1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls

by Winston Groom

  There was still the critical information of the date and time of the attack yet to be divined. Up until May 27, almost the last day the U.S. Pacific Fleet could act, the code breakers had not succeeded in breaking the ultrasecret cipher that contained this information. Then one of Rochefort’s senior cryptologists took a crack at it, after already putting in his regular twelve-hour shift. He was Lieutenant Commander Wesley A. Wright, and to give an indication of the complexities of his Herculean task, let us turn to David Kahn’s description of it in The Code Breakers: “As the night wore on Wright worked it out. He discovered that the date-and-time cipher comprised a polyalphabetic with independent mixed-cipher alphabets and with the exterior plain and key alphabets in two different systems of Japanese syllabic writing—one the older formal kata kana, the other the cursive hira gana. Each has 47 syllables, making the polyalphabetic tableau a gigantic one of 2,209 cells, more than three times as extensive as the ordinary Vigenere tableau of 676 cells. Nevertheless, by 5:30 A.M. he had a solution.”1

  What Commander Wright had deciphered told Nimitz that the Japanese attack against the Aleutians would commence at daybreak June 2 and the attack on Midway at daybreak June 3. This priceless information was clouded only by the staggering inferiority of the American fleet compared with the Japanese juggernaut. Against Yamamoto’s eight aircraft carriers, eleven battleships, sixteen cruisers, and forty-nine destroyers, the most Nimitz could muster were three aircraft carriers, eight cruisers, fourteen destroyers, and zero battleships—twenty-five ships against eighty-four. If surprise ever counted for anything, it had better be now.

  As a matter of fact, after the Coral Sea battle just three weeks earlier, Nimitz was left with only two carriers instead of three. Damage caused by the 800-pound bomb that exploded deep in Yorktown’s bowels had been so severe it was estimated by the experts that it would take three months to repair. But after personally inspecting the ship when it returned to Pearl, Nimitz ordered the navy yard to do whatever it took to make the thing seaworthy again. This they did immediately, working more than three thousand men around the clock, shoring up structural damage with timbers and bailing wire, re welding twisted bulkheads, splicing miles of broken cables, and producing a ready fighting ship in a little under three days!

  As the planes, bombs, ammunition, and fuel were frantically being taken aboard the carriers and the thousand and one minute details worked out for such a huge undertaking, Nimitz still had two crucial decisions to make. First was where, assuming the cryptoanalysts’ information was correct, to place the fleet to best intercept Yamamoto’s force with the maximum of surprise and, second, who possibly could replace Bill Halsey?

  Admiral Halsey had been the natural choice to lead this most important of missions, but at the last moment he had come down with a wretched skin ailment that rendered him temporarily unfit for command and landed him in the base hospital, fuming and fulminating. He was, however, able to give Nimitz a recommendation for his replacement, and it turned out to be a good one: Rear Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, a fifty-six-year-old 1907 graduate of Annapolis, who was not an aviator and had never commanded a carrier, let alone a carrier fleet. But Spruance was “intense and single-minded of purpose,” and his habit of pacing as exercise and letting off steam was frequently remarked on by those around him: pacing, always pacing, whether in his cabin or on the decks of his ships, seemingly lost in thought. However, he was not to lead the Midway operation. Instead, owing to the navy’s rigid rank-and-command system, Rear Admiral Frank Fletcher, who had just fought the carrier battle of the Coral Sea, was picked because he was senior to Spruance. Nevertheless, Spruance’s selection to replace Halsey was certainly testimony that “his virtues as a tactician were not lost on his seniors.”2

  The other decision—where to position the fleet to best ambush the Japanese—was equally vexing. Nimitz made a calculated guess that Yama-moto would approach Midway from the northwest, just as he had done at Pearl Harbor, and therefore the best place to attack him was on his northeastern flank, meaning that the Japanese fleet would be caught between the attack planes from Midway—which, owing to recent reinforcements, had become virtually an unsinkable aircraft carrier—and the planes from his own fleet. The plan was for Fletcher and Spruance to rendezvous their carriers at sea (Spruance commanding Halsey’s old force, the Enterprise and the Hornet, and Fletcher in the Yorktown with overall operational command), then steam to an imaginary spot labeled Point Luck, about 350 miles northeast of Midway, and wait there until the long-range reconnaissance planes from Midway had located the Japanese fleet. In this way they could box them in and hammer them from both ends. It was a good plan, perhaps even a brilliant plan, providing the Japanese cooperated and showed up when and where Nimitz thought they would.

