The Admirals

by Walter R. Borneman

  “Our submarines continue to turn in a fine performance of duty,” Nimitz wrote Halsey in the spring of 1943, at the height of the torpedo frustrations. “With a gradual increase in the number of submarines in the Western Pacific, the Japs’ ability to keep their far-flung island Empire supplied will gradually wane, and the time will come when they will have to make tough decisions regarding the abandonment of this, that or the other distant island base, simply because it cannot be kept supplied.”5

  Just how increasingly effective submarine operations became is evidenced by their impact on Japanese armed forces in the field and the Japanese war industry at home. Seventeen percent of army supplies shipped from Japan were sunk during 1943; 30 percent during 1944; and 50 percent in 1945. Just as draining on the Japanese navy was a shortage of fleet tankers that deprived their fleet of the mobility and staying power that would become almost routine among the growing American carrier forces. At home, for example, the disruption of Japan’s shipping lanes from Southeast Asia had reduced coal and ore imports by two-thirds by 1944. By March 1945, “imports of coal virtually ceased and iron ore was cut off entirely,” because the Japanese were forced to use whatever shipping capacity remained to haul much-needed foodstuffs.6

  Conversely, the Japanese achieved great initial offensive success with submarines, but then inexplicably diverted them to such mundane operations as resupplying distant outposts. In the first full year of the war, before this change, Japanese submarines almost managed to deliver a deathblow to America’s carriers. Saratoga was crippled and temporaily put out of action by a Japanese torpedo off Hawaii early in 1942. The I-168 sank the damaged Yorktown after the Battle of Midway before it could be towed to safety. Wasp was torpedoed off Guadalcanal. Other warship casualties at the hands of Japanese submarines that year included the sinking of the cruiser Juneau, with losses that included the five Sullivan brothers, and the crippling of the battleship North Carolina.

  But rather than push offensive submarine warfare, the Japanese subsequently diverted the vast majority of their boats to nuisance raids, supply missions, and evacuations. Submarines were never used aggressively against Allied merchant shipping—such as the constant flow of ships in the West Coast–Australia lifeline—which suggests that the Japanese simply failed to appreciate the havoc their German allies were causing in the North Atlantic. Japan continued to concentrate on warships instead of merchant vessels, and as warships were generally more protected, Japanese casualties were higher, with less return. Two obvious exceptions were the sinking of the escort carrier Liscome Bay during the invasion of the Gilbert Islands and the sinking of the heavy cruiser Indianapolis during the last month of the war.

  By the end of the war, Japanese naval and merchant shipping losses totaled 3,032 ships displacing 10.6 million tons. Of this total, U.S. forces alone—not counting British, Dutch, Australian, or other allies—sank 2,728 ships totaling 9.7 million tons. American submarines led the way, sinking 1,314 ships of 5.3 million tons, followed by navy-marine carrier-based aircraft, accounting for 520 ships of 2.1 million tons.7

  These submarine numbers represent 1,113 merchant ships, or 55.5 percent of all merchant tonnage sunk, and 201 naval vessels, or 27.5 percent of all naval tonnage sunk. Of the 288 submarines in commission during the war, 52 were lost by the war’s end. By comparison, the six-year Battle of the Atlantic, waged from 1939 to 1945, claimed 3,500 Allied merchant ships sunk, totaling 14.5 million tons.

  Submarine warfare had become much more destructive and far more of a strategic weapon than anything Chester Nimitz had imagined when he wrote his pre–World War I treatise that included launching bobbing telephone poles to masquerade as submarine periscopes. But what about airpower?

  First and foremost, airpower had become an inseparable component of sea power. After the attack on Pearl Harbor and the sinking of the British battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse off Singapore, no commander—Japanese, American, or British—dared to launch a major operation without local control of the air. The decisive Battles of the Coral Sea, Midway, and the Philippine Sea were almost singularly carrier air actions. And land-based air continued to show its power, as MacArthur’s air force had done against Japanese transports in the Battle of the Bismarck Sea.

