The Admirals Page 17
But to Halsey, who was used to maneuvering destroyers as if they were 16-foot powerboats, ship handling was ship handling. It really didn’t matter the size, as long as one understood the technique. That rationale may have been called into question one day when Halsey brought the 880-foot Saratoga into Coronado Roads at San Diego. He later claimed that it was an emergency, but he dropped the anchors while the Sara was still making 9 knots, backed full, and had the ship dead in the water by the time 75 fathoms of chain had paid out.25
Halsey was truly grateful for his command of the Saratoga, and he and King forged something of a mutual admiration society that had its roots in Halsey’s destroyer proficiency during the 1932 fleet maneuvers. Halsey was a guy who got things done and King definitely liked and respected that quality.
As much as King had a reputation for being cold, aloof, and impossibly demanding on many occasions, he also had a soft side. King’s papers are filled with letters to and from subordinates long since posted elsewhere or retired who admired him, and he always reciprocated with genuine warmth. When King was appointed chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics and accorded his first stars, one of those sending congratulations was a chief petty officer who had served under King years before. Writing from his current station at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, John N. LaChance told King that he had not been surprised to read of King’s promotion because “I think of you often as a great naval officer.” King responded in kind, telling LaChance, “I expect you, as I’ve told you before, to come to see me whenever you are in my vicinity. I have strong and pleasant recollections of our service together—and still feel that you are one of the best real Chief Petty Officers that I’ve ever known.”26
King also could be appreciative of those who helped his career. “I owe much, if not all, to my good friends, like yourself, who turned to and lent a hand,” King wrote Edward E. Spafford. The occasion was King’s appointment as aeronautics chief, and Spafford, a New Yorker and past national commander of the American Legion, was glad to have been of help but dubious about King’s career path in aviation. King reassured him, “Please do not think I am in a ‘blind alley’—that is not my view.”27
King definitely had a long-range career plan, and his three years as chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics was a key part of it. But in the depths of the Great Depression, and with naval appropriations of any sort tight, it didn’t help matters that working with Congress and testifying before its ponderous committees were not among King’s talents. He was the lone wolf, sure that he was right and totally bored by such bureaucratic rituals.
The navy’s guardian angel in the House, Naval Affairs Committee Chairman Carl Vinson, tried to help King along, but even Vinson couldn’t always save him from himself. After King testified one day about the importance of retaining flight pay for aviators, Vinson lobbed the admiral a softball question about what effect a pay cut would have on aviation morale. “I do not wish to be thought facetious, Mr. Chairman,” King replied, “but to be perfectly straightforward, as I wish to be, we are becoming so accustomed to these matters that I really think we could muster up another grin and bear it.”28 Less is usually more in such situations, but King never understood the need to corral his tongue.
Yet he did work well with Bill Leahy, then his counterpart at the Bureau of Navigation. Together they established the Naval Aviation Cadet Program, which recruited college graduates to take aviation training and then become aviators in the Naval Reserve. It was another unheralded step toward preparation for a global war. Together, too, Leahy and King continued to joust with Chief of Naval Operations Standley over the independence of the bureaus.
Where they differed was that Leahy seems to have enjoyed more frequent access to President Roosevelt, largely because of discussions of personnel. The lack of presidential association may have hurt King when it was time to rotate out of his bureau chief’s job and back to an operational command in 1936. There were only two seagoing jobs for an aviation flag officer, commander, Aircraft, Battle Force, a vice admiral who commanded the navy’s four carriers (Ranger had joined the fleet in 1934) and their aircraft squadrons; and commander, Aircraft, Base Force, a rear admiral who commanded the navy’s seaplane patrol squadrons, centered largely on the West Coast and in Hawaii.
