“STYKE ’N AYGGS, dammit, styke ’n ayggs!”
It came crackling over the teleradio in shrill and nasal urgency, this signal of imminent Australian departure, and it chilled the heart of Martin Clemens seated in his radio shack and watching the gray dawn of May 2 creep down the coast toward Snowy Rhoades on Cape Esperance at the western tip of Guadalcanal.
Though dismayed, Clemens was not entirely surprised. The day before the Japanese had hurled their most savage attack on the twin islets of Gavutu-Tanambogo in Tulagi Harbor. One of the RAAF’s remaining two flying boats had lumbered aloft with a huge hole in one wing, to disappear forever. The other had been caught on the water and smashed. It was later towed across the channel to Aola, where natives had dragged it out of sight and destroyed it.
So now the Japanese were truly coming and the Australians were leaving. Clemens and his handful of Europeans were all alone. How would the natives react to the Japanese?
Only last month a European had been murdered up in the Goldfields. One of the “bleddy boongs,” as most Australian planters described the natives, had done for Billy Wilmot with a long-handled ax. The interior of the poor old beachcomber’s hut had been spattered with blood, and the body, which Clemens had ordered exhumed, was a horrible, sickening sight. Luckily for most of the natives—the Christians—they had been at Good Friday services when the murder occurred. Of two pagan suspects, one of them owned just the ax to do the job; and on such flimsy evidence Clemens had taken the man into custody. But Clemens could not be sure. Moreover, the identity of the killer troubled him not so much as the fact of a European murdered at a time when plantations were being looted by rebellious natives and the Japanese were on their way. Through Clemens’s mind there flitted a phrase from one of the books on the Solomon Islanders: “These people are primarily and emphatically savages, with some good points certainly, but in their nature reigns unchecked the instinct of destruction.”1
Clemens was also having difficulty of a lesser though perhaps more irritating nature with the Catholic fathers at the Ruavatu Mission a few miles west of Aola. He had advised them to take refuge inland. But Father Henry Oude-Engberink, the Dutch priest in charge, replied that he and the American Father Arthur Duhamel and the three European nuns at the mission would remain with their flock. They were neutral. The war was not their concern. Clemens tried to explain that the Japanese would certainly not be “neutral” toward the nuns, that to remain on the coast was dangerous and foolhardy when the mission party might maintain its neutrality in the safety of the bush, but Father Engberink was obdurate: his place was with his flock. Bishop Aubin at the mission headquarters in Visale on the western end of the island had already decided to follow a policy of neutrality. To take sides, that was the charge always raised against missionaries: that they served a foreign power. It was the age-old excuse for persecutions. No, the fathers and the nuns would give the Japanese no grounds for such false accusations. They served no power but God.
That was that, and the interview had ended on a note of cool cordiality.
And now, the Japanese were coming south. Now the time of preparation and of worry was coming to an end. Soon he would find out if the natives were really to be trusted, if a policy of “neutrality” would really impress the bloodthirsty Knights of Bushido, and if he, Martin Clemens, would be clever enough to keep his life. Now, he thought, mentally quoting from his constant companion, his only book, Shakespeare’s Henry V, now: “We are in God’s hands, brother.”
Next morning the Japanese invasion force under Rear Admiral Aritomo Goto glided into empty Tulagi Harbor. Goto put ashore troops of the Kure and Sasebo Special Naval Landing Forces—so-called Japanese “Marines”—as well as aviation and communications personnel to staff a seaplane base and radio station. Unhurried because unharried, Goto unloaded at his leisure; stocking the Emperor’s latest acquisitions with great quantities of oil and gasoline and an inordinately large supply of beer and sake,* hard candy for the fliers, and cases of canned beef, pineapple, and crab meat.
