In the first days of March 1945, the ships of the British Pacific Fleet anchored at Manis in the Admiralty Islands and went looking for coconut trees. Their carriers had brought wooden floats out from home to keep each ship off whatever lay alongside her, but those floats belonged in calm water. Manis was an open anchorage, and Vice Admiral Sir Bernard Rawlings judged them in no way suitable for it. So the fleet got coconut trunks from the island, and every ship set about making extra fenders.
When the carrier Victorious smashed both of her own floats, the American base lent her steel ones. The men of that fleet had been at war since 1939 in the Arctic, the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean. Their second in command now described their position in plain words. Rawlings wrote in his war diary that they were starting from the letter A and in many ways with an unaccustomed alphabet to learn.
The fighting they had come to do was narrow and specific. The Americans would land on Okinawa on the first of April. South and west of Okinawa, between it and Formosa, ran a chain of smaller islands called the Sakishima Group, and on two of them, Miyako and Ishigaki, the Japanese kept airfields that could pass aircraft up the chain toward the American beaches. The British job was to keep those runways broken.
And yet the pages their officers wrote in the first weeks of that job spend very little ink on airfields. They are about hoses and tankers, signal books, a borrowed boat, a submarine that had to ask permission, and the weather. Rawlings sent off his first war diaries on the ninth and tenth of April, about two weeks after the first strikes, while his fleet was fueling between attacks. A carrier admiral’s report followed in late April, Rawlings’s own long narrative in May, and the commander-in-chief’s dispatch in June.
Taken in order, those pages show a fleet finding out what it meant to be one part of somebody else’s navy. The machine they were joining showed itself in pieces. At Manis, Rawlings found the shore facilities thin. They were in fact scanty, he wrote, although there was some iced beer.
He called the climate the most objectionable he had ever known. But he also saw what the base itself amounted to: an amazing example of what the Americans accomplish when they set out to plan big. Before it could strike anything, the fleet had to become a number. Until the middle of March, it was Task Force 113.
On the twenty-second, at the lagoon at Ulithi, Rawlings signaled that he would take the designation Task Force 57 on clearing the anchorage, ready for duty under the orders of Admiral Raymond Spruance, commanding the United States Fifth Fleet. Spruance signaled back: “Welcome TF-57. Good hunting. ” The fleet sailed under its new number the next day.
In his diary, Rawlings set down what that meant. For the first time, he wrote, a principal, if not the principal British fleet, had passed under the direct orders of an Allied commander-in-chief. The joining went deeper than a number. Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser, the fleet’s commander-in-chief, had already decided, on the advice of his communications officer, Captain Richard Courage, that the fleet would talk the American way, with American signal books, flags, phonetic alphabet, and codes.
The Admiralty in London sent its view in writing. The British method is superior, the board told him. Fraser went ahead anyway. He also had his officers change out of white into khaki.
Into every ship of the fleet came a small liaison team from the United States Navy, there to turn one navy’s signals into the other’s and back again. Over them sat Captain Euan of the United States Navy as senior liaison officer, first in the carrier Indomitable and later in the flagship King George V. Also aboard Indomitable was a fighter direction specialist named Lieutenant Commander Rowe, whose own opinion of the British would be written down within a month. Ulithi gave them their first good look at the scale of the thing.
The lagoon was so large that the Americans lent Rawlings a landing craft as a staff boat because his ships lay about ten miles from the American end of the anchorage. American tankers fueled the British fleet from the evening of the twentieth until the afternoon of the twenty-second. The service squadron there handed across newer fuses for the anti-aircraft guns of two battleships and two cruisers. Admiral Chester Nimitz had meant to come in person and welcome them, but Rawlings noted that the admiral had been laid up the day before with a cold, so his chief of staff came instead by seaplane from Guam.
Then the fleet was on its own oil. Two days out of Ulithi came the first fueling at sea. Three British tankers waited at the rendezvous, and in fine weather they could make nine knots. Most of the British warships were still rigged for the abeam method, in which the tanker trailed a hose behind her and the receiving ship crept up into her wake to pick it up.
The two hulls held in line for as long as the pumping took. The Americans passed several hoses across at once, ship beside ship. On the twenty-fifth of March, the weather came hard out of the northeast with a swell behind it. The hoses gave trouble from the start.
In the afternoon, Rawlings called it off, accepted destroyers going forward short of fuel, and had his battleships top them up from their own tanks. That evening, a fire started in the life rafts stowed under Indomitable’s island and was soon put out. At sunrise on the twenty-sixth, from south of Miyako, the first fighter sweeps went off against the airfields on Miyako and Ishigaki, with the bombers behind them. A Japanese reconnaissance plane was caught that morning and got away.
Lieutenant Commander Tominson, commanding a Corsair squadron from Victorious, did not come back. By the standards of the Pacific, it was a modest morning. It was also the day the British fleet stopped being an offer made at a conference and became a working part of Spruance’s plan. The next day, a shadowing aircraft turned up in the dark before three in the morning, and a Hellcat was flown off by moonlight to chase it.
The destroyer Unexcelled pulled an Avenger crew out of the water, and with them, an American Corsair pilot who had been adrift for two days. Rescue was where the British first ran hard into the system they had joined. The lifeguard submarines on station belonged to the United States Navy, and their orders came down its own chain. When the submarine Kingfish was asked to keep a good lookout for any ditched British air crews, Rawlings set down her answer: she would have to ask her boss first.
The quotation marks inside that sentence are his. It was soon cleared up when Nimitz’s headquarters told the submarine that Task Force 57 was operating near her and that she was to act as its rescue boat. That evening, Kingfish reported that she had picked up the pilot of one of Illustrious’s Avengers, and on the last day of March, she pulled out the crew of another. That night, a typhoon warning came in from Guam.
