4
The key question for Nimitz at the beginning of 1942 was how to employ his scarce resources. With only three carrier groups—and little else—he was in no position to seek battle with the Kidō Butai. Nor did he need to. Within a year he could expect the arrival of the first of the new-construction carriers and other warships that would give him a significant materiel superiority over the Japanese. That suggested that one possible strategy was simply to conserve his strength, hold on to Hawaii, and wait for those ships. That would have been consistent with the principle of “Germany First,” the strategic concept adopted by the government just weeks before the war began. Of course that was before the Japanese had struck at Pearl Harbor, which had immediately created public pressure to strike back. Moreover, Nimitz was unwilling to concede the initiative to the Japanese. He planned to use his carriers to hit their bases in the central Pacific, striking targets of opportunity to keep them back on their heels.
His boss, Ernie King, had similar thoughts. If anything, King was more eager than Nimitz to begin a counteroffensive. He shared with Nimitz the instinct (in King’s words) to “hold what you’ve got and hit them when you can.” But unlike Nimitz, who could focus his attention and energies exclusively on the Pacific, King had to fight a global war, including the ongoing Battle of the Atlantic against German U-boats. In addition, King was under pressure from America’s allies, including Australian prime minister John Curtin, to maintain the communications and supply link between Hawaii and Australia. King was acutely sensitive to the fact that Japanese occupation of New Caledonia, Fiji, or Samoa in the South Pacific would sever that link, and he wanted Nimitz to focus his attention southward, writing his Pacific commander that the protection of the lifeline to Australia (see map 1, p. 68) was second only to the defense of Hawaii itself, and not by much. He ordered Nimitz to commit both Halsey’s Task Force 8 and Fletcher’s new Task Force 17—two-thirds of America’s carrier force in the Pacific—to protecting and screening a convoy that was carrying reinforcements from San Diego to Samoa. Only after Samoa was secure would those carrier task forces become available for offensive operations.1
Nimitz perforce complied, but when King also ordered him to send a squadron of patrol planes to Australia, Nimitz pushed back. He protested that the reduction of aircraft in Hawaii left it “dangerously weak,” and he reminded King of the central importance of Hawaii to the Allied cause. Instead of rebuking Nimitz for his temerity, King replied that the transfer was isolated and temporary; he assured Nimitz that he fully understood the “paramount importance” of Hawaii. Over the next several months, however, there would be a subtle but steady push and pull between King and Nimitz about how, and especially where, to employ the three carrier task forces in the Pacific.2
By January 23 the American reinforcements had been safely landed at Samoa, and the Enterprise and Yorktown were freed up to operate against Japanese targets. Nimitz ordered Halsey to strike Japanese bases in the Marshall and Gilbert Islands. King not only approved, he urged that the strikes “be driven home” and suggested that Wilson Brown’s Lexington force should also raid Wake Island a few days afterward. His notion was that when Halsey struck at the Marshalls, the Japanese would pull coverage away from Wake, and Brown could exploit that. Though some members of Nimitz’s staff worried about sending all three carriers out simultaneously, Nimitz overruled them. For all his placid demeanor, Nimitz was perfectly willing to act boldly, taking what more conservative officers considered significant risks in order to regain the initiative. In this first American counterattack since Pearl Harbor, a robust offensive was crucial to improving morale both at home and in the fleet. As it happened, Brown’s raid on Wake had to be scrubbed after a Japanese submarine sank the oiler Neches, which left Brown with barely enough fuel to get to Wake and back. Deciding that there was too small a margin of error, Nimitz recalled him. He was willing to act boldly, but he also knew the difference between boldness and foolishness.3
No one was sure how extensive, or well protected, the Japanese bases in the Marshalls were. The former German colony had been granted to the Japanese as a mandate by the League of Nations after the First World War, and since then few Westerners had been allowed to visit them, much less prepare detailed charts. For some of those islands, the most recent charts available to the Americans had been made by Charles Wilkes, who had led the first U.S. Navy exploration expedition of the Pacific in 1840. King and Nimitz assumed that behind this veil of secrecy the Japanese had built up substantial defenses in the Marshall Islands. The American raid was therefore a shot in the dark.4
Fletcher’s Yorktown group made a fast run in toward the target, crossing over the international date line on January 29 and skipping at once to the 31st. Shortly before 6:00 a.m. on February 1, Fletcher turned the Yorktown into the wind to launch. The weather was terrible. Squalls surrounded the task force, and flashes of lightning could be seen on the western horizon in the direction of the principal target at Jaluit Atoll. The first planes spotted for launch were four Wildcat fighters that would act as combat air patrol (CAP) and protect the task force during the raid. Fletcher planned to keep the rest of his fighters aboard so he could rotate the CAP, and to act as a reserve in case of a Japanese counterattack.5
