In less than four years, the American navy had gone from the carnage of Battleship Row at Pearl Harbor to the largest and most powerful armada ever to sail the seas. It would have been difficult to forecast this day four years before, but in retrospect, three events in 1941 sealed the fate of the Axis powers: Germany’s headlong rush to self-destruction by invading Russia; the American-British alliance affirmed by the Roosevelt-Churchill conference at Argentia; and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which unified American sentiment as few other events could have done.
None of these occurrences, however, was as remarkable as the speed with which the Axis powers were reduced to ruin once the United States entered the war. During the 1,366 days between December 7, 1941, and September 2, 1945, the tremendous outpouring of America’s industrial might in ships, planes, tanks, and other armaments was matched only by the bravery and determination of the nation’s men and women. In the navy alone, the fleet grew from 790 vessels to 6,768, and its complement of officers, sailors, and marines swelled from 383,150 to 3,405,525. New construction increased active ship levels, net of losses, by 6 battleships, 21 fleet carriers, 70 escort carriers, 35 cruisers, 206 destroyers, 361 destroyer escorts, 120 submarines, 451 minesweepers, 1,104 patrol boats, and 3,604 amphibious and auxiliary craft.1
Despite the Japanese surrender ceremony being held on the deck of a battleship, the war had been a final curtain call for battleship admirals and their revered gray behemoths. Stately and magnificent though they were, the battleships had been eclipsed by aircraft carriers and submarines as omnipotent offensive weapons. Never again would navies come at one another with 16-inch guns blazing.
Throughout most of their careers, King, Nimitz, and Halsey had been on the cutting edge of the developing innovations in naval aviation and undersea warfare. And while Leahy dragged his black shoes for years over the battleship’s increased vulnerabilities, he came to embrace these newer weapons as essential to achieving the wartime goals he oversaw from the president’s right hand. Naval aviation and America’s submarine force would continue their ascension as both spear point and deterrent, but for the fleet admirals, September 2, 1945, was the apex of their careers.
America’s five-star admirals met their postwar futures with varying outlooks. Citing “the capitulation of Japan and the cessation of hostilities throughout the world,” Halsey asked for immediate retirement. “When you leave the Pacific, Bill,” MacArthur supposedly told him, “it becomes just another damned ocean!” Nimitz approved Halsey’s retirement request with an endorsement that asserted, “It will be difficult—if not impossible—to overestimate the value of Admiral Halsey’s splendid service to our country.”2
But that would have been too hasty an exit for one of America’s most well-known heroes. In December 1945, within a week of his retirement, President Truman recalled Halsey to active duty and promoted him to the fourth set of fleet admiral stars so many felt he deserved. The following April, Congress made the ranks of all eight five-star generals and admirals permanent and assigned them to active duty for life, in part to provide continuing compensation greater than their pensions.
Halsey teamed up with Joseph Bryan III, who had served in the Southwest Pacific, to write the admiral’s memoirs. These first appeared as an eight-part installment in the Saturday Evening Post and then in book form as Admiral Halsey’s Story. Halsey proved his loyalty by continuing to stand by his friend Husband Kimmel over Pearl Harbor, but the battle that wouldn’t die was Leyte Gulf. Halsey stood his ground and took on all comers, citing the divided commands between the Third and Seventh Fleets, Kinkaid’s supposed lack of aggressiveness in guarding San Bernardino Strait, and Nimitz’s grant of discretion in destroying the Japanese fleet. None of this, however, could erase the perception—no matter how successful the overall American results—that Halsey had been lured north by the Japanese, as postwar Japanese records made clear was indeed their intent.
On the personal side, Halsey quickly grew bored. A fund-raising post with the University of Virginia, which he had attended for one pre-Annapolis year, was unfulfilling. He served on the board of directors of the Carlisle Tire and Rubber Company, and later of ITT, but his duties were largely limited to those of a resident celebrity. Finally, there was Fan. The great love affair they had shared for years had crumbled during the war with Fan’s increasingly manic-depressive condition. By 1950, Halsey had settled in New York, while Fan lived in California near their son, eventually entering a nursing home.
