• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 848 0

fleet the world would ever see, crewed by men who showed themselves worthy of it. But only a nation so absurdly rich could have built two hundred battleships, carriers and cruisers in the war years, as well as a thousand smaller ships. It may be argued that King’s megalomania was no greater than that of Arnold and the air force, which also imposed a disproportionate drain on manpower. But the U.S. Army, always the Cinderella service, paid the price for both, with its chronic shortage of fighting infantrymen. Only late in the war did it dawn upon America’s leaders that their monumental industrial mobilisation was generating far more ships and planes than it had conscripted men to serve them.

By the autumn of 1944, the principal American naval forces committed to the Pacific were submarine flotillas operating out of Pearl Harbor and Brisbane; Seventh Fleet, commanded by Vice-Admiral Thomas Kinkaid—a motley gathering of cruisers, escort carriers and old battleships which operated under MacArthur’s orders in support of his land operations; and Nimitz’s heavy units, dominated by fast battleships and carriers. These were led alternately by William “Bull” Halsey, whose belligerence had made him a popular legend, and Raymond Spruance, the cooler and cleverer hero of Midway. The rationale for this odd arrangement was that it was difficult to plan operations in the cramped conditions of a warship. Each admiral therefore took it in turns to work ashore at Pearl, preparing for the next phase, or to direct the task groups at sea. To increase confusion—not least among the Japanese—Halsey’s command was known as Third Fleet; when Spruance took over, the same ships became Fifth Fleet. Under either designation, this represented the greatest concentration of naval power in the history of the world.

For those who served at sea, spasms of intense action served only to emphasise the dreariness of life between. “The thrills were brief and far apart,” wrote a crewman of the carrier Belleau Wood. Except for its flight crews,

day in and day out life at sea189 was pure monotony…Boilers, engines, bulkheads, decks, mess halls, offices and shops always look the same, no matter what goes on above. Every day was a duplicate of its predecessor and model for its successor: reveille in the dark to sit around battle stations for an hour until sunrise; launch aircraft for routine patrols which 90 percent of the time saw nothing save air, clouds and water; land aircraft; launch aircraft; land aircraft; three meals a day; scrub bulkheads; swab decks; run boilers and engines; then fade out with another hour after sunset at battle stations. “Relieve the watch. On deck section three. Relieve the wheel and lookouts.” Relieve the watch, relieve the watch, day after day, week after week. The sea and sky rolled endlessly by from one port period to the next; our eyes became “waterlogged.”

Many men chafed at their ignorance of the purposes of their ships’ activities, beyond the obvious ones of bombardment and defence against air attack. “You never know where you’re going190 from one island to the next,” said Louis Irwin, a turret gunner on the cruiser Indianapolis. “My lasting regret was that I didn’t know what the hell was going on, where we fitted into the big picture,” said Lt. Ben Bradlee, a destroyer officer. Eugene Hardy served on the cruiser Astoria at Midway, but was unaware that he had taken part in a great battle until somebody told him afterwards. “Dear Mom and Dad191,” wrote a twenty-year-old to his family in New Jersey from the Pacific, “I really feel like writing a long letter because I have some time, but there isn’t much to write about.”

If routine often became oppressive, in many respects a naval rating’s life was preferable to that of a combat infantryman. Death at sea was horrible, but actuarially much less likely than for a man in a “sharp end” role on land. Daily existence was softened by comforts unavailable to most ground troops. Yet in the Pacific, every seaman was prey to the unyielding heat. Temperatures above a hundred degrees were