Books: Mission Accomplished

VICTORY IN THE PACIFIC (407 pp.)—Samuel Eliot Morison—Atlantic-Little, Brown ($6.50).

“At 1400 began the final air attack. Hellcats and Avengers were able to make selective runs on the slowly moving, almost helpless ship.” As Ensign Yoshida recalls, “Men were jumbled together in disorder on the deck. Admiral Ito struggled to his feet. His chief of staff then rose and saluted. A prolonged silence followed. Ito looked around, shook hands deliberately with his staff officers, and then went resolutely to his cabin. The deck was nearly vertical. Shells of the big guns skidded, crashing against the bulkhead and kindling the first of a series of explosions.” At 1423 this queen of the battlewagons “slid under completely . . .”

So sank the super-battleship Yamato, sent out with a handful of destroyers as the only blue-water resistance that the imperial Japanese fleet could muster when the U.S. Navy came slamming up the island ladder to Okinawa on Easter Sunday 1945. So obviously sacrificial was Yamato’s “last gasp” mission against Admiral Raymond A. Spruance’s Fifth Fleet that the great ship was given only enough fuel for a one-way trip from Japan. The battle for Okinawa, at the homeland’s very door, was the death struggle of Japan, and its capture was the largest, longest amphibious operation of the Pacific war.

New conflicts have made allies of the enemies of ’45, and names like Okinawa and Iwo Jima already begin to seem almost as far away and long ago as Chickamauga and Antietam. It takes the death of the world’s most powerful warship to bring out Samuel Eliot Morison’s unrivaled gifts as a chronicler of the sea and thereby to sustain a grand narrative sweep through this 14th and final volume of his History of United States Naval Operations in World War II.

Suicides & Storms. Though the whole of Morison’s history displays U.S. productive might and organizing skill as decisive in both oceans, this last chapter is as full as all the others of men’s ordeal by storm and by battle. When Admiral William F. (“Bull”) Halsey led his fleet into its second typhoon in six months, a court of inquiry urged that he be transferred “to other duty,” and Navy Secretary Forrestal was only dissuaded from retiring the Navy’s No. 1 popular hero by the argument that to do so would boost enemy morale. Battered tin cans on Okinawa radar picket duty fought “to survive against the flaming terror of the kamikazes roaring out of the blue like the thunderbolts that Zeus hurled at bad actors in the days of old.” And to take Iwo Jima as a perch for fighters escorting B-29 attacks on Honshu, the Navy’s land-fighting arm fought what General Holland M. (“Howlin’ Mad”) Smith called “the most savage and the most costly battle in the history of the Marine Corps.”

With the completion of his naval history—a 15th volume, containing only an index and technical data, is due next year —Boston’s Samuel Eliot Morison takes his place in the line of classic narrators of the American past—James F. Rhodes, John B. McMaster, George Bancroft and Edward Channing. Right after Pearl Harbor, Morison, Harvard professor of history and Pulitzer prizewinning biographer of Columbus (Admiral of the Ocean Sea), proposed to his friend Franklin Roosevelt the idea of a “full, accurate and early” history of the naval war and got the assignment himself along with a commission as a lieutenant commander on active duty.

Morison and his staff witnessed all major U.S. naval operations, interviewed top brass and boot seamen; after the war, he settled down on Boston’s Beacon Hill and rolled out volume after imposing volume. Before his mission was accomplished, Morison retired from both Harvard and (as a rear admiral) from the Navy. But only last year, at 72, he published John Paul Jones and thus sailed another Pulitzer prizewinning biography into port.

Recollected in Tranquillity. Imaginative use of Japanese as well as U.S. sources doubles the depth of this incomparably best of World War II service histories. Morison’s insistence that it be “unofficial” (though all royalties go to the Navy) gives him room to light the text with judgments—as of Halsey’s and Kinkaid’s faulty assumptions in the battle for Leyte Gulf—that at times scorch the gold braid off commanding sleeves.

Morison probably writes his best about the giant hull-to-hull slugging matches in which American sailors showed their best. “Lord of himself,” he said of Midway’s victor, “Raymond A. Spruance emerged from this battle as one of the great fighting and thinking admirals in American naval history.” Of the fight for the South Pacific, he says: “For us who were there, or whose friends were there, Guadalcanal is not a name but an emotion.” Sailor-Scholar Morison, who rode eleven ships and won seven battle stars and the Legion of Merit with combat clasp while getting the story, can say with Vergil’s Aeneas:

Many of these things I saw And some of them I was.