The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History)

by Craig L. Symonds

  Butler was less than enthusiastic about this plan. He objected to concentrating his air forces at Cold Bay and Umnak, more than five hundred miles to the west, instead of at Kodiak, where they could protect the city of Anchorage. Those western bases lacked support facilities and protective revetments; Butler worried that his planes would be sitting ducks. The conversation was courteous enough, but Butler stubbornly resisted the idea of staging his bombers that far west. Theobald considered asserting his newly established prerogatives as joint commander and simply ordering Butler to do it, but feared that if he did so it would “create an initial schism between the Army and the Navy that [would] adversely affect all [their] operations from then on.” So he tried to reason with Butler, pointing out the advantages of acting offensively rather than defensively. He reminded Butler that his own surface ships “could accomplish little until the enemy aircraft carriers were definitely accounted for” and reminded him of Nimitz’s orders to inflict “maximum attrition” on the enemy. By the end of their five-hour conference, Theobald thought he had convinced Butler, and on June 1 he returned to his flagship, Nashville, and led his task force back to sea, taking up a position four hundred miles to the south. There his ships were cocooned in a seasonal fog so thick that, as one officer on the Nashville recalled, “for three days we never saw the ship ahead of us.”6

  Kakuta launched his first strike against Dutch Harbor early on the morning of June 3 (Alaska time). He sent off partial strikes from both of his carriers, but the inexperienced pilots from the Jun’yō got lost in the thick weather and turned back, and as a result only nine bombers from Ryūjō, plus three fighters, made it through to the target. The Ryūjō’s planes inflicted moderate damage, hitting the radio station, the oil tank farm, and an Army barracks, killing twenty-five Americans at the cost of two of their own planes.7*

  Now was the time for the American Army counterstrike against the carriers. Navy search planes found Kakuta’s carriers a mere 165 miles away and radioed their coordinates; one of the snoopers even managed to drop a few bombs, though none struck an enemy ship. Theobald expected that the Army bombers would now sortie. Instead, the Army pilots insisted that “they had to await an order from General Butler,” who had apparently had second thoughts since agreeing to Theobald’s arrangements. He told another Navy officer that he doubted the Army planes could even defend their own airfields, much less damage the enemy. He therefore radioed Theobald from Kodiak, “Unless otherwise directed by you [I] will not advance bombing squadrons from Kodiak to Cold Bay Area.” Since Theobald was observing radio silence, he could not respond to this astonishing message. Instead, he sent the destroyer Humphreys racing back to Kodiak with a written order.8

  Thus prodded, Butler released his bombers, though this did not result in an immediate strike. While en route to the target, the first group of Army planes received a radio report that the Catalinas had temporarily lost contact with the enemy. Rather than continue on in the expectation that contact could be reestablished—which it was—they turned around and returned to base. When a second group of bombers flew out toward the coordinates, the Army pilots fanned out to attack individually rather than attempt a coordinated strike. Most bombed from high altitude, some releasing their bombs blindly from above the stratus cloud layer, simply guessing at the enemy’s position “by calculation”—essentially by dead reckoning. As Theobald noted later, “such an attack could not be sure of hitting Kiska Island,” much less an enemy warship.9

  A few of the bombers had been equipped with ship-killing torpedoes, but the Army pilots, inexperienced with such weapons, released them, too, from high altitude, all but ensuring that they would break apart upon striking the water. (One Army pilot claimed that he landed his torpedo square on the deck of a carrier, though that proved false.) Some pilots failed to locate the enemy at all and returned to base still carrying their heavy torpedoes. To avoid landing with such volatile cargo, they jettisoned them on the rocks offshore. Unaware that the torpedo warheads became armed only after the torpedo ran for a prescribed distance in the water, they reported them as “duds” because they didn’t explode. Theobald was willing to forgive their ignorance of torpedo ordnance but regretted the loss of the torpedoes themselves, since they were scarce and expensive. By the end of the day, the Navy had lost six PBY Catalinas; the Army had lost two bombers and two P-40 pursuit planes. The Japanese lost four scout planes—shot down by Army P-40s operating from the field on Umnak—yet suffered no damage to their strike force. Having conducted the required attack on Dutch Harbor, Kakuta turned west to cover the landings on Attu and Kiska. The ever-present fog delayed those landings, and he decided to send a second strike against Dutch Harbor on June 4. This time his planes destroyed several oil tanks and a few more buildings, though they again failed to knock out the base.10

