The Mantle of Command

by Nigel Hamilton

  Instead of retreating into wheelchair-bound isolation, however, the President had sought to allay it by leading a life of constant activity, meetings, and personal interaction when staying the weekend at Hyde Park. Despite his exalted status, he deliberately treated each person he encountered as an existing or potential personal friend. With each one—whether cabinet member or valet—he would make a swift determination as to their character and interests, and use it to interpret the information he elicited. With his personal secretary Bill Hassett he discussed genealogy and rare books; with Harry Hopkins he rehearsed past and possible power plays of senators and congressmen; with Daisy Suckley, their shared family history, New York society, and filing systems; with Crown Princess Martha of Norway—who had three small children—the business of parenting; with ornithologist and author Ludlow Griscom, the identification of North American birds—even rising at 2:00 A.M. on May 10, 1942, to go birding with him, Daisy, and others at Thompson’s Pond, to hear the dawn chorus.

  The President was elated—“Total for day 108 species,” he noted with satisfaction, signing the checklist “Franklin D. Roosevelt.”2 “It is the kind of thing he has probably given up any idea of ever doing again,” Daisy reflected, “so it did him lots of good. In that far-off place, with myriads of birds waking up, it was quite impossible to think much of the horrors of war.”3

  To keep such widely different relationships fresh, genuine, and vital in the complex clockwork of his daily presidency—at least without resorting to cold discipline and intimidation—the President employed both his charm and his sense of humor: at once ironical and teasing, balancing the deadly seriousness of his responsibilities with levity, even occasional mischief. Also: refusing to let anyone in his presence act pompously, or imagine he or she possessed more power than that which the President permitted in his presence.

  Such had been the nature of Roosevelt’s leadership style for many years—and in assuming the reins of global military leadership on behalf of the United Nations, Roosevelt appeared, as noted by his aides, to apply the selfsame principles now as war leader: dominating his colleagues and subordinates through his status, his high intelligence, and his abiding confidence in himself and his own authority. It was a domination he also maintained, as he had since 1933, by a process of often maddening divide and rule: appointing gifted people to key positions, delegating day-to-day responsibility to them, but ensuring they remained ultimately subordinate to him as chief executive of the nation.

  Such delegation, at this time of Roosevelt’s life and health, never allowed any question but that he, and he alone, was “the Boss.” Around him kings abounded: Admiral King; Prime Minister King; General King; King Peter of Yugoslavia; Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands; Crown Prince Olaf of Norway; the former King Edward VIII of England, now the Duke of Windsor. The President, however, remained the ultimate global monarch, as all around him were aware: charming, well-mannered, and above all, naturally seigneurial.

  This was, Daisy Suckley noticed, the difference between the President and his adviser, Harry Hopkins, who was fawning in the presence of Winston Churchill, and was “almost familiar with the Cr. Princess Martha. That’s the difference between him and the P.[resident], who doesn’t have to show anyone he is not impressed by greatness of any kind. He is one of them,” she noted perceptively4—a self-assurance, at an otherwise dark moment in the war, that struck those around him as much as it did monarchs in exile.

  “He had been President for several years before the war came along,” recalled George Elsey, who joined the Map Room staff in April 1942. “He had been Boss for several years. Congress had generally—not always, but generally—done what he wanted. The American public had supported him. He simply felt that he knew what the country needed, what it ought to have, and that he could get his way with what he wanted. Had he not been in his third term, his attitude would have been very different. Had he been a first-termer, or second-termer . . . But here he was: an unprecedented third-term President—and of course he knew better than anyone else what was good for the United States. That was the attitude at that point! He was supreme in every respect. And he was in a better position than was Churchill, who had to explain himself to Parliament; he was better than Chiang Kai-shek, who couldn’t control his own country, that was riven with civil war,” as well as war with a Japanese invader. “‘I’m in control; this is the way it’s going to be—it’s going to be the way I want it!’” was the President’s frame of mind.