After the fighters were airborne, Yorktown launched seventeen Dauntless dive-bombers and eleven Devastator torpedo planes (armed with bombs for this mission), all of them under Commander Curtis Smiley. These planes were to strike the Japanese seaplane base at Jaluit, which was some 140 miles away. It was dawn by now, but the sky remained dark and filled with heavy clouds. The visibility was so poor that the pilots had difficulty finding one another over the task force. Smiley never did manage to gather all his planes into one group, and some of the pilots ended up flying off toward Jaluit on their own. While en route there, the Americans encountered a powerful thunderstorm with “sheet lightning and torrential rains” that reduced visibility to near zero. They pressed on nonetheless and dropped their bombs on or near the assigned target. Under these conditions it was hard to know with certainty whether they hit anything. They bombed a radio tower and strafed two small vessels in the lagoon. The advertised “seaplane base” turned out to be little more than a corrugated-tin hut. Several pilots, despairing of finding a worthy target, simply jettisoned their bombs.6
After that first group flew off toward Jaluit, Fletcher ordered the launch of fourteen more dive-bombers: nine for a strike on Makin, 120 miles to the south, and five more for Mili, forty miles to the north, about which virtually nothing was known. The weather was better over Makin than Jaluit, but the only targets of any value there were a minelayer and two large seaplanes, both of which were destroyed. It was all somewhat anti-climactic after the weeks of anticipation. At Mili the disappointment was even greater. It was the largest island in the Mili Atoll, and later in the war the Japanese would build an airstrip there and turn it into a major base, but in February of 1942 it was virtually unoccupied. Lacking targets worthy of their bombs, the Yorktown pilots did what they could, shooting up anything that looked worthwhile. For the most part, however, it was a wild goose chase.7
Then the attack planes had to go back through that appalling weather to find the task force. By then, the storm had caught up with the Yorktown. Winds gusted up to 50 knots, and the carrier pitched and rolled so wildly that Captain Buckmaster called back the circling Wildcats of the CAP. The attack pilots had to execute a landing under extremely perilous conditions and while low on fuel. When Ensign Tom Ellison landed his Dauntless, there was not enough fuel left in his tank to taxi. Several pilots didn’t make it back at all and had to ditch in the water. Fletcher ordered four destroyers to search for them, but in that storm-tossed sea not all the pilots could be recovered. After two hours, Fletcher broke radio silence to recall the destroyers, reformed his task force, and retired to the northeast. Though he had initially planned a second strike, the dearth of targets and the worsening weather convinced him to scrap it.8
For the fighter pilots on the Yorktown, the highlight of the whole raid was the downing of a big Kawanishi flying boat (“Emily”) that had been hovering near the task force and reporting its position. The Wildcat pilots chased the giant four-engine plane from one patch of clouds to another, riddling it with .50-caliber bullets. When a pilot shot off its tail section, the exultant pilot radioed: “We just shot his goddamned ass off!” Nonetheless, there was no disguising the fact that overall the Yorktown’s initial raid had been largely unproductive.9
Halsey’s Enterprise group, by contrast, had far better luck, and Halsey’s natural bellicosity allowed him to take full advantage of it. The first sign that things might be going his way came the day before the strike, when a Japanese scout plane, identified on radar, flew past without spotting the task force. Ever the showman, Halsey composed a sarcastic message thanking the pilot for failing to see him, had it translated into Japanese, ran off copies on the ship’s mimeo machine, and gave the copies to his pilots to drop along with their bombs. It was the wartime version of a playground taunt, and risky, too, since it could have revealed to the Japanese the effectiveness of American radar.
Nimitz had ordered Halsey to attack Japanese bases at Wotje and Maloelap in the Marshall Islands, but as Halsey moved toward the targets the skipper of the American submarine Dolphin reported that the defenses at the main Japanese base at Kwajalein were less extensive than previously believed, and, pressed by his eccentric and pugnacious chief of staff, Commander Miles Browning, Halsey added Kwajalein to the target list.
In the predawn darkness, twenty minutes ahead of Fletcher and some three hundred miles to the northwest, the Enterprise turned into the wind and increased speed to 30 knots. As on the Yorktown, the first planes to launch that morning were six Wildcats, to serve as CAP. Then came thirty-six Dauntless dive-bombers of VS-6 and VB-6 under Commander Howard “Brigham” Young. Their principal target was the pair of islands called Roi and Namur at the north end of Kwajalein Atoll.