  As both Nimitz and MacArthur drove closer to Japan, much of the focus in the Central Pacific turned to seizing island bases from which to bomb the Japanese home islands. Halsey worried that such a focus might give him short shrift in the South Pacific, but Nimitz reassured him otherwise. “You may rest assured,” Nimitz told Halsey, “that my Staff and I will continue to look out for your interests, although it may appear to some of you occasionally that your Force has been forgotten. We have a good over-all picture of what is happening in the Pacific, and will see that you are not left without tools when the time comes.”8

  Even before massive B-29 bombers began to rain destruction on Japan—first in small numbers from China and then from bases that would be seized in the Marianas during 1944—Nimitz kept a steady eye on all aspects of the Pacific war. He was convinced that his submarines were wreaking havoc on Japan’s economy long before the B-29s took flight. And the Japanese appeared to agree. Relying initially on a steady flow of natural resources from Southeast Asia, Japan at first showed tremendous economic performance. But even at its peak, Japanese production reached only about 10 percent of the potential output of the American economy. Japan spent most of 1942 consolidating its new territorial gains and waiting for an American response instead of desperately increasing its own economic output and attempting to deliver a knockout blow.9

  Meanwhile, America’s industrial output was turning out aircraft carriers, planes, and tanks in record numbers. By September 1943, the Japanese general staff began a study of the war’s lessons up to that time. Based on air, fleet, and merchant ship losses to date, Japan’s declining ability to import essential raw materials, and the looming threat of air attacks on the home islands, the study concluded that Japan could not win the war and should seek a compromise peace. This determination was made after the grand total of U.S. bombers to attack mainland Japan numbered as yet only the sixteen B-25s of the Doolittle Raid. The driving power behind such Japanese pessimism was not American airpower, but American submarines.10

  Japan fought on, of course, but a postwar American survey of bombing results found that “by August 1945, even without direct air attack on her cities and industries, the over-all level of Japanese war production would have declined below the peak levels by 40 to 50 percent solely as a result of the interdiction of overseas imports.”11 The massive B-29 firestorm raids against the Japanese mainland late in the war destroyed infrastructure, killed hundreds of thousands of people, and generally demoralized the civilian population. The evidence, however, shows that Japan’s capacity to wage war had already been severely reduced by offensive submarine operations. The B-29s pulverized Japan’s industrial plants, but many of those plants had been idled by a lack of raw materials.

  In emphasizing the impact of submarines against Japanese shipping, it should not be overlooked that naval airpower also played an important role in this regard. Witness the number of ships and tonnage sunk by navy and marine carrier-based aircraft, particularly after U.S. carriers struck close to Japan in 1945. There was also a little-known campaign by Army Air Force B-29s to drop mines into Japan’s home island sea-lanes and further sink and disrupt interisland commerce. Some even argue that had this mining effort been implemented sooner than it was, late in 1944, it would have complemented submarine efforts even more and eliminated all measure of Japanese shipping.12

  What the B-29 raids did do was bring the gloom and inevitable doom of the conflict home to the average Japanese citizen. The destruction was graphic and pervasive. Premier Kantaro Suzuki, Japan’s prime minister in the closing days of the war, told the Allies afterward, “It seemed to me unavoidable that in the long run Japan would be almost destroyed by air attack so that merely on the basis of the B-29’s alone [emphas
is in original] I was convinced that Japan should sue for peace.”13

  But even as late as the summer of 1945, from the perspective of Hap Arnold’s Army Air Force, “there [was] no way to escape the conclusion that the B-29 assaults had thus far failed to force a Japanese surrender in spite of the almost indescribable destruction.”14 This left the American submariners in the Pacific the unheralded heroes of the war. As King wrote afterward, “They made it more difficult for the enemy to consolidate his forward positions, to reinforce his threatened areas, and to pile up in Japan an adequate reserve of fuel oil, medical supplies, rubber and other loot from the newly conquered territory. Submarine operations thus hastened our ultimate victory and resulted in the saving of American lives…. Through their efforts the Japanese were much nearer the end in the late spring of 1945 than was generally realized.”15

  In the end, of course, it was a combined effort. Nothing can be taken away from the raw heroism of flying near thirty thousand feet, sucking oxygen in a leather flight jacket, while hammering away at enemy fighters or dodging exploding flak—whether in B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators over Hamburg and Ploesti, or in B-29s high above Yokohama. It took guts. It also took guts to sweat in the narrow confines of a submarine three hundred feet below the surface, with explosions rattling every instrument and fitting in one’s boat, or to hunker down beyond a burning German Tiger tank and advance up the road to Berlin.

