Special Ops: Four Accounts of the Military's Elite Forces

by Orr Kelly

  During his time in Washington, Yamamoto was deeply impressed by Mitchell’s sinking of the Ostfriesland, and upon his return to Tokyo, he became one of the most outspoken advocates of taking air power to sea. Before the conflict with the U.S. broke out, the Japanese built ten carriers, as big or bigger than the seven modern American carriers, and as fast or faster. But they did not abandon the navy’s traditional faith in the power of large battleships. The Yamato and three other new dreadnoughts were nearing completion. With eighteen-inch guns, they were the largest warships the world had ever seen.

  Planning for the attack on Pearl Harbor began a full year before it was carried out. For weeks, pilots practiced their tactics at Kagoshima Bay, whose harbor is similar enough to Pearl Harbor to provide realistic training. Finally, on 10 November 1941, the orders were given and one ship after another weighed anchor and steamed northward. Under strict radio silence, they gathered in Hitokappu Bay, in the Kurile Islands, far to the north of Tokyo. If a modern satellite had been able to photograph that gathering, it would have showed an awesome striking force: six carriers, two battleships, two heavy cruisers, one light cruiser, nine destroyers, three submarines, and eight supply vessels.

  On 26 November, the task force steamed out of Hitokappu Bay, staying far to the north of the normal shipping routes across the Pacific. American intelligence specialists puzzled over their failure to detect radio signals to and from a large part of the Japanese fleet. Something was up, but there was little reason to believe a powerful striking force was moving stealthily into position for its surprise attack. Only in recent years has the U.S. Navy rediscovered the art of emission control—turning off electronic signals that might tell the enemy where a fleet is—that the Japanese used so effectively.

  Just after 6 A.M. on 7 December, the six Japanese carriers—Kaga, Akagi, Shokaku, Zuikaku, Hiryu, and Soryu—turned eastward into a brisk wind about 200 miles north of Oahu and began to launch the first of two waves of planes. On each ship, the planes were crowded together on the stern to provide as much deck space as possible for the takeoff run. Unlike today’s carrier planes, which are hurled into the air by catapults, the Japanese pilots stood on their brakes, ran their engines up to full throttle and then careened down the pitching deck on their own power.

  Within fifteen minutes, the six carriers launched 183 planes: first, forty-three fighters, then forty-nine high-level bombers, followed by fifty-one dive bombers, and forty torpedo planes.

  For the next hour, crews worked frantically to bring more planes up from the hangar decks. At 7:15 A.M., the second wave of the attack began its takeoff. In this group were thirty-six Zero fighters, fifty-four horizontal bombers and seventy-eight dive bombers.

  The attackers achieved a stunning surprise. Before the morning was over, their bombs, torpedoes, and machine gun bullets had destroyed or badly damaged eight battleships, three light cruisers, three destroyers, and four auxiliary craft; destroyed or damaged 164 American planes, and heavily damaged many supply and maintenance facilities. The cost in lives had also been high: 2,403 dead and another 1,178 wounded. The Japanese lost twenty-nine planes, with another seventy-four damaged.

  Looking at the list of vessels destroyed or damaged, it is tempting to conclude that the Japanese focused on battleship row because they thought the battleships were more important than aircraft carriers. The fact is that the Japanese officers responsible for planning the attack on Hawaii (though not the admiral selected to carry it out) fully understood the new reality of warfare at sea. They knew how powerful and how flexible a weapon the carrier could be—as their ability to move their own floating air bases halfway across the Pacific to within striking distance of Hawaii demonstrated—and they had made the destruction of the American carrier force their number one priority. But, when the time came for the takeoff from the carriers north of Oahu, the Japanese simply didn’t know where the American flattops were.

  After the victorious Japanese had returned to their carriers, senior aviators urged two courses of action: First, send another strike back to knock out the American fuel tanks and other remaining targets; and, additionally, search for the missing American carriers and destroy them.