The weather was better for the Enterprise pilots, but it was still pitch dark at 4:34 a.m. when the first planes took off. Carrier launches are dangerous under any circumstances with each plane having a full fuel tank and carrying 700 pounds of bombs, and they are particularly dangerous in the dark. To keep the Enterprise concealed from prowling Japanese submarines, only a few hooded lights offered a dim and ghostly illumination of the flight deck as the pilots warmed up their engines. Taking off in such circumstances was like accelerating through a tunnel into black oblivion. One recalled that it was “like being inside a black felt hat,” and most of the pilots felt a “touch of vertigo” as they launched into the darkness.10
After takeoff, the bombers had to form up over the task force, which meant finding the other planes in the strike group as they all circled overhead in the dark. The planes, too, were blacked out except for a single white taillight. Finding their proper position in the formation was like groping blindfolded at 130 knots. Once all the Dauntless bombers were in the air, nine heavy Devastator torpedo bombers took off. Like the Devastators launched from Yorktown, they carried bombs rather than torpedoes. Lieutenant Commander Eugene Lindsey led this contingent, slotted for the attack on Kwajalein Island, some forty miles south of Roi-Namur and over 150 miles away. It took more than twenty minutes before the planes assembled into a formation that resembled a series of stacked Vs. Then the whole group headed off toward Kwajalein Atoll.11
As the attack planes flew off to the west, Halsey brought up the twelve remaining Wildcats of VF-6 from the hangar deck. Instead of keeping them so he could rotate his CAP, as Fletcher did, or sending them off as protection for the attack planes, he planned to use them offensively. Deck crews had attached 100-pound bombs under each wing, and Halsey sent the fighters off to attack the nearby islands of Wotje and Maloelap. Lieutenant Commander Wade McClusky led six Wildcats against nearby Wotje, and Lieutenant Jim Gray led six more against Maloelap. During the launch, one of the pilots in Gray’s section lost his bearings in the dark, and instead of lifting off, his plane slid sideways into the sea. The pilot was rescued, but it left Gray with only five airplanes.12
Like the Yorktown force that targeted Mili Island, McClusky’s fighters found little that was worthy of their ordnance at Wotje. At Maloelap, by contrast, the five pilots of Gray’s section found much more than they had bargained for. On the small island of Taroa, part of Maloelap Atoll, the Japanese had built a new concrete airfield. Constructed by prisoner labor over two years, it was large enough to host two dozen fighters and bombers, many of which were parked in rows along the apron, and several of which were at that moment taking off to defend the airstrip. There were, in fact, fifteen Japanese fighters at Taroa—older models than the vaunted Zero—and nine twin-engine bombers. To Gray it seemed like there were “thirty or forty” planes in sight.13
Gray’s five Wildcats dropped their ordnance on the airfield and began strafing, but the attackers became targets almost at once as Japanese fighters swarmed down on them. Worse, the guns on several of the Wildcats jammed, and under such circumstances there was nothing to do but to retire as fast as possible after they had dropped their small bombs. Gray’s guns did not jam, and he made three strafing runs on the airfield before he ran out of ammunition. By then there were eight Japanese fighters in the air, and Gray became the target of all of them. Bullets perforated his Wildcat’s wings and fuselage and thudded into the armor plate behind his seat. After he returned to the Enterprise, his plane crew counted more than forty bullet holes in the plane itself, and fifteen dents in the armor plate that had been installed behind his seat only days before.14
While the American fighters were extricating themselves, the bombers and torpedo planes were flying westward toward Kwajalein. After about an hour, the pilots identified a line of surf marking the perimeter of the giant atoll. Like most of the atolls in the Pacific, Kwajalein was essentially a thin strip of coral reef surrounding a central lagoon. From 14,000 feet it looked like a silver necklace that had been tossed carelessly onto a blue carpet. Though the atoll was more than sixty miles long end to end, only a few pieces of dry ground were large enough to accommodate an airfield—Ebadon at the western end, Kwajalein at the eastern end, and the twin islands of Roi and Namur at the northern tip. The dive-bombers of VB-6 and the nine Devastators of Gene Lindsey’s VT-6 broke off from the attack formation and headed south for Kwajalein Island; the scout bombers of VS-6 under Young continued westward toward the larger island of Roi. The Americans had assumed that Roi was Japan’s main base and expected the anchorage to be choked with shipping. Instead, when the dive-bombers arrived there at about 7:00 a.m., the sun now fully up, they found a small airfield and several support buildings, but no ships.15
Lieutenant Commander Halstead Hopping, the commander of Scouting Six, led the attack. Because his was the lead plane, antiaircraft fire concentrated on him. So did one of the Japanese fighters that came up behind him almost as soon as he pulled out of his dive. The fighter fired a long burst, and Hopping’s plane went spinning into the sea. The other planes in his squadron pressed home their attack, dropping smaller 100-pound bombs on the buildings and parked airplanes while fending off the Japanese fighters. One bomb hit an ammunition dump, creating a satisfying explosion, but there were few targets that justified use of a 500-pound bomb. The Americans destroyed eleven planes, more than half of them on the ground. Nonetheless, they no longer expected to find anything of greater value to attack.16
Then they heard Commander Young’s voice in their headsets—now that the bullets were flying, there was no longer any need to maintain radio silence. Young passed on a message he had received from Gene Lindsey, who reported that there were plentiful shipping targets at Kwajalein Island, forty miles to the south. One of his pilots even reported that there were “two carriers” in the lagoon. Young relayed the message to his squadron: “Targets suitable for heavy bombs at Kwajalein.” The Dauntless pilots regrouped and sped southward.17
Halsey, too, heard the report. The Enterprise maintained radio silence throughout the operation—essential when operating so close to enemy territory, or indeed at any time—but he could listen in as the pilots talked to one another. When he heard Young repeat the report about the “two carriers,” he launched nine more torpedo planes, armed this time with ship-killing torpedoes, under Lieutenant Lance “Lem” Massey, sending them to Kwajalein.
