William D. Leahy’s tenure as governor of Puerto Rico was a temporary assignment. To be sure, the island was central to the defense of the Caribbean in the event of war, and it was doubly certain that the defense of the Panama Canal would be of great importance. But Franklin Roosevelt seems to have had a broader plan for Leahy even as Bill and Louise sailed to the island in early September 1939.
The war of which FDR had spoken had come to pass much more quickly than expected, even if the United States was not yet in it. On September 1, having already used ominous threats to gobble up Austria and Czechoslovakia, Adolf Hitler unleashed his airplanes and tanks against Poland. Great Britain and France responded by declaring war on Germany. A week later, Roosevelt proclaimed a limited national emergency in the United States and authorized a call-up of reserves.
The burden of preparing for an ever-increasing global role fell particularly hard on the navy’s Bureau of Navigation and its new chief, Rear Admiral Chester W. Nimitz. After his term as assistant chief ended in 1938, Nimitz received his first stars and went to sea in command of a cruiser division. But he had barely reported when a hernia repair caused him to lose a month ashore. Nimitz—never one to be inactive—fretted that he would lose his cruiser command because of it. He did, but when he reported back for duty, he was appointed commander of a battleship division instead.
Nimitz thought he was in his element aboard his flagship, the Arizona. The last battleship to be commissioned prior to the American entry into World War I, Arizona mounted twelve 14-inch guns in two turrets fore and two turrets aft. At 31,400 tons, the 608-foot-long ship was capable of 21 knots—like most battleships of that era, a beefy platform for armaments but not a speedy one. Nimitz threw himself into the task of commanding his division and followed his usual practice of being interested in how well men did their jobs, whether a captain or a mess steward.
As it turned out, Nimitz’s real element was not in the giant ships he loved so much, but in managing men. Through his NROTC classes, his commands at sea, and his tour as assistant chief at BuNav, Nimitz had come to know so many so well and, understanding the needs of the fleet as he did, he had an uncanny ability to put the right man in the right job. Thus, while he professed disappointment at having his sea cruise as commander, Battleship Division One, cut short, few were surprised when Nimitz was called ashore to become chief of the Bureau of Navigation in the spring of 1939.
Admiral Claude Bloch, commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet, regretted to see him leave. “While the Navy Department gains in this transaction,” Bloch told Nimitz, “I feel that the fleet loses heavily and in as much as my activities are centered in the fleet I am very sorry to see you go… You have a big job on your hands in the Bureau of Navigation. Those who are dissatisfied by reason of not having been promoted are growing in numbers and strength and it is my conviction that your ingenuity and cleverness both are going to be taxed to the utmost.”1
As he disembarked from the Arizona, Nimitz received another unexpected note of remembrance and prophesy. Miller Reese Hutchison, a member of Thomas Edison’s team of inventors and himself the principal inventor of the first electrical hearing aid, sent Nimitz his congratulations on his new post and remembered two visits Nimitz had made as a young officer to the Edison lab in 1914. “Hutch” now recalled Thomas Edison saying, “Lieutenant Nimitz possesses more brains and is more practical, in my estimation, than any of the young Officers who have visited us. I predict he will, some day, be filling Admiral Dewey’s shoes. There is no foolishness about him. He wants to know and is successful in getting all the facts.” Hutchison closed his letter by saying, “Mr. Edison’s prediction is, I believe, very close to fruition.”2
Among Nimitz’s early responsibilities at BuNav was telling Admiral Bloch that when his tour with the fleet was completed in January 1940, he would be assigned to his final post as commandant of the Fourteenth Naval District. The United States and its territories and possessions were divided into fifteen such districts, and their command involved all-inclusive supervision of shore installations, coastlines, and sea-lanes. “Whether this is important duty or not,” Bloch responded to Nimitz, “hinges on circumstances; it may turn out to be very important or, on the other hand, it may turn out to be quite different.”3 The headquarters of the Fourteenth Naval District was in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Bloch’s replacement as commander in chief, U.S. Fleet, was to be James O. Richardson, Annapolis class of 1902, a year behind King and known by his academy nickname of “J.O.” or “JO.” Born in Paris, Texas, in the extreme northeast corner of the state, Richardson was a big-gun admiral who had served on destroyers, been the first captain of the cruiser Augusta, and commanded the Battle Force. While in Washington, he had gotten plenty of staff exposure as assistant to the chief of BuOrd, assistant CNO, and Nimitz’s immediate predecessor at BuNav. Richardson’s most important task as commander in chief was to deploy the fleet to Hawaii for its 1940 maneuvers. To his surprise and displeasure, he would be ordered to keep it there.
Nimitz’s other duties were numerous and time-consuming. Roosevelt’s declaration of a limited national emergency included a call-up of reserves on a voluntary basis, but that was only the beginning. The universities offering NROTC had increased from six when Nimitz first went to Cal Berkeley to twenty-seven. Congress increased the enrollment at Annapolis by giving five appointments to each congressman and senator instead of four, and the academy’s course was temporarily reduced from four years to three. The naval training stations at San Diego, Norfolk, Newport, and the Great Lakes were enlarged, and the basic training course for recruits was shortened from eight weeks to six. There was a rush about everything, and everything required more manpower.
