Intelligence in War: The Value--And Limitations--Of What the Military Can Learn About the Enemy (34 page)

Flying off, in 1942, was almost a stunt performance. The pilot worked up to full revolutions, released his brakes and accelerated down the deck, pulling the joystick back as he crossed the bow; engine failure or mishandling dropped him into the sea. All TF 16 aircraft made successful departures, and after formating, sixty-seven Dauntless dive-bombers, twenty-nine Devastator torpedo bombers and twenty Wildcat fighters set course for Nagumo’s calculated position.

Circumstances were to prevent their arrival in concentration. At the outset, Spruance decided to send the first four squadrons on ahead, since orbiting wasted precious fuel. Then, as they strung out towards the target, Nagumo, warned by his scouting aircraft of their approach, altered course at 9:05 from northeast to southeast. At 9:20, when
Hornet
’s dive-bombers reached the indicated position, they found the sea empty. Bombing 8’s leader therefore decided that Nagumo must be heading towards Midway, turned, and led his squadron due south. The aircraft were running out of fuel, however, and fifteen were forced to land on the island; the rest returned to their own carriers but all the Wildcat fighters fell into the sea with dry tanks.

Hornet
’s torpedo bombers, led by Lieutenant-Commander John Waldron, had become separated from the dive-bombers but, arriving near the target area, spotted funnel smoke on the horizon and turned to investigate. As they approached the Japanese carriers at sea level, to make their torpedo runs, they were attacked by the combat air patrol of sixty Zeros. In a few minutes all fifteen Devastators were shot down, only one pilot surviving. No hits were scored. Torpedo 8 was shortly followed by Torpedo 6, from
Enterprise,
which had also lost its fifteen escorts. Manoeuvring into a favourable approach, the Devastators attracted the Zeros which had just destroyed Torpedo 8 and were massacred. Only four of fourteen survived and the squadron achieved no hits. Finally, at about ten o’clock,
Yorktown
’s torpedo squadron, VT 3, appeared. It, too, was attacked at sea level by the Japanese combat air patrol, lost seven out of twelve aircraft and achieved nothing.

The destruction of the torpedo bombers was not, however, in vain. Because they descended to sea level to make their dropping runs, they thereby brought down the Japanese combat air patrol from its protective high altitude. When at 10:25, therefore, yet another wave of American aircraft approached, to bomb from 14,000 feet, Nagumo’s four carriers lay open to destruction. Their decks were crowded with aircraft waiting to be launched in a retaliatory strike, draped with fuel hoses and littered with torpedoes and bombs.
Akagi
was the first to be hit. Nagumo’s chief of staff, Ryunosuke Kusaka, reported “a terrific fire . . . bodies all over the place.” A bomb from a dive-bomber had hit the midships elevator, penetrated to the hangar deck and set off a torpedo store. Another fell into the aircraft park. Kusaka went on, “There was a huge hole in the flight deck, just behind the amidships elevator. The elevator itself, twisted like molten glass, was drooping into the hangar. Deck plates reeled upwards in grotesque configurations. Planes stood tail up, belching livid flames and jet-black smoke, their torpedoes began to explode, making it impossible to bring the fires under control. The entire hangar area was a blazing inferno and the flames swiftly spread to the bridge.”
²⁴

Akagi
’s fate had come about by accident, not intelligence activity. The intelligence supplied to TF 16 and TF 17 had, indeed, thus far resulted only in catastrophe. The three torpedo bomber attacks, by eighty-three aircraft, had resulted in the loss of thirty-seven, together with many of their fighter escorts, and no damage to the Japanese at all.
Enterprise
’s dive-bombers had been led to Nagumo’s carriers by hazard. The Japanese were not where they were expected to be; they were discovered by chance. Among Nimitz’s preparations for the encounter near Midway had been the deployment of a submarine screen. One of the submarines,
Nautilus,
attempting to set up an attack, had been detected by the destroyer
Arashi,
which lingered to drop depth charges, without effect. Working up to speed to rejoin the fleet, it created a vivid white wake. Lieutenant-Commander Clarence McClusky, leading the Dauntless dive-bombers of
Enterprise,
saw the white streak on the surface of the ocean, guessed and turned to follow at 9:55. At 10:20 he sighted
Akagi, Soryu
and
Kaga
steaming north-west in “a circular disposition of roughly eight miles”;
Hiryu
was farther ahead. Their original tight, self-supporting formation had been broken up by the torpedo bomber attacks. McCusky turned to engage, leading his dive-bombers down from 14,000 feet in a seventy-degree dive. Their terminal speed almost exceeded that of the carriers’ Zeros; but they, in any case, were flying too low, having driven off the torpedo bombers, to attain a defensive altitude.

