Sea Control - Sea Control: 607 Wielding the Trident

Episode Date: June 27, 2026

Wielding the Trident Andrew Blackley

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 Andrew Blackley, and we're going to discuss his book, Wielding the Trident, Admiral Raymond's Spirits, and America's Victory in the Pacific. Andrew, welcome aboard, and would you mind telling the listeners a little bit about yourself? Sure, Jonathan, thank you very much. So, yeah, I am a retired civil engineer. I had a 40-year career here in the Cleveland metropolitan area as an engineer.

But I've had a lifelong interest in military history. In 2008, I got a master's in military history from Norwich University through their distance learning program. Being a full-time engineer, I didn't have any other way of possibly doing that. So that worked out extremely well for me. And I really started getting serious into writing naval history through doing papers with the McMullen Naval History Symposium at Annapolis. And then attending the Society for Military History conferences there.

I met up with the historian John Kuhn, who became sort of a mentor for me. And he encouraged me to write a book proposal for a book on Admiral Spruance. So Admiral Raymond A. Spruance. The sort of the definitive biography of Spruance was written by Commander Thomas Buell, published in 1974, The Quiet Warrior. So it's been more than 50 years since there's been a new biography of Spruance. And in the intervening years, there's been a lot of new work done on campaigns in the Pacific War, in particular by people like Jonathan Partial and John Lundstrom and Trent Hone and many others,

looking at campaigns, at other personalities, other commanders, and so on. So I think with the encouragement of John Kuhn, I put together a book proposal for a new biography of Spruance for the Naval Institute Press. And I began working on this in 2022, the tail end of the COVID era, which made it difficult to get into. Many of the archives were closed, but fortunately, I was able to get access to the archives at the Naval War College and also did research at the Nimitz Library at Annapolis. And so that was a big help in getting me started on this biography. So what I've tried to do is to go back and using Buell's notes and papers that he kept that went to the Naval War College, I was able then to use that as the basis for my work as well.

But I tried to bring into it new aspects, like I said, of recent historical work, new information, new research, things that I've dug up as well in my research to give a slightly different take on Spruance. I think we both have come to the conclusion that Spruance was an exceptional naval commander. um he has been described by uh others as a um as a military genius and uh that's something that i i bring out in in the first chapter of my book which i agree with i think he had that ability to uh wayne hughes the famous um writer of uh the tactical fleet tactics uh once said that that Spruance had the ability to size up a situation 360 degrees. And, and he was an exceptional commander. And I think anyone who studied his, his career would, would agree with that.

So the format of the book basically follows his career starting with his career as a junior officer learning by steps to what it takes to be a leader. So the first 20 years of his career was spent in commands as a, destroyer commander first in the Philippines and then later on under William F. Halsey this is after the First World War

with the relocated Pacific Fleet and operating out of Coronado in San Diego this is in the early 1920s from there he went to some engineering billets and he was afraid

that he was going to be shoehorned or I should say pigeonholed into an engineering career, which he didn't want to have. He wanted to become a line officer. And so at the urging of his boss at the time, he applied to the Naval War College and was accepted. And he started there in the class of 1926. And so and through the interwar period, he spent up to eight years total as both a student and an instructor at the Naval War College. And this gave him a solid background in naval warfare. When he was a student at the Naval War College, one of his assignments was to evaluate how the Japanese defeated the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. He did a great deal of analysis on that. He also looked at the ability of the Japanese to wage a war against the United States. And this is kind of interesting thing that they concluded that the Japanese would only would be, they would not have the capability of waging a global war against the United States.

So that's something that he incorporated early on. But he also, I think, incorporated a deep respect for the Japanese as excellent tacticians and an intelligent enemy that could not be written off easily. So during the 1920s, he had spells as a staff officer. In the early 1930s, he was the executive officer of the battleship USS Mississippi. Again, he was stepping up in higher levels of command authority, sort of following the traditional black shoe naval officer career path towards commanding a battleship, which he would eventually do. He was a staff officer, again, for the destroyer forces for the Pacific Fleet in the 1930s. He participated when he was with Mississippi, both as an executive officer and later on as commander of Mississippi. He became commander of that battleship in 1938, participating in the fleet exercises that took place mostly on either side of the Panama Canal and in the Caribbean.

