With a still sluggish economy, an increasingly unstable world community, and a navy only slowly embarking on a capital ship construction program to keep pace with the other powers, Roosevelt and Leahy had their work cut out for them. “It is hoped,” Leahy wrote as he began his term as CNO, “that the fleet’s war efficiency can be maintained and that America with an efficient and adequate sea defense can avoid being drawn into any foreign wars.”11
Three weeks later, Admiral Leahy stood in the rain on a reviewing platform behind FDR for two hours as the president’s second inaugural parade trooped by on Pennsylvania Avenue. Nominally, the president’s first-rank naval adviser was the secretary of the navy, but Claude A. Swanson was in failing health. A seventy-four-year-old Virginian, Swanson had served his state since 1893 as congressman, governor, and United States senator and had been appointed secretary of the navy by Roosevelt in 1933. When Swanson was unable to attend cabinet meetings and other occasions because of his health, it was Leahy who frequently represented the Navy Department as acting secretary. This gave him even greater access to the president’s inner circle.12
While the alliance of a reinvigorated Germany and Italy held attention in Europe, the third member of the growing Axis alliance was causing a stir in the Pacific. Japan’s aggression against China erupted into total war early in July 1937, and with Japanese forces advancing on Shanghai, Roosevelt became concerned that American commercial and military interests were at risk of being caught in the crossfire.
That same month, Amelia Earhart disappeared on her attempted globe-circling flight. After navy search efforts failed to find her, Leahy pressed to occupy other islands near her intended target of Howland Island, while American naval forces were in the vicinity. But Roosevelt remained focused on Shanghai. “How many Marines do we have in Shanghai?” the president asked Leahy at a cabinet meeting. When Leahy gave an answer of 1,050, FDR said that he wished they were not there. Leahy recalled the rationale that they were protecting about four thousand Americans in Shanghai, but Roosevelt quickly countered that “there were about twenty-five thousand Americans in Paris and not a single American Marine.”13
Roosevelt and Leahy were certainly opposed to any action that might provoke a clash involving the marines, but FDR protested that some Americans were going to get hurt nonetheless. When part of the International Settlement at Shanghai evacuated, the rest dug in, remaining an uncomfortable sliver of neutrality both for its occupants and the invading Japanese, who found the continuing foreign presence annoying. Even before Chinese forces completely abandoned Shanghai and the Japanese directed their attack toward Nanking, Japan announced that it would conduct an extensive bombing attack on Nanking and warned all foreigners to leave the city.
“This threat by Japan,” Leahy bristled, “to conduct a bombing raid against the civil population of the Capital of China is another evidence, and a conclusive one, that the old accepted rules of warfare are no longer in effect. It establishes another precedent that will be seriously destructive of the rights and privileges of neutrals and noncombatants… There is today an urgent need for a restatement of the international rules governing the conduct of war… Someday Japan must be called to account for its abuse of power in this instance.”14
But doing this would be difficult, if not impossible. Despite Roosevelt’s pro-Chinese sympathies, he recognized that a large portion of his countrymen remained decidedly isolationist in temperament. The United States was still mired in the Great Depression—folks had their own problems at home. Leahy, and undoubtedly Roosevelt too, understood that Japan would only grow stronger if China was subjugated, but in Leahy’s words, “From all indications the present splendid opportunity [to check Japan] will be lost through lack of decision on the part of the major world powers.”15
Early in October, Roosevelt spoke in Chicago and gave what came to be called his Quarantine speech. Citing a rise in world lawlessness, he suggested at a minimum an economic embargo of those nations promoting the same. But the speech landed with a thud amid American isolationism. And on the world stage, the future Allied powers were certainly not acting in unison or with any degree of resolve in countering the growing aggressiveness of Adolf Hitler. For most, Asia too remained a remote sideshow. Then came an incident that might have meant war.
December 12, 1937, was a Sunday, but it was far from a quiet one near the Yangtze River port of Nanking. Shanghai, 170 miles downstream, was in fact in Japanese hands after a bitter siege, and the Japanese were advancing on Nanking, which had been serving as the capital of the Chinese Nationalists. As such, the city was home to embassies and international diplomats, as well as a host of newspaper reporters.
In the wide and muddy Yangtze, patrol boats from several neutral nations attempted to look after their nationals. These included the American gunboat Panay, not to be confused with the Spanish-American War derelict of the same name that Chester Nimitz and “Slew” McCain had once motored around the Philippines. This Panay was one of five shallow-draft, 190-foot river gunboats built in the late 1920s specifically for patrolling the Yangtze River. Their assignment initially was to protect American commercial interests during the Chinese civil war—lately put on hold to counter the Japanese threat.
On board the Panay, in addition to its crew of fifty-five officers and men, were the last personnel from the abandoned U.S. embassy and American, as well as two Italian, newspaper reporters who had all sought refuge there the day before. The Panay and three small Standard Oil tankers had then moved upriver some distance to escape the dueling Japanese and Chinese artillery barrages. Japanese aircraft also crisscrossed the skies, but with a large American flag flying from its stern and another stretched out horizontally atop the pilothouse, there did not appear to be much chance that the Japanese would mistake the Panay for a belligerent. Indeed, the Panay’s two 3-inch deck guns, its principal armament along with ten .30-caliber antiaircraft machine guns, were covered.
