A World at Arms (67 page)

As the situation in the Philippines deteriorated, it became obvious that aid could not be sent there in substantial quantities; instead the United States decided to send an army division (the 41st) to Australia on February 14, and, a week later, MacArthur was ordered there as well to take charge of the forces being built Up.
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Primarily American planes defended northern Australia against a whole series of Japanese air raids concentrating on Darwin, beginning in February 1942 and continuing into 1944.
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In early 1942, moreover, the United States government was being forced by circumstances to alter its general plans in two other ways. First, it became clear that a vastly greater shipping construction program would be necessary: there was no point in building up a huge army if it could not be sent out and supplied, and from here on, the shipping issue more and more obviously determined the size of America’s forces.
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Secondly, reinforced by Churchill’s insistence, the United States sent even more army units to Australia, thus postponing any possibility of “Gymnast,” the intended landing in French Northwest Africa.
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The shift, including the dispatch of a second division, necessarily had repercussions on the planned buildup in Great Britain of forces for operations in Europe, thus derogating temporarily from the Europe First strategy. It was a step taken in part at the urging of the British, who were later inclined to complain about it, but it was received with enthusiasm in Australia and enabled the London government to get Canberra to leave one Australian division in the Middle East.
^h
The shift also left Roosevelt all the more determined that
something
would have to be done in Europe in 1942.

The beginning of a real buildup of American ground and air forces in the South Pacific under a famous commander with great influence in Washington combined with a series of United States navy operations to remind Tokyo that the war in that region was not yet over. A series of raids in February and early March 1942 by American navy carrier task forces on Japanese and Japanese-conquered islands in the South Pacific,
and on the landing forces off New Guinea showed the Japanese that American naval power was still very active. These operations, furthermore, beyond inflicting some losses on the Japanese, provided the American ships and planes with very important practice in the handling of carriers and their planes.
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The need for both a further action in the south and for a way to bring the American navy to battle seemed clear to the Japanese.

These calculations were reinforced dramatically by the air raid on Tokyo. Roosevelt had been calling for a raid right after Pearl Harbor, a view combining morale considerations with a belief in the role of air power against Japan.
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The technical problem of flying to Japan from a carrier which was itself out of the range of Japanese land-based planes was solved by the device of using land-based B-25s to fly off the carrier
Hornet
and on to China rather than back to the carrier (on which such planes could not have landed anyway). Although the American task force was spotted by Japanese picket boats and had to send its sixteen planes off at a greater distance than planned, the project worked. The Japanese were completely surprised and did not shoot down a single one of the planes, which landed in China or crashed on running out of gas, one landing in the Soviet Union where its crew was interned.
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There was little physical damage, but the morale uplift of the raid, led by then Colonel James Doolittle, for the Allies was great. The morale blow to the Japanese was even greater. The sacred precincts of the homeland had been violated and the possibility of future violations of that kind made all too obvious. The murder of several of the American fliers who were captured and the slaughter of Chinese civilians who had helped others escape could not solve the basic problem; a new offensive to build a shield for Japan’s home waters was essential and that meant an assault on Midway.
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The pressure of time imposed by the need to strike before the Americans added new forces to those already deployed in the Pacific now finally produced agreement on a firm schedule for a series of Japanese operations. These would be, first, an attack to seize Port Moresby and the seaplane base at Tulagi in the Solomons in May; and because of the recent appearance of American carriers in the South Pacific, this operation would have to be supported by a carrier division of two aircraft carriers. Second, in early June would come the invasion of Midway to force the United States navy into battle, a project to be accompanied by a simultaneous diversionary attack on the Aleutian Islands off Alaska in the far north. In July, with the United States fleet disposed of, there would follow a Japanese attack on Fiji, Samoa, and New Caledonia.
Assaults on Australia were to follow and there could still be an invasion of Hawaii.

In facing these Japanese threats the Americans had one resource of great value and another they hoped for but did not get. The resource they had was an increasing ability to read the Japanese naval code as a result of cryptographic work done at Pearl Harbor, Washington, the Philippines (moved to Australia), and Singapore (moved to Ceylon). Unlike the diplomatic machine code which had been broken earlier, the main naval code was just beginning to be deciphered.
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The increased Japanese naval radio traffic, generated by the fleet units sent out in April 1942 to try to catch the American carrier group which had launched the Tokyo air raid, provided much new material for the American and British cryptographers, an important by-product of that raid.
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The knowledge gained about Japanese plans and dispositions from cryptanalytic intelligence was essential to the proper disposition of the American navy at both Coral Sea and Midway; in turn the American naval leaders learned from this experience how valuable such intelligence could be, devoted more men and resources to it, and came to pay the most careful attention to their intelligence officers.
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Not so successful, with opposite long-term implications, was the American effort to increase carrier strength between the Coral Sea and Midway battles. With the resources in the Pacific strained to the limit while two American carriers were assisting the British in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, the Commander-in-Chief of the American fleet, Admiral Ernest J. King, on May 18 asked the British to provide one of the three British carriers then operating off the African coast for the Pacific. He was promptly turned down.
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This was a serious error in spite of the concern over the Indian Ocean which motivated the refusal. King had spent much of the preceding year, at a time when the United States was still neutral, leading American warships in their operations in the Atlantic assisting Britain in its hour of peril. He never forgave the British their refusal to help in the Pacific when the situation was reversed and accepted British fleet units in the Pacific in 1944–45 only because of the insistence of President Roosevelt. Aside from a few units of the Australian navy, the Americans faced the Imperial Japanese navy in the great crisis of the Pacific War by themselves.

