Admiral Fletcher’s pilots had dropped the opening bombs in the Battle of the Coral Sea.
That night, while Admiral Goto streaked homeward through The Slot, the more powerful northern force steamed out of Rabaul. It was bound for Port Moresby. It sailed south, hoping to circle the tip of northeastern New Guinea and come up suddenly upon the big Allied base.
The light carrier Shoho and her screen accompanied the landing force. But a far more potent group built around the big carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku was slipping around the top of the Solomon Islands and racing south to catch the American force which had struck at Goto.
The next day, May 5, was uneventful. On the following day, May 6, Admiral Fletcher reunited his forces and headed Enterprise and Yorktown toward the tip of New Guinea. On May 7, the Battle of the Coral Sea was fully joined. In the first American attack ever launched upon an enemy carrier, Fletcher’s pilots pounced upon Shoho in a shower of bombs and torpedoes and sunk her in a matter of minutes. Because of this, the Port Moresby invasion was called off, and the troops sent back to Rabaul.
Next day Japan’s big carriers retaliated. They sank Lexington. But Shokaku was damaged and Zuikaku suffered severe losses in planes and pilots.
Thus the first seafight in history during which the contending ships did not exchange a shot, and it had been a Japanese tactical victory. The American loss of 30,000-ton Lexington, with oiler Neosho and destroyer Sims, far outweighed Japan’s loss of 12,000-ton Shoho and the ships sunk at Tulagi. Nevertheless, the strategic victory was American. Big Shokaku and Zuikaku had to be counted out of Admiral Yamamoto’s plans for Midway, and Port Moresby had been saved.
Japan had suffered her first reverse.
In Tokyo, the cancellation of the Port Moresby invasion was regarded as a temporary setback to the operation to isolate Australia. It was decided that Port Moresby could be taken in the rear. Troops would be ferried the short safe distance from Rabaul to Buna and would then march over the lofty Owen Stanleys to occupy the Allied base.
On May 18, Imperial General Headquarters activated the 17th Army with orders to carry out these operations. Command was given to Lieutenant General Haruyoshi Hyakutake.
Thin, testy, and tenacious, Haruyoshi Hyakutake was regarded as one of Japan’s most promising “younger” generals. Like Alexander Archer Vandegrift of the American Marines, he was fifty-five and a veteran of thirty-three years of service. Although equal in rank,* Hyakutake commanded a much larger body of troops; but these, like Vandegrift’s own, were widely scattered.
On the very day that Hyakutake took command of the 17th Army, he was—again like Vandegrift—deprived of one of his finest units, and commanders. The fierce Colonel Kiyono Ichiki was selected to lead his crack regiment of landing troops ashore on Midway. While Hyakutake prepared to fly down to his new headquarters at Rabaul, Colonel Ichiki and his staff boarded battleship Yamato to be briefed on their part in Admiral Yamamoto’s grand design.
Undismayed—for Haruyoshi Hyakutake was a man of optimism and a supreme confidence bordering on arrogance—17th Army’s commander busied himself assembling forces spread throughout China and the Dutch East Indies. He had not the slightest doubt that he would make short work of Moresby, and his only thought for Tulagi was that it would cover his exposed left flank.
And he paid absolutely no attention to the big island with the strange name on the other side of Iron Bottom Bay.
Two days later, not nearly so free of doubt or dismay, Major General Archer Vandegrift sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, for Wellington, New Zealand. With him aboard big Wakefield—the converted passenger liner Manhattan—were the Fifth Marines and most of the Eleventh’s artillery. They sailed under destroyer escort down the perilous Atlantic Coast, silhouetted for German submarines, like so many doomed tankers and merchantmen before them, by the pleasure-as-usual lights of the seashore resorts. They entered the Panama Canal and debouched into the Pacific, where the destroyers left them and later their long-range plane escort.
With only their own speed and a zigzag course to protect them against Japanese submarines, they sailed the vast Pacific in solitude. Only Vandegrift and a few others knew that Wakefield carried enough life jackets and lifeboats for only half the men. But the men were irrepressible. In the only moment of crisis—when Wakefield plowed into an enormous swell and waves of water plunged down open hatches—a lighthearted Marine averted panic with the cry, “Women and children first!”
