"Bull"

Five feet nine inches tall, he weighed only 150 Ibs. during the two years (1902-03) he played fullback for an oft-beaten Naval Academy team. But one day, when Navy was being flattened by a beefy, bulldozing squad from Virginia Polytechnic Institute, the little fullback came roaring out of nowhere, slammed the V.P.I. ball carrier so hard that he rocked him over the sideline, off the field, under the bleachers. His name was William Halsey, and they called him "Bull." That was the way he went through life.

As a Navy hero of the Pacific sea war, Admiral Halsey hit the Japanese as unpredictably and as hard. Two months after Pearl Harbor, he took the offensive in his flagship Enterprise, raided the Marshall Islands; two months after that, he launched Jimmy Doolittle's Army B-25s from Hornet against Tokyo. "We get away with it because we violate the traditional rules," he grinned, and the Navy loved him for his craggy jaw and bushy eyebrow's, his baseball cap, his salty determination to ride Emperor Hirohito's white horse through Tokyo.

Bull Halsey became a great commander. Off Guadalcanal he won a campaign so tight that at the end of it, he was down to "2,300 gallons of aviation gasoline and three or four planes fit to fight." From the South China Sea to Formosa he improvised great sea-air sweeps that cost the Japanese "so many ships that I cannot count them." As commander of the big Third Fleet at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, he was the scourge of the Japanese Navy. Toward the end of the war, Halsey took task forces of battleships as well as carriers to bombard the Japanese coast. "I had a tremendous steamroller--I could do anything I damned pleased," he said, but the Navy regarded him no more for his victories than for legends about his brilliant staff ("the Dirty Tricks Department"), his casual mess ("This is a pretty rough bunch; we don't stand on rank"), his inability to make speeches to his men that sounded more inspiring than: "I've never been so damned proud of anybody as I am of you."

At war's end he wound up 45 years in the Navy with a chestful of decorations and five-star fleet-admiral's rank. He said: "Let the younger fellow's take over." and Bull Halsey's officers--Forrest Sherman, Arthur Radford, Mick Carney, Arleigh Burke--did. He put in a stint for International Telephone & Telegraph Corp., launched but lost a fund-raising drive to save his old flagship Big E from the scrap heap. "Remember!" he rasped. "Scrapped ships will not rest peacefully in deep blue waters beside the gallant Lexington, Wasp, Hornet, Houston, Atlanta, and all the brave others. Our Navy must remain strong!" Last week, on Fishers Island in the peaceful grey waters of Long Island Sound, Bull Halsey, 76, died in his sleep of a heart attack.

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