CHAPTER 5
(MAY 1942)
HQ U.S. PACIFIC FLEET
PEARL HARBOR
OAHU, HAWAII
5 MAY 1942
Jimmy Doolittle’s daring raid from the deck of the USS Hornet on 18 April 1942 did little damage to Japanese warmaking capability. But bombing the emperor’s cities seriously alarmed military planners in Tokyo—and precipitated decisions they would soon regret.
Until the American B-25s struck their homeland, the generals and admirals of the Imperial military were uncertain as to where they would go next. Their advance through the western Pacific had taken less than half the time they had expected, and had cost them fewer than 5,000 casualties, fewer than 100 aircraft, and the loss of only one ship—a destroyer at Wake Island.
For most of March, the emperor’s military staff wrangled over three competing strategies: attacking west against India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), pressing south against Australia, or moving east against Hawaii.
Yamamoto, believing that it was essential to destroy the U.S. Navy in a decisive battle, advocated an eastern offensive: seizing Midway and the Aleutians and, if the Americans didn’t sue for peace, moving against Hawaii to precipitate an engagement that would eliminate the U.S. fleet once and for all. The Japanese naval general staff argued for attacking south to Australia, while the Imperial Army staff—already engaged in China, Burma, and the Philippines—opposed all three.
While the debate was being waged, Yamamoto dispatched Admiral Chuichi Nagumo’s carriers west, into the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea, and the Indian Ocean. Between 31 March and 9 April 1942, the “hero of Pearl Harbor” had raided the British bases on Ceylon, struck Royal Navy supply bases on India’s east coast, sunk six British warships—including the carrier HMS Hermes and the heavy cruisers Dorsetshire and Cornwall—and virtually swept the Indian Ocean clean of British merchant vessels.
Admiral Chester Nimitz
Instead of choosing one of the competing southern, western, or eastern strategic alternatives for their next step, flushed with the thrill of easy victories and filled with confidence, the warlords in Tokyo decided to pursue all three. That was the plan. Then Doolittle’s raid changed everything.
In Hawaii, there was desperation but no indecision. Twenty-four days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a tall, cool Texan, Chester W. Nimitz, had replaced Admiral Husband Kimmel as the commander of the Pacific Fleet. Nimitz had turned down the assignment a year earlier, telling friends, “I am so much junior to so many of the admirals, and if I take it, that will make me so many enemies.”
But with the country at war, Nimitz set his personal concerns aside. On 31 December 1941, aboard the submarine USS Grayling, fifty-six-year-old Chester Nimitz had added his fourth star and taken command of a badly damaged U.S. Pacific Fleet with FDR’s orders still in his head: “Report to the Pacific and stay there until the war is won.”
The man who would become Yamamoto’s nemesis was a long way from the hill country of Fredericksburg, Texas, where he had grown up in a tightly knit German-American community, raised by his mother, Anna, and grandfather, Charles. His father and namesake had died before he was born. As a young man he learned tolerance and forgiveness of mistakes. These qualities came out of personal experience. Nimitz had run his first ship, the destroyer USS Decatur, hard aground. At his court-martial he was reprimanded for “neglect of duty.” He would later say, “Every dog deserves two bites.” This colloquial and practical philosophy served him well as he sought to rebuild the shattered morale and demolished ships at Pearl Harbor.
The arrival of the Yorktown from the Atlantic shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack had brought U.S. carrier strength in the Pacific up to four—but on 11 January a Japanese sub torpedoed the Saratoga just 500 miles from Oahu. She would be out of the fight for five months. With only three carriers in operation, about the best Nimitz could manage during February and March were the fast carrier strikes by Halsey’s Enterprise, by Admiral Wilson Brown’s USS Lexington, and by Jack Fletcher’s Yorktown.
These “hit and run” strikes, though incapable of stopping the Japanese advance into New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, reinforced Yamamoto’s belief that the American carriers based in Hawaii had to be sent to the bottom. But before he could attack Hawaii, Midway would have to be taken. To that end, Yamamoto urged military planners in Tokyo to expedite operations in New Guinea, complete the construction of a major fleet anchorage at Rabaul, and complete the isolation of Australia. On 10 April, the general staff in Tokyo approved his plan, although they refused to fix a date for the seizure of Midway until the lifeline to Australia could be cut off from the U.S. mainland.
