Q: What is your age now? Morison: Eighty-six. Q: And you took your doctorate from Harvard, is that right? Morison: Yes. Q. In about 19? Morison: 13. Q: And your book. The Maritime History of Massachusetts, was written when? In 1921? Was this based on your doctoral dissertation? Morison: No, not at all. My doctoral dissertation was on the life of Harrison Gray Otis. That was printed first, and there s been a new edition of it since. And then, the story of this is that I started in to write a history of Massachusetts. Professor Andrew Channing handed it over to me. He was tired of the subject. So he said I could do it instead. I started in by doing all the maritime chapters, because I was already a sailing fan. And I had the bright idea to tell the publishers, if they d let me off from writing the entire history of Massachusetts, I d give them a good hook on the maritime history of Massachusetts, down to the Civil War. Thay accepted, and there it is. That was the first book of mine that was at all successful. Q: Well, it was. As I said before, a book that I ve much enjoyed and one that is, I think, in my limited knowledge, still something of a classic in its field. I don t think of anything else that treats the subject as well as this does, nothing that I have come across anyway. Morison: Unfortunately, I did not write a maritime history of Maine, because a colleague of mine, whose name I needn t mention, said, oh, you must leave that to me, I, a Maine man, you re a Massachusetts. So I did, but he never wrote it. So it s not written. Well, there is a book called The Maritime History of Maine, but it s no good. It s one of the about as dull as you could possibly make a book with that title. Q: Your books are extremely readable. They re books that one can sit down and read a hundred, two hundred pages of in one sitting, if not the entire book, and if one has an evening they hold my interest very much.
Morison: That s what I try to do. I don t think it s any use writing for your fellow professors or your immediate students. Q: Your audience is very limited and you might have a reputation among them, but certainly your reputation is much broader. International, I should think. How did you, Admiral, first become connected with the United States Navy and subsequently commissioned as an officer in the Navy? Morison: Well, I couldn t get into the Navy in World War I because I was too light for my height. I weighed, at that time, about a hundred and thirty-five. I m only a hundred and sixty now, but the Navy wouldn t have me, to my great disappointment. And I finally went into the Army, but I was there only for a few months before the Armistice came. Again, there was a question whether I d join the Naval Reserve. I didn t, however, because I did so much traveling in the course of my researches and so on, and I didn t want to be tied down. Then came World War II. I was doing my Columbus biography at that time, and I d almost finished it. Admiral of the Ocean Sea is the name of the book. Whan it occurred to me that it occurred to me and to President Roosevelt at about the same tine, that as I had, in the meantime, written a good deal of maritime history and had written the history of Harvard College, that I might be a good person to do the Navy in World War II. And I got commissioned shortly after Pearl Harbor, and both the Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, and Ernie King said, Now, build up a staff, get going, build up a staff, do what you like, go anywhere you want, as long as you don t ask in advance where you re going. And that s where I d accept building up a staff, because I had a warning about that in World War I. A professor of mine. Professor Johnson at Harvard, who was a great authority on military history, was made the historian of the United States Army, but he spent all the time in the war building up a staff and making himself a nuisance by pulling out of the combat army all the boys who had been studying under him. He offered me a major s commission just before I went into the Army, and the result was that when the Armistice came, and the word went around to economize, he and his staff were thrown out the first day. He hadn t accomplished anything or written a thing. So I was very cool about building up a staff. I started off with nobody, and I had one yeoman who stayed with me all through the entire works. Then, one ensign, who had been a student of mine at Harvard, and then two ensigns, and at the most, I had five officers working for me.
