The first airplane had barely made it into the air when visionaries started talking about shipboard takeoffs and landings. Shortly after the Wright brothers’ 1903 flight, a French inventor named Clément Ader made some rather startling predictions. Ader’s early aircraft models had done little more than bounce along the ground, but that didn’t stop him from espousing the concept of aircraft carriers in a 1909 book promoting military aviation.
“An airplane-carrying vessel is indispensable… [and] will be constructed on a plan very different from what is currently used,” Ader prophesied. “First of all, the deck will be cleared of all obstacles. It will be flat, as wide as possible without jeopardizing the nautical lines of the hull, and it will look like a landing field…. The speed of these ships should at least be that of cruisers and even exceed it in order to escape them.”1
The first step toward this realization occurred on November 14, 1910. Aircraft pioneer Glenn Curtiss and his civilian test pilot, Eugene Ely, hoisted a Curtiss pusher-type biplane onto a wooden platform constructed over the bow of the cruiser Birmingham. The platform was 83 feet long and 22 feet wide, and it canted down toward the bow at a 5-degree angle. Originally, the plan was for the Birmingham to steam across Hampton Roads and provide a little wind streaming over the wings to help with lift, but low, overcast skies forced a postponement, and the ship dropped anchor to await better weather.
Shortly after three that afternoon, the skies hinted at a brief respite, and Ely climbed into the pilot’s seat. Scarcely had the Birmingham’s anchor chains begun to rumble and clang as a signal that the ship was getting under way, when another bank of clouds started to descend. Ely decided that under way or not, he would wait no longer, and he gunned the plane down the short ramp. Off the bow it went, but as Ely fought for any measure of altitude, the spindly craft dropped farther and farther until it hit the flat surface of the water with a smack.
Ely got a lucky bounce back into the air and kept going, but the impact cracked his twin propellers, which caused the airplane to vibrate violently. Still, it was enough. Eugene Ely was airborne and had just made history with the first takeoff from a ship. Taking no more chances, he turned toward Willoughy Spit and gently set the plane down in the sand. Less than two months later, it was time to attempt to reverse the process.
Curtiss and Ely took their aircraft to the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, near San Francisco, where the cruiser Pennsylvania (recommissioned in 1912 as Pittsburgh to free the state name for a new battleship) had been outfitted with a wooden platform over its afterdeck. This one was a little longer and wider than Birmingham’s—120 feet by 30 feet—because Ely was going to attempt a landing. Ropes weighted by sandbags on each end were strung across the makeshift flight deck. Ely’s landing gear was outfitted with hooks to snag the ropes and slow the plane. A final “crash barrier” of canvas was stretched across the end of the platform to stop pilot and plane just in case the hooks didn’t catch the ropes. In its most rudimentary form, this is the same basic system that is still used to land carrier-based aircraft a century later.
And it worked. Shortly before noon on January 18, 1911, while the Pennsylvania sat at anchor in San Francisco Bay, Ely came buzzing toward its stern despite a ten-knot tailwind. He caught the lines and slowed to a stop. “Oh boy!” exclaimed his wife, Mabel, who was on board. “I knew you could do it.”
While the Pennsylvania’s captain took them below for lunch, the platform was cleared of its arresting gear and the Curtiss turned around in preparation for takeoff. After lunch, Ely did just that, completing the first successful landing and takeoff from a ship. The navy was intrigued enough to detail Lieutenant Theodore Gordon “Spuds” Ellyson to Curtiss’s aviation camp at North Island, San Diego, to learn to fly and become Naval Aviator No. 1.2
It would be a while, however, before the United States Navy embraced the new technology that Ely had pioneered. Because of the demands of World War I, it was Great Britain that modified a number of existing ships to carry airplanes. Britain also laid down the keel of HMS Hermes, the first aircraft carrier built specifically for that purpose. But the vessel was not launched until the fall of 1919, and, given postwar economies as well policy debates such as the Washington Disarmament Conference, the ship, with its bow-to-stern flight deck and an offset, “island” superstructure, was not commissioned until 1923. “To an officer used to destroyers,” recalled Bill Halsey after he first laid eyes on the Hermes at Malta, “she was an off-center, ungainly bucket, something a child had started to build and had left unfinished.”3
By then, the U.S. Navy had commissioned a converted carrier of its own. The Jupiter was originally launched in 1912 as a collier and saw most of its initial service tending to the Atlantic Fleet. The ship hauled coal to Europe to facilitate the postwar rush of returning doughboys and then reported to the navy yard at Norfolk for a complete makeover. A flat flight deck was built over its 542-foot length from bow to stern, but with no island or superstructure above it, giving quick rise to the nickname “the Covered Wagon.”
