The Conquering Tide

by Ian W. Toll

  Visitors who set foot on those remote shores were easily enchanted by the exotic beauty of the region—by the azure lagoons and white beaches; by the brilliantly colored fish, flowers, and birds; by the soft rustle of palm fronds and the metrical thump of the surf. Limes and lemons grew wild along the beaches. Flying fish leapt from the wakes of passing boats. Sunsets were unlike anything they had seen before: a sublime palette of colors ranging from blue to orange to green to red to purple. The stars were wrong, at least in the southern half of the sky. One might find a familiar constellation near the northern horizon, but it would appear upside down. Wartime letters, diaries, and memoirs are full of such observations.

  The islands also had a sinister aspect. Observers described dark volcanoes shrouded in steaming mists. Land crabs the size of dinner plates scurried around their tents at night. Fruit bats with four-foot wingspans took flight at sunset. Insects were relentless, and the mosquitoes carried malaria. Americans and other Westerners were alternately fascinated and repelled by the natives—their loincloths and bare breasts, their betel-reddened incisors filed to sharp points, the vaguely intelligible version of English they spoke. Rumors circulated that the tribesmen still practiced headhunting and cannibalism, a prospect both enthralling and hideous. Long pig was the pidgin word for human flesh. Harold Buell recalled that islanders on Espiritu Santo liked to joke about cannibalism. “A favorite native joke was to pinch your arm or stomach and state solemnly: ‘You makeum fine long pig.’ They would then grin broadly showing their front teeth.”46 Americans would barter handsomely for a shrunken head, and at least a few of those gruesome souvenirs were smuggled aboard ships and taken back to the United States.

  Units left on rear-area islands for weeks or months suffered paralyzing boredom. Poker games went on for days, as they did in every other part of the Pacific. Men played checkers, backgammon, and cribbage, and read months-old magazines, comic books, and newspapers. Bloody “grudge matches” were fought between feuding soldiers or sailors of rival ships, with wagers placed on the outcome. Everyone lived for mail, which arrived more regularly as the war progressed; reading letters, however, only took up a fraction of their time, and wartime censorship limited what they could write. Movies were screened each night in makeshift outdoor amphitheaters, with the men sitting on the ground or on coconut logs, but because new reels were scarce, the men were often condemned to watch the same film twenty or more times. They often recited the dialogue mechanically, in unison with the actors. Eventually, on the better-developed islands, the Seabees built tennis courts, horseshoe pits, and baseball diamonds. USO tours stopped at the larger islands, and the shows got bigger and more lavish in the final two years of the war. The smaller islands were lucky to receive any entertainment at all. Marine Private John Vollinger, who spent eight months on a lesser island in the Samoa group, saw “only one U.S.O. show consisting of two old vaudeville guys that told dirty jokes while juggling. Back in the States they would have been booted off the stage, but we wanted entertainment in any form.” 47

  Heavy drinking was a time-honored outlet. Every island had an officers’ club, though on smaller islands it might amount to a wooden table covered by a thatched roof. Admiral Aaron Stanton Merrill liked to say that “if we could find a palm tree and a bottle we’d set up an officer’s club.”48 Enlisted men had to work harder to procure a supply. Throughout the Pacific, one could find an illicit trade in “torpedo juice,” the high-proof fuel used in torpedoes. Beer was usually rationed at two cans a week. When a larger quantity of beer was obtained by backhanded means, it could be chilled by taking it to high altitude for thirty minutes. Pilots would provide that service in exchange for a share of the spoils. Whiskey was more scarce and expensive, but there was a price for everything on the black market.

  “War everywhere is monotonous in its dreadfulness,” wrote the newsman Ernie Pyle, when he toured the theater later in the war. “But in the Pacific, even the niceness of life gets monotonous. . . . [T]he days go by in their endless sameness and they drive men nuts. It’s sometimes called going ‘pineapple crazy.’ ”49 Morale in the South Pacific boondocks was a growing concern in 1943. The Joint Chiefs discussed the problem at length. General Marshall worried about the state of mind among army garrisons on rear island bases, and thought it essential to move them forward into combat areas as soon as it became feasible. His views on this subject likely factored in the support he often gave to King’s demands for offensive action in the Pacific.

