War and Remembrance (56 page)

I do not fear apocalypse. The armies of Germany and Japan are not going to land in New England and California. The oceans are broad, and America remains populous and strong, only impotent to wield its strength in time. Once the despots have swallowed their conquests there will be a pause for digestion and a peace of sorts, perhaps for a decade or two. Should the United States adopt a Vichy-like regime, there may be no third war at all,
only a long gradual sucking dry of America’s riches by the tyrannies. I need to plan for five or at most ten more years of life.
Après moi, le déluge.
And I must deliver Natalie and Louis if I can.

The decision does seem to be in my hands. Natalie is all but paralyzed. The hoyden who dashed to her lover in Warsaw while war was breaking out, who met another lover in Lisbon in wartime and married him on the spot, has become a mother. It has changed her. She says she will follow my lead. If she is willing to make this rash journey with an infant, it can only be because Avram Rabinovitz is involved, the man who awed and attracted her aboard the
Izmir.
Her submariner husband is half a world away, if indeed he is alive at all. For a bizarre and shadowy adventurer like Rabinovitz she can have only fugitive feelings, but I am glad this shred of moral assurance exists for her.

We will start for Lisbon, then. God help us! I wish I were on better terms with Him. But alas, as with the bishop of Volterra, I don’t know Him and He owes me nothing.

If the worst comes to the worst, Natalie will learn that I am not altogether a blundering wool-head. Like Hamlet, when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw. There are the diamonds.

V
ICE
A
DMIRAL
Nagumo’s wartime photograph shows a stern bald old Japanese gentleman in a European-style admiral’s uniform — thick gold epaulettes, diagonal sash, banks of medals — in which he looks choked and cramped. Nagumo far outclassed Raymond Spruance in rank and in achievement. He had not fought in the Coral Sea; that mess had been botched by lesser men. The victory record of his striking force from Pearl Harbor to the Indian Ocean was unstained. Of samurai descent, a destroyer and cruiser man of high repute, he was the veteran world master of carrier operations.

Steaming out of the melancholy rain and fog that had screened him for a week, Nagumo had launched his strike against Midway at dawn: half of each carrier’s fighters, dive-bombers, and Type-97 torpedo planes; these last, dual-purpose machines having been loaded with fragmentation bombs for a land strike. Then he had ordered the remaining one hundred eight planes in the four flattops spotted on deck in readiness to attack any enemy warships that might show up; these Type-97S armed with their usual torpedoes; and the dive-bombers with armor-piercing bombs. But Nagumo and his staff did not expect to encounter the enemy; this was just a conservative precaution.

Just before the strike launch Nagumo in his own hand had drawn up an
Estimate of the Situation:

1. The enemy fleet will probably sortie to engage once the Midway landing operations are begun.
   
2. The enemy is not yet aware of our plan, and he has not yet detected our task force.
   
3. There is no evidence of an enemy task force in our vicinity.
   
4. It is therefore possible for us to attack Midway, destroy land-based planes there, and support the landing operation. We can then turn around, meet an approaching enemy task force, and destroy it.
   
5. Possible counterattacks by enemy land-based air can surely be repulsed by our interceptors and antiaircraft fire.
   

Radioed victory reports, familiar but exhilarating, began to pour in from the Midway strike aviators. The atoll had sent up a large fighter force, but the Zeroes were mowing them down, and the bombers, without a single
loss, were laying waste to the two little islands of Midway. Hangars, power plant, barracks were aflame, guns were silenced, ammunition and fuel dumps were exploding skyward, and the whole garrison was a smoking shambles.

There was one disappointing note. The Yank aircraft had not been caught on the ground as at Pearl Harbor; they had taken the alarm and scrambled out of sight. The hangars and runways had been found empty. Of course, those planes would soon have to land and refuel, and that would be the time to destroy them. So the strike commander had radioed,
“There is need for a second strike.”

Here was the first snag of the day. The Midway airpower had to be smashed, or the landing would be a delayed and bloody one. But the planes now spotted on deck were armed to hit ships. The Type-ojs would certainly have to change weapons; torpedoes were no good for a strike on land. Nor were the armor-piercing shells in the dive-bombers as suitable as incendiary and fragmentation bombs.

