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

by Ian W. Toll

  As dawn broke each day, the cruisers and battleships launched their floatplanes to fly search patterns back toward the east, but those aircraft had little value in aerial combat. The fleet had no fighter protection at all; if caught by the American carrier planes, they would be sitting ducks, and they all knew it. On the other hand, there was some hope that the American flattops could be coaxed into air-striking range of Wake’s big land-based bombers, or perhaps even the guns of the Japanese battleships. On the morning of the 8th, it was apparent that the Americans had given up the chase. Ugaki observed, “We had no choice but to give up our intention of launching an all-out counterattack with the whole Combined Fleet.” With fuel running low, there was nothing left but a long, melancholy passage to the home islands.

  The Combined Fleet staff, in their cavernous quarters on the great flagship Yamato, stared out to sea, shocked and depressed. They said little; there was not much that could be usefully said. Yamamoto’s yeoman, Mitsuharu Noda, recalled that air officer Sasaki “looked as if he felt he was personally responsible for the defeat, showing it in his growth of beard, his sunken eyes, his unhappy, weary face.” Yamamoto himself was sick, sallow, and deflated. He spent most of his days behind the closed door of his stateroom, said Noda, and appeared only briefly to stand on the compass bridge and sip rice gruel. Ugaki noted that the commander in chief “suffered from a stomachache, which did not improve much in spite of treatment by a fleet doctor. This, too, is a source of concern in such a grave moment as this.” The ailment was diagnosed as roundworms, and treated with doses of “vermifluge.” By June 9 he seemed better, though his officers noted that Yamamoto “had been out of action for rather longer than treatment for worms would normally have required.”

  As Nagumo’s force joined up with the Main Body on June 10, Yamamoto’s staff played nice. No blame was shed, for indeed all must have realized that the greatest weight of responsibility for the defeat rested on Yamamoto’s shoulders. Yamamoto had acknowledged as much, declaring that the defeat was “all his responsibility, and they were not to criticize the Nagumo force.” Genda, Onishi, and Kusaka, appearing haggard and exhausted, went aboard the Yamato by breeches buoy. Entering Yamamoto’s private cabin, Kusaka said: “Admittedly, we are not in a position to come back alive shamelessly after having made such a blunder, but we have come back only to pay off the score some day, so I beg you from the bottom of my heart to give us such a chance in the future.” Yamamoto replied curtly: “All right.” Ugaki tried to ease Kusaka’s mind, offering him gifts and even money, and listened for the first time to the eyewitness accounts of the demise of the four carriers. The three men returned to the Nagara that afternoon.

  SINCE DECEMBER 7, the people of Oahu had lived under the constant threat of invasion. Now, as the American fleet returned to Pearl, they breathed easier—for the first time in six months the safety of the Hawaiian Islands seemed assured. Nimitz often went down to the wharves to greet returning ships. As the Enterprise and Hornet slid into their berths, the carrier aircrews left their ships and checked into the Royal Hawaiian or the Moana Hotel, both on Waikiki Beach, which had been commandeered for officers’ R&R. They plunged into their customary all-night bacchanals, but their carousing was more anguished than joyful. Some young men wept drunkenly for their dead friends; others brawled or vandalized hotel property. The MPs, shore patrol, and hotel detectives were harassed at every turn. “The routine of the returning airmen for the next few nights consisted of their tramping from room to room hunting for liquor, talking, arguing, fighting, and breaking the furniture,” Mears recalled. “Some few were feeling tender enough to want to find a girl, but for the most part their emotions were released in being just as mean as they could. I saw two boys who were good friends beating each other in the face with their fists, not trying to duck or box, until they both had black eyes and were crimson with blood. Another pilot tried to throw his smaller friend out of a window.” The aviators were infuriated by press reports wrongly crediting the Army Air Forces with sinking the Japanese carriers. When airmen of the two services met in Honolulu, hard words were exchanged, and in some cases fisticuffs. Not until after the war would it be conclusively established that navy dive-bombers had done all of the damage to the Japanese fleet.