  ADMIRAL HALSEY, WHO PRESIDED OVER the far-flung islands from his COMSOPAC headquarters in Noumea, was one of those rare military leaders who did not attach much importance to his own dignity. He laughed out loud at jokes made at his expense. He wore khaki shorts that flaunted his pale, spindly legs. He was not too proud to admit that he had graduated in the bottom third of his Naval Academy class of 1904, or that he had run up enough demerits to put his career there in peril. He had been a star fullback, he often said, on the worst football team in the navy’s history. (The team lost to Army every year he played, always by lopsided scores.) Halsey agreed with Ernest King’s maxim that a sailor who didn’t drink, smoke, or chase women was not to be entirely trusted. His bony hands were usually clutching a cigarette. He once stepped off a plane in Espiritu Santo and kissed his girlfriend, an army nurse, while a row of officers stood at attention. Now and again he drank until the break of dawn, slept for four hours, then grumbled about his hangover at the 9:00 a.m. staff meeting: “It seemed like a good idea last night.”50 Liberty with Halsey, said the admiral’s long-term chief of staff, was “more damned fun than a circus.”51

  Halsey had a fine sense of the absurd. He threw out wisecracks that would not have been out of place in a Bob Hope monologue. Overhearing one sailor tell another, “I’d go through hell for that old son of a bitch,” Halsey accosted the pair and said, “Right here I want to tell you that I object to being called ‘old.’ ”52 In 1945, upon receiving word of Japan’s surrender, he sent the following instructions to all carrier air groups: “Investigate and shoot down all snoopers—not vindictively, but in a friendly sort of way.”53 He was willing to be kidded about his lack of fortitude under fire. When the Enterprise was attacked by Japanese warplanes off the Marshall Islands in February 1942, Halsey threw himself flat on deck, forsaking the grandeur of his three-star rank. As he picked himself up, he noticed that one of his young signalmen was stifling a laugh. “Who the hell are you laughing at?” he asked. “You don’t have rank enough to laugh at an admiral.” As the man began to apologize, perhaps fearing he was in serious trouble, Halsey cut him off, saying, “I’m going to make you a Chief Petty Officer—that will make it look better.”54

  Halsey knew perfectly well that stories of these antics would circulate widely, with variations and embellishments, all up and down the ranks. Together they crafted an image of a happy warrior, a fighting man who loved war and wanted everyone else to have as much fun as he was having. There was plenty of truth in that representation, but it was not complete. More than any other major military commander of the Pacific War, Halsey wore his emotions on his sleeve. He wept openly, frequently, and without pretense. When inspecting ships returned from battle, or visiting wounded men in hospital wards, or pinning medals to men’s chests, or stepping up to a microphone to address the crew of a ship, he was never far from tears. Upon receiving the Distinguished Service Medal for leading a carrier raid into the Marshall Islands, he choked up and told the officers and men of the Enterprise that they had won it for him. His peculiar style of leadership was full of contradictions: simultaneously cold-blooded and tender-hearted, bombastic and coolly logical, overbearing and self-deprecating, sentimental and ridiculous. Whatever it was, it resonated powerfully. Sailor James J. Fahey of the Montpelier undoubtedly spoke for the fleet when he told his diary, in November 1943, “The men would do anything for him.”55

  He was taller than average, with broad shoulders and an exceptionally large head. His eyes were pale blue and crowned
with graying, disheveled eyebrows. He had an old sailor’s complexion, weather-beaten and spotted. His posture was not his greatest virtue; the cameras often caught him with his hands on his broad hips and his head set very far forward on his shoulders. Unlike King, Nimitz, Turner, or Spruance—in fact, unlike any other senior figure in the U.S. Navy—Halsey always made a point of smiling for photographers. He was a warm and cheerful man who liked people, even journalists. He was far more obliging with newsmen than either Nimitz or King, and always quick with a quotable line. They reciprocated his affection and gave him plenty of good copy. The press (and perhaps the American people) appeared eager to cast someone in the role of a Hollywood admiral. Halsey never auditioned for the role, but he did not recoil when it was thrust on him.