  “Now, that may be a false reading, but this is the sense I had of his perception of himself as the war went on,” Elsey recalled. “It was accepted by everyone that he was the Boss—Stimson, Knox, Marshall, King, Arnold—everyone. Absolutely! After all, think how many years he had been President! All those officers had been relatively junior officers, and they had risen with his support and under his command to their present ‘lofty’—relatively speaking—positions. And they had no reason to doubt or question his authority. What was Marshall? Marshall was a colonel, I guess, when FDR was elected president. What was King? Probably a captain in the Navy. And they’d all risen to where they were under FDR. They had no reason to challenge or contradict or believe otherwise than to accept his leadership. Except MacArthur—who of course was God, and superior to everybody—as taught him by his mother!”5

  Elsey laughed at the memory. “In that sense,” the commander reflected some seventy years later, “MacArthur and FDR were very much alike: they were ‘Mama’s boys,’ who’d been raised by their mothers to believe they were supreme, superior to the ordinary human being. And by God, their life was going to prove it!”6

  As, now, they proceeded to do: each in his own way.

  Aware of MacArthur’s failings as a commander in the field of modern battle, especially in terms of his relations with air and navy colleagues, Roosevelt had wisely turned down Marshall’s insistent recommendation that MacArthur, operating in Australia, be made supreme commander in the entire Pacific, with authority over all U.S. and Allied forces operating in the theater. Certainly the campaign to oust the Japanese from their ill-gotten gains would be tough and unrelenting: something MacArthur would have to undertake from secure positions in Australia once sufficient forces were sent his way. In the meantime, however, the Japanese Imperial Navy, with its all-conquering, high-speed carriers, had to be dealt with—and for that, the President decided, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, whom he had personally appointed to command the U.S. Pacific Fleet, was named supreme commander in the Pacific—commander in chief of all naval, army, and air forces in the north, central, and southern Pacific east of the 159th meridian: his operations monitored and checked on a daily basis by the President. MacArthur, by contrast, would command only the Southwest Pacific Area.

  Just how much the President was in personal control of the war astonished even the secretary of war, Colonel Stimson—who had only been invited to go inside the President’s Map Room on April 12, 1942, for the first time since the war began. “I had an interesting time with him in his map room which I had not seen before. Captain McCrea was there and acted as expositor,” the war secretary had confided to his diary. “We went over all the areas of the globe where we are interested, and I was interested by the fact that the President had here what we are unable to have at the War Department—the naval movements.”7

  The President was clearly way ahead of Stimson, even the Joint Chiefs of Staff—men he deliberately kept firmly under his thumb, charging them to develop and carry out his overall policies as a military high command headquarters, yet making sure each of the committee members reported also to him individually—thus depriving them of any hint of collective power. It was in this way that his decision to appoint Admiral Nimitz to command the whole of the Pacific, despite Marshall’s opposition, was final—but was now to be tested, as the Japanese Imperial Navy went into silent mode, permitting virtually no communications signals that American cryptographers could decipher. All eyes turned to their impending but surely dev
astatingly concentrated punitive response to Doolittle’s daring raid on Tokyo.

  Reading the ambiguous reports of his Washington cryptographic team, Admiral King cautioned that the Japanese might well attack Alaska, the West Coast, even South America.

  Admiral Nimitz, fortunately, now had his own Magic unit in Hawaii. Nimitz’s team correctly deciphered Japanese signals indicating an imminent amphibious invasion of Port Moresby by a mixed fleet of Japanese troop ships, supply vessels, carriers, cruisers, destroyers, and submarines. Six days after Doolittle’s raid, on April 24, 1942, Nimitz flew to San Francisco to meet in person with Admiral King—who belatedly agreed not only to Nimitz’s reading of Japanese intentions, but to Nimitz’s plan: namely to engage in a sea battle with the Japanese invasion fleet in the Borneo area with the only two U.S. aircraft carriers he could bring to bear in the region, given that USS Hornet and Enterprise were still returning to Hawaii from Japanese waters, following the Tokyo raid.

