Craig Symonds
Subject: Picking an Admiral to Wage War
Bio: Maritime History Professor at the US Naval Academy
Reading: Nimitz at War is here
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and history.
Today’s topic is Picking an Admiral to Wage War. Our speaker is Craig Symonds who is a Maritime History Professor at the US Naval Academy and the author of the book Nimitz at War.
Admiral Chester Nimitz was Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet during World War 2. He made the critical decisions to fight the Japanese carriers at Midway and to pursue America’s atoll hopping strategy to force Japan’s surrender.
I want to find out from Craig about what made Nimitz such an incredible leader, and why he excelled in evaluating calculated risk in wartime.
I also want to hear about learning in war and using technology to beat the enemy while minimizing your army’s casualties.
I want to discuss ethics in battle, and how America should respond to an enemy like the Japanese when they refuse to surrender and murder defenseless American POWs.
Craig can you please begin with your opening six-minute remarks.
Craig Symonds:
Chester Nimitz is not the quintessential warrior. He is not Bull Halsey; he is not George Patton; he’s certainly not MacArthur. What gives Nimitz his skill is his ability to work effectively with people and that requires listening as well as talking. It requires him to get a sense of the dynamic of the people, and this is what makes him so successful, particularly as a theater commander in World War II.
He comes to Pearl Harbor on December 31st, 1941. The shoreline is still covered with oil. The ships are still sunk at their moorings. The bottom of the USS Oklahoma looking like a metal island is still protruding from the oily water. This is the fleet he has been sent to command.
He walks into that headquarters where many of the staff officers are expecting to get chewed out for having failed for not being ready on the day of infamy. And he says, I am going to need your help. We are going to have to recover from this and learn to take the war to the enemy. Will you help me? And it's just the right note. A staff officer later said, it was like somebody opened a window and a fresh breeze blew in.
His ability to convince others to work together is the key to understanding his effectiveness as a military commander. He is not a draw the saber and charge the hill fellow. He is the fellow you want in charge of the entire operation.
Larry Bernstein:
On that December 31st, 1941, when Nimitz meets with Husband Kimmel, the previous admiral in charge of the Pacific Fleet, he tells him that if I had been in charge, I would have made the same error, and you would be replacing me. Do you believe it?
Craig Symonds:
Nimitz went out of his way to let Kimmel know that this could have happened to anybody including Nimitz. Franklin Roosevelt wanted to appoint Nimitz to Command the Pacific Fleet a year earlier. Nimitz at the time was the Chief of the Bureau of Navigation. FDR called him into the White House. And Nimitz said, “no. I'm too junior. There are 50 admirals who are senior to me. If you do this, all of them will be resentful.”
So, Kimmel was appointed. There was an expectation that the Japanese would conduct a strike that weekend. They expected attacks on Burma and Malaya and maybe even the Philippines, but not at Pearl Harbor because the logistics of carrying that out were so difficult. So, it is not impossible that Nimitz had he been in command, he would have been behaved in the same way as Kimmel. Nimitz wanted to communicate that to Kimmel. It is not that you failed, it's that the circumstances put you in an impossible position.
Larry Bernstein:
There was a commission to evaluate what happened at Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, and in it there were a couple errors. They did not have torpedo nets down to protect the battleships in harbor, which was something they could have learned from the Italians had made a similar error. The Air Force was more nervous about local Japanese people blowing up a plane that they put the fighters and other airplanes in the middle of the airfields and was easily destroyed when the zeros bombed them.
Surprise attacks are a surprise. I do not want to suggest that surprises cannot be effective and that different leaders would not have been surprised. It is more like there may have been some bad decisions.
Craig Symonds:
There are a couple of things to unpack here. One is you mentioned the Japanese attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto, which had taken place several months earlier. Here are battleships in port in Southern Italy that were attacked by British airplanes from an aircraft carrier. So that sounds awfully similar, and it has come to light that Japanese investigators studied that attack. It is not that the idea of attacking battleships with carrier-based airplanes was completely novel. What is novel is that they could do so from 4,000 miles away. That is unexpected.