But Doolittle’s raid threw them off their stride. Tokyo responded by accelerating its timetable. An invasion fleet and covering force were ordered to assemble immediately at Rabaul on the north coast of New Britain. The carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku were stripped from Admiral Nagumo and dispatched along with the light carrier Shoho to support the capture of Port Moresby, New Guinea, from which Japanese bombers could strike Darwin and Australia’s Northern Territory. The war planners also decided to seize Tulagi, an island in the Solomon chain north of Guadalcanal, for use as an air and seaplane base. As soon as the invasion forces were safely ashore, the Japanese carriers would detach and assemble at a point in the central Pacific for the attack on Midway.
All these changes to the Japanese operations plans required that they fill the airwaves with hundreds of encrypted radio messages. But Imperial radio operators weren’t the only ones listening.
Station Hypo
Back in Pearl Harbor, inside a windowless vault called Station Hypo, U.S. Navy signals specialists carefully recorded each of the Imperial Fleet’s encoded radio broadcasts—and then painstakingly decrypted them. The little-known facility—connected to arrays of antennas in northern Australia, on Midway, and around the Hawaiian Islands—was the creation of U.S. Navy Lt. Commander Joseph Rochefort, an eccentric forty-three-year-old mathematician who had spent several happy years with his family in Japan before the war, becoming fluent in Japanese. He and his little team of code-breakers had been intercepting and unscrambling Japanese message traffic since before Pearl Harbor. And because he had missed the cable ordering the attack on 7 December, he had fully expected to be fired along with Admiral Kimmel. But Nimitz, recognizing the man’s brilliance, and playing on his sense of duty, asked—not ordered—him to stay on.
The appeal to Rochefort’s patriotism had the effect Nimitz intended, and the team the code-breaker had built remained essentially intact. Then, after providing additional personnel necessary to do the job, Nimitz changed the guidelines on the dissemination of Station Hypo’s intercepts. Wary of leaks and keenly aware that politicians were looking over his shoulder, the admiral instructed Rochefort to stem the flow of information back to Washington. Instead, the decoded messages would first be given directly to him as the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, and Nimitz would determine which, if any, should be forwarded to Washington.
With additional personnel aboard, the rate at which intercepted Japanese messages could be decrypted improved dramatically. About the time that Doolittle was preparing for his raid on Tokyo, Rochefort, one of his Station Hypo colleagues, Navy Lt. Commander T. H. Dyer, and Commander Edwin Layton, Nimitz’s intelligence chief, succeeded in breaking the Imperial Navy’s JN-25 code. The Japanese fleet used this code to transmit thousands of messages daily. Station Hypo had been working with some 45,000 code groups, trying to translate them from Japanese into English. They considered themselves fortunate if they could recover 10 or 15 percent of a message. But sometimes that was enough.
By April 1942 Admiral Nimitz was getting solid intelligence from his Station Hypo code-breakers—he knew of Japanese ship movements even before many of Yamamoto’s own ships’ captains. In fact, some of the Japanese skippers never got the information themselves, a problem that plagued them throughout the war.
Among the team of bright young specialists that joined Station Hypo after Pearl Harbor was a farm boy from Iowa. Newly commissioned as an ensign, Mac Showers was ordered to Hawaii. He was told that his assignment was too sensitive to discuss with anyone.
ENSIGN MAC SHOWERS, USN
PAC Fleet Signals Intelligence Center
Station Hypo
Pearl Harbor, Hawaii
20 April 1942
I arrived at Hypo in February 1942. I was an ensign and was told that I was being assigned to an intelligence unit that was working for the Pacific Fleet. I went to the Navy yard and reported to Commander J. J. Rochefort. His office was in a basement that was relatively cold and damp, and people had to wear extra clothing in order to work comfortably down there. When I first saw Commander Rochefort, he was wearing a maroon smoking jacket and bedroom slippers. I was not particularly surprised. I figured a commander could do pretty much anything he wanted to. And it was uncomfortably cold. But I noticed that when he left, he didn’t wear those outside. He was in his proper uniform.
Rochefort had a very strong feeling that at the beginning of the war he had failed his commander in chief by not giving him warning of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. We now know there’s no way he could have known about it, because it was executed in total radio silence, but Rochefort took it personally. This gave Rochefort a dedication to his task, which he passed on to his people.
The Japanese diplomatic service used a coding machine, which we replicated even before the war, allowing us to read their coded diplomatic traffic. But the Japanese navy didn’t use that equipment. The Japanese military high command and their operating forces all used manual codes, which had to be encoded and decoded by hand using codebooks the size of an encyclopedia. For example, when they reported the sinking of their aircraft carriers, they had to go to the codebook and pick out a code group that represented the Kaga, and another one that represented the Akagi, and another one that represented the Iru, and then send their message by encoding that manually. And the recipient then had to decode it manually from an identical encyclopedic book, with all the code groups listed. That was the code system the Japanese navy used throughout the war. It was a laborious task.