Later there arrived the first of twelve float Zero fighter-planes and twelve Kawanishi flying boats, one of which was piloted by Lieutenant Commander Yoshio Tashiro, the brother-in-law of Saburo Sakai’s squadron commander. Another arrival was Mr. Ishimoto, the former Lever Brothers carpenter who was now returning to Tulagi as a conqueror. Ishimoto wore the uniform of a petty officer in the Japanese Navy, but he was nevertheless identified and reported by Martin Clemens’s scouts. The presence of the entire invasion force—the southern arm of the operation to cut the Australian-American lifeline—was also reported to the American carrier force to the south under Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher.
Leaving the Lexington group to continue refueling, Fletcher hurried north with Yorktown and her group of screening ships. At dawn next morning, Fletcher swung Yorktown into the wind and flew off his strikes against Goto.
The Japanese in Tulagi were caught completely by surprise.
“Massa, massa!” one of Clemens’s scouts shouted, waking him. “Altogether Japan he catchem trouble!”2
Clemens rushed to the shores of Aola Bay. Surrounded by delighted natives, he saw the American dive-bombers come plummeting out of the sun in long straight dives. Explosions rolled over the water. Pillars of smoke rose into the sky. Cheers and cries of derision rose from the throats of the scouts. They shook their fists and howled, “Japan he die-finish!” And of course, the reports of enemy destruction were exaggerated. It was claimed that nine ships were sunk. Actually, Yorktown’s airplanes had put only a destroyer, two mine sweepers and a destroyer-transport on the bottom of those waters which, because of the scores of ships that were to perish in them, were to be known henceforth as Iron Bottom Bay. More important, Goto’s cocksure force had been sent racing north up the long straight Solomons sea corridor which was to enter history as The Slot.
Admiral Fletcher’s pilots had dropped the opening bombs in the Battle of the Coral Sea.
That night, while Admiral Goto streaked homeward through The Slot, the more powerful northern force steamed out of Rabaul. It was bound for Port Moresby. It sailed south, hoping to circle the tip of northeastern New Guinea and come up suddenly upon the big Allied base.
The light carrier Shoho and her screen accompanied the landing force. But a far more potent group built around the big carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku was slipping around the top of the Solomon Islands and racing south to catch the American force which had struck at Goto.
The next day, May 5, was uneventful. On the following day, May 6, Admiral Fletcher reunited his forces and headed Enterprise and Yorktown toward the tip of New Guinea. On May 7, the Battle of the Coral Sea was fully joined. In the first American attack ever launched upon an enemy carrier, Fletcher’s pilots pounced upon Shoho in a shower of bombs and torpedoes and sunk her in a matter of minutes. Because of this, the Port Moresby invasion was called off, and the troops sent back to Rabaul.
Next day Japan’s big carriers retaliated. They sank Lexington. But Shokaku was damaged and Zuikaku suffered severe losses in planes and pilots.
Thus the first seafight in history during which the contending ships did not exchange a shot, and it had been a Japanese tactical victory. The American loss of 30,000-ton Lexington, with oiler Neosho and destroyer Sims, far outweighed Japan’s loss of 12,000-ton Shoho and the ships sunk at Tulagi. Nevertheless, the strategic victory was American. Big Shokaku and Zuikaku had to be counted out of Admiral Yamamoto’s plans for Midway, and Port Moresby had been saved.
Japan had suffered her first reverse.
In Tokyo, the cancellation of the Port Moresby invasion was regarded as a temporary setback to the operation to isolate Australia. It was decided that Port Moresby could be taken in the rear. Troops would be ferried the short safe distance from Rabaul to Buna and would then march over the lofty Owen Stanleys to occupy the Allied base.
On May 18, Imperial General Headquarters activated the 17th Army with orders to carry out these operations. Command was given to Lieutenant General Haruyoshi Hyakutake.
Thin, testy, and tenacious, Haruyoshi Hyakutake was regarded as one of Japan’s most promising “younger” generals. Like Alexander Archer Vandegrift of the American Marines, he was fifty-five and a veteran of thirty-three years of service. Although equal in rank,* Hyakutake commanded a much larger body of troops; but these, like Vandegrift’s own, were widely scattered.
