Sea Control - Sea Control 242 - Selling Seapower with Dr. Ryan Wadle and RDML Paula Dunn

Episode Date: April 18, 2021

Links1. Selling Seapower: Public Relations and the U.S. Navy 1917-1941, by Dr. Ryan Wadle, OU Press, 2019.2.Testing American Sea Power: U.S. Navy Strategic Exercises, 1923-1940, by Craig C. Felker, Williams-Ford Texas A&M University Military History, 2013. 3. To Train the Fleet for War: The U.S. Navy Fleet Problems, 1923-1940, by Albert Nofi, Naval War College Press, 2010.

Hey folks, Jared here. I have talked about our feed. I'm going to keep talking about it. There are two existing Sea Control feeds out there. So the current feed, the one that you want to be listening to, is labeled simply Sea Control and includes the phrase Simsex Flagship Podcast in its description. Sea Control Simsex Flagship Podcast. That's where you want to be. Please rate and review the new feed as well. This episode features author Dr. Ryan Wadley. He is newly hired by the Naval War College, so you can ignore all the parts in there

where he talks about being out at the Air War College in Alabama. But Ryan's the author of Selling Seapower, Public Relations in the U.S. Navy, 1917 to 1941. He's joined by Rear Admiral Paula Dunn, the Navy's Vice Chief Information Officer, and we're discussing the birth and evolution of Navy public affairs, as well as parallels to today's challenges. This episode was edited and produced by William McQuiston. Please check out everything going on over at the main website, CINSEC.org. We just completed a retrospective series on the 1980s maritime strategy, as well as Naval Intelligence Week, and our next call for submissions for Project Trident is out. Deadline fast approaching, so if you're interested in contributing to the discussion on maritime infrastructure and trade, submissions are due April 19th.

For more information, check out the website, simsec.org. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, the Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. On that note, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control, posted by the Center for International and Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. Today, we are welcoming the Navy's Vice Chief of Information, Rear Admiral Paula Dunn, and author Dr. Ryan Wadley to discuss Ryan's book,

Selling Sea Power, Public Relations in the U.S. Navy 1917-1941. So thank you both for joining us. Admiral, would you mind starting by introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about your background? I am Rear Admiral Paula Dunn, and I am the U.S. Navy's Vice Chief of Information. I lead the Navy Reserve Public Affairs Force of about 550 enlisted mass communication specialists and public affairs officers. I started my career on active duty, and about six years in, I transitioned into the Reserves, and I have served in the Pentagon and around the world, including combat and contingency operations. Like most Reservists, I have a civilian career, and I've spent the majority of mine

in the high-tech PR industry. I have a Master's in Communication and an MBA in Global Leadership, and I am accredited in PR from the Public Relations Society of America. I'm happy to be here with you today. Well, thank you again for joining us, Admiral. And Ryan, how about you? Can you tell us a little bit about your background? Yeah, sure. So I am Ryan Wadley. I am a professor of warfare studies at the East School of Graduate PME at the University of Maxwell Air Force Base. My training is in naval and military history. I received my doctorate from Texas A&M University. I studied under Jim Bradford, a long, long tenured naval historian. And prior to arriving at Maxwell, but after I graduated, I had the most natural job in the world.

I spent 18 months studying counterinsurgency operations for the U.S. Army at Fort Leavenworth. So that was my first real taste of government history and PME adjacent work. So that's my background. Well, thanks, Ryan. We're going to start with you since it is your book that we're discussing here. I have to ask first, what was it that inspired you to study this particular topic? And then especially since I see your background now includes counterinsurgency and your current job at Airy University. How did you get into writing about naval public affairs? Yeah, so so when I was in graduate school, so so to be honest, you know, my what I thought I was going to study shifted a few times in graduate school.

I think like a lot of historians, what I thought I would be doing changed once I actually got into school and started taking courses and got a better sense of what the profession was like. You know, and so in my second year of graduate school, that's when I really became focused on wanting to become more of a naval historian. And I initially started, I was working on a project that would have looked at the U.S. Navy's fleet problem system right around the same time. That's when I discovered that C. Steve Belker was working on the fleet problem system, published a great book out of that. Al Nofi has since added a book on that. And so when I got to the dissertation, I was talking to my committee and we were thinking of different avenues to go down. And in talking to one of my mentors, we realized that just with some of the work I'd done on the side, the fact that I had started taking courses on film studies, we kind of agreed upon like, hey, this is a really

interesting thing that no one has really looked at at least any time recently. And so that's when I discovered that the only prior studies of Navy public affairs and its development had been conducted by a couple of PAOs, Navy PAOs, who studied under Scott Cutlip, who was a public relations historian at Wisconsin. And this all occurred back in the 1960s. And so the topic was ripe for a new look. Thanks. I'm going to collect the names and the books from you at the end that you just referenced, because I want to include those in our show notes. But Admiral, how did you hear about this book? And then how has it been received in your community? I first heard of this book in 2019 while I was at the Navy Chief of Information Office in the

