The Admirals Read online

  Bill and Fan apparently had an understanding before he embarked on his round-the-world voyage. He indeed found her waiting on his return, but not necessarily rushing toward the altar, especially with a lowly ensign. But Halsey soon had an advantage when he passed the examination for lieutenant j.g. and then, because of vacancies in the expanding upper ranks, was immediately jumped another grade, sworn in as a full lieutenant, and given command of the gunboat Du Pont.

  “Do you realize,” Bill lobbied Fan, “you are being offered the heart and hand of a skipper in the United States fleet? How can you afford to delay?”

  “Well, now that you make it sound so attractive,” Fan said, laughing. “I suppose I would be foolish to procrastinate any longer.”

  They were married on December 1, 1909, at Christ Church in Norfolk. Among Halsey’s ushers were Annapolis grads Thomas C. Hart and Husband E. Kimmel. Thirty-plus years later, after the deadly attack on Pearl Harbor had many calling for Kimmel’s neck, Halsey would be among his friend’s most vehement supporters. Ten months after the wedding, on October 10, 1910, Bill and Fan welcomed Margaret Bradford Halsey to the family.14

  Such family bliss saw Bill Halsey flirt with the idea of leaving the navy for a warmer, drier, less uncertain future ashore. But he stayed on, and from 1910, when he reported as executive officer of the destroyer Lamson, until June 1932—except for one year as executive officer of the battleship Wyoming—all of Halsey’s sea duty was on destroyers.

  Like Chester Nimitz’s experiences, the best thing about these assignments was that at a very young age, Halsey learned the responsibilities and intricacies of command. As captain of his first ship, the destroyer Flusser, he also got a taste of politics.

  Flusser was ordered to Campobello Island, off the coast of Maine, to take the new assistant secretary of the navy on a tour of nearby naval installations. Upon returning to the island, the gentleman, who reportedly had some experience in small boats, asked Halsey to transit the strait between Campobello and the mainland and offered to act as pilot himself. Halsey was skeptical and in a bit of a bind. He could hardly say no to his superior, but he was also well aware that “the fact that a white-flanneled yachtsman can sail a catboat out to a buoy and back is no guarantee that he can handle a high-speed destroyer in narrow waters.”

  Standing close by, Halsey reluctantly relinquished the helm and watched as the assistant secretary began his first turn. The pivot point on the Flusser was near the bridge superstructure, and that meant that with roughly two-thirds of the ship’s length aft of the pivot, its stern would swing twice the arc of the bow. Clearly, there was much more to this than simply pointing the destroyer’s bow down the center of the channel.

  Halfway into the turn, the assistant secretary looked aft and checked the swing of the stern just as any seasoned skipper would do. Halsey was relieved and from then on figured that this man knew his business. His name was Franklin D. Roosevelt.15

  There seems little doubt that Franklin D. Roosevelt intended from an early age to follow his cousin Theodore’s footsteps into the White House. What better way to start the journey than by serving as assistant secretary of the navy? When the three-way presidential race of 1912 put Democrat Woodrow Wilson in the White House—defeating Theodore’s Bull Moose comeback try—Franklin called in his political markers in New York State and received the appointment. Like his cousin before him, Franklin was nominally subservient to a secretary of the navy who seemed an unlikely fit.

  Josephus Daniels was a newspaper publisher from North Carolina who owed his cabinet post to his strong political support of Wilson. With no prior naval experience, he had, however, very decided opinions about how the Navy Department should be managed and its role in U.S. foreign policy. Some labeled Daniels a pacifist, and there is little argument that he was at least a hard-core isolationist. He intended to concentrate on coastal defenses and dramatically retract Theodore Roosevelt’s global reach.

  As assistant secretary, however, Franklin Roosevelt showed that he was prepared to equal if not surpass cousin Teddy’s fervor for a global American navy. Heretofore, no one, not even Theodore, had spoken of challenging Great Britain’s long-established naval supremacy. But Franklin was only too willing to stake out such an extreme position in the hope of making a name for himself—shades of his cousin.

