The Admirals Page 22

  Weapons, tanks, and aircraft, such as the new B-17 bomber and the P-40 fighter, were also coming off assembly lines in increasing numbers. Ads encouraged young men to join their favorite branch of the armed forces, and if patriotism itself wasn’t enough of an inducement, FDR signed the Selective Training and Service Act into law and required registration for a “peacetime” draft. America was girding for war on the home front as well as at its far-flung Pacific outposts and on the stormy seas of the North Atlantic.

  In the summer of 1941, Roosevelt froze Japanese assets in the United States and instituted an embargo of American oil, steel, and other strategic exports to Japan in an attempt to slow its war-making capabilities—exactly the action Leahy had urged four years before in the wake of the Panay attack. Now, this had the effect of increasing the urgency Japan felt to strike southward, beyond its continuing involvement in China, and control the rubber, oil, and other natural resources of Southeast Asia—threatening to envelop China and consume British interests in Malaya and Burma in the process.

  There was a long-standing sentiment in the American military that something was about to happen, but there was no strong consensus as to what, when, or certainly where. “The three ring circus simply enlarges every day,” CNO Stark wrote Admiral Bloch at the Fourteenth Naval District in Honolulu in July. Stark had just told Kimmel that he had ordered the Asiatic Fleet in the Philippines to lay mines and stretch antisubmarine nets. “This perhaps will tell you better than anything else,” Stark told Bloch, “my feeling that most anything may happen in the Far East at any time.”31

  Bloch turned around and pleaded with Nimitz that “practically every district has been supplied with officers of greater experience and ability than the Fourteenth Naval District has.” With personnel stretched thin and forced to rotate officers and men of even marginal experience around the fleet, Nimitz was hearing much the same thing from every other district and command. “It looks to me as though any day we may be in the wrangle,” Bloch stressed, before wishing Nimitz himself back with the fleet. “I think it would be an excellent idea,” Bloch concluded, “to have one, Chester Nimitz, out here in command of one of the important task groups.”32

  By November 1941, events were moving forward with almost alarming speed. “Wake Island is making splendid progress and if you can hold off unpleasantness until after April or May, I believe that we will have enough harbor completed to get a thirty-foot ship into a protected anchorage,” Bloch reported to Stark.33

  But there would be no holding off. On November 27, based on intercepts of Japanese messages, the War and Navy departments sent what came to be called their “war warning” to all commands: “Negotiations with Japan looking toward stabilization of conditions in the Pacific have ceased and an aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days.” The American bases in the Philippines—the legacy of Admiral Dewey—would likely be in the way of any Japanese thrust southward, but there was no telling how far east the Japanese navy might move to protect its eastern flank.

  That same day at Pearl Harbor, Kimmel and Halsey held a long strategy session with Army Lieutenant General Walter C. Short, commanding land forces in Hawaii, and members of their respective staffs. At issue was the ordered reinforcement of aircraft to Wake and Midway islands. Short wanted to send the best available, the army’s new P-40s, but Halsey was quick to point out that army pilots were forbidden to fly more than fifteen miles from shore. What good would they be in protecting an island? Halsey grumbled. “We need pilots who can navigate over water.”

  It was decided that Halsey would sail immediately with Enterprise and deliver Major Paul A. Putnam’s Marine Fighting Squadron 211 of F4F Wildcats to the more distant and potentially dangerous destination of Wake. Later that afternoon, Halsey sat alone with Kimmel talking about possible outcomes. There was a strong likelihood that Halsey would encounter elements of the Japanese navy—even if only to spot a snooping periscope or to be overflown by reconnaissance planes. Knowing that any overt act might precipitate just the sort of undeclared war that King was fighting in the Atlantic, or worse, Halsey asked Kimmel bluntly, “How far do you want me to go?” Kimmel looked at his good friend and snapped, “Goddammit, use your common sense!”34

  So it was that it came to be December 6, 1941. In Vichy, Admiral Leahy pondered the collapse of the last remnants of a free France. Aboard the Augusta in Narragansett Bay, Admiral King stewed about fighting an undeclared war with one arm tied behind his back. In Washington, Admiral Nimitz took a break from manpower shortages and walked his dog past the Japanese embassy. And somewhere west of Pearl Harbor, Admiral Halsey nervously scanned the empty skies for an attack he felt certain would come. Tomorrow would be Sunday, December 7, 1941.

