The overstretched Quartermaster Corps, under Brigadier General Brehon Somervell, shouldered the burden of procurement, construction, and the embarrassing waste that accompanies every large government program. Congress, vigilant as ever for overspending in programs benefiting the poorly connected, found a plump target in the Army’s construction budget. The Senate formed a special committee to investigate the nation’s defense spending, and a former artillery captain, Senator Harry Truman of Missouri, took over as the committee’s chairman.24
The Truman Committee, as it became known, set off a minor panic in the War Department. To Stimson and Marshall, the Truman Committee smacked of the Civil War–era Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, an investigating body that radicals in Congress had used to hamstring Lincoln’s generals. Stimson feared history would repeat itself, and it gave him no comfort that the new committee chair was a scion of Kansas City’s famously corrupt Tom Pendergast political machine.25
Marshall had known Harry Truman since the First World War, and he held somewhat more faith in public servants like Truman. He felt the best approach to Truman’s committee was to embrace it, not rebuff it. As he told one deputy, “A free and easy and whole-souled manner of cooperation with these committees is more likely to create an impression that everything is all right in the War Department than is a resentful attitude, and [it] must be assumed that members of Congress are just as patriotic as we.”26
Marshall made a special effort to placate the temperamental senator. He met with Truman often, and he would leave meetings with his senior staff to take the senator’s calls. A constructive atmosphere grew from the top down, and the Truman Committee became one of Marshall’s closest allies in the Senate. By openly trusting the motives of Truman and his committeemen, Marshall had neutralized a monster before it could grow fangs.27
Which was fortunate, since, in the Atlantic Ocean, Hitler was baring fangs of his own.
EIGHT
INCHING INTO WAR
BRITAIN WAS LOSING THE BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC, A STRUGGLE MEASURED not in conquered territory but in tonnage and rates of loss. From April to December 1940, German bombers and U-boats sank 878 merchant ships. In one convoy alone, 11 out of 41 supply ships went to the bottom, taking with them thousands of tons of badly needed food, ammunition, and weapons.
Worse was to come. As Admiral Dönitz’s U-boats slaughtered merchantmen in the North Atlantic, the heavy cruisers Scharnhorst and Scheer ran down supply ships between Africa and South America. Merchantmen went down at three times England’s capacity to replace them, and British imports dropped to two-thirds of their prewar levels.
That meant Britons were slowly starving. While basic foods could still be rationed, imports like citrus fruits and eggs were luxuries of the past. Planes, fuel, and antiaircraft guns were joining trucks, steel, and medicines on the Atlantic’s dark floor. Churchill told his public in a radio address from London, “It is the Battle of the Atlantic which holds the first place in the thoughts of those upon whom rests responsibility for procuring the victory.”1
The Atlantic also held first place in the thoughts of those on the sidelines. Admirals in Washington knew America could be pulled into war at any moment, and a reorganization of the peacetime fleet was overdue. In early February, with Roosevelt’s consent, Admiral Stark formed the Atlantic Fleet and placed it under the command of a thin, bald sea dog who had been looking for a fight.2
• • •
Ernest J. King was sixty-two years old when Stark yanked him off the General Board, an old-folks home for senior admirals. When he assigned King command of the Patrol Force, a small fleet guarding America’s Atlantic coastline, the news rustled gossip grapevines at officers’ clubs from Newport to San Francisco. King, the rumor mill decreed, had been washed up. He was a good fighting admiral, but he had three strikes against him: he was combative with his fellow officers, he drank too much, and he was a carrier admiral.3
A descendant of lowland Scots, King hailed from a middle-class family in Lorain, Ohio. He attended the Naval Academy in Annapolis, and when the Spanish-American War broke out during his first cadet year, he finagled a sea assignment. He returned from his first cruise with a tattooed dagger on his right arm, an anchor on his left, and a bellicosity worthy of a bosun’s mate. Gliding over deck and bridge in his tailored Brooks Brothers uniform, he argued with superiors, wielded naval regulations like a boarding cutlass, and accepted nothing short of perfection from his men.4
A voracious reader, King studied the campaigns of Napoleon, Jackson, and Grant as intently as he studied Nelson, Mahan, and Fisher. He penned thoughtful articles on shipboard organization, commanded a high-profile submarine salvage operation, and worked his way up the Navy’s slippery ladder, through destroyers, cruisers, and submarines.
