The Japanese invasion of China represented an important watershed in William Leahy’s strategic and ethical outlook. A consistent noninterventionist, he had long argued that the United States should take no aggressive action that might ensnare the country in a war outside of the Western Hemisphere. Yet the possible subjugation of China led him for the first time to press for steps that could result in war. China had mattered to him, both strategically and emotionally, since his first experience there in 1900. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he believed the country would eventually emerge from its period of chaos and uncertainty to become a great force on the world stage, and he was convinced that the United States had an important role to play, to prevent other powers from taking advantage of China’s present weak state by attempting to colonize it. He therefore saw Japan’s move as in many ways more threatening to the United States than anything happening in Europe.
A few weeks after Leahy’s trip to Hyde Park, the Japanese announced that they would commence the bombing of Nanjing, which was serving as the Chinese capital. Japan warned all neutrals to withdraw their civilian populations. Leahy was appalled, for reasons both ethical and national, and contemplated military action.
This threat by Japan to conduct a bombing raid against the civil population of China is another evidence, and a conclusive one, that the old accepted rules of warfare are no longer in effect. It establishes another precedent that will be seriously destructive of the rights and privileges of neutrals and combatants. Compliance of the American Government with the demands of Japan in her undeclared war of aggression against China will almost certainly lose for Americans much of the high regard in which they have heretofore been held by the Chinese. . . . Some day Japan must be called to account for its abuse of power in this instance.1
For Leahy, someday came sooner than expected. On December 12, 1937, while attending a dinner party thrown by Secretary of War Henry Woodring, Leahy was telephoned with news that a small American gunship, USS Panay, patrolling on China’s Yangtze River, had been attacked by Japanese aircraft.2 In the coming hours he learned that not only had the gunboat been sunk and some accompanying American tankers hit, but also a number of crewmen had died and many more had been injured. The reasons for the attack are still debated, but for Leahy the significance was crystal clear.3 Now was the time to stand up to the Japanese and help China.
Once the dinner party ended, Leahy went to meet with Cordell Hull to discuss American policy in light of the attack. At 11:30 p.m. he arrived at the secretary of state’s apartment in the Carlton Hotel. There Leahy, Hull, and two other senior State Department officials tried, without success, to craft a response. The meeting meandered on until 1 a.m., with Hull seemingly more concerned that he receive no blame for the incident than in articulating a coherent plan. All that was agreed was that Leahy had to take the superfluous step of messaging the fleet to request more information.
Hull’s behavior helped crystallize Leahy’s doubts about the secretary of state. A longtime Tennessee representative and then senator with a distinctive lisp and a vocabulary shaped by his Appalachian roots, Hull had strong influence over many Southern Democrats.4 Yet for such a successful domestic politician, Hull was oddly passive, one could even say weak, when it came to foreign policy.5 He could neither express his notions well nor build a bloc to support what ideas he had. The president usually allowed Hull to act important by indulging him with the style of foreign policy–making—speaking with foreign diplomats and traveling overseas, presiding at unimportant but well-covered international events, and giving interviews—while keeping the substance of power for himself. Leahy found Hull’s vacillating annoying and believed that the secretary was obsessed with his own image.
December 13, if anything, made matters worse. The day started well enough, with a visit to Leahy from the Japanese naval attaché. In a sign of just how panicked the Japanese government was about the attack, he was offered unreserved apologies.6 This did little to mollify the admiral. Later that day he met again with Hull and was further frustrated by the secretary’s continuing paralysis. “Personal contact with the Department of State is convincing [me] that everything which can be done by the English language to protect Americans has already been done,” wrote Leahy. “It is, in my opinion, time now to get the Fleet ready for sea, to make an agreement with the British Navy for joint action, and to inform the Japanese that we expect to protect our nationals.”7 Leahy’s outlook was so hard-line that Hugh Wilson, the assistant secretary of state, became worked up to the point that he developed a migraine, and Hull was forced to personally prepare a cold pack to provide him some relief.8
The next day, Leahy and Roosevelt had their first private conversation about the Panay attack.9 Leahy argued that the navy should be made ready for action. He wanted all warships to be sent to port to have their hulls cleaned, their fuel tanks filled, and their stores packed with provisions. The president was more circumspect. Politically cautious, Roosevelt was unwilling to take any step that might end up in a shooting war, and while he strongly condemned the Japanese attack, he wanted to negotiate a settlement. Eventually the Japanese government, searching for a way out of the crisis, paid the American government $2 million in blood-money compensation, and that ended the whole affair.
