The Admirals

by Walter R. Borneman

  The first person to come aboard Enterprise that day did so via a bosun’s chair even before the carrier’s gangway was in place. To no one’s surprise, it was Nimitz. He climbed out with a grin and pumped Halsey’s hand with a hearty “Nice going!” Rear Admiral Robert Theobald, soon to be commander of Pacific destroyers, came next but was more pointed. Shaking a finger in Halsey’s face, Theobald, who had opposed the raid as too risky, exclaimed, “Damn you, Bill, you’ve got no business getting home from that one! No business at all!”5

  But the business had been so successful that Nimitz soon had a similar mission for Halsey. This time, the destination was recently captured Wake Island. But when Soc McMorris, Nimitz’s war plans officer, delivered the operational orders, Halsey, his number thirteen phobia firmly in place from that day aboard the old “Mizzy” as a young officer, was astounded that not only was his command now designated Task Force 13, but he was being ordered to sortie on February 13, a Friday! That was simply too much for him. McMorris agreed, quickly changing the designation to Task Force 16 and the departure date to February 14.

  The Wake mission went off without a hitch, although it too was largely in the category of a nuisance raid. It was notable, however, because it was the first time aerial-photography reconnaissance was used prior to an attack. But before Halsey could retire eastward, Nimitz flashed him another directive: “Desirable to strike Marcus if you think it feasible.”

  Marcus Island (aka Minami Tori Shima) was eight hundred miles beyond Wake on a direct line with Japan and only about thirteen hundred miles from Tokyo. It was a tiny, barren spot with little more than an airstrip, but it was almost in Japan’s backyard. Halsey turned Task Force 16 westward but then was forced to make a detour south to find better weather for refueling his ships. “Fueling is not a foul-weather operation,” he later recorded in his memoirs, something with which he would become eminently familiar a few years later in the Philippine Sea.

  Refueling was finally completed by March 1, but with seas still choppy, Halsey ordered his destroyers to stay with the oilers while he struck toward Marcus Island with Enterprise and the cruisers Northampton and Salt Lake City. The surprise was complete, and while the attack held no strategic value, it may well have been a factor in a plan that Nimitz presented to Halsey a few days after his return to Pearl Harbor.

  Nimitz was blunt. “Do you believe it would work, Bill?” he asked Halsey after giving him the overview.

  “They’ll need a lot of luck,” Halsey replied.

  “Are you willing to take them out there?”

  When Halsey replied that he certainly was, Nimitz made it official. Good, he told Halsey; the operation is “all yours!”6

  Meanwhile, Ernest J. King had wasted no time asserting himself as COMINCH. Predictably, the “joint consulship” with CNO Stark quickly dissolved. Roosevelt and Knox clearly lost confidence in Stark after Pearl Harbor, but broader political considerations kept them from immediately replacing him as they had Kimmel. Too much of a shake-up in America’s military might signal panic.

  With King gathering power as COMINCH, Roosevelt and Knox may well have decided from the very beginning that Stark’s days as CNO were numbered. Indeed, when King once insisted to Roosevelt and Knox that the command relationship between the two offices be further clarified, FDR supposedly replied, “Don’t worry. We’ll take care of that.” Still, the action they took in March 1942 was unprecedented. Stark was relieved of his CNO duties and dispatched to London to oversee American naval forces in Europe and become the senior U.S. Navy representative to the British government. King was assigned additional duties as CNO.7

  Executive Order 9096, which FDR signed on March 12, 1942, made it official: “The duties of the Commander in Chief, United States Fleet, and the duties of the Chief of Naval Operations, may be combined and devolve upon one officer who shall have the title ‘Commander in Chief, United States Fleet, and Chief of Naval Operations,’ and who shall be the principal naval adviser to the President on the conduct of the War.” It further made clear that while King had been promised the cooperation of the bureaus as COMINCH, they were now ordered to be under both “the coordination and direction” [emphasis added] of the CNO.8

  After years of withholding power from the CNO as an independent bureau chief, King had achieved just the opposite. His combined offices of COMINCH and CNO gave him the most sweeping accumulation of American naval power in the hands of one man since the days when the navy had floated only one ship under the command of John Paul Jones.

