In 1944, most stories about the Pacific start with the Americans. They start with the Marines wading ashore at Peleliu and Iwo Jima, with Nimitz at Pearl Harbor shifting fleets across a chart the size of a continent, with Halsey’s carriers and the night gunnery duel in Surigao Strait. The camera belongs to the United States Navy, and it earned the right to hold it. By that year the Americans had built the largest fighting fleet in human history and were spending it to take back an ocean one island at a time.

A second fleet sailed the same water, and its story is barely told. It was British, and by the middle of 1945 it ranked as the second most powerful naval force in the Pacific. The man who fought it at sea was a Cornish vice-admiral named Bernard Rawlings, and he left almost no mark on the popular memory of the war he helped to win.

Getting there

Putting a British fleet in the central Pacific took a political fight before it took a shot. Churchill wanted the force there for the sake of the peace that would follow the war, and in September 1944 he told Parliament the modern British fleet should go into the main effort against Japan. The obstacle was an American. Admiral Ernest King, the United States Chief of Naval Operations, doubted the Royal Navy could feed and fuel itself across Pacific distances, and carried a long memory of a navy that had ruled the sea for two centuries and now wanted a berth in an ocean the Americans were reconquering at heavy cost.

The British were let in on hard terms. The fleet would be self-supporting. It would take nothing from American stores it did not replace, with fuel the single exception. It would bring its own floating supply line, the Fleet Train, and by the middle of 1945 that train ran to close to eighty vessels: tankers, refrigerated store ships, repair and maintenance ships, two floating docks, four hospital ships, and an amenities ship fitted with a theatre and a brewery. Counting the escorts and the train alongside the fighting ships, the British committed more than three hundred vessels to the Pacific.

The distances defeated most people’s imagination, and Rawlings had a gift for making them real to an Admiralty raised on home waters. Running the fleet from Sydney to strike Japan, he said, was like sailing from Plymouth to attack Rio de Janeiro, refuelling once from harbour tankers off the Cape Verde Islands and again in the open sea. Britain lay twelve thousand miles astern. Sydney sat four and a half thousand miles from the target, and the forward base a thousand miles beyond that. Convincing the Americans the British could hold a fast carrier fleet together across that gap was half of Rawlings’s war.

The man who could not command his own fleet

The fleet had a Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser, and Fraser could not command it in action. As a full admiral he outranked the American commanders he would serve beside, Spruance and Halsey, and had he gone to sea he would have been the most senior officer afloat in either navy, sitting above Nimitz’s own men in Nimitz’s own ocean. The alliance could not carry that. Fraser stayed ashore at Sydney and ran the fleet as an organisation, and handed the fighting of it to his deputy.

That deputy was Rawlings, who took the fleet to sea in the battleship King George V, thirty-five thousand tons and ten fourteen-inch guns. Under him, commanding the carriers that were the fleet’s real striking power, sailed Vice-Admiral Sir Philip Vian, a hard and famous fighting sailor. The arrangement put the fleet’s name on the man who never sailed with it and left the man who fought it a rung down the ladder, in the place a sub-editor renders as a subordinate clause.

Fraser chose Rawlings on purpose. The job wanted a commander who could handle a fleet in battle and also hold together a coalition that had taken him in grudgingly, and the two talents rarely share a skull. Rawlings had spent thirty years gathering the second one in postings that look, from outside, like an unconnected list.

Tokyo taught him the enemy. From 1936 to 1938 he was British Naval Attaché in Japan, three years among the officers of the navy he would later help to destroy, and he came home knowing the country and its service from the inside. Crete taught him command.

Crete

In May 1941 Rawlings led a cruiser force in the Mediterranean while the British army came apart on Crete under German air power. On the night of 28 May he took a squadron into Heraklion to lift out the garrison, his flag in the light cruiser Orion. The plan was to load in the dark and be clear of the dive bombers by dawn. One cruiser was damaged going in and turned back. A destroyer’s steering failed, her troops and crew had to be shifted to another ship and the wreck scuttled, and the delay cost the squadron two and a half hours of darkness it could not spare. Daylight found the ships in the Kaso Strait, packed with soldiers, in the open, and the Junkers worked them over for hours.

A destroyer was hit and dropped astern. Rawlings could not turn back for her without offering the rest as targets, so he held his course and his speed and left her to sink. Orion took hit after hit. Her captain, G. R. B. Back, was cut down on the bridge beside him. Her forward guns were wrecked, and a bomb burst below among the soldiers crammed into her messdecks and killed them in their hundreds. She reached Alexandria that evening blackened and full of dead, still under her own steam. The London Gazette gave Rawlings the CB for the operation early in 1942, and an Aberdeen paper ran the award under the headline “Naval Heroes of Crete.” He had learned what command costs when it means holding a course while a ship under your flag dies in sight of you, and that knowledge was still in him four years later on the bridge of King George V.

