Chapter Ten

FROM THE DECK OF A SHIP INBOUND FOR PEARL HARBOR, THE FIRST glimpse of Oahu offered a satisfying contrast to the flat tedium of the Pacific. Dramatically steep greenish-brown slopes, alternately sunlit and cast in the shadow of clouds, soared above the horizon. Diamond Head, a jagged headland with the color and texture of corrugated cardboard, rose out of the sea and gradually marched eastward to uncover the long arc of Waikiki Beach and the city of Honolulu. The quartermasters called the bearings as they passed to starboard: the pink edifice of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, the Aloha Tower (painted in wartime camouflage), the Punchbowl Crater, Ahua Point. Patrol planes flew low overhead and picket boats drew in close, giving each incoming ship a wary look. The signal tower at Fort Kamehameha demanded and received recognition signals. A tugboat drew aside the antisubmarine nets at the outer entrance to the Pearl Harbor channel, then drew them back across the arriving ship’s wake. The channel was long, straight, and narrow, with surf breaking over coral reefs close aboard to port and starboard, but it was safely dredged to a depth of 40 feet and well marked by buoys.

Around Hospital Point, the entire panorama opened up: the central basin, Ford Island, the teeming dock complexes and administrative buildings along the East Loch. First-timers who had sailed from the mainland were surprised to find that Pearl Harbor was rather small and snug. The homeport of the mighty Pacific Fleet was nothing to compare with San Diego or San Francisco Bay. The visual effect was heightened by the scale and grandeur of the natural backdrop. To the north and west, scrub growth and palm groves gave way to graceful, undulating sugarcane fields and pasturelands stretching up into green foothills, and the towering ridgelines of the Waianae and Koolau ranges enclosed the horizon in every inland direction.

Pearl Harbor had seemed somewhat more spacious earlier in the war, but by the summer of 1943 the expanding fleet threatened to fill every available berth and mooring zone, and newly arrived ships inched into an impossibly congested harbor. Destroyers and other smaller vessels were often moored two or three abeam, with gangplanks laid between them. All the seaman’s arts were needed to maneuver a battleship or carrier through the overcrowded channels and roadsteads, around other ships (whether underway or moored), repair and fueling barges, floating dry docks, sunken battleships, and the ubiquitous whaleboats that crossed the channels with bells clanging insistently. Tides, fogs, shoals, wind, and wakes were confounding factors. Collisions or groundings were to be reported immediately, and they could cripple a skipper’s career prospects.

In mid-1943, following eighteen months of phenomenal exertions, Pearl Harbor had largely recovered from the surprise air raid that had launched the war. Veterans noted that the land around the harbor was noticeably less green than it had been in 1941, because so much native foliage had been uprooted and paved over to make way for new piers, shops, foundries, warehouses, hangars, barracks, tank farms, ammunition depots, antiaircraft batteries, administrative buildings, and windowless bombproof power plants. The clang and rattle of machinery sang out from dawn to dusk, seven days a week. Two new dry docks were under construction at the navy yard, including the enormous Drydock No. 4, more than 1,000 feet long and serviced by a towering 50-ton gantry crane that traveled up and down the neighboring pier on a wide-gauge track. Dredging barges were constantly at work to widen and deepen the channels and anchorages around Ford Island and West Loch. Between 1941 and 1945, thirteen million cubic yards of mud, silt, and sand was excavated from the harbor bottom.

To the west, construction teams were erecting long warehouses, a railroad spur, and a modern waterfront terminal on the Pearl City Peninsula. Most of Pearl Harbor’s fuel oil and diesel reserves had been pumped into subterranean concrete vaults north of the base, which were linked by pipelines to a huge new concrete fueling pier. Transportation around the base was provided by fifty-eight miles of roads and a narrow-gauge marine railway. Tractors pulled passenger wagons on regular routes, much like a municipal bus system; they were usually crammed to capacity with servicemen and civilian workers.

Five of the eight battleships damaged in the Japanese attack had been repaired and returned to service. Salvage work continued on the Arizona, Oklahoma, and Utah. The reclamation of those wrecked leviathans had been one of the most stupendous challenges ever encountered by engineers, comparable in scale or complexity to the construction of great bridges, dams, or canals. With their hulls ripped open by Japanese aerial torpedoes, several of the great steel ships had come to rest on the harbor floor. To raise and maneuver them into dry docks, where they could be repaired and rebuilt, the salvage teams first had to patch the submerged holes in their sunken hulls, then pump enough water out to raise them to a draft of 35 feet. Thousands of tons of ordnance, weaponry, equipment, and debris had to be removed before the ships could be raised. Noxious and explosive gases built up in the enclosed compartments, posing the constant threat of fire or poisoning.

Workers who descended into the interiors of the damaged ships wore rubber boots and coveralls and carried portable breathing gear. They lit their way with heavy battle lanterns and communicated with the surface by telephone lines connected to air hoses. Powerful suction blowers ventilated the ships, but as new hatches were opened, hydrogen sulfide gas often rushed out with enough force to blow men off their feet. The ships were flooded with an unspeakable black sludge made up of seawater and fuel oil. Badly decomposed corpses were floated into canvas bags, hoisted to the surface, and transferred into boats by medics wearing facemasks. In the once-refrigerated storerooms, salvage teams found tons of decaying ham hocks and sides of beef that disintegrated when handled. One officer on the salvage detail recalled that removing the rancid meat was “one of the meanest jobs” in the entire enterprise. Eventually they found that high-pressure water hoses shredded the rotten meat into small fragments, and these could be pumped overboard by gasoline-powered suction pumps, “no doubt to the great relish of Hawaiian sea life.”¹ Returning to the surface after an expedition into the ship, the salvage workers found themselves swathed head to foot in a black slime that could not be removed except by bathing in diesel fuel.

As the ships were pumped out, the interior decks and bulkheads remained coated with a greasy film. Scrubbing them clean was a Herculean challenge. High-pressure hoses, run from barges alongside, bombarded the surfaces with saltwater and various hot caustic solutions. The procedure was repeated again and again, sometimes for weeks at a time, until the surfaces felt and appeared clean. Inevitably, the water in Pearl Harbor was so badly polluted by these operations that it could no longer be used in the desalination plants, and water had to be pumped in from other parts of Oahu.

Salvage operations required immense manpower, and civilian reinforcements were brought in to supplement the Navy Yard’s ranks. The workers were almost all young, unmarried men, drawn to Hawaii by high wages and a desire to be close to the war front. Many were crowded into apartments hastily erected in the Navy Yard. “Civilian Housing Area III” offered all the essential trappings of a small city, including a police force, post office, newspaper, baseball diamonds, movie theaters, and retail services. With a peak wartime population of 12,000, it was Hawaii’s third-largest city (after Honolulu and Hilo).²

Professional divers, including both naval personnel and civilian contractors, did the difficult and dangerous job of inspecting, measuring, and patching the underwater damage. They mapped the flooded interiors, opened and closed watertight doors, disarmed unexploded ordnance, and removed debris and bodies. They worked in perfect darkness, feeling their way through the sludge-flooded innards of the sunken ships, where electric light was useless because it would only reflect back into the small glass ports on their heavy copper helmets. It was grisly work. Edward C. Raymer, a navy diver who wrote a vivid memoir of his work in the sunken battleships, dreaded colliding with the dead sailors who floated through the flooded compartments. He claims to have sensed the proximity of bodies before coming into contact with them, describing the intuition as a “strange feeling that I was not alone.”³ In early 1942, while searching for an unexploded Japanese torpedo warhead in the sunken Arizona:

I reached out to feel my way and touched what seemed to be a large inflated bag floating on the overhead. As I pushed it away, my bare hand plunged through what felt like a mass of rotted sponge. I realized with horror that the “bag” was a body without a head. Gritting my teeth, I shoved the corpse as hard as I could. As it drifted away, its fleshless fingers raked across my rubberized suit, almost as if the dead sailor were reaching out to me in a silent cry for help.⁴

Divers took precise measurements of the underwater breaches in the hulls. Timber patches were constructed to fit those dimensions, and the divers returned to mount them over the holes. The patches were never quite watertight, but they were supplemented by sawdust, oakum, wooden plugs, and whatever other suitable materials could be found in the sunken ships, such as mattresses, pillows, and clothing. Water was then pumped out of the patched hull by gasoline-powered suction pumps. Because water always continued to leak into the ship through the makeshift patches, it was necessary to employ hundreds of pumps simultaneously just to keep the water from rising.

In the case of more seriously damaged ships, such as the West Virginia and California, it was deemed necessary to construct a “cofferdam,” or watertight fencelike structure, all the way around the ship. A wall of 8-inch plank was reinforced with steel pilings driven deep into concrete foundations on the harbor floor. According to Homer Wallin, an officer who oversaw the work, the effort amounted to building a “makeshift drydock” on the site of the sunken battleships. It was “a stupendous and hazardous job.”⁵ Hundreds of tons of concrete was poured into the bottom of the harbor. The cofferdams were erected close aboard the sides of the ships, leaving a gap of about 2 to 3 feet. The hull damage was patched, the ship pumped out and raised, the cofferdam cast free of the pilings, and the entire unwieldy structure coaxed across East Loch into dry dock.

Presenting an even greater problem was the Oklahoma, which had rolled 150 degrees off the vertical and planted her superstructure into the mud at the bottom of the harbor. Only a portion of her keel and starboard bilge was visible above the surface. Workers and divers entered the ship through airlocks cut into her bottom, and descended into a Stygian labyrinth in which up was down and down was up, the decks overhead and the overheads underfoot. In December 1942, New York Times correspondent Robert Trumbull put on breathing gear and toured the “pitch black fetid boiler room of the capsized battlewagon.”⁶ The Oklahoma was judged a total loss, apart from her scrap value—but it was necessary to raise and relocate the 29,000-ton ship so that her valuable berthing position could be reclaimed for the fleet. Before she could be floated, she had to be rolled back to an upright position, a process that would require tremendous turning force. Twenty-one high-geared hauling winches were anchored to huge concrete foundations on Ford Island and rigged with high leverage. Heavy steel cables were run from the winches through hauling blocks to pads welded to the bottom of the ship. Each winch supplied 20 tons of pulling power, but even that was not enough. Submarine salvage pontoons were attached to the sunken topside, and compressed air was used to dig the superstructure out of the mud. The winches began taking up strain on the cables on the morning of March 8, 1943. The Oklahoma groaned, creaked, and gradually began to turn. The winches pulled her over at the rate of 3 feet per hour. They pulled for more than two months, until June 16, 1943, when she was upright with a 3-degree list. Another five months of work was needed to patch her hull and float her; finally she was maneuvered into the newly completed Drydock No. 4 on December 28.⁷

Rear Admiral William R. Furlong, commandant of the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard, enjoyed telling visitors that the battleships West Virginia, California, Tennessee, and Nevada had not just been repaired; they had been rebuilt from the keel up. They were modernized and newly equipped, superior in every respect to the ships that had been blasted, torpedoed, and sunk on December 7, 1941. Of the West Virginia, Admiral Furlong proudly concluded, “We built her new from the inside out. We went right to the bottom, like a dentist drilling out a rotten tooth.”⁸

By the second anniversary of Pearl Harbor, only the Arizona remained on the harbor floor. Divers had confirmed that her keel was broken, and the engineers had concluded that the great hull could not be raised intact. Bringing her up in sections was theoretically possible, but the job would be immensely difficult and the cost would far exceed her scrap value. It was decided to leave her where she lay. She lies there still.

ON AN AVERAGE DAY IN 1943, Honolulu’s honky-tonk Hotel Street district was overrun by 30,000 servicemen and civilian defense workers. Hawaiian traditions of charity and hospitality were strained to the breaking point. After the Battle of Midway, when the little sun-drenched city began to feel itself safe from the enemy, Honolulans grew increasingly annoyed by blackout procedures and other military regulations. Air-raid wardens stopped making their nightly rounds, coils of barbed wire rusted on the beaches, and national guardsmen slept at their posts.