  PART III

  ADMIRALS

  1941–1945

  No fighter ever won his fight by covering up—by merely fending off the other fellow’s blows. The winner hits and keeps on hitting even though he has to take some stiff blows in order to be able to keep on hitting.

  —ADMIRAL ERNEST J. KING, Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet, 1942

  Nimitz, King, and Spruance on board Spruance’s Fifth Fleet flagship, the cruiser Indianapolis (CA-35), in the Marianas, July 18, 1944. (National Archives, 80-G-287121)

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Searching for Scapegoats and Heroes

  Several hundred miles north of the Hawaiian island of Oahu, the big aircraft carrier slowly turned into the wind and began to launch its planes. In the predawn light, they climbed into squadron formations and streaked south to attack Wheeler and Hickam army airfields and the naval base at Pearl Harbor. The result was complete surprise. Actual damage, however, was limited to the wounded pride of the defenders. This was the morning of March 29, 1938, and the planes were from the American carrier Saratoga, operating under the command of Vice Admiral Ernest J. King as part of Fleet Problem XIX maneuvers. Almost four years later, the tactics would be largely the same, but the parties and results quite different.1

  The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Sunday, December 7, 1941, became one of those indelible generational markers. Everyone of age to understand would always remember where he or she was when the news crackled out of a radio or sprawled across the front page of a newspaper. The magnitude of the attack was sobering, but it was the long-planned, secretive manner in which it was executed—without a declaration of war and even as tenuous diplomatic relations still existed—that truly enraged the American people. Franklin D. Roosevelt had been slowly chipping away at American isolationism for years, but in two hours on a Sunday morning, Japan finished his task. America stood incensed and united in purpose as never before. It was inevitable, however, that in the chaos that followed, there would be a search for scapegoats as well as heroes.

  Vice Admiral Bill Halsey was having a second cup of coffee in his flag quarters aboard the Enterprise as the carrier neared Oahu after its delivery of marine fighter planes to Wake Island. Earlier that morning, Enterprise had launched eighteen of its own planes to fly ahead to Pearl Harbor and land at the naval air station on Ford Island. The phone from the bridge rang, and Halsey’s flag secretary, Lieutenant H. Douglass Moulton, answered it. “Admiral,” Moulton exclaimed, “the staff duty officer says he has a message that there’s an air raid on Pearl!”

  Halsey leaped from his chair. “My God, they’re shooting at my own boys! Tell Kimmel!”

  For reasons of radio silence, Enterprise had not notified Pearl Harbor of the inbound planes, and Halsey assumed a dreadful mistake in identification had occurred. It was actually much worse. Just then, Halsey’s communications officer burst into his cabin and handed him a dispatch from Kimmel to all ships: “Air raid on Pearl Harbor X This is no drill.” Enterprise went to general quarters.2

  It was early afternoon Washington, D.C., time and Rear Admiral Chester Nimitz was at home enjoying a radio broadcast of the New York Philharmonic. Suddenly, a flash bulletin interrupted the program announcing that the Japanese had bombed
Pearl Harbor. Nimitz barely had time to grab his overcoat when his aide, Captain John F. Shafroth, Jr., telephoned to say that he was on his way to the Navy Department and would pick up the admiral en route. Chester kissed Catherine good-bye and went out the door telling her, “I won’t be back till God knows when.”3

  Aboard the cruiser Augusta in Narragansett Bay, a marine orderly delivered a priority message with the news to Admiral Ernest J. King’s chief of staff. It was immediately passed on to the admiral, who read it without comment. The political constraints under which his fleet had been operating in the North Atlantic for the past six months were about to be removed. The remainder of the day off Newport was eerily calm as King waited for the summons he knew would come.

