8
The Coral Sea is one of the world’s most beautiful bodies of water. Named for the coral reefs that guard Australia’s northeast coast, it is bounded by Australia on the south, New Guinea on the west, the Solomon Islands on the north, and the New Hebrides on the east. On May 1, 1942, the same day that Halsey’s Task Force 16 left Pearl Harbor, Jake Fitch and the Lexington task force joined Frank Jack Fletcher’s Yorktown force four hundred miles southeast of Guadalcanal Island. The two task forces operated independently for six days, but when they were formally amalgamated into a single unit on May 6, it put Fitch in an awkward position. So long as the Lexington operated separately, he commanded the task force. Once it became part of Task Force 17 under Fletcher, he had no job at all. He didn’t even command the Lexington itself—that was the job of Captain Frederick C. Sherman. Instead, Fitch was, in effect, a passenger on the Lexington—a high-ranking passenger to be sure, but a passenger nonetheless. Fletcher resolved the situation by designating Fitch, a 1906 Annapolis classmate and a close friend, as the tactical air officer for both carriers. Fletcher retained operational control of the combined task force, but the brown shoe Fitch would assume tactical responsibility for air operations. It was a creative and diplomatic way to resolve an awkward command problem and to take advantage of Fitch’s experience and expertise. 1
That same May 1st, fifteen hundred miles to the northwest in the Japanese-controlled Caroline Islands, the Shökaku and Zuikaku and their escorts got under way from the spacious lagoon at Truk and steamed southward toward the Coral Sea to cover Operation MO. The commander of this Japanese force was Vice Admiral Takagi Takeo, who, like Chester Nimitz, was an old submarine man. Despite his seniority, Takagi had no experience in air operations and used a heavy cruiser as his flagship. Consequently, he delegated control of carrier operations to his close friend Rear Admiral Hara Chūichi who commanded Carrier Division (CarDiv) 5. Hara was a big man (his nickname was “King Kong”), but that did not impress the judgmental and diminutive (five foot two, 120 pounds) Genda Minoru, who believed that while Hara “looked tough,” “he did not have the tiger’s heart.” Though the Shökaku (“Soaring Crane”) and Zuikaku (“Happy Crane”) were the newest of Japan’s big carriers, their pilots were also the least experienced, and despite performing well at Pearl Harbor and in the Indian Ocean, they had yet to earn the full respect of the veterans in CarDivs 1 and 2. This independent operation was a chance for both Hara and the pilots of CarDiv 5 to prove themselves.2
Also on that busy May 1st, eighteen hundred miles further north, a group of senior officers met on board the Combined Fleet flagship Yamato, anchored in Hashirajima Harbor near Hiroshima, to participate in a war game for the attack on Midway. The officers who bowed to Yamamoto as they prepared to game out the battle plan were confident that in a few days the Port Moresby operation would be complete, CarDiv 5 could be reunited with the Kidō Butai, and they could turn their attention to bigger things.3
Fletcher’s orders from Nimitz were specific as to his objective but discretionary as to his movements. “Your task,” Nimitz wrote him, was to “assist in checking further advance by [the] enemy … by seizing favorable opportunities to destroy ships, shipping, and aircraft.” Nimitz did not tell him how to accomplish this; he left the tactical decisions to his subordinate.4
Fletcher already knew more about the Japanese movements than they did about his. He knew that they planned to conduct an operation in the Solomons to enhance their search capabilities over the Coral Sea. He knew, too, that around May 3 or 4 the Port Moresby invasion force would be moving south around the eastern tip of New Guinea through the Louisiade Archipelago and that it would be screened by a surface force that included at least one carrier (at that point assumed to be the mythical Ryūkaku, but in fact the light carrier Shōhō). Finally, he knew that the two big carriers of CarDiv 5 were somehow part of the operation, though their position and course were more of a mystery. Fletcher was fairly confident that the Japanese did not know his whereabouts, or even that he was in the Coral Sea, and he planned to keep it that way by maintaining radio silence and waiting until the analysts at Hypo, or one or another of the Allied search planes, could tell him where the Japanese were. All of this gave Fletcher an indisputable advantage, though none of it guaranteed success.5
One problem that Fletcher had was logistical. As Nimitz had reminded King, the Coral Sea was 3,500 miles from Pearl Harbor and at least 600 miles from the nearest source of fuel oil. It was imperative that Fletcher keep his two-carrier task force fueled up and ready, and to do that he would depend heavily on his big fleet oilers—Tippecanoe and Neosho. Fletcher’s biographer notes that he “constantly worried about uncertain logistics,” and that worry would remain an important feature of Fletcher’s decision making in the battles to come.6
Inoue did not expect American naval forces to interfere with Operation MO. Given his confidence in the power of land-based bombers, he thought the greatest threat to the Port Moresby invasion force was from aircraft on the Australian mainland. To neutralize that threat, he wanted the big carriers of CarDiv 5 to conduct raids against the Allied bases at Townsville and Cookstown on the Australian north coast. To accomplish this, Takagi was not to approach the Coral Sea from the north—the most direct route—but to steam around the Solomon Islands and enter the Coral Sea from the east, to stay beyond the range of Allied search planes from Australia. In military terms, he was planning a flank attack—or, in football terms, an end run. Hara was dubious about the mission. Worried about taking his carriers too close to the barrier reefs, he succeeded in getting Yamamoto to cancel the raids. His new assignment was to cover the approach of the Port Moresby invasion force and deal with any Allied surface units in the Coral Sea that might turn up. If an American carrier were in the Coral Sea, Takagi and Hara were to make it their primary mission. Given that Takagi and Hara did not know that both Lexington and Yorktown were already in the Coral Sea, or that they had 141 planes to the 124 on the two Japanese carriers, there was more reason than they knew to be concerned.7
