The Battle of Midway (27 page)

It paid off. By midmonth, the stream of messages indicated quite a bit about both the target and the time frame, though it was less clear which units would participate. The Japanese were evidently planning a major operation in the South Pacific. There were references to at least four carriers, two cruiser divisions, and a destroyer squadron, plus various landbased units. Altogether nearly three hundred surface units appeared in the message traffic—the largest assembly of warships in the war to date. In this regard, it was unclear what Nimitz could do about it. By now both the
Enterprise
and
Hornet
were beyond recall, more than halfway to Tokyo with Doolittle’s bombers. That left only the
Yorktown
, still in the South Pacific after the Lae-Salamaua raid, though in serious need of a refit and resupply, and the
Lexington
, which was in Pearl Harbor having her big eight-inch guns removed and replaced by antiaircraft guns. With the departure of Vice Admiral Wilson Brown for San Diego, the
Lexington
task force was now under the command of Rear Admiral Aubrey “Jake” Fitch, a short, broad-shouldered brown-shoe officer who had earned his gold wings in 1930. Even assuming that Fitch’s
Lexington
group could get to the Coral Sea in time to join the
Yorktown
, the two American carriers might prove insufficient to interfere with the thrust, given the size of the
Japanese commitment. At an April 18 staff meeting, the general agreement at headquarters was that “CinCPac will probably be unable to send enough force to be
sure
of stopping the Jap offensive.”
²⁴

The next day, Doolittle’s bombers completed their mission over Japan’s cities, and Halsey’s two carriers began steaming back toward Pearl, though it would take them a week to get there. Layton briefed Nimitz on April 22 that Rochefort’s intercepts offered clear “evidence of a powerful concentration in the Truk area,” and he suggested that “this will be the force which will make the long expected attack to the Southwest.” Jasper Holmes urged Rochefort to tell Nimitz that he should order Halsey not to return to Pearl at all but to refuel at sea and steam directly south to the Coral Sea. Rochefort reminded the enthusiastic Holmes that it was not the place of Navy lieutenants, or commanders for that matter, to tell four-star admirals what they should do. Their job was to provide the information that would allow the admiral to make his own decisions.
²⁵

Nimitz did not order Halsey to steam southward; the logistic realities made such a decision impossible. Nonetheless, he did trust Rochefort’s analysis and, despite the odds, was determined to commit his other two carriers to confront the Japanese offensive. He notified King that it was his “strong conviction” that the Japanese thrust toward Port Moresby “should be opposed by [a] force containing not less than two carriers.”
²⁶

The message triggered alarms in Washington. Redman remained distrustful of Rochefort and the assessments of Hypo. Station Cast, by now removed to Melbourne, Australia, and referred to as Belconnen, reported the Japanese objective as “RO,” not “MO,” and suggested that the target might be the Aleutian Islands rather than Port Moresby. If Rochefort were mistaken, Nimitz would be sending his last two carriers in the wrong direction. Though Rochefort was able to demonstrate that Belconnen had incorrectly decrypted the code, Redman remained skeptical. In fact, he was more than a little annoyed that Rochefort had bypassed him by taking his analysis directly to Nimitz. Redman wanted all intelligence intercepts to be sent to OP-20-GI in Washington, interpreted there, and then disseminated out to the fleet commanders. Rochefort should confine himself to purely tactical matters while
Washington dealt with the broader strategic questions. Redman couldn’t complain about this to Nimitz. He did, however, express his doubts to King.
²⁷

With Nimitz urging instant action and Redman expressing skepticism, King took the unusual step of writing directly to Rochefort to ask for “Station Hypo’s estimate of … future Japanese intentions.” In effect, King wanted Rochefort to defend and justify his assessment.

Rochefort wired back his response only six hours later (with a copy to Nimitz) in a concise report that made four main points:

1. The Kid
ō
Butai was in the process of withdrawing from the Indian Ocean, and its next effort would be in the Pacific.

2. The Japanese did not plan to invade Australia.

3. A new plan of operations involving some, but not all, of the Kid
ō
Butai was preparing to strike southward from Rabaul through the Coral Sea toward Port Moresby.

4. There were hints of another, even larger operation that would take place after Port Moresby, though its scope and objective were not yet clear.

The summary was remarkable for both its candor and its accuracy, and it convinced King that Rochefort knew what he was talking about. King even suggested that the American force in the Coral Sea might be bolstered by sending several American battleships there—the rehabilitated survivors of the Pearl Harbor attack.
²⁸

Nimitz, too, accepted Rochefort’s conclusions, but he was skeptical that sending battleships to the Coral Sea offered any kind of solution. He thought the battleships too slow, too vulnerable, too difficult to keep full of fuel, and in any case unlikely to affect the balance of power in the South Pacific. Nimitz ordered them back to the West Coast, mainly to get them out of the way. Instead, he would pit his two carriers against the three (or possibly four) carriers that the Japanese committed to the operation. He was willing to accept the odds because of, in his words, “the superiority of our personnel
in resourcefulness and initiative, and of the undoubted superiority of much of our equipment.” It was still remotely possible that Halsey could get to the Coral Sea in time, but even if he couldn’t, Nimitz was determined to oppose the Japanese thrust anyway. He ordered Fletcher to head for Noumea to restock the
Yorktown
’s near-empty larder and equip the Wildcat fighters with new self-sealing fuel-tank liners. Meanwhile, Fitch’s
Lexington
task force would steam from Pearl Harbor for the Coral Sea. The two carrier groups would rendezvous on May 1, at which time they would constitute “a single force under [the] command [of] Rear Admiral Fletcher.”
²⁹

