The Admirals Page 5

  His father was horrified by Bill’s first-semester grades, and his mother redoubled her efforts to win him an appointment to Annapolis. Congressional authorization for five additional presidential appointments in the wake of the navy’s Spanish-American War buildup helped. While Halsey later recalled that his mother “camped in McKinley’s office until he promised her one for me,” the political influence of former New Jersey governor and current U.S. attorney general John W. Griggs may have greased the ways.

  When his appointment finally came through, Halsey gave a backward glance at Charlottesville and hurried to Annapolis to take the entrance exams. He crammed with all his energy to make up for past deficiencies and on July 7, 1900, was sworn into the class of 1904, the last incoming academy class of fewer than one hundred cadets.3

  William F. Halsey, Jr., wasn’t destined for academic stardom at the Naval Academy, but he applied himself just enough to make respectable marks without adversely affecting his preferred social and athletic pursuits. Once, when Halsey came dangerously close to failing theoretical mechanics, his father strongly advised him to drop football. That, of course, was out of the question.

  Instead, Bill recruited the scholars in the class to tutor him and a few others similarly challenged. When the exam was over, Bill went to his father’s quarters for lunch and was immediately asked if the results had been posted. “Yes, sir,” Bill answered, and then reported that he had made 3.98 out of 4.0. His father stared at him for a full minute and then finally asked incredulously, “Sir, have you been drinking?”

  Football was one of Halsey’s passions. Although he played the game aggressively, he never claimed to be any good at it. In fact, Halsey later boasted that he was the worst fullback ever to play for Annapolis. He appeared consigned to the junior varsity, but when an injury sidelined the varsity fullback, Halsey started at that position his third and fourth years, surviving a 40–5 drubbing by Army in 1903.

  Aside from football and partying, Halsey took great delight in the summer training cruises, claiming, among other things, never to have been seasick. His father was now head of the Department of Seamanship at the academy, and from sail work on the square-rigger Chesapeake to steam indoctrination on the old battleship Indiana, the son was determined to show the father that he was becoming an all-around sailor. Young Bill learned a lot, but he was brought back to reality by the academy’s chief master-at-arms, who told him, “I wish you all the luck in the world, Mr. Halsey, but you’ll never be as good a naval officer as your father!”

  Halsey’s summer cruise aboard the Indiana during his third-class year left him with a souvenir tattoo. His father, who sported no less than four, advised him with the voice of experience against such permanent foolishness. “But as usual,” recalled Halsey, “I was too headstrong to listen.” The finished work showed a blue anchor with its chain forming “04” and a red “USNA” on its crown.4

  When Halsey marched to an early graduation in February 1904, the Lucky Bag, for which he was an associate editor, called him “a real old salt” and “everybody’s friend.” And while he might strive to live up to his father’s seamanship standards, young Bill—short and stocky though he was—had nonetheless taken on the rugged good looks of a solidly built sailor. He looked, the Lucky Bag proclaimed, “like a figurehead of Neptune.”

  His nicknames were “Willie” and “Pudge” and he seems to have set some sort of informal record for “the number of offices he has held”—even serving on the Christmas Card Committee his plebe year and the Class German Committee as a senior. But his heart belonged to athletics. Halsey’s performance on the football field—however lacking by intercollegiate standards—won him a navy “N,” one of only four accorded seniors on the team. But the honor he held dearest was the Thompson Trophy. First handed out in 1901 by Cadet Battalion Commander Ernest J. King, it was awarded annually to the first classman who had done the most during the year to promote athletics.

  Considering Halsey’s shunning of advice over the years, the Dickens quote the Lucky Bag chose for him was most appropriate: “It’s my opinion there’s nothing ’e don’t know.” But what counted most in Halsey’s mind was that while he stood only forty-third out of the sixty-two survivors of his incoming class of ninety-three, he was now Passed Midshipman Halsey and headed out to sea.5

  In fact, sea duty came almost too quickly. To secure choice service on the battleship Missouri, Bill and five classmates forfeited their graduation leave and rushed to Hampton Roads to join the ship before it sailed for Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and winter training exercises. The irony of this first assignment for Halsey would not become clear for more than forty years.