Q; Have you maintained communication with those people? Morison: Oh yes. I m very intimate with them still. They re all alive, except the first one, who died quite young. One was the head of the Red Cross. One is the head of the Naval Museum at Anacostia. And they ve all done very well. Q: You must have known personally then a number of the flag officers who led our Navy in the Second World War? Morison: Yes, I did. Q: Did you know I m sure you knew Admiral Nimitz and Admiral King? Morison: Yes. King hardly at all, because he was a rather remote person. Q: He had a feeling about staff. He said, as I recall, that when he was made the Commander-in- Chief that I ll run this whole damn show with a dozen men." Did he make a statement like that? Morison: I don t know if he really did. It was attributed to him. Whan I went to call on him I thought, after I got my commission, I ought to go and call on the Chief of the United States Fleet. So I did, and going through his lobby, I first talked with his chief of staff, an admiral whose name I ve completely forgotten now. And he said, So, you re going to be Naval Historian, are you? I said, Yes, sir. I don t believe in naval history, said he. He said, Look at s work. Our enemies learned more from him than we did. I was tempted to say, That wasn t s fault, if our Navy was so dumb as to rate him low. But I didn t say it, of course. Then I went in to see Admiral King. He gave me what somebody called one of his bleak looks and said, What is your qualification for this important mission that you ve been given? I said, I ve been teaching history, including maritime history, at Harvard for many years. I wrote The Maritime History of Massachusetts, and I have just published a life of Columbus, for which I followed all his courses under sail. Oh, you re that guy, he said, spreading his smile for the first time. Go ahead. You can have anything you like. And you know that worked right off for the Navy. Admiral of the Ocean Sea was a Book-of-the-Month Club work, you see, and so most of the naval officers picked it. Q: Even a naval officer would know that.
Morison: And everywhere I went, if I d find people a little bit stinky, I d say that I d written that book, and then everything was all right. Q: Well, did you know Admiral Halsey? Morison: Oh yes, I knew him too. Delightful person. Most interesting to talk to. Q: What are your thoughts about Admiral Halsey and his for example, the incident and I m not as clear on it as I might be but the situation in which he was off with his fleet, and Admiral King sent him the message, The world wonders where is the Third Fleet? Morison: Nimitz. Nimitz. Q: Nimitz. Admiral Nimitz. I was under the impression that King sent that message. Morison: No. Q: There was some enmity between King and Halsey Morison: That was Nimitz who did that, and the yeoman who drafted it put in what they call garbage. He chose a line out of The Charge of the Light Brigade. All the world wonders. Q: Oh, that s what it was. Morison: That s how it happened. It made Halsey perfectly furious. Q: Then it didn t come from Admiral Nimitz at all? Morison: It came from Nimitz. You said King. You said it came from King. Q: Yes, but it came from Morison: It came from Nimitz. Yes. Q: But Nimitz did not intend to put that in there? Morison: No, he didn t put in the garbage. He wanted to know what had become of that battleship task force. And oh, it was such a pity that they didn t turn loose those big battle wagons. They would have caught the Japanese fleet was getting back into San Bernardino Strait. There would have been a beautiful slaughter there. There wouldn t have been any question any more of any Japanese sea supremacy, because they d have lost all their big ships. As it is, in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, they lost their biggest battleship, with the eighteen-inch gun.
Q: Do you feel, as I think a majority of historians do, that the Battle of Midway was indeed the turning point? Morison: Yes. Oh yes, I do. But that was Spruance, and he I knew Spruance as well as I did anybody in the Navy. Kept up with him after the war, stayed with him out at Pebble Beach. I have the greatest respect for him, his ability. He was a great man, because he could make the right decision in a fluid tactical situation. Q: Very even-handed man. Morison: Yes. Yes. And modest too. He wasn t known to the public because he wouldn t ballyhoo his way to the reporters, the way Halsey did. Q: But now, what is your feeling about Halsey and his capabilities as a tactician? Do you think, for example, that he may have been a greater leader of men, for example, a more magnetic person than he was perhaps a tactician? Morison: Yes, that s right, but his tactics were all right down to that boo-boo that he made in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Up to that time, his tactics were all right. His excessive aggressiveness, going in and get the enemy and all that, betrayed him on that occasion. He wanted to have his top fleet up there for a poor little Japanese carrier task force that had no planes. Q: Yes. Yes. Well, at what point in our naval history, can you mark the occasion, if there in fact was one, in which our thinking turned solidly from battleships as the principal weapon to aircraft carriers? Morison: It was a matter of gradual turning. It didn t happen right away. For instance, that Rear Admiral who was the Commander of the Chicago Task Force in the later, the Guadalcanal campaign, who lost the Chicago. He had no idea of air power at all. And most of them learned very quickly and did not oppose having planes on the cruisers and battleships for reconnaissance, the way the British admirals did. I talked to a Royal Navy representative once about that. He was talking about how stuffy the British admirals were, and I said, Well, some of ours don t seem to have waked up to air power yet. Good God, he said, some of ours haven t woke up to steam. Q: Did you sail at any time with Admiral Halsey in his flagship?