It was May 27—Japan’s Navy Day, the date upon which the immortal Admiral Heihachiro Togo had annihilated the Russian Fleet at Tsushima—and today, thirty-seven years later, Admiral Yamamoto was leading Combined Fleet to Midway.
Yamamoto himself was aboard Yamato, the 64,000-ton battleship which was easily the mightiest ship afloat. Yamato mounted nine 18.1-inch* guns firing 3200-pound shells, 500 pounds heavier than the 16-inch projectiles fired by the best of the American battleships. One of her turrets weighed as much as a big destroyer and her sides were armored with steel sixteen inches thick. She was the symbol of Japan’s naval strength, this monster battleship, and Yamamoto gloried in her power. Here, as she lay at anchor at Hashirajima in the Inland Sea, the admiral had worked out the final details of the operation which was to destroy American seapower in the Pacific.
First he had attended to the possibility of any repetition of the Doolittle raid. A northern invasion force built around three light carriers was already en route to the western Aleutians in the North Pacific. Its mission was to seize Kiska and Attu, thus pushing American airbases back eastward, and also to draw American carrier strength away from Midway.
It was at Midway that the knockout blow was to be delivered. Most of the vast armada of 162 ships which Yamamoto had assembled were to sail to that island. The striking force consisted of four big, fast carriers under Chuichi Nagumo, the hero of Pearl Harbor, supported by one light carrier and four seaplane carriers, and backed up by no less than eleven battleships and a host of cruisers and destroyers and submarines. Once all these fighting ships had done their work, Colonel Kiyono Ichiki’s shock troops would storm ashore at Midway.
At eight o’clock in the morning of that momentous Navy Day, Nagumo’s flagship, Akagi, hoisted the signal:
“Sortie as scheduled!”
With cheering crews lining the rails, the carriers slipped past the battleships that were to follow. Destroyers and cruisers of the protecting screens took up their stations, white bow waves curling away from their prows. Steadily and with great majesty, Striking Force made for Bungo Strait. The ships passed through these narrow waters with all hands at battle station, until they had entered the Pacific and the bullhorns blared:
“Passage through strait completed. Stow gear. Restore normal condition of readiness.”
Aboard the carriers, men in undress whites and green work uniforms began to drift up to the flight decks to smoke. Some took off their shirts to do calisthenics in the waning sun. Officers sitting in canvas deck chairs chatted guardedly about the operation.
In a few more minutes, all of Striking Force would be at sea.
Landing Force was already underway.
It had sailed from Saipan under Rear Admiral Raizo Tanaka. Tanaka, a veteran destroyer leader who had participated in Japanese landings on the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies, had his doubts about the Midway operation. So did Commander Tameichi Hara, one of Tanaka’s ablest destroyer captains. After Tanaka had whispered details of the plan to Hara early last spring, the commander had blurted out his conviction that high command had lost its mind.3
“Shhhhh!” Tanaka said warningly. “As a matter of fact, I’m not sure about it. I hope it’s not true.”4
But it was, and Tanaka’s squadron consisting of flag cruiser Jintsu and ten destroyers, including Hara’s Amatsukaze, was ordered to escort Colonel Ichiki’s transports from Saipan to Midway. The day before Striking Force sortied from Japan, they put to sea.
Colonel Ichiki, as always, was supremely confident. Tanaka
was not. Nor was Hara, who stood on Amatsukaze’s bridge, sunk in misgivings.5
Admiral Chester Nimitz knew of the Japanese approach. Excellent intelligence work, notably assisted by the breaking of the Japanese code, had alerted Nimitz to Japanese Combined Fleet’s intention to sail to battle again. Nimitz became convinced that the strike was aimed at either Hawaii or Midway, probably Midway, and he conveyed this belief to Admiral King.
King agreed. He directed Nimitz to take the risk of deploying his carriers from the South Pacific to the defense of Midway and Hawaii. Nimitz got off an urgent message to Bull Halsey with Enterprise and Hornet.
