King spent the next seven summers at the naval hospital in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He slipped his moorings and sailed over the bar on June 25, 1956, at the age of seventy-eight. He was buried at Annapolis, home of the United States Naval Academy.14
The only hymn sung at his funeral was a Navy anthem, an old favorite of Franklin Roosevelt’s: “Eternal Father, Strong to Save.”
A rare moment of levity for Admiral Ernest J. King.
WAR’S FIRST DAY. General George Marshall is sworn in as U.S. Army Chief of Staff on September 1, 1939—the day Hitler launched his war in Europe.
Churchill and FDR meet to discuss the Nazi threat aboard Admiral King’s flagship, USS Augusta, in August 1941. To steady himself, FDR leans on the arm of his son Elliott.
FDR’S CABINET. Roosevelt (rear center) with his cabinet in the fall of 1941.
THE FIRST CHIEFS. General Marshall, Admiral Harold Stark, Admiral King, and Major General Henry “Hap” Arnold formed the first Joint Chiefs of Staff.
THE DOOR THAT NEVER CLOSED. Stimson and Marshall worked in adjoining offices at the Pentagon, where they could consult freely with each other. Throughout the war, they were an effective, harmonious team.
As an approving Navy Secretary Frank Knox looks on, Admiral King takes the oath of office of U.S. Navy Chief of Naval Operations.
BROTHERS IN ARMS. FDR and Churchill talk after church services aboard the battleship Prince of Wales in August 1941. An emotion-charged FDR told his son, “If nothing else had happened while we were here, that would have cemented us.” Next to Churchill are General Marshall and his new friend, Britain’s General Sir John Dill.
UNEASY PARTNERS. Admiral King tolerated Navy Secretary Knox—so long as he kept out of King’s naval war plans.
GLOBAL STRATEGIST. FDR looks at a globe made for him by General Marshall.
THE CHAIRMAN. Admiral William D. Leahy (center) served as chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs. His official title was “Chief of Staff to the Commander-in-Chief.”
THE CHIEFS AT WAR. King, Marshall, and Arnold after a White House meeting with FDR in 1942.
Paratroopers in England train for combat in October 1942. Marshall was instrumental in the development of the Army’s airborne divisions.
AMERICAN WARLORDS. Marshall, FDR, and King at Casablanca, January 1943. Standing behind them are Harry Hopkins, General Arnold, Lieutenant General Brehon Somervell, and Lend-Lease coordinator W. Averell Harriman.
THE COUSINS. Air Chief Marshall Charles Portal, Fleet Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, and General Alan Brooke meet with Churchill aboard the liner Queen Mary in May 1943 to map out strategy before meeting with the Americans.
Marshall confers with Churchill and an unhappy-looking General Bernard Montgomery in May 1943.
PROTÉGÉ AND PATRON. Generals Eisenhower and Marshall in a light moment before a press conference in Algiers, May 1943.
Marshall gives a speech at West Point, 1942.
THE ARSENAL OF DEMOCRACY. Ford Motor Company’s Willow Run plant turns out waves of B-17 Liberator bombers. Roosevelt’s production goal of fifty thousand planes per year was ridiculed by Axis leaders when he announced it in 1940. They didn’t laugh long.
MAIN NAVY. King and Knox attend a press conference in Knox’s office. King hated talking to the press—but learned to use journalists to influence decisions.
Chinese Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, FDR and Churchill meet with their military staffs in Cairo in November 1943.
THE BIG THREE. Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill pose for history at Tehran, December 1943.
An M-4 tank halts in Kasserine Pass, February 1943.
INTO THE MED. U.S. soldiers lie crammed into a troopship hold on their way to Africa. The American warlords fought bitterly to limit the Allied commitment in the Mediterranean, a “British” theater.
COMING HOME. A tired FDR catches up on paperwork during his return trip from Casablanca in January 1943. His “unconditional surrender” demand, announced at the end of the Casablanca conference, gave his military advisers fits.
NEW HEROES. Fighter pilots of the all-black Tuskegee Airmen (332nd Fighter Group) discuss German tactics over Italy in early 1944. Roosevelt, Stimson, Marshall, Knox and Eleanor Roosevelt struggled over the role non-white servicemen would play on the front lines.
Troops of the 34th Infantry Division advance in Tunisia.
U.S. Marines scramble over the wreckage of Tarawa in 1943.
OVERLORD IN ACTION. Riding over Omaha Beach, Eisenhower and King discuss the progress of the Normandy landings.
BIG PRIZE. Admiral King, Major General Holland Smith (with carbine) and Admiral Nimitz tour Saipan, a vital step in King’s plan to take back the Pacific.
THE PATH TO VICTORY. In July 1944, MacArthur, FDR, and Leahy listen as Admiral Nimitz advocates the “King Plan” for the conquest of Japan.
A NATION TURNED UPSIDE DOWN. A Frenchwoman passes a German antitank gun abandoned in the wreckage of her town.
