President Harry S Truman had served in the National Guard, with Army artillery in World War I, and as a colonel in the reserve after the war. As a senator in World War II, he had been struck in the Pearl Harbor hearings by the inadequacies of the military system, and he had chaired a special Senate committee probing into the duplications, inefficiencies, and waste in the separate Army and Navy operations and contracts. General of the Army George C. Marshall, who had Truman’s admiration, had called for military unification during the war.
“One of the strongest convictions which I brought to the office of President,” Truman would write, “was that the antiquated defense setup of the United States had to be reorganized quickly as a step toward ensuring our future safety and preserving world peace. From the beginning of my administration, I began to push for unification of the military establishment into a single department of the armed forces.”1 In the summer of 1945, when Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal recommended that the President endorse legislation increasing the strength of the Navy and Marine Corps, Truman did not approve, but instead set in motion a unification process and dynamic that would run for more than half a decade.
Hanson Baldwin, a 1924 U.S. Naval Academy graduate and the iconic military editor of The New York Times for 40 years, thought that “the unification procedure came one war too late.” The Army Air Forces were seeking to become an independent service delivering nuclear weapons with bombers just at the time that the German V-2 announced the dawning of the missile age: “. . . so what was the use of creating a triple kind of service with all the overhead that it entailed. Unification has meant triplication in many ways, as far as our bureaucracy and overhead is concerned and as far as the numbers of people involved . . . it has been a very costly enterprise and one of the reasons is that defense expense has increased so much purely due to this overhead.”2
In the summer of 1945, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) were directed to study Army and Navy legislative drafts. The Chiefs—Generals George C. Marshall and “Hap” Arnold, Admirals William D. Leahy and Ernest J. King—could not agree. In parallel, senators introduced two opposing unification bills in the Congress. Different players among the “unifiers” wanted naval aviation to transfer to the proposed new Air Force, and the Marine Corps to the Army. The Navy Secretary did not stand on the status quo, but he could not support a single department, a single cabinet secretary, with the Navy in a subordinated position.
Forrestal brought important credentials to his role as Secretary. He had served in naval aviation in World War I, risen to become President of Dillon, Read on Wall Street, become Under Secretary of the Navy, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Navy following the death of Secretary Frank Knox in May 1944. Truman appreciated Forrestal’s record of accomplishments and knew it would be a mistake to fire him. The two had several private chats at the White House.3
While the President exercised patience with Forrestal, he pressed ahead sending a military reorganization message to the Congress on 19 December 1945, calling for: a single Department of National Defense headed by a civilian, to be a member of the Cabinet; three branches of the department—Army, Navy, and Air Force—each under an Assistant Secretary; carrier- or water-based aviation and the Marine Corps to remain an integral part of the Navy; an active-duty Chief of Staff of the department, and active-duty commanders for each of the component branches. Forrestal advised White House staff that he could not support these proposals, and that while his senior naval officers would not publicly oppose the President, they would not testify in favor of the proposed reorganization.4
It should be noted that, unlike General Marshall, the Chief of Naval Operations Fleet Admiral King kept his focus on prosecution of the war to the very end; unification was not his issue. Vice Admiral William Smedberg, who during the War had served first on King’s staff and then became naval aide to Forrestal, recalls an exchange between the two. “Mr. Secretary,” King said, “What the Navy does will speak for itself. We don’t have to blow our own horn,” and Forrestal replied in words to this effect: “Admiral, you’re going to sink your Navy if you don’t let the people of this country know what you are doing, because the Air Force is telling everybody what they are doing, and they don’t hear anything about what the Navy is doing. We’re going to start telling them what the Navy is doing.”5
Four days before Truman’s message went to the Congress, Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz had been sworn in as the new Chief of Naval Operations. During his service as unified Commander of the Central Pacific Force, Nimitz had recommended national military unification to a JCS committee in December 1944. Now, almost a year later, he appeared before a Senate committee saying that his earlier opinion had been formed without adequate study. He opposed a single military department, because it might impede the vital role of sea power. He saw no need for a separate Air Force. “It was no more warranted,” he said, “than a separate submarine force. After all, the Navy had 250 submarines, and they had played an indispensable, and fairly independent, role in defeating Japan.”6
As tensions, accusations, charges of muzzling, and countercharges continued to mount among the White House, Navy, Army, Army Air Forces, and in Congress with each new week in 1946, Admiral Smedberg recalled: “On one occasion, the naval aviators got together with most of the senior admirals in the SecNav’s office . . . to discuss with the Secretary of the Navy the possibility of naval aviation going in a body and joining the Air Force. There were several who got up and spoke in favor of it, and there were several others, including Forrest Sherman, who were vigorously opposed.”7
On 13 May, Truman called Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson and Forrestal to his office, told them to work together and list their areas of agreement and disagreement. At the end of May, the two secretaries sent him a joint letter stating that they were not able to agree. In mid-June, the President advised both that he had decided, and had advised the heads of the congressional committees, that he supported a single Department of National Defense, a separate Air Force, which would take over land-based aviation, naval reconnaissance, antisubmarine patrol, and protection of shipping, and that the Marine Corps function would continue undisturbed.8
Forrestal and his active-duty Navy team struggled over how best to respond to the President. In late June, his reply—not committing to agreement—went to the White House, and the Secretary of the Navy boarded a plane to travel to the Pacific to witness the atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll, and then to continue around the world on a visit to the fleet. During a refueling stop in San Francisco, Forrestal was advised by base operations that the White House was on the line.
“Forrestal came back to the plane visibly disturbed. After we got airborne he sent for me and said: ‘Sit down, Smeddy, I want to tell you what happened. That was the President of the United States, and he told me in no uncertain terms that if I wouldn’t go along with a single department of defense, he would transfer naval aviation to the Air Force and he would transfer the Marine Corps to the Army. I recognized that I had no alternative. I had to say I would go along with a single defense department.’”9
1. Harry S Truman, Years of Trial and Hope, vol. 2 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956), 46.
2. The Reminiscences of Hanson Weightman Baldwin, vol. 2, interviewed by John T. Mason, Jr., (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute, 1976) 461, 476–77.
3. Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley, Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal (New York: Knopf, 1992; Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2000), 326.
4. Truman, Years of Trial and Hope, 49.
5. The Reminiscences of Vice Admiral William R. Smedberg III, U.S. Navy (Retired), vol. 2, interviewed by John T. Mason, Jr. (Annapolis, MD, U.S. Naval Institute, 1979), 297.
6. E. B. Potter, Nimitz (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1976), 408.
7. Smedberg, Reminiscences, 348–350.
8. Truman, Years of Trial and Hope, 50–51.
9. Smedberg, Reminiscences, 314–15.