All Hell Let Loose

by Hastings, Max

  2 THE CORAL SEA AND MIDWAY

  In January 1942, the Japanese seized Rabaul, on New Britain, and transformed it into a major air and naval hub. In the full flight of euphoria following their triumphs – ‘victory disease’, as sceptics among Hirohito’s people came to call it – they determined to extend their South Pacific holdings to embrace Papua, the Solomons, Fiji, New Caledonia and Samoa. The navy persuaded the army to agree an advance to a new imperial outer perimeter with Midway atoll in the centre and the Aleutians in the north, which should be seized from the Americans. They would then have bases from which they could interdict supply routes to Australia, now the Allies’ main staging post for the Asian war.

  Even before Corregidor fell, the Americans made a gesture which dismayed and provoked their enemies, because it provided an early hint of Japan’s vulnerability and lent urgency to their further endeavours. Lt. Col. James Doolittle’s 18 April air strike against Tokyo by sixteen B-25 bombers, launched from the carrier Hornet 650 miles from Japan, was materially insignificant but morally important. Heartening the Allied peoples in a season of defeats, it was an imaginative act of military theatre, of the kind in which Churchill often indulged. It persuaded the Japanese that they must seize Midway, America’s westernmost Pacific foothold, held since 1867. Once Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto had aircraft based on Midway, these could frustrate further Doolittle-style adventures.

  Japan’s objectives would prove disastrously over-ambitious; but the alternative, from Tokyo’s perspective, was to concede to the Americans freedom to mass forces for a counterstroke. Yamamoto and his colleagues knew that, unless the US could be kept under relentless pressure, Japanese defeat was inevitable. Their only credible strategy, they believed, was to strike at the Allies again and again, until Washington bowed to the logic of Japanese dominance and negotiated a settlement. Above all, the Imperial Navy sought to engage and destroy US warships at sea.

  Before addressing Midway, the Japanese moved against Papua and the Solomons. At the beginning of May 1942, three invasion convoys set sail for Port Moresby, protected by powerful strike and covering forces including three carriers. Vice-Admiral Shigeyoshi Inoue, directing operations, hoped that an American fleet would seek to intervene, for he expected to destroy it. The amphibious force destined for Tulagi island in the south Solomons, a few miles off Guadalcanal, landed unopposed on 3 May. Next day, aircraft from the carrier Yorktown struck Japanese ships offshore, sinking a destroyer and two smaller vessels, but the destruction was disappointing, when the attackers enjoyed almost ideal conditions.

  On 5 May a US fleet with a small Australian contingent, led by Rear-Admiral Frank Fletcher and forewarned by Ultra intelligence of Japanese intentions, steamed to intercept Inoue’s main force. At dawn on 7 May in the Coral Sea, Fletcher dispatched his cruisers, led by British Rear-Admiral John Crace, to attack the enemy’s transports. Fletcher was misinformed about enemy locations. US air squadrons, instead of finding the Japanese carriers, chanced upon Inoue’s amphibious force. Its transports promptly turned away, to await the outcome of the fleet encounter. Crace withdrew, on learning that he was advancing into empty ocean. Planes from Lexington scored an early success, sinking the small carrier Shoho. Meanwhile Fletcher’s carrier group had an extraordinarily lucky escape. The Japanese fleet was 175 miles astern of him; his own planes were absent when enemy aircraft sank and destroyed an American tanker and escorting destroyer which were trailing his task groups. If Inoue’s bombers had flown further and found the US carriers, these would have been exposed to disaster. As it was, on that first day both rival admirals groped ineffectually.

  Next morning, 8 May, as sunrise came at 0655, sailors in foetid confinement below took turns to snatch breaths of clean air from vents or scuttles, as waves of American and Japanese aircraft lifted off from their respective flight decks. Lt. Cmdr. Bob Dixon, who had led the previous day’s air attack on Shoho, again distinguished himself by locating the Japanese fleet. He lingered overhead to maintain surveillance, nursing his engine to save fuel – a constant preoccupation of naval fliers.

