Having failed to resolve their continuing Overlord versus Mediterranean differences, the Americans and British were put in the unusual position of having Stalin essentially make the decision for them. It had to be Overlord, Stalin said. He had been urging a second front in Europe for two years, and he simply did not believe that Italy or any other Mediterranean avenue provided the necessary direct thrust against Germany. Churchill spun a tale of various ventures, including his goal of bringing Turkey into the war on the side of the Allies, but Stalin stood firm, saying that the only proof of an Allied commitment to the Soviet Union would be the long-delayed cross-Channel invasion.
But even Roosevelt was put slightly on the defensive in this regard when Stalin asked him who was to be the supreme commander of that effort. Admitting that he hadn’t decided yet wasn’t good enough. Stalin insisted that he would not consider Overlord “actually under way” until such an appointment was made. Nonetheless, the key result of the Teheran Conference was a “firm” decision—this time the British really meant it—that Overlord and a coordinated invasion of southern France would take place in the late spring of 1944.48
Returning from Teheran, the British and American parties stopped once again in Cairo, this time for a postmortem. Somewhere along the line, Roosevelt made his decision on an Overlord commander, evidently without much counsel. Flying from Cairo back to Tunis on December 7, Roosevelt told Leahy that it would be Eisenhower. “His selection was something of a surprise,” Leahy admitted, noting that the Joint Chiefs had never recommended Eisenhower or anyone else and that they had just assumed it would be Marshall.49
Upon landing in Tunis, the president had barely been lifted into his automobile when he turned to Eisenhower and remarked conversationally, “Well, Ike, you are going to command Overlord.” Roosevelt admitted that he had considered giving the command to Marshall but had decided—with or without Ernie King’s input—that Marshall simply could not be spared from Washington. Marshall himself, good soldier that he always was, was said by the president to be in “full concurrence” with the decision. A few days later, typical of his usual graciousness, Marshall sent Eisenhower the original of FDR’s scrawled order: “The immediate appointment of General Eisenhower to command of Overlord operation has been decided upon.”50
Thus, the crescendo of 1943 swelled into what was to be the climactic year of 1944.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Take Care, My Boy
The only thing more difficult than ordering men into harm’s way is sending one’s own son into battle. It happened throughout World War II, as men in command found themselves making decisions that affected a younger generation that included their own offspring. These sons were grown men of fighting age to be sure, but at some point each of their steely fathers couldn’t help but mutter a silent prayer: “Take care, my boy.”
Chester Nimitz expressed those concerns in a 1942 Mother’s Day message. He was on the cover of Time magazine, in a dress uniform, binoculars draped around his neck, and his kind yet determined blue eyes blazing with overstated brilliance. “Who wants to know where the Fleet is?” the caption asked. But amid a report on the Battle of the Coral Sea were excerpts from a radio address Nimitz delivered to “mothers of America.”
In a steady, reassuring voice, Nimitz told his own wife, Catherine, and millions of other mothers across the country, “This Mother’s Day finds your sons fighting for freedom on worldwide battlefields. There will be long periods of silence when your boys will be active at their stations in far places from which no word can come.” And unfortunately, he went on, “there will be losses along the road to victory. If it is God’s will that your son or mine be called to make the supreme sacrifice, I know that we will face this stern reality as bravely as they do themselves.”1
Nimitz’s own son, Chester W. Nimitz, Jr., was in submarines. Father and son had been very close while young Chet was growing up, but once Chet entered Annapolis and donned the navy uniform, he couldn’t help but view the veteran officer who stood before him with just a bit of reserve—even if it was his own father.
Chet graduated from Annapolis in 1934 and initially went to sea on the cruiser Indianapolis before following in his father’s footsteps to submarines. It was no small coincidence that many senior naval commanders had sons in the submarine service. Just as it was in Admiral Nimitz’s junior days, submarine duty was still an early route to a command of one’s own. And when a son who had already continued the family tradition by attending Annapolis was determined to make his old man proud, no one could ever say that he had shirked danger or given less than his best if his duty was in submarines.