By then, Chester and Catherine Nimitz had found an apartment at 2222 Q Street, where their two older daughters, Kate and Nancy, were also living. Nancy, at age twenty, was flaunting the intellectual and political freedom that was long her trademark, and her father patiently gave her plenty of rope. But one afternoon while the Nimitz family were guests of the secretary of the navy aboard the yacht Sequoia, the presidential yacht, Potomac, with presidential flag flying, came chugging from the opposite direction. All aboard the Sequoia hurried on deck to render respects, but Nancy groaned, “I don’t know whether I want to salute Roosevelt.” That was enough for her father. “Whether you salute Roosevelt or not is your own business,” Nimitz told his daughter, “but you are going to salute the President.”4
Predictably, Ernest J. King’s posting to the General Board had caused him particular anguish, and it only got worse. Suddenly, the world was going to war, and from all appearances, King was going into retirement. Some days, King was flat-out depressed, calling himself a “has-been.” Yet on other occasions, he bristled with his usual confidence and asserted to junior officers, “They’re not done with me yet.” In between these extremes, King refused to fall into the reflective ease embraced by many of his fellow admirals on the General Board. Instead, he embarked on another round of intense study on naval deployments and the world situation almost as if he were cramming for a final exam.5
In March 1940, King was suddenly assigned to accompany Acting Secretary of the Navy Charles Edison (the inventor’s son) on a tour of the Pacific Fleet. No one, including King, seemed to know just why he was delegated to accompany Edison, but since the suggestion apparently came from the president himself, it was not questioned. Admiral Richardson, in charge of the Pacific Fleet, “wondered what the hell I was doing there,” King recalled, “[but] I went along for the ride.”6
The benefit of the trip to King proved to be that Edison was impressed by his knowledge and talents and gave him free rein upon their return to Washington to oversee a thorough overhaul of antiaircraft batteries throughout the fleet. King cut through bureaucratic red tape with his usual lack of finesse and got the job done in record time. It was just the sort of jolt that Edison thought the entire navy needed to break out of a “peace-time psychology” and “throw off a routine state of mind.” Edison told Roosevelt that King had the leadership skills to force this needed transformation, and he urged King’s future appointment as commander in chief, U.S. Fleet, to replace Richardson.7
For his part, Roosevelt, despite having detailed King to Edison’s side for the Pacific trip, was mum. The inside scuttlebutt was that Roosevelt—he of the ritual afternoon happy hour—was among those who thought King drank too much. Instead, in September 1940 King was summoned to the office of the CNO, Admiral Harold R. Stark, to hear the offer of command of the Atlantic Squadron (subsequently briefly called the Patrol Force), then a rather inferior group of aging battleships and cruisers, since the bulk of the navy’s aircraft carriers and newer firepower was in the Pacific. Rear Admiral Chester Nimitz, as chief of the Bureau of Navigation, was on hand to deliver the bad news that if King took the appointment, he would have only his rear admiral rank, not the three stars of a vice admiral he had enjoyed when last at sea. King waved Nimitz aside. It didn’t matter, he said. He very much “wanted to go to sea,” and he readily accepted Stark’s offer.8
A number of King’s colleagues were stunned by the assignment. King of the carriers, King of the vaunting ambition, was taking what many considered a junior command—certainly a step down from his deferential, if less-than-useful position on the General Board. Nonetheless King prepared for the assignment with his usual gusto. Then a routine physical revealed that he, too, had a hernia that needed to be repaired before he was ready for sea. The month’s recuperation gave him plenty of time to think. Recognizing how well his tour with Acting Secretary Edison had gone, King volunteered to accompany Frank Knox, the newly appointed secretary of the navy, on an inspection tour of Caribbean bases and Atlantic Squadron maneuvers slated for just before King was to assume command.
Knox’s appointment as secretary of the navy was part of Franklin Roosevelt’s 1940 presidential election strategy to stifle Republican isolationism and win bipartisan support for the looming global conflict. Knox was a newspaper publisher from Chicago who had been the Republican vice presidential candidate on the ill-fated Alf Landon ticket of 1936. One might question his specific navy credentials, but Knox’s role model was Theodore Roosevelt, under whom he had served as a Rough Rider during the Spanish-American War. That in and of itself harbored well for the navy. Not only would the Caribbean trip give King a chance to win points with Knox—much as he had done with Edison—but King also could evaluate his new command from the sidelines before hoisting his flag.
