Nimitz’s other duties were numerous and time-consuming. Roosevelt’s declaration of a limited national emergency included a call-up of reserves on a voluntary basis, but that was only the beginning. The universities offering NROTC had increased from six when Nimitz first went to Cal Berkeley to twenty-seven. Congress increased the enrollment at Annapolis by giving five appointments to each congressman and senator instead of four, and the academy’s course was temporarily reduced from four years to three. The naval training stations at San Diego, Norfolk, Newport, and the Great Lakes were enlarged, and the basic training course for recruits was shortened from eight weeks to six. There was a rush about everything, and everything required more manpower.
By then, Chester and Catherine Nimitz had found an apartment at 2222 Q Street, where their two older daughters, Kate and Nancy, were also living. Nancy, at age twenty, was flaunting the intellectual and political freedom that was long her trademark, and her father patiently gave her plenty of rope. But one afternoon while the Nimitz family were guests of the secretary of the navy aboard the yacht Sequoia, the presidential yacht, Potomac, with presidential flag flying, came chugging from the opposite direction. All aboard the Sequoia hurried on deck to render respects, but Nancy groaned, “I don’t know whether I want to salute Roosevelt.” That was enough for her father. “Whether you salute Roosevelt or not is your own business,” Nimitz told his daughter, “but you are going to salute the President.”4
Predictably, Ernest J. King’s posting to the General Board had caused him particular anguish, and it only got worse. Suddenly, the world was going to war, and from all appearances, King was going into retirement. Some days, King was flat-out depressed, calling himself a “has-been.” Yet on other occasions, he bristled with his usual confidence and asserted to junior officers, “They’re not done with me yet.” In between these extremes, King refused to fall into the reflective ease embraced by many of his fellow admirals on the General Board. Instead, he embarked on another round of intense study on naval deployments and the world situation almost as if he were cramming for a final exam.5
In March 1940, King was suddenly assigned to accompany Acting Secretary of the Navy Charles Edison (the inventor’s son) on a tour of the Pacific Fleet. No one, including King, seemed to know just why he was delegated to accompany Edison, but since the suggestion apparently came from the president himself, it was not questioned. Admiral Richardson, in charge of the Pacific Fleet, “wondered what the hell I was doing there,” King recalled, “[but] I went along for the ride.”6
The benefit of the trip to King proved to be that Edison was impressed by his knowledge and talents and gave him free rein upon their return to Washington to oversee a thorough overhaul of antiaircraft batteries throughout the fleet. King cut through bureaucratic red tape with his usual lack of finesse and got the job done in record time. It was just the sort of jolt that Edison thought the entire navy needed to break out of a “peace-time psychology” and “throw off a routine state of mind.” Edison told Roosevelt that King had the leadership skills to force this needed transformation, and he urged King’s future appointment as commander in chief, U.S. Fleet, to replace Richardson.7
For his part, Roosevelt, despite having detailed King to Edison’s side for the Pacific trip, was mum. The inside scuttlebutt was that Roosevelt—he of the ritual afternoon happy hour—was among those who thought King drank too much. Instead, in September 1940 King was summoned to the office of the CNO, Admiral Harold R. Stark, to hear the offer of command of the Atlantic Squadron (subsequently briefly called the Patrol Force), then a rather inferior group of aging battleships and cruisers, since the bulk of the navy’s aircraft carriers and newer firepower was in the Pacific. Rear Admiral Chester Nimitz, as chief of the Bureau of Navigation, was on hand to deliver the bad news that if King took the appointment, he would have only his rear admiral rank, not the three stars of a vice admiral he had enjoyed when last at sea. King waved Nimitz aside. It didn’t matter, he said. He very much “wanted to go to sea,” and he readily accepted Stark’s offer.8
A number of King’s colleagues were stunned by the assignment. King of the carriers, King of the vaunting ambition, was taking what many considered a junior command—certainly a step down from his deferential, if less-than-useful position on the General Board. Nonetheless King prepared for the assignment with his usual gusto. Then a routine physical revealed that he, too, had a hernia that needed to be repaired before he was ready for sea. The month’s recuperation gave him plenty of time to think. Recognizing how well his tour with Acting Secretary Edison had gone, King volunteered to accompany Frank Knox, the newly appointed secretary of the navy, on an inspection tour of Caribbean bases and Atlantic Squadron maneuvers slated for just before King was to assume command.
