As it was, Nimitz tried his best throughout the 1950s to get Carl Vinson to revisit the five-star issue for Spruance. “I appreciate more than I can tell you,” Spruance wrote Nimitz in 1957, “what you said to Mr. Vinson about me—not that I have any idea that anything can or will be done in the matter at a time like this, but it is very gratifying to know how you feel. The good opinion of my fellow officers in the Navy means a great deal to me, and you and King are at the top of my list in that respect.”20
And what of Spruance and Halsey, who had been prewar buddies in California? “So far as Bill Halsey and I are concerned,” Spruance wrote Halsey’s biographer nine years after Halsey’s death, “I was always a great admirer of Bill, as we had served together prewar in destroyers; and I was most happy during World War II to go to sea again under his command.”21
Before Bill Halsey received his five stars, however, there was to be one more controversy on his record. King was right. There was not one typhoon, but two.
After the court of inquiry into the December typhoon concluded, the Third Fleet sailed from Ulithi to conduct air raids against Formosa and the Ryukyu Islands in an effort to stifle the flow of reinforcements to the Philippines. A few days later, the fleet struck northern Luzon to pave the way for MacArthur’s landings at Lingayen Gulf north of Manila. Once again, kamikaze attacks were the principal threat to the fleet until McCain was able to spread the big blue blanket even wider.
On the evening of January 6, 1945, Halsey led Task Force 38, the fighting core of the Third Fleet, through the Luzon Strait between the Philippines and Formosa and into the South China Sea—what had once been considered a veritable Japanese lake. Reports that the battleships Ise and Hyuga, which had retreated from the Cape Engaño action off Leyte largely intact, were lurking about again got Halsey’s combative juices flowing. No battleships appeared to oppose him, but Third Fleet aircraft sank forty-four lesser ships and destroyed large numbers of Japanese aircraft that now would not find their way to reinforce the Philippines.
By January 25, Halsey and his ships were back in the safety of Ulithi Lagoon, and it was time for Halsey and McCain to rotate their commands to Spruance and Mitscher. Gruff guy that he could be, Halsey was also a sentimental sort, and he always had kind and affectionate words for his subordinates upon leaving a command. “I am so proud of you that no words can express my feelings,” he told the Third Fleet. “We have driven the enemy off the sea and back to his inner defenses. Superlatively well done!”22
So as Halsey and McCain returned stateside for a little rest and relaxation and to plan future operations, the task of invading Okinawa, in the Ryukyus, fell to Spruance and Mitscher. First, there was the campaign against tiny Iwo Jima, a five-week ordeal to capture eight square miles of rock that cost the lives of almost seven thousand Americans. Once the U.S. flag was raised on Mount Suribachi and the rest of the island secured, Iwo Jima was used as an emergency landing base for B-29s bombing Japan and as a staging area for the next step to Okinawa. Those landings began on April 1.
Nimitz had planned to rotate commanders from Spruance and Mitscher back to Halsey and McCain at the end of the Okinawa campaign, but the island proved tough. The American Tenth Army spent six weeks in the spring of 1945 barely moving against Okinawa’s devilish array of pillboxes and caves, while supporting navy ships offshore endured furious kamikaze attacks. Nimitz decided to rotate command at the end of May whether or not Okinawa was subdued.
This change occurred between Spruance and Halsey on May 27, 1945, and between Mitscher and McCain the following day. Once again designated Task Force 38, McCain’s various task groups continued to pound Okinawa and provide air support over the island.
Then the weather began to sour. Early on the morning of June 4, with McCain aboard the carrier Shangri-La in tactical command of the task force, McCain recommended to Halsey on the battleship Missouri that due to an approaching storm, air operations should be canceled and the task force should momentarily retire eastward from the Okinawa area. Halsey agreed and ordered a course to the east-southeast at 110 degrees, even though McCain had recommended due east. Part of the problem would become that the oncoming storm had split in half, with one portion trailing away to the west but a greater concentration gathering strength to the south.
