American Warlords

by Jonathan W. Jordan

  Delighted at the emphatic British support, Marshall cabled Stimson that the prime minister had declared himself in complete agreement with the plan. The year 1943 would see the great invasion of Hitler’s continental fortress.18

  Yet lying behind the agreeable British facade was fear that a more candid face would drive Marshall and King toward the Pacific. The brothers in arms therefore gave Marshall what he wanted and sent him home to ship men, weapons, and aircraft to England. “We knew pretty well there wasn’t a hope in hell of ROUNDUP, but we didn’t say so,” Ismay admitted later. “I think Marshall and Hopkins went back feeling that we were all sold on it.”

  This impression, he added with British understatement, would have “unfortunate consequences.”19

  •

  While Marshall argued strategy in the Atlantic, King’s intelligence analysts deduced that a Japanese invasion force was preparing to hit Port Moresby, a major Allied port on New Guinea’s southern coast near Australia. Moresby, they concluded, was a logical next step for Japan, for its capture would allow Admiral Yamamoto to threaten northern Australia by sea and air.

  In mid-April, King ordered Admiral Nimitz to meet him in San Francisco at Twelfth Naval District Headquarters for a strategy conference. On April 25 the two admirals talked there for a few hours, then continued their discussion over lunch at San Francisco’s Bohemian Club. Figuring Yamamoto would launch his attack around May 3, Nimitz proposed hitting him somewhere in the Coral Sea, off Australia’s northeast coast. Vice Admiral William Halsey’s carriers Enterprise and Hornet, returning from the Doolittle Raid, would steam southwest to join forces with Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, commanding the carriers Yorktown and Lexington. Once the enemy was spotted, Fletcher and Halsey would give battle.20

  King was uneasy about the plan. He liked Nimitz but didn’t entirely trust him. The Texan was a solid, marlinspike officer, but as a former Bureau of Navigation man, he was also the sort of officer King called a “fixer” or “trimmer”—a man willing to compromise, one who trimmed his sails and avoided the hard way that King instinctively sought. “Damn, if I could only keep him tight on what he’s supposed to do. Somebody gets a hold of him,” he told a lady friend.

  King didn’t trust Nimitz to stay the strategic course, and he didn’t want Nimitz courting serious risks with the Navy’s few precious aircraft carriers. Before leaving on trips to San Francisco, he would occasionally grouse, “Have to fly out and straighten Nimitz out again.”21

  In late April it was unclear to King whether Halsey would arrive at the Coral Sea in time to tip the odds in the Navy’s favor. King suggested that Nimitz add some heavy battleships to his task force, just in case, but Nimitz brushed off the suggestion. Battleships, he reasoned, would be too slow, too vulnerable to carrier attacks, and too difficult to keep fueled and provisioned. He would engage the enemy with carriers alone.

  King flew back to Washington. With some reservations, on April 27 he approved Nimitz’s plan.22

  • • •

  In a confused carrier engagement in the Coral Sea on May 7 and 8, Fletcher’s task force struck Admiral Shigeyoshi Inoue’s invasion fleet as it approached Port Moresby. Torpedo and dive-bombers from Yorktown and Lexington tore down on Inoue’s carrier spearhead. They sank one light carrier, Shōho, and badly damaged another, the heavy carrier Shōkaku. American fighters shot up the air complement of a third carrier, Zuikaku, so badly that she would be out of action for two months.

  It was a muddled result at best, but the Battle of the Coral Sea gave the Americans something to celebrate: a victory. The invasion fleet had been turned back, and for the first time since the war began, the U.S. Navy had sunk a Japanese ship larger than a destroyer.23

  The Americans did not come away unscathed, however. King’s beloved carrier, USS Lexington, had been set upon by Japanese torpedo bombers and took two tin fish in her side. She survived the battle, briefly, but the Americans were forced to divert her planes to Yorktown and abandon ship. With a heavy heart, Admiral Fletcher sent the broken thoroughbred to the ocean floor with five torpedoes. Yorktown, her flight deck pierced by heavy bombs, limped home to Pearl Harbor to repair the damage.24

