by Oliver North
Commander Joseph Rochefort
From the 5 May intercept and subsequent messages, the code-breakers determined that AF was to be struck by six heavy carriers, the Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu, Soryu, Shokaku, and Zuikaku, and the light carriers Hosho and Zuiho. Accompanying them were to be more than forty destroyers, fifteen submarines, seaplane tenders, and dozens of transports and support ships. After surprise air strikes to destroy U.S. aircraft on the ground, three cruisers and seven battleships would then bombard AF, including the biggest battleship in the world, the Yamato, Admiral Yamamoto’s flagship. After this “softening up,” AF would be assaulted and occupied by a force of 5,000 troops.
By 15 May, Nimitz had learned through other intercepts that the carrier Shokaku wouldn’t be at AF. She was at Truk undergoing extensive repairs from the damage sustained during the Coral Sea battle. And his intelligence officer had other intelligence that the Zuikaku wouldn’t make it to AF—wherever it was—because the carrier had lost most of its air group in the same battle.
But to Nimitz, the lack of these two carriers hardly mattered. The Japanese force headed for AF was the biggest naval armada ever assembled—145 ships—and he still didn’t know where they were going.
By 19 May, Layton and Rochefort were convinced that AF was Midway. But others, including many on his staff, thought it could be Darwin, Australia, mainland Alaska, or even Hawaii itself. Nimitz had to know. His only two operational carriers, the Hornet and the Enterprise, were in the South Pacific, east of Australia. The badly battered Yorktown had limped to Tonga near the Fiji Islands and was now headed slowly back to Pearl Harbor—with estimates that repairs from the damage sustained in the Coral Sea would take three months. Nimitz knew that if he put his carriers in the wrong place he could precipitate a disaster worse than the Day of Infamy.
Commander Edward Layton
That night, aware of his commander’s desperation, Rochefort devised a brilliant and devious scheme to trap the Japanese into revealing their target. Using the secure underwater cable between Oahu and Midway, he sent instructions to Marine Air Group 22 on Midway to broadcast a routine radio message “in the clear”—meaning unencrypted—that they were running short of fresh water. The Marines complied, broadcasting the innocuous message over their standard high-frequency “administrative & logistics” radio.
Fewer than twelve hours later, early on the morning of 20 May, an Australian intercept site transcribed a Combined Fleet coded message to Yamamoto informing him that a Japanese submarine had reported hearing a radio call: “The aviation unit on AF is running short of fresh water.”
Thanks to Station Hypo, Nimitz finally knew the target. And later that day, Rochefort’s code-breakers gave him another piece of vital but frightening information: the attacks were scheduled for 3 June in the Aleutians, and for 4 June on Midway.
Nimitz now knew the targets and the dates of attack. He correctly judged that the Aleutian invasion for the third was a deception designed by Yamamoto to draw U.S. forces away from Hawaii and Midway. And while Nimitz didn’t want to lose even another inch of American territory to the Japanese, the tiny islands of Adak, Attu, and Kiska were expendable compared with the strategically valuable Midway. If Yamamoto managed to seize the little atoll, Hawaii itself would be vulnerable, and with Japanese long-range land-based patrol aircraft and submarines operating from the Aleutians in the north Pacific and from Midway in the central Pacific, he would have only one way of striking back—through the narrow channels of the South Pacific islands. By the morning of 21 May there was no doubt in the mind of Chester Nimitz: He had to hold Midway. The only questions now were: How? And with what?
Japanese codebooks
The commander of the Pacific Fleet wasn’t one to waste time worrying. Nimitz ordered the Midway harbor and beaches mined and barbed wire emplaced. Seventeen Army Air Force B-17s—all he had to spare—were ordered to Midway. On 25 May, the seaplane tender Kitty Hawk delivered additional fighter planes and dive-bombers to the island, bringing the little airstrip up to a complement of sixty old Navy and Marine fighters and dive-bombers that had been taken off carrier duty, along with six new TBD torpedo planes—the first to reach the Pacific—twenty-three land-based bombers, and thirty-two of the new but untested Catalina PBY bombers.
