Army & Navy – COMMAND: End of an Admiral

With his wife beside him, Vice Admiral Theodore Stark Wilkinson was driving on to the ferry West Point, to cross from Norfolk to Portsmouth, Va. The car was borrowed and unfamiliar; he lost control. Quickly he stretched out his right arm, opened the far door, yelled “Jump!” and pushed Mrs. Wilkinson out to safety.

The car cut through the chain and gate at the end of the lane, plunged into 27 feet of water. Admiral Wilkinson had no time to save himself; they found his body an hour and a quarter later, behind the wheel. Thus, death came last week to a modest and self-effacing Navy hero who had always put the welfare of others above his own.

The year after he left Annapolis, “Ping” Wilkinson was badly burned in a coal-bunker explosion aboard the battleship Kansas. A legend grew up that he had gone into the bunker to save other men; Wilkinson insistently denied it.

At Vera Cruz, in 1914, Ensign Wilkinson led a company of sailors ashore in a pioneer amphibious operation, held an exposed key position under fire for 36 hours. When he received the Congressional Medal of Honor, he insisted on explaining that the Navy simply had some medals to pass out, and he “happened to be chosen.”

As head of Naval Intelligence, Rear Admiral Wilkinson was closeted with Admiral Harold R. Stark on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, asking his boss to alert the fleet on the basis of the intercepted Japanese 14 points. Yet when the Pearl Harbor Committee called him to testify, he insisted on making clear that he had not foreseen an attack on Hawaii.

After leapfrog moves through the Solomons, Wilkinson directed the great amphibious end run to Palau, which bypassed Truk. But, regarding himself more as planner than doer, he delegated much of the responsibility and credit for the Leyte and Lingayen landings to a junior admiral, Daniel Barbey, whose experience and tactical skill he greatly admired.

Slow, almost diffident in speech, Theodore Wilkinson seemed less decisive, less self-confident than his colleagues. But his colleagues, knowing his penetrating intelligence, knew better.

At 57, he had just begun work as a member of the committee set up by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to survey present-day strategy used in World War II, and to extract lessons for the future. For this assignment he had great gifts; the lessons now would not be quite so clear.