  Smarting over Lexington’s loss, and anxious to keep the news from Yamamoto, King clamped down on word of the carrier’s fate. He threw a tight news blackout over the sinking, and even concealed the loss from the British; he told Admiral Pound only that Lexington had been “damaged” during the battle.25

  • • •

  By mid-May, King was growing nervous about the Pacific situation in general and his fleet carriers in particular. Japan had nearly twice as many as he did, and the next big American flattop under construction would not have a champagne bottle broken across her bow until December. On May 14, he sent Nimitz a cable again urging caution: “Loss of Lexington represents one fifth our carrier strength in Pacific. . . . At present stage of our carrier building program we cannot afford to swap losses with this ratio.”26

  Because Yamamoto still held the upper hand, King’s intelligence staff believed he would again strike toward the South Pacific—if not at Port Moresby, then at New Caledonia or the Fijis. King wired Nimitz to suggest that he put Lexington’s surviving planes ashore in Australia and Hawaii and pull his ships under the protective umbrella of land-based fighters. On May 17 he advised Nimitz to employ “strong attritional tactics and not repeat not allow our forces to accept such decisive action as would be likely to incur heavy losses in our carriers and cruisers.”27

  But Nimitz, like Yamamoto, was a poker player willing to gamble when he held better than two pair. His codebreakers at Pearl Harbor, laboriously decrypting the Japanese Navy’s JN-25 code, convinced Nimitz that Yamamoto’s target was Midway. To the Texan, that foreknowledge was better than three jacks and a king.

  Nimitz acknowledged that the Aleutians, Moresby, or Oahu would be left naked if his carriers were concentrated around Midway. But he hadn’t enough ships to defend every place at once, so hard choices had to be made. He placed great faith in his intelligence men, and as the Japanese fleet left its home waters in late May, Nimitz leaned over the table and put all his chips on Midway.28

  So did Yamamoto. As a small island nation, Japan could not afford “attritional tactics” against a nation with oil, steel and prodigious industrial capacity. As King urged caution on Nimitz, Yamamoto’s air fleet, centered around four large carriers, covered a massive invasion force steaming east. His plan was a three-pronged gamble: A decoy task force would stab at Alaska’s Aleutian Islands; his battleship and transport armada would capture the American base at Midway; and a carrier force would destroy the American fleet from the north.29

  Shortly after leaving their bases, the Japanese fleets went silent, just as before Pearl Harbor. The men of Main Navy had no idea where they were, and Nimitz had only three carriers, including the wounded Yorktown. But he had land-based air support from Midway, and he was confident he had read Yamamoto’s cards correctly. “We are actively preparing to greet our expected visitors with the reception they deserve,” he radioed King on May 29.30

  As the Americans steamed west to meet the world’s mightiest fleet, King could only hope Nimitz was right.

  TWENTY

  “LIGHTS OF PERVERTED SCIENCE”

  HENRY STIMSON WAS A THROWBACK TO THE AMERICA OF 1900. THE SON OF A robber baron banker, he distrusted much of the newfangled world of the 1940s. As he once consoled an old cavalry officer who wrote to complain of the mechanization of the horse service: “[Some of my] oldest and choicest recollections are pervaded with the smell of horse sweat and saddlery. . . . Nearly all of us have to see some of the things we love remorselessly replaced in the modern mechanized world—a world that is just as repellent to me as I think it is to you.”1

  But wealth and social connections brought Stimson a wider perspective than most men, and at Highhold and Woodley he often reflected on scientific advan
ces of the “modern mechanized world.” His cousin Alfred Loomis, a patron of electronic and nuclear research, regaled him with advances in navigation technology, sound waves, and physics over after-dinner conversations at Highhold, or at the Loomis laboratory at Tuxedo Park. Through their talks, Stimson took an immediate interest in developments like radar, which were changing the way wars would be fought. And one project caught his eye like no other.

