The Admirals

by Walter R. Borneman

  The debate over what to do with MacArthur consumed much of January and February 1942. Some in Congress wanted him evacuated and appointed supreme commander over all American armed forces—everything, everywhere. That was enough to make Roosevelt, Marshall, and King gag. But the consensus was that MacArthur had to be saved. The Japanese simply could not be allowed the psychological victory of killing him or, worse, parading him through some propaganda spectacle. Recognizing that MacArthur might or might not follow the orders of someone he had once said had “no superior among Infantry colonels,” Marshall made it clear to him that whatever his orders, they would come directly from the president himself, a manner quite befitting the general’s ego and his genuine regrets about leaving his troops.25

  And, finally, late on Sunday afternoon, February 22, Roosevelt summoned Marshall, King, and Harry Hopkins to confer on MacArthur’s fate. When the meeting concluded, FDR told Marshall to draft a presidential directive ordering MacArthur to Australia. Three weeks later, after a harrowing PT boat ride and a B-17 flight from Mindanao, MacArthur, his family, and a close cadre of staff touched down at an emergency airfield near Darwin. “MacArthur is out of Philippine Islands,” Eisenhower wrote in his diary. “The newspapers acclaim the move—the public has built itself a hero out of its own imagination.”26

  Meanwhile, Bill Halsey was about to execute Chester Nimitz’s latest order. Captain Francis S. “Frog” Low, Admiral King’s operations officer, had come up with a daring plan designed “to strike an offensive blow against the Japanese homeland which would encourage and cheer up ‘all hands’ during those particularly dark days.” What’s more, such an offensive strike might prompt Japan to tighten air defenses around its home islands at the expense of campaigns in the South Pacific.

  Low’s idea was as simple in concept as it would be complicated in execution: bomb Tokyo. Navy planes did not have sufficient range for the job, and army planes with the range lacked either proximate land bases or the ability to return to aircraft carriers—assuming, of course, that they could lift off the length of a carrier’s deck in the first place. Low suggested launching army B-25 twin-engine medium bombers from a carrier quickly deployed close to Japan. After dropping their payloads, the bombers would continue flying west to friendly bases in China. King, who had been ranting about pushing the offensive, seized on Low’s idea and had his air operations officer, Captain Donald B. Duncan, sell it to General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, chief of staff of the Army Air Corps.27

  Arnold had just the man for the job, and within days the pilots of sixteen B-25s under the command of Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle were wondering why they were practicing so many short-field takeoffs. The answer slowly dawned on them and their four-man crews after Doolittle led his squadron to Naval Air Station Alameda on San Francisco Bay and they watched their bombers loaded aboard the Hornet (CV-8), the most recent addition to the American carrier fleet.

  When Nimitz handed Halsey the task of getting Doolittle as close to Japan as possible, Halsey insisted that he meet Doolittle in person to size him up and stress the hazards of the mission. Halsey and his chief of staff, Miles Browning, secretly flew from Pearl Harbor to San Francisco to confer with Doolittle and the Hornet’s commanding officer, Captain Marc Mitscher. Halsey pulled no punches. Doolittle had to understand that if Halsey’s ships came under attack before Doolittle’s planes could be launched, Halsey would push the bombers over the side in order to launch his own protective aircraft. Doolittle nodded. They seemed to be kindred spirits and they had a deal.

  In the company of the cruisers Vincennes and Nashville, four destroyers, and an oiler, Hornet put to sea as TF (Task Force) 18. It headed for a rendezvous north of Oahu with a supporting force Halsey would lead from Pearl Harbor. But Halsey almost missed the trip. Strong westerly winds delayed his and Browning’s return flight to Pearl Harbor, and then the admiral came down with a bout of what he thought was the flu. By the time Halsey finally landed and went aboard Enterprise, the entire operation was a day behind schedule. A drugged sleep in the PB2Y en route seemed to cure some of his symptoms, but he kept scratching at an annoying rash.

  Enterprise, the cruisers Northampton and Salt Lake City, four destroyers, and an oiler cleared the antisubmarine nets at the mouth of Pearl Harbor and headed for the rendezvous with Hornet’s group. Only when he was some distance from Oahu did Halsey dare to announce, “This force is bound for Tokyo.” Enterprise erupted with the loudest cheer Halsey had ever heard, stoked in part by frustrations over the fall of Bataan just four days earlier.

