War and Remembrance (61 page)

The Americans sent but four rear admirals into the fight: Fletcher,
Spruance, and the two screen commanders. By contrast, the Imperial Fleet sailed under the great Fleet Admiral Yamamoto himself, flanked by five vice admirals and thirteen rear admirals. In essence, Yamamoto took his headquarters to sea. Nimitz elected to keep his ashore, where it could use the radio, get information, and maintain broad perspective. Nimitz’s course was the sounder.

Yamamoto, who had brought off the monumental air victory of Pearl Harbor, rode through Midway on a silenced giant, the world’s biggest gunship. In retrospect, he seems not to have grasped the lesson of sea-air power which he himself taught the world. In his battle plan, the carriers were to clear away the land-based air menace; then he was to steam forward in massive grandeur with the Main Body, meet the Nimitz fleet head-on, and win the Pacific Battle of the Skagerrak. This delusory vision kept him out of action at Midway.

Radio Tokyo claimed a vast triumph, but the name of Midway was thereafter blotted from Japanese war reporting. The survivors were put into quarantine. So many records were suppressed or lost that the Japanese side of the battle will never be adequately documented. Yet Yamamoto did not fall. He was Japan’s greatest military figure. He had been a naval attaché in the United States. He had represented Japan at the naval conferences of the 1920s, and had won equality for her with the white man’s sea powers. He had been against the war with America, but given his sailing orders, he had done his best.

Yamamoto continued to lead his navy until April 1943, when Admiral von Nimitz, learning that Yamamoto was making an air tour of the South Pacific, ordered his plane ambushed and destroyed. So this great man perished. The final stain was on Nimitz. Between Achilles and Hector, there might have been more honor than this sneak murder.

At Midway, the colored man’s dramatic military surge in the industrial age was thrown back; perhaps not for all time, since most of mankind is colored; but certainly for fifty or a hundred years. Midway was a solid recovery of the upper hand by the Caucasian after his collapse at Singapore.

Yet before the figure of Isoroku Yamamoto, the military analyst must pause. If Nagumo turned in the typical performance of the colored man under pressure—erratic, dilatory, dithering—Yamamoto rose to disaster with firmness, nobility, and ingenuity worthy of a Moltke or a Manstein. Europe and America should remember that Asia can produce such men.

The five-minute overturn that struck the Japanese nation at Midway compels a final reflection.

Industrial-scientific developments since that time have made possible
Midway-style lightning holocausts of entire countries. The new Midway which now threatens is, as is well known, atomic surprise and counter-surprise with colossal rockets, between U.S. capitalism and Russian Bolshevism. These twin brutish materialisms of our age are spiritual hells, incapable of controlling the forces they wield. Today both carry the logic of the aircraft carrier much further. Their entire land masses and their whole populations are now flattop and crew; and both nations are vulnerable and destructive to an unheard-of degree.

The tale must proceed to its dark end. Perhaps our own prostrate, sundered, and mutilated Fatherland will out of its great agony in World War II produce a new philosopher — a Kant, a Hegel, a Nietzsche —to point a way out of mankind’s dread cul-de-sac. The German genius has always been for such Faustian reaching beyond the given.

Otherwise the prospect is grave. The Americans and the Russians are blood-brothers in uncultured hardness, though the Americans sometimes seem comfort-mad and the Russians woolly-headed. It means little or nothing to them that in their duel of dimwitted giants most life on earth is menaced, and all human advancement since Roman times seems condemned. As things stand now, one or another of their small allies will one unexpected day prove the Serbia or Poland of the Third World War. It will be no war in the old sense, however. It will be a lightning Midway of the continents.

TRANSLATORS NOTE:
Roon’s racial viewpoint is beneath comment. The shooting down of Fleet Admiral Yamamoto was ordered by the Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, a former newspaper publisher. Chester Nimitz was apprised of the plan, and endorsed it on the grounds that Yamamoto was irreplaceable, and in military value to Japan, equal perhaps to four carriers. The Japanese joined Hitler’s criminal attack on civilization and had to bear the consequences, Yamamoto among them.
— V.H.

