Post by miletus12 on Jun 27, 2023 16:06:17 GMT
See MAP.
Are you saying that trying to do both ORANGE and CARTWHEEL through all of 1944 ended up holding back the potential of ORANGE to keep going faster in '44 to Iwo, Okinawa or Taiwan that year?
There is only so much one human being can be expected to track. Why was Napoleon beaten in the Peninsula Campaign? He sent capable generals and competent troops. The logistics were not insurmountable.
He was beaten because he tried to general that theater by remote control on top of everything else he micromanaged. He could not divide problems into human sized management chunks or delegate regions *(theaters) of responsibility and trust his delegates to carry out assigned missions.
1. The general date for ORANGE is June 1944. CARTWHEEL (See MAP.) concluded about the same time.
2. Going back to the previous map, the convergence of the two axes of advance in time as geography, naturally pointed to the Philippine Islands next. The Japanese were not "brilliant" as the Banzai bois would have
3. What happened, was this:
The Americans argued among themselves about what to do in the two theaters. King told Nimitz to push Formosa (Taiwan). MacArthur, on his own, argued the Philippine Islands. It was not a simple Army-Navy dispute. King wanted to complete the blockade barrier, but MacArthur wanted to fight where he knew he had local popular aid, support and logistics. Plus, from a purely practical land warfare perspective, it was better to fight 350,000 Japanese with 150,000 armed Filipinos helping you than it was to fight 400,000 Japanese with no help at all.
Plus, the way the logistics was laid out as the war evolved KING I (not KING II) looked like Mindanao was the next object within land-based fighter range.
Then HALSEY put in his oar. I generally consider Halsey an inspirational leader, and a fair to middling poor destroyer man. He was a disaster as an operational artist or a strategist, an incompetent administrator, and like MacArthur a poor judge of human character, having no discernment. Halsey was somewhat lacking in the brains, emotional stability and honesty department. He was like Édouard Jean Baptiste Milhaud of Napoleon's cavalry. You pointed him at something and told him to charge. You did not expect him to think or be honest like Fletcher or Spruance.
But to the point: Halsey was told to poke at Formosa and see what it was like as to aerial opposition. He did and was stung badly by the Fukodome created Special Attack Force land-based anti-ship strike force which earlier in the war had sunk Force Z. A couple of cruisers had been mauled.due to Mitscher's mishandling of the air battle. Then Halsey was told to poke around the Philippine Islands. Nothing. Instead of drawing the correct conclusion that Rear Admiral Masafumi Arima on Luzon was hoarding his airpower for an actual invasion instead of revealing his hand as Fukedome had foolishly done, Halsey proudly announced that the Japanese air defense was weak in Luzon and how about invading Leyte?
MacArthur used that Halsey suggestion at the BIG POWWOW that FDR held in Honolulu to unsnarl the convergent offensives impasse. FDR, bought the pitch. He told MacArthur to take Leyte personally. This order was an internal American domestics political decision designed to keep MacArthur busy and out of FDR's hair. A STUPIDER reason for ordering and conducting a military operation I cannot find in WWII, unless I pick anything Churchill touched.
Unlike Churchill's inanities, the actual military logic was still quite workable, provided the TACTICAL arrangements were coherent and reasonable. What do I mean? Command, control, communications and intelligence (as in thinking, not information gathering.) had to be delineated so that the direction of the battle was conducted by one man and his staff at the top, not three.
Leyte was manageable by that one chain of local authority. By military necessity and as a rule of objectives assigned to the person responsible, that chain should have led to MacArthur, since it was HIS THEATER.
Whatever severe faults MacArthur had as a human being and no matter how incompetent his personal staff (They all stank on ice, both morally and intellectually.), the general lashup that was ALAMO could run an operation with consistent acceptable and sometimes brilliant success. Throw Halsey into the mix and even he could not screw it all up, since if MacArthur told him to do something, Halsey would salute the Flag and do it exactly as told, as he had done during CARTWHEEL.
4. Enter Nimitz.
From the record, we have a good idea that Nimitz was a shrewd judge of human character and talent. He was also very political in the navy meaning of the word in that he watched his backside with regard to King, who he knew distrusted him, ever since the Midway fiasco, when the USNAF had been slaughtered by the rank amateur Pacific fleet air staffs' bungling of the air battle, Never mind that Mitscher and Browning were not Nimitz's fault and that it was still "a famous victory". King knew the details of Stanhope Ring's off course mistake, Browning's insubordination in midbattle, and Mitscher's lying about his own bungling in preparing air op orders. Spruance, who would never shut up when he saw manure pile up around him, reported it all up through the chain, and it reached King, who immediately blamed Nimitz.
Nimitz knew who had produced the Midway expletive deleted manure sandwich of incompetence that had annihilated much of the USN pre-war trained aviator pool.
Those were Halsey's boys who mismanaged air operations.
So look at that chain. King did not trust Nimitz, who did not trust Halsey. Leyte looked like a high risk operation to Nimitz. He did not think the army could run a naval battle, so Nimitz decided he would keep Halsey on his leash. MacArthur could have 7th Fleet and Kincaid. That organization would be MacArthur's "navy". Remember that; because it was 7th Fleet who covered themselves with glory, while Halsey disgraced the 3rd Fleet.