  Theobald was so disgusted with the performance of the Army bombers that he decided to return personally to Kodiak in his flagship to talk again with Butler. He arrived there on the morning of June 5 and immediately went to see a somewhat chagrinned Butler, who was aware of how little his bombers had accomplished. Theobald formally requested that Butler allow the pilots to strike without waiting for permission and suggested that they make concentrated and coordinated attacks rather than isolated high-altitude bombings. He left that same afternoon, believing, or at least hoping, that the problems had been resolved. Nonetheless, Butler’s planes never did manage to strike the Japanese fleet. Indeed, so feeble was the American attack on Kakuta’s carrier force that the Japanese commander may have been unaware that he had been under attack at all. As one senior naval officer reported to King regarding the Army bombers: “Either they were too slow in taking off, or the weather was too bad, or the distance was too great, or they couldn’t find the enemy.” In the conditions that prevailed off the Aleutian archipelago, some of this was not altogether surprising. Still, the Navy was inclined to attribute it, in part at least, to Army timidity.11

  Kakuta, too, was disappointed with the effect of his air attacks on Dutch Harbor. Far more distressing, however, was the radio message he received the afternoon of June 5 from Yamamoto. For the commander in chief to break radio silence at all was astonishing enough; the message he sent was even more so. Hosogaya and Kakuta were to break off their attacks in the Aleutians, cancel the landings, send the transports back to Japan, and close in on the Kidō Butai near Midway. Four hours later, Yamamoto reversed himself and cancelled those orders, telling his northern force commanders to complete their mission after all. But clearly, something had gone very wrong with the Kidō Butai.12

  In fact, nearly everything had gone wrong, starting with the fact that the Japanese had failed to determine whether the American carriers they hoped to lure out to their destruction were even present in Pearl Harbor. They did have a plan to find out. Nearly three months earlier, well before the fateful conference in Tokyo at which Nagano and Fukudome had capitulated to Yamamoto’s blackmail and approved the Midway plan, the Japanese had conducted a long-range reconnaissance of Pearl Harbor using two giant Kawanishi flying boats. These remarkable four-engine seaplanes, called “Emilys” by the Allies, were 92 feet long (30 feet longer than the American Catalinas) and had an astonishing range of over 4,500 miles, which meant that, theoretically at least, they could fly from the Marshall Islands to Pearl Harbor and back without stopping. Such a flight would leave no margin for error, however, and so Commander Miyo (who a month later would strenuously oppose Yamamoto’s Midway plan) suggested that their range could be extended even further by refueling them at sea from submarines. This notion hinted at using them to bomb American cities along the continental West Coast. More immediately, it provoked discussions about a second attack on Pearl Harbor, a scheme that was code-named Operation K.13

  Americans were very much aware of the possibility of long-range air strikes by seaplanes refueled at sea. Three months before Pearl Harbor, Hypo analyst Jasper Holmes, writing under the pen name “Alec Hudson,” had published a story
in the Saturday Evening Post about American seaplanes refueled by submarines striking enemy bases three thousand miles away. In Holmes’s fictional tale, “twelve big bombers” attacked an enemy base “with machinelike precision,” wrecking an invasion convoy. Edwin Layton later speculated that Holmes’s story might have given the Japanese the idea for Operation K, but in fact the Japanese had begun experimenting with a seaplane-submarine partnership as early as 1939. After the war began, the Japanese planned to conduct a whole series of seaplane raids against Pearl Harbor—to keep track of the comings and goings of American warships, as well as to keep the Americans on edge and off balance by bombing them periodically. In the end, however, this dual objective undermined Japanese ambitions, for it focused American attention on the program and therefore compromised it.14

