Sea Control - Sea Control 446 - Mastering the Art of Command with Trent Hone

Episode Date: July 20, 2023

Links1. Mastering the Art of Command – Admiral Chester W. Nimitz and Victory in the Pacific by Trent Hone, U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2022.  

Hey folks, it's Jared. Trent Hone is back with us today to discuss his latest book on Nimitz and the Art of Command in the Pacific War. This episode was edited and produced by Jonathan Selling. I'd like to pause here to highlight our local chapters, whether you're in South Korea, Egypt, Singapore, France, New York, India, or the Caribbean. Chances are there's a SimSec local chapter near you. You can find a full listing of local chapters and contact information on our website, simsec.org. So if you're interested, please reach out. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in SimSec Podcast Network, the Bilge Pumps.

You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. And with that, Kimber's Men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is the author of Mastering the Art of Command, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, and Victory in the Pacific, Trent Owens. Trent, welcome back. The listeners don't realize this, but you and I finished recording, you know, no less than five minutes ago, fighting in the dark with your co-editor, Vincent P. O'Hara.

So I'm not going to ask you to do your whole background again. They can catch it there. See Control 209. You and I record with Sebastian Goldstein about your book, Learning War. So you're familiar to me, familiar to our audience. As a reminder to listeners, all opinions are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. So Admiral Husband Kimmel, we'll jump right into the book here. Commander of the Pacific Fleet just prior to Pearl Harbor.

What was his plan to fight the Japanese in the event of war? Yeah, I like how you're starting with this with this question to sort of set stage here. Because the book is about Nimitz, but I do talk about Kimmel and his intentions to try to put Pearl Harbor and the substance of the attack in context. So it's almost got a very difficult challenge, right, because the forward deployment of the fleet to Pearl Harbor is a policy choice of President Roosevelt, right? It's there to deter Japanese aggression in the Western Pacific. Japan at the time is fighting a war with China. They had occupied some French territory in Indochina and they're threatening or, you know, they have the potential to threaten the Dutch East Indies because, you know, there's a war going on in Europe. Holland has been occupied. And so Roosevelt wants to try to basically say, look, Japan, a war is not worthwhile.

You would you would incur the wrath of the United States and our fleet here sits on your flank if you're going to advance south. and that's a you know that's a that's a problem that you'll have to that you'll have to deal with now himmel has to figure out how to make that threat real how to deter in a way that you know from his perspective is is going to influence japanese decision makers so he's thinking about how do i how do i draw them out and this is this is a different plan and what he would face when we think about sort of a more traditional war plan orange right war plan orange is an advance across the Pacific to eventually take Japanese-held territory and then eventually introduce a blockade of the home islands. But in his book about War Plan Orange, Edward Miller

talks about this challenge that Kimmel confronted and spends a chapter looking at what Kimmel's plan might have been. So basically, it's to move boldly into the Marshall Islands, which had become Japanese territory. They were mandated to Japan after World War I. Use that aggressive incursion to try to draw the Japanese fleet out, potentially using the aircraft carriers as bait to get the Japanese fleet into a battle line action in an area where Kimmel can use land-based planes, especially the patrol bombers. So these are PBYs that would have been based at Wake Island and Midway. So he's hoping to augment the strength of his relatively limited, compared to the Imperial Japanese Navy at the time, carrier forces with these land-based planes. And we can look back

and say, oh, well, using patrol bombers, that wouldn't make a whole lot of sense. Knowing what we know about how they performed early in World War II, particularly in Patrol Wing 10, which was part of the asiatic fleet and and got um well failed to to execute as they were expected to but the expectation was that these planes would be able to use you know the northern bomb site bomb uh from a moderately high level and drop a pattern of bombs that would fall like a battleship salvo and then damage uh ships in formation japanese carriers japanese battleships etc so he's got this aggressive plan together, and he feels like it will potentially draw out the Japanese fleet, or if not, cause them to think twice about how many forces they could send south

to occupy European possessions in the Western Pacific, and potentially have to, you know, have to deal with this threat of an incursion into the Central Pacific that Kimmel and the Pacific Fleet were offering. Now, one of the reasons this is important is because Kimmel has this attitude of, well, I'm going to be the aggressive. My fleet, my staff, my subordinates, we're going to go after the Japanese. And we'll have to do that because, you know, they're not going to want to fight us directly. They may invade the Philippines, they may capture Guam, but, you know, the Pacific Fleet is this very powerful force and they're probably not going to challenge us directly uh so when pearl harbor happens and it reveals that the japanese attitude

