During his tenure as Atlantic Fleet commander, King had left an excellent impression on Knox and Roosevelt. Like Admiral Stark, King had known Roosevelt when “young Frank” was assistant navy secretary. King’s fleet had done an admirable job in the Atlantic under the circumstances, and his arrangements during Augusta’s rendezvous with Churchill had been flawless.
Navy politics being what they were, King was cagey when Knox approached him about the CINCUS job. He made the obligatory denial of the crown—protesting halfheartedly that the decision should come from the chief of naval operations—and accepted the offer only after Knox told him that the matter had been settled by the president.8
Even for a jaded old salt of sixty-three, it was a heady revelation. Commander-in-chief, U.S. Fleet, put him at the pinnacle of the Navy’s combat operations. He would be second only to the chief of naval operations in seniority. In some ways, CINCUS was even better than the CNO spot, since CNO was a planning position and CINCUS was a fighting man’s job.
Getting down to brass tacks, King told Knox he would need some changes to make the arrangement work. First, the traditional headquarters of CINCUS—with one of the three main fleets—had to go. With a two-ocean war, he said, it made no sense to post himself far from the place where big decisions would be made. His headquarters should be at Main Navy in Washington, near the president.
Of course, said Knox. What else?
Next was his relationship to Admiral Stark. As CNO, Stark’s job was to prepare war plans, provide strategic direction, and advise the president. CINCUS merely put the plans into action. But the line between strategic planning and war operations was a thin one, so Ernie King wanted something in writing that would divide the waters between himself and Betty. And that something needed the president’s signature.
Knox assured King they would work something out. The last thing he and Roosevelt wanted was their top admirals tripping over each other.9
Third, King didn’t like the acronym for his job. “CINCUS” sounded too much like an invitation to “Sink Us,” which was no joking matter after Pearl Harbor. The new acronym for the fleet commander-in-chief would be “COMINCH.”10
There was another duty King wouldn’t take. He loathed the press and believed nothing good could come of talking to the papers. For years he had snubbed reporters and had turned down an offer for a press relations officer. Now that newsmen would be on his doorstep, sometimes literally, he wanted nothing to do with them.
Knox agreed to take most of this load off King’s shoulders, though he said King would have to make important announcements to the press from time to time.11
King also wanted dispensation from testimony before Congress, except in the most crucial matters, like budgets. King understood his own limitations as a speaker, which were accentuated whenever he spoke alongside the Army’s top general. “Marshall would sound off without any notes, and speak very well indeed,” King later remarked. “I had trouble that way. . . . I had to use damned notes, and have things written up first, and read them. My education was defective. I can sound off all right and sometimes to the point, but it is a great help if you have been trained as a speaker.”12
Knox agreed. King had testified a few times previously, and had been a poor witness. He was impatient with congressmen and too forthright for his own good. His voice was gravelly and halting, he stared down at prepared notes, and he looked uncomfortable when speaking. “I have come to the conclusion that good witnesses on the Hill are probably born,” wrote one of King’s congressional liaisons. “Admiral King was not born to be a good one.”13
Finally, King requested authority over the Navy Department’s technical bureaus—Navigation, Shipbuilding, Ordnance, and the like. The Navy needed one man who could coordinate strategy with production, he insisted. It was no good to plan a war when someone else controlled the supply of men and weapons.
Knox thought about it, and took that question to the Boss.
The Boss balked. The naval bureaus had been independent of sea operations for more than a hundred years. They were powers unto themselves when Roosevelt was assistant secretary a generation before, and it would take an act of Congress to change the Navy Department’s basic architecture.14
Moreover, bureau chiefs were the men who petitioned Congress for money. FDR, who habitually diluted all authority except his own, didn’t want any single admiral, including his new COMINCH, given that much power.
