by Ian W. Toll
Had Fletcher believed his pilots’ story of a naval Armageddon, he might have gambled on staying through the night to finish off the cripples in the morning. Instead, he chose the more prudent course of withdrawing at high speed under cover of darkness to the southeast, safely beyond the range of Japanese land-based planes operating from the north coast of New Guinea. It was a fortunate decision. Perhaps the most important result of the Yorktown’s raid was that it alerted the Japanese to the presence of at least one American carrier in the neighborhood, since the single-engine bombers and torpedo planes that had screamed out of the skies over Tulagi were correctly identified as carrier-type aircraft. Immediately after the arrival of the first strike, several of the Japanese ships had heaved up their anchors and raced north, toward the safety of Rabaul. They had delivered their troops to the island, and the seaplane base would be up and running two days later, so there was no reason to hang around and be attacked repeatedly from the air.
Admiral Hara’s two big fleet carriers had been fueling north of Bougainville, 350 miles north. When he learned of the raid over Tulagi, he ordered the fuel hoses disconnected and thrown over the side, and the Shokaku and Zuikaku came charging down into the eastern Solomons. Admiral Aritomo Goto, whose Port Moresby invasion force had sailed that day from Rabaul, ordered the 12,000-ton escort carrier Shoho to part ways with the Port Moresby invasion force and go in hunt of the enemy. But none arrived in time to catch the lucky Yorktown before darkness fell the night of the 4th, and she made good her retreat into the pall of bad weather to the south.
She fell in with the Lexington at 8:16 the next morning, about 320 nautical miles south of Guadalcanal. Both carriers immediately began the dull and potentially dangerous business of topping off their fuel tanks from the tanker Neosho, while proceeding at moderate speed on a southwesterly course. The Lexington had already sucked the last gallon of fuel out of the Tippecanoe. Now some of her escorting destroyers came alongside and drank from the carrier’s gigantic tanks. By Fletcher’s operations order 242, Task Force 11 was subsumed into Task Force 17, and the entire fleet, spread out over a wide ocean path, joined in a circular formation with the carriers in the center and the cruisers and destroyers arrayed in inner and outer defensive rings. Though Fletcher remained in overall command, he signaled his intention to place Admiral Fitch, an aviator and veteran carrier officer, in tactical control of the two flattops during air operations. Fletcher’s orders, which took effect on the 6th, echoed those he had received from Nimitz—all units were directed to “destroy enemy ships, shipping, and aircraft at favorable opportunities in order to assist in checking further advances by enemy in the New Guinea–Solomon area.”
Each side was now tipped off to the presence of the other. But neither had a reliable notion of exactly where the enemy was to be found. May 5, 6, and 7 were a confused interlude in which the opposing carrier groups groped for one another in vain. The weather was variable—sometimes clear and fair, sometimes overcast and squally, with winds building to gale force and heavy seas on the make. Chance, baffling and imprecise intelligence, contradictory and erroneous scouting reports, and inept or misdirected attacks were the overriding themes. For most of the five-day battle, the American forces fumbled around in confusion, and were saved only by the fact that the Japanese forces were equally bewildered. Commander Layton called it a “deadly round of blind man’s buff.” It was almost as if some providential will had chosen to keep them apart.
The aircraft carrier, as they all knew, was a weapon suited to hit-and-run warfare. The ships themselves were extremely vulnerable, but they could inflict heavy punishment on an enemy from long range, if they could find him and strike him first. The tactical imperatives were to keep moving; to keep your scouts in the air, flying wide search patterns; and to hide your flight decks in weather fronts while pinning your enemy down in zones of clear visibility. “If they can’t find you they can’t hit you,” said Captain Sherman of the Lexington. “The carrier is a weapon that can dash in, hit hard and disappear.”
