“Pudge”
—Annapolis, Class of 1904
Hampton Roads, Virginia, had rarely seen such a display of naval power. After fourteen months at sea, sixteen U.S. Navy battleships were returning from a round-the-world cruise meant to demonstrate America’s military might and global reach. The architect of this endeavor, President Theodore Roosevelt, was as giddy as a schoolboy as he stood on the deck of the presidential yacht, Mayflower, and watched his Great White Fleet pass in review to the booming of twenty-one-gun salutes.
It was February 22, 1909, and the date was no coincidence—Washington’s Birthday. But more important, in less than two weeks Roosevelt would be leaving office, and he was not about to miss this exclamation point on his foreign policy. The goals for the navy that he had laid out as assistant secretary even before the dash of the Oregon were now triumphant before him.
Connecticut led the line, just as the battleship had when departing Hampton Roads in December 1907. There followed the other ships of the first division, Kansas, Minnesota, and Vermont. And then, like a grand roll call of states, the rest of the battle fleet: Georgia, Nebraska, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Louisiana, Virginia, Missouri, Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois, Kentucky, and the lone nonstate name, Kearsarge. All were post–Spanish-American War battleships that displaced at least twice the tonnage of the sunken Maine—proof positive of Roosevelt’s rush to naval power.
The only slight frustration about this thundering parade was that the weather was not cooperating with the moment. A wintry gray sky shed incessant drizzle as Roosevelt in top hat and dark overcoat clambered aboard the Connecticut to extend personal congratulations to the flagship’s officers and crew. They assembled on the foredeck below the forward 12-inch gun turret, but as the president started to climb onto the base of the turret to address them, he slipped on the rain-slick surface. Sailors caught him and boosted him up to the makeshift platform as cowboys might push a dude up on a horse. Unfazed as usual, Roosevelt launched into a rousing round of congratulations and assured the assembled sailors, “Those who perform the feat again can but follow in your footsteps.”1
Out of hearing range on the nearby Kansas, Ensign William F. Halsey, Jr., stood at attention. He was delighted to be home. The world cruise had been an eye-opener, but Bill, as his friends called him, had a girl waiting. He had “bombarded her with souvenirs and ardent letters from every port,” but since there was plenty of stateside competition for her hand, he was anxious to affirm where he stood.
Still, Halsey had not spent the cruise pining away. He and his shipmates had been the toast of every port of call from Rio de Janeiro to Yokohama, and they had taken full advantage of it. Always one to embrace the social scene, Halsey later confessed, “We needed the stretches at sea to rest from the hospitality ashore.”2
Standing at attention on neighboring battleships were some of Halsey’s Annapolis contemporaries. Lieutenant Harold R. Stark, class of 1903, and Passed Midshipman Raymond A. Spruance, class of 1907, stood on the Minnesota. Ensign Husband E. Kimmel, Halsey’s close friend and a classmate from 1904, watched from the Georgia. By the time another such gathering of naval power occurred, Halsey would command the fleet, and two of those officers would be disgraced. The third would be his rival.
Bill Halsey came from a line sprinkled with sailors and at least one pirate. He described these forebears as “big, violent men, impatient of the law, and prone to strong drink and strong language.” One of them, John Halsey, was granted a privateer’s commission by the colonial governor of Massachusetts during Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713). Among his escapades was a ferocious attack on four ships at once, capturing two in the process. Captain John indiscriminately continued such activity long after his privateer’s commission expired, thus becoming a pirate.
A century later, another Halsey, Eliphalet, captained the first Long Island whaler to round Cape Horn and make for the South Pacific whaling grounds. Other Halseys followed Eliphalet to sea, but Charles Henry Halsey chose to remain securely on land as first a lawyer and then an Episcopal clergyman. He married well—Eliza Gracie King was the granddaughter of the Federalist politician Rufus King—but Charles died young when he fell out of a window while inspecting the construction of a rectory. Eliza was left with a brood of six or seven children (the record is not clear), including two-year-old William Frederick Halsey.