On the very day that Hyakutake took command of the 17th Army, he was—again like Vandegrift—deprived of one of his finest units, and commanders. The fierce Colonel Kiyono Ichiki was selected to lead his crack regiment of landing troops ashore on Midway. While Hyakutake prepared to fly down to his new headquarters at Rabaul, Colonel Ichiki and his staff boarded battleship Yamato to be briefed on their part in Admiral Yamamoto’s grand design.
Undismayed—for Haruyoshi Hyakutake was a man of optimism and a supreme confidence bordering on arrogance—17th Army’s commander busied himself assembling forces spread throughout China and the Dutch East Indies. He had not the slightest doubt that he would make short work of Moresby, and his only thought for Tulagi was that it would cover his exposed left flank.
And he paid absolutely no attention to the big island with the strange name on the other side of Iron Bottom Bay.
Two days later, not nearly so free of doubt or dismay, Major General Archer Vandegrift sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, for Wellington, New Zealand. With him aboard big Wakefield—the converted passenger liner Manhattan—were the Fifth Marines and most of the Eleventh’s artillery. They sailed under destroyer escort down the perilous Atlantic Coast, silhouetted for German submarines, like so many doomed tankers and merchantmen before them, by the pleasure-as-usual lights of the seashore resorts. They entered the Panama Canal and debouched into the Pacific, where the destroyers left them and later their long-range plane escort.
With only their own speed and a zigzag course to protect them against Japanese submarines, they sailed the vast Pacific in solitude. Only Vandegrift and a few others knew that Wakefield carried enough life jackets and lifeboats for only half the men. But the men were irrepressible. In the only moment of crisis—when Wakefield plowed into an enormous swell and waves of water plunged down open hatches—a lighthearted Marine averted panic with the cry, “Women and children first!”
It was May 27—Japan’s Navy Day, the date upon which the immortal Admiral Heihachiro Togo had annihilated the Russian Fleet at Tsushima—and today, thirty-seven years later, Admiral Yamamoto was leading Combined Fleet to Midway.
Yamamoto himself was aboard Yamato, the 64,000-ton battleship which was easily the mightiest ship afloat. Yamato mounted nine 18.1-inch* guns firing 3200-pound shells, 500 pounds heavier than the 16-inch projectiles fired by the best of the American battleships. One of her turrets weighed as much as a big destroyer and her sides were armored with steel sixteen inches thick. She was the symbol of Japan’s naval strength, this monster battleship, and Yamamoto gloried in her power. Here, as she lay at anchor at Hashirajima in the Inland Sea, the admiral had worked out the final details of the operation which was to destroy American seapower in the Pacific.
First he had attended to the possibility of any repetition of the Doolittle raid. A northern invasion force built around three light carriers was already en route to the western Aleutians in the North Pacific. Its mission was to seize Kiska and Attu, thus pushing American airbases back eastward, and also to draw American carrier strength away from Midway.
It was at Midway that the knockout blow was to be delivered. Most of the vast armada of 162 ships which Yamamoto had assembled were to sail to that island. The striking force consisted of four big, fast carriers under Chuichi Nagumo, the hero of Pearl Harbor, supported by one light carrier and four seaplane carriers, and backed up by no less than eleven battleships and a host of cruisers and destroyers and submarines. Once all these fighting ships had done their work, Colonel Kiyono Ichiki’s shock troops would storm ashore at Midway.
At eight o’clock in the morning of that momentous Navy Day, Nagumo’s flagship, Akagi, hoisted the signal:
“Sortie as scheduled!”
With cheering crews lining the rails, the carriers slipped past the battleships that were to follow. Destroyers and cruisers of the protecting screens took up their stations, white bow waves curling away from their prows. Steadily and with great majesty, Striking Force made for Bungo Strait. The ships passed through these narrow waters with all hands at battle station, until they had entered the Pacific and the bullhorns blared:
“Passage through strait completed. Stow gear. Restore normal condition of readiness.”