  The two task forces joined up at 6:00 a.m. on April 13, blessedly not a Friday for Halsey’s phobia, and a day later crossed the international date line, thereby jumping to April 15. Things went almost too smoothly as Enterprise and Hornet, and their cruiser consorts, refueled and, leaving the destroyers and oilers astern, started the final high-speed run toward Japan. Then, early on the morning of April 18, after dodging one radar contact, the combined force was sighted by a Japanese picket ship. Six hundred fifty miles from Tokyo, instead of the planned four hundred, Halsey had no choice but to order Hornet to launch Doolittle’s planes and then turn for Pearl Harbor at 25 knots.

  Colonel Doolittle and his pilots and crews flew on into legend, although the increased flight distance meant that none of the planes reached the haven of airfields in China. Most crews bailed out over China and made their way into friendly hands. Remarkably, out of eighty men only three fliers were killed outright, and the Japanese executed another three, an event that outraged Halsey. In typical fashion, he vowed, “We’ll make the bastards pay!”28

  The Doolittle Raid may have been one of the best-kept secrets of the war. King later claimed that just seven people knew the complete plan—King, Nimitz, Halsey, Arnold, Duncan, Low, and Doolittle—and that King himself went to the White House to tell Roosevelt only after the carriers were almost to their launching point. And the entire operation remained quite mysterious. The navy was not interested in signaling to the enemy how far-ranging its carriers had been, and the army hoped to make the Japanese paranoid about the range of its bombers and the threat of future raids from, well, who knew where. When asked at a press conference where the planes had come from, FDR told one of his folksy stories that had them flying “from our new secret base at Shangri-La!”29

  Halsey’s ships returned from the Doolittle Raid and sailed into Pearl Harbor on April 25. This time, Nimitz was not on hand to greet him. For Nimitz, April 1942 was one of the defining watersheds in his career. As Japanese advances in the South Pacific continued unchecked, and with Admiral King still giving many orders from Washington, CINCPAC had flown east to San Francisco to consult with COMINCH. It was the first of sixteen face-to-face wartime conferences between King and Nimitz in San Francisco, Pearl Harbor, or Washington.

  During the first few months of 1942, one staff officer characterized Nimitz as “scared and cautious,” while a foreign observer later recalled him as “an old man, slow and perhaps slightly deaf.” The last was indeed true, due to his ear injury years before as a midshipman, but the other impressions were, in fact, only those of a calm and steady hand getting his sea legs as a theater commander in a tenuous environment.30

  The Japanese were marshaling forces at Truk and Rabaul. It appeared to Nimitz that they would attempt a major, concerted attack—either to capture Port Moresby, on the southeastern toe of New Guinea, as a base from which to threaten Australia or to drive eastward to threaten New Caledonia, Fiji, and Samoa astride the critical West Coast–Australia lifeline. To do either—or both, as Nimitz feared—would require control of the Coral Sea. Lexington and Yorktown were on station there under Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher’s command.

  Basing his actions in part on Japanese intelligence reports gathered in the wake of the Doolittle Raid, Nimitz determined to commit the full strength of his Pacific carriers—Lexington and Yorktown, as well as the returning Enterprise and Hornet—not only to repulse these threats but also to seiz
e the initiative for offensive operations that King had begun to formulate. But King was initially reluctant to commit the carriers en masse, seeking instead to keep them dispersed for supposedly safer hit-and-run raids, as had been the strategy to date. COMINCH further complicated matters by fixating on the South Pacific deployment of older, slower battleships that Nimitz understood to be a millstone, preventing nimble operations. King, of course, also knew that from his experiences throughout the 1930s, but it took Nimitz’s forceful lobbying at their San Francisco conference to persuade him that now was the time to concentrate the four carriers—sans battleships—into one powerful strategic force.

  This was a major shift in the way the U.S. Navy viewed its carriers, and it marked Nimitz as exerting aggressive leadership as a theater commander. In retrospect, it may also have marked him as more aggressive than King had previously thought—always a good thing with King. Even then, King did not agree to such action until the day after the conference had adjourned and Nimitz was back in Pearl Harbor.31

  Thus, on April 30, after only five days’ rest following the Doolittle Raid, Halsey sortied as Task Force 16 with Enterprise and Hornet and their cruiser, destroyer, and oiler escorts, the latter ships once again commanded by Halsey’s polar opposite and good friend, Rear Admiral Raymond Spruance. Once joined with Fletcher’s forces, Halsey would assume overall tactical command.