He ordered the Hornet and the Enterprise to steam at flank speed back to Hawaii to refuel and re-arm so that they could get in position northeast of Midway to meet the onslaught. He dispatched every available submarine in the Pacific Fleet—nineteen in all—to screen the island’s western approaches. To ensure that the Japanese wouldn’t have a free ride in the Aleutians, he ordered several smaller bases evacuated and sent a surface force of five cruisers, fourteen destroyers, and six submarines under the command of Rear Admiral Robert A. Theobald to do their best at disrupting the Japanese landings in Alaska.
Meanwhile, as the Japanese Combined Fleet headed east, the battle-damaged USS Yorktown was making her way from Tonga to Pearl Harbor. Navy Aviation Mechanic Bill Surgi was still aboard.
AVIATION MECHANIC BILL SURGI, USN
Aboard the USS Yorktown
Pearl Harbor, Hawaii
27 May 1942
We went from the Coral Sea to Tonga to survey the damage. The Yorktown was pretty well shot up. We had near misses on the port side, which gave us an oil leak. After patching her up as well as we could with all hands working around the clock, we headed for Pearl. It took us over a week to get back, and the damage-control people and the engineers they flew down to Tonga estimated, “It’s gonna take ninety days to fix her.”
Well, we got to Pearl Harbor, working on her the whole way, and when we pulled into port, they never really repaired it. For all the shrapnel holes in the hull and the fuel and water tanks, they drilled wooden pegs of different sizes and shapes that would fit the holes and we drove them in with sledgehammers to make her watertight. In the spaces below decks where the bombs had gone off, they put in big timbers and welded beams across to shore up the decks and bulkheads. Nobody got shore leave like we usually did when we came into port. We had shipyard workers on board, and our working parties were going around the clock. Nobody slept.
To fix the holes that the bombs had made in the flight deck, they hoisted aboard big metal plates and we fastened them down with four big metal spikes, one in each corner. Then, after just three days, we got the word that we were going back out.
The ship was not what we call seaworthy, but the flight deck was operational. The Yorktown’s air group was still intact; the squadrons were brought up to full strength and everybody was on board. As we were leaving Pearl Harbor, the skipper comes over the ship’s address system and says, “We’re going to help out at Midway.”
PEARL HARBOR SHIPYARDS
OAHU, HAWAII
28 MAY 1942
Admiral “Bull” Halsey’s Task Force 16, composed of the USS Enterprise and USS Hornet and their escorts, arrived at Pearl Harbor on 26 May. The next day Task Force 17, with Admiral Fletcher shepherding the crippled USS Yorktown—trailing a miles-long oil slick—limped into Pearl for repairs. The damage assessment for fixing the Yorktown was ninety days. Halsey ordered them to make her ready for sea in three days. Working night and day, yard workers and the crew made repairs so that the carrier could launch and land aircraft again. They did it, and Nimitz came aboard to pronounce the vessel “ready for action” even though repairs continued as the ship sailed.
But when the Enterprise, the Hornet, and their screen of five heavy cruisers, one light cruiser, and nine destroyers constituting Task Force 16, sortied from Pearl Harbor en route to Midway on 28 May, Halsey wasn’t aboard. He had been taken to a hospital in Hawaii for a severe case of dermatitis—seemingly not a serious condition, but after months of combat at sea, it had become a problem for the hard-nosed admiral, keeping him from sleeping. The doctors ordered the tenacious commander to bed rest, and Rear Admiral Raymond A. Spruance took command of the two-carrier Task Force 16, while overall command was handed to
Admiral Fletcher aboard the battered but bandaged Yorktown with Task Force 17.
The Yorktown left Pearl Harbor with Fletcher aboard on 29 May and rendezvoused with the Hornet and the Enterprise 150 miles northeast of Midway on 2 June.