  Nimitz telephoned early the next day and passed on verbal orders to King to report to Washington immediately. King and his aide, Lieutenant Commander Harry Sanders, left the Augusta dressed in civilian clothes to appear as inconspicuous as possible and boarded the afternoon express train from Boston to Washington. Civilian attire or not, the tall, ramrod-straight King was a hard man to miss. A navy enlisted man stared at him across the Pullman car for a long time before finally getting up his courage to ask, “Aren’t you Admiral King?” The admiral obliged the sailor with a requested autograph.4

  Several hours earlier, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had gone before a joint session of Congress and labeled the events of December 7 a day of “infamy.” He asked for a declaration of war against Japan. In Vichy, France, where a light snow had been falling, Ambassador William D. Leahy listened to FDR’s speech on the BBC. The president’s voice boomed over the radio waves and gave Leahy “a dramatic picture of the most powerful nation of the world embarking on an all out war to destroy the bandit nation of the Orient.” Leahy professed no doubt that the result would be “the destruction of Japan as a first class sea power regardless of how much time and treasure are required to accomplish that end.”5

  In the beginning, however, Washington was in complete disarray. With Roosevelt’s remarks still reverberating over the airwaves, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox left on a hurried inspection trip to Pearl Harbor. Part politician and part newspaperman, Knox sensed that some immediate showing of the administration’s flag on the scene was essential to public morale and confidence going forward. Knox declined to stay with Admiral Kimmel, saying that such contact might appear to prejudice his findings.

  Arriving at the Navy Department on the same day Secretary Knox departed for the Pacific, King roamed its corridors, attended meetings there and at the White House, and saw to the immediate needs of his Atlantic Fleet. But some suspected much more was afoot, and there occurred one of those apocryphal King stories. The admiral was making his way along a corridor on the third floor of the Navy Department when he encountered Captain John L. McCrea, soon to be FDR’s naval aide. McCrea was well known to King, having once skippered an accompanying destroyer when King had command of the Lexington.

  “Admiral,” asked McCrea, “is this story true that I hear about you?”

  “Well, John, I don’t know,” replied King, deadpan. “Which story is it?”

  “They tell me,” McCrea went on, “you were heard to say recently, ‘Yes, damn it, when they get in trouble they send for the sons of bitches.’ ”

  King couldn’t help but smile. “No, John,” he replied, “I didn’t say it. But I will say this: If I had thought of it, I would have said it.”6

  King remained in Washington for just four days, during which time Germany declared war on the United States and Congress reciprocated. King returned to Newport before being ordered back to Washington on December 16. Secretary Knox was already back from Pearl Harbor after a whirlwind six days, a flying visit that made his jaunt around the Caribbean with King the year before look like a pleasure cruise. Knox wasted no time reporting to the White House and telling FDR what had to be done.

  First, Knox was convinced that Admiral Kimmel and his army counterpart, Lieutenant General Walter C. Short, had to be relieved; there was simply no way that either officer could command confidence from either superiors or subordinates. Second, with a wounded, two-ocean navy now facing an unlimited two-ocean war, there needed to be one operational boss in charge of all fleets; henceforth, a commander in chief, U.S. Fleet, must supervise the three admirals in command of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Asiatic fleets (the latter admittedly quickly disintegrating). Finally, there had to be an immediate board of inquiry to determine the failures of the Pearl Harbor defenses and, undoubtedly, find the requisite parties to blame.

  Roosevelt agreed with all points and immediately turned to who should have supreme command of the fleets. The president seems not to have considered recalling Leahy from France to take the post, at least in part because his mission there was critical. CNO Stark was himself not free from the Pearl Harbor fallout. Who else was there? Knox was ready with what to him was the only answer. There was only one man, in Knox’s opinion, who had demonstrated on the front lines of the North Atlantic that he got things done and who had been totally out of the Pearl Harbor chain of command. Eighteen months before, he had been consigned to the General Board and reluctantly counting the months until his retirement. Now Admiral Ernest J. King was about to be appointed commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet.