At the last minute, Takagi and Hara got saddled with an extra job. Since they were already going that way, Inoue ordered Hara to ferry nine Zero fighters from Truk to Rabaul. Though it seemed unimportant at the time, this added requirement would prove crucial. Hara intended to fly the Zeros off his decks as he passed within 250 miles of Rabaul, but the weather worsened as he headed south, and when he sent them off on May 2 they were unable to fight their way through the storms and had to return to the carriers. Hara tried again the next day, with no better results. Indeed, this time one of the fighters had to ditch in the water while trying to return to the carrier. Consequently, the whole force lingered another day near Rabaul before the eight remaining planes could be delivered and CarDiv 5 could continue on its mission. That put Takagi and Hara forty-eight hours behind schedule, which meant they would not enter the Coral Sea until May 5. 8
Meanwhile, the newly arrived Lexington and her escorts refueled from the oiler Tippecanoe. This process was still under way on the evening of May 3 when Fletcher learned that Allied planes from Australia had spotted five or six big ships in the Solomon Islands. He deduced from their position that the target of this expeditionary force was the commodious anchorage at Tulagi, and believing that, in his words, “this is just the kind of report we have been waiting two months to receive,” he left the Lexington group behind to complete refueling and headed north with the Yorktown. 9
Steaming all night at high speed, Fletcher put the Yorktown in position for a dawn strike against the shipping gathered off Tulagi on Florida Island, located on the other side of Guadalcanal. Early on the morning of May 4, the York-town launched forty attack planes: twenty-eight bombers and twelve torpedo planes. Because he did not expect the Japanese at Tulagi to have much air cover, and because he wanted to ensure protection of the Yorktown, Fletcher kept all eighteen of his Wildcat fighters with the task force. This might have been disastrous had CarDiv 5 been on schedule, but since it was not, the only air opposition the Americans encountered consisted of a handful of float planes.10
The eager pilots from the Yorktown swooped down on the roadstead in the harbor off Tulagi and saw what looked to them like a rich target. They reported seeing a nest of three cruisers, several destroyers, and a seaplane tender, plus a lot of cargo and transport ships. Their eagerness distorted their vision. The “three cruisers” were actually an armed minelayer (the Okinoshima) and two destroyers. American planes expended thirteen 1,000-pound bombs and eleven torpedoes on the Okinoshima and still failed to sink her. The American attacks were piecemeal and uncoordinated in part because Captain Buckmaster wanted the air group commander, Oscar “Pete” Pederson, to stay on board the Yorktown as fighter director, and no other officer had been appointed to command the strike group in his absence. In three separate strikes that lasted all morning and into the afternoon, the Americans dropped seventy-six 1,000-pound bombs on the shipping near Tulagi and made only eleven hits. The relative inexperience of the pilots was one reason for this disappointing total; another was that when the Dauntless bombers dove from altitude, the windscreens on many of them fogged up and made accurate bombing difficult. Total losses for the Japanese were one destroyer (the Kikuzuki), three minesweepers, and four seaplanes. By the end of the day it was evident that the strike had fallen short of the staggering blow that Fletcher had anticipated, though it did provide valuable experience for the Yorktown pilots, a kind of warm-up for the main event.11
The Yorktown rejoined the Lexington the next day, and while the Yorktown refueled from the Neosho, Jake Fitch flew over to the flagship in the back seat of a dive-bomber in order to talk with Fletcher face-to-face. When his plane landed on the Yorktown’s flight deck, a member of the deck crew assumed that the man in the back seat was the plane’s enlisted gunner and greeted him with a jibe: “Well, chief,” he said, “you guys kinda missed out on some fun yesterday.” Fitch grinned and replied, “Yes son, I guess we did.” By then Fitch’s two stars were exposed and the poor deck hand was rendered speechless.12
Since the raid on Tulagi had tipped his hand, Fletcher broke radio silence to report the raid to Nimitz, and Nimitz responded with congratulations, especially praising the perseverance Fletcher had shown in sending three consecutive strikes. There was no disguising the meager results, however, and Fletcher had revealed his presence without having spotted any of the Japanese carriers. Though he did not know it, Takagi’s carrier force was north and west of him, still out of range (thanks to the delay in delivering planes to Rabaul). On May 5, however, CarDiv 5 rounded the tip of San Cristobal and entered the Coral Sea from the east behind Fletcher’s now reunited task force. That night, in fact, Hara’s two carriers passed through the very spot from which Fletcher had launched his Tulagi raid, though by then Fletcher was more than a hundred miles to the south. The Tippecanoe, emptied of her oil, was sent back to Pearl. Fletcher also detached the Neosho, guarded by the destroyer Sims, and sent her to the south while the American task force steamed west toward New Guinea to intercept the MO invasion force, which had left Rabaul on May 4. Hara steamed west, too, before turning south. On May 6, both forces sent out long-range air patrols, each seeking the other. Though at one point the two forces came to within seventy miles of one another, neither side made contact.13
On May 7, in the full darkness before dawn, the opposing carrier forces, running blacked-out to avoid being seen by enemy submarines, groped uncertainly toward each other. Fletcher detached a surface force of three cruisers and three destroyers under Rear Admiral John G. Crace of the Royal Australian Navy and sent it to guard the southern exit from Jomard Passage, which the Port Moresby invasion force was almost certain to use. In case his own force was badly crippled in the anticipated duel with the Japanese carriers, he wanted something there to blunt the invasion force. * It was a bit of a risk, for Crace’s detached surface force would be without air cover, but Fletcher did not want to separate his two carriers with the Japanese so near, and he could not be in both places at the same time.
The most important job now was to find those enemy carriers. To do that, Fletcher ordered search planes out a half hour before dawn. Based on a decrypted Japanese message forwarded to him by Nimitz, Fletcher believed that the Japanese would be approaching from the north, and he sent ten search planes fanning out in that direction. However, Rochefort’s analysts had confused the invasion force with the covering force; Hara’s carriers were actually some 210 miles to the east of him. Both American carriers also launched Wildcats as CAP, and Dauntless bombers for anti torpedo plane control; after that, Fletcher could only wait.14
Hara also sent out predawn patrols, but he sent them mostly to the south. With the Americans searching northward and the Japanese searching southward, neither carrier force spotted the other—though pilots from both sides soon found other targets.
Lieutenant John L. Nielsen, flying a Dauntless dive-bomber from the Yorktown, was searching amid the islands off the eastern tip of New Guinea when he spotted an Aichi E-13A “Jake” float boat—a “snooper” in the parlance of carrier operations. Fearing that it would alert the Japanese to the presence of an American carrier plane, if given time to send a contact report, he determined to shoot it down before it could transmit. With both planes firing, Neilsen chased it down out of the clouds and finished it off at low level. “He couldn’t have been 20 feet off the water when I hit him,” Neilsen recalled, “and he went down and under like a rock.”
About 15 minutes later, near the island of Misima in the Louisiade archipelago, his back-seat gunner, Walter Straub, spotted the wakes of surface ships below. Nielsen looked them over carefully before telling Straub to call in the report of “two cruisers and four destroyers,” giving their bearing and range from Point Zed. * Straub used the code table to transcribe the message, but when he tried to send it he found that their plane’s antenna was gone, apparently shot away by the Japanese float plane. Only the short-range radio was operating. Nielsen flew back toward the task force to close the range while Straub repeatedly broadcast the sighting report until finally, at 8:15, he got a “Roger” from the Yorktown. What he did not know was that the code table Straub had used was misaligned, and instead of reporting two cruisers and four destroyers the message that arrived on board the flagship was that he had spotted two carriers and four cruisers. 15
The report triggered a burst of excitement on board the Yorktown. Both Fletcher and Fitch knew that whoever got in the first blow had a tremendous advantage, and here was a chance to get a jump on the Japanese. The problem was that the range was too great. The reported sighting was 225 miles to the north—much too far for the torpedo planes or fighters, and a stretch for the dive-bombers. Fletcher therefore put the task force on a northerly course to close the range, and launched the first attack plane at 9:26. Just before the pilots climbed into their planes, Fletcher came out onto the bridge wing of the Yorktown with a bullhorn in his hand to tell them: “Get that goddamn carrier!”16 By 10:15, Task Force 17 had ninety-three planes in the air heading toward the contact sent in by Lieutenant Nielsen.
Then, disaster. Neilsen’s returning scout plane reached the task force soon afterward and, flying low over the Yorktown, Straub dropped a beanbag onto the deck with an attached note that confirmed the location of the Japanese force. When the note reached the flag bridge, however, Fletcher was horrified to read that it reported the sighting of two cruisers and four destroyers. When Nielsen reported to him after landing, Fletcher asked him, “What about the carriers?” Neilsen looked back at him and asked, “What carriers?” It is possible to imagine the blood draining from Fletcher’s face upon hearing that response. He had just sent his full strike force off to attack a relatively unimportant group of surface ships; the Japanese carriers were still out there somewhere. He thought briefly about recalling the strike, but if enemy carrier planes were headed his way, which was at least possible, given that a number of Japanese scout planes had been spotted nearby, he did not want to be caught in the middle of recovering airplanes. One witness later claimed that Fletcher told Neilsen, “Young man, do you know what you have done? You have just cost the United States two carriers.”17
Maybe not. Soon after that exchange, and with a humiliated Neilsen still standing on the flag bridge, an officer rushed in to tell Fletcher that a land-based Army bomber from Australia was reporting a Japanese carrier and twenty or more other ships only thirty miles away from the sighting that Neilson had sent in. This was no sure thing, for Army pilots were notoriously unreliable in identifying ship types; anything from a cargo vessel to a light cruiser might be reported as a carrier. Still, if this was a carrier, it was a more important target than the two cruisers that Neilsen had found. Fletcher decided that given the circumstances he had no choice but to break radio silence and vector the whole attack group toward the new sighting, which he did at 10:53, sending the message in the clear. His decision was made easier by the fact that it was likely that Takagi and Hara already knew where Task Force 17 was. But if they didn’t before, they would now.18
As it happened, a Japanese snooper had reported Fletcher’s location at 8:20 that morning. The report came too late, however. Like the Americans, Takagi and Hara had already shot their bolt, having sent their attack planes toward an inaccurate sighting. An hour earlier at 7:22, Hara had received a report from another of his scouts who spotted the huge silhouette of the loitering oiler Neosho below him, along with its escorting destroyer, and reported them as a carrier and a cruiser. An excited Hara ordered a full strike of seventy-eight planes from both of his carriers. The Japanese dive-bombers and torpedo planes flew southward to the reported coordinates for the American “carrier,” only to find the Neosho and Sims. After conducting a search for better targets—a search that used up more valuable time—they settled for blasting these two hapless victims, sinking the Sims with three bombs, and hitting the Neosho with seven, damaging her so badly that she stayed a float only because of the reserve buoyancy of her partially empty oil tanks.
While the loss of the tanker would inhibit Fletcher’s movements somewhat, it was not the death blow Hara had hoped for. * Worse, while his strike planes were thus engaged, Takagi and Hara got a report of another enemy surface force composed of battleships and cruisers near the exit from Jomard Passage. This, of course, was Crace’s cruiser-destroyer force. Hara assumed that these “battleships” were operating with the American carrier and that it must be there, too. Because of the range, he would have to steam westward for several hours to get close enough to launch another attack, and in the meantime he still had to recover the planes he had sent after the Neosho. 19
While the Japanese strike force flew southward toward the Neosho and Sims, the air group from Yorktown and Lexington flew northward toward the reported location of the Japanese carrier. At 11:00 a.m., the pilots spotted the MO screening force under Rear Admiral Gotō Arimoto that included the carrier Shōhō. The Shōhō was a new carrier, having been converted from the sub tender Tsurugisaki only months before, and she was significantly smaller than the big carriers of the Kido Butai, carrying only about twenty airplanes. When the American strike force arrived, the Shōhō’s escorts maneuvered to separate themselves from one another. Unlike American doctrine, which called for the escorts to close in on the carrier to provide additional antiaircraft fire, Japanese doctrine was to spread out so the carrier would have plenty of room for evasive maneuver.
By arrangement, the Lexington dive-bombers of Bill Ault’s Scouting Two attacked first. The Shōhō maneuvered radically, completing a full circle to port and managing to avoid all the bombs from Ault’s squadron. The Shōhō then turned into the wind and launched three more fighters to join the four she had flying CAP, but it was her last hurrah. At 11:15 the Lexington’s torpedo planes split into two groups for an “anvil attack,” dropping down to fifty feet above the water and slowing to under 100 knots to make their run. At the same time, 16,000 feet above, the dive-bombers of Lieutenant Commander Weldon Hamilton’s Bombing Two pushed over, opening their dive brakes and flying down at a steep 70-degree angle before releasing their 1,000-pound bombs at about 2,500 feet. For once, everything worked the way it had been drawn up in the training manuals. The windscreens did not fog up and the bombing was unusually accurate. Hamilton laid his own 1,000-pound bomb squarely in the middle of the Shōhō’s flight deck, and this was followed by several other hits by his squadron mates.20
Only minutes later, the Yorktown dive-bombers had their turn. The commander of Scouting Five, Lieutenant Commander William Burch, later claimed, “It was the best attack I ever made in my life.” “I never saw such beautiful bombing,” another rhapsodized. Even the American fighters held their own against the few Zeros. Wildcat pilot Lieutenant Junior Grade Walter Haas recalled, “We’d push over, single out a plane, and come down with all the speed we could build up in eight or ten thousand feet. We’d make a quick pass and find ourselves in a melee of twisting, dog-fighting planes.” Using these tactics, Haas got the war’s first confirmed kill of a Japanese Zero by an American Wildcat. By the time the Yorktown’s torpedo planes arrived, the Shōhō was mortally wounded and burning fiercely. They pumped ten more torpedoes into her anyway.21
Altogether, Lexington pilots claimed five bomb hits and nine torpedo hits, and Yorktown pilots claimed fourteen bomb hits and ten torpedo hits. Even allowing for exaggeration, the Shōhō had been smothered by bombs and torpedoes, and she all but disappeared under a blizzard of exploding ordnance. With black smoke pouring out of her, she continued to steam at high speed until she literally drove herself under the surface. “She went straight ahead,” recalled Burch, “sinking as she went, and was under the waves seven minutes after our first bomb hit her.” Out of a crew of 736, only 204 survived. Lieutenant Commander Robert Dixon, commanding the Lexington’s scouting squadron, continued to circle the area to watch the Shōhō’s death plunge. At 11:35, he went on the radio to send a prearranged message back to the task force: “Scratch one flattop.”22
The flight back to the task force was jubilant. There was some concern that the torpedo bombers might run out of fuel on the long flight home, but they all made it. Only three Dauntless bombers had been lost in the attack. When Lieutenant Commander Joe Taylor, who commanded the Yorktown’s torpedo squadron, touched down on the flight deck at about 1:00 p.m., Dixie Kiefer, the ship’s executive officer, ran up to him and lifted him off the deck in a big bear hug. Taylor and Bill Burch, the skipper of Scouting Five, hurried up to the flag bridge to give their report.
