The Conquering Tide (58 page)

The brownshoes were simultaneously elites and insurgents. They disdained old naval dogmas and were resolved to subvert them. They wanted more of everything—more commands, promotions, decorations, publicity, and resources, and a more dominant voice in strategic planning. It was not enough, they argued, to rely on the leadership of traditional line officers who were “air-minded.” The new fast carrier task forces were the vanguard of the fleet that would carry the war into the western Pacific. Therefore, the fleet ought to be led by men who had come up through the brownshoe ranks. Not even Ernest King or Bill Halsey, who had passed through flight training as captains on the wrong side of forty, were bona fide members of the flying fraternity—they were latecomers who had earned their wings in order to qualify for carrier command. Most of the “real” brownshoes were younger men, including a group of ambitious and talented “Young Turks” who had earned their wings in the 1920s, led air squadrons, skippered carriers, participated in the development of new aircraft, and were approaching the threshold for flag rank.

The emerging generation of aviators was uncomfortably mindful that their rivals in the Army Air Forces had climbed the promotion ladder more rapidly. The army flyers had also enjoyed the benefits of a more open-handed policy in awarding medals and other honors. Naval leaders correctly suspected that Hap Arnold's USAAF aspired to consolidate the functions of military aviation under its own aegis. With a political brawl over service unification looming in the postwar future, the danger to the navy's institutional interests was evident. Towers told a colleague in Washington that there had been a “failure of the high commands to give senior aviation officers, of long experience and proven professional ability, a real voice in strategic plans.”
⁸³

As plans for
GALVANIC
took shape, Towers advised Nimitz to send the new carrier task forces on far-ranging missions to attack Japanese airfields and (if opportunity offered) the Japanese fleet. He warned against limiting their freedom of movement by keeping them corralled in defensive sectors. Spruance and Turner wanted the carriers to provide air cover to the fleet while troops were landed at Tarawa and Makin; Towers preferred to send them 600 miles northwest, into the Marshalls, where they could rain bombs down on the enemy's airfields and cut off his air response at the source. Towers, echoing his chief of staff, Forrest Sherman, thought the Gilberts a waste of time and balked at the scale of
GALVANIC
. The outspoken COMAIRPAC complained that “Spruance wants a sledgehammer to drive a tack.”
⁸⁴

Towers went around Nimitz to make his case to King and others in Washington. On August 18, he wrote James Forrestal, undersecretary of the navy: “I must confess that those of us out here who are in a position to have a reasonably good idea of not only what is going on but also what is planned, have a feeling approaching utter hopelessness, and when I say this I'm referring to major plans and major policies.”
⁸⁵
Towers privately criticized the elevation of the blackshoe Spruance to command of the Fifth Fleet, and when certain remarks reached Spruance's ears, a rift opened between them. Spruance later told Admiral Charles M. “Savvy” Cooke Jr. that “if you were not an admirer of Towers, your path was not made smooth if he could help it. . . . Towers was a very ambitious man.”
⁸⁶
That was perhaps the most damning indictment Spruance ever aimed at a fellow officer.

From their high perch, Nimitz and Spruance believed they saw the big picture more clearly than did the brownshoe insurrectionists. The carriers could strike the enemy hard and across great distances, but they could not win the transpacific campaign outright. Whatever their capabilities or aspirations, the aviators and their machines must fit coherently into the grand scheme of amphibious invasions supported by finely choreographed logistics. The force that would take the Gilberts included 191 ships, 35,000 troops, and 117,000 tons of cargo. Coordination and protection of such an enormous force was an overriding concern, and no single component of the fleet should be let off the leash without considering the consequences to the whole. Nimitz, patient and forbearing as he was, eventually grew weary of the protests and grievances, and instructed Towers to lower his tone. In a heated meeting that fall, Towers recalled, Nimitz's “reaction was to the effect that I did not know what I was talking about.”
⁸⁷

