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

by Ian W. Toll

  But the Japanese army stalwartly opposed all new operations requiring troop commitments on such a large scale. Invading Australia or Ceylon would require transferring part of the Kwantung Army from Manchuria, and army leaders preferred to keep those troops in place with an eye toward invading Siberia, especially if Hitler’s spring offensive pushed the Soviet Union to the brink of collapse. In an army-navy liaison conference on March 7, the army representatives urged the navy to curb its ambitions. Admiral Ugaki griped in his diary that when the navy had presented its view, “The army took its usual attitude of refusing it . . . when they had no opinion of their own.” The Japanese army had a million troops in Manchuria and another 400,000 in China, but could not spare two divisions for operations in the Pacific or Indian oceans. Captain Yoshitake Miwa, the Combined Fleet’s air officer, vented his frustration: “We want to invade Ceylon; we are not allowed to! We want to invade Australia; we cannot! We want to attack Hawaii; we cannot do that either! All because the army will not give us the necessary forces.”

  The proper focus of future operations in the South Pacific, the army negotiators maintained, was to fortify the existing perimeter and sever enemy sea communications. To that end, they offered a plan to capture Port Moresby, on the southern coast of New Guinea. That Australian-held port was only 300 miles from the Cape York Peninsula, the northeast extremity of Australia, and would provide a fine base from which to menace Allied shipping in the Coral Sea. The beginnings of that offensive had already been set into motion with the capture of Lae and Salamaua, on the northeast coast of New Guinea, in early March. The navy agreed that Australia should be isolated from the United States, but proposed to do so by pushing farther east through the axis of the Admiralties, the Bismarcks, and the Solomons, eventually to capture New Caledonia, Samoa, and Fiji. (That was precisely the line of attack that Admiral King had most feared.) The two alternatives were not mutually exclusive. Both were aimed at interdicting sea communications between the United States and Australia, and both could be staged from Rabaul, the major Japanese sea and air base on the island of New Britain. The path of least resistance was to do both, in two stages—first seize Port Moresby, then New Caledonia, perhaps followed by Samoa and Fiji.

  These talks seemed to point toward a rough-and-ready army-navy consensus, but in mid-March, Admiral Yamamoto threw a wrench in the works. He insisted that the full strength of the Combined Fleet should be committed to a major offensive in the central Pacific, aimed at capturing the tiny American atoll of Midway.

  The proposal was a scaled-down version of the grander ambition of capturing Hawaii, a scheme that had long been championed by Japanese imperialists. In March 1942, the military and logistical barriers to a Japanese amphibious attack on Hawaii were insurmountable. Oahu was simply too strong and too far away from Japan—the constraints on available shipping and troop transportation alone ruled out such a massive operation. Moreover, the army flatly refused to supply the needed troops. But Midway, near the northwestern extremity of the Hawaiian archipelago, was a much easier nut to crack, and would provide a sea and air base from which to menace the sea routes into Pearl Harbor, which lay 1,149 miles to the southeast. It might even function as a springboard for a future invasion of Oahu.

  Combined Fleet staff planners, supervised by Admiral Ugaki, had been analyzing and refining the plan since the first week of 1942. The planning process had included extensive tabletop war gaming exercises in the Yamato’s cavernous wardroom. Yamamoto had certainly been kept apprised of these studies, which had been carried out right under his nose. But it was not until mid-March, after the army had quashed the proposed invasions of Australia and Ceylon, that the C-in-C threw the full weight of his considerable prestige and power behind the Midway plan. When he did so, his real objective was not the island itself, which was of dubious value, but the hope of flushing the Pacific Fleet out of Pearl Harbor and destroying it in a pitched naval battle. Above all, Yamamoto wanted to burn, sink, or capture the American aircraft carriers, which had been a thorn in the side of Japan’s new Pacific empire ever since they had escaped destruction on December 7, 1941. Enemy carrier planes had struck north and south of the equator—in the Marshalls (February 1, 1942), at Wake Island (February 24), in the waters east of Rabaul (February 20), at Marcus Island (March 4), at Lae and Salamaua on New Guinea (March 10). None of these raids had done a great deal of damage, and they had certainly done nothing to slow the pace of the Japanese advance. But there was no denying that the American flattops posed an ever-present threat. Halsey’s March 4 raid on lonely little Marcus Island, a mere 600 miles from the homeland, brought home the naval leadership’s most terrible fear—that the Americans might stage an attack on Tokyo itself.

