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

by Ian W. Toll

The SBD scout bombers were off the Yorktown and Lexington shortly after first light, and it was not long before a contact report came back. At 8:15 a.m., Lieutenant John Nielsen of VB-5 reported “two carriers and four heavy cruisers” near the Jomard Passage, northeast of Misima Island in the northern Louisiades. A glance at the charts showed that the reported position was about 175 miles to the west-northwest, within air-striking range. Assuming Nielson had found the main Japanese carrier force, Fletcher did not hesitate. He ordered the full Monty—a combined strike package of eight fighters, fifty-three dive-bombers, and twenty-two torpedo bombers—launched from both flight decks. The Lexington’s group began roaring into the sky at 9:25 a.m., the Yorktown’s about twenty minutes later. The airborne armada climbed to altitude and soon flew out of the frontal zone into clear, sunny skies, with magnificent visibility all around the compass. Spread out below them were the Louisiades, an archipelago of green tropical islets surrounded by coral reefs. Rows of breakers advanced upon the beaches at uniform intervals. The aircrews could look straight down through the clear, cerulean water to the shallow, sandy bottom.

  With the strike in the air and on its way to the target, Lieutenant Nielsen returned to land on the Yorktown. No sooner was he out of his cockpit when he denied that he had seen any such thing as an aircraft carrier—he had spotted only two cruisers and two destroyers. Confronted with his contact report, the red-faced pilot realized that he had made a coding error in his transmission. It was an innocent mistake, but potentially a very costly one—the Yorktown and the Lexington had shot their bolt against a quartet of mere surface ships, when the big Japanese carriers were still in the vicinity, exact whereabouts unknown. Fletcher blew his fuse. “Young man, do you know what you have done?” he cried. “You have just cost the United States two carriers!” Nielsen deserved the rebuke, as his error could easily have led to the result Fletcher foretold; but it did nothing to inspire confidence in the assembled staff to see their chief lose his composure at such a moment, to cry out in despair (as Lieutenant Biard put it) that “we had already lost a battle we were yet to fight.”

  Fletcher briefly considered recalling the strike, but elected to allow it to press on in hopes of destroying the invasion force itself, which might be in the same area. That aggressive decision was soon vindicated. At 10:22 a.m., a new sighting report was received from MacArthur’s headquarters—an army B-17 had spotted a carrier and several escorts, only thirty-five miles southeast of the first contact. The Yorktown radioed a course correction to the flight leaders. As it happened, however, Lieutenant Commander Weldon L. Hamilton, commander of the Lexington’s Bombing Squadron Two, had already spotted the only Japanese carrier in the vicinity. A few miles north of Tagula Island, cruising at 15,000 feet, he had scanned the horizon with his binoculars and spied white filaments laid across the blue surface of the sea, about forty miles east. Those were wakes, and if there were wakes there must be ships. He radioed the other skippers and they banked to starboard. As they drew nearer, Hamilton made out the unmistakable flat rectangular shape of a flight deck. He got back on the circuit: “I see one flattop bastard.”

  She was the 12,000-ton escort carrier Shoho, accompanied by four cruisers and one destroyer. This was Admiral Goto’s Covering Group, vanguard of the Port Moresby Invasion Force, which was not far behind. Goto’s lookouts saw the American planes approaching on the starboard bow, and the Shoho’s Captain Ishinosuke Izawa ordered a hard turn to port at 11:07 a.m. The carrier had only three fighter planes aloft, a pittance when compared to the huge air armada that was preparing to ruin the Shoho’s day; what was more, two of those were not even Zeros, but the previous-generation A5M Type 96 fighters (“Claude”), which were not nearly as dangerous.

  Commander William B. Ault, commanding the Lexington’s air group, was the first to attack. He and his command group of two wingmen, each in a Dauntless SBD armed with a 500-pound bomb, pushed over and dived on the carrier at 11 a.m. Her hard port turn spoiled their aim, and all three bombs fell in the sea, missing narrowly, though one near miss apparently blew five of Shoho’s planes over the side. A few minutes later, the ten SBDs of Lieutenant Commander Robert E. Dixon’s Scouting Two dove from 12,500 feet; they were pursued by two Type 96s, which followed the dive-bombers down but overran them when the Americans popped their airbrakes. The Shoho continued her hard port turn, coming full circle; the one Zero in the air attacked on the tails of the SBDs and threw off their approach; and all ten 500-pound bombs dropped by the squadron missed. Thus far the Shoho had been extraordinarily lucky. Her violently evasive maneuvers had helped her dodge thirteen bombs, and her game little threesome of fighters had done well against heavy odds to frustrate the attacks. Now Captain Izawa seized the moment to quick-launch three more Zeros.