Knox’s appointment as secretary of the navy was part of Franklin Roosevelt’s 1940 presidential election strategy to stifle Republican isolationism and win bipartisan support for the looming global conflict. Knox was a newspaper publisher from Chicago who had been the Republican vice presidential candidate on the ill-fated Alf Landon ticket of 1936. One might question his specific navy credentials, but Knox’s role model was Theodore Roosevelt, under whom he had served as a Rough Rider during the Spanish-American War. That in and of itself harbored well for the navy. Not only would the Caribbean trip give King a chance to win points with Knox—much as he had done with Edison—but King also could evaluate his new command from the sidelines before hoisting his flag.
King immediately assumed the role of tour guide and squired Knox on a whirlwind itinerary that used aircraft to cover a lot of ground from Washington to the Canal Zone and back. Some reports had King drinking too much—or at least too much for his fellow revelers. His personal specialty was “The King’s Peg,” a potent concoction of champagne poured over brandy in flutes or tall glasses with little or no ice. “Admiral King embarrassed all of us with his intoxicated behavior,” reported the commander at Key West, but if the report was true, Knox seemed not to notice or mind. By the end of the two-week tour, Knox shared Edison’s evaluation of King as a man who could get things done.9
Meanwhile, Bill Leahy’s tenure as governor of Puerto Rico was subject to world tensions as well as internal political friction on the island. Germany launched its blitzkrieg against France in May 1940, and Italy soon joined Germany in declaring war against Great Britain and France. After British troops evacuated the continent at Dunkirk, France pleaded for an armistice, which Adolf Hitler gleefully accepted in the same railcar used for Germany’s 1918 surrender. Governor Leahy was particularly glum about what this meant for the United States. “With only England offering effective resistance to the Nazis,” Leahy wrote, “and with China fighting alone and almost helplessly against Japan, I could see little or no prospect of our not being attacked on one side or the other sooner or later.”
Despite his Puerto Rican duties, Leahy spent much of May and June 1940 in Washington and conferred with FDR on numerous occasions about global issues. Roosevelt continued to lean heavily on Leahy for advice and perspective, even if by now Leahy was outwardly resigned that American involvement in the war was all but inevitable. FDR may have privately agreed with Leahy’s pessimism, but in a presidential election year, he had to remain publicly optimistic that the United States could somehow avoid sending another generation of young Americans into battle. Leahy termed this their “friendly disagreement,” but it certainly did not stop the president from once again affirming that in the event of U.S. involvement in the war, Leahy would be recalled to Washington.10
In Puerto Rico, Leahy was strict but fair as he tried to keep local elections free from the partisan violence that was usually sparked by claims for Puerto Rican independence. There also may have been an anti-German sentiment in the back of his mind. If the secondhand gossip Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes recorded is to be believed, Leahy told columnist Drew Pearson that if the broader European war should involve the United States, several hundred German
s in Puerto Rico “simply would disappear [and] no one would ever hear of them again.”
Ickes admitted that “this streak in an American naval officer who has come out of the soil of Iowa does startle me a little,” and it seems out of character for Leahy to have spoken candidly with Pearson in the first place. But Leahy was definitely a hard-core conservative as opposed to the liberal Ickes. “Leahy thinks that there may be an attempt on his own life,” Ickes observed later that fall, “but he seems to be prepared for it, and I don’t believe that he would hesitate to shoot down anyone who might attack him.”11
No doubt this was the advice that Leahy continued to give FDR when he returned to the United States again for consultations in October, just before the 1940 election. Leahy had lunch with the president and listened as Admiral James O. Richardson, who for a time had been assistant CNO under Leahy, objected to the Pacific Fleet’s continued presence at Pearl Harbor. It was bad for navy morale, Richardson argued, because the facilities there simply could not support a prolonged deployment. In Richardson’s mind, it wasn’t a matter of foreign policy—that the fleet was either a provocation or a deterrent to Japan in the Pacific. Rather, Richardson’s argument for a withdrawal was a logistical one—Pearl Harbor was simply too far away to support adequately.
