BANQUET. 255 
ADDRESS BY REAR ADMIRAL CARL T. VOGELGESANG, U. S. NAVY. 
Mr. Toastmaster, Mr. Secretary and gentlemen, I have been asked to say something 
about the necessity for a real American merchant marine and to show why the Navy is con- 
cerned with the question. 
We as a nation are once again drinking deeply from the well of hope, and in drinking 
we are forgetting the teachings of history. 
We are discounting experience and paying a premium on dreams. 
We are trusting that there will be no more wars, yet the world is seething in unrest 
and its economic life has never been so upset or so chaotic. 
No human soul has yet been able to point out a path that will lead to normal stability. 
Political and social unrest dominate the world, and in the midst of this turmoil we 
have repeated over and over again that there will be no more wars—a confusion of thought 
between hope and reality. 
We do not desire war. God knows we abhor it. But we have no right to throw a 
smoke screen around the realities of history and inculcate in the minds of our people a 
false sense of security which leads to spiritual and material unpreparedness for that -which 
is so essentially a probability in a world so unstable economically. 
The voice of our Government has been strong and vibrant about the necessity of main- 
taining our standards. It has been expressed in no uncertain terms by those who are today 
responsible for our safe navigation as a nation through the troublous and dangerous interna- 
tional sea. 
We are struggling to maintain against the advocates of unpreparedness a force adequate 
to give us prestige in international council, to insure our continued prosperity at home 
and abroad, and to maintain our economic standards which are the mark of our civilization. 
Now that, on our own initiative, a limitation has been placed upon size and numbers 
of certain types of vessels of war, it is more than ever incumbent upon us to provide for a 
strong and efficient merchant marine. 
We can all still remember the cry that arose during the world war for ‘“ships—more 
ships.” We all remember how less than a year before that time a national political cam- 
paign was waged in part on the slogan “He kept us out of war.” Behind the endorsement 
of that slogan was-no doubt the conviction that we could still be kept out of war. Yet war 
did come to us, and the pleading cry of “ships—more ships’? was heard from one end of 
the land to the other. That cry was not for more combatant ships—we were fairly well pre- 
pared in that respect—but it was a cry for more ships of the merchant marine. We needed 
them then to make our power effective in the war. We shall need them in the event of any 
war to make our combatant force effective in any theater of operations. They must exist for 
the logistic supply of the fleet. Without a continuous supply of fuel, of provisions, of am- 
munition, of war materials, your fleet is tied to your home ports and becomes an inefficient 
projectile of short range. With well-equipped and trained merchant seamen operating mer- 
chant carriers and acting as the supply train for the fleet, the Navy becomes what it is de- 
signed to be—the strong right arm of our country’s defense. 
But apart from the absolute need of a merchant marine in time of war, which is but an 
emergency use of it, we have a greater need of it in times of peace. 
