War and Remembrance (60 page)

In even sharper contrast to Spruance stands the performance of Nagumo.

Here was a carrier flag officer as experienced as Spruance was green, commanding the best carrier force afloat. Under the same pressures that beset Spruance, with a seasoned staff that swiftly executed his every wish, with vessels and air squadrons that operated with ballet precision, Nagumo fell apart, and threw away a battle that almost could not be lost.

Here was more American luck. The catapult of the cruiser
Tone
was defective, so the search plane assigned to the sector where the Americans happened to be hiding did not get off on time. The pilot sent vague reports. But popular accounts make too much of the famous
“Tone
float plane.” Nothing is commoner in warfare than unreliable scout or sentry reports. As soon as Nagumo learned of the presence of American ships, he should have assumed that they were carriers, and urgently prepared to attack. Instead, he dithered. Under air harassment from Midway that did him no harm, he kept changing his mind about his next move, and switching the armament of his Type-97 planes. Spruance’s dive-bombers resolved his dilemma by destroying him.

Nagumo himself escaped with his life from the
Akagi
by climbing down a rope from his bridge. Unlike Fletcher, he clung to command, though in Rear Admiral Yamaguchi aboard the
Hiryu
he had a fine subordinate in position to fight on. One wonders what Vice Admiral Nagumo’s feelings must have been as he boated in the open sea while three carriers burned in the morning sunshine before his eyes, the funeral pyres of Japan’s first-line carrier pilots and aircraft, a loss beyond replacing. His conduct afterward suggests he was in shock, for he ordered pell-mell retreat and reported to Yamamoto at one point that five American carriers were chasing him. Yamamoto relieved him in the middle of the night. Yamaguchi, who might have won the battle, elected to go down with the
Hiryu.

Aside from the dither, Nagumo committed another unpardonable mistake. Just prior to the fatal five minutes, he allowed the whole combat air patrol to abandon altitude and swarm down on the torpedo planes. Where torpedo planes appeared, dive-bombers could not be far behind. Had half the fighters stayed aloft, the whole story of the battle and possibly of the Second World War might have been different; but at the moment of maximum peril the upper sky was unguarded.

The tragic dispatch of the disaster came to Fleet Admiral Yamamoto, three hundred miles away, after long tense hours of silence, during which he had every reason to suppose that Nagumo was enjoying his customary success. As though sensing trouble ahead, Yamamoto for days had been sick at his stomach. Now, learning the worst, the ailing old man rallied.

Very well, he seems to have decided, Japan had lost the first round. Aggressive American naval doctrine would undoubtedly draw Nagumo’s conqueror westward in pursuit. Here then was a golden chance to counterambush and smash the thin Nimitz forces! He was on sound ground; many famous victories have followed on initial setbacks in the field. Yamamoto still had the enemy heavily outnumbered and outgunned in his Main Body. The four dispersed light carriers could be summoned. The
Hiryu
was intact. Urgent dispatches shot out to the scattered Imperial Fleet to close in around Yamamoto’s battleships.

From then until nightfall of June 4, on the flag bridge of the great battleship
Yamato,
the mood seesawed with the flux of the news. Thé reply of the carriers in the Aleutians caused gloom. They could not join up for three days. The
Hiryu
reported that her pilots had dive-bombed an enemy carrier, and then that her torpedo planes had left a second carrier dead in the water. This caused great joy, but it was a mistake. The
Hiryu
had struck the
York-town
twice —once with dive-bombers, again and fatally with torpedo planes — but good American damage control had totally quenched the fires of the first attack. The glee died when at sunset the
Hiryu
reported that it too was hit and ablaze.

Still Yamamoto grimly bore eastward. His aim now was to force a night action. If only he could himself encounter the thin-skinned American carriers! His great guns could sink them like ferryboats, lay waste to the screening vessels, and turn defeat into victory; and he could then still take Midway. The whole hope now was that Americans in hot pursuit would spit themselves on the eighteen-inch guns of the
Yamato,
the tremendous firepower of the other battleships and cruisers, and the devastating “long-lance” torpedoes of the Japanese destroyer squadrons.

Had Vice Admiral William F. Halsey been in command of the United States ships that probably would have happened. In such situations Halsey’s nature was to fling himself with impetuous bellicosity after his wounded foe.

But Raymond Spruance was in command. Spruance steamed toward the oncoming Yamamoto force just long enough to catch the
Hiryu
and destroy it. He then recovered his aircraft
and reversed course to the eastward away from the enemy.
After midnight he again reversed course, and at dawn
he was back in position to protect Midway with air cover from a possible landing.

This maneuver was the key to the victory at Midway; the finest command decision in the Pacific war, and one of the finest in the history of sea combat. It was wisdom itself, simplicity itself, with world consequences at stake.

It was not so regarded at the time. Spruance was chided even during the battle by his superiors in Pearl Harbor and Washington for failing to pursue the beaten foe that night. His own staff—or rather, Halsey’s staff, which did not like or understand their new nonaviator admiral —was disconcerted by his decision. Afterward, staff officers asserted that radar would have detected oncoming surface forces, and so the task force should never have lost contact with the enemy. This view persists in American military literature, and Raymond Spruance is still sometimes called an overcautious officer.

The criticism is erroneous. Having already won a crucial battle with far inferior forces, this brilliant commander would not stake his victory on a new electronic gadget. Instead, he put his fleet where without question it remained both secure and dangerous. Neither Spruance nor Nimitz knew where Yamamoto’s battleships were. Rear Admiral Spruance escaped Yamamoto’s terrible trap by acting on perfect military instinct. Not till many months later did American intelligence ferret out the facts about Yamamoto’s moves, which confirmed Spruance’s blind second decision as a historic masterstroke.

