Forgotten Fleet:
Task Force One, Part Two
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
October 2024

Blame for the Pearl Harbor disaster fell squarely, and to a great extent unfairly, on Husband E. Kimmel, commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet. As he watched his fleet burn, Kimmel tore off his shoulder boards, knowing his career to be at an end.

His replacement, Chester W. Nimitz, had plenty of experience with the Pacific Fleet and its battleships. His last command at sea had been Battleship Division One, flying his flag in Arizona. Nimitz pressed his new boss, Ernest J. King - elevated to commander in chief of the U.S. fleet on the same day Nimitz received his new billet - for more aircraft carriers and especially more cruisers and destroyers to escort them and perform other duties. He did not ask for battleships.

While Nimitz had been a battleship admiral who now rejected battleships, King had been a carrier commander and admiral. The carrier admiral now became the champion of the battleship; he had operated his carriers alongside battleships and believed that big guns had a place in the new, aviation-driven war to come. Their broad decks made for awesome anti-aircraft platforms, and at the time both American and Japanese doctrine called for surface forces to seek out and destroy enemy carriers.

New Mexico at Norfolk, 31 December 1941, just before deploying to the Pacific.

King named his old Naval Academy classmate, Vice Admiral William S. Pye, to command the battleship fleet assembled at San Francisco, now designated Task Force One, on 4 April 1942. Pye had commanded the Pacific Fleet’s Battle Force (the battleships and their supporting destroyers) in 1941 and at Pearl Harbor, and briefly commanded the Pacific Fleet after Kimmel’s relief. Kimmel had assigned the battleships to convoy duty between Hawaii and the West Coast, a meaningless directive since none of them were available for action during his brief tenure. New Mexico participated in one such mission just after her arrival in the theater, but with the Japanese deploying only submarines, not surface raiders, adding battleships to the convoys only added a high-prestige target.

Pye sketched out an aggressive training schedule. The battle fleet remained at sea continuously between 14 April and 10 May, and again between 31 May and 19 June. The ships practiced division and squadron maneuvers and drills of all sorts, particularly gunnery practice. All told, the battleships spent 74 percent of their time at sea.

King and his staff monitored Pye’s training regime closely, and were well aware of the crews’ excellent progress. In late April 1942, King suggested sending four of Task Force One’s ships to New Zealand. Japanese submarines had skulked about the North Island in March 1942, sending their floatplanes on recon missions over both Auckland and Wellington, the two major cities. New Zealand’s Fraser government, uneasy at the prospect of a Japanese invasion with their best troops in the Middle East and unsure that the handful of Australian and New Zealand cruisers operating in the area could defend the sea lanes, desperately wanted re-assurance.

On 25 May 1942, the carrier Saratoga arrived in San Diego, following a lengthy refit in Bremerton following torpedo damage, which also involved a major upgrade of her anti-aircraft capability. Finding sufficient cruisers and destroyers to screen her proved difficult; she would finally sail for Hawaii with just one anti-aircraft light cruiser and five destroyers. This meant that she would have very little protection against Japanese surface attack.

Pennsylvania alongside at Mare Island Naval Shipyard, 2 March 1942.

On the same day, King sent a recommendation (not an order) that the old battleships training with Pye at San Francisco could provide the needed heavy escort. King himself had operated Saratoga and her sister Lexington together with a battleship escort during 1938’s Fleet Problem XIX, in which the carriers struck the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. Nimitz refused, and Saratoga would rush to Pearl Harbor on 1 June without the battleships.

Also on 25 May, probably not coincidentally, the Vice Chief of Naval Operations, Frederick J. Horne, issued a schedule for rebuilding all of the old battleships along the same lines as West Virginia and California. This would entail replacing their 5-inch guns with a true dual-purpose secondary battery mounted in twin gunhouses, thicker deck armor, a great deal more light anti-aircraft weaponry and finally blisters along the sides to offset the added weight of these improvements. This would also short-circuit King’s battleship obsession. Horne and King disliked one another intensely, but King left logistical matters to Horne, including such mundane matters as battleship repair. The West Coast had only four drydocks large enough for the reconstruction program, two of which had to be kept ready for emergency use. Only two battleships, therefore, could be rebuilt at once. It would be a slow attrition, but eventually Horne’s program would take the battleships out of King’s calculations.

