On May 25, the Japanese changed the additive tables for JN-25, just as they had before their last major offensive, Pearl Harbor. It was a blow for Hypo and the rest of the code breakers, but by that time Finnegan, Wright, and Rochefort had decoded 90 percent of Yamamoto’s May 20 directive. After the Combined Fleet assembled at Saipan, the commanders would parley on May 26 and depart for their destination on May 27. Given the distances involved and the speed they would travel, it would put the massive Japanese armada close to Midway by June 1 or June 2.
Late on May 26, Lasswell finally made a breakthrough on the date code: It was a simple grid with the twelve months listed as columns and thirty-one kana characters as rows, with alternating kana characters in the cross references providing a garble check. Having solved the all-important date code, Hypo could reread the many decrypts about the invasion plans within the context of when the invasion would happen. The Japanese decreed that the battle for Midway would occur on the second or third day of Minazuki, the “low water month” of June. It was also apparently the code name for their anticipated new mailing address.
Rochefort worked around the clock to make sure everything checked out; he had a meeting the next morning with Nimitz, Layton, and the top commanders of the Pacific Fleet. He was fully aware that the Pacific command would be setting sail on his advice and would make momentous decisions based on his assemblage of details great and small. If he misinterpreted even a small aspect of the jumbled pile of decrypted messages scattered on his desk and throughout the basement, the task force commanders could easily make mistakes that would cost lives, ships, maybe even the war. There were no second chances. Running late, Rochefort put on his coat and hat, tucked some charts and papers under his elbow, and ran out the door for the most important meeting of his life.
Nimitz’s ordinarily bright blue eyes fixed on him with withering disapproval. Rochefort was late, disheveled, and unshaved, shifting uneasily before the assembled group of high-ranking Navy officials. Exhausted, Rochefort peered at them with bloodshot eyes; he could see that was more than enough scrambled eggs for a buffet, and that everyone was cleared for what he was about to divulge.
He told them that the Japanese would attack Alaska, and although they intended to keep the Aleutian Islands strongholds, that the timing was a ruse to lure the Pacific Fleet. At Midway, the fleet could expect to face the first and second carrier divisions, including the Kido Butai’s Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiryu, along with elements of other fleets as escorts, and a main body invasion force. The Shokaku and Zuikaku would not be there due to the damage they received at the Battle of the Coral Sea. The Japanese had sortied from Saipan that very day and would attack Midway from the northwest on June 2 or 3 to soften up the island for the invasion force that would follow. The staff marveled at the value of what he was telling them; Nimitz asked some questions, including those about the source, to which Rochefort replied that the source was very good. One of the men gathered there commented that Rochefort’s spy in Tokyo was worth every penny, but neither Rochefort, Layton, nor Nimitz tried to dissuade him from believing that the intelligence came from a mole in the enemy’s camp.
After the meeting, Nimitz famously asked Layton for his opinion on where and when they would find the Kido Butai. Layton demurred, saying that it wasn’t possible to give a precise location or time, but Nimitz insisted. As Layton recalled later in his book, “I knew that I would have to stick my neck out, but that was clearly what he wanted. Summarizing all my data, I told Nimitz that the carriers would probably attack on the morning of 4 June, from the northwest on a bearing of 325 degrees. They could be sighted at about 175 miles from Midway at around 0700 local time.”
For Nimitz, there was never any question about what to do. Thousands of miles southwest of Pearl, the Tangier and the Salt Lake City started to send radio broadcasts intended to resemble carrier task forces. On May 28 the carriers Enterprise and Hornet steamed out of Pearl for a point 350 miles northeast of Midway to ambush the Kido Butai, while all available dockworkers worked night and day to shore up and repair the crippled Yorktown. While the rest of Honolulu was blacked out, the oxyacetylene torches and arc welders swarming over the ship cast a weird glow across the nighttime harbor. The workmen used so much electricity trying to cram three months of repairs into three days that blackouts were reported across the island. Where the workmen couldn’t make structural iron repairs in the bombed-out ship, they shored up plates and bulkheads with ordinary lumber. They simply had to do everything in their power to get the ship back into fighting order; even if they repaired the ship in time, the odds would be three to four in favor of the Japanese. If the Shokaku and Zuikaku hadn’t been knocked out of commission at the Coral Sea, the Kido Butai would have been invincible. As it was, with the element of surprise provided only by Hypo, Nimitz’s task force commanders had a good chance of winning an upset victory. Whatever the outcome, Nimitz appreciated that this was perhaps the most momentous battle of the war, and may well decide the war’s outcome. It was arguably the most important naval battle in history, and it would be determined by Joe Rochefort and the group at Hypo.
