William Halsey: the Pacific's fighting admiral

If Chester Nimitz was the Pacific's cool planner, William Halsey was its fighter. Aggressive, plain-spoken and adored by his crews, he lived by his own motto, "Hit hard, hit fast, hit often," and in the grim months of 1942 he gave the US Navy the fighting spirit it badly needed. His boldness brought great victories and real controversy, and he went down in history as "Bull" Halsey.²

Early life

William Frederick Halsey Jr. was born on 30 October 1882 in Elizabeth, New Jersey. President William McKinley appointed him to the Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1900, and he graduated with the class of 1904.³

Destroyers and World War I

As a junior officer he served in battleships and destroyers. In World War I he commanded destroyers, and his service in that war earned him the Navy Cross.⁴

Wings at 52

The step that shaped his war came late. In 1935, at the age of 52, Halsey went through the naval aviator's course at Pensacola and earned his wings, so that he could command a carrier. He took over the carrier Saratoga and became one of the Navy's leading advocates of carrier warfare. In June 1940 he was promoted to vice admiral and given Carrier Division 2, the carriers Enterprise and Yorktown.⁵

Pearl Harbor and the 1942 raids

On 1 December 1941 Halsey put his ships on a war footing. Six days later the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor, and his carrier task force was suddenly almost the only operational American battle group left in the Pacific.⁶ › The Attack on Pearl Harbor, 1941

While the fleet rebuilt, Nimitz sent him on the Navy's first offensive of the war. On 31 January 1942, flying his flag in Enterprise, he struck the Marshall and Gilbert Islands, an "audacious attack" that won his flagship a Presidential Unit Citation and him the Distinguished Service Medal. In February he raided Wake and Marcus.⁷

In April 1942 his task force escorted the carrier Hornet with sixteen Army B-25 bombers under Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle. When a Japanese picket boat spotted the force, the bombers were launched early, from about 620 miles out, and on 18 April they struck Tokyo, the first bombing of the Japanese capital. The material damage was slight and every plane was lost, but the raid lifted American morale.⁸ › The Doolittle Raid, 18 April 1942

Then illness took him out of the war at its turning point. A severe skin disease put him in hospital, and he missed both the Coral Sea in May and Midway in June 1942, although his trained staff helped win Midway.⁹

The South Pacific

In October 1942 he returned to replace Vice Admiral Robert Ghormley as commander of the South Pacific force and area, at the darkest point of the Guadalcanal campaign. He arrived knowing from the codebreakers that a major Japanese offensive was coming, and, not one to wait, he ordered Rear Admiral Thomas Kinkaid's carriers north of the Solomons to seek out the enemy. At Santa Cruz, on 26 October, the Americans lost the carrier Hornet and fought to a draw, and Halsey ordered Kinkaid to withdraw as Japanese battleships closed in.¹⁰ › The Guadalcanal Campaign, 1942 to 1943

Three weeks later his ships won the decisive Naval Battle of Guadalcanal of 12 to 15 November, and he was promoted to full admiral. From then until mid-1944 he directed the campaign up the Solomon Islands. By mid-1943 the Allied commanders had agreed that storming the great Japanese base at Rabaul would cost too much, and chose to surround it, bomb it and starve it into submission instead. General Douglas MacArthur gave Halsey the planning and command of the key step, the landing on Bougainville on 1 November 1943, whose airfields put Rabaul within range of Allied fighters and bombers. Halsey and his amphibious commander chose to land where the Japanese were not, at Empress Augusta Bay, and build their own airfields.¹¹

The Third Fleet and Leyte Gulf

In 1944 Halsey took command of the Third Fleet and its fast carrier task force. From October 1944 his carriers struck Japanese airfields from Okinawa and Formosa to the Philippines; in the air battles of October around 500 Japanese aircraft were destroyed, robbing the enemy of the air cover it would need.¹²