  Shortly after war broke out in Europe, FDR appointed an “Advisory Committee on Uranium” to follow up on some theories suggested by physicists Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd. The committee’s purpose was the development of a superbomb fueled by fissile uranium, an explosive potentially far more powerful than combustibles like TNT or black powder. Such a weapon, scientists theorized, could destroy a harbor, perhaps even level an entire city. Nuclear science wouldn’t exactly throw open the gates of hell, but it might pry them far enough apart to defeat Hitler.

  There were a lot of “ifs” to the concept, and to many in uniform it seemed like a Buck Rogers idea. But Roosevelt dreaded a world in which the Nazis developed an atomic superweapon before the Allies did. Four years earlier, German scientists had split the atom, and Germany boasted some of the world’s most respected minds in the field of theoretical physics. In a speech to the House of Commons, Winston Churchill had warned of a Nazi “Dark Age,” made all the more sinister by the “lights of perverted science.” Perverted or not, Roosevelt intended to have that light switch in Allied hands before Hitler could find it.

  Nine days after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt established a “Top Policy Committee” to organize the development of a nuclear weapon, referred to in hushed whispers as the “S-1” section. Three months later, the committee handed S-1 to the Army Corps of Engineers, which was well organized for the massive infrastructure and manpower needs the project would require.

  Marshall oversaw the creation of a new headquarters with the innocuous name of “Manhattan District.” He placed the “District” under command of Colonel Leslie J. Groves, an abrasive, tenacious engineer who had been the driving force behind the Army’s massive pentagonal office building in Arlington, still under construction.2

  S-1’s cost mushroomed like a splitting atom as entire towns were built to house, feed, and provide laboratories for scientists, construction workers, and their families. Moving the project under Army jurisdiction put a tremendous strain on Marshall’s funding, and since S-1 was one of the war’s two most important secrets—the other being Allied decryption of enemy messages—Marshall could not simply tell Congress why he needed massive new funds. He would have to look under every War Department sofa cushion to find money he could divert for the Manhattan project.3

  As Manhattan’s costs ballooned, Marshall found he could push creative accounting only so far. “I obtained the first money,” he said, “by taking twenty percent of the appropriations concerning such matters as the development of bombs, artillery and kindred matters—which was legal.” As the project grew in size and complexity, however, the voracious baby required hundreds of millions of dollars, not merely millions. Marshall would have to find new ways to fund a project no one was supposed to know about.4

  Stimson’s credibility with Congress proved a godsend. He telephoned Senator Harry Truman, the committee chairman investigating Army-Navy waste, and asked him to back off an investigation into two vaguely described war plants. “That’s a matter which I know all about personally, and I am one of the group of two or three men in the whole world who know about it,” he told Truman.

  “I see,” said the senator.

  “It’s part of a very important secret development.”

  “Well, all right then—”

  “And I—”

  “I herewith see the situation, Mr. Secretary,” Truman interrupted. “You won’t have to say another word to me. Whenever you say that to me, that’s all I want to hear.”

  “All right,” said Stimson.5

  He hung up on cordial terms with the senator, and Marshall and Stimson breathed another sigh of relief. Truman, they felt, would meddle no further. Thanks to Stimson’s straight-shooting diplomacy, Senator Truman would have no reason to know about the atomic bomb’s existence until the blast appeared in the papers.

  •

  As Groves and his scientists worked on one unconventional weapon, George Marshall set men to work on a very different one. The Army was swelling with draftees, and few of those citizen soldiers would have the natural toughness, the moral indifference—the hatred—to slaughter their way to Berlin or Tokyo.

  Enlisted morale was usually left to unit commanders, but those officers were not usually inspiring speakers. Patton was colorful, but so crude that his message often got lost in translation. MacArthur was too aloof to fraternize with his men, and the lower levels—company-grades on whom the assignment of motivating men got dumped—were usually dull, inarticulate, or so bombastic that the men didn’t take them seriously. Since becoming assistant chief of staff, George Marshall had kept a careful watch on complaints from the rank and file, and pointless speeches was one gripe he had been hearing since the first months of the draft.6

  The nation had plenty of Hollywood artists who could stir emotions on a mass scale, and Marshall found ways to integrate directors, producers, actors, and studio heads into the war effort. One of these men, a director named Frank Capra, had signed up for the Army shortly after Pearl Harbor. The ticket-buying public loved his films; Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Lost Horizon, and the Oscar-winning It Happened One Night were huge box office successes. So not long after Mr. Capra of the Screen Directors Guild became Major Capra of the Army Signal Corps, Marshall called him into his office for an hour-long talk.