  To the President’s joy, in the final days of April 1942, Nimitz’s task force commander, Admiral Jack Fletcher, duly set upon the Japanese armada—and in the first carrier-to-carrier battle of World War II, as well as first naval battle ever conducted in which the combatant ships were out of sight of each other for the entire engagement, Fletcher’s planes fought the Japanese invasion to a standstill: the Battle of the Coral Sea, fought between May 1 and 8, 1942.

  A huge American carrier, the venerable thirty-six-thousand-ton USS Lexington (known as “Lady Lex”) was sunk, and the USS Yorktown badly damaged, while only the small Japanese carrier Shohu was blown apart on May 7, 1942, by American torpedo and dive-bomber planes. Yet that was the first major Japanese warship to be sunk in World War II—and more importantly, its loss persuaded Admiral Inoue, at his headquarters at Rabaul, to abandon the entire Japanese Coral Sea operation.

  Back in Japan, Admiral Yamamoto, the fleet commander, countermanded the pull-back order, but it was too late: the invasion vessels had turned back to Truk—and by nightfall, though both big Japanese carriers, the Shokaku and Zuikaku, were still afloat, they were down to only thirty-nine planes, and running low on fuel.8 Besides, Yamamoto was reminded, the Zuikaku would be urgently needed for the impending Midway operation. Instead of another amphibious attack on Port Moresby, it was decided, an overland campaign by Japanese Army forces would be conducted across the Owen Stanley Ridge—an impenetrable jungle that was, in due course, to prove beyond even their fabled abilities.

  Round one had therefore gone to Roosevelt: ensuring the security of Australia from invasion—indeed permitting it to become the springboard for a counteroffensive that could, in time, take back all the territories the Japanese had stormed since December 1941.

  “Delighted to hear your good news,” Churchill cabled the White House9—aware how wise the President had been to ignore his request for help in the Indian Ocean, only days before.

  However, as the Zuikaku withdrew to Japanese waters to rendezvous with the gathering Imperial Fleet, there was a far bigger naval battle to be fought—over Midway.

  Watching Japanese reactions to the Doolittle Raid, the President held his breath, scarcely able to believe the Japanese Navy would risk the virtually complete ascendancy they had hitherto gained in the Pacific and Indian Oceans in a do-or-die sea battle—especially if its object was little Midway, an atoll in the middle of the Pacific with a simple landing strip. Yet this was what American intelligence in Hawaii was predicting.

  Secretary Stimson, ashamed he had not installed a similar Map Room to that of the President, had set about rectifying the War Department’s myopia. It was, he realized belatedly, small wonder the President had refused to put Nimitz under MacArthur’s supreme command, for the President was able to see not only the global picture, but naval and army perspectives of the picture that were hitherto a closed book to Stimson’s team. “It was a great help to go over them tonight with him,” Stimson had recorded, noting the movements on the President’s maps of U.S. naval forces in the Pacific as well as the Atlantic, after leaving him. “Every task force, every convoy, virtually every ship is traced and followed in its course on this map as well as the position of the enemy ships and the enemy submarines so far as they can be located.”10

  The President, moreover, had “talked very frankly” to Stimson about the inability of the British to marry their naval and RAF forces in India. However hard Prime Minister Churchill begged for U.S. naval rescue in the Indian Ocean, he’d told Stimson, the U.S. Navy would only engage the Japanese Imperial Navy on its own terms, and in its own waters—where U.S. air power, army air force as well as naval, could be husbanded and put into battle together, to maximum effect.

  Admiral King’s intelligence team had initially been unable to fathom where the secret Japanese invasion fleet was heading, following the Doolittle Raid—causing Colonel Stimson to ask General Marshall to fly out to California to make sure, in person, that U.S. coastal forces were prepared for an onslaught, if Yamamoto’s forces were heading for America.

  The President had been unconvinced, though happy to see California’s air and coastal defenses put on a more warlike footing. What would a raid against the West Coast achieve? Why would the Japanese Kido Butai fleet take the risk?

