Several hundred miles north of the Hawaiian island of Oahu, the big aircraft carrier slowly turned into the wind and began to launch its planes. In the predawn light, they climbed into squadron formations and streaked south to attack Wheeler and Hickam army airfields and the naval base at Pearl Harbor. The result was complete surprise. Actual damage, however, was limited to the wounded pride of the defenders. This was the morning of March 29, 1938, and the planes were from the American carrier Saratoga, operating under the command of Vice Admiral Ernest J. King as part of Fleet Problem XIX maneuvers. Almost four years later, the tactics would be largely the same, but the parties and results quite different.1
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Sunday, December 7, 1941, became one of those indelible generational markers. Everyone of age to understand would always remember where he or she was when the news crackled out of a radio or sprawled across the front page of a newspaper. The magnitude of the attack was sobering, but it was the long-planned, secretive manner in which it was executed—without a declaration of war and even as tenuous diplomatic relations still existed—that truly enraged the American people. Franklin D. Roosevelt had been slowly chipping away at American isolationism for years, but in two hours on a Sunday morning, Japan finished his task. America stood incensed and united in purpose as never before. It was inevitable, however, that in the chaos that followed, there would be a search for scapegoats as well as heroes.
Vice Admiral Bill Halsey was having a second cup of coffee in his flag quarters aboard the Enterprise as the carrier neared Oahu after its delivery of marine fighter planes to Wake Island. Earlier that morning, Enterprise had launched eighteen of its own planes to fly ahead to Pearl Harbor and land at the naval air station on Ford Island. The phone from the bridge rang, and Halsey’s flag secretary, Lieutenant H. Douglass Moulton, answered it. “Admiral,” Moulton exclaimed, “the staff duty officer says he has a message that there’s an air raid on Pearl!”
Halsey leaped from his chair. “My God, they’re shooting at my own boys! Tell Kimmel!”
For reasons of radio silence, Enterprise had not notified Pearl Harbor of the inbound planes, and Halsey assumed a dreadful mistake in identification had occurred. It was actually much worse. Just then, Halsey’s communications officer burst into his cabin and handed him a dispatch from Kimmel to all ships: “Air raid on Pearl Harbor X This is no drill.” Enterprise went to general quarters.2
It was early afternoon Washington, D.C., time and Rear Admiral Chester Nimitz was at home enjoying a radio broadcast of the New York Philharmonic. Suddenly, a flash bulletin interrupted the program announcing that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. Nimitz barely had time to grab his overcoat when his aide, Captain John F. Shafroth, Jr., telephoned to say that he was on his way to the Navy Department and would pick up the admiral en route. Chester kissed Catherine good-bye and went out the door telling her, “I won’t be back till God knows when.”3
Aboard the cruiser Augusta in Narragansett Bay, a marine orderly delivered a priority message with the news to Admiral Ernest J. King’s chief of staff. It was immediately passed on to the admiral, who read it without comment. The political constraints under which his fleet had been operating in the North Atlantic for the past six months were about to be removed. The remainder of the day off Newport was eerily calm as King waited for the summons he knew would come.
Nimitz telephoned early the next day and passed on verbal orders to King to report to Washington immediately. King and his aide, Lieutenant Commander Harry Sanders, left the Augusta dressed in civilian clothes to appear as inconspicuous as possible and boarded the afternoon express train from Boston to Washington. Civilian attire or not, the tall, ramrod-straight King was a hard man to miss. A navy enlisted man stared at him across the Pullman car for a long time before finally getting up his courage to ask, “Aren’t you Admiral King?” The admiral obliged the sailor with a requested autograph.4
Several hours earlier, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had gone before a joint session of Congress and labeled the events of December 7 a day of “infamy.” He asked for a declaration of war against Japan. In Vichy, France, where a light snow had been falling, Ambassador William D. Leahy listened to FDR’s speech on the BBC. The president’s voice boomed over the radio waves and gave Leahy “a dramatic picture of the most powerful nation of the world embarking on an all out war to destroy the bandit nation of the Orient.” Leahy professed no doubt that the result would be “the destruction of Japan as a first class sea power regardless of how much time and treasure are required to accomplish that end.”5
In the beginning, however, Washington was in complete disarray. With Roosevelt’s remarks still reverberating over the airwaves, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox left on a hurried inspection trip to Pearl Harbor. Part politician and part newspaperman, Knox sensed that some immediate showing of the administration’s flag on the scene was essential to public morale and confidence going forward. Knox declined to stay with Admiral Kimmel, saying that such contact might appear to prejudice his findings.
