That was Welcome to mid Rats with sal from Commander Salamander, an Eagle one
from Eagle Speak at Seer Shore your home for a discussion of national security issues
in all things maritime. And good day everybody. Glad to have you aboard.
And if you are with us Live, which I would like to thank
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Live is not always comming it to you that way when you're doing your commute
during the week. We'll be right there ready for you when you want to
listen to us prattle on. But we're not going to prattle on today.
We've got a great topic with it with a great guest, and what we're
going to look about is it's a regular conversation. Everybody likes talking about the
vulnerabilities of aircraft carriers as if it's really anything new. It's really not.
You can go back to the dawn of when aircraft carriers are first used in
combat, and they are vulnerable, not just because of what they're designed to
do, which is carry a bunch of thin skinned airplanes full of fuel and
bombs around, but it's because of what they can do. There are few
assets that you can think of, especially in the last century, that a
nation can project sovereign authority and power on a global scale at sea, in
the global commons than an aircraft carrier. As such, people who don't have
that capability, or even have a smaller version or an equal version, They're
going to want to eliminate that capability because that's what best suits their needs if
they decide they don't want Uncle Sam twirling around in their waters doing what he
wants to do. And at peace and war, we see that even in
the events in the Red Sea recently, again the questions asked, where's the
aircraft carrier? It's not so much where are the armored divisions? And when
we look back at the great Pacific wars of the last century, whether World
War II, Korea and Vietnam, there are places where, especially towards the
end of World War Two, not so much in the beginning, which is
what we're going to talk about. The aircraft areas could operate pretty much,
it will and dominate most of the world oceans and that history and that habit,
especially for those that are Gen X and younger, we think that's our
birthright since to follow the Soviet Union, it's really not that age, if
it's not already, is going to be shutting its door any moment now.
And we want to talk a little bit about that reality because it's a background
I think is important for people to understand should the next Great Pacific War come
that it's not going to be like other wars where we're used to just having
our aircraft carriers, airwings doing whatever they want, wherever they want. And
we're going to bring on a returning guest today, spot on. He's been
doing a lot of the intellectual heavy lifting on this exact topic, and that
is doctor John T. June. He's a professor of military history at the
Army Command in General Staff College in Leavenworth, Kansas. John, Welcome back
to mid Rats this Sunday. It's great to have you board. Hey,
it's good to be here. So sorry about my bark and dog. He's
got a bark collar on too, so I don't know, we might have
to check our bark collar out. We are a dog friendly show that just
gives it that homie feel. I just introduced you and regulars the mid Rats.
They've they've listened to us interview you before, but we've always got new
listeners on board, and I've I've always found your job to be as interesting
as it is important because here you are, retired US Navy commander in the
heart of the country, very far away from salt water samitting most of your
time trudging around with army guys in Kansas, and talk for a little bit
about the staff college that you have there in Levenworth, your role and not
just you know, specific role, but how you see yourself as one of
the few Navy guys there that can perhaps broaden the horizon then for a lot
of our developing the leaders mostly on the land component. But I know that
you have a joint student body there. Yeah, yeah, no. I
came through here as a student back in the nineties. It was kind of
one of those good deal secrets that kind of exist in the military for people
in the Navy who wanted to kind of get access to the Midwest, which
is hard to do in a Navy career. So I came through here.
Oh gosh. I came from here twenty four years ago as a student or
no more than twenty four years almost twenty eight years ago, as a student
as part of you know, the jt ME one piece Joint Professional Military Education
once. But once I got here, I liked it. There was a
lot of military history here. I was a military history nut even back then.
And then when I got an opportunity to come back here and teach.
It was a joint billet to teach back here, and so I came back
and taught here. So it's you know, it was a great way to
kind of get to the Midwest and also to kind of do military history stuff.
Really great place to teach and everything, a really nice quality of life.
The base, the base here, they don't call it a base,
they call it a post. But it was just really nice. And so
so I've been here for twenty four years teaching foreign active duty and the rest
as a uh, civilian Department of the Army civilian. So I've been I've
been in actually in the Army now almost as long as I've been as I
was in the Navy before I retired from the Navy. So pretty joint is
a great it's a great job. I mean, we get approximately twelve hundred
students in every every year to the Command of General Staff Officer course. And
again it's there for the Army. It's their version of the Navy Command of
Staff College at a Newport and and and the top fifty in the Army comes
through here, and they pretty much do a good job sending that fifty here.
Of course, they don't have to manage ships to see like we do.
But you know, for a time it was difficult for them to get
through here because the law and terror with the Force GEN and and and the
rotational piece for Force GEN and but they, yeah, they send their top
fifty guys through here. And then they're all of our major allies and partners
and their office send their best officers here. So the cream of the crop
from all the NATO countries and Australia and New Zealand and anywhere else that's that's
actually a parking with the United States, including the Vietnamese, send their guys
here. So they're here, and so you get to meet a lot of
different people, a lot of different perspectives, and of course you're reading the
best that the army has. You know, quite a number of these guys
will go on to become become generals and and you know, a couple of
them will probably go all the way to the top the four star. The
Navy has the requirement to send people here at the Air Force and the Marines.
The Marines do the same thing that the Army does. They send their
best guys here, and the Air Force does that. The only service that
doesn't send their best people here is the Navy. The Navy basically sends like
whoever they can. Once they get here, they realize it's a pretty good
deal. But it's really hard for them to get people here unless you're like
me. You know, I had a buddy who'd gone here, and he
goes, hey, you like military history, this was the place for you.
Yeah, you got to put up with some army stuff, you know,
learning some army stuff here and there. But and you know, that's
this is broadening as far as I was concerned. So I've been doing that
for twenty years. I've been in the History department for that long. I
got a joint job teaching the joint curriculum here, but I almost immediately transferred
down to the History department because the guy who worked down there, who was
the director, guy named doctor Jim Wilbags, he and I were buddies,
and he wanted to get me down there so I could finish my PhD and
go to work for him. So that's how I did it, and I
worked my way up. I've been a named professor here. I was the
WILLIAMS. Stoft Chair of Historical Research from twenty thirteen to twenty sixteen. I'm
a full professor. Now I'm one of the I'm one of the gray beards
around the department. I'm one of the most senior guys in the department.
