< |war|150|>
Pete Hegseth wants to inculcate a war fighting spirit throughout our military, but he has a difficult job ahead if he hopes to return us to the awe-inspiring bravery of our men and women in World War II. Here’s a story which takes my breath away for its many reasons every time I read it:
In June of 1944, almost in simultaneity with the D-Day invasion on the other side of the world, the United States invaded the Marianas, the Pacific island chain that runs north-south parallel to the Philippines some 1,500 miles to their east. The largest island is Guam, but the Americans chose to invade Saipan, the northernmost of the fifteen islands and closest to Japan, the objective being for the Seabees to construct airfields for B-29s to attack the Japanese mainland.
Japanese policy had been to conserve their fleet, but they knew that if the Americans were to invade the Marianas, they must commit all of their fleet to battle “crushing with one stroke the nucleus of the great enemy concentration of forces…in one decisive battle”, in the words of Admiral Soemu Toyoda, who held overall command of the Japanese sea forces. Both naval powers had foreseen that, Midway notwithstanding, that most decisive battle, an all-or-nothing confrontation, was inevitable and that it would happen in the vast expanse of the Philippine Sea.
Admiral Raymond Spruance commanded the invasion force of Saipan, part of which was Admiral Pete Mitscher’s Task Force 58, assigned to cover the amphibious assault from the carrier Lexington. The task force was comprised of fifteen aircraft carriers, seven battleships, eleven cruisers, and eighty-six destroyers, testament to America’s phenomenal wartime production.
The Japanese, the world’s third most powerful navy, would be led by fleet commander Jisaburo Ozawa, who would have under his operational control a surface force led by Matome Ugaki, former chief of staff for Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of Japan’s combined fleet during World War II.
Ozawa would sortie with five full-sized and four smaller carriers which in all could put 473 planes in the air. They believed they had another 450 planes on the ground in the Marianas, but Mitscher, anticipating what was to come, had his carrier planes destroy almost all of them.
The Japanese planes had the advantage of being of lighter weight, meaning they could carry more fuel and travel further than the American Hellcats. They could attack while staying out of range of American carrier planes.
But the Japanese pilots were less experienced. Unlike the American practice of returning pilots to the the U.S. to train recruits, the Japanese left their pilots on station permanently, so their recruits in the homeland did not benefit from the experience of seasoned pilots.
encounter
On June 13th, the U.S. submarine Redfin spotted Ozawa’s force heading north from their base at Tawi Tawi, south of the Philippines. Two days later the fleet was sighted by another submarine, the Flying Fish, emerging from the Philippine archipelago into the Philippine Sea. The submarine Seahorse reported that Ugaki’s ships were coming up from the south.
Spruance reasoned that the Ozawa’s Japanese carrier fleet would act as decoy, to draw off in pursuit its America counterpart, while Ugaki’s force would slip in behind and attack the American supply ships and LSTs landing troops on Saipan. He therefore ordered Mitscher to keep his planes within reach of Saipan by taking up an intercept position 180 miles to the west. Tethered to Saipan by a battleship admiral, Mitscher, who had been one of the Navy’s first pilots, had made a bad guess and missed Midway by sailing in the wrong direction, and now champed at the bit for the opportunity to go after the Japanese carriers
But Spruance even had Mitscher sail to the east every night back toward Saipan, wary that the Japanese might slip past him in the darkness, and then turn west again in the morning to resume his 180 post. On June 19th, one of 43 scout planes sent by Ozawa found Mitscher’s force heading on its westward run back to the 180 mile point.
Ozawa was 380 miles distant, too far for his planes to return, but he launched anyway, ordering them to continue on to land in Guam after their attack on U.S. forces.
Sailors on the ships watched the ultimate dogfight in the skies. Atmospheric conditions caused the hundreds of planes to leave white contrails, “a frenzy of loops and circles”, mesmerizing those on the ships’ decks. Ozawa sent his planes in waves, a second in the late morning, two during the afternoon. When the day-long air battles ended, the ill-trained Japanese pilots had paid the price. Commander David McCampbell, who led the air crew on the Essex shot down five, Lieutenant J.G. Alex Vraciu, off the Lexington, downed six. The Japanese lost 358 planes, their pilots, and the crews of their torpedo aircraft — over 400 when those shot down over Guam are counted. The U.S. lost 33. “It was just like a turkey shoot”, was the Lexington‘s Lieutenant J.G. Ziggy Neff’s description. The tag stuck, and the battle is known as The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot”.
The Japanese carrier force suffered losses beyond its planes. Before the air battle had begun, a torpedo from the American submarine Albacore struck the brand new Japanese carrier Taiho. Warrant Officer Sakio Komatsu sighted the wake of a second torpedo and crashed his plane to explode it in an effort to save the carrier from which he had just taken off. The Taiho would continue to launch plans until hours later when gasoline fumes from ruptured aircraft fuel tanks exploded, sending the ship to the bottom.