  The first (and, as it turned out, only) seaplane attack on Pearl Harbor occurred in the first week of March 1942, before Yamamoto even submitted his Midway plan to the Naval General Staff. Two Kawanishis, each of them armed with four 500-pound bombs, took off from Wotje Island in the Marshalls on March 2 and in thirteen and a half hours flew 1,605 miles to an unoccupied atoll called French Frigate Shoals, halfway between Pearl Harbor and Midway. There they refueled from two prepositioned submarines, then flew on to Oahu, another 560 miles to the southeast, arriving just past midnight on the morning of March 4. By then the weather had thickened, and visibility over the American naval base was virtually zero. The pilot of the lead plane, Lieutenant Hashizume Hisao, could see a slight glow through the cloud layer, but not much else. Thinking that he had glimpsed the outline of Ford Island in Pearl Harbor through a gap in the clouds, he dropped his bombs. His consort did the same. Then both planes headed back for the Marshall Islands, another two thousand miles and fifteen nonstop hours away.

  The long range of the big four-engine Kawanishi H8K Type 2 seaplanes, called “Emilys” by the Allies, encouraged Japanese planners to consider long-range raids against American bases. (U.S. Naval Institute)

  For all the effort and expended fuel, the raid did no damage whatever. Hashizume’s four bombs fell on the forested slopes of Mount Tantalus behind Honolulu, and the four from the other plane fell into the water near the entrance to Pearl Harbor. Moreover, the heavy cloud cover meant that Hashizume could not report with much certainty about what ships were or were not in the harbor, though he claimed to have seen at least one carrier. 15

  The most important consequence of this raid was that it drew Nimitz’s attention to the threat. Nimitz asked Layton how the Japanese had managed to drop four bombs on Oahu (the four that fell into the harbor had disappeared altogether, and no one was even aware of them until after the war). Layton was fairly sure that they had done it with seaplanes refueled from submarines, and he told Nimitz about Jasper Holmes’s story in the Saturday Evening Post. Layton also speculated that the Japanese had used French Frigate Shoals to refuel. As a result, Nimitz stationed an American seaplane at French Frigate Shoals, sending the USS Ballard, a destroyer recently converted to a seaplane tender, there in late March.16

  For a variety of reasons, the Japanese did not continue their planned series of raids on Hawaii, but when Yamamoto sought reassurance that the American carriers were still in Pearl Harbor on the eve of the Battle of Midway, his staff suggested a reprise of Operation K. Again Hypo was able to alert Nimitz to the Japanese plan. On May 10, Layton informed Nimitz about an intercepted message that referred to the “K campaign” involving both aircraft and submarines, and three days later he reported that “the K campaign [was] underway.”17

  The Japanese committed six submarines to the project: two filled with aviation fuel, two as radio beacons, one as a plane guard, and one as a command boat. The first of them, the I-123 commanded by Lieutenant Commander Ueno Toshitake, arrived at French Frigate Shoals on May 26. When Ueno approached the atoll and peered into the lagoon through his periscope, he saw a U.S. Navy warship anchored there. When the two fuel-laden submarines showed up the next day, the American warship was still there. In fact, another converted seaplane tender, the Thornton, had joined her. The submarines were in no position to challenge them—the Type KRS submarine had been designed as a minelayer and did not have torpedoes or torpedo tubes. A surface attack would be suicidal, since each of the American surface ships boasted four 4-inch guns. Besides, the whole point of Operation K was stealth. The Japanese could only hope that the Americans would simply go away. Ueno radioed the circumstances back to his superior in the Marshalls and received orders to wait one more day. On May 31, several Catalina PBYs landed in the lagoon to join the tenders. Informed of this, Vice Admiral Tsukahara Nishizo cancelled Operation K. There would be no reconnaissance of Pearl Harbor before the Battle of Midway; the Japanese would simply have to trust that the American carriers were still there. Of course, the day before that, on May 30, the Yorktown had left Pearl Harbor to join Task Force 16 at Point Luck.18

