A Sailor's History of the U.S. Navy

by Thomas J. Cutler

  Sailors from USS Lexington abandon ship during the Battle of the Coral Sea during World War II. U.S. Naval Institute Photo Archive

  Knotted lines, cargo nets, and bedsheets tied together were suspended from the flight and hangar decks, and men were streaming down them in good order. Others jumped or dove as though they were back at their home-town swimming holes.

  In a few hours, Fireman Highfill, Commander Seligman, the dusting radioman, and hundreds of other men were crowded onto escort ships, watching the final moments of their ship. In the gathering darkness, the burning ship lit the sea and sky. Exploding ammunition and aircraft fuel tanks periodically flared like some great fireworks display.

  Admiral Frank Fletcher, the officer in tactical command, worried that Lexington would serve as a beacon to aid the enemy in locating his fleet, so he made the painful decision to send her to the bottom as quickly as possible. He ordered one of the destroyers to torpedo her and then ordered the task force to depart the area.

  Lady Lex did not give up easily as multiple torpedoes bit into her sides, but eventually she settled quietly into the sea just as the evening watch was being set on the surviving ships. The great fires winked out until all was dark as nature intended. Then there was a final explosion that was felt on the departing ships miles away, and Lexington plunged to the bottom of the Coral Sea.

  In writing his official report, Captain Sherman recorded that 216 men of a total complement of 2,951 had been lost with the ship. He added that both the ship and the crew had “performed gloriously.” He also noted that Lexington’s demise was “more fitting than the usual fate of the eventual scrap heap or succumbing to the perils of the sea.”

  The Battle of the Coral Sea was over. As the Japanese and American forces withdrew from these waters, the fighting had temporarily ended, but the reckoning had just begun. Each side had scored victories; both had suffered losses. For those who had perished, the war was over, but for those whose task it remained to fight on, there was a long road of struggle and sacrifice ahead. One of the tasks of the living was to determine the significance of this first major battle and to decide how to take best advantage of it. As events would prove, it would be the U.S. Navy who would do the better job.

  The Vocabulary of War

  Like most specialized subjects, warfare has a vocabulary of its own. The word logistics, for example, describes an element of warfare that is often overlooked by the casual observer but absolutely essential to the achievement of victory. Logistics is supplying forces with the crucial things they need to fight effectively—food, fuel, clothing, ammunition, repair parts, and so forth. Another term, metrics, has more recently entered the vocabulary of war and describes those elements—numbers of casualties and rounds expended, for example—by which effectiveness is measured. But among those specialized words, strategy and tactics—terms often used to describe the planning, the classifying, and the differentiating of various actions and their significance in war—are among the most frequently used, yet their meanings are often not fully understood by those who use them. For example, the Battle of the Coral Sea in World War II is often described as a strategic victory for the U.S. Navy and a tactical victory for the Japanese. But what does that mean?

  Although these terms are similar and overlap in their meanings, there are notable differences, nevertheless, that are valuable when plans for wars and battles are made and those engagements are assessed in their aftermath.

  Both strategy and tactics deal with using available military forces to accomplish objectives—that is, what it is that you want to achieve by the use of force. An overly simple but helpful way of describing the two terms is to think of strategy as pertaining to the war as a whole and tactics to the battles that are part of the war. Another simplification is that strategy can be thought of as the plan and tactics are the ways that plan is executed. Neither of these descriptions is completely accurate, however, and both fail to account for the variations and the overlaps sometimes encountered in the usage of these two words. For example, the planning for a major battle may be described as strategic, rather than tactical.

  Much of the difference between the two depends upon size and scale. Strategy often involves larger components (such as fleets) and usually is more long-term in duration (years, months, weeks). Tactics are smaller in scale (involving individual ships, for example) and shorter in duration (days, hours, minutes). Strategy can be employed in both war and peace, but tactics are generally linked to combat operations. Strategy is usually carried out by military commanders of high rank, while tactics can be employed by virtually anyone in contact with an enemy, from admirals to petty officers.

  In the case of the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Pacific Fleet commander, Admiral Nimitz, made the decision to send his available carriers to Australian waters to prevent the Japanese from invading Port Moresby on the southeastern side of New Guinea, knowing that the Allies’ loss of Port Moresby would give the Japanese a favorable geographic advantage and put Australia in serious jeopardy.

  That was a strategic decision made by a high-ranking officer involving large forces—two carriers and their escorts, a large percentage of all forces then available in the Pacific Theater—over a relatively long period of time (in the vast reaches of the Pacific it can take weeks to reposition forces). Once Admiral Nimitz had planned his strategy, he then turned operational command over to his subordinate commanders to devise the tactics that would accomplish the objective of preventing the Japanese from taking Port Moresby.

  During the actual battle on 8 May, the Japanese took advantage of the weather by hiding under the available clouds so that U.S. pilots would have difficulty spotting them, and Zuikaku was able to avoid damage by hiding in a passing rainsquall. Because the weather was clear around the U.S. carriers, the Japanese dive-bombers were able to dive on the carriers with the sun behind them, making it difficult for the American Sailors manning the antiaircraft guns to see them. These actions were tactical in nature, some made by captains (the commanding officers of the carriers) and some made by lieutenants (the dive-bomber pilots).