The timing of the Americans’ departure from Pearl Harbor was impeccable. Though Yamamoto was fairly certain that Enterprise and Hornet were in the South Pacific, he had ordered Japanese submarines to be positioned in Hawaiian waters by 1 June to intercept any other carriers or major combatants that might have arrived from the U.S. mainland. If they couldn’t sink them, they were to at least warn the rest of the Combined Fleet if the Americans sailed when the Aleutians were attacked on 3 June. He also dispatched seaplanes from the Japanese-held Marshall Islands on 1, 2, and 3 June to scout Hawaii and carry out the same task. But neither the subs nor the scout planes arrived until well after the two American carrier task forces had already sailed. The Japanese, believing that they had sunk both the Yorktown and the Lexington in the Coral Sea battle—and now more convinced than ever that Halsey was still in the South Pacific with the Hornet and the Enterprise—thought they had nothing to fear as they closed in for a surprise attack on Midway.
USS Yorktown
Meanwhile, Station Hypo was in high gear. Layton and Rochefort’s team went two days straight without sleep, taking catnaps at their radio sets. Having provided the strategic intelligence Nimitz needed, they now wanted to give the commanders at sea good information on the tactical situation.
STATION HYPO
PAC FLEET SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE CENTER
OAHU, HAWAII
2 JUNE 1942
On 2 June, Rochefort’s code-breakers had cracked enough JN-25 messages that he was able to tell Layton the dispositions of the enormous Japanese fleet as it closed on Midway—including the intended sequence of attack from the seven different subordinate commands that Yamamoto had established for the operation. And as if the Navy at sea and the Marines at Midway needed any more motivation, the Station Hypo crew let the Americans lying in wait know that the first attack aimed at the atoll would be commanded by Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, heading the First Carrier Strike Force, the very man and unit that had devastated Pearl Harbor on 7 December.
But neither Yamamoto nor Nagumo had considered two important factors : One, they no longer held the element of surprise—American code-breakers had seen to that. And second, they misjudged the Americans’ response, thinking that Nimitz would race to defend the Aleutians with everything he had available out of some sense of “military honor.”
JNS YAMOTO, IMPERIAL COMBINED FLEET FLAGSHIP
700 MILES NORTHWEST OF MIDWAY ATOLL
3 JUNE 1942
1930 HOURS LOCAL
The Japanese struck the Aleutians right on the schedule that Rochefort’s code-breakers had predicted. Bombers from the Imperial Navy’s Second Carrier Strike Force attacked Dutch Harbor, the biggest target off the Alaskan mainland, and two Japanese invasion forces captured the tiny uninhabited islands of Attu and Kiska. Dutch Harbor suffered only moderate damage.
Yamamoto received word of Admiral Kakuta’s successful attack against Dutch Harbor and cautioned his forces to be on alert, certain that the Americans would deploy to protect their territory and that the “decisive engagement to destroy U.S. naval power in the Pacific” was just ahead in the waters around Midway. And, Yamamoto reasoned, once that battle was over, no one in Japan—not the emperor, not the politicians—need ever fear another embarrassment like the Doolittle Raid in April.
It was this event, more than anything else, that had led Tokyo to approve Yamamoto’s audacious plan. The desire to avenge the Doolittle attack—and ensure that nothing like it would ever happen again—had also clouded the Japanese High Command’s otherwise successful strategic and tactical judgment.
Until the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Japanese had applied sound strategic and tactical doctrine in their naval engagements. They had insisted on gathering good intelligence before committing to action, required the use of overwhelming force against their enemy, operated from relatively simple, understandable, and straightforward plans, concentrated their forces at the main point of attack, and mandated strict radio discipline to preserve the element of surprise.
But in the Coral Sea fight, the Japanese had split their forces—and suffered losses as a consequence. And now, as the Combined Fleet closed on Midway, Yamamoto had constructed an elaborate plan, splitting his force into seven separate groups with two objectives: the Aleutians and Midway. Either from arrogance or from fatigue, they had little good intelligence, a very complicated plan, and no radio discipline whatsoever.
Yet with all this, the sheer number of ships—145 in total, all with experienced crews and pilots, still gave him a powerful advantage over the U.S. Pacific Fleet. To carry out the mission of destroying the U.S. Navy in Japan’s ocean, Yamamoto had personally chosen the First Carrier Strike Force—Kido Butai—the same force that had led the attack on Pearl Harbor. These were the same indomitable Bushido warriors who had led the attack on the American base, the very same commanders and pilots who had been victorious in every encounter with Japan’s enemies, from the Hawaiian Islands to the Indian Ocean: Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo and Air Officer Mitsuo Fuchida.
