The USS Yorktown (CV-5) undergoing repairs in the massive drydock at Pearl Harbor on May 28, 1942. Though some thought those repairs would require three months or more, Nimitz insisted that she be patched up in three days. (U.S. Naval Institute)
Nimitz authorized shore liberty for the Yorktown’s crew, partly as a reward for their long cruise and partly to get them out of the way of the yard workers. Soon, some fourteen hundred fabricators, shipfitters, and welders were swarming over the big carrier. They went to work with a purpose and intensity that suggested every minute counted, which it did. Whereas Yamamoto assumed that the loss of the Shōkaku and Zuikaku only narrowed the Kidō Butai’s margin of superiority, Nimitz knew that if the Americans were to have any chance against the oncoming juggernaut, they would need all three of their carriers.
The work continued around the clock. Though Honolulu was still blacked out for fear of enemy air raids, the dockyard at Pearl Harbor was lit up by giant floodlights and acetylene torches that burned through the night. The demand for electricity became so great that some districts in Honolulu endured power outages so that the yard could get all the power it needed. Pushed to make quick fixes rather than permanent repairs, the men did not bother with blueprints or plans. They cut plywood templates on board to match the gaping holes, sent the templates ashore to be duplicated in steel, then welded or bolted the patches into place. Deep inside the ship, work parties shored up sagging bulkheads instead of replacing them. 35
When Fletcher met with Nimitz in his Pearl Harbor headquarters, he thought the normally placid Nimitz seemed uncharacteristically tense. Nimitz asked how he felt, and Fletcher acknowledged that he was “pretty tired.” After all, he had just completed a 101-day deployment, fought a major battle, and ridden the crippled Yorktown back across 3,500 miles of ocean. Fletcher thought he and the crew of the Yorktown had earned a respite; he had even stopped for a quick drink en route to Nimitz’s headquarters. Nimitz agreed that Fletcher and his crew would ordinarily be entitled to a long refit on the West Coast. But these were not ordinary times. “We have to fix you up right away and send you out to Midway.” He explained what he knew of the Japanese plan. The Yorktown’s air group, depleted by the Battle of the Coral Sea, would be brought up to full strength with squadrons from the Saratoga.* The Yorktown would be repaired and refloated by the next day (May 29) and go to sea again the day after that.36
There was more, of course. Nimitz revealed that Halsey would be unable to participate in the forthcoming engagement because of his skin condition, and that Spruance would take over Task Force 16. Then, to Fletcher’s growing perplexity, Nimitz began to ask him pointed questions about various aspects of his command tenure in Yorktown. The roots of this awkward interrogation reached back to Ernie King’s suspicions about Fletcher’s timidity. King remained disappointed that Fletcher had not attacked the shipping at Rabaul. His disappointment had sharpened into anger when he had read Fletcher’s March 29 message informing Nimitz that he was retiring to Noumea to refuel; King had dashed off an angry and almost insulting blast to Fletcher that his message was “not understood.” Indeed, King seemed ready to write off Fletcher as an operational commander, and a few days after sending that missive he had proposed that Fletcher be moved into a shore billet as the acting commander of the South Pacific. Nor had the Battle of the Coral Sea eased King’s doubts. King acknowledged to his British counterpart that “we had rather the better of it” in the Coral Sea, but after reading the battle reports, he wrote to Nimitz (with a copy to Fletcher) that while he was “not familiar with all the circumstances,” he had “a feeling that destroyers might have been used in the night attacks” on May 7. Now, before Nimitz handed Fletcher the command of all of America’s remaining carriers in what was shaping up to be the decisive battle of the Pacific War, King wanted Nimitz to interrogate Fletcher sharply to determine his suitability for such an important job.37
The conversation was as embarrassing for Nimitz as it was for Fletcher, and the discussion became increasingly stilted. Finally, Fletcher said he would have to consult his log to respond in detail, and Nimitz, probably relieved, said that that was reasonable and they moved on to other topics. That night, after a second meeting that included Ray Spruance, Fletcher stayed up late to compose a typed thirteen-page single-spaced letter that began, “My dear Admiral Nimitz,” in which he explained all his command decisions in detail, especially in the Coral Sea. He had not attacked Rabaul, he wrote, because he did not have timely intelligence about suitable targets and it would have revealed his presence to the enemy. He did not order a destroyer night attack on May 7 because the location of the enemy carriers was uncertain. The airplane seen on the radar scope circling only thirty miles away was very likely a lost friendly. “All things considered,” he wrote, “the best plan seemed to be to keep our force concentrated and prepare for battle with enemy carriers next morning.”38
