The Red Cross, along with the navy and army intelligence operations, built on their meager reserves of information, but limited interaction with the Japanese through Swiss delegations had yielded little more than enemy demands regarding their own prisoners in the Pacific. There were other bits of information coming in that were so disturbing Bill would not share them with Arthur, much less his mother. They were learned via intercepted Japanese communications and other classified documents dispatched to the Map Room. The first, a quote by a Kempeitai official regarding Allied prisoners, had appeared in the Japan Times: “They cannot be treated as ordinary prisoners of war. Their defeat is their punishment. To show them mercy is to prolong the war . . . An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Hesitation is uncalled for and the wrongdoers must be wiped out.”
Another dispatch was so disturbing that Bill sought multiple translations to confirm that it had not been an error. In a memo to Captain McCrea, Bill elaborated:
The following excerpt was taken from a Japanese diary captured on New Guinea: “Because of food shortages, some companies have been eating human flesh (Australian soldiers). The taste is said to be good.” (Note: Because of the incredible implications of this statement, it was concurred in by three individual translations.)
Another entry several days later contained the following crude haiku:
When we ran short of rations,
We devoured our own kind to
Stave off Starvation.
After writing the memo, Bill put on his cap and walked out of the Map Room in the direction of the Rose Garden. On that early-summer afternoon, a group of military nurses evacuated from the Philippines had been invited to the Executive Mansion. The nurses, bedecked in their crisp whites, were now stationed at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington. When Mrs. Roosevelt heard of their arrival in the nation’s capital, she invited them to the White House to officially recognize their good works. Bill was more than happy to escort the nurses to see the First Lady, with whom he had a warm relationship.
After an initial exchange of pleasantries, Bill ventured an inquiry about Barton to the gathered nurses. “Oh yes!” exclaimed one, Mary Lohr. “He’s your brother? Oh my, yes, I knew him!”
She explained that she was working at Sternberg Hospital in December when the navy wounded were brought over from Cavite. Barton was wounded in the lower leg and foot, she said; she nursed him from the time he arrived until she was ordered to Corregidor on Christmas Day. He’d told her exactly what happened to him.
Bill was speechless as his new angel of mercy continued her tale.
“He said he heard shrapnel clicking on the road behind him. He’d been running, carrying something, when he got hit. Then he said, ‘The good news is, now I’m here with you!’ He was always cracking jokes, trying to buck us up,” she added.
Bill’s questions poured out.
“Yes, he was still there on Christmas, when our group of nurses left for Corregidor. In fact, on Christmas Eve he asked me to send a telegram to his parents, in New Jersey, I think, but from Manila’s Army and Navy Club, not the hospital. He didn’t want them to know he was in the hospital.”
That was the last time she saw him, she said.
Mary couldn’t say why only the army wounded were ordered out on the Mactan; by then, she was on Corregidor. “There was just no plan for the navy boys, I guess, in all the confusion.”
At they talked, the large Red Cross banner was unfurled for the occasion, not far from the circular drive where Filipino stewards polished the running boards and cleaned the windows of President Roosevelt’s Packard. Before the ceremonial greeting started, Bill said, “I am so grateful to you for this information, to know that that you saw him alive.” And then: “Our mother will be overjoyed to hear these things. This is a feast of news compared to what we’ve had so far.”
11
MIDWAY
BOLSTERED BY THE BRILLIANT success of USN Task Force 16 and Colonel Doolittle’s Tokyo raid, military intelligence worked furiously to break JN-25, the Japanese naval code. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the surprise invasion had enraged the enemy and shaken their confidence. A strong Japanese answer to the humiliating home-island strike was expected somewhere, and soon. No foreign power had successfully attacked Japan in more than four hundred years, and its military had assured the civilian government that Japanese skies and surrounding waters were protected and safe. The Japanese, it was soon learned, were formulating a grand reprisal.
