9

A Vast Ocean

THE SOUTH PACIFIC was part of a far larger ocean, considerably more distant from the centers of Allied naval command in Washington and London than either the Mediterranean or the Atlantic. To a far greater degree, naval operations hinged on air power, amphibious landings, the acquisition of island bases, and the availability of fuel depots, all of which ensured that supply ships, troop transports, tankers, and convoys took on enormous importance. The three largest fleets in the world—the British, American, and Japanese—collided in the Pacific, and it was no accident that the largest sea battles of the war—Pearl Harbor, the Coral Sea, Midway, off Guadalcanal, the Philippine Sea, and Leyte Gulf—were all Pacific engagements.

In late February 1942, just two months after Pearl Harbor, a patched-together Allied fleet of American, British, Dutch, and Australian cruisers and destroyers—the so-called ABDA command—collided with a Japanese force of about the same size in the Java Sea. The Allied ships had come to sink Japanese convoys and thereby stop the invasion of Java and therefore the Japanese momentum. But when the main battle and its follow-up skirmishes were finally over—the largest surface ship encounters since the Battle of Jutland—two Allied cruisers and three destroyers were sunk. Over twenty-three hundred seamen were killed, including the commander of the fleet, the audacious Dutch admiral Karel Doorman, who went down with his flagship the De Ruyter. The Allies failed to sink a single Japanese warship. Only thirty-six Japanese sailors were lost. The slaughter at the Battle of the Java Sea dispelled any of the Allies’ ethnocentric doubts about Japanese control of the Pacific after Pearl Harbor. Indeed, the Allies now thought Japanese sailors were supermen, and feared that their own initial defeats near Singapore and at Pearl Harbor may have been unavoidable rather than aberrant.

When the war began, in almost every area of naval operations the Japanese seemed to hold the advantages in the Pacific. Their cruisers and destroyers were generally larger and often better armed than their Allied counterparts. Japanese naval gunfire was more accurate, especially at night. Allied ships were not as well led, coordinated, or organized. One would have thought that Japan, not Britain, enjoyed a five-hundred-year naval tradition of global supremacy and had invented dreadnoughts, large-caliber naval guns, and steam propulsion. By the end of 1942, six months after the American victory at Midway, four of the six Pacific-based US carriers—Hornet, Lexington, Yorktown, and Wasp—were sunk, and a fifth—Saratoga—was damaged and out of action.¹

The naval war in the Pacific never followed patterns of sea fighting in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. For one, the matchup between the combatants was far different. Both sides had carrier fleets. The war started in earnest not in autumn 1939 but over two years later, when aviation and carrier technologies were already adapting to wartime conditions and vastly improving, and the larger lessons from the Atlantic and Mediterranean could be digested. The British and Americans for the most part fought only one naval enemy—the Japanese—not two, as in Europe. After 1943 the Axis European powers offered little indirect aid in drawing off Allied ships from the Pacific. Except for some initial and final joint operations, the British and Americans found no immediate need to coordinate many ship-to-ship or amphibious operations against Japan, as had been true in the Mediterranean and Atlantic. In British eyes, Singapore’s fall was psychologically catastrophic but perhaps insignificant in comparison to the incendiary burning of London. In contrast, the only American territory directly and seriously attacked in the war was by Japan, not Germany. Great Britain had no Pacific coastline; America’s was over 1,200 miles in length.

These paradoxes also helped to explain why the American navy would take the lead in the Pacific as the British initially had in the Atlantic. If the American admiral Ernest King appeared to the British cantankerous and obstinate in a way General George Marshall did not, it was partly because British admirals could offer him far less valuable advice about Japan than seasoned British generals could to Marshall about Germany and Italy. Britain was essential as a bomber base and launching pad for the invasion of Europe; no such British strategic asset existed in the Pacific, likewise leading to far greater American autonomy. In the end, the British and American fleets communicated enough during the Pacific war to avoid working at cross-purposes, but otherwise did not always worry about clearing operations with one another. That independence seems to have worked successfully enough in a way it had not initially in the Atlantic.²

Three key themes characterized the mutual racial stereotyping of the naval war in the Pacific. First, the Japanese believed, wrongly, that Western seamen, naval aircrews, and Marine and army ground troops lacked the ferocity and martial spirit of the sailors and amphibious troops of the Imperial Japanese Navy. They were surprised, for example, that the pilots flying outclassed TBD Devastator torpedo bombers equipped with defective torpedoes—the inadvertent sacrificial pawns at the Battle of Midway—unflinchingly flew on to their certain deaths. When Japanese veterans on Guadalcanal met defeat at the hands of untried and initially ill-equipped 1st Marine Division soldiers and several subsequent army regiments, they were shocked by the discovery that they were fighting a power that was even stronger spiritually than materially.

