This is another chapter that is basically a straight adaptation of one of Morison's books, in this case Volume 8, with which it shares a title. Unfortunately, the first half gets extremely short shrift, which I think is sad. As much as I am not a fan of Douglas MacArthur, Morison's full account of the New Guinea campaign has long convinced me that it is one of the great military accomplishments of WWII, and he simply doesn't use enough space here to do it justice. I also am not sure that Morison's claims about only MacArthur being able to pull it off are true, but I will agree that it is the one unambiguous piece of evidence the case in favor of him being a great general has going for it.
One thing that jumped out was Morison ascribing the inactivity of the Japanese fleet to American air superiority. While that's certainly part of the picture, the increasingly perilous oil situation the Japanese found themselves in was also a major component not only of the ships not moving, but also of the Japanese inability to train replacement pilots, and it's weird that he doesn't even mention that. That section also has another veiled reference to codebreaking in the Pacific Fleet "finding out" where the enemy submarines were and sending hunter-killer groups after them. And of course, this is where England put up an unmatched score of 6 boats in 12 days, despite the efforts of the group commander to spread kills out among the ships of the unit. For kill number 6, she was only allowed in after 3 other DEs had failed, and promptly added to her tally.
I was also confused by Spruance choosing Indianapolis as his flagship because she was expendable. That seems like a weird thing to want in a flagship, as the Admiral in charge presumably isn't, but a check of a biography I have of him made sense of it. He wanted to be able to direct his flagship where he thought his presence would be most useful, which ruled out a battleship (taking such a powerful unit out of position was a bad idea) and thought that he might end up exposing the ship to enemy fire when observing a landing, so wanted something that wouldn't be too badly missed if it was damaged in his service and had to be sent back for repairs.
Then you get the actual battle of the Philippine Sea, the greatest and last carrier battle of the war. Of course, much of the actual killing was done by submarine, and Morison doesn't spend much time on the story of Taiho, or "why you are exceedingly careful with your avgas systems". I also think he doesn't spend nearly enough time on how much this battle differed from earlier carrier battles. The expectation prewar had been that whichever side got its shot in first would win, but thanks to radar and the CIC, the Spruance's force was able to tank the Japanese attack and survive unscathed.
Comments
The effusive praise of MacArthur continues to baffle me. Even setting aside things we wouldn't learn for another 30+ years, the man had racked up some very conspicuous failures in his time to along with his great successes; and Morison's claim that MacArthur was beloved by the men who served under him suggests that Morison never spoke to anybody who served under MacArthur. It's just odd, and not obviously explicable by appealing to Morison's known biases.
It's even more inexplicable after I pulled the book Samuel Eliot Morison's Historical World and looked for MacArthur in the appendix. I'd forgotten that he becomes more Mac-skeptical in the later volumes, and was apparently one of the major public intellectuals who went to bat for Truman when MacArthur was fired. He's even pretty harsh on MacArthur (at least in Korea) in the Oxford History of the American People, written two years after this, although he's very complementary of MacArthur's handling of Japan (much more defensible) and reasonably positive on WWII, although less over-the-top than here. I'm not sure what's going on.
American Caesar runs deep I think.
The New Guinea campaign is not the unambiguous piece of evidence in favor of MacArthur being a great general, that distinction belongs to Inchon. I am personally not a fan of MacArthur, but there can be no denying that the landing at Inchon in 1950 was both operationally and strategically brilliant. Given how the UN forces at the Pusan Perimeter were on the rocks in some places just a week beforehand during the Great Naktong Offensive, Inchon has to be seen as one of the great military maneuvers of all time. If Communist China had not become involved Inchon would have probably actually ended the war by Christmas. All accounts state that MacArthur started thinking about an amphibious envelopment within days of the Korean War starting, that he pushed for Inchon as the landing site to retake Seoul and collapse the entire North Korean offensive (as oppossed to a landing closer to Pusan that might have relieved the perimeter, but not shifted the direction of the whole war), and that he was the one who won over the Joint Chiefs in the face of objections by many senior officers (particularly Navy admirals who thought a landing at a sea-walled harbor with high tides and narrow shipping channels was foolish). If anything MacArthur did was exceptional, that was it.
That USS England was scrapped two and a half years after her achievement, instead of being preserved as a museum ship, is one of the great tragedies of UN Navy and American history. The same for USS Enterprise, USS San Francisco, USS O'Bannon, USS Thresher, USS Barb, USS Heermann, and USS Pillsbury.
Spruance's choice of a cruiser versus a battleship looms large considering that some believe part of the reason Halsey left San Bernadino Strait uncovered four months later was because he was on the USS New Jersey. If he had detached Task Force 34 with his battleships to cover the strait then he would have been "left behind" when the carriers went to destroy the Japanese Northern Force off Cape Engano. The result, of course, was over 1,100 US sailors dead in the Battle Off Samar, and even greater risk to the invasion fleet if Kurita had not blinked.
