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

by Evan Thomas Narrated by George Wilson

Overview

Evan Thomas takes us inside the naval war of 1941-1945 in the South Pacific in a way that blends the best of military and cultural history and riveting narrative drama. He follows four men throughout: Admiral William ("Bull") Halsey, the macho, gallant, racist American fleet commander; Admiral Takeo Kurita, the Japanese battleship commander charged with making what was, in essence, a suicidal fleet attack against the American invasion of the Philippines; Admiral Matome Ugaki, a self-styled samurai who was the commander of all kamikazes and himself the last kamikaze of the war; and Commander Ernest Evans, a Cherokee Indian and Annapolis graduate who led his destroyer on the last great charge in the last great naval battle in history. Sea of Thunder climaxes with the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the biggest naval battle ever fought, over four bloody and harrowing days in October 1944. We see Halsey make an epic blunder just as he reaches for true glory; we see the Japanese navy literally sailing in circles, torn between the desire to die heroically and the exhausted, unacceptable realization that death is futile; we sail with Commander Evans and the men of the USS Johnston into the jaws of the Japanese fleet and exult and suffer with them as they torpedo a cruiser, bluff and confuse the enemy -- and then, their ship sunk, endure fifty horrific hours in shark-infested water. Thomas, a journalist and historian, traveled to Japan, where he interviewed veterans of the Imperial Japanese Navy who survived the Battle of Leyte Gulf and friends and family of the two Japanese admirals. From new documents and interviews, he was able to piece together and answer mysteries about the Battle of Leyte Gulf that have puzzled historians for decades. He writes with a knowing feel for the clash of cultures. Sea of Thunder is a taut, fast-paced, suspenseful narrative of the last great naval war, an important contribution to the history of the Second World War.

Editorial Reviews

In Sea of Thunder, Evan Thomas does not attempt to present a history of the entire Japanese-American naval war. Instead, he does something more adventurous and more revealing; he views that conflict of nations through the prisms of four naval commanders, two from each warring nation. Using oral histories, dairies, correspondence, and postwar testimony, he shows how cultural differences and personalities played a major part in the outcome of critical October 1944 Battle of Leyte Gulf. Military history from a different angle.

Ronald Spector

A number of talented authors have written about Leyte Gulf, among them C. Vann Woodward, the great historian of the American South, and James A. Field Jr., who was actually there, and won a Bronze Star. Samuel Eliot Morison devoted an entire volume to the battle in his History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. Now Evan Thomas is trying his hand, and it’s likely his predecessors would have enthusiastically approved of the result. Sea of Thunder is an engaging and thorough account based on extensive research in both the United States and Japan that describes the war in the Pacific and culminates at Leyte Gulf.
— The New York Times

Wesley K. Clark

Sea of Thunder, by Evan Thomas, an assistant managing editor of Newsweek, provides one of the most insightful analyses yet written of personalities and military cultures at war. The book tells the story of the Japanese and American commanders whose fates converged in history's last great naval engagement, the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944. It is also a story of competing traditions and the extraordinary influence of personality, organizations and culture on warfare -- despite the advanced technologies wielded in World War II.
— The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

Thomas, Newsweek's assistant managing editor, turns his considerable narrative and research talents to Leyte Gulf, history's largest and most complex naval battle. He addresses the subject from the perspectives of four officers: William Halsey, who commanded the U.S. 3rd Fleet; Adm. Takeo Kurita, his Japanese counterpart; Adm. Matome Ugaki, Kurita's senior subordinate and a "true believer" in Japan's destiny; and Cdr. Ernest Evans, captain of a lowly destroyer, the U.S.S. Johnston. The Americans believed the Japanese incapable of great military feats, while the Japanese believed the Americans were incapable of paying the price of war. Both were tragically wrong. Halsey steamed north in pursuit of a what turned out to be a decoy, while Kurita's main force was positioned to destroy the American landing force in the Philippines. Evans repeatedly took the Johnston into harm's way against what seemed overwhelming odds. His heroism, matched by a dozen other captains and crews, convinced Kurita to break off the action. With Halsey's battleships and carriers just over the horizon, Kurita refused to sacrifice his men at the end of a war already lost. Ugaki bitterly denounced the lack of "fighting spirit and promptitude" that kept him from an honorable death. Evans fought and died like a true samurai. As Thomas skillfully reminds us, war is above all the province of irony. (Nov.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

