Cherokee Jocko Fights the Cold War
By
Clark G. Reynolds
Navy History, June 2005
Rear Admiral Clark (right) earned his reputation as a fighter in World War II but would have to do some smart maneuvering to stay in the fight during the Cold War. Here he dons a Sioux Indian headdress with Fleet Admiral William F. Leahy on 3 September 1945 in Yankton, South Dakota, celebrating Japan's formal surrender.
Take off those neckties!" roared Rear Admiral J. J. "Jocko" Clark as he emerged from the RY-1 transport plane at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi on 27 June 1945. The plush Navy version of the Army Air Forces (AAF) B-24 Liberator bomber had brought this premier task group commander of the Fast Carrier Task Force from the war-torn Pacific to the richly deserved rest of a training command.
Born and raised as part Cherokee in the former Indian Territory that became Oklahoma, Clark equated Texas heat with that of the Pacific. At the command, his new officers happily removed their ties. His reputation as a fighter had preceded him in the fleet and the press, visualized by cartoon caricatures of him having scalped enemy Japan's Emperor Hirohito.
The seemingly trivial demands of demobilization enabled this divorced veteran to court and marry his second wife, prominent Texas entrepreneur-banker Shannon Jensen, in May 1946. By that time, however, the euphoria of global peace had begun to unravel as the Cold War developed between the United States and Soviet Russia. At the same time, the AAF was agitating for independent status as a third service, thereby threatening the future of the Navy, now centered on its own air arm.
Interservice passions flared so dramatically that Clark's fellow wartime fast carrier group commander, Vice Admiral Arthur W. Radford, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (Air), had ordered him to Washington to be his assistant that September. "Jock," as his friends called him, accepted the idea of unification but not with a separate Air Force. The two men and other naval aviators were opposed by key peers who accepted a U.S. Air Force, notably Vice Chief of Naval Operations Vice Admiral D. C. Ramsey and Clark's Naval Academy classmate (1918) Vice Admiral Forrest Sherman, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (Operations).
Sherman, however, had the ear of the CNO, Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, who agreed to accept the new Air Force as part of unification when it occurred in July 1947. Then Nimitz decided to retire, causing the two factions to endorse separate candidates to succeed him. Secretary of Defense James Forrestal preferred an aviator, namely Ramsey, whom Clark opposed for having championed the new Air Force.
President Harry Truman wanted a compromise figure, namely a non-aviator, Pacific Fleet commander Admiral Louis E. Denfeld. Clark reasoned that the next best thing to a non-flying CNO was to ensure that the new VCNO be a pilot, namely Radford. So he sent an officer to Pearl Harbor to ensure that Denfeld as CNO would insist on Radford to become VCNO. Denfeld, who admired Radford, agreed and made it so as his first act on becoming CNO in December.
When Admiral Nimitz announced his retirement, Admiral Clark lobbied for aviator Vice Admiral Radford (standing) to be CNO Admiral Denfield's (sitting) Vice Chief of Naval Operations.
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Feisty Jocko, opposed to Navy economizing, shortly thereafter succeeded in preventing NAS Corpus Christi from being turned over to the new Air Force. Then, early in 1948, he thwarted the planned closing of NAS Jacksonville by converting it from a training facility into the major fleet base for Atlantic Fleet carriers protecting the western Atlantic and the Mediterranean Sea from the new Soviet menace. The only cost to the taxpayer was dredging the Mayport basin to accommodate flattops.
Admirals Denfeld and Radford decided to reward Clark by recommending him for promotion to vice admiral as Commander Air Force Atlantic (ComAirLant). But the new Secretary of the Navy, John L. Sullivan, refused, citing Clark's "disloyalty" for having successfully opposed Sullivan's attempts to eliminate Corpus and Jax as economy measures. So Jocko was passed over for promotion and given a negative fitness report (24 November 1948) by the new DCNO (Air), Vice Admiral John Dale Price, who concluded it with a backhanded compliment: "R. Adm. Clark . . . has great tenacity and is unyielding in anything he thinks is right. He is a great fighting man."
Jock decided to get out of Washington to politically safer duty at sea, a view shared by Radford and Sherman, the former to command the Pacific Fleet, the latter U.S. naval forces in the Mediterranean—the "Sixth Task Fleet." He was given command of Carrier Division Four in November, operating between the Eastern seaboard and the Med. Hoisting his flag in the Philippine Sea (CV-47), he led the Midway (CVB-41) and escorts across a stormy Atlantic to Gibraltar in January 1949.
Based at Malta, Clark's task force helped enforce the Truman Doctrine of deterring the spread of communism into France, Italy, and especially Greece. Admiral Sherman directed Clark to make port calls to shore up local confidence and to cooperate closely with the smaller British naval force in the middle sea. Jock took an immediate liking to the British cruiser admiral, the renowned Lord Louis Mountbatten.
Clark's easy handling of his two-carrier task force appeared almost casual, but he was in his element, having led a task group twice that size in Pacific combat. Indeed, as then, he left routine ship movements to his staff operations officer, Commander Thomas H. Moorer, the future CNO who regarded Clark's policy of "just standing back and watching" the staff as: my good fortune, because he allowed me to do everything. . . . That gave me an opportunity to gain a new kind of experience. I had been operations officer on the Midway , and every time you changed course you had to ask the captain's permission. . . . [Now,] I could change the course of 15 to 20 ships any time I pleased and ask no one's permission! 1
Indeed, Clark had so much faith in Moorer that he would even fall asleep and snore in his chair on the flag bridge, unfazed by messages constantly coming in through four separate speakers. Most of the traffic was routine, but the instant something important or a question came through, he was awake and replied when necessary.
Or he just moved to the operations room, sat in the leather lounge, and listened to a baseball game on the Armed Forces Radio. This left Tom Moorer to "run the outfit, which he was perfectly capable of doing at any time." 2Or he just remained in his chair on the bridge and read a comic book from a stack of them kept fresh with new ones by his Marine orderly. 3
Clark's confidence, including an uncanny ability to predict the correct weather, rankled his immediate superior, Admiral Sherman, who repeatedly annoyed Clark throughout this deployment. Jock's flag secretary, then-Lieutenant Charles Melhorn, recalled "no love between them at all," as Sherman "never, never lost an opportunity" to badger him. "Forrest Sherman was harassing Jocko all the time," Moorer remembered, "They just didn't like each other at all." 4
Clark told Melhorn that their differences had begun at the U.S. Naval Academy, when intellectual classmate Sherman had taken umbrage at "cowboy" Clark's hazing activities, leading to his having been turned back a year. Other bones of contention had culminated in Jock's opposition to Sherman's plan for unification. Sherman plagued Clark during flight operations by signaling the carriers to join with the escorts soon after having sent the carriers off to conduct flight operations. Or he would change the base course "and head right for us" just as the carriers were in position to rejoin, causing Clark's ships to scatter. Then: "Expedite join-up." 5
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