Next day, May 7, Takagi finally sent out search planes, which spotted the big U.S. Navy fleet oiler Neosho and her escort, the destroyer Sims, which had been detached from Fletcher’s group and ordered to rendezvous later at a prearranged position much farther south. However, the Japanese search planes radioed back that they had located an “American aircraft carrier and a cruiser” and within the hour Takagi had launched nearly seventy planes to deal with this grand prize.
First to be struck was the destroyer (reported as a cruiser) Sims, which exploded with a terrific roar and was “lifted ten to fifteen feet out of the water” after being hit by three 500-pound bombs. Only fifteen out of her crew of two hundred and fifty were rescued. After the Neosho (reported as a carrier) was similarly hit, burning and listing, the captain ordered, “Prepare to abandon ship,” at which point scores of sailors, horrified by what had just happened to the Sims, leaped into the sea without further orders; many of them were hauled back aboard but others drifted away in life rafts.* Not only that but in the confusion the Neosho’s nervous navigator, trying to plot the ship’s position, reported the coordinates incorrectly by some hundreds of miles, which made eventual rescue problematic.
Meantime, all kinds of strange things were happening to Fletcher’s task force. For one, a U.S. cruiser was attacked by several high-flying bombers, which, maddeningly, turned out to be American B-17s from a U.S. air base in Australia under MacArthur’s command. For another, a search-plane pilot radioed back that he had just spotted a Japanese fleet of “two carriers and two heavy cruisers,” proving yet again that misidenti-fication of ships was not confined to the Japanese navy. Fletcher promptly launched nearly a hundred planes at this fat and seductive target, only to discover when the search plane returned that the pilot had meant to communicate that he had seen only “two heavy cruisers and two destroyers.”†3
Fletcher’s search planes, however, did come upon a genuine prize a while later, the Japanese light carrier Shoto, which was escorting the invasion transport ships. Ninety-three American planes jumped on her and in less than twenty minutes she sunk to the bottom of the Coral Sea. Both the Yorktown and Lexington broadcast the action over their public address systems so that thousands of anxious sailors could hear the battle. Because of radio static and the somewhat frenetic squawking among ninety-three pilots, most of the conversations were garbled; then, suddenly, the voice of Lieutenant Commander Robert E. Dixon came through loud and clear with these famous words: “Scratch one flattop! Dixon to carrier! Scratch one flattop!” One can imagine the cheering.
Five months to the day since the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, the Shoto became the first and only major Japanese warship sunk so far. For Admiral Takagi it was a mortifying development. He immediately ordered the troop transports to turn back from harm’s way until the Americans could be cleared from the Coral Sea—thus the invasion of Port Moresby, New Guinea, was postponed; though Takagi could not know it at the time, the postponement would be permanent.
That afternoon rain squalls and heavy weather closed in around both fleets but Takagi was determined to cripple or sink the American carriers if possible. Late that afternoon he sent off twenty-eight planes, which, owing to U.S. radar, were picked up and thwarted by a squadron of U.S. Navy Wildcats from the Lexington and Yorktown. The Wildcats shot down nine of them, at a cost of two of their own. The dogfights were so confused that at one point a squadron of six Japanese planes actually tried to land on the Yorktown, thinking it was one of their own carriers; they were ignominiously chased off with the loss of one plane. Of the remaining Japanese planes, eleven crashed into the ocean trying to land on their carriers, that is, after they finally found them in the dark. Thus, out of the original flight of twenty-eight, only seven returned safely.
At dawn next morning both Takagi and Fletcher, each still itching for a fight, sent out search planes. Fletcher had evened the odds with the sinking of the Show, but he knew there were still two Japanese carriers to be reckoned with. These were the Zuikaku and the Shokaku, both large, modern ships, which had taken part in the Pearl Harbor attack. What ensued was the first major battle in naval history where the opposing ships were never in sight of one another.
