Decision at Sea

by Symonds, Craig L.

The assertion that Dewey’s victory at Manila Bay in 1898 marked a turning point in American history is hardly novel. To some it was a “metamorphosis” or “rite of passage.” Others noted that it plunged America “into the maelstrom of world politics,” even “into the role of superpower and conqueror.” Redfield Proctor, the Vermont senator who had urged Dewey’s appointment, declared, “It is almost a creation or a new birth.” Observers in Europe also noted its significance. Writing in the Frankfurter Zeitung, a German editorialized that Dewey’s victory marked “a new epoch in history, not only for the United States, but likewise for Europe,” since in consequence “the United States now reaches beyond the American continent, and claims its share in the conduct of the world’s affairs.” More than a few in that racist age saw it as a victory of Anglo-Saxon superiority over the weaker races of the world. Henry Cabot Lodge declared confidently that the American triumph marked the final victory of Englishmen, Dutchmen, and their American descendants over the ruins of the empire of Philip II. To him, there was a direct historical link between the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 and Dewey’s victory in 1898. Spain collapsed, in Lodge’s worldview, because it was “unfit” and “for the unfit among nations there is no pity.” That same year, Rudyard Kipling published his poetic plea to America to take up “the white man’s burden” by bringing the enlightenment of Western values to the darker races.82

  Even those Americans who questioned such explanations saw in Dewey’s victory a new opportunity for America to reassert its role as a “city on a hill”—a model for the less enlightened. If democracy by example was not enough, Americans now accepted the notion that it was justifiable to use force to extend the blessings of democracy to others. McKinley himself defended the American occupation of the Philippines as an altruistic act, declaring that in later years, the Filipinos would “bless the American republic because it emancipated and redeemed their fatherland.” Like a father who knows best, McKinley predicted, in essence, “You’ll thank us later.”83

  The final peace treaty negotiated in Paris gave the United States not only the Philippines and Puerto Rico but also Guam in the Ladrones (Marianas) and tiny Wake Island, halfway between Guam and Midway (which was also a U.S. possession, having been acquired by purchase in 1867). Separately but simultaneously, the United States decided to annex the Kingdom of Hawaii. McKinley had submitted a treaty for Hawaiian annexation before the war, but he had not pushed it in Congress. It was the war that made annexation a matter of urgency. Three days after Dewey’s victory, a new annexation bill was introduced in the House. McKinley came out openly and enthusiastically for it in June, and it passed both houses of Congress within weeks by more than a two-to-one margin.84

  No longer would U.S. Navy forces in the Far East have to operate seven thousand miles from a friendly port. From Hawaii to Midway, Wake, Guam, and finally the Philippines, the United States now possessed a string of islands that stretched across the Pacific Ocean like beads on a string—or, more appropriately perhaps, like stepping stones—to support America’s commercial and naval presence in the Far East. Of course, those possessions brought new responsibilities as well as new opportunities. American occupation of the Philippines extended the nation’s territorial responsibilities some seven thousand miles westward. It not only gave the United States a presence in the Far East, it made the United States a Pacific power.

  The war liberated Cuba from Spain, but that war-torn island became “independent” only in the most nominal sense. Though the Teller Amendment to the declaration of war had prohibited the United States from acquiring Cuba for itself, another amendment—the 1901 Platt Amendment, which was inserted into the Cuban constitution—gave the United States the right and the responsibility to intervene in Cuba whenever, in the view of the American government, it was appropriate to do so. The initial U.S. occupation of Cuba ended in 1902, but American forces continued to intervene periodically. In 1906 an American “army of pacification” arrived to suppress another rebellion, and it remained there until 1909. Other interventions occurred with some regularity until the introduction of Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy in 1934.