  “Within a short time,” Marshall said, his blue eyes locked on the director, “we will have a huge citizens’ army in which civilians will outnumber professional soldiers by some fifty to one.” The unknown, he told Capra, was whether those citizens would fight with the same ferocity as Hitler’s supermen and Tojo’s samurai.

  To Marshall the answer was obvious. “Young Americans, and young men of all free countries, are used to doing and thinking for themselves,” he said. “They will prove not only equal, but superior to totalitarian soldiers if—and this is a large if, indeed—they are given answers as to why they are in uniform, and if the answers they get are worth fighting and dying for.”

  Marshall asked Capra to create a documentary series called Why We Are in the War. What he wanted, he said, was a film every soldier entering basic training could watch. He wanted it interesting, accurate, and informative.

  The short, handsome director tightened up as he listened to Marshall stress the importance of the project. He was a feature filmmaker, a storyteller, not a propagandist or a historian, and he was being asked to shape the attitudes of millions of trainees. “General Marshall,” he said at last, “I think it’s only fair to tell you that I have never before made a single documentary film.”

  “Capra,” said Marshall, “I have never been chief of staff before. Thousands of young Americans have never had their legs shot off before. Boys are commanding ships today, who a year ago had never seen the ocean before.”

  In Marshall’s world, precedent meant nothing. Every man and every woman in the war effort were doing things they had never done before, for the sole reason that their country needed them to do it. Capra understood. Infused with the zeal of a new project, he promised to make Marshall “the best damned documentary films ever made.”7

  Capra proved as good as his word. His film Prelude to War, the first installment in a seven-episode series titled Why We Fight, skillfully wove in clips of Nazi and Japanese propaganda films. Featuring the narrative talents of screen icon Walter Huston, Prelude to War showed Marshall’s soldiers in bold terms what they were fighting against. The movie included short cameos by FDR and Stimson and concluded with a stirring statement by General Mars
hall about America’s war aims.

  The movie was an instant hit with the troops, and Stimson delighted in giving advance screenings of Capra’s films to important War Department visitors as each new installment was finished. Released to the general public in 1943, Prelude to War won an Academy Award for the year’s best documentary.8

  With the Why We Fight series, Marshall enlisted the popular media as an ally in the cause of victory. But as Yamamoto’s fleet sailed toward Midway, Admiral King was about to learn that the popular media could threaten his war in the Pacific.

  TWENTY-ONE

  MIDWAY’S GLOW

  “U.S. KNEW ALL ABOUT JAP FLEET, GUESSED THERE WOULD BE A FEINT AT ONE BASE, REAL ATTACK AT ANOTHER.”

  SO SCREAMED THE WASHINGTON TIMES-HERALD’S HEADLINE FOR SUNDAY, June 7, 1942. In a two-day battle, the newspaper reported, Nimitz’s planes sank two or three Japanese carriers. The article claimed the Navy’s admirals had known the strength of Yamamoto’s battle fleet days before his ships converged on Midway Island. That invasion fleet was turned back, and the Americans had won a “momentous victory” in the Pacific.1

  The Times-Herald article was generally accurate, which was why King exploded like a powder magazine when he picked up his Sunday paper. “U.S. KNEW ALL ABOUT JAP FLEET” pointed everyone—American and Japanese—to but one conclusion: the Navy’s cryptographers had broken JN-25.

  In all his years in uniform, King had never seen such treasonable publication of American military secrets—in this case, the most vital secret of the Pacific War. That very day he held a rare press conference and misled journalists about the source of the Navy’s prognostication. He told them that since the Doolittle Raid and the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Navy had been expecting a Japanese counterattack, to “save face.” Midway seemed the most likely target, which was why Nimitz’s carriers had been ready for them.2