The Conquering Tide

by Ian W. Toll

  The U.S. Navy could take justifiable pride in its damage-control equipment and training, and with a little luck the Wasp might have survived. Captain Forrest P. Sherman conned his stricken ship with sangfroid even while a maelstrom of secondary explosions blew debris around the bridge. He maneuvered the Wasp to put the wind on her starboard quarter so that the flames were blown forward and to port.50 That allowed many hundreds of her crew to take refuge astern. Commander William C. Chambliss noted that the men reacted coolly and efficiently, “cracking their usual gags with their usual vivacity.”51

  But the Wasp had been struck at the worst possible moment in the most vulnerable part of her hull—near the aviation gasoline storage tanks, which exploded into incandescent flames. Having just launched planes, the Wasp’s fuel lines were full and the fires traveled through the hoses to the forward part of the hangar deck. (The deadly predicament was similar to that of the Japanese aircraft carriers on the morning of June 4 at the Battle of Midway.) Secondary explosions occurred quickly and with devastating effect. In the hangar, the inferno enveloped fueled-up planes. Their wing tanks exploded, their bombs and torpedoes detonated, and their .30- and .50-caliber guns began firing haphazardly. Lieutenant Chester M. Stearns, an engineering officer, made his way up to the hangar deck and noted that a torpedo was roasting under a burning TBF Avenger. He dived flat on deck in time to protect himself against the powerful explosion. When he looked up, “neither plane nor torpedo nor deck were there.” Several bombs left on racks near the bomb-arming station had apparently detonated, leaving a “vast hole through [the] elevator pit,” with a “seething mass of flames.”52

  The Wasp listed 15 degrees to starboard. Electrical lines and fire mains cut out throughout the forward part of the ship. Rivets popped out of the platings and shot through the air like bullets. Most of the communication circuits were knocked out, so the bridge could not communicate with stations belowdecks. Ready service ammunition by the starboard forward antiaircraft guns detonated and rained debris down along the Wasp’s entire length.53

  The devastating attack had been launched by Japanese submarine I-19. She had fired six torpedoes; five of these struck an American ship. Three hit the Wasp, one the destroyer O’Brien, and another passed under the keel of the destroyer Dale, narrowly missed the stern of the destroyer Mustin, and struck home into the North Carolina, sending a column of water and fuel oil to the height of the battleship’s masts. The O’Brien’s bow was torn cleanly off forward of frame 10, but she limped away. (She was lost en route to the American mainland.) The North Carolina’s starboard side was gouged open, but she likewise managed to steam away under her own power. Shortly thereafter, I-19 fired another spread of torpedoes at the Hornet from her stern tubes, and they missed narrowly. The screening ships began zigzagging prodigiously and dropped depth charges throughout the area, driving the enemy submarines away but destroying none.

  At 3:05 p.m., a tremendous gasoline vapor explosion ripped through the Wasp. Flames ascended to a height of 150 feet. A quadruple 1.1-inch antiaircraft mount forward of the island was plucked from its foundation and ejected high into the air. The weapon’s entire crew was killed. Admiral Leigh Noyes, who had taken command of Task Force 61 two weeks earlier, was thrown down on the deck of his signal bridge. He suffered third-degree burns on his face, scalp, and ears. The interior of the island was completely engulfed in smoke, requiring everyone to retreat aft. A steady rain of burning debris fell on the heads of men gathered on the flight deck. A pilot circling above said that the Wasp’s “whole island structure was white, as if the skin had been burned away from the flesh.”54

  Less than an hour after the attack, Sherman realized the game was up, and ordered the crew off the ship. Men went down lines into the sea or simply leapt feet first. Spectacular explosions continued, and debris rained down around the ship to a distance of about 200 yards. Whaleboats from the cruisers and destroyers moved among the swimmers and picked them up.55

  The Wasp burned fiercely through the afternoon, settling gradually by the bow. After sunset, when darkness began to descend over the scene, Chambliss recalled that the ship was “completely enveloped in flames, and presented a weirdly fascinating picture. Against the night tropical sky, she looked like some ship of neon fantasy.”56 The steel plating around her upper works glowed bright orange. Her ruptured tanks spilled bunker oil and aviation gasoline into the sea, and the fires spread around her to a radius of several hundred feet. Shortly after eight, destroyers fired several torpedoes into the burning hulk to be sure she went down. At nine, she rolled a bit to starboard, and the bow went under. She slid into the sea, very slowly, until only her stern remained; then she was gone.

