FoundSF

"I was there..."

by Robert Andersen, 2025

Originally published at the author's substack

1. From Navy Town to Fleet Week

Once upon a time in the West there was a great Navy Town known as “Frisco” to the sailors who had the run of the place. A good time city, diversions galore, gangway Big Easy. Market Street for bluejackets and the Top of the Mark for gold braid. Dive bars and Chinese food and The Wharf and The Sights. Silicon on Broadway, Blues in Harlem West, Psychedelia at the Fillmore. Beats in North Beach and Hippies in the Haight-Ashbury. Liberty Call in San Francisco was a siren-song, only eclipsed by Hong Kong, and the cool grey city of love stole the hearts—and wallets—of the Pacific bound.

In total war and cold war San Francisco was the gold-plated duty station, Treasure Island especially, and the ubiquity of the Navy meant the gray ships were a given, as much a natural part of the Bay as its tricky currents and slack tides. Short of the Gate being closed by seismic fiat one simply couldn’t imagine this place without the Navy in charge of its saltwater destiny.

On the Embarcadero there were always several gray ships berthed, for Fleet Week—when was it ever not Fleet Week—thirty DDs rosary-beaded from The Wharf to Mission Bay, and at the two major shipyards—Mare Island and Hunter’s Point—the drydocks saw submarines and battleships and the rest of the Victory At Sea armada in march-of-time progression.

WWII-era destroyers in formation entering the Golden Gate in 1957.

Photo: OpenSFHistory.org wnp14.10066

Over on Alameda could be found a busy air station and the homeport of a Forrestal-class aircraft carrier. Add a weapons station at Concord (Port Chicago), a hospital in Oakland (Oak Knoll), an air station (Moffett Field) on the Peninsula and the mothball fleet in Suisan Bay and you have a naval presence that rivaled that of Norfolk or San Diego. One dating to 1848 and the Conquest of California. Mare Island Naval Shipyard began laying keels before the Civil War. The Island-built USS San Francisco (CA 38)—see the memorial out at Lands End—survived its point-blank night battle with a Japanese battleship off Guadalcanal to make it back to Vallejo on fortitude alone. Three medals of honor, two posthumous. Turn-around from major battle damage in no time at all.

That naval presence was erased in the 1990s. Terminated with extreme prejudice. Turned into a superfund site. Not a base left standing. Tens of thousands suddenly found themselves out of a job, a profession, a way of life. The disappearance of the Navy from San Francisco Bay was sudden, breathtaking, without mercy. Total. No Quarter from the BRAC Commission. The rationales—obsolescence, contamination, downsizing—were applicable to every naval base in the country. Triage deemed the Navy Town the leading candidate for “closure.” Read wholesale abandonment. The demilitarization of the Bay Area—the Army too was evicted, losing The Presidio, Fort Mason, and the Oakland Army Base—perforce meant peace was now the profession of denizens one and all. The San Francisco motto—iron in war, gold in peace—was abbreviated to fool’s gold in a halcyon peace.

Save for the WWII submarine and Liberty Ship parked at Pier 43 you would never know that the Navy Town ever existed. San Francisco Bay is a playground now. Especially during OctoberFest, aka Fleet Week, when the Blue Angels romp overhead and the handful of gray ships remind the Bay Area that America still has a navy. Indeed, the Blue Angels overflew a memory hole. The five civilian shipyards that turned out some 1400 Liberty Ships during WWII are long gone. A keel hasn’t been laid along the Bay littoral since the 1950s. Two generations have grown up in the DMZ, in a place of perpetual peace, where the Navy is regarded as a curiosity at best, the invisible hand that keeps the Port of Oakland in supply-chain operation.

