by Oliver North
BATTLE OF THE CORAL SEA
OFF THE SOUTHERN TIP OF NEW GUINEA
7–8 MAY 1942
By 29 April, the carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku sortied from Truk, and the light carrier Shoho, commanded by Vice Admiral Takeo Takagi, arrived on station to provide cover for the invasion of Port Moresby and the attack on Tulagi. But the code-breakers at Station Hypo knew exactly what was happening. In the Pacific Fleet war room, Nimitz could see on a large tabletop map of the Pacific the disposition of the Japanese carriers, transports, and battle cruisers—and even Japanese submarines deployed to provide a security perimeter around their two invasion forces.
Yamamoto, the master of the surprise attack, was certain no one would find them and that his battle plans could not be compromised. But they were. And best of all, thanks to Station Hypo, Nimitz even knew the date set for the invasions: 3 May for Tulagi and 9 May for Port Moresby.
Looking at the charts on his office walls and the little wooden ship symbols on the map board in the Pacific Fleet Command Center, Admiral Nimitz had a terrible choice to make. The Hornet’s arrival at Pearl Harbor after launching the Doolittle raid had brought the fleet back up to four carriers. But the Enterprise and the Hornet had taken a beating from the stormy north Pacific. Nimitz had no other capital ships available but the Yorktown and the Lexington. Furthermore, his two code-breakers, Layton and Rochefort, were telling him that they “suspected” that Yamamoto was also preparing a subsequent operation to seize Midway. Could Nimitz risk two of his four carriers trying to stop the Japanese invasion forces already steaming to take Port Moresby and Tulagi?
Admiral Jack Fletcher commanded naval assets in three of the five carrier battles of the Pacific—Midway, Guadalcanal, and Coral Sea.
On 29 April, after talking it over with his staff, Nimitz gave the order for Rear Admiral Aubrey Fitch, fresh out of Pearl Harbor with the Lexington, to join Vice Admiral Jack Fletcher’s Yorktown, which had been operating in the South Pacific east of Australia for several weeks. He also directed the cruiser Chicago to sortie from New Caledonia and link up with HMAS Australia and HMAS Hobart, two Australian cruisers under the command of Rear Admiral J. C. Crace of the Royal Navy. Nimitz ordered this somewhat more formidable task force, under the command of Vice Admiral Fletcher, to proceed northwest into the Coral Sea to stop the Japanese invasion forces.
On 1 May, the Lexington and the Yorktown made contact in the southern Coral Sea, west of Espiritu Santo Island. For a full day and a half, the two carriers steamed northwest toward New Guinea. On 3 May, using information from Station Hypo, Pacific Fleet HQ informed Fletcher that the Japanese were landing on Tulagi, so Fletcher left the Lexington to complete refueling from the fleet oiler Neosho and proceeded due north with Yorktown to do what he could to disrupt the invasion. At 0700 on 4 May, his aviators launched a series of three attacks against the transports anchored off Tulagi. Though the 12,000-ton carrier Shoho was supposed to be protecting the troop and supply ships, the Yorktown’s pilots sent one transport to the bottom and damaged at least five landing barges. Then, before the Japanese could respond, Fletcher recovered his strike aircraft, turned the Yorktown south, and steamed at flank speed to rejoin Lexington on the morning of 5 May.
Though the Tulagi attack had done relatively little serious damage, the officers of the Japanese carrier striking force, commanded by Vice Admiral Takeo Takagi, were stunned. In Rabaul, where 4th Fleet commander Vice Admiral Shigeyoshi Inouye was coordinating the entire dual-invasion operation, there was an immediate effort to find the American carrier or carriers that had hit the Tulagi transports. But when long-range land-based bombers and patrol aircraft launched from Rabaul failed to find any American ships on 5 or 6 May, Inouye ordered the invasion covering force, including the Shoho, to break away from the invasion fleet headed for Port Moresby and head quickly south to find them. Meanwhile, Takagi was racing around the southern tip of the Solomons with the carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku, both veterans of the Pearl Harbor attack. By the night of 6 May, it was entirely possible that the Lexington and the Yorktown, heading straight toward the Shoho battle group and pursued from behind by the Shokaku and the Zuikaku, might be trapped between the two Japanese forces.
