Sold – “Keep the bastards dying!”

This is Commander Third Fleet himself. A hard job well done in 1944. A happy and prosperous New Year in 1945. Keep the bastards dying!

Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr. was, with Admiral Chester Nimitz the most famous American naval commander of World War II. In October 1942, at a critical stage of the Guadalcanal Campaign, he was made Commander South Pacific Forces and South Pacific Area. With his reputation for audacity and aggressiveness, his appointment was welcomed by the beleaguered Marine and Navy units. He lived up to his reputation, summarizing his strategy in a simple order to his carriers on October 26: “Attack–Repeat–Attack.” In a series of fierce engagements Japanese naval forces in the area were defeated and American victory on Guadalcanal assured. After Guadalcanal was secured in February 1943, Halsey’s forces spent the rest of the year battling up the Solomon Islands chain to Bougainville, then isolated and neutralized the Japanese fortress and air base at Rabaul by capturing positions in the Bismarck Archipelago.

He left the South Pacific in May 1944, as the war surged toward the Philippines and Japan. In June 1944 he was designated Commander Western Pacific Task Forces and assumed command of the Third Fleet, which was the most powerful aggregation of naval striking power in American history. In September his ships provided cover for the landings on Peleliu, before embarking on a series of damaging raids on Okinawa and Formosa. In late October, the Third Fleet was assigned to provide cover for the American landings on Leyte in the Philippines and to support Admiral Thomas Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet. Desperate to block the Allied invasion of the Philippines, the commander of the Japanese Combined Fleet, Admiral Soemu Toyoda, devised a daring plan which called for most of his remaining ships to attack the landing force. The resulting Battle of Leyte Gulf was the largest naval battle of World War II, and by some criteria the largest naval battle in history. Admirals Halsey and Kinkaid won victories on October 23 and 24 over the attacking Japanese surface ships.

Halsey was criticized for his follow-up in that victory and temporarily left his command to Admiral Raymond Spruance. Resuming command in May 1945, Halsey was involved in the Okinawa campaign, and then made a series of carrier attacks against the Japanese home islands. His last attack came on August 13, and he was present aboard USS Missouri when the Japanese surrendered on September 2. In fact, it was Halsey’s flag flying on USS Missouri that day.

The destroyer USS Charles S. Sperry joined the Third Fleet in December 1944. She sortied with her group for the first time on December 30, bound for the areas from which the carriers launched strikes against Japanese bases on Formosa and Luzon in preparation for the assault on Lingayen Gulf beaches. Continuing to neutralize Japanese airfields the force moved on to strike at targets in Indochina, on the South China coast, and on Okinawa before returning to base in January 1945.

Sperry took part in an audacious raid against Tokyo itself, the first carrier strikes on the heart of Japan since the Doolittle Raid. Sperry forces offered direct support during the assault landings at Iwo Jima. It then took part in the Okinawa operation, which kept her almost continuously at sea until June. Sperry was involved in the kamikaze strikes hurled at her force in April and May. By July she was covering the first occupation landings and the evacuation of Allied prisoners of war from Japanese prison camps. On August 31, the USS Charles S. Sperry arrived off Tokyo Bay for the surrender ceremonies held on September 2.

1944 was a year of hard combat, exhaustion, and steep losses for the U.S. forces in the Pacific, but great progress was made towards ultimate victory. And Halsey was proud of the men under his command, and as full of fight as ever. Late on the night of December 31, 1944, Halsey sent a spirited New Year’s telegram to his ships that read as follows:?“This is Commander Third Fleet himself. A hard job well done in 1944. A happy and prosperous New Year in 1945. Keep the bastards dying!”  Halsey felt so strongly about this message that he spoke it orally on board his own ship, as he relates in his autobiography (and is noted in the telegram as “voice call-can’t include”). The phrase “Keep the bastards dying!” struck a chord in World War II, and it is used as a chapter title in James Merrill’s “A Sailor’s Admiral: A Biography of William F. Halsey.”

The Speery of course received a copy – marked as from “Com 3rd FLT” and to Halsey’s command “Task Force 38” – and made its contents known to the men. A sailor from Ohio serving on board the Sperry at the time retained the original telegram as a memento, so it was not discarded. After the war, that sailor became an autograph collector, amassing a collection centered on literary and historical autographs. He notes that when Admiral Halsey visited the Granville Inn in Granville, Ohio on January 21, 1947, he met Halsey and got him to sign it in person. Our research of auction records over the past 35 years, and our other searches, disclose no other signed copy of this famous telegram; and we assume that none exists.

Douglas MacArthur, in his “Reminiscences”, wrote: “William Halsey was one of our greatest sailors…. Blunt, outspoken, [and] dynamic… he was of the same aggressive type as John Paul Jones, David Farragut, and George Dewey. His one thought was to close with the enemy and fight him to the death…His loyalty was undeviating, and I placed the greatest confidence in his judgment. No name rates higher in the annals of our country’s naval history.”