Against all this, Nimitz could only muster the Marines on the ground at Midway and the Army, Navy, and Marine pilots based on the atoll; nineteen submarines with defective torpedoes; eight cruisers; eighteen destroyers; two battle-untested carriers—the Hornet and the Enterprise—and the battered hull and patched flight deck of the USS Yorktown. And, of course, the American pilots who would fly from those carrier decks.
USS ENTERPRISE
155 NAUTICAL MILES NORTH-NORTHEAST OF MIDWAY ATOLL
4 JUNE 1942
1045 HOURS LOCAL
At 0415 on 4 June 1942, the Marine air base on Eastern Island was still covered in predawn darkness but alive with the roar of PBY Catalina and Army Air Corps B-17 aircraft engines. The patrol pilots were given their orders: find the Japanese fleet some 200 to 250 miles northwest of Midway, just across the International Date Line, somewhere near 180° longitude and 39° latitude, and report their exact position. The B-17s were told to hit any capital ships they could find west of Midway.
Fifteen minutes later, 108 strike aircraft were launched from four of Admiral Nagumo’s First Strike Force carriers hiding in the fog banks 150 miles northwest of Midway—where the PBYs were heading. Nagumo gave the order for his carriers to close on Midway so that his pilots wouldn’t have to fly so far when they returned from destroying the sleeping Americans and their airfield.
At about the time Nagumo launched his first strike, the Midway-based B-17s, flown by inexperienced pilots and crews, spotted a group of Japanese support vessels and dropped their bombs, failing to score a single hit. Four of the Catalinas drew first blood in the fight by sinking a Japanese oiler, though. Hearing the report of the attack, Admiral Fletcher ordered search planes aloft from the Yorktown, hoping to pinpoint the rest of the Japanese fleet and get the word back to the American carriers.
Nearly two hours after the B-17s, Catalina bombers, and PBY search planes launched from Midway, the Japanese attackers arrived over the atoll, hoping to catch the Americans with their aircraft on the parking aprons, as they had at Pearl Harbor. But most of the U.S. Marine fighters, dive-bombers, and torpedo bombers of Marine Air Group 22 were already aloft.
The Japanese air attack was fierce, but the Marines on the ground were ready and responded with a furious anti-aircraft barrage. The Marines of VMF-221, however, flying combat air patrol in the old Brewster Buffalos, were cut to pieces by the far superior Japanese carrier-based planes. Two-thirds of the squadron was gone in five minutes of air-to-air combat. At 0645, ten minutes after it started, it was over. Only six Japanese aircraft had been downed, but when the leader of the Japanese strike made one last pass over the air base in the gathering daylight, he saw that their bombs had started a fuel tank fire and destroyed a han
gar. It was what he didn’t see that alarmed him. There were only a few burning American airplanes on the ground—and worse, the runways were still intact. It would require another bombing attack. He headed back to his carrier to inform Admiral Nagumo to prepare another bombing run against Midway.
Meanwhile, a Midway-launched PBY spotted the Japanese carriers. Almost simultaneously, a Japanese scout plane found the Hornet and the Enterprise. Both pilots radioed back the locations to their respective fleets, and both the Japanese and American admirals prepared to attack each other’s ships.
With half his aircraft heading back from attacking Midway, Nagumo was beginning to fuel and arm his remaining planes with torpedoes and high-explosive bombs fused for an anti-shipping attack. Suddenly, two waves of Marine dive-bombers and torpedo bombers that had launched from Midway before the Japanese assault arrived overhead.
Though the Marine attacks were totally unsuccessful—no Japanese ships were hit—the attack by land-based aircraft convinced Nagumo that he first had to deal with the aircraft and runways on Midway before taking on the American carriers. He therefore ordered the armament on his planes changed back to ordnance for a ground attack. For almost an hour, there was chaos on the Japanese flight decks as pilots, plane crews, ordnance men, and deck handlers—already shaken by the violent maneuvers to avoid the American torpedo attacks—tried to comply with Nagumo’s order.