The carrier scouts flew wedge-shaped sectors out to a range of 175 or 200 miles. “We simply drew a limiting circle in the direction of the area of interest and assigned planes to go out on radii so that at the outer end of their search they would be twice visual distance apart,” explained Lieutenant Commander Paul D. Stroop, flag secretary to Admiral Fitch. “In other words, the objective was to cover the outer limits of your search sector completely.” Theoretically, the aircrews should be able to see every inch of sea in their assigned sectors. In practice, however, they rarely did. Even when the weather was mostly clear, as it was on the morning of May 5, the floating cumulus clouds tended to thicken and spread into solid blankets of overcast by the afternoon. The tremendous efforts required to stage aerial search flights in many directions at once depleted the American carriers of their aircraft and overtaxed the pilots, who flew long flights in the blazing heat, their canopies open to circulate air through the cockpit. They returned with necks and cheeks bronzed from long exposure to the sun, and when they removed their flight goggles or aviator glasses, they revealed “raccoon” tan lines. Part of the air reconnaissance load was shared by a seaplane base in Nouméa, the French colonial capital of New Caledonia, but it had only twelve PBY Catalinas in service and was too distant to search effectively in the Solomons. The army bombers operating out of Townsville flew the sectors between Rabaul and the Coral Sea, but they provided little in the way of reliable reconnaissance. Acknowledging that the army planes were dogged by bad weather, Captain Sherman lamented: “Whatever they saw, whether a transport, tug, or destroyer, was apt to be reported as either a battleship or a carrier.” Furthermore, the army pilots’ position reports were often far off the mark because their own navigation was faulty.
The Japanese relied heavily on their seaplanes, which staged out of several bases in New Guinea and the eastern Solomons. The Americans were quick to praise the superior qualities of the four-engine Type 97 Kawanishi flying boat, whose breathtaking range extended to as far as 3,000 miles, giving it an effective search radius of more than 1,000 miles. Commander Mort Seligman, the Lexington XO, judged that the more modest range of the SBD scout bombers put the Americans “under a handicap out here. . . . If we want to find out what the enemy is doing we’ve got to move up to within easy range of his land-based aircraft to find out. . . . That limits our attacks almost to early morning only after an all-night fast approach. And it makes it very difficult for us to gain the advantage of the element of surprise which is a much more important factor in war than most people realize.”
It was a reasonable point, but the Japanese had scouting problems of their own. Even when the ubiquitous snoopers did spot American fleet units, they were usually preoccupied with finding cloud cover to avoid being shot out of the sky by the American Wildcats, and tended to misidentify the types of ships they had seen. Due to persistent technical problems in their radio communications, the sighting reports often failed to get through to Admirals Takagi or Hara. Contacts at long range, even when reliable, might not be actionable—if the American carriers lay beyond air-striking range, a few hours of high-speed zigzagging might take them somewhere else entirely. Though Seligman could not know it until later, the Japanese felt as blind as the Americans during the five-day battle.
The American carrier aircraft, both the scouts and the fighters orbiting the task force, were constantly running into enemy air patrols. On the Lexington, staff officers crowded into the radio control room to listen to the live pilot transmissions: “Agnes to Lilly. A plane at 17,000, bearing 130, five miles. Having a look.” “Lilly acknowledged. Will be around.”
Late on the afternoon of May 5, Lieutenant Commander James H. Flatley, Jr., executive officer of the Yorktown’s “Fighting 42” and one of the most famed American fighter pilots of the war, radioed that he had spotted a Kawanishi above the cloud ceiling, about twenty-seven miles from the York-town and fifteen miles from the Lexington. The Yorktown’s fighter di
rector radioed back: “Where is the Kawanishi?” Flatley replied in the distinctively cocky-laconic drawl of the fighter jock: “Wait a minute, and I’ll show him to you.” Perhaps a minute passed, and the blazing remains of a seaplane fell spinning out of the cloud cover to the northeast, trailing a ribbon of black smoke behind it. It hit the sea and exploded, plainly visible from the deck of the Lexington.
