The Battle of Midway (5 page)

After laying out his argument, Stark presented four strategic alternatives, which he labeled A, B, C, and D. The last of them was his preferred option. Known as “Plan Dog” in Navy lingo, it asserted that in case of war with both Germany and Japan, the U.S. should remain on the defensive in the Pacific and devote its “full national offensive strength” to the defeat of Nazi Germany. “Should we be forced into a war with Japan,” Stark wrote, “we should … definitely plan to avoid operations in the Far East or the mid-Pacific that will prevent the Navy from promptly moving to the Atlantic forces fully adequate to safeguard our interests and policies in the event of British collapse.” Finally, Stark urged the initiation of “secret staff talks” with British officials.
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Stark’s memo found a ready audience in Washington, where Roosevelt, too, was worried about a British collapse, and the staff talks that Stark had recommended took place in January 1941 in Washington. From those meetings emerged a document known as ABC-1, which outlined the strategy subsequently known as “Germany First.” Specifically, it held that “since Germany is the predominant member of the Axis Powers, the Atlantic and European area is considered to be the decisive theater. The principal United States Military effort will be exerted in that theatre, and operations of United States forces in other theatres will be conducted in such a manner as to facilitate that effort.” That exact language was subsequently incorporated into the
American war plan called “Rainbow 5” that was adopted in November 1941, just eighteen days before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and thirty-five days before Nimitz took command. Given these strategic realities, Nimitz knew he would not be able to count on any significant reinforcement for his Pacific command until the new-construction warships began to slide off the building way in about a year. He would have to fend off the Japanese with what he had: three (soon to be four) aircraft carriers, a dozen cruisers, a few squadrons of destroyers, and the handful of submarines that had been overlooked by the Japanese on December 7. Nimitz would also have control of Task Force 1, made up of the old battleships that survived the Pearl Harbor attack (plus the
Colorado
, which had been undergoing overhaul in Puget Sound), and three more battleships returned to the Pacific from the Atlantic. Given recent events, however, it was unclear just how much of an asset those old battleships would be.
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Nimitz was eager to use the submarines right away. An old submarine hand himself, he held his change-of-command ceremony on board the submarine
Grayling
(SS-209) on the last day of the year. He did so not only because of his longtime association with submarines but also to boost the morale of the so-called silent service. Given the fact that the U.S. had gone to war against Germany in 1917 ostensibly because of Germany’s conduct of unrestricted submarine warfare, it is ironic that the first operational command sent out in December 1941 was the one to “EXECUTE UNRESTRICTED SUBMARINE AND AIR WAR AGAINST JAPAN.”
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Before the war was over, American submarines would take a terrible toll on the Japanese Navy and on her merchant fleet, and play an important role in several major surface actions as well, including Midway. But in the first year of the war, their impact was compromised by the fact that their torpedoes didn’t work. The American Mark 14 torpedo was equipped with an advanced magnetic proximity detonator that was designed to run underneath the target vessel and explode when it recognized the iron hull of the
ship above it. Though no one in the Navy knew it in December 1941, the torpedoes ran eleven feet deeper than the specifications indicated, which was often too deep for the warheads to register the magnetic anomaly of a ship’s hull. Even after some sub skippers changed the settings so the torpedoes didn’t run so deep, the warheads often failed to detonate. Some torpedoes actually struck an enemy ship only to bounce off the hull with a perceptible metallic clang and sink. Finally, the torpedoes were so erratic that their course was unpredictable, a few of them running in a circle, targeting the sub that had fired them.

There were two explanations for these catastrophic failures. The main one was that the peacetime Bureau of Ordnance had been underfunded during the Depression years, and, since the torpedoes cost ten thousand dollars each, the Bureau forbade live-fire testing. The second explanation was that the cutting-edge magnetic warhead was classified SECRET, and, according to the official postwar history, “security … became such a fetish, that measures designed to protect [the magnetic warhead] from enemy eyes actually hid its defects from those who made the regulations.” The result was a torpedo that often simply failed to detonate. On the very day that Nimitz arrived in Pearl Harbor, Commander Tyrell D. Jacobs, in command of the submarine
Sargo
(SS-188), fired eight torpedoes at three different ships from close range and scored no hits. He could not believe that he had missed and notified his superiors that there had to be something wrong with the torpedoes. Officers in BuOrd attributed his failure to bad shooting. Even after other skippers reported similar problems, the Bureau continued to insist that it was due to human error and not technical failure. Nimitz himself finally ordered deactivation of the magnetic proximity detonators in June of 1943, eighteen months after the war began.
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These were the tools that Nimitz had to hand when he assumed command of the American Pacific Fleet: a battleship fleet that rested on the bottom of Pearl Harbor, three carriers with a theoretical capacity of 264 airplanes, a handful of cruisers and destroyers, and a submarine fleet whose torpedoes did not work. The arrival of the
Yorktown
from the Atlantic would give him a fourth carrier, but because of the Allied commitment to Germany
First, as well as the industrial production schedule, he had little prospect of getting any other meaningful reinforcement anytime soon. In the weeks and months ahead he would have to decide how best to use these tools to contest Japanese domination of the Pacific, careful to preserve what he had, yet not so cautious that he conceded the Pacific to the enemy.

