by Craig Nelson
The Americans were imprisoned by the Kempeitai, the Japanese Gestapo who believed truthful confessions could be extracted from prisoners taken as near to death as possible. “I was given what they call the water cure,” Chase Nielsen said. “I was put on my back on the floor with my arms and legs stretched out, one guard holding each limb. A towel was wrapped around my face and put across my face and water was poured on. They poured water on this towel until I was almost unconscious from strangulation, then they would let up until I’d get my breath, then they’d start all over again. I felt more or less like I was drowning, just gasping between life and death.”
Even though the Japanese had already retrieved enough evidence to tell them all they needed to know about the Doolittle Raid, they simply could not believe that American bombers had successfully attacked the empire and were determined to beat the truth out of their captives. For two months, the torture and interrogation would continue, and thoughts of suicide naturally occurred in the minds of these young men. The Americans would think, what could be worse than this? Why not end it now? Then they would remember, they had no means; they didn’t even have the power to kill themselves.
• • •
When he first heard that Tokyo had been bombed, Isoroku Yamamoto was so filled with shame that he took to quarters aboard battleship Nagato and refused to come out. Day after day, he ignored his staff’s pleas, crippled by anxiety and depression. When finally Yamamoto emerged, he was determined that such a violation of his beloved country could never happen again.
When Doolittle struck, Japan’s armed forces were engulfed in bitter conflict on strategy in the wake of Operation Number One. The navy general staff wanted to consolidate and expand their Pacific conquests, eventually cutting off Australia’s sea lanes to the United States. Yamamoto and his Combined Fleet officers wanted to instead finish the job they’d started at Pearl Harbor by destroying the rest of America’s Pacific Fleet.
Yamamoto proposed solving two concerns with one battle. Since the Doolittle Raid must have been launched by a carrier near Midway, the American-controlled atoll eleven hundred miles west of Hawaii, then Midway must be the next target. With a victory at Midway, Japan could protect the home islands from future attacks and lure the US Navy into a battle that, in the face of Japan’s vastly superior Pacific naval power, it was guaranteed to lose. Additionally Japan would have a military base from which to launch the eventual conquest of Hawaii, and then a full retaliatory strike against the American West Coast.
Yamamoto’s strategy was approved.
• • •
Most of the men who survived the Doolittle Raid spent the rest of World War II in CBI/SEAC (China-Burma-India/Southeast Asia Command, known by wags as Confused Bastards in India and Saving England’s Asian Colonies). As they were thrown by war across the globe, another group of men, also not as honored and remembered as they deserve, were spending their combat years in Hawaii as self-imposed prisoners of the windowless basement in Pearl Harbor’s Naval District Administration Building. The Japanese attackers missed this building entirely on December 7, an oversight that was one of their greatest strategic errors.
The men in that basement were Station HYPO, the local branch office of OP-20-G, the Communications Security Section of the Office of Naval Communications. Their chief, Joseph J. Rochefort Jr., felt so responsible for December 7 that he rarely left the basement and he almost never slept. HYPO team was charged with cracking the latest Imperial Japanese Navy code—JN-25. If it weren’t for Rochefort, HYPO, a series of Japanese missteps, and the Kantai Kessen triggered by the Doolittle Raid, the Japanese Asian empire of Dai Nippon Teikoku might remain to this day.
On May 5, 1942, HYPO intercepted, decoded, and translated an order to strike the Aleutian Islands of Attu and Kiska on June 3, as well as a target code named “AH” on June 4. Rochefort guessed that AH was Midway, a notion his superiors dismissed. Why would Tokyo want to simultaneously hit opposite ends of the Pacific, and why would the Japanese make such efforts over Midway’s two negligible specks of atoll? Even so, Rochefort’s superiors approved his plotting a trick. Rochefort had Midway officers openly broadcast a false distress call that their distillation plant was broken. Almost immediately, Japanese forces on Wake informed Tokyo of AH’s water troubles.
The Americans had another secret Japan didn’t know, in that Japanese pilots had reported sinking two American aircraft carriers during May’s Battle of the Coral Sea. Instead, Yorktown had struggled into Pearl Harbor on May 27 and Nimitz was informed it would take three weeks to return her to service. He ordered the repairs done in three days. In the same miracle of sweat and engineering that had restored so many of the Queens of Pearl, on May 30, she sailed out, her band playing (in another of World War II’s great mysteries) “California, Here I Come.”
