War Stories II

by Oliver L. North

  When they did give us a little sleep, it would be only an hour or so. I was all tied up, and if I squirmed around, the guard would hit me on the side of the head with his club. It was more than I could stand.

  We were kept in solitary cells and questioned for sixty days. Dean Hallmark got dysentery so bad that we’d have to carry him over to the toilet. Later on they took Hallmark, Farrow, and Spatz away and executed them.

  LIEUTENANT DICK COLE, USAAF

  Plane #1, Doolittle Raid

  3,000 Feet Above China

  18 April 1942

  Paul Leonard bailed out first, then Fred Braemer, then Hank, and then me. I tried to see when I was going to hit the ground, but it was foggy and I couldn’t see how high I was, until all at once I felt some leaves brushing my face just before I hit the ground.

  I was probably the luckiest guy in the bunch. My chute drifted over a pine tree and so I didn’t hit the ground very hard. I don’t really recall much except that I made it down safe.

  I waited until dawn, took out my compass, and just started to walk west. Toward evening I came to the edge of a cliff. And down below, there was a military compound flying a Chinese nationalist flag, so I went down there.

  An hour or so later, Bombardier Fred Braemer came walking down the same path that I had followed. Neither of us could speak Chinese, so after a while, Fred and I used hand signals to let them know we wanted to leave.

  This group obviously had some means of communications and they knew where they wanted to take us. We ended up in a headquarters with the Chinese general in charge of that area. By the time we arrived, Doolittle was already there. And in the meantime we’d picked up the fifth member of our aircrew, Paul Leonard.

  They kept us there for about a week. And then they put us on a kind of river junk to keep us moving. Japanese patrol boats were going up and down the river with searchlights but we were never challenged.

  They eventually brought us ashore and moved us over land on foot until we ended up in Hen Yang. A few days later a C-47 came in and picked us up and took us to Chungking. From there I was fortunate enough to eventually be returned to the United States.

  Surprisingly, the first news of the raid came from Radio Tokyo, carrying broadcasts by Japan’s furious military leaders, promising revenge. An announcement from Washington, a few hours later, was vague and terse: “American planes might have participated in an attack upon the Japanese capital.” But by the following day, though details were still scant, newspaper headlines across the U.S. trumpeted the news: “Tokyo Bombed in Broad Daylight,” “U.S. Warplanes Rain Bombs on Jap Empire,” and “U.S. Bombs Hit Four Jap Cities.” Pressed by reporters to explain how the B-25s had managed to get all the way to Japan, FDR said that they had launched from “Shangri-La.”

  But while Americans celebrated the feat, many of the participants were still suffering. Pilot Ted Lawson, whose plane had crashed into the sea, had a crushed leg, and by the time the flight surgeon, Thomas “Doc” White, found him, the leg was rotting from gangrene. Doc White figured that to save Lawson’s life, the leg would have to go.

  Operating in a nationalist Chinese jungle encampment, the surgeon gave Lawson a spinal injection with Novocain to numb the pain, then used a hacksaw to methodically cut through the fetid flesh and thick leg bone. Lawson remained conscious throughout the long procedure, and when it was over, he watched quietly as Doc sewed up the wound and then used a hypodermic syringe to take his own blood to transfuse the traumatized patient. As a nurse carried the sawed-off leg outside the tent to dispose of it, Lawson said, “Thanks, Doc.”

  Back home, little was initially known about the fate of most of the airmen. General Hap Arnold had received a coded message from Doolittle on 21 April, relayed through the nationalist Chinese. But all that Doolittle was able to report at the time was that the mission to bomb Japan was accomplished and that bad weather, not a shortage of fuel, might mean that all sixteen of the B-25s had been lost. He also informed Washington that five American fliers had survived.

  By the time Doolittle arrived back in the United States, it was known that the Japanese had captured eleven of the airmen. What no one knew until much later was that they were all subjected to horrific torture and interrogation in an effort to discover how the attack could have taken place. Even after three of their number were executed by the Japanese, the Americans gave them only name, rank, and serial number.

