Admittedly, Nimitz procrastinated in giving Spruance command of the Fifth Fleet, but not out of any hesitancy about his qualifications. Nimitz simply wasn’t sure he could do without Spruance’s close counsel, but in the end he determined that Spruance would be an even greater asset with the fleet. Their year together at Pearl Harbor had given each a clear understanding of the other. “The admiral thinks it’s all right to send Raymond out now,” a CINCPAC staff officer joked. “He’s got him to the point where they think and talk just alike.”⁵

But when it came to the Marshalls invasion, Spruance was far from ready to mimic Nimitz. In concert with amphibious task force commander Kelly Turner and Holland Smith, who would again command the landing forces, Spruance recommended a two-step approach to Nimitz, first seizing the outer islands of Wotje and Maloelap and then using airfields there to support a second attack on the Japanese headquarters on Kwajalein, in the heart of the islands. After Tarawa, this seemed particularly prudent.

Nimitz weighed the advice of his commanders and also considered new reconnaissance that showed the Japanese to be heavily fortifying Wotje, Maloelap, and the outer islands to provide a protective ring around Kwajalein. Nimitz agreed that it would be difficult to mount a simultaneous assault on multiple islands. But then he shocked Spruance, Turner, and Smith by suggesting that while carrier planes neutralized the enemy airfields on the outer islands, one major thrust would be made directly against Kwajalein instead. The Marshalls could thus be secured in one fell swoop, or at least so said Nimitz in the face of his staff’s adamant opposition.

Considerable discussion ensued, and on December 14, with the clock ticking, Nimitz was forced to make a final decision. He asked Spruance, Turner, and Smith in turn where in the Marshalls they should strike, and each said the outer islands. “Well, gentlemen,” Nimitz said quietly after a moment of silence, “our next objective will be Kwajalein.”

After the conference ended, Turner and Spruance felt so strongly about Nimitz’s decision that they stayed behind to argue against it. Turner called the decision to strike directly at Kwajalein “dangerous and reckless,” and Spruance agreed. Finally, when their arguments began to wind down, Nimitz, still as calm as ever, leaned back in his chair and said, “This is it. If you don’t want to do it, the Department will find someone else to do it. Do you want to do it or not?” That settled the matter. Of course they would do it.⁶

Once this decision was made, both Nimitz and Spruance came under pressure from King to conduct the Marshalls operation—code-named Flintlock—very quickly. King wanted to keep up the offensive momentum and not give the Japanese time to regroup and fortify new forward positions. There was also the issue of the fast carriers. King had directed Nimitz to send them south after the Marshalls were captured, to support Halsey’s drive westward from the Solomons. Consequently, King was adamant that the Marshalls operation commence no later than January 16, 1944. Given the increasing distances from Pearl Harbor for ships and supplies, Spruance was equally adamant that it could not begin until February 1. Nimitz served as sort of a mediator between King and Spruance during this time—recognizing both sides—and in the end the main assault on Kwajalein began on February 1.⁷

In the meantime, King and Nimitz had decided that command of the fast carriers had to go to a more aggressive officer than Rear Admiral Charles “Baldy” Pownall. Spruance thought Pownall had performed admirably enough off Tarawa, but subsequent to that, Pownall led a raid on the Marshalls to hinder enemy airfields. When reconnaissance after a first strike at Kwajalein revealed numerous undamaged planes still on the atoll, Pownall turned his carriers away from the threat rather than launching a second strike. These planes eventually found Pownall’s force and put a torpedo into the stern of the new Essex-class carrier Lexington (CV-16) before returning to Kwajalein, where they remained a threat to any invasion force.

Vice Admiral John H. Towers, who had taken Ernie King for his first airplane ride above the Severn River decades before, led the charge to replace Pownall. King had promoted Towers to be Nimitz’s deputy CINCPAC and aviation expert in part to get him out of Washington. King disliked him, or at least was jealous of Towers’s political connections. Nimitz was not a fan of Towers either, but he accepted him at Pearl Harbor and chose to rely on his aviation expertise. “Towers was a very ambitious man,” the usually reserved Spruance noted and then summed up the feelings of many Pacific Fleet officers when he observed, “If you were not an admirer of Towers and did not play on his team, your path was not made smooth if he could help it.”⁸