As Yamamoto began to assemble his mission, HYPO was able to decrypt the date, location, time, and details of this battle. After an assault on Alaska’s Aleutians drew away some of America’s fighting force, Midway would be attacked by a group of four carriers led by Chuichi Nagumo, the hero of Pearl Harbor, followed by an invasion of Japanese troops. A third armada, which included three of Japan’s greatest battleships, would meanwhile wait nearby for the American navy to rush to Midway’s defense. It was a strategy that combined Mahan with Mitchell; a Kantai Kessen starring naval aviation.
On May 24, Rochefort handed the exact Japanese battle plans to Edwin Layton, CINCPAC’s intelligence officer, who studied the transcriptions, the Pacific charts, tides, winds, and weather, and informed Nimitz that the Japanese would “come in from the northwest on bearing 325 degrees and they will be sighted at about 175 miles from Midway, and the time will be about 0600.” It was, word for word and point by point, exactly what would happen and was the most significant intelligence in the history of World War II’s Pacific theater. Yet, even with this key advantage, Nimitz only had three task groups to send against Yamamoto’s ten battleships, twenty-four cruisers, seventy destroyers, eighteen tankers, fifteen submarines, eight aircraft carriers, and assorted transports—185 ships in all. Additionally, one of America’s greatest admirals had been sidelined; the stress and exhaustion of the first months of war had finally caught up with Bill Halsey, who succumbed to an attack of eczema that sent him to the hospital. In his stead, Rear Admiral Ray Spruance became temporary head of Enterprise, joined by Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher on Yorktown, and Pete Mitscher on Hornet.
• • •
June 4 turned out to be a typical Pacific summer day, with flat water, a few scattered white clouds, and wind so mild a carrier would need full-out power to launch its air. At 0534, scout planes radioed back to Enterprise that enemy carriers had been spotted. Ray Spruance ordered his airmen to attack.
At 0615, Vice Admiral Nagumo ordered seventy-two bombers and thirty-six fighters to strike the Americans on the twin atolls of Midway. They were met by twenty-five obsolete fighter planes, which they downed. From 0630 to 0650, the Japanese destroyed Midway’s hospital, fuel tanks, and Marine command post, killing another twenty men. They were met by heavy antiaircraft fire however; thirty-six Japanese planes were taken, and thirty more made it back to their carriers too damaged to fly again.
At 0702, Enterprise and Hornet together launched twenty Wildcat fighters, sixty-seven Dauntless dive-bombers, and twenty-nine Devastator torpedo planes, keeping behind only the airpower needed for defense. At 0838, Yorktown sent out seventeen Dauntlesses, twelve Devastators, and six Wildcats—in sum, pretty much everything the Americans had to throw.
At 0705, ten Devastators from Midway attacked. Their torpedoes missed, and seven of them were shot down. Since the Japanese hadn’t yet vanquished the atoll and there was no sign of an approaching American fleet, Nagumo changed strategy against Yamamoto’s plans and ordered another assault on Midway. This meant doing what he’d forgone in not making a third strike on Pearl Harbor—an hour-long process of lowering planes below, replacing their torpedoes with bombs, and raising them back to the
flight deck.
At 0728, the very last of Nagumo’s patrol planes sent a message: “Sight what appears to be ten enemy surface ships . . . 240 miles from Midway.” The reported position established that they were well within air range, so Nagumo reversed direction, ordering that all planes that hadn’t yet been switched to bombs should now keep their torpedoes. Yamamoto’s double-edged strategy of invading Midway while simultaneously destroying the American fleet had bottlenecked. Nagumo’s decks were full of land bombers and a few dive-bombers, not the right equipment for a naval aerial assault, and he had planes returning from Midway unable to land, since the decks were too crowded.
Almost immediately, twenty-seven dive-bombers and fifteen B-17 Flying Fortresses attacked, dropping 322 bombs—over 120,000 pounds of explosives—which missed. Ten were shot down. “We had by this time undergone every kind of attack by shore-based planes—torpedo, level bombing, dive-bombing—but were still unscathed,” Mitsuo Fuchida, watching from the Akagi deck while recovering from an appendectomy, remembered. “Frankly, it was my judgment that the enemy fliers were not displaying a very high level of ability. It was our general conclusion that we had little to fear from the enemy’s offensive tactics.”
