When Halsey was finally able to focus, his operations officer came to his cabin and reported, “Admiral, we have had three torpedo planes missing for two days.”
Halsey knew at once. “My boy?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
Halsey told him, “My son is the same as every other son in the combat zone. Look for him just as you’d look for anybody else.”
But that brave statement hardly did anything to assuage the worry. Another day passed, and then two, making four days since the planes had been reported missing. Halsey, who had often been asked to hold out hope for missing men, now faced his own cruel realization: “Only a miracle can bring him home.”
And it came. Late on August 12, searchers spotted several rubber rafts beached on an island between New Caledonia and Efate. The missing planes had strayed off course and been forced to make water landings, but all ten men aboard, including Lieutenant Halsey, were safe, except for the effects of exposure. The day they were all rescued turned out to be Friday, August 13, long the admiral’s dreaded jinx. “From then on—for awhile,” wrote the senior Halsey, “I spit in the eye of the jinx that had haunted me on the thirteenth of every month since the Missouri’s turret explosion thirty-nine years before.”12
And there was one other particularly poignant father-son relationship. Rear Admiral “Slew” McCain’s son, John Sidney McCain, Jr., Annapolis class of 1931, was in command of the submarine Gunnel as it participated in the North Africa landings. The chaos of America’s first major amphibious assault was punctuated by mechanical problems with the Gunnel’s engines and poor recognition signals that at one point put the Gunnel under attack from Allied bombers.
A year later, McCain and Gunnel were on patrol in the Yellow Sea, still experiencing engine problems. McCain had the good fortune to sight no less than four enemy carriers during his patrols, but engine problems and faulty torpedoes kept him from sinking any. Tough Slew McCain worried about his boy, but perhaps the only thing tougher was twenty-some years later when John Sidney McCain, Jr., was an admiral in command of all Pacific operations and his own son, John Sidney McCain III, a naval aviator, was shot down over North Vietnam and endured five and a half years of captivity.13
It was not, of course, any easier on the wives. Bill Leahy had lost his beloved Louise just before he returned from Vichy in the spring of 1942. It had been his “good luck,” he wrote more than a decade after her death, “to be married to a highly talented example of American womanhood who expected her husband to accomplish favorable progress, and who took her full share of the hardships involved.”14
Few love affairs could surpass the devotion, companionship, and mutual adoration shared by Chester and Catherine Nimitz. They were first and foremost—in the catchphrase of a later generation—“soul mates.” They routinely wrote each other almost daily when they were apart, and no matter what the turmoil swirling around them, their letters always managed to convey an intimate, personal touch, as if the other was truly the most important person in the world—which they were. “You are ever in my thoughts,” he told her, “and I am happiest when I know you are well and happy.”15
Ernest King’s marriage was another matter. His interactions with Mattie—seven children aside—were frequently as distant and detached as most of his other relationships. King could send a chatty letter to a chief petty officer with whom he had served years before or quietly arrange maternity care for the wife of a junior officer who was himself convalescing in a hospital, but when he went home during his war years in Washington, it was to his quarters on the Dauntless, moored at the Washington Navy Yard, and not to Mattie at his official residence at the Naval Observatory.16
What affection King showed was reserved for his daughters and a few special wives of younger officers to whom he was frequently a father figure. There were certainly whispers of his infidelity, but investigating them three-quarters of a century removed has yielded little more than the proverbial “everybody knew he was doing it.” In any event, Mattie stayed the good sailor to the end and lies by his side at Annapolis.17
Bill Halsey’s marital story may be the grimmest of all. Bill and Fan were well down the path to emulating Chester and Catherine Nimitz when Fan began to suffer from alternating bouts of mania and depression in the late 1930s. Her illness became worse as the war progressed and made for uncomfortable reunions whenever Bill returned to the States. Eventually, it became clear that they couldn’t live together, even though Bill always provided for her care.18
What is certain is that the war and its inherent dangers and uncertainties took its toll on the best of relationships and frequently severed the worst of them. Some of the sons who were rushed into manhood would not return home. Many daughters would do their part in America’s industries and in military support roles around the world. There would be, as Chester Nimitz intoned on the first Mother’s Day of the war, “losses along the road to victory.”19
It was gruff Halsey, writing more quickly after the war than Leahy, King, or Nimitz, who summed up the human cost of the inexorable march of events they had witnessed. As Halsey looked over his shoulder from his campaigns across the Pacific, “the old battlefields were already disappearing into the jungle or under neat, new buildings. Where 500 men had lost their lives in a night attack a few months before, eighteen men were now playing baseball. Where a Jap pillbox had crouched, a movie projector stood. Where a hand grenade had wiped out a foxhole, a storekeeper was serving cokes. Only the cemeteries were left.”20
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Driving It Home
The U.S. military’s drive westward through the Central Pacific began in earnest on November 20, 1943, with the invasion of the atolls of Makin and Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands, code-named Operation Galvanic. The campaign provided a steep but necessary learning curve. Nimitz and his planners had expected to overwhelm the Japanese defenders with firepower as well as manpower and complete the assault in a day—the main island, Tarawa, was but two miles long and six hundred yards wide, with a high point of ten feet in elevation.
