The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History)

by Craig L. Symonds

  The reserve that Nimitz normally displayed in moments of crisis had earned him a reputation as unemotional; at least one officer described him as “coldly impersonal.” Nimitz was certainly undemonstrative, able to maintain an astonishing coolness under pressure. Even as a midshipman, his quiet reserve impressed classmates, who described him in the Naval Academy yearbook, the Lucky Bag, as one who “possesses that calm and steady-going Dutch way that gets at the bottom of things.” As an example of that, a quarter century later, during his command of the heavy cruiser Augusta, he had directed Ensign O. D. Waters (inevitably nicknamed “Muddy”) to “bring the ship to anchor.” Perhaps nervous with the captain’s eyes on him, Waters brought the big cruiser into the anchorage too fast, overshot the mark, and had to order the engines full astern while paying out ninety fathoms of anchor cable before the ship finally came to a stop. Nimitz remained silent throughout. Only when the Augusta was securely at anchor did he remark, “Waters, you know what you did wrong, don’t you?” Waters responded: “Yes, sir, I certainly do.” To which Nimitz replied, “That’s fine.” While Nimitz was not cold—he was a great teller of jokes and fond of terrible puns—he did keep his emotions under control, rarely betraying them to others. His most confrontational response was generally “Now see here.” That ability to remain calm under pressure would be severely tested over the next six months, and indeed throughout the Pacific war.3

  Before he stepped out of the flying boat and into the launch that had come out to greet him, Nimitz turned and shook hands with every member of the seaplane’s crew, apologizing for keeping them from their families on Christmas Day. His first question to the officer on the launch was about Wake Island, a tiny outpost of coral and sand two thousand nautical miles to the west. When he had left California, Wake’s small Marine garrison was still holding out against a Japanese invasion, and an American relief force was steaming toward it at best speed. Told now that Wake Island had surrendered and that the relief expedition had been recalled, Nimitz said nothing, staring out silently over the rain-spattered surface of the harbor for several minutes, his expression unreadable. As the launch headed for shore, he could see several small boats moving about the roadstead. They were fishing the bodies of dead servicemen from the water.4

  Nimitz had been ordered to Pearl Harbor as commander in chief, Pacific (CinCPac), because Washington had concluded that keeping Admiral Husband Kimmel in charge after the disaster of December 7 was politically impossible. On December 9, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox had left Washington for Pearl Harbor to assess things for himself. Arriving two days later, the wreckage still smoldering, Knox was appalled by what he saw. He was also appalled that no one seemed able to explain to him why the Japanese had achieved such complete surprise. His annual report, issued the previous summer, had asserted that “the American people may feel fully confident in their navy.” Just three days before the attack, Knox had spoken at a small dinner party in Washington in honor of Vice President Henry Wallace. “War may begin in the Pacific at any moment,” he had warned the assembled guests. “But I want you to know that no matter what happens, the United States Navy is ready. Every man is at his post, every ship is at its station. The Navy is ready. Whatever happens, the Navy is not going to be caught napping.” Yet within seventy-two hours of those assurances, the Navy was caught almost literally napping. Little wonder that Knox was furious.5

  The 66-year-old Knox had been an unlikely choice as secretary of the navy. A lifelong newspaperman, he was also a lifelong Republican, and had been Alf Landon’s running mate on the Republican presidential ticket in the 1936 election. In that role he had been a virulent critic of President Roosevelt and the New Deal. Despite that, after Germany’s invasion of Poland and the onset of war, Roosevelt sought to build a bipartisan administration dedicated to rearmament by naming several prominent Republicans to the cabinet. His first thought was to ask both Landon and Knox, the defeated Republican ticket, to join the cabinet, with Landon as commerce secretary and Knox as navy secretary. Landon, however, insisted on a pledge that Roosevelt would not seek a third term as a condition of his acceptance, so Roosevelt instead picked another Republican, 73-year-old Henry L. Stimson, who had been secretary of state under Hoover, to head the War Department. He did, however, ask Knox to take over the Navy Department, announcing both appointments on June 20, 1940, two days before France formally surrendered to the Nazis.6

