Days of Infamy

by Newt Gingrich

  Perhaps.

  That was a probable the more panicky would grasp on to. He was focused on the moment, and invasion or not, he knew with utter certainty what Yamamoto was really after this morning: him. The surviving American carriers, that was what he was throwing the dice for now.

  In spite of the panicked radio broadcasts out of Honolulu, the reporter on the air giving a blow-by-blow account of the fight out at sea, as if reporting on a ball game—and not knowing a damn thing about what he was talking about—at least had given them one valuable clue: the bombardment had stopped, at least for the moment.

  There were reports of Jap paratroopers landing in the Dole plantation, another of landing craft coming in at Kaneohe. He doubted both. The Japanese simply did not have the transport planes to reach Hawaii with paratroopers.

  He looked at the chronometer: 02:05 local time.

  Until someone dragged a dead Jap paratrooper or Imperial marine in front of him, the hell with those reports. What he did know for certain was that Draemel had gone down fighting and possibly crippled one of their battleships, which was most likely limping away from the coast at this very moment.

  “I want air crews awakened at 03:30, and make sure they have a damn good breakfast,” he announced.

  He didn’t add the grim thought that for many it would most likely be their last.

  “Entire crew to stand to at 04:00. Search planes to launch at 05:15.”

  His air boss, Lieutenant Commander Wade McCloskey, stood silent, but he could read the man’s thoughts. McCloskey had been temporarily promoted to CAG, Commander Air Group, replacing, at least for the moment, Commander Howard Young, who had flown on to Pearl yesterday morning, taking off at dawn to return to base. It was standard procedure, planes flying back in once in range of the island, giving the men some added air time, and a morale booster for those selected, since it meant they got back home hours ahead of their ship.

  But yesterday’s morale boost had flown straight into disaster. Young had taken off with eighteen planes from VB-6 and VS-6, all Dauntlesses, what could have now been part of his big punch. Most of them were dead, either dropped by the Japs or shot down by panicky sailors and soldiers on the ground.

  The air units McCloskey now commanded were little more than half the normal strength for Enterprise. He had but nineteen Dauntlesses and eighteen Devastator torpedo bombers on board. Halsey thanked God he had not sent on the boys from VF-6, his fighter squadron, so he still had nineteen Grumman F4F-3 Wildcats, enough to provide a screen for an offensive strike while at the same time enough remained behind to cover this task force. It meant he had a total of fifty-six aircraft on board, just a little over half of what Enterprise was capable of handling… and here they were now in the middle of a war and he felt like a pugilist with one arm already tied behind his back.

  McCloskey stood silent, waiting for any additional orders. Being pulled off the line and up onto the bridge obviously rankled the man, but he was damn near forty years old, Halsey thought when making the decision, a very old man indeed to be out there in a dogfight. McCloskey would have to run things from the bridge, and he was a man Halsey knew could be trusted to see it done right.

  “Can I lead?” McCloskey ventured, looking him straight in the eye, but already sensing the answer.

  Halsey shook his head.

  “I’ll need you here. Besides, when was the last time you slept? Those going up at dawn need to be fresh, and you’ll be up the rest of the night getting the strike ready. Sorry, Commander, your place is here with me.”

  McCloskey nodded reluctantly.

  “I know the boys aren’t trained for night launch, but we can’t wait for dawn. First search planes out at 05:15, fully loaded strike force prepared and on the deck as well.”

  “Yes sir,” and the reply was wooden, without emotion. Both knew that given the experience of their pilots, more than one of them would most likely crash on takeoff in the predawn darkness.

  “I want every plane available for launch at 05:45. Ten fighters to be held back as CAP, five of them in the air at all times, other five ready to launch immediately.”

  “Sir?”

  “Didn’t you understand me? At first twilight we start to launch our strike wave.”

  “Sir, without a report from the scout planes?” McCloskey asked. Halsey pointed back to the plot board.

  “They got a battleship out there that is hit, maybe crippled. By dawn it will have moved only forty, maybe fifty miles at most.”

