The Battle of Midway (20 page)

Both Nagano and Rear Admiral Fukudome Shigeru, head of the plans division, remained mute. It was Commander Miyo Tatsukichi, the only naval aviator in the room, who challenged Watanabe. A short, wiry man with gold fillings, he had attended both Eta Jima and the Naval Staff College with Watanabe, and the two men knew each other well. Nevertheless, their exchange grew increasingly tense. Possession of Midway, Miyo argued, would be more of a burden than an asset. Even if the invasion went flawlessly, the atoll’s distance from Japan would make it extremely difficult,
if not impossible, to sustain. Japan’s logistical capabilities were already stretched to the breaking point, and everything needed to sustain Midway as a Japanese outpost—food, ammunition, and especially oil—would have to be shipped there across an ocean crawling with American submarines. Sufficient tankers needed to carry refined oil from Japan to Midway simply did not exist, and, if they did, how wise was it for Japan to be exporting refined oil—the dearth of which had triggered the war in the first place? Moreover, up to this point in the war, Japan had advanced from one position to another only under the umbrella of land-based air. That would not be the case with Midway. The atoll was, however, under the umbrella of American land-based air from Oahu, which would make it vulnerable to American raids and recapture. Finally, if Combined Fleet wanted a battle with the American carriers, one could be had by attacking Fiji or Samoa, the loss of which would break the American link to Australia. And a battle in the South Pacific would give Japan all the advantages that the Americans would have at Midway.
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Watanabe was not used to hearing such sharp and direct criticism of a plan generated by the commander in chief. He responded to Miyo by asserting that “after capture [Midway] would be supplied the same as was already being done with Wake.” And he pledged “to go to Fiji and Samoa after the Battle of Midway had been won.” Apparently flustered, he merely repeated the outlines of the plan that he had been entrusted to deliver. It was evident that the evidence weighed heavily against adoption of the Midway plan, but Yamamoto’s influence had grown so great that it could not be dismissed outright. Fukudome, who had once been Yamamoto’s chief of staff, tried to calm the heated discussion: “Come, come,” he said, “don’t get too excited. Since the Combined Fleet’s so set on the plan, why don’t we study it to see if we can’t accept it?”
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The group met again three days later. It was clear at once that studying the details of the plan had only confirmed Miyo’s doubts. He reiterated, even more strongly, its obvious defects. Unable to counter Miyo’s arguments, Watanabe left the room to telephone the flagship
Yamato
. He summarized Miyo’s criticisms and asked for a response. Was Yamamoto still committed to the Midway plan? He was. Watanabe returned to the room to tell the
members of the General Staff that Yamamoto’s mind was made up, and that “if his plan was not adopted he
might
resign.”

It was Fukudome who asked the crucial question: “If the C in C’s so set on it, shall we leave it to him?” No one else in the room spoke, but several nodded. Nagano capitulated once again, as he had over the Pearl Harbor raid. Miyo could only bow his head; some thought he was forcing back tears. Yamamoto had forced the Pearl Harbor raid onto the General Staff by bluff and threat. Now he was imposing the Midway plan on his skeptical and reluctant superiors. The behavior of the Naval General Staff was, as the historian H. P. Willmott has noted, “nothing less than an abject and craven shirking of responsibility.”
²⁷

