Senator KEAN. Yes; but you cannot use a battleship as a scout very well.

Admiral PRATT. Ordinarily you would not, but war is a very peculiar thing, it is an art of its own, and you do not necessarily use one type of ship in the operations of war only in that particular work for which it was primarily designed; you use it as any type, any type to perform a work which you deem essential at that moment. Ordinarily, you are quite right, you would not use it, but a cruiser could be used for that, and she has a 10,000-mile radius.

Senator KEAN. Yes; but she cannot go 65 miles an hour.

Admiral PRATT. That is very true; I am not bringing this up in any way to try to prove that we would not use airships at all, and I may say that probably a lighter-than-air ship could be used for this work without detriment to other services better than any other type of ship could, and I call them all ships-airships, surface ships, or any other ships.

Senator KEAN. You are the head of the personnel of the Navy? Admiral PRATT. No, sir; not of the personnel; I am Chief of Operations.

Senator KEAN. What I was going to ask you was, perhaps you could answer, the personnel of the Navy, it has appeared to us, or at least to me, I am speaking for myself, that this ship left Lakehurst at 7:28; she went to Philadelphia; that took her 50 minutes, we will say. At 8:30 an airplane left Fort Newark and went to Philadelphia, or went to Camden which is right opposite Philadelphia, and she said that she could communicate, and she knew that the thunderstorm, from her records, she was thoroughly informed that there were thunderstorms. She flew from Fort Newark to Camden, which is almost exactly the same course which the ship took, and she knew about these thunderstorms, she went through them and continued on her way from Camden on to Richmond carrying the mail. All of the time she was in constant communication with the source of her information, and as I understand it the Akron was equipped with the same kind of instruments and yet the commanding officer turned directly at Philadelphia, and turned right into the storm. Now, it seems to me he was lacking in judgment or equipment as a commander?

Admiral PRATT. I cannot tell you, of course, what passes through any man's mind; they had the facilities for getting the information. No man is put in charge of lighter than air, so I understand, because the Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics is always consulted in these matters, and as I understand it the captain of the Akron had had a great deal of lighter-than-air work.

Senator KEAN. Well, our testimony here is he had some year or so, but that he had not had the experience that you would demand for the captain of a submarine.

Admiral PRATT. I am not so sure of that. I would like could I ask Commander Fulton to reply or tell us exactly how much experience he had; I think he knows more about it than I do.

Commander FULTON. I do not know the exact number of hours that Captain McCord had. He qualified in 1926 and 1927 as "naval aviator, airship." He went to sea as navigator of the aircraft carrier Saratoga, about 2 years; returned to Lakehurst, was executive officer of the station for a short while. Was operations officer of the station for about a year; was executive officer of the Los Angeles

and was second in command for approximately a year, and had been assigned to the Akron as understudy or make-you-learn, as you might say, of Captain Dressel, for approximately 6 months. I would estimate that he had a total of at least 2,000 hours experience in lighter-than-air craft, rigid airships, at the time of the Akron disaster. He had been in command of the Akron for a period of 3 months and had operated the Akron for 430 hours during that 3month period.

Senator KEAN. Four hundred hours?

Lieutenant Commander FULTON. Four hundred and thirty hours. Senator KEAN. Admiral, would you put a man in command of a destroyer who had had the experience of 430 hours?

Admiral PRATT. Why, it sometimes so happens in the service that a younger man has to fleet up and take command who has never had a command before.

Senator KEAN. That is true.

Admiral PRATT. Senator, in the Navy you have to take what you have. We have some 300 destroyers, we are able to give men more training in that branch.

Senator KEAN. What I am trying to get at, Admiral, is this: We have here, at least I think, and I believe the rest of the committee thinks, that here is a very expensive ship, costing $4,000,000, and we think that the people that command those ships ought to be better trained, ought to have had more experience; that either we ought to use a smaller ship and give them command of the smaller ship for some time so that they have had experience and more hours in the air, a great many more hours in the air, that they ought to have some smaller ships in which they have shown their efficiency for some time before they are permitted to what you might call take a battleship or the fleet. Now, it takes 25 years, it was testified, for a man to become captain of a battleship, and I think that is what the committee feels, but the committee feels that this man lacked judgment in command of this ship, because if he had done anything but what he did do, why, the ship would still be here.

