A World at Arms (68 page)

The attack on Dutch Harbor by planes from the carriers sent to the Alaska operation on June 3 showed the Americans that their intelligence was correct. In the ensuing fighting, the Japanese inflicted some damage and suffered minor losses in planes. By the time their carriers were recalled, naturally too late to help the main force embattled at Midway, the Japanese had prepared the way for unopposed landings on the uninhabited islands of Attu and Kiska. They left without contact with the American warships in the area which Admiral Theobald, against explicit orders, had sent to the wrong position. The capture of the two islands could be and was trumpeted as a great accomplishment by Tokyo, but it could neither justify the diversion of Japanese strength from, nor off-set defeat in, the main engagement.
⁶⁸

The Japanese carriers headed for Midway followed by a landing force, both with screening warships and, at a distance, by a large naval force including the new super-battleship
Yamato
with Yamamoto himself aboard. He had decided not to assume command of the carrier strike force, which was headed by Admiral Nagumo Chuichi, nor to stay ashore; as a result he could hardly communicate with his various forces during the battle. The first task of the carriers was to launch an attack on Midway and if necessary a second one to prepare the way for the landing to seize the island, and enable the Japanese to use the airfield there themselves in the naval engagement that was expected to follow.
How Nagumo was to cope with the Midway base and the American navy if involved with both simultaneously had never been clarified, since honest answers to those officers who raised the question would have required abandonment or major modification of the whole plan.

It was, however, precisely this contingency which arose. Once the Americans had figured out the correct sequence of the intended Japanese moves in the South and Central Pacific on the basis of careful and successful signals intelligence, they collected their remaining usable three carriers in the Pacific and provided them with what screening force was available. With the two modern battleships
North Carolina
and
Washington
in the Atlantic, nothing larger than cruisers could be employed. Unknown to the Japanese, the three carriers were sent out to meet them.

On the morning of June 4 the Japanese carriers sent their first strike against Midway, but the Midway commander was determined not to be caught with his planes on the ground. The bombs dropped by Midway planes on the Japanese all missed; but the damage caused by the raid on the island, though considerable, was not considered sufficient by the Japanese to prepare the way for the landing assault. A second air attack on the island was ordered, but from here on things began to go wrong for Nagumo. He had to change the arming on the planes kept on his carriers for the second strike; he had to recover the planes returning from the first strike; and he received reconnaissance reports that there were American warships soon identified as carriers in the area and therefore once again altered the arming of his planes for this contingency. The upshot of the resulting sequence of orders was that his carriers were extremely vulnerable to attacks from the American carriers because fuel hoses, armed planes, and ammunition were all over the hangar and flight decks in incredible confusion.

The initial American waves of attacking torpedo and bombing planes were all warded off by Japanese fighters and anti-aircraft fire with great losses to the Americans and at little cost to the Japanese; but while many of the American planes failed to find the Japanese ships, those that did had attacked bravely, if without direct results, at
low
levels. This meant that when minutes later American naval dive bombers appeared above, the Japanese, who lacked radar and whose visual spotters were concentrating on the low – level action, were caught off guard and with their fighter planes unable to gain the altitude necessary to intercept. Within a few minutes, three of the four carriers were hit by bombs which tore open their decks, ignited fires, and set off great explosions among the tanked up and armed planes on and below the flight decks. Ammunition and fuel fires and explosions quickly followed; and all three carriers,
Akagi, Kaga
and
Soryu,
were soon out of commission, two sinking that night and the third being scuttled the following day.

The planes from the
Hiryu,
the fourth Japanese carrier, attacked and damaged the
Yorktown;
but the second strike from the
Hiryu,
which was supposed to attack one of the other American carriers, struck the
Yorktown
again, not recognizing that this was the same ship. The other two American carriers remained undamaged and, using the remainder of their own planes and some of those from the
Yorktown,
hit the
Hiryu
in circumstances very similar to those which had caused such devastation on the other three carriers. In little time, the
Hiryu
too was lost. During the next two days, a Japanese submarine was able to sink the badly damaged
Yorktown,
and an American submarine attack led to a collision between two Japanese heavy cruisers of the covering force with one subsequently sunk and the other badly damaged by air attacks; but the main action was over in one long day of battle. Reluctantly Yamamoto had to call off the Midway operation – he could not pull together in time the carrier forces his own plan had scattered over the Pacific. The Americans, on the other hand, had every reason to be careful and avoid being drawn into battle with the great fleet of battleships and cruisers (as well as the other carriers) the Japanese had sent out.
⁶⁹

