King’s aide called Marshall’s office two days later and said that the admiral agreed completely and would not attend the game, although he would ask that the box be held for members of his staff. It was a small example, perhaps, but lesser men might well have been content to see the other set up.8
In that same vein, King went out of his way to extend an invitation to Marshall to travel with him on his plane to the National Governors Conference on Mackinac Island in early July 1945. Both men were attending to brief the governors on the progress of the war, and King told Marshall that he would “like it very much if you will go with me.” King described the schedule and noted that while he had to stop in Cleveland on the return trip, his plane would continue on to Washington with Marshall. Again, it was a small thing, but King didn’t have to extend the invitation. Marshall accepted.9
King may well have been happy to cultivate his friendship with Marshall because his ties to both the White House and the secretary of the navy were now tenuous. King had never had much of a personal relationship with Roosevelt—in part because of personality and even more so because Leahy was FDR’s top sailor—but the president was confident of King’s abilities. After Roosevelt’s death, King had almost no relationship with Truman, in large part because King had previously ignored Senator Truman’s Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program as an intrusive waste of time.
Late in 1943, when Senator Truman had wanted information from the Joint Chiefs on the Canol pipeline project in western Canada, King had pled national security and denied his request. That didn’t stop Truman, of course. As he told King in reply, “It seems to me the Senate is entitled to know the facts of the matter and we expect to know them.” Truman eventually got what he wanted, on Canol and just about everything else, but he was not one to forget a snub.10
King’s relationship with Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal wasn’t much better. As navy undersecretary since 1940, Forrestal deserved high marks for his procurement role in getting the Atlantic and Pacific commands what they needed to fight the Axis. When Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox died in the spring of 1944, Forrestal was the hands-down favorite to replace him, and Roosevelt made the appointment. But whereas Knox had been a huge supporter of King and content to give him full rein—at least at the beginning of the war—Forrestal was adamant about civilian control of the military. This didn’t stop King from carrying on as usual, but his brusque, make-a-decision manner conflicted with Forrestal’s more cerebral, problem-solving approach and caused friction between the two.
King may well have been responsible for the beginnings of the rift when, late in 1943, he tried to implement one of his many reorganization plans. This one would have brought naval shipyards and some of Forrestal’s procurement duties under King’s command. King claimed—somewhat disingenuously if one looks at the turnaround times—that ship repairs were taking too long for fleet operations. Even Knox balked at this, as did Roosevelt, who sent Knox instructions to “tell Ernie once more [emphasis in original]: No reorganizing of the Navy Department’s set-up during the war. Let’s win it first.”11
The Knox-Forrestal reaction was to promote a plan to separate once again the roles of chief of naval operations and commander in chief, United States Fleet, leaving King to tend to military operations only as COMINCH and not as CNO. King predictably opposed this, even though he always felt that the CNO should be “the top man in the Navy”—him, of course. (By contrast, the organization of the War Department made it quite clear that Marshall was the top soldier, responsible to the secretary of war and then the president.)
King continued in his dual roles but chafed under Forrestal’s assertion of civilian control. He claimed that Forrestal “seemed bent on harassing [him] in some ways,” but he hardly helped his own cause by occasionally berating the secretary as if he were a junior officer rather than his civilian superior. In the summer of 1945, the two came to verbal blows over the recommendations of the Flag Officer Selection Board. Rather than going to King, Forrestal summoned Marc Mitscher, the ranking member of the board then on permanent duty in Washington, and “took him to task for what he considered poor recommendations.”