As the only qualified aviator—never mind that he never flew solo—King should have had precedence over flag officers who were merely aviation observers. With characteristic force of personality, he lobbied for the Battle Force assignment and the three stars of a vice admiral, but he ran into opposition from both Admiral Standley and King’s Annapolis classmate Rear Admiral Adolphus Andrews, who had succeeded Leahy as chief of the Bureau of Navigation. Andrews “had no intention of allowing King to get three stars before he did,” and King lacked the presidential clout to do anything about it. The result was that King ended up still a rear admiral in command of the Base Force of seaplanes.29
But one thing was certain. Out of the economic chaos of the Great Depression, the growing uneasiness of the world order in both Europe and the Far East foreshadowed ominous events. Bill Leahy and Ernest King had gotten their first stars, and now they, and the entire United States Navy, would be increasingly pushed into positions of projecting power.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Projecting Power
After his years at the Naval War College and at sea with Admiral Robison gaining experience in fleet formations built around aircraft carriers, Commander Chester W. Nimitz was again detailed to an academic setting, but this time he was the teacher. Despite the overriding sentiment in the 1920s against the military, Congress bowed to the wishes of the Navy Department and in 1925 created the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps (NROTC). Bill Leahy was assigned to the Bureau of Navigation at the time and strongly supported the move. While the program’s initial funding was sparse, the NROTC quickly provided the navy with a nucleus for the expanded manpower and expertise that would be sorely needed a few years later.
Nimitz was one of six officers ordered to command sixty-man NROTC units at Harvard, Yale, Northwestern, the University of Washington, Georgia Tech, and the University of California at Berkeley. Nimitz drew the assignment at Berkeley and found that among his first duties was recruiting interested prospects to fill the sixty slots. In addition to their regular college courses, enrolled midshipmen took seamanship, navigation, engineering, and related courses and were eligible upon graduation for a commission in the Naval Reserve.
At first, Nimitz was leery that such a shore assignment might derail his chances for higher command, but with Admiral Robison as his mentor and others, including Bill Leahy in the Bureau of Navigation, becoming increasingly aware of his abilities, Nimitz need not have worried. In fact, the three years that the Nimitz family spent in Berkeley were among the happiest of their lives—even more so than those in Hawaii because the children were older.
Son Chet, who wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps at Annapolis, and young Catherine, increasingly called Kate to distinguish her from her mother, were into their teens, and Nancy wasn’t far behind. Not only did Nimitz find the cultural interaction with a university community stimulating—one of the rare occasions he was outside the close-knit navy fraternity—but he also had plenty of time for family activities, including vacations and camping trips into the nearby Sierras. His children would always remember him as very involved and hands-on, just as he was in his professional activities.
And if Bill Leahy had once grumbled that the navy had not adequately prepared him to write articulately, Nimitz made sure in grading his midshipmen’s papers that he corrected spelling and grammar as well as facts. As for his own advancement, he forged a bond with the university community, and Cal Berkeley in particular, that lasted all his life. He was promoted to the permanent rank of captain in 1927, and when his tour at Berkeley ended in 1929, his exemplary service and the high regard in which he was held—by civilian academics and fellow officers alike—left no question that Chester Nimitz was slated for continued
advancement.1
Nimitz went next to San Diego as commander, Submarine Division Twenty. He was forty-four and almost a quarter of a century out of Annapolis. When asked for a sketch of his career to date for a twenty-fifth-anniversary yearbook, he replied that he had enjoyed all his assignments because, he believed, “of my making it a point to become as deeply immersed and as interested in each activity as it was possible for me to become.” Indeed, he confessed to knowing “no other profession for which I would forsake my present one.”2
But in the early 1930s, the navy, as Bill Leahy had learned, was sailing choppy political seas. Captain Nimitz was next assigned to command the Rigel, a tender charged with watching over a fleet of about thirty-five out-of-commission destroyers in San Diego. The sight of these ships sitting idle rankled Nimitz, but the good news was that once again, he was able to have his family with him for an extended period. A third daughter, Mary, was born in 1931.
Chester and Catherine made it a point of parenting junior officers as well, just as they had done with NROTC midshipmen in Berkeley and young officers from the Brooklyn Navy Yard years before. This San Diego assignment also gave Nimitz occasion to indulge his passion for playing tennis and taking long hikes, occasionally in the company of Captain Raymond Spruance, then chief of staff to the commander, Destroyers, Scouting Force.3
But the payoff was coming. On October 16, 1933, Captain Nimitz assumed command of the heavy cruiser Augusta and sailed the ship to the Far East Station for duty as flagship of the Asiatic Fleet. Six hundred feet in length, with a beam of sixty-six feet and a displacement of nine thousand tons, Augusta and its sisters in the Northampton class, including the Houston, were capable of knifing through the water at better than 32 knots. Augusta, Maine, would try to claim the ship, but the cruiser had been sponsored by Evelyn McDaniel of Augusta, Georgia, and named for that southern city.
