Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942

by Ian W. Toll

  “Dad was a people man entirely,” Chester Junior told his father’s biographer. “He really wasn’t interested in the guns and technology of the navy.” The judgment was a little unreasonable—Nimitz had at one point been the navy’s foremost expert on diesel engines. But it was certainly true that in the latter half of his career, when he was being groomed for high command, Nimitz concerned himself with the general discipline of leadership. He had closely observed the best of his commanders and consciously modeled himself after them. His specialty, if he could be said to have one, was in nurturing and managing the navy’s human capital. His real genius was as a leader, a manager, a judge, and a motivator of men. In the late 1920s, he was appointed to teach at Berkeley as a professor of naval science and tactics. There he spent much of his time recruiting students to the Naval Reserve program, a program that he always held close to his heart. He found great satisfaction in “working with young and extremely independent young men with untrammeled minds—and trying to introduce a little discipline into their thinking and actions.”

  In 1935, he took the first of two tours of duty at the Bureau of Navigation, the navy’s personnel department, responsible for “procurement, training, promotion, assignment, and discipline of officers and enlisted personnel in the Navy.” He had a special talent for identifying talented officers and putting them in positions in which their talents would shine. The bureau gave him jurisdiction over the two major feeders for naval officers, the Naval Academy and Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC), as well as all the boot camps and other special training schools and programs. He championed the controversial policy of eliminating any differences in the uniforms worn by reservist and regular navy officers. The policy, intended to bolster the authority of the reservists, was unpopular among many in the “Annapolis clique.” But it avoided the discrepancy that existed in the British navy, in which reserve officers wore wavy gold stripes (from which sprung the derogatory nickname “the wavy navy”). As chief of the Bureau of Navigation, Nimitz sent out an “ALNAV”—a message to all admirals on all ships and stations—directing them all to take reservists as their personal aides and release their Naval Academy graduates for sea duty. Mahan’s dictum that good men and bad ships make a better navy than bad men and good ships was always near Nimitz’s thoughts. He was an Annapolis man, but never tolerated blinkered parochialism when it ran against the interests of the service.

  Under Roosevelt’s administration there had been a tremendous fleet buildup. Major naval spending acts in 1934, 1938, and 1940 created a voracious appetite for officers and enlisted men at all ranks. (The “Two-Ocean Navy” act of 1940 aimed to build two fleets large enough to operate independently without sinning against Mahan’s law of concentration. It authorized a 70 percent expansion of the fleet for a then-stupefying price tag of $4 billion.) Nimitz, more than any man in the service, had provided the needed manpower. He introduced the practice of advertising naval recruiting campaigns in newspapers and magazines. The basic training period for enlisted recruits was shortened from eight to six weeks. The Naval Academy class was enlarged by 25 percent, and the academic course shortened from four to three years. New ROTC programs were founded at universities across the country. To carry out the administrative and clerical tasks of the expanding service, he pioneered the hiring of thousands of women as yeomen (F) or yeomanettes.

  He was not an aviator and had never served on a carrier, but he had spent much of his career at sea—as all naval officers were expected to do—and his seagoing billets were appropriately varied between destroyers, cruisers, and battleships. He had held a series of important staff jobs; he had engaged in war planning, commanded a cruiser division, and commanded a battleship division. At sea he always assumed that his subordinates knew their jobs until confronted with clear evidence that they did not. He did not affect the “blood and thunder” style of command. He gave his men plenty of scope to act and came down on them only when they had revealed themselves as complacent or incompetent. In such cases he spoke in a low voice, and in polite but blunt terms told a man that his performance had fallen short. “Admiral Nimitz never raised his voice and I never heard him curse during the many years I served with him,” wrote Lamar. “But he had a calm and cool manner of dressing down an ensign or even Admiral Halsey when and if he needed it. He never showed displeasure publicly, and I could only tell when he was upset by seeing him biting his lips. Then his steely blue eyes would flash.” He was not a slave driver, and he looked after the welfare of his men. Lamar recalled that the admiral “never failed to ask me, whenever we went out, whether his orderlies and drivers had had their chow.” But he did not lack the ruthlessness required of all military commanders in wartime. Later, when losses mounted during the Pacific offensive in 1943–44, he would say: “This is one of the responsibilities of command. You have to send some people to their deaths.”