King exploded not only about Forrestal interfering in what had been an entirely proper selection process, but also about him summoning one member of the board to account for its total actions. Forrestal pulled rank on King by asking King to accompany him to the White House, implying that Truman would support Forrestal’s list and not that of the selection board. It is difficult to see Roosevelt interfering in such a manner, but Truman approved the list as changed by Forrestal without asking King’s views. King later summed up his relationship with Forrestal by observing, “I didn’t like him and he didn’t like me.”12
But the rift certainly was not entirely King’s fault. Chester Nimitz, who also could be bullheaded at times, was not immune from Forrestal’s delving into matters Nimitz also considered solely within his own military purview. Forrestal once decided that CINCPAC should publish a daily newspaper, or at the very least, some sort of Pacific Fleet magazine. Nimitz had the public relations staff to do the job, but he felt the extra work of distribution was “just too much when we are trying to run a war.” It appeared to be a huge waste of valuable time, particularly when overseas editions of Time and Newsweek were readily available.
Forrestal kept insisting that Nimitz take on this task until Nimitz stormed, “The publicity side of the war is getting so large, it almost overshadows the fighting side.” Forrestal finally relented, but the incident earned Nimitz a spot on Forrestal’s list as someone who could be almost as stubborn and recalcitrant as King, and it would play a role several months later when discussions turned to King’s successor.13
Throughout July and early August, Halsey’s Third Fleet made repeated carrier attacks against Tokyo and Japan’s main islands. Halsey wondered why Nimitz placed several cities off-limits, but his planes struck the last remnants of the Japanese fleet at Kure and Kobe, sinking a battleship, two converted battleships, four cruisers, five destroyers, and three carriers, effectively eliminating any remaining vestiges of the Japanese navy. “If the enemy had not already heard the crack of doom,” Time reported, “he heard it now.”14
But there was more in the air than apparent doom for the Japanese empire. Throughout the summer, American intelligence had begun to show a massive buildup of Japanese forces on Kyushu, including kamikaze-style aircraft. Indeed, even before the Joint Chiefs’ June decision on the invasion, Nimitz had reversed himself in a private memo to King. Given the lengthy and costly campaign on Okinawa, Nimitz now told King, “it would be unrealistic to expect that such obvious objectives as southern Kyushu and the Tokyo Plain will not be as well defended as Okinawa.” Once again, to avoid staggering casualties, Nimitz became an advocate of blockade and bombing tactics.15
King kept Nimitz’s views to himself, which set the stage for the war’s final showdown between MacArthur and the navy. Earlier in the spring—before the Joint Chiefs’ supposed “final” decision to invade Kyushu—King had adamantly told his fellow chiefs that while he was issuing orders to prepare the navy for an invasion of Kyushu, he expected to revisit the decision later in the summer. Now that time had come.
On the one hand, King had alarming intelligence reports of troop strength ashore, his top commander’s opposition to a direct invasion, and fears of another round of deadly kamikaze attacks against his fleet. On the other hand, King had George Marshall and Douglas MacArthur. The former was still intent on occupying enemy territory but beginning to worry about Kyushu. The latter was busily giving his “personal estimate” that the forces said to be opposing Operation Olympic were “greatly exaggerated.”16
MacArthur made a habit, his critics claimed, of underestimating his opposition’s strength—as he had in invading Luzon—in order to carry out his personal strategic vision. In the case of Kyushu, MacArthur’s goal may well have been his “personal interest in commanding the greatest
amphibious assault in history.” King, his own confidence in Olympic waning, decided to send Marshall’s growing concerns and MacArthur’s haughty reply to Nimitz for comment and instructed him to include MacArthur in his response. If Nimitz reiterated his summerlong opposition to invading Kyushu, as King assumed he would, it would drive a wedge deeper than ever into the interservice rivalry but give King the opportunity to have the Joint Chiefs rethink the entire invasion plan.17
Meanwhile, the reason for Nimitz withholding Hiroshima and Nagasaki from Halsey’s target list became clear. King had learned about the atomic bomb program late in 1943 when Marshall had paid a quiet visit to his office and swore him to secrecy. Thereafter, Marshall kept King informed about developments at regular intervals. By February 1945, it was time to tell Nimitz, and King dispatched Commander Frederick L. Ashworth to Nimitz’s headquarters on Guam to do so. Ashworth arrived hot and bedraggled by the Pacific climate, with the top secret dispatch crumpled in a sweaty money belt.