Flatley was on the radio again, this time addressing the Lexington combat air patrol: “A fine thing when we have to come over here and shoot these fellows down from on top of you. Why don’t you keep your own nose clean?”
Lieutenant Noel A. M. Gayler, one of the Lexington’s F4F pilots, came on the circuit: “That one nearly fell on top of me, Jimmy. I was climbing up through those clouds and when that ball of fire swept past me I couldn’t make out for a minute what it was.”
“That’ll teach you not to fly underneath me,” said Flatley.
The carrier pilots had plenty of good reasons to be apprehensive of a showdown with their Japanese counterparts. In the first five months of the war, the Japanese carrier forces had struck many hard blows against the Americans, receiving none in return. Through May 4, 1942, U.S. Navy pilots could claim a cumulative score of twenty-four Japanese aircraft shot down. There was just one navy ace—Butch O’Hare, who would give his name to the busiest commercial airport in the world. Nonetheless, the American flyboys were restless, tense, but surprisingly upbeat. They were spoiling for a fight. They gathered in their smoke-filled wardroom lounges each night after dinner, when darkness had fallen and their airplanes had been put to bed, and pored over maps of the theater. They talked endlessly about flying and fighting, illustrating maneuvers with their hands, chalking diagrams on a blackboard—and in those exchanges much useful work was done, because it was the aviator’s way to share his knowledge with his colleagues, and glean all of theirs in return.
Recent encounters with the quick and maneuverable Zero had revealed its weaknesses; months of experience with the clumsier but sturdier F4F Wildcat had enhanced their pilots’ respect for its virtues. “Don’t forget now, no dogfighting with these babies,” one of the Lexington’s fighter pilots said. Another replied, “I think if we stick to our pair combinations we should be able to handle ’em.”
There was a steady flow of new communications intelligence each day, from Rochefort’s basement to Layton to Nimitz to Fletcher via long-range coded radio transmissions, which were received in the Yorktown radio shack, decrypted, and delivered to the admiral on the flag bridge. But until May 6, the specific timing and direction of Japanese fleet movements remained ambiguous. Captain Sherman of the Lexington would later reflect that intelligence on the position of the Japanese fleet was so “sketchy” as to be almost worthless. Reports from Pearl Harbor indicated the presence and direction of many Japanese units between New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, but those reports were multifarious and confused. Radio intercepts from the fleet were of very little use in the early days of the battle, either because the Japanese adhered to radio silence or because their forces were too distant to allow for good intercepts. Fletcher was an old school officer who, not having much experience in dealing with the world of communications intelligence, could not bring himself to trust it. Lieutenant Forrest R. Biard had been detached from Hypo to sail with the Yorktown, but he ran afoul of the admiral when he declined Fletcher’s invitation to brief the entire flag staff on the nature of his work. To do so would have been a clear violation of security measures designed to protect Ultra. Though Biard was clearly in the right, Fletcher did not relish being defied by a lowly lieutenant, and the exchange appears to have poisoned the relationship before it ever had a chance to develop.
But Hypo still managed to provide Fletcher and Fitch with a vital advantage in the battle. The Allied force was less powerful than the combined Japanese forces that were being brought into the area (albeit in several task groups, complicating the need for coordination). But whatever the disparity in force, the Allies had the advantage of knowing in advance that the Japanese intended to take Port Moresby, and must send vulnerable troopships in that direction from Rabaul. On May 3, Station Hypo broke and distributed to key parties the substance of the orders relayed to Admiral Takagi. Four days later, the codebreakers intercepted and decoded several messages sent from the MO Occupation Force which revealed its position and plans. On May 5, Fletcher learned from radio intelligence that the big Japanese carriers would move into the position they were to assume for the Moresby landings by 10 a.m. that day. That gave him the warning he needed to run south, out of the way of Takagi’s air search patterns.