Pentagon. This is the headquarters for U.S. Navy's Public Affairs. The book has been very well received. In fact, Admiral Brown, the active duty chief of information, started a book club for junior officers in the PA community. And Selling Seapower was our first book selection. And to give you an idea of how well it was received after the invite went out, we received significantly more people wanting to come than we had expected. And now, mind you, this was in the early days of virtual meetings. So we weren't even sure if we could handle the capacity. But the good news is it turned out that we could. But yeah, the book has been well received by junior folks and your senior folks alike. And I'm really grateful that our next generation of leaders are interested this

much in our history. And I appreciate the significant amount of work that Ryan put into writing such a thoughtful and well-researched history. You know, his book has a lot to teach us. He writes about how the Navy underwent dramatic transformation between World War I and World War two. There were significant technologies coming to the fore, like the aircraft carrier, aviation, submarines, you know, all at the same time, mass communication was revolutionized by broadcast radio and the film industry. So the period that the book was, was one of major changes in strategy and technology for the Navy, you know, paired with disruptive changes in mass communication. Well, that experience is certainly relevant today, isn't it?

So, yes, the past always has a lot to teach us about how we should be meeting our challenges today and in the future. Thanks. So, Ryan, I found it interesting that public affairs actually originated in the Office of Naval Intelligence. How did Navy Public Affairs get its start? So the story of public affairs, it evolves over a few decades. You know, you had seen officers like Stephen Luce, Alfred Thayer Mahan, you know, really try to take the case for building a larger Navy to the public as early as the 1880s. But all of these activities were going on outside of really any kind of like official sanction. And so what you see is the fact that the Navy culture, you know, most people tend to interpret the Navy's culture as being part of a silent service. a service that is, for the most part, cut off from the public, doesn't really know how to sell

itself, express itself. And so Mahan and Luce and officers of those ilk are really kind of the outliers in all of this. And so there's this kind of cultural dichotomy going on within the Navy's officer corps and in its senior leadership. When this really starts to change, though, is the Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels. Josephus Daniels is a very interesting character. There are many, many policies that he enacts over the course of his time in office that are controversial, you know, and then there are some that even for as much as his contemporaries and his successors don't really seem to much care for him, really end up having a lasting impact on how the Navy does business. And one of the things that he does is he starts to do a more sustained

engagement with the press. His background is as a newspaper editor in Raleigh, North Carolina. And so for a while, he's functioning essentially as his own public affairs officer trying to explain himself and Navy policy to the press. Eventually, there's a lieutenant assigned as the press officer. So in some ways, that's really the birth of Navy public affairs. This is in early 1917. And then during, you know, so right around the time that America enters World War I, Daniels creates the Navy News Bureau that's designed to, it's staffed mostly by civilians, and it's designed to interact with the Committee for Public Image that's ongoing during the war, but also manage the Navy's public image. And, you know, the problem, though, with the Navy

News Bureau is since it's staffed by civilians, it really is kind of at the whims of budgets and other factors. And so it's already being downsized after World War I. And after Daniels leaves office, the Navy News Bureau is completely disbanded. And so it's kind of this branch that is for the most part cut off. And so the birth of Navy Public Affairs as we know it really takes place several months later in February 1922, when the Navy, which is really kind of reeling from having dealt over the last year with the campaigns waged by Billy Mitchell, arguing that the Navy is obsolete. And then the Naval Arms Limitation Movement, which is really this broad-based social and political movement arguing against further naval construction. And so the Navy

doesn't really know how to handle these shocks. And so what you end up seeing is the Navy realizes it needs to engage the public in a long-term sustained and also an official capacity. And so So they established what they call the information section of the Office of Naval Intelligence. So if you're wondering why O&I, Office of Naval Intelligence is really seen as kind of this clearinghouse for all sorts of information. This is also where the Office of Naval Records and Library is housed, the Naval Historical Section. And so the fact that the O&I is already kind of seen as the place to filter through all sorts of different types of information, It did, in a weird way, make for a somewhat natural fit, at least compared to what your other options would have been in the Navy's bureaucracy at the time. Thanks, Ryan. Admiral, I'm going to come back to you because I read with interest the beginning of this story that described Navy officer culture as conservative from a publicity standpoint and that the service had a reputation as the silent service.

Did it remind you at all of the initial resistance to move on to social media? Yeah, you know, there's parallels between the interwar period and today in selling sea power calls out, you know, the OPSEC concerns back then. And we certainly have OPSEC concerns today. You know, public affairs professionals, of course, have to be savvy at OPSEC. You know, there's always a balance between publicity and and, you know, how and security. But, you know, I also believe that today's challenges are different and beyond just OPSEC concerns. When we talk about, you know, reticence to social media, social media is a completely different animal. You know, it can take what you say and it can put it anywhere, not just where you want it to reach, but well beyond that. One post or one tweet or, you know, one unfortunate share can go anywhere.