Aboard the carriers, men in undress whites and green work uniforms began to drift up to the flight decks to smoke. Some took off their shirts to do calisthenics in the waning sun. Officers sitting in canvas deck chairs chatted guardedly about the operation.
In a few more minutes, all of Striking Force would be at sea.
Landing Force was already underway.
It had sailed from Saipan under Rear Admiral Raizo Tanaka. Tanaka, a veteran destroyer leader who had participated in Japanese landings on the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies, had his doubts about the Midway operation. So did Commander Tameichi Hara, one of Tanaka’s ablest destroyer captains. After Tanaka had whispered details of the plan to Hara early last spring, the commander had blurted out his conviction that high command had lost its mind.3
“Shhhhh!” Tanaka said warningly. “As a matter of fact, I’m not sure about it. I hope it’s not true.”4
But it was, and Tanaka’s squadron consisting of flag cruiser Jintsu and ten destroyers, including Hara’s Amatsukaze, was ordered to escort Colonel Ichiki’s transports from Saipan to Midway. The day before Striking Force sortied from Japan, they put to sea.
Colonel Ichiki, as always, was supremely confident. Tanaka was not. Nor was Hara, who stood on Amatsukaze’s bridge, sunk in misgivings.5
Admiral Chester Nimitz knew of the Japanese approach. Excellent intelligence work, notably assisted by the breaking of the Japanese code, had alerted Nimitz to Japanese Combined Fleet’s intention to sail to battle again. Nimitz became convinced that the strike was aimed at either Hawaii or Midway, probably Midway, and he conveyed this belief to Admiral King.
King agreed. He directed Nimitz to take the risk of deploying his carriers from the South Pacific to the defense of Midway and Hawaii. Nimitz got off an urgent message to Bull Halsey with Enterprise and Hornet.
“Expedite return.”
Halsey’s ships bent it on for Hawaii. They sailed into Pearl Harbor on May 26. But their commander, Nimitz’s most aggressive flag officer, was unfit to fight.
Six months on the bridge under the tropic sun, six months of tension, had afflicted Halsey with an unbearable skin eruption. He could not keep from scratching, and the disease spread. By the time he had returned to Hawaii, he had exhausted every homemade remedy, including oatmeal baths, and had lost twenty pounds.
Halsey went into the hospital, while Nimitz placed command of the defense of Midway under both Admiral Fletcher and Vice-Admiral Raymond Spruance.
They would have a fleet of seventy-six ships built around Enterprise, Hornet, and Yorktown, without, however, a single battleship to protect them. The carriers would depend on cruisers and destroyers for their screens, a garrison of Marines would provide Midway’s land defenses, while land-based Marine and Army air would also be deployed against the enemy. Finally, there was the calm and canny Nimitz, who refused to take the enemy’s Aleutians bait, and sent Fletcher and Spruance into the battle with these instructions:
“You will be governed by the principle of calculated risk, which you shall interpret to mean the avoidance of exposure of your force to attack by superior enemy forces without good prospect of inflicting, as a result of such exposure, greater damage on the enemy.”
Meanwhile, the American pilots were searching the Pacific. On June 3, Ensign Jack Reid lifted a Catalina flying boat off Midway and headed for the very sector at which Nimitz expected the enemy forces to converge. Seven hundred miles out he saw a cluster of specks come crawling over the rim of the horizon.
“Do you see what I see?” Reid yelled to his co-pilot.
“You’re damned right I do!” the co-pilot shouted, and Reid ducked into a cloud.6
Someone besides Snowy Rhoades to the west and Martin Clemens to the east, and all the missionaries and Melanesians between them, had at last taken notice of Guadalcanal.
The Japanese had come.
