The Battle of Midway (13 page)

Nimitz perforce complied, but when King also ordered him to send a squadron of patrol planes to Australia, Nimitz pushed back. He protested that the reduction of aircraft in Hawaii left it “dangerously weak,” and he reminded King of the central importance of Hawaii to the Allied cause. Instead of rebuking Nimitz for his temerity, King replied that the transfer was isolated and temporary; he assured Nimitz that he fully understood the “paramount importance” of Hawaii. Over the next several months, however, there would be a subtle but steady push and pull between King and Nimitz about how, and especially where, to employ the three carrier task forces in the Pacific.
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By January 23 the American reinforcements had been safely landed at Samoa, and the
Enterprise
and
Yorktown
were freed up to operate against Japanese targets. Nimitz ordered Halsey to strike Japanese bases in the Marshall and Gilbert Islands. King not only approved, he urged that the strikes “be driven home” and suggested that Wilson Brown’s
Lexington
force should also raid Wake Island a few days afterward. His notion was that when Halsey struck at the Marshalls, the Japanese would pull coverage
away from Wake, and Brown could exploit that. Though some members of Nimitz’s staff worried about sending all three carriers out simultaneously, Nimitz overruled them. For all his placid demeanor, Nimitz was perfectly willing to act boldly, taking what more conservative officers considered significant risks in order to regain the initiative. In this first American counterattack since Pearl Harbor, a robust offensive was crucial to improving morale both at home and in the fleet. As it happened, Brown’s raid on Wake had to be scrubbed after a Japanese submarine sank the oiler
Neches
, which left Brown with barely enough fuel to get to Wake and back. Deciding that there was too small a margin of error, Nimitz recalled him. He was willing to act boldly, but he also knew the difference between boldness and foolishness.
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No one was sure how extensive, or well protected, the Japanese bases in the Marshalls were. The former German colony had been granted to the Japanese as a mandate by the League of Nations after the First World War, and since then few Westerners had been allowed to visit them, much less prepare detailed charts. For some of those islands, the most recent charts available to the Americans had been made by Charles Wilkes, who had led the first U.S. Navy exploration expedition of the Pacific in 1840. King and Nimitz assumed that behind this veil of secrecy the Japanese had built up substantial defenses in the Marshall Islands. The American raid was therefore a shot in the dark.
⁴

Fletcher’s
Yorktown
group made a fast run in toward the target, crossing over the international date line on January 29 and skipping at once to the 31st. Shortly before 6:00 a.m. on February 1, Fletcher turned the
Yorktown
into the wind to launch. The weather was terrible. Squalls surrounded the task force, and flashes of lightning could be seen on the western horizon in the direction of the principal target at Jaluit Atoll. The first planes spotted for launch were four Wildcat fighters that would act as combat air patrol (CAP) and protect the task force during the raid. Fletcher planned to keep the rest of his fighters aboard so he could rotate the CAP, and to act as a reserve in case of a Japanese counterattack.
⁵

After the fighters were airborne,
Yorktown
launched seventeen Dauntless dive-bombers and eleven Devastator torpedo planes (armed with
bombs for this mission), all of them under Commander Curtis Smiley. These planes were to strike the Japanese seaplane base at Jaluit, which was some 140 miles away. It was dawn by now, but the sky remained dark and filled with heavy clouds. The visibility was so poor that the pilots had difficulty finding one another over the task force. Smiley never did manage to gather all his planes into one group, and some of the pilots ended up flying off toward Jaluit on their own. While en route there, the Americans encountered a powerful thunderstorm with “sheet lightning and torrential rains” that reduced visibility to near zero. They pressed on nonetheless and dropped their bombs on or near the assigned target. Under these conditions it was hard to know with certainty whether they hit anything. They bombed a radio tower and strafed two small vessels in the lagoon. The advertised “seaplane base” turned out to be little more than a corrugated-tin hut. Several pilots, despairing of finding a worthy target, simply jettisoned their bombs.
⁶

After that first group flew off toward Jaluit, Fletcher ordered the launch of fourteen more dive-bombers: nine for a strike on Makin, 120 miles to the south, and five more for Mili, forty miles to the north, about which virtually nothing was known. The weather was better over Makin than Jaluit, but the only targets of any value there were a minelayer and two large seaplanes, both of which were destroyed. It was all somewhat anti-climactic after the weeks of anticipation. At Mili the disappointment was even greater. It was the largest island in the Mili Atoll, and later in the war the Japanese would build an airstrip there and turn it into a major base, but in February of 1942 it was virtually unoccupied. Lacking targets worthy of their bombs, the
Yorktown
pilots did what they could, shooting up anything that looked worthwhile. For the most part, however, it was a wild goose chase.
⁷