In the 1920s, when other officers looked at naval aviation as if the Wright brothers had suggested putting bicycles on ships, King embraced the air service. He commanded the carrier Lexington for two years and did a stint with the Bureau of Aeronautics at Main Navy, the naval headquarters on Constitution Avenue. In Washington, two blocks from an obscure Army colonel named George Marshall, King learned the inner mysteries of the Navy’s bureaucratic machinery, Congress, and the unpredictable mustang called Washington politics.5
King once told a friend, “You ought to be suspicious of anyone who won’t take a drink or doesn’t like women.” Ernie King was guilty of neither sin, and he earned a reputation as a man who played as hard as he worked. “He was the damnedest party man in the place,” said one officer who saw him splice the main brace at club bars on many a weekend. “Ernie was the first guy there on Saturdays. . . . He joined the club because actually he was a great guy with the ladies and with liquor both.”6
An agile dancer and conversationalist, he could be both solicitous and forward to the fairer sex. At dinner parties attractive women sat next to the “garter snatcher” at their own risk, for King’s hands might spend as much time under the table as above.* His marriage to Mattie Egerton, a once-comely Baltimore socialite, had worn thin after producing six daughters and a son, and King’s affairs in port and abroad were a matter of enthusiastic Navy scuttlebutt.7
King cared nothing for what people thought of him, and early in his career he decided he was not tough enough to be a great admiral. Determined to excise this career flaw, he drove his men with a fervor that would have done credit to Captain Bligh. He bullied colleagues and harangued subordinates. Aboard the carrier Lexington, rumor had it that the admiral’s right hand was more sunburned than his left, the result of shaking his fist at pilots through the open bridge window. “There are two kinds of naval officers,” he once told a friend, “good guys and S.O.B.s, and the quicker you learn to be a S.O.B. the better off you will be!”*8
• • •
When war broke out in Europe in 1939, King’s career had been stranded in the horse latitudes. His last really interesting assignment was Fleet Problem XIX in 1938, a war game in which he launched a surprise carrier attack on Pearl Harbor, to what the umpires said was devastating effect.
Since then, he had been passed over for the Navy’s top job, chief of naval operations, in favor of his old friend Admiral Stark. Some of King’s friends blamed his stalled career on his drinking and petulance, while others saw the backroom hand of the “gun club,” as the battleship admirals were known. Whatever the reason, the General Board, King’s current assignment, was the Navy’s traditional last stop before the glue factory.9
But his fortunes began looking up in the fall of 1940, when Admiral Stark called him into his office to discuss the Patrol Force. It was a small collection of ships, hardly worthy of the term “fleet.” Most of the capital ships—carriers, battlewagons, and cruisers—were assigned to the Pacific and Asiatic squadrons. And the Patrol Force job would not entitle King to a promotion. He had worn the three stars of a vice admiral two years earlier, on a temporary basis, when he com
manded the Aircraft Battle Force. He was back to two stars now, and as commander of the Patrol Force, he would remain a two-star rear admiral.
It didn’t matter, for King was elated. The Patrol Force would get him out to sea, and out of the hell of being washed ashore. By the grace of God and Betty Stark, King was getting a chance to end his career aboard a warship’s bridge. He snapped up the job and shipped out for what he knew would be his last big assignment.10
When his two-star pennant snapped over the ancient battleship Texas in December 1940, King lost no time showing his men who was boss. He told one subordinate, “I don’t care how good they are, unless they get a kick in the ass every six weeks, they’ll slack off.” He whipped his squadron into shape, ordered wartime blackouts and drilled, drilled, drilled them until general quarters was running at a pace that would have made Lord Nelson smile.11
But looking over the hardworking Texans, he decided their appearance was not quite right. King harbored a fetish for naval uniforms, and in his mind he often tinkered with the Navy’s look. Now, as squadron commander, he was in a position to remake his men’s uniforms in his image. He issued a general order prescribing a new uniform for the Patrol Force: a thin white jacket atop heavy blue pants.
