American Warlords
Page 31
For all their disagreements, King and Marshall had formed a good working partnership. Marshall did not ask for too much on MacArthur’s behalf, and King refused to squeeze every drop of blood from the Army at the cost of his relationship with Marshall. The hard-swearing, hard-drinking womanizer from Ohio understood, better than most Army strategists, the symbiotic relationship among air, land, and sea forces. It would be a long war, and though they would lock horns time after time, he and Marshall knew they would have to “get along” a while longer.15
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If Savo Island had been King’s Garden of Gethsemane, Marshall found his in the Dorsal Mountains of Tunisia. As Rommel’s force retreated from Libya before Montgomery’s Eighth British Army, it came within striking distance of the American II Corps, under command of Major General Lloyd Fredendall. On February 14, two panzer divisions smashed into the American corps at the crossroads town of Sidi bou Zid in eastern Tunisia. Rommel’s panzers drove the apple-green Americans back through Kasserine Pass, killing, wounding and capturing more than six thousand soldiers and destroying hundreds of tanks, trucks, and artillery pieces. Seventy miles behind the front lines, General Fredendall prepared for a siege in his fortresslike bunker while his scattered, leaderless units retreated in disorder.
Watching from Algiers as the American line crumbled, a depressed Eisenhower kept Marshall dutifully informed of the fiasco—so much so that Marshall felt Eisenhower was spending too much time thinking about Washington and not enough thinking about the battle. Marshall brusquely replied, “I am disturbed that you feel under the necessity in such a trying situation to give so much personal time to us.” He promised Eisenhower, “You can concentrate on this battle with the feeling that it is our business to support you and not harass you and that I’ll use all my influence to see that you are supported.”16
The crisis passed after four nerve-racking days. Rommel, lacking fuel to follow up his initial victories, grudgingly pulled back his panzers, leaving a charred wake of American corpses. But the Kasserine blitz brought into stark focus the problem of poor American generalship, and it was Marshall’s job to ensure that the problem was fixed immediately.
As the Americans were reeling, Eisenhower sent observers to the front. He listened carefully to reports from Major Generals Omar Bradley, Lucian Truscott, and Ernest Harmon, whose conclusions were remarkably consistent: air-ground cooperation was weak, antitank doctrine was flawed, and General Fredendall’s handling of his corps was terrible.
Eisenhower asked Marshall to recall General Fredendall. Because he believed the top man in each theater—Eisenhower, MacArthur, Stilwell in China—should be free to promote and fire whomever he chose, Marshall approved Fredendall’s relief.
Marshall knew that relieving Fredendall and demoting him to his lower, “permanent” rank would confirm what some newspapers were saying: the war was being bungled. Fredendall could still be useful as a training commander, imparting practical lessons to trainees while not risking men in another Kasserine fiasco. He had Fredendall shipped to the States, gave him a third star, and appointed him deputy commander of the Second U.S. Army, a training outfit. But he kept Fredendall at home for the rest of the war.
The change paid off. Eisenhower brought in General Patton to take Fredendall’s place, and Patton appointed Bradley, another Marshall protégé, as his corps deputy. After a month of heavy fighting, Eisenhower sent Patton back to Morocco to plan the invasion of Sicily, and moved Bradley up to II Corps command. Under Bradley’s careful leadership, the II Corps fought its way to the sea.
On May 8, the Axis armies in Africa surrendered, exactly six months after the TORCH landings. A quarter million Italian and German soldiers checked into Eisenhower’s prisoner-of-war cages, there to await an all-expenses-paid cruise to their new homes in Aliceville, Alabama and other fine towns of the American South and West.
• • •
During the Tunisian campaign, Marshall kept a close eye on the Army’s public relations. He appreciated the need to create American heroes. While Army doctrine stressed teamwork in military operations, the public needed vibrant personalities to rally behind. Marshall encouraged reporters to give Eisenhower his share of credit for the victory in Tunisia, while Eisenhower liberally spread the laurels among Bradley and his British partners.
