by Ian W. Toll
Admiral Halsey watched from his flag bridge, dressed in a leather jacket and an oversized white sun helmet. He listened eagerly to the radio chatter of the American pilots, which revealed a fair picture of the action: “Get away from that cruiser, Jack! She’s mine! . . . Bingo! . . . Look at that big bastard burn!” He often summoned the squadron leaders to report to him in person. During lulls in the action he sometimes retired to his cabin, where he smoked a cigarette, or tried to lose himself in a paperback novel, or just lay in his bunk and started at the ceiling. By remaining so long in the theater of operations, within easy reach of half a dozen Japanese air bases in broad daylight, he was pushing his luck, and he knew it. Though the destroyer screen was hyper-alert, the danger of submarine attacks grew more critical the longer the Enterprise lingered in the neighborhood. The task force was on Wotje’s doorstep, sometimes even close enough to see the air action over the island. It was surprising that no enemy planes had approached.
Had the American airstrikes been so effective that the Japanese could not mount a counterattack? Or did they simply have no idea that the Enterprise was there? At one o’clock in the afternoon, Lieutenant Commander Hollingsworth of Bombing Six, having made three separate strikes that day, asked: “Admiral, don’t you think it’s time we got the hell out of here?” Halsey replied: “I’ve been thinking the same thing myself.” The last of the group were taken aboard at 1:22 p.m., and the entire task force turned northeast and poured on steam.
The Japanese had indeed been caught largely by surprise, and would engage in bitter self-criticism after the day’s raid. In retrospect, they would realize that the signs had been there. Submarine I-23 had sighted Halsey’s task force at sea at the beginning of January, and as a result alerts had been sent to all the bases in the Marshalls. After the Saratoga was torpedoed on January 11, they concluded that the Americans would keep their remaining carriers out of harm’s way; when there were no further radio intercepts or sightings in the vicinity, they relaxed their guard a bit. The Marshalls’ air defenses had been entrusted to the 24th Air Flotilla (kohi sentai), under the command of Rear Admiral Eiji Gota. The local air forces amounted to thirty-three carrier fighters, nine G3M medium bombers, and nine seaplanes. He did not have enough airplanes or pilots to maintain constant air search patterns around the islands. Rear Admiral Sukeyoshi Yatsushiro, who ran the Marshalls Defense Force from a stone headquarters on Kwajalein, had hosted his staff officers at a dinner party the night before the raid, and the sake had no doubt flowed freely. The next morning he was buried under the rubble of his headquarters when it was flattened by a 500-pound bomb. Yatsushiro was the first Japanese admiral killed in the war.
As Taroa licked its wounds, five undamaged G3M bombers lifted off from its pockmarked airstrip and streaked north in search of the American intruders. This strike, which got aloft at about noon, was led by Lieutenant Kazuo Nakai. They searched fruitlessly above the cloud cover for ninety minutes, but at 1:30 p.m. caught sight of the fleeing Enterprise through a gap in the cumulus clouds. Nakai pushed his airplane’s nose down in a shallow dive, picking up speed; his four companions followed in a loose “V” formation. They appeared as a cluster of blips on the Enterprise radar plot, and the FDO ordered the orbiting Wildcats to intercept. This time no one doubted that they were enemy, as the American attack planes were all aboard. Four Wildcats made visual contact with the enemy at 10,000 feet. By that time, the incoming Japanese bombers were a mere fifteen miles away from the Enterprise, and doing their best to remain hidden in the clouds. Before the American fighters could get into proper attacking position, the Japanese planes entered the range of the screening ships’ antiaircraft fire, and the F4Fs were forced (according to doctrine) to sheer away.
The five intruders dropped through the cloud ceiling at an altitude of 6,000 feet and sped directly toward the starboard bow of the Enterprise at a speed of about 250 knots. The piercing, importunate beep-beep-beep-beep of the general alarm sounded on every ship in the task force. “It is a continuous ringing,” Dickinson recalled, “a series of dashes made with an electric bell. A deaf man could hear that clangor.” The Enterprise’s antiaircraft guns opened up and “the noise sounded terrific in the steel walls of the ready room, as it might on the inside of a thunderbolt. The ship shook each time a bigger gun was fired. We had smaller guns that went off with a crack and plenty of machine guns to fill any chinks in the tumult.” On deck below, Alvin Kernan and his mates were working to attach a torpedo to the belly of one of the TBD Devastators when they heard the big 5-inch antiaircraft guns open up above their heads, and a voice over the loudspeaker cried: “Stand by to repel enemy air attack.” The ship, maneuvering to spoil the aim of the enemy bombers, turned violently to starboard, causing the deck to heel sharply to port—and the torpedo they were handling skittered away across the oily steel deck. The ordnancemen scrambled after it, pounced on it, and lashed it down to a ring bolt. “I wanted to get the hell out of there,” Kernan said, “but we couldn’t leave the torpedo with its unarmed but still dangerous charge for fear it would break loose and smash into a bulkhead and explode.”
