From almost the time of the founding of the Republic, the U.S. Asiatic Fleet, along with its French, Dutch, Austrian, British, Italian, Russian, German, and Portuguese opposite numbers, served a unique role in the Orient. After the arrival of the white man in that part of the world, the little fleets of what were in Chinese eyes barbarian interlopers acted as seagoing fire departments, rushing to one or another of the political conflagrations that arose with regularity in an area where a millennial empire was disintegrating in the face of newer imperialisms with which the ancient ways could not cope.
These “fleets” were small and ill suited to traditional warfare. But they were admirably suited to protect their respective nationals, whether they were individuals in some backwater or groups of several thousand in concessions of foreign settlements immune to Chinese law, and until 1904, to Japanese law in similar concessions in Japan. From Shanghai into China’s heartland, 1,300 miles up the Yangtze, these ubiquitous foreign men-of-war rode uninvited. That many of them were ancient relics was of small importance; the Chinese judged their power by the number of stacks they had. More to the point, they carried guns, and some of them armor as well, all superior to anything the Chinese could bring to bear against them.
It was an anomaly that a U.S. Asiatic Fleet of a mere 8,000 officers and men and a handful of ships, most of them obsolete, should have been commanded since 1916 by one of only four full admirals in the U.S. Navy. But prestige and rank were the names of the game. The commander in chief of that fleet wielded more real power and influence on U.S. affairs in China than did the American minister (later ambassador) at the Chinese capital.
It can be said that the Asiatic Fleet that faced the Japanese in World War II was not in any sense a fleet; it was simply an agglomeration of ships. We shall read in the following pages of the calamities that befell this small group of preponderantly elderly ships with obsolete or defective equipment; condensers leaking as a result of near-misses; boiler brickwork sagging from continuous steaming at full power; short of everything from food to fuel; no ammunition or torpedo resupply; no secure bases; blind because of an almost total lack of reconnaissance; bare of any air cover whatsoever; wrongly employed through the bungling, if not incompetence, of a too-little-and-too-late Allied combined command.
These battle-worn, used-up ships staggered to sea time and again against hopeless odds toward clearly imminent disaster. The squandering of them and the loss of thousands of veteran sailors makes the blood boil. But their small triumphs warm the heart and their individual heroism has become a part of our heritage. We are grateful to Captain Winslow for keeping these heroic performances alive in our memories.
Kemp Tolley
Rear Admiral, U.S. Navy (Ret.)