The Admirals Read online

  And King put the best possible spin on the entire matter, immediately recognizing the potential of night operations. Among his other innovations during these maneuvers, he implemented combat air patrols (CAPs) circling overhead to protect his ship from enemy attacks. Competitive and hard-driving, he pushed his ship and men to their fullest and himself always one notch above that.

  Recollections of junior officers are replete with tales of King making mistakes or merely compounding problems with his thundering. Once he stormed to the flight deck to rearrange parked aircraft because he wanted more room for takeoffs and no one could do it to his satisfaction; by the time he was done, he had lost ten feet of space.

  Quite a few officers simply withered under King’s sharp demeanor. He was a force few could withstand, but those who did usually earned King’s begrudging respect. When a torpedo plane missed the flight deck and landed in the starboard gun gallery one afternoon, its pilot faced the inevitable summons to the bridge. His squadron commander, John J. Ballentine, made it there first.

  “Ballentine,” King barked, “what is wrong with your pilots?”

  “Nothing,” Ballentine replied. “Your ship is not into the wind, and until it is, I will not let any more of my pilots land.”

  After Ballentine stormed off the bridge, King adjusted Lexington’s course directly into the wind, and the recovery operations continued. But King remembered Ballentine. Later, when King returned to sea duty wearing admiral’s stars, he specifically requested that Ballentine become his operations officer.

  “Under King,” wrote his principal biographer, “the fit survived and developed into some of the Navy’s finest captains and admirals. The unfit were eliminated.” Still, there was another side of King, and the line he walked between them could sometimes be quite narrow. Aboard ship, King was sharp, demanding, and generally intolerant of anyone who didn’t follow regulations or anticipate his every command. Onshore, however, it was a different story.

  King never did anything halfway, and that included his partying. Scarcely had the Lexington docked after the Panama war games than King—despite days without sleep and the Prohibition laws—was ashore and in the back of a bar nursing a private bottle of bootleg Scotch. He was soon surrounded by a group of junior officers, and such events became an established norm. King called it “play time,” but such fraternization created potential problems. Aboard ship, King was the lord and master; ashore at parties, he was “Uncle Ernie.” His advice was, “You ought to be very suspicious of anyone who won’t take a drink or doesn’t like women.”15

  Fleet maneuvers the following year, 1932, were held in the warm waters around Hawaii. The general premise was a carrier-based air strike against Pearl Harbor and other installations on Oahu. The weather was atrocious, with high waves. Aircraft were slow to take off and equally slow to land on the pitching decks. Still, the “attack” was successful, and it set some minds to thinking.

  Lexington was ordered eastward shortly afterward to engage a threat from an “enemy” force that had transited the Panama Canal. King honed his tactics and chose to “attack” the opposing carrier near dusk when most of its planes had just returned from sorties and were on deck, unarmed and without fuel. The mission was judged a success, but the complete destruction of the “enemy” fleet was made possible by an aggressive torpedo attack led by destroyers under the command of William F. Halsey, Jr.

  Halsey had looked up to King ever since their days at Annapolis, when King had been the four-striper in command of the battalion and Halsey a lowly plebe. Their paths hadn’t crossed much in the intervening years—save for their days driving destroyers in the North Atlantic under Admiral Sims—as Halsey had stuck with destroyers while King had tried his hand first at submarines and then at carriers. But this close association during the 1932 fleet maneuvers seems to have brought Halsey to King’s attention as a man who got things done.16

  Prior to that, in between Halsey’s sea duty aboard destroyers, he had spent a year in Washington at the Navy Department’s Office of Naval Intelligence commanding, as Halsey told the story, an LSD—“a Large Steel Desk.” Writing about this year in his memoirs, Halsey made an interesting observation that some would say he should have remembered when a typhoon was bearing down on his fleet in the Philippine Sea. Saying that the function of Naval Intelligence was to “collect, coordinate, interpret, and disseminate,” Halsey professed that the most difficult step was the last. “It isn’t enough to get the right information to the right man at the right time,” he wrote; “you have to make sure he doesn’t let it molder in his ‘in’ basket.”17

  From Washington in September 1922, Halsey had been posted to the American embassy in Berlin as the naval attaché. It is difficult to imagine Bill Halsey in any sort of a diplomatic role, and a sense of his unease even emanates from photographs of him during this tenure, a sailor far more at home on the bridge of a warship than at a diplomatic reception. Finding conditions in postwar Germany physically spartan and socially resentful, Fan managed to endure the conditions with young Bill, but the Halseys soon sent daughter Margaret to boarding school in Switzerland.