The carrier and her escorts threw up an impressive volume of antiaircraft fire, but it was largely futile: the flak bursts tended to appear well behind the rapidly oncoming planes. Halsey lamented, “Our AA guns might as well have been water pistols,” and Captain George D. Murray of the Enterprise judged that the ineffectiveness of the AA gunners was “a matter of grave concern.” As the enemy planes drew closer the 1.1-inch gun mounts on the catwalk opened up, and Kernan, unable to see the Japanese planes from his station in the hangar deck, knew that “when the small-caliber guns cut in, it was time to put your head down.”
All five Japanese planes continued charging along their fixed bombing track. At an altitude of 3,000 feet, their bomb bay doors opened and sticks of 100-kilogram bombs fell in a diagonal line behind them. Captain Murray, watching those well-aimed bombs grow larger, called for full power to 30 knots and a hard turn to port. But now he ordered an ingenious maneuver, calling for full reverse rudder to starboard: “The effect on the ship was that its forward speed was checked and at the same time, the ship was suddenly moved sideways out of its own track.” The Enterprise neatly “crabbed” or “sidestepped” the bombs, which fell in a tight pattern off her starboard bow, some as close as 30 feet away. Those near misses sent up towers of water to a height of 200 feet. Robert Casey, watching from the deck of the nearby Salt Lake City, thought the Enterprise had been blown out of the water—the geysers thrown up by the bombs completely obscured her from his view. “But the water comes down and the mist disperses and we see that the carrier has spun about,” he wrote. “The bombs fell precisely where she was when the planes came out of the cloud. But by the time they hit she was somewhere else.”
One of those near misses had sent fragments into the carrier’s port side, which cut a gasoline line and started a fire on the flight deck. Through the loudspeaker a voice cried: “Fire! On the flight deck, aft.” An antiaircraft gunner was hit in the leg, so badly that the limb was nearly severed at the upper thigh. He remained at his post, but soon died from loss of blood.
As the bombers pulled out of their dives, scarcely 1,500 feet above the sea, one banked left and came roaring back toward the Enterprise. That was the flight leader, Lieutenant Nakai, whose plane had been hit (probably by a flak burst, possibly by one of the fighters). Smoke trailed aft from both engines, and Nakai may have judged that his plane had been mortally wounded and could not make the flight back to Taroa. He seemed determined to make a suicide crash attack on the carrier. He approached from astern, in much the same way that a friendly plane would approach for a normal landing. Bruno P. Gaido, an aviation machinist’s mate second class, left his action station in the port catwalk and slid into the rear seat of a parked dive-bomber. He seized the gun and began firing at the incoming G3M. Captain Murray, understanding Nakai’s intentions, ordered a hard turn to starboard. Gaido kept firing steadily, st
anding up to depress his gun; a stream of tracers went into the nose and cockpit of the big bomber at point-blank range. Lieutenant Nakai may have been killed by that determined fire, as his plane seemed not to maneuver at all in the last stage of his attack. His drifting G3M’s wing struck a glancing blow off the port side of the flight deck and ripped a parked SBD in half, spilling debris and gasoline across the deck. Nakai’s plane splashed into the sea: Gaido continued firing down at the sinking aircraft until the sea closed over it.
Lieutenant Dickinson and several fellow members of his squadron left their ready room to observe the results. The first thing they noticed was an overpowering, cloying odor of gasoline, copiously splashed across the flight deck. Fire control teams, dressed in padded suits with square hoods and rectangular visors, were spraying the deck down with foamite, a “frothy egg-white stuff.” Halsey, watching from the flag bridge, was nervy—he told his staff that “my knees are crackin’ together.” The bombing attack had been deadly accurate, and the misses uncomfortably close. The admiral would no doubt have agreed with Captain Murray’s judgment (expressed in the after-action report) that the Enterprise’s escape “can only be described as miraculous.”
