US Marine Corps - The Black Vault

Service in the Naval Aeronautical Organization 101
mander Turner from the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Air, Edward P.
Warner, which concluded with “I hope there will be opportunity for many
more such studies and practices, both in your command and elsewhere.” ‘z
A copy of this letter was placed in Commander Turner’s official record.
By April 1929, Commander Turner was able to report: “There have been
ten occasions when operations have been held by this squadron with units of
the Army, since 1 July 1928. “ ‘3 These included Joint Board Problems 1 and 3
as set forth in Joint Board No. 350. And Admiral Bristol, at the end of the
1929 fiscal year, in commenting on Fleet training during the previous 12
months said:
One of the most interesting features has been the development of combined
Army-Navy aircraft operations.’4
He summed up the matter with these words:
Cooperation between the Army and Navy air forces has been excellent and
great advancement made in combined operation.Gs
WAR PLANS
A tour of the Asiatic Station at this time also provided an excellent oppor-
tunity for an analysis of war operations in the Philippines. That Commander
Turner was so minded is indicated by what he wrote in April 1929:
It is customary amongst Naval officers to consider it practically settled that
the ORANGE [Japanese] forces in the case of an ORANGE-BLUE War,
will be landed on the shores of Lingayan Gulf. The existing ASIATIC
FLEET operating plan covers this contingency in considerable detail.GG
Commander Turner did not controvert this surmise, which proved to be
100 percent correct. But he thought, and was forthright enough to say so in a
carefully reasoned three-page letter, that the possibility of a Japanese land-
ing in a southern arm of Lamon Bay, called Lopez Bay, “should be again
studied” by the Navy as an alternative Japanese landing objective. Lopez
Bay was 125 miles by rail and road southeast of Manila. There the water
was smooth and the beaches good. Turner believed that “this matter has not
‘2ASSECNAV, letter, January 26, 1929.
WCOMAIRONS, A.R., 1929, pp. 6, 11.
m Asiatic, A. R., 1929, p. 26.
= Ibid., p. 44.
WCOMAIRONS, Asiatic to CINC, Asiatic, letter, FE 14/FC–4/FF6/AV, 20 Apr. 1929.