The Mantle of Command

by Nigel Hamilton

  “Measures now in hand by Pacific Fleet have not been conveyed to you in detail because of secrecy requirements,” the President explained, “but we hope you will find them effective when they can be made known to you.”28

  More, on that score, the President would not say.

  Listening to Roosevelt as he read aloud the telegram he was about to dispatch, Mackenzie King found himself intrigued, as he also imagined Churchill would be—“some venture by the Americans” that must be kept secret, the Canadian premier noted in his diary, for reasons that “would be apparent later and which could not be mentioned even to Churchill at this time. It seemed to me,” he reflected, “this had reference to some attack the American fleet intended to make, or action to keep the Japanese away from the Indian Ocean.”29

  In a sign of how the balance of power among the Western allies was now changing, the Canadian prime minister arranged with President Roosevelt to hold a military conference on allocation of Lend-Lease planes to take place in Ottawa the next month—without even bothering to first obtain Churchill’s agreement. His work done, King bade farewell to the President and spent the night of April 17, 1942, in the special sleeping car of his train, traveling to New York and arriving in the early hours of April 18.

  There, in the afternoon, the Canadian premier visited a spiritualist friend, Mrs. Coumbe—who had her own visions. “She spoke of not being alarmed about either France or India. She had a vision about large fleets and little fleets.” Quite what it meant was unclear. “It seemed to her to signify unrest in France, which would, ultimately, be all to the good,” he noted.

  Back in Car 100 on his special train, King had dinner with a friend. “After dinner, I read the papers,” he recorded, “including”—to his utter surprise—“an account of the bombing of Tokyo.”30

  The first of the President’s secret “measures,” it was clear, had begun. America was on the offensive.

  PART SEVEN

  Midway

  15

  Doolittle’s Raid

  AT 12:45 P.M. ON MAY 19, 1942, Brigadier General James Doolittle—recently promoted from the rank of colonel—was ushered into the Oval Office to meet President Roosevelt.

  Doolittle was there to receive the coveted Medal of Honor, escorted by Generals Marshall and Arnold—and pretty Mrs. Doolittle, whom the officer had not seen for more than a month, when he set off from California on his epic mission: to bomb the capital of Japan for the first time in World War II.

  Doolittle had stated in the car on the way to the White House that he didn’t feel he deserved the Medal of Honor. “General, that award should be awarded for those who risk their lives trying to save someone else,” he’d protested.

  Marshall had silenced him in six words: “I happen to think you do.”1

  So did the President, as the originator of the April 18 “Doolittle Raid.”

  Ever since the fateful day of the Pearl Harbor attack, and in the succeeding weeks as Japanese forces cut their swath down the Malay Barrier toward Australia, the President had urged his chiefs of staff to find a way to retaliate; some operation that would shake Japan’s sense of its own invincibility and show the rest of the world that the United States would retaliate against aggression—with a vengeance.

  The Tokyo raid was “a pet project of the President’s,” in Secretary Stimson’s words.2 Since Stimson himself had opposed it from the start—considering it a dispersion of effort in the Pacific, and a beacon for “sharp reprisals” by the Japanese—he was not invited to the little Oval Office ceremony, held before newsmen and press photographers. Admiral King was late and missed the photo opportunity, yet in truth he had been as intimately involved in the undertaking as Doolittle, Marshall, and Arnold—and would be significantly more affected by its consequences.

  Fleet Admiral Ernie King was the only senior admiral in the U.S. Navy with a pilot’s license, as well as command experience in submarines, aircraft carriers, battleships, and cruisers. It was King who had, early in January 1942, first suggested U.S. Navy carriers could be used to launch U.S. Army bombers in invasion operations—the planes then able to land on airfields seized or established by amphibious troops. On January 10, 1942, King had proceeded to give the go-ahead, with General Arnold, for a medium bomber B-25 group of the USAAF to start training, under U.S. Navy supervision, for abbreviated carrier-takeoff. In this instance it was not to support an invasion but to fulfill the President’s call for a bombing raid on the capital of the Japanese Empire, launched from the sea.

