Mechanical Man

The Japs fought desperately this week in their own front yard. In one of the greatest air battles of the Pacific war, hundreds of Jap planes took to the air, flew against a U.S. task force which was assaulting Saipan. Inside a few brief hours, said the U.S. Navy, more than 300 had been destroyed. On the island itself, U.S. troops fought on.

The U.S. assault on the key Jap base in the Marianas had begun nine days before. For four days a U.S. naval force had pounded Saipan. Bombers from U.S. carriers had carried in their loads of destruction. For two days U.S. battleships, cruisers, destroyers had unloaded their long, hot guns on the island.

On the fifth day, transports made their rendezvous outside the coral reefs of the island, and the landing craft darted in towards the beaches. U.S. soldiers and U.S. marines swarmed ashore at Agingan Point, while Japs who had survived the bombardment bit into them with enfilading fire from automatic weapons, pounded them with mortar shells.

"If We Can Land." One high-ranking officer had said anxiously: "If we can land on Saipan we can land anywhere there are Japanese."

Less than a year ago the Navy's utmost effort was an island hop onto New Georgia. In beginning the Marianas campaign the Navy had completed a gargantuan, leap 3,750 miles from its main base at Pearl Harbor to within 1,500 miles of Japan's homeland.

Patently, for an undertaking of such proportions, the Navy would have gathered a fleet bigger than any naval force yet assembled in the Pacific. The man in com mand was the man who, under Admiral Chester Nimitz, bosses the Fifth Fleet, the man who ran off the great amphibious attacks on the Gilberts and the Marshalls--the cold, calculating, mechanical man named Raymond Ames Spruance.

The Target. Early reports indicated that the fight was going slowly against fanatical resistance. After making the beachhead, U.S. amphibious troops had given some ground before fierce Jap counterattacks, but they hung on. By the third day they were ready to press forward.

Early this week they had fought their way clear across the lower end of the island, had seized Aslito Airfield. U.S. air forces held control of the sky, bombed in stallations, showered Jap civilians and sol diers with invitations to surrender. But no one doubted that the soldiers of Nippon would fight to the end.

Japan could not afford to let Saipan go. The shots of the U.S., getting closer & closer, were on the target now. When the Navy got Saipan, the next shots could be on the bull's eye--Japan's homeland. Opened by old Matt Perry with blandishments almost a century ago, Japan was on the way to being opened again--with steel. One of the mathematical minds behind that quickening progression was Admiral Spruance.

"Attack at Once." At the historic Battle of Midway, where Admiral Spruance trod the bridge in his first great battle command, the Spruance toughness became a Navy legend.

At a critical point in the battle when the Japs hoped to drive through to Pearl Harbor and a decisive victory, U.S. task forces lost contact with the enemy. Then 15 planes of Torpedo Squadron Eight suddenly came out of the overcast and saw spread out below them three Jap carriers and their escorts.

Torpedo Eight's commander radioed the information, asked for permission to withdraw and refuel. Their gas was almost gone.

Aboard his flagship Spruance considered. If Torpedo Eight withdrew, the Japs would have time to get their planes into the air and be ready to ward off the attacks of other U.S. planes. He made his solemn calculations with human lives and ordered: "Attack at once."

Torpedo Eight attacked, kept Jap fighters occupied until other U.S. squadrons could get to the scene. All 15 planes were shot down. Only one of Torpedo Eight's 30 airmen survived. But Spruance's decision and Torpedo Eight's courageous assault paved the way for the devastation visited on the Japs before the end of that day.

Spruance has since been criticized by some venturesome tacticians for not chasing down the scattered Jap survivors. The record will some day show whether the criticism is justified. The Japs were spread to the four winds over a wide and smoky ocean. A reckless excursion into enemy waters might have undone the victory. The defense of the whole Pacific depended then on the handful of ships in Spruance's command. He had to preserve them, and he did. Right or wrong, that was the way he calculated when he retired.

Model Boy. Spruance might pose as the model of an admiral in the U.S. Navy, which sets great store by selfdiscipline, intelligence, conformity to Navy pattern. He is a modified version of his starched, icy-eyed commander in chief, Admiral Ernest King.

It is a role Raymond Ames Spruance began to prepare for as a little boy whom neighbors of the Spruances in Indianapolis remember as "a sweet, lovely, gentle baby and so noncombative." What other little boys thought of such a model is not recorded. As a boy the only apparent trouble young Spruance ever gave anyone was falling into a well. Mary Farley, an Irish cook, saved him for history.

His Hoosier parents were not well off. When a brother was born they sent young Spruance off to live temporarily with his grandmother in New Jersey, where he was watched over by three maiden aunts. He went back to Indianapolis for high school. There he was a diligent student, "neat and tidy," according to Miss Ella G. Marthens, who taught him Latin.

