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

by Ian W. Toll

  Inoue’s request exasperated Admiral Yamamoto, who thought him craven and passive. At midnight, the commander in chief peremptorily denied permission to pull back and directed Takagi to hunt down and annihilate all Allied naval forces left in the vicinity. Takagi did not have the fuel to go after the Americans—some of his destroyers were at 20 percent fuel, his cruisers at about 50 percent—but for appearance’s sake he launched some searches in the direction of the retiring American fleet. May 9 and 10 were occupied in refueling his ships from a tanker, and by that time it was clear that Fletcher’s forces had fled the scene.

  The Japanese could have pushed on and taken Moresby with little opposition, and many have wondered why they did not. It was a strange failure of nerve for a nation that had shown such consistent boldness in the war to date. It ensured that the Battle of the Coral Sea would go into the history books as a strategic victory for the Allies.

  On May 11, Yamamoto countermanded his earlier order and told Takagi to bring Zuikaku home. She was needed for the Midway offensive.

  LEST ANYONE FORGET THE COST OF WAR, both the Shokaku and the York-town, as they retreated from the scene of battle, buried large numbers of their fallen crewmen in their wakes. Maintenance officer Hachiro Miya-shita of the Shokaku said that his ship rang out with the cries of the wounded, but many of those plaintive voices fell silent as the men succumbed to their wounds. He was moved by the plight of his lieutenant, whose body was so thoroughly riddled with shrapnel that the doctor was reminded of “picking potatoes from the soil.” On May 9, Shokaku committed 107 bodies to the deep. “We covered their faces with gauze and wrapped their bodies in blankets,” Miyashita said. “Then we placed a practice non-explosive 30 kilogram bomb between their legs in the crotch area in order to weigh down the body for burial at sea. However, after being put in the water, the caskets later broke up due to water pressure, and the dead bodies floated back up to the surface.”

  Chief Warrant Officer Frank Boo of the Yorktown would never forget seeing “bloody handprints” on white sea bags, where men stricken by the bomb blast had tried to raise themselves to their feet. The corpsmen laid the dead on wire-mesh stretchers and pulled sheets over their faces. On the night of May 8, many of those stretchers were left in officers’ staterooms (near the ship’s hospital) until a sea burial could be arranged. Ensign Buell, the Yorktown SBD pilot, was so exhausted that he crawled into a bunk in a room full of dead shipmates. He was awakened in the small hours of the morning by “hands grasping me and lifting me from the bunk. It was still dark, and I had no idea what was happening so I asked in a rather loud voice what the hell was going on. At the sound of my voice I was immediately dropped halfway out of the cubicle, and a rather startled voice said: ‘My God, Doc, this one ain’t dead!’”

  Chapter Eleven

  ADMIRAL FLETCHER’S FIRST BUOYANT REPORTS TO PEARL HARBOR AND Washington had been transmitted when the Lexington was still fighting for her life and seemed likely to survive. “First enemy attack completed, no vital damage our force,” he radioed Nimitz, and a relieved CINCPAC replied, “Congratulations on your glorious accomplishments.” Fletcher’s subsequent updates described the deteriorating conditions aboard the Lex. Finally came the abysmal news that she was gone. Commander Layton recorded that Nimitz was “visibly jolted and muttered several times that they should have saved her.”

  Now there were only three American carriers left in the Pacific, and one (Yorktown) had suffered battle damage that might or might not require her to return to the mainland for repairs. Later that evening, Nimitz did his best to buck up his staff’s morale, reminding them that the Japanese were undoubtedly bleeding too. “We don’t know how badly he’s hurt,” he told them. “You can bet your boots he’s hurt too! Remember this—the enemy has got to be hurt, and his situation is not all a bed of roses.” But on May 10, he wrote Admiral King privately in a very different tone: “At present stage of our carrier building program, we cannot afford to swap losses with this ratio.”

