After his years at the Naval War College and at sea with Admiral Robison gaining experience in fleet formations built around aircraft carriers, Commander Chester W. Nimitz was again detailed to an academic setting, but this time he was the teacher. Despite the overriding sentiment in the 1920s against the military, Congress bowed to the wishes of the Navy Department and in 1925 created the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps (NROTC). Bill Leahy was assigned to the Bureau of Navigation at the time and strongly supported the move. While the program’s initial funding was sparse, the NROTC quickly provided the navy with a nucleus for the expanded manpower and expertise that would be sorely needed a few years later.
Nimitz was one of six officers ordered to command sixty-man NROTC units at Harvard, Yale, Northwestern, the University of Washington, Georgia Tech, and the University of California at Berkeley. Nimitz drew the assignment at Berkeley and found that among his first duties was recruiting interested prospects to fill the sixty slots. In addition to their regular college courses, enrolled midshipmen took seamanship, navigation, engineering, and related courses and were eligible upon graduation for a commission in the Naval Reserve.
At first, Nimitz was leery that such a shore assignment might derail his chances for higher command, but with Admiral Robison as his mentor and others, including Bill Leahy in the Bureau of Navigation, becoming increasingly aware of his abilities, Nimitz need not have worried. In fact, the three years that the Nimitz family spent in Berkeley were among the happiest of their lives—even more so than those in Hawaii because the children were older.
Son Chet, who wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps at Annapolis, and young Catherine, increasingly called Kate to distinguish her from her mother, were into their teens, and Nancy wasn’t far behind. Not only did Nimitz find the cultural interaction with a university community stimulating—one of the rare occasions he was outside the close-knit navy fraternity—but he also had plenty of time for family activities, including vacations and camping trips into the nearby Sierras. His children would always remember him as very involved and hands-on, just as he was in his professional activities.
And if Bill Leahy had once grumbled that the navy had not adequately prepared him to write articulately, Nimitz made sure in grading his midshipmen’s papers that he corrected spelling and grammar as well as facts. As for his own advancement, he forged a bond with the university community, and Cal Berkeley in particular, that lasted all his life. He was promoted to the permanent rank of captain in 1927, and when his tour at Berkeley ended in 1929, his exemplary service and the high regard in which he was held—by civilian academics and fellow officers alike—left no question that Chester Nimitz was slated for continued advancement.1
Nimitz went next to San Diego as commander, Submarine Division Twenty. He was forty-four and almost a quarter of a century out of Annapolis. When asked for a sketch of his career to date for a twenty-fifth-anniversary yearbook, he replied that he had enjoyed all his assignments because, he believed, “of my making it a point to become as deeply immersed and as interested in each activity as it was possible for me to become.” Indeed, he confessed to knowing “no other profession for which I would forsake my present one.”2
But in the early 1930s, the navy, as Bill Leahy had learned, was sailing choppy political seas. Captain Nimitz was next assigned to command the Rigel, a tender charged with watching over a fleet of about thirty-five out-of-commission destroyers in San Diego. The sight of these ships sitting idle rankled Nimitz, but the good news was that once again, he was able to have his family with him for an extended period. A third daughter, Mary, was born in 1931.
Chester and Catherine made it a point of parenting junior officers as well, just as they had done with NROTC midshipmen in Berkeley and young officers from the Brooklyn Navy Yard years before. This San Diego assignment also gave Nimitz occasion to indulge his passion for playing tennis and taking long hikes, occasionally in the company of Captain Raymond Spruance, then chief of staff to the commander, Destroyers, Scouting Force.3
But the payoff was coming. On October 16, 1933, Captain Nimitz assumed command of the heavy cruiser Augusta and sailed the ship to the Far East Station for duty as flagship of the Asiatic Fleet. Six hundred feet in length, with a beam of sixty-six feet and a displacement of nine thousand tons, Augusta and its sisters in the Northampton class, including the Houston, were capable of knifing through the water at better than 32 knots. Augusta, Maine, would try to claim the ship, but the cruiser had been sponsored by Evelyn McDaniel of Augusta, Georgia, and named for that southern city.
Commissioned only in 1931, the cruiser was the result of a building program that had proceeded while battleship construction was stymied by the limits of the Washington treaty. But after a hurried overhaul at the Bremerton Navy Yard in Washington State, and with most of the 735-man crew new to the ship, Nimitz the teacher had his work cut out for him. His manner was not to bark orders and intimidate with ultimatums, as Ernie King might have done, but rather to convey his expectations quietly yet firmly from top to bottom. Nimitz himself set the example of hard work, competence, and pride in oneself that he expected his subordinates to follow.
