In the autumn of 1944, Radio Tokyo announced to the Japanese people that the United States Third Fleet had been wiped from the sea. Japanese newspapers printed the score: American carriers sunk by the handful, battleships and cruisers sent to the bottom off Formosa. The claims ran as high as eleven carriers destroyed, and celebrations swept Japan. The fleet that had supposedly been annihilated was still there, untouched, steaming straight toward the Japanese home islands.
The admiral who commanded it heard the broadcasts and sent a single message back to his superiors: his sunken and damaged ships, he reported, had been salvaged and were now retiring at high speed toward the enemy. That admiral was William Frederick Halsey. His own country’s newspapers called him Bull, a name he disliked and one that only strangers used. The men who served under him simply loved the fight in him.
He had graduated from the Naval Academy in 1904, the same year the man who would one day plan Japan’s naval war graduated from his own. For four decades he had been a destroyer sailor, then a late convert to the cockpit, and everything in him ran toward boldness rather than caution. He was known through the fleet as a plain, blunt man who spoke like the sailors he led and shared their scorn for comfort. He would be blamed, and blamed fairly, for one of the most debated decisions in the history of the United States Navy.
He would lose more ships to a single storm than many admirals lost to the enemy in years of war. And yet the Imperial Japanese Navy came to treat him as the most dangerous commander the Americans had. When Japan gambled everything on its last great naval battle, it built the entire plan around one assumption about how this one man would behave. At the close of 1941, the United States Navy in the Pacific was staggering.
Pearl Harbor lay wrecked, the battle line resting in the mud of its own harbor. The country wanted a reply, and none seemed possible. Halsey was already an old man by the standards of the cockpit. He had earned his aviator’s wings in 1935 at the age of fifty-two, the oldest man ever to qualify as a naval aviator, insisting on flying the aircraft himself rather than taking the shortcut of an observer’s course.
Now he commanded the carrier Enterprise, and when he looked out at the ruin of Pearl Harbor from her bridge, he made a promise that spread through the fleet: before they were through, he said, the Japanese language would be spoken only in hell. In the first weeks of 1942, while most of the Navy was still bracing for the next blow, Halsey went looking for the enemy. On February 1, his task force struck the Marshall and Gilbert Islands, the first American offensive blow of the Pacific War. Frank Jack Fletcher hit the southern atolls while Halsey drove Enterprise in among the northern ones, launching strikes and then running before the Japanese could gather a reply.
On February 24 he raided Wake Island. On March 4 he pushed all the way to Marcus Island, within roughly a thousand miles of Tokyo, hit it, and turned for home. The physical damage was modest, but that was never the point. Halsey was teaching a demoralized fleet that the enemy could be reached, and teaching the enemy that no island was truly safe.
Each raid was a gamble. After Pearl Harbor, the carriers were almost the only offensive weapon the United States had left in the Pacific, and Halsey was risking one of them every time he went hunting. He judged the risk worth taking because a fleet that never struck could never win. Then came the raid that made his name.
In April 1942, Halsey was handed the most audacious plan of the early war. The carrier Hornet would carry sixteen Army bombers, twin-engine machines never designed to lift off from a ship, and deliver them close enough to strike Tokyo. Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle would lead the flyers. Halsey, in Enterprise, would guard the whole force and command it at sea.
The bombers could not land back aboard; they would fly on to China after the strike. The plan depended on getting within roughly four hundred miles of Japan before launching. On the morning of April 18, still more than six hundred miles out, the force ran into a line of Japanese picket boats. One got a contact report out before it was sunk.
Halsey did not hesitate over his irreplaceable carriers. He ordered the bombers off early, far from where anyone had planned, and signaled Doolittle and his gallant command: Good luck and God bless them. All sixteen aircraft clawed off the pitching deck. Launching so far out meant the flyers would reach China in the dark and nearly out of fuel, and almost every one of the sixteen aircraft was lost in crash landings once its work was done.
Halsey knew that when he gave the order, and he gave it anyway, because the alternative was to risk the carriers the whole Pacific War depended on. The bombers reached Tokyo and other cities and stunned a nation that had believed itself beyond reach. The bombs did little material harm, and that was never where the power of the raid lay. It struck instead at a promise the Japanese high command had made to its own people: that the home islands could never be touched.
Stung by that humiliation, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto forced through his plan to draw the American carriers into a decisive battle far to the east at a small atoll called Midway. The cost of Halsey’s own part was real. Of the eighty airmen, three were killed, eight captured, and several of the prisoners later executed. Within weeks, Halsey himself was struck down, not by the enemy but by a savage skin ailment brought on by relentless stress.
He had lost around twenty pounds and could no longer stand the strain of command. When the decisive battle he had helped provoke was fought at Midway that June, Halsey was lying in a hospital bed. He called it the sharpest disappointment of his career. But before he went to that bed, he did one last thing that mattered: he recommended that a quiet, methodical rear admiral named Raymond Spruance take his place.