The assistant managing editor of Newsweek uses the perspectives of four commanders-two Japanese and two American-to reconstruct the clash of navies and cultures in the South Pacific during World War II. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The paths of four different seaborne warriors-two Japanese, two Americans-collide at the now-overlooked Battle of Leyte Gulf, the "gory apex," mother of all sea battles. The October 1944 battle remains the largest in history; as Newsweek assistant managing editor Thomas observes, it involved 300 ships and nearly 200,000 sailors over an area of 100,000 square miles. Most Americans know little about it, perhaps because many sailors at the time wanted to forget it; for one thing, Thomas writes, the battle involved serious missteps on the part of Admiral William "Bull" Halsey-no one but reporters ever called him "Bull," and then not to his face-who through miscommunication and "poor staff work" failed to control a critically important approach, endangering the American invasion of the Philippines. He blamed near-disaster on a subordinate, Admiral Thomas Kinkaid, who, shut out from Halsey's master plan, made assumptions that he should not have. Halsey elliptically acknowledged later that "he had been bold where caution was called for," but Thomas does more to relieve Kinkaid of blame. The battle cost the lives of many American sailors, including one of Thomas's four chief subjects, Commander Ernest Evans, a mixed-blood Cherokee who set his destroyer against the Japanese as if he were leading a cavalry charge. Among the fighters on the Japanese side were two admirals, Matome Ugaki and Takeo Kurita, who took different approaches to military matters; Ugaki, whose superiors regarded him as a drunk, had worried from the outset that Japan would lose a war with America but nevertheless followed and exceeded orders, while Kurita decided on his own to steam away from battle, thereby saving the lives ofperhaps 30,000 Japanese sailors and untold Americans as well; whereas Ugaki launched kamikaze assaults, Kurita "had not been willing to sacrifice his men in a futile gesture of nobility."A competent inquiry into a naval battle that, Thomas ably shows, deserves more study.

From the Publisher

"Thomas's prose keeps pace with the fight and captures its eerie quality...The result is both a naval adventure story and a striking meditation on the nature of military courage." — The New Yorker

With this exemplary book, Evan Thomas has set a benchmark for historical writing — and analysis — against which subsequent work will be measured." — Michael J. Bonafield, Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

"One of the most insightful analyses yet written of personalities and military cultures at war...An exciting read...Thomas draws the battle scenes with exquisite precision...Those who would direct military strategy and policy should be well warned — and should have Thomas's book, well-worn, at their bedsides." — Wesley K. Clark, The Washington Post Book World

"A riveting tale of character and war by one of our most graceful writers. With impressive scholarship and a brilliant eye for detail, Evan Thomas tells the extraordinary story of Leyte Gulf without ever losing sight of the men in the maelstrom." — Rick Atkinson, author of An Army at Dawn

"This is a wonderful book; thoughtful and riveting all at the same time, and it's good history — you're never quite sure things are going to turn out the way you know they did!" — Ken Burns, filmmaker of The War

JUN/JUL 07 - AudioFile

While trying to retake the Philippine Islands from the Japanese in WWII, the U.S. Navy fought the last great sea engagement in world history, the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Narrator George Wilson starts with a quote from Winston Churchill, whom he mimics: “War is mainly a catalog of blunders.” The tactical mistakes made by Admiral Halsey and his foe, Admiral Kurita, dominate the story. Wilson keeps the narrative vital and exciting, using every bit of the action to maximize excitement for the listener. He uses dramatized voices for many of the historical figures—including Tokyo Rose—and describes the kamikaze attacks and torpedo hits with the restrained authority of a seasoned commander. J.A.H. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170673407
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	05/23/2008
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	914,763

Read an Excerpt

PROLOGUE

CULTURE, CHARACTER, AND THE LONELINESS OF COMMAND

In 1943, American sailors and soldiers entering the harbor at Tulagi, the front-line U.S. Navy base in the South Pacific, passed a billboard telling them to

Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs!

