by War
Still Yamamoto grimly bore eastward. His aim now was to force a night action. if only he could himself encounter the thin-skinned American carriers! His great guns could sink them !ike ferryboats, lay waste to the screening vessels, and turn defeat into victory; and he could then still take Midway. The whole hope now was that Americans in hot pursuit would spit themselves on the eighteen-inch guns of the Yamato, the tremendous firepower of the other battleships and cruisers, and the devastating "long-lance" torpedoes of the Japanese destroyer squadrons.
Had Vice Admiral william F. Halsey been in command of the United States ships that probably would have happened. In such situations Halsey's nature was to fling himself with impetuous bellicosity after his wounded foe.
But Raymond Spruance was in command. Spruance steamed toward the oncoming Yamamoto force just long enough to catch the Hiryu and destroy it. He then recovered his aircraft and reversed course to the eastward away from the enemy. After midnight he again reversed course, and at dawn he was back in position to protect Midway with air cover from a possible landing.
This maneuver was the key to the victory at Midway; the finest command decision in the Pacific war, and one of the finest in the history of sea combat. it was wisdom itself, simplicity itself, with world consequences at stake.
It was not so regarded at the time. Spruance was chided even during the battle by his superiors in Pearl Harbor and Washington for failing to pursue the beaten foe that night. His own staff -or rather, Halsey's staff, which did not like or understand their new nonaviator admiral-was disconcirted by his decision.
Afterward, staff officers asserted that radar would have detected oncoming surface forces, and so the task force should never have lost contact with the enemy. This view persists in American military literature, and Raymond Spruance is still sometimes called an overcautious officer.
The criticism is erroneous. Having already won a crucial battle with far inferior forces, this brilliant commander would not stake his victory on a new electronic gadget. Instead, he put his fleet where without question it remained both secure and dangerous.
Neither Spruance nor Nimitz knew where Yamamoto's battleships were. Rear Admiral Spruance escaped Yamamoto's terrible trap by acting on perfect military instinct. Not till many months later did American intelligence ferret out the facts about Yamamoto's moves, which confirmed Spruance's blind second decision as a historic masterstroke.
Spruance's Third Decision
Shortly after midnight Yamamoto sensed that he had been foiled, that the night action would not take place, and that daylight might find him well within range of Midway's airplanes.
Anguished flag conferences ensued. For Yamamoto and his staff, huddling in the luxurious undamaged flag country of the mightiest battleship afloat, leading a battle line of stupendous firepower through the night, there must have been a sickening sense of frustration. The combined fleet was like a gorilla confronting a cobra; if only once it could lay its paws on its puny foe and tear it to ribbons! But the cobra had struck and vanished. Yamamoto's operations officer, the same Captain Kuroshima, now put forward a gallant proposal. Let the Imperial Fleet steam straight on to the atoll, and with dawn's first light let it pulverize the air installations with gunfire and proceed with the landing! The atoll's planes had failed against Nagumo, after all, and a swarm of them had splashed. The ones that remained must be poor stuff - As for the American carriers, they had suffered huge plane losses, and two (as he thought) were out of action or sunk.
The concentrated AA of the Main Force, with cruiser float planes and the aircraft of two light carriers, could surely handle the surviving American carrier strength. But the plan was hooted at as suicidal folly. There was little impulse for daring left in the staff.
Yamamoto straightway rejected Kuroshima's idea, and with all respect to this great warrior's memory, the present writer wonders why.
Spruance was in fact substantially weakened by plane losses. The Midway air strength was a shoddy mishmash of ineffective army and marine units. However, there is an inexorable rhythm to battles.
The time for dash had passed on the Japanese side.
Nevertheless Yamamoto was more than ready to fight on in his own way.
The atoll.could n-of now be seized, but the small Pacific Fleet had been drawn far out beyond its Pearl Harbor air umbrella, and that was a great chance. If only it could be brought to battle and smashed, history would still call the Midway operation a success.
Yamamoto projected two more traps for the foe. He would retreat westward. No doubt the enemy would pursue with harassing tactics. He hoped now to lure the foe within the seven-hundred-mile airpower circle of Wake Island, and there pounce on him with his great force-battleships, heavy cruisers, and destroyer divisions. This giant force had not yet fired a gun or seen an enemy aircraft. That it was in retreat from two battle-worn American carriers and their escorts was grotesque.
Simultaneously, he ordered the carriers in the Aleutians to attack again. The capture of Attu and Kiska was to proceed. The American fleet might then be ordered north, where it would run into four heavy cruisers, a light carrier, and the formidable carrier ZLiikaku, at last repaired, replenished withfresh pilots and aircraft, and making for the Aleutians at top speed.
The two arms of the gorilla, as it were, would grasp at the cobra from the west and the north.
Spruance did pursue. Naval men say that "a stern chase is a long chase." The last phase dragged on for two days as Yamamoto fell back and the American fleet hunted him. Spruances surviving dive-bombers did very poorly against targets smaller than aircraft carriers. The only other sinking during the long chase, in fact, was an already damaged heavy cruiser, which had collided with a sister ship in a submarine scare. Kuroshima may have been profoundly right in guessing that Spruance was no threat to the heavy Main Force. But the staff on the Enterprise kept urging Spruance ever westward. The requirement to pursue and annihilate was for them holy writ.
