In accordance with a strategy approved at Casablanca in January 1943, the U.S. Navy launched a Central Pacific offensive by seizing Tarawa and Makin atolls in the Gilbert Islands in November 1943 and the Marshall islands of Kwajalein and Majuro in January and February 1944- General Douglas MacArthur, commander of the Southwest Pacific theater, argued persistently that the Pacific Fleet should thereafter support a unitary advance under his command along the “New Guinea-Mindanao axis.” Admiral Ernest J. King, Chief of Naval Operations, no less persistently opposed his arguments, regarding the Marianas—700 miles west of the Marshalls—as the key to the Pacific theater. In March the Joint Chiefs of Staff reached a Solomonic solution: the Central Pacific drive would descend on the southern Marianas in June, and MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific advance would leapfrog to Mindanao in November.
Conduct of the Marianas campaign was entrusted to Admiral Raymond A. Spruance—in King’s opinion the most intelligent flag officer in the Navy—who had commanded the assaults on the Gilberts and Marshalls.
Vice Admiral Marc A. Mitscher’s Task Force 58 would screen landings of the amphibious elements of Spruance’s Fifth Fleet on Saipan, Guam, and Tinian. The greatest concentration of naval air power assembled to date, TF-58 included 15 fast carriers—7 heavy and 8 light—organized in four task groups, plus a battle line of 6 modern battleships under Vice Admiral Willis A. Lee. On 6 June—the same day Allied forces stormed ashore at Normandy—the American armada sailed from Majuro for the Marianas.
The Imperial Japanese Navy had not contested the seizure of the Gilberts or Marshalls, an inactivity caused by the virtual annihilation of two generations of carrier pilots at Midway, Guadalcanal, and in the defense of Rabaul. By spring 1944, however, enough replacements had been at least half trained to populate its carriers, and in May, Admiral Soemu Toyoda, the Combined Fleet’s third wartime commander, issued the orders for Operation A- Go, a planned response to the next major U.S. landing that would commit his carriers to the “decisive battle” enshrined in Japanese naval doctrine. Two months earlier, those carriers—5 heavy and 4 light—had been organized into the 1st Mobile Fleet, similar in structure to TF-58, under Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa, one of the Imperial Navy’s ablest officers. To offset the numerical disadvantage under which Ozawa’s airmen would be forced to enter action, Vice Admiral Kakuji Kakuta’s land-based 1st Air Fleet would rush to the battle area.
Although the Imperial Navy’s leaders preferred the decisive encounter to take place in the Carolines or the Palaus, when it became clear that the blow would fall in the Marianas, they did not hesitate to pick up the gauntlet. The 1st Mobile Fleet sortied from the Philippines on 13 June, and at 0855 on 15 June, 11 minutes after the Marines hit the beach on Saipan, Admiral Toyoda gave the order to execute Operation A-Go.
Shunning the arabesque tactics to which the Imperial Navy was addicted, Ozawa chose to operate the Mobile Fleet as a single unit. His hopes of victory rested on two expectations: first, that Kakuta’s planes, flying from the Marianas and the Carolines, would bloody the U.S. carrier groups before the fleets came into contact; and second, that the superior range of his relatively fragile aircraft—approximately 300 miles, as opposed to their sturdier U.S. counterparts’ comfortable 200—would allow him to attack the Fifth Fleet while remaining outside its reach.
The first of these expectations was destined for disappointment. In the week before the battle, Mitscher’s task groups smashed the Japanese attempts to marshal air power in the Marianas. To make matters worse, Kakuta’s facesaving, fictional reports led Ozawa to believe that they were proceeding as planned. Had Mitscher had his way, Ozawa’s second expectation also would have been a disappointment. That it was not can be ascribed to one of the most controversial command decisions in the Pacific theater.
The Fifth Fleet received ample notice of the enemy’s approach. Three U.S. submarines sighted elements of the Mobile Fleet between 13 and 15 June. Spruance thereupon postponed the invasion of Guam (scheduled for 18 June) and ordered TF-58 to concentrate west of Tinian. A fourth submarine, the Cavalla (SS-244), came to periscope depth in the midst of the Japanese fleet late on 17 June. Mitscher received her report at 0345 on 18 June and concluded that TF-58 should carry the battle to Ozawa by steaming westward during the night of 18-19 June; Lee’s battle line could engage the enemy before dawn, and the carriers would launch at first light. Upon being apprised of this program, Lee declared that he did not “(repeat not)” desire a night action, for which his forces were untrained and in which communication difficulties might offset the U.S. radar edge. Spruance did not like the idea, either. To Mitscher he signaled, “Task Force 58 must cover Saipan and our forces engaged in that operation. Consider that we can best cover Saipan by advancing to westward during daylight and retiring to eastward at night so as to reduce possibility of enemy passing us during darkness.”