  All of the Doolittle Raiders were awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for their heroism. FDR presented Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle with the Medal of Honor and promoted him to brigadier general, allowing him to bypass the rank of colonel.

  Of the eighty men who went on the mission, three were killed while jumping from their planes after the raid. Eleven were captured, and the Japanese executed three of them on 15 October 1942. Another prisoner died of maltreatment by his captors, and four others were released when the war ended, following three and a half years of imprisonment.

  Most of the Doolittle Raiders were reassigned after they returned to the United States and volunteered to fly combat missions elsewhere. Ten of them were killed in action, in North Africa, Europe, and Indochina, and four others were shot down in the European theater and captured by the Germans, who held them for the duration of the war.

  At the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, a carefully protected display case holds eighty silver goblets, each engraved with the name of a Doolittle Raider. Every 18 April, the goblets are used at a reunion of the surviving Doolittle Raiders, in a private and emotional ceremony. They toast their comrades, living and dead, and reminisce. The goblets of those who have passed on since the last reunion are inverted inside the case. And one day soon, all the goblets will be upside down.

  CHAPTER 5

  AN AWAKENED GIANT: THE BATTLE OF THE CORAL SEA

  (MAY 1942)

  HQ U.S. PACIFIC FLEET

  PEARL HARBOR

  OAHU, HAWAII

  5 MAY 1942

  Jimmy Doolittle’s daring raid from the deck of the USS Hornet on 18 April 1942 did little damage to Japanese warmaking capability. But bombing the emperor’s cities seriously alarmed military planners in Tokyo—and precipitated decisions they would soon regret.

  Until the American B-25s struck their homeland, the generals and admirals of the Imperial military were uncertain as to where they would go next. Their advance through the western Pacific had taken less than half the time they had expected, and had cost them fewer than 5,000 casualties, fewer than 100 aircraft, and the loss of only one ship—a destroyer at Wake Island.

  For most of March, the emperor’s military staff wrangled over three competing strategies: attacking west against India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), pressing south against Australia, or moving east against Hawaii.

  Yamamoto, believing that it was essential to destroy the U.S. Navy in a decisive battle, advocated an eastern offensive: seizing Midway and the Aleutians and, if the Americans didn’t sue for peace, moving against Hawaii to precipitate an engagement that would eliminate the U.S. fleet once and for all. The Japanese naval general staff argued for attacking south to Australia, while the Imperial Army staff—already engaged in China, Burma, and the Philippines—opposed all three.

  While the debate was being waged, Yamamoto dispatched Admiral Chuichi Nagumo’s carriers west, into the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea, and the Indian Ocean. Between 31 March and 9 April 1942, the “hero of Pearl Harbor” had raided the British bases on Ceylon, struck Royal Navy supply bases on India’s east coast, sunk six British warships—including the carrier HMS Hermes and the heavy cruisers Dorsetshire and Cornwall—and virtually swept the Indian Ocean clean of British merchant vessels.

  Admiral Chester Nimitz

  Instead of choosing one of the competing southern, western, or eastern strategic alternatives for their next step, flushed with the thrill of easy victories and filled with confidence, the warlords in Tokyo decided to pursue all three. That was the plan. Then Doolittle�
��s raid changed everything.

  In Hawaii, there was desperation but no indecision. Twenty-four days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a tall, cool Texan, Chester W. Nimitz, had replaced Admiral Husband Kimmel as the commander of the Pacific Fleet. Nimitz had turned down the assignment a year earlier, telling friends, “I am so much junior to so many of the admirals, and if I take it, that will make me so many enemies.”

  But with the country at war, Nimitz set his personal concerns aside. On 31 December 1941, aboard the submarine USS Grayling, fifty-six-year-old Chester Nimitz had added his fourth star and taken command of a badly damaged U.S. Pacific Fleet with FDR’s orders still in his head: “Report to the Pacific and stay there until the war is won.”