Miraculously, the dockworkers repaired Yorktown enough for it to accompany the other two carriers. It left Pearl Harbor on Saturday, May 30, and not a day too soon. Japanese submarines arrived on that day to form a reconnaissance picket around the Hawaiian Islands to report aircraft carriers and attack targets of opportunity. Their arrival had been delayed by the hasty redrawing of plans caused by the Coral Sea battle, Doolittle’s bombing of Tokyo, and raids on Japanese strongholds in the Pacific. Had they gotten there in time to report the carriers, Nimitz would have lost the element of surprise. An intelligence coup also prevented Japanese plans for a reconnaissance flight over Pearl before the battle. Nimitz’s forces escaped detection by the very narrowest of margins, but the Japanese had one last chance to discover the ambush. Somehow a Japanese radio intelligence unit at Owada in Japan discovered that there were carriers in the Hawaiian area—not in the southwest Pacific as they had previously assumed. They transmitted their intelligence to Yamamoto’s flagship in the main force, the Yamato, as well as to Admiral Nagumo, who was commanding the four carriers in the Kido Butai. Nagumo never received the report, and Yamamoto refused to break radio silence to amplify the warning; he assumed that Nagumo had received it and read it. Nagumo’s first confirmation of the presence of American carriers would come at a time when he would be least able to do anything about it.
The battle started when a U.S. Navy PBY flying boat located the invasion fleet and radioed a report. Nimitz reiterated to his task force commanders that the invasion fleet was not the striking force with the Kido Butai’s estimated four or five carriers. The next day, Nagumo launched an attack on Midway with nearly all his planes. The ground-based forces on Midway mustered up some bombers to locate and attack the Japanese carriers, but they were ineffective. Midway’s obsolete fighter planes were likewise swatted from the sky, although the antiaircraft guns made a good account of themselves and shot down several of the attacking Japanese planes. After assessing the effectiveness of their attack on the island, the Japanese flight commanders recommended that they come back to finish off the job.
While the Japanese were returning from bombing Midway, task force commanders Admirals Fletcher and Raymond A. Spruance launched their own attacks—and their timing couldn’t have been better. Although the Japanese had learned of one American carrier through a floatplane reconnaissance report, they didn’t have nearly as much information as Fletcher and Spruance. Nagumo was caught on the horns of a dilemma: His pilots were low on fuel and he’d already started outfitting a second wave with bombs suitable for attacks on land targets. He was committed to getting the pilots back, then wasted precious time refitting the available planes with ordnance to go after the one carrier they knew about. Then they spotted the first American torpedo bomber.
The top-of-the-line Japanese Zero fighter planes made quick work of the obsolete American Devas
tator planes as they came in flat and slow in order to launch their torpedoes. Of forty-one such planes launched in the raid, only four would come back, and of the thirty-seven crews who were shot down, only one man survived. Despite the signal failure to damage even a single Japanese ship, the torpedo bombers had accomplished at least one thing: The Zeroes were now low to the water and would not be able to gain sufficient altitude in time to have an effect on the American dive bombers, which came in squadron by squadron to drop a series of devastating bombs on the Soryu, the Kaga, and the Akagi. Only the Hiryu escaped unscathed to launch its own attack on the American carriers. Each of the Japanese carriers that had been hit were doomed because they received the bomb hits when their hangars were filled with highly inflammable aviation fuel and munitions. The remaining pilots from these ships landed on the Hiryu as its own pilots searched for the American carriers and found the Yorktown.