  In Washington, on June 7, reporters filed into a Naval Headquarters conference room to be briefed by Admiral King. It was King’s first press conference since the start of the war. “In comparison with the losses of the enemy,” he said, “United States losses are inconsiderable.” He admitted that it was not yet clear what was happening in the Aleutians, partly because heavy fog had limited contact with enemy forces. A reporter asked if it was true that the Japanese had hurled their entire navy into the conflict. “Perhaps not everything, but the bulk of it. One of their methods of doing things is not to send a boy to do a man’s job.” Pressed to reveal whether the American fleet would pursue the retreating Japanese forces, King grew touchy. He pointed out that the Japanese had substantial shore-based airpower on Wake Island. “With 130,000,000 amateur strategists in this country, many would undoubtedly advocate some such follow-up action,” he said, but “for us to rush in to a mop-up operation might not be well-advised.”

  Four of Japan’s finest fleet carriers and a heavy cruiser sunk; a cruiser and several destroyers damaged; 292 aircraft destroyed; more than 3,000 Japanese killed. The Americans had won their stunning victory at the cost of the Yorktown and Hammann sunk, 145 planes destroyed, and 307 men killed in action. In Raymond Spruance, Nimitz had discovered the most valuable American seagoing commander of the Second World War (though for the time being he was to be cast ashore as the CINCPAC’s chief of staff). Spruance, characteristically, did not even deign to answer his critics, who faulted him for a lack of aggressiveness in not pursuing the enemy fleet on the night of the 4/5th. Though he might have leveled damaging criticism at Captain Mitscher for the poor performance of Hornet’s air group, or at Halsey’s staff (and his chief of staff, Captain Miles R. Browning, in particular), he held his fire. He was generous in his praise of Fletcher, to whom he wrote on June 8: “If it had not been for what you did and took with the Yorktown, I am firmly convinced that we would have been badly defeated and the Japs would be holding Midway today. As it is, I think their ears will be pinned back for some time to come.”

  Possessing foreknowledge of Japanese intentions, Nimitz had been dealt a very strong hand. It is also true that he played that hand skillfully, indeed flawlessly. In arranging his forces, Nimitz had concentrated on one overriding objective to the exclusion of all others: to ambush and destroy the Japanese carriers. Whereas Yamamoto’s plan was vast and fatally complex, Nimitz’s was straightforward, and aimed at the enemy’s most vulnerable point. He had provided Midway atoll with all the airpower he could scrape together, overruling the local Army Air Forces commanders who wanted to retain more aircraft on Oahu. He had placed his three carriers on Nagumo’s port flank, distant enough to avoid early detection, but near enough to launch a punishing attack. Though he knew the Japanese would attack the Aleutians, he had refused to divert the bulk of his forces from the main event north of Midway. He had been content to concede the loss of the westernmost islands in the Aleutians archipelago, knowing they offered little value as military assets and could be recaptured in good time. That attitude was consistent with the teachings of Miyamoto Musashi, the renowned samurai swordsman of the sixteenth century. “As far as attacks made on you are concerned,” Musashi had advised, “let opponents go ahead and do anything useless, while stopping them from doing anything useful. This is essential to the art of war.”

  Fletcher and Spruance had evaded detection until Nagumo’s airstrike on Midway was aloft and on its way; they had launched their aircraft before Nagumo could respond; they had maneuvered their ships out of the way of the onrushing guns of the Main Body. Once Yorktown was abandoned, Fletcher had generously ceded tactical command of remaining American forces to Spruance. After the decisive first day of the battl
e, Spruance had resisted the temptation (and the advice of some of the other officers) to chase far to the west, demonstrating a prudence that kept faith with Nimitz’s instructions to act according to “calculated risk,” and consolidating the American victory.

  Even so, the Americans had needed more than a few strokes of good luck. The battle had been a near-run thing, and easily might have gone the other way. The Japanese cruiser scouts might have found the American carriers an hour earlier, giving Nagumo precious time to prepare and launch an effective counterstrike before the dive-bombers hurtled down on Kido Butai. Those dive-bombers, the most potent weapon in the American arsenal, arrived over the enemy at just the right time and in the right sequence, when the Zeros had been spread far and wide at low altitude. By lucky happenstance, the Enterprise and Yorktown Dauntlesses, having launched at different times and flown widely divergent courses to the enemy, converged on the fleet simultaneously from different directions. Luck (and some quick thinking on the part of Lieutenant Dick Best, leader of Bombing Six) ensured that the SBDs attacked and scored fatal hits on three different Japanese carriers, when they easily might have concentrated their attacks on only one or two. Subsequently, Hiryu’s two strikes each targeted the Yorktown, although the Enterprise and Hornet were well within range, with the result that two of three American flattops survived the battle with no damage at all.

