The Battle of Leyte Gulf: The Last Fleet Action

Two The Option of Difficulties: The American Situation in the Aftermath of the Victory in the Philippine Sea

C h a p t e r T w o The Option of Difficulties The American Situation in the Aftermath of the Victory in the Philippine Sea War lends itself to the sound bite as instant wisdom, but amid the clich és and the wisdom that single sentences allegedly impart to proceedings, two perhaps have relevance to the situation that confronted the United States in the wake of her navy’s victory in the Philippine Sea in June 1944. The first, taken from Wavell’s writings of some eighty years ago, is that war is an option of difficulties. The most obvious and immediate difficulties exist at the point of contact with the enemy, but the argument that Wavell made was that the option of difficulties exists at each and every level of war. The second, source unknown, is one that has been handed down to us, and it is quite simply that wars never solve problems. Wars might transpose problems or might alter problems, but wars never produce solutions. In examining these truisms one is struck by the variety of difficulties. These could be physical or abstract, man-made or natural, yet whether one’s first attention is fixed upon the operational or tactical, the historical account necessarily must fix its first consideration upon the strategic or, to use the term that was applied in the first half of the twentieth century, the grand strategic, level of war. Herein, any child of Clausewitz must encounter problems because his trinity necessarily involves rationalism, reason, yet any examination of the framing of national policy, and even more obviously alliance policy, immediately brings to the fore those considerations and calculations that are not rational. In waging war one thinks instinctively that reason will apply at the grand strategic level and that this The Option of Difficulties 13 is the one area of struggle that can be examined in relative ease in terms of the identification of objectives, the ordering of priorities, and the allocation of resources. But, of course, if this were the case then Wavell would have been wrong. The American victory in the Philippine Sea in June 1944 is notable on two counts at the grand strategic level. It was the month that saw the United States come of age, when the irresponsibility of post-1918 adolescence was superseded by entry into the national inheritance as the world’s greatest and only truly global power. June 1944 saw American forces enter Rome and other American forces, along with those of Britain, Canada, and other allies, establish themselves ashore in northwest Europe. It was a month that saw the strength of the 8th Air Force reach 2,000 heavy bombers, and it was a month that saw other American heavy bombers strike for the first time against the Japanese home islands from bases in China. June 1944 saw a second American amphibious endeavor, half a world away from Normandy, and it was this effort that led to the battle of the Philippine Sea, which was the greatest naval battle fought to date in the Pacific and indeed in terms of carrier, battleship, and cruiser numbers was the greatest naval battle of all time.1 June 1944 was one of those moments in history when Time itself waited upon events that all involved knew possessed fundamental, overwhelming importance. It was the month that ensured that Germany and Japan could not avoid utter and total defeat, the month that ensured the eclipse of Europe. It was the month of arrival in the American century. For the second count, June 1944 saw the coming together of all the problems that confronted the American high command in its ordering of national affairs with regard to the Japanese war. Both in terms of mainland China and the western Pacific, the month that more than any other moment of time marked the emergence of American national power on the international stage saw difficulties compounded, the affliction of complexities, in the wake of a national victory which might have been expected to simplify such matters. Even at a distance of almost sixty years, almost a lifetime, it is difficult to set out an order of both importance and significance to the three problems that the American national leadership faced at this juncture in the prosecution of the war against Japan. In terms of final destination, June 1944 saw 14 The Battle of Leyte Gulf the American...