Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century

by Robert A. Heinlein

  They would be launching two hours before dawn—and Heinlein had no experience at all in nighttime operations.

  But orders were orders.

  Two hours before dawn, King turned on every floodlight on the flight deck, and kept them on until the last plane was in the air, directly defying Admiral Yarnell’s orders from Saratoga—and destroying any chance he might have had for promotion to admiral.20

  Legal orders are orders and must be obeyed—except when they must not be obeyed. That was the thorniest problem of the theory of command, one they worried over in bull sessions and class sessions at the Academy. But it could not be reduced to principles; it had to be tested in the contingency of battle. “I was proud of the Old Man that night, he showed his bravery and his basic humanity … by taking his finger off his number for his men—with his flag almost in sight.”21 Brandley and Heinlein’s T4M went up in a combined launch of 152 planes from the Saratoga and the Lexington. An hour later, the planes came out of the storm front over the Koolau Range and into clear air over Pearl Harbor, where they “strafed” lines of planes parked on runways. The dive-bombers dumped twenty tons of theoretical explosives on airfields, ships in the anchorage, the Army headquarters at Fort Shafter, Schofield Barracks, and Hickam Field. It was a complete surprise: not a single fighter plane was launched from Pearl that morning. The aircraft squadron got back to their carriers almost without incident. It was twenty-four hours before the Black group even located them. They got Yarnell’s flag a few days later when Saratoga was “bombed” from the air and ruled damaged by the Referee, Admiral Schofield.

  At the postmortem critique conducted on the Grand Joint Exercise No. 4, on February 18, 1932, Admiral Yarnell argued that the successful attack on Pearl Harbor meant the Navy should reevaluate American naval tactics—but he was voted down by the majority of battleship admirals. The final report’s conclusion was exactly the reverse of the actual experience :

  [I]t is doubtful if air attacks can be launched against Oahu in the face of strong defensive aviation without subjecting the attacking carriers to the danger of material damage and consequent great losses in the attack air force.22

  If the lesson was lost on the U.S. Navy, Japanese observers filed a thorough report of the attack. This report would form the basis for the 1936 recommendation for surprise attack against Pearl Harbor made in the Japan Navy War College’s “Study of Strategy and Tactics in Operations Against the United States.”23

  While in transit from Lahaina, all the Class of ’29 ensigns received word that they would at last, in April, be given their examinations for promotion to lieutenant. Heinlein’s physical examination was scheduled in two weeks. Captain King told him to prepare a book of extracts from confidential Navy circulars to make a study guide in Strategy and Tactics.

  They returned to Long Beach, where they found waiting for them orders from the Department of the Navy to cooperate with Fox Movietone News, who wanted fifteen minutes of film of the crew of the Lexington at their morning exercises. Fox didn’t tell King it would probably take two days to get that much usable film.

  Normal ship’s routine called for fifteen minutes of exercise in the morning. That would do. Heinlein was on top of the No. 2 turret helping the chief cameraman—he caught the sound camera in his arms once when a sudden roll pitched it off its tripod. They had gotten perhaps three minutes of usable film when Captain King appeared on deck and told the new Executive Officer, Herbster, to stop this “civilian nonsense” and put the men back to work. It was not surprising that the men dispersed, but the location company left without grumbling. Heinlein concluded that anyone recognizes the “voice of command” when he hears it.24

  Leslyn and her best friend, Elcy Arnold, put together a very extravagant wedding—on no budget at all: Elcy loaned Leslyn the sumptuous gown and veil her mother had made for Elcy’s own wedding—a white, floor-length, formal gown trimmed with lace, with long, close sleeves that emphasized her slim arms.

