The Navy and the Formation of NATO

The Navy’s quiet maintenance of its planning links, liaison and education exchanges, and efforts at communication standardization with the British and Canadians that began during World War II significantly eased the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on 4 April 1949. While the initial motivation for this activity was to coordinate postwar occupation, repatriation, and security activity, once NATO was established, contingency planning for a war against the Soviet Union heavily contributed to the development of the Navy’s critical role in Cold-War era limited (non-nuclear) warfare.

Prior to the second half of the twentieth century, the United States adhered to a policy of avoiding peacetime alliances, and as a result the Navy entered World Wars I and II unprepared for coalition warfare. In World War I, the resulting ad-hoc naval cooperation with the British took the form of a division of American battleships that were attached to the British fleet in the North Sea and the deployment of several dozen destroyers to Ireland as convoy escorts. Both of these groups adopted the operating procedures and leadership of the Royal Navy for the duration of the conflict.[1] In World War II’s early stages, ABDACOM (American-British-Dutch-Australian Command) was created for a brief period in 1942 in an attempt to coordinate the defense of South East Asia—an effort that failed miserably due to infighting over leadership and a broader lack of coordination and supply. In each case, the Navy’s lack of experience with coalition warfare contributed to excessive administrative, operational, and tactical friction, and made it clear that some sort of peacetime collaboration with potential allies was necessary to pave the way for a more formal wartime alliance.[2]

This lesson was taken to heart by President Franklin Roosevelt and Navy leadership even before the ABDACOM disaster. As the second Battle of the Atlantic intensified in August 1940, Roosevelt and Canadian Prime Minister William King established the Permanent Joint Board on Defense (PJBD), ostensibly to protect U.S. neutrality, but additionally to plan the defense of North America. While formal coordination with the British was politically impossible before December 1941, the U.S. nevertheless began secret cooperation as early as the extension of the Pan-American Security Zone in April of that year, which opened the door for U.S. forces to escort convoys as far as Iceland. Finally, in the immediate aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill created the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS), a body that included the American and British service heads, to plan the strategic direction of the U.S./U.K. war effort. That organization spun off a number of subordinate boards to coordinate the war effort itself, such as the Combined Communications Board (CCB), which sought to standardize and streamline communication terminology and doctrine between the allies.[3]

While the United States quickly moved to demobilize its armed forces after both World Wars, this demobilization was slowed in 1945 by occupation, repatriation, and security duties several orders of magnitude greater than 1919. A substantial amount of this work relied upon the Navy, which now supported a diminished British Royal Navy in the Atlantic and Mediterranean and filled the power vacuum created by the destruction of the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Western Pacific. Additionally, the potential for a third World War between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union encouraged President Harry S. Truman and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to maintain their close wartime relationships with the British and Canadians, particularly on naval matters. Critically, the PJBD, CCS, and CCB, which had proved highly useful during the war persisted into the postwar period because they facilitated ongoing coordination. These efforts were politically dangerous not only due to the continuing American disdain of peacetime alliances, but also because the end of the war featured the creation of the United Nations to arbitrate international disputes. This institution was highly popular with the American public, and meant that the military had to carefully camouflage its continuing foreign relationships.[4] Defense unification in 1947 and the cancellation of the carrier United States in favor of the U.S. Air Force’s B-36 Peacemaker intercontinental strategic bomber in 1949 (the so-called “Revolt of the Admirals”) also contributed to the Navy’s political and budgetary woes.[5]

Throughout these challenges between 1945 and 1950, the Navy managed to maintain its critical World War II relationships with Britain and Canada in the form of what historian Corbin Williamson has called “deep and wide links.”[6] Deep links included an exchange of a few foreign postings: liaison officers and attendance of foreign military schools. On the other hand, wide links included multinational exercises or brief foreign training, but included much larger numbers of personnel. These were accompanied by a continuation of joint planning, such as that carried out by the CCS and PJBD, and efforts at standardization of communications and doctrine by the CCB. Much of this effort could be accomplished at a personal level rather than an official one based on the leadership relations that had been established between the Western allies during the war. Overall, deep and wide links not only kept up the hard-won relationships between the U.S. Navy and its wartime allies, but additionally fostered new relationships and reinforced interoperability. While higher coordination was not politically possible before 1949, these links bridged a critical capability gap that had been created by demobilization. The framing of a future conflict in terms of coalition warfare was also a major shift for U.S. planners.[7]

The establishment of NATO in April 1949 built upon this groundwork laid by the Navy. Increasingly aggressive Soviet actions, specifically the communist Czechoslovak coup of February 1948 and the Berlin blockade that began in June of that same year, forced a reexamination of U.S. foreign policy and cleared the deck for a defensive pact with Western Europe.[8] The alliance formalized the Navy’s Atlantic sea control mission; in the event of a conflict with the Soviets, a third Battle of the Atlantic was expected in which the enemy would leverage cutting-edge German submarine technology captured in 1945 to prevent American reinforcement of Europe. At first, sea control enjoyed less prominence than that accorded to the offensive roles of the Army and Air Force, and did little to halt the Navy’s budgetary downward spiral. Close cooperation between the U.S., British, and Canadian navies—all diminished by budget cuts—would therefore be critical to the accomplishment of this task.[9]

Ultimately, the detonation of the first Soviet atomic bomb in August 1949 and the critical role of naval aviation in providing air support to UN forces in the Korean War underlined the need for rapidly deployable forces capable of fighting a limited war.[10] The need for a quick reaction striking force was a message that NATO and the Truman administration immediately took to heart; even at the height of the Korean conflict, three carriers remained in the Atlantic or Mediterranean poised to respond to emergencies in Europe.[11] Accordingly, the position of Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic (SACLANT) was established in 1952 as a counterpart to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) to manage all NATO naval forces in the Atlantic Ocean. As was the case with the establishment of ABDACOM ten years earlier, the choice of who would hold this position—an American or British naval officer—was fraught with political difficulties. But the allies had, at least, learned to iron these issues out in peacetime rather than while trying to fight a war for survival. Aside from the appointment of an overall commander, the transition to a formal alliance was reasonably smooth thanks to the preexisting links that the Navy had fought hard to establish.[12]
 
The establishment of NATO and of SACLANT was a significant step in the redefinition of the U.S. Navy’s role after World War II, but it was not the end of its political and funding difficulties. The Eisenhower administration’s (1953-1961) “New Look” policy doubled down on a reliance on air-dropped nuclear weapons with the possibility of “Massive Retaliation,” or of a mass attack with atomic bombs, in response to any provocation against the United States or one of its allies.[13] But it quickly became clear that this approach was unsustainable, particularly as the Soviet Union rapidly built up its own nuclear stockpile. As the idea of limited war between the superpowers (often in the form of “proxy” wars) became more credible in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Navy’s ability to project power ashore, coupled with its critical role in resupplying Europe, rapidly reinforced the service’s place in the Cold War defense establishment and in NATO.