  Roosevelt and Knox left the question of Kimmel’s replacement until a second conversation the following morning, but that too became obvious. They needed a man who was well versed in both ships and men and who was also untainted by the recent disaster. “Tell Nimitz,” commanded Roosevelt, “to get the hell out to Pearl and stay there till the war is won.”7

  No one seems to have asked why Nimitz instead of Halsey. Roosevelt and Knox knew both men, and they were themselves good judges of men. Halsey, with three stars on his collar and arguably the navy’s top carrier commander save perhaps King, would seem to have been a logical choice. Halsey was, in fact, senior to Nimitz by a year at the academy, and his permanent flag rank predated Nimitz’s by almost four months.

  At a minimum, Knox may have swayed FDR toward Nimitz because he knew Nimitz better from his stint at the Bureau of Navigation, during which time Halsey was sailing around the Pacific. But in a far broader sense, both FDR and Knox may have looked at the situation in the Pacific and decided that although there would be plenty of brawling for a man like Halsey, wringing victory from the shards of defeat would require something more.

  King reported to the White House later that day and conferred with Roosevelt and Knox, as well as CNO Stark. Never one to soft-pedal an opinion, King voiced a number of concerns. In a two-ocean global war, the commander in chief must command from a shore headquarters in Washington, not some seagoing battleship, no matter what tradition dictated. It was also critical that a clear delineation be made between the new commander in chief position and Stark’s continuing responsibilities as CNO.

  Then there was the matter of perception. King had always focused on perception—if he looked and sounded like an admiral, junior officers would tremble in his presence. Consequently, the perception of the established acronym for commander in chief, U.S. Fleet—CINCUS—just wouldn’t do. Its pronunciation, “sink us,” was hardly appropriate after what had just occurred at Pearl Harbor. Thus, King wanted the acronym to be COMINCH.

  The biggest change was that King, who had long opposed the command authority of the CNO over the bureaus, particularly when he was chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, now insisted just the opposite—that COMINCH have full authority over the long-independent bureaus. Roosevelt hesitated only on this final point. That would require a change in federal law, the president told King, but in the interim he assured King that he would replace any bureau chief who did not cooperate with him.8

  Two days later, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8984, “Prescribing the Duties of the Commander in Chief of the United States Fleet and the Co-operative Duties of the Chief of Naval Operations.” It was sweeping in its scope and gave King powers that heretofore had been sprea
d across the secretary of the navy, the bureaus, fleets at sea, and naval forces ashore. There was now no question that King held “supreme command of the operating forces comprising the several fleets of the United States Navy and the operating forces of the naval coastal frontier commands [the naval districts].” And as such, he would be “directly responsible, under the general direction of the Secretary of the Navy, to the President of the United States.”9

  The CNO’s role remained technically unchanged, and for the moment left Stark to jolly the bureaus into getting the required logistics in place for action and to prepare long-range war plans. How well this dual leadership would work remained to be seen, and King’s memoirs gives his own pointed view by calling it “joint consulship.”10

  King later claimed—somewhat disingenuously, one suspects—that he had told Knox earlier that morning that Stark was the logical choice to command the fleets and that King would gladly serve under him. “Dolly” King and “Betty” Stark were on friendly enough terms, Stark having been two years junior to King at Annapolis. But this was to be not only the role of a lifetime but also the role for which King had spent his lifetime preparing.

  While most of official Washington evidenced some measure of shell shock in the days immediately after Pearl Harbor, such fog had rarely afflicted King, particularly when it came to major decisions. It is difficult to imagine him deferring to Stark, beyond some small measure of perfunctory graciousness. Far more in keeping with King’s personality was the letter he wrote Stark several days later, in which he asked Stark to enumerate the duties the CNO’s office would transfer to King as the new COMINCH.11

  When Knox returned to his office in the Navy Department, he sent for his chief of the Bureau of Navigation, who had been existing on three to four hours sleep a night as he shuttled manpower into the fight. Knox asked Nimitz how soon he could be ready to travel, and the admiral replied with the standard, “Where and for how long?” Knox delivered the news that he was to be commander in chief, Pacific Fleet (CINCPAC). That evening, Nimitz made it home early to tell Catherine.