  The Hornet, now the last battle-worthy carrier remaining in the South Pacific, recovered all of the Wasp’s twenty-six planes that were aloft during the attack. Forty-five more went down with the ship. Remarkably, given the carnage, only 173 of the Wasp’s officers and men were lost, a consolation owed to Sherman’s fine seamanship and the quick work of the escorting destroyers.

  The sudden and devastating loss of the Wasp at a time when the task forces were under omnipresent threat of submarine attack finally prompted Nimitz to lay down the law. “For three weeks Task Force 61 and its elements remained in the same waters adjacent to our supply route to the Solomons in an area known to be infested with submarines. The mission did not require that the Task Force be restricted to that area.” Henceforth, wrote CINCPAC, “The area of operations of our Task Forces should be changed radically at frequent intervals.”57

  * Office of Price Administration; Office of Production Management; Defense Plant Corporation; War Production Board; Office of War Information; War Resources Board; Supply, Priorities, and Allocations Board.

  Chapter Five

  TOKYO IN AUTUMN: THE PARKS WERE PAINTED WITH EVERY SHADE OF yellow, orange, and red, and the air was pleasantly cool and not too humid. On a clear morning, from a hilltop, one might catch a distant view of Fuji. Nothing filled a Japanese heart like a glimpse of that regal snowcapped cone.

  More than anywhere else in the country, Tokyo was a study in the contrasts of old and new Japan. Throughout the sprawling city, the ancient and the modern coexisted side by side. Men in tailored three-piece suits and fedora hats strolled alongside women in brightly colored kimonos. Automobiles, streetcars, and bicycles vied for the right of way with rickshaws and ox-drawn carts. Billboards and neon signs drew the eye away from hanging lanterns and banners fluttering on wooden poles. Power lines, construction cranes, and elevated railways rose above a sea of dark tile rooftops. The metropolis had only recently begun to grow vertically; large office and apartment buildings were a rarity outside the core finance, business, and government districts. Most urban Japanese lived in miniature wooden houses, crammed into teeming neighborhoods linked by cobblestone streets barely larger than alleys. Steel-framed concrete buildings were going up all over town, but the workers who built them wore split-toed shoes and loincloths and nothing else, just as they had in decades or centuries past.

  Hirohito, the emperor of Japan, had been seldom seen by his people in peacetime. Now, as the spiritual leader and sovereign of a nation at war, he was allowed a higher profile. In October 1942, as the struggle for Guadalcanal approached its savage climax, the emperor’s red Rolls-Royce twice carried him beyond the gray stone walls of his Imperial compound. On the fifteenth, he presided over the ceremonial induction of the spirits of 15,021 war dead at Yasukuni Shrine. A crowd of 30,000 came to pay respects. A news photographer captured a sea of solemn, reverent faces under the shrine’s huge tori. On the twenty-ninth he appeared at the 13th Meiji Shrine National Athletic Games, where one popular competition was a “bayonet charging race.” That month also witnessed a wave of public veneration for the fallen crewmen of the “midget” submarine that had shelled Sydney, Australia, the previous June. The cremated ashes of four seamen were transported aboard a truce ship from Sydney, arriving in Japan on October 9, 1942.1 Newspapers a
nd magazines eulogized the men who had given their lives in a virtual suicide mission against the hated Australians, but none dared acclaim the enemy’s chivalry in repatriating their remains.