Instead, a close-in naval barrage fired on a relatively flat trajectory created a scene of apparent wild destruction but failed to penetrate the deeply dug-in fortifications. Coordination between air support, naval bombardment, and the assault waves hitting the beaches left much to be desired. A full thirty minutes elapsed between the end of the shore bombardment and the first assault wave, giving the defenders ample time to emerge from their bunkers and defend the beaches. And while LVTs (landing vehicles, tracked) floated over the surrounding coral reefs without difficulty, other landing craft grounded on them during an unforeseen low tide. They were forced to disgorge their troops into deep water and deadly fire.
Makin fell to the army’s Twenty-seventh Infantry Division on November 23 with only light casualties, but dug-in defenders on Tarawa cost the veteran Second Marine Division over three thousand casualties, more than a third of them killed. These delays on the ground also cost the navy. Once the invasion target was confirmed, Japanese planes and submarines keyed on the Gilberts.
Despite the criticism leveled at Admiral Fletcher in moving his carriers off the beachhead at Guadalcanal the previous year, Nimitz instructed Spruance to do just that in the Gilberts after a torpedo plane disabled the light carrier Independence. But the deadliest loss came off Makin when a Japanese submarine fired a torpedo into the escort carrier Liscome Bay. These half-pint “jeep” carriers were intended to bear the burden of close-in air support and fighter protection for amphibious landings, but they were frequently as vulnerable as floating gasoline cans. The torpedo exploded the Liscome Bay’s magazine, quickly sinking the ship and killing nearly 650 officers and crew out of a complement of about 900. Among those missing and presumed dead was enlisted man Doris “Dorie” Miller, to whom Nimitz had awarded the first Navy Cross to an African-American, for his heroism during the Pearl Harbor attack. Clearly, it was deadly to linger around beachheads.
In typical fashion,
Nimitz wanted to rush to Tarawa and see the difficulties firsthand in order to better educate his forces for the next go-round. Spruance advised him to wait a day or two, as mopping-up operations were still under way, but Nimitz would have nothing to do with that. On November 25, he flew with selected staff in a PB2Y Coronado from Pearl Harbor to the Ellice Islands and then hopped a Marine Corps DC-3 for the flight to Tarawa. Even then, the plane had to circle while bulldozers worked on the recently captured airstrip.
“I have never seen such a desolate spot as Tarawa,” Nimitz wrote Catherine. “Not a coconut tree of thousands was left whole.”1 His men, however, saw him, and just as on his visit to Guadalcanal, word spread quickly through the Second Division: “The old man? Oh yeah, he came by my post last night.” The effect on morale was incalculable.