Half an hour before sunrise, May 8, Fletcher’s task force began to launch planes (eighty-four). So did the Japanese (seventy). They found each other’s ships at almost precisely the same time, actually passing by each other in the air from opposite directions. The Americans reached the position of the Zuikaku and Shokaku about a hundred and seventy miles distant, just before ten-thirty. Their attack was not a spectacular success, as of the day before. The U.S. torpedo bombers failed to damage a single target; either the torpedoes failed, as usual, to explode or, as one Japanese aboard stated later, they were so slow that “we could turn and run away from them.”4 The dive-bombers faired a little better, scoring two hits on the Shokaku, which did not cripple her but, luckily, set some fires and put her plane-recovery operations out of business. However, she was still able to launch, and after putting her remaining planes into the air to land on the Zuikaku, the Shokaku was ordered to retire northward out of the battle area. Zuikaku escaped damage altogether by sailing into a fierce thunderstorm. For this the American forces sacrificed forty-seven planes and their pilots.
The Japanese were more successful. In the brilliant morning sun they spotted the Lexington cruising along in a light breeze, small whitecaps dancing around her. Lady lex’s fighter control had picked up the approaching Japanese planes on its radar twenty minutes earlier but that was not time enough for them to launch enough Wildcat fighters—the time necessary for them to gain altitude—to blunt the Japanese assault, which came in quickly and straight out of the sun. Lady Lex, at 40,000 tons, was slow to the helm and unable to dodge two of the eleven torpedoes launched by the Japanese planes, which hit her portside. Men below were so grotesquely scorched by the conflagration that followed that their “skin [was] literally dripping from their bodies.” Then the dive-bombers began to come in.
Meantime, the Yorktown, a dozen miles astern, was enduring the same treatment. Being a lighter and more agile ship she was able to dodge the torpedoes but took an 800-pound bomb near the conning island, which tore through the flight deck, the hangar deck, and the galley before finally exploding in the ship’s soda fountain. Sixty-six sailors were killed or wounded by this blast. It was all over in less than fifteen minutes and the exultant Japanese pilots headed home, reporting that they had sunk two U.S. aircraft carriers. This erroneous information would lead to much trouble later on for Admiral Yamamoto.
Lexington, meantime, though severely crippled, had managed to shore up her damages, was making good speed, and seemed destined to fight another day when, at 12:45 P.M., a huge explosion ripped through her innards. The ship shuddered so violently that the captain thought they had been attacked by a submarine; instead it was aviation gasoline vapors, which had been ignited by a generator belowdecks that someone had thoughtlessly left running. Smoke billowed from all vents and many men below were killed. Even this did not sink her, and the Lady continued on at twenty-five knots, billowing enormous columns of white, black, gray, and yellow smoke from every pore while her crew frantically fought the raging fires below.
In the middle of all this came a remarkable and heart-wrenching conversation between the Yorktowr’s radio room and one of the pilots, Commander William B. Ault, who had led the dive-bombing strike on the Shokaku. Both he and his radioman had been wounded by antiaircraft fire; his plane was shot up, losing altitude, and almost empty of fuel, and he was trying to find somewhere, anywhere, to put it down.
Radioman: “Nearest land is over 200 miles away.”
Ault: “We would never make it.”
Radioman: “You are on your own, good luck.”
Ault: “Please relay to Lexington. We got one 1,000 pound bomb hit on a flattop. We have both reported 2 or 3 times, (a pause) Enemy fighters. Am changing course North. Let me know if you pick me up.”
Ault: “OK, so long people. We’ve got a 1,000 pound hit on the flattop!”5
Commander Ault was never heard from again. But if anyone, Japanese, Nazi, or otherwise, including a small cranky few in the United States itself, ever thought the American fighting man was soft, that exchange should have set them straight,
Lady Lex was fighting a losing battle against the great fires that raged within her. Later in the afternoon two more stupendous internal explosions rocked her and the commanding admiral Aubrey Fitch phoned Captain Frederick Sherman on the bridge. “Well, Ted, let’s get the men off.” It was a sad day indeed for Lexington’s crew, many of whom had been with her since she had been commissioned in 1927. As Dr. Morison points out, “This happy ship was loved as few ships have been before or since.” The abandonment was orderly and businesslike, as opposed to the panic aboard the oiler Neosho the day before. The thousands of sailors took off their shoes and lined them neatly on the deck; neatest of all were the shoes of the company of marines aboard.* They either jumped or climbed down ropes suspended from the five-story-high flight deck. The ship’s pay officer even tried to take his records with him, as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars in the purser’s safe. The captain’s dog Wags was rescued along with everyone else not killed in the attack. Men waiting their turn to gp overboard dug generously into portions of ice cream from the ship’s store. Last to go was Captain Sherman, who went hand over hand down a lifeline to a waiting destroyer.6
Whaleboats from the destroyer squadrons fished the men out of the ocean; by sunset the great aircraft carrier was dead in the water, deserted and abandoned, still belching smoke and flames. As everyone watched choked with emotion, many with tears in their eyes, a destroyer ordered by Captain Sherman to finish off the Lady did so by firing four torpedoes at close range. Unlike most, these hit home and the Lexington quickly began to settle by the stern. Within minutes, as darkness closed over the Coral Sea, she slipped beneath the waves into fifteen thousand feet of water.
