But in the west the Japanese were running into trouble. The attack along the dry Khalka river-bed from the railhead at Halun-Arshan met the same fate as the almost identical sortie launched in 1939. The numbers on each side were roughly equal, but the Soviet forces were qualitatively far superior. The Japanese had no heavy tanks, no medium tanks to match the T-34s, and none of that battle-sense won by the Soviet tank-crews in close encounters with the German panzers. After advancing fifty miles across the arid flats towards Buir Nor the four divisions of the Japanese left wing were simply routed by Rokossovsky’s brilliantly executed armoured encirclement. The right wing fared no better. Three days later, in the area of Kharanor, it received a similar thrashing.
General Umezu’s confidence was rather strained by these defeats, but his spirits were slightly restored by the surrender of the small Soviet force still in Vladivostok on 19 August. Japanese losses had been heavier than expected however, and after two divisions had been entrained for the west to bolster their ailing comrades on the Mongolian front there only remained three depleted divisions for the march on Khabarovsk, some four hundred miles up the Trans-Siberian. By the end of the month they had covered forty of them, reaching the small town of Sibirtsevo. They were to get no further.
The military leaders in Tokyo had grossly under-estimated the Red Army in the Far East, and had grossly overestimated the ability of their own forces, hitherto used exclusively against either non-industrialised nations or Western armies fighting in unfamiliar surroundings, to overcome a Western army that was fighting in its own back-yard and with superior weaponry. The spirit of banzai could not compensate for the disparity of strength.
The decision to attack the Soviet Union, which had been taken for opportunist rather than sound strategic reasons, was to prove the worst legacy of the ‘victory disease’ engendered by Midway and earlier triumphs. It won the Japanese nothing but the city of Vladivostok and the consequent blockage of the American-Soviet supply route. This might have proven its worth given time, but time was never on the side of Japan. On the debit side the attack on the Soviet Union ruled out the reallocation of the Kwangtung Army to other theatres, and it tied down a large portion of the Japanese Army’s Air Force at a time when Japan was crucially short of planes and trained pilots. The last slack had been taken up; the Japanese Army had lost its flexibility.
And as for the three carriers used against Vladivostok - their absence was soon to be dearly felt elsewhere.
III
While battle had raged through the streets of Vladivostok Kido Butai had been passing close by the spot from which, nine months before, it had opened the war against the United States. This time only four carriers - Akagi, Soryu, Shokaku and Zuikaku - were rolling and pitching in the North Pacific waves, but other factors had proved more constant. Admiral Nagumo was still pacing across his bridge expressing anxiety. Admiral Kusaka was still reassuring him.
This time Kusaka had less cause for optimism, for Kido Butai was not the force it had been. Victory had taken its toll, and both Genda and Fuchida were worried about the quality of the pilots drafted in to replace those lost at Midway. Japanese training programmes had been crippled by the shortage of aviation fuel, and these replacement pilots had not enjoyed the many hours aloft that had been granted their predecessors. This was all the more serious in that the battles to come would probably prove harder than those already passed. Genda and Fuchida tried to suppress their doubts as they pored over the maps of Los Angeles and San Diego in the Akagi operations room.
Yamamoto, denied the chance to hit Oahu, had decided to give the Americans a lesson in vulnerability by hitting the Californian coast. The choice of San Diego as a target was obvious enough; it was the biggest US Navy base on the West Coast. Los Angeles, to Yamamoto, represented something more intangible. In his years as Naval Attaché in Washington the Admiral had learnt, or thought he had learnt, a great deal about the American character. Americans were a nation of materialists and a nation of dreamers living in uneasy conjunction. He had decided to attack both, the material in San Diego, the dream in Los Angeles.
It would be risky. Surprise, though essential, might well prove elusive. Kido Butai would have to pass through the Hawaii-West Coast sea-lanes without being detected. Once within range of its targets the fleet would be vulnerable to attack from shore-based aircraft. Withdrawal would have to be swift indeed. Once out of reach of these aircraft Kido Butai would be safe, for according to Japanese Intelligence the US Navy only possessed one remaining carrier, the Ranger. And since their agent in Panama had not reported this carrier’s passage through the Canal, it was assumed that she was still in the Atlantic.