But Tarawa’s heavy casualties brought a howl of protest in the United States. Some of it was pointedly personal. “You killed my son on Tarawa,” one bereaved mother wrote to Nimitz. To the admiral’s credit, he insisted that every piece of mail be answered.2
Other criticism came from closer at hand. Amphibious forces commander Marine Corps Major General Holland M. Smith was indeed “howlin’ mad” at the casualties, and he vented his frustration on Nimitz when they regrouped back in Pearl Harbor. Smith claimed that Tarawa wasn’t worth the price paid and that it should have been left to “wither on the vine” rather than be taken by direct assault.3
On an island-by-island basis, Smith’s argument might have been made almost anywhere, but in the broader picture of the Central Pacific, the tactical lessons of Tarawa had to be learned someplace. Grieved though he was by the casualties, Nimitz, with King’s continuing support, was glad that these lessons were learned early in the Gilberts. But to Smith’s point, perhaps the most important lesson of Tarawa was that it reinforced in the minds of all the top commanders the island-hopping strategy that Thomas C. Kinkaid had already pioneered in the Aleutians and Halsey was embracing in the Solomons.
The most immediate effect of the bloody land and sea battles on and around Tarawa was to make Nimitz’s chief lieutenants suddenly leery and extremely cautious about their next thrust into the Marshall Islands. That was the scene of Halsey’s early 1942 raid with Enterprise. Now, instead of just commanding the cruisers in Halsey’s task force, Raymond Spruance was in command of the entire Fifth Fleet.
Cerebral Spruance may have initially underestimated Nimitz. Their early encounters had been largely social, and Nimitz’s low-key, aw-shucks manner tended to camouflage his razor-sharp thinking. Any skepticism certainly changed to admiration, however, after Spruance relied on Nimitz’s general directives at the Battle of Midway and then spent a year with Nimitz as his chief of staff, housemate, and general confidant. “The better I got to know him,” Spruance recalled, “the more I admired his intelligence, his open-mindedness and his approachability for any who had new or different ideas, and, above all, his utter fearlessness and his courage in pushing the war.”4
Admittedly, Nimitz procrastinated in giving Spruance command of the Fifth Fleet, but not out of any hesitancy about his qualifications. Nimitz simply wasn’t sure he could do without Spruance’s close counsel, but in the end he determined that Spruance would be an even greater asset with the fleet. Their year together at Pearl Harbor had given each a clear understanding of the other. “The admiral thinks it’s all right to send Raymond out now,” a CINCPAC staff officer joked. “He’s got him to the point where they think and talk just alike.”5
But when it came to the Marshalls invasion, Spruance was far from ready to mimic Nimitz. In concert with amphibious task force commander Kelly Turner and Holland Smith, who would again command the landing forces, Spruance recommended a two-step approach to Nimitz, first seizing the outer islands of Wotje and Maloelap and then using airfields there to support a second attack on the Japanese headquarters on Kwajalein, in the heart of the islands. After Tarawa, this seemed particularly prudent.
Nimitz weighed the advice of his commanders and also considered new reconnaissance that showed the Japanese to be heavily fortifying Wotje, Maloelap, and the outer islands to provide a protective ring around Kwajalein. Nimitz agreed that it would be difficult to mount a simultaneous assault on multiple islands. But then he shocked Spruance, Turner, and Smith by suggesting that while carrier planes neutralized the enemy airfields on the outer islands, one major thrust would be made directly against Kwajalein instead. The Marshalls could thus be secured in one fell swoop, or at least so said Nimitz in the face of his staff’s adamant opposition.
Considerable discussion ensued, and on December 14, with the clock ticking, Nimitz was forced to make a final decision. He asked Spruance, Turner, and Smith in turn where in the Marshalls they should strike, and each said the outer islands. “Well, gentlemen,” Nimitz said quietly after a moment of silence, “our next objective will be Kwajalein.”