Nimitz forwarded Fletcher’s letter to King, along with one of his own (“Dear King”), in which he wrote that he had “finally had an opportunity to discuss with Fletcher … his operations in the Coral Sea area, and to clear up what appeared to be lack of aggressive tactics of his force.” As far as Nimitz was concerned, “these matters have been cleared up to my entire satisfaction, and I hope, to yours.” Fletcher, Nimitz wrote, “is an excellent, seagoing, fighting naval officer and I wish to retain him as task force commander.” Fletcher had passed the test, though if King had been grading it instead of Nimitz, the outcome might have been different.39
Nimitz ended his letter by quoting King’s own words back to him. In the days before Pearl Harbor, when King had commanded the Atlantic Fleet, he had frequently reminded his subordinates that despite shortages, “we will do the best we can with what we have.” King had used it so frequently that it had become the semiofficial slogan of the Atlantic Fleet. Now Nimitz used that phrase to close his letter of May 29: “We are actively preparing to greet our expected visitors with the kind of reception they deserve,” he wrote, “and we will do the best we can with what we have” In this context, though, it had a double meaning. It meant not only that they would make do with the ships and equipment they had—Halsey’s two carriers (though without Halsey), and a patched-up Yorktown carrying planes and pilots from the Saratoga—it also clearly meant that they would make do with the commander that was available.40
Nimitz gave Fletcher his orders later that same day. Though Fletcher would command the entire American carrier force, Nimitz wanted him to keep the Yorktown group separate from Task Force 16. Spruance’s two carriers were to launch the first strike while Fletcher held the Yorktowns air group back as a reserve until all of the Japanese carriers had been definitely located. Nimitz also reiterated “the principle of calculated risk,” and, using King’s language, he cautioned Fletcher not to “accept such decisive action as would be likely to incur heavy losses in our carriers and cruisers.” If defeat seemed likely, he was to break off the engagement and retire. After all, as Commander Miyo had repeatedly but fruitlessly pointed out at the conference in Tokyo at which Watanabe had pitched Yamamoto’s original plan, Midway was too far from Tokyo to make its occupation by Japan sustainable. Even if the Japanese took it now, the Americans could always get it back later.41
Early the next morning (May 29), Drydock Number One was reflooded, the Yorktown floated off her blocks, and the gates were opened. The big flattop backed gingerly out into the main harbor and over to a loading dock, where she began to take on board the fuel, ammunition, and provisions she would need over the next several days. By then, Spruance was already at sea. Elements of Task Force 16 had begun to leave Pearl Harbor on the morning of May 28. The destroyers had gone out first and set up a screen. Then the cruisers followed, one at a time, at five-minute intervals. Finally, the two carriers departed. They were naked of airplanes—the planes and their crews were still at Kaneohe Air Station and Ewa Field and would fly out to the carriers only after the task force was well out to sea.42
A
s the work on the Yorktown progressed, an ensign named Jack Crawford, only six months out of the Naval Academy and fresh from radar school at MIT, reported his arrival in Pearl Harbor. He had orders to report to the Yorktown for duty and was eager to get aboard his first ship. The personnel officer at Pearl told him that there was no rush, since the Yorktown was likely to be in drydock for several months, but the young ensign was in a hurry. Told he would need the signature of the chief of staff to effect the transfer, Crawford went to the captain’s house and knocked on his door. The Filipino steward who answered told him that the captain was watching a movie. With the impatience of youth, Ensign Crawford told him to get the captain out of the movie; he needed a signature. The obviously irritated captain signed the orders, but he warned Crawford that his attitude did not bode well for his future career. “Son,” he told him, “you’re headed for trouble.” He was more right than either of them knew. Crawford went aboard the Yorktown at ten o’clock that night.43
The next day, Nimitz came aboard and talked to Fletcher and Buckmaster. He had no more instructions; he merely wished them “good luck and good hunting.” Soon afterward, the Yorktown was under way. Once in open water she joined the ships of her escort for the cruise northward to a rendezvous with Spruance’s Task Force 16 at a predetermined point 1,400 miles north of Oahu and 325 miles north of Midway that had optimistically been designated as “Point Luck.” There, the American carriers would be on the flank of the Kidō Butai as it approached. Ironically, it was very near the spot where the Japanese commander of the Red Team during the shipboard War Games at Hashirajima had put them, and where Rear Admiral Ugaki Matome had insisted they could never be.44
* It is interesting that for war-gaming purposes, both the Americans and the Japanese made their own forces “Blue” and the enemy “Red,” though in a bow to the defunct Plan Orange, Americans most often referred to the Japanese as “Orange.”