Arriving at the Navy Department on the same day Secretary Knox departed for the Pacific, King roamed its corridors, attended meetings there and at the White House, and saw to the immediate needs of his Atlantic Fleet. But some suspected much more was afoot, and there occurred one of those apocryphal King stories. The admiral was making his way along a corridor on the third floor of the Navy Department when he encountered Captain John L. McCrea, soon to be FDR’s naval aide. McCrea was well known to King, having once skippered an accompanying destroyer when King had command of the Lexington.
“Admiral,” asked McCrea, “is this story true that I hear about you?”
“Well, John, I don’t know,” replied King, deadpan. “Which story is it?”
“They tell me,” McCrea went on, “you were heard to say recently, ‘Yes, damn it, when they get in trouble they send for the sons of bitches.’ ”
King couldn’t help but smile. “No, John,” he replied, “I didn’t say it. But I will say this: If I had thought of it, I would have said it.”6
King remained in Washington for just four days, during which time Germany declared war on the United States and Congress reciprocated. King returned to Newport before being ordered back to Washington on December 16. Secretary Knox was already back from Pearl Harbor after a whirlwind six days, a flying visit that made his jaunt around the Caribbean with King the year before look like a pleasure cruise. Knox wasted no time reporting to the White House and telling FDR what had to be done.
First, Knox was convinced that Admiral Kimmel and his army counterpart, Lieutenant General Walter C. Short, had to be relieved; there was simply no way that either officer could command confidence from either superiors or subordinates. Second, with a wounded, two-ocean navy now facing an unlimited two-ocean war, there needed to be one operational boss in charge of all fleets; henceforth, a commander in chief, U.S. Fleet, must supervise the three admirals in command of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Asiatic fleets (the latter admittedly quickly disintegrating). Finally, there had to be an immediate board of inquiry to determine the failures of the Pearl Harbor defenses and, undoubtedly, find the requisite parties to blame.
Roosevelt agreed with all points and immediately turned to who should have supreme command of the fleets. The president seems not to have considered recalling Leahy from France to take the post, at least in part because his mission there was critical. CNO Stark was himself not free from the Pearl Harbor fallout. Who else was there? Knox was ready with what to him was the only answer. There was only one man, in Knox’s opinion, who had demonstrated on the front lines of the North Atlantic that he got things done and who had been totally out of the Pearl Harbor chain of command. Eighteen months before, he had been consigned to the General Board and reluctantly counting the months until his retirement. Now Admiral Ernest J. King was about to be appointed commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet.
Roosevelt and Knox left the question of Kimmel’s replacement until a second conversation the following morning, but that too became obvious. They needed a man who was well versed in both ships and men and who was also untainted by the recent disaster. “Tell Nimitz,” commanded Roosevelt, “to get the hell out to Pearl and stay there till the war is won.”7
No one seems to have asked why Nimitz instead of Halsey. Roosevelt and Knox knew both men, and they were themselves good judges of men. Halsey, with three stars on his collar and arguably the navy’s top carrier commander save perhaps King, would seem to have been a logical choice. Halsey was, in fact, senior to Nimitz by a year at the academy, and his permanent flag rank predated Nimitz’s by almost four months.
At a minimum, Knox may have swayed FDR toward Nimitz because he knew Nimitz better from his stint at the Bureau of Navigation, during which time Halsey was sailing around the Pacific. But in a far broader sense, both FDR and Knox may have looked at the situation in the Pacific and decided that although there would be plenty of brawling for a man like Halsey, wringing victory from the shards of defeat would require something more.
King reported to the White House later that day and conferred with Roosevelt and Knox, as well as CNO Stark. Never one to soft-pedal an opinion, King voiced a number of concerns. In a two-ocean global war, the commander in chief must command from a shore headquarters in Washington, not some seagoing battleship, no matter what tradition dictated. It was also critical that a clear delineation be made between the new commander in chief position and Stark’s continuing responsibilities as CNO.
