Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942

by Ian W. Toll

  The Mitsubishi A6M Zero was a dogfighting champion, an aerial acrobat that out-turned, out-climbed, and out-maneuvered any fighter plane the Allies could send against it. It was armed with two 7.7mm machine guns (synchronized to fire through the propeller) and two powerful wing-mounted 20mm cannons licensed from the Swiss arms manufacturer Oerlikon. It excelled in relatively low-speed, low-altitude “tail-chasing,” because its tight turning radius allowed it to get behind any Allied fighter plane or even to flip over on its back and kill the enemy with a short, accurate burst from above. The Japanese pilots spoke reverently of the airplane’s responsiveness to the slightest pressure on the controls. “She handled like a dream,” said fighter pilot Saburo Sakai, who flew in the first attack runs against the Philippines. “Just a flick of the wrist—she was gone! I went through all sorts of aerobatics, standing the Zero on her tail, diving, sliding off on the wings.” Allied pilots who attacked the Zero using classical dogfighting techniques—chasing and maneuvering to get on the enemy’s tail—were shot down almost to a man. Those lucky enough to escape into a cloud, or parachute to the ground, were full of horrified expletives at the shocking capabilities of this mysterious fighter.

  The Zero had been placed in service in the summer of 1940, almost eighteen months before Pearl Harbor. Operating from bases on Formosa and along the Chinese coast, Zeros had accompanied bombers on long-range missions into the heart of China. By the standards of the era, the aircraft’s range was extraordinary. Manipulating fuel mixtures and propeller speeds, the Japanese had shown it was possible to fly this single-seat plane more than 1,000 miles on a single tank. Pilots were accustomed to the taxing work of such long missions, sometimes even setting the trim to level flight and dozing off in the cockpit. The Zero had chewed up Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalist air force—in 1940 and 1941, not a single Zero was downed in air-to-air combat over China.

  The arrival of this deadly plane had not escaped the attention of General Claire Lee Chennault, commander of the “Flying Tigers,” an American volunteer group that fought for the Chinese air force. One of the Tigers, in his diary entry for November 21, 1941, noted that General Chennault had coached the P-40 pilots on how to fight the Zero, offering the same tactical advice that navy fighter jocks would later develop independently—dive from altitude, stick to your wingmen, set up passing shots, and “never try to dogfight a Zero, particularly in turning combat. Hit and run! Hit and run, dive, and then come back to altitude. Of course, always try to stay in groups of at least two. As soon as you find yourself alone, search the skies to rejoin someone.” But Chennault’s intelligence reports were simply ignored in Washington. The Americans could not bring themselves to believe that Japan could have built and manufactured a machine with a climb rate of 3,000 feet per minute. For a year and half, the Zero remained almost completely unknown in Allied aviation circles, and the American and British pilots were forced to learn about this lethal athlete the hard way. It was yet another example of the fatal hubris of the West in the face of plentiful evidence of the Japanese threat, an attitude that would cost hundreds of planes and aircrews in the early months of the Pacific War.

  ON WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 10, an armada of more than fifty Japanese bombers crossed the China Sea and cruised serenely over Manila Bay at an altitude of 20,000 feet. Nothing could be done to stop them—a few P-40s had tried to intercept them off the coast of northern Luzon, but had been brushed aside by the escorting Zeros, and the U.S. Navy’s 3-inch antiaircraft guns could not even reach that height. Untroubled by resistance or opposition, the bombers circled the target-rich panorama below “like a flock of well-disciplined buzzards,” as one witness recalled. They were obviously drawing a bead on the Manila waterfront, the ships moored at the wharves, and the U.S. naval base at Cavite, the navy’s principal base west of Pearl Harbor. When they finally let go of their payloads, the bombs cut a swath of carnage through the heart of Cavite, wiping out the repair shops, the warehouses, the machine shops, the barracks, and the power plant. Several barges and tugboats were destroyed at their berths, and one submarine, the Sealion, was a total loss. Fires raged out of control. Strong winds swept off the bay and fed the flames, and the firefighters could do little to stop them because much of their equipment had been destroyed. Lieutenant John Buckley, a PT-boat skipper, was appalled at the sight. “They’d flattened it,” he said of Cavite; “there isn’t any other word. Here was the only American naval base in the Orient beyond Pearl Harbor pounded into bloody rubbish.”

