The Allies

by Winston Groom

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  NIMITZ’S FIXATION ON HAVING Yorktown made seaworthy so quickly was inextricably connected with a discovery made by Commander Rochefort and his code breakers: the Japanese were planning a big operation in the central Pacific. Cryptologists working night and day had even figured out roughly when, but not where—only that the Japanese identified their target as “AF.”

  Rochefort suspected the target might be Midway Island, which was the only U.S.-held possession remaining in the central Pacific. Soon, he hit on a subterfuge stunning in its simplicity. He sent a top secret message to the commander of Midway, telling him to report, falsely, over the open airwaves, to Pearl Harbor that the freshwater distillation plant at Midway was broken. A day or so after the false report the Japanese took the bait. U.S. radio intercepts picked up a Japanese message to Tokyo that “AF was running low on water.” Everybody knew there was a chance now for the United States to ambush the ambushers.11

  Now that they knew where, naval intelligence desperately needed to know exactly when. One of the cryptologists, Lieutenant Commander Wesley Wright, who had just finished his regular twelve-hour shift, took a crack at it. He attacked an infinitesimally complex cipher until, at last, at 5:30 a.m. he was able to report a solution: the Japanese attack on Midway would begin at daybreak June 3.

  This priceless information was clouded only by the staggering inferiority of the U.S. force against the Japanese fleet, which contained, so far as the U.S. Navy knew, up to eight large aircraft carriers, eleven battleships, sixteen cruisers, and fifty destroyers. Against this, the Navy could muster only three carriers, zero battleships, eight cruisers, and fourteen destroyers. If surprise ever counted for anything it had better be now.12

  As anticipated, on the morning of June 3 a Navy PBY “flying boat” long-range reconnaissance plane spotted the Japanese ships right after dawn, about 375 miles from Midway. But what the pilot actually saw was not the main attack force with the carriers but the troop transports with the invasion force. The Japanese attack bombers had taken off for Midway Island at 4:30 a.m., before dawn.

  Based on this report, seventeen B-17s took off from Midway to bomb the ship—but not a bomb struck home. The lone saving grace was that at least the B-17s were not on the Midway runways when the Japanese attackers came roaring in.

  The Japanese strike wreaked havoc on Midway, not only causing major damage to buildings, hangars, shops, and fuel dumps but also destroying dozens of the “older, heavier, and slower” American planes that had been shot down by Zero fighters.

  In the meantime, Admirals Raymond Spruance and Frank Jack Fletcher had launched planes of their own at dawn. The first Americans to find the enemy carriers were forty-one Douglas Devastator torpedo planes. It was a slaughter by the Japanese, whose faster Zeros and ship-to-air defenses knocked practically all of them from the sky without a single American torpedo hit being scored. Only six made it back to the U.S. carriers.

  Again, the rule of unintended consequences tilted in favor of the Americans. The U.S. torpedo attack, which lasted about forty minutes, had discombobulated the Japanese. Their big carriers had to take jolting actions to evade U.S. torpedoes and were thus unable to bring their own torpedo planes and bombers above decks to launch them, or to switch armaments to planes on deck.

  At this crucial moment, the American dive-bombers, notably in the new Douglas SBD Dauntless, arrived on the scene and caught the Japanese, their decks filled with planes, just returned from Midway. Moreover, their air cap—the defensive squadrons of Zeros that hovered above the carriers—was caught down “on the deck” chasing the American torpedo planes. As a result they were unable to gain altitude before the dive-bombers screamed in and unleashed their loads.

  When it was over, about 10:30 a.m., three of the enemy carriers, Kaga, Akagi, and Soryu, were aflame from stem to stern; they later sank three miles down to the ocean floor. The fourth carrier, Hiryu, was also located and attacked late that afternoon and joined its friends beneath the waves—but not before it had launched planes that found the unfortunate Yorktown and bombed her so severely that her speed was reduced just enough for a Japanese submarine to put in a fatal torpedo.*9

  Thus the Battle of Midway concluded, a decisive American victory that permanently disarranged Japanese designs for control of the Pacific. The Midway invasion was thwarted, and Yamamoto withdrew his fleet to fight another day. But from the date of this key battle the Japanese did not conquer and keep another square foot of Pacific soil for the rest of World War II. The Midway battle was crucial. In exchange for 307 lives, the Yorktown and a destroyer, and 147 airplanes, the American fleet had destroyed four Japanese carriers, more than three hundred planes, a cruiser and a destroyer, and nearly five thousand Japanese sailors and airmen. It has been called, with justification, “the turning point” in the Pacific war.