Then there was the matter of perception. King had always focused on perception—if he looked and sounded like an admiral, junior officers would tremble in his presence. Consequently, the perception of the established acronym for commander in chief, U.S. Fleet—CINCUS—just wouldn’t do. Its pronunciation, “sink us,” was hardly appropriate after what had just occurred at Pearl Harbor. Thus, King wanted the acronym to be COMINCH.
The biggest change was that King, who had long opposed the command authority of the CNO over the bureaus, particularly when he was chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, now insisted just the opposite—that COMINCH have full authority over the long-independent bureaus. Roosevelt hesitated only on this final point. That would require a change in federal law, the president told King, but in the interim he assured King that he would replace any bureau chief who did not cooperate with him.8
Two days later, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8984, “Prescribing the Duties of the Commander in Chief of the United States Fleet and the Co-operative Duties of the Chief of Naval Operations.” It was sweeping in its scope and gave King powers that heretofore had been spread across the secretary of the navy, the bureaus, fleets at sea, and naval forces ashore. There was now no question that King held “supreme command of the operating forces comprising the several fleets of the United States Navy and the operating forces of the naval coastal frontier commands [the naval districts].” And as such, he would be “directly responsible, under the general direction of the Secretary of the Navy, to the President of the United States.”9
The CNO’s role remained technically unchanged, and for the moment left Stark to jolly the bureaus into getting the required logistics in place for action and to prepare long-range war plans. How well this dual leadership would work remained to be seen, and King’s memoirs gives his own pointed view by calling it “joint consulship.”10
King later claimed—somewhat disingenuously, one suspects—that he had told Knox earlier that morning that Stark was the logical choice to command the fleets and that King would gladly serve under him. “Dolly” King and “Betty” Stark were on friendly enough terms, Stark having been two years junior to King at Annapolis. But this was to be not only the role of a lifetime but also the role for which King had spent his lifetime preparing.
While most of official Washington evidenced some measure of shell shock in the days immediately after Pearl Harbor, such fog had rarely afflicted King, particularly when it came to major decisions. It is difficult to imagine him deferring to Stark, beyond some small measure of perfunctory graciousness. Far more in keeping with King’s personality was the letter he wrote Stark several days later, in which he asked Stark to enumerate the duties the CNO’s office would transfer to King as the new COMINCH.11
When Knox returned to his office in the Navy Department, he sent for his chief of the Bureau of Navigation, who had been existing on three to four hours sleep a night as he shuttled manpower into the fight. Knox asked Nimitz how soon he could be ready to travel, and the admiral replied with the standard, “Where and for how long?” Knox delivered the news that he was to be commander in chief, Pacific Fleet (CINCPAC). That evening, Nimitz made it home early to tell Catherine.
“You always wanted to command the Pacific Fleet,” Catherine responded brightly. “You always thought that would be the height of glory.”
“Darling,” replied Chester, “the fleet’s at the bottom of the sea. Nobody must know that here, but I’ve got to tell you.”12
That night, Nimitz also faced his daughters, although they guessed that he was headed for Pearl Harbor even before he could get out the news. Afterward, anticipating that he would have to make some statement to the press, Nimitz took a tablet and wrote in his neat hand, “It is a great responsibility, and I will do my utmost to meet it.”
He passed the pad around the dining room table for comment, and when it reached Kate, she tore off the page and pocketed it, claiming that she was sure it was history and her father could simply make another copy. He did, but this time it was Chet’s wife, Joan, who snapped it up. Finally, on his third try, he was able to keep his brief but direct statement. Soon it would be Nimitz’s turn to take a train trip.13
He spent two hectic days turning the Bureau of Navigation over to his successor. On Friday morning, December 19, he paused for a quiet hour with Catherine to attend daughter Mary’s school Christmas pageant. A family lunch followed, and then his flag lieutenant H. Arthur Lamar, arrived with a car and driver to take them to the Navy Department for brief good-byes to Stark and Knox and then to Washington’s Union Station. Knox had offered a plane, but Nimitz pled exhaustion and asked for several relatively calm days on a transcontinental train to study reports and gather his thoughts before descending into the Pearl Harbor cauldron. So the Baltimore and Ohio’s Capitol Limited carried Nimitz and Lamar westward to Chicago later that afternoon.
