Although the reasons for integrating the Navy were compelling, by mid-December 1943, Secretary Knox had made his decision: the Navy would make no significant changes to its policies. The seamen of Port Chicago knew nothing of the Navy’s deliberations. What they did know was that they were being asked to handle more tonnage with a shorter turnaround time. To cope with the new schedule, Great Lakes delivered another 183 men, bringing Port Chicago’s number of black enlisted men to 706 by late December.
The Navy Bureau of Ordnance expected that these men would be trained. “Stevedoring,” it said, “requires special technical knowledge … owing to the hazards involved.” However, because Captain Goss was under the impression that loading depended “principally on common sense,” he put them into the holds and into boxcars, handling torpedoes and fragmentation bombs after nothing more than a lecture.
For the civil rights community, 1944 began with a bang. Secretary Knox, who had originally dismissed the idea of having black naval officers, bent to pressure from the NAACP, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Adlai Stevenson, then one of his assistants, and decided to allow sixteen men to become the first black American naval officers. In January the candidates entered Great Lakes for segregated training. But for the ammunition handlers of Port Chicago, Knox’s decision was more of a slap in the face than anything else. It was a symbolic gesture. Sixteen out of 100,000 black enlisted men would get a chance to do something meaningful in the Navy.
In January 1944, Captain Goss announced a new depot-wide goal of ten tons per hold per hour. In a Liberty ship with five cargo holds (three in the forward section of the ship and two in the aft), Goss’s target meant that the seamen were expected to load fifty tons per hour, or four hundred tons per eight-hour shift. Lieutenant James Tobin was alarmed by the demand. With basic cargo, fifty tons per hour was doable. Given the hazardous nature of the ammunition passing through the depot, however, Tobin was convinced that the mark was unobtainable. Lieutenant Herbert Woodland, head officer of the 3rd Division, and later also assistant educational officer, believed, too, that the new mark was risky. In his opinion, most of Port Chicago’s officers—many of them reserve officers unfamiliar with dangerous ordnance—were too inexperienced to teach what he considered incompetent work crews how to handle ammunition. As far as he was concerned, the Navy Bureau of Personnel had created a bad situation, which Captain Goss had made worse. From the perspective of the longshoremen’s union, Port Chicago was a catastrophe waiting to happen. Allegedly the union warned the Navy Bureau of Ordnance that none of the divisions at Port Chicago were up to the challenges of handling ammunition, and offered to send in experienced advisers. The bureau, however, chose to ignore the union’s offer.
That month Port Chicago received 403 railroad cars of freight and handled in excess of 23,000 tons of ordnance. Among the ships that docked at Port Chicago was the Navy’s workhorse, the USS Lassen, which was scheduled to return to the Central Pacific to replenish the 2,655 tons of shells American battleships had fired on Roi and Namur in the lead-up to the invasion of the Marshall Islands.
By February 1944, ordnance demands from the Southwest and Central Pacific had outstripped the capabilities of the country’s supply line. Shipments of ammunition from depots were seldom accomplished within a three-day margin of their projected arrival times. Delays complicated loading operations, tying up ships that were scheduled to take part in invasions. Last-minute deletions, substitutions, and additions to orders based on the needs of the fleet and ground troops also caused significant holdups. From a standpoint of safety, the biggest problem for Port Chicago was the buildup of unprotected ordnance. The depot was forced to keep more boxcars of explosives than it was set up to handle, a situation that flew in the face of critical Navy Ordnance and Coast Guard regulations designed to prevent the possibility of a traumatic explosion.
CHAPTER 17
Ernie King’s Beloved Ocean (the Strategic Picture)
In 1921 a Marine staff officer by the name of Major Earl “Pete” Ellis made an ominous forecast: the assignment of Germany’s former island colonies in the Central Pacific to Japan under the League of Nations mandate would one day make war in the Pacific inevitable. Over two decades later Ellis’s prediction came true.