King immediately assumed the role of tour guide and squired Knox on a whirlwind itinerary that used aircraft to cover a lot of ground from Washington to the Canal Zone and back. Some reports had King drinking too much—or at least too much for his fellow revelers. His personal specialty was “The King’s Peg,” a potent concoction of champagne poured over brandy in flutes or tall glasses with little or no ice. “Admiral King embarrassed all of us with his intoxicated behavior,” reported the commander at Key West, but if the report was true, Knox seemed not to notice or mind. By the end of the two-week tour, Knox shared Edison’s evaluation of King as a man who could get things done.9
Meanwhile, Bill Leahy’s tenure as governor of Puerto Rico was subject to world tensions as well as internal political friction on the island. Germany launched its blitzkrieg against France in May 1940, and Italy soon joined Germany in declaring war against Great Britain and France. After British troops evacuated the continent at Dunkirk, France pleaded for an armistice, which Adolf Hitler gleefully accepted in the same railcar used for Germany’s 1918 surrender. Governor Leahy was particularly glum about what this meant for the United States. “With only England offering effective resistance to the Nazis,” Leahy wrote, “and with China fighting alone and almost helplessly against Japan, I could see little or no prospect of our not being attacked on one side or the other sooner or later.”
Despite his Puerto Rican duties, Leahy spent much of May and June 1940 in Washington and conferred with FDR on numerous occasions about global issues. Roosevelt continued to lean heavily on Leahy for advice and perspective, even if by now Leahy was outwardly resigned that American involvement in the war was all but inevitable. FDR may have privately agreed with Leahy’s pessimism, but in a presidential election year, he had to remain publicly optimistic that the United States could somehow avoid sending another generation of young Americans into battle. Leahy termed this their “friendly disagreement,” but it certainly did not stop the president from once again affirming that in the event of U.S. involvement in the war, Leahy would be recalled to Washington.10
In Puerto Rico, Leahy was strict but fair as he tried to keep local elections free from the partisan violence that was usually sparked by claims for Puerto Rican independence. There also may have been an anti-German sentiment in the back of his mind. If the secondhand gossip Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes recorded is to be believed, Leahy told columnist Drew Pearson that if the broader European war should involve the United States, several hundred Germans in Puerto Rico “simply would disappear [and] no one would ever hear of them again.”
Ickes admitted that “this streak in an American naval officer who has come out of the soil of Iowa does startle me a little,” and it seems out of character for Leahy to have spoken candidly with Pearson in the first place. But Leahy was definitely a hard-core conservative as opposed to the liberal Ickes. “Leahy thinks that there may be an attempt on his own life,” Ickes observed later that fall, “but he seems to be prepared for it, and I don’t believe that he would hesitate to shoot down anyone who might attack him.”11
No doubt this was the advice that Leahy continued to give FDR when he returned to the United States again for consultations in October, just before the 1940 election. Leahy had lunch with the president and listened as Admiral James O. Richardson, who for a time had been assistant CNO under Leahy, objected to the Pacific Fleet’s continued presence at Pearl Harbor. It was bad for navy morale, Richardson argued, because the facilities there simply could not support a prolonged deployment. In Richardson’s mind, it wasn’t a matter of foreign policy—that the fleet was either a provocation or a deterrent to Japan in the Pacific. Rather, Richardson’s argument for a withdrawal was a logistical one—Pearl Harbor was simply too far away to support adequately.
Then Leahy watched as Richardson practically threw himself off a cliff and professed to FDR, “The senior officers of the Navy do not have the trust and confidence in the civilian leadership of this country that is essential for the successful prosecution of a war in the Pacific.”12
One can almost hear Franklin D. Roosevelt grinding his teeth on his usually jaunty cigarette holder. FDR appreciated military men who spoke their minds about military issues in private counsels with him—that’s why he valued Leahy and would come to value George C. Marshall. But Richardson had made the unpardonable error in Roosevelt’s mind of crossing the line between military and political matters. FDR mumbled something in reply about the limits of what could be done in an election year, but Richardson had shown his hand too well. It was only the pending election that kept FDR from terminating him right then and there.
Leahy returned to Puerto Rico, and Roosevelt won a third term handily enough, but on November 17, as the president reviewed the challenges ahead, he sent Leahy a blunt telegram. The French armistice with the Germans had left a shadow government in Vichy led by World War I hero Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain and nominally in control of the southern third of the country, as well as the French fleet. Roosevelt told Leahy that the situation was “increasingly serious” because there was some “possibility that France may actually engage in the war against Great Britain and in particular that the French fleet may be utilized under the control of Germany.”
Leahy was “the best man available for this mission” as ambassador to Vichy France, FDR said, because he could “talk to Marshal Pétain in language which he would understand and the position which you have held in our own navy would undoubtedly give you great influence with the higher officers of the French Navy who are openly hostile to Great Britain.” Roosevelt hoped that Leahy would “accept the mission to France and be prepared to leave at the earliest possible date.” Leahy, of course, was far too much of a sailor to take FDR’s “hope” for anything less than an order. He replied immediately, “I can leave Puerto Rico in a week.”13
Several weeks later, Rear Admiral Ernest J. King boarded his new flagship, the aging, pre–World War I battleship Texas, and led his Atlantic Squadron of largely secondhand ships back to the Caribbean for amphibious training exercises with army and marine units. For all King’s talk of glorying in Napoleon’s ability to envision the grand strategy and then empower his subordinates to execute it, King had always had his hand in everything, and even as recently as the 1939 carrier maneuvers with Bill Halsey, he had not refrained from interfering with details best left to subordinates.
