The Admirals

by Walter R. Borneman

  In keeping with generally accepted naval thinking, Nimitz did not presage any great strategic role for submarines, but he certainly recognized their growing offensive importance. “The steady development of the torpedo,” he wrote, “together with the gradual improvement in the size, motive power, and speed of submarine craft of the near future will result in a most dangerous offensive weapon, and one which will have a large part in deciding fleet actions.”

  In addition to those smaller submarines slated for harbor and coastal defenses, Nimitz foresaw the development of what would become the “fleet type” submarine, capable of “the same cruising radius as a modern battleship” and easily able to “accompany a sea-keeping fleet of battleships.” He also showed his tactical creativity by suggesting a “ruse” whereby escorts might “drop numerous poles, properly weighted to float upright in the water, and painted to look like a submarine’s periscope.” Nimitz speculated that these decoys might divert an enemy fleet into other waters where submarines were lurking to make an offensive strike.

  Interestingly enough, in this era of early radio communications, Nimitz described an elaborate, thirty-foot-tall radio mast that transmitted and received up to fifty miles and could be “taken down ready for submergence in five (5) minutes,” a far cry from the crash dives of thirty years later.6

  Service in the Skipjack and later the Sturgeon also made Nimitz by necessity something of an expert in diesel engines. In fact, when the navy decided to experiment with diesel engines in larger surface ships as the transition from coal-fired steam to oil-fired steam was being completed, he was judged the navy’s leading diesel expert, and the year before the outbreak of war in Europe, he was dispatched to Germany to inspect Rudolf Diesel’s operations.

  Upon his return to the United States, Nimitz was assigned to the Brooklyn Navy Yard to supervise the installation of two 2,600-?horsepower diesel engines in the new oil tanker Maumee. He and Catherine were married by then, and their first child, daughter Catherine Vance, was born on his birthday in 1914. A year later, he was still working on the Maumee when his son, Chester Jr., was born.

  Like Bill Halsey, Chester Nimitz now flirted with leaving the navy. He had a devoted wife and a wonderful, growing family. What’s more, his diesel expertise made him highly sought after by private industry. His navy pay of $240 per month, plus a $48 quarters allowance, paled alongside the $25,000-a-year, five-year contract he was reportedly offered by the Busch-Sulzer Brothers Diesel Engine Company of St. Louis. In fact, had Nimitz played the negotiation game, he might have commanded much more. Instead, after scarcely thinking it over, the quiet, self-effacing Nimitz merely said, “No, I don’t want to leave the navy.”7

  With this diesel work on the Maumee, Nimitz was a hands-on officer just as he always was. It wasn’t unusual to find him in overalls and with dirty hands working next to his men. Once, when a scaffold collapsed, he was knocked unconscious and buried under a pile of lumber. But that wasn’t the most serious injury he sustained.

  One day, Lieutenant Nimitz had dressed in his whites to give a tour to a group of visiting engineers from all over the country. To keep his hands clean, he put on a pair of heavy, canvas gloves. When one of the engineers asked a question about the exhaust system, Nimitz pointed to the spot in question, as he had done many times. But on this occasion a fingertip of his thick gloves caught between two gears and pulled his finger in after it. The only thing that saved his hand from being chewed to pieces was his Annapolis class ring, which caught in the gears and gave him an instant to jerk his hand away. As it was, he lost two sections of the ring finger on his left hand and was a bloody mess by the time he arrived at the hospital. Characteristically, he wanted to return to finish his tour after being stitched up, but the doctor convinced him otherwise.8

  By the time the Maumee was finally commissioned, the war in Europe had been raging for more than two years. At the outset, submarines seemed to be the least of anyone’s concerns. The world’s navies combined could muster only about four hundred boats, and most of these were aging gasoline-powered relics unsafe for combat or just about anything else. France led the way, but in numbers only. Its 123 boats were hardly fit to operate beyond sight of its coast. Great Britain floated 72 subs, but only 17 were newer diesel boats. Russia ranked third in numbers but could barely match France in effectiveness. The United States stood fourth with 34, one-third of them diesel powered, thanks in part to Nimitz’s influence. Finally, there was Germany. Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz had long been skeptical of the Unterseeboot (undersea boat), or U-boat, and half of the Imperial German Navy’s 26 vessels were aging smoke-belchers run on kerosene, while the other half were largely untried diesels, many still undergoing shakedown cruises.

