by Ian W. Toll
On the morning of the 15th, Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins drove with the prime minister to his private train, which he boarded from a private siding on Sixth Street. The president bid his goodbyes from the car; Hopkins walked with Churchill and his entourage to the train. Hopkins handed Churchill a note and present for Mrs. Churchill (“Clemmie”), in which he had written: “You would have been quite proud of your husband on this trip. . . .”
After a marathon flight across the Atlantic by flying boat, with a refueling stop in Bermuda, Churchill returned to London to find a very difficult political situation. The news had been very bad, both in East Asia and in North Africa. Parliament was threatening a revolt; the criticism of his leadership had grown very pointed. The prime minister might have taken some solace from a warm note from Roosevelt, who had turned sixty on January 30. The president had written, “It is fun to be in the same decade with you.” Churchill made a masterful defense in the House of Commons, and demanded a vote of confidence, which he received, on January 27, by a vote of 464 to 1.
Chapter Six
IN THE U.S. NAVY OF 1942, EVERY ADMIRAL KNEW EVERY OTHER ADMIRAL, at least by name and face. But King and Nimitz had never been close, either personally or professionally. King’s overbearing domination drew a sharp contrast to Nimitz’s soft-spoken collegiality, and if it had been up to the new COMINCH to name Kimmel’s replacement, it is safe to assume he would have chosen someone else. Nimitz understood that his tenure was probationary. In letters to his wife, the Texan confided that he and King had not yet established trust or rapport. He would have to tread carefully, for when the COMINCH lost confidence in a man, the consequences were felt immediately.
In a secure cable dated January 2, 1942, King let it be known that he was not pleased with the dilatory and halfhearted deployment of the American aircraft carriers since December 7. He wanted hit-and-run raids on Japan’s “fixed aircraft carriers”—Makin in the Gilberts and a constellation of island air bases in the Marshalls. He urged Nimitz to send the carriers steaming at high speed into enemy waters, to launch bombing raids with total surprise on enemy islands, to catch the Japanese in their beds, knock out their planes on the ground, crater their airstrips, level their hangars, machine shops, and barracks, kill their pilots and maintenance crews, blow up their fuel tanks, and torpedo the ships anchored in their lagoons.
Nimitz mulled it over with his staff. There were sensible and well-reasoned objections, not the sort that could be dismissed as timorous or craven. Admiral Claude C. Bloch, chief of the Fourteenth Naval District, who was directly responsible for the defense of Hawaii, baldly stated that the loss of the carriers would leave Hawaii exposed to invasion. As a matter of well-established doctrine, sending carriers into the range of land-based bombers was thought to be a tactical loser, unless the attackers were certain of achieving total surprise. The Japanese had done it successfully on December 7—but now, with the war on, wouldn’t they anticipate such attacks along the eastern perimeter of their empire? If so, there was a grave risk of devastating counterstrikes against the American flattops by Japanese twin-engine land bombers that had longer legs than the American carrier planes.
Moreover, was it even worth the risk? Planning documents produced by the CINCPAC staff during that period reveal that very little was known about those secluded atolls of the Marshalls and Gilberts: they were largely shrouded in mystery. But it seemed likely that they offered little in the way of high-value targets. What good was punching craters in a coral airstrip when the damage could be so readily repaired? None of the enemy’s major capital ships was likely to be found anchored in those remote islands, and the shore installations were not particularly important or valuable. Why take a gamble and lose more ships so early in the war, when the prudent course was to buy time to rebuild? Risky operations could wait until 1943, when the American economy had been fully mobilized and a new fleet delivered into Nimitz’s hands. The danger to the carriers was vividly illustrated on January 11, when the Saratoga was struck by a Japanese torpedo about 500 miles south of Oahu. She returned to Pearl under her own power, but the damage required that she return to Puget Sound for repairs. Saratoga was one of four American carriers in the Pacific; her loss, wrote Edwin Layton, “cut our offensive strength by 25 percent.”