  As he studied the photographs and briefing reports on board the Super Chief, Nimitz contemplated the full dimensions of the challenge lying ahead of him. He would be inheriting a shattered command, a crippled fleet, and a deeply demoralized staff. He would arrive in Hawaii at a time when it was generally feared that the islands might be overrun by the enemy. He would be in charge of the largest naval war that had ever been waged, and hold command over a war theater that was larger, in square miles, than any other presided over by any military commander in history. The fleet that would destroy the Japanese navy and take the war into the western Pacific would be of a size and scale fundamentally unlike any force ever before assembled. It would require mobilizing the entire American economy and the entire American people. On Sunday, Nimitz again wrote to Catherine, and this time his tone was more guarded. “Had a fine sleep and awoke much refreshed, but after spending most of today reading reports and estimates I find it difficult to keep on the cheerful side. Perhaps when I actually arrive and get over the first shock, things will be better.”

  They rolled on through miles of painted desert, an epic landscape of mesas and red sandstone cliffs. Navajo women sold blankets and jewelry at the stations of the little towns along the way. Nimitz again tried and failed to teach Lamar how to play cribbage. In Arizona, the landscape continued much the same, with abandoned Hopi pueblos sometimes visible from the train windows, and solitary cacti standing here and there on the hills, and at Seligman their watches were set back another hour. They crossed the Colorado River into the California town of Needles, and continued on through the forbidding plains of the Mojave Desert, where forlorn, sun-baked mountain ranges sat in the distance. Gradually the land grew more fertile as they entered the heart of California. Soon there were apple, peach, and cherry orchards, then a sea of orange and lemon groves. They passed through Fontana, where in two years’ time Henry Kaiser would build the first integrated steel mill west of the Rockies. Further westward the palm-lined bungalow communities grew larger and more numerous, and billboard-lined highways stretched away on either side of the tracks; then suddenly there were warehouses, canning sheds, and refrigeration plants towering over the fenced lettuce fields; and everywhere were canals, culverts, and ditches bringing water to make the produce grow. Through tunnels, over bridges, into Pasadena, and on Monday morning the Super Chief rolled into the City of Angels.

  Nimitz shook hands with Lamar, who was to fly back to Washington, and boarded a connecting train for San Diego, arriving the afternoon of December 22. There he spent the night as a guest of the local naval air station commander. He was to fly to Oahu in a PB2Y-2 Coronado flying boat, but stormy weather on December 23 made for a rough takeoff attempt. One of the wingtips dragged under the water, and the plane taxied back to base, defeated. The following day, Christmas Eve, the weather was more cooperative. The admiral expressed regrets to the pilot and aircrew for separating them from their families on the holiday. Before his departure Nimitz wrote his wife, closing with the thought: “I only hope I can live up to the high expectations of you and the President and the Department. I will faithfully pr
omise to do my best.” At four in the afternoon, the big seaplane, heavily laden with fuel for the long haul to Pearl Harbor, roared down the channel and wobbled into the sky.

  FOR TWO DESPERATE WEEKS, the little garrison on Wake Island had held out against relentless Japanese sea and air attacks. The atoll was one of the most remote places on earth, a V-shaped tendril of sand, scrub, and coral rock, 2,300 miles from Oahu, 2,000 miles from Tokyo, 600 miles north of the only slightly less godforsaken atolls of the northern Marshall Islands and the Japanese airfields from which the daily bombing raids had come. Wake and its two small sister islets of Wilkes and Peale, comprising about three square miles all told, were remnants of the partly submerged rim of an ancient volcano. They encircled a shark-infested, cobalt blue lagoon, too shallow and thickly strewn with coral heads to accommodate ships of any draft. With a peak elevation of 20 feet, the islands were so close to the sea that ships might pass within a dozen miles and never know they were there. They had no palm trees, no freshwater sources, produced no food other than fish, and were populated only by flightless birds, hermit crabs, and rats that had deserted some visiting ship decades or possibly centuries earlier. A primitive scrub clung to the parched coral soil. Waves broke across a fringing coral reef, and the din of booming surf was Wake’s everlasting background music. The sound was not unpleasant but very loud, so much so that men had to raise their voices to make themselves heard, and (perilously) the engines of approaching airplanes could not be detected until they were immediately overhead.

