All Hell Let Loose (43 page)

Equally fascinated – and appalled – was Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, Japanese hero of the Pearl Harbor strike, now an impotent spectator on the deck of
Akagi
: ‘I was horrified at the destruction that had been wrought in a matter of seconds. There was a huge hole in the flight deck just behind the midship elevator … Deck plates buckled in grotesque configurations. Planes stood tail up belching livid flames and jet-black smoke. Reluctant tears streamed down my cheeks.’

The dive-bomber attack sank two Japanese carriers immediately, and the third flaming hulk was scuttled that evening. It was an extraordinary achievement, not least because two squadrons of dive-bombers and their Wildcat escort were sent on the wrong course and failed to engage. All ten pilots in
Hornet
’s Wildcat squadron Fighting Eight ran out of fuel and splashed into the sea without sighting an enemy; the ship’s thirty-five Dauntlesses landed on Midway, having missed the battle.

The Japanese were enraged by the loss of their carriers, and vented their spleen on every American within reach. Wesley Osmus, a twenty-three-year-old torpedo-bomber pilot from Chicago, was spotted in the sea by a destroyer lookout, retrieved from the water and interrogated on the bridge by an emotional officer waving a sword. Towards sunset the Japanese, losing interest in their captive, took Osmus to the fantail of the ship and set about him with a fire-axe. He was slow to die, clinging to the rail until his fingers were smashed and he fell away into the sea. The Imperial Japanese Navy was as profoundly and institutionally brutalised as Hirohito’s army.

At mid-morning Nagumo’s sole surviving carrier,
Hiryu
, at last launched its own attack, which fell on Fletcher’s
Yorktown
. American radar detected the incoming dive-bombers fifty miles out, and fighters began to scramble. Eleven ‘Val’ bombers and three Zeros were shot down by Wildcats, two more ‘Vals’ by anti-aircraft fire; three Japanese bombs hit
Yorktown
, but energetic damage control enabled the carrier to continue landing its dive-bombers, even as the crew fought huge fires. Admiral Fletcher transferred his flag to the cruiser
Astoria
, and surrendered overall command to Spruance.

At 1430, a wave of Japanese torpedo-bombers from
Hiryu
closed on
Yorktown
, which again flew off fighters. Ensign Milton Tootle had just cleared the deck of the carrier in his Wildcat when the attackers closed in. Tootle turned through the American anti-aircraft barrage, shot down an enemy plane, then was himself downed by a Zero after a flight lasting barely sixty seconds; he was lucky enough to be rescued from the water. Several attackers were shot down, but four launched their torpedoes, two of which struck the carrier. The ocean flooded in, and the ship took on a heavy list. Just before 1500, the captain ordered
Yorktown
abandoned. The decision was possibly premature, and the ship might have been saved, but in 1942 less was known about damage control than the US Navy had learned two years later. Destroyers rescued the entire crew, save those who had perished during the attacks.

At 1530, Spruance launched another strike of his own, by twenty-seven dive-bombers, including ten
Yorktown
planes which had landed on his flat-tops while their own ship was being attacked. Just before 1700, these reached
Hiryu
while its crew were eating riceballs in their messdecks. The ship had sixteen aircraft left, ten of them fighters, but only a reconnaissance plane was airborne, and the Japanese now lacked radar to warn of the Americans’ coming. Four bombs struck the carrier, starting huge fires. Little Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi, the senior officer aboard, mounted a biscuit box to deliver a farewell address to the crew. Then he and the captain disappeared to their cabins to commit ritual suicide, while the remaining seamen were taken off. The stricken ship was scuttled with torpedoes: four of the six carriers that had attacked Pearl Harbor were now at the bottom of the Pacific. On the American side,
Hornet
’s ill-fortune persisted when a pilot, returning wounded, accidentally nudged his gun button as he bumped down heavily onto the flight deck. A burst of fire killed five men on the superstructure. The returning aircrew were shocked by their losses, but in Jimmy Gray’s words, ‘We were too tired and too busy to do more than feel the pain of an aching heart.’

