D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC

by Donald L. Miller

  Halsey hoped to get within 500 miles of the target before launching Doolittle’s bombers. But when Hornet and its powerful escort force reached a point 650 miles from the Japanese coast they ran into enemy picket boats. The task force destroyed them, but there was the possibility that the Japanese had already radioed the presence of the Americans. Doolittle doubted that his planes could fly from this point, hit Tokyo, and still make the Chinese mainland. It was abort or go. Halsey said to go. “The wind and sea were so strong that morning that green water was breaking over the carrier’s ramps,” Halsey wrote later. “Jimmy led his squadron. When his plane buzzed down … the Hornet’s deck … there wasn’t a man topside who didn’t sweat him into the air.”79

  Doolittle’s raiders achieved total surprise. Swooping in at rooftop level, they hit Tokyo and five other Japanese cities, killing about fifty civilians, without the loss of a single plane.80

  Although the raid did little damage, it lifted American morale. Asked from what base the planes had flown, President Roosevelt whimsically replied, “Shangri-la.”

  Aided by a strong tailwind, fifteen of the sixteen planes made it to China but ran out of fuel and crashed before they could reach their bases; one made it safely to Siberia. Sixty-four of the fliers, including Doolittle, escaped, spirited to safety by the Chinese underground. The Japanese forces in China captured eight airmen. Three were later executed, in violation of international law and with the Emperor’s approval, and one died in prison after being tortured.

  But it was the Chinese who suffered the most grievous consequences. In a four-month reign of terror, 250,000 Chinese were slaughtered by the Japanese in reprisal for a few brave peasants lending assistance to the downed Doolittle crews, “a scale of murder,” historian Walter Boyne has written, “equal to that of the Rape of Nanking.”81

  The raid caused the Japanese to keep hundreds of planes in the home islands that otherwise would have gone to the South Pacific. More importantly, it was a deep psychological blow to the Japanese, one that led, in retaliation, to the grandiose expansion of Japanese military ambitions that brought on the Battle of Midway.

  CORAL SEA

  America’s first attempt to stop Japanese expansion southward to secure bases to protect its newly won empire came in the waters of the magnificent sea that washes the shores of New Guinea, the Solomons, and New Caledonia. In early May, a Japanese invasion fleet steamed into the Coral Sea from Rabaul, headed for Port Moresby, a tiny but strategically important outpost that faces Australia on the southeastern tip of New Guinea’s Papuan peninsula. American intelligence had decrypted the Japanese naval code and the Pacific command sent a task force of two carriers, Lexington and Yorktown, under Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, to surprise the enemy.

  This was the first major engagement in naval history in which surface ships did not exchange a single shot. Separated by 175 miles of water, the two fleets never got close enough to see each other. Carrier-based planes did all the fighting; and there was so much confusion in this swirling aerial battle that several Japanese planes, in darkness and bad weather, tried to land on the deck of Yorktown. American planes sank one small Japanese carrier and heavily damaged a larger one, but Lexington was lost and Yorktown was badly mauled and had to limp back to Pearl Harbor.

  This historic battle, which took place in the days following General Wainwright’s surrender of Corregidor, was not a clear-cut American victory, but it prevented the enemy from landing at Port Moresby and taking all of New Guinea. Undeterred, the Japanese seized the mission outpost of Buna, on the north coast of New Guinea, and prepared to use it as base from which to begin an overland assault on Port Moresby. The fate of Port Moresby would be decided in a bitter land engagement in some of the most difficult terrain in the world. To support the coming fight for Port Moresby, the Japanese began secretly building an air base on a tiny island called Guadalcanal.

  The Battle of the Coral Sea convinced the crews and commanders of the Pacific Fleet that they could fight on at least equal terms with the powerful and more experienced Japanese navy. At the end of May, Yorktown, repaired in the miracle time of sixty-eight hours, joined Enterprise and Hornet to fight another carrier-to-carrier battle in the waters off Midway Island.

