Evan Mawdsley is a renowned British military historian who has written books on Russian history and the Second World War. In 2019 he published an award-winning maritime history of World War II, The War for the Seas, which highlighted the role of sea lanes and their use in determining the outcome of the war. In Supremacy at Sea, Mawdsley traces the operations of the principal U.S. Navy carrier force in the Pacific in the first half of 1944 and the factors that contributed to that force’s success. Mawdsley focuses on the period from January through June 1944, a critical period in the Central Pacific campaign during which the U.S. Pacific Fleet, along with Army, Marine, and Army Air Corps forces, achieved a series of victories over Japan that were “extraordinary in . . . speed and depth” (p. xlv). Mawdsley combines narrative accounts of engagements with concise summaries of the factors (such as pilot training, equipment, personnel, logistics, and intelligence) that made possible Task Force 58’s success.

Mawdsley’s account relies on a range of primary and secondary sources, especially the war diaries and reports of Task Force 58 that are available online through Fold3.com. He begins with a survey of the October 1942 Battle of Santa Cruz in which the U.S. Navy lost the carrier Hornet and suffered damage to the carrier Enterprise, bringing the Pacific Fleet’s carrier strength to dangerously low levels. At Santa Cruz, the Americans lacked numerical superiority, used their fighters inconsistently for fleet air defense, and failed to effectively use their submarines as scouts, whereas the Japanese demonstrated considerable skill in coordinating their aerial attacks. During the period from January to June 1944 all these factors changed, which Mawdsley demonstrates by exploring Task Force 58’s operations. Task Force 58 was the fast carrier task force, which consisted of heavy and light carriers, battleships, cruisers, and escorting destroyers. Although the majority of the Pacific Fleet’s prewar carrier strength had been lost by the end of 1942, the arrival of the new carrier Essex in Pearl Harbor on 31 May 1943 inaugurated a period of steady carrier reinforcement. By late 1944 Task Force 58 included more than 15 carriers, giving it a decisive numerical advantage over any opposing Japanese force.

Mawdsley then surveys the careers of the two officers who led Task Force 58 in early 1944, Raymond Spruance and Marc Mitscher. Spruance was a thoughtful officer who came up in destroyers and battleships while Mitscher came up in aviation and had extensive experience in carriers. Spruance commanded the Central Pacific Force, later renamed the Fifth Fleet, while Mitscher was the direct commander of Task Force 58, the primary fighting element of the Central Pacific Force. The work includes a helpful survey of carrier air operations before examining the landings in the Marshall Islands in January 1944. The island of Majuro in the Marshalls provided the advance base from which Task Force 58 operated during the Central Pacific campaign. Operating out of this advance base, instead of the established fleet base at Pearl Harbor, was possible due to the dramatic expansion of expeditionary logistical capabilities such as mobile logistic supply ships and underway replenishment using oilers.

After the initial landings in the Marshalls, Task Force 58 went on to conduct a series of raids throughout the Central Pacific, which steadily reduced Japanese air and naval strength in the area. A large raid on the major Japanese base at Truk destroyed more than 200 Japanese planes and several transports and auxiliaries while damaging Truk’s military facilities. The major Japanese warships had left Truk in the weeks before the raid, to the disappointment of American commanders. Mawdsley combines this account of the Truk raid with a description of the task force’s layered air defenses, a style he uses effectively throughout the work, combining narrative with organizational context. The raid on Truk was followed by air raids on the Marianas in late February 1944. The Japanese detected the approach of Task Force 58 but were unable to inflict significant damage on the force, highlighting the American ability to defeat Japanese land-based aircraft even when they had advance warning.

The extended time at sea of Task Force 58 throughout this period was possible due to the Navy’s logistical capabilities. Mobile logistic ships provided repair and maintenance services to the task force while underway replenishment provided fuel and aviation gas. Two separate squadrons of tankers ensured a steady supply of fuel and gas. One squadron carried fuel from the continental United States and Hawaii to the advance base at Majuro, then a second squadron picked up the fuel at Majuro and carried it on to the fleet.

Following a replenishment and repair period at Majuro, Task Force 58 raided Palau in the western Caroline Islands. The raid was similar to the attack on Truk in that no major Japanese warships were destroyed, though 36 smaller ships were sunk and dozens of aircraft were destroyed. The steady attrition of Japanese air strength in the Central Pacific is a recurring theme of Mawdsley’s account. In the Palau chapter Mawdsley also traces the Pacific Fleet’s intelligence capabilities, which ranged from radio intelligence (traffic analysis, decryption, and direction finding) to aerial photography and submarine scouting. He concludes that for the Central Pacific campaign, intelligence was a helpful supporting factor but not a decisive one in explaining American victories.

The raid on Palau was followed in April and May by attacks on New Guinea and again on Truk. The attacks on New Guinea supported landings on the northern coast of New Guinea by General MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific command. These landings deep behind Japanese lines were preceded by a series of air attacks by MacArthur’s Fifth Air Force, which largely destroyed Japanese aerial opposition in northern New Guinea. As a result, Task Force 58’s support for the landings turned out to be less necessary than originally envisioned.

The raids throughout the Central Pacific and the landings in New Guinea led the Japanese to expect a further American offensive in the corridor between the Caroline Islands and New Guinea. The landings in the Mariana Islands to the north, which began in June 1944, thus caught the Japanese flat-footed. Mawdsley’s account slows down in the final chapters to provide a day-by-day account of the Battle of the Philippine Sea, the last major carrier-to-carrier engagement in naval history.

Intelligence from American submarines and radio intelligence provided advance warning of the approach of the Japanese fleet. During a series of air attacks on 19 June, the Japanese lost more than 330 aircraft due to the effectiveness of American fleet air defense. An American air strike on the Japanese fleet late on 20 June inflicted minor damage on the Japanese, sinking one auxiliary carrier, which joined the two carriers the Japanese had already lost to submarine torpedoes. The strike was conducted with less than half the available dive and torpedo bombers in Task Force 58 due to a planned second strike that did not occur. The attack took place at twilight, was uncoordinated, and was conducted by aircrew with little experience in anti-ship operations, which accounts for its limited results. Mawdsley concludes that these limited results, combined with the high losses suffered during the recovery of the strike (almost 40% of the aircraft were lost), meant that the operation had “deep flaws” (p. 211). Still, the Battle of the Philippine Sea was an overall American victory.

In his final chapter Mawdsley briefly traces the rest of the war in the Pacific as well as the postwar assignments of Spruance and Mitscher. He concludes that the Central Pacific campaign was the start of an era in which the U.S. Navy exercised global command of the sea, an era that has lasted to the present. Throughout the book Mawdsley uses personal vignettes to illustrate different elements of the U.S. Navy’s development, such as the expanded pilot training program that provided aircrews for Task Force 58.

Supremacy at Sea builds upon earlier works such as Clark Reynolds’ Fast Carriers: The Forging of an Air Navy (1968), which examined the development of American carrier aviation throughout World War II. Supremacy at Sea’s emphasis on the war in the Pacific as a transition between the Royal Navy’s naval supremacy and the U.S. Navy’s naval supremacy is also a theme of Paul Kennedy’s Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order in World War II (2022), also published by Yale University Press. Mawdsley’s account is written in an engaging, clear style that effectively highlights the factors that shaped Task Force 58’s operational success in the Central Pacific campaign.