Spruance's third major decision was to disregard this urging, and strong messages from Nimitz as well; to break off the pursuit, and end the battle. He would not enter the airpower circle of Wake Island.
This seems a sort of clairvoyance. He is e done reported to have put it very simply to his staff: "We have just about all the damage we are going to do. Let's get out of here." His vessels were low on fuel; his aviators were exhausted; an enemy of unknown but heavy strength eluded him beyond the horizon; the known menace of land-based air cancelled out the doctrine of pursuit. So Rear Admiral Raymond Spruance decided, and so he sealed the Midway victory.
At the last moment his work was almost undone, for Chester von Nimitz took the Aleutian bait, and ordered Spruance north!
Fortunately, Nimitz later thought better of this, and cancelled the order. On June 11th, Task Force Sixteen returned to Pearl Harbor to learn that Army Air Corps bombers had won the Battle of Midway by sinking four carriers, several battleships, etc etc.
The story was in every newspaper. it was in the weekly magazines.
All Hawaii believed it. For a time, all America believed it.
Raymond Spruance never issued a contradictory public account.
In footnotes to postwar reports and memoirs, the Army Air Corps acknowledged that it did no damage at Midway.
Once, much later in life, when complemented on his victory, Raymond Spruance responded, "There were a hundred Spruances in the Navy. They just happened to pick me for the job." fact, there was only one Spruance and luck gave him, at a fateful hour, to America.
Strategically, the great Nimitz-Spruance victory accomplished three things: 1. American submarines could continue to depart with full fuel bunkers from Midway instead of Pearl Harbor, a round-trip difference of 2300 miles. This multiplied their killing power in the war. William F. Halsey later wrote that the submarine campaign was the first cause Of Japan's defeat.
2. Japan's first-line carrier squadrons were drowned or shot down Off Midway. The loss of this cadre of leade
rs and trainers could never be made up.
3. Japan passed overnight, in morale, from plan to desperation.
Morally, from 10:30 A.M. June 4,1942, onward, Japan was on the run, though this brave race gavl% a good account of itself to the last.
Yamamoto: Vale
The trounced Imperial Fleet skulked back into Hiroshima Bay.
Yamamoto still did not know that he had been beaten not by Nimitz, nor even by the famous Halsey, but by an anonymous replacement, olucked from the ranks of American rear admirals.
The Americans sent but four rear admirals into the fight: Fletcher, Spruance, and the two screen commanders. By contrast, the Imperial Fleet sailed under the great Fleet Admiral Yamamoto himself, flanked by five vice admirals and thirteen rear admirals. In essence, Yamamoto took his headquarters to-sea.
Nimitz elected to keep his ashore, where it could use the radio, get information, and maintain broad perspective. Nimitz's course was the sounder.
Yamamoto, who had brought off the i-nonumental air victory of Pearl Harbor, rode through Midway on a silenced giant, the world's biggest gunship. In retrospect, he seems not to have grasped the lesson of sea-air power which he himself taught the world. In his battle plan, the carriers were to clear away the land-based air menace; then he was to steam forward in massive grandeur with the Main Body, meet the Nimitz fleet head-on, and win the Pacific Battle of the Skagerrak. This delusory vision kept him out of action at Midway.
Radio Tokyo claimed a vast triumph, but the name of Midway was thereafter blotted from Japanese war reporting. The survivors were put into quarantine. So many records were suppressed or lost that the Japanese side of the battle will never be adequately documented. Yet Yamamoto did not fall. He was Japan's greatest military figure. He had been a naval attach!& in the United States. He had represented Japan at the naval conferences of the 1920s, and had won equality for her with the white man's sea powers. He had been against the war with America, but given his sailing orders, he had done his best.
Yamamoto continued to lead his navy until April 1943, when Admiral von Nimitz, learning that Yamamoto was making an air tour of the South Pacific, ordered his plane ambushed and destroyed. So this great man perished. The final stain was on Nimitz. Between Achilles and Hector, there might have been more honor than this sneak murder.
At Midway, the colored man's dramatic military surge in the industrial age was thrown back; perhaps not for all time, since most of mankind is colored; but certainly for fifty or a hundred years. Midway was a solid recovery of the upper hand by the Caucasian after his collapse at Singapore.
Yet before the figure of Isoroku Yamamoto, the military analyst must pause. If Nagumo turned in the typical performance of the colored man under pressure-erratic, dilatory, dithering-Yamamoto rose to disaster with firmness, nobility, and ingenuity worthy of a Moltke or a Manstein. Europe and America should remember that Asia can produce such men.
Midway: The Final Lesson
The five-minute overturn that struck the Japanese nation at Midway compels a final reflection.
Industrial-scientific developments since that time have made possible Midway-style lightning holocausts of entire countries. The new Midway which now threatens is, as is well known, atomic surprise and counter-surprise with colossal rockets, between U.S. capitalism and Russian Bolshevism. These twin brutish materialisms of our age are spiritual hells, incapable of controlling the forces they wield. Today both carry the logic of the aircraft carrier much further. Their entire land masses and their whole populations are now flattop and crew; and both nations are vulnerable and destructive to an unheard-of degree..
