When the young British soldier goes out to the East, Rudyard Kipling wrote, “’e acts like a babe and ’e drinks like a beast.” Rear Admiral Kemp Tolley thinks he knows why: “When I went back out to the Far East in 1931, booze was half a buck a bottle and a nickel a shot in the cabarets. You couldn’t afford not to drink.”
Tolley was born in Manila’s Army hospital in 1908, when his father, Army Lieutenant Colonel Oscar Kemp “O.K.” Tolley, was on his second tour of duty in the Philippines. Off duty, O.K. was a history buff. This enthusiasm rubbed off on young Kemp when his father bought a set of history books that dated back to the 1880s. The boy was horrified, however, upon reading of atrocities committed against the British in the war the books called “The American Rebellion.” He could find no mention of these bestial acts in the books his mother used to teach him from their quarters in the Philippines.
On duty, O.K. and his brother officers faced a number of small insurrections throughout the Philippines, armed only with the .38 caliber revolvers the Army issued to its officers in the days before the Colt .45. The .38s were incapable of stopping a crazed Mohammedan in his tracks before he killed a Christian with his bolo knife, his passport to the happy hereafter. So the elder Tolley wrote to officials at Colt, explaining the problem. In response, they sent him what amounted to a small cannon—a .45 revolver with a 7 1/2-inch barrel—and a bill for $14.75. Tolley cheerfully paid.
Young Kemp had learned a great deal from his father. When he entered the U.S. Naval Academy in 1925, he was the sixth youngest of his 408 classmates. But he knew some things his elders did not. He knew not to believe everything he read in books, and he knew guns were not toys, but tools of his father’s trade. The heavy rifle he carried in solitary stalks around his country village of Monk- ton, Maryland, 50 miles from the Academy, had left him with curvature of the spine and his right arm an inch longer than his left. To give the local boy a chance of staying on board, the medical people sent him to the gymnasium, where two physical therapists took him in hand. So successful were they that the muscular youngster went on to become a four-year member of the gym and rifle teams. Tolley also won the coveted gold cross of the Academy as the best rifle and pistol shot of his class.
When the eagle-eyed midshipman graduated in 1929, his biography in the yearbook hinted at the cloak-and-dagger career he would pursue with such intensity and success. The single adjective it used to describe him was “secretive,” and it concluded, “Never bones (studies), never has time to bone, stands high in his class anyway. He’d rather spend his time at something interesting such as taking Russian lessons from a Plebe. . . . But he is going to make good in the service because you just can’t confine a man who is always making something.”
Kemp Tolley retired in 1959 and wrote three books that summarized his career, Yangtze Patrol, Cruise of the Lanikai, and Caviar and Commissars, a trilogy that told much about his unique, exciting life. But the books left most readers yearning only to know more. He has filled in some of the gaps in about 100 published articles, but much more still remains to be said about this self-described “loner.”
In 1975, Dr. John T. Mason, Jr.—then-director of the U.S. Naval Institute’s Oral History Program—conducted several interviews with Rear Admiral Tolley. So thorough and factual was the result that one would be hard- pressed to improve upon it today.
In 1910, at age two, Kemp was too young to remember returning to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where his father attended the obligatory School of the Line. But through family reminiscences, he heard talk about his family’s acquaintance with Douglas MacArthur, then a lieutenant. At that time, of course, there were no movies and no television. If you wanted a radio, you made one yourself. The dramatic society served as a principal form of entertainment. Even though bachelor MacArthur’s noble brow was receding somewhat, he was still a handsome guy, and all the palpitating young gals and young wives always wanted to play opposite him as the heroine. He and O.K. were on the sandlot baseball team and everyone thought that Douglas was a pretty fine fellow.
After Leavenworth, the Tolleys went back to the Philippines, which Kemp’s father, a hot- weather expert, loved. They came home in 1914, and World War I broke out. In 1916, O.K. was ordered to the Mexican border. Kemp recalls:
Every now and then, some half- dozen Mexican bandits armed with rifles tried to shoot six different types of ammunition out of the same gunnery. They were very poor, very ignorant, and certainly not particularly dangerous, until Pancho Villa invaded New Mexico and killed some people. As a result, my dad and his outfit were stationed along the river, and we lived in two of those small towns for about two years.