  “That’s still thousands of square miles of ocean to find him in, sir.”

  “That bastard will run due west to the Marshalls,” and Halsey walked over to the plot board, stabbing at it with a stubby forefinger. “He’ll be there, and the Japs will have fighters over her. If we can get in there by dawn, ahead of their own air support which they’ll send in to cover the cripple, then maybe, just maybe we can track the incoming fighters sent to cover the battleship, do a reciprocal bearing, and find the carriers!

  “We’ll make full steam due north till it’s time to turn into the wind. That puts us a hundred miles south of them. Our boys will be over her before dawn, ahead of the Japs, and we’ll find those carriers and get in a first strike.”

  “And if they aren’t there or get there ahead of us?” McCloskey asked cautiously. “Then what?”

  “If that’s the case,” Halsey replied with a sarcastic smile,” on December ninth, I’ll be beached, and someone with more sense will be in command.”

  He didn’t add that chances were that finding the Japs first or not, they’d most likely be dead before nightfall. With less than forty strike planes, half of them antiquated Devastators, flying death traps, his boys would be lucky to take out one, at best two of their carriers, leaving at least one, maybe upward of three or four of their carriers to launch an overwhelming attack in reply.

  Caution whispered to him. Turn about now, stay out to sea, try to link up with Lexington as he had first planned to do, until the third strike wave had hit Pearl and all communications via CinCPac had ceased.

  But now? The Japs were most likely finished with Pearl. With a damaged battleship to sweat over, they’d head back to the Marshalls. Newton might be running south to try a hookup, or then again, north in an attempt to cut off the Japs if they were indeed north of the island. He wasn’t going to gamble Enterprise on such guesses. But regardless, if he could get a solid first strike in now, Lexington could do a killing follow-up.

  This was about pride now as well. The Navy, across a hundred and sixty-five years of her history, had never taken such a blow as it had this past day. If he turned tail and hid, sure there’d be defenders who would say he had made the wise, conservative choice. But in his mind the name of the Enterprise and his own would be forever besmirched as the ship and the admiral who turned and ran, rather than go in harm’s way, perhaps even leaving Lexington to die alone.

  Admiral Draemel had had the guts to do what he knew had to be done, knowing the odds. With such an example, could he do anything less?

  He paused, looking at the plot board, drawing an arc from northwest of Oahu to its west.

  “Four scout planes to go up, and that is it, the rest of VS-6 to stay with VB-6 as a strike force. Scout planes to first proceed toward where their battleship will be. Hell, if she is crippled, we’ll find her soon enough, then fan out and try and pick up the bearings of any Japs coming in. Once they are well clear of our group, have a couple of the pilots radio into Pearl, see if they can raise someone and coordinate a search with whatever they have there. If need be they should draft some damn civilians and anything left that can still fly to search to the west and north of the island just in case the Japs do play cautious and pull back.”

  “What about the rest?” McCloskey asked, pointing out the other two hundred and seventy degrees of ocean surrounding them.

  He emphatically shook his head.

  “Searching that will take another dozen planes. We’ve only got thirty-seven stri
ke aircraft, minus the search planes on board, and nineteen fighters. We conduct a full-out search and our remaining strike force is cut in half.”

  He shook his head. It was a damn tough balancing act. If Enter prise were at full strength he could afford to send out twenty planes as scouts and still have upward of sixty attack planes ready to go. Every additional plane sent out as a scout was one less bomb dropped on their carriers in what he assumed would be his one and only chance to take a swing at the bastards. It was all a gamble. He’d be leaving tens of thousands of square miles of ocean unsearched, and if he was wrong, if the entire Jap task force had circled with the battleships, they could very well be southwest or due west of him, and not northwest off Oahu as he now assumed and was betting his pile on.

  Get there first over the battleship, then fan out and search, that would be his game now. It was the only card he felt he could play against whoever it was who was playing out his own on the other side.

