The Mantle of Command

by Nigel Hamilton

  The President—aware that crying wolf was par for MacArthur’s course—patiently explained to the general that his fears were unfounded. A huge Japanese fleet—the largest amphibious invasion fleet it had ever sent into combat—was currently at sea, invisible thanks to dense fog, but “it looks, at this moment,” he cabled MacArthur on June 2, “as if the Japanese fleet is heading toward the Aleutian Islands or Midway and Hawaii, with a remote possibility it may attack Southern California or Seattle by air”—i.e., not Australia.17

  The President’s message shut MacArthur up—the general victim of his inveterate localitis. Admiral Yamamoto, as forecast by Nimitz’s code breakers, meanwhile split his armada; directing one-third to the Aleutians and Dutch Harbor, the rest to Midway to support his ten-thousand-man invasion of the island, backed by four aircraft carriers and a formidable amount of naval artillery. Assuming the Japanese proved successful, there was no end to what they could next undertake—indeed, in the absence of General Arnold, who had flown to England, General Marshall had sent all currently available Lend-Lease bombers still in the United States to the West Coast rather than to Britain.

  As the President politely dealt first with the Russian foreign minister in Washington, then with the visiting royals at Hyde Park, anticipation became torment.

  Before lunch on June 3, the President took his guest Princess Martha, and her companion Madame Ostgaard, to the Library, where his personal and presidential papers were to be housed. The midday meal was taken early, however, as his personal secretary recorded that day—for the President had agreed to seek alternative summer accommodation for still other “royal exiles.”18

  That the President of the United States, directing critical military efforts across the entire globe, should be tasked with finding a summer residence for the Dutch royal family in exile struck Hassett as extraordinary. “Roosevelt, Inc, gentlemen’s estates and summer homes,” he added sarcastically in his diary. “Needs of royalty carefully attended to.”19

  Roosevelt enjoyed driving, though, given his immobility, and was happy to check out locations for the royals. Besides, there was nothing better the President could do while waiting for news from Midway. He had the utmost confidence in Admiral Nimitz, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, whom he liked and admired for his cool judgment. On the basis of Nimitz’s brilliant intelligence breakthrough, the President had authorized the admiral’s ambush. It would be the greatest sea battle of the war thus far—employing America’s entire Pacific force of aircraft carriers. It was, in sum, all or nothing—and unlike Winston Churchill, he had no intention of interfering in the operations of his commanders in the field, or ocean.

  “Some day,” Nimitz had already written to his wife on May 31, 1942, “the story of our activities will be written and it will be interesting.”20

  Interesting it certainly was. On the morning of June 3, 1942, word came through both to Nimitz at his headquarters in Hawaii, and to the President in Washington, that two Japanese light carriers had begun their feint attack on Dutch Harbor. A thousand miles farther south, however, Yamamoto’s primary fleet was approaching Midway.

  USAAF bombers, operating from the Midway airfield, did their best to hit the approaching vessels of the Japanese landing force from eight to twelve thousand feet. Their aim was appalling—some bombs missing by more than half a mile. The great Japanese armada merely continued toward the atoll—and early on the morning of June 4, 1942, launched their expected attack—using some 108 Japanese naval bombers.21

  There followed a day of intense drama—the airwaves crackling with claims and counterclaims.

  That evening, near Hyde Park, the President’s train was made ready, and at 11:00 P.M. it left Highland Station for Washington, complete with royals, Harry Hopkins, “and the rest of us,” Bill Hassett recorded.

  Waking the next morning, the President left the train at Arlington at 9:00 A.M. and made his way by car to the White House. There, in the Map Room and the Oval Office, tantalizing fresh news began to come through. First three, then all four Japanese aircraft carriers in the attack on Midway had been successfully ambushed. They were burning fiercely—indeed, in the course of the day they were ordered to be torpedoed and sunk by their own colleagues, lest they fall into American hands and be towed back to Pearl Harbor in quasi-Roman triumph. The entire carrier contingent of the Japanese Kido Butai fleet, under Admiral Nagumo—commander of the attack on Pearl Harbor—had been obliterated.

