The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History)

by Craig L. Symonds

  The three surviving Japanese planes dropped their bombs over the task force, scoring no hits, and then turned to head back to base—all but one. O’Hare had shot the engine off the left wing of Lieutenant Commander Itō Takuzō’s command airplane, and the big bomber spiraled out of the formation, losing altitude quickly. Like Nakagawa, Itō ordered his pilot, Warrant Officer Watanabe Chūzō, to crash into the American carrier. With only one engine, however, Watanabe could not hold his course. The Lexington turned hard to starboard, and the big Japanese bomber flew alongside for a few heart-stopping seconds before it splashed into the sea 1,500 yards off the port bow.33

  Butch O’Hare’s adventures for the day were not quite over. As he came in to land on the Lexington, low on fuel and out of ammunition, an overzealous young gunner on the carrier’s port quarter opened fire on him. O’Hare saw where the fire was coming from, but coolly continued to execute his landing. After he climbed out of the cockpit, he walked slowly back to the gun tub on the port quarter and, looking down at the machine gunner there, said to him: “Son, if you don’t stop shooting at me when I’ve got my wheels down, I’m going to have to report you to the gunnery officer.”34

  The F4F-3 Wildcat was the U.S. Navy’s principal carrier-based fighter in the spring of 1942. In this staged photograph, two of them are being flown by two of the Navy’s best fighter pilots: John S. “Jimmy” Thach flies F-1 in the foreground, and Edward “Butch” O’Hare flies F-13. (U.S. Naval Institute)

  When it was over, fifteen of the seventeen Japanese planes had been destroyed. The Lexington pilots celebrated their victory with such enthusiasm that Brown had to remind them that this was not a football game. Nonetheless, the successful defense of the task force on February 20 dramatically boosted the morale of the pilots, especially the Wildcat pilots of Jimmy Thach’s VF-3. The Japanese bombers had proved remarkably vulnerable, and the Americans took to calling the Bettys “flying Zippos,” after the famous cigarette lighter whose advertising slogan was that it lit up the first time, every time. The Americans lost only two Wildcats and one pilot, Ensign J. Woodrow Wilson, killed when a 20 mm shell hit his cockpit.

  The air battle on February 20 had deprived Rabaul of all but three of its attack bombers (the two that managed to return and one that had been unable to make the sortie), yet it was less than a complete American victory, given that the original target had been the Japanese shipping at Rabaul. Some members of Nimitz’s staff questioned Brown’s decision to retire. After all, the virtual destruction of Rabaul’s air arm suggested that he could have operated there with at least as much impunity as Halsey had off the Marshalls. Brown’s explanation of an “acute fuel shortage” struck some as curious, since careful planning had gone into meeting the fuel needs of the task force. Nimitz gave his task-force commander the benefit of the doubt, but he was concerned when Brown reported, “Unless it is intended we return [to] Pearl, it will be necessary [to] proceed to Sydney.” Neither Nimitz nor King wanted any of the American carrier groups to begin operating out of Australia for fear that once they were there, the Australian authorities would never let them go. Though he said nothing at the time, all this may have left Nimitz with nagging uncertainties about the suitability of “Shaky” Brown for aggressive carrier operations.35

  Halsey’s raid on Wake Island took place four days later. By now the Enterprise task force had a new numerical designation. When Halsey received his orders for the mission, he noticed that his command had been redesignated Task Force 13, and—even worse—that it was to sail on February 13, which happened to be a Friday. Halsey insisted that both numbers be changed. He may have meant it as a joke. Nonetheless he waited until Valentine’s Day before departing for Wake, doing so in command of what was now labeled Task Force 16, the designation it would carry into the Battle of Midway.36