  “No. They have to be north of the island and are moving southwest, and will be somewhere in here by morning,” and again he pointed to the plot board, the tens of thousands of square miles of ocean west of Oahu.

  “All strike aircraft to be armed with torpedoes or armor piercing. Strict orders: They are to go for the carriers.”

  “That battleship if they can’t find the carriers?” McCloskey asked.

  “What can it do to us?” Halsey snapped. “If they’ve got a damaged battleship out there, that means at least one carrier or more close by providing air cover as they pull it out. That’s what I want.

  “Now get to work!”

  He left McCloskey to work out the details, climbed the ladder up to the next deck, and went into his cabin, closing the door. The blackout curtain over the porthole was drawn shut and he double-checked it before turning on the light over his bunk.

  Without bothering even to take his shoes off he lay down and snapped the light off.

  Damn all. If only I had a full complement of aircraft. I’ve got a strike force of less than forty bombers. Chances are half, two thirds would be lost, especially the aging albatrosses, the Devastators. The poor kids on those planes were doomed, and he wondered how many of them were sleeping soundly at this moment, and how many were lying awake in the dark as he now was, wondering what dawn would bring.

  FIVE decks below the admiral, Lieutenant Dave Dellacroce stared into the darkness. The room was blacked out, the only sound the snoring of his roommate, Lieutenant Pat Gregory.

  That son of a bitch can sleep through anything, he thought ruefully, almost angry at him for his composure, his eager excitement expressed over dinner, that in a few hours they’d be giving payback to the Japs.

  Yet again Dave played back the story, constantly repeating in his head, of just how the hell he had got here. Born and raised in Lafayette, Indiana, he had, of course, gone to Purdue, planning on being an electrical engineer, and then one day he’d seen a poster on a bulletin board, a very seductive poster: he could learn to fly for free, at Uncle Sam’s expense and wouldn’t even have to join up.

  It was a deal too good to pass up, and he, along with dozens of other guys, had shown up at the airport adjoining campus. Amelia Earhart had even been there to give them a little pep talk about the joys of flying. And she sure as hell was right.

  He took the physical, passed, then signed a little bit of paperwork, kind of noticing the fine print that if he was accepted into the program, took the lessons, and got his license, in the event of a “national emergency” he was subject to mobilization. But what the hell, he would be with the Navy, an officer and a pilot. And besides, except for the squabbling in Spain and somewhere in Africa, and China, who could ever imagine a national emergency? And the skies called.

  He soloed in only seven hours in a Piper J-3 Cub, a little beauty, damn near cracked her up five hours later when he buzzed his girlfriend’s farmhouse and got a little too close. She was, in fact, a big reason he’d gotten into a plane to start with. He wanted to impress her since she was starting to talk about some guy going to Indiana University who wanted to be a doctor. In fact, she ditched him just a couple of weeks later anyhow.

  Someone reported his nearly fatal buzz job, most likely her father, the old goat, and his instructor, a kindly old guy with a limp from the Great War, chewed him out a bit, then took him out and showed him how to do it safely, this time over another girl’s house, Betty, who he was now engaged to. They’d even played dogfights, with his instructor blowing up a balloon, tossing it out the open window, and telling him to find it and hit it.

  So he was just about to graduate from Purdue, class of 1940, had a hundred-plus hours flying with “the club”—and then the letter came in the mail, telling him there was indeed a “national emergency.”

  Actually it had all been rather exciting. The little sixty-five-horsepower Piper Cubs and Aeronca Chiefs were left behind for Stearmans, then up to hefty T-6s, and he had qualified in the spring for the Navy’s F4F Wildcat. In June he had made his first carrier landing—damn, that was a sweat-soaked moment—and in November been assigned to Enterprise, just barely catching up with her before she sailed last week.

  It had postponed yet again getting married to Betty. Though he missed her, longed for her, the thrill of being on the Enterprise was some compensation, and after this posting, there would be plenty of time.

  Yesterday had changed all that in a matter of seconds. The game of just fooling around with life was over; now it was real. The other guys had spent the day cursing the Japs, and then clamoring for action, and word was in a few hours they were going to get some.