Prominent among the “Young Turks” was Captain Joseph J. Clark, known to friends and shipmates as “Jock” or “Jocko.” At the war's outset, he had been executive officer of the old
Yorktown
(CV-5). Promoted captain in February 1942, he had returned to Washington to await reassignment. There he made a name for himself by proposing a plan, seemingly absurd on its face, to build 150 new aircraft carriers. By his own account, there was nothing scientific in the figure: he thought it obvious, after Pearl Harbor, that the navy would need a vast fleet of carriers to crush Japan, and he had simply plucked a big, round number “out of the air.” Kelly Turner, still head of the navy's war plans unit, brushed the idea off, saying, “You can't get that many.” But Admiral Towers thought Clark was “absolutely right” and arranged to send the young captain on a multi-city speaking tour to promote the idea.
^*
88

Born and raised on a farm in northeast Oklahoma, Clark was of mixed Scotch-Irish and Cherokee Indian descent. He was a registered member of the Cherokee Nation, and the first Native American to graduate from the Naval Academy (class of 1917). By his own lights Clark was a typical “Oklahoma cowboy,” but he was proud of his partial Cherokee lineage and even played it up. He had been registered (by his parents) as one-eighth Cherokee.
^†
Clark willingly tolerated, or perhaps encouraged, physical descriptions referring to “the deep tan and high cheek bones of an Indian” (
Honolulu Star-Bulletin
, 1944), or his “hump-bridged nose and short-clipped, sparse hair which resembles a scalp lock and waves like prairie grass” (
Life
magazine, 1945).
⁸⁹
He grinned broadly for photographers while wearing a majestic feathered headdress. Cartoons published in his ships' newspapers and cruise books depicted him wielding a tomahawk to scalp the Japanese prime minister Hideki Tojo or the emperor Hirohito. Clark invited the chief of the Cherokee Nation to attend the commissioning of the new
Yorktown
(CV-10).

Clark was a leader in the mold of Bill Halsey—a colorful and exuberant character who wore his heart on his sleeve and did not mind making
himself slightly ridiculous in the eyes of his men. He battled his weight and carried an impressive paunch. The shirt flaps of his khaki uniform did not stay tucked. In otherwise glowing fitness reports, superiors drew attention to his lack of personal tidiness and to his physical bearing. Clark allowed himself to be made an object of fun, or deliberately seemed to undercut his own authority. When a navigator grounded his ship in an impossibly crowded Bermuda anchorage, the captain took the conn and barked, “Goddamn you, now it's my turn to run it aground!”
⁹⁰
A chief petty officer who served under him on the
Hornet
(CV-12) left this fond description:

Jocko Clark was part American Indian; his lower lip stuck way out, and was always sunburned. Finally, the doctor on the
Hornet
gave him no choice but to wear a gauze 4x4 with a string over his ears so the pad protected his lip. Jocko did it, but it made him madder than hell. I've seen him snatch three or four of those things off in the course of a couple of hours. He'd tear it off and throw it down. And here would come the doctor and make him a new one. . . . Whenever he came on the bridge—GQ or any other time—he often wore sick bay pajamas that he slept in. Sometimes his hairy stomach would be sticking out, but he was oblivious to his appearance. He was just universally loved, respected, and admired on the
Hornet
. He had a great feeling for the pilots. More than once, when a pilot landed aboard, shot up or whatever, the doctor, the emergency crew, and Jocko would get to him all about the same time. Jocko would bend over the stokes litter and pin a medal on the guy right there on the stretcher. You know pilots appreciated that. He was really and truly a great man.
⁹¹

Earning his gold wings in 1925, Clark had ascended rapidly through the ranks. He had flown several types of aircraft, eventually specializing in the Boeing F3B biplane fighter. He had skippered a carrier fighter squadron on the
Lexington
in 1933–34, when Ernest J. King was her captain. Clark had got on well with King, a history that stood him in good stead when the latter rose to COMINCH-CNO. Clark's first carrier command was the
Suwannee
, an 18,000-ton escort or “jeep carrier” converted from the hull of an oil tanker. While overseeing the commissioning of the ship in Newport News, Virginia, Clark drove the civilian yard workers and ship's crew to meet a seemingly impossible deadline, and managed to get the ship commissioned
in time to take part in Operation
TORCH
, the invasion of North Africa, in November 1942. He circulated a motto during this period of breakneck effort: “Get things done yesterday; tomorrow may be too late!”
⁹²
The
Suwannee
distinguished herself during
TORCH
, and Clark received high praise in his fitness reports.