Second, the British and Americans falsely assumed that the Japanese were mere emulators of Western science, copycats always one step behind in all categories of naval design, aviation, and technology. Americans were soon to be stunned, for example, by Japanese optics and skilled night gunnery in their one-sided victory at Savo Island. For a supposedly parasitic power, Japan’s navy, despite the usual absence of onboard radar, had somehow started the Pacific war with more numerous carriers, the world’s largest battleships, the best torpedoes and destroyers, and the most skilled aviators flying in naval bombers, fighters, and torpedo planes that were all comparable with or superior to American models.

Third, in part because of the racial dimension, there was often little quarter given in the Pacific and Asia. The Japanese executed captured American seamen, often after harsh interrogations, both as a reflection of their own martial code and as a way of terrifying Western soldiers. Yet while mostly following the rules of Westernized warfare, the Americans proved more brutal. They relied on their overwhelming firepower against the vast majority of their Japanese enemies who were reluctant to surrender, and did not worry about the collateral damage that their martial might visited upon civilians in Japanese industrial zones.

Ultimately, it was the Japanese who were the more mistaken in their stereotyped assumptions. By late 1942, British and American seamen and ground troops were fighting as audaciously as the Japanese, while Japan’s technology and industry ultimately proved inferior by 1943. For all of their prewar mastery, the Japanese could never quite match the rapid breakthroughs and industrial mobilization of their Western enemies, who were far more experienced in the rapid challenge-response cycle of technological innovation than the Japanese. In addition, the premodern brutality of the Japanese did more to galvanize their enemies than the horrific use of American bombs and shells did to win the Japanese any sympathy as victims.

Also, unlike the European theater, the Allied naval war in the Pacific was not an auxiliary to land and air operations. Most American infantry fighting was by definition amphibious, relying on ships landing, and then supporting, expeditionary army units and Marines. In contrast, British and American navies in the Atlantic and Mediterranean had sought to achieve maritime superiority as a means to plant conventional infantry and armor on German-occupied territory, or to stop Axis amphibious or airborne invasions. This combined strategy ensured that continental armies fought their way into the heart of the German homeland and thus quickly left the protection of naval artillery and air cover.³

In the Pacific, warships were more autonomous and less commonly subordinated to infantry operations. The Allies targeted the Japanese navy and merchant fleet and thereby hoped to starve the vast and overextended Japanese maritime empire into submission. Their efforts were akin to the Kriegsmarine’s efforts against Great Britain, but with two important differences. First, unlike the Germans, the British and American hunters enjoyed far more naval assets—more ships, planes, and late-model technology—than did their targets. Second, the Americans were more confident that they could occupy or destroy mainland Japan, while the Germans had long given up on doing the same to the British homeland by mid-1941.

The Allies weren’t the only ones to fight a two-front war. Japan diverted precious resources away from its Pacific operations because of its army’s decade-long quagmire in Manchuria, Burma, and China—all theaters that also relied on maritime superiority to ferry weapons and men from mainland Japan. The Pacific war was also far more unpredictable than the Battle of the Atlantic. The Mediterranean had been familiar to Western powers since the hegemony of the classical Athenian and Roman imperial navies. Despite major Allied bases at Singapore and in the Philippines, much of the South Pacific remained a blank slate to the Allies. The routes across the North Atlantic had been fought over for centuries by Europeans and their colonial subjects, but the American fleet knew little about the maritime landscape around Guadalcanal or off Java. Everything from ocean currents and shoals to tropical diseases and little-known indigenous peoples made fighting in the Pacific a far more mysterious enterprise than steaming in the non-exotic Atlantic or the Mediterranean. James Michener could never have written a best-selling novel titled Tales from the North Atlantic, nor Rodgers and Hammerstein an idyllic musical about Americans based amid those same frigid waters. Nicholas Monsarrat’s epic postwar novel of the Battle of the Atlantic, The Cruel Sea, is a quite different, nightmarish elemental story of men at sea amid furious weather and wily German U-boaters.

