The Admirals

by Walter R. Borneman

  Nimitz approached the matter more cerebrally and concluded that Yamamoto was an acceptable strategic target. But Nimitz also clearly recognized that this was more than a routine attack and passed the question up the chain of command even as he issued orders to Halsey’s command. King does not appear to have been personally involved in this referral, but some accounts suggest that Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox was. Knox was concerned about the implications of targeting an individual and reportedly passed the problem to the White House.

  Roosevelt had left Washington by train on April 13 for a tour of military bases en route to Monterrey, Mexico, to boost Mexican-American relations. The White House Map Room reportedly sent dispatches about the proposed intercept to the train, but the record is silent on any response from Roosevelt or Leahy in the president’s behalf. When the confirming order went back to Nimitz, it invoked the authority of the president but was signed by Frank Knox.

  Considering Leahy’s generally conservative leanings and his reported comments before the war about doing away with German sympathizers who might cause trouble in Puerto Rico, it is unlikely that Leahy had any moral questions about the Yamamoto mission. If FDR did, he wanted to keep them private and distance himself from what he hoped would remain a military, rather than a political, decision.18

  With sweeping characterizations, even Douglas MacArthur managed to convey a sense in his memoirs that somehow he had been involved in the Yamamoto mission and was responsible for its results. But in truth, many of MacArthur’s moves during 1943 were made with an eye toward a far greater mission. There would be a presidential election in 1944, and a bevy of conservatives were whistling “Hail to the Chief” in the general’s ear—much to the frustration of Leahy, Marshall, and the president himself.

  Leahy was far more conservative than Roosevelt, and as early as FDR’s second election, in 1936, Leahy had echoed the hope of many of the president’s friends that he “incline his efforts more toward conservatism.”19 That hadn’t happened, and neither did Leahy’s role as FDR’s chief of staff stop him from continuing his relationships within Washington’s conservative circles. As whispers of MacArthur’s presidential desirability increased, it made for some interesting evenings for the admiral.

  Leahy claimed that he followed “a fixed policy of not becoming involved in any domestic partisan politics,” but that did not keep him from events such as an April 1943 dinner with Democratic senator Peter Gerry of Rhode Island, Democratic senator Harry F. Byrd, Sr., of Virginia, and former Republican senator Frederick Hale of Maine. All three were, in Leahy’s words, “leaders in a growing opposition in Congress to the Administration of President Roosevelt,” and Byrd’s name was being floated as a running mate for General MacArthur.

  The conversation that evening proved a far-ranging discussion of the need to change domestic policies—Byrd in particular was a harsh critic of the New Deal—but the senators also asked Leahy many questions about the war and foreign relations. Leahy called them “friends of mine of long standing” and for that reason assumed they “probably felt no hesitation in expressing their thoughts in my presence.” But it must have put Leahy on a very fine line. One minute he was chatting with friends of “long standing” about Roosevelt’s political shortcomings, and the next he was reporting to the president, sometimes about those very conversations. The fact that Leahy could do this—and that he did not shy away from acknowledging that he had done both—is indicative of his strong sense of fidelity to his superior above all else. It was a Leahy trait Roosevelt recognized early on and came to rely on more and more.

  “When possible,” Leahy recalled, “I would tell Roosevelt about these and similar conversations I heard from time to time. If there was opportunity, I would tell the President in advance of my acceptance of invitations of this nature to be sure that he had no objection—not from the political angle—but because the conversation might turn to military matters. The President never objected, as he knew I wasn’t going to divulge any secrets.”20 That subtle comment may well have been the reason Leahy grew increasingly close to the fulcrum of presidential power while at the same time staying largely out of the public spotlight.

  It was about this time that Bill Halsey acquired what was apparently a new nickname. At Annapolis, he had been “Willie” or “Pudge,” names he had gladly left behind. But now he began to be called “Bull” by an increasing number of newspaper correspondents.