Nimitz seemed more focused on immediate operations than the promise of a superweapon, but it was his responsibility to provide logistics for the B-29s that would drop the bombs. Ashworth selected Tinian, between Saipan and Guam, as the forward base for the 509th Composite Group. Word of the new weapon was strictly on a need-to-know basis, and Nimitz did not inform Halsey until July 22.18
The reactions of the four fleet admirals to dropping the bomb mirrored their naval upbringing. They had come of age with the battleship and matured in leadership roles with the development of submarines and airpower. This new atomic power was something quite foreign and generally repulsive to them. It was a different kind of warfare, for which none of them had any enthusiasm.
Leahy had his doubts that the bomb would work, and even if it did, he wondered whether it should be used. He was with Truman when the new president was given “a scientist’s version of the atomic bomb.” According to Truman, Leahy called it “the biggest fool thing we have ever done” and claimed that it “will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives.”19
Even after Truman received news at Potsdam of the first successful test in the New Mexico desert, Leahy remained skeptical. Meeting with King George VI in England en route home from Potsdam, Leahy told the king, “I do not think it will be as effective as is expected. It sounds like a professor’s dream to me!” But a few days later, on August 6, reports of the destruction at Hiroshima reached the presidential party aboard the cruiser Augusta in the mid-Atlantic. Truman was excited and called it “the greatest thing in history.” Leahy immediately thought of the future.20
“The lethal possibilities of such atomic action in the future is frightening,” he wrote in his diary, “and while we are the first to have it in our possession, there is a certainty that it will in the future be developed by potential enemies and that it will probably be used against us.”21
Leahy readily admitted that he had “misjudged the terrible efficiency” of the bomb, but that only hardened his resolve that it shouldn’t have been used. Just as he had cautioned against an invasion of Japan, Leahy held the opinion that the bombing of Hiroshima and then Nagasaki three days later “was of no material assistance” to bringing about the Japanese surrender.
Leahy felt so strongly about this that he concluded his memoirs with a grim foreboding of what the atomic age meant. “My own feeling,” he lamented, “was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion.” It was indeed a long way from those lusty cheers on the decks of the Oregon in 1898 after it had raced around Cape Horn. And significantly, Leahy wrote those words not as some decades-removed revisionism, but about 1949.22
King was of much the same mind. In his memoirs, he reverted to his opposition to an invasion of Japan and called the rationale that the bomb would save American lives misplaced because, had Truman been willing to wait, King thought, a blockade would have “starved the Japanese into submission” without its use. Privately, King declared that he “didn’t like the atomic bomb or any part of it.”23
Nimitz, too, was of an older school. He considered the bomb “somehow indecent, certainly not a legitimate form of warfare,” and hoped it would not be used. Captain Edwin Layton, still the CINCPAC intelligence officer, offered the opinion that because it was such a radical change from conventional warfare, it might give the Japanese emperor an out to surrender and end the war without loss of face among his people. Nimitz was forced to agree, but that did not mean he had to like it. “Thank you very much,” Nimitz said to Fred Ashworth after Ashworth delivered his sweaty communiqué about the bomb’s existence. But as he left the room, Ashworth heard Nimitz mumble, half to himself, “You know, I guess I was just born a few years too soon.”24
Only Halsey, his reasoning more military than humanitarian, disagreed slightly with the other three. “It was a mistake ever to drop it,” he acknowledged. “Why reveal a weapon like that to the world when it wasn’t necessary?” And Halsey believed that it wasn’t necessary because Japan was “utterly defeated and knew it” before the Hiroshima blast. About all the bombs succeeded in doing, Halsey claimed with his usual bias, “was to leave less Japs to be fed.”25
On August 10, with no immediate reaction from the Japanese to the two bombs, Nimitz pondered his reply to King, copy to MacArthur, on the Kyushu invasion plans. Even the normally diplomatic Nimitz might well have lit a powder keg, but other events were to intervene and void the necessity of his response.26
Early on August 11, King sent Nimitz another message. This time, it was a “peace warning.” Indications were that Japan was about to surrender, and there was suddenly no rush on the Kyushu response. Truman and the Joint Chiefs wanted to keep up the pressure until a surrender was assured, so Halsey ordered another round of carrier attacks on Tokyo. Nimitz countermanded the order, but when no word of surrender came, he told Halsey to launch the strikes. On the morning of August 15, Halsey ordered a similar raid and told Nimitz he was doing so.