Not many visiting servicemen had a good word to say about the city. “The men, almost without exception, detested Honolulu,” wrote the sailor and memoirist Theodore C. Mason.⁹ It was jaded, expensive, and desperately overcrowded. Samuel Hynes, a marine aviator, called it “another crowded Navy town, much like Pensacola or San Diego, full of sunlight and sailors and bad liquor.” One of his fellow pilots, a Texan, pronounced it “Nothin’ but Amarillo with a beach.”¹⁰ Oahu was nicknamed the “Rock,” and the consensus verdict (according to Paradise of the Pacific, a popular local monthly magazine) was that there were “just too damn many people of all descriptions on this damn rock, and something ought to be done.”¹¹

Overcrowded buses and overpriced taxis brought the crowds of white-and-khaki-clad men to the Army-Navy YMCA, where they poured out onto the street and went looking for any kind of amusement. The heart of the vice district ran along Hotel Street from the “Y” to the river, a neighborhood of brash neon, booming jukeboxes, and peeling paint, where dirty sidewalks were lined with dismal bars, brightly lit penny arcades, and tawdry souvenir shops. An odor of stale beer and rotten fish wafted through the street. The beer was cold, but cocktails were watered down and overpriced, and insolent bartenders pestered the men to drink up and order another or else make space for the next paying customer. Burly Hawaiian bouncers kept the peace, but at the first sign of real trouble the shore patrol and military police were called in to knock heads and haul the malefactors away. Men stood in long lines for hot dogs, popcorn, ice cream, Coca-Cola, tattoos, massages, haircuts, pinball machines, shooting galleries, baseball batting cages, pool tables, and photos with a hula dancer. Fifteen cents would buy a bowl of sai min—pork and noodles—but a customer had to eat on his feet while being jostled on the crowded sidewalk, and some maintained that the “pork” was actually dog meat. Barefoot Asian boys aged six to twelve offered shoeshines for a quarter, shouting, “Hi, Pal!” and “Shine, Mac!”¹² On a typical afternoon, one officer remembered, Hotel Street was filled with “white hats of sailors on leave as far as you could see.”¹³

For Hawaii’s retail and business sector, the war was a gold rush. Between 1941 and 1943, 8,000 new businesses were established in the islands, and retail trade increased by $22 million, more than 75 percent. Rents skyrocketed, real estate prices surged, and bank deposits increased by fivefold. The editors of Paradise of the Pacific noted in May 1944 that “there were 288 restaurants here in 1939, and there are now 630, but it’s still practically impossible to get a meal without standing in line.”¹⁴ The territorial economy had long been dominated by a haole (Caucasian) elite, but the war was especially kind to owners of retail businesses and restaurants, many of whom were ethnically Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Filipino.

Local civilian and military authorities had agreed to tolerate a regulated sex trade for the duration of the war. In 1943, fifteen brothels employed 260 prostitutes in Honolulu’s red light district.¹⁵ Known as “cathouses” or “bell rooms” (“Give the bell a ring”), the establishments were scattered along Hotel, River, and North Beretania Streets, with discreetly lettered signs identifying them as (for example) the “Bungalow,” the “Rex,” the “Ritz,” the “Anchor,” the “Bronx,” or the “Rainbow Hotel.” On a typical afternoon when the fleet was in port, long lines of servicemen stretched down the stairways and out onto the sidewalks; the wait was often an hour or more. Each customer paid three dollars and was ushered into a small cubicle with a single cot. “Chop-chop,” one such man recalls being told by the Chinese madam; he had better undress quickly because his three dollars had bought him only three minutes with “Missie Fuck-Fuck.” As the woman entered, a timer was set. When it rang three minutes later, the encounter had ended whether the man had ejaculated or not, and the woman stood up and left the room.

The experience was altogether cheerless and degrading—“A guy might as well use a dead fish,” one marine remarked afterward¹⁶—but the Honolulu brothels never lacked for customers. By one estimate, they sustained a wartime average of 250,000 customers per month. Each woman saw between fifty and a hundred men per day and earned about $25,000 per year. The madams earned as much as $150,000 each year. Local officialdom took a close interest in the enterprise, for reasons both venal and hygienic. The Honolulu Police Department registered each prostitute as an “entertainer” and expected to collect a share of her earnings; the standard bribe was reportedly fifty dollars per woman per month.¹⁷ In turn, the vice squad acted as enforcers for the madams by intimidating, beating, or deporting their disobedient girls. Army and navy doctors examined each woman weekly, and outgoing customers were required to visit adjacent “prophylactic stations” for examination and treatment.¹⁸

The USO, with fifty-one clubs in the islands, provided more wholesome entertainment. A-list celebrities such as Bob Hope and Artie Shaw hosted lavish musical variety shows, with a big band fronted by guest singers, and the songs interspersed with stand-up routines or dance performances. The USO hosted huge dances in which men typically outnumbered women by a ratio of twenty-five to one. The “USO girls” were “respectable”—many were daughters of socially prominent Hawaiian families—and each was under the watchful eye of a chaperone. With a hardy sense of duty and patriotism, they bestowed their smiles and good cheer to all men equally, regardless of rank, looks, or dancing proficiency. They danced for three to four hours a night, with short breaks. Cutting in was permitted every two and a half minutes, when a whistle blew through the loudspeaker.

Left out of the USO events, and denied other perks available only to men in uniform, were the civilian defense workers. Young, unattached males, whose numbers swelled to 82,000 in 1944, were crowded into substandard housing complexes and stuck fast to the bottom of Oahu’s social pecking order. Their wages were about 30 percent higher than those paid on the mainland for similar jobs, but they found that the cost of living in Hawaii was about 60 percent higher. Many made themselves conspicuous by wearing garish Hawaiian “aloha” shirts untucked over trousers, a fashion traditionally disdained by other haole. Fairly or unfairly, the war workers earned a reputation as “Okies, interlopers, and draft dodgers”¹⁹—notorious miscreants, gamblers, and drunks, unsuitable for civilized society. Servicemen generally despised them, landlords refused to rent to them, policemen harassed them, and women of all races would not give them the time of day. A territorial health department report concluded that “groups of war workers in this community apparently contain a rather notable number of unstable, alcoholic, psychoneurotic or psychopathic individuals.”²⁰

Many newly arrived mainland whites, particularly those from the American South, were nonplussed by the tolerant racial attitudes prevailing in Hawaii. The islands’ many Asian and Pacific racial and ethnic groups coexisted on harmonious terms. Off-base housing, mass transit, and most retail establishments were largely desegregated (though African American servicemen still endured segregated barracks). Japanese Hawaiians, representing the single largest ethnic group in the territory, had feared persecution or worse after the attack on Pearl Harbor—but by mid-1943 it was evident that the overwhelming majority were loyal to the American cause. The extraordinary heroism in Italy of the all-nisei (second-generation Japanese American) 442nd Regimental Combat Team was publicized and celebrated in the Hawaiian press.

Mainland whites who expected to be treated with deference and respect were amazed when it was not automatically forthcoming. “The defense worker received the jolt of his life,” observed a columnist in Paradise of the Pacific, “when he found that the other races had turned the tables on him and were eyeing him appraisingly, were calculating his probable social status, and were often ‘looking down their noses’ at him when he moved into their community.”²¹

Given the radical gender imbalance in wartime Hawaii, interracial dating and marriage gained a social acceptance that would not reach the mainland until two or three generations later. In 1943 and 1944, according to territorial statistics, 32 percent of all marriages in Hawaii were between spouses of different races. Marriages between Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Hawaiians, Puerto Ricans, and Filipinos were common. Almost one-half of all white men married a woman of another race, and 9 percent of all white women married a man of a different race. There were 189 marriages between a white man and an ethnic Japanese woman.²² Then again, Hawaii’s wartime divorce rate was 48 percent, almost three times higher than the rate on the mainland.²³

For thousands of American servicemen, a long interval in wartime Hawaii left them impatient to get on with the war. Bill Davis, a navy fighter pilot stranded on Maui for months on end, remarked that the period seemed like an extended vacation. His days were full of tennis, leisurely training flights, and lunches at an officers’ club. “This was all wonderful, but we were beginning to think our motto was that of John Paul Jones, when he said, ‘I have not yet begun to fight.’ ”²⁴ Even Hawaii’s extraordinary natural beauty assumed a monotonous and oppressive aspect. Men who had been too long in the islands were said to be “rock happy” or “pineapple crazy.” The best remedy was to send them west, into battle. A reserve naval lieutenant, writing in a local paper, joked that “after three trips on a Honolulu bus, a 97-pound yeoman second class, armed with nothing weightier than a rolled copy of the Honolulu Advertiser, would joyously leap into a Jap pillbox.”²⁵

ADMIRAL NIMITZ, who ran the whole show in Hawaii, and whose monumental Allied theater command took in about a fifth of the earth’s surface, lived in a stately white house at the top of Makalapa Hill. The hill, actually the cone of an extinct volcano, was a serene district of green lawns and recently erected homes. Japanese gardeners tended to the newly planted trees and native vegetation, which had not yet grown to maturity and thus did not obstruct the panoramic western views of Pearl Harbor. Makalapa Hill provided quarters for the navy and marine brass—houses for admirals and generals, bungalows for captains and colonels. The prefabricated structures were evenly spaced and built to cookie-cutter architectural plans. Streets bore the names of historic American naval battles, including earlier battles of the war in progress. Lest the enemy attempt to decapitate the high command at one stroke, the neighborhood’s existence was held in strict secrecy: the name “Makalapa” was never permitted to appear in any public document or press communiqué.

CINCPAC headquarters was about a quarter mile from Nimitz’s house. It was a plain two-story office building, built heavily of steel-reinforced concrete, purposely designed to draw no attention to itself. On a typical morning, Nimitz and his chief of staff, Raymond Ames Spruance, walked to work and arrived at their adjacent offices at the southwest corner of the second “deck” before 0800.

At 0900, the staff section heads crowded into Nimitz’s office and sat in folding chairs for a daily morning conference. They received an intelligence briefing and reviewed incoming overnight communications. Discussions of forthcoming operations or other important subjects followed. As the fleet grew in 1943, the crowd at Nimitz’s daily “open house” for commanding officers of ships newly arrived at Pearl Harbor grew steadily larger. Nimitz seemed to enjoy these encounters, and he drew much useful information from his freewheeling interviews with the skippers. His flag lieutenant, Arthur Lamar, commented that Nimitz “enjoyed visiting just as much with a young lieutenant (jg) commanding an LST as with a senior captain with a brand new battleship. He loved people!”²⁶

In that respect Nimitz was similar to FDR, who had come to know the admiral well in 1940 and 1941, when he had served as the navy’s personnel chief in Washington, and who had handpicked Nimitz for command of the Pacific Fleet. The white-haired Texan was cheered and energized in his interactions with subordinates of all ranks, and led with a distinctively warm and personal touch. After returning a salute, he customarily extended his hand and introduced himself: “My name’s Nimitz.” He kept a fund of slightly off-color stories, funny but never profane; he often used them as a means to dispel tension after men had aired disagreements. Others were astonished by Nimitz’s capacity to remember old acquaintances and shipmates, officers and enlisted men—he rarely forgot faces and could often produce a man’s name and cite details of his subsequent service. It was not just a matter of keen memory. From early in his career, Nimitz had kept a file of index cards with names and other pertinent information. His staff was always expected to keep those files updated. “In making inspections of ships and islands,” recalled Lieutenant Lamar, “he always liked to call officers by name. We did this by means of cards which I made up before each visit, and I often coached the Admiral behind his back. All hands enjoyed this personal touch.”²⁷

The chief’s working day, recalled Ralph Parker, another member of the CINCPAC staff, was “just one conference after another, in varying degree and in varying scope.”²⁸ It might be with one man, just returned from the theater of operations, or with a group that filled the room and occupied every chair so that junior officers were obliged to stand with their backs against the wall. Nimitz was content to listen at length and was tolerant of dissent. He did not emulate King’s iron-fist management style or MacArthur’s bad habit of surrounding himself with flatterers. Even when discussions grew heated, Nimitz remained imperturbable. He did not sign off on a decision until all objections had been aired and registered. As Ralph Parker observed, “The old idea of Napoleonic command, of being so far superior to all your subordinates that none of them dares say anything but ‘Aye Aye, Sir’—that idea no longer holds. It’s absolutely necessary to get the opinion of subordinates, particularly those who have to carry out an order.”²⁹

Nimitz and Spruance often left the office together when the sun was still high in the sky. The two shared a compulsive need for strenuous outdoor exercise, and they often hiked to the top of Makalapa Crater, easily outpacing the much younger officers who joined them. Nimitz’s competitive streak came out on the tennis court, where he ran Lamar around and never let the younger man take a set, and on the horseshoe court outside his quarters, where he could beat Spruance pitching with either hand. When the fleet surgeon told him that target shooting was an effective therapy for stress, Nimitz had a shooting range constructed outside his office and invited officers to join him in firing .22 and .45 target pistols, with wagers limited to a dime. “He quickly became an enthusiastic marksman,” said Lamar, “and every day we used to fire several hundred rounds. I suppose by the time the surrender took place at Tokyo Bay, we must have fired at least half a million shots!”³⁰

On Sunday afternoons, Nimitz, Spruance, and a party of other officers might head over the mountains to a secluded beach on Oahu’s north coast, a place they nicknamed “Prostate Rest.” Their regular routine was a two-mile hike down the beach, followed by a long swim. One weekend in the summer of 1943, Nimitz invited a few key intelligence officers to join the expedition. Tom Dyer, one of the cryptanalysts who had broken the Japanese naval codes before the Battle of Midway, was surprised to be invited. He borrowed a swimsuit to make the trip and rode in the backseat, wedged between the two admirals. Nimitz, having sustained an injury, announced that he would sit on the beach rather than hike and swim, as was his usual custom. “I was perfectly willing to sit in the sun with him,” said Dyer, who was no athlete and worked long hours in a windowless basement, “but Spruance suggested we take a walk down the beach. . . . It wasn’t a walk, it was practically a marathon. He was putting one foot in front of the other at a very rapid pace.” On the return swim, Dyer lasted about a quarter of a mile. He staggered back down the beach, badly sunburned and with the swimsuit chafing his thighs, and declared that he had “been injured in the line of duty.”³¹

Nimitz did not relish publicity, but as wartime CINCPAC he was a public figure with duties akin to those of a civilian elected official. He often appeared at public functions and receptions, in white uniform and gloves. He dined regularly at the governor’s palace. Newspaper photographers caught him touring ships, pinning medals to chests, dancing with a hula girl at an enlisted men’s recreation center, or inspecting carrots at a Victory Garden Show in Honolulu while wearing a lei “made of tiny vegetables.”³² He attended dinner parties given by Hawaii’s civilian upper crust, where women wore evening gowns and white-clad stewards served drinks on trays. Nimitz was always accompanied by his marine guards, men selected for height and appearance who dressed in rigidly starched uniforms. His car, a large gray sedan, flew a four-star flag and was always waxed to a gleaming luster. In January 1944, he was the guest of honor at a “Texas Round-Up” picnic in Moana Park, an event attended by 40,000 Texan servicemen. The smiling admiral was photographed pitching horseshoes with sailors and holding the corner of a Texas flag.³³

At home in the evenings, he and Spruance relaxed over weak cocktails—an old-fashioned or a scotch and soda mixed in a tall glass, with a thimble of liquor and lots of ice. The two admirals often ended the evening sitting in armchairs at 37 Makalapa Drive, listening to a classical symphony on a phonograph. Their Filipino steward turned off the lights, opened the blackout shades, and let the night air into the house. Occasionally they discussed the war, but more often they sat in silence. By the summer of 1943, near the end of Spruance’s fourteen-month stint as CINCPAC chief of staff—a period in which the two men had lived in the same house, worked in adjoining offices, and hiked for miles together most afternoons—each usually knew what was in the other’s mind. They carried the weight of responsibility for hundreds of thousands of lives, and for the casualties that would inevitably escalate as the war moved closer to the enemy’s homeland. As Nimitz’s most trusted subordinate, Spruance would soon be rewarded with the navy’s top seagoing command and would lead the bloody campaign westward across the heart of the Pacific.

