Leahy would remember 1943 as “a year of conferences.” Roosevelt and Churchill and their key military advisers met on no less than five major occasions. But for all the dickering over strategy that would dominate these sessions, even the location of this first presidential visit abroad was subject to lengthy negotiation. Churchill had come to the United States twice during 1941 and 1942, but that was politically much different than the president of the United States going to London. FDR wanted to avoid giving his critics ammunition by even the slightest appearance of subservience to Great Britain.
Churchill suggested Iceland in hopes of enticing Stalin to attend, but Stalin’s journey there from Murmansk or a similar point would have had its own dangers, and in any event, warm-blooded FDR decreed the location much too cold. Churchill, with his flamboyant love of the historic and adventurous, went to the other extreme and suggested Marrakesh, in Morocco, but that remote location posed transportation and communication problems. Then Stalin declined to leave the Soviet Union for any destination while the fate of the German Eastern Front remained so unsettled.
Finally, Casablanca—Morocco, to be sure, but more accessible than Marrakesh—was suggested. It was perfect. By arriving in nearby Fedala (now Mohammedia), where elements of Major General George Patton’s Torch forces had landed, Roosevelt could highlight the American effort in North Africa and appear quite independent of his British allies.2
Marshall, King, and Arnold left Washington in two C-54 four-engine transports en route to Casablanca on January 9, 1943, planning to arrive a few days before the presidential party to confer with the British chiefs of staff. Roosevelt, Leahy, and a small contingent left the capital late that same evening by rail from a special railway siding hidden under the Bureau of Engraving and Printing near the Tidal Basin. This was the first use by the president of the Ferdinand Magellan, a private Pullman car originally built in 1922 that had just been refurbished with heavy armor, bullet-resistant glass, and special escape hatches. FDR occupied the presidential suite, and the remaining four staterooms were reserved for Leahy; Harry Hopkins; Ross McIntire, the president’s physician; and Grace Tully, the president’s secretary. Henceforth, whenever FDR traveled by rail and Leahy accompanied him, Leahy was accorded these special accommodations in the closest practical proximity to the president.
Leahy’s identification for the trip bore the nomenclature “Register No. 2” and asserted that the bearer—described as 67, 5 feet 10 inches, 162 pounds, gray-brown hair, and gray eyes—was “a member of the party of the President of the United States.” If there was any question as to Leahy’s status in the party, only FDR himself was designated with a lower number, “Register No. 1.”3
The presidential train pulled into Jacksonville, Florida, on the evening of the tenth, and Grace Tully left the party. At 5:00 a.m. the next morning, the remainder of the president’s retinue departed Jacksonville in two Pan American Airways flying boats bound first for Port of Spain, Trinidad. The president’s plane and its consort landed without incident or any of the uproar that accompanied the C-54s carrying Marshall, King, and Arnold when they landed in Puerto Rico. Accounts long afterward by both King and Arnold demonstrated that interservice rivalries could surface in the most trivial of matters.
Marshall and Arnold were in the first plane to leave Washington, and King and various army and navy staff officers flew in the second. Inexplicably, King’s plane arrived over Borinquen Field in Puerto Rico first, but was required to circle for about half an hour until Marshall’s plane landed, because Marshall’s commission at four-star rank was senior to King’s. Just who insisted on this adherence to protocol is uncertain, but King was always convinced that “it came from Marshall or Arnold.” Supposedly, upon finally landing, King snapped to Marshall, “That performance cost you about a hundred gallons of gas.”4
Arnold was more diplomatic. In his memoirs, he simply noted, perhaps a tiny bit wryly, that either King’s pilot flew a more direct course or his plane was a little faster, but had to circle, “waiting for the senior plane to arrive. A delay in landing, such as that, especially in hot weather, always causes a bit of ill humor, but once we were down and had been assigned to comfortable quarters…, everyone was happy again.”5
The casualty of FDR’s stop in Trinidad, however, proved to be Leahy. The admiral awoke on the morning after the layover with a fever above 101°F and what Dr. McIntire diagnosed as bronchitis. McIntire recommended, and the president decreed, that Leahy remain in Trinidad to rest and rejoin the party on its return. Leahy did so, and FDR flew on to Casablanca without his closest military aide. Had this happened two years hence en route to Yalta, it would have been unthinkable, but Harry Hopkins was still closer to the president overall and FDR quite confident of his own capabilities.
