Despite being outgunned two to one in heavy ships, McMorris engaged and fought a fierce surface battle until the cruiser Salt Lake City went dead in the water. As a last-ditch effort, McMorris ordered his destroyers to lay smoke and launch a torpedo attack against the oncoming Japanese cruisers. Just then, in one of those quirks of war, Salt Lake City ran out of armor-piercing shells and started firing high explosives. Their white phosphor trails looked somewhat like bombs falling from the sky. The Japanese assumed they were under attack by bombers from American bases in the Aleutians and hurriedly broke off the engagement. The Battle of the Komandorski Islands broke the Japanese supply line to Attu and Kiska and cleared the way for their invasion.
Rear Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid, now North Pacific Area commander, promoted a plan with Nimitz to bypass more heavily defended Kiska and attack Attu first. With foul, foggy skies precluding any air support and wild seas rocking the transports, elements of the Seventh Infantry Division landed at three points on the island to an eerie silence. Twenty-six hundred Japanese troops had retreated into the hills, from which they soon unleashed a fury of fire. On May 29, the nineteenth day of what was supposed to be an easy occupation, eight hundred remaining Japanese stormed the American lines in a final suicide attack. When Kiska was invaded later in the summer, the Americans found that its garrison had been evacuated without detection amid the Arctic mists.36
Meanwhile, King and Nimitz discussed the lessons of Attu at their post-Trident meeting in San Francisco—most important, the concept of bypassing strongly defended points in what would come to be called “island-hopping”—and moved forward with their Central Pacific plans. While Halsey and MacArthur continued their drives in the Solomons and New Guinea, Nimitz would first strike the islands of Tarawa and Makin in the Gilbert Islands, seizing an airfield and a seaplane base, and then assault the key anchorages of Kwajalein and Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands, en route eventually to the Marianas.
What made this surge possible was the addition to the United States Navy during 1943 of seven Essex-class aircraft carriers and nine smaller Independence-class light aircraft carriers. Contrast these sixteen carriers newly commissioned in one year with the total of eight carriers that the American navy had floated on December 7, 1941, five of which were lost during 1942. This was exactly the outpouring of America’s industrial might that Admiral Yamamoto had feared if Japan did not win the war in the first year after Pearl Harbor. And many more carriers were on the ways readying to be launched and commissioned during 1944.
The Essex-class carriers (CVs) were about 872 feet long, displaced a loaded weight of about 36,000 tons, had a top speed of 33 knots, and carried 90 to 100 planes. The Independence-class light carriers (CVLs) were about 619 feet long, displaced a loaded weight of about 16,000 tons, had a top speed of 32 knots, and carried 30 to 40 planes. The CVLs were laid down on Cleveland-class cruiser hulls and thus had an easily recognizable thin bow protruding from the forward end of their flight decks. Added to these vessels were another sixteen escort, or “jeep,” carriers (CVEs) launched in 1943. They ranged from 492 to 553 feet in length, had top speeds of about 17 knots, and carried a complement of 25 to 30 planes.
While Admiral Yamamoto had feared this onslaught of production, Admiral King had waited, perhaps not too patiently, to receive it. As these carriers became available through 1943, he was particularly anxious to move forward with Central Pacific operations before the Combined Chiefs of Staff met again and backtracked on the Trident agreements.
To that end, King approved Nimitz’s recommendations to promote Raymond Spruance to vice admiral and give him command of the Central Pacific Force, soon to be called the Fifth Fleet, and to move Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner north from Halsey’s South Pacific Area to command its amphibious component. Within weeks, the marines successfully lobbied King for a fifth division in the Pacific, and Nimitz appointed Major General Holland M. Smith to command all the marines in Turner’s force. With “Terrible” Turner and “Howlin’ Mad” Smith at Spruance’s side, King, who once had conceded that Spruance was the only naval officer smarter than King himself, could be assured of plenty of leadership.37
Hardly had King set these wheels in motion with Nimitz when it was time for another Allied conference. This one, code-named Quadrant, took place in Quebec, as Washington was sweltering in the dog days of August 1943. More than a few of the participants thought that such a gathering so soon after Trident was unnecessary, but both sides were determined to solidify the agreements just made there.