But once again Station Hypo provided the intelligence Fletcher needed. Alerted to the Shoho battle group, he dispatched scout planes at first light on 7 May. At 0815, one of the patrols reported “two carriers and four heavy cruisers” off the southern tip of New Guinea. Though this “sighting” conflicted with the Station Hypo information—and was soon proven to be incorrect—Fletcher decided to launch the attack groups from both Yorktown and Lexington.
At 1100, in the first attack ever made by U.S. pilots against an enemy carrier, ninety-three American torpedo and dive-bombers swarmed over the Shoho, hitting her with thirteen bombs and seven torpedoes, sending the carrier to the bottom in just minutes. In a radio call back to the Yorktown, one of the strike leaders, Lieutenant Commander Robert E. Dixon, jubilantly reported, “Scratch one flattop!”
While Fletcher was busy recovering his attack aircraft, the Japanese, infuriated by the first sinking of a major Imperial Navy warship, launched every land- and sea-based aircraft that would fly in an effort to find the Americans. In less than an hour, aircraft launched from the Shokaku and the Zuikaku found the American fleet oiler Neosho and the destroyer Sims trailing more than 100 miles behind Fletcher’s carriers. Mistakenly identifying the ships as a carrier and her escort, the Japanese pilots attacked with bombs and torpedoes. At 1230, the valiant little destroyer went down with most of her crew. Though the Neosho took seven hits, she miraculously managed to stay afloat until her crew could be rescued four days later.
Two hours after the attack, land-based bombers launched from Rabaul spotted Admiral Crace and his little flotilla of Australian and American cruisers, steaming in the van of Fletcher’s carriers. Once again the Japanese aviators mistook the cruisers for carriers and dropped their bombs from high altitude to avoid the furious anti-aircraft barrage from Crace’s vessels. When the Japanese pilots returned to Rabaul, they reported that they had sunk a battleship and a cruiser—when in fact not one of the Allied ships had been touched.
Late in the afternoon of 7 May, Admiral Tagaki, determined to avenge the loss of the Shoho, decided to make one more effort to find the American carriers, which no Japanese aircraft had yet sighted. He ordered Rear Admiral Tadaichi Hara, the commander of the carrier air wings, to choose twenty-seven of his best pilots, all with night-operations experience, and launch them into the darkening sky. Radar operators on the American carriers detected the inbound raid and vectored the combat air patrol to intercept. In the ensuing melee, nine of Hara’s veteran pilots were blasted out of the sky. A tenth Japanese aircraft was shot down by anti-aircraft fire when the pilot mistook the Yorktown for his own carrier and attempted to land. Eleven more Japanese pilots perished attempting to land on their own decks. When the ill-fated raid was over, only six of Hara’s twenty-seven attackers were alive.
Before dawn on the next day, both Fletcher and Takagi had scouts in the air searching for the opposing carriers. Despite heavy overcast and squalls over the Japanese fleet, they spotted each other almost simultaneously at about 0800. Between 0900 and 0925 both the Lexington and the Yorktown launched their attack groups of torpedo planes and dive-bombers. But by 1030, when they arrived over the location where the Japanese carriers had been reported, only the Shokaku was visible in the squall line. The American aircraft unleashed everything they had on the carrier.
Unlike the success they had enjoyed the day before in attacking Shoho, the strike on Shokaku was almost a failure. Every American torpedo either missed or was a dud. Only three of the dive-bombers found their marks. But in the end, those three were enough to render the Shokaku’s flight deck unusable. No longer able to fight, Takagi ordered the ship to return to Truk before it became a target for another raid.
As the Shokaku sped away, the planes she and the Zuikaku had launched were
swarming over the Lexington and the Yorktown. Anti-aircraft fire and the carriers’ combat air patrols succeeded in disrupting the attack on the Yorktown, which managed to weather the assault, receiving only a single bomb hit that was insufficient to put her out of action. But the larger and less maneuverable Lexington was an easier target. Four bombs and two torpedoes found their mark, but for a while it appeared as though valiant efforts by her damage-control parties might keep her in action.
Then, at about 1245, after the attackers had disappeared over the horizon and she was recovering planes on her flight deck, the Lexington was rocked by a terrible explosion as gasoline vapors from a ruptured fuel line ignited deep inside her hull. About two hours later, a second, even larger explosion buckled her flight deck and set a raging inferno that forced Captain Frederick Sherman to order the crew to abandon ship.
