Far out in the central Pacific, fast American carrier forces were conducting hit-and-run raids during these early weeks of 1942. But the pivot of naval action had shifted west, as Japanese forces converged on the Malay Barrier. Defending the East Indies was a pick-up collection of Dutch, British, and American warships. To the continuing problems of inexperience were added those of a multinational command lacking in common training and even communications, and plagued by shortages of all kinds and by a sinking realization that the Allies could put up only a holding action at best. Despite small tactical victories and individual gallantry, the little Asiatic fleet was virtually destroyed and the Malay Barrier completely breached by early March. The Japanese were especially effective in protecting their ships and invasion forces with land- or carrier-based air power, while the American effort on this score was desperate. The Air Force actually had several hundred fighters accumulating in Australia, but ferrying them to Java via defenseless and unfamiliar fields was risky. One flight was smashed by the enemy over Bali. Another ran into foul weather, and all the planes crashed. Another turned back because of weather and was then destroyed in a heavy Japanese attack on Port Darwin. The aircraft tender Langley went down off Java with thirty-two P-40’s on board; a cargo ship came through with twenty-seven crated fighters, but these had to be dumped, still crated, into the sea during the evacuation of Java.
“The Pacific situation is now very grave,” Roosevelt cabled to Churchill after the fall of Java. It is doubtful, though, that, except for the few hours when the Pearl Harbor losses were coming in, he ever felt any sense of despair over the Pacific defeats. As he wrote to Churchill after the fall of Singapore, no matter how serious the setbacks “we must constantly look forward to the next moves that need to be made to hit the enemy.” The sharper the challenge, indeed, the more direct the President’s response, for feeling was rising in the administration that the people needed some dramatic feat of arms, even if the strategic value was small.
Such a feat was already in the works. In Florida, on an airstrip the size of a carrier’s deck, army airmen under Colonel James Doolittle were practicing take-offs with fully loaded medium bombers. On April Fool’s Day, sixteen of these B-25’s were loaded onto the carrier Hornet and lashed down on the flight deck. Thirteen days later the Hornet rendezvoused in the northern Pacific with the Enterprise, flying the flag of Admiral William F. (“Bull”) Halsey. The small fleet then sped west through heavy seas. These operations were carried out in the strictest secrecy; although this had been a pet project of the President, even he did not know the full details.
The plan was daring, almost foolhardy—to launch the bombers, which had a far longer range than carrier aircraft, about five hundred miles off the coast of Japan for raids on major cities, after which the planes would have barely enough fuel to fly on across the Sea of Japan and land on friendly Chinese airfields. The risk intensified when, about six hundred miles out from Japan, Halsey was discovered by Japanese picket boats; he chose to launch the bombers early instead of either retiring or running his carriers into a hornet’s nest.
The army pilots had never flown off a flattop. Green water was breaking over the carrier’s ramps. But Doolittle and all his men got off, and within four hours were dropping bombs on a surprised Tokyo and other cities. Not a plane was lost over Japan. One crew landed at Vladivostok and was interned by the neutral Russians; the Japanese captured two crews who went down short of China, and later executed three men for attacking civilian targets; three planes made crash landings; the other crews bailed out in the night over China. There were only five deaths. Behind them they left a mortified Imperial Headquarters and two exultant carriers streaking east.
“What’s the news?” Roosevelt innocently asked Hassett the next morning in his Hyde Park bedroom. Hassett mentioned rumors of the bombing. “You know,” Roosevelt said, “we have an airplane base in the Himalayas.” Hassett looked skeptical. “The base is Shangri-La.” The President got no rise from his aide, who had never read James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, but Roosevelt liked his little joke and soon was telling reporters about the mythical base. The news of the bombing electrified the nation. Few cared that the bombers had done little damage, or that vengeance might be wreaked on the Chinese, or that the Japanese might even retaliate against the West Coast. At last something had been done to “remember Pearl.”