For athletics, he walked. For an instructive hobby, he collected stamps. The women in his life taught him sobriety and decorum. He acquired the beginning of terrific singleness of purpose which today shocks men of less orderly habits.

The Priesthood. By 1903 he was a plebe at the Naval Academy, where he was known to his classmates as a sober young man, nicknamed "Sprew," who always got seasick on summer cruises. High in his class, he was selected to study electrical engineering at Schenectady. Afterwards he served briefly in China and returned to a shore-based job at Newport News Shipbuilding & Drydock Co.

By 1939 he had spent 14 of his 32 years in the Navy on shore--in Navy yards or at the Naval War College. His most important seagoing job had been skipper of the battleship Mississippi. He ran a clean and happy ship--with no monkey-business. He had acquired a solid engineering background and a reputation as a tactician.

For some officers the Navy is a comfortable career. For the single-minded Spruance it was a religion. With an almost priestlike intensity he had trained himself to fight a war. By 1939 he was ready to show the country how it could cash in on his steely virtues.

Model Admiral. The next year he was made a rear admiral. In 1941 he was sent to the Pacific. After the Battle of Midway, he became chief of staff to able Admiral Chester Nimitz, who said earnestly: "Nothing you can say about him would be praise enough." In an office overlooking Pearl Harbor he settled down to being Nimitz's right bower and helping to plan the Pacific war.

Correspondents, who had infrequent interviews with him, found a thin-lipped man who seldom smiled, never laughed. His office had a settee for visitors (who under Spruance's piercing eye were inclined to state their business briefly), an armless swivel chair and an ordinary desk which he seldom used.

A high desk was the other piece of office furniture. There he did most of his work, standing. When he wasn't standing he paced, slowly and deliberately--a compact man with grey-streaked hair, long, thin nose and blue gimlet eyes.

For relaxation he listened to recorded symphony music. For exercise he walked as he had in boyhood, striding along at the regulation rate of 132 steps a minute. Once 208-lb. Rear Admiral Charles A. Dunn, an old classmate, agreed to hike around the foothills of Pearl Harbor. Dunn soon regretted it. His feet swelled and blistered. Still Spruance paced along, hour after hour, until Dunn finally asked plaintively if they could turn around at the next crossroads.

"Certainly," said Spruance, who knew that the next crossroads were five miles away.

Family Man. In 1914 Raymond Spruance had married lighthearted, handsome Margaret Dean, whose father ran Dean Bros. Pumps, Inc., of Indianapolis. They had two children, Margaret, now 24, and Edward Dean, 28. Edward followed his father into the Navy via Annapolis.

Father and son were both on missions at sea when the Japs struck on Dec. 7, 1941. They met in Pearl Harbor the following day. Edward said with brash confidence: "We'll blast the Jap Navy out of the Pacific in a week." Spruance unrolled a map, gave his son a lecture from which Edward retired a sobered young man. Edward, a lieutenant commander and a good officer, last week was awaiting his own submarine command.

Last year Mrs. Spruance and Margaret moved to Monrovia, Calif., where the Admiral could visit them occasionally. There he became a reluctant celebrity.

Fighting Fool. In 1943 the papers suddenly began to blazon his name. Spruance got a new duty. Spruance was put in command of a Central Pacific fleet (later designated the Fifth Fleet). On a day in February he became a full admiral--at 57 the youngest in the Navy.

Combat duty did not change the orderliness of his ways. He walked the Admiral's deck, by his own estimate covering eight to ten miles a day, frequently stripped to the waist to absorb the sun's healthful rays. A war correspondent cracked: "Spruance will win the war in a walk--literally." Vice Admiral William L. Calhoun, chief of Pacific supply, remarked with admiration: "A cold-blooded fighting fool."

He is no fool. He is a single-minded man who has dedicated himself to warfare. He is a battleship man by upbringing, but he is no "battleship admiral." During the raid on Truk, airmen privately and bitterly complained because he sent battleships in to finish off Jap warships which had already been damaged by dive bombers. Airmen thought they should have had the glory of the final kill.

But the airmen had already had a hot and glory-filled day while the battleships patiently screened their operations. Spruance sent the battleships in to give them a workout. He did not want his 16-in. gunners to get stale. He has stated: "The object of Navy tactics is to use all of the weapons that you have at your command."

This week the Japs in the Marianas felt the weight of his many weapons. With the Marianas secured, the U.S. Navy will be able to reach into the waters of the homeland, the seas which U.S. submarine men call "The Empire." The man rescued from a well had his cold eyes on new horizons.

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