Bull Halsey is the most overrated admiral of WW2 and it isn't close. Give him credit where it's due. He was aggressive when the Navy needed aggression. He escorted the Doolittle Raid and took over at Guadalcanal when morale was at rock bottom. The sailors loved him and the press loved him even more. But look at what happened when the big moments came. He missed Midway entirely, stuck in a hospital with a skin condition. Spruance, a quiet cruiser admiral who had never commanded carriers, took his place and won the most important naval battle of the Pacific war. At Leyte Gulf in October 1944, Halsey's one job was to protect the invasion beaches. When the Japanese dangled a group of carriers to the north, he took the entire Third Fleet after them. Every battleship. Every fast carrier. Nobody guarding San Bernardino Strait. Those carriers were decoys with barely any planes left. The real threat, Kurita's force with the Yamato, came straight through the strait he'd left open. The only thing standing in the way off Samar was Taffy 3. Six slow escort carriers, three destroyers, four destroyer escorts. Tin cans like the Johnston, Hoel and Samuel B. Roberts charged battleships and heavy cruisers with torpedoes and 5 inch guns. Over a thousand American sailors died, and somehow they turned Kurita back. Nimitz sent Halsey a message asking where Task Force 34 was. A radioman padded the end with "the world wonders." Halsey thought it was an insult and reportedly threw his cap on the deck in a rage. By the time he turned south, it was over. Two months later he steered the fleet into Typhoon Cobra. The destroyers Hull, Monaghan and Spence capsized. Around 790 men were lost along with well over 100 aircraft. A court of inquiry found he'd made errors of judgment. Six months after that he sailed into another typhoon. A second court of inquiry recommended he be reassigned. He was too famous to fire. In December 1945 Congress gave him a fifth star. Raymond Spruance won Midway, won the Philippine Sea, and ran Iwo Jima and Okinawa. He never got one.