The surprise raid, indeed, had a big and unexpected payoff. In the few months after Pearl Harbor the Japanese had destroyed five enemy battleships, one carrier, two cruisers, seven destroyers, and a host of merchant ships, all at the cost of twenty-three small ships—the largest a destroyer—and a sizable number of valuable but expendable planes. The Imperial Navy was riding high; where to turn next? To many in the high command, Australia and India were the most inviting targets. But Yamamoto was still insisting on the old strategy of crushing the American Navy and thus gaining time to build a western Pacific bastion. Pearl Harbor had failed to do the trick. Since the American bombers had obviously come from Midway, Yamamoto argued, the Japanese fleet must now turn east and capture both Midway and the western Aleutians—and draw into combat the carriers of Pacific fleet commander Admiral Chester W. Nimitz. With some doubt the high command approved this plan and began to assemble a huge fleet.
The Japanese at this point were still pressing their advance to the southwest, toward the Solomon Islands and into the Coral Sea. A clash here early in May gave a foretaste of the new kind of naval war—aerial combat at long distances, without direct engagements between surface vessels. The Americans drew first blood on May 7, sinking a small carrier. After much groping in the dark by both sides, planes next day from the Lexington and the Yorktown and from the Shokaku and the Zuikaki pummeled each other’s carriers. The Shokaku was badly damaged, while the grand old Lexington caught fire and later went down, but not before every man was saved, and even the captain’s dog. While the Japanese won the Battle of the Coral Sea, they pulled back from their drive on Port Moresby, and neither the Shokaku nor the Zuikaki was able to take part in the approaching showdown in the central Pacific.
But the Japanese felt that they had plenty of power left for the grand sortie against Midway. On May 27, anniversary of Admiral Togo’s rout of the Russians in the Battle of Tsushima, the main striking force began to move out—first the screen of destroyers, then the cruisers, the battleships, headed by Admiral Yamamoto’s flagship, the superdreadnaught Yamato, transports with troops for the seizure of Midway, a large covering force of submarines, and a great striking force of four carriers. To the northeast another attack group was heading toward the Aleutians. Yamamoto’s design was bold and ambitious: to attack Dutch Harbor, in the eastern Aleutians, and to occupy the western islands in the chain; then to capture Midway, with the hope of drawing the American fleet to its defense and into a decisive battle. He did not plan to go on to Hawaii, at least for a time. These “Oriental disciples of Mahan,” as Samuel Eliot Morison called them, knew that they could seize the military bastion of Oahu only by smashing America’s Pacific fleet; if they failed, they could not even hold Midway.
Yamamoto’s tactic depended on surprise as well as power, and surprise was denied him from the start. From early May 1942, the broken code and other sources had given Nimitz extensive intelligence of enemy plans. He had time to pack tiny Midway full of planes, to dispatch a small fleet of cruisers and destroyers off toward Alaska, and to mobilize his carriers for the main strike. The Enterprise and the Hornet sortied out of Pearl on May 28, under the command of Admiral Raymond A. Spruance. The heavily damaged Yorktown, patched up at Pearl Harbor in less than two days, pulled out on the thirtieth. The Japanese main fleet was now bearing down on its target.
The President followed the moves closely. “It looks, at this moment,” he wrote to MacArthur on June 2, “as if the Japanese Fleet is heading toward the Aleutian Islands or Midway and Hawaii, with a remote possibility it may attack Southern California or Seattle by air.”
Early
on June 4 over one hundred planes soared off the four Japanese carriers and descended on Midway, while the Enterprise and the Hornet, unknown to the enemy, waited to pounce. So valiant was the island’s defense that Nagumo, commanding the Japanese carrier forces, decided that a second softening-up was necessary before the invasion. Spruance’s torpedo bombers caught him as he was busy recovering planes from the first strike and preparing planes for the second. By mischance the American torpedo bombers came in without fighter protection, and Zeroes knocked them down in a terrible slaughter; not a single torpedo reached the enemy flattops. But the intrepid torpedo bombers drew so much attention that American dive bombers were able to make their long plunges and rain their missiles on cluttered flight decks. In a few minutes three Japanese carriers were infernos of explosions and fire. Dive bombers got the fourth carrier later in the day. The Yorktown, too, was set afire in a counterstrike, and heeled badly; it was abandoned, then reboarded, and was being towed to safety when a Japanese submarine penetrated the screening warships and sank her and a destroyer with three torpedoes.