King, commander-in-chief as well as CNO, was well aware that Pye’s seven battleships represented far greater fighting power than the eight dreadnoughts that Pye had commanded on 7 December. Colorado and Maryland each boasted eight 16-inch guns, while the other five had a dozen 14-inch guns each. All had been extensively overhauled and refitted, with improvements to their armor and particularly their torpedo protection. All seven had the same surface search and fire control radar as the new fast battleships; none of the ships at Pearl Harbor had had these devices.

Except for the older Pennsylvania, these ships featured superior internal arrangements that made them far more survivable in battle. Their turbo-electric drives meant that no direct mechanical contact existed between their machine rooms and their drive shafts, eliminating a key weakness of older battleships, and allowing far more compartmentation. They had no shell-handling rooms; hydraulic lifts brought ammunition directly from the magazines to the guns, simplifying loading procedures and eliminating a potentially fatal flaw.

Colorado at anchor in San Francisco Bay. May 1942.

Most importantly, the ships were manned by American battleship sailors, a self-anointed elite of long-service professionals. Pye’s intensive training regime brought the gun crews to a high level of speed and efficiency, while their gunnery control crews had ample opportunity to practice with their new radars.

Nimitz, the Pacific commander in chief, could easily have summoned Pye’s battle fleet to join the carriers at Midway, either as an escort for Saratoga or a separate surface action group. They stood at peak readiness in early June with all seven ships fully prepared for action. Yet Nimitz left them well outside the theater of operations and they played no part in the Battle of Midway.

The reason was very simple: the Pacific Fleet could not provide fuel for Pye’s battleships if they operated out of Hawaii. While California had essentially a limitless supply of oil and refineries to process it, Nimitz had only seven naval oilers available to serve the fleet, and a limited number of commercial tankers to bring that production to Pearl Harbor. The German u-boat campaign had targeted tankers, and more than one-third of the United States’ total tanker tonnage had been sunk in the first six months of the war.

One of those seven available fleet oilers, Neosho, was lost in the Battle of the Coral Sea. Four of the Atlantic Fleet’s new, large oilers that could have been shifted to the Pacific instead were taken in hand in February and March 1942 for conversion to escort aircraft carriers. These new oilers, commissioned in 1940 and 1941, each had had a capacity of 146,000 barrels. Their presence in the Pacific would have allowed Nimitz to deploy all of his assets.

Nimitz’s staff calculated in April that with the limited storage available at Pearl Harbor, the relative lack of oilers capable of refueling his ships at sea, and the paltry flow of oil from the West Coast, the Pacific Fleet could operate four aircraft carriers and their escorts but no more. At Midway, Nimitz deployed three carriers with a fourth (Saratoga) and her escorts rushing to join them. The battleships simply could not be maintained; the older battleships burned an enormous amount of fuel (1,200 barrels a day compared to 1,100 for an aircraft carrier or 950 for the more-efficient fast battleship North Carolina). A heavy cruiser, now the basis of the carrier screens, burned 600 barrels per day.

That tanker shortage would continue to plague American operations well into 1942, with Frank Jack Fletcher obsessing over his carriers’ fuel status at the Coral Sea and again during the Guadalcanal invasion. In early September, Saratoga and her escorts would be temporarily stranded at Tonga when the fleet base there ran out of fuel. Nimitz, having commanded a division of battleships before the war, knew exactly how thirsty they could be when operated at fleet speed.

You can order Midway Deluxe right here.

Rising Sun Package
      Midway Deluxe Edition
      Bismarck Playbook Edition
      Midway: Rising Sun 1940
Retail Price: $192.97
Package Price: $155
Gold Club Price: $124
You can experience the Rising Sun Package right here.
Please allow an extra four weeks for delivery.

Sign up for our newsletter right here. Your info will never be sold or transferred; we'll just use it to update you on new games and new offers.

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.

Daily Content includes no AI-generated content or third-party ads. We work hard to keep it that way, and that’s a lot of work. You can help us keep things that way with your gift through this link right here.