  The Missouri was affectionately called the “Mizzy.” At 388 feet long, and with four 12-inch main guns and a displacement of 12,500 tons, it cruised at a maximum speed of 18 knots. By the time Halsey stood on the deck of the next battleship to be christened Missouri, the “Mighty Mo” was of a generation of battleships that boasted nine 16-inch guns, displaced 45,000 tons, stretched 887 feet, and cut through the seas at 32.5 knots. Halsey’s progression from one Missouri to the other is a graphic example of the evolution of American naval might.

  But Halsey served aboard the “Mizzy” first, and his cruise was not to be without incident. On Wednesday, April 13, 1904, he was a junior officer on the bridge as the battleship took its turn at the fleet’s annual target practice off Pensacola, Florida. Suddenly a heavy blast aft rocked the ship, and a column of flame shot several hundred feet into the air from the top hatch of the 12-inch after turret. A second, sharper blast followed. Powder bags in the turret had caught fire and spread to a dozen more. Thirty-one officers and men perished, and the carnage made a profound and lasting impression on Halsey. Almost fifty years later, he still found the disaster looming “monstrous in my memory” and making him dread the thirteenth of every month, particularly if it fell on the double hex of a Friday.6

  This accident cast a pall over Halsey’s two years on the Missouri and the start of his career, but he got a break by being assigned to temporary duty at the Naval Academy during the 1904 and 1905 football seasons. The likable Halsey was detailed as assistant backfield coach despite his less-than-stellar gridiron record. Clearly, it was his bulldog determination that the academy wanted, and in 1905 Navy fought Army to a tie.

  After the 1905 football season, Halsey, now two years out of Annapolis, received his commission as an ensign. He was detached from Missouri to Don Juan de Austria, a former Spanish gunboat that had been salvaged out of Manila Bay. The Don Juan bored Halsey terribly as it chugged around the Caribbean on customs duty and at one point anchored for six months in the Bay of Samaná, on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The only excitement was the weekly mail steamer from the United States.

  But a reprieve was in sight. In March 1907, Halsey reported for duty aboard the Kansas, the navy’s newest battleship, so new that it would not sail for its shakedown cruise until the following August. By then, it was clear that something major was afoot, and when Kansas got things squared away, it joined fifteen other battleships—all painted a peaceful white—in the roadstead at Hampton Roads, Virginia. On December 16, 1907, the battleships weighed anchor and steamed in review past the presidential yacht, Mayflower, and its nervous occupant.7

  In the wake of the Russo-Japanese War, the peace that Theodore Roosevelt had brokered was not sitting well in Japan. Admiral Togo may have destroyed the Russian fleet at Tsushima, but the final treaty did not accord Japan any financial indemnity for its losses. The truth of the matter was that both Russia and Japan were broke.

  In Japan, this triggered a rush of emigration to the United States, particularly California. When the ensuing backlash against this influx included an attempt to segregate schools in San Francisco for Asian immigrants, Japan strongly protested. It cited the failure of an indemnity and this unequal treatment as evidence that the United States considered Japan a second-rate power and the Japanese a second-class people. Some politic
ians in both countries engaged in saber rattling.

  Roosevelt considered the crisis grave and in response determined that this was one of those cases of speaking softly but carrying a big stick. While assuring Japan of America’s friendship, he would use the Great White Fleet as a symbol of American power. Should Great Britain and Germany take a lesson from it as well, so much the better.

  Roosevelt wanted it understood “that the Pacific was as much our home waters as the Atlantic, and that our fleet could and would at will pass from one to the other of the two great oceans.” At the time, the British and German navies—arguably the first and second most powerful in the world—were skeptical of such a movement. If TR and his navy left a string of disabled battleships at ports around the world, he would be an international laughingstock—thus his nervousness as the fleet departed Hampton Roads.

