After a brief detour into the Atlantic, our book club for Samuel Eliot Morison's The Two-Ocean War, a history of the USN in WWII, returns to the Pacific to cover the pair of carrier battles that are probably the most prominent of the Pacific War.
We open with the briefest descriptons of the Battle for Wake Island, which brings up one of the (mercifully short) list of major flaws that Morison has. Normally, he's extremely positive on US leaders, to the point that I was sort of expecting his half-page word kiss to Admiral Nimitz to end with "and he walked to work across Pearl Harbor without even getting his shoes wet". But for reasons that nobody has ever worked out, he really disliked Frank Jack Fletcher. The tonal dissonance this provokes in the main series is actually pretty amusing, where he goes out of his way to shower everyone else with praise, while Fletcher cannot do a single thing right. Obviously, this is an area where modern historians have taken a rather different approach, most notably in John Lundstrom's Black Shoe Carrier Admiral. Current views are that Fletcher was generally a competent and effective admiral, and in particular that he really did need to fuel before approaching Wake.
The Fletcher-bashing continues into Coral Sea, where Morison is extremely careful to give Aubrey Fitch credit for actions on the 8th. Beyond that, there's not a whole lot to say about his coverage, which is fairly brief, as Midway is where his real interest lies. Still, at least Fletcher "learned a thing or two" from Coral Sea beforehand, allowing him to win one of the great victories of the war. (He's nicer than he was in the full account.) Much as in the Atlantic, the war was shaped by codebreaking in a way Morison could only nod at here. The famous story is that the target of the operation ("AF") was confirmed by ordering Midway to broadcast that it was having trouble with the water plant, and subsequently the cryptographers picked up "AF is short of water".
In the account of Midway itself, Morison gives a lot of credit to Miles Browning, which is odd because the same is not true in his full account. No idea why this is, and it's an area where more recent history largely disagrees. It's also worth pointing out that the Japanese weren't as close to launching their strikes as Morison makes out. Details on this, and everything else wrong with the conventional understanding of Midway, can be found in the excellent Shattered Sword. Morison generally stays at a high enough level I don't need to get into the others, but the book is very much worth a read if you're interested in Midway, or a more numbers-heavy take on naval history in general. And then we close with yet another swipe at Fletcher. I generally like Morison's rather personal and opinionated take on history, but this is just making him seem petty.
Comments
I love the Coral Sea bit's look back at history, where the only violence had been "between trade ships and Melanesian war canoes". He does the word-pictures and similes thing throughout, but not as well. The sea like some kind of blue Persian ceramic was not a familiar image to me.
He mentions Japanese killing downed American airmen, but not big atrocities, even in the Philippines where America was so strongly present.
I think the atrocities thing is a matter of framing and when he wrote. This is very much a history of the war as seen in battles. Killing downed airmen happened in battles, while the Bataan Death March isn't a battle. (And given the condensation from the 14-volume set, he's going to have had to be pretty ruthless about that kind of thing.) Also, he's writing in the early 60s, and I strongly suspect that anyone who would think of reading this kind of book was well aware of that stuff in a way that is less true today.
I know it's a big war and a (relatively) short book, but I expected a bit more detail on both Coral Sea and Midway. I guess I was spoiled by Miracle At Midway, and haven't read anything else since.
It's especially enlightening to see bean's comments on Morison's quirks. He really didn't like Fletcher much, did he?
Morison does acknowledge MAGIC (though not by name) twice in his discussion of Midway, and both times says it was invaluable to pulling out the win.
We also run into (another/the other) instance of Morison slagging a non-Fletcher USN officer here, specifically "Fuzzy" Theobald. TBH I do not know enough about Theobald's defensive efforts in the Aleutians in 1942 to say whether Morison's critique is valid, or whether it might be colored by Theobald's post-war writing career.
Meanwhile Morison's discussion of Fletcher at Coral Sea and Midway specifically seems mostly fair, specifically praising him for "gallantly" detaching Crace's force to intercept the Port Moresby invasion force and for "wisely" holding back Yorktown's strike to wait for additional sighting reports. Even the bit about putting Fitch in tactical control at Coral Sea doesn't read like a criticism, at least IMO, but as a sound decision to let the specialist do his specialty. ... And then we come to the end of the chapter, when Morison assigns all the credit for victory at Midway to Spruance (and Browning(!)). That's just frustrating.
@Philistine:
"Whenever someone says the words 'Fletcher won't, I reach for my Browning."
He does say in the chapter's final paragraph that June 4 should be a national holiday where Fletcher is one of five commanders Americans should think good of. So it's not pure negativity, just... an idiosyncratic analysis of Midway.
Pedantic correction: IIUC a "cryptographer" is someone who designs (or academically studies) code and cipher systems. The people who identified AF would be more properly called codebreakers.
I was expecting Fletcher to get handled worse, based on the rumors. OTOH, I read a head, and just you wait till he gets to Monty...
I was taken by his statement of "Fletcher learned a thing or two" for two reasons. One, its very interesting for Morrison to be forced to compliment Fletcher, so he did it in a backhanded way.
Two, seeing the colloquialisms from the era in the modern day is slightly jarring from an anachronistic point of view, particularly since my kids give me crap all the time about phrases I use. The best part is that they actually have to do research to find out the decade each phrase was most popular when they use the phrase "Dad, the 1890's called. They want their slang back!"
It’s apparent that Morrison spent a lot time with senior officers who had an axe to grind and making Fletcher look bad served that interest. High on that list is likely Turner who should have been held responsible for Savo but managed to dodge that by splattering everyone else like Fletcher with blame. Fletcher of course famously declined to be interviewed by Morrison and I wonder if some of how he treats Fletcher is retaliation for that.
Regardless of his motivations I simply cannot forgive Morrison his treatment of Fletcher especially given how badly it has distorted history’s view of him.
For one thing his criticism of Fletcher’s fueling is something Morrison really really gets wrong as Sal from what’s going on with shipping has demonstrated. Morrison is looking at the ability to refuel from a 1945 perspective when the art was massively more advanced than it was in early 1942. He also utterly fails to understand just how fast a destroyer running at high speeds will burn through fuel.
Fletcher in my view he is the finest Carrier Task Force commander of WW2. He’s not an aviator and he takes command at a time when the doctrinal playbook is paper thin. He’s up against the IJN at the absolute height of their power and ability and at a time when US forces are considerably less adept. Despite all these handicaps he ends up 3-0 against the IJN. And frankly Lexington should have survived her damage and had Mark Mitscher not tried to pretend he was the smartest man in the room and ordered the flight to nowhere his aircraft would have put down Hiryu during the first strike meaning Midway is over by noon with the score 4-0. Remove those two losses from the Scoreboard and Fletcher’s record is even more impressive.
I know some may argue for Mitscher or Clark as being better carrier task force commanders. But they were fighting an entirely different war at a time when they had total dominance. By the time of the Big Blue Fleet a US commander could afford to be almost suicidaly aggressive given the comparative state of the two fleets. By contrast Fletcher is fighting at a time when he knows his carriers are essentially irreplaceable national assets that he can’t afford to risk.