MEN AT WAR: Waiting for the Second Alarm

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If the lithe, handsome, four-star U.S. admiral who holds the job of CINCPAC (Commander in Chief, Pacific) were to write a geography primer for children, he would probably start with these simple facts: three-fourths of the earth's surface is ocean. One-third of the earth's surface is the Pacific. Above this vast reach of blue water, above its coasts and islands, is the three-dimensional ocean of the air.

If he were to write a modern history primer, he might put down this: it has become the business of the U.S. to make the Pacific, in the words of General MacArthur, a peaceful lake. The Pacific actually became a U.S. responsibility when Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853 opened the Pandora's box of Japan; the U.S. began to recognize its responsibility when it took the Philippines from Spain in 1898, helped to quell the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, helped to settle the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. In World War II, it cost the U.S. a painful, bloody, island-to-island struggle to make the Pacific a peaceful lake. The U.S. never intends to be forced to fight that kind of war again.

And for a primer on naval power, this: historically, sea power is the most mobile and therefore the most economical form of military force. For 3,000 years or more, navies fought on the two-dimensional ocean surface. The carrier-based plane gave navies the third dimension of the air. It has even given them a sort of fourth dimension—a sweep of 500 miles or more inland from any coast. Nearly all the economic and political power centers of the world lie within 500 miles of deep water.

Tireless Crusader. The CINCPAC who shrewdly broods over these matters is Arthur William Radford, 54, who has been a red-hot airman, a resourceful administrator, a crack staff man and a fighting carrier admiral. Above all, he has been a tireless crusader for Navy air—first against "battleship admirals" and later, in the great postwar unification controversy, against those who, Radford was convinced, were trying to nibble Navy aviation out of existence.

Radford brought to this fight much more than narrow departmental esprit de corps, more than the questionable methods that were used by the Navy in its desperate attempt to make its points. At Annapolis he absorbed the great U.S. tradition of sea power—the tradition that led U.S. Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan to explain to the British how they won and held their empire, the tradition which explains Winston Churchill's grasp of strategic problems.