So Roosevelt refused King’s request. But he promised King that any bureau chief who didn’t cooperate with him would be fired. That, he said, should give King all the power he needed.15
King agreed, and on December 18 Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8984, which placed King in command of all American naval operations. With a typically Rooseveltian touch, it also expanded King’s new powers by making COMINCH directly responsible to the president, throwing a wrench into King’s relationship with Secretary Knox. The order then trimmed Admiral Stark’s sails by providing that while the CNO would develop long-range war plans, short-range planning belonged to King.16
Once King saw the president’s signature on Order 8984, he made one last move to complete his conquest. He told his aide to draft a polite note to his old friend Betty Stark. The note read, “I would appreciate your preparing a memorandum stating what functions and responsibilities the CNO should turn over to COMINCH.”17
• • •
Main Navy, said one staffer, looked like an “anthill with the top kicked off.” Admiral King spent the first four days of his new job kicking over anthills from a musty, unswept government office on the building’s third deck.*18
If Marshall was the prototypical clean-desk man, Admiral King was the tornado-desk man. “His desk was something of a rat’s nest,” remembered his flag secretary. “He was a miserable housekeeper . . . the papers were six inches deep on his desk. His incoming basket was always overflowing.”19
Like all senior commanders, King functioned through his staff, the men he depended on to make big recommendations, refine sweeping concepts, and draft orders that moved thousands of men across the globe. He often reminded his staffers, “If I make a mistake, it is likely to be a big one; don’t let me make it if you can put me right.”20
To avoid those big mistakes, King surrounded himself with a small core group of devoted, hardworking officers and drove them relentlessly, at the cost of a few heart attacks and one suicide. He replaced nine-to-five civilian typists with enlisted men, and rotated officers between staff and sea duty, so Main Navy wouldn’t catch a debilitating case of the “Washington mentality.”21
A special peeve of King’s was paperwork, which he fought like it was Yamamoto’s flagship. He ordered his staff to reduce anything addressed to him to a single typewritten page. “He didn’t want any two-page memoranda,” recalled one of his men. “If you sent him a memorandum that didn’t have your signature at the bottom of the page, he’d throw it in the wastebasket, and you’d wonder where it was.”22
King’s replies were often sent on two-by-three-inch yellow paper slips, penned in his precise, heavy script and peppered with the quotation marks, underlines, and excessive punctuation that marked his writing style. He would return a memorandum with “OK K” if it was excellent, “No K” if not. If it were particularly bad, he might write, “?!?!?!—K.” He would never provide an explanation. It was the job of King’s bewildered officers to figure out why the boss didn’t like it. The admiral wasn’t a man to waste time or words on explanations to underlings.23
Apart from the few staffers whose careers he intended to advance, King remained aloof from his colleagues. He held no regular staff conferences, and allowed unlimited access only to his chief of staff, Rear Admiral Russell Willson; his hard-boiled chief planner, Captain Charles “Savvy” Cooke Jr.; and his deputy, Rear Admiral Richard Edwards.24
He had a tongue like a bosun’s lash. He made no small talk, conf
ided in no one, and never mentioned his family or personal life. He had no social interests to speak of—at least, none he let on to those around him—and no interest in becoming friends with his brother officers. “He was the true lone wolf, and didn’t give a damn whether anyone liked his attitude or not,” recalled his intelligence chief. Another said, “He possessed little warmth or charisma, but captured one’s loyalty and zeal with his own superior conduct and performance. He was just plain cold armor-plated steel.”25
King’s reputation permeated the chart room, the service’s Holy of Holies. King’s intelligence head recalled, “Within a few minutes of Admiral King’s entrance into the room, everyone seemed to have evaporated into thin air; disappeared, flag officers as well as captains and the few commanders who were authorized. No one seemed to want to be where King was.”26
• • •
Though his permanent office was on Main Navy’s third deck, King knew he would be traveling to the West Coast, the Caribbean, and Hawaii, as well as around Washington. For that reason, he demanded three perquisites: a car, an airplane, and a flagship.27
The car and plane were easy. A vice president of the A&P Company loaned King his Cadillac for the war’s duration, and for his personal aircraft, King yanked a beautifully appointed Lockheed Lodestar from the hapless chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics.28
The flagship was more difficult, since ships were expensive to maintain, and of questionable value to an admiral who rode a Cadillac to an office on Constitution Avenue. Initially, King appropriated the converted yacht Vixen from the commander of the Atlantic submarine fleet. But the yacht had been manufactured at the Krupp shipyard in Kiel, Germany—a pedigree the newspapers noticed—and King eventually decided he needed a more suitable, American vessel.29
A number of luxury yachts had been loaned by wealthy families to the Navy for war service. William Vanderbilt’s beautiful yacht Alva, for instance, sailed into service as USS Plymouth, and Secretary Knox occasionally berthed aboard the former presidential yacht Sequoia.
