Topic 2
DEWEY AND FIGHTING BOB

TWO of the brightest chapters in America's brilliant naval history deal with Dewey in Manila Bay and the battleship cruise around the world.  For Dewey's presence in Manila Bay, Roosevelt was responsible — he had, in fact, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, to battle with bureau chiefs to send him there — thereby breaking precedent much as he did later in sending Rear Admiral "Fighting Bob" Evans on the famous battleship cruise.

Dewey he sent to Asia on the chance that he would have to fight, and Evans, prepared to fight, left with President Roosevelt his pledge that were there a fight he would come home as Dewey did—or not at all.

There has been much mystery and some dispute as to the orders under which Evans sailed.  What his written orders may have been I do not know.  But here is Colonel Roosevelt's story of his last interview with Evans before "he shoved off" on that memorable voyage.

"I said to Evans," said Colonel Roosevelt in discussing the matter, "' Admiral, I am very fond of you, but if you or your ships are surprised in port or at sea, don't come back to me.

'"You are going on a mission of peace, to see that the peace is kept, but from the time that you lift anchor in the roads until you return, guard your ships as though you were at war.

'"Seek no trouble; take no chances; don't be surprised.'

"Evans stood looking me straight in the eye while I was talking.

"'Mr.  President,' said he, 'Mr.  President, if I am surprised, I won't come back.'

"And I don't believe he would have.

"The situation was serious and Evans knew it nearly if not quite as well as I.  There was one chance in ten that the trip would end in war.  I decided to take the nine chances that it would prevent the war that seemed certain, was certain, if strong measures were not taken to prevent it.

"I was talking softly to Japan and, in the fleet, was letting it see my big stick.

"Evans was the man to handle the fleet.  He was worth a couple of battleships both for the moral effect on his men and the knowledge of the rest of the world that he was not called ' Fighting Bob' for nothing.  I knew that he did not want to fight — your first class fighting man never looks for fight — I knew that he could be depended upon not to pick a fight, but, by George! I knew, and Japan knew, that if occasion demanded he could fight and would fight.

"Can you imagine Mr.  Wilson taking such a course?"

Of Dewey as a fighting man Colonel Roosevelt had the very highest regard, but he also realized that like most other mortals, Dewey had his limitations.

"As a fighting man, as a man on the bridge or in the conning tower, Dewey had no superior," he once told me.  "He was everything the traditions demand an American sailor man shall be.  But take him off his quarter deck and set him in a swivel chair and he was lost — he was only slightly better than Crown inshield.

" Crowninshield, you know, did not wish Dewey sent to command the Asiatic squadron.  He insisted that it was not Dewey's turn — that some one else should go, because, in the course of ordinary routine, the other man should go.  I knew what Dewey was — a fighting man of the Farragut type and just as capable as his old commander of saying, ' Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.' He proved it by cutting the cable after he had done his main job.

"It was because I believed he was the right man for the job that I sent him to the East over the bureau's protest, and it was because I knew he was a first class man in a fight that I sent him to Southern waters when it looked as though we might have to mix it up with Germany a few years later.  When Germany realized that I meant business, she quit, but if she had n't, Dewey would have given as good an account of himself there as he had in Manila Bay.

"Between ourselves, the old man was rather keen for the chance at Germany.  He recognized, as did few men of his time, what Germany and German policies really were and what Germany meant to try and do to the world.

"On the other hand, I saw his limitations when a dispute arose between him and General Wood as to the place where fortifications should be built to defend Manila.  Wood objected that the place favored by the navy, and, of course, by Dewey, could not be defended by the army.  I sent for the admiral and put the thing up to him.  He listened, shrugged his shoulders, and, in effect asked, ' What of it?'

"So long as it could be defended by the navy and fitted in with the navy's scheme of things, he did not care.  He lacked the necessary breadth, the necessary imagination to size the entire problem — to get the other fellow's viewpoint.

"However, as things developed, both were wrong, for the Japs before long had guns that would have made the place picked by the army untenable."