As Gene Lindsey had promised, the lagoon at Kwajalein was filled with Japanese shipping, including a light cruiser, several submarines, and a dozen or more freighters. There were, however, no carriers. The Japanese had no fighter cover, which meant that the American pilots could make their runs targeted only by ground fire. The first wave of bombers dropped their ordnance, shot up the shipping in the turquoise waters of the lagoon, then flew back to the Enterprise for more fuel and ammo. As they were returning to the carrier, they passed Massey’s torpedo planes going in the other direction. Unharried by Japanese fighters, the low and slow American Devastators had time to line up on their anchored prey. There was even some competition among the pilots for the big prizes. Halsey smiled when he heard one of the pilots radio to another: “You ease off to the right; that big one is mine.” In addition to wreaking havoc on Japanese shipping, one of the American bombs killed Rear Admiral Yatsushiro Sukeyoshi, an Eta Jima classmate of Yamamoto’s chief of staff and the first Japanese flag officer to die in the war.18
Meanwhile, back at the task force, Halsey had the first group of bombers rearmed and refueled and sent them to hit the airfield on Taroa that Gray’s fighters had found. Aware that the bombers parked there were the most proximate threat to his task force, he wanted to neutralize as many of them as possible. Other groups were vectored there as they became available. Lieutenant Richard Best dropped his bomb on a hangar at Taroa and then fought off several fighters, one of which clipped him in the fuel tank. The escaping vapor looked like smoke, and Best’s rear-seat gunner, Aviation Radioman First Class Lee McHugh, called him on the intercom: “Mr. Best, Mr. Best, we’re on fire!”
“Where? Where? Where?” Best called back.
“The right wing!”
“Dammit, McHugh, that’s our gasoline leaking. Don’t you ever scare me like that again.”19
For nearly nine hours, Halsey kept the Enterprise maneuvering within easy range of four Japanese bases. For part of that time, Wotje Island was actually in sight; columns of smoke could be seen rising from it. Finally, after returning from yet another strike, the commander of Bombing Six, Lieutenant Commander William Hollingsworth, climbed up to the bridge and said to Halesy, “Admiral, don’t you think it’s about time we got the hell out of here?” A grinning Halsey agreed, and after recovering the last of its planes, Task Force 8 began its withdrawal.20
And just in time. Soon, five twin-engine Nell bombers appeared. There would have been nine of them, but the strikes on the Taroa airfield had destroyed two and damaged two more. Rather than wait until those last two could be repaired, the Japanese commander had sent out all the operational aircraft he had. The Nell was an older airplane, designed in the early 1930s for the war in China, and while several Nells had taken part in the sinking of HMS Prince of Wales in December, the aircraft was not an ideal weapon for precision bombing. Rather than trying to place one bomb directly on the target, as the dive-bombers did, Japanese doctrine called for the twin-engine bombers to pass over the ship in a tight formation and to release all their bombs simultaneously so that at least one struck the target. This time, however, the Japanese squadron commander, Lieutenant Nakai Kazuo, decided on a more direct attack. He tipped his Nell over into a shallow glide with the four other planes following his lead. At two thousand feet, they released their bombs. Explosions erupted all around the Enterprise, showering the flight deck with sea spray and shrapnel. Though there were no direct hits, a piece of shrapnel from a near miss mortally wounded a sailor and cut a fuel line that started a fire, though it was quickly contained.21
Lieutenant Nakai ordered his plane out of formation and directed it at the stern of the Enterprise where a dozen or more planes were parked. The Japanese would not adopt deliberate suicide as a war tactic until several years later, but Nakai’s plane had been badly damaged by two of the Wildcats, and he may have concluded that he could not make it back to base. Seeing his maneuver, Aviation Machinist’s Mate Third Class Bruno P. Gaido ran across the deck of the Enterprise, jumped into the back seat of the rearmost plane, and manned its .30-caliber guns. He fired continuously at the nose of the oncoming bomber as it flew straight toward him. The captain of the Enterprise, George Murray, ordered the carrier hard to starboard. Nakai—if he was still alive—was unable to match the turn. His wing sliced off the tail of the bomber from which Gaido continued to fire, and the Nell scraped forty feet of the flight deck before crashing into the sea.22*
There was more to come. Two hours later, as the Enterprise steamed northeast at 30 knots, a second attack came. The Japanese at Taroa had managed to patch up their two damaged bombers and send them out as well. These two conducted a more conventional level-bombing attack, though they, too, failed to score a hit. McClusky’s Wildcat pilots went after them. Halsey grinned again when he heard Lieutenant Junior Grade James Daniels blurt out over the radio net, “Bingo! Bingo! I got one!” The second Nell, though crippled, managed to escape because the Wildcats were too low on fuel to pursue it. After this second scrape with Japanese land-based air, Halsey changed course to the northwest, using a weather front to cover his withdrawal.23
