Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942

  As he toured the stricken ships and shore facilities, Nimitz concluded that the Japanese attack, spectacular as it was, “could have been devastatingly worse.” True, the navy had lost 1,999 killed and 710 wounded, three times its combined losses in the Spanish-American War and First World War. (Including all services and civilians, the attack had left 2,403 dead and 1,178 injured.) True, some 300,000 tons of shipping had been knocked out of action, including eight battleships (six would be repaired and returned to service). True, 188 planes had been wiped out, mostly on the ground, representing some 90 percent of Oahu's military aircraft. But the Japanese had failed to hit the repair shops along the piers, and especially the fuel tank farms, where the fleet’s 4.5 million barrels of fuel oil were stored. “That was a most serious error,” Nimitz later said. “These tanks could have been destroyed by machine-gunning them with 50-caliber incendiary machine gun bullets. . . . Had our oil supply been destroyed, and considering the tremendous shortage of fuel and petroleum production, generally, in Europe, it would have taken years to re-establish that supply and would have delayed our Pacific war accordingly.” By a stroke of luck, the Japanese had caught the American battleships in port, rather than at sea. “Imagine, if you can,” said Nimitz after the war, “what would have happened to our slower battleships in such an action with the aircraft of six carriers working on them and with our fleet having no air cover at all . . . we would have lost by drowning or capture almost 20,000 men had our fleet been in deep water.” Finally, the submarine fleet had been entirely spared, and the undersea campaign could begin immediately.

  Perhaps Mahan would have turned over in his grave to hear it said, but the loss of the American battleships was no catastrophe. It might have even been entered on the ledger as a net gain, because their crews—thousands of the best trained and most experienced men in the service—were released to serve in other capacities. The battleships were too slow to operate with the carriers, and incapable of defending themselves against air attack. As one officer put it, the Japanese had converted the American fleet from “a seventeen knot fleet to a twenty-five knot fleet.” Losing them on the opening day of the war forced the American naval high command to acknowledge the ascendancy of aviation and submarines. The Japanese navy, with its magnificent line of battleships intact, would be slow to make the same adjustment.

  On New Year’s Eve, in a brief, self-effacing ceremony, Nimitz relieved Pye and assumed command of the fleet. Naval custom required the new C-in-C to unfurl his four-star flag on a flagship, but since Nimitz’s command would be shorebound throughout the war, the act was merely ceremonial, a nod to tradition. The ship chosen was a submarine, the Grayling, moored at a pier off the CINCPAC headquarters. The choice was fitting. Nimitz had been a submariner in the primitive, pre–First World War days, and had always been proud to wear the dolphin insignia. (He later quipped, in black jest, that nothing else was left.) A small coterie of journalists and photographers were permitted to attend, and at the end Nimitz paused to speak to them. Pressed with questions about how the war would unfold, Nimitz was vague—Casey of the Chicago Daily News wrote that he was “reasonably frank about saying nothing.” The admiral did forecast that enemy submarines would probably shell the west coast (as indeed they did), but the navy censors later changed “probably” to “possibly.”

  Afterward, Nimitz crossed the dock to the headquarters and climbed the stairs to his office. He called the senior staff into the room. Having been stationed at Pearl Harbor before the Japanese attack, and having witnessed the craven recall of the Wake relief force, many of those officers carried an enervating burden of guilt, akin to a feeling of personal disgrace. They expected to be shunted off into dead-end billets for the remainder of the war, and many hoped only to be sent to sea, with a chance to redeem themselves in combat. Nimitz saw the problem clearly and understood what had to be done. “These were all fine men,” he later said, “but they had just undergone a terrible shock, and it was my first duty to restore morale and to salvage these fine officers for future use, and this I proceeded to do.” He spoke briefly, in a low tone. “I know most of you here,” he said, “and I have complete confidence in your ability and judgment. We’ve taken a whale of a wallop, but I have no doubt of the ultimate outcome.” December 7 would not be held against them; they could forget the disaster and get on with the war. They were needed, and must remain, at their posts. He would listen to requests for seagoing assignments, but “certain key members of the staff I insist I want to keep.”

  “In a very few minutes, speaking softly,” one such officer recalled, “Admiral Nimitz convinced all hands of his ability to lead us out of this.”

  Chapter Five

  ADMIRAL ERNEST J. KING, COMMANDER IN CHIEF OF THE U.S. FLEET and chief of naval operations, was a hard man with a hard, disapproving mouth. He frequently wore a scowl. He was tall, very slim, and always physically fit. When Teddy Roosevelt handed him his Naval Academy diploma in 1901, King stood six feet tall and weighed 165 pounds. In 1941, at age sixty-three, he was the same height and just 10 pounds heavier. He rarely smiled, and if (for the sake of photographers) he tried to soften the edges of his mouth, he succeeded only in appearing pained. Official navy portraits emphasized his long, narrow face, his sharply cleft chin, his dark, close-cropped hair, and his small, gleaming, close-set eyes. He was said to be a bit vain about his appearance, and sensitive about the expanding bald spot on the top of his head. He was always immaculately turned out, with uniforms purchased from Brooks Brothers in New York, and tailored to fit his slim frame; in his official photographs a white handkerchief was neatly tucked into the breast pocket of his uniform jacket, below a formidable row of ribbons and medals.

