LitArk » Books » Non-fiction

Thomas Alexander Hughes - Admiral Bill Halsey: A Naval Life

Here you can read online Thomas Alexander Hughes - Admiral Bill Halsey: A Naval Life full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2016, publisher: Harvard University Press, genre: Non-fiction. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Book:
Admiral Bill Halsey: A Naval Life
Author:
Thomas Alexander Hughes
Publisher:
Harvard University Press
Genre:
Books / Non-fiction
Year:
2016
Rating:
5 / 5
Favourites:
Add to favourites
Your mark:
- 100
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5

Description
Author's other books
Similar books

Admiral Bill Halsey: A Naval Life: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Admiral Bill Halsey: A Naval Life" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

William Halsey was the most famous naval officer of World War II. His fearlessness in carrier raids against Japan, his steely resolve at Guadalcanal, and his impulsive blunder at the Battle of Leyte Gulf made him the Patton of the Pacific and solidified his reputation as a decisive, aggressive fighter prone to impetuous errors of judgment in the heat of battle. In this definitive biography, Thomas Hughes punctures the popular caricature of the fighting admiral to reveal the truth of Halseys personal and professional life as it was lived in times of war and peace.
Halsey, the son of a Navy officer whose alcoholism scuttled a promising career, committed himself wholeheartedly to naval life at an early age. An audacious and inspiring commander to his men, he met the operational challenges of the battle at sea against Japan with dramatically effective carrier strikes early in the war. Yet his greatest contribution to the Allied victory was as commander of the combined sea, air, and land forces in the South Pacific during the long slog up the Solomon Islands chain, one of the wars most daunting battlegrounds. Halsey turned a bruising slugfest with the Japanese navy into a rout. Skillfully mediating the constant strategy disputes between the Army and the Navyas well as the clashes of ego between General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Chester NimitzHalsey was the linchpin of Americas Pacific war effort when its outcome was far from certain.

Thomas Alexander Hughes: author's other books

Who wrote Admiral Bill Halsey: A Naval Life? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Admiral Bill Halsey: A Naval Life — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Admiral Bill Halsey: A Naval Life" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

ADMIRAL BILL HALSEY

A NAVAL LIFE

Thomas Alexander Hughes

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

2016

Design by Dean Bornstein

Jacket credit: Bettmann/Corbis

Jacket designer: Jill Breitbarth

978-0-674-04963-5 (alk. paper)

978-0-674-96929-2 (EPUB)

978-0-674-96930-8 (MOBI)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Hughes, Thomas Alexander, 1963 author.

Title: Admiral Bill Halsey : a naval life / Thomas Alexander Hughes.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015040172

Subjects: LCSH: Halsey, William F. (William Frederick), 18821959. | United States. NavyBiography. | AdmiralsUnited StatesBiography. | World War, 19391945Pacific AreaNaval operations, American.

Classification: LCC E746.H3 H84 2016 | DDC 359.0092dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015040172

For Alicia, Elizabeth, and Katherine

CONTENTS

1. An American Aristocracy
2. The Admirals Captain
3. A Carefree and Careful Boy
4. New Officer, New Navy, New Century
5. A Naval Band of Brothers
6. Becoming Bill Halsey
7. The Oldest Aviator
8. The First Fighter
9. The Right Man
10. The Thin Red Line
11. Real Tales of the South Pacific
12. The Crossroads of Command
13. Low Tide
14. High Tide
15. At Sea at Last
16. Bulls Run
17. An Old Man at Sea
18. At Home at Last

U.S. carrier raids, January to May 1942

Guadalcanal, August 1942 to January 1943

New Georgia, June to August 1943

Bougainville, October to November 1943

Battle of Leyte Gulf, October 1944

THE WORLD WAR II naval hero Admiral Bill Halsey arrived at Fishers Island Country Club for his summer vacation on July 30, 1959. For years he had come to this sleepy islet three miles off the Connecticut coast near New London. The place soothed the old man, surrounded as it was by the seas he had plied his entire life. Swimming and reading filled days of relaxation, though he swam less vigorously than in summers past and cataracts complicated the reading. He took his suppers early, and he liked the fare simple. He was usually in his small but comfortable room by eight, asleep by nine. August 15 was like that, except, it being Saturday, he retired late from the parlor, where he enjoyed chatting with other guests. When he missed breakfast the next morning, the club manager went to his room. Halsey was unconscious. Shortly before noon, the sole physician on tiny Fishers Island pronounced him dead from an apparent heart attack. He was seventy-six years old.

Biography begins at the end, when judgments of a finished life are first possible. Within hours of Halseys death, President Dwight Eisenhower mourned the loss of a great natural leader. The next day the New York Times wrote of a man born to a naval career and of an inspiring leader of bold action. The Baltimore Sun called Halsey a sailors sailor whose formula for winning was simpleKill Japs, kill Japs, and kill more Japs. The Washington Post proclaimed Halsey a seadog of the old school. Known since his football days at Annapolis as Bull, he was square of jaw, pungent of speech, audacious in combat, and original in his approach to naval tactics. In each account, only Halseys intemperance at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, where he had abandoned an American invasion force to chase impotent Japanese aircraft carriers, had marred an otherwise brilliant career.