At the outbreak of the war, young Nimitz was the third officer on the Sturgeon operating out of the Philippines. Within months, he was the boat’s executive officer and then the exec of the Bluefish. After a second patrol aboard Bluefish, Chet got his own command. “Boy oh boy!” the new lieutenant commander of the Haddo wrote his admiral father. “I get the delicious trembles when I think of my first patrol as C.O.” But Chet’s first sortie with Haddo in March 1944 proved a frustrating experience when a load of torpedoes with supposedly improved magnetic exploders went off prematurely or not at all.2
Still, young Chet’s admiration for his father was reflected in his every move, and the letters he posted home from his submarine commands throughout the Pacific were enough to make any father proud, and probably shed a private tear or two. This was especially true on those nights when the father knew so well what the son was facing one hundred, two hundred, or three hundred feet below the surface, listening to the metallic click that signaled another round of depth charges rolling off the fantail of some Japanese destroyer.
Haddo and young Nimitz had better luck on a subsequent patrol off Mindoro, in the South China Sea, when, working with four other subs, they attacked a large convoy. The initial torpedoes brought a furious onslaught of depth charges from the enemy escorts that were so loud and continuous that Nimitz had to shout to be heard in the Haddo’s conning tower. But then the convoy turned and presented Nimitz with perfect silhouettes. He fired six bow torpedoes at two large transports and sank both, his first confirmed kills. Later on that patrol, Nimitz fired four torpedoes down the throat at an onrushing destroyer. All missed, but he sank another destroyer instead.
By the time Haddo finished that patrol, Nimitz had sunk five ships totaling almost fifteen thousand tons, putting Haddo’s cruise on the list of the top twenty-five war patrols by number of ships sunk and ranking its skipper 77th on the list of 465 World War II sub commanders by ships and tonnage sunk. But there was a bitter downside. Nimitz and his crew were safe, but one of the other boats, the Harder, along with its seemingly indestructible captain, Sam Dealey, had been lost. Nimitz was the one who reluctantly had to send the message, “I must have to think he is gone.”3
And there were others lost. Manning Kimmel, 1935 graduate of Annapolis and son of Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, served as a junior officer on the submarine Drum even as his father was under scrutiny for the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Eleven days afterward, in a letter that would warm any father’s heart, Manning wrote, “There is so little to say at a time like this—but… my complete confidence and belief in you has not been shaken a bit and I think you are the grandest Dad in the world.”4
By April 1942, the Drum, under the command of Robert H. Rice, a son-in-law of King’s chief of staff, Russell Willson, was in action in the Pacific and sank the nine-thousand-ton seaplane tender Mizuho, the largest Japanese combat vessel sunk by submarines up to that time. Manning Kimmel went on to serve as executive officer on the Drum and then on the Raton before being given command of the Robalo in the spring of 1944.
Sent into the South China Sea from the sub base at Fremantle, Australia, Kimmel conducted a “wildly aggressive patrol,” firing twenty torpedoes in four attacks but sinking only one tanker, which was not confirmed by postwar records. Robalo was subsequently caught on the surface by Japanese bombers, which
damaged both periscopes, sprang the conning tower hatch, and knocked out the boat’s radar. Despite this, Kimmel kept the Robalo on station until the end of its patrol. It was a brave effort, but Kimmel’s squadron commander thought it a little foolhardy as well. “Anybody else would have come home long before,” grumbled Heber H. “Tex” McLean. “I worried that Kimmel was a little too anxious to put the name of Kimmel high in Navy annals.”5
Kimmel and Robalo were next dispatched to the South China Sea via Balabac Strait, a narrow passage between Borneo and the Philippines that was heavily mined by the Japanese. Returning through the strait after its patrol, Robalo apparently hit a mine and sank. Early reports had all hands going down with the boat, but the explosion may have thrown as many as six or seven men, including Kimmel, from the bridge into the water. Other reports had these survivors picked up and imprisoned as POWs. Rumors of their capture trickled out, but any surviving Robalo crew members were apparently killed by the Japanese in grisly fashion in retaliation for an Allied air raid.