By 8:00 p.m., Task Force 38 consisted of Task Group 38.1, which had just completed refueling and was under the command of Rear Admiral J. J. “Jocko” Clark; Task Group 38.4, which had been with McCain and Halsey all along; and Services Squadron 6, the oilers, cargo ships, and escort carriers under the command of Rear Admiral Donald B. Beary. McCain, still in overall tactical command, wanted to keep moving east out of the path of the storm. But he consulted with Halsey, who ordered a U-turn to the northwest and settled on a course of 300 degrees—slightly north of due west.
“What the hell is Halsey doing,” McCain asked his staff incredulously, “trying to intercept another typhoon?”23 Later, with Halsey’s concurrence, McCain brought the fleet to due north, but the tightly packed southern half of the storm still had the ships in its sights. Halsey and McCain were in Task Group 38.4 leading the line, with Clark’s Task Group 38.1 in the middle, about sixteen miles to the south, and Beary’s services group following another eighteen miles south of it.
As the task force ran due north, the typhoon struck with a vengeance. Task Group 38.4 was far enough north that it rode out the fury with little damage. Beary made the mistake of signaling his ships to proceed independently to the northwest—right into the storm center. But it was Task Group 38.1, in the center of the fleet, that took the brunt of the storm’s punch.
At 4:00 a.m. on June 5, Clark requested permission to steer clear of the storm center by turning to a course of 120 degrees. Once again, McCain checked with Halsey, who signaled McCain that Clark was to maintain his heading due north. Evidently, both Halsey and McCain felt they were getting into calmer seas at the northern end of the line, and unlike Clark, neither apparently could see the storm center on his radar.
McCain waited to reply to Clark’s request to turn to 120 degrees while he mulled over Halsey’s insistence on continuing due north. Finally, McCain signaled Clark that he could use his own judgment, but by then, when Clark made a series of course changes in search of calmer seas, the moves left his task group near the eye of the storm.
Clark’s group suffered major damage to the fast carriers Hornet and Bennington, two escort carriers, and three cruisers, including the Pittsburgh, which lost its entire bow. Twenty-six other ships reported minor damage, and 146 aircraft aboard the carriers were destroyed or damaged. The only bright spot was that the human toll—six—was much lower than in the December typhoon.
Clark reported aboard the Shangri-La the next day to confer with McCain about the damage. When he told McCain that he could have avoided the brunt of the storm had he been permitted to deviate from the base course earlier, McCain was noncommittal. It seemed clear to Clark that McCain was reluctant to criticize Halsey’s actions. By the time both McCain and Clark reported to Halsey on the Missouri, it seemed equally obvious to Clark that Halsey was fully aware that his own actions were to blame for Clark’s losses.24
Crippled though it was, Task Force 38 soon regrouped and headed westward for more strikes against Okinawa. Tough Jocko Clark, back on board Hornet, ignored its warped flight deck over the bow and steamed full astern at eighteen knots for two days in order to launch and recover planes. By then, the Okinawa campaign was finally showing signs of winding down, and Task Force 38 withdrew to San Pedro harbor in Leyte Gulf, the navy’s most recent advance base. There Halsey, McCain, Clark, and Beary were summoned aboard the New Mexico to appear before a court of inquiry convened to investigate the second thrashing of an American fleet by a typhoon in just six months.
Halsey led off by once again blaming the weather service, but it was hardly that simple. Clark’s counsel presented a chronological record complete with track charts and photographs of the radar images that showed the
task force to have been eastward of the storm path when Halsey ordered the course change to 300 degrees. If the fleet had continued eastward, the storm would have passed astern.