The second thing is the torpedo nets. The Pearl Harbor itself is a relatively shallow harbor. It must be dredged regularly, and because of that, it does not lend itself to the use of torpedoes. Torpedoes when they are dropped from even a low flying airplane, the torpedoes go down to a hundred feet or so and then rise again to their running depth. So, you need a hundred feet of water before you can launch these things. Well, the Japanese were aware that Pearl Harbor was relatively shallow began working out a special protocol where they attached wooden fins to their torpedoes that would detach on impact and prevent them from going down to the level of a hundred feet so that they could run in shallow water. The protocols for moored ships in Pearl Harbor was that torpedo nets were superfluous because the shallow water would make the use of torpedoes in the harbor not likely.
Now, your question was, would Nimitz have made those same mistakes? Well, that is speculative. Nimitz was a careful planner. Maybe he would have said, let's build some redundancy into this, even though it is shallow water. Let's put up torpedo nets.
The message that every Pacific commander got on the 27th of November two weeks before the Pearl Harbor attack from Washington says, this message is to be considered a war warning. Negotiations with the Japanese have broken down. We expect them to attack in the next two weeks. Among the places they are likely to attack are Burma, Borneo, Siam, Malaysia, perhaps even the Philippines. All Pacific commanders are hereby required to take defensive efforts to protect their resources.
What defensive efforts are appropriate in Pearl Harbor? The threat it seemed to Kimmel, was that the large population of Japanese Americans in Hawaii might attempt to sabotage some of the equipment there. Therefore, let's protect the airplanes by bunching them together in the middle of the runway and guard them carefully. So that's the reason the airplanes were in position that they were in. Would Nimitz have done differently? My suspicion is he might have done some things differently but not a lot.
We talk about being a surprise attack. The December 5th newspaper in Hawaii had a big banner headline and letters two inches high that said Japanese may attack this weekend. So, the idea that the Japanese were going to attack that weekend was not a surprise to anybody. What was a surprise was that they could take six heavy carriers all the way across the Pacific and get to a position where they could launch aircraft to attack the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. It seemed so improbable that taking accounts for it seemed unnecessary.
Larry Bernstein:
In our previous podcast with Admiral Stavridis, he mentioned that you need to go to war with a war admiral and not with someone who may be more appropriate in peace time. And that explains the decision to switch out Kimmel for Nimitz. How do you think about which admirals are appropriate for peace time and which ones are appropriate for war?
Craig Symonds:
The image of peacetime admirals as somebody who does well at cocktail parties and looks good in a uniform. If someone reaches the rank of admiral in the United States Navy, he better have some war fighting capabilities and experience, go hard charging types. Bull Halsey falls into that category and George Patton for the Army.
Those are the people that you want at the point of the spear. On the other hand, there are people who control where that spear is going to go and how many times you use it and where it is directed. They are war fighters too, but they're not necessarily people that you want running the war.
I'd start with George Marshall, who was the Army Chief of Staff, a quiet Virginian who managed the entire United States Army throughout the Second World War, later became Secretary of State, and supervised the Marshall Plan, but never gets the credit he deserves for the overall supervision of the Second World War.
Marshall, Eisenhower, and Nimitz are the people who are not necessarily the loudest, but they are the most thoughtful voice in the room. What Nimitz could do very effectively is make sure that he used his human tools, people like Bull Halsey when he needed him to do something that was particularly violent, but maybe switch him out with a more low-key commander Raymond Spruance.
Larry Bernstein:
Yamamoto had given the fleet commander in charge of the attack at Pearl Harbor instructions potentially to go back for a second strike. And when he finds out that this success of the initial wave, he decides not to do a second wave, which would have taken out maybe the repair shops and oil tankers. Instead, he cuts and runs, and Yamamoto was disappointed. How should we think about that decision of when to press and when not to, and showing a certain level of aggression versus passivity whether it be Nimitz or Yamamoto who are trying to evaluate their commanders in the field?
Craig Symonds:
Larry, that is a great question. After the war was over, historians looked back and said, the Japanese might have benefited greatly if they had destroyed the oil tank farm. Hawaii has no oil of its own. All the fuel oil that drove those destroyers, carriers, battleships, all had to come from California in tankers across a broad ocean. Destroying the oil tanks would have idled the fleet for six months. The other thing you mentioned, the repair shops and if you are going to damage ships and you don't have repair facilities, you might as well have sunk them. So those are two prime targets for people to understand the logistics of war.
