The Conquering Tide (83 page)

On any terms other than a direct comparison with the resources of the Fifth Fleet, the First Mobile Fleet was an awesome force. It was the largest concentration of carrier airpower the Imperial Navy had ever amassed, about 50 percent larger than the force that had attacked Pearl Harbor in
1941.
Taiho
, with its armored flight deck and newly constructed torpedo blister, was thought to be the toughest and most impervious carrier in either of the opposing fleets. The behemoths
Yamato
and
Musashi
were the world's two mightiest surface warships. Spirits among the Japanese rank and file were seemingly buoyant. Masatake Okumiya recorded that many of his fellow officers believed that victory was ensured, and “our pilots were convinced that they would shatter the attacking American fleet.”
¹⁹
Ugaki, after surveying the great armada from his bridge, mused in his diary, “Can it be that we'll fail to win with this mighty force? No! It can't be!”
²⁰

As always, Admiral Spruance walked for hours around the forecastle of the
Indianapolis
, often accompanied by Gil Slonim, an intelligence officer detailed to the Fifth Fleet. A series of contact reports had tracked the Japanese fleet from Tawi Tawi, and Filipino coastwatchers had reported a “large carrier and battleship force” traversing the San Bernardino Strait on June 15. Some hours later, the submarine
Flying Fish
sighted a large enemy task force consisting of “at least three battleships, three carriers and a number of cruisers and destroyers.”
²¹
Well to the south, a short time later, the submarine
Seahorse
reported another large group of enemy warships traveling northward in a location about 200 miles east of Surigao Strait. This was Ugaki's surface warship group.

Spruance summoned a squadron of long-range, radar-equipped PBM seaplanes from Eniwetok. They would begin long-range search flights to the west to locate the Japanese fleet. That these two widely separated elements or task forces might be headed to a rendezvous was an obvious possibility, but there was no proof of it. Spruance was vigilant to the danger of an end-run attack on the amphibious fleet off Saipan. Divided forces and flanking attacks had been a hallmark of Japanese naval strategy in many previous engagements.

Early on the morning of June 16, the submarine
Cavalla
, on her first war patrol, discovered several tankers and supply ships that previously had not been located. At 9:15 p.m. the same day, at a point about 800 miles west-southwest of Saipan,
Cavalla
's radar detected many large ships headed east at 19 knots. Captain Herman J. Kossler radioed Admiral Lockwood in Pearl Harbor with the contact report: “fifteen or more large combatant ships.”
²²

When this information was received several hours later on the
Indianapolis
, Carl Moore woke Spruance. Reviewing all the reports received in the past twelve hours, they concluded that the enemy fleet was deliberately
hovering beyond the striking range of the American carriers. It appeared to Spruance that Ozawa was merely probing, and perhaps hoping to lure the Americans west. Upon learning that the Japanese fleet had departed its anchorage in Tawi Tawi, Spruance had assumed it would come directly toward him and attempt a pitched surface battle. “For a second time it turned out wrong,” he told Nimitz. “Their attitude about risking their fleet had not changed. Their methods of operation had changed, in that they were using carriers again. They intended to use their fleet to exploit advantages that their carrier air might gain. They had no intention of throwing everything at us by coming in to Saipan at high speed to fight it out.”
²³

Spruance's bottom line was that he would not leave the amphibious fleet, the transports, and the beachhead unprotected until he knew the location of every element of the Japanese fleet. The easterly wind would always limit the potential westward progress of Task Force 58 during daylight, but Spruance would not allow the flight decks to stray farther than near air-striking range from the Marianas. In the Battle of Tsushima, which Spruance and his colleagues had studied at the Naval War College, Admiral Togo had waited for the Russian Fleet to come to him. That “waiting” strategy was always on his mind, as he would write later: “We had somewhat the same situation, only it was modified by the long-range striking power of the carriers.”
²⁴
Now he was inclined to wait and let Ozawa come east. He summoned the two carrier groups (commanded by Clark and Harrill) back from the Bonins. Mitscher asked for confirmation that he remained in tactical command of Task Force 58, and Spruance confirmed that Mitscher was indeed, but with the proviso that he would “issue general directives when necessary.”
²⁵
He also asked to be informed in advance of Mitscher's plans. Spruance had the carriers on a short leash.

