#Fleet commander pacific game app manual#

It was a problem that had vexed Roosevelt even before the war. What would the armed forces do now to catch up in the midst of an ongoing war? As one intelligence official summed it up, “We were caught so utterly unprepared.” With Congress keeping the purse strings tight, there had been no money to spend gathering intel for wars that might pop up one day in some remote corner of the world. The military had languished along with the rest of the country-training soldiers with Springfield rifles manufactured in 1903 and using borrowed cruise liners to transport troops. The years between World War I and World War II stretched across the lean budgets of the Depression years. They found spotty reports scattered among files of government agencies but no comprehensive references that spanned the globe and nothing that left them with a sense of what to expect when they went to war. The military searched their files for background materials. The troops needed to come prepared for whatever they might find, which meant knowing everything they could about an area in advance. The navy could navigate its way to just about any far-off target anywhere in the world, thanks to the nautical charts maintained by the Hydrographic Office, but what would it find when it got there? Were the beaches flat and wide or would they be narrow, steep, and difficult to land on? Was the terrain mountainous, volcanic, or swampy? Would high winds and waves impede a smooth landing? Would they land during the rainy season? Who were the native people and what language did they speak? Were there drivable roads once troops got across the beaches?Īll these details mattered because going to war was more than hauling men, tanks, rifles, and ammunition to a designated site and attacking the enemy. Getting to these places would be the easy part. It was unlike any other war Americans had fought. World War II spilled across the globe into places most Americans had never heard of and where the military had never been. She was not going to let anyone think she couldn’t fill them.ĭuring the first year of the war there had been a mad scramble in Washington to gather information about the countries where troops might be fighting, especially distant locales like New Guinea, Indochina, Formosa, and all the tiny islands dotting the sixty-four million square miles of the Pacific Ocean. She had stepped into his shoes at the Hydrographic Office. Now, thanks to the overly confident Revelle, Sears was wearing the uniform too. When Revelle walked into the conference room of the Munitions Building-tall, broad shouldered, and uniformed-he was in complete control. He had started as an academic in a tweed jacket with elbow patches, but when the navy made him a lieutenant he took on the persona of “the man in charge.” Taking charge of a team of oceanographers did not come naturally to a bench scientist who worked alone all day staring into a microscope, especially if that scientist was a woman, but Sears had learned from watching Revelle. To assume the role of leader, Sears would need to push through her innate reserved tendencies and any thoughts racing around in her head that screamed you don’t belong here. She had never been asked to set agendas, call meetings, or give people orders, much less make sure they carried them out, but she was going to have to do those things to get the military the information they needed to win the war. It was now her responsibility to set up and direct the operations of an oceanographic intelligence unit researching vital questions that impacted the war. For the first time in her life, she was in charge. Sears was no longer at Woods Hole, where she had been sidelined by her male colleagues who sailed on Atlantis and collected her specimens while she stayed onshore. And now she was going to have to do something about it.

The more she took in, the more she understood exactly how dire the lack of oceanographic intelligence was and how it could undermine military operations.

#Fleet commander pacific game app manual#

She had learned it from gathering all the known references on drift and drafting an urgently needed manual to help locate men lost at sea. She had learned it from answering requests from every branch of the military for tidal data, wave forecasts, and currents to support tactical operations overseas. She had learned it from meeting with Roger Revelle and his cohorts on the Joint Chiefs Subcommittee on Oceanography where she listened to concerns about what the navy was lacking and took detailed notes. Reprinted by permission of William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.įour months into her job at the Oceanographic Unit, Sears had learned a lot about what the military needed from oceanographers. From Lethal Tides by Catherine Musemeche.