Recommissioned in 1922 as Langley—to honor the deceased astronomer and aviation pioneer Samuel P. Langley—the ship had two obvious problems: it was neither very large nor very fast. Its flight deck was cramped, and the old collier’s engines maxed out at 15 knots even with its lighter load of planes instead of coal. But the Langley was to serve one undeniable purpose. As the next generation of aircraft carriers slid down the ways, they would be manned by pilots and crews who more often than not had learned their basic operational skills aboard it.4
Pioneer though the Langley was, the converted collier was only a stopgap as an aircraft carrier. Once the treaty limiting battleship tonnages was signed, the U.S. Navy looked to its shipyards and found two hulls that had originally been laid down as battleships. Battle Cruiser CC-1 was under construction at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts, and Battle Cruiser CC-3 was taking shape at the New York Shipbuilding Corporation in Camden, New Jersey. Under the treaty, these couldn’t be launched as battleships. So on July 1, 1922, the order was given to complete both ships as aircraft carriers. They were launched in 1925 and commissioned within weeks of each other late in 1927. (A ship has three dates of significance in its construction: the date it is “laid down”—construction starts on its keel; the date of its launching and christening—it slides down the ways and floats; and the date it is commissioned—considered operational and entered on the U.S. Navy rolls as an active-duty ship.)
CC-1 became the carrier Lexington (CV-2), and CC-3 was christened Saratoga (CV-3). Lexington displaced a beefy 41,000 tons and was 888 feet long with a 105.5-foot beam. Saratoga had less armor plating and weighed a respectable 33,000 tons, with the same dimensions. Both carriers could more than double the speed of the Langley, churning along at 34 knots when required, and carried a complement of eighty-one aircraft.5
From the hands-on command experience of building a submarine base, Chester Nimitz was ordered to report to the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. His record there proved that his high standing at Annapolis was no fluke. As much of a doer as he was a mechanic, Nimitz was also well suited to devouring a full range of books and papers on tactics, strategy, and military history. He found academic life stimulating and later termed his year in Newport “one of the truly important assignments of my career.”
To be sure, there were war games on a huge plotting board—almost invariably with Japan as the aggressor in the Pacific—but there was also keen scrutiny of the fleet tactics employed in the Battle of Jutland. Whatever else could be said about the movements of the British and German fleets there, it was well acknowledged that both formations had been extraordinarily cumbersome and complex. The cruising formation of the British fleet, for example, deployed twenty-four battleships in six columns abeam, with screens of destroyers and cruisers extending over twenty miles. Turning such a multilegged formation in unison, let alone deploying it into battle lines, was problematic at best.
The president of the Naval War College overseeing these discussions in 1922 was none other than Admiral William S. Sims, who had already influenced Ernie King’s and Bill Halsey’s development of destroyer techniques, not to mention the convoy system. When Sims spread his war games fleet across the plotting board, he introduced aircraft carriers to the mix—even though Lexington and Saratoga were still months away from commissioning—and he argued that the aircraft carrier would replace the battleship as the navy’s capital ship. The reason was that carriers presented a 360-degree range of firepower via their aircraft that far outdistanced the radius of a battleship’s guns. The battleship sailors scoffed in disbelief, much as they had done at Sims’s initial World War I arguments for antisubmarine warfare and convoys, but that did not stop Sims from envisioning future battles between surface fleets hundreds of miles apart that would attack only with carrier-based planes.
Sims’s fixation with a widening circle of projected power may have influenced Nimitz’s fellow classmate—both at Annapolis and now at the Naval War College—Commander Roscoe C. MacFall when he took his own turn at the plotting board. Rather than placing ships in long lines, MacFall arrayed his fleet in concentric circles around his capital ships—admittedly still battleships. The tactical advantage was that with a common pivot point in the center of the circle, all ships could turn together and remain in formation. The circle formation also had the advantage of concentrating antiaircraft fire around the capital ships.