Of all the military services, the Navy is the most set in its ways. To the surprise of few besides King, the Texans loathed their new slops. “It’s too hot in the legs, where you want to be cool, and too cool above, where you want to be warm,” complained one intrepid watch officer.
“Well,” said the bemused admiral, “it shows who can prescribe the uniform.”12
Though Ernie King generally didn’t give a damn what his men thought of him, after a few weeks of grumbling he reinstated the old look. But before long his sartorial obsession got the better of him. Concluding that Navy whites stood out against the ship’s gray structures, he decided to camouflage his men by dyeing their uniforms light brown. Every man, King decreed, would have one set of his whites soaked in coffee, which he ordered brewed up in enormous cauldrons under the tearful eyes of the ship’s galley cooks.
“At the first morning quarters after the completion of the task,” recalled one officer, “the Texas crew had uniforms ranging in color from ecru to chocolate brown.” Painfully aware that the Texans would be the laughingstock of the fleet once they reached the next port, King quietly dropped his experiment, and said not a word about it again.13
• • •
A few months into King’s sea command, his code clerks received a signal from the Navy Department that caught the admiral’s eye: The varied and dispersed naval forces of the United States would be consolidated into three separate groups.
The Navy works in mysterious ways, but it was not difficult for King to sniff out what was going on behind closed hatches. The incumbent commander-in-chief, U.S. Fleet, Admiral James Richardson, had butted heads with Roosevelt over the president’s decision to move the bulk of the surface fleet from San Diego to Pearl Harbor. In no mood to hear the admiral’s carping, FDR fired Richardson and reorganized the fleet into three components, each designed to deal with a different problem: the Atlantic Fleet, for defense of the sea-lanes to Britain; the Pacific Fleet, to defend America’s western frontiers; and the Asiatic Fleet, to contain the Japanese in China.14
While King mulled over who his Atlantic Fleet boss might be, he received a letter from Rear Admiral Chester Nimitz, the Navy’s personnel head. King, Nimitz said, was being promoted. What’s more, the president had decided to give him a fourth star as soon as another full admiral sailed into mandatory retirement, probably during the summer of 1941. Nimitz’s letter left no question who would run the Atlantic Fleet; its new commander would be Vice Admiral Ernest King.15
King was thrilled. The job would put him on the front lines of an important war—a war still undeclared, but one where he could make a real difference.
A congratulatory letter from Secretary Knox followed Nimitz’s cable. It was Knox’s wish, he said, “to maintain the closest possible relationship. . . . I am still a great deal of a novice in this Navy business, and I am depending upon you men to help me along in my education.”16
As King saw it, Knox’s letter summed up exactly where the two men fit into the Navy’s picture. And he would never let Knox forget it.
•
Roosevelt had reached a watery crossroads. He put the odds of war at about one in five, yet he had just won an election on the promise of no direct intervention in Europe. He then campaigned for Lend-Lease with the assurance that material aide to England was the best way to keep America out of war. How, he wondered, could he do anything more for Churchill after making such fundamental promises to his own people?17
The “how” emerged through another glacial shift in public opinion. On April 8, a Gallup poll announced that 41 percent of those surveyed favored convoy protection of British merchant ships. That was a good sign, for it suggested a strong and growing minority was following the president’s lead.
But fully half the public opposed shooting at German U-boats, and Roosevelt vividly remembered public support for President Wilson drying up as the death toll mounted in the spring of 1918. The public might be with him now, but that consensus could easily fall apart like pound cake in a thunderstorm once casualty lists brought home war’s human cost.18
In small, mostly unheralded steps, Roosevelt edged away from the crepe paper fiction of neutrality. On April 10, he huddled with Stimson, Hull, Knox, Stark, Morgenthau, and Hopkins to discuss how far into the eastern Atlantic he could send U.S. combat ships. Though he didn’t feel that Congress would permit him to convoy ships to England, perhaps he could find a way around the neutrality laws by extending the Navy’s territory, under the guise of defending the Western Hemisphere.