After the conference ended, Turner and Spruance felt so strongly about Nimitz’s decision that they stayed behind to argue against it. Turner called the decision to strike directly at Kwajalein “dangerous and reckless,” and Spruance agreed. Finally, when their arguments began to wind down, Nimitz, still as calm as ever, leaned back in his chair and said, “This is it. If you don’t want to do it, the Department will find someone else to do it. Do you want to do it or not?” That settled the matter. Of course they would do it.6
Once this decision was made, both Nimitz and Spruance came under pressure from King to conduct the Marshalls operation—code-named Flintlock—very quickly. King wanted to keep up the offensive momentum and not give the Japanese time to regroup and fortify new forward positions. There was also the issue of the fast carriers. King had directed Nimitz to send them south after the Marshalls were captured, to support Halsey’s drive westward from the Solomons. Consequently, King was adamant that the Marshalls operation commence no later than January 16, 1944. Given the increasing distances from Pearl Harbor for ships and supplies, Spruance was equally adamant that it could not begin until February 1. Nimitz served as sort of a mediator between King and Spruance during this time—recognizing both sides—and in the end the main assault on Kwajalein began on February 1.7
In the meantime, King and Nimitz had decided that command of the fast carriers had to go to a more aggressive officer than Rear Admiral Charles “Baldy” Pownall. Spruance thought Pownall had performed admirably enough off Tarawa, but subsequent to that, Pownall led a raid on the Marshalls to hinder enemy airfields. When reconnaissance after a first strike at Kwajalein revealed numerous undamaged planes still on the atoll, Pownall turned his carriers away from the threat rather than launching a second strike. These planes eventually found Pownall’s force and put a torpedo into the stern of the new Essex-class carrier Lexington (CV-16) before returning to Kwajalein, where they remained a threat to any invasion force.
Vice Admiral John H. Towers, who had taken Ernie King for his first airplane ride above the Severn River decades before, led the charge to replace Pownall. King had promoted Towers to be Nimitz’s deputy CINCPAC and aviation expert in part to get him out of Washington. King disliked him, or at least was jealous of Towers’s political connections. Nimitz was not a fan of Towers either, but he accepted him at Pearl Harbor and chose to rely on his aviation expertise. “Towers was a very ambitious man,” the usually reserved Spruance noted and then summed up the feelings of many Pacific Fleet officers when he observed, “If you were not an admirer of Towers and did not play on his team, your path was not made smooth if he could help it.”8
It rankled Spruance even more when King and Nimitz—without directly consulting Spruance—followed Towers’s recommendation to give Rear Admiral Marc Mitscher the fast carrier command, designated Task Force 58, under Spruance as the overall fleet commander. Mitscher would soon prove his worth, but Spruance’s early apprehension may have stemmed from his own lack of appreciation of the full potential of fast-strike carriers, as well as his personal impression—deserved or not—that Mitscher had n
ot acquitted himself particularly well as captain of the Hornet during the Battle of Midway.9
In the big picture, these tensions were the inevitable growing pains of transforming aircraft carriers from a tactical support role into a strategic-weapons spearhead. The end compromise was that King and Nimitz agreed that all major commanders, including Spruance, who were non-aviators, had to have an aviator as their chief of staff or deputy, and conversely that all major commanders who were aviators had to have a surface officer in the second position.10
So with Mitscher’s carriers ready to subdue airfields in the Marshalls and block any reinforcements from Truk or the Marianas, Spruance led his fleet against Kwajalein. He expertly applied the lessons of Tarawa and struck with “violent, overwhelming force, swiftly applied.” He also insisted on the “isolation of the objective area.” In other words, keep the enemy from reinforcing the objective and provide a sure corridor in for one’s own supplies.11
The good news was that after a more accurate naval bombardment that didn’t end until the first wave was five hundred yards offshore, casualties were much lighter than at Tarawa. Marines from the new Fourth Marine Division overran the islets of Roi and Namur, on the north side of the atoll, and the army’s Seventh Division, battle trained in the tough Aleutians campaign, fought its way across the length of Kwajalein in five days. Some 42,000 American troops were engaged, with only 372 killed and about 1,600 wounded.
On February 8, Spruance’s flagship, the cruiser Indianapolis, anchored along with hundreds of ships of the Fifth Fleet in the relative safety of the Majuro lagoon, twenty-four miles long and five miles wide, on the eastern edge of the Marshalls. There they were protected from high seas and enemy submarines, but most important, the service units of the fleet, from oilers to repair ships and tugs, could establish a secure forward base two thousand miles closer to Japan than Pearl Harbor.
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