I used to be that new, young, you know, brand new historian,
and now I'm the old, you know, fogey historian. You know
who who you know can remember events that other people weren't even born during,
you know, and so all that Cold War stuff that I did. You
know. I was telling my students the other day, you know, the
year I turned eighteen was the year that they eliminated the draft. And they
look at me like, my god, you know, I tell them I'm
a twenty I'm a twentieth century man. You've got a living relic of the
past century here to teach you. So so I've got lots of anecdotal stories
and see stories and stuff. So I love it. As long as I
as long as I enjoy teaching the students, I think I'll keep doing it.
I didn't lose you guys, did I. No, it's my turn
to ask you a question, John, And I couldn't find my unmute button
because I'm even older. I'm even older than you are. So it's one
of the one of those, one of those, one of those exciting adventures
in live radio in your moment. Yeah yeah, Well it's got a little
red light on it. You think I'd be able to spot it right away,
but you know, I'm not any naval aviator, so I usually have
a long time to think about these things. Let's talk a little bit about
your book that I think came out in October of last year, Strategy and
Crisis. Talk a little bit about that and the lessons we can learn from
from World War Two that maybe this is a broad topic, but maybe applicable
to what's going on in East East Asia right now. Yeah. So the
book actually began during COVID was I was at the Naval War College as the
Ernest King professor there lisiting professor, So I was there during the COVID year,
and I always tell people I eventually came back here because they never opened
the college backup, so I could actually teach for them from my basement.
But while I was there, I met this guy named Mike Pathkeovict. Mike's
an old friend, and he was doing a new series for the Naval Institute
called The Essentials of strategy right, and he goes, hey, we'd like
to get you to do a book for us in this new series. So,
as it turned out, this is the inaugural book in the Essentials and
Strategy series. And I looked at the Pacific War in nineteen thirty seven and
nineteen forty five, and I started it in nineteen thirty seven because because that's
when that's when the war really started. It started in China, and in
nineteen thirty seven in North China at the Marco Polo Bridge, and then it
rapidly spreads throughut China with his massive battle in Shanghai in nineteen thirty seven.
That was a World War two kind of battle, you know, with with
machine guns, tanks, a naval aircraft, bombing targets ashore, you know,
over a million combatants and just this amazing thing. So so I agreed
to do it. In the book looks at all of the all of the
aspects of that war of World War II in the Pacific and in concise chapters,
so it's a one stop shopping book. I kind of modeled it on
Ron Spector's Eagle against the Sun. I wanted to kind of have that sort
of the Steel to it, but does to sort of take a fresh look
at that. And and so so that the title was not my title.
Naval Listen To kind of picked it out for me, Strategy and Crisis.
My title was, you know, world War two in the Pacific, you
know, kind of you know here it is, you know, generic Wheedy's
or something, you know, but they wanted it to be, you know,
something sexy. So so so I did that book. And so the
book is really looks at at the operational and strategic level of World War Two.
I don't get into the tactics very much at all. But when they
changed the funny story that I want to tell you guys here and you might
give me a chance to to kind of kind of riff on this is is
that when they said, okay, well we want you to title the book
Strategy and Crisis, and I said, well, heck, you know,
nobody's people are gonna people are gonna want their money back because I don't really
you know, kind of go into strategy and Crisis. I kind of tell
you about the strategies that Japanese and Americans, Chinese, the British, the
Netherlands, France, all these different actors are trying to import both prior to
the war and then as the crisis deepens and war breaks out in China.
But I don't really have a thread of strategy crisis throughout the book. So
maybe I should write an eplogue, you know, to kind of explain why
it's strategy and crisis. It's it's more narrative than argument. The narrative is
uh we talked about this in the pre show bit, but just just for
the listeners, uh, kind of the the the impetus to invite John to
come back on here is is. I just was having it again one of
my little little moments where I was getting little frustrated with some of the conversations
about future conflict west of the International date Line and aircraft carriers and vulnerability because
it's I remember back it was a cover of The Atlantic back and I think
nineteen eighty seven. I was in college at the time that I saw that
had the US Navy as sitting ducks. I mean, this is not a
new line of argument, and I think a lot of people find think this
is a new thing that they've discovered, when it's just the opposite. This
has always been true for some of the reasons that I said in the introduction,
and John kind of kind of popped me a DM and he's like,
hey, you know, I've I've written a book that kind of covers on
this, and as I will, let me come on and bring it on,
because I think it's a really important part of because a lot of people
they're not so much reinditting the wheels, they're getting the first blush of thinking
about something that they really should be on the fourth or fifth iteration trying to
pick up the details on And I liked one of the maybe it's because you've
been around a bunch of army guys here, but in chapter two of your
book, Strategy and Crisis, I like the title that you use, which
was an oceanic blitz Greg and the fact that as one of my favorite but
also one of my frustrating pictures of World War Two is the famous one.
