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

by Ian W. Toll

  But it was the first offensive operation mounted by the Pacific Fleet, and for that reason alone it was an important boost to morale and self-confidence at a time when those considerations had grown very important. It had provided valuable practice—the navy was learning how to fight by fighting. Seventy-seven pilots of the Enterprise air group had flown a total of 158 flights, a few logging five flights and ten hours of cockpit time in a single day. The ship had consumed 148,043 gallons of fuel; in the twenty-four-hour period prior to the raid, she had steamed more than 560 miles, a record for an aircraft carrier. Alvin Kernan wrote that the early carrier raids taught the men of the fleet the skills they needed to win the Battle of Midway. “It was amazing how long it took to get the hang of it and to react instantly in the right way,” he observed. “War, we gradually learned, is a state of mind before it can be anything else.”

  As the officers huddled and debriefed, all agreed that there was plenty of room for improvement. The mission had exposed serious defects in maintaining a task force formation at high speed, in underway refueling, in the use of radar and communications to direct fighters over carriers. The F4F Wildcat’s lack of maneuverability and speed in a climb were again noted, and the chronic jamming of its .50-caliber guns was deemed a disgrace. The TBD Devastator was dangerously slow, and it seemed a miracle that none of the Enterprise’s torpedo bombers was lost. The ineptitude of antiaircraft gunnery was lamented by everyone, including the gunners themselves—better weapons and more training (especially target practice conducted from ships traveling at speeds of more than 25 knots) were urgently needed. Defense against air attack was hampered by the impossibility of distinguishing between friendly and hostile aircraft on the radar screen. Lookouts had been too quick to imagine submarine contacts. As for the cruisers and destroyers, their gunnery had been poor, and it would have to improve if the surface navy hoped to make a decent showing in the war. More fighters were needed on the carriers—there should be enough to provide ample escorts for outgoing airstrikes while also leaving some behind to protect the carrier. Robert Casey was amused by the earnest self-flagellation, which left the impression “that a great deed which yesterday had seemed like one of the most brilliant, audacious and effective naval performances of modern times was really something we ought to be ashamed of.”

  February and March would bring new hit-and-run raids on Japanese outposts. On February 20, the Lexington and a task force made a bold foray into the heart of the new Japanese empire in the south to hit the big Japanese base (wrested from the Australians) at Rabaul on New Britain. (The Lexington was detected on approach by enemy reconnaissance planes and had to hightail it to the east.) Halsey and the Enterprise visited Wake Island on February 24, and then turned north to hit Marcus Island on March 4. The latter was not a terribly significant outpost, but it lay only 1,000 miles away from Tokyo. On March 10, a task force built around Lexington and Yorktown, under Vice Admiral Wilson Brown, Jr., sent carrier bombers to raid primitive Japanese airfields at Salamaua and Lae on the north coast of New Guinea.

  The value of those early American carrier raids has often been denigrated by historians. Even during the war, many Americans apparently held the same view; Morison quotes an officer who remarked that “The Japs didn’t mind them any more than a dog minds a flea.” For the men who went along on them, the impression was of a lot of high-speed steaming across interminable Pacific distances, culminating in a few hours of largely uncontested airstrikes. Casey, who was along for several of them, remarked that “we travel something like 20,000 miles in two months for a total of about five hours of tense action.” When Halsey’s February 1 attacks were reported in Tokyo, the radio and newspapers reacted with a snore. Moreover, the Japanese, no less prone than the Americans to over-reporting of results, believed they had inflicted heavy damage on the attacking forces. The fighters of the Chitose Air Group made wildly overoptimistic claims of their destruction of American planes—seventeen American aircraft were said to be shot down over Taroa, and the fighters on Roi claimed they had flamed five American bombers.