If Leahy’s aggression did not win out in this instance, the Panay crisis did drive home an important point to him and the president. A war involving the United States was now far more likely than it had seemed only six months earlier. Even before the crisis, the two men had dwelled on serious questions about the present and future strength of the US Navy. On November 26, Roosevelt had called Leahy to the White House, and the two settled into the president’s office for an hour-long chat covering the increasingly uncertain world situation and the balance of global naval power. America’s best course, they decided, was to press ahead with the construction of four large battleships.10 It was the start of the process that determined the shape of the US Navy in late 1941 and early 1942, and therefore what the United States could or could not do once the Japanese attacked at Pearl Harbor.
In making their choices Roosevelt and Leahy were given greater flexibility than any US president and CNO in the interwar period. For the first time since 1920, the United States had complete freedom of choice about what to build. The naval arms-control process, which had dominated interwar fleet construction since the Washington Conference, had come to a shuddering halt in 1936. At the Second London Conference, the Japanese delegation had made a pitch for naval parity between itself, the United States, and the United Kingdom.11 When the Americans and British refused, Japan withdrew from the arms-control agreements. All bets were now off.
Starting with their November 1937 conversation through the end of June 1938, Leahy and Roosevelt decided on a new naval building plan and then laid the groundwork for congressional approval. The plan they devised reveals a lot about their strategic beliefs. When it came to naval construction, they favored an orthodox, balanced force. This meant continuing with the present American fleet structure, only building bigger, faster, and more heavily armed vessels. In other words, the United States would continue to prioritize the battleship over the aircraft carrier. Leahy and Roosevelt were so entwined when it came to battleship building that they had only one significant difference of opinion between 1937 and 1938. Roosevelt wanted to limit all new battleships to 14-inch guns to save money and preempt any new naval race in gun size.12 Leahy pressed for 16-inch guns, and in the end the president gave way. This was an important victory, as the war would show. The firepower of 16-inch guns was significantly greater than their 14-inch counterparts, and they provided important benefits in both ship-to-ship combat and in supporting US landing forces in the Pacific. Leahy did not know it at the time, but the Japanese were secretly preparing to build battleships armed with guns of more than 18 inches.
Leahy’s continued focus on battleship construction only reinforced his reputation as the preeminent member of the US Navy’s “Gun Club,” leading to criticism that he failed to realize that the battleship was about to be replaced by the aircraft carrier as the defining weapon of sea power.13 There is a certain truth in this. Leahy, like his Japanese, German, and British counterparts, never wavered from his basic position that his nation must maintain battleship dominance. When in the wake of the Panay crisis the president suggested extra aircraft carriers be added to the US building program, Leahy, who believed that the United States was already the world’s leader in this category, demurred.14 The president accepted Leahy’s judgment.
In January they brought Congress into the discussions, a sign of how assertive the president now was about naval policy. Whereas Roosevelt had in the past often let Carl Vinson be the driving factor in deciding what would be built, now the president pushed on Congress the plan that he and Leahy had developed. On January 5, 1938, Roosevelt sat down with Leahy, Assistant Secretary Edison, and Vinson to discuss naval needs.15 The president proposed a flat 20 percent increase in all vessel categories above the naval arms-control limits.16 The next day, Leahy met alone with Vinson to craft a strategy to gain congressional approval.17 Leahy soon returned to the White House to meet with Roosevelt and Claude Swanson, who was temporarily back in the office, to further refine the 20 percent plan.18 Finally, on January 29, Leahy met for more than two hours with the president, discussing naval building and the possibility of a naval war.19 It capped an extraordinary month of close cooperation between the two men. Harold Ickes, who watched it unfold from his place in the cabinet, was once again impressed. Roosevelt informed his cabinet that he was going to press ahead with a huge peacetime American naval expansion and prepared a public statement to that effect. He held off on releasing the statement, according to Ickes, because Leahy told the president that the time was not right.20
In February 1938, Leahy and Vinson reprised their double act and worked together to shepherd the plan through Congress. Over a period of months, they proved to be a political juggernaut. Testifying before congressional committees, Leahy often spoke lines he had scripted ahead of time with Vinson, and the two huddled in the admiral’s office to select which shipyards should build which ships.21 As time was running out before Congress’s June adjournment, Leahy made a personal call on the Speaker of the House, William Bankhead of Alabama, to make sure that the Speaker called on Vinson first the following day during one of the House’s last sessions.22 Coordinating action and employing all the levers of power at their disposal, they pushed through a number of different naval appropriations bills, as well as other naval measures.
