The Admirals Read online

  Bill Leahy’s posting to Washington in 1918 as director of gunnery and engineering exercises prompted him and Louise to buy a house there. Young Bill was well into his teens and hoping to follow his father to the Naval Academy. Barely six months into the job, Leahy was asked to serve as chief of staff to the commander of the Pacific Fleet. It was the sort of operational experience Ernest King routinely coveted, but Leahy was personally relieved when the chief of naval operations vetoed the request and kept him in Washington. Even in the navy, one could take only so much moving about, and Leahy didn’t want to disrupt his family again so soon.4

  Instead, Leahy, now a captain, made frequent trips to sea from his Washington base to observe target competitions and review the efficiency of gunnery departments. This put him squarely in the confrontation as Brigadier General Billy Mitchell of the Army Air Service stepped up claims that airpower was making battleships obsolete. The first field test of this assertion occurred in November 1920 when the navy preemptively decided to conduct its own tests with the aging, pre–Spanish-American War battleship Indiana. To its regret, it invited General Mitchell to witness the exercise.

  Navy planes dropped dummy bombs from the air while relatively small six-hundred-pound bombs were remotely detonated at key points on and near the ship. Just what the correlation was between the simulated aerial attack and these static explosions was open to question. Certainly, Mitchell criticized the entire demonstration as a charade. But in a post-action report, Leahy defensively declared that the operation had demonstrated “the improbability of a modern battleship being either destroyed completely or put out of action by aerial bombs.”

  The navy brass bristled further when General Mitchell disclosed these “confidential” tests to the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee and repeated both his criticisms and his boasts. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, who was on his way out with the rest of the Wilson administration, struck back and was quoted in the New York Times as saying that he “knew of no development of the World War or experiment since that would justify any conclusion that battleships were practically rendered useless by aircraft development.”5

  Mitchell continued his attacks until the navy finally permitted him to plan a simulated search-and-destroy mission with dummy bombs against the obsolete battleship Iowa (BB-4), which was equipped as a radio-controlled target, as well as a live-fire exercise against the captured German battleship Ostfriesland. Mitchell declined to undertake the offered exercise against Iowa—the navy insisted it was because he was afraid his planes wouldn’t even be able to locate the moving ship—but he rushed to drop six 2,000-pound blockbusters in quick succession on the stationary Ostfriesland.

  The battleship sank in just twenty-one minutes, and the navy cried foul, citing its agreement with Mitchell to conduct the attack slowly so that crews could assess the damage between strikes. The end result was that the navy claimed the sinking was inconclusive because the Ostfriesland was not under way and fighting back. Mitchell retorted that the result would have been even more spectacular if the battleship had been operational and carrying its normal complement of magazines and fuel. The interservice rivalry continued, but what stuck in the public’s mind was that no matter how he had done it, “Mitchell had sunk a battleship, as he claimed he could.”6

  Bill Leahy stuck to his guns, both literally and figuratively, but some of his postwar assignments broadened his perspectives well beyond battleships. In addition to his gunnery and big ship expertise, his talents as a diligent and efficient staff officer were being recognized, as well as certain skills as a diplomat. He got his first direct taste of melding military might with diplomacy in the spring of 1921, when he was sent to Constantinople to take command of the cruiser St. Louis. The ship was an aging veteran whose chief purpose in the Turkish capital was diplomatic rather than militaristic.

  Turkey was at war with Greece, and the harbor at Constantinople (soon to become Istanbul) was crowded with warships sent to observe the action, as well as to monitor any Russian ships or expatriates flowing out of the Black Sea. This Greco-Turkish war was largely a result of Greece, a nominal member of the Allied powers, trying to grab territory as the Ottoman Empire, a member of the defeated Central powers, was being dismembered—giving rise to the new republic of Turkey.