  As Admiral Nimitz proudly declared in the official communiqué he issued on June 6, 1942: “Pearl Harbor has now been partially avenged. Vengeance will not be complete until Japanese sea power is reduced to impotence. . . . Perhaps we will be forgiven if we claim that we are about midway to that objective.”22

  As it transpired, the American ambushers had been extraordinarily lucky. The discipline, professionalism, and bravery of the Japanese aviators and seamen were beyond compare—indeed, at 10:00 A.M. on June 4, 1942, the great naval battle could well have gone the other way. Not a single American plane operating from the U.S. Army airbase on Midway, despite heroic attacks in which most were shot down, even scratched one of Admiral Nagumo’s carriers. Nor did a single U.S. torpedo plane, operating from Admiral Raymond Spruance’s Task Force 16, under Fletcher’s overall tactical command, succeed in hitting the Japanese carriers, despite equal heroism—in fact, the Japanese carriers survived no less than eight waves of American attacks without suffering the slightest damage. U.S. Army Air Force bombers simply proved incapable of hitting the nimble Japanese carriers from high altitude, while the heavily laden, trundling TBD Devastator torpedo bombers, flying at fifteen hundred feet from their carriers with their mostly ineffective torpedoes, were sacrificial lambs when pounced upon by Japanese Zero fighters, as the President was informed by three Midway fliers invited afterward to visit him at the White House and tell him in person their version of the battle. What was needed, they said, was “something that will go upstairs faster.”23

  Yet the sacrifice of so many American fliers had not been in vain. With the Japanese Zeros rendered helpless at mounting a defense while flying at low altitude to deal with the Devastator torpedo bombers, a veritable storm of American SBD Dauntless dive-bombers suddenly swooped on the Japanese carriers from nineteen thousand feet. With their thousand-pound bombs they had hit each one of the three Japanese flattops in the main Japanese formation on its pale yellow flight deck, marked with a red “Rising Sun” disk—penetrating the vessel’s wood and steel topskin and setting the warship ablaze.

  One accompanying destroyer captain, Tameichi Hara, could not at first credit news that all three Japanese carriers were ablaze. “Was I dreaming? I shook my head. No, I was wide awake! . . . The horrifying reports continued until there was no room for doubting their accuracy.”24 Aboard the largest battleship in the world, the Japanese flagship Yamoto, hundreds of miles in the rear, Admiral Yamamoto “groaned” as he read the latest dispatch from the commander of the screening force at Midway: “Fires raging aboard Kaga, Soryu, and Akagi resulting from attacks by enemy carrier and land-based planes. . . . We are temporarily withdrawing to the north to assemble our forces.”25 Admiral Nagumo, victor of the Pearl Harbor sneak attack, was compelled to evacuate his flagship, the Akagi, as it burned—only dissuaded from suicide by a subordinate. Then the fourth and last Japanese carrier, the Hiryu, was attacked by still more SBD Dauntless planes—and though its pilots managed to reach and disable the USS Yorktown carrier, it, too, became an inferno, and had to be sunk by its own compatriots.

  Four Japanese carriers sunk in a single day?

  It was a victory on a scale not even Nimitz had dreamed possible. Moreover, though Admiral Yamamoto attempted to snatch a consolation victory by summoning his remaining cruisers and lighter vessels from support of his Aleutian expedition, he was out of luck. Admiral Fletcher prudently kept his remaining ships out of nighttime range. Instead he called upon U.S. Air Force B-17s and Marine Corps aircraft from Midway to attack and sever
ely damage Yamamoto’s luckless, retreating Japanese heavy cruisers in daylight the next day—one of which was finished off by more dive-bombers from Spruance’s Task Force 16 on June 6, 1942.