Ellis, however, was not just a doomsayer. After studying islands and distances, he expanded on a plan by the Naval War College (War Plan Orange) and established a groundbreaking blueprint—Operation Plan 712, Advanced Base Operations in Micronesia—for defeating Japan. Twenty-three years later the Navy’s drive across the Central Pacific followed the essential details of his plan.
Despite Ellis’s prescription for success, the invasion of the Central Pacific never would have happened without the persistence and vision of Admiral Ernest King, Commander-in-Chief, United States Fleet and Chief of Naval Operations. The Central Pacific, the blue-water highway to Tokyo, was his baby.
The centerpiece of Admiral King’s plan was the Mariana Islands, a chain of fourteen volcanic islands, including Saipan, Guam, and Tinian, most of which were uninhabited, situated north of the island of New Guinea and south of Japan in the Philippine Sea. Ellis had excluded the Marianas from his proposal, but King believed that they were the key to ultimate victory in the Central Pacific. Other islands would come first, but upon seizing the Marianas, the United States could either starve Japan by isolating it from its resource base in the Southwest Pacific or threaten Japan directly with aircraft carriers, long-range submarines, and bombers. With a range of 3,500 miles, and a bomb capacity in excess of four tons, the heavily armed B-29 was America’s newest and mightiest weapon. By turning the Marianas into giant air bases, the U.S. could send bomber crews to the home islands of Japan, only 1300 miles away, and possibly put a quick end to the war.
Admiral Ernest King’s year-long campaign to get the Joint Chiefs of Staff to recognize the strategic validity of the Central Pacific campaign began in Morocco in early 1943. The first of many top-secret conferences, during what journalists called the “Year of the Conference,” this one took place in the French colonial city of Casablanca. For King and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and their British counterparts, Casablanca kicked off a year of horse-trading, arm-twisting, and compromise in which tempers frequently spilled out of the well-appointed meeting rooms.
In the conference room, King warned against allowing Japan to consolidate its conquests. Using rough graphs to show that the Allies had directed only 15 percent of all resources in money, manpower, and weapons to the Pacific war, he lobbied for greater resources. He proposed a 15-percent increase, which, though modest, would support a series of campaigns designed to illustrate Allied resolve in the Pacific.
King irked the Brits. They found him hot-tempered and singularly absorbed with war against Japan. British general Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff and the top military man in England, insisted that for King “the European war was just a great nuisance that kept him from waging his Pacific war undisturbed.” Prime Minister Churchill called the Central Pacific “Ernie King’s beloved ocean.”
President Roosevelt, however, regarded King as the “shrewdest of strategists,” and a man of extreme competence. After the debacle at Pearl Harbor, he knew that the admiral was the only person who could rebuild the Navy. Secretary Frank Knox agreed. Giving him powers that no other chief of naval operations had ever enjoyed—King was the most powerful naval officer in the history of the country—the executive order that Roosevelt issued made King responsible only to the president.
Reluctantly the British delegates listened to King, though Churchill and his advisers had no intention of giving much ground. Ultimately, however, they made a small though ambiguous concession to the admiral. They prepared a brief compromise document, which the Brits hoped might temporarily placate King. “Operations in the Pacific and Far East,” the document said, “shall continue with the forces allocated, with the objective of maintaining pressure on Japan, retaining the initiative and attaining a position of readiness for a
full-scale offensive against Japan by the United Nations as soon as Germany is defeated.”
In early February 1943, King flew west to San Francisco to meet with Admiral Nimitz, the commander of his Pacific Fleet. Satisfied with his minor victory at Casablanca, King and Nimitz sat down to fashion a plan for the Central Pacific. Nimitz, too, had good news to share. Intelligence reports indicated that the Japanese had abandoned the southern Solomons, and after a battle as savage as the one fought by the Marines at Guadalcanal, MacArthur’s troops had defeated Japanese Imperial forces on New Guinea’s Papuan Peninsula. Both leaders knew, though, that the Japanese would not rest. Nimitz suspected that already they were planning another attack—on Samoa, perhaps—in order to sever the Allied supply line to the South Pacific. It was not hard to convince King; he had been warning against this threat since the early days of 1941. Though King, as always, wanted to “keep pressure on the Japs,” Nimitz cautioned him. A Central Pacific push was ill-advised until war production was at full capacity and they had the ships—and forces—to pull if off.
