The Battle of Midway (37 page)

Kakuta launched his first strike against Dutch Harbor early on the morning of June 3 (Alaska time). He sent off partial strikes from both of his carriers, but the inexperienced pilots from the
Jun’y
ō
got lost in the thick weather and turned back, and as a result only nine bombers from
Ry
ū
j
ō
, plus three fighters, made it through to the target. The
Ry
ū
j
ō
’s
planes inflicted moderate damage, hitting the radio station, the oil tank farm, and an Army barracks, killing twenty-five Americans at the cost of two of their own planes.
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Now was the time for the American Army counterstrike against the carriers. Navy search planes found Kakuta’s carriers a mere 165 miles away and radioed their coordinates; one of the snoopers even managed to drop a few bombs, though none struck an enemy ship. Theobald expected that the Army bombers would now sortie. Instead, the Army pilots insisted that “they had to await an order from General Butler,” who had apparently had second thoughts since agreeing to Theobald’s arrangements. He told another Navy officer that he doubted the Army planes could even defend
their own airfields, much less damage the enemy. He therefore radioed Theobald from Kodiak, “Unless otherwise directed by you [I] will not advance bombing squadrons from Kodiak to Cold Bay Area.” Since Theobald was observing radio silence, he could not respond to this astonishing message. Instead, he sent the destroyer
Humphreys
racing back to Kodiak with a written order.
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Thus prodded, Butler released his bombers, though this did not result in an immediate strike. While en route to the target, the first group of Army planes received a radio report that the Catalinas had temporarily lost contact with the enemy. Rather than continue on in the expectation that contact could be reestablished—which it was—they turned around and returned to base. When a second group of bombers flew out toward the coordinates, the Army pilots fanned out to attack individually rather than attempt a coordinated strike. Most bombed from high altitude, some releasing their bombs blindly from above the stratus cloud layer, simply guessing at the enemy’s position “by calculation”—essentially by dead reckoning. As Theobald noted later, “such an attack could not be sure of hitting Kiska Island,” much less an enemy warship.
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A few of the bombers had been equipped with ship-killing torpedoes, but the Army pilots, inexperienced with such weapons, released them, too, from high altitude, all but ensuring that they would break apart upon striking the water. (One Army pilot claimed that he landed his torpedo square on the deck of a carrier, though that proved false.) Some pilots failed to locate the enemy at all and returned to base still carrying their heavy torpedoes. To avoid landing with such volatile cargo, they jettisoned them on the rocks offshore. Unaware that the torpedo warheads became armed only after the torpedo ran for a prescribed distance in the water, they reported them as “duds” because they didn’t explode. Theobald was willing to forgive their ignorance of torpedo ordnance but regretted the loss of the torpedoes themselves, since they were scarce and expensive. By the end of the day, the Navy had lost six PBY Catalinas; the Army had lost two bombers and two P-40 pursuit planes. The Japanese lost four scout planes—shot down by Army P-40s operating from the field on Umnak—yet suffered no damage to their strike force. Having conducted the required attack on Dutch Harbor, Kakuta
turned west to cover the landings on Attu and Kiska. The ever-present fog delayed those landings, and he decided to send a second strike against Dutch Harbor on June 4. This time his planes destroyed several oil tanks and a few more buildings, though they again failed to knock out the base.
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Theobald was so disgusted with the performance of the Army bombers that he decided to return personally to Kodiak in his flagship to talk again with Butler. He arrived there on the morning of June 5 and immediately went to see a somewhat chagrinned Butler, who was aware of how little his bombers had accomplished. Theobald formally requested that Butler allow the pilots to strike without waiting for permission and suggested that they make concentrated and coordinated attacks rather than isolated high-altitude bombings. He left that same afternoon, believing, or at least hoping, that the problems had been resolved. Nonetheless, Butler’s planes never did manage to strike the Japanese fleet. Indeed, so feeble was the American attack on Kakuta’s carrier force that the Japanese commander may have been unaware that he had been under attack at all. As one senior naval officer reported to King regarding the Army bombers: “Either they were too slow in taking off, or the weather was too bad, or the distance was too great, or they couldn’t find the enemy.” In the conditions that prevailed off the Aleutian archipelago, some of this was not altogether surprising. Still, the Navy was inclined to attribute it, in part at least, to Army timidity.
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Kakuta, too, was disappointed with the effect of his air attacks on Dutch Harbor. Far more distressing, however, was the radio message he received the afternoon of June 5 from Yamamoto. For the commander in chief to break radio silence at all was astonishing enough; the message he sent was even more so. Hosogaya and Kakuta were to break off their attacks in the Aleutians, cancel the landings, send the transports back to Japan, and close in on the Kid