Admiral PRATT. That is all very true, but I think on the other hand you have got to take into consideration that lighter than air is still in the experimental stage. We can not go into, let us say, quantity production. We have to do the best with what we have, and we were using the Los Angeles as a sort of training ship. She is smaller and I believe has done some very excellent training work. We have had to lay her up on account of economy. We have to keep the work going on, and that is just about the only ship that we have training in.

Senator KEAN. I think that is right, but what I wanted to know is, and the point of my question was, whether it would not be a good thing for the Navy to have a ship or two of about the size of the Los Angeles, or even a little smaller as training ships?

Admiral PRATT. Well, if the country gets a little flusher, and we do not have to curtail our expenses too much, I would not object to that.

Senator KEAN. What I mean to say, Is that a practical suggestion or is it not? That is what I am trying to get at.

Admiral PRATT. I really do not know; I think those are matters. which have got to be settled almost entirely by men who have lighter

than-air experience. I know so little about the lighter-than-air problem, and I think, as far as the advancement goes, very few of us know much about it anyway.

Senator KEAN. It has been brought out in this investigation-it was brought out that Commander Wiley on at least two occasions advised the commander of this ship, when he was asked, to go in a different direction. We also brought out that in thunderstorms there is always an up current before the thunderstorm that will lift your ship, and that the power of that current is greater than the down current that is behind the thunderstorm. So that if he had followed Commander Wiley's suggestion and had gone west, why he would have struck the up current first instead of the down current.

Admiral PRATT. Maybe that is so; I do not know.
Senator KEAN. Yes; I mean to say that is possible.

Admiral PRATT. You see, here is the problem which confronts us: You take ships that sail the surface of the sea, we get a lot, we gain a lot, of information, not only from our own service but from the merchant services, from the ships that have sailed the sea from time immemorable. While we are not pioneers, there has not been a great deal of commercial activity, you might say, in lighter-than-air anywhere in the world for commercial purposes. Even such work as they have done has been more or less of an experimental task, so we do not have a great mass of data to go on, and we have to work these problems out ourselves, with such information as we can get from other sources, and it is feeling your way along all the time. To my mind it is just a question, in a matter of this sort, Should you drop all possibilities, or should you go along, feeling your way, taking your chances and accepting your losses?

Colonel BRECKINRIDGE. Admiral, there has been a great deal of discussion here about the rotation of personnel, a lot of questioning directed to the feeling of some members of the committee that it is a mistake to take these lighter-than-air officers and send them to sea. What is your reaction to that comment?

Admiral PRATT. Now, if we were running a merchant service, you would put a man in command of the ship, and he would stay there a long time; he would know that ship from the ground up, and he would know that ground, if he ran from here to Europe, he would be the best man on that run. If suddenly you had to put him down and run him across the Indian Ocean or somewhere else, he would not fit in very well. Now, naval men have to know their work on all types of ships, due to the casualties of war, which we have to provide for in our training; we have to familiarize them with all types of ships, and to make it a matter of an individual, giving him an appointment which lasts for the greater part of a man's life, you would fit him for that, but you would also prevent a greater number of men from knowing not as much as he knows, but, well, not enough to be able to handle the job under average circumstances, who, through experience, would get to be very competent in that particular sort of work. Take, for instance, the captain of a battleship. He cannot start out as the captain of a battleship, but he has to work his way up from the bottom, standing a deck watch until he gets command of a smaller ship, until he gets the big ship, the first time he takes the big ship out he feels as though he had a mammoth on his hands, and he does not know what to do with it, regardless of

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how much experience he has had. But we must keep that system of change of duty; otherwise the service in the air for all purposes would not be as efficient as it is today; but when you brought up this question of rotation-I am rather sorry we have brought it upI thought that was limited strictly to what the papers have spoken of as a rotating reserve, which they have gotten a very wrong idea of what the purpose of it is.

Colonel BRECKINRIDGE. No, sir; we are not being plagued with that question. In the course of questioning here, Admiral, various inquiries have seemed to sense an analogy to the historic Army fact that men have spent their lives in the Infantry, or Cavalry, or the Artillery, and have been promoted therefrom to being a general commanding all armies, and that that was worked out satisfactorily; the main example constantly stated here has been that of Napoleon, who was an artillery officer. Then it has been sought to establish an analogy between that system and the Navy, trying to demonstrate, or at least endeavoring to inquire whether a man who had spent all of his life in airships could not make a satisfactory admiral. What is your observation on that line of speculation?