  Insofar as the public was permitted to know, Japanese forces were continuing to trounce the Allies on land, at sea, and in the air. The print and radio media, under exacting state control, rang with exultant declarations of victories and expressions of contempt for the enemy. The editors of Kokusai Shashin Joho (International Graphic Magazine) scoffed at the American slogan “Remember Pearl Harbor.” (“Yes, Nippon will remember too,” they remarked, “the same day and the same harbor.”)2 Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, an army general who dominated the regime with Hirohito’s support, declared in a publicized speech at the War Ministry, “The British-Americans want obstinately to continue their counterattack. But making use of our great material resources, we are ready to annihilate them at any moment at any point on the globe.”3 Japan had brought a vast Pacific empire under the flag of the “Rising Sun.” From north to south, they ruled from the western Aleutians to the East Indies; from east to west, the Solomons to the Burma-India frontier. Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura, a former ambassador to Washington, explained that the Allied position in the Pacific was hopeless, for Japan “need only hold out in conquered positions.”4 Perhaps peace would come if the two arch-villains and warmongers Roosevelt and Churchill were driven from office by their own people. Only then would the Allies take a more constructive attitude and acknowledge Japan’s Asian ascendancy. So it was said.

  The Japanese came out to the rallies, mouthed the slogans, waved their hats, marched in the lantern parades, and bowed to the departed spirits at Yasukuni. To all appearances they continued to support the war no less fervently than they had in the heady early months, when spectacular victories came in rapid and uninterrupted succession. Beneath the surface, however, were symptoms of discontent. The Japanese people had obediently submitted to harsh privations for the sake of the war—stringent rations, labor drafts, censorship, repression of political parties, and civil defense regulations promulgated by the tonarigumi, or “Neighborhood Associations.” But living conditions were deteriorating, and the austere regimentation of daily life was losing whatever charm it had once held. Restaurants closed for lack of food. Intercity train tickets were treasured commodities to be sold or scalped for more than their face value. In December, to arrest falling share prices, the stock market was placed under direct government control.5 Japanese of that generation were accustomed to war as a quasi-permanent condition; the country had been waging war, to a greater or lesser degree, since the invasion of Manchuria in 1931. War with all enemies, waged indefinitely, had seemed natural enough in the past. But by the fall of 1942, the people began to grasp that this was a total war, which must end either in total victory or in total defeat.

  On street corners, women called out to other women to sew a crimson stitch into a 1,000-stitch belt, a traditional talisman believed to protect the wearer against enemy bullets. Millions of soldiers and sailors went off to war with these cotton bands concealed under their uniforms. Japanese public opinion could barely envisage the enormous casualties their forces would suffer in 1944 and 1945, but the death toll was rising alarmingly in late 1942, and the military drafts had started to creep up and down the age scale for Japanese men. According to Hiroyo Arakawa, a Tokyo baker, “Everyone lived in dread of their impending call-up.”6 Nothing inflamed the resentment of ordinary Japanese against the rich and well connected as much as exemptions from military service. Parents with sons overseas were incensed by rumors that strings had been pulled to keep an upper-class lad out of uniform. Arakawa recalled that her husband’s cousin—a man from an influential family, employed at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Tsurumi—had received several call-up notices but each time arranged to be excused from service: “The big shots always get the best deal.”7 She was likewise exasperated by military men and police officers who felt entitled to help themselves to food or other store items without paying.

  As servicemen circulated back into the country, either wounded or on leave, they brought whispers of a war that was progressing much differently than the public reports let on. Saburo Sakai, the fighter ace wounded in combat over Guadalcanal on August 7, returned to Tokyo on leave that autumn. He was appalled by the shrill, vainglorious propaganda—the ubiquitous handbills, the martial orchestral music blaring through loudspeakers, the sham assurances that Japan was still running up a score of one-sided victories. “The nation was drunk on false victories,” he wrote. “It was hard to believe that a destructive war was going on.” But he soon realized that not everyone on the home front believed what they read in the papers or heard on the radio. His own mother asked him, in a low conspiratorial voice, whether it was true that Japan was winning the war. “We must win,” he told her. The alternative was too awful to contemplate.8