The Pacific naval war saw over forty separate engagements between Japanese and American warships. For all the talk of the ruthlessness of the Bushido code, the Japanese were captives to American admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan’s grand idea of seeking one great battle to destroy an enemy navy and thereby gain maritime superiority, and with it a negotiated rather than an absolute victory. That idea had worked with the near destruction of the Imperial Russian fleet at the great Battle of Tsushima thirty-six years prior to Pearl Harbor that pressured the Russians to seek peace. The overly complex strategies of the Imperial Japanese Navy from the Battle of Midway to the Battle of Leyte Gulf shared that common theme of hoping to lure the Americans into a trap and then decimating their fleet, resulting in paralysis of the American war machine. Yet that nineteenth-century strategy had failed utterly even at Japan’s greatest tactical victory at Pearl Harbor. The problem was not just that they had not destroyed enough of the right sort of ships or bypassed infrastructure and oil depots or had failed to goad the wounded Americans into a follow-up shootout in the mid-Pacific. The real flaw of the operation was that even in victory the Japanese were still quite unable to reach the sources of manpower and production in North America. Japan did not fully appreciate that Pearl Harbor’s fleet was merely a proximate tactical expression of remote but nearly unlimited and impregnable American strategic power.

Rarely in history have even lopsided naval victories—at Salamis, Syracuse, Lepanto, or Trafalgar—led outright to the end of a war. In contrast to the Japanese victory, the Americans aimed instead not just at blasting apart the enemy fleet in one decisive interaction of battleships and carriers, but also at insidiously severing Japanese maritime supply lines, securing bases for long-range strategic bombers, and cutting off and isolating Japanese island garrisons. Destruction of the Japanese people’s ability to wage war was the American navy’s aim, not a large and symbolic blow that would convince the Japanese that Pearl Harbor had been a mistake and could be rectified by concessions and peace talks.

THE PACIFIC WAR fell into three distinct phases. The first year of the war—from December 7, 1941, to January 1, 1943—was fought by Japan against the prewar Pacific fleets of the United States and, to a lesser extent, Great Britain and its Commonwealth allies, along with orphaned ships of the Netherlands. Before Pearl Harbor, the US Pacific Fleet was impressive enough, boasting nine battleships, three carriers, twenty-four heavy and light cruisers, eighty destroyers, and almost sixty submarines. Nonetheless, on December 7, 1941, the Americans in the Pacific were outnumbered in every category by the Imperial Japanese Navy, especially in the number of fleet carriers.

The greater number of ships, much longer experience and training, superior naval aircraft, far better torpedoes, and skilled night-fighting ability earned the Japanese a cumulative draw, in terms of surviving naval tonnage, in a series of wild engagements in the Java Sea, the Coral Sea, Midway, and at five sea battles off Guadalcanal. By the end of 1942, despite substantial losses at Midway, the Japanese still had salvaged rough parity, at least in the sense that the Imperial Japanese Navy had destroyed about as many ships as it had lost. It still had the greatest number of undamaged fleet carriers in the world, and thereby was still able to defend the outer defensive rings of its Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

At the beginning of 1943, however, a second, quite different war followed between what soon amounted to a mostly new American fleet and a now fossilized, prewar Imperial Japanese Navy, increasingly hampered by oil shortages and the cumulative losses of highly skilled carrier pilots. At the precise time that Japan was declaring supremacy in the Pacific, it was largely ignorant that the United States could increasingly tap into not only a supply of ships from the large Atlantic fleet, but also an entirely new armada that had been under construction since 1940–1941. This aggregate force would soon prove not just larger than the prewar American Pacific fleet of 1941, but more than double the size of the entire Imperial Japanese Navy. As noted earlier, in addition to a new fleet of escort (122) and light carriers (9), the US also turned out twenty-four large, Essex-class fleet carriers (each some 27,100 tons, with 90–100 planes). The carriers were soon aided by new generations of Hellcat, Helldiver, and Avenger fighters and torpedo and dive bombers—each model superior to their Japanese counterparts. By war’s end, the US Navy would train over sixty thousand naval pilots and deploy some ninety thousand naval aircraft of all types.