  After leaving Berlin in July 1924, Halsey was back aboard destroyers for a year, showing the flag around Europe and the Mediterranean. Fan and young Bill joined Margaret in Switzerland for the duration. Then, in the fall of 1925, all the Halseys returned to the States, and Fan and the children settled in Asheville, North Carolina, while Bill reported for his lone nondestroyer sea duty during this period. In preparation for promotion to the rank of captain, he served as executive officer of the battleship Wyoming. Meanwhile, Fan put her own spin on all the moves navy wives endured by flatly asserting that she spent her time “buying and abandoning garbage cans all over the world.”

  After Bill’s promotion to captain in February 1927, there was yet another move—this one to Annapolis, where he was given command of the receiving ship at the Naval Academy, an aging salvage from the Spanish-American War named the Reina Mercedes. From this flagship, Halsey was responsible for every vessel in the academy’s fleet. The Reina Mercedes served as his living quarters, as well as barracks for enlisted men.

  Fan took one look at the dismal captain’s quarters and ordered an immediate overhaul. When she was finished, their “porch” on the afterdeck, with views down the Severn River to Chesapeake Bay, became one of the best entertaining spots on the base. The Halseys launched into their usual rounds of partying and young midshipmen added to the merriment by calling on seventeen-year-old Margaret. Life was good. The next three and a half years at Annapolis passed pleasantly and remained “one of the most delightful tours” in Halsey’s career.

  But those years also gave Halsey occasion to flirt with flying. In addition to commanding the academy’s ships, Halsey was in charge of its small aviation detail. When he expressed some reservations about being responsible for something he knew nothing about, the lieutenant commanding the detail had a quick response. “Fine! Let’s go flying!” They did, and Halsey loved it.

  Right then and there, Bill Halsey became a loud proponent of naval aviation. So loud, in fact, that after this tour at Annapolis was over, the Bureau of Navigation asked if he would like to take flight training at Pensacola. “I jumped at the chance,” he recalled, but then, to his chagrin, he failed the eye examination. Instead, he was ordered to command DESRON-14, a destroyer squadron of nineteen ships then attached to the Atlantic Fleet. Like it or not, he was still wedded to destroyers. And his commanding officer, the commander of Destroyers, Scouting Force, was to be Bill Leahy.18

  CHAPTER TEN

  First Stars

  By the spring of 1926, Captain William D. Leahy had put in three years with the Bureau of Navigation, and it was time for him to rotate to sea duty. Given his contacts in the bureau, Leahy should have had an inside track on his next assignment, but he was at one of the defining crossroads that all career officers face.

  The next year would mark the thirtieth since his graduation from Annap
olis. If fifty-one-year-old Leahy drew command of a minor vessel, he was almost assured that he would soon be on the retirement list as a captain. But if he was posted to command a capital ship, the odds were strongly in his favor that he was destined for flag rank. If that happened and he was accorded admirals’ stars, Leahy would join a line that might someday lead to the office of chief of naval operations or commander in chief, U.S. Fleet.

  When Leahy’s orders finally came through, they were for the battleship New Mexico. His future with the navy was secure. Commissioned in the closing days of World War I, New Mexico (BB-40) displaced 32,000 tons in its 624-foot length and mounted twelve 14-inch guns among four turrets. Despite being eight years old, the ship was largely state-of-the-art for battleships then on the navy’s rolls. In fact, because of the limitations imposed by the Washington Conference treaty—and obligingly followed by the United States—the grim truth from Leahy’s perspective was that the United States commissioned no new battleships between West Virginia (BB-48) in 1923 and North Carolina (BB-55) in 1941.