That, Kemp felt, was the start of his basic philosophy of being a loner. He had always been perfectly happy and able to move on his own without too much companionship. “I guess,” he says, “that was because my mother always taught me by the Calvert System, a kind of correspondence course out of Baltimore that furnished books and guidance to the teacher. We were kicked around from one place to another so frequently that it wasn’t practical to go to local schools.”
His mother was a Baltimore native, a third-generation ex-Genoese named Passano, whose family ran the Waverly Press. After O.K. retired in 1923, the family settled down at Monkton, and Kemp enrolled in a school that went from the fourth to the seventh grades, all of them taught by one 18-year-old who went from class to class during the course of an 0800 to 1515 working day. From there he went to Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, having spent an interim year in a local high school and an agricultural high school, both of which he detested.
Kemp’s ambitions were beginning to form. He hoped for a career in the military. Failing that, he wanted to attend the Colorado School of Mines. Having inherited his mother’s love of new places and new faces, what he wanted more than anything was the chance to travel. His parents left education decisions to him. “They were very lenient and most understanding in that respect,” Kemp remembers.
During World War I, O.K. went to France with the First Division. Among his superiors was an officer Kemp had known as his father’s battalion commander, an autocrat who loved to bedevil both adults and children, including Kemp. He recalled that this martinet used to walk behind him and strike him smartly in the head with his swagger stick for no apparent reason. Soon after the division arrived in France, word got back to this sadistic officer that several of his soldiers planned to shoot him in the back the next time they went over the top. So he ordered Kemp’s father to put these people in double irons. O.K. refused to do it on the grounds that it was illegal under the Articles of War. In the investigation that followed, O.K. was cleared, but he knew that his career in the Army was over if he stayed in. His accuser became a lieutenant general.
Kemp’s life changed dramatically in 1924, when his father drove the whole family to the Naval Academy one sunny Sunday. Kemp had spent most of his summers on the Little Gunpowder River near Monkton, swimming, fishing, canoeing, or doing something on the water, so he was delighted to see the midshipmen in cutters, some under sail, some being rowed. He made up his mind to enter the Academy, but acceptance proved to be a difficult ordeal. Maryland Senator William Cabell Bruce had only two appointments to grant—and 32 applicants. Kemp left Baltimore Polytechnic Institute and enrolled in Baltimore’s Army-Navy prep school for a full year of cramming before taking the entrance exam to the Academy. He finished second and won one of the two appointments.
At the Academy, Tolley met other plebes who had an easier time getting in than he did. His roommate, Harry Simpson, lived next door to a congressman who called over the fence one day, “Harry, how would you like to go to Annapolis?” After his congressman explained what he was talking about, Harry said, “Sure, what have I got to lose?” But he went to the Army-Navy football game in Chicago his plebe year, where he met a girl who rendered him unable to think of anyone or anything else. Simpson’s grades deteriorated so badly as to end his military career.
Kemp recalls:
We got very little spending money as midshipmen. The first classmen, the graduating class, got $12 a month, second class got $8, third class youngsters got $5, and the plebes got $3. No one, even then, could live riotously on $3 a month. Fortunately, in my day at the Naval Academy, it was customary for the young lady to take care of her own lodging and feed herself and the midshipman as well, because she knew he didn’t have much money. I think at West Point it was the responsibility of the young man to provide the accommodations.
Those midshipmen who had naval officer friends were frequently in luck, because sometimes they would volunteer to put the girl up and feed the midshipman. For the most part, though, the relationship between an officer and a midshipman was like that between a hare and a hound. The poor plebe, like the hare, knew that trouble was coming, he just had no idea from which direction. During his four years at the Academy, Kemp was never friendly with any of his company officers. To him, a lieutenant was an old man. It took ten years to make lieutenant, and some lieutenant commanders had from 12 to 18 years’ service. Still, he found when he graduated and served with some of his former duty officers that they were fine fellows. They had been, like the midshipmen, victims of a bad system they did not invent and had neither motive nor opportunity to change.
Essentially, they all had the same problems and motivations. Kemp Tolley was no exception:
Leave, liberty, and money continued to occupy our minds, because all three were in short supply. Christmas was the first leave you got. For a while there had been Easter leave for four or five days, but that was suspended while I was there. Money was a paramount problem for most. Our pay was $65 a month, out of which we had to supply our own clothes and the necessities of life. We had a ration allowance of $24 a month, but we never saw that. It went straight to the commissary to pay our grocery bill.
