The Admirals

by Walter R. Borneman

  By now, Nimitz was quite content to stick with submarines, but his command track required that he spend a year aboard the battleship South Carolina as its executive officer. The ship made two round-trips to Europe bringing home American troops and then settled in at Norfolk. Unfortunately, Nimitz was unable to find suitable quarters for Catherine and their children to join him. “It wouldn’t be so bad if I were at sea,” he lamented to his mother. “Then separations are to be expected.”2

  As his year on the South Carolina wound down, Nimitz thought that he might work again with his mentor, Admiral Samuel S. Robison. The up-and-coming admiral was the newly appointed commandant of the Boston Navy Yard, and he offered Nimitz a position as his industrial aide. But the command track that Robison had pushed Nimitz toward during the war won out when the Bureau of Navigation decreed instead that Nimitz report to Pearl Harbor. There Nimitz would get plenty of command experience, as well as a chance to employ his engineering skills. His orders were to build a Pacific submarine base from scratch out of World War I salvage materials.

  Pearl Harbor in the early 1920s was a far cry from the mammoth installation it would become just two decades later. Despite spacious, multipronged lochs, its entrance was historically quite shallow, so much so that early visitors keyed in on Honolulu harbor, a few miles to the east. Nonetheless, by 1845, while on an extensive survey of the Pacific, Commodore Charles Wilkes of the U.S. Navy offered the opinion that should its mouth be deepened, Pearl Harbor “would afford the best and most capacious harbor in the Pacific.”

  In 1887, with American interest in the Pacific increasing, the United States renegotiated a commercial treaty with King Kalakaua’s Hawaiian government for the exclusive right to establish a coaling and repair station in Pearl Harbor and improve the entrance as it saw fit. In one of the darker chapters of American imperialism, the country’s reach to the Philippines soon swept aside any respect for Hawaiian sovereignty and the United States simply annexed the islands in 1898.

  When the U.S. Navy finally built its first facilities there within months of annexation, they were at Honolulu, not Pearl Harbor. The issue remained the difficulty of channel access. Not until 1908 did Congress authorize dredging the Pearl Harbor entrance and the lochs to accommodate the navy’s largest ships. Construction of a dry dock and accompanying shops and supply buildings also began. This took time, and the harbor facilities—Naval Station Pearl Harbor—were not officially dedicated until August 1919. The acquisition that same year of Ford Island, in the harbor’s center, by the army and navy as shared—albeit begrudgingly—airfield facilities and Chester Nimitz’s arrival to build a submarine base were evidence that construction here was only the beginning.3

  As a thirty-five-year-old lieutenant commander, Nimitz had his work cut out for him. Materials for everything from a machine shop to a foundry had to be scrounged from East Coast shipyards and sent west via the Panama Canal. Despite his orders, Nimitz was accorded only marginal cooperation from commanders who didn’t know what they were going to do with rusting war surplus but didn’t want anyone else to have it, just in case. Here Nimitz’s rapport with hard-nosed chief petty officers paid off. He was always quick to acknowledge their skills and, being quite willing to do anything and everything for Commander Nimitz in return, the chiefs conducted more than their fair share of “moonlight requisitioning.”

  Up and down the East Coast, Nimitz’s marauding chiefs begged, stole, and borrowed materiel likely never to be missed—or used—while their commander did his own arm-twisting to persuade reluctant officers to part with other equipment. Even Nimitz was surprised, however, when their salvage was off-loaded at Pearl Harbor and the chiefs presented him with a staff car they had somehow acquired along the way. Years later, Nimitz liked to joke that the Pearl Harbor submarine base was built mostly from stolen materials, although it was really only a case of transferring them from one government pocket to another.