That, too, worried King, who remembered that it was Fletcher who had commanded the failed relief expedition to Wake, and that Fletcher had accomplished little during the raid in the Marshalls in early February. Just a month earlier, King had seen a copy of a message Fletcher had sent to Nimitz informing him that he was “en route [to] Noumea … for provisions.” Without consulting Nimitz, King shot back: “Your [message] not understood if it means you are retiring from enemy vicinity in order to provision.” The pugnacious King declared that the men should live off hardtack and beans as long as they could still fight. In fact, the crew of the
Yorktown
had already been eating emergency rations—mostly beans and canned spinach—for several weeks. When there were only five steaks left on board, Captain Buckmaster had raffled them off, drawing the winners’ names from a hat. King was unimpressed; during those same weeks, after all, the
Yorktown
had not struck a blow. Now he worried that Fletcher would not be sufficiently aggressive commanding a two-carrier task force in the Coral Sea. To discuss it, King asked Nimitz to meet him in San Francisco, and Nimitz flew there on April 24.
³⁰

At their meeting, Nimitz summarized his plan to concentrate all four American carriers in the Coral Sea, though he acknowledged that since Halsey could not get there until May 13 at the earliest, it meant that Fletcher’s two carriers would very likely have to take on at least three, and perhaps as many as five, Japanese flattops. King again raised the idea of sending some old battleships there; Nimitz gently deflected the suggestion. They also discussed Fletcher’s command temperament. Both men expressed “uneasiness as to Fletcher’s operations,” but short of flying Halsey down there to
take over Fletcher’s task force, which would be awkward in the extreme, there seemed to be no alternative. King reminded Nimitz that April 29 was the emperor’s birthday and suggested that the Japanese might have some special operation planned to coincide with that date. Nimitz acknowledged that, but based on Rochefort’s analysis he remained convinced that the operation would not begin until May 3. Nimitz flew back to Pearl on April 28 not knowing King’s final decision. When he arrived, he was gratified to find that King had approved his plans. Halsey would return to Pearl, resupply his task force, and then take it south to join Fletcher as soon as possible. If Halsey did not get there in time, however, which seemed likely, Fletcher would simply have to do the best he could.
³¹

The very day that Nimitz flew to San Francisco, Rochefort’s team broke another message from Admiral Inoue himself. As usual, there were many elements of the message that could not be read, but it contained call signs for “the MO fleet” and “the MO attack force,” as well as “the MO occupation force.” Another message contained code groupings for the
Sh
ō
kaku
and
Zuikaku
as well as other ships. Rochefort was able to tell Layton, who then told Nimitz, that a Japanese invasion force with at least one carrier and possibly more was planning to enter the Coral Sea around the eastern end of Papua/New Guinea on or about the third of May, and that another task force that included the
Sh
ō
kaku
and
Zuikaku
would provide cover for the operation. Rochefort reported that X-Day, the day scheduled for the landing at Port Moresby, was May 10.
³²

Halsey’s Task Force 16 left Pearl on April 30.
*
It had taken five days to resupply his two big flattops and their escorts not only with oil but also with ammunition, beef, and beans (and presumably canned spinach). That same day (May 1st west of the International Date Line), the
Sh
ō
kaku
and
Zuikaku
left their base at Truk in the Caroline Islands almost due north of
Rabaul. Since they had to travel less than a third of the distance that Halsey did to reach the Coral Sea, it was now certain that Halsey would not get there in time. For better or worse, the defense of Port Moresby would depend entirely on the
Lexington
and the
Yorktown
, their very names evoking the alpha and the omega of the American Revolution, with both of them under the tactical command of Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher.
³³

*
The “on-the-roof gang” got its name from the fact that the men were trained on the roof of the Navy Department Building in Washington on which the radio intercept tower was located. Because the building had not been designed for such use, the trainees had to climb a ladder to get there.

*
The term Hypo (the British phonetic code for the letter H) derived not from its location in Hawaii or Honolulu but from the radio tower at He’eia. Hypo was later redesignated as the Fleet Radio Unit, Pacific (FRUPAC). Station Cast was named for Cavite Navy Yard in Manila and later moved to Corregidor when the Japanese overran Manila. Eventually it relocated to Melbourne, Australia, where it was renamed Belconnen, and later Fleet Radio Unit, Melbourne (FRUMEL).

**
In the interest of accuracy, not to mention fairness, it is important to note that one of the prime movers of this early organization was Agnes “Miss Aggie” Driscoll, who began working in the Code and Signal Station when Safford did in 1924. She held the rank of chief yeoman (the highest then available to women), though she all but invented the science of cryptanalysis and trained most of the men who later played such a crucial role in American code breaking.

*
That same day, the Japanese changed their code system for geographical designators. They often did this just prior to a new operation to ensure secrecy. This time, however, their decision backfired, since the change helped confirm the imminent attack, and the message contained both the old and new designators, which allowed the code breakers to update their dictionary of designators.