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The Challenge of Logistics Support When peace returned to the Pacific in August 1945, both Britain and the United States were deploying the most potent fleets ever created.1 It was not just the sheer numbers either. The necessary flexibility to win a war stretching across vast oceans had required a unique capacity for sustaining huge combat fleets at sea for lengthy periods many thousands of miles from their shore bases. This ability to keep carrier task forces regularly on station, in action at high tempo for months at a time had required frequent restocking of fuel, gasoline, aircraft, provisions, spares, and ammunition from specialist ships while they remained under way at sea. The magnitude of this logistics challenge was therefore quite daunting. Its application was decisive. For without fleet trains to provide essential logistic support, Allied task forces had neither the mobility nor endurance to seek out and destroy the Japanese air, sea, and garrison forces before them. A measure of the challenge can be deduced by looking at the amount of fuel oil, diesel oil, and aviation gasoline issued while under way by a fleet train of sixty-seven fleet oilers and merchant tankers to support just one American task force off Okinawa between March 17 and May 27, 1945.2 This requirement alone represented more petroleum than Japan produced or imported for the whole of 1944.3 In hindsight this must surely rank as one of the most significant indicators of the war’s eventual outcome. Yet neither navy had been prepared for the scale and intensity of the Pacific campaign, and both had been compelled to develop their replenishment capability the hard way—by trial and tribulation. It was presumed however that the difficulties they had encountered would at least provide lessons that, if heeded, would avoid a repeat in the future of their early fraught experience. Logistics, after all, was undoubtedly expected to stay in some form or other. By the end of the war both navies employed a vast, complex—if rather prosaic—logistics infrastructure that not only took on a life of its own but, at least for the Americans, was to become the hallmark in planning for the rest of the century. Within months, however, both became constrained by budget cutbacks, decimated by rapid demobilization, and disoriented by the immediate contraction in xxv Introduction xxvi | Introduction operational imperatives. Uncertainty of purpose soon permeated through each as the vacuum left by the defeated enemy remained unfilled. This was further compounded by the debilitating effects of interservice rivalry, a confusing role transition in peacetime, and perceptions of base vulnerability in the new atomic age, all of which posed new problems for naval planners and leaders alike. Yet much that was learned about supplying and sustaining large combat-ready forces at sea was seemingly relegated or forgotten. As Thomas Wildenberg noted, “The financial and personnel cutbacks were so severe in the post-war period that the [U.S.] navy found itself temporarily forced to abandon mobile logistic support as a practice.”4 The Korean War therefore became a timely reminder as the struggle to reassemble as well as relearn the art of logistic sustainability provided testament to the problems that can arise if core capabilities and skills, perhaps not sufficiently recognized for their relevance at the time, are allowed to wither. Purpose of This Book This book will explore how the Royal Navy (RN) and U.S. Navy (USN) initially went about developing and refining the art and science of mobile logistic support from the early years of the twentieth century, leading up to their transformational baptism of fire in 1945. It will then examine how progress was subsequently defined by the constraints and opportunities that governed the early postwar period of peace until five years later, when the sudden outbreak of the Korean War forced both navies to reconsider their priorities. After analyzing why the contribution of mobile logistics was so critical by 1945, the book will then seek to establish the extent to which this capability became a core competency to be preserved in peacetime to meet new challenges, many of which have remained as relevant as ever to this day. Much has been written about how navies have prepared themselves for war and even more on how they have operated in one. Relatively little illumination, however, has been shed on how navies manage contraction with its consequential effect on decisions, priorities, and plans. Yet history has shown the Royal Navy, for example...

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