The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History)

by Craig L. Symonds

  Doolittle and Halsey had discussed this possibility during their restaurant dinner in San Francisco; both knew what to do. Halsey blinkered a message from the Enterprise: “Launch planes. To Col. Doolittle and his gallant command, good luck and God bless you.” On board the Hornet, the klaxon sounded and a voice called out: “Army pilots man your planes.”31

  The seas were rough. The assistant signal officer on the Enterprise, Robin Lindsey, called it the “God damnest weather [he’d] ever seen.” Green water broke over the bow of the Hornet, and everyone on deck had to wear a lifeline to avoid being swept over the side. The wind gusted up to 27 knots, and with the Hornet making 30 knots, the relative wind speed over the deck was 50 knots or more. Despite the choppy seas, that wind was a blessing, for it would aid in getting the 31,000-pound bombers into the air. Navy Lieutenant Edgar Osborne stood near the bow with a safety line around his waist and a checkered flag in his hand. Sea spray soaked him each time the big carrier plunged into another wave. He watched the majestic rise and fall of the Hornet, waving the black-and-white checkered flag over his head in a circle as a signal for Doolittle to rev his engines. Then, just as the Hornet reached the nadir of its plunge, Osborne slashed the flag downward. Doolittle released the brake, and his B-25 surged forward. He kept the nose wheel on the white line painted on the Hornet’s flight deck. If he kept it steady, his right wing tip should clear the superstructure of the ship’s island by six feet. The plane raced downhill at first, and then, as the Hornets bow rose up again, his plane rose up with it and was boosted into the sky with plenty of flight deck to spare. It was exactly 8:20 a.m.32

  Doolittle made one pass over the ship, then flew off on the coordinates he had calculated. He did not circle to wait for the rest of the planes to join him. To do so would waste precious fuel, especially since they were launching nearly a hundred miles beyond optimum range. Flying in formation used up additional fuel, since every pilot except the leader had to make constant tiny adjustments to hold his position. Instead, each plane would make its way to the target independently.33

  The rest of the planes took off at intervals of several minutes. The second one almost didn’t make it. Lieutenant Travis Hoover’s plane dropped off the end of the deck and disappeared. After a few harrowing seconds, it appeared again, struggling up into the sky. The rest of the launchings were mostly routine—as routine as launching two-engine land bombers off a carrier could be. Until the last one. The tail of the sixteenth plane extended out over the back of the Hornet’s fantail, and the plane had to be wrestled forward to the launching spot by the deck crew. The wind continued to gust unpredictably. One particularly severe gust caught Seaman Robert W. Wall and threw him into the left wing propeller. His arm was badly mangled and later had to be amputated. But the plane left on time.34

  Doolitt le’s B-25 Mitchell bomber takes off from the deck of the Hornet on April 18, 1942. Note the white line painted on the flight deck to help the pilots avoid hitting the ship’s island superstructure. (U.S. Naval Institute)

  As soon as the last plane was airborne, Halsey ordered the carriers and cruisers to reverse course and steam east, away from Japan, at 25 knots while the crew turned its attention to bringing up the planes from the hangar deck so that the Hornet could function as a real carrier again. As Doolittle and his bombers flew westward, Halsey and Task Force 16 sped away eastward.

  The Army pilots, accustomed to navigating over land by following railroads or highways, were now flying over 650 miles of open ocean toward a target none of them had ever seen. They had practiced for the mission by flying out over the Gulf of Mexico, learning to fly by compass bearing alone. To conserve fuel, they flew at 165 knots, replenishing the tanks by hand from gas cans stored on board, saving the cans to throw over the side all at once, so that they didn’t form a trail on the surface of the sea for the Japanese to follow. About a half hour into the flight, Taylor’s Number Two plane caught up to Doolittle and settled in on his wing, though the rest headed for Japan independently. They flew low, about 200 feet, and passed over some small ships, mostly fishing vessels, though Doolittle thought he saw a light cruiser. Doolittle made landfall well north of Tokyo—navigating by dead reckoning was always a bit dicey. Instead of following the coast southward, as some did, he decided to fly inland and approach the target from the north. He was still flying low, the shadow of his plane jumping around on the ground as it conformed to the topography. He passed some small biplanes—perhaps army trainers—but there was no reaction from them. Other pilots recalled flying over groups of civilians who looked up and waved, assuming, not unreasonably, that these were Japanese planes on a training mission. One plane flew over a baseball field with a game in progress, and the crowd stood up to wave. The pilots waved back.35

