The Battle of Midway (24 page)

As soon as the last plane was airborne, Halsey ordered the carriers and cruisers to reverse course and steam east, away from Japan, at 25 knots while the crew turned its attention to bringing up the planes from the hangar deck so that the
Hornet
could function as a real carrier again. As
Doolittle and his bombers flew westward, Halsey and Task Force 16 sped away eastward.

The Army pilots, accustomed to navigating over land by following railroads or highways, were now flying over 650 miles of open ocean toward a target none of them had ever seen. They had practiced for the mission by flying out over the Gulf of Mexico, learning to fly by compass bearing alone. To conserve fuel, they flew at 165 knots, replenishing the tanks by hand from gas cans stored on board, saving the cans to throw over the side all at once, so that they didn’t form a trail on the surface of the sea for the Japanese to follow. About a half hour into the flight, Taylor’s Number Two plane caught up to Doolittle and settled in on his wing, though the rest headed for Japan independently. They flew low, about 200 feet, and passed over some small ships, mostly fishing vessels, though Doolittle thought he saw a light cruiser. Doolittle made landfall well north of Tokyo—navigating by dead reckoning was always a bit dicey. Instead of following the coast southward, as some did, he decided to fly inland and approach the target from the north. He was still flying low, the shadow of his plane jumping around on the ground as it conformed to the topography. He passed some small biplanes—perhaps army trainers—but there was no reaction from them. Other pilots recalled flying over groups of civilians who looked up and waved, assuming, not unreasonably, that these were Japanese planes on a training mission. One plane flew over a baseball field with a game in progress, and the crowd stood up to wave. The pilots waved back.
³⁵

Ten miles north of Tokyo, Doolittle encountered nine Japanese fighter planes flying in three tight V formations. They ignored him. At the outskirts of the city, Doolittle pulled up to 1200 feet, turned southwest, and dropped his first bomb at 1:30 p.m. (ship time). He had been flying for five hours. After dropping his four 500-pound bombs, Doolittle took his plane back down to 500 feet. There was a lot of antiaircraft fire now, though it was inaccurate; at 500 feet his plane was a difficult target. He passed over an aircraft factory where new planes were lined up in rows outside, but he had no bombs left, and he continued southwestward out over the Sea of Japan and on toward the China coast.
³⁶

He made landfall at dusk; soon it was full dark. He was now flying over unknown terrain with no certain objective. Doolittle pulled up to 8,000 feet to avoid running into a mountain and flew on. At 9:00 p.m., after covering 2,250 miles in thirteen hours, he was running out of gas. He got no response on the radio frequency he had been given for the Chinese airfields. He did not know that news of his mission had never made it to the Chinese. At 9:30, he ordered his crew to prepare to jump. He ensured that they went first, and then, setting the autopilot for level flight, he followed them out into the night.
³⁷

He landed in a rice paddy that had recently been fertilized with human excrement. After slogging his way to solid ground, he knocked on the door of a small house where a light was showing, and tried out the phrase that the Chinese-speaking Lieutenant Stephen Jurika had taught all of them during the Pacific crossing:
Lushu hoo megwa fugi
: “I am an American.” The only response he got was the dousing of the light and the bolting of the door. He walked on. The next day, after a night trying to stay warm, he encountered three Chinese soldiers. He drew them a picture of an airplane with parachutes coming out of it. They were skeptical at first but relaxed when they found his parachute, which the unwelcoming farmer had secreted in his house. After several days, they got him to Hang Yang Airfield, and from there he, and eventually most of the others, were flown to the Nationalist Chinese headquarters at Chungking. There they were presented with presidential congratulations and notification that each of them would be awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Three weeks later, in a small and secret ceremony in the White House, President Roosevelt awarded Doolittle the Medal of Honor.
³⁸

All sixteen American bombers had successfully found their targets, hitting Yokohama, Nagoya, and Kobe as well as Tokyo, but none of them had landed safely on Chinese airfields. One landed in southern Russia after its skipper, Captain Edward York, discovered that he did not have enough fuel to make it to China.
*
The rest crash-landed somewhere in China or along
the Chinese coast. Of the eighty Doolittle raiders (five men per plane), seventy-three eventually made it back to the United States—though it took a while for some of them. Two died when their plane crashed, and another was killed bailing out. Eight were captured by the Japanese. Of those, three were executed, one died in prison, and the others survived the war in a POW camp. The crew of Captain York’s plane was interned in Russia. Just over a year later, those five escaped from the Soviet Union into Iran and eventually made it back to the States.

For their part, the Japanese made light of the Doolittle raid, punning on his name to claim that his handful of bombers had done little to hurt the great empire, which was true enough. The American pilots had hit an oil tank farm, a steel mill, and power plants; one bomb slightly damaged a brand-new carrier—the
Ry
ū
h
ō
—still in the shipyard. But they also hit several schools and an army hospital. Naturally, Japanese newspapers declared that the bombers had targeted schools and hospitals to “kill helpless children,” the usual wartime propaganda. Despite their defiant pronouncements, however, the Japanese high command was humiliated; the ability of the Imperial Army and Navy to protect the life of the emperor had been called into question. The Doolittle raid did not trigger the Midway expedition—that decision had already been made. It did, however, remove any doubts the Army had about backing the operation. According to Watanabe, “With the Doolittle raid the Japanese Army changed its strategy and not only agreed to the Midway plan of the Navy but agreed to furnish the troops to occupy the island.”
³⁹

In the United States, news of the raid was received jubilantly. Americans thought of it as payback for Pearl Harbor. One might note that the Americans had lost all sixteen bombers, one more plane than the Japanese had lost in the American air victory off Rabaul on February 20. Still, there had been so little good news in the war so far that the Doolittle raid inspired both celebration and speculation about how those planes had managed to cross the Pacific. Though the Japanese learned from the captives that the bombers had been launched from a carrier, that fact remained an official secret for more than a year, and when asked where the planes had taken off, Roosevelt answered puckishly that they had flown from “Shangri-La,” the
mythical and mystical city of James Hilton’s popular novel
Lost Horizon
. In homage to that, one of the new
Essex
-class carriers then under construction would be christened
Shangri-La
.