Nimitz’s teaching style was sometimes so understated as to be powerfully profound. The captain was keen on giving every officer and enlisted man “as much responsibility as he could handle” and never shied away from providing young ensigns experience at the conn. One day, coming into an anchorage, a young ensign named Odale D. “Muddy” Waters approached with far too much speed and “had to back the ship full power and lay out 90 fathoms of chain [540 feet] before he got her stopped, then had to heave back to 60 fathoms.” Captain Nimitz watched the entire procedure without a comment and then asked, “Waters, you know what you did wrong, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir, I certainly do,” replied Waters. “I came in too fast.”
Nimitz nodded in agreement—end of lesson. Waters later became a rear admiral.
But Nimitz was also never afraid to teach from his own experiences. Coming alongside the anchored oiler Pecos in exceptionally blustery winds, Nimitz himself took the conn. It seemed like a perfect landing until a freak gust sent the Augusta’s bow into the lifeboat davits of the Pecos and snagged an anchor just as the lines were being made secure. A quick strain on the number 3 line and a fortuitous shift of wind untangled the mess, but Nimitz quickly sent for the lieutenant who had been supervising the lines.
“Thompson,” Nimitz snapped without his usual calm, “what did I do wrong?”
E. M. “Tommy” Thompson gulped and then replied, “Well, sir, you were overconfident and misjudged the effect the wind would have on a ship riding lightly on the water.”
“That’s right,” Nimitz affirmed. “Now, Thompson, what should I have done?”
“Probably the safe thing to have done, sir, would have been to have gone ahead, drop the starboard anchor, and to have backed down on it.”
“That’s right,” Nimitz said with a scowl, “and, Thompson, don’t you ever forget it!” It was no coincidence that Thompson, too, became a rear admiral. He had a great teacher.4
The Asiatic Fleet was hardly a powerhouse—aside from the Augusta, it consisted of a squadron of destroyers, a squadron of submarines, and a collection of gunboats and auxiliary ships—and the chief duty of its admiral was to show the flag up and down the Chinese coast and from Manila to Yokohama. Per long-established procedures, these exercises moved north and south following the temperate climate. It was not entirely risk-free, because Japan continued its control of Manchuria and eyed more Chinese territory farther south, but social calls were the order of the day when in port.
The occasion Nimitz remembered most was a port call in Tokyo Bay in 1934 that coincided with the funeral of Admiral Togo, whom Nimitz had met on his 1905 visit to Japan as a passed midshipman. Foreign ships boomed salutes, flags flew at half-mast, and a delegation of the Augusta’s sailors and marines marched in the funeral procession. The following day, Nimitz was among those invited to the service at Togo’s modest cottage in the forest outside Tokyo. His opinion of the admiral continued to be one of high respect, and he never wavered in that view.
By the following spring, it was time for Nimitz to give up the Augusta and return to shore duty in Washington as assistant chief of the Bureau of Navigation. It was hard to say who was sadder at the parting, the crew or its captain. Nimitz’s eyes glistened as he said farewell and his junior officers accorded him the unusual honor of rowing him in a whaleboat to the liner that would carry him home.
“I think one can safely say,” recalled one of those officers, yet another of Nimitz’s protégés who would wear admiral’s stars, “that the Augusta had reached an absolutely unheard-of level of high moral, high pride, and competence at every level down to the lowliest mess cook.”5
Upon Nimitz’s arrival back in the United States, Chet, who by now was a midshipman at the Naval Academy, asked his father where he expected to get in the navy and how he was going to do it. His father unabashedly replied that he intended to follow the route he had always taken and do his very best at whatever he was assigned. He was confident that if he did so, his own road would someday lead to the office he said he would like to have—chief of naval operations.6
When Captain Nimitz reported to Washington and the Bureau of Navigation, Bill Leahy was heading to sea as a vice admiral and commander, Battleships, Battle Force. A year later, on March 30, 1936, Leahy was accorded the four stars of a full admiral and made commander, Battle Force, essentially the backbone of the U.S. Fleet. Under his command were fourteen battleships, nine cruisers, forty-three destroyers, eight minelaying destroyers, and the navy’s four aircraft carriers, the aging Langley, Saratoga (still under Bill Halsey’s command), Lexington, and Ranger. In all, Leahy was responsible for 78 ships; 2,762 officers; and 30,370 enlisted men.7
But Leahy’s time at sea, flying his four-star flag, was to be short-lived. Admiral Standley’s objections to the contrary, Franklin Roosevelt wanted Leahy to replace Standley as chief of naval operations, effective January 2, 1937. Leahy took the news in typical stride, with hints of both humility and nostalgia. He certainly recognized the honor of the post and that it signified his climb to the top of the navy pyramid. But his pleasure at the selection was also “tempered by a realization,” he acknowledged, “that it brings to an end a service at sea that commenced on board the frigate Constellation in June 1893 and that has in the forty-three intervening years provided splendid opportunities for service and adventure in peace and war in many parts of the world.”8