* * *

C
APTAIN
Henry sat slouched over the detective novel in the sea cabin, his head on his hand, a cigarette burning down in his fingers.

“The aviators are breaking radio silence, Cap’n.” Hines, the quartermaster, saluting in the doorway.

“Very well.” He leaped up and hurried to the wheelhouse, where his attempt to settle at ease in his high chair deceived nobody. The ship’s clowns had long been mimicking his stooped posture and quick cigarette gestures when he was tense. Knowing glances went among the men on watch as he crouched and smoked, staring out to sea. Through the bridge loudspeakers came scratchy talk from the weak faraway aircraft transmitters: “…
Earl, you take that one on the left
…
Commencing our attack
…
Hey! Zeroes at eleven o’clock
…
Victor Sail Six, this is Tim Satterlee, I’m hit and ditching, wish me luck
…
Wow, look at that big bastard burn!
…”;

“Sounds like they’re doing pretty good, sir,” ventured the exec, who was pacing and mopping sweat from his face.

Pug only nodded, straining his ears in vain for the timbre of his son’s voice; the keyed-up youngsters out there all sounded alike. These garbled fragments peppered with hot obscenities brought laughter and noisy chatter on the bridge, which Pug for once overlooked in his own excitement.

When the transmissions petered out, Captain Henry glanced about him and the bridge talk died. Long silence, with crackling of static. Returning pilots began to give calm position reports, sometimes with a wry joke, as their fuel ran out and they prepared to ditch; from Warren, not a word. After a while radar reported “friendlies” approaching. The fleet swung ponderously into the wind. Pug’s lookouts reported specks low in the western sky, which grew into airplanes roaring in over the screen to the carriers. The
Yorktown,
hull down far to the west, was landing its planes, too. As the aircraft came straggling into Pug’s binoculars, he resolved
not
to worry if no SBD made a wing-waggling pass over him. Warren would have a fuel problem like the rest, and might be ditching. Still, as the
Enterprise
dive-bombers landed, he counted them. Thirty-two had departed. Ten… eleven… twelve… A long interval went by; long for him, anyway. Plane after plane kept landing on the
Hornet;
a few on the
Enterprise,
but no more dive-bombers…

“Dauntless off the starboard bow, Captain!” A shout of the quartermaster from the other wing. Pug darted through the bridge house. Rocking its white-starred wings, the plane thrummed over the forecastle and veered off toward the
Enterprise,
the goggled pilot waving a long arm. Victor Henry kept his face seaward, watching the aircraft come in to land. He would not put a hand up to his wet eyes. Nobody on the bridge came near him. So several minutes passed.

From the bridge house, the exec called,
“Yorktown
reports many bogies on radar, Captain. Bearing two seventy-five, distance forty. Closing speed two hundred knots.”

Pug managed to articulate, “Very well. Go to General Quarters.”

On the
Enterprise,
the landing officer sliced a paddle past his throat in a grinning cut. Warren’s wheels thumped on the deck. Joy swept him as the drag of the arresting gear strained him against his belt.
Home!
He gunned forward over the flattened barriers, killed the engine, and jumped out with his chart board, slapping Cornett on the back as the radioman leaped to the deck. Quickly the handlers shoved the plane toward the elevator.

“Well, we made it,” Warren tried to yell over the engine noise of another bomber slanting in to land. The sudden wailing of the general alarm drowned him out. Sailors streamed over the flight deck to battle stations, avoiding the Dauntless that slammed down (6-S-9,
Pete Goff, God bless him!).
Bells clanged, and the loudspeaker bellowed,
“Stand by to launch fighters. ”

Cornett trotted off. Warren dropped into the nearest AA tub. The helmeted gun crew turned surprised eyes at this aviator fallen among them, and the telephone talker gestured toward the flat gray hump on the horizon to the west. “Fire control reports a mess of bogies going for the
Yorktown,
Lieutenant.”

“Sure, they’ve come on her first. Better look sharp, all the same.”