Nagumo and his staff were debating this pesky problem when air raid bugles sounded, black smoke poured from destroyers to signal
Planes sighted,
and roaring enemy aircraft swooped in low over the wave crests, unmistakable blue U.S. attackers with white-starred wings. Unescorted by fighters, the enemy craft fell like shot fowl under AA and Zero attack. A few launched torpedoes before they went down in flames, but these weapons porpoised, broached, or broke in pieces on striking the water. Not one hit or ran true. It was a miserable display of American ineptness, a brilliant clean sweep by Nagumo’s combat air patrol. One plane crashed on the flight deck of the
Akagi
right before Nagumo’s eyes, cartwheeling harmlessly over the side. The vice admiral and his staff saw the twin engines, the white star on the flaming blue fuselage, and inside the canopy the blood-soaked pilot, probably already dead. This plane was too big for carrier launching. It was a B-26 medium bomber, and it could only have come from Midway.

That settled it for Nagumo. He would have to make that second strike. As for any enemy fleet nearby, search planes had been aloft since dawn and had reported nothing. Farfetched precautions had to go by the board. The planes now on deck would hit Midway, and to speed matters, only the Type-97 torpedo planes would be rearmed. The two big flattops of his division, the
Akagi
and the
Kaga,
had that chore to rush through. The Types of the smaller
Hiryu
and
Soryu
in Division Two were all off over Midway. Their decks held only fighters and dive-bombers, ready to go. So the orders went out to Nagumo’s division. The elevators whined up and down. The big Type-97s were struck below to the hangar deck. Crack crews swarmed to switch the weapons.

A decided surprise came at half past seven. The heavy cruiser
Tone
relayed word from its search plane that ten ships, “apparently enemy,” had been sighted about two hundred miles to the east, heading southeast, away from Nagumo and the atoll. The message said nothing about carriers. Surface ships two hundred miles distant could not rescue Midway now. Once the atoll’s air force had been obliterated, these vessels could be picked off; but first things first. The rearming of the Type-Q7s with bombs for land attack went on apace.

Then Nagumo or a staff officer had alarming second thoughts. Enemy course southeast — that course was
into the wind.
Could that float plane pilot have seen carriers and idiotically failed to specify them?

To the carriers:
“Suspend rearming! Leave torpedoes in Type-gy bombers!”

To the float plane:
“Ascertain ship types and maintain contact. ”

So the chances of war froze the whole vast Japanese operation to the vagaries of one young pilot in one obsolescent cruiser scout plane. Half the Type-97s were already respotted on the flight decks with bombs. The rest were still below with their torpedoes. Now the air raid bugles blared once more, destroyers puffed black smoke balls, and dots in the sky grew to Douglas dive-bombers, approaching from the direction of Midway — again, with no fighter escort — at a peculiar shallow angle, contrary to the usual tactics of U.S. “hell-divers.”

These planes were in fact being flown for the first time by raw Marine pilots, last-minute reinforcements for Midway, and their commander was trying to glide-bomb. A second massacre ensued; to the cheers of Japanese deckhands and gun crews, Zeroes picked off the blue planes one after another, and they burst into pretty rosettes of flame and arched smoking into the sea. Not a single bomb landed.

Perhaps this cold-blooded squandering of American pilots’ lives in a second attack without fighter escort surprised Nagumo. It was not what one might expect of a soft decadent democracy. But then, the Zeroes had probably shot down all the fighters Midway had started with. The main point stood out: the skies this day were his. The Americans, though brave, were outmatched.

Now the far-off bumbler in the float plane answered up:
Enemy ships consist of five cruisers and five destroyers.
Well! No carriers; the rearming of Type-97S could proceed. But the air raid bugles sounded again, and this time a formation of gigantic land planes came drumming high, high overhead: B-17s by their silhouettes, the dreaded “Flying Fortresses.” A harsh apparition; tiny Midway was peculiarly set for air combat! Yet what could the monsters actually do against moving ships with their high-level bombing? The test of this long peacetime debate was at hand as the huge bombers approached at twenty thousand feet.

