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

by Ian W. Toll

  On April 18, the Doolittle raid brought another dam burst of Japanese radio traffic, the largest and most profitable yet. New details soon emerged about the pending operation in the South Pacific. MO was identified as a designator for Port Moresby. By April 24, Nimitz and King had in hand an intercept that referred to an “MO Fleet,” an “MO Occupation Force,” and an “MO Attack Force.” A large Japanese force comprising air groups and carriers would steam into the Coral Sea, covering the approach of a separate amphibious group, which would land troops at Port Moresby. Working from intercepted and decrypted messages revealing ship departure times, the intelligence analysts estimated the operation’s scheduled date as the first week of May.

  Nimitz came to realize that Hypo was producing most of the key breaks in JN-25, and that he had better take action to ensure that Rochefort was not hamstrung by the bureaucrats in Washington. In mid-April, he asked King to realign the division of responsibility between Washington and Pearl Harbor. Hypo should be assigned to “reading today’s traffic today while it is of value to forces afloat,” while the OP-20-G cryptanalysts should focus on back traffic. King endorsed the request with a peremptory flick of his pen, apparently without even asking his subordinates their opinion. Not surprisingly, they took personal umbrage at this maneuver, and the quarrel between Rochefort and the Redmans escalated into a blood feud. Rochefort had the upper hand for the time being, but his higher-ups would take advantage of any stumble. From that point on, freewheeling speculation was not to be shared between units. Meticulous scorekeeping was the new order of the day, and any mistaken estimates would be held against the party who had been so bold as to put them into play.

  ON THE MORNING OF APRIL 22,, Layton sat down with Nimitz and provided a wide-ranging intelligence review, including the best and most current evidence concerning the pending Coral Sea operation. His major point: “There are many indications that the enemy will launch an offensive in the New Guinea–New Britain–Solomon area . . . [the offensive would] start very soon.” But two weeks before battle, there was still a dangerous array of unknowns. He estimated that the enemy force might include “5 carriers, 1 battleship, 5 heavy cruisers, at least 4 light cruisers, 12 destroyers, and more than a dozen submarines,” as well as perhaps 135 land-based naval bombers, more than 100 Zeros and a similar number of reconnaissance planes. More than 20,000 troops might be brought into the theater in army transports. Yet there remained major uncertainties. Washington continued to warn of a diversionary raid against Hawaii. No less a figure than Army Chief of Staff George Marshall warned the local army commander of pending air attacks on the Hawaiian Islands. Layton judged that “there were no signs of Japanese movements toward the Hawaiian Islands,” and that a lack of any evidence of a buildup of bombers in the nearby Mandates made such an attack highly improbable.

  Nimitz was feeling the strain. No matter how well his intelligence advisers did their jobs, the responsibility to act upon their estimates was his alone. They did not disguise from him the gaps in their knowledge. There was the unpleasant possibility that the Japanese were practicing radio deception on a grand scale, hoping to lure the American fleet south, which would leave the great fortress of Oahu vulnerable to another enemy air raid or worse. It was not enough for Nimitz to listen. He had to test his advisers’ degree of conviction, to probe for flaws in their logic, and to reconstruct their process of assembling a mosaic from many disparate bits of evidence. After all of that, he had to believe in his gut that they were right. He did. At this precarious juncture, with the war hanging in the balance, Nimitz chose to bet his command on the accuracy of the intelligence. A study produced by his staff in late April 1942 identified intelligence as the most important advantage possessed by the Americans at that stage of the war. The Japanese were superior in carrier, battleship, and shore-based air strength, the study asserted, but the Americans could overcome these deficiencies with “Fairly accurate knowledge of direction of enemy advance” and “probability of being able to detect change in enemy deployment.” Nimitz decided (as he put it) to “accept odds in battle if necessary”—to throw his two available carriers against the Japanese fleet and hope that they prevailed. But he would have to sell the plan to King, who remained concerned about the safety of both the carriers and Pearl Harbor.