Throughout that period, to all outward appearances, Nimitz maintained a cool, confident demeanor that lifted the spirits of those about him. It was an act, for he was beset by unrelenting anxiety. Though he worked hard all day, at night sleep refused to come. On the day he assumed formal command as CinCPac, he wrote his wife, “I have still not reached the point where I can sleep well because there is so much going on and so much to do.” He felt like he was on “a treadmill whirling around actively but not getting anywhere very fast,” and even after a month, he confessed to her, “I do feel depressed a large part of the time.”
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Meanwhile, on the other side of the Pacific, the Japanese celebrated what certainly looked like a decisive victory at Pearl Harbor, and they had already embarked on a campaign to consolidate their triumphs by establishing what they called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: an empire that stretched from China to the mid-Pacific, and from Alaska to Australia. At the heart of this Japanese success was the group of six Japanese aircraft carriers that had executed the attack on Pearl Harbor, a force known as the Kid
ō
Butai.

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More than fifteen hundred Americans were taken prisoner by the Japanese when the island fell. Most of them (1,146) were civilian construction workers; the others included 368 Marines, 65 Navy men, and five Army soldiers. Most were transported to Japanese POW camps where they remained—those who survived—until 1945. A hundred or so of the construction workers were retained on Wake, and in 1943, when it looked like the island might be recaptured by the Americans, the survivors were lined up and shot.

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In fact, these old battleships were too slow to operate with the much faster carrier and cruiser forces and needed significant modification even to fulfill their eventual role as shore bombardment vessels.

T
ranslated literally, the Japanese term Kid
ō
Butai means “Mobile Force,” though the spirit of the term is better understood as “Attack Force,” or “Strike Force.” Composed of six large aircraft carriers plus two fast battleships, and screened by a dozen cruisers and destroyers, it was the most powerful concentration of naval air power in the world. The American practice was to operate carriers singly, putting each one at the center of an independent task force as Kimmel had done with the
Saratoga
for the aborted relief mission to Wake Island. That meant that an American task force could put ninety airplanes in the air at most, though sixty was more realistic. With the Kid
ō
Butai, however, the Japanese put all their eggs into one basket, operating six heavy carriers as a single unit that, theoretically at least, could put 412 airplanes aloft at the same time. For the attack on Pearl Harbor, they had launched 350 aircraft.
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The man who had conceived that attack was the commander in chief of Japan’s Combined Fleet, Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku. A somewhat enigmatic figure in the history of the Pacific war, Yamamoto was neither
physically intimidating nor particularly aggressive. At five foot three he barely met the minimum height standard for admission to the naval academy at Eta Jima, and he possessed what one fellow officer called an “almost feminine delicacy,” a characterization that was intended as a compliment. He was both keenly intelligent and fiercely ambitious, traits that contributed to his boundless self-confidence. He was also something of a maverick; one recent scholar remarked on his “pronounced individuality.” While serving two tours as the Japanese naval attaché in Washington, he had taken courses at Harvard University and traveled extensively throughout the United States. He was one of a very few Japanese naval officers who supported flight training, believing strongly that aviation was key to the future of naval warfare. Subsequently, he commanded both the aircraft carrier
Akagi
(1928–29) and the First Carrier Division (1933–34). He shared at least one characteristic with Chester Nimitz: he had a quiet confidence and austerity that led others to defer to him. One associate noted that “however difficult the question, he always appeared totally unperturbed,” though an American officer who knew him before the war claimed, “You could see it if something irritated him for his eyes would become hard and cold.”
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Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, shown here in his official portrait, was a maverick in the Imperial Japanese Navy who seemed to enjoy imposing his daring plans on the Army and Navy hierarchy. (U.S. Naval Institute)

In other ways, however, Yamamoto was quite different from his dour American counterpart. He was something of a showman, even a show-off, and frequently acted as if he were deliberately tempting fate. With very little encouragement, he would perform daring gymnastic feats, such as standing on his hands on a ship’s railing. One of his most salient characteristics was his fondness for (perhaps even obsession with) games of chance. Though he was proficient at games of skill such as
shogi
and chess, he was infatuated with the Japanese game of
go
and American poker. (Chester Nimitz’s favorite card game was cribbage.) Yamamoto would bet on almost anything and did so often, sometimes bullying subordinates into betting against him. He could play poker for hours, foregoing sleep and playing literally around the clock. That willingness to tempt fate may also have contributed to his remarkable candor. In a society in which a misspoken word might become the start of a bitter feud, he tended to speak his mind openly even when it offended powerful elements within the government. Indeed, he seemed to relish this risky high-wire act. This last quality was particularly evident during the 1930s when Yamamoto assumed great professional and personal risk by expressing opposition to the political and strategic agenda of the Japanese Army.
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