  King had followed the progress of the battle closely from his office in Washington, but resisted the temptation to interject himself into the flow of radio communications between Nimitz and Fletcher, reasoning that “they need all the communications they can use in order to coordinate their work effectively.” When he learned that the Lexington was no more, however, the COMINCH was badly shaken. As one of her former skippers, King knew the ship as well as any man in the service. He ordered that her loss be concealed from the press. He told Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, the British first sea lord, that the battle had been “merely the first round of an engagement that will continue, with increasing strength on the part of the enemy, which we shall have difficulty in matching.”

  Coral Sea, it is often said, was something new under the sun—the first naval battle in which the opposing ships never came into direct sight of one another. It was also one of the most confused and confusing battles in the history of war at sea, characterized on both sides by an almost incredible series of miscues, miscommunications, misidentifications, misinterpretations, and miscalculations. In immediate material terms it was a victory for the Japanese, though not by so great a margin as they claimed and apparently believed. In addition to the Lexington, they had done away with the valuable oil tanker Neosho and the destroyer Sims; they had damaged the Yorktown; they had destroyed fifty Lexington planes (including those that went down with the ship) and sixteen Yorktown planes. The Allies had sunk the light carrier Shoho, one light cruiser, two destroyers, a transport, and four gunboats. They had damaged the Shokaku and one aircraft tender. Though the Japanese had come out ahead in the tally of ships sunk, however, they had lost twice as many aircraft as the Americans, and suffered twice as many casualties. In aerial combat, the Japanese had lost thirty-three fighters, three four-engine patrol bombers, five floatplanes, sixteen dive-bombers, and seventeen torpedo planes. An additional thirty planes had gone down with Shoho. They had suffered ninety aircrew killed, compared to only thirty-five Americans, because the latter had done a much better job at recovering their downed aviators.

  A tactical victory for the Japanese; a strategic victory for the Allies. That is the time-honored and often-repeated verdict on the Battle of the Coral Sea. Certainly it was the latter. The objective of the Japanese operation had been the capture of Port Moresby, and their failure to achieve it was the first major reversal in their five-month Pacific offensive. If Admiral Inoue had been bolder, the Japanese could have taken the port with little effort or risk. After the battle of May 8, there was nothing to stop a successful troop landing at Moresby except the Allies’ land-based bombers, which had never posed much of a threat to ships underway at sea. Captain Sherman judged that Moresby would have fallen within forty-eight hours.

  As important as the Battle of the Coral Sea was to the United States, the battle was of supreme importance to Australia. Japanese possession of Moresby would have posed a serious threat to northern Australia’s cities and military bases. General MacArthur, who did not often praise the navy, said that the battle had been “the real safeguard of Australian independence.” It was, in a sense, Australia’s Trafalgar—a naval victory that shattered the hopes of a formidable would-be invader. For years after the war, the anniversary of the battle was celebrated by Australians as a quasi-national holiday.

  But was Coral Sea really a tactical victory for the Japanese? Shokaku was damaged and later repaired; Zuikaku was unscathed, but suffered heavy losses to her air group. Most crucially, neither flattop was back in action in time for the Battle of Midway, where their presence might well have altered the outcome. The Yorktown, though damaged, was the only aircraft carrier on either side to make an appearance at both Coral Sea and Midway, and her air group would play a decisive role in the second battle. At the risk of engaging in semantics, Webster’s defines tactics as “the science of arranging and maneuvering military and naval forces in action, especially (as distinguished from strategy) with reference to short-range objectives.” Less tha
n one month elapsed between Coral Sea and Midway. Taking them together, did not the Allies score a tactical victory on May 8 by knocking the two big Japanese flattops out of the action to come on June 4?