  In addition to the acquisition of an overseas “empire,” another consequence of the astonishing success of the U.S. Navy in the Spanish-American War was that it prompted a dramatic increase in the size of the fleet. On December 7, 1900, a month after McKinley’s reelection victory at the polls, the government invited bids from contractors for the construction of five new battleships and six new armored cruisers, a force that would more than double the size of the Navy. All of the new ships would be significantly larger than the ships of the existing fleet. It was, as a contemporary noted proudly, “the largest single addition to our armored ships ever advertised for at one time.”85

  McKinley never lived to see it. He was shaking hands in a receiving line in Buffalo, New York, in September 1901 when an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz stepped forward and fired two shots into his chest. The mortally wounded president lingered for over a week before he died, leaving the office to his new vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, who presided over the subsequent naval expansion and who dispatched the so-called Great White Fleet on its global circumnavigation five years later.

  As for Dewey, his great popularity after the victory in Manila Bay led to a short-lived “Dewey for president” boom. But the stoic and phlegmatic naval officer made a poor candidate, and the boomlet soon faded. Dewey lived out the rest of his professional career as chairman of the prestigious but only modestly influential General Board of the Navy. In the end, Dewey’s place in history—his fifteen minutes of fame, to employ the modern euphemism—depended on a single event, and the phrase most closely associated with him is the not-quite-heroic command he gave to the Olympia’s captain on the morning of May 1:“You may fire when ready, Gridley.”

  The man to whom those words were addressed, Captain Charles V. Gridley, having lived to participate in a great naval battle, surrendered command of the Olympia and started home soon afterward. He never made it. The ill health that had plagued him for months, exacerbated perhaps by the pressure of recent events, claimed his life before he made it as far as Japan.

  Montojo returned to Spain to face a court-martial. Accused of dereliction of duty, the wounded veteran argued that his squadron had been defeated not because of any failure on his part or that of his men, but because they were simply overmatched by Dewey’s newer and larger force. At Montojo’s request, Dewey wrote a lengthy letter acknowledging that Montojo had fought bravely, as befitted the great Spanish Navy, but he stopped short of admitting that the American force had been vastly superior. That, after all, would demean his own accomplishment. It probably didn’t matter, because someone needed to take the fall for the humiliation of Spain’s once proud navy. Montojo was found guilty and expelled from the service.

  Though some scholars have attempted to suggest that American imperialism in the Pacific and the Caribbean was the product of a deliberate conspiracy by industrialists and expansionists who sought to turn the United States into an empire, a more likely explanation is that the Battle of Manila Bay triggered a sequence of events that led all the participants down a road that few had foreseen and for which even fewer were prepared. For most Americans, the rhetoric of 1898 was real; to them liberating Cuba was a noble and unselfish goal. But in the process of achieving it, forces were unleashed that led the United States into an entirely new chapter of its national history. Sympathy for Cuban rebels had led to war; Mahan’s theories of naval supremacy had led Dewey to Manila Bay; the destruction of Montojo’s fleet had created a vacuum of authority in the Philippines; America’s decision to fill that vacuum led to a brutal war of conquest. In the end, the United States emerged from the war as an acknowledged world power. Given America’s circumstances, this moment would surely have come sooner or later even if Dewey had never steamed into Manila Bay. But as it happened, his victory there was the milestone event that signaled this turning point in American
and world history. The United States was a world power, a status from which there would be no retreat.

  The Spanish-American War, and the Battle of Manila Bay in particular, marked not only the advent of an American empire in territorial terms, but also the first manifestation of American efforts to remake the world in accordance with its notion of what constituted proper government. In that respect, it marked a critical redefinition of America’s place in the world and an appropriate beginning to what subsequent historians would label “the American century.” As the London Times put it four weeks after Dewey’s victory: “This war must in any event effect a profound change in the whole attitude and policy of the United States. In future America will play a part in the general affairs of the world such as she has never played before.”86

  [PART FOUR]

