Admiral Bill Halsey: A Naval Life
Thomas Alexander Hughes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. 504 pp. Maps. Photos. Notes. Biblio. Index. $35.
Reviewed by Walter R. Borneman
In the grim early months of World War II, as the American public searched for heroes, two men came to personify the American war effort in the Pacific: General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral William F. Halsey Jr. They were polar opposites in command style and personality, but each was a determined fighter and came to appreciate that quality in the other.
While MacArthur was besieged on Corregidor and then escaped to Australia, Halsey took the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise (CV-6) on daring hit-and-run raids against Japanese installations in the Marshall Islands and at Wake Island and then shepherded the Hornet (CV-8) and the Doolittle Raiders near Japan. Dashing south after the Doolittle mission, Halsey’s carriers arrived too late for the action at the Battle of the Coral Sea. Halsey himself missed the great victory at Midway after being hospitalized with a chronic skin ailment.
Who was the real Bill Halsey? Despite numerous biographies and evaluations of Halsey’s command decisions during the Battle of Leyte Gulf and in two typhoons, Thomas Alexander Hughes ably demonstrates that there never has been any easy answer to that question. That may be among the reasons Hughes acknowledges that it took him “a long time” to write this biography. The result, however, was well worth his effort.
Bill Halsey traced his roots to the early days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. While he overplayed the time his ancestors spent at sea, his father was a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and a career naval officer. Hughes offers an in-depth look at the relationship between father—who suffered from alcoholism—and son, and a more thorough analysis of Halsey’s own medical problems than previously reported. He also covers the heartbreaking descent of Halsey’s beloved wife, Fan (née Frances Cooke Grandy), from the belle of Norfolk to the ward of a mental institution. Both situations weighed on Halsey’s own mental state. All this, as well as the details of Halsey’s destroyer service and belated baptism into naval aviation, makes for the most well-rounded portrait to date of Halsey prior to the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941.
Having chronicled Halsey’s early 1942 raids, Hughes devotes considerable attention to the two years that followed, from Halsey’s dispatch by Admiral Chester W. Nimitz to save the faltering Guadalcanal campaign through his less-than-flawless leadership in assaulting the middle islands of the Solomons in 1943. The latter is “a neglected corner,” Hughes writes, often overshadowed by General Douglas MacArthur’s fights in New Guinea and Nimitz’s thrust into the Central Pacific at Tarawa.
Given the depths to which Hughes plumbs Halsey’s career, one minor surprise is that he devotes relatively little space—roughly 15 percent of the book—to Halsey’s tenure as commander of the U.S. 3rd Fleet. Halsey alternated in an effective command rotation with Admiral Raymond A. Spruance between June 1944 and September 1945, when Halsey stood with MacArthur on the deck of his flagship, the battleship USS Missouri (BB-63), and watched Nimitz sign the articles of Japanese surrender for the United States.
If there is a caution in Hughes’ tale, it is his assertion that Halsey “mediated the disputes of policy and personality . . . between MacArthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz that bedeviled the American war effort.” To be sure, Halsey was stuck in a difficult position—responsible to MacArthur for strategic directive and accountable to Nimitz for just about everything else. But as for Halsey being an arbiter between MacArthur and Nimitz, Hughes’ subsequent characterization of Halsey’s “murky position” may be closer to the truth.
In a similar vein, the assertion that “MacArthur and Nimitz exchanged nary a letter or cable across the entire campaign” as evidence of interservice discord overlooks the pattern of communication between the two theater commanders via the Joint Chiefs. Hughes is even more dismissive in his characterization of the Honolulu Conference of 1944. “Roosevelt came to Honolulu,” he writes, “not so much to grandstand as to settle difficult strategic issues. His trip was the natural, even necessary result of a divided command in the Pacific that had provided MacArthur and Nimitz no single superior short of the presidency”—a statement that ignores the role of the Joint Chiefs in supervising both MacArthur and Nimitz. But these criticisms should be taken as points of discussion, not derision.
While generally a sympathetic portrait, Admiral Bill Halsey ends with a tone of disappointment. Perhaps that is because Halsey himself came to be disappointed in some aspects of his career—his command decisions at Leyte, which he vigorously defended; his actions during two typhoons, which he routinely ignored; and the publication of his autobiography, which he came to feel was ill-advised. What cannot be doubted is that Hughes has produced an admirable portrait of a fighting admiral.
