Lucky 666

by Bob Drury

  II After the war, new technology allowed meteorologists to recognize the significant effect wind field convergence had on tropical weather, particularly near the equator, and the term “intertropical convergence zone” replaced “intertropical front.”

  III U.S. Intelligence eventually gave code names to 122 different makes of Japanese aircraft, including “Rufe” for the AM62-N Zero-style floatplane and “Hamp” for an upgraded version of the original Zero model that came on line in mid-1942. By then, however, the Americans had bestowed such an iconic stature on the plane that most enemy fighters continued to be referred to by American Airmen as Zeros or “Zekes.”

  IV Most American bomber flight crews did not even realize that the hinged flight control surface at the tip of their wings—aileron is French for “little wing”—was constructed primarily of cloth.

  PART

  II

  It is probable that future war will be conducted by a special class, the air force, as it was by the armored knights of the Middle Ages.

  —Brigadier Gen. William “Billy” Mitchell, “Winged Defense,” 1924

  9

  BREAKING THE CODE

  REAR ADM. FRANK JACK FLETCHER was an unlikely hero. In fact, he was probably lucky to still have a job. Five months earlier, in late December 1941, Fletcher had been placed in command of the relief task force charged with delivering reinforcements to the 1,500 beleaguered Marines, sailors, and U.S. civilian construction workers garrisoning Wake Island in the Western Pacific. The Americans had been under constant air bombardment since the day after Pearl Harbor, and had even repelled several small landings attempted by the Japanese. By the time Fletcher arrived, however, a larger enemy invasion force had already killed or captured the island’s defenders, and secured Wake.

  Fletcher was criticized heavily in Washington for what the Navy brass felt were unnecessary refueling stops that compromised his mission. On the front lines, however, the admiral’s immediate superiors cited a series of unavoidable storms as the cause of the delay and refused to blame him for the loss of Wake. Such was Adm. Nimitz’s faith in the man that he made a point of retaining Fletcher as commander of the flotilla, consisting of an aircraft carrier, three heavy cruisers, and eight destroyers. This proved to be a wise decision.

  Five months later, in May 1942, the Imperial General Command initiated a series of campaigns in the Southwest Pacific that Japanese war planners presumed would knock Australia out of the war. They hoped that with the fall of its Australian ally, an isolated United States, still reeling from Pearl Harbor, might be forced to rethink its entire Pacific strategy. A major aspect of this Japanese push south was to capture the Allies’ bare-bones installation at Port Moresby. This would not only eliminate the staging area for American bombers attacking Rabaul—“Japan’s acknowledgment of the needle in her flank”—but move the Empire a step closer to invading Australia.

  The Port Moresby operation was to consist of a two-pronged amphibious landing centered on the base’s two airfields. Two thousand Japanese troops would come ashore southeast of the town and engulf the Kila Kila fighter strip while another 3,500 landed to the northwest and drove on Seven Mile airdrome, used for staging bombing missions. The town would be encircled and devoured. Nearly simultaneously, the seizure of Guadalcanal and its key airfield in the southern Solomons would serve both a tactical and a strategic purpose—Japanese bombers would now be housed less than 1,400 miles from Brisbane, while the shipping stem from America would be severed.

  As for the Port Moresby assault, as far back as 1938 the Japanese Imperial Command had planned to effect this separation of Australia from its powerful American ally by using New Guinea as a jumping-off point. With the forces of the Rising Sun achieving their goals across the South Pacific with efficient and brutal precision, all that needed to be added to the Port Moresby operation were specific dates. In the spring of 1942 this was easily done; the Japanese Navy predicted that its amphibious landings would take place on May 7.

  Australian Prime Minister John Curtin was not the only politician to recognize the severity of the situation. If Australia was lost, the Roosevelt administration might even have to consider abandoning all of the United States’ Pacific holdings and make protecting Pearl Harbor and the American mainland a priority even above defeating Germany. That was, at any rate, the Japanese thinking behind the assault on Port Moresby. If it was carried out with speed and stealth, the Americans and Australians would never know what hit them. How could they? They would have had to break the most secure code the Imperial Navy used to send messages . . . which is exactly what the Allies had done.