Navy cryptanalysts at Pearl Harbor and in Washington scrutinized hundreds of intercepts a day and worked around the clock. The only other Pacific intercept stations—in Guam and the Philippines—had been lost, placing particular pressure on the already shorthanded Station Hypo, Oahu’s Naval Intelligence operation.
JN-25 was formidable. It consisted of approximately forty-five thousand five-digit numbers, each representing a word or phrase. For transmission, the five-digit numbers were superenciphered using an additive table. Cracking the code first required intense mathematical analysis to strip off the additive, and then analysis of patterns and sequences to determine the meaning of the five-digit numbers. Under Commander Joe Rochefort, Station Hypo’s brilliant, if eccentric, head, the staff made slow but steady progress—thanks to JN-25’s rote use of the additive tables.
In May, Hypo cryptanalysts picked through thousands of radio intercepts between enemy ships with intensifying interest. There had been a spike in Japanese naval communications in the Pacific, and each bit of decrypted intelligence from that heightened traffic flow offered tiny clues to the Japanese Navy’s whereabouts and intentions. In the White House Map Room, Bill Mott logged the code-cracking progress reports and then presented the eyes-only summaries to the White House inner sanctum and FDR himself.
Bill’s own training in codes and ciphers enabled him to follow Station Hypo’s progress with knowledge and precision. By the second half of May, Rochefort felt sure that a major enemy strike was in late-stage planning, though the coded traffic had so far revealed little more. Hypo’s staff was still deciphering only fractional bits of JN-25 at a time and understood 10 percent to 15 percent of the overall code, at best. Still, a persistent clue from recent intercepts was emerging: the term or location “AF” was mentioned repeatedly.
Meanwhile, Enterprise and Hornet had been abruptly called back to Pearl Harbor from reconnaissance patrols in the Central Pacific. The cryptic cable from Admiral Halsey to CNO Admiral Ernest King was of far greater weight than the sum of its words:
Have Ordered Enterprise and Hornet to Expedite Return.
Halsey
Bill never feared more for Benny’s life. American naval strength against Japan was at an all-time low, and the enemy knew it. Not only was the battleship fleet crippled, the carrier Lexington had been sunk in early May at the Battle of the Coral Sea, where an eight-hundred-pound bomb had also ripped apart USS Yorktown’s insides. It was unclear whether Yorktown could be repaired, and her sister carrier, USS Saratoga, was still in dry dock from the broadside torpedo it took at the Gilbert and Marshall Islands.
Official Washington pondered this paltry flattop arithmetic as the clocks ticked down toward a certain enemy assault on beleaguered US naval forces somewhere in the Pacific. Five carriers minus Lexington and Yorktown equaled three. Three minus Saratoga equaled two, leaving only Enterprise and her new sister, Hornet, which had never engaged in battle. Two carriers to hold the Pacific against an all-out assault by the Imperial Navy?
As the new storm clouds gathered, Station Hypo’s wildcatter analysts struck a cryptographic gusher. Acting on a hunch that “AF” was the JN-25 designation for Midway Island, Hypo directed the commanding officer at Midway to send a message in the clear indicating a malfunction at Midway’s water distillation plant and that fresh water was needed urgently. Shortly after, Hypo intercepted a Japanese intelligence report indicating that “AF” had a water problem. This breakthrough not only confirmed the identification of “AF” as Midway,
but also verified that Hypo had broken JN-25, the General Purpose Code used by the Japanese Navy.
This electrifying revelation also meant that the opportunity for a surprise attack had just reverted from the Japanese to the Americans; they now had a shot at ambushing the enemy’s incipient ambush. But even with this powerful advantage of surprise, the engagement still carried long odds for the handicapped US Navy. Intercepts revealed that as many as seventy enemy ships and sixteen submarines were priming to launch against Midway, including at least four, possibly five, aircraft carriers brimming with superior planes and experienced pilots. And the fateful rendezvous was fast approaching, according to Station Hypo; the Japanese assault on “AF” was slated for the third or fourth of June.