Of special note were the escort carriers (8,000–10,000 tons, 17 knots), designed not to replace but to augment light and fleet carriers. They were small, unarmored, unstable in rough seas, uncomfortable for sailors, and slow, but were still perhaps the most innovative naval idea of the war. Aside from their cheaper cost and rapidity of construction, escort carriers were in many ways more cost-effective than either larger light or fleet carriers. It took just three-and-a-half escort carriers to match the air power of a standard fleet carrier. And in terms of the size of the crew needed to deploy naval aircraft, escorts were again far more economical (850 versus 3,500). With the 122 escort carriers it launched during the Pacific war, the US Navy found a rapid method of beefing up and dispersing the air fleet’s arm, and covering the huge ocean, in a way that otherwise would have required the enormous expense of adding thirty-four additional fleet carriers. And as new-model and heavier naval aircraft were deployed on frontline Essex-class fleet carriers, thousands of first-generation and lighter F4F Wildcats and Dauntless dive bombers found second careers on escort carriers.

In less than four years, American shipyards not only produced a staggering tonnage of warships, but ships of superior quality in every category currently deployed by any of the major combatants. In addition to two new North Carolina–class battleships (36,000 tons, nine 16-inch guns), the US Navy added four even faster and more powerful battleships of the South Dakota–class (35,000 tons, nine 16-inch guns) and, most astonishingly, four huge Iowa-class battleships (45,000 tons, nine 16-inch guns), all to be augmented by refloating six older battleships that had been submerged at Pearl Harbor. The Germans publicized the launching of the Bismarck as a seminal moment in the history of German sea power; the Americans yawned as they launched their four Iowa-class battleships, all superior in quality to Bismarck and Tirpitz.⁴

The new American carriers and battleships were flanked by an additional fleet of fourteen new Baltimore-class heavy cruisers (14,500 tons and nine 8-inch guns) and an extraordinary destroyer arm of 175 Fletcher-class, fifty-eight Sumner-class, and over ninety-five advanced Gearing-class ships. Whereas the Japanese had shorted their smaller ship fleet by an unwise investment in huge battleships, the Americans were far more flexible in building an unglamorous but huge armada of over four hundred destroyer escorts (approximately 1,400 tons, 24 knots), the majority by 1943 deployed in the Pacific. This brilliantly versatile ship could stop merchant vessels with its 3-inch and (on some later models) 5-inch guns, provide anti-aircraft support for the fleet, launch torpedoes against larger ships, and sink submarines with depth charges. Along with the escort carrier, the destroyer escort helped to explain why the Japanese submarine force never achieved the results of its American counterpart, why American merchant ships in the Pacific suffered relatively minimal losses, and why American warships could go after even the smallest Japanese trawler.⁵

After Pearl Harbor the United States also built and deployed an entire new armada of large, long-range, and sophisticated fleet submarines—over 70 of the Gato-class and 122 Balao-class fleet boats, which along with other classes represented some 228 new submarines that joined the fleet, again with the vast majority deployed in the Pacific. American subs would sink over half of all Japanese ships lost, and shut down Japanese supply lanes, doing as much in unheralded fashion to destroy the Japanese economy as the napalm and mines dropped by the B-29 bomber fleet. The Balao- and later Tench-class submarines were superior to any other submarine produced in number during the war.

These assets allowed a third and utterly destructive phase of the war to be conducted by US surface ships and submarines from early 1943 to August 1945 against Japanese merchant shipping. In addition, US surface ships provided constant artillery support to amphibious operations and granted near immunity to American merchant vessels supplying a burgeoning number of air and naval bases reaching ever closer to the Japanese mainland. The net result was the strangulation of the import-based Japanese mainland economy and the orphaning of hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers on scattered Pacific islands without much hope of either resupply or evacuation.

No navy in military history had started a war so all-powerful as the Japanese and ended it so utterly ruined and in such a brief period of time—not the Persians at Salamis, nor the Athenians at Aegospotami (405 BC), the Ottomans at Lepanto, the French at Trafalgar, or even the Russians in 1905.