On January 7, Task Force 8, built around the carrier Enterprise, entered Pearl Harbor for her periodic refueling and reprovisioning. Vice Admiral Halsey, who had commanded the task force with Enterprise as his flagship since before the war began, planted himself at Nimitz’s conference table for the regular morning meeting at 8 a.m. on the 8th. With him was his cruiser commander, Rear Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, the trusty understudy who would eventually eclipse Halsey as a superior fleet commander. A week earlier, Halsey had been summoned to testify before the Roberts Commission (the first of several Pearl Harbor investigations), and the questioning had turned to his opinion on the proper use of carriers. Halsey replied that they were tantamount to a naval cavalry, and quoted the Confederate cavalry general Nathan Bedford Forrest: “I think General Forrest’s description is the best thing I know, to get to the other fellow with everything you have and as fast as you can and to dump it on him. You have to scout out and find it, and as soon as you find it, send everything you can at him and hit him with it.”
Halsey was all for the proposed raid on the Marshalls. It might divert Japanese forces from their southern drive, where they were threatening the Coral Sea area and even Australia itself. Landing a heavy punch on those outer perimeter outposts of the Japanese Empire would protect Samoa and other positions on the Australia lifeline by degrading the effectiveness of their air bases. Halsey theatrically declared that he would take the Enterprise into the Marshalls and do it himself. He argued with spirit and conviction. It was important to strike the enemy somewhere, if only to retrieve the navy’s self-respect. Certainly there were risks, he acknowledged—but what battle was ever fought without risks? In contrast to the skeptics, he seemed not to have been shaken by the failures and setbacks of the first month of the war.
Halsey had not yet tasted fame, and possibly did not yet realize that he would become the public face of the U.S. Navy, but in pointed contrast to King or Nimitz he was willing to play the part of the salt-stained sea gladiator. Samuel Eliot Morison would observe that the press “expected admirals to pound the table and bellow as in the movies.” Halsey pounded and bellowed. He had just the right look for the role. His square face was battered by wind, sun, and salt; his thinning hair was combed straight back from his spacious forehead; his wide-set eyes were crowned by a regal pair of undomesticated Scottish eyebrows. When he smiled, he seemed to leer. Like General George S. Patton (to whom he is inevitably compared), he appeared to love war. He was a sailor’s sailor, and popular on the lower deck. “As the general rule,” he avowed, “I never trust a sailorman who doesn’t smoke or drink.” In January 1942, he was eager to get the show on the road. An ordnanceman on the Enterprise recalled passing near his quarters and overhearing the admiral “thundering away, cursing Washington and the shore-based admirals for their cowardice.”
In a sense, Halsey had lived his entire life in the navy. His father had been a naval officer before him, and as a child he had lived all around the world. At age fifteen he had written directly to President McKinley, asking for a Naval Academy appointment. The letter contained numerous errors of spelling and fact, and was addressed (contrary to protocol) to “Major William McKinley,” the president’s old army rank. It was never answered. But his mother bent the ears of the right people, and Halsey was admitted as a naval cadet in July 1900. At the academy he ran up a precariously high tally of demerits, but he was always well-liked among his peers. With appealing self-deprecation, he would later brag of being a star fullback on the worst football team in the history of the navy. (In 1903, the team fell to Army by a score of 40–5.) He graduated with the class of 1904, one year before Nimitz, ranked forty-third in his class of sixty-two. The Lucky Bag called him �
�everyone’s friend” and “A real old salt. Looks like a figurehead of Neptune.”
Halsey’s early years in the service were largely in destroyers. He took his first command in 1909 (USS DuPont) and by 1920 had commanded a destroyer division. He did tours in the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, and as naval attaché in U.S. embassies in Germany, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. He served (as required for all those officers climbing into the higher ranks) in battleships, and completed the course at the Naval War College in the early years of the Depression. In 1934, as a fifty-two-year-old captain, he took the lateral route into the field of naval aviation by reporting to Pensacola for flight training. It was late in life to learn how to fly, and he was not a naturally gifted flyer, but he earned his wings the following year, qualifying him for carrier command. He had the Saratoga for two years, and then returned to Pensacola as commander of the Naval Air Station. He was promoted rear admiral in 1938. By the outbreak of the Second World War he was one of the navy’s most seasoned carrier task force commanders.
