the duration,” and that he was to be out of the building by five o’clock.
But that wasn’t what Knox had had in mind at all.
Knox said that he suspected—human nature being what it was—that the reports he was getting—and would be getting—from the admirals in the Pacific—men with a lifelong devotion to the Navy—would understandably paint the situation to the advantage of the Navy, rather than as what it actually was.
What he had to have, Knox said, was a cold, expert appraisal of what was going on out there from someone who knew ships, and shipyards, and the Pacific, and wasn’t cowed by thick rows of gold braid on admirals’ sleeves.
Someone, for example, who had spent his lifetime involved with the Pacific Ocean; someone so unawed by rank and titles that he had told the Secretary of the Navy he should resign.
Within days, a hastily commissioned Captain Fleming S. Pickering, U.S. Navy Reserve, boarded a Navy plane for Hawaii, his orders identifying him as the Personal Representative of the Secretary of the Navy.
Pleased with the reports Pickering had furnished from Pearl Harbor, Knox ordered him to Australia to evaluate the harbors, shipyards, and other facilities there. He arrived shortly before General Douglas MacArthur did, having escaped—at President Roosevelt’s direct order—from the Philippines to set up his headquarters in Australia.
Pickering became an unofficial member of MacArthur’s staff, but by the time of the First Marine Division’s invasion of Guadalcanal, was convinced that his usefulness was pretty much at an end.
Aware—and not caring—that Knox would certainly be annoyed and probably would be furious, Pickering went ashore on Guadalcanal with the Marines. He offered his services to the First Marine Division commander, Major General A. A. Vandegrift, in any capacity where Vandegrift thought he might be useful, down to rifleman in a line company.
The First Division’s intelligence officer had been killed in the first few hours of the invasion, and Vandegrift—who had come to admire Pickering’s brains and savvy while they were planning the logistics of the invasion—named Pickering “temporarily, until a qualified replacement could be flown in from the United States,” to replace the fallen incumbent.
The day after his qualified replacement arrived, so did the U.S. Navy destroyer Gregory, under dual orders from the Navy Department: Deliver urgently needed aviation fuel to the island, and do not leave Guadalcanal until Captain Fleming Pickering, USNR, is aboard.
En route to Pearl Harbor, the Gregory was attacked by Japanese bombers. Pickering was on her bridge with her captain when her captain was killed. Pickering, as senior officer of the line aboard—and an any ocean, any tonnage master mariner—assumed command of the destroyer, skillfully maneuvering her until the attack was over, whereupon he passed out from loss of blood from the wounds he had suffered when the first bomb struck.
He was flown to the Navy Hospital in San Diego, where, as he recuperated, he decided that his wound would probably spare him from a court-martial, and that he would quietly be released from the Navy.
He was, instead, summoned to Washington, where, on the Presidential yacht, Sequoia, President Roosevelt not only gave him—at the recommendation of the Navy’s Commander-in-Chief, Pacific—the Silver Star for his valor in “assuming, despite his grievous wounds” command of the Gregory, but informed him that he had that day sent his name—at the request of Secretary Knox—to the Senate for their advice and consent to his appointment as Brigadier General, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve. He would serve, the President told him, on Knox’s personal staff.
He soon found out what Knox had in mind for him to do.
Literally hidden in one of the “temporary” wooden buildings erected during World War I on the Washington Mall was the USMC Office of Management Analysis, even its name intended to conceal its role as the personal covert intelligence operation of Secretary Knox.
Pickering, in addition to his other duties, was named its commander, and in effect became director of covert intelligence operations for the Navy.
In February 1943, after General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander, Southwest Pacific Ocean Area, and Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, U.S. Navy Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, had made it abundantly clear that neither would have anything to do with Colonel “Wild Bill” Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services in their theaters of operation, President Roosevelt had solved that problem by issuing an executive order naming Brigadier General Fleming Pickering, USMCR, as OSS Deputy Director for the Pacific.
Although Pickering hated the appointment—before the war, he and Donovan had once almost come to blows in the lobby of New York City’s