So some of the reticence to social media is about risk as well, right? I mean, no one ever gets criticized for the tweets, you know, they didn't send. So I say that on an individual level, you know, there are some who believe as a whole that there needs to be more Navy leaders on social media, especially Twitter. there's not a lot of flag officers on twitter now and that's been called out a few times on twitter uh twitter's sporty you know it's not for everyone um and i get that and i'm also respectful for time constraints you know people are really busy you know everyday leaders have to make decisions on what they do with their limited time so you know i believe navy leaders have various reasons not to be on social media and some of those are similar to the reasons in

the past with OPSAC, and some of it is time and risk. Thanks, ma'am. Ryan, I'm going to come back to you because you hinted at this in your previous answer. So to what extent does public affairs and naval aviation owe a debt to Billy Mitchell? Yeah, so Mitchell, so he has a prominent role in air combat and in the use of American air power in World War I. And so almost immediately upon his return to the United States, you know, he's in contact with counterparts in the RAF. You know, the RAF had just gone independent in early 1918. And so Mitchell, upon his return to the United States in early 1919, starts waging this very public campaign to establish an independent air service. Now, the interesting thing with Mitchell is in the earliest days of his campaign,

you know, his rhetoric is actually somewhat more conciliatory than what it becomes. you know, Mitchell by the mid-1920s, let's just say, is a much more flamboyant and outspoken person than where he is in 1919. But he's still pushing for an independent air service, and this would include taking over the U.S. Navy's growing air arm as well. And so because of his tactics, you know, because of the way in which the Navy is starting to appreciate the value of aviation, even if it's still, you know, still trying to conceive of like an offensive role at this point. But they but they definitely see the value in terms of like reconnaissance and artillery spotting, you know, something that can aid the battle, the fleet in battle. And so so Mitchell, you know, as he's waging this campaign, one of the things that he wants to do is prove the value and the efficacy of air power.

And so he helps goad the Navy into doing the bombing trials off the Virginia Capes in the summer of 1921 that eventually culminates in Mitchell breaking all of the established rules for how the ships were supposed to be assessed as the trials were going on. And he and his flyers sink the old German battleship off Friesland. And, you know, there's all sorts of apocryphal stories that come out of this incident. But one of the things, though, that Mitchell's campaign had done is even as the Virginia Cape trials are going on, the Navy elevates aviation to bureau status, which in those days, if a part of the Navy's bureaucracy has been enshrined as a bureau, that gives the bureau an incredible amount of power and control. And so Rear Admiral William Andrew Moffat is given command of the Bureau. He was the previous director of Naval Aviation, which was the previous weaker position. And so Moffat is actually a very inspired choice. He is one of the most astute bureaucrats that I've had the pleasure of studying as a naval historian.

And we could spend a lot of time talking about Moffat's work as a bureaucrat. One of the other things, though, that Moffat really has a gift for is public relations. And so even though he's very ambivalent about it, you know, 1925, he actually tells a friend that, you know, public relations is an anathema. You know, I was brought up to hate it and I still hate it now. And so he is kind of this reluctant warrior, but he's a very effective and very savvy public relations man. And so so what he ends up doing once he gets control of more control over naval aviation is to use his assets to to kind of promote the development of naval aviation and to kind of fight off the claims made by Mitchell about the Navy being behind in aviation and the fact that maybe the Navy cannot control its own aviation assets effectively. thanks i'm going to come right back to you then uh how did the navy initially attempt to engage journalists so yeah so in in terms of engaging journalists so one of the first things that the navy or one of the i would say even before you get the the public affairs established is you know the navy had realized that that if you just create spectacle you know uh you can

get journalists to come cover that and so going all the way back to see like the the world's fair in Chicago in the 1890s, the Great White Fleet, all sorts of events where the Navy had realized you could generate coverage like this. And so even through World War I, things like the launching of battleships could sometimes attract a lot of press attention. But in terms of sustained engagement, some of this is tied back to Daniels. During Daniels' tenure in office, he establishes the tradition of the Secretary of the Navy being available for press conferences twice a day. Oftentimes, you know, there wasn't any news to give out during one or both of these periods. But this appears to have continued throughout the entire interwar period. I don't get the sense that

the Secretaries of the Navy under the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations were quite as diligent about this, but you see plenty of evidence that when Franklin Roosevelt takes office in 1933, that his secretaries, and maybe the first one is Claude Swanson, really kind of stick to this press conference schedule. So you have regular press conferences by the secretary. The other thing that they also do is, especially once you get the information section established, you know, they can work with journalists on feature stories, you know, they can respond to inquiries. And at one point, you know, there's a suggestion that's never acted upon, unfortunately, but the Navy had an ally at times in the Navy League of the United

States, you know, and we can talk more about that later. But one of the things that their principal figure, William Howard Gardner, suggests to the Navy is to establish essentially a civilian writer's course at the Naval War College to try to essentially teach journalists more about how the Navy and sea power works. Unfortunately, it was a rather expensive scheme at the time it was proposed, and so it's never fully enacted. But you do see some similar ideas to that being handed down in the years and then decades that follow. So, Admiral, do you think something like Gardner's Navy boot camp for journalists, I think that was one of the phrases they used in the book, Ryan, is necessary or advisable today?

