by John Prados
There was no escaping Combined Fleet’s constant prodding, however. Late that afternoon, alone in the flag plot on the Shokaku, Nagumo had another heated exchange with his chief of staff. Kido Butai’s commander was ready to fight. Kusaka still advised caution. The same conversation had occurred repeatedly before staff. Admiral Nagumo had had enough of that unpleasantness. The time had come to attack without remorse. Ugaki’s latest dispatch could not be ignored. The carriers would advance. Nagumo wanted his chief of staff to decide to head south.
“I admit I’ve objected to your suggestions,” Kusaka replied, “but you are the commander and must make the final decisions.” Then the chief of staff repeated his litany: The American fleet had yet to be found; now that they themselves had been discovered, the B-17s from Espíritu Santo would surely reacquire them. If they went south they must expect things to happen. Besides, Kusaka continued, as chief of staff his place was merely to assist. Only the two men were present, staring each other down, and Nagumo Chuichi did not survive the war. Kusaka attests that Nagumo insisted. The chief of staff gave in: “It’s your battle. If you really want to head south, I’ll go along with your verdict.”
In the gathering dusk of October 25, the Kido Butai came about and set a southerly course at twenty knots. It was one of those enchanting South Pacific evenings, the night warm and the moon shining. At 9:18 p.m. the fleet received Yamamoto’s latest operations order, noting the Army’s plan to storm Henderson Field, forecasting a high probability that Allied naval forces would appear northeast of the Solomons, directing that the enemy be destroyed.
Japanese forces assumed battle dispositions (from this point the text will refer to forces individually). A hundred miles west of Nagumo, Vice Admiral Kondo steamed with his Advance Force, built around battleships Kongo and Haruna, with heavy cruisers and destroyers. Rear Admiral Kakuta maneuvered the Junyo, screened by a couple of destroyers, a few miles beyond Kondo. Rear Admiral Abe Hiroaki’s Vanguard Force, after briefly rejoining Nagumo, was posted sixty miles ahead. Abe assumed a line-abreast formation, his ships eight to ten miles apart in search mode. Sweating on the Shokaku’s flag bridge, Kusaka worked to prevent a Midway-like surprise. He arranged for morning scouts to depart Abe’s ships at 4:15 a.m., reaching the ends of their search legs at dawn. A second search wave—which Kido Butai had not bothered with at Midway—would follow. The carriers armed strike planes in momentary readiness for launch. One more advantage: Nagumo would have the weather gauge at the start, steaming directly into the wind and able to launch immediately, whereas his opponents would have to alter course in order to throw their warbirds into the air.
Like the Americans, the Imperial Navy posted mobile radio detachments aboard key fleet units. During the night, monitors informed Kondo and Nagumo of strong transmissions. Signal strength indicated proximity, so while the Japanese could not read the intercepts, they knew the emitters had to be nearby snoopers. In fact, this was a PBY piloted by Lieutenant (Junior Grade) George Clute of Patrol Squadron 11. Soon after midnight Clute’s radar-equipped Catalina found Abe’s Vanguard, which he reported and tracked for a time before attacking it. Clute launched two torpedoes at the destroyer Isokaze. In the darkness Clute imagined her a cruiser. Commander Toyoshima Shunichi, the destroyer skipper, saw the PBY six miles away, waited until it had committed to its drop, then went into a tight turn. Clute’s torpedoes missed. No score.
The PBY attack disturbed Nagumo, but he could draw a little comfort from the fact that it was the Vanguard, not Kido Butai, that had been sighted, though radio emissions could still be heard. Complacency disappeared at 2:50 a.m., when another snooper, Lieutenant Glen E. Hoffman’s Catalina, appeared directly over the carriers and tried her luck with four bombs. Alarm bells sounded only as the munitions fell. They missed close to starboard, spraying water on the superstructure of Captain Nomoto Tameteru’s carrier Zuikaku. On the flagship, consternation. Staff officer Takada almost fell down the ladder racing to Nagumo’s cabin to tell him the Zuikaku was safe. Nagumo and Kusaka were sitting together. Kusaka’s stomach tied up in knots. He was indignant. Nagumo looked at his chief of staff. “What you said before was true,” the admiral conceded. “Reverse course, full speed.” The Kido Butai turned through 180 degrees, increasing to twenty-four knots. The moon disappeared behind clouds, ominous, since increased darkness would make it harder to see the enemy. For an hour Kido Butai rushed defensive preparations, disarming and draining gas from the ready strike aircraft. Having carrier decks crammed with armed planes was another Midway error the Japanese were determined to avoid. But no Americans came; there would be no attack this night.