Lamar was under strict instructions from all concerned that his primary job was to get the admiral to relax, and he brought along two bottles of Scotch to help with the process. They each had two healthy highballs and ate dinner, and then Nimitz, exhausted, fell into his first good sleep in two weeks.
Shortly after breakfast the next morning, the Capitol Limited pulled into Chicago, and Lamar hailed a taxi for a quick trip to the Navy Pier so that Nimitz could get an overdue haircut. Afterward, the admiral checked the progress of the Naval Reserve Midshipmen’s School, then renting space in Abbott Hall on Northwestern’s campus. The navy would now need every one of the men. Then Nimitz and Lamar rode to Dearborn Station; boarded the vaunted Chief of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway; and settled into adjoining compartments as the train started its journey westward across the heartland, bound for Los Angeles.
Lamar poured an afternoon libation, and the admiral began to read the ten pounds of reports on the Pearl Harbor attack. They had been entrusted to Lamar with instructions to show them to Nimitz only west of Chicago, after he had had a day of rest. It was grim business. Perhaps most heartbreaking to Nimitz personally was the photograph of the Arizona, his flagship as commander, Battleship Division One, now resting broken in the mud. Gone were more than a thousand of its crew, including Nimitz’s friend since Annapolis, Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd, who had rushed from his flag quarters to the battleship’s signal bridge at the first sounds of the attack.
Eight battleships, 3 light cruisers, 3 destroyers, and 4 auxiliary craft lay either sunk, capsized, or heavily damaged. Naval aviation had lost 92 planes, including 46 patrol bombers and 5 of Halsey’s incoming planes from the Enterprise mistakenly shot down. (That evening, four of the Enterprise’s F4F Wildcats, returning from searching for the Japanese fleet, were also shot down by friendly fire.) Army air losses were equally staggering: 77 planes destroyed and 128 heavily damaged. Then there was the human toll: 2,403 navy, marine, army, and civilian personnel killed and 1,178 wounded.
And there was continuing angst all across the Pacific. Japanese aircraft sank the British battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse off Malaya; bombs rained down on Hong Kong, Singapore, and Manila; and Japanese soldiers invaded the Philippines. Guam fell on December 10 (December 9, Washington, D.C., time), but Wake Island fifteen hundred miles closer to Hawaii still held out. A relief force centered on the carrier Saratoga, newly arrived from the West Coast and commanded by Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, was en route to Wake, while Halsey and the Enterprise sailed off Midway in support and as a deterrent to another Japanese attack on Hawaii. The third Pacific carrier, Lexington, was momentarily making a feint toward Jaluit, in the Marshall Islands.
By the time the Chief thundered over the big bridge across the Mississippi, Nimitz paused to write his daily letter to Catherine, which was his ritual whenever and for however long they were apart. Having made an analysis of the reports, he told her, “my conscience will now permit me to relax,” although he admitted that he found “it difficult to keep on the cheerful side.” He was “convinced that there will be more action in the Pacific than elsewhere for many a day to come” and that “by the time I reach Pearl Harbor, I will be able to meet the requirements of the situation.”
Four days later, after high winds foiled one takeoff attempt and cost him a day, Nimitz was airborne from San Diego in a Consolidated PB2Y Coronado four-engine flying boat en route across the wide Pacific. It was Christmas Eve, and showing his typical concern for those serving under him, the admiral told Catherine that he greatly regretted taking its pilots and crew away from their families just before Christmas, but he had “no choice on my part.”14
Leahy heard the news of King’s and Nimitz’s appointments via the BBC in Vichy. “These three admirals all of whom I know intimately,” Leahy wrote in his diary of King, Nimitz, and Thomas C. Hart, who was to remain in command of the dwindling Asiatic Fleet, “are in my opinion the best qualified by experience, talent and temperament of all the flag officers known to me for high sea command in war.”15
Leahy told FDR much the same thing in a letter the next day. “Given a free choice,” Leahy said, he would have selected exactly those three “as the best.” Of them, he considered “Hart the most reliable, the least likely to make a mistake, [but] as being physically doubtful because of his age.” Leahy may have leaned toward the older Hart, an Annapolis classmate, because of the time-honored academy pecking order, but he was not above admitting to an earlier mistake. “One error of judgment in regard to the selection of a CinC which I made in the past,” Leahy confessed to FDR in reference to his support of Admiral Richardson, “should make me doubtful but one can feel pretty sure of Hart, King and Nimitz.”16
By then, King had already received his official orders from both Knox and Roosevelt, the latter addressing him on White House stationery: “Sir… you are hereby designated as Commander in Chief, United States Fleet, and will continue the rank of admiral.” Having returned to Newport to wind up matters there, King departed the Augusta permanently for Washington the same day.17
As previously constituted, CINCUS, now COMINCH, had been a seagoing command. King’s most immediate task was to assemble a fleet staff, land based in Washington, to become his headquarters and support his operational directives as well as his future global travels. Rooms were hastily arranged on the third floor of the Navy Department Building on Constitution Avenue, but subordinates answering the summons to King’s staff found barren offices, void of all but the most basic furniture and an ample collection of dirt.
