For Ernest J. King, the Savo Island battle was the blackest night of the war. Hundreds, possibly thousands of men had been lost. His great Solomons offensive was stalling, and marines who had landed in the first waves were stranded, their reinforcements pulling back, their only air cover—Army air cover—weak.13
Hauling himself out of bed the next morning, King rode to Main Navy and sent a terse message to Ghormley demanding an explanation. He dispatched a team of investigators to determine who, if anyone, was to blame, and ordered his staff to throw a news blackout on the disaster.14
As King was sorting through the red waters of the Solomons, deciding what to tell the president, a note arrived from the White House. It read:
Dear Ernie:—
You will remember the “sweet young thing” whom I told about Douglas MacArthur rowing his family from Corregidor to Australia—and later told about Shangri-La as the take-off place for the Tokyo bombers.
Well, she came to dinner last night and this time she told me something.
She said, “We are going to win this war. The Navy is tough. And the toughest man in the Navy—Admiral King—proves it. He shaves every morning with a blowtorch.”
Glad to know you!
As ever yours,
F.D.R.
P.S. I am trying to verify another rumor—that you cut your toenails with a torpedo net cutter.*15
In the wake of Savo Island, King’s focus—besides replacing lost ships and men—was to keep Japanese intelligence officers from updating their order of battle charts to write off four Allied cruisers. That meant battening down some tight hatches on the news.16
As he had done after Coral Sea, King went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that no one knew of American losses in the Pacific. Several weeks after Savo Island, the Army-Navy Joint Planning Board invited the respected New York Times correspondent Hanson Baldwin to Washington to share his impressions after a recent tour of the South Pacific. While briefing some thirty senior Army and Navy officers on his observations, Baldwin happened to mention the recent loss of the battleship South Dakota, which left only one U.S. battleship in the South Pacific.
To his astonishment, one of King’s planners, Captain Charles Brown, leaped to his feet, roaring, “I object to that! I object to that!”
Everyone stared at Brown.
“This is top secret information!” Brown continued, not noticing the puzzled looks. “Admiral King has given the strictest orders that no one is to know about this!”
Baldwin was dumbfounded, and everyone, even Navy men, looked at Brown in bewilderment. Baldwin said he hadn’t told anyone about the sinkings—except, of course, the Army-Navy planning board gathered together in the conference room that day.
When Brown continued to protest, it dawned on Baldwin what the captain was saying. When King ordered that no one was to know about South Dakota, he meant No One was to know—not even the board that formulated war plans for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Army and Air Forces “had no idea of what had happened at Guadalcanal or Savo,” Baldwin later wrote. “And these same officers were supposed to be planning! That, I think, is a hell of a way to run a war.”17
• • •
It was a hell of a way to run a war. But as Japan piled reinforcements onto Guadalcanal’s sandy west side, Admiral King faced a more immediate problem: he had caught the tiger by the tail, and neither he nor his planners could figure out how to turn it loose.
The Navy was becoming stuck in the Solomons, and it could not afford to remain stuck there for long, as both supply lines to Australia and America’s military reputation were wrapped up in the success of WATCHTOWER. So five days after Savo Island, King followed up his request for bombers that Marshall had been ignoring for two weeks. Forced to respond, Marshall offered King one of the fifteen groups he had told the British he could transfer to the Pacific if ROUNDUP were canceled. But he would go no further.18
To Marshall, King was the kudzu wandering through his global strategy. Giving to Ghormley meant taking from MacArthur—and taking from Eisenhower, whose TORCH operation would go forward in just over two months. In Europe, Marshall was trying to convince a reluctant British ally to invade France in 1943, and Arnold was trying to amass a strategic bomber force in England. A departure of more bombers, fighters, and transports to the Pacific might give the British an excuse to postpone ROUNDUP indefinitely.19
Though it meant risking defeat in the Solomon Islands, Marshall, Leahy, and Arnold agreed that TORCH must remain the top priority. Marshall would help Ghormley by diverting some bombers he had planned to send MacArthur, and he would order MacArthur to give Ghormley as much air support as he could spare. Otherwise, he would stick to the “Germany First” plan.20
Though Guadalcanal was a Navy show, MacArthur knew Marshall might tighten the same ligature on him when it came time to hit New Guinea and Rabaul. In language calculated to explode on the Joint Chiefs like a time-delay bomb, MacArthur warned that America would face a repetition of the disasters of the war’s early months unless the president and chiefs matched the Japanese on air, ground, and sea.21
Caught between shrill warnings from MacArthur and the demands of TORCH, Marshall scraped together an infantry division to send to the hard-pressed Pacific. He ordered Arnold to look for more planes, and passed MacArthur’s plea for more support to Roosevelt.
He also asked Arnold to schedule a trip to the Pacific, to see what things looked like on the ground. Knowing the airman would be unpopular with the beleaguered marines and sailors, he advised Arnold before leaving: “Listen, don’t get mad, and let the other fellow tell his story first.”22
That was all Marshall could do for the Pacific War.
•
“Arnold is naturally discouraged by the raids that have disrupted all his efforts,” Stimson told his diary on September 2.