The surviving crew members made it over the side to be rescued by destroyers while the Yorktown recovered Lexington planes still in the air. At 1930 she was still afloat but burning madly. Fletcher gave the order to sink her. A destroyer put five torpedoes into her side, and at 1936 the Lady Lex sank beneath the waters of the Coral Sea—becoming the first U.S. carrier lost to enemy action.
Aviation Mechanic Bill Surgi, an eighteen-year-old from Louisiana, watched the battle aboard the USS Yorktown. He had a ringside seat for the Japanese attack on his ship—and the aftermath.
AVIATION MECHANIC BILL SURGI, USN
Aboard the USS Yorktown
Coral Sea
7–8 May 1942
On 6 May the Neosho refueled us. But then she left us with the Sims. On the next day our planes were out searching for the Japanese fleet and they found the Sims and the Neosho right after they had been attacked. The Sims went down within minutes. Thirteen people survived out of two hundred fifty–odd people. But somehow the Neosho managed to stay afloat. It took four days for the crew to get rescued.
That night, several Japanese aircraft were trying to get back to their carriers and they mistakenly got into our landing pattern. And they’re surveying our group, sending us blinker signals and we’re not answering them. They’re at the outer limits of the approach circling us when we start landing our Wildcats. Then someone saw an airplane coming in with fixed landing gear, which we didn’t have. All our planes had retractable landing gear, so we knew it wasn’t ours. That’s when Captain Elliott Buckmaster broadcast over the ship’s address system, “Stand by to repel!” And the guns cut loose. It was a Japanese dive-bomber. We shot him down.
The next day, 8 May, I was standing up forward of the island, in the catwalk, when the Japanese attacked. They came at us with torpedoes and dive-bombers. One bomb went right beside us and exploded in the water. And the shrapnel came up and did some minor damage to the ship. It was a near miss for me but it killed my buddy, P. C. Meyers. He was the first person I’d ever seen killed. We were ordnance men; we worked together.
Then, a little while later, another bomb went through the flight deck, through the hangar deck, mess deck, living spaces deck, and exploded in the supply deck. We have compartments in there that we lived in and when that bomb went off we had a space the size of a theater. There were fifty-four people in there; only four people got out alive. We had other near misses on the port side that perforated the hull and gave us an oil leak. But we still made out better than the Lexington. She took at least four bombs and two torpedoes. For a while it looked like she might be able to make it, but then a gasoline leak set her afire and they had to abandon ship. It was a terrible sight watching her burn and all those men trying to make it over the side and down the lines into the water. She stayed afloat, burning, and then after they had everybody alive off, one of our destroyers had to sink her with torpedoes.
STATION HYPO
PAC FLEET SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE CENTER
OAHU, HAWAII
20 MAY 1942
As Admiral Fletcher limped back toward Hawaii with the damaged Yorktown and her escorts, he couldn’t tell who had won the Battle of the Coral Sea. He didn’t know until he arrived back in Pearl Harbor that in Rabaul, Admiral Inouye, having lost the element of surprise, had already recalled the Port Moresby invasion force for fear that the transports might still be engaged by a surface force or attacked by land-based aircraft.
The consequences of the fight were clearer to those who had monitored the battle from Hawaii. Tactically, Nimitz judged the outcome to be a modest Japanese victory. Though the Japanese had lost far more aircraft and suffered many more casualties, the loss of the 30,000-ton Lexington was far more serious than the sinking of the 12,000-ton Shoho. And the small Japanese destroyer-transport and barges sunk at Tulagi hardly equaled the loss of the Neosho and the Sims, as far as the U.S. Navy was concerned.
But from a strategic perspective, Nimitz considered this first engagement, in which the opposing ships never saw each other, as a victory for the Americans. For the first time since the war began, the Japanese had been forced to turn back an invasion force. He and his commanders had validated the use of Station Hypo intercepts in “near-real” time—meaning that the intelligence was useful in the midst of a battle, not just in planning one.
