United States Pacific Fleet

• 1. Introduction

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  The United States Pacific Fleet, known by its abbreviation USPACFLT, is the naval force responsible for one of the largest stretches of ocean on Earth. On the morning of the 7th of December 1941, that fleet lay anchored at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and within hours it would define the course of a world war. But the story of how the Pacific Fleet came to be at Pearl Harbor at all begins with a warning that went unheeded and a commander who was removed for speaking the truth.

  The fleet's origins trace back to 1907, when two older formations, the Asiatic Squadron and the Pacific Squadron, were merged into a single Pacific Fleet. In the decades that followed, the fleet's shape shifted repeatedly as the United States tried to figure out where naval power should be concentrated and what threats it should prepare for. By December 1941, the Pacific Fleet had grown into a force of nine battleships, three aircraft carriers, dozens of cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and more than a hundred patrol bombers. That force would survive the Pearl Harbor attack, but only barely, and what it looked like afterward would be nothing like what it looked like before.

• 2. The Admiral Who Said No

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  Admiral James O. Richardson commanded the Pacific Fleet before Pearl Harbor, and he did something unusual for a senior officer: he argued directly with his civilian superiors about where the fleet should be based. During the summer of 1940, as Japan pushed into new territories across Asia, the U.S. government instructed the fleet to move from the West Coast to Pearl Harbor as a show of deterrence. Richardson traveled to Washington, D.C. in person to protest the decision. He believed stationing the fleet at Pearl Harbor would leave it dangerously exposed to a Japanese attack, and he said so plainly.

  His protests were not welcomed. Political calculations took precedence over his military judgment, and Richardson was relieved of command. His replacement was Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, who was in command when Japan struck. The irony was stark: the man who had predicted the vulnerability was dismissed, and the attack he feared came to pass under his successor's watch. Kimmel himself would later become the subject of lasting controversy over who bore responsibility for the disaster.

  Before the formal move to Pearl Harbor, the Battle Force had been stationed along California. Battleships, carriers, and heavy cruisers were based at San Pedro, near the Long Beach Naval Shipyard. Lighter ships, including destroyers and submarines, were at San Diego. That arrangement held until the fleet was pushed forward under Richardson, and then kept forward under Kimmel.

• 3. The Fleet on 7 December

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  At the moment Japan struck, the Pacific Fleet was organized into interlocking layers of force. Vice Admiral William S. Pye commanded the Battle Force from his flagship USS California. Rear Admiral Walter S. Anderson led the battleships. Vice Admiral William F. Halsey Jr. commanded the aircraft arm of the Battle Force from USS Enterprise. The submarine contingent was spread across five separate squadrons under Rear Admiral Thomas Withers.

  The nine battleships were grouped into three divisions and had been positioned to counterbalance the ten battleships of the Imperial Japanese Navy. What no one expected was that the carriers, widely seen as secondary to the battleships at that point in naval thinking, would be elsewhere. The USS Saratoga was in San Diego picking up her air group after a refit. The USS Enterprise was en route back to Hawaii after delivering aircraft to Wake Island. The USS Lexington had just left on a similar delivery mission toward Midway. All three carriers were absent when the bombs fell.

  The Rear Admiral commanding the Fourteenth Naval District, Claude C. Bloch, was also present in Hawaii, responsible for the defense of the base itself. Destroyer Division 80, consisting of three destroyers, was assigned directly to his district rather than to the fleet, tasked specifically with protecting the base and the ships within it.

• 4. Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath

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  The Japanese attack on the 7th of December 1941 struck the Battle Line hardest. Two battleships were destroyed outright. Two more were damaged so severely they required lengthy reconstruction. Four others suffered lighter to moderate damage. The loss of so many capital ships in a single morning forced the U.S. Navy into a posture it had not planned for: fighting a Pacific war with aircraft carriers and submarines as its primary instruments.

  The submarine force responded immediately. Beginning on the first day of the war, Pacific Fleet submarines launched a sustained campaign against Japanese merchant shipping. By the war's end, that campaign had claimed 1,314 ships with a combined tonnage of roughly 5.3 million tons, according to the postwar reckoning of the Joint Army-Navy Assessment Committee, known as JANAC. The committee acknowledged that its figures were imperfect, but even with that caveat the scale of the submarine campaign was enormous.

  The battles that followed Pearl Harbor stretched across much of the Pacific. The Pacific Fleet was involved in the Battle of Midway, the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the Solomon Islands campaign, the Battle of the Philippine Sea, the Battle of Okinawa, and many others. One event less remembered than those major engagements was the West Loch disaster, which occurred at Pearl Harbor itself on the 21st of May 1944.

• 5. Cold War Deployments

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  After Japan's surrender, the Pacific Fleet carried out Operation Magic Carpet, the massive logistical effort to bring American servicemen home from across the Pacific and Asia. The fleet then settled into a new role as a standing presence in a region that remained deeply unsettled. Since 1950, it has been engaged in the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and two Taiwan Straits Crises.

  The Mayaguez Incident of 1975 drew Pacific Fleet forces into a tense confrontation off the coast of Cambodia. Operation New Arrivals and other post-Vietnam operations followed. In 1971 the fleet began the RIMPAC exercise series, a multinational training program that has continued for decades.

  During December 1989, the fleet was drawn into the political turmoil of the Philippine coup attempt through Operation Classic Resolve. The USS Enterprise and another carrier group, together with the USS Midway's battle group, converged near Manila Bay. The carriers maintained deck alerts and flew E-2C aircraft on 24-hour coverage over Manila. After the immediate crisis passed, CVW-11 returned home via the Arabian Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, leaving the Enterprise in Norfolk, Virginia for refueling.

  One of the more unusual moments of the late Cold War came around the 10th of September 1990, when U.S. Navy ships visited Vladivostok. That visit marked the first time American naval vessels had entered the Soviet Union's Pacific port since before World War II. Before the crew could complete the visit, they received orders that their Pacific cruise had been canceled, and they turned back toward Long Beach to join a battle group heading for the Persian Gulf.

• 6. Structure and Scope Today

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  The Pacific Fleet's headquarters sits at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii, with a large secondary facility at Naval Air Station North Island in California. The fleet provides naval forces to the Indo-Pacific Command, the theater-level joint command responsible for U.S. military operations across the broadest geographic area in the American military structure.

  As of 2011, USPACFLT's authority covers the numbered Third and Seventh Fleets, Naval Air Force Pacific, Commander Naval Surface Forces Pacific, Naval Submarine Force Pacific, and Fleet Marine Force Pacific. Shore commands under its authority include Commander Naval Forces Korea, Commander Naval Forces Japan, and Commander Naval Forces Marianas.

  The fleet's coastal defense responsibilities were formalized on the 7th of March 1984, when the Secretaries of Transportation and Navy signed a Memorandum of Agreement establishing Maritime Defense Zones. The Pacific MDZ, an echelon three command under the Pacific Fleet commander, is responsible for coastal defense out to 200 nautical miles around the U.S. West Coast, the Aleutian Islands, and Hawaii during periods of hostility. On the 1st of October 1990, Commander U.S. Naval Forces Alaska was established as the naval component commander for the Alaskan Command, taking on responsibility for coordinating Navy activity across Alaska and the Aleutian area.