On May 28 a scouting party arrived from Tulagi, landing at Lunga midway on the northern coast. In the early days of June they paid more visits, accompanied by Mr. Ishimoto. They slaughtered plantation cattle with machine guns and butchered them with great waste. At other times Ishimoto asked the natives the whereabouts of the District Officer, for Clemens had withdrawn from Aola Bay to the bush village of Paripao.
“Him he gone,” the natives replied. “Him no more.”7
Such evasive replies infuriated Ishimoto. He lectured the natives on their duty to the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and he was encouraged by some of the men in the front rank who nodded their heads vigorously. Ishimoto’s claque, of course, was composed of Martin Clemens’s “plain-clothes men.”
The District Officer had stripped his scouts of all distinguishing badges. They wore ordinary lap-laps like the other natives and their instructions were to mingle with the Japanese, to work for them, and to spy on them. They had become proficient in reporting enemy ships. It was no longer, “One big-fellow war he stop,” but “One fellow cruiser gottem gun ’long six inch.” There had been difficulty in identifying the caliber of the antiaircraft guns on Tulagi, until Clemens hit upon the idea of keeping small logs of varying diameter in his hut at Paripao.
The scouts would paddle over to Tulagi in their graceful gondolas and climb the enemy guns at night, carefully grasping the barrels in their hands or hefting the shells. Back at Paripao they would squat with closed eyes and expressions of pained concentration on their faces while Clemens placed log after log in their hands. Then, with faces brightening and the exclamation, “Him no more, massa!,” one or another of them would burst out: “Gottem shell like small fellow beerbottle.”
“A three-incher!” Clemens would exclaim, and the information would go off to Australia.
One day in June, Clemens received an ominous message from Snowy Rhoades, which went:
“Japs at Savo (Island) with one machine gun and tin hats, enquiring for whereabouts of white men on Guadalcanal. Said they would go there in about two weeks time.”8
In other words, they were coming to Clemens’s island to stay.
The First Marines were leaving New River.
With the Seventh Marines still on detached duty in Samoa, with the Fifth Marines and most of the artillery still sailing toward New Zealand, the last of Vandegrift’s echelons was heading for the West Coast under Brigadier General William Rupertus, the division’s assistant commander. The night before the departure by rail, the men gave themselves a farewell party. They went down to the “slop chute” and bought cases of canned beer and carried them back to those rickety, stifling, mosquito-ridden squad huts that they detested. They began to drink, and then, to sing. They sang songs like “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” or “Merrily We Roll Along” or other favorites such as “The Old Mill Stream” or “A Tavern in the Town” before turning to the serviceman’s repertoire of regional songs, “Dixie,” “The Wabash Cannonball”:
Listen to the jingle, the rumble and the roar
Ridin’ through the woodlands and the ocean by the shore.
“Birmingham Jail,” “Red River Valley,” after which, as an inevitable sign of insobriety they began bawling out bawdies and dirty songs, but then, because only a few lewdly dedicated minds among them actually knew all the words, they had to fall back on the college ballads which everyone knew, ending with the sentimental “Sweetheart of Sigma Chi,” and being, by that time, so sentimentally drunk, there was nothing left to do but blubber about “My Mom” and “M Is for the Million Things She Gave Me,” until, at the conclusion of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” some of them were weeping openly and others so outraged by the realization that they would not be home for Christmas that they had begun to wrestle on the floor or duel each other with sheathed bayonets—“grab-assing,” as the Marines call it—while others had wandered outside to pick fights with other squads.