  Admiral Thomas C. Hart, commander in chief of the Asiatic Fleet, watched the scene from the roof of his fleet headquarters building. His reaction is unrecorded. He might have had some premonition that the army’s air defenses would not stand, because he had taken the wise precaution of sending most of his ships away to the south before the outbreak of the war. Now his main base, with all its supporting facilities and munitions, was a smoking hole in the ground. Most damaging, perhaps, was the loss of 230 torpedoes. At this point it was Hart’s awful duty to abandon the Philippines, to send all remaining ships of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet south, where they might join up with British and Dutch units for the defense of the Dutch East Indies.

  A WEEK BEFORE THE WAR, against the recommendation of his admirals, Prime Minister Churchill had ordered a powerful naval squadron to Singapore in hopes of deterring Japanese aggression against the colony. “Force Z,” as it was called, was built around two of Britain’s finest and most prestigious ships of war, the battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Repulse. The fate of those ships, even more than the loss of the American battle line at Pearl Harbor, was to mark the turning of a new page in naval history.

  On December 8 (local date), just hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Admiral Tom Phillips had ordered his force to sea to intercept and destroy a Japanese invasion force sighted in the South China Sea. The British had no aircraft carrier in the theater, and the RAF was already in disarray, so the squadron was obliged to sail without air support. Phillips recognized the danger but hoped that the operation could “finish quickly and so get away to the eastward before the Japanese can mass a formidable scale of attack against us.”

  From the first, Force Z had a great deal of difficulty in even locating the Japanese fleet. They headed northwest into the Gulf of Siam, toward the Japanese beachhead at Kota Bahru in northern Malaya, then chased a false report of a Japanese landing at Kuantan, farther down the coast.

  Despite the lack of air cover, the officers and crews of the great British warships were upbeat—whatever they had heard of the shocking result of the air battles over northern Malaya, they remained confident that the Japanese were no match for two of the best and most powerful ships of the Royal Navy. Bert Wynn, able seaman of Repulse, recalled that among his mates “the main topic of conversation was how long would it take us to sink the Japanese warships felt to be in attendance around the coast of Singora. I still remember the feeling of absolute confidence running throughout the ship . . . the outcome of such an engagement was felt to be a formality.” When, on the afternoon of December 9, a Japanese surface force was sighted by a British patrol plane, a flag deck officer of the Repulse remarked to CBS radio correspondent Cecil Brown (who was on board as a press observer), “Oh, but they are Japanese. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  That night over dinner in the officers’ wardroom, Brown raised a provocative question. In light of what had happened at Pearl Harbor, were the British too confident? The British officers chewed the question over thoughtfully, and one conceded that it was “wrong” to underestimate the enemy. But the prevailing feeling among them was summed up in another officer’s reply: “We are not overconfident; we just don’t think the enemy is much good. They could not beat China for five years and now look what they are doing out here, jumping all over the map instead of meeting at one or two places. They cannot be very smart to be doing that.”

  The air attack on Force Z began shortly after 11 a.m. on Wednesday, December 10. It was
pressed home by three waves of twin-engine G3M “Nell” and G4M “Betty” bombers of the 22nd Air Flotilla, based in Indochina, near Saigon. The attackers had crossed the South China Sea, had been in the air for about five hours, and were nearing the point of no return. British lookouts spotted a cluster of ominous black dots high above the horizon in the west, and the marine buglers sounded the call to quarters. As the incoming G3Ms came into range, at an altitude of about 12,000 feet, the gunners opened up and the sky was peppered with black antiaircraft bursts. Remaining in close formation, the bombers dropped several 250-kilogram bombs. Turning and twisting violently, heeling sharply to starboard and then to port, the Repulse dodged all but one bomb, which struck her seaplane deck, killing perhaps two dozen men, but otherwise not impairing the maneuverability or defenses of the ship.

