But a little was as far as the incrementalist in FDR would push, and he would not force the Navy to open every hatch to black sailors. In its second report, the General Board recommended offering Negro enlistees general service duties—clerks, radiomen, ammunition handlers, and segregated Coast Guard cutter crews—so long as they stayed off oceangoing ships except as messmen. Knox forwarded the Navy’s recommendation to Roosevelt with the suggestion that he “announce boldly that nothing will be done to impair morale by introducing a racial problem in the Navy while the war is in progress.”22
It was far less than black leaders had hoped for, and a good deal more than the admirals wanted. But with a war to win, it was enough for Roosevelt.
•
While Knox’s admirals fought over the Negro problem in Washington, Stimson faced a Japanese problem on the West Coast. According to the 1940 U.S. census, 112,353 persons of Japanese ancestry lived in the three Pacific coast states. Of these, 71,484 were American-born sons and daughters of immigrants, or Nisei.23
Since Pearl Harbor, Major General John DeWitt of the Western Defense Command, headquartered in San Francisco, had been worried about sabotage. A single-minded man, DeWitt believed a number of Japanese individuals, some of them citizens, some not, had been acting as spies, fifth-column agents and saboteurs. In late January, Canada began evacuating Japanese from sensitive areas within British Columbia, and DeWitt asked the War Department to do the same for a long list of industrial and population centers, including San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Puget Sound.24
DeWitt’s request reached sympathetic ears. Two years earlier, Roosevelt had told Stimson that German spies had stolen U.S. plans for the Norden bombsight, and in 1941 Marshall informed Stimson of a plan by Italian saboteurs to wreck ships in American harbors.
To Stimson, the question of loyalty was a natural one. He had traveled to Japan and negotiated a naval treaty with the Emperor’s ministers years before. He felt he knew the Japanese about as well as any Occidental, and he believed Japan would not hesitate to use fifth-column agents on the western seaboard. There had been no acts of sabotage—yet—and many young men of Japanese extraction were training for the war in Europe. But with the West Coast populated by so many Japanese, attacks against military and industrial targets were only a matter of time.25
“All along the West Coast, the presence of enemy aliens became a suddenly, sinisterly glaring fact,” warned Time magazine. News services reported FBI raids on houses with signal flags and radio transmitters. Columnist Walter Lippmann wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “It is a fact that the Japanese navy has been reconnoitering the Pacific Coast. . . . It is a fact that communication takes place between the enemy at sea and enemy agents on land. These are facts which we shall ignore or minimize at our peril.”26
Whatever the facts, flames were fanned by political opportunism. California Attorney General Earl Warren and Governor Culbert Olson asked General DeWitt to expel the Japanese from California, while congressmen from coastal states called for the evacuation of persons of Japanese lineage.27
The blend of war fever, racial prejudice, and uncertainty produced an anti-Japanese flash pot on the West Coast. A reporter for Life wrote, “Officials found themselves torn between a violent popular outcry for tough treatment of Japs, and perverse apathy toward the even more numerous and equally dangerous Germans and Italians.” One Nisei, booted from his job as an architectural draftsman, lamented, “What really hurts is the constant reference to us as ‘Japs.’ ‘Japs’ are the guys we are fighting. We’re on this side and we want to help. Why won’t America let us?”28
Stimson would have felt better had there been, say, a riot or a violent strike by Japanese Americans or their white antagonists. That would justify federal intervention. But relocating 100,000 peaceful residents because of their race seemed repugnant to a lawyer who venerated the Constitution. He cautioned DeWitt not to commit the War Department to any kind of mass relocation without his personal approval.29
Then he began having second thoughts. To his diary he reminded himself, “The people of the United States have made an enormous mistake in underestimating the Japanese.” With an elder’s disdain for the younger generation, Stimson concluded that the greater threat came, ironically, from the American-born Nisei more than from their immigrant parents—who, he figured, were probably of better character than their spoiled children. On February 10 he revealed his deeply conflicted mind to his diary:
The second generation Japanese can only be evacuated either as part of a total evacuation, giving access to the areas only by permit, or by frankly trying to put them out on the ground that their racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or trust even the citizen Japanese. The latter is the fact but I am afraid it will make a tremendous hole in our constitutional system to apply it.30
Better, he concluded, to rip that “tremendous hole” in the Constitution than risk another catastrophic attack. He regretted driving innocent people from their homes, but in true emergencies—and there were few emergencies greater than the present one—individual rights must be subordinated to the common good. It was the same deplorable principle that compelled old men to pull fresh-faced young men from their families, put them in uniform, and send them to die.