Through the second week of August the carriers sailed on undetected at the maximum speed allowed by the accompanying oil tankers. The search-planes flew a 180-degree arc to a distance of 300 miles ahead of the fleet, and several times the carriers changed course to avoid being sighted by merchant ships. By early morning on 18 August they were approaching their destination, a point some two hundred miles off- the Californian coast, equidistant from Los Angeles and San Diego. So far everything was proceeding according to plan.
As the sky lightened in the west the planes left the decks of the four carriers. Both cities were to be attacked simultaneously, to maximise the element of surprise and to give an exaggerated impression of Japanese strength. Tomonaga was to lead the planes from Shokaku and Zuikaku against Los Angeles, Fuchida those from Akagi and Soryu against San Diego.
On the American coast a sleepy radar operator in San Diego picked up the incoming flight but assumed it was composed of American planes. There was no particular reason for this assumption, save, the general expectation that the Japanese were about to attack Oahu and an understandable refusal to believe that Yamamoto would have the temerity to attack the sacred soil of continental America. In Los Angeles the radar operator seems to have been completely asleep; no other satisfactory explanation has ever been found for the complete failure to detect the enemy approach.
Fuchida’s planes swept into the attack at 07.15. Their sole target was the naval base in San Diego Bay, and to their joy the Japanese pilots discovered that once again the American warships were unprotected by torpedo nets. Their old friends the battleships Pennsylvania and Maryland, which had been under repair in the dockyards ever since Pearl Harbor, were once again sent to a shallow harbour floor by Japanese bombs and torpedoes. The battleship Mississippi, the cruisers Vincennes, Chicago and Minneapolis, and several destroyers suffered similar fates.
The attackers did not escape unscathed. Though the AA defences had little reason to congratulate themselves the American fighters, once airborne, took a heavy toll of the Japanese planes. Nearly a third of Fuchida’s force failed to return to the waiting carriers.
Over Los Angeles Tomonaga’s attack was inflicting less material damage but wreaking untold havoc in the wonderlands of the American psyche. Turning in from the sea along the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains, the Japanese bombers homed in on the eccentric target Yamamoto had chosen for them - the Hollywood dream factory. The Warner, Universal and Walt Disney studios, strung out along Ventura Boulevard, were hit by numerous bombs. One of them killed the well-known director Michael Curtiz in his car at the Warner studio gates; another destroyed all the prints of his latest film, Casablanca, in the Warner editing rooms. As a minor concession to military rationale, the Japanese planes also attacked the Lockheed aviation factories three miles further north in the San Fernando valley. With rather less deliberation a stray bomb knocked the H and the WOOD from the famous Hollywood sign, leaving, or so Oliver Hardy was later to claim, a splendid memorial to his talents in the night-time sky. And with splendid irony another Japanese bomb destroyed the cinema at which John Huston’s Across the Pacific had opened the previous week.
By this time the American fighters had belatedly scrambled into the air from their Long Beach and Los Alamitos airfields, and several stray members of the attacking force were brought do
wn over the city. But by and large Tomonaga’s force had disappeared before the population of Los Angeles was aware of its arrival. The panic only set in later. For weeks afterwards, nervous citizens would either scan the sky for unfriendly planes or form standing patrols on the beaches, their eyes peeled for the inevitable Japanese invasion barges.
By 11.00 Nagumo’s carriers had recovered all the planes that were going to return, and Kido Butai was making top speed into the south-west. For the next forty-eight hours it was attacked spasmodically, and with little noticeable effect, by shore-based American planes of all shapes and sizes. But by nightfall on 20 August Nagumo believed his fleet was safe, from both attack and detection. He ordered a change of course to the south-east.
Nagumo did not know that ten miles behind him, its low silhouette hidden by the horizon’s curve, the American submarine Cuttlefish was doggedly trailing his giant carriers. At midnight on 20 August her captain reported the Japanese change of course.