I think it's a outhily a tall murderers row that has all these Essex class
carriers, plus I think the Enterprise lined up in a row with this huge
fleet around them, and that really did not represent that that first fifteen months
of the war from nineteen you know, the way I would like to like
to draw. The line is from Pearl Harbor up to about March of forty
three. It's a very different war. It was very much the come as
you are war that we would face if we have something in the Western Pacific
showing up in the next ten years. If you could for a second,
you know, talk for a little bit the cold water in the face of
what the Imperial Japanese Navy was able to do in the Western Pacific with their
interior and exterior lines of communication to really, even in hindsight, regardless of
how many times you've read it, it's just shocking to what they're able to
accomplish in those fifteen months. Yeah, if your listeners have a screen available,
or they have multiple screens like I do, they might want to bring
up the West Point Atlas page and go to something called go to to the
West Point Military Atlases, it's public domain, and then go to the World
War two in the Pacific, and then go to something called the centrifugal offensives,
which is a beautiful, beautiful sort of betrayal of what you're talking about,
was what I call the Oceanic Blitzkreeg. So I want to back up
here a little bit and talk about two. The first thing is is,
you know, the aircraft carrier was a very contingent weapons system platform idea slash
concept world War One. The impetus for aircraft carriers in World War One was
not to go out and ships at sea. The idea was the British were
going to create these carriers that could take the fight depends in Belgium and North
Germany, and so they began converting battleships and one battle cruisers the furious to
go attack these things. Well, the war kind of ended before they'd actually
proved their utility, but the British had quite a few of these. They
led the world in aircraft carriers when the war ended, and by the time
we get to the early nineteen twenties, the British had like eight aircraft carriers,
most of them converted from other ships. The Japanese had one experimental carrier,
the host Show, and the United States had one experimental carrier, the
Langley. But it got all caught captured into this idea of airpower. I
mean, it's going to be ironic that the nation with the lead in aircraft
carriers at the end of World War One, Great Britain will actually be the
nation that's furthest behind in aircraft carrier development when war comes in the nineteen thirties,
So for Britain in nineteen thirty nine. For Japan, of course,
in nineteen thirty seven, Japan will have already used aircraft carriers as power projection
platforms against land targets as early as nineteen thirty two. So the Japanese is
the pros from delver when World War II comes along in terms of employing aircraft
carriers at least as power projection platforms. But people didn't know what these things
were going to do so much they kind of to guess. You know,
the Americans went down a track of aircraft carriers are going to provide air defense
for the battle fleet. You know, we agree to these treaties that we're
going to limit the number of aircraft carriers we have, and pretty soon we
learn that their role that we don't really have enough of them to provide air
defense for anything more than air defense. Even though in the war period we
come up with this thing called the scouting fleet, and we put the aircraft
carriers in the scouting fleet. But we keep learning over and over again in
our fleet exercises that battleships are very vulnerable to aircraft carriers and so they need
air defense and so so nobody really knows what these things can or cannot do.
Early in the war, one of them get sunk by German battle cruisers
up off of Norway. The British loser carrier to battle cruiser fire up off
of Norway. So they are very very biblical, and that's known prior to
the war beginning in the Pacific well at the same time, and I spend
quite a bit of time when I do the World War II lecture for the
Naval War College and to do one on Tuesday and Prins Cola. By the
way, World War two, the US Navy and World War two, the
Japanese do a really fine job developing their concept, but they use it for
the wars that they end up in. And so if they're in a land
war in Asia, they use their aircraft carriers to conduct the land war in
Asia, kind of like we do in the War on Terror. So land
wars in Asia necase. So there. But they also have designed these things
to as a sort of fleet, you know, command of the sea platform.
But their their main role is power projection and defense of the battle fleet.
That's their main role in the Japanese Navy and in the US Navy.
And it makes you know, it makes perfect sense at their first major blow
against the United States is not a fleet on fleet engagement. It's an engagement
against a couple of islands, you know, the Hawaiian Islands. And so
this big blow by aircraft carriers, that the Japanese strike will be power projection,
not fleet on fleet engagement. Yamamoto actually is very, very worried that
the considerable air defenses that exist on Pearl Harbor. You know, we have
the Pacific Air Forces, they are the Army Air Force and the Navy Air
Force, that his carriers will be discovered. He's very worried that land based
air is gonna sink at least a third of his carriers, and that's his
estimate for the Pearl Harbor. After he's decided, you know, if we
get out of this with one third of aircraft carriers sunk, we'll be lucky,
okay. And so when he gets out of it without any of them
being sunk, he's you know, he basically has a party back there on
his flagship Knock Uptoe. He's not on the Yamapa yet, he's still on
the battleship, which is not part of the Pearl harbor rating force. So
the aircraft carrier was an unknown quantity. The knowns about the aircraft carrier was
that it was a really good strike you know, power projection platform in an
environment where the other guy didn't have any navies or where the other guy was
sleeping, and said, Pearl harm it, right. So that's kind of
that, and I go into that in the in the book. The other
piece is the Oceanic blitz Green this is. This is. I had come
up with this a number of years ago, over twenty years ago. I
looked at a map of the Japanese offensives and I'm gonna I'm just gonna make
this analogy and then I'm gonna let you guys kind of tease me some more
questions. And the Japanese attacks looked a heck of a lot like what the
Germans did on the Eastern Front against the Russians in nineteen forty one, you
know, about six months earlier, in fact, in June of nineteen forty
one. So you have these major offensives, except in the Japanese case,
they're on land, air and sea, and in the German case it was
air and land. But it was the same direction going east, and it
was the same way they had. They had efforts to the south, they
had efforts to the to the north, they had efforts down the central Pacific,
and the Japanese did Germans won better. They went they went west as
well, into Thailand and Burma towards India. So just these incredible offensives and
the movement trying to follow the movements of the Japanese navy in this time period,
the first six months of the of the Japanese expansion of the war in
the Pacific against the United States the Netherlands. In Great Britain was is it's
Dizzy's the mine. You know. That's why I since your listeners to to
the centrifugal offensives, just to show them just this incredible reach and movement of
these naval forces, and not just the aircraft carries, the entire combined fleet,
you know. And John Parcells got captured by this idea, you know,
forty years ago or however old John is I don't know, maybe maybe
he's younger than that, and he it fascinated in fore Lesia. He has
a web page, you know, combined Fleet, you know that he that
he does, and then he wrote a whole battle on Midway about it.
He's so fascinated with this Japanese fleet that can move and strike all these blows
in such a vast fashion. But I always thought that the similarity between the
Blitzkree against the Soviet Union and the Blitzkree against the Americans, the British and
the Netherlands bore so many things in common with each other in terms of it.
