The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors

by James D. Hornfischer

  King penalized caution wherever it surfaced. In March, he was outraged to learn that one of his admirals in the South Pacific, Frank Jack Fletcher, had decided to return to base to refuel his carriers rather than hold them ready to intercept enemy shipping gathering near Rabaul. During the Battle of the Coral Sea in May, he took a dim view of Fletcher’s refusal to release his destroyers to pursue the retreating Japanese carrier force. When Nimitz subsequently recommended Fletcher for both a promotion and a medal—taking pains to defend his judgment to King by pointing out Fletcher’s shortage of destroyers to protect his carriers—King refused to approve either.

  King reduced all issues to their impact on keeping his fleet ready for war. No other considerations counted. When officials at the Department of the Interior’s Fish and Wildlife Service informed him in June that Navy units were targeting whales and other marine mammals during gunnery exercises, King quickly put an end to it, writing Nimitz, “Undoubtedly these acts are committed lightheartedly by the crews without realizing that the killing and injury of whales results in the destruction of valuable war materials of which there is a wholly inadequate supply.” King was indifferent to the concerns of marine biologists. To him it mattered only that his fleet needed whale meal and lubricants, resources that the West Coast whaling fleet, thinly drawn by a two-ocean war’s demands on shipping, was struggling to provide.

  Most people who crossed King’s path came to fear him for one reason or another, but the New York Times war correspondent Hanson W. Baldwin, no stranger to the COMINCH’s high mercury, saw something else in his bluster. “His greatest weakness is personal vanity,” Baldwin wrote. “He is terrifically sensitive and in some ways has many of the attributes of a woman.” This remark probably revealed more about Baldwin than about King, whose virility was actually a mark against him. Women avoided sitting next to him at dinner parties because, it was said, “his hands were too often beneath the table.”

  King’s personality was famously and not flatteringly likened to a blowtorch. Some people turned that metaphor to his favor, saying he was “so tough he shaved with a blowtorch.” That nuance would have been lost on him, for he was never willing to propel his career by cultivating people’s favor. After facing off with King at a meeting once, General Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote in his diary, “One thing that might help win this war is to get someone to shoot King. He’s the antithesis of cooperation, a deliberately rude person, which means he’s a mental bully.” King liked his tough reputation. When he was called to Washington to replace Harold Stark as CNO, King remarked, “When things get tough, they call for the sons of bitches.” It marked the style of King’s intellect and independence, and not necessarily for the better, that he mistrusted the judgment of anyone but himself. Those he deemed lesser minds included some formidable figures, including General Marshall, whom King deemed provincially Eurocentric and ignorant of seapower and the Pacific generally, and the one officer who would prove to have the keenest judgment of all the flag officers in the Navy: Chester W. Nimitz. King soon learned that he could give his Pacific Ocean Area chief some space to operate, but in the early days he was known to treat Nimitz as he did other subordinates. Of Nimitz he had once said, “If only I could keep him tight on what he’s supposed to do. Somebody gets ahold of him and I have to straighten him out.” Apparently leery of Nimitz’s accommodating way, King sent him unsubtle signals about his expectations. Once he wrote to his Pacific commander, “You are requested to read the article, ‘There Is Only One Mistake: To Do Nothing,’ by Charles F. Kettering in the March 29th issue of Saturday Evening Post and to see to it that it is brought to the attention of all of your principal subordinates and other key officers.” So overriding was his will to action that for a time King made a practice of bypassing Nimitz in operational matters. If this was a test of fortitude, Nimitz passed. Finding the discourtesy intolerable, he confronted King during one of their many meetings and told him the state of affairs had to change. King let Nimitz run the Pacific naval war thenceforth with little overt interference.

  Fair, gentle, courtly, and vigorous, Nimitz was a match for any of the blustery egos surrounding him. He would emerge in time as the Pacific war’s essential man, the figure through whom all decisions flowed, on whom all outcomes reflected, and whose judgment was respected from Main Navy all the way down the line. He lay like a valley of humility between two mountains of conceit: Ernest King and General Douglas MacArthur, the commander of the Southwest Pacific Command and the Navy’s stalwart intramural rival. The divided Army-Navy command would be a continuing complication in the war ahead. King and MacArthur had enough weight of will to pull major commanders into their orbits and hold them in place by their gravity. Nimitz, in time, became their fulcrum.

  Nimitz generally reserved his thoughts for himself. Complaints he harbored that had no bearing on plans, fruitless reprimands, second and third guesses—he held them within. The emotional pressure they created often left him sleepless. Most nights he awoke at 3 a.m., read till 5:30, then went back to bed. The pace of work at CINCPAC headquarters needed just a few months to exhaust him utterly. By spring 1942 his mind was a turmoil, his spirit gripped by pessimism. The repair of the battle fleet and the reconstitution of Pearl Harbor naval base were moving more slowly than many wanted. He feared his supporters were turning sour. “I will be lucky to last six months,” he lamented in a letter to Catherine.