IV
Contrary to Japanese belief the US Navy possessed three operational carriers in August 1942, not one. Two of them, moreover, were in the Pacific. Saratoga, though badly damaged by a torpedo in January, had not as the Japanese happily assumed, been sunk. In June it had re-emerged from the San Diego repair yards and was now in Pearl Harbor. Neither was Wasp where the Luftwaffe had said it was - at the bottom of the Mediterranean. In fact this carrier had passed through the Panama Canal in early July, unnoticed by the local Japanese agent, who was languishing in an American military prison in the Canal Zone. His codebook was still in use however, as the American intelligence authorities relayed comforting but false information to Tokyo. Wasp had also required extensive repairs, and had only been passed fully operational the previous week. It had sailed for Pearl only forty-eight hours before Fuchida’s planes appeared over San Diego harbour.
So Admiral Nimitz, still Pacific C-in-C despite the Midway debacle, had something to play with. When the news of the Californian attacks reached him in Hawaii he acted with commendable speed. Saratoga was leaving Pearl Harbor before the morning was over; she was to rendezvous with Wasp in the vicinity of Clipperton Island, some eight hundred miles off the Mexican coast.
Nimitz did not know where Nagumo was going, but he suspected the worst. Though the reports coming in from Cuttlefish suggested that Kido Butai was returning home via the southern Pacific, the American C-in-C feared a Japanese strike against the Panama Canal. He was right, but it would be two nerve-wracking days before Cuttlefish reported Nagumo’s change of course and confirmed Nimitz’s suspicions. From that moment on the question was - could the Japanese carriers be overtaken? It seemed likely that Kido Butai, operating at such distance from its bases, would be moving slowly to conserve fuel. If so, then there was a chance.
The Japanese carriers, once beyond the reach of shore-based aircraft, had indeed reduced speed for that reason, but not to the degree Nimitz was hoping for. He had assumed that the maximum speed of the accompanying tankers - around twelve knots - would be the maximum speed of the fleet. He was mistaken. The tankers had been left behind after a last refuelling on the morning of 22 August; more were waiting farther to the south, having sailed from Truk at the beginning of the month.
Aboard Kido Butai spirits were high. Another great victory! They had attacked the American mainland with relative impunity! In the operations rooms the maps of San Diego and Los Angeles had been returned to the map-drawers, and those of the Panama Canal Zone brought out for intense perusal. Genda and the flight leaders studied the paths to be taken by the torpedo-bombers as they homed in on the giant gates of the Pedro Miguel and Miraflores locks.
The destruction of these gates, Yamamoto had discovered in consultation with Japanese engineers, would put the Canal out of action for many months. Allied trade would be gravely impeded, and additional strain placed on an already precarious shipping situation. It would also make it harder for the US Navy to switch its ships from ocean to ocean at short notice. But the main rationale behind the Canal attack was psychological. The mere fact of a successful Japanese strike against an American installation 9000 miles from Japan was what counted. Surely the enemy would realise from this the impossibility of winning the Pacific war.
Aboard the Japanese ships the days went by. The rough and cold northern Pacific was a long way behind them now, and the crews relaxed in the bright tropical sun. Kido Butai was over 7000 miles from Japan, further than it had travelled in the Ceylon operation. Even Nagumo had almost ceased his worrying, a fact which caused Kusaka a certain amount of anxiety.
On the morning of 26 August the fleet rendezvoused with the tankers sent out from Truk and took on another week’s fuel. By evening on the following day Kido Butai was one hundred miles due west of Coiba Island, 450 miles from the Pacific end of the Panama Canal. Genda went over the attack plans with the flight leaders one more time.
At 06.00 on 28 August the carriers were lying fifty miles off the wide entrance to the Gulf of Panama. The planes were speeding down the flight decks and into the sky. Once again Mitsuo Fuchida would lead them into the attack. Soon after 06.30 the 120 Japanese planes moved off in formation, the dawn to their right, Panama straight ahead.