The Japanese were determined to seize Port Moresby to protect their southern perimeter, to control the straits between New Guinea and Australia, to threaten Australia, and, if the army ever changed its mind, to provide a base for invading that continent. The Americans, on the other hand, were equally determined to assist the Australians in holding
it as an essential outpost for the defense of Australia and an equally essential springboard for any counter-attacks northwards.
ⁱ
The Japanese were therefore planning to seize it by seaborne landing, with a carrier group of two large and one light carrier providing air support. The idea that this small force could obtain control of the air over Port Moresby and shield the landings at Tulagi in the Solomons as well as near Port Moresby was ridiculous – six carriers had hit Pearl Harbor, four had been used to cover the seizure of Rabaul, and five for the attack on Ceylon. But the insistence of Yamamoto on his strike at Midway prevented the allocation of adequate forces to the Port Moresby attack.

It was between these carriers and their screening units on the one hand and the two American carriers
Yorktown
and
Lexington,
with their screens on the other, that the Battle of the Coral Sea was fought on May 3–8, 1942. The Japanese landing on Tulagi in the Solomons to seize a base there was carried out on May 3; that scheduled for Port Moresby on May 10 would never take place. After attacking the Japanese ships covering the Tulagi landing and destroying the reconnaissance planes there, the American carriers in a series of air strikes fought the Japanese carriers on May 7 and 8. In a naval battle carried out at a great distance and for this reason unlike any prior naval engagement, the airplanes sought out the ships of the other side without the ships themselves ever firing directly on each other as had been characteristic of all prior fighting at sea. The American planes sank the light carrier
Shoho
(12,000 tons) while losing the fleet carrier
Lexington.
The
Yorktown
and the Japanese fleet carrier
Shokaku
were damaged while the other Japanese fleet carrier, the
Zuikaku,
lost planes but was not damaged. The Japanese thereupon abandoned the idea of a landing at Port Moresby and decided to try to take it by an advance overland, a campaign reviewed later in this chapter. But the inter-action between the Coral Sea Battle and that at Midway as well as the latter battle itself must be reviewed first.
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In the first great carrier battle, the tactical advantage was clearly with the Japanese who had, in effect, traded a light carrier for one of the few American fleet carriers. But the strategic advantage was all with the Americans. The Japanese advance had been halted for the first time. The landings to seize Port Moresby had been called off and the follow-up operation to seize Nauru and Ocean Islands (between the Solomons and the Gilberts) also had to be postponed for months. The Japanese
pretended in public and to their German allies that they had won a great victory,
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and at first they may themselves have believed at least some of the tales of American battleships and aircraft carriers sunk in this battle, but the reality was very different. As the projected attack on Midway had prevented an adequate allotment of Japanese forces to the Port Moresby operation, so, reciprocally, the Port Moresby operation reduced the Japanese strength available for Midway.

The damaged
Shokaku,
which could neither launch nor recover planes, had to be returned to home base for repairs and could not return to service until July.
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The
Zuikaku,
though not damaged, had lost a larger proportion of its planes, needed to be refitted after its prior actions, and therefore was also not immediately available for the central Pacific project. The Japanese navy simply did not have the replacement aircraft and crews available. The Americans, on the other hand, recalled the damaged
Yorktown
to Pearl Harbor and made minimum essential provisional repairs on it in three days so that it could fight again. As a result, the United States navy would be able to meet the four carriers of the Japanese with three of its own. Time pressures, over-confidence, and, as will become apparent, a ridiculous plan, hampered Yamamoto at the same time as desperate measures, excellent intelligence, and good judgement helped the Americans.

The detailed plans worked out in Yamamoto’s Combined Fleet Headquarters to implement the project he had insisted upon involved a dispersion of effort to an extraordinary extent. Though originally counting on the two fleet carriers sent to support the operation against Port Moresby, the Japanese still were neither going to concentrate their remaining eight carriers on the Midway attack nor would they wait for the undamaged
Zuikaku
to be ready to participate. Instead, the original time schedule would be adhered to and four carriers were diverted to other missions. Two carriers were to provide air support for a simultaneous assault on Alaska, focusing on the air base at Dutch Harbor and also seizing two of the western Aleutians.

This strange project was designed with several aims. It would provide a diversion to confuse the Americans; because of its assault on American territory it might coax the American navy into battle; and finally it would provide bases for blocking any American attacks on the Kuriles and the Japanese home islands from Alaska. It ended up doing none of these things, in part because the Americans knew from their code-breaking what was coming – although Admiral Robert A. Theobald, the naval commander, refused to believe that the Japanese would do anything so silly – andthere were no plans for an American northern assault on Japan. The operation did mean that, at the crucial battle, the Japanese
not only did not have the superiority in carrier air that they might have had but that two carriers were too far away to return in time to the main Japanese striking force.

Furthermore, two light carriers, the
Hosho
and
Zuiho,
were also abstracted from the main attack and kept behind in the framework of the support force of battleships and cruisers which would theoretically participate in any main fleet action which might occur (presumably against battleships Yamamoto thought he had sunk at Pearl Harbor). Of the nine carriers potentially available to Yamamoto therefore, the central part of his operational plan involved only four, a force with no margin for the hazards of war. It also deserves to be noted that the four carriers could not be brought back to full strength in planes because there were not enough replacements for the losses incurred to date and many of the replacement pilots actually allocated were not fully trained.
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The great advantage with which the Japanese had begun on December 7, 1941, was dwindling. Nevertheless, the Japanese were confident that Midway Island could be neutralized by carrier strikes and then seized with the American fleet destroyed soon after. All questions raised within the naval staffs were brushed aside; Japanese experience and superiority would suffice to cope with all contingencies.