  There was some remaining uncertainty as to where Secretary Knox stood in the hierarchy. King was still charged with operating under his “general direction.” But words in the same sentence also made King “directly responsible” to the president for all naval forces, and in practice he enjoyed full access to the White House with or without Knox. On the military side, there was no longer any doubt that King was America’s top sailor and that when he spoke, he did so as the unqualified supreme commander of all naval forces.

  The best evidence that FDR was firmly behind this new arrangement may have come to King via a letter written by the president’s right-hand man and alter ego, Harry Hopkins. “I think it is perfectly grand,” Hopkins told King, “and I have a feeling it is going to be one of the most important things the President has done during the war.”9

  National newsmagazines also embraced King’s dual appointment as a very positive step in the war effort. “Combining the two top Navy jobs,” reported Life, “cleaned away a long accumulation of bureaucratic trash.” Time called King “boot-tough” and noted that the “shake-up in the top drawer put an airman alone at the top.” The man now unquestionably in charge was termed one of “the Navy’s toughest ‘sundowners’ [Navy slang for a strict disciplinarian] and… most offensive-minded officers.”10

  As he had done when assuming command of the Atlantic Fleet two years before, King wasted no time in reiterating his general philosophy in a press release circulated on March 26. Saying that he had little to add to what he had been saying as COMINCH over the past three months, King nonetheless noted, “Since repetition is a form of emphasis, it may not be amiss to repeat that this will be a long and a hard war.” But, admonished King, “it is high time to stop talking defense—and above all to stop thinking defense… We must strike the enemy when and where we can—and keep on striking him heavier and heavier blows as mounting production puts into our hands more and more tools of war. Our days of victory are in the making.”11

  But not all battles were to be on the seas or distant shores. Cooperation between the army and navy had never been anything to cheer about, and nothing had brought to light the deficiencies in interservice teamwork more than the recent disaster at Pearl Harbor. Ultimately, such cooperation and mutual respect had to start at the top of each service.

  King’s well-established counterpart as chief of staff of the army was General George C. Marshall. In an army as dominated by West Point graduates as the navy was by Annapolis alumni, Marshall was somewhat of an anomaly. He had not attended West Point but had graduated instead from the Virginia Military Institute, attaining his commission as a second lieutenant in 1901, the same year King graduated from Annapolis. Marshall served in infantry assignments and then caught the eye of commanding general John J. Pershing, who became a mentor and made Marshall a member of his staff after World War I.

  Marshall spent the interwar years with training commands, War College assignments, and general staff work, receiving promotion to brigadier general in 1936. In November of that same year, while in command of Vancouver Barracks in Washington State, Marshall met King for the first time at the Northwest Air Meeting in Portland, Oregon. Three years later, Roosevelt promoted Marshall over the heads of thirty-four senior officers to become army chief of staff. At age fifty-eight, he inauspiciously assumed the duties on September 1, 1939, the same day Germany invaded Poland.

  Usually outwardly reserved and gracious, Marshall next met King in Washington, D.C.,
early in 1941. As King recalled the encounter, Marshall was, “although polite, distinctly cool in his manner.” This may have been due merely to Marshall’s general demeanor, or he may have been smarting over a run-in several of his staff officers had recently had with King while observing amphibious landings in the Caribbean shortly after King assumed the Atlantic Fleet command. King was certain that his marines were providing accompanying army troops a topflight example of how it was done, while the army officers busily critiqued the marines.12

