You’ll weekly obtain, FREE OF CHARGE, “The One Hundred and Fifty Mistakes and Omissions” in history about Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher as well as his invaluable lessons in strategy.
We’ll also compare Fletcher’s battles, the only decisive ones in the Pacific, with history’s greatest ones and ask questions about the strategic and tactical decisions made by the great commanders under enemy fire. Their answers will be published weekly.
Finally we’ll contribute ideas from our book “The Three Natures” about the profile of the natural strategist, the natural tactician and the natural administrator.
How the natural relation between them is, how teams should be organized and what positions should each of the three natures take up in them.
We expect to start sending our free e-mails towards the end of July, when we’ll officially inaugurate our system of two bilingual web sites.
The second will be dedicated to strategy and its multiple applications. Both of them will be associated to a blog.
Who was Frank Jack Fletcher?
Fletcher - Surface warfare officer already holder of Congress Medal of Honor - was jumped over other Admirals to command of a carrier task force in the first week of the Pacific War. He held the entire western flank of the United States during the first six months of the Pacific War when we were losing the war, when all resources went to Germany First, Fletcher allowed the War to be fought strategically. He is the man most responsible for the victory of WW2 in a timely manner.
All have been very easy to Japan. They destroyed the US Battle Fleet, then they sailed half way round the world to destroy the US Asiatic Fleet, the British Far East Fleet, the Dutch Eastern Fleet. sinking 10 battleships, a carrier, and almost a dozen cruisers without loss to themselves.,
The Imperial Japanese Navy had never lost a battle. till they met Frank Jack Fletcher. He stopped that rampaging beast. at the top of their form and power, ready to add Australia to their conquests,. Outnumbered two to one at all times, sometimes by worse odds, la forced it to return in his three of the five carrier battles in history. He saved Australia at the Coral Sea;, He broke his enemy at Midway; and He closed the way to Guadalcanal at Eastern Solomons.. He destroyed six of Japan's ten carriers, four from the big six which had made the infamous attack on Pearl Harbor
His performance, based on sheer talent, for there was no track record of carrier combats, made him the best carrier forces commander in all History and the most successful naval combat commander since Trafalgar, All was based on sheer talent, and with just the remnants of a depression era fleet,. There was no book on how to fight a carrier war --he wrote that book with his deeds while America's industrial might was being mobilized so that his successors could whip butt with impunity.
Later on, at the Command of the North Pacific, he was just the right man to restore public confidence in face of the threat of an invasion through Alaska. He organized the huge supply influx to the USSR and put the Japanese navy traffic under siege, sinking over thirty ships during those months. Northern Japan surrendered to him and he governed it, briefly, when the Soviets were still planning to take over by their own.
‘Natural born strategist’, many could not understand his decisions, case in point, withdrawing the carrier force in Guadalcanal, which now seems like a right decision, and one of the truly valuable ones in WWII.
Born warrior, Fletcher offered, already from the peace of a desk, retrieving from his three stars rank, if necessary to return to the combat risks.
Prioritizing national and organizational goals over his own personal ambitions was the key to his success, and empowering his men on the operational made him a pioneer in ‘management by objectives’.
He also initiated, efforts to rescue aviators downed in combat.If this impressive file of record wasn’t enough Fletcher to be more remembered, it was because he saw a higher calling than personal gain in fighting the war. His sense of duty allowed him to take no part of himself, away from the cause to give a record of personal achievements.
He put his whole effort to victory taking no concern for personal glory, and he paid the price of virtual anonymity in the press then and in history books since. Neither he want, afer the war, to take a part as some of his colleagues, in a petty, miserable fight for a piece of glory, which was won at the stake of his young warriors.
The mere existence, of such a man, dignifies the country that fathered him.
‘If it had not been for what you did and took with the Yorktown, I am firmly convinced that we would have been badly defeated and the Japs would be holding Midway today” (Raymond A. Spruance’s letter to Fletcher. June 8 1942)
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