Hornet’s Torpedo Squadron Eight meanwhile followed John Waldron’s hunch straight to the Japanese fleet. At 0918, they were spotted by cruiser Chikuma, who signaled her closest destroyer. The two opened fire and blew out smoke screens. One by one, Zero attackers appeared in the sky above the American fliers, quickly swooping down to maul the Devastators. Of the fifteen planes of Torpedo Squadron Eight, fourteen caught enemy fire, burst into flames, and fell into the sea. The sole survivor was Ensign George Gay. During the assault, the electric release for his torpedo jammed, so he had to do it manually. His target, carrier Soryu, saw his missile’s wake, moved, and the American torpedo missed. Ensign Gay then tried strafing the carrier’s deck with his guns, but they didn’t work. Now, five Zeros were after him. They disintegrated his rudder. They killed his crewman. They shot off one of his wings. His plane crashed, but the ensign, though hit in the leg and seriously wounded, was still alive. George grabbed his seat cushion and rubber life raft out of the cockpit and hid under the floats from Japanese patrols.
At 0920, Wade McCluskey and his Enterprise SBD dive-bombers arrived at the last reported Japanese position before the withdrawal. At an altitude of twenty thousand feet, McCluskey could see for sixty miles or so, and no ships were to be found in any direction. His gas gauge gave him two choices. Everyone in his squadron could give up, salvo their ordnance into the water, and return to Enterprise, or they could immediately fly in exactly the right direction and just as immediately attack. Wade was a fighter pilot who’d never dropped a bomb before, and he began a box search starting in the most likely direction he thought Nagumo might have taken: the northeast. Finally McCluskey sighted a Japanese destroyer—the Arashi, which had unsuccessfully been chasing and rolling depth charges against American sub Nautilus—running north at flank speed, and decided it must be heading toward the Japanese fleet. Enterprise Bombing Six followed it.
At 1005, pilots in McCluskey’s squadron reported seeing “curved white slashes on a blue carpet”—the wakes of more ships than any US naval airman had ever seen.
At 1020, all four Japanese carriers turned into the wind, to begin a devastating assault on the American fleet. Simultaneously, McCluskey’s force of thirty-seven dive-bombers met up with Yorktown’s remaining fighters and torpedo planes directly overhead. The Americans rose to position and began their assaults. “I saw this glint in the sun and it looked just like a beautiful silver waterfall; these dive-bombers coming down,” remembered James E. Thach, leader of the Yorktown fighters. “I’d never seen such superb dive-bombing.”
The first three bombs aimed at Kaga missed, but the fourth struck directly in the middle of her launch line. Two more missed, but the seventh and eighth struck forward, exploding on the hangar deck below. Kaga burst repeatedly into flames; even her paint caught fire. Three bombs then hit their mark on Soryu; its fire was so intense that the hangar doors warped. By 1915, both had sunk.
On Akagi, “the plump silhouettes of the American Dauntless dive-bombers quickly grew larger, and then a number of black objects suddenly floated eerily from their wings,” Fuchida recalled. “Bombs! Down they came straight toward me! . . . The terrifying scream of the dive-bombers reached me first, followed by the crashing explosion of a direct hit. There was a blinding flash and then a second explosion, much louder than the first. . . . Looking about, I was horrified at the destruction that had been wrought in a matter of seconds. There was a huge hole in the flight deck just behind the midship elevator. The elevator itself, twisted like molten glass, was drooping into the hangar. Deck plates reeled upward in grotesque configurations. Planes stood tail up, belching livid flame and jet-black smoke. Reluctant tears streamed down my cheeks as I watched the fires spread.”
A bomb from Enterprise Bombing Six’s Lieutenant Richard Best, had struck the dead center of Akagi’s flight deck, crashed through to the hangar deck beneath, and exploded. Just as on Arizona, that single strike chain-reacted with the ship’s own bombs and fuel, blowing crewmen overboard and destroying Akagi, the lead flattop of what was once the world’s mightiest naval force, with a single blow. Jumping to the escape boats when the ship was abandoned, pilot Fuchida broke both of his legs.
At 1040, eighteen dive-bombers and six fighters launched from Hiryu immediately found Yorktown. She was hit on the flight deck, down the smokestack, and four decks below, with an armor-piercer, as well as with two Japanese torpedoes. Dead in the water, at 1458 she was abandoned.