  World War II demonstrated that airpower alone, or sea or land power alone, could not win a war in the twentieth century. It took a combination, and this realization nurtured the unity-of-command refinements that developed during World War II, ultimately resulting in the creation of the Department of Defense.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Halsey’s Luck

  No matter their level of competence, most great commanders are blessed with a certain amount of luck. In 1944, one needed to look no further than recent experiences in the current conflict to support that. Commanders make educated decisions based on facts, experience, and gut-level instinct, but at some point, a willingness to roll the dice takes over. Dwight Eisenhower faced such a moment weighing the weather odds before Normandy. Chester Nimitz had a similar moment before Midway, trusting American intelligence and dispatching Fletcher and Spruance to Point Luck. If luck seems too casual a term, if serendipity too flighty, then call it the vagaries of war. Those vagaries were about to descend on Bill Halsey.

  Having spent twenty months in command of the South Pacific Area, Halsey was reassigned to command the Third Fleet. This force was essentially Spruance’s Fifth Fleet. As the Central Pacific drive gained steam, King and Nimitz devised a command rotation between Spruance and Halsey so that while one admiral and his staff were at sea executing current operations—as Spruance did that summer in the Marianas—the other was at Pearl Harbor planning the next operation. It didn’t hurt matters that the use of different fleet numbers for essentially the same forces added a level of confusion for Japanese intelligence. As Halsey put it, “Instead of the stagecoach system of keeping the drivers and changing the horses, we changed drivers and kept the horses.”1

  As Halsey left the South Pacific command on June 15, 1944, he bade his officers and men an emotional farewell. Halsey told them that if a shoulder patch was ever designed for those who had served with him during those lean months, he wanted it to show three things: “a piece of string, a can of beans and a rusty nail.”2 Sending Halsey his own farewell, Douglas MacArthur assured him that it was “with deepest regret we see you and your splendid staff go” and called him “a great sailor, a determined commander, and a loyal comrade.”3

  After an official transmittal of the command change, Halsey replied to MacArthur on a personal level. “You and I have had tough sledding with the enemy,” Halsey acknowledged, but “my own personal dealings with you have been so completely satisfactory that I will always feel a personal regard and warmth over and above my professional admiration.”4 A few months later, MacArthur, loyal to a fault, would stand by Halsey when Halsey’s luck was sorely tested.

  In the interim, the time had finally come for the ruler to summon the pretender. Franklin D. Roosevelt, as commander in chief, ordered MacArthur, who had not seen Roosevelt or been in the United States since 1937, to meet with him in Honolulu. MacArthur had successfully avoided other top-level conferences by sending minions and pleading the impossibility of an absence from his headquarters. But he could not ignore this direct order from the president.

  Besides, this might well be MacArthur’s best chance to force the issue of Pacific strategy beyond the Marianas. King and Nimitz were promoting a stab directly westward to Formosa and an eventual linkup with mainland China, bypassing the Philippines in the process. MacArthur, who had vowed in 1942 that he would return to the Philippines, was still as determined as ever to do just that—and not via Formosa.

  On the evening of July 13, 1944, Roosevelt and Leahy left Washington by train for Hyde Park. As always, their itinerary and final destination were well-kept secrets. The presidential train arrived on the west bank of the Hudson opposite FDR’s beloved Springwood in time for breakfast the next morning, followed by an inspection of progress on the adjacent Roosevelt Presidential Library.