And there he had a front row seat to the lessons that were being learned in the application of, especially in aircraft and carriers to naval warfare. And even though he was very much schooled in gunnery and he was a gunnery expert and he definitely loved sailing battleships, commanding battleships, he also achieved a sincere appreciation for the importance of naval air power. And that also was reinforced by his studies and his instruction and war gaming at the Naval War College. So after his stint as a battleship commander with Mississippi, in 1940, he was given an assignment to expand and rebuild a new naval base at San Juan, Puerto Rico. This was in the reconstituted 10th Naval District. This was, I think, a very important assignment for him. gave him insights on how to build an airfield on extremely poor terrain. The ground there had been composed entirely of material that had been dredged out of San Juan Harbor.

It was very poor soil, and he very quickly learned what it takes to build a major base facility under extremely adverse conditions, so that gave him an appreciation for base construction. From there, he moved on, and one of the things that he wanted to do when he was given, you know, whenever an officer is given a fitness report, and all of his, I should mention this, that as he was moving up to various ranks, by this time in 1940, he was a captain, and he was on the promotion list for lower-ranked rear admiral. Whenever a naval officer is evaluated by a superior, they have an opportunity to write in what their preferred next assignment would be. And in 1940, he stipulated that he specifically wanted to be assigned to Cruiser Division 5,

which was part of task force two located in pearl harbor and it was no coincidence that this was commanded by william f halsey now uh spruance had served with halsey halsey was his commander they served together in a destroyer squadron in san diego in the early 1920s and they developed a lifelong friendship as a result of that service together, and it had been written elsewhere that Spruance was disappointed that he didn't get a battleship command, but I think that my research has shown that he never really wanted a battleship command coming into what he was clearly, by 1939, he could see that which way the winds of war were blowing. There was already war raging in europe war going on in the atlantic ocean but um even though admiral king ernest king

had just been appointed the commander of the atlantic fleet was looking for a chief of staff and he wanted uh spruance to come and work for him uh in the atlantic fleet uh spruance avoided that and instead uh got admiral nimitz who at the time was the head of naval personnel to cut him orders to go to Hawaii. So he was able to get to Hawaii, and he arrived there in September of 1941 to take over Cruiser Division 5 under the command of his good friend Bill Hawsey.

So now he was going to be, instead of just another battleship commander, he was going to be a cruiser commander, which would be literally at the point of the spear. He knew that Bill Halsey was aggressive, that if a war came about, that he would be in the thick of it under Halsey's command. And that's what he sought out to do. So this leads up then to Pearl Harbor. Well, thanks for giving that intro to his early life.

And before we get into this, I'd just like to remind everyone that all opinions expressed are our own and not representative of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. So, Andrew, before we get into the Second World War, talk a little bit about his early career. He obviously starts as a Black Shoe Line officer, but eventually gets associated with some of the major naval aviation battles of the war, Midway, Philippine Sea. So can you talk a little bit about Spruance's views of aviation versus being a line officer? Sure. So, like I said, he was involved on battleships mostly during the fleet exercises that took place in the 1930s. And especially in Fleet Exercise 20, which took place in February 1939, it was pretty obvious to him that carrier air power was going to be the major offensive weapon.

He'd seen how carriers were able to knock each other out, that it was necessary for a carrier to be the first one to hit their opposite number. And once they had established local air superiority, that enabled them to basically to bomb the battle line. So he saw that in these fleet problems, the battle line was pretty much just in the background. And it was pretty clear to him at that point that this was the future of naval warfare. So I think even though he was not an aviator, he was always interested in aviation. I shouldn't say always. In the 1930s, he became more interested in aviation and was very interested in the latest developments in aircraft. and this was this was this came out as well uh when he was a commander of cruiser division five his air officer uh was somebody that he kept at his side all the time and as they observed um you

know he had a front row seat to carry operations off of the enterprise so he could he was very always was very inquisitive about what was going on why they did things in a certain order which aircraft performed the best so um i think he became a convert to to naval aviation so he was not he was not a naval naval aviator and he was not imbued with the current uh doctrine uh aviation doctrine and i think that actually paid some dividends uh at the battle of midway so i don't know you know hopefully i've answered your question on that i think uh you know he they studied naval aviation and one of his instructors, another good friend of his that he met earlier

in his career was Richmond Kelly Turner and together they were the main instructors at the Naval War College in the late 1930s and Kelly Turner was also a believer in air power and he probably was the one that really converted Spruance to the importance of carrier aviation. So Spruance, at that point, he was not going to go and get his wings like Halsey did.