  On April 24, Nimitz boarded his big Coronado flying boat and flew to San Francisco for a face-to-face summit with the COMINCH. The city by the bay was at about the midpoint between Washington and Hawaii, and so offered a convenient rendezvous. (It was the first of eighteen meetings between King and Nimitz during the war; most of these would be held in San Francisco.) Nimitz and his staff checked into a top-floor suite in the St. Francis Hotel on Union Square. For the next three days they held day-long meetings with King and his staff at the main conference room of the San Francisco Federal Building.

  Their most pressing business was to settle their strategy to deal with the pending MO offensive, but there were other items on the agenda. King enlightened Nimitz on the larger context of the war—the production ramp-up, haggling with the British and Soviets, prospects for an invasion of Europe, and how the Pacific fit into the Allies’ global strategy. King suspected that Nimitz had been too gentle with his subcommanders and staff. He wanted the Pacific Fleet purged of “pessimists and defeatists,” and the ousted men banished to peripheral billets. Navy Secretary Knox had advocated retiring many of the more senior admirals and placing junior admirals into seagoing commands, and King supported the policy. Nimitz did not object, but he recommended that assignments be made through the established channel of his old bureau in Washington. He believed in the navy’s personnel system and was willing to let it function without interference.

  King was specifically after Vice Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher. This “black shoe” (surface navy) admiral had accumulated a mixed record in the early months of the war. He had seemed to demonstrate a lack of aggressiveness, and his task forces had been embarrassed by unreasonably long fueling delays. King’s faith in Fletcher was hanging by a thread, but Nimitz maintained that all the American carrier task forces were climbing a steep learning curve, and Fletcher had done about as well as could be expected in the circumstances. King conceded the point, and granted Fletcher a stay of execution. The best American carrier task force commander was Bill Halsey, but Halsey was on his way back to Pearl Harbor from the Doolittle raid, and would not be able to get the Enterprise to the South Pacific in time for the pending confrontation. King grasped that he had perhaps overreached in committing two of four available carriers to the Tokyo raid at a time when they might all be needed to deter a concerted enemy offensive in the south, but now it was too late to do anything about it.

  A third important question was a subtheater commander for the South Pacific. On April 14, Nimitz had assumed direct command of this area, but the great distances involved required a commander on the spot. This would be Vice Admiral Robert L. Ghormley, who had served until now as the navy’s liaison in London. King considered him a “very able man,” and Nimitz concurred. Ghormley would establish his headquarters in New Zealand. Rear Admiral J. S. McCain, an officer who had earned his wings at age fifty-one, was named commander of air forces in the South Pacific.

  Though Nimitz had explained his decision to contest the Japanese advance on Moresby as a willingness to “accept odds in battle if necessary,” the truth is that the CINCPAC was spoiling for a fight in the Coral Sea. Port Moresby was simply too important to yield to the enemy. It would give the Japanese a launching platform for new attacks on air bases and port facilities in Queensland, Australia; it would extend Japanese air search patterns over the Coral Sea; it would allow for a buildup of forces for the planned offensive farther east against New Caledonia, Fiji, and Samoa. Though the Japanese army had definitely ruled out an invasion of Australia, possession of Moresby might accomplish much the same thing—to cut the great island-continent off, to draw the noose around its neck. On the other hand, Port Moresby was far enough east that t
he Japanese supply lines into the area would be stretched very thin. It was at the outer range of airstrikes from Rabaul and other bases. Contesting its occupation would not expose Allied forces to the brand of overpowering Japanese sea and air attacks they had suffered in and around Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. For the first time since Pearl Harbor, a pitched sea battle with the Japanese fleet was deemed an acceptable risk.

  With King’s go-ahead, Nimitz returned to Pearl on April 28 and issued plans and orders for the approaching Battle of the Coral Sea. Carrier groups built around Fletcher’s Yorktown group (Task Force 17), and Rear Admiral Aubrey “Jake” Fitch’s Lexington group (Task Force 11), would arrive in the Coral Sea in time to attack the Japanese invasion fleet. They would rendezvous off the New Hebrides with an ANZAC (Australia–New Zealand) force of cruisers, under the command of Rear Admiral John C. Crace. Fletcher would assume command of all local Allied naval forces. His orders, which he received on April 29, were to “check further advance of the enemy in the New Guinea–Solomon area by destroying enemy ships, shipping and aircraft.”