Three hundred miles to the west Rear-Admiral Frank Fletcher stood on the bridge of the Saratoga and watched the same dawn ease the darkness away. His force comprised the two carriers Wasp and Saratoga, the battleships Washington and North Carolina, five cruisers and seventeen destroyers. It was almost within striking distance of where Fletcher assumed the enemy had to be. His search-planes were about to be launched; he assumed that the Catalinas based at Fort Amador in the Canal Zone would already be in the air. Soon there should be news.
The American fleet was observing complete radio silence, and there was one important fact of which Fletcher was unaware. Ranger, the sole US carrier in the Atlantic, had been relieved of escort duty and rushed south across the Caribbean to join the battle. It had arrived at the Atlantic end of the Canal in the early hours of that morning, and was due to pass through to the Pacific the following night.
There would not be time. At 07.10 Ranger’s captain received two pieces of information. One of the Catalinas had found the Japanese fleet, and the Canal Zone radar installations, on full alert for several days, had picked up an incoming flight of enemy planes. The only naval battle in history to span two oceans was underway.
The Canal Zone’s AA defences had been greatly strengthened in the months that followed Midway, and the radar warning had given the USAAF plentiful time to scramble, so Fuchida’s planes received a lively welcome. The Vals and their Zero escort were assailed by American fighters - mostly Wildcats - high above the Canal Zone, and both sides suffered heavy losses. Far below the raging dogfights the Kates were flying through a hail of flak towards the Pedro Miguel locks. Two broke through to launch their torpedoes against the lower gates, both of which were severely damaged. But since the locks were empty and the upper gates also closed there was no uncontrollable rush of water. The one torpedo dropped inside the locks exploded harmlessly when it hit the shallow bottom. As his surviving planes turned back to sea a frustrated Fuchida radioed Nagumo that there was need of a second strike.
The Admiral, waiting for such news with Kusaka on the Akagi bridge, agreed to launch one. There was no likelihood of US naval forces in the area, and his fleet could protect itself against the Panama fighters. The search-planes from the cruisers Tone and Chikuma had been out on patrol to the east and south since 06.30, and had found nothing but empty ocean. The sky was still clear. At 08.15 Nagumo ordered the second strike-force into the air.
Unknown to the Japanese theirs were not the only planes hurtling down a carrier’s flight deck. At around 08.25 Ranger was launching its fighter- and torpedo-bombers from a point five miles off Colon in the Atlantic Ocean. They flew across the isthmus, passing on their left the fire and smoke left by Fuchida’s raid, and ventured out into the Gulf of Panama.
At around the same moment Adm
iral Fletcher was listening to the clanking of the Saratoga lift as it brought the armed planes up from the hangar deck. The distance between his task force and the Japanese was rapidly closing. Fletcher offered a silent prayer of thanks for the blanket of cloud which seemed to be accompanying his eastward passage.
From the viewpoint of the Akagi bridge these clouds were still no more than a line across the western horizon, and Nagumo and Kusaka were pre-occupied with watching the recovery of Fuchida’s returning planes. Soon after 09.30 Kusaka went down to talk with Fuchida himself, leaving Nagumo to fret on his own. The Admiral noticed the clouds on the horizon. They were coming nearer. Could the Tone search-plane have missed something out there to the west?
‘What could it have missed?’ asked the sarcastic Kusaka on his return. ‘A fleet of American carriers? All but one were sunk at Midway! And if that one is out there, we shall have no trouble in destroying it.’
The logic seemed sound to Nagumo, but before he had time to ponder the question further some disquieting news came in. A flight of approaching bombers was reported by the northernmost Japanese destroyers. As the Zero patrols above the fleet sped north to intercept this menace, Nagumo and Kusaka asked each other where it had come from. It could only be the mainland. But what were carrier planes, Dauntlesses and Devastators, doing in Panama? Could that one carrier be in the area?
For the next ten minutes the two Admirals considered this question, as the flak and the Zeroes dealt with Ranger’s planes. No great damage was suffered; only Soryu was hit by a bomb and the resultant fire was easily extinguished.
Nagumo’s problems were not yet over, however, for now he received news from Tomonaga. The second strike on Panama had been as unfortunate as the first. The American air defences were still unbroken, the lock-gates were still unbreached, and there was need for a third strike.
The Moscow Option Page 21