As it turned out, it was Chester Nimitz who would supervise the integration of these two developments—MacFall’s concentric-circle formations and Sims’s concept of the aircraft carrier as capital ship—into fleet operations at sea. After his tour at the Naval War College, Nimitz was picked by his old mentor from his World War I submarine days, Admiral Samuel S. Robison, to become Robison’s assistant chief of staff when he became commander in chief, Battle Fleet, the second-highest operational command in the navy. Nimitz reported aboard Robison’s flagship, the battleship California, and during the fleet’s first round of maneuvers, he convinced both the admiral and his senior captains to try the circle formation. When they did, it worked surprisingly well.
Aligning off the flagship, the entire fleet could pivot together as all the ships kept a constant bearing and distance from the flagship. When the fleet was deploying into battle formation, a battleship led the way out of the circle, and the trailing ships followed accordingly. (Maintaining formation at night became more problematic, but these difficulties lessened when ships were finally equipped with radar.)
As this tactic was refined over a succession of maneuvers, however, there was one obvious exception to the circular formation. Flight operations require aircraft carriers to turn into the wind so that aircraft can take off and land with the benefit of the wind just as they do on land. A carrier with its bow pointed into a twenty-knot wind and steaming ahead at fifteen knots provides a pilot with the advantage of thirty-five knots of wind moving over his plane’s wings even before he shoves the throttle full. Similarly, turning into the wind to land aircraft allows for slower landing speeds. For example, an aircraft with a normal landing speed of sixty-five knots has an effective deck speed of only thirty knots when landing on a carrier surging at fifteen knots into a twenty-knot wind.
When the Langley was required to launch or recover its planes, the carrier left the circular formation and sailed into the wind accompanied by only two destroyers. The ship was easy prey for submarines and frequently ended up some distance from the main force.
To Nimitz, the solution was obvious. Admiral Sims was right: the carrier, not the battleship, was the chief capital ship, and the concentric-circle formation should have the carrier at its center. That way, when the carrier was required to turn into the wind for flight operations, the entire fleet turned with it. Under pressure from Nimitz, Admiral Robison sought permission from the Navy Department to combine Langley with his battle force for maneuvers. The result was that the carrier always had the protection of the surrounding screen of ships, and those ships always had the protection of the carrier’s planes. It was only 1924, but Nimitz later regarded those pioneering maneuvers with carrier-centered, circular task-force formations “as laying the groundwork for the cruising formations that we used in World War II in the carrier air groups and practically every kind of task force that went out.”6
While Ernest J. King was still uncertain about the outcome of the S-51 salvage operation, his conversation with William D. Leahy in the Bureau of Navigation had not offered King much hope for a plum sea-duty assignment. In his anxiety, King went to see Rear Admiral William A. Moffett, the chief of the navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics. A native of South Carolina and an 1890 graduate of Annapolis, Moffett had cut his teeth on cruisers and battleships before accepting the appointment as the first chief of aeronautics in 1921. He had become devoted to aviation, and while some—including King—would question his fascination with lighter-than-air craft, Moffett was strongly committed to naval aviation as an integral part of fleet operations and not as a separate service. “Hell, we won’t secede from the Navy,” Moffett admonished his junior officers. “If we are half as good as we think we are, we’ll take it over.”7
Moffett sympathized with King’s plight about a future command and offered an intriguing alternative. Congress was tinkering with navy regulations so that aviation commands would require qualification as naval aviators or at least observers. The problem was that most qualified aviators were far too junior to assume command of a naval air base or one of the two carriers nearing completion. King was almost fifty, but if he was willing to qualify to fly, Moffett promised him command of an aircraft carrier.
An aircraft carrier? That thought got King’s blood racing. Much like the previous promise of a flotilla command if King went to submarine school, Moffett’s offer seemed to be King’s ticket up to the next rung of the career ladder. The offer of command of a capital ship did not come lightly. But typical of King, he pondered the decision for several months while he finished raising S-51 and still hoped that a cruiser command might open up. “I suppose that Bill Leahy has told you of my strenuous desires to get command of one of the scouts [light cruisers],” King wrote Captain Thomas R. Kurtz, an Annapolis classmate now in the Bureau of Navigation. “I hope that you will keep me in mind for that duty.”8
But then King got itchy. “It seemed to me,” King later said, “that aviation was the coming thing in the Navy.” A month before S-51 was raised, he accepted Moffett’s offer and expected to report for flight training at Pensacola after the salvage operation was complete. But Moffett suddenly had a more pressing need, and with S-51 barely in dry dock, King was ordered to take command of the seaplane tender Wright.