The Army’s response was, in effect, a shrug. Since the plan did not call for any significant participation by the Army, its leaders seemed to say: do whatever you want so long as you don’t call on us for support. But the Army did worry about Inoue’s move southward to Port Moresby, for that did involve Army assets, and as a result, five days after winning his victory over the Naval General Staff, Yamamoto agreed to lend one carrier division of the Kid
ō
Butai to Inoue for what was codenamed Operation MO—the capture of Port Moresby. For that operation, Yamamoto selected the newest and least experienced of the carrier divisions—CarDiv 5, composed of the new carriers
Sh
ō
kaku
and
Zuikaku
. Inoue had to promise that he would complete the conquest of Port Moresby swiftly, so that those carriers could rejoin the Kid
ō
Butai in time for the Midway campaign, now codenamed Operation MI. The Fiji-Samoa operation would have to be postponed until July, though Yamamoto agreed to allow a smaller operation for the capture of Ocean and Nauru Islands (Operation RY), and another to seize the westernmost islands in the Aleutians (Operation AL). This latter effort, often referred to as a diversion for Midway, was in fact a separate initiative unrelated to the Midway Operation apart from its timing. In effect, instead of choosing between moves to the south, north, or west, the Japanese decided to undertake all three, and to do so virtually simultaneously.
²⁸

In addition to internal military politics, one reason for the apparent hurry was that both Yamamoto and the Naval General Staff recognized that Japan’s carrier superiority in the Pacific was only temporary. The Japanese
had six big carriers to the Americans’ three (or perhaps four—they weren’t sure where the
Wasp
was), but they knew that the Americans had no fewer than eleven big carriers under construction, all of which would become operational in 1943; the Japanese had only one under construction, the
Taih
ō
, which would not be available until 1944 (though they also converted several other existing ships into carriers). In short, the Japanese needed to complete their conquests and establish their defensive perimeter before the new American carriers and the flood of American airplanes began arriving in the Pacific.

The day after the Naval General Staff capitulated to Yamamoto’s Midway Operation, the planes of the Kid
ō
Butai conducted their raid on Colombo in far-off Ceylon and sank the
Dorsetshire
and
Cornwall
. Four days later they struck at Trincomalee and sank the
Hermes
. Soon they would be returning through the Straits of Malacca to the Pacific. They would need to refit and resupply, and then they would be ready for more operations. The officers and men were hoping for liberty in Hiroshima. They would be disappointed. The crews of the
Sh
ō
kaku
and
Zuikaku
would not even be allowed to reach a Japanese port. Instead, those two ships underwent a quick resupply in Formosa so they could be ready for Operation MO.

On April 16, Nagano presented the “Imperial Navy Operational Plan for Stage Two of the Great East Asia War” to Emperor Hirohito, who, in theory at least, had final approval of all operations. Plans were never presented to the emperor until all the competing elements in the military and the government had agreed; all Hirohito could do was bless a decision that had already been made. The chief of the Army General Staff was present when Admiral Nagano presented the outlines of the Midway plan. He silently acquiesced because it did not call for the allocation of any soldiers. The landings and occupation of Midway would be the responsibility of Naval Infantry—the Japanese version of Marines. The Army may have suspected that Yamamoto’s plan was only the first step toward an invasion of Hawaii, which certainly would require support from the Army, but it could speak up in opposition to that move when the time came.
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Yamamoto had won, though it was not yet clear what the consequences of his internal victory over the Naval General Staff and the Army might be. As Commander Miyo had pointed out, the thrust into the Central Pacific was a gamble even if the Kid
ō
Butai triumphed over the American carriers, for the logistical burden of sustaining an outpost at Midway, 2,235 nautical miles from Tokyo, was daunting, especially if the Army continued to remain on the sidelines. On April 16, the day when Nagano presented the plan to the emperor, it was hard for Army leaders to imagine a set of circumstances that would cause them to change their mind about supporting this adventure in the central Pacific.

Two days later, American bombers appeared over Tokyo.

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Early in 1941, Yamamoto wrote a letter to another officer who favored war with America. In that letter, Yamamoto stated that in any such war the Japanese would be compelled to seek “a capitulation at the White House, in Washington itself.” After the war began, Japanese newspapers published this letter, which led the Western press to assume that this was, in fact, Yamamoto’s goal. Instead, Yamamoto had written the letter as a way of suggesting that a war with the U.S. was not winnable. The next line in this letter, omitted when it was published, was: “I wonder whether the politicians of the day really have the willingness to make [the] sacrifice … that this would entail.”

