Operation Drumbeat

by Michael Gannon

  Naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison, who knew King well, captured him in these finely chiseled words: “Tall, spare and taut, with piercing brown eyes, a powerful Roman nose and deeply cleft chin … he was a sailor’s sailor who neither had nor wanted any life outside the Navy. … He had a firm grasp of naval strategy and tactics, an encyclopedic knowledge of naval detail, an immense capacity for work, and complete integrity….He had no toleration for fools or weaklings … and was more feared than loved. … He cleared the deck ruthlessly at frequent intervals.” In sum, Morison recalled, he was “a hard, grim, determined man.”28 Or, as one of his daughters remarked of him, “He is the most even-tempered man in the Navy. He is always in a rage.”29 FDR, who liked hardness in a man, quipped, “He shaves with a blowtorch,”30 and decided to name him commander of the entire U.S. Navy. This, then, was the man who would be Grand Admiral Erich Raeder’s counterpart in Washington. With King in charge, there would be no more surprises. He was a known quantity—100 percent. Not only would he scrape the hull clean, he would also keep the mainland United States inviolate against enemy attack. An old Army friend, a retired colonel, wrote King from Maiden, Massachusetts: “There is going to be HELL, with all the trimmings, popping up soon BUT … with Ernie King at the helm … America can rest assured that there will not be any repetition of the unfortunate affair at Pearl Harbor.”31’

  On 30 December King assumed the duties of Commander in Chief, United States Fleet, originally designated CINCUS; King quickly changed that unfortunate-sounding acronym to COMINCH. Responsible directly to the President, he exercised “supreme command of the operating forces comprising the several fleets of the United States Navy and the operating forces of the Naval Frontier Command.” It is worth emphasizing that King assumed primary and direct responsibility for the coastal (Frontier) commands. In these duties he worked at first in an uneasy duumvirate with the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, still held by Admiral “Betty” Stark, previously the highest operations office in the Navy. By March 1942, however, Stark, who according to Morison “looked more like a bishop than a sailor,”32 was posted to London in an expediently devised capacity as Commander U.S. Naval Forces Europe, and King subsumed Naval Operations under his own office, thereby becoming COMINCH-CNO with unprecedented powers. (In unpublished “Random Notes” found in his papers, King suggested that Stark had been “fired” by Roosevelt because of Pearl Harbor. Alleging that the Army had been equally culpable for what happened on 7 December, King wrote: “I again repeat that I have never been able to understand how or why F.D.R. could fire Admiral Stark without doing the same to General [George C] Marshall [Army chief of staff]. In my opinion one could not possibly be more suspect than the other.” Stark’s biographer maintains that the CNO freely offered his resignation and proposed the London assignment for himself.33) For whatever reason, Stark was gone and King held undisputed authority over the Department of the Navy, where he proceeded over the next months to do his own brand of firing. The casualties were those officers whom King himself considered defeatist or responsible (or suitable scapegoats) for Pearl Harbor. Wilkinson would go, along with the director of naval communications.34 As for Captain Frank T. Leighton, whose daily situation map-room pins identifying surface ships and U-boats King called “little toys and other play things,” he ordered one day: “I want him out of the Navy Department before four-thirty this afternoon.”35 Leighton’s replacement was Commander George C. Dyer, King’s flag secretary.36 Operations survived relatively unscathed, and “Terrible” Turner became an assistant chief of staff. It was clear early on in King’s reign that Operations remained in full charge, and that the war with Intelligence would not soon be over. To King ONI was no more than an archive and lending library, and he treated it as such, cutting it off from all OIC/London messages and estimates as well as from all operational data: ONI for example would not learn of the Battle of Midway (3-5 June 1942) until it was over—and from a reporter at that.37 Meeting Admiral King in a department corridor. Captain John L. McCrea, naval aide to the President, said: “They tell me you were heard to say recently, ‘Yes, damn it, when they get in trouble they send for the sons of bitches.’” “No, John,” King answered, “I didn’t say it. But I will say this: If I had thought of it, I would have said it.”38