  Arguing that dreadnought battleships “are what we need,” Franklin exhorted, “The policy of our Congress ought to be to buy and build dreadnoughts until our Navy is comparable to any other in the world.” His goal was equality at a minimum, not merely ascendancy. And as for Daniels’s coastal defense scheme, Roosevelt thought “our national defense must extend all over the western hemisphere, must go out a thousand miles into the sea, must embrace the Philippines and over the seas wherever our commerce may be.”16

  So it helped the navy tremendously that it was Franklin Roosevelt, far more than his boss, who was inclined to spend time with the fleet. Roosevelt had served no time in the military, never captained a merchantman, and indeed, as Halsey initially suspected, counted his nautical experience at the helms of family yachts, but the sea was in his blood and FDR considered himself a sailor. With the possible exception of Warm Springs, Georgia, he would always find his greatest relaxation upon its restless waves.

  Two years later, it was Bill Leahy’s turn to captain FDR around. After briefly looking after target practice and engineering competitions, Leahy was recruited as an assistant by his mentor, Henry T. Mayo, now a rear admiral and aide for personnel to Secretary Daniels. This gave Leahy frequent access to both Daniels and Roosevelt, as well as the host of officers lobbying for one assignment or the other.

  When his tour was finished, Leahy did his own lobbying and requested command of the new destroyer tender Melville. Roosevelt was agreeable to the station, but Daniels overruled him and instead put Leahy in command of the Dolphin, the secretary’s personal dispatch boat. The downside was that this was something of a beck-and-call messenger service, but the positive aspect was that the Navy Department official doing most of the calling was Assistant Secretary Roosevelt, not Daniels.

  This gave Roosevelt and Leahy plenty of occasions to sail together along the East Coast and as far as Campobello during the summers of 1915 and 1916. Doubtless they had at least some conversations about the future of the navy. During an outbreak of polio that summer, Franklin and his wife, Eleanor, kept their children secluded at Campobello longer than usual and then Roosevelt dispatched Leahy and the Dolphin to pick them up and take them directly up the Hudson to his home in Hyde Park, New York—a one-way voyage of some six hundred miles with dubious governmental purpose.

  It’s important to get a mental picture of FDR at the time of his early sails with Bill Leahy. Roosevelt was an energetic and athletic thirty-three-year-old, easily motoring around on his own two legs. About the only similarity between this man who strode purposefully aboard the Dolphin and almost demanded his turn at the helm and the wheelchair-bound leader of the Allies three decades later was the pince-nez eyeglasses that perched on the bridge of his nose. The fact that Roosevelt was seven years Leahy’s junior didn’t stop him from calling the lieutenant commander “Bill.” Naval etiquette, as well as Leahy’s firm separation of familiarity from duty, demanded that Leahy call FDR either “Mr. Secretary” or “Mr. Roosevelt.” But the two hit it off.

  Leahy’s entries in his diary in those years are sporadic, as well as almost painfully discreet, and he made no mention of Roosevelt, writing only that the Dolphin “operated in the Atlantic visiting the Coast of Maine, New York, Norfolk, and Savannah.” Years later, however, Leahy acknowledged his “close contact” with Roosevelt on these cruises and wrote that he held “an appreciation of [FDR’s] ability, his understanding of history, and his broad approach to foreign problems” and that “there developed between us a deep personal affection that endured unchanged until his untimely death.”17

  As for Secretary Daniels, he may be best remembered for his General Order No. 99. I
ssued on June 1, 1914, it prohibited alcoholic beverages on board any naval vessel or within any navy yard or station and held commanding officers directly responsible for any violations. With the Prohibition movement sweeping the country and alcohol on navy vessels already limited to officers’ messes, this was not, however, quite as radical a measure in practice as it was in the headlines.18

  The navy’s grog ration had gone out before the Civil War, and by 1914 liquor was served only in officers’ wardrooms, and then only if an officer wished to purchase it. These “wine messes” were akin to private clubs, where chits were signed and the bill paid monthly. Daniels promised to abolish the messes because they discriminated against enlisted men, who were granted no such access, and because there was some evidence that freedom of drink might corrupt some younger officers—Ernest J. King among them.

