The "Revolt of the Admirals" was a policy and funding dispute within the United States government during the Cold War in 1949, involving a number of retired and active duty United States Navy admirals. These included serving officers Admiral Louis E. Denfeld, Chief of Naval Operations, and Vice Admiral Gerald F. Bogan, as well as Fleet Admirals Chester Nimitz and William Halsey, senior officers during World War II.
The episode occurred at a time when President Harry S. Truman and Secretary of Defense Louis A. Johnson were seeking to reduce military expenditures in the aftermath of World War II so Truman could redirect funding to his domestic priorities. This policy involved deep cuts to the U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps, while making the United States Air Force and strategic nuclear bombing the primary means of defending American interests. The Navy sought to carve out a role for itself in strategic bombing with naval aviation, which the Air Force saw as one of its primary roles.
Partly driven by interservice rivalry, the debate escalated from differences over strategy to the question of civilian control over the military. The cancellation of the aircraft carrier and accusations of impropriety by Johnson in regard to the purchase of the Convair B-36 Peacemaker bomber for the Air Force led to an investigation by the House Committee on Armed Services chaired by Congressman Carl Vinson.
While the dispute was settled in favor of the Truman administration, the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 demonstrated the shortcomings of a defense policy primarily reliant on nuclear weapons, and many of the proposed cuts to conventional forces were ultimately reversed.
Background Armed forces unification During World War II, the War Powers Act of 1941 allowed the President broad power to reorganize the armed forces, but this authority was to expire six months after the end of the war. In April 1944, the United States Congress began considering legislation for post-war organization. In response, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), the wartime body consisting of the most senior uniformed leaders prepared to make its own recommendations, as the organization of the JCS and its various advisory committees were themselves ad hoc wartime creations. On 9 May 1944, the JCS appointed a Special Committee for Reorganization of National Defense under the chairmanship of Admiral James O. Richardson, a former Commander in Chief, United States Fleet, consisting of Major General William F. Tompkins from the War Department General Staff, Major General Harold L. George from the USAAF, Rear Admiral Malcolm F. Schoeffel and Colonel F. Trubee Davison, a former Assistant Secretary of War for Air.
The committee reported to the JCS on 11 April 1945. It endorsed the unification of the War and Navy Departments into a single department of armed forces headed by a civilian secretary, with three equal services through the creation of an independent U.S. Air Force. During the war, the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) had achieved a degree of de facto independence from the United States Army and was eager to become a fully-fledged armed service on an equal footing with the Army and the United States Navy. Richardson dissented, favoring the status quo over the creation of a new department, but he accepted the proposal to perpetuate the organization of the JCS by statute.
Senior Navy officers including Fleet Admirals William D. Leahy (the Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief), Ernest J. King (the Commander in Chief, United States Fleet) and Chester W. Nimitz (the Commander in Chief, US Pacific Fleet) regarded the committee's recommendations as radical. They opposed the idea of a single secretary of National Defense, which they felt was too much responsibility for one man, and it interposed a civilian head between the JCS and the President of the United States, which might diminish the Navy's power and influence. They also feared the possible loss of the Navy's air arm, as had happened to the Royal Navy when the Royal Naval Air Service was absorbed into the Royal Air Force upon the creation of the latter in 1918.
The Senate Committee on Military Affairs formed a subcommittee to draft legislation, with Major General Lauris Norstad, the Assistant Chief of the Air Staff for Plans, and Rear Admiral Arthur W. Radford, the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (DCNO) for Air, as its advisors. Radford was considered a hard liner in his opposition to unification even within the Navy, and in July 1946, James Forrestal, the Secretary of the Navy and Nimitz, now the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), replaced him with the DCNO for Operations, Rear Admiral Forrest Sherman. Although also a naval aviator, Sherman did not oppose unification. He and Norstad drew up an agreement that was endorsed by the JCS and forwarded to President Harry S. Truman, for approval on 12 December 1946.
This became the basis for the National Security Act of 1947, which created the National Security Council (NSC), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), an independent United States Air Force (USAF), three civilian military department heads and the National Military Establishment, a unified command with a cabinet-level Secretary of Defense to oversee the service departments and the JCS. The Act left the Navy with the autonomy it sought, and control of its own Naval and Marine Corps Aviation, effectively legitimizing four military air forces. The act appeared to end the debate, although none of the services was completely happy with it.
Forrestal, a former naval aviator who had led the fight against unification, was appointed the first Secretary of Defense; John L. Sullivan, formerly the Assistant Secretary of the Navy (AIR) succeeded him as Secretary of the Navy; Kenneth C. Royall, the Under Secretary of War, became the Secretary of the Army; and Stuart Symington, who had been the Assistant Secretary of War for Air, became the first Secretary of the Air Force. As the Navy had wanted, the Secretary of Defense had a coordination role and lacked the authority and resources to exercise effective control over service departments and their chiefs. Forrestal hoped that with unification accomplished, the services would set aside their parochial differences.