See MAPs.
and
The summary of that fiasco was that Halsey during the pre-battle conference was specifically told, by Spruance no less, to stick close to the landings and PROTECT THE 6th ARMY. So what went wrong there?
Well, remember King and Nimtiz, navy politics and that chain of mistrust, and how Nimitz liked to cover his backside? Into the VERY DETAILED WRITTEN fleet instructions Nimitz gave to Halsey, was a section about how if there was an opportunity to kill the last of the Japanese aircraft carriers, then Halsey should avail himself of that opportunity. It was a Nimitz cover his own backside insertion as an afterthought, so that he would not be criticized for not instructing Halsey to finish what many naval critics faulted Spruance for not doing at the Turkey Shoot. And by critics I mean MITSCHER.
None of this divided naval command would have been a problem if Halsey was chopped to MacArthur. Halsey's incompetent staff had actually seen the Toyoda bloody shirt gambit as a possibility. They had taken it to heart; that Spruance's advice was sound. They had planned to leave a battleship force close to the one northern passage they knew the Japanese had to use to get at Krueger. In effect, they were willing to split 3rd Fleet forces to cover all bets; since they knew the Japanese had to come at them in two split teams themselves. The Americans had a good idea of where the Japanese start positions were and when these split forces would show up.
Except the Japanese were slow to react and so Halsey sent off six of of his sixteen aircraft carriers (TG38.1 McCain) for rest refit and recuperate along with their screen to Ulithi. because he assumed turn backs and late arrivals meant no-shows. He dutifully bombed what his aviators could find. Mitscher's air staff bungled that job. Halsey overconfidently assuming with Mitscher's assurances that his aviators had turned back the major discovered threat in the Sibuyan Sea (Kurita) let stand the order to detach McCain. In the middle of an ongoing operation, Halsey did this incomprehensible thing.
Mitscher's air staff, then bungled the next search plan. They had to be told by the Army's 5th Air Force; "Hey, there are aircraft carriers off Cape Engano, you idiots." He informed Halsey, who now remembered that he was supposed to sink aircraft carriers. Cue the "Bull". Charge! With the 10 aircraft carriers and 6 battleships left that he had, he went after Ozawa.
Now if he had detached Lee with the battleships (TF 34) and screen forces for the San Bernardino Strait contingency as were in his own staff's op plan; even that lunacy would have been excused. He took the battleships and their assigned screen forces with him. He told no-one that he did this.
Even Mirtscher questioned that idiocy.
Meanwhile; 7th Fleet clobbered Nishimura at Surigao Strait and made what can only be described as a naval Thermopylae of a stand at San Bernardino Strait. Kurita lost his nerve. Krueger was saved by "MacArthur's Navy".
Kincaid dutifully did what he should and the Taffys turned in a magnificent performance. There is no other way to describe it.
Ineviatbly from the 7th Fleet calls to 3rd Fleet for help and the resultant confused master plot, back at Pearl Harbor, the shambles of the battle gone horribly wrong emerged. Nimitz had to intervene.
Turkey Trots To Water.
Translated into Standard English. "Get your stupid self back to San Bernardino Strait where you belong, you idiot."
When Halsey got that message, he did exactly what Miles Browning did at Midway. He threw a temper tantrum and stormed off mad until his physician calmed him down and suggested that maybe, just maybe it might be smart if the fleet headed for San Bernardino Strait before Nimitz had to do something drastic like order an arrest of those responsible for dereliction.
Herman Wouk gets that one wrong in "War and Remembrance".
Halsey left Davison, with his weakest task group, incidentally outnumbered and outgunned by Ozawa, behind to finish Ozawa off if he coukl^1. Then Halsey who ran his fuel bunkers dry in the doing, made a speed run back to San Bernadino Strait with Task Force 34 and with five aircraft carriers with them for added insurance.
He had to SLOW DOWN to refuel destroyers he ran dry in ballast. He arrived six hours too late with only two battlships and with the rest of 3rd Fleet scattered behind him in a confused melange of ships bobbing around in a loose oval of ocean 300 miles long by 150 miles wide. If there had been any Japanese submarines in the area (The Taffys chased them off.), the Japanese 6th fleet would have had a field day in a target rich environment.
To let you know what a complete manure sandwich this had turned into, MCCAIN, who was the task group commander doing the R5 at Ulithi, took it upon himself, without orders to stop that nonsense movement, turn around and head west with whatever he could scrape up. He launched his first airstrikes about when Kurita's cruisers were shelling Gambier Bay. Those aircraft were still an hour away and stil out of range when Kurita broke and ran. It was a rough situation for TG38.1 since many of those planes would not have fuel enough to return if they headed on in. Fortunately they had the recall in the nick of time when Taffy 3 gave the all clear.
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Solution?
All it would have taken, was MacArthur getting on the radio, and saying to the Bull. "Bill, stay put." But Halsey was not in MacArthur's chain. He answered to Nimitz. The NAVY lacked faith that MacArthur could let his professional advisors (Kincaid's staff.) do their naval jobs. All of them, except Halsey, had no faith in MacArthur about this.
Not even FDR. And that was a shame, because for once MacArthur had good people in place who would not let boneheads like Sutherland, Willoughby or Halsey ruin what should have been a routine operation.
Miletus12
^1 Davison played keepaway and took his own sweet time, but he got that job done. Four for six.