I am not a fan of MacArthur, but if ever there was an overrated commander it was Halsey. Spruance should have absolutely been the one to get the 5th star.
As an aside, at this point in the war a dedicated command ship converted from a cruiser with large spaces for an operational, not tactical, CIC, large area air and sea plots, etc. would have been a good idea, similar to how cargo ships were being converted into the first LCC amphibious command ships. There was absolutely no reason for the commander of the Third/Fifth fleet, or even TF38/58, to be on a vessel actually fighting the enemy. The need was for a mobile equivalent of Hugh Dowding's command and control system, both in the general sense of a force multiplier from information filtering and the soon to be very specific need of countering kamikaze's. Of course, the coming of the Midway class carriers and their much larger size meant that they could host that role instead.
Morrison talks about how Rocky Mount had been commissioned in time for the Marshall Islands invasions, but it was being used by Admiral Turner, who probably had a much more important use for it.
Yes, it would have been great if we had one for each invasion fleet and each carrier fleet. However, we didn't. We ended up with 4. Three of them were used by Pacific invasion force commanders. The 4th was used in the Atlantic.
As Bean so vividly stated, the US fleet was able to tank the Japanese attacks during this phase of the war. It wasn't until we got close enough to large land masses that could hold more than one or two airfields that the Japanese recovered their ability to inflict damage on the US Navy. That was mostly due to sheer mass, and I don't believe all the command ships in the world would have sufficed to keep the kamikazes away from the fleet.
One of the things that used to bother me about Morrison is that he always named the captain or admiral commanding a ship/force in the books. In this condensed version, I actually found it helpful for the first time in keeping track of who was running which invasion force.
Another thing that strikes me is that the US Navy had enough ships/men/equipment to field not just one invasion force, but..... 4, if I am counting correctly, and only prior to the Guam invasion did they have to send back for more.
The miracle of the Pacific war.... well, there's two. One is the sheer amount of stuff that was produced to fight the war, which is based on the US industrial might. The second is that the Navy actually listened to the commissioned civilians about how to run the shipping, rather than having an attack of "not invented here" syndrome.
I'm not sure how much that would help. The LCCs were there to coordinate really complicated landing operations which were run as an integrated whole. But in a lot of ways, fleet actions are simpler, and you really want each task force to have reasonable capability to fight on its own. There might be an argument for a central tactical plot with space to hold more plotters and more radio personnel, but that sort of thing is going to inevitably be behind the ball thanks to the pace of developments in WWII. I definitely don't know why you'd need a big operational plot, because those are relatively simple and don't need the sort of real-time updating you do when dealing with kamikazes. (Also, I suspect that any manual CIC is going to be pretty overwhelmed dealing with kamikazes, no matter how big. That was sort of the point of those tactics.)
The experience of the Battle of Britain suggests that a central tactical plot would have helped quite a lot in dealing with kamikaze attacks, just as they did in dealing with the major German attacks in the summer of 1940.
As for the operational plot, the recent discussion about Leyte on the Chapter 14 post of Two Ocean War reinforces my view that it would have been beneficial, if not critical, to have a big operational plot. The key issue is the reports on the night of the 24th that the Center Force had turned around. Numerous commanders identified what this meant and the need to block San Bernardino Strait or the risk to 7th Fleet. However, when they attempted to talk to Halsey about it they were rebuffed by him or his staff (technically Mitscher, when woken up by Arleigh Burke, didn't bother to talk to Halsey because he knew he would be rebuffed, but same effect).
"What I hear I forget, what I see I remember." What if instead Halsey had been running the battle from a cruiser that had a turret removed to create a two story command center like the Battle of Britain Bunker, with him on the second level looking down on a map as plotters moved ship markers around in response to position and intelligence reports. Would seeing the marker for Kurita's Center Force physically moving east toward San Bernardino have forced him or his staff to acknowledge what was going on and take action? Maybe not, but it is likely yes. You can say operational plots are simple and don't need real time updating, but that's not actually the case. Leyte Gulf was a very complex battle with dozens of individual task groups spread over thousands of square miles of ocean. Real time updating of Japanese ship locations (to the extent they were known) together with a display that put that information before the commander would probably have made all the difference.
The two situations are less comparable than they look. Tactical plots were all over the fleet by this point, and they successfully won the Battle of the Philippine Sea. A lot of the effectiveness of kamikaze tactics comes from the fact that they were dispatched in small groups, which overwhelmed the raid-handling capability of the fleet's CICs. (If you want to know more, read Norman Friedman's Network-Centric Warfare.)
