Racial condescension was matched by arrogance in tactical matters. During joint Army-Navy war games in February, 1932, the air group from the carrier Lexington simulated a surprise attack on Oahu military bases. Staged at daybreak Sunday morning, the strike prefigured the Japanese attack nearly ten years later, and by war-game rules demolished Pearl Harbor and other military facilities. When British naval planes destroyed the Italian fleet anchored at Taranto in southern Italy in 1940, the Navy still professed not to worry; the battleship was supreme. Submarines, in the minds of Navy brass, were the real threat. Although it was taken for granted that any war in the Pacific would be fought against Japan, Navy men subscribed to the opinion, most whimsically expressed by Vice-Admiral Wilson Brown, that Japanese airmen were “distinctly inferior to American fliers.” Brown based his assessment not on intelligence reports but on remarks by the head of the Singer Sewing Machine subsidiary in Japan; the executive said that Singer would not let employees fly on Japanese commercial aircraft because they were so badly kept up, and by this reasoning military air power could not be much better.
During the thirties, the Navy collided head on with the melting pot in an episode that had the combustible elements of a cheap novel—sex, racism, murder, perjury, lynch law, inept cops, two trials, a world-class attorney, demagogic reporters, foaming editorials, political blackmail, loony congressmen, ass-kissing sailors, a homicidally hoity mother-in-law, vacillating bureaucrats, Presidential intervention, a miscarriage of justice, and finally the Pinkerton Detective Agency, which, after the dust had settled, sorted everything out. “The Massie case,” as this lurid series of events came to be called, was rivetingly detailed in 1966 by Peter Van Slingerland in “Something Terrible Has Happened.” The fuse was lit by Thalia Fortescue Massie, the twenty-year-old wife of Lieutenant (j.g.) Thomas Hedges Massie, Annapolis ’27, a Kentuckian and the engineering officer on the submarine S-43, operating out of the Pearl Harbor Sub Base. Thalia Fortescue married Massie when she was sixteen, after his graduation from the Naval Academy, but she was not cut out to be a Navy wife. She was too young, too spoiled, too self-indulgent. She avoided marathon bridge games with other wives, took courses at the University of Hawaii, and perhaps mixed too much with the locals. The marriage was volatile. When Massie and Thalia were not fighting, they often were not speaking.