Nimitz tried to downplay Halsey’s boast, but newspapers seized on it, and soon a variety of equestrian gear—including a saddle complete with bridle, blanket, and lariat, from the Lions Club of Montrose, Colorado—began arriving in Halsey’s mail. His cabin on the Missouri “began to look like a tack room.” Even serious Raymond Spruance couldn’t avoid the issue. Spruance was asked during a late August press conference aboard the New Jersey if he thought Halsey would ride the white horse through Tokyo. “I can’t predict,” Spruance deadpanned, adding “and I also don’t know how long it has been since Halsey has ridden a white horse.”33
On August 29, Nimitz and his staff flew into Tokyo Bay on two PB2Y Coronado seaplanes and taxied up to the battleship South Dakota, which was to serve as his flagship. Halsey’s flagship, Missouri, was at anchor nearby. The next day, MacArthur landed at an airfield near Yokosuka. At the foot of the ramp to greet him was General Robert L. Eichelberger, whom MacArthur had once told in the dark days on New Guinea, “Go out there, Bob, and take Buna or don’t come back alive.” Now MacArthur grinned at him and said, “Bob, this is the payoff.”34
Douglas MacArthur had every reason to be smug. On the evening of the Japanese surrender announcement, President Truman had appointed MacArthur supreme commander of the Allied powers and had directed him to receive Japan’s formal surrender and oversee its occupation. To Nimitz and many of his naval brethren, this was a case of the army rushing to grab the glory after the sea-lanes had been secured by navy blood.
In truth, it had been a collaborative effort, and it was Secretary of the Navy Forrestal—always a navy champion, despite his infighting with King and Nimitz—who suggested that the ceremony take place on a ship and that if MacArthur was to sign as supreme Allied commander, Nimitz should sign for the United States. It helped to boost the navy’s heroes when Forrestal recommended Halsey’s Missouri—conveniently from Truman’s home state—as the location.35
The world would watch MacArthur preside, but Nimitz never wavered in his assertions about the role sea power had played in the conflict. Meeting with correspondents in his cabin on the South Dakota on the evening of August 29, Nimitz reminded them that the surrender had come about before any invasion had been necessary primarily because of sea power, “spearheaded by carrier-borne aircraft and an excellent, efficient submarine force.” And for all the awe of the atomic bomb, Nimitz maintained that sea power had made the bomb’s use possible by providing bases from which planes could carry it. “Without seapower,” the admiral concluded, “we could not have advanced at all.”36
The next day, Nimitz and Halsey went ashore and toured the naval base at Yokosuka. It was a mess. Nimitz expressed scorn and surprise that the Japanese had taken no precautions to have “the station in a proper state of cleanliness for the occupation.” During the tour, the Japanese automobile assigned for the occasion ran out of gas. Halsey never got to ride the emperor’s white horse—Nimitz undoubtedly saw to that—but that didn’t stop Halsey from venting his usual anger at his now vanquished foes. “Admiral Halsey’s remarks,” the New York Times reported, “were unprintable.”37
None of this kept Nimitz from his usual letter writing to Catherine and his children. He remained prolific and, as always, evidenced his keen sense of humor. On September 1, after paying a visit to MacArthur in the latter’s new headquarters in Yokohama, Nimitz wrote his daughter Kate, “In a few minutes I will go to call on Admiral Fraser, RN, on the Duke of York, anchored close by—partly on official business, partly because I like him, and mostly to get a Scotch and soda before dinner because our ships are dry.”38
But the big day was to be Sunday, September 2. Nimitz arrived on board the Missouri with plenty of time for reminiscing with Halsey. The bad weather of the past several days was clearing. Nimitz, who had figuratively stood by Halsey through Leyte and two typhoons, was now literally standing beside him as Douglas MacArthur strode up the gangplank. Nimitz saluted; MacArthur returned the salute and shook hands with Nimitz and then Halsey.
Nimitz gestured MacArthur in the direction of the surrender ceremonies but immediately realized that he was on the right. Strict protocol gave MacArthur that spot as the ranking officer. With a gentle pat on MacArthur’s left side, Nimitz steered the general to the right and deftly stepped to his left as they marched down the deck. Halsey followed. When they were assembled below a massive 16-inch turret with the representatives of the Allied powers and the cream of the American high command in the Pacific, a small launch pulled alongside bearing Japanese foreign minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and chief of the army general staff Yoshijiro Umezu.