They were historically successful. In May, Congress approved the entire building plan in what has come to be known as the Second Vinson Act (HR 9218). The measure included Roosevelt and Leahy’s flat 20 percent building increase. Among the vessels slated for construction were four battleships with 16-inch guns, which were to be some of the most famous US warships of all time, the Iowa class.* In addition, more than 60,000 tons of new cruisers and 30,000 tons of new destroyers were also approved, vessels that would prove crucial to the US Navy in the months after Pearl Harbor. Yet the Second Vinson Act was but one of many major pieces of naval legislation the two helped pass. The number of naval personnel was increased significantly, so that the navy and Marine Corps combined were now more than 125,000. In moves that would pay great dividends to the carrier wars in the Pacific a few years later, the Saratoga and Lexington were modernized and a great deal of money was spent on improving US base facilities and building support ships, such as another fast tanker.23
Leahy and Roosevelt’s focus on the battleship continued even after all these legislative successes. In July 1938, when the navy began putting together a proposed ten-year building plan, it was decided to ask for fourteen new battleships and five aircraft carriers.24 This was the genesis of what would result in the “Two-Ocean” naval bill of 1940. Regardless of Leahy’s continuing love for the battleship, he was determined that the United States have the best carrier force in the world. He always operated on the assumption that the United States did and would continue to possess the world’s most powerful naval air force. During Leahy’s time as CNO, the navy made significant strides in the development of its aviation abilities. The range and striking power of US aircraft carriers markedly increased.25 Large mobile dry docks were also built, thanks to Leahy.26 The admiral’s greatest role in transforming the navy into a force that could project airpower across the Pacific might have been the emphasis he placed on fast fleet tankers. Working closely with Democratic senator Josiah Bailey and Rep. S. Otis Bland, Leahy helped gain approval for the construction of twenty-four high-speed tankers for the fleet.27 Adm. Emory Land, who ran the Bureau of Construction and Repair from 1932 until 1937, and would run the Maritime Commission (which oversaw the construction of merchant vessels) during the war, believed that, without Leahy’s push, these ships would never have been built. Having access to these mobile dry docks and fast tankers meant that the navy could develop its fleet train concept earlier than any other power, allowing it to project aircraft carrier strength far into the Pacific for what would have seemed extraordinarily long periods of time by the perspective of the 1930s.* Leahy’s dogged determination and political prowess made sure that the navy was able to fight effectively in the Pacific war.
Leahy’s understanding of the importance of air superiority for the application of sea power had been revealed during the Panay crisis, in a way that foreshadowed many of his strategic plans during World War II. But perhaps most telling was his support of a distant blockade against Japan. Though he had called for action, he believed that the best way to fight was not by charging across the Pacific to engage the Japanese but by obstructing Japan’s access to world markets. “Send the Japanese a strong note, demanding not only their apologies and indemnities but also their withdrawal from Manchuria,” he told his old friend Constantine Brown. “If they refuse these demands, we should blockade the Japanese trade routes by placing destroyers at the entrance to the Indian Ocean.”28 Leahy knew that the United States could not yet guarantee air supremacy in the western Pacific. Without air control, he did not want the navy to take the unnecessary risk of search of the Japanese Fleet at the opening of hostilities.29 He first wanted to sever Japanese trading lines to such vital raw materials as oil and various metallic ores. “We should assign two destroyer divisions to intercept Japanese shipping to South America,” he said to Brown. “We can do this successfully now because it will take the Japanese Navy three to four years to complete its building program.”30 Having stepped on Japan’s economic windpipe, Leahy believed that American naval power could bring the enemy to heel without risking a major engagement; at the very least, the navy could force the Japanese to fight on American terms. It was part of his growing understanding of the coming air-sea war, which he made explicit during one of his congressional testimonies. In front of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, during his advocacy of the Second Vinson Act, Leahy was asked by the committee chair what he wanted out of any naval buildup. Leahy was unequivocal that controlling movement was essential, and that the United States needed to be able to impose a blockade and at the same time not allow another power to control the movement of American goods and supplies.31
His faith in the supremacy of air-sea war was reinforced during the internal American struggle over the future of the US base on Guam. This famous island in the Mariana chain was the focus of a great deal of political debate during Leahy’s time as CNO.32 The closest major American-controlled island to Japan, Guam was a vital strategic location. Yet Leahy argued that developing a large naval base there was pointless unless a large air component, including airstrips, hangars, and repair facilities, was included. Without the ability to launch significant airpower from the island, Leahy believed that it would be far too risky for the United States to deploy the Pacific Fleet to Guam.