Yes, in the last war King had convinced Admiral Henry T. Mayo of the importance of delegating and then trusting his destroyer captains; he had preached the importance of individual training and career advancement so as to be fully capable of executing such instructions; but when push came to shove, King had always had a terrible time biting his own sharp tongue and trusting that his orders would be carried out.
If there was to be an epiphany, perhaps it occurred one dark night in January 1941 during the Caribbean maneuvers. King was up to his usual behavior. He ordered his ships darkened and then sent a radio message to prepare to alter course. Before all the ships had acknowledged, King gave the command to execute the turn. In the bedlam that followed, it was a miracle there were no collisions, as King ordered turn after turn and his ships struggled to keep up. Finally, he ordered a cruising formation and left the bridge, to the relief of all hands.
But a few hours later, when the watch officer ordered a routine course change and matter-of-factly reported it to the admiral, King stormed back to the bridge and cussed a blue streak, demanding to know who had signaled the course change. The watch officer, Francis S. Low, whose nickname was “Frog,” unabashedly replied, “I did, sir.” How dare he assume King’s authority, the admiral thundered.
Finally, after the tirade subsided, King approached Low, who had retreated to a dark corner of the bridge, and patted him on the shoulder with a proffered semi-apology. “Admiral,” sputtered Low as he wheeled around, “aside from asking for my immediate detachment, there is not one goddamn thing you can do to me that I can’t take.”14
Low’s outburst may or may not have gotten King to thinking, but over the next several months, he issued a series of orders on the exercise of command, essentially mandating less detailed orders on “how” to execute a mission and more initiative in executing the “what” of the mission. “We are preparing for—and are now close to,” King told his Atlantic Squadron on January 21, “those active operations (commonly called war) which require the exercise and the utilization of the full powers and capabilities of every officer in command status.” Not assuming any personal blame for his own self-centric and controlling persona, King nonetheless urged that the “initiative of the subordinate” in “how to do it” should be supported after ordering “what to do” unless the particular circumstances demanded otherwise.15
“Sometimes I got a kind of obsession of interfering with admirals who had to do the job,” King later wrote with some understatement, but even when he “sometimes believed I could have done a better job myself,” he got himself “in hand enough not to interfere unless it seemed that it really had to be done.”16
For King, this change in attitude, admittedly a long time coming, could not have occurred a moment too soon. Bossing carriers or small task forces was one thing, but King was about to command a much larger operation in which delegation, trusting subordinates’ initiative, and picking the right ones in the first place was the only way things were going to get done efficiently and effectively.
Barely had King arrived in the Caribbean for these January 1941 maneuvers, when he received a message from Secretary of the Navy Knox that President Roosevelt had reorganized the U.S. Fleet and, in recognition of a two-ocean threat, had divided it into three separate fleets. Henceforth, there would be the Atlantic, Pacific, and Asiatic Fleets, and King’s Atlantic Squadron would form the nucleus of the Atlantic force.
The details came in a communication from Nimitz at BuNav. King’s stars were on the way. His interim appointment to vice admiral was effective immediately, and he would receive the four stars of a full admiral befitting his fleet command posthaste. Roosevelt used the same flurry of changes to relieve James O. Richardson with Husband E. Kimmel and designate Kimmel as commander in chief, Pacific Fleet. There would be no more talk about the fleet leaving Pearl Harbor.
Kimmel had been one of Bill Halsey’s groomsmen at his wedding and remained one of Halsey’s closest friends. Up to a point, their careers had been similar. Kimmel had cut his teeth on commanding destroyers and then destroyer divisions, but while Halsey went into aviation, Kimmel remained with the big-gun surface ships, eventually commanding the battleship New York and the Cruisers, Battle Force.
“Needless to say,” Kimmel wrote Nimitz after learning of his appointment, “I am much flattered and pleased with the assignment, but my satisfaction is mixed with anxiety as to whether or not I shall measure up to the job. However, no efforts on my part shall be spared.”17
But for whatever shortcomings Kimmel thought he faced, at least he had a modest supply of ships. For King in the Atlantic, it was a different story. There was still too much “business as usual,” King wrote Knox shortly after assuming command. Things had to change. Knox heartily concurred and told King in return that he was “not at all surprised, but… gratified to know that the Commander-in-Chief of the Atlantic Fleet recognizes the existence of an emergency and is taking proper measures to meet it. I knew you would!”18
One of King’s first steps was to hasten most of his ships into port for long-overdue overhauls and modifications to improve their combat readiness. Depth charges for antisubmarine warfare and antiaircraft batteries were high on the list. The result was the Atlantic Fleet was “temporarily immobilized in the shipyards,” but it emerged far better prepared to fight a long war.
Recognizing that the navy, indeed the entire American armed forces, was short of men, ships, and materiel, King assured Nimitz at BuNav that he would work with what he was given and then issued his “Making the Best of What We Have” order. Shortages would be no excuse for poor performance. “I expect the officers of the Atlantic Fleet to be the leaders in what may be called the ‘pioneering spirit,’ ” King ordered. “We must all do all we can with what we have.”19
But for all of King’s newfound assertions about the “initiative of the subordinate” in “how to do” something, he found himself in somewhat of a quandary as to just “what to do” himself. President Roosevelt had just provided Great Britain with fifty Lend-Lease destroyers in exchange for Caribbean and Canadian bases, but beyond a general support for British shipping, the rules of engagement were rather sketchy.