Captain Francis S. “Frog” Low, who had first earned King’s respect by standing his ground under the admiral’s berating on the bridge of the Texas, was called from the Atlantic Fleet. Rear Admiral Russell Willson, then superintendent of the Naval Academy and a shipmate of King’s from their days on Hugo Osterhaus’s staff, reluctantly reported to become King’s chief of staff and swallowed his disappointment that he wasn’t given a seagoing command. Summoned as deputy chief of staff was Rear Admiral Richard S. Edwards, lately in command of the submarine base at New London, Connecticut, and another key member of King’s North Atlantic team.
Edwards arrived in Washington on December 29 and found King “enthroned in the most disreputable office I have ever seen.” King and Willson were sharing a beat-up desk with a couple of chairs. Edwards and Low “borrowed a broken down table from a friend who was out to lunch and set up shop in a corner of the Admiral’s office… As the headquarters of the greatest navy in the world it fell somewhat short of being impressive.”18
But while King was assembling a staff, his attention was also required at the White House. Winston Churchill swept into town three days before Christmas, encamped on the second floor of the White House, and showed no inclination to leave until he and his new ally had come to grips with basic strategy. This first of Roosevelt and Churchill’s wartime conferences—counting their Atlantic Charter meeting as occurring while America was technically neutral—also marked the first time King directly participated in strategy sessions at the chiefs-of-staff level. Admiral Stark was also present as chief of naval operations, and there was still some uncertainty over who was the senior American naval officer. This run of meetings between American and British military leaders—officially the First Washington Conference—lasted into January and was code-named Arcadia.
Churchill was thrilled by the United States’ entry into the war, but he was also concerned lest Japan’s onslaught in the Pacific distract America’s attention from the war against Germany that Great Britain had been fighting for nearly two and a half soul-draining years. The results of Arcadia reassured Churchill that the United States was indeed committed to a strategy of “Germany First” and that Germany’s defeat was the ultimate key to victory over Italy and Japan. What this strategic concept of Germany First meant in tactics in the field was another matter. Figuring that out would occupy a considerable part of King’s attention over the next three years, as well as nag at his responsibilities to float a two-ocean navy and prosecute a global war in the Pacific at the same time.
Meanwhile, for all the orders from Roosevelt and Knox, King still had not assumed formal command as COMINCH. There is at least anecdotal evidence that he wanted to delay his formal assumption of command until January 1, 1942, “hoping that history would disassociate him with the disastrous events of December 1941.” Certainly, this is just the sort of politically savvy decision making King frequently practiced throughout his forty-year career. As a voracious and opinionated reader of history and biography, King may well have been thinking of history’s verdict, although the exigencies of the moment would seem to have influenced him otherwise.
King may simply have wanted to get better organized before he hoisted his flag. This was his excuse when Knox repeatedly urged him to set a date late in December. Finally, an exasperated Knox asked King, “Well, what are you waiting for?” and King took command as COMINCH on December 30, 1941.19
King’s orders to Nimitz were more readily acted upon. Nimitz flew into Pearl Harbor at 7:00 a.m. on Christmas Day 1941. Gunners were still very jumpy, and the admiral’s PB2Y Coronado was met over Molokai by a fighter escort and shepherded into a watery landing near the submarine base east of Battleship Row. Still wearing a civilian suit, Nimitz climbed into a whaleboat for the short trip to the dock and realized that he didn’t dare sit down. The tiny craft was fouled with debris and covered by a thick oily residue inside and out. It was a microcosm of what Nimitz saw when he looked about him. The air wreaked of black oil and burned wood. The usually bright waters of the East Loch were littered with the sources of the smells. Behind him, the capsized hull of the Oklahoma protruded above the water.