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  NOT LONG AFTER THE AMERICAN VICTORY at Midway, Churchill returned to the United States and stayed with Roosevelt at Hyde Park, lobbying valiantly for him to support a U.S. invasion of French North Africa. He persisted in his argument that although the Allies were not strong enough yet for a cross-Channel invasion of France, they could in fact oppose the Germans in North Africa. This would serve to deny them the rich spoils of the Arabian oil fields and the Suez Canal—if not of the entire Mediterranean, which would be lost if the Germans successfully persuaded the Spanish dictator Franco to allow them access to attack the British stronghold of Gibraltar, which sat at the Atlantic entrance to the Mediterranean Sea.

  Marshall and the entire military establishment were against this strategy, via what might be termed the Marshall Dictum: diversions beget other diversions. If they had known what was in Churchill’s devious mind, they would have been doubly opposed. After clearing North Africa of the Axis, Churchill reasoned, the next step would be an Allied invasion of Sicily, followed by an invasion of Italy to knock her out of the war. From there loomed the infinite possibility of a slash at Germany from Europe’s “soft underbelly,” up into Austria’s thin border with Italy, and into southern Germany itself, thereby avoiding a dangerous amphibious landing in France altogether. Churchill saw the big picture clearly in his mind, just as he had seen it in the tragic Gallipoli invasion that had gone awry during the previous war.

  At length Roosevelt relented and Churchill got his American invasion of North Africa, but not necessarily into the soft underbelly of the Balkans. It seemed to American citizens a long way from conquering Germany, and they knew nothing about it until the radio, newspapers, and newsreels announced on November 8, 1942, that a U.S. naval fleet and invasion transports had appeared at dawn off the coast of French Morocco.

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  ROOSEVELT FACED A FRAUGHT dilemma of how to proceed with the Vichy French prior to the U.S. invasion of North Africa. Because Vichy controlled the French North African colony of Morocco, with its large garrison of soldiers, no one knew how the invasion would be received. Churchill and Roosevelt guessed—hoped, actually—that when American and British forces landed on the Moroccan coast they would be greeted as liberators. On the other hand, if the invasion was resisted, it could result in a great loss of life and possibly in failure.

  Three characters emerged as possibilities to disarm the French troops: Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the Free French, consisting of about ten thousand French soldiers rescued during the British evacuation of Dunkirk and others scattered around Central Africa; General Henri Giraud, a popular figure who had recently escaped from the Nazis and was hiding in southern France; and Admiral François Darlan, an odious collaborator with the Germans who was then in charge of the Vichy affairs in the Mediterranean.

  The stakes were high. There were some 120,000 Vichy soldiers in France’s North African colonies, armed by the Germans to put down just such an invasion as the Allies were now contemplating. They’d had several years to fortify, and there was still enough French navy remaining to put up
a fight, as well as a Vichy air force of 170 fighters and bombers.

  Roosevelt plunged personally into the political intrigue, sending as his special representative Robert Murphy, a young career diplomat who had been the chargé d’affaires at Vichy. Murphy schmoozed with all the unctuous Vichyites, and soon he was able to identify those who might be amenable to coming to terms with an American invasion. He was a foreign dignitary, so Murphy also had access to French North Africa, where he proved himself a valuable spy, noting Vichy French fortifications, aerodromes, warships, tides, roads, and radio stations. Roosevelt also sent his close aide Admiral William D. Leahy as ambassador to Vichy, for which the president paid a steep political price. His enemies in the press and elsewhere assailed him mercilessly for cooperating with such a malodorous regime.