Nimitz was relieved to have the vigorous support of the man who would lead the operation. Moreover, he was receiving radio intelligence that seemed to improve the risk assessment. Enemy radio traffic had risen sharply in Truk in the Carolines but remained steady in the Marshalls, suggesting the pattern of a southward fleet movement. More concretely, fragmentary radio decrypts referred to a Koryaku Butai, or “occupation force,” aimed at Rabaul on New Britain. If the Japanese fleet was moving toward Rabaul, there was no danger that the American carrier task forces would blunder into it thousands of miles north, in the central Pacific. Air and submarine reconnaissance also tended to confirm that there would be no unpleasant surprises in the Marshalls.
On January 9, Nimitz assented to the raid and put Halsey in command of it. It would be folded into another, primarily defensive mission. Samoa was to be reinforced by a marine brigade, which had sailed two days earlier from San Diego in a slow convoy of four transports. The convoy was accompanied by Task Force 17, built around the carrier Yorktown, recently arrived from the Atlantic and under the command of Admiral Fletcher. Halsey and Task Force 8 would go south to provide air cover and an anti-submarine screen until the convoy arrived safely at its destination. Enterprise would join up with the Yorktown and then sail northwest for the Marshalls. They would sneak across the International Date Line and race toward the Japanese bases. Enterprise would hit Kwajalein, Maloelap, and Wotje in the heart of the Marshall Islands, while Yorktown peeled off to the south and hit Makin, Mili, and Jaluit in the Gilberts and southern Marshalls.
AS ENTERPRISE LAY AT HER BERTH in Pearl Harbor, her crew worked around the clock, taking aboard fuel, fresh water, provisions, and ammunition. As usual, the rumor mill spun without interruption, and although the crew had been left in the dark, no one doubted that the Enterprise’s war was about to begin in earnest. The massive loading, on an urgent timetable, could mean only one thing: “Are loading for bear,” read a notation in one of the air group diaries.
On the morning of January 11, Nimitz and Halsey walked together from the headquarters to the pier and shook hands at the foot of the gangway. “All sorts of luck to you, Bill!” called Nimitz. At noon, the carrier with her screening cruisers and destroyers took in their lines and got underway. By mid-afternoon they had left the dry, dusty foliage of Barbers Point astern and were steaming into the offing at better than 25 knots. Once they were safely at sea, Halsey briefed his air groups, letting them know that after the rendezvous off Samoa they would turn north and “raise a little hell up in the Gilberts or Marshalls.” There was no general announcement as yet, but among the men, who could sense what was coming, there was a discernable lift in morale.
Southward, toward the equator, each day was a little hotter than the last, and soon it was downright uncomfortable belowdecks. Sea level is sea level anywhere, but sea level bulges outward slightly at the equator, so crossing the line from north to south involves climbing over a hill of water. The interior of the Enterprise was a warren of metallic corridors connected by hatches, lit with harsh electric overhead lights and lined with cables, air ducts, and piping. Before December 7, most of those internal spaces had been painted white or gray, but now that the Japanese attack had dramatized the flammability of paint, working parties were put to the tedious work of chipping it all away, inch by square inch, with iron scrapers. They tore up the linoleum tiles and scraped smooth the steel underneath. They worked in the sweltering, airless heat—exacerbated by the wartime requirement of keeping the watertight doors and hatches dogged down—and found that they sweated through their uniforms so quickly they might as well strip them off and work in their underwear. It was brutal, hateful, thankless work—“a labor of the damned,” one wrote. The pilots, on their daylight patrols, kept their canopies open to cool themselves, but even the wind was sultry and oppressive. When they could fly through a rain squall they did so gratefully, craning their necks around their windshields, letting the blessed cool water run all over them and their planes—but such adventures also raised the risk of getting lost.