Heeding Halsey’s curt order, Enterprise and Hornet churned back to Pearl in late May, and the heavily damaged Yorktown hobbled to drydock for repairs. The plan was to refuel and reprovision the first two and to repair Yorktown—in four days, not the three months considered minimally necessary. The warships would then sail west and lie in wait northeast of Midway for the approaching Japanese armada.
JAPAN’S DECISION TO ATTACK Midway was based on a grand misperception that would ultimately change the course of the Pacific War. The enemy picket boats that Benny had sighted on April 17—and that Nashville torpedoed just before Colonel Doolittle and his men took to the skies—never did get the word to their Japanese superiors that the planes over Tokyo had launched from an aircraft carrier. When queried by the press after the attack, President Roosevelt said with a smile that the B-25s had flown from “Shangri-La”—the mythical city in James Hilton’s popular novel Lost Horizon. But the Japanese believed they had launched from Midway, the closest American land base to Japan’s home islands. As a result, Japanese high command decided to revise its war strategy and attack and occupy Midway to prevent future raids on its home soil.
Admiral Yamamoto had advocated securing Midway, understanding the power of his adversary. He had attended Harvard University and traveled extensively in the United States as a young officer. “I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant,” he was rumored to have said after coordinating the successful Pearl Harbor attack. He stood alone among victory disease-ridden commanders in his belief that Japan could succeed against America only if it knocked out its battleship and carrier strength early in the war, before the country’s mighty shipbuilding industry could mobilize to replace them. This would give resource-starved Japan enough time to seize the oilfields of the Dutch East Indies and Malaya and strengthen its own arsenal before any Allied counterattack.
Only after the humiliating success of Doolittle’s surprise Tokyo raid did Yamamoto’s superiors yield to his view—and his imperative that the Japanese attack and occupy Midway Atoll, strategically situated 1,300 miles northwest of Honolulu and 2,500 miles east of Japan. Wresting Midway from the Americans, he persuaded, would limit their ability to defend Hawaii, thwart their resistance to Nippon conquests in the entire region, and protect Japan proper. Seizing the objective in an overwhelming surprise attack would further allow the Japanese Navy to annihilate the remainder of the US Pacific Fleet. Under Yamamoto’s ambitious Midway annexation plan, the Pacific Ocean would soon become one large Japanese fishpond.
ON THE COOL SPRING evening of May 26, 1942, Bill Mott stood outside the Oval Office with an urgent intelligence update for Admiral Ernest King, chief of naval operations (CNO). King was behind closed doors with President Roosevelt, a relative rarity. Despite King’s accurate reputation as generally irascible, Bill respected him for his unalterable—if minority—view that America’s interests were best served by allocating more men, money, and materiel to the battle in the Pacific. In a world war in which British and other European interests competed with this priority, the navy’s senior flag officer was consistently obdurate on this point.
To his core, King was suspicious of what he saw as British attempts to divert resources from his ability to fight Japan—not just to save their homeland but also to preserve their colonial holdings in the Pacific. The CNO wasn’t isolated in this opinion: the Allies’ joint South East Asia Command (SEAC) was mordantly nicknamed “Save England’s Asian Colonies” by his sympathizers. King was also well known for his rants against MacArthur, using unprintable adjectives to describe his disgust at the general’s failures in the Philippines as well as his “absurd” demands on the US Navy. Bill didn’t hate that about the CNO, either.
While he waited to speak with Admiral King, Bill chatted with Grace Tully, the president’s secretary, all the while nervously fingering the envelope, stamped “Top Secret,” in his hand. Grace finally told him she would ring the Map Room as soon as King emerged from the Oval Office; their meeting seemed to be taking longer than expected. Still clutching the envelope, Bill retreated down the cavernous West Wing hallway, now quiet at the relatively late hour of seven o’clock.
The Map Room was tense, hushed, and smoky. Barely audible above the teletype was the murmur of gathering brass conferring over the same eyes-only document that Bill Mott had presented to them a half hour earlier. The communication was from Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet (CINCPAC). It revealed the shattering news that Admiral Halsey was too sick to engage in the “next operation” and had to be practically forced off the Enterprise to be hospitalized at Pearl Harbor, fuming and cursing every step of the way.