  Combat was a hard and unforgiving school, but the U.S. Navy was taking its lessons to heart. If the navy did one thing right after the debacle of December 7, it was to become collectively obsessed with learning and improving. Each new encounter with the enemy was mined for all the wisdom and insights it had to offer. Every after-action report included a section of analysis and recommendations, and those nuggets of hard-won knowledge were absorbed into future command decisions, doctrine, planning, and training throughout the service. The insights offered by the Battle of the Coral Sea were many. The battle had exposed the problem of fogging bombsights in the SBD Dauntless dive-bombers, which Nimitz judged to be the “outstanding material defect of the 3-day action.” The battle had revealed the need for more and better antiaircraft gunnery training. Plainly, the number of F4F fighters embarked on the carriers should be increased significantly, both to accompany and protect outbound airstrikes and to fly combat air patrol over the task forces. The CAP should be stationed at a greater distance from the carriers, to give them time to intercept incoming bogeys, and at much higher altitude, so they could trade some of that altitude for speed when engaging incoming enemy attack planes. The Douglas TBD Devastator was disastrously obsolete and must be replaced as quickly as possible. The American air groups must learn how to keep an outbound air group together, so that dive-bombing and aerial torpedo attacks could be coordinated. In that the Japanese excelled, as the officers and crew of the Lexington had learned to their distress.

  Perhaps the greatest significance of the battle was that the American aviators had fought their enemies to a draw. The Japanese flyers and aircraft were losing their mystique. The F4F pilots were learning how to use the greater diving speed and structural resilience of their machine to advantage against the lighter and more vulnerable Zero. These improved tactics, pioneered by aviation leaders like Lieutenant Commander Jimmy Flatley, accounted to a large degree for the heavy air losses suffered by the Japanese. Squadron leaders set pen to paper and distributed their conclusions. Flatley advised his fellow Wildcat pilots:

  Gain plenty of altitude before contact with enemy VF [fighters]. You can lose altitude fast but you can’t gain it fast enough when up against enemy VF. Use hit and run attacks diving in and pulling out and up. If your target maneuvers out of your sight during your approach, pull out and let one of the following planes get him. If you attempt to twist and turn you will end up at his level or below and will be unable to regain an altitude advantage. If you get in a tough spot, dive away, maneuver violently, find a cloud. Stay together. The Japs’ air discipline is excellent and if you get separated you will have at least three of them on you at once. You have the better plane if you handle it properly, and in spite of their advantage of maneuverability you can and should shoot them down with few losses to yourselves.

  IMPERIAL HEADQUARTERS IN TOKYO announced that two American carriers, identified as the Saratoga and Yorktown, had been sent to the bottom. The claimed sinking of the Yorktown was based on the aviators’ optimistic impression that they had hit her with three torpedoes and eight to ten 550-pound bombs, presumably enough punishment to sink any carrier in the world. Rear Admiral Hara, in his after-action report, had surmised that the Yorktown was probably sunk, but acknowledged that he could not confirm it. Tokyo also announced that Japanese forces had sunk an American battleship, disabled a British heavy cruiser, and badly damaged a British battleship of the Warspite class. Those latter claims were a flight of fantasy—no Allied battleships had been in the area, and no cruisers had been hit.

  Emperor Hirohito published a rescript lauding the fleet for its latest splendid victory. Even Adolf Hitler joined in the chorus. “After this new defeat,” the Führer predicted, “the United States warships will hardly dare to face the Japanese fleet again, since any United States warship which accepts action with the Japanese naval forces is as good as lost.”

  Among the officers of the Combined Fleet staff, however, there was little joy. Even if it proved true that two enemy carriers were on the floor of the Coral Sea, the price had been heavy: the Shoho was the first major Japanese ship destroyed in the war, and the loss of so many aircraft and veteran aircrews came as a nasty shock. Moreover, the senior officers of the Japanese navy knew what the public bulletins did not disclose—that the main objective of Operation MO, Port Moresby, remained in Allied hands. Combined Fleet staff faulted Takagi and Hara for having been insufficiently aggressive in hunting down the American fleet, and condemned Inoue for timidity in withdrawing his forces prematurely.

  Air staff officer Masatake Okumiya summed up the feelings of the staff: “The truth of the matter was that our senior naval commanders in the Coral Sea area lacked the fighting spirit necessary to engage the enemy.” In his private diary, Admiral Ugaki confided: “A dream of great success has been shattered. There is an opponent in a war, so one cannot progress just as one wishes. When we expect enemy raids, can’t we employ the forces in a little more unified way?”