  But a closer look at the private reactions of Japanese naval leaders leaves a sharply different impression. Halsey’s raid arrived as a very nasty surprise. Admiral Matome Ugaki, chief of staff to Yamamoto, recorded his impressions in his diary. “They have come after all,” he wrote. “They are some guys!” The raids were “a reproach that went to the heart”—they had “made us look ridiculous.” Ugaki was disgusted that the Americans had not been detected on approach, and noted that the Marshall Islands should have been better prepared for such an attack than the Americans had been two months earlier, when the two nations were not yet at war. “After experiencing defensive weakness ourselves, we cannot laugh at the enemy’s confusion at the time of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.” He mourned the death of Admiral Yatsushiro, who had been a classmate at the Japanese Naval Academy at Etajima. Captain Yoshitake Miwa, Combined Fleet’s chief of operations, reported that Yamamoto’s entire staff was infuriated, but “could only grit their teeth and jump up and down in frustration.”

  As the first reports of the raids came in, the Japanese navy sent bombers based in Truk to chase to the east; several Truk-based submarines were also sent out to take up positions in case the American task forces came farther west. Japanese radio intelligence stations listened carefully for any violation of radio silence that would allow them to home in on Halsey’s location, but received nothing except commercial broadcasts from Hawaii reporting the victory of the American task forces. Additional forces were sent out to sea to intercept any remaining U.S. ships. Ugaki lamented that the American raids had been well timed to coincide with the Japanese activity in the south. They had hit on a weak flank when the major Japanese forces were engaged elsewhere. “The enemy’s attempt was most timely because our operations were focused in the southwest Pacific and the defensive strength in the Marshalls was thin,” he wrote. “In addition to a fairly big result, they achieved their purpose of diverting our strength. Carriers closed in and heavy cruisers’ bombardment was also most daring. It seems we have been somewhat fooled. . . . There is little chance of the enemy coming up again tomorrow morning. Anyway, we have missed the game.” Dispatching so much naval force on a wild goose chase across the Pacific was “futile” and “impulsive,” according to air officer Mitsuo Fuchida. Twelve hundred miles lay between Truk and the Marshalls: in the time it would take the Japanese force to cover that distance, the American task force would surely be safe in port. Even after it was clear the Americans had escaped, two of the six carriers in Nagumo’s force, Shokaku and Zuikaku, were detached to patrol the waters off Japan. That reduced the striking power of the fearsome Kido Butai.

  Perhaps the most far-reaching consequence of Halsey’s raids was that they brought home to the Japanese admirals the vulnerability of their capital. Even if such a raid could not do great damage, the navy’s “face” was very much at stake. Ugaki correctly predicted that the Americans would soon attempt to land a direct punch on Tokyo itself. “They will adopt this kind of method in the future,” he wrote on February 2. “And the most probable move they would make would be an air raid on our capital. . . . It was fortunate for us that the enemy only scratched us on this occasion and gave us a good lesson instead of directly attacking Tokyo.” “Whatever happens,” Captain Miwa agreed, “we must absolutely prevent any air attack on Tokyo.” And since there was no foolproof defense against carrier raids, a conviction grew within their minds that they must find a way to get rid of the American carriers. Thus were sown the seeds of Yamamoto’s plan to hurl the entire strength of the Imperial Japanese Navy against Midway, in hopes of forcing the American carriers out of Pearl Harbor to fight and lose the decisive battle of the war.

  Chapter Seven

  SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON, THE FIRST AND GREATEST HISTORIAN OF American naval operations in the Second World War, compared Japan’s southward offensive to “the insidious yet irresistible clutching of multiple tentacles.” I
t was a wide-ranging sea-air-land Blitzkrieg, as precisely choreographed as a ballet. The attacks fell upon one Allied target after another, with staccato rapidity, across a 6,000-mile front. “Like some vast octopus,” wrote Morison, the Japanese advance “relied on strangling many small points rather than concentrating on a vital organ. No one arm attempted to meet the entire strength of the ABDA [“American-British-Dutch-Australian”] fleet. Each fastened on a small portion of the enemy and, by crippling him locally, finished by killing the entire animal.”

