The race to build bigger, faster, and more powerful battleships—particularly between Great Britain and Germany—had fueled the competition that had erupted into global war. Now, in its aftermath, battleships were still the queens of the seas, but their supremacy, which Theodore Roosevelt had trumpeted with the Great White Fleet, had been called into question.
Of the foursome who would sit atop the U.S. Navy twenty years later, it was the senior member, William D. Leahy, who clung to the power of battleships the longest. In part, this was because Leahy was the oldest of the quartet and his Naval Academy indoctrination in these ships had been honed by the Oregon’s rush around Cape Horn and subsequent Spanish-American War victories. It may also have been that of the four, Leahy saw the least direct action during World War I—not for lack of trying—and hence had less exposure to the emerging power of submarines and aircraft.
In 1916, Leahy was ordered to take the Dolphin to the Caribbean. For a year, he shuttled among its islands, monitoring a revolution in Haiti, assisting in the U.S. acquisition of the Virgin Islands from Denmark, and keeping tabs on suspected German raiders. By the time he was recalled and assigned to the Nevada as its executive officer, the battleship was bound not for the wartime North Atlantic, but for an extended overhaul in dry dock.
Leahy pleaded with his superiors to get him into the action, and he was finally allowed to make one crossing of the Atlantic as captain of the transport Princess Matoika—a former German liner. He returned to Great Britain and France a second time in July 1918 to observe naval gunnery before reporting to Washington as director of gunnery and engineering exercises. Leahy’s gunnery expertise—now extending over a twenty-year career—was well recognized, and it reinforced his views as a proponent of battleships. And battleships, despite the growing awareness of submarines and airpower, were still very much on the minds of the U.S. naval command, especially when it came to the question of what would happen to defeated Germany’s fleet.1
In the armistice terms ending hostilities, the Allies demanded the immediate surrender of a sizable portion of the German fleet. Ten battleships, six battle cruisers, and six light cruisers that Germany had dared not risk after the Battle of Jutland were unceremoniously steamed to the sprawling British naval base at Scapa Flow on the northern tip of Scotland. There they dropped anchor and waited. Germany also turned over fifty destroyers and all its submarines to the British.
The Germans considered these ships temporary hostages to ensure their good behavior until a peace treaty could be negotiated. In fact, Great Britain and France had no intention of ever releasing the ships, a point brought home when the subsequent Treaty of Versailles mandated that the German navy also deliver an additional eight battleships, eight light cruisers, forty-two destroyers, and a bevy of torpedo boats. Henceforth, according to the Versailles terms, Germany was to float no more than six aging predreadnoughts, six light cruisers, and a dozen each of destroyers and torpedo boats. For all practical purposes, the German navy would cease to exist.
This rankled Germany to its core, but nowhere did the terms fall more heavily than on the captains of the German ships anchored in Scapa Flow. Had this outcome been foreseen, they might well have chosen initially to fight their way into Scapa Flow with all guns blazing. Now their only real recourse was to deprive the Allies of their ships.
At 11:15 a.m. on June 21, 1919, while the majority of the British fleet was out of the harbor on maneuvers, a prearranged signal fluttered up the mast of the light cruiser Emden. “Paragraph eleven, confirm,” it read innocuously, but every captain in the impounded German fleet knew that this was the order to open all sea cocks and scuttle their ships. Before the remaining British ships on station could intervene, the German vessels settled into the deep waters of Scapa Flow and, save for a grim collection of masts, vanished from sight. Four hundred thousand tons of naval might went down without a fight.
At first, there was a good deal of Allied outrage at this clandestine maneuver. They had clearly been deprived of the spoils of war. But on closer examination, some in Allied councils held that the Germans had actually done them a favor. Dividing the captured vessels among the victors would likely have led to considerable bickering, and even if the United States and Great Britain had gotten the lion’s share, assimilating four or five additional battleships with different armaments and machinery into their fleets would have been problematic and promised nothing but continuing headaches.