The Enterprise task force returned triumphantly to Pearl Harbor on February 5. Halsey’s planes had sunk a transport and a sub chaser and damaged six other ships, including the cruiser. The raid was little more than a pinprick to the vast Japanese empire, but as Halsey noted in his after-action report it was “the first instance in history of offensive combat by U.S. carriers,” and “the first offensive operation by Task Forces of the Pacific Fleet in the current war.” Because of that, when the Enterprise task force entered Pearl Harbor, it received a hero’s welcome. Ships blew their whistles as their crews lined the rails to wave their caps and cheer. Nimitz himself came on board the Enterprise to shake Halsey’s hand.24
By contrast, the return of Fletcher’s Yorktown group the next day was anticlimactic. Fletcher reported honestly that “no objectives of any real military value were known in the vicinity,” and because of that, and the poor conditions, he had decided “to withdraw and refuel.” It was the correct decision, but it meant that there were no whistles or waving caps for the men and the ships of Task Force 17.25
Gratifying as this small victory was, Admiral King remained concerned about the security of the South Pacific, and especially that tenuous communications link between Hawaii and Australia. The Japanese capture of Rabaul on New Britain Island on January 23—an operation in which four carriers of the Kidō Butai had participated—led him to press Nimitz once again to “operate a carrier group in the South Pacific.” There was even a hint of sarcasm in his message, which asked Nimitz whether he was “aware of [the] serious threat to communications with Australia created by current enemy occupation of … Rabaul.” Nimitz was indeed aware of it, but he balked at the idea of committing his mobile carrier forces to the defense of static lines of communication. It was far better, in his view, to use them offensively to disrupt the enemy’s own lines of communication. In the stilted language of a naval message, he protested to his boss: “A mobile striking or covering force to remain constantly in the area [of Samoa-Fiji] seems likely to result in [the] principal employment of fleet being [the] defense [of] distant communication lines.” This, he argued, would leave the initiative entirely to the Japanese. “Recommend against proposal as a guiding directive.” He suggested instead that as a permanent force in the Samoan area, two cruisers and four destroyers “should be the maximum.” King, too, favored the offensive, but he was under tremendous political pressure to defend American allies in the region, especially the Australians. In a compromise, he told Nimitz to send two cruisers and two destroyers to operate “continuously in Samoan area” and rotate other ships there “as you see fit.”26
At least some of the pressure on King came from the White House. In a “fireside chat” on February 23, the president told his radio listeners, “If we lost communication with the Southwest Pacific, all of that area, including Australia and New Zealand and the Dutch Indies, would fall under Japanese domination.” Were that to happen, the president warned, Japan could “extend her conquests” to the Americas, or, in the other direction, to India, “through the Indian Ocean to Africa, to the Near East, and try to join forces with Germany and Italy.”* Responding to these concerns, King wrote the president that “our primary concern in the Pacific is to hold Hawaii,” but that “our next care in the Pacific is to preserve Australasia.” He ordered Wilson Brown’s Lexington group into the South Pacific, effectively removing it from Nimitz’s control, for a raid against the Japanese citadel at Rabaul at the northern tip of New Britain. At the same time, in order to divert Japanese attention from that raid, Halsey and Fletcher were to strike again at targets in the Central Pacific, including another attempt on Wake.27
The raid on Rabaul was Wilson Brown’s opportunity to duplicate Halsey’s success in the Marshalls. It didn’t work out that way. While still several hundred miles from the target on February 20, his task force was spotted by three Japanese long-range scout planes. The Lexington had several Wildcat fighters of VF-3 (formerly of the Saratoga) aloft that day, including one piloted by the squadron’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander John S. “Jimmy” Thach, one of the most skilled and innovative pilots in the fleet. Thach shot down the first snooper himself, and another pilot claimed a second. Despite that, Brown had to assume that the patrol planes had radioed his location, course, and speed to Rabaul. Having lost the element of surprise, and claiming an “acute fuel shortage,” he decided to call off the strike, though he continued to steam in the direction of Rabaul during the daylight hours, turning around only after nightfall.28
The Japanese patrol planes had indeed reported the presence of the Lexington group to Rabaul, and at 2:00 that afternoon, Vice Admiral Gotō Eiji sent seventeen two-engine bombers to the attack. They were big Mitsubishi G4M1 bombers (“Bettys”) that were both newer and faster than the seven Nells that had assailed Halsey in the Marshalls. The ability to employ land-based airplanes from a web of Pacific bases was a central feature of Japanese prewar defensive plans. These long-range planes could strike at American warships well before the carriers got close enough to launch their own aircraft. What the Japanese didn’t anticipate was that the Americans would be able to see them coming.29
Vice Admiral Wilson Brown commanded the Lexington task force during two planned raids on the Japanese base at Rabaul. Here he wears the gold aiguillette that he sported as President Roosevelt’s’ naval aide in 1943–44. (U.S. Naval Institute)