The hastily repaired veteran of the Coral Sea battle took several hits and lost power. The order to abandon ship went over the PA system, and the crew made its escape. When the stubborn old carrier didn’t sink, some crewmen went back to see if it could be saved and started to pump some of the seawater out of the bilge. But no one could account for the I-168, a Japanese submarine lurking off the slow-moving carrier. A salvo of four torpedoes blew new holes into the Yorktown and sank the destroyer assisting her. With the massive amounts of new water cascading into the ship, and the loss of the pump power from the destroyer, she finally sank.
The sorties from the remaining carriers, Hornet and Enterprise, found and sank the final Japanese carrier, Hiryu, and with it the last of Japan’s most seasoned naval pilots. The defeat was so surprising, so total, that it threw Yamamoto and the rest of the Japanese invasion forces into disarray. After a few feints to try to draw Spruance toward the Combined Fleet’s battleships in a night engagement Spruance was sure to lose, Yamamoto conceded defeat and called off the invasion. He turned back the mighty Combined Fleet—an armada whose cumulative deck area was larger than the twenty acres of the island they’d been sent to capture.
Despite the fact that many of their officers realized the proportions of their defeat, for the Japanese, their case of victory disease acquired peculiar symptoms. Speaking through their propaganda organs, Midway and every other defeat was either downplayed or became a victory, and by some strange logic the massacre of thousands of their troops and sailors became signs of progress. The state of the armed forces was strong—and getting stronger. Pilots claiming to have shot down a plane and skippers claiming to sink an American ship were given credit for cumulatively sinking whole American armadas, even on the scantest of evidence. Victory would only take more time—and more sacrifice. As loss after loss piled up and the traditional wooden boxes containing the cremated remains of fallen sailors and soldiers came home, many refused to acknowledge the inevitability of defeat. Even later when Japan’s major cities were firebombed into cinders, wide swaths of the population still thought that they were winning the war, because that was what they were told by their leaders. Toward the end of the war, the many Japanese who read the writing on the wall had to consider whether national defeat might be preferable to the peculiar present state of starving in supposed victory.
The U.S. Navy was ecstatic. When the location of the Japanese carriers came through to Nimitz, he recalled Layton’s prediction of where and when they would find them, and told him, “Well, you were only five minutes, five degrees, and five miles out.” Although they were down to three carriers in the Pacific—the Hornet and the Enterprise, along with the Saratoga, which was being refitted on the West Coast—they had destroyed four of Japan’s six largest aircraft carriers and rendered the other two incapable of fighting. The Japanese navy could no longer range around the Pacific and project its power at will. The American public was heartened to have good news after so many months of defeat and retreat, but just as they’d wondered where Pearl Harbor was on December 7, 1941, they puzzled at the significance of the flyspeck of Midway on a map of the Pacific and wondered how the Navy had conducted a major naval engagement without any of the ships actually spotting one another.
Unfortunately a Chicago Tribune reporter with special knowledge of Navy operations thought everyone should know more. His front-page headline was a huge scoop, straight out of the Navy’s hide:
JAP FLEET SMASHED BY U.S.—
2 CARRIERS SUNK AT MIDWAY
Navy Had Word of Jap Plan to Strike at Sea—
Knew Dutch Harbor Was a Feint
The article went on to describe the Japanese ships in such detail that the only logical conclusion was that the Americans knew about the invasions at Midway and the Aleutians because they had broken the enemy’s code. Japanese naval attachés at neutral consulates and embassies around the world read American publications for intelligence—and this was a whopper. It was only the first of a string of security breaches, near misses, and self-inflicted wounds that would plague the Navy well into the next year.
8
The Slot
By September, the Sculpin plied the Pacific in search of enemy shipping and men-of-war. A tour in the East China Sea yielded little but danger because the daytime submergence doctrine and unreliable torpedoes made for dangerous but unsuccessful encounters. They were taking extraordinary measures to travel thousands of miles so that they could risk their lives to fire faulty torpedoes at the enemy, then take a depth-charging that in some cases was fatal to the boats and all within. In what was to be the longest-running and wholly unnecessary scandal of the war beneath the waves, the torpedoes’ occasional hits and sinkings covered up its flaws.
