The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History) (33 page)

*
An interesting postscript to this gambit is that the message did affect Japanese logistical planning for the invasion of Midway. One of the
marus
(transport ships) in the invasion force was assigned to carry two new salt-water evaporators to replace the “broken” one on Midway after occupation.

*
There has been a lot of confusion about the character of these decrypts. In his postwar oral history, Rochefort described it as a single op order in twelve parts, which is often how it is described. However, the list of raw decrypts shows that the information was retrieved from a dozen different messages, all dated May 20, each of which dealt with a different aspect of the plan. No single comprehensive operational order dated May 20 has been found. It is very likely, therefore, that Rochefort, in making his presentation to Nimitz on May 25, simply conflated these several messages into one. For a longer discussion of this, see
Appendix E
.

*
The Naval Academy class of 1907, which was particularly large, was commissioned in three sections to smooth the entrance of so many new officers into the fleet. With his high class standing, Spruance graduated with the first group on September 12, 1906, even though he was a member of the class of 1907.

*
The
Yorktown
retained most of Wally Short’s bombing squadron (VB-5) though it was redesignated as VS-5 in order to make room for Max Leslie’s VB-3 from
Saratoga. Yorktown
s fighter squadron, originally VF-42 from
Ranger
, supplied some pilots but was merged into VF-3 under Jimmy Thach; the squadron was also assigned the newer Dash 4 Wildcats. The torpedo squadron (VT-3 under Lem Massey) also expected replacement planes, hoping to get the newer and faster Grumman Avengers, though the strictness of the timetable meant that the pilots of VT-3 flew out to the
Yorktown
in the older and slower Devastators.

10

Opening Act

T
he battle opened not in the central Pacific but among the fog enshrouded islands of the Aleutian archipelago some two thousand miles to the north. Part of the price that Yamamoto had to pay for getting the Navy General Staff to accept Operation MI was his agreement to continue with Operation AL—the occupation of several small islands in the western Aleutians. Though at the time the Americans assumed that this was a diversion for the Midway campaign, it was a stand-alone operation with quite limited goals: the occupation of the islands of Attu and Kiska in the western island chain in order to expand the empire’s defensive perimeter. To prevent the Americans from interfering with these landings, the Japanese planned to neutralize the American base at Dutch Harbor on the island of Unalaska, some four hundred miles east of Attu and Kiska. The overall operation was under Vice Admiral Hosogaya Moshirō, who commanded the Japanese Fifth Fleet, and the force assigned to strike Dutch Harbor consisted of two carriers and their supports under the command of Rear Admiral Kakuta Kakuji. One of the two carriers was the
Ryūjō
, which carried only thirty-seven planes. The other was the 24,000-ton
Jun’yō
, which carried fifty-three planes. Combined with two heavy cruisers and a destroyer screen, they comprised the Second Striking Force—a kind of mini Kidō Butai.

Though the entire Japanese operational plan for June of 1942 was characterized by a dispersal of force, the decision to send two carriers to the Aleutians seems particularly profligate. In fact, however, neither could have been used to reinforce the Midway-bound Kidō Butai. The
Ryūjō
was simply too small, and the
Jun’yō
, which had originally been laid down as a passenger liner and converted into a carrier only recently, had a top speed of only 24 knots, which meant she could not keep up with the Kidō Butai; even the plodding
Kaga
could sustain 28 knots. On the other hand, the fighters and bombers on the decks of those two carriers might have played an important—even a decisive—role in the Battle of Midway had some or all of them been transferred to the
Zuikaku
. This was not done mainly because the Japanese did not believe the
Zuikaku
was needed, but also because the pilots in the
Jun’yō’s
air wing were relative novices with little if any battle experience. Because of that, though the
Jun’yō
nominally carried fifty-three aircraft, Kakuta could count on only about thirty-three of those for combat operations.
¹

The Americans had long been aware of Alaska’s vulnerability. The tail end of the Aleutian archipelago at Attu was only 650 miles from the northernmost of the Japanese Kurile Islands. The Japanese had a small base on Paramushiro in the Kuriles, but until 1937 the Americans had virtually no military presence in Alaska. That year, the Navy began construction of a seaplane base at Sitka, and soon afterward another at Dutch Harbor, though that was still some 1,400 air miles from Paramushiro. By 1942, these two American bases hosted two destroyers, three Coast Guard cutters, and a handful of long-range PBY Catalinas, all under the command of Navy Captain Leslie E. Gehres. The Army had twenty bombers plus forty pursuit planes under the command of Brigadier General William O. Butler.

In January 1942, Roosevelt had asked King about “operational readiness in the Alaskan area.” At the time King dismissed the idea of a Japanese assault there because “a landing in Alaska would be a costly undertaking, unproductive of immediate results, and would expose the occupying forces to strong counter attack.” Despite King’s skepticism, however, the United States did begin to build up its Alaskan forces, largely in response to Alaska’s governor, Ernest Gruening, who complained to FDR’s secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, that “Alaska is far from prepared for eventualities.” What Gruening wanted was money—for airfields, planes, and equipment. And he got it. Ickes recognized that Gruening’s request was as much political as strategic, and he sent it on to the president, who approved the construction of a new 5,000-foot airstrip on the island of Umnak, just west of Dutch Harbor.
²

