War and Remembrance (52 page)

The flattops of both sides went limping home from the Coral Sea. Fourteen hundred Yankee workmen at Pearl Harbor, laboring around the clock, patched up the badly hit
Yorktown
in three days, and it fought at Midway, But the two damaged Japanese flattops were
dropped from the operation.
The high command refused a postponement to train and replace air crews, and ordered no urgent repair effort. To ensure a full moon for the landing, or for some such footling reason, the weight of two carriers was nonchalantly forgone.

Plan and Counterplan

Yamamoto’s battle plan for Midway was the work of Captain Kuroshima, who had devised the great but aborted “westward” strategy. His judgment seems to have waned. The Midway scheme was grandiose in scope and dazzling in its intricacy, but it lacked two military virtues:
simplicity,
and
concentration of force.
It was a dual mission, always a hazardous business.

1. Capture Midway atoll.
   
2. Destroy the United States Pacific Fleet.
   

The plan started with a replay of Pearl Harbor, a surprise carrier strike at the atoll. Under Admiral Nagumo, four carriers — instead of the six originally called for—-would approach from the northwest by stealth. They would wipe out the air defenses at a blow, and the landing force would then capture the atoll before Nimitz could interfere. It was assumed (quite soundly) that Nimitz would have to come out and fight, no matter how weak he was. Yamamoto himself planned to lie with his battleships several hundred miles astern of Nagumo, out of aircraft range, prepared to close and annihilate the Nimitz fleet elements that would survive Nagumo’s air onslaught.

The plan included a feint at the Aleutian Islands off Alaska. There other carriers would blast American naval bases, and an invasion force would land. The feint might decoy Nimitz’s meager forces far to the north, thus enabling Yamamoto to get between the Pacific Fleet and the Hawaiian Islands, a stupendous opportunity; if not, Japan would still seize and hold the Aleutians, thus tearing loose the northern anchor of the American line in the Pacific.

So, despite his overwhelming advantage in power, Yamamoto elected to base his operation on deception and surprise; but there was no surprise. Nimitz gambled that what his decoders told him was true, and that he might win against odds by surprising the surprisers. He thus cut the Gordian knot of military theory: should operations be based on what the enemy would
probably
do, or on the
worst
he could do? Chester von Nimitz even shrugged off the barbed nagging from Washington of Fleet Admiral King, who kept pointing out that the Japanese fleet might be heading for Hawaii. Had Nimitz proved wrong, his disgrace would have been greater than that of the Pearl Harbor commander-in-chief who was cashiered.

But Chester von Nimitz was made of good stuff. He was of pure German military descent, and he had bred true. His Texas family traced its line directly to one Ernst Freiherr von Nimitz, an eighteenth-century German major, with a crowned coat of arms. This ancestor in turn derived from von Nimitz military forebears going back to the Crusades. Recent generations of
Nimitzes, lacking the means to keep up the aristocratic style of life, had dropped the “von,” and of course in Texas it would have been a handicap.

Nimitz made one simple grand decision: to ambush Yamamoto. He determined to position his carriers well northeast of Midway, as Nagumo’s carriers were steaming down from the northwest. In this deadly game played around a wide water-girt bulge of the earth, much hung on who saw whom first. Placing his heavy pieces so, concealing them by distance, Nimitz seized a big advantage.

For Midway’s land planes could search an arc of seven hundred miles, while Yamamoto’s carrier craft could at best patrol three hundred miles. Also, Nimitz could receive patrol reports in Hawaii by underwater cable from Midway, so that no increase of broadcast traffic from the atoll would warn Yamamoto that the Americans were alerted. From Hawaii, Nimitz could then broadcast the patrol reports in code to his carriers, while Yamamoto’s forces plodded within range, oblivious and unseeing.

Such was Nimitz’s ambush. Yamamoto’s fleet steamed right into it.

Yet not all ambuscades succeed. Surprise is a great but fleeting advantage. Yamamoto’s powerful and battle-toughened forces quickly rallied from Nimitz’s surprise, and in its opening phase the Battle of Midway took shape as a smashing Japanese victory.

TRANSLATORS NOTE:
Fleet Admiral Nimitz was a quiet man of broad vision, with a good sense of humor. Shortly before he died he read in manuscript my translation of this chapter. At Roon’s usage of “von Nimitz” he enjoyed a hearty laugh, but he remarked that the details of his genealogy were accurate.

A Navy adage runs, “If it works you’re a hero, if it doesn’t you’re a bum.” Actually there was much guesswork in the Midway intelligence break. Clues had to be teased out of the Japanese by deceptive signals. Admiral Nimitz’s decision to act on this inconclusive “dope” was daring. He did not know the Japanese plan. Rather, he had a fair indication of what might ôe going on. He proceeded on hunches that proved brilliantly right.

The Wehrmacht coding precautions were not all that adequate. At this writing I can say no more, but the fact is that German communications were deeply penetrated.
—
V.H.

* * *

T
HE
air squadrons flew out from Oahu to join the departing carriers in clear calm weather. On its approach, the leading
Enterprise
torpedo plane went into a spin, crashed, and tumbled overboard with pieces flying. To Warren, circling high above in a new dive-bomber, it looked like a toy breaking up. The plane guard destroyer rushed to the wreckage, boiling smoke like a locomotive and streaking the sea white. The plane crew was rescued, as he learned on landing. Such accidents were not uncommon, yet this one struck him as a bad omen.