It rankled Spruance even more when King and Nimitz—without directly consulting Spruance—followed Towers’s recommendation to give Rear Admiral Marc Mitscher the fast carrier command, designated Task Force 58, under Spruance as the overall fleet commander. Mitscher would soon prove his worth, but Spruance’s early apprehension may have stemmed from his own lack of appreciation of the full potential of fast-strike carriers, as well as his personal impression—deserved or not—that Mitscher had not acquitted himself particularly well as captain of the Hornet during the Battle of Midway.⁹

In the big picture, these tensions were the inevitable growing pains of transforming aircraft carriers from a tactical support role into a strategic-weapons spearhead. The end compromise was that King and Nimitz agreed that all major commanders, including Spruance, who were non-aviators, had to have an aviator as their chief of staff or deputy, and conversely that all major commanders who were aviators had to have a surface officer in the second position.¹⁰

So with Mitscher’s carriers ready to subdue airfields in the Marshalls and block any reinforcements from Truk or the Marianas, Spruance led his fleet against Kwajalein. He expertly applied the lessons of Tarawa and struck with “violent, overwhelming force, swiftly applied.” He also insisted on the “isolation of the objective area.” In other words, keep the enemy from reinforcing the objective and provide a sure corridor in for one’s own supplies.¹¹

The good news was that after a more accurate naval bombardment that didn’t end until the first wave was five hundred yards offshore, casualties were much lighter than at Tarawa. Marines from the new Fourth Marine Division overran the islets of Roi and Namur, on the north side of the atoll, and the army’s Seventh Division, battle trained in the tough Aleutians campaign, fought its way across the length of Kwajalein in five days. Some 42,000 American troops were engaged, with only 372 killed and about 1,600 wounded.

On February 8, Spruance’s flagship, the cruiser Indianapolis, anchored along with hundreds of ships of the Fifth Fleet in the relative safety of the Majuro lagoon, twenty-four miles long and five miles wide, on the eastern edge of the Marshalls. There they were protected from high seas and enemy submarines, but most important, the service units of the fleet, from oilers to repair ships and tugs, could establish a secure forward base two thousand miles closer to Japan than Pearl Harbor.

But now it was Spruance’s turn to urge King and Nimitz to speed up the timetable. Four hundred miles west of Kwajalein lay the atoll of Eniwetok. Its lagoon, with a circumference of fifty-some miles, easily provided the largest natural harbor in the Pacific. Reconnaissance photos showed Spruance that the atoll was at present lightly defended, but the recent arrival of several thousand Japanese troops suggested that a buildup was under way. If the Japanese were given another two and a half months until the Joint Chiefs’ target date of May 1, 1944, for an invasion, they might well turn it into a fortress.

In record time, the Joint Chiefs agreed, and King set a landing on Eniwetok for February 17. In the meantime, Spruance got the news that upon Nimitz’s recommendation and King’s hearty concurrence, he had been promoted to full admiral. This made Spruance, at fifty-seven, the youngest naval officer to attain that rank and at the time only the seventh admiral to fly four stars, behind Leahy, Stark, King, Nimitz, Royal Ingersoll of the Atlantic Fleet, and Halsey.¹²

Spruance promptly transferred his flag from the more nimble Indianapolis to the new Iowa-class battleship New Jersey. Teaming other fast battleships up with Mitscher’s carriers in Task Force 58, Spruance led a raid against Truk in the Carolines. For decades, Truk had been the principal Japanese naval base in the Central Pacific, and reports of it being the “Gibraltar of the Pacific” had been ingrained into a generation of American naval officers. Spruance wanted to be on board the big New Jersey in case the Japanese moved to engage in a major surface action. That didn’t happen, but the raid caused considerable damage to the shore facilities around Truk Lagoon, scattered a host of Japanese merchant ships, and sank a cruiser and several destroyers.

The advance through the Gilberts and Marshalls had been impressive, but this blow against the reputedly impregnable Truk had almost as high a morale factor as the Doolittle Raid two years before. A cartoon on the front page of the Washington Evening Star on Washington’s Birthday, February 22, 1944, said it all. Captioned “The George Washington Influence,” it showed a grinning Chester Nimitz dusting off his hands as Prime Minister Tojo sat amid the ruins of Truk in the background. “I cannot tell a lie,” said the admiral. “I did it with the fleet he annihilated [at Pearl Harbor].”¹³

Meanwhile, Europe had certainly not been forgotten. With King’s battle against the German U-boats largely won, men and munitions flowed eastward across the Atlantic in a steady stream, reinforcing the war effort in Italy and stocking up Great Britain for the long-planned invasion of France. On June 4, Rome finally fell to Allied forces, marking almost a year of dogged fighting on the Italian peninsula after the previous summer’s race around Sicily.