THE PEARL HARBOR attack was brilliantly conceived and conducted, although in prewar scenarios the United States supposedly had anticipated just such a surprise carrier attack on Hawaii. A huge Japanese fleet of six aircraft carriers and their capital ship escorts (2 battleships, 3 cruisers, and 11 destroyers, all except one to be later sunk by 1945) somehow made their way undetected to within two hundred miles of the Hawaiian shore. Then, even more amazingly, the First Air Fleet—some 353 planes strong, in two waves—completed the utter surprise, ruining in just two hours the battleship strength and much of the air power of the Pacific command, while departing with only marginal losses. Not since the Battle of Trafalgar had one navy so damaged its enemy (2,403 Americans killed, four American battleships submerged, four damaged) at so little cost to itself (64 killed), and yet achieved so few strategic results.⁶

The Japanese somehow believed that if they cut off North American supply lines to Australia, held off the US fleet for two years in the eastern and South Pacific, and consolidated their newly won empire, the British and Americans—faced with a losing war in Europe—would finally sue for accommodation. By needs, the Pearl Harbor attack also was operationally blinkered. Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, who had little experience commanding carriers, did not order third and fourth strikes on Pearl Harbor that might have ruined the port facilities, destroyed much of the existing fuel supplies of the fleet, taken out valuable support ships and submarines, or blown up arms depots and workshops. Nagumo, despite his past ignorance of naval air operations, had perhaps some legitimate reasons for not doing so. The Japanese fleet’s own fuel supplies were tenuous. Nagumo could ill afford losses to his small and irreplaceable cadre of naval aviators. He had no sure idea about the whereabouts of three American carriers or an unknown number of submarines. Unpredictable December weather—it was no easy task refueling on the high seas in winter—likewise added to the Imperial Japanese Navy’s traditional anxiety. Many of Nagumo’s aviators privately were relieved that the fleet was playing it safe and going home after just two strikes at Pearl Harbor. Perhaps most important, the fleet commander knew that many in the reactionary Japanese admiralty would consider Pearl Harbor a success by virtue of the destruction of the prestigious American battleship fleet.⁷

In the seven months following Pearl Harbor, the Japanese fleet ran wild, easily erasing the old European colonial and American spheres of influence. Naval superiority meant virtually unopposed landings at the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, the Dutch East Indies, Wake Island, New Britain, the Gilbert Islands, Guam, and Hong Kong. The Japanese are often scolded by historians for becoming infected with the “Victory Disease” early in the war. Yet in just four early naval battles preceding the Battle of the Coral Sea—at Pearl Harbor, Singapore, in the Indian Ocean and the Java Sea—they sank or grounded six Allied battleships, one carrier, one battle cruiser, six cruisers, and five destroyers, and killed over six thousand British, Dutch, Commonwealth, and American seamen, all without suffering a single ship lost and fewer than two hundred dead. However, despite tactical naval victories and strategic acquisitions, the Japanese navy still had not accomplished its main goal of destroying the American carrier fleet. More important, as the Japanese steamrolled through the Pacific, the further the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere expanded, the more undermanned and undersupplied Japanese naval and merchant forces became.⁸

At the Battle of the Coral Sea (May 4–8, 1942), conditions in the Pacific theater insidiously began to change, although it was not so apparent at the time. A relatively weak American fleet, centered around just two carriers—with largely inferior planes—fought the Japanese to a rough draw. The interruption of Japan’s prior record of success was an astounding achievement just five months after Pearl Harbor. The Imperial Japanese Fleet lost more seamen and key aviators at Coral Sea than did the Americans. Moreover, as a result of Coral Sea, the Japanese called off the planned invasion of Port Moresby on New Guinea, the first time in the war that the Imperial Navy had cancelled an amphibious operation. The sinking of the light carrier Shoho, the damage to the fleet carrier Shokaku, and the near destruction of the air arm of the fleet carrier Zuikaku were far more grievous to Japan than were the sinking of the Lexington and the damage to the Yorktown to the Americans—especially given the greater American ability to repair capital ships and get them back into battle far more quickly.⁹

The next major encounter, at Midway (June 4–7, 1942), was, to paraphrase Churchill of the British win at El Alamein, not the beginning of the end of the Japanese fleet, but rather the end of the beginning of the American effort to blunt Japanese aggression. At the cost of the sinking of the previously wounded Yorktown, and the loss of much of the American torpedo bombing force, the Americans destroyed four Japanese fleet carriers along with nearly 250 naval aircraft.¹⁰

There were many reasons for the American victory at Midway, beyond the unplanned sacrifice of the obsolete American Devastator torpedo bombers that diverted Japanese fighters away from the faster, higher flying, and mostly unnoticed Dauntless dive bombers. The overall commander Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto unwisely had divided up his huge fleet, ensuring that his battleships, additional carriers, and cruisers would be sent on a strategically nonsensical invasion of the Aleutians, and thus were not present at Midway. Yamamoto’s prebattle overconfidence also was undone by intelligence failures. He not only received little accurate information about the general whereabouts of the Enterprise and Hornet, but also assumed that the Yorktown had been sunk or rendered disabled at the Battle of the Coral Sea. In the end, Yamamoto did not seem to believe that two American carriers of not much more than twenty thousand tons displacement posed an existential threat to his grand fleet wherever they were.¹¹