Regardless of Manning Kimmel’s final fate, when Admiral King heard the news that Kimmel’s boat had been lost, he ordered Manning’s brother, Thomas, to shore duty. Thomas Kinkaid Kimmel, Annapolis class of 1936, had already made five war patrols on the aging S-40 and briefly served as engineer on the Balao. He was hoping for a command of his own despite his brother’s fate, but King refused to budge, no doubt thinking that the Kimmel family had already suffered enough because of the war.6
The navy, of course, had no monopoly on such situations. Army Chief of Staff George Marshall’s first wife was quite sickly and died without having children. When Marshall remarried in 1930, he acquired three stepchildren. He was particularly devoted to the youngest, Allen Brown. In September 1942, Brown, by then married with a young son of his own, enlisted in the army and asked no special treatment from his stepfather, whom he always called “George”—making him one of the few people accorded permission to do so. (Once, when the glad-handing Franklin Roosevelt called Marshall “George” instead of “Marshall” or “General,” Marshall noticeably bristled, as if stabbed with a bayonet.)
Brown went through officer training and graduated from the Armored Forces Center at Fort Knox. He deployed first to Africa and then to Italy. On May 29, 1944, as Brown led his tank unit in the drive from the Anzio beachhead toward Rome, he stood up in the turret of his tank to reconnoiter the advance through his field glasses. A German sniper bullet killed him instantly. Marshall learned the news in his office at the Pentagon and immediately went to his quarters at nearby Fort Myer to tell his wife. Inspecting the Italian front some weeks later, Marshall not only visited Brown’s grave in the cemetery near Anzio but also insisted upon viewing the site of his last battle from both the air and the ground.7
Bill Leahy’s son, William Harrington Leahy, was among the luckier ones. He was Bill and Louise Leahy’s only child, but being somewhat older—thirty-seven at the war’s outbreak—he held more senior positions. Young Bill graduated from Annapolis with the class of 1927 and within weeks married Elizabeth Marbury Beale. Always the supportive father, Leahy nonetheless was “acutely disappointed by the boy’s decision to marry at this time”—thinking it would “certainly adversely affect his career as a naval officer.”8
But the navy between the wars was becoming more accommodating to junior officers, and young Bill and Elizabeth’s early years went well as he reported as an ensign to the battleship California. Bill and Louise missed the wedding, but only because Bill’s own orders sent him hurrying to join the battleship New Mexico.
By the time the United States entered World War II, young Leahy was posted to the U.S. embassy in Great Britain as assistant naval attaché. After Louise died during those last few weeks in Vichy, young Bill arranged ten days’ leave to meet his father in Lisbon during the ambassador’s homeward journey and proved to be a source of comfort to him. After the war, William Harrington Leahy would rise to the rank of rear admiral and command the naval station at Pearl Harbor.
King’s son, Ernest Joseph King, Jr., followed his famous father to Annapolis but only with considerable fatherly prodding. “Ernest Endeavor,” for whom King had waited patiently through six daughters, entered the academy with the class of 1945. He was described as having been “a meek little boy, thoroughly terrified of his father.” If a family story told by Rear Admiral Russell Willson, then academy superintendent, is true, young King, who was going by his middle name, “Joe,” attempted to enlist Willson’s assistance in persuading Admiral King to permit him to resign during his unhappy first year. Supposedly, Willson refused and told Joe, “Maybe you are ready to sacrifice your career but I’m not ready to sacrifice mine!” Actually, Willson persuaded young King that he was far better off at the Naval Academy “than as the enlisted draftee he would undoubtedly become if he resigned.”9
Admiral King may or may not have known about Joe’s attempt to leave Annapolis, but Joe persevered and stayed to graduate. He was immediately posted as an ensign to the cruiser Savannah, which drew escort duty for FDR’s presidential party aboard the cruiser Quincy en route to the Yalta Conference in 1945. When the ships called at Malta during the preliminary round of talks before the American and British delegations flew east to meet the Russians, King took his son to the Officers’ Club for dinner and proudly introduced him to the gathering of senior officers.