  General Arnold had pleaded for pressure, rather, to be put on the Soviet Union to permit a Russian airbase to be used for the takeoff and landing of the planes. The President had ruled that out as naïve. With German forces massing for a repeat of Operation Barbarossa—code-named Blue, this time—Stalin would not dare incite a Japanese declaration of war that would then force the Russians to fight not just on one but two fronts. Equally, there were no U.S. bombers currently in China for the task—indeed, those that had been sent to India on their way to support China were inevitably reassigned to defend India, once British forces fell apart in Burma and the Indian Ocean.

  Only by using U.S. carriers as mobile airfields could the President’s directive be carried out—just as the Japanese were doing in the Indian Ocean, spreading mayhem and panic. But with this difference: that American carriers, wisely, would not risk being attacked by enemy land-based aircraft. They would launch their B-25s secretly, from outside the range of Japanese land-based planes—and it had been this operation to which the President, in his cable to Winston Churchill on April 16, 1942, had mysteriously referred.

  At the very moment Prime Minister Mackenzie King was staying at the White House, a secret U.S. Navy carrier task force comprising sixteen ships, submarines, and ten thousand sailors had been sailing toward the Japanese mainland in the strictest secrecy. Once airborne, their sixteen long-distance, heavily loaded B-25 army bombers would blitz military targets in the Tokyo area, then fly on and land in western China, and there become, if all went well, the first contingent in Chiang Kai-shek’s air force, counterattacking the Japanese.

  The President had been thrilled with reports of the plan’s progress since inception. Using painted outlines on airfields to resemble mock carrier decks, the pioneering speed-aviator Colonel James Doolittle had not only adapted B-25s for the task, but had trained his crews to take off in a matter of four hundred yards, then find their targets six hundred miles away across the Pacific, avoid anticipated antiaircraft and enemy fighter fire by flying absurdly close to the ground, aim their bombs on specified, strictly military targets—and then fly another thousand miles to reach relative safety in China—the first time land-based air force bombers had ever been so launched in human history.

  Bombing their capital, Tokyo, would serve as an unmistakable warning to the Japanese public at home as well as in the front lines, the President calculated, even as their forces shelled and bombed the U.S.-Filipino defenders in the Philippines. More importantly, an air raid on Tokyo would, if successful, draw Japanese naval attention back from the Indian Ocean by demonstrating to the Japanese their failure to defend their own capital and homeland. At the very least it would force the Japanese high command to hold the major part of its navy in the Pacific, instead of sending it back to the Indian Ocean, after refueling.

  Above all it was in the Pacific, not the Indian Ocean, that the President believed the U.S. Navy could best deal with the Japanese. Under the command of Admiral Chester W. Nimitz—who had been appointed the supreme Allied commander for all waters of the Pacific east of the Solomon Islands—the U.S. Pacific Fleet could confront the Japanese juggernaut in American-controlled waters. Flying from land bases in the Hawaiian Islands and American atolls such as Midway, U.S. Army Air Force bombers and fighters could, in intimate new cooperation with U.S. Navy aircraft, then deal with the Japanese Kido Butai (literally, “mobile force”) carrier fleet on its own, American, terms.

  Strict radio silence
kept by the American task force, until it had withdrawn safely from the reach of Japanese land-based aircraft, meant that no report of the success or failure of the Doolittle Raid could be sent to Washington on April 18, 1942.

  Roosevelt had been spending the weekend at Hyde Park, in any case. When Captain McCrea, his naval aide, finally called the President from the White House to tell him that hysterical announcements had been monitored on Tokyo radio about an enemy air raid on the city, Roosevelt was coy.

  “My telephone conversation with him (about 10 A.M.) went something like this,” Captain McCrea later recalled:

  McCrea: The most important item of the morning’s report, Mr. President, is that Tokyo has experienced an air raid from U.S. planes.

  The President: Really (with a laugh)—How? Where do you suppose those planes came from?

