The Conquering Tide (36 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.

O
N
N
EW
Y
EAR'S
E
VE, 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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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In Ray Spruance's tactful opinion, “Bill Halsey was a great fighter and leader of men, but he did not shine as an administrator.”
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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.”
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The SOPAC staff developed a vital
esprit de corps
, symbolized by their practice (decreed by Halsey) of not wearing neckties. “He wants his men
to be comfortable,” a sailor observed in his diary. “He doesn't go in for this regulation stuff.”
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The “no-ties” policy was not entirely for the sake of physical comfort in a sweltering climate, however—army officers did not normally wear them, and Halsey did not want them to become a symbol of service divisions. “I don't want anybody even to be thinking in terms of Army, Navy, or Marines,” he told his officers. “Every man must understand this, and every man
will
understand it, if I have to take off his uniform and issue coveralls with ‘South Pacific Fighting Force' printed on the seat of his pants.”
⁷⁰

Noumea was a languid little colonial capital, a bit tumbledown but still charming in contrast to almost any other seaport in the South Pacific. Vandegrift recalled it as “ramshackle in a pleasantly unpainted way with galleries encircling the second stories of residences and louvered doorways flanked by brilliantly blooming flowers.”
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Being French, the town offered good food and wine to those who could afford it. Plantation grandees lived in airy mansions on hills, flanked by elegant rows of coconut palms. Their daughters, usually dressed in immaculate white silk dresses, were local icons. Thousands of Americans who had never met them nonetheless knew their faces and names, but they were accessible only to officers and available only for marriage. The French colonialists were not overjoyed by the inundation of Americans, but granted that if they had to be overrun by Allied servicemen, better the Americans than the British.

As Halsey's staff expanded and the hot southern summer approached, it became increasingly evident that the flagship
Argonne
could not accommodate a major command. Local French officialdom had been uncooperative in responding to Ghormley's requests for quarters ashore, but Halsey was determined to succeed where his predecessor had not. He sent Colonel Julian Brown as an emissary to the French governor, His Excellency Marie Henri Ferdinand Auguste Montchamp. Having previously served in French forces, Brown had been awarded a fourragère and the Croix de Guerre, which he wore when he went to meet the governor. Brown asked for suitable housing in town or elsewhere on the island. “What do we get in return?” asked Montchamp. Brown replied, “We will continue to protect you as we have always done.” At a subsequent meeting Brown added, “We've got a war on our hands and we can't continue to devote valuable time to these petty concerns. I venture to remind Your Excellency that if we Americans had not arrived here, the Japanese would have.”
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