is quite different not only will we come after the pacific fleet but we will sink the majority of its battleships in a morning uh well you know kimmel's plan is shattered and his command is not just seriously damaged in terms of the material losses but the morale of him and many of his subordinates is seriously shaken by that attack. Yeah, we'll get into the staff's mindset and a couple of questions here, but how was Nimitz then selected to lead the Pacific Fleet after Pearl Harbor? Well, Nimitz is interesting because he had been offered the command of the fleet when Kimmel got it. So the prior fleet commander, Admiral James Richardson, he got into trouble with President Roosevelt because he didn't agree with his policy of forward deploying the fleet to

Pearl Harbor. He felt like it would be safer and more rational to put it on the West Coast. And he wasn't shy about vocalizing that opinion. And so he's not aligned with the policy of the civilian leadership of the commander in chief. So Roosevelt sought to relieve him. And in doing so was looking for an effective leader for the Pacific Fleet. And Nimitz was actually one of the officers who was considered. And I think one of the reasons he was considered is Nimitz had been head of the Bureau of Navigation at the time, which later became the Bureau of Personnel. So Nimitz is responsible for personnel assignments, knows the officers of the fleet quite well, has a sense of their strengths, their limitations, and is seeking out for them positions where they

can be most effective, both to advance their career and to further the Navy and the nation's interests. Roosevelt and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox had offered Nimitz command of the Pacific Fleet at that time. Nimitz declined because he felt he would have had to have been advanced over the heads of many other officers, and he felt that that would diminish his ability to lead them effectively. They might be resentful of how he had been leapfrogged into that position, And he didn't think that that would be good for him or good for the service as a whole. So he politely said no. Kimmel was also advanced ahead of many other officers, but didn't have the same reservations that Nimitz did. So it's interesting to think, you know, what would have happened if Nimitz had been in command at Pearl Harbor instead of Kimmel.

But anyway, after the attack, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox goes to Pearl Harbor very quickly, flies out, sees Kimmel and his staff in action in the days after the attack, comes back to Washington, lengthy conference with President Roosevelt and others. And, you know, Knox is convinced that Kimmel has to be relieved. He's not bearing the burden of command appropriately anymore. And Roosevelt and Knox agree that the other person on the list, you know, the other person that they had discussed, Nimitz, would be the right person for the job. So they picked him and sent him out there. So you mentioned the shattered morale. What state did Nimitz find the staff down upon his arrival at Pearl Harbor? And then what did he do to start restoring spirits? Yeah, this is notable in some post-war interviews that he gave, and of course, in another documentation that we have, he talks about the officers being in a state of shock when he arrives at Pearl Harbor. So they've been shocked, not just from the attack itself, because by the time he gets there, which is toward the end of December, it's around Christmas, there's still all kinds of debris and detritus in the harbor itself. So there's this physical aspect to the defeat that can be seen. But the mental aspect has gotten, if anything, even worse because there was an effort to relieve Wake Island. This had been initiated by Kimmel.

But then he departs, goes back to Washington. Commander of the fleet falls to an interim fleet commander, Vice Admiral William Pye. Pye is a bit more cautious than Kimmel was. And so after reviewing opportunities and options with his staff, because Japanese carrier planes had appeared over Wake Island, he felt like it was too dangerous to proceed with the relief expedition. And so there's a schism developing. There are officers like Pai who felt like this was the right decision. This was the costest decision. This made sure that none of the carriers which were in a position to relieve Wake had been sunk. And then there were others who thought that this was a missed opportunity, that there was a chance to inflict some damage on the Japanese carrier forces, and they were upset. So Nimitz has to begin to deal with this, not just morale problem, but this tension that is developing in the officer corps. So he does something unusual, and that is he decides to retain all the staff members.