  Ten miles north of Tokyo, Doolittle encountered nine Japanese fighter planes flying in three tight V formations. They ignored him. At the outskirts of the city, Doolittle pulled up to 1200 feet, turned southwest, and dropped his first bomb at 1:30 p.m. (ship time). He had been flying for five hours. After dropping his four 500-pound bombs, Doolittle took his plane back down to 500 feet. There was a lot of antiaircraft fire now, though it was inaccurate; at 500 feet his plane was a difficult target. He passed over an aircraft factory where new planes were lined up in rows outside, but he had no bombs left, and he continued southwestward out over the Sea of Japan and on toward the China coast.36

  He made landfall at dusk; soon it was full dark. He was now flying over unknown terrain with no certain objective. Doolittle pulled up to 8,000 feet to avoid running into a mountain and flew on. At 9:00 p.m., after covering 2,250 miles in thirteen hours, he was running out of gas. He got no response on the radio frequency he had been given for the Chinese airfields. He did not know that news of his mission had never made it to the Chinese. At 9:30, he ordered his crew to prepare to jump. He ensured that they went first, and then, setting the autopilot for level flight, he followed them out into the night.37

  He landed in a rice paddy that had recently been fertilized with human excrement. After slogging his way to solid ground, he knocked on the door of a small house where a light was showing, and tried out the phrase that the Chinese-speaking Lieutenant Stephen Jurika had taught all of them during the Pacific crossing: Lushu hoo megwa fugi: “I am an American.” The only response he got was the dousing of the light and the bolting of the door. He walked on. The next day, after a night trying to stay warm, he encountered three Chinese soldiers. He drew them a picture of an airplane with parachutes coming out of it. They were skeptical at first but relaxed when they found his parachute, which the unwelcoming farmer had secreted in his house. After several days, they got him to Hang Yang Airfield, and from there he, and eventually most of the others, were flown to the Nationalist Chinese headquarters at Chungking. There they were presented with presidential congratulations and notification that each of them would be awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Three weeks later, in a small and secret ceremony in the White House, President Roosevelt awarded Doolittle the Medal of Honor.38

  All sixteen American bombers had successfully found their targets, hitting Yokohama, Nagoya, and Kobe as well as Tokyo, but none of them had landed safely on Chinese airfields. One landed in southern Russia after its skipper, Captain Edward York, discovered that he did not have enough fuel to make it to China.* The rest crash-landed somewhere in China or along the Chinese coast. Of the eighty Doolittle raiders (five men per plane), seventy-three eventually made it back to the United States—though it took a while for some of them. Two died when their plane crashed, and another was killed bailing out. Eight were captured by the Japanese. Of those, three were executed, one died in prison, and the others survived the war in a POW camp. The crew of Captain York’s plane was interned in Russia. Just over a year later, those five escaped from the Soviet Union into Iran and eventually made it back to the States.

  For their part, the Japanese made light of the Doolittle raid, punning on his name to claim that his handful o
f bombers had done little to hurt the great empire, which was true enough. The American pilots had hit an oil tank farm, a steel mill, and power plants; one bomb slightly damaged a brand-new carrier—the Ryūhō—still in the shipyard. But they also hit several schools and an army hospital. Naturally, Japanese newspapers declared that the bombers had targeted schools and hospitals to “kill helpless children,” the usual wartime propaganda. Despite their defiant pronouncements, however, the Japanese high command was humiliated; the ability of the Imperial Army and Navy to protect the life of the emperor had been called into question. The Doolittle raid did not trigger the Midway expedition—that decision had already been made. It did, however, remove any doubts the Army had about backing the operation. According to Watanabe, “With the Doolittle raid the Japanese Army changed its strategy and not only agreed to the Midway plan of the Navy but agreed to furnish the troops to occupy the island.”39

  In the United States, news of the raid was received jubilantly. Americans thought of it as payback for Pearl Harbor. One might note that the Americans had lost all sixteen bombers, one more plane than the Japanese had lost in the American air victory off Rabaul on February 20. Still, there had been so little good news in the war so far that the Doolittle raid inspired both celebration and speculation about how those planes had managed to cross the Pacific. Though the Japanese learned from the captives that the bombers had been launched from a carrier, that fact remained an official secret for more than a year, and when asked where the planes had taken off, Roosevelt answered puckishly that they had flown from “Shangri-La,” the mythical and mystical city of James Hilton’s popular novel Lost Horizon. In homage to that, one of the new Essex-class carriers then under construction would be christened Shangri-La.