* An interesting postscript to this gambit is that the message did affect Japanese logistical planning for the invasion of Midway. One of the marus (transport ships) in the invasion force was assigned to carry two new salt-water evaporators to replace the “broken” one on Midway after occupation.
* There has been a lot of confusion about the character of these decrypts. In his postwar oral history, Rochefort described it as a single op order in twelve parts, which is often how it is described. However, the list of raw decrypts shows that the information was retrieved from a dozen different messages, all dated May 20, each of which dealt with a different aspect of the plan. No single comprehensive operational order dated May 20 has been found. It is very likely, therefore, that Rochefort, in making his presentation to Nimitz on May 25, simply conflated these several messages into one. For a longer discussion of this, see Appendix E.
* The Naval Academy class of 1907, which was particularly large, was commissioned in three sections to smooth the entrance of so many new officers into the fleet. With his high class standing, Spruance graduated with the first group on September 12, 1906, even though he was a member of the class of 1907.
* The Yorktown retained most of Wally Short’s bombing squadron (VB-5) though it was redesignated as VS-5 in order to make room for Max Leslie’s VB-3 from Saratoga. Yorktown s fighter squadron, originally VF-42 from Ranger, supplied some pilots but was merged into VF-3 under Jimmy Thach; the squadron was also assigned the newer Dash 4 Wildcats. The torpedo squadron (VT-3 under Lem Massey) also expected replacement planes, hoping to get the newer and faster Grumman Avengers, though the strictness of the timetable meant that the pilots of VT-3 flew out to the Yorktown in the older and slower Devastators.
10
Opening Act
The battle opened not in the central Pacific but among the fog enshrouded islands of the Aleutian archipelago some two thousand miles to the north. Part of the price that Yamamoto had to pay for getting the Navy General Staff to accept Operation MI was his agreement to continue with Operation AL—the occupation of several small islands in the western Aleutians. Though at the time the Americans assumed that this was a diversion for the Midway campaign, it was a stand-alone operation with quite limited goals: the occupation of the islands of Attu and Kiska in the western island chain in order to expand the empire’s defensive perimeter. To prevent the Americans from interfering with these landings, the Japanese planned to neutralize the American base at Dutch Harbor on the island of Unalaska, some four hundred miles east of Attu and Kiska. The overall operation was under Vice Admiral Hosogaya Moshirō, who commanded the Japanese Fifth Fleet, and the force assigned to strike Dutch Harbor consisted of two carriers and their supports under the command of Rear Admiral Kakuta Kakuji. One of the two carriers was the Ryūjō, which carried only thirty-seven planes. The other was the 24,000-ton Jun’yō, which carried fifty-three planes. Combined with two heavy cruisers and a destroyer screen, they comprised the Second Striking Force—a kind of mini Kidō Butai.