  Nimitz’s team was convinced Midway was the designated target—and in order to overcome the skepticism of Admiral King’s cryptographers in Washington, they came up with a simple but brilliant idea. Operating under the foremost cryptanalyst of his time, Commander Joe Rochefort, Nimitz’s intelligence analysts ordered a hoax American radio transmission to be sent out from U.S. forces on Midway, requesting water. The Japanese intercepted the signal—and in dutifully forwarding a copy of the message to their headquarters in their own secret naval cypher, they inadvertently gave away the code name they had been using for target Midway, since before their fleet set out. Thenceforth Nimitz had, at his headquarters, an advance copy of Yamamoto’s plan, complete with dates, times—and its true destination.11

  By May 20, 1942, with more than 85 percent of Japanese orders successfully deciphered, it was agreed between King and Nimitz that an intended Japanese feint or diversion toward the far-north Aleutian Islands would be left to local U.S. Army, Army Air Force, and naval units to repel. Instead, the United States would focus on repelling the attack on Midway. The airfield defenses and U.S. Air Force contingent would be substantially reinforced from Hawaii, together with submarines. Meanwhile, the three remaining carriers of Nimitz’s Pacific fleet (the fourth having been sunk in the Coral Sea) would be sent out ahead of time from Hawaii, under strict radio silence and hopefully undetected by Japanese long-range patrol aircraft. They were ordered to lie concealed in waters several hundred miles from the atoll, out of Japanese view: an ambush to ambush the ambushers. Only after the Japanese invasion of the island began would they be put into battle, when the four huge Japanese carriers would be awaiting the return of their bomber planes.

  Thus was the Midway counterstrike prepared, less than six months after Pearl Harbor.

  Like Admirals Nimitz in Hawaii and King at the Navy Department in Washington, the President followed the build-up to the great sea battle at the end of May with mounting anticipation.

  “Called me up last night from Wash[ington] about the weekend,” Daisy Suckley noted, disappointed, in her diary on May 26, 1942, when Roosevelt canceled his weekend plans to come to Hyde Park. “He can’t get away until next Monday or Tuesday.”12 He was, he explained, expecting the Russian foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, who would be pleading for an immediate American invasion of France to draw off German divisions in Russia. He also had a bevy of foreign royals visiting, including the Duke and Duchess of Windsor—“who are in Washington on their own invitation and about as welcome as a pair of pickpockets,” the President’s secretary, Bill Hassett, noted caustically in his own diary.13 “He said he was very tired & all alone & was going to bed at 10,” Daisy meanwhile recorded. “He said Fala,” his faithful Scottie, “was very sweet—
jumped into the front seat of the car beside him & went to sleep.”14

  As former assistant secretary of the navy in World War I, and now U.S. commander in chief in World War II, the President was all too aware of the critical importance of Nimitz’s plan for the impending naval battle—details of which he did not even share with Churchill. Against Japan’s eight aircraft carriers, ten battleships, and twenty-four heavy and light cruisers, seventy destroyers, and fifteen submarines, as the Imperial armada set out from Palau and Japanese waters on May 27, 1942, Nimitz could only furnish three carriers, seven heavy cruisers and one light cruiser, fourteen destroyers, and twenty-five submarines.

  On April 9, MacArthur’s former U.S-Filipino forces on Bataan had finally been forced to surrender,15 and a month later, on May 6, 1942, after full-scale Japanese landings across the strait, General Wainwright was forced to surrender his thirteen thousand remaining forces on Corregidor Island to the seventy-five-thousand-strong Fourteenth Japanese Imperial Army under General Masaharu Homma (who was subsequently executed for his role in the infamous Bataan Death March). For weeks thereafter, General MacArthur had been bombarding the President and Combined Chiefs of Staff from his headquarters in Melbourne with new warnings of “catastrophe” unless the President sent him aircraft carriers and more aircraft. “The Atlantic and the Indian Ocean should temporarily be stripped” to provide security for Australia, he cabled to instruct General Marshall. “If this is not done, much more than the fate of Australia will be jeopardized. The United States itself will face a series of such disasters and a crisis of such proportions as she never faced in her whole existence.”16