  MIDWAY

  On the morning of June 3, 1942, a Catalina flying boat sighted a Japanese flotilla some 700 miles west of Midway Island. It was part of Admiral Yamamoto’s armada of 165 ships heading toward Hawaii to deal a knockout blow to the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

  Yamamoto was in personal command of the Midway operation on his flagship Yamato, the world’s largest battleship, bearing the sacred name of the Japanese race. Infuriated by the Doolittle Raid, he had convinced Imperial Headquarters to bring on the decisive naval battle of the war. Before Pearl Harbor, he had predicted he could “run wild for a year or six months,” but that the future would be gravely uncertain for Japan once prodigious America gathered its military strength.82 Now he was about to test America’s naval power in hope of a swift, smashing victory that would convince America that it could defeat Japan only at an intolerable cost.

  Yamamoto’s carrier commander was Admiral Nagumo. Sailing under strict radio silence, he expected to surprise and slaughter the American fleet, as he had at Pearl Harbor. A diversionary force was sent toward the American base at Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians, near the Arctic Circle. It was to draw the American fleet northward, opening the way for Yamamoto to take Midway, a strategically important atoll that guarded the western approaches to the main Hawaiian Islands. When the Pacific Fleet learned it had been fooled and raced back to Midway, it would be “annihilated,” Yamamoto vowed, by the greatest assemblage of Japanese naval power ever sent to sea. “Every man was convinced that he was about to participate in yet another brilliant victory,” said Mitsuo Fuchida, who had led the Pearl Harbor air attack.83

  This time the Americans were not caught napping. Patrol planes had been sent out from Pearl Harbor to locate the incoming Japanese fleet thanks to the heady action of a naval intelligence team under Lieutenant Commander Joseph J. Rochefort, the unsung hero of the upcoming battle. Rochefort and other military cryptanalysts had broken part of the Japanese message code, and as the first reports of a tremendous concentration of enemy naval forces in the Central Pacific came into headquarters at Pearl Harbor, cool-headed Admiral Chester Nimitz, the new Commander in Chief, Pacific (CINCPAC), had taken immediate action to verify them.

  The Japanese code designation for the main target they intended to hit was AF, but was AF Midway or the Aleutians or somewhere else in the Pacific? Rochefort and one of his assistants, Lieutenant Commander Jasper Holmes, tricked the enemy into revealing the answer. There was a secret—and completely secure—undersea telephone cable link between Pearl Harbor and Midway and CINCPAC sent a message over it to Midway, ordering the local commander to send back by radio, “in plain English,” a spurious report that the garrison’s water filtration plant had broken down, leaving Midway without fresh water.84 A Japanese listening post intercepted the transmission and radioed Tokyo that “AF” was having water problems, a message that Rochefort’s eavesdropping team picked up and decoded. The ruse had worked. The target was Midway. A few days later Rochefort broke the Japanese navy’s date cipher and gave Nimitz the exact day of the impending attack, June 4.85

  Nimitz then ordered Admirals Fletcher and Raymond A. Spruance (Halsey would have been in charge but was hospitalized with a skin infection) to ignore the Japanese feint north and concentrate all available warships in the waters around Midway. Yorktown sailed from Pearl Harbor with repairmen still on board, B-17 Flying Fortresses were flown in from the West Coast, and the defenses of Midway were reinforced. Nimitz had guessed correctly that the Japanese wanted to use captured Midway as a base to launch a final and decisive offensive against the Hawaiian Islands, only 1,100 miles east of Midway, invading and occupying them and forcing the Americans to the peace table.

  Nimitz’s greatest gamble of the war was putting qu
iet, self-effacing Raymond Ames Spruance, a commander with no carrier experience but with an amazing strategic mind—his men called him electric brain—in charge of one of the two carrier task forces sent out to stop the enemy. Spruance’s Task Force 17, comprised of Enterprise and Hornet, along with six cruisers and ten destroyers, sailed out of Pearl Harbor first, followed two days later by Fletcher’s Yorktown, the carrier the Japanese were confident they had destroyed in the Battle of the Coral Sea.

  Nimitz’s plan was elegantly simple: he would hide his three carriers until Nagumo’s planes hit Midway. Then he would launch his planes and destroy the unprotected Japanese flattops. It was the Japanese, not the Americans, who would sail into an ambush.

