by Richard Snow
ADMIRAL DOENITZ KNEW AS well as anyone alive that U-boat men were determined. But even he was occasionally startled by just how determined. While Hardegan was homeward-bound and the Eastern coastal waters still so thick with oil that gloomy fires would spontaneously combust on the breast of confined and sluggish waves, word spread about “the American shooting gallery.” The Type VIIs wanted in on this. Doenitz had initially believed that the VIIs didn’t have quite enough range to operate off the American coast. But skippers and crews worked out ways. They crossed the Atlantic at low speeds to conserve fuel, and to Doenitz’s surprise “they filled some of the drinking- and washing-water tanks with fuel. Of their own free will they sacrificed many of the amenities of their living quarters in order to make room for the larger quantities of stores, spare parts and other expendable articles which an increase in the radius of action demanded.”
None was more determined than Captain Peter Cremer. Sailing west in his VII, the U-333, he tangled with a tanker, the British Prestige, which rammed him and rode over his boat. Seawater jetted into the control room from the periscope well and the ventilation ducts. The cascade suggested the pressure hull had been ruptured, and Cremer surfaced to see what had happened. The conning-tower hatch wouldn’t open, so the captain went out the galley hatch and quickly got the picture: “The tanker had first hit us at the bow, twisted our nose to port and then, with the turning of her screws acting like a chopper, shaved off the bridge. … The watertight stem was torn open … the periscope snapped, the D/F [direction finder] set and torpedo aiming sight destroyed. The bow caps of tubes two and four were jammed and could not be opened.”
Time for any prudent skipper to go home: “No one would have reproached me if I had broken off the patrol and turned back.” Instead, Cremer entered in 333’s log, “Intention—ahead into the straits of Florida. Surfaced by day, in no circumstances return home without a steamer.”
On May 4 Cremer saw the Bethel Shoal buoy, some twenty miles northeast of Vero Beach, and headed south along the coast. Like Hardegan before him, he was amazed. “We had left a blacked-out Europe behind us. Whether in Stettin, Berlin, Paris, Lorient or La Rochelle—everywhere had been pitch-dark.” Here, though, guided by the Jupiter Inlet lighthouse, he stood in close enough to “read the flickering neon signs.” Not only that: “from Miami and its luxurious suburbs a mile-wide band of light was being thrown upward to glow like an aureole against the undersides of the cloud layer, visible from far below the horizon. All this after nearly five months of war!”
He let his men come up on the bridge and have a look. They were enchanted. They forgot their half-destroyed boat with its two dead torpedo tubes. “Against the footlight glare of a carefree new world were passing the silhouettes of ships recognizable in every detail and shape as the outlines in a sales catalog. Here they were formally presented to us on a plate: please help yourselves!”
That first night under the footlights, the U-333 hit the tanker Java Arrow, blew the stern off a Dutch freighter named the Amazone, and attacked another tanker, the Halsey, which exploded. The lush tropic moon that had been competing with the brilliant shore to light the battlefield began to set. Nobody came to pester U-333. Cremer figured his ruin of a ship might have a few more good days of hunting here, and he was right.
“The survivors of sunken steamers and tankers,” Cremer wrote of those days, “were often hailed by the men on the conning tower of U-boats and asked for the names of their ship and the cargo. Sometimes they even told.”
And why not? Their ship was gone, some, maybe many, of their shipmates dead, their captain likely not there. They weren’t military men, most of them, just sailors, who had experienced the worst misfortune that can befall a sailor. Best to placate the owners of the fearsome machine that had brought this about.
So the U-boats would cruise through the wreckage, the men on deck cordial and interested, sometimes indicating to the occupants of the lifeboats the best course toward land, sometimes giving them water or cigarettes or bandages. The German sailors enjoyed a joke during that prosperous season. As they headed away from a sinking ship, from the growing dawn, they liked to call out, “Send the bill to Roosevelt!”
