It is with the latter of these factors that this article is concerned. The new role and the new pattern of sea power are to be seen most clearly in (1) amphibious war and (2) the operations of the Carrier Task Force. The United States Fleet has been in active combat steadily from the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The facts, as everyone knows, are very different. And the United States Navy would have yet to fight its first real combat action since before the turn of the century. But if blockade, convoy, and raiding were the whole story, Allied naval forces today would have the same inconspicuous though valuable role they had in World War I. These fleets, in short, have carried on all the traditional functions of naval power. Our own submarines have made a magnificent record as raiders of Japanese shipping, in addition to their other missions. They have made relentless war on enemy submarines and surface raiders, in the endless task of maintaining command of the sea. They have convoyed their own shipping over immensely long sea communication lines.
To be sure, the British and American fleets have maintained distant blockades of their enemies. And in spectacular measure, the new pattern of sea warfare has been the product of American ingenuity and initiative-in response to the compulsion of cold, geographic facts quite unlike any which belligerents of earlier wars ever faced. To an extent almost beyond belief, today's naval war is different from that of World War I. It represents in fact a revolution in naval war, and more completely than did the invention of the submarine or torpedo. The Fast Carrier Task Force has appeared so often in news dispatches, has become so much a commonplace in this war of unnumbered innovations, that its uniqueness tends to escape notice.
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