Norfolk vs. San Diego

Temporary or not, San Diego now had its warships and sailors to go with its budding training center, hospital, communication sites, supply depots, and airfields. All local energies turned to making the temporary permanent. Knowing that they could not compete in naval tradition or legacy with homeports like Norfolk, San Diego leaders added a new page to their playbook and, instead, pressed hard to win the fervent support of the citizenry. Building upon widespread enthusiasm for the Navy first generated by the visit of the Great White Fleet, San Diegans responded eagerly to this challenge, establishing a record of civic support for the Navy without equal across the country.

Throughout San Diego, Navy men were feted as never before, and a citywide election returned a 90% approval for naval expansion, with the San Diego Union speaking for all San Diegans when it wrote: "All the government asks of San Diego is the concession of a few acres of tidelands and a site for a hospital in Balboa Park. In return, it gives San Diego one of the finest naval establishments in the world." 9 San Diego boosters were not entirely clairvoyant about history's destination, but they did realize, to their great credit, that wherever history was headed, they and the Navy were going there together. 10

San Diego Bay's North Island earned the distinction of "birthplace of naval aviation" when the first naval aviator was trained and the first naval aircraft were operated from there in 1911. Hampton Roads likewise quickly became a center of naval aviation. Top: A Vought SU-2 Corsair flies over North Island circa 1933. Top: A Vought SU-2 Corsair flies over North Island circa 1933. Above: A 1939 view of NAS Norfolk's Chamers Field, with Willoughby Spit in the background.

Knowing that a budget-strapped Navy would be attracted by bargains, precious land along San Diego's waterfront and in its vast city park was dangled before naval officials—all "donations." Kettner, in turn, wrangled appropriations for a new destroyer base and for aviation expansion at North Island. Before most other competing cities along the Pacific Coast could wake up, San Diego had amassed, with a sense of timing that was to prove decisive, a "critical mass" of naval infrastructure just as Norfolk had done.

Interestingly, during those crucial years around World War I, a common theme bound both San Diego and Norfolk. With a curious similarity not fully appreciated by naval officers either then or now, it was not Navy Department planners who held the correct vision of the present-day's dominant naval bases, but unsung local civic boosters who displayed a much better sense of long-term value.

Despite modest Navy budgets during the 1920s and 1930s, San Diego's star was clearly in the ascent with a growing fleet in Pacific waters. Just as striking, Norfolk's navy was a scene of overcapacity and slumping investment as it readjusted to the fleet's loss. 11 Major naval advances in carrier aviation, dive-bombing, anti-submarine warfare, and gunnery now bore a San Diego imprint, and big-ticket naval shipbuilding in the tidewater declined precipitously.

It was not that San Diego and Norfolk were in direct competition—most in San Diego viewed competition for Navy dollars in regional terms, battling San Pedro, San Francisco, or Hawaii—it was more that San Diego had successfully seized a well-timed opportunity and was using it to rapidly solidify its naval underpinning. Long-promised dredging projects finally elevated San Diego Bay to world-class status, new naval bases sprang up around the city, and positive public support for the Navy fired high levels of mutual admiration. If San Diego in the 1920s and 1930s was not quite dominant among Pacific coast Navy towns, it was clearly doing most things right. Norfolk was maintaining its leading market share in the East, but in a depressed bear market.

No Navy centers would prosper more than San Diego and Norfolk during the war effort beginning in 1941. For the first time, these two nodes of naval power would advance equally in naval basing considerations—again not in competition, but as two perfectly paired horses in blue-and-gold livery pulling a great carriage forward. When the Navy established centers for the new science of amphibious warfare, they sprang up in Coronado and Little Creek, just outside Norfolk. When operational training became a priority for Atlantic and Pacific ships, the fleet's operational training commander set up shop in Norfolk and San Diego. Great naval hospitals at Portsmouth and Balboa anchored naval medicine, and both ports shared the load in ship repair and modernization.

The Navy's investment in both locations climbed steadily. Dollars, ships, aircraft, and hundreds of thousands of men and women flowed through both San Diego and Hampton Roads during the war. Piers, classrooms, and warehouses were built and improved; southern forests and western mesas surrendered to new airfields and logistics bases. Infrastructure and capacity raced skyward. Both San Diego and Hampton Roads were transformed as never before in their histories. It was disruptive and messy, but for both cities it established a diversified and stable foundation upon which most subsequent metropolitan growth was built.

Worldwide victory in 1945 brought demobilization: Bases closed, industrial output returned to commercial uses, beaches opened to summer bathers. Despite the turmoil of downsizing, San Diego and Norfolk continued as primary concentration points for mothballed ships and aircraft and for those parts from closing bases that the Navy wanted to keep. It was the first instance of a dominant theme that would span the next 60 years: As naval bases came and went elsewhere in the country, San Diego and Norfolk would relentlessly absorb new infrastructure with each call for consolidation or greater efficiency.

Twin Anchors of the Modern Navy

The advent of the Cold War ended most talk of demobilization and guaranteed that the nation's naval bases would retool and reprioritize. Naval task forces deployed to forward areas to contain the Soviet superpower and maintain presence while great new advances in nuclear weaponry, nuclear-powered propulsion, carrier striking power, long-range missiles, and high-technology sensors advanced naval capability by leaps and bounds. This new Cold War strategy was far different from U.S. naval strategy prior to World War II (and different from naval strategy since the demise of the Soviet Union) and the fleet reshaped not for a single campaign or for homeland defense but for protracted, drawn-out overseas presence.