The American sacrifice had been heavy, but victory was the reward. Admiral Nagumo opted for withdrawal, only to have his order countermanded by Yamamoto, who demanded a night surface attack on the Americans. This was frustrated when Spruance turned away, recognising that his fleet had accomplished everything possible. The disengagement was finely judged: Yamamoto’s battleships, of which the Americans knew nothing, were closing fast from the north. Spruance had achieved an overwhelming balance of advantage. His foremost priority was to maintain this, protecting his two surviving carriers. Yamamoto acknowledged failure, and ordered a Japanese retreat. Spruance again turned and followed, launching a further air strike which sank one heavy cruiser and crippled another. This was almost the end of the battle, save that on 7 June a Japanese submarine met the burnt-out
Yorktown
under tow, and dispatched her to the bottom. This blow was acceptable, however, set against the massive Japanese losses.

Both Nimitz and Spruance had displayed consummate judgement, contrasted with Yamamoto’s and Nagumo’s errors, even though it was Fletcher, and not Spruance, who made the important decision to launch the second strike that caught
Hiryu
. The courage and skill of America’s dive-bomber pilots overbore every other disappointment and failure. The US Navy had achieved a triumph. Nimitz, with characteristic graciousness, sent his car to bring Commander Rochefort to a celebration party at Pearl Harbor. Before his assembled staff, the Commander-in-Chief said: ‘This officer deserves a major share of the credit for the victory at Midway.’ Luck, which favoured the Japanese in the war’s first months, turned dramatically in favour of the Americans during the decisive naval battle of the Pacific war. But this does not diminish the achievement of Nimitz and his subordinates.

The Japanese fleet remained a formidable fighting force: in the months that followed, it inflicted some severe local reverses on the Americans in the Pacific. But the US Navy had displayed the highest qualities at a critical moment. Japanese industrial weakness made it hard to replace the losses of Midway. One of the cardinal misjudgements of the Axis war effort was failure to sustain a flow of trained pilots to replace casualties. The Americans, by contrast, soon began to deploy thousands of excellently trained aircrew, flying the superb new Hellcat fighter. Nimitz remained short of carriers until well into 1943, but thereafter America’s building programme delivered an awesome array of new warships. The pattern of the Pacific war was set, wherein the critical naval actions were fought between fleets whose major surface elements seldom engaged each other. Carrier-borne aircraft had shown themselves the decisive weapons, and the US would soon employ these more effectively and in much larger numbers than any other nation in the world. Marc Mitscher, captain of the
Hornet
, feared that his career was finished, so poorly had his ship’s air group performed at Midway; it is widely believed that he falsified the log record of his squadrons’ designated attack course, to conceal his own blunder, which kept them out of the battle. Nimitz and Spruance, together with the aircrew of
Yorktown
and
Enterprise
, were the heroes of Midway, but Mitscher went on to become the supreme American carrier leader of the war.

3
GUADALCANAL AND NEW GUINEA

The next phase of the Pacific campaign was driven by expediency and characterised by improvisation. The US, committed to ‘Germany first’, planned to dispatch most of its available troop strength to fight in North Africa. MacArthur, in Australia, lacked men to launch the assault on Rabaul which he favoured. Instead, Australian troops, slowly reinforced by Americans, were committed to frustrate Japanese designs on the vast jungle island of Papua New Guinea. Separated from the northern tip of Australia by only two hundred miles of sea, this became the scene of one of the grimmest struggles of the war.

Meanwhile, six hundred miles eastwards in the Solomons, Japanese who had occupied Tulagi island moved on to neighbouring Guadalcanal, where they began to construct an airfield. If they were allowed to complete and exploit this, their planes could dominate the region. An abrupt American decision was made to pre-empt them, by landing 1st Marine Division. Such a stroke fulfilled the US Navy’s driving desire, promoted by Admiral Ernest King in Washington, to engage the enemy wherever opportunity allowed. The Marines were staging through Wellington, New Zealand, en route to an undecided objective. They found themselves ordered to restow their ships for an immediate assault landing; when the local dock labour force refused to work in prevailing heavy rain, Marines did the job themselves. Then, in the first days of August 1942, they sailed for Guadalcanal. In their innocence, many supposed that they were destined to wage war in a tropical paradise.