In January 1943, he received orders sending him back to Newport News as prospective captain of the new
Yorktown
(CV-10), second-in-class of the
Essex
carriers. Clark subsequently learned that Admiral King had personally selected him for the prestigious new command.

The
Yorktown
had been launched on January 21, 1943, three weeks before Clark's arrival, with Eleanor Roosevelt acting as sponsor. Several minutes before the scheduled launch, while speeches were still underway, the great carrier had shifted, groaned, and begun creeping down the launch ways. The first lady, a seasoned veteran of ship-christening ceremonies, seized the waiting bottle with both hands and bashed it against the moving hull, shattering the bottle and splattering herself with champagne. All present agreed that the event was auspicious; the
Yorktown
was evidently in a hurry to get into the war. The crew gave her the first of several nicknames: “Ship in a Hurry.”
⁹³

The unfinished
Yorktown
was moored at a Newport News Shipbuilding & Drydock Company pier, where she would spend the next several months being outfitted and commissioned. When Clark arrived on February 15, he walked down the dock to have a look. Her wide flight deck towered over him. He had come a long way from Alluwe, Oklahoma. “This was a proud moment in my lifetime, and I knew it as I stood there.”
⁹⁴

The race to get the
Yorktown
into service drove the new crew to the edge of exhaustion. Clark was a slave driver, and he did not mind admitting it. Three other
Essex
carriers were in advanced construction, and Clark liked the idea of getting the
Yorktown
out to Pearl Harbor ahead of them all. That was a long shot, however, because the first-in-class
Essex
had been commissioned on the last day of 1942, and would soon depart on her shakedown cruise. Clark also had his eye on the
Lexington
(CV-16), another sister, which was being commissioned in Boston at the Fall River Company under the supervision of Captain Felix B. Stump. The fourth,
Bunker Hill
(CV-17), Captain John J. Ballentine, was at the Bethlehem Steel shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts. Clark frankly avowed that he wanted to beat the
Essex
to the Pacific, and “Beat the
Essex
” was adopted as the ship's motto.

Captain Donald Duncan of the
Essex
was a friend and academy classmate, and the two captains conferred closely and learned from one another's experiences. By mutual agreement they made copies of all outgoing correspondence concerning the outfitting of the ships, and shared it among themselves and with Stump and Ballentine.
⁹⁵
Clark was glad to share information, but his natural competitive instincts were never far from the surface; he expected the
Yorktown
to be superior to her sisters in every measurable respect.

The yard set a commission date of April 15, but warned that the schedule was likely to slip. Clark declared that he intended to meet it. Four thousand of the 31,000 workers at the yard were put on the job, and Clark lobbied to have needed building materials diverted from other ships under construction. He avowed that he would not “cut corners,” at least insofar as care and quality of equipment were concerned. But he was more than willing to finagle materials by underhanded means and to fudge safety regulations. An air officer on the rival
Essex
suspected that “a lot of dishonest things were done to get things provided for the
Yorktown
which should have come to the
Essex
just so we wouldn't get finished in time, but we never were able to prove anything.”
⁹⁶
Clark had ammunition loaded directly from flatcars, a prohibited procedure. When the yard could not meet his schedule for painting the hull, he put the crew on the job. He even assigned junior officers to join in the chipping and painting, upending an ancient naval taboo and prompting at least one young lieutenant to put in for a transfer. “Jocko had tremendous drive,” recalled George W. Anderson, the new ship's navigator (and a future chief of naval operations). “He always wanted to be first. He was very competitive. . . . It was drive, drive, drive all the time.”
⁹⁷

Much of Clark's time was apportioned to recruiting officers, and for this purpose he traveled frequently to Washington to look in on “BUPERS” (the Bureau of Naval Personnel). He wanted certain men in certain jobs, notably Raoul Waller as his executive officer. But he was also cognizant of the danger of bringing too many of his “friends” along, and he liked to use reservists in important roles—an attitude less common among many of his contemporary Annapolites.
⁹⁸
The commissioning period also involved intensive training. Clark purposely cut short the “Abandon ship” drill, telling the crew that he preferred to use the time for the “Don't give up the ship” drill. He instead stressed damage-control and firefighting procedures.