  Their next encounter was on the Augusta en route to and from the Atlantic Charter Conference. They appear to have gotten along splendidly. The very first thing Marshall did upon returning to Washington was to write King a letter of thanks and express his “deep appreciation of the consideration shown me while I was aboard the Augusta.” By Marshall’s standards, the letter was downright syrupy. Marshall told King that he hoped very much to have “another opportunity to travel under your protection and guidance” and offered full cooperation for “anything I can ever show you or do for you in the Army,” concluding, “I am yours to command.”13

  But by early 1942, tensions were high all around. One army officer who did not hesitate to make his impressions of Admiral King quite clear, if only to his private diary, was Marshall’s up-and-coming protégé, newly appointed brigadier general Dwight D. Eisenhower. Arriving in Washington in December 1941, Eisenhower found “lots of amateur strategists on the job, and prima donnas everywhere.”14

  Eisenhower formed a definite opinion of Admiral King and described him as “an arbitrary, stubborn type, with not too much brains and a tendency toward bullying his juniors.” Ike was wrong on the brains part, of course, but hardly alone in his description of King’s other characteristics. “But,” Eisenhower continued, “I think he wants to fight, which is vastly encouraging. In a war such as this, when high command invariably involves a president, a prime minister, six chiefs of staff, and a horde of lesser ‘planners,’ there has got to be a lot of patience—no one person can be a Napoleon or a Caesar.”15

  But it seems that Eisenhower thought that King was trying to be either or both. “One thing that might help win this war,” Eisenhower snarled on March 10, “is to get someone to shoot King. He’s the antithesis of cooperation, a deliberately rude person, which means he’s a mental bully… who is going to cause a blow-up sooner or later.”

  Eisenhower wrote this entry in his diary the very day he learned that his revered father had died and that there was nothing he could do “but send a wire.” He may have been venting his emotions at King’s expense. After he became supreme commander and was far removed from the relative freedom of expression of a junior brigadier, Ike admitted, “In glancing back over old notes I see that Admiral King annoyed me. In justice I should say that all through the war, whenever I called on him for assistance, he supported me fully and instantly.”16

  At the time, four days after his “shoot King” comment, Eisenhower was still steaming. “Lest I look at this book sometime and find that I’ve expressed a distaste for some person, and have put down no reason for my aversion, I record this one story of Admiral King.” Supposedly, General Henry H. Arnold’s office sent King an important note that was inadvertently addressed to “Rear Admiral King,” two stars below his current rank. The letter came back unopened with an arrow pointing to the word “Rear.” If “that’s the size of man the navy has at its head,” Ike recorded, “he ought to be a big help winning this war.” Much later, Eisenhower recanted these harsh words, too.17

  What appears to have changed Eisenhower’s mind—other than perhaps a maturing awareness that interservice cooperation had to be attained and preserved at any cost—was a face-to-face encounter he had with King shortly after this. According to Eisenhower, what broke the ice and changed his opinion of King occurred when Marshall had dispatched him to King’s office with a request. King was “performing true to form,” Ike later recalled. He scarcely looked up from his desk and in response to Eisenhower’s question barked a one-word answer: “No!” But as others who had earned King’s respect had done, Eisenhower stood his ground and replied that such an attitude “could not do much to assure co-operation between the two services.”

  At that, King looked up. In fact, he stood up, and just when the “blow-up” Eisenhower had predicted seemed imminent, King’s entire demeanor changed and he motioned to a couch and said, “Sit down, Eisenhower.” Explaining that sometimes he got a little too wrapped up in his navy way of thinking, he asked Eisenhower to restate his request. Ike did so, and King replied, “Why, I think we can do it, surely.” From then on, recalled Eisenhower, “I had a friend in the Navy.” In fact, when it came time to pick a commander for the Allied invasion of North Africa, it was supposedly King who said, “Why not put it under Eisenhower.”18

  Eisenhower’s boss had a similar encounter with King. Shortly after King became CNO, and as such Marshall’s equal at the Joint Chiefs of Staff level, as well as commander of the navy’s combatant forces, King called on Marshall at his office in the Munitions Building. When he arrived, Marshall was in the midst of a very heated exchange with an Australian diplomat who was well known as a loose cannon. It took Marshall some minutes to defuse the matter at hand, and in the meantime, King, who was not used to waiting for anyone, stalked out in a fit of pique.