On the other hand, the Germans could not be allowed to retain such a potent force—the country may well have been defeated, but the largely unscathed navy certainly had not been. Sinking the German fleet solved both these problems, and the fact that the Germans had done it themselves made it all the more palatable.2
With the disposition of the German fleet a nonissue, the remaining naval powers pondered what would happen next. For a short time, it appeared that the United States might lead a naval rearmament race for which neither Great Britain nor Japan had much appetite—the former because it was financially exhausted by the just-ended war and the latter because it wanted nothing more at this point than to consolidate its control over former German mandates in the Marianas, Caroline, and Marshall Islands. As a nominal member of the Allied powers, Japan had acquired these islands, minus Guam (in the Marianas), under the Treaty of Versailles.
But instead, when Republican Warren Harding’s isolationist administration came to power in 1920, it engineered an almost complete turnaround in foreign policy. These Republicans blocked Woodrow Wilson’s dream of a League of Nations, but not without having very decided views of their own as to how the postwar world should look.
Harding’s secretary of state, Charles Evans Hughes, soon issued a call for a disarmament conference among the World War I victors: the United States, Great Britain, Japan, France, and Italy. (The sixth power that had been considered a World War I ally was Russia, but it was deep in the throes of civil war, and its navy had yet to recover from Tsushima.)
Of these, Japan proved the most reluctant participant. It was no secret that there had been friction between Japan and the United States even before the Russo-Japanese War. But Japan could neither afford an arms race with the United States nor risk losing its hard-won status as a first-rate power should it decline to attend. Consequently, representatives of these five countries met in Washington on November 12, 1921, to craft a new world order based on limited naval might.
Laying the entire American disarmament proposal on the table at the start, Hughes suggested limiting future capital ship construction and scrapping certain existing vessels, to result in a 5:5:3 ratio among the United States, Great Britain, and Japan. The eventual aim was to stabilize the world’s navies at a total tonnage of 500,000 tons each for the United States and Great Britain; 300,000 tons for Japan; and 175,000 tons each for France and Italy. Among the key provisions, all signatories would honor a ten-year moratorium on building capital ships; total aircraft carrier tonnages would be limited by similar ratios; and no capital ships would exceed 35,000 tons or carry armaments larger than 16-inch guns.
When the treaty was completed, its fine print provided a number of exceptions. The British were allowed to complete the 45,000-ton battleship Hood, which for nearly two decades was the largest warship afloat. Japan could complete the 43,000-ton Mutsu, in return. The principal U.S. exception allowed for the completion of the 33,000-ton aircraft carriers Lexington and Saratoga, even though they were over the prescribed 27,000-ton carrier limit.
Significantly, an American proposal to extend the 5:5:3 ratio from battleships down to cruisers and lesser vessels failed because both Great Britain and Japan were well ahead of the United States in existing cruisers. Likewise, Great Britain’s distaste for the horrors wrought by German submarines prompted it to attempt to limit their use against merchant ships, but France refused to ratify the provision.
That left the nonfortification clause of the proposed treaty, which was aimed squarely at the broad reaches of the Pacific. Beyond what Japan might do in its home islands and the United States in Hawaii, the signatories agreed not to fortify bases on their island possessions, including such American linchpins as Wake, Guam, and, most important of all, the Philippines.
The U.S. Navy high command was furious about this decision. Just because the United States had not done much to fortify these territories in the quarter century since their acquisition in the Spanish-American War, it did not mean that the navy was willing to abrogate all pretense of their defense. Hughes and his supporters in Congress assumed that it was worth the risk, however, if it kept Japan from fortifying its newly acquired islands. A few years later, of course, Japan would do exactly that without regard for the Washington treaty.
So the Five-Power Naval Limitation Treaty was signed, and pacifists around the world hailed it as the start of a millennium of peace. But a closer look showed its disquieting downside. Although Great Britain, after two centuries of maritime supremacy, finally agreed to naval parity with the United States, future friction between these two countries seemed unlikely. The far bigger concern was how Japan’s actions might affect both British and American interests from Hong Kong to Manila, not to mention Australia and even India.