But I made out all right. When I graduated, I had about $1,000 on the books, which just took care of my graduation equipment. The poor guys who, unlike me, lived a great distance away, paid and paid. Hitchhiking didn’t exist. You had to buy a railroad ticket. No airplanes, of course, and only one midshipman in ten owned a car.
Kemp’s first love was shooting. He owned a shotgun, a rifle, and a revolver, and he used to annoy his neighbors by popping away whenever he could afford the ammunition, which was not often. He pinched pennies by using a muzzle-loading shotgun, about half as expensive to shoot as a breechloader that shoots an ordinary cartridge. Thus, when he first went on the rifle range, he had no problem in qualifying as an expert rifleman. He made the Navy Rifle Team—indoor and outdoor—and got the chance to confirm the old shooter’s adage, “It never rains on the rifle range.” The team made only one trip a year—to New York—to compete. They went up on Friday, shot on Saturday, and came back Sunday. Saturday night they had to figure out how they were going to spend their $3, $5, $8 or $12 in the big city.
The gym team made only about two trips a year to compete; for years, they were the national champions. Every other year the team went to West Point to challenge Army and to Philadelphia to take on Temple. The rest of the time, about six meets a year, the university teams came to the Academy.
Kemp remembers his studies at the Academy with mixed feelings:
As to our studies, every month stood on its own. You took an exam every month and it always seemed like one exam was barely over before a new series turned up. There were about six subjects, two each day. If you got a failing mark, anything below 2.5, any one month, you were hung on the ‘tree.’ If your basic average fell below 2.5, you were in real trouble. You either had to take a re-examination for the whole course, get turned back, or get thrown out, depending on how far below 2.5 you were.
This really depleted plebe ranks. We started out with 408 and graduated 252, just about the standard 40% attrition. If you said, ‘Oh, God, that guy is one of the 40%,’ it meant that he was rather substandard mentally, and your guess was that he would never make it academically. A great proportion of them went out at the end of January, but not for mental reasons. They just didn’t like the Naval Academy.
There were about 100 ex-enlisted men in each class. They were selected from the ranks and sent to Bainbridge to take the entrance exam like everybody else. Some made outstanding officers, but the casualty rate was fairly high due to the fact that they didn’t like the discipline. They had been used to sailors’ discipline, and midshipman discipline was too much for them.”
Looking back, Kemp gives the courses themselves low marks. “They were too hidebound,” he says, “It wasn’t the type of education that inspires independent thought.” He found the whole curriculum to be development of the ability to do things on your own, to research and study on your own. The professor was not up there to explain or to elaborate on what the book said. The professors, particularly those who were naval officers, were referees between the student, the book, and the examining board.
Naval officer professors were often out of their depth in liberal arts areas, such as English and History. But in navigation, gunnery, and seamanship, they all knew their stuff, were enthusiastic, and were good teachers.
Civilian professors were a mixed bag. Some were viewed almost as comics. We had one, Herman the German, he was known as, who was an English prof with one leg shorter than the other. I suppose old Herman was a nice guy, but we never got to know him. He would almost act the part of a clown in his Germanic attempts to force ideas on us. And then there was Slipstick Willie, a Professor of Physics and Electricity, who came in for a share of lampooning. On the other hand, in the Language Department for example, they had some excellent people, nearly all civilians.
On a typical day you marched to class, fell out, hung up your coat and cap and stood up. The section leader reported absentees, and the order of seats was given. Then the professor might ask, ‘Any questions on today’s lesson?’ The midshipmen then asked as many questions as they could in order to use up all 40 minutes of the time available. The professor, of course, was wise to the ones who were playing this game on him. Somehow he had to find a way to give each of the 15 students a mark for the day. And so the game was played by both student and teacher. But there was no opportunity for a teacher to teach under these circumstances.
Still, I think it was preparing you for the days when you would be on your own, where there wouldn’t be any teacher when you went aboard ship as an Engineering Officer, let us say, with a plant you are unfamiliar with, with no help to find out how it worked just from the books. That is precisely the way you are brought up in the Naval Academy.
Midshipmen looked forward to summer cruises, because they would be getting out of the Academy, and the hare-and-hounds games would end. Cruises were made in battleships. In Kemp’s first cruise—just after first-class graduation—plebes who had become youngsters went on board the battleship USS Utah (BB-31) in June 1926. Sailors manned the port side of the ship and midshipmen the starboard. Tolley and his brother youngsters shoveled coal in the fire rooms, swabbed decks, scrubbed the paint work, and did everything but mess cook, which was done by Filipinos who had accompanied them from the Academy.