Morison: I ve never been at sea with him. I ve only seen him on shore, at Pearl Harbor, and after the war at Newport. Q: You think you ll shortly finish the book on Magellan then? Morison: It s not the book on Magellan. It s The European Discovery of America, the second volume, called The Southern Voyages. The Northern Voyages you want is on my shelf over there, if you want to look at it. This is the southern voyages, from Columbus to the Dutchman who discovered Cape Horn, and I ve written everything now except the little short chapter on the Dutchman, to end up with. Q: Do you think that will be your last book? Morison: Oh, I m sure it will, yes. I m not going to write any more. I m getting too old and forgetful, and besides, it s about time I took a rest. Q: How many books have you written? Morison: Oh, I don t count them. You ll find the list inside my latest book, which is on Samuel Champlain. Q: Well, back to the Battle of Midway. There s a great deal made there about the use of radio intelligence to have foreknowledge of the Japanese plans. Do you find this in your when you looked into that period, did you find that this was in fact the critical thing? Morison: Well, I ll tell you the story of that, and I don t know that I was allowed to tell it, because I had a perfectly free hand in the Navy in writing, except for hush-hush things, like radio at that time still was. But what happened was the Japanese made a boo-boo. They had a daily broadcast. I don t know whether it was the Japanese or English. It didn t matter, because we had plenty of people who could translate Japanese, and a trick was put over on them. They were using a code name for Midway. We thought it was Midway, but we didn t know. We ll call it Arbutus. So we put out a piece of fake news, a lot of our B-17 s had burned up at Midway, and the Japanese, in the next broadcast of theirs that very evening, they said, Yanks have lost a lot of planes, burned up at Arbutus. So we knew that was what they were aiming at. Before that little simple question was solved, we thought that they might be aiming at the West Coast, or almost anywhere. Q: And Admiral Nimitz was under way?
Morison: He was the decisive person. He had sent the fleet under way under Spruance and Fletcher. Q: Have you written anything on the Navy in Korea? Morison: No, not a thing. I didn t get involved in that, except in my general United States history. There s one called The Oxford History of the Amorican People, where I ve got a page or two on the Korean War. Q: Dr. Alvin Burke, who got his doctor s degree from the University of Chicago in the 30s he s now a man of perhaps 72 or 73 years of age, still teaching. And I remember him saying often that the problems that we did not solve in the First World War were those which led to the Second World War directly, and it was to him very apparent. Of course, he lived through that period. Morison: Yes. Political problems, yes. Q: Do you agree with that? Morison: Why, yes. The failure to make any satisfactory settlement with Germany, that would at least partially satisfy the German people, led to Hitler and led to World War II. It was about as simple as that. As for the Japanese, I think we might, considering the strength the Chinese people have shown in recent years, we might well have left it to them to deal with the Japanese and not try to letting ourselves try to save China. We d only get a kick in the ass for our efforts. Q: We did, in fact, get a kick in the ass, I think. Morison: Yes. Q: I think General Stilwell pointed that out to us in those early days. We were not doing the right thing. Morison: The fundamental reason for our getting involved with Japan was trying to save China from Japanese conquest. Q: Why were we so strong on China? Was it this business of the missionaries and Pearl Buck and the poor downtrodden man and this kind of thing? That we felt a moral responsibility? Morison: Yes, I think it was.