  The tip of the Japanese spear was the land-based medium bomber, often accompanied by the ubiquitous Zero. The long range of those aircraft allowed leapfrogging advances of 500 miles or more. Troop convoys approached soon thereafter, protected by cruisers and destroyers. Small parties of resourceful Japanese soldiers were put ashore on lush jungle islands where the Allies had little or no interior communications. They advanced quickly against weak local defenses. Again and again, they captured Allied airfields intact, or with slight damage. Japanese aircraft flew in and began staging for the next series of attacks farther south. When Japanese amphibious forces took control of the air base at Jolo Island, twenty-four Zeros of the Tainan Air Corps flew 1,200 nautical miles to land at the new field. That was an extraordinarily long flight for those single-engine, one-seat aircraft, but all arrived safely.

  Two weeks after Pearl Harbor, Allied resistance was crumbling so quickly that planners at the Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo brought forward their plans for the next phase of the war. That was the invasion of the Dutch East Indies and seizure of its coveted oil fields, the primary war aim of Japan’s entire southern offensive. Those assets offered the prospect of self-sufficiency for a Japanese war economy that had until now relied overwhelmingly on imported American oil. The Dutch fields needed to be taken sooner rather than later, as Japan was even then eating into its limited oil reserves. The Japanese would not wait to finish off the beleaguered Allied armies in the Philippines and Malaya—using the airfields wrested from the Americans and British, they would strike south into the heart of Field Marshal Sir Archibald Wavell’s newly constituted ABDA command before his forces could dig in.

  The rapid advance of Japanese forces on the main Philippine island of Luzon opened the way to an early invasion of the southern island of Mindanao and the capture of the American seaplane base at Davao, which provided a fine staging base for operations in the shallow waters of the Makassar Strait, the Molucca Sea, and the complex island geography of southern Oceania. Landing parties were put ashore on the thinly populated islands against little or no Allied ground resistance. With the Makassar Strait in the hands of the Japanese, the route to Sumatra and Java was suddenly unguarded and exposed.

  In late December 1941, Japanese forces landed at Kuching on Sarawak, and on Jolo, between Mindanao and Borneo in the Sulu Sea. Landings continued at Malaya, staged from Indochina through the Kra Isthmus of Siam, or across the Gulf of Siam. The great British naval base at Singapore, celebrated as the “Gibraltar of the East,” was supposed to have stood as a bulwark against Japanese advances on the islands south of Malaya. But with command of the sea and air yielded to the Japanese, Singapore was isolated and neutralized, its still considerable defending forces in no position to harass the Japanese troop convoys bypassing its eastern flank. In January 1942, a convoy advanced through the South China Sea on eastern Sumatra, from the Makassar Strait on Dutch Borneo, and established new beachheads at Brunei (January 6) and Jesselton (January 11). Forces sailing from Davao landed at Tarakan Island (January 12) and Balikpapan (January 24) on eastern Borneo, and the Menado Peninsula (January 11) and Kendari (January 24) on Celebes. The little island of Amboina, with its fine airfield, was seized on January 31. Timor, a Portuguese colony, now lay within easy grasp to the south, and from there the long, defenseless north coast of Australia would lie exposed to the conquerors.

  Borneo had been shared by the British and Dutch, neither of whom had adequate defensive forces in place. With the island’s colonial masters spread too thin, the Japanese forces rapidly gained the upper hand. The Dutch had blown up or set fire to the oil rigs to prevent their use by the Japanese. Between eighty and a hundred Dutch civilians were murdered in reprisal for that application of the “scorched earth” principle. In any case, Japanese engineers got the oil flowing again soon enough. Resistance on the island would be snuffed out by mid-February.

  On January 10, the newly appointed Marshal Wavell, supreme commander of ABDACOM, arrived in Java and set up his headquarters in Lembang, seventy-five miles southeast of Batavia. His large staff did not lack for talent—he had under his command a retinue of high-ranking generals and admirals of four nations—but it was all too clear that General Marshall’s experiment in command unity would be futile and short-lived. Admiral Hart, commander in chief of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet, had arrived by submarine in Surabaya Harbor on January 1. He would command the ABDA naval forces, officially designated as “ABDAFLOAT” (in those dire conditions the acronym was perhaps too clever). Hart had ordered the remaining surface units of the Asiatic Fleet out of the Philippines after its main base at Cavite had been left in smoking ruins by Japanese bombers three days after Pearl Harbor. The largest ship in the fleet, formerly Hart’s flagship, was a heavy cruiser, the USS Houston. She had once served as President Roosevelt’s yacht. She was accompanied by two other cruisers and thirteen ancient four-stack destroyers.