Sicily was about to fall to the Allies on August 17, after a thirty-nine-day campaign, although Generals George Patton and Bernard Montgomery had taken American-British rivalries around the conference table to the extreme by racing each other to Messina via circular routes around the island. Landings on the boot of Italy would come next. But the Americans were focused on the Overlord buildup, and Roosevelt was determined to go no farther up the Italian peninsula than Rome, and then only to acquire air bases from which to bomb Germany.
Churchill, however, continued to intersperse place names such as Greece, Rhodes, and the Aegean into his lengthy discourses. While sparked in part by Churchill’s great sense of history—sometimes misplaced, as the World War I campaign at Gallipoli had proved—this continuing discussion of operations in the eastern Mediterranean again threatened to take the Allied focus farther and farther afield despite agreements to the contrary at Trident. To the most skeptical Americans, Churchill’s words simply reinforced British priorities for a postwar empire in the Middle East and not the direct annihilation of Germany. Finally, it wasn’t volcanic Ernie King but calm, genteel George Marshall who had enough.
When Churchill continued to press Roosevelt a few weeks later for an invasion of Rhodes, in the Aegean, claiming that a short-term diversion of landing craft from the Overlord buildup would not be detrimental, Marshall resorted to rare profanity to make his point. He told Churchill, “God forbid, if I should try to dictate, but not one American soldier is going to die on [that] goddamned beach.” Later, Marshall recalled, “I doubt if I did anything better in the war than to keep [Churchill] on the main point. I was furious when he tried to push us further into the Mediterranean.”38
So the Americans held the line in the Mediterranean, and the British reluctantly restated their commitment to a firm Overlord date. But who was to hold supreme command of this venture was still in doubt. Shortly after Trident, Churchill, acting quite on his own, made the first of three assertions to Brooke that he was to command Overlord. Whether these were, in fact, merely Churchill’s “wishes,” Brooke took them as a certainty and clearly reveled in the opportunity.
But by the time of the Quadrant Conference in Quebec, it was clear that Churchill had spoken without the consent of his transatlantic partner. With it becoming increasingly clear that American troops would outnumber the British in any cross-Channel invasion, Roosevelt was not about to have them under any but an American supreme commander. Odds favored Marshall at that point, but whoever it was, he would be an American. When Churchill confronted Brooke with the news just before he was to chair a meeting of the Combined Chiefs at Quebec, he was devastated, all the more so because Churchill “offered no sympathy, no regrets at having had to change his mind, and dealt with the matter as if it were one of minor importance!”39
If nothing else, the Quadrant Conference was also notable for one oft-told anecdote, the details of which seem to vary with the telling. The acrimony among the Combined Chiefs of Staff was certainly no secret. Thus, when gunshots were heard from inside the meeting room one afternoon, a staff member waiting outside exclaimed, “Good heavens, now they’ve started shooting each other!”
But the impetus for the shots proved to be even stranger than the most heated of arguments. Lord Louis Mountbatten, soon to be supreme Allied commander of the Southeast Asia Theater, was an inveterate tinkerer. During a break in one session of the Combined Chiefs, Mountbatten asked to demonstrate the qualities of a se
cret new product, a mixture of ice and wood pulp called Pykrete, after its inventor, the British Geoffrey Pyke. Mountbatten envisioned using the material—buoyant and reputedly nearly indestructible—to build a gigantic, self-propelled, floating airfield, the ultimate aircraft carrier, from which fighters could cover amphibious landings off the coast of France.
“Just look,” raved Mountbatten, as he brandished a loaded revolver and proceeded to fire first into a block of ice—it shattered—and then into the pykrete. The harder pykrete failed to absorb the bullet, which went ricocheting around the room, nicking the leg of King’s trousers—according to King—with its last gasp. Pykrete never made it into production, and the chiefs of staff all escaped unharmed.40
Despite Churchill’s propensity for oratory, it was Roosevelt who had the last word. After the final meeting on August 24, Roosevelt and Churchill met with reporters to discuss the results of the conference. As Churchill’s remarks escalated into a full-blown speech, FDR leaned over to Leahy and whispered, “He always orates, doesn’t he, Bill?”41
Time put Soviet marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky on its July 5, 1943, cover with the caption “Summer for bleeding, winter for victory.” What this meant was that Germany’s summer offensive, a steamroller of almost two hundred divisions, would fail and that Soviet troops would counterattack from the Black Sea to Leningrad. Victory was far from certain, but winter would once again be a Russian ally.