Calling for an atlas, FDR and his lieutenants pored over a map of the Atlantic. Looking between Africa’s west coast and the pregnant bulge of Brazil, then moving up the map, Roosevelt concluded he could reasonably declare the twenty-sixth meridian to be the new American patrol zone. British ships west of that line would not fall under the Navy’s full protection, but American warships would track any German submarines they found and report their locations to the British, who could steer their convoys clear of danger or send destroyers to sink the offending sea wolves.19
FDR knew the move would rile insolationists almost as much as it would inflame the Germans. Sniffing political fallout in the air, he told Knox and Stark there would be no public announcement about the new patrol zone. The Navy’s actions, he said, would speak for themselves.*20
Not everyone on his team was comfortable with this characteristically Rooseveltian approach. As Henry Stimson saw it, the president was steering the country toward war without a fixed end in mind, weaving a giant tapestry with only the foggiest idea of what the image would look like. If Roosevelt wanted war with Germany—which Stimson fully supported—then as president, he should rally the public, announce his intentions openly, and ask Congress for a declaration. If not, he should stop provoking Hitler and risking full-scale war over an incident at sea. Stimson confided to his diary, “I am worried because the President shows evidence of waiting for the accidental shot of some irresponsible captain on either side to be the occasion for his going to war.” 21
Thinking as a former secretary of state, Stimson believed it was all the more important for Roosevelt to have a coherent foreign policy in the Atlantic because clouds were darkening over the Pacific. By 1941, Japan boasted the third-largest navy in the world, the world’s largest carrier fleet, and fifty-one infantry and light armor divisions. In China, its rampaging army had driven back Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces, and fresh divisions began sweeping down the China coast toward French Indochina. “The Japs are getting up steam,” a worried Stimson wrote. “Every message that we get from every direction indicates that they are gaining momentum and determination to go ahead.” 22
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sp; • • •
On April 24, Roosevelt summoned Stimson, Knox, Hull, and Hopkins to the Oval Office for a conference on the Pacific. Stimson, concerned about a shortage of ships in the Atlantic, begged him to transfer the big battleships from Pearl Harbor to the East Coast. The move would not affect the Pacific force, he said, because General Marshall had looked into Hawaii and “felt that Hawaii was impregnable whether there were any ships left there or not; that the land defense was simply sufficient, together with the air defense, to keep off the Japanese.”
Knox agreed with Stimson. Hawaii was impervious to attack, so most of the Pacific Fleet could safely move over to the Atlantic.23
Roosevelt disagreed. The fleet at Pearl Harbor protected the entire southwestern Pacific, not just Hawaii, he said. The Navy might have to defend Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, or the Dutch East Indies. Besides, moving battleships to the Atlantic would not affect the U-boat menace, since the Navy was not presently fighting German subs. The Navy’s job was peaceful. Its orders were simply to locate the aggressors and report back to Washington. As he had told the press, the Navy was on a fact-finding mission, more or less.24
As he listened, Stimson grew tired of Roosevelt’s double-talk, of his pretense that the U.S. could support Britain without giving the fascists cause for war. The United States was acting as the eyes and ears of the Royal Navy, which was hunting U-boats, and that meant the U.S. Navy was hunting U-boats. America was in an undeclared war in the Atlantic.
To Stimson, Roosevelt’s contorted logic seemed better suited to bargaining with precinct bosses than homicidal dictators. “I wanted him to be honest with himself,” he wrote after one meeting. “To me it seems a clearly hostile act to the Germans, and I am prepared to take the responsibility of it. He seems to be trying to hide it into the character of a purely reconnaissance action which really it is not. However, as he fully realizes that he will probably get into a clash with the Germans by what he does, it doesn’t make much difference what he calls it.” 25
American Warlords Page 10