President Roosevelt announced the news about Rome in a radio address the next day. FDR coyly gave only a hint of what he knew was even then under way in the skies above Normandy. But close observers focused on something else. Five months in, this was Roosevelt’s first fireside chat of 1944, and he had been conspicuously absent from Washington during much of April. Just how was the president’s health, and would he run for an unprecedented fourth term¹⁴

By the following day—June 6, 1944—such speculation was momentarily swept aside by the news that Allied soldiers, sailors, and airmen under General Dwight Eisenhower’s supreme command had crossed the English Channel and begun the liberation of Europe via Normandy. In what may have been part of an elaborate ruse to throw off German spies, the president’s chief of staff was not even in Washington at the time.

Instead, Bill Leahy was visiting his birthplace in tiny Hampton, Iowa, having arrived in the state on June 4 to give the commencement address at Cornell College, in Mount Vernon, and receive an honorary doctor of laws degree. On the morning of June 6, he was having breakfast at the home of a daughter of his father’s old law partner when “the radio brought to Iowa news that the invasion of France had begun.” Only that evening did Leahy motor to Mason City and board a Milwaukee Road train en route back to Washington.¹⁵

Leahy’s fellow Joint Chiefs had also stayed relatively low-key—at least as low-key as King was capable of being. Calm Marshall apparently did not even rise early to tune in initial radio reports of the attack from his quarters at Fort Myer. In truth, there was little concrete news that early, and even Eisenhower waited impatiently at Portsmouth, England, to get a clearer picture. But within forty-eight hours, Marshall, King, and Arnold were all off for Great Britain to see firsthand the results of their two-year effort.

With Marshall and Arnold in one C-54 transport and King in another, they flew from Washington to Newfoundland and then across the North Atlantic to an attempted landing at Prestwick, Scotland. Heavy fog obscured the field, and the planes were diverted south to Wales. There an aide flagged down the Irish Mail and hastily arranged for an unheated car to be added to the train. With only a tin of strong, scalding tea among them, the three American chiefs sat through a six-hour ride to London, arriving at Euston Station to be greeted by Sir Alan Brooke and his British chiefs of staff at 7:45 p.m. on June 9.

The Americans were quartered at Stanwell Place in Staines, about twenty miles southwest of London, and the next morning the Combined Chiefs of Staff met at the War Cabinet office for a review of all fronts. But their thoughts kept returning to Normandy. Early on Sunday morning, June 11, King and Arnold decided to pay an impromptu visit to Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force and get the latest information on the landings firsthand. It was supposed to be only a twenty-minute drive, and Arnold’s aide assured the general that he knew the route. Forty-five minutes later, Arnold and King were reduced to asking directions from bobbies, to no avail. Finally finding their way back to Stanwell Place, but without any information, Arnold recorded, “Admiral King was somewhat irked.”

But they need not have worried. The boy soldier in Churchill had been itching to get to the Normandy front, and he proposed an excursion that soon took on the feeling of a school field trip. The Combined Chiefs took a special train to Portsmouth, and early on June 12 they were met there by a beaming Dwight Eisenhower. Victory was far from assured, but the initial progress was encouraging. Marshall, King, Arnold, and Eisenhower then boarded the American destroyer Thompson and set off for the American beaches of Omaha and Utah, while Churchill and the British chiefs boarded a British destroyer and embarked on a similar inspection of the British sector.

As the Thompson surged across the Channel at 30 knots, through a mass of hundreds of ships of all types and sizes, King no doubt took pride in what the U.S. Navy had accomplished. But perhaps there was an even more profound sight overhead. There were four thousand American and British planes in the air that day, but not one German aircraft. Arnold called the harbor at Portsmouth and the mass of ships moving across the Channel “a bomber’s paradise,” but the Allies had clearly established air superiority. It was as graphic a demonstration as possible of the entwined roles of air and sea power.

This did not mean, however, that all friction between the army and navy had been eliminated. As four P-51s and three Spitfires fell to friendly fire from King’s ships, Arnold noted, “Our own Navy [is] far more dangerous than GAF [German Air Force] in spite of [the] fact that they demand overhead cover from our Air Force.”