MacArthur, who had so many times been theatrical in his actions, nonetheless always knew the power of understatement. His opening remarks were brief, powerful, and to the point. Having made them, he directed the representatives of Japan to sign the surrender documents. Then it was his turn. Using no less than six pens, MacArthur signed as supreme commander. It was arguably the pinnacle of his career, and—past arguments aside—he performed his duty with dignity and gratitude toward his navy comrades.
Nimitz chose only two pens for his signatures, one a gift from longtime friends and a reliable green Parker pen. Halsey and Rear Admiral Forrest Sherman, Nimitz’s deputy chief of staff, stood behind Nimitz as he did so. Newsreel footage shows Halsey and MacArthur exchanging whispered remarks. According to Halsey, MacArthur instructed him to start a massive flyover of 450 carrier planes. After all the Allied representatives had signed, MacArthur made a few concluding remarks and then intoned, “These proceedings are closed.”39
One obvious omission from the surrender ceremony was Raymond Spruance. MacArthur had invited him to attend, but Spruance had declined, saying that Nimitz had not ordered him to do so and that if Nimitz had wanted him aboard the Missouri, he would have ordered him to be there. Instead, Spruance spent September 2 on board his own flagship, New Jersey, off Okinawa. Since Nimitz and Spruance were and remained great friends, it is unreasonable to assign any personal snub or oversight to the absence of an order or invitation. It has been speculated that Nimitz may have been guarding against a worst-case scenario whereby some last-ditch Japanese attack decimated the Allied high command on the Missouri. The evidence is strong that there was no one Nimitz would have trusted more to lead renewed attacks against Japan than Spruance.40
Conversely, one of Nimitz’s admirals summoned to attend the surrender was reluctant to do so. “Slew” McCain was still highly miffed over his reassignment to the Veterans Administration in the wake of the second typhoon and didn’t want to linger, telling Halsey, “I want to get the hell out of here!” But Halsey would have none of it. “Maybe you do, but you’re not going,” he tartly replied. “You were commanding this task force when the war ended, and I’m making sure that history gets it straight.”
So McCain lined up in the front row on the Missouri to watch the surrender. “Thank God you made me stay, Bill!” he exclaimed to Halsey afterward. “You had better sense than I did.” Four days later, one day after his return to San Diego, McCain dropped dead of a heart attack.41
Nimitz wrote to Catherine on the afternoon of the surrender. “The big moment is over,” he told her, “and the Japs have signed the formal terms of surrender. Everything clicked in a minute by minute schedule and the ceremony started at exactly 9 am Tokyo time.”
But even in reporting this news of perhaps the greatest achievement of his life, Nimitz reverted to the personal between him and Catherine. He might well have said that their relationship was the greatest achievement of his life. “I was tremendously pleased (and surprised),” he now wrote her, “to receive your five letters of 23 and 24 Aug with enclosures—which were brought up from Guam by one of our officers who brought up important mail. This is rapid time—your 24 Aug letter written on my 25 Aug was only 7 days from Berkeley to Tokyo Bay.”
He included a schematic of deck positions on the Missouri and confessed to a certain amount of “nervous excitement” when it was his turn
to sign. “But I did sign in the correct places (one signer did not),” he assured her. “First copy signed with the Woo gift pen and second copy signed with my old green Parker pen.”42
The next day, Nimitz boarded his Coronado and flew back to Guam. Among his passengers was a young marine lieutenant who had been captured on Bataan and released from a Tokyo prison only four days before. It was typical of Nimitz to provide the lift. World War II was over, the boys were coming home, and perhaps Nimitz summed up the feelings of almost every American serviceman and servicewoman when he told Catherine that the marine was “about the happiest young man I ever saw.”43
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Measures of Men
In less than four years, the American navy had gone from the carnage of Battleship Row at Pearl Harbor to the largest and most powerful armada ever to sail the seas. It would have been difficult to forecast this day four years before, but in retrospect, three events in 1941 sealed the fate of the Axis powers: Germany’s headlong rush to self-destruction by invading Russia; the American-British alliance affirmed by the Roosevelt-Churchill conference at Argentia; and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which unified American sentiment as few other events could have done.