An article in Newsweek after Roosevelt announced his appointment called Leahy “gruff in voice, a strict disciplinarian, he drives himself and everybody else.” The reporter was particularly impressed by the sixty-one-year-old Leahy’s endurance during the recent fleet maneuvers, when the need for the men to remain constantly on duty wore down some of his junior officers. It was said that “Old Bill can stick on the bridge for six weeks without sleep.” But the article also showed Leahy’s well-liked other side: “Off duty he is kindly, friendly, and as comfortable as an old shoe.”9
Leahy’s appointment as CNO depended, of course, on FDR’s reelection in November 1936, but that matter was never really in doubt. It was a Roosevelt landslide, and “in view of friendly personal relations of long standing with Frankyn [sic] Roosevelt, and a complete belief in his exalted ideals of service to the Nation,” Leahy wrote, “his election by an overwhelming majority of the electorate is particularly pleasing to me.” Still, Leahy’s innate conservatism could not help but show through. “Roosevelt at the present time,” Leahy confided to his diary, “is definitely a Liberal, and it is the hope of many of his friends that he can detach himself from radical members of his present entourage and incline his efforts more toward conservatism.”10
That was not going to happen, but there is no doubt that Leahy’s flag-rank rise and his increasing measure of influence derived in large part from FDR’s support. Roosevelt was most comfortable when working within a “good old boy network” of those he had known for a long time. That doesn’t mean that Roosevelt didn’t reach out to recommended new talent, but if he knew someone personally, as he did Leahy and Halsey, or was aware of someone’s accomplishments, such as King’s salvaging of the S-51, Roosevelt was more apt to pick that person over an unknown no matter how highly recommended.
Popular perception has long suggested that FDR favored the navy over the army, but when it came to budgets, deployments, and promotions, he was evenhanded as commander in chief. On an emotional level, however, Roosevelt’s combination inspection-fishing-vacation trips—such as he enjoyed aboard the cruiser Houston—were among his favorite occasions. And his long-standing relationships with the navy’s admirals, particularly the duty-minded Leahy, made him more comfortable having them around. This contrast is underscored by remembering that the army chief of staff from 1930 to 1935 was Douglas MacArthur. The general was still trying to emulate his father’s advance up Missionary Ridge during the Civil War, and his visits to the White House often took on the aura of a state visit. FDR was not intimidated by MacArthur—or anyone else—but neither was he terribly comfortable with him. When MacArthur left Washington for the Philippines and Malin Craig, whom Roosevelt did not know well, became army chief of staff, it was only natural that Roosevelt gravitated toward the loyal and understated Leahy as his chief military adviser.
With a still sluggish economy, an increasingly unstable world community, and a navy only slowly embarking on a capital ship construction program to keep pace with the other powers, Roosevelt and Leahy had their work cut out for them. “It is hoped,” Leahy wrote as he began his term as CNO, “that the fleet’s war efficiency can be maintained and that America with an efficient and adequate sea defense can avoid being drawn into any foreign wars.”11
Three weeks later, Admiral Leahy stood in the rain on a reviewing platform behind FDR for two hours as the president’s second inaugural parade trooped by on Pennsylvania Avenue. Nominally, the president’s first-rank naval adviser was the secretary of the navy, but Claude A. Swanson was in failing health. A seventy-four-year-old Virginian, Swanson had served his state since 1893 as congressman, governor, and United States senator and had been appointed secretary of the navy by Roosevelt in 1933. When Swanson was unable to attend cabinet meetings and other occasions because of his health, it was Leahy who frequently represented the Navy Department as acting secretary. This gave him even greater access to the president’s inner circle.12
While the alliance of a reinvigorated Germany and Italy held attention in Europe, the third member of the growing Axis alliance was causing a stir in the Pacific. Japan’s aggression against China erupted into total war early in July 1937, and with Japanese forces advancing on Shanghai, Roosevelt became concerned that American commercial and military interests were at risk of being caught in the crossfire.
That same month, Amelia Earhart disappeared on her attempted globe-circling flight. After navy search efforts failed to find her, Leahy pressed to occupy other islands near her intended target of Howland Island, while American naval forces were in the vicinity. But Roosevelt remained focused on Shanghai. “How many Marines do we have in Shanghai?” the president asked Leahy at a cabinet meeting. When Leahy gave an answer of 1,050, FDR said that he wished they were not there. Leahy recalled the rationale that they were protecting about four thousand Americans in Shanghai, but Roosevelt quickly countered that “there were about twenty-five thousand Americans in Paris and not a single American Marine.”13
Roosevelt and Leahy were certainly opposed to any action that might provoke a clash involving the marines, but FDR protested that some Americans were going to get hurt nonetheless. When part of the International Settlement at Shanghai evacuated, the rest dug in, remaining an uncomfortable sliver of neutrality both for its occupants and the invading Japanese, who found the continuing foreign presence annoying. Even before Chinese forces completely abandoned Shanghai and the Japanese directed their attack toward Nanking, Japan announced that it would conduct an extensive bombing attack on Nanking and warned all foreigners to leave the city.