From a stable of Thoroughbreds King chose Delphine, a 1,200-ton, 257-foot showpiece built for Detroit’s Dodge family. King had Delphine repainted in wartime camouflage and fitted with an antiaircraft gun on her forecastle. After reviewing a list of imposing names drawn up by his staff, he had his yacht rechristened USS Dauntless.
Moored in the Anacostia River alongside the Naval Gun Factory, Dauntless served the nation valiantly as King’s houseboat. The admiral would awaken every morning at 0700 for exercises and a shower, then take breakfast and read the newspaper—usually turning to the comic page first, his eyes zeroing in on his favorite strip, Blondie.
Breakfast concluded, he would proceed to the aft deck and stand at attention as the ship’s colors were hoisted. A quick walk down the gangplank would take him to his waiting Cadillac, whose Marine Corps driver would let him off at the Mall near Main Navy. He would arrive at his office between 0831 and 0833 to begin his workday.
King’s office routine rarely varied. Like Marshall, he would begin by reviewing the overnight dispatches before moving to antisubmarine, administrative, and logistics reports. At 0930, he would walk to Secretary Knox’s office for his morning conference, and a half hour later he would be back at his desk, reviewing selections of the 35,000 pieces of monthly mail sifted through a funnel of staffers, secretaries, assistants, and deputies. Visitors were kept at bay until noon, and promptly at 1245 King would stop for lunch at a small mess room near his office, then return to work.
Despite his prewar reputation as a hard drinker, King’s evenings were quiet. He would return to the pier in his car, salute the colors as they were retired for the night, then go below for dinner with the ship’s duty officer. He swore off hard liquor—mostly—for the duration of the war, and he was rarely seen with anything stronger than the occasional glass of sherry or a beer. At night he relaxed by listening to Edgar Bergen–Charlie McCarthy routines on the radio, watching Spencer Tracy films and devouring Western novels by Zane Grey and Ernest Haycox.
King’s weekends were usually spent working, though occasionally he would spend them at the homes of Navy friends near Washington—and sometimes at the homes of wives whose husbands were away on naval duty. One or more Sundays each month, he would ride to the Naval Observatory, his official residence, and spend the afternoon with his wife, Mattie, and any of their six daughters who happened to be in town.
Otherwise, he rarely saw his wife, his daughters, or his son, a midshipman studying at Annapolis. Once, when King’s communications officer and wife paid a social call on Mattie King, Mattie politely inquired after her husband’s health.30
FOURTEEN
“DO YOUR BEST TO SAVE THEM”
UNDER AGREED ALLIED STRATEGY, GERMANY WAS AMERICA’S MAIN ENEMY. But Japan was hardly a footnote. Hours after the Pearl Harbor attack, a Japanese air strike caught and destroyed more than half of MacArthur’s heavy bombers on the ground.* Five days later, 3,000 soldiers of Japan’s 16th Division swarmed ashore on Luzon, the largest of the Philippine Islands, and just before Christmas, General Masaharu Homma’s Fourteenth Army landed 48,000 superbly trained soldiers at Lingayen Gulf, on the island’s west side. MacArthur’s outnumbered force was corralled onto the tiny Bataan Peninsula and Manila Bay’s gateway island of Corregidor.1
With each passing week, the picture grew darker. Japanese infantry poured down the Malay Peninsula toward Singapore, scooping up the remaining French possessions and threatening the resource-rich Dutch East Indies. They captured Guam, and laid siege to Wake Island and Hong Kong.