  NAVAL AVIATION AND WORLD WAR

  The Battle of Midway June 4, 1942

  IF DEWEY’S VICTORY IN MANILA BAY SIGNALED AMERICA’S debut as a world power, U.S. participation in the Great War of 1914–18 confirmed it. Shocked by the German policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, the United States entered the war in 1917 just as the original combatants were exhausting themselves. As a result, not only did the United States avoid the massive casualties endured by the other combatants in the bloody fighting on the Western Front from 1914 to 1917, it also tipped the balance of forces at just the right moment to help determine the outcome. American industrial capacity played a significant role by producing the cargo ships, transports, and escorts, in both record time and record numbers, to overcome the German U-boat menace. This might have marked the moment when the United States emerged as a preeminent—even dominant—world power. But it proved to be a false dawn. Americans in 1918 were not yet ready to don the mantle (and the responsibility) of world power, a fact signaled by the Senate’s rejection of both the Versailles Treaty and membership in the League of Nations.

  During the two decades of peace between the world wars, the United States was only partly successful in remaining detached from international disputes. The United States objected when Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, but not strenuously. Guided by popular skepticism about overseas entanglements after the anticlimactic results of World War I, the government declared only that it would not recognize the puppet regime that the Japanese established there. Undeterred by such legal niceties, Japan invaded China six years later, in 1937. This time the United States objected more vigorously, especially after the American theater-going public viewed newsreels of Japanese atrocities in China, including the virtual destruction of the city of Nanking, an event known then, and ever since, as “the rape of Nanking.” Though U.S. protests grew more pointed through the 1930s, they fell short of specific threats. The United States had fought its war with Spain in 1898 in protest of Spanish misrule in Cuba, and it declared war against Germany in 1917 due in part to what Americans perceived as inhumane conduct by that country, but the notion that the United States should police the bad behavior of other nations was not yet a majority view.

  Meanwhile, the Second World War began in Europe. After a six-month “Phony War,” the German blitzkrieg swept across Belgium and France in the spring of 1940, completing in a few months what German armies had failed to do in four years during the First World War. Japan’s leaders saw opportunity in these circumstances, and soon after the fall of France, the Japanese occupied French Indochina. This time the protest of the United States was more than pro forma. The Franklin Roosevelt administration notified the Japanese that unless they evacuated Indochina and showed a willingness to discuss (at least) their position in China, the United States would halt the sale of oil to Japan.

  This was a serious threat, for the United States—at that time a petroleum-exporting country—was Japan’s primary source of oil. The American threat exposed Japan’s dependence on foreign oil and provoked a national crisis within the government. To the Japanese, the choice seemed to be either to do what the Americans demanded in return for the privilege of buying their oil or to maintain the nation’s dignity and sovereignty by finding an alternative source of oil. To the Japanese, this was no choice at all. As it happened, there was another source nearby in the oil-rich islands of the Dutch East Indies. Moreover, the Dutch East Indies—like French Indochina—had become a political orphan since the Netherlands, too, had fallen to the German war machine. Japanese conquest of these islands would go a long way toward making Japan energy-independent.

  The problem was that the American Philippines lay directly astride the line of supply and communication between the Dutch East Indies and the Japanese homeland. Though the Americans might not interfere with Japanese tankers carrying the lifeblood of Japanese industry from Java, Borneo, and Sumatra to Japan, the point was that they could. Therefore, to obtain an alternative source of oil and to secure the supply route for that oil, the Japanese would have to control the Philippines—and that meant war with the United States. The logic was irresistible. After a series of fruitless negotiations, the Japanese made the final decision for war in November 1941. They would strike preemptively at the American battleship fleet in Hawaii in accordance with the Mahanian dictum that success in war derived from the destruction of the enemy’s main battle fleet.

  In general, the Japanese were delighted with the results of their attack; not only was the American battleship fleet virtually destroyed in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, but the attacking Japanese aircraft carriers escaped without even being detected, much less damaged or destroyed. As it happened, however, the Japanese attack had missed an important element of the American order of battle, for by chance the American aircraft carriers were not in port on that historic and infamous December 7. At the time, the Japanese much regretted that they had missed an opportunity to destroy the American carriers as well as the battleships . . . but not as much as they would regret it later.