There was also the matter of his base of operations. King had ships protecting the North Atlantic sea approaches to the eastern United States and the soft underbelly of the Caribbean, including the vital Panama Canal. He also had a patrol squadron of four largely obsolete cruisers and five destroyers covering the South Atlantic between Brazil and Africa. King himself had to be close to Washington, as Roosevelt, Knox, and CNO Stark all came to call on him more and more, but he also wanted to be near the action at sea. So King chose Newport, Rhode Island, and the waters of Narragansett Bay, within sight of the Naval War College, as his home port.
Never one to run at half speed, he found the uncertainty over rules of engagement in the Atlantic as draining as the regular commutes he made to Washington for staff conferences. “Well,” King would grumble, “I’ve got to go down to Washington again to straighten out those dumb bastards once more.”20
On April 18, 1941, while King was in Washington on one of his visits, he received a call from the White House asking him to meet the president at Hyde Park at three o’clock the following afternoon. The summons itself was somewhat unusual, but it was the “come alone” part of the message that most aroused King’s curiosity. He flew to a small airfield near Poughkeepsie, New York, was met by a car, and then was driven to Hyde Park. There, from behind the wheel of his 1936 Ford Phaeton, specially outfitted with hand levers, FDR motioned King into the passenger seat and drove up the hill to his secluded stone cottage. This would indeed be a very private talk.
Despite all that Roosevelt had been doing to aid Great Britain, the situation there was grim, and the president was determined to meet face-to-face with Prime Minister Winston Churchill as soon as practical. The meeting had to be conducted with the utmost secrecy, a condition that argued against Washington, D.C., or any other point of easy access. So Roosevelt spread out his charts of the Canadian Maritime Provinces and proposed to meet Churchill at one of the U.S. Navy’s new Lend-Lease bases on the southeastern toe of Newfoundland—if Admiral King could get him there.
One might imagine that FDR would have felt more comfortable with either Leahy or Halsey in this role. He had, after all, sailed with both of them. But Leahy was in Vichy France and Halsey far off in the Pacific. King, with at least FDR’s acquiescence, was the commander in chief of the Atlantic Fleet that would have to orchestrate the ruse.
The first plan was for Roosevelt to slip east from Ottawa by rail to Gaspé, at the mouth of the St. Lawrence, after attending a conference with Canadian prime minister Mackenzie King. From Gaspé, one of Admiral King’s cruisers would take FDR to Argentia, on Placentia Bay. King left Hyde Park that day sworn to secrecy, but there were potential problems. The rail segment was long and apt to attract attention, and the mid-May date that Roosevelt proposed might find the Gulf of St. Lawrence still clogged with river ice. FDR decided to postpone the trip, and King heard nothing more from him until late July.21
In the meantime, King shifted his flag from the venerable Texas to the much newer and sleeker cruiser Augusta. This ship had been Chester Nimitz’s prized command, and it was destined to be on the scene of all the great Atlantic Theater campaigns of World War II. After eight years in the Pacific, Augusta had returned to Mare Island Naval Shipyard for a complete overhaul in November 1940. After King urged that the work be expedited, the ship came through the Panama Canal and arrived at King’s disposal in late April 1941.
Within a few weeks of moving aboard, King’s attention was fixed on Great Britain’s desperate sea chase after the German battleship Bismarck. After exiting the Denmark Strait between Greenland and Iceland, Bismarck and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen sank the pride of the British fleet, the gigantic battleship Hood, and badly damaged the accompanying battleship Prince of Wales. Churchill warned Roosevelt that these wolves were loose in the North Atlantic and intended a formidable raid against merchant shipping. “Give us the news” of their whereabouts, Churchill pleaded, “and we will finish the job.”22
King alerted his ships and dispatched long-range patrol planes from Newfoundland to probe the fog-enshrouded seas. Many of their pilots were still fairly green, and there were many close calls with the weather and navigation. None encountered Bismarck, but some aircraft were forced to land at alternate points. One PBY put down before King’s very eyes in Narragansett Bay, despite his order that the planes avoid public scrutiny by not flying over more populated areas.
“Admiral,” stammered his nervous air officer, “there must be a Narragansett Bay in Newfoundland.”
“There had better be,” King growled.23
Swordfish torpedo planes flying off the British aircraft carrier Ark Royal ultimately crippled Bismarck’s steering mechanism to the point that its subsequent wobbly course to a safe port in occupied France was intercepted by other elements of the Royal Navy. The giant battleship was finally sunk after a concerted attack by battleships, carrier-based planes, and torpedo-firing cruisers and destroyers. By now, neither King nor anyone else in the U.S. Navy with any foresight doubted the power of carrier-based aircraft. Still, at the British Admiralty’s request, King put several older American battleships on station in the western Atlantic to guard against a similar outbreak.