Upon the return of the entire party to Washington, the president briefed Leahy on his meetings with Churchill, and Marshall and King did the same regarding the sessions of the Combined Chiefs of Staff. Perhaps because none of them made Leahy feel that he had missed something really big, he was left with the impression “that little of value toward ending the war” had been accomplished.6
In fact, three major decisions came out of the Casablanca Conference. First, it was agreed that offensive operations from the North African front would continue with the July 1943 invasion of Sicily. Second, there would be no cross-Channel invasion during 1943—much to the chagrin of Stalin, who even in absentia kept pushing for a true second front in Europe. Offensive operations against Germany would focus instead on winning the antisubmarine war in the North Atlantic and ratcheting up Arnold’s plan for pinpoint, daylight bombing. Finally, the overall Allied strategy of Germany First did not prevent King from insisting upon an increase in resource allocation for the Pacific—for both MacArthur and Nimitz—from about 15 percent to 30 percent of the total war effort. This set the stage for increased operations throughout the Pacific once Halsey prevailed in the Solomons.
Two other issues from the Casablanca Conference were first, an announcement in the final news conference by Roosevelt and Churchill of an Allied policy of unconditional surrender, which Leahy fretted had not been discussed among military channels, and second, Roosevelt’s growing recognition that Charles de Gaulle would be a thorn in Anglo-French relations—something Leahy had been saying since his tenure in Vichy. When Roosevelt and Churchill had difficulty getting de Gaulle to attend the conference and accept French general Henri Giraud’s leadership role in North Africa, Roosevelt asked Churchill, “Who pays for de Gaulle’s food?” Churchill responded, “Well, the British do.” To which Roosevelt suggested, “Why don’t you stop his food and maybe he will come.” Whether or not Churchill did so, de Gaulle finally appeared.7
Another conference early in 1943 promised at least as much drama as the one between Roosevelt and Churchill: Bill Halsey was about to meet Douglas MacArthur face-to-face. Halsey’s first encounter with MacArthur—albeit only via cables—had gotten their relationship off to a rocky start. MacArthur had his hands full pushing the Japanese back across the Owen Stanley Range from the outskirts of Port Moresby, and the general wanted naval units from Halsey’s South Pacific Area to support amphibious landings near Buna, on the north shore. Even MacArthur’s own area naval commander, Vice Admiral Arthur S. Carpender, was reluctant to commit his ships to those reef-strewn waters and be subjected to Japanese air attacks from Rabaul.
New on the job and fighting for his life on Guadalcanal, Halsey also declined to do so. “Until the Jap air in New Britain [Rabaul] and northern Solomons has been reduced,” he told MacArthur, “risk of valuable naval units in middle and western reaches of Solomon Sea can only be justified by major enemy seaborne movement against south coast of New Guinea or Australia.”
MacArthur immediately appealed to Marshall and huffed that “although he had faithfully supported the South Pacific command during its crises,” when he was “under acute pressure” and needed assistance, there was none to be had. As usual, MacArthur portraye
d his own crisis as the gravest threat, but Carpender, Halsey, Nimitz, and King were “unanimous in opposing the dispatch of fleet units to the Buna area.”8
MacArthur’s turn came a few months later when the Japanese staged a number of diversionary sea and air attacks in the Solomons to cover their attempts to evacuate Guadalcanal. Halsey appealed to MacArthur for the loan of a few heavy bombers, but the general tersely replied by radio dispatch, “My own operations envisage the maximum use of my air forces.”
Then MacArthur launched into one of his strident lectures, suggesting to Halsey that he was “in complete ignorance of what you contemplate.” There was a chance, MacArthur pontificated, that he might be able to launch some support missions in the future, but only if Halsey provided him with “some knowledge of your intentions.” Requiring a detailed battle plan for the loan of a few planes struck Halsey as meddlesome at best and critical of Halsey’s overall competence at worst.
Halsey thought he was being treated akin to a schoolboy asking to use the restroom and forwarded a copy of the general’s dispatch to Nimitz. Regardless of what he thought himself, Nimitz counseled calm. Halsey ultimately agreed, telling Nimitz of MacArthur, whom he referred to as “Little Doug,” “I refuse to get into a controversy with him or any other self-advertising Son of a Bitch.”9
But by March 1943, things looked better on both fronts. MacArthur’s forces had fought a bloody campaign and captured Buna, reestablishing a toehold on the northern coast of New Guinea. Japanese attempts to reinforce Lae, to the northwest, met with disaster in the Bismarck Sea when American and Australian bombers and fighters repeatedly attacked a convoy en route from Rabaul to Lae, sinking eight transports and four destroyers. Meanwhile, Halsey’s SOPAC forces had finally secured Guadalcanal. The question was, Where next?