  Today he is best remembered for his exuberant loathing of the enemy, summed up in his signature slogan: “Kill Japs, kill Japs, and then kill more Japs.”56 His messages to the fleet typically concluded with the refrain “Keep ’em dying.” In a private letter to Nimitz, written shortly after he took command in the South Pacific, Halsey vowed that he was “obsessed with one idea only, to kill the yellow bastards and we shall do it.” In the same letter he proposed new submarine operations as a means of “securing more monkey meat.”57 Killing enemy soldiers and sailors was the duty of every man in uniform, and Halsey was not the only senior Allied leader to indulge in exterminationist wartime rhetoric. But Halsey, more than any other officer of his generation, made himself famous (or infamous) for fudging the distinction between Japanese fighting forces and civilians, and for seeming to advocate a vengeful occupation of postwar Japan. “When we’re done with them, the Japanese language will only be spoken in hell” was his (probably apocryphal) remark upon returning to Pearl Harbor the day after the December 7 attack. He told reporters, in early 1944, “When we get to Tokyo, where we’re bound to get eventually, we’ll have a little celebration where Tokyo was.”58 In private, Halsey suggested (presumably in jest) that the Allies should castrate all Japanese males and spay all Japanese women. He told Kelly Turner that he looked forward to parading Isoroku Yamamoto in chains through the streets of Washington, “with the rest of you kicking him where it would do the most good.”59 In several publicly reported remarks, he seemed to imply that Hirohito, the Showa emperor who was adored by ordinary Japanese as a benevolent father-god, would be executed following the Japanese defeat. On January 2, 1943, Halsey shared his vision for the postwar occupation of Japan: “We will bypass all smaller towns and let [occupation forces] loose in Tokyo. That will be a liberty town they’ll really enjoy.”60

  Words are not deeds, and there is no reason to believe that Halsey, given the opportunity, would actually order a city sacked, a population neutered, or a prisoner degraded and abused in defiance of the Geneva Convention. Halsey’s hatred of the enemy was genuine, and his sentiments were widely shared by servicemen and civilians of the Allied nations. In the peculiar context of a savage war, his more outlandish rants are best understood as figurative rallying cries rather than literal threats. Behind the bellowing thespian was a complicated man with a nuanced conscience. The crowning irony of his career came after the Japanese surrender in 1945, when Halsey (of all people) publicly criticized the decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  The more interesting questions are practical ones. How, if at all, did Halsey’s virulent wartime rhetoric serve the Allied cause? Did it do any harm? After the war he explained that his purpose had been to embolden his fighting forces by deflating the myth of the Japanese “super-warrior,” an artifact of Japan’s extraordinary triumphs in the opening phase of the war. But it seems more likely (based on a reading of his wartime correspondence, and the opinions of those who worked closely with him) that Halsey’s swashbuckling oration had no calculated purpose at all. He simply gave vent to his feelings without pausing to think through the consequences. He apparently never considered that he might be playing directly into the hands of Japanese propagandists, who could more or less truthfully report that an American theater commander had threatened to wipe out the entire Japanese race.

  Dehumanization of the enemy was one of war’s necessary evils, but it was every officer’s responsibility to arrest the descent into bestiality. On Guadalcanal, a small minority of American infantrymen had engaged in the practice of mutilating enemy dead. Most common was the practice of extracting teeth for the value of their gold fillings—but there were also instances of men wearing severed ears on their belts, of necklaces made of teeth, of heads erected on poles, of skulls mounted on tanks. As early as September 1942, Nimitz had ordered that “no part of the enemy’s body may be used as a souvenir,” and warned that violators would face “stern disciplinary action.”61 That order was subsequently reinforced by several directives issued by the Joint Chiefs. But the practices of mutilation and trophy-taking continued throughout the war, and they were even reported in the American press. In May 1944, a Life magazine picture of the week depicted a woman admiring a Japanese skull sent to her as a gift by her boyfriend, a navy lieutenant. A month later, FDR was presented with a letter-opener carved from the bone of a Japanese soldier’s arm. (The president accepted it at first, but later returned it with the request that it be buried.)

  The Japanese news media was quick to seize on such reports. Cross-edited with excerpts of Halsey’s bloody-minded tirades, they provided plenty of grist for the mill of Japanese wartime propaganda. Truth was cleverly combined with fiction. The Americans were represented as beasts, savages, and demons. Surrender to such a foe was unthinkable. The fight to protect the homeland must therefore be waged to the last man, woman, and child. In 1944 and 1945, when the inevitability of Japan’s defeat was no longer in doubt, the cost would be paid in American as well as Japanese lives.

