Harry D. Train II

Admiral Harry Depue Train II (born November 5, 1927) is a retired United States Navy admiral and a Senior Fellow at the Joint Advanced Warfighting School at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia.

"Preserving the Atlantic Alliance" (January 1981)

 * Article published in Proceedings, the academic journal of the U.S. Naval Institute, Volume 107/1/935.


 * I think it is generally agreed that credible naval forces provide, to the nation or the alliance which possesses them, a backdrop for political actions on the part of elected leaders. But to be credible, it is extremely important that naval forces be able to win battles and win wars. Therefore, the maritime balance among seafaring nations is extremely important. Raymond Aron, the French professor and journalist, made a very wise observation during the Sea Link Conference at Annapolis last June: “While military might cannot do everything, without it you cannot do anything.” Perhaps that is the central theme of the marriage of maritime capability with those political, economic, and ideological factors that loom so large in the political eyes of the NATO nations.


 * Although numbers of ships, planes, and weapons are important, you cannot look at the maritime balance in terms of numbers alone. We feel that the maritime forces of the alliance do have a slim margin of maritime superiority over the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact today. Having said that, we must remember, that the Japanese had a slim margin of maritime superiority over the United States in the Pacific at the start of World War II, and they lost that slim margin overnight in the Battle of Midway.


 * Former Secretary of Defense Mel Laird has said that NATO is an alliance strung together by ships. That is certainly true. This is a reflection of the total dependence of the alliance upon the reinforcement/resupply effort. It is the Atlantic that gives NATO its character. The ocean which connects the members of the NATO alliance was exploited very successfully by a different alliance in the course of World War II. It was the basis for the longest, most bitterly fought, painful campaign of that war—the Battle of the Atlantic.


 * It’s a pity that the war in the Pacific generated such great interest on the part of historians that it has totally consumed their activity. Our naval historians have contented themselves with dealing exclusively with the sea control war in the Pacific, where two competing powers fought each other with large-deck aircraft carriers and produced such memorable naval leaders that their names will live on for centuries and become the basis for much discussion on the part of midshipmen and students of naval history. In the course of speaking to service colleges in the United States and Europe, I have often paused and asked the students if they can name one admiral of any nation who fought in the Battle of the Atlantic. Very seldom can anyone, even among students of history, come up with the answer to that question. The Battle of the Atlantic went virtually unobserved by U. S. historians and by many political leaders. It was a dirty, grubby war which at its height involved dozens of aircraft carriers operating on the submarine problem and much of our intelligence services. In the end, however, it was responsible for the successful reinforcement and resupply of Europe. We must not forget that lesson. It is very pertinent to the problem we are facing today.


 * As we look at the problem of allocating priorities within the NATO nations, we need not necessarily make the choice between social programs and defense expenditures. It’s possible to accommodate both requirements simultaneously. During the Eisenhower years in the United States, we did both concurrently. At that time, the United States invested 10% of its gross national product in defense. Unemployment was the lowest it had been in two decades. The inflation rate was the lowest in two decades, and there were no overriding social problems resulting from that allocation of priorities. The defense effort, in conjunction with the effort to build the interstate highway system of the United States, resulted in the creation of sufficient jobs to minimize the social problems that the country might have been faced with. Nor did we accumulate the enormous national debt that one might expect from that experience. The parallels with today are not exact, of course, but it could well be that the experiences of the past can help us chart our course for the future.

Quotes about Train

 * Admiral Harry D. Train II is part of a Navy family. He is the son of the late Rear Admiral Harold Cecil Train and the father of Rear Admiral Elizabeth L. Train. “I was absolutely steeped in Navy from my first conscious thoughts,” he reflected at the start of his oral history, published by the U.S. Naval Institute in 1997. “I can’t remember a day in my entire life that the Navy was not a dominant element in my life.” During 1945-1982, Train rose from midshipman to admiral in an active-duty career that included operational surface ship and submarine commands, destroyer flotilla and carrier battle group commands, and service as Commander, Sixth Fleet. From 1978 to 1982, he was triple-hatted as Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic, Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Atlantic Command, and Commander in Chief, U.S. Atlantic Fleet. Ashore, his assignments included director of the Joint Staff, as well as individual tours with the Secretary of the Navy, the Chief of Naval Operations, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
 * A Denis Clift, Proceedings, Vol. 143/6/1,372, U.S. Naval Institute, June 2017