Q: And so we saw the Japanese as the aggressor? Morison: Yes. Q: The same sort of thing, one would think, that got us into Vietnam perhaps, this feeling that we could protect these millions of other people. We re dealing with populations that are four and five times our own size. Morison: In Vietnam, it was largely to protect them from the Communists, or to protect the free world from the Communists. There wasn t any Communist issue in protecting China from Japan. Q: True. Do you have views that you would care to discuss on Vietnam and whether our involvement there was perhaps what it should have been, or should we have been involved at all? It s only hindsight. Morison: No, I would say the whole thing stinks. We shouldn t have gotten involved at all. Q: There were a number of people who warned us not to get involved. A number of historians and a number of people who understood that part of the country. It would seem they understood it better than the decision-makers. Morison: An English historian, military historian, had a very good expression I ve used a good deal, and that s strategic overstretch. He said that s what the Japanese did at the beginning of World War II, and that s what we did in going to Vietnam. It costs about ten times as much to get a soldier in Vietnam as it did to get a soldier into Western Europe. And it was too much for us to do. It was strategic overstretch. I think that s a very nice phrase. Describes a lot of errors. Q: Admiral, what role do you see for the U. S. Navy in the next ten to twenty years? Morison: Protecting our oil line. Q: And the Soviets see an opportunity there to exploit us too? Morison: Yes. Q: What s your feeling about Soviet sea power and the growth of it, the rather phenomenal growth of it in the last Morison: Why, it s very menacing, because all of their ships are new compared with ours. Q: Do you think that the Soviets would what do you see as their foreign policy and the way
they use their navy as an instrument of their foreign policy? Do you see it as an offensive one, or do you think that, as some officers have coined it, that it is defensive? Morison: Well, they would call it defensive, of course. Everybody calls his foreign policy defensive, and of course, they are essentially offensive. Now, what whether the Soviets have given up ideologically their ambition to rule the entire world, I don t know. If they haven t, they will continue to make trouble wherever they can, hoping to bring down the capitalist governments. Whether they have decided to try and live in peace with the capitalist governments, I just don t know. I think probably that they have. They thought they d bring down the United States after World War II, but they didn t. That s probably taught them something, that a country like ours isn t very easy to subvert, to destroy. Q: Well, why would they though continue to build up their Navy, continue to build up their submarine inventory, continue to produce missiles of greater range and greater strength? Morison: Well, they don t want to be pushed around by us. They want to be in a position, when they can reach some objective in foreign policy by an aggressive naval move, that they can. Q: You would think that they would perhaps try something like that then, that some time in the near future perhaps, in the next ten years, that they might try to make a very overt kind of naval move, something short of war, something to intimidate us perhaps? Morison: Yes. An interesting article in The New York Times the other day said that Brezhnev was being pushed by the military people in Russia to be more aggressive. They don t think that he s aggressive enough. They want to get on top and have more influence on the government than they have with Brezhnev. I don t know whether that s true or not. Q: That s a very dangerous kind of thing. Morison: Yes. Q: Well, do you think, that we are prepared? Do you think that our decision-makers, that our present administration, realizes the gravity of that kind of thing? Morison: I don t know whether they do or not. I should think that Kissinger did. Whether the others do or not, I don t know. Q: How could we, within our limited assets, now in a period when military force is not at all
popular in this country, how can we counter their efforts? They ve gone into the Indian Ocean, they sail freely in the Baltic, they now come into the Caribbean several times a year with squadrons of surface and subsurface ships. They now fly their airplanes to Africa and Cuba. Morison: Well, the sea is free and so is the air. We can t object to that. If we could do a limited objective, get them off Georges Banks, that would help. Q: They re just exploiting the fish. I ve talked to the fishermen up along the coast here, and they don t, the fishermen here don t know what s being done to them. All they know is they re not catching fish. I m not talking now so much about the lobstermen as I am about the fishermen as such. And even the lobstermen, who occasionally might catch fish for their own table, they re pointed out to me that they re not catching the fish are not there, the herring, the haddock are not there. Morison: Yes, as an example, I haven t been able to get a whole haddock here all summer. I had to get my daughter to bring one up from Boston to make proper chowder. Q: It seems to me, for example, that when the Soviets sail freely into the Caribbean and operate within 20 or 30 miles of Brownsville, Texas, and New Orleans and places like that, wouldn t it be wise for us, for example, to take a task group of relatively the same size and sail about in the Baltic and the Black Sea, and the Sea of Japan and places like that, just to show them that we can do it, and each time they do it, for us to do it? Morison: Well, if you re going to follow it up by negotiation and make a 200-mile limit off the coast, I think it might work, yes. But the trouble is, our government is really stupid in clinging to the old three-mile limit all these years. We ought to have pushed for a 200-mile limit years ago.