MacArthur's War: A Novel of the Invasion of Japan

by Douglas Niles

  Now it was suggesting a very large group of aircraft coming from the northwest. He checked his watch; it was still too early for the American air groups to be returning to their carriers.

  “Sound general quarters,” he ordered tersely. As the klaxon rang throughout the ship and men went running to the gun stations or damage control parties, he raised his binoculars and looked at the flags running up the mast of the Enterprise.

  He was not surprised to decipher the admiral’s orders as, “Stand by to defend against air attack.”

  ABOVE ENTERPRISE, SOLOMON SEA, 2019 HOURS

  A crackle of static sounded in Lefty Wayner’s ears, broken by snatches of speech: “There, to the left—spotted one—I hit him!—Look at those flames!”

  Lefty listened to those radio reports as he patrolled his lazy circle over the carrier that had been his home for the whole course of this war. He wished he was with the attacking formations, but he had drawn guard duty today, as he had at Midway. So he was once again circling the carrier, flying the routine of combat air patrol. Of course, knowing that the Jap carriers were out there meant that he was keeping his eyes open, craning his neck with extra vigilance. One reason was the real and practical need for alertness.

  The other reason was that every time he closed his eyes he saw that little Jap biplane diving away from him, hiding in the clouds, and reporting back to the enemy fleet. It was Lefty’s secret, and it tore at his heart: I lost the Battle of Midway. If he had just shot down that little scout before it had reported the location of the American fleet, the whole battle might have gone differently.

  No one had ever criticized his effort at Midway—hell, he had even gotten a commendation when he’d shot down two Jap bombers during the battle—but Lefty Wayner couldn’t help blaming himself. When he had tried to tell people, they dismissed his fears. “No one could have hit that scout. It wasn’t your fault.”

  He didn’t believe them.

  If I’d seen that son of a bitch sooner … if my first burst had been aimed better…. The questions were never far from the surface of his consciousness. The Japanese attack would not have materialized until much later…. The Enterprise would not have been damaged. The Hornet and the Yorktown might still be afloat and in action.

  In the months following the Battle of Midway, Lefty had been promoted to full lieutenant, had seen the Big E restored to serviceability, and had shot down two more enemy planes in action around the Solomons. But no number of victories, he knew, would ever be able to make up for the one that got away.

  Now, the American strike had hit paydirt, and the bastards know we’re here, Lefty reflected. No doubt some kind of return favor was on the way. In the fading light he scanned the skies to the east, watching; when his radio crackled with a warning from the ship—a report that radar had detected a large flight of bogies some fifty miles out—he wasn’t surprised. The Wildcats of the combat air patrol climbed a little higher, dispersed into the path of the enemy formation; the pilots charged their guns and kept their unblinking eyes on the sky.

  And then there was no more time for reflection. The Japanese bombers, about two hundred of them, were in sight.

  Japanese aircraft designations were such a confusing mess that Air Technical Intelligence Unit in Australia had developed a set of code names for them. Whoever it was who ran the unit liked hillbilly names, because there were Zekes and Jakes and Rufes and Hanks and Slims.

  The Aichi Type 99 dive-bombers with the characteristic fixed landing gear dangling like the talons of a hawk were now called Vals. They were on top, approaching in a wide V formation, with perhaps a dozen planes leading the way. Other flights of similar dive-bombers came beyond, all flying straight and level. Just as the radar operators on the Enterprise had reported, the enemy attacked in strength, on a direct course toward Halsey’s fleet.

  Lefty tilted the stubby nose of his fighter toward the enemy planes. His fingers tightened on the stick as he pushed his little fighter over, ready to exact vengeance for that little bastard scout plane at Midway. The Wildcat picked up speed, wind and engine noise blending into an eardrum-rattling roar.

  The line of Vals continued on without wavering, the aircraft resembling a line of elegant storks. The diving Grumman zoomed closer, and Wayner selected his target. His thumb tightened on the trigger and four .50 caliber machine guns—two on each wing—stuttered. The navy pilot watched his tracers converge, guided them across one of the enemy dive-bombers, and was rewarded as the enemy plane exploded in a blinding flash of flaming gas and detonating bomb. A second later he was through the Japanese formation, banking around hard to make another attack. Half a dozen American fighters buzzed along with him, speeding from their long dives, now lurching and growling as they pitched upward and started to turn.