Halsey experienced what to varying degrees Nimitz, King, and Leahy all experienced—a severe letdown from the high-stress rush of complicated combat commands to a mundane life of occasional speeches and parades. Other than the continuing controversies over his actions off Leyte, there were few poignant moments in Halsey’s last years. Once again assuming a fund-raising chairmanship, he tried in vain to save the vaunted Enterprise as a museum and memorial, but pleas for funds and designation as a national shrine came up short. In August 1958, the carrier was towed to the scrap yard.
About that same time, Robert Montgomery began production of a movie based on Halsey’s role in the critical weeks of the Guadalcanal campaign. Eventually called The Gallant Hours, it starred James Cagney, looking uncannily like the wartime Halsey. But Halsey did not live to see its release. In August 1959, he vacationed, as he had several times before, at the country club on Fishers Island offshore Mystic, Connecticut. Sun and the surf suited the admiral, but on the morning of August 16, he failed to appear for breakfast. The club manager found him alone in his room, dead at seventy-six from an apparent heart attack. Only weeks before, Halsey had taken yet another naval historian to task for second-guessing his actions at Leyte.
Halsey’s body was flown by helicopter to Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, New York, and then by plane to Washington, D.C. After lying in state in the National Cathedral’s Bethlehem Chapel and a service on August 20, the state funeral procession of horse-drawn caisson and flag-draped casket made its way across the river to Arlington National Cemetery. Halsey was buried near his parents on the side of a knoll below the Custis-Lee Mansion, looking eastward to Washington. Chester Nimitz, representing President Eisenhower, stood at the head of the casket as it was lowered into the ground to a nineteen-gun salute, three rifle volleys, and taps.3
The only fleet admiral unhappier in retirement than Halsey was King. The autumn of 1945 passed, in King’s words, “with the burdensome and somewhat tedious process of demobilization.” King’s turf battles with Forrestal also came to a head. The post of commander in chief, U.S. Fleet (COMINCH), was abolished, and as the newly defined CNO, King stepped into the role that was now legally the naval equivalent of what Marshall had been on the army side and King had already been de facto—the nation’s top sailor.
High on the list of King’s differences with Forrestal was King’s wish that Nimitz succeed him as CNO. Nimitz was eager for the job, and King—though he still considered Nimitz somewhat of a “fixer”—nonetheless saw it as a way to reward Nimitz for his stalwart service. Marshall was doing the same by stepping down in favor of Eisenhower and King may also have privately thought that if the hero of Europe was filling Marshall’s shoes, the hero of the Pacific should fill his. Forrestal’s preferred candidate was Admiral Richard S. Edwards, most recently King’s deputy as both COMINCH and CNO. Edwards was clearly qualified, and Forrestal most likely preferred his easygoing manner and subservience to Nimitz’s independent streak.
Finally, King forced Forrestal’s hand by writing to Truman via Forrestal, asking the secretary within the letter to hand it to the president. King requested that Nimitz relieve him. Forrestal delivered the letter, and Truman agreed to the appointment. But Forrestal showed his authority by limiting Nimitz’s tenure in office to two years instead of the traditional four and expediting the change of command.
King, conscious of history as he always was, had wanted to stay in office at least until December 17, the five-year anniversary of his return to sea duty with the Atlantic force, or December 30, the fourth anniversary of his appointment as COMINCH. King was also hoping to get Nimitz some well-deserved leave by making the change in January 1946. Instead, Forrestal picked a December 15 date, knowing full well the other considerations. In typical fashion, King did not ask the secretary to change the date because he “would not give [Forrestal] the opportunity to turn him down.”4
Among the accolades that celebrated King’s retirement and his service was a gold star in lieu of a third Distinguished Service Medal from President Truman; honorary degrees from Northwestern, Princeton, and Oxford; and an elaborate scroll befitting a king from the admiral’s circle of regular newspaper correspondents. Even the British chiefs of staff, failing to mention the many turf battles and King’s dogged devotion to the Pacific campaign, nevertheless went out of their way to praise his keen insight and “breadth of vision and unshakeable determination to secure the defeat of our enemies in the shortest possible time.”5
By the following year, King was at work on what he hoped would be his account of the international conferences in which he had participated as a member of the Combined Chiefs of Staff. Walter Muir Whitehill, a Naval Reserve officer who had been instrumental in preparing King’s wartime annual reports to the secretary of the navy, soon proposed a biography. King’s conference memoirs and Whitehill’s planned biography merged, particularly after King suffered the first of a number of strokes in 1947. Fleet Admiral King: A Naval Record was published in 1952 in the third person with King and Whitehill as coauthors, but it is King’s voice, transcribed by Whitehill from dozens of interviews, that resounds from its pages.