Up at the Second Battalion, one of the machine gunners had begun to punch holes in the huts’ wallboard sides. The man was Indian Johnny Rivers, a powerfully built youth of about medium height, half Indian and half English, who had been raised in the Pennsylvania Dutch country. He had been a professional prizefighter before the war, and he was, with his keen good humor and laughing black eyes, a great favorite with both men and officers. The gunners cheered and whooped as Johnny staggered from hut to hut, crouching and unleashing his famous right, yelling “Here’s another one for the goddamned mosquitoes to come in!”9
It was a marvelous method of letting off the steam which months of boredom and frustration can generate in such exuberant spirits. Soon other gunners joined Rivers in ventilating the despised shacks, symbols of all that they had hated during those weeks upon weeks of marching, marching, marching, of sleeping in the rain or eating a sodden slop for chow, of sitting for monotonous hours in wallowing Higgins boats while seasick men threw up to windward, or of repeatedly jumping into the surf and running up the beach with heavy, squish-booted step to fall on the sand and crawl forward with cradled rifle and become coated in grit like a fish in flour. Punching holes in flimsy walls should square away those “chicken” captains and corporals and every other regulation martinet who insisted upon doing things by the book—like the enraged Gunny Jim Blalock who at that very moment was bawling “Knock if awff!” and promising them that they would all “see the man” in the morning.
They did. But Lieutenant Colonel Al Pollock, Rivers’s battalion commander, was helpless, on the day of departure, to do more than give the men a tongue-lashing and put them on restriction. This was merely a disciplinary tautology, because as Rivers’s buddy, Private Al Schmid, a short, stocky brashness with an irrepressible blond cowlick, explained the situation: “We were on restriction already!”
“Yah-vo!” said Johnny, and that afternoon he and Smitty and the rest of the First Marines went aboard their train.10
They were astonished. Here was no grimy, crowded troop train but a line of Pullman cars with a separate berth for each man, with porters and a luxurious dining car in which waiters in white jackets served their individual tastes on clean plates and starched linen. Very few twenty-one-dollar-a-month privates have gone so opulently to war.
Five days later—having traversed that vast and gloriously varied country which most of them had never seen before—having been charmed by gophers gaping at them from prairie holes, having marveled at the primitive pure beauty of the Ozarks or the myriad million fireflies that seemed to set the Kansas wheatfields blazing, having missed the Mississippi by a night crossing but having caught their breath at the grandeur of the Rockies, they climbed the Sierra Nevadas like a long slow roller-coaster and went racing down the reverse grades to San Francisco and the sea.
As they disembarked from the trains to board waiting ships, newsboys went among them hawking newspapers with great black headlines announcing that a vast air-sea battle was being fought at a place called Midway Island.
The Japanese struck first.
Confident that no American carriers could possibly reach the Midway area for two more days, Admiral Chuichi Nagumo launched his opening strike at Midway Island itself while flying off a merely routine search for enemy ships.
On June 4, just before sunrise, 108 fighters, dive-bombers and torpedo-bombers roared aloft from the decks of Admiral Nagumo’s four big carriers. Marine pilots at Midway rose to intercept them. They were slaughtered. Marines flying the near-useless Brewster Buffaloes had no chance against the superior Zero. Only pilots such as Captain Marion Carl flying the new Grumman Wildcats were able to battle the Zero on anything like even terms. In all, fifteen American fighters were shot down. But superb American antiaircraft fire prevented the enemy from damaging Midway’s runways, while downing or damaging dozens of enemy aircraft.
One third of the Japanese attacking force was either shot down or badly damaged, and the formation leader radioed Admiral Nagumo that a second strike against Midway was required. Even as the report was being received, Midway’s land-based bombers came winging over Nagumo’s ships. They were driven off with heavy losses, the Japanese ships were not scratched, but the very appearance of the Americans served to underscore the report that Midway’s airfields were far from being knocked out.
Nagumo ordered ninety-three planes, then armed for possible strikes against enemy ships, to be rearmed with fragmentation and incendiary bombs for use against Midway. As the armorers rushed to comply, a search plane reported ten American ships to the northeast.