When the influential British press threw the largest and greenest laurels at Montgomery’s feet, however, Marshall grew irritated. He did not want to see American contributors overshadowed by the larger-than-life personality of Montgomery, whose reputation in America soared with the U.S. release of the British documentary Desert Victory in April. Marshall wrote his press relations officer, “You can tell some of these newsmen from me that I think it is a damned outrage that because [Eisenhower] is self-effacing and not self-advertising that they ignore him completely.”17
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At Casablanca, one of the few points of wholehearted agreement had been the U-boat peril. During 1942, the Allies lost nearly two million shipping tons and thousands of sailors to German submarine, surface raider and air attacks. Successive waves of Liberty ships, tankers, and colliers coming out of American and British shipyards could not keep up with German sinkings. Worse yet, Admiral King estimated that the Kriegsmarine had more serviceable U-boats in 1943 than when it started the war.
On any given day, the Allies had about 1,500 ships plying the waves, and by mid-1943, the United States would be producing about 1.5 million tons of transport vessels each month. Admiral King, calculating losses against production, felt that if the Allies could reduce U-boat sinkings to half a million tons per month, the problem would be licked by American production power.
But for now, ships went down and King knew the Navy’s fortunes would get worse before they got better.18
• • •
Henry Stimson had never taken his mind off the idea of using radar-equipped bombers to sink German submarines—an idea for which the Navy, it seemed to him, had no real interest. As Stimson saw it, land-based bombers with radar could hunt down U-boats on the open waters while Navy planes provided close convoy protection. But to his disappointment, in early 1943 Secretary Knox, Undersecretary James Forrestal, and the Navy’s admirals insisted that the problem was a simple lack of escort vessels. They refused to adopt an Army air group to do their job.19
Stimson renewed his efforts to get Army planes into the U-boat war after the Battle of the Bismarck Sea in early March. There, off the New Guinea coast, U.S. and Australian bombers wiped out an entire Japanese troop convoy. “The thing that cheers me about it,” Stimson wrote, “is that it was accomplished without any help of the Navy and only by land based planes—the kind of planes Knox is always saying are no good.” 20
Stimson went back to see FDR with a proposal to use land-based Army bombers as submarine hunters. He claimed the Army could deploy an effective antisubmarine force six months before Admiral King could perfect the Navy’s convoy system. To Stimson’s delight, Roosevelt agreed with him—enough, at least, to suggest a trial run over the Bay of Biscay on the occupied French coast. Then, considering the explosion once word of Stimson’s plan reached Main Navy, Roosevelt added, “I don’t want to go over Knox’s head.” He asked Stimson to talk to Knox about it first.21
Knox and King had considered Army sub hunters back in 1941, when King headed the Atlantic Fleet. At the time, King insisted that the Navy needed its own bomber fleet. “The medium bombers are primarily to help the Navy do its job at sea,” he had argued. “They are best manned by Navy personnel who know the ways of the sea and of sea-going people.” Long-range bombers were, to King, just another weapon the Navy should have in its arsenal whenever it could be useful.22
To King, the job, not the weapon, determined who would command. In this case, the job was hunting maritime threats. That was the Navy’s area of expertise, and that meant the Army should butt out. “There was only one solution,” recalled Ca
ptain “Frog” Low, King’s antisubmarine head. “Get the Army out of the antisubmarine business.”23
On the first of April, a grimly determined Henry Stimson approached Knox with his proposal for a “Special Anti-Submarine Task Force” under command of an Army officer. Speaking as one old soldier to another, Knox told Stimson he worried that the admirals would “think that we were setting up an independent command right in the middle of their submarine work in the Atlantic.” By endorsing the proposal, he would incite a mutiny on his unstable quarterdeck.24