Eliza settled in Elizabeth, New Jersey, to raise her fatherless children, but it was a tough lot. Friends repeatedly tried to help, and when Charles’s former law partner, George M. Robeson, was appointed secretary of the navy in 1869, William, by now about fifteen, announced that he would like to go to the U.S. Naval Academy. Robeson made the necessary arrangements, giving William a vacant slot from Louisiana, and he proceeded to graduate from Annapolis in the class of 1873.
After William Halsey advanced to lieutenant in 1880, he married Anne Masters Brewster, a childhood friend who traced her roots back to the Brewsters of Plymouth Colony. Shortly after the wedding, the bridegroom reported for a lengthy sea tour, but not before Anne was pregnant. On October 30, 1882, in her father’s house in Elizabeth, Anne gave birth to William Frederick Halsey, Jr. By the time the child’s father returned from sea, the boy was two and his head was ringed with long golden curls. Much to Anne’s chagrin, Lieutenant Halsey promptly marched his namesake to the barbershop.
The usual naval assignments, with resulting moves about the country, followed, but the Halseys’ happiest times may have been when William Sr. was stationed at the Naval Academy as an instructor in physics and chemistry. Certainly, it was during those years of living in close proximity to Annapolis and savoring its daily rituals that young William—still called “Willie”—expressed his desire to attend on his own. Characteristically, he took matters into his own hands when he was fourteen and wrote a rather rambling letter directly to president-elect William McKinley requesting a presidential appointment. Addressing McKinley by his Civil War rank of “Major,” young Halsey confessed, “I… have always wanted to enter the Navy.”
Both a strict disciplinarian and a keen academic, William Frederick Halsey, Sr., set a high standard for his son. He had enrolled Willie in a boarding school, Swarthmore Grammar outside Philadelphia, in hopes of readying him for the academy. When the letter to McKinley showed no promise, William Sr. nonetheless ratcheted up the preparation and sent his son to a special prep school in the Annapolis area. Grandly known as Buck Wilmer University, it was run by a retired naval officer—Buck Wilmer himself—for the express purpose of preparing prospective appointees for the rigorous entrance exams.
But there were two problems. First, there was no word from President McKinley despite more letters, and the Annapolis slot from the Halseys’ Elizabeth, New Jersey, congressional district was filled. Willie even wrote to the congressman who represented the district in Louisiana from which his father had been appointed, but those had been special circumstances. Second, despite all his studies, it was becoming quite clear that young Halsey wasn’t one to excel academically.
By the fall of 1899, with no hope of Annapolis in sight, the Halseys chose another tack for their son. They enrolled Willie in the University of Virginia’s medical school at Charlottesville on the theory that he might still enter the navy as a medical officer. The academic result was predictable. Anatomy classes, formaldehyde odors, and cadavers just weren’t his thing. Instead, Willie took on the more mature name of “Bill” and plunged headlong into the university’s social life, including the Delta Psi fraternity. Then, too, there was his growing interest in football. “I didn’t learn much,” Bill Halsey later confessed of his year at Virginia, “but I… had a wonderful time.”
His father was horrified by Bill’s first-semester grades, and his mother redoubled her efforts to win him an appointment to Annapolis. Congressional authorization for five additional presidential appointments in the wake of the navy’s Spanish-American War buildup helped. While Halsey later recalled that his mother “camped in McKinley’s office until he promised her one for me,” the political influence of former New Jersey governor and current U.S. attorney general John W. Griggs may have greased the ways.