  Among the principal American military leaders of the Second World War, King has always been the most neglected and least understood. In that he would have taken deep satisfaction. He did not want or seek a public profile, though one was eventually thrust upon him. He thought reporters a nuisance and at first refused to deal with them at all. It was said, half-jokingly, that King would have liked to say nothing until the end of the war, and then release a two-word communiqué: “We won.” (When he realized that the army was getting better press than the navy, he did begin speaking to reporters, but off the record.) He was an immensely powerful adviser to President Roosevelt, with whom he met privately at the White House almost every day, and who sought his advice and backing for every significant military decision of the war. But King did not flaunt his influence with the president; indeed, he sometimes seemed intent on disguising it. When he spoke strongly or emphatically to Roosevelt, he did so one on one, or with no one other than Harry Hopkins in the room—in larger White House meetings he kept a still tongue, or spoke only briefly. On such occasions Roosevelt, seeking guidance, sometimes threw a quizzical glance at King. The admiral replied by nodding or shaking his head almost imperceptibly, so that the president and no one else would see the signal.

  After the war, King made no effort to secure his place in history. He wrote an unrevealing memoir, concealing his role behind the stilted prose of an after-action report. Only one book-length biography of King has ever been published. His army counterpart, General George Catlett Marshall, went on to serve as President Truman’s secretary of state (a role for which King would have been comically unsuited). Marshall gave his name to the reconstruction of postwar Europe; King gave his name to a public high school in his hometown of Lorain, Ohio. Unlike Douglas A. MacArthur, King’s erstwhile nemesis, who invented the famous maxim about old soldiers, the old admiral really did just fade away.

  History, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Who was this five-star admiral of the Second World War, who left barely a trace of himself in the historical record? In the literature he is usually painted with a few broad strokes of the brush, and the overall effect is unflattering. Four charges have been laid against King, growing simultaneously louder and less coherent as they have reverberated through the historical echo chamber. First, that he was
a foul-tempered martinet who was utterly ruthless and as mean as a snake. Second, that he was a narrow-minded navy partisan, who cared only for the parochial interests of his service. Third, that he did not support the “Europe-first” policy, and campaigned to make the Pacific the main theater of the war. Fourth, that he harbored an obsessive animosity against the British, and did his best to undermine the alliance. There was some truth in the first of those four charges, though King’s abrasiveness and ruthlessness have been exaggerated, and were facets of a more complex personality. As for the second, third, and fourth, they do not stick.

  HE WAS BORN IN 1878, in a workman’s cottage in Lorain, Ohio, an industrial town on the southern shore of Lake Erie. His father was a railroad repair shop foreman. As a boy, King passed long hours in the shop, and for the rest of his life took naturally to machines and engineering. He was brilliant—that much was evident even in early childhood—and despite his humble origins he had no trouble winning admission to the Naval Academy in 1897. There he excelled in his academic coursework, and in his senior year attained the rank of battalion commander, the highest leadership position in the student body, allowing him to wear the stripes of a cadet lieutenant commander. At graduation in 1901, he was ranked fourth in his class.

  King was always supremely ambitious. From early in his career, he openly avowed his intention to rise to the top of the navy. Someday, he declared to his colleagues, he would be the chief of naval operations. “He told me he was going to the top,” recalled an officer who served under him. “No braggadocio, just extreme confidence.” He plotted his ascent shrewdly, seizing the coattails of admirals who seemed destined for important commands. He perfected the art of “writing his own ticket”—arranging through backchannels to be assigned billets likely to advance his career, and did not hesitate to lobby for the jobs he wanted. He served at sea on cruisers, destroyers, battleships, aircraft carriers, and submarines. He held a series of prestigious staff and administrative jobs. He was conspicuously good at everything he did. Shiphandling and navigation came naturally to him, but he was also an efficient administrator, handling paperwork fearlessly and efficiently, and communicating in succinct, lucid prose. He was astute enough to understand that he would have to populate his résumé with less glamorous jobs, to do the “drudgery” of the navy, to suffer the “hard knocks of the service.” He descended into the hot, dark, cramped, dangerous engine rooms and wrestled with engines, letting his finely tailored uniforms be stained with grease and splattered with oil. He threw himself body and soul into every job, always making a point to work harder than anyone else, until the navy doctors ordered him to ease up.

  As ambitious as he was, King did not fit the pattern of a single-minded careerist. In his dealings with others, even superior officers who could have damaged his career prospects, King was inclined to behave with haughtiness and contempt. He did not pay court to officers he did not respect; he did not strive to be liked by anyone, even for tactical reasons. He went through life with the attitude of a man beleaguered on every side by dunces. In his insistence on high standards, even from men above him in the chain of command, he sometimes walked up to the edge of insolence or insubordination. He revealed his integrity through his supercilious refusal to play politics when a principle was at stake. As a lowly ensign he had argued relentlessly with superiors when he believed he was right. “King justified himself by citing regulations, chapter and verse,” wrote his biographer. “It was a typical King sea-lawyer tactic. He delighted in compelling flag officers to concede that they were wrong by quoting a regulation in King’s favor.” Not surprisingly, some of King’s early fitness reports suffered as a result, though they never seemed to slow his rate of promotion.