The submarine Cavalla sent a spread of six torpedoes at the Pearl Harbor veteran Shokaku. Three hit, sending the ship under the waves nose down with 1200 lives lost.
let loose
Spruance finally released Mitscher on June 20th with the Japanese in full retreat. His carriers had gone a hundred miles to the east to launch their planes into that day’s east wind. That put his task force 275 miles from the enemy’s carriers as spotted by one of his pilots. It took four hours sailing westward to recover his starting position. It was becoming late afternoon. Mitscher figured he could recover his planes if his carriers steamed at full speed at the direction of the attack to shorten their return flight. Then, after the first deckload had launched, the scout plane pilot altered his report. The Japanese carriers were 330 miles west.
Mitscher did not recall his strike force but did not send further planes. His 216 planes caught up with the Japanese ships and in the fading light, revealed by their flashes of their antiaircraft fire, sank the light carrier Hiyo, damaged the Zuikaku, and several other vessels.
The pilots regrouped their planes and headed back in the growing darkness flying at seven thousand feet, their most fuel-saving altitude, grimly watching the needle on their gauges dip ever lower. Engines began to sputter and choked. One after another, planes fell into the sea, with the downed pilots subsisting in the blackness on their small, inflated life rafts as the task force pressed toward them at full speed.
If the pilots did reach the ships, how could they find them in the dark? The Navy’s ships were always blacked out at night. Radar began to show planes on their way returning in the pitch black is when Mitscher gave an order “much celebrated then and since among aviators” for which he is known:
“Blue Jacket this is Bald Eagle himself. Turn on the lights”.
One by one, all the ships in his task force, carriers, cruisers, destroyers, beamed their enormous 30-inch spotlights straight skyward, illuminating themselves to Japanese submarines to bring the pilots home. Mitscher radioed them that they should land on any flattop they saw. They began to land, some so out of fuel they could not taxi the deck and had to be pulled out of the way to clear for others coming in.
The next morning, destroyers followed the path of the attack and recovered 143 of the 177 who had fallen for lack of fuel.
In the Battle of the Philippine Sea, the Japanese had lost three carriers, among them their newest and largest Taiho, and some 400 planes. They had lost several hundred pilots and would resort in desperation to kamikaze raids against American ships. The Americans had lost no ships, a hundred planes, and twenty pilots. The Battle of the Philippine Sea had written an end to the Japanese navy as the fighting force at once was.
But I present to you this story for the thrill of one man’s decision to “Turn on the lights”.
This is adapted from Craig L. Symonds’ “World War II at Sea”, Oxford University Press, 2018
Oct 4 2025 | Posted in
Defense |
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< the military|188||>
In a speech before hundreds of the United States’ top military brass, President Trump delivered the headline at minute :44 when he said, “And I told Pete [Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth], we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.” In the most ominous words we’ve ever heard from a president, he told them:
”America is under invasion from within…no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms. At least when they’re wearing a uniform, you can take them out. These people don’t have uniforms. But we are under invasion from within. We’re stopping it very quickly…This is going to be a big thing for the people in this room…”
Trump has chosen Portland, Oregon, as the next city to be invaded, first by his federalizing the Oregon National Guard, and then apparently by sending in the U.S. military. Portland “looks like a war zone”, he said in the speech. In response to Oregon’s governor, who told Trump he is not needed, “I said, well, unless they’re playing false tapes, this looked like World War Two. Your place is burning down.” That is false, and apparently he did see the wrong videos; the rightwing channels had been showing footage from five years ago when there was rioting in the city after the George Floyd murder uprisings.
fall in
At great cost and the greater risk of concentrating the entire leadership of the U.S. military in a single location, Hegseth had ordered all generals, admirals, and top-ranked non-commissioned officers to report to the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia, to dictate to them rules they must institute to transform the military into war fighters. That entails getting rid of “woke” practices that promoted leadership “based on their race, based on gender quotas, based on historic so-called firsts”; that tolerated “fat or unfit or under-trained troops”; that permitted beards, long hair, and “superficial individual expression.”
Not to belittle Hegseth, who served three tours in various locales and was awarded two bronze stars, but it was an extraordinary juxtaposition: hundreds of officers, many of them combat unit leaders who had led battalions, brigades, divisions or fleets and risen to top ranks, stars gleaming on their shoulders, being lectured by a brash young man who, while promoted to major in the National Guard, had never led more than a platoon as a second lieutenant – about 44 men and women.
the uninvited
Still, he was organized and well-prepared to deliver a polished message. One can only wonder what he must have then thought when he heard just two days before the event that President Trump wanted to attend and speak, too. In front of all these serious, disciplined men and women, Hegseth must have wondered if Trump was going to deliver one of his meandering monologues leaving the audience to wonder what is wrong with the man.
Yes he was.
