The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History)

by Craig L. Symonds

  In addition to internal military politics, one reason for the apparent hurry was that both Yamamoto and the Naval General Staff recognized that Japan’s carrier superiority in the Pacific was only temporary. The Japanese had six big carriers to the Americans’ three (or perhaps four—they weren’t sure where the Wasp was), but they knew that the Americans had no fewer than eleven big carriers under construction, all of which would become operational in 1943; the Japanese had only one under construction, the Taihō, which would not be available until 1944 (though they also converted several other existing ships into carriers). In short, the Japanese needed to complete their conquests and establish their defensive perimeter before the new American carriers and the flood of American airplanes began arriving in the Pacific.

  The day after the Naval General Staff capitulated to Yamamoto’s Midway Operation, the planes of the Kidō Butai conducted their raid on Colombo in far-off Ceylon and sank the Dorsetshire and Cornwall. Four days later they struck at Trincomalee and sank the Hermes. Soon they would be returning through the Straits of Malacca to the Pacific. They would need to refit and resupply, and then they would be ready for more operations. The officers and men were hoping for liberty in Hiroshima. They would be disappointed. The crews of the Shōkaku and Zuikaku would not even be allowed to reach a Japanese port. Instead, those two ships underwent a quick resupply in Formosa so they could be ready for Operation MO.

  On April 16, Nagano presented the “Imperial Navy Operational Plan for Stage Two of the Great East Asia War” to Emperor Hirohito, who, in theory at least, had final approval of all operations. Plans were never presented to the emperor until all the competing elements in the military and the government had agreed; all Hirohito could do was bless a decision that had already been made. The chief of the Army General Staff was present when Admiral Nagano presented the outlines of the Midway plan. He silently acquiesced because it did not call for the allocation of any soldiers. The landings and occupation of Midway would be the responsibility of Naval Infantry—the Japanese version of Marines. The Army may have suspected that Yamamoto’s plan was only the first step toward an invasion of Hawaii, which certainly would require support from the Army, but it could speak up in opposition to that move when the time came.29

  Yamamoto had won, though it was not yet clear what the consequences of his internal victory over the Naval General Staff and the Army might be. As Commander Miyo had pointed out, the thrust into the Central Pacific was a gamble even if the Kidō Butai triumphed over the American carriers, for the logistical burden of sustaining an outpost at Midway, 2,235 nautical miles from Tokyo, was daunting, especially if the Army continued to remain on the sidelines. On April 16, the day when Nagano presented the plan to the emperor, it was hard for Army leaders to imagine a set of circumstances that would cause them to change their mind about supporting this adventure in the central Pacific.

  Two days later, American bombers appeared over Tokyo.

  * Early in 1941, Yamamoto wrote a letter to another officer who favored war with America. In that letter, Yamamoto stated that in any such war the Japanese would be compelled to seek “a capitulation at the White House, in Washington itself.” After the war began, Japanese newspapers published this letter, which led the Western press to assume that this was, in fact, Yamamoto’s goal. Instead, Yamamoto had written the letter as a way of suggesting that a war with the U.S. was not winnable. The next line in this letter, omitted when it was published, was: “I wonder whether the politicians of the day really have the willingness to make [the] sacrifice … that this would entail.”

  6

  Pete and Jimmy

  The wild card in America’s carrier force was the USS Hornet, a sister ship of the Yorktown and Enterprise with essentially the same characteristics and capacity. Commissioned in October, six weeks before Pearl Harbor, she remained in Norfolk over the winter as she fitted out, and it was not until March of 1942 that she was ready for sea with a crew, an air group, and a commanding officer. That commanding officer was Captain Marc A. Mitscher, whose Academy nickname was “Pete.” The nickname came about because Mitscher had arrived in Annapolis from Oklahoma in 1904 soon after another Oklahoma native named Pete Cade had “bilged out.” Cade had been a popular mid, and his classmates were unsure that trading him for the short, skinny, and taciturn Mitscher was a good bargain. They ordered the new plebe to call out the name of the departed Cade every time an upperclassman required it. On those occasions, Mitscher would brace up and shout out: “Peter Cassius Marcellus Cade, Jr.” His classmates took to calling him “Oklahoma Pete,” and Pete he remained for the rest of his life.1