Nimitz concurred, but two hours later Ed Layton burst into Nimitz’s office unannounced waving a sheet of paper. “This is the hottest thing we’ve had,” Layton told the admiral. It was Japan’s acceptance of unconditional surrender. CINCPAC flashed Halsey the order “Suspend air operations,” then radioed all commands in the Pacific Ocean Area, “Cease offensive operations against Japanese forces… [but] beware of treachery or last moment attacks by enemy forces or individuals.”27
Characteristically, Nimitz took the news calmly with a satisfied smile. Out on Halsey’s flagship, it was another story. Four years earlier, Doug Moulton had rushed into Halsey’s cabin on the Enterprise with word of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Now it was Moulton, still with the admiral as his air operations officer, who interrupted Halsey’s breakfast on the Missouri with news of the surrender. Halsey whooped, hollered, and pounded the shoulders of everyone within reach. In Washington, King’s reaction was more laconic: “I wonder what I am going to do tomorrow.”28
V-J Day, as it came to be called, was especially poignant for Leahy. The man for whom he had worked so long and hard to bring this day about was no longer there to share the triumph. With Truman’s blessing, Leahy took to the airwaves to address the American public and those under arms in the field.
“My fellow Americans,” Leahy began, “We, with our allies, have won what President Roosevelt called on December 8, 1941 the ‘inevitable victory.’ The terms we laid down at that time—unconditional surrender—have been met…. We must now turn to the binding up of our own and of the world’s wounds.”
Acknowledging the transformation in the nation’s armed forces, Leahy declared, “Today we have the biggest and most powerful navy in the world, more powerful than any other two navies in existence…. But,” he cautioned, “we must not depend on this strength and this power alone.” America’s true strength and the secret weapon that really won the war, he concluded, came “from our basic virtues as a freed
om-loving nation.”29
To that, FDR would have said amen. What Eleanor Roosevelt did say to Leahy was that her thoughts were with him and that “Franklin would want to clasp your hand and congratulate you for all you have done to make this victory possible.”30
Later that day in the Pacific, Nimitz issued his own, more detailed instructions to his commands. “With the termination of hostilities against Japan,” he cautioned, “it is incumbent on all officers to conduct themselves with dignity and decorum in their treatment of the Japanese and their public utterances in connection with the Japanese.” These were the same people who had attacked Pearl Harbor, Nimitz continued, but “the use of insulting epithets in connection with the Japanese as a race or as individuals does not now become the officers of the United States Navy.”31
Of course, one of the worst offenders was Halsey. Throughout the conflict, Halsey’s exhortation to “kill more Jap bastards” was among the milder of his racially charged rants. Like Patton on land in the European Theater, Halsey made too many public relations gaffes simply by being himself. When asked earlier in the spring if the emperor’s palace was a military objective, Halsey said no, but then in a moment of what even Halsey admitted was “thoughtless flippancy,” he rushed on to say, “I’d hate to have them kill Hirohito’s white horse, because I want to ride it.”32
Innocuous as that may have sounded to some, the sanctity of the emperor to the Japanese people weighed heavily on Nimitz’s mind. Riding a horse reserved only for the emperor was just the sort of degradation of the emperor’s position that Nimitz hoped to avoid when he and MacArthur were relying on Japanese subservience to the emperor to effect a bloodless occupation.
The Admirals Page 48