With his story in print, King was further plagued by declining health. There was not much more for him to do. As his principal biographer wrote, “King’s life came to an end gradually, painfully, and pathetically.” It was not the way he would have wanted it. With additional strokes, his mind was a prisoner in a body that became increasingly crippled and marked by slurred speech and an unsteady hand. He became a regular in a suite at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, journeying only to the naval hospital in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for the summers.
But even as the inevitable appeared before him, King retained his sharp wit. When the navy dispatched George Russell, King’s onetime flag secretary, to find out the admiral’s wishes in keeping with the planned state funerals for five-star admirals and generals, King, when he learned the reason for the visit, gave a hearty laugh and remarked, “Well, Russell, I hope this isn’t urgent.”6
It wasn’t, but eventually King died in Portsmouth on Monday afternoon, June 25, 1956, at the age of seventy-seven. His broken body was flown to Washington, D.C., and lay in state at the National Cathedral. King, who had approved or disapproved so much with a penciled “Yes, K,” or “No, K,” was responsible for the brevity of the service. Read from the Book of Common Prayer, it contained only one hymn: “Eternal Father, Strong to Save.” Twenty minutes later, the procession formed for the drive to Fifteenth Street and Constitution Avenue and the march to the Capitol.
The day was sunny and pleasant in temperature—a rare touch of Washington at its best before the dog days of heat and humidity. Hymns that King had chosen, “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “God of Our Fathers,” with its stirring trumpet fanfares, accompanied the flag-draped casket on its way. But King’s final destination was not to be Arlington. He wanted to be buried within sight of the grounds and the institution that had started him on his way and had always been part of who he was. He was going home to Annapolis. There, in the Naval Academy Cemetery on a tree-covered knoll above the Severn River, King was laid to rest. Mattie, who had suffered her own health problems and had been content to call Annapolis the family home over the years, would join him there in 1969.7
Nimitz, in part because of his personality but also because of Catherine and his abundant and supportive family, made the postwar transition far easier than King or Halsey. First came his two-year stint as CNO. He remained an ardent champion for the navy as he oversaw postwar demobilization and worked toward the structure of independent service branches within the unified Department of Defense that was finally instituted by the National Security Act of 1947. Perhaps most significantly, Nimitz advocated the navy sharing responsibility with the air force for delivering atomic weapons. In time, this resulted in submarines and aircraft carriers as key players in the nation’s nuclear arsenal.
Nimitz steadfastly refused to write his own memoirs, but that did not stop him from writing articles supporting the navy and serving as coeditor of several books, including Sea Power with E. B. Potter, who at Catherine’s request would eventually write the admiral’s biography. Nimitz also steadfastly refused to linger in Washington once his tenure as CNO was complete, even though the navy offered to provide him with an office there as an active-duty fleet admiral. Instead, in December 1947 Chester and Catherine headed for California.
In San Diego, daughter Kate and James Lay’s children, including a set of twins born in 1948, were key attractions for the doting grandparents. But it was in Berkeley, scene of their happy family days during Nimitz’s NROTC tour at the University of California, that they found the perfect house. After years of navy bases and hotel rooms, Chester and Catherine settled into a Spanish-style home with a grand view of San Francisco Bay. Chet and Joan soon arrived in Berkeley with more grandchildren when Chet was assigned as executive officer of the campus NROTC unit. The senior Nimitz also became a regent of the university.
But by the end of 1948, Nimitz, too, was showing signs of an uneasy retirement. Even so patient a man as he could spend only so much time gardening—which he did with a vengeance—and attending occasional VIP events. With Catherine’s blessing, he accepted a position with the United Nations as the plebiscite administrator for Kashmir, the area hotly contested between Pakistan and India as those countries split and became independent of Churchill’s British Empire. When neither country could agree to a vote or Nimitz’s subsequent attempts at arbitration, he returned to Berkeley in the spring of 1950, although he continued to serve as a roving ambassador for the United Nations for another two years.
Busy years in Berkeley followed. While Nimitz remained grimly indignant about the atrocities visited upon Allied personnel during World War II, he continued to respect the Japanese as a people and particularly appreciated their naval heritage. He encouraged the preservation of the Japanese battleship Mikasa, Admiral Togo’s flagship at the Battle of Tsushima, and Togo’s home, which Nimitz had visited in 1934.