  When Japanese torpedo bombers came skimming in at low altitude, Lexington’s captain ordered a starboard turn to minimize the target profile of his ship. To thwart that maneuver, the Japanese pilots came in on both bows, so that if their target changed course in either direction, she would present a broadside aspect to their torpedoes, increasing the likelihood of a hit. These were decisions made in the heat of battle that were designed to give a tactical advantage.

  Coupled with courage and skill, the tactics employed during the battle by the ship captains, pilots, gunners, and others had much to do with the survival or the loss of the individual units. When the smoke had cleared and the fleet commanders had withdrawn their forces, the score in a purely tactical sense seemed to favor the Japanese. They had lost only a light aircraft carrier compared to the U.S. loss of a full-sized attack carrier, as well as a destroyer and an oiler.

  But in the greater strategic sense, the Americans actually fared better than the Japanese. The elation evident in the flight commander’s report, “Scratch one flattop!” when U.S. pilots were able to sink the light carrier Shoho was appropriate not only in the heat of the moment, but also because the loss of the air support that Shoho was tasked with supplying to the invading forces caused the Japanese commander to turn his task force around, abandoning the attack on the Port Moresby. Because taking Port Moresby was a major objective of the Japanese—the primary reason for the Battle of the Coral Sea—the loss of Shoho was a victory of strategic importance for the Americans. Going back to the earlier simplistic definitions of strategy and tactics, the battle had gone in favor of the Japanese, but the effect on the war had favored the Americans. Viewed this way, the assessment that the battle had been a tactical victory for the Japanese navy and a strategic victory for the U.S. Navy is a reasonable assessment.

  There was another strategic consideration as well. Because the carriers Zuikaku and Shokaku
were temporarily put out of action at Coral Sea, they were not available for the next major battle at Midway. The number of carriers that faced off in that critical battle was three for the Americans and four for the Japanese, a much better matchup for the Americans than the three-to-six ratio it might have been. Because Midway proved to be a pivotal battle in the war, the Japanese suffered a defeat from which they never fully recovered. Thus, the relatively minor damage inflicted on Zuikaku and Shokaku had important strategic effects on the outcome of the war.

  Strategy versus Tactics

  At the Battle of Valcour Island during the American Revolution, the Americans employed good tactics to offset some of the advantages enjoyed by the British as they carried out their strategy of trying to split the colonies along the Hudson River corridor in New York. Although the British had a far superior force, the Americans placed their forces in Valcour Bay so they would have the upwind advantage. This caused the British ships sailing southward along Lake Champlain to have to come about and attack into the wind—no easy task for vessels powered by sails, especially those that were square-rigged. This was an excellent example of tactical positioning on the part of the Americans; it was enhanced by the crescent formation they used, which allowed them to concentrate their fire. They also cut spruce trees and rigged them along the sides of their vessels to make them blend in with the surrounding tree-lined shores and to provide some protection against small arms fire when the British got in close.

  Despite these tactical enhancements, the American force was ultimately no match for the superior British fleet and the victory went to the latter. But just as at Coral Sea, the tactical victory for one side proved to be a strategic victory for the other.

  The British strategy had been to come down the lake to the Hudson River and then proceed southward to New York, effectively cutting off New England from the rest of the colonies. But the presence of the American naval force at the southern end of Lake Champlain had forced the British commander to delay his advance. By the time the battle was over, winter had arrived, and the British commander decided to hold off any further advance until the following spring. This bought valuable time for the Americans and allowed them to gather the forces necessary to defeat the British at Saratoga the following year, which not only thwarted Britain’s strategy of dividing the colonies, but also delivered a serious blow to British morale and convinced the French to enter the war as an American ally. While it would be several years before the full effects could be realized, that victory ultimately led to American independence. Clearly a strategic victory was realized despite a tactical defeat.

  Strategy and tactics also had unexpected results in Vietnam in 1968. American forces were caught off guard in the early hours of the Tet Offensive, as Communist insurgents—the so-called Vietcong—rose up in many places all over South Vietnam during the celebration of the Vietnamese New Year and, in coordination with North Vietnamese forces, scored a number of tactical victories. They inflicted heavy casualties on American forces, managed to get several insurgents inside the walls of the American embassy compound, and seized the ancient and symbolic city of Hue.

  American and South Vietnamese forces soon turned around these early tactical victories, however. The insurgents in the American embassy compound were killed before they could get into the embassy itself. Marines took back Hue City after a bloody siege. American naval forces operating on the rivers in the “brown-water” navy were credited with saving the strategically vital Mekong Delta in a series of battles along the twisting waterways. Army forces decimated the Vietcong, dealing them a defeat from which they would never recover; from that time forward, all serious opposition came from the North Vietnamese regulars coming into South Vietnam from strategic sanctuaries. Ultimately, it was clearly an overwhelming tactical victory for U.S. and South Vietnamese forces that, once they recovered from the initial surprise, fought courageously and effectively.