The Japanese officer class were warriors. They considered themselves the inheritors of the samurai, and the idea that they should attack the warships of the enemy was primary in their thinking. When that first group of pilots came back to the carriers and told Chuichi Nagumo, we wrecked most of their airplanes, we could fuel up re-arm, go back and really finish the job. He said no because the battleship fleet had been neutralized. And that was the objective, neutralize the battleship fleet so that the Americans cannot interfere with our conquest of the South Pacific. Remember, the overall goal here is not to beat Americans. What they want are the resources of the South Pacific. What was then the Dutch East Indies now Indonesia, Java, Sumatra, Borneo, and they needed that oil desperately.
And the reason they attacked the United States fleet was because that oil would have to go from the Dutch East Indies past the American Philippines to get to Japan. That means we must take the Philippines too. That means war with America. Let's begin by taking out their battle fleet so they can't interfere with our conquest.
When those pilots returned to the carriers and told Nagumo, we should go back for a second strike, they would not have attacked the oil, they would not have attacked the repair shops. That's not what warriors do. Warriors sink ships, they would have gone after the cruisers, the destroyers, the battleships that were not yet utterly destroyed. They would have finished the job, meaning the utter destruction of the battleship fleet. That is what they later said in interviews that they wanted to do. So not sending a second strike was probably not a bad idea on Nagumo’s part. He knew he had pressed his luck. He brought six carriers and their escorts all the way across the stormy Pacific without ever being spotted, carried out a surprise attack on schedule. Let's get the hell out of here.
Larry Bernstein:
One of the characteristics that you describe Nimitz is his ability to evaluate calculated risk. Risk reward for every major decision. And you thought he did a particularly good job.
Craig Symonds:
Nimitz's subordinates did not have to deal with the risk reward question. They were given directions and told what to do. There are a couple of cases that come to mind where we see this in play. One is after the landing on Tarawa in November of 1943. It did not go well. A thousand Marines were killed, 3000 were wounded in an island smaller than one square mile. It was shocking. Because of that, the next step in the Central Pacific Drive was supposed to be to the Marshall Islands, the centerpiece of which was an island called Kwajalein. That is where the Japanese had their main defenses.
Nimitz's subordinates said to him, this is a step too far. We should not go directly to Kwajalein. We should attack some of the outer islands set up bases there, and then carry out a bombing and artillery attack on Kwajalein until it can be taken more easily. Nimitz concluded that the lessons learned at Tarawa could be applied to the assault on Kwajalein, and therefore that was overly cautious. No, he said, I think we can go ahead. But before he said that he went around the room to every one of his staff officers and had them vote. All of them voted to attack the outer islands first, and then, he overruled them. Well, this quiet, soft spoken manager of war takes an extraordinarily bold decision here, overruling those others. They were applying what they thought of as a cost benefit calculation as well.
They thought the risk was too high. Nimitz decided it was not. So, when we talk about this as a calculation, it's not a formula and do the math. It was a subjective evaluation that every commander makes at one point or another. But that Nimitz was particularly adept at it, and he did so not just by measuring and weighing the cost versus the advantage, it was also by a gut level instinct that we can go ahead.
Larry Bernstein:
Tarawa goes very poorly. Before Marines landed, the Navy fired at the island leveling the place. And then the Marines showed up, but it was at low tide. The transport boats could not get close, and they had to make a run for it for hundreds of yards through the water. And there were still machine guns on the beaches. The Japanese killed off many Americans even before they got to the island. And surprisingly, the Japanese had not been softened up as much as they could have been by these battleships.
After the battle, Nimitz demands to go to the island to investigate firsthand, and he decided that we needed to reevaluate how we are going to do these marine invasions. Tell us about learning from mistakes about how to change strategy from a bad experience for the next battle.
Craig Symonds:
Every commander must do this. Tarawa is a particularly interesting case, the tide at Tarawa. There is something called a neap tide when the sun and the moon are at right angles to one another, and it creates a lower tide even than the usual low tide. And we knew this existed, but we really thought that it would be four feet of water over the shelf of coral that extended from the island out into the bay. It didn't.
It was only about three and a half feet. These are the boats that we are trying to get across this coral shelf, and they only got to within about a quarter of a mile of the beach, and then the Marines had to clamber out over the side and walk on this coral reef with water up to their waist. You say charge ashore, but hard to charge fast in waist deep water and they are being shot at. This is a horror. The Japanese guns, which the Navy thought had been taken out are just peppering them as they come ashore.
Nimitz attacked this was to order 2,500 more what were called alligators. These are tracked landing vessels that can carry the Marines and they look like little tanks with track wheels that could get over a coral reef if necessary.
