Twilight of the Gods

by Twilight of the Gods (retail) (epub)

  When finally cornered by the newsmen, Spruance was cool and matter-of-fact. He dwelled on the minutiae of logistics, a subject that did not much interest them. He did not speak in soundbites; he gave them nothing that they might have used to sketch his personality or style of leadership. Some reporters used their imaginations to fill the void. A January 1944 issue of Collier’s Weekly depicted Spruance as a hard-driving workaholic: “When Admiral Spruance isn’t walking he’s driving—driving himself, his subordinates, his ships and the enemy. He’s a demon for work.”17 Moore teased the admiral by repeating the phrase on the bridge of the Indianapolis. A demon for work! Years later, in a postwar interview, Moore burst out laughing as he reread the Collier’s story: “The laziest man you’ve ever seen! He hated to work. He hated to write anything. He was no driver—you can see, he didn’t drive me, he tried to keep me from working, and the same thing with everybody else. He didn’t drive his ships. He did drive the enemy, when it came to that point, but this fellow gives the impression that you’ve got a tough, hard-boiled, driving man here, which he wasn’t at all.”18

  In June 1944, while the Fifth Fleet was spearheading the invasion of the Marianas, Spruance’s bronzed face appeared on the cover of Time magazine under the headline: “The Mechanical Man.” Time depicted him as a “cold, calculating, mechanical man,” more technician than warrior. When the magazine was delivered to the flag bridge of the Indianapolis, Spruance tried to hide it. The subterfuge failed, as Moore found another copy and read excerpts aloud over the ship’s public-address system. Later, in a more reflective mood, Moore wrote his wife (who was, like himself, a dear old friend of Raymond Spruance) and concluded that Time had simply fabricated an identity for the Fifth Fleet commander. “If they had come to me, I could have given them a much better picture of him, but I think it is just as well that the public and the thousands of men in this fleet look on him as Time had pictured him. He has the fine military qualities Time credits him with, but he is shy and diffident rather than hard-boiled.”19

  If Spruance deliberately tried to avoid work, as he freely admitted in at least one postwar letter, he achieved the singular feat of turning his indolence into a virtue.20 His insistence upon delegating authority down the line of command tended to bring out the best in subordinates. He kept his mind clear of details in order to focus on the big picture; he refused to consider minor issues because he was storing up his mental energy for the major ones. His daily 5-mile deck hikes kept him healthy and fit. The physical exercise helped him sleep soundly at night, even while under the strain of prolonged operations in enemy waters. As others in the fleet grew exhausted and edgy, Spruance remained fresh and well rested. He told his wife in a letter from sea, “If I don’t exercise, I don’t feel as well and I get nervous and mentally depressed . . . I am in tip-top condition and intend to stay that way in order to do my job, which, after all, is an important one.”21

  This wisdom of this philosophy was apparent as the new seakeeping capabilities lengthened the duration of the fleet’s blue water cruises. Military and medical authorities were confronting the rising costs of “command fatigue.” More than ever before, seagoing commanders were rated according to their mental and physical stamina. When a visitor went aboard the Indianapolis in the summer of 1944, he noted that the Fifth Fleet staff officers were “dog-tired and showed it.” They seemed overdue for a long leave on dry land. But Spruance, who was older than any man on his staff, appeared rested, healthy, and alert.22

  A COLLEAGUE HAD REMARKED TO SPRUANCE, at the outset of the Marianas campaign: “Every commander must be a gambler.” If that was so, Spruance retorted, he intended to be a gambler of the “professional variety,” because he wanted “all the odds I could get stacked in my favor.”23 He did not believe in running unnecessary risks, especially at this late stage of the Pacific War, when American forces enjoyed a large and growing margin of superiority. Above all, he intended to protect the beachhead on Saipan and the vulnerable amphibious fleet that lay offshore. When a powerful Japanese fleet approached on the night of June 18, 1944, Admiral Mitscher asked permission to take Task Force 58 west to intercept it. Wary of the risk (however remote) of an end-run attack on the beachhead, Spruance denied the request. On the morning of June 19, the Japanese carriers launched three large airstrikes against the Fifth Fleet. In a daylong aerial battle nicknamed the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot,” F6F Hellcats met and slaughtered the attackers, sending more than three hundred Japanese aircraft down in flames. But Task Force 58 was too far east to launch a counterattack on the Japanese fleet. After a twenty-four-hour stern chase, Mitscher’s carrier airmen finally managed to sink two enemy fleet oilers and an aircraft carrier on the night of June 20, but the greater part of the Japanese fleet survived to fight another day.