On the 7th, 19,000 Americans landed first on the outlying islands, then on Guadalcanal proper, in the face of slight opposition following a heavy naval bombardment. ‘In the dirty dawn … there were only a few fires flickering, like the city dumps, to light our path to history,’ wrote Marine Robert Leckie. Australian coastwatcher Captain Martin Clements watched exultantly from his jungle hideout as the Americans came ashore, writing in his diary, ‘Wizard!!! – Caloo, Callay, Oh! What a day!’ On the beach, men vastly relieved to find themselves alive split coconuts and gorged on the milk, heedless of implausible warnings that the Japanese might have poisoned them. Then they began to march inland, soon parched and sweating prodigiously. The Japanese, following another huge intelligence failure, had not anticipated the Americans’ arrival. In what would prove a critical action of the Pacific war, the landing force quickly seized the airstrip, christened Henderson Field in honour of a Marine pilot hero of Midway. Some men liberated caches of enemy supplies, including
sake
which allowed them to become gloriously drunk during the nights that followed. Thus ended the last easy part; what followed became one of the most desperate campaigns of the Far Eastern war, characterised by small but bloody battles ashore, repeated clashes of warships afloat.

Two days after the initial assault, at sea off Guadalcanal the US Navy endured a humiliation. Admiral Fletcher had signalled Nimitz that he believed local Japanese air power presented an unacceptable threat to his three aircraft carriers, and recommended their withdrawal. Without waiting for approval, he set course north-eastwards. Rear-Admiral Kelly Turner, commanding the transports inshore, made plain his belief that the carrier commander had deserted his post of duty, and Fletcher’s reputation suffered lasting harm. But modern historians, Richard Frank notable among them, believe that Fletcher made an entirely correct decision to regard the safety of his carriers as the foremost strategic priority.

In the early hours of the following morning, 9 August, Allied naval forces suffered a surprise which revealed both command incompetence and a fatal paucity of night-fighting skills. Japanese Vice-Admiral Gunichi Mikawa led a heavy cruiser squadron into an attack on the offshore anchorage, which was protected by one Australian and four American heavy cruisers, together with five destroyers. The enemy ships had been spotted the previous afternoon by an RAAF Hudson, but its sighting report was not picked up at Fall River on New Guinea because the radio station was shut down during an air raid. Even when the Hudson landed, there was an inexcusable delay of several hours before word was passed to the warships at sea.

The Americans were deployed off Savo island in anticipation of a Japanese strike, but in the darkness Mikawa’s cruiser column steamed undetected through the western destroyer radar picket line. Within three minutes of the Americans belatedly spotting
Chokai
, the leading Japanese ship, at 0143 the Australian cruiser
Canberra
was struck by at least twenty-four shells which detonated, in the words of a survivor, with ‘a terrific orange-greenish flash’. Every man in the boiler rooms was killed and all power lost;
Canberra
was unable to fire a shot during the subsequent hours before being abandoned. There is some contested evidence that the cruiser was also hit by a torpedo from the American destroyer
Bagley
, aiming at the Japanese.

The destroyer
Paterson
found itself in a perfect firing position, but amid the deafening concussion of its guns, the ship’s torpedo officer failed to hear his captain’s order to trigger the tubes. At 0147 two Japanese torpedoes hit
Chicago
. Only one of these exploded, in the bow, but it crippled the ship’s fire-control system.
Astoria
fired thirteen salvoes without effect because she too failed to see Mikawa’s ships, and her gunnery radar was defective. The cruiser was wrecked by Japanese gunfire at a range of three miles, and abandoned next day with heavy loss of life.

Vincennes
was likewise devastated, and already on fire when her own armament began to shoot. Her commanding officer, Captain Frederick Riefkohl, had no notion the enemy was attacking, and supposed himself a victim of friendly fire. As Mikawa’s huge searchlights illuminated the American cruiser, Riefkohl broadcast angrily over his voice radio, demanding that they should be switched off. Thereafter, he concentrated on trying to save his ship, hit by three torpedoes and seventy-four shells which reduced it to a flaming hulk. Only belatedly did the American captain acknowledge that the Japanese were responsible, and order destroyers to attack them – without success.
Quincy
fired starshells which proved ineffective because they burst above low cloud, while a Japanese seaplane dropped illuminant flares beyond the American squadron, silhouetting its ships for Mikawa’s gunnery directors. The hapless
Quincy
’s captain was killed a few moments after ordering an attempt to beach the ship, which sank with the loss of 370 officers and men.
Chokai
suffered only one hit, in its staff chartroom.