By the end of the day on May 6, it was clear that the Port Moresby Invasion Force would advance around the eastern end of New Guinea via the Jomard Passage, in the Louisiades Archipelago, on either May 7 or 8. With that hard information in hand, Fletcher put the task force on a northwesterly course, topping off fuel tanks from the Neosho as they steamed at moderate speed, hoping to gain a position from which to attack the Japanese carriers, which he presumed to be covering the invasion convoy’s progress toward Moresby. Fletcher kept his carriers “cocked”—geared up to launch an all-out airstrike upon receiving the anticipated contact report. He cut the Neosho loose and sent her south with a destroyer, the Sims; the trusty oil tanker held his only remaining fuel reserve, and he needed her well out of harm’s way. He also took the curious decision to detach three cruisers and three destroyers, designated as Task Group 17.3 under the command of Admiral Crace, to oppose the invasion force as it entered the Jomard Passage. The decision was controversial even at the time, as the Allies had learned the hard way that unprotected surface units should not be sent into waters dominated by enemy aircraft. It also stripped the American carriers of a large part of their antiaircraft screening defense. Apparently, Fletcher was willing to run those risks rather than allow Japanese troops to land at Moresby unopposed while Task Force 17 was pinned down in battle.
Assuming the Japanese carriers were still several hundred miles north, Fletcher would have been appalled to know that they were actually to the east, on his starboard flank, well into the Coral Sea. On the basis of a contact report received earlier that day, Admiral Takagi had ordered Hara to make an end run around the southern Solomon Islands and advance south to find and destroy the American carriers. At that moment, Task Force 17 was totally exposed and in mortal peril. If the Japanese had been luckier, they might have won the battle outright, perhaps sinking both Yorktown and Lexington while they were refueling. (Such a blow might then have altered the outcome at Midway, and therefore changed the entire course of the war.) But the Japanese scout’s report had been mistaken in putting the American carriers on a bearing of 190 degrees, nearly due south. Takagi interpreted the report in a way that was consistent with what he already believed—that the American carriers were deep in the Coral Sea, nowhere near the invasion force’s route of advance. On the night of May 6–7, the two mutually oblivious fleets passed within seventy nautical miles of one another, each giving chase to the other but in the wrong direction.
DAWN REVEALED A LEADEN CEILING of cumulus clouds. A southern cold front had overtaken Task Force 17, bringing cool, gusty winds, choppy seas, and intermittent rain squalls. Visibility was limited to ten or fifteen miles. The Lexington’s meteorological officer, Lieutenant G. L. Raring, estimated that the frontal area extended only a few miles north of the American carriers. North of the island of Tagula, where the enemy was thought to lurk, the skies should be clear and visibility excellent. That was reassuring, as the conditions provided good cover for the task force, while perhaps leaving the enemy exposed to a knockout air attack.
Crace’s Task Group 17.3, having separated from the main Allied fleet the previous afternoon, found itself under clear skies, 115 miles south of the eastern Louisiade Archipelago. As it happened, the combined Australian and American cruiser and destroyer force would not meet the invasion flotilla, which turned back toward Rabaul the next day; but it was subjecte
d to multiple high-level bombing attacks and an aerial torpedo attack on the afternoon of May 7. The Japanese pilots apparently believed they had won a major victory, claiming one California-class battleship sunk, one British Warspite-class battleship damaged, and one cruiser damaged. Those claims were subsequently reported as fact in the Japanese press. In truth, Crace’s ships had dodged perhaps a hundred bombs and torpedoes with adept use of their helms, and had come through the barrage without taking a single direct hit. (The U.S. cruiser Chicago suffered seven casualties by enemy strafing.) Before the day was done, the squadron endured the added indignity of being bombed by three of MacArthur’s B-26s, whose aircrews apparently mistook them for enemy ships. “Fortunately,” Crace remarked, “their bombing, in comparison with that of the Japanese a few minutes earlier, was disgraceful.”