Chuichi Nagumo was thunderstruck. No American ships were supposed to be within a thousand miles of Midway! Shaken, pacing Akagi’s bridge with his white-gloved hands locked behind his back, Nagumo took a full quarter-hour to decide to order the ninety-three planes changed back to ship-bombs. By then, it was too late—the formations which had attacked Midway were returning and all flight decks had to be cleared to receive them. Still sailing toward Midway in box formation, the four big carriers—Akagi, Hiryu, Soryu, and Kaga—began taking planes aboard.
An hour later all decks were cleared. Nagumo ordered the second strike launched against the American task force.
And in so doing he did exactly what the Americans expected him to do.
Captain Miles Browning, Bull Halsey’s chief of staff on loan to Admiral Spruance, had calculated that Nagumo would keep steaming toward Midway and would launch a second strike at the island. He decided that the time to hit the Japanese would be while they were refueling planes on deck.
At seven that morning, 175 miles from the enemy’s calculated position, Spruance ordered Enterprise and Hornet to launch planes. Twenty Wildcats, sixty-seven Dauntless dive-bombers, and twenty-nine Devastator dive-bombers—116 planes in all—went hurtling aloft. Admiral Fletcher delayed Yorktown’s launching on the chance that other targets might be discovered. Even so, by nine o’clock, just as the last of the warbirds from Enterprise and Hornet were airborne, Yorktown had thirty-five planes—six Wildcats, seventeen Dauntlesses, and twelve Devastators—in the skies.
Most of them caught Nagumo. They found his four big carriers as expected, rearming and refueling.
Hornet’s torpedo-bombers—her fighters and dive-bombers missed the enemy entirely—attacked first. They were annihilated. Of fifteen Devastators that struck, every one was shot down and only one pilot survived. Enterprise’s torpedo squadron skimmed in next, and was also slaughtered: ten out of fourteen destroyed. Then came Yorktown’s dozen Devastators, and only four survived.
Not a single Japanese ship was touched.
In about a hundred glittering seconds it seemed to Chuichi Nagumo that the war was won.
And then the matchless American dive-bombers also found the Japanese.
There were thirty-seven Dauntlesses from Enterprise under Lieutenant Commander Clarence McCluskey. McCluskey took half of them down on Kaga, while Lieutenant Earl Gallaher led the rest against Akagi.
They sank them both.
Next, seventeen Dauntlesses from Yorktown under Lieutenant Commander Max Leslie fell upon Soryu and left her a crippled wreck to be broken in two by the torpedoes of U.S. submarine Nautilus.
In six minutes, Nagumo had lost his own flagship—having to transfer to the cruiser Nagara—and two other carriers. But he retaliated by ending the career of Yorktown. And while the bold Japanese Kates were breaking through Yorktown’s antiaircraft screen to put three torpedoes into the great ship’s hull, twenty-four Dauntlesses led by the formidable Gallaher found Hiryu, fell upon her, and put her on the bottom.
Well to the rear with Yamato and the Main Body, Isoroku Yamamoto read reports of the battle in stunned silence. His entire fast carrier group—four big flattops—had been lost, against only one American carrier sunk. With them went their complement of 250 planes, and 2200 officers and men. Although the smaller northern force had seized bases in the Aleutians, it had failed in its chief mission: to lure the Americans away from Midway.
Yamamoto recognized disaster when he saw it, and he ordered a general retirement. For the first time in 350 years Japan had suffered a naval defeat. At one blow—in a single day’s fighting—the advantage gained at Pearl Harbor had been lost and parity in carrier power was restored in the Pacific.
All of the Japanese ships reversed course. Isoroku Yamamoto went to his cabin and stayed there for the remainder of the voyage. Tight-lipped and sorrowing, Admiral Tanaka and Commander Hara escorted a bewildered Colonel Ichiki back to Guam.
Never again was the word Midway mentioned in the Japanese Navy.
Ernest King saw his chance.
