World War II, U.S. Naval Operations in: The Pacific

World War II, U.S. Naval Operations in: The Pacific. In The Armed Forces of the Pacific: A Comparison of the Military and Naval Power of the United States and Japan, published early in 1941, retired Capt. William D. Puleston, former Director of Naval Intelligence, concluded that a war between the two countries would end with an American victory in a climactic naval battle somewhere in the western Pacific. Carrier‐based aircraft would be important, but the decisive element would be the battle line of heavy surface ships. Such thinking was widespread in the pre‐World War II navy.

The circumstances and aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941, radically altered the character and course of World War II in the Pacific. Since the three carriers of the U.S. Pacific Fleet were out of the harbor and the eight battleships were heavily damaged, air power would dominate naval action for the first six months of 1942 and would heavily influence strategic planning for the entire war. When surface combat began in August 1942, American heavy cruisers had to do the work of battleships against Japanese capital ships. The battleships damaged at Pearl Harbor would slowly return, along with their newer, faster sisterships, but their chief functions would be gunfire support for landings and escort of carrier task forces. Only twice, at Guadalcanal in November 1942 and at Surigao Strait in the Battle for Leyte Gulf two years later, would there be classic gun duels with Japanese battleships in the manner anticipated by every fresh young ensign of the late 1930s.

Following Pearl Harbor, destruction of small British and Dutch naval forces (along with the inadequate United States Asiatic Fleet) meant that the Allied effort in the Pacific war would become almost exclusively American. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his advisors, reacting more to public pressure and political considerations than to geographical realities, the need for unity of command, and clear administration, assigned to Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur the Southwest Pacific Area, comprising Australia, the Solomons, New Guinea, and the Philippines, while Adm. Chester W. Nimitz commanded all the remaining Pacific Ocean Area. Interservice rivalry and bickering, especially by the more image‐conscious MacArthur, flared repeatedly during the war.

The first, or defensive, phase of the Pacific war lasted from Pearl Harbor until August 1942. Submarines harassed Japanese military and commercial shipping. The celebrated carrier raid on Tokyo (18 April) by James Doolittle's B‐25s proved that Japan was vulnerable and buoyed American spirits. A defensive line, protecting vital communications with Australia, stretched from the Aleutians to Midway to Samoa to New Guinea. Above all, Japanese expansion to the east and southeast had to be stopped. The major engagements of this phase came as Americans blunted each prong of a three‐part Japanese expansion plan for the spring and summer of 1942.

A Japanese effort at a seaborne invasion of Port Moresby in southeastern New Guinea as a base from which to attack Australia led to the Battle of the Coral Sea (4–8 May). Fought entirely between carrier fleets 95 miles apart and tactically unfortunate, the battle accomplished its strategic purpose of preventing the invasion. A month later the Japanese sought to spread the northern end of the defensive perimeter by attacking the Aleutians and to draw the American fleet into a destructive battle by threatening Midway with a large invasion fleet. Once again, air‐to‐air and air‐to‐surface action replaced ship‐to‐ship combat. The Battle of Midway (4–6 June), one of the war's most decisive victories, cost the Japanese four carriers, plus 250 planes and experienced pilots. The United States lost one carrier.

The third part of the overall Japanese plan, a move through the southern Solomons against New Caledonia, Fiji, and Samoa to cut the communication line to Australia, ended the purely defensive phase of the war. On 7 August 1942 United States Marines invaded Guadalcanal in the southern Solomons to prevent completion of a vital Japanese airfield. The invasion marked the beginning of the second or offensive phase of the Pacific War by the Americans. The centerpiece of this offensive phase was the recapture of the Philippines, preceded by an island‐hopping campaign to get there, and followed by another one to position American forces for the expected seaborne invasion of Japan.

