by Herman Wouk
Why then is this decisive event so underestimated? The anomaly stems from the nature of the battle. Victory at Midway turned partly on the analysis of Japanese coded radio traffic. The feat could not be revealed in wartime. * The United States Navy’s version of Midway was foggy and guarded, and it came out several days late. A long time passed before the setback to Japanese war plans was fully assessed. So the realities of Midway were obscured. The war rumbled on, and the battle faded from sight, as Mount Everest can be obscured by a whirl of dust raised by a truck. But as time passes, this turning point looms ever larger and clearer in the military history of mankind.
“Flattop” Warfare
The German reader accustomed to land warfare needs a brief sketch of the tactical problem at sea. On the water of course there is no terrain. The battleground is all one smooth level unbounded field. This simplifies combat as the land soldier knows it, but adds weight to fundamental elements. The aircraft carrier developed as a radical advance in range of firepower.
In ancient sea fighting, warships rammed each other, smashed each other’s banks of oars, cast arrows, stones, lumps of iron, or flaming stuff across a few feet of open water. Sometimes they came alongside each other with grappling hooks, and soldiers leaped across and fought on the decks. Long after guns were installed in men-o’-war, hand-to-hand waterborne fighting continued. John Paul Jones won the first big sea fight for America by grappling and boarding the British man-o’-war Serapis, exactly as a Roman sea captain would have done to a ship of Carthage.
But the great nineteenth-century revolutions in science and industry brought forth the battleship, a giant steam-driven iron vessel, with rotating centerline guns that could fire a one-ton shell almost ten miles to port or starboard. All modern nations hastened to build or buy battleships. The front-running race between our own shipyards and England’s to build ever-bigger battleships was a prime cause of the First World War. Even before that, English capitalists had obligingly built a fleet of these monsters for the Japanese, who in 1905 used it to trounce czarist Russia at Tsushima Strait. Only one other large battleship engagement ever took place. At the Battle of the Skagerrak, in 1916, our High Seas Fleet outfought the British navy in a classic action. Twenty-five years later, at Pearl Harbor, the type went into final and futile eclipse.
The battleship was the dinosaur of sea warfare, misbegotten and shortlived. Each one was a drain on a nation’s resources like the equipment for many army divisions. But it did bring long-range firepower into sea war. The trajectories of its big guns required a correction for the curvature of the earth! Thus the industrial age brought man face to face with the physical limits of his tiny planet.
After the First World War a few farseeing naval officers perceived that the airplane could far outrange the battleship’s big guns. It could fly hundreds of miles, and the pilot could guide his bomb almost onto the target. Against the crusty advocacy of battleship admirals, they fought and won the argument for building “flattops,” seagoing airdromes. Pearl Harbor settled the twenty-year dispute in an hour, and the Pacific conflict became an aircraft carrier war.
TRANSLATORS NOTE:I was a battleship man all my life. Roon ignores the role of the battleship in maintaining the balance of power for a turbulent half-century, though nobody can disagree that it failed at Pearl Harbor. His casual claim of German victory in the Jutland stand-off (Battle of the Skagerrak) is ridiculous. The Imperial German High Seas Fleet never sailed to fight after Jutland. Much of it was scuttled at Scapa Flow. Eventually Hitler scrapped the rest, after the Bismarck was sunk and the other battleships immobilized at their moorings by RAF bombs.— V.H.
Carrier Combat Tactics
All Pacific flattops, U.S. and Japanese, carried three kinds of airplanes.
The fighter plane was defensive. It escorted the attacking planes to the target, and protected them by knocking down fighters that tried to intercept them. It also protected its own fleet against enemy attackers, by hovering overhead in a combat air patrol.
There were two attacking types: the dive-bomber plane and the torpedo plane. The dive-bomber dropped its missile through the air. The torpedo plane aimed for the death blow below the waterline; its technique was riskier, its missile heavier. It had to fly for many minutes on a straight course low over the water, and slow down to drop its torpedo. During this approach, the torpedo plane pilot was suicidally vulnerable to AA fire or to a fighter plane attack. He therefore needed strong fighter protection.