  For a while, Roosevelt felt that the sixty-three-year-old General Giraud was the best choice of a go-between who could command Vichy troops to lay down their arms. He was a legendary soldier in the French army, as well as a master of disguises. Captured by the Germans in World War I, Giraud escaped and faked his way across half of Europe posing as “a butcher, a stable boy, a coal merchant, and a magician.” Until recently he had been held prisoner in the Konigstein dungeon, where he “shaved his mustache, darkened his hair with brick dust, and, with a homemade rope he had plaited by hand, lowered himself 150 feet to the Elbe.” Passing himself off as an engineer, he made it back to France with a 100,000 mark price on his head.13

  After indicating that he was receptive to helping the Allies, Giraud was loaded into a British submarine and taken to Gibraltar where, on the eve of the invasion, he made himself unbearable. Through an interpreter, Giraud told Eisenhower, who was in overall command of the invasion, that he expected to be in supreme command of all Allied troops during the operation. Furthermore, he produced a detailed set of plans for liberating France and defeating Nazi Germany. Taken aback, Eisenhower offered Giraud command of all the French troops he could recruit, but he was not about to offer him his own job. Giraud persisted, however, sulking, grandstanding, and in the end he threatened not to help the Allies at all.

  After this unhappy encounter, it was learned that Admiral Darlan, the Vichy commander of North Africa, had gone to Algiers to visit his son, who was sick with polio. He was promptly captured by a pro-Allied group and brought to the American high command. At first Darlan agreed to tell the Vichy troops to join the Allies; then he waffled and said he would have to speak with Marshal Philippe Pétain at Vichy. When Pétain told him instead to resist the invasion, Darlan again promised Eisenhower that he would order the French troops to cease fire, then lied and said he had no authority outside the city of Algiers.

  Roosevelt had indeed gotten in bed with skunks, but it was the kind of political intrigue he enjoyed. When the press and politicians excoriated him for dealing with Vichy, Roosevelt followed the advice Winston Churchill had given him: “Just tell them it’s a temporary expedient of war.”14

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  IN THE MEANTIME, something dreadful was being hatched in the South Pacific. In May 1942 the Japanese had established a small seaplane base on the island of Tulagi in the Solomon Islands to the northeast of Australia. By July aerial photos showed they also had begun constructing a major air base on the much larger nearby island of Guadalcanal. Evidently, even though their surprise attack on New Guinea’s Port Moresby had been thwarted at the Coral Sea battle, the Japanese had not given up on their designs for taking Australia—or at least in establishing a base to bomb the American shipping lanes and their supply and support facilities in the New Hebrides and New Caledonia chains of islands.

  The development was alarming and clearly would need to be countered, since what the Japanese were building amounted to an unsinkable aircraft carrier that could do immeasurable damage. The U.S. Army as yet could not provide trained troops to attack the enemy. So the Navy decided to send in the Marines. Roosevelt was briefed and gave his approval, not knowing that he had just sanctioned one of the most storied battles of the Pacific war. The issue seesawed back and forth so often it gave the president and his cabinet cause to question its wisdom in the first place.

  The First Marine Division, seventeen thousand strong, was escorted by a task force commanded by Admiral Fletcher that included the carriers Saratoga, Enterprise, and the new carrier Wasp. Because of the danger of enemy air attacks, Fletcher agreed to stick around for only two days. This horrified the Marine commander, Major General Alexander A. Vandegrift, because the troop transports would be unprotected for one to three days while unloading—as would the Marines, from who-knew-what might be encountered on the island.

  At dawn on August 7, 1942, the American task force began landing Marines on Guadalcanal and Tulagi.