On the day that Bismarck went down, May 27, 1941, President Roosevelt proclaimed an “unlimited national emergency.” The difference between this and FDR’s “limited national emergency,” in place since September 1939, was largely a matter of semantics. The president was slowly bringing the American public around to Bill Leahy’s pessimistic outlook. Certainly, the events that King was charged with orchestrating that summer bespoke an inevitable escalation toward war.
American forces had already assumed the defense of Greenland. In June, U.S. troops relieved the British garrison in Iceland, freeing up British troops for duties elsewhere and, even more important, providing King’s ships with another port from which to shepherd convoys. While Roosevelt was still reluctant to protect British ships, King was ordered to conduct convoys of American and Icelandic ships from the United States to Iceland and include any ships from friendly neutrals that chose to sail along. Then, on July 25, 1941, King was again summoned to Hyde Park. This time, Roosevelt intended to use the cover of an August vacation aboard the presidential yacht, Potomac, to board the Augusta in secrecy and sail to Argentia to meet Churchill. Barely a week later, on Sunday, August 3, Augusta anchored off City Island at the western end of Long Island Sound. King had not even told its captain the purpose of the trip, but the hurried construction of several ramps that could accommodate a wheelchair offered a strong clue.
That afternoon, a destroyer came alongside and transferred Chief of Naval Operations Harold Stark and Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall to the Augusta. It was the first time King had more than a passing encounter with Marshall. Major General Henry H. Arnold, chief of the Army Air Corps, and other senior aides from both the army and navy went aboard the nearby cruiser Tuscaloosa at the same time. Tuscaloosa was to accompany Augusta to Newfoundland and serve as a backup in case any calamity befell King’s flagship. Then, the two cruisers, screened by a division of destroyers, got under way and steamed slowly eastward along the northern shore of Long Island to Smithtown Bay, where they anchored for the night.
Sixty-some miles to the northeast across the waters of Long Island Sound, President Roosevelt departed the submarine base at New London, Connecticut, that same afternoon aboard the Potomac, with all the trappings of a weeklong fishing trip. Potomac leisurely sailed eastward with the Coast Guard cutter Calypso as escort and anchored for the night at Port Judith, Rhode Island. On Monday morning, Roosevelt even managed to put a touch of royalty on his charade at a port call just south of New Bedford, Massachusetts, when he entertained Princess Martha of Norway, who was a regular guest at the White House after Germany’s invasion of Norway.
By nightfall, the Potomac had made its way to Menemsha Bight, near the western tip of Martha’s Vineyard. There the Augusta and its escorts were waiting, having passed across the waters of Block Island Sound that King knew so well. In the morning, the president, his personal physician, and two military aides came on board. King lost no time in getting under way, while the Potomac, with the presidential flag still flying, carried on its deception. The yacht even transited the Cape Cod Canal with a crew member seated on deck wearing a floppy FDR fishing hat and tossing an occasional wave.
There was no apparent rush, as Churchill was not due in Argentia until August 9, but King ordered the Augusta and its consorts to 21 and then 22 knots. Radar had recently been installed on the cruisers, and King apparently placed great reliance on it. Despite dense fog off Cape Breton Island and the crowded shipping lanes then hurrying support from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to Great Britain, King maintained his speed. No doubt he meant to show the president a bit of dash, both personally and for the navy as a whole, but one wonders what might have happened had the Augusta encountered a stray merchantman or fishing trawler in the gloom. Early radar was certainly not foolproof.
The skies were clear, however, on the morning of August 7, when Cape St. Mary loomed above the entrance to Placentia Bay. The destroyers busied themselves with patrol duty, while Augusta and Tuscaloosa anchored in their assigned locations off Ship Harbour. For two days, the Americans waited as the sunny weather gave way to the more typical Newfoundland fog.
Winston Churchill couldn’t have scripted it better had he tried. For out of the mist, on the morning of August 9, still bearing the scars from its encounter with the Bismarck, the battleship Prince of Wales glided into the harbor, with its crew lining the rails, its band playing, and Churchill standing unmistakably on a wing of the bridge. Those susceptible to historical hyperbole might even claim that it was the moment when the Allies won World War II.
But in truth, it was only the beginning. Prince of Wales anchored astern of Augusta, and Churchill and his military retinue came aboard to pay their respects. While Roosevelt and Churchill dined privately for lunch, King hosted a luncheon for the assembled staffs. This was an event of some importance because it was the first meeting—however relaxed for the moment—of what would be called the Combined Chiefs of Staff. King was not yet at their level—Admiral Stark still represented the U.S. Navy—but King’s presence at this conference gave him an introduction to his British counterparts, as well as a proximity to Roosevelt, Churchill, and Marshall that would serve him well in wartime conferences to come. Although there would be rancorous debates between the American and British chiefs, First Sea Lord Sir Dudley Pound admitted a few weeks after Argentia that he had “formed a very good opinion of Admiral King.”
The next day was Sunday, and FDR accepted Churchill’s invitation to attend church services on the quarterdeck of the Prince of Wales. The American destroyer McDougal ferried the president and his party from the Augusta to the British man-of-war, coming alongside in bow-to-stern fashion to better accommodate the president’s transfer via a narrow gangway. King, who had once been called to task for bringing his dinghy alongside a ship in just such a manner, made no comment on this occasion.