  The aging cruiser Chicago was to be Nimitz’s temporary headquarters while land overgrown with cacti and palms was cleared on a peninsula that jutted into the southeast loch east of Ford Island. Once, the cruiser had been the command of Alfred Thayer Mahan, but now, with its engines inoperable and its propellers removed, it had seen better days. The ship served as bachelor quarters for unmarried officers, while enlisted personnel were assigned to wartime barracks recently dismantled and shipped from Europe.

  The majority of the work was accomplished in about a year. Nimitz was promoted to commander and stayed on for another year to command both the base and Submarine Division Fourteen. His new office looked out across the harbor, past his submarine charges, and westward to Ford Island. On this first tour of duty at Pearl Harbor, Nimitz could hardly have imagined that twenty years later, he would be back in this very same office, surveying a maze of destruction in the harbor below as the newly appointed commander in chief, Pacific Fleet.

  These two years in Hawaii were a grand time for the Nimitz family—certainly among their happiest memories. The world was at peace, and Chester was involved with a challenging project, yet he could come home at night and enjoy Catherine’s company and that of their children. Young Catherine and Chester junior were in elementary school. And with a true family home—they rented a large house—Chester and Catherine were able to continue their tradition from their days in Brooklyn working on the Maumee and entertain a host of younger submarine officers with their simple yet gracious hospitality.4

  One of those young submariners was Lieutenant j.g. Stuart S. Murray, newly assigned as the commanding officer of R-17. Murray was all of twenty-one, and R-17 was his first command. The R-class boats had a tendency to fishtail at slow speeds, and it was relatively easy to bump the propellers or dent the nose of one’s boat into the propeller guards on an adjacent sub as one pulled into or away from the tightly packed moorings. The result of such a miscalculation was at best a loud, grinding noise that Nimitz could hear on shore in his office, or at worst a badly mangled prop that put the sub out of commission for several days.

  Murray had just such an encounter one day and reluctantly trudged up to Nimitz’s office to report that R-17 would be out of commission while the boat had a propeller changed. Nimitz heard Murray out without comment. Ernie King would no doubt have ripped the young lieutenant up one side and down the other. Nimitz, perhaps remembering that day in 1908 when Decatur had sat aground off Batangas harbor, reacted differently. “Murray,” said Nimitz patiently, “every submarine commander has a starting credit: one tail and one nose [of the submarine], or two tails, or two noses. When he’s used up that credit, then he’s going to be in trouble sometime. You’re only half gone. You’ve only used one tail. Now, go on back and try not to take the rest of your credit.”5

  After two years at Pearl Harbor, Nimitz was ordered to the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Once again, the assignment allowed him to have his family with him, but it was also an important step up in his career. The ongoing education of naval officers was receiving greater emphasis and no one had been sounding that theme more loudly than Ernest J. King.

  After following Admiral Mayo around Europe, King was more than ready for a tour ashore. The fact that it was to be as the new head of the Naval Postgraduate School at Annapolis was all the better. This would give King an opportunity to put into practice the ideas he had been honing about naval officers continuing their education right up through the ranks. It also put him back home with Mattie and their growing brood.

  Just as the Nimitz family enjoyed its time at Pearl Harbor, the Kings would also fondly remember these years at Annapolis. Their older daughters were starting to attract the attention of nervous midshipmen, and Ernest and Mattie would finally have a son. A favorite King family story tells of a woman asking King how many children he had, to which he replied, “Six daughters and a son.” When the woman asked his son’s name, proud King puffed up and replied, “Ernest Joseph King, Junior.” Well, huffed the woman, “it should have been ‘Ernest Endeavor.’
”6

  King continued to exhibit his trademark of unstoppable nervous energy and maintained his reed-thin appearance—he tried to quit smoking a few times, but never succeeded. But around the house, Mattie, despite her failure to connect with her husband on intellectual topics, ran the roost. King, who was so quick to press juniors as well as superiors with his sharp-tongued, sea-lawyer tactics, rather meekly submitted to Mattie’s rule. In part, this may have been because King’s intellectual energies were more than challenged by his work at the postgraduate school.