Trump spoke for an hour and eleven minutes, rambling from one subject to another and back again about subjects that had nothing to do with the sea of uniforms before him: winning in court against the Associated Press about re-naming the Gulf of Mexico (he didn’t; he lost), President Biden and use of an autopen, Trump’s own signature (“I love my signature, everybody loves my signature”), paper quality in the White House (“We have beautiful paper, the gorgeous paper”), and how careful he is on stairs these days.
He told his listeners of all the wars he has ended and repeatedly returned to that subject, the Nobel prize he won’t get (“they’ll give it to some guy that didn’t do a damn thing”), tariffs (“I said, tariff is my favorite word. I love the word tariff”), and how many counties he won compared to the Democrats in the 2024 election.
He must have given pause to the admirals present when he said,
“I think we should maybe start thinking about battleships, by the way… your secretary likes it and I’m sort of open to it…I tell you, it’s something we’re seriously considering.”
This in the new age of drones and anti-ship missiles. Battleships are entirely outmoded, a realization that became apparent even toward the end of World War II. But Trump is nostalgic:
”And I look at those ships, they came with the destroyers alongside of them and man, nothing was going to stop, they were 20 deep and they were in a straight line and there was nothing going to stop them.”
He went on at some length:
”And I’m not a fan of some of the ships you do. I’m a very esthetic person. I don’t like some of the ships you’re doing esthetically. They say, oh, it’s stealth. I say that’s not stealth. An ugly ship is not necessary in order to say you’re stealth.”
He continuously insulted President Biden, which is what led to the discussion of stairs:
”Every day, the guy’s falling down stairs. I said it’s not our president. We can’t have it. I’m very careful. You know, when I walk downstairs for — like I’m on stairs like these stairs, I’m very — I walk very slowly.”
As for President Obama,
”I had zero respect for him as the president, but he would bop down those stairs — I’ve never seen, da da da da da da, bop, bop, bop, he’d go down the stairs, wouldn’t hold on. I said, great, I don’t want to do it.”
Listening in stone-faced silence, the men and women in their hundreds must have had the same thought: ‘I was made to fly thousands of miles for this?’.
mum’s the word
Retired generals and admirals spoke to those still in the ranks – they know many who they have guided thanks to the military’s mentorship programs. Because the military strives to stay non-partisan, they could not be outspoken about the speech, but the adjective that was heard most frequently was “embarrassing”.
It was worse than that. This was not a crowd of mid-country worshippers attending one of his campaign rallies. Trump was going before a serious, no-nonsense crowd of great accomplishment. At moments of his speech, Trump would – one could tell by the wording – switch to the prepared script to praise those before him, congratulating them for exceeding recruitment goals after a long period of shortcoming, for the B2 bombing run against Iran, for being the best there is. What does it say about him, though, that he didn’t have the sense to stick to his carefully written script about promised support, plans for ships and weapon production, increased NATO spending, etc.? What sort of mind chooses to wander aimlessly and babble irrelevantly to this august assemblage?
There was a good deal of commentary in the media that Trump is showing more than just a disorderly mind, that “the president is not well”. How are we somehow to get through more than three years of this, especially as he increasingly becomes tyrannical?
lethality
What is Hegseth telling the military for whom Trump plans “a big thing for the people in this room“ when he sends their troops into our cities to combat his imagined “enemy from within”? Hegseth demands a military trained to fight:
“We fight to win. We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy. We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality, and authority for warfighters… We let our leaders fight their formations, and then we have their back.”
How well suited is this training that Trump, who has no conception of military service, would turn loose against Americans? Capt. Margaret Donovan (Ret.), U.S. Army, a JAG officer who gave legal advice on more than a thousand airstrikes and other lethal engagements, reacted to the jettisoning of rules of engagement thus:
“It stands against everything, every norm, every ethic, every moral that these military commanders have developed, learned, and hopefully imposed on their junior soldiers throughout their careers.”
get physical
In other respects, the reforms Hegseth demands are mostly physical, coming from someone who obsessively does pull-ups with RFK Jr.
All women in combat units must meet the same fitness standards as men.
Across the branches of service, every member at every rank is required to take a PT test twice a year, as well as meet height and weight requirements.
A field test for combat arms units that must be executable in any environment at any time and with combat equipment.
“Standards must be uniform, gender neutral, and high. If not, they’re not standards. They’re just suggestions, suggestions that get our sons and daughters killed”.
And for someone who was in the service in past decades (like this writer) to learn that the following is absent and needs to be restored, it says a lot about what the military has become:
“We’re empowering drill sergeants to instill healthy fear in new recruits, ensuring that future warfighters are forged. Yes, they can shark attack, they can toss bunks, they can swear, and yes, they can put their hands on recruits.”
As for the Pentagon itself, Hegseth was not bashful:
“It’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon and leading commands around the country and the world. It’s a bad look…”
And…
“No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses, no more climate change worship, no more division, distraction, or gender delusions, no more debris. As I’ve said before and will say again, we are done with that s**t. I’ve made it my mission to uproot the obvious distractions that made us less capable and less lethal.”
Oct 3 2025 | Posted in
Defense |
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