The Admirals Read online

  “You are sure to be compared with others that have taken the hard knocks of the service and have come through with credit,” Hughes lectured; “you would be surprised how your record of service is looked upon.” Then Hughes offered some pointed advice that no doubt echoed around the halls of King’s comfortable quarters: “Get a job at sea where you can do some of the drudgery of the service.”

  For one of the very few times in his calculating career, King was genuinely taken aback and momentarily cowed. He had indeed mapped out his career long ago; he had indeed done his share of plotting for the best assignments; but he had, after all, also done his time on the navy’s requisite rungs of command, not the least of which was his recent, inglorious year on the beef boat.

  In King fashion, he replied to Hughes thoroughly, but without the sharp arrogance of his usual writing. Admitting that he had always looked to his future, King told the admiral that he had nonetheless “never, in any degree, knowingly avoided or shirked any duty of any kind.” If his staff assignments with Admirals Osterhaus and Mayo had been plums, it was because they had selected him. Defensively, he reviewed the remainder of his assignments and pronounced himself “not unfitting for future usefulness.” Nevertheless, in a show of rare humility, he “promised to heed Hughes’s friendly warning.”12

  This exchange with Admiral Hughes may well have been weighing on King’s mind a few months later when, in late September, he and Mattie took a week’s leave and drove through New England to view the fall colors. Out of touch with his office and the daily papers, King was greeted on his return by his daughters, one of whom immediately exclaimed, “Daddy, wasn’t it just awful about the loss of the S-51?”

  Several days before, on the morning of September 25, 1925, S-51 had put to sea for engineering trials in Block Island Sound, southeast of New London. S-51 was running on the surface under diesel power late that evening when the lights of the steamer City of Rome came into view well astern. By all reports, the bridge officers on the steamer also saw the white navigation light atop the sub’s conning tower, although there was some controversy over whether or not the sub’s red and green running lights were visible.

  Nevertheless, in one of those freak “how in the world could this happen?” accidents, the City of Rome plowed onward, the S-51 and the steamer both altered course very late in the process—turning toward each other rather than away—and the City of Rome rammed the sub and tore a thirty-foot gash in its port side. The boat quickly filled with water and sank with thirty-four officers and crew. Only three men managed to escape the nightmare.

  Recriminations flew from both sides. The steamship company charged that “rookies” were in command of the sub at the time of the collision; the navy wondered how the captain of the City of Rome could have failed to radio a report of the collision for almost two and a half hours, conduct only a cursory search for survivors, and then steam nonchalantly on his way.

  In an unofficial note to an Annapolis classmate then at the Naval War College, King was particularly blunt. “All hands here [in New London] are deeply resentful,” King reported, “over the performances of this ‘road hog of the sea’ [City of Rome], whose criminal stupidity and incompetence have caused the utterly needless waste of valuable lives.”

  As commandant of the submarine school, King was not in the direct chain of command for the S-51, but he was certainly part of the close fraternity. When asked if it was possible that some of the crew might still be alive, King was quoted in the New York Times as saying, “Men cling to life under incredible conditions.”13

  There were to be no other survivors, but King was ordered to get involved directly as the officer in charge of the salvage operations. Never mind that King had no particular salvage experience. The navy was determined to blunt public criticism of the incident and prove to skeptical civilian salvage operators that the submarine could indeed be raised from a depth of 130 feet. The operation would be dicey, and it would be watched carefully. The navy’s prestige—and suddenly King’s, too—was on the line.

  According to one source, “It was the first time in his career that he had received orders without negotiating in advance and without weighing how they would affect his career.”14 Perhaps Admiral Hughes had been right after all. King hesitated at first when the telephone call came, but then quickly avowed that he would be glad to lead the operation. It would not be easy.