  This was a period of great transition for the U.S. Navy. Its ranks had undergone a sharp increase from the days of Theodore Roosevelt, growing from 22,492 officers and enlisted men at the beginning of the Spanish-American War in 1898 to a total of 530,338 at the end of World War I in 1918. But now the challenges of peace and demobilization included figuring out how to maintain and train an officer corps that would stand ready to confront the new types of warfare so recently brought into focus—not the least of which were the submarine and the airplane.

  Working with two other officers, Dudley Knox and William S. Pye, with whom King had a great rapport—the exception, it appears—King produced a report that outlined a four-phase approach to naval education: the Naval Academy, preparing midshipmen for division officer assignments; the General Line School, preparing lieutenants for department head assignments; the Junior War College, preparing lieutenant commanders for independent command and staff assignments; and the Senior War College, preparing captains for flag rank.

  King’s report also recommended that line officers acquire a subspecialty in an area of naval management, from ordnance categories (torpedoes, mounted guns, etc.) to navigation or personnel management, so that the navy would have its own in-house experts in each field. Finally, perhaps remembering his numerous visits to the Bureau of Navigation to plead for assignments that fit his career aspirations, King suggested a standardized system of assignment from ensign to admiral, so that an officer might be able to chart his career path without the helter-skelter that seemed to accompany many assignments.

  In typical King fashion, he crafted the final report in little more than a day, putting it into simple and clear language. There was no padding, no unnecessary posturing. And just so his efforts wouldn’t disappear into the navy’s vortex of young officers’ suggestions never to be heard again, he published the report in the United States Naval Institute Proceedings. This gave his work wide circulation and further boosted his image as an organizational guru of some standing. In time, most of his recommendations were adopted. Most important to World War II was the establishment of Junior War College (1923) and General Line School (1927) courses.7

  King’s pleasure in his duty at the Naval Postgraduate School came to an abrupt end in the spring of 1921 when he learned that Rear Admiral Henry B. Wilson was to become the new superintendent of the Naval Academy. King was both stunned and angry. According to King, Wilson was the antithesis of everything that King had been preaching about continuing education for naval officers. Wilson had even gone so far as to advise certain officers not to waste a year of their careers attending the postgraduate school.

  It didn’t help matters, of course, that both men disliked each other. In King’s case, that dislike may have resulted from some tiff before or after Wilson succeeded Admiral Mayo as commander in chief, Atlantic Fleet. For his part, Wilson, a gentleman of the old-school navy, quite likely was just one of the many senior officers who bristled in King’s frequently abrasive presence.

  Determined to bargain his way out of an unpleasant encounter with Wilson, King went to the Bureau of Navigation at Washington to apply for sea duty. “What’s the rush?” asked the detail officer. “You rate a third year at Annapolis.”

  “You know damn well why I want to go to sea,” King growled in return.

  The Bureau of Navigation may have been sympathetic, but it was not very helpful. King was simply too junior for any captain’s command on a battleship or cruiser and too senior to command a division of destroyers. Given the postwar cutbacks, there was nothing else available. But persistent King continued to lobby. Finally, the detail officer threw up his hands and offered King the Bridge, a plodding refrigerator ship that was commonly known around the fleet it serviced as a “beef boat.” It was hardly a glamour job or even one to get King further notice, but command of the Bridge did get him out of Annapolis and back at sea.

  For the better part of a year, King and the Bridge steamed about the Atlantic as a floating commissary. It may have been the most boring year of King’s life, but he stuck it out and then once more presented himself at the Bureau of Navigation. Now what?

