Mitscher is my nomination. As I understand it, the complaint is that at Midway he misdirected his airstrike, which appears to be the case. Possibly it was a case of micromanagement; other carrier battles don’t seem to mention the head guy specifically ordering the attack planes to fly a narrow vector.
However, it bears mentioning that up until Midway, almost everyone mishandled carrier strikes. Aircraft carriers were still a new weapons system – and particularly using them as principal instruments of fleet engagement and power projection, as opposed to just scouting.
The Pearl Harbor attack couldn’t help missing the American carriers, perhaps, but failing to make an additional strike to get the strategic oil reserve was a huge mistake. Coral Sea was still a case of fumbling with the new weapon system. At Midway, only Spruance deserves any credit for decisionmaking (specifically his decision to split the “all or nothing” strike and order away the aircraft already aloft, to save critical fuel) and that assessment includes the Japanese. But the success of the Dauntless dive bombers was largely the result of their pilots and squadron leaders, not the air bosses and admirals.
But Mitscher learned fast. By the start of 1944, his task force struck the heavily fortified Truk atoll in a high-speed raid, launching thirty airstrikes, each larger than the Pearl Harbor strike, and took Truk right out of the war. Only mastery of the continuous flow of aircraft landing, refueling, re-arming, launching, wind and weather, and fleet maneuvering allowed Mitscher to accomplish this much sheer activity while still traveling at high speed and not snarl everything up in some kind of gigantic accident. American losses were minimal, mostly due to heavy flak.
Later he showed humanity and a good judgment of risk when he ordered his carriers to turn on all their lights at the Battle of the Philippine Sea, to land his pilots in the dark. This was contrary to the thinking of the times, which was that the submarine and night-bomber threat to the carriers was too great to ever risk illumination at night, but Mitscher correctly judged the threat of waning Japanese naval power to be less than the loss of his best pilots. About 80 aircraft were lost anyway, but most of the human beings were pulled form the water and lived. In that same battle, Spruance was heavily criticized for being overcautious, by the way.
The days of carrier-to-carrier combat have passed, and with satellites we will never have that same “feeling for each other blind” dynamic in (surface) naval combat, but for the brief period of its heyday, Mitscher mastered a these new technologies and new ways of thinking about war, and delivered enormously complex, large-scale, high-speed attacks with efficiency.
Admiral Alrleigh Burke called Mitscher “the preeminent carrier force commander in the world.”
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