Joseph Stalin finally felt he could afford to leave his country to meet his fellow Allied leaders, provided he did not have to go very far. Thus, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to meet him in the Iranian capital of Teheran late in November after reviewing positions between themselves in Cairo en route.
Leahy left the White House at about 9:30 p.m. on November 11 with Roosevelt and his inner circle of Harry Hopkins, naval aide Rear Admiral Wilson Brown, Major General Edwin “Pa” Watson, and presidential physician Rear Admiral Ross McIntire. They motored to Quantico, Virginia; boarded the presidential yacht, Potomac; and sailed down the Potomac River to Chesapeake Bay. There, the following morning, the sight of America’s newest battleship, Iowa (BB-61), greeted them. Commissioned only the previous February, Iowa was more than twice as long and fast and three times as heavy as the Oregon, the ship that had carried Leahy around the Horn forty-five years before.
Marshall, King, and Arnold, along with their respective staffs, were already on board, and the battleship steamed to Hampton Roads to top off its fuel. Unlike Bill Halsey, Roosevelt and Leahy were not superstitious of the number thirteen, but many sailors, including Roosevelt, considered it unlucky to put to sea on a Friday. Consequently, the Iowa loitered in Hampton Roads for a few hours and finally got under way at 12:01 a.m. in the early morning of Saturday, November 13. In the company of three sleek destroyers, the battleship passed through the capes of the Chesapeake and raced eastward.42
U-boats were a concern, although King was well along in winning the Battle of the Atlantic. Still, the Iowa took precautions to steam at 25 knots and zigzag. On the second day out, Roosevelt and Leahy were sitting on deck just forward of the president’s quarters, watching a demonstration of antiaircraft fire, when the loudspeaker blared, “This is not a drill—repeat—this is not a drill.” Both men felt the big ship heel to port and surge forward as its rudder was put over and flank speed rung up. Batteries unleashed a furious fusillade at cries of “Torpedo in the water!” and there followed a horrendous explosion astern of the ship.
Admiral King was never far from the bridge of any ship he was on, and he stuck his head inside, close to Iowa’s commanding officer, Captain John McCrea, who had once been FDR’s naval aide. Quite uncharacteristically he snarled quietly through clenched teeth, “Captain McCrea, what is this interlude?”
Inexplicably, one of the accompanying destroyers, W. D. Porter, had taken the occasion to track the Iowa as a practice target for a torpedo attack. That was bad enough, but a torpedo had accidentally fired and gone streaking toward the presidential ship. McCrea’s quick actions had prevented a catastrophe, and the warhead had been destroyed by gunfire. One may well imagine King’s subsequent explosion directed at the captain of the Porter, but FDR reportedly told King to forget the entire incident in order to avoid publicity about the president’s travels.43
That evening, King joined McCrea in the captain’s sea cabin and launched into one of his rambling reviews of various naval personnel from Mahan to the present. When he had worked his way to McCrea, King told him that he regarded McCrea as a good officer, but that he had one outstanding weakness. Naturally, McCrea politely inquired what that might be.
“Your big weakness, McCrea,” said King, “is that you are not a son of a bitch. And a good naval officer has to be a son of a bitch.”
“Admiral,” McCrea replied, “you might be right, but you are a good naval officer and I have never heard anyone refer to you as a son of a bitch.”
That ended the conversation as King gave McCrea a scowl and stomped out of his cabin, knowing full well that he was lying. Truth be told, of course, King was well aware of his own reputation—and seemingly pleased about it—and it was McCrea who had asked King about referring to himself as a son of a bitch in the corridor of the Navy Department Building just after Pearl Harbor.44
The remainder of the Atlantic crossing went without incident. Disembarking from the Iowa at Mers el-Kebir, outside Oran, Algeria, the presidential party was met by Dwight Eisenhower and then flown east to Allied headquarters at Tunis. While Leahy was necessarily obliged to accompany FDR for the evening, Eisenhower invited both Marshall and King to spend the night at his “little cottage” in nearby Carthage, a respite away from the hurry-scurry of the presidential party that truly seemed to please both men. It was inevitable, however, that the conversation would turn to command of Overlord, now firmly targeted for the late spring of 1944. Characteristically, it was King who brought up the matter and gave its history, as he knew it, including the story of Churchill’s offer to Brooke and his subsequent reversal.