During the night, with his carriers burning or sunk, and his battleships never brought into play, Yamamoto ordered a withdrawal. Spruance considered pursuit but he feared running into the enemy’s vastly superior gunpower and perhaps even more carriers. Each side had had enough. The Navy had made mistakes and enjoyed a good deal of luck in the encounter; yet in one carrier thrust Nimitz had broken the backbone of Japanese naval air power, turned the tide of battle in the central Pacific, and incidentally revealed, in Spruance, a commander with a fine balance of boldness and caution, intuition and realism.
The nation was elated by the victory, but Roosevelt did not exaggerate its effect. The Japanese had won two footholds, Attu and Kiska, in the western Aleutians while Nimitz was occupied to the south, and all around its vast rim of advance and victory Japan was consolidating its grip. Bataan had long since fallen, and early in May the island fortress of Corregidor, pounded by massed artillery from only two miles across the water, had surrendered. The last message to the President from its commander, General Jonathan M. Wainwright, had epitomized the long string of defeats in the Southwest Pacific:
“With broken heart and head bowed in sadness but not in shame, with continued pride in my gallant troops, I go to meet the Japanese commander.”
SEVEN The Cauldron of War
THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF had no direct part in either the dismal setbacks or the glittering victories of his Navy in the Pacific. He offered suggestions, approved the major decisions, and received a stream of reports during large engagements, but unlike Hitler, who constantly advised and pressed his generals on tactical matters, Roosevelt was content to leave such questions to Admiral King and his Navy headquarters down on Constitution Avenue, and to Admiral Nimitz in his command post at Pearl Harbor. The President occasionally got the same inflated reports of air victories over the Japanese that the public did; he happily informed Churchill that carrier planes in a surprise raid in New Guinea had sunk two heavy cruisers and probably a light cruiser, when actually only one light cruiser and a small transport had gone down. Tempted though he was to involve himself in the fascinating day-to-day moves of his services—especially the Navy—he knew that he must reserve himself for the overriding political and strategic problems. These were coming to a head in the early months of 1942.
For the third spring in a row Hitler was mobilizing for a vast offensive on his Eastern Front. During March the Russian counterattacks had ground down in the snow and mud. The invaders had suffered well over a million casualties—over 100,000 from frostbite alone—and new divisions had to be drawn from Germany and its junior partners. Hitler’s aim was no longer the crushing of the Soviet colossus in great encircling movements, but attrition and defeat through close pincer actions.
“Our aim is to wipe out the entire defense potential remaining to the Soviets,” he ordered in mid-April, “and to cut them off, as far as possible, from their most important sources of war industry.” The Wehrmacht would hold in the center and seize Leningrad in the north, but put its main weight in the south to capture Sevastopol, immobilize Stalingrad, and break through into the Caucasus. Five armies, of one hundred divisions, and 1,500 aircraft were poised for the attack in the south. Hitler did not ignore the heady prospect below the Mediterranean of pushing the British east, opening up the Middle East for assault, and even driving on to a meeting with Japan in India. But, ever the proponent of concentrated strength and attack, he barred any strategic diversion from the eastern war.
The Kremlin still had little choice of strategy. “We want to rid our Soviet land of the German fascist scum,” Stalin proclaimed on May Day 1942. “To achieve this aim we must smash the German fascist army and annihilate the German invaders to the last man if they do not surrender. There is no other way….” The Kremlin, emboldened by its winter victories, was not relying on a passive defense; spoiling actions were planned against the expected Nazi assault. But to contain and hurl back the Nazi legions Stalin needed far more aid than he was receiving from the West. Above all, he wanted a direct attack across the English Channel that would create a major second front in France and ease the pressure.
The Kremlin was not reticent on the matter. Pravda complained about the inactivity in the west; to the Russians, who could lose whole divisions in a day, the Mediterranean and Pacific battles seemed little more than skirmishes. Litvinov, still the Kremlin’s most persuasive commentator to the West, complained to American and British friends that only simultaneous offensives in the east and the west could vanquish Hitler. We hear much about the common efforts of the United Nations, he argued, but what were common efforts without common fighting?