  FDR may have been attracted to Knox because the jowly, round-faced newspaperman had been a Rough Rider under Franklin’s “Uncle Teddy” in the Spanish-American War. For his part, Knox remained suspicious of the New Deal, but he was foursquare behind FDR on the question of national preparedness, and he admired Roosevelt’s get-tough policies toward Hitler’s regime. He was also a man of quick decision. As publisher of the Chicago Daily News, he had a hardnosed management style, guided by facts and deadlines, that made him impatient with delay or uncertainty. (“All my life I have been fighting against time,” he declared during his confirmation hearing.) Roosevelt’s deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes thought him “impetuous” and “inclined to think off the top of his head.” That impetuosity was evident as the grim-faced Knox toured the wreckage of the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 11. When he got back to Washington, he reported to Roosevelt that the Japanese had achieved surprise at Pearl Harbor because of “a lack of a state of readiness,” and the blame for that, in his view, fell squarely on the shoulders of the commanding officers, Lieutenant General Walter C. Short of the Army and Admiral Husband Kimmel of the Navy. Eventually a lengthy investigation headed by Supreme Court justice Owen Roberts would come to a similar conclusion and declare that Short and Kimmel were guilty of “a dereliction of duty.” However fair or unfair that conclusion, the political reality was that neither man could be retained in his position.7

  Once it was clear that Kimmel would have to go, Roosevelt and Knox discussed who should replace him. On December 15, they sent for Admiral Ernest J. King, the talented but abrasive commander of the Atlantic Fleet. While King had compiled an impressive service record during his forty-one years in the Navy, his personality was notorious. He tended to be abrupt and dismissive when dealing with subordinates, and he did not suffer fools gladly, whatever their status. When introducing himself to a group of young officers in Hawaii, he declared, “I’m Ernest King. You all know who I am. I’m a self-appointed son of a bitch.” He asserted his privileges of rank as a matter of course. One officer recalled, “You could be halfway through a haircut and he decided that he wanted a shave. You got out of the barber chair and waited until he was shaved.” His personal life was notorious. Though he foreswore drinking during the war, he had a well-earned reputation as a heavy drinker and womanizer. What FDR and Knox wanted now, however, was not a role model but a warrior, and King was arguably the most aggressive senior officer in the Navy. When King arrived in Washington on December 16, Knox told him that the president wanted him not merely for the Pacific command but for the more powerful position of commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet (CinCUS), with authority over both the Atlantic and Pacific and all Navy commands worldwide.8

  The tough-minded and tough-talking Admiral Ernest J. King wielded unprecedented authority over the U.S. Navy during World War II as both commander in chief (CominCh) and chief of naval operations (CNO). (U.S. Naval Institute)

  FDR made the formal offer that afternoon. King was willing to accept—he made no secret of his lifelong ambition to “get to the top”—but he had three conditions: first, he wanted his abbreviated title changed from CinCUS (which sounded too much like “sink us”) to CominCh; second, he wanted a promise that he would not have to hold press conferences or testify before Congress unless absolutely necessary; and third, he wanted authority over the various navy bureaus, those entrenched centers of political influence that had existed within the Navy as near-independent fiefdoms since their creation in 1842. FDR agreed at once to the first two conditions and told King that, while he couldn’t chan
ge the law concerning the bureaus, he would see to it that any bureau chief who proved unable or unwilling to cooperate with King would lose his job. King’s new authority was unprecedented. According to Executive Order no. 8984, he would have “supreme command of the several fleets … under the general direction of the Secretary of the Navy,” and would be “directly responsible to the President.”9

  If King reported directly to the president, it was not clear what role the chief of naval operations (CNO) was to play in the new command structure. In King’s view, his new position would make up for “the organizational deficiencies” inherent in the CNO’s office, and he would naturally “fulfill some of the functions that the peacetime Chief of Naval Operations should have had under his control.” The sitting CNO was Admiral Harold Stark, a “modest and self-effacing” man, according to his biographer, who would soon be overshadowed by the forceful and confident King. Like many officers who came out of the prewar Naval Academy, Stark had a nickname. During his plebe (freshman) year in the fall of 1899, an upperclassman, noting Stark’s last name, asked if he was related to General John Stark. The young plebe did not know who General Stark was, and the outraged upperclassman told him rather forcefully that John Stark had led American forces at the Battle of Bennington in the Revolutionary War, during which Stark had supposedly declared, “We will win today or Betty Stark will be a widow!” Though it is uncertain that General Stark ever made such a statement, it was a piece of military lore the upperclassman thought the young plebe should know. From then on, whenever an upperclassman demanded it, Midshipman Stark had to brace up and call out in his parade-ground voice: “We will win today or Betty Stark will be a widow!” As a result, he became known to his classmates as “Betty Stark,” and “Betty Stark” he remained throughout his naval career, signing his memos—even to the president—simply as “Betty.” He had risen to the top of the Navy’s hierarchy despite his curious nickname, as well as his gentle manner and cherubic appearance (Samuel Eliot Morison thought he “looked more like a bishop than a sailor”), but his tenure as CNO would not survive the force of King’s personality. In three months, King would replace him in that job, becoming both CominCh and CNO for the duration of the war and exercising near-absolute authority over the Navy.10