The Solomons campaign lasted from August 1942 until January 1943. It included three major land battles on Guadalcanal and six naval engagements in the southern and eastern Solomons, most of them extremely fierce night surface actions, fought at close range. The Japanese prided themselves on night fighting with searchlights; the Americans had radar, a new weapon not always available and not always well used in combat. Most Japanese cruisers, unlike American cruisers, carried torpedoes. Lingering controversies over tactics and command arose from several engagements, most notably the loss of three American and one Australian heavy cruiser at Savo Island in August 1942. More effective torpedoes increased the efficiency of U.S. submarine raids on Japanese shipping during 1943.

The securing of Guadalcanal on 9 February 1943 focused full attention on Rabaul, a major Japanese base on New Britain, which stood in the way of any approach to the Philippines via the islands to the southeast. Six more naval engagements occurred in the central and northern Solomons and the Bismarck Sea before Rabaul, neutralized and bypassed, ceased to be a threat in January 1944.

The encirclement of Rabaul had clearly required a joint army‐navy strategic effort, although MacArthur had pressed for army dominance in a hopscotch campaign along island chains and the north coast of New Guinea. The assault on the Philippines, whose personal significance to MacArthur matched its strategic significance, also required joint effort to avoid a dangerously unprotected eastern flank. The navy and marine corps, with some army troops as well, swept westward across the central Pacific, beginning with Tarawa in the Gilberts in November 1943, continuing with Kwajalein in the Marshalls, and ending with Saipan, Guam, and Tinian in the Marianas in mid‐1944. The Japanese attempted to destroy the American fleet with air attacks in the Battle of the Philippine Sea (19–20 June) but lost three carriers and nearly 500 planes. From this defeat the Japanese naval air arm never recovered.

October 1944 brought the long‐awaited invasion of the Philippines. The Battle for Leyte Gulf (23–26 October), the world's last great naval battle, secured and protected the congested landing beaches. A multi‐phase response to a complex Japanese plan, the battle included the destruction in Surigao Strait of one battleship formation by the gunfire of several repaired Pearl Harbor battleships, heavy air attacks on other Japanese ships in several locations, and the luring away of Adm. William F. Halsey's Third Fleet by a decoy Japanese carrier force. In light of a near disaster, Halsey's judgment has been controversial ever since. The Japanese lost four carriers, three battleships, ten cruisers, and eleven destroyers, permanently ending their ability to challenge the U.S. Navy for control of the seas.

Only the kamikaze or suicide plane remained a major weapon. First used in the Philippines, this desperate sacrifice of both plane and pilot was a terror weapon designed to maximize loss of life among sailors stationed topside on the destroyers and cruisers that screened the carriers, and most importantly to cause as many fires as possible on the carrier. Kamikazes sank 34 ships, none larger than a destroyer, and damaged 368 others, including some carriers, in a failed attempt to prevent the capture of Okinawa (April–June, 1945). But the failure was bloody: nearly 5000 sailors died, more than double the number killed at Pearl Harbor and comprising nearly 15 percent of the navy's total World War II battle deaths in all theaters. Following American use of the atomic bomb against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan agreed to surrender on 14 August, executing the final documents on board the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945.

The greatest naval war in history had ended with victory for a naval force of unprecedented size and power. The Marianas campaign alone, for example, required 800 ships manned by 250,000 sailors, transporting 150,000 Marines and soldiers. From Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay, the U.S. Navy lost 128 combatant vessels in the Pacific and only 29 in the Atlantic. To a much greater degree than the Atlantic phase, the Pacific phase of World War II evolved into the world's first three‐dimensional format of the traditional navy war, with large formations of ships engaged in surface, submarine, and air combat. Only superior American human and industrial resources made such an effort possible.

Bibliography

Samuel E. Morison , History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, 15 vols., 1947–1963.
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S. E. Smith, ed., The United States Navy in World War II, 1966.
Thomas B. Buell , The Quiet Warrior: A Biography of Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, 1974.
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Craig L. Symonds , The Naval Institute Historical Atlas of the U.S. Navy, 1995.

James E. Sefton