As horrific as the scene was, Nimitz had a pressing question on his mind. “What news of the relief of Wake?” he asked the three officers who met him. It was grim. Under Japanese attack from air and sea, Wake’s defenders had radioed, “Issue in doubt.” Admiral William S. Pye, Kimmel’s temporary replacement, overruled a counterattack and ordered all forces eastward. Rumor had it that when Halsey, aboard Enterprise, heard the news, he cussed a blue streak for half an hour.
Nimitz remained silent. “When you get back to your office,” he quietly told Kimmel’s chief of staff, “call Washington and report my arrival.” Then, perhaps to himself, he muttered, “This is a terrible sight, seeing all these ships down.” That evening, Nimitz was only too glad to have Christmas dinner with Kimmel and Admiral and Mrs. Pye. Later, he wrote Catherine that the country “must be very, very patient because we are confronted with a most difficult period.”20
At 10:00 a.m. on Wednesday, December 31, 1941, Nimitz stood on the deck of the submarine Grayling and read his orders assuming command of the Pacific Fleet. Later, Nimitz liked to joke that the Grayling’s deck was the only one in the fleet undamaged and free of debris, but given his years in submarines, it was a fitting choice.
King’s operational orders to Nimitz were as simple and concise as the geography of the Pacific made executing them overwhelming and complex: first, Nimitz was to secure and hold the communication and supply lines between Midway, Hawaii, and the West Coast; second, he must maintain a similar lifeline between the West Coast and Australia via Samoa, the Fiji Islands, and New Caledonia. Most Americans had never heard of these places, but if the Japanese were allowed a toehold on any of them, they would push a bulge of military influence well eastward into the South Pacific and detour any support for Australia southward around New Zealand—a wildly circuitous route.
In undertaking these tasks, Nimitz quickly came to the same conclusion as King. This was to be a different kind of war. The days of Commodore Dewey standing on the bridge of his flagship, leading his fleet into battle, and uttering some pithy remark were over. The numbers of men and ships flung across the sprawling Pacific demanded that Nimitz maintain his headquarters at Pearl Harbor, where some measure of central command and control afforded him half a chance of keeping the big picture in mind.
In looking out across Pearl Harbor from his new CINCPAC offices at the submarine base, Nimitz quickly came to realize that production plants, shipyards, dry docks, support ships, and a host of operations behind the scenes would factor as heavily into winning the war as a night carrier launch or a torpedo fired down the throat at an onrushing destroyer. Other men would get to command the spear point; Nimitz would calmly and diligently manage the arm that held the spear.
And in examining how he might go about it, he came to a second, prophetic conclusion. Nothing could ever replace the treasure of America’s men and women killed or forever maimed by Japan’s attack, but Nimitz looked around Pearl Harbor and decided that it could have been much worse. On the list of physical casualties, there were three glaring omissions that would prove to be major strategic blunders on the part of the Japanese.
The American aircraft carriers—albeit a lonely three in number in the Pacific—had escaped unscathed. Equally important, the American submarine base, whose construction Nimitz had supervised twenty years before, was largely untouched. No American submarines were sunk or heavily damaged in the attack. In the opening six months of the war, while America tried to establish a defensive perimeter and searched for both scapegoats and heroes, these carriers and submarines would aggressively counterpunch.
Nimitz recognized one other oversight by the attacking Japanese. The dry docks, maintenance facilities, and oil storage tanks were generally unscathed. The battleship Pennsylvania had taken some hits as it sat in one of the dry docks, but it was back afloat and headed for the West Coast for repairs by the time Nimitz took command. The maintenance shops hummed with round-the-clock activity repairing damaged ships. But perhaps the greatest asset was the surviving oil tanks. Had 4.5 million barrels of fuel oil been blown up, what was left of the Pacific Fleet would have been forced to limp back to the West Coast and have its operations in the Pacific severely curtailed. That action, not Japan’s sinking of a few aging battleships, would have given Japan the free rein it sought in the South Pacific.