  The first wave of US aircraft located and attacked the carrier Shokaku, inflicting significant but not fatal damage. Most of the torpedo-carriers and dive-bombers missed. The strikes were poorly coordinated. Dive-bomber crews suffered severe problems when their sighting telescopes and windshields misted up during the steep descent from ‘pushover’ at 17,000 feet to ‘pull-up’ at 1,500. Pilots fumed at their own lack of speed and defensive firepower against Japanese fighters. Commander Bill Ault got lost on his way home, a frequent and fatal error in that vast ocean. He sent a laconic farewell message before ditching and vanishing forever: ‘Okay, so long people. Remember we got a thousand-pound hit on the flat top.’ But Shokaku survived. Lt. Cmdr. Paul Stroop, a staff officer aboard Lexington, acknowledged ruefully, ‘We should have been more effective.’

  And even as the Americans were diving on Inoue’s fleet, the Japanese struck Fletcher’s ships much harder. When radar reported enemy aircraft closing, the US carrier captains called for twenty-five-knot flank speed and began evasive action before meeting shoals of incoming torpedoes, a rain of bombs. Yorktown suffered a single hit which killed more than forty men, and a near-miss which momentarily blasted the ship’s racing screws clear of the water. Her captain asked the engine room if he should reduce speed, to receive the defiant answer: ‘Hell no, we’ll make it.’ But Lexington’s full helm turn as torpedoes approached failed to save her: the 40,000-ton carrier was struck with devastating effect. ‘It was pretty discouraging to see these Japanese launch their torpedoes then fly very close to the ship to get a look at us,’ said Paul Stroop. ‘They were curious and sort of thumbed their noses at us. We were shooting at them with our new 20mms and not hitting them at all.’ Blazes broke out which found plentiful tinder – inflammable bulkhead paint, wooden furniture such as no US warship would carry again. Half-naked sailors suffered terrible burns – ‘the skin was literally dripping from their bodies’. This was the last time American crews willingly exposed flesh in action. After just thirteen minutes the Japanese planes turned away, leaving a shambles which greeted Fletcher’s airmen returning from their own strike.

  Heroic efforts were made to control Lexington’s fires: Lt. Milton Ricketts, sole survivor of a damage-control team wiped out by a bomb, was himself mortally wounded, but ran out a hose and began playing water on the flames before collapsing dead. Soon, however, in Stroop’s words ‘fires had gotten increasingly violent and we were beginning to get explosions … that sounded like a freight train rumbling up the hangar deck … A rushing wall of flame … would erupt around the perimeter of the elevator.’ Leaking gasoline fumes triggered a massive blast below decks: ammunition began to cook off; the decision was made to abandon the ship. Its senior officer, Admiral Fitch, walked calmly across the flight deck accompanied by a marine orderly clutching his jacket and dispatches, to be picked up by a destroyer’s boat below. Men in their hundreds began to leap into the water. The rescuers were so effective that only 216 of Lexington’s crew were lost out of 2,735, but a precious carrier was gone. Yorktown was severely damaged, though she was able to complete landing on planes two minutes after sunset. In the small hours of darkness, the dead were buried over the side, in expectation of renewed action next day.

  The Battle of the Coral Sea

  But the battle was done: both fleets turned away. Fletcher’s task groups had lost 543 lives, sixty aircraft and three ships including Lexington. Inoue lost over 1,000 men and seventy-seven aircraft – the carrier Zuikaku’s air group suffered heavy attrition. But the balance of destruction favoured the Japanese, who had better planes than the Americans and handled them more effectively. Amazingly, however, Inoue abandoned the operation against Port Moresby and retired, conceding strategic success to the US Navy. Here, once again, was a manifestation of Japanese timidity: victory was within their grasp, but they failed to press their advantage. Never again would they enjoy such an opportunity to esta
blish dominance of the Pacific.