  At the outset of the war, as befit its role as mistress of the seas, Great Britain used its naval might to impose a blockade against Germany. It was all quite civilized and chivalrous. Under centuries-old international law, British warships had the right to stop any German merchant ship attempting to run the blockade, conduct its crew and passengers to safety, and then either sink or capture the vessel. Neutral vessels were subject to “stop and search” to ascertain that they were not carrying war materials or were not German ships flying a neutral flag as a disguise.

  In response, Germany sortied ten of its older submarines to punch a hole in the British blockade. On this first concerted submarine attack in naval history, two U-boats were lost to the elements, and the remainder limped home without recording any damage. Von Tirpitz may well have sniffed and said, “I told you so.”

  But a month later, U-9, another older boat, happened upon three aging British cruisers steaming on a straight course at 10 knots. The U-boat fired two torpedoes at the lead cruiser and scored two hits. The cruiser rolled over and sank in less than thirty minutes. But then the U-9’s captain watched in amazement as the other two cruisers, supposing their companion had hit a mine, stopped dead in the water to lower boats and rescue survivors. U-9 fired two more torpedoes into each of the remaining cruisers, and they quickly settled under the waves. In less than an hour, the British navy had lost three cruisers and fourteen hundred men. Now the fledgling U-boat flotilla had von Tirpitz’s attention.

  U-boat proponents on the German Imperial Admiralty Staff proposed that Germany ring the British blockade with a wider U-boat blockade of its own. But there were problems with that approach. For starters, Germany’s twenty-four remaining U-boats were hardly enough, and stopping suspected neutrals might well expose the U-boats to aggressive countermeasures, not to mention the issue of how to dispose of the numerous passengers. But such chivalry was about to go out the window. It was about to become a different kind of war.

  On February 4, 1915, Germany announced a “war zone” around the British Isles and warned that all British ships within it would be sunk. While Germany declared that it would not specifically target neutrals, it also warned that it might be hard to tell the difference from a periscope and that neutrals entering the zone would do so at their own risk. The unlimited scope and concomitant audacity of this new type of warfare was brought home a few months later when the British passenger liner Lusitania was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland. It sank quickly, with a loss of nearly 1,200 men, women, and children, including 126 Americans.

  Swayed by international condemnation over the Lusitania, Germany temporarily backed off its U-boat campaign. When it renewed its efforts early in 1916 to try to force a victory in France, another civilian vessel, the French cross-Channel packet Sussex, was hit by a torpedo, with the loss of fifty lives. Once again, the world cried foul and Germany again reduced its U-boat operations, even as newer and faster boats were rolling down the ways of its shipyards.

  By early 1917, the European war was well into its third year of stalemate in the trenches of France. Try as it might, and despite the massive Battle of Jutland, the German navy had been unable to defeat the British Grand Fleet decisively in the North Sea. Germany had to do something to break the British block
ade, and it chose to unleash an unrestricted campaign of submarine warfare.

  On February 1, fifty-seven U-boats put to sea, and for the remainder of the war, an average of thirty-five to forty boats were on station at all times. The initial result was a shock to Allied morale, as well as to shipping tonnage. One thousand Allied merchant ships totaling almost two million tons were sunk during the next three months. U.S. ambassador to Great Britain Walter H. Page intoned the obvious: “The submarine is the most formidable thing the war has produced—by far.” It threatened an “absolute and irremediable disaster.”

  But this unrestricted submarine warfare by the Germans against all shipping also brought the United States into the war and united all but America’s most extreme isolationists in a way that the attack on Pearl Harbor would do a generation later. On April 6, 1917, at the peak of the U-boat offensive, President Woodrow Wilson tossed aside his slogan of “He kept us out of war” and asked Congress to declare war on Germany in response to numerous attacks on American ships.