  Lieutenant Commander Hamilton of Bombing Two had been maneuvering his squadron at high altitude to set up a coordinated attack with the Lexington’s torpedo planes. Just as Dixon’s SBDs released their bombs, the fifteen dive-bombers of his squadron, each armed with a 1,000-pound bomb, rolled into their dives. “The Jap was exactly downwind as I nosed down, simplifying my problem tremendously,” said Hamilton. “My bomb, which was the first 1,000 pounder to hit, struck in the middle of the flight deck’s width, just abaft amidships. As I looked back the entire after-portion of the flight deck was ablaze and pouring forth heavy black smoke.” Dixon, recovering from his dive, saw a thunderclap of an explosion and a ball of fire mushrooming to a height of 400 feet. He congratulated Hamilton over the radio: “Mighty fine, mighty fine.” A second bomb struck centerline-aft, near Shoho’s elevator, touching off secondary explosions on the hangar deck. As his SBD pulled away from the scene, Hamilton turned back to have a look. “The ship was a flaming wreckage, rent by tremendous explosions, slowed to nearly stopping—a spectacular and convincing pageant of destruction.”

  The Shoho’s fate was probably sealed by those two hits, but the Americans were not yet finished with her. Lexington’s Torpedo Squadron Two, led by Lieutenant Commander James H. Brett, Jr., was approaching from the southwest, broad on the burning carrier’s beam; they had found a path through the screening vessels where the antiaircraft fire was relatively thin. The lumbering TBDs spread out to set up an “anvil” attack, in which torpedoes would be dropped on both bows simultaneously, so that the Shoho could not maneuver to avoid them both. The attackers were concealed behind the curtain of smoke and the geysers of water sent up by the dive-bombers’ near misses, and though they were dogged by fighters they made excellent drops. The “fish” separated from the aircrafts’ bellies at an altitude of 100 feet and dived nose-first into the sea, then recovered and ran true into the Shoho, where they detonated and tore great holes in her hull beneath the waterline. Five torpedoes apparently struck the carrier, two on the starboard side and three on the port. As the torpedo planes retreated, it was obvious that the Shoho was dead in the water. Despite the notoriously low airspeed of the Devastators, none was lost in the attack or the withdrawal.

  The Yorktown’s air group arrived over the carrier at 11:25, and from his altitude of 18,000 feet, Lieutenant Commander William Burch, Jr., did not realize that the Shoho was crippled. He led his seventeen SBDs into a dive-bombing attack that probably added another five or six 1,000-pound bombs to her tally of misery. Five minutes later, the Yorktown’s torpedo planes arrived and put another two to five torpedoes into her hull. That coup de grâce was entirely superfluous. With too many bombs to count raining down along her whole length, and too many torpedoes to count tearing out her bowels, the Shoho simply blew apart and sank. Burch recalled that she “just ploughed herself under.” Wildcat pilot Jimmy Flatley, orbiting at 5,000 feet, was moved by the spectacle. “The sight of those heavy dive bombers smashing that carrier was so awful I was physically ill,” he said. “They followed each other at three or four-second intervals, and those powerful explosions were literally tearing the big ship apart.”

  Flatley was disappointed that the Dauntlesses and Devastators had w
asted bombs and torpedoes on a target that was done for, while four enemy cruisers and a destroyer were allowed to escape unmolested. There should have been a tactical coordinator to observe the action from altitude and divert attacks to other targets. Lieutenant Commander Stroop, flag secretary to Admiral Fitch, agreed that the Yorktowners had flogged a dead horse. “It was a very successful attack,” he said, “except that we had an overkill on the carrier. . . . Looking back on this, it was too bad that the attack hadn’t been better coordinated and some of the force spread around on other ships. But this being our first battle of that kind, everybody went after the big prize, and they sank this rather soft carrier very quickly.”