  Lefty caught sight of the enemy fighters before he completed the maneuver. Sparkling in the rays of the setting sun, they swept downward and leveled out, mingling with the Wildcats, coming on very fast. One of the vaunted Zeros sped past, aiming at Wayner’s wingman, and Lefty pulled his stick, kicked his rudder around. The target seemed huge just to the port of his gun sights, the enemy fighter settling into level flight, the pilot concentrating on his shot. But the Zero was too fast—it was gone before Lefty could line up his guns.

  So he went for another dive-bomber, snarling down the now staggered line of Vals, pumping shots into several before another began to burn furiously. Lefty grinned, a fierce expression of glee, as the Jap plunged out of the formation, spiraling toward the ocean below. He saw a chute open. You’re not getting away that easily, you fucking Nip bastard, he thought and fired a burst down through the parachute.

  Another Zero went past, fastened like glue to the tail of a Grumman, and the American pilot curved to port in the Thach weave, as they had been practicing all summer. Lefty dropped his flaps to slow down, and this brought the Jap right across his nose. With a single burst he sent a fusillade of slugs into the nimble fighter and shouted aloud as he saw the port wing crumple and break away.

  “Down on the deck—we’ve got Kates coming in from all sides!” The alarmed voice crackled in his earphones, a fighter director calling for help from the carrier. Six Wildcats, Lefty leading the way, screamed in a power dive toward the dappled images of the deadly Nakajima B5N “Kate” torpedo bombers converging on the Enterprise from both the port and starboard bows. Whichever way the great ship turned, she would present a broadside target toward one of the flights.

  There was no time to make a choice—Lefty simply dived toward the nearest of the low, flat torpedo bombers. Wind rattled the canopy and shook the little fighter as he plunged through ten, eight, six thousand feet of altitude, starting to level out only as he screamed almost down to sea level. He roared in from the flank of the attacking formation and rattled off shots as soon as the targets were in range.

  There were about ten of them, and they droned toward the broad beam of the Enterprise, flying less than a hundred feet above the water. Knowing that his carrier’s survival was at stake—a torpedo was far and away the deadliest threat to his great ship—he aimed with care. A strange sense of calm pervaded him as he slashed into the Kates. His tracers converged on one of the bombers, flaming it immediately; the next one flipped over and crashed when his bullets shattered the cockpit glass and killed the pilot. The Wildcat blazed through the line and he drew a bead on the last plane in view, pouring slugs into the nose until his ammo ran out. As he flew past, he watched the torpedo bomber sink lower and lower until it splashed into the sea, immediately touching off a huge blast as the torpedo exploded.

  He glanced back and saw that other Wildcats were scoring against the Japs as well. One Kate survived long enough to launch its fish, but Lefty could see that the weapon’s trajectory would take it safely past the Big E’s stern—though the torpedo was heading instead for one of the screening cruisers. At this distance he couldn’t tell if it was the Minneapolis or the Portland. Either way, the explosion hit aft. Nearby, the Wasp too
maneuvered frantically but had thus far avoided getting hit.

  To the north, however, the picture was dire. The greatest number of enemy attackers had converged there, and even from ten miles away Lefty could see that the Saratoga had been hit, hard. A plume of black smoke already rose some two miles into the air, and as he watched, another explosion, and then still more blasts, rocked the very guts of the grand old ship.

  PORTLAND, SOLOMON SEA, 2101 HOURS

  Frank Chadwick watched the last of the Japanese torpedo bombers splash, and he cheered along with every other man on the flag bridge. They stood in the open air, watching the frenzy of the aerial battle, and remained there, limp and exhausted, as the last of the Japanese planes turned for home. The Minneapolis was damaged and could barely make way, so command of the screening group passed to Frank in the Portland.

  Only when the battle was over, when damage control reports started to come in—the Saratoga had taken three torpedo hits and twice as many from bombs; her captain had already ordered “abandon ship”—did Chadwick’s thoughts turn back to the American pilots winging their way back to their carriers.

