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At the Battle of Leyte Gulf, young Lieut. Zumwalt won a Bronze Star for his work in the combat information center of the destroyer U.S.S. Robinson as she attacked Japanese battleships. He had a narrow escape as officer of the deck on the destroyer U.S.S. Phelps when he maneuvered the vessel to avoid a submarine attack and one torpedo passed just underneath her keel. "He may be a good officer," reported a superior on the Phelps. "But it was difficult to tell because he was seasick for the first three months." His most memorable experience in the war came when his task force captured several Japanese ships and he was installed on one of them, the Ataka, as skipper of an 18-man U.S. prize crew. His orders were to sail the Ataka up the Yangtze and Whangpoo rivers to Shanghai, still occupied by 175,000 Japanese troops.
Fulbright Said No
Zumwalt and his crew scared off two Japanese PT boats, blasted a signal light that was trying to order the Ataka to stop, and steamed brazenly into Shanghai. Zumwalt's bluff convinced the Japanese that a "vast horde, of American ships" was following and that they should not bother his captured vessel. When one Japanese army captain later approached the Ataka, Zumwalt grabbed the officer's pistol, spun him about and hauled him off the ship by the seat of his pants. The captain's driver surprised Zumwalt with a pistol at pointblank range, but before he could fire, Zumwalt lifted the captain as a shield. A Texas sailor then knocked the driver down from behind.
The high point of Zumwalt's "invasion" of Shanghai came at a dinner he attended in the home of a Russian family. There he met Mouza Coutelasi-du-Roche, whose French father and Russian mother had earlier settled in Manchuria. In a letter Zumwalt later wrote to his father, he described meeting Mouza: "Tall and well-poised, she was smiling a smile of such radiance that the very room seemed suddenly transformed, as though a fairy waving a brilliant wand had just entered the room. For a long moment there was utter silence. Then we sat down to the most memorable meal of my life." Mouza agreed to teach Zumwalt Russian, and the lessons drew them closer. After five weeks, he asked her to marry him. They went through two ceremonies, one by a Presbyterian minister at the American Embassy, one in a Russian church.
Zumwalt never did leave the Navy, although he toyed with the idea several times. He applied for a Rhodes scholarship in 1947 and got to the finals, but was knocked out, ironically, by a future foe of almost everything military who was on the Rhodes Selection committee: J. William Fulbright. Recalls Zumwalt: "Fulbright simply could not understand why anybody military had anything to learn at Oxford."
Now physically shipshape at 175 Ibs. (just five pounds over his weight as a football tackle at Tulare High) and nearly 6 ft., Zumwalt runs−not jogs−for two miles each morning around the Naval Observatory Grounds outside his house. He also brings home briefcases of work, marking papers in a hand so illegible that only a half dozen Pentagon aides, known as "the interpreters," can decipher it. When he began working at breakfast, however, his wife mutinied. She kissed him and