THE DECISION TO relieve Kimmel, the evidence suggests, had not been made by Secretary Knox. Knox directed that he be axed, CNO Stark was to recall, “shortly after coming from the White House.” “A commander in chief,” he added drily, “would not be removed without the President’s permission.” The sudden reversal of the assurance to the public that there would be no immediate change in command, however, is best explained by the machinations of Secretary of War Stimson, the Cabinet member responsible not for the Navy but for the Army.
Relations between the Army and the Navy had long been uneasy at best. This was very much the case in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor when, behind the scenes, finger-pointing began. In his diary entry of December 11th, Stimson had written that there was “bitterness on both sides over the failure at Hawaii . . . The younger and less responsible, and some of the irresponsible older men, are all trying to throw the burden off on the other Department.” Later, in another journal entry, he wrote scornfully that the Navy was “shaken and panic-stricken after the catastrophe.”
On the 11th, when Knox was far away starting his flying visit to Hawaii, Stimson had told the press it was “no time for accusations of blame . . . Anything like that, it seems to me, is a sign of an immature government.” This statement, however, was less than forthright. Army records show that the previous day, well before any probe of Short’s competence or incompetence, orders had been issued that the General be replaced. The fact that a replacement was on the way, Stimson told Roosevelt, was a “most confidential” matter, which “nothing should be said about.”
Stimson evidently felt, though, that replacing Short would suggest that the Army rather than the Navy was deemed to have been responsible for the disaster. “My opinion,” he told Roosevelt, “is that the housecleaning . . . should be synchronized with a similar housecleaning in the Navy command, and all announced at the same time.”
So it was that, at the request not of his Navy superiors but of the Secretary of War and before any assessment of blame—Kimmel came to be relieved of his command.
During the wait for Justice Roberts and the members of the commission to arrive, the Admiral’s mood fluctuated. Though he had half-expected to be relieved, the emotional effect of the reality swiftly became evident. Poco Smith, who knew him as well as anyone on the team, noticed that Kimmel had become unusually quiet, looked depressed. The old confidence had gone out of him. Patrol Wing 2’s operations officer Logan Ramsey, a mere lieutenant commander, was astonished to be consulted by the Admiral about material he was preparing for the Roberts Commission.
From Washington, CNO Stark had forwarded a favorable comment on the Admiral in the Congressional Record along with a scrawled note: “Keep cheerful, good luck, we’ll fight it out . . . Betty.”
After the announcement that Kimmel had been replaced, and that there was to be an investigation, the chirpiness evaporated. “Dear Kimmel,” Stark wrote on the 17th, “I wish there was something I could do for you, both officially and personally, but I know you will keep your chin up. My best to all hands, and good luck.”
The CNO had always been something of a contradiction, a man who daily made tough decisions in his capacity as head of the Navy, yet mixed professional exchanges with chummy repartee. Just after sending the first of the notes cited here, he also fired off an effusive letter to Roosevelt:
Dear Mr. President:
I told Jack to tell you this morning, and I have been thinking about it seriously in these past tense days:
You are not only the most important man to the United States today, but to the world. If anything should happen to you, it would be a catastrophe. I do not say this to you because of my own personal relationship, but as a cold-blooded fact.
I have said if I were Hitler and were timing it, and he probably has timed it, that I would have ready a spectacular raid on the United States—Washington, New York, or somewhere. Because he knows as well as any man what it would mean were anything to happen to you.
Please, Mister, let Ben Moreell or somebody provide, and provide as quickly as possible, a place where, in case of an air raid or any other disturbance, not only your safety, but the precious hours of sleep which you need and which are probably too few, would be provided for against any disturbance of any kind, so far as we can humanly make it possible.
Sincerely,
BETTY
Stimson, at the War Department, was less than enthusiastic about Stark. Of all Roosevelt’s advisers, he had written in his journal, the Chief of Naval Operations was the “weakest one.”
As the jockeying for influence went on in Washington, Kimmel—toppled from his post—struggled to keep his emotional balance. As he had been for the best part of a year, the Admiral was far from his family. His wife Dorothy was living at an apartment hotel in Long Beach, California. Though the couple still maintained a house on the East Coast, and though she was still separated by more than two thousand miles from her husband in Hawaii, she felt somehow closer to him there.
Dorothy had spent much of her time in Long Beach with two other Navy wives, both also married to admirals serving at Pearl Harbor. One of them, Inez Kidd, was now a widow. Her husband Isaac had been on the bridge on December 7th when a Japanese bomb killed him, the ship’s captain, and 1,175 others in the single cataclysmic explosion of the Arizona.
Dorothy and Kimmel had last seen each other in June, and then only briefly, when he was on the way back to Hawaii from his flying visit to Washington. The couple had for a long time barely seen their children at all. Manning was on the East Coast, waiting for a new submarine, on which he would serve as engineering officer, to be ready for action. Tom, who was executive officer aboard the submarine USS S-40, based in the Philippines, had been ordered to sea on the outbreak of war. He would soon be involved in dangerous hunt-and-be-hunted exchanges with Japanese warships. The one son able to respond effectively to news of the attack on Pearl Harbor had been twenty-year-old Ned, by then in his senior year at Princeton.
Ned had hurried across the country to California by train to be with his mother. Aware that there had been many casualties at Pearl, he would remember, he at first had no way of knowing whether his father was dead or alive. When he arrived to join Dorothy, he was carrying a newspaper with the headline “Japs Say Admiral Kimmel Killed.”
On December 18th, having learned that his father had been removed from command, Manning wrote:
Dear Dad,
There is so little to say at a time like this. But I do want you to know that I’m sure that your part of the job has been “well done”! My complete confidence and belief in you has not been shaken a bit, and I think you are the grandest Dad in the world.
MANNING
In a time of slow basic communications—there was no easy long-distance phone contact for most ordinary citizens—Kimmel family members had no clear idea how things were developing. In a letter to his in-laws later that month, Manning would write: “We have heard from several sources that Dad’s reputation hasn’t suffered, and that Secretary Knox doesn’t feel that Dad’s action in any way can bring discredit to him. But I imagine we will know more about this later.”
In another letter, Manning told his father that Secretary Knox had sent word through an intermediary that he thought “no discredit would be attached to you as a result of the investigation.”