The Battle of Midway (4 page)

Whatever the merits of these criticisms, after Kimmel was relieved of command, the expedition became Pye’s responsibility. On December 20, with the
Saratoga
task force still 725 miles from Wake, Pye learned that the Japanese had renewed their assault and, more importantly, that they had committed at least one of their carriers, and possibly two, to the attack. The two carriers were, in fact, the
S
ō
ry
ū
and
Hiry
ū
, both of which had participated in the Pearl Harbor attack. If
Saratoga
got tangled up with two (or more) of Japan’s big carriers, it dramatically escalated the risk. Then, two days later, on the morning of December 22 (Hawaii time), with the
Saratoga
task force still more than five hundred miles from its destination, Pye learned that the Japanese had secured a lodgment on the island and were overpowering the outnumbered defenders. A poignantly laconic message from the garrison’s commander summed up the situation: “Issue in doubt.” At about the same time, Pye received a message from Stark in Washington that read, in part, “Wake is now and will continue to be a liability.” That message authorized Pye “to evacuate Wake.” A note at the end read, “King concurs.” But evacuation was impossible now, and Pye wired Stark to tell him so. Eager as Pye was to come to the aid of the gallant Marines on Wake Island, he was not willing to risk the
Saratoga
task force against two enemy carriers in what now looked like a lost cause, especially if Washington considered Wake “a liability.” Reluctantly, he issued orders for the
Saratoga
to turn around. When Fletcher got that order, he threw his hat to the deck in frustration. The pilots on the
Saratoga
who were scheduled to fly off the carrier the next day to support their fellow Marines were near mutinous, and there was angry talk about ignoring the orders and going ahead with the relief mission anyway. But discipline held; the Marines defending Wake were left to their fate.
¹⁷
*

The decision was a body blow to American morale. In Washington, Roosevelt was so upset he told Stark to demand an explanation from Pye. Though Stark himself had played a role in the decision, he dutifully wrote Pye that it was “essential for understanding required by higher authority that you furnish me with further information as to considerations which governed [the] retirement of two Western task forces.” Pye might have written back that he did it because Stark and King had labeled Wake “a liability,” but instead he wrote: “I became convinced that the general situation took precedence and required a conservation of our forces.” FDR remained unsatisfied and never quite forgave Pye. Knox was furious. In a letter to Kimmel the previous January, the Navy secretary had written: “There is no such thing as fighting a safe war…. Prudence must be relegated to a secondary position to the bold and resolute employment of the fleet.” He saw nothing bold or resolute in the decision to abandon the beleaguered Wake garrison. Nimitz, too, was disappointed that the effort to succor Wake had been recalled, but he spent no time regretting what he could not change: it was “water over the dam,” he said. And he continued to hold both Pye and Fletcher in high regard. Still, it was one more bitter disappointment for a country still reeling from the shock of Pearl Harbor, and one more burden for the new commander to bear.
¹⁸

At the Naval headquarters building, Nimitz met with the officers of Pye’s (formerly Kimmel’s) staff, shook their hands, and asked them to stay on to help him. Having expected a dressing down, the officers immediately brightened in response to this appeal; one recalled that Nimitz’s arrival was like someone opening a window in a stuffy room. Indeed, after a careful assessment, Nimitz concluded that the terrible losses of December 7 had been less disastrous than they first appeared. Though all eight battleships had been hit, and five of them sunk, it had happened in the shallow waters of Pearl Harbor where most of them could be raised and repaired. Had the fleet gone to sea in an effort to drive off the attackers, those ships would very likely have been sunk in deep water and lost forever, and with a much greater loss of life. Instead, six of the eight battleships that were sunk or damaged on December 7 would be raised and repaired and would see action again later in the war.
¹⁹

Moreover, while the death of the crewmen aboard these ships was unquestionably tragic, the temporary loss of the battleships themselves proved not to be all that strategically important. The very success of the Japanese attack underscored what some had been arguing for years: that battleships had been supplanted as the dominant weapon of naval warfare by aircraft carriers, and all three of America’s Pacific Fleet aircraft carriers had been out of port when the Japanese struck. As already noted, the
Saratoga
was at San Diego and about to return to Pearl Harbor after a refit at the Puget Sound Navy Yard in Bremerton, Washington. The other two American carriers were also at sea on December 7. In response to a “war warning” that he received from Washington on November 27, Kimmel had sent them off the next day to ferry combat planes to the distant American outposts at Wake and Midway. Halsey and the
Enterprise
, escorted by three cruisers and nine destroyers, had ferried a dozen Marine fighter planes to Wake Island, where those planes played a major role in fighting off the initial Japanese attack, and Rear Admiral John H. Newton and the
Lexington
with a similar escort carried planes to Midway, though news of the Japanese attack led Newton to turn the
Lexington
around before he could deliver them.
²⁰