Off Omaha Beach, Eisenhower and the American chiefs transferred first to a smaller sub chaser and then to a DUKW (pronounced “duck”), a six-wheeled amphibious craft built by General Motors and capable of either land or water travel, for the ride to the beach. There was to be no theatrical splashing ashore as Douglas MacArthur would soon stage in the Philippines. Instead, army photographers caught the group climbing somewhat awkwardly over the side of the vehicle and onto French soil. They toured the beach area in jeeps, met U.S. ground commander Lieutenant General Omar Bradley, ate lunch in a field kitchen, and visited wounded soldiers about to be flown back to England.

Late in the afternoon, Arnold opted to return to England by air, while Marshall and King retraced their journey by DUKW to the Thompson. Being punctual almost to a fault, both men wanted to be on time for a celebratory dinner Churchill was hosting on his private train upon everyone’s return to Portsmouth. Churchill’s concept of time was quite different, however, and he had no qualms about detouring his own destroyer to fire a few rounds into the German lines, despite the fact that this made him quite late.

King passed the time in Churchill’s well-stocked railcar bar, and as Churchill’s arrival got later and later, King drank more and more sherry. When Churchill finally arrived, it was obvious that Churchill, too, had been drinking en route, and the host insisted that it continue. Endless rounds of champagne atop sherry were almost too much for King, but he “managed it.” According to Thomas B. Buell, his biographer, “It was the only time we know of that King broke his vow of sobriety during the war.” (Marshall seems to have avoided any such condition.)¹⁶

Meetings of the Combined Chiefs of Staff continued the next day, but even after the apparent success of the Overlord landings—or perhaps because of it—the British were once more questioning the need for a planned second invasion of France from the Mediterranean. The strategic theme that wouldn’t die—Churchill’s fixation with Italy and the Balkans—reared its head again. King, in particular, stood by earlier arguments in favor of what was then being called Operation Anvil (later Dragoon). He saw a need for a second deepwater port (Cherbourg being the first), liked the idea of a direct sea link from the United States to Marseilles, and thought that an Allied attack on southern France would divert German resources from the Normandy front. In this, King retained Marshall as his ally against the prospect of Churchill plunging eastward from Italy into the Balkans.

From King’s viewpoint, there was so much congestion in the English Channel that the efficiency of movements there was becoming saturated. “There are so many craft involved now,” King had told Roosevelt earlier in the year, “that one could almost walk dry-shod from one side of the channel to the other.”¹⁷

Capturing the port at Antwerp, Belgium, was a possible alternative, but Leahy diplomatically noted, “The slowness of the British divisions on our left flank [in that direction] was displeasing.” This left the landings in the south of France front and center. Eventually, the British agreed to a second front in France, and Allied troops landed near Marseilles on August 15. No wonder, however, that when the Joint Chiefs returned to Washington and briefed Leahy, he responded that Overlord had been a success, “but I did gather from the conversations of our Chiefs on their return that there was considerably more argument and criticism of the British than has appeared in publicized accounts.”¹⁸

The British were still bulling their way into the Balkans later in the year after German troops withdrew from Greece. Churchill wanted to use American LSTs (landing ship, tank) to land British troops to occupy Athens, even in the face of resistance from Greek Communists. The official American position was that this resistance was an internal matter for the Greek people to address, and King chose, on his own authority, to order a halt in LST support. Churchill immediately got on the transatlantic hotline and pleaded his case to Harry Hopkins, who just as quickly conferred with Leahy.

With the war winding down, the lines between military and political decisions were beginning to blur, and Leahy told King that whatever the merits of his order, he “had intruded into politics and had bypassed the chain of command.” It was one of the rare reprimands King received from Leahy, but it underscored that Leahy had no hesitancy in enforcing political directives. True to his methods, however, King quickly devised a face-saving maneuver, arranging to transfer the LSTs to the British as part of larger Lend-Lease operations. King avoided countermanding his orders, Churchill got his support, and the overarching policy of no U.S.-flagged vessels in Greek waters stood.¹⁹

But it was Leahy who expressed the overriding sentiment in Europe after the Overlord and Dragoon invasions. “Before 1944 had ended,” the admiral wrote, “we had met Hitler’s best on a battlefield that favored the defenders, and without any superiority in man power were driving back the Führer’s legions with a speed that amazed everyone, particularly our sensitive Russian allies.”²⁰

What made the Allied success at Normandy all the more impressive was that halfway around the world, King’s navy was almost simultaneously conducting another major amphibious operation—not thirty miles across the English Channel from well-stocked bases, but three thousand miles across the wide Pacific from Pearl Harbor. This was the invasion of the Mariana Islands, principally Saipan, Tinian, and Guam, that King had long claimed held the key to victory over Japan.