  The sixteen battleships cleared Cape Henry at the entrance to Chesapeake Bay and steered south toward the Caribbean. Christmas 1907 found the fleet in Port of Spain, Trinidad. Then it was on to Rio de Janeiro; Punta Arenas, Chile; and through the Strait of Magellan to Callao, Peru. The fleet was almost retracing the dash of the Oregon in reverse, which may well have been what Roosevelt was thinking when he conceived the idea. Later, Roosevelt would call the voyage of the Great White Fleet and the construction of the Panama Canal “the two American achievements that really impressed foreign peoples during the first dozen years” of the twentieth century.8

  As the fleet cruised onward, Ensign Halsey had time to savor the various cultures, but as a junior officer, he also put in his share of time supervising the shore patrol. Getting a load of older and frequently inebriated enlisted men back on board ship was trying for a young officer, but Halsey proved himself up to the task, particularly during a lengthy port call at San Francisco. The gruff ensign made something of a name for himself among the madams of the city by posting shore patrolmen outside their houses of ill-repute and forbidding enlisted men to enter.

  Publicly, San Francisco was to have been the fleet’s farthest westward advance, but Roosevelt almost certainly had much more in mind from the beginning. To move the American battle fleet from the Atlantic to the Pacific was one thing, but to have it then circumnavigate the globe was a show of real power. Leaving San Francisco in July 1908, the Great White Fleet steamed first to Honolulu, then Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne, and Manila, anchoring in Manila Bay near the site of Admiral Dewey’s triumph a decade earlier.

  To the chagrin of sailors and Manila businesspeople alike, shore leave was canceled because of a cholera outbreak. There was also the pressing matter of a special invitation. Not to be outdone, the Japanese emperor had extended an invitation to Roosevelt for the fleet to visit Japan. Both the president and Rear Admiral Charles Sperry, commander of the fleet, were cautious. To decline the invitation would be the ultimate insult, but to anchor in Yokohama harbor was risky.

  Sperry and his senior officers well remembered what had happened to the Maine in Havana harbor—coal bunker explosion or not—and to the Russian fleet at Port Arthur. The Japanese had also made a similar sneak attack on Chinese naval forces in 1894. While Halsey was far too junior to be involved in these councils, he was firmly of the opinion that the invitation was a deceitful Japanese charade.

  But the first enemy lurking on the voyage to Yokohama was a typhoon. It struck the fleet in the East China Sea and scattered the ships, causing some minor damage and sweeping two men overboard. It proved the only major disruption of the fourteen-month cruise. It was also Halsey’s first encounter with a typhoon; it would not be his last. Meanwhile, the Japanese fleet of ten battleships and twenty-nine armored cruisers was said to be at sea “on maneuvers.” Tensely, the American fleet regrouped and steamed into Tokyo Bay two days late on October 18, 1908.

  The Japanese proved to be a model of courtesy and decorum. They had not given up their interest in Manchuria, but they were not ready for a war with the United States. Halsey was in the party that was hosted aboard Admiral Togo’s flagship, Mikasa. Unlike another junior officer named Chester Nimitz, who had visited Japan and met Togo three years before in the aftermath of the Battle of Tsushima, Halsey was impressed by neither the admiral nor his massive ship.

  What the Japanese managed to do, however, was force an apparent U.S. snub of China. The emperor’s invitation had been on the grounds that the entire American fleet call at Yokohama but not China. Thus, when Admiral Sperry dispatched only half of his battleships—not to Shanghai but to the smaller port of Amoy (now Xiamen)—and then returned to Manila with the remainder, China accused the United States of the only diplomatic snub of the voyage.

  Once the two groups of battleships reassembled, they steamed into the Indian Ocean and through the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean Sea. The fleet divided up to make port calls, and Halsey got a choice assignment when Kansas anchored in a sparkling cove on the French Riviera and was treated to French hospitality for almost two weeks. He and the other younger officers definitely appreciated the sleeveless, stockingless, and low-cut French bathing fashions that had yet to reach the United States.

