Spruance Won the Pacific. The Press Never Once Printed His Name.

The Navy that Spruance won the Pacific for promoted the man who would feed the press. And buried the man who would not. The sea doesn't forgive. Neither does the Navy. And neither does history. — SOURCES — PRIMARY SOURCES United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Interrogations of Japanese Officials, Naval Analysis Division (1946). Particularly Nav No. 3 / USSBS No. 32 (Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa, Philippine Sea), Nav No. 55 / USSBS No. 227 (Ozawa, second interrogation, October 1945, on Leyte and SHO Plan), Nav No. 9 / USSBS No. 47 (Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita), and Nav No. 36 / USSBS No. 150 (Captain Toshikazu Ohmae, chief of staff, Mobile Fleet). Available through the Naval History and Heritage Command reading room and the Ibiblio HyperWar archive. Raymond A. Spruance Papers, MSC-012. Naval War College Archives, Newport, Rhode Island. 11 archival boxes — correspondence, speeches, Naval War College thesis on Command, 1965 Paris Match interview typescript, and the scrapbook of his ambassadorship to the Philippines. Thomas B. Buell Collection on Raymond A. Spruance. Naval War College Archives, Newport, Rhode Island. 14 archival boxes — original oral history transcripts and audio of staff officer interviews including Carl Moore, E. P. Forrestel, and Margaret Spruance Bogart. Reprocessed 2019. Public Law 80-666 (1948). Statutes at Large Vol. 62 pt. 1, pp. 1082–1083. Spruance's special congressional act granting full four-star admiral's pay for life. Naval History and Heritage Command. H-Gram H-032-1 (Operation Forager and the Battle of the Philippine Sea); Spruance biographical files; ship histories for USS Enterprise, USS New Mexico, USS New Jersey, USS Indianapolis. Spruance's Fitness Reports after Midway. NHHC, June 2010. Battle Stations! Your Navy In Action (1946). Source for Spruance's own action-report summary of the Marianas Turkey Shoot. PRINCIPAL SECONDARY AUTHORITIES Thomas B. Buell. The Quiet Warrior: A Biography of Admiral Raymond A. Spruance. Little, Brown, 1974; Naval Institute Press reissue with introduction by John B. Lundstrom, 2009. Winner of the Alfred Thayer Mahan Award and the Samuel Eliot Morison Award. The standard biographical authority. Built from Buell's 1963 interview with Spruance and exhaustive staff oral histories. E. P. Forrestel. Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, USN: A Study in Command. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966. 275 pages. Foreword by Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, introduction by Rear Admiral E. M. Eller, Director of Naval History. CRITICAL READING FLAG: institutionally cautious because written by a former staff officer while Spruance was still alive; valuable for fact, restrained on personality. Hunter Abell. "Spruance Merits a Fifth Star." U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 147/6/1,420 (June 2021). The current authoritative case for posthumous promotion to Fleet Admiral. Walter R. Borneman. The Admirals: Nimitz, Halsey, Leahy, and King — The Five-Star Admirals Who Won the War at Sea. Little, Brown, 2012. The standard joint biography. Source for the decisive verdict that Halsey was "too much of an institution in the American press to be denied" the fourth set of five stars. John B. Lundstrom. The First Team and the Guadalcanal Campaign and The First Team: Pacific Naval Air Combat from Pearl Harbor to Midway. Naval Institute Press. Lundstrom's introduction to the 2009 Buell reissue contains the line, "every time Admiral Raymond A. Spruance commanded an operation against the Japanese, they lost." Ian W. Toll. Pacific Crucible (Norton, 2011); The Conquering Tide (Norton, 2015); Twilight of the Gods (Norton, 2020). The current standard popular trilogy on the Pacific naval war. Craig L. Symonds. The Battle of Midway. Oxford University Press, 2011. World War II at Sea: A Global History. Oxford University Press, 2018. Modern scholarly authority; corrects the Miles Browning credit narrative on the Midway launch decision. James D. Hornfischer. The Fleet at Flood Tide: America at Total War in the Pacific, 1944–1945. Bantam, 2016. Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal. Bantam, 2011. Source for the verdict that Spruance "should forever be remembered as the greatest operational naval commander of World War Two." Wayne P. Hughes, Jr. "An old salt picks his 4 favorite American admirals." Foreign Policy, March 2017. Adapted from his Naval War College Review essay, Vol. 62 No. 4, Article 8 (Autumn 2009). William Tuohy. America's Fighting Admirals: Winning the War at Sea in World War II. Zenith Press, 2007. Source for Captain George C. Dyer's contrast between serving under Spruance and Halsey. Thomas J. Cutler. The Battle of Leyte Gulf, 23–26 October 1944. Naval Institute Press, 1994. The standard work on the Halsey decision at Leyte and the resulting fight off Samar.