Two decades later, following Nimitz’s death, Spruance told a reporter that fear was a near-universal human trait, a condition that even the bravest men labored to keep in check. But Nimitz was out of the ordinary: “He was one of the few people I knew who never knew what it meant to be afraid of anything.”³⁴

ON JUNE 1, 1943, the first of a new class of 27,100-ton aircraft carriers crept into Pearl Harbor and inched into a berth north of Ford Island, directly flanking the still-capsized hull of the battleship Utah. The arrival of the Essex (CV-9) had been keenly anticipated. A navy band and a larger-than-usual complement of hula dancers waited on the pier. Up on Makalapa Hill, on the top “deck” of the CINCPAC headquarters, a crowd of officers passed around a pair of binoculars.

The Essex was much easier to handle than the older fleet carriers, but Captain Donald Duncan was relieved to have a pilot aboard to conn the big ship into the congested harbor.³⁵ The Essex was 872 feet long, and her beam at the flight deck was 147 feet. She had been designed to squeeze through the Panama Canal, but only just—in order to accommodate her passage two weeks earlier, several lighting towers and pilothouses along the top of the locks had been removed or cut down to size. “It was a very necessary thing,” said Duncan, “because I well remember in going through the locks of the Canal, if you stretched a little bit, you could reach out and touch the edge of the roof from the wing of the navigation bridge, which was right along the same line as the side of the ship.”³⁶

Duncan had last seen Pearl Harbor in March 1942, when the devastation of the Japanese attack had been evident throughout the area. Fifteen months later, it appeared “that some tremendous effort had been made to get it straightened out and cleaned up and rebuilt. . . . [T]he Navy Yard was going strong, all damages being repaired; and the appearance of the place was one of being busy and confident and very much on the job.”³⁷

Many more aircraft carriers, large and small, would steam down the Pearl Harbor entrance channel in the ensuing six months. The new Yorktown and Lexington, named for the flattops lost at Coral Sea and Midway the previous year, were built on identical lines to the Essex. They arrived from the mainland in July and August. The fourth-in-class, the new Hornet, would follow by the end of the year. The navy planned to build and commission twenty-four of these huge first-line carriers by 1945. The 11,000-ton light carrier Independence (CVL-22), converted from a hull originally intended as a light cruiser, arrived in July and was soon followed by her sisters Princeton and Belleau Wood. Several diminutive escort or “jeep” carriers (CVEs) joined the fleet that fall. Though too slow to operate with the new fast carrier task forces, CVEs were valuable in transporting and resupplying aircraft and in providing air cover to amphibious operations.

The new fast battleships of the Iowa class would not reach the Pacific until 1944, but the Colorado and Maryland (Colorado-class battleships armed with 16-inch guns) were in port to be outfitted with new radar systems and additional antiaircraft mounts. Cruisers, destroyers, destroyer escorts, transports, fleet oilers, minesweepers, minelayers, mobile dry docks, hospital ships, and many other types of combatant and auxiliary ships squeezed into the harbor. A billion-dollar crash-building program in 1942 had produced more than a quarter of a million tons of amphibious landing craft, in a variety of types ranging from small Higgins boats to 300-foot-long tank-landing ships (LSTs). As the fleet grew, it became evident to anyone with a view of Pearl Harbor that a big offensive was in preparation.

The Essex-class carriers had been designed with all of the shortcomings of the earlier fleet carriers in mind, and were superior in every respect to their predecessors. They carried a complement of ninety-six planes and tore through the sea at 33 knots. Much of the design work had been coordinated by veteran aviator Jim Russell (who would eventually achieve four-star rank) during a tour of duty in the Bureau of Aeronautics before the war. Russell, who had served in carriers in many capacities for many years, pushed for new catapults and arresting gear, more and better firefighting equipment, and new maintenance and storage facilities. He placed the three aircraft elevators as far as practicable from the centerline of the ship, to create more elbow room in the hangar and allow for more rapid and flexible cycling of aircraft. More controversially, Russell designed a very large flight deck that retained its width and rectangular shape all the way to the forecastle. Engineers warned that the overhanging forward corners of the flight deck, weakly supported by two steel I-beams, would be vulnerable to collapse in heavy weather. Russell acknowledged the point but maintained that it was worth risking storm damage in order to construct “a proper flying field.”³⁸ (Both were right: some of the Essex-class flight decks did suffer in extreme weather, but the damage was easily repaired and the trade-off deemed satisfactory.)

The Essex carriers were designed to be as light as possible within the necessary strength tolerances. As a result, said Captain Duncan, they were much more responsive to their helms: “When you gave [them] the gun, those ships really jumped. It was quite different than some of the older, heavier ships. That I think was an indication of what can be done with very detailed care to things of that kind.”³⁹

Russell offered “very strong representations” to his superiors about the importance of the pilot ready rooms, which he thought ought to be far more comfortable than those on the older aircraft carriers. They should be air-conditioned, well lighted, and placed as near as possible to the deck spots for each squadron’s aircraft. Russell wanted large leather reclining chairs, arranged to face toward a blackboard and a teleprinter linked to Air Plot, so that each pilot could remain seated comfortably while working at his navigation board. He argued that men would be better rested and more effective if they could prepare for their flights in “peace and comfort . . . . instead of standing up and getting on each others’ toes, with very poor lighting and poor ventilation as in the ready rooms on the old carriers.”⁴⁰ The point was brilliantly vindicated when the Essex and her sisters went into service.

The new carriers were matched with a new generation of carrier fighters and bombers. By June 1943, the Grumman F6F Hellcat had replaced the obsolete F4F Wildcat. The Hellcat was a very large aircraft, weighing 1,200 pounds unloaded, but it was powered by a monstrous 2,000-horsepower Pratt & Whitney engine and climbed at 3,500 feet per minute. Its flying range was just short of 1,000 miles. The cockpit, slickly faired into the fuselage, was heavily armored. The F6F carried six electrically charged .50-caliber guns and about twice the ammunition of the F4F.

The Wildcat had lagged behind the Japanese Zero fighter in climbing speed and maneuverability. The Hellcat would match the Zero’s climbing speed below 14,000 feet and outpace it in a climb at higher altitudes. Its speed on the level or in a dive was superior to that of the Zero at any altitude.

On first impression, many assumed that the massive blue aircraft must be a bomber. Indeed, the new Grumman could be configured to carry 4,000 pounds of bombs or rockets, and it was sometimes used in the role of a fighter-bomber. “The plane was a monster,” wrote Bill Davis, who first encountered it in August 1943. His squadron, VF-19, checked out in the F6F at Los Alamitos Naval Air Station in California. From the moment the engine fired, Davis was thrilled and amazed. “There was a thunderous backfire as flames shot out of the exhaust pipe. A sailor with a fire extinguisher moved toward the plane, but the engine quickly caught and the flames disappeared as the engine started to purr with a mighty roar. I could feel the power through the throttle as well as my ears and every quaking fiber of my body.” Davis taxied to the end of the runway, checked the magnetos, and paused for a moment. He was a bit apprehensive, and had to summon his nerve before opening up the throttle. His description of that first check-out flight is worth quoting in its entirety:

The noise was fantastic. The response was instantaneous. Correcting for the torque of the giant engine, I started straight down the runway. I glanced at the instruments and couldn’t believe that I had only applied half the engine’s power. I pushed the throttle against the stop; the surge of power and speed was incredible.

The tail came up immediately as I eased the stick forward. A slight pull back and I was in the air. Instantly I hit the switch and pulled the wheels up so that anyone watching would know I was a hot pilot. Crossing the end of the field, I was already at five hundred feet. This thing really sang the song of the birds. I was really flying, and I had six .50-caliber machine guns, unloaded at the moment, but I knew I was ready for those Japs. Revenge would be mine.

I put the plane through every maneuver I knew, and a few more. It was amazingly responsive for a plane its size. It flew like a small fighter. Approaching the field, I made a tight turn into final approach, I knew everyone would be watching. Rolling out of the turn, I stalled it at the beginning of the runway. Pulling the flaps up as I taxied to the flight line, I knew I was home. This is what I’d been training for; I was ready.⁴¹

In order to retire the Wildcat and supply the rapidly expanding carrier fleet with new fighters, the Bureau of Aeronautics had pressed Grumman for a terrific ramp-up in production. In the month of July 1943, the Grumman plant in Bethpage, Long Island, turned out 250 Hellcats, and it was on pace to turn out 500 per month by 1944.⁴² But Grumman fell behind in its production of spare parts, and when the shortages grew critical in the fall of 1943, the bureau took the drastic step of refusing to accept delivery of new planes until the backlog was filled.⁴³

The venerable Douglas SBD Dauntless dive-bomber, which had destroyed four enemy carriers at the Battle of Midway and served as a vital workhorse in the air battle for Guadalcanal, was overdue for retirement. With a top speed of 260 miles per hour, the much-loved Dauntless could not keep pace with the TBF Avenger and the new Hellcat, and its bomb load capacity (1,200 pounds in most configurations) was insufficient. But its heir, the Curtiss SB2C Helldiver (an acronym for “Scout Bomber, Design Number 2, Curtiss”), had been plagued with problems from the start of its career, and its introduction into the fleet was delayed by more than a year. Early prototype SB2Cs suffered from longitudinal instability and structural weaknesses, especially in the tail and main wing beam, and several early test flights ended in crashes. Design modifications addressed some of these problems while creating others. In carrier trials, the SB2C’s landing gear often collapsed and its tailhook often missed the arresting cables (or worse, snagged the cable and was wrenched out of the fuselage). The plane was prone to stalls, leaks, hydraulic failures, electrical shorts, and flat tires.

It was a demanding airplane to fly, with high stick forces and a weak aileron response. Pilots did not trust it in a dive and tended to release their bombs high, at the expense of accuracy. The Helldiver was especially balky at low airspeeds, as on a carrier landing approach. The aviators saddled the new plane with various unflattering nicknames: the “Bladder,” the “Big-Tailed Beast,” the “Ensign Exterminator,” the “Son of a Bitch 2nd Class.” The Dauntless pilot Samuel Hynes hated everything about the SB2C, even its name, which he supposed had been chosen by some “public relations man.” The Helldiver, wrote Hynes, “was as showy and as phony as the name, like a beach athlete, all muscle and no guts. It was a long, slab-sided, ugly machine, with a big round tailfin. . . . We were all afraid of the SB2Cs, and we flew them as though they were booby-trapped.”⁴⁴

Harold Buell, a veteran dive-bomber pilot who had recently taken command of VB-2, checked the Helldiver out in early 1944. He liked the large bomb load and faster airspeed and was not concerned about his own ability to handle the plane. But Buell worried about his squadron’s less experienced pilots: “My first reaction was that the Beast, as this Curtiss monster was called, would be trouble for the squadron. Compared to the steady, forgiving SBD, this aircraft required much more pilot ability to fly both operationally and as a dive-bombing weapon.”⁴⁵

But in late 1943, after long delays, the Bureau of Aeronautics was determined to force the SB2C into service despite the risks, and began pressuring carrier and squadron commanders to cooperate. The plane was justly unloved and no fun to fly, but it did offer essential benefits over the Dauntless, notably its 295-mile-per-hour maximum airspeed (which would allow it to fly coordinated strikes with the other carrier planes), and its much higher bomb load (an internal bomb bay held 2,000 pounds of bombs, and a 500-pound bomb could be carried under each wing). The Helldiver, unlike the SBD, had folding wings, a feature considered indispensable in the new-generation carriers. For all its early problems, the SB2C could be produced rapidly and in the needed quantities. “It was a very complex plane, a very difficult plane to maintain, but there was the capability of ‘cranking them out,’ ” said Lieutenant Commander Herbert D. Riley, a planner with the Bureau of Aeronautics. “That’s what we had to have, building capacity. It was never a question of money; we could always get the money in those days. It was a question of the capacity of American industry to produce airplanes.”⁴⁶

By early 1944, the Curtiss plant in Columbus, Ohio, was turning out more than 300 Helldivers per month, and a Goodyear plant in Akron began producing them from Curtiss blueprints later in 1944.⁴⁷ Eventually, 7,140 Helldivers were built. As dive-bombing squadrons became more accustomed to the aircraft, they grew to tolerate its idiosyncrasies and even began to resent criticism directed against their aircraft. Despite its shortcomings, the SB2C would inflict plenty of punishment on the enemy in 1944 and 1945.