For his part, Nimitz knew (thanks to the code breakers) that the Japanese planned to attack the Aleutians at the same time as they closed on Midway. He was not willing to weaken his carrier task force to defend those distant islands, nor was he willing to let them go by default. He appointed newly promoted Rear Admiral Robert A. “Fuzzy Theobald, a stocky 1907 Annapolis classmate of Ray Spruance, to command a surface force of five cruisers (two heavy cruisers and three light cruisers) plus four destroyers as Task Force 8, and gave him orders to defend the archipelago and “inflict maximum attrition” on the enemy attackers.
³

Without carriers, Theobald knew he had to depend on General Butler and the Army for his air support. In theory, at least, Theobald had command authority over Butler’s bombers, for in April Marshall and King had agreed that “when a state of fleet-opposed invasion is declared, unity of command is vested in the Navy.” The problem was that neither service had any practical experience with joint operations, and there was no clear chain of command or channel of communications that allowed the two services to work together efficiently. As there was no Department of Defense or Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, the two services were entirely separate. Though Nimitz asked King to “inform Army that surface force will be almost completely dependent on them for air cover,” King could not order it. The only person with simultaneous command authority over both the Army and the Navy was the president himself. As a result, there was confusion and missed opportunity on the American side, though, as it turned out, this was matched by confusion and missed opportunity on the Japanese side, too.
⁴

Rear Admiral Robert A. “Fuzzy” Theobald commanded the cruiser-destroyer force dubbed Task Force 8 that Nimitz assembled to defend the Aleutian Islands. (U.S. Naval Institute)

Theobald and his task force reached Kodiak Island, some five hundred miles east of Dutch Harbor, on May 27—the same day that the crippled
Yorktown
appeared off Pearl Harbor. He met with General Butler at his headquarters and explained his plan to inflict “maximum attrition” on the approaching enemy, in conformance with Nimitz’s directive. Theobald’s surface force could not close with Kakuta’s carriers unless the Americans first gained command of the air. The Navy Catalinas were ideal for scouting, but they were flimsy and vulnerable and relatively useless in an attack, especially against carriers. Theobald could not even plan a night destroyer attack, because at that latitude in early June there was hardly any night. Butler would have to bring his Army bombers to the forward airstrip at Cold Bay and the new field at Umnak, where they would wait for a sighting report from the Catalinas and then attack. If their attacks sufficiently weakened the carriers, Theobald could then close with his cruiser force and finish them off with gunfire.
⁵

Butler was less than enthusiastic about this plan. He objected to concentrating his air forces at Cold Bay and Umnak, more than five hundred miles to the west, instead of at Kodiak, where they could protect the city of Anchorage. Those western bases lacked support facilities and protective revetments; Butler worried that his planes would be sitting ducks. The conversation was courteous enough, but Butler stubbornly resisted the idea of staging his bombers that far west. Theobald considered asserting his newly established prerogatives as joint commander and simply ordering Butler to do it, but feared that if he did so it would “create an initial schism between the Army and the Navy that [would] adversely affect all [their] operations from then on.” So he tried to reason with Butler, pointing out the advantages of acting offensively rather than defensively. He reminded Butler that his own surface ships “could accomplish little until the enemy aircraft carriers were definitely accounted for” and reminded him of Nimitz’s orders to inflict “maximum attrition” on the enemy. By the end of their five-hour conference, Theobald thought he had convinced Butler, and on June 1 he returned to his flagship,
Nashville
, and led his task force back to sea, taking up a position four hundred miles to the south. There his ships were cocooned in a seasonal fog so thick that, as one officer on the
Nashville
recalled, “for three days we never saw the ship ahead of us.”
⁶

Kakuta launched his first strike against Dutch Harbor early on the morning of June 3 (Alaska time). He sent off partial strikes from both of his carriers, but the inexperienced pilots from the
Jun’yō
got lost in the thick weather and turned back, and as a result only nine bombers from
Ryūjō
, plus three fighters, made it through to the target. The
Ryūjō’s
planes inflicted moderate damage, hitting the radio station, the oil tank farm, and an Army barracks, killing twenty-five Americans at the cost of two of their own planes.
⁷
*

Now was the time for the American Army counterstrike against the carriers. Navy search planes found Kakuta’s carriers a mere 165 miles away and radioed their coordinates; one of the snoopers even managed to drop a few bombs, though none struck an enemy ship. Theobald expected that the Army bombers would now sortie. Instead, the Army pilots insisted that “they had to await an order from General Butler,” who had apparently had second thoughts since agreeing to Theobald’s arrangements. He told another Navy officer that he doubted the Army planes could even defend their own airfields, much less damage the enemy. He therefore radioed Theobald from Kodiak, “Unless otherwise directed by you [I] will not advance bombing squadrons from Kodiak to Cold Bay Area.” Since Theobald was observing radio silence, he could not respond to this astonishing message. Instead, he sent the destroyer
Humphreys
racing back to Kodiak with a written order.
⁸

Thus prodded, Butler released his bombers, though this did not result in an immediate strike. While en route to the target, the first group of Army planes received a radio report that the Catalinas had temporarily lost contact with the enemy. Rather than continue on in the expectation that contact could be reestablished—which it was—they turned around and returned to base. When a second group of bombers flew out toward the coordinates, the Army pilots fanned out to attack individually rather than attempt a coordinated strike. Most bombed from high altitude, some releasing their bombs blindly from above the stratus cloud layer, simply guessing at the enemy’s position “by calculation”—essentially by dead reckoning. As Theobald noted later, “such an attack could not be sure of hitting Kiska Island,” much less an enemy warship.
⁹