Iceberg

Okinawa is where the British fleet earned its keep, and the work was not the sort that makes films. King George V did not steam up and flatten the island with her guns. For most of the campaign the battleships were nearly spectators. The task the fleet drew was to keep a set of airfields broken.

The airfields lay in the Sakishima islands, Ishigaki and Miyako, strung between Formosa and Okinawa, where the Japanese staged aircraft north to throw at the invasion. Task Force 57, as the British were designated under Spruance, brought four fleet carriers to the line, Indomitable, Victorious, Illustrious and Indefatigable, and settled into a grind: two days of strikes on the coral runways, then two days pulled back over the horizon to refuel from the Fleet Train while American escort carriers held the gap. The enemy filled the craters by night. The British reopened them by morning. Reporting his fleet for duty, Rawlings signalled Nimitz that it joined the American forces “with a feeling of great pride and pleasure,” and at home the padre of King George V, the Reverend James Stanley Bezzant, gave a round-by-round wireless account of the first strikes that ran in the papers as the “Radio Padre’s Pacific Battle Commentary.”

Then the kamikazes came, and the British carriers turned out to carry an advantage designed into them years before by the accident of European geography. British carriers had armoured flight decks. The Illustrious class had been drawn up in the late 1930s for a war in the narrow seas around Europe, where enemy bombers flew from land bases close at hand and fighters alone could not be trusted to stop every raid, so the designers built the flight deck and hangar as an armoured box and accepted a smaller air group as the price. A British fleet carrier went to sea with about three dozen aircraft where an American Essex carried ninety or more. The Americans had planned for the open Pacific and bought the big air group. Off Okinawa the British bargain paid.

When a suicide aircraft struck an American wooden deck it tended to punch through and start a fire that cost the ship months. When one struck a British deck the crew swept the wreck over the side and flew aircraft again within hours. On 1 April a Zero drove into the deck of Indefatigable and killed fourteen men, and she was operating aircraft again inside the hour. On 4 May a kamikaze punched a two-foot hole in Formidable’s armoured deck, which a working party filled with wood and quick-drying cement so flying could go on; five days later Formidable and Victorious were both hit again in a single morning and both kept operating. Over the campaign every British carrier on station was struck, and not one was out of action for more than eight hours. The fleet’s own report drew the sum plainly. Without the armoured decks, four carriers would have been finished for at least two months.

When an American carrier was crippled off Okinawa, Spruance asked the British to hit the Japanese airfields on Formosa instead, and Rawlings took the job at once. Formosa was heavier work than Sakishima by a wide margin. The Sakishima targets were a handful of coral strips on two small islands. Formosa was a large garrisoned island with major airfields at Shinchiku and Matsuyama, its own concentration of anti-aircraft guns and land-based fighters, and it lay to the south-west, so striking it meant closing on that concentration and sending aircrew deeper over defended ground and farther from any hope of rescue. British aircraft struck it on 11 and 13 April and shot down sixteen Japanese aircraft for the loss of three of their own. When Spruance then asked for further Sakishima strikes, Rawlings agreed. He and Vian, watching the Americans take a hammering off Okinawa, more than once offered a day of strikes nobody had asked them for, and the Americans took it with thanks. By the time the fleet came off the line it had spent sixty-two days at sea, flown more than five thousand sorties, dropped about a thousand tons of bombs, and lost eighty-five men, forty-four aboard ship and forty-one in the air.

There was grace even in the fleet’s embarrassments. In the crowded sky over the ships, telling friend from foe was a running problem, and on one occasion King George V’s own gunners opened up on a friendly aircraft. Rawlings watched the exchange, observed that the battleship and the aeroplane had both missed, and let it rest there. A man less sure of himself would have raged. He understood that in a coalition the useful thing to do with a mistake is to decline to make a scene of it.

The weapon that left no mark

The most important thing Rawlings did in the Pacific never showed up in a gunnery return. When the British fleet passed from Spruance’s command to Halsey’s in the summer of 1945, Halsey put a choice to him about how the two fleets would work together. One option kept the British semi-independent on the flank. The other folded them fully into the American formation, the better arrangement in battle and the more humbling one in person, since it placed the British admiral squarely under American tactical control. Rawlings chose the second before Halsey had finished laying out the alternatives. “Of course, I’ll accept Number 1,” he said, taking the harder and less flattering job because it served the common effort. Halsey wrote that his admiration for the man began in that moment, and that “a finer officer and firmer friend I have never known.”

Spruance felt the same, and the two had gone into Okinawa without so much as a face-to-face meeting first. Spruance’s chief of staff remarked during the campaign that the two fleets meshed as though the admirals had known each other twenty years. The American liaison officer who lived aboard King George V, Lieutenant Commander Robert F. Morris, wrote afterwards to the historian John Winton that Rawlings was “a great tactician and able leader in the Royal Navy,” and that to American eyes he looked the very picture of the old-school British admiral. Morris had watched Nimitz, Halsey and Spruance in Rawlings’s company, and set down how plainly all three liked him.

