Army and Air Force represented a major loss of status for the Navy, which had traditionally seen itself as the nation's first line of defense. The Navy's budget had exceeded the Army's for every year but one between 1922 and 1939. It enjoyed the support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and had its own secretary who reported directly to him. The Navy had cultivated political patronage in Congress by dispersing construction and maintenance of its vessels around the nation, and the House Committee on Naval Affairs and the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs had supported the acquisition of expensive capital ships and the development of naval aviation. The Navy had acquired its first aircraft carriers in 1922, when it commissioned a converted collier as the . Carriers accompanied the fleet, and the aircraft had the roles of scouting, observation and attacking enemy vessels. Between 1910 and 1930, around twenty percent of all naval officers went into naval aviation. These included Forrest Sherman, Arthur Radford, Gerald F. Bogan and Daniel V. Gallery, all of whom rose to flag rank in the wartime Navy. Crucially, and in contrast to the Army, where corps loyalty was paramount, the Navy inculcated the attitude that every officer was a naval officer first and a specialist second. This was bolstered by a long-standing ethos of creating a "balanced fleet", in which all specialists played a part. While some naval aviators became zealous advocates of naval air power, they expressed no desire to separate from the Navy. To operate from carriers, aircraft needed tailhooks and strengthened undercarriages, which made them heavier and less maneuverable than similar land-based aircraft, but fears that they could not compete against land-based fighters proved ultimately groundless; between 1 September 1944 and 15 August 1945, US Navy Grumman F6F Hellcat and Vought F4U Corsair fighters downed 2,948 Japanese fighters against a loss of 191 of their own. However, like strategic bombing, the record of aircraft carriers was not as clear cut as the enthusiasts suggested. Only two battleships were sunk by US carrier aircraft alone: the giant and . US carrier aircraft accounted for 4 of the 18 Japanese heavy cruisers that were sunk, 6 of the 25 light cruisers and 27 of the 127 destroyers. What they were particularly lethal against was other aircraft carriers, sinking 11 of the 19 Japanese carriers sunk in the war. In the post-war drawdown, the aircraft