That the Normandy and Saipan landings occurred within the same month just thirty months after Pearl Harbor was a testament to America’s industrial might. It was also a testament to King’s global vision. Even with his begrudging support of Germany First, King had still managed to wrangle, plead, beg, and borrow enough resources for the Pacific to get the job done. There had never been any long, defensive holding action in the Pacific, but rather a continuing offensive, just as King had initially insisted on during the grim early months of 1942.

With Eniwetok and the Marshalls secure as a forward base, King and Nimitz were free to push on to the Marianas, completing the encirclement of Truk and arriving within striking distance of the Philippines, Formosa, and Japan itself. But it would not be easy, particularly because their first opponent would be Douglas MacArthur. Throughout early 1944, MacArthur had grown increasingly nervous about an advance on one of his flanks—not from the Japanese, but from Nimitz’s forces in the Central Pacific. Taking the Gilberts and the Marshalls had not particularly ruffled MacArthur’s plans, but a leap to the Marianas would not only consume massive amounts of men and ships but also pose the possibility that such a thrust might get to mainland Japan before MacArthur’s own efforts via the Philippines.

During the cautionary period that gripped most of Nimitz’s staff, between bloody Tarawa and the success at Kwajalein, MacArthur promoted a plan to stop the Central Pacific drive at the Marshalls and divert all efforts southward to support his own advance. The Joint Chiefs rejected this notion, but much like Churchill over the Balkans, MacArthur was not one to be denied.

On the eve of the landings at Kwajalein, MacArthur sent his three key staff members—chief of staff Richard Sutherland, air commander George Kenney, and naval commander Thomas Kinkaid—to a strategy conference at Pearl Harbor to plead his case. Even as they did so, MacArthur was sending criticisms of the navy and assurances about his own strategy outside the chain of command to Secretary of War Stimson and, through him, to Roosevelt himself.²¹

The Pearl Harbor conference proved to be a congenial affair, largely because MacArthur’s representatives chose to hear what they wanted to hear. Their one-front strategy along the MacArthur-Halsey line was not ruled out, and Nimitz’s staff, quite occupied with the pending Marshalls invasion, did not promote any specific plans regarding the Marianas.

Nimitz routinely reported the conference discussions to Admiral King, but MacArthur wrote General Marshall as if a major shift in strategy had occurred. MacArthur brashly assumed that all air, land, and naval forces in the Pacific, including those of the British, were about to be put under his supreme command. Such an outright transfer of forces—even in the unlikely event that King concurred—was unthinkable without causing mass confusion in the command structure then in place. At the very least, it would have placed Nimitz subordinate to MacArthur. King had made clear his opposition two years before, but the general blindly thought the same was about to occur.

MacArthur even wove a web for Halsey. “I’ll tell you something you may not know,” MacArthur confided to Halsey privately. “They’re going to send me a big piece of the fleet—put it absolutely at my disposal.” He’d need a ranking admiral, of course. “How about you, Bill?” MacArthur asked, before promising, “If you come with me, I’ll make you a greater man than Nelson ever dreamed of being!” To Halsey’s credit, he didn’t take the bait.²²

King, of course, with the concurrence of the Joint Chiefs, hotly opposed MacArthur’s machinations. But King also found fault with Nimitz—“indignant dismay,” he termed it—for even listening to the MacArthur plan.

“Apparently, neither those who advocated the concentration of effort in the Southwest Pacific [MacArthur’s staff], nor those who admitted the possibility of such a procedure [Nimitz and his staff],” King scolded, “gave thought nor undertook to state when and if the Japanese occupation and use of the Marianas and Carolines was to be terminated. I assume that even the Southwest Pacific advocates will admit that sometime or other this thorn in the side… must be removed.” And if there was any doubt as to where King placed MacArthur’s overall strategy, the admiral affirmed, “The idea of rolling up the Japanese along the New Guinea coast… and up through the Philippines to Luzon, as our major strategic concept, to the exclusion of clearing our Central Pacific line of communications to the Philippines, is to me absurd.”²³

But Nimitz also got himself crosswise with King over the issue of invading Truk. After the success of Spruance’s raid there and the landings in the Marshalls, Nimitz was optimistic about westward progress. He seems to have at least toyed with invading Truk rather than focusing on King’s goal of the Marianas. “I am sorry to say,” King wrote Nimitz, “that the impression prevails here—rightly or wrongly—that you seriously contemplate taking Truk by assault.” This simply would not do, said King. Truk was a vital Japanese base, but pushing westward to the Marianas would have “the effect of pinching off Truk” and isolating it—the classic island-hopping operation applied on a grand scale. Truk would, in effect, become the hole in an encircling doughnut of American air and naval power.