Commissioned only in 1931, the cruiser was the result of a building program that had proceeded while battleship construction was stymied by the limits of the Washington treaty. But after a hurried overhaul at the Bremerton Navy Yard in Washington State, and with most of the 735-man crew new to the ship, Nimitz the teacher had his work cut out for him. His manner was not to bark orders and intimidate with ultimatums, as Ernie King might have done, but rather to convey his expectations quietly yet firmly from top to bottom. Nimitz himself set the example of hard work, competence, and pride in oneself that he expected his subordinates to follow.
Nimitz’s teaching style was sometimes so understated as to be powerfully profound. The captain was keen on giving every officer and enlisted man “as much responsibility as he could handle” and never shied away from providing young ensigns experience at the conn. One day, coming into an anchorage, a young ensign named Odale D. “Muddy” Waters approached with far too much speed and “had to back the ship full power and lay out 90 fathoms of chain [540 feet] before he got her stopped, then had to heave back to 60 fathoms.” Captain Nimitz watched the entire procedure without a comment and then asked, “Waters, you know what you did wrong, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir, I certainly do,” replied Waters. “I came in too fast.”
Nimitz nodded in agreement—end of lesson. Waters later became a rear admiral.
But Nimitz was also never afraid to teach from his own experiences. Coming alongside the anchored oiler Pecos in exceptionally blustery winds, Nimitz himself took the conn. It seemed like a perfect landing until a freak gust sent the Augusta’s bow into the lifeboat davits of the Pecos and snagged an anchor just as the lines were being made secure. A quick strain on the number 3 line and a fortuitous shift of wind untangled the mess, but Nimitz quickly sent for the lieutenant who had been supervising the lines.
“Thompson,” Nimitz snapped without his usual calm, “what did I do wrong?”
E. M. “Tommy” Thompson gulped and then replied, “Well, sir, you were overconfident and misjudged the effect the wind would have on a ship riding lightly on the water.”
“That’s right,” Nimitz affirmed. “Now, Thompson, what should I have done?”
“Probably the safe thing to have done, sir, would have been to have gone ahead, drop the starboard anchor, and to have backed down on it.”
“That’s right,” Nimitz said with a scowl, “and, Thompson, don’t you ever forget it!” It was no coincidence that Thompson, too, became a rear admiral. He had a great teacher.4
The Asiatic Fleet was hardly a powerhouse—aside from the Augusta, it consisted of a squadron of destroyers, a squadron of submarines, and a collection of gunboats and auxiliary ships—and the chief duty of its admiral was to show the flag up and down the Chinese coast and from Manila to Yokohama. Per long-established procedures, these exercises moved north and south following the temperate climate. It was not entirely risk-free, because Japan continued its control of Manchuria and eyed more Chinese territory farther south, but social calls were the order of the day when in port.
The occasion Nimitz remembered most was a port call in Tokyo Bay in 1934 that coincided with the funeral of Admiral Togo, whom Nimitz had met on his 1905 visit to Japan as a passed midshipman. Foreign ships boomed salutes, flags flew at half-mast, and a delegation of the Augusta’s sailors and marines marched in the funeral procession. The following day, Nimitz was among those invited to the service at Togo’s modest cottage in the forest outside Tokyo. His opinion of the admiral continued to be one of high respect, and he never wavered in that view.
By the following spring, it was time for Nimitz to give up the Augusta and return to shore duty in Washington as assistant chief of the Bureau of Navigation. It was hard to say who was sadder at the parting, the crew or its captain. Nimitz’s eyes glistened as he said farewell and his junior officers accorded him the unusual honor of rowing him in a whaleboat to the liner that would carry him home.
