The Conquering Tide (73 page)

Carl Moore, the Fifth Fleet chief of staff, was later asked to explain Spruance's reasoning. As always, Moore was candid. The boss was on a sightseeing expedition. “Well, I think it was a matter of curiosity. . . . I think Admiral Spruance was as much interested in taking a look at Truk as he was in hunting for Japanese ships.”
⁴⁶
Moore also speculated that the chief may have been motivated to taunt the Japanese by operating the flagship within plain sight of their largest naval base outside the home islands.

That night, a flight of Nakajima B5N “Kate” torpedo planes stalked the American task force. The intruders had not flown from Truk—their origin has never been conclusively determined, but it is likely they launched from
either Rabaul or Saipan. Night fighters attempted to intercept them but could not find them in the darkness. A few minutes after midnight, one of the prowlers roared low over the flight deck of the carrier
Intrepid
. The incident spooked the crew, and Admiral Alfred E. Montgomery of Task Group 58.2 ordered a hard port turn to throw off the attackers. But the B5N had already dropped its torpedo, and while the
Intrepid
was still in its turn, an explosion astern sent a powerful shockwave through the hull. The torpedo had struck the carrier's vulnerable starboard quarter. Eleven of her crew were killed and another seventeen wounded in the explosion. Damage-control parties sealed off the flooded compartments, and the ship could make way under her own power, but her rudder jammed and kept her in a helpless turn. She nearly collided with the
Essex
. She was in no danger of sinking but could not keep pace with the task force; she withdrew to Majuro and thence to Pearl Harbor and San Francisco for repairs.

At 2:00 a.m. on the eighteenth, the
Enterprise
launched a flight of twelve radar-equipped TBF Avengers to attack the surviving Japanese ships in Truk Lagoon. Each aircraft was armed with four 500-pound bombs. The concept of a low-altitude night attack, with the planes guided to the targets by radar alone, had been studied and discussed but never attempted. It required the pilots to navigate to Truk on instruments. Once over the lagoon, they circled over the anchorages until radar echoes provided an image of the targets. The mission was a tactical breakthrough, unprecedented in the annals of aviation or naval history. Lieutenant Commander William I. Martin, who had trained the airmen, called it “a real classic.” He recalled:

Radar displays at that time required an operator to do a great deal of interpreting. It was like learning a new language. Instead of it being a polar plot, looking down on it like a map, the cathode ray tube just gave indications that there was an object out there. After considerable practice, a radar operator could determine that there was a ship there and its approximate size. You related the blip on the radar scope to the image of the ship.
⁴⁷

The pilots approached the targets at an altitude of 250 feet or even lower, and released their bombs based on radar readings alone. At masthead altitude, with a slow airspeed, this method of bombing proved devastatingly accurate. The Avengers scored thirteen direct hits and sank eight Japanese
ships. The antiaircraft fire was thick but wild; only one of the twelve planes was shot down.

As February 18 dawned, Task Force 58 put another 200 planes into the sky. They met negligible air opposition over the atoll and worked over the remaining targets at their leisure. Hundreds of incendiaries were dropped on smoking airfields, airplane parking areas, and hangars. The bombers paid special attention to the fuel tank farms, which had been spared on the first day in order to prevent smoke from obscuring visibility.

Two days earlier, the Japanese cruiser
Agano
had been sunk north of Truk by the American submarine
Skate
. A destroyer, the
Oite
, had been dispatched to pick up the survivors, numbering about 400 officers and sailors. The destroyer had set course for Saipan but was ordered back to Truk after the raid began. Crammed with the rescued crewmen of the sunken
Agano
, the star-crossed
Oite
entered the lagoon on the morning of February 18 and was quickly set upon by a flight of TBF Avengers from the
Bunker Hill
. Struck amidships by a torpedo, the
Oite
broke in half and went down. She took more than 500 men down with her; only 20 survived.

Flight leaders reported that they were having trouble locating worthy targets. Spruance, aware that he might be flogging a dead horse, ordered all planes back to their carriers, and Task Force 58 retired toward Majuro.