Now that naval war in the Western Pacific has ceased to be a James Bond plot-device, the Pacific Theater back for an encore, watch the scary preview set in the Scenario Sea, the post-bellum enclave looks more and more like a pre-bellum provocation. The size and permanent infrastructure of the Fleet does matter. The rout of San Francisco Bay figures as a major loss to the Navy in the Pacific. In retrospect a debacle, a major defeat presaging a cataclysmic one. Did the Navy resist? Put up a fight for Mare Island, which serviced nuclear submarines? After all, it had signed off on the closing of the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, Mare Island’s Atlantic twin. All that well-honed tradecraft down the drain. After hitting a seamount at flank speed off Guam, killing one and injuring dozens, the USS San Francisco, SSN-711, had to be repaired in Puget Sound. The silent service dearly would want to have Mare Island back.

The chestnut, of a dropped Bridge closing the Gate, trapping the Fleet inside the Bay, was used to justify slamming the Gate behind the everything-must-go exit. As the recent pas-de-deux in the narrow channel attests getting out of San Diego may not be so easy either. Indeed, a staple of Scenario Sea fiction is the container ship blocking the channel into Pearl. Closing the Panama Canal. From Alameda to the Gate is a straight shot taking twenty minutes or less. Beats going around the Horn.

Cargo cultists wait on the dock of the Bay for the gray ships to return. But as Fleet Week showcases those ships are few and far between. The world’s largest navy is now found on the other side of the Pacific. The PLAN is the second coming of the Imperial Japanese Navy. A bigger better badder IJN. Which has total command of the Scenario Sea. It has one mission: to sink the US Navy.

That mission became that much easier when the Navy evacuated San Francisco Bay without a shot being fired. The Eastern Pacific is where the “near-peer” competition with China kicked-off, a prologue as it were to the narrative of the looming showdown in the Western Pacific. A narrative that underscores the squandering of American naval supremacy. Fat Leonard take a star turn. Indeed, that folie de grandeur has left the East of Suez Fleet at sea, turning circles, now China, now Russia, now Iran, now North Korea. Tout l’azimuth the US Navy, undermanned and overworked, showing major rust, is up against it, set Condition Zebra.

USS San Francisco Memorial at Land's End.

Photo: Wally Gobetz, flickr.com

The USS San Francisco Memorial overlooks the Pacific, aligned to follow the Great Circle to Guadalcanal, and the fierce naval battle of November 1942, which took the lives of 107 sailors and marines, including Admiral Callaghan and Captain Young. As boys we would romp through the thick monterey cypress just below the shot-up bridge wings, to secure a cliffside vantage to watch the Fleet arrive in force, all those destroyers heralding the pass in review of the carrier Essex and the cruiser Helena. The procession through the Gate was a sight never to forget.

Because I grew up in the Navy Town enlistment at age 18 was a native rite-of-passage. College could wait while I saw the world—or rather the watery parts of the world. Three years aboard DD879—my Harvard College and Yale—quenched the thirst for saltwater. But it did not slake the admiration for those who go down to the sea in the gray ships of my alma-mater. I missed the WestPac, and Operation Sea Dragon, and Liberty Call in Hong Kong and Frisco. Hence the reenlistment as it were. Back to the future as a novel writer. Back to the Vietnam War.

And forward to the Scenario Sea. Where all hell is about to break-loose at any minute. America has more than the Big Box Store to lose this time around. It could lose its Navy. Save for those who aspire to gold braid the recruiting pool is going the way of the Aral Sea. Short of bringing back a Barbary Coast tradition—shanghaiing the geeks of Silicon Valley—the Navy is in extremis when it comes to R&R. Recruitment and retention are that much more difficult when the Navy has been offshored, removed from the American navel-gaze. Skeet-shooting in the Red Sea. The erasure of the Navy Town was a bottom line calculation. Incalculable is its effect on the juvenile psyche, those kids who used to race from one ship to the next during visiting hours, spellbound by the might and majesty of the United States Navy. I couldn’t wait to enlist.