As Halsey prepared to push west through the Solomons beyond the line of 159° east longitude, dividing his South Pacific Area from MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific, the Joint Chiefs determined that Halsey be accountable to MacArthur as the supreme theater commander for broad strategic direction, even though he continued to answer to Nimitz in every other regard. This made for a potentially awkward two-hat situation for Halsey. Consequently, after forces in both areas weathered a furious aerial onslaught meant to check MacArthur at Buna and Halsey on Guadalcanal—it was organized by Admiral Yamamoto himself—Halsey decided that he must insist on an audience with MacArthur even if he had to camp outside his headquarters in Brisbane to get it. (Only two months before, MacArthur had rather unceremoniously gone out of his way to persuade Nimitz and Secretary of the Navy Knox not to visit him when on an inspection tour of the South Pacific after once again declining Nimitz’s invitation to meet in Nouméa.)10
Somewhat to Halsey’s surprise, when he wrote MacArthur about his plans, the general responded with a glowing invitation to arrive in Brisbane on April 15. MacArthur was rarely lukewarm. He was either hot or cold. Having made the decision to meet Halsey, MacArthur received him like some favored Roman consul returning from far-flung provinces. He was at the wharf in person as Halsey’s PB2Y taxied to a stop, and the general readily shook Halsey’s hand with undeniable MacArthur charm.
But as the group moved away from the wharf to the waiting cars, one innocuous comment almost ruined the mood. Brigadier General Julian Brown, who had been Halsey’s “enforcer” in dealing with the recalcitrant French on New Caledonia, was walking with Commander H. Douglass Moulton, Halsey’s longtime flag secretary. “Say, Doug,” Brown began with a gesture to Moulton. MacArthur, whose eternally devoted wife, Jean, even addressed him as “General,” stopped short, spun on his heel, and fixed an icy stare at Brown, who frantically gestured that he had been speaking to Moulton and not the general himself. MacArthur wheeled back around and continued to engage Halsey in conversation as he led the way to the cars.11
“Five minutes after I reported,” Halsey later recalled, “I felt as if we were lifelong friends. I have seldom seen a man who makes a quicker, stronger, more favorable impression…. The respect that I conceived for him that afternoon grew steadily during the war and… I can recall no flaw in our relationship.” Sure, Halsey admitted, they had their arguments, “but they always ended pleasantly.”12
At this first face-to-face meeting, MacArthur professed to remember Halsey’s efforts on the gridiron against West Point, while Halsey noted that their fathers had met while on their respective army and navy duties in the Philippines forty years before. And MacArthur may have been a lot like King in immediately sensing and respecting any officer who wasn’t afraid to stand his ground before him. Halsey was “blunt, outspoken, dynamic,” MacArthur in turn recalled, and “had already proven himself to be a battle commander of the highest order.” Halsey was “a strong advocate of unity of command in the Pacific,” which sat well with MacArthur, as did what the general called Halsey’s willingness “to close with the enemy and fight him to the death.” Later, undoubtedly because MacArthur never found so welcome an admirer in King or Nimitz, he would say of Halsey, “No name rates higher in the annals of our country’s naval history.”13
In most respects, then, the MacArthur-Halsey relationship quickly became a mutual admiration society of the highest order, and it led to a quick agreement to push the lines forward. Operating from New Guinea, MacArthur would seize the islands of Kiriwina and Woodlark, while Halsey, having already taken the small, unoccupied Russell Islands just west of Guadalcanal, would invade New Georgia Island in the western Solomons. The effect would be to keep the Japanese from exiting the Solomon Sea and put their key bases at Rabaul and Bougainville within range of land-based bombers and fighters.