And of course in the Japanese case, the distances are almost triple of
what they were for the Germans against the Soviets, and quadruple in some cases.
Just these vast, vast distances. Well, at some point, I
think you talked about the shift in the United States. But first the US
had to defend, had to build up, and we had think at the
time, after Pearl Harbor we had three terriers if I'm not mistaken, in
the Pacific, maybe four, I can't remember exactly, but and we want
to do since we had lost most of our at least temporarily lost our battleships,
it was pretty clear I would think to the Tonis when he took over,
maybe to Kimmel before he before he left, it that we were suddenly
dependent on the aircraft carrier for a lot of things. Talk a little bit
about that, the need to preserve those and preserve the logistics train that was
keeping them, uh and and any of the other ships out at sea.
Yeah, well, there's a lot of new scholarship on this. But but
but the source that I used was Ernest King's reports to the Secretary of the
Navy to kind of set things up for the approach. And I once remember
when when the Japanese attack US on December seventh, and then he attacked the
British and the Dutch and the Ties on December the eighth, uh and and
of course US in the Philippines. The uh, the uh. You know,
the strategy has already been decided by something called the American British Conversations,
which occurred secretly in washing in DC the year before, in nineteen forty forty
one, and that decision was codified in a memorandum called the Planned Dog Memo,
which was which was said to the people who were doing something called the
Rainbow Plans. And so Europe was first. Certainly, when the Germans attacked
Russia, the europe first strategy became became even more solidified. You know that
we were going to use lend lease the arsenal of democracy for the Russians and
for the Soviets and for the British and anybody else who wanted to fight the
Germans. So the strategy was already decided. That strategy, of course,
is put into crisis by the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. And so now
we have some decisions to make. But Admiral King, not yet chief of
Naval Operations, is the Commander in chief of the US League, recently promoted
for Commander of the Atlantic Fleet to Commander in Chief of the US Fleet.
And King King describes to the Secretary that we have to defend first, and
he divides the Pacific War up into four phases. The defense, defense,
the defense offense, where he's going to use what forces he has as an
active defense offensively using defensive forces actively to kind of keep the Japanese off the
balance, but not really to go on the offensive. And then he'll use
something called the offense defense. And then he'll have the offense offense. And
so he divides the war up into those sort of phases. The other thing
that he makes clear for the Secretary to know, and which was well understood
in the Navy at the time. But it's King who's pushing this down to
his commanders, especially Chester Nimmits when he takes over a Pearl Harbor. Is
this idea of calculated risk. Trent Hones talked about this and his work,
particularly his recent work, uh mastering the Art of Command, which is on
minutes and what he's doing in the Pacific War. But it's King King,
and it's well understood throughout the Navy, and this is the idea that we're
not going to gamble our naval assets, but we will risk them if there's
the opportunity to perhaps do more damage to the enemy than he can do to
us. But this has got to be calculated. You can't lose precious assets,
really, Milly And initially the Dolittle Raid, which is something that mimics
is or that King is excited about, kind of violates King's guidance and mimeotoas
actually against the dou Little raid. Uh So that first period after Pearl Harbor
is the period of the carrier raids, but Nimets actually doesn't like the fact
that the King and Doolittle and Halsey, but King's really the father of it,
are gonna risk two of these very very important aircraft carriers in kind of
a crazy raid on Japan to kind of boost American morale and the sort of
proof of concept, you know, with these precious aircraft carriers. When Pearl
Harbor is struck. There are only three aircraft carriers in the Pacific. One
of those carriers is the Saratoga. Who's Who's Who's getting her overhaul and having
her eight inch guns removed by the way in in the in uh, Saratoga
is not even anywhere near Pearl Harbor. The other two aircraft carriers are out
on a war punting already. One of them is going to Wake Island to
beef up the defenses of Wake Island UH with with the marine aviators and supplies,
and the other one is pushing in aviation and supplies into Midway. And
so the Lexington and the Enterprise are that's what they're doing when when war comes.
The other more aircraft carriers will probably shock your readers to know are europe
first. One of them, the Wasp, is faring aircraft to Malta in
the in the in the Mediterranean. You know, I've always thought what would
happen if the if the WASP had got plugged by a by a U boat,
you know, doing this mission in the Mediterranean. So and then the
and then the other carriers are just coming online, and those are gonna be
the Yorktown, the Hornet, and the UH and the Ranger, and the
Ranger will never come over to the Pacific. The Ranger will say eventually,
Wasp, Porned and Yorktown will all come over to the Pacific through the sus
Canal or not. The seuwis canw the Panama Canal. They're designed to go.
They're they're not so big that they can't get through the Panama Canal.
So they were designed deliberately so that they could move between the fleets. So
the United States is on the defense with its carriers UH and the first carrier
Rays do cost Japanese concerns, and they follow King's guidance of calculated risk.
Aside from the Doolittle raid, which I argue is very important, it has
an outsized impact. It causes the approval of a hair brain scheme that yam
alone has been trying to get approved by which the Army and the Navy Imperial
General Staff have been detailing as a bridge too far. And that's this plan
to take Hawaii to eliminate the US fleete once and for all. And Yamomoto
is frantic. He wants he realizes the Americans have decided to go ahead and
fight anyway without their battle line. They're using these task forces built around aircraft
carriers to power projection in the Pacific against the Japanese advance on one of their
main lines of advance. The Japanese have three main lines of advance going on
in the Pacific after Pearl Harbor. One is to the south to capture the
oil and the resources of the Dutch and British East Indies. One of them
is driving into Burma to threaten Britain's cash cow and the engine of the British
economy that's kind of keeping Britain in the war both with manpower and resources in
that's India. And then the third one is to cut off the strategic sea
line of communication between the United States and Australia. And where NIMTS is doing
the most damage is on that third leg that's driving down New Guinea and the
Solomons and the Bismarcks to try to cut the sea line of communication with Australia.