The Japanese had been checked at Midway and it was now time for the Americans to seize the offensive. The question was: Where? By the middle of the month King had decided that Tulagi-Guadalcanal in the Solomons was the proper place. He proposed the operation to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
But General Marshall and General Arnold were firmly committed to the build-up of the U.S. forces in England—Operation Bolero, as it was called. On May 6, President Roosevelt had told them: “I do not want Bolero slowed down.” They were cool to King’s proposal, even though Cominch backed it up with intelligence reports that the Japanese were moving into Guadalcanal. After much debate, with some reluctance, they agreed.
But who would command?
Marshall wanted General MacArthur and King wanted Admiral Nimitz. It would be a Navy show with the Navy’s Marines, King argued, even though the Solomons did lie within MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Area. Finally, again after debate, the Solomons were included in the South Pacific Area which Admiral Ghormley was developing under Nimitz’s control.
On June 25 the Joint Chiefs notified Ghormley to confer with MacArthur on the operation.
Next day Ghormley, in Auckland, telephoned General Vandegrift in Wellington.
Wakefield had entered Wellington’s beautiful harbor on a Sunday, June 21. Marines crowding the rails saw a great round of deep blue water girdled by an amphitheater of sloping green hills dotted by white houses with red-tile roofs.
But there was bad news in Wellington.
Lieutenant Colonel William Twining, chief of Vandegrift’s advance party, came aboard with the report that the unloading of the cargo ships which had preceded them was far behind schedule.
“What in hell is wrong?” Vandegrift exploded.
“They work differently from us,” Twining replied. “They stop for morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea. If it’s raining they don’t work at all.”11
Vandegrift met the impasse with characteristic directness. Heedless of the sensitivities of socialist unions basking in the favor of a Labor Government, he ordered his Marines to form working parties and unload the ships themselves. It was fortunate that he had acted thus and so quickly, for five days later he received Ghormley’s telephone call, and on the next day he and his staff were flying to Auckland.
Vandegrift was astounded when he entered Ghormley’s office. He had known the admiral as a suave and gracious diplomat. But Ghormley appeared harassed. His manner was brusque.
“Vandegrift,” the admiral said, “I have some very disconcerting news.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Admiral,” the general said.
But the admiral merely handed the general a top-secret dispatch and grunted, “You will be more sorry when you read this.”12
Archer Vandegrift could not believe what he read. It was the Joint Chiefs’ directive and it specified that the First Marine Division—his, Vandegrift’s—would seize Tulagi and Guadalcanal. They were to land August 1. Five weeks away!
Vandegrift read the dispatch again, slowly, in a tense silence broken by the drumming of Ghormley’s slender fingers on the table.
At last Vandegrift looked up and expostulated: his division was fragmented, one third in Samoa, one third in Wellington, one third at sea; most of his men had not been in uniform six months; most of his equipment was new and needed to be broken in; his supplies would now need to be unloaded, sorted, and combat loaded; he knew nothing of Guadalcanal, not even its location. He concluded:
“I just don’t see how we can land anywhere by August first.”
Ghormley nodded. “I don’t see how we can land at all, and I am going to take it up with MacArthur. Meanwhile, we’ll have to go ahead as best as we can.”13
Archer Vandegrift began going ahead immediately. He summoned his staff to Ghormley’s headquarters, learning that he would be able to replace the missing Seventh Regiment with the Second Marine Regiment, that he would also have Edson’s Raiders—reclaimed rather than received, he thought dryly—as well as the Third Defense Battalion. These units, of course, were widely scattered: the Second Marines were aboard ship in San Diego, Edson was in Samoa, and the defense unit was in Hawaii. Nevertheless, they could rendezvous at sea. The most pressing matter at the moment, even more so than licking in weeks a logistics problem that normally required months, was to find out something—anything—about Guadalcanal Island.
* Rice wine, pronounced to rhyme with rocky.
* There were no brigadier generals in the Japanese Army. A Japanese lieutenant general was only equal to an American major general.
* Naval artillery is measured by the diameter of the shells fired.