  But Vice Adm. Chuichi Nagumo, who led the First Air Fleet in its surprise attack, had been picked almost entirely on the basis of seniority. The result was to put a traditional battleship admiral with no experience or interest in the use of air power in charge of this large-scale use of air power at sea. Moreover, he was a cautious man, reluctant to risk an attack on his ships and unwilling to go beyond the exact letter of his orders.

  Instead of completing the devastation of the American forces in Hawaii and seeking out the American carriers, Nagumo turned his task force toward home.

  Where were the American carriers? The Saratoga and Hornet were on the West Coast and the Yorktown was still in the Atlantic, along with the smaller Ranger and Wasp. That left two carriers to be accounted for. Days before the Japanese attack, the Lexington and Enterprise had managed to slip off undetected to ferry reinforcements of aircraft to Wake Island. When the attack came, they were returning to Hawaii but were still hundreds of miles to the west, while the Japanese fleet was about 200 miles to the north of Oahu. The American carriers thus were not in a position to disrupt the Japanese attack, but they were also spared the destruction suffered by much of the rest of the fleet.

  If the surprise attack demonstrated the ability of a carrier task force to move large numbers of aircraft into position to attack a fixed target, something else that happened in the very first hours of the Pacific war proved, if anything, even more unsettling to those who still clung to the belief that a major warship could not be successfully attacked from the air.

  On 10 December, a Japanese submarine reported two British warships in the South China Sea north of Singapore. At 6 A.M., nine planes took off from Saigon in search of the ships. At 7 A.M., thirty-four high-level bombers and fifty-one torpedo planes followed in nine waves. Just as they were running short on fuel, a scout plane spotted the British formation, and the bombers and torpedo planes attacked.

  Their targets were H.M.S. Prince of Wales, a 36,717-ton battleship, the most modern of its type in the world, and H.M.S. Repulse, a 33,250-ton World War I–era ship. With the loss of only four planes, the Japanese sank both ships, and 840 British sailors died. It was one thing to knock out a row of battleships anchored at their base in Pearl Harbor. It was another to attack and sink a battleship able to maneuver in the open seas. Winston Churchill later wrote, when he was informed of the loss, “In all the war, I never received a more direct shock.”

  The lesson of the vulnerability of surface ships to air attacks was reinforced for the U.S. (and the Japanese) soon again in the Battle of the Coral Sea, 3–7 May 1942. The Lexington, one of the two biggest, fastest carriers in the U.S. Navy, was attacked from the air and sunk. The smaller Yorktown was so badly damaged in the same battle that the Japanese counted her as having been sunk. The U.S. sank a small Japanese carrier and damaged the Shokaku, one of the two big Japanese carriers involved in the fight. The Zuikaku herself was not hit, but she lost the majority of her aircraft and many pilots.

  The Battle of the Coral Sea was part of a desperate effort by the U.S. to halt, or at least slow, the progress of the Japanese offensive through the western Pacific and Southeast Asia, toward Australia and a possible linkup with Hitler’s forces in the Indian Ocean. For the Japanese, the worry was that the remnants of the American fleet remained on their flank as they sped toward the south and west.

  It was this concern, plus what was later ruefully labeled the “victory disease,” that set the stage for one of history’s great decisive battles.

  For decades, the U.S. Navy had based its plans for fighting in the Pacific on War Plan Orange. When that plan was first drawn up in 1907, America’s naval buildup, dramatized by President Theodore Roosevelt’s “Great White Fleet,” was well underway, and Japan was building its own modern navy. Orange was revised regul
arly at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, but its basic structure remained the same: in the event of war, the American battle line would confront the Japanese fleet in the mid-Pacific, and destroy it in a major showdown.

  Admiral Yamamoto knew War Plan Orange almost as well as the Americans. A copy had been purloined from the safe of the secretary of the navy and sent to Tokyo in the mid-1930s, and Japanese intelligence had managed to keep track of revisions. Yamamoto decided on a bold operation that would play out the Orange strategy, but do it at a time and place of Japan’s choosing. Well before the Pearl Harbor attack, Yamamoto had reasoned that the U.S. Navy would not come out to fight a major engagement until it had rebuilt its strength. But perhaps he could stack the cards so the American admirals had no choice. The scenario he devised involved an invasion of the tiny island of Midway. Situated some 1,500 miles to the west of Hawaii, Midway in Japanese hands would pose a constant threat of renewed attacks on Hawaii and on American ships and aircraft that might try to threaten Japanese operations in the South Pacific.

