He was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery following a Washington funeral attended by Forrestal and the Chief of Naval Operations, Fleet Admiral Ernie King. Among his pallbearers was General Alexander Vandergrift, who had commanded the Marines on Guadalcanal, and Vice Admiral Aubrey Fitch, the Superintendent of the United States Naval Academy. He was awarded a fourth star posthumously.
My father, who had left for the States immediately upon receiving word of the admiral’s death, arrived too late to pay his respects. My mother found him standing on the tarmac at San Diego when she returned from Washington. He was in the throes of deep grief, a grief that took years to subside. He told my mother he was relieved to have missed the funeral. “It would have killed me,” he explained.
There was, however, an event near the end of my grandfather’s life that no one discussed. In none of the published accounts of my grandfather’s death nor in any of the many tributes offered by his contemporaries was mention made of the incident that had cost my grandfather his command just one day before the war’s end.
Less than three months earlier, he had been ordered by Nimitz to resume command of Task Force 38, which at that time constituted almost the entire Third Fleet as it provided air support to the American invasion of Okinawa. One week after he resumed command, my grandfather and Halsey received the first reports from search planes of a tropical storm south of Okinawa that was fast becoming a typhoon.
When the first reports of the June typhoon were received, the fleet meteorologists advised Halsey not to move the fleet. But Halsey, fearing that the typhoon would drive him westward and in range of Japanese planes based in China, ordered his task groups to sail southeast in an attempt to get around the storm. My grandfather was aboard his flagship, the Shangri-La. Puzzled by his instructions, he turned to his friend, a war correspondent for the Associated Press, Dick O’Malley, and said, “What the hell is Halsey doing, trying to intercept another typhoon?” His observation was a reference to Halsey’s actions during a typhoon that had struck the fleet in December 1944, sinking two destroyers. According to John Thach, my grandfather had recommended a heading for the fleet that would have avoided the earlier storm, as had Admiral Nimitz. But Halsey had insisted on another course, a course that tragically failed to take his ships out of harm’s way.
A little less than six months later, at one o’clock on the morning of June 5, Halsey received a late report from an amphibious command ship that this latest storm was too far to the south for the fleet to get safely around it. Halsey attempted to get out of its way by reversing course from southeast to northwest, greatly surprising the commanders of his task groups, who were now in imminent peril.
At four o’clock, one of those commanders, Admiral J. J. Clark, signaled my grandfather (to whom Halsey had given tactical command of the fleet’s race to safer waters) that their present course would bring his task group directly into the storm. A few minutes later he signaled, “I can get clear of the center of the storm quickly by steering 120. Please advise.”
My grandfather consulted Halsey, who advised against a course change. He then signaled Clark for an updated report of the position and bearing of the storm’s eye before ordering Clark to use his best judgment. After communicating with Halsey and Clark, my grandfather could have spent only a few minutes considering the matter before deciding to reject Halsey’s advice. But it was a few minutes too long. His order came twenty minutes after Clark signaled for advice and too late for his task group to escape the worst of the storm.
Although none of Clark’s ships sank, many of them were damaged, including four carriers. One hundred and forty-two aircraft were lost. Six men from Clark’s task group and a nearby fueling group were swept overboard by the storm-tossed seas and drowned. Four others were seriously injured.
A few days after Task Force 38 resumed operations off Okinawa, my grandfather and Halsey were ordered to appear before a court of inquiry on June 15. In the court’s opinion, the fleet’s encounter with the typhoon was directly attributable to Halsey’s order to change course and my grandfather’s failure to instruct Clark for twenty minutes.
Upon receiving the court’s report, Secretary Forrestal was prepared to relieve both Halsey and my grandfather. But Admiral King persuaded Forrestal that Halsey’s relief would be too great a blow to the Navy’s and the country’s morale.
Two months later, my grandfather was ordered to relinquish his command.
Professional naval officers constitute a small community today. It was a much smaller one in the years when my father and grandfather made their living at sea. Yet I only learned of the episode that closed my grandfather’s career when, many years later, I read an account of the typhoon in E. B. Potter’s biography of Admiral Halsey.
My father never mentioned it to me.
–– CHAPTER 2 ––
Slew
In his memoirs, Admiral Halsey makes brief mention of the typhoon, blaming his task group’s encounter with it on late warnings and erroneous predictions of the storm’s course, but he offers no description of my grandfather’s role in the disaster.
My grandfather’s request to return home rather than witness the drama of Japan’s surrender was a measure of his despair over losing his command. Halsey did write of his subordinate’s outrage at being relieved of his command, describing him as “thoroughly sore.”
I once suspected, as my father probably had, that the court’s findings had hastened my grandfather’s death. But as I grew older, it became easier to dismiss my suspicion as the dramatization of the end of a life that needed no embellishment from a sentimental namesake. My grandfather had not been banished into retirement after losing his command. President Truman had ordered him to Washington to serve under General Omar Bradley as the deputy director of the new Veterans Administration to help integrate back into civilian society the millions of returning American veterans, a prestigious and important appointment.
I doubt any assignment would have eased immediately the indignation he must have felt over losing his last wartime command. But by all accounts, my grandfather was a tough, willful, resilient man who, had he lived, would have resolved to serve with distinction in his new post as the surest way to put a great distance between himself and that fateful storm.
I was a few days shy of my ninth birthday when my grandfather died. I had seen very little of him during the war, and most of those occasions were hurried affairs. I remember being awakened in the dead of night on several occasions when he dropped in unannounced on his way from one assignment to another. My mother would assemble us on the parlor couch and then search the house for her camera, to record another brief reunion between her children and their famous grandfather. Even before the war, my father’s career often kept a continent or more between my grandparents and me. And the recollections I have of him have dimmed over the half century that has elapsed since I saw him last.
The image that remains is that of a rail-thin, gaunt, hawk-faced man whose slight build was disguised by a low-timbered voice and a lively, antic presence. It was fun to be in his company, and particularly so if you were the primary object of his attention, as I remember being when we were together.
He rolled his own cigarettes, which he smoked constantly, and his one-handed technique fascinated me. While the skill was anything but neat (Admiral Halsey once ordered a Navy steward to follow him around with a dustpan and broom whenever he was aboard the admiral’s flagship), that it could be accomplished at all struck me as praiseworthy. He would give me his empty bags of Bull Durham tobacco, which I valued highly, and which deepened my appreciation of the performance.