You know, a new admiral coming into the Pacific Fleet traditionally would bring with him trusted advisors, you know, staff members that he knew that he was familiar with. Nimitz doesn't do any of that. Instead, he has a group conversation, but also a series of individual conversations with these officers and communicates to them implicitly by keeping them on the staff, but also explicitly in these conversations saying, you know, nope, I trust you. you're still valuable. You are not going to be tarnished by, by this defeat, you know, so long as, you know, let's move, let's move forward together and holds them there on the, on the staff. Some of them rotate out relatively quickly because, you know, they're captains and this is an opportunity for them to get a, a C command to secure a promotion to, to rear Admiral. But as much as possible, he tries to use the power that he now has, the responsibility that he holds to try to reinvigorate them, to try to convince them that not just a victory is possible,

but that by working as a team, they can achieve it more easily. How did Nimitz's leadership contribute to success then at the Battle of Midway? What came through most strongly to me, looking at all the various records, the plans, the details that we have is Midway, I like to think of Midway now as Nimitz's battle, and usually we don't think about it that way, because we look at it in terms of the mechanism of success, and who is leading that? Well, the commander of the carrier forces is Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, where Admiral Raymond Spruance is commanding two of the carriers, initially underneath Fletcher's direction but then independently once uh once fletcher's carrier is damaged carry yorktown

and so we think about them as being the the victors uh the architects uh at midway but really it's nimitz who puts it all together on on a number of different levels he's the one who decides that's where the pacific fleet is is going to fight so reacted very quickly to emerging intelligence and one of the things that i stressed in in the book because it was it was news to me it was a revelation uh back in 1934 nimitz had been commanding officer cruiser augusta cruiser augusta was the flagship of the asiatic fleet and at that that year the asiatic fleet monitored a japanese exercise and broke japanese codes to build a detailed order of battle and to keep track of of the japanese ships and and what they were doing now in 1934 japanese codes were

much less sophisticated than in 1942 so it was possible for you know just the code breaking group within the asiatic fleet to do that on their own a lot of that work was done on nimitz's ship so he knew the advantage that signals intelligence and code breaking could give him he had seen it in action is a younger officer. And so when the station hypo at Pearl Harbor begins to gain insight into Japanese plans and intentions, he's very quick to act on it. He doesn't need to be thoroughly convinced. So he prioritizes Midway, acts it full of aircraft so that it can effectively operate as an unsinkable aircraft carrier. He establishes a cordon of submarines around the island, or at least to the Northwest where the Japanese are expected to approach from.

and then positions the carriers in such a way and this uh john partial recently wrote a wonderful article about this in the naval war college review uh demonstrating the point luck where the where the carriers initially are is uh on a place that gives nimitz an option he stations them there so that if the japanese plans don't develop as anticipated the carriers could withdraw without being engaged. But if the plans developed as anticipated, they could move west and be ready to strike the Japanese along their line of advance, more or less as soon as they were sighted. And on the 2nd of June, once Nimitz became convinced that there would only be four Japanese carriers and that the plans for their attack on the island were developing as the intelligence

had predicted, he ordered Fletcher to move the carriers west. And so they were in position for the victory that develops on the 4th of June. And so one of the things that I think is really fascinating about Midway and about everything we know about it now is all the things that Nimitz did to architect it. In a recent, well, it's not recent because it was back when the Gray Book

was first digitized and made available. Craig Simons, who's written a wonderful book on Nimitz as well, Nimitz at War, gave a talk. and said something to the effect of, although Nimitz never led his fleet in battle, he was responsible for a lot of what happened in the Pacific. And I think with Midway, we see a potential counterpoint to that

because even though Nimitz isn't at sea, he knew, and we know this from his communications, he knew that modern fleet command needed to be exercised from shore where you had access to communication technologies, radio interception, and all these other things in order to be able to do it effectively. So he commanded the fleet, the Pacific Fleet at Midway,

and he acted that way. And I think the victory is one that he honed, but in his typical way, he was very content to allow others to receive the accolades. He could stand in the background and allow the victory to flourish. And he knew and other people knew what he had done.