  If the Americans didn’t come out to fight, Yamamoto would have a base within striking distance of Hawaii. If they did come out to fight, he would outnumber them and destroy them.

  By analyzing Japanese radio traffic, American intelligence officers learned that a major operation was afoot. They suspected Midway was the target but couldn’t be sure. In a classic ruse, the defenders on Midway were ordered to report by radio that they were running short of fresh water. Within hours, the Japanese had reported this broadcast and associated it with their code word for Midway, thus confirming the target for the attack.

  The Japanese plans involved an attack in three waves: First came Admiral Nagumo, the same man who had led the Hawaiian attack, with the carriers Hiryu, Soryu, Kaga, and Akagi. From the southwest came the invading force carrying some 5,000 troops. And finally—and this was not discovered by American intelligence before the battle—Admiral Yamamoto himself commanded a powerful surface fleet built around the battleships Yamato and Musashi to administer the coup de grace.

  Preparations for the battle had two other facets. Between Hawaii and Midway, along the line that the Americans would have to come when they learned the island was under attack, a picket line of submarines was to be placed, but they arrived two days late. And far to the north, another fleet would make a diversionary attack on the Aleutian Islands.

  It was an artfully contrived trap, with irresistible bait and powerful jaws ready to clamp shut. In all, there were 145 Japanese ships at sea, opposed by thirty-five American vessels.

  The one significant advantage the Americans had was their foreknowledge of the Japanese plans, which enabled them to move their outnumbered force into position to surprise Nagumo. They also had one more carrier than the Japanese credited them with. The Yorktown had not been sunk in the Coral Sea. Despite severe damage, she had been able to limp back to Pearl Harbor, trailing a ten-mile-long oil slick. Salvage experts estimated it would take three months to make her battleworthy again. They were given three days. The Yorktown entered the harbor on 27 May and sailed off to war again on 30 May.

  Already at sea were the two other available American carriers, the Enterprise and the Hornet, the same ship from which General Jimmy Doolittle’s B-25 bomber force had been launched to bomb Tokyo a short time before.

  Nagumo’s attention was focused on his attack on Midway and possible retaliation by planes based there. So far as he knew, the Yorktown was at the bottom of the Coral Sea, and deceptive radio signals broadcast by another ship had convinced him the other two American carriers were a thousand miles away in the South Pacific. Early on 3 June, Nagumo launched his planes for an attack on Midway. They were returning when he received the shocking word that at least one American carrier was in the vicinity.

  Instead of launching the planes remaining on his decks to attack the American carrier, Nagumo chose to change the bomb load on his planes as he retrieved the returning aircraft. This made him terribly vulnerable to attack, with the decks of his carriers filled with planes, bombs, ammunition, and torpedoes. And through it all snaked the hoses carrying high-octane aviation fuel.

  He managed to get a swarm of Zero fighters into the air as the first wave of American carrier-based planes—torpedo craft without fighter escort—began their attack. In the years just before the war, the navy had replaced its older torpedo planes with new models capable of more than 200 miles an hour. But, to make his attack successfully, the pilot had to drop down to eighty feet above the sea, slow to eighty knots and bore in until he was within 1,000 yards of the target.

  Lumbering slowly toward their targets, the planes were defenseless against gunfire from the ships and from the tiny, agile Zero fighters that swarmed around them. Only one of the first wave of American torpedo bombers survived to return to its carrier.

  But the Zeros were either being refueled or flying at wave-top altitude looking for more torpedo planes when a formation of American bombers flying at 19,000 feet arrived undetected and went into their screaming dives. Within six minutes, three Japanese carriers had been so badly damaged that they sank or had to be scuttled. The fourth was found later in the afternoon and also fatally damaged, but not before its planes had damaged Yorktown so badly that she, too, sank.