The tale must proceed to its dark end. Perhaps our own Prostrate, sundered, and mutilated Fatherland will out of its great agony in World War II produce a new philosopher-a Kant, a Hegel, a Nietzsche-to point a way out of mankind's dread cul-de-sac. The German genius has always been for such Faustian reaching beyond the given.
Otherwise the prospect is grave. The Americans and the Russians are blood-brothers in uncultured hardness, though the Americans sometimes seem comfort-mad and the Russians woolvheaded. it means little or nothing to them that in their duel of dimwitted giants most life on earth is menaced, and all human advancement since Roman times seems condemned. As things stand now, one or another of their small allies will one unexpected day prove the Serbia or Poland of the Third World War. it will be no war in the old sense, however. It will be a lightning Midway of the continents.
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: Roon's racial viewpoint is beneath comment The shooting down of Fleet Admiral Yamamoto was ordered by the secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, a former newspaper Publisher. Chester Nimitz was apprised of the plan, and endorsed it on the grounds that Yamamoto was irreplaceable, and in military value to Japan, equal perhaps to four carriers. The JaPanese joined Hitler's criminal attack on civilization and had to bear the consequences, Yamamoto among them. - v.H.
Captain HENRY SAT slouched over the detective novel in the sea cabin, his head on his hand, a cigarette burning down in his fingers.
"The aviators are breaking radio silence, Capon." Bines, the quartermaster, saluting in the doorway.
"Very well." He leaped up and hurried to the wheelhouse, where his attempt to settle at ease in his high chair deceived nobody. The ship's clowns had long been mimicking his stooped posture and quick cigarette gestures when he was tense. Knowing glances went among the men on watch as he crouched and smoked, staring out to sea. Through the bridge loudspeakers came scratchy talk from the weak faraway aircraft transmitters: "... Earl, you take that one on the left...
Commencing our attack... Hey! Zeroes at eleven o'clock...
Victor Sail Six, this is Tim Satterlee, I'm hit and ditching, wish me luck...
Wow, took at that big bastard burn!... "
"Sounds like they're doing pretty good, sir," ventured the exec, who was pacing and mopping sweat from his face.
Pug only nodded, straining his ears in vain for the timbre of his son's voice; the keyed-up youngsters out there all sounded alike.
These garbled fragments peppered with hot obscenities brought laughter and noisy chatter on the bridge, which Pug for once overlooked in his own excitement.
When the transmissions petered out, Captain Henry glanced about him and the bridge talk died. Long silence, with crackling of static.
Returning pilots began to give calm position reports, sometimes with a wry joke, as their fuel ran out and they prepared to ditch; from Warren, not a word.
After a while radar reported "friendlies" approaching. The fleet swung ponderously into the wind. Pug's lookouts reported specks low in the western sky, which grew into airplanes roaring in over the screen to the carriers. The Yorktown, hull down far to the west, was landing its planes, too. As the aircraft came straggling into Pug's binoculars, he resolved not to worry if no SBD made a wing-waggling pass over him.
Warren would have a fuel problem like the rest, and might be ditching.
Still, as the Enterprise dive-bombers landed, he counted them.
Thirty-two had departed. Ten... eleven... twelve... A long interval went by; long for him, anyway. Plane after plane kept landing on the Horhet; a few on the Enterprise, but no more dive-bombers...
"Dauntless off the starboard bow, Captain!" A shout of the quartermaster from the other wing. Pug darted through the bridge house. Rocking its white-starred wings, the plane thrummed over the forecastle and veered off toward the Enterprise, the goggled pilot waving a long arm. Victor Henry kept his face seaward, watching the aircraft come in to land.
He would not put a hand up to his wet eyes. Nobody on the bridge came near him. So several minutes passed.
From the bridge house, the exec called, "Yorktown reports many bogies on radar, Captain. Bearing two seventy-five, distance forty.
Closing speed two hundred knots."
. Pug managed to articulate, "Very well. Go to General Quarters."
On the Enterprise, the landing officer sliced a paddle pa
st his throat in a grinning cut. Warren's wheels'thumped on the deck. Joy swept him as the drag of the arresting gear strained him against his belt. Home! He gunned forward over the flattened barriers, killed the engine, and jumped out with his chart board, slapping COmett on the back as the radioman leaped to the deck. Quickly the handlers shoved the plane toward the elevator.
"Well, we made it," Warren tried to yell over the engine noise of another bomber slanting in to land. The sudden wailing of the general alarm drowned him out. Sailors streamed over the flight deck to battle stations, avoidin the Dauntless that slammed down (6-S-9, Pete Golf, God bless him!). Bells clanged, and the loudspeaker bellowed, "Stand by to launch fighters." Cornett trotted off. Warren dropped into the nearest AA tub. The helmeted gun crew turned surprised eyes at this aviator fallen among them, and the telephone talker gestured toward the flat gray hump on the horizon to the west. "Fire control reports a mess of bogies going for the Yorktown, Lieutenant."