For the Americans, Truk's extravagant reputation inflated the symbolic importance of the victory. Even so, judging by the material results,
HAILSTONE
had been one of the most smashing carrier raids of the war. Though most of Japan's heavy naval units had previously fled the lagoon, the attackers had sunk three light cruisers, four destroyers, three auxiliary or training cruisers, and six other naval auxiliaries. They had, in addition, sent about thirty merchant ships to the bottom of the lagoon, including five precious oil tankers. In aggregate, the total shipping losses approached 200,000 tons. Many of those vessels had been laden with munitions and other supplies that could not be recovered. Seventeen thousand tons of fuel went up in the attack, at a time when fuel was running very short.
⁴⁸
The Japanese had lost 249 aircraft, most destroyed on the ground. All of that was accomplished at negligible cost to the striking force. Mitscher's carriers lost twenty-five aircraft, including those destroyed in accidents; all but nine pilots and aircrewmen were recovered safely and would fly again. The only ship to suffer any significant damage was the
Intrepid
, but she would return to service later in the year.

A navy communiqué announced that “the Pacific fleet has returned in Truk the visit made by the Japanese fleet on Dec. 7, 1941, and effected a partial settlement of the debt.”
⁴⁹
Time
magazine's verdict was accurate: “The overfeared power of land-based air power had been set aside by greater air power from the sea.”
⁵⁰

Truk was thereafter useless as a fleet base; it would not serve in that function again. Its airfields were cleared and repaired, and when Koga ordered Rabaul's air units evacuated, most flew to Truk. But if the atoll was vulnerable to Mitscher's attention in February 1944, it would be no less so later in the spring. Task Force 58 would revisit Truk in April, when no shipping remained in the lagoon. During this repeat performance, the air groups concentrated their attentions on the airfields and aircraft of the erstwhile Japanese bastion, and left it a smoking ruin.

Chapter Thirteen

A
DMIRAL
M
INEICHI
K
OGA, THE TACITURN COMMANDER IN CHIEF OF
the Combined Fleet, had been a close personal friend of his predecessor Isoroku Yamamoto. But Koga lacked his late friend's strategic and political audacity. He never dared to challenge the suzerainty of the Tokyo-based Naval General Staff (NGS) or the leadership's single-minded fixation on the all-important “decisive fleet battle”—a concept that dominated Japanese naval planning and strategic thinking before and during the war. This climactic clash of fleets was to occur somewhere in the western Pacific. It would involve substantially all of the capital ships in both the American and the Japanese navy. It would occur (it was hoped) in tactical circumstances favoring the Japanese side. It might begin with punishing land- and carrier-based air attacks on the American fleet, perhaps while the Americans were tied down in support of some major amphibious operation. But the big guns of the Japanese battleships would deliver the
coup de grace
. The thrashing would be so complete, so shocking, and so devastating that the government of Franklin D. Roosevelt would be moved to ask for a truce. Diplomatic negotiations would follow, and Japan would secure a peace that preserved its sovereignty, its honor, and some portion of its empire.

It would be no exaggeration to say that bringing about a single, all-deciding naval battle amounted to an obsession among the Tokyo admirals. The idea had been inculcated into generations of students at the Japanese Naval Academy at Etajima through the writings of the American strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan. The annals of history provided many convincing examples of such battles, none better than Admiral Heihachiro Togo's wipeout of a Russian fleet in Tsushima Strait in 1905. Intensive Naval Staff College
study of the Anglo-German Battle of Jutland (1916) had further hammered the principle home—though in that instance, it was agreed, the British had grasped the chance of a decisive victory but let it slip through their fingers. Teikichi Hori, a “treaty faction” admiral purged from the Imperial Japanese Navy in 1933, observed that Japanese naval planning had ossified perilously in those years of ultranationalist ferment: “This kind of creeping formalism spread until it became a kind of strategic orthodoxy and [the navy] ended up as a smug little society which insisted that all ideas on strategy should conform to this orthodoxy.”
¹

Literally from the first minutes of the Pacific War, events proved that airpower and submarine warfare had unseated the battle line as the ultimate arbiter of naval power. But the admirals had refused to relinquish their trust in the big guns. Though Isoroku Yamamoto had been one of the most air-minded officers to reach the top rungs of the Japanese navy, his move against Midway had been a bid to force a decisive battle early in the war. He had intended a critical role in that battle for the surface warships, including his flagship
Yamato
. Aviators were not fast-tracked to promotions, nor were they placed into important sea commands and planning jobs as they had been in the U.S. Navy. Not until 1944 was the carrier task force integrated into the heart of the Combined Fleet. War planning proceeded under the orthodox assumption that the battleships (especially the leviathans
Yamato
and
Musashi
) would play a leading part in the war's final act.