  Of course there was still the question of who would command the Pacific Fleet (or what was left of it) at Pearl Harbor. With little discussion, Roosevelt and Knox decided that the only possible choice was Chester Nimitz. Roosevelt had considered appointing Nimitz to the command back in January, but at that time Nimitz himself had suggested that he was too junior for such a post. Had he accepted, it would have been he, and not Kimmel, who was in charge at Pearl Harbor on December 7. Now, a year later, Nimitz was still relatively junior to many of the other candidates for Kimmel’s job, but there was no place for such punctilio in the present crisis. Roosevelt is supposed to have exclaimed: “Tell Nimitz to get the hell out to Pearl and stay there till the war is won.” King, too, thought him the right man for the job, though he was less sure that the quiet, undemonstrative Nimitz would be sufficiently aggressive in his new role. He worried that he listened to too many people and was too willing to compromise. “If only I could keep him tight on what he’s supposed to do,” King remarked. “Somebody gets ahold of him and I have to straighten him out.” During the war, King would send scores of messages and require several meetings, all in an effort to “straighten out” Nimitz. But Pearl Harbor was nearly five thousand miles from Washington, and King had two oceans and alliance politics to worry about, which would limit his ability to micromanage Pacific strategy.11

  In at least one respect, Nimitz was a curious choice as CinCPac, for he did not represent any of the traditional power centers within the Navy hierarchy. The U.S. Navy of 1941 was divided into clearly differentiated, and mutually jealous, warfare communities. The most visible and cohesive was composed of those who served in destroyers, cruisers, and especially battleships. For at least two generations, and certainly since the publication of Alfred Thayer Mahan’s famous book The Influence of Sea Power Upon History (1890), governments and navies the world over had looked upon the giant steel castles of big-gun battleships as the final arbiters of naval power and, by extension, of world power. Officers whose careers were dedicated to these mighty battlewagons were members of “the Gun Club.” They wore traditional double-breasted blue uniforms marked with gold stripes and black leather shoes, and in their own view, and in the view of most Americans, they were the real navy.12

  In the 1920s, however, the first stirrings of a coming revolution in naval warfare became evident when the U.S. Navy converted the collier Jupiter into the country’s first aircraft carrier, the USS Langley (CV-1). The men who signed up for pilot training—“naval aviators” in the Navy’s parlance—developed a swaggering elan to match the pioneering drama of their service. In the open-air cockpits of their airplanes they wore fleece-lined leather outfits that protected them from the intense cold at high altitudes. On the ground they wore forest-green uniforms marked with black stripes, as well as brown shoes. These “brown shoe” officers conceived of themselves as elite warriors who put their lives on the line almost every day by performing inherently dangerous carrier takeoffs and landings, and they considered themselves a breed apart from the “black shoe” officers who merely drove ships. For their part, the black shoes resented the fact that because of flight pay the aviators were paid 50 percent more than they were.13

  Nimitz belonged to neither clan, for he had spent much of his early service in submarines, starting in 1909, when the sub service was what carrier aviation became in the 1920s: a cutting-edge career that attracted ambitious and daring young officers who could rise quickly to command in an experimental service. Soon, despite his youth and his rank, Nimitz was the commanding officer of the aptly named Plunger, a tiny (107 ton) training submarine only sixty-four feet long and twelve feet wide. He spent World War I on the staff of Captain Samuel S. Robison, commander of U.S. Atlantic submarines, and as a member of the Board of Submarine Design. During the early 1920s, while the Navy’s air arm was being created, Lieutenant Commander Nimitz was engaged in supervising the construction, and subsequently the command, of the submarine base at Pearl Harbor. As it happened, that sub base was one of the few targets the Japanese had overlooked in their strike on December 7.14