If the Japanese had an edge on the Americans in torpedo technology, the Americans had a huge advantage in that they had radar and the Japanese did not. Radar had made its debut in the fleet in 1937 when a prototype—looking much like a bedspring tied to the mast—had been installed on the destroyer Leary, A much newer and more efficient version, CXAM radar, made by RCA, was installed on the American carriers in the fall of 1940. Depending on the skill of the operator, CXAM radar could identify approaching aircraft from fifty to a hundred miles out, and surface ships fourteen to twenty miles away. The new system was idiosyncratic, however; images appeared and faded, and it was difficult, if not impossible, to determine altitude or even the number of contacts. Nonetheless, it was a huge improvement over the naked eye. Just before 4:00 p.m., the Lexington’s radar picked up an air contact seventy-six miles out. As it happened, the Lexington was about to rotate its CAP and had just launched six replacement Wildcats. The planes coming off patrol were already circling for a landing when they were ordered to stay aloft. Instead, the Lexington launched four more Wildcats plus eleven Dauntless bombers (without bombs), which gave them twenty-seven aircraft to contest an assault by what turned out to be seventeen Japanese bombers approaching in two waves.30
The first wave of nine bombers was simply overwhelmed by the Americans, which provoked cheers from the crewmen of the Lexington, who could see the planes falling from the sky. The Bettys were well armed, but they had no fighter support and, like most Japanese combat aircraft, were poorly armored. Jimmy Thach got one, and his squadron mates took care of the rest. Like Lieutenant Nakai, who had tried to crash his plane into Halsey’s Enterprise, Lieutenant Nakagawa Masayoshi tried to crash his crippled bomber into the Lexington. When it was 2,500 yards away and closing, the guns on the Lexington opened up. Most of the shells exploded behind the plane, and an officer on Brown’s staff who had a reputation as a crack duck hunter, yelled out “Lead him! … damn you, lead him!” As the Lexington turned away, Nakagawa’s plane, riddled with bullets and with most of its crewmen likely dead, crashed into the sea.31
The annihilation of that first wave of bombers was gratifying, though when a second wave of eight Bettys arrived, only five recently launched Wildcats had enough fuel left to make an attack. One of them was piloted by Lieutenant Edward “Butch” O’Hare and another by his wingman, Lieutenant Junior Grade Marion Dufilho. The other three were widely separated. Dufilho’s guns jammed almost at once so that O’Hare faced the challenge of fending off eight medium bombers virtually alone. The Bettys may have lacked armor, but they bristled with armament. Each plane had a machine gun in the nose, another in a blister on the top of the fuselage, two more in blisters on the sides, plus a 20 mm cannon in the tail. It took remarkable courage for one pilot to assail a formation of such planes; O’Hare had to know that as many as two dozen gunners would be aiming at him. However, unlike the Japanese, who were flying in formation, O’Hare had freedom to maneuver, and he began to pick off the Japanese bombers one by one. With only thirty to forty seconds’ worth of ammunition, he attacked the starboard plane first and then worked his way through the formation. “When one would start burning, I’d haul out and wait for it to get out of the way,” he said later. “Then I’d go in and get another one.” He shot down three bombers and badly crippled two more, continuing his attack until he had expended all his ammunition. He was credited with five kills and became the first official U.S. Navy ace of the Pacific war.32*
The three surviving Japanese planes dropped their bombs over the task force, scoring no hits, and then turned to head back to base—all but one. O’Hare had shot the engine off the left wing of Lieutenant Commander Itō Takuzō’s command airplane, and the big bomber spiraled out of the formation, losing altitude quickly. Like Nakagawa, Itō ordered his pilot, Warrant Officer Watanabe Chūzō, to crash into the American carrier. With only one engine, however, Watanabe could not hold his course. The Lexington turned hard to starboard, and the big Japanese bomber flew alongside for a few heart-stopping seconds before it splashed into the sea 1,500 yards off the port bow.33
Butch O’Hare’s adventures for the day were not quite over. As he came in to land on the Lexington, low on fuel and out of ammunition, an overzealous young gunner on the carrier’s port quarter opened fire on him. O’Hare saw where the fire was coming from, but coolly continued to execute his landing. After he climbed out of the cockpit, he walked slowly back to the gun tub on the port quarter and, looking down at the machine gunner there, said to him: “Son, if you don’t stop shooting at me when I’ve got my wheels down, I’m going to have to report you to the gunnery officer.”34
The F4F-3 Wildcat was the U.S. Navy’s principal carrier-based fighter in the spring of 1942. In this staged photograph, two of them are being flown by two of the Navy’s best fighter pilots: John S. “Jimmy” Thach flies F-1 in the foreground, and Edward “Butch” O’Hare flies F-13. (U.S. Naval Institute)
When it was over, fifteen of the seventeen Japanese planes had been destroyed. The Lexington pilots celebrated their victory with such enthusiasm that Brown had to remind them that this was not a football game. Nonetheless, the successful defense of the task force on February 20 dramatically boosted the morale of the pilots, especially the Wildcat pilots of Jimmy Thach’s VF-3. The Japanese bombers had proved remarkably vulnerable, and the Americans took to calling the Bettys “flying Zippos,” after the famous cigarette lighter whose advertising slogan was that it lit up the first time, every time. The Americans lost only two Wildcats and one pilot, Ensign J. Woodrow Wilson, killed when a 20 mm shell hit his cockpit.
