The only thing more difficult than ordering men into harm’s way is sending one’s own son into battle. It happened throughout World War II, as men in command found themselves making decisions that affected a younger generation that included their own offspring. These sons were grown men of fighting age to be sure, but at some point each of their steely fathers couldn’t help but mutter a silent prayer: “Take care, my boy.”
Chester Nimitz expressed those concerns in a 1942 Mother’s Day message. He was on the cover of Time magazine, in a dress uniform, binoculars draped around his neck, and his kind yet determined blue eyes blazing with overstated brilliance. “Who wants to know where the Fleet is?” the caption asked. But amid a report on the Battle of the Coral Sea were excerpts from a radio address Nimitz delivered to “mothers of America.”
In a steady, reassuring voice, Nimitz told his own wife, Catherine, and millions of other mothers across the country, “This Mother’s Day finds your sons fighting for freedom on worldwide battlefields. There will be long periods of silence when your boys will be active at their stations in far places from which no word can come.” And unfortunately, he went on, “there will be losses along the road to victory. If it is God’s will that your son or mine be called to make the supreme sacrifice, I know that we will face this stern reality as bravely as they do themselves.”1
Nimitz’s own son, Chester W. Nimitz, Jr., was in submarines. Father and son had been very close while young Chet was growing up, but once Chet entered Annapolis and donned the navy uniform, he couldn’t help but view the veteran officer who stood before him with just a bit of reserve—even if it was his own father.
Chet graduated from Annapolis in 1934 and initially went to sea on the cruiser Indianapolis before following in his father’s footsteps to submarines. It was no small coincidence that many senior naval commanders had sons in the submarine service. Just as it was in Admiral Nimitz’s junior days, submarine duty was still an early route to a command of one’s own. And when a son who had already continued the family tradition by attending Annapolis was determined to make his old man proud, no one could ever say that he had shirked danger or given less than his best if his duty was in submarines.
At the outbreak of the war, young Nimitz was the third officer on the Sturgeon operating out of the Philippines. Within months, he was the boat’s executive officer and then the exec of the Bluefish. After a second patrol aboard Bluefish, Chet got his own command. “Boy oh boy!” the new lieutenant commander of the Haddo wrote his admiral father. “I get the delicious trembles when I think of my first patrol as C.O.” But Chet’s first sortie with Haddo in March 1944 proved a frustrating experience when a load of torpedoes with supposedly improved magnetic exploders went off prematurely or not at all.2
Still, young Chet’s admiration for his father was reflected in his every move, and the letters he posted home from his submarine commands throughout the Pacific were enough to make any father proud, and probably shed a private tear or two. This was especially true on those nights when the father knew so well what the son was facing one hundred, two hundred, or three hundred feet below the surface, listening to the metallic click that signaled another round of depth charges rolling off the fantail of some Japanese destroyer.
Haddo and young Nimitz had better luck on a subsequent patrol off Mindoro, in the South China Sea, when, working with four other subs, they attacked a large convoy. The initial torpedoes brought a furious onslaught of depth charges from the enemy escorts that were so loud and continuous that Nimitz had to shout to be heard in the Haddo’s conning tower. But then the convoy turned and presented Nimitz with perfect silhouettes. He fired six bow torpedoes at two large transports and sank both, his first confirmed kills. Later on that patrol, Nimitz fired four torpedoes down the throat at an onrushing destroyer. All missed, but he sank another destroyer instead.
By the time Haddo finished that patrol, Nimitz had sunk five ships totaling almost fifteen thousand tons, putting Haddo’s cruise on the list of the top twenty-five war patrols by number of ships sunk and ranking its skipper 77th on the list of 465 World War II sub commanders by ships and tonnage sunk. But there was a bitter downside. Nimitz and his crew were safe, but one of the other boats, the Harder, along with its seemingly indestructible captain, Sam Dealey, had been lost. Nimitz was the one who reluctantly had to send the message, “I must have to think he is gone.”3
And there were others lost. Manning Kimmel, 1935 graduate of Annapolis and son of Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, served as a junior officer on the submarine Drum even as his father was under scrutiny for the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Eleven days afterward, in a letter that would warm any father’s heart, Manning wrote, “There is so little to say at a time like this—but… my complete confidence and belief in you has not been shaken a bit and I think you are the grandest Dad in the world.”4
By April 1942, the Drum, under the command of Robert H. Rice, a son-in-law of King’s chief of staff, Russell Willson, was in action in the Pacific and sank the nine-thousand-ton seaplane tender Mizuho, the largest Japanese combat vessel sunk by submarines up to that time. Manning Kimmel went on to serve as executive officer on the Drum and then on the Raton before being given command of the Robalo in the spring of 1944.