“This threat by Japan,” Leahy bristled, “to conduct a bombing raid against the civil population of the Capital 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 noncombatants… There is today an urgent need for a restatement of the international rules governing the conduct of war… Someday Japan must be called to account for its abuse of power in this instance.”14
But doing this would be difficult, if not impossible. Despite Roosevelt’s pro-Chinese sympathies, he recognized that a large portion of his countrymen remained decidedly isolationist in temperament. The United States was still mired in the Great Depression—folks had their own problems at home. Leahy, and undoubtedly Roosevelt too, understood that Japan would only grow stronger if China was subjugated, but in Leahy’s words, “From all indications the present splendid opportunity [to check Japan] will be lost through lack of decision on the part of the major world powers.”15
Early in October, Roosevelt spoke in Chicago and gave what came to be called his Quarantine speech. Citing a rise in world lawlessness, he suggested at a minimum an economic embargo of those nations promoting the same. But the speech landed with a thud amid American isolationism. And on the world stage, the future Allied powers were certainly not acting in unison or with any degree of resolve in countering the growing aggressiveness of Adolf Hitler. For most, Asia too remained a remote sideshow. Then came an incident that might have meant war.
December 12, 1937, was a Sunday, but it was far from a quiet one near the Yangtze River port of Nanking. Shanghai, 170 miles downstream, was in fact in Japanese hands after a bitter siege, and the Japanese were advancing on Nanking, which had been serving as the capital of the Chinese Nationalists. As such, the city was home to embassies and international diplomats, as well as a host of newspaper reporters.
In the wide and muddy Yangtze, patrol boats from several neutral nations attempted to look after their nationals. These included the American gunboat Panay, not to be confused with the Spanish-American War derelict of the same name that Chester Nimitz and “Slew” McCain had once motored around the Philippines. This Panay was one of five shallow-draft, 190-foot river gunboats built in the late 1920s specifically for patrolling the Yangtze River. Their assignment initially was to protect American commercial interests during the Chinese civil war—lately put on hold to counter the Japanese threat.
On board the Panay, in addition to its crew of fifty-five officers and men, were the last personnel from the abandoned U.S. embassy and American, as well as two Italian, newspaper reporters who had all sought refuge there the day before. The Panay and three small Standard Oil tankers had then moved upriver some distance to escape the dueling Japanese and Chinese artillery barrages. Japanese aircraft also crisscrossed the skies, but with a large American flag flying from its stern and another stretched out horizontally atop the pilothouse, there did not appear to be much chance that the Japanese would mistake the Panay for a belligerent. Indeed, the Panay’s two 3-inch deck guns, its principal armament along with ten .30-caliber antiaircraft machine guns, were covered.
But Sunday lunch was barely over when three Japanese navy planes quite suddenly made directly for the Panay and dropped a total of eighteen bombs. The ship’s machine guns were unlimbered in self-defense, but the initial attack wrecked the forward 3-inch gun and the pilothouse and wounded the captain, Lieutenant Commander J. J. Hughes, and several others. Had it truly been a case of mistaken identity, the attack might have then stopped, but instead twelve more dive-bombers and nine fighters appeared and made run after run at the ship, as well as at the nearby Standard Oil tankers.
Within thirty minutes, all power and propulsion were lost and the Panay was settling fast into sixty feet of water. Captain Hughes gave the order to abandon ship, but Japanese fighters continued to strafe some of the lifeboats as they made their way to shore. Two crew members and one of the Italian reporters were killed, and a total of eleven officers and men were seriously wounded. Almost everyone aboard had some measure of injuries from flying shrapnel and wood splinters.
When the American ambassador to Japan, Joseph C. Grew, heard of the attack, all he could think of was the bombing almost forty years earlier of the Maine. Grew told the press, “I had been working for five years to build up Japanese-American friendship and this incident seemed to me to risk shattering the whole structure.” Indeed, Grew “began to plan the details of hurried packing in case we had to leave—precisely as we began to pack in Berlin after the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915.”16
Bill Leahy heard the news via a telephone call that interrupted a dinner party being given by Secretary of War Harry H. Woodring. Later that evening, Leahy was summoned to a conference with Secretary of State Cordell Hull that lasted past midnight. “It is, in my opinion,” Leahy said, “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.”17
Leahy proposed a blockade of Japan that would deprive the island nation of the rubber, petroleum, and other raw materials from the East Indies that were fueling its war aims. Two days after the attack, he met with the president and urged him to send the “ships of the Fleet to Navy Yards without delay to obtain fuel, clean bottoms, and take on sea stores preparatory to a cruise at sea.” Years later, with the benefit of history, Leahy felt even more strongly that had “we then blockaded Japan, we could check the Tokyo bandits’ ideas of conquest, possibly even without a war.”18
Franklin Roosevelt certainly didn’t discount the growing Japanese threat, but he knew the sentiment of his countrymen. While American public opinion might generally support China over Japan, 70 percent of American voters interviewed in a Gallup poll in January 1938 “favored a policy of complete withdrawal from China—Asiatic Fleet, Marines, missionaries, medical missions, and all.”19
And this public sentiment aside, Roosevelt himself was just then under considerable attack from isolationists in Congress who were backing a constitutional amendment introduced by Democrat Louis Ludlow of Indiana. It required a national referendum before any congressional declaration of war was effective except in blatant circumstances of a direct attack on the United States or its possessions. If passed, it would turn presidential war powers back more than a century. The January 1938 vote of 209–188 in the House of Representatives to return the matter to the Judiciary Committee showed just how closely contested the matter was.