  It would be no exaggeration to say that Yamamoto and his navy colleagues were obsessed with the specter of enemy bombers appearing suddenly over the capital. Since time immemorial, the Japanese people had regarded their homeland as inviolate, but their densely built wooden cities were extraordinarily vulnerable to air attack. Japanese middle-aged or older could remember the Great Kanto earthquake and fire of 1923, which had leveled huge swaths of Tokyo and Yokohama and left about 140,000 dead. A few incendiary bombs on a dry, windy day might bring a repetition of the horror. Above all, Tokyo was the imperial seat, and if the city could be hit from the air, then so could the Imperial Palace itself. Fear for the emperor’s life, wrote navy airman Mitsuo Fuchida, was an “ever-present and highly disturbing worry. . . . The fighting services, especially, were imbued with the idea that their foremost duty was to protect the Emperor from danger. Naturally, they felt that it would be a grave dereliction of this duty if the Emperor’s safety were jeopardized by even a single enemy raid on Tokyo.”

  In his private correspondence, Admiral Yamamoto returned again and again to the subject. He advised a Shinbashi geisha to move some of her property out of Tokyo, because the navy had no reliable means to deter an enemy air attack on the city. He complained bitterly of radio and press reports assuring the Japanese people that air raids were not to be feared. His staff recalled that the C-in-C asked for daily reports of the weather in Tokyo, and was always relieved to learn that the skies above the city were overcast. He directed Ugaki to arrange for long-range reconnaissance flights to be made over the eastern sea approaches, and to conscript a fleet of fishing sampans to be deployed in a picket line some 600–700 miles off the coast. In February and March, when most of the Japanese navy was engaged in conquest far to the south, erroneous reports of enemy ships or aircraft east of Japan prompted many sensational “scares.” On three separate occasions, the Combined Fleet’s main division of battleships, which had remained in the Inland Sea, was sent racing into the offing to chase those phantoms. On March 12, as Japanese cities held rallies to celebrate the surrender of the Dutch East Indies, Admiral Ugaki confided in his diary: “If real enemy planes raided amidst the festivities, the mere thought of the result makes me shudder. A great air raid over the heads of the rejoicing multitude! I think it is better to stop such celebrations.”

  Working around the clock for several days and nights in late March, Combined Fleet staff completed a preliminary draft plan for the Midway operation. It received Yamamoto’s endorsement on March 30. The operation would require the approval of the Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo, but as in the earlier case of the Pearl Harbor raid, the headquarters was loath to give it. For the second time in six months, Admiral Yamamoto deliberately sought to usurp the rightful planning and policy-making function of the Naval General Staff. In doing so, he seems to have been motivated (at least in part) by a desire to settle some old scores. In the 1930s, his efforts to advance the cause of naval aviation had often run into resistance from conservative battleship officers on the NGS. In the fall of 1941, the NGS had opposed his plan to attack Pearl Harbor, and backed down only when he had come to the brink of tendering his resignation. After the attack had knocked the American battleships out of action, leading officers of the NGS tried to share
in the glory by concealing their attempt to obstruct the operation. Yamamoto was an old hand in the politics of the navy, and was not above making a ruthless power play against the headquarters. He was at the height of his power and influence, and seemed determined not to let the moment pass—if possible he would arrogate the planning and strategy-making functions of the NGS to his own staff.

  The issue was settled in a planning conference at the Imperial General Headquarters between April 2 and 5. Yamamoto sent an emissary to Tokyo to represent the view of the Combined Fleet: Commander Yasuji Watanabe, a staff gunnery officer and one of the admiral’s regular shogi opponents. With the boss’s half-shaped plan under his arm, Watanabe went into conference with a group of NGS planners. He encountered hard-hitting, tenacious opposition. Those on the staff were irked by the prospect of any diversion or delay of their preferred thrust toward New Caledonia, which they had embraced as a fallback to an invasion of Australia after that operation had been deep-sixed by the army.