Kimmel had ordered Halsey to return to Pearl Harbor by December 7, but refueling at sea and an accident involving a cable that became wrapped around a propeller of the cruiser
Northampton
delayed him, and he was still several hundred miles out when he received the startling message, “Air Raid Pearl Harbor. This is no drill.” Halsey’s first thought was that it was a case of mistaken identity. In order not to enter port with a deck load of airplanes (which could not take off from an anchored carrier), the Americans routinely flew their airplanes into Oahu from up to a hundred miles out. Halsey had launched a number of scout planes that morning that would have been arriving at Pearl just about the time of the report; he feared that nervous gunners at Pearl had mistaken his planes for enemy aircraft. As it happened, the planes from the
Enterprise
arrived in the midst of the Japanese attack, and some of them were targeted by friendly fire. Once Halsey realized that the raid was real, he launched more planes to search for the enemy. He sent most of them southward toward a reported contact—false, as it turned out—and thus missed the retiring enemy fleet. It was just as well,
for had Halsey’s scout planes found the six carriers of the Japanese strike force and opened a general engagement, he would have been hopelessly overmatched, and the
Enterprise
might well have become the next victim of the day, with consequences much greater than the temporary loss of eight battleships.
²¹

As a result of these circumstances, Nimitz had three large aircraft carriers he could count on to be the nucleus of his new fleet. A fourth was on the way, for the
Yorktown
(CV-5), which had been sent to the Atlantic in April along with three battleships and several light cruisers and destroyers, was now ordered to return to the Pacific. That would give Nimitz four aircraft carriers and a powerful strike force to counter future Japanese initiatives. Of course it was theoretically possible for the U.S. to bring even more warships around from the Atlantic to the Pacific, including some battleships. That was problematic, however, in light of the fact that on December 11 Hitler declared war on the United States, committing the U.S. to a two-front war with enemies in both oceans.

The onset of a two-ocean war necessitated a reconsideration of American strategic plans. For more than twenty years, the U.S. Navy had focused most of its planning, training, and war gaming on a possible war with Japan. The blueprint for that future war was officially known as Plan Orange, and the first version of it had been sketched out in 1911. Its basic outlines were simple—even simplistic. It presumed an outbreak of war triggered by a Japanese assault on the Philippines, following which the U.S. fleet would gather in Pearl Harbor and strike out across the broad Pacific for a showdown with the Japanese battle fleet somewhere in the western Pacific. Over the years the plan had been updated and modified, and several options built into it, but the basic outline remained the same.
²²

Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s had led to both ambitious rearmament programs and strategic adjustment. The Vinson-Trammel Act of 1934 began this metamorphosis, and by the time of Pearl Harbor the United States had an enormous armada under construction: eight battleships, twelve carriers, thirty-five cruisers, 196 destroyers, and more than three thousand airplanes—a force, taken together, that was larger than the entire Japanese
Navy. None of these new-construction warships, however, would be ready for deployment until very late in 1942 or early 1943. In the meantime, the Nazi conquest of France in June, 1940, and the ensuing U-boat threat to the Atlantic lifelines, dramatically changed many of the assumptions behind Plan Orange. Until then, U.S. strategists had hoped that Britain and France could hold off the Germans long enough for America to complete her rearmament. Now with France defeated and occupied, and Britain teetering on the brink of collapse, it looked possible—perhaps even likely—that Hitler might complete his conquest of Europe before the U.S. had fully rearmed. In light of those facts, in November of 1940, a few weeks after Roosevelt’s reelection to a third term, and a full year before Pearl Harbor, Betty Stark wrote a lengthy memo to Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox that offered a completely new strategic blueprint.
²³

Stark’s November 1940 memo was one of the most consequential documents ever submitted to the government by a naval officer. Executing Plan Orange against Japan, he wrote, “would take a long time,” and as a result “we would have to accept considerable danger in the Atlantic.” In fact, as Stark well knew, there was
already
“considerable danger” in the Atlantic, where U.S. destroyers were engaged in a kind of quasi-war with German submarines in an effort to keep open the line of supply from the United States to beleaguered Britain. Concerned about a British defeat, and the dire consequences of such an event for the United States, Roosevelt repeatedly stretched the meaning of “neutral” by expanding U.S. Navy operations in the Atlantic. Stark was concerned about Britain, too, and to address those concerns, he recommended reversing twenty years of Navy planning to reorient American focus from the Pacific to the Atlantic. “The reduction of Japanese offensive power,” he wrote, could be achieved “chiefly through economic blockade” while the United States devoted the bulk of its efforts to “a land offensive against the Axis powers.” That would require “a major naval and military effort in the Atlantic,” during which time “we would … be able to do little more in the Pacific than remain on a strict defensive.” The great danger, of course, was that Britain might collapse in spite of American support, in which case the U.S. would find itself on the defensive in both oceans. But Stark was betting on the British to hold out.
²⁴

Admiral Harold “Betty” Stark served as CNO until replaced by King in March 1942. His November 1940 “Plan Dog” memo was instrumental in reorienting American strategy from the Pacific to Europe. (U.S. Naval Institute)