And as if we and as if we needed any reminding, of course,
in Nagumo comes in Hammers Tarwin Australia with a carrier raid in March April,
but Nimts in one attack sinks a bunch of Japanese transports and and and
and actually his carriers under I'm trying to remember who was in charge. I
don't know if it was Lee Noius yet, it wasn't Fletcher yet, but
Fletcher was actually uh uh heading up a carry task force in New York Town
and they actually fly over the Owen Stanley Mountains in New Guinea, sink a
bunch of Drapanese transports, and they shoot down all these Japanese airplanes the first
time the Japanese naval aviation, land based naval aviation in this case is actually
given a bloody nose by American aircraft carriers. You talked about logistics. The
list logistically, as it turns out, is not depleted, will become We
actually have a shortage of fast oilers. One of the reasons that we kind
of leave the battleships behind is we don't have enough oilers for fast carrier task
forces and battleships. Another myth is that there are no battleships after harderest nonsense.
Within a it's enough months, and we've got at least four battleships that
can work and run, and we have battleships in the Atlantic that we could
bring over what we just don't have the fast oilers to oil these things.
So Nimics makes the decision, supported by King, to devote these pressions fast
oilers like the Neoshow and the Cimarron and ships like this to supporting the fast
carrier arrays and of course the doozy of the ray against Japan. Yeah,
it's amazing the amount of echoes of officis we have here in twenty twenty four
that they were experiencing right at the kickoff at war. And in the back
of King and Nimits and everybody else's mind, they knew that by mid nineteen
forty three, the decisions that were made seven years ago to really invest in
the two Ocean Navy and to get the shipyards up and running and the cut
steel would start to come to the front, but they still had a war
to fight. And there's a tow your book. There's a nice companion article
I would recommend to the reader. They can just google John's name k but
it's titled multi the main operations in a bygone era, the Guadalcanal Campaign August
forty two to January of forty three. And when people talk about what could
possibly a war game different scenarios today west of the National Daylight, I think
it's really important for them to look back at things. For instance, you
start the article not at the very beginning, but about a couple of pages
in quote, the American carriers, as Admiral Fletcher had already pointed out,
were under the same constraints and particularly vulnerable to Japanese submarines and land based aircraft
unquote the modern day equivalent. The Chinese do have quite a few submarines,
but it's the People's Liberation Army, rocket forces and their aviation forces and a
lot of their ballistic and cruise missles of things. It's a similar threat.
And then as you go through the campaign, you know certain things pop up.
In late August, the Enterprise is damaged, the submarine I twenty six
torpedo, the Saratoga you have later on, the Hornet was sunk and the
Enterprise was damaged again, and of course the Japanese forces are saying again.
And by the time we got to the heart of the Guadalcanal campaign, there
were not as many carrier assets that ideally you would want to operate with.
Talk for a little bit about how the leaders we had at the time and
changing out some leaders at the time were able to continue with the overall campaign
not having some of the assets that they would ideally want to have, simply
because of a little bit of bad luck at sea. Yeah, so I
use Guadalcanal as an example, and King doesn't do this in his report where
he actually switches to the offensive. I think at Coral c or Midway.
But I consider Corals and Midway both sort of defensive victories. But the guy
in tactical command at both of these battles as a guy nobody remembers anymore.
Frank Jack Fletcher, who earned a Navy Cross in World War One and earned
a Medal of Honor fighting Mexican War War troops in Mexico in nineteen fourteen.
I think so, And he's going to be the guy in the initial phases
of Glaudalcanal, but King characterizes King's characterization, I change it. This is
the beginning of the American offense, and it's called the first offense for a
reason. This is the first American offensive in the Pacific since the Japanese had
brought the Americans into the battle. Till then the Americans of British and the
Dutch had all been on their heels just kind of moving backwards. As the
Japanese took the Philippines, book the Indies, uh, the took the started
to take most of New Guinea, got into Papua New Guinea, took the
Bismarck Islands, started their way down the Solomon Islands, and so after midway,
King takes this risk, it's not a gamble and throws in the first
marine division plus, so it's a division plus in the Vaucanal to secure an
airfield. And it begins this this fight and over command of the sea in
the southern Solomon Islands, which is at the very edge of the Japanese operational
reach from their major base at Rebult, very edge of the Americans operational reach
from their bases that they're developing in French territory in New Caledonia, Innumeya,
which is in New Caledonia, and then a fete which is today Vona Apsu
in the New Hebrides. So the it's at the very edge of the operational
reach for both the Japanese and the Americans. But the Americans take this thing
on the offensive. The carrier forces are very much the same, but that
big fleet you talked about is not going to really start to come online until
the next year. And so so we seize this airfield. We also sees
a seaplane base which was actually was the initial initial objective was to see the
seaplane base at two captured during the Battle of the Coral Sea. And so
we send Nimitz sends his most experienced commander of carriers in combat. Not Spruance,
he spruances. Actually Niman's a chief of staff. He sends he said
Fletcher, and Fletcher's got strict guidance, No, don't risk these carriers,
and and so forever afterwards, because he pulled these things out for about a
week after the marine's landed, everybody's kind of cast. But he comes back
and he almost and he gets torpedoed by Japanese submarine for his trouble. Actually,
before that happens, he fights another major carrier battle in the Eastern Solomons,
which the Japanese think is a victory. They come away from the Battle
of the Eastern Solomons just like they did at the Coral c thinking, Hey,
the Americans don't have any aircraft carriers left. We've sunk them all.
Now we can get rid of this American you know, regiment that's down at
Guadalcanal. And this is the beginning of a Japanese tale of intelligence shortcomings,
where they have no idea that we have this entire marine division down there with
enough rations, you know, to make it by until the Americans could push
another supply convoy through at least for months, and Marines have enough to keep
them on maybe starvation rations, certainly way more than the Japanese have. And
so begins this battle over this airfield called Henderson Field, a marine aviator who
was killed at Midway, and so they name it in honor of him.