  Halsey’s Task Force 16 arrived back in Pearl Harbor on April 25. Mitscher had hoped to grant liberty to the crew of the Hornet; its men had been at sea almost continuously since leaving Norfolk. But with only four American carriers in the Pacific, there was no time for that. The men of the Hornet and Enterprise, as well as their escorts, had to forego leave in Hawaii, just as the men of the Shōkaku and Zuikaku had to forego leave in Japan. The Japanese sailors on their two carriers were bound on a special mission. And thanks to a handful of men working secretly in the basement of the Fourteenth Naval District headquarters building in Pearl Harbor, the Americans knew what that mission was.

  * Dwight Morrow, a former Republican senator from Ohio, had a special interest in aviation. (His daughter Anne would later marry the famed aviator Charles Lindbergh.) It was the Morrow Board that recommended the creation of a separate Air Corps within the U.S. Army.

  * The Army pilots were Lieutenants John Fitzgerald and James McCarthy, the first men to fly land-based bombers off a carrier deck, and they did so with no special training and very little advance notice.

  * Very likely, Captain York’s plane burned fuel faster than the others because the mechanics at McClellan Field near Sacramento, unaware that the carburetors on the Mitchell bombers had been specially recalibrated for fuel economy, reset them to normal.

  7

  The Code Breakers

  In addition to the men who drove the ships, flew the planes, or manned the guns—and those who some months later waded ashore carrying M-1 rifles—there were others whose contributions to victory in the Pacific were of an entirely different sort. Among the most consequential were those whose job it was to intercept, decrypt, and analyze Japanese radio traffic. In a windowless basement room at Pearl Harbor officially dubbed the Combat Intelligence Unit and which those working there called “the dungeon,” more than two dozen men toiled around the clock in an effort to glean useful intelligence out of the Japanese radio messages that were plucked out of the ether every day by the radio receiver at He’eia on Oahu’s north shore. It was the most secret organization in the U.S. Navy. Some of these men (called the “on-the-roof gang,” or “roofers” in the workplace vernacular) wore headsets and transcribed the blizzard of dots and dashes into number groups or Japanese kana characters.* Others sought to find patterns in those characters by running primitive IBM card-sorting machines that spewed out millions of punch cards each day. Still others sat at desks or tables and worked through tall stacks of intercepts, looking for repeated codes or phrases that might provide a hint about Japanese movements or intentions. It was an eclectic team of idiosyncratic individuals that collectively played one of the most important roles in the Pacific War, and particularly in the Battle of Midway.1

  As far back as World War I, the United States had been successful at breaking the Japanese diplomatic code. In the 1920s, a clandestine organization headed by Herbert Yardley and rather dramatically dubbed “the Black Chamber” devoted itself to breaking the diplomatic codes of several nations, including Japan. Their success had allowed the Americans to take a hard line at the 1921–22 Naval Arms Limitation Conference in Washington, where they had proposed that 10:10:6 ratio in battleship tonnage for the United States, Great Britain, and Japan. Though the Japanese were holding out for a 10:10:7 ratio, the American chief negotiator—the secretary of state and future Supreme Court chief justice Charles Evans Hughes—knew from reading intercepted Japanese secret messages that Tokyo would accept the 10:10:6 formula rather than let the talks fail.