  Commander Tatsukichi Miyo, First Section Air Officer of the NGS, laid out the case against the Midway operation with clarity and passion. His objections were similar to those raised against the more ambitious plan to invade Hawaii. To mount an operation so far across the central Pacific, said Miyo, required logistical support on a scale that would strain Japan’s shipping resources. The carrier force was worn out and could likely not undertake both the northern and southern offensives within the fleet’s aggressive timetable. Japanese naval forces would have no land-based air cover or reconnaissance, while the enemy would have it in abundance—the Japanese fleet would be entirely dependent on carrier airpower. The value of Midway, even if occupied successfully, was dubious. An air counterattack from the main Hawaiian Islands would be violent and sustained, and Pearl Harbor’s submarine fleet would raise havoc with the shipping link to Japan. Midway would provide little value to reconnaissance, as U.S. task forces could easily skirt the 600- or 700-mile flight radius from the island. As for the hope that the offensive would draw the remnants of the Pacific Fleet out of Pearl Harbor for a decisive battle, Miyo raised the disturbing possibility that the Americans might not cooperate. What if they did not contest the landings, but merely conceded Midway to the invaders? The NGS compared Yamamoto’s plan with their preferred attack in the south, and argued that it was inferior in every respect.

  After the war, Miyo wrote that he and his colleagues were appalled by the hamhanded way in which the C-in-C had gone about planning his attack on Midway. “One wonders whether C. in C. Yamamoto appreciated just how ineffective aerial reconnaissance using Midway as a base would be,” wrote Miyo. “Had he really taken into thorough account the enormous drain on resources and difficulty in maintaining supplies on such an isolated island, or the reduction in air strength necessary in other areas in order to keep it up, and the influence on the fleet’s operational activities?”

  But Commander Watanabe had not been sent to Tokyo to answer the staff’s cogent criticisms. He had been sent to impose Yamamoto’s will. After three days of ineffectual haggling, Watanabe called the Yamato on a secure telephone line and reported that the discussions were deadlocked. Now it remained only for Yamamoto to play his trump card, the same one he had played several months earlier to force the NGS to approve his raid on Pearl Harbor. Yamamoto told Watanabe to say that the best way to isolate Australia was to destroy the American flattops, and that if the Pacific Fleet did not contest the landing, then the Japanese would be left in possession of a strategically located territory in the central Pacific. The C-in-C’s mind was “firmly made up.” That was a coded threat to resign his command if the plan was not approved, and the NGS cried uncle. “Come, come,” Admiral Shigeru Fukudome told Miyo, when the latter grew heated in reiterating his arguments. “Don’t get too excited. Since the Combined Fleet’s so set on the plan, why don’t we study it to see if we can’t accept it?”

  On April 5, the NGS gave its tentative approval to Yamamoto’s Midway offensive. But critical details remained unresolved, including (most importantly) the date of the operation. Opponents still held some hope of killing the operation through the shrewd use of delaying tactics. Typically in such matters, the sketchy consensus had involved face-saving compromises. Rather than simply choosing one course of action and ruling decisively against the others, the regime gave all parties, including the NGS and the army, part of what they wanted. At the insistence of the NGS, a second operation in the Aleutians was tacked onto the Midway plan, involving the capture of two islands and a raid on Dutch Harbor, on Unalaska Island.

  On April 16, the General Headquarters issued Directive No. 86, which laid out the sequence of objectives for the next three months. In May, the capture of Port Moresby; in June, the capture of Midway and the Aleutians; in July, the seizure of New Caledonia and Fiji. Critical details remained to be filled in, but the next phase of the naval war had been decided and decreed.

  ON THE FIRST DAY OF APRIL, at the Alameda Naval Air Station in San Francisco Bay, sixteen B-25 Mitchell bombers taxied from the hangars to a pier. Each aircraft was coaxed to a spot directly beneath the crane of the USS Hornet, a new Yorktown-class aircraft carrier painted in a distinctive blue-gray camouflage pattern. At a ground crewman’s signal, the engines were cut and the twin propellers spun to rest. A hook descended and was fastened to a ring bolt on the top of the fuselage. Each aircraft was hoisted with loving care to the Hornet’s flight deck, where it was let down gingerly, pushed to an assigned mark, and made fast to the deck by sturdy hemp lines. Sixteen times that process was repeated, until the entire after section of the flight deck was crowded with B-25s in a staggered double file.

