Black Shoe Carrier Admiral; Frank Jack Fletcher at Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal

Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2006. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Fair [due to loss of flyleaf and extensive ink marks and notations]/Good. The format is approximately 7.25 inches by 10.25 inches. xxii, 558, [10] pages. Abbreviations, Acronyms and Special Terms. Photographs. Maps. Task Organizations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. DJ has some edgewear and soiling. Front flyleaf gone. Ink underling on DJ front flap and SUBSTANTIAL portions of the text. May be signed on the inside front cover. John B. Lundstrom is the author of several books on the Pacific War, including The First Team and The First Team and the Guadalcanal Campaign. He is the recipient of the Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature, the Hook Contributor's Award and the Admiral Arthur W. Radford Award by the National Aviation Museum. Frank Jack Fletcher (April 29, 1885 - April 25, 1973) was an admiral in the United States Navy during World War II. Fletcher commanded five different task forces through the war; he was the operational task force commander at the pivotal battles of the Coral Sea and Midway, which collectively resulted in the sinking of five Japanese fleet carriers. In 1914, then Lieutenant Fletcher was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions in the battle at Veracruz. September 1945, he proceeded to minato, Japan, with the North Pacific Force (consisting of about sixty vessels) for the emergency naval occupation of Northern Japan. He remained there until ordered to return to the United States, and on December 17, 1945, was appointed to the Navy's General Board. On May 1, 1946, as Senior Member of that Board he became Chairman, and continued to serve until his retirement on May 1, 1947, with the rank of full admiral. An abundance of new evidence demanded this reevaluation of Frank Jack Fletcher, the "black shoe" admiral who won his battles at sea but lost the war of public opinion. A surface warrior, in contrast to a 'brown shoe' naval aviator--Fletcher led the carrier forces that won against all odds at Coral Sea, Midway, and the Eastern Solomons. These and other early carrier victories decided the Pacific War not only because they inflicted crippling losses but also because they denied Japan key strategic positions in the region. Despite these successes, by 1950 Fletcher had become one of the most controversial figures in U.S. naval history and portrayed as a timid bungler who failed to relieve Wake Island in December 1941 and who deliberately abandoned the Marines at Guadalcanal. In this book, author John Lundstrom recalls that Fletcher once remarked,"after an action is over, people talk a lot about how the decisions were deliberately reached, but actually there's always a hell of a lot of groping around," and notes that the goal of his study is to probe and explain the "groping around." Drawing on new material, Lundstrom offers a fresh look at Fletcher's decisions and actions. The first major reassessment in more than fifty years of the once-maligned naval officer, it provides a careful analysis of the effect of radio intelligence on decision-making in the carrier battles during the first nine months of the war in the Pacific. This new assessment is based on thousands of documents and massive dispatch files and personal papers that no historian has previously used.