Major Naval Battles in the Pacific

Superb naval intelligence and codebreaking gave the Americans some advance warning about where, when, and in what strength the Japanese would strike next. Land-based aircraft from the island of Midway harassed the carriers of Admiral Nagumo, in command of the Carrier Striking Task Force, and caused them to lose focus on the American carriers. The Americans took risks to win, the Japanese were too careful not to lose. The loss of four Japanese fleet carriers at Midway would almost equal the sum total of all new replacement fleet carriers built by Japan during the entire war. The verdict at Midway now meant that the Japanese could no longer expect accustomed naval superiority in any of its projected expansions in the South Pacific.¹²

But Japan’s naval power was such that it could not be so easily neutralized in just two battles at the Coral Sea and Midway. Japanese battleships and cruisers remained adept at night fighting. Despite their losses, the Japanese still retained through 1942 a slight edge in naval air strength. The Japanese did not take long to prove their resilience. In their efforts to supply their battling forces on Guadalcanal between August and November 1942, the American and Japanese navies fought a series of brutal naval battles and several smaller engagements off the island: Savo Island (August 8–9), the Eastern Solomons (August 24–25), Cape Esperance (October 11–12), the Santa Cruz Islands (October 25–27), the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal (November 12–15), and Tassafaronga (November 30). When the protracted five-month sea conflict was over, the Americans had won the island but suffered losses at least comparable to the Japanese: about 440 planes, over five thousand naval casualties, and well over twenty ships. During the sustained fighting, the carriers Saratoga and Enterprise were damaged and the Wasp and Hornet sunk. With the earlier losses of the Lexington and Yorktown at the Coral Sea and Midway, the United States had effectively no fleet carriers that were undamaged in the South Pacific until the full repair and refit of the Enterprise and the arrival of new Essex-class ships in mid-1943. Such carrier losses would hamper aggressive use of carrier forces for much of 1942–1943. For a brief moment before the arrival of a new generation of carriers, Japan’s strategy of nullifying American naval air power while occupying dozens of Pacific islands and using their land air bases as immovable “aircraft carriers” to harass the vulnerable US fleet seemed to be working.¹³

Yet after all the destruction, the Japanese still lost Guadalcanal. With the American conquest of the island went any chance the Japanese had of cutting the Allied supply lines to Australia, much less to making inroads into the Indian Ocean. Japan’s destroyer and naval air strengths were now irreplaceably damaged. Guadalcanal, not Midway, was the true turning point of the Pacific naval war.¹⁴

BY MID-1943, THE tide had turned for good against the Japanese. By the end of 1944, the new American fleet deployed not just the largest air arm in the world, but one larger than all contemporary carrier air arms combined. Proof of such overwhelming superiority was clear at the next great battle in the Philippine Sea (June 19–20, 1944), fought in conjunction with the American landings on the Mariana Islands. When the so-called Great Mariana Turkey Shoot was over, just a single American fleet (a fast carrier force of seven fleet carriers, eight light carriers, and seven battleships) had destroyed the bulk of Japanese naval air power in the Pacific, downing over 450 carrier aircraft while sinking three Japanese carriers without losing a single ship. There were lots of reasons for the American victory. But chief among them was that the US Navy simply sent out far more numerous and better aircraft—many of them superb F6F Hellcat fighters—piloted by better-trained and more experienced aviators.

Later at the Battle of Leyte Gulf (October 24–25, 1944), which was likely the largest sea battle in naval history in terms of the combined tonnage of the some 370 assembled ships, the Americans in just four days ended the Japanese navy’s ability ever again to wage conventional offensive operations. The Imperial Japanese Navy, which probably had fewer naval aircraft at the battle than the Americans had ships, lost a fleet carrier, three light carriers, three battleships, and an incredible ten cruisers and nine destroyers, while sending its first suicide planes against the American fleet. In less than six months, Japan would turn systematically to kamikaze attacks, and at Okinawa used them to inflict the worst losses on the US Navy in its history. But after Leyte Gulf, Japanese warships never again constituted a strategic threat and were incapable of sustained operations. The loss at Leyte was Japan’s version of Aegospotami, the catastrophic naval defeat of 405 BC that left the city of ancient Athens open to attack and siege, and ended its last vestiges of empire.¹⁵

WHAT ELIMINATED THE Japanese fleet in just three years was not just the huge and skilled American fleet of carriers and surface warships. Americans also had mostly secure supply lines from the West Coast to the South Pacific, and an endless fleet of merchant ships that ensured that US Marine and Army divisions were always better supported than their Japanese opponents.

