Book Review: 'The Fleet At Flood Tide: America at Total War in the Pacific, 1944-1945'

(C) 2016 Bantam Books, an imprint of Penguin/Random House LLC

The United States Navy is currently the world’s largest and most capable navy in the world. No other nation – including the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation – has as large a fleet – 282 warships, including 11 aircraft carriers in service, with two Gerald R. Ford carriers being built – or can project naval air power (3,700 deployable aircraft, second only in size and striking power to the U.S. Air Force, the world’s mightiest air force) as the American Navy.

It’s worth remembering, though, that until World War II, this wasn’t always so; America’s mother country, Great Britain, started the war as the world’s premier naval power; in 1939 the Royal Navy’s 1,400 warships ensured that Britannia did, indeed, rule the waves. But after the United States entered the war – having restarted its naval construction program in 1937 to modernize a badly-neglected fleet, create jobs, and deter aggressor nations such as Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire – America’s vast industrial capacity and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s determination that the U.S. Navy would be second to none changed all that. In 1945, at war’s end, the U.S. Navy had a fleet strength of 6,798 vessels of all types, including warships, submarines, transports, and auxiliary vessels.

Though a significant portion of the Navy’s strength was deployed in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean Sea supporting the Army in its war against Germany and Italy, the war in the Pacific was truly the “Navy’s war.” America’s war against Japan was primarily a contest between two naval powers, not so much by design but by the realities of geography: In Europe, the U.S. Army was in its element, waging war on the land and in the air against a continental power – Hitler’s Third Reich – with vast numbers of soldiers, armored vehicles, artillery pieces, and a semi-independent air force which provided both tactical and strategic air support to the landbound “dogfaces” and “track-heads.”

The Pacific War was entirely different. Here, the Army’s focus was to attain airbases close enough to Japan’s Home Islands so that the airmen – who dreamed about the use of strategic bombing as the decisive war-winning method of using air power – could have bases for the Army Air Force’s new B-29 Superfortress bombers. The acquisition of the ideal target islands – the Marianas – would require some participation by the U.S. Army’s ground forces, of course, but it was up to the Navy to transport the combined Army-Marine Corps invasion force there, as well as to protect – both actively and defensively – the transports and their precious cargo of men and material from the aggressive Japanese response to an American invasion of Guam, Saipan, and Tinian.

The Fleet at Flood Tide: America at Total War in the Pacific, 1944-1945 is naval historian James D. Hornfischer’s latest examination of the U.S. Navy’s war in the Pacific. This time around, he sets his sights on Operation Forager, the campaign to capture the Marianas in the summer of 1944, and its consequences – both immediate and long-term – for the United States and Japan during the last year of World War II.

In The Fleet at Flood Tide, Hornfischer tells the fascinating and often inspiring story of how the United States rebuilt its shattered post-Pearl Harbor Pacific Fleet from a small number of scattered carrier-centered task forces into the juggernaut that bore down on the Marianas on June 15, 1944. It is a tale of an industrial miracle as well as the story of a nation-state’s intense focus on retribution for a daring but ultimately unsuccessful surprise attack. For many Americans, including those who understood that Germany was the primary enemy during the war, the phrase Remember Pearl Harbor wasn’t just a propaganda slogan; it was a call for righteous vengeance.

Hornfischer, the winner of the Navy League of the United States’ Commodore John Barry Award and other distinctions, gives readers a vivid recreation of the U.S. Fifth Fleet and its attached ground force element, the V Amphibious Force at war in the summer of 1944. The Fleet at Flood Tide includes descriptions of the runup to Operation Forager, including an overview of the growth – both in strength and strategic influence – of the U.S. Navy between the dark days of 1942 and the creation of Admiral Raymond A. Spruance’s Fifth Fleet and its centerpiece, the Fast Carrier Force embodied by Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher’s Task Force 58.

At the start of The Fleet at Flood Tide, Hornfischer writes:

Almost two years underway, the war in the Pacific, the Navy’s war, was not yet total. Indeed, some were calling it a phony war. Such a term had been applied to the eight-­month period of stasis in Europe between the declaration of war by the Allies and their first major operations on Germany’s Western Front in 1940. In the Pacific, the year 1943 had been, for the Navy, a year of rebuilding and waiting.