Commander Edwin Layton was a good friend of Rochefort’s. They had known each other a long time and had studied the Japanese language together in Japan for three years. Layton was somewhat more flamboyant, but more forceful. The two worked very closely together and trusted each other. Layton was a very persuasive individual and the perfect man to be Admiral Nimitz’s intelligence officer.
Station Hypo set out to break the Japanese naval code, from thousands of messages transmitted every day in Morse signal. It was copied by intercept operators who tuned in on the frequencies that the Japanese were using. They had typewriters with Japanese characters. After those messages were copied, they would be sent down to our processing unit.
That was the name of the game: recover a “string” of code groups so that we could figure out the sense of the message from the code groups we had already broken. Little by little we were able to fill in the blanks and recover more words. This all came from a codebook that had thousands and thousands of code groups, each one meaning something, the name of a ship, the name of a person, the number or position, a place.
Rochefort would sit there in the basement producing this information, and give it to Layton, who would look it over, digest it, ask questions about it until he understood it. And then he would pass it to Admiral Nimitz.
By April 1942, we were able to read enough of the Japanese naval traffic to realize that they were preparing to mount a major operation in the South Pacific. It would put them within flying distance of Australia. We figured out enough about this operation to tell Admiral Nimitz what they were planning to do and when they planned to do it.
BATTLE OF THE CORAL SEA
OFF THE SOUTHERN TIP OF NEW GUINEA
7–8 MAY 1942
By 29 April, the carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku sortied from Truk, and the light carrier Shoho, commanded by Vice Admiral Takeo Takagi, arrived on station to provide cover for the invasion of Port Moresby and the attack on Tulagi. But the code-breakers at Station Hypo knew exactly what was happening. In the Pacific Fleet war room, Nimitz could see on a large tabletop map of the Pacific the disposition of the Japanese carriers, transports, and battle cruisers—and even Japanese submarines deployed to provide a security perimeter around their two invasion forces.
Yamamoto, the master of the surprise attack, was certain no one would find them and that his battle plans could not be compromised. But they were. And best of all, thanks to Station Hypo, Nimitz even knew the date set for the invasions: 3 May for Tulagi and 9 May for Port Moresby.
Looking at the charts on his office walls and the little wooden ship symbols on the map board in the Pacific Fleet Command Center, Admiral Nimitz had a terrible choice to make. The Hornet’s arrival at Pearl Harbor after launching the Doolittle raid had brought the fleet back up to four carriers. But the Enterprise and the Hornet had taken a beating from the stormy north Pacific. Nimitz had no other capital ships available but the Yorktown and the Lexington. Furthermore, his two code-breakers, Layton and Rochefort, were telling him that they “suspected” that Yamamoto was also preparing a subsequent operation to seize Midway. Could Nimitz risk two of his four carriers trying to stop the Japanese invasion forces already steaming to take Port Moresby and Tulagi?
Admiral Jack Fletcher commanded naval assets in three of the five carrier battles of the Pacific—Midway, Guadalcanal, and Coral Sea.
On 29 April, after talking it over with his staff, Nimitz gave the order for Rear Admiral Aubrey Fitch, fresh out of Pearl Harbor with the Lexington, to join Vice Admiral Jack Fletcher’s Yorktown, which had been operating in the South Pacific east of Australia for several weeks. He also directed the cruiser Chicago to sortie from New Caledonia and link up with HMAS Australia and HMAS Hobart, two Australian cruisers under the command of Rear Admiral J. C. Crace of the Royal Navy. Nimitz ordered this somewhat more formidable task force, under the command of Vice Admiral Fletcher, to proceed northwest into the Coral Sea to stop the Japanese invasion forces.
On 1 May, the Lexington and the Yorktown made contact in the southern Coral Sea, west of Espiritu Santo Island. For a full day and a half, the two carriers steamed northwest toward New Guinea. On 3 May, using information from Station Hypo, Pacific Fleet HQ informed Fletcher that the Japanese were landing on Tulagi, so Fletcher left the Lexington to complete refueling from the fleet oiler Neosho and proceeded due north with Yorktown to do what he could to disrupt the invasion. At 0700 on 4 May, his aviators launched a series of three attacks against the transports anchored off Tulagi. Though the 12,000-ton carrier Shoho was supposed to be protecting the troop and supply ships, the Yorktown’s pilots sent one transport to the bottom and damaged at least five landing barges. Then, before the Japanese could respond, Fletcher recovered his strike aircraft, turned the Yorktown south, and steamed at flank speed to rejoin Lexington on the morning of 5 May.