Fletcher now sailed his one remaining carrier, Yorktown, east and then north, away from the Japanese, as he had received a message from Nimitz back in Pearl to come home quick; something very nasty was brewing in the mid-Pacific. Nimitz sent the same message to Halsey, commanding the Enterprise and the Hornet, whose task force was finally racing south to help Fletcher after reprovisioning in Hawaii.
The Coral Sea Battle had cost the Americans one large aircraft carrier, an oiler, and a destroyer; sixty-six airplanes and 547 men killed; as well as serious damage to the Yorktown. The Japanese lost a light carrier, 1,047 sailors and airmen killed, and seventy-seven airplanes, but they had caused the Lexington to be scuttled and believed they had sunk York-town too, which then led them to conclude that there were probably only two U.S. carriers left in the Pacific (since they also believed that they had sunk the Saratoga by submarine attack a month earlier). This misinformation would figure critically in their calculations for the impending Midway battle.
Not only that but the American bombing of the Shokaku was so severe that it would take months to repair it, and the Zuikaku had lost so many pilots and planes that, like Shokaku, it would have to sit out the Battle of Midway. With the destruction of the Lexington the Japanese had won a tactical victory; strategically, however, they had lost the battle, as they would soon find out.
As in so much of war from time immemorial, ramifications of the Coral Sea Battle were not apparent to either side at the time; both publicly announced a great victory, but privately the U.S. Navy was not well pleased at having one of its few Pacific aircraft carriers resting at the bottom of the ocean. And there was worse news to come. General Wainwright and his 15,000 on Corregidor were on their last legs, facing an army that now numbered 250,000 Japanese, and everybody understood that aside from prayers there was nothing anyone could do to help them.
Immediately after the fall of Bataan, General Homma turned his attentions to reducing Corregidor with relentless air and artillery bombardments. He could not claim victory in the Philippines to Imperial Headquarters in Tokyo until he had captured the big rock island at the entrance to Manila Bay and also caused the surrender of the remaining U.S. Filipino forces operating in the vast islands south of Luzon. This of course was easier said than done, and was made all the more annoying by the pressure exerted by Tokyo for Homma to wrap it up.
With Bataan now in his hands, Homma lined up more than one hundred huge artillery pieces at the peninsula’s tip and other strategic points and began an around-the-clock bombardment of Corregidor’s three-mile length.* Not only that but with beefed-up airpower newly provided by Tokyo, Homma ordered round-the-clock aerial bombing too. This caused many American soldiers, sailors, and marines to adopt a molelike existence underground; for those manning the many artillery and antiaircraft batteries, this was not possible, so they just stood outside and took it and fired back whenever they could. One antiaircraft battery captain described it this way: “The bombers come over; we see them drop their bombs—all the while we are tracking them with our instruments ... the bombs continue downward on their way towards us. We open fire. In about 15 seconds our guns are pointing as nearly straight up as they can. We cease firing. The bombs whistle; we duck for a few seconds while the bombs burst, and pop up again to engage the next flight. When fighters come in one after the other we stay up while the bombs hit all around us.”7
The Japanese artillery bombardment was horrific and certainly frightened the men more than the aerial bombing because of its accuracy. It had begun shortly after the fall of Bataan and for the next month increased in fury until, by May 1, the three-mile-long island received more than 3,600 shells during a five-hour period from the behemoth 240mm guns alone.* Their shells were so large that men could actually follow them with their eyes and watch the flickering shadows they cast on the ground. Slowly but inexorably the Rock began to crumble. All aboveground buildings were destroyed. Phone lines were cut and transportation was practically nonexistent. Trees were flattened and shrubbery blown to smithereens. It was hauntingly reminiscent of the sort of destruction seen during the First World War in Flanders and northern France, a kind of moonscape of craters and wreckage for miles around. Beach defenses were shattered. At one point a direct hit by a large Japanese gun tossed a ten-ton American rifled artillery piece hundreds of yards into the air, until it finally landed in the middle of the golf course; another was blown into the ocean. All wildlife disappeared or went below ground; the island’s power plant came in for particular attention and was out of order most of the time, causing surgeons in the tunnel to operate by flashlight and fire-control directors to operate not at all.