The Most Even-Tempered Man in the Navy
Admiral King in command, 1942
The president may not have received a bill for the Cyclops or the Java Arrow, but he did feel hounded. When, in March, Churchill sent Harry Hopkins a stern cable saying, “I am most deeply concerned at the immense sinking of tankers west of the 40th meridian and in the Caribbean Sea. … The situation is so serious that drastic action of some kind is necessary,” Roosevelt responded with a most uncharacteristic testy hauteur: “Your interest in steps to be taken to combat the Atlantic submarine menace as indicated by your recent message to Mr. Hopkins on this subject impels me to request your particular consideration of heavy attacks on submarine bases and building and repair yards, thus checking submarine activities at their source and where the submarines congregate.” In other words, if you don’t want tankers sunk off our shores, do something about it yourself. Churchill did, sending air raid after futile air raid against the impregnable Biscay submarine bunkers.
The prime minister knew very well, though, that what the official historian of the Royal Navy was to call the “holocaust” taking place off our shores was due to American and not British negligence. This negligence had many causes and there were many excuses for it. The country had, after all, just been flung into a world-girdling sea war with a substantial part of its naval strength vanished. But after months, indeed years, of seeing what was coming, here is what the navy had on hand to protect the “Eastern Sea Frontier” (the U.S. coastline to two hundred miles out) from the St. Lawrence River to North Carolina when Hardegan headed our way: one Coast Guard cutter; four yard patrol boats (these YPs could be pretty much anything assigned the designation—fishing boats, for instance); four subchasers (one hundred feet long, made of wood, crew of thirty); three Eagle boats from World War I (originally produced by Ford with much fanfare, they turned out to be a sort of anti–Model T—costly, inefficient, universally detested); and five airplanes fit for combat duty.
The man in overall charge of this gimcrack armada was Admiral Ernest J. King. Plucked from the brink of retirement after the Pearl Harbor debacle, he is remembered for his summation of this turn in his career: “When they get in trouble, they send for the sons of bitches.” He later denied saying this, but added that he regretted he hadn’t. What he did say was “Any good naval officer is a son of a bitch” (although nobody ever called the quite adequate Lord Nelson one), and he was certainly the most intimidating person in the American high command. He was also possibly the smartest.
“Not since the Army of Northern Virginia had an American military force depended so much upon a single commander as the United States Navy, in the year 1942, did on Ernest Joseph King,” wrote Elting Morison, who was keeping the Eastern Sea Frontier War Diary during the crisis. “If not the only officer who could have retrieved the physical and spiritual disaster that befell his service on December 7, 1941, he was the officer who did. … Behind the bleak and fixed composure some intense spirit burned away, a spirit fed by incalculable devotions to individual concepts of self and the service. Above and beyond all these ran resolution—grim, harsh, ruthless and whatever else it can be made to seem—but above all resolution.”
Roosevelt saw this in King, and more besides. “He’s a grand navy man,” FDR told his son Elliott. “‘Wars can only be won by sea power; therefore, the navy’s plans must be the best; furthermore, only the Pacific is a naval theater; therefore, only the Pacific is important.’” The president ended his paraphrase with a laugh and said, “That’s not exactly his reasoning, but it’s close enough.”
It was close enough. King saw the shape of the whole war clearly while the smoke was still hanging over Pearl, and it pretty much all went his way. But his heart was in the Pacific operations to come, and perhaps the most controver
sial part of his career began when Doenitz’s boats arrived on the East Coast.
Ernest King was born in Lorain, Ohio, in 1878. His father was a foreman in the railroad repair shops there, and from his earliest days King loved the complexity and precision of machinery. He understood it, too; as soon as he could buy a car, he took apart its engine and, once satisfied to have the theories of internal combustion made concrete, put it back together again.