Japan’s intent had been to cripple the American battleship might that could rapidly disrupt its drive south toward the natural resources it needed in the Netherlands East Indies and Southeast Asia. In that, the Japanese succeeded. But within a year, all but two of those battleships would be refloated and heading west to seek revenge, even as the very nature of Japan’s attack had proven that their days as strategic weapons were fading.
The other man who recognized these failings in the Pearl Harbor attack as readily as Chester Nimitz was Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Japan’s architect of the attack. His country was flush with victory and his pilots even more so, but Yamamoto understood the industrial might of the United States and feared for Japan’s future. He felt strongly that Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, the leader of the Japanese attack force, should have delivered a final knockout blow. Yamamoto would never forgive Nagumo for following his orders only to the point where King would have demanded that “the initiative of the subordinate” take over.
In Japan, there would be a continuing controversy about whether Nagumo should have ordered a third attack wave to hit the dry docks, fuel tanks, submarine base, and more—not just striking a blow against the American fleet, but crippling its refuge. No formal actions against him were ever taken, of course, because on the face of it, Japan had won a great victory.21
On the American side, it was a different story. Frank Knox’s whirlwind tour was just the beginning. The Roberts Commission, chaired by Supreme Court justice Owen J. Roberts and composed of two navy and two army officers, arrived in Honolulu even before Admiral Nimitz. The panel took testimony from 127 witnesses and pored over stacks of documents. Not surprisingly, the most damning words in the commission’s final report were aimed squarely at Kimmel and Short. In view of prior warnings to be on the alert for possible attacks in the Pacific, including the “war warning” of November 27 that Kimmel discussed with Halsey just prior to Halsey’s departure for Wake, the report concluded that it had been a “dereliction of duty” for both Kimmel and Short not to have consulted with each other about the warnings and better coordinated the appropriate defense measures each was undertaking.
“Dereliction of duty” was not an offense subject to court-martial, but it might just as well have been. Under considerable pressure to do so, both Kimmel and Short applied for retirement and were granted the same at their permanent grade ranks of rear admiral and major general, respectively.22
Among Kimmel’s staunchest and most vocal supporters was Bill Halsey, Kimmel’s friend since Annapolis and in whose wedding Kimmel had been a groomsman. Halsey stood by Kimmel from the time Enterprise steamed into Pearl Harbor on December 8 until the day Halsey drew his last breath, feeling that no one had worked harder than Kimmel to prepare the fleet for war and that the success of the attack had been due to a lack of patrol planes. Halsey boldly told the Roberts Commission that he himself had been prepared for a Japanese attack while en route to Wake “because of one man: Admiral Kimmel.” Years after the war, Halsey was still telling Kimmel that he believed “you and Short were the greatest military martyrs this country has ever produced.”23
Ernie King was also initially sympathetic. “I wish to express in writing—what I feel you already know—that you have my sincere regrets over what has occurred,” he told Kimmel in a “Dear Kim” note as he was preparing to assume his COMINCH command; “it is something that might well have happened to any of us!” Two months later, on the eve of Kimmel’s retirement, King bemoaned the omissions of the Roberts Commission and claimed that the result of the attack would have been the same no matter who had been in command. “No one,” King concluded with his own emphasis, “thought the Japs would strike—or even that they were ready to strike!”24
King’s comforting words reflected a view that was then quite rampant: America had suffered a grave defeat; it could have come about only as the result of a sneak attack. Indeed, much would be written about the “surprise” attack on Pearl Harbor and the extent of U.S. culpability, but the fact remains that increasingly throughout the fall of 1941, the American military hierarchy, from President Roosevelt on down, expected the Japanese to attack somewhere in the Pacific. The pure audacity of a strike against Pearl Harbor seems to have escaped the attention of most, and even when that possibility was discussed, enemy submarines coming into the harbor and sabotage from Japanese residents on the island were the suspected vehicles, not a carrier-borne air wave—even though King himself had simulated just such an attack in war games three years earlier.