  Wake’s sole value was as a way station, a link in the chain of islands connecting the United States to Asia through the axis of Oahu, Midway, Guam, and the Philippines. It had been annexed in 1899, first to serve as a cable relay on the transpacific telegraph, later as a coaling station and a refueling stop for the Pan-American China Clipper Service, whose big four-engine passenger seaplanes landed in the lagoon twice a week. In January 1941, the navy had constructed a 4,500-foot crushed-coral airstrip, and had been working with what little manpower and material resources were on hand to improve defensive installations and ground support facilities for aircraft. The lagoon’s small sea-channel was being dredged and coral heads dynamited with the intention of developing an anchorage for large ships. About 1,000 civilian construction workers were converting the Pan-Am facilities on Peale Island into an expanded air station. Two military camps, each with barracks, offices, and storehouses, stood at opposite ends of Wake. A garrison of 450 officers and men of the 1st Marine Defense Battalion was stationed at the shore batteries and defensive works along the southern beaches of Wake and Wilkes islands; many of those men were quartered in tents. The atoll’s entire air force consisted of the twelve F4F-3 Wildcats of Marine Fighting Squadron 211 (VMF-211), which had flown in from the carrier Enterprise four days before the war.

  At noon on December 8 (local date), just hours after the raid on Pearl, Wake was attacked by thirty-four G3M medium bombers operating from the island of Roi in the Marshall Islands. They glided in from the south, under the clouds, at altitude 1,500 feet. No one saw or heard them until less than a minute before the first bombs fell. Four of the Wildcats were patrolling at 12,000 feet, but did not spy the enemy bombers 10,000 feet beneath them. Two more planes had been ordered into the sky but had not yet taken off. Eight new blue-gray marine fighters, two thirds of Wake’s entire air strength, were parked almost wing to wing on the edge of the strip. They were not properly dispersed because there was very little room on the cramped airfield to disperse them. The G3Ms roared overhead in a tight “Vee-of-vee” formation and dropped their sticks of 60-kilogram fragmentation bombs with lethal accuracy: they fell directly among the parked aircraft and adjoining machine shops. At the same time the Japanese gunners strafed the pilots and ground crews who were caught out in the open. Dozens of men were cut down in their tracks as they ran across the airfield. The attack unfolded very quickly; the bombers were there and then they were gone. They banked left to attack Camp 2 and the Pan-Am Terminal on Peale Island, wiping out several of the buildings and facilities in that area, and killing ten Pan-Am employees. Then they banked left again and raced away to the south. Neither the marine antiaircraft gunners nor the four planes in the air were able to react in time, and the attackers made a clean escape.

  Wake’s senior officer, Commander Winfield Scott Cunningham, learned of the attack when a line of bullet holes walked across the ceiling of his Camp 2 headquarters. He leapt into his pickup truck and raced down the main road to the airfield. There, through a shimmering heat haze, he saw the charred hulks of eight precious Grummans, “flames licking over them from end to end.” Two large aviation fuel tanks had taken direct hits and detonated, and drums of gasoline along the airfield perimeter were ablaze. Oily black smoke boiled up from the fires and carried away to leeward. Tents had been shredded by machine-gun fire: the aerial gunners had missed nothing. Strewn across the hard-packed coral surface of the airstrip were “broken bodies and bits of what had once been men.”

  As in the Philippines and Malaya, the initial Japanese airstrikes had come quickly, over a shockingly long range, and were conducted much more skillfully than the Allied airmen had expected. “Our planes on the ground were like targets in a carnival shooting gallery, stationary targets that could not shoot,” wrote one of the surviving pilots, Lieutenant John Kinney. Seven of the eight Wildcat fighters at the airfield were destroyed; the eighth was badly shot up but by a heroic patch-job was made airworthy. That left just five fighters to contest the ensuing waves of airstrikes. The strafing and bombing had taken a terrible toll on both the air and ground crews. Of VMF-211’s fifty-five men on the ground, twenty-three were killed and eleven wounded. Not a single aircraft mechanic escaped injury. The squadron had suffered more than 50 percent casualties in the first few minutes of combat.