When his appointment finally came through, Halsey gave a backward glance at Charlottesville and hurried to Annapolis to take the entrance exams. He crammed with all his energy to make up for past deficiencies and on July 7, 1900, was sworn into the class of 1904, the last incoming academy class of fewer than one hundred cadets.3
William F. Halsey, Jr., wasn’t destined for academic stardom at the Naval Academy, but he applied himself just enough to make respectable marks without adversely affecting his preferred social and athletic pursuits. Once, when Halsey came dangerously close to failing theoretical mechanics, his father strongly advised him to drop football. That, of course, was out of the question.
Instead, Bill recruited the scholars in the class to tutor him and a few others similarly challenged. When the exam was over, Bill went to his father’s quarters for lunch and was immediately asked if the results had been posted. “Yes, sir,” Bill answered, and then reported that he had made 3.98 out of 4.0. His father stared at him for a full minute and then finally asked incredulously, “Sir, have you been drinking?”
Football was one of Halsey’s passions. Although he played the game aggressively, he never claimed to be any good at it. In fact, Halsey later boasted that he was the worst fullback ever to play for Annapolis. He appeared consigned to the junior varsity, but when an injury sidelined the varsity fullback, Halsey started at that position his third and fourth years, surviving a 40–5 drubbing by Army in 1903.
Aside from football and partying, Halsey took great delight in the summer training cruises, claiming, among other things, never to have been seasick. His father was now head of the Department of Seamanship at the academy, and from sail work on the square-rigger Chesapeake to steam indoctrination on the old battleship Indiana, the son was determined to show the father that he was becoming an all-around sailor. Young Bill learned a lot, but he was brought back to reality by the academy’s chief master-at-arms, who told him, “I wish you all the luck in the world, Mr. Halsey, but you’ll never be as good a naval officer as your father!”
Halsey’s summer cruise aboard the Indiana during his third-class year left him with a souvenir tattoo. His father, who sported no less than four, advised him with the voice of experience against such permanent foolishness. “But as usual,” recalled Halsey, “I was too headstrong to listen.” The finished work showed a blue anchor with its chain forming “04” and a red “USNA” on its crown.4
When Halsey marched to an early graduation in February 1904, the Lucky Bag, for which he was an associate editor, called him “a real old salt” and “everybody’s friend.” And while he might strive to live up to his father’s seamanship standards, young Bill—short and stocky though he was—had nonetheless taken on the rugged good looks of a solidly built sailor. He looked, the Lucky Bag proclaimed, “like a figurehead of Neptune.”
His nicknames were “Willie” and “Pudge” and he seems to have set some sort of informal record for “the number of offices he has held”—even serving on the Christmas Card Committee his plebe year and the Class German Committee as a senior. But his heart belonged to athletics. Halsey’s performance on the football field—however lacking by intercollegiate standards—won him a navy “N,” one of only four accorded seniors on the team. But the honor he held dearest was the Thompson Trophy. First handed out in 1901 by Cadet Battalion Commander Ernest J. King, it was awarded annually to the first classman who had done the most during the year to promote athletics.
Considering Halsey’s shunning of advice over the years, the Dickens quote the Lucky Bag chose for him was most appropriate: “It’s my opinion there’s nothing ’e don’t know.” But what counted most in Halsey’s mind was that while he stood only forty-third out of the sixty-two survivors of his incoming class of ninety-three, he was now Passed Midshipman Halsey and headed out to sea.5
In fact, sea duty came almost too quickly. To secure choice service on the battleship Missouri, Bill and five classmates forfeited their graduation leave and rushed to Hampton Roads to join the ship before it sailed for Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and winter training exercises. The irony of this first assignment for Halsey would not become clear for more than forty years.
The Missouri was affectionately called the “Mizzy.” At 388 feet long, and with four 12-inch main guns and a displacement of 12,500 tons, it cruised at a maximum speed of 18 knots. By the time Halsey stood on the deck of the next battleship to be christened Missouri, the “Mighty Mo” was of a generation of battleships that boasted nine 16-inch guns, displaced 45,000 tons, stretched 887 feet, and cut through the seas at 32.5 knots. Halsey’s progression from one Missouri to the other is a graphic example of the evolution of American naval might.