Technology surmounts geography here. The other thing you mentioned is the preliminary gunfire support naval guns are awesome. Some of these older battleships, they are 14-inch guns, fire shells weighing 1200 pounds over 15 miles, and they just explode with spectacular effect. And the islands only one square mile. So you line up these battleships and you just let go. And my God, the whole island, there is barely a palm tree standing.
When the battleships lifted fire, the carrier planes came in and bombed the hell out of it. So, this island has been plastered.
What we learned going ashore, and as you mentioned after Nimitz visited the island subsequently, is that the Japanese had dug deep down into the coral rock and they had also covered them with resilient palm logs that would absorb some of the concussion of those so that even though they were buried in sand and the island was practically denuded of all agriculture of any kind, many Japanese were killed, no doubt about it, but many Japanese still survived. And it was a crowded island. There were nearly 5,000 Japanese on that island. Then the Marines send 20,000 men ashore. Think about an island, a square mile wide with 25,000 men on it. It devolved into a horrible close range bitter violent struggle on the island.
Nimitz had some of those pill boxes built on an unoccupied island in the Hawaiian chain called Kaho’olawe. And then he said, build these things and then we are going to fire shells at them for 10 minutes. Stop, go ashore, take a look. What impact did it have until they figured out what was the appropriate protocol? First, you cannot just shoot at the island. You must have specific targets in mind, and you must use armor piercing shells that will get down into those hardened defenses and take them out so that when they attacked Kwajalein and the Marshall Islands, they knew what they were doing, and they pretty much devastated it.
Larry Bernstein:
You mentioned that there were 5,000 Japanese on the island of Tarawa, and if I recall there were like 17 prisoners of war taken. These Japanese were going to fight to the death, and that was different than the war in Europe. It was different than anything that the United States had faced previously. How does it change the calculus to have an opponent who will fight to the death?
Craig Symonds:
There was a cultural divide unbridgeable between the Americans and the Japanese. The Americans could not understand how the Japanese would squander their lives, so thoughtlessly, even before Tarawa. On Guadalcanal, for example, the Japanese would attack the marine lines on Edson’s Ridge with human body waves of attacks and take horrendous casualties, and they do it again and again and again screaming Banzai. And the Americans thought, these people are insane.
On Wake Island, when the Marines there found themselves low on ammunition, surrounded, out of food and surrendered, the Japanese thought, what do you mean surrendered? Nobody surrenders in the Japanese mindset. Anyone who surrenders is not a warrior. You lose all honor by surrendering. So that cultural divide, they thought each side thought the other was absolutely out of its mind.
Larry Bernstein:
The Americans based at Wake Island surrendered. That group later in the war was beheaded when the Americans decided to take back Wake Island. Tell us about that decision to not follow the Geneva Convention by the Japanese, their decision to kill unarmed prisoners of war, and then how the Americans treated that later when he was put on trial in Tokyo.
Craig Symonds:
That is part of the cultural divide. The Japanese did not believe honor was due to anyone who had allowed himself to be taken prisoner and the 200 marines also a thousand civilian constructions workers who the Japanese kept as slave laborers. When it became clear that they were going to lose Wake Island instead of repatriating them or even using them as leverage for good treatment, they lined them up and machine gunned them. Many were beheaded, killed them all. Obvious war crime. The Japanese officer who had ordered that was subsequently tried and executed. It stands out as a particularly gruesome example, but hardly unusual in the Pacific War, and it has a long-term impact on the Americans as well.
The Americans by 1943 had come to appreciate the Japanese do not take prisoners, they execute prisoners. They do not respect human life. So why should we? There are cases in the war when, for example, an American submarine commander, named Mush Morton, who commanded a famous American submarine. The Wahoo sank a Japanese troop ship in the Bismarck Sea and perhaps several thousand Japanese soldiers were bobbing around. And Morton surfaced his submarine, manned the machine guns, and executed them in the water. And his XO Richard O’Kane said, captain, you cannot do this. This is a violation of the Geneva Convention. And Morton pointed to an island nearby, and he said, you see that island, if they make it safely to that island, they will kill American soldiers. It is my duty to make sure that does not happen. And
By late ‘43, the Americans had come to the mental frame of mind that that was a legitimate exercise of war powers because the Japanese would've done the same thing. Wars create momentum of their own, not only in terms of violence but in terms of morality of what is acceptable. You see it in World War 2, certainly on the Eastern Front. You see it in Vietnam that once wars become violent, that violence spreads across both sides. And so yes, the Japanese culture of not taking prisoners, of executing prisoners, that almost became the default protocol for War in the Pacific.