The most visible manifestation of the Navy's Cold War strategy was the cyclical deployment. Carrier task forces and amphibious groups assumed nominal deployment patterns of six-months, ballistic missile submarines fell into rigid patrol cycles, and attack submarines sailed to distant patrol zones to relieve others on station.

As the fleet evolved to meet this deployment imperative, all naval support services aligned to the same cycle. Manpower policies, training schedules, and supply channels all fell into line. For every carrier task force forward deployed to the Mediterranean, another would be performing advanced training in the Virginia Capes Operating Area and two others would be in varying levels of readiness stateside. The Navy's overwhelming need to provide fresh forces for forward deployments became a forcing function that favored efficient concentration at its megaports of San Diego and Norfolk. One after another, deploying forces would be taken through repetitive inter-deployment readiness and training schedules using and reusing support services that were centralized ashore. It made no sense to diffuse this support to many far-flung locations; it made eminent sense to centralize the fleet's training, supply, maintenance, and communications in as few hubs as possible.

Fleet operations have always colored activities along the San Diego and Norfolk waterfronts and become a distinguishing feature of both metropolitan centers. Top: Three Omaha -class light cruisers at anchor in San Diego Bay in December 1934. Above: "Big Mo," the USS Missouri (BB-63), gets underway from Norfolk in August 1954 with the Iowa (BB-61) and the escort carrier Saipan (CVL-48) nearby.

Thus, those economic and structural trends that favored the building of a critical mass of naval support in San Diego and Norfolk beginning with World War I were reinforced by the needs for the Cold War. Tellingly, in the mid-1950s when the first supercarriers of the Forrestal and Kitty Hawk classes entered the fleet, a robust competition surfaced for their basing. Despite many appeals from Rhode Island, Seattle, San Francisco, and Hawaii, nearly all of the carriers ended up in either Norfolk or San Diego. Although the Navy's complexity would spread bases to many points around the country and although there have been occasional efforts to spread the fleet to a greater number of homeports (particularly overseas basing in Japan and Greece or Navy Secretary John Lehman's venture to base his 600-ship Navy at locations in Mississippi, Texas, and Washington), San Diego and Norfolk's clout increased with each fleet growth cycle. Symbolically and practically, the Cold War raised San Diego and Norfolk to their status as the dominant nerve centers for American naval power today.

Conditions since the end of the Cold War have not substantially altered the dynamics of the central importance of both San Diego and Norfolk to the fleet. Nationwide base closures mandated by the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process have favored force concentration within the Navy's megaports as critical fleet functions realigned for efficiency. Likewise, efforts to make naval shore support networks more cost-effective have had more impact on reducing far-flung naval installations than in modifying San Diego or Norfolk's dominance in fleet operations.

San Diego and Norfolk now stand comfortably linked and share center stage in nearly every facet of naval operations. Both cities used the Navy to advance civic goals so that the Navy service ranks as the largest single contributor to economies that otherwise would be vastly different. The Navy's contributions to two wonderfully different cultures have helped each reach a higher potential. The San Diego-Norfolk bond has grown more complex and entwined over the years—a fascinating interaction of destiny for two societies cast from molds that could hardly have been more dissimilar. It is incorrect to describe this brotherhood as a competition, as that word almost never comes up in San Diego-Norfolk conversation. Both of these naval power centers are learning from each other's present and past to reassuringly plot their course toward the future-a future that, from all evidence, will still be tinged in nautical lexicon.

Iris H. W. Engstrand, San Diego, California's Cornerstone (Tulsa: Continental Heritage Press, 1980), p. 37. back to article
Bruce Linder, San Diego's Navy, An Illustrated History (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2001), p. 37. back to article
Kevin Starr, The Dream Endures, California Enters the 1940s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 113. back to article
George Dewey, "Letter concerning establishment of a Naval Station in San Diego," 20 December 1907, Secnav General Correspondence File, National Archives, RG80. back to article
Ira R. Hanna, The Growth of Norfolk Naval Air Station and the Norfolk-Portsmouth Metropolitan Area Economy in the Twentieth Century (Norfolk: Old Dominion University, 1967), pp. 9-11. back to article
Gordon Calhoun and Joe Judge, "The Navy Builds a Home," The Day Book , November 1997, p. 7. back to article
Thomas C. Parramore, Norfolk, The First Four Centuries (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), p. 297. back to article
Secretary of the Navy, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Navy 1919 , (Washington, D.C., Department of the Navy), p. 186. back to article
"Building a Seaport", San Diego Union , 2 August 1920, p. 4. back to article
"Navy Items Carried by Record Vote", San Diego Union , 4 August 1920, p. 1. back to article
Bruce Linder, Tidewater's Navy, An Illustrated History , (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2005), p. 88. back to article

Mr. Linder is a naval historian and the author of San Diego's Navy: An Illustrated History (Naval Institute Press, 2001), which was awarded best non-fiction book in San Diego for 2001. He has turned his historical sights toward that other great American naval homeport in Tidewater's Navy: An Illustrated History , to be released by the Naval Institute Press this autumn.

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