Decision at Sea

by Symonds, Craig L.

  * Lovelace was more likely the second mortal casualty of the campaign since a Dauntless dive-bomber from the Hornet on antisubmarine patrol had failed to return the day before, and its pilot had been declared missing. No trace of the plane was ever found.

  * Technically, the TBD-1 had a crew of three, with a bombardier occupying the middle seat. But when the plane was armed to carry torpedoes, a bombardier was just excess baggage, and during the Battle of Midway, the Devastators flew with two-man crews.

  * Most sources describe both of the carriers the Japanese committed to the Aleutian campaign as light carriers, but the larger of the two, the Junyo, carried forty-five airplanes, nearly as many as the carriers of the Kido Butai (fifty-three). The second carrier assigned to the Northern Group was the Ryujo, which carried thirty-seven planes.

  * Hugh Bicheno (Midway [2004], pp. 73–77) postulates that the complexity of the Japanese plan may have had less to do with strategy than with political rivalry between the Japanese army and navy. He suggests that Yamamoto may have gone to sea in the Yamato not so much to support Nagumo as to be able to claim a naval victory afterward and return to Tokyo with sufficient prestige to unseat Tojo’s army-dominated government. It is an interesting speculation, but since Yamamoto was killed in 1943 (in yet another application of American code breaking) we will never know.

  * The failure of Operation K was due in part to the fact that the Japanese had tried this trick before. In early March they had refueled two Emilys at French Frigate Shoals and those planes had then flown to Hawaii to drop a few bombs on Pearl Harbor. The raid not only failed to do any damage to the American base but revealed both the Emily’s long-range capability and the usefulness of French Frigate Shoals as a seaplane base, which was why Nimitz had sent vessels there.

  * The TBF Avenger was similar to the TBD Devastator except that it was made by Grumman Aircraft rather than by Douglas, and it carried its torpedo inside the fuselage rather than slung underneath, which made the Avenger slightly more aerodynamic. Though the Avenger proved effective later in the war, it had no more luck at Midway than the Devastator.

  * In addition to his uncertainty about the location and status of the rest of the Japanese carrier force, the fact that Fletcher had been criticized for not keeping enough fighters behind to protect the task force during the Battle of the Coral Sea may have influenced his decision to keep most of his fighters behind for combat air patrol (CAP).

  * Two groups of B-17 Flying Fortress bombers also participated in the attack on the Hiryu, though none of them scored a hit. Indeed, of the 322 bombs dropped by B-17s during the Battle of Midway, none of them struck a target. Despite this, newspapers at the time gave most of the credit for the U.S. victory at Midway to the Army bombers. The New York Times, for example, reported on June 9 that “the main damage to the Japanese fleet off Midway was inflicted by our land-based airplanes.” The subsequent controversy led to more than one brawl between Army and Navy personnel ashore.

  * Although a vast improvement over World War II sonar systems, the hull-mounted SQS-56 sonar on the Stark was not very sophisticated compared to more advanced sonar systems available at the time. Irreverent American sailors referred to it dismissively as the “Helen Keller” sonar system.

  * Conventional wisdom held that it was unwise to operate carriers in an area where they had limited sea room and were vulnerable to land-based air. For that reason, the United States had not sent carriers into the Persian Gulf since 1976, though in 1990 the United States did send two carrier groups into the Gulf as part of the buildup for Operation Desert Storm. By then, the term “Camel Station” had been dropped in favor of “Gonzo Station,” which was an acronym for Gulf of Oman Northern Zone.

  * A popular song of the 1970s by a group called Tony Orlando and Dawn told of a man returning from prison who was unsure that his girl still wanted to see him. In the song, he writes her to suggest that if she wants him back, she should “tie a yellow ribbon ’round the old oak tree.” The song inspired Americans to tie yellow ribbons around trees, light poles, and mailbox posts as symbols of their support for the hostages in Iran. A huge yellow ribbon was tied around the Super Dome in New Orleans for Super Bowl XV. Since then, a yellow ribbon has come to symbolize support for U.S. troops on overseas duty.

  * Conspiracy theorists argue that officials of the Reagan-Bush campaign team deliberately colluded with the Khomeini regime to keep the hostages imprisoned until after the election to avoid giving Carter a diplomatic victory that might have aided his reelection. Though there is strong circumstantial evidence of such a plot, no clear evidence has been found to substantiate it.

  * The experience of the Bridgeton led to a morbidly humorous exchange between a Navy official and a group of reporters. When the reporters asked how many minesweepers the U.S. Navy had in the Gulf, the Navy official at first replied, “None.” Then, after pausing, he changed his answer to eleven: the number of Kuwaiti tankers the U.S. had pledged to escort.