Larry Bernstein:
The shooting of the unarmed Japanese sailors in the Pacific, was that captain brought up on charges? How did Washington deal with that behavior?
Craig Symonds:
Washington dealt with it by awarding him the Navy Cross. There was no reconsideration after the war because Mush Morton took his sub into the Sea of Japan late in the war and sunk several ships there and then in attempting to exit was himself caught by Japanese destroyers and his boat was sunk and he was killed. He is still considered one of the great American submarine commanders of the Second World War, and this episode in the Bismarck Sea had generally been downplayed.
What might have happened to him in a close examination of those circumstances in a post-war environment is not clear. But I will tell this story that at Nuremberg, the allies brought Admiral Karl Donitz up on charges of committing war crimes because he ordered his U-boat commanders not to rescue anyone from any of the ships that they sunk. They were to leave them drowning in the water and sail away. And that the allies said that is a war crime. One of those who testified about this was Chester Nimitz. And Nimitz said, those are the same orders we gave our submarine commanders, and Donitz was found not guilty.
Larry Bernstein:
Does this view in the Navy or in the U.S. armed forces change in later engagements?
Craig Symonds:
None of this could possibly have happened in 1939 when the war first began in Europe. There was a protocol that U-boats were to surface and give warning to ships to put your passengers in boats, and then we'll sink your ship. That didn't last very long because the British put guns on those ships and sink the submarine. So that became an unwise protocol.
Then it went from we will sink the ship without warning to we will ignore the stragglers in the water to we will machine gun the stragglers in the water. The Japanese did the same thing. They machine gunned POWs in the water on ships that were sunk that were carrying POWs. There is a trajectory toward violence and a rejection of humanity as wars lengthen.
If we go back all the way to the age of sail, captains at sea were virtually gods. They could do anything. They could hang their own sailors if they felt like it because there was no oversight. Today, everything takes place under the bright light of technology. So, some of those things are unlikely to take place today or to take place more than once.
Larry Bernstein:
In Shakespeare's Henry V, there is a moment at the Battle of Agincourt where Henry took prisoners, but when the battle starts to turn, Henry gives the order to kill those prisoners. Killing prisoners of war is as old as time, and the Geneva Convention makes it illegal, but it does not change the risk that those prisoners put their enemies at risk. How should we think about that change in psychology to protect prisoners of wars and other innocents?
Craig Symonds:
The Japanese did not sign the Geneva Convention, so they did not feel bound by it. But it is interesting to me that the Japanese took prisoners at all. When the Corregidor surrendered, they had more prisoners than they knew what to do with, and they sent them off on this now notorious Battan death march to prisoner of war camps that were held five times as many people as they were built to contain. And then when they became overcrowded, they put the prisoners on ships and sent them to Manchuria, China or even Japan to work in war industries. All of those are violations of the Geneva Convention. But the Japanese said, we didn't sign the Geneva Convention.
You ask how things may have changed since then. I'm not sure human nature has changed. I do think sensitivity to cultural norms has changed. The cultural norm that dominated World War II Japan no longer exists in Japan today.
It is a good thing for international organizations, the League of Nations, the United Nations, whoever it might be, to convey against inhumane activities. The one that is received the most notorious mockery is the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact, which was signed in 1925, which made war illegal. All nations would head forth solve their problems through discussion and negotiation. Nobody would ever go to war and everybody signed that. Well, that did not happen. Hitler took over Germany and war came to use the passive voice.
There were discussions in London in 1930 about limiting what a submarine was allowed to do, but those were ignored in World War II as well. It does not mean that by passing a law against something that thing stops. It's worthwhile for nations to pay attention to what we perceive as humane and what we perceive as inhumane in the hope that humanity will pay at least some attention to those things.
Larry Bernstein:
Curtis LeMay was put in charge of bombing the Japanese mainland later in the war and made the decision to use incendiaries on his bombing of Tokyo, which resulted in as many as a million civilian deaths. The fire got to be so hot that even the rivers burned. No one seemed to question Curtis LeMay's decision-making of killing those million civilians. He was later promoted to head of SAC Command and was on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and even was George Wallace's choice for vice president. Take me through that American decision to encourage Curtis LeMay bombing civilians.