As Clark took his task force south on June 17, he sent long-range search flights to the southwest. Results were negative. Knowing that the Japanese fleet was out there, probably not far beyond the maximum 350-mile search radius of his planes, he considered racing west through the night and interposing his ships between Ozawa and the home islands of Japan. It was a historic opportunity, and Clark knew it. He proposed the venture to Harrill via TBS, but the latter firmly declined. They had been ordered to return to Task Force 58. Clark considered taking Task Group 58.1 and going it alone, but he realized that would entail great risk: “I did not wish to find myself
on a windy corner with so many Japanese airplanes that I could not shoot them all down.”
²⁶
Both Clark and Harrill returned south and fell in with Mitscher midday on June 18.

O
ZAWA ARRAYED HIS FLEET IN TWO LARGE GROUPINGS.
A van force, consisting of Carrier Division 3 and the First Battleship Division under Ugaki, was positioned about a hundred miles in advance (east) of the main body. The van force was under the command of Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita. The rear group was divided into two carrier divisions, of which the strongest, representing about half the air strength of the Mobile Fleet, was Carrier Division 1, which included the
Taiho
,
Shokaku
, and
Zuikaku
. Ozawa retained direct command of the division from his flagship
Taiho
.

Upon receiving
Cavalla
's updated contact report on the morning of June 18, Mitscher and his staff officers considered the possibilities from Ozawa's point of view. He was likely on a tight fuel budget. He would attempt to employ the greater range of his carrier planes to advantage by striking the Americans with massed carrier airpower from beyond 300 miles west. Therefore he would steam east and launch his planes either late that afternoon or before dawn on the nineteenth. Events would soon confirm that these deductions were on the mark. (Mitscher and his staff also considered that Ozawa might send his surface forces ahead to attempt a night attack, but that scenario was less certain.) To close the range on the enemy, and orient Task Force 58 favorably to the prevailing easterly winds, Mitscher asked Spruance for permission to take the carriers farther west. Spruance, still eyeing the risk of a flanking attack on Turner's amphibious fleet, answered in the negative. As logged in the Fifth Fleet war diary, Spruance “informed CTF-58 that in his opinion the main enemy attack would come from the westward but might be diverted to come from the southwestward and that diversionary attacks might come from either flank or reinforcement might come from the Empire.”
²⁷
If morning searches were negative, Spruance instead proposed that Mitscher launch another round of bombing raids on airfields at Guam and Rota.

Mitscher was nonplussed by these directives. Like every other aviator in the fleet, he was keen to get at the enemy carriers. He was ill at ease with the likelihood that Task Force 58 might have to fight off a huge carrier
airstrike without any means of hitting back. The suggested raids against Guam and Rota were not entirely sensible because the operations of the previous week had nearly exhausted the aerial ordnance suitable to such a mission (contact-fused land bombs); what was left in ample supply were armor-piercing bombs designed to punch holes in ships. Mitscher launched his search, but he had no expectation of finding enemy ships within the limited radius of his planes. They did not, although in a few instances the American scouts brushed elbows with their Japanese counterparts at or near the limit of their outbound flights. An Aichi reconnaissance floatplane (“Jake”) was shot down at the end of one of these searches. Afternoon patrols (on bearings between 195 degrees and 315 degrees to a distance of 325 miles) were also negative. Ozawa was plainly keeping the Americans at arm's length. The pattern fit Mitscher's expectations: Ozawa would launch planes at dawn on the nineteenth while keeping his flight decks carefully beyond the range of counterstrikes.