The fight over approving the funds needed to build up Guam started in late 1938 and extended into early 1939. Leahy was so worked up that he asked for a private meeting with FDR in January 1939 to press his case for an integrated air-sea facility.33 Though he was able to get the president’s backing, in this one case Congress demurred under the strength of isolationist sentiment and the desire not to spend such sums. The legislature would support the building of certain naval facilities but opposed a large air-support plan. Deciding that developing a smaller facility on the island would be pointless, Leahy pulled the plug.34 Though this move was criticized at the time, in light of what we now know about World War II, Leahy’s instincts were proven correct. It was impossible to defend any Pacific island without air control, as the course of the war demonstrated.
The fight over Guam represented the only setback that Leahy and Roosevelt experienced when it came to preparing the US Navy for the coming war in the way that they most wanted. Indeed, their work together over the previous year and a half had further reinforced their friendship. Their interactions grew more relaxed, even when they had different perspectives on a particular question, and their correspondence more informal and friendly. One of the most illuminating of these gentlemanly disagreements was in an area that became increasingly important as the world crept ever closer to war: the exchange of intelligence. With access to reports from US naval attachés deployed around the globe, Leahy controlled a great deal of America’s secret intelligence, and he forwarded reports to the president that he felt were worthy of concern. Roosevelt, by contrast, often sent the admiral intelligence reports he had received that appeared dubious at best.
Roosevelt favored stories of cloak-and-dagger activities on the part of devious foes. In August 1937, as the Japanese were plunging ever deeper into China, the president passed to Leahy a report that Japanese crab-fishing boats were appearing off the coast of Alaska in suspiciously large numbers.35 These sneaky Japanese fishermen, Roosevelt believed, might very well be scouting for invasion sites in case of war. Leahy, dismissive of alarmist reports and conspiracy theories, tried to calm the president’s nerves about the crab fishermen instead of feeding his suspicions. He promised he would send the navy to investigate but told Roosevelt, politely, to relax: “The specific fishing activity referred to . . . are carried on north of the Alaskan Peninsula and in an area that would not be of much use in war except for such airbase activities as might be permitted by the arctic weather conditions.”36 The rational application of airpower mattered far more to the admiral than any tales of derring-do.
Leahy, in comparison, would usually send Roosevelt either data-driven analyses or larger geopolitical reports. A few weeks after Roosevelt got worked up over the crab fishermen, Leahy passed to the president intelligence that Japan and Russia had significantly increased their stockpiles of oil.37 In October 1937, he sent Roosevelt a detailed report he had received from a US naval officer in China about the different domestic pressures being placed on Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government and how these pressures might lead to a Chinese collapse in the war against Japan.38
Leahy was not one-sided in the intelligence he passed along. He sent Roosevelt different reports that he thought were relevant, regardless of their implications. In early 1938, Leahy sent Roosevelt intelligence gathered from the US naval attaché in Fascist Italy. The attaché had sources in the Italian Navy, who had recently met with members of the Japanese Navy. Far from painting the Japanese Navy as a threat, these Italian sources claimed (falsely, as it turned out) that Japan would not try to build battleships with 18-inch guns.39 The entire thrust of the report was to minimize the idea that Japan was planning on entering a naval race with the United States. There was no sign that the report was a deliberate distortion by the Italians, and Leahy did not try to undermine its credibility to the president.