DEATH’S DOOR. Photographs of FDR accepting the 1944 Democratic nomination showed him looking gaunt, tired, and old, in stark contrast to his energetic looks of 1940.
An enemy goes down during the Battle of the Philippine Sea.
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt dines with American troops in South America. Eleanor traveled widely in her unofficial role as FDR’s emissary and U.S. goodwill ambassador.
Stimson and Marshall discuss the military picture in Asia and the Pacific.
One of FDR’s closest advisers was Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., an old friend from Hyde Park.
VISITING THE FRONT. Marshall confers in France in October 1944 with Major General Walton Walker and Patton.
WAR CHIEFS AT SEA. King, Leahy, Roosevelt, Marshall, and Major General Laurence Kuter confer aboard the cruiser USS Quincy on the journey to Yalta to meet with Churchill and Stalin.
Henry Stimson and his aide, Colonel William Kyle.
A LION IN WINTER. FDR sits with (clockwise) Churchill, Anna Roosevelt Boettiger, and Sarah Churchill Oliver aboard the cruiser USS Quincy in Malta Harbor, January 1945.
LORDS OF THE OCEAN. Admirals King and Nimitz flank Navy Secretary James Forrestal in late 1945. “I hated his guts,” King said of his Navy Department boss.
DEATH FROM ABOVE. A mushroom plume rises over Nagasaki, Japan. Nagasaki was bombed because Stimson couldn’t bear to destroy the cultural sites of Kyoto.
WELCOME TO THE ATOMIC AGE. Stimson guided the development of the atomic bomb from its early stages through its use to destroy Nagasaki. Here technicians give the “Fat Man” plutonium bomb its final paint job.
Patton, Stimson (with hat), and Assistant War Secretary John J. McCloy salute the American flag in Germany, 1945.
VICTORY! A beaming Harry Truman points to the signature of Emperor Hirohito on the instrument of surrender, as Henry Stimson and General George Marshall look on.
“THESE PROCEEDINGS ARE CLOSED.” General MacArthur watches as Japanese emissaries sign the instrument of surrender.
Allied war prisoners liberated from Aomori Prison, August 1945.
SELECTED ALLIED CODE NAMES
Unlike modern military operations, whose names are chosen for their public relations value, operations in World War II were christened on the governing principle that the name should give no hint of the objective. To this, Winston Churchill added a second requirement: operations should not be given boastful or frivolous monikers. As he told Pug Ismay, “Intelligent thought will already supply an unlimited number of well-sounding names that do not suggest the character of the operation or disparage it in any way and do not enable some widow or mother to say that her son was killed in an operation called ‘BUNNYHUG’ or ‘BALLYHOO.’”
There were exceptions, for men did lose their lives in Operations TOENAILS (New Georgia) and SLAPSTICK (Taranto).
ANAKIM
Allied invasion of Burma near Rangoon
(never attempted)
ANVIL Allied invasion of southern France (later DRAGOON), August 1944
ARCADIA Allied conference, Washington,
December 1941–January 1942
ARGONAUT Allied-Soviet conferences, Malta-Yalta,
January–February 1945
AVALANCHE Allied landings at Salerno, Italy, September 1943
BAYTOWN Allied landings at Calabria, Italy,
September 1943
BOLERO Allied force buildup in U.K., 1942–1944
BUCCANEER Allied attack on Burma’s Andaman Islands
(never attempted)
CARTWHEEL U.S. drive against Rabaul, in New Britain
(formerly ELKTON)
COBRA U.S. attack to break out of Normandy, July 1944
CORONET MacArthur’s plan to invade Honshu, Japan
(never attempted)
DEXTERITY MacArthur’s landing on New Britain,
December 1943
DRAGOON Allied invasion of southern France,
August 1944 (formerly ANVIL)
ELKTON MacArthur’s Rabaul campaign (never attempted)
EUREKA Allied-Soviet conference, Tehran,
November–December 1943
FORAGER U.S. Marine-Army invasion of the Mariana Islands,
June 1944
GRANITE Nimitz’s campaign plan for the Central Pacific, 1944
HUSKY Allied invasion of Sicily, July 1943
JUPITER Churchill’s plan to invade Norway (never attempted)
MAGIC Decryption of Japanese diplomatic messages
MATTERHORN Strategic bombing of Japan,
June 1944–August 1945
NEPTUNE Allied landings in Normandy, France,
June 1944 (part of OVERLORD)
OCTAGON Allied conference, Quebec, September 1944
OLYMPIC MacArthur’s plan to assault Kyushu, Japan
(never attempted)
OVERLORD Allied invasion of France, June 1944
POINTBLANK U.S.-British bomber offensive against Germany,
1943–1944
QUADRANT Allied conference, Quebec, August 1943
RAINBOW U.S. prewar strategic plans
RECKLESS MacArthur’s landing at Hollandia, New Guinea,
April 1944