Now that forty year-olds and the mentally challenged are bluejacket material the desperation of the sea service becomes a national disgrace. A national service requirement for males aged 18-21 is long overdue. Sea duty takes you out of your comfort zone, way out, and introduces you to the good, the bad, and the ugly. It is the best classroom there is by far and the learning curve is steep and demanding. The halcyon peace of dawn at sea is no fool’s gold.

The view from the USS San Francisco Memorial is an ominous one. The Chinese are in the Solomon Islands and the Great Wall of Sand makes Freedom Of Navigation transits through the South China Sea a reverse-english kowtow to the Suzerain. Crashback at any time. The Great Helmsman 2.0 is too eager to turn the neon lights out in Taipei and the ever-burgeoning PLAN is preparing for the long-awaited day of infamy—commence the century of American humiliation—when it gets to sink the Seventh Fleet Tsushima style.

Once upon a time in the West a great Navy Town existed. Flourished in total war and cold war. Saw the gray ships come and go all the weeks of the year. Exulted in Liberty Call. Here, sailor, let me buy you a drink. That Town went the way of all fairy tales. It could not thrive in the glare of a halcyon peace. It had to be shut-down. Turned into a superfund site. A different kind of fairy tale took its place. That tale—endless gold from data mining—has gone the way of the Salesforce Tower. The abandoned downtown is now a superfund site of another kind. A cargo cult fever-dream. That halcyon peace proved fool’s gold.

As we watch, from Crissy Field, the kite-surfers skip and soar over the Bay, the question the Navy Town of yore poses is a siren-song of iron-clad incredulity. Is that the fog of another war coming through the Gate?

2. The Fog of Another War

Once upon a time West of the West the United States Navy owned the Golden Gate. San Francisco was the Navy Town of record. Certainly during World War II it was fabled Frisco, gobs on the town, the great good-time place that pulled out all the stops, licit and illicit, to ensure liberty call enjoyed urban folkways. The City that knew how. No wonder so many returned after the War to naturalize, put down roots. Kerouac’s Fabulous White City on its eleven mystical hills sang its siren song to millions passing under the Bridge Pacific Theater bound.

Now, save for Fleet Week in October—a showcase visit to a foreign shore—America’s Navy remains far-flung, over-the-horizon, a fugitive from its invincible past, overworked and undermanned, confronting a new adversary across the Date Line. An adversary that has come out of nowhere to become the world’s largest navy. Announcing a gunmetal horizon rife 360 with the gray ships of the People’s Liberation Army Navy. Liberty Ship zeal is now made in China. All those destroyers and frigates heralding the pass in review of an invincible future boasting a sanguinary red flag. Will Fleet Week have to learn to speak Mandarin?

The PLAN is designed to do one thing. To sink the United States Navy. In the next decade, if the numerologists are right, there will be a no-quarter showdown in the Western Pacific. A gigantomachy between the Chinese Navy and the Seventh Fleet. The Scenario Sea, where war games are played out with ever increasing alarm, invariably finds the Seventh Fleet sent to the bottom in no time at all.

Of course this time around there will be no Mare Island to repair any cruiser or destroyer lucky to survive the antiship missile onslaught. Since Subic, Yokuska and Guam will probably also be targeted good luck making it back to the Gulf Coast or Norfolk. Pearl will be a nightmare and the Panama Canal is no sure passage now that a Chinese company, Hutchison PPC, operates the ports on either side of the waterway. A staple of Scenario Sea fiction is the container ship blocking the channel into Pearl or putting the Canal out of business. The Chinese construction footprint in Panama is Big Foot impressive, a virtual annexation of the Canal Company.

Indeed, it is no stretch to say it is now China that rules the waves. The “maritime statecraft” the Secretary of the Navy espouses has been Made In China for sometime. Under the radar as it were the Chinese have broken free of the Nine Dash Line and come to dominate global shipping. Be it port infrastructure, port operations, shipbuilding or an outsized merchant marine China has come to own the watery part of the world. Their fishing fleet alone is a force to reckon.