Halsey’s Task Force 16 arrived back in Pearl Harbor on April 25. Mitscher had hoped to grant liberty to the crew of the
Hornet;
its men had been at sea almost continuously since leaving Norfolk. But with only four American carriers in the Pacific, there was no time for that. The men of the
Hornet
and
Enterprise
, as well as their escorts, had to forego leave in Hawaii, just as the men of the
Sh
ō
kaku
and
Zuikaku
had to forego leave in Japan. The Japanese sailors on their two carriers were bound on a special mission. And thanks to a handful of men working secretly in the basement of the Fourteenth Naval District headquarters building in Pearl Harbor, the Americans knew what that mission was.

*
Dwight Morrow, a former Republican senator from Ohio, had a special interest in aviation. (His daughter Anne would later marry the famed aviator Charles Lindbergh.) It was the Morrow Board that recommended the creation of a separate Air Corps within the U.S. Army.

*
The Army pilots were Lieutenants John Fitzgerald and James McCarthy, the first men to fly land-based bombers off a carrier deck, and they did so with no special training and very little advance notice.

*
Very likely, Captain York’s plane burned fuel faster than the others because the mechanics at McClellan Field near Sacramento, unaware that the carburetors on the Mitchell bombers had been specially recalibrated for fuel economy, reset them to normal.

I
n addition to the men who drove the ships, flew the planes, or manned the guns—and those who some months later waded ashore carrying M-1 rifles—there were others whose contributions to victory in the Pacific were of an entirely different sort. Among the most consequential were those whose job it was to intercept, decrypt, and analyze Japanese radio traffic. In a windowless basement room at Pearl Harbor officially dubbed the Combat Intelligence Unit and which those working there called “the dungeon,” more than two dozen men toiled around the clock in an effort to glean useful intelligence out of the Japanese radio messages that were plucked out of the ether every day by the radio receiver at He’eia on Oahu’s north shore. It was the most secret organization in the U.S. Navy. Some of these men (called the “on-the-roof gang,” or “roofers” in the workplace vernacular) wore headsets and transcribed the blizzard of dots and dashes into
number groups or Japanese kana characters.
*
Others sought to find patterns in those characters by running primitive IBM card-sorting machines that spewed out millions of punch cards each day. Still others sat at desks or tables and worked through tall stacks of intercepts, looking for repeated codes or phrases that might provide a hint about Japanese movements or intentions. It was an eclectic team of idiosyncratic individuals that collectively played one of the most important roles in the Pacific War, and particularly in the Battle of Midway.
¹

As far back as World War I, the United States had been successful at breaking the Japanese diplomatic code. In the 1920s, a clandestine organization headed by Herbert Yardley and rather dramatically dubbed “the Black Chamber” devoted itself to breaking the diplomatic codes of several nations, including Japan. Their success had allowed the Americans to take a hard line at the 1921–22 Naval Arms Limitation Conference in Washington, where they had proposed that 10:10:6 ratio in battleship tonnage for the United States, Great Britain, and Japan. Though the Japanese were holding out for a 10:10:7 ratio, the American chief negotiator—the secretary of state and future Supreme Court chief justice Charles Evans Hughes—knew from reading intercepted Japanese secret messages that Tokyo would accept the 10:10:6 formula rather than let the talks fail.

Six years later, when the State Department was preparing for the London Naval Conference, Yardley sent President Hoover’s new secretary of state, Henry Stimson, a batch of decrypted messages that revealed Japan’s negotiating strategy. Instead of praising Yardley, Stimson was horrified. He was said to have remarked that “gentlemen do not read other gentlemen’s mail.” Whether or not he actually made this statement, he shut down the Black Chamber and ended, temporarily, efforts to read Japanese diplomatic messages. Yardley, who apparently could not
resist claiming public credit, got even with Stimson a few years later by exposing the operation he had led in a series of magazine articles, and then by publishing a memoir,
The American Black Chamber
(1931), in which he revealed the once highly secret operation. For their part, the Japanese complained that the Americans had been cheating and resolved to improve their codes.
²

The U.S. Navy was less fastidious than the State Department; efforts to break the Japanese Navy’s operational code continued uninterrupted. This quite separate effort began in 1924, when the communications intelligence organization was established on the top floor of the Navy Department building in Washington under the Code and Signals Section. Placed under the director of Naval Communications, this office was designated as OP-20-G. For almost twenty years, OP-20-G was the private fiefdom of the gifted and eccentric Commander Laurance F. Safford, a lugubrious, bespectacled 1916 Annapolis graduate with darting eyes and disheveled hair who looked, one coworker said, as if “he had been scratching his head in perplexity.”
³
It was Safford who established the unit’s two satellite stations, one in Manila in 1932 called Station Cast, and Station Hypo in Hawaii in 1936.
*
It was also Safford who recruited the first team of analysts who became key players in the wartime code-breaking effort.
**