  The first time this occurred is uncertain, and even Halsey’s principal biographer does not offer an opinion. Among the earliest occurrences may have been in the Tucson Daily Citizen on November 25, 1942, in an article written as Halsey was turning around American fortunes on Guadalcanal. “This Is ‘Bull’ Halsey, Folks,” read the headline on an unsigned piece, likely picked up from the Associated Press. J. Norman Lodge, a senior AP correspondent attached to Halsey’s headquarters in Nouméa, was the probable author. Leading with Halsey’s mantra of “Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs” and singing Halsey’s praises, the article concluded with, “Glad to ’ve met you, Admiral ‘Bull’ Halsey. Be seeing you again, we’ll betcha.”21

  Two weeks later, Robert Trumbull, the New York Times correspondent who had reported Halsey’s return to Pearl Harbor the previous September as “Fighting Bill,” wrote a piece attributing the “Bull” nickname to the football field at Annapolis forty-some years before. Trumbull claimed, “His team mates called him ‘Bull’ Halsey, and to them and others who can call an admiral by a nickname and get away with it he is still ‘Bull’ Halsey.”22 But if this was indeed true, it seems strange that there are no letters in Halsey’s papers in which his Annapolis classmates address him as “Bull,” similar to those collegial missives to “Rey” King or “Betty” Stark.

  As mentions of “Bull” Halsey increased, Rear Admiral C. W. Crosse, a 1907 Annapolis graduate who overlapped one year with Halsey, wrote him a letter with the salutation “Dear ‘Bull’ (Where the hell did the papers get that name for you?).” Writing back to “Dear Charlie,” who was the source of his private liquor ration, Halsey replied, “I do not know where the name ‘Bull’ came from. It was invented by the newspapers mayhaps. They decided I talked too much and put in part of the colloquialism.”23

  So, increasingly he became “Bull” Halsey, but his hard and determined streak was definitely pointed at the Japanese, and when it came to promoting interservice cooperation—long before his initially wary visit to MacArthur—Halsey got equally high marks. Simple as it seems, one of his chief innovations was to decree that no ties would be worn with khaki uniforms in the South Pacific. This eliminated any easy distinction among army, navy, and marine personnel, the latter two of which had been wearing ties, and put the term “unity of command” into rank-and-file practice.

  Fastidious though he usually was in his personal appearance, Halsey was also not above playing to reporters by giving interviews shirtless, under a palm tree, with a knife strapped to his belt. Then there was the hat. Senior military commanders like MacArthur seemed to take their own personal style of headgear as a privilege of rank, and Halsey adopted a shabby cap more in line with a retired railroader than a commanding admiral. It was “easy to wash, cheap to buy, and not worth a damn as a hat,” he readily admitted to a fellow Annapolis grad, who was now president of the Monsanto Chemical Company, who had criticized it. But “it accomplishes one of my chief aims out here, and that is to make it very difficult to distinguish between the officers of the Army, Navy, and Marines.” There was no time, Halsey told him, “for anything but team play and no service rivalry.”24

  “Halsey’s visit was most welcome and did a world of good,” Arthur Carpender, MacArthur’s naval commander, acknowledged to Nimitz after Halsey’s Australia visit. “The good effect of his personality and sound common sense can hardly be overestimated.”25

  Even George Marshall was impressed, which wasn’t an easy accomplishment. “Halsey seemed to be the easiest [naval commander] to do business with,” Marshall recall
ed. “He was always trying to smooth out things instead of arousing things…. In the single practice of taking the tie off the shirt he made a move to broaden general unanimity.”26

  But as 1943 went forward with its rush of Allied strategy sessions, unanimity was frequently in short supply. In May, the Americans hosted the Third Washington Conference, code-named “Trident,” for their British counterparts. On May 12, the day the meetings began, 230,000 German troops surrendered in Tunisia, effectively bringing the North African campaign to a successful conclusion. That was the good news. The Americans and British had demonstrated that they could conduct a joint operation in a remote location and press it home to victory. But around the conference table, the air remained clouded by an atmosphere of mutual suspicion over strategic goals.

