The Battle of Midway (21 page)

Lieutenant “Pete” Mitscher at the controls of an early seaplane in Pensacola, Florida. Becoming a pilot completely changed the trajectory of Mitscher’s naval career. (U.S. Naval Institute)

To his great disgust, Mitscher did not see any action during World War I. Instead, his big break came after the war, in 1919, when he was assigned to join the Navy team that attempted the first transatlantic crossing by air. Rather than make the flight in a single hop, the plan was to fly huge seaplanes—essentially flying boats, designed by Glenn Curtiss—from the American east coast to the Azores and then on to Europe. Mitscher was a backup pilot on the NC-1 (N for Navy; C for Curtiss). Though only one of the three planes (not Mitscher’s) managed to complete the trip, the exploit brought the Navy plenty of positive publicity, and Mitscher and everyone else involved received the Navy Cross.
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Mitscher’s early involvement in naval aviation proved the making of him. In 1925, President Coolidge asked his friend Dwight Morrow to head a board to evaluate the potential of aviation for the services.
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Called to testify before the Morrow Board, Mitscher declared that it was entirely inappropriate for black shoe officers to have management of pilots and airplanes. He asserted that only “experienced aviation men should have administration of the training of aviation personnel and the detail of aviation personnel.” While this was entirely logical and genuinely reflected Mitscher’s views, it also helped ensure that those who had managed to get into the game early would have the first claim on supervisory positions when naval aviation became a major component of the fleet.
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Mitscher wrote privately that it was “the great ambition of [his] life” to get on board “an aviation ship,” which he finally did in 1926. A year later he was the air boss on the new
Saratoga
. Two years after that he was the exec on the
Lexington
. He was not interested in grand strategy and never attended a war college. A fellow officer described him as “a person who did not enjoy the long process of planning, of thinking too much about logistics.”
He just wanted to fly, and he was good at it. One problem was that his fair skin made the outdoors into a hostile environment. He burned so easily that despite wearing a specially designed long-billed baseball cap, his nose was always peeling. Eventually his sun-ravaged skin gave him the look of a withered gnome. He remained both stubborn and temperamental, though he no longer got into fistfights. He also remained taciturn, and when he did speak it was in a voice so low that others were compelled to lean in close to hear him. A fellow officer recalled that he was “very, very quiet and seldom said much,” and another that “he never used five words if one would do.” Despite his low voice, he disliked having to repeat things and fired a staff officer who asked him to repeat himself once too often. By 1938 Mitscher had become a Navy captain and the assistant chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics. Then in May of 1941 he was selected as the prospective commanding officer of the new-construction
Hornet
. Many of his Academy classmates were astonished.
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As captain of the
Hornet
, Mitscher no longer flew airplanes, and he missed it. He remained reticent, seldom telling jokes or engaging in light banter. He spent hours in his cabin chain-smoking and reading paperback detective novels. “He would go through a novel in nothing flat,” a shipmate recalled. Despite that, Mitscher exuded an air of confidence and authority, especially when it came to air operations. He realized that he had a green crew—fully 75 percent of the men on board the
Hornet
were fresh from boot camp or cadet training—and he patiently tried to bring them up to the mark. The 18-year-old helmsman on the
Hornet
thought the soft-spoken skipper “gave the impression of being a kind, gentle, and highly intelligent person.” But Mitscher’s patience was often tested, especially when it came to air operations, and he showed occasional flashes of anger, particularly toward his young pilots. During the
Hornet’s
shakedown cruise, while watching flight operations from the open bridge wing, he saw the landing signal officer wave off Ensign Roy Gee during his first approach. Gee came around again and worked his way back into the pattern, but as he made his approach the LSO waved him off again. It took Gee ten tries before the LSO finally gave him the cut sign and Gee landed safely. When he climbed out of his airplane, he was ordered to report at once to the bridge. There he was confronted by an irate Mitscher.

“Can’t you fly?” Mitscher asked.

“I won’t do it again, Captain,” the humiliated ensign replied.