He was not going to do that late in his career, but he definitely had this interest and appreciation for carrier as just another one of the, you know, one of them was going to be the up-and-coming main weapon in the naval warfare toolbox, if you will. Yeah. Moving into the Midway, can you describe some of the Bruce's strategy for victory there? And Midway has undergone a significant amount of re-evaluation over the last few years. And can you maybe update the listeners of some of the changes which have come out since the last book on Spirits did 50 years ago? well yeah so there have been a number of books on midway craig simon wrote an excellent book on it which i used but in particular john partial uh book on the shattered sword i think is an excellent

reference and has some of the best research available on the battle of midway looking at both the american and the japanese viewpoints uh john lundstrom as well also deals with midway John Lundstrom is basically a biographer of Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher. So Fletcher had seniority to Spruance, and he was really the initial commander. So the way that Spruance ended up being in command at Midway was not something that he expected or sought. It was entirely serendipity or happenstance, if you will, a series of events, the first of which was that at Pearl Harbor, the man who would have been second in command to Task Force 8, this eventually became Task Force 16, Halsey's task force was Admiral Isaac Kidd. So back then, before Pearl Harbor, Task Force 8 was composed of the Carrier Enterprise, three battleships, Battleship Division 1, headed up by the USS Arizona under Kidd, and then Cruiser Division 5. So, unfortunately, Kidd was literally obliterated on the bridge of Arizona when the magazine blew up.

That left Spruance essentially second in command. And at that point, not only were the battleships out of commission, they were just too slow to keep up with the carriers. There was really never any serious intention of having the battleships tag along with the task force. The task force had to move fast. And they had, that's why the cruisers. So at this time, Spruance was in the cruiser Northampton. That was his flagship. And there was a treaty cruiser. These were, these were fast, but lightly armored cruisers. So on the return from – so going back here a little bit, setting the stage, they – with – before Midway, there had been five, six months of carrier raids into the Pacific, hitting Wake Island, Marcus Island, Waukegee, the Marshall Islands. And Spruance was along observing how carrier operations were being carried out this entire time. Halsey kept Spruance in the loop of whatever communications he got and intelligence he got.

And so at the Battle of Coral, so what happened then was Test Force 16 was given the task of escorting Hornet out to conduct the Doolittle Raid. And so Doolittle Raid then triggers the Japanese to really push for the Operation MI, the operation to capture Midway Island and to force the U.S. fleet to come out and fight. The Japanese were bothered that they had missed the carriers at Pearl Harbor. They were figuring out ways that they could sink them. They sank the Lexington at Coral Sea. They thought they'd sunk the Yorktown, but of course, Yorktown made it back to Pearl Harbor. Task Force 16 had been sent to reinforce Fletcher down at Coral Sea, but they could not get there in time. And so they were recalled back to Pearl Harbor in mid-May, and during that time, as is known, Halsey contracted an extreme case of dermatitis.

And it was so extreme that when he got back to Pearl in 26 May, that he was ordered to go to the hospital. And so he had always envisioned Spruance as being his second in command and had made arrangements for Spruance to take over for him if anything should happen to him in battle. And so when he got back to Pearl Harbor, he made that recommendation to Nimitz that Spruance was the only flag officer that he would entrust Task Force 16 to. Yorktown came back a couple days later. Fletcher made his reports. They evaluated Yorktown. It was repaired within three days. In the meantime, as they conferred at Pearl Harbor, they came up with, Nimitz came up with this plan to ambush the Japanese at Midway. And that was based, of course, on the intelligence that Edward Layton had given him. And that's a familiar story. I don't think I need to go over that. But they were going to be positioned north of Midway Island, sort of as a cocked pistol, waiting for the Japanese carriers to appear. Jack Fletcher was a seniority.

He had seniority over Spruance, and he was in command of the force. So Task Force 17 and 16 rendezvoused on the 2nd of June and proceeded northeast of Midway. So at this point now, they're waiting at Point Luck or just west of Point Luck for the Japanese to appear. They've got search planes out, and they're waiting to spot the Japanese carriers. They believe that they know at this point, pretty sure there are going to be four Japanese carriers. They have three carriers. The Japanese were only expecting one, maybe two. But they also considered Midway to be itself to be an unsinkable carrier.