Wright’s job was to shuttle seaplanes around and serve as a mobile support base. It had a reputation as “an easy ship,” but that changed immediately when King marched up its gangplank. His bite equaled his bark, and within weeks the Wright was smartening up while its new captain was taking his first flights in the open-air rear cockpit of a two-man seaplane.
King wasn’t a natural, but he learned enough over the next few months that he pressured Moffett to designate him a student aviator. It was King’s usual response: he got a brief introduction, and suddenly he was an expert. Moffett demurred and instead ordered King to report to Pensacola early in 1927 for the complete course in flight training.
The naval air base at Pensacola was a rather down-and-out operation in those days. Funds were tight, the whole idea of naval aviation still had plenty of skeptics, and a batch of newly minted ensigns fresh out of the academy were being lumped together with old fuddy-duddies like King. This all made for an experience where the only rank that really mattered was how well one did in the pilot’s seat.
As he had always done when studying was a means to an end, King threw himself into his course work and spent as much time in the air as permitted. This became one of those times in his life when he abstained from alcohol, preached abstinence to his fellow students, and “badgered the base commander to enforce the prohibition laws.”
Then one Saturday afternoon, King strolled into the officers’ quarters and found a drinking party under way. Knowing well his previous rants, one of the instigators thrust a drink into King’s hands and waited for his reaction. King looked from the glass in his hand to the assembled crowd and back again and then took a sip. That was all he needed. From then on, whether it was drinking or poker, Captain King became “the damnedest party man in the place.” As usual, once he embraced something, he did it full bore.
And none of this reveling, of course, had any negative impact on his flying. Thanks to his lessons aboard the Wright, King soloed soon after arriving in Pensacola, He was very mechanical in his approach, did everything by the book, and seemed to relish flying, but he never became totally comfortable serving as pilot in command. He simply didn’t have the innate seat-of-the-pants mentality that characterized so many pilots of that era. King earned his wings because he was required to do so for advancement, but after they were pinned on his chest on May 26, 1927, he never again flew alone. He delighted in taking the controls on flights, but he also wanted the safety net of another pilot on board (and in fact the navy later mandated this policy for senior officers over fifty).9
His pilot’s license requirement fulfilled and certified as Naval Aviator No. 3368, King was summoned by Admiral Moffett to report back to command of the Wright. After a ten-day leave with Mattie and his family in Annapolis, King did so and then watched expectantly as Lexington and Saratoga were commissioned late in 1927. Patience, Admiral Moffett counseled, but then a call from the chief of naval operations interrupted both of their plans. Another submarine, S-4, was down off Cape Cod after colliding with a Coast Guard cutter. This time, there really might be survivors, and King was ordered to take command of the rescue operations.
In weather too stormy for flying, King raced to New York by train and then sped from Penn Station to the Brooklyn Navy Yard in a police motorcade. There he hopped into a seaplane from the battleship New York, gave the pilot thumbs-up, and endured two frigid hours of flying to Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Arriving on the scene, King found the reliable Falcon over the crash site and tapping coming from the submerged hull. But the weather was worsening, and attempts to blow the sub’s ballast tanks full of air and force it to the surface failed. Similar attempts to rig an air hose and pump fresh air into the boat to sustain the crew also failed. The press corps flocked about Provincetown with its own litany of second-guessing. Finally, the commander of the Atlantic Fleet submarines ordered the Falcon and its support ships into the harbor at Provincetown to ride out a furious gale. It lasted for days, and on Christmas Eve 1927, the navy was forced to announce that everyone aboard S-4 was presumed dead.
Now King faced another difficult salvage operation—one that was once again exacerbated by wintry weather. Then came the letter from Admiral Moffett that he had been expecting. He was offered command of the Langley. It wasn’t the Lexington or Saratoga, but it was an aircraft carrier. And King hesitated. Just as he was during the operations to recover S-51, he was torn between seeing the present operation through to completion and taking the command. Then too, just as he had continued to covet a cruiser command before flight training, he not so secretly still hoped that Fortune might see him on Lexington or Saratoga.
“I hardly know how to reply at this time,” King responded to Moffett. But in the end, he determined to stay with the S-4 salvage operations and take his chances because “developments regarding the Lexington and Saratoga commands, may, in June or thereabouts, be of interest and importance to me.”