  Having resolved one crisis, Marshall turned to a potentially serious one with King and hurried over to the admiral’s office. Marshall explained that far from being discourteous, he simply had not been willing to turn the Australian loose without calming him down. As for their own relationship, he and King had to work together for the good of the country. They simply “couldn’t afford to fight, so we ought to find a way to get along together.” King listened carefully, thought for a moment or two, and then thanked Marshall for coming over to see him. “We will see if we can get along,” King said, “and I think we can.” The two would never be warm friends, but henceforth they would be courteous allies.19

  There was, of course, one other prima donna determined to have center stage, with whom Marshall and Eisenhower were well acquainted and King soon would be. From Roosevelt on down the question was debated at length: what were they going to do with Douglas MacArthur?

  The general once described Eisenhower as “the best clerk I ever had,” and after serving MacArthur as an aide in both Washington and the Philippines, Eisenhower was well versed in his theatrical ways. “In many ways MacArthur is as big a baby as ever,” Eisenhower noted. “But we’ve got to keep him fighting.”20

  Few in official Washington disagreed with either of those points. MacArthur, whom FDR had once called “one of the two most dangerous men in the country,” the other being Huey Long,21 required constant reassurance for his ego. Always his own favorite general, MacArthur was not above putting out press releases making him sound as if he was the only American totally engaged in the war effort and able to keep Japanese troops from riding San Francisco cable cars. Indeed, in the first three months of 1942, Time magazine alone made mention of King seven times and Nimitz twice, while news of MacArthur’s exploits appeared thirty-two times. But Roosevelt and Marshall realized that with the Allies in full retreat across all of Southeast Asia, MacArthur’s very verboseness made him the logical rallying point.

  MacArthur’s position in the Philippines, however, was tenuous at best. A lack of airpower in this new kind of war was at the crux of it. The general had lulled Roosevelt and Marshall with overly optimistic predictions of the power of his air force and then failed either to use it or protect it. As for the subsequent deterioration of conditions there, Marshall reiterated a common theme: “It’s all clear to me now except one thing. I just don’t know how MacArthur happened to let his planes get caught on the ground.”22

  Having declared Manila an open city and eschewed any form of the guerrilla resistance that had characterized Filipino opposition to foreign invasions dating back two centuries, MacArthur ordered his combined forces of about 15,0
00 Americans and 65,000 Filipinos to mass on Bataan. He himself hunkered down on the nearby island of Corregidor. Admittedly, this concentration on Bataan had long been part of the Americans’ Plan Orange against Japan, which presupposed a quick relief thrust through the Central Pacific after fighting the requisite major sea battle à la Dewey en route. But like so many prewar assumptions, this, too, quickly changed and MacArthur failed to adapt.

  Clearly not understanding the dead end into which MacArthur had led American and Filipino troops on Bataan, Bill Leahy in far-off Vichy inexplicably joined those waving MacArthur’s banner. “MacArthur is the only army commander on the Allied side who has been successful up to the present time and he can be depended upon to use his available forces efficiently.” This is one of Leahy’s more startling comments. Unlike the verve of Eisenhower’s diary, Leahy’s diary was usually bland and not very enlightening as to his true feelings. One wonders why he was inclined to make such a bald statement in MacArthur’s defense, particularly given Halsey’s successful exploits against Kwajalein and around Wake Island.23

  Eisenhower had another take on the matter. “Bataan is made to order for him,” Ike wrote of MacArthur’s situation. “It’s in the public eye; it has made him a public hero; it has all the essentials of drama; and he is the acknowledged king on the spot.”24