The Battle of Midway (18 page)

Worse was to come. The two heavy cruisers Layton had sent back toward Addu Atoll were en route there on April 6 when a Japanese search plane found them and radioed their location back to the Kid
ō
Butai. Within twenty minutes, Nagumo had eighty-eight planes in the air winging their way toward the reported coordinates.
¹⁰

The cruisers never had a chance. Like the
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
the previous December, they had no air cover and were therefore sitting ducks. Gun crews on the cruisers threw up all the antiaircraft fire they could muster, and the ships twisted and turned in the hope of confusing the dive-bombers, but with so many planes attacking—and from different directions at that—it was hopeless. The
Dorsetshire
went down first. Hit by ten bombs and concussed by several near misses, she sank in minutes. The
Cornwall
, hit by nine bombs, followed her a few minutes later. Once again, aircraft had proved their dominance over surface warships.
¹¹

The Kid
ō
Butai was not finished. Three days later, on April 9, the Japanese struck again, this time at the British naval base at Trincomalee on Ceylon’s east coast. Again, the British put up all the planes they had—twenty-three altogether, including seventeen Hurricane fighters—but they were brushed aside or sent spinning toward the sea in flames by the Zeros. The British also sent nine land-based Blenheim bombers to attack the Japanese carriers. Five were shot down over the target by the patrolling Zeros; the others limped back with serious damage. None scored a hit.

As he had at Colombo, Layton sent most of his ships to sea to get them out of the way. The small aircraft carrier
Hermes
, with an escort of
one destroyer, steamed southward along the coast. The Japanese found her nonetheless, and Nagumo sent ninety planes to the attack. The Val dive-bombers blanketed her with bombs, and the
Hermes
virtually disappeared under a rainstorm of hits and near misses. Within ten minutes, she and her escorting destroyer were dead in the water and sinking. After that, Somerville decided to send part of his force to Kenya on the east coast of Africa and took the rest, including the two carriers, north to Bombay, effectively surrendering the eastern Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal to the Japanese. “I am convinced,” he wrote, “that it is not good policy to take excessive chances with the Eastern Fleet for the sake of Ceylon.” Having secured Japan’s southern flank, Nagumo turned the Kid
ō
Butai back toward the Pacific.
¹²

Even as the big carriers and their escorts steamed through the Straits of Malacca back into the South China Sea, the Japanese high command feuded over their next assignment. One option was to complete the isolation of Australia by seizing the islands of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Samoa—exactly what Ernie King and Franklin Roosevelt feared they would do. Even Japanese Army leaders supported these limited moves because they required fewer troops than the proposed alternatives.

Another claimant on the Kid
ō
Butai was Vice Admiral Inoue Shigeyoshi, commander of the South Seas Force. Inoue until recently had been head of the Naval Aviation Division, and he was a ferocious advocate of air power, especially land-based air. For most of his career, he had insisted that airplanes had made much of the Navy obsolete. “The days of the battleship are gone,” he had declared in 1937. “It has been replaced by the aircraft.” Inoue even argued that the effectiveness of long-range land-based airplanes made carriers obsolete. If that were not sufficiently heretical, he had declared in January of 1941 that it was “impossible … for Japan to defeat America,” and that the United States could “wipe out Japanese forces.” After that bit of apostasy, he was dispatched to the South Seas command, with his headquarters on the isolated island of Truk in the Carolines. In part, his reassignment was an aspect of the reshuffling of commands in anticipation of war, but in addition, like Yamamoto, he was banished to sea duty for his unwelcome ideas and his unwillingness to keep quiet about them.
¹³

It was Inoue’s Fourth Fleet, with support from the Kid
ō
Butai, that had seized Rabaul back in January. He had been shocked on February 20 when only two of the seventeen bombers he had sent out against Wilson Brown’s
Lexington
task force had returned. After all, the ability of land-based aircraft to defend the perimeter of the empire was at the heart of his strategic vision and the foundation of Japan’s entire defensive strategy. Inoue’s shock turned to alarm after the Allied raid on Lae and Salamaua left him without enough shipping to continue the campaign. He notified both the Naval General Staff (Nagano) and Combined Fleet (Yamamoto) that before he advanced any further, he would need carrier support. He requested two carriers, but, given that the Kid
ō
Butai was still in the Indian Ocean when he submitted this request, he declared that he would settle for the damaged
Kaga
, then undergoing repairs in Sasebo.
¹⁴

Another demand on the Kid
ō
Butai soon arose in connection with a plan to occupy at least some of the Aleutians, the long chain of frozen rocky islands that trailed out from Alaska across much of the North Pacific. The westernmost of those islands was within theoretical bombing range of the northernmost of Japan’s home islands; the occupation of at least some of them would serve as an early-warning system in Japan’s defensive perimeter and also prevent the Americans from using them to stage air raids against the homeland. Thus by the end of March, even before the Kid
ō
Butai had returned from the Indian Ocean, Japan’s naval leaders were considering two separate initiatives that would require its participation: one to break communications between Hawaii and Australia by seizing Port Moresby, the Australian base on the south coast of New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands, followed by an attack on Fiji and Samoa; and another to extend the defensive perimeter of the empire and protect Japan’s northern flank by seizing the westernmost of the Aleutian Islands.
¹⁵

Complicated as this was, it would soon get much more so, for none of this took Yamamoto into account. The apparent success of his calculated gamble at Pearl Harbor and the string of naval victories that followed had added greatly to his prestige and had given him unprecedented informal authority in crafting Japanese strategy for the “Second Operational Phase.” Once the Kid
ō
Butai returned from the Indian Ocean, Yamamoto knew exactly what he wanted to do with it, and it did not involve Australia, New Guinea, or the Aleutians. He wanted to finish the job that Nagumo had left uncompleted at Pearl Harbor.