  In the course of the war, the US Navy would show itself the most impressive of its nation’s fighting services, but it faced a long, harsh learning process. Several early commanders were found wanting, because they were slow to grasp the principles of carrier operations, which would dominate the Pacific campaign. American fliers’ courage was never in doubt, but at the outset their performance lagged behind that of their enemies. At Pearl Harbor, albeit against an unprepared and static enemy, Japanese planes achieved the remarkable record of nineteen hits and detonations out of forty torpedo launches, a record no other navy matched. When US carrier planes attacked Tulagi anchorage on 3 May 1942 against slight opposition, twenty-two Douglas Devastator torpedo-bombers achieved just one hit. Attacking Shokaku two days later, twenty-one Devastators scored no hits at all. Most American torpedoes, the Japanese said later, were launched too far out, and ran so slowly that they were easily avoidable.

  Among US naval aircraft, the Coral Sea battle showed that the Dauntless dive-bomber was alone up to its job, not least in having adequate endurance. The Devastator was ‘a real turkey’, in the words of a flier, further handicapped by high fuel consumption. Worst of all, Mk 13 aerial and Mk 14 sea-launched torpedoes were wildly unreliable, unlikely to explode even if they hit a target. A most un-American reluctance to learn from experience meant that this fault, afflicting submarine as much as air operations, was not fully corrected until 1943.

  War at sea was statistically much less dangerous than ashore for all participants save such specialists as aviators and submariners. Conflict was impersonal: sailors seldom glimpsed the faces of their enemies. The fate of every ship’s crew was overwhelmingly at the mercy of its captain’s competence, judgement – and luck. Seamen of all nations suffered cramped living conditions and much boredom, but peril intervened only in spasms. Individuals were called upon to display fortitude and commitment, but seldom enjoyed the opportunity to choose whether or not to be brave. That was a privilege reserved for their commanders, who issued the orders determining the movements of ships and fleets. The overwhelming majority of sailors, performing technical functions aboard huge sea-going war machines, made only tiny, indirect personal contributions to killing their enemies.

  Carrier operations represented the highest and most complex refinement of naval warfare. ‘The flight deck looked like a big war dance of different colors,’ wrote a sailor aboard Enterprise. ‘The ordnance gang wore red cloth helmets and a red T-shirt when they went about their work of loading machine-guns, fusing bombs, and hoisting torpedoes … Other specialties wore different colors. Brown for the plane captains – one attached to each plane – green for the hydraulic men who manned the arresting gear and the catapults, yellow for the landing signal officer and deck control people, purple for the oil and gas kings … Everything was “on the double” and took place with whirling propellers everywhere, waiting to mangle the unwary.’ The US Navy would refine carrier assault to a supreme art, but in 1942 it was still near the bottom of the curve: not only were its planes inferior to those of the Japanese, but commanders had not yet evolved the right mix of fighters, dive-bombers and torpedo-carriers for each ‘flat-top’ – after the Coral Sea, captains deplored the inadequate proportion of Wildcats. US anti-aircraft gunnery was no more effective than that of the Royal Navy. Radar sets were short-sighted in comparison with those of the later war years. Damage control, which became an outstanding American skill, was poor.

  The US Navy boasted a fine fighting tradition, but its 1942 crews were still dominated by men enlisted in peacetime, often because they could find nothing else to do. Naval airman Alvin Kiernan wrote:

  Many of the sailors were there, as I was, because there were few jobs in Depression America … We would have denied that we were an underclass … There wasn’t such a thing in America, we thought – conveniently forgetting that blacks and Asians were allowed to serve in the navy only as officers’ cooks and mess attendants. Our teeth were terrible from Depression neglect, we had not always graduated from high school, none had gone to college, our complexions tended to acne, and we were for the most part foul-mouthed, and drunkenly rowdy when on liberty … I used to wonder why so many of us were skinny, bepimpled, sallow, short and hairy.

  Cecil King, chief ship’s clerk on Hornet, recalled: ‘We had a small group of real no-goodniks. I mean these kids were not necessarily honest-to-God gangsters, but they were involved in anything that was seriously wrong on the ship – heavy gambling and extortion. One night one of them was thrown over the side.’ For most men, naval service required years of monotony and hard labour, interrupted by brief passages of violent action. A few, including King, actively enjoyed carrier life: ‘I just felt at home at sea. I felt like that’s what the Navy’s all about. Many times I would wander around the ship, particularly in the late afternoon, just enjoying being there. I would go over to the deck edge elevator and stand and watch the ocean going by. I feel like I’m probably one of the luckiest people in the entire world … for having been born in the year that I was, to be able to fight for my country in World War II; this whole era … is something that I feel real privileged for having gone through.’