TASK FORCE SIXTEEN IS PROCEEDING TO INTERCEPT A JAP LANDING ATTEMPT AT MIDWAY

Flashing across the teletype screens shortly after the pilots landed aboard, the words generated cheery excitement in the ready rooms. But in a long, long, dull week of northward zigzagging at standard speed, the excitement faded into an uncomfortable mix of boredom and mounting tension. The
Enterprise
and the
Hornet,
ringed by cruisers and destroyers, slowly moved from sunny tropical seas to gray swells, gray skies, and cool winds. Under the umbrella of the Hawaiian air patrol, there was nothing for the fliers to do. The newcomers, three-year Academy men or reserve ensigns, gloried in their prima-donna freedom from ship routine: sleeping late, playing acey-deucey and cards, fogging the ready rooms with tobacco smoke, drinking gallons of coffee and lemonade, eating big meals and great mounds of ice cream, killing time between drills and lectures with chatter of sex, shore leave, airplane mishaps, and the like, perpetrating ham-handed practical jokes; and generally mimicking, in their green self-consciousness, the Hollywood picture of combat fliers.

Usually Warren enjoyed the ready-room camaraderie play, but not this time out. Too many of the squadron mates with whom he had started the war were dead, missing, or transferred. The high-spirited recruits, mostly unmarried, made him feel old and irritable. The protracted idleness ate at him. He was flight operations officer, third in command, and he tried to keep busy reviewing tactics manuals, devising navigation problems and blackboard combat drills, exercising violently on the flight deck, and haunting the hangar deck to check and recheck the squadron’s aircraft.

Idleness breeds gossip. Idleness plus tension is a bad brew. As the slow
days passed, the talk in the ready rooms drifted to the topic of Rear Admiral Spruance. Word was trickling down from flag country that Halsey’s staff was not cottoning to him. Halsey had built up the former screen commander, his old friend, to them as a brilliant intellectual. The staff was finding him a damned queer fish: cool, quiet, inaccessible, the Old Man’s absolute opposite. He was content at meals to sit almost mum. He depressed Halsey’s loyal and ebullient subordinates, who had absorbed their style from the rollicking Old Man. Why had Halsey pushed forward this taciturn nonflyer to fight a carrier battle, when red-hot aviators like John Towers had been available? Out of friendship? At lunch on the first day out, so rumor ran, Spruance had opened up after a long boring silence by saying, “Gentlemen, I want you to know that I’m not worried about any of you. If you weren’t any good, Bill Halsey wouldn’t have you.” He seemed unaware that he himself was under worried scrutiny.

His ways were altogether odd. He tramped the flight deck alone by the hour, but otherwise he seemed rather lazy. He went to bed early and slept long and well. During an alarm over a night surface contact he had not turned out, merely ordered an evasive maneuver and gone back to sleep. Each day he ate an unvarying breakfast of toast and canned peaches, and drank only one cup of morning coffee; which he made himself, with the fussiness of an old maid, from special beans he had brought aboard. When it rained or blew hard topside, he sat in the flag mess reading old books from the ship’s library. Almost, he seemed to be along for the ride. Halsey’s chief of staff, Captain Browning, was running the task force, and Spruance was just initialling Browning’s orders.

All in all, the staff was counting on Spruance for very little. Browning would fight the battle, and if the patched-up
Yorktown
got to the scene in time, Frank Jack Fletcher would take charge, since he was senior to Spruance. Fletcher had not done so well in the Coral Sea, but at least he had been blooded in carrier combat. Thus went the idle talk in the ready room; which irked Warren and troubled him too.

Arriving on station, a spot in the trackless sea designated “Point Luck,” Task Force Sixteen steamed back and forth through two more tedious days, waiting for the
Yorktown.
This was the place of ambush, some three hundred twenty-five miles from the atoll; beyond the range of enemy carrier planes, yet close enough for a quick attack once Midway aircraft espied the foe. Dolphins frisking among the slow-moving ships found no scraps to eat; the crews were forbidden to throw so much as a paper cup overboard.

At last, making full speed, with no outward mark of its Coral Sea battering, the
Yorktown
hove into view. Like the ship, its decimated air squadrons were a patch job of Coral Sea survivors and
Saratoga
aviators hastily thrown together; but another flattop, patched or not, was mighty welcome. With
Fletcher now in tactical command, more fleet alarms began to break out.
Yorktown
warnings about enemy submarines or aircraft touched off the old frenzied routines time and again: sharp turns of all ships, flight decks crazily canting, crews scurrying to man and train guns, destroyers foaming and crisscrossing; then would come the bored wait, the standdown, the recovery of aircraft, and the resumed plan of the day. None of the alarms proved genuine. The two task forces milled around and around Point Luck: the
Yorktown
with its own screen of cruisers and destroyers called Task Force Seventeen, the
Hornet
and the
Enterprise
still designated Task Force Sixteen, under Spruance as subordinate to Fletcher.

Warren scheduled himself out on the first dawn search. When his new Dauntless bounded forward between lines of hooded yellow guide lights on the deck and roared off into the cold night toward the crowded stars and the Milky Way, his spirit lifted too. The new fliers had looked grave during the ready-room briefing when told of the absolute radio silence orders; the carrier would send out no homing signals and if they had to make emergency water landings, distress calls were forbidden. Thus the chilly reality of the approaching enemy was thrust on them. Not having patrolled in an SBD-3 before, Warren too was uneasy at these tough rules. But the new machine purred out two hundred miles; then, in a soft lilac dawn and a beautiful sunrise, its new electronic homing device returned him dead on Point Option. A pleasant sight, those two carrier islands nicking the horizon! He landed with a clean catch of the number three wire. A great airplane, sure enough: improved navigation gear, a sweet engine, self-sealing tanks, extra guns, thicker armor. Even his gunner, a gloomy Kentucky mountain boy named Cornett, who seldom spoke and seemed to be using a foreign language when he did, climbed smiling out of the rear seat.

“Not a bad crate at that,” said Warren.

Cornett spat tobacco juice and said something like, “Rakn rat smat new dew.”