“Well, Joe, what did you see?” Fletcher asked.
“I’ll show you in a minute,” Taylor answered mysteriously.
“Come now,” Fletcher replied, “this is no time for joking.”
“I’m not joking,” Taylor told him. “We took pictures.”
Soon Taylor’s back seat gunner came running up with the still wet images he had printed at the ship’s photo lab. When Fletcher and Buckmaster looked at the photos of the burning and sinking Shōhō, Taylor remembered, “they jumped up and down like a couple of old grads in the grandstand when a last minute touchdown saved the day.”23
The Japanese light carrier Shōhō on fire and sinking in the Battle of the Coral Sea on May 7, 1942. (U.S. Naval Institute)
Fletcher gave some thought to ordering a second strike aimed at the other ships in the invasion fleet, but launching a strike after 2:00 in the afternoon meant that the attack planes would have to return in the dark. Besides, the remaining Japanese carriers were still out there somewhere and had not been located. Finally, given the activity of several Japanese “snoopers” in the last few hours, there was a good chance that Task Force 17 could soon expect an attack of its own. He decided to retire southward and await more information. That decision did not sit well with Lieutenant Forrest Biard, one of Rochefort’s Hypo analysts, who had been placed on board the Yorktown as a Japanese linguist, to intercept and translate messages sent in the clear. Biard worked in a small radio shack adjacent to Fletcher’s command post at flag plot, where he listened to the Japanese radio traffic and reported directly to Fletcher. The easygoing Fletcher and the intense and abrasive Biard did not get along well. Though Biard insisted passionately that the Japanese carriers were off to the east and within range, he could not provide a bearing or a distance, and he failed to convince Fletcher to launch.24
At 5:47 p.m., the radar on the Yorktown picked up a number of bogeys, and the Americans scrambled more fighters to join the CAP already circling above the task force. Altogether, the two carriers were able to put thirty fighters in the air to meet an incoming attack by twenty-seven bombers and fighters. In fact, the attackers had no idea that the American carriers were there. Despite the snoopers, the Yorktown and Lexington remained hidden under heavy cloud cover. Instead, Hara had sent this late-afternoon strike toward the reported position of those “battleships” off the Jomard Passage, which Takagi believed also included a carrier. Crace’s cruisers had been the recipients of an attack by land-based Japanese bombers that afternoon; now Hara’s carrier planes sought to find them as well. The Japanese bombers were flying low amid the clouds and in the growing darkness and not expecting to find carrier-based fighters in their flight path. When the American Wildcats came screaming down on them from 5,000 feet, they were thrown into confusion. One excited Japanese pilot reported, “Enemy fighters have completely destroyed the attack group.” This was an exaggeration, but the Americans did shoot down seven planes and damaged two others. The rest fled.25
Or at least they tried to. As dusk turned to full dark around 6:30 p.m., the Lexington and Yorktown were recovering the fighters that had driven off this ill-fated sortie when several unidentified planes flew past the Yorktown with their running lights on and began flashing messages in code. It was not a code that anyone on the Yorktown recognized. Then the planes swung around and entered the landing pattern, as if preparing to come aboard. By now it was evident that these were hostile planes whose pilots had mistaken the Yorktown for one of their own. A few of the American escorts opened fire, and then the Yorktown’s own antiaircraft guns joined in, sending a curtain of ordnance into the group of circling planes, both friendly and hostile. When that happened, Ted Sherman recalled, “aircraft disappeared into the darkness like a flock of birds flushed by hunters.” Twenty-three-year-old Ensign Richard Wright was startled to see tracers from his own ship fly past the cockpit of his Wildcat fighter. He insisted that “some of those tracers came between my face and the instrument panel,” and he shouted into his transmitter, “What are you shooting at me for?” As the Japanese planes fled, so did the American pilots, including Wright. One of them, Ensign John D. Baker, was subsequently unable to find his way back again in the dark. Pete Pederson, the Yorktown’s air group commander acting as fighter control director, watched Baker’s blip on radar and radioed him a course to follow to get back, but Baker never answered and was never seen again. When Pederson could not raise him on the radio, he wept.26
That Japanese planes would mistake the Yorktown for one of their own carriers suggested that their flattops might not be far off. Those manning the radar on the Yorktown watched as the blips representing the surviving Japanese planes retired eastward. A few of them began to circle only about thirty miles away before disappearing off the screen, as if they were landing. That led some to surmise that the Japanese carriers might be very close indeed. It was too dark now for an air mission, but Fletcher toyed with the idea of sending his cruisers and destroyers for a night surface attack. The problem was that the location of the Japanese carriers was only speculative, and if it were incorrect, dawn would find his surface ships well off to the east—sitting ducks for a Japanese air strike. Then, too, a high-speed run to the east would use up a lot of fuel, an important consideration now with the Neosho smashed and no other tanker expected until May 13. Once again, Fletcher decided to wait for more information. Despite subsequent criticism, it was the correct decision, for in fact the Japanese planes had not been landing; they were lost. Many never did find their host carrier. Of the twenty-seven planes Hara had sent out, only eighteen managed to return to their own ships, which were, in fact, more than a hundred miles northeast of Task Force 17. 27
On the whole, May 7 had been a good day for the American pilots. They had sunk the Shōhō in a textbook attack and shot down a total of nineteen planes while losing only three bombers and three fighters of their own. For his part, Admiral Hara was devastated. He felt that he had been unlucky in not finding the Americans first. He was so frustrated that, as he said later, he “felt like quitting the navy.” The Americans were as elated as Hara was despondent. As Bill Burch put it, “Despite the pounding we had given them on former occasions, we all felt that this, our first opportunity to try our punch against a major unit of the enemy fleet, was our compensation for the years of training and the weary months of steaming over trackless tropic seas.” It was, however, only the prologue.28
The next day, the opposing carrier forces finally found one another. As they had the day before, both sides sent out pre-dawn air searches. The first sighting of the day came from Lieutenant Junior Grade Joseph Smith flying a Dauntless from the Yorktown. He reported sighting “Two carriers, two battleships.” Then, before he could complete the report, his radio cut out. Nevertheless, Fletcher knew what sector Smith had been searching, and at 9:08 he turned tactical command over to Fitch, who ordered a full strike by seventy-five airplanes. The location of the target was confirmed a half hour later by Bob Dixon, who had sent the “Scratch one flattop” report the day before, and who was searching the sector next to Smith’s. He flew over to Smith’s area and was able to complete the report: “Two carriers, two battleships, four heavy cruisers, several destroyers, 170 miles to the northwest.” The actual distance was closer to two hundred miles, but luckily for the Americans, Hara was steaming toward them as fast as he could go. He, too, had received a sighting report from his patrol planes, and at 9:15, he sent sixty-nine planes to attack Fletcher. En route to the target, flying at 17,500 feet, Bill Burch looked down and saw the Japanese attack force below him headed in the other direction.29
The Yorktown dive-bombers arrived over the Japanese carrier force at 10:32. Hara’s two carriers were about eight miles apart, one ahead of the other, steaming at high speed almost due south toward the American task force. The lead carrier (Zuikaku) was about to enter a cloud, but the trailing carrier (Shōkaku) was in the open. The dive-bomber pilots were eager to strike, but they waited for the slower torpedo planes to arrive so that they could conduct the kind of coordinated attack that had proved so successful the day before. While they waited, they could see Japanese fighters taking off from the Shōkaku and begin climbing up from sea level. It was agonizing to watch, Johnny Neilsen remembered. “We sat up there 20 minutes waiting for those torpedo planes, watching the Zeros climbing up toward us.” Worse, all that time, the lead carrier was getting closer to the protective cover of the weather front.30
Finally, around 11:00, the torpedo planes arrived. Burch waved his arm and waggled his ailerons as a signal, and peeled over into a dive. The Japanese Zeros circled and waited, making side runs at the bombers as they flew past. Burch and the other bombers had been almost directly above the Shōkaku, and they dove nearly vertically, their planes corkscrewing as they plunged downward. As Burch passed through a thermal layer at about 8,000 feet, his windscreen fogged up so badly he couldn’t see at all. He tried sticking his head out of the cockpit; though at 250 knots that was impossible. Meanwhile, the carrier turned and twisted so that, instead of making a bombing run along her length, he had to attack from abeam, which gave him a much narrower target. As a result, the Yorktown bombers made only two hits. One of them was by Lieutenant John J. Powers, who had sworn before he left the Yorktown that morning that he was going to lay his bomb on the flight deck of a Jap carrier. Powers kept his Dauntless in a full dive until he was barely five hundred feet from the target before releasing his bomb. His plane was destroyed by the ensuing blast. He was subsequently awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor.31
Meanwhile Joe Taylor’s Devastators dropped down to fifty feet for their torpedo attack. The Wildcat fighters drove off the first assault by six Zeros, but this time there were more Zeros than Wildcats. Their fire was so heavy that Taylor thought the bullets striking his plane “sounded like rain on the roof.” As a result, most of the torpedo bombers dropped their fish from too great a distance. Though the pilots reported making four hits, this was wishful thinking. One problem was that because the American torpedoes ran at only 33.5 knots; the 34-knot Shōkaku could simply outrun them. 32
The Lexington strike force, arriving later, had even less luck. By now the Zuikaku had made it under the cover of the weather front and only the Shōkaku was visible. Moreover, amid the thickening weather there was a lot of confusion, and most of the Lexington’s bombers never found a target at all. Those that did encountered a sky full of Japanese fighters and cloud bursts from antiaircraft fire. “It was an incredible scramble,” one pilot recalled. “People yelling over the radio, mixed up, and you never knew who the hell was on top of whom.” In the end, only four bombers from the Lexington dove on the Shōkaku, and only one got a hit. The American pilots reported a total of six hits, but the Shōkaku was actually hit only three times, though all three were by 1,000-pound bombs, which damaged her deck so badly that she could no longer launch or recover airplanes. After that, Takagi decided to send her northward, out of the fight. Hara directed the planes from the Shōkaku that were still airborne to land on the Zuikaku, which had escaped entirely.33
Meanwhile, 150 miles to the south, Hara’s planes were hitting Task Force 17. By now, the cloud cover no longer protected the American carriers, and both of them were clearly visible in the bright sunshine. Thanks to radar, the Americans had spotted the incoming bogeys at 68 miles, and they braced for the attack. All available fighters, seventeen of them (the rest had gone with the attack force), were put in the air, bolstered by twenty-three Dauntless bombers (without bombs). On board the carriers, watertight doors were secured, gasoline was purged from the fuel lines, and fire hoses and first aid kits were made ready.34