  As Nimitz expected, the great battle was fought entirely by planes and submarines, in what was to become a new and decisive form of naval warfare. As in the Battle of the Coral Sea, the opposing carrier fleets never saw each other. The Americans struck first. On the afternoon of June 3, Flying Fortresses from Midway attacked, but missed, a squadron of enemy landing ships. The Japanese knew at once that surprise was lost and Nagumo reacted sharply with a heavy bombing of Midway the following day—an attack that severely damaged shore installations but failed to knock out the island’s airfields.

  When the flight leader of the raiding force urged a second strike, Nagumo rearmed the torpedo planes he had intended to use against the American fleet—if it showed up—with fragmentation bombs for another attack on Midway. But by this time, the carriers Enterprise, Hornet, and Yorktown had come within striking distance—150 miles—of his own carriers, and swarms of planes, led by Torpedo Squadron 8 from Hornet and dive-bombers from Enterprise commanded by Lieutenant Commander Clarence (Wade) McClusky, set out to find their prey. Gilbert Cant, the New York Post’s Pacific correspondent, describes the opening hours of this attack:

  TORPEDO EIGHT, FLYING OBSOLETE DOUGLAS Devastators … was led by Lieutenant Commander John C. Waldron. It became separated from the other formations in the long search for the Japanese ships. A group of bombers and fighters which failed to find the enemy at the assigned position … had to be ordered to land on Midway as they were running out of gasoline…. But Waldron reasoned that if the Jap ships were not where they were supposed to be, it was probably because they had found the welcome too warm for their comfort and had decided to retire some distance, if not entirely. He therefore backtracked along their previously known course. McClusky arrived at the same conclusion, but not until after he had overshot the enemy’s reported position by seventy-five miles or more. Then he too set out to intercept them to the northwest. The effect of these identical decisions made at different times was to bring Waldron’s squadron within sight of the enemy….

  Waldron found the main enemy force with few fighter planes in the air, but his squadron had been out a long time and was running short of gas. It had accomplished part of its mission merely by locating the retiring Japanese and reporting their position. Waldron radioed his information and added: “Request permission to withdraw from actions to refuel.” The admiral to whom the request was passed had an awful decision to make. To permit these planes to withdraw draw might make all the difference between sinking or crippling three carriers (Waldron had not sighted the fourth) and giving them a chance once more to slip out of sight under a squall. Three carriers could determine the balance of power in this 1942 sea war, in which the carrier was a capital ship … of greater importance … [than] the battleship….

  Hypothetical scores of ships and hypothetical thousands of lives were on one side of the scale; on the other side were fifteen planes and the lives of their three-man crews. The admiral ordered: “Attack at once.”86

  Before taking off, Waldron had met with his pilots: “I want each of us to do his utmost to destroy our enemies. If there is only one plane left to make a final run in, I want that man to go in and get a hit. May God be with us all.”87

  Flying directly into the enemy’s gun barrels, all fifteen of Torpedo 8’s low-flying Devastators were blown into the sea by whirling Zeros and murderous sheets of anti-aircraft fire, “and for about one hundred seconds the Japanese were certain they had won the Battle of Midway, and the war,” writes Samuel Eliot Morison.88

  Ensign George Gay, the only only flier in Torpedo 8 to survive this American-style kamikaze attack, was shot down and wounded, and watched the rest of the air battle from his floating seat cushion. Two other torpedo squadrons attacked the carriers. The Zeros, flying at deck level, cut them up, too; out of the eighty-two airmen who attacked the carriers in their slow, two-seater torpedo planes—little more than flying coffins—only thirteen survived. Jack Waldron was last seen diving toward an enemy carrier, standing straight up in his cockpit, which had been turned into a blazing furnace by exploding gasoline.89

  Not a single Japanese ship was hit in this massacre. The torpedo planes, however, had been unintended sacrificial lambs. With Nagumo’s protective cover of fighter planes preoccupied with them at sea level, Clarence McClusky’s dive-bombers appeared suddenly overhead. They, too, had initially failed to find Nagumo’s fleet, but had accidentally located an enemy destroyer, which had been pursuing the American submarine Nautilus. Abandoning the search, it had headed back to the fleet, creating a foaming white wake, which the fast-thinking McCluskey had followed. The Japanese destroyer had led the American squadron straight to its prey.