But the magnetic exploder had been tested only once before the war. In a trial against a ship that was going to be scrapped—oddly, a submarine—the first of two torpedoes made its way harmlessly underneath the target. When the second torpedo worked as designed and exploded underneath the submarine, breaking its keel and sinking it, the Bureau of Ordnance satisfied itself with the 50 percent success rate and moved the Mk XIV torpedo into production with the Mk VI exploder. When it came to actual war, when men’s lives were on the line, the skippers found that the torpedoes weren’t the miracle weapons breathlessly described to them with utmost secrecy.
The first fault they discovered was that the torpedoes ran too deep. Admiral Lockwood, who was commander of Subs, Southwest Pacific, took his skippers’ advice to heart and on June 20, 1942, he ran tests by firing the torpedoes into fishing nets. He found that the depth settings were off by an astounding eleven feet. A torpedo like that would never stand a chance against a ship with a shallow draught, such as the dangerous destroyers that specialized in hunting and killing the submarines. Lockwood wrote to the Bureau of Ordnance, but their response was that his tests weren’t conducted properly and were therefore inconclusive. Infuriated with the lack of cooperation, Lockwood conducted them again, and finally forced the bureau’s hands into recognizing that there was a problem, and they finally took steps to address the depth setting.
What most skippers suspected but what the Navy wouldn’t acknowledge for another year—about eighteen months into the war—was that contrary to the bureau’s assurances, the Mk VI magnetic influence detonator was worse than useless, it was positively dangerous. The detonator was supposed to be triggered by a rapid change in magnetic flux caused when the torpedo went under the large iron mass of a ship. If the trigger wasn’t sensitive enough, the torpedo would pass underneath a target ship, fail to recognize the sudden magnetic change, and keep churning past the target. Fully alerted to the easily spotted torpedo wakes, the ship that should have been doomed now charged the submarine or alerted a sub killer. Even worse than this were the occasions when the magnetic exploder was too sensitive. A safety precaution armed the torpedo only after its engine had completed a certain number of turns, so that it could explode only after it had traveled about 400 yards—a little over one boat length—thus preventing a premature explosion too near the submarine. But many skippers we
re discovering that the torpedoes exploded as soon as they armed—thus giving their position away to the enemy before they could even make evasive maneuvers, a situation much worse than if the exploder never went off at all. The torpedoes also had a contact detonator but the skippers were under orders not to use it. The result was that the Bureau of Ordnance was able to put the torpedoes’ faults onto the skippers, claiming that they weren’t giving the torpedoes proper maintenance, were making inaccurate observations, or that junior officers were making mistakes on the Torpedo Data Computers. More often than not the sub commanders at headquarters inexplicably concurred with the “Gun Clubbers,” as the Bureau of Ordnance was called, and criticized the skippers for their inability to hit targets as well as for a lack of aggressiveness. To make matters worse, many of the skippers deactivated the magnetic influence detonators in favor of the contact detonators, which buttressed the false impression that the magnetic detonators were working more consistently than they were.
It was true that some skippers were avoiding risk at all costs, preferring to patrol far from anywhere they were likely to run into trouble. They were usually older, more cautious captains who had risen up the ranks on the basis of how well they did paperwork, followed Navy doctrine, and how clean their boats were. Most notably, the really aggressive skippers had been sacked before the war because they were detected by destroyer escorts during exercises. After the war started, though, the overcautious skippers came back with too many torpedoes, too many excuses, and outraged junior officers. After the submarine high command sniffed out the overcautious skippers and replaced them, the average age of a submarine skipper was around thirty years.
In Lucius Chappell the men of the Sculpin had the benefit of an aggressive and seasoned skipper. After proving the faulty depth settings on the torpedoes, Admiral Lockwood started off the Sculpin’s fifth war patrol by accompanying it on a trip from Fremantle to the port of Albany on Australia’s southern coast. Lockwood would have dearly loved to have gone out on a true war patrol—many of the older officers derisively called “staffies” also wanted to go out as well—but Lockwood’s superiors reminded him of the consequences if he were to be lost or, worse, captured. As a commander who was sympathetic to the skippers under him, however, Lockwood saw the benefit of sending senior staff out into the field to see what his boys were up against on war patrols. For their part, the men under the capable Lockwood affectionately called him “Uncle Charlie.”
A Tale of Two Subs Page 12