  McCrea: That, Mr. President, is what the Japanese want to know. Our intelligence sources say that is the question in Tokyo everyone wishes an answer to—where did those planes come from?

  Roosevelt had said no more until later that afternoon, when he called McCrea, “remarking about as follows: ‘I think I can answer the question.’” The President continued, “Ask ‘Ernie’ King if he doesn’t think it a good idea to say that the raid came from Shangri-la. If so, when the word reaches Japan, every Japanese will be busy looking at his or her equivalent of a Rand McNally atlas!”3

  Captain McCrea had done as instructed. “I called Admiral King and told him what the President had said. Admiral King laughed softly, and thought well of the idea.”

  “Shangri-la”—the fictional valley in James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon, where a group of downed airplane passengers landed—thus became the President’s response when questioned by the press, asking for details, on his return to Washington on April 21, 1942.

  The Japanese military, by contrast, were incensed, once they figured out the mystery. An entire U.S. naval task force had approached Japan without being identified! Japanese air defenses had been either nonexistent or deplorable where they did exist—not a single B-25 had been shot down or even hit.

  The triumph of the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor had thus been avenged, leading the Japanese military to embark on reprisals against the populace in China, reprisals of almost unimaginable atrocity: a fury of executions, butchery, and slaughter of civilians accused of harboring the American fliers responsible for bombing their capital city—Chiang Kai-shek cabling in a panic to say the Japanese were murdering as many as a quarter million Chinese civilians for harboring and aiding Doolittle’s fliers, after they crash-landed or bailed out of their planes at night over western China. “The Japanese troops slaughtered every man, woman, and child in those areas—let me repeat—these Japanese troops slaughtered every man, woman, and child in those areas,” the generalissimo wired.4

  Murdering tens—even hundreds—of thousands of Chinese civilians was not going to win the war against the United States for Japan, however. In the headquarters of the Japanese high command there was consternation that the protective screen around Tokyo had proven as assailable as the American defenses at Pearl Harbor. Thus, failing to catch a task force under Admiral William Halsey’s command before it could withdraw, the Japanese Combined Fleet staff argued over how best to respond to what amounted to an embarrassing, even shaming, defeat: one that was seen as a direct insult to their revered Emperor, since the American planes had flown right over the imperial palace, as if mocking its vulnerability. A distraught woman had broken in to Radio Tokyo’s broadcast, shouting: “Your lives are in danger. Your country is in danger. Tomorrow—even tonight—your children may be blown to bits. Give your blood. Save them. Save yourselves. Save Japan.”5

  Even Secretary Stimson was astonished by the hysterical Japanese reaction to the Tokyo raid.

  The Japanese, Stimson noted in his diary, “have been taken wholly by surprise and were very much agitated by it, and it is quite interesting to see their conduct under such conditions. It has not been at all well self-controlled. I have always been a little doubtful about this project, which has been a pet project of the President’s, because I fear that it will only result in sharp reprisals from the Japanese without doing them very much harm. But I will say that it has had a very good psychological effect on the country, both here and abroad and it has had also a very wholesome effect on Japan’s public sentiment.”6

  Stimson was right. The raid on Tokyo was taken by many in Japan’s homeland as an evil omen: a harbinger of how the nation would one day be punished for its devotion to the god of total war. A Samurai nation that had not itself been invaded for thousands of years had embarked on a rash war of conquest across the entire Pacific and Southeast Asia—and only four months after its triumph at Pearl Harbor was rudely reminded what the cost might be. As one woman wrote her cousin, a Japanese pilot in the South Pacific, the “knowledge that the enemy was strong enough to smash our homeland, even in what might be a punitive raid, was cause for serious apprehension of future and heavier attacks.”7

  The effect was to be far more consequential than public sentiment, however. An April editorial in Japan’s New Order in Greater East Asia had forecast that the United States and Britain would soon decline into “second-rate or third-rate powers, or even to total disintegration and collapse.”8 The Tokyo raid seemed to contradict that prediction.

  Such an unanticipated, successful American air attack demonstrated to the Japanese high command the need to finish what the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had started: the destruction of America’s remaining naval power in the central Pacific.