Now, on 9 May, as dawn was breaking in Hawaii, Nimitz had even bigger concerns. On 5 May, just before the battle was joined in the Coral Sea, Station Hypo had intercepted a message from Imperial Fleet headquarters in Kure to the Combined Fleet. The message, now almost totally decrypted by Rochefort’s code-breakers, ordered the invasion of a place designated as “AF” to commence on 4 June.
Nimitz was now down to two undamaged carriers. He had only the Enterprise and the Hornet, which had not yet engaged in anything except the Doolittle Raid. Now he needed them to stop a major Japanese invasion of a place called AF. And as of 9 May, he didn’t even know where AF was. He decided to press Rochefort and Layton a little bit harder to come up with the answer before it was too late.
CHAPTER 6
TURNING POINT: THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY
(JUNE 1942)
MIDWAY ATOLL
1,137 MILES NORTHWEST OF HAWAII
10 MAY 1942
Midway—1,100 miles west-northwest of Hawaii, an atoll of two tiny islands, is just 2.4 square miles of land barely above water. The highest terrain features are radio pylons on Sand Island and the control tower at the airfield on Eastern Island. Before the war Midway had been a weather station and refueling stop for the Pan American Airways Flying Clippers—the first trans-Pacific air service. In 1935, the U.S. Navy had worked a secret deal with Pan Am to significantly increase aviation fuel storage on Eastern Island and to have Pan Am service Navy PBYs that landed at the big seaplane ramp.
Before 7 December 1941, Midway had been practically defenseless. But it wasn’t anymore. At the very moment Fuchida’s aircraft were lifting off for Pearl Harbor, the Lexington had been delivering planes to the Marines assigned to protect Midway. Immediately afterward, the Navy took over the island and began to beef up its defenses.
By New Year’s Day, 1942, and for the next five months, Midway had a strong garrison of Marines equipped with anti-aircraft and coastal defense guns, a fighter squadron, and a scout-bomber squadron. Admiral Nimitz had given Midway all the troops, guns, and aircraft the atoll could hold until the runways and aprons were expanded and more barracks built.
Yamamoto tested the island’s defenses in late January, when one of his submarines surfaced and tried to take out Midway’s radio station with its deck gun. A Marine three-inch battery opened up and forced the sub to make a panicked dive just minutes after it had surfaced. There were two more sub attacks on the island during the next two weeks, with the same results.
On 1 March the two Marine air squadrons were melded into a new unit, dubbed Marine Air Group 22, and brought up to a full complement of sixty-four aircraft. The new group was formed from Fighter Squadron 221, flying antiquated, Navy cast-off F2A-3s, and Marine Scout Bombing Squadron 241, with hand-me-down Navy SB2U-3 Vindicators the Marines nicknamed “Vibrators�
� because the ancient engines were so ragged. Unfortunately, the Marine pilots assigned to fly the SB2s were fresh out of flight school and untrained in dive-bombing. So when they arrived on Midway they began practicing shallow-glide bombing attacks—a tactic that would prove to be lethal.
Airfield at Midway.
By 18 May 1942, Admiral Nimitz had done all he could with what he had available to improve Midway’s defenses. For more than a week, in the aftermath of the shootout in the Coral Sea, Commanders Edwin Layton and Joseph Rochefort had been telling him that they were “fairly sure” that the entire Imperial Combined Fleet was about to invade the place.
STATION HYPO
PAC FLEET SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE CENTER
OAHU, HAWAII
20 MAY 1942
On 5 May, as the battle in the Coral Sea was developing, an Australian radio intercept site—part of Rochefort’s “Magic” network—picked up and transcribed a long message in JN-25. The message was passed to Station Hypo still encrypted, but within two days, Rochefort’s code-breakers determined that it was an operations plan issued by Combined Fleet headquarters in Kure ordering an invasion of two widely separated U.S. installations.
By 10 May the team at Station Hypo had determined that the lightly defended U.S. bases on Adak, Attu, and Kiska in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands chain had been targeted for invasion.
A second target identified in the intercepted message was designated by the letters “AF” in the Japanese code. But the code books being so painstakingly assembled by Commanders Rochefort and Layton, Lt. Commander T. H. Dyer, and others in the Hypo bunker had no reference for “AF.” They simply did not know where it was—and yet, according to the Combined Fleet message, AF was to be attacked a day after the Aleutians. And what an attack it was planned to be!