By 1944, when a Navy-led court of inquiry concluded “that no offenses have been committed nor serious blame incurred on the part of any person in the naval service,” King, as chief of naval operations, disagreed. He didn’t go so far as to repeat the “dereliction of duty” charge, but he did find both Kimmel and King’s own predecessor, Admiral Stark, “lack[ing] of the superior judgment necessary for exercising command commensurate with their rank and assigned duties.”25
After the war, with the world and King himself much more mellow, King swung back to a defense of Kimmel in notes prepared for his autobiography but not published. King believed that Kimmel and Short had been “ ‘sold down the river’ as a political expedient!” Remembering that the army had had long-standing responsibility for the defense of the islands, King felt that it, including Short, had been particularly circumspect when it came to providing information or offering insight. “They very carefully said nothing about this during the investigation,” King maintained, “something for which I [emphasis in original] will never forgive them, for they could at least have taken part of the blame.”26
General Short died in 1949, having remained largely quiet about the entire affair through no less than nine different investigations. Kimmel died in 1968, having spent almost thirty years after the attack attempting to wipe away the charge of dereliction of duty. It was a campaign that his surviving sons carried into the twenty-first century. The ultimate test of any military commander, however, is that he rises or falls with whatever glories or misfortunes befall his command. Sometimes he is responsible, sometimes he is not, but as the commander he is always accountable nonetheless. Had even one of thirty-six patrol planes been in the air—instead of on the ground—that morning and spotted the Japanese carrier force or the waves of inbound aircraft in time to allow fighters to scramble and every antiaircraft gun on ship and shore to be trained skyward as the first wave of Japanese planes swept over the island, Kimmel and Short—no matter what else their shortcomings in hindsight—would have gotten the credit. Having been caught flat-footed, they got the blame.
Ever the considerate superior, no matter how difficult the situation, Nimitz no doubt supported a letter that his successor at BuNav, Rear Admiral Randall Jacobs, appears to have written to a bewildered Kimmel on January 15, 1942. Jacobs advised Kimmel that with his appearance before the Roberts Commission complete, he was being assigned to the Twelfth Naval District in San Francisco. Both men knew that this would be only temporary, but Jacobs omitted the word “temporary” from Kimmel’s orders so that his family might travel to San Francisco at government expense.
“Naturally,” Jacobs concluded, “none of us here know all the facts connected with the Pearl Harbor incident, and I am doubtful, personally, whether all the facts ever will be known. Needless to say, I feel deeply for you.”27
One other responsible party to the overall events of December 7 appeared beyond reproach. Regardless of what Douglas MacArthur had been doing in the Philippines for the past six years as a military adviser to the Philippine government, the general had been recalled to active duty by President Roosevelt in July 1941 and given command of U.S. Armed Forces Far East (USAFFE). As such, MacArthur had received a host of alert admonishments throughout the fall, including Marshall’s “war warning” message of November 27.
In the wee hours of Monday, December 8, Manila time, MacArthur’s bedside telephone rang in his penthouse. “Pearl Harbor!” the general exclaimed when he heard the news. “It should be our strongest point.” A few minutes later, at 3:40 a.m., as MacArthur hurriedly dressed, a second call came from Brigadier General Leonard T. Gerow in the army’s War Plans Division in Washington. Gerow confirmed the news and told MacArthur that he “wouldn’t be surprised if you get an attack there in the near future.”
Nine hours later, after other Japanese air attacks against northern Luzon were reported, several hundred Mitsubishi bombers and Zero fighters roared over Clark Field outside Manila and destroyed the bulk of American airpower in the Philippines—MacArthur’s air force—as it sat on the ground. Even after years of increasingly hostile Japanese intentions and fair evidence that something was building to a head in the Far East, some might be tempted to forgive MacArthur for being the victim of a surprise attack. But how could he still have his airplanes lined up wingtip to wingtip nine hours after being notified of the attack on Pearl Harbor? Two days later, with Philippine skies generally void of defending planes, another Japanese air attack destroyed the American naval base at Cavite.28
MacArthur “might have made a better showing at the beaches and passes, and certainly he should have saved his planes on December 8,” a newly appointed brigadier general who had long served as the general’s aide confided to his diary. “But,” wrote Dwight D. Eisenhower, “he’s still the hero.”29
The man was clearly fallible, but the legend was not. In the dark days of early 1942, when rallying cries and heroes were in short supply, the legend had to be preserved at all costs. FDR knew it. Leahy appears to have blindly affirmed it. King, Nimitz, and Halsey would all come to grips with it in their own ways. But for now, America desperately needed a hero, and Douglas MacArthur was the man of the hour. In short order, the United States Navy would provide a few heroes of its own.