  What coastal defense against U-boats the U.S. Navy had been able to muster by January 1942 was under the putative control of the North Atlantic Naval Coastal Frontier, established on 1 July 1941, and commanded by King’s Annapolis classmate, sixty-three-year-old Rear Admiral Adolphus “Dolly” Andrews, with headquarters in New York City, where Andrews was also commandant, Third Naval District. The frontier’s jurisdiction ran from the North International Boundary (Canadian border) off West Quoddy Head, Maine, to the lower line of Onslow County in North Carolina and comprised four naval districts: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Norfolk. The southern Sixth Naval District headquartered at Charleston would be brought into the Frontier Command in the first week of February, thus extending its jurisdiction south to the boundary between Duval and St. Johns counties in northern Florida. At the same time, the name of the defense zone would be changed to Eastern Sea Frontier (ESF), by which it would be known for the remainder of the war (hence its use hereafter in this narrative). Similar frontier force commands had been in place since 9 September for the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean (east and west), and Panama, accounting, along with ESF, for some seven thousand miles of coastal water. Within its littoral responsibilities, ESF embraced all harbors, ports, waterways, bays, inlets, and coastal shipping lanes seaward; that is, east, for a distance of two hundred miles. With the “local defense” forces of each naval district, as well as with warships and aircraft assigned to the Frontier Coastal Force, Admiral Andrews was charged with the responsibility of “coordinating the operations” of these forces as well as any that might be provided by the Army’s Northeast Defense Command and First Air Force. Specifically, by order of the general war plan WPL-46, Rainbow 5, Andrews was to (1) defend the frontier; (2) protect coastal shipping; (3) support the Atlantic Fleet, of which Admiral Royal E. Ingersoll took command as CINCLANT, relieving King, on 1 January; and (4) support the Army and “Associated Forces” within the frontier.39 In meeting this large order, Andrews asked his district commandants to make the following assumptions: that submarine activity may be expected with submarines operating against shipping with torpedoes, mines, or gunfire; that small enemy surface-raiding forces in the form of warships or disguised merchantmen may penetrate the coastal zone; that minor raids on the U.S. coast may be made by shipborne aircraft or small motor torpedo boats; and that “large scale attacks will probably not occur unless the enemy managed to obtain a base within operating distance of the Frontier.”40 There is no question that Andrews meant business—in the abstract. As early as two months before Pearl Harbor, he ordered forces in his command: “Destroy German and Italian naval, land, and air forces encountered.”41 The only questions were whether his forces could—or would—destroy anything.

  A proposal set forth by Andrews on 10 July for an “Army and Navy Joint Control and Information Center” received strong support from both the Army’s Northeast Defense Command (Lieutenant General Hugh A. Drum) and the chief of naval operations. Admiral Stark urged the rapid establishment of such centers in all frontiers in a dispatch of 31 December. By that date Andrews’ center was complete and operational, occupying the central and west wing space of the fourteenth floor of the Federal Building, 90 Church Street in New York City. It was no OIC, of whose operations Andrews seemed unaware (if one can judge from the surprise with which news of Rodger Winn’s work was received at the center in May [!] 1942), but it was an honest effort by Andrews and his Army counterparts to gather, share, and respond to information about enemy operations in the frontier zone with what technique they had at the time; though, curiously, the one example offered by Andrews’ staff of how the center would operate focused on the possibility of “an enemy aircraft carrier of
f the coast”—this despite the fact that as surely must have been known, Germany had no operational carrier.42 The Frontier War Diary contains both a verbal and graphic description of the center. The T-shaped space measured ninety by thirty-two feet in one direction and forty by twenty in the other. Navy space included a large “operations office” with two wall charts—one of the Atlantic Ocean and another of the two-hundred-mile offshore frontier zones; offices for Andrews’ seven-officer staff; clerical help; and communications equipment. One officer was detailed to write the ESF War Diary. For the period December 1941-March 1942 that officer was Lt.(jg) Lawrance R.Thompson. The system of monthly narrative chapters followed by daily/hourly reports instituted by Thompson would be continued by his successor, Lt. (jg) Elting E. Morison, who took up those duties in May and reconstructed the diary from March forward. Morison would compose the diary until November 1943 when he was reassigned to Main Navy in Washington.43 The Army had equal space that it devoted to air intelligence, operations, and support personnel. The purpose of the center was expressed in the war diary: “Maintain a running estimate of the military situation in the theater of operations by means of plotting information on operating charts and maps and maintain a digest of unplottable material.” The plots covered merchant ships traveling off the coast, changed every hour; surface patrol vessels, changed every hour; air patrols, changed every half hour; enemy operations and contacts (if any), including warnings received from the Army Air Corps Regional Filter Center. It was not sophisticated. The systems betrayed no acquaintance with the war-won experience of the OIC, which Main Navy had simply not passed on or taken much to heart itself. But there was one OIC gift that COMINCH did pass on (circumventing ONI), though its exact source other than Britain was never identified to anyone in the center, including Andrews and his communications officer, thirty-five-year-old Lieutenant (jg) Richard H. Braue. Each day when the gift arrived in the center code room, Braue would struggle with the British cipher, which required two to four hours to render intelligible.44 Placing the decrypt in a metal message case and strapping on a service .45, the six-and-a-half-foot brown-haired Braue would then walk up to Andrews’ office on the fifteenth floor. There, removing the decrypt from its case, he would hold it out at arm’s length for Andrews to read. After the admiral finished scribbling down the coordinates of forces that might affect his frontier, Braue would place the decrypt back in his case and return to the code room, where he would file the decrypt in a safe to which only he and the admiral held the combination. Andrews would then descend to the operations office and move magnetic markers on the Atlantic wall chart. What he was watching, thanks to London’s daily U-boat estimate, was the day-by-day march of five U-boats from east to west. In just over a week, the markers for three of those boats would move from the Atlantic chart to the frontier chart, and “Dolly” Andrews would move from the abstract world to the real.