  Six years later, when the State Department was preparing for the London Naval Conference, Yardley sent President Hoover’s new secretary of state, Henry Stimson, a batch of decrypted messages that revealed Japan’s negotiating strategy. Instead of praising Yardley, Stimson was horrified. He was said to have remarked that “gentlemen do not read other gentlemen’s mail.” Whether or not he actually made this statement, he shut down the Black Chamber and ended, temporarily, efforts to read Japanese diplomatic messages. Yardley, who apparently could not resist claiming public credit, got even with Stimson a few years later by exposing the operation he had led in a series of magazine articles, and then by publishing a memoir, The American Black Chamber (1931), in which he revealed the once highly secret operation. For their part, the Japanese complained that the Americans had been cheating and resolved to improve their codes.2

  The U.S. Navy was less fastidious than the State Department; efforts to break the Japanese Navy’s operational code continued uninterrupted. This quite separate effort began in 1924, when the communications intelligence organization was established on the top floor of the Navy Department building in Washington under the Code and Signals Section. Placed under the director of Naval Communications, this office was designated as OP-20-G. For almost twenty years, OP-20-G was the private fiefdom of the gifted and eccentric Commander Laurance F. Safford, a lugubrious, bespectacled 1916 Annapolis graduate with darting eyes and disheveled hair who looked, one coworker said, as if “he had been scratching his head in perplexity.”3 It was Safford who established the unit’s two satellite stations, one in Manila in 1932 called Station Cast, and Station Hypo in Hawaii in 1936.* It was also Safford who recruited the first team of analysts who became key players in the wartime code-breaking effort.**

  One of those whom Safford recruited was Ensign Joseph J. Rochefort, who had enlisted in the Navy in the last days of World War I and earned a commission after graduating from Stevens Institute. Rochefort was a tall, thin, and soft-spoken man whose ready smile disguised a fierce intensity. He had not set out to be a code breaker, and never requested the duty. Nevertheless, in 1924 his former commanding officer on the fleet oiler Cuyama, Commander Chester Jersey, when asked to nominate someone for the Code and Signals Section, recalled that Ensign Rochefort had been particularly good at crossword puzzles. He sent in Rochefort’s name, and in 1925 Ensign Rochefort became Safford’s number two man. Four years later, the Navy sent Rochefort to Japan for a three-year tour, ostensibly as an attaché but really to study Japanese language and culture.4

  Joe Rochefort, seen here as a captain in a postwar photograph, was a key figure in the American code-breaking apparatus before and during the Battle of Midway. (U.S. Naval Instit
ute)

  Both Safford and Rochefort proved adept at the tedious and exacting work of code breaking, but they could not remain continuously in the job. Because the Navy expected its officers to serve at sea if they expected to be promoted, the two men adopted the practice of filling in for one another: Rochefort took over OP-20-G when Safford went to sea, and Safford resumed command when it was Rochefort’s turn to deploy. In June of 1941, with war looming, Safford sent Rochefort, by now a lieutenant commander, out to Hawaii to take over as the head of the Combat Intelligence Unit (CIU), colloquially known as Station Hypo. There, Rochefort had particular responsibility for breaking what was called the “Japanese admirals’ code.” Station Cast in Manila remained focused on trying to decrypt the Japanese Navy’s operational code.5

  As it happened, the Japanese made little use of the admirals’ code, and for several months—including the critical month before Pearl Harbor—Rochefort and his team spent a lot of time chasing down blind alleys. Since they did not have access to the intelligence gathered from either the Japanese diplomatic code (known as “Purple”) or the operational codes, Rochefort could not share information gathered from those sources with his boss, Admiral Kimmel.6

  Instead, Rochefort and his team relied heavily on traffic analysis, that is, an examination of the external character of the messages rather than of their content. The analysts noted the call sign, the message classification, its level of importance or precedence, the frequency of transmission, its length, and the location of the transmitter to draw conclusions about what the message might mean in terms of Japanese naval movements. If, for example, the volume of message traffic suddenly surged, it could mean that a fleet was getting under way. Of course, since fleets at sea often maintained radio silence, the absence of radio traffic might be equally significant. When messages to or from the Kidō Butai suddenly stopped, that could be as important as a sudden flurry of messages, or even more important. In addition, it was occasionally possible for a veteran operator at He’eia to determine the identity of the sender of a particular message by recognizing the characteristic tempo or cadence (called a “fist”) of his Morse-code transmissions. If the sender was known to work at a specific base or ship, it provided the Americans with one more piece of intelligence. Traffic analysis had limitations, however. On one occasion, when radio traffic showed that several destroyers usually associated with a particular Japanese carrier were in the Marshalls, Rochefort assumed the carrier was there, too. He was wrong. His rare error was an example of how the analysts had to apply intuition to determine the utility of the intercepts.7