What was the importance and what were the implications of this battle? The most obvious implications were the losses of both sides. The American loss of the
Yorktown
was soon offset by the return of the repaired carrier
Saratoga
to the fleet at about the time the Japanese had refitted the
Zuikaku
with a new group of airplanes; but the fundamental fact was that there was no way for the Japanese to replace within a reasonable time the four carriers they had lost. The idiotic nature of Japan’s insistence that the naval limitation treaty of 1922 restricted her unduly was never more dramatically illustrated: during the whole Pacific War, Japan commissioned 14 carriers of all types, the United States 104.
⁷⁰
Equally important, the Japanese had great difficulty replacing the more than 300 airplanes lost – the whole complement of four carriers – and the hundreds of experienced air crews and thousands of naval crewmen who did not return.
^j

Every effort was made to keep the Japanese public from learning of the defeat, but the Emperor was told the truth.
⁷¹
An attempt was also made to mislead the Germans into thinking Japanese losses were smaller and American losses greater than the Japanese themselves knew; but the Germans eventually found out what had really happened, in part because the Japanese asked them whether they could purchase and transfer to
the Pacific the uncompleted German aircraft carrier
Graf Zeppelin!
⁷²
The project to assault New Caledonia was dropped immediately,
⁷³
and Yamamoto became generally more cautious hereafter.
⁷⁴

Fortunately for the Americans, this caution did not extend to the codes used by the Japanese. Neither a careful analysis of the Midway battle itself, which could have raised suspicions about code security, nor a significant hint from the Germans,
⁷⁵
nor a
Chicago Tribune
story about the use at Midway of the breaking of Japanese codes by the American navy,
⁷⁶
registered in Tokyo. Routine changes made in naval codes did hold up American cryptographers for a while and thus contributed to the Japanese naval victory at Savo Island on August 8, but the basic procedures remained in use – and vulnerable – until the end of the war.

A lesson the Americans might have learned, but did not, was the ineffectiveness of their land-based bombers. Unwilling or unable to recognize that a smaller number of dive bombers had sunk four carriers, they did not recognize for years that the Army and marine bombers had merely hit the ocean.
⁷⁷

More important than any of these matters was the broader impact of Midway on the war. Here was, as one scholar has put it, “the first irreversible Allied victory of the Second World War.”
⁷⁸
As the construction figures indicate, there was no way the Japanese could defeat the United States, but the course of the war as a whole could still have proceeded very differently. The Japanese losses and the American victory prevented a major new Japanese offensive either in the south or in the Indian Ocean and opened the way for the Americans to stage a counter – attack in the Solomon Islands,
⁷⁹
which, as will be seen, pre-occupied the Japanese for the rest of 1942 and prevented them from any return to an offensive in the Indian Ocean, an operation they had hoped for and promised to the Germans. Finally, closely related to the foregoing and perhaps most important, a Japanese victory and an American defeat would certainly have forced a major reexamination of the Europe First strategy. The American victory on the other hand – ironically for Admiral King-made it possible for the United States to maintain in principle and eventually in practice a strategy that placed first emphasis on victory over Germany.
⁸⁰