  On February 24, bombers from the Enterprise attacked Wake from the north while the heavy cruisers of Halsey’s escort group—Northampton and Salt Lake City under Rear Admiral Raymond Spruance—shelled it from the south. The results were indecisive; the Americans inflicted some minor damage on the Japanese base while losing three planes. Afterward, Task Force 16 continued west all the way to Marcus Island, only a thousand miles from Tokyo, to conduct another raid. That attack, deep inside the Japanese defense perimeter, took the defenders completely by surprise. The American planes had a strong tailwind and arrived over the target before sunup. In the pitch darkness, the tracers of the Japanese ground fire looked to one pilot like “a string of oranges following me out in a gentle curve.” Though the raid inflicted only minor damage, it caused considerable concern in Tokyo, and even led authorities there to order a blackout of the capital. Compared with the triumphs of the Kidō Butai throughout South Asia and on the north coast of Australia, these American counterattacks were little more than nuisance raids, but they did gain the attention of the Imperial General Staff, and, equally important, they provided America’s young brown-shoe aviators with both confidence and invaluable experience.37

  Meanwhile, King and Nimitz continued to spar over the best use of the American carrier task forces. As always, King was under pressure from several quarters. The Japanese were clearly building up their forces at Rabaul for another push southward, and this fueled his concern for the safety of the Hawaii-Australia line of communication. He was also being urged to do more to protect Australia itself. After the fall of Singapore in mid-February, the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) was recalled from the Mediterranean. Churchill wanted to use two of its divisions to defend Burma. Australia’s prime minister, John Curtin, insisted that they were needed at home. Churchill begged Curtin to change his mind, arguing that the men were essential to fend off the Japanese assault on Rangoon. In response to an urgent plea from Churchill, Roosevelt promised Curtin that an American division would be sent to Australia at once. Curtin thanked FDR and accepted the offer, though he brought the Australian troops home nonetheless.38

  All this compelled King to bolster Nimitz’s southern flank, and he created a new command theater called ANZAC (Australia, New Zealand Area Command).* With the Saratoga in Bremerton for repairs, its former task group commander, Herbert Leary, was without a job, and after promoting him to vice admiral, King made him the ANZAC commander, with authority over the east coast of Australia, New Zealand, New Caledonia, New Hebrides, the Solomon Islands, and Fiji. King’s order to Leary was to conduct “a strong and comprehensive offensive to be launched soon against exposed enemy naval forces.” There was a limit to King’s willingness to accommodate himself to political realities, however. When Roosevelt queried King about a request from Curtin to use an American carrier to ferry planes from California to Australia, King shot back that the carriers in the Pacific “are urgently required for offensive action as fighting carriers, and cannot logically be spared for use as ferry boats.”39

  From the start, Leary proved something of a disappointment. He set up his headquarters at Melbourne, on the Australian mainland, and when King heard about it, he immediately ordered Leary to rejoin his flagship at sea. Like Nimitz, King was concerned that forces based in Australia would become fixed there and pass beyond his effective control. Leary objected. “My considered judgment … is that operational command can only be exercised from Melbourne,” adding, “I request reconsideration.” For once, King relented and Leary remained at his headquarters at Melbourne.40

  Not being subject to the same political pressures as King, Nimitz was perplexed by the creation of ANZAC. King had already removed Wilson Brown’s Lexington task force from Nimitz’s authority; now he declared that Leary, too, would report directly to CominCh in Washington, effectively bypassing Nimitz altogether. Nimitz wondered whether King’s plan was “to gamble all upon securing Australia as a base of future operations against the enemy, and leave our Pacific Area open to attack.” Rather than to act defensively, he preferred to conduct “bold operations against the enemy’s flank.” In fact, King agreed. “Our current tasks are not merely protective,” King w
rote in a message to task-force commanders, “but also offensive where practicable as [the] best way to protect is by reducing enemy offensive power … particularly carriers.” At the same time, however, he wanted some, and possibly most, of the American carrier force to be directed southward. Until New Caledonia received sufficient reinforcements to ensure its security, King suggested to Nimitz, at least one and possibly two carrier groups should operate in that area. Nimitz protested that the logistical requirements for operating two carriers so far from their base were daunting. To keep them full of fuel would require three Cimarron-class oilers on constant rotation, and the loss of one of those oilers would “seriously jeopardize” the task force. King acknowledged that “this depends on logistics and must be decided by CINCPAC.”41