The Midway unfolds over a couple of days, really, But now we're going to talk about Guadalcanal, which is a months-long campaign with multiple battles occurring with various degrees of success and failure. How did Guadalcanal test Nimitz's leadership style, and how did he adapt as that campaign unfolded? Yeah, Guadalcanal is very different. It's a months-long slog, as you said. And it's really a complex challenge that Nimitz has. And you can argue, and I think people have argued, even at the time, right, the nickname for Operation Watchtower, which was what triggered the assault on Guadalcanal and Tulagi, was Operation Shoestring, which is intended to reflect the fact that the logistical infrastructure to support the campaign that was envisioned didn't really exist yet. And so the Pacific Fleet isn't wholly ready, at least not as ready as they would like to be.

Yet they are ordered by the commander in chief, Admiral Ernest King, to fight at that time to take the island. And so there aren't there isn't the necessary supplies and infrastructure. The Pacific Fleet also lacks some of the forces that it's really going to need. And it fights in a way that is revealed to be lacking in certain respects, because it goes in, Guadalcanal is really where a lot of pre-war assumptions, not so much about carrier combat, some of those are getting revealed to be problematic in Battles of Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway, which proceeded, but assumptions about how to fight on the surface, especially at night, begin to be exposed at Guadalcanal. Another challenge that Nimitz has is it's really close to the boundary of two theaters. They have to actually shift the theater boundaries to allow the operation to be executed to ensure that all of Guadalcanal is within Nimitz's Pacific Ocean areas and within Pacific Ocean areas in the South Pacific area. But it butts up against General Douglas MacArthur's Southwest Pacific area. And he's fighting the Japanese in New Guinea at the same time, trying to ensure that their overland advance to Port Moresby is unsuccessful.

But he's very fearful of a naval operation that the Japanese will endeavor to land again and turn his flank. And so he is fairly vocal about asking for naval support to reduce that that threat. And he's not very optimistic about the outcome at Guadalcanal, General MacArthur, and neither is Nimitz's chief subordinate in the area, Vice Admiral Robert Gormley, who's commander of the South Pacific area. So there are all these difficulties, and it turns into this grinding logistical struggle. But again, the logistical infrastructure isn't really there just to support it. Nimitz becomes concerned, and he takes a step that he would often do, which is to go and see, see what it is like for himself. So toward the end of September 1942, the landings initially took place at the beginning of August. So this is some number of weeks later, but he's heard enough about how things are going that he wants to visit. Goes down to Nomea, visits Gormley's headquarters, representatives from MacArthur's command join him there.

Then Nimitz flies on to Guadalcanal, and he's impressed by his visit there, because commanding the defenders of the island is Marine Major General Alexander Vandegrift, commander of the first marine division and nimitz is convinced by vandergrift and and his staff that they can hold so long as they receive the proper support so nimitz flies back to leah another conference with with gormley discusses how you know how gormley and his command have to provide the support and prods gormley to not just support logistically but to contest japanese incursions into the waters around the island to raid with his his carrier forces up into the to the northern solomons and he also has to convince macarthur staff that positioning the bulk of the pacific

fleet's fighting forces in and around wattle canal or that area of the south pacific is the right thing to do because again they're asking for reinforcement in order to deal with the potential of a japanese amphibious operation and nimitz's you know comment to them is if we stop them at the corner, thinking about the southern tip of the Solomon Island chain as sort of the corner, the entry point into the Coral Sea, who stopped them at the corner, then, you know, that's what matters. So that's why the fleet is here. And however, despite this prodding and this pressure, Gormley remains relatively pessimistic. And this can be seen in the messages that he sends, Although he does initiate a number of important offensive operations, he sends soldiers from the U.S. Army to Guadalcanal to reinforce Vandegrift's command.

But as a new Japanese offensive is developing in October, Gormley is sending messages, as we're saying, he doesn't have the forces that he needs. He's not sure he's going to be able to resist the pressure that's going to fall upon him and his command. And so Nimitz consults with his staff, all the staff members who went with Nimitz to see Guadalcanal and Gormley at Nemea vote in favor of relieving Gormley. And so Nimitz is, I think, you know, he talks about, I think it's anguished consideration was how he put it. He decides to relieve Cornley. William F. Halsey is on his way to the South Pacific to take command of the carrier forces. But Nimitz decides to relieve, to put Halsey in command of the South Pacific area as a whole. And so when Halsey shows up, he talks about the hot potato that anybody's ever handed him. And he has to take control of the South Pacific area in the midst or right before the Japanese offensive that is unleashed in October.