  The greatest sea battle of the Second World War was then finally over—its conclusion marked in the early hours of that morning when Admiral Yamamoto reluctantly issued his signal of defeat: Order #161, beginning with the words, “The Midway Operation is canceled.”26

  For Yamamoto, the naval confrontation in the central Pacific had turned into a calamity. Even his hopes that Japanese planes from the Hiryu, his last, burning carrier, could instead land on Midway’s runway had gone up in smoke, literally.27 Every single Japanese plane that had set out on the fateful, punitive expedition was therefore lost, together with more than a quarter of the Imperial Navy’s best pilots.28

  Admiral Yamamoto’s chief of staff, Matome Ugaki, noted in his diary that those responsible “ought to have known the absurdity of attacking a fortress with a fleet!”29 Yet it was Ugaki’s own commander who had persuaded the Japanese Combined Headquarters to back the plan—dooming Japan to defeat in the Pacific if it failed.

  At the White House, by contrast, there was jubilation—followed by alarm when a reporter from the Chicago Tribune, Robert McCormick’s isolationist newspaper that had earlier leaked the President’s Victory Program before Pearl Harbor, wrote a new dispatch detailing exactly what American intelligence had known of the Japanese plan, in advance of the battle. “NAVY HAD WORD OF JAP PLAN TO STRIKE AT SEA,” ran the nefarious Tribune banner. “UNITED STATES NAVY KNEW IN ADVANCE OF JAP FLEET: Guessed There Would Be Feint at One Base, Real Attack at Another,” was the headline as McCormick’s exclusive was then repeated in the Washington Times-Herald on June 7, 1942—together with exact details of the Japanese order of battle and three echelons.

  The President was so angry, he first considered sending Marines to close down McCormick’s building in Chicago, and having McCormick tried for treason—which carried the death penalty. A few days later, however, Secretary Knox talked him out of that—substituting a grand jury investigation of McCormick for violation of the Espionage Act.30

  Fortunately, the Japanese were too shocked to take note of McCormick’s publication of the leak. They had, in any case, already changed their JN25 code a week before the battle, which henceforth proved formidably difficult to break. Besides, nothing good would come from drawing further attention to McCormick’s story, any more than it would have after his Victory Program revelation. McCormick would only hate the President more deeply, given the subsequent national rejoicing over the triumphant feat of American arms. Even General MacArthur was reluctantly compelled to signal his personal congratulations to Admiral Nimitz, his fellow supreme commander, on his “splendid” naval victory.31

  In Washington, the President breathed a sigh of relief. And apprehension—knowing the United States must now turn its full attention to Europe and the defeat of Adolf Hitler, who was hell-bent on conquering Soviet Russia in a second, titanic version of Barbarossa that year.

  Hawaii Is Avenged

  In a sea ambush at Midway, the U.S. fleet avenges Pearl Harbor, sinking all four Japanese carriers. Thus ends Japan’s brief domination of the Pacific. At the White House, FDR is overjoyed—and proud of his supreme commander, Admiral Nimitz. Here Marine General Thomas Holcombe shows FDR a Japanese flag his son Marine Major James Roosevelt helped capture during a raid on Makin Island.

  The Fall of Tobruk

  On June 19, 1942, Churchill flies to Hyde Park to warn the President that the U.S. generals’ plan for a Second Front in France that year is too difficult. Two days later, more than thirty thousand British troops surrender the vital port of Tobruk to Rommel without a fight. It becomes clear to FDR at the Pacific War Council in Washington that the United States will have to intercede in North Africa to save the British, while the Russians must save themselves.

  Dieppe

  The secretary of state for war, Henry Stimson, and General Marshall, the army chief of staff, do not agree. They threaten to switch to the Pacific unless the British go along with a Second Front invasion in 1942. The result, when Churchill feels compelled to mount a miniversion, is the British “fiasco” of Dieppe on August 19, 1942—where more than three thousand brave Canadians are killed, wounded, or captured in a few hours without getting off the beaches.

  The President is mortified. He appoints retired Admiral Bill Leahy as his military chief of staff at the White House to put down the Stimson-Marshall insurrection and help enact his “great pet scheme”: U.S. landings in French Northwest Africa, which the Germans have failed to occupy.

