User:Gunbirddriver/Pacific Theater

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The construction of piers at Ulithi
At BLUE Beach, one officer and fifteen men of CBD 1054 were assigned to the construction of a pontoon causeway. The installation consisted of two single-pontoon strings, 150 long, placed about 150 feet apart at right angles to the beach line. A 2-by-30-pontoon string was then placed at right angles to the offshore end of the first two strings. The enclosed space was filled with coral rock, sand, and gravel, after all sections had been filled with sand and sunk. The pier was ready for use by LCT's on November 1, 1944

A number of pontoon piers of a new and special design were built at Ulithi. These piers, each consisting of the 4-by-12-pontoon sections, filled with sand and gravel, were sunk and anchored in place by guy ropes to deadmen on shore and by iron rods, driven into the coral, with connecting tie pieces running across the tops of the pontoons. Despite extremely heavy weather on several occasions the pontoon piers stood up remarkably well, giving extensive service, with few repairs necessary. Piers of this type were also installed by the 51st Battalion to be used as aviation-gasoline mooring piers near the main airfield.

Building the Navy's Bases in World War II

Outline
Paper of some interest

Fleet actions
The Japanese prepared to sortie, but did not end up taking the bait.
 * Canberra and Houston used to tempt out Japanese fleet Baitdiv1 Potter p. 191

William Halsey, Jr.|Bill Halsey
Source, excellent photos: http://ww2db.com/person_bio.php?person_id=54

Halsey quotes
"Can you hold?" "Yes, I can hold but I have to have more active support than I've been getting." "You go back there, Vandegrift. I promise to get you everything I have." p. 199 "The Pacific Fleet has paid its first installment on a bill run at at Pearl Harbor."

Ghormley: He let it be known by his actions that he was unwilling to commit scarce and dwindling naval assets to keep the marines at Guadalcanal and Tulagu resupplied. p. 33 from Guadalcanal Decision at Sea: Eric Hammel

"Before Guadalcanal the enemy advanced at his pleasure -- after Guadalcanal he retreated at ours." - Admiral "Bull" Halsey

"If it helps kill Japs it's important. If it doesn't help kill Japs it's not important."

"I don't know why those -- rats thought they could lick America. That was their first mistake.  Their second mistake was when they started fighting dirty." Utica Daily Press 2/20/1945

"I shall make this war as harsh as possible and show no signs of tiring until [the enemy] begs for mercy."

"War is the remedy our enemies have chosen. And I say, give them all they want!"

'My only regret is that our ships don’t have wheels, so that when we drive the Japs from the coast we can chase them inland’.

"Can you hold?" "Yes, I can hold, but I have to have more active support than I've been getting." Kelly Turner explained that the Navy was already doing its utmost. He was losing transports and cargo ships at an alarming rate as he did not have enough warships and aircraft to control the waters off Guadalcanal. "You go back there, Vandegrift. I promise to get you everything I have." p. 199

"This is the proudest day in my life."

Disregarding Ghormley's restrictions ordered Kincaid and Hornet to rendezvous with Enterprise Task Force and sweep north of the Santa Cruz islands, placing the force south and west of the approaching Japanese force.

Before dawn on the 26 October, Halsey to all naval forces under his command: "Attack-Repeat-Attack!" p. 200

Lieutenant General Millard Harmon, Army commander under Halsey in South Pacific.

"I'll never forget it. One minute we were two limp with malaria to crawl out of our fox holes, the next we were running around whooping like kids"  p. 198

MacArthur on Halsey
"William Halsey was one of our greatest sailors.... Blunt, outspoken, dynamic... he was of the same aggressive type as John Paul Jones, David Farragut, and George Dewey. His one thought was to close with the enemy and fight him to the death. The bugaboo of many sailors, the fear of losing ships, was completely alien to his conception of sea action. I liked him from the moment we met, and my respect and admiration increased with time. His loyalty and undeviating.  I placed the greatest confidence in his judgment.  No name rates higher in the annals of our country's naval history."