  The Solomon Islands are one of the darkest, most forbidding territories on earth. No tropical paradise like Tahiti or the beaches of Waikiki, it was a mountainous, slug-shaped tropical hell about ninety miles long and twenty-five miles wide. When the transports arrived at night (in what would be known as Ironbottom Sound for the number of warships soon to be sunk there), the aroma of fresh ocean breezes soon changed into a fetid, sinister stink of rotting tropic vegetation and scummy, stagnant “rivers” filled with ferocious crocodiles. The widely traveled writer Jack London remarked in his South Seas Tales that “the worst punishment I could inflict on my enemies would be to banish them to the Solomons.”15

  Shortly before dawn the cruisers and destroyers opened up with their batteries on the beaches of Guadalcanal. The Japanese radio on Tulagi, twenty miles away, sounded the alarm to the big Japanese base at Rabaul, six hundred miles north, which immediately dispatched a flight of twenty-seven twin-engine bombers to forestall the Allied invasion. From their hiding places far up the island chain, coast watchers—former Australian coconut planters—sighted the Japanese aircraft and broadcast a warning to the fleet, causing the ships to stop unloading and scatter.

  Planes from the U.S. carriers shot down fourteen of the bombers, and no hits were scored on American ships. Landing forces were pleasantly surprised to find that on Guadalcanal there were mostly only Japanese laborers and Korean slaves building the aerodrome. The Japanese on Tulagi were likewise dispatched, but not without a sharp fight. All in all it had been a good day. As the Americans would soon discover, however, nights were a different matter.

  The Japanese had immediately dispatched a power naval fleet of seven cruisers and escorting destroyers to deal with the U.S. warships. Six Allied cruisers and nineteen destroyers were cruising Ironbottom Sound the night of August 8, protecting the eighteen troop transports that continued to unload. The night was squally, and lightning flashes eerily lit up the cone of an extinct volcano named Savo Island that lay at the north of the sound.

  Upon their approach, the Japanese cruisers launched a number of floatplanes with flares, which suddenly lit up the sky above the Allied ships. A U.S. destroyer came to life: “Warning! Warning! Strange ships entering the harbor!” The Australian cruiser Canberra was the first to go, torpedoed and sunk by a salvo of twenty 8-inch shells. The cruiser Chicago was nearly blown in half. The Astoria was set aflame, as was the Quincy, which, in a gallant action, got off a salvo before starting to go down; this probably saved the American troopships still unloading at the beaches. The Quincy’s final shots hit the chartroom of the Japanese command cruiser; without navigation tools, and in the narrow confines of the sound on a rainy night, the Japanese broke off the action. But not before another U.S. cruiser, the Vincennes, was sent to the bottom in flames.

  Thus ended the Battle of Savo Island, the new worst disaster the U.S. Navy had suffered in a sea battle. From beginning to end, it took just thirty-five minutes. A thousand and twenty sailors were dead, and the U.S. cruiser force was decimated. Japanese skill at night fighting was stunning. Their use of superior night glasses, as well as optics, searchlights, flares, night gunnery, and torpedo training, had completely overwhelmed the Americans. The d
efeat was so horrendous that Admiral King actually kept it from Roosevelt for a time.

  This was the first of six naval battles for Guadalcanal, with the Americans getting the worst of it for the first half, before getting the hang of it and sinking most Japanese ships in the end.

  * * *

  THE U.S. MARINES on Guadalcanal were on their own. Standing on the beaches, they gaped as dozens of small boats began to arrive with hundreds of oil-blackened, burned, dismembered, or dead bodies of sailors fished from the bloody, oil-slicked waters of Ironbottom Sound.

  Every night on Guadalcanal the Japanese dispatched a bomber known as “Washing Machine Charlie,” for the queer sound of his engines. He would drop a load of bombs on the marines’ camp at the airfield and then fly back to Rabaul. Five days after they had landed, a patrol had gone out to investigate reports that the Japanese were flying the white flag of surrender. It was led by the colonel in charge of the intelligence section (who should have known better) and contained intelligence analysts, medical officers, and others unaccustomed to combat. They were ambushed on the beach and slaughtered. Of twenty-six men in the patrol only three escaped.

  The next week, the Japanese—under the impression that the marine landing was merely a raid—sent a thousand-man detachment composed of soldiers who were supposed to have captured Port Moresby on New Guinea but for the Battle of the Coral Sea. Their commander decided to attempt one of the Japanese army’s infamous banzai charges, in which large bodies of troops screaming Banzai! (“May the emperor live a thousand years!”) rush and overwhelm an enemy position with shock and speed.

  This time it did not work.