• • •
For Stimson and Marshall, the first order of business was reinforcing MacArthur. Five days after Pearl Harbor, Marshall summoned MacArthur’s former chief of staff, Brigadier General Dwight Eisenhower, a man who knew the islands well. Marshall moved Eisenhower into the second spot in the War Plans Division and ordered him to find reinforcements for Luzon’s garrison. “Do your best to save them,” he commanded.2
Japan’s silk noose tightened around the Pacific, and Marshall knew that without control of the seas, little could be done. Stateside soldiers couldn’t swim across the ocean, and the Navy lacked the surface ships to protect slow, vulnerable troop transports from Japanese cruisers, subs, and bombers.
Desperate to succor the garrison, Marshall even sent cash to Australia to bribe any blockade-runners willing to make the Australia-to-Manila run with food and ammunition. But he found few takers at any price. As Marshall’s agent in Australia admitted, “We were out-shipped, out-planned, out-manned, and out-gunned by the Japanese from the beginning.”3
From Corregidor’s Malinta Tunnel, an out-manned, out-gunned MacArthur sent a steady stream of radio messages pleading for troops, planes, and naval support. He played every card in his deep rhetorical deck: he reminded Washington of its moral obligation to protect its dependents, he badgered Marshall to show his written pleas for help to the president, and he railed against War Department plans to build a base in Australia at the expense of the Philippines.4
MacArthur’s demands taxed the patience of War Department staffers, who lacked enough of anything to go around. “Looks like MacArthur is losing his nerve,” an overworked Eisenhower grumbled to his diary. “I’m hoping that his yelps are just his way of spurring us on, but he is always an uncertain factor.” Frustrated at being stuck in Washington while war raged in the Pacific, Ike complained, “In many ways MacArthur is as big a baby as ever. But we’ve just got to keep him fighting.” 5
On the surface, Marshall and MacArthur kept a respectful relationship, though it was also distant and cold. Marshall had been a protégé of General Pershing, who had denied MacArthur’s application for a Medal of Honor during the last war. The slighted MacArthur had long despised the “Chaumont crowd,” as he called Pershing’s clique, and when he was chief of staff in the early 1930s, MacArthur paid back “Pershing’s man” by refusing to change orde
rs assigning Colonel George C. Marshall to a teaching post with the Illinois National Guard, a career-killing backwater. Marshall did not earn his first star until after MacArthur left Washington for Manila.6
Marshall did not hold the past against MacArthur, though, and he did his best for the Philippines’ defenders. When MacArthur complained that Admiral Thomas Hart, the Asiatic Fleet commander, refused to spare any submarines to ferry antiaircraft ammunition to Corregidor, Marshall sent Eisenhower to Admiral King’s office with a message asking King to press Hart to relieve MacArthur’s ammunition shortage. King curtly replied, “You may tell General Marshall that if any more drastic action is necessary than is represented in my usual method of issuing orders, such action will be taken.”
The remark was typical King gruffness, and Eisenhower left Main Navy red-faced and fuming. But after Eisenhower left, King gave Hart a hard shove, and two days later he notified Marshall that two submarines laden with antiaircraft ammunition were departing for Luzon.7
The submarine shuttle was a tiny drop in a badly leaking bucket. Marshall gave MacArthur a consolation gift—a promotion to four-star general—but that was all he could do. Before that dismal December ended, MacArthur declared Manila an open city. His men, haggard and half-starved, settled into their last positions, on Bataan and Corregidor, and awaited whatever aid their country might send them.8
To those stranded men it would be a long wait, for an unexpected visitor to Washington was about to direct everyone’s attention away from Douglas MacArthur and the Philippine Islands.
American Warlords Page 15