It had been reinforced with additional aircraft, B-17 bombers, and it was potentially a very formidable air force there they would have to deal with before the Japanese could actually land at Midway. So, I don't know if I answered your question at this point about how Spruance got into command. So Fletcher was the tactical officer in command on June 4th. He was a tactical officer in command when the four Japanese carriers were knocked out on June 4th. So as it happened, Spruance and Task Force 16, which was Enterprise and Hornet, were ahead of Yorktown, and they launched first. And as they turned about into the wind to recover, eventually Yorktown was further west than they were.

So after they had, you know, the famous story of Wayne McCluskey following the destroyer path and pouncing on Akagi and Kaga and then the carrier group from Yorktown hitting Soryu. They were able to knock out these three carriers in a very short order. Unfortunately, the fourth carrier, Hiryu, had not been hit yet. And even though there was some

debatable whether or not it was there. They launched a strike on Yorktown and that hit Yorktown twice. And Yorktown was abandoned once and they came back and brought the engines back online. But during that process, late in the day on June 4th, when it looked like Yorktown was was going to have to be abandoned, Fletcher transferred his flag into a cruiser nearby, and he basically transferred his command to Spruance. And this was a little unusual, that being the senior officer, he could have easily transferred his flag into the other two carriers. And it's never really been fully explained why exactly he did that, but Spruance nevertheless was very gratified that now he was given the opportunity. So at this point,

They've sunk at least three carriers. Later that day, they then hit at 1,700 on June 4th. They did find Hiryu, and Commander Best dropped a 500-pound bomb down the elevator and turned that into a flaming wreck. But they weren't sure if it was sunk yet. And so that was still an open question on June 5th. So the interesting thing at this point now, Spruance, you know, Fletcher had achieved the results that Nimitz wanted. They'd taken out four carriers and his three carriers were still mostly intact. So now it was really Spruance's battle to lose.

Spruance took over as the officer in technical command then on the evening of June 4th. And then he made a decision at that time that was considered to be pretty controversial at the time. And that was on the evening of June 4th, he commanded Task Force 16 to turn east, to head away from the Japanese. He did not want to get tangled up with the remnants of the Kido Butai, the mobile force. He knew they had been escorted by at least two battleships and several cruisers and destroyers, and he knew that his treaty cruisers, which were called tin can cruisers, and his aircraft carriers with very depleted air groups would be no match for the Japanese at this point. And they were not trained in night operations either. Miles Browning, who was his air officer on Enterprise, was furious. He thought that we need to keep heading west so that we can attack the Japanese first thing in the morning.

Well, Spruance was concerned, knowing about Japanese night fighting tactics, that he was going to end up embroiled in a night battle with the Japanese that he couldn't possibly win. They couldn't launch aircraft, and his surface ships were no match for the Japanese fleet. So he ordered his ships to come about and head west. So that was a controversial call on his part, and he was criticized by the brown shoes, by the aviation guys for doing that, that he didn't really appreciate how to command an air group. But earlier in the day, I think he had made an important decision back at 700 hours on June 4th when Wade McCluskey was in the air with his dive bombing group, and they were waiting for the rest of the air group to launch from Enterprise. And there were mechanical issues. They were getting slow off the flight deck. They're waiting for the for the for the fighters and the torpedo bombers get in the air. And in the meantime, the dive bombers are circling around waiting.

So the standard technical doctrine for naval aviation at that time was to have all your air groups to wait, circling the carrier until they all were in the air. Then they would proceed to the target. The dive bombers and fighters would be up high and the torpedo bombers would be down low. And then they would then coordinate a pincer attack on either side of a target carrier. That was the ideal. However, Spruance was informed by his intelligence officer who had heard a Japanese and deciphered a Japanese radio dispatch informing the Kido Butai that they had spotted the American carriers. Knowing that had been spotted, he ordered Wade McCluskey to proceed immediately to the target. And that turned out to be a very, I think, a very fortuitous decision. Um, so, and at the end of the day, the other interesting thing about what happened at that time was that Hornet also was launching, uh, their attack. They, this was under Hornet at the time was commanded by, uh, Mark Mitcher, who was, who

was in fact a career aviator. Uh, he was a protege of, of, uh, Tower of John Towers. Uh, they were amongst the earliest Naval aviators. And I think, and this is something that Craig Simons has pointed out, that perhaps Mitcher thought he knew more than anyone else about how to fight a carrier battle. And when he gave his air group directions, he basically told them to go due west. When McCluskey and the air group from Yorktown, They proceeded on a different heading to intercept where they believed that the Japanese carriers were going to be.