Accidents and navigational errors took a heavy toll. One of the SBDs of Scouting Six came within a whisker of shooting down a four-engine flying boat that proved to belong to New Zealand. On January 13, a pilot attached to the same squadron broke radio silence, a violation of orders and an act that put the entire task force in jeopardy. On January 16, a dive-bomber landing on the Enterprise tore clear of an arresting wire and ran off the deck onto the catwalk, where it mortally wounded a chief petty officer. Later that day, one of the bombers of Torpedo Six ditched at sea and its crew was set adrift in a lifeboat, where they would drift for twenty-four days and wash up on an island 750 miles away, sun-baked and starving. Pilots flying search patrols sometimes got lost in the overcast, and drifted far off course; and on one occasion the Enterprise had to break radio silence to bring a lost bird home, a breach of security that put Halsey and his staff officers in a bad temper.
Pilots were in short supply; more were due to arrive from the States, but not until April or May. In the rapid fleet expansion of 1940–41, many new aviators had entered the air groups. Some of the Enterprise pilots would make their very first carrier landing on this cruise. The rookies were still learning how to make attack runs. Everything was being learned, practiced, and improvised. Standards were improving with practice, but this was war, and war was an unforgiving school. The green pilots were making too many mistakes. They would have to lift their game, and do it fast.
The screening ships were also were plagued with accidents and bad luck. A sailor was lost overboard from the destroyer Blue. A man on the cruiser Salt Lake City was crushed in one of her turrets. Throughout the task force, the results of antiaircraft gunnery practice gave little encouragement. Even after the heavy training schedules in the lead-up to the war, the carrier groups had much to learn about operating at sea in war conditions. They were learning that they needed more of everything: more training, more gunnery practice, more antiaircraft guns of every caliber, more ammunition, more supplies, more spare parts. The .50-caliber ammunition was dangerously scarce, and certain categories of airplane-mounted ordnance were running low. There was a real danger of running out of torpedoes on this cruise. There were not enough floatplanes to carry out reconnaissance flights, either operating from the islands or from the heavy cruisers. For the moment, there were a sufficient number of planes on the carriers but precious few in reserve, and losses would be difficult to replace. There was an urgent need for better communications technology: better radios, better radar, new beacons and homing equipment, and all agreed they urgently needed the emerging technology known as identification-friend-or-foe (IFF) systems, to help gunners distinguish American planes and thus avoid shooting at their friends.
North of Samoa, the Enterprise launched heavy air searches to the northwest while 5,000 marines got safely ashore at Pago Pago. Men on the flight deck could see the green hills of the British Samoa Islands. The
carrier stood east and then west for five days, waiting to rendezvous with her sister, the Yorktown. They met on January 23, and two days later the fleet hauled off to the northwest, toward the Marshalls, which lay some 1,600 miles away, on the far side of the International Date Line. The Yorktown group sailed about 150 miles astern of Halsey and the Enterprise group, with plans to peel off to the south to hit Jaluit and Mili in the southern part of the Marshalls and Makin in the Gilberts.
The last days of January were fine, and the task force advanced through a gently rolling sea under a pastel blue sky. But as they approached the date line the wind picked up, and as reporter Robert Casey stood on the deck of the Salt Lake City he took in an “intensely dramatic” setting—“a gray-blue sea laced with white-gray wave-tops—a cloudy gray sky that was almost black at the zenith and lightened to a sort of mauve by reflected sunset at the horizon.” The task force advanced in a circular formation with the carrier always at the center. From the flight deck of the Enterprise, men could see the screening vessels spread out around the horizon in every direction. The heavy cruisers bucked along, two on each side of the ship; and the destroyers in the outer ring, riding up and down the waves, throwing up seas on either side, labored mightily. To Casey, the ships on the horizon appeared like “silhouettes”—“motionless, deep cuttings of gray matt pasted against the sky. Only the tremendous white waves looping their bows showed that they were moving. All about us was a high, hissing spume as we drove into the rollers.”