  King assembled a fleet of salvage vessels, including the minesweeper Falcon, and a willing group of very brave navy divers. They were led by Edward Ellsberg, who would go on to a distinguished career in salvage operations and write many volumes on the subject. But no part of the operation was yet established textbook procedure. Falcon moored directly over the sunken sub but took repeated poundings in the open waters east of Block Island. Divers previously limited to about 90 feet of water pushed their own limits and that of their equipment and probed the 130-foot depths. The plan was to pump compressed air into the sub’s watertight compartments, attach eight giant pontoons to its hull, and then lift.

  But winter was not far away. The Navy Department kept pressing King to complete the job as soon as possible, but by mid-December, gale-force winds, choppy seas, and freezing temperatures conspired to force a delay until spring. King spent the next few months in limbo, wondering what he had gotten himself into. He was scheduled to return to sea duty in the summer of 1926 regardless of the S-51 operations. Bill Leahy, nearing the end of his three-year tour at the Bureau of Navigation as a detail officer, wrote King in mid-February proposing command of the transport Henderson. It was hardly the cruiser command King sought, but it wasn’t exactly a beef boat.

  King replied to Leahy with an abundance of caution. “It seems to me that I am in a dilemma,” King confessed, “chiefly on account of the job of raising the S-51.” He didn’t consider himself indispensable to completing the task—at least he didn’t say so to Leahy—but King did stress that the job was “about halfway to completion” and that he was “thoroughly familiar with all the problems involved, and feel that I should finish it, both as a matter of professional pride and for the good of my service reputation, in the spirit of finishing what you have begun.”15 Admiral Hughes’s criticism may well have continued to ring in his ears.

  King had gotten himself into a “damned if he did, damned if he didn’t” situation. He could leave the S-51 salvage operations early and risk being called a quitter, or he could see them through, gamble on their outcome, and take whatever assignment might be available when they were finished.

  Leahy confirmed that King was unlikely to get a desired command after salvaging S-51, but King chose to stick with it, and he returned with his salvage flotilla to the unruly waters of Block Island Sound in mid-April 1926. It was slow work, particularly learning how to operate the eight pontoons as a team rather than independently breaching whales. Finally, on June 21, with plenty of newspaper reporters circling the scene to report on their efforts, the salvage team was ready to attempt to lift the sub the following morning.

  But then a bitter summer storm swept in from sea. King decided to postpone the operations only to have S-51 take on a mind of its own and bob to the surface, tangling lines and bouncing off pontoons in the process. As the storm gained strength, King decided that the only solution was to sink the sub again to prevent it from breaking apart. As towering waves battered the sub and surrounding salvage ships, navy divers—whom King would later praise far beyond his normal regard for subordinates—braved the waters to open the vents on the pontoons and send the entire mess back to the bottom.

  By the time the storm had blown through and the waters calmed, King was ready to try again, but the diving supervisor suddenly lost his nerve. There was no turning back now, of course, and King sent the man ashore and pressed on with others willing to take the risks. At last, on the afternoon of July 5, S-51 bobbed to the surface of the Atlantic and stayed there. What remained was a long tow, still supported by the pontoons, to the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
r />   The appearance of the raised sub and King’s accompanying flotilla caused something of a sensation along the East River as it made its final port. It also unleashed a media frenzy that had been held in abeyance while the outcome of the operation was in doubt. The navy had gotten the job done, and King and his men in turn got the lion’s share of the praise. King, Ellsberg, and the commander of the Falcon received the Distinguished Service Medal (the navy’s second-highest decoration), and the principal divers were awarded the Navy Cross. King had gambled and won. He received national publicity, and his reputation within the navy suddenly skyrocketed. He was now a permanent captain, and clearly head and shoulders above many of his contemporaries. The sky was the limit.16

  CHAPTER NINE

  Aircraft Carriers

  The first airplane had barely made it into the air when visionaries started talking about shipboard takeoffs and landings. Shortly after the Wright brothers’ 1903 flight, a French inventor named Clément Ader made some rather startling predictions. Ader’s early aircraft models had done little more than bounce along the ground, but that didn’t stop him from espousing the concept of aircraft carriers in a 1909 book promoting military aviation.