The Battle of Leyte Gulf followed. Halsey's Third Fleet, with 17 fast carriers and 6 fast battleships, was to cover the landings, with authority to attack the Japanese fleet if the chance came. On 24 October his aircraft sank the giant battleship Musashi, and inflated claims, together with a temporary westward turn by Admiral Kurita's force, convinced him it was beaten. When Japanese carriers were sighted to the north, he took all his carriers and battleships after them, leaving San Bernardino Strait unguarded.¹³ › Battle of Leyte Gulf, 1944

The carriers were a decoy, with only about 110 aircraft between them. On 25 October Halsey's planes sank all four, among them Zuikaku, the last survivor of the Pearl Harbor attack, but at dawn Kurita's battleships came through the strait and fell on the escort carriers of Taffy 3 off Samar. Halsey did not receive Kinkaid's calls for help until almost ten o'clock. Only after Nimitz's famous message, "Where is TF 34? The world wonders," did he turn his battleships south, knowing it was too late. The run north and back became known, in hindsight and with some scorn, as "Bull's Run," and the decision is still debated.¹⁴

The typhoons

Weeks later the sea itself turned on him. On 18 December 1944, while trying to refuel east of the Philippines, the Third Fleet ran into Typhoon Cobra. Three destroyers, Spence, Hull and Monaghan, capsized; across the fleet 790 men died and 146 aircraft were lost, and 27 ships were damaged. The court of inquiry put responsibility on Halsey but found no negligence: his mistakes were "errors in judgment committed under stress of war operations and stemming from a commendable desire to meet military requirements." Halsey's biggest error, the Navy's historians judge, was waiting too long to let his ships break formation and ride out the storm.¹⁵

In June 1945, off Okinawa, it happened again. Typhoon Viper cost far fewer lives, six men lost overboard, but the second court of inquiry was scathing, calling a course change "extremely ill-advised" and recommending that "serious consideration" be given to assigning Halsey and his carrier commander, Vice Admiral John McCain, "to other duty." Navy Secretary James Forrestal wanted to relieve him but was talked out of it, partly because it would give aid and comfort to the enemy.¹⁶

Victory

Halsey kept his command to the end. From late May 1945 he led the final naval operations around Okinawa, and by July his aircraft were operating freely over the Japanese home islands. On 2 September 1945 the Japanese surrender was signed aboard his flagship, the battleship Missouri, in Tokyo Bay.¹⁷ › The Battle of Okinawa, 1945

How he commanded

Halsey was a carrier admiral and an attacker by instinct, true to his motto. The Navy's own account credits him with a keen tactical mind, brilliant and creative, and with turning the Pacific war from hit-and-run raids into direct assault.¹⁸

The same instinct produced his two great failures. At Leyte he believed the claims of his pilots and chased the most tempting target, and in the typhoons he pushed operations too long before thinking of the weather. His popularity and his combat record shielded him from the consequences, and EBSCO's summary credits him with sinking more enemy warships than any other naval commander of the war.¹⁹

Later life and death

In December 1945 Halsey was promoted to fleet admiral, the five-star rank. After special duty for the Secretary of the Navy he retired in 1947, and from 1951 to 1957 he was president of International Telecommunications Laboratories. He died on 16 August 1959 at the Fishers Island Country Club, off the Connecticut shore, and was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery on 20 August.²⁰

Legacy and memory

Halsey remains one of the most famous American admirals, and one of the most argued about: the leader who raised the fleet's spirits in 1942 and drove it to victory, and the commander whose choices at Leyte and in the typhoons historians still dissect. The Navy named a guided-missile frigate, Halsey (DLG-23), after him; at its commissioning in 1963 Fleet Admiral Nimitz gave the eulogy for his old comrade.²¹

Read more about his commander, Chester Nimitz, the other commanders of the Pacific War, the greatest battles of the Pacific War, or what happened on 18 April, the day of the Doolittle Raid.