Instead, Mitchard sent off his entire group due west, thinking that he was going to intercept two other carriers that he thought were following behind the Japanese force. So the belief was that the Japanese were going to be fighting carrier battles the same way that the U.S. Navy would fight carrier battles, that they would be coming in with two carriers to conduct supporting operations for the amphibious assault on Midway and keep back two carriers in a separate group to provide cover for the amphibious operation. So Mitcher sent his off to the West, and this is something that has been called the flight to nowhere. As it turns out, in that day of June 4th, none of the air groups on Hornet ever touched one of the Japanese ships. They missed hitting any of the carriers. They did get late in the day, attempted to drop bombs on Japanese battleships, and they missed. So that's, you know, at least in the beginning of the battle, Fletcher and then Spruance were fighting with only really two effective carriers, plus whatever was launched from Midway. And the Midway force is important because they, even though they were not successful, none of the planes from Midway managed to hit any of the Japanese carriers.

carriers, but they did cause the carriers to change course, to go into evasive action, and slowed them down considerably, and caused some confusion in the Japanese. And I think that sort of set the stage to enable the Enterprise and Yorktown Air Groups to successfully find and hit the japanese carriers yeah that cautiousness that you see with spruce um at the end of the battle is really a characteristic of him throughout the his career it seems yeah so yeah so he was he was criticized for that and the uh interestingly the naval war college did an analysis of the battle midway and faulted him for not following up as it as the naval aviators said he should have done but later on this is when after he had become Nimitz's chief of staff he one day he asked

Leighton this is like in November of 1942 he asked Leighton if he had seen any captured intelligence or had had interrogated any prisoners he wanted to know anymore he had this hunch moto was planning to do to entice the americans to keep heading west where they would hit them uh the next morning with overwhelming force and so it was a good thing that he turned away and then and really the that sprunson forwarded that back to admiral king and to nimitz and uh and they all said you know what you were you did the right thing so it turned out that his consciousness here uh was a was truly a blessing yeah yeah no it's you can really see in the book his um real kind of um caution and and you know just subtle planning um but after serving with

nimitz he commands the um fifth fleet do you go through his service there well yeah so it wasn't He wasn't guaranteed that he was going to get that. It wasn't until really into well into the spring of 1943. You know, at first, Nimitz told him, you know what, I need you here. I can't spare you to be. I know you'd like to be in charge of the Central Pacific Drive. And this is something that King had been had been pushing for with the combined chiefs for the last year. And now things are coming together with all the new Essex-class carriers are coming into the theater in the summer of 1943. After Operation Husky and the invasion of Sicily, they were getting shipping and landing craft.

So now the stage is being set for a major offensive that's going to take place in November of 1943. and this is something that Nimitz had studied as Spruance's chief of staff had run studies on this and he knew exactly what it would take to make it work but Nimitz said you know I need you here but then you know Nimitz then had second thoughts and and this is a story that that Spruance relayed later on in his life then that Nimitz came to him like the day next day and said you know I had to change, you're in luck. I changed my mind. You're going to be the commander of the Central Pacific Force. And I'm sure, you know, as I write in the book, you know, Spruance was known to be very reticent about showing emotions. Some people called him old frozen face. He had this innate

shyness that until he got to know you very well, he was really sort of a very closed personality. But once he got to know you and you got to know him, he was a very warm and friendly individual. And it's important that he became Nimitz's chief of staff, which really was a job he had been assigned to even before he took over task force 16 at Midway. He already was designated to be Nimitz's chief of staff. He wasn't real happy about that. He'd been chief of staff before and did not want a desk job in the middle of a big shooting war. But he and Nimitz became very close friends. They lived together in the same house.

They messed together every day. They walked down to headquarters every day. And they just shared thoughts. And in fact, that's an issue for naval historians is that so much of their conversation and planning was done, you know, man to man and in person that very little of it was set down for the record. Spruance himself hated writing anything. He never wrote a memoir. He was never a big, he was never a self promoter, and nor was Nimitz for that matter. So neither one of them wrote their own memoirs or kept a diary. So the things that they discussed in this year and a half as they were planning the Central Pacific Drive are unrecorded. So some things have to go by. Sometimes you have to go by inference to think to find out what it was that they were they were they were planning.

So, you know, they, Spruance, because of his planning, Ernest King wanted to, you know, war plan Orange, which goes back, you know, even before the First World War, had and was refined numerous times in her war, called for the U.S. Navy to go through the Central Pacific and take the Marianas Islands. This is being, you know, we already had Guam. That includes Saipan, Tinian. The Japanese, of course, captured Guam in early 1942. And so King was itching to get back and reestablish or basically to follow through on War Plan Orange and to get to the Marianas. But to get there, you had to go to the Marshall Islands. And this was all in this Japanese mandated islands. The U.S. had very little intelligence about what was actually built there.