The Japanese used a coordinated attack with torpedo planes coming in from both sides in an “anvil” attack while their bombers prepared to dive out of the sun. Ted Sherman, skipper of the Lexington, wrote admiringly that their attack was “beautifully coordinated.” Soon, the water around both carriers was filled with erupting geysers from near misses and the tracks of swiftly running torpedoes. The two carriers maneuvered radically in an attempt to avoid the torpedoes. The Lexington, however, was not a nimble ship. According to Sherman, “it took 30 to 40 seconds just to put the rudder hard over. When she did start to turn, she moved majestically and ponderously.” Despite that, she seemed for a time to lead a charmed life. On one occasion, a torpedo ran alongside on the port beam while another streaked past the starboard beam, both missing. Two more ran directly under her without exploding. But the Lexington’s luck could not last forever. Within minutes, she was struck by two bombs and two torpedoes. Several fires broke out, and the ship gradually took on a 7-degree list.35
The Yorktown also received attention from the attackers. She was repeatedly shaken by several near misses, including one explosion that was so violent it lifted the stern of the big carrier clear out of the water so that her four brass propellers could be seen spinning in the air. She also took one direct bomb hit amidships, fifteen feet from the ship’s island. That bomb penetrated the flight deck and exploded deep inside the ship. The “main steam lines vibrated excessively for a few seconds then steadied.” The lights blinked and went out, and three of the ship’s nine boilers had to be secured. Buckmaster called down to the engine room to ask what speed the engines could produce under these circumstances. The engineer told him he could generate steam for 24 knots. Buckmaster wondered if they should back off from that to avoid overtaxing the remaining boilers. “Hell no!” was the answer. “We’ll make it.”36
Back in Hawaii, Nimitz was kept appraised of the action by Rochefort and the “roofers” at Hypo who listened in on the radio traffic, both friendly and hostile. The Japanese pilots were reporting the destruction of one carrier and serious damage to another. Soon afterward, Fletcher reported damage to both American carriers, but also that they both continued to operate.37
Then, as quickly as it started, it was over. The attack had lasted about half an hour—from 11:13 to 11:40. On the Yorktown, Buckmaster allowed some members of the crew to go down to the mess deck to get something to eat. When they got there, they found that the ship’s surgeons had used the mess tables to lay out some of the fifty-five men who had been killed in the attack. Yeoman Second Class Sam Laser remembered, “They hadn’t been covered yet, and many of them had horrible wounds—blood streaming from their eyes, missing limbs, and so on. We had to walk past all that to get to the chow line, and the only thing they had was crackers and salmon. For five years after that I couldn’t eat salmon.”38
This photograph captures the moment at 12:47 p.m. on May 8, 1942, when an internal explosion on the Lexington triggered the sequence of events that led to her destruction. (U.S. Naval Institute)
Over on the Lexington, Sherman corrected the ship’s list with counter flooding, and by 12:30 both carriers were recovering the planes returning from the strike against the Shōkaku. Then at 12:47 p.m., there was a huge internal explosion deep inside the Lexington. The big carrier had linear gas tanks that went from the bottom of the ship up several decks, and they had been ruptured by a number of near misses. Gas fumes had accumulated, and a spark from an electric generator ignited a massive explosion. It was so powerful that the huge forward elevator platform flew into the air and crashed down onto the flight deck “with a great bang” on top of an airplane. The explosion also started a number of fires that the damage control teams struggled to contain. An hour later came a second explosion that destroyed the Lexington’s ventilation system. Sherman had to order the engine rooms evacuated before the men there were asphyxiated. At 2:50 p.m., he blinkered a message to Fletcher on the Yorktown: “This ship needs help.” Destroyers came alongside to help fight the raging fires, but it was a losing battle. The Lexington had no power, and the fires were burning out of control. At 4:00 there was a third blast. The out-of-control fires were cooking off the stored ammunition. As the big torpedoes exploded, one officer thought that it “sounded like a freight train rumbling up the hangar deck.” Fitch leaned over the rail of the flag bridge and told Sherman that he had better “get the boys off the ship.”39
Discipline held. Sherman recalled that as the crew came topside and prepared to go over the side, “some of them lined up their shoes in orderly fashion on the deck before they left, as if they expected to return.” Most of the crew was saved—more than 2,700 men. Sherman made sure he was the last one off, and by nightfall, as one witness recalled, “the whole sky was lit up red with that ship burning from stem to stern.” That night, Fletcher sent the destroyer Phelps to sink her with torpedoes. It took five of them. As the Lexington sank, there was one more “tremendous explosion” underwater as she broke apart.40
Again, Fletcher considered another strike. Though the Yorktown now trailed a fifty-mile long oil slick behind her, she could still make 25 knots, more than enough to launch and recover aircraft. The problem was that although most of his attack planes had returned, they were, in the words of one pilot, “all shot to hell,” and of questionable utility. Fletcher decided instead to retire southward, and Fitch agreed.41
Takagi and Hara also considered a second strike. But they had only nine bombers and torpedo planes left, and the Zuikaku was running low on fuel. Admiral Inoue had ordered Gotō’s invasion force to turn around and head north soon after the Shōhō went down, and now he sent the same order to Takagi and Hara. For his part, Hara was glad to get it. He admitted later in a private conversation with Yamamoto’s chief of staff that the battle with the Americans had broken his confidence. Consequently, while Fletcher and the Yorktown retired to the south, Hara and the Zuikakusteamed north. That afternoon, about the time that Sherman ordered the crew of the Lexington to abandon ship, Inoue postponed Operation MO indefinitely.42
There was one more tense moment for the Americans on May 9, when Lieutenant Junior Grade Frederic Faulkner reported sighting undamaged Japanese carriers only 170 miles away. Fletcher rang up 28 knots and sent Bob Dixon with four dive-bombers (of the sixteen he had left) to try to pinpoint their location. Dixon returned, having spotted nothing but coral reefs. Fletcher began to suspect that what Faulkner had seen was a series of small islands. He called Faulkner to the flag bridge and spread out a chart of the area.