The invasion of Guadalcanal, the first Allied offensive of the war, launched in August 1942, had been carried out on a shoestring, using a back-­of-­the-­envelope contingency plan. The six-­month campaign of attrition ended in U.S. victory in February, but nine more months would pass before the Marine Corps attacked another Japanese-­held island. While General Douglas MacArthur’s troops wore down the Japanese in New Guinea and the Army’s Kiska Task Force retook the Aleutians, the Navy endured an interval of gathering and adjustment, of preparation and planning, recruitment and training, construction and commissioning. Mostly the latter,  and the shipyards would tell an epic tale.

The lead ship of the Essex class of aircraft carriers joined the fleet on New Year’s Eve 1942. The 34,000-­tonner would emerge as the signature ship of the U.S. Navy’s combat task force. Four more would be launched before 1943 was out. A pair of Iowa-­class battleships reached the Pacific that year, too, as four more of the 45,000-­ton behemoths took shape in the yards. A horde of new destroyers and destroyer escorts—­more than five hundred of them—­were launched in the year’s second half alone. But the greatest economies of scale revealed themselves in the building of merchant ships. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had directed the Maritime Commission to produce twenty-­four million tons of cargo shipping in 1943. The surge was so great that it might have strained the wine industry’s capacity to make bottles to smash against prows on launching day. Surprising shortages cascaded through the supply chain. When grease was rationed for the exclusive use of combat units, a shipyard in Beaumont, Texas, found a substitute to use in lubricating the skids of their ramps: ripe bananas. Personnel officers, short on applicants, hired women and minorities to work in the yards and looked inland from the traditional recruitment fields of the coasts on the hunch that farmers with wits enough to survive the Dust Bowl might be useful in building ships. Coming out of the Depression, no one missed the chance to earn a better wage.  

In The Fleet at Flood Tide, readers will find a well-crafted and balanced narrative account of the decisive campaign that led to the dramatic and world-changing finale of the Second World War. In its pages, Hornfischer describes the invasion of the Marianas in such a way that we get the strategic perspective as seen from the highest levels of command as well as the “grunt’s point of view” as he tells the stories of individual sailors, Marines, soldiers, airmen, and the Navy’s new “frogmen” – the members of the Underwater Demolition Teams, forerunners of today’s Sea, Air and Land (SEAL) Teams.

The book covers the Pacific War’s strategic climax from various vantage points; in its pages, readers will see Operation Forager and its stunning consequences over a year later as it was experienced by both Americans and Japanese participants. There are eyewitness accounts from ordinary civilians caught up in the horrors of war, as well as accounts from the sailors, soldiers, and airmen who fought and suffered much while serving their respective countries.

In addition to the story of the amphibious landings on Saipan, Tinian, and Guam (which was the first U.S. Territory liberated from Japanese occupation during the Pacific War), The Fleet at Flood Tide describes many aspects of Operation Forager, including:

• The Battle of the Philippine Sea, the largest carrier-to-carrier battle in history
• The deadly, nearly one-sided aerial battles that history records as “The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot”
• The first large-scale deployment of the Navy’s Underwater Demolitions Teams, especially-trained divers with a dangerous assignment: find obstacles on enemy-held beaches and destroy them before the initial waves of Marines and GIs landed on D-Day
• The Japanese army’s largest banzai charge of the Pacific War
• The tragic fate of many of Saipan’s Japanese population, many of whom chose to jump to their deaths off the cliffs at Marpi Point rather than be captured by the Americans
• The arrival on Tinian of the U.S. Army Air Force’s XXth Bombing Command and its B-29 Superfortress bombers, including a secretive and elite unit, the 509^th Composite Group

The book also includes maps, charts, and 120 black-and-white photographs that enhance Hornfischer's clear, crisp, and authoritative prose. 

The Fleet at Flood Tide: America at Total War in the Pacific, 1944-1945 is a good example of how to write a work that is both scholarly and appealing to a general audience. It is a story of triumph and tragedy, full of vignettes that capture the horrors of total war in all its magnitude, ranging from the story of naval aviators such as Lt. Alexander Vraciu, who shot down six Japanese aircraft in eight minutes during the "Great Marianas Turkey Shoot" to an account of Japanese Sakae Oba, the commander of the last holdouts on Saipan and how he and his men surrendered to American forces on December 1, 1945, nearly three months after Japan's formal surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.