Spruance destroyed four Japanese carriers at Midway and turned the war in the Pacific. Halsey’s eye for the right man had shaped a victory he was too sick to share. By October 1942, those habits were needed more than ever. The campaign for Guadalcanal had turned into a grinding nightmare.
The Marines ashore were exhausted and short of everything. The waters around the island had swallowed so many warships from both sides that sailors already called the anchorage Iron Bottom Sound. Almost every night Japanese warships ran down the channel the men called the Slot, landing fresh troops and shelling the Marines, a routine so regular the Americans named it the Tokyo Express. Whoever held the island’s single airstrip, Henderson Field, controlled the sky over the Southern Solomons.
The island also guarded the sealanes toward Australia, and its loss would have reopened them to the enemy. By that autumn it was still an open question whether the Americans could hold on at all. The American commander in the South Pacific, Vice Admiral Robert Ghormley, had grown pessimistic and worn down, and Admiral Nimitz decided the theater needed a fighter. On October 18, 1942, the order went out: Halsey would take over as commander of the entire South Pacific.
He later said it was the hottest potato anyone had ever handed him. The effect on the men was electric. Word ran through the foxholes on Guadalcanal that Bull Halsey was in charge now, and morale lifted overnight. Halsey was tested within days.
On October 26, a powerful Japanese carrier force came south to finish the campaign. Halsey’s answer to his commanders was three words: attack, repeat, attack. The Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands that followed was on the surface an American defeat. The carrier Hornet, the same ship that had launched the Tokyo raid, was sunk.
Enterprise was damaged. But the Japanese carriers were mauled, their irreplaceable air crews cut down, and the land offensive they were meant to support collapsed. Henderson Field held. The Japanese could not replace the trained carrier crews they burned up that day, while American shipyards and flight schools were only beginning to reach full stride.
Halsey had traded a carrier for the enemy’s momentum, and in the hard arithmetic of that autumn, it was a trade worth making. Then came the decision that defined his time in the South Pacific. In mid-November, the Japanese moved to smash Henderson Field once and for all, sending battleships to bombard it into rubble and a convoy of troops to overwhelm what was left. The first night of the naval battle on November 13 was a pointblank brawl in the dark, fought so close that ships fired across a few hundred yards of water.
It killed two American admirals, Daniel Callaghan and Norman Scott, in the same action and left ships burning across the sound. But it also broke up the first bombardment and left a Japanese battleship crippled and doomed. Halsey, told that Japanese battleships were still coming, made a call more cautious men would never have made. He detached his own fast battleships, Washington and South Dakota, from the protective screen of his last operational carrier and sent them into the narrow, island-choked waters of Iron Bottom Sound to fight at night under Rear Admiral Willis Lee.
On the night of November 14–15, Lee’s two battleships met a Japanese force built around the battleship Kirishima. It became the first battleship-against-battleship duel of the Pacific War. It nearly went wrong. South Dakota suffered an electrical failure that knocked out her radar and communications, and she took a beating in the darkness.
All four American destroyers in the van were sunk or knocked out of the fight. But Washington, unseen, tracked the enemy flagship on radar and opened fire at close range. In a matter of minutes she struck Kirishima with at least nine heavy shells and dozens of smaller ones and tore the Japanese battleship apart. It was one of the first times in history a battleship had been beaten in the dark by an enemy it could see only as a glow on a radar screen.
Kirishima was scuttled before dawn. The bombardment never came. The troop convoy was wrecked. It was a costly victory, paid for in destroyers and men, but it was the turning point of the entire Guadalcanal campaign.
In the weeks that followed, Halsey was raised to full admiral. By February 1943, the Japanese slipped away from Guadalcanal for good, and the long American road across the Pacific had found its starting line. By 1944, Halsey commanded the Third Fleet, the most powerful naval force yet assembled in the Pacific. It gathered more than a dozen fast carriers and hundreds of aircraft and ranged across the Western Pacific almost at will, striking airfields from the Philippines to Formosa and destroying Japanese aircraft by the hundreds.
He and Spruance took turns leading essentially the same fast carriers, one fighting while the other planned, and the shifting name of the fleet confused Japanese intelligence about how many fleets the Americans even had. That September, after his carriers met surprisingly weak resistance over the Philippines, Halsey urged his superiors to throw out the cautious timetable and invade the island of Leyte far ahead of schedule. They agreed within days, and the invasion was moved up by months. It was aggressive, it was correct, and it set the stage for the largest naval battle in history.
The Japanese plan for the defense of Leyte was desperate and clever. It was built quite deliberately around Halsey’s own aggression. A force of aircraft carriers under Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa would sail down from the north as bait. These carriers had almost no aircraft left worth the name.
Their only job was to be seen and to tempt the aggressive American admiral into charging after them. While Halsey chased the decoy, a powerful surface force under Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita would slip through the center and fall upon the vulnerable invasion shipping. The plan assumed it knew exactly how Halsey would react. That was its cleverness, and that was its gamble.
On October 24, Halsey’s aircraft found Kurita’s center force in the Sibuyan Sea and hammered it, sinking the giant battleship Musashi, one of the two largest warships ever built. Kurita appeared to turn back. Then late that day, scouts found Ozawa’s carriers to the north. This was the moment the whole battle turned on.