  Further, Communist strategy had counted on a simultaneous uprising of the people of South Vietnam once the insurgent attacks had begun. This did not materialize. All things considered, it would seem that the American and the South Vietnamese forces had won both a strategic and a tactical victory in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive.

  But this did not prove to be the case. The initial shock of the Communist attacks had so stunned the American people that what was actually a major victory was seen by many as a defeat. In the first days of the Tet Offensive, American media reported it as a major setback, which in many ways it had been. But in the weeks that followed, the resounding tactical victory for the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies was largely overlooked as the American media, the Congress, and the military leadership struggled to reassess the U.S. commitment in Southeast Asia. It was a classic case of perception overruling reality. With the American will shaken at home, a series of events over the next several years ultimately caused American military forces to come home from a war in which they had never lost a major battle, yet never achieved their overall strategic objective: the survival of South Vietnam as a democratic nation. Victory would be denied them because the Communist strategy of outwaiting their adversaries had prevailed.

  While these examples demonstrate differences between strategy and tactics, they should not give the impression that the two are always at odds. Quite the opposite. In more cases than not, good tactics reinforce good strategy, so that important battles won ultimately lead to victory in war.

  The Spanish-American War at the end of the nineteenth century illustrates the effects of good and bad strategy and tactics. In the events leading up to the war and in two major sea battles, strategic and tactical applications directly affected the outcome of the war as a whole.

  Showing the Flag

  For years, tensions had been building between the United States and Spain, mostly over the Spanish-owned island of Cuba, just a few miles off the coast of Florida. Cuban revolutionaries had long been trying to overthrow their Spanish overlords, and various U.S. interests were at stake. As the struggle between the two sides raged on, American plantations there had been taken, an American schooner was seized as a gunrunner, two American tourists were shot as spies, and various other incidents kept tensions high.

  In January 1898, USS Maine was dispatched to Cuba to send a message of American determination to the Spanish government and to protect American citizens then in Havana. The strategy of sending a warship to an area in crisis is often called “forward presence” or “showing the flag,” and the battleship Maine was in many ways an ideal way to accomplish this. She was an imposing sight for her day. Her hull, boats, and anchors were a gleaming white, her superstructure, masts, and smokestacks a reddish brown, and her guns and searchlights a foreboding black. From her varnished mahogany pilothouse, her officers could send orders to the coal-fired boiler rooms via specially designed telegraphs. Two 10-inch guns were mounted in a turret forward that was offset to starboard, and two more 10-inch guns were mounted in an after turret, offset to port. With this arrangement, the guns could fire through an unobstructed arc of 180 degrees on their respective sides and through an additional arc of 64 degrees on the opposite sides. This main battery was supplemented by an array of more than twenty smaller guns of various calibers and functions and by four torpedo tubes.

  Apprentice First Class Ambrose Ham was signal boy of the watch when Maine made landfall on 25 January 1898. He had originally been assigned as a crew member in the captain’s gig, but another young Sailor had convinced him to trade assignments. After getting approval from his division officer, Lieutenant Jungen, Ham made the switch, a choice that would later save his life.

  Battleship USS Maine was sent to Cuba in 1898 to send a message of American determination to the Spanish government and to protect American citizens in Havana. U.S. Naval Institute Photo Archive

  Tensions were high in Maine as she slowly steamed into Havana harbor, close aboard Morro Castle perched upon a high rock on the port side of the channel. Ordinary Seaman Frank
Andrews wrote in a letter to his father: “As we steamed in under the guns of Morro we calculated how long it would take us to silence it. Our turret-gun crews were standing out of sight, of course, while the rest of the crew was around the deck. At the first shot from the Spanish they would have found their places.”

  Ambrose Ham remembered that “as we entered the harbor everything looked peaceful.” But he heard another Sailor tell two friends, “We’ll never get out of here alive.”

  Arriving at mooring buoy number four, about four hundred yards from a wharf near the city’s customhouse, the ship’s anchor chain was detached from the anchor, passed through a ring on the buoy, and then brought back aboard the battleship and secured. Colors were shifted and Maine’s crew settled in for a long stay.

  Because of the high state of tension, the crew was not allowed to go ashore. Instead of the normal in-port watch, Captain Charles Dwight Sigsbee had ordered a quarter watch at night, so that a fourth of the crew was immediately available to man the guns should the need arise. Armed sentries manned the forecastle and poop deck during the hours of darkness, and the ship’s gangways were guarded as well.

  Ham noted that “time was beginning to drag.” He longed to go back to his home in Schenectady, New York, and spent much of the time thinking about that. There was not much in the way of entertainment, and every evening at sundown he watched the Spanish sailors on nearby ships “run up the masts and chase the devils out of the gear blocks. Some years ago a Spanish sailing ship got into a gale and when they tried to take in sail the blocks would not work. The ship capsized.”

  For more than two weeks, the 358-man crew of USS Maine went about their routines, aware of their part in a tense international situation, yet unable to do anything other than show their flag and be ready for hostilities should they erupt. On the morning of 15 February, Ham was roused from a deep sleep at 0530 by the gravelly voice of a boatswain’s mate announcing reveille. Ham rolled out of his hammock and began tricing it up, unaware that this was the day when the mind-numbing routine would finally end.