  Marshall and his fellow American chiefs had become skeptical about the British commitment to invade Europe directly at any time. Chief of the Imperial General Staff Sir Alan Brooke, and his British cohorts begrudged King every PT boat, landing craft, and soldier, sailor, airman, or marine sent to the Pacific. Brooke blamed Pacific operations—a “diversion” in his mind—not only for scuttling any cross-Channel invasion, but also for threatening ongoing Mediterranean operations, including the planned invasions of Sicily and Italy. Brooke further dashed American hopes for a quick victory in Europe by declaring, “No major operations would be possible until 1945 or 1946, since… in previous wars there had always been some 80 French divisions available on our side.”27

  For his part, King was still suspicious that Great Britain and its commonwealth might drop out of the war against Japan once Germany was defeated. Others, including General Joseph Stilwell, argued the other side of that coin: if Great Britain aggressively pursued the Pacific war, it was doing so only to reestablish Singapore and its colonies in the Far East. This prospect had its origins in Churchill’s own famous statement that he did not intend to be the prime minister who presided over the dismantlement of the British Empire. (Churchill might well have delivered just such a self-inflicted blow himself when he insisted that Brooke, the British chiefs of staff, and a vast cadre of their planners and theater commanders all sail together for Trident aboard the Queen Mary. One lucky German U-boat might have altered the course of the war.)28

  Leahy, too, was suspicious of British designs to push eastward through the Mediterranean. Churchill expounded at length on the merits of taking Italy out of the war and strengthening ties to Turkey. But while Churchill “made no mention of any British desire to control the Mediterranean regardless of how the war may end,” Leahy counted himself among those who believed that British access to India via Suez and the eastern Mediterranean was “a cardinal principle of British national policy of long standing.”29 Churchill, meanwhile, appeared in no great rush to set a date for a cross-Channel invasion.

  Brooke bemoaned the “hours of argument and hard work trying to convince [the Americans] that Germany must be defeated first,” but in reality, American recalcitrance was directed not against a Germany First plan, but against Great Britain’s rather circuitous route—North Africa, Sicily, and Italy—to achieve it. King, in particular, thought very little of the strategic value of the British plan to take Italy out of the war. Italy was clearly the weakest member of the Axis and a drain on Germany and Japan that King did not want to assume should it be conquered. As for attacking Germany from there, “Hannibal and Napoleon crossed the Alps,” King remarked sarcastically, “but times are different now.”30

  Whenever the British procrastinated on setting a firm date for a cross-Channel invasion, King was not above forcefully reminding them of the “dangers of tying down forces and equipment to await eventualities.” In other words, this was King’s less-than-subtle threat that if there was to be no rapid deployment of resources in the European Theater, King would divert them to the Pacific.31

  Having missed the Casablanca Conference with bronchitis, Leahy assumed the chairman’s role of the Combined Chiefs of Staff at a summit conference for the first time at Trident. He was quite comfortable in this role and evidenced a moderate temperament and reasoned voice that went about building consensus in the most disarming of ways. “Well George,” he would say to Marshall after the army chief of staff had promoted a plan of which Leahy was skeptical, “I’m just a simple old sailor. Would you please back up and start from the beginning and make it simple, just tell me step one, two, and three, and so on.”

  By the time Marshall or anyone else had made such a careful recitation, the proponent frequently saw flaws in his own plan, which was exactly the result Leahy intended in the first place. This didn’t always work, of course, and it was King who sometimes felt able to call his fellow sailor’s bluff. Once, during a discussion of Japanese operations, Leahy questioned King about his uncharacteristic caution. “When I was a boy,” said Leahy, “I was brought up with the idea that the U.S. Navy was invincible.”