Halsey saw carriers, and to a carrier admiral, the enemy’s carriers were the target that mattered above all others. He gathered his entire fleet and raced north to destroy them. In doing so, he left the San Bernardino Strait, the back door to the invasion beaches, completely unguarded. He believed Kurita was beaten and retreating.
Kurita was not. There was a deeper flaw beneath the decision, and it was not his alone. No single officer commanded the whole battle. Halsey and his Third Fleet answered to Admiral Nimitz far away in Hawaii.
The Seventh Fleet, the force actually guarding the invasion beaches, answered to General Douglas MacArthur. The two fleets shared no common commander at the scene, and each assumed the other was watching the strait. When Halsey went north, the admiral guarding the landings believed a force of battleships had been left behind to hold the door. None had been.
The gap between two separate commands became the gap the Japanese sailed straight through. What followed the next morning was two battles at once. Far to the north off Cape Engaño, Halsey got his triumph. His aircraft flew more than five hundred sorties and sank all four of Ozawa’s carriers, including Zuikaku, the last surviving carrier from the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Japan’s carrier force, the weapon that had begun the war in the Pacific, was destroyed as a fighting arm forever. It was a crushing and complete victory. And far to the south off the island of Samar, the gamble came due. Kurita’s surface force, battleships and heavy cruisers, came through the strait Halsey had left open and fell upon a tiny group of American escort carriers and their thin screen of destroyers.
These were small, slow, lightly armed ships, never meant to face battleships. Kurita’s flagship was Yamato, the most powerful battleship ever built, and its enormous guns opened on vessels that could not have stopped a single one of them. What they did next became one of the most heroic last stands in American naval history. The destroyers charged.
They laid smoke. They fired torpedoes. They attacked ships many times their size until they were overwhelmed. The escort carriers Gambier Bay and St.
Lo were lost, along with the destroyers Hoel and Johnston and the destroyer escort Samuel B. Roberts. Commander Ernest Evans, who drove Johnston straight at a wall of enemy steel, was killed and later awarded the Medal of Honor. But the fury of that resistance and the loss of several of his own heavy cruisers convinced Kurita that he was facing far more than he was.
He lost his nerve, turned, and retreated back through the strait. The invasion was saved by the men who refused to run, not by the fleet that had gone north. As the crisis broke, a message reached Halsey from Admiral Nimitz. It asked where Task Force 34, his battleships, actually was.
Attached to the end of the message, as meaningless padding meant to confuse enemy codebreakers, were three words that a communications officer failed to strip away: the world wonders. Halsey read it as a public insult, a slap delivered in front of his own staff, and for a moment he was blind with anger. His chief of staff had to take him by the arm before he mastered himself. Then he turned his battleships south.
By the time they arrived, Kurita was long gone. Halsey had won the battle he chose to fight and nearly lost the one he left behind. Taken as a whole, Leyte Gulf was the largest naval battle ever fought and a decisive American victory that broke the back of the Japanese Navy. With little fleet left to send against the Americans, Japan turned more and more from that month on to the suicide aircraft, the kamikaze.
But the open strait stayed with Halsey for the rest of his life, and it remains the one decision from that battle he admitted he regretted. The sea was not finished with him. That December, off the Philippines, Halsey’s fleet steamed into a typhoon his weather picture had badly underestimated. The storm was a monster.
Three destroyers, Hull, Monaghan, and Spence, rolled over and sank with almost all hands. Close to eight hundred men were lost, more than in some pitched battles, and dozens of ships and aircraft were damaged. A court of inquiry placed primary responsibility on Halsey, yet found his errors came from a determination to keep his fleet in the fight rather than from negligence. He kept his command.
A second typhoon battered his fleet the following summer and damaged still more ships, and again he kept his flag. His popularity and the trust of his superiors carried him through. The Japanese had built their entire Leyte plan around the certainty that Halsey would charge after a decoy. They were right.
He did. And that reveals something the propaganda broadcasts never could. The enemy did not fear Halsey because he was flawless. They feared him because he was relentless in the one way that mattered most in war: he would always come forward.
Ozawa, the admiral sent to lure him north, said it plainly after the surrender. He admitted he had little confidence in serving as a lure, but there was no other way than to try. The Japanese had studied their opponent and concluded that the surest thing on the whole ocean was that this American would attack. That was the paradox of William Halsey.
The same instinct that left a strait open was the instinct that struck at Tokyo when a beaten country needed hope, steadied a collapsing front at Guadalcanal, and sent battleships into black and narrow water because the moment demanded it. His faults were the shadow cast by his greatest strength, and his enemies grasped that truth more clearly than many of his critics. When the war ended, he stood on the deck of the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay as Japan signed the surrender, and he was raised to the five-star rank of Fleet Admiral, one of only four men in American history to wear it.
The Navy that had once wondered how to answer Pearl Harbor had found its answer early, in an aging aviator who had never learned how to wait.