Mr. Borneman is the author of The Admirals: Nimitz, Halsey, Leahy, and King (2012), which won the Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature, and MacArthur at War: World War II in the Pacific (2016), both published by Little, Brown and Company.
Storm over Leyte: The Philippine Invasion and the Destruction of the Japanese Navy
John Prados. New York: NAL Caliber, 2016. 388 pp. Intro. Notes. Biblio. Index. Maps. Illus. $28.
Reviewed by David Sears
John Prados introduces his fine account of the Second Battle of the Philippine Sea by asserting that the FDR-MacArthur-Nimitz Pearl Harbor confab in July 1944 “set up the most momentous military headache of the Pacific War.” That headache (“using the atomic bomb on Japan versus invading the Japanese Home Islands”) lies at the core of Prados’ intriguing thesis: “The Pearl Harbor conference and the Philippine campaign that started at Leyte Gulf led directly to that horrible dilemma.”
Prados concludes that conquering Taiwan instead would have more thoroughly strangled Japan, thus avoiding Hobbesian choices. He makes a sound case and certainly one worth considering. Still, this reviewer’s sense is that Japanese intransigence, combined with the atomic bomb’s availability and America’s dread of invasion, made the outcome inevitable. Fortunately, the virtues of Storm over Leyte far outweigh this one difference of opinion.
Chief among the book’s virtues is the way Prados brings groundbreaking military-intelligence research to the Battle of Leyte Gulf (its more familiar moniker). For seven decades, the intelligence component had remained in the shadows. He also spotlights lesser-known operatives from alphabet outfits such as the Joint Intelligence Center Pacific Ocean Area (JICPOA) and its cohort, the Fleet Radio Unit Pacific (FRUPAC). Prados also—fittingly—takes note of the “Boulder Boys,” the language-officer graduates from the University of Colorado at Boulder who were fluent in Japanese. They arrived just in time. The invasion of Saipan yielded an enormous cache of Japanese documents.
Prados also presents a refreshingly clear delineation of just how Japan’s Sho Go (Victory Plan) came together then fell apart. Essentially, Sho Go anticipated four contingencies. Sho I, the invasion of the Philippines, which Japanese planners recognized as most likely; Sho II, Taiwan; Sho III, Central Japan; and Sho IV, Northern Japan. All of Japan’s high-level commanders seemed to agree that air, land, and sea forces had to be marshaled and coordinated for Sho Go to succeed.
Then, in August 1944, came the fundamental question: Should Sho primarily target America’s transports or its combatants? Three years earlier, off Savo Island during the first stage of the struggle for Guadalcanal, Vice Admiral Gunichi Mikawa had gone for the combatants instead of the transports. Japanese strategists’ 20-20 hindsight regarded this as a grave mistake. Imperial General Headquarters (IGHQ) was thinking less of victory and more of politics, convinced that destroying transports was more likely to prolong the war and bring it to a negotiated conclusion. The problem, according to Prados, was that the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) “had been designed and trained to sink an enemy fleet.” This dog, in other words, would hunt.
In early October, the IGHQ’s best-laid plans began to crumble. U.S. Navy carrier strikes on 10 October at Okinawa triggered what Prados terms “air-only Sho.” This, he says, is central to understanding what happened at Leyte Gulf. On-scene commanders were splitting precious resources—air for “Taiwan Sho,” surface for “Philippines Sho.” After disastrous premature air battles, Japan “no longer possessed an integrated, multidimensional weapon.” Bottom line: “the depleted air arm left the Imperial Navy’s surface fleet naked before the enemy.”
If the IJN was an inveterate hunter, so was Admiral William Halsey, who faced three alternatives as battle loomed: stay and guard the San Bernardino Strait with all his forces; detach battleships to guard the strait and take his carriers north; or go after Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa with all three carrier groups. The third option, Halsey argued, “preserved my fleet’s integrity, it left the initiative with me, and promised the greatest possibility of surprise.” And so, when the Bull pulled the trigger, it was: “Mick [his chief of staff, then-Rear Admiral Robert Carney], start them north.”
Prados thinks that both sides made the same mistake for the same reason. IJN instincts to attack fleets instead of invasion forces countered IGHQ’s strategic preferences. And Halsey left the San Bernardino Strait unguarded because he wanted his forces intact while he went after the carriers—in his opinion, the main threat.