Japan had no such security. One reason why was that in less than four years American submariners sank over two hundred Japanese warships and 1,300 merchant vessels—well over 50 percent of all Japanese ships lost to the Americans. That was a remarkable feat, given that the Americans entered the war without much actual submarine wartime experience and had to cover a far larger area of operations than in the Atlantic, even as their supply lines lengthened throughout the war as those of the retreating Japanese shrank.

The Japanese were far less adept in antisubmarine operations than the British and Americans in the Atlantic. By one method of calculation, the American submarine offensive proved to be the most cost-efficient method of war making of the entire war: Japan paid more than forty times the cost, both in conducting antisubmarine operations and in making up for lost shipping to submarines, than the combined US expense of conducting its submarine offensive and suffering its own merchant losses. That proved an unsustainable ratio, given that the US economy at the start of the war was already ten times larger than the Japanese.

The Pacific naval war might be summed up with one final irony. At the beginning of the war, off Singapore, the Japanese had taught the navies of the world about the futility of sending battleships and cruisers like the HMS Prince of Wales and Repulse into battle without air cover. Less than four years later, the Imperial Japanese Navy was reduced to dispatching on a one-way suicide mission the world’s largest battleship, the Yamato, to Okinawa as a behemoth maritime kamikaze without sufficient fuel or air support against the world’s greatest carrier air arm. What Britain had taught the Italians at Taranto in 1940 about the vulnerability of battleships to dive bombers and torpedo bombers had been forgotten by the British off Singapore in 1941. And the same lesson Japan had embraced at Singapore, they likewise ignored by needs off Okinawa in 1945.¹⁶

As in the case of Germany and Italy, Japan’s expeditionary ambitions were far too large to be met by its existing naval forces or by its potential to build and man new ships. The Imperial Japanese Navy might have fought and matched either the Royal Navy or the American Pacific Fleet in the eastern Pacific under the conditions of a limited war, perhaps like the Russo-Japanese conflict of 1904–1905. But it could not fight the two largest fleets in the world simultaneously, much less in engagements ranging from the Aleutians to the Indian Ocean, while also ferrying armies throughout the Pacific and protecting the sea-lanes of a newly acquired empire far larger than Japan itself.

For all the traditions of national seamanship, admiralty, and courage, World War II at sea was ultimately predicated on which side built the most merchant tonnage and warships, and put the largest number of men at sea in good ships under competent commanders. The British and Americans would end the Axis’s ability to move materiel and troops across the seas. And after 1942, they, not Japan and Germany, would choose how, when, and where the theaters of World War II would unfold. Ships were the foundation of Allied cooperation. Britain would send help to Russia and give the United States a huge depot and base from which to cross the English Channel to Europe. The United States would keep Britain and Russia supplied with critical food supplies and resources, wage an existential war against Japan, and partner with Britain to prune off German appendages in the Mediterranean and Italy.

At war’s end, the Allies had fielded more planes, tanks, and infantrymen than had the Axis. But the greatest disproportionality was in naval and merchant marine vessels. Whether by measuring aggregate tonnage or individual ships, total Allied naval construction exceeded that of the Axis by at least seven- to tenfold. Of the sixty million who perished in World War II, naval operations claimed the least number of casualties, far fewer than either those lost to air power or fighting on land. Yet it was Allied superiority at sea that had saved all three Allied nations millions of lives and ensured that they could never lose the war.

IN THE NEXT five chapters, a few recurring themes resonate about the relative effectiveness of ground troops: the size of armies, the quality of fighting men, the nature of arms and equipment, and the effectiveness of supreme commanders, both in the tactical and strategic sense. None was a static benchmark; all evolved as belligerents sought to adapt, change, and improve. Yet the final story of Allied victory on the ground was found in eventually fielding far larger armies than those of the Axis powers, which by late 1943 at last roughly matched the fighting ability, weapons and supplies, and generalship of those who had started the Second World Wars.