As it turned out, King was rewarded on all counts. In mid-March 1928, S-4 bobbed to the surface after the deployment of a series of pontoons similar to those used on S-51. He reported back to the Wright in May with his second Distinguished Service Medal (the peacetime navy was a little more generous with this honor in those days). Then Moffett made good on his pledge and King received his orders to take command not of the proffered “Covered Wagon” Langley, but of the shiny new Lexington. King was walking on air—for about three weeks.10
Quite suddenly, on July 28, 1928, the Bureau of Navigation canceled his coveted orders to the Lexington, and—apparently at Moffett’s request—he was assigned instead to the Bureau of Aeronautics in Washington as Moffett’s assistant. He reported promptly but was less than pleased. It seems unlikely that Moffett purposely employed a bait and switch but that he instead belatedly caved in to pressure from a recently qualified aviator five years senior to King who desperately wanted the Lexington command. Writing his memoirs twenty years later, King still could not bear to cite the Lexington by name: “He learned to his disgust that he was presently to be shifted from his highly congenial new command at sea.” To him, the whole affair of changed orders was an “annoying period.”11
King was assured that he would “love the job” of Moffett’s assistant. But Moffett was clearly the well-established heavyweight in the bureau, the man who had fought for its creation and nurtured its growth. He was energetic, resourceful, and not afraid to be combative in pursuit of his goals. These were exactly the words that might just as well have been used to describe King, and his sudden proximity to Moffett produced predictable friction.
It wasn’t that Moffett and King didn’t like each other, but rather that each was used to having his own way. King played no favorites—his or anyone else’s—and Moffett was content to coddle certain naval aviators who were bringing in good press, the polar explorer Commander Richard E. Byrd among them. King fretted, too, over Moffett’s direct control of aviation assignments outside the normal channels of the Bureau of Navigation. Without such control, King might well have been strutting the bridge of the Lexington and not haggling with Moffett.
Finally, after King had been on the job about nine months, the friction rose to the boiling point, and Moffett sputtered, “It seems to me you want to be chief of the Bureau.” That was probably true, but King merely replied, “Admiral, I request a change of duty so you can have a different assistant.”
Moffett readily obliged, but far from exiling King to some outpost, he gave him command of the naval air station at Norfolk, then, as now, among the major naval aviation facilities. They might not have gotten along, but Moffett clearly respected King’s talents. And within a year, Moffett promised King that in the summer of 1930 he would at long last have command of a carrier, the Saratoga.
Most captains with an eye toward the stars of a rear admiral would have been ecstatic, but King proved his usual, particular self. Because Saratoga was the flagship of the carrier force, its captain had an admiral on board inevitably looking over his shoulder. King wanted the Lexington and a good measure of freedom. He told Moffett so in no uncertain terms. Moffett might well have put King in his place, but he didn’t. He gave King the Lexington as requested. It had taken twenty-nine years since his Annapolis graduation, but Captain Ernest J. King was at last the master of what he and many others thought was “the finest ship command in the world!”12
Lexington had been commissioned for only two and a half years when King stepped aboard the carrier in June 1930. Much was still being learned about these floating behemoths. Lexington’s crew of around 2,100 officers and enlisted men was twice that aboard the largest battleship of the era. The sheer number of men and the numerous departments tended to decentralize the chain of command. And the air squadrons that rotated duty aboard the vessel presented their own set of problems. Some pilots treated the carrier as a cruise ship and expected to do little duty beyond flying. Others looked to their squadron commander, not the carrier captain, as the ultimate authority. None of this sat very well with Ernest J. King.
First and foremost, King reminded everyone—including the pilots from the air squadrons—that there was only one code of conduct and that was the Navy Regulations. Departmental idiosyncrasies fell by the wayside as “King made it his business to know everything that was happening on the ship.”13 As for the pilots, King ordered them to conduct thorough inspections of their aircraft before and after each flight and to put in their time on watch as naval officers. This was the U.S. Navy, gentlemen, not a barnstorming circus or brunch at the Hotel del Coronado.
King’s approach worked. Lexington went from being a “loose” ship to being a taut one ruled by King’s iron hand. “If a man knew his business,” recalled future admiral J. J. “Jocko” Clark, then the commander of one of Lexington’s air squadrons, “it was easy enough to get along with Ernie King. But God help him if he were wrong; King would crucify him.”14 Along the way King’s penchant for experimentation brought much-needed innovation to the operations and tactics of America’s new carrier fleet.