Every time American carrier will go down, it's air wing will fly into Henderson
Field and become part of what's called the Cactus Air Force. By the time
we get to September, there are three different air forces at Henderson Airfield,
the Marines with their Marine Air, the Navy with the Navy Air mostly carrier
aviators who are now on an unsinkable aircraft carrier named Henderson Field, and an
Army aviators will start flying in P thirty nine aer cobras that'll become part of
the air force. In the daytime, the Japanese will be unable to operate
in the waters around Guadalcanal. At the night time, the Americans will be
able to unable to operate in the waters around Guadalcanal because of the Japanese service
night fighting tactics. And they'll deliver a stinging defeat at Sado Island early in
the campaign, and then another bloody battle at Cape Esperance where it's more of
a tie but still very very black, and so you get this battle.
You know, airplanes don't fly at night back then, and so the uh
SO the Americans control the seas by day because they have land based air,
not really carrier air uh and and by the time we get to the end
of October, the Americans don't have any carriers left. The Japanese themselves are
starting to run out of ships too, and and and uh, and the
Japanese keep trying to capture the airfield, but they keep losing these battles.
They lose a battalion level force in in the beginning of the campaign, and
they essentially are defeated with a brigade attack on the airfield in September, and
then in October they try a core level attack which is completely unsynchronized with the
Navy attack from Truck, and so you have the Japanese coming down with an
invasion invasion force from from Truck to support the army, but the Navy force
attacks early defeated the Battle of Santa Cruz Island where the Hornet is sunk and
the Enterprise damaged, and so now it's just the Marines and their air force
against the Japanese and their surface ships that are trying to supply the Japanese army
to take the base. And you get these bloody battles in November called the
Naval Battles of Guadalcanal, where ironically the ship that kind of seals the doom
of the Japanese garrison in Guadalcanal will be the radar equipped battleships under Willis leave
and they'll break the back of the Japanese Navy and its attempt to desperately reinforce.
When it's all said and done and the sun comes up after four days
of day night land fighting at Guadalcanal in the middle of November, the Marines,
the Navy aviators, and the Army aviators will control the seas around Guadalcanal,
and the Japanese on the the decision to withscaw their forces from Guadalcanal and
let the Americans have it. So this is a six month all out battle.
It'll go on for another month as the Japanese withdrawn on the northern end
of the island to retreat and pull their forces out. And by the way,
they will pull out somewhere around seven to eight thousand Japanese soldiers at night
using the Tokyo Express in the face of the American American Navy, because we
just don't have the combat power to prevent them from doing it. So it's
a very desperate fight, but it's an American win. Fletcher loses his job
because he gets wounded on the Saratoga and Slew McCain, who's commanding the land
based there is also given a break so too, and then the Navy overall
Commander, Robert Gormoley will be fired and removed from command and replaced with Halsey.
But Halsey is gonna have precious few aircraft carriers to do this fight.
He's going to be mostly using surface ships and airplanes land based airplanes including Army
B seventeens from a fete to kind of contest this this operation, and it
becomes very much of a close run thing, an amazing fight. I just
want to tell your readers one thing. If they go to look for the
article that sal mentioned that the Commander's and the Commander Salamander mentioned, they're probably
going to find that they have to be a student that seek gets a seat
to get at the article. They might be able to get access to it
because it is posted on blackboard for the Navy students and the Army students.
Hear it, but it's not it has it's an unpublished reading for the students.
So I'm sorry that that article on guadal Canal Multi domain campaign, it's
based on the same research though that I wrote the chapter for the book on
this. So so if people go to the book that they can get pretty
much sort of stuff. Not quite the same thing because because they it is
different. But but the book does have a chapter that deals with puble Canal.
I'm trying to try to go up to it right now and tell him
which chapter it is. Yeah, I think that's deep into the offense.
I think it's uh, it's either chapter three or chapter four, maybe chapter
four. Yeah. As I was reading through the book, I was struck
by how Admiral Wiley in his in his analysis of how we you know we
strategy. You know, he's the the concept of the sequential end and ulatives
cumulatives there you go. Yeah, sure I knew that. You know,
it's pretty well laid out in your book. I mean they you know,
they it was. It was kind of forced. I think by that by
the nature of course, Wiley has the benefit of of hindsight because he's looking
at it after the after the war. But uh, you know, we
we turn the we turned these subs loose to engage in unrestricted warfare, and
then we start uh moving along as we had to do to capture these outlying
areas until we could get close to the to the homeland. Kind of talk
about that a little bit, as you know, is is it just King's
genius that he saw this ahead of time? Is wildly just reflecting what what
what actually happened, and is not really well. So, you know,
scholarship is hard to find consensus on the reasons for the success in the Pacific.
That Trent Hoane has provided some really good answers when he talks talks about
this in Learning War that the Navy is a learning organization. But again it's
a learning organization with an immense industrial base behind it. So if you're going
to fight a nutritional war with the United States at least back, then not
a good idea. Right on top of it, there is good leadership,
but it's it's systems and systems. I mean, it's like one of the
French captains Seid after Trafalgar. At Trafalgar, every British captain was a Nelson.
Well, in the Navy you had a lot of Nelson's and Kings and
Nimtzs and Halsey's and Spruances and Fletchers, and these guys all sort of follow
sort of the same pattern and they all sort of had the same view of
warfare. I think does a good job of kind of showing you it's not
just the Navy and the Marines. The army plays a huge role in this.
I mean MacArthur wanted to do the first defensive. He told the Combined
Choose of Staff and the JCS, listen, give me two weeks, give
me the first Marines, and I'll kick the Japanese out of New Guinea and
I'll go capture a bull. Of course, everybody on the Joint Piece of
Staff laughed at him. They go, we no, that's a crazy idea,
and it'll take us Gosh, Rebull won't even ever fall, but it'll
take another year and a half to neutralize Reball. So MacArthur was, you
know, doing some sort of you know, tropical route or something down in
Australia when he after that. But he does begin his offensive shortly after the
Guadalcanal begins at Boona and Goona, And just like Guadalcanal, it's at the
limits of his operational reach. And it's ugly, you know. It's the
Americans don't have it their whole way there are the Pacific is the second priority,
right and and and Nimitz himself or not Nimets, but MacArthur's theater is
you know, even lower priority than then Nimtz's South Pacific theater under Halsey.