In the end, Japan’s official inquiry into the Panay attack called it all a terrible mistake, but that still failed to explain how American flags could be mistaken for Chinese at such close range. The United States Naval Court of Inquiry reached the opposite conclusion and called the sinking deliberate, but Roosevelt’s willingness to accept profuse apologies and a $2.2 million indemnity put the matter to rest. As it turned out, Neville Chamberlain, then prime minister of Great Britain and heavily focused on events in Europe, would likely have been no more inclined to support Leahy’s plea for a joint blockade or take any firmer action against Japan than he had against Nazi Germany.
One result of the Panay sinking, however, was that American press coverage of the event was heavily anti-Japanese and underscored that Japan was a shameless aggressor. One of those aboard the Panay was Universal News cameraman Norman Alley. He captured dramatic 16 mm movie footage of the evacuation and subsequent attack and sinking. When Leahy and his staff saw this film at the Navy Department on December 31, it confirmed without doubt that the Panay had been “subjected to a very severe, long continued bombardment.”
The film was initially without audio, but when Universal Pictures released it into theaters, the scenes of the wounded and the sinking ship, set against dramatic background music and a narrator calling the Japanese “war-crazed culprits,” made an impression that would slowly bring the country around to Leahy’s way of thinking.20
The end of a tumultuous year also brought Leahy a “Dear Bill” note from FDR, thanking him for “the nicest Christmas present I have had.” It was a model of the new battleship North Carolina, the first to be laid down since the limits of the Washington Conference treaty, but not due to be launched until 1940. Speed up the construction, the president kidded, so that he could take a cruise on the ship. Then he added, “The good old Navy is coming strong.”21
Franklin Roosevelt’s assertion of an up-and-coming navy was part cheerleading, but one reason for his optimism was the work that Ernest King had been doing with naval aviation. King had been disappointed when he was denied the chance to break out a three-star vice admiral’s flag as commander, Aircraft, Battle Force. The result was that he remained a rear admiral and was put in command of the Aircraft, Base Force, of seaplanes, centered largely on the West Coast and in Hawaii. But in retrospect, this put him in charge of two very important and related developments in naval aviation.
The first was the initial deployment of the venerable PBY flying boat, nicknamed the “Catalina.” Powered by two Pratt & Whitney engines and carrying a crew of about eight depending on the model, this high-wing aircraft had a range of about 2,500 miles. Some four thousand PBYs would be built and see service in World War II for patrol and reconnaissance, antisubmarine duty, convoy escorts, and search-and-rescue operations. Nowhere, of course, would they become more valuable than in the wide watery expanses of the Pacific. King pushed his PBY pilots to their limits, just as he did everyone else, requiring them to train under wartime conditions.
The second important contribution King made was to sail his flagship, the tender Wright, which he had once commanded, all over the Central Pacific and as far north as the Gulf of Alaska scouting suitable seaplane bases. He didn’t need much for a base, usually just a lagoon sheltered by a coral reef or a protected fjord along Alaska’s coast. These locations greatly improved the navy’s operational reach in the Pacific, and more often than not, the PBY proved to be the lifeline between far-flung outposts.