In the end, the court of inquiry concluded that Halsey had failed to heed Nimitz’s admonishment after the December typhoon to improve the coordination and timeliness of weather reports and that Halsey was to blame for the “remarkable similarity between the [two] situations, actions and results.” It further concluded that the proximate cause of the damage to the Third Fleet “was the turning of the Fleet to course 300.”25
Secondarily, the court blamed McCain for his twenty-minute delay in granting Clark permission to steer eastward to 120 degrees. It might not seem like much of a delay, but in the face of this concentrated typhoon, minutes made all the difference. Clark and Beary also incurred some blame because they had continued on courses and speeds “although their better judgment dictated a course of action which would have taken them fairly clear of the typhoon path.”26 Actually following their better judgment in the face of Halsey’s orders to stay the course would, of course, have required a good deal of brass.
The court of inquiry recommended that Halsey and McCain be sent letters of reprimand pointing out their errors and “lack of sound judgment displayed”—lessons, it noted, which might have been learned from the December encounter, but which were “either disregarded or not given proper consideration.” The court also recommended that “serious consideration” be given to assigning Halsey and McCain to other duties—that is to say, relieving them of their sea commands.27
Halsey’s shot at the fourth set of five stars might have vanished on that note, but once again Nimitz and King stepped in to save him. According to Jocko Clark, Nimitz was privately furious with Halsey and “minced no words in charging Halsey with gross stupidity in both typhoons, especially the latter, where Halsey had good weather information.”28 But such an outburst, if indeed Nimitz made it, would never be given a public airing.
“CINCPAC has considered,” Nimitz wrote the court in his official response, “not only the events under inquiry, but the outstanding combat records of the officers to whom responsibility has been attached in this case.” Halsey had “rendered invaluable service to his country. His skill and determination have been demonstrated time and again in combat with the enemy.”
King retraced the court’s opinion by noting in his own endorsement, “The gravity of the occurrence is accentuated by the fact that the senior officers concerned were also involved in a similar, and poorly handled situation, during the typhoon of December 1944.” King felt that Halsey and McCain could have avoided the worst of this second storm “had they reacted to the situation as it developed with the weather-wise skill to be expected of professional seamen.” But that was the end of his lecture. “Notwithstanding the above,” King wrote, he recommended “no individual disciplinary measures be taken, for the reason stated by… Fleet Admiral Nimitz.”29
Halsey was untouchable, but Slew McCain was not so lucky. He was expendable, and Nimitz quietly prepared to relieve McCain of his task force command notwithstanding King’s official pronouncement. It does not seem an exaggeration to say that McCain took the fall for Halsey. McCain had always been a loyal “King man,” and this result may have grated on King at least as much as his public posturing in Halsey’s defense. Small wonder, then, that King would be inclined to admit, “I should not say it but it is true. Halsey made two mistakes; not the great battle; what I had against him were the two typhoons.”30
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Interim President
After the politically charged FDR-MacArthur-Nimitz conference at Pearl Harbor in July 1944, the presidential party had put back to sea on the cruiser Baltimore. As always, the president’s itinerary was a well-kept secret, but this time even Leahy, who of course knew their destination, was skeptical of its worth. “Reaching a sufficient distance from Diamond Head to make observation from shore impossible,” Leahy noted, the Baltimore swung almost due north and, with an antisubmarine screen of four destroyers, surged forward at 21 knots, bound for Adak in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska.1
Roosevelt was playing the role of commander in chief to the hilt, but why Alaska? After the reconquest of Kiska and Attu in 1943, there had been some thought to marshal forces in Alaska and strike a blow from there against Japan’s Kuril Islands, or even its northern island of Hokkaido. This potential threat kept the Japanese guessing, but the major drawback to a northern front—in addition to its routinely dismal flying and fighting weather—would be that an attack against Japan from the north would do nothing to disrupt Japan’s key arteries of natural resources flowing from the south. (King certainly understood that as he argued for an attack against Formosa.)