  Born in Texas in October 1879, Andrews arrived at the Naval Academy in Annapolis nineteen years later without ever having seen a ship of any kind in his life. By contrast with his future adversary, Dönitz, he was the eighteenth man in his commissioning class. First assignments as an officer presaged a successful and distinguished career, in which it may fairly be said he specialized in presidents and battleships. In 1903 as an ensign he went aboard the USS Dolphin, a yacht designated for use by the secretary of the Navy, and for two years he served as a White House aide to President Theodore Roosevelt. After brief service on Asiatic station with a Yangtze patrol, he began battleship duty successively aboard the USS Michigan, Utah, Oklahoma, and Mississippi, becoming commander in 1918 of the Massachusetts. After brief assignments to the Third Naval District, Naval War College at Newport, and the Atlantic Fleet, he returned to White House duty as commander of the presidential yacht Mayflower and naval aide to President Warren G. Harding, whose deathbed he attended. Continuing as senior naval aide to President Calvin Coolidge and learning how to court the favor of powerful politicians, he acquired a reputation among his Navy colleagues as a shamelessly ambitious officer, a reputation that later explained to many the vote he cast as chief of the Bureau of Navigation against promotion of his classmate King to a vice admiral’s billet. First in celebrity, he apparently believed that he therefore deserved to be the first with three stars. A rear admiral on the eve of war, he could claim extensive battleship experience; diplomatic service on two brief assignments to Geneva; command of the submarine base at New London; chief of staff duties with the commander, Battle Force, and with CINCUS (predecessor to COMINCH); as well as command of the Atlantic Scouting Force with the temporary rank of vice admiral. In July 1941 he received joint command of the Third Naval District and the Eastern Sea Frontier. At the time ESF did not appear to be a prestigious assignment, and few in the service were likely to have expected that it, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Caribbean Frontier would for six months of 1942 become the most intense continuous theater of German naval operations.

  Andrews was a formidable person who could hold his ground when pressed, as evidenced by an exchange of correspondence with King in November 1941, when the latter was still CINCLANT. As he told Andrews, “It is none of my business, and strictly speaking, it is not,” but he had heard that the organization and readiness for mounting U.S. wartime transatlantic convoys in Andrews’ ports “do not exist.”45 Within two days Andrews fired off a spirited, detailed response the force of which was to convey his own conviction that the districts in his command, though undermanned, were exceedingly well organized and ready for such duties. “I have no idea who told you that organizations, etc., do not exist,” he replied to King, and suggested that such reports were “pure fabrication.”46 To this fine defense King replied that, “My informant … is in a position … to know whereof he speaks—it is evident that he did not—and I shall tell him so.”47 By Pearl Harbor, Andrews was one of the most widely known flag officers in the Navy, though often parodied for his stilted speech and pomposity of manner. Secretary of the Army Henry L. Stimson called him a “terrible old fusspocket.”48 More charitable, Samuel Eliot Morison called him “senatorial in port and speech.”49 That he lacked Dönitz’s capacity to laugh at the incongruous is attested by an incident in Boston when, as ESF commander, he inspected the operation room of First District Headquarters at 150 Causeway Street. The staff had cleared the desks of dispatches and all hands were in proper uniform, but Andrews was two hours late, so discipline slackened and a young ensign named Pete Rollins leaned back against a window to smoke his pipe. At just that moment Andrews swept into the room with a flourish of gold braid and ribbons. Rollins, startled, tried to dump the burning dottle of his pipe into an ashtray, but it settled on the top of his desk instead, where the embers raised a cloud of varnish smoke. While Andrews fixed him with a wooden stare, Rollins swept the dottle into a nearby metal wastebasket, forgetting that it contained a loose pile of old dispatches, which quickly ignited. His next maneuver, under Andrews’ unremitting stare, was to stomp the flames with his size-eleven foot, which promptly became wedged in the basket. As flames leaped up his trouser leg, Rollins banged the basket about the floor until, at last, the fire went out. Now at smoldering attention, he looked up to see that Andrews had not altered his fixed, bleak countenance. The great man then turned and departed. The inspection of the operation room was over. Staff officers crowded around Rollins to congratulate him. It was his first day on active duty.50