He graduated from Annapolis in 1901 and just eight years later made a reputation for himself in the service by winning from the Naval Institute’s Proceedings magazine the considerable prize of $500 for an essay entitled “Some Ideas About Organization Aboard Ship.” In 1920 he tossed off—not quite the right phrase, but he did work awfully quickly—an article for Proceedings about how naval officers should be educated. It was, to say the least, influential. In 1980 his biographer Thomas Buell could write, “The report’s basic ideas have since been refined, but naval training and career management today still conform to the concepts and principles that King set down in one day over half a century ago.”
King did everything in his changing service: commanded a destroyer division before the First World War, won the Navy Cross for his work on the staff of the commander of the Atlantic Fleet during it, got interested in submarines and took charge of their New London base, taught himself to fly and commanded the carriers Lexington and Saratoga in the 1939 fleet exercises. (He was forced to use them in support of the battleships rather than independently, as he wished. Pearl Harbor granted that wish.)
He was good, and he knew it; so good that he saw no reason to practice false bonhomie, or, many of his contemporaries thought, even the most common civility. He drank heavily and expected the same of those around him—he was proud of a cocktail he’d invented and named the King’s Peg: champagne and brandy sharing a tall glass with a derisory shard of ice—womanized energetically enough to earn a lifelong reputation for it, and drew on apparently inexhaustible reserves of anger. One of his six spectacularly good-looking daughters said, “He is the most even-tempered man in the navy. He is always in a rage.”
He made no effort to conceal his disposition and seems once in a while to have displayed an indulgent fondness toward it, as when he sent one of the women who put oil on his emotional waters a photograph of him leaning back in a chair laughing. “Abby,” he wrote, “you see it can be done.” It wasn’t done often enough, though, for FDR to feel able to make him chief of naval operations in 1939. King wanted the job, thought he deserved it, but was far too proud to try to curry favor with the president. With word due he went ashore looking for news—he was at anchor in Guantánamo Bay at the time—and ran into Harold Stark in a crowd of other admirals. One of them told him that Stark had just been made CNO. Showing no temper at all this time, King walked over to his rival and warmly congratulated him. King, sixty and four years away from mandatory retirement, got a place on the Governing Board.
This august body was made up of senior officers approaching retirement who had risen high but would rise no higher and thus were likely beyond the goads and snares of self-interest. They offered advice on any number of maritime subjects and had no power to see that the advice was taken. It was an honorable way to ease out of a career.
A friend meeting King at a Sunday-afternoon cocktail party was startled to find the admiral in tears. Yet a year later, when a junior officer who barely knew King ran into him in the Navy Department, the admiral told him, “They’re not done with me yet. I’ll have another chance.”
That he got it was largely due to the generous-spirited Stark, one of King’s few contemporaries who, beyond acknowledging his competence, actually liked the man. Stark urged FDR to make King commander in chief, U.S. Fleet. That didn’t happen, but in the summer of 1940, with the U.S. navy taking responsibility for the defense of the western hemisphere, Ernest King was offered command of the Atlantic Squadron. Once having attained the naval pinnacle of flag rank, admirals fly their personal pennant, and King, as a former vice admiral, had three stars on his. This was a two-star job, a rear admiral’s, but King said that didn’t matter at all and in mid-December broke his two-star flag in the old battleship Texas. He got the vagrant star back soon, and another one besides, making him a full admiral. In February 1941, with its work getting stiffer all the time, the Atlantic Squadron became the Atlantic Fleet, and King took command of it.
A couple of months later the new CINCLANT—Commander in Chief, Atlantic Fleet—issued a statement (“Atlantic Fleet Confidential Memorandum”) that both defined the working conditions that would prevail for years to come, and the tenor of the man who wrote it. King took his first point for granted:
“1. If and when the existing emergency becomes intensified—develops into a state of war—all of us will accept cheerfully and willingly the difficulties and discomforts as well as the hazards and the dangers with which we shall then be confronted.”