The next day, strikes were cancelled and the fleet drew off to a fueling area to the south. On the thirtieth, the fueling was finished by midafternoon, and the ships ran back north at speed. Easter Sunday, the first of April, was the day of the Okinawa landings. In the morning, the radar picked up a raid, and the fleet went to flash red.
Indomitable was strafed and one of her ratings killed. A kamikaze came down into the base of Indomitable’s island. Four officers and ten ratings died. The armored deck dished in where the aircraft struck, and the sick bay beside the flight deck, the briefing room, and the radio office were wrecked.
Within the hour, aircraft were landing on her again, and she operated on a reduced scale for the rest of the day. One line from that morning has been quoted ever since, and it stands on very little. An American liaison officer is supposed to have said that a kamikaze on an American carrier meant six months in the yard at Pearl, while in a British carrier it was a case of sweepers, man your brooms. No officer is ever named.
No newspaper of 1945 carrying it has turned up. The dispatch itself says only that within a remarkably short time, aircraft were operating again. At about five that afternoon, a second suicide aircraft glanced off the edge of Victorious’s flight deck. The pilot’s handwritten instructions, his orders on which targets to choose, were blown on board.
They were translated and passed to intelligence. On the second of April, Rawlings had a bombardment planned, in part so that his gun crews could fire at something real. Many of them, he wrote, were very young and untried. He cancelled it in favor of more air strikes, and the reasoning he gave was the American reasoning: that the most profitable means of destroying the enemy was by air and not by guns.
The fleet pulled back to refuel on the third. At the rendezvous, there was no sign of the tanker group. When the tankers did arrive, the cross swell was too heavy for any of it to begin. The fleet shifted to another area, and through the fourth and the fifth it took on fuel in a heavy swell with what Rawlings called numerous delays.
On the evening of the fifth, the time ran out. The two battleships left nearly fifty percent short of their full stowage, and the carriers had aviation fuel for two days of flying. Rawlings put his feelings about that into one sentence: I do not like battleships steaming about short of fuel. Then he took them back to the islands anyway.
On the sixth, a kamikaze’s wing tip struck the island of Illustrious, and the fleet’s own guns shot down one of its own Seafires. On the seventh, the bombers went back to crater runways the Japanese had repaired. That evening, word reached the fleet of the air strikes that had sunk the battleship Yamato. Rawlings said the news filled them with admiration and, at the same time, it must be admitted, with envy.
On the eighteenth of April, the American lieutenant commander in Indomitable sent up his own report on his hosts, and it mixes praise with complaint. On the part of the work he knew best, he was generous. British fighter direction compares favorably with that in the US fast carrier task forces, Rowe wrote. Their radio discipline, he added, was better than his own navy’s.
Then the other side: aircraft availability was woefully poor. The Seafire, the naval version of the Spitfire, was in his view not worth carrying in a carrier force. And he noticed the men’s fatigue. Fatigue, he wrote, showed much sooner in their carriers because of the lack of necessities, conveniences, and comforts compared with American ones.
The carrier admiral, Rear Admiral Sir Philip Vian, gave a warmer version of the same conversation in his own report, saying Rowe had told him their standard was as good as or better than that of the Fifth Fleet. Both versions survive, and nothing settles which was nearer to what Rowe said. Fraser would later put the background to that first strike in one careful line: that doubt as to our ability to operate in the Pacific manner was somewhat naturally in American minds. He never says whose doubt he meant, but the minutes of a conference held six months before the first sweep went off survive.
They come from Quebec, from the fourteenth of September 1944, when the British and American chiefs of staff sat down together. The British side said Churchill’s offer of a fleet for the Pacific had been no sooner made than accepted by the president. Admiral Ernest King, the American naval chief, said it was not his recollection that the president had agreed to that. Then came the sentence that has hung on King ever since.
He was not, the minutes say, prepared to accept a British fleet which he could not employ or support. King has carried most of the blame in the telling of this story, as the admiral who did not want the Royal Navy in his ocean. But the condition in those minutes is about support. Set beside it are the things Rawlings spent his first weeks writing down: the tankers that made nine knots and the rendezvous with nothing at it, the battleships sent back to the line half empty, the borrowed landing craft, the borrowed floats and fuses, and the oil taken on at Ulithi.
The United States Navy’s own history of its Pacific logistics states the arrangement in one line: that except for bulk petroleum products, it was not responsible for supplying Rawlings’s force. Rawlings put the shortfalls in writing himself. He called the resources of his own fleet train somewhat embryonic. He said the operations had revealed several flaws in our organization which diligence, time, and additional resources would remedy.
Fraser in his dispatch was blunter. His ships had kept the sea for stretches of up to a month at a time, and he reminded the Admiralty that similar American task groups were doing the same thing for twice as long. He also wrote that what settled the doubters in the end was simple. It was the evidence of American eyes that we could support ourselves logistically.
When the fleet went into Leyte to replenish at the end of April, the sailors given liberty could not get to the beer ashore. So Rawlings had the beer brought out to them, a bottle a man a day, which he reported proved immensely popular. His covering letter to Spruance went off on the ninth of May. It notes that it had been unusual in his generation for a British fleet of that size to stay at sea as long as this one had.
It says the liaison teams in every ship had lived up to their name in its best sense. Its last paragraph before the signature is about the rescue service, the same arrangement whose submarine had needed to ask her boss in March. “I have yet to find a more helpful and responsive attitude than that accorded to me by these American authorities responsible for the provision and movements of lifeguard submarines and aircraft,” Rawlings wrote. Then one more line.
“I am very grateful for their work. ”