But Halsey served aboard the “Mizzy” first, and his cruise was not to be without incident. On Wednesday, April 13, 1904, he was a junior officer on the bridge as the battleship took its turn at the fleet’s annual target practice off Pensacola, Florida. Suddenly a heavy blast aft rocked the ship, and a column of flame shot several hundred feet into the air from the top hatch of the 12-inch after turret. A second, sharper blast followed. Powder bags in the turret had caught fire and spread to a dozen more. Thirty-one officers and men perished, and the carnage made a profound and lasting impression on Halsey. Almost fifty years later, he still found the disaster looming “monstrous in my memory” and making him dread the thirteenth of every month, particularly if it fell on the double hex of a Friday.6
This accident cast a pall over Halsey’s two years on the Missouri and the start of his career, but he got a break by being assigned to temporary duty at the Naval Academy during the 1904 and 1905 football seasons. The likable Halsey was detailed as assistant backfield coach despite his less-than-stellar gridiron record. Clearly, it was his bulldog determination that the academy wanted, and in 1905 Navy fought Army to a tie.
After the 1905 football season, Halsey, now two years out of Annapolis, received his commission as an ensign. He was detached from Missouri to Don Juan de Austria, a former Spanish gunboat that had been salvaged out of Manila Bay. The Don Juan bored Halsey terribly as it chugged around the Caribbean on customs duty and at one point anchored for six months in the Bay of Samaná, on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The only excitement was the weekly mail steamer from the United States.
But a reprieve was in sight. In March 1907, Halsey reported for duty aboard the Kansas, the navy’s newest battleship, so new that it would not sail for its shakedown cruise until the following August. By then, it was clear that something major was afoot, and when Kansas got things squared away, it joined fifteen other battleships—all painted a peaceful white—in the roadstead at Hampton Roads, Virginia. On December 16, 1907, the battleships weighed anchor and steamed in review past the presidential yacht, Mayflower, and its nervous occupant.7
In the wake of the Russo-Japanese War, the peace that Theodore Roosevelt had brokered was not sitting well in Japan. Admiral Togo may have destroyed the Russian fleet at Tsushima, but the final treaty did not accord Japan any financial indemnity for its losses. The truth of the matter was that both Russia and Japan were broke.
In Japan, this triggered a rush of emigration to the United States, particularly California. When the ensuing backlash against this influx included an attempt to segregate schools in San Francisco for Asian immigrants, Japan strongly protested. It cited the failure of an indemnity and this unequal treatment as evidence that the United States considered Japan a second-rate power and the Japanese a second-class people. Some politicians in both countries engaged in saber rattling.
Roosevelt considered the crisis grave and in response determined that this was one of those cases of speaking softly but carrying a big stick. While assuring Japan of America’s friendship, he would use the Great White Fleet as a symbol of American power. Should Great Britain and Germany take a lesson from it as well, so much the better.
Roosevelt wanted it understood “that the Pacific was as much our home waters as the Atlantic, and that our fleet could and would at will pass from one to the other of the two great oceans.” At the time, the British and German navies—arguably the first and second most powerful in the world—were skeptical of such a movement. If TR and his navy left a string of disabled battleships at ports around the world, he would be an international laughingstock—thus his nervousness as the fleet departed Hampton Roads.
The sixteen battleships cleared Cape Henry at the entrance to Chesapeake Bay and steered south toward the Caribbean. Christmas 1907 found the fleet in Port of Spain, Trinidad. Then it was on to Rio de Janeiro; Punta Arenas, Chile; and through the Strait of Magellan to Callao, Peru. The fleet was almost retracing the dash of the Oregon in reverse, which may well have been what Roosevelt was thinking when he conceived the idea. Later, Roosevelt would call the voyage of the Great White Fleet and the construction of the Panama Canal “the two American achievements that really impressed foreign peoples during the first dozen years” of the twentieth century.8
As the fleet cruised onward, Ensign Halsey had time to savor the various cultures, but as a junior officer, he also put in his share of time supervising the shore patrol. Getting a load of older and frequently inebriated enlisted men back on board ship was trying for a young officer, but Halsey proved himself up to the task, particularly during a lengthy port call at San Francisco. The gruff ensign made something of a name for himself among the madams of the city by posting shore patrolmen outside their houses of ill-repute and forbidding enlisted men to enter.