  The Japanese, meanwhile, were not just sitting around like cardboard dummies; they had their own plans to foil any attempt by the American navy to surprise them, although in retrospect these were faulty. First, Yamamoto believed that his diversionary attack on the Aleutian Islands would draw at least some if not all of the U.S. fleet far northward, out of the Midway battle area. In addition, he did not believe that Nimitz would react to the attack on Midway until the attack had already begun—that was his passionate dream, his vision, not only to capture Midway but in the process to lure the Americans into the decades-old Japanese notion of the Great Sea Battle, in which the remainder of the U.S. Navy would be sunk and the entire Pacific turned into a Japanese-held lake.

  Just in case, though, the Japanese had taken careful precautions lest the Americans not behave as expected. They sent a fleet of twenty submarines to sneak in and scout out Hawaiian waters, reporting back on any U.S. movements. Too, their master plan called for their cruisers to catapult-launch reconnaissance planes to scout westward from north to south in any direction from which the Americans might appear. On paper the plan worked, but its operational faults were glaring. For one thing the submarines arrived off Hawaii later than expected, and as a result they completely missed the American fleet, which, in any case, based on Rochefort’s information about the Japanese submarines’ pending arrival, was already put out to sea, steaming for Midway. For another, not all their cruiser-launched reconnaissance planes were able to get into the air on time; thus there were critical holes in the coverage. Most important, they hadn’t the foggiest notion that U.S. intelligence had been reading their mail.*

  What was going through the two U.S. admirals’ minds as their carriers bucked and wallowed through the great swells of the North Pacific has not been recorded. Fletcher only a few weeks earlier had seen the burning hulk of the Lexington, for which he was responsible, go down in the Coral Sea, a commander’s worst nightmare. This must have been in his thoughts as they steamed west toward Midway. Spruance, for his part, detested publicity and, in turn, distrusted “the press,” as it was called in those days. He gave no interviews and thus was often characterized as being aloof or standoffish. Yet one can imagine him thinking that he and Fletcher commanded the only ships in the entire Pacific Ocean—the aircraft carriers—capable of inflicting serious damage on the Japanese; if they were lost it would be catastrophic to the U.S. war effort. Nimitz’s orders to Fletcher and Spruance had been no more than the ages-old simplified dictum of warfare: to attack the enemy, but only if there was a reasonable chance to inflict more damage upon him than he could inflict upon you. Both admirals knew perfectly well that great dangers lurked; that a battle at sea was unforgiving; that planes would go down in flames and ships would sink into fathomless depths; that there would be suffering and anguish and grief; that many men probably would die—all these things were certainly in their minds and upon their shoulders.

  On Midway Island tensions were equally charged; everyone knew an attack was forthcoming and, unlike at Wake Island six months earlier, they knew this was going to be a big one. The reason they knew it was that Nimitz had personally paid a visit to Midway a couple of weeks earlier and informed its commanders of the impending i
nvasion. He asked what they needed, within reason, and they told him; Nimitz said, “And if I deliver all these things to you, can you hold the island?” They replied that they could and would. So seventeen of the precious long-range B-17 Flying Fortresses were delivered to Midway, as were twenty-five big Catalina flying boats, the most effective reconnaissance plane in the U.S. arsenal. More fighting troops were sent, bringing the total up to about three thousand, as well as five tanks, more antiaircraft guns, more fighters and dive-bombers, more coastal guns and sea mines, more cement and steel reinforcing for bunkers and barbed wire for the beaches, and more machine guns and ammunition. Nimitz delivered all he had, nearly stripping himself bare at Pearl Harbor.