To his crew and top Washington brass, the seemingly irreplaceable Halsey was now unable to lead the charge in this next—and most critical—sea battle of the war. The diagnosis was a severe case of dermatitis compounded by exhaustion, for which there was no quick or easy cure. Worse yet, Halsey had apparently decided, with minimal consultation, that a little-known rear admiral by the name of Raymond Spruance was to take his place.
Spruance! The news took Bill by surprise. As if Benny and the crew weren’t in enough danger, now subtract the revered, fearless, battle-hardened Halsey and install a cruiser commander—who wasn’t even an aviator and who had never commanded an aircraft carrier? Respected? Yes, but untested, and Spruance had never even seen sea-air battle!
War Secretary Stimson said nothing as he reviewed the onionskin paper containing the news. In the uncomfortable silence that followed, Bill walked along the Pacific wall map and inspected the updates. Not one of the men voiced concern about Spruance, as though to do so would have placed a hex. But the discomfiting news hung in the air as palpably as the layer of smoke from Stimson’s cigarette.
The facts were these: Admiral Halsey had worked with Raymond Spruance—currently in command of a cruiser division—for more than a decade and had tremendous faith in him. Halsey regarded Spruance as a brilliant tactician with a reputation for making quick, masterful, and precise decisions under pressure. Admiral Nimitz also liked and respected Spruance, but, more importantly, he had immeasurable faith in Halsey’s judgment in such matters.
When Admiral King was finally apprised of Spruance’s selection to replace Halsey for the Midway operation, he too concurred. He was certainly not about to challenge either Nimitz or Halsey on the eve of battle, from a distance of six thousand miles. Thus the closed society of top brass had spoken by barely speaking. The selection of Rear Admiral Raymond Spruance, cruiser commander, for tactical command of the upcoming Armageddon of the Pacific was not reversible.
ABOARD THE USS ENTERPRISE, when the ship and air crews learned of Halsey’s illness and the substitution of Spruance, the reaction was seismic. “Spruance! He was against sending Doolittle to Tokyo!” Benny hollered across the wardroom as the men ate their dinner. “I know that for a fact.”
“He thinks aviators are for the birds, that’s what I heard,” came a reply. “The pilots are mad as hell!”
These and countless other such conversations reverberated throughout Enterprise just hours before the men were to put to sea for certain battle. The crew were stunned and gloomy when they heard about Halsey. Some cursed and fretted, others prayed. With little else to go on in
the last six months, they’d placed every ounce of hope, faith, and pride in their feisty and indefatigable admiral. In their heart of hearts, the Enterprise crew was in the fight as much for Halsey as they was for their country.
At daybreak on May 28, 1942, Enterprise, Hornet, and a rudely patched-up Yorktown slipped from their Pearl Harbor berths, followed by an abbreviated band of weary-looking cruisers and oilers. There was a keen sense among all of them that David was trudging to meet Goliath, though the precise details of their mission had not yet been announced.
Early rumors aboard Enterprise were that they were on their way to repel an all-out Japanese assault—complete with planned troop landings—on the Hawaiian Islands; it was dramatic, if wildly inaccurate. By early morning May 29, however, the convoy was three hundred miles north of the Hawaiian island of Kauai, a distance at growing odds with rumors of a land attack in the other direction. At 0505 that same morning, just after the ships’ sirens wailed general quarters and the men took to their battle stations, a message from Admiral Nimitz was read aloud over the ships’ loudspeakers:
“In the cruise just starting, you will have the opportunity to deal the enemy heavy blows. You have done this before, and I have great confidence in your courage, skill, and ability to strike even harder blows. Good hunting and good luck.”
Then came Captain Murray’s voice:
“We have reason to believe the Japanese may attempt to occupy Midway Island. We are, therefore, moving into such position to counter such an attempt should it develop.”
The Jersey Brothers Page 14