  Cunningham and his officers correctly guessed that the attack had come from Roi or one of the other airstrips of the northern Marshall Islands. Assuming the Japanese bombers would not fly at night, they worked backwards to deduce that another attack would fall the next day at midday. Pilots and mechanics, including several walking wounded, worked on repairing damage to the five serviceable planes. Bulldozers borrowed from the civilian contractors dug crude revetments in which to park those survivors. The remaining aviation fuel tanks were dispersed far away from the airfield. The wounded were transported to the Camp 2 hospital on the back of trucks. The Pan-Am seaplane, anchored in the lagoon, had been hit several times, but luckily none of its vital systems was beyond repair. The company asked for and received Cunningham’s permission to send the plane to Hawaii with as many of its employees as it could carry. (To Cunningham’s disgust, all of the company’s non-white employees were left behind.) For the sake of morale and common decency, the dead had to be removed from the field before they were swarmed by the island’s rapacious crabs. Burial details held back the crustacean horde until a dump truck arrived and transported the bodies to Camp 2, where they were placed in a refrigerated storehouse alongside ham hocks and sides of beef.

  As anticipated, the next day’s air raid arrived shortly before noon, but this time the twenty-seven attacking G3Ms bombed from high altitude, about 12,000 feet. Again the bombing was alarmingly accurate, leaving many of the remaining buildings of Camp 2 in smoking ruins. An antiaircraft battery at Peacock Point was knocked out, and the fire control equipment for one of the 5-inch shore guns was damaged. All of the surviving Wildcats were in the air to receive the enemy, and managed to send one of the Japanese bombers flaming into the sea. The marine antiaircraft batteries also opened up and shot down one of the attacking planes, and another was observed with smoke trailing as it fled to the south. The airstrip suffered no serious damage, but as Lieutenant Kinney observed, “The destruction in the vicinity of Camp 2 was devastating. Barracks buildings, both civilian and navy, were riddled, machine shops and warehouses flattened. The most devastating aspect of that day’s raid, however, was the damage done to the civilian hospital at
Camp 2. All of the wounded from the first day’s attack were there when the bombs started falling again. The hospital took at least one direct hit, probably several, and quickly burst into flames.” The patients and medical corpsmen were moved into two empty magazines, dark and airless chambers where at least they could count on some protection against bomb shrapnel.

  The besieged garrison dug in for a long campaign, with grim hopes that the navy would come to the rescue. Airstrikes continued almost daily, usually arriving about midday. The pilots and mechanics, lacking maintenance manuals, spare parts, and tools, did their best to keep their handful of Wildcats flying by cannibalizing parts from the wrecked planes at the airfield. From about ten each morning, four fighters patrolled the skies above the atoll. On the 10th, they shot down two enemy bombers, and the antiaircraft gunners put up plenty of flak that appeared to damage two more. But the twin-engine Mitsubishis dropped a bomb directly onto a Wilkes Island storage shed that held 125 tons of dynamite (used by the civilian engineers to dredge the lagoon’s sea-channel). The colossal blast dismounted one of the antiaircraft guns, destroyed a searchlight truck half a mile away, and detonated all of the marine ammunition (both 3- and 5-inch) within a quarter mile. Range-finding equipment for one of the shore batteries was destroyed. Casualties, surprisingly, were limited to one killed and four wounded, but the garrison was so small that it could hardly afford to lose a man.

  At three in the morning on December 11, marine lookouts detected faint silhouettes moving on the southern horizon. “They were like black ghosts slowly moving around out there on the ocean,” recalled Sergeant Charles Holmes. Studying them intently in the light of a half moon, the observers soon concluded they were a column of ships. Commander Cunningham was alerted. Some hoped that they might be friendly ships, a relief force from Pearl Harbor, and a few of the civilian contractors actually ran down to the beach with bags in hand, hoping to be among the first to be taken on board. Either Cunningham or the marine garrison commander, Major James Devereux, decided to keep the searchlights dark and hold fire until the ships had closed to within close range. (Both men claimed credit for the decision, leading to hard feelings after the war.) If the column included cruisers (as it did) their guns would probably be of larger caliber and longer range than Wake’s 5-inch shore guns. If so, the enemy could elect for a long-range artillery duel in which the Americans would be gravely disadvantaged. Devereux gave strict orders not to fire, but rather to “Stand quiet till I give the word to do anything.” As the ships advanced, anxiety grew among the marines: those suspenseful hours before dawn were harder on the nerves than actual combat. “We were scared to death,” Corporal Bernard Richardson later confessed. “We could see what was going to happen to us. We seemed to be surrounded . . . we could see that we were about to get it.”