 * Worked well with MacArthur.
 * A reporter asked Halsey if he thought General MacArthur's fleet would get to Toyko first. The admiral grinned and answered "We're going there together."  Then seriously he added "He's a very fine man.  I have worked under him for over two years and have the greatest admiration and respect for him."  Utica Daily Press 2/20/45

Japanese Naval Strategy references
 * Fuchida, Mitsuo and Masatake OkumiyaMidway: The Battle That Doomed Japan Naval Institute Press 1955.
 * Hirama, Yoichi Japanese Naval Preparations for World War II Naval War College Review 1991.

Note: the image of Nagato and Center Force leaving Borneo is courtesy of Lieutenant Tobei Shiraishi.

Admiral Halsey's Decision
By midnight 24-25 October fast carrier groups 2, 3 and 4, including Admiral Lee in Washington and Admiral Halsey in New Jersey and all their battleships and cruisers, were tearing north, just as the Japanese wanted them to do.

In the meantime, Kurita's Center Force, which Halsey had assumed to be no serious menace to Kinkaid, was debouching from San Bernadino Strait unopposed and even undetected.

Admiral Kinkaid assumed in his operation plan, "Any major enemy naval force approaching from the north will be intercepted and attacked by Third Fleet covering force." This was a natural interpretation of Halsey's orders from Nimitz to engage the enemy fleet if and when an opportunity occurred. But now that two major enemy forces were approaching from the north of Leyte Gulf, Halsey ignored the stronger and let it get between him and Seventh Fleet, Becuase he mistakenly assumed that it was the weaker, and "no serious menace." In other words, he made the same mistake that the Japanese higher command did about the air battle over Formosa, accepting aviators' reports of damage as actual damage.

It was not a case of either-or. Halsey had enough gun and air power to handle both Japanese forces. The alternative to rushing everything up north was not, as he said, "to guard statically San Bernadino Strait." Three groups of Task Force 34 (Battle Line, of which we shall hear more anon), had more than enough power to take care of Ozawa's 17 ships. Battle Line might have been detached to guard San Bernadino Strait, not statically but actively.

But Halsey wished to deal the Northern Force a really crushing blow. In every previous carrier action of the war - Coral Sea, Midway, Eastern Solomons, Santa Cruz and Philippine Sea - the Japanese, although badly mauled, had saved most of their ships. He was determined that this would not happen again. He expected that the Northern Force was planning to shuttle-bomb him by ferrying planes back and forth between carriers and airfields, as they had attempted to do in the Battle of the Philippine Sea.

He felt it unwise to leave any considerable surface force to watch San Bernadino Strait without detaching one carrier group for air protection, which would weaken his striking power.

[Morison here has the following footnote - "Admiral Lee, however, said after the battle that he would have been only too glad to have been ordered to cover San Bernadino Strait without air cover."]

After all, the Northern Force was out in the Philippine Sea, "asking for it." The Center Force might never come out; and Halsey was no man to watch a rathole from which the rat might never emerge. He had just lost [the light carrier] Princeton to an air attack which he believed, erroneously, to have come from Ozawa. The quickened tempo of enemy air activity on the 24th seemed a presage of worse to come, and it was natural for Halsey to aim at annihilating the one sure source of Japanese air power, the carriers of the Northern Force. He did know, before ordering Task Force 38 north, that the Japanese Center Force had resumed course toward San Bernadino Strait; but still assumed that it was too "heavily damaged" to be a "serious menace" to Kinkaid.

At least three task force commanders were amazed and disturbed by Halsey's decision. Admiral Bogan even contemplated a protest.

After seeing aircraft reports to the effect that the Center Force had resumed an easterly course, he [Bogan] discussed the situation over TBS [voice radio] with Captain Ewen of Independence.Ewen not only confirmed the reports but mentioned the ominous fact that all navigation lights in San Bernadino Strait were brightly lit, after a long black-out. Bogan immediately drafted a message to Halsey incorporating this intelligence, then called him personally over TBS and read it. "A rather impatient voice" - of a staff officer, presumably - replied "Yes, yes, we have that information." Bogan was prepared to follow up with another message, recommending that Admiral Lee's Battle Line be formed with his TG38.2 [Bogan's own carrier group] as cover, letting Sherman's and Davison's groups handle Ozawa. But after that brush-off, he said no more.