  The man who would become Yamamoto’s nemesis was a long way from the hill country of Fredericksburg, Texas, where he had grown up in a tightly knit German-American community, raised by his mother, Anna, and grandfather, Charles. His father and namesake had died before he was born. As a young man he learned tolerance and forgiveness of mistakes. These qualities came out of personal experience. Nimitz had run his first ship, the destroyer USS Decatur, hard aground. At his court-martial he was reprimanded for “neglect of duty.” He would later say, “Every dog deserves two bites.” This colloquial and practical philosophy served him well as he sought to rebuild the shattered morale and demolished ships at Pearl Harbor.

  The arrival of the Yorktown from the Atlantic shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack had brought U.S. carrier strength in the Pacific up to four—but on 11 January a Japanese sub torpedoed the Saratoga just 500 miles from Oahu. She would be out of the fight for five months. With only three carriers in operation, about the best Nimitz could manage during February and March were the fast carrier strikes by Halsey’s Enterprise, by Admiral Wilson Brown’s USS Lexington, and by Jack Fletcher’s Yorktown.

  These “hit and run” strikes, though incapable of stopping the Japanese advance into New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, reinforced Yamamoto’s belief that the American carriers based in Hawaii had to be sent to the bottom. But before he could attack Hawaii, Midway would have to be taken. To that end, Yamamoto urged military planners in Tokyo to expedite operations in New Guinea, complete the construction of a major fleet anchorage at Rabaul, and complete the isolation of Australia. On 10 April, the general staff in Tokyo approved his plan, although they refused to fix a date for the seizure of Midway until the lifeline to Australia could be cut off from the U.S. mainland.

  But Doolittle’s raid threw them off their stride. Tokyo responded by accelerating its timetable. An invasion fleet and covering force were ordered to assemble immediately at Rabaul on the north coast of New Britain. The carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku were stripped from Admiral Nagumo and dispatched along with the light carrier Shoho to support the capture of Port Moresby, New Guinea, from which Japanese bombers could strike Darwin and Australia’s Northern Territory. The war planners also decided to seize Tulagi, an island in the Solomon chain north of Guadalcanal, for use as an air and seaplane base. As soon as the invasion forces were safely ashore, the Japanese carriers would detach and assemble at a point in the central Pacific for the attack on Midway.

  All these changes to the Japanese operations plans required that they fill the airwaves with hundreds of encrypted radio messages. But Imperial radio operators weren’t the only ones listening.

  Station Hypo

  Back in Pearl Harbor, inside a windowless vault called Station Hypo, U.S. Navy signals specialists carefully recorded each of the Imperial Fleet’s encoded radio broadcasts—and then painstakingly decrypted them. The little-known facility—connected to arrays of antennas in northern Australia, on Midway, and around the Hawaiian Islands—was the creation of U.S. Navy Lt. Commander Joseph Rochefort, an eccentric forty-three-year-old mathematician who had spent several happy years with his family in Japan before the war, becoming fluent in Japanese. He and his little team of code-breakers had been intercepting and unscrambling Japanese message traffic since before Pearl Harbor. And because he had missed the cable ordering the attack on 7 December, he had fully expected to be fired along with Admiral Kimmel. But Nimitz, recognizing the man’s brilliance, and playing on his sense of duty, asked—not ordered—him to stay on.

  The appeal to Rochefort’s patriotism had the effect Nimitz intended, and the team the code-breaker had built remained essentially intact. Then, after providing additional personnel necessary to do the job, Nimitz changed the guidelines on the dissemination of Station Hypo’s intercepts. Wary of leaks and keenly aware that politicians were looking over his shoulder, the admiral instructed Rochefort to stem the flow of information back to Washington. Instead, the decoded messages would first be given directly to him as the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, and Nimitz would determine which, if any, should be forwarded to Washington.