“Expedite return.”
Halsey’s ships bent it on for Hawaii. They sailed into Pearl Harbor on May 26. But their commander, Nimitz’s most aggressive flag officer, was unfit to fight.
Six months on the bridge under the tropic sun, six months of tension, had afflicted Halsey with an unbearable skin eruption. He could not keep from scratching, and the disease spread. By the time he had returned to Hawaii, he had exhausted every homemade remedy, including oatmeal baths, and had lost twenty pounds.
Halsey went into the hospital, while Nimitz placed command of the defense of Midway under both Admiral Fletcher and Vice-Admiral Raymond Spruance.
They would have a fleet of seventy-six ships built around Enterprise, Hornet, and Yorktown, without, however, a single battleship to protect them. The carriers would depend on cruisers and destroyers for their screens, a garrison of Marines would provide Midway’s land defenses, while land-based Marine and Army air would also be deployed against the enemy. Finally, there was the calm and canny Nimitz, who refused to take the enemy’s Aleutians bait, and sent Fletcher and Spruance into the battle with these instructions:
“You will be governed by the principle of calculated risk, which you shall interpret to mean the avoidance of exposure of your force to attack by superior enemy forces without good prospect of inflicting, as a result of such exposure, greater damage on the enemy.”
Meanwhile, the American pilots were searching the Pacific. On June 3, Ensign Jack Reid lifted a Catalina flying boat off Midway and headed for the very sector at which Nimitz expected the enemy forces to converge. Seven hundred miles out he saw a cluster of specks come crawling over the rim of the horizon.
“Do you see what I see?” Reid yelled to his co-pilot.
“You’re damned right I do!” the co-pilot shouted, and Reid ducked into a cloud.6
Someone besides Snowy Rhoades to the west and Martin Clemens to the east, and all the missionaries and Melanesians between them, had at last taken notice of Guadalcanal.
The Japanese had come.
On May 28 a scouting party arrived from Tulagi, landing at Lunga midway on the northern coast. In the early days of June they paid more visits, accompanied by Mr. Ishimoto. They slaughtered plantation cattle with machine guns and butchered them with great waste. At other times Ishimoto asked the natives the whereabouts of the District Officer, for Clemens had withdrawn from Aola Bay to the bush village of Paripao.
“Him he gone,” the natives replied. “Him no more.”7
Such evasive replies infuriated Ishimoto. He lectured the natives on their duty to the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and he was encouraged by some of the men in the front rank who nodded their heads vigorously. Ishimoto’s claque, of course, was composed of Martin Clemens’s “plain-clothes men.”
The District Officer had stripped his scouts of all distinguishing badges. They wore ordinary lap-laps like the other natives and their instructions were to mingle with the Japanese, to work for them, and to spy on them. They had become proficient in reporting enemy ships. It was no longer, “One big-fellow war he stop,” but “One fellow cruiser gottem gun ’long six inch.” There had been difficulty in identifying the caliber of the antiaircraft guns on Tulagi, until Clemens hit upon the idea of keeping small logs of varying diameter in his hut at Paripao.
The scouts would paddle over to Tulagi in their graceful gondolas and climb the enemy guns at night, carefully grasping the barrels in their hands or hefting the shells. Back at Paripao they would squat with closed eyes and expressions of pained concentration on their faces while Clemens placed log after log in their hands. Then, with faces brightening and the exclamation, “Him no more, massa!,” one or another of them would burst out: “Gottem shell like small fellow beerbottle.”
“A three-incher!” Clemens would exclaim, and the information would go off to Australia.
One day in June, Clemens received an ominous message from Snowy Rhoades, which went:
“Japs at Savo (Island) with one machine gun and tin hats, enquiring for whereabouts of white men on Guadalcanal. Said they would go there in about two weeks time.”8
In other words, they were coming to Clemens’s island to stay.
The First Marines were leaving New River.