  Yet with all that, if the Japanese launched a full-scale invasion—which they intended to do—Midway was still not fully equipped to defend against it. Many—but not all—of the island’s 121 planes were either obsolete or, in many cases, practically antiques from the early 1930s; most guns were of First World War vintage and the men were equipped with First World War rifles and tin-plate helmets and wrapped leggings, just like the doughboys of 1917. Such was the continuing state of American unpreparedness, despite the fact that U.S. factories were just now pouring forth a remarkable and unprecedented array of modern weaponry, which had yet to find its way into the remote Pacific supply chain. Still, for all the shortcomings the marines and other military personnel on Midway felt they were up to the task, and certainly would have given a hot reception to the 5,000 Japanese special assault troops that were at that very moment headed their way.

  For most of modern history Midway Island, like Wake, had been little more than a speck upon the ocean, uninhabited except by birds and once frequented by Japanese feather hunters. It was so remote that it wasn’t even “discovered” until 1859, when an American sailing captain blundered into it, marked it on a chart, and claimed it for the United States; even then, it was another eight years before we got around to formally annexing it by sending a U.S. warship to steam out, run up an American flag, and conduct the usual ceremony.

  Like Wake Island, Midway is an atoll, kidney-shaped, about fifteen miles north to south and a bit longer east to west, with a big lagoon in the middle; however, the only habitable parts are two islands about three or four miles long, for the rest is low-covered shoals. With the arrival of steam propulsion it took on new importance as a mid-Pacific coaling station and, later, as a trans-Pacific undersea cable station; later still, it was used as a stopover and refueling point for the giant trans-Pacific Pan-American clippers, which could set down in Midway’s big, protected lagoon. As at Wake, the airline built a seaplane ramp, a hotel for passengers, storage facilities, and other amenities.

  By this time the various workers and employees had turned bleak Midway into a veritable garden spot by planting eucalyptus and iron wood trees and all sorts of flowering shrubbery and lawns; they even built tennis courts. In the 1930s, as tensions with Japan rose, the U.S. military began to take an interest in Midway as a forward reconnaissance base and the navy revamped the seaplane ramps and began building runways and other facilities so they could station a small number of their big PBY flying boats there to keep an eye on what the Japanese were up to in the Marshall Islands to the south. In 1942, after the fall of Wake, a thousand or so miles to the southwest, Midway took on enormous significance because it was now the farthest U.S. Pacific warning station, guarding Hawaii against another surprise attack or even invasion. From its modern runways the lagoon scout planes and the long-range PBYs could patrol the ocean for more than seven hundred miles in any direction and hope to pick up a Japanese fleet sailing across the international date line.

  This development was not lost on the Japanese, which was why, at this very moment, they were steaming eastward to put Midway out of business. They expected rough going and so, in addition to the 5,000-man invasion force with all of its supporting ships, they sent the greater portion of their fleet, with all its aircraft carriers and battleships, to pound Midway into submission. What they did not expect was that the U.S. Navy, such as was left of it, would also be there in a timely way to greet them.*

  As they approached Midway the Japanese were sailing into the “fog of war”—this time literally. The north-central Pacific mists closed in upon them so thickly that neighboring ships could not be seen at all, despite the use of powerful searchlights, and their officers craned out of conning towers and bridges straining to get a glimpse of anything ahead, abeam or astern. Because of the strict radio silence imposed by Yamamoto, the situation became extremely dangerous since the prospect of midsea collision was quite real.

  The Japanese assault force was four-pronged. First to sortie was the group of ships attacking the Aleutian Islands in Alaska—carriers, cruisers, destroyers—in hopes of confusing and diverting the Americans into thinking that the big movement was headed there. Next was the main Midway striking force, consisting of the carriers Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu, and Soryu, which had all taken part in the attack on Pearl Harbor. As well, there were two battleships, three cruisers, and eleven destroyers. Missing from this formidable armada were two more carriers, which well might have made the difference in the outcome of the battle: the Zuikaku and Shokaku, which had been so shot up and depleted at the Battle of the Coral Sea a month earlier that they were still in dry dock.* If Yamamoto had suspected the Americans would arrive on the scene with three carriers, he might well have canceled the Aleutian invasion and brought his whole force to bear at Midway. But he did not suspect this, because of the recent sightings of the Enterprise and Hornet so far away in the South Pacific.