Then the attack planes had to go back through that appalling weather to find the task force. By then, the storm had caught up with the
Yorktown
. Winds gusted up to 50 knots, and the carrier pitched and rolled so wildly that Captain Buckmaster called back the circling Wildcats of the CAP. The attack pilots had to execute a landing under extremely perilous conditions and while low on fuel. When Ensign Tom Ellison landed his Dauntless, there was not enough fuel left in his tank to taxi. Several pilots didn’t make it back at all and had to ditch in the water. Fletcher ordered four destroyers to search for them, but in that storm-tossed sea not all the pilots could be recovered. After two hours, Fletcher broke radio silence to recall the destroyers, reformed his task force, and retired to the northeast. Though he had initially planned a second strike, the dearth of targets and the worsening weather convinced him to scrap it.
⁸

For the fighter pilots on the
Yorktown
, the highlight of the whole raid was the downing of a big Kawanishi flying boat (“Emily”) that had been hovering near the task force and reporting its position. The Wildcat pilots chased the giant four-engine plane from one patch of clouds to another, riddling it with .50-caliber bullets. When a pilot shot off its tail section, the exultant pilot radioed: “We just shot his goddamned ass off!” Nonetheless, there was no disguising the fact that overall the
Yorktown
’s initial raid had been largely unproductive.
⁹

Halsey’s
Enterprise
group, by contrast, had far better luck, and Halsey’s natural bellicosity allowed him to take full advantage of it. The first sign that things might be going his way came the day before the strike, when a Japanese scout plane, identified on radar, flew past without spotting the task force. Ever the showman, Halsey composed a sarcastic message thanking the pilot for failing to see him, had it translated into Japanese, ran off copies on the ship’s mimeo machine, and gave the copies to his pilots to drop along with their bombs. It was the wartime version of a playground taunt, and risky, too, since it could have revealed to the Japanese the effectiveness of American radar.

Nimitz had ordered Halsey to attack Japanese bases at Wotje and Maloelap in the Marshall Islands, but as Halsey moved toward the targets the skipper of the American submarine
Dolphin
reported that the defenses at the main Japanese base at Kwajalein were less extensive than previously believed, and, pressed by his eccentric and pugnacious chief of staff, Commander Miles Browning, Halsey added Kwajalein to the target list.

In the predawn darkness, twenty minutes ahead of Fletcher and some three hundred miles to the northwest, the
Enterprise
turned into the wind
and increased speed to 30 knots. As on the
Yorktown
, the first planes to launch that morning were six Wildcats, to serve as CAP. Then came thirty-six Dauntless dive-bombers of VS-6 and VB-6 under Commander Howard “Brigham” Young. Their principal target was the pair of islands called Roi and Namur at the north end of Kwajalein Atoll.

The weather was better for the
Enterprise
pilots, but it was still pitch dark at 4:34 a.m. when the first planes took off. Carrier launches are dangerous under any circumstances with each plane having a full fuel tank and carrying 700 pounds of bombs, and they are particularly dangerous in the dark. To keep the
Enterprise
concealed from prowling Japanese submarines, only a few hooded lights offered a dim and ghostly illumination of the flight deck as the pilots warmed up their engines. Taking off in such circumstances was like accelerating through a tunnel into black oblivion. One recalled that it was “like being inside a black felt hat,” and most of the pilots felt a “touch of vertigo” as they launched into the darkness.
¹⁰

After takeoff, the bombers had to form up over the task force, which meant finding the other planes in the strike group as they all circled overhead in the dark. The planes, too, were blacked out except for a single white taillight. Finding their proper position in the formation was like groping blindfolded at 130 knots. Once all the Dauntless bombers were in the air, nine heavy Devastator torpedo bombers took off. Like the Devastators launched from
Yorktown
, they carried bombs rather than torpedoes. Lieutenant Commander Eugene Lindsey led this contingent, slotted for the attack on Kwajalein Island, some forty miles south of Roi-Namur and over 150 miles away. It took more than twenty minutes before the planes assembled into a formation that resembled a series of stacked Vs. Then the whole group headed off toward Kwajalein Atoll.
¹¹

As the attack planes flew off to the west, Halsey brought up the twelve remaining Wildcats of VF-6 from the hangar deck. Instead of keeping them so he could rotate his CAP, as Fletcher did, or sending them off as protection for the attack planes, he planned to use them offensively. Deck crews had attached 100-pound bombs under each wing, and Halsey sent the fighters off to attack the nearby islands of Wotje and Maloelap. Lieutenant Commander Wade McClusky led six Wildcats against nearby Wotje, and
Lieutenant Jim Gray led six more against Maloelap. During the launch, one of the pilots in Gray’s section lost his bearings in the dark, and instead of lifting off, his plane slid sideways into the sea. The pilot was rescued, but it left Gray with only five airplanes.
¹²

Like the
Yorktown
force that targeted Mili Island, McClusky’s fighters found little that was worthy of their ordnance at Wotje. At Maloelap, by contrast, the five pilots of Gray’s section found much more than they had bargained for. On the small island of Taroa, part of Maloelap Atoll, the Japanese had built a new concrete airfield. Constructed by prisoner labor over two years, it was large enough to host two dozen fighters and bombers, many of which were parked in rows along the apron, and several of which were at that moment taking off to defend the airstrip. There were, in fact, fifteen Japanese fighters at Taroa—older models than the vaunted Zero—and nine twin-engine bombers. To Gray it seemed like there were “thirty or forty” planes in sight.
¹³