The air battle on February 20 had deprived Rabaul of all but three of its attack bombers (the two that managed to return and one that had been unable to make the sortie), yet it was less than a complete American victory, given that the original target had been the Japanese shipping at Rabaul. Some members of Nimitz’s staff questioned Brown’s decision to retire. After all, the virtual destruction of Rabaul’s air arm suggested that he could have operated there with at least as much impunity as Halsey had off the Marshalls. Brown’s explanation of an “acute fuel shortage” struck some as curious, since careful planning had gone into meeting the fuel needs of the task force. Nimitz gave his task-force commander the benefit of the doubt, but he was concerned when Brown reported, “Unless it is intended we return [to] Pearl, it will be necessary [to] proceed to Sydney.” Neither Nimitz nor King wanted any of the American carrier groups to begin operating out of Australia for fear that once they were there, the Australian authorities would never let them go. Though he said nothing at the time, all this may have left Nimitz with nagging uncertainties about the suitability of “Shaky” Brown for aggressive carrier operations.35
Halsey’s raid on Wake Island took place four days later. By now the Enterprise task force had a new numerical designation. When Halsey received his orders for the mission, he noticed that his command had been redesignated Task Force 13, and—even worse—that it was to sail on February 13, which happened to be a Friday. Halsey insisted that both numbers be changed. He may have meant it as a joke. Nonetheless he waited until Valentine’s Day before departing for Wake, doing so in command of what was now labeled Task Force 16, the designation it would carry into the Battle of Midway.36
On February 24, bombers from the Enterprise attacked Wake from the north while the heavy cruisers of Halsey’s escort group—Northampton and Salt Lake City under Rear Admiral Raymond Spruance—shelled it from the south. The results were indecisive; the Americans inflicted some minor damage on the Japanese base while losing three planes. Afterward, Task Force 16 continued west all the way to Marcus Island, only a thousand miles from Tokyo, to conduct another raid. That attack, deep inside the Japanese defense perimeter, took the defenders completely by surprise. The American planes had a strong tailwind and arrived over the target before sunup. In the pitch darkness, the tracers of the Japanese ground fire looked to one pilot like “a string of oranges following me out in a gentle curve.” Though the raid inflicted only minor damage, it caused considerable concern in Tokyo, and even led authorities there to order a blackout of the capital. Compared with the triumphs of the Kidō Butai throughout South Asia and on the north coast of Australia, these American counterattacks were little more than nuisance raids, but they did gain the attention of the Imperial General Staff, and, equally important, they provided America’s young brown-shoe aviators with both confidence and invaluable experience.37
Meanwhile, King and Nimitz continued to spar over the best use of the American carrier task forces. As always, King was under pressure from several quarters. The Japanese were clearly building up their forces at Rabaul for another push southward, and this fueled his concern for the safety of the Hawaii-Australia line of communication. He was also being urged to do more to protect Australia itself. After the fall of Singapore in mid-February, the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) was recalled from the Mediterranean. Churchill wanted to use two of its divisions to defend Burma. Australia’s prime minister, John Curtin, insisted that they were needed at home. Churchill begged Curtin to change his mind, arguing that the men were essential to fend off the Japanese assault on Rangoon. In response to an urgent plea from Churchill, Roosevelt promised Curtin that an American division would be sent to Australia at once. Curtin thanked FDR and accepted the offer, though he brought the Australian troops home nonetheless.38
All this compelled King to bolster Nimitz’s southern flank, and he created a new command theater called ANZAC (Australia, New Zealand Area Command).* With the Saratoga in Bremerton for repairs, its former task group commander, Herbert Leary, was without a job, and after promoting him to vice admiral, King made him the ANZAC commander, with authority over the east coast of Australia, New Zealand, New Caledonia, New Hebrides, the Solomon Islands, and Fiji. King’s order to Leary was to conduct “a strong and comprehensive offensive to be launched soon against exposed enemy naval forces.” There was a limit to King’s willingness to accommodate himself to political realities, however. When Roosevelt queried King about a request from Curtin to use an American carrier to ferry planes from California to Australia, King shot back that the carriers in the Pacific “are urgently required for offensive action as fighting carriers, and cannot logically be spared for use as ferry boats.”39
From the start, Leary proved something of a disappointment. He set up his headquarters at Melbourne, on the Australian mainland, and when King heard about it, he immediately ordered Leary to rejoin his flagship at sea. Like Nimitz, King was concerned that forces based in Australia would become fixed there and pass beyond his effective control. Leary objected. “My considered judgment … is that operational command can only be exercised from Melbourne,” adding, “I request reconsideration.” For once, King relented and Leary remained at his headquarters at Melbourne.40
Not being subject to the same political pressures as King, Nimitz was perplexed by the creation of ANZAC. King had already removed Wilson Brown’s Lexington task force from Nimitz’s authority; now he declared that Leary, too, would report directly to CominCh in Washington, effectively bypassing Nimitz altogether. Nimitz wondered whether King’s plan was “to gamble all upon securing Australia as a base of future operations against the enemy, and leave our Pacific Area open to attack.” Rather than to act defensively, he preferred to conduct “bold operations against the enemy’s flank.” In fact, King agreed. “Our current tasks are not merely protective,” King wrote in a message to task-force commanders, “but also offensive where practicable as [the] best way to protect is by reducing enemy offensive power … particularly carriers.” At the same time, however, he wanted some, and possibly most, of the American carrier force to be directed southward. Until New Caledonia received sufficient reinforcements to ensure its security, King suggested to Nimitz, at least one and possibly two carrier groups should operate in that area. Nimitz protested that the logistical requirements for operating two carriers so far from their base were daunting. To keep them full of fuel would require three Cimarron-class oilers on constant rotation, and the loss of one of those oilers would “seriously jeopardize” the task force. King acknowledged that “this depends on logistics and must be decided by CINCPAC.”41