FOR NEARLY FOUR DECADES, since the presidential administration of Theodore Roosevelt, analysts at the Naval War College in Newport had studied and planned for a prospective war against Japan. In successive iterations of the “Orange” and “Rainbow” war plans, the navy had contemplated a westward naval-amphibious offensive through the heart of the Pacific. The American fleet would sortie from Pearl Harbor and hop from island to island through the Marshall, Caroline, and Mariana groups. When it penetrated Japan’s “outer defense” ring, it would meet and destroy Japan’s main battle line. That decisive naval victory would trigger the war’s endgame. Japan would be cut off from its territories on the Asian mainland and in the South Pacific. Starved of imported raw materials, the Japanese economy would collapse. An invasion of Japan might or might not be necessary, but in either case victory would follow as a matter of course.

Several related versions of this blueprint sat on the shelves at Navy Headquarters in Washington. It had been evident, following the Japanese strike on Pearl Harbor, that the navy and its sister services lacked the necessary sea, air, or ground forces to undertake such a massive operation in 1942, and would not be able to assemble them until 1943 or 1944, if even then. But it always remained the navy’s view—that is to say, the view of Ernest J. King—that the Pacific War would eventually be won by executing the strategy outlined in War Plan Orange. There would be a direct westward assault from Hawaii on Japanese-held islands in the central Pacific. It would be carried out by the Pacific Fleet and the Marine Corps, with the U.S. Army and U.S. Army Air Forces in subsidiary roles. Nimitz and his admirals would be in charge; MacArthur would have no part of it. The only issue to be decided was when such a campaign should begin.

Characteristically, King wanted to get the show on the road as early as possible, and he had exerted all his influence to send the needed forces to Nimitz. As usual, his efforts were doggedly opposed by the British, who wanted a concentration of all available Allied forces for the defeat of Germany, and by MacArthur, whose preferred road to Tokyo ran through the Philippines, and who wanted no competing offensive to the north. But King eventually succeeded in bringing his colleagues on the Joint Chiefs around to his way of thinking and gradually won their undivided backing. William Leahy, who had taken a direct hand in developing the Orange and Rainbow plans during his long naval career, was an instinctive ally. George Marshall was anxious about the state of the South Pacific and determined to keep Japan on the defensive. Throughout late 1942, King worked behind the scenes to persuade Marshall of the strategic importance of the Marianas, which lay directly astride sea routes linking Japan’s home islands to the resource-rich East Indies. The Marianas would provide suitable airfields for the army’s B-29 “Superfortresses,” which would enter service in 1944 and could carry 10,000 pounds of bombs to a radius of 1,600 miles. From Guam and Tinian in the Marianas, the heavy bombers could strike major Japanese population centers and industrial areas. “I finally got General Marshall to understand,” King wrote after the war.⁴⁸

In the Allied conferences of early and mid-1942, the British military chiefs had hoped to win Marshall and the U.S. Army leadership over to their concept of a minimalist and purely defensive war in the Pacific, pending the final defeat of Germany. But when the high command met in Casablanca, French Morocco, in January 1943, it was immediately clear that Marshall and King had reached an understanding, and were in agreement that the Pacific required more reinforcements.

In the first meeting of the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCOS), at Anfa Camp on the morning of January 14, Marshall proposed to allocate Allied troops, shipping, and munitions by a formula of “ 70 percent in the Atlantic theater and 30 percent in the Pacific theater.”⁴⁹ King spoke immediately after Marshall, leaving little doubt that the two Americans were reading from the same playbook. According to his estimates, said King, the Allies were engaging “only 15 percent of our total resources against the Japanese in the Pacific theater,” a proportion that “was not sufficient to prevent Japan consolidating herself and thereby presenting ultimately too difficult a problem.”⁵⁰

General Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the British Imperial General Staff, was knocked back on his heels. He had long since marked King as an irredeemable Anglophobe and a “Pacific-firster,” and now the ruthless admiral had apparently cast a spell over George Marshall. Brooke asked, Upon what basis had the Americans computed the 30 percent formula? King replied, somewhat lamely, that it “was a concept rather than an arithmetical computation,” but in any case 15 percent was insufficient to do more than hold the lines in the Pacific. Brooke held his tongue but later told his diary that the proposed figure was “hardly a scientific way” of fixing allocation between theaters.⁵¹

The official minutes of the Combined Chiefs meetings, recorded in strictly anodyne terms, tended to disguise the heated subtext of the debate. The British had lost much of their Asia-Pacific empire and wanted it back. In Malaya, especially, they had been disgraced; in order to retrieve their prestige in the region, they must have a role in the defeat of Japan. But until Germany was knocked out of the war, Britain could offer no meaningful contribution to the Pacific theater. If the Americans closed in on Japan too early, British military power might be rendered strategically irrelevant in the Pacific, with portentous consequences for the future of the empire. But Ernest King was not at all interested in the future of the British empire, and he even appeared to take an unseemly relish in the humbling of British seapower.

In his diary, General Brooke confided a sour loathing for the “shrewd and somewhat swollen headed” admiral, whose objective seemed to be “an ‘all-out’ war against Japan instead of holding operations.”⁵² At dinner that night, Brooke watched in amusement as King drained one glass too many and became “nicely lit up.” “With a thick voice and many gesticulations,” the admiral remonstrated stridently with Churchill, to the prime minister’s evident embarrassment.⁵³ Two days later, after another round of punishing negotiations, Brooke concluded wearily, “It is a slow and tiring business which requires a lot of patience. They can’t be pushed and hurried, and must be made gradually to assimilate our proposed policy.”⁵⁴

The scale of the Pacific effort was only one dimension of their quarrel. Marshall’s view, shared by Secretary of War Henry Stimson and to varying degrees by the other American service chiefs, was that Germany could be defeated only by a direct invasion across the English Channel, the operation code-named ROUNDUP. The British feared a debacle in northern France and preferred new operations in the Mediterranean. In 1942, Churchill and his generals had persuaded FDR to back their proposed invasion of North Africa (TORCH), over the sharp objections of Marshall and Stimson. Marshall, still smarting from that reversal, now wanted a firm commitment to execute ROUNDUP in the summer of 1943. The British refused to commit to a date for ROUNDUP, and were dubious that such an operation was feasible before 1944. But still, they asked for an immediate buildup of forces in England so that ROUNDUP could be launched if and when opportunity offered—that is, if and when the Red Army gained the upper hand on the eastern front, and a German collapse appeared imminent. Meanwhile, they favored further efforts in the Mediterranean, perhaps an invasion of Italy. Marshall did not much like this proposed southern line of attack, regarding it as a diversion from the “main plot” and a “suction pump” that would draw strength away from ROUNDUP.⁵⁵

Selected excerpts of minutes of the Combined Chiefs meeting at Casablanca put across the substance of the opposing arguments, and show the degree to which King and Marshall now spoke with one voice on the importance of the Pacific:

ADMIRAL KING stated that the Japanese are now replenishing Japan with raw materials and also fortifying an inner defense ring along the line of the Netherlands East Indies and the Philippines.

SIR ALAN BROOKE inquired how far forward the U. S. Chiefs of Staff envisaged it would be necessary to go in order to prevent the Japanese from digging themselves in. He feared that if operations were too extended it would inevitably lead to an all-out war against Japan and it was certain that we had not sufficient resources to undertake this at the same time as a major effort against Germany.

GENERAL MARSHALL explained that it had been essential to act offensively in order to stop the Japanese advancing. For example, in New Guinea it had been necessary to push the Japanese back to prevent them capturing Port Moresby. In order to do this, every device for reinforcing the troops on the island had had to be employed. The same considerations applied in Guadalcanal. It had been essential to take offensive action to seize the island. Short of offensive action of this nature, the only way of stopping the Japanese was by complete exhaustion through attrition. It was very difficult to pause: the process of whittling away Japan had to be continuous.

SIR CHARLES PORTAL [RAF chief] asked whether it was not possible to stand on a line and inflict heavy losses on the Japanese when they tried to break through it. From the very fact that the Japanese continued to attack, it was clear that they had already been pushed back further than they cared to go.

GENERAL MARSHALL spoke of our commitments in the Pacific, of our responsibilities, with particular reference to the number of garrisons we have on small islands and the impossibility of letting any of them down. He insisted that the United States could not stand for another Bataan.

SIR ALAN BROOKE stated that we have reached a stage in the war where we must review the correctness of our basic strategic concept which calls for the defeat of Germany first. He was convinced that we cannot defeat Germany and Japan simultaneously. The British Chiefs of Staff have arrived at the conclusion that it will be better to concentrate on Germany. Because of the distances involved, the British Chiefs of Staff believe that the defeat of Japan first is impossible and that if we attempt to do so, we shall lose the war.

GENERAL MARSHALL stated that, in his opinion, the British Chiefs of Staff wished to be certain that we keep the enemy engaged in the Mediterranean and that at the same time maintain a sufficient force in the United Kingdom to take advantage of a crack in the German strength either from the withdrawal of their forces in France or because of lowered morale. He inferred that the British Chiefs of Staff would prefer to maintain such a force in the United Kingdom dormant and awaiting an opportunity rather than have it utilized in a sustained attack elsewhere. The United States Chiefs of Staff know that they can use these forces offensively in the Pacific Theater.

SIR ALAN BROOKE said that the British Chiefs of Staff certainly did not want to keep forces tied up in Europe doing nothing. During the build-up period, however, the first forces to arrive from America could not be used actively against the enemy; a certain minimum concentration had to be effected before they could be employed. His point was that we should direct our resources to the defeat of Germany first. This conception was focused in paragraph 2(c) of the British Joint Planning Staff’s paper (C.C.S. 153/1) in which it was stated that we agreed in principle with the U. S. strategy in the Pacific “provided always that its application does not prejudice the earliest possible defeat of Germany.”

ADMIRAL KING pointed out that this expression might be read as meaning that anything which was done in the Pacific interfered with the earliest possible defeat of Germany and that the Pacific theater should therefore remain totally inactive.

SIR CHARLES PORTAL said that this was certainly not the understanding of the British Chiefs of Staff, who had always accepted that pressure should be maintained on Japan. They had, perhaps, misunderstood the U. S. Chiefs of Staff and thought that the point at issue was whether the main effort should be in the Pacific or in the United Kingdom. The British view was that for getting at Germany in the immediate future, the Mediterranean offered better prospects than Northern France.

GENERAL MARSHALL said that he was most anxious not to become committed to interminable operations in the Mediterranean. He wished Northern France to be the scene of the main effort against Germany—that had always been his conception.

ADMIRAL KING said that we had on many occasions been close to a disaster in the Pacific. The real point at issue was to determine the balance between the effort to be put against Germany and against Japan, but we must have enough in the Pacific to maintain the initiative against the Japanese. . . . He felt very strongly . . . that the details of such operations must be left to the U. S. Chiefs of Staff, who were strategically responsible for the Pacific theater. He did not feel this was a question for a decision of the Combined Chiefs of Staff.

Brooke wanted to check the westward momentum of the Pacific offensive, for fear that it would divert shipping and other resources away from the Mediterranean. He asked that any decision to push past Rabaul to Truk be “deferred.” In the event that Rabaul fell into Allied hands, Brooke wanted surplus forces in the South Pacific transferred to the Mediterranean. King replied that whatever forces became available in MacArthur’s theater would be needed by Nimitz for the conquest of the Marshalls. Moreover, he added, “on logistic grounds alone it would be impossible to bring forces from the Pacific theater to the European theater.”

The committee’s final recommendations to Churchill and FDR represented a compromise skewed toward the American view. The Allies would aim to seize Burma and Rabaul by the end of 1943, with the proviso that “these operations must be kept within such limits as will not . . . jeopardize the capacity of the United Nations to take advantage of any favorable opportunity that may present itself for the decisive defeat of Germany in 1943.” The Americans could launch further operations against the Marshalls and Carolines only after the capture of Rabaul, using forces already allocated to the Pacific theater.