  For some time it looked as if the new Pete would follow the same course as the old one at Annapolis. Mitscher got bad grades and lots of demerits. For two years, he was constantly on the brink of being kicked out. And then he was; in 1906, at the end of his second year, he was ordered to resign. In an act of defiance, he wrote out his resignation on a piece of toilet paper. In spite of that, and perhaps as a sop to the congressman who had appointed him (a friend of Mitscher’s father), he was allowed to reenter the Academy, but only if he started over as a plebe. Out of either stubbornness or determination, or perhaps both, Mitscher reentered the Academy as a member of the class of 1910. Though he was repeating classes he had already taken, his grades remained poor, and his conduct worse. Nor was he especially popular. He seldom laughed or even smiled, and his natural quietness was interpreted by some as sullenness. His odd looks did not help. Short and slight, he had milk-white skin that burned easily, and white, wispy hair that was already thinning noticeably, which he combed over the top of his balding head. The 1910 Lucky Bag profiled him in verse:

  Pete dislikes all allusions or mirth

  On the hue of his hair or its dearth

  It gives him much pain

  When he has to explain

  That he’s not an albino by birth.

  He spent a lot of his time smoking and card playing, and several times came close to being expelled again. He graduated third from the bottom of his class in 1910, after six years at Annapolis.2

  Mitscher’s early career as a surface officer was as undistinguished as his record at the Academy. Despite his diminutive size, he was stubborn, argumentative, and short-tempered, and he managed to get into a surprising number of fights. Then in 1915 his career changed dramatically when as a lieutenant junior grade he was accepted into the new Bureau of Aeronautics. Mitscher decided it was an activity that was worth his time and effort—for one thing, his diminutive stature was actually an asset in an airplane’s cockpit. The card-playing slacker became a hard worker and an enthusiastic devotee of aviation. Moreover, as one of the first students to show up at Pensacola in the Navy’s infant flying corps, Mitscher got in on the ground floor of a new service that was soon to expand rapidly. In June of1916, at the age of 29, Pete Mitscher became Naval Aviator Number 33.3

  At that time, of course, there were as yet no aircraft carriers in the U.S. Navy (the Jupiter would not be converted into the Langley until 1920). For four years, Mitscher flew fabric-covered seaplanes resembling box kites from shore bases; only occasionally were they propelled off the back of cruisers. Breakdowns were frequent, and the pilots patched up their own cloth-and-string “aeroplanes” after each crash, of which there were many. One authority estimates that for every fifteen minutes of flying time, the pilots spent four hours making repairs. The newly promoted Lieutenant Mitscher described what may have been a typical day in a letter home to his wife, Frances: “We transferred ten wrecks to the yard, and repaired two. The other day Donohue smashed one of the remaining ten and we worked night and day to get it ready. Stone fired off with it today and smashed it again, so we now have to repair some more.”4

  Lieutenant “Pete” Mitscher at the controls of an early seaplane in Pensacola, Florida. Becoming a pilot completely changed the trajectory of Mitscher’s naval career. (U.S. Naval Institute)

  To his great disgust, Mitscher did not see an
y action during World War I. Instead, his big break came after the war, in 1919, when he was assigned to join the Navy team that attempted the first transatlantic crossing by air. Rather than make the flight in a single hop, the plan was to fly huge seaplanes—essentially flying boats, designed by Glenn Curtiss—from the American east coast to the Azores and then on to Europe. Mitscher was a backup pilot on the NC-1 (N for Navy; C for Curtiss). Though only one of the three planes (not Mitscher’s) managed to complete the trip, the exploit brought the Navy plenty of positive publicity, and Mitscher and everyone else involved received the Navy Cross.5