  The next day, April 2, the Hornet put to sea with her escorts: two heavy cruisers, four destroyers and a fuel tanker. They had been designated Task Force 18. The morning fog was lifting as the task force passed under the long red span of the Golden Gate Bridge, and the carrier was plainly visible to anyone watching from the hills of San Francisco or Marin. Every day of the war, warships of every size and description passed through that channel for undisclosed Pacific destinations. But in April 1942, an aircraft carrier was still a relatively rare sight, and it would have been natural for honest citizens to stop and stare. Rarer still was a flattop loaded with twin-engine army bombers, because (as anyone familiar with aviation knew) such airplanes did not operate from carriers. The B-25s were much larger than the Dauntlesses, Devastators, and Wildcats that were the standard carrier aircraft of the day. They had two engines and two tails, stood almost 18 feet high, and had a wingspan of 67 feet 6 inches, so that their wingtips protruded over the edges of the flight deck and hung over the sea like diving boards. Among the Hornet’s crew, who had been told nothing of their mission or destination, it was rumored that the carrier would ferry the B-25s to Pearl Harbor, where they would be lifted off the deck by cranes. That offered the most plausible solution to the mystery, because every man aboard knew that twin-engine army bombers did not, under any circumstances, fly from aircraft carriers.

  At Alameda, the Hornet had also embarked a large contingent of airmen and ground personnel of the Army Air Forces, 70 officers and 130 enlisted men. The officers shared the staterooms of the Hornet’s pilots, with cots brought in to provide additional bunks. The two groups of aviators, though they had been conditioned to regard each other as aliens and rivals, got along well. They showed one another around their respective airplanes—the B-25s on the flight deck, the carrier planes crammed below, with wings folded erect, on the hangar deck. Lieutenant Commander Stephen Jurika, Jr., the ship’s intelligence and operations officer, thought the army flyboys were laid-back to the point of being “undisciplined.” They were careless in their uniforms, with crushed hats, open collars, and “worn-out, scuffed-type shoes.” When quizzed by their navy hosts about their mission, they simply shrugged and looked away. They had been ordered not to talk. During the Hornet’s westward voyage, they often slept in, skipped breakfast, and turned up late to the morning briefing at
0830. They spent most of their days and nights at the poker table. Whatever their mission, they did not seem terribly concerned.

  HOURS AFTER THE RAID on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt had asked his military chiefs to find a way to hit back at Japan. He had returned to the point many times in the first three months of the war, as American morale descended to its nadir. The commander in chief asked, and asked again—was there any chance of bombing the Japanese home islands?

  Admiral King had assigned two senior members of his staff, Captain F. S. “Frog” Low and Captain Donald B. Duncan, to investigate the possibilities. There were no ready options. The greatest obstacle was the great distances lying between Japan and any of the terrestrial airfields from which a long-range bombing attack might be launched. China, the Soviet Union, and the Aleutians were each considered and discarded. A carrier task force might creep within striking range of Japan, but the aircraft would have to be launched from a point no farther than 200 miles off the Japanese coast. In that vulnerable position, like a worm writhing on a hook, the carrier would have to await the return of her planes. The risk of losing one or more of America’s precious flattops to a Japanese counterstrike was unacceptably high.

  Frog Low, on a trip to Norfolk to inspect the newly commissioned USS Hornet, noticed a painted outline of a flight deck on a Naval Station runway. An idea entered his mind. That outline, used by pilots to hone their skills in carrier flight operations, was slightly elongated to reflect the benefit of the “apparent” wind. In actual carrier flight operations at sea, a flattop turned into the wind and used her engines to augment the speed of that wind across her flight deck. Even in a rare dead calm, a carrier could generate an apparent headwind equivalent to her maximum speed (32 knots in the case of the Hornet). In the North Pacific, there was normally at least a 10-knot breeze, which would allow for more than 40 knots of apparent wind in flight operations. No one in his right mind would try to land a twin-engine medium bomber on an aircraft carrier. But such an airplane might manage to take off from a carrier into the teeth of a gale-force headwind. If configured to fly at an extremely long range, a bomber squadron could be launched 500 miles off the Japanese coast, drop its payload on assigned targets in Japan, and continue across the East China Sea to secret airfields in coastal China. The operation would be risky for the carriers and extremely hazardous for the bomber crews, but it would not be expected by the Japanese. With luck and surprise it might succeed.