By mid-May 1943, one of Nimitz’s routine communications with Halsey started with “Dear Bill, I enclose a clipping from this morning’s Honolulu Advertiser which you may find of interest. I note that ‘General MacArthur and Admiral Halsey are kindred souls.’ ” Even if Nimitz couldn’t resist the poke, he was delighted by the truce, no matter how it had been generated.14
“I have just received an enthusiastic letter from Bill Halsey,” Nimitz wrote Carpender, MacArthur’s naval commander, several days later, “and I am very gratified at the entente cordial that I am convinced exists between the South and Southwest Pacific people.” Then, just to be sure the MacArthur camp hadn’t gotten too removed from CINCPAC, Nimitz encouraged Carpender with a postscript: “As Admiral Halsey is my agent in all dealings with the Southwest Pacific Area, I am sending him a copy of this letter and I request that you send him a copy of your reply to me.”15
Halsey’s return to Nouméa from MacArthur’s headquarters was postponed a few days while he made a goodwill swing through Canberra, Melbourne, and Sydney. With Nimitz having gotten no closer than Nouméa and King farther away still, Halsey quickly became the face of the American naval upper echelon in Australia and an Aussie favorite, in part for his straight-talking manner. Such talk had gotten him in trouble at the end of 1942 when, in a bout of overexuberant cheerleading, he had boldly predicted the war would be over in a year. Much like General George Patton, Halsey, who played so well to the press, would become—with the encouragement of his staff—a little gun-shy of them.16
But this showing of the flag also meant that Halsey was absent from his headquarters when one of the most dramatic plans of the war was carried out. It began on the morning of April 14, when Commander Edwin T. Layton, CINCPAC’s chief intelligence officer, was ushered in to see Nimitz. The code-breaking operations that were so sensitive and secret had plotted in intricate detail the whereabouts and travel itinerary of Admiral Yamamoto. Nimitz read over Layton’s transcribed dispatch and then studied the map. April 18 in the South Pacific would be the key date and place. Yamamoto’s travels would bring him within three hundred miles of P-38 fighters just arrived at Henderson Field on Guadalcanal. Ironically, this date was the one-year anniversary of the Doolittle Raid.
“What do you say?” Nimitz asked Layton. “Do we try to get him?”
Layton was enthusiastic
. Of course we do. Yamamoto carried almost hero status with the Imperial Japanese Navy, which still may not have grasped his forebodings after Pearl Harbor. Losing Yamamoto would be a supreme blow to Japanese morale, not only in the military but also across the civilian population. “You know, Admiral Nimitz,” continued Layton laconically, “it would be just as if they shot you down. There isn’t anybody to replace you.”
Nimitz couldn’t help but smile. He was far too humble to believe that, but in Yamamoto’s case, Layton’s observation sealed his decision. “It’s down in Halsey’s bailiwick,” Nimitz replied. “If there’s a way, he’ll find it.”17
Halsey (or possibly his deputy) received Nimitz’s orders and passed them on to Rear Admiral Marc Mitscher, commander, Air, Solomons. Twin-engine army P-38 Lightnings equipped with long-range drop tanks were assigned the mission. But to preserve the secrecy of Layton’s code breakers, Nimitz attributed the source of Yamamoto’s itinerary to Australian coast watchers, and Mitscher ordered subsequent long-range patrols so that the key intercept flight would not stand out to the Japanese.
On that Sunday morning, the P-38s shot down two Japanese “Betty” bombers after a perfectly timed rendezvous over Bougainville. Admiral Yamamoto was among the casualties. After the chaos and adrenaline of several frantic minutes of aerial combat, there was no conclusive evidence as to which American pilot of the attacking Lightnings, Thomas G. Lanphier, Jr., or Rex T. Barber, had shot down the bomber carrying Yamamoto. Lanphier made the first boastful claims upon returning to Henderson Field, but circumstantial evidence gradually favored Barber. Then, too, Major John Mitchell, the mission leader, who had flown with the covering fighters, may well have deserved almost as much credit for planning and executing the intercept so perfectly. (It helped, of course, that Yamamoto’s punctuality was well known.)
But another issue arose: whether Yamamoto should have been targeted individually in the first place and from how high in the American chain of command the final order had come. Among the ambiguities in the record is whether Halsey had already departed Nouméa for his meeting with MacArthur when Nimitz’s orders arrived. If so, Halsey’s deputy, Vice Admiral Theodore S. Wilkinson, carried them out in his name. But Halsey, whose wartime comments against the Japanese transcended military enmity and bordered on overt racism, had no qualms whatsoever about targeting Yamamoto.
The Admirals Page 33