  Ensign Gay watched as McClusky’s dive bombers came pouring out of the sun “like a beautiful silver waterfall.”90They were about to catch Nagumo’s carriers in their most vulnerable position, without their protective fighter “cap” and with their decks crowded with planes refueling and rearming, this time with torpedoes, for an expected wipe-up attack on the American carriers. Akagi was the first to be hit.

  “At 10:20 Admiral Nagumo gave the order to launch when ready,” Matsuo Fuchida recalled. “The big ship began turning in the wind. Within five minutes all her planes would be launched.

  “Five minutes! Who would have dreamed that the tide of battle would shift completely in that brief interval of time.”91

  At 10:25 A.M. McClusky’s dive-bomber group was about to deliver what historian John Keegan has called “the most stunning and decisive blow in the history of naval warfare.”92

  Lieutenant Clarence E. Dickinson was in McClusky’s Enterprise group:

  AS I PUT MY NOSE DOWN I picked up our carrier target in front of me. I was making the best dive I have ever made…. We we coming down in all directions on the port side of the carrier, beautifully spaced…. I recognized her as the Kaga; and she was enormous….

  The target was utterly satisfying…. I saw a bomb hit just behind where I was aiming…. I saw the deck rippling and curling back in all directions exposing a great section of the hangar below…. I dropped a few seconds after the previous bomb explosion …

  I saw the 500-pound bomb hit right abreast of the [carrier’s] island. The two 100-pound bombs struck in the forward area of the parked planes….

  Then I began thinking it was time to get myself away from there and try to get back alive.93

  When McClusky’s dive-bombers bore down on the Japanese carriers, Matsuo Fuchida learned what it was like to be on the other end of a surprise air strike. He was on the Akagi but was not flying that day, having come down with a case of appendicitis:

  AT 10:34 THE ORDER TO START launching came from the bridge by voice-tube. The Air Officer flapped a white flag, and the first Zero fighter gathered speed and whizzed off the deck. At that instant a lookout screamed: “Hell-Divers!” I looked up to see three black enemy planes plummeting towards our ship. Some of our machine guns managed to fire a few frantic bursts at them, but it was too late.94

  Within less than a minute the ship was turned into an inferno. Nagumo, with tears in his eyes, had to be forced by his officers to abandon the doomed Akagi. Fuchida stayed behind to try to hold off the inevitable, but broke both his ankles jumping from one deck to another to avoid the explosions and raging fires
. He was strapped to a bamboo stretcher and lowered to a boat, which carried him to a rescue ship.

  “The [Japanese] carriers … resembled a very large oil-field,” Ensign Gay reported later. “The fire coming out of the forward and after end looked like a blowtorch, just roaring white flame and the oil burning…. Billowing big red flames belched out of this black smoke … and I was sitting in the water hollering Hooray, hooray!”95

  That night Akagi and Kaga both sank. A third carrier, Soryu, was hit by 3,000 bombs and horribly damaged. When its commanding officer, Captain Ryusaku Yanagimoto, refused to abandon ship, Chief Petty Officer Abe, a Japanese wrestling champion, was sent aboard to bring him to safety, by force if necessary. But Abe respected the will of the greatly loved commander and left him on the bridge, his samurai sword in hand, calmly singing “Kimigayo,” the Japanese national anthem. An American submarine sent Soryu to the bottom.

  The attack had taken less than six minutes. After it was over, Ensign George Gay was pulled from the sea. He had participated in and witnessed one of history’s greatest naval engagements.

  The Japanese were battered, but still capable of fight. Dive-bombers from the carrier Hiryu, which had become separated from the other carriers during the American air attack, struck back, fatally damaging the Yorktown after flying through a hornet’s nest of American fighters in an act of “Oriental desperation.”96 But then around four o’clock, American planes reached the Hiryu, bombing and burning it from stem to stern.

  “When it was ascertained that the ship was in a sinking condition, Admiral [Tamon] Yamaguchi and Captain [Tomeo] Kaku decided that they would go down with the ship,” one of their fellow officers recalled. “They all shared some naval biscuits and drank a glass of water in a last ceremony. Admiral Yamaguchi gave his hat to one of his staff officers and asked him to give it to his family; then there was some joking among them—the captain and the admiral—that their duties were finished when the ship sank.”97