  The Enterprise and Hornet, returning from the Doolittle raid, would put into Pearl Harbor for fuel and provisions. Then they would hurry south, to reach the Coral Sea by mid-May. They would not arrive in time to meet the initial thrusts of the Japanese fleet—that was the price paid by the Americans for bombing Tokyo—but they could at least be in a position to reinforce their sisters if the battle should expand into a protracted campaign.

  The Japanese had been building up their strength in the region for ten weeks, since their shockingly early invasion (January 23) of Rabaul. From that major staging base, they had spread out like the spokes of a wheel to seize satellite positions in adjacent island groups. Small amphibious landing parties went ashore, usually unopposed, and secured a flat stretch of ground that would accommodate an airfield. Work parties cleared trees and brush and leveled a primitive dirt landing strip. Mechanics, spare parts, fuel drums, and ammunition were brought in by freighters. The planes flew in with their aircrews. By May 1, Japan had established a large and growing network of these little satellite airfields—Kavieng, on New Ireland; Salamaua and Lae on the north coast of New Guinea; Buin on Bougainville Island; Buka Island. None was terribly important in its own right, but together they were mutually supporting and backed by the power of Rabaul. And all signs indicated that the buildup was ongoing. The Japanese submarine presence in local waters was expanding. Convoys from the west brought freighters, minelayers, gunboats, submarine and seaplane tenders, and troopships. The enormous four-engine Kawanishi Type 97 flying boats, with ranges approaching 3,000 miles, patrolled far and wide. The eye of Tokyo was over the Solomons, New Guinea, and a large and growing swath of the Coral Sea.

  Operation MO involved a tortuous amalgamation of naval surface forces, carrier task forces, amphibious landing parties, and various land-based air units amounting to about 150 aircraft. Vice Admiral Shigeyoshi Inoue, commander of the Fourth Fleet, retained command of the operation from his headquarters in Rabaul, but no fewer than six other admirals sailed with fleet elements at sea. Vice Admiral Takeo Takagi, victor of the Java Sea, commanded the Carrier Strike Force, built around the big fleet carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku with their screening vessels of cruisers and destroyers—but a subordinate, Rear Admiral Tadaichi Hara, commander of Carrier Division 5, would exert tactical control of the two carriers during the battle. The invasion itself would be brought to the beaches by the Port Moresby Invasion Force, including about 10,000 army and navy troops in twelve lumbering transports. Several other surface naval units and one light carrier group (built around the 12,000-ton baby flattop Shoho) were dispatched to cover the landings. Though Port Moresby was the main objective, the Japanese also intended to take the little tropical island of Tulagi—in the waters that would later be made famous during the Guadalcanal Campaign as “Ironbottom Sound”—with the idea of building a small seaplane base for reconnaissance flights to the south and east. Tulagi would be taken on May 3, Port Moresby on May 10.

  Admiral Inoue was unpleasantly conscious that everything was being rushed, that nothing was being done with the care or attention it deserved. He had been forced into a schedule that was compressed and inflexible. The planned incursion into the Coral Sea had already been twice delayed, because of the proven presence of American carrier forces in the vicinity. Now that the Midway sortie had been definitely scheduled for the last week of May, there could be no further slips. The Japanese carriers had just returned from their foray into the Indian Ocean, but they were once again racing out to a distant theater. The MO plan, like so many Japanese naval campaigns, seemed unnecessarily complex. Forces were divided in such a way as to flout Mahanian doctrine. Japanese strategists justified these deployments by pointing to airpower and radio communications, two elements that had been unknown in Mahan’s day. Nevertheless, a complex arrangement of forces relied upon close coordination and timing, and was more prone to unravel in the face of determined enemy counterstrikes.

  Thus far in the war, Minoru Genda’s concept of massed carrier airpower, embodied in the six-carrier task force of Kido Butai, had been brilliantly vindicated. In four months, Nagumo’s carriers had traveled more than 50,000 miles, spreading terror and devastation a full third of the way around the earth, from Hawaii in the east to Ceylon in the west. But the mileage was beginning to wear. The ships and crews had been sent on too many missions in too many directions; they had traveled too many miles with too little rest; they had been pushed to the limits of endurance by commanders who were loath to accept that such limits even existed. Three carriers—half of Kido Butai—had been slated for Operation MO, but Kaga was scratched from the mission at the last minute. She was in desperate need of repairs and refitting, and would stay in port to prepare for Midway. As Admiral Takagi’s Carrier Strike Force put to sea from Truk on the first day of May 1942, it included only the Shokaku and Zuikaku. Kido Butai, which had operated as a unified striking force since December 7, had for the first time been cleaved into its component parts. The curtain was about to rise on the first duel of aircraft carriers in the history of war at sea, and by happenstance the two fleets sailed into battle with near-equivalent force.