  Captain Izawa ordered abandon ship at 11:31 a.m., and in the last moments before she sank, a quarter of her crew leapt into the sea. Two hundred and three men survived; 631 were killed in the explosions or were trapped in the ship when she went down. All twenty-one of the Shoho’s airplanes were lost. Though she was only a baby flattop, far less valuable or dangerous than the Shokaku or Zuikaku, she was the first major Japanese ship destroyed in the war. Dixon prompted a round of applause on the Yorktown and Lexington when he radioed back the prearranged message: “Scratch one flattop! Dixon to Carrier, Scratch one flattop!”

  The immediate significance of the sinking of the Shoho was that it prompted Admiral Inoue, monitoring events from his headquarters at Rabaul, to fear for the safety of the Port Moresby invasion convoy. He ordered the flotilla to turn around and beat a hasty northward retreat, thus abandoning (at least for the moment) the objective of the entire MO operation. Until the American carriers were caught and killed, he was not willing to risk the safety of his troops and other surface units. As it turned out, they would not return. The attempt to take Moresby by sea would be given up for good, delivering a strategic victory to the Allies and placing Australia forever beyond the threat of invasion.

  TWO HUNDRED MILES TO THE EAST, the two big Japanese fleet carriers had duplicated Fletcher’s error of launching an all-out attack on a secondary target based on a flawed sighting report. At 7:22 a.m. that morning, a cruiser-based floatplane pilot radioed that he had spotted one carrier and one escorting cruiser 163 miles due south of the Shokaku and Zuikaku. The scout confirmed his report at 7:45 a.m., and a second Japanese patrol plane corroborated the sighting. Takagi and Hara took the bait. Assuming they had found the Saratoga, which they thought to be the only American flattop in the theater, the Japanese commanders ordered a massive air attack from both flight decks. At 8 a.m. the airplanes began roaring into the sky, and thirty minutes later a formidable air armada was southbound. It included seventy-eight planes in all: thirty-six D3A2 dive-bombers (“Vals”), twenty-four torpedo-armed B5N2 Nakajimas (“Kates”), and a fighter escort of eighteen Zeros.

  But the Japanese scouts had botched the job. They had come across the tanker Neosho and the destroyer Sims, which Fletcher had sent away the previous day. After the Japanese airstrike had departed, new contact reports arrived on the bridge of the Shokaku—two American carriers, Hara realized with a shock, were 288 miles to the northwest, almost in the opposite direction of the first reported contact. Japanese ship-to-air radio technology being unreliable, Hara was concerned that he could not reroute his outbound strike—the risk of a garbled transmission was too great. So he allowed it to continue on its way, but the Japanese carriers meanwhile turned northwest in the hope of getting to within striking range when their planes returned: “We will join battle with the enemy in the west after we have attacked to the south.” Upon learning that the “carrier” to the south was nothing more than an oiler and destroyer, however, he radioed an urgent recall order. Perhaps, Hara hoped, there would be time enough to recover the planes, refuel them, and send them after the big game in the northwest.

  The Neosho, 25,000 tons, and the little Sims, 1,570 tons, were marked ships. Their officers and crews apparently did not realize how dire the situation was until the huge enemy airstrike came over the horizon at 10:38 a.m. The oiler and destroyer were entirely without air cover, and their antiaircraft defenses were pitiful in comparison to the number of enemy planes circling overhead. But the Japanese did not attack immediately. Visibility having improved significantly since that morning’s flyover, the strike leaders knew at once that they had been led astray. To send the whole strike down on those two puny ships would be a waste, and the squadron leaders directed some of the airplanes to disperse in a search pattern to look for any other good targets. Finding none, the torpedo planes and Zeros broke away without attacking, and returned to the carriers. The dive-bombers remained to take care of the Neosho and Sims.

  They attacked at their leisure, rolling into their dives as if they were performing at an air show, and sent a rain of bombs down on the two star-crossed ships. The Neosho was pulverized with seven 250-kilogram bomb hits; the Sims, hit with three bombs, broke in half and went down, taking 178 of her 192-man crew with her. The burning, crippled Neosho appeared to be finished, and the Japanese planes flew away to the north. Some of her crew panicked and leapt into the water though no abandon ship order had been given; the captain sent whaleboats to fetch them back on board; and the remaining crew went through the requisite steps of destroying classified documents and codebooks. But the Neosho would not founder—she drifted, ablaze, with only weak auxiliary radio communications. All of her whaleboats were lowered into the sea and kept station with the mother ship as she battled for survival.

