US Marine Corps - The Black Vault

264 Amphibians Came To Conquer
3. The actual availability of the desired officer from the viewpoint
of the Bureau of Naval Personnel.
4. The officer’s own personal assessments of the change, and how
hard he tries for the staff billet.
If the Flag officer has worked his way up the ladder through billets in
the Bureau of Personnel, he has a far wider knowledge of officers’ records
and reputations than if he has not, and generally a warmer friendship with
those currently sitting at the detail desks. Rear Admiral Turner had not
been a ,BUPERS bureaucrat. He had been a two-star Flag officer only seven
months. And he had had a few stormy telephone conversations with detail
desks in the process of assembling an adequate planning staif for
COMINCH.
In any case, Admiral Turner remembered that he had had a “hell of a
time” trying to get anyone whom he particularly wanted ordered to his first
afloat staff. In fact, he “fired and fell back.” He batted .000 on the names
he submitted.’e
The Bureau then suggested officers and he accepted them. In May 1942,
there was a miniscule number of naval officers with a background of peacetime
amphibious training and none with a background of wartime amphib-
ious operations. Rear Admiral Turner had not touched stays often enough
with any of the few peacetime am~hibiously qualified officers to pinpoint
them as desirable members of his staff. The Bureau had a thousand times
more places to billet such oficers in the explosively expanding amphibious
forces than there were officers available.
Consequently, it is regrettable, but not surprising, that, except for the
Flag Secretary, not a single naval oficer selected by the Bureau and ordered
to the staff of the Commander of the Amphibious Force South Pacific, which
was our first amphibious command in World War 11 to enter into large
scale combat with the enemy, had any special amphibious training, or any
recent peacetime amphibious experience. Professional knowledge based on
actual training in amphibious operations, had to come from the Marine
officers on the staff. As might be expected, the Marines were a first-rate
group.’”
By 9 June 1942, Rear Admiral Turner knew which oficers the Bureau of
Personnel planned to order to his staff, for he drafted a four-page memo-
randum to the Assistant Chief of Staff, Colonel Linscott, on that date,
n Turner.
mIbid.