At the Trident conference in Washington the following May, the Allies remained largely divided over the same issues and along the same lines. While en route to Washington, Brooke confided to his diary that he dreaded the renewal of old arguments: “Casablanca has taught me too much. Agreement after agreement may be secured on paper but if their hearts are not in it they soon drift away again!”⁵⁶

In fact, the Joint Chiefs did not intend to offer any concessions at all concerning the scale of the Pacific campaign. When the Combined Chiefs of Staff convened in the ornate marble Board of Governors Room at the Federal Reserve Building on May 13, the Americans took a brusque tone from the outset. Admiral Leahy, now serving as de facto chairman of the Joint Chiefs, flatly informed the British that any provision limiting freedom of action in the Pacific “would not be acceptable to the United States Chiefs of Staff.” He added that if the Americans suffered an unexpected reversal in the war against Japan, they would shift forces to the Pacific “even at the expense of the early defeat of Germany.”⁵⁷

On the morning of Friday, May 21, King provided a long briefing on the progress of the Pacific War, ending with an analysis of possibilities for the latter half of 1943 and 1944. “Regardless of which route might be taken,” he concluded, “the Marianas are the key to the situation because of their location on the Japanese lines of communication.”⁵⁸

Brooke, in restrained exasperation, reiterated his familiar arguments. He later complained to his diary that King had tried “to find every loophole he possibly can to divert troops to the Pacific!”⁵⁹ But with few forces actively engaged against the Japanese, the British lacked standing to shape strategy in the theater. Without quite saying it, Leahy, King, and Marshall intimated that the Pacific was now an American responsibility, and left no doubt that they would fight it on their own terms and according to their own schedule. In Trident’s final conference documents, the American strategic proposals were enacted wholesale, including “Seizure of the Marshall and Caroline Islands” without reference to the timing of MacArthur’s assault on Rabaul.⁶⁰

TWO PARALLEL PACIFIC CAMPAIGNS, north and south of the equator, now had the imprimatur of the Allied high command. But Nimitz did not yet possess the sea or carrier air forces needed to wage a central Pacific offensive, and the troops in his theater required months of additional amphibious training. From his South Pacific headquarters, Halsey was calling for reinforcements to carry his fight into the central Solomons. Nonetheless, King wanted hard deadlines for the central Pacific campaign. “In order that effective momentum of offensive operations can be attained and maintained,” he told his fellow chiefs on June 10, “firm timing must be set up for all areas.”⁶¹ Four days later, the Joint Chiefs of Staff instructed Nimitz to prepare to invade the Marshall Islands with a tentative sailing date of November 15, 1943. MacArthur was to release the 1st Marine Division in time to participate in the operation, and most of Halsey’s naval and amphibious forces would be shifted to Pearl Harbor as well. With unusual candor the chiefs acknowledged that the date was somewhat arbitrary—but in the absence of deadlines “it is not repeat not practicable to provide able structure for our operations throughout the Pacific and Far East.”⁶²

Predictably outraged, MacArthur objected that the demands of his CARTWHEEL campaign precluded any transfers of troops or ships from his theater to Nimitz’s. Indeed, MacArthur wanted (and would receive) covering support from the Pacific Fleet’s new fast carrier task forces in raids against Rabaul, Truk, and other Japanese bases on the southern route. Likewise, Halsey was anxious about the withdrawal of aircraft from the SOPAC region for support of operations north of the equator. Diverting airpower from the drive on Rabaul, he warned Nimitz on June 25, “would seriously jeopardize our chances of success at what appears to be the most critical stage of the campaign.”⁶³

Without borrowing forces from the South Pacific, Nimitz could not realistically tackle the Marshalls until early 1944, and some on the CINCPAC planning staff counseled patience. They argued, not unreasonably, that the new offensive should await the arrival of a large fleet of Essex carriers, which could spearhead long leaps across ocean wastes and beat back enemy land-based air attacks. By February or March 1944, a much-expanded Fifth Fleet could simply steam into the Marshalls and seize the four or five largest Japanese bases in the group simultaneously. If the Japanese fleet came out to fight, the fast carrier task forces would willingly and confidently give battle.

But King wanted action in 1943. He insisted that the northern line of attack be opened before the final assault on Rabaul, so that the enemy could not concentrate his defenses against either prong of the westward advance. Enemy territory had to be taken, somewhere in the central Pacific, before the end of the year. Two competing suggestions were debated at CINCPAC headquarters. Captain Forrest P. Sherman, the influential chief of staff to Vice Admiral John Henry Towers (Commander Air Forces, Pacific, or “COMAIRPAC”), circulated a plan to recapture Wake Island and employ it as a springboard for a later assault on the Marshalls, which lay about 500 miles south. Spruance favored opening the new campaign much farther south and east, where the fleet could count on greater land-based air support from rear bases in the South Pacific. He wanted to launch the new offensive in the Gilbert Islands, some 600 miles southeast of the Marshalls. Nimitz was swayed by his chief of staff’s reasoning, and persuaded King in turn. COMINCH arranged the necessary Joint Chiefs of Staff directive on July 20, 1943. The operation, code-named GALVANIC, called for the simultaneous capture of objectives in the Ellice Islands, the Gilbert Islands, and Nauru by November 15 of that year.

SINCE HIS VICTORIOUS RETURN from Midway a year earlier, Raymond Spruance had privately hoped for another major command at sea. But it was not the taciturn admiral’s way to lobby for a job, and he was neither surprised nor disconcerted when Nimitz told him, as the two men walked to CINCPAC headquarters one morning in May 1943, “There are going to be some changes in the high command of the fleet. I would like to let you go, but unfortunately for you I need you here.”

In his version of the conversation, recalled years later, Spruance replied, “Well, the war is an important thing. I personally would like to have another crack at the Japs, but if you need me here, this is where I should be.”

The next morning, as the two went again on foot from house to office, Nimitz brought the subject up again. “I have been thinking this over during the night,” he said. “Spruance, you are lucky. I’ve decided that I am going to let you go, after all.”⁶⁴

Nimitz sold King on the assignment during their meeting in San Francisco later that month. On May 30, a dispatch from Navy Headquarters in Washington lifted Spruance to the rank of vice admiral. Shortly afterward, he was detached from the CINCPAC staff and placed in command of the Central Pacific Force, later designated the Fifth Fleet. It was the largest seagoing command in the history of the U.S. Navy.

Time was short. Spruance had little more than four months to plan the largest and most complex amphibious operation yet attempted. Naval forces and landing troops had to be collected from far-flung parts of the South Pacific and the mainland. His key commanders had not yet been named to their posts, nor had they even been identified. Writing the plan would be an immensely complicated and demanding job. Spruance moved quickly to recruit a chief of staff with the requisite experience and initiative. He chose an old friend and shipmate, Captain Charles J. “Carl” Moore, who was then serving in Washington as a member of Admiral King’s war-planning staff. Spruance asked Moore to select the other key staff officers, poaching them from navy headquarters if he wished, but asked him to keep the headcount to a manageable minimum. Moore arrived in Pearl Harbor on August 5 and moved into a spare bedroom in Nimitz and Spruance’s house atop Makalapa Hill.⁶⁵

Spruance’s command philosophy was to delegate any task that he did not absolutely have to do himself. He later observed, with worthy candor, “Looking at myself objectively, I think I am a good judge of men; and I know that I tend to be lazy about many things, so I do not try to do anything that I can pass down the line to someone more competent than I am to do it.”⁶⁶ Carl Moore would have agreed with the entirety of that judgment. Spruance did not micromanage; he picked good men, gave them authority, and held them accountable. He never failed to grasp the data he needed to render major decisions, but once those decisions were made, he dismissed from his mind the details of their execution. By refusing to absorb himself in such particulars, he kept his mind clear to consider the broadest problems of strategy and organization. Plausibly, Spruance did not need to work as hard as others because he possessed the sort of mind that took in and processed information more rapidly. Ernest King, who was no simpleton, attested that Spruance “was in intellectual ability unsurpassed among the flag officers of the United States Navy.”⁶⁷ His distinction as a seagoing commander, at the Battle of Midway in 1942 and with the Fifth Fleet later in the war, would seem to vindicate his hands-off approach.

It was also true, at least in a limited sense, that Spruance was lazy. He seemed to bore easily, and often resisted talking about the war. He was a compulsive walker, and tended to walk out of the office at all hours of the day, whether or not work remained to be done. He often took members of his staff along with him. Moore wrote about one such instance in a letter to his wife, composed three days after his arrival in Hawaii: “Raymond is up to his tricks already, and yesterday took me on an eight mile hike in the foothills. It was hot and a hard pull at times, and particularly so as we carried on a lively conversation all the way which kept me completely winded.”⁶⁸ Moore tried to engage the boss about the coming operation, but Spruance steered the conversation toward unrelated subjects and held forth on the virtues of physical fitness. A few days later Moore wrote his wife again: “Yesterday Raymond stepped up the pace and the distance and we covered over 10 miles in three hours. My right leg caught up with my left and both were wrecked by the time I got back. . . . If he can get me burned to a crisp or crippled from walking he will be completely happy.”⁶⁹

Spruance wanted Kelly Turner to command the amphibious fleet. It was not necessary to give the issue much thought. With a year of hard-earned experience in the South Pacific, Turner was the navy’s preeminent amphibious specialist. Spruance knew him well, having served with him at sea and at the Naval War College. “I would like to get Admiral Kelly Turner from Admiral Halsey, if I can steal him,” he told Nimitz in June.⁷⁰ With the northern Solomons island-hopping campaign in high gear, Halsey was not keen to release Turner, so Nimitz made it simple. In a personal “Dear Bill” dated June 26, the CINCPAC explained that he had been ordered to wage a new offensive in the central Pacific: “This means I must have Turner report to me as soon as possible.”⁷¹ When Turner came north, he brought several of his best staff officers with him, causing Halsey further heartburn.

Marine Major General Holland M. Smith would command the invasion troops, designated the Fifth Amphibious Corps (or “VAC”). Smith was one of the pioneers of amphibious warfare. He had persuaded the navy to adopt Andrew Higgins’s shallow-draft boats as landing craft, and had successfully trained several divisions in amphibious operations at Camps Elliott and Pendleton in southern California. He had lobbied for a combat command in the Pacific, and was backed for the job by Secretary Knox and Admiral King. Nimitz did not know him well, but Spruance had worked with him in the mid-1930s, when both officers were stationed in the Caribbean. Nimitz offered him the job during an inspection tour of the South Pacific, and Smith readily accepted it.

Turner and Smith made a combustible pair. Both men were aggressive, ambitious, and overbearing. Both were respected authorities in the field of amphibious warfare, but had become accustomed to running things without competition or interference. Both were prone to fits of rage, and had earned nicknames as a result: “Terrible Turner” and “Howlin’ Mad” Smith. Smith was exceptionally touchy about command relations between the navy and the Marine Corps. At Guadalcanal, Turner had offended General Vandegrift by infringing upon the latter’s command prerogatives. During the planning of GALVANIC, Spruance sometimes wondered “whether we could get the operation planned out before there was an explosion between them.”⁷²

Arriving in Pearl Harbor the first week of September, Holland Smith was assigned quarters in a bungalow at the base of Makalapa Hill. The little house was beneath his rank, and he knew it. Always sensitive to any trace of an insult to the Marine Corps, he coldly reminded the responsible naval officer that he was a major general, senior to most admirals at Pearl, and demanded more suitable quarters. The assignment was explained as an oversight, though Smith did not believe it had been; apologies were offered and the general was lodged in a grander house higher on the hill.

Smith had previously met Kelly Turner in Washington, when the latter was the navy’s war plans chief. He found the admiral precise and courteous, like “an exacting schoolmaster,” and “affable in an academic manner,”⁷³ but he had also encountered Turner’s famous temper. “He could be plain ornery. He wasn’t called ‘Terrible Turner’ without reason.”⁷⁴

For Operation GALVANIC, Turner expected to stand above Smith in the chain of command. That would be consistent with the model employed in Operation WATCHTOWER. But Smith wanted direct command of all amphibious troops throughout the operation—prior to, during, and after the landing—and wished to report directly to Spruance.

To Turner the issue was simple. A precedent had been set in the South Pacific; the existing model was proven. By what right did Smith, a newcomer to the Pacific, propose to change it? To Smith the issue was one of principle, and concerned the status and honor of the Marine Corps. Smith suspected that the navy would take care of its own, and that he would not get a fair hearing in Pearl Harbor. The issue reverberated in Washington, and was even appealed to the secretary of the navy, who would not rule on the question directly but expected it to be resolved in such a way as to secure effective cooperation between the navy and the Marine Corps.

Spruance wanted no part of the dispute, and simply ignored it. “Oh, Carl, don’t worry about it,” he told Moore. “They know what I want to do, and they’re not going to make any trouble.” That was not so. When no compromise emerged after prolonged argument, Moore put the question to Spruance again, and was told, “Fix it up to suit yourself.”⁷⁵

The fleet commander’s laissez-faire attitude placed Moore, a navy captain, in the unenviable role of refereeing a stand-up fight between an admiral and a general. “They both complained to me about the other,” he recalled:

Holland Smith particularly complained about Kelly Turner. He was a whining, complaining type. He loved to complain. He loved to talk and loved to complain, and he would come and sit on my desk and growl about Turner. ‘All I want to do is kill some Japs. Just give me a rifle. I don’t want to be a commanding general. Just give me a rifle, I’ll go out there and shoot some Japs. . . . I’m not worried about anything else around here.’ See, that kind of a line. I was trying to soothe him down, and Turner would come and complain about that blankety-blank Smith, couldn’t get any cooperation out of him, and so forth.⁷⁶

At last a compromise emerged. Moore crafted an operational order that left Turner in command of the landing forces until the shore commander went ashore and assumed command of the troops. When Turner was so informed, all troops ashore would fall under command of the Fifth Amphibious Corps and thus report to Holland Smith. The model was accepted, and would remain in force throughout the remainder of the war.

