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.)