I'm not also sure Leyte Gulf makes your case. Without wanting to get deep into the weeds of the battle, the problem is that neither Halsey nor anyone on his staff believed that Kurita had turned around. The marker would never be on the map, and if it had been, someone would have been saying "Kurita has turned around, you should send Lee to cover the strait" pretty much regardless of how big the flag plot is. Maybe a bigger staff on a dedicated command ship would have spotted it, but IIRC Halsey Mitcher et al were deep into confirmation bias and might well have ignored it.
Chain Home was made up of a vast network of coast watchers, radar stations, and most crucially telephone networks to link them all together. On land this was easy to build, but to replicate the system in a fleet would be a massive undertaking. Each sector would need its own command cruiser, and dozens if not hundreds of escorts would need to be refit as air direction destroyers.
I look at it the other way around. The report from the reconnaissance aircraft from USS Independence would have made its way onto the map because in a dedicated command ship/operations plot there would be a staff processing reports and putting them on the map somewhat on autopilot, regardless of the confirmation bias of higher ups.
'someone would have been saying “Kurita has turned around, you should send Lee to cover the strait”' isn't a hypothetical if a marker got placed on the map, its what actually happened WITHOUT an operations plot. Both Bogan and Lee reached out to Halsey, and Burke/Flatley went to Mitscher. In all cases they were rebuffed (the confirmation bias you mention). But if there were a marker of a Japanese battle group being moved east towards San Bernardino Strait by a plot technician every 30 minutes or hour on a 'big board' that Halsey was looking at, then it becomes much harder if not impossible to ignore.
@MattC
If you look at the link to "radar and the CIC" in the OP, you'll find my account of how the Chain Home system was adapted to use at sea. The very short version is that they sort of did that, but ships had to do plotting internally because the communications links weren't there to move data around the way Chain Home did.
@Onux
I am not sure at all that this works. This is an era when information from scouts tends to be fragmentary and often frankly bad, so it would be easy enough for Halsey to dismiss the reports from the shadowing aircraft if they disagree with the version of reality he wants. If two senior admirals can't convince him to take the threat seriously, what are the odds that he won't just browbeat the JG in charge of the plotting section?
@bean
The information from the scout aircraft was good enough to get just about everyone in Halsey's command aware of the threat except him. It clearly conveyed that the Center Force was heading east, which would have been the vital information to get the marker moving on the plot in a way that made the danger clear.
Yes, Halsey can still just be stupid and ignore everything; I have been very critical of his command during this battle. However, to be able to browbeat the JG in charge of plotting he has to see the marker for Center Force in the "wrong" spot and thus come face to face with reality not his version of it.
Also, while the confirmation bias was clearly there, that doesn't mean it was malicious. Halsey is being given all kids of reports and being asked to make all kinds of decisions. He's being handed message slips to read, possibly while having other discussions; he may be looking over a map, he might not; his main focus is the Japanese carrier group, which is what is should be; fatigue and stress play a role. A proper plot/big board/operations room helps with this. During the Battle of France, British fighters had an average interception rate of 30% during their sorties. During the Battle of Britain it was 90%. Same aircraft, same pilots, same commanders. The difference was the Dowding System of command and control, with big board plots just like the one I am advocating* so that commanders could process the stream of information to understand the threat and properly direct forces. There is a reason that CIC/TOC/COCs are now ubiquitous in all operational environments, not just military but also disaster response, large fires, etc. They are a better way of processing and presenting information and help commanders avoid mistakes.
Yes, Halsey should have left TF 34 to guard the San Bernadino Strait (or at least some destroyers for early warning!) but that mistake having been made a property C2 setup should have helped him correct it before it was too late.
Should also note here that this type of system should have helped avoid Halsey's other great mistake of not responding to Kurita's attack right away. I have my doubts that he only received the messages at 1000, but let's give him the benefit of that doubt; as above he is busy, messages are coming in all of the time and possibly out of order, he is giving messages as well as receiving them, etc. With a proper fleet plot set up copies of the messages from Taffy 3/Kinkaid would have been going straight to that JG, who had none of those distractions and whose only job was to read the messages and plot appropriate friendly and enemy positions. Had Halsey been sitting on the second floor of a plot room looking down at dispositions, there is no way he could have missed the marker(s) for a major Japanese surface fleet suddenly appearing right next to the marker for Taffy 3 at 0815 or so.
*Worth noting that the big board at Fighter Command HQ at Bentley Priory in WWII covered an area approximately that taken up by the Battle of Leyte Gulf, some 400 x 600 mi.
I do know this. In fact, I'm fairly certain you learned this fact from me.
More than that, flag plots existed (several are mentioned in Morison's account of the decision not to guard San Bernadino Strait), and even the most basic flag plot was adequate for this job. It looks on a close read like Halsey's most basic mistake was less thinking that Kurita had turned back than taking too seriously his aviator's reports of damage after the attack on Musashi. The problem was twofold. First, Halsey assumed that the air attack had been far more effective in reducing the fighting power of the Japanese force than it actually was. Second, Halsey assumed that Kinkaid realized he was taking TF 34 with him, which Kinkaid of course did not, leaving Taffy 3 vulnerable.