One after another, three of the big Japanese carriers succumbed, first
Akagi
, Nagumo’s flagship, then
Kaga,
whose parked aircraft, fuel lines, bomb stores and hangars were set alight by 500- and 1,000-pound bombs. Finally,
Soryu
was attacked by dive-bombers from
Yorktown
which, launched late, were attracted to the scene by the smoke of battle and dropped bombs that, among other damage caused, folded the midships elevator back against the bridge.

Between 10:25 on 4 June, when Nagumo was preparing to launch his anti-carrier strike, and 10:30, when
Enterprise
’s Bombing Squadron 6 delivered its attack, Japan’s plan to conquer the Pacific was reduced to ruins. Three of its six big carriers had been fatally struck; the fourth was to fall to American naval power before the twenty-four hours were out.
Soryu
was finished off in the early morning of 5 June by torpedoes from
Nautilus,
the submarine whose intervention had inadvertently guided the dive-bombers of Spruance and Fletcher to Nagumo’s carriers the day before. At about the same time,
Hiryu,
hit by dive-bombers launched from
Enterprise
on the afternoon of 4 June, succumbed to fatal damage sustained in that raid.

The Japanese defeat was not to be quite unbalanced.
Yorktown
, which had survived grievous damage at the Coral Sea and launched one of the decisive strikes of 4 June, was found by aircraft from the still-surviving
Hiryu
about noon the same day and, despite the desperate efforts of its combat air patrol, hit hard. Abandoned, then reboarded by a damage control party, she was limping towards the safety of Pearl Harbor when a Japanese submarine, one unit of a screen deployed by Yamamoto to entrap Nimitz’s fleet in his great Midway scheme, found her proceeding eastward at very low speed, on 5 June, manoeuvred to intercept and fired four torpedoes. Two hit, and after a desperate death struggle, she capsized on the morning of the 6th.

The battle of 4 June 1942—Midway—was nevertheless instantly reckoned, exultantly by the Americans, reluctantly but no less certainly by the Japanese, a dramatic victory for the power of American arms. Beginning with all the advantages, the Imperial Japanese Navy had been reduced in a few hours, indeed minutes, of hectic conflict from dominance to subordination in the struggle for control of the Pacific. The Japanese empire’s long-laid plans, to acquire an impregnable strategic holding in the Central and South Pacific and to create a world-class fleet capable of defending it against any counteroffensive, had been reversed in a few hours of violent combat.

Yet the question remains to what extent exactly Midway was an intelligence victory. It was hailed as such by those in the know at the time and, when the facts became public knowledge, in general opinion. OP-20-G, and its outstations on Hawaii and at Melbourne, was credited with identifying, first, Japan’s decision to switch the axis of its naval offensive from the South Seas—against Australia—to the Central Pacific, next to identifying Midway as the offensive focus, then to establishing a narrow time bracket for its launching and, finally, to constructing an accurate plot of the Japanese order of battle; on 31 May, Nimitz issued a signal, 13/1221, beginning, “Estimate Midway organisation stop striking force 4 carriers [
Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu, Soryu
], 2 Kirishimas [battleships] 2 Tone class cruisers 12 destroyers . . . ,” an almost exact tally of the ships under Nagumo’s command. More conventional intelligence—radar contact by Midway’s station, visual sighting of Nagumo’s fleet by one of Midway’s search aircraft—established the Japanese carrier fleet’s oceanic position and speed of advance just before its first strikes were launched. That information allowed Captain Simard on Midway to launch his bomber and torpedo strikes and Admiral Fletcher to position the two task forces for their ship-to-ship attacks.