  Elcy’s mother was a caterer, and the cake was her wedding gift to Leslyn—“a 4-tier dream of confection and sentiment.”25 Elcy even corralled her youngest brother into helping out, sending him downtown to the Los Angeles Flower Mart early one morning to get a washtub full of daffodils, which she and Leslyn made into bouquets for the six bridesmaids and matrons, all friends from UCLA, including Elcy, Brita Bowen, and Mrs. Herbert Hayland. Leslyn’s cousin Marion Beard was her matron of honor—a very fitting turnabout; Leslyn had helped engineer Marion’s marriage, against their parents’ wishes, to Chester Beard in 1922, when he was finishing up his chemical engineering degree at the University of Southern California (the MacDonalds had taken Marion in when her father died in 1910 or 1911, and her mother was not able to support her, so the girls had grown up together).26 The day before the wedding, Elcy surprised Leslyn with two dozen Talisman roses, a gorgeously romantic sunset pink, for her bride’s bouquet—a traditional choice of flowers for very formal weddings.27

  Heinlein turned out the next morning in his most formal uniform, gold-braided Navy frock coat with cocked hat and saber. He had grown a neat Van Dyke beard—except that it was his first beard and had not come in evenly. It had “holidays” in it, areas where the hair had not grown as thick as the rest of the beard. He was accompanied by his closest friends from Lexington, also in frock coats and cocked hats. They formed an aisle under an arch of raised sabers for the couple. Dick Downer, an aviator from Davenport, Iowa, who had graduated from the Academy with Ivar, signed the marriage certificate as witness. Robert N. S. Clark, who had become one of Heinlein’s best friends, was best man.28 In the small group snapshot of the wedding party Heinlein put in his scrapbook, a short man in formal Naval uniform stands on his right. This may have been Cal Laning, about to be detached from Oklahoma. In later years, even with Laning’s personal tendency to dramatize himself, all that was left was the periodic lament: “Robert stole my girl”29 with a varying spice of irony, depending on how he felt at the time.

  The honeymoon had to be short: Lexington was due in April for its annual overhaul in Bremerton, so Heinlein could get only six days of leave—and he had to take the medical part of his examination for promotion the day after the wedding. It was to be a working honeymoon, too.

  Heinlein arranged to sublet an apartment in Seattle for six weeks. Leslyn would go up by train—she did not drive—and start making their first real home. Heinlein returned to Lexington, presumably a very happy man. The “supervisory professional examinations” for promotion took place on April 11, 1932. Heinlein was allowed—required—to handle the approach to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, in dense, nerve-racking fog, with only the slightest input from Captain King, who went belowdecks, leaving him with the conn.30 His education as a naval officer continued to progress.

  The Strategy and Tactics studying he had been doing for the promotion exam got him interested in the subject, and he applied to the War College for a correspondence course. They sent him the first two installments, and he began working on the course in the apartment he and Leslyn sublet for their stay.

  All the bachelors of the steerage had again rented a farmhouse far out on the Sound, away from any prying eyes, and furnished it with scrounged furniture. Again they modified the plumbing so that the taps in the kitchen sink dispensed moonshine “cougar milk” from a barrel in the attic. They called it Stone Acres and hung two suggestive coconut shells as their road sign at the gate. Stone Acres was devoted—and “devoted” was just the word—to “drunken brawls”31 each night, with marathon sessions each weekend. Robert and Leslyn were invited to at least one of those marathon brawls and knew what was going on—but so long as the boys kept the Eleventh Commandment wholly (“Thou Shalt Not Get Caught”), Heinlein would do nothing about it.

  These junior officers got caught.

  Two Seattle debutantes stayed at Stone Acres for a week or more. They had told their parents they were staying with Robert and Leslyn, a respectable married couple. If the girls had bothered to let Rob
ert or Leslyn in on the secret, they would certainly have been very annoyed—it was at the very least an imposition—but, Robert said, he would nevertheless have rolled with the punch—“and lied to their parents to protect their (frail) reputations and to keep my messmates out of a jam, and I’m sure that [Leslyn] would have lied just as calmly and convincingly.”32

  The honor code forbidding an officer and gentleman to lie, cheat, or steal did not require him to impeach a woman’s reputation. He would have preferred simply to stand mute—respectfully refuse to answer and accept the consequences: “I will not lie to a brother officer at any time and I will not lie under oath to anyone. But I can imagine circumstances under which I would refuse to answer.”33

  One of the girls’ parents telephoned them while Robert was out, asking for their daughter. Caught off guard, Leslyn simply said that the girls were not staying with them and that she knew nothing about it. One or both sets of parents then hired a private detective to find their daughters—and the whole mess came to light and, more important, to Captain King’s very public attention. Probably one of the parents had gone straight to King, as the junior officers’ commanding officer.