  The battle confirmed a feeling, widely shared by Japan’s naval airmen, that the two carriers of Hara’s Division 5 were the “little brothers” of Kido Butai. They were regarded as the “B” team, whose aviators were less experienced and less skilled than the “A” team, represented by Carrier Divisions 1 (Akagi, Kaga) and 2 (Soryu, Hiryu). Yet even the B team was believed to have sunk two American carriers at Coral Sea—and if the B team could deal so punishing a blow to an evenly matched enemy, then the A team should have nothing to fear at Midway. The sentiment was summed up in an epigram that made the rounds through the ranks of Kido Butai: “If the sons of the concubine [Shokaku and Zuikaku] could win the victory, the sons of legal wives should find no rivals in the world.”

  There may have been merit in those criticisms of the Japanese commanders and the aviators of Carrier Division 5, but they also tended to deflect attention away from a more urgent question. Had the Japanese underestimated their adversaries? Whatever the material outcome of the battle in the south, it had revealed that the American pilots were not pushovers; that the F4F Wildcat, handled properly, was a match for the Zero; and that the American dive-bombers posed a dangerous threat to ships. The enemy had appeared suddenly, at a very inconvenient moment, well within striking range of Japanese fleet units. The Americans were not incompetent and demoralized. They were evidently willing and able to give a good account of themselves in battle. But Yamamoto and his key subordinates were unwilling to interpret the result at Coral Sea for what it was—an ill omen, signifying that the Midway plan carried much graver risks than they had allowed themselves to believe.

  On May 5, two days before the big fight in the Coral Sea, orders for the Midway and Aleutians operations had been disseminated throughout the Japanese fleet. Navy Order No. 18, under the signature of Admiral Osami Nagano, had instructed Yamamoto to “carry out the occupation of Midway Island and key points in the western Aleutians in co-operation with the Army.” It would be the largest naval-amphibious operation ever attempted in the history of naval warfare. It would split the Japanese forces into five largely independent tactical groups, operating throughout a vast North Pacific battle zone, from the icy outer islands of the Aleutian archipelago to the atoll of Midway, 2,000 miles south. Nearly 200 Japanese ships would participate in the offensive, and more than 700 planes. “Taken together, Operations AL and MI represented the commitment of almost the entirety of the Imperial Japanese Navy,” write Jon Parshall and Tony Tully in Shattered Sword (2005), their groundbreaking study of the Japanese experience at Midway; “all of its carriers, all of its battleships, all but four of its heavy cruisers, and the bulk of its lesser combatants. Twenty-eight admirals would lead those forces into battle, and they would log more miles and consume more fuel in this single operation than was normally used in an entire year.”

 
The plan involved a complex, highly choreographed series of attacks which would have to unfold with exquisite timing and in strict radio silence. On June 3, a northern force would launch an air raid on the American base at Dutch Harbor on Unalaska Island—the chief American air base in the Aleutians—followed by attack and seizure of three outer Aleutian Islands. At dawn on June 4, the Japanese carriers would launch airstrikes on Midway from the northwest, with the aim of destroying its aircraft on the ground and clearing the beaches for the invasion forces, which would land on the atoll the night of June 5. Once the atoll was secured, two construction battalions would land and begin upgrading and expanding its air facilities. Any American naval forces sallying out of Pearl Harbor to oppose the invasion would be set upon and destroyed.

  The Midway operation was not a product of sound military planning. It was a farrago of compromises struck to quell internal dissent and to balance the demands of rivals in the Combined Fleet and the Naval General Staff. Not surprisingly, it was shot through with contradictions, flaws, and unnecessary risks. It exposed a fatal hubris and an unwarranted contempt for the enemy. The plan spread Japanese forces too thinly over a huge expanse of the North Pacific, and relied on dubious conjectures about how the Americans would react. It asked too much of a few elite aviators who had been flying and fighting almost without respite since December 7. Though the Japanese were loath to admit it, the most experienced of their carrier aircrews were bone-weary, while the newcomers lacked the training and seasoning to equal the skill of the veterans. In his subsequent report on the battle, Admiral Nagumo would observe that there had been “considerable turnover in personnel. . . . Inexperienced flyers barely got to the point where they could make daytime landings on carriers. It was found that even some of the more seasoned flyers had lost some of their skill.”