Aboard the Junyo, which received immediate notice of Nagumo’s maneuver, air officer Okumiya had the staff duty watch, and forwarded the order to Kondo’s flagship, cruiser Atago. Kondo’s and Kakuta’s forces followed suit about half an hour after the Kido Butai. Abe’s Vanguard turned north after that. The Japanese launched their dawn search as planned. The second-wave scouts left Nagumo’s carriers at 4:45 a.m., an hour before dawn. Nagumo then prepared a combat air patrol of twenty-two fighters and a strike wave of seventy planes. At that point Nagumo, Kondo, and Kakuta, plus Abe, were headed north, with the latter between Kido Butai and Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid’s Task Force 61. The Japanese were primed for battle.
At Nouméa another admiral huddled over his charts. Vice Admiral William F. Halsey, newly minted SOPAC commander, knew little about the theater and had had less than a week to learn. Halsey understood that a huge Japanese offensive impended, and he had the advantage of intelligence—which had accurately informed him that “Y-day,” the moment the enemy had picked to set off their fireworks, would be October 23. The top officers—Kelly Turner, Vandegrift, and new AIRSOLS chief Rear Admiral Aubrey Fitch—had briefed Halsey on the overall situation. He recognized Guadalcanal’s crucial importance. The Allied fleet already plied Torpedo Junction. Bull Halsey did know about aircraft carriers—he reckoned their combat power increased with the square of the number—so two carriers were as strong as four single ships, and he hastened the rendezvous of the Hornet and Enterprise forces into Task Force 61 under Kinkaid. Halsey recalled, “The crescendo of the fighting ashore made it plain that the climax was rushing toward us. I thought that the twenty-fifth would precipitate it.” For a brief moment that seemed so. The Kido Butai was spotted once and that abortive air strike sent after it. But the enemy proved elusive. Halsey sent Norman Scott’s surface flotilla on a night sweep through Ironbottom Sound. Again nothing. The Bull felt in his bones that battle must be just hours away. He ordered to all his commands: “ATTACK—REPEAT—ATTACK.”
Admiral Kinkaid had already put his task force in motion toward the seas where the enemy had been sighted. He too was certain of battle. Kinkaid assigned flagship Enterprise to conduct the morning search and put up antisubmarine patrols, while the Hornet readied a strike. On the Enterprise, Air Group 10 skipper Commander John Crommelin gave his pilots a pep talk, telling them they were all that stood in the way of Japanese victory in the Pacific. He would work them to the bone, Crommelin warned; they could not afford to waste a single bomb. The crews manned their planes. Amid final aircraft checks, Kinkaid received a retransmission of Glen Hoffman’s sighting. Recalling the fiasco of the previous afternoon, he elected to await precise information before striking. The Enterprise turned into the wind, and sixteen Dauntlesses began their takeoff rolls. They were scout bombers armed with 500-pound munitions. It was 6:00 a.m. The sun was just peeking over the horizon. The SBDs struggled for altitude. They would fly in eight pairs on preselected search vectors.
Lieutenant Commander James R. (“Bucky”) Lee, boss of Scouting 10 (VS-10), gave himself the most promising sector. But first honors went to lieutenants Vivian Welch and Bruce McGraw of Bombing 10. Barely an hour from the Enterprise, both planes saw a Japanese scout pass in the opposite direction. Figuring that bird had to have a nearby roost, they pressed on. Just twenty minutes later they glimpsed warships ahead. It was Ab
e’s Vanguard Force. The two crews counted ships, checked, and compiled a careful contact report, tabulating two battleships, a heavy cruiser, and seven destroyers steaming north at twenty knots. They did not spot Hara’s two cruisers, which had become slightly separated from the main formation. There were no carriers. Welch and McGraw flew to the limit of their range, hoping to find Nagumo. They did not. Turning back, they overflew Abe again. Admiral Abe now ordered a northwest course and went to battle speed, thirty knots. About 6:45 a.m., two more search bombers came up and attacked, diving on Captain Kobe Yuji’s cruiser Tone. Flak from the heavy ship and her consorts threw off the SBDs’ aim, and both missed. The defenders thought they had shot the planes down. Abe’s flotilla went to battle stations. On destroyer Akigumo, Lieutenant Yamamoto Masahide noticed that the sea that morning was quiet and the sky quite beautiful.