These concerns were well known and freely discussed. As early as 1917, Frederick McCormick published The Menace of Japan, and the same year as the Washington Conference, Walter B. Pitkin’s book asked, Must We Fight Japan? Ironically, Franklin D. Roosevelt was one of those voicing optimism about future relations with Japan. “Shall We Trust Japan?” Roosevelt asked rhetorically in a magazine article. Citing Japan’s willingness to join the Washington Conference and noting that there was “enough commercial room” in the Pacific “for both Japan and us well into the indefinite future,” Roosevelt answered his question in the affirmative.3
But with the benefit of hindsight, it can be argued that what the Washington Conference really did was tie the hands of the U.S. Navy for more than a decade and provide Japan with a closer ratio to American might than it would have enjoyed had the Americans embarked on a major naval buildup or, at the very least, not limited new ship construction. That was not, however, the domestic sentiment of the times, and Theodore Roosevelt no doubt rolled over in his grave at these limits on “his” navy.
Bill Leahy’s posting to Washington in 1918 as director of gunnery and engineering exercises prompted him and Louise to buy a house there. Young Bill was well into his teens and hoping to follow his father to the Naval Academy. Barely six months into the job, Leahy was asked to serve as chief of staff to the commander of the Pacific Fleet. It was the sort of operational experience Ernest King routinely coveted, but Leahy was personally relieved when the chief of naval operations vetoed the request and kept him in Washington. Even in the navy, one could take only so much moving about, and Leahy didn’t want to disrupt his family again so soon.4
Instead, Leahy, now a captain, made frequent trips to sea from his Washington base to observe target competitions and review the efficiency of gunnery departments. This put him squarely in the confrontation as Brigadier General Billy Mitchell of the Army Air Service stepped up claims that airpower was making battleships obsolete. The first field test of this assertion occurred in November 1920 when the navy preemptively decided to conduct its own tests with the aging, pre–Spanish-American War battleship Indiana. To its regret, it invited General Mitchell to witness the exercise.
Navy planes dropped dummy bombs from the air while relatively small six-hundred-pound bombs were remotely detonated at key points on and near the ship. Just what the correlation was between the simulated aerial attack and these static explosions was open to question. Certainly, Mitchell criticized the entire demonstration as a charade. But in a post-action report, Leahy defensively declared that the operation had demonstrated “the improbability of a modern battleship being either destroyed completely or put out of action by aerial bombs.”
The navy brass bristled further when General Mitchell disclosed these “confidential” tests to the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee and repeated both his criticisms and his boasts. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, who was on his way out with the rest of the Wilson administration, struck back and was quoted in the New York Times as saying that he “knew of no development of the World War or experiment since that would justify any conclusion that battleships were practically rendered useless by aircraft development.”5
Mitchell continued his attacks until the navy finally permitted him to plan a simulated search-and-destroy mission with dummy bombs against the obsolete battleship Iowa (BB-4), which was equipped as a radio-controlled target, as well as a live-fire exercise against the captured German battleship Ostfriesland. Mitchell declined to undertake the offered exercise against Iowa—the navy insisted it was because he was afraid his planes wouldn’t even be able to locate the moving ship—but he rushed to drop six 2,000-pound blockbusters in quick succession on the stationary Ostfriesland.
The battleship sank in just twenty-one minutes, and the navy cried foul, citing its agreement with Mitchell to conduct the attack slowly so that crews could assess the damage between strikes. The end result was that the navy claimed the sinking was inconclusive because the Ostfriesland was not under way and fighting back. Mitchell retorted that the result would have been even more spectacular if the battleship had been operational and carrying its normal complement of magazines and fuel. The interservice rivalry continued, but what stuck in the public’s mind was that no matter how he had done it, “Mitchell had sunk a battleship, as he claimed he could.”6
Bill Leahy stuck to his guns, both literally and figuratively, but some of his postwar assignments broadened his perspectives well beyond battleships. In addition to his gunnery and big ship expertise, his talents as a diligent and efficient staff officer were being recognized, as well as certain skills as a diplomat. He got his first direct taste of melding military might with diplomacy in the spring of 1921, when he was sent to Constantinople to take command of the cruiser St. Louis. The ship was an aging veteran whose chief purpose in the Turkish capital was diplomatic rather than militaristic.