  “An airplane-carrying vessel is indispensable… [and] will be constructed on a plan very different from what is currently used,” Ader prophesied. “First of all, the deck will be cleared of all obstacles. It will be flat, as wide as possible without jeopardizing the nautical lines of the hull, and it will look like a landing field…. The speed of these ships should at least be that of cruisers and even exceed it in order to escape them.”1

  The first step toward this realization occurred on November 14, 1910. Aircraft pioneer Glenn Curtiss and his civilian test pilot, Eugene Ely, hoisted a Curtiss pusher-type biplane onto a wooden platform constructed over the bow of the cruiser Birmingham. The platform was 83 feet long and 22 feet wide, and it canted down toward the bow at a 5-degree angle. Originally, the plan was for the Birmingham to steam across Hampton Roads and provide a little wind streaming over the wings to help with lift, but low, overcast skies forced a postponement, and the ship dropped anchor to await better weather.

  Shortly after three that afternoon, the skies hinted at a brief respite, and Ely climbed into the pilot’s seat. Scarcely had the Birmingham’s anchor chains begun to rumble and clang as a signal that the ship was getting under way, when another bank of clouds started to descend. Ely decided that under way or not, he would wait no longer, and he gunned the plane down the short ramp. Off the bow it went, but as Ely fought for any measure of altitude, the spindly craft dropped farther and farther until it hit the flat surface of the water with a smack.

  Ely got a lucky bounce back into the air and kept going, but the impact cracked his twin propellers, which caused the airplane to vibrate violently. Still, it was enough. Eugene Ely was airborne and had just made history with the first takeoff from a ship. Taking no more chances, he turned toward Willoughy Spit and gently set the plane down in the sand. Less than two months later, it was time to attempt to reverse the process.

  Curtiss and Ely took their aircraft to the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, near San Francisco, where the cruiser Pennsylvania (recommissioned in 1912 as Pittsburgh to free the state name for a new battleship) had been outfitted with a wooden platform over its afterdeck. This one was a little longer and wider than Birmingham’s—120 feet by 30 feet—because Ely was going to attempt a landing. Ropes weighted by sandbags on each end were strung across the makeshift flight deck. Ely’s landing gear was outfitted with hooks to snag the ropes and slow the plane. A final “crash barrier” of canvas was stretched across the end of the platform to stop pilot and plane just in case the hooks didn’t catch the ropes. In its most rudimentary form, this is the same basic system that is still used to land carrier-based aircraft a century later.

  And it worked. Shortly before noon on January 18, 1911, while the Pennsylvania sat at anchor in San Francisco Bay, Ely came buzzing toward its stern despite a ten-knot tailwind. He caught the lines and slowed to a stop. “Oh boy!” exclaimed his wife, Mabel, who was on board. “I knew you could do it.”

  While the Pennsylvania’s captain took them below for lunch, the platform was cleared of its arresting gear and the Curtiss turned around in preparation for takeoff. After lunch, Ely did just that, completing the first successful landing and takeoff from a ship. The navy was intrigued enough to detail Lieutenant Theodore Gordon “Spuds” Ellyson to Curtiss’s aviation camp at North Island, San Diego, to learn to fly and become Naval Aviator No. 1.2

  It would be a while, however, before the United States Navy embraced the new technology that Ely had pioneered. Because of the demands of World War I, it was Great Britain that modified a number of existing ships to carry airplanes. Britain also laid down the keel of HMS Hermes, the first aircraft carrier built specifically for that purpose. But the vessel was not launched until the fall of 1919, and, given postwar economies as well policy debates such as the Washington Disarmament Conference, the ship, with its bow-to-stern flight deck and an offset, “island” superstructure, was not commissioned until 1923. “To an officer used to destroyers,” recalled Bill Halsey after he first laid eyes on the Hermes at Malta, “she was an off-center, ungainly bucket, something a child had started to build and had left unfinished.”3

  By then, the U.S. Navy had commissioned a converted carrier of its own. The Jupiter was originally launched in 1912 as a collier and saw most of its initial service tending to the Atlantic Fleet. The ship hauled coal to Europe to facilitate the postwar rush of returning doughboys and then reported to the navy yard at Norfolk for a complete makeover. A flat flight deck was built over its 542-foot length from bow to stern, but with no island or superstructure above it, giving quick rise to the nickname “the Covered Wagon.”