Couple that expansive civilian sector to the ever burgeoning military fleet and half the world’s ports are in thrall to Chinese maritime statecraft. In play as it were. The Chinese have proven masters of a geopolitical Go played for global domination. The US has been outflanked and out to lunch when it comes to the seven seas. There are no shipyards in San Francisco Bay. As a consequence of ceding the high seas to the PRC the US finds itself playing (praying) for time, Freedom Of Navigation forays into the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait emblematic of the last days of the Pax Americana.

Where does that leave the Seventh Fleet? Short of pulling back to Pearl it means good luck and god speed. Good luck in avoiding flashpoints in the South China Sea and god speed in flight from Chinese missile range should the PLAN go after Taiwan. The auguries are not in its favor. The one hundred tanker problem remains insuperable—perhaps Maersk can reverse course and come through after all. And who wants to serve on a Sealift rustbucket, especially since it will be no free ride across the Pacific. The naval war begins outside the Gate. The Seventh Fleet is essentially on its own. Help will not be on the way in time. Japan and Australia will have to think twice in the face of Chinese nuclear saber-rattling. Is Melbourne or Tokyo worth a Taipei?

7th Fleet arriving.

Photo: history.navy.mil

The view from the USS San Francisco Memorial is a grave one. Unless statecraft of San Francisco Conference caliber intervenes a naval war in the Western Pacific is all but preordained. So long as the Great Helmsman 2.0 is determined to seize Taiwan come hell or high water that showdown is a matter of when. The Perfect Storm is fast approaching, predicated on too little and too late, what happened to the might and majesty of the US Navy.

The saga of the Navy since Desert Storm has been landlocked. Deserts, not the high seas. Stand up the Fifth Fleet. CentCom. Inside the Persian Gulf. The littoral combat ship. The Navy adopts cammies, atrophies seamanship. While American built and flagged vessels bottomed-out in numbers, goodbye merchant marine, the American flag on warships increased to jumbo size, the better to show the world that we still measure up.

But we don’t. The disappearance of the Navy from San Francisco Bay should have been a wake-up call. But it wasn’t. Peace in our time. With the result that War in the Pacific is a very real possibility. With the result that the Seventh Fleet is under the gun no matter what the admirals featured on Sixty Minutes say.

Quantity has its own quality. We can also say that folly is a foe’s best ally. The folly of abandoning the high seas in favor of expeditions in the desert has brought the Navy to a moment of truth. It won’t do to keep repeating the mantra of world’s most powerful. The Seventh Fleet is a sitting duck because it was taken for granted that it would deter the PLAN from investing the South China Sea and building the Great Wall of Sand and bullying Taiwan into submission. Taken for granted. Hubris meet nemesis meet the bottom of the Scenario Sea.

As I write this Fleet Week in San Francisco just ended. The blue angels romped overhead, and the parade of ships—two gray ships and one white (Coast Guard) vessel-- through the Gate signaled the arrival of the foreign Navy to the pacific shores. San Francisco Bay is a lark for the seldom-seen “Fleet,” now liberty call. See the sights. San Francisco Bay in other words is off-limits to the Navy. To homeporting. To the clang of iron in shipyards. To the preparation for naval war in the Pacific. Not a base standing. NotInMyBay with a Frisco panache.

The rout of San Francisco Bay is a black chapter in the history of the US Navy. A cost-saving measure turns out to have high costs indeed. The pivot from the high seas to the desert, from the Pacific to the Persian Gulf, has been nothing short of a debacle. Eyes wide shut too long, the Navy has soldiered on with East of Suez force levels, presaging a bigger rout to come. Forsaking the Bay, its rich maritime and naval history today a gaping memory hole, has been an invitation to another American Century, this one twice as triumphant.

View northward across the outer Golden Gate from Land's End, 2019.

Photo: Chris Carlsson

View northeasterly to the Golden Gate Bridge from Land's End, 2019.

Photo: Chris Carlsson