But King was only getting warmed up. “You may be surprised to know,” he lectured Nimitz in a paragraph headed “Another Subject,” “how widely you are quoted as the basis for comment and speculation as to what we are going to do next in the Pacific Ocean Area.” Nimitz had “said nothing much but what would be obvious to military men,” King agreed, “but the use of it has, I fear, verged on ‘giving aid and comfort to the enemy.’ ” King went on to caution Nimitz to “watch your step in dealing with the press, etc.” before signing off with the platitude “Remain cheerful—and keep up the splendid work you are doing.”²⁴

It was a bumpy month or two for Nimitz because, having gotten himself into trouble with King by appearing too accommodating to MacArthur, he now ran into the general’s buzz saw as well. MacArthur and Halsey had devised a plan to bypass the Japanese strongholds of Kavieng and Rabaul and jump ahead to Manus in the Admiralty Islands, much as King had long advocated in regard to Truk and the Marianas. Halsey’s South Pacific command—still in the dual role of answering to MacArthur for overall strategy but to Nimitz for everything else—took Green Island, east of Rabaul, and then supported MacArthur’s efforts to take Los Negros Island and its fine Seeadler Harbour, on the east side of Manus.

All of this went generally according to plan, but then Nimitz, knowing that Halsey had been directly involved in the planning of a major fleet installation in Seeadler Harbour and had the Seabees to undertake the operation, innocently suggested to King, with a copy to MacArthur, that Halsey’s South Pacific Area be extended westward to include Manus. MacArthur reacted as if Nimitz had snatched his only child.

He immediately summoned Halsey to Brisbane and went into a tirade in front of Halsey, Kinkaid, and Halsey’s chief of staff, Robert B. “Mick” Carney. Not only would he oppose any such efforts by Nimitz—MacArthur insisted on calling him Neemitz when peeved—but he also would see to it that the harbor be restricted to ships of Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet and not permit one ship of the Fifth Fleet to anchor there.

After a fifteen-minute lecture, MacArthur, who had once offered to make Halsey grander than Nelson himself, pointed the stem of his ever-present pipe at Halsey and demanded, “Am I not right, Bill?”

“No, sir!” Halsey shot back, and proceeded to tell MacArthur that not only did he disagree entirely, but if the general stood by his order, he would “be hampering the war effort!” MacArthur’s courtiers gasped, but Halsey had made his point. Still, it took another two rounds of debate before MacArthur calmed down.²⁵

Even so, the general sent a similar message to Marshall, arguing that Nimitz had “proposed to project his own command into the Southwest Pacific by the artificiality of advancing South Pacific Forces into the area” and that somehow this involved MacArthur’s “personal honor.” MacArthur asked to present his case to the secretary of war and to the president.²⁶ Marshall assured MacArthur that his honor was not at stake and told him he would arrange for him to see Roosevelt. Privately, Marshall no doubt rolled his eyes and thought, Here we go again. Years afterward, Marshall was still of the opinion, “With Chennault in China and MacArthur in the Southwest Pacific, I sure had a combination of temperament.”²⁷

With his usual, maddening understatement, Leahy described this latest MacArthur-Nimitz squabble thusly: “It appeared that MacArthur’s ideas might conflict with those of Nimitz, and the difference in the personalities of these two able commanders was going to require delicate handling.”²⁸

Consequently, Nimitz and MacArthur were both summoned to Washington to work out their differences. But by then, in typical fashion, MacArthur pleaded that he simply couldn’t be spared from his command and sent Sutherland in his stead. When the conference ended, the Joint Chiefs had categorically made two major Pacific Theater decisions: first, there would be no more talk of taking Truk—Nimitz would bypass it; and second, the timetable for the Marianas invasion would be moved forward from October to mid-June. Additionally, Marshall informed MacArthur—carefully as always—that his visions of grandeur would once again be limited to his continued advance along the coast of New Guinea and that his full cooperation with Nimitz was a given.