Bucky Lee was as good as he had hoped. He and wingman Ensign William Johnson at that very moment encountered Kido Butai. Lee saw a carrier, then two—clouds covered Zuikaku—and reported them headed north-northwest at fifteen knots. Lee eventually glimpsed the third ship, but Japanese lookouts spotted him too, and fighters intercepted. If he found the carriers, Commander Lee planned to summon his scouts and attack. Instead he had to limp away, damaged, though the Dauntlesses claimed three Zeroes. But others heard Lee’s report and closed in. One pair was driven off, damaging several more Zeroes.
Another flight was the Dauntlesses piloted by Lieutenant Stockton Strong and wingman Ensign Charles Irvine. At Eastern Solomons it had been Strong who first spotted the Ryujo, and now he had John Crommelin’s words echoing in his head—no bombs to waste! He had refrained from attacking Ryujo, an act of omission that now obsessed Strong. He was a hundred miles from Bucky Lee. But the SBDs reached the position, emerging through a cloud right above light carrier Zuiho. The Americans were in the sun for Zuiho’s lookouts. Captain Obayashi Sueo’s sailors hardly saw them, and the covering Zeroes were nowhere around. Strong and Irvine dived. The flak began as they dropped through 1,500 feet; then the Zeroes came and the next minutes were hot indeed. Both planes made it to Enterprise with gas for just one landing approach. Commander Crommelin put Strong in for the Medal of Honor. He got the Navy Cross. Enterprise’s after-action report recorded the attack on a Shokaku-class carrier.
Captain Obayashi thought his gunners had gotten one of the American planes. They got him instead. Two 500-pound bombs hit Zuiho’s flight deck aft, holing it, wrecking the flak guns and the arresting gear needed to land planes. At an estimated sixteen yards in diameter, the hole was nearly as wide as her flight deck, rendering Zuiho useless as a floating airfield. This was a tremendous disappointment for Obayashi’s sailors, who had spent almost the entire war training fliers in the Inland Sea. A brief sortie with battleships, an aircraft ferry cruise to the Philippines, and the Midway operation, in which Zuiho had seen no combat, made up her entire war record. Now, in the first minutes of her first real battle, Zuiho was out of action. It was 8:30 a.m.
Admiral Kinkaid did not await his scouts’ return. His staff plotted the Japanese carriers to the west-northwest between 185 and 200 miles distant. Kinkaid increased speed to twenty-seven knots at 7:08 a.m. and altered course to close on the enemy. The first-wave strike from Hornet was halfway through its launch within a half hour, twenty bombers and torpedo planes in the formation. The Enterprise, operating independently, launched twelve strike aircraft at 7:50. Both units had Wildcats for fighter escort. The Hornet launched another wave of twenty planes, also with an escort, and evenly divided between dive-bombers and torpedo planes, about 8:15. At the moment of the Zuiho attack, these waves were already winging for Nagumo.
The Japanese were actually ahead of this curve. A Kido Butai scout filed the first sighting report at 6:50 a.m. Admiral Kusaka insisted—and Nagumo agreed—on immediate attack with overwhelming force. Nagumo ordered his strike unit aloft at 7:10 a.m. The carriers began launching immediately and had finished inside twenty minutes. Zuiho planes were in this group, as well as on patrol duty, so her damage did not prevent her contributing to the battle. Lieutenant Commander Murata Shigeharu led the whole unit, its knife edge twenty Shokaku torpedo planes and twenty-one Zuikaku dive-bombers. Zeroes from all three ships escorted them. The carriers immediately began cycling a second wave, which departed more raggedly. Lieutenant Commander Seki Mamoru led nineteen Shokaku dive-bombers off at 8:10, and Lieutenant Imajuku Jiichiro followed with sixteen Zuikaku torpedo bombers at 8:40. In addition, at 8:05 Nagumo directed Abe’s van to engage the Americans with guns.
Far to the west, Rear Admiral Kakuta ordered out his initial strike wave at 9:05. It consisted of seventeen Val dive-bombers and twelve Zero fighters under Lieutenant Shiga Yoshio.
Japanese and American strike waves passed within sight of one another as they sped toward their targets. Both sides warned their carriers of incoming aircraft. The Zuiho’s Zeroes peeled off to destroy two Enterprise TBF Avengers and shot up a couple more torpedo bombers so badly that they had to abort. Enterprise Wildcats claimed two enemy and the TBFs three more, but the strike lost its fighter escort. The Hornet wave droned on, scattered but unblooded.