After Guadalcanal is over, MacArthur and Halsey develop a really good working relationship,
and then Hall and then and then MacArthur h starts to build up his own
naval forces. Eventually they become the seventh Fleet under Kincaid, and he fights
a series of just really dazzling operational campaigns up New Guinea across to Cape Gloucester
on the island of New Britain, which is where Reball is. At the
same time, Halsey is fighting another campaign up the Solomons, and so Halsey
and MacArthur are the original duel advanced with Halsey going up to Solomons, to
New Georgia and Bougainville supported by the Navy, and Nimmet's actually his offensive in
the Central Pacific doesn't really get started to late nineteen forty three with Tarla,
and then Nimts has his brilliant campaigns in the Marshalls and in the Carolans,
well not really in the Carolands, you know, and some people would say
and a wee talk is really in the Marshalls, and it's not in the
Carolns. You know. The fascinating thing here is they figure out how to
kind of make Japan's defense on interior lines at the strategic and operational level a
drawback, not an advantage. You know. The idea is that Keto Bu
Tai and the Japanese carriers and fleet would be able to run around on interior
lines and defeat these turn these offensives in turn. But the problem is Yamamoto,
Japanese fleet that's in rapul and the Imperial Navy General staff have got to
meet three major offenses at the same time, and they simply don't have aircraft,
carriers, the aircraft, and the army troops to do it. In
fact, the Army goes to the Navy and says, you lied to us.
You're telling us you need more troops to defend these islands, but we've
got a war in China that were bought down in and we really don't have
any troops to give you. You kind of lied to us about, you
know, what it was going to take to beat the Americans, and so
so you know, on the American side, everybody's working together on the Japanese
side. Everybody's dysfunctional, and each time the Japanese think they have figured out
where the next blow is going to land. You know, the Americans land
in Tarawa and see the Gilberts and they go, okay, well, let's
focus there, and then boom, you know, MacArthur lands. You know,
MacArthur lands in Cape Nassa, and it lands Alamua, and then boom,
Halsey shows up in Bougainville, and you know, and the Japanese just
can't they can't get their balance. And the problem is now they're in the
worst form of warfare that they wanted to fight, which is a nutrition war,
and the Americans keep showing up with more and better troops. Are almost
from mid nineteen forty three on, the Americans will almost always have command of
the air and local command of the sea in these fights, and the Japanese
won't, and it'll be very difficult for them. The only time where they
really make an effort to kind of get it back will be in the Battle
of the Philippines Sea, where they kind of try to get that command of
the air and see and it backfires on them. They have a something called
the Decisive Battle Doctrine and So when the when NYMPHIS Central Pacific Campaign shows up
in the Marianas, and this is gonna be Operation of Forager, the the
the Japanese just aren't ready for it. They're thinking that they're gonna, you
know, launch their carrier airplanes. Then they'll go on a one way trip
and fly into the bases in Guantini and Saipan. Well, the Americans shoot
down all the Japanese land based air forces before the Japanese fleet even shows up.
And then if they're flying into land in these bases, the Americans already
dominate the air and then they have the Great Marianas Turkey shoot and and so
the Japanese suffer these horrendous losses of these precious carriers that it's taken them almost
to nine months together enough to kind of attack the Americans. And so you
get this. So the Japanese had this decisive battle, they lose it,
and they keep losing it. They'll lose it again. And I'm sure I'm
going here that they kind of keep losing the decisive battle and they go,
well, next time we'll get them, you know, next time we'll get
them. And they take it all the way to the end. Of the
war with Okinawa, where they again, are the Americans, you know,
getting off likely and these battles, No, they're they're suffering, but they're
just totally strange Japan with air and sea and power and UH and the Japanese
are starting to run out of options. I'm curious your opinion on something that
the older I get, the more I agree with. Is when you know,
we talk about attritional warfare, and especially when you think about the industrial
age of warfare, and it's also easier to put up on a put up
on a slide, so to speak, numbers of ships, numbers of aircraft,
aircraft carriers' losses. But one thing that really during the latter part of
the war seemed to be an even greater problem with the Japanese. And I'm
curious where you'd put the balance here. It's not so much the fact like
in Midway that they lost all those carriers, but they lost all of the
most experienced aviators they had, which gave him that comparative advantage at the opening
of the war. And so it wasn't just the material and industrial attrition,
but the Japanese never seemed to get off the back foot when it came to
having their air wings led and experienced on the level that the Americans just kept
sending from Konis. Yeah, the the Japanese training and Mark Pete goes into
this in a great book called Sunburst, which is the history of the Japanese
naval aviation. It's very much like his book with Dave Evans Akaign, but
Sunburst tills the story of jeb and they come up with this grueling training program
to train the most elite naval aviators in the world, Japanese. Japan and
in nineteen forty one has the best naval aviation force in the world, both
land based and sea based. I mean they sink the Prince of Wales and
the Repulse with land based torpedo bombers and it's like they didn't even break a
sweat when they did it. And so they but they don't have the programs
to train these guys for the long deray. And then when the war against
desperate as at Guadalcanal, they can't pull these guys out of the line.
I mean, we're pulling guys out of the line like Jimmy Thatch and flat
Lee and butch oh here to trained guys back in the United States because we
have this huge one hundred carrier fleet coming and we cycle guys out of the
line. Japanese don't do that. They won't bring their guys back, and
then they run into the problem of not only don't they have the veterans anymore,
but now they don't have the gas to train these guys because we're sinking
all their oilers. They have to divide their fleet with the carriers up in
Japan and the battleships and the service ships down in Lingo Road in Singapore because
they don't have the oil anymore because we sink all of their oil tankers in
the av gas and so the Japanese ironically end up where the Germans are.