  Recommissioned in 1922 as Langley—to honor the deceased astronomer and aviation pioneer Samuel P. Langley—the ship had two obvious problems: it was neither very large nor very fast. Its flight deck was cramped, and the old collier’s engines maxed out at 15 knots even with its lighter load of planes instead of coal. But the Langley was to serve one undeniable purpose. As the next generation of aircraft carriers slid down the ways, they would be manned by pilots and crews who more often than not had learned their basic operational skills aboard it.4

  Pioneer though the Langley was, the converted collier was only a stopgap as an aircraft carrier. Once the treaty limiting battleship tonnages was signed, the U.S. Navy looked to its shipyards and found two hulls that had originally been laid down as battleships. Battle Cruiser CC-1 was under construction at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts, and Battle Cruiser CC-3 was taking shape at the New York Shipbuilding Corporation in Camden, New Jersey. Under the treaty, these couldn’t be launched as battleships. So on July 1, 1922, the order was given to complete both ships as aircraft carriers. They were launched in 1925 and commissioned within weeks of each other late in 1927. (A ship has three dates of significance in its construction: the date it is “laid down”—construction starts on its keel; the date of its launching and christening—it slides down the ways and floats; and the date it is commissioned—considered operational and entered on the U.S. Navy rolls as an active-duty ship.)

  CC-1 became the carrier Lexington (CV-2), and CC-3 was christened Saratoga (CV-3). Lexington displaced a beefy 41,000 tons and was 888 feet long with a 105.5-foot beam. Saratoga had less armor plating and weighed a respectable 33,000 tons, with the same dimensions. Both carriers could more than double the speed of the Langley, churning along at 34 knots when required, and carried a complement of eighty-one aircraft.5

  From the hands-on command experience of building a submarine base, Chester Nimitz was ordered to report to the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. His record there proved that his high standing at Annapolis was no fluke. As much of a doer as he was a mechanic, Nimitz was also well suited to devouring a full range of books and papers on tactics, strategy, and military history.
He found academic life stimulating and later termed his year in Newport “one of the truly important assignments of my career.”

  To be sure, there were war games on a huge plotting board—almost invariably with Japan as the aggressor in the Pacific—but there was also keen scrutiny of the fleet tactics employed in the Battle of Jutland. Whatever else could be said about the movements of the British and German fleets there, it was well acknowledged that both formations had been extraordinarily cumbersome and complex. The cruising formation of the British fleet, for example, deployed twenty-four battleships in six columns abeam, with screens of destroyers and cruisers extending over twenty miles. Turning such a multilegged formation in unison, let alone deploying it into battle lines, was problematic at best.

  The president of the Naval War College overseeing these discussions in 1922 was none other than Admiral William S. Sims, who had already influenced Ernie King’s and Bill Halsey’s development of destroyer techniques, not to mention the convoy system. When Sims spread his war games fleet across the plotting board, he introduced aircraft carriers to the mix—even though Lexington and Saratoga were still months away from commissioning—and he argued that the aircraft carrier would replace the battleship as the navy’s capital ship. The reason was that carriers presented a 360-degree range of firepower via their aircraft that far outdistanced the radius of a battleship’s guns. The battleship sailors scoffed in disbelief, much as they had done at Sims’s initial World War I arguments for antisubmarine warfare and convoys, but that did not stop Sims from envisioning future battles between surface fleets hundreds of miles apart that would attack only with carrier-based planes.