The Conquering Tide

by Ian W. Toll

  The pilots approached the targets at an altitude of 250 feet or even lower, and released their bombs based on radar readings alone. At masthead altitude, with a slow airspeed, this method of bombing proved devastatingly accurate. The Avengers scored thirteen direct hits and sank eight Japanese ships. The antiaircraft fire was thick but wild; only one of the twelve planes was shot down.

  As February 18 dawned, Task Force 58 put another 200 planes into the sky. They met negligible air opposition over the atoll and worked over the remaining targets at their leisure. Hundreds of incendiaries were dropped on smoking airfields, airplane parking areas, and hangars. The bombers paid special attention to the fuel tank farms, which had been spared on the first day in order to prevent smoke from obscuring visibility.

  Two days earlier, the Japanese cruiser Agano had been sunk north of Truk by the American submarine Skate. A destroyer, the Oite, had been dispatched to pick up the survivors, numbering about 400 officers and sailors. The destroyer had set course for Saipan but was ordered back to Truk after the raid began. Crammed with the rescued crewmen of the sunken Agano, the star-crossed Oite entered the lagoon on the morning of February 18 and was quickly set upon by a flight of TBF Avengers from the Bunker Hill. Struck amidships by a torpedo, the Oite broke in half and went down. She took more than 500 men down with her; only 20 survived.

  Flight leaders reported that they were having trouble locating worthy targets. Spruance, aware that he might be flogging a dead horse, ordered all planes back to their carriers, and Task Force 58 retired toward Majuro.

  For the Americans, Truk’s extravagant reputation inflated the symbolic importance of the victory. Even so, judging by the material results, HAILSTONE had been one of the most smashing carrier raids of the war. Though most of Japan’s heavy naval units had previously fled the lagoon, the attackers had sunk three light cruisers, four destroyers, three auxiliary or training cruisers, and six other naval auxiliaries. They had, in addition, sent about thirty merchant ships to the bottom of the lagoon, including five precious oil tankers. In aggregate, the total shipping losses approached 200,000 tons. Many of those vessels had been laden with munitions and other supplies that could not be recovered. Seventeen thousand tons of fuel went up in the attack, at a time when fuel was running very short.48 The Japanese had lost 249 aircraft, most destroyed on the ground. All of that was accomplished at negligible cost to the striking force. Mitscher’s carriers lost twenty-five aircraft, including those destroyed in accidents; all but nine pilots and aircrewmen were recovered safely and would fly again. The only ship to suffer any significant damage was the Intrepid, but she would return to service later in the year.

  A navy communiqué announced that “the Pacific fleet has returned in Truk the visit made by the Japanese fleet on Dec. 7, 1941, and effected a partial settlement of the debt.”49 Time magazine’s verdict was accurate: “The overfeared power of land-based air power had been set aside by greater air power from the sea.”50

  Truk was thereafter useless as a fleet base; it would not serve in that function again. Its airfields were cleared and repaired, and when Koga ordered Rabaul’s air units evacuated, most flew to Truk. But if the atoll was vulnerable to Mitscher’s attention in February 1944, it would be no less so later in the spring. Task Force 58 would revisit Truk in April, when no shipping remained in the lagoon. During this repeat performance, the air groups concentrated their attentions on the airfields and aircraft of the erstwhile Japanese bastion, and left it a smoking ruin.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ADMIRAL MINEICHI KOGA, THE TACITURN COMMANDER IN CHIEF OF the Combined Fleet, had been a close personal friend of his predecessor Isoroku Yamamoto. But Koga lacked his late friend’s strategic and political audacity. He never dared to challenge the suzerainty of the Tokyo-based Naval General Staff (NGS) or the leadership’s single-minded fixation on the all-important “decisive fleet battle”—a concept that dominated Japanese naval planning and strategic thinking before and during the war. This climactic clash of fleets was to occur somewhere in the western Pacific. It would involve substantially all of the capital ships in both the American and the Japanese navy. It would occur (it was hoped) in tactical circumstances favoring the Japanese side. It might begin with punishing land- and carrier-based air attacks on the American fleet, perhaps while the Americans were tied down in support of some major amphibious operation. But the big guns of the Japanese battleships would deliver the coup de grace. The thrashing would be so complete, so shocking, and so devastating that the government of Franklin D. Roosevelt would be moved to ask for a truce. Diplomatic negotiations would follow, and Japan would secure a peace that preserved its sovereignty, its honor, and some portion of its empire.