  Third to sortie was the Midway invasion force itself, assembled well to the southeastward in the Marshall Islands and consisting of a carrier, a battleship, ten cruisers, twenty destroyers, and various seaplane carriers and other support ships to escort the 5,000-man invasion force in fifteen transport ships.

  Finally was the heavy artillery, that which Yamamoto envisioned as finally winning the Great Sea Battle, the sinking of the remnants of the American fleet and destroying entirely American sea power in the Pacific. This consisted of Yamamoto’s flagship, the Yamato, the most powerful battleship ever built, before or since, a gargantuan metallic behemoth bristling with eighteen-and-a-half-inch guns—which outranged and outpowered anything else afloat—and armored so heavily that it weighed nearly twice as much as any other battleship of any navy. Added to this were six other battleships, three cruisers, twenty-one destroyers, a carrier, and all the attendant support ships.

  Yamamoto’s plan was roughly this:

  1. The Aleutian force would attack the Americans at Dutch Harbor, Alaska, then occupy several islands at the western end of the chain to give the Japanese a firm base in the North Pacific. It was also hoped that this action would confuse the Americans and cause them to speed north with their fleet, only to find that the main attack was at Midway; then, when they sped back to Midway, they would head into annihilation.

  2. The Midway Striking Force with the big carriers would first lend support to the invasion fleet by bombing Midway, knocking out its planes and installations, and eliminating Midway as a danger from land-based aircraft and then—most important—turn, face, and destroy the U.S. fleet, which was sure to come rushing toward them either from Pearl Harbor or from its fool’s errand in the Aleutians.

  3. Finally, Yamamoto’s big battleship fleet, steaming a day or so behind the Midway Striking Force, would suddenly appear on the scene to blow out of the water any remaining U.S. ship still afloat. That was the way it was supposed to work, and might have, too, except for the sort of prophetic dictum tersely expressed by MacArthur to his aides when they finally reached Australia after the harrowing voyage from the Philippines: “You win, you lose, live or die, and the difference is just an eyelash.”

  Or, in the case of Midway, a lot of eyelashes, batting not all at once but fluttering over a period of weeks, months, even years: the agonizing deliberations of code breaking, ship repairing, pilot training, r
einforcing remote outposts such as Midway. For the Japanese, “Victory Disease” had set in to the point that most believed themselves invincible. One who did not share this conviction was the commanding officer of the Midway Striking Force, Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, who had commanded the wildly successful sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and now found himself in the position of mother hen, protecting his priceless brood of capital ships and worrying himself over what would happen out on the ocean blue, so far from home, if the United States Navy showed up with any kind of powerful forces.

  Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, who had led the Pearl Harbor attack and was expected to play a major role in the Midway operation, was aboard Nagumo’s flagship, Akagi, when first night out to sea he had to have an emergency appendectomy. This left him out of the action but in a perfect position to observe and reflect on the operation as a whole, which he did in his fascinating narrative Midway: The Battle that Doomed Japan.

  Nagumo was, Fuchida reported, during the ten years he had known him, a tough, intelligent, and highly capable naval officer but “it was not long, however, before I noted that Nagumo had changed, and I began to feel dissatisfied with his apparent conservatism and passiveness. It might have been because he was now commanding an air arm, which was not his specialty. Personally he was as warmhearted and sympathetic as ever, but his once-vigorous fighting spirit seemed to be gone, and with it his stature as an outstanding naval leader. Instead he seemed rather average, and I was suddenly aware of his increased age.”3

  Those are harsh words for a subordinate to use to describe his superior, especially one of the leading admirals in the Japanese navy, but Fuchida’s observations have a ring of truth about them that is hard to dispute, especially because they were echoed by Nagumo’s air officer and the chief architect of the Pearl Harbor operation, Commander Minoru Genda.