The Enterprise and her task force resumed their high-speed withdrawal. The ships tore through the sea at 30 knots, leaving long, plunging wakes behind them. Casey, on the Salt Lake City, was repeatedly sent sprawling to the cruiser’s deck. “I had trouble getting to my feet with the shock and plunge of the ship,” he wrote. “I smashed my head against the bell and battered my bones on the rails and skinned my knees. . . . We are sticking our nose into it and flinging spray up over the bridge. Our wake looks like a waving green stair carpet with white fringe and no particular pattern on a blue floor.” Someone coined the phrase “Haul Ass with Halsey.” The men of the task force would claim charter membership in the “Haul Ass with Halsey” club.
The Enterprise kept up a larger than usual fighter patrol and all of the antiaircraft guns were manned and armed. The carrier remained on high alert for air attacks, and her crew assumed that more enemy bombers would be coming. They were not wrong. At 4 p.m. the radar plots recorded two more incoming G3Ms, this time from an altitude of about 14,000 feet. They were quickly pounced upon by the nine Wildcats flying CAP. As the enemy aircraft came into range of the ships’ 5-inch guns, the American fighters veered off to avoid friendly fire. The CAP leader, Lieutenant Commander McClusky, acted as a spotter for the antiaircraft gun crews. “Your bursts are low,” he said over the radio. “Get them up. That’s better. Now you’re little high. Just a little lower now. Now you’re on! You’re on! You’ve got him!” One of the bombers rocked and trailed smoke. Both planes released 500-kilogram bombs from high altitude, but the Enterprise evaded with a hard turn to port and the bombs dropped harmlessly into the sea off the starboard bow. McClusky radioed, “Knock off AA fire. We’ll take ’em.” The fighters again bored in and registered several hits. One of the G3Ms burst into fire and glided into the sea. The other escaped with smoke trailing from its engine.
Now the sun lay low in the west, and the enveloping shelter of darkness was little more than two hours away. The task force continued to be haunted by radar contacts, and the Wildcats chased and shot down a Japanese floatplane (Aichi E13A1 Type 0, Allied code name “Jake”) as evening approached. The sun set at 6:35 p.m, and a yellow moon rose ten minutes later. By seven, the Enterprise had landed all of her fighters and steamed away at high speed, engines roaring, to the northeast. The moon, one day past full, was bright enough that men on deck could read by it, and the ships trailed long, luminescent wakes that could have been seen from the sky, but no more strange planes approached that night. Halsey ordered a turn back to the northwest, hoping that this odd course would throw off any pursuers. At dawn, the Americans were relieved to find that they had sailed into a wet cold front, and were shrouded in rain and fog. The task force turned back to the northeast, toward Oahu. Dickinson called the weather a “nice air raid shelter,” and Casey agreed that “Under the circumstances the fog is very acceptable.” No flights were attempted in those conditions, and the aviators enjoyed a well-earned day of rest. Task Force 8’s passage home was pleasingly uneventful.
The Yorktown and Task Force 17 had meanwhile attacked the islands of Jaluit and Mili in the southern Marshalls, and Makin in the Gilberts. The carrier had launched coordinated airstrikes at dawn on all three islands. Flight operations had been hindered by heavy overcast and intermittent squalls of rain; but the raids had not encountered anything like the determined opposition the Enterprise air group had found in the islands to the north. Results were meager. At Jaluit, eleven torpedo planes and seventeen dive-bombers dived through layers of wet murk and attacked auxiliary ships anchored in the lagoon. Two were hit, neither sunk. The wretched weather, rather than enemy resistance, claimed six American planes from that flight, lost at sea on the return. At Makin, nine dive-bombers attacked over the lagoon at dawn, possibly hitting an anchored minelayer (but failing to sink it), and lighting up two big Kawanishi Type 97 flying boats, also at anchor. The attack on Mili was a wasted effort, because the SBDs found no targets worth attacking.