Turkey was at war with Greece, and the harbor at Constantinople (soon to become Istanbul) was crowded with warships sent to observe the action, as well as to monitor any Russian ships or expatriates flowing out of the Black Sea. This Greco-Turkish war was largely a result of Greece, a nominal member of the Allied powers, trying to grab territory as the Ottoman Empire, a member of the defeated Central powers, was being dismembered—giving rise to the new republic of Turkey.
This was Leahy’s first post in which his diplomatic skills were at least as important as his naval ones. His overriding concern was to safeguard American interests—always a subjective standard—while remaining carefully neutral. The post also showed him the social side of diplomacy, something he would come to know intimately. “I find it a necessary part of my efforts to acquire information to attend many dinner dances and receptions at the residences of the diplomatic and military officials,” Leahy wrote. “These social affairs are invariably interesting because of the different antagonistic and friendly nationalities represented and because of the exchange of gossip and misinformation that can best be accomplished in a gathering that apparently has no official status.”7
Perhaps Leahy’s most lasting indoctrination into the delicate balance of diplomacy came one night when the watch on the U.S. destroyer Sturdevant picked up a teenage boy swimming toward the ship. He was Greek and obviously in a panic, having just escaped Turkish-held territory. If Leahy ordered him returned, the boy would almost certainly be shot as a spy. But keeping him risked a potentially explosive breach of neutrality. Leahy’s decision was to bring the lad aboard the St. Louis, dress him in sailor’s clothes, give him his first decent food in months, and then allow him to pose as a member of the crew. All hands embraced the ruse, and when a nervous Leahy later confessed his actions to his superior, the admiral advised him to forget all about it. Humanity, it seemed, had a role in diplomacy.8
When Leahy returned to the United States at the end of 1921, he should have been in line for a year at the Naval War College. It was an important step if he desired to attain flag rank, but instead he was ordered back to sea as the commanding officer of the minelayer Shawmut. He was also given additional duty as the commanding officer of Mine Squadron One. The positive aspect was that Leahy got his first experience commanding multiple ships. On the negative side, the command had him shuttling about the East Coast and the Caribbean on a host of minor assignments.
One particular duty in 1923, however, gave him another experience with naval aviation. His ships were detailed as lifeguard stations between Hampton Roads and the Canal Zone as a squadron of eighteen torpedo planes made a practice deployment. Every plane had some trouble en route, two turned back, and one was lost at sea. Leahy’s ships then shepherded a deployment of scout planes from Key West to the canal with similar results. Plane after plane experienced mechanical problems before limping into its destination.
Once in Panama, these aircraft joined in fleet maneuvers and were reported to have an operational radius of eight hundred miles. Leahy, in particular, found that to be a bad joke. He had seen naval aviation in operation and rescued a part of it from the waters of the Atlantic. If this was the best airpower could do, battleships did not have much to fear, despite Billy Mitchell’s theatrics.
