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The president of the U.S. Naval War College later called this "an almost perfect surface action." Bull Halsey himself described it as "the classic sea action of this war." And for Burke was reserved perhaps the finest moment that can come to a blue-water sailor. When his Little Beavers steamed into their home base, every ship in the roadstead turned up its searchlights, and the bluejackets manned the rails to cheer Arleigh Burke and his gallant cans.
Fateful Assignment. The war moved into the Central Pacific; the Marshalls were invaded, Truk was bombed, the Marianas scouted, and Admiral Marc Mitscher made a lasting name for himself as the commander of a great new carrier task force. In Washington, Admiral Ernie King, the Navy's able, chill-eyed CNO, abruptly ordered that every aviation task force commander should have a nonaviator as chief of staff. Burke was assigned to Mitscher. At first neither Mitscher, the airman, nor Burke of the black-shoe Navy, liked the arrangement, but it was a fateful assignment. Burke was a long time changing Airman Mitscher's prejudice against surface sailors but he did it by demonstrating his consummate understanding of ships' capabilities.
Under Mitscher, Burke helped plan such U.S. victories as the Marianas Turkey Shoot and the Battles of the Philippine Sea. Moreover, he studied the employment of naval air power with the same tireless energy that had pulled him through his plebe year at the academy. Near war's end he played a key role in the death of Japan's mightiest battleship, Yamato. When word came that Yamato was bearing down on Okinawa, Burke hastily drew up a battle plan, Mitscher approved it and launched his planes. A British observer protested: "You are launching before you can possibly be sure of location." Replied Burke: "We are launching against the spot where we would be if we were Yamato." Yamato did not live to see the sun go down that day.
Secret Mastermind. No sooner had the war ended than the Navy was up to its scuppers in trouble. It fought against a plan to merge it and the Army under a single commander, managed to retain considerable autonomy under the "unification'' compromise that created the Defense Department. Then, in 1949, Harry Truman's Defense Secretary Louis Johnson, by direction a drastic budget cutter, abruptly canceled construction of the Navy's super carrier United States. The Navy decided that Johnson's act was a plain threat to naval aviation and, indeed, to the Navy as an effective combat command. There seemed only one thing to do: fight.
Arleigh Burke, established as a man who had thought as well as fought, was placed in charge of Op-23, the secret unit that would mastermind the Navy's fight. Captain Burke's actual orders were to prepare high-level, high-caliber position papers. In practice, Op-23 also furnished ammunition against the Air Force and its B-36. And to the Navy press section from Op-23 came material for the spate of scurrilous leaks that reached its climax with the Revolt of the Admirals (TIME. Oct. 17, 1949 et seq.).