But Sunday lunch was barely over when three Japanese navy planes quite suddenly made directly for the Panay and dropped a total of eighteen bombs. The ship’s machine guns were unlimbered in self-defense, but the initial attack wrecked the forward 3-inch gun and the pilothouse and wounded the captain, Lieutenant Commander J. J. Hughes, and several others. Had it truly been a case of mistaken identity, the attack might have then stopped, but instead twelve more dive-bombers and nine fighters appeared and made run after run at the ship, as well as at the nearby Standard Oil tankers.
Within thirty minutes, all power and propulsion were lost and the Panay was settling fast into sixty feet of water. Captain Hughes gave the order to abandon ship, but Japanese fighters continued to strafe some of the lifeboats as they made their way to shore. Two crew members and one of the Italian reporters were killed, and a total of eleven officers and men were seriously wounded. Almost everyone aboard had some measure of injuries from flying shrapnel and wood splinters.
When the American ambassador to Japan, Joseph C. Grew, heard of the attack, all he could think of was the bombing almost forty years earlier of the Maine. Grew told the press, “I had been working for five years to build up Japanese-American friendship and this incident seemed to me to risk shattering the whole structure.” Indeed, Grew “began to plan the details of hurried packing in case we had to leave—precisely as we began to pack in Berlin after the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915.”16
Bill Leahy heard the news via a telephone call that interrupted a dinner party being given by Secretary of War Harry H. Woodring. Later that evening, Leahy was summoned to a conference with Secretary of State Cordell Hull that lasted past midnight. “It is, in my opinion,” Leahy said, “time now to get the Fleet ready for sea, to make an agreement with the British Navy for joint action, and to inform the Japanese that we expect to protect our Nationals.”17
Leahy proposed a blockade of Japan that would deprive the island nation of the rubber, petroleum, and other raw materials from the East Indies that were fueling its war aims. Two da
ys after the attack, he met with the president and urged him to send the “ships of the Fleet to Navy Yards without delay to obtain fuel, clean bottoms, and take on sea stores preparatory to a cruise at sea.” Years later, with the benefit of history, Leahy felt even more strongly that had “we then blockaded Japan, we could check the Tokyo bandits’ ideas of conquest, possibly even without a war.”18
Franklin Roosevelt certainly didn’t discount the growing Japanese threat, but he knew the sentiment of his countrymen. While American public opinion might generally support China over Japan, 70 percent of American voters interviewed in a Gallup poll in January 1938 “favored a policy of complete withdrawal from China—Asiatic Fleet, Marines, missionaries, medical missions, and all.”19
And this public sentiment aside, Roosevelt himself was just then under considerable attack from isolationists in Congress who were backing a constitutional amendment introduced by Democrat Louis Ludlow of Indiana. It required a national referendum before any congressional declaration of war was effective except in blatant circumstances of a direct attack on the United States or its possessions. If passed, it would turn presidential war powers back more than a century. The January 1938 vote of 209–188 in the House of Representatives to return the matter to the Judiciary Committee showed just how closely contested the matter was.
In the end, Japan’s official inquiry into the Panay attack called it all a terrible mistake, but that still failed to explain how American flags could be mistaken for Chinese at such close range. The United States Naval Court of Inquiry reached the opposite conclusion and called the sinking deliberate, but Roosevelt’s willingness to accept profuse apologies and a $2.2 million indemnity put the matter to rest. As it turned out, Neville Chamberlain, then prime minister of Great Britain and heavily focused on events in Europe, would likely have been no more inclined to support Leahy’s plea for a joint blockade or take any firmer action against Japan than he had against Nazi Germany.
One result of the Panay sinking, however, was that American press coverage of the event was heavily anti-Japanese and underscored that Japan was a shameless aggressor. One of those aboard the Panay was Universal News cameraman Norman Alley. He captured dramatic 16 mm movie footage of the evacuation and subsequent attack and sinking. When Leahy and his staff saw this film at the Navy Department on December 31, it confirmed without doubt that the Panay had been “subjected to a very severe, long continued bombardment.”
The film was initially without audio, but when Universal Pictures released it into theaters, the scenes of the wounded and the sinking ship, set against dramatic background music and a narrator calling the Japanese “war-crazed culprits,” made an impression that would slowly bring the country around to Leahy’s way of thinking.20
The end of a tumultuous year also brought Leahy a “Dear Bill” note from FDR, thanking him for “the nicest Christmas present I have had.” It was a model of the new battleship North Carolina, the first to be laid down since the limits of the Washington Conference treaty, but not due to be launched until 1940. Speed up the construction, the president kidded, so that he could take a cruise on the ship. Then he added, “The good old Navy is coming strong.”21
Franklin Roosevelt’s assertion of an up-and-coming navy was part cheerleading, but one reason for his optimism was the work that Ernest King had been doing with naval aviation. King had been disappointed when he was denied the chance to break out a three-star vice admiral’s flag as commander, Aircraft, Battle Force. The result was that he remained a rear admiral and was put in command of the Aircraft, Base Force, of seaplanes, centered largely on the West Coast and in Hawaii. But in retrospect, this put him in charge of two very important and related developments in naval aviation.