  As night fell, it was clear the U.S. had won a crucial victory. It had lost a carrier and a destroyer, 150 aircraft, and 300 men. The Japanese had lost four carriers, a cruiser, 322 aircraft, and some 5,000 men. The American commander was later criticized for failing, just as Nagumo had seven months before, to follow up his advantage and chase down the fleeing Japanese. But in this case his caution was well placed. If he had gone blundering off through the darkness, he might well have fallen under the guns of the Yamato and Musashi, leading the powerful fleet of surface ships that, unknown to the Americans, formed the other jaw of the trap.

  Land-based aircraft from Midway played some part in the battle, although the four-engined, B-17 Flying Fortresses, which seemed incapable of finding or hitting their targets, proved a grievous disappointment. Submarines also played a role, finishing off the sinking Yorktown. But Midway remains in the history books a battle of carriers, the first battle in which the fate of nations hung on the outcome of a battle between these new weapons.

  Two months after Midway was the opening of another battle that to this day exerts a powerful influence on American military forces. On 6 August 1942, 16,000 men of the 1st Marine Division landed on the beaches of Tulagi and Guadalcanal, two small islands north of Australia in the South Pacific. With air cover from the Saratoga, Wasp, and Enterprise, the marines made a successful landing, catching the Japanese by surprise. But on 8 August, while transports were still unloading supplies, the naval commander sent all three of his carriers south for refueling. This left the 6,000 marines on Tulagi and the 10,000 on Guadalcanal stranded without air cover and with only a few hand tools and one captured bulldozer.

  Within a week, the marines scratched out an airfield so marine fighter planes could come to their aid, but they have never forgotten that experience. Ever since they were abandoned by the navy, the marines have insisted on control of their own powerful air force—a full air wing for each division—to support their troops on the ground.

  As Yamamoto had correctly foreseen when he warned so strenuously against becoming involved in war with the United States, the tide would begin to turn against his homeland as American military and economic might was brought to bear. But he probably did not believe that tide would turn so early, and he may even have believed that a successful battle of Midway would make possible an eventual Japanese victory. But that was not to be.

  In 1944, the Japanese became so worried about the increasing strength of the American fleet and the growing threat to their home islands that they seized upon a desperate means of stopping the Americans. Young men were given rudimentary flight training and then sent out to crash their explosives-laden planes into the American ships. They were called kamikaze
, after a typhoon—the “divine wind”—that saved Japan from invasion by a Mongol fleet in 1281. In a little less than a year, some 2,000 Imperial Navy volunteers died in these attacks, sinking forty ships and damaging at least 300 others. One result of this assault was the creation of the U.S. Navy’s first force of strike-fighters—the early ancestors of the F/A-18. This is how it came about:

  The new F-6F Grumman Hellcat—a tough, easy-to-fly fighter with six machine guns—was just coming into service in large numbers. The navy also had the gull-winged F-4U Vought Corsair, although it was at first not deemed suitable for carrier service. The threat from the kamikazes meant that the carriers needed more fighter protection—lots more—and these two planes provided it.

  Kent Lee, then a young fighter pilot aboard a new carrier, the U.S.S. Essex, remembers being sent ashore on Eniwetok for nine hours of training in the Hellcat. Then he was back on his carrier flying combat missions.

  The fighters began to turn the tide against the suicide planes. But with their decks filled with fighters, the carriers lost much of their offensive punch. With their increasing ability to defend themselves and other ships in the fleet, the carriers’ ability to harm the enemy sharply declined.

  Frederick (“Mike”) Michaelis, then a young squadron commander who was later to become an admiral and serve as chief of naval materiél, recalls how the crew members noted that the Hellcats had been fitted with “hard points” from which bombs could be hung, although they were not intended as bombers. With a little ingenuity, it was found that the Hellcats, when not needed as fighters, could do a creditable job as bombers. Because they lacked the speed brakes of the dive-bombers, however, they attacked in a fairly shallow dive. As soon as they had dropped their bombs, they became fighters again.