Writing a less-than-friendly Admiral Standley shortly before Leahy succeeded him as CNO, King admitted that he was “disappointed at having to come to sea in this billet,” but in “some three months” he had become both an expert on and a champion for these flying boats. “The advent of the 60 new PBY airplanes (now beginning),” King assured Standley, “will provide the means of demonstrating the capabilities of ‘airboats’ in what should be a convincing way.”22
King went out of his way to tell another officer who had recently completed his flight training at an advanced age much the same thing. Fifty-two-year-old Captain John S. McCain, Annapolis class of 1906, had been hoping to command the new aircraft carrier Yorktown, but he was given the air base at Coco Solo in the Canal Zone under King’s command instead. King, too, seemed to expect that McCain would get a carrier, but Yorktown was behind schedule, and with a philosophical navy version of que sera, sera—“different ships—different long splices”—King assured McCain that he was glad to have him “joining this command, in which you will gain first-hand knowledge of that important (and little-known) adjunct of the Fleet—the flying boats.”23
King, of course, planned to be in the seaplane assignment only for one year, but when he next made the trek to Washington in January 1937, not much had changed as far as his own advancement. Bill Leahy was now chief of naval operations, but both Leahy and King had spoken out loudly against any increase in power for that office. Consequently, Leahy was not in much of a position to help King when Adolphus Andrews, as chief of the Bureau of Navigation, still insisted that King’s “services were needed to continue with the expansion, organization and development of patrol squadrons.”24
King grumbled but went back to the Pacific for another year, including another summer cruise to Alaskan waters. Sometimes the navy changed command designations to confuse matters, but in this case, King’s deployment of PBYs and other aircraft all over the Pacific prompted the designation of his command to be changed from “Aircraft, Base Force” to “Aircraft, Scouting Force.” It might seem a subtle distinction, but King had put seaplanes on the move along with the rest of the navy.
And, not surprisingly, King came up with a plan during his second year in the Pacific to put himself on the move as well. When the commander, Aircraft, Battle Force, retired in November 1937, even Andrews found it impossible to deny his classmate the vice admiral post. Far from sending Andrews his thanks, however, King sent him a reminder of his own ultimate goals. “I have always assumed that you would wish to know the views and desires of flag officers as to their own personal preferences where their professional prospects are concerned,” King wrote Andrews, without pausing to think that the answer was probably no. Discounting any appearance of “a tinge of ‘ambition’ or even of ‘selfishness,’ ” King nonetheless reminded Andrews that he had frankly discussed his personal objectives with Andrews when he had come into BuNav and “They are now some six months ‘behind schedule’—and ‘age 64’ looms just that much nearer!”25
King’s solution was to combine his carrier command with the light cruisers, destroyers, and patrol planes of the Scouting Force. Operationally, this would have removed the speedy 33-knot carriers from working with the slower 21-knot battleships and made for “fast-moving and far-ranging independent operations”—exactly King’s preferred modus operandi. Command-wise, the move would have merged two vice admiral commands into one. King, of course, unabashedly proposed that he be given the combined command.
Andrews declined. The tactical worth of what King proposed would prove itself in a few short years when Bill Halsey was leading fast-strike carrier raids all around the Pacific. But in 1937, the battleship had not yet been demoted from its perch atop the navy’s strategic arsenal. There may, however, have been another motive in Andrews’s thinking. A few weeks later, it was his turn to leave the Bureau of Navigation and head for sea duty. Andrews took the Scouting Force command himself, and with it the three stars of a vice admiral.26
King flew his own three-star flag from the Saratoga and immediately began to put his squadrons through his usual intense training, particularly night operations in preparation for the 1938 fleet maneuvers. Experience and techniques had progressed quite a bit since Fleet Problem XII in 1931, when King had almost lost his airplanes after dark. But nighttime carrier operations were still very dicey. Many squadrons thought that night flying meant taking off at sunset and coming back in an hour. King thought differently.
On one foggy, misty night, King ordered the air groups from the Lexington and Saratoga to launch simultaneously well after sunset. The chaos was predictable but, in King’s mind, instructional. A number of pilots simply headed for shore-based airfields; some of those vowed to quit if King continued such drills. But the pilots whom King came to value returned to their correct ships and landed without mishap.
As always, King was the ultimate authority, the one and only arbiter. One night when the communications watch officer groped his way across the darkened flag bridge, he bumped into an unrecognized figure. “Sir, are you on duty?” he queried. “Young man,” came the response, “this is the Admiral. I am always on duty.”27
As an admiral overseeing his fleet of carriers, including the one serving as his flagship, King later professed that “he subscribed heartily to Admiral Mayo’s view that flag officers must never interfere in the management of their flagships.” But in 1938, that was not yet the case. King simply couldn’t let go of any measure of control. He would formally advise the captain of his appointed flagship that he was to act as if King were not aboard, but in practice, King could not help interfering.28
Late in 1938, King transferred his flag to Lexington. His flag bridge was one level above the ship’s bridge, and whenever the Lexington’s captain, John H. Hoover, “handled the flagship in a manner that did not please King, the admiral would lean over the flag bridge railing and loudly berate the skipper before the two bridge crews.” To his credit, Hoover, himself later a vice admiral, would merely wave a hand in acknowledgment and go on with his job, not at all rattled by King’s tirade.29
Another subordinate who was not rattled by King was Bill Halsey. He had spent two years in command of the Saratoga and then rotated ashore for a year as commandant of the Pensacola Naval Air Station. In March 1938, Halsey was promoted to rear admiral and two months later ordered back to sea as commander of Carrier Division Two, the new carriers Yorktown and Enterprise.