  Following this two-day “Battle of the Philippine Sea,” Spruance’s conservative tactics came under harsh scrutiny. Critics charged that he had forgotten or ignored the cardinal principle of carrier warfare—to strike first. In this case, according to the naval aviators, it had been doubly important to move west on the night of June 18, because the prevailing trade winds in those waters blew from the east, and the carriers would therefore be obliged to steam east throughout the daylight hours to conduct flight operations. By tethering Task Force 58 to Saipan, Spruance had made the calculated decision to allow the Japanese to strike the first aerial blow, while simultaneously placing his carriers out of range for a counterstrike. In the (admittedly short) history of carrier warfare, the decision was unprecedented.

  To Spruance’s critics, his tactics had seemed not only wrong but obviously wrong, and therefore unpardonable. Arleigh Burke, Mitscher’s chief of staff, later recalled that he and his colleagues were “heartbroken” by the decision. The Americans had grasped the chance to wipe out the entire striking arm of the Japanese navy, and let it slip through their fingers. The debate exposed a rift in the ranks of the U.S. Navy between traditional naval line officers who had served chiefly in battleships and other surface warships (“blackshoes”) and an insurgent cadre of professional naval aviators (“brownshoes”). The brownshoes argued that a blackshoe like Spruance was not qualified to command the fast carrier task force because he lacked an innate feeling for the new capabilities of carrier aviation. The controversy was freighted with biases and warped by personal ambitions, but it was remarkably virulent. A rising cohort of brownshoe captains and rear admirals insisted that Spruance must go, and they were willing to test the limits of propriety (or even mutiny) in aiming criticism against their chief. Spruance’s performance in the battle was endorsed by King and Nimitz when they visited the Marianas the following month, silencing chatter that he might be ousted from his job. But the hullabaloo continued to reverberate noisily in Pearl Harbor and Washington.

  August 1944 brought an important command transition. Admiral Halsey, who had held a sub-theater command (COMSOPAC) in the South Pacific since October 1942, was brought north to relieve Spruance. The changeover would occur at the conclusion of the Marianas campaign. Spruance and his staff would take a well-deserved leave in the States, and then return to Pearl Harbor to plan future operations. Halsey would command the fleet until January 1945, and then be relieved in turn by Spruance. The cycle would repeat every five to six months until the end of the war. One admiral and his staff would be at sea while the other was ashore, planning the next round of invasions and carrier strikes. Somewhat confusingly, the Fifth Fleet would be designated the Third Fleet when Halsey commanded it, and Task Force 58 would become Task Force 38. Upon Spruance’s return, they would again become the Fifth Fleet and Task Force 58. The numbers would change, but the two fleets were one and the same. This ruse was intended to dupe the Japanese into believing that two independent fleets were roaming the Pacific. There is evidence that it succeeded, at least at first. Japanese commercial radio broadcasts sometimes referred to both the Fifth and the Third Fleets, speculating on their respective locations and missions.24

  The “two
-platoon” command scheme offered clear advantages. Spruance might possess exceptional stamina, but he and his team could not be expected to remain at sea indefinitely without a breather. The war had moved so far to the west that it was no longer practicable for the fleet to return to Pearl Harbor after each successive operation. When the Americans penetrated into the inner perimeter of Japan’s empire, it was thought essential to keep the Pacific Fleet continuously engaged against the enemy. The air assault would be unremitting, with one strike following close upon another. But it was also necessary that fleet commanders and their staffs be directly engaged in planning new operations. As a practical matter, one team would need to be working in a shore-based headquarters while the other was at sea.25