Sent into the South China Sea from the sub base at Fremantle, Australia, Kimmel conducted a “wildly aggressive patrol,” firing twenty torpedoes in four attacks but sinking only one tanker, which was not confirmed by postwar records. Robalo was subsequently caught on the surface by Japanese bombers, which damaged both periscopes, sprang the conning tower hatch, and knocked out the boat’s radar. Despite this, Kimmel kept the Robalo on station until the end of its patrol. It was a brave effort, but Kimmel’s squadron commander thought it a little foolhardy as well. “Anybody else would have come home long before,” grumbled Heber H. “Tex” McLean. “I worried that Kimmel was a little too anxious to put the name of Kimmel high in Navy annals.”5
Kimmel and Robalo were next dispatched to the South China Sea via Balabac Strait, a narrow passage between Borneo and the Philippines that was heavily mined by the Japanese. Returning through the strait after its patrol, Robalo apparently hit a mine and sank. Early reports had all hands going down with the boat, but the explosion may have thrown as many as six or seven men, including Kimmel, from the bridge into the water. Other reports had these survivors picked up and imprisoned as POWs. Rumors of their capture trickled out, but any surviving Robalo crew members were apparently killed by the Japanese in grisly fashion in retaliation for an Allied air raid.
Regardless of Manning Kimmel’s final fate, when Admiral King heard the news that Kimmel’s boat had been lost, he ordered Manning’s brother, Thomas, to shore duty. Thomas Kinkaid Kimmel, Annapolis class of 1936, had already made five war patrols on the aging S-40 and briefly served as engineer on the Balao. He was hoping for a command of his own despite his brother’s fate, but King refused to budge, no doubt thinking that the Kimmel family had already suffered enough because of the war.6
The navy, of course, had no monopoly on such situations. Army Chief of Staff George Marshall’s first wife was quite sickly and died without having children. When Marshall remarried in 1930, he acquired three stepchildren. He was particularly devoted to the youngest, Allen Brown. In September 1942, Brown, by then married with a young son of his own, enlisted in the army and asked no special treatment from his stepfather, whom he always called “George”—making him one of the few people accorded permission to do so. (Once, when the glad-handing Franklin Roosevelt called Marshall “George” instead of “Marshall” or “General,” Marshall noticeably bristled, as if stabbed with a bayonet.)
Brown went through officer training and graduated from the Armored Forces Center at Fort Knox. He deployed first to Africa and then to Italy. On May 29, 1944, as Brown led his tank unit in the drive from the Anzio beachhead toward Rome, he stood up in the turret of his tank to reconnoiter the advance through his field glasses. A German sniper bullet killed him instantly. Marshall learned the news in his office at the Pentagon and immediately went to his quarters at nearby Fort Myer to tell his wife. Inspecting the Italian front some weeks later, Marshall not only visited Brown’s grave in the cemetery near Anzio but also insisted upon viewing the site of his last battle from both the air and the ground.7
Bill Leahy’s son, William Harrington Leahy, was among the luckier ones. He was Bill and Louise Leahy’s only child, but being somewhat older—thirty-seven at the war’s outbreak—he held more senior positions. Young Bill graduated from Annapolis with the class of 1927 and within weeks married Elizabeth Marbury Beale. Always the supportive father, Leahy nonetheless was “acutely disappointed by the boy’s decision to marry at this time”—thinking it would “certainly adversely affect his career as a naval officer.”8
But the navy between the wars was becoming more accommodating to junior officers, and young Bill and Elizabeth’s early years went well as he reported as an ensign to the battleship California. Bill and Louise missed the wedding, but only because Bill’s own orders sent him hurrying to join the battleship New Mexico.
By the time the United States entered World War II, young Leahy was posted to the U.S. embassy in Great Britain as assistant naval attaché. After Louise died during those last few weeks in Vichy, young Bill arranged ten days’ leave to meet his father in Lisbon during the ambassador’s homeward journey and proved to be a source of comfort to him. After the war, William Harrington Leahy would rise to the rank of rear admiral and command the naval station at Pearl Harbor.