The most maddening thing was that there was not much the Americans could do about it. All of their larger guns were fixed—the “concrete artillery,” was what old-timers called it. As in Singapore, the biggest guns, the ones with the range and power to inflict serious damage, all pointed out to sea, while the Japanese could move their guns around and hide them in foliage. Their smokeless powder made them all the more elusive while the U.S. guns were easy to spot. At one point a huge balloon began appearing every day over Bataan, carrying a basket of Japanese artillery observers to pinpoint their prey and adjust fire. One by one, the American batteries and searchlight sections were silenced.
By most accounts the Malinta Tunnel was a hellish place, almost always choked with dust and fumes and otherwise humid and vermin infested; it was noisy from motor traffic and diesel generators, smelly from thousands of unwashed bodies, and maddeningly illuminated day and night from long bluish-hued lights that laced its ceilings. Flies and mosquitoes were rampant; the latrines were horrid, even when they worked. At least it was bombproof, which was good fortune since it was now difficult even for a rat to survive on the surface for any length of time. With Bataan now lost, every man on the island knew he was doomed; the “great naval relief convoy” had proved to be a
cruel hoax. There was food enough for only about two months, even on half-rations, and the artillery and antiaircraft batteries were being destroyed at an alarming rate.
Though they knew all this, the men trudged on, joking and cursing darkly among themselves and trying to make the best, as soldiers will do, until this became one of the proud moments in American history: one afternoon, as General Wainwright looked on, a huge Japanese artillery shell exploded on the parade grounds near the ten-story-tall flagpole that flew an enormous American flag. “A fragment from the bomb cut the halyard and ‘Old Glory’ slowly, terribly, began to descend down the pole as if drawn by some ghostly and prophetic hand.” But before it touched the ground three men, a captain, a sergeant, and a Filipino civilian, raced out in the middle of the bombardment and gathered it up, fixed the halyard, and raised the flag again smartly to the top. For this Wainwright awarded each of them the Silver Star.8
A more prudent Japanese military would simply have conserved lives and property and starved the Americans out, since they had a pretty fair notion of how long the Corregidor foodstuffs would last. (After all, where would they be going?) But Tokyo wasn’t interested in anymore waiting; it wanted victory and wanted it now, one reason being that until the big guns of Corregidor could be silenced, the Japanese would be denied the use of Manila Bay and its harbor,* said to be the finest and most protected in the Far East. So nothing was left to Homma but to attack Corregidor by seaward invasion, a plan he knew would be costly. Nevertheless, he ordered it done.
A problem most critical to survival on Corregidor was drinking water, and the prospects were looking bleak. Before the war, water was shipped in from the mainland, but of course that was no more. The island had a number of deep wells but these were all driven by diesel pumps and diesel fuel was running perilously low due to heavy use of generators needed to provide power to all the guns and artillery. By early May ‘42, engineers estimated that there was scarcely a week’s supply of diesel fuel; after that, no water. Each man was already reduced to a single canteen per day, scarcely enough “for men who had to do heavy physical work in the open on a sunbaked tropical island where the temperature soared up to 100 degrees during midday. The lack of water was not only a major inconvenience but a serious threat to health.”9
1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls Page 24