  For some time Admiral Yamamoto, the commander in chief of the Japanese Imperial Fleet, had been arguing that the U.S. Pacific Fleet should be lured from its base at Pearl Harbor and dealt with, once and for all. His recommendation had been ignored, since Japanese invasion forces had been advancing farther and farther in the South Pacific, virtually without opposition. Why risk that success—which required constant naval carrier and warship support—to embark on an old-fashioned fleet naval battle? Japanese forces were, after all, almost at the southern end of the Malay Barrier, in Borneo. An amphibious invasion of the south coast of Borneo around Port Moresby, only three hundred miles north of Australia, would, if backed by a Japanese naval carrier force, enable Japan to cauterize Australia as an Allied military base, and allow Japanese forces then to take New Caledonia, Fiji, and the Samoan Islands—thus severing Australia’s tenuous maritime communications with America. This seemed a far more effective strategy than risking a fleet battle in open seas.

  The Doolittle Raid, however, had upset such calculations. Admiral Yamamoto, it now appeared, was right: the U.S. Pacific Fleet was too powerful to be left untouched. The humiliating American air attack on Japan’s capital now gave Yamamoto the ammunition he needed—claiming that he must, at all costs, cauterize Pearl Harbor as the base of the carrier fleet from which Doolittle’s bombers had sprung.

  Given the number of bombers and fighter planes that the U.S. Army had since Pearl Harbor sent out to the Hawaiian Islands, another Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor would now be suicidal, as would an attempted invasion, Yamamoto accepted. But seizure of the atoll of Midway, an American military and air base 1,325 miles west of Hawaii, would give the Japanese an airfield for land-based planes with which to keep the American fleet locked up at Hawaii, while the Japanese Kido Butai carried out its operations in the South Pacific—or Indian Ocean. If the U.S. Pacific Fleet allowed itself to be lured out to contest the Midway landings, so much the better! The carriers that escaped destruction at Pearl Harbor could in that case finally be attacked by superior Japanese fliers’ skills, and sunk.

  Thus on April 20, 1942, the day after Doolittle’s raid, the Japanese plan to seize New Caledonia, Samoa, and Fiji in order to cut America’s sea communications with Australia was put on hold. Instead, a massive Japanese air, naval, and amphibious assault on Midway would be undertaken by the Japanese Imperial Navy, with ten thousand troops loaded on
transports, just as soon as naval forces assigned to the imminent capture of Port Moresby, the Australian base in New Guinea, had completed their task and could be withdrawn.

  And with that fateful decision, in the wake of the President’s latest “pet project,” the great Japanese march of victories in the Pacific came to its peak.

  16

  The Battle of Midway

  IF THE PRESIDENT WAS NERVOUS about a major Japanese naval reaction to the Doolittle Raid, he refused to let his concerns show. A leader must exhibit confidence, he felt, since the slightest hint of anxiety or dejection would spread like ripples in a pond. It was for others—Stimson, Knox, Marshall, Arnold, King—to worry and second-guess; for him to solicit information, views, and observations before making his ultimate decisions as commander in chief.

  Despite being (or in part because of being) surrounded by men and women who revered him, the President was lonely for the kind of relationships in which he could let down his guard—as Daisy Suckley, FDR’s cousin and close friend, noted in her diary. His longtime secretary, office manager, and daily companion, Marguerite “Missy” LeHand, had been paralyzed by a stroke in June 1941. Sara Roosevelt, the President’s mother, had died in September of that year. He missed their company. Eleanor had her own cottage on the Hyde Park estate, Val-kill (valley stream)—two miles away from the “Big House,” which stood empty most of the time now. (In 1938 Roosevelt had built his own cottage, “Top Cottage,” on the hill above the Big House, but Sara had forbidden him to spend the night away from the mansion—and her—while she was alive.) “The house has no hostess most of the time,” Daisy recorded matter-of-factly, “as his wife is here so rarely—always off on a speaking tour, etc.”1