  ON NEW YEAR’S EVE, 1942, Halsey met with a group of reporters aboard his flagship Argonne in Noumea Harbor. Asked for a preview of the war to come in 1943, he obliged. “Victory,” he declared. “Complete, absolute defeat for the Axis powers.”62 Pressed to elaborate, he was unequivocal: the Allies would be in Tokyo by the end of the year. The reporters, presumably stunned by their good fortune, filed their copy, and the rash prophecy was splashed across the front pages of newspapers across America. In New Zealand two days later, Halsey stuck to his guns. “We have 363 days left to fulfill my prediction,” he told The New Zealand Herald, “and we are going to do it.”63

  In his postwar memoir, Halsey confessed that he had known that the promised timetable was impossible. The war could not be won in 1943, or even in 1944. He had offered the spurious prediction as a means to bolster the morale of his forces and to fortify the political standing of New Zealand’s prime minister, Peter Fraser. Within a matter of weeks, he began to understand that he had hoisted himself with his own petard. Draft boards complained. American production leaders feared that workers would leave the factories. Secretary Knox and Admiral King were obliged to deny rumors that Halsey had been drunk when he spoke to the press. The admiral’s batty prediction would be flung back in his face, again and again. Eventually he would be forced to disavow it, to his own embarrassment and the glee of the Japanese copywriters.

  According to DeWitt Peck, a marine officer who served in the COMSOPAC headquarters, Halsey’s loose tongue and high-spirited blustering were strictly for public consumption. “The impression that people got from newspaper stories and so on [was] that he was impulsive and a damn-the-torpedoes-full-speed-ahead type. He wasn’t. . . . I never saw him making a lightning damn-the-torpedoes decision at all. He was a thoughtful, intelligent, forceful leader.”64 Halsey insisted on a full airing of views before any decision. He wanted to hear every possible objection, every counterargument, and he encouraged even junior officers and enlisted men to speak up if they had something to say. As a strategist he was bold but not reckless. He had a fine command of details; he saw the entire picture; he weighed risks properly. A British officer who visited Halsey in Noumea was amused by the admiral’s appearance
and manner—his informality, his folksy humor, his shorts, his plain khaki shirt without insignia. “I remember thinking that he might well have been a parson, a jolly one, an old-time farmer, or Long John Silver. But when I left him and thought of what he had said, I realized that I had been listening to one of the great admirals of the war.”65

  Halsey had brought several key members of his carrier task force staff with him to the South Pacific. Miles Browning, who had served for more than a year as his chief of staff, retained that role and title in the South Pacific. Others included Julian Brown (intelligence), Doug Moulton (air operations), and Bill Ashford (flag lieutenant). Marine General DeWitt Peck, who had served ably as a war plans officer since before the Guadalcanal landings the previous August, stayed on in that capacity. Harold Stassen, a former governor of Minnesota, came on board as assistant chief of staff in March 1943. Rear Admiral William L. Calhoun, Nimitz’s service force commander, came south to take over logistics in the South Pacific. Captain John R. Redman took over as COMSOPAC communications officer. Even with this talented line-up, however, the SOPAC headquarters organization remained shorthanded and overstressed until late 1943. More than once, Nimitz had to prod Halsey to provide timely action reports.66 In Ray Spruance’s tactful opinion, “Bill Halsey was a great fighter and leader of men, but he did not shine as an administrator.”67

  Halsey was determined not to repeat Ghormley’s mistake of allowing himself to be bogged down in details. He would delegate as much authority as possible to others, preserving his time and energy for essential decisions. He received his fourth star shortly after taking over in Noumea, making him the sixth admiral to hold that eminent rank. It gave him leverage in Washington, which he employed to prevent the recall of some of his key officers to the capital, while demanding that more be sent to him. He also lobbied for promotions, and then threatened to promote officers on his own authority if his requests were not granted in timely fashion. The SOPAC organization grew steadily, eventually numbering over 300 officers and enlisted men of the navy, marines, and army. Halsey had an extraordinary ability to remember names and faces; he called enlisted men by their first names and summoned from memory minor details of their past service. He had an “open door” attitude. One of his officers recalled, “Halsey would see the janitor if he wanted to come in.”68