RENO MacArthur’s campaign for the Southwest Pacific,
1944–1945
ROUNDUP Allied cross-Channel invasion (later OVERLORD)
SEXTANT Allied conference, Cairo, November–December 1943
SHINGLE Allied landing near Anzio, Italy, January 1944
SLEDGEHAMMER Allied contingency plan to invade France, 1942
(never attempted)
SYMBOL Allied conference, Casablanca, January 1943
TERMINAL Allied-Soviet conference, Potsdam, July–August 1945
TORCH Allied invasion of French North Africa,
November 1942
TRIDENT Allied conference, Washington, May 1943
ULTRA U.S. decryption of encoded foreign messages
WATCHTOWER U.S. assault against Tulagi and Guadalcanal,
August 1942
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted to a diverse battalion of technical experts, archivists, historians, writers, editors, and war veterans who have done their level best to keep me on a steady course as this book crawled from concept to jumble of granular facts to completed story. I owe a great deal to the editorial geniuses of Hal Elrod, Allegra Jordan (The End of Innocence), and Penguin’s Brent Howard, as well as the incisive Richard Story, Jim Hornfischer (Neptune’s Inferno), Kirk Patterson, Sally Jordan, Andy Hill, Warren Kimball (The Juggler), the Churchill Centre’s Richard Langworth, Kate Jordan, and Jennifer Elrod, all of whom provided critiques, questions, insight, or encouragement. I am also grateful to Paul Barron and Jeffrey Kozak of the George C. Marshall Research Library; and to the staffs of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, the Naval War College, the Library of Congress, the Navy Historical Foundation, the Eisenhower Library, the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, the U.S. Army Military History Institute, and Murray State University’s Forrest C. Pogue Library. I must also express my appreciation to the legion of history bloggers and forum participants from armchairgeneral.com and other sites who have sparred over, critiqued, or dealt death blows to many hypotheses that went into or were left out of this book.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
PRIMARY SOURCES
Archival Materials
Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts
John J. McCloy Diary
Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, Kansas
Ruth Briggs
Harold Bull
Gilbert Cook
Norman Cota
Dwight D. Eisenhower (Pre-Presidential Papers)
Dwight D. Eisenhower (Presidential Papers)
Dwight D. Eisenhower (Post-Presidential Papers)
Alfred Gruenther
Floyd Parks
Walter Bedell Smith (Personal Papers)
Barbara Wyden
Forrest C. Pogue Library, Murray State University, Murray, Kentucky
Forrest Pogue
Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York
Atomic Bomb File
Adolf Berle
Wilson Brown
Howard Bruenn
James Byrnes
Albert Wayne Coy
George M. Elsey
Federal Bureau of Investigation
George Fox
Franklin Delano Roosevelt Foundation
Anna Roosevelt Halsted
Herbert Hoover
Harry Hopkins
Anthony Johnstone
Pare Lorentz
Map Room Files
John McCrea
A. J. McGehee
Ross McIntire
William McReynolds
Lowell Mellett
Henry Morgenthau Jr.
Robert Ogg
Charles Palmer
Fabienne Pellerin
William Rigdon
Elliott Roosevelt
FDR—Official File
FDR—President’s Personal File
FDR—President’s Secretary File
James Roosevelt
Fred Schneider
Elizabeth Shoumatoff
Lela Mae Stiles
Grace Tully
Sumner Welles
George C. Marshall Foundation Library, Lexington, Virginia
Harvey A. DeWeerd
George Elsey
Thomas Handy
George C. Marshall
Frank McCarthy
Reminiscences File
Paul Robinett
William Sexton
Reginald Winn
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Frank Maxwell Andrews
Henry Arnold
Felix Frankfurter
William Halsey
Everett Hughes
Harold Ickes
Ernest King
Frank Knox
William Leahy
Robert Patterson
George Patton
Carl Spaatz
National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland
U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania
Clay and Joan Blair
Omar Bradley
Robert Coffin
Hobart Gay
Chester Hansen
Courtney Hodges
John Lucas
Office of the Center of Military History
U.S. Naval War College Library, Newport,
Rhode Island
Ernest King
Yale University Library, New Haven, Connecticut
Henry Stimson Diaries
Henry Stimson Papers
Oral Histories and Interviews
Adams, Claude (GCML)
Arnold, Eleanor (PL)
Baruch, Bernard (PL)
Bolte, Charles (PL)
Bonesteel, Charles (PL)
Bradley, Omar (PL)
Brady, Dorothy (FDRL)
Brooke, Alan (PL)
Bryden, William (GCML)
Buchanan, Kenneth (GCML)
Bull, Harold (PL)
Bundy, Harvey (PL)
Byrnes, James (PL)
Carter, Marshall (PL)
Christiansen, James (GCML)
Clark, Mark (PL)
Clay, Lucius (PL)
Collins, Joseph (PL)
Coningham, Arthur (PL)
Cooke, Charles (PL)
Cunningham, Andrew (PL)
American Warlords Page 59