“Bet your ass,” said the sailor whose steel helmet was stencilled
Gun Captain.
“Sir,” he added, showing white teeth, and they all laughed.

In his exaltation Warren thought that these were wonderful-looking American kids, that the weather was amazingly fine, that there was nothing to beat combat in the world, and that this victorious return in a damaged plane, with the fuel needle jammed at zero, was like starting life over with a million dollars. The launching of fighters commenced. Fingers to their ears, Warren and the gun crew peered toward the
Yorktown,
while planes howled off the deck one by one. They were still taking off when a smoke column grew out of the distant gray shape. “Shit, they got her,” said the gun captain sadly.

“Maybe their screen’s just making smoke,” said another sailor.

“That ain’t no smoke screen, you idiot,” said the gun captain. “That’s a
goddamn bomb hit, and —
Jesus Christ!”
He frenziedly trained the weapon at a cluster of specks in the sunny sky. “Here comes a gang of the bastards. Straight
at
us.”

“All gun crews, attention” The loudspeaker took on an urgent tone.
“Planes approaching on the port quarter are not, repeat not, BOGIES, they are FRIENDLIES. Hold your fire. They are returning
Yorktown
aircraft, low on fuel and requesting emergency landing. The
Yorktown has been hit. Repeat HOLD YOUR FIRE. Stand by to take planes on board.”

Plane handlers scampered out on deck with red, yellow, and green jerseys showing under their life jackets. Warren jumped from the gun tub, sprinted across the windy deck, and went below. A glance into the torpedo squadron room sobered him. The teletype was clicking away, and on the unwatched screen words crawled,

YORKTOWN REPORTS THREE BOMB HITS HEAVY DAMAGE BELOW DECKS

Acey-deucey sets, packs of cards, girlie and sports magazines lay about the vacant leather reclining chairs. Ashtrays heaped with cigar and cigarette butts gave off a heavy stale smell. Good God, Lindsay’s squadron must have had a bad time! Still, maybe they were elsewhere, in the wardroom or in sick bay, the ones who had got back….

His own squadron room, though far from full, was lively and noisy. Of the ten fliers here, two were reserves who had not gone out. Eight of the eighteen returned so far, then. Only eight! They were talking, laughing, holding coffee or a sandwich in one hand and gesturing airplane maneuvers with the other. Overhead the
Yorktown’s
planes were thumping down with snarling engines, while the teletype clicked out a new damage report. She was on fire, dead in the water; damage control parties were beginning to master the blaze, but the
Enterprise
would have to land her search planes, too.

Warren gave the debriefing officer his combat account, chalking out his dive maneuver on the blackboard, while the jubilant pilot talk went on and on — who had gotten a hit, who had missed, who had been attacked by Zeroes, who had been seen on fire or going in the water, who might have ditched on the return leg. About Warren’s hit there was no argument: solid, spectacular, confirmed. The rest of the attack was shrouded in dissent, even to the number of carriers observed — five, two, three, four, no consensus whatever; not about that, not about the hits, not even about the near-misses, and some disagreements verged on the acrimonious.

A telephone call from his squadron commander summoned Warren to Air Operations, and he hurried to the dark low crowded plotting room, clamorous with loudspeaker blare. Amid ozone-reeking, green-flashing radar
scopes, and big Plexiglas compass roses still marked with orange grease-pencil tracks of the Jap attack, Gallaher was huddling with’a refugee lieutenant from the
Yorktown.
McClusky had returned wounded, Gallaher said, so he would lead the group to attack the fourth carrier. Search planes were out to pinpoint its position now. His exec was missing, and Warren was next in line. Warren would have to scratch together a bomber squadron at once, with the surviving pilots of Bombing Six, Scouting Six, and the
Yorktown
aviators. Instant promotion to squadron command seemed quite normal to Warren on this radiant day. Gallaher went off at a call from Miles Browning. Warren sketched an attack plan with the
Yorktown
squadron leader, a hard-faced Southerner itching to strike back at the Jap flattop that had disabled his ship.