Though the Tulagi attack had done relatively little serious damage, the officers of the Japanese carrier striking force, commanded by Vice Admiral Takeo Takagi, were stunned. In Rabaul, where 4th Fleet commander Vice Admiral Shigeyoshi Inouye was coordinating the entire dual-invasion operation, there was an immediate effort to find the American carrier or carriers that had hit the Tulagi transports. But when long-range land-based bombers and patrol aircraft launched from Rabaul failed to find any American ships on 5 or 6 May, Inouye ordered the invasion covering force, including the Shoho, to break away from the invasion fleet headed for Port Moresby and head quickly south to find them. Meanwhile, Takagi was racing around the southern tip of the Solomons with the carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku, both veterans of the Pearl Harbor attack. By the night of 6 May, it was entirely possible that the Lexington and the Yorktown, heading straight toward the Shoho battle group and pursued from behind by the Shokaku and the Zuikaku, might be trapped between the two Japanese forces.
But once again Station Hypo provided the intelligence Fletcher needed. Alerted to the Shoho battle group, he dispatched scout planes at first light on 7 May. At 0815, one of the patrols reported “two carriers and four heavy cruisers” off the southern tip of New Guinea. Though this “sighting” conflicted with the Station Hypo information—and was soon proven to be incorrect—Fletcher decided to launch the attack groups from both Yorktown and Lexington.
At 1100, in the first attack ever made by U.S. pilots against an enemy carrier, ninety-three American torpedo and dive-bombers swarmed over the Shoho, hitting her with thirteen bombs and seven torpedoes, sending the carrier to the bottom in just minutes. In a radio call back to the Yorktown, one of the strike leaders, Lieutenant Commander Robert E. Dixon, jubilantly reported, “Scratch one flattop!”
While Fletcher was busy recovering his attack aircraft, the Japanese, infuriated by the first sinking of a major Imperial Navy warship, launched every land- and sea-based aircraft that would fly in an effort to find the Americans. In less than an hour, aircraft launched from the Shokaku and the Zuikaku found the American fleet oiler Neosho and the destroyer Sims trailing more than 100 miles behind Fletcher’s carriers. Mistakenly identifying the ships as a carrier and her escort, the Japanese pilots attacked with bombs and torpedoes. At 1230, the valiant little destroyer went down with most of her crew. Though the Neosho took seven hits, she miraculously managed to stay afloat until her crew could be rescued four days later.
Two hours after the attack, land-based bombers launched from Rabaul spotted Admiral Crace and his little flotilla of Australian and American cruisers, steaming in the van of Fletcher’s carriers. Once again the Japanese aviators mistook the cruisers for carriers and dropped their bombs from high altitude to avoid the furious anti-aircraft barrage from Crace’s vessels. When the Japanese pilots returned to Rabaul, they reported that they had sunk a battleship and a cruiser—when in fact not one of the Allied ships had been touched.
Late in the afternoon of 7 May, Admiral Tagaki, determined to avenge the loss of the Shoho, decided to make one more effort to find the American carriers, which no Japanese aircraft had yet sighted. He ordered Rear Admiral Tadaichi Hara, the commander of the carrier air wings, to choose twenty-seven of his best pilots, all with night-operations experience, and launch them into the darkening sky. Radar operators on the American carriers detected the inbound raid and vectored the combat air patrol to intercept. In the ensuing melee, nine of Hara’s veteran pilots were blasted out of the sky. A tenth Japanese aircraft was shot down by anti-aircraft fire when the pilot mistook the Yorktown for his own carrier and attempted to land. Eleven more Japanese pilots perished attempting to land on their own decks. When the ill-fated raid was over, only six of Hara’s twenty-seven attackers were alive.
Before dawn on the next day, both Fletcher and Takagi had scouts in the air searching for the opposing carriers. Despite heavy overcast and squalls over the Japanese fleet, they spotted each other almost simultaneously at about 0800. Between 0900 and 0925 both the Lexington and the Yorktown launched their attack groups of torpedo planes and dive-bombers. But by 1030, when they arrived over the location where the Japanese carriers had been reported, only the Shokaku was visible in the squall line. The American aircraft unleashed everything they had on the carrier.