Budgets and strategy
Following the end of World War II, the United States Government was concerned about the large deficit spending that had been necessary for the war effort, which reached 119 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in 1946. Deficit spending had lifted the United States out of the Great Depression, but now Truman and his economic advisors were concerned about the prospect of inflation, which rose to 14.4 percent in 1947 after wartime price controls were removed, and embraced austerity. To reduce expenditures, the armed services had to quickly demobilize and return to a peacetime military. Defense budgets declined from $81 billion in fiscal year 1945 (equivalent to $ billion in ) to $9 billion in fiscal year 1948 (equivalent to $ billion in ), representing a decline from 37.5 percent of GDP to 3.5 percent. The services were reduced from 89 Army and Marine divisions to 12; from 213 Air Force air groups to 63 (only 11 of which were operational, with some existing only on paper); and from 1,166 Navy warships to 343. Meanwhile, $13 billion went into the Marshall Plan, from 1948 to 1952.
US war plans were drafted for a potential conflict with the Soviet Union. It was considered unlikely that the Soviet Union wanted to start a war, but the plans were prepared for the possibility that one might break out as a result of a miscalculation. The Soviet Union had fifty divisions in Germany and Austria to the U.S. Army's one, enough to quickly overrun Europe east of the Rhine. This was a major barrier, but it was not considered that it could be held for long, forcing a retreat to the Pyrenees. In view of the Soviet Union's overwhelming superiority in conventional forces, the planners felt that the United States had no alternative means of striking back other than a strategic air offensive employing both conventional and nuclear weapons.
Admiral Louis E. Denfeld, who had succeeded Nimitz as CNO on 15 December 1947, was critical of the war plan, which he regarded as deeply flawed. He noted that abandoning Western Europe without a struggle ran counter to the US Government policy of building up the democracies there, and it meant accepting the loss of the Mediterranean Sea as well. The plan called for using the Karachi area as a base for the strategic air campaign, but this would involve an enormous logistical effort to sustain, and it would not support other elements of the war plan. Moreover, there was no fallback in case the strategic bombing campaign failed. He was willing to sign off on the plan only as a temporary one for short-range planning and advocated a more aggressive strategy in which the Rhine and Middle East were held. None of the three services had the resources to implement the short-term war plan, much less the more ambitious one.
Strategic bombing In the years leading up to World War II, the United States Army Air Corps had developed a doctrine of strategic bombing, which was promulgated by the Air Corps Tactical School. The experience of strategic bombing during World War II revealed major flaws in the Air Corps', later Army Air Forces', precision bombing doctrine. Unescorted bombers were found to be highly vulnerable to enemy fighter aircraft and took high losses. Improvements in anti-aircraft guns drove the bombers to higher altitudes, from which accurate bombing was difficult. None of the principal targets of the bombing offensive in Europe was destroyed or even suffered severe disruption and only the oil campaign was ultimately regarded as successful. Air raids on Japan encountered weather and flying conditions that made daylight precision bombing from high altitude even more difficult than in Europe, resulting in a switch of tactics to low-level area bombing of cities with incendiaries. The wartime Chief of the USAAF, General of the Army Henry H. Arnold, contended that the conventional bombing had destroyed Japan's ability to wage war, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had given the Emperor of Japan an excuse to end the war.
The advent of nuclear weapons gave the strategic bombardment theorists encouragement that the factors that had limited the effectiveness of strategic bombing during the war could be overcome. Colonel Dale O. Smith, USAF, wrote that:
The bombing campaign called for in the war plans was both nuclear and conventional. By June 1948, components for about fifty Fat Man and two Little Boy bombs were on hand. These had to be assembled by specially trained Armed Forces Special Weapons Project assembly teams. Only Silverplate Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers were capable of delivering nuclear weapons, and of the 65 that had been made, only 32 were operational at the start of 1948, all of which were assigned to the 509th Bombardment Group, which was based at Walker Air Force Base, formerly Roswell Army Airfield, in New Mexico. Trained crews were also in short supply; at the beginning of 1948 only six crews were qualified to fly atomic bombing missions, although enough personnel had been trained to assemble an additional fourteen in an emergency. But up to 20 percent of the target cities in the war plan were beyond the range of the B-29, requiring a one-way mission, which would expend the crew, bomb and aircraft. There were also doubts about the ability of the B-29 to penetrate Soviet air space; as a propeller-driven bomber, it was highly vulnerable to the new Soviet jet fighters, even at night.