04 August 2010
 
The War in the Navy


(Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, 1945. Official navy picture)
 
CDR Joe Rochefort had a sign behind his desk at Station Hypo:
 
“There’s no limit to what you can accomplish, so long as you don’t care who gets the credit!”

That was not true for others in the Pacific. Not the Redman Brothers, certainly, but at least their mendacity is understandable. They were not running the show when the deal went down. Sorry to back-track on you, but this is necessary.
 
If you want the man most responsible for the successful Japanese attack, you should not throw a pebble on the grave of poor Husband Kimmel, who watched his fleet being destroyed in the harbor on December 7th.

(Then Captain Edward Layton. Official navy Picture)
 
Eddie Layton was there. He said “Kimmel stood by the windows of his office at the submarine base... a spent .50 caliber machine gun bullet crashed through the glass.” It cut the front of his white blouse and bruised him on the chest. Layton reported the Pacific Fleet Commander said: "It would have been merciful had it killed me."
 
Kimmel was prescient about that.  The cover-your-ass drill began almost immediately back in Washington. Kimmel was sent packing ten days later and Chester Nimitz was brought in. Kimmel would spend the rest of his life defending his actions prior to the attack, accurately pointing out that crucial information had been withheld from him in the crucial months before the disaster.
 
The real culprits in the failure never paid a dime for what they did, and the culpability went right to the top.
 
The officer who was directly responsible for the failure of the Navy to be ready was a son-of-bitch named Richmond Kelly Turner. I will say it without emotion at this distance, but in the day, he was the Navy’s equivalent of George Patton: serenely confident of his own abilities and filled with a divine certainty of the correctness of his judgment.
 
He was a tall and imposing man with beetling brows and a sharp intelligence and belligerent manner.
 
He was commissioned a regular deck officer, fifth in the Annapolis Class of ’08, and a force of nature. He rose through the Battleship Navy was a hard man, impatient of his subordinates but invaluable to weaker officers who were senior to him, Like Admiral “Betty” Stark, the Chief of Naval Operations and became the kind of Flag officer that Eddie Layton was fond of saying “couldn’t go ashore without giving detailed instructions to the coxswain.”
 
He was possessed of a self-generated vision. He observed the future of naval warfare involved the airplane, and as a Commander, volunteered for flight training at Pensacola, later commanding a seaplane tender and serving as XO of the USS Saratoga, one of the first modern big deck (for the time) aircraft carriers.
 
Then and now, only rated aviation officers can command what were clearly becoming the queens of the Fleet, so as I said, Richmond Kelly Turner was not a stupid man.
 
He attended the Naval War College at Newport in 1935, and was kept on until 1938 as the head of the Strategy faculty. He never had a lick of intelligence training, but he was absolutely confident of his ability to craft strategy.
 
His last ship (he would command task groups as a Flag officer) was the heavy cruiser Astoria (CA-34), and therein lies a tale.
 

(USS Astoria (CA-34) underway off Hawaii, 1942. Official Navy picture)
 
Upon completion of Fleet Problem XX in early1939, Captain Turner and his sleek warship were summoned north to embark the ashes of Japanese Ambassador Hirosi Saito for the journey back to his homeland. It was a gesture calculated to express America's gratitude Japan in a period of rising tensions, wrapped in the guise of reciprocity for the ceremonial return of the remains of United States Ambassador to Japan, Edgar A. Bancroft, who died on post in 1926.
 
Brief stops for fuel and ceremony with local Japanese communities were conducted in Panama and Honolulu before proceeding west across the wide Pacific. On 17 April, escorted by IJN destroyers Hibiki, Sagiri and Akatsuki, Turner steamed slowly into Yokohama harbor with the United States ensign at half-staff and the Japanese flag at the fore.
 
A 21-gun salute from Astoria was returned by the light cruiser Kiso. American sailors carried the ceremonial urn ashore that afternoon, with a state funeral held the next day. After the ceemony, the Japanese  turned on the hospitality for Turner and his sailors.
 
I have seen a picture of one of the parties that were held in honor of the visiting representatives of the Main Enemy of Japan. At the Tokyo Naval club party on April 19th, Captain turner is seated in the front row, just a few seats away from then-VADM Isoroku Yamamoto, IJN, the architect of the strike on Pearl.
 
Eddie Layton used to play bridge with Admiral Yamamoto, when he was a language student there.
 