  It would be no exaggeration to say that bringing about a single, all-deciding naval battle amounted to an obsession among the Tokyo admirals. The idea had been inculcated into generations of students at the Japanese Naval Academy at Etajima through the writings of the American strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan. The annals of history provided many convincing examples of such battles, none better than Admiral Heihachiro Togo’s wipeout of a Russian fleet in Tsushima Strait in 1905. Intensive Naval Staff College study of the Anglo-German Battle of Jutland (1916) had further hammered the principle home—though in that instance, it was agreed, the British had grasped the chance of a decisive victory but let it slip through their fingers. Teikichi Hori, a “treaty faction” admiral purged from the Imperial Japanese Navy in 1933, observed that Japanese naval planning had ossified perilously in those years of ultranationalist ferment: “This kind of creeping formalism spread until it became a kind of strategic orthodoxy and [the navy] ended up as a smug little society which insisted that all ideas on strategy should conform to this orthodoxy.”1

  Literally from the first minutes of the Pacific War, events proved that airpower and submarine warfare had unseated the battle line as the ultimate arbiter of naval power. But the admirals had refused to relinquish their trust in the big guns. Though Isoroku Yamamoto had been one of the most air-minded officers to reach the top rungs of the Japanese navy, his move against Midway had been a bid to force a decisive battle early in the war. He had intended a critical role in that battle for the surface warships, including his flagship Yamato. Aviators were not fast-tracked to promotions, nor were they placed into important sea commands and planning jobs as they had been in the U.S. Navy. Not until 1944 was the carrier task force integrated into the heart of the Combined Fleet. War planning proceeded under the orthodox assumption that the battleships (especially the leviathans Yamato and Musashi) would play a leading part in the war’s final act.

  So Koga never doubted that he must sooner or later hurl the Combined Fleet into the path of the advancing enemy. But when and where? Since 1942, the heavy ships (battleships and carriers) had been kept in reserve, well out of the enemy’s reach. The Japanese carriers had not come out to fight since the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands in October 1942. After losing the battleships Hiei and Kirishima off Guadalcanal a month later, the navy had largely relied on its destroyers and land-based airpower to wage its campaign in the South Pacific. Koga would prefer to make his stand within range of friendly terrestrial air bases. He needed time to rebuild his carrier air groups, and as the fuel supply became critical, he had good reason to hope that the battle would be fought as near as possible to the oilfields of Borneo and Sumatra.

  On the other side of the ledger, Koga had to acknowledge that time was not on his side. Month by month, the titanic output of the enemy’s industrial plant was arriving in the advanced war zones of the Pacific. American scientific and technical expertise was opening an ever-widening mismatch in air combat efficiency, especially in the vital categories of radar, radio communications, and antiaircraft defenses. The submarine campaign was obliterating 200,000 tons of Japanese shipping per month, and it would soon cripple the nation’s war industries. The enemy’s twin advances in the south and central Pacific were swallowing up strategically vital terr
itories. All such considerations weighed in favor of committing the Combined Fleet as soon as tactical circumstances permitted.