Turner and Smith readily agreed on one point. Neither man wanted to capture the isolated phosphate rock island of Nauru, which had been included among the objectives assigned in the Joint Chiefs of Staff directive. Nauru’s mountainous terrain presented difficulties, and it lay 380 miles south of Tarawa, the atoll that was GALVANIC’s main objective. Nauru was of little value either to the enemy or to the Allies, and its small airfield could be kept “pounded down” by regular air raids.

On September 24, Admiral King flew into Pearl Harbor for his regular bimonthly conference with Nimitz. At CINCPAC headquarters the next morning, Spruance circulated a letter written by Holland Smith that laid out the case to scratch Nauru from GALVANIC. King asked, “What do you propose to take instead of Nauru?” Spruance proposed Makin, an atoll north of Tarawa, on the grounds that it was more strategically located and could be more easily stormed. “Admiral King gave me the fish eye,” Spruance recalled, “but agreed to recommend the change of objectives to the JCS.”⁷⁷

The Gilbert Islands were sixteen palm-crowned atolls, straddling the equator about 400 miles west of the International Date Line. Each atoll was formed by an oblong ring of long, narrow, sandy islands enclosing a brilliant sapphire lagoon. Peak elevation was about 10 feet above sea level. Though they were near the equator, the islands were swept by a steady ocean breeze, and the air was pleasingly dry and fresh. Robert Louis Stevenson, who had visited the Gilberts in the 1880s, found “a superb ocean climate, days of blinding sun and bracing wind, nights of a heavenly brightness.”⁷⁸

Makin Atoll was three-sided, with a lagoon measuring eight by sixteen miles. Butaritari, a ribbon of sand thirteen miles long, was the only island in the atoll that could accommodate an airfield. Makin had been employed by the Japanese as a seaplane base, but little else. It was not strongly defended. Aerial photos had detected no large-caliber shore guns and few coastal fortifications, and the garrison was thought to number 500 to 800, of whom a proportion would be laborers rather than trained fighters.

Tarawa, eighty-three miles south of Makin and about 2,500 miles southwest of Hawaii, looked to be a considerably tougher nut to crack. The largest and southernmost island in the atoll was Betio, slightly more than two miles long and about half a mile wide, with an axis favorably oriented toward the prevailing winds. Betio, the Americans knew, was one of the most heavily fortified islands in the Pacific. A 4,000-foot airstrip lay behind a network of trenches, bunkers, and pillboxes constructed of concrete and overlaid with sand and palm logs. Shore guns ranging in size from 5 to 8 inches faced north, west, and south. On its lagoon shore, Betio was protected by coral reefs to a distance of about 1,200 yards. Based on aerial reconnaissance, the garrison appeared to number between 2,500 and 3,100 men.

The assault on Tarawa was assigned to the 2nd Marine Division, which had fought in the later stages of the Guadalcanal campaign and then had withdrawn to New Zealand for rest, recuperation, and additional training. The division was under the command of Major General Julian C. Smith, who first caught wind of the coming operation in mid-August, when he learned that Admiral Spruance was flying into Wellington and wanted to see him. Spruance, with Captain Moore in tow, walked into Smith’s office and dropped a pile of documents on the desk. Did the general think his division could take Tarawa? Smith had not heard of Tarawa: “Never knew there was such an island.”⁷⁹ He would review the documents, he said. When did Spruance need an answer? “I’m leaving tomorrow morning,” said Spruance. Smith said his division would do the job.

Admiral King had envisioned GALVANIC as a navy and marine show, but George Marshall was keen to get the army into action in the central Pacific, and offered the 27th Infantry Division, then located in Hawaii. Nimitz assigned the assault on Makin to one of the division’s regimental combat teams, the 165th Infantry. Major General Ralph C. Smith was to command these troops, completing a triumvirate of three (unrelated) Smiths in charge of the GALVANIC invasion forces. The command arrangement placing the marine Holland Smith above the soldier Ralph Smith was a source of predictable unpleasantness. The army’s top man in the Pacific, General Robert C. Richardson, questioned the need for the army troops to be folded into the Fifth Amphibious Corps, and proposed that Ralph Smith report directly to Admiral Turner. Nimitz declined the suggestion. Operation GALVANIC required cooperation between the services on an unprecedented scale, and the CINCPAC was intolerant of infighting. But the interservice sensitivities inherent in this mixed command hierarchy would erupt into a public imbroglio the following year, in the Marianas.

The army assault regiment required intensive amphibious training, and Holland Smith oversaw landing exercises at several remote bays in the lesser Hawaiian Islands. Poor weather conditions forced the cancellation of several exercises, and beach conditions did not perfectly match those of the actual objective. Holland Smith was concerned about the regiment’s readiness and even its morale. But he took some consolation in the mounting evidence, based on air and submarine reconnaissance, that Makin would be a walkover, at least when compared to Tarawa.

As in the Solomons, the Americans were short of accurate charts or hydrographic tables covering the Gilberts. They relied, in part, on information dating back to the nineteenth and even the eighteenth centuries. Summing up the state of the charts, Turner told Nimitz, “The land contours are inaccurate, soundings are few and unreliable, the orientation of land areas is frequently in error and even the location of the island is often questionable.”⁸⁰ Putting reconnaissance teams ashore in advance of the operation was considered, but then ruled out, as it might alert the Japanese to the coming invasion. The submarine Nautilus, fitted with special equipment for periscope photography, brought valuable data back to Pearl Harbor in August. Aerial photographic reconnaissance, conducted in September and October by carrier planes and B-24s, provided more information on the state of Betio’s coastal fortifications. The photos plainly revealed the locations of the big guns, which were mounted in strong concrete emplacements. The photos also revealed that the entire island was ringed with obstacles: coconut log seawalls, barbed wire aprons, antitank ditches, and concrete tetrahedrons in the surf.

Analysts estimated the size of the enemy garrison by counting the latrines and reckoning how many troops each latrine would serve. (They were constructed on pilings over the beach, so that the surf would carry away excrement, and therefore were readily identifiable in aerial photographs.) Low-altitude oblique shots of the beach defenses would have proved valuable in determining the precise locations of covered pillboxes and bunkers, but the rushed preinvasion schedule did not permit for such flights.⁸¹

Several dozen British residents of the Gilberts had fled to New Zealand and Australia at the outset of the war. Sixteen of these dislocated British colonialists, whom the Americans collectively nicknamed the “foreign legion,” were questioned closely about conditions in Tarawa lagoon. A vital concern was the depth of water over the reefs that lay between the entrance to the lagoon and the north side of Betio. Some were confident that the reefs would be at least 5 feet deep at high water. If that was so, the American landing craft could pass over them with no danger of grounding. But the intended date of the invasion coincided with a neap tide, when the tidal range would be reduced to a minimum. Major F. L. G. Holland of New Zealand, who seemed to know Tarawa better than anyone else, warned that the depth over the reefs could be less than 3 feet. Moreover, the neap tide would cause irregular “dodging currents” that might carry the landing craft off their courses. After interrogating Major Holland at length, Julian Smith concluded that the man knew what he was talking about, and warned Admiral Turner and Holland Smith that the marines might have to disembark and wade ashore from the fringing reef, perhaps half a mile from Betio’s north beach.

For twenty years the Marine Corps had planned and trained for a direct assault on a heavily defended beach. The Corps had developed and acquired the specialized landing craft required to mount such an operation, and had refined the specialized tactics of coordinating naval fire support, air support, and logistics. But the marines had not yet proved to themselves, or to the enemy, that a small fortress-island could be taken by frontal amphibious assault. Tarawa posed formidable problems. There would be no immediate means of achieving depth of deployment; the landing forces would initially be pinned down on a long, narrow beach. The flat little island would offer scant room for maneuvering onto the enemy’s flanks. The battlefield was so contracted, it seemed doubtful that direct naval gunfire or air support could be provided without posing danger to the marines ashore. All understood in advance that the assault on Tarawa was unprecedented and might prove appallingly costly.

SINCE THE 1920S, NAVAL AVIATORS had been authorized to wear brown leather shoes with khaki uniforms, while surface naval officers were obliged to wear black. This negligible uniform distinction acquired symbolic importance when the flyers began calling themselves “brownshoes,” and their more tradition-bound colleagues “blackshoes.” The flyers made a point of bending the uniform code by scuffing their shoes and refusing to polish them, by growing their hair just a little longer than regulations allowed, and by wearing weather-beaten caps, including the distinctive “duck-billed” cap made famous by Marc Mitscher. The brownshoes liked to test the limits of naval discipline and decorum. “When you’re in a battleship, you’re in the Annapolis Navy,” wrote Joseph Bryan III, who served as an intelligence officer on the Yorktown:

But when you’re in a carrier, you’re in the fighting Navy. Your ship is being run by and for a bunch of barn-storming youngsters who don’t tie their shoes at all, if they don’t feel like it, and who would just as soon address Admiral King as “Ernie,” unless it meant he’d ground them and keep them out of the next scrap.⁸²

Vice Admiral Towers, who had headed the Aeronautics Bureau in Washington before taking up his billet as COMAIRPAC in October 1942, was the navy’s senior aviator in active service and the acknowledged leader of the brownshoe navy. He had graduated from the Naval Academy in 1906, the same year as Raymond Spruance and one year after Nimitz. His remarkable career had advanced in close step with the evolution of naval aviation. He had learned to fly in 1911, in a primitive biplane with a wooden frame, fabric-covered wings, wire struts, and a top airspeed of 60 knots. Towers was a protégé of the pilot and aircraft designer Glenn Curtiss. He achieved various distance and endurance records; he set up the first flight-training program in Pensacola; he completed the first air crossing (in stages) of the Atlantic; he commanded the navy’s first aircraft carrier, the Langley (CV-1). He had survived several plane crashes. Many of his contemporaries had not been so fortunate. For more than twenty years, he had battled King and Nimitz over such questions as funding for the carrier navy and promotions for career aviators. He had earned a somewhat begrudging respect from both colleagues, and reached reasonable compromises concerning the training, selection, and promotion of officers involved in naval aviation and aircraft carriers. But he was never personally close to any of the officers he regarded as “battleship-oriented,” and he argued that the attack on Pearl Harbor and the sinking of the British battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse by Japanese air attack off Malaya in December 1941 had transformed naval warfare into something fundamentally new.

The brownshoes were simultaneously elites and insurgents. They disdained old naval dogmas and were resolved to subvert them. They wanted more of everything—more commands, promotions, decorations, publicity, and resources, and a more dominant voice in strategic planning. It was not enough, they argued, to rely on the leadership of traditional line officers who were “air-minded.” The new fast carrier task forces were the vanguard of the fleet that would carry the war into the western Pacific. Therefore, the fleet ought to be led by men who had come up through the brownshoe ranks. Not even Ernest King or Bill Halsey, who had passed through flight training as captains on the wrong side of forty, were bona fide members of the flying fraternity—they were latecomers who had earned their wings in order to qualify for carrier command. Most of the “real” brownshoes were younger men, including a group of ambitious and talented “Young Turks” who had earned their wings in the 1920s, led air squadrons, skippered carriers, participated in the development of new aircraft, and were approaching the threshold for flag rank.

The emerging generation of aviators was uncomfortably mindful that their rivals in the Army Air Forces had climbed the promotion ladder more rapidly. The army flyers had also enjoyed the benefits of a more open-handed policy in awarding medals and other honors. Naval leaders correctly suspected that Hap Arnold’s USAAF aspired to consolidate the functions of military aviation under its own aegis. With a political brawl over service unification looming in the postwar future, the danger to the navy’s institutional interests was evident. Towers told a colleague in Washington that there had been a “failure of the high commands to give senior aviation officers, of long experience and proven professional ability, a real voice in strategic plans.”⁸³

As plans for GALVANIC took shape, Towers advised Nimitz to send the new carrier task forces on far-ranging missions to attack Japanese airfields and (if opportunity offered) the Japanese fleet. He warned against limiting their freedom of movement by keeping them corralled in defensive sectors. Spruance and Turner wanted the carriers to provide air cover to the fleet while troops were landed at Tarawa and Makin; Towers preferred to send them 600 miles northwest, into the Marshalls, where they could rain bombs down on the enemy’s airfields and cut off his air response at the source. Towers, echoing his chief of staff, Forrest Sherman, thought the Gilberts a waste of time and balked at the scale of GALVANIC. The outspoken COMAIRPAC complained that “Spruance wants a sledgehammer to drive a tack.”⁸⁴

Towers went around Nimitz to make his case to King and others in Washington. On August 18, he wrote James Forrestal, undersecretary of the navy: “I must confess that those of us out here who are in a position to have a reasonably good idea of not only what is going on but also what is planned, have a feeling approaching utter hopelessness, and when I say this I’m referring to major plans and major policies.”⁸⁵ Towers privately criticized the elevation of the blackshoe Spruance to command of the Fifth Fleet, and when certain remarks reached Spruance’s ears, a rift opened between them. Spruance later told Admiral Charles M. “Savvy” Cooke Jr. that “if you were not an admirer of Towers, your path was not made smooth if he could help it. . . . Towers was a very ambitious man.”⁸⁶ That was perhaps the most damning indictment Spruance ever aimed at a fellow officer.