  He had boasted along with the rest; after all, that’s what carrier fighter pilots were supposed to do. But now? In the dark, he just stared at the ceiling, feeling the vibration of the ship as it ran through the night, course changing every fifteen minutes, some hammering a couple decks above, crews doing final work on a plane most likely, sound of a hoist nearby, bringing up bombs from the magazines buried deep below the waterline.

  He wished now he had married Betty. Though he’d never admit it to any of the guys, when it came to women he had never gotten all that far, in fact not far at all. Betty was a devout Methodist and drew clear lines and kept to them. If I get out of this alive, I’m getting her over to Oahu any way I can and marry her the same day, he thought. But thinking about that was nearly as maddening as thinking about what was coming in a few short hours, and alternating back and forth between the two, he did not sleep a wink… not knowing that except for a very lucky few, all were lying awake, captivated by the fear or anticipation of what was to come.

  Akagi

  105 miles west-northwest of Oahu

  02:45 hrs local time

  IT HAD BEEN a tough operation, one rehearsed dozens of times, but never until now actually attempted under combat conditions: a nighttime refueling.

  The last of the tankers had finally cast off from abeam of Akagi.

  They had not been able to top off. Only two of the four carriers of his group were running with full loads of fuel; Akagi was seven hundred tons of oil short, Kaga nearly eight hundred tons, but it should be enough for one full day of fast combat operations with sufficient oil left to take them into the Marshalls, where the reserve civilian tankers were waiting.

  That was not his concern at the moment, however. Yamamoto still was quietly seething over Nagita and the damage to Hiei, how he had allowed a night attack from seaward to strike his ship and cripple it. Rather than placing his destroyers landward, they should have been covering out to sea, anticipating that some of the American ships had managed to slip out of Pearl and past the submarines, which had failed so abysmally in keeping the port bottled up.

  It was an aspect of the plan made by Nagumo that he had allowed to stay in place, the ridiculous waste of suicide midget subs, tying up the heavier fleet subs that had to carry them into position. Nagumo had allowed the rest of the subs to be scattered about, rather than concentrating all near the entryway i
nto Oahu, keeping perhaps one or two as pickets farther out for rescue of downed pilots.

  Every last fleet sub available should have been positioned off the main channel. They had, as an entire group, proven worse than useless so far. Repeated attempts to raise them had been futile; they were laying low and thus out of radio contact for a change in orders.

  He would address that later. He had to focus on the moment, knowing that exhaustion was taking hold. He had been up more than twenty-four hours now and needed to get at least a few hours’ rest.

  Yamamoto looked at the latest telegraph reports from Hiei: only able to use two of its four propeller shafts due to the explosion astern, which had also bent the rudder; barely able to make five knots, meaning it would be less than twenty nautical miles west of Oahu at dawn. If the Americans did indeed have any land-based aircraft left, that would be their target at first light.

  Let them come, though he doubted there would be more than a handful left after the punishment delivered to their bases.

  What he hoped for now, though he would never dare to say it even to Genda or any of his closest advisers, was that the crippled Hiei would indeed act as a lure—a lure for American carrier-based planes.

  And the scout planes and fighters of Hiryu and Soryu would be waiting, circling high above, observing the inbound track of the enemy attackers and then sweeping out on a reciprocal bearing.

  Of course he did not want to lose Hiei, but her damage might be heaven-sent to guide him in to his opponent’s fleet. A trade of a battleship for their three elusive carriers would be worth it, even if many back in Tokyo would howl over the loss.

  It was nearly three local time. Refueling done, his own task force would pick up speed to twenty knots, moving to be a hundred fifty nautical miles west of Hiei come dawn, deck loaded with every plane available for a massive strike while Soryu and Hiryu, a hundred miles farther south, would cover attacks from that direction. His main task force would cast their net westward, the second force to the south, and either they would find the Americans, or the Americans themselves would reveal their position when they went for Hiei.