I think it's neither necessary nor advisable today. You know, it might have been a good idea back in the day, but I don't think that would float today. I think if we offered to educate defense reporters on how to write on the Navy, that wouldn't go over very well. But the good news is, is we don't have to. I believe the Pentagon Press Corps is among the smartest and most savvy press in the world. You know, you don't get the Pentagon as a beat without being pretty darn smart and good at your job. You know, but there are things for journalists we can do besides a boot camp, per se.

And we do those things that we provide access, interviews, MPARCs to platforms, interviews with leaders and and to give them as much access as we can and let them come up with their own conclusions. Thanks, ma'am. So, Ryan, what were the early challenges of coordinating public affairs, given the relatively primitive communications technology and then the geographically dispersed nature of the Navy? Yeah. And one other challenge I would also add into that is just some of the bureaucratic dispersion that the Navy is dealing with. So for the information section, for the bulk of the interwar period, so roughly from its establishment in 1922 until about 1936 when it finally starts to grow, Navy public affairs is, for the most part, five people. It's an O-5 billet. You do have a couple of O-2s, O-2s and O-3s under him. There's a civilian aide, which for almost the entire interwar period is a female secretary, Helene Filbert. And then they also have a Marine orderly working for them. So so you've got a really small cadre and it's a relatively junior group as well. For a brief period in the mid 1920s, you do have reserve officers attached to the different naval districts, you know, the naval districts at the time, it was a way of having like a naval presence, bureaucratic presence, all throughout the United States, and then also outside of the United States as well.

And so you did have reserve intelligence officers who kind of helped out with public affairs, but this was a brief thing. And unfortunately, the scheme actually goes away in about 1927, and it doesn't make a return until very late again in the interwar period. So for the most part, Navy Public Affairs, and so it's within ONI, which is part of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. So you've got this hurdle. There's Dudley Knox, who's a retired captain and a historian and just this kind of intellectual raconteur, who's the head of the Office of Naval Records Library. He's kind of waging his own publicity campaign, really without any kind of coordination with the with the information section. You've got Moffitt, who runs a bureau and, you know, and he's got, you know, being a flag officer, he has a whole lot more clout. And so so there's these bureaucratic challenges, the geography, as I mentioned, with the with the, you know, the fact that the entirety of the information section is within the Navy Department offices in D.C. And so with the exception of having the reserve intelligence officers out in the naval districts, you don't really have a presence outside of Washington for most of the interwar period. So you've got all of these challenges. But on the communication technology side, so there is the problem of, yeah, they are centrally located. And at the time, you know, we think of nowadays Washington as kind of this major hub of media activity.

At the time, it's kind of a backwater, you know, even all the way up into the 70s. You know, one of the things that we often kind of forget about Watergate is the fact that the Washington Post at the time is still not, you know, it's kind of a second tier paper, you know, even up into the 70s. And so, you know, but it's also still, I think, reflective of Washington still being kind of behind in terms of its development as a city. But, you know, one of the things that really helps the information section during the 20s and 30s is the fact that since you do have these new communication technologies coming online, in particular, the development of film, radio, which you do have a lot of like centralized broadcast, you know, the development of broadcast networks by the late 1920s. the fact that you have a lot of centralization there's also the wire services for print press and you do have national magazines and so the fact that you do have kind of these nationally distributed forms of communication whether visual auditory or print it does actually help the information section kind of get a better handle on their jobs because you know even though they

are small they can have kind of an outsized influence and in particular the the relationship with Hollywood, which we'll talk more about later, is especially important just because of how much film production is really starting to be concentrated in Southern California. So, Emeril, do you still see some of the same issues that Ryan just mentioned today? And if moderate communications has solved the quote-unquote speed issue, what new challenges does it present? Yeah, well, I think the speed issue being solved brought in a whole level of ills with it. So, speed of information has its own problems, right? So, you know, we have a very big issue with social

media literacy in this country. And of course, it comes at you fast. We have the challenge with the sheer volume of information sources. It's easy for anyone to make up a new source nowadays. And we have receivers and consumers of that information that don't really understand what's true and what isn't true. And research shows that fake news, unfortunately, spreads faster than real news on the internet. In addition to something we're dealing with today that we didn't have back then is news from adversaries targeting and successfully reaching Americans. The Chinese Communist Party spends billions of dollars on worldwide networks of news outlets. There's Xinhua and Global Times and others, Russian Times, and they did something

brilliant a few years ago and rebranded themselves as RT. So all of these have significant social media presence in English. And because of the first challenge I mentioned, and that is the lack of social media literacy, we have American people seeing these stories, often misinformation or disinformation, and they don't fully understand that they're consuming information from a foreign government. So, you know, frankly, this challenge that, you know, Ryan described us having earlier, the fact of it getting fixed with speed, you know, it brought its own set of badness with it. So without a doubt, you know, quite frankly, social media literacy is a national security issue. And I'd say that's our biggest challenge today. And then do you see any parallels between the

service's political situation described at the beginning of the book and today? And when I say political situation, I guess I'm not talking about a partisan political situation. I'm more talking about the need right now to discuss the importance of sea power and the importance of the Navy. Yeah, well, you know, Ryan's book highlights how Americans were, you know, coming out of World War I. They were tired of war, and they had concerns about the size of the federal budget and taxes. Well, that certainly sounds familiar, doesn't it? You know, Americans today are wary of a long presence in the Middle East, and I think we, and not just the Navy, but the whole Department of Defense, have the challenge of proving why we're important, why we deserve or need the budget

that we ask for. And there's always going to be a conversation going on in Congress about the military and what sort of resource it needs. And that's fair. You know, public opinion was a key influence on that conversation back then in the interwar years, and public opinion matters now. You know, the American taxpayer deserves to know what our Navy does and why, as well as the threats that we face, as does Congress. So, you know, they can make good decisions about, you know, what our path forward should be. So, you know, Navy leaders then had to adapt to effectively communicate what they saw as threats and what was required to meet those threats. And we certainly still need to do that today. And it's a team effort. It's not just the Navy Office of Legislative Affairs. It's also

our public affairs team and Navy leaders. Communication is always going to be a constant effort. Thanks, ma'am. And then one more question before I go back to Ryan. So I read, right before I read Selling Seapower, I read Trent Hone's Learning War, and I recommended both of them when we put together our SIMSEC end-of-year reading list. And the reference I used was, these are both kind of how we got here books. It's one of the real highlights of learning more from you is the description of development of the Combat Information Center on a ship. And there were all these elements dating back to the 1940s that I could recognize today.

So, Amaral, I'm going to ask, what did you recognize from this book? Because there were several subjects in here that triggered memories from my lone tour as a collateral duty PAO. Well, first of all, I think it's great that you took a turn as a collateral duty PAO. The public affairs community in the Navy is pretty small, and you can't be everywhere, so collateral duty PAOs are really an essential part of our team, and mostly on smaller ships. A lot of things go on there, and our only coverage is collateral duty PAOs, so good on you for that. That resonated with me, but also another element that resonated with me was the Fleet Hometown News Program.

I didn't know until I read Ryan's book that had went back that far. You know, and it's a good reminder that when we're telling a Navy story back then and today, you know, it's always impactful to tell the story as close to home as possible, whether that's through a sailor who's working, a hometown area air show or a fleet week or reaching back to a local newspaper when someone that came from that area just completed an important mission or met a key milestone in their career. You know, it makes the Navy very real when we can see up close, you know, our Americans can see up close or find out that someone we know or maybe someone they went to high school with, you know, decided to start a career in the Navy. A few other things, you know, in Ryan's book that were really interesting to me were how far back current tactics went, like the close relationship with the Navy League, as well as working with Hollywood and Navy days. yeah we're going to get into those now right i'm going to insert a question that's uh a little off script how is the initial relate how did the relationship with the navy league develop yeah so the navy league uh so the navy league is is formed in 1902 and so it's designed to be a kind of an american parallel to navy leagues that are uh in britain and germany and those things are

real, like mass social movements, you're talking like 10s of 1000s of members in both of those countries. And this is as you know, Britain, you know, Britain is is starting to respond to both the French and the German and, you know, in some ways, the Russian development of their naval forces and right at the turn of the century. And so Germany, you know, Germany at this point is this is when Germany starts building up its its big battle fleet. And so the Navy League is born then out of a couple of other different groups like the naval order but it really uh never takes off in terms of like a mass movement and focuses more on kind of this a little more more so on on lobbying leaders and and congress and so it's supposed to be independent of the navy but you

know like theodore roosevelt however you know gives gives the group a shot in the arm you know he's he's a big proponent of it and so but then during world war one the the navy league actually kind of runs afoul of Josephus Daniels you know they there are several policies that he enacts they don't see eye to eye on and you know and then there's fights over you know exactly the level of preparedness that the United States has for World War I but the final break though comes after the after the U.S. entry into the war there's an explosion at Mare Island in 1917 that the Navy League essentially accuses Daniels of covering up sabotage. And so Daniels essentially blackballs the Navy League for a few years. And so, you know, the Navy League is really kind of

shut out. And he keeps this ban up even after the war comes to an end. This is, you know, it's a rather nasty spat. And the Navy League actually comes very close to bankruptcy. The policy is immediately reversed after Daniels leaves office in March of 1921. And so in the months that follow, you see not so much the Secretary of the Navy, Enwood Denby, but it's the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt Jr., who really starts to try to rehabilitate the Navy's relationship with the Navy League. And so this is at the time that William Howard Gardner emerges as like the Navy League's key figure, really kind of their driving intellectual force. and so so they're rebuilding this relationship and so in 1922 roosevelt takes the takes a meeting from a widow who is connected to like an army navy club in new york and so she's pleading for

