Bull's-Eye

(See Cover)

For the first time, Japan's home islands saw a U.S. fleet and felt the lightning strokes of its big guns. While a thousand carrier planes swirled over the homeland, battleships, cruisers and destroyers stood in toward shore.

There was nothing to stop them. Three miles from the beaches they squared off to subject Japan to an indignity without precedent. A great steel plant, only 275 miles from Tokyo, was hammered by the warships' guns. And that was only a be ginning; a day later the Americans struck again. Battleships sailed into the narrow waters between Honshu and Hokkaido --and smashed steel works and other military objectives to bits & pieces.

The Fleet & the Bull. If the enemy had not already heard the crack of doom, he heard it now. The Third Fleet that swung up & down the east coast of Japan was the mightiest the world had ever seen. The Navy took pains to ensure that Japan should feel its power.

Among its great battleships were half a dozen 35,000-and 45,000-tonners, all completed since Pearl Harbor. In the carrier task force were half or more of the 27 fast carriers now in service.* There were schools of destroyers and fast-stepping cruisers. Over them, when the air strikes began, were swarms of Hellcat and Corsair fighters, Helldiver dive bombers, Avenger torpedo planes.

As they droned off over Japan, others were left behind to fly CAP (combat air patrol). And on the bridge of the Third Fleet's flagship was the tough, stubby seadog whom the Japanese mortally hate & fear. "Bull" Halsey was on the prowl.

The Japs know Admiral William Frederick Halsey, to their sorrow. They know him as the Annapolis-trained Dead End Kid who calls the Japs monkeys, whose battle cry is "Kill Japs, kill Japs, and then kill more Japs." They also know him as the calculating, chance-taking seaman who coolly gambled on disaster in the Philip pines invasion last fall to send his fleet north and destroy most of the surviving carriers of the Japanese fleet.

That was the end of Japanese sea power. This time the enemy knew, weeks before he struck, that Halsey was at sea again. The blow was delivered in the Halsey manner that they had learned to expect. It was daring, powerful, crushing. The Third Fleet's battleships could have run into serious trouble, standing off Japan for a shore bombardment. Halsey took the chance.

From the East. Out of the dawn on July 10, his commander of Task Force 38, Vice Admiral John S. ("Jock") McCain, sent off a horde of fighters to strike at the remnant of Japan's home-based air power. McCain's airmen prayed that the Japs would come out and give them another red-letter day like the "Marianas Turkey Shoot" of June 19, 1944.

But the Japs decided not to fight: not a single Zeke or Jack, Tony or Nick rose to challenge the U.S. fighters as they swooped on the airfields. It was a bombing and strafing job: 109 Jap planes were wrecked on the ground; 231 more were hit. The CAP boys over the fleet had better airmen's luck--two Jap reconnaissance planes had turned up to be shot down.

To the North. Then the U.S. fleet dropped over the horizon. Was that the end? Would Halsey hit again? Of course he would. But when & where? The enemy could only wait and wonder.

Sure enough, Halsey struck again. Four days later his carrier planes thundered up again out of the dawn. Some struck Hokkaido (pop. 3,300,000), which had never been bombed before. Some struck northern Honshu. Some struck in Tsugaru Strait, where the railroad and automobile ferries run between Aomori (on Honshu) and Hakodate (on Hokkaido), almost the only link between the two islands.

Much of the food for Honshu townspeople moves--or did move--across that ferry route from agricultural Hokkaido. So does--or did--much of the coal for Honshu steel mills. At the end of the day, two train ferries had been sunk and a third damaged; 13 small ships had been sunk. Airplanes were scarce: the U.S. flyers found only 86, all landbound, which they destroyed or damaged.

That same day, three hours before noon, three great, grey ships stood inshore off the east coast of Honshu, 275 miles north of Tokyo. They were the Massachusetts, South Dakota and Indiana; running in tight formation with them were the heavy cruisers Chicago and Quincy (both named for ships sunk at Guadalcanal), while a dozen destroyers scudded around them. Promptly at noon, the big guns began to speak.

Steel to the Mills. From nine 16-in. rifles on each of the three battleships came a blinding flash, a deafening roar, an earthquake-like concussion; 2,100-lb. shells rained into the Imperial Iron & Steel Works in Kamaishi (prewar pop. 42,000).

