| Forgotten Fleet:
Task Force One, Part Three
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
October 2024
 There’s no evidence that Nimitz disdained the fighting power of the battleships; had he been able to keep them fueled, he likely would have brought them to Pearl Harbor and deployed Task Force One alongside the carrier task forces. But his fuel situation forced him to prioritize his assets, and he gave that priority – correctly – to his aircraft carriers and their less-inefficient heavy cruiser escorts.
What is clear is that Nimitz feared the loss of prestige intendant on the loss of a battleship, even an old one. Outside of the Pearl Harbor attack, no American battleship had ever been sunk as a result of enemy action, and Nimitz did not want it to happen on his watch. King forwarded continual proposals to employ the battleships, which Nimitz just as continually rejected.
Task Force One, its escorting destroyers and the escort carrier Long Island all went to sea during the Battle of Midway in early June. Pye dispatched two battleships on 31 May 1942 to investigate a report of a Japanese carrier approaching the West Coast, but they found nothing, which was probably a good thing. On 4 June, the day of the Battle of Midway, King came aboard Pennsylvania for a ceremony honoring Nimitz (a deception to help obscure American readiness to meet the Japanese invaders, as Nimitz was actually in Hawaii). On the following morning, as soon as Long Island arrived in San Francisco, Pye led four more battleships and the carrier out of San Francisco Bay to rejoin the first two ships and steam a point about halfway between their home base and Midway Island. They turned back on the 14th, arriving home on the 20th; Long Island had detached on the 17th to return to San Diego.
Anti-aircraft practice aboard Colorado. March 1942.
The training cycle slowed abruptly after Task Force One’s return to San Francisco, and now the seven battleships suddenly spent much less time at sea. King visited Nimitz on 4 July to discuss the planned offensive in the South Pacific; the CNO wanted the invasion fleet to include at least two of Task Force One’s battleships. Nimitz again demurred, but on 1 August, Pye’s fleet began a week of intensive drills off the California coast. The carrier Hornet joined them on the 8th for more exercises as they steamed for Hawaii, and on the 14th Task Force One entered Pearl Harbor.
Once there the training regimen slacked off again, but in the meantime the United States had suffered a costly defeat at the Battle of Savo Island. King again recommended the deployment of battleships to the South Pacific, this time suggesting that three to five ships be sent. And again, Nimitz declined. And on 27 August, Horne’s rebuilding program directed the dispatch of Tennessee to Puget Sound for a lengthy reconstruction that would take her out of action until May 1943.
King and Nimitz met again on 7 September, with the CNO repeating his desire to see the old battleships contribute in the South Pacific. Nimitz continued to refuse, even as American forces in the theater dwindled over the course of the month to just one aircraft carrier, two heavy cruisers (one of them damaged), four light cruisers and nine destroyers. A tour of the area by Nimitz left the Pacific commander convinced that the old battleships would be doomed in the narrow waters; theater commander Robert Ghormley cautioned that American warships could only effectively enter the waters off Guadalcanal by daylight, and the battleships’ low speed would inevitably bring them into danger from aircraft and submarines by day as well as surface forces by night.
Norman Scott, commanding a surface action group in the South Pacific after serving on King’s staff, offered a contrasting opinion. The old battleships had a place in the night fighting off Guadalcanal, where their immense firepower could be decisive in a close-range engagement.
Maryland sets out for the South Pacific. 8 November 1942.
Pennsylvania’s turn for reconstruction came on 4 October; she would remain at Hunters Point until 4 February 1943, and return to active service in late April. Idaho went to Puget Sound on 14 October, to remain there for overhaul (though not a thorough reconstruction) until 28 December 1942. The next subtraction would be “Spike” Pye himself, then 62 years old. Pye was relieved in late October and named President of the Naval War College. He never served at sea again; part of the Navy and all of the Marine Corps had refused to forgive his “abandonment” of the Wake Island garrison in December 1941.
No one took over for Pye; the remaining four battleships now operated as two two-ship divisions. Two more ships, Idaho’s sisters Mississippi and New Mexico, entered Pearl Harbor’s yard on 15 October for urgent work to cut away part of the superstructure that impeded to fields of fire of their anti-aircraft batteries, remove some of their rather useless casemate-mounted 5-inch guns, and fit more light anti-aircraft weapons and directors for them. The work lasted until 29 November.
That left just Colorado and Maryland available when the call to action finally came. New storage tanks and additional tankers had eased the fuel situation, and on 8 November 1942, Battleship Division 4 finally set out for war. They reached Fiji on 17 November, four days after their leading advocate on the scene, Norman Scott, was killed during the First Naval Battle of Guadalcanal. The two ships remained at Fiji, rarely even conducting training at sea, with area commander William Halsey unwilling to use them in the front lines. When Mississippi and New Mexico joined them on 18 December, Halsey ordered their new anti-aircraft weaponry stripped and fitted to Colorado and Maryland.
Mississippi at sea. June 1942. |
Despite the added guns, Halsey didn’t commit the battleships, even after the Americans lost one heavy cruiser sunk and three more of them badly damaged at the Battle of Tassafaronga on 30 November, losses so severe that Halsey ceased challenging the Japanese with surface forces in Ironbottom Sound. Only on 2 February did the four battleships finally leave Fiji in search of battle, but the Americans did not press the issue. A second sortie six days later would be cancelled when the Japanese deployment was revealed as an enemy hoax.
How would Pye’s battle fleet have performed, given the chance to engage the Japanese?
They had the same gunnery radar that proved so devastatingly effective for Washington in the Second Naval Battle of Guadalcanal in November, with crews that had had far more gunnery training. The 16-inch guns of Colorado and Maryland could penetrate the armor of any likely opponent other than the super-battleship Yamato; the 14-inch guns of the other five battleships could deal out almost as much punishment. The Americans had better protection than any Japanese battleship (again, other than Yamato) and immeasurably superior gunnery. In addition to radar, the Americans had just completed an intense training cycle where the Japanese battleships practiced haphazardly if at all and were notorious for their poor shooting. On the negative side, they were terribly slow.
That heavy firepower would be seen as vitally important within a year, as the older battleships provided fire support to the island-hopping campaign across the Pacific. All of the old Pacific Fleet battleships participated, and even the Atlantic Fleet’s ancient relics New York, Texas and Arkansas trundled through the Panama Canal to join them.
Nimitz’s apparent calculation that the impact on the public of losing an elderly battleship out-weighed whatever contribution they could make in combat is of course impossible to test. It’s undeniably true that the Pacific Fleet commander had to make careful decisions regarding fuel allotments, at least in the first year of the war. But the decision to convert the four Cimarron-class oilers into Sangamon-class escort carriers also sidelined the seven older battleships. King had opposed the conversions, believing the escort carriers too small to operate effectively in the Pacific; their existence also kept the battleships out of action.
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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good.
He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and new puppy. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold.
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