The Japanese were very assiduous about making sure that nobody would get in there. If you did get in there, they made sure you wouldn't come back alive. At least that's some of the theories. So very little was known about it. So Spruance's recommendation was to start this process of heading into the Central Pacific by going into the Gilbert Islands first. This is sort of a little further south and west, and they targeted Tarawa Atoll. So that was the first target from there. They would be able, once they've captured the Gilberts, they could then turn that into an advanced base,

gain intelligence information that would be within flight distance of the Marshall Islands, and then from the Marshall Islands, they could then jump to the Marianas. And this is exactly what they did. Of course, Tarawa and the assault on Betio Atoll had some horrific lessons for the Navy and the Marine Corps because of the casualties that the Marines suffered there in three days. And so a lot of lessons were learned during that operation, mainly the need to have a lot of both aerial and shore bombardment, not hours in advance, but days in advance. They were surprised at how well the Japanese had dug in into the island. As Pruetz later remarked, when it came to building airstrips and roads, the Seabees and the Army engineers were unbeatable. The Japanese were very poor at base construction, but they did excel at building concrete dugouts and coconut dugouts and fortifying islands,

which is what they did at Taralong. But they had some advance, they had time to do that. They had gotten an inkling that there was going to be an invasion, possibility of invasion here. And this was the most exposed, their most exposed outpost in their defensive perimeter. So they spent a lot of time fortifying it. They still were in the process of fortifying it when we attacked in November. And it needs to be pointed out at this time that there had been operations trading back and forth between, but Halsey was now commanding the naval forces in the South Pacific

and was assisting MacArthur in Operation Cartwheel to cordon off and surround and neutralize the Japanese base at Rabaul and to establish bases in the Bismarck Archipelago and in northern New Guinea. And in so doing, the Japanese command, so Yalamoto was killed, as you know, in April 1943, flying back to, or flying to an island in the South Pacific. He was shot down by P-38s. He was replaced by Admiral Koga Mineichi, another very capable Japanese commander. and so koga's idea was that they needed to continuously to assume sort of a defensive posture where they're going to build the this defensive perimeter and try to entice the u.s

navy into a decisive battle of at the uh that would um benefit them in a place of japanese choosing so they knew that they knew that the americans now were coming in with new A new fleet of carriers, and they knew very well that the United States had industrial and air and naval assets that they couldn't possibly match. They had a chance in 1943, perhaps early 1944, to perhaps inflict what they considered to be a decisive defeat on the Americans. And so that's what happened then, basically leading up into the Battle of the Philippine Sea. So, after the Gilbert's operation, the next operation, almost just several months later, at the end of January, early February, they take Kwajalein, and two weeks later, they take Eniwetok, and they went right up through the Marshall Islands. They bypassed the islands that they knew from Leighton's intelligence that were being reinforced. They basically bypassed those islands and went to the most weakly defended islands.

These two islands' atolls were nowhere near as well fortified as Tarawa. They were hit with intensive naval and air bombardment for days ahead of time. And as a result, they were able to capture a pretty much commanding position in the Marshall Islands with the capture of Anahuitoc in a matter of less than a month and with very low casualties on the American part. So, getting back to your book, as you said, it's been the first biography of him written in 50 years. What new did you uncover, and what was most surprising about that? I think the biggest thing, one of the things that I brought to this that really had not been discussed in other histories at this point was the importance of something called Plan Z. So the Admiral Koga, in August of 1943, put together the first version of what he called the plan for Z operations. This was a plan for a decisive battle within the defensive perimeter. This was going back to Japanese ideas that they formulated even before the war.

The idea that they could entice the American fleet to move through the Central Pacific where they would be hit by attritional attacks by Japanese submarines and aircraft, land-based aircraft. Land-based aircraft was always an important part of Japanese naval thinking, maybe even more so than the United States Navy. They looked at their land-based air component as a part and parcel of their capabilities. So what they wanted to do was to entice the American fleet to come through this defensive perimeter where it would undergo attritional attacks, whittled down, and then ambushed by the combined fleet at a place of their choosing. And in this Plan Z, the revised version of Koga, Koga issued the revised version in early March of 1944. And in it, he stressed the importance of hitting the transports. Carriers, of course, were important, and it was important that they be knocked out. But he wanted his, especially his battleships, to be able to break off and sortie off if need be and attack the troop transports.

