The U. S. Navy played a decisive role in World War II, particularly in the World War II Pacific theater where, in a series of engagements from the Battle of the Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway in 1942 to the Battle of the Philippine Sea and the Battle for Leyte Gulf in 1944, it destroyed the Imperial Japanese Navy. The new importance of naval air power was an especially significant feature of the Pacific war. In the European theater as well as the Pacific theater, the navy also supported amphibious warfare operations, including the invasion of Normandy and the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. With the British Royal Navy, the U. S. Navy prevailed in the Battle of the Atlantic against German submarines.
During World War II, the Navy Department was directed by a civilian secretary of the navy comparable to the secretary of the army heading the U. S. Army and responsible to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the commander in chief. From July 1940 until his death in May 1944, W. Franklin “Frank” Knox was secretary of the navy. James V. Forrestal replaced Knox. Below the secretary were a variety of navy bureaus, which administered the service, and a Navy Board, which advised civilian leaders. The navy’s highest military commander was the chief of naval operations, a position held in 1939 by Admiral Harold R. Stark. The preponderance of the navy’s strength then rested in the Pacific Fleet, the U. S. Navy’s largest, led by the commander in chief, U. S. Fleet, based at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The United States also had a small Asiatic Fleet based in Manila, in the Philippines, and a much smaller Atlantic Squadron. In February 1941, the Atlantic Squadron was upgraded to become the Atlantic Fleet, and a true two-ocean navy was created, with the Atlantic Fleet led by Vice Admiral Ernest J. King and the Pacific Fleet commanded by Vice Admiral Husband E. Kimmel. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when Admiral Stark moved to Europe to command U. S. naval forces in that theater, King merged the posts of commander in chief, U. S. Fleet, and chief of naval operations, and held both positions himself. King thus had unprecedented power over the navy bureaus and reported directly to the president.
The U. S. Navy organized seven separate fleets during World War II, and these operated continuously in every ocean, including the Mediterranean, and along the American coastline. Following the attack at Pearl Harbor, the U. S. Navy also took administrative control of the 170,000 member U. S. Coast Guard and 1,150 coast guard ships and boats. The strengths of the navy’s fleets varied according to their primary duties. The 10th Fleet was in charge of antisubmarine warfare along the U. S. coasts, but had no ships. Other fleets were often combined into much larger and more powerful task forces for specific operations. During the invasion of the Mariana Islands in June and July 1944, for example, Task Force 58 commanded by Rear Admiral Marc Mitscher, consisted of eight battleships, 15 fleet carriers, 24 cruisers, and smaller supporting vessels.
At the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, the U. S. Navy, like most other naval powers, was still oriented toward capital ships, of which it had 15 of varying ages, most dating from the World War I era. In addition to its battleships, the navy also possessed five aircraft carriers, 18 heavy cruisers, 19 light cruisers, 61 submarines, and a variety of smaller craft including destroyers, patrol-torpedo boats, and gunboats; together, these totaled approximately 1,099 vessels, manned by 125,000 sailors. to shipbuilding programs initiated in the 1930s, and especially in July 1940, the U. S. Navy was undergoing a major expansion by the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. That attack devastated the battleship fleet and hastened the new emphasis on aircraft carriers and air power. Between July 1, 1940, and August 31, 1945, the U. S. Navy, supported by the nation’s remarkable shipbuilding program, completed or acquired an astounding 92,000 ships, boats, and craft of all varieties. In this total were 66,000 landing ships and landing craft, plus some 1,300 ships larger than destroyer escorts, including 138 aircraft carriers, 111 of which were escort carriers. The U. S. Navy lost through all causes, 157 ships, including submarines, destroyers, and larger vessels.
The U. S. Navy, like the army and U. S. Marines, controlled its own air force, including carrier-based fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo bombers, as well as land-based patrol craft. Naval aviation grew tremendously between July 1940 and August 1945 as more than 75,000 aircraft were delivered; naval air personnel rose from 10,923, of whom 2,965 were pilots, to 437,524 personnel, of whom 60,747 were pilots.
The navy as a whole expanded from 161,000 personnel in 1940 to more than 3,400,000 in August 1945, including aviators but not counting the nearly half million marines. At the beginning of the war, African Americans could serve in the navy only as messmen; but during the war, the navy began using blacks not only in service and labor positions but also, in some cases, as radiomen, gunners’ mates, and in other capacities. Particularly after racial unrest in 1944 arising from its treatment of black sailors, the navy also took steps toward desegregation. U. S. Navy casualties between December 7, 1941, and September 2, 1945, numbered approximately 37,000 killed and 38,000 wounded.
Further reading: Nathan Miller, War at Sea: A Naval History of World War II (New York: Scribner’s, 1995); Samuel Eliot Morrison, The Two-Ocean War: A Short History of the United States Navy in the Second World War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963); Ronald Spector, Eagle against the Sun: The American War with Japan (New York: Free Press, 1985).
—Clayton D. Laurie
World History