  On May 4, planes from Fletcher’s Yorktown struck a new Japanese naval anchorage at Tulagi, just north of Guadalcanal. In the smoke and confusion of their first pitched strike, Fletcher’s pilots returned to Yorktown with wildly inflated claims of destruction, including two destroyers sunk and a badly mangled seaplane tender and large cruiser. Fletcher flashed the news to Nimitz, who professed wary congratulations and then cautioned, “Hope you can exploit your success with augmented force,” meaning Lexington, which was refueling to the south.32

  As it turned out, Nimitz’s caution was well founded. Actual damage from the Tulagi strike proved to be only one destroyer and some minor small craft. Then, as Yorktown stood south to rendezvous with Lexington, a Japanese carrier force circled into the Coral Sea around the eastern end of the Solomons. Confusion was rampant on May 7 on both sides as Japanese planes from the carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku streaked south, not in pursuit of the American carriers, but to attack the destroyer Sims and oiler Neosho, which had been erroneously reported to be an American carrier and cruiser.

  Meanwhile, B-17s flying from Australia spotted the Port Moresby invasion fleet, including the light carrier Shoho, steaming into the Coral Sea between New Guinea and the Solomons. As the two big Japanese carriers focused on Sims and Neosho, Fletcher’s two carriers moved west to engage them, but wound up attacking the invasion force instead. American planes sank the Shoho, to the excited cry of one of the Lexington’s dive-bomber leaders: “Scratch one flattop!”33

  But by that evening, the two principal carriers on each side still had not directly engaged one another. That changed the next morning when planes from the opposing carriers found their targets, leaving Lexington the most heavily damaged of the four after taking two torpedoes and two direct bomb hits. With Yorktown also damaged from a bomb amidships, Fletcher chose to retire southward as expeditiously as Lexington could manage. The Japanese carriers, with Shokaku heavily damaged as well, likewise retired north of New Guinea with the repulsed Port Moresby invasion fleet.

  Late in the afternoon on May 8, gasoline vapors from ruptured fuel lines deep within the Lexington’s hull ignited and spiraled into a series of gut-wrenching explosions. The carrier’s captain, Frederick Sherman, ordered the ship abandoned, and Fletcher had the grim duty of assigning a destroyer to sink the flaming wreck with torpedoes to avoid any chance of its salvage by the Japanese. Nimitz got the news by sporadic and long-delayed radio traffic, and when the final blow came, the engineer in him couldn’t help but surface, and he muttered, if only to himself, “They should have saved the Lexington.”34

  But it could have been much worse. Tactically, the Americans had sustained heavier losses, but they had nonetheless managed strategically to blunt the Japanese drive toward Australia, the first setback to Japan’s unchecked, five-month, post–Pearl Harbor romp. The Battle of the Coral Sea also sealed the fate of the battleship—though none were present—by proving that carrier aircraft might well fight major battles without surface ships ever coming into direct contact with one another.

  And there was a third result. The battle left COMINCH King, though ten thousand miles away, with a strong apprehension that Frank Jack Fletcher was not the man to command an aggressive campaign. If Halsey had been at Coral Sea, King mused, things might have been different. Still, it was hard for most other observers to criticize Fletcher for the outcome. Five months after Pearl Harbor, he had taken on a slightly superior force and at worst emerged with a draw. At best, he had saved Australia.

  Recognizing that part of his role was as cheerleader and morale booster, and before he had learned of the loss of the Lexington, Nimitz sent Fletcher a warm note of praise, no doubt thinking strategically: “Congratulations on your glorious accomplishments of the last two days. Your aggressive actions have the admiration of the entire Pacific Fleet. Well done to you, your officers, and men. You have filled our hearts with pride and have maintained the highest traditions of the Navy.”35

  Nimitz recommended to King that Fletcher be promoted to vice admiral and be awarded the Distinguished Service Medal. King balked. In King’s mind, losing a carrier, particularly the Lexington, which he had once commanded, was hardly reason to bestow stars or medals or both. Nimitz should have remembered King’s words from the North Atlantic late in 1941, when he strongly opposed medals for commanders who lost ships—even if they did win battles.