Going back to setting the stage here, in February of, I should say in March of 1944, Spruance leads Task Force 58 on a strike on Palau. So by this point, the combined fleet had been forced out of Truk, which had been their Gibraltar of the east, that had been their main headquarters, but they had been so down on cruisers, and they're still trying to rebuild their carrier air arm, that he never felt that he was in a position, Kogan never felt he was in a position to attack the fifth fleet as it did these operations for Galvanic. at Tarawa or in the Marshall Islands assaults so Koga retreated uh got on a on a on a on a flying boat and headed for Davao in in southern Philippines and his they flew into a tropical storm Koga disappeared and was never seen again his chief of staff who had a copy of these plans in his briefcase. His plane went down. He was captured by guerrillas in Chibu in the Philippines, and this information eventually made its way to Brisbane, Australia, where it was translated and then transmitted back to Pearl Harbor. So just before the Battle of the Philippine Sea

in early June, Spruance was given a copy of Koga's plan, his plan Z. And so he was basically handed this intelligence coup that gave him a detailed listing of all the forces that the combined fleet could bring into the battle, what their intentions were going to be. Basically, he was given a rundown on both Japanese intentions and their capabilities. So he had this important intelligence, and it's my contention that this highly influenced his decision-making during the Battle of the Philippine Sea.

Unfortunately, or fortunately for how you want to look at it, when Koga disappeared, he was replaced by Admiral Toyota as the commander of the combined fleet. And Toyota issued a new version of the Z-Plan, which he called the AGO Plan for Decisive Battle in early May. And now he changed the emphasis from hitting the transports to destroying the carriers. And in this plan, again, they were looking to try to entice the Americans into a battle in the Carolina Islands. I describe a lot more than some of the background that was going into this. They believe that there was going to be that the American major thrust was going to be was going to to to come through MacArthur and operations in New Guinea and that that that the Americans American main thrust was going to come up to the Philippines through New Guinea. And that's where they were concentrating the combined fleet in late May, early June of 1944. When all of a sudden they're informed that there's an American fleet off the coast of Saipan and they're conducting naval bombardment and it looks like they're going to do a landing,

They suddenly have to change their plans, and now they have to sortie far to the north to meet the American fleet somewhere in the north. And in this process, the commander of the mobile fleet, Admiral Ozawa, decides that he is going to keep his fleet or his carriers at a distance beyond the range of American aircraft. He's going to stay out of it. He knows that his aircraft are lighter and they have more range than American carrier aircraft. So he purposely is keeping his carrier forces beyond the range of American carrier forces. And his idea is that they're going to execute these attacks on the American fleet off of Saipan. They would land their aircraft on Guam and the other air bases at Tinian and Rota, and they would then rearm and then again go out and attack the American fleet. so that was that was his plan uh and of course spruance was was expecting something different he was expecting them to come around his flanks and his orders uh on uh on the 17th and 18th of

june to uh to mitcher mitchner and to uh willis lee uh was that you know we need we need to be within tactical distance of saipan because i'm expecting them to make an end run around around our fleet. So instead, of course, the Japanese launched their attacks beyond the range of American carrier aviation. However, thanks to our superior radar and tactical dispositions, instead they fly into the battle line and all the anti-aircraft guns and variable time fuses that the battle line has. The American carriers under Mitchell and Task Force 58 are seeing these Japanese raids coming 60, 70 miles in advance, and they're already up in the air stacked and waiting for them to come. These Japanese aviators don't have anywhere

near the training or ability that they're um that that they had back in 1942 and so these guys are just red meat for the uh for the hellcats of task force 58 and that's called of course the uh the marianas turkey shoot where we destroy 450 some uh japanese aircraft as they attempt to to hit the U.S. fleet. As it turns out, they've got one glancing bomb off the South Dakota, virtually, you know, no damage to the American fleet. The other important thing that I need to mention about, because Spruance had a copy of Plan Z, he shared that with his subcommanders, not his submarine commanders, but with Turner and Holland Smith, and had them prepare in case it would be a flanking attack. He also had Mitchell in the week ahead of the Battle of the Philippine Sea just saturate Guam and Tinian and Rota airfields with attack after attack. So the Japanese had been depending on their base air forces to be a major component in the battle. But they were, in fact, wiped out by the time Ozawa and his fleet got within striking distance.