  Chapter Ten

  THE LEXINGTON, TENDERLY KNOWN BY HER CREW AS “LADY LEX,” WAS one of the oldest and largest aircraft carriers in the world. She had been launched in 1925, when carrier aviation was still in its infancy. Like her twin sister, the Saratoga, she had been originally intended as a battlecruiser, but converted to a carrier once the great hull had been finished. The Lexington’s 36,000-ton displacement dwarfed that of the Enterprise, Yorktown, or Hornet, each of which displaced less than 20,000 tons. She was 60 to 70 feet longer than her younger sisters, and her island was smaller, leaving her with a long, sweeping parade ground of a flight deck.

  Even in the mid-twentieth century, when most seafaring superstitions were a thing of the past, sailors held idiosyncratic feelings about the various ships of the fleet. The Lex was always held especially dear. “The Lexington was a ‘good ship’ as was said in the navy,” recalled Alvin Kernan, who served on the Enterprise, “while her sister ship the Saratoga was not, for unknown reasons.”

  Zigzagging out of Pearl Harbor on April 15, she and her escorts (heavy cruisers Minneapolis and New Orleans and seven destroyers) steamed away to the southwest toward Palmyra Island, where the Lexington had been ordered to ferry fourteen Brewster Buffalos of Marine Fighting Squadron 211. Every morning at dawn, the ship launched half a dozen F4F Wildcats to fly combat air patrol over the task force. Shortly afterward, several SBD scout bombers took off and flew air search patterns to the south and west, to a range of 200–250 miles. During her sojourn in Pearl Harbor, where the Lex had spent more than a week in dry dock and another week moored in the repair basin, the carrier had been fitted out with the latest radar technology. A big new “bedspring” antenna rotated atop her foremast. Radar gave the crew a shared feeling of security, a sense of being le
ss vulnerable to nasty surprises, and therefore boosted morale. “We knew radar could see things we couldn’t see,” wrote Signalman Floyd Beaver, who served on Rear Admiral Aubrey Fitch’s flag allowance. “It is scary even now to think about what the carrier war would have been like without radar.”

  Farther south, in the equatorial doldrums, the sea was as warm as a bath and the sun radiated its stultifying heat into the ship. Belowdecks, the temperature held above 100° Fahrenheit throughout the day, and never fell below 90° even at night. The Lexington’s colossal power plant, deep in the bowels of the ship, included sixteen huge steam boilers and four 33,200-kilowatt turbine engines. Scorching heat was an inevitable byproduct of those great machines, and much of it remained trapped in the steel envelope of the carrier’s interior. On the flight deck at midday, where the ambient heat from below merged with the overbearing rays of the equatorial sun, the steel deck plates were like skillets. They would burn exposed flesh or melt rubber soles, and sailors sometimes amused themselves by frying eggs on them. On the saunalike lower decks, where condensation collected on every surface, Chicago Tribune reporter Stanley Johnston observed that the ship appeared to sweat like a human being: “Beads of moisture combined to form rivulets which forever coursed down floors, walls and roofs, the bulkheads, decks and side plates of this great floating city.” No place was hotter than the engine room itself, in which the “black gang” (the engineers) toiled in a harshly lit subterranean cavity where the temperature never fell below 110° and sometimes approached 130°, about the upper limit of human endurance. Sailors who grumbled of the heat in the mess hall or hangar deck were sent to pay a courtesy call on the engineers, an experience that put their complaints into perspective. When Robert Casey visited the black gang on another ship, he felt his “eyeballs hardening like over-boiled eggs.” After a few hideous minutes he escaped to the “chilly upper world,” where a temperature of 100° felt mild by contrast.