  Finally, it was time for the combined fleet to rendezvous at Gibraltar early in February 1909 and make the crossing of the Atlantic. Winter storms churned its waters so much that even Halsey confessed to a rare bout of seasickness. On February 21, the sixteen battleships dropped anchor off Cape Henry and spruced themselves up for one final review. The next day, after Theodore Roosevelt finished speaking on the foredeck of the Connecticut, Ensign Halsey hurried ashore to meet his girl.9

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Nimitz

  “Nim-i-tiz”

  —Annapolis, Class of 1905

  The 250-foot destroyer Decatur was being tossed about like a matchstick. With a narrow beam of not quite twenty-four feet, the slender ship was locked in the vise grip of a Pacific typhoon. Lashed by ferocious winds, it continually rolled 50 degrees to either side. On the bridge, twenty-three-year-old Ensign Chester W. Nimitz fought for his sea legs and was certain that his ship would break in two atop the monster waves. Yet young Nimitz could look to no one else for reassurance. Unusual as it was for someone of his age and rank, he was the captain of the Decatur, responsible for its safety and that of its seventy-two-man crew.

  It was the spring of 1908, and the Decatur was in the South China Sea en route from French-controlled Saigon—then known as “the Paris of the East”—to Manila. For three very uncomfortable days, the typhoon held the Decatur in its grip. Nimitz later told his grandfather that it was his first “real live typhoon” and he hoped it would be his last. Remarkably, the Decatur made port in Manila only a few hours behind schedule. Several months later, the young captain and his ship would not be so lucky.

  On the evening of July 7, the Decatur was entering Batangas harbor, south of Manila Bay. Ensign Nimitz was on the bridge as usual. Charts for the area were suspect, and standard procedure was to take position bearings from the surrounding landmarks. Nimitz chose to estimate his position instead of taking bearings, and he may also have failed to consider whether the tide was running in or out. Nonetheless, the Decatur proceeded into the harbor without incident until the leadsman charged with taking soundings in the bow suddenly sang out, “We’re not moving, sir!” Ensign Nimitz had just committed an unpardonable navy sin and run his ship aground.1

  The Nimitzes traced their heritage back to a long line of Germanic warriors. Some fought for the “Swedish Meteor,” King Gustavus Adolphus, as he blazed his way across northern Europe in the early 1600s. Their fortunes rose and fell with the times. By the early 1800s, they had branched out as dealers in cloth, and the family mantle passed to Karl Heinrich Nimitz, who promptly squandered their wealth. His youngest son, Karl Heinrich, Jr., went to sea in the merchant marine at the age of fourteen to earn his way.

  In 1844, after only a few years aboard ships, young Karl joined his parents and some siblings who had immigrated to Charleston, South Carolina. Two years later, the Nimitz clan and other recen
t German arrivals banded together to purchase a block of land in the new state of Texas. In the sand hills along the Pedernales River west of still tiny Austin, the company founded Fredericksburg, so named in honor of Prince Friedrich of Prussia. Many of the younger settlers promptly anglicized their given names. Thus, Karl Heinrich, Jr., became Charles Henry.

  These German Texans were a close-knit group, and German customs and language continued to prevail in the Hill Country for decades. One of the stories that later circulated concerned a young man who left town to go to college. He wrote home saying he was required to take a foreign language, and he asked his parents what he should study. Supposedly they talked it over and then replied, “Take English, son.”

  In April 1848, Charles Henry Nimitz married Sophia Dorothea Mueller, the daughter of a fellow settler. Together, they would have twelve children. Charles served briefly in the Texas Rangers, but in 1852 he started the Nimitz Hotel on the east end of Fredericksburg’s Main Street. Sophia, despite an almost continual state of pregnancy, did most of the cooking.

  As West Texas grew, the hotel prospered. As it expanded, Charles adopted a nautical theme, shaping the marquee like the bow of a ship and adding a balconied upper story that was topped by rooms resembling a pilothouse. Some travelers even called it “the Steamboat Hotel.” Given Charles’s penchant for storytelling, it was easy for him to embellish his few years at sea and take on the persona of a successful seafarer.