With the Seventh Marines still on detached duty in Samoa, with the Fifth Marines and most of the artillery still sailing toward New Zealand, the last of Vandegrift’s echelons was heading for the West Coast under Brigadier General William Rupertus, the division’s assistant commander. The night before the departure by rail, the men gave themselves a farewell party. They went down to the “slop chute” and bought cases of canned beer and carried them back to those rickety, stifling, mosquito-ridden squad huts that they detested. They began to drink, and then, to sing. They sang songs like “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” or “Merrily We Roll Along” or other favorites such as “The Old Mill Stream” or “A Tavern in the Town” before turning to the serviceman’s repertoire of regional songs, “Dixie,” “The Wabash Cannonball”:
Listen to the jingle, the rumble and the roar
Ridin’ through the woodlands and the ocean by the shore.
“Birmingham Jail,” “Red River Valley,” after which, as an inevitable sign of insobriety they began bawling out bawdies and dirty songs, but then, because only a few lewdly dedicated minds among them actually knew all the words, they had to fall back on the college ballads which everyone knew, ending with the sentimental “Sweetheart of Sigma Chi,” and being, by that time, so sentimentally drunk, there was nothing left to do but blubber about “My Mom” and “M Is for the Million Things She Gave Me,” until, at the conclusion of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” some of them were weeping openly and others so outraged by the realization that they would not be home for Christmas that they had begun to wrestle on the floor or duel each other with sheathed bayonets—“grab-assing,” as the Marines call it—while others had wandered outside to pick fights with other squads.
Up at the Second Battalion, one of the machine gunners had begun to punch holes in the huts’ wallboard sides. The man was Indian Johnny Rivers, a powerfully built youth of about medium height, half Indian and half English, who had been raised in the Pennsylvania Dutch country. He had been a professional prizefighter before the war, and he was, with his keen good humor and laughing black eyes, a great favorite with both men and officers. The gunners cheered and whooped as Johnny staggered from hut to hut, crouching and unleashing his famous right, yelling “Here’s another one for the goddamned mosquitoes to come in!”9
It was a marvelous method of letting off the steam which months of boredom and frustration can generate in such exuberant spirits. Soon other gunners joined Rivers in ventilating the despised shacks, symbols of all that they had hated during those weeks upon weeks of marching, marching, marching, of sleeping in the rain or eating a sodden slop for chow, of sitting for monotonous hours in wallowing Higgins boats while seasick men threw up to windward, or of repeatedly jumping into the surf and running up the beach with heavy, squish-booted step to fall on the sand and crawl forward with cradled rifle and become coated in grit like a fish in flour. Punching holes in flimsy walls should square away those “chicken” captains and corporals and every other regulation martinet who insisted upon doing things by the book—like the enraged Gunny Jim Blalock who at that very moment was ba
wling “Knock if awff!” and promising them that they would all “see the man” in the morning.
They did. But Lieutenant Colonel Al Pollock, Rivers’s battalion commander, was helpless, on the day of departure, to do more than give the men a tongue-lashing and put them on restriction. This was merely a disciplinary tautology, because as Rivers’s buddy, Private Al Schmid, a short, stocky brashness with an irrepressible blond cowlick, explained the situation: “We were on restriction already!”
“Yah-vo!” said Johnny, and that afternoon he and Smitty and the rest of the First Marines went aboard their train.10
They were astonished. Here was no grimy, crowded troop train but a line of Pullman cars with a separate berth for each man, with porters and a luxurious dining car in which waiters in white jackets served their individual tastes on clean plates and starched linen. Very few twenty-one-dollar-a-month privates have gone so opulently to war.
Five days later—having traversed that vast and gloriously varied country which most of them had never seen before—having been charmed by gophers gaping at them from prairie holes, having marveled at the primitive pure beauty of the Ozarks or the myriad million fireflies that seemed to set the Kansas wheatfields blazing, having missed the Mississippi by a night crossing but having caught their breath at the grandeur of the Rockies, they climbed the Sierra Nevadas like a long slow roller-coaster and went racing down the reverse grades to San Francisco and the sea.
Challenge for the Pacific: Guadalcanal: The Turning Point of the War Page 5