Four days later, Stimson received the Navy’s reply, written by Admiral King. Specially equipped aircraft flying from land, King allowed, would be an effective supplement to the convoy system. In time, the Navy would have sufficient bombers of its own to take over the functions Stimson proposed giving to the Army. But unity of command, the Great Commission preached by both services, dictated that when antisubmarine bombers were launched, they would—they must—fall under the jurisdiction of the Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Navy.25
In the wake of his encouraging meeting with Roosevelt, Stimson felt he had the upper hand, even without Knox’s support. He pressed his view upon Harry Hopkins and ordered Marshall to take the matter up with the Joint Chiefs.26
But Henry Stimson underestimated Ernie King. Learning that the president, Stimson, Knox, and Hopkins were leaning against him, King retreated to his inner keep and prepared for a long siege. He threw together a separate command, designated the Tenth Fleet, to “control allocation of anti-submarine forces to all commands in the Atlantic.” The Tenth Fleet, as King envisioned it, would absorb all functions that Stimson seemed bent on giving the Army.27
King’s “Tenth Fleet” wasn’t really a fleet, but a coordinating office for a small group of scientists, engineers, and communications workers, and its commander was one Admiral Ernest J. King. When Stimson, Marshall, and Arnold realized the Tenth Fleet was only a paper organization, they renewed their efforts to send Army bombers on ocean patrols.28
To Stimson, the antisubmarine war “provided an almost perfect example of the destructive effect of the traditional mutual mistrust of the two services. . . . The Navy and the Air Forces had a mutual grudge of over twenty years’ standing—the Navy feared that the Air Forces wished to gain control of all naval aviation, while the Air Forces saw in the Navy’s rising interest in land-based planes a clear invasion of their prescriptive rights. The Air Forces considered the Navy a backward service with no proper understanding of air power; the Navy considered the Air Forces a loud-mouthed and ignorant branch which had not even mastered its own element.”29
The deployment of antisubmarine bombers remained stalled among Stimson, Marshall, Arnold, and King until early July. In a deal brokered by Rear Admiral John McCain and Lieutenant General Joseph McNarney, the Army Air Forces agreed to provide more than two hundred bombers to the Navy. In return, General Arnold asked only that bombers ceded to the Navy would be used exclusively for antisubmarine warfare and reconnaissance of America’s coasts; strategic bombing missions would remain the responsibility of the Army Air Forces.30
King again refused. He wanted those bombers, and he would do with them what he pleased. He would agree that their primary function would be antisubmarine warfare, but he would not restrict himself or the Navy as to how those bombers would be used or what they could carry. He might need to bomb a Japanese air base or a U-boat pen somewhere, someday, and he refused to handcuff himself just to keep Arnold’s staff happy.31
Now it was Marshall’s turn to be furious. Tired of King’s empire building, he warned King that Secretary Stimson would never agree to give away bombers that the Navy could send to bomb Berlin. “If the matter is taken to the President,” he told King, “the Secretary desires to be heard by him on the subject.”32
Eventually, King, ever sensitive to the power of words, agreed to language emphasizing that the “primary” function of the Navy’s bombers would be for antisubmarine warfare. But he stipulated that no commander, Army or Navy, would be forbidden to hit the enemy if some unexpected opportunity presented itself.
King’s wordsmithing was comfort enough for Marshall and Stimson, and on July 9 they accepted his conditions. American bombers, under King’s Tenth Fleet, would take to the skies against Hitler’s U-boats. The Army disbanded its antisubmarine unit, and the organization of the bombers was finally settled, more than a year and a half after Pearl Harbor.
“Boy, what a fight!” King remembered. “But we won.”33
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King didn’t win every battle, though, and now and then he picked awkward moments to run to cable’s length and engage with broadsides. He was supposed to be a big-picture admiral, but as the Navy grew under his watchful eyes, his restless mind drifted back to his experiments with uniforms on the Texas.
