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For Adm. Halsey himself, the book of course is his own biography; for those in a hurry, a biographical sketch at The Pacific War Online Encyclopedia, although somewhat hostile, provides a good overview of his career.
Co‑author Lt. Cdr. Joseph Bryan, III (properly, Joseph St. George Bryan, b. April 30, 1904 in Henrico County, VA, † April 3, 1993 in Richmond, VA) came from a family of journalists and wrote a number of books on various historical and military subjects. In the course of his career, he served in the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force, and the CIA as head of its psychological warfare division. A rather full, formal biographical sketch at Encyclopedia Virginiana omits one of the more interesting chapters of his life, though: in 1969 he became Acting President of NICAP, a UFO organization which had been prominent in the preceding decades; he was brought in to clean up its financial mismanagement, and is still suspected by some to have been a government mole whose purpose was to discredit NICAP and disband it.
His son C. D. B. Bryan became a well-known journalist and author as well; some of the family's interesting inner history may be found scattered thru several entries in the blog of a grandson, "Boxes in the Attic".
A preliminary version of the book first appeared serialized in eight installments in the Saturday Evening Post.
The printed book is inscribed,
To |
The printed book includes neither Table of Contents nor Table of Illustrations, nor do the chapters bear titles.
The printed edition includes 79 photographs: except for the frontispiece, they are gathered in three glossy signatures following page 34, page 130, and page 242. In addition, there are 14 maps, all line drawings.
The page numbers below indicate the placement of the illustrations in these three signatures: 34D, for example, is the 4th photograph (or set of photographs) in the group following p34. In this Web transcription, not being constrained by print limitations, I've moved the illustrations to appropriate locations in the text.
The captions of the photographs given below are for the most part as printed, or close adaptations or abridgments; when altogether my own, they're shown in a different-colored font. Similarly, I've supplied captions for the maps; in the printed book only the first is captioned.
Fleet Admiral Halsey |
Frontispiece |
Father, as a naval cadet, 1873 |
34A |
Mother, my sister Deborah, and I, 1888 |
34B |
At school, 1894 |
34C |
As a plebe, 1900 |
34D |
Two U. S. S. Missouri's: "Mizzy" and "Mighty Mo" |
34E |
U. S. S. Don Juan de Austria, 1906 |
34F |
My first command, U. S. S. Dupont, 1909 |
34G |
Cabinet Secretaries on board Lt. Halsey's ship, 1913 |
34H |
U. S. S. Benham, 1918 |
34I |
Skipper of the U. S. S. Shaw, 1918 |
34J |
A T4M circling to come aboard the U. S. S. Saratoga, 1935 |
34K |
At Pensacola, 1935 |
34L |
The Sara's worst day, when she took seven hits off Iwo Jima, 1945 |
34M |
"The Big E, the galloping ghost of the Oahu coast" (U. S. S. Enterprise, 1942 |
130A |
A portrait of Admiral Halsey in four frames |
130B |
A Japanese model of Pearl Harbor, showing "Battleship Row" |
130C |
Some members of my staff |
130D |
Bougainville, 1943 |
130E |
South Pacific Commanders |
130F |
Task force and task group commanders of the Third Fleet, and Ray Spruance, Commander Fifth Fleet |
130G |
A Japanese carrier of the Zuiho class, afire and her flight deck buckled, at the Battle for Leyte Gulf, October 25, 1944 |
130H |
A kamikaze crashes the U. S. S. Essex, November 25, 1944 |
130I |
At the White House, March 1945, with my wife |
130J |
The Third Fleet maneuvers off Japan, August 17, 1945 |
242A |
The attack on the Japanese warships at Kure, July 28, 1945 |
242B |
The heavy cruiser Tone, after the attack of July 28 |
242C |
The Third Fleet's first night in Sagami Bay, August 27, 1945, when the sun seemed to sink directly into Fujiyama's crater |
242D |
The surrender ceremony, aboard my flagship U. S. S. Missouri, September 2, 1945 |
242E |
The White Horse |
242F |
My flagship, the U. S. S. South Dakota, leads TG 30.2 under Golden Gate Bridge, October 1945 |
242G |
The end of my sea duty. I am piped over the side for the last time |
242H |
Home again |
242I |
I receive my fifth star, December 11, 1945. |
242J |
The Authors: Adm. Halsey and Lt. Cdr. Bryant |
rear jacket |
Early Raids of the Enterprise |
86 |
Feb. 1, 1942: Raid on the Marshall and Gilbert Islands |
91 |
October 1942: South Pacific Area |
110 |
August-November, 1942: Guadalcanal |
118 |
May 1943: Solomon Islands |
156 |
May 1943: New Georgia |
162 |
August-November, 1943: Bougainville |
178 |
November, 1943: Battle of New Britain |
182 |
December 1944: Typhoon Cobra January 1945: South China Sea Raid |
196 |
October 1944: Battle of Leyte Gulf |
212 |
October 1944: Battle of Leyte Gulf — Oldendorf & McCain's attacks |
213 |
April-June 1945: Okinawa |
252 |
Japan: The End of the War |
256 |
These webpages transcribe my copy of the original 1947 edition, Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc. (hardback). It is marked
Copyright, 1947, by William F. Halsey
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but is now in the public domain because neither copyright was renewed in 1974 or 1975 as then required by law: details here on the copyright law involved.
For citation and indexing purposes, the pagination is shown in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line); p57 these are also local anchors. Sticklers for total accuracy will of course find the anchor at its exact place in the sourcecode.
In addition, I've inserted a number of other local anchors: whatever links might be required to accommodate the authors' own cross-references, as well as a few others for my own purposes. If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage of the text, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local anchor there as well.
As almost always, I retyped the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if successful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine: gambit declined.)
My transcription has been minutely proofread. In the table of contents below, the sections are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe the text of them to be completely errorfree; a red background would mean that the page had not been proofread. As elsewhere onsite, the header bar at the top of each chapter's webpage will remind you with the same color scheme.
The printed book was remarkably well proofread. The inevitable typographical errors were very few, and almost all trivial: I marked them with a dotted underscore like this: as elsewhere on my site, glide your cursor over the underscored words to read what was actually printed. One correction didn't lend itself to that treatment because it conflicted with HTML: it is marked with a bullet like this.º Similarly, glide your cursor over bullets before measurements: they provide conversions to metric, e.g., 10 miles.
A number of odd spellings, curious turns of phrase, etc. have been marked <!‑‑ sic in the sourcecode, just to confirm that they were checked. They are also few.
Any overlooked mistakes, please drop me a line, of course: especially if you have a copy of the printed book in front of you.
The icon I use to indicate this subsite is essentially a cropped version of the book's front jacket.
Images with borders lead to more information.
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A page or image on this site is in the public domain ONLY if its URL has a total of one *asterisk. If the URL has two **asterisks, the item is copyright someone else, and used by permission or fair use. If the URL has none the item is © Bill Thayer. See my copyright page for details and contact information. |
Site updated: 5 Jan 18