  The second thing that went wrong that week was that the Japanese were tardy in establishing the submarine cordons that were supposed to track the American carriers as they left Pearl Harbor in response to an attack on Midway. Seven submarines, constituting Cordon A, were to occupy a north-south line west of Pearl Harbor. Six more would constitute Cordon B north and east of French Frigate Shoals. Another six would occupy a line near Midway. The subs were to report the carriers’ movements and then inflict whatever damage they could as a prologue to the main event. All three cordons were to be established by June 2. They got a late start out of Japan, however, and also lingered a day in Kwajalein, so that they were late in arriving. In addition, several subs were delayed by their involvement with the aborted Operation K. As a result of all this, only one sub made it into position by June 2; the others did not arrive until June 4. By then, the American carriers were nearly a thousand miles to the north. Watanabe Yosuji, Yamamoto’s loyal logistics officer, blamed the submarine commander Captain Kuroshima Kameto. Watanabe insisted that Kuroshima was simply not energetic in pursuit of his duties. Whatever the merits of that assertion, Yamamoto and Nagumo steamed eastward unaware that the American carriers—their principal quarry—had already flown the coop.19

  On June 2, Yamamoto’s battleships and Nagumo’s carriers, fighting their way eastward through rough seas, were blanketed by a fog so thick that the ships had to use searchlights to find one another in the formation. On the one hand this was a stroke of luck, for it hid them from the prying eyes of American long-range search planes from Midway. On the other it also prevented Nagumo from sending out search planes of his own, and it was stressful for the entire formation to execute the required zigzag course (to confuse American submarines) while maneuvering through a fog. A witness on board Akagi recalled seeing Nagumo and members of his staff on the bridge staring “silently at the impenetrable curtain surrounding the ship, … each face tense with anxiety.” Nagumo may indeed have been anxious. He had heard nothing from the submarines other than one report from I-168 off Midway, which relayed the information that, although the Americans were conducting intensive air search operations, the only vessel in sight was a picket submarine off Sand Island. Nagumo had to assume that no news was good news.20

  In fact, of course, the Americans were very much on the alert. On May 29, Nimitz had designated Navy Commander Logan C. Ramsey as the operational air coordinator for the airplanes at Midway, and Ramsey dramatically stepped up both the frequency and the range of the air search patrols. There had been some discussion within the American high command about Ramsey’s authority to send Army B-17 Flying Fortress bombers on such missions. Just as Theobald and Butler quarreled over their respective roles in defending Alaska, Army and Navy leaders at Midway squabbled over whose job it was to search for enemy warships. The Army insisted that the B-17s should be reserved for combat missions. The Navy’s position was that (in the words of one admiral) it was “criminal waste and stupid folly” not to take advantage of their two-thousand-mile range for air search missions. The discussion made it back to Washington,
where George Marshall decided in favor of the Navy. As a result, the Americans were able to use not only the Navy PBY sea planes but also the heavy B-17 Army bombers in their air search pattern.21

  The work was tedious. Every morning before dawn, the PBYs took off one by one at five-minute intervals from Midway’s protected lagoon while the B-17s took off from the airstrip on Eastern Island. They flew for seven or eight hundred miles out on their assigned vectors, then flew back again along a different axis to cover more area. After ten to twelve hours in the air, the crews landed, secured their planes, ate, slept, and then got up the next morning before dawn to do it all again. They flew mostly at low altitude—around 1,000 feet. That narrowed their search area, but the visibility was better and they were less likely to make mistakes in identification.22

  The first sighting report came in at 9:00 a.m. on June 3 from Ensign Charles R. Eaton, piloting a PBY about five hundred miles west of Midway. Eaton reported seeing “two Japanese cargo vessels” that fired on him with antiaircraft fire. Back in Midway, Captain Simard concluded, correctly, that these were only minesweepers patrolling ahead of the main body. Only minutes later, another report from a different search plane electrified the listeners at Midway, at Pearl Harbor, and out at Point Luck where Fletcher, Spruance, and the American carriers lay in wait.23