King opined to Marshall and Eisenhower that FDR had tentatively decided to give the Overlord command to Marshall, despite King’s strenuous objections. Marshall, King said, simply couldn’t be spared from the work of the American Joint Chiefs of Staff and particularly from that of the Combined Chiefs of Staff. King went on to say that the only mitigating circumstance was the fact that Eisenhower was apparently slated to take Marshall’s chief of staff position. Clearly, King had become an Eisenhower advocate—in part because Ike had shown the sort of backbone King respected when standing up to him in their early encounters. Still, King said that he firmly “believed it was a mistake to shift the key members of a winning team.”
Marshall listened to King’s discourse in embarrassed silence. He already knew how King felt, and King was equally certain that “Marshall always wanted that command.” But the basic trouble in King’s mind was “that Eisenhower had had command in the field and Marshall never had.”
King’s views certainly should not be taken as being anti-Marshall. King had, in fact, made a similar determination as to the appropriateness of his own field command. Throughout 1943, Secretary of the Navy Knox repeatedly urged King to take personal command of the Pacific Fleet and win some glorious naval triumph. King thought that was “the craziest idea,” for exactly the same reason he now opposed the switch in roles between Marshall and Eisenhower. “Don’t you understand,” King told Knox, “you can’t shift the fellow who is working up that command? To try to send me over there to take command in the field is absolutely wrong in every way.”45
The next morning, Roosevelt spoke generally about the Overlord command with Eisenhower, who on the basis of King’s remarks the previous evening thought he should be packing his bags for Washington. FDR was as cagey as ever in not tipping his hand, but Ike suddenly realized that the Overlord position was indeed “a point of intense official and public interest back home.” Roosevelt noted, however, that he “dreaded the thought of losing M
arshall from Washington,” before the historian in him added, “You and I know the name of the Chief of Staff in the Civil War, but few Americans outside the profession do.”46
On then to Cairo, where the Americans and British were supposed to perfect a united front with which to greet Stalin in Teheran. Instead, the Cairo Conference proved to be more unsettling than most. King and Brooke got into a terrible row over the proverbial issue of landing craft—this time, whether they should be diverted to the usual British interests in the Aegean or to the Bay of Bengal, where King was championing an invasion of the Andaman Islands as a step toward retaking Rangoon. Incredibly, Churchill was still talking about Rhodes, despite the fact that in Leahy’s words, “the American Chiefs had rejected this idea completely weeks before, but the Prime Minister was not easily discouraged.”47
Added to the mix was the presence in Cairo of Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek. China, like the Soviet Union, was often the forgotten ally in the war. The British seemed less interested in China, but Roosevelt and the American Joint Chiefs recognized that chaotic, disorganized, and barely manageable though it was, China had several million men under arms and was drawing considerable resources away from Japan just as the Soviet Union was draining German resources. And at this point in the war, there was significant support among Leahy, King, and Nimitz for the idea that Japan would ultimately be attacked from land bases in China.
With little resolved at Cairo, the American delegation flew east to Teheran on the morning of November 27, after waiting three hours for a clingy early fog to dissipate. Roosevelt’s party had intended to stay at the American Legation in downtown Teheran, but Stalin’s delegation reported rumors of an assassination attempt on the president and invited his party to stay at the Soviet compound two miles away instead. Dubious about eavesdropping, Roosevelt nevertheless agreed, and while a formal motorcade distracted attention, Roosevelt, Hopkins, Leahy, and a lone Secret Service driver raced along back roads and arrived at the Soviet compound before the official caravan. The Russian guards were so strict that they stopped everybody to examine their passes. The Americans were advised to stop immediately if challenged and only King seems to have been upset by the less-than-normal questioning of just who he might be.
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