  About twenty minutes later, Force Z radar sets picked up a flight of nine torpedo-armed G3Ms coming in from the west. They approached virtually on the wavetops and pressed home their attack against the flagship Prince of Wales, diving in groups of two and three to less than 100 feet altitude and attacking on both bows. She was hit twice near the stern, jamming her rudder and flooding her engine rooms. The crippled leviathan steamed helplessly in a jagged circle, flames and smoke spewing behind her into the sky.

  A third attack, by torpedo-armed G4Ms of the Kanoya Air Group, descended on the Repulse. Spared in the first barrage, the Repulse maneuvered to save herself, and managed to avoid almost twenty torpedoes, but at last she was caught in an “anvil” attack, with torpedoes dropped simultaneously on each of her bows. “For me,” wrote Cecil Brown, who watched from the flag deck and recorded his impressions in a notebook, “this whole picture—orange flame belching from the 4-inchers, white tracers from pom-poms and Vickers guns, and gray airplanes astonishingly close, like butterflies pinned on blue cardboard—is a confusing, macabre game.” Repulse was struck twice (possibly as many as four times) and immediately began to take on water. “Suddenly there was a massive explosion,” one of her crew recalled. “I immediately knew we’d lost Repulse, for within seconds she took on a frightening list to port, so rapid no amount of counter flooding would save her.” Her captain ordered abandon ship, shouting, “You’ve put up a good show, now save yourselves.”

  The men had to jump into the sea, where many drowned and others treaded water for hours, their faces blackened by fuel oil. At 12:23 p.m., Repulse rolled over and sank stern-first, her huge hull protruding vertically from the sea, her bow pointed straight up to the sky. Destroyers circled cautiously, picking up survivors.

  With the Repulse gone, a new wave of Japanese bombers turned to the easier task of putting away the crippled Prince of Wales. At 12:44 p.m., she was struck between the stacks by a 500-kilogram bomb dropped from altitude by a G4M bomber, and began to sink immediately. Many men were trapped belowdecks when the ship rolled over and began to sink. The destroyers circled and picked up as many swimmers as they could. A Japanese plane overhead flashed a bravura taunt in plain English: “We have finished our task now. You may carry on.”

  A handful of RAF fighter planes arrived just as the Prince of Wales was going down, but they could do nothing but circle and watch. One of the pilots recalled the sight of the men in the water: “After an hour, lack of petrol forced me to leave, but during that hour I had seen many men in dire danger waving, cheering and joking, as if they were holiday-makers at Brighton waving at a low-flying aircraft. It shook me, for here was something above human nature.”

  The battle claimed the lives of 47 British officers and 793 men. The Japanese, amazingly, had lost only three planes in the action. The attack, the British had to admit, had been carried out in textbook fashion. “The enemy attacks were without doubt magnificently carried out and pressed well home,” wrote the captain of the Repulse after the battle. “The high level bombers kept tight formation and appeared not to jink.” It had been a finely choreographed one-two punch, with the high-level bombers arriving first and distracting the gunners, followed closely by the torpedo bombers that came in low and dropped their deadly fish in perfectly executed “anvil” attacks.

  On the morning of December 10, Churchill was awakened by a telephone call from Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, the first sea lord, who gave him the appalling news that Japanese bombers had sent both ships to the bottom. “Are you sure it’s true?” the prime minister asked. “There is no doubt at all,” Pound replied. As he put the receiver back in its cradle, Churchill later wrote: “I was glad to be alone. In all the war I never received a more direct shock. . . . As I turned over and twisted in bed the full horror of the news sank in upon me. . . . Over all this vast expanse of waters Japan was supreme, and we everywhere weak and naked.” It meant that the last vestige of British seapower in the Pacific had been broken; it meant that even India could now be threatened by sea, as it soon would be; it meant that the Indian Ocean sea-lanes were vulnerable. Both ships, but the Prince of Wales especially, had held immense significance to British naval prestige. She was one of the newest and most formidable battleships in the fleet. The previous August, she had carried Churchill to Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, to meet Roosevelt in the flesh for the first time since either man had come to power, and her sweeping teak decks had provided the dramatic setting for that first wartime Anglo-American summit.