  Well before the war began, American and Australian intelligence officers had been working on intercepting and decoding Japanese radio messages. Since the attack on Pearl Harbor several breakthroughs had been made, with American cryptologists partially deciphering the enemy’s main naval encryption system, known as JN-25. Although the code breakers had yet to completely crack JN-25, their methods had become proficient enough to provide fair warning that Port Moresby was in peril. Reconnaissance flights reporting an increase in shipping traffic at Simpson Harbour and an influx of land-based bombers to Rabaul’s Vunakanau airdrome further solidified the strong circumstantial case.

  By early May the Americans were well aware that a large enemy naval force had departed from Rabaul and was steaming into the Coral Sea with Port Moresby its likely objective. MacArthur’s staff in Brisbane was even hinting to reporters that a major Japanese offensive was imminent. This intelligence breach outraged Adm. King back in Washington: as King knew, the Japanese read American and Australian newspapers, and they might easily deduce that their codes had been broken. King even buttonholed Gen. Marshall at a meeting of the Joint Chiefs to remind him to keep MacArthur’s loose lips sealed.

  But Japanese military intelligence seemed not to have picked up on the public hints. This was fortunate for a variety of reasons, the most crucial being that the U.S. Navy had so few ships in the Western Pacific—had the Japanese suspected that America was covertly tracking their movements, they could have prepared to take advantage of this imbalance. At his headquarters in Hawaii, Adm. Nimitz second-guessed himself for dispatching Adm. William Halsey to transport Doolittle’s bombers; there was now no way Halsey’s two carriers could reach the Coral Sea in time to intercept the Japanese force. Nimitz was left to order whatever vessels he had available to counter the strike. The most readily available in the area was the task force under the command of Adm. Fletcher. Though Fletcher had acquired a second carrier, he remained severely outgunned. He could not fail to recognize that in a fight on the open sea, his ships wouldn’t stand a chance. He would have to rely solely on his carriers’ airpower.

  Meanwhile, Fletcher’s Japanese counterpart, Adm. Shigeyoshi Inoue, began to receive Imperial intelligence reports indicating that American ships were somewhere in his vicinity. Inoue welcomed them; the Allied ships presented a golden opportunity. Fletcher’s two carriers, the USS Yorktown and the USS Lexington, represented half of America’s entire carrier force. If Inoue, while landing his 5,500 troops at Port Moresby, could also cripple or even destroy those carriers, the war in the Southwest Pacific might be as good as won.

  Bad weather delayed the meeting of the two fleets for several days. On the morning of May 7, the date set for the invasion, reconnaissance flights from both flotillas found each other, and attack planes were launched. Over the next two days the Japanese managed to sink an American destroyer and oiler.I The Americans sent a cruiser and a light carrier to the bottom of the sea.

  The next day the Americans suffered their most grievous loss when the Lexington, having endured a succession of withering Japanese bombing runs, detonated in a cloud of black smoke. It sank rapidly, taking 26 officers and 190 sailors with it. Only the heroic maneuvers of Fletcher’s destroyer skippers resulted in the rescue of over a thousand men. The Yorktown was also damaged, but it fared better than the large Japanese carrier Shokaku—the lead ship i
n its class—which sustained crippling damage from American dive-bombers.

  What came to be known as the Battle of the Coral Sea was the first naval engagement in history in which enemy ships did not directly fire on one another. The entire fight had been waged by aircraft, with American fliers destroying more than 100 enemy planes while losing only 35 of their own. When these startling numbers were reported to Imperial General Headquarters, the Japanese high command decided that without adequate air cover, Adm. Inoue’s remaining ships were too vulnerable, and the Port Moresby invasion force was ordered to turn back for Rabaul.