Craig Symonds:
In Europe, the Anglo-Americans discuss how they were going to conduct a bombing campaign against Germany. Germany had been bombing Britain for some months. So this is not initiating aerial warfare. The idea of the Americans who had come up with the Norden bombsight. The Americans believed that with the Norden bombsite in daytime bombing, we could pick out an airplane factory or a ball bearing factory and put a bomb right on that factory so that we could kill the war making capability of our foe without killing civilians.
The British were skeptical of this. They did not want to fly their airplanes over Germany in the daytime. They would take losses that were unacceptable. So, they said, no we are going to fly at night, and we are going to find a city and just drop bombs randomly across the city in the expectation that some of those bombs will hit military targets. They will do to the Germans, what the Germans have been doing to us. They have it coming. Well, this divide between a specific and targeted aerial bombing attack, which was the American view, and a general blanket bombing of the foe, which was the British view, lent itself to considerations of how to bomb Japan as well.
The Americans are fully in charge of the bombing campaign over Japan. They do not have any British to argue with them. They are going to do it with the Norden bombsight from 30,000 feet using this sophisticated new sleek bomber the B 29 Startofortress. But they could not do it because from 30,000 feet, the winds that blow constantly over Japan would blow those carefully targeted bombs up to a hundred miles away from their target. So that just did not work. And after months of trying this, LeMay finally decided, I am going to jettison that. I am going to come in low and use small 70-pound incendiary bomblets and scatter them over the city.
Here is his justification. He says, the people who work in those airline factories have their homes in Tokyo and if we destroy the housing units of the factory workers, they won't be able to go to work and the production of Japanese airplanes and munitions will slow or cease.
It is just military targeting of the housing units of the factory workers. But as you point out what this creates an internally driven firestorm that just rips the heart out of Tokyo. It was March 6th, 1945, and absolutely burned out the city. It was considered an enormous success and applied to other cities all across Japan. Tokyo is the famous one because it's the first and the largest, but there were many of them. And cities were burned to the ground.
Curtis LeMay did say, “if we lose this war, I'm going to be executed as a war criminal,” because he knew this was a violation of the Geneva Convention, but it was the only way he could carry out an effective bombing campaign against the Japanese.
Larry Bernstein:
In your Nimitz biography, another aspect of Nimitz's success and brilliance was his ability to manage his superiors and his peers across the military like MacArthur, his immediate superior Ernie King, the President of the United States, Secretary of the Navy Knox. And he also had to manage below Spruance, Halsey, and Turner. What made Nimitz a particularly good leader?
Craig Symonds:
If you are going to make a list of the characteristics necessary to be an effective military commander, or a leader of any kind, the word at the top of the list is temperament. Because you require a temperament that allows you to modulate the way you respond to subordinates. Who in the example I cited earlier, object to attacking Kwajalein because it might be too tough a target, and you just must overrule them? At one point, he said, gentlemen, this is it. We are going to attack Kwajalein. If you do not want to do it, I will find commanders who will. So that's tough guy, foot down, could not do that with Ernie King, Franklin Roosevelt could not even do it with Douglas MacArthur.
Franklin Roosevelt was a successful politician because he could jolly up almost anybody, and he and Nimitz got along splendidly. There was never any confrontation. If things got a bit testy, Nimitz or Roosevelt might tell a joke, and they got along just fine.
The difficult individual there is Ernest King chief of Naval Operations and Commander in Chief of the United States Navy with an acronym of COMINCH. It says a lot about him that about a year or so into the war, one of FDRs advisors, Admiral Leahy, came to King and said, I see you are using this acronym COMINCH or Commander in Chief in all your correspondence. You know that the Constitution has only one Commander in Chief and that's President of the United States, and he thinks maybe you should use some other acronym. And King said, is that an order? And Leahy said, no, but the President would like it if you did it. And King said, well, then I am going to keep it.
Tough guy. The old joke was he shaves with a blowtorch. His daughter once said of him, he's the most even-tempered man in the Navy because he's always in a rage. Those are the cliches about King. But he was a difficult man to work with, and he was extremely opinionated, and he was not all that sure that Nimitz was tough enough to make the hard decisions that King believed were necessary to win the war.
Because King held all those command hats, he was a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Combined Chiefs of Staff. He had to deal with Churchill and Alanbrook and all these guys as well as FDR. His plate was full. So, he had to leave much of the decision making about Pacific Theater operations to Chester Nimitz.