  Mitscher’s early involvement in naval aviation proved the making of him. In 1925, President Coolidge asked his friend Dwight Morrow to head a board to evaluate the potential of aviation for the services.* Called to testify before the Morrow Board, Mitscher declared that it was entirely inappropriate for black shoe officers to have management of pilots and airplanes. He asserted that only “experienced aviation men should have administration of the training of aviation personnel and the detail of aviation personnel.” While this was entirely logical and genuinely reflected Mitscher’s views, it also helped ensure that those who had managed to get into the game early would have the first claim on supervisory positions when naval aviation became a major component of the fleet.6

  Mitscher wrote privately that it was “the great ambition of [his] life” to get on board “an aviation ship,” which he finally did in 1926. A year later he was the air boss on the new Saratoga. Two years after that he was the exec on the Lexington. He was not interested in grand strategy and never attended a war college. A fellow officer described him as “a person who did not enjoy the long process of planning, of thinking too much about logistics.” He just wanted to fly, and he was good at it. One problem was that his fair skin made the outdoors into a hostile environment. He burned so easily that despite wearing a specially designed long-billed baseball cap, his nose was always peeling. Eventually his sun-ravaged skin gave him the look of a withered gnome. He remained both stubborn and temperamental, though he no longer got into fistfights. He also remained taciturn, and when he did speak it was in a voice so low that others were compelled to lean in close to hear him. A fellow officer recalled that he was “very, very quiet and seldom said much,” and another that “he never used five words if one would do.” Despite his low voice, he disliked having to repeat things and fired a staff officer who asked him to repeat himself once too often. By 1938 Mitscher had become a Navy captain and the assistant chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics. Then in May of 1941 he was selected as the prospective commanding officer of the new-construction Hornet. Many of his Academy classmates were astonished.7

  As captain of the Hornet, Mitscher no longer flew airplanes, and he missed it. He remained reticent, seldom telling jokes or engaging in light banter. He spent hours in his cabin chain-smoking and reading paperback detective novels. “He would go through a novel in nothing flat,” a shipmate recalled. Despite that, Mitscher exuded an air of confidence and authority, especially when it came to air operations. He realized that he had a green crew—fully 75 percent of the men on board the Hornet were fresh from boot camp or cadet training—and he patiently tried to bring them up to the mark. The 18-year-old helmsman on the Hornet thought the soft-spoken skipper “gave the impression of being a kind, gentle, and highly intelligent person.” But Mitscher’s patience was often tested, especially when it came to air operations, and he showed occasional flashes of anger, particularly toward his young pilots. During the Hornet’s shakedown cruise, while watching flight operations from the open bridge wing, he saw the landing signal officer wave off Ensign Roy Gee during his first approach. Gee came around again and worked his way back into the pattern, but as he made his approach the LSO waved him off again. It took Gee ten tries before the LSO finally gave him the cut sign and Gee landed safely. When he climbed out of his airplane, he was ordered to report at once to the bridge. There he was confronted by an irate Mitscher.

  “Can’t you fly?” Mitscher asked.

  “I won’t do it again, Captain,” the humiliated ensign replied.

  “You’re damned right you won’t,” Mitscher told him. “You’re not ever going to fly off this ship again.” Mitscher ordered that Gee’s name be struck from the flight roster. But if Mitscher was quick to anger, he also relented quickly. Five days later he ordered Gee restored to flight status.8

  On the last day of January 1942, the Hornet was anchored off Norfolk when Captain Donald “Wu” Duncan, Ernie King’s air officer, came on board. Once he was alone with Mitscher, Duncan asked him a question: “Can you put a loaded B-25 in the air on a normal deck run?” That depended, of course, on how many planes crowded the flight deck. Mitscher thought a moment. “How many B-25s?” he asked. “Fifteen,” Duncan told him. Mitscher bent over the spotting board, a wooden template of the Hornet’s flight deck that showed where each plane was placed at any given moment. He calculated how much space a B-25 with its 67-foot wingspan would take up on the Hornet’s deck. Finally he answered that it could be done. “Good,” Duncan replied. “I’m putting two aboard for a test launching tomorrow.”9