King’s son, Ernest Joseph King, Jr., followed his famous father to Annapolis but only with considerable fatherly prodding. “Ernest Endeavor,” for whom King had waited patiently through six daughters, entered the academy with the class of 1945. He was described as having been “a meek little boy, thoroughly terrified of his father.” If a family story told by Rear Admiral Russell Willson, then academy superintendent, is true, young King, who was going by his middle name, “Joe,” attempted to enlist Willson’s assistance in persuading Admiral King to permit him to resign during his unhappy first year. Supposedly, Willson refused and told Joe, “Maybe you are ready to sacrifice your career but I’m not ready to sacrifice mine!” Actually, Willson persuaded young King that he was far better off at the Naval Academy “than as the enlisted draftee he would undoubtedly become if he resigned.”9
Admiral King may or may not have known about Joe’s attempt to leave Annapolis, but Joe persevered and stayed to graduate. He was immediately posted as an ensign to the cruiser Savannah, which drew escort duty for FDR’s presidential party aboard the cruiser Quincy en route to the Yalta Conference in 1945. When the ships called at Malta during the preliminary round of talks before the American and British delegations flew east to meet the Russians, King took his son to the Officers’ Club for dinner and proudly introduced him to the gathering of senior officers.
Although young Joe was cut more from his mother’s cloth than his father’s, he nonetheless made a career in the navy and retired as a commander. It was Ernest Joseph King, Jr., who received the flag from his father’s casket at the admiral’s funeral, and he lies buried beside the graves of his parents on the tree-covered knoll of the United States Naval Academy Cemetery overlooking the Severn River at Annapolis.10
In the navy, war was truly a family affair. William Frederick Halsey III desperately wanted to follow the family tradition and enter Annapolis, but just as less than 20/20 vision had plagued his father’s flying, young Bill simply could not meet the visual standards for admission without corrective lenses—then forbidden. Instead, Bill entered Princeton with the class of 1938 and emulated his father’s athletic skills on its grounds. He played lacrosse, became the university’s 135-pound boxing champion, and served as president of the Intramural Athletic Association.
By the late summer of 1942, Ensign Halsey was in the Naval Reserve, bound for duty in the Pacific as an aviation supply officer. When Admiral Halsey returned to duty in the Pacific en route to the Guadalcanal fight at about the same time, Nimitz surprised both father and son by arranging a reunion as their paths crossed at Pearl Harbor. In typical Nimitz fashion, he invited both for dinner and to spend the night in his personal quarters. Afterward, young Halsey reported for duty aboard his father’s favorite ship, the carrier Saratoga, then being repaired from torpedo damage sustained early in the Solomons campaign.
Later, with the Saratoga operating in and out of Nouméa near Admiral Halsey’s headquarters, father and son got to see each other on the occasions when young Bill had shore leave. They were both careful, however, not to seek or accept special privileges. In fact, many of young Halsey’s shipmates simply didn’t know that he was the admiral’s son.
Soon a lieutenant j.g., young Bill was “hard-working and unassuming” and “certainly never traded on his father’s reputation.” But that didn’t mean that he lacked the Halsey brashness. Once, when a group of junior officers were discussing a newspaper quote attributed to Admiral Halsey, one of them opined as to how “the old son of a bitch is full of hot air,” not realizing that his son was seated at the table, too. Those in the know quickly looked at Bill, but he was laughing his head off. “What’s so funny?” the officer making the remark demanded, only to be told, “The old son of a bitch is Bill’s old man.” The newcomer stammered an apology, but Bill waved it off, saying that he didn’t care and he was sure “his father wouldn’t have objected either.”
On another occasion, an aviation machinist’s mate came on board the Saratoga and asked for an ignition harness, adding authoritatively that it was for Admiral Halsey’s personal plane. Young Bill didn’t divulge his identity and reluctantly let him have one, even though that left only four for the carrier’s full complement of planes. A couple of weeks later, the machinist’s mate was back, saying that the first harness had broken and he needed another. Again, Bill turned one over without comment.
By the third time this happened, it was a senior officer making the demand over the intercom from another part of the ship, but Lieutenant Halsey decided he had had enough. “I have another three,” he replied, “but you can’t have one.”
There was a vacant pause, followed by the officer saying that his junior had clearly misunderstood. “This harness is for Admiral Halsey’s plane.”
“Oh, I understand, all right,” replied Bill cheerfully. “You can tell Admiral Halsey to shove it in his ear.”
When the officer on the line demanded his name, Bill replied, “William Frederick Halsey,” and hung up. He heard no more about it and kept his three remaining harnesses for the Saratoga’s planes.11
On August 7, 1943, the Saratoga put into Efate, and young Bill used the occasion to fly down to Nouméa for spare parts, as well as a visit with his father. He spent the night in the admiral’s quarters and then started back to the carrier as a passenger in a flight of three torpedo planes. The evening of his son’s departure, Admiral Halsey came down with a severe attack of flu that took him out of any coherent action for several days.
When Halsey was finally able to focus, his operations officer came to his cabin and reported, “Admiral, we have had three torpedo planes missing for two days.”