Having been thus subdued, only then did MacArthur, who had snubbed Nimitz twice on the latter’s visits to nearby Nouméa, do an about-face and cordially invite Nimitz to Brisbane for a personal conference with all the assurances of “a warm welcome” so that “the close coordination of our respective commands would be greatly furthered.”²⁹

Steady Raymond Spruance sailed westward in the Indianapolis to lead his Fifth Fleet against the Marianas. There is no question that Spruance’s command style was diametrically opposed to Halsey’s. Spruance always had a detailed operations plan that he followed—occasionally, it will be seen, to subsequent criticism. Halsey, by contrast, was quick to shoot from the hip. “You never knew what you were going to do in the next five minutes or how you were going to do it,” George C. Dyer, who commanded the cruiser Astoria under both Halsey and Spruance, complained. This was frequently because Halsey himself did not know.

Dyer, who later served King as his intelligence officer, confessed that his feeling “was one of confidence when Spruance was there and one of concern when Halsey was there.” Nimitz put it quite differently, recognizing at least part of the difference when he said, “Bill Halsey was a sailor’s admiral and Spruance, an admiral’s admiral.”³⁰ The one thing both Halsey and Spruance had going for them, however, was that Nimitz trusted them to accomplish their missions.

The Marianas campaign was to be a much more complicated operation than those against the Gilberts and Marshalls. Saipan, Tinian, Guam, and even smaller Rota were much larger islands with sizable civilian populations. They were defended by 60,000 troops entrenched in rugged terrain and supported by tanks and artillery. At his disposal, Spruance had about 127,000 assault troops backed by more than 600 ships.

The Northern Attack Force of the Second and Fourth Marine Divisions, with the Twenty-seventh Infantry Division in reserve, targeted Saipan for a June 15 landing, while the Southern Attack Force of the Third Marine Division and the First Marine Brigade was scheduled to land a few days later on Guam, depending on the success of the Saipan operations. Once again, Mitscher’s Task Force 58 was responsible for ensuring that Spruance had an isolated target.³¹

The Japanese, however, had other ideas. The Japanese fleet had not sortied en masse since the Battle of Midway two years before, and Nimitz and Spruance were inclined to think that it would not contest the landings in force. Nonetheless, Spruance prepared for surface action just in case. By now, any misgivings Spruance might have had about Mitscher had vanished, and he put his trust in him as his carrier ace just as Nimitz had done.

Heavy bombardment of the invasion beaches began on D-Day minus 2, but almost at once an American submarine reported a Japanese force of at least four battleships, six cruisers, and six destroyers on the move off the northern tip of Borneo. But where were their carriers? Nimitz’s best intelligence estimates put nine battle-ready Japanese carriers somewhere in the southern Philippines. Under the right circumstances, they could still wreak plenty of havoc against Spruance’s fifteen opposing carriers.

The landings on Saipan went off on schedule, but that evening Spruance received another report of battleships and carriers exiting San Bernardino Strait, in the Philippines, and steaming eastward into the Philippine Sea. The next morning, yet another submarine sighted a Japanese task force northeast of Mindanao, also heading east. It appeared that the western Philippine Sea was filling with at least two major Japanese forces queuing for a concerted strike against the American landing forces on Saipan, the American fleet, or both.

Spruance postponed the landings on Guam and ordered Task Force 58 and his other forces to concentrate near the Marianas by June 17. When Kelly Turner told Spruance that there was no way he could withdraw transports and supply ships eastward, out of harm’s way, without compromising the beachhead, Spruance replied, “Well, get everything that you don’t absolutely need out of here to the eastward, and I will join up with Mitscher and Task Force 58 and try to keep the Japs off your neck.”³²

It continues to be debated just how essential those transports were to Turner’s efforts. Spruance took Turner at his word that they could not be moved and thus committed his fleet to a largely defensive role within easy range of Saipan. Given well-known Japanese tactics of dividing forces, Spruance was particularly concerned that while one enemy unit engaged his principal carriers, another unit might slip around either of his flanks and strike Turner’s transports. Spruance was prepared to engage the Japanese fleet, but his overriding concern became protecting the beachhead and guarding against an end run.