Having set the stage, Prados constructs battle narratives that are fluid, dramatic, and engaging—among the best this reviewer has ever read. They flow so well because he constructs such a solid prebattle foundation. One tiny quibble: Writing about the action off Samar, Prados laments: “the CVEs were equipped largely with older-model Wildcats, but they did their best.” Not entirely so. CVE Wildcat aviators have extolled the fighting features and resiliency of the General Motors FM models they flew.
Prados wraps up Storm over Leyte by revisiting his argument that conquering the Philippines made for an “imperfect blockade.” He writes, “War termination in the Pacific could have resulted if a successful blockade had made it plain to Japanese leaders and commanders that further military operations were simply not possible.”
Perhaps, but it still seems that Prados writes the essence of Leyte Gulf’s history in the book’s final paragraph: “[A] Japanese surface fleet . . . put American aircraft carriers under its guns. Courageous sailors . . . turned back the Japanese armada. The biggest naval battle in history came down to a few storm-beaten ships on which the sun never set.”
Mr. Sears is a New Jersey-based military historian, former U.S. Navy destroyer officer, and the author of four books, including Pacific Air: How Fearless Flyboys, Peerless Aircraft, and Fast Flattops Conquered the Skies in the War with Japan (2011) and Such Men as These: The Story of Navy Pilots Who Flew the Deadly Skies over Korea (2010), both published by Da Capo Press.
The Silent Deep: The Royal Navy Submarine Service since 1945
Peter Hennessy and James Jinks. London: Allen Lane/Penguin Books, 2015. 823 pp. Intro. Illus. Maps. Index. Append. $24.99.
Reviewed by Norman Polmar
This important, interesting, and well-written book describes British submarine development and operations during the Cold War and the subsequent two decades. The authors’ discussions of “special operations”—British submarines operating in northern waters to collect intelligence against the Soviet navy—are particularly interesting. These passages also provide significant, albeit limited, information on similar U.S. submarine operations. The book’s sources in this regard include official documents and interviews with former commanding officers and participants in these missions.
Great Britain, like the United States, first used diesel-electric submarines for operations in Soviet waters. Both countries failed in their initial efforts: the United States in 1949 with the loss of the submarine Cochino (SS-345), and Britain in 1952. Once the latter achieved success in missions into Soviet waters, some British boats were given “unauthorized modifications,” and some commanding officers exceeded their “guidance” to obtain intelligence on Soviet warships and submarines, their operations, and their communications. Some commanders not only pushed the envelope but “tore it,” according to the authors.
There were times when an entire submarine crew was in danger during a special operation and others when a single crew member was at risk. On a 1954 intelligence mission, the diesel boat HMS Totem underwent a damaging Soviet depth-charge attack that left her periscopes and snorkel unusable. During the same mission, the Totem suffered a major problem with “special equipment” on her masts. The submarine surfaced, and the electrical officer, Peter Lucy, was ordered to climb the conning tower to make repairs. The commanding officer, John Coote, recalled, “if Totem was detected [we] would immediately close all hatches and crash-dive, leaving Lucy to fend for himself in the freezing waters of the Barents Sea.” Lucy made the repairs and was inside when the boat submerged. Interestingly, Coote was on board the USS Stickleback (SS-415) when she spent 34 days on patrol off the Soviet submarine base at Petropavlovsk during a cruise in which the boat spent five consecutive weeks submerged.
Later, the Royal Navy employed nuclear-propelled attack submarines (SSNs) for intelligence missions. “For the Commanding Officers of the Royal Navy’s newest SSNs, these intelligence gathering operations were exceptionally demanding,” the authors write. At least one former diesel submariner turned down an opportunity to command an SSN because he had “such a bad time up against the Soviets” on previous intelligence-collection missions.
The accounts of these missions make fascinating reading. So, too, do the machinations of the British government, Admiralty, Director of Naval Intelligence, and submarine force commander in deciding the when and where of these operations. Each mission required political authorization because of concern about Britain’s relationship with the Soviet Union.
The Silent Deep also describes British submarine operations during the Suez invasion of 1956, the Falklands campaign of 1982, and other crises and conflicts. Beyond operations, the book provides a valuable account of British submarine development in the post–World War II period. Several aspects of this story are particularly interesting, such as the deliberations over the subject of nuclear-armed torpedoes (including the possible acquisition of the U.S. Mark 45 Astor) and over acquiring the U.S. Regulus land-attack missile to provide submarines with a strategic weapon before submarine-launched ballistic missiles became available.