Churchill chose the hymns, which included “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.” This seemed to seal the emotional bonds, and before they parted, Roosevelt and Churchill crafted what came to be called the Atlantic Charter. It enumerated eight common goals, essentially war aims. Given the United States’ official status as a neutral, they had to be couched, in Roosevelt’s words, as “certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries on which they base their hopes for a better future for the world.” Among them were self-determination for all peoples, “the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny,” and the time-honored freedom of the seas.24
That freedom of the seas was soon to be tested. During the frenzied hunt for the Bismarck the preceding May, a German submarine, U-69, had torpedoed the five-thousand-ton American merchantman Robin Moor in the Atlantic between Brazil and Sierra Leone. The commander of U-69 gave proper warning and permitted the thirty-eight crew members and eight passengers to evacuate into lifeboats before sending the ship to the bottom. But the lifeboats drifted with sparse food and water for five days before serendipitously being rescued.
The delay in learning of the sinking and the Bismarck story pushed the Robin Moor off the front pages, but Roosevelt was determined that it not set a precedent. Characterizing the sinking as “a warning that the United States may use the high seas of the world only with Nazi consent,” FDR told Congress, “We are not yielding and we do not propose to yield.”25
Then came the Greer incident. The Greer was a Wickes-class destroyer of World War I vintage assigned to the North Atlantic convoy routes. On September 4, 1941, a British patrol plane signaled the ship that a German U-boat was lurking ten miles ahead. The Greer’s sonar picked up a contact, and the plane dropped four depth charges before departing the scene because of low fuel. But the destroyer kept up a pursuit until the U-boat fired a near-miss torpedo, after which the Greer unleashed a flurry of depth charges. Another torpedo and more depth charges were exchanged before Greer discontinued the engagement.
Critics thought that the Greer’s captain, Commander George W. Johnson, had been too aggressive, perhaps even provoking the U-boat. But King stood behind him one hundred percent. Don’t worry, King assured Johnson, “As long as I command the Atlantic Fleet, no one is going to nail your tail to the mast because you defended yourself.”26
In fact, Roosevelt used the encounter to adopt a “shoot on sight” policy against both U-boats and German surface ships in the North Atlantic, but the result was predictable. In October, a torpedo struck the U.S. destroyer Kearny, with the loss of eleven men. Then the oiler Salinas and the destroyer Reuben James were hit. The latter sank, with the loss of many of its crew members, prompting Woody Guthrie to pen a song about the dead sailors asking, “Tell me what were their names.”27
Part of Guthrie’s angst stemmed from the American public not yet comprehending the full sacrifices that King’s men, and all those in the armed forces, were beginning to make. In typical bureaucratic fashion, the Navy Department hoped that it might compensate and boost morale by awarding medals and commendations. King wasn’t convinced.
“I suggest that we ‘go slow’ in this matter of making ‘heroes’ out of those people who have, after all, done the jobs they are trained to do,” King told Admiral Stark. “The earlier incidents [Salinas and Kearny] loom large by contrast with peacetime conditions—but can be expected to become commonplace incidents as we get further along.”
“Personally,” King reiterated to Nimitz, “I do not favor such awards unless the incidents indicate clearly deeds which are ‘above and beyond the call of duty.’ ” Perhaps forgetting that he himself had been the recipient of the Navy Cross largely for transiting the Atlantic during World War I, King hoped “there will be no repetition of certain awards made during the last war where people were, in effect, decorated when they lost their ships.” King, being King, could not help but conclude by volunteering, “I do not consider my opinion as being ‘hard-boiled’—naturally!—merely ‘realistic.’ ”28
That same November, King noted his sixty-third birthday. But despite appearing in a feature article in Life magazine as “King of the Atlantic,” the admiral was in no mood to celebrate. He now had but one year until retirement, and it looked as though his career would end in this uncomfortable and uncertain time.29
Meanwhile, the man who was soon to be on a seat as hot as Admiral King’s was Vice Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr. Since the summer of 1940, Halsey had been commander, Aircraft, Battle Force, in charge of the navy’s aircraft carriers in the Pacific. His mission of keeping his carriers battle ready meant that at least one was usually undergoing an overhaul at any time. Perhaps the most significant change that occurred was the installation of radar. Halsey was intrigued by its possibilities and awestruck the first time the Yorktown used its antenna array to locate an opposing war games force “out of sight over the horizon.” With each subsequent improvement in equipment, radar ranges increased farther and farther and vastly expanded the eyes of the fleet.
By the summer of 1941, Yorktown, Ranger, and the recently commissioned carrier Wasp were deployed with King’s forces in the Atlantic. That left Halsey operating out of Pearl Harbor with Saratoga, Lexington, and Enterprise. Halsey and Admiral Kimmel organized task forces of cruisers and destroyers around the three carriers and made it a general rule that only one task force would be in port at Pearl Harbor at any one time, to better protect the fleet from attack or sabotage.30
Kimmel and Halsey had good reason to be concerned, but they were hardly alone. War with Germany, if not with Japan as well, had taken on an air of inevitability. Newspapers and magazines of this period were filled with stories of a buildup in American military forces and FDR’s slow but steady gearing up of what later would be called the military-industrial complex.