  Captain Leahy had grave misgivings about what this lull in construction meant for the navy’s future, particularly as tensions of one sort or another with Japan had been afloat almost his entire career, but he was delighted to move aboard New Mexico and take command. The battleship was the flagship for the commander of Battleship Division Four, but unlike Ernie King, Leahy didn’t seem to mind an admiral’s presence in the flag quarters. During part of Leahy’s tour, his executive officer was Commander John S. McCain. Together, they ran a taut ship, and New Mexico garnered fleet awards in gunnery, engineering, and overall efficiency.

  On one occasion, New Mexico was slated to conduct a full-power speed trial, both to test the efficiency of a recent overhaul and as part of fleet competitions. For the first twenty-two hours of the twenty-four-hour run, New Mexico surged smoothly through the seas at better than twenty-one knots. Then, with two hours to go, a heavy vibration shook the ship, indicating a bent or broken propeller.

  Just because Bill Leahy was usually reserved and quiet does not mean that he lacked a competitive instinct—far from it. A lesser captain might have slowed his ship and given up. Recognizing, however, that New Mexico “had an excellent chance to win… if the full-speed trial should be successful and no chance if the trial failed,” Leahy decided to maintain full speed. The shaking became so severe that the crew feared that a main mast might snap, but New Mexico charged through the final two hours and won the engineering trophy.1

  As Bill Leahy’s year aboard the New Mexico came to a close, he got the silver stars he sought and a top job to go with them. Promoted to rear admiral, he was assigned to be chief of the Bureau of Ordnance. The man with the long history of battleships and firepower was now the head of the navy’s department of big guns. One navy publication called him “a shark on gunnery.”2

  Leahy would be among the last of the big-gun battleship admirals to rise to the top. Those officers destined to keep pace and follow him were more attuned to the emerging roles of submarines and aircraft carriers, but for Leahy, his advancement to flag rank marked a steady rise up the rungs of the old navy hierarchy, from his duty aboard the Oregon to his coveted new membership in the elite club of admirals.

  And it was, particularly during the lean defense-spending years of the late 1920s and early 1930s, definitely an elite club. As cosmopolitan as a naval officer’s experiences might be—frequently taking him (and in those days it was only a masculine pronoun) to all corners of the globe—his personal friendships and those of his family were usually restricted to the United States Navy. It was a small, tight-knit circle, where there were strong bonds of camaraderie and loyalty, as well as inevitable competition and conflict. And the connecting thread was usually the United States Naval Academy. Assignments ashore and on ship came and went, but one’s academy classmates were forever. From Manila to Panama or Honolulu to Guantánamo Bay, the fraternity gathered just as if its members were still on the banks of the Severn.

  Prohibition was still in effect, and while Leahy had no qualms about taking a quiet nip in the privacy of his home, he certainly avoided the carousing crowds of which Ernie King and Bill Halsey were usually at the center. There was an oft-repeated, tongue-in-cheek admonishment that claimed “a naval officer never drinks. If he drinks, he doesn’t get drunk. If he gets drunk, he doesn’t stagger. If he staggers, he doesn’t fall. If he falls, he falls flat on his face with his arms under him so no one can see his stripes.”3

  In 1927, there were 8,944 officers in the United States Navy. When one reached the rank of commander, as Leahy, King, Nimitz, and Halsey had all done by 1918—albeit for Nimitz and Halsey, these were wartime ranks not made permanent until later—he was usually assured of remaining in the service until retirement after thirty years. The promising commanders were promoted to captain—something the foursome had all achieved by 1927—and then the captains were carefully evaluated for elevation to flag rank, as Leahy had just been, or put on the retirement list.

