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failed to adjust in advance to the kind of warfare obtaining in 1940,
other examples, less well-known, which lie much closer home,
There are
In all the investi-
gations and hearings on the Pearl Harbor disaster, there has at this writing not
yet been mention of a fact which is as pertinent as any-—-that our ships were
virtually naked in respect to antiaircraft defense,
They were certainly naked
in comparison to what was considered necessary a brief two years later, when the
close~in antiaircraft effectiveness of our older battleships was estimated by the
then Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance
to have increased by no less than 100 tines}
That achievement was in great part the redemption of past errors of omission.
The
admirals who had spent so many of their waking hours denying that the airplane was
a grave menace to the battleship had never taken the elementary steps necessary to
validate their opinions, the steps, that is, of covefing’their ships with as many
as they could carry of the best antiaircraft guns sreiisbie
ous
Whatever may be the specific changes indicated, it is clear that our military
authorities will have to bestir themselves to a wholly unpreccdented degree in
revising military concepts inherited from the past.
That will not be easy,
They
must be prepared to dismiss, as possibly irrelevant, experience gained the hard
way in the recent war, during which their performance was on the whole brilliant,
Thus far there has been no public evidence that Ancrican military authorities
have begun really to think in terms of atomic warfare,
The test announced with
such fanfare for the summor of 1916, when some ninety-seven
naval vessels will
be subjected to the blast effect of atomic bombs, merely serves to confirm this
impression.
Presumably the test is intended to gauge the defensive efficacy of
tactical dispersion, since there can be little doubt of the consequences to any
one ship of a near hit,
While suchtests are certainly uscful it should be
.
recognized at the outset that they can provide no answer to the basic question of
the utility of sea power in the future,
Ships at sea are in any case not anong the most attractive of military
targets for atomic bomb attack,
Their ability to disperse makes them comparatively
ay