  In Spruance’s view, he had merely acted out his part in a script written by Nimitz. He had done nothing brilliant; he had been lucky. “We were shot with luck on the morning of June 4, when the fate of the operation was decided,” he wrote later. As for his own role in the action: “All that I can claim credit for, myself, is a very keen sense of the urgent need for surprise and a strong desire to hit the enemy carriers with our full strength as early as we could reach them.”

  As momentous as it was, Midway did not in itself turn the tide of the Pacific War. The American mobilization was proceeding apace, but would require another six months to take effect on the distant frontiers of the Pacific theater. For the Japanese navy, the destruction of four fleet carriers with all their aircraft was obviously a devastating blow, as was the loss of so many trained mechanics and crewmen. But most of the Japanese aircrews had survived the action. By one historian’s estimate, 110 Japanese carrier aviators died at Midway—only about one quarter of those who had sailed with Kido Butai. Those surviving veterans were, at this stage of the war, the most valuable asset in the Japanese naval air arsenal.

  Even so, Midway had blunted the tip of the Japanese spear. Yamamoto had gambled on knocking the U.S. Navy out of the war, and lost. He would never again muster the forces to mount a sustained offensive against any Allied territory. Midway made certain that the Pacific War would be a prolonged war of attrition—precisely the sort of war that Yamamoto had warned against. The Japanese navy retained a cadre of superb pilots, but Japan was not producing enough new flyers to replace those inevitably killed in action. Facing shortages of aircraft, fuel, and ammunition, and with too few seasoned professional instructors, Japan had no obvious means of expanding its flight training pipeline. In 1943, 1944, and 1945, the Japanese navy would speed the flight training process by relaxing its standards—critically, by reducing the number of flying hours each trainee would perform before graduating into front-line service. An increasing proportion of newly minted Japanese aviators would be shipped off to war with no live firing experience. With little hope of relief, Japan’s remaining veteran flyers were condemned to keep flying until they died, and they knew it. Many would give their lives in the latter half of 1942, during the long, arduous, and ultimately futile struggle for control of the island of Guadalcanal.

  In the American view, Midway eliminated the risk of a Japanese attack on Hawaii or the west coast of North America. As important, it relieved political pressure on FDR to transfer a greater share of forces to the Pacific, freeing him to emphasize his greatest priority, which was to keep the Soviet Union in the war against Germany. In that sense, the Battle of Midway ratified and confirmed the vital “Europe-first” strategy. For that reason, it ranks as one of the most essential events of the Second World War, bearing not only on the conflict in the Pacific but on the fate of Nazi Germany.

  JOE ROCHEFORT AND HIS TEAM OF CRYPTANALYSTS had been brilliantly vindicated, but none found it easy to savor the triumph. A week before the battle, just as the Japanese fleet had put to sea, the Japanese navy had adopted a new cipher book for its main operational code, JN-25. This changeover, from “JN-25-B” to “JN-25-C,” wiped out the codebreakers’ accumulated efforts of the previous six months. Once again, Japanese radio intercepts were indecipherable. They would remain so until the exhausted cryptanalysts could summon the will and energy to do it all again. According to Jasper Holmes, the mood among his colleagues was gloomy. “Perhaps it was exhaustion, like that of a distance runner collapsing over the tape at the end of a long, hard race, but cryptanalysis was always a manic-depressive business. . . . Each man feared in his bones that we would never again succeed in the long and difficult task of breaking a new code.”

  Rochefort allowed his team to take a short break, and someone organized a staff party at a private home on Diamond Head. “This thing was a great big drunken brawl,” Rochefort later recalled. “That’s all it was . . . just a straight out-and-out drunken brawl.” But after a day or two, they all drifted back in to the dungeon and resumed their customary round-the-clock routine, “because by this time we had this new edition [of the Japanese code] we had to start reading as of yesterday hopefully.”