  Doubtless there were a few impromptu parties on June 30, 1914, the night before the regulation went into effect, and among those mourning were probably Halsey and FDR, the latter of whom was never one to let Prohibition or any other order interfere with his ritual happy hour. King, who had a few run-ins with demon rum early in his career, became one of those who could take it with zest and no morning-after hangover or leave it alone completely—something he did for long periods of time.

  But by the end of the summer of 1914, the navy had more on its mind than a mealtime drink. An escalating entanglement of alliances suddenly found Europe at war, despite the fact that the royal leaders of three of the belligerents were related. What role, if any, the United States might play was still murky, but every naval officer knew that the North Atlantic was no longer the barrier it had once been.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Dress Rehearsal

  After grounding the Decatur in the Philippines in the summer of 1908, Chester Nimitz reluctantly reported for submarine duty. His characterization of these vessels as “a cross between a Jules Verne fantasy and a humpbacked whale” was slow to change. During his first-class year at Annapolis, Nimitz and his classmates had taken training runs on the Severn River aboard the navy’s first commissioned submarine, Holland—all fifty-four feet of it—and Nimitz had not been impressed. The only good thing about duty aboard these small “boats”—submarines were never called “ships”—was that they offered plenty of command experience.

  Submarines themselves were not particularly new, but neither had they progressed very far in sophistication. The egg-shaped, one-man, hand-driven Turtle tried to sink HMS Eagle, a sixty-four-gun ship of the line anchored off the tip of Manhattan during the American Revolution. Almost a century later, the Confederate submarine H. L. Hunley did in fact sink the Union sloop Housatonic in Charleston harbor after ramming it with a torpedo-tipped, harpoon-like device. The resulting concussion waves sank the Hunley, too, and its crew was lost.

  For the entire nineteenth century, the navies of the world seemed to eschew submarine development out of some foreboding that doing so might disrupt the established dominance of capital surface ships. No one put this matter more succinctly early on than John Jervis, Great Britain’s first lord of the Admiralty during the Napoleonic wars. Hearing of Prime Minister William Pitt’s infatuation with an early submarine design, Jervis exclaimed, “Pitt is the greatest fool that ever existed to encourage a mode of war which those who command the sea do not want and which, if successful, will deprive them of it.”1

  While upper echelons resisted submarine development, by the late 1890s Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt was among those urging the navy to take a closer look. Later, as president, Roosevelt was finally able to do something about it. On August 25, 1905, while he idled at his home, Sagamore Hill, and waited for emissaries to come to terms and end the Russo-Japanese War, Roosevelt embarked on a little diversion. Despite gray skies and choppy seas on Long Island Sound, he descended beneath the waves aboard Plunger, the U.S. Navy’s second commissioned submarine.

  The experience left Roosevelt ecstatic. “Never in my life have I had… so much enjoyment in so few hours,” he wrote to his secretary of the navy three days later. But there was much more. “I have become greatly interested in submarine boats,” Roosevelt continued. “They should be developed.” As for the old guard “at Washington who absolutely decline to recognize this fact and who hamper the development of the submarine boat in every way,” the president was quick to order changes. “Worse than absurd” was his discovery that sailors risking their lives on these early craft were not accorded the usual extra pay for sea duty. The president decreed otherwise.2

  So when Ensign Chester Nimitz reported for duty with the First Submarine Flotilla early in 1909, his assignment at least showed on his record as “sea duty.” He assumed command of the Plunger and came to grips with one of its basic flaws. Plunger and its sisters were powered by gasoline engines on the surface and batteries when submerged. But gasoline proved too volatile a fuel. Not only could it cause disastrous explosions, but also a boat could fill with crippling fumes even when submerged and running on batteries.

  Reluctant submariner though he initially was, Nimitz was also always one to embrace the positive in any assignment and put his full energy into it. Characteristically, he assumed the role of problem solver and began a campaign to replace gasoline engines with diesels. The brainchild of the German engineer Rudolf Diesel, diesel engines, too, were in their infancy, but they relied on the heat of compression to ignite the fuel rather than an incendiary spark. (Ironically, the German navy would lag in incorporating this improvement into its own submarine fleet.)