Roosevelt had really started the buildup in 1933, when he had diverted a slice of a Depression-era public works bill to the navy for the construction of warships, including Enterprise and Yorktown. In 1934, in part in response to Japan flexing its muscles in China, the Vinson-Trammell Act authorized naval strength to be increased to the maximum limits of existing treaties. By FDR’s 1938 Naval Expansion Act, across-the-board increases of 20 percent boosted tonnages that much further. Finally, the Naval Expansion Acts of June 14 and July 19, 1940—the latter called the Two-Ocean Navy Act—authorized the construction of 7 new battleships, 18 aircraft carriers, 29 cruisers, 115 destroyers, and 42 submarines.
Weapons, tanks, and aircraft, such as the new B-17 bomber and the P-40 fighter, were also coming off assembly lines in increasing numbers. Ads encouraged young men to join their favorite branch of the armed forces, and if patriotism itself wasn’t enough of an inducement, FDR signed the Selective Training and Service Act into law and required registration for a “peacetime” draft. America was girding for war on the home front as well as at its far-flung Pacific outposts and on the stormy seas of the North Atlantic.
In the summer of 1941, Roosevelt froze Japanese assets in the United States and instituted an embargo of American oil, steel, and other strategic exports to Japan in an attempt to slow its war-making capabilities—exactly the action Leahy had urged four years before in the wake of the Panay attack. Now, this had the effect of increasing the urgency Japan felt to strike southward, beyond its continuing involvement in China, and control the rubber, oil, and other natural resources of Southeast Asia—threatening to envelop China and consume British interests in Malaya and Burma in the process.
There was a long-standing sentiment in the American military that something was about to happen, but there was no strong consensus as to what, when, or certainly where. “The three ring circus simply enlarges every day,” CNO Stark wrote Admiral Bloch at the Fourteenth Naval District in Honolulu in July. Stark had just told Kimmel that he had ordered the Asiatic Fleet in the Philippines to lay mines and stretch antisubmarine nets. “This perhaps will tell you better than anything else,” Stark told Bloch, “my feeling that most anything may happen in the Far East at any time.”31
Bloch turned around and pleaded with Nimitz that “practically every district has been supplied with officers of greater experience and ability than the Fourteenth Naval District has.” With personnel stretched thin and forced to rotate officers and men of even marginal experience around the fleet, Nimitz was hearing much the same thing from every other district and command. “It looks to me as though any day we may be in the wrangle,” Bloch stressed, before wishing Nimitz himself back with the fleet. “I think it would be an excellent idea,” Bloch concluded, “to have one, Chester Nimitz, out here in command of one of the important task groups.”32
By November 1941, events were moving forward with almost alarming speed. “Wake Island is making splendid progress and if you can hold off unpleasantness until after April or May, I believe that we will have enough harbor completed to get a thirty-foot ship into a protected anchorage,” Bloch reported to Stark.33
But there would be no holding off. On November 27, based on intercepts of Japanese messages, the War and Navy departments sent what came to be called their “war warning” to all commands: “Negotiations with Japan looking toward stabilization of conditions in the Pacific have ceased and an aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days.” The American bases in the Philippines—the legacy of Admiral Dewey—would likely be in the way of any Japanese thrust southward, but there was no telling how far east the Japanese navy might move to protect its eastern flank.
That same day at Pearl Harbor, Kimmel and Halsey held a long strategy session with Army Lieutenant General Walter C. Short, commanding land forces in Hawaii, and members of their respective staffs. At issue was the ordered reinforcement of aircraft to Wake and Midway islands. Short wanted to send the best available, the army’s new P-40s, but Halsey was quick to point out that army pilots were forbidden to fly more than fifteen miles from shore. What good would they be in protecting an island? Halsey grumbled. “We need pilots who can navigate over water.”
It was decided that Halsey would sail immediately with Enterprise and deliver Major Paul A. Putnam’s Marine Fighting Squadron 211 of F4F Wildcats to the more distant and potentially dangerous destination of Wake. Later that afternoon, Halsey sat alone with Kimmel talking about possible outcomes. There was a strong likelihood that Halsey would encounter elements of the Japanese navy—even if only to spot a snooping periscope or to be overflown by reconnaissance planes. Knowing that any overt act might precipitate just the sort of undeclared war that King was fighting in the Atlantic, or worse, Halsey asked Kimmel bluntly, “How far do you want me to go?” Kimmel looked at his good friend and snapped, “Goddammit, use your common sense!”34
So it was that it came to be December 6, 1941. In Vichy, Admiral Leahy pondered the collapse of the last remnants of a free France. Aboard the Augusta in Narragansett Bay, Admiral King stewed about fighting an undeclared war with one arm tied behind his back. In Washington, Admiral Nimitz took a break from manpower shortages and walked his dog past the Japanese embassy. And somewhere west of Pearl Harbor, Admiral Halsey nervously scanned the empty skies for an attack he felt certain would come. Tomorrow would be Sunday, December 7, 1941.