Shortly after midnight Yamamoto sensed that he had been foiled, that the night action would not take place, and that daylight might find him well within range of Midway’s airplanes. Anguished flag conferences ensued. For Yamamoto and his staff, huddling in the luxurious undamaged flag country of the mightiest battleship afloat, leading a battle line of stupendous firepower through the night, there must have been a sickening sense of frustration. The combined fleet was like a gorilla confronting a cobra; if only once it could lay its paws on its puny foe and tear it to ribbons! But the cobra had struck and vanished.

Yamamoto’s operations officer, the same Captain Kuroshima, now put forward a gallant proposal. Let the Imperial Fleet steam straight on to the atoll, and with dawn’s first light let it pulverize the air installations with gunfire and proceed with the landing! The atoll’s planes had failed against Nagumo, after all, and a swarm of them had splashed. The ones that remained must be poor stuff. As for the American carriers, they had suffered huge plane losses, and two (as he thought) were out of action or sunk. The
concentrated AA of the Main Force, with cruiser float planes and the aircraft of two light carriers, could surely handle the surviving American carrier strength.

But the plan was hooted at as suicidal folly. There was little impulse for daring left in the staff. Yamamoto straightway rejected Kuroshima’s idea, and with all respect to this great warrior’s memory, the present writer wonders why. Spruance was in fact substantially weakened by plane losses. The Midway air strength was a shoddy mishmash of ineffective army and marine units. However, there is an inexorable rhythm to battles. The time for dash had passed on the Japanese side.

Nevertheless Yamamoto was more than ready to fight on in his own way. The atoll could not now be seized, but the small Pacific Fleet had been drawn far out beyond its Pearl Harbor air umbrella, and that was a great chance. If only it could be brought to battle and smashed, history would still call the Midway operation a success.

Yamamoto projected two more traps for the foe. He would retreat westward. No doubt the enemy would pursue with harassing tactics. He hoped now to lure the foe within the seven-hundred-mile airpower circle of Wake Island, and there pounce on him with his great force —battleships, heavy cruisers, and destroyer divisions. This giant force had not yet fired a gun or seen an enemy aircraft. That it was in retreat from two battle-worn American carriers and their escorts was grotesque.

Simultaneously, he ordered the carriers in the Aleutians to attack again. The capture of Attu and Kiska was to proceed. The American fleet might then be ordered north, where it would run into four heavy cruisers, a light carrier, and the formidable carrier
Zuikaku,
at last repaired, replenished with fresh pilots and aircraft, and making for the Aleutians at top speed.

The two arms of the gorilla, as it were, would grasp at the cobra from the west and the north.

Spruance did pursue. Naval men say that “a stern chase is a long chase.” The last phase dragged on for two days as Yamamoto fell back and the American fleet hunted him. Spruance’s surviving dive-bombers did very poorly against targets smaller than aircraft carriers. The only other sinking during the long chase, in fact, was an already damaged heavy cruiser, which had collided with a sister ship in a submarine scare. Kuroshima may have been profoundly right in guessing that Spruance was no threat to the heavy Main Force. But the staff on the
Enterprise
kept urging Spruance ever westward. The requirement to pursue and annihilate was for them holy writ.

Spruance’s third major decision was to disregard this urging, and strong messages from Nimitz as well; to break off the pursuit, and end the battle. He would not enter the airpower circle of Wake Island. This seems a sort of clairvoyance. He is reported to have put it very simply to his staff:
“We have done just about all the damage we are going to do. Let’s get out of here.” His vessels were low on fuel; his aviators were exhausted; an enemy of unknown but heavy strength eluded him beyond the horizon; the known menace of land-based air cancelled out the doctrine of pursuit. So Rear Admiral Raymond Spruance decided, and so he sealed the Midway victory.

At the last moment his work was almost undone, for Chester von Nimitz took the Aleutian bait, and ordered Spruance north! Fortunately, Nimitz later thought better of this, and cancelled the order. On June 11th, Task Force Sixteen returned to Pearl Harbor to learn that Army Air Corps bombers had won the Battle of Midway by sinking four carriers, several battleships, etc., etc. The story was in every newspaper. It was in the weekly magazines. All Hawaii believed it. For a time, all America believed it. Raymond Spruance never issued a contradictory public account. In footnotes to postwar reports and memoirs, the Army Air Corps acknowledged that it did no damage at Midway.

Once, much later in life, when complimented on his victory, Raymond Spruance responded, “There were a hundred Spruances in the Navy. They just happened to pick me for the job.” In fact, there was only one Spruance and luck gave him, at a fateful hour, to America.

Strategically, the great Nimitz-Spruance victory accomplished three things:

1. American submarines could continue to depart with full fuel bunkers from Midway instead of Pearl Harbor, a round-trip difference of 2300 miles. This multiplied their killing power in the war. William F. Halsey later wrote that the submarine campaign was the first cause of Japan’s defeat.
   
2. Japan’s first-line carrier squadrons were drowned or shot down off Midway. The loss of this cadre of leaders and trainers could never be made up.
   
3. Japan passed overnight, in morale, from élan to desperation. Morally, from 10:30
   A.M.
   June 4, 1942, onward, Japan was on the run, though this brave race gave a good account of itself to the last.
   

The trounced Imperial Fleet skulked back into Hiroshima Bay. Yamamoto still did not know that he had been beaten not by Nimitz, nor even by the famous Halsey, but by an anonymous replacement, plucked from the ranks of American rear admirals.