  But the season of spring was like a lifetime in that war. Though grievous damage to the fleet was still visible at Pearl, the loss was never as great as it had seemed. All but two of the battleships were sent to the West Coast for repair and modernization and made ready for war within months. The war, of course, did not wait for them. Reconstituted around its aircraft carriers, and under the leadership of new commanders, the Pacific Fleet struck back in the spring.

  The carrier fleet’s surging esprit de corps, such a novelty for the battered warriors of Pearl Harbor, carried Chester Nimitz through the six months he had most dreaded. The Pacific Fleet’s flattops, under Vice Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr., ventured forth and struck targets from the Gilberts all the way to Japan’s home islands. A task force with the carriers Enterprise and Hornet, the latter playing host to a flight of strangers, twin-engined Army bombers, launched an audacious raid against Tokyo. After Colonel Jimmy Doolittle’s B-25s had done their work, the Combined Fleet’s commander in chief, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, pledged to draw out and destroy the nuisance-making U.S. fleet once and for all. He made plans to seize Midway and the Aleutian Islands, then target Hawaii itself. He also continued the push from Rabaul south toward the stronghold of Port Moresby, New Guinea. He meant to isolate Australia, then continue southeast to threaten U.S. bases as far away as Samoa.

  In early May, a carrier task force under Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher intercepted a Japanese invasion fleet bound for Port Moresby. In the Battle of the Coral Sea, the U.S. Navy sank the Japanese carrier Shoho, damaged a second, and turned back the invasion. Though the Lexington was lost and the Yorktown damaged, American pilots relished their victory and soon reformed for another crack at the Combined Fleet. During the first week of June, after Nimitz’s codebreakers detected an enemy plan to invade Midway Island, a pair of carrier task forces under Fletcher and Spruance sprang an ambush. By the time fliers from the Enterprise, Hornet, and hastily repaired Yorktown called it a day on June 5, Japan’s thrust toward Hawaii was parried, with losses that included four frontline aircraft carriers and 110 pilots. The victory put the U.S. Navy in position, for the first time, to carry the fight to the enemy.

  The old plan for a Pacific offensive envisioned parallel drives toward Tokyo, one running from New Guinea toward the Philippines, the other through the Central Pacific to the Marianas. Which path received priority for supply, equipment, and reinforcement would depend on the outcome of an important battle yet to be fought—between the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy. General Douglas MacArthur advocated the New Guinea route, Nimitz and the Navy the Cent
ral Pacific. Though the interservice rivalry was well established, the outbreak of war pitted them in competition for scarce weapons and matériel. As the first American offensive of the war took shape, the warriors in the Pacific would be constantly pleading their cause to those in Washington who rationed the resources. As it happened, King’s ambitions faced obstacles from those who outranked even MacArthur. FDR himself was said to favor European operations.

  As King saw it, the events of early June provided the longed-for opening for a Pacific offensive. While he knew his president would cherish sending his beloved fleet into action, King also knew what Roosevelt’s overriding aim was in the spring of 1941: helping the Russians. In a May 6 memo to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, FDR wrote, “It must be constantly reiterated that Russian armies are killing more Germans and destroying more Axis matériel than all the twenty-five united nations put together. To help Russia, therefore, is the primary consideration.” Despite her infamy, Japan was a negligible threat, Roosevelt thought. With Germany knocked out of the fight, Japan could not hold on, he believed. “The whole question of whether we win or lose the war depends on the Russians,” he wrote in June. “We can defeat the Japanese in six weeks.” King didn’t think the Navy’s victory at Midway had registered sufficiently with the Allied high command.

  As FDR saw it, diverting German forces from the critical Eastern Front and preventing a separate Russian truce with Hitler required a bold American move in Europe. The plan Roosevelt liked best, Operation Sledgehammer, would throw forty-eight divisions, more than seven hundred thousand men, across the English Channel and into France before the end of 1942. The Army’s ambitions were constrained by the pessimism of the British and the U.S. Navy’s inarguable need to at least hold on in the Pacific. Giving resources to that modest goal, even if it were simply a “maintenance of positions,” would compromise Eisenhower’s cross-channel plans. An alternative urged by the British, an invasion of North Africa, originally known as Operation Gymnast, then Operation Torch, was less risky from Churchill’s point of view, though it still competed for American time, resources, and attention.

  From his work with the British, King was aware that, officially, a “Germany first” strategy was operative. But his close involvement in negotiations and personal relationship with George Marshall enabled him to create the leeway to run the Pacific as he saw fit. In many cases he dealt exclusively with Marshall in designing strategy in the Pacific. As far as he was concerned, the strategy all along was “Pacific first.” The Navy was clearly most vested there. Four of its five heavy aircraft carriers were in the Pacific, and twenty-seven of its thirty-eight cruisers. “I sent an order to Admiral Nimitz,” King wrote after the war, “saying that despite all other orders, large or small, the basic orders are that the Pacific Fleet must, first, keep all means of communications with the West Coast and, second, but close to the first order, to keep all areas between Hawaii and Samoa clear of the Japanese and then, as fast as it could, expand that area toward Australia.” His mandate to Nimitz reflected the clarity of the Navy’s self-arranged destiny in the west. King considered “Germany first” little more than a political campaign slogan. Let the Joint Chiefs host their debating society with the British. King’s Navy had an ocean to conquer.

