Sea of Thunder: Four Commanders and the Last Great Naval Campaign 1941-1945
By Evan Thomas

In Sea of Thunder, journalist and historian Evan Thomas tells the story of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the last and largest naval battle of World War Two. Between the 23rd and 26th of October, 1944, hundreds of ships and aircraft of the American and Imperial Japanese navies fought in the warm waters surrounding the Philippine island of Leyte. More than 10,000 Japanese—and roughly 2,800 American and allied—sailors and pilots died over four days of combat. Rather than destroy the American force landing on Leyte, the Japanese Navy was itself shattered. In the style of The Wise Men, his history of the early Cold War, Thomas recounts the battle through biographies of four key officers: Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey, commander the U.S. Third Fleet; Commander Ernest Evans, who led a desperate attack on overwhelming Japanese forces after Halsey sent most of the American fleet in the wrong direction; Admiral Takeo Kurita, who led the main Japanese force during the battle; and Matome Ugaki, his fanatical subordinate. By focusing on individuals, Thomas produces a book filled not only with extraordinary heroics, but also with lessons in leadership and strategy that should be of value to those in many non-military fields.

One of the book’s greatest strengths is its exposition of the egotism and bad communications that nearly cost the U.S. Navy the battle, despite its superiority in numbers and firepower. While acknowledging the Admiral’s great wartime achievements, Thomas does not shrink from criticizing Halsey’s lackluster performance at Leyte Gulf. Although he had been ordered to protect the transport ships landing U.S. troops on Leyte, Halsey allowed himself to be lured away by a decoy force of Japanese aircraft carriers whose planes had already been largely destroyed. This allowed a powerful force of Japanese battleships to approach the vulnerable U.S. invasion fleet. Its commander did not learn of Halsey’s action until hours had passed.

Halsey was too fixated on personally destroying what he thought to be the main Japanese fleet in the kind of set-piece naval battle he had, in his own words, 'dreamed about since [his] days as a cadet.'

Thomas dissects a blunder that could have cost thousands of lives and seriously delayed victory over Japan. Halsey, along with many of his senior officers, had the flu, which may have impaired their judgment. The Admiral’s personal staff was reluctant to question his decisions, and, at times, even to wake him up. Subordinate commanders, as well as Halsey’s chief of intelligence, were blithely ignored when they questioned the decision to take the whole fleet on the chase. Thomas suggests that Halsey was too fixated on personally destroying what he thought to be the main Japanese fleet in the kind of set-piece naval battle he had, in his own words, “dreamed about since [his] days as a cadet.” Therefore, he was unwilling to split his forces or permit a subordinate to win the glory. He swallowed the bait with his whole fleet.

Protocol and inefficient communications were also a problem. The invasion fleet Halsey was charged with protecting took orders not from him, but from General MacArthur, commander of the troops it carried. MacArthur’s insistence on military protocol meant that messages between the two fleets had to be relayed through his headquarters on the island of New Guinea island of Manus hundreds of miles away. The process sometimes took six hours. When messages did get through, ambiguous wording created misunderstandings that cumbersome communications made all but impossible to dispel. Meanwhile, even as the Navy brass followed the battle from Pearl Harbor, they fretted over the propriety of questioning the judgment of a commander in the field. By the time they suggested that Halsey reverse course, the Japanese had nearly won the battle. Deference to the man-on-the-spot was usually an advantage against the hierarchical Japanese, but it could be taken too far.

As a result, a small formation of escort carriers (small ships with no more than two dozen planes apiece) and “tin can” escorts, including Ernest Evan’s destroyer U.S.S. Johnston, were all that stood between the Japanese and the vulnerable U.S. transport fleet. Known as Task Force or “Taffy” 3, they should have been no match for Admiral Kurita’s force, which included Yamato and Mushashi, the largest battleships ever built. Led by Johnston, the Americans nevertheless charged the Japanese, firing torpedoes, guns and even flares, to buy time for reinforcements to arrive. Planes armed only with machine guns mimicked torpedo attacks on the Japanese dreadnoughts. Evans and most of his men were killed but their sacrifice was not wasted. Their ferocious attacks made the Japanese break off their attack, convinced that they had encountered a much more powerful force.

Thomas’s treatment of the Japanese yields unusual insight into enemies usually imagined as fanatical automatons. By late 1944, the Japanese military had become a suicide cult. Orders bore little connection to military reality. Units reeling from powerful attacks were repeatedly exhorted to “trust in Heavenly Guidance” and “clean up the remnants” of the overwhelmingly stronger American fleet. Death in battle was assumed.

Sea of Thunder draws on diaries and interviews to contrast how Admirals Kurita and Ugaki responded to the self-destroying culture in which they found themselves. Admiral Ugaki was unable to resist the nihilism that surrounded him. Inwardly questioning the wisdom of war with America, Ugaki forced himself to embrace the bushido ethic of wartime Japan. He wrote “death poems” and meditated on the good fortune of junior officers who “expect never to return alive.” Ugaki’s attitudes were typical: Japanese officers were expected to lash themselves to their sinking ships. After the battle Ugaki took charge of Japan’s “special attack” or kamikaze forces. Upon learning of Japan’s impending surrender, he flew to his death in the war’s last kamikaze attack.

Admiral Kurita, by contrast, emerges as Thomas’s most unlikely hero. Historians have tended to dismiss the Japanese admiral as overly cautious, as did many of his colleagues in the Japanese Navy. As Thomas tells the story, however, Kurita had simply come to accept Japan’s inevitable defeat and wanted to waste as few lives as possible. Kurita feared that even if he ravaged the invasion fleet, his ships would eventually be annihilated by Halsey’s numerically superior forces. When the Japanese high command ordered that he renew his attack, Kurita announced that he would attack a nearby American carrier force. This force did not exist. Thomas argues strongly that Kurita falsified intelligence to avoid a suicide mission. Kurita returned to Japan alive and in semi-disgrace. As commandant of the Japanese Naval Academy for the balance of the war, he insisted that his cadets represented the “light of rebuilding the empire” and, Thomas writes, tried to keep them alive. After the war, the Admiral worked odd jobs as a scrivener and a masseur. Never explicitly admitting to his humanitarian subterfuge, he died in 1977.

If Thomas’s biographic approach has a flaw it is the asymmetry between the two American commanders on which he focuses. His pairing of Ugaki and Kurita demonstrates how some leaders may resist a destructive ideology when others succumb. Evans certainly deserved his posthumous Medal of Honor but it is hard to draw useful contrasts between him and Halsey. Both men were physically courageous, but Evans never commanded a fleet. Thomas might have more usefully paired Halsey with a more senior American officer. Nevertheless, Sea of Thunder brings a decisive battle vividly and insightfully to life. It warrants a place on the shelf of any naval history buff or student of leadership and strategy.

Carlos Ramos-Mrosovsky is a third-year student at Havard Law School.