From their high perch, Nimitz and Spruance believed they saw the big picture more clearly than did the brownshoe insurrectionists. The carriers could strike the enemy hard and across great distances, but they could not win the transpacific campaign outright. Whatever their capabilities or aspirations, the aviators and their machines must fit coherently into the grand scheme of amphibious invasions supported by finely choreographed logistics. The force that would take the Gilberts included 191 ships, 35,000 troops, and 117,000 tons of cargo. Coordination and protection of such an enormous force was an overriding concern, and no single component of the fleet should be let off the leash without considering the consequences to the whole. Nimitz, patient and forbearing as he was, eventually grew weary of the protests and grievances, and instructed Towers to lower his tone. In a heated meeting that fall, Towers recalled, Nimitz’s “reaction was to the effect that I did not know what I was talking about.”⁸⁷

Prominent among the “Young Turks” was Captain Joseph J. Clark, known to friends and shipmates as “Jock” or “Jocko.” At the war’s outset, he had been executive officer of the old Yorktown (CV-5). Promoted captain in February 1942, he had returned to Washington to await reassignment. There he made a name for himself by proposing a plan, seemingly absurd on its face, to build 150 new aircraft carriers. By his own account, there was nothing scientific in the figure: he thought it obvious, after Pearl Harbor, that the navy would need a vast fleet of carriers to crush Japan, and he had simply plucked a big, round number “out of the air.” Kelly Turner, still head of the navy’s war plans unit, brushed the idea off, saying, “You can’t get that many.” But Admiral Towers thought Clark was “absolutely right” and arranged to send the young captain on a multi-city speaking tour to promote the idea.^*88

Born and raised on a farm in northeast Oklahoma, Clark was of mixed Scotch-Irish and Cherokee Indian descent. He was a registered member of the Cherokee Nation, and the first Native American to graduate from the Naval Academy (class of 1917). By his own lights Clark was a typical “Oklahoma cowboy,” but he was proud of his partial Cherokee lineage and even played it up. He had been registered (by his parents) as one-eighth Cherokee.^† Clark willingly tolerated, or perhaps encouraged, physical descriptions referring to “the deep tan and high cheek bones of an Indian” (Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 1944), or his “hump-bridged nose and short-clipped, sparse hair which resembles a scalp lock and waves like prairie grass” (Life magazine, 1945).⁸⁹ He grinned broadly for photographers while wearing a majestic feathered headdress. Cartoons published in his ships’ newspapers and cruise books depicted him wielding a tomahawk to scalp the Japanese prime minister Hideki Tojo or the emperor Hirohito. Clark invited the chief of the Cherokee Nation to attend the commissioning of the new Yorktown (CV-10).

Clark was a leader in the mold of Bill Halsey—a colorful and exuberant character who wore his heart on his sleeve and did not mind making himself slightly ridiculous in the eyes of his men. He battled his weight and carried an impressive paunch. The shirt flaps of his khaki uniform did not stay tucked. In otherwise glowing fitness reports, superiors drew attention to his lack of personal tidiness and to his physical bearing. Clark allowed himself to be made an object of fun, or deliberately seemed to undercut his own authority. When a navigator grounded his ship in an impossibly crowded Bermuda anchorage, the captain took the conn and barked, “Goddamn you, now it’s my turn to run it aground!”⁹⁰ A chief petty officer who served under him on the Hornet (CV-12) left this fond description:

Jocko Clark was part American Indian; his lower lip stuck way out, and was always sunburned. Finally, the doctor on the Hornet gave him no choice but to wear a gauze 4x4 with a string over his ears so the pad protected his lip. Jocko did it, but it made him madder than hell. I’ve seen him snatch three or four of those things off in the course of a couple of hours. He’d tear it off and throw it down. And here would come the doctor and make him a new one. . . . Whenever he came on the bridge—GQ or any other time—he often wore sick bay pajamas that he slept in. Sometimes his hairy stomach would be sticking out, but he was oblivious to his appearance. He was just universally loved, respected, and admired on the Hornet. He had a great feeling for the pilots. More than once, when a pilot landed aboard, shot up or whatever, the doctor, the emergency crew, and Jocko would get to him all about the same time. Jocko would bend over the stokes litter and pin a medal on the guy right there on the stretcher. You know pilots appreciated that. He was really and truly a great man.⁹¹

Earning his gold wings in 1925, Clark had ascended rapidly through the ranks. He had flown several types of aircraft, eventually specializing in the Boeing F3B biplane fighter. He had skippered a carrier fighter squadron on the Lexington in 1933–34, when Ernest J. King was her captain. Clark had got on well with King, a history that stood him in good stead when the latter rose to COMINCH-CNO. Clark’s first carrier command was the Suwannee, an 18,000-ton escort or “jeep carrier” converted from the hull of an oil tanker. While overseeing the commissioning of the ship in Newport News, Virginia, Clark drove the civilian yard workers and ship’s crew to meet a seemingly impossible deadline, and managed to get the ship commissioned in time to take part in Operation TORCH, the invasion of North Africa, in November 1942. He circulated a motto during this period of breakneck effort: “Get things done yesterday; tomorrow may be too late!”⁹² The Suwannee distinguished herself during TORCH, and Clark received high praise in his fitness reports.

In January 1943, he received orders sending him back to Newport News as prospective captain of the new Yorktown (CV-10), second-in-class of the Essexcarriers. Clark subsequently learned that Admiral King had personally selected him for the prestigious new command.

The Yorktown had been launched on January 21, 1943, three weeks before Clark’s arrival, with Eleanor Roosevelt acting as sponsor. Several minutes before the scheduled launch, while speeches were still underway, the great carrier had shifted, groaned, and begun creeping down the launch ways. The first lady, a seasoned veteran of ship-christening ceremonies, seized the waiting bottle with both hands and bashed it against the moving hull, shattering the bottle and splattering herself with champagne. All present agreed that the event was auspicious; the Yorktown was evidently in a hurry to get into the war. The crew gave her the first of several nicknames: “Ship in a Hurry.”⁹³

The unfinished Yorktown was moored at a Newport News Shipbuilding & Drydock Company pier, where she would spend the next several months being outfitted and commissioned. When Clark arrived on February 15, he walked down the dock to have a look. Her wide flight deck towered over him. He had come a long way from Alluwe, Oklahoma. “This was a proud moment in my lifetime, and I knew it as I stood there.”⁹⁴

The race to get the Yorktown into service drove the new crew to the edge of exhaustion. Clark was a slave driver, and he did not mind admitting it. Three other Essex carriers were in advanced construction, and Clark liked the idea of getting the Yorktown out to Pearl Harbor ahead of them all. That was a long shot, however, because the first-in-class Essex had been commissioned on the last day of 1942, and would soon depart on her shakedown cruise. Clark also had his eye on the Lexington (CV-16), another sister, which was being commissioned in Boston at the Fall River Company under the supervision of Captain Felix B. Stump. The fourth, Bunker Hill (CV-17), Captain John J. Ballentine, was at the Bethlehem Steel shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts. Clark frankly avowed that he wanted to beat the Essex to the Pacific, and “Beat the Essex” was adopted as the ship’s motto.

Captain Donald Duncan of the Essex was a friend and academy classmate, and the two captains conferred closely and learned from one another’s experiences. By mutual agreement they made copies of all outgoing correspondence concerning the outfitting of the ships, and shared it among themselves and with Stump and Ballentine.⁹⁵ Clark was glad to share information, but his natural competitive instincts were never far from the surface; he expected the Yorktown to be superior to her sisters in every measurable respect.

The yard set a commission date of April 15, but warned that the schedule was likely to slip. Clark declared that he intended to meet it. Four thousand of the 31,000 workers at the yard were put on the job, and Clark lobbied to have needed building materials diverted from other ships under construction. He avowed that he would not “cut corners,” at least insofar as care and quality of equipment were concerned. But he was more than willing to finagle materials by underhanded means and to fudge safety regulations. An air officer on the rival Essex suspected that “a lot of dishonest things were done to get things provided for the Yorktown which should have come to the Essex just so we wouldn’t get finished in time, but we never were able to prove anything.”⁹⁶ Clark had ammunition loaded directly from flatcars, a prohibited procedure. When the yard could not meet his schedule for painting the hull, he put the crew on the job. He even assigned junior officers to join in the chipping and painting, upending an ancient naval taboo and prompting at least one young lieutenant to put in for a transfer. “Jocko had tremendous drive,” recalled George W. Anderson, the new ship’s navigator (and a future chief of naval operations). “He always wanted to be first. He was very competitive. . . . It was drive, drive, drive all the time.”⁹⁷

Much of Clark’s time was apportioned to recruiting officers, and for this purpose he traveled frequently to Washington to look in on “BUPERS” (the Bureau of Naval Personnel). He wanted certain men in certain jobs, notably Raoul Waller as his executive officer. But he was also cognizant of the danger of bringing too many of his “friends” along, and he liked to use reservists in important roles—an attitude less common among many of his contemporary Annapolites.⁹⁸ The commissioning period also involved intensive training. Clark purposely cut short the “Abandon ship” drill, telling the crew that he preferred to use the time for the “Don’t give up the ship” drill. He instead stressed damage-control and firefighting procedures.

Before she could be commissioned, the Yorktown was required to pass a stem to stern inspection by the Board of Inspection and Survey, whose members arrived the second week of April. They tested all of the ship’s machinery, her major propulsion systems, auxiliary machinery, arresting gear, launching gear, catapult, magazines, and ammunition hoists. The ship’s charts and other required documents and publications were turned out and cataloged. The board found that all was in order and released the ship for commissioning on April 15, as scheduled. At 0700 on the appointed morning, the ship inched out of her berth and got underway. It was a short voyage across Hampton Roads and into a new berth at the Norfolk Navy Yard, where the Yorktown was formally entered into the service of the U.S. Navy.

April and May comprised a period of strenuous training, fitting out, and shaking down. The ship performed sea trials, cruising up and down the Chesapeake Bay. Her gunners shot at target sleeves towed by planes. On May 5, the Yorktown landed her first plane, a new F6F flown by the legendary fighter pilot Jimmy Flatley, who reported aboard as commander of the new Air Group Five. Among the newcomers were thirty-six of the troublesome SB2C Helldivers, with freshly trained aircrews and a group of engineers and mechanics from the Curtiss plant in Columbus, Ohio. The Yorktown was the first carrier to take the unpopular “Beasts” aboard.

On May 21, the Yorktown put to sea with an escort of three destroyers and turned south. Her destination was the Gulf of Paria, a shallow inland sea enclosed by Trinidad and the coast of Venezuela. A major naval supply depot and air station had been established on Trinidad. The gulf was more than seventy miles long, offering ample space for high-speed exercises and air operations. A single deepwater entrance channel was blocked by antisubmarine nets. The gulf was thus protected against German U-boats, and for that reason it was prized by the navy as a shakedown cruising area.

Air Group Five landed at the air station on Trinidad and flew out to the carrier each day. Clark was particularly irascible during this stressful period, often bellowing at the crew through a handheld bullhorn. He was quick to place men “in hack” (confine them to quarters), but he did not hesitate to make spot promotions when a man showed exceptional ability or initiative. Clark was especially concerned with the speed and efficiency of plane-handling procedures during flight operations. He was relentless in timing the airedales, who brought the planes up from the hangars and spotted them (positioned them for launch) on the flight deck. Clark demanded that planes be spotted as tightly as possible to leave a maximum amount of deck run available on the forward flight deck. Getting armed and fueled-up planes aloft quickly was the prime objective of any aircraft carrier. The interval between recovering (landing) planes and respotting the next group for launch was the period when the ship was most vulnerable to attack. Contacts with the enemy, he told the crew, were likely to be rare and ephemeral: “Not only must we seek them out but we must be ready to make the most of [contacts] when they do come and to hit, both night and day, on those occasions when suitable targets are found.”⁹⁹

The arrival of larger and heavier planes taxed the strength and endurance of the deck crews, but Lieutenant Joe Tucker of the Air Department had a solution in hand. At the navy yard in Norfolk he had spotted two jeeps and two small tractors parked near the pier, and decided to commandeer them. He had them lifted onto the Yorktown by a crane and stowed in the hangar. (Marine guards had been bribed with bottles of spirits to look the other way.) Tucker’s mechanics devised a makeshift towbar that hooked around the forward wheels of the aircraft. Constant repetition and practice using the vehicles to move the airplanes led to much more rapid cycling and respotting. The jeeps and tractors, which Tucker called “mules,” proved to be an effective innovation and were adopted on all carriers of the class.¹⁰⁰

Clark had previously been billeted as a plane inspector at the Curtiss plant in Columbus, Ohio, so he was well acquainted with the new SB2C Helldiver and its tribulations. During operations in the Gulf of Paria, the Curtiss machines suffered chronic mechanical failures. One abruptly lost power after launch, and its pilot was forced to execute a water landing ahead of the ship. Another made a hard landing, and its tail wheel collapsed. Tail hooks were yanked out of more than a dozen planes. Yorktown’s mechanics and the visiting Curtiss engineers attempted to repair the accumulating damage, but spare parts were not always available and there was only so much that could be done on the hangar deck of a ship at sea. By mid-June, more than half had to be grounded, and Lieutenant Tucker estimated that the Helldiver needed about 200 modifications before it would be ready for service. He recommended returning the entire squadron to Curtiss and asking to draw a squadron of SBDs for the Yorktown’s first cruise to the Pacific. After lengthy discussion, Captain Clark agreed, and ordered the damaged SB2Cs put ashore at Trinidad. He wrote a seven-page memorandum detailing their defects. When the Yorktown returned to Norfolk a week later, Clark drove up to Washington and explained the problem to Admiral King. King agreed to let the ship take aboard a squadron of thirty-six new SBD-5s.