  FDR Inspects the Nation

  Boarding his presidential train, FDR sets off on September 17, 1942, on a fourteen-day inspection tour of U.S. production plants and military training facilities, prior to American landings in North Africa.

  Gearing Up for Victory

  From East Coast to West Coast, from the Gulf to South Carolina, the President inspects and inspires the “arsenal of democracy” he has fathered. The miracle of mass production—of ships, planes, tanks, guns, and munitions—is stunning: a new ship in ten days, the promise of a plane an hour . . . Together with rigorous training and rehearsal in amphibious operations, the tour confirms the President’s faith in Allied victory—under American arms and leadership.

  Waiting for Torch

  At Shangri-la, the President’s secret camp in the Maryland mountains, FDR awaits news of the Torch invasion of Morocco and Algeria. The war secretary has bet him the invasion will fail, but FDR remains optimistic his “great pet scheme” will succeed.

  Torch

  Generals Eisenhower and Patton are FDR’s favorite protégés—the one appointed by him to be supreme commander of the Torch invasion, the other his star performer as a saberrattling armored corps commander at Casablanca.

  Armistice Day

  With the surrender of all Vichy French forces in Northwest Africa to Eisenhower on November 11, 1942, the huge U.S. invasion is heralded around the world as the turning of the tide of World War II. In Washington that day, the President, accompanied by General Pershing of World War I fame, gives thanks at Arlington National Cemetery. “May He keep us strong in the courage that will win the war,” he prays, “and may He impart to us the wisdom and the vision that we shall need for true victory in the peace which is to come.”

  PART EIGHT

  TOBRUK

  17

  Churchill’s Second Coming

  SHORTLY AFTER THE TRIUMPH of Midway, while on the floor of the House of Commons in Ottawa, the Canadian prime minister, Mr. Mackenzie King, received word that “President Roosevelt wished to speak to me over the ’phone. I left at once,” he noted in his diary on June 11, 1942.

  After exchanging greetings, King asked the President: “How are you? To which he, the President, replied: I am terribly ‘upshot.’”1

  Upset?

  King waited to hear what about.

  The President “then asked me if I had any information about a certain lady who was crossing the Atlantic to pay a visit to this side.”

  If enemy agents were eavesdropping—and subsequent evidence would prove that they were—they would have been puzzled. The President was unable to refer to anyone by name, it being an open line, but King “said that I thought I knew who he meant.” In fact the premier had, “this morning, received word that the person mentioned would be leaving almost immediately.”

  The President corrected him. The “certain lady’s” flight from England had been postponed by a day, Roosevelt informed his Canadian counterpart—and “then asked: ‘Do you know where she is to land?’

  “I replied: I do not know. He said: ‘I do not know either.’”

  The President tried, elliptically, to explain. He was referring, he said, to “the lady [who] was coming to stay with her daughter at a house which had been engaged for the summer at Stockbridge, Mass[achusetts].” The house wasn’t ready for the lady in questio
n—yet the President had found himself simply unable to get her to postpone her trip. As the President complained, he had personally been charged with “the job of getting the house,” which had entailed quite some searching, “and in addition, he had done pretty well everything else including obtaining the servants,” in fact everything “short of supplying the silver.” “He said to me,” King recorded the President’s expostulation, “Don’t you love it?”

  “Well,” responded the premier with a chuckle, “that comes from your making such a favourable impression” on the daughter of the “certain lady.”

  And at that the two political leaders burst into laughter.2

  It was true. The President had a soft spot for Princess Juliana of the Netherlands, her husband, and their children.

  To help the President out, the Canadian premier duly agreed to house the princess’s mother, Queen Wilhelmina, and her family on their arrival in North America, at least until the Massachusetts summerhouse was ready—the two men shaking their heads at such responsibilities in the very midst of a world war for civilization. “The President was quite amusing about the whole affair,” Mackenzie King summarized in his diary that night, “saying that it was pretty much the limit in the way of imposition.”3