  This was Leahy’s first post in which his diplomatic skills were at least as important as his naval ones. His overriding concern was to safeguard American interests—always a subjective standard—while remaining carefully neutral. The post also showed him the social side of diplomacy, something he would come to know intimately. “I find it a necessary part of my efforts to acquire information to attend many dinner dances and receptions at the residences of the diplomatic and military officials,” Leahy wrote. “These social affairs are invariably interesting because of the different antagonistic and friendly nationalities represented and because of the exchange of gossip and misinformation that can best be accomplished in a gathering that apparently has no official status.”7

  Perhaps Leahy’s most lasting indoctrination into the delicate balance of diplomacy came one night when the watch on the U.S. destroyer Sturdevant picked up a teenage boy swimming toward the ship. He was Greek and obviously in a panic, having just escaped Turkish-held territory. If Leahy ordered him returned, the boy would almost certainly be shot as a spy. But keeping him risked a potentially explosive breach of neutrality. Leahy’s decision was to bring the lad aboard the St. Louis, dress him in sailor’s clothes, give him his first decent food in months, and then allow him to pose as a member of the crew. All hands embraced the ruse, and when a nervous Leahy later confessed his actions to his superior, the admiral advised him to forget all about it. Humanity, it seemed, had a role in diplomacy.8

  When Leahy returned to the United States at the end of 1921, he should have been in line for a year at the Naval War College. It was an important step if he desired to attain flag rank, but instead he was ordered back to sea as the commanding officer of the minelayer Shawmut. He was also given additional duty as the commanding officer of Mine Squadron One. The positive aspect was that Leahy got his first experience commanding multiple ships. On the negative side, the command had him shuttling about the East Coast and the Caribbean on a host of minor assignments.

  One particular duty in 1923, however, gave him another experience with naval aviation. His ships were detailed as lifeguard stations between Hampton Roads and the Canal Zone as a squadron of eighteen torpedo planes made a practice deployment. Every plane had some trouble en route, two turned back, and one was lost at sea. Leahy’s ships then shepherded a deployment of scout planes from Key West to the canal with similar results. Plane after plane experienced mechanical problems before limping into its destination.

  Once in Panama, these aircraft joined in fleet maneuvers and were reported to have an operational radius of eight hundred miles. Leahy, in particular, found that to be a bad joke. He had seen naval aviation in operation and rescued a part of it from the waters of the Atlantic. If this was the best airpower could do, battleships did not have much to fear, despite Billy Mitchell’s theatrics.

  As part of these exercises, the old battleship Iowa, still equipped with a radio-controlled device, was placed in Leahy’s charge as a target drone for live-fire exercises. The ship proved tougher than expected and outlasted the first day’s fire, taking 5-inch shells and three 14-inch shells in stride. The second day was different. The Mississippi opened up at fifteen thousand yards with armor-piercing shells. Its second salvo proved fatal, and the Iowa sank in fifty fathoms of water. Apparently, the lesson to some in the navy was that it still took a battleship to sink another battleship, although Leahy bemoaned, “There was something very sad about seeing the old veteran destroyed by the guns of its friends.”9

  Shortly after these 1923 maneuvers, Leahy was assigned to the Bureau of Navigation as a detail officer, a post he would hold for three years. This meant that while the chief of the bureau made the major deci
sions on personnel assignments, Leahy was tasked with making sure that each ship had the proper complement of officers and that the officers themselves had the required mix of sea and shore duty, as well as school and practical experience. It was a time of reduced military spending and low nationwide military priorities. As one admiral put it, the navy was “laboring under economy run wild.”10

  The assignment put the Leahys back in Washington and they took regular advantage of its cultural activities, particularly the theater and symphony. In both, Leahy preferred the classics and eschewed some of the wilder social exuberance and excesses of the by now Roaring Twenties. If the officer corps of the navy was itself rather conservative, Bill Leahy was decidedly more so.

  Early the following year, by coincidence on the Leahys’ twentieth wedding anniversary, Woodrow Wilson died. He had become a broken and pitiful old man, but Leahy’s words in his diary were not charitable: “Thus ends the career of a man who had the greatest opportunity that has ever been presented in the cause of world peace, and who failed completely to take advantage of it.”11 Unbeknownst to him, the next time a man had a similar opportunity, Leahy would be at his side as one of his most trusted advisers.

