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In the new South Pacific headquarters, a culture of informality reigned. Halsey rejected the new gray uniforms mandated by Washington. He favored working khakis. “The officers and chiefs of my command are wholly at liberty to wear the damn things—if, that is, they are so lacking in naval courtesy and have such limited intelligence as to prefer dressing differently from the commander of the force,” he wrote. Halsey’s approach to dress wasn’t dogmatic or dictatorial. A verse graced a plaque in the front hall of the headquarters: “COMPLETE WITH BLACK TIE / YOU DO LOOK TERRIFIC, / BUT TAKE IT OFF HERE: / THIS IS STILL SOUTH PACIFIC!”

The casual ethos helped promote something else Halsey thought important: eliminating the distinctions among the services. His men were not marines or sailors or soldiers, but warriors of the South Pacific Fighting Forces. Halsey’s all-service esprit de guerre was relentlessly practical. Interservice tribalism was always costly, and all costs paid to the enemy’s cause. Halsey wasn’t shy about drawing from the Department of the Army’s budget. Under the principle of a united SOPAC team, he drew in Army welders, electricians, and mechanics to service the fleet—and asked that the cooperation be loudly touted. “I would like to see it widely advertised that the army is helping us here. I have never seen anything like the spirit there is in this neck of the woods. It is a real United States service.”

Taking in the breadth of his duties, Halsey quickly sympathized with his predecessor. “As I dug into my new job, I realized that the tremendous burden of responsibility that Bob Ghormley had been carrying was far beyond my own capacity.” No matter how brilliant or hardworking a man was, he couldn’t do it himself. Halsey would lean on his staff. “There’s a lot to be done,” he told them. “Look around, see what it is, and do it.” Halsey had once begged off from an assignment to command the Norfolk Navy Yard. His reasoning, as he told the Navy’s personnel chief at the time, Chester Nimitz, was that he didn’t feel suited to administering an industrial establishment. That, of course, was precisely what he had signed on for now.

Halsey continued Ghormley’s effort to clear the cargo logjam at Nouméa. He expanded the plan to increase covered storage from 200,000 square feet to a million, then brought in hardware for a new 160-by-600-foot pier and tools to equip three new construction battalions. Since forceful leadership always seemed to be in short supply, he asked for a captain or commander from the Civil Engineer Corps to command the Seabees. “The maximum possible urgency must be assigned to the development of this base,” he wrote King’s office. When Halsey invoked urgency and immediacy, he did it not in complaint but in affirmation, on behalf of specific tasks and challenges. The long memorandum he sent to Nimitz demanding more of everything (above all “tankers and more tankers and more tankers”) was detailed and straightforward but did not suggest “or else disaster will follow,” as Ghormley’s sometimes did. “You are well aware of our needs and this is not offered in complaint or as an excuse but just to keep the pot boiling,” he wrote to Nimitz.

His manner of securing a new headquarters from the French administration at Nouméa reflected his action-minded personal ethos. One day he sent his intelligence officer, Marine Colonel Julian P. Brown, to discuss his headquarters accommodations with the Free French governor. Wearing his best dress uniform, pinned with decorations dating to the First World War, Brown presented himself and began pressing the case for a new American facility ashore. When the governor asked, “What do we get in exchange?” Brown replied with the same ordnance-on-target forthrightness that Halsey was known for, if with some uncharacteristic sobriety: “We will continue to protect you as we have always done.” This somehow failed to impress the governor, who in grand diplomatic fashion took