  It was already sunset; by the time they returned it would be fully dark. There was only one way to get those fliers back onto the carriers. It was dangerous, it was risky, but there was really not much choice. Whatever planes could be diverted to Henderson Field would go there; for the rest, the ships would have to turn on their lights. This would make them sitting ducks for any lurking submarines. There were submarine pickets all around, of course, and antisubmarine planes circling the fleet. The risk could be reduced—but it could not be eliminated.

  Within an hour the signal flags from the Enterprise ordered every searchlight and running light in the fleet illuminated as the planes came straggling back from their attack. With the loss of the Saratoga, all the returning aircraft had to land on two carriers, but so many of the planes had been lost in the battle that there was enough deck space to handle the load.

  And there was almost enough time. The last returning F4F stuttered and lurched as it approached the carrier. Chadwick, still watching from the bridge, willed it to find another sniff of gasoline in those empty tanks—but instead the stubby little fighter dropped like a stone as the engine quit entirely. It fell into the sea a hundred yards to the stern of the Enterprise. A destroyer steamed over to attempt a rescue, but it looked to Frank like the pilot never made it out of the plane.

  OVER THE JAPANESE FLEET, 2242 HOURS

  It looked to Ellis Halverson like the ocean had turned to flame. Fire exploded from Japanese ships on all sides—some because they had been gutted by bombs and torpedoes, others because they were blazing away at the attacking B-17s with every gun on deck.

  The Pathfinders had done their work well: overhead, a series of flares lit up the night with searing brilliance, outlining the ships even as the enemy gunners blasted at the approaching bombers. Ellis could see two carriers that looked to be burning from stem to stern, but spotted another one—apparently undamaged—just a few miles away. He led his flight of B-17s directly toward it.

  The Skylark II roared through the escort ring around the Japanese flattops, all guns blazing. The B-17 was pretty fast—better than three hundred miles per hour—but it wasn’t fast enough to outrun high-velocity antiaircraft shells. That would take, simply, a very large amount of luck.

  In the thunderstorm of antiaircraft coming at the Skylark, any bit of maneuverability or speed Ellis lost was a potential killer. He needed all of the nearly four thousand eight hundred horsepower in the four Wright Cyclone engines as he powered the heavily laden bomber toward the Jap carriers. Tracers whipped past the glass windshield. As Halverson watched the course of the streaking rounds, he saw bullet holes appearing in his starboard wing, walking outward toward the number two engine. He pulled on the stick and the bomber lurched to the side, out of the path of bullets. The Zero roared past, so close that he could see the fighter pilot’s face, outlined in the garish light of the drifting flares, through the bubble canopy.

  “Two more of the bastards at six o’clock!” Corporal Chuck Delaney, tail turret gunner/radioman, barked the news into the intercom.

  Jesus Christ! There were so damned many of them! Everywhere he looked he saw wheeling, shooting, and diving fighters. The Zeros were faster and more nimble than the bombers gravid with their heavy loads—so much so that Halverson felt like a duck in a shooting gallery. The Jap fleet was spread across the whole horizon, an impossibly daunting target. What seemed like hundreds of huge ships twisted and turned slowly across the sea to avoid air attack, all bringing their guns to bear against the Americans.

  Halverson, in the lead Fortress, wrenched so violently to the right that the plane stood almost on its wing as a pair of Zeros zipped past. Righting his plane for a moment, the veteran commander lurched the other way and once more came back to a level bearing. The numbers two through ten bombers of the squadron were strung out line abreast, each one maneuvering frantically. They were flying low, a necessity in order to skip bomb, but this only added to the sensation of having a large bull’s-eye painted on the airplane.

  Adding to the chaos were the antiaircraft bursts, black puffs of smoke appearing to all sides, occasionally sending ripples of shrapnel against and through the Skylark II’s skin. A huge flash, followed by a stunning concussion, knocked the Fortress to the side. Halverson grimaced and swore. The number three plane had been hit and its bombs had exploded. As Ellis flashed past the cloud of wreckage, he noticed one engine, the propeller still attached, tumble down toward the ocean. No chutes. Damn.