  “After a pleasant day,” the presidential party reboarded the Ferdinand Magellan at 6:30 p.m., bound for California. Along with FDR, Eleanor Roosevelt, Leahy, and “the usual communication and Secret Service personnel” were military aide Pa Watson, naval aide Wilson Brown, the indispensable Grace Tully, and both Rear Admiral Ross McIntire, the president’s physician, and Commander Howard G. Bruenn, a young cardiologist who had also been attending the president in recent months.5

  But there was to be an intermediate stop before reaching California. The presidential special roared west from Albany on New York Central tracks and shortly after noon on July 15 pulled into Chicago, where the party faithful were gathering for the upcoming Democratic National Convention. Only four days before, after what seemed an interminable period of either indifference or shrewdness that had frozen out any serious challengers, Roosevelt had finally acknowledged at a press conference that he would accept his party’s nomination for a fourth term.6

  He would not be denied, of course, and that left open only the question of a vice presidential candidate. The current vice president, Henry Wallace, had fallen out of favor with Roosevelt and the Democratic Party establishment for his increasingly eccentric views. Contenders as replacements included Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas and James F. Byrnes, the former South Carolina congressman and senator who had become FDR’s domestic policy guru and, some said, almost an “assistant president” for the home front.

  Leahy seems to have heavily favored Byrnes at that time, and in various conversations with Roosevelt, “he frequently slipped in a strong recommendation for his favorable consideration of Byrnes.” On the trip from Hyde Park to Chicago there was certainly no shortage of speculation, and the president’s party “talked frequently about our preferences for the second highest post—that is, all of us except the President himself.”

  The stay in Chicago was short, and even before the convention convened the president’s special was westbound from Chicago. FDR announced to his fellow travelers the “surprising information that he had recommended Senator Harry Truman” for the vice presidential nomination. Except for Truman’s work investigating national defense issues, Leahy confessed he “knew almost nothing about him.”7

  Arriving in San Diego, Roosevelt and his party spent two days watching amphibious landing exercises while the Chicago convention convened and went about the process of renominating him. On July 21, after Truman’s nomination for vice president was also in place, Roosevelt boarded the cruiser Baltimore. The president settled into the captain’s cabin, and Leahy occupied the flag officer’s cabin. Then, because it was a Friday, the Baltimore “waited after midnight to sail from San Diego.”8

  Five days later, at 3:00 p.m. on July 26, after a voyage L
eahy termed “without incident” and accompanied by generally pleasant weather, the Baltimore docked alongside a seawall within the confines of Pearl Harbor. Nimitz and the hierarchy of the Pacific Fleet immediately went aboard to pay their respects. But where was Douglas MacArthur?

  The general had left Brisbane the day before in his personal B-17, named Bataan, and made a twenty-six-hour flight from Brisbane across the Pacific to land at Hickam Field on Oahu about an hour before the Baltimore docked. Upcoming strategy session aside, MacArthur spent most of the flight pacing the aisle and grumbling about the “humiliation of forcing me to leave my command to fly to Honolulu for a political picture-taking junket.” There was certainly to be some of that, but as usual MacArthur proceeded to top all comers when it came to the theatrical.

  Just as Roosevelt, Leahy, Nimitz, and their entourage were disembarking from the Baltimore for shore accommodations, the terrific wail of a siren filled the dockside. A long open car with a motorcycle escort swept into view, did a circling lap around the dock, and came to a stop at the foot of the Baltimore’s gangplank. In the car were a chauffeur in khakis and one lone figure in the backseat in a battered cap and leather flying jacket, despite the summer heat of Hawaii. There was no mistaking Douglas MacArthur.

  He had taken the opportunity to stop by his guest quarters to take a bath—understandable after a full day in the air—but by lingering there, he had clearly picked the perfect moment of entrance for the maximum attention. MacArthur stepped smartly from the automobile and strode up the gangplank to a thunderous ovation.

  Never one to be upstaged, Roosevelt greeted MacArthur warmly. Leahy, whose relationship with MacArthur went back nearly forty years to “when as young officers we had good times together in San Francisco,” remarked dryly, “Douglas, why don’t you wear the right kind of clothes when you come up here to see us?” Disregarding his time in the bath, MacArthur gestured to the heavens and replied, “Well, you haven’t been where I came from, and it’s cold up there in the sky.”9