Nimitz found all this confusing and a bit alarming. Minutes taken at a staff meeting in February of 1942 note that King’s message “did not materially clarify the command relationships.” Nor was there any more illumination when Pye returned from a visit to Washington and reported to Nimitz that as far as he could tell, “no over-all plan has been adopted” for the Pacific area. Nimitz was still feeling his way in regard to his command relationship with King. To this point he had acted as a dutiful subordinate, and King had treated him accordingly. Increasingly, however, Nimitz began to believe that it was important to establish the fact that he was in command, and that he should exercise authority over the carrier task forces in his theater. When King suggested that Nimitz send major elements of his command to support the heavily pressed ABDA (American, British, Dutch, and Australian) command, Nimitz replied that his forces were too weak to supply such a reinforcement, and offered that it would be better to conduct more diversionary raids to take some of the pressure off of ABDA. The question became moot a few days later when the Japanese virtually annihilated the ABDA naval command, sinking four Allied cruisers and seven destroyers during the Battle of the Java Sea (February 27–28). At about the same time, the Japanese also sank the old Langley, which had been the first American carrier, though she had been converted to a seaplane tender back in 1937. These losses temporarily ended the discussion over whether Nimitz ought to support ABDA. It also made the line of communication to Australia even more tenuous.42
Indeed, it was evident that the Japanese were building up their forces at Rabaul for a new push southward, and to forestall that, King ordered Brown to make a second attempt to raid the shipping at Rabaul. Brown claimed that he needed a second carrier task force for such a mission. King ordered Nimitz to send him Fletcher’s Yorktown group. Even after that, Brown hedged, reporting to King that he did not consider an attack on Rabaul “advisable.” Perhaps growing impatient with Brown, King insisted.43
Before Brown and Fletcher could get into position, however, the tactical picture changed again, and dramatically so. The shipping that had been crowding into Rabaul Harbor left there on March 7 and appeared the next day off the north coast of New Guinea, three hundred miles to the southwest. Japanese soldiers went ashore at Lae and Salamaua to establish new outposts for their maritime empire and to protect the approaches to Rabaul. Brown at once concluded that the shipping off those two ports offered a more valuable target than Rabaul itself, and on his own he changed the objective of the raid. It was within the authority of a task-force commander to alter the target with shifting circumstances, as Halsey had done at Kwajalein, but this was the second time that Brown had been ordered to strike at Rabaul and the second time he found a reason not to do it. Moreover, instead of approaching the new target from the east, Brown decided to attack from the south, launching planes from the Gulf of Papua south of New Guinea and sending them over the Owen Stanley Mountain Range, which runs like a gigantic spine along the middle of southeastern New Guinea.44
Most of the planes were bombers and escorting fighters. Brown also sent off twenty-five Devastators, thirteen of them carrying the heavy Mark 13 torpedo, and the rest with bombs. The slow and heavy Devastators had difficulty getting over the mountains, and they surmounted the crest only with the aid of a timely updraft. When the 104 American aircraft from two carriers came swooping down the verdant valleys on the north shore of New Guinea on March 10, they found even more targets off Lae and Salamaua than Halsey had found at Kwajalein. It was a bright, clear day, and there was no air opposition. The Americans had a field day. Based on the testimony of his pilots, Brown reported sinking five transports, three cruisers, a destroyer, and a minesweeper. The actual toll was less, but still impressive: three large transports sunk plus one more severely damaged, and additional damage to a light cruiser, several destroyers, and a large seaplane. Only one American aircraft was lost. Indeed, the raid so savaged Japanese sealift capacity that the local Japanese commander worried about his ability to sustain his foothold in New Guinea. It was the best day of the war so far for the brown shoes, and Roosevelt wired Churchill that it was “by all means the best day’s work we have had.”45
The Lexington task force returned to Pearl Harbor on March 26. The raid had been an unqualified success, and Nimitz recommended Brown for the Distinguished Service Medal. Then, two days later, Nimitz tapped Brown to head the new Amphibious Force being organized in San Diego. It was not quite a promotion, and some wondered at the time and later whether the purpose of the appointment was to remove Brown from the command of Task Force 11. The Pacific War historian John Lundstrom is doubtful, insisting that Brown’s “departure from carrier command had nothing to do with any perceived impression of lack of ‘aggressiveness.’” Perhaps not. But for whatever reason, both King and Nimitz had decided that Brown’s skills were better suited to other tasks. The “Running Summary” kept at CinCPac headquarters by Navy Captain Lynde D. McCormick noted that Brown “did not approach New Britain at all, but went to a position south of New Guinea and sent aircraft across the peninsula to Lae and Salamaua…. Even with the damage inflicted, it is doubtful if the enemy will be greatly retarded.”46
In that, at least, McCormick was wrong. The raid had a dramatic impact not only on Japanese shipping but also, and more importantly, on Japanese decision making. Vice Admiral Inoue Shigeyoshi, the Fourth Fleet commander who headed the Japanese South Seas Force, concluded that continuing the advance southward would now be impossible without carrier support. That conclusion would bring important elements of the Kidō Butai into contact with the American carriers for the first time.47
* Halsey noted Gaido’s heroic effort and promoted him to aviation mate first class that afternoon.
* There was another reason why the Western allies worried so much about Australia. As King wrote to FDR on March 5: “Australia—and New Zealand—are ‘white men’s countries’ which it is essential that we shall not allow to be overrun by Japanese because of the repercussion among the non-white races of the world.”
* Recognizing the public relations value of O’Hare’s feat, the Navy ordered him stateside, where Roosevelt awarded him the Medal of Honor, after which he was sent on a tour to sell war bonds. For that reason, he missed both the Battle of the Coral Sea and Midway.
Few of the thousands of modern-day passengers who travel through Chicago are aware that the city’s two major airports are both named to honor heroes of the Pacific War. Midway Airport is named for the battle itself, and passengers there can view a full-sized Dauntless dive bomber suspended from the ceiling of Terminal A. The larger O’Hare Airport, one of the busiest in the world, is named for Butch O’Hare.
* This is not to be confused with the Australia-New Zealand Army Corps, also called ANZAC, which fought at Gallipoli in World War I. This new ANZAC command lasted only until April, when it was absorbed into the Southwest Pacific command under Douglas MacArthur.