“The war was won largely by Grumman and Douglas,” Clark wrote; “that was the Navy’s war, Grumman and Douglas.” By 1943, the SBDs were too slow to fly in a coordinated strike with the TBFs and F6Fs, so they “were actually a handicap in wartime. But we had to live with them, because they were the only dive bombers that we could rely on in the navy, the only ones that were in stock with enough of them on hand to do the job. So for a long time, before the bugs were worked out of this SB2C, that was the navy’s dive bomber.”¹⁰¹

On July 6, Yorktown sailed for the Pacific with a destroyer screen in company. After a quick run to Panama, zigzagging at 30 knots through the Windward Passage to thwart U-boats, she dropped anchor in Colón on the morning of the tenth. On the following morning, with the captain and much of the crew recovering from a riotous liberty, the Yorktown inched into Gatun Locks with less than a foot of clearance on either side. There was not even space enough for bumpers. The concrete sides of the lock scraped sickeningly against the hull. Clark screamed constantly at the helmsman. The executive officer, Raoul Waller, dashed starboard and port across the flight deck “like a fussy old maid about her cat.”¹⁰²

The Yorktown raised Oahu at dawn on July 24 and eased down the entrance channel at midday. A welcome message from Admiral Nimitz was sent by blinker light: “The Yorktown carries a name already famous in the Pacific, and in welcoming you we anticipate that you will maintain the high reputation of your predecessor.” Clark replied: “Many thanks for your message. That’s what we came here to do.”¹⁰³

AS THE PACIFIC WAR MOVED WEST, and drew closer to the enemy’s main bases of support, the Americans would inherit the same disadvantages of distance that had undone the Japanese in the lower Solomons. Forces assigned to GALVANIC included 116 combatant ships and 75 auxiliary vessels. They would sortie directly from ports throughout the Pacific, including New Zealand, Samoa, Efate, the Solomons, Fiji, Hawaii, and the American West Coast. A supreme logistics effort was required to push such a fleet across the Pacific. A supply train of auxiliaries (including fifteen fleet oilers) would provide underway refueling and replenishment from bases at Funafuti, Espiritu Santo, the Fijis, and Pearl Harbor. Looking beyond the Gilberts, into the Marshalls and Marianas, the service and supply forces would be obliged to move quickly into newly conquered territories and convert them into advanced rear bases to support the next westward leap. Timing must be meticulous and exact. Admiral Spruance, when interviewed by historians after the war, often remarked that strategy and tactics never approached the importance of logistics in the transpacific campaign.

Logistics was the realm of the Service Forces, Pacific Fleet (SERVPAC), commanded by Vice Admiral William L. Calhoun. In September 1943, SERVPAC listed 324 vessels, but the central Pacific offensive required a tripling of that figure in six months, to 990 vessels in March 1944. Since early 1942, Calhoun’s command had been run out of CINCPAC headquarters on Makalapa Hill, but inexorable expansion soon forced the commander of SERVPAC (COMSERVPAC) into a new, dedicated headquarters next door. In October 1943, Calhoun commissioned a new Service Squadron Four to provide logistical support for GALVANIC. The squadron operated from Funafuti atoll in the Ellice Islands, south of the Gilberts—the nearest Allied-held territory to the atolls that were to be conquered. Funafuti was well matched to its role as a forward mobile supply and repair base. Its large lagoon could comfortably accommodate several hundred ships, but its single narrow entrance could easily be shielded against incursion by enemy submarines. Funafuti was also the headquarters of land-based air forces assigned to GALVANIC, under the command of Rear Admiral John H. Hoover (commander of Aircraft Central Pacific), whose flagship was the seaplane tender Curtiss.

The planning of GALVANIC was not quite so truncated as that of WATCHTOWER the previous year, but the schedule seemed oppressive to leading participants and commanders, many of whom were not assigned to their roles until August or September. Admiral Harry W. Hill would command the Southern Amphibious Group, the force assigned to take Tarawa. Admiral Turner, who stood above him as commander of the Fifth Amphibious Force, would sail with the Northern Amphibious Group against Makin. Hill was not briefed on his duties until September 18, when he met with Turner in Efate. With the target date five weeks away, Turner could not yet say which transports would be assigned to Tarawa, or even what Hill’s flagship would be.¹⁰⁴ The circumstances, Hill recalled, were “hectic, if not confused.”¹⁰⁵ He never had the opportunity to meet his air support commander, and did not meet most of his primary commanders until the live rehearsals on the eve of sailing for the operation. The communications plan was late arriving in Efate. He moved aboard his flagship, the battleship Maryland, less than a week before the fleet sortied.

General Julian C. Smith intended to land three battalions on Betio’s northern beaches—one each on the beaches designated Red 1, Red 2, and Red 3. He held no illusions about the strength of the enemy’s defensive fortifications. The log seawall revealed by reconnaissance photos stood about 20 feet above the high-tide mark, and varied from about 3 to 6 feet tall. Directly behind it was a complex of rifle pits and covered pillboxes, connected by trenches and positioned to provide interlocking fields of fire on the beach and lagoon. Coral sand and rocks were piled between the seawall and the pillboxes to obscure visibility from the beach. Concrete obstacles and iron spikes were positioned to stop armored vehicles, and tank traps had been dug to a depth of about 6 feet.¹⁰⁶

Admiral Turner chose to hold one regiment (the 6th) of the 2nd Marines in reserve, a decision hotly opposed by Julian Smith. Turner alone would decide whether to commit the reserve force, though he was expected to consult with Holland Smith, who would be present on his flagship. As in the Guadalcanal campaign the previous year, Turner’s decision to hold ground forces in reserve forced the marine commanders to alter their plan of attack. After being curtly overruled, General Julian Smith insisted that the orders be spelled out in writing, “as I did not feel that the plan should be my responsibility.”¹⁰⁷

The most worrisome aspect of the assault on Tarawa atoll remained the coral reef in the lagoon. Thanks to a titanic construction ramp-up spurred by Admiral King, new landing craft and amphibious vehicles were available in much greater numbers. There was a confounding array of different types, all designated by acronyms beginning with “L” (landing): LCVPs, LCVs, LCMs, LCIs, LSTs, LVTs, LCTs, and so on. Not all were equally suited to the task at hand. Training exercises often resulted in significant damage and mechanical failures, and a chronic dearth of spare parts kept damaged craft on the beach.¹⁰⁸ Well-trained crews were needed to operate the landing craft, but training programs on the mainland were strained to the breaking point. Prior to GALVANIC, one amphibious officer recalled, “Several LCTs and LCIs had no officers or men who had ever been to sea prior to their trans-Pacific voyage.”¹⁰⁹

The answer to Tarawa’s reefs was the LVT (landing vehicle, tracked), an amphibious tractor often called the “amtrac” or “alligator.” These clever little vehicles could clamber up and over shallow coral heads and drive up a beach. In tests overseen by General Holland Smith, an amtrac charged up a Hawaiian beach, crushed a log barricade under its treads, and “walked clean through seven lines of barbed wire.”¹¹⁰ They could be transported in LSTs and launched directly into the sea about two to three miles offshore.

The 2nd Marine Division, in September 1943, could muster a hundred amtracs, but many had been hard run in the Guadalcanal operation and were in a sad state of disrepair. General Julian Smith estimated that he could make seventy-five of the craft seaworthy by cannibalizing parts from the remaining twenty-five, which would then be junked. Fifty new LVTs were found in Samoa, and they were fetched by LSTs after the division had already sailed from Wellington. Each amtrac could carry about one platoon, and would be required to make several return trips back to the transport group. Some would inevitably be disabled or destroyed. The trouble would arise with the second and third waves, as the supply of available amtracs diminished. Most of the marines in those later waves would likely be obliged to land in ordinary Higgins boats (LCVPs), which might not manage to cross the reefs. If they could not, the men would have to wade in to the island under heavy enemy fire.

Each of the three Red beaches would be seized, initially, by one battalion. Estimates of Japanese troop strength ranged as high as 4,000, so the attackers would be at approximate parity with the defenders. Early planning for Tarawa had contemplated the possibility of seizing an island adjacent to Betio and converting it into an artillery platform. The option was discarded as it could lead to a lengthy stalemate in the shallows separating the two islands. If the marines on the three Red beaches were unable to penetrate directly inland, Julian Smith would move forces down to the west end of the island, “secure that and then attack from the flank.”¹¹¹

Without overwhelming superiority in numbers (at least initially), the marines would trust in airpower and heavy naval fire support to gain the upper hand. For about two and a half hours before the initial landings, the island would be worked over by carrier planes and raked by battleships, cruisers, and destroyers offshore. The fire support group would draw in as close as 1,000 yards from the beach. In the first phase, they would concentrate their fire on the 8-inch artillery emplacements and knock them out. In the second phase, they would simply blanket the entire 300-acre island with high-explosive shells. General Julian Smith and his fellow marines were not nearly as sanguine as were the admirals concerning the potential of the preinvasion bombardment. Having suffered under repeated naval barrages on Guadalcanal, the marines understood that troops could hunker down in well-covered bunkers or trenches and withstand such punishment.

After the marines had taken the beaches, naval fire support would become a considerably thornier subject. The island was very small, so friendly and enemy forces would necessarily be engaged at eyeball-to-eyeball range. But the marines must have the ability to call in naval shelling and air attacks, even on targets very near their own positions. Phase III of the fire support plan was triggered when the assault forces had an initial foothold on the beach. At that point, targeting and firing decisions would shift into the hands of shore parties. Marines ashore, the GALVANIC plan took pains to emphasize, “are not merely spotting agencies, but also control firing.”¹¹² They would select the targets, call fire down on those targets, and order firing to end. The same was true of air support. The marines were to set up reflective panels or smoke pots marking their forward positions. The pilots were warned that these markers “must be scrupulously observed, and direct support attacks executed without endangering our ground forces.”¹¹³

Carl Moore worked fifteen-hour days to complete the operational plans for GALVANIC in time to meet the sailing date. The basic plan could fit into three pages, but no fewer than seventeen “planning annexes” were appended. There was a communication plan, an intelligence plan, a meteorological plan, an air search plan, a logistics plan, and contingency plans for major action. Plans directed the movement and rendezvous of various fleet elements.¹¹⁴ Minor changes in any one annex often compelled a run of corresponding changes to others. On October 13, three weeks before the sailing date, Moore warned Spruance that the planning process was in chaos, and that many important decisions remained to be rendered. He gently implied that the boss ought to spend more time in the office and involve himself more closely in the vital work. But Spruance remained as serene and aloof as always, often disappearing for hours into the hills above headquarters. “Raymond is so funny,” Moore wrote his wife:

When he feels the urge for exercise, nothing can stop him. He won’t stop for anything but goes tearing off, usually with me grabbing at his coattails trying to get him to sign something or give me some decision that will let me proceed until he gets back. Invariably he begs me to come along, knowing darn well that I won’t, and if I did the work would stop. When he gets back, it’s hard to make him pay attention long enough to read and sign before he flops into bed. What a life I have.¹¹⁵

On October 29, Moore and the Fifth Fleet staff worked late into the night to complete the final product. The GALVANIC operations plan ran to 324 pages and weighed three pounds. A platoon of marines was rounded up to perform the careful work of mimeographing, collating, and binding 300 copies. At 5:00 a.m. they were finished. Couriers began distributing copies to commands and ships throughout the Navy Yard. Copies were boarded on planes to be flown to New Zealand, Noumea, Efate, Funafuti, and Samoa. Moore, dog-tired and mentally shattered, wrote his wife on the morning of the thirtieth: “The heartbreaking struggle is over.”¹¹⁶ But the real heartbreak, as he was to reflect many years later, awaited in Tarawa lagoon.

^* The U.S. Navy had 119 aircraft carriers in commission at war’s end. Had the conflict lasted until 1947 or 1948, a reasonable prognosis in the early days, Clark’s figure might have been surpassed.

^† Later genealogical research revealed that Clark’s Cherokee ancestry was considerably more diluted. He had a single Cherokee great-great-great-grandmother, making him one-thirty-second Cherokee.