“You’re damned right you won’t,” Mitscher told him. “You’re not ever going to fly off this ship again.” Mitscher ordered that Gee’s name be struck from the flight roster. But if Mitscher was quick to anger, he also relented quickly. Five days later he ordered Gee restored to flight status.
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On the last day of January 1942, the
Hornet
was anchored off Norfolk when Captain Donald “Wu” Duncan, Ernie King’s air officer, came on board. Once he was alone with Mitscher, Duncan asked him a question: “Can you put a loaded B-25 in the air on a normal deck run?” That depended, of course, on how many planes crowded the flight deck. Mitscher thought a moment. “How many B-25s?” he asked. “Fifteen,” Duncan told him. Mitscher bent over the spotting board, a wooden template of the
Hornet
’s flight deck that showed where each plane was placed at any given moment. He calculated how much space a B-25 with its 67-foot wingspan would take up on the
Hornet
’s deck. Finally he answered that it could be done. “Good,” Duncan replied. “I’m putting two aboard for a test launching tomorrow.”
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The big land-based, two-engine Mitchell bombers had been named for Billy Mitchell, the interwar U.S. Army general who had been court-martialed for accusing Army and Navy leaders of “criminal negligence” for not making a greater commitment to air power. The Mitchell bombers were about the size of a Japanese Nell and, in conformance with Mitchell’s vision, had been designed for coastal defense. They were too big to land on a carrier and had to be hoisted aboard the
Hornet
by crane at the Norfolk docks. On February 2 (two days after Fletcher and Halsey struck at the Marshalls in the Pacific), the
Hornet
went out into the Atlantic with two Mitchell B-25s lashed to her flight deck. At 53 feet long and with that 67-foot wingspan, the two planes looked out of place even on the broad deck of the
Hornet
. The weather was less than ideal—a light snow was falling—and the test was interrupted when one of the escort vessels reported what was believed to be the periscope of a submarine, which proved instead to be the tip of a mast on an uncharted wreck. In the end both planes took off safely and without incident, flown by young Army pilots with no previous training in carrier
operations. Duncan was satisfied. He left the next day to take the news back to Washington, where several very senior officers were waiting.
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From the very day of Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt had envisioned conducting a retaliatory strike on Japan’s home islands. He urged such a raid not as part of a grand strategy but to give the American public something to cheer. To conduct a carrier raid against Japan, however, would subject the Navy’s scarce and valuable carriers to unacceptable danger. They would have to steam to within two hundred miles of the enemy coast and then wait there for the strike planes to return. It was simply too risky. American land-based bombers, with their greater range, could reach Japan from China. However, getting them to the airfields in China “over the hump” of the Himalayas from India would take months, and FDR was eager to strike while the pain of Pearl Harbor was still palpable. The notion that it might be possible to fly long-range, land-based bombers off a carrier deck originated with Navy captain Seth Low, Ernie King’s operations officer, who thought it up while watching them lift off from airfields in Florida on which the outline of a carrier deck had been painted for practice landings. He pitched the idea to King, who told him to talk to Duncan, and soon afterward, Duncan went out to the
Hornet
to conduct the test that proved it could be done.
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The problem was that while B-25s might take off from the
Hornet
, they could not land there. They would have to fly off the carrier some five hundred miles out from Japan, drop their bombs, then find someplace else to land. One option was to land them at Russian airfields near Vladivostok. But Stalin, who had his hands full with the Germans, did not want to add the Japanese to his list of enemies and refused permission. The other option was China, though to make it all the way to airfields in the part of China that had not yet been overrun by the Japanese meant that the B-25s would have to be significantly modified to carry extra fuel, which would limit their bomb load. Another problem was that because the B-25s were much too
large to fit on the carrier’s elevators, they would have to remain on the flight deck throughout the Pacific crossing, which meant the carrier could not conduct normal air operations. In other words, the
Hornet
would be unable to defend herself. In consequence of that, a second carrier would have to be assigned to accompany her. Indeed, King even wondered if it might not require three carriers—two for the heavy bombers and one to defend the task force.
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Many wondered whether it was an intelligent use of rare American carriers to use most or all of them simply to conduct an air raid whose purpose was mainly to boost morale. In any event, the plan required cooperation from what in 1942 was still called the Army Air Forces, and in March of 1942 the U.S. Army and Navy were very much at odds about future strategy. It was not the kind of dysfunctional hostility that characterized relations between the Japanese Army and Navy but a far more subtle competition over resources and priorities. The U.S. Army continued to adhere to the Germany First strategy that had been laid down in ABC-1 and Rainbow 5 in November 1941, whereas King was already pushing hard for an early Pacific offensive. After the collapse of the ABDA coalition, the British agreed to allow the United States to assume full responsibility for the conduct of the war in the Pacific, and at a March 5 strategy meeting in the White House, King presented a memorandum he had prepared for the president that emphasized the importance of holding Hawaii and defending the lines of communication to Australia, but which also called for a “drive northward from the New Hebrides into the Solomons and the Bismarck archipelago,” which meant attacking Rabaul. To make sure that a busy FDR didn’t miss the central point of his argument, King summed it up in three bulleted items at the end: “Hold Hawaii, Support Australasia, Drive northwestward from New Hebrides.”
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