Shortly after 1600, Enterprise and Hornet sent out the rest of their aircrews to mop up. At around 1700, twenty-four Yorktown Dauntlesses scored four hits on Hiryu, sinking her. Nagumo’s airmen reported sinking three American carriers, and he ordered a pursuit, thinking he could incite a night battle, at which the Japanese now excelled. But as time went on and more reports came in, he realized that his pilots’ first calls were exaggerated, and that he could be heading up against a surprisingly powerful American fleet. At 0815 on June 5, the order was given to withdraw. That night, George Gay, sole survivor of Hornet’s Torpedo Squadron Eight, was found by an American flying boat, rescued, and taken home.
The Americans knew they had repelled a great force, but it was a while before either side understood that this was a true Kantai Kessen, the decisive battle that was the turning point in World War II’s Pacific theater. If the attack on Pearl Harbor had been wildly successful in so many ways, its effect on American morale was the exact opposite of what Yamamoto had predicted. The Americans might be mystified, grief stricken, humiliated, and in shock after December 7, but they were not ready to grant Tokyo any peace treaties; they were ready to wreak vengeance.
For Japanese leaders however, Operation Number One (which included Pearl Harbor) infected them with a fatal dose of victory disease. At Midway, “for reasons that will always defy rational analysis,” military historian H. P. Willmott noted, “Yamamoto insisted upon a tactical deployment that incorporated every possible risk and weakness and left his forces inferior to the enemy at the point of contact, despite their having what should have been an irresistible numerical and qualitative superiority.” As for the Imperial Japanese Army, he noted, “One cannot ignore the simple fact that not a single operation planned after the start of the war met with success.”
Roosevelt had sent the Doolittle Raiders as vengeance for Pearl Harbor; Yamamoto responded by attacking Midway; and the American triumph in that battle, using the secrets of HYPO, would cost the Japanese four of the six carriers that had attacked Oahu a mere six months before, along with 322 planes and 700 pilots, crewmen, and schooled naval officers. Their feared navy would never forcefully strike again, and the Japanese would from then on be on the defensive from a greater US naval power.
The American vengeance had just begun. After the heroic work of salvage at the
cofferdams and dry docks of Pearl Harbor, Nevada participated in Midway, the Aleutians, Normandy, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and operations against the Japanese home islands. California was awarded seven battle stars for its numerous campaigns. West Virginia fought in Surigao Strait, Leyte, Luzon, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa; on September 2, 1945, she entered Tokyo Bay as witness to the formal Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri. Meanwhile, the thirty-one Japanese ships in the First Air Fleet that had attacked Hawaii were all hunted down by the US Navy and fully destroyed. The Midway victory sunk carriers Soryu, Kaga, Akagi, and Hiryu. Shokaku was destroyed on June 19, 1944, at the Battle of the Philippine Sea, after which, on July 6, Admiral Chuichi Nagumo shot himself in the head. Zuikaku was sunk off Cape Engano on October 25, 1944; and Tone was destroyed at her Inland Sea moorings on July 24, 1945. Eventually, Isoroku Yamamoto’s captured flagship Nagato was towed to Bikini Atoll and used as a nuclear-test target.
CHAPTER TWELVE
* * *
TRIUMPH
On April 28, 1942, Prime Minister Hideki Tojo called a special conference to resolve the question of what Japan should do with its eight captured Doolittle Raiders. Tojo felt ambivalent; he believed the American bombing “contrary to international law. It was not against troops but against noncombatants, primary-school students. . . . it was homicide.” But he also feared that other countries would judge POW executions as barbarous, and that such an act could endanger Japanese prisoners of war.
By June, the Kempeitai realized that they were making no progress in extracting the confessions they wanted from the Raiders. All eight captives from Bat out of Hell and Green Hornet were reunited and after being forced to sign “confessions,” were sent to Shanghai’s Bridge House, one of World War II’s most notorious prisons. “At night we would hear this beautiful, beautiful American music with all of the popular tunes that we had heard in the States,” Bob Hite said. “That was hard to understand. . . . One of the tunes they played when I think we all kind of wanted to cry a little bit was ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.’ It was hard to take and think that here we were, we could hear music like that, and then to realize where we were, and what had happened to us.”