Carrier battle doctrine was the same in both navies. The three types of aircraft were launched for a mission by squadrons. The fighters, dive-bombers, and torpedo planes would join up and wing together to the target. The fighters would engage the defending fighters, the dive-bombers would attack, and when the enemy was most distracted the vulnerable torpedo planes would slip in low for the kill. This was called coordinated attack, or deferred departure.
In this scheme there were variations: i.e., a fighter could carry a light bomb; and the Japanese from the start designed their torpedo plane, the Type-97 bomber, as a two-purpose machine. Instead of a torpedo, it could carry a very large fragmentation bomb, thus giving it a strong capability against land targets as well.
On this dual-purpose Japanese bomber,in the end, the whole battle turned.
Code Book C
Intelligence too was crucial. By analysis of encoded radio traffic and by fractional decipherment of the code, the Americans discerned the enemy battle plan. The Japanese should have foreseen and avoided this. In modern war all codes and ciphers must be frequently replaced. This was a standard rule in our Wehrmacht commands. One has to assume that the enemy is copying all the broadcast gibberish, and that what the mind of man can devise the mind of man can unravel. Japan’s communication doctrine called for code replacement, but her navy’s preparations for Midway were plagued by both overconfidence and hurry. The hurry resulted from the Doolittle raid.
Navy Code Book C had been in use by the Japanese since Pearl Harbor. Aided by pioneer use of IBM machines, American and British teams had worked on the texts for half a year. A Code Book D was supposed to go into use on April first. Had this been done the Japanese signals for the Midway attack would have been secure. But the replacement was postponed to May first and then to June first, in the post-Doolittle scramble. On June first the opaque curtain of Code Book D did at last fall, but by then only three days remained before the battle, and Japan’s plan was largely known to the enemy.
The Damaged Carriers
The Japanese faults of overconfidence and hurry showed up after the Coral Sea battle, a carrier skirmish that took place when they tried to capture Port Moresby in New Guinea, to create an air threat to Australia. The expedition ran afoul of two American carriers. The Japanese had the better of the two-day melee, a comedy of blundering decisions and airborne blind-man’s buff in bad weather, during which the opposing vessels never sighted each other. The Japanese sank the big flattop Lexington and an oiler, and damaged the Yorktown. They lost a light carrier, and took bomb damage and aircraft attrition in the fleet carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku.
The flattops of both sides went limping home from the Coral Sea. Fourteen hundred Yankee workmen at Pearl Harbor, laboring around the clock, patched up the badly hit Yorktown in three days, and it fought at Midway, But the two damaged Japanese flattops were dropped from the operation. The high command refused a postponement to train and replace air crews, and ordered no urgent repair effort. To ensure a full moon for the landing, or for some such footling reason, the weight of two carriers was nonchalantly forgone.
Plan and Counterplan
Yamamoto’s battle plan for Midway was the work of Captain Kuroshima, who had devised the great but aborted “westward” strategy. His judgment seems to have waned. The Midway scheme was grandiose in scope and dazzling in its intricacy, but it lacked two military virtues: simplicity, and concentration of force. It was a dual mission, always a hazardous business.
Capture Midway atoll.
Destroy the United States Pacific Fleet.
The plan started with a replay of Pearl Harbor, a surprise carrier strike at the atoll. Under Admiral Nagumo, four carriers — instead of the six originally called for—-would approach from the northwest by stealth. They would wipe out the air defenses at a blow, and the landing force would then capture the atoll before Nimitz could interfere. It was assumed (quite soundly) that Nimitz would have to come out and fight, no matter how weak he was. Yamamoto himself planned to lie with his battleships several hundred miles astern of Nagumo, out of aircraft range, prepared to close and annihilate the Nimitz fleet elements that would survive Nagumo’s air onslaught.
The plan included a feint at the Aleutian Islands off Alaska. There other carriers would blast American naval bases, and an invasion force would land. The feint might decoy Nimitz’s meager forces far to the north, thus enabling Yamamoto to get between the Pacific Fleet and the Hawaiian Islands, a stupendous opportunity; if not, Japan would still seize and hold the Aleutians, thus tearing loose the northern anchor of the American line in the Pacific.