So Koga never doubted that he must sooner or later hurl the Combined Fleet into the path of the advancing enemy. But when and where? Since 1942, the heavy ships (battleships and carriers) had been kept in reserve, well out of the enemy's reach. The Japanese carriers had not come out to fight since the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands in October 1942. After losing the battleships
Hiei
and
Kirishima
off Guadalcanal a month later, the navy had largely relied on its destroyers and land-based airpower to wage its campaign in the South Pacific. Koga would prefer to make his stand within range of friendly terrestrial air bases. He needed time to rebuild his carrier air groups, and as the fuel supply became critical, he had good reason to hope that the battle would be fought as near as possible to the oilfields of Borneo and Sumatra.

On the other side of the ledger, Koga had to acknowledge that time was not on his side. Month by month, the titanic output of the enemy's industrial plant was arriving in the advanced war zones of the Pacific. American
scientific and technical expertise was opening an ever-widening mismatch in air combat efficiency, especially in the vital categories of radar, radio communications, and antiaircraft defenses. The submarine campaign was obliterating 200,000 tons of Japanese shipping per month, and it would soon cripple the nation's war industries. The enemy's twin advances in the south and central Pacific were swallowing up strategically vital territories. All such considerations weighed in favor of committing the Combined Fleet as soon as tactical circumstances permitted.

Nor could any military commander ignore the increasingly strident demands emanating directly from the throne. The god-king Hirohito was pressuring his liaison conference to wage the war more aggressively, to confront the American fleet and crush it. As a young crown prince, Hirohito's education had been largely entrusted to the leading army and navy heroes of the Russo-Japanese War, Admiral Togo and General Maresuke Nogi. The boy had been steeped in Mahanian doctrine, and apparently never doubted that the war must be won by a decisive fleet engagement in the pattern of Tsushima. He let it be known that he was sorely disappointed by the loss of Guadalcanal. After the fall of Attu in May 1943, he sternly rebuked his army and navy chiefs of staff. The emperor expressed anxiety over the waning prestige of Japanese military power and its consequences for the future of his Asian-Pacific empire. His queries became increasingly pointed, shrill, and even sarcastic. He demanded to be briefed in detail, whereas he had previously been satisfied with knowing only the broad strokes, and took a direct part in deciding major questions of strategy. On August 5, as Allied forces drove into the central Solomons, the emperor dressed down the chief of the Army General Staff, General Hajime Sugiyama:

If we continue fighting in this manner, it will be like Guadalcanal. It will only raise the fighting spirit of the enemy, and then the neutral countries will start to waver, China will get big-headed, and the impact on the countries in the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere will be enormous. Can't you somehow beat down the American forces head on at some front? All the battle fronts look bad. Can't you give the American forces a walloping? If we continue to get pushed back steadily this way, it will have a significant impact on other countries, not just on the enemy. Now, just where are you going to show some success? Where are you going to stage a decisive battle?
²

In mid-September, the emperor convened a series of meetings with military leaders at the Imperial Palace. On the agenda was a fundamental overhaul in war strategy. With the support of General Hideki Tojo, who simultaneously held the offices of prime minister and army minister, leaders at the liaison conference agreed to a “New Operational Policy” calling for a significant contraction in Japan's western defense perimeter to islands far behind the front lines. The new “absolute defense line” would run from the Kurile Islands south through the Marianas, Truk, Palau, New Britain, western New Guinea, the East Indies, and Burma. Positions on that inner perimeter would be heavily reinforced with land-based air units and army troops to be transferred from Manchuria. Garrisons outside the perimeter, including those in the Gilbert and Marshall island groups, would receive no further reinforcement. If attacked, they must exact a bloody toll on the enemy before perishing in combat to the last man.