The only possible resumption of the offensive to which the Japanese, as already mentioned, now turned was an overland assault to seize Port Moresby.
⁸¹
Because the new Allied command in the South Pacific was building up slowly, the Japanese were able to get first to the northern end of the land route, the Kokoda trail.
⁸²
Landing an army contingent at Buna on July 21, they proceeded to push back the Australians across the rugged Owen Stanley Mountains and eventually covered 120 of the
150 miles toward the key base.
⁸³
This was possible in part because the Australian units facing them were too small, MacArthur’s intelligence having completely failed to recognize the threat, and in part because the air force command structure simply did not function well. Certainly in the face of a determined and energetic Japanese push, new measures were needed. The debates in Washington and Melbourne, where MacArthur’s headquarters were located, and between them, had delayed a planned United States-Australian landing at Buna, so that the Japanese had arrived there first. Now all appeared to be going badly. A new air commander was sent out, and that commander, General George C. Kenney, soon brought about dramatic improvements. The air strikes he commanded helped the Australians finally halt the Japanese on September 17. By then the Japanese were themselves so weakened from losses and the horrendous terrain that they were told to halt by their headquarters, which was at this time so engrossed in the campaign for Guadalcanal that reinforcement for New Guinea had to be postponed until after Japanese victory in the Solomons-which never came.
⁸⁴
From places within sight of Port Moresby the Japanese began a withdrawal back across the Kokoda trail; few ever saw home.

If the Japanese had beaten the Allies to Buna, the reverse was true at the southeastern end of New Guinea. There Australian troops with some American engineers and anti-aircraft units had been landed on June 25 at Milne Bay to begin establishing what became one of the great shipping and air bases in the South Pacific. When Japanese marines came ashore on August 25, they were met by the entrenched Allied force. In two weeks of bitter fighting the Japanese were crushed, losing over 2000 men and evacuating only a remnant by September 7.
⁸⁵
For the first time in the war, a major Japanese amphibious force had been defeated ashore. The tide was turning against Japan on New Guinea even before her weary land forces had begun to trudge back over the Kokoda trail.

The follow-up to the victory at Milne Bay did not go smoothly. Unfamiliarity with the terrain problems, another intelligence failure which put Japanese strength in the Buna-Gona area at under two thousand when it was actually more than four times that large, and the inexperience of all the American and some of the Australian staffs, produced a long and bitter campaign. Heavy Allied casualties due both to Japanese weapons and disease, the sacking of both United States and Australian generals and a proclamation of victory from MacArthur’s headquarters long before the campaign was over, characterized a battle that did not end in victory for the Allies until January 22, 1943. At the margins of the newly acquired Japanese empire, the forces engaged and the casualties were small by the standards of the great front in Eastern Europe,
but the fighting was no less hard and the percentage of casualties as high. Of the 15,000 or so Japanese committed to this battle, almost none survived, while over 10,000 battle casualties and disabled by disease constituted about half the Allied soldiers involved. But the Allies were learning how to fight the Japanese and the terrain of New Guinea; they were paying a heavy price; but they were learning and winning. The same could be said of the better known and equally difficult battle that began before and ended after that in Papua: Guadalcanal.

THE FIRST COUNTER-OFFENSIVE: GUADALCANAL

As the Japanese advance moved apparently irresistibly forward in the first half of 1942, the Allies had tried to halt it or at least contain it by the creation of a general command for all Allied forces in the area. This structure, the American-British-Dutch-Australian (ABDA) Command under Wavell, had collapsed under the hammer blows of Japanese victories. The British had fallen back on India, and the Americans found themselves committed to the defense of Australia. For this task, they had established a new command under MacArthur, and that headquarters, soon officially denominated the Southwest Pacific, had mounted first the actual defense of Australia and then the Papuan campaign just described. But that left open the whole range of the Pacific Ocean, and here army – navy rivalry precluded a simple resolution. The navy, and especially Admirals King and Nimitz, was not about to let an army commander, least of all General MacArthur, control the deployment and employment of its main fleet in an area that was so obviously an oceanic one as the Central Pacific. On the other hand, there was no way that as assertive a general as MacArthur was going to serve under any admiral. Only divided theaters with cooperation enjoined upon them would do; and in war as in much of real life, logic turned out not to be the best guide. In spite of all the complaints, the double command system would work with the Joint Chiefs of Staff from Washington coordinating the two prongs of the defense and later offense. By putting up with lots of belly-aching and posturing from MacArthur and occasional complaints from Nimitz, the American command got the best out of both, while the Japanese were never able to concentrate their resources on coping with the one as they were time and again whipsawed between the two. The first instance of this was to be the fighting in the Solomons in the very months that the Japanese were still trying to make their way to Port Moresby.