Lee himself was an officer of alert mind and keen analytical sense, whose advice was often sought on strategy; but not now. Working on the mass of intelligence that reached [Washington's] flag plot, he had figured out that the Northern Force must be a decoy with little or no striking power, and that the earlier turn-around of the Center Force was temporary. Before sunset ended the opportunity of sending visual signals, Admiral Lee in Washington sent Admiral Halsey in New Jersey a message stating his views. No reply was made other than a perfunctory "Roger." After darkness descended and the Independence reports came in, Lee sent Halsey a message by TBS to the effect that he was certain Kurita was coming out. After that he kept silence.

CTF 38 [Commanding Officer Task Force 38 - the fast carrier force], Vice Admiral Mitscher in Lexington, by-passed for days by Admiral Halsey in issuing orders, had become little better than a passenger in his beloved Fast Carrier Forces Pacific Fleet. When, at 2029, he received Commander Third Fleet's [Halsey's] order to turn north, he inferred that Halsey intended to assume the tactical command in the following day's battle, and decided to turn in. As he left flag plot his chief of staff, Commodore Arleigh Burke, remarked "We'd better see where that [Japanese] fleet is." Mitscher assented.

A few minutes later, Burke received the Independence aircraft contact on Center Force "still very much afloat and still moving towards San Bernadino"; and at about 2305 a clarifying report came through. No doubt about it! Burke and Commander James Flatley, operations officer, thought it was imperative to detach Battle Line. The woke Mitscher up and urged him to "tell Halsey" to do so. "Does Admiral Halsey have that report?" said the task force commander. "Yes," said Flatley. "If he wants my advice he'll ask for it," said Mitscher. Then he rolled over and went back to sleep.

Thus three task groups of Third Fleet - 65 ships strong - went steaming north at 16 knots to engage the 17 ships of Ozawa's Northern Force, leaving nothing but empty air and ocean between the Seventh Fleet [the invasion fleet], in and around Leyte Gulf, and Kurita. His still powerful Center Force completed the transit of San Bernadino Strait at 0035 October 25, amazed to find nobody there to fight, and shaped a course for the rendezvous off Suluan with Nishimura [commanding the Japanese Southern Force].

US Navy official history - "History of US Naval Operations in World War II" by Samuel Eliot Morison - Volume XII "Leyte," pages 193-7.

Also: His response to Pearl Harbor was pithy enough: "When we're through with them," he growled, surveying the wreckage of the U.S. Pacific Fleet on December 8th, 1941, "the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell." During those awful early months, when one western bastion after another was falling to the Japanese, Halsey remained defiant. His view of the war was fairly easy to summarize: the U.S. had to find a way to "Kill Japs! Kill Japs! Kill more Japs!" And indeed, talk of "killing Japs" and "dead Japs" fills an inordinate amount of space in a list of his most famous quotations. Halsey was a fighter at a time when the nation seemed paralyzed, and the U.S. Navy wasn't even sure what it was supposed to be "doing." Halsey spearheaded what early response there was to Pearl Harbor: hit and run raids on the Gilbert and Marshall islands in February, 1942, and on Wake island in March; command of the "Doolittle Raid" (to many at the time, the "Doolittle-Halsey Raid") in April, center stage for those tough naval battles off Guadalcanal in the fall. To an American public looking for heroes in a dark time, Halsey was the man. A fortuitous typo by a reporter even turned "Bill" Halsey into "Bull," and a legend was born.

And: The Seventh Fleet that landed the marines was under the overall command of General MacArthur, while the Third Fleet covering force was under command of Admiral Nimitz. There was no single commander of the entire operation. One had to go back to the President before you find the joint commander for MacArthurs invasion force and Halsey's covering force.

Orders issued by Nimitz's staff to Halsey that gave him freedom of action to persue the Japanese carrier fleet if the opportunity presented itself. These orders were specifically included for Halsey because of a percieved belief that Spruance had not been offensive enough in the Phillipine Sea battle.

Permission for Navy photos: Although from a commercial site, this photo was taken by a US Navy member performing official duties for the US government which makes this and any other photo he took during this time original works of the US Government. Original works of the US Government are public domain documents.