Even before the Americans began their series of carrier-based raids on Japanese bases in the Marshall Islands and elsewhere, Yamamoto had concluded that it was essential to eliminate the danger of such raids by finding and sinking the American flattops. Though the Japanese public had celebrated Pearl Harbor as a great victory, Yamamoto himself, as noted above, had been hugely disappointed that Nagumo had not remained in the area long enough to wreck the base or to find and sink the American carriers. Nagumo had seen the American battle fleet as his most important target, and once that had been dispensed with he had broken off the raid. At the time, the young and aggressive commander of the Second Carrier Division, Rear Admiral Yamaguchi Tamon, blinkered Nagumo a signal that he had “completed preparations” for another attack, a not-so-subtle hint that there was more work to be done. But Nagumo was immune to such suggestions. Once he had recovered his airplanes, he turned the Kid
ō
Butai around and headed for home. Had he launched a third strike, he might have destroyed the repair facilities on Oahu and especially the oil tank farm, which would have crippled the Americans far more than the loss of their battle fleet.
¹⁶

Since then, the consequences of having missed the carriers had been vividly demonstrated by American raids on the Marshalls, Wake, Lae/Salamaua, and elsewhere. In addition, Yamamoto was haunted by the thought that so long as the American carriers roamed the Pacific, there was always a chance, however remote, that they might find a way to launch a raid against the Japanese homeland. His chief of staff confided to his diary that protecting Tokyo from air raids was “the most important thing to be borne in mind.” Halsey’s raid on Marcus Island, only 999 nautical miles from Tokyo, was a reminder that such a catastrophic event was not impossible. As early as January of 1941, Yamamoto had expressed the fear that “we cannot rule out the possibility that the enemy would dare to launch an attack upon our homeland to burn our capital city and other cities.” He feared that the Americans might strike while the Kid
ō
Butai was still in the
Indian Ocean, and as a precaution he ordered the establishment of a picket line of small vessels seven hundred miles off the Japanese coast, well beyond the maximum range of American carrier bombers. However, there was always a chance that one or more American carriers might sneak past those pickets and find a way to launch. Since the protection of the homeland—and especially protecting the life and safety of the emperor—was the Navy’s first mission, such a possibility was unacceptable.
¹⁷

Consequently, even before the Kid
ō
Butai returned from its initial strike at Pearl Harbor, Yamamoto had already begun to think about ways to complete what Nagumo had left unfinished. He ordered his chief of staff, Ugaki Matome, to sketch out a plan for an invasion of Hawaii as a way of provoking a climactic sea battle that would result in the destruction of the American carriers. Ugaki spent four days in mid-January battling a terrible toothache while he outlined an operational plan to “mobilize all available strength to invade Hawaii while attempting to destroy the enemy fleet in a decisive battle.” Such plans were completely unrealistic, however, because the Japanese simply did not have the resources to invade Hawaii and lacked the sealift capability to keep it supplied even if they could take it. Both the Naval General Staff and the Army made it clear that such an operation was out of the question. In spite of that, Yamamoto continued to hope that he could contrive a way to lure the American carrier force out to its destruction. He was aware that Nagano and the General Staff, and the Army, too, opposed his plan for a decisive confrontation in the central Pacific, but to Yamamoto that only made the challenge of getting his way more appealing. As strategically important as it was to get the American carriers, it was almost as important to outwit his domestic rivals within the Japanese military hierarchy.
¹⁸

The one constant in all of these plans was the Kid
ō
Butai. Carriers would be needed to spearhead the invasion of Fiji and Samoa, and also for the Aleutian initiative, and now Inoue was calling for at least some portion of the Kid
ō
Butai for the assault on Port Moresby as well. Yamamoto found all these requests annoying and wrongheaded. Just as Chester Nimitz complained to Ernie King that carriers should be used offensively, not defensively, Yamamoto wanted to use his carriers to attack and destroy their
American counterparts, not to protect transports in invasion fleets. His view was that once the American carriers were out of the picture, future Japanese invasion groups could roam the western Pacific at will. To achieve this end, it would be necessary to threaten an asset so important that the Americans would feel compelled to commit most or even all of their carriers to defend it. Given Ernie King’s concern for the security of Fiji and Samoa, a Japanese thrust at those islands might provoke the reaction Yamamoto sought. Yamamoto, however, did not think them important enough to ensure a decisive confrontation. He sought an objective close to the Americans’ principal base at Pearl Harbor. Yamamoto continued to hope that operations in the central Pacific could somehow lead to the occupation of Hawaii, which could then be used as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the Americans. These considerations led him to examine the Hawaiian archipelago carefully. Since neither the Army nor the General Staff would support an invasion of Hawaii, he decided to target the small two-island atoll of Midway.
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