ō
Butai near Midway. Four hours later, Yamamoto reversed himself and cancelled those orders, telling his northern force commanders to complete their mission after all. But clearly, something had gone very wrong with the Kid
ō
Butai.
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In fact, nearly everything had gone wrong, starting with the fact that the Japanese had failed to determine whether the American carriers they
hoped to lure out to their destruction were even present in Pearl Harbor. They did have a plan to find out. Nearly three months earlier, well before the fateful conference in Tokyo at which Nagano and Fukudome had capitulated to Yamamoto’s blackmail and approved the Midway plan, the Japanese had conducted a long-range reconnaissance of Pearl Harbor using two giant Kawanishi flying boats. These remarkable four-engine seaplanes, called “Emilys” by the Allies, were 92 feet long (30 feet longer than the American Catalinas) and had an astonishing range of over 4,500 miles, which meant that, theoretically at least, they could fly from the Marshall Islands to Pearl Harbor and back without stopping. Such a flight would leave no margin for error, however, and so Commander Miyo (who a month later would strenuously oppose Yamamoto’s Midway plan) suggested that their range could be extended even further by refueling them at sea from submarines. This notion hinted at using them to bomb American cities along the continental West Coast. More immediately, it provoked discussions about a second attack on Pearl Harbor, a scheme that was code-named Operation K.
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Americans were very much aware of the possibility of long-range air strikes by seaplanes refueled at sea. Three months before Pearl Harbor, Hypo analyst Jasper Holmes, writing under the pen name “Alec Hudson,” had published a story in the
Saturday Evening Post
about American seaplanes refueled by submarines striking enemy bases three thousand miles away. In Holmes’s fictional tale, “twelve big bombers” attacked an enemy base “with machinelike precision,” wrecking an invasion convoy. Edwin Layton later speculated that Holmes’s story might have given the Japanese the idea for Operation K, but in fact the Japanese had begun experimenting with a seaplane-submarine partnership as early as 1939. After the war began, the Japanese planned to conduct a whole series of seaplane raids against Pearl Harbor—to keep track of the comings and goings of American warships, as well as to keep the Americans on edge and off balance by bombing them periodically. In the end, however, this dual objective undermined Japanese ambitions, for it focused American attention on the program and therefore compromised it.
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The first (and, as it turned out, only) seaplane attack on Pearl Harbor occurred in the first week of March 1942, before Yamamoto even submitted his Midway plan to the Naval General Staff. Two Kawanishis, each of them armed with four 500-pound bombs, took off from Wotje Island in the Marshalls on March 2 and in thirteen and a half hours flew 1,605 miles to an unoccupied atoll called French Frigate Shoals, halfway between Pearl Harbor and Midway. There they refueled from two prepositioned submarines, then flew on to Oahu, another 560 miles to the southeast, arriving just past midnight on the morning of March 4. By then the weather had thickened, and visibility over the American naval base was virtually zero. The pilot of the lead plane, Lieutenant Hashizume Hisao, could see a slight glow through the cloud layer, but not much else. Thinking that he had glimpsed the outline of Ford Island in Pearl Harbor through a gap in the clouds, he dropped his bombs. His consort did the same. Then both planes headed back for the Marshall Islands, another two thousand miles and fifteen nonstop hours away.

The long range of the big four-engine Kawanishi H8K Type 2 seaplanes, called “Emilys” by the Allies, encouraged Japanese planners to consider long-range raids against American bases. (U.S. Naval Institute)

For all the effort and expended fuel, the raid did no damage whatever. Hashizume’s four bombs fell on the forested slopes of Mount Tantalus behind Honolulu, and the four from the other plane fell into the water near the entrance to Pearl Harbor. Moreover, the heavy cloud cover meant that Hashizume could not report with much certainty about what ships were or were not in the harbor, though he claimed to have seen at least one carrier.
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The most important consequence of this raid was that it drew Nimitz’s attention to the threat. Nimitz asked Layton how the Japanese had managed to drop four bombs on Oahu (the four that fell into the harbor had disappeared altogether, and no one was even aware of them until after the war). Layton was fairly sure that they had done it with seaplanes refueled from submarines, and he told Nimitz about Jasper Holmes’s story in the
Saturday Evening Post
. Layton also speculated that the Japanese had used French Frigate Shoals to refuel. As a result, Nimitz stationed an American seaplane at French Frigate Shoals, sending the USS
Ballard
, a destroyer recently converted to a seaplane tender, there in late March.
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