Halsey knew at once. “My boy?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
Halsey told him, “My son is the same as every other son in the combat zone. Look for him just as you’d look for anybody else.”
But that brave statement hardly did anything to assuage the worry. Another day passed, and then two, making four days since the planes had been reported missing. Halsey, who had often been asked to hold out hope for missing men, now faced his own cruel realization: “Only a miracle can bring him home.”
And it came. Late on August 12, searchers spotted several rubber rafts beached on an island between New Caledonia and Efate. The missing planes had strayed off course and been forced to make water landings, but all ten men aboard, including Lieutenant Halsey, were safe, except for the effects of exposure. The day they were all rescued turned out to be Friday, August 13, long the admiral’s dreaded jinx. “From then on—for awhile,” wrote the senior Halsey, “I spit in the eye of the jinx that had haunted me on the thirteenth of every month since the Missouri’s turret explosion thirty-nine years before.”12
And there was one other particularly poignant father-son relationship. Rear Admiral “Slew” McCain’s son, John Sidney McCain, Jr., Annapolis class of 1931, was in command of the submarine Gunnel as it participated in the North Africa landings. The chaos of America’s first major amphibious assault was punctuated by mechanical problems with the Gunnel’s engines and poor recognition signals that at one point put the Gunnel under attack from Allied bombers.
A year later, McCain and Gunnel were on patrol in the Yellow Sea, still experiencing engine problems. McCain had the good fortune to sight no less than four enemy carriers during his patrols, but engine problems and faulty torpedoes kept him from sinking any. Tough Slew McCain worried about his boy, but perhaps the only thing tougher was twenty-some years later when John Sidney McCain, Jr., was an admiral in command of all Pacific operations and his own son, John Sidney McCain III, a naval aviator, was shot down over North Vietnam and endured five and a half years of captivity.13
It was not, of course, any easier on the wives. Bill Leahy had lost his beloved Louise just before he returned from Vichy in the spring of 1942. It had been his “good luck,” he wrote more than a decade after her death, “to be married to a highly talented example of American womanhood who expected her husband to accomplish favorable progress, and who took her full share of the hardships involved.”14
Few love affairs could surpass the devotion, companionship, and mutual adoration shared by Chester and Catherine Nimitz. They were first and foremost—in the catchphrase of a later generation—“soul mates.” They routinely wrote each other almost daily when they were apart, and no matter what the turmoil swirling around them, their letters always managed to convey an intimate, personal touch, as if the other was truly the most important person in the world—which they were. “You are ever in my thoughts,” he told her, “and I am happiest when I know you are well and happy.”15
Ernest King’s marriage was another matter. His interactions with Mattie—seven children aside—were frequently as distant and detached as most of his other relationships. King could send a chatty letter to a chief petty officer with whom he had served years before or quietly arrange maternity care for the wife of a junior officer who was himself convalescing in a hospital, but when he went home during his war years in Washington, it was to his quarters on the Dauntless, moored at the Washington Navy Yard, and not to Mattie at his official residence at the Naval Observatory.16
What affection King showed was reserved for his daughters and a few special wives of younger officers to whom he was frequently a father figure. There were certainly whispers of his infidelity, but investigating them three-quarters of a century removed has yielded little more than the proverbial “everybody knew he was doing it.” In any event, Mattie stayed the good sailor to the end and lies by his side at Annapolis.17
Bill Halsey’s marital story may be the grimmest of all. Bill and Fan were well down the path to emulating Chester and Catherine Nimitz when Fan began to suffer from alternating bouts of mania and depression in the late 1930s. Her illness became worse as the war progressed and made for uncomfortable reunions whenever Bill returned to the States. Eventually, it became clear that they couldn’t live together, even though Bill always provided for her care.18
What is certain is that the war and its inherent dangers and uncertainties took its toll on the best of relationships and frequently severed the worst of them. Some of the sons who were rushed into manhood would not return home. Many daughters would do their part in America’s industries and in military support roles around the world. There would be, as Chester Nimitz intoned on the first Mother’s Day of the war, “losses along the road to victory.”19
It was gruff Halsey, writing more quickly after the war than Leahy, King, or Nimitz, who summed up the human cost of the inexorable march of events they had witnessed. As Halsey looked over his shoulder from his campaigns across the Pacific, “the old battlefields were already disappearing into the jungle or under neat, new buildings. Where 500 men had lost their lives in a night attack a few months before, eighteen men were now playing baseball. Where a Jap pillbox had crouched, a movie projector stood. Where a hand grenade had wiped out a foxhole, a storekeeper was serving cokes. Only the cemeteries were left.”20