  Nor could any military commander ignore the increasingly strident demands emanating directly from the throne. The god-king Hirohito was pressuring his liaison conference to wage the war more aggressively, to confront the American fleet and crush it. As a young crown prince, Hirohito’s education had been largely entrusted to the leading army and navy heroes of the Russo-Japanese War, Admiral Togo and General Maresuke Nogi. The boy had been steeped in Mahanian doctrine, and apparently never doubted that the war must be won by a decisive fleet engagement in the pattern of Tsushima. He let it be known that he was sorely disappointed by the loss of Guadalcanal. After the fall of Attu in May 1943, he sternly rebuked his army and navy chiefs of staff. The emperor expressed anxiety over the waning prestige of Japanese military power and its consequences for the future of his Asian-Pacific empire. His queries became increasingly pointed, shrill, and even sarcastic. He demanded to be briefed in detail, whereas he had previously been satisfied with knowing only the broad strokes, and took a direct part in deciding major questions of strategy. On August 5, as Allied forces drove into the central Solomons, the emperor dressed down the chief of the Army General Staff, General Hajime Sugiyama:

  If we continue fighting in this manner, it will be like Guadalcanal. It will only raise the fighting spirit of the enemy, and then the neutral countries will start to waver, China will get big-headed, and the impact on the countries in the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere will be enormous. Can’t you somehow beat down the American forces head on at some front? All the battle fronts look bad. Can’t you give the American forces a walloping? If we continue to get pushed back steadily this way, it will have a significant impact on other countries, not just on the enemy. Now, just where are you going to show some success? Where are you going to stage a decisive battle?2

  In mid-September, the emperor convened a series of meetings with military leaders at the Imperial Palace. On the agenda was a fundamental overhaul in war strategy. With the support of General Hideki Tojo, who simultaneously held the offices of prime minister and army minister, leaders at the liaison conference agreed to a “New Operational Policy” calling for a significant contraction in Japan’s western defense perimeter to islands far behind the front lines. The new “absolute defense line” would run from the Kurile Islands south through the Marianas, Truk, Palau, New Britain, western New Guinea, the East Indies, and Burma. Positions on that inner perimeter would be heavily reinforced with land-based air units and army troops to be transferred from Manchuria. Garrisons outside the perimeter, including those in the Gilbert and Marshall island groups, would receive no further reinforcement. If attacked, they must exact a bloody toll on the enemy before perishing in combat to the last man.

  The buildup of strength on the inner perimeter would take time—time to move troops from the mainland, to erect new shore fortifications, to build aircraft, and to train new air groups—so the policy designated “mid-1944” as “our approximate target for full readiness.”3 But the new policy did not rule out an early confrontation with the American fleet, if opportunity offered: “Whenever the occasion presents, we shall capture and destroy the enemy’s offensive forces.”4

  Koga was keen to fight his Tsushima sooner rather than later. Since May 1943, the commander in chief and his staff had been studying and revising plans for Operation Z, which envisioned a grand sortie of the Combined Fleet to confront the American fleet in the central Pacific, if possible while the enemy was pinned down in support of an amphibious invasion. Admiral Pownall’s carrier raids of September and October 1943 had twice coaxed a powerful Japanese fleet out of Truk. Koga personally commanded the second of these sorties, and anchored his ships in Eniwetok Atoll for four days in October. In both instances it was soon understood that the American movements had been hit-and-run carrier raids rather than sustained operations, and the fleet returned to Truk.

  Relentless shipping losses and the MacArthur-Halsey drive on Rabaul prompted successive revisions to Operation Z. In late October it was decided that the fleet would not come out to fight in Micronesia or in defense of the Bismarcks. The decisive confrontation would be postponed until the enemy attempted to pierce the inner perimeter. Koga would make his stand in the Philippine Sea, in defense of either the Marianas or Palau, depending on the movements of the American fleet. Pursuant to those decisions, when the Fifth Fleet launched its offensive into the central Pacific, Japanese garrisons in the Gilberts and Marshalls received diffident air support and no naval support at all, except as provided by submarine patrols.

  After suffering heavy air losses at the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands (October 1942), the Japanese carrier task force had retired to the Inland Sea for repairs, for refitting, and for the rebuilding of its decimated air groups. Incumbent commander Chuichi Nagumo (who had led the carrier striking force in the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Battle of Midway, and the carrier duels off Guadalcanal) was relieved and sent back to the homeland to command the Sasebo Naval District. His successor was Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa, a tall, gruff, unsightly man nicknamed “the Gargoyle.”* Ozawa took the fleet carrier Zuikaku as his flagship. The force was reorganized and designated the Third Fleet, consisting of three carrier divisions, two battleships, six cruisers, and more than a dozen destroyers. Most of the Third Fleet’s air strength was concentrated in Carrier Division 1 (the veteran fleet carriers Zuikaku and Shokaku and the light carrier Zuiho) and Carrier Division 2 (the heavy sisters Hiyo and Junyo, both built on converted passenger-liner hulls and commissioned in mid-1942).