In the following days over 2,000 obituaries aped these characterizations. One columnist recounted Halseys monumental hatred of Japan, another called him swashbuckling, a third said he was the saltiest old salt of World War II. According to one widely circulated death notice, Halsey was the Nathan Bedford Forrest of the seasgetting there fastest with the mostest. A West Coast writer said Halsey seemed to violate all the traditional rules of naval warfare, and another championed the admirals daring, persistent, sometimes unorthodox way of thrashing the Japanese fleet clean out of the Pacific. These accounts repeated the same adjectives enough to constitute clich: sea dog, salty, aggressive, audacious. In them, Halsey was a fighting man from a Navy family, simple in outlook, fierce in temperament, and colorful in expression. He was a wartime symbol for American enmity toward Japan, a favorite among the rank and file, and his moniker, Bull, had aptly captured a brusque sailor with plenty of fight. He had descended from a long line of mariners, and his wartime service had concentratedon the positive side of lifes ledgeron carrier attacks at the wars outset and the struggle for Guadalcanal in 1942, andin the debit columnon fleet action at Leyte Gulf in 1944.

History followed obituary. Samuel Eliot Morisons multivolume account of the naval war framed Halsey as a hard-hitting sea commander, sometimes brilliant, sometimes intemperate. Sea Power, the basic text read by midshipmen at Annapolis for years, described Halseys ready courage in early carrier attacks and both praised and admonished his aggressive fleet command later in the war. In other leading books, Halsey was an admiral inclined toward boldness to the point of recklessness, the Navys fire eating answer to George Patton, a pugnacious and grizzled fighting admiral. Books prominently profiled the fighting admiral and clung stubbornly to, in the words of one, a garrulous, boozing Halsey. Clark Reynolds, in his seminal The Fast Carriers, presents as good an example as any of this common view: Halsey was a gifted leader, a bull whose limited intellect prompted careless charges around the ocean. Reynolds wrote that Halsey had at least as much salt water in his veins as any American naval officer of his generation and, by World War II, had personified the laymans vision of swashbuckling sea fighters.

Biography followed history. In 1946, Ralph Jordans Born to Fight repeated wartime accounts of seagoing exploits. In 1968, Chandler Whipple structured William F. Halsey: Fighting Admiral around what he claimed was Halseys motto: Attack, Repeat Attack. In 1974, Benis Franks Halsey promised more, but in most respects delivered less. Two years later, James Merrill published A Sailors Admiral, writing, Bill Halsey was not one of the Navys intellectuals, but he was a fighting admiral without peer. In 1985, E. B. Potters Bull Halsey, the best of the admirals biographies, nonetheless sprang from an image of witless bellicosity. The most recent biography, John Wukovitss Admiral Bull Halsey, published in 2010, never strays far from its first sentence: William F. Halsey came by his combativeness honestly, for belligerence had nourished a family tree spotted with sea dogs and sinners.

Popular culture followed history. In fiction, James Michener wrote of old Bull Halsey who had guts in Tales of the South Pacific, James Jones of the admiral who called the Japanese yellow-bellied monkey meat in The Thin Red Line, and Tom Clancy of fighting Bull Halsey in TheHunt for Red October. Hollywood mimicked this image in films such as From Here to Eternity, Midway, Pearl Harbor, and the one biopic devoted to Halsey,

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Admiral Bill Halsey: A Naval Life»

Look at similar books to Admiral Bill Halsey: A Naval Life. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Thomas McKelvey Cleaver

Tidal Wave: From Leyte Gulf to Tokyo Bay

E. B. Potter

Triumph in the Pacific; The Navy’s Struggle Against Japan

Prados

Storm over Leyte: the Philippine invasion and the destruction of the Japanese Navy

Harris

Admiral Nimitz: the commander of the Pacific Ocean theater

Clavin Tom

Halseys Typhoon: the True Story Of A Fighting Admiral, An Epic Storm, And An Untold Rescue

McCain John Sidney

Admiral John S. McCain and the Triumph of Naval Air Power

Thomas J. Cutler

Battle of Leyte Gulf: 23-26 October 1944

John B. Lundstrom

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

William F. Trimble

Admiral John S. McCain and the Triumph of Naval Air Power

John Prados

Storm Over Leyte: The Philippine Invasion and the Destruction of the Japanese Navy

Reynolds

On the Warpath in the Pacific : Admiral Jocko Clark and the Fast Carriers

C. Vann Woodward

The Battle for Leyte Gulf: The Incredible Story of World War IIs Largest Naval Battle

Reviews about «Admiral Bill Halsey: A Naval Life»

Discussion, reviews of the book Admiral Bill Halsey: A Naval Life and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.