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Springfield native devised plan to defeat Japan in World War II

And Clarence Williams did it years before Pearl Harbor

$ABOVE: As a four-star admiral, Clarence Williams assumed command of the international fleet that protected foreigners from civil unrest in China during the mid-1920s. The four stars on his shoulder epaulets are the mark of his rank. BELOW, LEFT: Williams' 1863 birthdate is listed beneath the date of his arrival at the U.S. Naval Academy on this medal in the collection of the Clark County Historical Society. BELOW, RIGHT: \uFEFFWilliams' ceremonial sword is part of the collection of the Clark County Historical Society. Staff photos by Marshall Gorby$

Marshall Gorby ABOVE: As a four-star admiral, Clarence Williams assumed command of the international fleet that protected foreigners from civil unrest in China during the mid-1920s. The four stars on his shoulder epaulets are the mark of his rank. BELOW, LEFT: Williams' 1863 birthdate is listed beneath the date of his arrival at the U.S. Naval Academy on this medal in the collection of the Clark County Historical Society. BELOW, RIGHT: \uFEFFWilliams' ceremonial sword is part of the collection of the Clark County Historical Society. Staff photos by Marshall Gorby

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By Tom Stafford, Staff Writer 7:48 PM Sunday, November 1, 2009

When his son donated retired Adm. Clarence S. Williams’ naval uniforms, medals, swords and other effects to the Clark County Historical Society in 1956, he highlighted as his father’s most notable service the command of an international fleet of 48 ships assembled in 1927 to protect foreigners along China’s Yangtze River from the effects of a brewing civil war.

Half a century later, historians may beg to differ.

Since the 1991 publication of Edward S. Miller’s “War Plan Orange,” the elder Williams is best remembered for the far-sighted and brilliant work he did from 1900 to the mid-1920s creating the fundamental plan the United States would use to win a war against a nation that at the time wasn’t even considered an enemy.

By the time Williams left the Navy’s War Plans Division in 1922 for a three-year stint as president of the Naval War College, “he and his supporters had bequeathed to the nation a sound war plan for advancing at least halfway across the Pacific” in an anticipated war against Japan, Miller said.

What the author calls “history’s most successful war plan” both undergirded the entire island-hopping fight against Japan in World War II and established Williams as “one of the finest strategists of the century.”

A 1992 New York Times review of the book went so far as to say that more than 50 years after the admiral’s retirement, “Miller’s research has given the Navy a new hero in Rear Adm. Clarence S. Williams.”

Home-grown talent

Williams was born Oct. 7, 1863, in Springfield to Orson Bennett and Pamela Floyd Williams. His father at the time worked for T.B. Peet & Co., a stove dealer, and the family lived on High Street.

Educated in Marysville and Springfield schools, Williams graduated from Springfield High School in 1880, and was appointed to the U.S. Naval Academy by recommendation of Gen. J. Warren Keifer, at the time the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Graduating in the top 10 percent of his Class of 1884, Williams was sharp enough to teach mathematics, mechanics and navigation at the Naval Academy. At the turn of the century, he also was considered sharp enough to be included on the short list of officers the Navy assembled for its strategic planning team.

Having commanded the torpedo boat U.S.S. Gwin in the Spanish American War, Williams by then was a seasoned commander. He also was familiar with the geography of the Pacific, having done a 1900 hydrological survey of a small island that would play a big role in World War II: Midway.

Among the “rising stars” of the Navy, Miller writes “Williams had the right temperament for a war planner: analytical, mature in judgment, unswayed by eloquence, yet a good listener who demand facts and asked penetrating questions.’’

“On the (planning) board, they called him ‘The Oracle’ for his grasp of the future,” Miller writes. “His classmates had dubbed him ‘Parson’ for his sober demeanor, yet his eye had a twinkle when he spun a sailors’ yarn.”

No islands to man

But it wasn’t a yarn that Williams focused on when he envisioned a war against Japan: It was a string of far flung Pacific Islands the United States had claimed — islands that sat thousands of miles from its mainland and much closer to Japan.

The practical indefensibility of those islands was foremost in his mind.

Although others in the Navy were in favor of trying to build installations to make the islands and atolls easier to defend, Miller says Williams understood “that politicians would never underwrite a chain of Pacific bases.”

Long before Japan’s rise to power, the plan would have seemed an unnecessary expense to taxpayers and an act of aggression by the international community.

Miller said the mood of the time was such that even the U.S. Department of State “kept a wary distance from the idea of war planning,” leaving Williams and the Navy to go about the work themselves.

Although they might have enjoyed a feeling of broader support for their work, Miller writes, Williams said the strategy and plan they produced “was so predictable and the strategic situation in the Pacific so clear that the Navy could independently and confidently decide its best lines of action.”

With the blessing of the secretary of the Navy, it did.

Sea power vs. land power

Assuming most of the Japanese territorial ambitions in the far East would require a large standing Army, Williams early on concluded the United States would win “by waging a maritime war” against Japan’s land-based army, Miller writes.

Miller said that single insight “became an indelible strategic axiom of War Plan Orange,” in which Orange represented Japan and Blue the United States.

Phase I of the strategy called for the United States to do what necessity eventually required at the outbreak of war: To surrender its distant islands, pull back, and then mount a patient counteroffensive to take the islands back one by one and advance its base of operations.

Williams’ initial strategy was unpopular among a group of so-called “thrusters” who would have preferred to rush across the ocean to immediately and heroically retake the land in the event of an attack.

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