None of these occurrences, however, was as remarkable as the speed with which the Axis powers were reduced to ruin once the United States entered the war. During the 1,366 days between December 7, 1941, and September 2, 1945, the tremendous outpouring of America’s industrial might in ships, planes, tanks, and other armaments was matched only by the bravery and determination of the nation’s men and women. In the navy alone, the fleet grew from 790 vessels to 6,768, and its complement of officers, sailors, and marines swelled from 383,150 to 3,405,525. New construction increased active ship levels, net of losses, by 6 battleships, 21 fleet carriers, 70 escort carriers, 35 cruisers, 206 destroyers, 361 destroyer escorts, 120 submarines, 451 minesweepers, 1,104 patrol boats, and 3,604 amphibious and auxiliary craft.1
Despite the Japanese surrender ceremony being held on the deck of a battleship, the war had been a final curtain call for battleship admirals and their revered gray behemoths. Stately and magnificent though they were, the battleships had been eclipsed by aircraft carriers and submarines as omnipotent offensive weapons. Never again would navies come at one another with 16-inch guns blazing.
Throughout most of their careers, King, Nimitz, and Halsey had been on the cutting edge of the developing innovations in naval aviation and undersea warfare. And while Leahy dragged his black shoes for years over the battleship’s increased vulnerabilities, he came to embrace these newer weapons as essential to achieving the wartime goals he oversaw from the president’s right hand. Naval aviation and America’s submarine force would continue their ascension as both spear point and deterrent, but for the fleet admirals, September 2, 1945, was the apex of their careers.
America’s five-star admirals met their postwar futures with varying outlooks. Citing “the capitulation of Japan and the cessation of hostilities throughout the world,” Halsey asked for immediate retirement. “When you leave the Pacific, Bill,” MacArthur supposedly told him, “it becomes just another damned ocean!” Nimitz approved Halsey’s retirement request with an endorsement that asserted, “It will be difficult—if not impossible—to overestimate the value of Admiral Halsey’s splendid service to our country.”2
But that would have been too hasty an exit for one of America’s most well-known heroes. In December 1945, within a week of his retirement, President Truman recalled Halsey to active duty and promoted him to the fourth set of fleet admiral stars so many felt he deserved. The following April, Congress made the ranks of all eight five-star generals and admirals permanent and assigned them to active duty for life, in part to provide continuing compensation greater than their pensions.
Halsey teamed up with Joseph Bryan III, who had served in the Southwest Pacific, to write the admiral’s memoirs. These first appeared as an eight-part installment in the Saturday Evening Post and then in book form as Admiral Halsey’s Story. Halsey proved his loyalty by continuing to stand by his friend Husband Kimmel over Pearl Harbor, but the battle that wouldn’t die was Leyte Gulf. Halsey stood his ground and took on all comers, citing the divided commands between the Third and Seventh Fleets, Kinkaid’s supposed lack of aggressiveness in guarding San Bernardino Strait, and Nimitz’s grant of discretion in destroying the Japanese fleet. None of this, however, could erase the perception—no matter how successful the overall American results—that Halsey had been lured north by the Japanese, as postwar Japanese records made clear was indeed their intent.
On the personal side, Halsey quickly grew bored. A fund-raising post with the University of Virginia, which he had attended for one pre-Annapolis year, was unfulfilling. He served on the board of directors of the Carlisle Tire and Rubber Company, and later of ITT, but his duties were largely limited to those of a resident celebrity. Finally, there was Fan. The great love affair they had shared for years had crumbled during the war with Fan’s increasingly manic-depressive condition. By 1950, Halsey had settled in New York, while Fan lived in California near their son, eventually entering a nursing home.
Halsey experienced what to varying degrees Nimitz, King, and Leahy all experienced—a severe letdown from the high-stress rush of complicated combat commands to a mundane life of occasional speeches and parades. Other than the continuing controversies over his actions off Leyte, there were few poignant moments in Halsey’s last years. Once again assuming a fund-raising chairmanship, he tried in vain to save the vaunted Enterprise as a museum and memorial, but pleas for funds and designation as a national shrine came up short. In August 1958, the carrier was towed to the scrap yard.