  Bill Leahy may have been a battleship man, but there was no question that Bill Halsey, now a commander, had become well established as a destroyer man. Like him, destroyers were small but tough, nimble yet hard-hitting. They had proved their worth in antisubmarine and convoy operations during the war, but their mobility and beefed-up arsenal of torpedoes also put them in the category of offensive weapons, particularly against slower and more ponderous battleships.

  In the closing days of World War I, Halsey had returned to the United States to assume command of the newly commissioned destroyer Yarnall. One of the Wickes-class destroyers, with their distinctive four smokestacks, Yarnall was 314 feet long with a narrow beam of 31 feet that could slice through the waves at a top speed of 35 knots. The ship’s complement of 122 officers and crew manned batteries of four 4-inch and two 3-inch guns, but the offensive punch came from twelve torpedo tubes.

  Halsey thought that taking his new ship to Europe as an escort for President Wilson’s voyage to the Paris Peace Conference would be the perfect shakedown cruise, and he volunteered Yarnall for the duty. The outbound leg went smoothly enough, but as Wilson preached and his counterparts procrastinated, the conference dragged on for months. Much to Halsey’s chagrin, Yarnall was reduced to ferry service in the English Channel and North Sea, shuttling servicemen between the continent and Britain.

  When the destroyer finally returned to the United States in the summer of 1919, it was assigned to the newly formed Pacific Fleet. The destroyers were to be based at San Diego, and in addition to the Yarnall, Halsey was given command of a division of six destroyers. The overall commander, Destroyers, Pacific Fleet, was to be Rear Admiral Henry A. Wiley, one of Admiral Sims’s disciples, and Wiley was determined that his ships be models of efficiency and smartness no matter how relaxed the rest of the postwar navy was becoming. Wiley did the job so well that by the end of the admiral’s tour, Halsey claimed, “You could tell a destroyer man by the way he cocked his cap and walked down the street.”12

  Wiley’s successor, Captain William V. Pratt, took this spit and polish to the next level. Pratt relentlessly drilled Admiral Sims’s mantra of teamwork and coordinated attacks into his skippers. As one naval veteran put it, “Devout destroyermen beamed with approval (and sometimes envy) upon the division of graceful destroyers: bones in their teeth, rooster tails churning astern, pirouetting in union with signal flags snapping in the breeze, plunging into steep seas and shaking green water from their forecastles—six commanding officers understanding one another perfectly, a brotherhood of proud and confident fighters and seamen.”13

  Halsey’s squadron commander was the same F. T. Evans who had pushed Ernest King to close up formation in the Terry. Evans took Pratt’s tactics to the extreme and devised various attack formations that were executed not by fluttering signal flags but by whistle blasts. As Halsey recalled, “When a squadron of nineteen destroyers maneuvers by whistles—at night, blacked out, at 25 knots—it’s no place for ribbon clerks.”14

  Halsey thrived on this sort of action, as did another destroyer skipper in Evans’s division, Lieutenant Commander Raymond A. Spruance. Four years Halsey’s junior in age and a 1907 graduate of Annapolis, Spruance was the opposite of Halsey in just about every way except for his love of destroyers. Halsey was boisterous and outgoing; Spruance was quiet and shy. Halsey piloted ships and later airplanes by the seat of his pants; Spruance was meticulous and calculating in every plan and every action. Halsey thrived on the public’s attention and courted it; Spruance shunned the spotlight and kept a very low profile. Halsey was the crashing wave, the rushing stream; Spruance was the epitome of the expression “Still waters run deep.”

  Yet in these wild days of racing destroyers around the Pacific, these two men bonded and became best friends. Their wives and families did the same ashore. Fan Halsey and Margaret Spruance took to each other, and six-year-old William F. Halsey III found a playmate in six-year-old Edward Spruance. But here, too, they were opposites. The Halseys roared through life ashore with endless rounds of “boozy picnics, boisterous beach parties, and evening revels” that frequently left the Spruances awed and more often than not on the sidelines with studied self-restraint.15

  In the spring of 1921, Halsey’s squadron of nineteen destroyers, including Spruance in command of the Aaron Ward, was ordered on war games that included a simulated torpedo attack on four battleships sortieing from Long Beach. Texas, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Idaho were on station there as concrete evidence that the United States would brook no Pacific interference from Japan. As the senior division commander, Halsey took charge of the “attacking” destroyers and found himself in control of the largest fleet of his career thus far.