Right now, though, the admiral went on, those dangers were only potential, but the “difficulties and discomforts” were all on hand, and they had to be treated with the “same spirit of cheerfulness and willingness.” This meant not being disheartened by a “lack of trained seagoing personnel, inadequacies of matériel, the necessity to continue operations in that area which is strategically central, and the waiting for developments over which we have no control.”
Personnel: train all we have to fill the needs of our present ships, then give them over to new ships. Matériel: distinguish between what is necessary and what is desirable, and forget about the latter. When in the yard (and here King displays his exasperating predilection for peppering the most straightforward sentences with quotation marks, whose overall effect is to make him sound not nearly as smart as he is), “we must take heed of the fact that overhaul periods … longer than those required for urgent items of work not only keep our own ships ‘out of service’ but affect the availability of labor and matériel for new ships.” Operations: accept “the circumstances premised on strategical considerations imposed by the current international situation” and respond to them with “the forces available, even though they are less in number and in power than appear adequate.” Waiting: use the time to make yourself better at what you do.
“4. I expect the officers of the Atlantic Fleet to be the leaders in what may be called the ‘pioneer spirit’—to lead in the determination that the difficulties and discomforts … shall be dealt with as ‘enemies’ to be overcome by our own efforts. …There is work in plenty for all hands.”
Fifth and last was the dictum that encapsulated it all: the too long patrols, the crews of the rusting four-stackers trying to wring some fun out of Iceland’s pallid diversions, the desperate amateurism that was to defend our Eastern seaboard. The italics are most definitely King’s:
“We must do all that we can with what we have.”
King personally did the most with what he had, working eighteen-hour days. November 23, 1941, found him worn-out and discouraged. It was his sixty-third birthday; just a year left until retirement. One of his friends said, “It was the only time I ever sensed he was completely down and out. King wrote a number of letters to us saying that there was nothing more ahead of him.”
One of the many things King disliked were the biweekly trips he had to make from the naval base at Newport where he was stationed to Washington “to straighten out those dumb bastards once again.” But the meeting with Frank Knox on December 16 was something else. The secretary of the navy wanted King to become CINCUS—Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet. This shook King, but not so much that he didn’t have some conditions. Before accepting the job he asked the president for three things. He did not want to give press conferences. This was fine by FDR. King wanted command over all the bureaus in the Navy Department. That, said the president, would take a change in federal law, but he promised to replace any bureau chief King didn’t like. The final request was editorial: in the wake of Pearl Harbor any command that was pronounced “sink us”
seemed unfortunate.
Fine. CINCUS would change to the no lovelier but less subversive COMINCH. Two days later Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8984, giving King “supreme command of the operating forces of the several fleets of the United States Navy and the operating forces of the Naval Coastal Frontier Command.”
So Ernest King undertook, with unprecedented authority, to run what would become a navy of unprecedented strength.*
At the moment, though, King’s navy was not ready for the job that Doenitz gave it. In the first four months of 1942 the U-boats sank 515,000 tons—eighty-seven ships—along the East Coast. This ongoing calamity was a matter of concern to Admiral Royal R. Ingersoll, who had replaced King as commander in chief, Atlantic Fleet, and something more than that to Vice Admiral Adolphus Andrews, who commanded the Eastern Sea Frontier from his headquarters at 90 Church Street in Manhattan. That is, Ingersoll was responsible for what happened in most of the ocean, but it was Andrews who had to cope with the first American action of the new Atlantic war.
Adolphus “Dolly” (there it is again, the four-year-old’s nickname cherished by Annapolis men) Andrews was a landlocked Texas boy a year younger than King who first saw a ship when he arrived at the Naval Academy, where he graduated at the head of his class. He had a fine career, serving as an aide to Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge, seeing duty on four battleships. Many of his contemporaries thought he had pursued that career too ruthlessly, and some saw him as a humorless politician. Stimson once called him a “terrible old fusspocket of a society man.” But he was capable and committed, and he wasn’t scared of King. Nor was he sanguine as the New Year dawned.