By the summer of 1963, keeping up the house in Berkeley, which Chester and Catherine called Longview, had become a burden. The navy arranged for them to live in Quarters One on Yerba Buena Island in San Francisco Bay, where adequate staff could assist with their needs. Always a walker, who had led many a navy comrade uphill and down, Nimitz was finally slowed by a shattered kneecap and osteoarthritis of the spine. He insisted on risky back surgery in an attempt to relieve the pain but caught pneumonia in the process. Several small strokes followed, and there was evidence of congestive heart failure. In and out of the hospital, he wanted most to be home with Catherine, and there, with her at his side, he died on February 20, 1966, a few days short of his eighty-first birthday.
The obligatory state funeral in Washington, D.C., followed, but he came home a final time to California for burial under a simple regulation headstone adorned with five stars in Golden Gate National Cemetery. By agreement with his friends Raymond Spruance and Richmond Kelly Turner, they would all lie together with their wives along a treeless drive among rows and rows of the same headstones. “To me,” said Catherine, “he has just gone to sea and, as I have done so many times in the past, some day I will follow him.” She did in 1979.8
Leahy’s postwar transition was perhaps the easiest of the four fleet admirals’ because he remained as chief of staff to the president for another four years. In the wake of Roosevelt’s death, Leahy had been blunt with Truman about his propensity to speak his own mind. Truman—himself no stranger to the blunt word—appreciated it and highly valued Leahy’s independent advice, which continued to involve a wide range of foreign affairs as well as military issues.
Whatever else Leahy was, he was no yes-man. Among his disagreements with Truman was his adamant opposition to the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. He felt that such an action would “needlessly alienate the Arabs and endanger American access to the oil of the Middle East.”9 Truman, of course, felt differently and prevailed. So, too, did the emerging Truman-Marshall line toward China after George Marshall became secretary of state in 1947. Leahy fully supported Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government. Instead, Truman and Marshall urged Chiang to work out some accommodation with Mao Tse-tung and eventually came to the conclusion that China was lost to the Communists. By contrast, Leahy’s determination to aid Greece and Turkey against Soviet expansion contributed to the president’s decision to issue the Truman Doctrine.
Events at home and abroad reached a boiling point in 1948 as Truman recognized the new state of Israel; the Soviets blockaded Berlin, resulting in the famous airlift; and Truman won a stunning come-from-behind election. Leahy wholeheartedly supported the airlift and Truman’s election, but he remained skeptical of the politics of the Middle East. “The President’s announcement [recognizing Israel],” Leahy wrote, “made with inadequate consideration leaves many questions unanswered” and could, he concluded, “drag the United States into a war between the two religious groups.”10
During the heated 1948 campaign, some called for Leahy’s dismissal as an aging—he was seventy-three—fossil of another age, a hard-line conservative bordering on reactionary. Leahy had already told Truman that he wished to retire after the election—no matter the outcome—but in September, in the face of such criticism, he offered to do so immediately. Truman would have none of it, telling Leahy in a letter handwritten from his whistle-stop campaign train, “You are my friend and I am yours come hell or high water.”11
After the election, health problems called for Leahy’s retirement as planned, but he stayed on active duty as a fleet admiral and regularly visited Truman at the White House and in Key West. In 1950, Leahy published his memoirs, I Was There, professing to be an eyewitness account of possibly the closest inside adviser ever to serve two presidents. The book was hardly a gripping saga, but rather a Leahy-esque recitation of the facts as he had seen them. Despite a foreword by Truman, it focused almost exclusively on Leahy’s World War II service and not his years with Truman.