  The big land-based, two-engine Mitchell bombers had been named for Billy Mitchell, the interwar U.S. Army general who had been court-martialed for accusing Army and Navy leaders of “criminal negligence” for not making a greater commitment to air power. The Mitchell bombers were about the size of a Japanese Nell and, in conformance with Mitchell’s vision, had been designed for coastal defense. They were too big to land on a carrier and had to be hoisted aboard the Hornet by crane at the Norfolk docks. On February 2 (two days after Fletcher and Halsey struck at the Marshalls in the Pacific), the Hornet went out into the Atlantic with two Mitchell B-25s lashed to her flight deck. At 53 feet long and with that 67-foot wingspan, the two planes looked out of place even on the broad deck of the Hornet. The weather was less than ideal—a light snow was falling—and the test was interrupted when one of the escort vessels reported what was believed to be the periscope of a submarine, which proved instead to be the tip of a mast on an uncharted wreck. In the end both planes took off safely and without incident, flown by young Army pilots with no previous training in carrier operations. Duncan was satisfied. He left the next day to take the news back to Washington, where several very senior officers were waiting.10*

  From the very day of Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt had envisioned conducting a retaliatory strike on Japan’s home islands. He urged such a raid not as part of a grand strategy but to give the American public something to cheer. To conduct a carrier raid against Japan, however, would subject the Navy’s scarce and valuable carriers to unacceptable danger. They would have to steam to within two hundred miles of the enemy coast and then wait there for the strike planes to return. It was simply too risky. American land-based bombers, with their greater range, could reach Japan from China. However, getting them to the airfields in China “over the hump” of the Himalayas from India would take months, and FDR was eager to strike while the pain of Pearl Harbor was still palpable. The notion that it might be possible to fly long-range, land-based bombers off a carrier deck originated with Navy captain Seth Low, Ernie King’s operations officer, who thought it up while watching them lift off from airfields in Florida on which the outline of a carrier deck had been painted for practice landings. He pitched the idea to King, who told him to talk to Duncan, and soon afterward, Duncan went out to the Hornet to conduct the test that proved it could be done.11

  The problem was that while B-25s might take off from the Hornet, they could not land there. They would have to fly off the carrier some five hundred miles out from Japan, drop their bombs, then find someplace else to land. One option was to land them at Russian airfields near Vladivostok. But Stalin, who had his hands full with the Germans, did not want to add the Japanese to his list of enemies and refused permission. The other option was China, though to make it all the way to airfields in the part of China that had not yet been
overrun by the Japanese meant that the B-25s would have to be significantly modified to carry extra fuel, which would limit their bomb load. Another problem was that because the B-25s were much too large to fit on the carrier’s elevators, they would have to remain on the flight deck throughout the Pacific crossing, which meant the carrier could not conduct normal air operations. In other words, the Hornet would be unable to defend herself. In consequence of that, a second carrier would have to be assigned to accompany her. Indeed, King even wondered if it might not require three carriers—two for the heavy bombers and one to defend the task force.12

  Many wondered whether it was an intelligent use of rare American carriers to use most or all of them simply to conduct an air raid whose purpose was mainly to boost morale. In any event, the plan required cooperation from what in 1942 was still called the Army Air Forces, and in March of 1942 the U.S. Army and Navy were very much at odds about future strategy. It was not the kind of dysfunctional hostility that characterized relations between the Japanese Army and Navy but a far more subtle competition over resources and priorities. The U.S. Army continued to adhere to the Germany First strategy that had been laid down in ABC-1 and Rainbow 5 in November 1941, whereas King was already pushing hard for an early Pacific offensive. After the collapse of the ABDA coalition, the British agreed to allow the United States to assume full responsibility for the conduct of the war in the Pacific, and at a March 5 strategy meeting in the White House, King presented a memorandum he had prepared for the president that emphasized the importance of holding Hawaii and defending the lines of communication to Australia, but which also called for a “drive northward from the New Hebrides into the Solomons and the Bismarck archipelago,” which meant attacking Rabaul. To make sure that a busy FDR didn’t miss the central point of his argument, King summed it up in three bulleted items at the end: “Hold Hawaii, Support Australasia, Drive northwestward from New Hebrides.”13