Ozao was not aware of that. The Japanese were very poor at communicating with each other. One of the other things that I find interesting was that the Japanese launched four different raids during the Battle of Philippine Sea on the 20th or 19th of June. Their first raid was decimated, but the few that did return claimed that they had sunk numerous American aircraft carriers. They had set six aircraft carriers on fire, and so they totally were misleading their Japanese commanders about the results they had achieved, when in fact they had achieved nothing. And it wasn't until Ozawa then was on Taiho, the state-of-the-art Japanese carrier that was hit along with the Shokaku. So two of the main carriers were torpedoed by submarines on the morning of 19 June and went down with huge losses. Ozawa wanted to go down with the Taiho, but his staff got him to transfer to a cruiser. He was out of the picture for most of the rest of the day on 19 June and into the morning of 20 June.

And so the Japanese fleet was pretty much operating in sort of autopilot at that point. They didn't have a tactical commander, really. They might have been able to strike out and make a tactical hit, a flanking maneuver during the night, but nobody was there to tell them to do that. So even though, again, Spruance was criticized for being too cautious here, but I think that he had good reason for that. And as it turns out, the result of the Battle of the Philippine Sea was Japanese carrier aviation was completely crippled. They never recovered from that. And as a result, late in 1944 and into 1945, they had to resort to kamikaze tactics. And they knew that they could not achieve any kind of results with conventional air attacks anymore. They just no longer had the fuel, basically, to train their pilots.

That was one of Ozawa's problems, that he wanted to introduce this idea of shuttle bombing because he couldn't trust his pilots that once they had taken off the carrier, that they could land on the carrier without crashing. And the last thing he wanted, of course, was to have wrecked planes on his flight deck holding up carrier operations. So he basically told them, after you conduct your raid, land, rearm, and reattack. And, you know, basically we'll pick you up later on. So that sort of then, you know, set the stage eventually for what happened at Leyte Gulf. You know, the Japanese carriers that Spruance missed at Philippine Sea, he missed them not because he wasn't trying to get them.

He pursued them as fast as he could, but they were out in front of him. And he just could not catch up to them. Those carriers, you know, came back and were used as bait to lure Halsey away in Task Force 38 in October of 44 at Leyte Gulf. And that almost ended in a disaster. Of course, which is a whole nother story. I just mentioned it briefly in my book. I sort of contrast what Halsey's decision making with Spruance's. Spruance never criticized Halsey for anything he did. He believed that Halsey achieved a great victory as well. He was amazed, however, that Kurita, the Japanese commander, never followed through and attacked Kincaid's fleet,

the 7th Fleet, off Leyte Gulf when they had the opportunity to do so. But he said, you know, this is exactly what I was afraid was going to happen to me at Saipan, that they were going to split their forces like they did like they'd done previously in the past. It just so happened that the Philippine Sea was the one main operation where they didn't split their forces.

Well, thanks for that. Yeah, that's really interesting. But unfortunately, we're just about coming up on time here. So before we sign off, where can the listeners find

you and what are you working on next? So I do, I have a lot of things that I publish in Naval History Magazine I do, I produce a feature in Naval History Magazine on armaments

and innovations in historic ships and I have a number of articles I've published and if you go to the to the U.S. Naval Institute website and you Google Blackley You can find all the stuff that I've published with them in the past, but I'm working on right now.

I have another book contract with the Naval Institute Press to explore more deeply these failed Japanese operation plans. You know, there's these plans that they devised for for decisive battle. I can only touch on them briefly in the Spruance book, but I find it so fascinating that I want to go into much more detail and and dig into, you know, the Japanese seriously believe that they could they could somehow obtain war winning results by the decisive fleet action against the U.S. fleet, even into 1944. And I want to explore that. I think they were seriously deluded, and I think the thinking officers among them knew that as well. Nonetheless, they continued to toe the party line and tried to do the best they could. The best they could hope for really was a negotiated peace, which they never were going to get, because, you know, they started a limited war

and we declared a total war and they never had a chance. Yeah, yeah. That sounds like a really interesting topic. So we'll definitely be keeping a lookout for that when that releases. And we will have links in the show notes to Andrew's other writings.

Yeah, I'd like to thank my guest, Andrew. and thank you again for joining us until next time it's been my pleasure you're welcome so yeah and we'll see you next time there I met with

Richie Arney so help me Thank you. © transcript Emily Beynon