Arnold had not been referring to German air raids over England, or Japanese raids on Guadalcanal. His prized bomber fleet—the strategic force that would wreck Hitler’s industrial base—had become the target of King’s shrill demands for aircraft. Before he left for the Pacific, Arnold complained to Stimson, “King never lets up. He has not receded one inch from his demands upon us and I prophesy that he will eventually get them all.” The air warrior confided to his crumpled pocket diary, “King for some time has tried to get more planes for the Pacific; tries subterfuge and cunning. Navy is trying to run a land war, relying on Army Air and Marines to put it across, but does not want to have its battleships or cruisers meet Jap Navy or get sunk.” 23
At a Joint Chiefs meeting on September 15, King and Arnold plunged into a bitter argument over King’s calls for more aircraft. Arnold argued that by April 1943, the Allies would have more planes in the Pacific than the Japanese would. But the marines being strafed on Guadalcanal didn’t give a damn about April 1943, for without air support, they might not last that long. King needed those planes now.
The two commanders got nowhere, and after they had spun their wheels, Leahy finally suggested that the chiefs postpone their discussion until Arnold had a chance to see the Pacific for himself. Leahy managed to calm tempers, but he couldn’t change the basic math: neither Arnold nor King had enough bombers to go around.24
King spent the next few weeks hectoring Marshall for more air support from Army assets in the Southwest Pacific, meaning MacArthur. Marshall passed along King’s request, which drew a typical MacArthurian reply—pessimistic and rife with scorn for the Navy: “If we are defeated in the Solomons, as we must be unless the Navy accepts successfully the challenge of the enemy surface fleet, the entire Southwest Pacific will be in gravest danger.” It was imperative, he said, “that the entire resources of the United States be diverted temporarily to meet the critical situation; that shipping be made available from any source; that one corps be dispatched immediately; that all available heavy bombers be ferried here at once . . .”
MacArthur’s list went on. And on.25
TWENTY-FIVE
GIRDLES, BEER, AND COFFEE
IN LATE 1942, MIDTERM ELECTIONS AND FIGHTING IN THE SOLOMONS LEFT AN invisible scar upon each other.
“In the two weeks before election the loss or retention of a jungled island 5,000 miles away may thus materially affect the character of the next Congress and the government of many a State,” Time remarked on October 26. “These are the weeks when political candidates are at the mercy of chance.” One Democratic strategist predicted, “The loss of the Solomons, if we do finally lose them, is going to set this country afire. Hell’s fire, the people will be mad.”1
War was intruding on politics, just as politics intrudes on war. As the elections drew near, antiadministration forces began shelling the White House with the usual salvos of late-campaign hyperbole. They latched onto the bloody stalemate in the Solomons, where soldiers, marines, and sailors were battling a fierce Japanese counterattack, and they accused Roosevelt of failing to put real muscle into the Pacific war. They claimed MacArthur had been denied supreme command in the Pacific theater to squelch his chances as a presidential candidate, and demanded to know why MacArthur wasn’t getting more men and supplies to fight Japan in New Guinea.2
FDR had no intention of allowing a festering sore like Guadalcanal to infect the congressional elections. In late October, he ordered the Joint Chiefs to ensure “that every possible weapon gets into that area to hold Guadalcanal.” Marshall and Arnold obediently scraped up a squadron of B-24 bombers with partly trained crews and sent them to New Caledonia. When Marshall told Roosevelt that shipping was the impediment to sending more weapons, Roosevelt ordered the War Shipping Administration to release twenty more cargo ships. What was good for the First Marine Division was good for the administration, and Roosevelt would make sure both had a fighting chance come November.3
• • •
A few days before the election, FDR was called to referee a fight between Elmer Davis, head of the Office of War Information, and Admiral King. Davis, charged with keeping the public informed of the war’s progress, wanted to release news of the loss of the carrier Hornet, which had been sunk the day Time wrote of politicians being at the mercy of chance. King, naturally, opposed telling the public anything that would allow Japan’s intelligence men to write Hornet off their order of battle charts, and refused to allow Davis to release the news.
Balancing military security against the upcoming elections, FDR again struck a compromise. “If the announcement of the loss were withheld, the Republicans would say it was on account of the election,” he told his secretary, Bill Hassett. But taking King’s objection into account, he agreed to announce only the loss of a carrier, not the class of carrier or its name.
Davis pressed his case. The families of sailors on other aircraft carriers would worry unnecessarily about their fathers, sons, and husbands if the carrier’s name were kept from the public. FDR held his ground. The lives of the living, he reasoned, could be jeopardized if the Japanese knew the U.S. Fleet was down one large, fast carrier. Davis would get letters and calls, but Hornet’s fate would remain, to an extent, under wraps.4
• • •
The landings in Africa, if successful, would give the Democrats a big political boost, and FDR wanted that boost before November 3, not after. During an early meeting with Marshall on TORCH, Roosevelt had folded his hands and pleaded in mock supplication, “Please make it before Election Day.”