  King had a keen interest in military history, and was an insatiable reader. He devoured all the works of Mahan, of course; but he also read deeply into the Napoleonic Wars and the American Civil War. In the early years of his career King caught the reformist spirit, and in 1909 he published a controversial piece in the Naval Institute Proceedings entitled “Some Ideas About Organization Aboard Ship.” In that prize-winning article, a sharp critique of conservatism in the navy, the thirty-one-year-old lieutenant censured the navy’s “inertia to change” and its culture of “clinging to things that are old because they are old. It must be admitted that this characteristic has been in many things a safeguard; it is also true that in quite as many it has been a drag to progress.” While running the submarine base at New London, King took the War College correspondence course and passed all twelve installments in just three months, an unprecedented achievement. He was a champion of postgraduate education, and served, as a forty-year-old captain, in command of the Naval Postgraduate School in Annapolis. He pushed to expand the Naval War College and to require all officers headed toward higher rank to pass through it.

  In 1928, now a fifty-year-old captain, King threw his lot in with naval aviation. He entered pilot training and earned his wings, a step that qualified him for carrier command. He did the minimum required to win his wings, and never attained more than rudimentary flying skills—but his seniority ensured that King was one of the first qualified naval aviators to reach flag rank, a major advantage in his subsequent career. He held a series of important aviation jobs, ashore and at sea. He was named assistant chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, then given command of the Naval Air Station at Hampton Roads, Virginia, then (in 1930) named captain of the carrier Lexington. Promoted to rear admiral in 1933, he returned to the Bureau of Aeronautics in Washington, this time as chief. King was deeply involved in the development of the navy’s reconnaissance seaplanes. He pushed the pilots to fly long hours and in dangerous conditions; when they quit, King bade them good riddance, declaring that he was doing the vital work of weeding the weaker men out of the service.

  As captain of the Lexington, King consolidated his reputation as an imperious and hard-driving martinet. He hovered on the bridge, glowering down at the men on the flight deck, watching over their every move. If a pilot made a clumsy approach or put his bird down too hard, he could expect to be summoned to the bridge, his name blared humiliatingly through the loudspeakers for the entire crew to hear. As King dressed a man down, he gesticulated wildly, hands waving over his head, and poured out a long tirade laced with sarcasm. When a Lexington pilot ran out of fuel and ditched in the carrier’s wake, King summoned the pilot to the bridge and told him: “The next time you decide to land in the water, do it ahead of the ship so I won’t have to turn around to pick you up.” Frequently, he did not even bother bringing offenders up to the bridge to receive their rebukes. “He didn’t need a megaphone,” said an officer who served under King on the Lexington. “He’d just stand on the edge of that bridge, and they could hear him from one end to the other of the flight deck, even in a high wind, because he could really bellow when he was mad.” It was not always clear why King was angry; he was given to fits of seemingly irrational rage. Suddenly, with no apparent reason and no explanation, he might shove a stack of papers off a desk onto the floor, and then storm off the bridge without saying a word.

  King worked harder than the men under his command and faulted them for not keeping to his pace. He declared that he needed only five hours of sleep per night, and often took those five hours without returning to his cabin, but rather “jackknifing his long frame on a short transom in flag plot.” He was a stickler for the prerogatives and trappings of his rank, and was not collegial with subordinates. On a cramped bridge he might brusquely order a junior officer to “Get out of my way.” When another man was climbing up a ladder and nearing the top, and King wanted to climb down, he did not wait for the climber to reach the top; he simply mounted the rungs, forcing the junior officer to descend to the deck and step out of his way. In the ship’s barbershop, an officer recalled, “You could be halfway through a haircut and [King] decided that he wanted a shave. You got out of the barber chair and waited until he was shaved.” When a film was screened for the crew in the hangar de
ck, it did not begin until King had arrived and taken his seat.

  King’s reputation for personal toughness, for ruthlessness, for wielding the power of his rank with a heavy hand, had probably done his career more good than harm. Roosevelt himself enjoyed trafficking in stories about the admiral’s legendary toughness, telling his guests that he “shaved with a blowtorch” and “cut his toenails with a torpedo net cutter.” Whether or not King really enjoyed yelling at his subordinates is open to debate, but there is no doubt that he believed in yelling as a matter of principle. King chose to be feared rather than loved. “I don’t care how good they are,” he once said. “Unless they get a kick in the ass every six weeks, they slack off.” He did not believe in the culture of collegiality that bound Annapolis graduates to one another, because he understood that it had too often allowed indolent or incompetent officers to survive and thrive. King made it his personal business to rid the navy of such men, and earned many enemies along the way. But he was also fair—he respected men who did their jobs well, whether or not he liked them personally. He praised them in fitness reports and used his influence to see that they were promoted. “If a man knew his business,” said Admiral J. J. Clark, “it was easy enough to get on with Ernie King. But God help him if he was wrong; King would crucify him.”