The billboard was signed by Adm. William F. Halsey, Jr., their commander. As the war progressed, newspapers quoted Halsey as saying about the Japanese, "We are drowning and burning them all over the Pacific, and it is just as much pleasure to burn them as to drown them."

To twenty-first-century ears, Halsey sounds like a racist monster or a sadist. In his own time, however, he was regarded by the public as a war hero, a little outspoken, too crude perhaps, but refreshingly blunt about the true nature of the enemy and the hard job ahead. In the wartime America of the 1940s, Halsey's attitude was unexceptional. Americans routinely referred to the Japanese as "Japs" and "Nips," and often as animals or insects of some kind (most commonly, monkeys, baboons, gorillas, dogs, mice, rats, vipers and rattlesnakes, and cockroaches). The Japanese were just as bigoted. They depicted Americans and other Westerners as reptiles, worms, insects (rendered in cartoons with the faces of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill), frogs, octopuses, beached whales, and stray dogs. Dehumanizing the enemy to make it easier to kill them is an ancient practice between warring nations, but rarely has it been practiced with more depraved creativity than in the Pacific War.

The roots of mutual contempt between Japan and the United States were twistedand deep. The Americans, as historian John Dower has shown, regarded the Japanese as half-child, half-savage, to be pitied or condescended to but also to be feared. Before the turn of the twentieth century, newspapers and politicians warned of the "Yellow Peril," and when Congress set immigration quotas in the 1920s, Asians were excluded altogether. The Japanese copied the West by modeling their navy on the British Royal Navy, from uniforms to ships, but regarded Westerners as filthy "demons" who wished to defile the pure Yamato race. When the kamikazes flew off on suicide missions against the Americans in the spring of 1945, virgin schoolgirls holding cherry blossoms were mustered to the airfields to wave them goodbye.

Some historians see the war between Japan and the United States as a grand tragedy of racial prejudice. It was certainly a cultural misunderstanding on an epic scale. Without suggesting moral equivalence -- Japan was the clear aggressor -- it is fair to say that both sides blundered into war. Blinded or warped by racial and cultural bias, East and West consistently underestimated or misjudged the other. Before the war, the Americans did not believe the Japanese capable of great military feats, like attacking Pearl Harbor, in part because Japanese were widely regarded in the West as "little people," near-sighted, buck-toothed comical figures who made cheap toys and bowed obsequiously. By the same token, the Japanese, whose faith in their own master or divine "leading race" (shido minzoku) exceeded Adolf Hitler's belief in German superiority, thought that Americans would surrender quickly because they were weak and decadent, a nation of frightened housewives, labor agitators, and greedy plutocrats. When the Americans did not give up but rather kept building more planes and tanks, the Japanese responded with massive suicidal attacks, believing that Americans, selfish and mongrelized, could not stand up to such a show of national unity and self-sacrifice. The Americans eventually decided, as a Fifth Air Force intelligence circular put it in July 1945, that "the entire population of Japan is a proper Military Target . . . THERE ARE NO CIVILIANS IN JAPAN." The Americans began burning Japanese cities -- sixty-six of them, finally obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs.

The degree to which cultural and racial stereotyping led to fatal misjudgments is remarkable. The Japanese did not think that the Americans had the stamina required for long stretches of submarine duty. So they neglected antisubmarine warfare -- with the result that American submarines were able to cut the vital supply lines between Japan and her oil-rich southern colonies. Similarly, the Japanese were lax about changing their communication codes, in part because they thought that the Americans were not smart enough to break them.

In the war in the Pacific, misunderstanding and miscalculation reached an apogee -- or nadir -- in late October 1944, at a naval engagement known as the Battle of Leyte Gulf. It was the biggest naval battle ever fought. The conflict involved more ships (almost 300), more men (nearly 200,000), and covered a larger area (more than 100,000 square miles, roughly the size of the British Isles) than any naval battle in history. The fighting was horrific, dramatic, and courageous. And yet both sides missed their main chance.