Mitscher respected Spruance, and was not inclined to pester his commander for a different decision. The task group commanders and their air staffs were freer in disparaging their blackshoe chief and his overcautious attitude. As Jocko Clark returned from his northern foray that morning, he was flabbergasted to learn that Spruance had chained Task Force 58 to the Saipan beachhead. The end-run scenario was a chimera, he insisted—even from a position 250 miles farther west, the task force could have readily covered Saipan “with our radar, our search planes, and our submarines keeping us informed of the movements of the enemy fleet.”
²⁸
Like most of the carrier admirals, Clark chalked up Spruance's decision to the characteristic blackshoe officer's ignorance of “the full capabilities of the fast carriers.”
²⁹
Ted Sherman, the veteran carrier admiral, wrote that Spruance was a career surface naval warrior who “still was thinking in terms of a surface action. . . . There were no ‘ends' in aerial warfare.”
³⁰

Certainly Spruance chose conservative tactics in Operation
FORAGER
. He admitted it at the time and never regretted it afterward. He knew Nimitz's mind and priorities better than any other man in the fleet. His orders were to cover the beachhead and transport fleet at all costs. Kelly Turner had advised that he could not withdraw the transports on June 18 and 19 without placing the troops ashore in jeopardy. Seventy thousand Americans were on Saipan, fighting an unexpectedly bloody campaign—1,500
men had already been killed and 4,000 wounded, and those figures were expanding rapidly. Holland Smith had observed that the presence of a powerful fleet offshore weighed heavily in the morale of the contending forces. His soldiers and marines relied on a continual flow of supplies, reinforcements, and ammunition over the beachhead. He needed to evacuate his growing numbers of wounded. Japanese air attacks had fallen on the fleet offshore every evening, at or shortly after dusk. Smith and Turner knew and accepted that Task Force 58 must contend with the enemy fleet, but they had every right to expect that the fleet would guard their precarious sea-to-land operation against disagreeable surprises from any quarter. The navy had offered solemn commitments to the army and marines; issues of interservice unity were at stake.

As night fell on June 18, a dispatch from Pearl Harbor brought news that a radio transmission had been picked up in the enemy's presumed vicinity. (Ozawa had broken radio silence to make contact with airbases in the Marianas.) Direction-finding (DF) devices had fixed the point of origin in a zone 355 miles west-southwest of the American fleet. That location was consistent with the contact provided by the
Cavalla
earlier in the day. At Flag Plot on the
Lexington
, it seemed to settle the issue, or at least added enough evidence to merit an aggressive move to engage the enemy. At about 11:30 p.m., Mitscher made his last appeal. By TBS to the
Indianapolis
, he informed Spruance that he intended to turn west at 1:30 a.m., in order to put Task Force 58 in a position to launch airstrikes against Ozawa the following dawn. That would provide space for the carriers to head east throughout June 19, keeping bows pointed into the wind for continuous flight operations.

The proposal languished for an hour as Spruance considered the situation and discussed it with Moore and his other staff officers. The waters were further muddied by a partially jammed transmission from the submarine
Stingray
, radioed from a location farther south and east. It might have been a contact report that had been jammed by a flanking force underway for the dreaded end run on Saipan. Moreover, Spruance reasoned, the DF fix was an approximation and might be off by a considerable distance. It might have been sent by any Japanese ship, not necessarily the main body; it might be a ruse, transmitted by a lone destroyer sent away for just that purpose. It proved nothing. Spruance replied at 12:30 p.m.: “Change
proposed does not appear advisable. . . . End run by other carrier groups remains possibility and should not be overlooked.”
³¹
As his fleet diary put it, somewhat defensively, “It was of highest importance that our troops and transport forces on and in the vicinity of Saipan be protected and a circling movement by enemy fast forces be guarded against.”
³²

Alfred Thayer Mahan had lectured that a naval commander with a clear advantage must pursue, attack, and destroy the enemy, and “nothing can excuse his losing a point which by exertion he might have scored.”
³³
To a colleague who remarked that the British had done “well enough” in a recent battle, Horatio Nelson had famously replied, “If ten ships out of eleven were taken, I would never call it well enough, if we were able to get at the eleventh.”
³⁴
Throughout the (admittedly brief) history of carrier warfare, the cardinal rule had been to strike first. Spruance's decision to jerk the leash, against which Task Force 58 was straining so fervently, amounted to a coldly considered choice to allow Ozawa to strike the first blow. It might even let Ozawa strike the
only
blow, because there was no assurance that Task Force 58 would get far enough west to launch a counterstrike. Spruance's decision was unprecedented, and it seemed to defy elementary doctrine. The aviators were incredulous. Had the victor of Midway lost his mind, or merely his nerve?