So, despite his overwhelming advantage in power, Yamamoto elected to base his operation on deception and surprise; but there was no surprise. Nimitz gambled that what his decoders told him was true, and that he might win against odds by surprising the surprisers. He thus cut the Gordian knot of military theory: should operations be based on what the enemy would probably do, or on the worst he could do? Chester von Nimitz even shrugged off the barbed nagging from Washington of Fleet Admiral King, who kept pointing out that the Japanese fleet might be heading for Hawaii. Had Nimitz proved wrong, his disgrace would have been greater than that of the Pearl Harbor commander-in-chief who was cashiered.
But Chester von Nimitz was made of good stuff. He was of pure German military descent, and he had bred true. His Texas family traced its line directly to one Ernst Freiherr von Nimitz, an eighteenth-century German major, with a crowned coat of arms. This ancestor in turn derived from von Nimitz military forebears going back to the Crusades. Recent generations of Nimitzes, lacking the means to keep up the aristocratic style of life, had dropped the “von,” and of course in Texas it would have been a handicap.
Nimitz made one simple grand decision: to ambush Yamamoto. He determined to position his carriers well northeast of Midway, as Nagumo’s carriers were steaming down from the northwest. In this deadly game played around a wide water-girt bulge of the earth, much hung on who saw whom first. Placing his heavy pieces so, concealing them by distance, Nimitz seized a big advantage.
For Midway’s land planes could search an arc of seven hundred miles, while Yamamoto’s carrier craft could at best patrol three hundred miles. Also, Nimitz could receive patrol reports in Hawaii by underwater cable from Midway, so that no increase of broadcast traffic from the atoll would warn Yamamoto that the Americans were alerted. From Hawaii, Nimitz could then broadcast the patrol reports in code to his carriers, while Yamamoto’s forces plodded within range, oblivious and unseeing.
Such was Nimitz’s ambush. Yamamoto’s fleet steamed right into it.
Yet not all ambuscades succeed. Surprise is a great but fleeting advantage. Yamamoto’s powerful and battle-toughened forces quickly rallied from Nimitz’s surprise, and in its opening phase the Battle of Midway took shape as a smashing Japanese victory.
TRANSLATORS NOTE:Fleet Admiral Nimitz was a quiet man of broad vision, with a good sense of humor. Shortly before he died he read in manuscript my translation of this chapter. At Roon’s usage of “von Nimitz” he enjoyed a hearty laugh, but he remarked that the details of his genealogy were accurate.
A Navy adage runs, “If it works you’re a hero, if it doesn’t you’re a bum.” Actually there was much guesswork in the Midway intelligence break. Clues had to be teased out of the Japanese by deceptive signals. Admiral Nimitz’s decision to act on this inconclusive “dope” was daring. He did not know the Japanese plan. Rather, he had a fair indication of what might ôe going on. He proceeded on hunches that proved brilliantly right.
The Wehrmacht coding precautions were not all that adequate. At this writing I can say no more, but the fact is that German communications were deeply penetrated.— V.H.
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28
THE air squadrons flew out from Oahu to join the departing carriers in clear calm weather. On its approach, the leading Enterprise torpedo plane went into a spin, crashed, and tumbled overboard with pieces flying. To Warren, circling high above in a new dive-bomber, it looked like a toy breaking up. The plane guard destroyer rushed to the wreckage, boiling smoke like a locomotive and streaking the sea white. The plane crew was rescued, as he learned on landing. Such accidents were not uncommon, yet this one struck him as a bad omen.
TASK FORCE SIXTEEN IS PROCEEDING TO INTERCEPT A JAP LANDING ATTEMPT AT MIDWAY
Flashing across the teletype screens shortly after the pilots landed aboard, the words generated cheery excitement in the ready rooms. But in a long, long, dull week of northward zigzagging at standard speed, the excitement faded into an uncomfortable mix of boredom and mounting tension. The Enterprise and the Hornet, ringed by cruisers and destroyers, slowly moved from sunny tropical seas to gray swells, gray skies, and cool winds. Under the umbrella of the Hawaiian air patrol, there was nothing for the fliers to do. The newcomers, three-year Academy men or reserve ensigns, gloried in their prima-donna freedom from ship routine: sleeping late, playing acey-deucey and cards, fogging the ready rooms with tobacco smoke, drinking gallons of coffee and lemonade, eating big meals and great mounds of ice cream, killing time between drills and lectures with chatter of sex, shore leave, airplane mishaps, and the like, perpetrating ham-handed practical jokes; and generally mimicking, in their green self-consciousness, the Hollywood picture of combat fliers.