These were the next generation of American aircraft carriers. Bigger, faster carriers with roomier flight decks to accommodate more aircraft and more rapid launching and recovery operations were needed; Yorktown and Enterprise were just the first step in that direction. Displacing almost 20,000 tons each, 809 feet in length, and capable of making almost 33 knots when pressed, these sisters carried between eighty-one and eighty-five aircraft. Both were built at Newport News, Virginia, with Yorktown (CV-5) commissioned on September 30, 1937, and Enterprise (CV-6) on May 12, 1938.
The operational backbone of all carriers was the flight deck, but the hangar deck, one level below, was a close second. Efficiently shuttling the right type of aircraft between decks via the carrier’s elevators was essential to smooth flight operations. Early carriers, including Yorktown and Enterprise, had elevators built into the middle of their flight decks. Not only did these in-line elevators create potential confusion for flight operations, but they also made the hangar deck more vulnerable to attacking aircraft when the elevators were lowered or when a mechanical problem or battle damage stalled an elevator in the down position and left a gaping hole in the flight deck.
Halsey’s task during the latter half of 1938 was to get both Yorktown and Enterprise fully operational and to work out the kinks. King, as Halsey’s immediate superior, was looking over his shoulder and wanting Yorktown and Enterprise ready for Fleet Problem XX maneuvers in the Caribbean early in 1939. “As you can readily understand,” Halsey wrote King in mid-November, “it is going to be a scrap right up to the last minute to get these ships clear from the material bureaus and Navy Yard by 3 January. However, every time an objection is raised, we listen and say, ‘Fine, the ships will leave on 3 January.’ I hope it works.”30
King was hardly one to rely on hope from a subordinate, but he seems to have been convinced that Halsey was doing his best and showing great effort in the process. While Enterprise received last-minute adjustments in the Norfolk Navy Yard, Halsey arranged to have fuel and fresh provisions loaded directly onto the ship while it was there—no small matter considering that 350 tons of food had to be transported by barge or refrigerated cars. King congratulated Halsey on his “enterprise and initiative in arranging for the fueling and provisioning” in order that both carriers “may make a prompt get-away early in January.”31
The carriers made it, and Carrier Division Two with Bill Halsey flying his flag as its commander, COMCARDIV2, rendezvoused with King and the carriers Lexington and Ranger. Saratoga, Halsey’s favorite, was absent because of an impending overhaul at the Bremerton Navy Yard, and Ranger was now under the command of Captain John S. McCain, who had finally gotten his carrier.
But Vice Admiral King was in an unusually foul mood. Somehow, during a dark night en route to transiting the Panama Canal from the Pacific, he had slammed into a deck grating outside his cabin on the Lexington, badly bruising one of his legs. He was ordered to rest in bed for at least several days, but he wanted these 1939 maneuvers to be the capstone to his career at sea, as well as the impetus to propel him to the CNO’s job when Bill Leahy retired later that year. King refused to rest and snarled his way around the flag bridge of the Lexington.
Enterprise in particular was still very green when Halsey joined up with King for the maneuvers. The pilots of its recently formed air squadrons were a little green, too. Predictably, King became upset at a delay in Enterprise launching planes. He sent one of his usual accusatory signals and demanded to know the name of the officer responsible for the delay. Not one to shirk his own responsibility as a commanding officer or to blame a junior, Halsey signaled back “COMCARDIV2,” meaning himself.32
In the end, the fleet exercises went well enough. The crews of Enterprise and Yorktown gained confidence and King gave the battleship admirals, as well as President Roosevelt, who watched the final round from the cruiser Houston, a lesson in what naval aviation could do. Afterward, the flag officers met FDR at a reception aboard Houston, and each in his own way may have done some not-so-subtle lobbying to succeed Leahy. King always claimed that he refrained because “he had never ‘greased’ anyone during his forty-two years of service and did not propose to begin, particularly at a moment when many of the admirals were trying so hard to please Mr. Roosevelt that it was obvious.”33
King’s claim to never having been a self-promoter was disingenuous at best, but the truth of the matter seems to be that Leahy’s successor had already been agreed upon. It would not be King. Perhaps he had stepped on too many toes, ruffled too many egos. Some said that his reputation for drinking—even if he seemed to be able to turn it on and off at will—was a problem. Others undoubtedly questioned his trademark “lone wolf” approach.
But in a navy that still had only three admirals who could be considered naval aviators—King, Halsey, and Charles A. Blakely—it was hardly surprising that Leahy’s replacement would come from the remaining seventy-one preponderantly battleship admirals. So King was forced to swallow both pride and disappointment and cheerily congratulate Rear Admiral Harold R. Stark on his pending appointment. How long Stark might last was another matter.