As part of these exercises, the old battleship Iowa, still equipped with a radio-controlled device, was placed in Leahy’s charge as a target drone for live-fire exercises. The ship proved tougher than expected and outlasted the first day’s fire, taking 5-inch shells and three 14-inch shells in stride. The second day was different. The Mississippi opened up at fifteen thousand yards with armor-piercing shells. Its second salvo proved fatal, and the Iowa sank in fifty fathoms of water. Apparently, the lesson to some in the navy was that it still took a battleship to sink another battleship, although Leahy bemoaned, “There was something very sad about seeing the old veteran destroyed by the guns of its friends.”9
Shortly after these 1923 maneuvers, Leahy was assigned to the Bureau of Navigation as a detail officer, a post he would hold for three years. This meant that while the chief of the bureau made the major decisions on personnel assignments, Leahy was tasked with making sure that each ship had the proper complement of officers and that the officers themselves had the required mix of sea and shore duty, as well as school and practical experience. It was a time of reduced military spending and low nationwide military priorities. As one admiral put it, the navy was “laboring under economy run wild.”10
The assignment put the Leahys back in Washington and they took regular advantage of its cultural activities, particularly the theater and symphony. In both, Leahy preferred the classics and eschewed some of the wilder social exuberance and excesses of the by now Roaring Twenties. If the officer corps of the navy was itself rather conservative, Bill Leahy was decidedly more so.
Early the following year, by coincidence on the Leahys’ twentieth wedding anniversary, Woodrow Wilson died. He had become a broken and pitiful old man, but Leahy’s words in his diary were not charitable: “Thus ends the career of a man who had the greatest opportunity that has ever been presented in the cause of world peace, and who failed completely to take advantage of it.”11 Unbeknownst to him, the next time a man had a similar opportunity, Leahy would be at his side as one of his most trusted advisers.
Bill Leahy may have been a battleship man, but there was no question that Bill Halsey, now a commander, had become well established as a destroyer man. Like him, destroyers were small but tough, nimble yet hard-hitting. They had proved their worth in antisubmarine and convoy operations during the war, but their mobility and beefed-up arsenal of torpedoes also put them in the category of offensive weapons, particularly against slower and more ponderous battleships.
In the closing days of World War I, Halsey had returned to the United States to assume command of the newly commissioned destroyer Yarnall. One of the Wickes-class destroyers, with their distinctive four smokestacks, Yarnall was 314 feet long with a narrow beam of 31 feet that could slice through the waves at a top speed of 35 knots. The ship’s complement of 122 officers and crew manned batteries of four 4-inch and two 3-inch guns, but the offensive punch came from twelve torpedo tubes.
Halsey thought that taking his new ship to Europe as an escort for President Wilson’s voyage to the Paris Peace Conference would be the perfect shakedown cruise, and he volunteered Yarnall for the duty. The outbound leg went smoothly enough, but as Wilson preached and his counterparts procrastinated, the conference dragged on for months. Much to Halsey’s chagrin, Yarnall was reduced to ferry service in the English Channel and North Sea, shuttling servicemen between the continent and Britain.
When the destroyer finally returned to the United States in the summer of 1919, it was assigned to the newly formed Pacific Fleet. The destroyers were to be based at San Diego, and in addition to the Yarnall, Halsey was given command of a division of six destroyers. The overall commander, Destroyers, Pacific Fleet, was to be Rear Admiral Henry A. Wiley, one of Admiral Sims’s disciples, and Wiley was determined that his ships be models of efficiency and smartness no matter how relaxed the rest of the postwar navy was becoming. Wiley did the job so well that by the end of the admiral’s tour, Halsey claimed, “You could tell a destroyer man by the way he cocked his cap and walked down the street.”12
Wiley’s successor, Captain William V. Pratt, took this spit and polish to the next level. Pratt relentlessly drilled Admiral Sims’s mantra of teamwork and coordinated attacks into his skippers. As one naval veteran put it, “Devout destroyermen beamed with approval (and sometimes envy) upon the division of graceful destroyers: bones in their teeth, rooster tails churning astern, pirouetting in union with signal flags snapping in the breeze, plunging into steep seas and shaking green water from their forecastles—six commanding officers understanding one another perfectly, a brotherhood of proud and confident fighters and seamen.”13
Halsey’s squadron commander was the same F. T. Evans who had pushed Ernest King to close up formation in the Terry. Evans took Pratt’s tactics to the extreme and devised various attack formations that were executed not by fluttering signal flags but by whistle blasts. As Halsey recalled, “When a squadron of nineteen destroyers maneuvers by whistles—at night, blacked out, at 25 knots—it’s no place for ribbon clerks.”14
Halsey thrived on this sort of action, as did another destroyer skipper in Evans’s division, Lieutenant Commander Raymond A. Spruance. Four years Halsey’s junior in age and a 1907 graduate of Annapolis, Spruance was the opposite of Halsey in just about every way except for his love of destroyers. Halsey was boisterous and outgoing; Spruance was quiet and shy. Halsey piloted ships and later airplanes by the seat of his pants; Spruance was meticulous and calculating in every plan and every action. Halsey thrived on the public’s attention and courted it; Spruance shunned the spotlight and kept a very low profile. Halsey was the crashing wave, the rushing stream; Spruance was the epitome of the expression “Still waters run deep.”