So by mid-1944, the Alaskan frontier had transitioned from potential invasion springboard to somewhat of a backwater. After a round of dismal port calls in heavy fog and damp, chilly weather—the presidential flotilla was unable even to enter Dutch Harbor because of limited visibility—Roosevelt may well have asked himself why, indeed, Alaska. A cruise to warm, southern waters, even a publicity transit of the Panama Canal and a return up the eastern seaboard, might just as well have conveyed to the public the vigor of a hands-on commander in chief. Instead, the Alaskan cruise, including a trip along the beautiful Inside Passage in a cramped and crowded destroyer, left the president haggard and worn. But what happened at the navy yard in Bremerton, Washington, only made matters worse.
The presidential destroyer Cummings—according to Leahy, the first destroyer that Roosevelt had traveled any distance on as president—arrived at the Bremerton Navy Yard late on the afternoon of August 12 so that the president could address several thousand workers. The speech was broadcast on radio and meant to be an up-to-the-minute report to the American people on his whirlwind tour of the Pacific. Instead, it proved to be one of his weaker efforts. Everything that could go wrong did.
Without his usual speechwriters and the editing of Grace Tully, who was not on the Pacific trip, Roosevelt dictated the speech to an assistant naval aide. Remarkably, he then chose to deliver it standing upright in his braces from the destroyer’s forecastle—despite having not worn his braces in some months and lost considerable weight in the interim. The crowd, having just gotten off work on a Saturday and looking forward to rushing elsewhere, was unresponsive. Roosevelt’s delivery was halting, in part because the rough text was rambling and lacked his usual smooth style. A breeze ruffling his papers didn’t help the situation. To all who heard him, the president sounded tired, slightly confused, and at times short of breath.
But then, about halfway through the speech, Roosevelt was seized by a chest pain that radiated outward to both shoulders. Only his iron will kept him upright and in some semblance of control. When he finally finished, the president confessed the pain to Howard Bruenn, his cardiologist. Bruenn diagnosed an attack of angina and not a heart attack, but it was nonetheless proof positive for Bruenn of coronary disease in his patient. Clearly, the routine, cheery reports of the president’s health from White House physician Ross McIntire were overly optimistic, if not downright false.2
Bruenn’s medical concerns were kept quiet, but on the basis of Roosevelt’s bungled Bremerton speech, there were many—even among his most ardent supporters—who wondered whether FDR was up to the task of another campaign, let alone another four years in the presidency. Did Roosevelt still have his old political magic? How would he respond to the onslaught of Republican attacks?
On September 23, 1944—blissfully late for the official opening of a presidential campaign even then—Roosevelt addressed the Teamsters Union at the Statler Hotel in Washington, D.C. In the aftermath of his Alaskan cruise, a fiction had spread that somehow Roosevelt’s pet Scottish terrier, Fala, had been left behind at one of the Aleutian ports and that the president had dispatched a destroyer to retrieve him. In a speech slated to rank near his “nothing to fear” and day of “infamy” utterances, the old master g
randly touched all the bases and then turned Fala loose against the entire Republican establishment.
“These Republican leaders,” Roosevelt declared with mock seriousness, “have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala.” He and his family took such attacks as a matter of course, asserted FDR, but Fala resented them. “You know,” continued FDR in his folksy way, “Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I had left him behind on the Aleutian Islands and had sent a destroyer back to find him—at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars—his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since.”3
Roosevelt’s audience in the hall and those listening on radio across the country howled in delight. The grand old man still had it, but how long would the magic last? Chief of Staff Leahy may well have wondered the same thing more deeply than most, but characteristically, he kept his thoughts on the matter to himself.
On November 7, 1944, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to an unprecedented fourth term as president of the United States. Despite his failing health and the looming postwar challenges, Roosevelt seems to have taken an almost cavalier attitude toward continuing in office. He was comfortable there; the country was comfortable with him being there. Why do anything different? And, perhaps in his mind, why not die there? But all this begs the question, if Roosevelt’s famed attention to detail and the parceling out of responsibilities among subordinates so that only he had the full picture diminished with his decreasing faculties, and if he was in fact less than a full-time president, who was running the government?
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