  Three days earlier, Japanese airplanes had blindsided the American battleships in their anchorage; but never before had such ships been sunk by air attack while operating at sea in full combat readiness. The fate of Force Z was something new in the annals of naval war, and it settled old and bitter arguments. Though it was a Japanese victory and a painful Allied defeat, it was also a conceptual triumph within naval circles all over the world for the cause of aviation, and did more than even Pearl Harbor to undermine the power of the Mahanian “big gun club.” Fleet doctrine would be hastily rewritten: battleships would now be relegated to a support role within task forces built around aircraft carriers. Their antiaircraft weaponry would be doubled, tripled, and finally quadrupled, until they were bristling with AA guns of every caliber, and better able to defend both themselves and the carriers against enemy air attack. Their huge 14- and 16-inch main batteries would be employed mainly for shore bombardment, in support of amphibious troop landings. These doctrines were swiftly adopted by the U.S. Navy, and to a lesser extent by the Royal Navy; but they would be slower to penetrate the upper ranks of the Imperial Japanese Navy, where hopes for a decisive clash of battleships at sea would be cherished almost to the end of the war.

  THE JAPANESE OFFENSIVE ADVANCED SOUTHWARD by a leapfrogging pattern. Land-based Zeros and medium bombers attacked suddenly and across unexpectedly long distances, clearing the skies over the beaches for the invasion forces that followed. Columns of Japanese troopships, unmolested by air attacks, put troops, tanks, and weapons ashore. From those beachheads the Japanese forces advanced inland, swallowing up territory and capturing airfields, usually intact. Air groups flew into the captured airfields and prepared for the next series of attacks further south. New hammer blows then fell on Allied positions with startling rapidity, before the defenders could pull themselves together. The Philippines, Guam, Hong Kong, Malaya—all were scenes of Japanese triumph and Allied distress. American and British airfields were strewn with twisted, smoking clots of wreckage, the remains of aircraft wiped out on the ground. Mechanics had been killed, hangars damaged or gutted, spare parts destroyed on the ground or fallen into enemy hands. By Thursday morning, four days into the war, Allied pilots and ground support personnel were swimming in a state of confusion, fear, denial, and shock. Scenes of chaotic and panicked retreat added the onus of disgrace to the agony of defeat. At Iba in the Philippines, American personnel fled their posts without orders. At Clark Field, the runways were cratered and unusable, and most of the buildings and hangars had been flattened. The remains of dead airmen were strewn over the base, and would not even be collected and buried until a week had passed. Civilians and military officials, shocked
by the speed and scale of the disaster, now seriously doubted that they could hold back the attacking tide.

  IT IS OFTEN SAID that Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor was worth the cost in U.S. ships, planes, and men lost, because it galvanized the American people when they had seemed hopelessly divided over the coming war. The judgment is accurate, but incomplete. Hitler finished the job on Thursday, four days after the Japanese attack, by declaring war on the United States when he had the option of doing nothing at all.

  In secret prewar communications with the British, Roosevelt had committed the United States to a “Europe-first” strategy. The military logic of “Europe-first” was unassailable, but the policy was never popular with the American people, who felt (after Pearl Harbor) that they had a personal score to settle with the Japanese. On Sunday afternoon, Secretary of War Stimson had proposed a preemptive declaration of war against all three Axis partners, but Roosevelt had rejected the suggestion out of hand, saying he did not want to cleave American opinion at the very moment it had finally been incited to war. Even after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt could not have obtained a declaration of war against Germany except perhaps by a sharply divided vote in Congress. But without such a declaration, there was a danger that America’s productive output would be sucked into the vortex of the Pacific emergency, leaving Russia and Britain on the verge of collapse.

  Pearl Harbor had caught Hitler by surprise, no less than anyone outside Japan’s ruling circle. When the news reached the Wolf’s Lair, the Führer’s eastern headquarters in the Masurian Woods of East Prussia, he was exultant. “The turning point!” he declared to members of his assembled staff. “We now have an ally who has never been vanquished in 3,000 years!” The surprise attack seemed likely to tie the United States down in the Pacific, and prevent for the time being its providing effective aid to Germany’s enemies. The Japanese onslaught promised to deprive Britain of its Eastern empire, perhaps even India. Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels shared the Führer’s misguided optimism, noting in his diary: “A complete shift in the general world picture has taken place. The United States will scarcely now be in a position to transport worthwhile material to England, let alone the Soviet Union.”