  When Leahy was accorded the stars of a rear admiral, he joined an elite group of active-duty admirals—every one a graduate of the Naval Academy. The academy certainly wasn’t an absolute requirement for flag rank, but between the Spanish-American War, when Annapolis increased its enrollment, and World War II, no nongraduate attained flag rank. Leahy realized that he was “the first of my Naval Academy date to reach flag rank, which is either something to have accomplished or extraordinarily good luck.” He was now assured of employment until he reached the mandatory retirement age of sixty-four, and quite possibly by then, he would reach the office of chief of naval operations (CNO).4

  In 1927, the CNO’s position was one of stature and prestige, but it was certainly not the powerful position it would become. Secretary Josephus Daniels’s pre–World War I reorganization of the navy’s hierarchy was still in place. There were eight largely independent bureaus with their bureaucratic abbreviations—Construction and Repair (BuC&R), Engineering (BuEng), Medicine and Surgery (BuMed), Navigation (BuNav), Ordnance (BuOrd), Yards and Docks (BuYard), Supplies and Accounts (BuSandA), and the new kid on the block, Aeronautics (BuAer). Each of the bureau chiefs was a chieftain within his own realm—fighting with his fellow chiefs for budget and other priorities—and the chief of naval operations was merely the primus inter pares, or “first among equals.”

  Within Leahy’s Bureau of Ordnance, the battleship was still king. But the continuing adherence of the United States to the restrictions of the Washington treaty meant that no new battleships were coming down the ways. What’s more, some isolationists and antimilitary types claimed that the limits of the treaty were only caps not to be surpassed and that it was just fine if naval strength fell well below those levels. In fact, opposition to the military in general during the late 1920s was so strong that senior officers in both the navy and army were ordered to wear civilian suits instead of uniforms if they were on duty in Washington. Too much braid showing was judged to be a bad thing.

  Attempting to increase fleet strength, the navy’s General Board—essentially an advisory group of senior admirals who were putting in time until retirement—battled the Coolidge and Hoover administrations’ political opposition to all but a minimum of defense spending. Efforts came to a head at events surrounding the London Naval Conference of 1930. Admiral Leahy had to step adroitly to avoid being caught in the crossfire. If battleships had been the focus of the Washington Conference of 1921, cruisers were in the forefront in London.

  Aside from dickering with Great Britain and Japan on overall ratios, the American delegation found itself divided on whether heavy or light cruisers best served its purposes. While the British sought a larger number of 5,000- to 6,000-ton “light” cruisers mounting 6-inch guns, most American representatives favored the 10,000-ton “heavy” cruisers mounting 8-inch guns, which would be more self-reliant in the vast distances of the Pacific and equally useful should the need arise in the Atlantic.

  While the prep
onderance of navy brass supported heavy cruisers, President Herbert Hoover tapped Admiral William V. Pratt, then commander in chief, U.S. Fleet, to be his administration’s chief spokesman. Pratt—who had earlier taught destroyer tactics to Bill Halsey—sought compromise with the British by recommending eighteen heavy cruisers—instead of the twenty-three championed by the General Board—and allocating the remaining tonnage to light cruisers, on the theory that they were not necessarily unsuited to Pacific operations.

  This theory was not unreasonable, but when the U.S. Senate ratified the results of the London Conference in July 1930, the General Board cried foul and asserted that Admiral Pratt had sold out the U.S. Navy to appease the British. Chief of Naval Operations Charles F. Hughes, a Leahy mentor as well as the admiral who had once advised King to take more risks in his career, was particularly incensed. Leahy mirrored Hughes’s thinking that the treaty granted Japan and Great Britain “advantages that they had not previously possessed… [and] was not advantageous to our National defense.”5

  Although the treaty gave Japan parity with the United States in submarines, it also showed how idealistic negotiators were in thinking that they could put the offensive power of the submarine back in the box and outlaw unrestricted submarine warfare. It decreed that “except in the case of persistent refusal to stop on being duly summoned, or of active resistance to visit or search, a warship, whether surface vessel or submarine, may not sink or render incapable of navigation a merchant vessel without having first placed passengers, crew and ship’s papers in a place of safety.” For these purposes, the ship’s boats were “not regarded as a place of safety unless the safety of the passengers and crew is assured, in the existing sea and weather conditions, by proximity of land, or the presence of another vessel which is in a position to take them on board.”6