  The other recurring theme in submarine development was torpedoes. When Admiral David Farragut damned them and steamed into Mobile Bay during the Civil War, he was only ignoring free-floating and moored mines. No explosive projectiles came speeding toward him. But just after the Civil War, Englishman Robert Whitehead designed the prototype of a self-propelled torpedo powered by compressed air that could be launched underwater.

  Fourteen feet long, fourteen inches in diameter, and weighing three hundred pounds, it delivered an eighteen-pound dynamite charge up to seven hundred yards at a speed of six knots. With improvements in directional control, range, speed, and explosive power, Whitehead torpedoes quickly became an offensive staple for navies around the world, albeit still fired from surface ships as the Japanese did at Port Arthur.

  The same basic torpedo design was soon put aboard the early Holland-class submarines, although the Plunger and its six sisters mounted only one torpedo tube each. Bigger boats with more tubes followed, and by 1910 the American navy had commissioned eleven additional submarines of ever-increasing size, still all gasoline powered. Of these, Nimitz commanded the 105-foot Snapper, with two torpedo tubes, and the 135-foot Narwhal, which mounted four tubes. By then, Whitehead’s successors were mixing pure alcohol and water with compressed air to produce a high-pressure steam that turned a turbine connected to the propeller shaft. This improved weapon still left a telltale wake of air bubbles, but it could carry a heavier explosive payload over a much greater distance.3

  By the fall of 1911, the twenty-six-year-old Nimitz, now a full lieutenant, returned from sea duty aboard the Narwhal and was ordered to the shipyard at Quincy, Massachusetts, to oversee the installation of diesel engines in Skipjack, the navy’s first diesel-powered submarine. Nimitz was to assume command after its commissioning, and he took some satisfaction in knowing that the navy had come around to his way of thinking about the older gasoline-powered boats.

  But before taking Skipjack to sea, Nimitz was introduced over a bridge game to Catherine Freeman, the daughter of a ship broker. It was not necessarily love at first sight—Catherine’s older sister, Elizabeth, was the star attraction for young naval officers—but Catherine was intrigued by “the handsomest person I had ever seen in my life.” She described the young submarine captain as having “curly, blond hair, which definitely was a little bit too long because he had just come in from weeks at sea and had not had a chance to have it cut.” She “kept thin
king what a really lovely person this was,”4 and by the time Skipjack was ready for sea the following spring, Chester and Catherine had begun a lifelong ritual of writing each other daily letters whenever they were apart.

  On March 20, 1912, Skipjack was conducting normal surface operations in Hampton Roads, when W. J. Walsh, a fireman second class, lost his footing and slipped overboard. It quickly became apparent from Walsh’s thrashing that he was not a swimmer and was in immediate danger. Nimitz saw the situation and without hesitation jumped into the water. He reached the sailor with a few strong strokes, but between Walsh’s panic and the tide, Nimitz could not fight their way back to the Skipjack. Instead, it suddenly looked as if they both might be swept out to sea. With grim determination, Nimitz kept Walsh afloat until a boat from the nearby battleship North Dakota finally picked up both of them.

  It was an act of personal courage typical of Nimitz, but it also set the naval base at Hampton Roads buzzing with the story of an officer who had risked his life for an enlisted man. Nimitz, however, was never one to draw such distinctions. The Treasury Department later awarded him its Silver Lifesaving Medal, but with his usual modesty Nimitz simply reported to Catherine the next day, “I had to go swimming yesterday, and it was awfully, awfully cold.”5

  That same spring, Nimitz was invited to address the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, on the subject of defensive and offensive tactics of submarines. It was a highly unusual honor for a twenty-seven-year-old lieutenant, but it showed again that his willingness to work hard in whatever assignment he drew had its rewards. The lecture was classified, but Nimitz became a published author when an expanded, nonclassified version appeared in the United States Naval Institute Proceedings the following December.