Though the entire Japanese operational plan for June of 1942 was characterized by a dispersal of force, the decision to send two carriers to the Aleutians seems particularly profligate. In fact, however, neither could have been used to reinforce the Midway-bound Kidō Butai. The Ryūjō was simply too small, and the Jun’yō, which had originally been laid down as a passenger liner and converted into a carrier only recently, had a top speed of only 24 knots, which meant she could not keep up with the Kidō Butai; even the plodding Kaga could sustain 28 knots. On the other hand, the fighters and bombers on the decks of those two carriers might have played an important—even a decisive—role in the Battle of Midway had some or all of them been transferred to the Zuikaku. This was not done mainly because the Japanese did not believe the Zuikaku was needed, but also because the pilots in the Jun’yō’s air wing were relative novices with little if any battle experience. Because of that, though the Jun’yō nominally carried fifty-three aircraft, Kakuta could count on only about thirty-three of those for combat operations.1
The Americans had long been aware of Alaska’s vulnerability. The tail end of the Aleutian archipelago at Attu was only 650 miles from the northernmost of the Japanese Kurile Islands. The Japanese had a small base on Paramushiro in the Kuriles, but until 1937 the Americans had virtually no military presence in Alaska. That year, the Navy began construction of a seaplane base at Sitka, and soon afterward another at Dutch Harbor, though that was still some 1,400 air miles from Paramushiro. By 1942, these two American bases hosted two destroyers, three Coast Guard cutters, and a handful of long-range PBY Catalinas, all under the command of Navy Captain Leslie E. Gehres. The Army had twenty bombers plus forty pursuit planes under the command of Brigadier General William O. Butler.
In January 1942, Roosevelt had asked King about “operational readiness in the Alaskan area.” At the time King dismissed the idea of a Japanese assault there because “a landing in Alaska would be a costly undertaking, unproductive of immediate results, and would expose the occupying forces to strong counter attack.” Despite King’s skepticism, however, the United States did begin to build up its Alaskan forces, largely in response to Alaska’s governor, Ernest Gruening, who complained to FDR’s secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, that “Alaska is far from prepared for eventualities.” What Gruening wanted was money—for airfields, planes, and equipment. And he got it. Ickes recognized that Gruening’s request was as much political as strategic, and he sent it on to the president, who approved the construction of a new 5,000-foot airstrip on the island of Umnak, just west of Dutch Harbor.2
For his part, Nimitz knew (thanks to the code breakers) that the Japanese planned to attack the Aleutians at the same time as they closed on Midway. He was not willing to weaken his carrier task force to defend those distant islands, nor was he willing to let them go by default. He appointed newly promoted Rear Admiral Robert A. “Fuzzy Theobald, a stocky 1907 Annapolis classmate of Ray Spruance, to command a surface force of five cruisers (two heavy cruisers and three light cruisers) plus four destroyers as Task Force
8, and gave him orders to defend the archipelago and “inflict maximum attrition” on the enemy attackers. 3
Without carriers, Theobald knew he had to depend on General Butler and the Army for his air support. In theory, at least, Theobald had command authority over Butler’s bombers, for in April Marshall and King had agreed that “when a state of fleet-opposed invasion is declared, unity of command is vested in the Navy.” The problem was that neither service had any practical experience with joint operations, and there was no clear chain of command or channel of communications that allowed the two services to work together efficiently. As there was no Department of Defense or Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, the two services were entirely separate. Though Nimitz asked King to “inform Army that surface force will be almost completely dependent on them for air cover,” King could not order it. The only person with simultaneous command authority over both the Army and the Navy was the president himself. As a result, there was confusion and missed opportunity on the American side, though, as it turned out, this was matched by confusion and missed opportunity on the Japanese side, too.4
Rear Admiral Robert A. “Fuzzy” Theobald commanded the cruiser-destroyer force dubbed Task Force 8 that Nimitz assembled to defend the Aleutian Islands. (U.S. Naval Institute)
Theobald and his task force reached Kodiak Island, some five hundred miles east of Dutch Harbor, on May 27—the same day that the crippled Yorktown appeared off Pearl Harbor. He met with General Butler at his headquarters and explained his plan to inflict “maximum attrition” on the approaching enemy, in conformance with Nimitz’s directive. Theobald’s surface force could not close with Kakuta’s carriers unless the Americans first gained command of the air. The Navy Catalinas were ideal for scouting, but they were flimsy and vulnerable and relatively useless in an attack, especially against carriers. Theobald could not even plan a night destroyer attack, because at that latitude in early June there was hardly any night. Butler would have to bring his Army bombers to the forward airstrip at Cold Bay and the new field at Umnak, where they would wait for a sighting report from the Catalinas and then attack. If their attacks sufficiently weakened the carriers, Theobald could then close with his cruiser force and finish them off with gunfire.5
The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History) Page 22