On June 17, as the battle for Saipan continued fierce and deadly, Task Force 58 searched westward during the day for any sign of the approaching Japanese, but then retired eastward toward evening to be tied to the beachhead. Seaplanes hastily sent to Saipan and carrier scouts failed to locate the Japanese carriers, but Japanese scouting planes seemed to be shadowing the American carriers, attempting either to find a way around them or to coordinate a strike at them from a safe distance. The Japanese weren’t steaming straight into a melee off Saipan, but this only caused Spruance additional angst over the possibility of an end run.

The prevailing winds didn’t help either. Steady winds from the east meant that every time the Americans conducted flight operations—either to launch or recover planes—the big carriers had to turn into the wind and run east for some distance. This had the effect of increasing the distance between them and the oncoming Japanese, while the Japanese, heading eastward, could conduct air operations while continuing to close the distance.

On the night of June 18, despite submarine reports of the enemy closing, Spruance elected once again to steer eastward in order to be near Saipan, instead of continuing west to position his carriers for a dawn strike against the oncoming Japanese. Mitscher favored the latter but followed Spruance’s orders and crafted a defensive battle line of battleships, cruisers, and destroyers out in front of his carriers.

The next morning, the entire American fleet came under a concerted attack from carrier-based planes, as well as from airfields on Guam and Rota. Wave after wave of attacking aircraft became ensnarled with the antiaircraft fire of Mitscher’s battle line and then found themselves outmatched by his aviators. In what came to be called the Marianas Turkey Shoot, 383 Japanese planes went down in flames, against only 25 American losses. The American carriers remained untouched, but so did the Japanese carriers—save one crippled by a submarine torpedo—and therein lay the root of the criticism that would soon come Spruance’s way.

By the morning of June 20, Spruance had finally become convinced that there would be no end run, and he instructed Mitscher to proceed west to find the Japanese carriers. But by then, staggered by their air losses, the Japanese were withdrawing westward, and the continuing east wind meant that whatever westward pursuit Mitscher mounted would be halting, as he would be forced to turn eastward from time to time for flight operations. The day slipped away, and it was late afternoon before scouts located the Japanese carriers. Mitscher’s pilots were game to attack, despite being almost at maximum range and with the late hour almost certainly meaning a night landing—if they made it back at all.

The attacking squadrons finally found the Japanese carriers and, low on fuel, made their runs as quickly as possible and then headed eastward. Mitscher ordered his carriers’ lights turned on to receive them, but mass confusion ensued, and more American planes ditched in the ocean than were shot down all day by the Japanese. By the time dawn came on the 21st, the American fleet was in disarray, and the retreating Japanese were well out of range.

Then came the critics. Towers, in particular, blamed Spruance for letting the enemy carriers escape and screamed for his head, much as he had done against Kinkaid after the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands. Characteristically, Towers suggested himself as Spruance’s replacement, but Nimitz would have none of that. Despite lost opportunities, it was hard to argue against overall losses of 476 planes and 445 aviators for the Japanese and 130 planes and 43 pilots for the Americans. The Japanese also lost two of their nine carriers to U.S. submarines and another to the belated evening air attack.

When King and Nimitz visited Saipan a month later, after it had been subdued, King’s first words to Spruance as he stepped off their plane were, “Spruance, you did a damn fine job there. No matter what other people tell you, your decision was correct.”³³

But even Spruance had his doubts, although he never backed down from his determined duty to protect Turner’s beachhead. “As a matter of tactics,” Spruance wrote after the war, “I think that going out after the Japanese and knocking their carriers out would have been much better and more satisfactory than waiting for them to attack us; but we were at the start of a very important and large amphibious operation and we could not afford to gamble and place it in jeopardy.”³⁴

A week after the battle, Time put Spruance on its cover, complete with his four stars of a full admiral. “After the Marianas,” the caption read, “The Empire,” meaning Japan itself. Doubtless Douglas MacArthur, fearing a route that would bypass the Philippines, was among those not cheering.³⁵

By all accounts, the Battle of the Philippine Sea was an American victory. Japanese airpower sustained huge and irreplaceable losses. The beachhead on Saipan was safe, and landings would soon occur on Guam. In Japan, Tojo’s government fell as he called the loss of Saipan “an unprecedentedly great national crisis.”³⁶

But what continued to nag at many American naval commanders were the six Japanese carriers that remained to fight again. On the Japanese side, their planners realized that the Americans would continue to key on any enemy carriers that threatened their amphibious operations. On the American side, the failure to destroy the enemy fleet would weigh heavily on U.S. command decisions the next time such an opportunity presented itself.