some assistance to help keep the club going he apparently doesn't really care that much about the club but something in the conversation really kind of inspires him like well what about if we had like a day to kind of promote the navy nationwide and so he gives this to his uh to his chief aide, who is Captain William Vesey Pratt, who later becomes CNO. And so Pratt fleshes out this plan and presents it to Roosevelt. Roosevelt shares it with some other key figures. And so everyone kind of agrees this is a great idea. But how do we do this, given that the public, they believe the public will react strongly if the Navy is seen as kind of very shamelessly promoting itself and so they hand the information off to the uh to the head of the oni uh captain

luke mcnamee and so he reaches out to gardner and so he spells out uh the plan that that pratt has come up with and but he basically puts in there like present this to your leadership and then uh make a formal request and then we'll agree to it and we'll act surprised you understand and so So anyway, so this is how Navy League kind of comes into being or Navy Day comes into being with with this with this idea of having Navy League sponsorship. And so the plan ends up involving, you know, doing like a media campaign of getting articles and newspapers into magazines, doing film screenings for like recruiting films all around the country, moving ships to different ports. And basically and then also having like key speeches and in public spaces. The first Navy Day is successful and attracts a lot of attention, even though there's a lot of lessons that they learn from this. And so Navy Day really comes into its own in 1923. It's a much larger and much more successful celebration. And in the years thereafter, Navy Day becomes like this annual tradition for the next few decades. It doesn't go away until Secretary of Defense Johnson essentially cancels Navy Day in, I believe, 1949.

And so it becomes a very big event. The Navy League still continues to sponsor it, although for the most part, it's really the Navy kind of promoting itself with still kind of this veneer of Navy League support in the years thereafter. But it becomes a major publicity event. yeah i've watched with interest brian mcgrath has been kind of outspoken banging away at the navy league to engage a little bit more with selling sea power i'm i'm actually curious now if he's read your book because i i would almost he has i would be willing to bet based on the rhetoric that he had but yeah to hear you say that i was like okay it makes sense uh what he's saying now and why he's saying it admiral how do you yeah and i would just say that that was some of

Some of his public comments, you know, if you look at the work that Gardner is doing in the 1920s, there is a very obvious parallel to to the way that that some of the some of the think tanks nowadays work. I mean, Gardner is essentially a one man think tank. He does have some some other support in the league, but for the most part, he's doing this on his own. And, you know, there's been been a parallel made to the way that the the Air Force Association funds the Mitchell Institute that is headed by a retired General David Deptula. Yeah, thank you, Admiral. How do you view the relationship with the Navy League today? You know, I have great respect and appreciation for the Navy League and we work with them, but we're independent and I think it's an important and productive relationship. Ryan reinforced how important it is for the Navy to have these relationships, but to remain independent and careful about how we engage with any external organizations. And I did find it very interesting in the book how the Navy League got so crosswise with the Navy that they were actually banned. I just can't imagine something like that happening today. It's a it's a solid, respectful relationship with the Navy League.

Thanks. So, Ryan, how did the services earlier relationship with Hollywood develop? Yeah, so the film industry, you know, it starts to develop in the first couple of decades of the 20th century, you know, and occasionally there are films made about naval subjects that at times they will reach out to the Navy Department and get kind of this ad hoc. One of the problems you've got with the early film industry is it's controlled essentially by a monopoly that's related to, it's kind of comes out of the company that Thomas Edison forms, and it's known as the Trust. And so you've got a, there's a business problem. There's also kind of a respectability problem. I know this may sound like a flippant joke, but those who are going to films, especially in the first 10 or 15 years of the 20th century, it was either seen as like working class entertainment or basically a domain for perverts, because, you know, with the rise of film, you get the rise of pornography. It's, you know, almost hat in hand. And so, you know, there's this serious credibility problem that the film industry has. It really starts to be overcome in the 19-teens. This really starts to advance the art of filmmaking, even with something like Birth of a Nation, which is very advanced from a technical standpoint, even if it's mostly just this horribly racist throwback to a different era. Yeah. But so so as the film industry becomes more respectable, you know, the you know, they're seeking they're kind of seeking this validation.

Unfortunately, they don't really have a partner in the Navy. Daniels, for for security reasons, for the most part, kind of tries to put a stop to cooperation between the Navy and film production during World War One. And then with this kind of social turn that coincides with the rise of the Naval Arms Limitation Movement after the war, there's really not a whole lot of interest in films about the Navy and sailors. There's a few here and there, like one of them is an early Harold Lloyd film, which is fantastic. But for the most part, you don't really have much relationship until the mid 1920s. you know at that point you know you start to see more films about military and naval subjects and and the film industry then is now is very much a copycat industry and so what one studio is doing another one will soon follow suit and so you know starting with uh in 1920 there's a there's a film that's made at west point uh in 1924 and so they come up with the idea uh the

following year a different studio to make a film at annapolis and this is called uh the midshipman and stars Ramon Navarro, who's a big silent film star in the day. They film at the Academy. They even let him participate in the graduation ceremonies. He gets a diploma at the end of the film. And so in the years that follow, just because these films are seen as profitable, they're seen as attractive, but they're also seen as kind of bridging this gap to like respectable middle-class audiences. You know, the film studios, they really want to be essentially like a middle-brow art form. And so you kind of get this symbiotic relationship. You know, the Navy wants to be seen as respectable again by the American public and the