“I think one can safely say,” recalled one of those officers, yet another of Nimitz’s protégés who would wear admiral’s stars, “that the Augusta had reached an absolutely unheard-of level of high moral, high pride, and competence at every level down to the lowliest mess cook.”5
Upon Nimitz’s arrival back in the United States, Chet, who by now was a midshipman at the Naval Academy, asked his father where he expected to get in the navy and how he was going to do it. His father unabashedly replied that he intended to follow the route he had always taken and do his very best at whatever he was assigned. He was confident that if he did so, his own road would someday lead to the office he said he would like to have—chief of naval operations.6
When Captain Nimitz reported to Washington and the Bureau of Navigation, Bill Leahy was heading to sea as a vice admiral and commander, Battleships, Battle Force. A year later, on March 30, 1936, Leahy was accorded the four stars of a full admiral and made commander, Battle Force, essentially the backbone of the U.S. Fleet. Under his command were fourteen battleships, nine cruisers, forty-three destroyers, eight minelaying destroyers, and the navy’s four aircraft carriers, the aging Langley, Saratoga (still under Bill Halsey’s command), Lexington, and Ranger. In all, Leahy was responsible for 78 ships; 2,762 officers; and 30,370 enlisted men.7
But Leahy’s time at sea, flying his four-star flag, was to be short-lived. Admiral Standley’s objections to the contrary, Franklin Roosevelt wanted Leahy to replace Standley as chief of naval operations, effective January 2, 1937. Leahy took the news in typical stride, with hints of both humility and nostalgia. He certainly recognized the honor of the post and that it signified his climb to the top of the navy pyramid. But his pleasure at the selection was also “tempered by a realization,” he acknowledged, “that it brings to an end a service at sea that commenced on board the frigate Constellation in June 1893 and that has in the forty-three intervening years provided splendid opportunities for service and adventure in peace and war in many parts of the world.”8
An article in Newsweek after Roosevelt announced his appointment called Leahy “gruff in voice, a strict disciplinarian, he dri
ves himself and everybody else.” The reporter was particularly impressed by the sixty-one-year-old Leahy’s endurance during the recent fleet maneuvers, when the need for the men to remain constantly on duty wore down some of his junior officers. It was said that “Old Bill can stick on the bridge for six weeks without sleep.” But the article also showed Leahy’s well-liked other side: “Off duty he is kindly, friendly, and as comfortable as an old shoe.”9
Leahy’s appointment as CNO depended, of course, on FDR’s reelection in November 1936, but that matter was never really in doubt. It was a Roosevelt landslide, and “in view of friendly personal relations of long standing with Frankyn [sic] Roosevelt, and a complete belief in his exalted ideals of service to the Nation,” Leahy wrote, “his election by an overwhelming majority of the electorate is particularly pleasing to me.” Still, Leahy’s innate conservatism could not help but show through. “Roosevelt at the present time,” Leahy confided to his diary, “is definitely a Liberal, and it is the hope of many of his friends that he can detach himself from radical members of his present entourage and incline his efforts more toward conservatism.”10
That was not going to happen, but there is no doubt that Leahy’s flag-rank rise and his increasing measure of influence derived in large part from FDR’s support. Roosevelt was most comfortable when working within a “good old boy network” of those he had known for a long time. That doesn’t mean that Roosevelt didn’t reach out to recommended new talent, but if he knew someone personally, as he did Leahy and Halsey, or was aware of someone’s accomplishments, such as King’s salvaging of the S-51, Roosevelt was more apt to pick that person over an unknown no matter how highly recommended.
Popular perception has long suggested that FDR favored the navy over the army, but when it came to budgets, deployments, and promotions, he was evenhanded as commander in chief. On an emotional level, however, Roosevelt’s combination inspection-fishing-vacation trips—such as he enjoyed aboard the cruiser Houston—were among his favorite occasions. And his long-standing relationships with the navy’s admirals, particularly the duty-minded Leahy, made him more comfortable having them around. This contrast is underscored by remembering that the army chief of staff from 1930 to 1935 was Douglas MacArthur. The general was still trying to emulate his father’s advance up Missionary Ridge during the Civil War, and his visits to the White House often took on the aura of a state visit. FDR was not intimidated by MacArthur—or anyone else—but neither was he terribly comfortable with him. When MacArthur left Washington for the Philippines and Malin Craig, whom Roosevelt did not know well, became army chief of staff, it was only natural that Roosevelt gravitated toward the loyal and understated Leahy as his chief military adviser.