1947 and the Navy's Hunt for Cafeteria Communists
By Vera Kessler ·
Kept secret for decades, the files trace the transition from defeating the Axis to hunting "subversives" within the Navy’s own lunchrooms.
The cost of a misplaced political conviction in 1947 was not a debate, but the erasure of a livelihood and the permanent marking of a dossier. For the low-level employees of the Navy Department, the threat was no longer a foreign fleet, but the suspicion of their own superiors over who they associated with during their lunch hour.
Because the original pages are held in a restricted vault, we are working here from the official archival description of the series. This record, titled "Security-Classified Correspondence," catalogs the administrative and warfare planning of the Department of the Navy—the agency responsible for the nation's maritime defense—between 1940 and 1947. It documents a terrifying pivot: the moment the American military stopped fighting a war of liberation and started practicing the art of the internal purge.
The Cafeteria and the Purge
By 1947, the Department of the Navy had turned its intelligence apparatus inward. The record cites "Presidential concerns about possible Communist influence in the Navy Department cafeteria" (1947 Secret, P8-1). It is a chilling detail. The highest office in the land was not merely concerned with generals or diplomats, but with the people serving coffee and trays, treating the cafeteria as a breeding ground for subversion. This obsession was not an isolated quirk of the Truman era but a component of the "implementation of the U.S. Government loyalty program" (1947 Secret, P9-2).
The public record establishes the loyalty program as a systemic effort to root out perceived ideological enemies from federal employment. When the record links these "Presidential concerns" to the broader loyalty program, it exposes the architecture of the Red Scare before it ever hit the headlines of the McCarthy era. The Navy was not just protecting secrets; it was policing thought.
This is where the desk's reading begins: the pattern suggests the files we have are a sanitized remnant. The incongruity between the triviality of a cafeteria and the weight of a "Secret" classification indicates a systemic ideological purging. The desk's reading is that the "cafeteria" was a convenient, low-stakes entry point for a much broader dragnet designed to identify and remove anyone with progressive leanings, long before the public knew such a list existed.
The Enemy of My Enemy
While the Navy was hunting for communists in its own kitchen, it was simultaneously building a secret army out of the ruins of the Third Reich. The record documents the "training of German agents in Austria for use against the Soviet Union" (1947 Secret, A8-2/EF7). To do this, the Navy relied on the "exploitation of German scientists" (A8-2/EF) and a deep "exchange of technical information with the United Kingdom," the primary European ally that had shared the burden of the Atlantic war.
The irony is absolute. The Navy Department, acting through the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO)—the statutory office held by the Navy's highest-ranking officer who serves as a military adviser to the president—was purging American citizens for suspected socialist sympathies while providing salaries and training to the very people who had spent years trying to dismantle the democratic world.
The connection here is the transition of the "enemy." In 1944, the Navy was executing "Plan FARRAGUT," a comprehensive strategy to erode Japanese air and naval strength in the Mariana Islands, named for David Glasgow Farragut, the Civil War hero and first admiral in U.S. Navy history. By 1947, the enemy had shifted from the Axis to the Soviet Union, a transcontinental communist state that the Navy was now analyzing for its "ability to wage aggressive war" (1947 Secret, A16-3/EF61).
The Architecture of Silence
This pivot required a new kind of secrecy. The record shows the Navy was already coordinating with the Department of War—the primary federal agency for land forces before it became the Department of Defense—to manage these postwar transitions. It lists the organization of "resistance activities in France" (1943 Secret Shelf, A14-6/EF28), where the Navy had spent the war training agents to operate behind enemy lines.
The desk's reading is that these wartime resistance networks were not dismantled after the liberation of France. Instead, the pattern suggests the conversion of these "agent training" programs into permanent Cold War stay-behind networks. The record lists the French resistance and the German agents in Austria as isolated events, but if the shape of this file is what it appears to be, they are the two halves of a single strategy: the creation of a global, invisible infrastructure of operatives who owed their loyalty not to a nation, but to the secret directives of the CNO.
This culture of invisibility extended to the highest levels of naval command. The record mentions Admiral Forrest Sherman, a strategist who later became CNO himself, and his reports on "Anglo-American staff conversations at Argentia, Newfoundland" (1940-1941 Secret, QB/EF). It also notes a Navy member's participation in a 1947 fact-finding trip to China led by Lieutenant General Albert C. Wedemeyer, a high-ranking officer tasked with assessing the viability of the Nationalist government against the growing communist insurgency.
These missions—in Newfoundland, China, and the ruins of Austria—establish a trajectory. The Navy was no longer just a fleet of ships; it was becoming a global intelligence agency. However, the records of this intelligence activity end abruptly around 1947.
The Great Erasure
This abrupt ending is the most telling gap in the record. 1947 was the year of the National Security Act, which created the CIA. The record shows a massive concentration of intelligence, communication intercepts, and counter-espionage files that simply stop.
The desk's reading is that we are seeing the transition of intelligence primacy from the Office of Naval Intelligence to the CIA. The Navy didn't stop spying; it just stopped keeping the records in the CNO's general correspondence. The intelligence apparatus was moved into a new, more opaque silo, designed to be shielded from the kind of archival discovery we are attempting now.
Further, the record mentions reports on the 1946 atomic weapons tests at Bikini Atoll (1946 Secret, A16-3[31]). Yet, there is a glaring absence of any documentation regarding the fierce inter-service battle between the Navy and the Air Force over who would control nuclear deterrence. The public record knows this battle was existential for the Navy, as the Air Force argued that aircraft carriers were obsolete in the atomic age. The absence of this conflict in a file that covers "the planning and conduct of warfare" is not an accident. It is a scrubbing.
If this file is shaped the way it looks, it is a record of what the Navy wanted the history to be: a seamless transition from the triumph of 1945 to the vigilance of 1947. It presents the "loyalty program" as a matter of administrative security and the use of Nazi agents as a strategic necessity. It hides the internal wars of the Pentagon and the systemic purging of American workers.
What a full release would show is the precise moment the U.S. government decided that the internal surveillance of its own employees was as critical as the surveillance of its enemies. The people in the Navy Department cafeteria were not the targets; they were the test subjects. The desk's reading is that the loyalty program was the prototype for a domestic intelligence state, and the redacted pages are protecting the names of those who designed it.