film industry is seeking its own, its own credibility. And so, so there is kind of this natural melding of, of, of interests. And so, you know, the more and more requests for film cooperation begin to begin to come in in the years that follow. And so in, in 1928, 1929, the Navy realizes they need to make this relationship more structured. And so you get the establishment of the Navy Department Motion Picture Board. And so this group is, it's the head of the information section, it's the head of the recruiting bureau, it's the morale officer from the Bureau of Navigation, which is the forerunner to the modern day Bureau of Personnel, and then also the censorship officer with the ONI. And so these four are tasked with reviewing requests for film cooperation. And so the system that they set up, for the most part, doesn't really change for the remainder of the interwar period. They ask for studios to submit scripts, they review them, they will then reject or accept cooperation, and then they will outline the terms under which this cooperation will occur.

And for the most part, by making this a regular process, I think it really does go a long way towards helping or encouraging the studios to submit more requests because they know they're going to be acted upon in a timely fashion. But also, I think being dealt with in a fair way, even though at times because of the personnel shifts of, you know, which officers are occupying those particular billets, you know, you do see some ideas that will be rejected by a board in one year, but a fairly similar idea may be accepted by the board a few years later. So it's not 100% consistent, but it is a whole lot more structured than what you had seen prior to 1929. Ryan, I think the story of Sea Eagles and Helldivers is illustrative of the balance between the need to generate positive publicity while maintaining operational security. And the Admiral mentioned that earlier. What happened in that instance? So the film Sea Eagles, which is eventually released as Helldivers in late 1931, it's really one of the first big blockbusters that comes out of this Navy Hollywood partnership. The screenplay is written by Frank Spig Weed. Weed was one of the Navy's air racers. So this is part of Moffitt's publicity campaigns in the early to mid 1920s to get the Navy into air races to prove that the Navy could advance technology.

And Weed is going to be hurt in a home accident. He's going to be partially paralyzed. and so as a way to to to kind of generate some income and to kind of rely on his expertise he turns to writing stories and and eventually film scripts and so so one of the film one of the scripts that he writes is is uh sea eagles and so if you're trying to imagine the plot to this imagine top gun if top gun focuses on goose uh only goose instead of being this upright family man is instead kind of a drunken burnout and so the film uh you know the the navy agrees to to cooperation what's really interesting is during the script process the the navy is much more worried about the way that the the principal character uh whose name is wendy played by

wallace beery is portrayed he's this kind of uh drunken slovenly enlisted man and so the navy's really worried about the image of of its sailors and so so during the script process they are much more concerned about this than they are about any of the technical issues uh and so they the you know there's really very little discussion uh made within the correspondence over whether or not allowing this the this cooperation on on kind of technical secrecy grounds should be allowed but when the film is completed and so it's screened for the navy department in uh in december of 1931. Ironically enough, some of the key figures in the Navy Department don't see the film until after it has premiered in New York just a few days prior. And so when the Navy sees

the footage, they are surprised because of just how much of essentially carrier operations are shown. The film had been shot aboard the Saratoga. And so in particular, one of the things that they are upset about is the fact that you can see how naval aircraft land on a carrier deck through the use of arresting gear. The Navy views this as a secret. And so there's a lot of back and forth between the Navy Department. Moffitt gets involved. One of the assistant secretaries of the Navy gets involved. And eventually the compromise that they come up with is to essentially introduce this black bar onto the screen so anytime a uh one of the planes comes into land this black bar comes up and obscures how the arresting hook catches uh catches the wire there are a couple of landings

you can still kind of see how this goes on that that aren't uh fully obscured but for the most part all of these sequences are going to be uh kind of re-edited and what they're really concerned with is that other rivals in particular the british and the japanese uh may may may catch onto this now the irony is is that you know a couple years later the germans apparently started the film uh thinking that they'll be able to learn something about this if they ever want to build aircraft carriers though the navy in in a rather funny bit of navy correspondence there's a there's an observation made like you know they could have just sent one of their guys to a theater with a notepad and probably gotten everything that they they would have needed but here they are um but

the film actually becomes very big in japan and so it kind of ends up serving as as this backdoor propaganda uh for japanese naval aviation but uh even still several years after the film has come out which by the way one thing that also needs to be point that needs to be made is is in those in those days you don't have uh very many prints of a film being made it's not like nowadays where a film opens in 2 000 screens at once uh back then you know there may be only a few prints in circulation and so a film will will travel around from theater to theater and so a film like hell divers is going to be in circulation for a year plus uh very easily but uh a few years after the fact that you know when the navy is is has gotten a request to make a submarine picture

there's a lot of consternation in the navy department over whether or not they should allow this film to be made and one of the things that they look back upon is is hell divers you know and so some viewing this as kind of the letting letting out some key secrets but there are others who recognize that whatever value, you know, the value we got out of that film is probably outweighs any minor security risk that may have come from this. And so there's a great deal of disagreement over security concerns raised by the film. But these kinds of security concerns never really go away, you know, particularly as the 30s go on and, you know, and as the international situation changes. And so security becomes even more paramount