Admiral PRATT. Why, I have always maintained that whether a man was an airman, or a line officer provided he had sufficient sea experience in all types, he was just as eligible to be the admiral in command as any other man, and I am glad you brought that point up and mentioned Napoleon, because it was for the very reason that Napoleon had no conception of the value of sea power that a great many of the, you may say the misfortunes which befell France at the time he was in power happened to fall to her lot. The thing that broke the back of France was the Battle of Trafalgar, and it was because Napoleon did not understand the value of sea power, and took many of his officers out of the ships and put them in the army, and wrecked the French Navy, that many of the disasters happened to come upon the French Republic at the time. There was the case of a one-sided man, great as he was, and France has never recovered from that day to this, from the effects of a policy which Napoleon introduced at that time.

Colonel BRECKINRIDGE. Retracing the matter, however, to one service or the other, rather than raising the interesting question of the lack of comprehension of a supreme leader on land or sea, how do you meet this endeavor to point an analogy between the Army and the Navy in which a question of, we will state, that a man serving in the Army, in the Artillery, makes a satisfactory general, even though he has not served in the other branches of the service, therefore a man might serve in lighter-than-air and make a satisfactory admiral.

Admiral PRATT. If you wish to get the best results out of a particular type, you usually put in command a man who has had experience in that type. If you wish to make a good general who has a broad vision, knows what it is all about, how to use all of his arms most efficiently, that requires a different quality of mind, and it requires a different training to do that, to give a man his preliminary training, we send him to school again; we send him in the Army to the Army War College and in the Navy we send him to the Naval War College, where he studies the rudiments of the art of war, in general, which is largely the application of force properly applied at the right time.

To acquire an insight into those things requires the work of a scholar and it requires a peculiar tempermental attitude of mind; you might find a man in the Infantry who had it, you might find a submarine man in the Navy who had it, even though he had spent most of his life in submarines; you might find an airman who had those peculiar qualities which go to make up the great general. No training in any one type, necessarily, or proficiency in that type necessarily gives the man the correct attitude toward war in general. Do I make myself clear?

Colonel BRECKINRIDGE. Yes, sir. I would like to pursue that a step further. If an officer had spent all of his command service-that is, individual ship command service-on an airship, and did not round that out with service on surface vessels, would or would not that onesided training, in general, interfere with his availability for a proficiency in the grade of admiral?

Admiral PRATT. No; it would not; if we had a large lighter-than-air force, there would be question that the man who had the command of all of those units should be a man who had been trained in lighterthan-air. It would be foolish-I would not say foolish, but I think it would be rather unwise to put a man who had had surface ship experience as the admiral to command lighter-than-air. In the same way it would be unwise, if you had other men, to put a man who had had lighter-than-air experience only in charge of the division of battleships. But, if you are now speaking of the man who must direct the movements of all, who must coordinate all forces, I would not have the slightest objection to putting any man in that position; it depends upon the man.

Colonel BRECKINRIDGE. Would you consider it a wise policy to assign specialists to lighter-than-air as a permanent proposition?

Admiral PRATT. I would not want to do that and have them spend their entire time in lighter-than-air for this reason: After all, lighterthan-air is merely a part of a great service, and as a part of a great service the components of each part must mix with the other, must know the duties of the other, must know how the others will cooperate with them in the solution of a big problem; and I know of no better way than a certain amount of physical contact.

If you segregate and separate people too much, they get into a little compartment and that has been one of the fruits of the service, and I think we require it, that in order that each man shall know what the other does, so that each commander of a separate unit or force shall know what to expect, how the other man will work to cooperate with him in the solution of a problem, he must have something more than a mere piece of paper which shows him that he is a part of the service. He must have considerable phyical contact. That is one of the reasons why our Navy and all navies are regarded as fairly liberalminded when you speak of military men. It is this closer contact that we have with each other, this intimate association, which is one of our most valuable assets, not only in the solution of the problems of war, but in the solution of our problems of peace, that is the contacts we make, not only within the service but outside of the service. But I think, however, and we do it with men that show special qualifications, or through training and experience have acquired a greater knowledge, so far as we can do it, without disturbing the greater