On 18 April 1949, workers at Newport News, Virginia, laid the keel of the biggest warship the US Navy had ever ordered: USS United States, a flush-decked supercarrier built to launch bombers big enough to carry atomic weapons. Five days later, the new Secretary of Defense, Louis A. Johnson, cancelled her.

What followed is remembered as the Revolt of the Admirals: a public, bitter and career-ending fight between the Navy and the newly independent US Air Force over who would deliver America's nuclear weapons, and whether the Navy's aircraft carriers had any future at all. At the centre of it was one aircraft, the Air Force's enormous Convair B-36 Peacemaker.

In October 1949, Navy officers took that fight to Congress.

Bombs, Budgets and a New Air Force

The US Air Force became an independent service in 1947, and it came with a clear doctrine: the next war would be won by strategic bombers carrying atomic bombs. The B-36, with six piston engines and later four jets as well, could fly intercontinental missions from bases in the United States. If that was the future, the Air Force argued, expensive carriers were a luxury.

The Navy saw it differently. USS United States was meant to show that carriers could deliver nuclear weapons too, with heavy bombers on a flush deck with no island and fighters to escort them. Defence budgets were shrinking fast, and both services knew there was not enough money for everything.

Louis Johnson, who became Secretary of Defense in March 1949, sided with the bomber. On 23 April he cancelled the carrier, five days after its keel had been laid. Navy Secretary John L. Sullivan resigned in protest within days.

A Billion-Dollar Blunder?

The fight soon turned ugly. An "anonymous document" circulated in Washington calling the B-36 a "billion-dollar blunder" and pointing out that Johnson had previously been connected to Convair, the bomber's manufacturer. Its author turned out to be Cedric R. Worth, a former Navy commander working as a civilian assistant to the Under Secretary of the Navy. He was dismissed after a naval court of inquiry.

The Navy also argued that the B-36 was not the invincible bomber the Air Force claimed. Captain Arleigh Burke's analysts pointed out that the Navy's new McDonnell F2H Banshee jet fighter could already reach the altitudes needed to intercept a bomber like the B-36, and that any serious enemy would soon have similar fighters. In that case, B-36s would need long-range escorts the Air Force did not have.

Morale in the naval aviation community collapsed. Vice Admiral Gerald Bogan wrote a memo that leaked to the press.

Testimony in October

The House Armed Services Committee, chaired by Representative Carl Vinson, held hearings on the B-36 and on unification of the services in two phases. In the second, from 6 to 17 October 1949, a parade of senior Navy officers testified. Captain John G. Crommelin had already gone public, telling reporters that unification was a mistake and that the Navy was being deliberately weakened. The Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Louis Denfeld, backed his officers in his own testimony.

That decision cost him his job. On 27 October 1949, Navy Day, President Truman relieved Denfeld. Crommelin was later forced to retire. The committee condemned Denfeld's removal as a reprisal for his testimony and, in its report, made a point about the role of Congress.

The National Naval Aviation Museum Foundation on the Revolt of the Admirals.

Korea Settled the Argument

The Navy lost the battle of 1949 and won the argument within a year. When North Korea invaded the South on 25 June 1950, it was not the nuclear war the B-36 had been built for. Carrier aircraft were among the first American air power over the peninsula, with USS Valley Forge striking Pyongyang on 3 July 1950. Truman wanted a naval blockade of North Korea, but after the cuts it could at first be imposed only on paper.

Three days before the invasion, on 22 June 1950, Johnson had already approved a new supercarrier. In September Truman asked for his resignation and replaced him with George C. Marshall. The carrier Johnson approved became USS Forrestal, launched in October 1955: an angled-deck, steam-catapult supercarrier able to operate heavy nuclear bombers, and the ancestor of every American supercarrier since.

The B-36 never dropped a bomb in anger and was retired by 1959. The admirals who revolted lost their careers, but the carrier they fought for is still at the centre of American power at sea.

The story of the Convair B-36, the giant bomber at the heart of the 1949 fight.

USS Forrestal, the supercarrier the Navy finally got after the Revolt of the Admirals.

Sources: Wikipedia (Revolt of the Admirals; USS United States (CVA-58); Convair B-36 Peacemaker); House Armed Services Committee; Naval History and Heritage Command.