Second classmen did the work of petty officers—boat coxwains, junior directors on deck to show the youngsters how to scrub paint work and paint. Having done all that the year before, they were helpful to the youngsters, some of whom did not know which end of the paint brush to dip into the pot.
First classmen stood junior officer of the deck watch, aide to the navigator and chief engineer, and did largely what they would do one day on a battleship as fresh-caught ensigns. The whole atmosphere was one of familiarity, with no hazing or uneven treatment between the first and third classes. The best part was liberty, but in Kemp’s three cruises, he did not once go to Europe. “This was the era of Calvin Coolidge,” Kemp says. “He could put his foot on a dime and tell which was heads or tails—a penny-pincher if there ever was one.” But the summer cruise was most noteworthy for its absence of hazing. When he was no longer on the receiving end of it, Kemp viewed hazing as a way to make a plebe feel he was part of a pecking order, that he should not get too full of himself, and that he had to undergo some demeaning experiences and frustrations in order to realize he was a human being who had to fit in a tight little society.
The Naval Academy denied it, even though any duty officer could walk down any corridor and see such things as a plebe walking in a single file or turning straight corners or sitting ramrod straight on the front edge of his chair in the mess hall. Yet Academy officials did nothing about it, because they, too, had all survived this system. The midshipmen largely ran the regiment, and regimental officers— from the five-striper on down—had tremendous independence, as long as things went all right. The duty officer did not intrude, except when he saw individuals with spots on their blouses, or hands in their pockets, or wearing unshined shoes or non-regulation clothing, such as low shoes, which only the first class could wear. So the hierarchy, as well as the pecking order privileges, were well established The first class were at the top of the pile and they were not surrendering any of it. If they saw a youngster with hands in pockets, he got them sewed up fast, under regimental auspices. And the officers had nothing to do with such internal administration.
But there the system did have its excesses. According to Tolley:
As you will always find in any group of humans, there were a few sadistically inclined people who really gloried in causing pain to people, and the preferred method to apply pain was a broom. Now, a broom looks like a large, feathery object which would almost caress your backside. But when you took an ordinary broom and whittled most of the loose ends off until you just had the part up near the handle, plus the part that is stitched around it, you have a good and solid club. If you get whacked with it while you are bent over, it will rattle your teeth. The first time it hits you, you can’t believe that a broom could do that. It jolts your backside right through the top of your head.
It never broke any bones that I know of. Nobody ever got anything but bruises, but it was a brutal form of punishment. I had a roommate who had a sadistic streak in him. I saw him bend Jack McCain over; Jack barely squeaked through under the height requirements and, soaking wet, didn’t weigh 115 pounds. He looked like a wretched little animal that had just crawled out of the water with its fur still wet. But Jack was tougher than hell. I had heard my old roommate ask Jack to name the morning menu. A plebe was supposed to know the weather report, the morning menu, and certain other items, like the names of various British battleships and their sister ships and who was the greatest baseball player of all time and a bunch of utterly useless things. So old Jack would bend over, and my roomie would hit him three or four or five times and say, ‘Do you want another one? Are you going to learn it the next time?’
And Jack would say, ‘Hit me again, sir, I can take it.’ And he would tell him that, until my roomie would give up. Tears were coming out of Jack’s eyes but he wouldn’t give up. Jack was not the brightest naval officer that ever lived, but he was certainly one of the gutsiest. The son of a four-star admiral, Jack himself made four stars and his son might have, too, had he not chosen a career as one of the senators from Arizona.
In my years at the Naval Academy, I knew of about 15 people like my roomie. One of them broke his arm one time and we were all elated. Then, by golly, he discovered that a one-arm-operated sword was a satisfactory substitute for a broom that took two good arms to wield. You had to be careful and use the flat side instead of the cutting edge, such as it was. But my roomie and his kind never prospered. He ended up a commander, but others never graduated. There was definitely a deficiency in their character.
Rear Admiral Tolley certainly had no “deficiency” in character. His Naval Academy experience had prepared him for what lay ahead, and he became one of the most colorful men ever to don the uniform of the U.S. Navy.