  Congress readily obliged, and the U.S. Navy dusted off its contingency plan for war with Germany, code-named Plan Black. Plan Black called for assembling American battleship might in the Atlantic and destroying the advancing German fleet in one grand battle à la Togo at Tsushima. But Germany was not Russia, and the bulk of its battleship fleet, far from crossing the Atlantic, was cautiously hidden away in German harbors. After the Battle of Jutland, Kaiser Wilhelm was willing to challenge the Royal Navy only sparingly in the North Sea, let alone sail his fleet across an unruly ocean to fight the United States.

  Recognizing that most nations prepare to fight the latest war and are inevitably forced to adapt when the next one comes, Rear Admiral William S. Sims, the U.S. Navy’s highest-ranking officer in the British Isles, put it rather bluntly. Sims urged the rapid deployment of as many destroyers as possible to the seas around Britain for antisubmarine warfare and the institution of a convoy system to better protect merchant ships on the Atlantic crossing.

  Ambassador Page told President Wilson much the same thing. “If the present rate of destruction of shipping goes on,” Page wrote, “the war will end before a victory is won…. The place where it will be won is in the waters of the approach to this Kingdom [Great Britain]—not anywhere else.”

  At first, the American naval hierarchy was incredulous, certain that Sims was way off base and had duped Page in the process. Thinking this was the Spanish-American War all over again, the admirals in Washington clung to the idea of one pitched battleship encounter. But as shipping losses continued at a deadly pace, something had to change. U.S. destroyers were finally rushed across the Atlantic, and the British, who had dragged their feet in implementing the convoy system in part out of fear of massing potential targets for German surface raiders, first instituted the convoy system on a Gibraltar-to-London run on May 20, 1917. By September, convoys were in general use on both sides of the Atlantic.9

  By then, Nimitz was deep in the middle of the North Atlantic as executive officer and chief engineer on the Maumee. Diesel engines for surface ships was an idea that never got very far, but under Nimitz’s watch the Maumee performed admirably and led the way with a far more important innovation—refueling at sea.

  Heretofore, while on duty in the Gulf of Mexico, the Maumee had simply stayed at anchor while its customers came alongside to refuel. But now, given the vastness of the North Atlantic and thirsty destroyers both shepherding convoys and chasing after real and suspected U-boats, the fueling station had to come to them. As with his push for diesels in submarines, Nimitz was an early proponent of underway refueling and he worked with the crew of the Maumee to craft equipment for a full range of procedures.

  Maumee was on station in the North Atlantic to refuel the first six American destroyers dispatched to Great Britain. It was tricky and dangerous work. “Spring and early summer in this area is no time for a vacation,” Nimitz later wrote. “Icebergs are numerous and there is much drifting ice. Strong and bitter-cold winds prevail, and there are few days of smooth seas.”10

  But in this storm-tossed environment, Maumee was up to the challenge, and by July had refueled all thirty-four of the American destroyers ordered to Queenstown (now Cobh), Ireland, for antisubmarine duty. Such underway replenishing would become indispensable twenty-five years later when the U.S. Navy was flung across the wide Pacific, and Nimitz could say that he had been involved from the very start of such operations.

  One destroyer skipper who was not yet in the North Atlantic but who was champing at the bit to sail was Lieutenant Commander William F. Halsey, Jr. After cruising around Campobello Island with Franklin Roosevelt, Halsey had taken command of the destroyer Jarvis and refined his tactics and techniques under William S. Sims, then commander of the Atlantic Fleet Destroyer Flotilla.

  When the war started in Europe, Jarvis was assigned patrol duty off New York harbor. During these days, Halsey’s seamanship was never in question. By his own account, he was once running through thick fog when “a hunch too strong to be ignored” caused him suddenly to order, “Full speed astern!” When the Jarvis settled to a stop, Halsey hailed a nearby fisherman and asked his position. “If you keep going for half a mile,” came the reply, “you’ll be right in the middle of the Fire Island Life Saving Station!”

