Fleet Problem IX
23-27 JANUARY 1929
FLEET PROBLEM IX
Between the World Wars, US military planners began to imagine the Pacific as a direction from which a future enemy might emerge. They listed Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Alaska, and the Panama Canal as potential targets of such an enemy’s first strike. In fact, periodically during the 1920s and 1930s our Navy conducted exercises near these sites, practicing various attack and defense scenarios. The exercise of 1929, Fleet Problem IX, was staged in the eastern Pacific around Panama. A “Black Fleet” aggressor force was tasked with attempting to “destroy” the Panama Canal.
Fleet Problem IX was historic before it started. It would be the first exercise in which aircraft carriers played a role. LEXINGTON (CV-2) and SARATOGA (CV-3) had been commissioned just a year earlier; the former being assigned to the force protecting Panama, and SARATOGA, under the command of CAPT Harry E. Yarnell, would scout for the Black Fleet. Most tacticians in this day saw little role for flattops in direct combat. The battleship was capital; aircraft carriers were but supporting auxiliaries, scouting over the horizon as the “eyes of the Fleet.” Only a few forward thinkers saw a potential for naval aviation in direct offensive combat. One of these was RADM Joseph M. “Bull” Reeves, commander of Aircraft Squadrons, Battle Fleet.
On January 25th, as Fleet Problem IX proceeded, Reeves quietly detached SARATOGA from her Black Fleet duties and sent her south under escort of a single cruiser. She made a large end sweep around the southern arm of the defending forces, closing undetected to within 150 miles of the Canal during the early morning hours of this day, the 26th. From here she launched 69 biplanes into the pre-dawn darkness.
The surprise was total. SARATOGA’s planes arrived over the Canal at sunrise, unnoticed until their “bombs” were falling. Though defenders had been on alert throughout the exercises, opposition could not be mounted in time. Referees ruled the vital Miraflores and Pedro Miguel Locks destroyed, effectively disabling the Panama Canal. Her strike planes sustained no combat losses, though SARATOGA herself was discovered and “sunk” by the defending force later that day.
Naval planners were stunned by the effectiveness of SARATOGA’s coup d’etat, but the raid was so “outside the box” that it was dismissed out of hand by doctrinal experts. Indeed, the utility of the offensive naval airstrike was re-demonstrated in later Fleet Problems, but traditional thought prevailed. It was not until the Japanese air raid on Pearl Harbor in 1941 that the concept of offensive airstrikes gained wide endorsement in the American Navy.
Watch for more “Today in Naval History” 2 FEB 24
CAPT James Bloom, Ret.
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Department of the Navy, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (Air Warfare). United States Naval Aviation 1910-1980. Washington, DC: GPO, 1981, pp. 66-67.
Johnson, Brian. Fly Navy: A History of Naval Aviation. New York, NY: William Morrow & Co., 1981, pp. 138-41.
Potter, E.B. Sea Power: A Naval History, 2nd ed. Annapolis, MD: USNI Press, 1981, p. 237.
Reynolds, Clark G. The Fast Carriers: The Forging of an Air Navy. New York, McGraw-Hill, 1968, p. 17.
Sweetman, Jack. American Naval History: An Illustrated Chronology of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, 1775-Present, 2nd ed. Annapolis, MD: USNI Press, 1991, p. 153.
ADDITIONAL NOTES: CAPT Yarnell (1875-1959) fought at the Battle of Santiago in the Spanish-American War and received the Navy Cross for his work in the CNO’s Office during WWI. By the interwar period he had developed a reputation as an expert in Naval aviation. He was promoted to Flag in 1930 and served later as the CIC of the Asiatic Fleet. He retired on 1 November 1941, a month before Pearl Harbor but was recalled to Active Duty twice during the war. He died 7 July 1959 in Newport, Rhode Island. Seventeen months after his death the Navy launched our second of the Leahy-class guided missile cruisers, HARRY E. YARNELL (DLG-17). Like her Leahy-class sisters, YARNELL decommissioned after the 1991 Persian Gulf War and was sold for scrap.
Admiral Reeves is also remembered with a Leahy-class cruiser, REEVES (DLG-24).