About that same time, Robert Montgomery began production of a movie based on Halsey’s role in the critical weeks of the Guadalcanal campaign. Eventually called The Gallant Hours, it starred James Cagney, looking uncannily like the wartime Halsey. But Halsey did not live to see its release. In August 1959, he vacationed, as he had several times before, at the country club on Fishers Island offshore Mystic, Connecticut. Sun and the surf suited the admiral, but on the morning of August 16, he failed to appear for breakfast. The club manager found him alone in his room, dead at seventy-six from an apparent heart attack. Only weeks before, Halsey had taken yet another naval historian to task for second-guessing his actions at Leyte.
Halsey’s body was flown by helicopter to Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, New York, and then by plane to Washington, D.C. After lying in state in the National Cathedral’s Bethlehem Chapel and a service on August 20, the state funeral procession of horse-drawn caisson and flag-draped casket made its way across the river to Arlington National Cemetery. Halsey was buried near his parents on the side of a knoll below the Custis-Lee Mansion, looking eastward to Washington. Chester Nimitz, representing President Eisenhower, stood at the head of the casket as it was lowered into the ground to a nineteen-gun salute, three rifle volleys, and taps.3
The only fleet admiral unhappier in retirement than Halsey was King. The autumn of 1945 passed, in King’s words, “with the burdensome and somewhat tedious process of demobilization.” King’s turf battles with Forrestal also came to a head. The post of commander in chief, U.S. Fleet (COMINCH), was abolished, and as the newly defined CNO, King stepped into the role that was now legally the naval equivalent of what Marshall had been on the army side and King had already been de facto—the nation’s top sailor.
High on the list of King’s differences with Forrestal was King’s wish that Nimitz succeed him as CNO. Nimitz was eager for the job, and King—though he still considered Nimitz somewhat of a “fixer”—nonetheless saw it as a way to reward Nimitz for his stalwart service. Marshall was doing the same by stepping down in favor of Eisenhower and King may also have privately thought that if the hero of Europe was filling Marshall’s shoes, the hero of the Pacific should fill his. Forrestal’s preferred candidate was Admiral Richard S. Edwards, most recently King’s dep
uty as both COMINCH and CNO. Edwards was clearly qualified, and Forrestal most likely preferred his easygoing manner and subservience to Nimitz’s independent streak.
Finally, King forced Forrestal’s hand by writing to Truman via Forrestal, asking the secretary within the letter to hand it to the president. King requested that Nimitz relieve him. Forrestal delivered the letter, and Truman agreed to the appointment. But Forrestal showed his authority by limiting Nimitz’s tenure in office to two years instead of the traditional four and expediting the change of command.
King, conscious of history as he always was, had wanted to stay in office at least until December 17, the five-year anniversary of his return to sea duty with the Atlantic force, or December 30, the fourth anniversary of his appointment as COMINCH. King was also hoping to get Nimitz some well-deserved leave by making the change in January 1946. Instead, Forrestal picked a December 15 date, knowing full well the other considerations. In typical fashion, King did not ask the secretary to change the date because he “would not give [Forrestal] the opportunity to turn him down.”4
Among the accolades that celebrated King’s retirement and his service was a gold star in lieu of a third Distinguished Service Medal from President Truman; honorary degrees from Northwestern, Princeton, and Oxford; and an elaborate scroll befitting a king from the admiral’s circle of regular newspaper correspondents. Even the British chiefs of staff, failing to mention the many turf battles and King’s dogged devotion to the Pacific campaign, nevertheless went out of their way to praise his keen insight and “breadth of vision and unshakeable determination to secure the defeat of our enemies in the shortest possible time.”5
By the following year, King was at work on what he hoped would be his account of the international conferences in which he had participated as a member of the Combined Chiefs of Staff. Walter Muir Whitehill, a Naval Reserve officer who had been instrumental in preparing King’s wartime annual reports to the secretary of the navy, soon proposed a biography. King’s conference memoirs and Whitehill’s planned biography merged, particularly after King suffered the first of a number of strokes in 1947. Fleet Admiral King: A Naval Record was published in 1952 in the third person with King and Whitehill as coauthors, but it is King’s voice, transcribed by Whitehill from dozens of interviews, that resounds from its pages.
The Admirals Page 49