This was the weapon the British fleet actually brought to the Pacific. King had let them in expecting friction, and Rawlings gave the Americans none: no incident, no bruised pride, no quarrel that reached a newspaper. He swallowed the indignities of the arrangement, took the junior seat without complaint, offered more than was asked, and turned a fleet the Americans had thought of as a foreign navy into one they treated as their own. His success reads as a list of things that did not happen, and things that do not happen leave nothing for a headline to catch.

The guns

The battleships did get their night. On 17 July 1945 King George V took her place in an American battle line off the industrial city of Hitachi, eighty miles up the coast from Tokyo, alongside Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Alabama. She put 267 rounds of fourteen-inch shell into the works ashore. A spotter pilot watching the first British salvo land sent back a verdict no gunnery manual holds, that it had gone in “smack on the kisser.” Twelve nights later she bombarded Hamamatsu, the last time a British battleship fired her main armament in anger. When the combined Anglo-American armada ranged off Tokyo that month, an Essex paper caught the scale of it in a front page reading “Armada Attacks Tokyo Area,” and named Rawlings and King George V and the carrier Formidable a few lines below the headline.

Cornwall

The Japanese surrender was signed aboard the American battleship Missouri on 2 September 1945. Britain’s name went on the instrument, and it was Fraser who signed it, the Commander-in-Chief who had spent the war ashore at Sydney. The man who had fought the fleet at sea stood among the guests. A later historian claimed Rawlings felt his place had been usurped by the man who signed. His own flag captain rejected it flatly, and said he was too big a man to hold such a feeling.

Rawlings retired in 1946 and turned away from the road that might have taken him to the navy’s highest chair. His obituary said he shunned personal publicity, and that only in 1945 did his name become known to the public at all. He went home to Cornwall, served as High Sheriff, and said little. Speaking to a naval reunion in 1950 about the shape of the service to come, with its talk of amalgamation into one fighting force, he gave the plain sailor’s answer: “you may dislike it, but you cannot alter it.”

The trouble with being good at Rawlings’s kind of work is that its success is invisible by nature. The alliance that never fractured, the fleet that never quarrelled with its allies, the blunder that never became an incident, these are victories counted in the negative, in trouble that failed to arrive, and history keeps poor records of the negative. It remembers the Marines on the sand and the carriers in the Surigao night, and forgets the man whose achievement was that the coalition held. When the story of the Pacific begins, as it nearly always does, with the Americans, it is worth knowing that a second fleet worked that ocean, and that it worked because one self-effacing Cornishman was better at being an ally than almost anyone alive. He drew no notice for it, which was the final measure of how well it was done.

Sources

Contemporary press

• “Naval Heroes of Crete.” Aberdeen Journal, 9 January 1942 (the CB for the Crete evacuation).
• “Okinawa Landings by 100,000 Men” / “British and U.S. Navies Engaged.” Aberdeen (Press and) Journal, 2 April 1945.
• “Thrust Across Jap ‘Stepping Stone’ Island” / “Well Done, British.” Derby Daily Telegraph, 2 April 1945 (Nimitz’s message to Rawlings).
• “Americans Strike Deep Into ‘Invade Japan’ Island” / “Padre Gave Battle Commentary.” Evening Telegraph (Dundee), 2 April 1945.
• “U.S. Drive Deep Inland” / “Radio Padre’s Pacific Battle Commentary.” Gloucestershire Echo, 2 April 1945.
• “Armada Attacks Tokyo Area.” Essex Newsman, 17 July 1945.
• “The Changing Navy.” Western Times, 1 December 1950 (Rawlings on the future of the service).
• All from the Daily Mail Historical Archive and British Library Newspapers (Gale).

Books and articles

• John Winton, The Forgotten Fleet: The Story of the British Pacific Fleet, 1944–45 (Michael Joseph, 1969), for the Morris letter and the surrender dispute.
• Fleet Admiral William F. Halsey and J. Bryan III, Admiral Halsey’s Story (1947), for the “Number 1” exchange and Halsey’s assessment.
• Admiral of the Fleet Sir Philip Vian, Action This Day (1960).
• David Hobbs, “The Royal Navy’s Pacific Strike Force,” Naval History Magazine (U.S. Naval Institute), February 2013, and “Making Good Once More,” Naval History Magazine, February 2024, for fleet composition, casualty and sortie figures, and the armoured-deck record.
• “Task Force 57: The British Pacific Fleet,” armouredcarriers.com, for the appointment, the Morris quotation and the kamikaze narrative.
• Naval Historical Society of Australia, “Orion into the Breach,” for the Heraklion evacuation.
• U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command, H-Gram 053, for the Hitachi bombardment.
• uboat.net and The Dreadnought Project, for ranks, dates and commands.

Notes on two details

• The nickname “Stormy” could not be verified in any source consulted; the only contemporary shortening on record is “Bee” (for Bernard), which appears once, in the Essex Newsman of 17 July 1945.
• Casualty figures for Orion at Crete vary between accounts; the “hundreds” killed below decks follows the first-hand narrative and should be read as close rather than exact.