  The expansion of the US Navy’s officer corps made a dramatic and brilliant contribution to the service’s later success, and some learned to love the sea service and the responsibilities it conferred on them. Most ordinary sailors, however – especially as ships began to fill with wartime recruits – did their duty honourably enough, but found little to enjoy. Some found it all too much for them: a sailor on Hornet climbed out on the mast yardarm, and hung 160 feet over the sea trying to muster nerve to jump and kill himself until dissuaded by the chaplain and the ship’s doctor. He was sent to the US for psychiatric evaluation – and eventually returned to Hornet in time to share the ship’s sinking, the fate of which he had been so fearful.

  Those who experienced the US Navy’s early Pacific battles saw much of failure, loss and defeat. The horrors of ships’ sinkings were often increased by fatal delays before survivors were located and rescued. The Pacific is a vast ocean, and many of those who fell into it, even from large warships, were never seen again. When the damaged light cruiser Juneau blew up after a magazine explosion on passage to the repair base at Espiritu Santu, gunner’s mate Allan Heyn was one of those who suddenly found himself struggling for his life: ‘There was oil very thick on the water, it was at least two inches thick, and all kinds of blueprints and documents floating around, roll after roll of toilet paper. I couldn’t see anybody. I thought: “Gee, am I the only one here” … Then I heard a man cry and I looked around it was this boatswain’s mate … He said he couldn’t swim and he had his whole leg torn off … I helped him on the raft … It was a very hard night because most of the fellows were wounded badly, and they were in agony. You couldn’t recognize each other unless you knew a man very well before the ship went down.’ After three days, their party had shrunk from 140 men to fifty; on the ninth day after Juneau’s loss, the ship’s ten remaining survivors were picked up by a destroyer and a Catalina flying boat. Sometimes, vessels vanished with the loss of every man aboard, as was almost always the case with submarines.

  The Japanese began the war at sea with a corps of highly experienced seamen and aviators armed with the Long Lance torpedo, most effective weapon of its kind in the world. Their radar sets were poor, and many ships lacked them altogether. They lagged woefully in intelligence-gathering, but excelled at night operations, and in early gunnery duels often shot straighter than Americans. Their superb Zero fighters increased combat endurance by forgoing cockpit armour and self-sealing fuel tanks. The superiority of Japanese naval air in 1942 makes all the more astonishing the outcome of the next phase of the war in the Pacific.

  Admiral Yamamoto strove with all the urgency that characterised his strategic vision to force a big engagement. Less than a month after the bungled Coral Sea action, he launched his strike against Midway atoll, committing 145
warships to an ambitious, complex operation intended to split US forces. A Japanese fleet would advance north against the Aleutians, while the main thrust was made at Midway. Nagumo’s four fleet carriers – Zuikaku and Shokaku were left behind after their Coral Sea mauling – would approach the island from the north-west, with Yamamoto’s fast battleships three hundred miles behind; a flotilla of transports, carrying 5,000 troops to execute the landing, would close from the south-west.

  Yamamoto may have been a clever man and a sympathetic personality, but the epic clumsiness of the Midway plan emphasised his shortcomings. It required him to divide his strength; worse, it reflected characteristic Japanese hubris, by discounting even the possibility of American foreknowledge. As it was, Admiral Chester Nimitz, the US Navy’s Pacific Commander-in-Chief, knew the enemy was coming. By one of the war’s most brilliant feats of intelligence work, Commander Joseph Rochefort at Pearl Harbor used fragmentary Ultra decrypts to identify Midway as Nagumo’s objective. On 28 May the Japanese switched their naval codebooks, which thereafter defied Rochefort’s cryptographers for weeks. By miraculous luck, however, this happened just too late to frustrate the breakthrough that betrayed Yamamoto’s Midway plan.