I would not assume that this is the case. Nothing you're talking about actually improves the flow of messages through the system, and when all of your encryption and decryption has to happen by hand, things will get delayed. I'm also in the camp that Halsey's reaction to that was pretty poor and he should have finished off Ozawa instead of turning south.
Flag plots existed, but I both agree and disagree that a "most basic" plot would have helped. On the agree portion, as I mentioned elsewhere, guarding San Bernardino Strait was an absolute requirement of Halsey even if Center Force had not existed. It was key terrain for access to the landing beaches and had to be at an absolute minimum watched (and really, held and controlled) even if there were no enemy forces spotted moving towards it. This did not require a plot of any kind, it only required Halsey to be one step above incompetent during his initial map study of the area when planning the operation months before.
As to disagree, Halsey being incapable of knowing to post security like a very junior officer (we're talking platoon commander/officer of the day level responsibility, not even as far up as company commander or officer of the deck) the question is what C2 system would have helped force him to understand the situation and change his decisions to act and react better.
The flag plot that Halsey used, did it look like this: https://static.wixstatic.com/media/8b1df1f3cd725dd07c4f308f1f886070bd2bc5~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w999,h667,alc,q85,encavif,qualityauto/8b1df1f3cd725dd07c4f308f1f886070bd2bc5~mv2.jpg or this: https://bentleypriorymuseum.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/RAF-BP-HQ-Fighter-Command-768x598.jpg ?
Or was it the cramped 12 ft x 20 ft compartment (minus a light lock vestibule) shown on this video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hknqopuB6zI
There was no dedicated room on the USS New Jersey that allowed Halsey to sit and study the operational situation on a map board a floor below, undistracted by the hum of the activity keeping the plot up to date, as there was in the British fighter command examples. Do we even know if Halsey was in the flag plot full time, or was he on the flag bridge, making his decisions with the salt spray in his face like an admiral of yore (c.f. Callaghan commanding from a ship without radar at the First Naval Battle of Guadalcanal and getting mauled, versus Lee commanding via the glow of a radar screen one night later as he stalked and destroyed Kirishima, winning the Guadalcanal campaign). Given how much of this scenario played out overnight, it is also worth noting that the Iowa class did not have a flag cabin on the 03 level so an admiral could be steps from the plot, to match the captain's at-sea cabin right next to the bridge on the 04 level. Once Halsey was in bed he was a deck away from whatever plot existed.
The issue here isn't just "did a map exist with unit plots on it" but the overall presentation of information. As I stated previously "what I hear I forget, what I see I remember". A plot on a wall or chart table in that cramped flag plot is of no use if Halsey's back is to it. The goal is to synthesize information into as accurate and as real time a display as possible, and then present it in an intuitive way to facilitate rapid but not impulsive decision making. Once again, there is a reason that every organization that has to deal with these situations (not just military but police, disaster response, even transit agency and power companies) have adopted the theater style ops room/COC/CIC format. There is no reason the USN could not have had such a space on a converted light cruiser in 1944.
The same goes for radio messages. The radio room Halsey was relying on was also a cramped 12x20 space. A dedicated command ship, by removing space and personnel used for main armament, would have had plenty of space for a radio room with more than six seats, the radiomen and cryptographic technicians to staff it, and most importantly a layout designed to speed the process (a linear process with a radio operator passing messages to a decoder at his side, rather than over the shoulder and across the room jumps to mind).
As to the specifics of 25 October, the "delayed decryption" argument doesn't hold much weight since Kinkaid was sending some messages unencoded with wording like "My situation is critical." Again, let's give Halsey the benefit of the doubt and focus on the systematic issues at play. Halsey is not sitting around just waiting to read messages from the 7th Fleet. He is reading messages from his own force, from Nimitz in Pearl, drafting messages to send, discussing with his Chief of Staff. His main focus is on the Japanese carrier force and the status of Mitscher's upcoming strike against it (and in general I agree that's where it should be!). The hypothetical plot JG we have been discussing has none of those distractions. His only job is to read messages that make mention of enemy forces and ensure the Quartermaster petty officers (did the Operations Specialist rating exist in 1944?) place the appropriate markers on the big board plot, while another JO or Chief does the calculations every 30-60 minutes to update locations based on last reported course and speed. The enemy plot JG does not have to read and plot friendly positions, or handle messages about logistics and fuel, or throw a temper tantrum when a message comes in from Nimitz with a reference to an old poem padded at the end that makes him look like a fool. With that infrastructure and system in place I can absolutely see Sprague and Kinkaid's calls for help being recognized and placed where Halsey could not help but see them hours before he actually took any action.