  ISOROKU YAMAMOTO LIVED IN A PLUSH SUITE of air-conditioned cabins on the superbattleship Yamato, which rested at her moorings, wrapped in anti-torpedo nets, in the huge cobalt lagoon of Truk Atoll in the Caroline Islands, about 1,600 miles south of Japan. As commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, he did not work particularly hard, and when he did work, his attention was not always on the problems of the war. He read and wrote letters to friends and strangers. He played shogi (Japanese chess) against staff officers, often for money. He wrote poetry quickly and (according to his Japanese biographer) not very well, but he had a good hand for calligraphy and provided samples to admirers who asked for them. He read, often late into the night. That Yamamoto did not work obsessively was no mark against him, at least in the view of his loyal chief of staff, Admiral Matome Ugaki. Ugaki reproved staff officers who burdened the commander in chief with minutiae; he preferred that the boss reserve his mental energy for decisions of the highest strategic order.

  Tradition demanded that Yamamoto live in sumptuous luxury, and he did. He dined in his wardroom, at a polished teak table covered with a white tablecloth, and his meals easily rivaled those that one might find in an expensive Tokyo restaurant. The navy had recruited professional chefs to man the galley. Luncheons were Western-style, served with silver and finger bowls; dinner was usually Japanese cuisine, with such delicacies as broiled sea bream, egg custard, and sushi. Yamamoto’s particular favorites, such as urume-iwashi (sardine), were brought from Japan by sea or air. The ship’s bakery turned out fresh bread and other baked goods. Crewmen were sent to fish in the lagoon to provide the freshest sushi for his table.

  The admiral liked his food and ate with gusto. Finding little opportunity for exercise, he grew portly, as any man must who carries extra weight and stands just five feet three inches tall. But he had the sturdy build and bull-necked confidence of an athlete. His salute was famous in Japan, often captured in wartime newsreels. It was a casual gesture, almost laconic—his meaty right hand raised, straight up at the elbow, to the right edge of the visor on his uniform cap. His orderlies kept his uniforms in scrupulous condition: in the tropics he always appeared in whites, starched and pressed, with gold buttons and chrysanthemum-crested epaulettes reflecting the sun. He was not a dandy, but he had a part to play. Yamamoto was a warm man, always kind and considerate to his officers, yet he maintained an Olympian distance from the crew of his flagship, who snapped to attention at his appearance and did not twitch until he was out of sight. Only occasionally did Yamamoto show himself on deck, usually to raise his cap for a departing ship or a flight of aircraft overhead.

  In the West, Yamamoto is best remembered as the prime mover behind Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the disastrous attempt to seize Midway six months later. In Japan, his legacy is more multifaceted. It owes more to his prewar career as a subcabinet minister and diplomatic representative. In the militarist regime of Japan’s “dark valley” period (1930–45), there was no such thing as civilian control of the military; rather, the military directly controlled all domestic, economic, and international functions of gover
nment. Military leaders suppressed the political parties, stripped the Diet (parliament) of its power, placed the media under state supervision, and controlled the appointment of cabinet ministers. In both fact and effect, generals and admirals became politicians, civilian ministers, and foreign diplomats. Western historians are predisposed to evaluate Yamamoto’s career using the same standards, benchmarks, and gauges one would apply to any professional naval officer in such nations as the United States or Britain. To do so misses the point. Quite apart from his naval career, Isoroku Yamamoto was a major player in Japanese politics from the mid-1930s through the outset of the Pacific War, and probably the nation’s most revered public figure after the emperor himself.

  Disdainful of the army and the ultranationalist right, Yamamoto had consistently opposed the Japanese radicals who used revolutionary violence and assassinations to achieve their ends. He was a leading figure in the navy’s moderate “treaty faction,” known for its support of unpopular disarmament treaties. His rivals charged him with courting fame and celebrity, cultivating newsmen to ensure favorable press coverage, and maneuvering for his own advantage in politics. There is undoubtedly some truth in these charges. If Yamamoto had not been so politically adept, he could not have survived the repeated purges of like-minded officers in the turbulent 1930s. But it is also true that he put his life on the line to prevent the slide toward war with the United States and Britain.