  The Neosho would wage a four-day struggle for survival against rising winds and heavy seas. She had no power, a severe starboard list, and two thirds of her crew were missing and presumed dead. On May 11, her ordeal was brought to an end by the destroyer Henley, which removed the survivors and sent her to the bottom with two torpedoes.

  Receiving the urgent distress signal from the Neosho, Fletcher was taken aback. The nervous tension on the Yorktown’s flag bridge was palpable. The Yorktown and Lexington’s planes were already en route to the northwest, where Fletcher had believed they would find the two big Japanese flattops. The Neosho’s report, if true, could only mean that the enemy carriers were in the opposite direction, or perhaps (even more unnerving) he might be bracketed by enemy carrier task forces on two flanks. On the other hand, the report also suggested that the two big Japanese carriers had shot their bolt in the wrong direction, and could not attack the Lexington and York-town until late in the day, at the earliest. Both sides had committed to attacking the wrong target, and the two errors had effectively cancelled one another out. By sinking the Shoho, in fact, the Americans had come away with the better consolation prize. In any case, it was now clear to both sides that their big carriers were finally on the verge of coming to grips—if not later that afternoon, then the next morning without fail.

  Between 12:45 and 1:15 p.m., the American strike returned and landed aboard the carriers, having lost only three Dauntless SBDs. The aircrews filed into the wardrooms for lunch, their merriment at having sunk an enemy carrier intermixed with sorrow for fallen comrades. Several of the aircraft had been badly shot up, and the Lexington’s deck hands clustered around the machines and gaped at the damage. Here was dramatic proof of the value of sturdy construction. Stanley Johnston wrote that one of the Dauntlesses reminded him of a “colander.” Wings, fuselage, tail, and Plexiglas windshield were riddled with bullet holes.

  By 2:20 p.m. the air groups were refueled and rearmed, and might have made another sortie against the Port Moresby Invasion Force, which was still within range. But the conservative Fletcher elected not to launch a second strike, as he did not yet know precisely where the big Japanese carriers were and did not want to be caught shorn of his planes. Postwar analysis would show that his onboard radio intelligence specialist, Lieutenant Forrest Biard, had picked up an enemy homing beacon giving a course and speed of the Japanese carriers: “280 degrees speed 20 knots.” With this partial information Fletcher might have made sound deductions about their location, but a language officer initially mistranslated the
signal as a Japanese patrol plane’s report of the heading and speed of the American carriers. The confusion was soon cleared up, but Fletcher lacked confidence in the intelligence and was unwilling to gamble on it. Later in the war, it would become a court-martial offense to refuse to act on good intelligence, but for now it was Fletcher’s privilege to ignore his intelligence officer if he so chose, and he did. Task Force 17 would lie doggo for the remainder of the afternoon.

  It was late in the day, and the weather was turning for the worse: a lowering cloud ceiling, southeasterly winds gusting to 30 knots, and frequent rain squalls. The American aviators had not been trained in night operations, and it was sensible to worry that some might not be able to navigate back to the carriers on their return leg. Fletcher turned the task force to the southwest, better to slip under the protecting veil of the weather front and await the morning to launch his next attack. He would later explain that he had judged there was “insufficient daylight for an attack following an extensive search.” The Yorktown and Lexington would keep a strong force of fighters flying CAP, but the bombers and torpedo planes would remain deck-bound until morning.

  The Japanese were bolder. At 4:15 that afternoon, with a new contact report in hand, Hara chose to roll the dice on a late-day strike. His pilots would have to land after nightfall, in conditions of dubious visibility, and he must have known the risk of losses was high. The aircrews were handpicked; the most seasoned and skillful among them were chosen for the mission. Several had already made the long round-trip flight to the Neosho and Sims, and they were fatigued, but still game as always. Hara launched twelve dive-bombers and fifteen torpedo planes from Shokaku, with orders to fly 277 degrees to a range of 280 nautical miles. They were to search for and attack the American carriers. If they were successful, the Japanese might win the Battle of the Coral Sea outright in time for a late celebratory dinner.