But he succeeds and his forces succeed in thwarting it. And then Halsey turns back another attempt in November. And through the inspiring leadership of the forces in that area and effective collaboration with the army from a logistical perspective, wholly ensures that the United States and its allies triumph in the campaign. I want to divert from our script here to just ask one follow-up question that I thought of as you were describing. We always talk about operations shoestrings. Do you think that is helpful to the narrative, to the repetition of the operations shoestring piece? Because I understand that the U.S. is kind of at the end of a logistical supply line here. We're struggling to push

everything that the Marines and the soldiers on the ground need forward. On the other hand, I don't think the Japanese have it any better. Everything that you read about the Battle of Guadalcanal is that the Japanese soldiers who came off Guadalcanal at the end of it were skeletons. They were just surviving on handfuls of rice, basically. So Operation Shoestring sort of gives this implication that the U.S. is dramatically outnumbered or facing some sort of insurmountable odds because of a logistical challenge when in reality after the initial

landing and the first battle or two the marines outnumber the japanese something like six to one on the island and then the japanese slowly filter their forces in but again really with no way to supply them to the point where they're running destroyers down the slot with fuel and personnel and sort of floating barrels ashore to supply their forces any thoughts yeah yeah uh joey Turner has written a nice study of logistics. It's called Feeding Victory. He's got a whole chapter on the Guadalcanal campaign. And I was really excited when I saw it because it makes similar points to what you've just made. I mean, yes, the U.S. servicemen who were involved called it Operation Shoestring. And I think this is an acknowledgment of the fact that

the Navy was not as prepared as it would have liked to have been. But the Navy was better prepared, as you say, to fight at this very distant location than the Japanese were. Much more capable about reinforcing the island, much more capable about ensuring that its defenders had food, had ammunition, had medicine. And the Japanese suffer from all this. They called it Starvation Island for a reason, because the soldiers there, the Japanese soldiers there, starve. They don't have enough to eat, particularly toward the end of the campaign. They're in really bad shape and and the the casualties that they incur are significantly greater from uh fatigue and disease than from the actual fighting uh with with u.s servicemen so i think that's a good point

and i do think that that was part of the calculus i think one of the things that i mean i mean certainly we we know from the conversations that they were having before the operation that there was an expectation that they would be able to advance through the solomons you know northwest through the solomons more rapidly than they actually could but i think also part of the logic in admiral king's head was this is going to be a fight at at the end of these vast distances at these vast lines of communication and we are more practiced at providing material over distances like this than the japanese are and i don't know how much of that was based on you know rational calculation and how much of it was based on uh sort of assumptions and hunch but i do think that

that was a factor yeah i just think about as well that the demands for oil just for the vessels involved there which becomes critical for the japanese uh to the point you get further into the war and they're having to make decisions about individual ships getting underway and Their battleships are basically just tied up to a pier because they can't get them underway. But we'll set that all aside. That's a whole other podcast. That's a whole other podcast, yes. But what is a, quote-unquote, complexity leadership, and how did Nimitz and his staff practice it during the Central Pacific Offensive?

Yeah, complexity is a theme that I try to weave through. It was a major part of my prior book, Learning War, which looked at the evolution of tactics and doctrine in the U.S. Navy. and in here I was trying to think about it in terms of you know what is what does leadership mean and can we apply a complexity lens to that I was building off of thoughts that others had brought to it but I thought it was very useful to think about leadership not as something that an individual does but as a environment or a set of relationships that an individual helps to trigger. So a lot of times we'll think of, you know, someone who is a superior in a military organization, you know, they've got a higher rank, they're a general or admiral. Okay. Well,

you know, they're, they're a leader and they have that positional authority and that it can execute by formulating plans and orders and, you know, off they go. But I think leadership is, it's much more nuanced than that. And I expect, you know, whether they've been in the, in the services or not many listeners will be able to think back of times where they have experienced a leader who has created an environment you know allowed the kinds of sort of thoughtful consideration and dialogue to decide what to do but then not only that in terms of execution you know some leaders will be very directive and sort of tell you with the narrow constraints what to do others will give you more freedom of action which can inspire an individual is it certainly it has