  The Bureau’s answer was much the same as before. In the reduced navy, there wasn’t any command available that fit King’s qualifications, neither in big ships nor as commander of a smaller flotilla. Once again, King prepared to camp out in front of the detail officer’s desk until offered another opportunity. This time, the Bureau of Navigation came up with the idea of submarines. Spend three or four months at the New London, Connecticut, submarine school, King was told, and he could have command of a submarine division of four boats. Pleased at any cost to be off the beef boat, King said yes. For once, he would be following in Chester Nimitz’s footsteps.8

  King entered the submarine school at New London as somewhat of a curiosity, “a captain among some fifty very junior officers.” Ostensibly, he was there as a student to learn, but “as usual,” he later wrote, “I had ideas of my own.” Established doctrine—even after the scare put into Allied shipping by the U-boats—still taught that submarines were to be used for limited defensive purposes. King disagreed and not only advocated long-range offensive uses but also argued that submarines should work in units much like surface ships and coordinate their attacks. To accomplish this, the crews had to get off their cozy tenders or out of their port housing and live aboard their boats, taking them to sea for extended periods rather than merely conducting a few hours of training cruises per day.

  When he completed his training, true to the Bureau of Navigation’s word, King was given command of a four-boat division, and he made most of his ideas stick. His crews lived on their boats, and he was soon leading his division to sea to sail all the way from New London to the Caribbean for the fleet’s annual winter maneuvers.

  The sea voyage proved to be a disaster. King’s boat, S-20, broke down, and he ordered the remainder of his division onward. Similar mechanical breakdowns soon befell the others and it was only with great difficulty that they regrouped at St. Thomas, in the Virgin Islands.

  The ensuing fleet exercises were no less dysfunctional. Doing things his own way as usual, King ordered his division to get under way without asking routine permission to do so from the senior officer. “Why are you underway without my permission,” came the query from the flagship. “I am underway in accordance with your operation order,” King signaled back. S-20 then proceeded to lead the other three division boats to sea, with the flagship still blinking furiously astern. Like so many other encounters, King took it all as a game of wills and thereafter spent many months writing letters back and forth with the commanding admiral debating the finer points of the regulations, until King was at last ordered to cease and desist.9

  For some reason, King was never accorded the highly sought-after dolphin insignia that certified that he was a qualified submariner. (Chester Nimitz wore his throughout his career.) Such qualification usually required about a year aboard a sub and a demonstration of full knowledge of its operations. Whether King avoided taking the qualifying exams out of fear of failure so late in his career or whether he simply considered them an unnecessary hurdle is debatable. But not receiving the dolphin insignia did not keep him from always fondly embracing the undersea brotherhood, nor did it keep him from his next assignment.

  Despite his disruptive academic opinions and his less-than-stellar operational performance, King was given command of the submarine base at New London in Sept
ember 1923. Suddenly, he was in charge of the largest sub base in the country and the center of all training functions for the entire submarine service.

  King lost no time in assuming all the trappings of the role and moved Mattie and the children into a veritable mansion, complete with four servants and a car and chauffeur. Naturally, his gig stood crewed and ready whenever he wanted to go anywhere by water. Unabashedly, King took on the role of the navy’s ambassador in the entire state of Connecticut. When a junior officer involved in a civilian motor vehicle accident boldly suggested to King that his interest in the matter was both unnecessary and outside his jurisdiction, King drew himself up to his full ramrod height. “Young man,” he barked, “when anything happens that reflects on the Navy, it is my business.”10

  Similarly, when the Waterbury Herald ran a story about a “sub base man” being fined for certain lewd behavior, King was quick to write the editor and protest that the offender belonged to a Coast Guard vessel and not to the submarine base. “Our own personnel come in for their share of notoriety,” King concluded, “without receiving that which is not due them.”11

  In the early summer of 1925, after almost two years in command at New London, King received a letter from Admiral Charles F. Hughes, soon to become chief of naval operations, which jolted his smug little fiefdom. Looking to King’s future, Hughes was quite candid. Phrased as “a friendly hint” that King could take or leave, “but ask no questions,” Hughes suggested that King’s entire naval reputation was in some jeopardy. The backroom talk among flag officers was that King had been too picky in his choice of assignments and had rarely put his career on the line.