During the first nine months of the war against Japan, the U.S. Pacific Fleet clawed its way back from near destruction in one of the swiftest and most remarkable reversals of naval fortune since the Greeks defeated the Persians at Salamis. Shattered by the surprise assault at Pearl Harbor, the Pacific Fleet was outmatched at the outset by the tough and highly skilled Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN). In five months Japan overran the western Pacific and Southeast Asia, gained all its initial strategic goals, and grasped for more. In May and June 1942, in hard-fought aircraft carrier battles in the Coral Sea and off Midway, the Pacific Fleet won victories that not only denied Japan crucial strategic positions, but also inflicted crippling losses. The United States achieved relative parity in naval strength in the Pacific and gained the initiative. On 7 August the Pacific Fleet launched an amphibious counteroffensive in the southwest Pacific. Following seven bitter months, as the advantage seesawed from one side to the other, the Allied victory at Guadalcanal decided the course of the Pacific War.
From December 1941 to October 1942 Vice Adm. Frank Jack Fletcher led forces that contributed decisively to the dramatic turnabout, sinking six Japanese carriers for the loss of two U.S. carriers. In the history of those crucial early campaigns, he is second in importance to Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, the beloved commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet. Only Fletcher participated in all the different phases of the Pacific Fleet’s strategy during that time period. He took part in the futile attempt of Nimitz’s predecessors to hold the vital asset of Wake Island, fought in the early raids, spearheaded Nimitz’s dramatic carrier confrontations at Coral Sea and Midway, and supported the invasion of Guadalcanal.
Fletcher was a “black shoe.” That color, worn by the majority of U.S. naval officers, was emblematic of the surface navy as a whole, as opposed to the brown shoes brandished by the proud naval aviators. After Pearl Harbor it finally became obvious the ungainly aircraft carrier had supplanted the majestic battleship as the cynosure of sea power. Only other carriers could truly contend with them. However at the outset of the war, Japan outnumbered the United States in that category of warships. The U.S. Navy could only hope to attain decisive superiority in late 1943, after new construction reinforced the fleet. No one could say whether the Pacific Fleet could survive in the meantime. Ideally the admiral who led the U.S. carriers in the first three of the only five carrier battles in history would have been a naval aviator and task commander of vast experience. Instead Fletcher, the non-aviator, happened to be the man on the spot, and thus he bore that awesome responsibility.
Having someone run the show in a new and to him unfamiliar method of warfare would seem the very recipe for disaster. Yet when the odds were never more tilted in favor of the IJN, Fletcher gained three vital carrier victories. In May 1942 the Battle of the Coral Sea prevented the invasion of Port Moresby and handed Japan its first strategic setback of the war. Fletcher’s carrier striking force scored decisive success on 4 June in defense of Midway, although the crippling of his flagship Yorktown gave the laurels to his talented subordinate Rear Adm. Raymond A. Spruance. In August 1942 Fletcher led the carriers (and nominally the whole expeditionary force) against Guadalcanal. Just surviving the Battle of the Eastern Solomons on 24 August, his third carrier clash in four months, helped forestall a devastating attack on the marine foothold and prevent the Japanese from landing fresh troops. The South Pacific Force thereby earned an essential breather during a critical portion of the Guadalcanal campaign. Frozen out of carrier command in October 1942, Fletcher returned to combat a year later in charge of the North Pacific Area. In September 1945 he accepted the surrender of naval forces in northern Japan.
No other U.S. admiral—and very few flag officers of any nation—came out ahead in three separate pitched battles during World War II. Fletcher retired in 1947 wearing four stars. The destroyer USS Fletcher (DD-992) is named in his honor. Yet by 1950 he wore the dubious distinction of most controversial figure in U.S. naval history. For all his hard-won accomplishments in battle, he is scornfully remembered primarily for two incidents: the failure to relieve the marine garrison of Wake Island in December 1941 and the supposed deliberate abandonment of the marine landing force at Guadalcanal, which is said also to have caused the terrible defeat at Savo. Historian Nathan Miller wrote in 1995, “No American admiral has had a worst press in postwar histories than Fletcher and even though he had won the Medal of Honor during the Vera Cruz expedition of 1914, he has been accused of cowardice.” A general history of the era, David M. Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945, noted of the withdrawal of the carriers from Guadalcanal, “The fact remains that Fletcher displayed highly questionable judgment and a conspicuous want of courage.” The 1999 memoir of noted author Capt. Edward L. Beach condemned Fletcher (“Fueling Jack”) as a “peacetime” commander “weak in professional concern for the demands of war,” who succumbed to “craven caution from on high” and “his own fears of the unknown.” Historians Williamson Murray and marine Col. Allen R. Millett declared in their study of World War II the “very cautious” Fletcher “lacked the character to lead hard-pressed American forces.” The most recent analysis of the naval war from Pearl Harbor through Guadalcanal, by a respected Napoleonic-era scholar, astonishingly avowed Fletcher bore the taint of “traitor,” and that for his “cowardice” in pulling the carriers out from Guadalcanal, he was “court-martialed” and “relieved of his command.” No such court-martial ever took place, and no one else labeled Fletcher a “traitor.” Such, though, is the pervasive nature of Fletcher’s strongly negative historical reputation, which is based on severely outdated secondary sources.1
The image of Fletcher as timid bungler is due in large part to his portrayal in volumes three through five of Rear Adm. Samuel Eliot Morison’s enormously influential “semiofficial” History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. In 1947 Morison wisely observed in the preface of volume one, “No history written shortly after the event it describes can pretend to be completely objective or even reasonably definitive. Facts that I know not will come to light; others that I discard will be brought out and incorporated in new patterns of interpretation.”2 It is time to heed Morison’s admonition and present a major reinterpretation of Fletcher’s role in the Pacific Fleet from December 1941 to October 1942. Those who for more than fifty years accepted Morison’s relentlessly derogatory portrait of Fletcher must now weigh a mountain of new evidence that demands a fresh verdict for a heretofore maligned naval officer who won his battles at sea, but lost the war of objective evaluation.
The present book has long been in the works. In 1974 Rear Adm. Oscar Pederson, who served on Fletcher’s staff in 1942, wrote: “I hope you will be able to do a study on Frank Jack Fletcher. I feel he is a forgotten man and I think he made some hard and tough decisions for which not only did he not receive credit, but was severely criticized.”3 At that time I had just begun my research on the Pacific War and required the next twenty years to complete three books: The First South Pacific Campaign (1976), The First Team (1984), and The First Team and the Guadalcanal Campaign (1994), which analyzed Pacific Fleet strategy and the 1942 carrier battles in great detail. That lengthy apprenticeship developed many additional sources and gave me the background better to understand the command decisions that underlay these complex events. Fletcher once told the celebrated author Walter Lord, “After an action is over, people talk a lot about how the decisions were deliberately reached, but actually there’s always a hell of a lot of groping around.”4 In the heat of battle it probably seemed that way, but in fact doctrine and method provided the indispensable framework. The goal of this study is to probe and explain the “groping around,” and thereby illustrate just how a carrier task force commander functioned both in battle and in the often mundane but vital preparation for combat. Only in that way can Fletcher’s decisions and actions be well and truly judged.