  Admiral Nimitz concluded that the Battle of Midway was “essentially a victory of intelligence.” His foreknowledge of the Japanese plan was an asset equivalent in value, perhaps, to two additional carrier groups. Nimitz had known when the Japanese forces would sortie, and from where; he had known where the attacks would fall, and when; he had known that the Japanese would attempt to reconnoiter Pearl Harbor with seaplanes before the battle, and that they would deploy a submarine picket line to observe and intercept the American fleet. He had known when and where the enemy forces would rendezvous after the operation. The success of the American codebreaking campaign was so complete that it consolidated the field of communications intelligence within the U.S. Navy. By making believers out of the key decision makers in the upper ranks, who had entered naval service when radio technology was in its infancy, the victory at Midway ensured that communications intelligence would never again suffer for funding, manpower, or respect.

  Many men had contributed bits and pieces to the breaking of the Japanese code, including those stationed in Melbourne and Washington; but it was Joe Rochefort who had taken those bits and pieces and assembled them into an accurate mosaic. Rochefort had a rare genius for the art of sifting through masses of disparate and contradictory data. He drew liberally upon his knowledge and experience as a naval officer who had served long years at sea, and also upon his understanding of the Japanese language and culture. He relied upon logical deduction; he played hunches; he developed theories and tested them repeatedly until he was sure he was right. No less important, he knew how to persuade his superiors (Nimitz, especially) of the soundness of his conclusions even when he lacked absolute proof. Tom Dyer said that Rochefort’s special talent was to “make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” The early intercepts referring to Midway “were perfectly capable of being read in a totally different way than the correct way. Knowledge of the character of the Japanese . . . enabled him to get the right meaning.”

  However belatedly, Rochefort’s historic achievement has won the recognition it deserves. Edward L. Beach, the submarine captain–turned–historian of the U.S. Navy, memorably concluded: “To Commander Joe Rochefort must forever go the acclaim for having made more difference, at a more important time, than any other naval officer in history.” In 2003, the Battle of Midway Roundtable, an online community of veterans and historians, was asked to name the single “most important combatant” in the battle. The res
ult of the survey, fittingly, was a tie between Nimitz and Rochefort. Support for Rochefort was particularly strong among the Midway veterans.

  But in June 1942, no one outside a privileged circle knew that the Japanese code had been broken—and even within that privileged circle, few were aware that Rochefort had drawn the right conclusions while his superiors in Washington had clung obdurately to the wrong ones. Rochefort may have been vindicated by events, but he was a marked man. For proving his rivals wrong, he would pay with his career. His enemies in Washington—the Redman brothers, Commander Wenger, and unidentified members of Admiral King’s staff—apparently conspired to seize credit for the victory while diminishing Hypo’s role. The conspirators, perfectly aware that strict wartime secrecy would abet their misconduct, did not merely shade the facts but directly lied. The Redmans falsely maintained that analysts at OP-20-G, rather than Hypo, had identified June 3 as the date of the initial attacks; they argued that Rochefort was unqualified to run Hypo and should be removed from the post, because he was “an ex-Japanese language student” who was “not technically trained in Naval Communications”; and they told everyone who would listen that “Pearl Harbor had missed the boat at the Battle of Midway but the Navy Department had saved the day.” When word of the codebreaking success was inadvertently leaked to the Chicago Tribune, the Redmans maliciously implied that Rochefort had been the source of the leak.*

  The campaign succeeded. Both men were soon promoted, and the elder brother, Rear Admiral Joseph R. Redman, was awarded a Distinguished Service Medal. When Rochefort was put up for the same medal with Nimitz’s strong endorsement, the application was denied. Rochefort was recalled to Washington and shunted into jobs in which his talents were wasted. “I have given a great deal of thought to the Rochefort affair,” Tom Dyer later wrote, “and I have been unwillingly forced to the conclusion that Rochefort committed the one unforgivable sin. To certain individuals of small mind and overweening ambition, there is no greater insult than to be proved wrong.” Jasper Holmes made the same point a bit more poetically: “It was not the individual for whom the bell tolled but the navy [that] died a little.”