  If Robert and Leslyn had been given a chance to discuss the potential risk, they could have avoided the problem entirely:

  [I]f these chuckleheads had warned me, they and the girls would never have been caught—[Leslyn] would have told the inquiring parent that the girls were “out shopping” or some such stall, then would have jumped into a taxi, rushed out to Stone Acres, grabbed the girls, taken them back to town, had them phone home, then seen to it that they caught the next ferry … and their silly coverup would have remained intact. Yes, I’m hypothesizing … but on other occasions for other girls she had covered matters far more difficult.34

  On Monday morning when Heinlein reported back to Lexington, he found that almost the entirety of Steerage was under hack, except for two or three who, like himself, had wives and apartments in town. Suddenly, it was Heinlein’s problem, too, since he was then president of the Junior Officers Mess.

  King handled it very quietly. Since Heinlein was not directly involved with the investigation King conducted, he never knew the details, and nobody involved ever spilled the beans, either. But there were no records of orders about the confinement of the Junior Mess. Heinlein was not asked to prepare charges and specifications. The whole matter was handled orally, no reports at all once King ascertained that no serious crime had been committed—no kidnapping or rape—all adults, and the girls had gone there of their own volition, stayed because they wanted to stay, had been free to leave at any time.35

  At that point, well, it was “damfoolishness all the way around”—youthful indiscretion—but not something that called for official discipline by the Navy. King kept it from becoming an open scandal; he probably, Heinlein thought,36 pointed out to the girls’ parents that any major punishment to his junior officers would have to be based on sworn and public testimony by their daughters, and that was the end of that. Hack was quietly lifted; nothing was logged, nothing was said. Surprisingly, Heinlein even saw the girls later, at ship’s social functions.

  On June 6, 1932, exactly three years after his commissioning as ensign, Heinlein was promoted to lieutenant, j.g. (junior grade), and, with the increase in pay, began sending small sums home to his mother in Kansas City. A new assistant gunnery officer had joined Lexington, and Heinlein was given the title and responsibility for a turret division. That would look good on his records, as he was due to be rotated to another ship soon. But, with his quarterly fitness report, Heinlein found a recommendation from King that he be retained as Lexington’s gunnery officer.37 That was an extraordinary compliment, but also an eminently sensible recommendation, as Heinlein was one of the very few men in the Navy trained—and very expensively—on the ballistic computer.

  Captain King must have sent in a request of his own at about the same time.

  In a sense, the Stone Acres crisis must have been the touchstone test for King’s command. There was personal slackness involved—lack of good judgment, to be sure—but none of the officers involved had been even slightly derelict in the performance of their duties. He had been brought in to tighten up a slack ship, and within a few months after he took command, the Lady Lex was taut and humming, the fittest, happiest ship in the fleet, and winning fleet competitions of every sort. Morale was high. Captain King’s work on Lexington was done.

  King was relieved by Captain Blakely on June 10, 1932, without ceremony, as he had ordered. Captain Blakely came aboard and relieved him in civilian dress. King shook hands with the new Captain, saluted him, and requested permission to leave the ship. Five minutes or less later, he walked away.

  I watched him walking down the dock. He seemed smaller in civilian clothes, older, and slightly stooped. He was carrying an overnight bag and that did not look right, either. He knew that he had just left his last ship … and must have known (as we all suspected) that he had tossed away his career, blown his chances for flag, by one act of defiance in refusing to endanger any man of his unnecessarily.38

  The only recognition King would accept was a large scroll of appreciation for his unprecedented perfect flight-safety record, signed by every aviator who had flown under his care.

