The Battle of Midway (15 page)

The raid on Rabaul was Wilson Brown’s opportunity to duplicate Halsey’s success in the Marshalls. It didn’t work out that way. While still several hundred miles from the target on February 20, his task force was spotted by three Japanese long-range scout planes. The
Lexington
had several Wildcat fighters of VF-3 (formerly of the
Saratoga
) aloft that day, including one piloted by the squadron’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander John S. “Jimmy” Thach, one of the most skilled and innovative pilots in the fleet. Thach shot down the first snooper himself, and another pilot claimed a second. Despite that, Brown had to assume that the patrol planes had radioed his location, course, and speed to Rabaul. Having lost the element of surprise, and claiming an “acute fuel shortage,” he decided to call off the strike, though he continued to steam in the direction of Rabaul during the daylight hours, turning around only after nightfall.
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The Japanese patrol planes had indeed reported the presence of the
Lexington
group to Rabaul, and at 2:00 that afternoon, Vice Admiral Got
ō
Eiji sent seventeen two-engine bombers to the attack. They were big Mitsubishi G4M1 bombers (“Bettys”) that were both newer and faster than the seven Nells that had assailed Halsey in the Marshalls. The ability to employ land-based airplanes from a web of Pacific bases was a central feature of Japanese prewar defensive plans. These long-range planes could strike at American warships well before the carriers got close enough to launch their own aircraft. What the Japanese didn’t anticipate was that the Americans would be able to see them coming.
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Vice Admiral Wilson Brown commanded the
Lexington
task force during two planned raids on the Japanese base at Rabaul. Here he wears the gold aiguillette that he sported as President Roosevelt’s’ naval aide in 1943–44. (U.S. Naval Institute)

If the Japanese had an edge on the Americans in torpedo technology, the Americans had a huge advantage in that they had radar and the Japanese did not. Radar had made its debut in the fleet in 1937 when a prototype—looking much like a bedspring tied to the mast—had been installed on the destroyer
Leary
, A much newer and more efficient version, CXAM radar, made by RCA, was installed on the American carriers in the fall of 1940. Depending on the skill of the operator, CXAM radar could identify approaching aircraft from fifty to a hundred miles out, and surface ships fourteen to twenty miles away. The new system was idiosyncratic, however; images appeared and faded, and it was difficult, if not impossible, to determine altitude or even the number of contacts. Nonetheless, it was a huge improvement over the naked eye. Just before 4:00 p.m., the
Lexington
’s radar picked up an air contact seventy-six miles out. As it happened, the
Lexington
was about to rotate its CAP and had just launched six replacement Wildcats. The planes coming off patrol were already circling for a landing when they were ordered to stay aloft. Instead, the
Lexington
launched four more Wildcats plus eleven Dauntless bombers (without bombs), which gave them twenty-seven aircraft to contest an assault by what turned out to be seventeen Japanese bombers approaching in two waves.
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The first wave of nine bombers was simply overwhelmed by the Americans, which provoked cheers from the crewmen of the
Lexington
, who could see the planes falling from the sky. The Bettys were well armed, but they had no fighter support and, like most Japanese combat aircraft, were poorly armored. Jimmy Thach got one, and his squadron mates took care of the rest. Like Lieutenant Nakai, who had tried to crash his plane into Halsey’s
Enterprise
, Lieutenant Nakagawa Masayoshi tried to crash his crippled bomber into the
Lexington
. When it was 2,500 yards away and closing, the guns on the
Lexington
opened up. Most of the shells exploded behind the plane,
and an officer on Brown’s staff who had a reputation as a crack duck hunter, yelled out “Lead him! … damn you, lead him!” As the
Lexington
turned away, Nakagawa’s plane, riddled with bullets and with most of its crewmen likely dead, crashed into the sea.
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The annihilation of that first wave of bombers was gratifying, though when a second wave of eight Bettys arrived, only five recently launched Wildcats had enough fuel left to make an attack. One of them was piloted by Lieutenant Edward “Butch” O’Hare and another by his wingman, Lieutenant Junior Grade Marion Dufilho. The other three were widely separated. Dufilho’s guns jammed almost at once so that O’Hare faced the challenge of fending off eight medium bombers virtually alone. The Bettys may have lacked armor, but they bristled with armament. Each plane had a machine gun in the nose, another in a blister on the top of the fuselage, two more in blisters on the sides, plus a 20 mm cannon in the tail. It took remarkable courage for one pilot to assail a formation of such planes; O’Hare had to know that as many as two dozen gunners would be aiming at him. However, unlike the Japanese, who were flying in formation, O’Hare had freedom to maneuver, and he began to pick off the Japanese bombers one by one. With only thirty to forty seconds’ worth of ammunition, he attacked the starboard plane first and then worked his way through the formation. “When one would start burning, I’d haul out and wait for it to get out of the way,” he said later. “Then I’d go in and get another one.” He shot down three bombers and badly crippled two more, continuing his attack until he had expended all his ammunition. He was credited with five kills and became the first official U.S. Navy ace of the Pacific war.
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The three surviving Japanese planes dropped their bombs over the task force, scoring no hits, and then turned to head back to base—all but one. O’Hare had shot the engine off the left wing of Lieutenant Commander It
ō
Takuz
ō
’s command airplane, and the big bomber spiraled out of the formation, losing altitude quickly. Like Nakagawa, It
ō
ordered his pilot, Warrant Officer Watanabe Ch
ū
z
ō
, to crash into the American carrier. With only one engine, however, Watanabe could not hold his course. The
Lexington
turned hard to starboard, and the big Japanese bomber flew alongside for a few heart-stopping seconds before it splashed into the sea 1,500 yards off the port bow.
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Butch O’Hare’s adventures for the day were not quite over. As he came in to land on the
Lexington
, low on fuel and out of ammunition, an overzealous young gunner on the carrier’s port quarter opened fire on him. O’Hare saw where the fire was coming from, but coolly continued to execute his landing. After he climbed out of the cockpit, he walked slowly back to the gun tub on the port quarter and, looking down at the machine gunner there, said to him: “Son, if you don’t stop shooting at me when I’ve got my wheels down, I’m going to have to report you to the gunnery officer.”
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The F4F-3 Wildcat was the U.S. Navy’s principal carrier-based fighter in the spring of 1942. In this staged photograph, two of them are being flown by two of the Navy’s best fighter pilots: John S. “Jimmy” Thach flies F-1 in the foreground, and Edward “Butch” O’Hare flies F-13. (U.S. Naval Institute)