  Nimitz found all this confusing and a bit alarming. Minutes taken at a staff meeting in February of 1942 note that King’s message “did not materially clarify the command relationships.” Nor was there any more illumination when Pye returned from a visit to Washington and reported to Nimitz that as far as he could tell, “no over-all plan has been adopted” for the Pacific area. Nimitz was still feeling his way in regard to his command relationship with King. To this point he had acted as a dutiful subordinate, and King had treated him accordingly. Increasingly, however, Nimitz began to believe that it was important to establish the fact that he was in command, and that he should exercise authority over the carrier task forces in his theater. When King suggested that Nimitz send major elements of his command to support the heavily pressed ABDA (American, British, Dutch, and Australian) command, Nimitz replied that his forces were too weak to supply such a reinforcement, and offered that it would be better to conduct more diversionary raids to take some of the pressure off of ABDA. The question became moot a few days later when the Japanese virtually annihilated the ABDA naval command, sinking four Allied cruisers and seven destroyers during the Battle of the Java Sea (February 27–28). At about the same time, the Japanese also sank the old Langley, which had been the first American carrier, though she had been converted to a seaplane tender back in 1937. These losses temporarily ended the discussion over whether Nimitz ought to support ABDA. It also made the line of communication to Australia even more tenuous.42

  Indeed, it was evident that the Japanese were building up their forces at Rabaul for a new push southward, and to forestall that, King ordered Brown to make a second attempt to raid the shipping at Rabaul. Brown claimed that he needed a second carrier task force for such a mission. King ordered Nimitz to send him Fletcher’s Yorktown group. Even after that, Brown hedged, reporting to King that he did not consider an attack on Rabaul “advisable.” Perhaps growing impatient with Brown, King insisted.43

  Before Brown and Fletcher could get into position, however, the tactical picture changed again, and dramatically so. The shipping that had been crowding into Rabaul Harbor left there on March 7 and appeared the next day off the north coast of New Guinea, three hundred miles to the southwest. Japanese soldiers went ashore at Lae and Salamaua to establish new outposts for their maritime empire and to protect the approaches to Rabaul. Brown at once concluded that the shipping off those two ports offered a more valuable target than Rabaul itself, and on his own he changed the objective of the raid. It was within the authority of a task-force commander to alter the target with shifting circumstances, as Halsey had done at Kwajalein, but this was the second time that Brown had been ordered to strike at Rabaul and the second time he found a reason not to do it. Moreover, instead of approaching the new target from the east, Brown decided to attack from the south, launching planes from the Gulf of Papua south of New Guinea and sending them over the Owen Stanley Mountain Range, which runs like a gigantic spine along the middle of southeastern New Guinea.44

  Most of the planes were bombers and escorting fighters. Brown also sent off twenty-five Devastators, thirteen of them carrying the heavy Mark 13 torpedo, and the rest with bombs. The slow and heavy Devastators had difficulty getting over the mountains, and they surmounted the crest only with the aid of a timely updraft. When the 104 American aircraft from two carriers came swooping down the verdant valleys on the north shore of New Guinea on March 10, they found even more targets off Lae and Salamaua than Halsey had found at Kwajalein. It was a bright, clear day, and there was no air opposition. The Americans had a field day. Based on the testimony of his pilots, Brown reported sinking five transports, three cruisers, a destroyer, and a minesweeper. The actual toll was less, but still impressive: three large transports sunk plus one more severely damaged, and additional damage to a light cruiser, several destroyers, and a large seaplane. Only one American aircraft was lost. Indeed, the raid so savaged Japanese sealift capacity that the local Japanese commander worried about his ability to sustain his foothold in New Guinea. It was the best day of the war so far for the brown shoes, and Roosevelt wired Churchill that it was “by all means the best day’s work we have had.”45