Perhaps the best measure of Leahy’s worth to Truman—and Truman’s acknowledgment of the admiral’s stony discretion—was that the president confided to Leahy in November 1951 that he would not seek another term, a decision Truman did not announce publicly until late March 1952. And when Truman held his final farewell dinner in the State Dining Room of the White House for forty-two intimates in December 1952, it was Leahy, despite the fact that he had been out of the president’s direct service for four years, who held the guest-of-honor’s position at the president’s right hand. Perhaps Truman realized that in those terrifying and hectic days following Roosevelt’s death, the recent vice president of the United States, who had not even been told about the atomic bomb, owed his preparation for the world stage to Leahy’s self-effacing loyalty to their country.12
Leahy’s last major hurrah was his eightieth birthday party at the Carlton Hotel in Washington in 1955. “When I was a young officer,” the current CNO, Admiral Robert B. “Mick” Carney, wrote in tribute, “the pronouncements of Admiral Leahy had all of the validity and authority of the Sinai tablets. Captain Leahy was my idea of what the Captain of the ship should be.”13
Leahy was in and out of Bethesda naval hospital until the end came on July 20, 1959, with his son, William H. Leahy, himself a retired rear admiral, at his bedside. After seventeen years without his beloved Louise, Leahy was buried beside her in Arlington National Cemetery. “There never was a finer man or an abler public servant,” Truman wrote Leahy’s son. “I could always depend on him to tell me the truth, whether I liked it or not, a quality too seldom found in men of his position.”14
Of the principal contemporaries of the fleet admirals, Raymond Spruance, always the cerebral scholar, got his wish and became president of the Naval War College. Retiring from the navy in 1948, he served a stint as ambassador to the Philippines and remained the exceedingly gracious gentleman he had always been until his death in 1969. He and Margaret are buried beside Chester and Catherine Nimitz in Golden Gate National Cemetery.
Douglas MacArthur remained in Japan throughout its occupation. America’s only proconsul in the Roman tradition, he did not return to the United States until after his 1951 firing by President Truman over his demands to expand the Korean War into China. He died in 1964, after counseling both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson to avoid a military buildup in Vietnam.
Winston Churchill was unceremoniously voted out of office in July 1945 even as he attended the Potsdam Conference. But the bulldog returned as prime minister from 1951 to 1955. When he died in 1965, it marked the passing of the British Empire. Churchill had his quirks, but when it came to putting a determined face and a rallying rhetoric on the Allied cause, it is not unreasonable to call him, as Time did in its January 2, 1950, issue, “Man of the Half-Century.”
The other contemporary of the four admirals who might well deserve a similar accolade—besides Franklin Roosevelt—was George Marshall. In his preparation for war, his unselfish leadership during the struggle, and his postwar service as secretary of defense and state, Marshall defined the Allied war effort and the free world’s response to the postwar Cold War. Dwight D. Eisenhower went on to succeed Marshall as army chief of staff and later became a two-term president of the United States.
Many of the naval officers who served under King, Nimitz, and Halsey went on to lead the postwar navy. Nimitz’s deputy Forrest Sherman; Halsey’s chief of staff, Robert Carney; and Mitscher’s chief of staff, Arleigh Burke, all became chief of naval operations. Others passed from the scene early, including Marc Mitscher, who died in 1947. Frank Jack Fletcher retired with the rank of full admiral that same year and did not help his reputation by refusing to be interviewed or to write his memoirs.
One of the most poignant appraisals of the four fleet admirals came from Roland N. Smoot after all were dead. Smoot was no outside observer. A 1923 graduate of the Naval Academy, he assumed command of the destroyer Monssen early in 1941. Monssen escorted Hornet on the Doolittle Raid, fought at Midway, and sank in Ironbottom Sound during the fury of the Guadalcanal campaign. Smoot later led a destroyer squadron at Surigao Strait and eventually retired as a vice admiral.
“I’ve tried to analyze the four five-star Admirals that we’ve had in this Navy,” Smoot reminisced. “You have a man like King—a terrifically ‘hew to the line’ hard martinet, stony steely gentleman; the grandfather and really lovable old man Nimitz—the most beloved man I’ve ever known; the complete and utter clown Halsey—a clown but if he said, ‘Let’s go to hell together,’ you’d go to hell with him; and then the diplomat Leahy—the open-handed, effluent diplomat Leahy. Four more different men never lived and they all got to be five-star admirals, and why?”15
Smoot answered his own question with one word: “leadership.” Each of the fleet admirals, he said, had “the ability to make men admire them one way or another.” But far more than instilling admiration alone, each in quite different ways possessed a commanding presence that engendered commitment and resolve toward a common purpose. King demonstrated it by bluster and verve; Nimitz by putting his hand on your shoulder and saying, Let’s get this thing done; Halsey—still the fullback—by rushing though the line in such a way that everyone on the team wanted to go through with him; and Leahy by never letting his own personal feelings, or those of others, interfere with the long-range objectives and best interests of his country.
