar world. President Woodrow Wilson
By 1924, the U.S. Navy would be the most powerful in the world, a dismaying prospect to the British government. U.S. naval ascension was delayed by the decision to shift battleship construction assets to the production of antisubmarine warships, such as destroyers, and to merchant ships to counter losses to German submarines. In the three years that followed the signing of the armistice ending World War I, the United States built more warships than all the rest of the world combined. In taking dead aim at British naval superiority, the United States also revealed apprehension concerning Japan’s being linked to Britain by the ten-year renewal of the Anglo-Japanese alliance in 1911. Between 1917 and 1921, Japanese naval appropriations tripled, undoubtedly affected by the upsurge in U.S. construction. It is not surprising that with the demise of German naval power in 1919, concern in the United States shifted from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In the summer of that year, the battle fleet was divided, with the newer and heavier units being sent to the West Coast.
Fear of a costly, all-out naval race in the immediate postwar period served to induce a certain amount of moderation. In Washington, D.C., in 1921-1922, the five leading naval powers adopted a system of restrictions on individual capital ships (battleships and battle cruisers) and aircraft carriers as well as on the aggregate tonnages of capital war fleets. By the terms of the Five-Power Treaty,
Domination of the Imperial Japanese Navy by the hardliners of the so-called Fleet Faction, who chafed at Japan’s second-rank status under the treaties, resulted in significant pressure on the Japanese government to demand equal status with the United States and Great Britain at the London Naval Conference of 1935. When Great Britain and the United States demurred, the Japanese government provided the requisite notice that it would no longer abide by the naval treaties after December, 1936. Japan’s subsequent penetration of China in 1937 and Hitler’s annexation of Austria and absorption of the Sudetenland in 1938 seemed to provide ample proof for the proposition that unilateral restraint by the United States was a dangerous policy. The issue of naval preparedness became correspondingly less controversial.
In 1932, U.S. naval officers applauded the election of navalist Franklin D. Roosevelt to the presidency after the lean years of Republican naval and military expenditures. They were not disappointed. On the same day he signed the National Industrial Recovery Act
A newly completed ship at the Bethlehem-Fairfield shipyards in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1943.
By 1938, many isolationists, hemispherists, and internationalists were in agreement that a powerful navy was an indispensable adjunct to a free United States, and so another authorization bill swiftly passed through Congress. The second Vinson-Trammel bill, the Naval Expansion Act,
President Roosevelt, who largely acted as his own secretary of the Navy, shared most admirals’ perception that the battleship defined naval power. Although additional aircraft carriers were authorized in the late 1930’s, the main focus of the Roosevelt naval buildup was the production of the seventeen new battleships authorized prior to U.S. entry into World War II.
Despite the flurry of construction authorizations, U.S. naval power was insufficient to protect the Atlantic and Pacific interests of the United States in the wake of Pearl Harbor. A full year prior to that catastrophe, the Navy, pressured by the president, had been forced to shift its strategic focus from an offensive action against Japan to a position that in any future war would include both Germany and Japan; the fleet would take the offensive in the Atlantic while assuming a defensive posture in the Pacific. Even this severe modification of the strategy implicit in the two-ocean standard did not achieve satisfactory results for a disconcertingly long period of time.
Although the success of Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor might well be considered the result of a failure of specific rather than general preparedness, the inability of U.S. naval resources to provide adequate protection against the onslaught of Germany’s U-boat attack during all of 1942 provides convincing evidence that the Atlantic fleet had not achieved even a one-ocean capability at that time. This was an outgrowth of the myopic battleship strategic paradigm that restricted movement toward true capabilities in air, surface, and subsurface warfare. It was not until early 1943 that U.S. naval forces began to gain the upper hand in the Atlantic and Pacific theaters of the war.
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Baer, George W. One Hundred Years of Sea Power: The U.S. Navy, 1890-1990. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994. Detailed history of the modern U.S. Navy examines how naval policy has been formulated. The Navy’s readiness for World War II is discussed in chapter 8. -
Davis, George T. A Navy Second to None: The Development of Modern American Naval Policy. 1940. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1971. Informative scholarly study of U.S. naval policy and armaments as well as the relation of naval power to commerce. -
Hagan, Kenneth J. This People’s Navy: The Making of American Sea Power. New York: Free Press, 1991. Excellent concise history of the U.S. Navy examines the service’s military, political, and technological evolution. -
O’Connell, Robert. Sacred Vessels: The Cult of the Battleship and the Rise of the U.S. Navy. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1991. Readable cautionary account of naval strategic weapons and the profession in which they evolved. -
Pelz, Stephen E. Race to Pearl Harbor: The Failure of the Second London Naval Conference and the Onset of World War II. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974. Excellent examination of the naval policies of the great sea powers from the end of arms limitations to Pearl Harbor. Draws on American, Japanese, and British sources. -
Tuleja, Thaddeus V. Statesmen and Admirals: Quest for a Far Eastern Naval Policy. New York: W. W. Norton, 1963. Provides informative discussion of the interwar relationship between the naval policies of the United States and Japan. -
Wheeler, Gerald. Prelude to Pearl Harbor: The United States Navy and the Far East, 1921-1931. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1963. Presents clear discussion of the attitudes of senior naval officers, Congress, the executive branch, and the U.S. public during an important period of naval limitation.
Franklin D. Roosevelt Is Elected U.S. President
Neutrality Acts
Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Peace
United States Begins Mobilization for World War II
Roosevelt Uses Business Leaders for World War II Planning
Ogdensburg Agreement