They had no fighter escort. With their terrible gun-blisters they needed none. The Zeroes did not rise to challenge them. Ponderously, the four carriers scattered as heavy black bombs came showering down, plain to see, on the two smaller flattops, the
Soryu
and the
Hiryu.
Dark watery explosions engulfed them, again and again. The high-flying giants grumbled away in the sky, the splashes subsided; and out of the smoke into the sunlight, unscathed, the two carriers steamed!

With this historic defensive success, after slaughtering two low-level bomber waves, Nagumo was riding high. Obviously, however, Midway crawled with bombers. The second strike was imperative. He had been right to switch the Type-97s to bombs, and that process must now be speeded up.

Before he could act, four almost simultaneous jolts threw the old hero off balance again.

There was always much uproar around Nagumo during operations — clang of elevator warning bells, bark of flight deck loudspeakers, roar of engines warming up, chatter of radio receivers, shouts of flag bridge signalmen. Long habit enabled him to shut out this familiar racket, but the cataract of crises and tumult that burst on him now was something new. He had to make decision after decision — on some of which hung the future of his country, and indeed of the world order — in haste, in uncertainty, in a very hurricane of noise, alarm, confusion, upsets, and contradictory advice. A high commander lives for such moments, and he began to breast the storm with veteran calm.

First, still another wave of bombers came diving out of the clouds.

Second, as the bugles were shrilling and the remaining fighter planes on deck were scrambling to reinforce the combat air patrol, a stricken-faced officer brought Nagumo an addendum from the
Tone
pilot:
Enemy appears to be accompanied by a carrier bringing up the rear.

Third, even as Nagumo was digesting this shocker, a different alarm signal flashed through the task force:
“Submariner

Fourth, at precisely this juncture, his own first-strike airplanes began arriving back from Midway, winging in sight, low on fuel, some shot up and in distress, demanding to land on the cluttered carrier decks.

Nagumo found himself driven to the wall. A second strike on Midway? No, not
now;
not with an enemy aircraft carrier full of elite pilots within range! The order of his two missions was rudely reversed. No longer was he attacking the atoll; he himself was threatened with a crossfire of land-based bombers and carrier aircraft. Before anything else, he had to get that carrier.

The air raid proved to be only some old-type scout bombers buzzing a battleship of the screen and then running away from the Zeroes into the light clouds. Destroyers swarming over the supposed submarine found nothing. What to do now? The obvious course was to hit out at that carrier at once: turn into the wind, order the
Soryu
and the
Hiryu
to launch their planes all
spotted and ready to go, and send off the Type-97s crowding his own decks. These now were armed with bombs, of course, not torpedoes — the ones
with
torpedoes were below — but bombs were better than nothing. That
would
clear the decks to recover the first strike, while getting right after the foe.

But it was such a weak gesture for the great Nagumo Force! A fraction of his power, without the punch of torpedoes, without fighter escort, for the fighters were mostly aloft and low on fuel. All morning Nagumo had been watching the slaughter of unescorted bombers. And what about that cardinal rule of war, the concentration of force?

Then again, he could keep calm, and call for cool heads and quick hands; clear
all
decks, including the
Soryu
and the
Hiryu,
by striking aircraft below; recover all planes from Midway, and all fighters of the combat air patrol; refuel and arm all aircraft, while closing the enemy at flank speed; and
then
hit him in the coordinated attack prescribed by doctrine, with his massed air might.

Of course, that would take time; perhaps as much as an hour. Delay in carrier warfare could be risky.

As Vice Admiral Nagumo weighed this momentous choice, surrounded on the flag bridge by the anxious faces of his staff— while all over the task force antiaircraft guns still rattled, and ships heeled and turned in a tangle of crisscrossing white wakes on the remarkably smooth blue sea, and the planes returning from Midway roared low, round and round the
Akagi,
and Zeroes drove off the last of the slow enemy bombers, and the thousand noises of a carrier in action rose all around him — at this fateful moment Nagumo got a message from his subordinate, the division commander of the
Soryu
and the
Hiryu: