by Larry Berman
When the brigade returned at the end of the summer, plebes were quickly put to the test by upperclassmen, especially by the second-year youngster class, who took full advantage of no longer being at the bottom rung of the academy’s ladder. Youngsters took special delight in hazing rituals that included ordering plebes to walk down the center of corridors with eyes in the boat (looking straight ahead), memorizing and repeating meal menus, squaring all corners at right angles, addressing upperclassmen as Mister, performing pushups for minor infractions of regulations, or “shoving out”—sitting without a chair at meals. Reef Points was the plebe bible, containing all the information needed to survive; every word of it had to be memorized. At any time of day or night, a plebe could be asked to recite a poem, sing a naval song, or provide details on a particular battleship history. All of this was geared to instill discipline and learn how to accept authority and punishment with a stiff upper lip.
The glossary for the 1939 Reef Points provided a list of terms to be used by all midshipmen: Bull was the nickname for subjects like English and history. Chico referred to Filipino mess boys. Dago was a reference to any foreign language. To French out was to take unauthorized leave or go over the wall. Steam referred to engineering; skinny, to physics; math, to analytic and applied mechanics, later calculus. Spanish athlete was a nonathlete. Moke referred to a “colored corridor boy or mess attendant.” To drag was to have a date, usually for the hop.8
Bud survived plebe summer, enjoying the physical challenges as well as the new structure. “I think I always enjoyed the discipline. In part there is a certain challenge in measuring up, and there’s a certain challenge in figuring out how to beat the system too.”9 Classes had just started when the inevitable news arrived on September 13, 1939, that Bud’s mother was dead. With Bud at the academy and Saralee at Berkeley, fourteen-year-old Jim bore the brunt of Frances’s final weeks of morphine-induced nightmares. “By the end of August, she had been crying out for death while I held her hand. Mercifully, she slipped into a coma a few days later,” recalled Jim. “Now her suffering was over.”
Elmo had anticipated the moment since Bud had departed for the academy. In a letter to the superintendent, Elmo explained that “for two years his [Bud’s] mother has fought a lingering illness buoyed up by the hope that she could know he had attained this goal. Now that this wish is consummated, like a ship that has slipt [sic] its anchor, we are seeing her drift rapidly downstream. Your plebe knows this situation and I have tried to prepare him for the zero hour.”10 Elmo requested only that when the time arrived, he could send a telegram to the superintendent, and “perhaps a few words of advice may help him to carry on in the true tradition of the navy.”
The call came just two weeks into the start of the academic semester. Bud had braced himself for the moment but found the news difficult to accept. “For the first time I could remember, my life seemed to be without meaning or purpose. It would take the better part of a world war for me to regain that sense of purpose.”11 By Bud’s own admission, he underwent “a reexamination of my direction and goals in life.” Three thousand miles from home and without any family support, Bud questioned the role of God and religion in life. His brother and mother had died so young. How was it possible to believe in a just God?12 It was truly the most traumatic experience of his life at that point. He questioned why such a warm, compassionate, and understanding woman “who had given so much to others was taken during the prime of her life, after a slow and painful demise.” His mother’s death “left me bitter. The goals I had set to serve my fellow man in the field of medicine no longer seemed so important to me. That long term goal was replaced by a short term one that required I only do now that which I needed to get me through until tomorrow.”13
Bud honored his mother’s wishes by not returning home for the funeral service at the family’s Sycamore home. With over two hundred Tularians present, Tulare High School music teacher Cyril White played “Auld Lang Syne” on the violin, the same melody Frances had requested for the funeral of Bruce Craig.14
Bud’s remaining anchor was now his father. “I worshipped the man. I consulted with him at every step of my career,” Bud said of the man he considered “his hero, ideal, and father.”15 In a 1972 letter to his father written en route to his hospital bed, Bud encapsulated his father’s influence upon him: “They say that fathers should not try unduly to influence their sons in a career. Yet it was clearly your influence that carried me into the Naval Academy and it was, in the early post-war years, my knowledge of how much it meant to you that kept me in the naval service. The fact that I have had the opportunity to serve my country in a top post is, then, directly attributable to the love and respect I have for you and for all to which that has led, I am grateful to you. But beyond that, the way you passed on as a faith, in my youth, of public service, devotion to country, love of family, courage to face the issues squarely and to dare to deal with them forthrightly, disinterest in wealth, dedication to the pursuit of excellence in leadership and in one’s profession, provided a guidepost which I have tried to use in my life.”16
Nowhere was this bond between father and son more evident than in the dozens of letters exchanged between 1939 and 1943, which reveal the joys and trepidations, the ups and downs, and the shaping of a worldview that would define Bud’s later life.17 Early letters document the travails of academic struggle, the pressures to succeed, the tension between yearning to live a life on the edge by testing academy rules and the demands of military conformity. There was the incessant fear of losing his place in class standing, of not being able to cut it, of letting his father down. These anxieties were later replaced by a growing self-awareness that he possessed the right stuff to succeed. The letters also reflect a young naval officer’s evolving views on the war in Europe, the rise of fascism, and the prospect of dying in battle. At bottom, the letters reveal a process whereby a young man discovers his commitment to duty, honor, and service.
Bud found it difficult getting back to the rigorous schedule of the academy. Reeling from his mother’s death, he sought emotional support from a former steady girlfriend from Long Beach, Geraldine Chapman, attending school in the Washington, D.C., area. She had known about Frances, and it was understandable that Bud would turn to her. The one problem he faced was that plebes were not permitted off the Yard for dating. Plebes could, however, sign out for cross-country hiking. Bud came up with a plan whereby he would sign out for the hike but, once across the railroad trestle bridge, he’d meet his girlfriend. In a letter to his father, Bud bragged about beating the system, under which plebes were not allowed to drag. He began by packing two picnic lunches and walking with a carefully screened upperclassman until he saw Geraldine, at which time she would join them. “Anyone seeing them would think that two others were dragging,” wrote Bud. The lowly plebe was just tagging along. Once out of sight of the academy, the upperclassman would go his own way so that Bud and Geraldine could have lunch along the Severn. They would then walk back until they saw Naval Academy personnel and go their separate ways, “as tho [sic] we were total strangers. It was a good strategy,” bragged Midshipman Zumwalt.18
There were times when Bud partied too long with his girlfriend. “We had a wonderful time but when Sunday nite came around I was so tired and worn out that I couldn’t see straight,” Bud wrote to his dad.19 He reported having no energy and a low-grade fever, but feared academy medics would kill him. Bud preferred a diagnosis from “an old country doctor from a cow town” rather than from those “who would likely remove his spine clear up to medulla oblongata” when all he had was a cyst.
This was all rather disheartening for Elmo to hear. Memories flooded back of Bud’s senior year in high school, when they argued about Bud’s amorous pursuits. In no uncertain terms, Elmo advised Bud that he was “painting the social trail too vigorously.” Elmo challenged Bud to get into shape by exercising.20 The Naval Academy became, in retrospect, boot camp for a life of multitasking and burning the cand
le at both ends. Bud insisted that he could wake up forty-five minutes before reveille to catch up on classwork and also study Saturday afternoons, if necessary. He preferred socializing and sleeping to studying and intended to keep at it. “I console myself with this logic—Plebe year counts only a minute fraction toward our final standing. The next three years increase in importance. In Sept we can discuss the whole situation to decide if I should turn on more steam. Until then, I shall give em both barrels at my present rate.”21
With this kind of attitude, it is not surprising that the plebe-year letters reveal Bud’s apprehension about staying afloat academically. “I have just completed the hardest academic week I have had,” Bud informed his father.22 After taking his math exam, Bud reported that he “went into the exam room . . . and blew up.” He feared losing 200 places in the class standing. “I feel like a man who has just been knocked out. Sorry I don’t have the capacity both you and I thot [sic] I had.”23 When first half-year grades were posted, Bud “hit a new low” in math, in which he plummeted from 49th to 111th. “All because I received a 2.61 in my final. In short, two hours of ‘blow up’ cost me 62 numbers.”24 He struggled in other subjects as well. “In Skinny I dopt [sic] from 9 to 17 which makes it look as though I am on the skids pretty bad. All I can say is that I know I can do better—that I can exert more push and goddamit—I am going to show them a thing or two.”25 The one consolation was “125 plebes are trying to bilge out, almost 1/6th of class . . . this is certainly ‘survival of fittest’ contest.”26
By mid-February of the new year, Bud was finding his ground, exercising, and focusing on how to relax under pressure. “I think sometimes that I am a temperamental nitwit,” he wrote in a candid self-appraisal. “As you know (better than anyone else) I am a mixture of high strung foolishness at times.”27 For the first time since his mother’s illness, Bud forgot his father’s birthday. “No gift that I could have sent you, on time, could express the thought, no yearly eulogy could convey the continued year round day by day love, that your son bears for you,” wrote Bud in apology. “Rarely a night passes by, but that my pre-slumber thots [sic] turn to you and the family. Always in these moments, there is thankfulness for the Providence that gave me my Dad. . . . And tho I confess with shame to have forgotten your birthday, I point with pride to the countless hours of every day that are devoted to thinking of you and your strength.”28
The drums of war occupy a large part of the correspondence, offering a window into world events as they unfolded and the shaping of a worldview. By March 1940, Finland had been at war with Russia for four months, beseeching the Allies for assistance amid the bitter fighting.29 On March 10, 1940, Bud wrote, “I hope like hell that England and France send troops to Finland, but I doubt that they will. That British caution is certainly a trying thing.” A day after he mailed the letter, Britain and France announced “all available resources” to help the Finns,30 but the pledge arrived too late, and Finland soon signed a pact ceding substantial territories, as well as economic and military privileges, to the Soviet Union.31
“The European situation has got me down,” Bud wrote two weeks later. “England’s blockade is a failure. Russia and Germany are working like demons to exchange their agriculture and industry respectively. They have licked the blockade, thus making France and Eng take the offensive.” Bud was also concerned with war looming in the Near East. The New York Times reported on March 24, 1940, that the region was “bristling with troops and armament” and filled with the growing belief that Europe’s war heading their way was “almost inevitable and perhaps not far off.”32 Maxime Weygand, commander in chief of Allied Near Eastern Forces, had assembled a large force of at least two hundred thousand troops. Bud envisioned geographic difficulties that would likely complicate if not crush chances for Allied victory. “If war starts in the Balkans, Weygand in spite of his forces will be operating far from a home base and supplies,” wrote Bud. “He will lose to a German army operating close to home. Neither side has a chance in the west—so there you are. At best a stalemate, which is tantamount to an Allied defeat.”33
Bud held hopes for Maurice Gustave Gamelin, commander in chief of the allied troops in France.34 “My only hope lies in Gamelin. His is a genius. I hope to see some great strategy from him. Do you know it would be a break for the Allies to have Italy declare war, either FOR or AGAINST. The FOR is obvious. AGAINST, Gamelin would smash the Italians in nothing flat. The mountain passes from France to Italy run from a French focal point to spread out in Italy (like your fingers spread from your hand). With Italy as a base, a new front against Germany thru Brenner pass can be opened up.”
Concluding with a personal note, Bud admitted, “This week for some reason, I have been homesick and dissatisfied. I can’t get over the feeling that I have let people down with my record.”35 A week later he reported, “We finished our exams today. I am dissatisfied with the results. . . . There are only 68 days more before we finish this horrible year.” His grade in Steam placed him 611, leading Bud to think that his professor “is a Jew (I am almost certain) and hates my German name. . . . Now this MAY BE imagination, but I feel sure my work is better than the grade.”36
Meanwhile in Europe, Gamelin led a combined British, French, Belgian, and Dutch force as German troops entered the Low Countries, but when German forces broke through French lines, he was replaced by General Maxime Weygand.37 “War has begun like a hell at last,” wrote Bud. “All these things have broken into the routine of our life here. I am so keyed up over this war that life here seems almost inconsequential.”38 “The worst hell of history has begun, I think. I pray to God that the Tommies and Frenchies can hold them.”39
After listening to an international news hookup depicting the raging battle from Arctic Norway to the Swiss border, he wrote, “I can’t leave the radio, I am so entranced.” By now Bud favored the Allies sending their Asia Minor army of 750,000 up through Greece and into the Balkans. “If they disrupt the southeastern industry, they have Germany licked. Russia is not going to molest them. She is going to ‘sit it out.’ ” He also favored a U.S. declaration of war: “At last this country has gotten into a friendly state of cooperation with the Allies. It’s about time. I think that in spite of the losses we would incur, that it would be wise to declare war, protect the Dutch Indies, join the British blockade and gear our industry to produce enough planes to blast the Germans from the face of the earth. Our planes could throw air power to the allies in a big hurry.”40
Bud’s plebe year took a dramatic turn when he attended a meeting of the Quarterdeck Society, the academy’s oratorical and debating club. He was not intending to speak, but after sizing up the three midshipmen participating in the preliminary round, Bud signed up for the main event, having little doubt he could beat the other speakers. Bud had supreme confidence in his communication skills, having honed them in high school and with his father. One of Bud’s second-year roommates, fellow Californian Ray Angelo, liked to recall the quiet Sunday afternoon in Bancroft when Bud first demonstrated his oratorical talents. They had received a crate of old mushy grapes that Ray’s dad had shipped from California. Bud decided to give their next-door dorm mates a wine-making lecture. “The silver tongued Zumwalt” strode into the room barefooted and “immediately launched into an impromptu ten minute discourse on the history and art of wine making in old Italy. His eloquence held the amazed audience spellbound and he then announced that they would be treated to an actual demonstration. The grapes were dumped on the polished floor, stomped upon.” Bud and his roommates then fled. “Thus was born a great naval orator.”41
Bud’s plan for participating in the academy’s debate challenge seemed well thought out until seven new participants showed up, including the academy’s most experienced and skilled orators. Looking at the competition, “My heart sank,” he later wrote.42 Being designated to speak sixth provided Bud with a chance to estimate adversaries and compose himself. “I was in a perfect emotional pane to deliver my effort
s,” Bud reported to his father. Addressing the coming war, Bud chose to attack two myths that had become accepted as truths: that strict neutrality could safeguard national existence and that aloofness from foreign alliances offered a similar protection from aggressors. “Until six weeks ago, a large part of the world existed in a realm of imagination—a land of make believe” because they had accepted these myths. “In past weeks, the world had been forced to awaken from this fantasy and face a stark reality that a neutral Norway had been swallowed up. . . . Today that government has ceased to exist. That brave contented people has become mute with horror and dumb at the sudden terrible catastrophe to their nation. Almost like a giant octopus, the monogarchy [sic] of Central Europe has stretched its tentacles into a death grip on the land of the Norsemen.”
By Bud’s line of reasoning, these events had transpired “because Norway was a myth. Because Norway’s very existence and her attitude toward the outer world was sublimely ridiculous, because Norway believed in THE GOLDEN RULE. Hitler built a Trojan Horse within the land of the Viking . . . they stood idly by while the Germans marched in—and with Norway, perished the first of the two great myths—the fantasy that blind, idealistic neutrality can secure a national safety.”
Farther south, Belgium and Holland had not claimed strict neutrality, so they had eliminated Norway’s Achilles’ heel, that is, they had armed themselves, had fortified themselves, “but it was as two Boy Scouts ‘Being Prepared’ against some monstrous Frankenstein.” Norway was overrun and so many killed because “these countries cast aside that time worn adage, ‘United We Stand.’ They chose to stand alone . . . with them fell the Second Great Myth.” Rattling off a list of the fallen countries, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Norway, Luxembourg, Holland, and Belgium, Bud posited that the lesson for democracies was that there can be no neutrality, no escape from alliances—“The only defense against totalitarian Blitzkrieg is the defense of collective security and 100% preparedness.”