  * The shah’s military buildup was still under way at the time of the revolution that drove him from power. He had recently contracted with the United States for the delivery of four new, specially modified Spruance-class destroyers. After the shah’s fall, the United States halted delivery of these vessels, bought them from the builder, and commissioned them as U.S. Navy warships. The USS Kidd, which participated in the first Gulf convoy, was the namesake of the class. Despite their official designation as Kidd-class destroyers, sailors routinely called them “Khomeini-class destroyers.”

  * One of the Iranian “detainees” from this confrontation said that he had attempted to shoot down the attacking American helicopter with a Stinger missile but could not get the tone that indicated the missile was locked on. The container for the Stinger was found by one of the U.S. patrol boats from the barge Hercules, but not the missile itself. Navy dive teams tried three times to recover the missile because of the possibility that it was one of the weapons shipped to Iran as part of the Iran-Contra scandal in which Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, USMC, played such a conspicuous role. Ironically, North’s younger brother Tim was an officer on board the Thach at the time of this recovery effort.

  * The Roberts was carried to the United States piggybacked on top of the Dutch heavy-lift vessel Mighty Servant II, which the United States leased from the Netherlands. Like the Stark, the Roberts was repaired and returned to service.

  * Variously spelled Sabalan, Savblan, and Zabalon, the spelling used here was the one most widely used at the time.

  * The Iranians were not the only ones who were suspicious about the coincidence of the simultaneous Iraqi ground attack and American naval attack. Administration spokesman Charles Redman declared, “There is no linkage or connection between these two events,” and no evidence has ever emerged to suggest otherwise, though a number of analysts conclude that given America’s intelligence capability in the region, it is hard to see how the United States could have been ignorant of the attack, and very likely the Iranians drew the same conclusion.

  * The Iranians had a total of nine Harpoons, all sold to them by the United States, but only one that was operational—the one on the Joshan. The Joshan’s bold decision to take on the ships of SAG Charlie may have been motivated by that fact.

  * The Iranians repaired the Sabalan, and it was still operational in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

  * All aircraft send out an electronic signature called a “squawk,” indicating whether it is civilian or military. Subsequently, investigators surmised that because the receivers in the Vincennes were collecting signals from a variety of aircraft—the Iran Airbus, an AWACS and Navy E2-C Hawkeye, and an Iranian P-3—this may have confused the team in the CIC. In addition, the flat panel depicting the air traffic showed only a two-dimensional picture, and it is possible that the tactical information officer may have confused the decreasing range of Iran Airlines flight 655 with descending altitude.

  * In another kind of sea change, women were au
thorized to go to sea on a limited number of Navy logistics ships beginning in 1978. Indeed, women were aboard the USS Acadia, the repair ship that came to the aid of the Stark after it was struck by Iraqi missiles in May 1987. Not until 1993, however, did Congress repeal the law banning women from service on combat ships. Consequently, although no women were aboard any of the ships that participated in Operation Praying Mantis, women pilots flew combat missions over Iraq to enforce the no-fly zone after Gulf War I, and they served in a wide variety of combat roles during Gulf War II.

  * The extent to which the collapse of the Soviet Union caught the United States by surprise is evident in the 1982 National Intelligence Estimate, declassified twenty years later, which stated: “We believe this [Soviet] wartime strategy will remain essentially unchanged over the next 15 to 20 years.”

  * Unlike rockets, which rely on solid or liquid fuel that can burn in the absence of oxygen, cruise missiles have jet engines that breathe air, making them essentially unmanned jets.

  * American anger at the unwillingness of the French to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq (which included renaming french fries as “freedom fries” in the congressional cafeteria) is ironic in light of the fact that French president Jacques Chirac not only made a trip to the United States after 9/11 to express French sympathy and support but visited ground zero in New York to pay his respects before President Bush did.

  * In many respects, the Taliban government in Afghanistan was the creation of the United States. Throughout much of the 1980s, the CIA had funneled arms and supplies to the Afghan “freedom fighters” (as President Reagan labeled them), who were resisting Soviet occupation. As noted in Part Five, the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan, which left the Taliban in control, was treated in Washington as a great victory.

  * The official report of the bipartisan congressional committee that investigated the events of September 11, 2001, subsequently concluded that there was no collusion or collaboration between the government of Iraq and bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organization, though public opinion polls continued to show that most Americans believed there was a connection.

  * The notion that the United States would be better off without allies can be traced back to George Washington, who warned of “entangling alliances” in his Farewell Address. Washington’s warning derived from the assumption that the United States was so geographically isolated, the great powers of the world would leave it unmolested if Americans simply stayed out of their way. The Wolf-owitz Doctrine, by contrast, assumed that the United States had become so dominant it could do whatever it wanted, and that partnership with allies would only complicate and hinder U.S. execution of its policies.