  The Navy had not taken Captain King’s recommendation to retain Heinlein as gunnery officer on Lexington. Nor did they grant Heinlein’s request for duty in the Asia stations: on June 20, 1932, Heinlein received orders to transfer to the destroyer Roper, home ported in San Diego, ninety miles south of San Pedro. He reported in to his new billet on June 23, though he would still spend some weeks on Lexington before the transfer would be complete.

  Captain Blakely was no King, as Heinlein found out dramatically within two weeks of his taking command of Lexington. On June 29, 1932, Dick Downer—the aviator who had witnessed Heinlein’s wedding certificate—was killed in a flying accident off Encinitas, California. Heinlein was given the difficult task of notifying Downer’s parents.39 It was even more difficult for him because he had just recently had a run-in with the dead pilot; Downer had given him an order40 that didn’t sound right at all, and Heinlein had fallen back on the CYA (Cover Your Ass) defense of asking for the order in writing. This is not something one does lightly: it is a strong message to one’s superior officer that he’s heading down a wrong path. Most officers will think twice about putting any order in writing that might be questionable, but Downer had ignored him and given him the written order. As Heinlein had expected, it went wrong. Heinlein was exonerated, leaving Downer to take the brunt of the discipline. It hadn’t affected their friendship—Downer was bright enough to know that Heinlein had tried to warn him; he just got carried away and lost his temper and his judgment.

  But Downer’s good attitude didn’t make the loss of Heinlein’s friend any easier to take.

  King, he heard, was passed over for promotion, as everyone had expected.

  And life went on, losing some of its savor every day. Heinlein had a particularly unappetizing legal case to defend before the new captain: “He was a nasty little beast who would have looked well hanged at the yardarm … but he was my client, and I always gave my clients all I had, no matter how angry it sometimes made the President of the Court.”41

  There were eight specifications in the General Court Martial, and Heinlein got him acquitted of the seven he was actually guilty of, tangling the witnesses up on cross-examination. But the man was convicted on the eighth count—of which he was innocent (a reviewing board later reversed this conviction)—and sentenced to two years in prison.

  Representing such defendants was duty Heinlein would rather have avoided,42 but he didn’t really have any way out: if a prisoner requested him for defense, he had to serve. On one occasion, late in his tour, he was with an inspection party that visited the brig. For some reason, he closed the door this time, and on the back he found a list of officers’ names, with some stars marked after each name. He asked ar
ound and discovered that it was a kind of legal handicap sheet for the prisoners: any time an officer defended a guilty man and got him off, his name would be posted on the inside of that door, and for each additional case in which a guilty man got off, a star would be added. Heinlein had a lot of stars after his name—and that must have accounted for his being tagged so often for defense. He took an eraser and rubbed out his name, and that was the end of his “law practice.”

  And just in time. He and Leslyn would make a new home near his new station, the Roper’s home port of San Diego.

  13

  SWALLOWING THE ANCHOR

  Carrier men looked down on the destroyers and battleships as antiquated, just as battleship men looked down on carriers as flibbertigibbety experiments. When he reported in on June 23, 1932, Heinlein found nothing to shake his prejudices: Roper was tied up to a mooring buoy with three other World War I–vintage ships, constituting a “desdiv” (destroyer division). To Heinlein’s eyes, fresh from the clean, modern lines of Lexington, she must have looked like a piece of junk.

  Roper (DD-147) was a Wickes-class destroyer, smaller, faster, and lighter than Lexington. Roper had been laid down and launched in 1918, but was mothballed in the 1920s and recommissioned in 1930. Her annual schedule was similar to Lexington’s, taking part in fleet exercises in Panama, Hawaii, and the Caribbean.

  Heinlein would have to learn the ropes all over again in California while the ship went on to Port Angeles, near Seattle—two and a half months of shore duty at North Island, near Coronado, during which he would be carried on Roper’s T.O. (Table of Organization) as “Under Instruction B.F. Gunnery School.” At the end of the course, he would probably be promoted and assigned as Roper’s gunnery officer.