Then Leahy watched as Richardson practically threw himself off a cliff and professed to FDR, “The senior officers of the Navy do not have the trust and confidence in the civilian leadership of this country that is essential for the successful prosecution of a war in the Pacific.”12
One can almost hear Franklin D. Roosevelt grinding his teeth on his usually jaunty cigarette holder. FDR appreciated military men who spoke their minds about military issues in private counsels with him—that’s why he valued Leahy and would come to value George C. Marshall. But Richardson had made the unpardonable error in Roosevelt’s mind of crossing the line between military and political matters. FDR mumbled something in reply about the limits of what could be done in an election year, but Richardson had shown his hand too well. It was only the pending election that kept FDR from terminating him right then and there.
Leahy returned to Puerto Rico, and Roosevelt won a third term handily enough, but on November 17, as the president reviewed the challenges ahead, he sent Leahy a blunt telegram. The French armistice with the Germans had left a shadow government in Vichy led by World War I hero Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain and nominally in control of the southern third of the country, as well as the French fleet. Roosevelt told Leahy that the situation was “increasingly serious” because there was some “possibility that France may actually engage in the war against Great Britain and in particular that the French fleet may be utilized under the control of Germany.”
Leahy was “the best man available for this mission” as ambassador to Vichy France, FDR said, because he could “talk to Marshal Pétain in language which he would understand and the position which you have held in our own navy would undoubtedly give you great influence with the higher officers of the French Navy who are openly hostile to Great Britain.” Roosevelt hoped that Leahy would “accept the mission to France and be prepared to leave at the earliest possible date.” Leahy, of course, was far too much of a sailor to take FDR’s “hope” for anything less than an order. He replied immediately, “I can leave Puerto Rico in a week.”13
Several weeks later, Rear Admiral Ernest J. King boarded his new flagship, the aging, pre–World War I battleship Texas, and led his Atlantic Squadron of largely secondhand ships back to the Caribbean for amphibious training exercises with army and marine units. For all King’s talk of glorying in Napoleon’s ability to envision the grand strategy and then empower his subordinates to execute it, King had always had his hand in everything, and even as recently as the 1939 carrier maneuvers with Bill Halsey, he had not refrained from interfering with details best left to subordinates.
Yes, in the last war King had convinced Admiral Henry T. Mayo of the importance of delegating and then trusting his destroyer captains; he had preached the importance of individual training and career advancement so as to be fully capable of executing such instructions; but when push came to shove, King had always had a terrible time biting his own sharp tongue and trusting that his orders would be carried out.
If there was to be an epiphany, perhaps it occurred one dark night in January 1941 during the Caribbean maneuvers. King was up to his usual behavior. He ordered his ships darkened and then sent a radio message to prepare to alter course. Before all the ships had acknowledged, King gave the command to execute the turn. In the bedlam that followed, it was a miracle there were no collisions, as King ordered turn after turn and his ships struggled to keep up. Finally, he ordered a cruising formation and left the bridge, to the relief of all hands.
But a few hours later, when the watch officer ordered a routine course change and matter-of-factly reported it to the admiral, King stormed back to the bridge and cussed a blue streak, demanding to know who had signaled the course change. The watch officer, Francis S. Low, whose nickname was “Frog,” unabashedly replied, “I did, sir.” How dare he assume King’s authority, the admiral thundered.