For two hours the guns roared, and their shellbursts walked through the steel plant. The Jap reply from shore batteries was only a whispered echo. The "sacred soil" of Japan, from which the Kamikaze (divine wind) was supposed to disperse all attackers, had been violated.

The next morning, three battleships, still newer and still bigger than the Indianas, appeared in the more dangerous waters off Muroran, at the mouth of Hokkaido's Volcano Bay. They were the Iowa, Missouri and Wisconsin, and they took the Nihon Steel Works and the Wanishi Iron Works as their target, while screening craft darted closer inshore to shoot at smaller bull's-eyes.

With his carrier forces commanding the air over northern Japan, and his gunnery ships commanding the seas within sight of its shores, there was no telling to what lengths Halsey might go in succeeding days. His love of spectacular improvisation knew no limits.

The Seed of Hate. To Bull Halsey, the assault was the fulfillment of two longstanding ambitions. Ever since Dec. 7, 1941, he had been obsessed with the desire to hit Japan. That morning, four years ago, as planes flying from his flagship Enterprise to Ford Island were attacked by Zeros, Halsey exploded: "My God, they're shooting at my own boys! Tell Kimmel." Then it dawned on him: Kimmel already knew, and this was war. Halsey, as senior officer afloat, soon got an order to take command of all U.S. warships then at sea in the Pacific.

As early as March 4, 1942, the Bull (it was "Raider" Halsey then) drove with one carrier, the Enterprise, to within a thousand miles of Tokyo, and sent her planes to bomb tiny Marcus Island. Six weeks later he stood on the same carrier's flag bridge and watched Lieut. Colonel (now Lieut. General) Jimmy Doolittle's ill-fated B-25s fly off the Hornet to carry to Tokyo the first token of the war.

By November 1944, Halsey saw his dream coming true: after his Third Fleet had covered General MacArthur's return to the Philippines he would strike the hated Empire. But there were not enough land-based aircraft to defend the Philippine beachhead; twice the chafing Third Fleet was recalled to give tactical support. The first carrier-plane strikes on the Tokyo area, which had been scheduled to mesh with the first B-29 attacks on the enemy capital, had to be canceled. Admiral R. A. Spruance got in ahead in February ; Halsey had to be content with storming into the South China Sea, and waiting months for his great chance.

"Come & Get Me." Headlong Admiral Halsey had another ambition. When the fleet got back to respectable strength and the Jap radio still tauntingly asked "Where is Halsey?" he had exclaimed: "I'd like to send a signal giving my latitude & longitude, and dare 'em to come and get me. But Nimitz won't let me." Last week, Fleet Admiral Nimitz still omitted to mention the latitude & longitude, and named only a small part of the strength of Task Force 38. But it was a fair and fearful sample.

The force, said Nimitz, was "a part of the Third Fleet." It was built around McCain's fast carrier task force, usually made up of three or four groups. (Sample group: four carriers, two or more battleships, half a dozen cruisers and a dozen destroyers).

Nimitz also published the names of three of McCain's task group commanders: pianoplaying, fight-loving Rear Admiral Gerald F. Bogan; lean, relaxed Rear Admiral Arthur W. Radford; and serious, solid Rear Admiral Thomas L. Sprague, recently graduated from jeep carriers to the big sisters.

The Coach. At sea, during an air operation, Halsey does not exercise detailed, tactical control of the fleet: that is the responsibility of the top carrier admiral (in this case, McCain). But Halsey wears the Navy's gold wings above the left breast pocket of his open-necked, tieless shirt. He won them at 52, and is regarded by career aviators as a reasonable facsimile of a high-octane air admiral.

While he has never flown a modern, fast combat plane, and has never flown on or off a carrier's deck, Bull Halsey has more of the patina of the flyer than most others of the Navy's Johnny-come-latelies to aviation--and shows his age less.

This is not so much a matter of training as of temperament. In his college days, which included a year at the University of Virginia before he went to Annapolis, by McKinley appointment, Halsey passed from "Pudge" or "Bill," as his family had called him, to "Bull."

Five feet nine inches tall, he weighed 150 Ibs. during the two years (1902, 1903) he played fullback on an oft-defeated Navy team. There are countless versions, with apocryphal trimmings, of the incident in which Halsey starred most conspicuously as "the bull." Navy was being flattened by a beefy, bulldozing V.P.I. team. A middie tackled the bruiser who was carrying the ball for V.P.I., rolled with him across the sidelines and under the bleachers. The crowd cheered the mid die, but he did not get up: thoroughly bulldozed, Bull Halsey was carried off on a stretcher.