The first was the initial deployment of the venerable PBY flying boat, nicknamed the “Catalina.” Powered by two Pratt & Whitney engines and carrying a crew of about eight depending on the model, this high-wing aircraft had a range of about 2,500 miles. Some four thousand PBYs would be built and see service in World War II for patrol and reconnaissance, antisubmarine duty, convoy escorts, and search-and-rescue operations. Nowhere, of course, would they become more valuable than in the wide watery expanses of the Pacific. King pushed his PBY pilots to their limits, just as he did everyone else, requiring them to train under wartime conditions.
The second important contribution King made was to sail his flagship, the tender Wright, which he had once commanded, all over the Central Pacific and as far north as the Gulf of Alaska scouting suitable seaplane bases. He didn’t need much for a base, usually just a lagoon sheltered by a coral reef or a protected fjord along Alaska’s coast. These locations greatly improved the navy’s operational reach in the Pacific, and more often than not, the PBY proved to be the lifeline between far-flung outposts.
Writing a less-than-friendly Admiral Standley shortly before Leahy succeeded him as CNO, King admitted that he was “disappointed at having to come to sea in this billet,” but in “some three months” he had become both an expert on and a champion for these flying boats. “The advent of the 60 new PBY airplanes (now beginning),” King assured Standley, “will provide the means of demonstrating the capabilities of ‘airboats’ in what should be a convincing way.”22
King went out of his way to tell another officer who had recently completed his flight training at an advanced age much the same thing. Fifty-two-year-old Captain John S. McCain, Annapolis class of 1906, had been hoping to command the new aircraft carrier Yorktown, but he was given the air base at Coco Solo in the Canal Zone under King’s command instead. King, too, seemed to expect that McCain would get a carrier, but Yorktown was behind schedule, and with a philosophical navy version of que sera, sera—“different ships—different long splices”—King assured McCain that he was glad to have him “joining this command, in which you will gain first-hand knowledge of that important (and little-known) adjunct of the Fleet—the flying boats.”23
King, of course, planned to be in the seaplane assignment only for one year, but when he next made the trek to Washington in January 1937, not much had changed as far as his own advancement. Bill Leahy was now chief of naval operations, but both Leahy and King had spoken out loudly against any increase in power for that office. Consequently, Leahy was not in much of a position to help King when Adolphus Andrews, as chief of the Bureau of Navigation, still insisted that King’s “services were needed to continue with the expansion, organization and development of patrol squadrons.”24
King grumbled but went back to the Pacific for another year, including another summer cruise to Alaskan waters. Sometimes the navy changed command designations to confuse matters, but in this case, King’s deployment of PBYs and other aircraft all over the Pacific prompted the designation of his command to be changed from “Aircraft, Base Force” to “Aircraft, Scouting Force.” It might seem a subtle distinction, but King had put seaplanes on the move along with the rest of the navy.
And, not surprisingly, King came up with a plan during his second year in the Pacific to put himself on the move as well. When the commander, Aircraft, Battle Force, retired in November 1937, even Andrews found it impossible to deny his classmate the vice admiral post. Far from sending Andrews his thanks, however, King sent him a reminder of his own ultimate goals. “I have always assumed that you would wish to know the views and desires of flag officers as to their own personal preferences where their professional prospects are concerned,” King wrote Andrews, without pausing to think that the answer was probably no. Discounting any appearance of “a tinge of ‘ambition’ or even of ‘selfishness,’ ” King nonetheless reminded Andrews that he had frankly discussed his personal objectives with Andrews when he had come into BuNav and “They are now some six months ‘behind schedule’—and ‘age 64’ looms just that much nearer!”25
King’s solution was to combine his carrier command with the light cruisers, destroyers, and patrol planes of the Scouting Force. Operationally, this would have removed the speedy 33-knot carr
iers from working with the slower 21-knot battleships and made for “fast-moving and far-ranging independent operations”—exactly King’s preferred modus operandi. Command-wise, the move would have merged two vice admiral commands into one. King, of course, unabashedly proposed that he be given the combined command.
Andrews declined. The tactical worth of what King proposed would prove itself in a few short years when Bill Halsey was leading fast-strike carrier raids all around the Pacific. But in 1937, the battleship had not yet been demoted from its perch atop the navy’s strategic arsenal. There may, however, have been another motive in Andrews’s thinking. A few weeks later, it was his turn to leave the Bureau of Navigation and head for sea duty. Andrews took the Scouting Force command himself, and with it the three stars of a vice admiral.26
King flew his own three-star flag from the Saratoga and immediately began to put his squadrons through his usual intense training, particularly night operations in preparation for the 1938 fleet maneuvers. Experience and techniques had progressed quite a bit since Fleet Problem XII in 1931, when King had almost lost his airplanes after dark. But nighttime carrier operations were still very dicey. Many squadrons thought that night flying meant taking off at sunset and coming back in an hour. King thought differently.
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