Several weeks after returning from California, King penned a letter to Roosevelt. King’s memorandum to the president again emphasized the importance of securing the lines of communication between the West Coast of the United States and Australia by way of Samoa, Fiji, and New Caledonia. King added that it was essential to protect Australia and New Zealand because they were “white man’s countries.” Losing them would provide the “non-white races of the world” enormous encouragement. King concluded his “integrated, general plan of operations” with three directives: “Hold Hawaii; support Australasia; drive northwestward from New Hebrides.”
Not long after Roosevelt received the admiral’s memo, Churchill and more than one hundred advisers and staff members arrived in New York aboard the Queen Mary for a series of meetings to be held in Washington. Hard-nosed bargaining marked the conference.
On May 21, 1943, more than a week into the Washington conference, dubbed “Trident,” King announced his plan to split the Japanese line of communications, separating the home islands from Japan’s southern resource colonies. He proposed to starve the Japanese into submission. The key to doing this, he informed the Brits, were the Marianas. By capturing the islands, especially Saipan, the Allies could cut off Japan’s access to its raw materials in the Southwest Pacific and isolate the Carolines and the great base at Truk. They could then move forces westward into the Philippines and China or northwestward into Japan. The offensive, King speculated, might even compel the Japanese navy to challenge the Allies to the decisive naval battle that he wanted. His ideas, King explained, were not novel. The Naval War College had developed them decades earlier, and most naval officers regarded them as articles of faith.
Predictably, the Brits balked at committing to anything that authorized in writing an offensive campaign in the Central Pacific. King’s temper flared more than usual when American general Richard Sutherland, MacArthur’s chief of staff, seemed to have persuaded the Combined Chiefs that King’s plan would constitute a series of “hazardous amphibious frontal attacks against islands of limited value,” and that its reliance on carrier-based aircraft operating far from their sources of fuel and ammunition made it unworkable. Seizing the opportunity, Sutherland again argued that the best line of approach, which could make use of Australia as a war base and could be supported by a large reserve of land-based aircraft, was from New Guinea to Mindanao. However, when the Combined Chiefs took the time to study the Army plan in detail, realizing that it would require thirteen new combat divisions and nearly two thousand planes along with landing craft and naval support ships, a colossal undertaking, they cooled. Sutherland’s request far exceeded American capacity.
In the end, Trident gave formal agreement to a series of compromises whereby Roosevelt and his commanders agreed to eliminate Italy from the war in return for a firm date—spring 1944—on Marshall’s coveted cross-Channel invasion. The other British concession, “Strategic Plan for the Defeat of Japan,” formalized the Allied commitment to the Pacific, giving King the green light for his long-sought invasion of the Central Pacific. The caveat? The Combined Chiefs would have final say over the offensive, and King would have to agree to seize the Gilberts before the Marshalls. Nevertheless, King emerged victorious. He had come to the conference intent on establishing the necessity of a “master plan” for the Pacific, and the British had conceded.
In August 1943, five months after Trident, the Combined Chiefs assembled again for the year’s third major conference—Quadrant—held in Quebec. Much had transpired during the months leading up to Quadrant. The Allies had captured Sicily, the Italian government had overthrown Mussolini and was threatening to leave the Axis, the Red Army had crushed Germany’s last strategic offensive in the east at Kursk, American offensives in New Guinea and the Solomons had gained considerable momentum, and the 7th Infantry Division had recaptured Attu in the Aleutian islands of Alaska. Little, though, had changed between King and the British. King hammered at old themes—more resources for the Pacific theater and the need for a broad strategy—and the British, again, resisted. Undeterred, King reiterated his plan for the Central Pacific, underlining the importance of the Marianas. Its loss, King said, would constitute an enormous strategic and psychic blow for Japan. For the second time, King outlined a scenario in which the Japanese Combined Fleet would be compelled to challenge the U.S. Navy, which with its new Essex-class carriers and F6F Hellcats, would have the chance to administer what might be the final blow to the Japanese.