King’s first chance to show off the Lexington’s snappiness, as well as his own command abilities aboard it, took place during fleet maneuvers off Panama early in 1931. After initially being sent on what he considered a wild-goose chase, King ordered Lexington to come about and race at full speed back into the area where he suspected Langley was posing as an “enemy” carrier. As Lexington closed to within the maximum range of its aircraft, established protocol dictated launching scouts to locate the target, to be followed by bombers and torpedo planes.
But King was impatient to score a “kill” before darkness fell, and he launched his bombers and torpedo planes thirty minutes after the scouts. Navigation by aircraft at sea was then still rudimentary at best. Once one’s home carrier receded from view, pilots relied on dead reckoning with a compass and estimates of wind and speed to get back to where the carrier was supposed to be.
An hour or so later, with evening approaching, the scouts returned on schedule to the Lexington and reported no sign of either the “enemy” or the trailing bombers and torpedo planes. King paced the bridge and watched the darkening skies for any sign of the planes. Fleet regulations required all aircraft to be recovered by sunset, for the very good reason that night landings had yet to be attempted.
Lexington’s radio sent out a flurry of dots and dashes, black smoke poured from its stack, and searchlights frantically probed the descending darkness. If ever King doubted himself, now, on the verge of losing thirty-one aircraft on his first major operation, might have been one of those times.
Twilight in the tropics is fleeting, and just before it vanished, the missing aircraft lumbered into view, having found and “attacked” the Langley. The pilots began to make what became for all but the first few aircraft their first night carrier landing. When all were aboard safely, the flight commander hurried to the Lexington’s bridge.
Characteristically, King greeted him with a gruff, “Where the hell have you been?” When the flight commander protested that Lexington was not where he had been briefed it would be, King dressed him down for misunderstanding the briefing. Whatever the fault, it certainly was not King’s. As one of the aviators later recalled, “Everyone was out of step but him!”
And King put the best possible spin on the entire matter, immediately recognizing the potential of night operations. Among his other innovations during these maneuvers, he implemented combat air patrols (CAPs) circling overhead to protect his ship from enemy attacks. Competitive and hard-driving, he pushed his ship and men to their fullest and himself always one notch above that.
Recollections of junior officers are replete with tales of King making mistakes or merely compounding problems with his thundering. Once he stormed to the flight deck to rearrange parked aircraft because he wanted more room for takeoffs and no one could do it to his satisfaction; by the time he was done, he had lost ten feet of space.
Quite a few officers simply withered under King’s sharp demeanor. He was a force few could withstand, but those who did usually earned King’s begrudging respect. When a torpedo plane missed the flight deck and landed in the starboard gun gallery one afternoon, its pilot faced the inevitable summons to the bridge. His squadron commander, John J. Ballentine, made it there first.
“Ballentine,” King barked, “what is wrong with your pilots?”
“Nothing,” Ballentine replied. “Your ship is not into the wind, and until it is, I will not let any more of my pilots land.”
After Ballentine stormed off the bridge, King adjusted Lexington’s course directly into the wind, and the recovery operations continued. But King remembered Ballentine. Later, when King returned to sea duty wearing admiral’s stars, he specifically requested that Ballentine become his operations officer.
“Under King,” wrote his principal biographer, “the fit survived and developed into some of the Navy’s finest captains and admirals. The unfit were eliminated.” Still, there was another side of King, and the line he walked between them could sometimes be quite narrow. Aboard ship, King was sharp, demanding, and generally intolerant of anyone who didn’t follow regulations or anticipate his every command. Onshore, however, it was a different story.
King never did anything halfway, and that included his partying. Scarcely had the Lexington docked after the Panama war games than King—despite days without sleep and the Prohibition laws—was ashore and in the back of a bar nursing a private bottle of bootleg Scotch. He was soon surrounded by a group of junior officers, and such events became an established norm. King called it “play time,” but such fraternization created potential problems. Aboard ship, King was the lord and master; ashore at parties, he was “Uncle Ernie.” His advice was, “You ought to be very suspicious of anyone who won’t take a drink or doesn’t like women.”15
Fleet maneuvers the following year, 1932, were held in the warm waters around Hawaii. The general premise was a carrier-based air strike against Pearl Harbor and other installations on Oahu. The weather was atrocious, with high waves. Aircraft were slow to take off and equally slow to land on the pitching decks. Still, the “attack” was successful, and it set some minds to thinking.