Nimitz had the temperament to wait him out when he was in a rage to respond soothingly when he was angry, to do enough to satisfy him, and occasionally even to pull the wool over his eyes, but he could manage King by instead of standing up to him.
He would say, thank you, Admiral. That is wonderful advice. I will certainly take that into consideration. That is the way he managed King. Now, the other difficult character in the Pacific Theater is Douglas MacArthur.
MacArthur was brilliant and successful so early in his career that it completely went to his head. He earned seven silver stars as a Division Commander in World War I. He got out of World War I as the youngest Division Commander ever. Then became the youngest Superintendent of West Point and the youngest Army Chief of Staff in history. He had done it all before he was 50. He expects to be given command of the entire Pacific Theater, but instead it's divided. King was not about to let Douglas MacArthur command the U.S. Navy in the Pacific. That is not going to happen. So, like King Solomon and the baby, they cut the Pacific Ocean in half.
MacArthur got the smaller portion, but it has the big land masses: Australia, New Guinea, the Philippines, and he is in command of what is called the Southwest Pacific Theater. Nimitz has everything else, 65 million square miles, the largest military theater in the entire World War. 10 times the size of the European theater that Eisenhower commanded. So, this is a big command, and MacArthur feels a little miffed by this.
Larry Bernstein:
FDR delegated a lot of decision-making to Marshall, Nimitz, MacArthur, and King. Churchill did less. What is an appropriate level of delegation for the president or the prime minister in wartime?
Craig Symonds:
It is appropriate to say that the Prime Minister indicates the direction of the war and allows his senior officers to determine how that direction will be executed. But you are talking about Winston Churchill. He is not a typical Prime Minister. Winston Churchill believed in himself. He was both prime minister and appointed himself defense minister.
Churchill had spent time in the trenches in World War I. He had been Lord of the Admiralty.
To answer your immediate question, yes, it is the job of the head of government to show the direction, the policy, and it is the job of the operational commanders to execute that policy. It's usually not the job of the head of government to tell them how to do it.
Larry Bernstein:
Strategy for the Pacific Theater, MacArthur desperately wanted to return and take back the Philippines, but Nimitz and King had a different plan, which was to go skip the Philippines entirely. Tell us about the big strategic thinking, the role that Nimitz played, and whether Nimitz was correct on what was the best strategy for defeating the enemy.
Craig Symonds:
These two theater commands, one under MacArthur one under Nimitz, each conducted its own offensive. MacArthur worked his way along New Guinea. The Navy in the Pacific Ocean area did this island hopping Central Pacific drive. But that was compatible. MacArthur thought it was foolish to have these two separate commands, two separate logistics systems. This is wasteful. Give me overall command, I'll take care of this. But that never got far.
Where the real fight came was when MacArthur wanted then to go to Luzon, the northern most of the Philippine Islands. There are a thousand islands in the Philippine Archipelago. But the biggest and most important is Luzon. That is where Manila is. That is where MacArthur had lived for many years. First as a boy, when his father was the commander there, and then later as the head of the Philippine Army Field Marshal was his title of the Philippine army. So, to him, Manila and Luzon had not only a strategic value, but an emotional value. But the strategic goal was to cut the Japanese supply line. Remember the Japanese went to war in the first place to secure the supply lines from the South Asian islands of the Dutch East Indies to Japan. If Luzon falls back to the Americans, that supply line is cut.
But King said, if we take Formosa, that will cut that supply line. And there is one island in Formosa, not a thousand. We only must take the one. So, there is lots of advantages to going to Formosa instead of Luzon. Well, that is not going to fly with MacArthur because it's not just the strategic question. It is the moral one. There was a famous meeting in Hawaii where Franklin Roosevelt himself was present. Nimitz and MacArthur each gave their views. It should be Formosa, it should be Luzon, back and forth, back and forth. Roosevelt did not decide. He said, I am going to leave this up to the Joints Chief of Staff.
But here is the interesting thing about Nimitz and his temperament. Nimitz made the pitch for Formosa as King ordered him to do, but he did not go to the mat for it. When MacArthur said, “here's another reason.” Nimitz would say, “yes, that's a good point of view. That would work too.” And I think that Nimitz was not sandbagging, but he was not giving it a hundred percent in support of King's point of view, because he saw which way the wind was blowing.