within the Navy Department. So, Emeril, how do you manage the relationship with Hollywood today? So, today we have the Navy Office of Information West in Hollywood and the Navy Office of Information East in New York City, and both of those report on up to the Chief of Information in the Pentagon. And, you know, we work with studios, producers, TV shows, and we decide which projects to take, and we're most interested in those that are going to project the Navy accurately or portray the Navy accurately. So for those offices, you know, NAB Info West, NAB Info East for short, you know, they'll review scripts and they'll review books and they'll help get the entertainment industry that we're working with, you know, the expertise that

they need to make their film. For example, you may have seen Greyhound starring Tom Hanks last year. In that case, we connected the filmmakers with the historians at the Navy History and Heritage Command. They can advise writers and producers on everything from the uniforms that people wore to what the ships looked like and how they operated. You know, another example is Hunter Killer. I don't know if you saw that one. That's set on a Navy submarine. And we gave the star of that movie, Gerard Butler, we took him out to a sub for three days so he could see what that was really like. And of course, I can't talk about movies without talking about the sequel to Top Gun, Top Gun Maverick, that we hope to see come out this year. It was supposed to come out

last year, but it was delayed a few times due to COVID. We're really looking forward to that release when theaters are open. Obviously, we helped with that one. And if you haven't seen the trailers, you know, please look them up. The flying in those trailers is not CGI. That's real naval aviators. And it's incredible. But it's not just famous movies and shows. We support documentaries and science shows as well. And I think as Ryan explained so well in his book, you know, we need to draw talent from all over the country, not just people who already know about the Navy who live in fleet concentration areas. And, you know, the entertainment that people, that Americans consume is really a great way to reach the American public. And,

you know, most Americans, you're not going to have the opportunity to get on a submarine or Navy ship, but just maybe a young man or woman will see a film or a TV show and think about a Navy career, even a career in science and technology because of what they saw in a film. thanks ma'am were there any lessons for you as you read about press coverage for the fleet problems in the 30s and then consider the upcoming large-scale exercise you know any time that you're trying to communicate what's happening during real world exercise that comes with a responsibility to balance the desire to publicize and the need to ensure operational security and this is definitely a trickier balance when you have reporters around during exercises you know and speed is important

because a story can lose its relevance if it's days old. So during the fleet problems of the early years, you know, reporters initially weren't allowed to file their stories until the ship was in port. You know, initially, as Ryan describes, eventually the Navy allowed them to use the ship's communication equipment to file. Today, we can fly reporters out on and off a ship,

you know, easier than we could back in that day. So timing is less of a problem. But, you know, guarding operational security while providing press access and the ability to file quickly was important then and it's important now, you know, for any exercise or MPARC. And it will certainly be important during the large-scale exercise when we conduct it later this year. Unfortunately, that's all the time that we have for today. I'd like to thank my guests for Admiral Paula Dunn and Dr. Ryan Wadley. Admiral, where can we find

you online and what are you working on next? You can find me at Vice Chinfo on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. As for what's next, I'm in this position for the next two years, but my immediate challenge is helping the Navy's new Chief of Navy Reserve Vice Admiral John Mustin transform our Navy Reserve Force to provide the strategic depth our Navy needs, and I'm pretty excited about where he's taking us. Thanks, ma'am. And then just one final question is, has anything changed in your office based on this book? You know, yeah. So since the book has come out and since Chinfo featured it in his book club. I've seen a surge of interest in our junior officers in the history of our profession. And I think that's great. Thanks, ma'am. And Ryan, where can we find you and what's

your next project? So you can find me on Twitter, RD Wadley, R-D-W-A-D-L-E. What I'm currently working on right now is a biography of Harry Arnell, who's one of the Navy's early carrier commanders. And he's also the head of the Asiatic fleet just before the start of World War II. But But yeah, one thing I'm looking into for sure is kind of extending the history of Navy public affairs past my stopping point. And so there's a wealth of archival documents out there that, as far as I know, no one's ever looked at that cover Navy public affairs well into the 50s and 60s. Ryan, let me ask you a quick follow up. How does all this Navy stuff you're doing go over down at Air University? So the fact that I am, so, so at least I'm conversant in air power. So, you know, that, that, that helps, but the fact that, you know, but one thing that that's always been a fairly

easy sell is the fact that, that since a decent chunk of my work has touched on naval aviation and, and kind of, you know, essentially naval air power, it does make for a fairly easy justification for, you know, at least, you know, anyone's ever wondering like, you know, What value does what value is Ryan's work? And so. So, yeah, those those conversations usually get a stop and start fairly fast once once someone explain once we explain what it is I'm working on. So, yeah, it's it's not as hard as you would think. But but yeah, it is a little weird being an able historian at the Air Power School. Well, thank you both again for joining us today and thanks to the listeners for tuning in. We'll see you next time. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 The white and red are pulling out the shimbo now.

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