The Warm-Up. Annapolis left less of its conservative impress on Halsey than on most of its graduates. He acquired less book learning than many, graduating two-thirds of the way down his class ('04), but he kept more of his individuality as a rough & tough scrapper, quick to make up his mind and fearless in action. He became the kind of man around whom legends grow.

When war came to the Pacific in 1941, Halsey, a vice admiral and commander of aircraft carriers, Pacific Fleet, was running task, forces of big ships as though they were destroyer divisions: the emphasis was on speed and maneuver. But after his first hell-for-leather raids on the Jap islands -- the Gilberts and Marshalls, Wake and Marcus -- his force missed the Battle of the Coral Sea by hours. Halsey went back to Pearl Harbor on May 26, 1942, suffering from a skin disease which laid him up for weeks. He missed the Battle of Midway, decisive engagement of the war against Japan.

Tojo Had the Ball. But Halsey was a sailorman's sailor; the Navy still expected great things of him. On Sept. 15, on the deck of the Saratoga at Pearl Harbor, Admiral Nimitz said: "I've got a surprise for you, men. Admiral Halsey's back." Officers and enlisted men broke into cheers when Halsey stepped forward.

The campaign for Guadalcanal was going from bad to worse (the Wasp had just been sunk), and Nimitz sent Halsey south. A month later, he named him Commander, South Pacific -- and the spirits of fighting men throughout the area soared. For his effect on morale. Bull Halsey was worth a division of fast battle ships.

Halsey's job was to sit behind a desk in Noumea and direct a campaign while other men fought the battles. Rear Admirals Daniel J. Callaghan and Norman Scott were killed in the crucial series of night actions known as the Battle of Guadalcanal (Nov. 13-15, 1942), which turned the Jap tide from the shores of "Bloody Island." Halsey became a hero and a four-star admiral. He took off the pins with three stars on them, ordered them sent to the widows of Callaghan and Scott. "Tell them," said he, "that it was their husbands' fighting guts that won me my four stars." Pre-Season Talk. When he sits in his high, steel chair on the flag bridge of a super-battleship, Halsey's wide, thin-lipped mouth with downturned corners looks tight enough. But he is a good talker in private conversation, he-man variety; his give-&-take with his top staff officers is free & easy.

At slackness or poor work at sea he roars in the voice that has made him renowned as the tough guy of the fleet. But his junior officers and enlisted men know that Bull Halsey is no sundowner: under the bushy eyebrows The Old Man's eyes gleam with good humor. The Bull is a softie, and his men love him as they love few other admirals.

Dirty Tricks Department. At 62, Halsey is still rugged, and in better health than he was three years ago. He rises at 0600, reads the overnight accumulation of dispatches while downing scalding coffee, and greets his staff at breakfast at a more comfortable hour with a grinning "Sit down, goddammit."

His eyes moisten visibly when the men cheer his public appearances; he cannot make a smooth, cliche-packed speech of thanks, but is more likely to blurt (as he did after the first hit-run raids): "I've never been so damn proud of anybody as I am of you."

He has the most elaborate information service aboard his flagship of any commander afloat. His staff is large and he enjoys hearing it called the "Dirty Tricks Department." Its meetings are what the name implies: Halsey warned an overstarched admiral who joined him: "This is a pretty rough bunch. We don't stand on rank."

Any Halsey fleet operation is likely to have a lot of improvisation about it. His directive from Nimitz may require him to strike an island or group of islands and neutralize the air power based there--as last September, when he had his first sea command in more than two years, and Mindanao was the target. That seemed too soft, so he went back and tackled the central Philippines. They, too, seemed soft.

A flyer shot down off Leyte was rescued by guerrillas, and when he returned to the fleet he bore word of how relatively weak the Japanese were in the Visayas. Halsey conferred with Vice Admiral Mitscher, then commanding Task Force 38, and with Nimitz. Soon he was on his way to see MacArthur, who agreed to a new plan of invading the Philippines in October instead of December, and at Leyte instead of Mindanao.

In the resulting naval battle, Halsey was heartbroken when he had to leave two Jap battleships unsunk off Cape Engano, only to find that four others to the south had given him the slip. But he did not lose his temper for long. Bull Halsey is permanently mad only at the Japs.

Sixteen Essex-class, the Saratoga, Enterprise and Ranger, and eight Independence-class.

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