Usually Warren enjoyed the ready-room camaraderie play, but not this time out. Too many of the squadron mates with whom he had started the war were dead, missing, or transferred. The high-spirited recruits, mostly unmarried, made him feel old and irritable. The protracted idleness ate at him. He was flight operations officer, third in command, and he tried to keep busy reviewing tactics manuals, devising navigation problems and blackboard combat drills, exercising violently on the flight deck, and haunting the hangar deck to check and recheck the squadron’s aircraft.
Idleness breeds gossip. Idleness plus tension is a bad brew. As the slow days passed, the talk in the ready rooms drifted to the topic of Rear Admiral Spruance. Word was trickling down from flag country that Halsey’s staff was not cottoning to him. Halsey had built up the former screen commander, his old friend, to them as a brilliant intellectual. The staff was finding him a damned queer fish: cool, quiet, inaccessible, the Old Man’s absolute opposite. He was content at meals to sit almost mum. He depressed Halsey’s loyal and ebullient subordinates, who had absorbed their style from the rollicking Old Man. Why had Halsey pushed forward this taciturn nonflyer to fight a carrier battle, when red-hot aviators like John Towers had been available? Out of friendship? At lunch on the first day out, so rumor ran, Spruance had opened up after a long boring silence by saying, “Gentlemen, I want you to know that I’m not worried about any of you. If you weren’t any good, Bill Halsey wouldn’t have you.” He seemed unaware that he himself was under worried scrutiny.
His ways were altogether odd. He tramped the flight deck alone by the hour, but otherwise he seemed rather lazy. He went to bed early and slept long and well. During an alarm over a night surface contact he had not turned out, merely ordered an evasive maneuver and gone back to sleep. Each day he ate an unvarying breakfast of toast and canned peaches, and drank only one cup of morning coffee; which he made himself, with the fussiness of an old maid, from special beans he had brought aboard. When it rained or blew hard topside, he sat in the flag mess reading old books from the ship’s library. Almost, he seemed to be along for the ride. Halsey’s chief of staff, Captain Browning, was running the task force, and Spruance was just initial
ling Browning’s orders.
All in all, the staff was counting on Spruance for very little. Browning would fight the battle, and if the patched-up Yorktown got to the scene in time, Frank Jack Fletcher would take charge, since he was senior to Spruance. Fletcher had not done so well in the Coral Sea, but at least he had been blooded in carrier combat. Thus went the idle talk in the ready room; which irked Warren and troubled him too.
Arriving on station, a spot in the trackless sea designated “Point Luck,” Task Force Sixteen steamed back and forth through two more tedious days, waiting for the Yorktown. This was the place of ambush, some three hundred twenty-five miles from the atoll; beyond the range of enemy carrier planes, yet close enough for a quick attack once Midway aircraft espied the foe. Dolphins frisking among the slow-moving ships found no scraps to eat; the crews were forbidden to throw so much as a paper cup overboard.
At last, making full speed, with no outward mark of its Coral Sea battering, the Yorktown hove into view. Like the ship, its decimated air squadrons were a patch job of Coral Sea survivors and Saratoga aviators hastily thrown together; but another flattop, patched or not, was mighty welcome. With Fletcher now in tactical command, more fleet alarms began to break out. Yorktown warnings about enemy submarines or aircraft touched off the old frenzied routines time and again: sharp turns of all ships, flight decks crazily canting, crews scurrying to man and train guns, destroyers foaming and crisscrossing; then would come the bored wait, the standdown, the recovery of aircraft, and the resumed plan of the day. None of the alarms proved genuine. The two task forces milled around and around Point Luck: the Yorktown with its own screen of cruisers and destroyers called Task Force Seventeen, the Hornet and the Enterprise still designated Task Force Sixteen, under Spruance as subordinate to Fletcher.