  What official reports and newspapers back in the States celebrated as Fletcher’s “victory” was in truth more stopgap than turning point. Indeed, in comparing the ship losses on both sides it could be argued that the Japanese had achieved a tactical triumph. Further, American aircraft out of Australia had performed dismally, with less than half of the bombers finding enemy targets. In one formation the bombers mistakenly dropped their ordnance on a task group of Royal Australian Navy cruisers and destroyers; luckily, and typically, these payloads all missed. But there is not much doubt that the Battle of the Coral Sea was a strategic success for the Americans if for no other reason than the fight forestalled the invasion of Port Moresby.

  Perhaps more important, though Allied forces in the Pacific remained thoroughly outmanned and outgunned, for the first time since the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor the Rising Sun’s seemingly unstoppable juggernaut across Asia had been slowed. The Imperial General Staff, however, was far from cowed. For even as pilots from each side bombed the other’s shipping on the Coral Sea, Japanese scouts were mapping the tiny island of Guadalcanal in the southern Solomons, a little over 700 miles to the northeast. In mid-June, the van of Japan’s invasion force came ashore there unopposed.

  The landing force quickly scattered the island’s smattering of Caucasian cattle ranchers and rubber harvesters. A few would subsequently volunteer to remain behind as spotters, or coastwatchers, as the Royal Australian Navy called them. The native Melanesians of Guadalcanal who were not captured and conscripted as slave labor fled into the jungle. By early July a full complement of Japanese soldiers and marines had arrived with over 100 trucks of construction equipment with which to refurbish the island’s grass airstrip.

  As Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, Adm. Nimitz was already planning a counterinvasion of both Guadalcanal and the even smaller Japanese-held island of Tulagi for an as yet undetermined date in the future when he began to receive reports from the coastwatchers informing him that the enemy effort to recondition the airfield on Guadalcanal was proceeding faster than expected. The new airdrome taking shape, he was told, appeared both sturdy enough and long enough, at 3,600 feet, to allow for the operation of long-range bombers that could reach Australia. Nimitz was taken aback.

  Tall, courtly, and strikingly handsome, Nimitz carried himself with an aristocratic mien that lent an air of confident gravitas to his office. He was also an ardent map hobbyist whose profound interest in military literature was reflected in his principle of taking only what he called “calculated risks.” He recognized that it would take time, probably at least a year, for America’s factories, mills, and assembly lines to achieve a practical war footing to begin driving back the Japanese via an island-hopping campaign. Until then he was prepared only to execute a twofold battle plan—to surprise and confuse the enemy with quick and stealthy strikes against their holdings while also overburdening the Imperial Navy’s ability to protect its lengthening supply lines and shipping lanes. But now, with the enemy on Guadalcanal virtually knocking on Australia’s door, Nimitz exhorted his invasion planners to send him a timetable for landings no later than August.

  As the admiral’s staff rushed to meet this deadline, they were more than buoyed by news of a battle that had just taken place near a small island far off to the northeast.

  THE TINY ATOLL OF MIDWAY, as its name implies, breaches almost the exact center of the Pacific Ocean, dangling from the northwestern tip of the Hawaiian Islands chain like the smallest charm on an unclasped bracelet. Prior to the war, the U.S. Navy had constructed a crude airstrip of perforated steel matting on the lagoon-fringed spit of land with the intention of establishing a forward submarine base that would allow its boats to range deeper into the Western Pacific.

  But the Imperial Navy, particularly Adm. Yamamoto, also had eyes for Midway. Yamamoto considered it the ideal location for the decades-old plan to lure the American fleet into an ambush. Yamamoto’s strategy was simplicity itself: threaten Midway, await the arrival of America’s aircraft carriers to defend it, and destroy them. Yamamoto himself would personally lead the Combined Fleet when he sprang the trap. With Midway in their possession, Japanese forces would not only have eliminated the threat of another embarrassing—like Doolittle’s—raid on the homeland, but also have secured their own forward base a mere 1,300 miles from Oahu.