  The question now became what to tell Halsey and Enterprise and Hornet as they finally neared the Coral Sea. Halsey, who had been itching for a fight, was now scratching like crazy at his infuriating dermatitis and getting less and less sleep. King—smarting over the loss of Lexington—momentarily reverted to his pre–Coral Sea caution and signaled Nimitz that it would be “inadvisable” for Halsey’s force “to operate beyond the coverage of our shore-based air or within range of enemy shore-based air.” This had the effect of greatly restricting Halsey’s operations and left him “mad as the devil.”36

  In appraising the overall Pacific situation, King and Nimitz were both heavily relying on intelligence garnered from the sleuth work of three groups of code breakers in Australia, Washington, and Hawaii, the latter led by Commander Joseph J. Rochefort, a number-crunching nerd who combined a computer-like mind with unabashed intuitive insight. How the two admirals now chose to apply that intelligence, however, differed greatly.

  King still thought the Japanese would attempt a drive, perhaps as far as Fiji and Samoa, to restrict or sever the West Coast–Australia lifeline. With Yorktown en route to Pearl Harbor for repairs, King and Nimitz had initially agreed that Enterprise and Hornet would remain in the South Pacific. But now Nimitz wasn’t so sure. He read Rochefort’s latest reports as suggesting a change in direction of the main Japanese attack from the South Pacific to the Central Pacific, at least as far as Midway.

  The week before the Coral Sea engagement, as he was massing his carriers in the South Pacific, Nimitz had taken two precious days and flown eleven hundred miles to inspect Midway’s defenses, in part to reassure King that things were under control on that front. Midway wasn’t much of a place. Two tiny islands, crisscrossed by airstrips, totaled barely fifteen hundred acres on the edge of a lagoon circled by a jagged reef. But in May 1942, Midway may have been the most heavily defended acreage in the Pacific. Certainly, the outpost was a thorn in the side of any Japanese operations passing within range of its aircraft. Nimitz crawled into gun pits, squirmed through underground command posts, and kicked the dirt with the island’s defenders in the earthy, teamwork-inspiring manner that he exhibited so strongly. When it was time to return to Pearl Harbor, he left with a sense th
at the island could be held.37

  For several weeks after the Battle of the Coral Sea, Halsey remained in limbo. King wanted him to stay in the south, Nimitz wanted him in the north, and wherever he was, King’s air umbrella directive threatened his flexibility. As the officer in tactical command, however, Halsey felt compelled to push, if not outright ignore, King’s momentary caution, which in itself was decidedly counter to all that King had taught Halsey about carrier operations in the first place. King didn’t scrutinize Halsey’s actions, but he procrastinated when Nimitz pressed him to order Halsey back north to counter the growing threat against Midway. What, Nimitz wondered, was King waiting for?

  Finally, Nimitz received enough intelligence from Rochefort to convince him that the next big push was indeed coming in the Central Pacific. Japanese radio intercepts increasingly pointed away from Port Moresby and the South Pacific in general. To Nimitz, this meant that Japan’s carriers were elsewhere—most likely the Central Pacific—and he could wait for King no longer. As CINCPAC, Nimitz ordered Halsey north.

  Nimitz told King and Halsey that while he was convinced that Japan was planning “three separate and possibly simultaneous enemy offensives”—against the Aleutians to cover their northern flank, another try for Port Moresby, and a carrier-intensive strike along the “Midway–Oahu line”—the latter was to be the most serious. If King, who was still focused on the South Pacific leg of this triple threat, felt strongly enough, he could countermand Nimitz’s order or even relieve Nimitz. In the meantime, Nimitz had made a firm decision. Not only did he hurry Halsey north with Hornet and Enterprise, but he also directed Fletcher to expedite his return to Hawaiian waters and repair the damaged Yorktown at Pearl Harbor.

  Still, having once again taken bold steps to mass his carriers, Nimitz wanted some sign from King that he concurred. Finally, on May 17, it came. King acknowledged having “somewhat revised my estimate and now generally agree with you,” although he tried unsuccessfully to convince Nimitz to order Yorktown to the West Coast for its repairs, an action in keeping with his cautious carrier dispersal rather than Nimitz’s aggressive concentration.38