“Here’s a chart that shows a chain of small islands at the identical spot at which you made your contact,” he told Faulkner. “Do you think you could have made a mistake?” A chastened Faulkner replied that he might have been wrong. Fletcher expressed no anger. He merely replied, “That’s all I wanted to know.” He reduced speed to 15 knots to conserve fuel and headed for Noumea in New Caledonia.43
In the Battle of the Coral Sea—the first engagement in history between opposing carrier forces—the Japanese inflicted more damage on the Americans than the Americans did on the Japanese. The United States lost its largest carrier (Lexington), a fleet oiler (Neosho), and the destroyer Sims, and suffered damage to the Yorktown; the Japanese lost only the small carrier Shōhō and suffered significant but not mortal damage to the Shōkaku. On the other hand, Japanese airplane losses were heavier. The Americans lost 81 planes while the Japanese had lost 105. Moreover, while the Americans recovered all but a few of their pilots, the Japanese did not. Many of their best frontline pilots had been killed, a loss they could ill afford. When Hara sent the twenty-seven-plane attack toward the American “battleships” on the afternoon of May 7, he had handpicked his best pilots for the mission because of the difficult conditions. Nine of them had failed to return.
In spite of that, the Japanese were generally pleased with the outcome. They believed that they had sunk both of the American carriers. Newspapers in Japan trumpeted the Battle of the Coral Sea as a major victory. When the pilots of Carrier Division 1 heard the results of the battle, they mocked the surviving pilots of CarDiv 5 good naturedly by declaring that if the “sons of the concubine” could win a victory over the American carriers, imagine what the “sons of legal wives” would do. Within the Japanese high command, however, there was disappointment. Yamamoto was furious that Inoue had called off the action without ensuring the destruction of the American carriers. His chief of staff confided to his diary that “a dream of great success has been shattered.”44
In post-battle evaluations, the Americans, too, had a mixed response to the battle. The loss of the Lexington was a major blow. On the other hand, the Japanese invasion force had been turned back. Fletcher had fulfilled the strategic objective assigned him by Nimitz “to assist in checking further advance by [the] enemy … by seizing favorable opportunities to destroy ships, shipping, and aircraft.” As it happened, the Japanese never did take Port Moresby, and the complex timetable of their several interdependent operations was irredeemably wrecked. The damage to the Shōkaku, though not fatal, was enough to convince the Japanese to keep her out of the forthcoming Midway operation. Though the Zuikaku was not damaged at all, the loss of so many of her planes and pilots led to a decision to keep her out as well. At the time, it hardly seemed to matter. With the loss of two American carriers, the Japanese believed that the odds had actually improved. Over time, the assessment of historians has been that the Battle of the Coral Sea was a tactical victory for the Japanese but a strategic victory for the Americans.
There was one more way in which the Americans benefited from this confrontation. Before the battle, Japan’s experienced pilots had given them a great tactical advantage. Now, with the loss of so many of those pilots, and with the experience gained by the Americans, that advantage had diminished.
* Some historians have criticized this decision, pointing out that had Fletcher won the carrier battle, the Japanese would have had to call off Operation MO, and had he lost it, Crace’s few cruisers and destroyers would not have been strong enough to stop them anyway, so that Fletcher’s decision simply took Crace’s surface force off the battle map. But Crace himself sought an independent role in the campaign, and, as it happened, he had a completely unforeseen role to play.
* Point Zed was a predetermined location that could be used as a reference point in radio transmissions so that the radio reports did not give away the location of the American task force.
* Sixty-eight members of the crew of the Neosho abandoned ship into four life rafts. The rest (123 men) stayed on board and were subsequently rescued by the destroyer USS Henley. Most of those who went into the life rafts did not survive. On May 16, the USS Helm found one of the rafts with two life jackets in it but no men. After the rescue operation, the Henley sank the Neosho with torpedoes and shellfire.