Lexington was ordered eastward shortly afterward to engage a threat from an “enemy” force that had transited the Panama Canal. King honed his tactics and chose to “attack” the opposing carrier near dusk when most of its planes had just returned from sorties and were on deck, unarmed and without fuel. The mission was judged a success, but the complete destruction of the “enemy” fleet was made possible by an aggressive torpedo attack led by destroyers under the command of William F. Halsey, Jr.
Halsey had looked up to King ever since their days at Annapolis, when King had been the four-striper in command of the battalion and Halsey a lowly plebe. Their paths hadn’t crossed much in the intervening years—save for their days driving destroyers in the North Atlantic under Admiral Sims—as Halsey had stuck with destroyers while King had tried his hand first at submarines and then at carriers. But this close association during the 1932 fleet maneuvers seems to have brought Halsey to King’s attention as a man who got things done.16
Prior to that, in between Halsey’s sea duty aboard destroyers, he had spent a year in Washington at the Navy Department’s Office of Naval Intelligence commanding, as Halsey told the story, an LSD—“a Large Steel Desk.” Writing about this year in his memoirs, Halsey made an interesting observation that some would say he should have remembered when a typhoon was bearing down on his fleet in the Philippine Sea. Saying that the function of Naval Intelligence was to “collect, coordinate, interpret, and disseminate,” Halsey professed that the most difficult step was the last. “It isn’t enough to get the right information to the right man at the right time,” he wrote; “you have to make sure he doesn’t let it molder in his ‘in’ basket.”17
From Washington in September 1922, Halsey had been posted to the American embassy in Berlin as the naval attaché. It is difficult to imagine Bill Halsey in any sort of a diplomatic role, and a sense of his unease even emanates from photographs of him during this tenure, a sailor far more at home on the bridge of a warship than at a diplomatic reception. Finding conditions in postwar Germany physically spartan and socially resentful, Fan managed to endure the conditions with young Bill, but the Halseys soon sent daughter Margaret to boarding school in Switzerland.
After leaving Berlin in July 1924, Halsey was back aboard destroyers for a year, showing the flag around Europe and the Mediterranean. Fan and young Bill joined Margaret in Switzerland for the duration. Then, in the fall of 1925, all the Halseys returned to the States, and Fan and the children settled in Asheville, North Carolina, while Bill reported for his lone nondestroyer sea duty during this period. In preparation for promotion to the rank of captain, he served as executive officer of the battleship Wyoming. Meanwhile, Fan put her own spin on all the moves navy wives endured by flatly asserting that she spent her time “buying and abandoning garbage cans all over the world.”
After Bill’s promotion to captain in February 1927, there was yet another move—this one to Annapolis, where he was given command of the receiving ship at the Naval Academy, an aging salvage from the Spanish-American War named the Reina Mercedes. From this flagship, Halsey was responsible for every vessel in the academy’s fleet. The Reina Mercedes served as his living quarters, as well as barracks for enlisted men.
Fan took one look at the dismal captain’s quarters and ordered an immediate overhaul. When she was finished, their “porch” on the afterdeck, with views down the Severn River to Chesapeake Bay, became one of the best entertaining spots on the base. The Halseys launched into their usual rounds of partying and young midshipmen added to the merriment by calling on seventeen-year-old Margaret. Life was good. The next three and a half years at Annapolis passed pleasantly and remained “one of the most delightful tours” in Halsey’s career.
But those years also gave Halsey occasion to flirt with flying. In addition to commanding the academy’s ships, Halsey was in charge of its small aviation detail. When he expressed some reservations about being responsible for something he knew nothing about, the lieutenant commanding the detail had a quick response. “Fine! Let’s go flying!” They did, and Halsey loved it.
Right then and there, Bill Halsey became a loud proponent of naval aviation. So loud, in fact, that after this tour at Annapolis was over, the Bureau of Navigation asked if he would like to take flight training at Pensacola. “I jumped at the chance,” he recalled, but then, to his chagrin, he failed the eye examination. Instead, he was ordered to command DESRON-14, a destroyer squadron of nineteen ships then attached to the Atlantic Fleet. Like it or not, he was still wedded to destroyers. And his commanding officer, the commander of Destroyers, Scouting Force, was to be Bill Leahy.18