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In 1940, Sherman became the Navy's chief aviation plans officer. There he learned something of the green tables of diplomacy. He sat on the Canada-U.S. Joint Defense Board, accompanied Franklin Roosevelt to the Atlantic Conference. Said his boss, irascible old Admiral Richmond ("Kelly") Turner: "He was a grease-lightning operator, a box of brains. He always had a plan—never left anything to chance."
Three Torpedoes. Sherman was also a fighter. After Pearl Harbor, he begged for a chance at combat, got command of the Wasp, a small (14,700 tons) carrier that was already outdated by the new Essex-class flattops then abuilding. Under him the Wasp was a taut, efficient and happy ship. The flight plan he worked out for his air group became the pattern through the War for all U.S. carriers.
But one day, as the Wasp plowed in formation through a bright Pacific sea, 300 miles southeast of Guadalcanal, three Jap torpedoes struck home. Fire reared high from her ruptured tanks; gasoline spread around her in a sea of flames. Like many another skipper, Sherman had long before figured out just what he would do if he "caught a fish." In an inferno of smoke and exploding ammunition, he maneuvered his ship so that the flames blew away from the hull, backed her stern clear of the flaming, gasoline-covered water. Sherman was the last man to leave. He was burned, and badly shaken up by depth charges while he was in the water; 193 of his men were dead. But through the lane he had cleared off the stern, 2,054 had swum to safety.
Sherman never saw combat again. For the rest of the war, he was the major planner in the greatest campaign the U.S. Navy ever fought. As Deputy Chief of Staff to Admiral Chester Nimitz, Sherman insisted after Tarawa that the tactically unimportant, heavily defended islands of Maloelap and Wotje should be bypassed, and Kwajalein attacked in one long, 250-mile jump. Said Kelly Turner: "Admiral Spruance and I were astounded." But Sherman was right—so right that the Navy and Kelly Turner's amphibious-force troops hopped on to grab Eniwetok. Thus the Navy's spectacular leapfrogging technique was born. Often, Nimitz remembers, he and Sherman would retire to the big map room where they would talk, look at the map and think. Said Nimitz: "Sherman never hesitated when things looked worst. He's a realist without being a pessimist."
At war's end, when Nimitz became Chief of Naval Operations, he gave Sherman the job of working out the unification agreement. Sherman dutifully sat down with his friend Lieut. General Lauris Norstad of the Army Air Force and negotiated agreement. To the anti-unification Navymen, led by Vice Admiral Arthur Radford, this was just short of treason to their service. When Denfeld brought Radford to Washington as his vice chief, Sherman went off to take command of the Mediterranean Fleet.
Precision Tools. There Sherman became an on-the-ground leader in the cold war, learned the uses of naval forces as "the precision tools of diplomacy." He flung 80 planes over Italy at election time. His ships visited North African ports, dropped in at Naples, Trieste and Athens. Sherman took tea with Britain's Earl Mountbatten, visited the Pope, swam with Greece's King Paul and his Queen.