Another area where Leahy and Roosevelt differed was on the possibility of war in Europe. Focused on the threat posed by Japan, Leahy took longer than the president to become truly worried about Nazi Germany. When the Nazis first rose to power in 1933, Leahy was skeptical of their intentions but spent little time considering their impact. Germany’s navy was so small that it hardly concerned a man obsessed with sea power and naval threats to the United States. He rarely discussed the Nazis or Hitler. He did mention once some severe criticism of Hitler’s anti-Semitic policy and looked on the German dictator as a typical thuggish nationalist who was trying to rebuild Germany—in a brutal manner, at the expense of other nations.40
Not until 1935 did his worries about the Nazis start to grow. In March of that year Hitler repudiated the conscription clauses of the Versailles Treaty, which meant that Germany intended to build up their armed forces in any way it saw fit. Though Leahy deemed the development “alarming,” he remained committed to keeping the United States out of any European crisis.41 The United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union together, he believed, should be able to keep Hitler in check. He held on to this detached view until 1938. While he was working to secure the passage of all that naval legislation in the spring of that year, the Nazis seized and incorporated Austria into the Third Reich. This was another direct contravention of the Versailles Treaty and represented the first serious expansion of German power. Leahy lamented the disappearance of the Austrian state but showed no interest in having the United States do anything about it.42 In Leahy’s mind that was something that Britain and France could object to if they wanted.
In September 1938, Hitler made his infamous move on Czechoslovakia by demanding the transfer of the German-populated Sudetenland from the Czechs to the Reich. In what is often seen as the high point of the policy of “Appeasement,” British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and his French counterpart, Édouard Daladier, agreed during the Munich Conference with Hitler and Mussolini to hand the Sudetenland to the Nazis. Leahy’s reaction was highly critical, though more than a little tinged with hypocrisy. He complained that the British and French were cravenly surrendering to Hitler’s dangerous demands and in the process threatening to overturn the European balance of power. For the first time he seemed worried that Germany might dominate the Continent. His rhetoric about the Nazi state hardened markedly. Now the Germans were a “bandit” state.43 However, he still hesitated to have the United States stand shoulder to shoulder with Britain and France. A few months after the crisis had passed, Leahy applauded an address given by his friend and committed isolationist Sen. David Walsh that called for America to stay out of European affairs.44
Interestingly, Leahy’s reaction to the Munich crisis did reveal that he remained reluctant to send warships into areas where air control could not be guaranteed. On September 17, 1938, Leahy made a special visit to the White House to discuss with Roosevelt what the United States should do in case Britain and France went to war with Germany. They also discussed sending American warships to European waters to help evacuate American citizens and treasure (specifically gold). Leahy opposed sending battleships, as air supremacy could not be guaranteed, instead suggesting cruisers with the best possible antiaircraft defenses.45 Roosevelt also wanted to send only cruisers, though smaller ones than those Leahy favored.
While Leahy was worried about war with Nazi Germany relatively late in the day, he seemed even less concerned with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Navy was far weaker than even the German Fleet, and it made little or no impression on Leahy, even when he continued to doubt whether capitalism and communism would ever coexist peacefully. In July 1938, Leahy was invited to a dinner at the Soviet embassy to celebrate Howard Hughes’s round-the-world flight, which had included a Russian stopover. Guests were shown a Soviet film of a huge military parade in Moscow. Leahy watched as thousands of well-drilled soldiers marched by Stalin, impressed at their military bearing. He remarked that all those soldiers were in service to “a government that completely disagrees with our ideals” and an ideology that was “an impressive menace to the continued existence of Democratic Governments.”46 Yet he hardly seemed worried about the military capabilities of the Soviet Union.
By the end of 1938, Leahy had stamped his authority on the US Navy and the Roosevelt administration—and his naval career had stamped him with certain strategic ideas. From the time he served as the head of the Bureau of Ordnance through his time as CNO, he had wielded more power over deciding not only what types of vessels the United States would build but how each class should be configured. American battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and even aircraft carriers were all shaped by his preferences. Further, he had crafted much of the fleet’s personnel policy, a particularly important development, as the fleet was expanding rapidly in the late 1930s.
The US Navy was more Bill Leahy’s navy than that of any other officer of his generation. Strategically, he had refined his ideas in surprising ways to take into account the growth of air-sea power. He had developed a strong faith in the economic power of sea control, believing that the United States should first and foremost be able to cut off any potential enemy from world trade. As such, he saw no need for his nation to wage risky campaigns or fight grand battles it was not certain to win. He saw war as a methodical business, wanted to keep American casualties to as minimal a level as possible, and believed that even distant blockade resource control should form the foundation of American strategy until the United States had built up such an overwhelming force that it could guarantee victory. It meant that when the war did break out, America would have to fight Bill Leahy’s war.