  The Lexington task force returned to Pearl Harbor on March 26. The raid had been an unqualified success, and Nimitz recommended Brown for the Distinguished Service Medal. Then, two days later, Nimitz tapped Brown to head the new Amphibious Force being organized in San Diego. It was not quite a promotion, and some wondered at the time and later whether the purpose of the appointment was to remove Brown from the command of Task Force 11. The Pacific War historian John Lundstrom is doubtful, insisting that Brown’s “departure from carrier command had nothing to do with any perceived impression of lack of ‘aggressiveness.’” Perhaps not. But for whatever reason, both King and Nimitz had decided that Brown’s skills were better suited to other tasks. The “Running Summary” kept at CinCPac headquarters by Navy Captain Lynde D. McCormick noted that Brown “did not approach New Britain at all, but went to a position south of New Guinea and sent aircraft across the peninsula to Lae and Salamaua…. Even with the damage inflicted, it is doubtful if the enemy will be greatly retarded.”46

  In that, at least, McCormick was wrong. The raid had a dramatic impact not only on Japanese shipping but also, and more importantly, on Japanese decision making. Vice Admiral Inoue Shigeyoshi, the Fourth Fleet commander who headed the Japanese South Seas Force, concluded that continuing the advance southward would now be impossible without carrier support. That conclusion would bring important elements of the Kidō Butai into contact with the American carriers for the first time.47

  * Halsey noted Gaido’s heroic effort and promoted him to aviation mate first class that afternoon.

  * There was another reason why the Western allies worried so much about Australia. As King wrote to FDR on March 5: “Australia—and New Zealand—are ‘white men’s countries’ which it is essential that we shall not allow to be overrun by Japanese because of the repercussion among the non-white races of the world.”

  * Recognizing the public relations value of O’Hare’s feat, the Navy ordered him stateside, where Roosevelt awarded him the Medal of Honor, after which he was sent on a tour to sell war bonds. For that reason, he missed both the Battle of the Coral Sea and Midway.

  Few of the thousands of modern-day passengers who travel through Chicago are aware that the city’s two major airports are both named to honor heroes of the Pacific War. Midway Airport is named for the battle itself, and passengers there can view a full-sized Dauntless dive bomber suspended from the ceiling of Terminal A. The larger O’Hare Airport, one of the busiest in the world, is named for Butch O’Hare.

  * This is not to be confused with the Australia-New Zealand Army Corps, also called ANZAC, which fought at Gallipoli in World War I. This new ANZAC command lasted only until April, when it was absorbed into the Southwest Pacific command under Douglas MacArthur.

  5

  Seeking the Decisive Battle

  The first phase of the war had gone well for Japan—so well, in fact, that four months into it, her leaders faced the unexpected dilemma of not knowing what to do next. By March of 1942, virtually all of Japan’s prewar goals had been achieved: British Ma
laya and its great bastion of Singapore were in Japanese hands, as were the Dutch East Indies, including the oilrich islands of Borneo, Java, and Sumatra. Most of the Philippines, too, had fallen. Some American and Filipino soldiers still held out in Bataan, but they would surrender on April 9, after which only the tiny island of Corregidor still held out, and it was only a matter of time until it fell. Thailand had capitulated early. Rangoon, the capital of Burma, fell on March 8, and Japanese forces chased the British back toward the border with India. All this had been accomplished with a total loss to the Imperial Japanese Navy of only five destroyers, three patrol boats, seven minesweepers, seven submarines, and several transports. Not a single capital ship had been seriously damaged, much less sunk. It had been so easy that in some quarters it led to what has been dubbed “victory disease”: an expectation that every new initiative would automatically result in triumph. It was not at all clear, however, what those new initiatives might be. Though the Japanese had planned the “First Phase of Operations” with close attention to detail, their notions of what might come next were vague at best.1