  But first Yamamoto had to convince his superiors in Tokyo that this was the right time for an epochal showdown with the Americans. He faced strong opposition from influential members of the Imperial Navy General Staff, who instead argued for employing the Combined Fleet in a broader South Pacific offensive. Even more ambitious than the landings at Port Moresby, this sweeping drive would entail invasions not only of New Guinea and the Solomons, but also at New Caledonia, Fiji, and Samoa.

  In the end, however, Yamamoto’s renown and track record prevailed, and the admiral pressed forward with his Midway plans. He scheduled the assault for early June when, taking no chances, he planned to sail with more than 200 warships, including two battleships and four aircraft carriers carrying over 500 planes. It would be the largest combined tonnage ever assembled in the history of naval warfare.

  And it was indeed a well-planned venture. Except that, as with the Coral Sea, American code breakers knew all about it.

  Thanks to this foreknowledge, Adm. Nimitz was also aware that his Pacific Fleet, with three aircraft carriers and no battleships, was outnumbered. Under normal circumstances this discrepancy in firepower between the competing flotillas would have given the American admiral pause. But on this occasion there was also a mitigating factor to consider. Some months earlier, Adm. King had sent Nimitz an editorial from the Saturday Evening Post, suggesting that Nimitz make it required reading among his staff. Written by a vice president of research at General Motors and titled “There Is Only One Mistake: To Do Nothing,” the article argued that “taking risks, even accepting intelligent mistakes with tragic consequences, was a recipe for determining and solving real problems amid the distractions of apparent problems.”

  There was no doubting King’s intentions in forwarding the story, and it served its purpose. Nimitz decided to buck the long odds his ships would face at Midway. After all, his code breakers had provided him with the element of surprise. He wagered that this would give his 233 aircraft more than a fighting chance. His bet paid off.

  The four-day battle produced a devastating U.S. victory that stunned the Japanese. Wave after wave of American planes swept over the enemy fleet, knocking Zeros out of the sky and feasting on the ships below as their captains desperately, and unsuccessfully, attempted evasive maneuvers. Back at Garbutt Field in Australia, tremendous whoops and hollers went up in the 22nd Bomb Group’s Ready Room when Jay and his fellow Airmen learned that four of their Marauders had taken part in the assault. The bombers had been held up in Hawaii for repairs when the rest of the Group had flown on to Australia, and now they became the first U.S. Army aircraft to ever complete a torpedo attack. It was a proud moment.

  In the end, U.S. losses amounted to a single aircraft carrier and one destroyer while all four Japanese carriers—the Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiryu—were among the vessels destroyed before a humiliated Yamamoto ordered the remnants of his Combined Fleet withdrawn. In a bitter irony for the Japanese, each of those four carriers had been among the half dozen to carry out the attacks on Pearl Harbor. It was not lost
on the Americans that the last day of the fighting at Midway, June 7, also marked the six-month anniversary of that dreadful day.

  Of equal importance, more skilled enemy aviators were killed in one day than the Japanese could develop in a year. As one Army Air Force general observed in the aftermath of the Battle of Midway, the Japanese Army and Navy might be able to “hold their own in any league, but he simply cannot train Airmen to compare with ours in a hurry. His original highly trained crews were superb, but they are dead.”

  Although neither side could have foreseen it at the time, losing a quartet of aircraft carriers was a blow from which the Empire would never quite recover. For the moment, however, the catastrophe at Midway forced the Japanese to accept that, for the first time, they were now on a defensive footing. Their earlier Southern Strategy regarding New Caledonia, Fiji, and Samoa was restructured in favor of consolidating their holdings in the Bismarcks, in the Solomons, and on New Guinea. Moreover, there was now a much greater urgency to secure and stabilize these bases. Despite their defeat at Midway—or perhaps because of it—to Imperial General Headquarters this meant another assault on Port Moresby, this time from a different direction.

  WITH THEIR PREVIOUS ATTACK ON Port Moresby thwarted by the Battle of the Coral Sea—and with no carriers left to provide support for another amphibious landing directly on the Allied base—the Japanese decided on another tack: to land a force on New Guinea’s opposite coast and march overland, traversing the buttresses of rock that formed the Owen Stanley Range.