  “What caused me to back my engines,” Halsey recalled years later, “was probably a feeling of drag from the shoaling water, or the sudden appearance of large swells off the stern; but something told me I had to act and act fast.” And that innate sense of the sea, as well as his commanding presence, was more than enough to make his crew follow him willingly anywhere his can-do demeanor and confident swagger led.

  But before the United States entered the war, Halsey was assigned to shore duty as the disciplinary officer at the Naval Academy. Bill Halsey had not pushed the disciplinary limits during his own academy days as much as Ernie King had, but neither was Halsey one to take any great delight in enforcing what would later be called “Mickey Mouse” regulations. He found the shore duty less than challenging.

  The highlight of his tour at Annapolis may have been the birth of his son, William Frederick Halsey III, on September 8, 1915. It was a great family time with Fan, four-year-old Margaret, and young Bill, but by the following year, Halsey was clearly bored “nursing midshipmen” and desperately yearned to get back to sea. By the time the United States officially entered the war in April 1917, Halsey’s yearning had turned to an obsession. For nine months, he sat with his gear laid out and waited for orders. Finally, he learned that Sims, his old commander, was leading the destroyer deployment to Europe and that he had Halsey on a short list of officers he wanted assigned to his command. So, Bill Halsey celebrated Christmas with Fan and their children and then shipped off to Queenstown, Ireland, arriving there on January 18, 1918.

  Halsey spent what was called a “makee-learn” month as an executive officer on a destroyer pulling convoy duty. There was the occasional rescue or submarine hunt, but mostly the destroyer sailed west with an outbound convoy to the usual limit of U-boat activity—about five hundred miles west of Ireland—and then picked up an inbound convoy to escort back east. The normal routine was five days at sea and then three days in Queenstown to enjoy the liquid hospitality of the Royal Cork Yacht Club.

  After this quick apprenticeship, Halsey was given command of the destroyer Benham and then the Shaw. Convoy duty continued, along with chases of suspected U-boats. Although Halsey later admitted that he never actually saw a U-boat, his ships dropped their share of depth charges. “First egg I have laid,” he recorded in his diary. Later, when his seniority put him in command of two U.S. destroyers and two British sloops, he confessed that he “had the time of my life bossing them around.” It was Halsey’s first experience in multiple command in a war zone, and he was “proud as a dog with two tails.”11

  The member of the foursome who would sit atop the American naval hierarchy twenty-five years later, and who gained the most insi
ght into fleet operations during World War I, was Ernest J. King. After his baptism piloting the Terry back from the Gulf of Mexico, King considered himself a destroyer man and got command of the new one-thousand-ton Cassin, which was assigned to the Atlantic Fleet Destroyer Flotilla. In short order, he became the commander of a four-ship division. The war had begun in Europe, but the United States was still a declared neutral.

  In 1915, King got a summons, much as William D. Leahy had earlier received, from Henry T. Mayo, who by now was a vice admiral and commander, Battleship Force, Atlantic Fleet. Once again, King mulled over the politics: Should he stay with destroyers and hope to get into the fight, or accept a staff appointment with Mayo? This decision was easy, however, as Mayo was definitely considered an up-and-comer and the probable commander in chief, Atlantic Fleet, by the following summer.

  King reported to Mayo’s staff in December 1915 as staff engineer, but he was by then far more interested in operational planning than mechanics. When the admiral’s staff produced a fleet plan dictating each destroyer’s course and speed, King boldly challenged it as unnecessary supervision. Surely, King argued, destroyer captains were capable of devising their individual operations within the broader fleet directives. The next morning, King was hauled before a peeved Admiral Mayo, who might well have told him to mind his own duties or pack his seabag. Instead, the admiral heard King out and agreed to test his captains with more discretion as to their own ships.

  In King’s mind, he was taking a page from his hero, Napoleon, who instructed his marshals in the grand strategy but permitted them certain discretion in its implementation on their particular piece of the battlefield. To King’s credit—and perhaps relief—the destroyer captains performed admirably on their own initiative, and King’s standing with Admiral Mayo increased as a result.