This program remained in force when between 2200 and 2245 (records vary) that evening, Commander-in-Chief Pacific (CincPac) headquarters notified Fifth Fleet that Ozawa had broken radio silence—ironically, to contact the air units in the Marianas—and high-frequency direction-finding had taken a fix on his position, which proved to be 355 miles west of TF-58. Assuming that the Mobile Fleet was really there and TF-58 continued moving east, the next day the U.S. carriers could look forward to being hit by an enemy they could not hit back. If, on the other hand, they reversed course, by dawn they could close to 150 to 200 miles—ideal range for their air groups.
Accordingly, at 2325 Mitscher advised Spruance that he proposed to turn west, an action Spruance’s staff was advocating already. For more than an hour Spruance weighed his decision, still suspicious that the Japanese intended to outflank TF-58 and attack the amphibious forces off Saipan. Reliable intelligence credited the Mobile Fleet with at least 40 ships. The Cavalla had sighted only 15. Might the enemy signal have been a red herring, sent by a detached destroyer to deceive U.S. forces as to the Mobile Fleet’s location? In the midst of deliberation over this question, Spruance received word that the Japanese had jammed a transmission from the Stingray (SS-186), a submarine on patrol 175 nautical miles east- southeast of CincPac’s plot of the Mobile Fleet. In fact, the Stingray was merely having problems with her radio, but Spruance surmised that she might be attempting to report a Japanese fleet unit. At 0038 on 19 June he told Mitscher, “Change proposed does not appear advisable. . . End run by other carrier groups remains possibility and must not be overlooked.”
Thus, at 0825 the leading Japanese task group began the largest carrier battle ever fought by launching against TF-58 at a range of 300 nautical miles. But position was the only advantage the Japanese enjoyed; quantitatively, they confronted odds of more than 2 to 1, with 430 against 891 carrier aircraft, and qualitatively, their inferiority was still more pronounced. Mitscher’s experienced aviators slaughtered Ozawa’s neophytes in what became known as “The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.” The U.S. task force lost 30 aircraft; its attackers approximately 315, including 50 based on Guam; and while not a single U.S. carrier was hit, the submarines Albacore (SS-218) and Cavalla penetrated the Mobile Fleet’s screen and sank the heavy carriers Taiho and Shokaku. Mitscher turned west at 2007 and late the next afternoon launched 230 planes in a long-range strike that destroyed the heavy carrier Hiyo and ravaged what remained of Ozawa’s air groups. The raid cost TF-58 100 aircraft, most of which ran out of fuel on the way back to the carriers. Fortunately, the majority of their crews were rescued. More would have been lost had Mitscher not made the courageous decision to turn on the carriers’ searchlights to guide his pilots home. When Spruance called off the chase, the Mobile Fleet’s carrier air strength had been reduced to 35 planes. The Fifth Fleet had not only safeguarded the invasion of the Marianas, it dealt Japanese carrier air power a blow from which it never recovered.
Despite the magnitude of the victory, aviators and some others condemned non-aviator Spruance’s refusal to allow TF-58 to turn west on the night of 18-19 June in order to gain a position from which, presumably, it could have erased the Mobile Fleet. Rear Admiral J. J. Clark, commander of Task Group 58.1, growled, “It was the chance of a century missed.” Many good historians have reached the same verdict. Yet, in the final reckoning, it seems difficult to fault the reasoning Spruance recapitulated when he wrote: “As a matter of tactics, I think that going out after the Japanese and knocking their carriers out would have been much better . . . than waiting for them to attack us; but we were at the start of a very important . . . amphibious operation and we could not afford to gamble and place it in jeopardy.”
For further reading: James H. Belote and William M. Belote, Titans of the Seas: The Development and Operations of Japanese and American Carrier Task Forces During World War II (New York: Harper & Row, 1975); Thomas B. Buell, The Quiet Warrior: A Biography of Admiral Raymond A. Spruance (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1987); Samuel Eliot Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Vol. VIII: New Guinea and the Marianas (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975); Clark G. Reynolds, The Fast Carriers: The Forging of an Air Navy (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1992); William T. Y’Blood, Red Sun Setting: The Battle of the Philippine Sea (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1981).