  “Admiral,” responded King, “when you were a boy, who would have believed that the Japanese would have taken over the Philippines and Southeast Asia?”32

  But such easy banter did not always work with their British allies. The root of the problem, according to Brooke, “really arises out of King’s desire to find every loophole he possibly can to divert troops to the Pacific!”33

  When discussions, particularly between Brooke and King, remained tense after the first few days of Trident, Marshall loaded up the Combined Chiefs after a Saturday morning session—save Hap Arnold who was in Walter Reed Hospital recovering from a heart attack—and whisked them off to Williamsburg, Virginia, for what might be called a getaway weekend. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., put his recently completed Williamsburg Inn at their disposal, and Rockefeller even dispatched his personal butler from New York to attend to the details.

  Scrumptious food, fine wine and liquor, bird-watching (Brooke was a devoted birder), swimming, and even croquet gave one and all a chance to cultivate a more personal relationship with their counterparts. Outdoor activities and sipping brandy by a roaring fire lent a more human side to the stern uniforms who routinely gathered around the conference table, particularly when, in one of the most oft-recounted episodes of the weekend, Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal dove into the swimming pool in a borrowed pair of oversize trunks and came up without them. Roosevelt, meanwhile, took Churchill to Shangri-La (later Camp David).34

  When the conference resumed in Washington, the differences were still there, but Marshall’s low-key way of instilling a sense of camaraderie had taken some of the edge off the discussions. By the time the Trident Conference ended a week later, Roosevelt, Churchill, and their chiefs had agreed to a May 1, 1944, date for a cross-Channel invasion of Europe, soon to be code-named Overlord.

  In exchange for the British concession of a firm invasion date, the Americans agreed to pursue British plans in the Mediterranean, provided definite target dates were met for the buildup of men and materiel in Great Britain in anticipation of Overlord. Leahy, Marshall, and King were all adamant on this point as a way of ensuring that Churchill’s lust for the eastern Mediterranean would not irrevocably suck American resources away from a direct thrust against Germany. And, once again, it should be remembered that while Joseph Stalin still had not made an appearance at one of these Allied conferences, the burdens his country was suffering on Germany’s Eastern Front were continuing to deplete Germany’s overall war-making capacity.

  Meanwhile, King had made a sweeping presentation on the importance of the Mariana Islands to the entire Pacific operation. His very mention of the name sent planners scurrying to their maps, and King admitted that it had taken him “three months to educate Marshall” about their importance.

  But sitting in the Central Pacific, the Marianas were indeed the hub of a wheel of considerable strategic influence. A supply line ran eastward to Pearl Harbor. To the south, the Caroline Islands and the major Japanese naval base at Truk could be isolated. Westward the path led to the Philippines, Formosa (now Taiwan), or Okinawa via whic
hever route MacArthur and the Joint Chiefs might choose in order to sever Japan’s supply lines from the East Indies. And to the north, beyond the tiny atoll of Iwo Jima, lay Japan itself. Reassured of Germany First and knowing that whatever happened in the Pacific, the Americans would bear the brunt of it, even Brooke admitted, “We dealt with the Pacific and accepted what was put forward.”35 So as Trident adjourned, King hurried west to San Francisco to confer with Nimitz and implement the drive through the Central Pacific.

  Nimitz’s attention during the spring of 1943 had been focused on the occupied islands of Attu and Kiska in the Aleutians. Japanese forces on American territory posed a threat to morale, but there was also a strategic element involved. Despite bitter weather that made operations on both sides problematic, there was always the risk that the Japanese would attack farther eastward along the chain and even threaten the air routes that were delivering desperately needed warplanes to the Soviet Union across the Bering Strait. King and Nimitz wanted this far-flung right flank of their Central Pacific drive secure, and at this point in the war, there was also some thought that a renewed American presence only two thousand miles from Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido might keep Japan guessing about the Allies’ next move.

  Throughout February and March, two veteran cruisers and four destroyers under Rear Admiral Charles H. McMorris, recently CINCPAC planning officer and about to become chief of staff of the Pacific Fleet, effectively blockaded Attu and Kiska against most re-supply efforts. But early on the morning of March 26, McMorris’s ships tangled with a Kiska-bound convoy, guarded by four heavy cruisers and four destroyers of Japan’s Northern Force, near the Komandorski Islands.