The exactitude of the intelligence available to Nimitz and his subordinate commanders about the Midway attack was indeed extraordinary: enemy objective, timing, strength, direction of approach, launch position, a tick list of “information enemy” requirements; and all the more extraordinary in that most was the product of cryptanalysis. Yet it has to be recognised that, despite the riches cryptanalysis bestowed on the Americans, the result was not preordained, the outcome hung in the balance even after Fletcher had launched his aircraft towards Nagumo’s position and that contingencies and chance were critical determinants of the victory.

Spruance risked all by his decision to launch “a full load” from
Hornet
and
Enterprise,
every dive- and torpedo bomber he had. Despite the intelligence the crews had been given, many failed to find the target. Nagumo, so much vilified in the aftermath, made a correct and prudent decision to alter course, based on a reconnaissance sighting of the incoming aircraft, before
Hornet
’s dive-bombers arrived. They found empty sea at the expected point of encounter, were led away in the wrong direction to search for the Japanese, missed the battle and, in the case of their escorting fighters, missed their mother ships on their return flight. TF 16’s torpedo bombers, which had become separated from the dive-bombers on the approach, detected Nagumo only by chance, at the extreme limit of vision, and were then devastated by his combat air patrol. By that stage of the battle, Nagumo would have had every reason to believe that he was winning. The events of the next few minutes would have reinforced that belief.
Enterprise
’s torpedo bombers had also missed Nagumo and only spotted his ships at the extreme limit of vision. They were then overwhelmed by the combat air patrol as they made their attack.

Nagumo, moreover, had been able to land on and re-arm his Zeros—they were operating so close to their mother ships that they did not need refuelling—during this stage of the fighting. By 10:25, the four Japanese carriers, though somewhat dispersed by taking evasive action against TF 16’s torpedo bombers, were untouched and were preparing to fly off their own strike planes against the enemy, whose position and distance could be estimated by scouting reports and observation of the Americans’ line of approach.

What happened next was the outcome of random factors. The first was that the opening attacks had been delivered by torpedo bombers, which drew the Japanese combat air patrol down to sea level, at a moment when the American dive-bombers were to begin their descent from 14,000 feet. The second, a truly haphazard event, was Bombing 6’s sighting of the wake of the destroyer
Arashi,
departing from its depth-charging, unsuccessful, of the U.S. submarine
Nautilus
and leaving a signature that the quick-witted Commander McClusky realised pointed to Nagumo’s position. The third, which ante-dated the opening of the engagement, was Nagumo’s time-wasting indecision at the very outset.

Poor Nagumo; the bold destroyer commander had not been equipped, by either training or experience, to perform the intricate and rapid calculations of relative speeds in three dimensions that a successful carrier commander needed to make. An outside observer can see in retrospect that, on receipt of the
Tone
seaplane’s sighting report of American warships within flying distance of his irreplaceable carriers, he should have cancelled the order for his bombers to prepare a second strike against Midway, as Tomonaga urged, and readied all his strike aircraft for a ship-to-ship attack. It was his inability, after seven o’clock, to make up his mind, despite the promptings by light-signal from his fellow admiral Tamon Yamaguchi, commanding the
Hiryu
-
Soryu
group, that led to his decks being cluttered by fuel hoses, loose ordnance and re-arming aircraft when, three hours later, Lieutenant-Commander McClusky’s Bombing 6 began its dive which culminated, in less than five minutes, in the sinking of three of the four Japanese carriers.

Results in war, in the last resort, are an affair of body, not mind; of physical force, not plans or intelligence. Over the longer run, of course, a power of superior intellectual resource will, if its superiority translates into possession of superior industrial, technical and demographic means, ineluctably overcome a power inferior in those qualities. There are no examples in military history of a state weaker in force than its enemy achieving victory in a protracted conflict. Force tells. Mind, however, is usually also its concomitant. The governing class of the Japanese empire, with less than a third of the population of the United States and a fraction of its industrial capacity, had been deluded to believe that its painfully acquired collection of modern warships and aircraft, even when enhanced by the warrior spirit of its sailors and airmen, could overcome. That had been Admiral Yamamoto’s warning. His estimate of “running wild” for a year or six months had been exactly realised. The Japanese had risked all and, at Midway, lost all.