inspired me in my career to to you bring my creativity to it you know if i'm given sort of a generalized outcome to try to achieve ah well now i can i can think about how to do that and and rather than sort of getting a directive a very constraining order maybe i will work with my superior and we'll have we'll have a dialogue i'll bounce my ideas off them they'll share some of the advice or the experience they have or the knowledge that they have from their position and we create uh this environment that is more conducive not just to my freedom of action but to allowing new ideas to come to the fore that we can then that we can then capitalize on and i think this is a good way to think about uh leadership to think about how individuals and positions of

authority can can foster this kind of creativity and inspire this kind of collective action because it's not just among you know one subordinate but if you can do it within a group right you can sort of foster this team environment for uh it could be aligned and rapid uh decision making and i think that this is something that nimitz proved very good at throughout the war but i think is extremely effective when it comes time to to execute the central pacific offensive because after things stabilize and the guadalcanal campaign halsey brings that to to a victory he begins to collaborate with macarthur to advance up the solomons as originally conceived macarthur continues to make advances in new guinea things begin to stabilize in the north pacific so nimitz

can turn his attention to what he and admiral king and others see as as the most effective avenue toward bringing the war to Japan itself, the islands of Japan, not just the outlying outposts that they've seized. And that is using the maneuverability of the fleet to advance quickly over the wide waters of the Central Pacific. And so Nimitz has to think about how to do that.

And he has to do that with his staff and with his subordinates. And so he works with them to craft something called the Granite Campaign Plan, which they use to govern the offensive. And I think it's best understood as a series of options. Nimitz has to provide the Joint Chiefs of Staff and their planners a lot of detail. These are the operations we want to execute.

So these are the forces that we need. These are the supplies that we need. This is what you have to do for us in order to execute these various things. They have to provide some detail. But then there can be a negotiation about what operation gets executed and when and in what priority. And what they do with granite is basically say, here's a series of options.

These are the things we could be doing in the Central Pacific, but we're going to hold off on executing any of these until the time is right. And that means in some of these operations, we might not have to execute. You know, if we don't have to seize truck, which it turns out they didn't have to seize truck,

the large Japanese base in the Central Pacific, it can be bypassed. And so it facilitates this maneuverist approach short, the leapfrogging strategy, as we commonly call it. And that is something that emerged with Nimitz and his staff. The other thing that Nimitz does is he maintains a very close and collaborative relationship with his initial Central Pacific Force commander, which is Vice Admiral Raymond Spruance. Spruance had come to Nimitz's staff after the victory at Midway. They developed a very close, collaborative relationship, and they had a shared understanding of how to execute

the offensive. And so Nimitz thought, well, I can remain in command of the Central Pacific, or I will delegate execution of these operations to Sperlence. But through this shared understanding that we have, and through my ability to share information and messages with him, we'll be able to rapidly turn any tactical success to an operational or strategic achievement. And you can see that with how rapidly the central pacific offensive unfolds uh and the strategic success of it and then a final question can you compare halsey's performance at late golf with sort of everything you you described to us about nimitz's approach yeah well i feel like this is a little bit of a little bit of a landmine um you know because it gets loaded like no promises that

It's not a loaded question. There's a lot of people with a lot of thoughts about Halsey. You know, we war game Leyte Golf with my German students. And I briefed them before we did it about what happened in the Battle of Leyte Golf and Halsey and what Halsey did. And they played through the game and the students did exactly, I'd say exactly what Halsey did. They lost track of the Japanese center force in sort of the inner archipelagic waters of the Philippines. Like they're like, oh, well, they've gone away and they left their force sitting there and they lost two divisions. And so there's a lot of I get it.

Halsey is a complex figure. And I think it's sometimes treated unfairly as like he's acting on information that he has. He's not given critical pieces of information at some points. But no, I'll turn it over to you. you're the actual historian i'm just a guy who played a game once oh well i mean that game sounds fascinating thank you for sharing that that that detail uh but i have i have been critical of halsey's decision making i i wrote a piece on it for uh i think it's lydia 75 edited by thomas cutler i have a chapter in there which is specifically about that so uh just to review

so everyone's sort of on the same page you know the japanese are coming at late in three in three groups. There's a northern and southern Pinscher intended to converge on Ledy Gulf. The northern Pinscher is what we typically call the center force. The southern Pinscher, the southern force has destroyed the Battle of Surigao Strait, and that

