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Hawaii will receive invitations in the nail. However, all members and their guests are welcome to attend. To register, call (toll-free) 800-233-USN1, or use the registration form in this issue.
International Navies Essay Contest
Since 1981, Proceedings has devoted >ts March issue to international navies, and our editors have waited anxiously for envelopes with exotic postmarks, bearing each year’s crop of manuscripts. To ease this anxiety, we instituted an interna- t'onal essay contest last year and received 46 entries, many of which appear in this issue.
Last year’s contest helped make this °ne of our strongest March issues ever, and we’d like to build on that experience. So once again, we ask would-be authors t° write about the issues that are most significant for the world’s navies. We especially encourage our foreign readers to Wr'tc about their own navies—the geographic and cultural influences that bear uPon them; their commitments, capabili- tles> and limitations; and their relationships wi^ 0ther navies.
We will publish the three winning arti- c'es in the March 1990 Proceedings. Au- nors of these entries will win prizes of 5,1-000, $750, and $500.
Please limit your article to 3,500 words and submit it by 1 August 1989. If you do n°t have a 3,500-word article, write a r°fessional Note (1,000-2,000 words) °n a Comment and Discussion item (still Sorter). We will purchase a number of n°n-prizewinners at our regular rates. l'SSa> Contest Rules:
• Articles must be original and no ^ i°nger than 3,500 words.
■ All entries should be directed to Editor-in-Chief, USNI Proceedings, L- S. Naval Institute, Annapolis, MD 21402.
• Articles must be received at the Naval ^ institute on or before 1 August 1989.
• Letters notifying the winners will be j nailed on or about 1 October 1989.
' All articles should be typewritten, double-spaced, and on S'A." x 11" Paper.
• The Naval Institute will publish the winning articles in the March 1990 Proceedings. Some entries not awarded a prize may be selected for Publication. The authors of such articles shall be compensated at the rate established for the features for which
~j ihey are bought.
• The Naval Institute Editorial Board W>U judge the competition.
Woeeedings / March 1989
Where We Were
March 1919—One historian crowned him “King of the Oceans’’ and most would agree that the regal “Ernie The Bald” was more qualified to assume the office of Chief of Naval Operations in 1942 than any officer in this century. Aviator, strategist, submariner, and one of only two officers who would be both Secretary-Treasurer and President of the Naval Institute, Captain Ernest J. King showed the breadth of his professional skills with his article about battleships in this issue.
Five of this month's seven articles are devoted to U. S. naval personnel, whose tremendous expansion in membership late in the war was possible, as Rear Admiral A. C. Dillingham graciously points out, “only because the British Navy controlled the sea.”
The Royal Navy's contributions to the U. S. Navy’s “Rocks and Shoals”—the Articles for the Government of the Navy of the United States, which predate the Declaration of Independence by seven months—reflect the most savage side of the pre- and post-Elizabethan navies. In “On the History of Discipline in the Navy,” Charles R. Williams recalls bestial British punishments—the cat o'nine tails followed by a bath of salt water was among the milder chastisements—that debased our sailors and our Navy for a blessedly short while.
March 1939—Commander Robert B. “Mick” Carney continues to pepper Proceedings pages with articles, on his way to becoming today’s oldest living former Chief of Naval Operations. This, his 12th, is based on the log of the Iroquois, a steam sloop of war, during her troubled 1889-90 Samoan cruise. A nuts-and-bolts man, he writes mostly about the tin cans he loves (with an occasional piece of off-duty hunting and fishing). Thus, this gifted writer quickly spots the single nut that was the Iroquois's undoing, but enlivens his paper with such charming asides as the migratory habits of plovers and blue-water aphorisms—“good sailors look over the bow and never the taffrail.”
Why the Iroquois? Mick Carney’s late father was a youngster in her and Mick served a short cruise in the Adams, a wooden screw gun boat, that waited at Samoa for her.
Oddly, essayist Henderson Daingerfield Norman tackles the same genre in the same issue. A long-dead kinsman’s papers included an epic poem about the exploits of the 90-ton schooner Flying-Fish during her Antarctic cruise with Lieutenant C. Wilkes (1838-42). Norman fleshes out the story while perceptively noting that the poem about the hyphenated schooner was published in New York when that city’s name was still hyphenated.
March 1959—This issue is the last to bear the stamp of Commander Roy de S. Horn to whom all subsequent editors are indebted. That we are reading Proceedings today is a testimonial to Roy’s ability to spot and publish the idea whose time has come. An example of this is Commander Paul Backus’s watershed prize essay, “Finite Deterrence, Controlled Retaliation,” published this month, in which he advocates a fleet ballistic-missile weapon system that will marry the nuclear-powered submarine and the Polaris missile. This essay rescued Paul Backus from the anonymity he had theretofore enjoyed as head of the Navy’s ballistic missile branch.
Backus's article is not the only farsighted contribution in this issue. Commander W. E. Muller explains how the Navy will be affected by the law, enacted this year, that creates something called a “Federal Aviation Agency." And in "Iron Brains and Iron Ships," Commander C. P. Rozier predicts a Navy in which computers (“a batch of tiny iron doughnuts strung in a maze of wires, like Cheerios enmeshed in Shredded Wheat") will carry out tactical decisions and "in off-duty hours will order spare parts and pay the crew.”
Clay Barrow
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