Of the four admirals, William D. Leahy is undoubtedly the most overlooked. Yet given his roles as confidant, adviser, and enforcer for two presidents, he was arguably the most influential—a fact little recognized at the time or in numerous accounts since. A 1950 review of I Was There captured the essence of Leahy’s contribution. Writing in the New York Herald Tribune, Walter Millis praised Leahy’s service to the nation, but then noted some uncertainty as to what that service truly was. “Just what it was,” Millis confessed, “a service of loyalty, of temperament, of skill in persuasion or negotiation, or advice on men or policies—does not clearly appear from this book.”16 It was, of course, a combination of all of those points, and it is perhaps to Leahy’s credit that his role remained publicly undefined and unacknowledged.
In point of fact, Leahy was chief of staff to the president, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and de facto national security advisor all rolled into one. Leahy’s “unique experience in the Navy and diplomacy,” the Washington Post observed on his eightieth birthday, “made his contribution in the war far more valuable than appears in any public record.”17 That does not mean, however, that Leahy was a man entirely devoid of vanity. Early on, Leahy kept scrapbooks of newspaper clippings of his career and continued to do so throughout World War II after Louise died.
The landmark study by Eric Larrabee, Commander in Chief: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants and Their War, accords Leahy scant mention, while devoting chapters to the likes of Marshall, King, Nimitz, and Eisenhower. In so many accounts of World War II, including Robert Sherwood’s defining Roosevelt and Hopkins, “Hopkins’s reputation as the President’s principal assistant in diplomacy and Marshall’s image as Roosevelt’s preeminent adviser on military strategy… assume such heroic proportions that the contributions of other presidential advisers and assistants are virtually eclipsed.”18 Truth be told, of course, Hopkins himself acknowledged Leahy’s central role in both diplomatic and military matters.
As for Marshall, Leahy came to disagree “sharply” with him on postwar foreign policy—Leahy’s inherent conservatism versus Marshall’s more liberal multilateralism, in addition to the specifics over China—but Leahy nonetheless said, “As a soldier, he was in my opinion one of the best, and his drive, courage, and imagination transformed America’s great citizen army into the most magnificent fighting force ever assembled.”19
Whatever his true opinions of his colleagues, Leahy characteristically kept them guarded and publicly polite. But his frankness nonetheless shone through when it came to the volatile King. “He was an exceptionally able sea commander,” Leahy acknowledged, but “he also was explosive and at times it was just as well that the deliberations of the Joint Chiefs were a well-kept secret.”20
And Leahy was certainly not afraid to take King to task when the situation warranted it. In February 1944, as Churchill pleaded for yet another summit, Leahy, Marshall, and King were not receptive, but King was unusually outspoken, saying that the British were “just playing games.” As Leahy diplomatically put it, “The plain-spoken admiral did not hide his irritation at some of the tactics of our British ally…. I got King in a corner… and asked him to be more polite.”21
Whereas Leahy was stern, reserved, and even dour, King was nothing short of bombastic. Throughout his career, King’s personality was routinely commented upon—and frequently feared—by his contemporaries and junior officers alike. His seniors usually found it merely annoying, although many—Forrestal was clearly an exception—tended to overlook his grating manner because there was no question that this demanding and strong-willed individual was also highly intelligent and capable of delivering results.
King simply had no tolerance for subordinates who failed to carry out his orders to his satisfaction. Considering that King’s satisfaction was a very high bar, many failed to clear it. “On the job,” wrote historian Robert Love in his history of the chiefs of naval operations, “[King] seemed always to be angry or annoyed.”22 But some of that anger or annoyance may well have been a mask that was best breached when one stood up to him or took the initiative in doing what King likely would have done had he been in the other’s shoes.