Finally, after the tirade subsided, King approached Low, who had retreated to a dark corner of the bridge, and patted him on the shoulder with a proffered semi-apology. “Admiral,” sputtered Low as he wheeled around, “aside from asking for my immediate detachment, there is not one goddamn thing you can do to me that I can’t take.”14
Low’s outburst may or may not have gotten King to thinking, but over the next several months, he issued a series of orders on the exercise of command, essentially mandating less detailed orders on “how” to execute a mission and more initiative in executing the “what” of the mission. “We are preparing for—and are now close to,” King told his Atlantic Squadron on January 21, “those active operations (commonly called war) which require the exercise and the utilization of the full powers and capabilities of every officer in command status.” Not assuming any personal blame for his own self-centric and controlling persona, King nonetheless urged that the “initiative of the subordinate” in “how to do it” should be supported after ordering “what to do” unless the particular circumstances demanded otherwise.15
“Sometimes I got a kind of obsession of interfering with admirals who had to do the job,” King later wrote with some understatement, but even when he “sometimes believed I could have done a better job myself,” he got himself “in hand enough not to interfere unless it seemed that it really had to be done.”16
For King, this change in attitude, admittedly a long time coming, could not have occurred a moment too soon. Bossing carriers or small task forces was one thing, but King was about to command a much larger operation in which delegation, trusting subordinates’ initiative, and picking the right ones in the first place was the only way things were going to get done efficiently and effectively.
Barely had King arrived in the Caribbean for these January 1941 maneuvers, when he received a message from Secretary of the Navy Knox that President Roosevelt had reorganized the U.S. Fleet and, in recognition of a two-ocean threat, had divided it into three separate fleets. Henceforth, there would be the Atlantic, Pacific, and Asiatic Fleets, and King’s Atlantic Squadron would form the nucleus of the Atlantic force.
The details came in a communication from Nimitz at BuNav. King’s stars were on the way. His interim appointment to vice admiral was effective immediately, and he would receive the four stars of a full admiral befitting his fleet command posthaste. Roosevelt used the same flurry of changes to relieve James O. Richardson with Husband E. Kimmel and designate Kimmel as commander in chief, Pacific Fleet. There would be no more talk about the fleet leaving Pearl Harbor.
Kimmel had been one of Bill Halsey’s groomsmen at his wedding and remained one of Halsey’s closest friends. Up to a point, their careers had been similar. Kimmel had cut his teeth on commanding destroyers and then destroyer divisions, but while Halsey went into avi
ation, Kimmel remained with the big-gun surface ships, eventually commanding the battleship New York and the Cruisers, Battle Force.
“Needless to say,” Kimmel wrote Nimitz after learning of his appointment, “I am much flattered and pleased with the assignment, but my satisfaction is mixed with anxiety as to whether or not I shall measure up to the job. However, no efforts on my part shall be spared.”17
But for whatever shortcomings Kimmel thought he faced, at least he had a modest supply of ships. For King in the Atlantic, it was a different story. There was still too much “business as usual,” King wrote Knox shortly after assuming command. Things had to change. Knox heartily concurred and told King in return that he was “not at all surprised, but… gratified to know that the Commander-in-Chief of the Atlantic Fleet recognizes the existence of an emergency and is taking proper measures to meet it. I knew you would!”18
One of King’s first steps was to hasten most of his ships into port for long-overdue overhauls and modifications to improve their combat readiness. Depth charges for antisubmarine warfare and antiaircraft batteries were high on the list. The result was the Atlantic Fleet was “temporarily immobilized in the shipyards,” but it emerged far better prepared to fight a long war.
Recognizing that the navy, indeed the entire American armed forces, was short of men, ships, and materiel, King assured Nimitz at BuNav that he would work with what he was given and then issued his “Making the Best of What We Have” order. Shortages would be no excuse for poor performance. “I expect the officers of the Atlantic Fleet to be the leaders in what may be called the ‘pioneering spirit,’ ” King ordered. “We must all do all we can with what we have.”19
But for all of King’s newfound assertions about the “initiative of the subordinate” in “how to do” something, he found himself in somewhat of a quandary as to just “what to do” himself. President Roosevelt had just provided Great Britain with fifty Lend-Lease destroyers in exchange for Caribbean and Canadian bases, but beyond a general support for British shipping, the rules of engagement were rather sketchy.
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