Although young Joe was cut more from his mother’s cloth than his father’s, he nonetheless made a career in the navy and retired as a commander. It was Ernest Joseph King, Jr., who received the flag from his father’s casket at the admiral’s funeral, and he lies buried beside the graves of his parents on the tree-covered knoll of the United States Naval Academy Cemetery overlooking the Severn River at Annapolis.10
In the navy, war was truly a family affair. William Frederick Halsey III desperately wanted to follow the family tradition and enter Annapolis, but just as less than 20/20 vision had plagued his father’s flying, young Bill simply could not meet the visual standards for admission without corrective lenses—then forbidden. Instead, Bill entered Princeton with the class of 1938 and emulated his father’s athletic skills on its grounds. He played lacrosse, became the university’s 135-pound boxing champion, and served as president of the Intramural Athletic Association.
By the late summer of 1942, Ensign Halsey was in the Naval Reserve, bound for duty in the Pacific as an aviation supply officer. When Admiral Halsey returned to duty in the Pacific en route to the Guadalcanal fight at about the same time, Nimitz surprised both father and son by arranging a reunion as their paths crossed at Pearl Harbor. In typical Nimitz fashion, he invited both for dinner and to spend the night in his personal quarters. Afterward, young Halsey reported for duty aboard his father’s favorite ship, the carrier Saratoga, then being repaired from torpedo damage sustained early in the Solomons campaign.
Later, with the Saratoga operating in and out of Nouméa near Admiral Halsey’s headquarters, father and son got to see each other on the occasions when young Bill had shore leave. They were both careful, however, not to seek or accept special privileges. In fact, many of young Halsey’s shipmates simply didn’t know that he was the admiral’s son.
Soon a lieutenant j.g., young Bill was “hard-working and unassuming” and “certainly never traded on his father’s reputation.” But that didn’t mean that he lacked the Halsey brashness. Once, when a group of junior officers were discussing a newspaper quote attributed to Admiral Halsey, one of them opined as to how “the old son of a bitch is full of hot air,” not realizing that his son was seated at the table, too. Those in the know quickly looked at Bill, but he was laughing his head off. “What’s so funny?” the officer making the remark demanded, only to be told, “The old son of a bitch is Bill’s old man.” The newcomer stammered an apology, but Bill waved it off, saying that he didn’t care and he was sure “his father wouldn’t have objected either.”
On another occasion, an aviation machinist’s mate came on board the
Saratoga and asked for an ignition harness, adding authoritatively that it was for Admiral Halsey’s personal plane. Young Bill didn’t divulge his identity and reluctantly let him have one, even though that left only four for the carrier’s full complement of planes. A couple of weeks later, the machinist’s mate was back, saying that the first harness had broken and he needed another. Again, Bill turned one over without comment.
By the third time this happened, it was a senior officer making the demand over the intercom from another part of the ship, but Lieutenant Halsey decided he had had enough. “I have another three,” he replied, “but you can’t have one.”
There was a vacant pause, followed by the officer saying that his junior had clearly misunderstood. “This harness is for Admiral Halsey’s plane.”
“Oh, I understand, all right,” replied Bill cheerfully. “You can tell Admiral Halsey to shove it in his ear.”
When the officer on the line demanded his name, Bill replied, “William Frederick Halsey,” and hung up. He heard no more about it and kept his three remaining harnesses for the Saratoga’s planes.11
On August 7, 1943, the Saratoga put into Efate, and young Bill used the occasion to fly down to Nouméa for spare parts, as well as a visit with his father. He spent the night in the admiral’s quarters and then started back to the carrier as a passenger in a flight of three torpedo planes. The evening of his son’s departure, Admiral Halsey came down with a severe attack of flu that took him out of any coherent action for several days.
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