The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History) (15 page)

In that, at least, McCormick was wrong. The raid had a dramatic impact not only on Japanese shipping but also, and more importantly, on Japanese decision making. Vice Admiral Inoue Shigeyoshi, the Fourth Fleet commander who headed the Japanese South Seas Force, concluded that continuing the advance southward would now be impossible without carrier support. That conclusion would bring important elements of the Kidō Butai into contact with the American carriers for the first time.
⁴⁷

*
Halsey noted Gaido’s heroic effort and promoted him to aviation mate first class that afternoon.

*
There was another reason why the Western allies worried so much about Australia. As King wrote to FDR on March 5: “Australia—and New Zealand—are ‘white men’s countries’ which it is essential that we shall not allow to be overrun by Japanese because of the repercussion among the non-white races of the world.”

*
Recognizing the public relations value of O’Hare’s feat, the Navy ordered him stateside, where Roosevelt awarded him the Medal of Honor, after which he was sent on a tour to sell war bonds. For that reason, he missed both the Battle of the Coral Sea and Midway.
   Few of the thousands of modern-day passengers who travel through Chicago are aware that the city’s two major airports are both named to honor heroes of the Pacific War. Midway Airport is named for the battle itself, and passengers there can view a full-sized Dauntless dive bomber suspended from the ceiling of Terminal A. The larger O’Hare Airport, one of the busiest in the world, is named for Butch O’Hare.

*
This is not to be confused with the Australia-New Zealand Army Corps, also called ANZAC, which fought at Gallipoli in World War I. This new ANZAC command lasted only until April, when it was absorbed into the Southwest Pacific command under Douglas MacArthur.

5

Seeking the Decisive Battle

T
he first phase of the war had gone well for Japan—so well, in fact, that four months into it, her leaders faced the unexpected dilemma of not knowing what to do next. By March of 1942, virtually all of Japan’s prewar goals had been achieved: British Malaya and its great bastion of Singapore were in Japanese hands, as were the Dutch East Indies, including the oilrich islands of Borneo, Java, and Sumatra. Most of the Philippines, too, had fallen. Some American and Filipino soldiers still held out in Bataan, but they would surrender on April 9, after which only the tiny island of Corregidor still held out, and it was only a matter of time until it fell. Thailand had capitulated early. Rangoon, the capital of Burma, fell on March 8, and Japanese forces chased the British back toward the border with India. All this had been accomplished with a total loss to the Imperial Japanese Navy of only five destroyers, three patrol boats, seven minesweepers, seven submarines, and several transports. Not a single capital ship had been seriously damaged, much less sunk. It had been so easy that in some quarters it led to what has been dubbed “victory disease”: an expectation that every new initiative would automatically result in triumph. It was not at all clear, however, what those new initiatives might be. Though the Japanese had planned the “First Phase of Operations” with close attention to detail, their notions of what might come next were vague at best.
¹

From the beginning, the Japanese had never imagined that they would be able to conquer the United States and dictate peace terms to the White House.
*
Rather, their goal was to demonstrate that it would be equally impossible for the Americans to conquer Japan. When the Americans launched their inevitable counterattack and attempted to fight their way westward across the Pacific, the Japanese planned to make their progress so painful that the Yankees would eventually decide that the cost of subduing them—in both blood and treasure—was unacceptable. Once that happened, a negotiated settlement was the only possible outcome, and in the course of those negotiations the Japanese would argue that they should be allowed to keep their Southeast Asian conquests. Their assumption that their Anglo-American opponents could be brought to the negotiating table after suffering reversals at sea was based in part on their experience in the war against Russia in 1904–5, when the Russians had accepted negotiations because they feared internal unrest at home more than defeat abroad. Such an assumption did not apply to the British or the Americans, however, especially after Pearl Harbor.
²

There was general agreement in Japan that to bring about the kind of stalemate that they hoped would trigger negotiations, at some point it would be necessary to establish a defensive perimeter around her new possessions and dare the Americans to assail it. The question was, where? Initially they assumed that this defensive barrier would run from the Kuriles in the northern home islands, through captured Wake Island (which the Japanese renamed Ōtorijima) in the central Pacific, then south to the Marshalls and Gilberts. But after the easy triumphs of January to March of 1942, they considered an expanded perimeter that might include Australia, Hawaii, or the Aleutians—or all three. There was also discussion about Japan’s obligations to Germany under the Tripartite Pact. The Army in particular pondered both the wisdom and the timing of an attack on the Soviet Union. And finally, there was Yamamoto’s determination to eliminate the threat of more American carrier raids by engineering a climactic naval battle somewhere in the central Pacific that would destroy those carriers once and for all. All of these options were contemplated by a Japanese decision-making architecture that depended less on clear lines of hierarchy and authority than on subtle and constantly shifting political and personal relationships between power centers, relationships that were frequently jealous and competitive.
³