With that, Stimson recommended the forced relocation of men, women, and children of Japanese extraction. On February 11 he telephoned the White House and put the question directly to Roosevelt. FDR told Stimson to take whatever action he thought best. Citizens or aliens, Japanese, German, or Italian—the War Department had carte blanche to remove whomever it wanted, as military necessity demanded. Roosevelt’s only limitation was, “Be as reasonable as you can.”31
Neither Roosevelt nor Stimson was quite comfortable with their decision. But, as Stimson reminded himself, the ancient Romans used to say, “Inter arma silent leges.” Accepting that the law was at least quiet—if not actually silent—in times of war, Roosevelt tore open the constitutional hole. On February 19, he signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the secretary of war to designate any area as a military zone and remove such persons as he may designate from those areas.32
The next day, Stimson gave DeWitt his orders: All of coastal California, half of Washington and Oregon, and southern Arizona were designated as military zones. Any Japanese found there were to be removed and sent to “relocation camps” in Rocky Mountain states.33
Roughly 110,000 Japanese would be subject to the War Department’s orders, and the Army began building internment camps ringed with towers, fences and barbed wire. Japanese families began moving in early May, and how long they would remain in those rough tar-paper shacks depended on how fast Roosevelt and his warlords could win the war.*34
But to win the war, Marshall and King would first have to settle a fight between the Army and the Navy.
EIGHTEEN
ROLLING IN THE DEEP
ADMIRAL KING HAD BEEN KEPT WAITING, AND HE HATED BEING KEPT waiting. He sat in Marshall’s antechamber, watching one cigarette after another burn to the butt. He sat an intolerably long time—the sort of wait a commander forces on a subordinate to show him who is boss—and Ernie King sure as hell wasn’t Marshall’s subordinate. With a sour look, he got up and walked back to his office at the other end of the Main Navy–Munitions Building complex, leaving a terrified reception secretary in his wake.
Marshall didn’t know Admiral King was waiting for him, for at that moment he was placating a bad-tempered Australian foreign minister named Herbert Evatt, who had been mouthing off in the press about MacArthur and Australia getting the short end of the war effort. Marshall wore down Evatt’s fury through patience, diplomacy, and firmness, but not before King’s own patience expired.1
• • •
King had first met Marshall at a football game back in 1938. Three years later, he gave some of Marshall’s lackeys a good chewing-out, and since then the two men had
butted heads. “I had trouble with King because he was always sore at everybody,” Marshall later told an interviewer. “He was perpetually mean.”
