Books: Turn on the Lights

THE MAGNIFICENT MITSCHER (364 pp.)—Theodore Taylor—Norton ($5).

There was nothing outwardly magnificent about Marc Andrew Mitscher, boy or man. A dull student in Oklahoma City schools, he was dropped from Annapolis as a disciplinary problem, got back in only to graduate at the "wooden end of the line." "Pete" Mitscher was already bald and beginning to look wizened when, at 29, he won his wings. Thereafter, throughout the monotonous, between-war years of fitness reports and training procedures, he lived only for naval aviation. As the first U.S. Navy officer assigned to command flying operations from the deck of a ship (the converted collier Langley), Pete Mitscher wrote the book on seaborne air power. And as tactical commander of the Pacific Fleet's fast carrier task forces in World War II, Mitscher the mediocre became Mitscher the magnificent.

His command decisions were consistently and uncannily right. If he erred, it was in not pressing his views upon his superiors, Admirals Raymond A. Spruance and William F. Halsey, in the great battles of the Philippine Sea and Leyte Gulf—both occasions when too much of the Japanese fleet got away. In all naval war there has been no bolder or more dramatic decision than Mitscher's, in the Philippine Sea, to violate the hallowed blackout rule and light up the fleet like Coney Island to help homing flyers find their carriers. Characteristically, he took this crushing responsibility with only four words uttered in an almost inaudible voice: "Turn on the lights." Two years later, on Feb. 5, 1947, his heart weakened by years of overwork, Mitscher "slipped his chain." He slipped, also, into undeserved oblivion, from which this dry but workmanlike biography will do something to rescue him.