When it was over, fifteen of the seventeen Japanese planes had been destroyed. The
Lexington
pilots celebrated their victory with such enthusiasm that Brown had to remind them that this was not a football game. Nonetheless, the successful defense of the task force on February 20 dramatically boosted the morale of the pilots, especially the Wildcat pilots of Jimmy Thach’s VF-3. The Japanese bombers had proved remarkably vulnerable, and the Americans took to calling the Bettys “flying Zippos,” after the famous cigarette lighter whose advertising slogan was that it lit up the first time, every time. The Americans lost only two Wildcats and one pilot, Ensign J. Woodrow Wilson, killed when a 20 mm shell hit his cockpit.

The air battle on February 20 had deprived Rabaul of all but three of its attack bombers (the two that managed to return and one that had been unable to make the sortie), yet it was less than a complete American victory, given that the original target had been the Japanese shipping at Rabaul. Some members of Nimitz’s staff questioned Brown’s decision to retire. After all, the virtual destruction of Rabaul’s air arm suggested that he could have operated there with at least as much impunity as Halsey had off the Marshalls. Brown’s explanation of an “acute fuel shortage” struck some as curious, since careful planning had gone into meeting the fuel needs of the task force. Nimitz gave his task-force commander the benefit of the doubt, but he was concerned when Brown reported, “Unless it is intended we return [to] Pearl, it will be necessary [to] proceed to Sydney.” Neither Nimitz nor King wanted any of the American carrier groups to begin operating out of Australia for fear that once they were there, the Australian authorities would never let them go. Though he said nothing at the time, all this may have left Nimitz with nagging uncertainties about the suitability of “Shaky” Brown for aggressive carrier operations.
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Halsey’s raid on Wake Island took place four days later. By now the
Enterprise
task force had a new numerical designation. When Halsey received his orders for the mission, he noticed that his command had been redesignated
Task Force 13, and—even worse—that it was to sail on February 13, which happened to be a Friday. Halsey insisted that both numbers be changed. He may have meant it as a joke. Nonetheless he waited until Valentine’s Day before departing for Wake, doing so in command of what was now labeled Task Force 16, the designation it would carry into the Battle of Midway.
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On February 24, bombers from the
Enterprise
attacked Wake from the north while the heavy cruisers of Halsey’s escort group—
Northampton
and
Salt Lake City
under Rear Admiral Raymond Spruance—shelled it from the south. The results were indecisive; the Americans inflicted some minor damage on the Japanese base while losing three planes. Afterward, Task Force 16 continued west all the way to Marcus Island, only a thousand miles from Tokyo, to conduct another raid. That attack, deep inside the Japanese defense perimeter, took the defenders completely by surprise. The American planes had a strong tailwind and arrived over the target before sunup. In the pitch darkness, the tracers of the Japanese ground fire looked to one pilot like “a string of oranges following me out in a gentle curve.” Though the raid inflicted only minor damage, it caused considerable concern in Tokyo, and even led authorities there to order a blackout of the capital. Compared with the triumphs of the Kid
ō
Butai throughout South Asia and on the north coast of Australia, these American counterattacks were little more than nuisance raids, but they did gain the attention of the Imperial General Staff, and, equally important, they provided America’s young brown-shoe aviators with both confidence and invaluable experience.
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