Touchy as King was about rank, sparks occasionally flew over accidental breaches of naval protocol. At Placentia Bay in 1941, King bitched out General Arnold for coming aboard his flagship without first asking permission. In early 1942, when Arnold’s stenographer sent King a message incorrectly addressed to “Rear Admiral King,” the letter came back unopened with a heavy arrow pointing to the word “Rear.”2
King even bit back at Army compliments when he considered them presumptuous. Once, Major General Mark Clark sent King a telegram from England praising the work of a Navy captain on his planning staff and recommending the man’s promotion to rear admiral. Marshall later told Clark, “Let me tell you what happened. King and I were having a terrible argument on something. We couldn’t agree at all. I was trying to get him in a good humor to get him softened up for this thing and I thought I had, and then the door opened and he came stomping into my office, put the telegram on my desk and said, ‘Read that.’ I read it, and King said, ‘Who the hell is Clark??’”3
Marshall’s staffers loathed the admiral. In his diary, Lieutenant General Joseph Stilwell called him a “high-powered ‘rejector’” who “won’t co-operate or listen or help.” Eisenhower groused to his diary “One thing that might help win this war is to get someone to shoot King. He’s the antithesis of cooperation, a deliberately rude person, which means he’s a mental bully. . . . Of course Stark was just a nice old lady, but this fellow is going to cause a blow-up sooner or later, I’ll bet a cookie.” 4
Service rivalries died hard, putting a further strain on relations between soldiers and sailors. As Henry Stimson later observed, chauvinism began in the academies—West Point and Annapolis—and reached a fever pitch every year with the Army-Navy football game. Because their officers rarely interacted in peacetime, most generals and admirals lacked the familiarity that breaks down distrust. The Navy, Stimson remarked, “seemed to retire from the realm of logic into a dim religious world in which Neptune was God, Mahan his prophet, and the United States Navy the one true church.”5
To Ernie King, George Marshall could be “a very agreeable man when he wanted to be,” but he didn’t always want to be. “Sometimes I think he’s stupid and other times, very good,” King later mused. “His basic trouble is that like all Army officers, he knows nothing about sea power and very little about air power.” King considered Marshall the second-smartest man among the Joint Chiefs, after himself, but that did not mean the two headstrong men would see eye to eye. “We had many fights,” he recalled sourly.6
And Marshall, in King’s estimation, was about the best the Army had. Arnold, King claimed, “didn’t know what he was talking about.” King told his biographer that to form a sound strategy, “You have to use imagination and horse sense. It always seemed to me that the Navy was better equipped with strategical insight than the Army. The Air Corps didn’t know a damn thing about it.”7
• • •
After King marched out of Marshall’s antechamber that March day, Marshall figured he and King needed to clear the air between them. Picturing King building up a four-pipe head of steam, he scurried the two blocks from the Munitions Building to Main Navy’s entrance. He presented himself to King’s gatekeeper, and the flag secretary showed him in with pointed formality.
Taking a seat opposite the scowling admiral, Marshall said he hadn’t any intention of being discourteous. He explained that he was tangling with a difficult Australian, and couldn’t show the man out when King had arrived.
Frowning, King said nothing.
“If you or I begin fighting at the very start of the war, what in the world will the public have to say about us?” Marshall asked. “They won’t accept it for a minute. We can’t afford to fight. So we ought to find a way to get along together.”
King stared at him, saying nothing. It seemed a minute or two passed before he opened his mouth.
“You have been very magnanimous in coming over here the way you have,” he said with heavy, clumsy formality. “We will see if we can get along, and I think we can.”8
•
Getting along would not be easy. The Allies had agreed that offensive action would be directed against Hitler, not Tojo, until the Third Reich was slain. But as American, British, and Dutch territories fell to the samurai sword, King grew anxious to stabilize the crumbling Pacific line. That would require more than just sitting back and staving off Japan’s blows. As he told Secretary Knox, “[You have to] hold what you’ve got and hit them where you can, the hitting to be done not only in seizing opportunities but in making them.”9
Because every island that fell would carry a heavy cost in ships and blood to recapture, in mid-February the admiral floated the idea of occupying a few minor islands near Australia with Army troops. To Marshall, King’s proposal sounded like an offensive in disguise. The Army was supposed to be moving east, not west, and he wrote King on February 24, “In general it would appear that our effort in the Southwest Pacific must for several reasons be limited to the strategic defensive for air and ground troops.” He politely asked King to flesh out his ideas in detail, but reminded him of the strategy the Allies had set for the war: offense against Hitler, defense against Japan.10
On March 2, King asked Marshall to consider a Pacific strategy of hopping along a series of islands that sheltered Australia’s northern coast: the New Hebrides, the Solomons, and the Bismarck Archipelago. King intended to use marines and naval air to assault the beaches and wrest the islands from their defenders. Once the islands were secure, the Army would follow up for occupation duty. The capture of these islands, he said, would safeguard the great Allied base in Australia and pave the way for future operations against Japan.11
Nothing doing, thought Marshall. King was proposing a full-blown offensive in the Pacific while Hitler was master of Europe. Moreover, the idea of the Army following in the footsteps of the Marines, guarding ammo dumps and ports, was as repugnant to Marshall as it surely would be to MacArthur.12
To King, Marshall was dangerously short-sighted. The Allies could make a few vital inroads to cover Australia while still fighting the Germans to the east—and for the moment, they were not fighting the Germans anywhere much except in the Atlantic Ocean, King’s other domain.