The book includes extensive discussions of British torpedoes. There is hardly any mention of mines, however, and none of Operation Cudgel, a proposal to have X-Craft (midget submarines) towed by “mother” submarines to forward areas to plant nuclear mines in Soviet ports. Initiated to meet a 1954 Admiralty requirement, Cudgel was canceled in 1956.
It is difficult to identify any significant shortfalls in this large volume. There is no bibliography, but this is a minor deficit in view of its 70 pages of detailed notes. There are also 25 pages of profiles of British, Soviet, and U.S. submarines describing their basic characteristics. The authors are professional historians, and Hennessy was made a life peer in 2010. Those interested in submarine development, operations, and intelligence during the period covered will find this book necessary reading.
Mr. Polmar is coauthor, with K. J. Moore, of Cold War Submarines: The Design and Construction of U.S. and Soviet Submarines (Potomac Books, 2004).
The Castaway’s War: One Man’s Battle against Imperial Japan
Stephen Harding. Boston: Da Capo Press, 2016. 289 pp. Maps. Illus. Biblio. Notes. Index. $26.99.
By Mark Felton
Admiral William “Bull” Halsey described Hugh Barr Miller as “the bravest man I ever met,” and it’s hard to disagree with the Bull’s summation of the central character in Stephen Harding’s latest World War II adventure. The author of The New York Times bestseller The Last Battle has shifted focus to the Pacific, bringing us, as the subtitle accurately declares, “One man’s battle against Imperial Japan.”
The Castaway’s War is the gripping story of Lieutenant Hugh Miller, a U.S. Navy officer shipwrecked on a tropical nightmare island in the Pacific in 1943 following the sinking of his ship by a Japanese torpedo. Miller’s ship, the destroyer USS Strong (DD-467), part of Task Group 36.1, sank during a bloody engagement in the Kula Gulf on 5 July 1943 in the Solomons Island campaign.
“Rose Bowl” Miller, a young officer and prewar University of Alabama football player, was knocked unconscious during the sinking and, along with several other crewmen, was missed during rescue efforts by other U.S. ships. He eventually made it ashore to Arundel Island. They were all in a bad way, sunburned, dehydrated, and suffering the effects of having ingested fuel oil during the sinking. Several died soon after. Miller ordered the three remaining survivors to leave, believing that he was dying. Now alone, Miller somehow pulled through, and in true Robinson Crusoe style he used all his skills and considerable determination to gather food, rebuild his health, and effect his own salvation, even though the island was swarming with Japanese patrols.
During his 41 days as a castaway, Miller never forgot he was first and foremost a naval officer with a job to do, and he managed to gather intelligence on the Japanese forces even though he was deep behind enemy lines with little chance of survival. During several terrifying encounters with the enemy, this one-man army singlehandedly killed several Japanese, stealing their clothing, weapons, and food to go on. It remains one of the great injustices of the war that Miller, even though vocally supported by such World War II luminaries as Admiral Halsey and President Dwight D. Eisenhower, was denied a richly deserved Medal of Honor.
Harding has infused his tale with fascinating detail and moving scenes interspersed with the action, which is edge-of-the-seat stuff. The book often reads like a thriller, and it is hard to remember that one is reading fact, not fiction. The Castaway’s War is superbly researched and referenced, drawing on Harding’s interviews with key participants, and it tells Miller’s story from both the American and the Japanese side.
Harding has mined another forgotten gem of World War II—a story that grabs us from the start and drags us remorselessly into a wartime heart of darkness—a situation whose outcome is by no means certain. You will find yourself, like this reviewer, willing Miller on in his desperate attempts to remain ahead of the Japanese, who hunt him like a dangerous animal. Harding’s is an uplifting account of the resilient nature of the human spirit in times of great peril and adversity and an individual’s determination to triumph over everything that nature and man could throw at him.
Dr. Felton is a British military historian who taught in Shanghai, China, for more than a decade. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including China Station: The British Military in the Celestial Empire, 1839–1997 (Pen & Sword, 2013) and Zero Night: The Untold Story of World War Two’s Greatest Escape (Thomas Dunne Books, 2015).