Captain Turner radiated charm and was praised by US Ambassador Joseph C. Grew for his grace in the diplomatic process.  The whole visit went so well that Ambassador Saito's widow donated a pagoda to adorn the yard of Luce Hall at Annapolis.
 
Astoria departed Yokohama for a round of good-will port visits at Shanghai, Hong Kong, Manila, and Guam before returning to her home port at San Pedro. Clearly earmarked for flag rank, Turner reported to Main Navy to become Director of War Plans (OP-16), working for the 8th Chief of Naval Operations, Harold Raynsford “Betty” Stark.
 

(ADM Stark as CNO. Official navy Photo)
 
“Betty” Stark got his nickname as a plebe in the Class of ’03, and you have to put him down as the other major enabler of the disaster at Pearl. An intelligent and insightful officer with a tousle of gray hair, Stark hated controversy, and was grateful that the forceful Turner was able to take over the tough and mind-numbing job of generating the detailed plans that would be used to take the war to Europe and Japan.
 
The problem was that his portfolio in Op-16 had two parts: plans and estimates. The former would determine how the coming war would be waged. The latter contained the critical elements of where and when. I told you Kelly Turner was a son-of-a-bitch earlier, and what is more, once he was out of his area of expertise as a line officer, he was wrong more often than he was right but incapable of admitting it.
 
Accordingly, when the Office didn’t like the intelligence assessment from the Office of Naval Intelligence, he directed it to be changed. He used his Flag rank and access to Betty Stark to bulldoze all opposition. He seized control of the Naval Communications and the products of the Fleet Radio Units and wrenched the analysis over to his estimates section.
 
There he had three officers preparing the assessment of what the Japanese were going to do, and they were not intelligence officers, but they did know what their Boss wanted.
 
The war in Main Navy was as savage as anything that happened in the jungles of the Pacific later, and the graves of thousands of sailors and Marines from Pearl Harbor on are directly attributable to the staff wars that went on in Turner’s time at War Plans.
 
Those are bold statements, I know, and the heavy secrecy that wrapped the ULTRA program enabled those who won the staff war and lost a Fleet on December 7th were able to pin their mistakes on others.
 
Thankfully, we say, it can’t happen again. We learned our lesson, right?
 
Remember the sign over Joe Rochefort’s desk. I do.
 
When I was ending my career in the Navy, watched the new Administration of George W. Bush come to the Pentagon. Uncle Don Rumsfeld was a bureaucratic bully like Kelly Turner. He brooked no opposition to what he knew to be true.
 
When the intelligence gang would not go along with revealed truth, he entrusted his Plans and Policy Chief Doug Feith to set up his own little analytic office to cull through the raw material to find nuggets that supported the position Uncle Don was convinced was right.
 
You know where that went.
 
Oh, and one other thing. In a stunning reorganization, the navy is consolidating all of its “information” resources into a New OpCode. The former Radio Intelligence tribe that got defacto independence after World War Two is being jammed together with the Office of Naval Intelligence and Naval Communications. The CNO is making an intelligence officer walk point on the reorganization, but there is clearly going to be a sharing of leadership in the future. We will clearly someday have a Communications officer running the show. It is not 1940 all over again, I am sure.
 
But it certainly is back to the future, isn’t it?
 
The secrets that Eddie Layton and my pal Mac kept finally came out in the 1970s, and Mac lead the drive to get Joe Rochefort a posthumous Distinguished Service Medal.  Eddie Layton died before completing his book, but it was finally published in 1985, giving the first account of how badly the Navy leadership had botched the analysis of Japanese intentions.
 
Kelly Turner died with his reputation intact on February 12, 1961 He is buried in Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno, CA, alongside his wife Hattie, and near those of Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, Raymond A. Spruance, and Charles A. Lockwood with their spouses.
 
It was an arrangement made by all of them when they were alive.
 

(Grave of Admiral R.K. Turner at San Bruno)
 
Spruance had his nomination to Fleet Admiral blocked by Congressman Carl Vinson, who got a Nimitz-class carrier named in his honor for being chair of the House Armed Services Committee. Vinson preferred Bill Halsey get the honor. Lockwood was the architect of unrestricted submarine warfare that strangled the Home Islands.
 
And of course, after Kelly Turner was eased out of War Plans due his belligerent inability to work with the Army, he led the naval campaign at Guadalcanal. That was the one that began just as the Japanese changed their codes, and Kelly and his sailors and Marines had to fight in the blind.
 
What goes around, you know?
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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