Three days after sending his plan to Marshall, King went directly to the president. In a memo to Roosevelt, he suggested that a limited offensive in the Pacific would be desirable. Australia and New Zealand, he reiterated, were the keys to the Pacific War—“‘white men’s countries’ which it is essential that we shall not allow to be overrun by Japanese because of the repercussions among the non-white races of the world.” To safeguard Australia and expand the Allied perimeter, King proposed opening a “very few” lines of advance (repeating the underlined words “very few” four times in his memo, in case they might somehow be overlooked). King’s very few lines of advance would include a drive to the Bismarck and a push toward the South China Sea.13
Roosevelt brightened as he read King’s proposal. He wanted to show the public tangible progress in the Pacific, and aggressive action would give Churchill’s people hope for the Far East—a feeling as scarce these days as fresh eggs in London.14
A pleased Admiral King went back to his planners and told them to begin drafting an advance through the Central Pacific. He was careful not to give the Army any idea of what he was cooking up.
• • •
When the Japanese sliced the ABDA region in two, the Allies had agreed to put the Americans in charge of the war east of Singapore. But the vast Pacific theater, which ran from the China coast to California, could not possibly be managed by a single commander.
On March 7, Marshall proposed a plan drafted by General Eisenhower that divided the Pacific theater into two regions. Under Eisenhower’s
proposal, the Army would handle everything in the Southwest Pacific, from Australia to the Philippines, while the Navy would get everything else. The Army, not the Navy, would take responsibility for the drive up the Hebrides, Solomons, and Bismarck islands that King had staked out in his memorandum to Marshall four days earlier. MacArthur, Eisenhower suggested, would command whatever naval, marine, and air forces were required for this first island-hopping campaign.15
King blew up when he read Eisenhower’s plan. The small islands near Australia and New Guinea, he argued, must be attacked and defended by the Navy, which possessed the only trained amphibious forces. He recognized that Australia, the larger Dutch islands, and New Guinea were big enough for the kind of land war the Army was used to fighting, so he suggested giving MacArthur Australia and the big islands. Nimitz must have the smaller islands, regardless of where they lay.16
King’s strategic conceptions, while generally sound, often became lost in his strident delivery. But Marshall looked beyond King’s buzz-saw personality and crafted a compromise. The Navy would have the New Hebrides and most smaller Pacific islands. MacArthur would take the Australia–New Guinea area. Marshall only asked that King slot the Philippines within MacArthur’s jurisdiction, “for psychological reasons.”17
King agreed, and on March 16 the Joint Chiefs settled the matter. Admiral Chester Nimitz would command the “Pacific Ocean Areas” as an Allied theater commander. The Pacific Ocean Areas would be divided into three regions: the Central Pacific, under Nimitz; the South Pacific, under Vice Admiral Robert Ghormley; and the North Pacific, under Rear Admiral Robert Theobald. MacArthur would run the Southwest Pacific, which began at 160 degrees longitude, near the Solomon Islands. He would command ground and air forces within his area, as well as any Navy units temporarily placed under his command by Admiral King.18
American Warlords Page 19