For Admiral Halsey, the commander of the main American striking force, the battle beckoned as the dream of a lifetime. A brassy, rough-and-ready national hero, dubbed "Bull" Halsey by the press, he had overcome defeatism early in the war. He believed he was on the verge of the greatest naval victory since Trafalgar. And yet, misjudging the enemy, he fell for a Japanese feint and sailed off in the wrong direction.

For the Japanese navy, the battle offered the opportunity to die gloriously -- and, possibly, to turn around the course of the war. Halsey's mistake opened the way for Adm. Takeo Kurita and the main Japanese battle fleet to descend upon Gen. Douglas MacArthur's landing force invading the Philippines. Up against smaller, weaker ships -- destroyers and "jeep" carriers -- the Japanese should have been wolves amongst the sheep. But confused, exhausted, and daunted by an unexpected show of American gallantry, Kurita turned his fleet around at the critical moment and limped home to quiet disgrace. In Japan today, naval scholars still debate Kurita's "mysterious retreat."

Curiously, in America, the Battle of Leyte Gulf has been largely forgotten. When Americans think of the victorious "Good War," they tend to think of D-Day and the liberation of Europe, not the Pacific War. Most people have heard of the Battle of Midway or seen the image of the marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima. But the Battle of Leyte Gulf blurs together with a dozen other battles fought in jungles or on coral reefs on the other side of civilization. Most Americans do not know when the Battle of Leyte Gulf was fought, where Leyte Gulf is, or even how it's pronounced (lay-TEE). They certainly don't know why the battle mattered.

For the Imperial Japanese Navy, the battle was a death knell. Never again would the Japanese be able to put to sea to engage the Americans in a fleet action. Without a fleet, the Japanese Home Islands were cut off, starved, and exposed to American attack. The battle was also, quite possibly, the last big naval battle. Fleets of ships and men have been fighting for thousands of years, but never before or since have they arrayed themselves against each other on such a scale. In the long history of fleet engagements, from Salamis, where the ancient Greeks fought the Persians, through the epic line-of-battle duels of the British, French, Dutch, and Spanish during the Age of Sail, to the modern clashes of the world wars, the Battle of Leyte Gulf stands as a kind of gory apex. The combatants used every kind of craft, from submarine to kamikaze plane, and employed every type of available weapon, and died every imaginable way -- by fire, blast, exposure, drowning, and shark attack. At least 13,000 men, along with one of the two greatest battleships ever built, were lost.

This is the story of four commanders, two American, two Japanese, whose lives collided in the biggest sea fight of the worst war in modern history. My narrative will follow these men from the breakout of war in December 1941 to the day when they came together in the giant naval engagement in and around the Philippine Islands. The Battle of Leyte Gulf is the climax of this book, although not quite the end of the story for the three men who survived it.

Cultures clash; nations do battle. But in the end wars are fought, and won or lost, by the actions of individuals -- heroes and cowards, the prudent and wanton, ordinary men reacting, not always predictably, to extraordinary circumstances. The characters of these men often reflect the cultures of their nations. A twisted national culture can corrupt even the purest souls. And yet, individual differences do matter, often critically and sometimes surprisingly.

The four men in the story that follows had to think, as all warriors do, about their own mortality. Japanese culture -- or, more precisely, the national identity propagandized by the militarists who ran Japan during World War II -- venerated death. In American war songs, as historian H. P. Willmott has noted, Johnny comes marching home again; in Japanese war songs, he marches off to die. But that does not mean that the human beings who fought for Japan were always heedless about wasting lives. Americans, on the other hand, celebrated the individual. The job of an American soldier or sailor, to paraphrase Gen. George S. Patton, was not to die for his country, but to make the enemy die for his. While Japanese commanders extolled "spirit," American commanders valued material superiority. But the Americans were no less brave than the Japanese -- and, at times, no less foolhardy.

Illness, accident, fate all play a hand in deciding battles and determining the course of history. But the true story of any battle lies in the passage of individual character -- a quirky, sometimes fragile and storm-tossed vessel -- across the roiled, violent seas of national culture. Our journey begins aboard a ship in a bay on the coast of Japan, two months before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Copyright © 2006 by Evan Thomas

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