  Some had doubts about the wisdom of this rotating fleet command. Two analogies lent themselves to describing the new arrangement, and both gained wide currency at the time and in postwar accounts. The first was: “Two drivers, one team of horses.” The second was the inescapable football metaphor: “Two backfields, one offensive line.” In either case, the horses or the linemen had reason to be concerned, because no provision was made for their rest. According to Rear Admiral Arthur Radford, who commanded one of the carrier task groups in 1945, “the horses sometimes wondered whether the returning drivers, rested from their earlier exertions, really were aware of the nerve-wracking, day-in-day-out months at sea put in by the single crews of the ships.”26

  There was also the sensitive question of whether Halsey’s team was ready. Spruance and his outfit had grown into the job during a year of hard-earned experience. Halsey and his close-knit staff had been in a shore-based headquarters in Nouméa, New Caledonia, for nearly two years. Halsey had not commanded at sea since the comparative dark age of 1942. Far-reaching technological and doctrinal changes had occurred in the intervening period. He and his squad would have a great deal to learn, but naval combat was a hard and unforgiving school.

  While commanding in the South Pacific, Halsey had made a name for himself as a charismatic, swaggering, limelight-loving warrior, the navy’s answer to George S. Patton. His nickname among the rank and file, quickly adopted by the newspapers, was “the Bull.” He was obliging with reporters and always quick with a quotable line. His bloody-minded tirades against the Japanese had been received with enthusiasm, not only by Allied servicemen in the Pacific but also civilians in the United States. Like many celebrities, he had a famous tagline. “The way to win this war,” he said, “is to kill Japs, kill Japs and kill more Japs.”27 He signed off his messages: “Keep ’em dying.” Referring to atrocities against American prisoners, he declared ominously, “They’ll be properly repaid.” He told the press he intended to ride the emperor Hirohito’s famous white horse through downtown Tokyo, and had addressed himself directly to the emperor, declaring: “Your time is short.”28 Halsey’s tendency to speak first and think later had caused embarrassment in the past, most notably when he had rashly predicted that the Allies would achieve complete victory in the Pacific by the end of 1943. Three months later, he had been forced to retract that sensational forecast, and the retraction was gleefully highlighted in the Japanese state-controlled news media. Halsey regretted that he had “made a monkey out of myself many times” in the newspapers, and pledged to learn from his past mistakes.29 But Spruance privately feared that “Halsey’s publicity had actually turned his head,” and wondered (prophetically, it turned out) whether his brassy colleague would feel pressured to “live up to a glorified public image, rather than be guided by his best military judgment.”30

  A war correspondent who got to know Halsey’s inner circle of staff officers in mid-1944 noted that the gang was always in high spirits. “Halsey kept up a running banter; all the Halsey men seemed always to be having a hilarious time.”31 Their leader set the tone. He was a profane, rowdy, fun-loving four-star admiral who laughed at jokes at his own expense and fired provocative verbal salvos against the enemy. The staff, led by Robert “Mick” Carney, called itself the “Dirty Tricks Department.” They were intensely loyal to Halsey, and he reciprocated their loyalty. Naturally they all wanted to come along with “Admiral Bill” on the next adventure, especially since the Third Fleet command was a plum assignment for any ambitious officer, and Halsey did not want to break up his band. That undoubtedly played into his decision to take a large cohort of his SOPAC staff with him when he left Nouméa for Pearl Harbor on June 16, 1944. As they moved into their temporary Third Fleet headquarters in the Navy Yard at Pearl Harbor, they numbered more than a hundred officers and enlisted men, and more were due to arrive from the South Pacific before the intended command turnover in August. Few had served in the fleet since the arrival of the Essex-class fast carriers the previous year. Halsey’s Third Fleet staff was nearly twice the size of Spruance’s team, and it would have been even larger if Admiral Nimitz had not insisted on limiting its headcount.

  Personnel reshuffling was occurring at the task group level as well. Mitscher had been ruthless in purging weaker performers, forcing out three task group commanders since assuming leadership of Task Force 58 in January 1944. A new generation of recently promoted aviation admirals coveted those jobs, which were among the most prestigious in the navy. Career ambitions, personal rivalries, and the ongoing brownshoe insurgency came into play as they jockeyed for the prized billets. Most of the new task group commanders had graduated the Naval Academy between 1916 and 1919. That made them considerably junior to the blackshoe admirals who commanded the battleships and cruisers in the fleet. Vice Admiral Willis “Ching” Lee, who had administrative command of the battleships, had graduated in the Class of 1908, just two years behind Spruance. He had a decade of seniority over the men running the several task groups, to whom Lee and his battleship skippers would have to answer. That sort of arrangement was virtually unknown in the prewar period, but the blackshoes had acknowledged the ascendency of the aircraft carrier, and with a war to win they did not stand on the niceties of the class-year pecking order.

