Halsey's Bad Rap

Here is where the criticism becomes overly harsh. Yes, he made a mistake, or rather, a number of them. He bought his pilots’ reports about the weakness of the Center Force and the strength of the Northern Force. With his belief based on these mistaken reports, he felt safe in taking off after the decoy. Theodore Roosevelt said that in a crisis, the worst thing you can do is nothing. Halsey wasn’t someone who could do nothing. He saw what he considered an opportunity to sink the majority of the Japanese fleet and took it. When he realized his mistake, he turned his forces around and raced back in time to save the other small carriers.

Halsey is, unfortunately, remembered more for the Battle of Leyte Gulf than he is for his status as an early aviator or as one of the architects and motivating forces of the island-hopping strategy that won the war in the Pacific. His headlong style often got him in hot water with his superiors, but they all wanted him around. He wasn’t an original thinker, really, but he was intelligent and sly and determined. The entirety of his career should be the proper measure of his legacy, not his mistakes, no matter the size.

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