Yet in these wild days of racing destroyers around the Pacific, these two men bonded and became best friends. Their wives and families did the same ashore. Fan Halsey and Margaret Spruance took to each other, and six-year-old William F. Halsey III found a playmate in six-year-old Edward Spruance. But here, too, they were opposites. The Halseys roared through life ashore with endless rounds of “boozy picnics, boisterous beach parties, and evening revels” that frequently left the Spruances awed and more often than not on the sidelines with studied self-restraint.15
In the spring of 1921, Halsey’s squadron of nineteen destroyers, including Spruance in command of the Aaron Ward, was ordered on war games that included a simulated torpedo attack on four battleships sortieing from Long Beach. Texas, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Idaho were on station there as concrete evidence that the United States would brook no Pacific interference from Japan. As the senior division commander, Halsey took charge of the “attacking” destroyers and found himself in control of the largest fleet of his career thus far.
Once the destroyers reached the starting point of the exercise, Halsey was free to operate as he saw fit. Accordingly, he split his command into two parallel columns about one thousand yards apart and led them toward the battleships at twenty-five knots, signaling as he did so for his ships to make smoke.
Captain Pratt was on the bridge next to Halsey as an observer. Pratt raised an eyebrow and asked, “What do you intend to do?”
“What’s the limit?” Halsey responded.
“The sky,” Pratt replied, evidently not fully appreciating Halsey’s competitive nature.
The two columns of destroyers rushed onward and intercepted the advancing line of battleships from both sides. As the destroyers fired their dummy torpedoes, they quickly turned away and ducked into the obscurity of the smoke screen. The battleships had hardly anticipated this close-in attack—and from both sides! But the problem in this simulation was that while the torpedoes indeed contained only dummy warheads, their compressed air–fuel mixture was itself subject to a lesser explosion if they struck their intended targets too early in their run. By the time Halsey’s trailing ships launched their torpedoes, the length of this run was down to only seven hundred yards.
One torpedo rammed Texas, and the resulting concussion from the compressed air explosion jarred the battleship’s engine room and blew out the circuit breakers for most of its electrical gear. Two or more torpedoes exploded close to the Mississippi’s propellers and mangled them. A similar hit on the New Mexico ruptured some plating and flooded the ship’s paint locker. Only Idaho stood unscathed. “In a minute and a half Halsey’s destroyers had done a million and a half dollars’ worth of damage” in a mock attack that should have been a rude wake-up call to the battleship admirals.
Instead, Pratt and Halsey were summoned aboard the flagship New Mexico and firmly told that in the next round, there would be no more close-in attacks. The destroyers must fire their dummy torpedoes from no less than five thousand yards. Thus handicapped, Halsey’s ships achieved only a few hits on the second day and the battleships were able to declare victory. Nonetheless, on returning to shore, the destroyers were greeted with a newspaper headline that blared, “Destroyers Decisively Defeat Battleships.”16
But once again, a generation of senior admirals, whose careers had been largely won and honed aboard battleships, ignored the prophetic results. Coming at it from two very different perspectives, Billy Mitchell and Bill Halsey had both demonstrated serious threats to battleship might. In the future, torpedoes stealthily fired from over and under the waves, and airborne assaults from carrier-based planes were to pose far more of a threat than an opponent’s 16-inch guns.