T
he wild card in America’s carrier force was the USS
Hornet
, a sister ship of the
Yorktown
and
Enterprise
with essentially the same characteristics and capacity. Commissioned in October, six weeks before Pearl Harbor, she remained in Norfolk over the winter as she fitted out, and it was not until March of 1942 that she was ready for sea with a crew, an air group, and a commanding officer. That commanding officer was Captain Marc A. Mitscher, whose Academy nickname was “Pete.” The nickname came about because Mitscher had arrived in Annapolis from Oklahoma in 1904 soon after another Oklahoma native named Pete Cade had “bilged out.” Cade had been a popular mid, and his classmates were unsure that trading him for the short, skinny, and taciturn Mitscher was a good bargain. They ordered the new plebe to call out the name of the departed Cade every time an upperclassman required it. On those occasions, Mitscher would brace up and shout out: “Peter Cassius Marcellus Cade, Jr.” His classmates took to calling him “Oklahoma Pete,” and Pete he remained for the rest of his life.
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For some time it looked as if the new Pete would follow the same course as the old one at Annapolis. Mitscher got bad grades and lots of demerits. For two years, he was constantly on the brink of being kicked out. And then he was; in 1906, at the end of his second year, he was ordered to resign. In an act of defiance, he wrote out his resignation on a piece of toilet paper. In spite of that, and perhaps as a sop to the congressman who had appointed him (a friend of Mitscher’s father), he was allowed to reenter the Academy, but only if he started over as a plebe. Out of either stubbornness or determination, or perhaps both, Mitscher reentered the Academy as a member of the class of 1910. Though he was repeating classes he had already taken, his grades remained poor, and his conduct worse. Nor was he especially popular. He seldom laughed or even smiled, and his natural quietness was interpreted by some as sullenness. His odd looks did not help. Short and slight, he had milk-white skin that burned easily, and white, wispy hair that was already thinning noticeably, which he combed over the top of his balding head. The 1910
Lucky Bag
profiled him in verse:

Pete dislikes all allusions or mirth
On the hue of his hair or its dearth
It gives him much pain
When he has to explain
That he’s not an albino by birth.

He spent a lot of his time smoking and card playing, and several times came close to being expelled again. He graduated third from the bottom of his class in 1910, after six years at Annapolis.
²

Mitscher’s early career as a surface officer was as undistinguished as his record at the Academy. Despite his diminutive size, he was stubborn, argumentative, and short-tempered, and he managed to get into a surprising number of fights. Then in 1915 his career changed dramatically when as a lieutenant junior grade he was accepted into the new Bureau of Aeronautics. Mitscher decided it was an activity that was worth his time and effort—for one thing, his diminutive stature was actually an asset in an airplane’s cockpit. The card-playing slacker became a hard worker and an
enthusiastic devotee of aviation. Moreover, as one of the first students to show up at Pensacola in the Navy’s infant flying corps, Mitscher got in on the ground floor of a new service that was soon to expand rapidly. In June of1916, at the age of 29, Pete Mitscher became Naval Aviator Number 33.
³

At that time, of course, there were as yet no aircraft carriers in the U.S. Navy (the
Jupiter
would not be converted into the
Langley
until 1920). For four years, Mitscher flew fabric-covered seaplanes resembling box kites from shore bases; only occasionally were they propelled off the back of cruisers. Breakdowns were frequent, and the pilots patched up their own cloth-and-string “aeroplanes” after each crash, of which there were many. One authority estimates that for every fifteen minutes of flying time, the pilots spent four hours making repairs. The newly promoted Lieutenant Mitscher described what may have been a typical day in a letter home to his wife, Frances: “We transferred ten wrecks to the yard, and repaired two. The other day Donohue smashed one of the remaining ten and we worked night and day to get it ready. Stone fired off with it today and smashed it again, so we now have to repair some more.”
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