The weather grew steadily worse as the morning wore on. The wind rose, the Yorktown was tossed in heavy seas, and visibility dropped to little more than zero. Flight operations were suspended for a time. But there were persistent radar contacts indicating the possible presence of Japanese planes, and shortly after 11 a.m. one of the destroyers sighted a strange aircraft west of the Yorktown. Conditions having abated enough to launch planes, Captain Elliott Buckmaster sent a division of Wildcats aloft to chase down the intruder. They searched fruitlessly amid rain and heavy overcast and returned empty-handed to the ship. Shortly after one that afternoon, the carrier’s radar plot detected another snooper just thirty-four miles away. Wildcats were vectored out to intercept, and after a long game of cat and mouse through the cloud cover, two F4Fs trapped the enemy aircraft in a patch of clear sky. It was a big four-engine Kawanishi Type 97 flying boat, the same type as the two destroyed at anchor that morning at Makin. It was hit several times and exploded; flaming debris fell into the sea within sight of the Yorktown. Buckmaster’s colorful second-in-command, the recently promoted Captain J. J. “Jocko” Clark (who would soon command his own ship), offered a play-by-play summary over the Yorktown’s public address system. “Burn, you son of a bitch, burn!” he exulted.
Admiral Fletcher had planned another round of strikes in the afternoon, but the weather did not improve. Further operations risked losing more American airplanes without promising much in the way of results. Fletcher’s run of bad luck seemed endless. Early that evening, Halsey radioed him with orders to disengage and return to Pearl.
AT DAWN ON FEBRUARY 5, the Enterprise lookouts glimpsed the green mountains of Oahu through a thick haze. She and the other ships of Task Force 8 approached Pearl Harbor on a tortuous zigzagging track—a measure against enemy submarines—and then raced in toward the entrance channel through two protective lanes of destroyers. For their arrival, Halsey had ordered that all hands dress in white uniforms and man their battle quarters. The Enterprise flew her huge battle flags. The ships in the harbor greeted them with a blare of whistles and sirens; sailors on their decks, also dressed in whites for the occasion, shouted and waved. Throngs of sailors and civilian workers stopped working and pressed down to the docks on Ford Island and the Navy Yard. Halsey stood on his flag bridge, high in the Enterprise superstructure; even from a great distance his white-clad head and shoulders could be seen above the rail as he saluted and waved. Admiral Nimitz, waiting with an entourage of staff officers on the docks, consented to be hoisted to the hangar deck in a bosun’s chair. When he met Halsey on the flight deck, he seized his hand and said, “Bill, it was wonderful, a great job.” Halsey, overcome, broke down in tears.
A message was read aloud over the public address system of each ship in the task force: “Commander Task Force 8 to Task Force 8: Well done! You have
made history in the Marshalls. I am proud to have the honor to command you. God bless you! Halsey.”
Never again in the entire course of the war would Halsey be more closely bonded to the men under his command. They gave him a nickname: “Bull” Halsey. For good measure, they gave him another: “Wild Bill.” Rumors circulated that the next mission of the “Haul Ass with Halsey” club would take them deep into the heart of the western Pacific, to relieve MacArthur’s beleaguered forces in the Philippines. Or possibly even to Tokyo itself, because “Wild Bill will try anything once.”
Newspaper and radio correspondents, having been treated with barely concealed contempt by King and held at arm’s length by Nimitz, had almost despaired of finding a star personality in the upper ranks of the navy. Now they had their man. The carrier raids would receive headline treatment in the American newspapers, alongside photos of a beaming Admiral Halsey. The significance of the raids would be exaggerated for effect, even equated with December 7—Pearl Harbor, it was said, had been “avenged.” They provided a badly needed respite from the relentless onslaught of bad news emerging from the Pacific theater. They offset (in a small way) the dismal news that Singapore, Britain’s main Pacific stronghold, had surrendered to the Japanese.
The estimates made by the Enterprise pilots of enemy ships and aircraft destroyed in the Marshalls proved grossly inflated. In all, Task Force 8 had sunk two transports and one smaller craft and damaged another transport and one smaller craft. Nine enemy bombers and three fighters had been destroyed on the ground or in the air. Several buildings had been damaged or destroyed. The Japanese had lost ninety men, including Admiral Yatsushiro. The Americans had degraded the immediate usefulness of Japan’s Marshall Islands bases without putting them out of action. The damaged airstrips could be repaired, the installations rebuilt, the men replaced, and the air groups reinforced by the Fourth Fleet, based to the west in Truk. In that sense, the raids had provided a glimpse of the long air war of attrition that would have to be waged across a vast sea frontier. To destroy those outer perimeter bases permanently would not be possible for another two years.