Captain Charles P. Mason’s Hornet had just finished returning seven Wildcats to combat air patrol when, within minutes, Commander Murata’s planes swept in. It was 8:55. The Enterprise was luckily concealed beneath a squall. Murata went for the enemy he could see. Kinkaid’s fleet had the protection of an extremely strong combat air patrol of thirty-seven F-4F Wildcats from both carriers. They engaged as quickly as they could. Unfortunately radar operators were confused. The blip of the incoming Japanese aircraft merged on their screens with that of the outgoing U.S. strike. Radarmen remained uncertain until the enemy were only forty-five miles out—fifteen minutes at a typical cruise speed, less at battle speeds. Air controllers on the “Big E,” which had the duty, positioned interceptors low to conserve fuel. The Japanese closed from above, and very fast.
Flak was tremendous. A cruiser on every quarter ringed the Hornet, and beyond them lay a second ring of six destroyers. One light cruiser was the new antiaircraft ship Juneau. But Commander Murata, the Imperial Navy’s torpedo ace, calm and calculating, kept his pilots’ shoulders to the wheel. Captain Mason threw Hornet into a series of frantic gyrations at twenty-eight knots, putting his rudder hard over, port then starboard, hoping to throw off the enemy. The first two attackers got only near misses and were both flamed. Japanese planes kept coming. Murata’s force was nearly annihilated, losing seventeen of twenty-one Vals, sixteen of twenty Kates, and five of twelve Zeroes. But in just three minutes beginning at 9:12, the Hornet suffered several crippling bomb hits, damage from a pair of planes that crashed aboard, and two torpedo impacts to starboard. By 9:25 Mason’s ship was dead in the water, her forward engine room flooding, and fires raged on the signal bridge, the flight deck, the hangar deck, the mess, and the petty officers’ quarters. Moreover, the water mains were disabled. More than a thousand Hornet sailors formed bucket brigades, combating the flames with water, literally pail by pail.
Kinkaid’s strike formations were still winging toward the enemy. They struck within minutes of Hornet’s fight for life. Hornet’s airmen had been split up when the Japanese intervened against the strike planes. Her torpedo unit never found the enemy. Lieutenant Commander William J. (“Gus”) Widhelm’s dive-bombers came up behind the Nagumo force, which was speeding north. Shokaku’s radar actually detected them almost a hundred miles away, enabling fourteen of twenty-six patrolling fighters to intercept. But only two Dauntlesses were knocked out. Gus Widhelm also did not make it, forced to ditch when his engine gave out during the approach.
Communications experts of the Japanese mobile radio units, having identified the U.S. frequencies, came on the air to mimic American pilots, inserting false information. This was a tactic the U.S. radio units eschewed, probably because Japanese naval slang was even more difficult than the language itself—and few enough Americans were fluent in that. San
ta Cruz may have been the first time the Japanese practiced this form of deception. Some American pilots were angry at colleagues for providing bogus information, until they worked out that none of them had talked the talk. Nevertheless the enemy’s radio deception had only marginal impact.
Eleven Hornet SBDs reached the carriers, and the key punches were thrown by Lieutenant James E. Vose Jr.’s flight. Five planes pushed over above Shokaku about 9:27 a.m. Captain Arima Masafumi evaded some bombs, but three struck her flight deck from midships aft, smashing guns and damaging the hangar deck. In the flattop’s wake was Hara Tameichi’s Amatsukaze, which had stopped briefly to rescue two ditched airmen. Hara, who had been with Ryujo when she was crippled at Eastern Solomons, was horrified. He felt the Ryujo had been a second-string warship, but Shokaku was strictly first-team, with expert crew and a crack air group. How she could succumb so easily mystified him.
Twenty minutes later Admiral Nagumo sent a dispatch bearing the grim news but also some hope. Kido Butai was headed northwest, with Zuiho on fire and both she and Shokaku unable to handle aircraft. On the other hand, the task force leader added, an American carrier was also on fire. Not long afterward, with Shokaku’s communications failing, destroyer Arashi, then carrier Zuikaku took over as focal points for task force message traffic.
Meanwhile the Enterprise attack force also sought big game. Reduced to five Avengers and three Dauntlesses, plus escort, by the midcourse firefight, Commander Richard K. Gaines winged past Admiral Hara’s small Tone group, then eyed the Vanguard Force in the distance. Hoping it contained carriers, Gaines continued, found it did not, and flew beyond that. Short of fuel, Gaines turned back to hit the Vanguard. Abe’s ships had formidable defenses, in all seventy-six heavy flak guns, ninety light weapons, and the main batteries of the big ships. Destroyer Isokaze, then battleship Kirishima, were the first to sight the enemy. Abe had gone to flank speed, making thirty-three knots.