  They were through the ring of destroyers now, and it seemed like every ship in the task force was blasting away at Ellis Halverson personally. Ahead loomed the tall, pagoda-shaped superstructures of enemy heavy cruisers and battleships, every ship clearly outlined in fire and flare light—despite the fact that it was fully after dark. The battlewagons even fired their big guns, explosive shells sending up fountains of water in an attempt to knock the low-flying bombers out of the sky. Halverson veered to the side, and the surviving bombers of his small formation followed. A quick glance showed him only six planes off his wing—had the other three all splashed?

  Doctrine called for them to split up, to coordinate an approach from two directions so that the Jap carrier would have to expose a flank to one if it turned to present the narrow bow to the other. Fuck doctrine, Halverson thought—if he could get close enough to drop his bombs, and then somehow get out of here alive, he’d call himself a Horatio Alger hero.

  He saw smoke trailing from both starboard engines of the number two bomber and clenched his teeth, urging the pilot to pull up, to stay in the air even over the force of gravity, watching until the nose dropped and the B-17 hit the ocean in a massive splash. Four down. Shit.

  And then it was there, right in front of him: a Japanese aircraft carrier, stretched out like it was a half-mile long. He saw the island superstructure, the command tower that was tiny by American standards, jutting above the huge flight deck. The ship was turning, and the Lucky Dicers had a shot only at the starboard quarter. Still, that seemed big enough. He took his plane down until he was practically skimming the wave tops. The rest of the squadron followed, each pilot trying to see through a windshield that was now grimy with soot and oil and the mist that lingered from the spewing explosions in the water.

  The pilots did the best they could to ignore the hailstorm of antiaircraft. A great flash and concussion ignited just to port, and Halverson grimaced as Dick Vail’s Grable’s Gams vanished. Pieces of metal pinged against the Skylark II, and he felt alarming shudders and thumps as explosions roared to all sides.

  But there was the target, even bigger than life. The Skylark II was flying low, and Ellis had to slow down now, making the bomber a perfect target. But luck continued to fly along with him. He held his course almost to the point of madness until, a few hundred feet from the target, Halverson pulled the lever to let his bombs go, hurling them acro
ss the surface of the water as precisely as he could. There came an immediate and very welcome lurch as the B-17 freed of the cumbersome weight, popped upward.

  Immediately he pressed the throttles forward, propelling the bomber right down to the deck, roaring past the big aircraft carrier’s stern.

  The five surviving Fortresses finally started to climb, turning away from the carrier. Now the bombers were speedy aircraft again, capable of pulling away from the enemy fighters. Halverson couldn’t see the target anymore, but he listened to Delaney’s excited description.

  “Hot damn!” The tail gunner screamed into the microphone. “Captain, we blew that son of a bitch right out of the water!”

  AKAGI, 200 MILES EAST OF RABAUL, 2245 HOURS

  Admiral Nagumo looked around at the night that had become his own personal hell. Where had these bombers come from? They were brave, coming in so slowly—it seemed that half of them had been shot down.

  But the other half … they had completed their deadly work. First the army bombers had blasted the Shokaku and the already damaged Hiryu. Then the final insult: a volley of bombs had skipped into the side of the Akagi, puncturing the venerable ship’s bowels, blowing up deep within her guts. The flares still burning overhead cast their white brilliance like searing searchlights. All of his carriers were burning…. The Kido Butai fleet had been devastated beyond recovery by the two consecutive attacks.

  Staff officers were pleading with him, even tugging at him, trying to get him to leave. But his feet would not move, his mouth could not articulate a sound. Didn’t they know? Couldn’t they see? His heart was broken in his chest. There was no purpose to anything, not anymore.

  There was one essential strategic difference between the American fleet and the Japanese fleet. When a Japanese carrier sank, it was essentially irreplaceable. Japanese heavy industry was experiencing an increasing shortage of vital war materiél; in particular, there was simply not enough steel to build any more large warships. But the Americans, so far away in a land rich with natural resources, when they lost a carrier, simply built another, or two, or perhaps six. That was what Yamamoto had known and had warned about.