  For General Marshall, a powerful voice on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it would take a fully concentrated effort to beat the Axis decisively in either hemisphere. On July 13, he sent Eisenhower a secret telegram stating that an invasion of North Africa would be a fruitless dispersion of force. “We would nowhere be acting decisively against our enemies,” he wrote. With North Africa commanding most of its attention, the Army would have few aircraft, so critical to victory, available in the South Pacific. Winston Churchill pressed the case for North Africa, however. He candidly regarded an amphibious assault against France in 1942 and even in 1943 as suicide. Marshall was publicly noncommittal. Fearing a compromise that pleased no one, but wishing to strike effectively against the Axis somewhere, Marshall expressed a willingness to entertain the Pacific-first offensive strategy that Admiral King envisioned. The general saw the prospect of a Navy offensive in the Pacific as a lever to budge the intransigent British. If landings in France could not be made by early 1943, Marshall wrote to Eisenhower, “We should turn to the Pacific and strike decisively against Japan with full strength and ample reserves, assuming a defensive attitude against Germany except for air operations.”

  As King wrote after the war, his idea was to “stop the enemy as soon as we could get the ships, planes and troops to make a stand as far to the westward as possible.… I kept close watch on the area of Guadalcanal and finally decided, whether or not the J.C.S. would agree, I wanted to make some real move…. The Army still insisted that the time wasn’t ripe so I answered them, ‘When will the time be ripe since we have just defeated a major part of the enemy’s fleet [at Midway]?’ ”

  Knowing that he needed King’s support in the continuing arguments with the British, even as he feared unilateral Navy initiatives, Marshall agreed to back a Navy-directed plan in the South Pacific. If this was a bluff to cow the Brits, Eisenhower strengthened it by relaying Marshall’s suggestion to Roosevelt. Ike, too, thought that if a cross-channel invasion couldn’t be launched from England, then America should “turn our backs upon the Eastern Atlantic and go, full out, as quickly as possible, against Japan!”

  The president doubted the value of seizing “a lot of islands whose occupation will not affect the world situation this year or next.” Still, King knew FDR wanted action and believed he would not likely block a well-considered plan to turn the fleet loose against the Axis. As far back as March, King had urged Roosevelt to approve “an integrated, general plan of operations” based on the idea of holding six strongpoints that spanned the South Pacific from east to west: Samoa, Fiji, New Caledonia, Tongatabu, Efate, and Funafuti. From those bases the Navy could protect the sea-lanes to Australia, then drive northwest into the Solomons and the Bismarcks. The opportunity to do that had finally come.

  Neither King nor Marshall seemed to grasp the degree to which politics would compel Roosevelt to veto an express Pacific-first strategy. For reasons of electoral calculation—to preserve his Democratic majorities in a congressional midterm election—Roosevelt wanted American troops fighting Germans before the end of the year. “We failed to see,” Marshall would write, “that the leader in a democracy has to keep the people entertained. The people demand action.”

  Public opinion was increasingly in favor of pursuing the fight in the Pacific. In January 1942, a Newsweek editorialist wrote, “Congressmen are receiving a growing stream of mail from constituents condemning the conduct of the war. The writers demand to know why Wake, Guam, and Midway garrisons were neither reinforced or rescued, why the Philippines were left with only a meager force of fighter planes while hundreds were sent to Europe, why the Navy has not laced into the Japanese fleet, etc.”

  The answer was the political clout of America’s Atlantic ally. “King’s war is against the Japanese,” one of Churchill’s advisers had warned him. If London did not commit to Eisenhower’s invasion of France, the adviser wrote, “everything points to a complete reversal of our present agreed strategy and the withdrawal of America to a war of her own in the Pacific.” On hearing this, Churchill reportedly remarked, “Just because the Americans can’t have a massacre in France this year, they want to sulk and bathe in the Pacific.” That was a dubious characterization of what his Atlantic cousins really wanted. Because the Japanese had struck them directly, and Hitler hadn’t, what many Americans—or the Navy at least—wanted was a massacre in the Pacific. The victory at Midway opened the course.

  The Navy would find its war on the boundless battlefield of the western ocean. When Martin Clemens turned on his teleradio in Aola and tapped out news of an airfield in the making, the pattern of the coming days began to take shape in the mind of Ernest King.

  To those in peril on the sea

  THE LAST STAND OF THE
TIN CAN SAILORS

  A Bantam Book

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Published by

  Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 2004 by James D. Hornfischer

  Excerpt from Neptune’s Inferno copyright 2010 by James D. Hornfischer

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2003062792

  Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book Neptune’s Inferno. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-48730-8

  v3.0_r2

  www.bantamdell.com