Publicly, San Francisco was to have been the fleet’s farthest westward advance, but Roosevelt almost certainly had much more in mind from the beginning. To move the American battle fleet from the Atlantic to the Pacific was one thing, but to have it then circumnavigate the globe was a show of real power. Leaving San Francisco in July 1908, the Great White Fleet steamed first to Honolulu, then Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne, and Manila, anchoring in Manila Bay near the site of Admiral Dewey’s triumph a decade earlier.
To the chagrin of sailors and Manila businesspeople alike, shore leave was canceled because of a cholera outbreak. There was also the pressing matter of a special invitation. Not to be outdone, the Japanese emperor had extended an invitation to Roosevelt for the fleet to visit Japan. Both the president and Rear Admiral Charles Sperry, commander of the fleet, were cautious. To decline the invitation would be the ultimate insult, but to anchor in Yokohama harbor was risky.
Sperry and his senior officers well remembered what had happened to the Maine in Havana harbor—coal bunker explosion or not—and to the Russian fleet at Port Arthur. The Japanese had also made a similar sneak attack on Chinese naval forces in 1894. While Halsey was far too junior to be involved in these councils, he was firmly of the opinion that the invitation was a deceitful Japanese charade.
But the first enemy lurking on the voyage to Yokohama was a typhoon. It struck the fleet in the East China Sea and scattered the ships, causing some minor damage and sweeping two men overboard. It proved the only major disruption of the fourteen-month cruise. It was also Halsey’s first encounter with a typhoon; it would not be his last. Meanwhile, the Japanese fleet of ten battleships and twenty-nine armored cruisers was said to be at sea “on maneuvers.” Tensely, the American fleet regrouped and steamed into Tokyo Bay two days late on October 18, 1908.
The Japanese proved to be a model of courtesy and decorum. They had not given up their interest in Manchuria, but they were not ready for a war with the United States. Halsey was in the party that was hosted aboard Admiral Togo’s flagship, Mikasa. Unlike another junior officer named Chester Nimitz, who had visited Japan and met Togo three years before in the aftermath of the Battle of Tsushima, Halsey was impressed by neither the admiral nor his massive ship.
What the Japanese managed to do, however, was force an apparent U.S. snub of China. The emperor’s invitation had been on the grounds that the entire American fleet call at Yokohama but not China. Thus, when Admiral Sperry dispatched only half of his battleships—not to Shanghai but to the smaller port of Amoy (now Xiamen)—and then returned to Manila with the remainder, China accused the United States of the only diplomatic snub of the voyage.
Once the two groups of battleships reassembled, they steamed into the Indian Ocean and through the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean Sea. The fleet divided up to make port calls, and Halsey got a choice assignment when Kansas anchored in a sparkling cove on the French Riviera and was treated to French hospitality for almost two weeks. He and the other younger officers definitely appreciated the sleeveless, stockingless, and low-cut French bathing fashions that had yet to reach the United States.
Finally, it was time for the combined fleet to rendezvous at Gibraltar early in February 1909 and make the crossing of the Atlantic. Winter storms churned its waters so much that even Halsey confessed to a rare bout of seasickness. On February 21, the sixteen battleships dropped anchor off Cape Henry and spruced themselves up for one final review. The next day, after Theodore Roosevelt finished speaking on the foredeck of the Connecticut, Ensign Halsey hurried ashore to meet his girl.9