In mid nineteen forty four, a new pilot's first combat mission will be his
last mission. The only guys that are surviving are a few, you know,
you know, the few that are left. You know. I forget
there was a Stuka pilot who wrote a book called, you know, the
First and the Last. I think it was I forget his name, but
anyway, that was The Japanese and the German looked off are very much alike
it. They just don't have the pilots to compete anymore. And that's because
they hadn't foreseen that this was going to be a war of attrition in the
air. You know, we sort of stumbled into this in the German campaign.
We sort of stumbled into this, this Achilles heel for the Luftwaffa.
We don't in the Pacific. Slu McCain in the midst of the Guaddal Canal
campaign rites back and he's the commander of calm Air so packed commander Air Forces
South Pacific, the land based Air Forces, and he writes back to King
saying, hey, we can turned Guadalcanal into the sinkhole for Japanese aviation.
And we do, and we basically do it throughout the Pacific, and it
becomes a case of where the Japanese have to resort to these desperate measures of
Kamikazi's katsu goos, banca boats, suicide boats, all the kinds of things
we're seeing today, you know, are basically sort of you know, I
mean, I hate to use it because it's not really their unmanned, unguided
systems that well, the Japanese don't have that luxury in nineteen forty four,
so they go with manned guided systems, right, and is the guidance system.
And so it's a it's a fascinating story. It's a tragic story too,
because this is this is a superb force that the Japan takes to war,
but by the time we get to the end, very few of them
are alive. Yeah. I liked the first quote at the conclusion, in
the conclusion you wrote, which is from addwal King. The war has been
variously termed a war of production and a war of machines, whatever else.
It is as far as the United States is concerned, as a war of
logistics. And you know, you just hit on that we sank their oilers
with that interrupted their ability to train new aviators. We were cutting off their
supplies to make new aircraft. And yeah, I mean that spells of doom
and and I think there are a lot of lessons to be learned to that
if we have to go to war again in the Pacific, it's you know,
the logistics is key. But let's let's talk a little bit about what
you know. This book I highly recommend people read. It's not it's not
a it's not a very long book, but it's it's dense and Yeah,
Naval Institute wouldn't let me make it longer. They wouldn't let me out an
epilogue to it. That's how short they wanted it to be. I wrote
it now, Yeah, I wrote another four pages and they couldn't even put
that in the book. The advantage of that, though, John, is
that people, you know, they they will read a shorter book if you
if you pick up my Hands, you know, History of Seapower. That's
that's an intimidating book for a lot of people. So, uh, while
we're talking about this, so what are you working on now? What can
we look forward to the next scene out of your your fertile mind. Well,
I've got some chapters coming out and some new books that are going to
be coming out. One of them is with Naval Institute Press. It's a
book on fleets and being edited by Sally Pain. So I've got a chapter
on fortified fleets and beings. They're talking about actually the British Navy in the
Dutch Navy and what they were doing early in the Pacific War and prior to
it in terms of how they wanted to defend. So that'll be an analogy
in an anthology that's coming out. I'm working on a paper right I'm going
to present in April at the Society of Military History, and it's completely it's
like, you know, Mighty Python. Now for something completely different. It's
going to be on Mark Bristol, a lieutenant commander commanding the Newport Torpedo Station
in nineteen o eight to nineteen ten eleven. And that's because I'm fascinated by
this guy Bristol. He's not a World War Two admiral, but he's He
was our first ever ambassador to Turkey while he was an active duty admiral,
and he also commanded the gunboats in China as the commander of the Asiatic Fleet
and it was on the General Board. So I'm right. So this was
kind of a spinoff and my interest in Admiral Bristol and him commanding the Newport
Torpedo Station. It's it's I hoped eventually publish that at some point. But
one of the archives there is Stacy Perilla and I were talking about, you
know, the Newport Torpedo Station. Today it sounds like, oh yeah,
very boring torpedo station, you know, prior to World War One, but
it was like Silicon Valley. I mean, it was right at the center
of all this advanced innovative technology like wireless telegraphy and periscope optics and submarines and
unguided systems like torpedoes, and and this guy was right here in the middle
of it with all of these crazy inventions and machines and everything. So that's
coming up in h that's coming up in side of military history. That'll be
up in Washington at Arlington when they have their conference there. And then the
next book project I have is with Navorlands due press, but I'm I pitched
it to him. It's a Mask of Naval Command, kind of modeled on
John Keek's Mask of Command. Have a contract or anything for that right now,
it's just a book proposal, So I'm just kind of waiting to hear
on that. Well, I'm really interested in the UH, in the the
Newport UH torpedo stations, those little little out of the out of the direct
view cornered little stories that I think are really enlightening. So yeah, I
look, you have to to send me a link when that becomes publicly available,
and that seems really interesting, I have to give you a preview on
it. So so Bristol takes over this outfit and takes command. And shortly
after he gets there and takes command, Uh, a submarine comes to report
for duty. And it's the USS Plunger. It's one of the brand new
first generation American submarines and it comes in to get its torpedoes tested and also
to assist with research and development on torpedo systems for submarines. And the commander
of the Plunger is Chester w Mimics Ensign w NIMMS. So I love this
stuff. It's it's always been a small navy. You'd never know who you're
to run into. And and John, we really appreciate you coming on for
this Super Bowl Stundy. It has been a great conversation and look forward to
the next time. Yeah. I love to sell Eagle ones. You guys
are great goat chiefs. Yeah, get ready to put your gear on.
Get get that face paint going, John, Thank you, every Thank everybody.
Another edition of mid Rats until next time. Hope everybody has a great
Navy day. Cheers. Goodbye to Paddy, Mike, my looney want to
marry me and a friend of be comily all your being to blame me said
holding all the name a long way off y. It's a long way.
It's a long way. The Army all think it well lived well. It's
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