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.
History rendered the debate moot when Japanese war planes destroyed the United States’ only means of doing that in their attack on Pearl Harbor.
Thus opened what Williams had already envisioned as Phase II of the conflict, the island-hopping war driven by the basic insight that “Japan would gain no advantage from its massive army” in such a war.
“Only small garrisons could be sustained on small islands, where control of the sea would assure (the United States) of an overwhelming concentration of force,” Miller writes.
This strategy required the Japanese to defend the indefensible islands, which it had no choice but to do because of the larger and obvious American strategy: To push the Japanese back to the mainland and cut off their shipping lanes before laying siege to the mainland and reducing their industries to rubble by massive bombing strikes of Phase III.
Just how far-sighted Williams and his fellow planners were is seen not only by their realization of the important part air power would play in the war, writes Miller, but in their forecast of specifics of how the fight would unfold.
“Superimposed on the three-phase concept was the expectation of a single great naval encounter that would determine control of the sea,” writes Miller — an encounter Williams expected the United States to win because, by the time it came, the nation’s superior manufacturing capabilities would have put a stronger force on the seas.
That the battle eventually took place at the very island Williams surveyed in 1900 makes his foresight seem prescient.
Role reversal
Two other aspects of Williams’ thoughts on the war against Japan are interesting to consider in retrospect.
Fifteen years before the war against Japan began, writes Miller, “the prime uncertainty (among strategists) was whether the American public would tolerate a lengthy war, say of a year or two years duration, for (islands) not (seen as) vital to national security.”
When war came, the already worldwide scale of the conflict coupled with the American public’s outrage over the attack of Pearl Harbor ensured public support for the longer war.
A second assumption of Williams and his planners also shines a different light on the end of the war with Japan.
“It was an article of faith among all planners that the United States need never invade Japan,” Miller writes.
“To make their studies complete, however, the professional strategists of the 1920s considered the possibility,” Miller reports.
Williams concluded in 1922 that there was “almost no prospect of success” in an invasion of the Japanese homeland, Miller reports.
Unlike on the smaller islands, “the enemy can always concentrate forces greatly superior to the successive expeditions into which our land forces must be organized for overseas transportation,” Williams wrote.
Williams saw the vessels that might be sent ashore as perhaps the smallest, most indefensible islands in the battle for the Japanese homeland.
An admiral’s thoughts
Martin said the quality of the work Williams and others did in their plan is reflected in the remark by World War II Adm. Chester Nimitz, who was at the Naval War College when Williams was its president, that “the war unfolded just as predicted in naval war games.”
Although he retired in 1927, Williams received a commission as an admiral on the list of the navy’s retired officers July 29, 1942, and watched War Plan Orange unfold out in news dispatches from the Pacific.
But one can’t help but wonder whether War Plan Orange also was on his mind when he was in China in 1927 commanding the international fleet with a list of allies that included the target of the plan he had devised: Imperial Japan.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.
About the Author