Though he had no business thinking about what clothes his officers wore, King decided to create a new uniform, something different from the ubiquitous khaki that, he sneered, looked too much like the Army’s garb. “In my view, khaki is not to be considered as other than a stop-gap,” he had written the previous June, and by April 1943 he had conjured up a dark gray uniform suitable for both ship and shore.34
Gray, thought King, was perfect for its “simplicity and utility.” Unlike whites, it would not attract the attention of strafing enemy pilots against a steel superstructure. It did not show small stains, making it suitable for engineer and ordnance officers. And the color gray, King thought, was “more nearly consonant with democratic principles.”35
While his Texas experiments had been a flop, King had better reason to hope his new uniform would stick. In April, Secretary Knox approved the new design, and with Knox’s signature, “King Gray” became the Navy’s regulation uniform for commissioned and petty officers. King’s staff obediently paid for new uniforms from their modest government salaries, and a supportive Admiral Leahy showed up for meetings of the Joint Chiefs wearing the new regulation color, even while King wore the traditional Navy blue.36
King was not the only commander to indulge sartorial whims. Marshall and Eisenhower tinkered with the infantryman’s uniform, and before the war Patton had become infamous for an outlandish green-and-gold suit he personally designed for his tankers.
But King had not considered the sailor’s fondness for tradition, and the new uniform was a dud. At sea, young officers wearing “King Gray” were hooted at as bellhops and doormen by old salts. King’s chief of staff, Admiral Willson, was asked by two Washington teenagers if he was a bus driver or a train conductor. One of King’s longtime friends grumbled, “None of us ever felt that the gray uniform he insisted on during the Second World War ever made any contribution to us winning the war. It cost a lot of money for those who had to buy them and also put an extra load on the textile industry, all for no real purpose.”37
Some commanders paid lip service to the new uniform regulations, but most benignly neglected it, especially in the Pacific. Nimitz, King heard, went so far as to ban it. When he got wind of the revolt in the Pacific, King cabled Nimitz to ask whether it was true that Pacific officers were not permitted to wear the new gray. Summoning his powers of military obfuscation, Nimitz replied, “Inquiry discloses some local commands, while not prohibiting gray, have expressed preference for khaki. Am fully aware gray is authorized and will issue appropriate clarifying directive.”38
Any “appropriate clarifying directive” from Nimitz would be a far cry from what King intended.
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King’s wrangling with the Army, the Air Forces, the naval bureaus, Knox, and a thousand other foes ground away at his leather-clad soul. “Life here is strenuous, of course,” he confessed to a Naval Academy classmate in a rare moment of openness, adding quickly, “So far I have managed to keep well and, on the whole, to remain as cheerful as circumstances allow.”39
While King did his exercises in the morning, and managed to snatch some pleas
ure reading in his cabin at night, he had no horseback rides, vigorous exercise regimen, or evening social hour, as Marshall, Stimson, and Roosevelt did. At home, Marshall had a supportive wife in Katherine. Stimson had the faithful Mabel, and FDR had women, official and unofficial, to complete his domestic life. But King, living several miles from his uninspiring wife, Mattie, had no regular intimates. He had to find them outside the great Washington bubble.
For King, one placid harbor was the Shenandoah Valley farm of Paul and Charlotte Pihl. Paul, a Navy captain and old friend, was a member of King’s logistical team, and Charlotte, sister of Wendell Willkie, was a charming, vivacious woman whom King had first met at a party when her husband happened to be out of town.
King would arrive at the Pihl house alone on weekends and stay with Paul and Charlotte in their farm’s guesthouse. There he could relax, take in the quiet country air, muse about becoming a gentleman farmer, and most importantly, not think about war. “The farm was such a great relaxation for him from the tensions of his work,” Charlotte told an interviewer years later.40
When Captain Pihl was transferred to California, Charlotte stayed on the farm and King continued his weekend visits. His long-standing reputation as a rake had been an article of faith in naval circles for decades, and rumors of an affair between Captain Pihl’s wife and the “boudoir athlete” were natural. Mattie knew of her husband’s visits and resented them, but did not try to stop him. She would call the Pihl farm and ask if the admiral was there; Charlotte would offer to have him come to the phone, but Mattie always refused, begging Charlotte not to tell King she called. When Charlotte invited her to come to the farm, she always declined. “Ernest doesn’t want me to come up there,” she would say before hanging up.41