What also emerged at Quadrant was King’s growing support for MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific initiative. King explained that he now saw the wisdom of a dual offensive, stretching Japan’s defenses and its fuel-starved Imperial Navy to the breaking point. By virtue of their stunning early war victories and an empire that now stretched over one sixth of the earth’s surface, the Japanese were especially vulnerable to this two-pronged strategy. King called it the “whipsaw plan,” and was convinced that it would keep enemy intelligence wondering where the next American blow would come. MacArthur, however, opposed King throughout the second half of 1943 (and the early months of 1944), and continued to try to make the case for supreme command of the Pacific theater and a single offensive led by the Army.
Ultimately it was President Roosevelt, in consultation with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who declared that the offensive would be two-pronged and simultaneous, with two separate commanders: MacArthur would fight his way across New Guinea and toward the Philippines while Admiral Chester Nimitz, King’s commander-in-chief for Allied air, land, and sea forces in the Pacific Ocean, slashed and pounded across the Central Pacific, capturing tactically important islands, en route to the innermost reaches of the Japanese empire. At the Cairo-Teheran conferences in late November and early December 1943, the Combined Chiefs gave formal approval to the two routes in a master plan titled “Specific Operations for the Defeat of Japan, 1944.”
MacArthur, who did not attend the conference, electing instead to send Sutherland, was furious at the outcome. The Central Pacific, Sutherland had argued, should be abandoned for three reasons: it could be carried out only by massive and costly amphibious operations; it relied too much on carrier-based aviation; and finally, because of the distances involved, the Central Pacific offensive would involve an agonizingly slow series of stops and starts. MacArthur’s proposal called instead for Nimitz, after taking the Marshalls, to assist the general’s forces in pushing on to Mindanao.
In another blow to MacArthur, the Combined Chiefs not only gave their approval to the Central Pacific offensive, but gave seizure of the Marshalls, Carolines, Palaus, and Marianas priority in scheduling and resources. “Due weight,” the Chiefs said, “should be accorded to the fact that operations in the Central Pacific promise a more rapid advance toward Japan and her vital lines of communication, the earlier acquisition of strategic air bases closer to the Japanese homeland and are more likely to precipitate a decisive engagement w
ith the Japanese fleet.” Based on this decision Nimitz sketched out a tentative timetable for the drive across the Central Pacific: Kwajalein would be invaded on January 31, 1944, Eniwetok on May 1, Truk on August 15, and Saipan, Tinian, and Guam on November 15.
By committing U.S. forces to a two-pronged war in the Pacific, Admiral Nimitz knew that he would be placing enormous pressure on American industry. To outproduce Japan (and Germany, too), the country’s war effort would have to reach unprecedented new heights. Dockyards, working round the clock, would be called upon to assemble a steady stream of submarines; amphibious vehicles; large new destroyers; Independence-class light carriers; fast, well-armed Essex-class carriers, capable of hauling eighty to one hundred aircraft and over three thousand men; and cargo ships. Factories would be ordered to churn out planes and tanks. Arsenals would have to produce huge amounts of ordnance, which West Coast ammunition depots, like Port Chicago, would have to load onto Liberty, Victory, and Navy ships speeding for the Pacific.
In late September 1943, not long after the Quebec conference, Emperor Hirohito met at his Imperial Council Chambers in Tokyo with his prime minister, Hideki Tojo, his chief of the Naval General Staff, Admiral Osami Nagano, his commander of the Imperial Combined Fleet, Admiral Mineichi Koga, and Baron Yoshimichi Hara, president of the Imperial Privy Council. Although much of Japan was under the illusion that Japanese forces continued to score significant victories, these five men knew the reality of their country’s military situation: the tide in the Pacific was turning against them. Soon large numbers of American ground, air, and naval reinforcements would arrive in the Pacific to challenge the Japanese empire.
The Color of War Page 13