  Throughout most of 1943, the Japanese carriers remained idle at Truk or in home waters. The same was not true of the air groups. Ozawa’s carrier planes were repeatedly sent south to bolster the deteriorating fortunes of the land-based naval air forces at Rabaul and satellite airfields in the Solomons and New Guinea. In July 1943, most of Carrier Division 2’s aircraft (about 150) flew into Rabaul to be integrated into the Twenty-Sixth Air Flotilla. The Zero pilots, trained at great expense to fly from aircraft carriers, suffered disastrous losses in pitched daily air battles against relentless waves of well-armed B-24s and B-25s.

  In August and September, several Japanese fighter units were ordered to fly down to the primitive airstrip at Buin, on southern Bougainville, where conditions on the ground and in the air were even worse than at Rabaul. Halsey’s heavily reinforced Guadalcanal-based air forces (AIRSOLS) battered the hard-pressed dirt airstrip day by day, and many of the Japanese carrier pilots who survived longer than a week succumbed to exhaustion and disease. In October 1943, the flyable remnants of Japan’s badly mauled air forces at Buin began pulling back to Rabaul.

  The following month, Koga ordered nearly 200 planes of Carrier Division 1 into Rabaul from Truk (Operation RO). Among them were many of the Third Fleet’s most skilled and experienced airmen, including all of the squadron leaders. More than half of those planes were shot down within a week, and virtually none of the downed aviators were recovered. One of Admiral Ozawa’s staff officers recalled the scene at the Spring Island airfield in Truk as the survivors arrived on November 13:

  I was astonished by the small number of planes that had returned. There were hardly any fighters to be seen. But it was worse with torpedo planes and fighter bombers. None of them had come back. . . . On the field Ozawa was giving the commander’s speech of instruction that customarily followed an operation. Afterward I heard from some fliers about the speech. Ozawa had climbed the platform to address them and, being overcome with dismay at how few of his men had survived, was unable to utter a word. He stood there on the platform in silence for a very long time, weeping bitterly.5

  On January 25, 1944, as the combined AIRSOLS and Fifth Air Force campaign against Rabaul reached its overpowering culmination, Koga fed another 150 planes from Carrier Division 2 into the meat grinder. Few of the Zero pilots had flown in combat prior to the deployment. They were
instructed to avoid engaging the American bombers and fighters except when “battle circumstances appear particularly favorable to you.”6 For the sake of morale more than anything else, Nakajima torpedo planes from Carrier Division 2 were dispatched on risky night missions against Halsey’s ships off Bougainville and MacArthur’s transports off New Guinea. Those flights scored no hits on American shipping, but dozens of the valuable bombers were lost to antiaircraft fire and operational accidents. Masatake Okumiya, an air staff officer, recalled the dreadful last days at Rabaul:

  The days passed in a blur. Every day we sent the Zeros up on frantic interception flights. The young and inexperienced student pilots had become battle-hardened veterans, their faces showing the sudden realization of death all about them. Not for a moment did the Americans ease their relentless pressure. Day and night the bombers came to pound Rabaul, to smash at the airfield and shipping in the harbor, while the fighters screamed low on daring strafing passes, shooting up anything they considered a worth-while target. So intense were the enemy attacks that we were unable to find time to attack their bases. Our losses mounted steadily, and the list of dead and missing pilots grew visibly.7

  The losses from Carrier Division 2 in this last operation at Rabaul amounted to about ninety planes. Among those few aviators who returned to Truk in late February, many had been laid low by malaria and other tropical diseases. They also brought with them the incubus of defeatism and despair, which inevitably spread through the remaining Third Fleet air groups.