  AT DAWN ON MAY 28, 1942, the American aircraft carrier Yorktown (hull number CV-5), trailing a ten-mile-long oil slick, limped into Pearl Harbor under its own power after a three-thousand-mile trek across the Pacific. The Yorktown was returning from the Battle of the Coral Sea, the first naval engagement in history in which all of the casualties and all of the damage—to both fleets—had been inflicted by carrier-based airplanes rather than by naval gunfire. It was the first naval battle in which the opposing fleets never actually sighted each other. The Yorktown had received a near-mortal wound in that battle when a Japanese Val dive-bomber had penetrated the umbrella of American fighter planes overhead to drop a 551-pound semi-armor-piercing bomb onto her wooden flight deck. The bomb had smashed through the deck and exploded deep inside the ship, killing or wounding sixty-six men and starting fires that spread quickly despite the efforts by damage control teams to contain them.1

  The Yorktown had survived, but her consort, the Lexington (CV-2), had not. Hit by two torpedoes and three bombs, the Lexington suffered a huge secondary internal explosion that compelled her captain to order abandon ship. The loss of the Lexington was a heavy blow to the Americans, for it left the United States with only three carriers in the Pacific theater. Indeed, the Japanese thought there were only two, for they believed the damage they had inflicted on the Yorktown would also be fatal. Instead, the wounded flattop made it safely back to Pearl Harbor, where blocks were set up in Dry Dock Number One to receive her.

  The Yorktown crept into dry dock at 6:45 that morning, and almost at once some fourteen hundred workers swarmed over her. The dockyard workers labored with a purpose and intensity that suggested that every minute counted. They worked throughout the day and into the growing darkness. Though only a dozen miles away in Honolulu the city was blacked out (“as dark as the inside of a derby hat,” in one officer’s phrase), Pearl Harbor was lit up by giant floodlights as workers labored on through the night. 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. No one even bothered with fresh paint.2

  The work was still under way when the valves were opened to refill the dry dock on the morning of the twenty-ninth, and men were still working—the bright points of light from their acetylene torches visible from shore—when the big carrier moved out into the ship channel at 9:00 A.M. on May 30, barely forty-eight hours after her arrival. The two other American carriers in the Pacific, Hornet and Enterprise, had departed Pearl Harbor two days before, the same morning that the Yorktown had gone into dry dock, and now the Yorktown was heading for a rendezvous with them at a predetermined point 325 miles north of the tiny atoll of Midway, a location designated somewhat hopefully as “Point Luck.”3

  Despite the jury-rigged repairs, the Yorktown was an imposing sight as she headed out to sea: at 809 feet long and displacing 19,800 tons, she was three times longer and four times heavier than Dewey’s Olympia. Both her size and her silhouette would have utterly confounded Dewey and his contemporaries. Even the imaginative John Ericsson would have been impressed, for no fewer than eight of Ericsson’s Monitors, sitting side by side in pairs, would have fit comfortably on the Yorktown’s flight deck. That deck, essentially a floating landing strip, was overlooked by an incongruous “island”: essentially a five-story building that jutted up on her starboard side and which served as both the ship’s bridge and airport tower.

  The Yorktown carried a respectable battery of eight five-inch guns, four quad-mounted 1.1-inch pom-pom guns, an array of .50-caliber machine guns, and newly installed twenty-millimeter Oerlikon antiaircraft guns. But all of that was secondary to her principal weapon. Though her flight deck was empty now, once she was well out to sea she would take on board an impressive array of fighting aircraft: Wildcat fighter planes, Devastator torpedo bombers, and Dauntless dive-bombers. Ever since the Battle of the Capes more than a century and a half earlier, when the opposing forces had engaged at a half cable’s length (one hundred yards), the range between naval combatants had been growing. In the Battle of Hampton Roads, the Virginia had fired at the grounded Minnesota from a mile away; Dewey had engaged Montojo in Manila Bay from two and a half miles, but the bombers on the Yorktown could deliver their ordnance onto a target more than two hundred miles away. The effective range of the fleet’s strike arm had grown so long that navies could now engage—as they had in the Coral Sea—without ever sighting each other.4