center force, or the northern Pinscher, appeared to have turned back, well, it did turn back, after a repeated air attack in the Subian Sea. And then the third force, the northern force, which is really a carrier decoy, is sighted by Halsey's groups, and he resolves to pursue it with the entirety of the Third Fleet, which is

really, at this point, Task Force 38, because a lot of the other pieces of the Third Fleet are now part of the Seventh Fleet, on loan to Admiral Kincaid and General MacArthur. Now, I'm critical of Halsey's decision to take the Third Fleet, or the entirety of Task Force 38 North, to pursue the Japanese because the information available to make, or the information was available to make a better decision. And a better decision isn't made. And I think that is the piece to be critical about. And so to refresh, the people who know that the Japanese center force has turned around include Vice Admiral Willis Lee, who would have commanded Task Force 34, which Halsey had ordered a preparatory issue, not an execution order to form. He knows the Japanese to turn around and

he tries to signal Halsey to suggest, you know, to do something different and is evidently ignored because the signal never really makes it to Halsey. Halsey has retired. Halsey is tired and his staff isn't informing him. Rear Admiral Gerald Bogan, who's commanding one of the carrier task groups, makes a similar suggestion. Hey, let's leave Task Force 34 here. We can cover it with my carrier group. The rest of you can dash north and deal with this new Japanese force that has been sighted. And Arlie Burke, a captain at the time, who's chief of staff to Vice Admiral Mark Mitchell, commanding Task Force 38, Burke wants to do something similar. So these suggestions, the ideas are there. And turning it back to this complexity of leadership idea, Halsey hasn't

created the kind of environment where these ideas can come forward far enough to be acted upon. And one of the reasons is that his staff doesn't want to wake him to deal with this and also doesn't feel comfortable enough making this kind of decision on their own, right? Okay, maybe the admiral does need to rest, right? We do need sleep. But has he created an environment where subordinates can weigh all this information, make a decision, and then inform him afterwards And he'll say, OK, you know, walk me through it. Why is this the right decision? How did how did how did we get there? It didn't happen. And so the northern flank of the amphibious forces is left exposed. And we get the tense battle off Samar, the last stand of the tin can sailors, as James Hornfisher called it, which, you know, is full of noble American heroics. But it could a better outcome have been achieved. And I think I think so, because Halsey was focused on on concentrating and not using the capabilities of his forces to the to the fullest. He had enough fighting strength to decouple his forces to leave Task Force 34 and a covering carrier group off Samar.

and he could have gone north with the other carrier groups and attacked both Japanese forces but he wasn't he wasn't able to do so and what is interesting in the historical record is that Nimitz and King acknowledge that Halsey's staff has these kinds of problems they see this issue and so they are they talk about it in a conference that they have after the fact and essentially it's What are we going to do about it? How do we get Halsey a better environment for decision-making? And so I think, you know, King, or sorry, Nimitz's leadership is quite different.

And we see a valuable contrast here with Halsey and Halsey's performance at Lady Golf. Well, unfortunately, that's all that we have time for. I'd like to thank my guest, Trent Hone. Trent, I just asked you this 25 minutes ago. I might ask again for this one, though. So where can we find you online and what are you working on next? Yeah, the Twitter is a decent place to find me.

I think you'll probably put my Twitter handle out there. I have a website, which is just TrentHone.com. I don't keep it as up to date as I probably should, but it does have the talks that I'm giving up there. It has links to books and everything else. I'm in a variety of different Naval Institute events. I think some of those are upcoming later this year. And the next thing that I'm working on is a book about Admiral King and different leadership positions that he held through his career, trying to understand what was it like to be a U.S. Navy officer in the early 20th century. So sort of look at the history of the officer corps through King's eyes.

And then also, how did he use everything that he learned as commander in chief and as a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in World War II? Well, I look forward to that and to talking with you about when it comes out. I think you want to talk about strong personality contrast, the way King is sort of notorious. What's the opposite of a vuncular? He's that. i look forward to reading uh everything everything that you have about him and then having a compare contrast discussion about nimitz but thank you again for joining us to listeners thanks for tuning in we'll see you next time We'll be right back. I don't believe all my bullies and all my bullies and all my bullies and more now.