  Admiral King was determined to maintain control of top personnel assignments in the Pacific. His practice was to rotate officers from the fleet back to administrative and planning jobs in Washington, and to send others from the headquarters out to the fleet. The policy was sensible and just, but it meant that men who had been “flying desks” in Washington were suddenly thrust into important seagoing commands even though they had no recent experience in the fleet. Given the breakneck pace of technological and doctrinal evolution, they would have much to learn and absorb. When the Fifth Fleet put into Eniwetok Atoll on August 10, after more than two months of uninterrupted combat operations supporting the invasion of the Marianas, several newly appointed task group commanders flew in and relieved their predecessors. Vice Admiral John S. “Slew” McCain, who had most recently served as King’s deputy chief of naval operations for air, relieved Joseph “Jocko” Clark as commander of Task Group 58.1. His flagship was to be the Wasp. Frederick “Ted” Sherman relieved Alfred Montgomery in command of Task Group 58.3, hoisting his flag in the Essex. Gerald Bogan retained command of Task Group 58.2, with his flagship Bunker Hill; Ralph Davison rode in the Franklin as commander of Task Group 58.4. All were briefed on the impending fleet command turnover, which would occur midday on August 26. Spruance would take the Indianapolis back to Pearl Harbor, and the battleship New Jersey would bring Halsey out to the western Pacific by the first week of September.

  Sooner or later, Admiral Mitscher would also need a spell of rest. The fleet surgeon had noted the telltale signs of nervous exhaustion: Mitscher had lost about 15 pounds in six months, and since he had been scarcely bigger than a horseracing jockey to begin with, he could hardly afford it. But replacing Mitscher presented a dilemma. Several ambitious brownshoe admirals were angling for the job, both in Washington and in Pearl Harbor. Few naval aviators in the service possessed Mitscher’s rank and seniority, and none had seagoing experience with the new carriers. Mitscher favored promoting one of the existing task group comm
anders into the role: he nominated Ted Sherman. But Sherman had begun the war as a captain, and promoting such a junior admiral into the exalted command would excite jealousy and resentment.

  King eventually selected John McCain for the job. McCain was a very senior vice admiral, having graduated Annapolis in 1906. He had been one of King’s most trusted deputies in Washington. He had been the air commander in the South Pacific during the Guadalcanal campaign, and then ran the aeronautics bureau of the Navy Department. Like King and Halsey, he was a latecomer to aviation—all three officers had done their flight training when they were captains over the age of fifty, solely in order to earn the qualification needed to command an aircraft carrier. The “real” brownshoes, who had come up through the ranks as flyers, did not regard these “Johnny-come-latelys” as genuine members of their guild. Many were perplexed and even unsettled by the news that McCain would take over Mitscher’s role as commander of Task Force 38.

  Mitscher was slated to remain with the fleet until November, during which time McCain would undergo a three-month break-in period in the subordinate role of a task group commander, one of four in Task Force 38. His predecessor in that job, Jocko Clark, would remain at sea in the Hornet, making the short flight from the Hornet to the Wasp to consult with the new boss whenever necessary. “Makee-learnee,” a term derived from pidgin English, was the navy’s nickname for this sort of on-the-job training arrangement. McCain would not inherit Mitscher’s experienced staff, so he faced the difficult task of building a new team from scratch. But many of the officers possessing essential know-how were due for leave, or already attached to other admirals, or both.

  Noting that he was senior to Mitscher by a margin of four years, McCain remarked to John Towers that he felt as if someone were trying to “cut his throat.”32 In any previous era of American naval history, a four-year gap in seniority would have decided all such wrangles in McCain’s favor. But under the pressure of a vast and bloody war, many old traditions were being set aside. Pragmatic solutions were the order of the day. After giving him a respectful hearing, Nimitz told him to do his best under the circumstances.