“Rey,” Stark reportedly told King, “you are the man that should have had that job.” When King replied, “Other people don’t think that,” Stark graciously responded, “Well, I do myself.”
Another fellow admiral agreed with Stark but scolded, “Why Rey, you should have gotten that job. But why the hell didn’t you start getting along in the Gun Club [the battleship admirals]?” King characteristically responded, “They had their chance… and they didn’t take it, so to hell with them.”34
Some years before, King had readily acknowledged that he “had a proper ambition to get to the top, either Commander in Chief of the United States Fleet or even to become Chief of Naval Operations.”35 But now that seemed forever out of reach. He was to be assigned to the General Board to put in his last three years until mandatory retirement.
King was terribly down and glum about his future, certain he had none. The U.S. Navy simply had not yet come to understand the full power of naval aviation as King had worked to develop it. Despite his frequently raucous, theatrical, and antagonistic ways, he had pushed naval aviation to a point where it could assume a very lonely and almost impossible burden two and a half short years hence.
“Dear Ernie,” wrote an admirer in a handwritten note, “It has been an education, and a very pleasant one, to serve under you this past winter. May I thank you for your patience of me personally and for the professional lessons you have given me—I should be proud to serve under you any time—anywhere, & under any conditions. The best of luck always—may your new job be to your liking—and here’s hoping for more stars afloat. Always sincerely yours, Bill Halsey.”36
Halsey now raised his flag on the refitted Saratoga and assumed King’s old job as commander, Aircraft, Battle Force. By the strange twist of the navy’s temporary rank system, as King was detailed to the General Board to await the end of his naval service, he reverted to his permanent rank of rear admiral. When Halsey relieved King, Halsey became a temporary vice admiral and as such outranked King.37
Meanwhile, Bill Leahy was also apparently nearing the end of his naval service. Leahy turned sixty-four on May 6, 1939, and six days later, President Roosevelt announced at a press conference that he would nominate the admiral to be governor of Puerto Rico. The Washington rumor mill was rife with speculation that Leahy might be appointed secretary of the navy—the ailing Swanson would finally die in July—and FDR appears to have considered that option. The governorship of the territory of Puerto Rico was of some importance to the overall defense and stability of American interests in the Caribbean. It was hardly on a par with the navy post, but at the time Roosevelt’s thinking may have been inclined toward emphasizing civilian control of the Navy Department while he slowly pulled the country away from isolationism.38
Leahy wasn’t entirely sure what he was getting into in Puerto Rico, as the island was divided by numerous internal political factions, but he took the assignment with good grace, as he had always done. “Some of the recent visitors to the Spanish Main,” Leahy wrote to Admiral Claude “Claudius” Bloch, “assure me that the Office is sufficiently full of grief to keep even an old sailor moving rapidly. However, as you and I know so well, old sailors will try anything once, and we will endeavor to survive, if not to enjoy, such incidents as may come to us.”39
The Washington Post predicted that Leahy’s tenure in Puerto Rico would be “anything but quiet and restful” but badly missed the mark when it attempted a comparison. Had Leahy been chosen to become governor of Hawaii instead, the paper speculated, “he could look forward to a pleasant term of service in an important but not too strenuous position.”40
Leahy’s retirement was set for August 1, in part to allow him to participate in the June state visit of Great Britain’s King George VI and Queen Elizabeth to the United States. Leahy was also honored to give the commencement address at the Naval Academy. Mincing no words, the retiring chief of naval operations told the 578 graduating midshipmen of the class of 1939 that “a grave emergency comes once in every generation and that they must be prepared to meet one before their retirement.”41
On July 28, Leahy was in the Oval Office conferring with FDR on Puerto Rican matters when the president surprised him by having an entourage of photographers and navy brass enter the room just before presenting him with the Distinguished Service Medal. Praising Leahy’s role in the navy’s greatest peacetime expansion, the citation concluded, “The extraordinary qualities of leadership and administrative ability that have marked his tenure as the highest ranking officer in the Navy have been exemplified throughout his entire Naval career.”42
Three hundred officers of the Navy Department feted Leahy at a formal dinner in his honor at the Mayflower Hotel that evening as a testament to his high standing. But the accolades that mattered most for Leahy’s future came the next day in a letter from FDR. Emphasizing Leahy’s “conspicuous administrative ability,” Roosevelt voiced his “sincere hope that after retirement from the Navy your valuable experience will be given for a long time to the public service and that you will enjoy many years of health and happiness.” Then, across the bottom of the page in his own hand, the president scrawled, “Dear Bill, I just hate to have you leave. FDR.”43
Below his typed diary entry for August 1, 1939, Leahy wrote in longhand, “This brings to an end forty-six years of active service in the Navy of the United States.” Privately, the president assured the retiring admiral, “Bill, if we ever have a war, you’re going to be right back here, helping me to run it.”44