  With additional personnel aboard, the rate at which intercepted Japanese messages could be decrypted improved dramatically. About the time that Doolittle was preparing for his raid on Tokyo, Rochefort, one of his Station Hypo colleagues, Navy Lt. Commander T. H. Dyer, and Commander Edwin Layton, Nimitz’s intelligence chief, succeeded in breaking the Imperial Navy’s JN-25 code. The Japanese fleet used this code to transmit thousands of messages daily. Station Hypo had been working with some 45,000 code groups, trying to translate them from Japanese into English. They considered themselves fortunate if they could recover 10 or 15 percent of a message. But sometimes that was enough.

  By April 1942 Admiral Nimitz was getting solid intelligence from his Station Hypo code-breakers—he knew of Japanese ship movements even before many of Yamamoto’s own ships’ captains. In fact, some of the Japanese skippers never got the information themselves, a problem that plagued them throughout the war.

  Among the team of bright young specialists that joined Station Hypo after Pearl Harbor was a farm boy from Iowa. Newly commissioned as an ensign, Mac Showers was ordered to Hawaii. He was told that his assignment was too sensitive to discuss with anyone.

  ENSIGN MAC SHOWERS, USN

  PAC Fleet Signals Intelligence Center

  Station Hypo

  Pearl Harbor, Hawaii

  20 April 1942

  I arrived at Hypo in February 1942. I was an ensign and was told that I was being assigned to an intelligence unit that was working for the Pacific Fleet. I went to the Navy yard and reported to Commander J. J. Rochefort. His office was in a basement that was relatively cold and damp, and people had to wear extra clothing in order to work comfortably down there. When I first saw Commander Rochefort, he was wearing a maroon smoking jacket and bedroom slippers. I was not particularly surprised. I figured a commander could do pretty much anything he wanted to. And it was uncomfortably cold. But I noticed that when he left, he didn’t wear those outside. He was in his proper uniform.

  Rochefort had a very strong feeling that at the beginning of the war he had failed his commander in chief by not giving him warning of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. We now know there’s no way he could have known about it, because it was executed in total radio silence, but Rochefort took it personally. This gave Rochefort a dedication to his task, which he passed on to his people.

  The Japanese diplomatic service used a coding machine, which we replicated even before the war, allowing us to read their coded diplomatic traffic. But the Japanese navy didn’t use that equipment. The Japanese military high command and their operating forces all used manual codes, which had to be encoded and decoded by hand using codebooks the size of an encyclopedia. For example, when they reported the sinking of their aircraft carriers, they had to go to the codebook and pick out a code group that represented the Kaga, and another one that represented the Akagi, and another one that represented the Iru, and then send their message by encoding that manually. And the recipient then had to decode it manually from an identical encyclopedic book, with all the code groups listed. That was the code system the Japanese navy used throughout the war. It was a laborious task.
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  Commander Edwin Layton was a good friend of Rochefort’s. They had known each other a long time and had studied the Japanese language together in Japan for three years. Layton was somewhat more flamboyant, but more forceful. The two worked very closely together and trusted each other. Layton was a very persuasive individual and the perfect man to be Admiral Nimitz’s intelligence officer.

  Station Hypo set out to break the Japanese naval code, from thousands of messages transmitted every day in Morse signal. It was copied by intercept operators who tuned in on the frequencies that the Japanese were using. They had typewriters with Japanese characters. After those messages were copied, they would be sent down to our processing unit.

  That was the name of the game: recover a “string” of code groups so that we could figure out the sense of the message from the code groups we had already broken. Little by little we were able to fill in the blanks and recover more words. This all came from a codebook that had thousands and thousands of code groups, each one meaning something, the name of a ship, the name of a person, the number or position, a place.

  Rochefort would sit there in the basement producing this information, and give it to Layton, who would look it over, digest it, ask questions about it until he understood it. And then he would pass it to Admiral Nimitz.

  By April 1942, we were able to read enough of the Japanese naval traffic to realize that they were preparing to mount a major operation in the South Pacific. It would put them within flying distance of Australia. We figured out enough about this operation to tell Admiral Nimitz what they were planning to do and when they planned to do it.