In theory at least, the principal decision-making body in the Imperial Japanese Navy was the Naval General Staff. Until 1933, it had been subordinate to the Navy Ministry, but a “reform” that year—in effect a coup by the fleet faction—elevated the Naval General Staff to a position of de facto superiority, giving its members responsibility for armament, education, training, personnel, and command. The head of the staff was Admiral Nagano Osami, a 61-year-old career officer who had preceded Yamamoto in command of the Combined Fleet. Nagano was a battleship-and-cruiser man, a stolid, taciturn officer who had graduated from Eta Jima in 1900 and had been a staff officer in the Russo-Japanese War. Physically, Nagano (whose nickname was “The Elephant”) could hardly have been more different from the diminutive Yamamoto, but their career tracks were strikingly similar. Both men had served tours of duty in the United States and attended Harvard—in Nagano’s case, Harvard Law School. Both had been members of the treaty faction before the war and participated in the 1922 Washington conference and the 1930 London conference. They had both opposed Japan’s adherence to the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy. After that, however, Nagano adjusted his outlook. By April of 1941, when he became chief of staff, he had concluded that war had become inevitable. In light of this fact, Nagano actively supported a thrust southward to occupy the Dutch East Indies and British Malaya, at least in part to prevent the Army from dominating the decision-making process.
⁴

Admiral Nagano Osami (nicknamed “the Elephant”) headed the Naval General Staff in the spring of 1942. At a series of meetings in April, he and the rest of the staff capitulated to Yamamoto’s insistence on conducting Operation MI. (U.S. Naval Institute)

The first open split between Nagano and Yamamoto came over the wisdom of striking at Pearl Harbor. Nagano believed that it would be possible to seize the British and Dutch possessions in the South Pacific without drawing the United States into the war. He argued that the Pearl Harbor gambit was unnecessary and risky, and that it would pull resources away from the all-important strike southward. Yamamoto saw this as timidity. He opined to an associate that Nagano was “the kind of man who thinks he’s a genius, even though he’s not,” and told another, “Nagano’s a dead loss.” In the end, Yamamoto got his way concerning Pearl Harbor by threatening to resign unless his plan was accepted. It was a particularly audacious piece of extortion, and Yamamoto was bold enough to tell Nagano “not to interfere too much and thus set a bad precedent in the Navy.” It is unimaginable that Chester Nimitz would have made such a suggestion to Ernie King, or that he would have kept his job if he had. A bad precedent was indeed set: a fleet commander could make strategic plans on his own and force those plans onto his putative superiors by threatening to resign. In the months after Pearl Harbor, the rampage of the Kidō Butai elevated Yamamoto’s prestige higher, though the admiral himself had remained aboard his flagship in Hashirajima Harbor near Hiroshima.
⁵

Now in March, with most of the war’s goals already achieved, Nagano and the Naval General Staff considered the next step. Their first instinct was to look southward. Nagano believed that when the Americans began their inevitable counteroffensive, they would use Australia as their base, and that could be forestalled at the outset by occupying the continent. Despite a successful raid by the Kidō Butai on the Australian naval base at Darwin in February, the Japanese Army was appalled by the notion of invading Australia. Because General Tōjō Hideki was both war minister and prime minister, the Army had a virtual veto over any plan that called for the participation of ground troops, and the Army had no interest in such an open-ended commitment. Australia was sparsely defended, as most of her soldiers had been sent to other theaters of war, but it would nonetheless take a minimum of ten divisions—some 200,000 men—to seize and hold just the northern coast, and Japan did not have ten divisions to spare, or the ships to transport and supply them.
⁶

Nor was the Army interested in another proposal of the Naval General Staff: the invasion and occupation of Ceylon in the Indian Ocean. The expectation was that such a move would provoke an uprising by the restive native population of India and threaten the British Empire where its stability was most precarious. According to one member of the Naval General Staff, a principal purpose of the operation was to “carry out Indian independence.” In addition, a move across the Indian Ocean toward the Persian Gulf offered the possibility of linking up with Axis forces, as well as access to the oil fields of the Middle East. Though the conquest of Ceylon would require only two divisions rather than ten, the Army was not interested. Its main concern continued to be the festering conflict in China, where four-fifths of its active divisions were concentrated. If the Army looked anywhere for new fields to conquer, it was to the north rather than the south or the west. In the late fall and early winter of 1941, as the Wehrmacht drove toward Moscow, many Japanese generals anticipated the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union, and they did not want to miss out on the spoils when that happened. They concluded that it was necessary to hold troops in readiness “to share a victory when the Germans succeed.”
⁷

The Army’s obstructionism bred resentment not only within the Naval General Staff in Tokyo but at Combined Fleet Headquarters on board Yamamoto’s flagship, where one of his staff officers complained: “We want to invade Ceylon; we are not allowed to! We want to invade Australia; we cannot! We want to attack Hawaii; we cannot do that either! All because the Army will not agree to release the necessary forces.” Yamamoto’s logistics officer recalled that, “since the Army-Navy could not come up with a common agreement of effort on the second phase operations, the Navy looked more and more toward what it could do alone.”
⁸