  Once the destroyers reached the starting point of the exercise, Halsey was free to operate as he saw fit. Accordingly, he split his command into two parallel columns about one thousand yards apart and led them toward the battleships at twenty-five knots, signaling as he did so for his ships to make smoke.

  Captain Pratt was on the bridge next to Halsey as an observer. Pratt raised an eyebrow and asked, “What do you intend to do?”

  “What’s the limit?” Halsey responded.

  “The sky,” Pratt replied, evidently not fully appreciating Halsey’s competitive nature.

  The two columns of destroyers rushed onward and intercepted the advancing line of battleships from both sides. As the destroyers fired their dummy torpedoes, they quickly turned away and ducked into the obscurity of the smoke screen. The battleships had hardly anticipated this close-in attack—and from both sides! But the problem in this simulation was that while the torpedoes indeed contained only dummy warheads, their compressed air–fuel mixture was itself subject to a lesser explosion if they struck their intended targets too early in their run. By the time Halsey’s trailing ships launched their torpedoes, the length of this run was down to only seven hundred yards.

  One torpedo rammed Texas, and the resulting concussion from the compressed air explosion jarred the battleship’s engine room and blew out the circuit breakers for most of its electrical gear. Two or more torpedoes exploded close to the Mississippi’s propellers and mangled them. A similar hit on the New Mexico ruptured some plating and flooded the ship’s paint locker. Only Idaho stood unscathed. “In a minute and a half Halsey’s destroyers had done a million and a half dollars’ worth of damage” in a mock attack that should have been a rude wake-up call to the battleship admirals.

  Instead, Pratt and Halsey were summoned aboard the flagship New Mexico and firmly told that in the next round, there would be no more close-in attacks. The destroyers must fire their dummy torpedoes from no less than five thousand yards. Thus handicapped, Halsey’s ships achieved only a few hits on the second day and the battleships were able to declare victory. Nonethele
ss, on returning to shore, the destroyers were greeted with a newspaper headline that blared, “Destroyers Decisively Defeat Battleships.”16

  But once again, a generation of senior admirals, whose careers had been largely won and honed aboard battleships, ignored the prophetic results. Coming at it from two very different perspectives, Billy Mitchell and Bill Halsey had both demonstrated serious threats to battleship might. In the future, torpedoes stealthily fired from over and under the waves, and airborne assaults from carrier-based planes were to pose far more of a threat than an opponent’s 16-inch guns.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Submarines

  After inspecting submarine operations throughout Europe, Chester Nimitz spent the winter of 1918–1919 in Washington on special duty in the office of the chief of naval operations as the resident expert on submarine design. The best part may have been that he was able to have his growing family—Catherine, young Catherine, and Chester junior—with him for a short time. A second daughter, Anna, who would be nicknamed “Nancy,” was born later in 1919.

  In the wake of World War I, the submarine service to which Nimitz had reluctantly reported in 1909 was enjoying an increased visibility and popularity. In the immediate postwar period, before pacifist budget cuts could take hold, forty-three O- and R-class boats were in commission, and fifty-one of the newer, larger S-class boats were coming down the ways. These S-boats were the first small step toward taking the American submarine beyond its initial role as a coastal defense and turning it into a long-range offensive weapon. The sheer number of these boats in commission gave many junior officers their first commands, just as Nimitz had realized a decade before.

  And while Nimitz focused on submarine design and engineering, those with a strategic sense for the future could not help but tally up wartime losses and find that for every U-boat lost by Germany, thirty-two Allied ships had gone to the bottom. The exact numbers showed that Germany had lost 178 U-boats, while sinking 5,708 Allied vessels, totaling 11 million tons. These astounding numbers, and the close margin by which destroyers and convoys had held these undersea predators at bay, were not lost on the victors, and they certainly would be remembered by the vanquished Germans in the years ahead.1