The most powerful supporters of this point of view outside Russia were three politically conservative, anti-Communist, and militarily orthodox Americans: Henry Stimson, George Marshall, and Dwight Eisenhower. As the new head of the Army’s revamped War Plans Division, Eisenhower had consistently urged the massing of American strength in Britain as the nearest, safest, most usable, best-located area to mount a concentrated attack against the German rear. “We’ve got to go to Europe and fight—and we’ve got to quit wasting resources all over the world—and still worse—wasting time,” he argued. “If we’re to keep Russia in, save the Middle East, India, and Burma, we’ve got to begin slugging by air at West Europe, to be followed by a land attack as soon as possible.” Stimson and Marshall strongly concurred, despite some differences of opinion in the War Department. The plans for a North African invasion that had been tentatively worked up at the ARCADIA Conference were shelved for the time—a decision made easier by German successes in Libya. Late in March Stimson wrote to the President:
“John Sherman said in 1877, ‘The only way to resume species payments is to resume.’ Similarly, the only way to get the initiative in this war is to take it.
“My advice is: As soon as your Chiefs of Staff have completed the plans for the northern offensive to your satisfaction, you should send them by a most trusted messenger and advocate to Churchill and his War Council as the American plan which you propose and intend to go ahead with if accepted by Britain….And then having done that, you should lean with all your strength on the ruthless rearrangement of shipping allotments and the preparation of landing gear for the ultimate invasion. That latter work is now going on at a rather dilettante pace. It should be pushed with the fever of war action, aimed at a definite rate of completion not later than September….”
By the end of March, Stimson, Marshall, and Company had a double-pronged war plan for a second front. Between eighteen and twenty-one divisions, including armored, motorized, and one airborne, would be prepared for a massive assault across the Channel by April 1943. A contingency plan was also drawn for a more limited operation, employing a third as many men, for the fall of 1942. The purpose of the second plan betrayed the Army’s concern that the Soviets might be either too weak or too strong. It would be employed only if the Russians fa
ced imminent collapse without a second front—“In this case the attack should be considered as a sacrifice to the common good.” Or it would be used if the German defenses in Western Europe became critically weakened.
On April 1, 1942, Stimson and Marshall took their plans to the White House. They were worried about the President’s reaction. In past meetings he had shown, they felt, a tendency to respond too readily to the widely scattered needs of his allies and his area commanders. Stimson feared he might go in for another “dispersion debauch”; Marshall had tabbed the President’s habit of “tossing out new operations” as his “cigarette-holder gesture.” But this time they found their chief ready to be convinced. Whatever the difficulties, he recognized the importance of bolstering the Russians and keeping them in the war. Not only did he endorse a cross-channel attack, but he decided to send Hopkins and Marshall to London to consult Churchill. The President’s decision “will mark this day as a memorable one in the war,” Stimson noted in his diary for this April Fool’s Day.
“What Harry and George Marshall will tell you all about has my heart and mind in it,” Roosevelt wrote to Churchill three days later. “Your people and mine demand the establishment of a front to draw off pressure on the Russians, and these people are wise enough to see that the Russians are today killing more Germans and destroying more equipment than you and I put together. Even if full success is not attained, the big objective will be….”
In London the Americans found Churchill surprisingly responsive to their plans. They sent optimistic reports to Roosevelt about the prospects for agreement. Actually Churchill was skeptical of an early large-scale invasion and downright hostile to an emergency landing in the fall of of 1942. All his old fears remained—of another desperate landing with a strong possibility of defeat and evacuation, as in Gallipoli, of a premature British commitment before the Americans could invest heavy ground and air power, of another blood bath in France like World War I. As always, he was playing with thoughts of peripheral operations; an invasion of northern Norway was the favorite at the moment. His military chiefs, notably Brooke, put their professional judgment behind his fears and doubts. Uncharacteristically, though, Churchill did not present his real views bluntly. He accepted the cross-channel attack in principle but lobbed up reservations and qualifications. At this juncture he wanted neither to discourage his ally Stalin, who, after all, could make some kind of deal with Hitler, nor to thwart his friend Roosevelt, who might give in to popular clamor to concentrate in the Pacific and abandon Atlantic First.
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