Yet planners on both sides of the Atlantic recognized that an October date was unrealistic, given the transportation schedules required to move 60,000 men, water, food, weapons, and equipment from North America to North Africa—to say nothing of two other task forces embarking from England. When Eisenhower informed Washington that the landings would take place on the morning of November 8, Roosevelt was disappointed, but he went along without a word of complaint. The needs of the operation took first priority, and D-day for TORCH would remain in the hands of soldiers, not politicians.5
• • •
After D-day, however, a great many questions would remain in the hands of politicians, and some of those politicians would be French. There were an estimated 120,000 French troops in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, and if those soldiers turned their guns on the invaders, the Allies might be driven into the sea. Even if the Allies managed to shoot their way through the French Army, they would take horrendous losses more profitably spent against Rommel than against the French.
If, on the other hand, the French joined the Allies, they could shut down Rommel’s supply ports in Tunisia and force the Desert Fox to surrender—or starve.
The burden of persuading those Frenchmen to change sides would fall on Eisenhower’s shoulders, and at Roosevelt’s direction, Robert Murphy, America’s consul general in Algiers, flew to London disguised as a lieutenant colonel to brief Eisenhower on his options.* The Allies, Murphy said, could align themselves with one of three faction leaders: Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle, leader of the French resistance in Dakar; Admiral Jean Louis Xavier François Darlan, commander of the French Navy and Vichy’s second-in-command; or Henri Honoré Giraud, a former French Army commander who, Murphy said, had the stature to rally the French officer corps.6
After talking it over with Murphy, Eisenhower decided Giraud was the horse to back. De Gaulle’s anti-Vichy broadcasts on BBC radio made him un traître infâme to most French officers, and Darlan, though powerful, was a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semitic fascist. Giraud, said Murphy, was the compromise choice most likely to convince his countrymen to lay down their weapons—or better still, fire them at Germans and Italians.7
•
The problem of governing conquered lands had plagued the U.S. Army since the days of the Mexican War. Military men are not, as a general rule, adept politicians, and basic training doesn’t cover subjects like municipal administration or international law. So in the summer of 1942, Stimson and Marshall asked reservist Brigadier General Cornelius Wickersham, a partner at an old Manhattan law firm, to head a new school of military government in the picturesque hills of Charlottesville, Virginia.8
As Marshall and Stimson envisioned the school as a way to avoid local mistakes that had ignited the Filipino revolt after the Spanish-American War. Like the infantry school at Fort Benning, the School of Military Government would be an advanced institution for officers tasked with rebuilding shattered governments on a democratic foundation.9
Liberals within the administration saw a right-wing demon in the making. Secretary Ickes, Undersecretary Acheson, and Harry Hopkins began hearing rumors of a college of little MacArthurs—men, the stories said, sympathetic to a coup d’état against Roosevelt, in which Wickersham would be anointed president and Marshall his vice president. Bureaucrats in State, Treasury, and Interior began raising a ruckus.10
The accusations stung Marshall, who knelt at the altar of civilian rule. War in a democracy involves more than flanking movements and aerial bombardment, and George Marshall understood this better than any man in any nation’s uniform. He explained his philosophy to John Hilldring upon Hilldring’s appointment to head the Army’s civil affairs branch:
We have a great asset and that is that our people, our countrymen, do not distrust us and do not fear us. Our countrymen, our fellow citizens, are not afraid of us. They don’t harbor any ideas that we intend to alter the government of the country or the nature of this government in any way. This is a sacred trust that I turn over to you today. We are completely devoted, we are a member of a priesthood really, the sole purpose of which is to defend the republic.11
Stimson dispatched his troubleshooter, Assistant Secretary Jack McCloy, to assuage the State Department. Before long, Acheson was satisfied that the Army was neither trying to supplant the Department of State, nor building a shadow government on American soil.
But alarm bells rang anew as Election Day a
pproached. Stimson told his diary after one cabinet meeting, “The cherubs around the White House still scented danger, and when they found that the school had enrolled a man by the name of Julius Klein (the same name as an old intimate friend and adviser of Herbert Hoover’s), they thought the worst had happened and rushed to the President with the bad news. Apparently he swallowed the story and I found a rather sharp memo from him wanting to know what the Army was doing and by what authority it was doing it without going to him.” 12
Three days later, Roosevelt, Stimson, Ickes, and other cabinet members argued for an entire afternoon over Julius Klein’s role in the School of Military Government. Stimson wrote, “I had all the typical difficulties of a discussion in the Roosevelt Cabinet. The President was constantly interrupting me with discursive stories which popped into his mind while we were talking, and it was very hard to keep a steady thread.” 13
Hearing Stimson’s report of the Julius Klein discussion, Marshall was astounded. “Mr. Stimson came back from a cabinet meeting that lasted almost all afternoon and I discovered that they had been discussing entirely this particular officer whose name was the same as that of an intimate of a onetime Republican leader,” he recalled. “Mr. Roosevelt was very bitter about this matter and Mr. Stimson was very much stirred up over it.”
Marshall looked into the matter and found that the Julius Klein at the School of Military Government was an entirely different fellow from the one Herbert Hoover had known. Evidently the man who consumed an entire afternoon of the wartime cabinet’s attention had never met Hoover in his life. “I was shocked when I found out how long the cabinet spent—all afternoon—warring over this thing,” Marshall said.14
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