MacArthur was going to win this fight, and he was not going to take the Navy down in a losing cause, fighting against it. In the end, it was Luzon and not Formosa and MacArthur went to Manila and recaptured the city. It is another example of how Nimitz very carefully and in a nuanced way, modulated how much effort he had to give to one point of view without sacrificing the overall strategic goal.
Larry Bernstein:
Truman famously fires MacArthur. Do you think FDR should have fired MacArthur? I mean, his strategy about this moral argument, the Philippines seems wrongheaded in the context of winning the war. Just because MacArthur made a promise on his exit from the Philippines that he shall return does not justify the losses of American lives to fulfil his obligation.
Craig Symonds:
No, he should not have fired Douglas MacArthur. Douglas MacArthur had a habit of issuing what he called communiques from his headquarters daily. There are thousands of them. Here is everything that has happened in the Southwest Pacific Theater. We did this, we did that, killed the enemy, attacked this spot. Only one name is ever included. MacArthur. Back home, he was godlike. Firing MacArthur in 1944 and 1945. Oh, my Lord. I do not think he could have done it. It is hard for me to come up with a reason why he should have done it.
Now this question you raised about strategic military goals versus moral imperatives. Moral imperatives should not be entirely discounted in war. There are occasions when the moral value of an operation has weight, maybe not more weight than the final strategic outcome, but weight nonetheless. MacArthur's argument that we said the Philippines were our responsibility. I personally pledge to return. If we do not do that, no one in Asia will ever trust us again. Those are not invalid arguments.
Formosa was a tough nut to crack. It would have been exceedingly difficult to take Formosa. It's only one island but it's large, and it's covered with Japanese airfields. It had a substantial Japanese garrison. So, taking Formosa would not have been a cakewalk. It happened to go MacArthur's way and we won the war. So, there we are.
Larry Bernstein:
Samuel Huntington wrote a book called The Soldier and the State, and it reflected the subordination of the military to the democratically elected president. MacArthur is too popular to be fired. He could not be controlled by the President or the Joint Chiefs. He was like a lone wolf.
I wonder if that would be in violation of what Huntington was talking about in the American system of government. It is intolerable for a senior commander to be that the President cannot fire him without too many repercussions. Talk to me about the Soldier and the State and the line of command.
Craig Symonds:
One of the most revered aspects of the American constitutional system is this idea of civilian control of the military. It is hammered into the minds of everyone who wears a uniform regularly. I mentioned earlier wars create their own momentum. There is a strong popular view that the civilian government is in charge until the bullets start flying and then you turn it over to the military, at least in terms of operational decision making that the military should decide what to do, not the civilians that civilians can hold back.
This came to a head in Vietnam when there were restrictions placed on the bombing targeting of American bombers, what you could hit, what you could not hit based on political calculations that had been made in Washington. Well, this will be too dangerous. We talked about the calculation of risk. Is it too dangerous to bomb Hanoi? Would it trigger a larger war? The pilots who flew the planes felt that the anti-aircraft batteries inside the restricted area were shooting at them and that they should be allowed to shoot back. So, this is a flexible boundary between civilian control and military execution that's subject to reconsideration under different circumstances.
Larry Bernstein:
What is special about Nimitz so that in the future we can find our next Admiral Nimitz to become our leader?
Craig Symonds:
Nimitz's life is a quintessential American success story. The child of immigrants came from Germany, settled in the hill country of Texas, went to public school, irregularly, ran around barefoot most of his youth, helping on the farm. He saw an artillery unit at a county fair, dressed up in their West Point uniforms and thought, boy, those guys look sharp and applied to West Point, but the spot was filled. So, what about Annapolis? Okay. And on such small things hinge such big outcomes because Nimitz became just the man you want in just the right place at just the right time. And we as Americans can take some solace for all the things that go wrong in this country. There is that resilience of manpower, humanity, people who can rise to the occasion when we need them. At least we hope so.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Craig for joining us.
If you missed our previous podcast was about a new novel The Restless Wave about the War in the Pacific by Admiral James Stavridis. The Admiral was the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO and the former Dean of Tuft’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
We discussed how fiction can give us a window into the life and trials of a young officer in the armed forces. The Admiral also explained how technological disruption can change how the military operates.
Leadership is critical in war, and Admiral Stavridis described why we often need to change our officer corps when war breaks out.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, War in the Pacific, here.
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