  After World War I, Nimitz became an expert on the design and construction of diesel engines, and he supervised the engineering plant on the new-construction oiler Maumee (AO-2), becoming first her chief engineering officer and then her executive officer. In that capacity, he helped pioneer the practice of refueling U.S. Navy warships while they were under way, a protocol that dramatically extended the fleet’s cruising range and sea-keeping capability. After a tour in command of the heavy cruiser Augusta in the early 1930s, he served two tours in Washington in the Bureau of Navigation (subsequently renamed the Bureau of Personnel). To some observers in the Navy, this was cause for concern. They worried that by becoming a “Washington repeater,” Nimitz was spending too much time pushing paper instead of at sea. In addition, much of his time in Washington was spent working with those navy bureaus so despised by King. And his Washington service kept him away from the “real Navy.” He did not, for example, play a role in Navy strategic planning during the 1930s, nor participate in any of the tactical fleet exercises that were an important component of peacetime service in the interwar years. On the other hand, whatever he had missed by devoting himself to the administration of BuNav, it put him in touch with, and made him known to, the nation’s political leaders.15

  Admiral Chester Nimitz took over as commander in chief, Pacific (CinCPac) on the last day of1941. Beneath a placid and stoic demeanor, Nimitz concealed both a warrior’s instinct and a willingness to take bold risks. (U.S. Naval Institute)

  When Nimitz stepped ashore at Pearl Harbor on that gloomy Christmas Day of 1941, he was met not by Kimmel but by Vice Admiral William S. Pye. Kimmel had learned on Dec
ember 16 that he was going to be relieved and, appreciating that his continued presence would be awkward, had volunteered to be detached in favor of Pye, his second in command. Pye was a Naval Academy classmate of Ernie King and a half decade older than Nimitz, with forty-one years of active service, most of it in battleships. Raised in Minneapolis, he had the pugnacious physiognomy of a cop on the beat, with a bulbous nose and dark eyes crowned by shaggy eyebrows. At age 61, his hair was thin but still dark, combed straight back from a high forehead.

  It was Pye who had felt compelled to order the recall of the Wake relief expedition. Kimmel had built a task force (Task Force 14) around the aircraft carrier Saratoga (CV-3), which had been in San Diego during the Japanese attack and returned to Pearl Harbor a week afterward on December 15. After a quick refueling, Kimmel sent her on toward Wake Island the next day under Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher with an escort of three cruisers, nine destroyers, a seaplane tender, and a fleet oiler to keep them all supplied with fuel. Betty Stark gave Kimmel the authority to evacuate the garrison if necessary, but the hope was that Fletcher could reinforce the defenders of Wake by delivering supplies and a new squadron of airplanes. To distract the Japanese, Kimmel sent Vice Admiral Wilson Brown and the Lexington (CV-2) southward to attack the Japanese-held Marshall Islands, and Vice Admiral William F. Halsey and the Enterprise (CV-6) westward to support Fletcher. Critics argued subsequently that Kimmel should not have waited for the Saratoga before sending a relief expedition, or, alternatively, that he ought to have sent all three carriers to Wake rather than trying to distract the Japanese by sending them out on different missions.16

  Whatever the merits of these criticisms, after Kimmel was relieved of command, the expedition became Pye’s responsibility. On December 20, with the Saratoga task force still 725 miles from Wake, Pye learned that the Japanese had renewed their assault and, more importantly, that they had committed at least one of their carriers, and possibly two, to the attack. The two carriers were, in fact, the Sōryū and Hiryū, both of which had participated in the Pearl Harbor attack. If Saratoga got tangled up with two (or more) of Japan’s big carriers, it dramatically escalated the risk. Then, two days later, on the morning of December 22 (Hawaii time), with the Saratoga task force still more than five hundred miles from its destination, Pye learned that the Japanese had secured a lodgment on the island and were overpowering the outnumbered defenders. A poignantly laconic message from the garrison’s commander summed up the situation: “Issue in doubt.” At about the same time, Pye received a message from Stark in Washington that read, in part, “Wake is now and will continue to be a liability.” That message authorized Pye “to evacuate Wake.” A note at the end read, “King concurs.” But evacuation was impossible now, and Pye wired Stark to tell him so. Eager as Pye was to come to the aid of the gallant Marines on Wake Island, he was not willing to risk the Saratoga task force against two enemy carriers in what now looked like a lost cause, especially if Washington considered Wake “a liability.” Reluctantly, he issued orders for the Saratoga to turn around. When Fletcher got that order, he threw his hat to the deck in frustration. The pilots on the Saratoga who were scheduled to fly off the carrier the next day to support their fellow Marines were near mutinous, and there was angry talk about ignoring the orders and going ahead with the relief mission anyway. But discipline held; the Marines defending Wake were left to their fate.17*