  Thomas Hart had been the first major military commander to voice the unpopular view that the Philippines were indefensible and therefore doomed. His early withdrawal had not endeared him to General MacArthur, who faulted the navy for failing to provide adequate support against the Japanese invasion convoys landing troops on Luzon. But the decision to pull the fleet out of the Philippines was the correct one. Without air cover, the fleet was defenseless, and its withdrawal to the south was necessary if it was to have any effect at all in the war.

  Even as the rapid Japanese advance seemed to throw the Allies’ basic prewar assumptions into doubt, several of the ABDA commanders were upbeat about their chances. As is usual in such cases, the commanders were expected to buck up the morale of their subordinates, and their bravado may have been calculated. But Wavell seemed adamant when he predicted that the Japanese tide sweeping down the Malay Peninsula would be stopped dead at Singapore, even after learning that the island’s northern, land-facing defense works were inadequate. As late as January 31, two weeks before the surrender of more than 60,000 British and empire troops to a much smaller Japanese army, Wavell was expressing confidence that the island would stand. British commanders in Burma likewise thought they could hold the line. The Dutch vice admiral Conrad E. H. Helfrich pledged that his forces would thwart Japanese troop landings in the East Indies. None of those optimistic forecasts would be borne out.

  The Japanese clearly intended to take Java, the richest island in the East Indies. They prepared two large invasion forces to advance down the east and west coasts of Borneo to close on opposite sides of the island in a pincer movement. It appeared that the best hope of the ABDA naval forces was to try to intercept and destroy (or at least whittle down) those fleets, perhaps sinking troopships and killing a large number of Japanese soldiers before they could get ashore. In January, however, the ABDA naval forces were busily employed in convoying Allied freighters south, and could not mount effective resistance.

  As their transnational crews by now suspected, the ships of the ABDA fleet were pitifully unprepared to meet the onslaught. Nor did they have the option to flee to safer waters and fight another day. It was their duty to face probable annihilation. Their mission was to buy time, to stall the onrushing Japanese while the Allies brought reinforcements into the theater. The fleet itself was inherently weak, a four-nation flotilla of mostly obsolete cruisers and First World War–vintage destroyers. It was a second-rate force even by the assessment of its own commanders. The ongoing decimation of Allied airpower in the theater meant that they would fight, for the
most part, without air cover.

  Hart organized his surface warships into a “Striking Force” based at Surabaya, under the command of Rear Admiral W. A. Glassford. Glassford’s ships sortied several times in mid-January, but were stymied by a lack of air reconnaissance and often failed to discover incoming enemy convoys. He withdrew to Kupang Bay in eastern Timor to refuel, and was still there on the morning of January 20 when he received a PBY Catalina’s sighting report of an enemy invasion force off Balikpapan, a major Dutch oil-producing complex on the eastern coast of Borneo. He dispatched four old “four-piper” destroyers to foil the landing. They sailed into Makassar Strait, zigzagging to throw enemy air patrols off the scent. Shortly after midnight on January 24, they reached Balikpapan Bay. Admiral Hart sent a one-word command by encrypted radio signal: “Attack!” Commodore Paul Talbot, in the John D. Ford, instructed the other captains: “Torpedo attack; hold gunfire until the fish are gone; use initiative and prosecute the strike to your utmost.”

  The destroyers approached at 27 knots. Fortunately for them, the Japanese fleet was anchored close inshore, and the oil facilities had been set ablaze by the retreating Dutch. That provided a fine backlight. The torpedo-men picked out the anchored transports as clear silhouettes. In an action lasting over three hours, Talbot’s destroyers made several close approaches and fired all of their torpedoes, sinking three enemy troop transports and a torpedo boat.