When Captain Arleigh Burke was transferred to the Atlantic after his tenure with Mitscher in the fast carriers, he was immediately charged with routing certain ships as soon as possible. Alone in the Washington headquarters late one night, Burke issued a series of orders in King’s name—as was custom but never done without King’s or another admiral’s approval. King called Burke into his office the next morning and proceeded to deliver a tongue-lashing about clearing such matters even though the exigency of the moment demanded action. Burke took the tirade without flinching, but as he was being dismissed, King almost winked at him and said quietly, “You did the right thing, son.”23
If Leahy remains the most overlooked of the four fleet admirals, King may be the most overlooked strategist of the Allied planning counsels. It was King who pushed an offensive global strategy on Marshall as early as March 1942, issued absolute orders to Nimitz to hold the Pacific sea-lanes to Hawaii and Australia at all costs, and resolved to stop the Japanese advance in the Solomons no matter how grim the navy’s toll became in the waters around Guadalcanal. And those who label King as a critic of Germany First need remember his early and continuing role in winning the Battle of the Atlantic against German U-boats and assembling the naval might to invade North Africa, Italy, and France. King articulated a global vision of victory, ran a two-ocean war, and finally reached the point in his career where he was able to delegate its execution to men like Nimitz and Halsey.
King frequently termed Nimitz a “fixer,” a term King ascribed to most officers with experience in the Bureau of Navigation. But Nimitz’s tenure at BuNav, as well as his own personality, gave him a broader view of leadership than King possessed. “Leadership,” said Nimitz, “consists of picking good men and helping them do their best for you. The attributes of loyalty, discipline and devotion to duty on the part of subordinates must be matched by patience, tolerance and understanding on the part of superiors.”24
In fact, Nimitz’s years at BuNav gave him the keen insight into personnel that became so important to putting the right man in the right command. He possessed a shrewd ability to evaluate people and bring out their best. And if he was occasionally slow to find fault, it was due to the virtues of patience and loyalty, not indifference or neglect. Nimitz was “inspiring in his brilliance,” recalled Roland Smoot, and “inspiring in his ability to let you feel that he has complete and utter confidence in you.”25
Nimitz, and to an even greater extent Halsey, personified the American war effort in the Pacific. While songs, poems, and scuttlebutt about MacArthur tended toward the derogatory, those same ranks cheered Nimitz and Halsey. Nimitz himself was fond of a poem by Captain William Gordon Beecher, Jr., written from the perspective of a lowly enlisted man. Each verse started with “Me and Halsey and Nimitz” before concluding,
We’re warnin’ them never
To start it again.
For we’ve got a country
With millions of men
Like Nimitz and Halsey and me.26
That Halsey enjoyed similar camaraderie with his men was evidenced by numerous comments and stories that circulated and made it seem as if “the old man” was half a step behind them all the way. Sometimes he was. Once, when two enlisted men were walking along a passageway shooting the breeze, one of them acknowledged, “I’d go to hell for that old son of a bitch.” The sailor felt a poke in his back and turned around to find Halsey playfully wagging a finger. “Not so old, young man.”27 Later, when Halsey dispatched a shore party to rescue starving prisoners of war on the eve of the surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay, one navy enlisted man, who had endured a long captivity, exclaimed, “I knew it! I told these Jap bastards that Admiral Halsey would be here after us.”28
Yes, the fleet admirals were different, but each had an enduring sense of duty, mission, and love of country that had been honed years before on the banks of the Severn. Each of them first learned to be a follower. Then each unquestionably became a leader. All played pivotal roles in bringing the United States Navy to the pinnacle of naval power.
In 1953, after World War II was fought and won, a newspaper editor asked one of America’s fleet admirals to participate in a series of articles by celebrated people on the turning point in their careers. “Looking back,” the newsman queried, “what single act, incident, influence or encouragement set you in the direction of success instead of failure?”29
The seventy-eight-year-old admiral to whom this was addressed wrote in the first sentence of his reply that he was “unable to remember any acts, incidents or influence that were turning points in my naval career.” But then he went on for almost four double-spaced, typewritten pages to reminisce about his time at the United States Naval Academy and the importance of those years and the relationships he had formed there—almost sixty years before—to the man he became. “Those of us who departed from the United States Naval Academy,” Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy concluded, had acquired the requisite skills but, “without conscious effort,” had also acquired something more.30
“You will,” Leahy once told graduating midshipmen, “all have to a greater or lesser degree something else that is intangible… a combination of loyalty to ideals, tradition, courage, devotion, clean living, and clear thinking. It is more than ‘esprit de corps’ because it reaches far beyond the corps and comradeship.”31
Just as this intangible element defined the navy’s four fleet admirals, it characterizes all who pass through the gates of the United States Naval Academy and inexorably binds them to the navy, to one another, and to the steadfast service of their country.