Unlike the success they had enjoyed the day before in attacking Shoho, the strike on Shokaku was almost a failure. Every American torpedo either missed or was a dud. Only three of the dive-bombers found their marks. But in the end, those three were enough to render the Shokaku’s flight deck unusable. No longer able to fight, Takagi ordered the ship to return to Truk before it became a target for another raid.
As the Shokaku sped away, the planes she and the Zuikaku had launched were swarming over the Lexington and the Yorktown. Anti-aircraft fire and the carriers’ combat air patrols succeeded in disrupting the attack on the Yorktown, which managed to weather the assault, receiving only a single bomb hit that was insufficient to put her out of action. But the larger and less maneuverable Lexington was an easier target. Four bombs and two torpedoes found their mark, but for a while it appeared as though valiant efforts by her damage-control parties might keep her in action.
Then, at about 1245, after the attackers had disappeared over the horizon and she was recovering planes on her flight deck, the Lexington was rocked by a terrible explosion as gasoline vapors from a ruptured fuel line ignited deep inside her hull. About two hours later, a second, even larger explosion buckled her flight deck and set a raging inferno that forced Captain Frederick Sherman to order the crew to abandon ship.
The surviving crew members made it over the side to be rescued by destroyers while the Yorktown recovered Lexington planes still in the air. At 1930 she was still afloat but burning madly. Fletcher gave the order to sink her. A destroyer put five torpedoes into her side, and at 1936 the Lady Lex sank beneath the waters of the Coral Sea—becoming the first U.S. carrier lost to enemy action.
Aviation Mechanic Bill Surgi, an eighteen-year-old from Louisiana, watched the battle aboard the USS Yorktown. He had a ringside seat for the Japanese attack on his ship—and the aftermath.
AVIATION MECHANIC BILL SURGI, USN
Aboard the USS Yorktown
Coral Sea
7–8 May 1942
On 6 May the Neosho refueled us. But then she left us with the Sims. On the next day our planes were out searching for the Japanese fleet and they found the Sims and the Neosho right after they had been attacked. The Sims went down within minutes. Thirteen people survived out of two hundred fifty–odd people. But somehow the Neosho managed to stay afloat. It took four days for the crew to get rescued.
That night, several Japanese aircraft were trying to get back to their carriers and they mistakenly got into our landing pattern. And they’re surveying our group, sending us blinker signals and we’re not answering them. They’re at the outer limits of the approach circling us when we start landing our Wildcats. Then someone saw an airplane coming in with fixed landing gear, which we didn’t have. All our planes had retractable landing gear, so we knew it wasn’t ours. That’s when Captain Elliott Buckmaster broadcast over the ship’s address system, “Stand by to repel!” And the guns cut loose. It was a Japanese dive-bomber. We shot him down.
The next day, 8 May, I was standing up forward of the island, in the catwalk, when the Japanese attacked. They came at us with torpedoes and dive-bombers. One bomb went right beside us and exploded in the water. And the shrapnel came up and did some minor damage to the ship. It was a near miss for me but it killed my buddy, P. C. Meyers. He was the first person I’d ever seen killed. We were ordnance men; we worked together.
Then, a little while later, another bomb went through the flight deck, through the hangar deck, mess deck, living spaces deck, and exploded in the supply deck. We have compartments in there that we lived in and when that bomb went off we had a space the size of a theater. There were fifty-four people in there; only four people got out alive. We had other near misses on the port side that perforated the hull and gave us an oil leak. But we still made out better than the Lexington. She took at least four bombs and two torpedoes. For a while it looked like she might be able to make it, but then a gasoline leak set her afire and they had to abandon ship. It was a terrible sight watching her burn and all those men trying to make it over the side and down the lines into the water. She stayed afloat, burning, and then after they had everybody alive off, one of our destroyers had to sink her with torpedoes.
STATION HYPO
PAC FLEET SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE CENTER
OAHU, HAWAII
20 MAY 1942
As Admiral Fletcher limped back toward Hawaii with the damaged Yorktown and her escorts, he couldn’t tell who had won the Battle of the Coral Sea. He didn’t know until he arrived back in Pearl Harbor that in Rabaul, Admiral Inouye, having lost the element of surprise, had already recalled the Port Moresby invasion force for fear that the transports might still be engaged by a surface force or attacked by land-based aircraft.
The consequences of the fight were clearer to those who had monitored the battle from Hawaii. Tactically, Nimitz judged the outcome to be a modest Japanese victory. Though the Japanese had lost far more aircraft and suffered many more casualties, the loss of the 30,000-ton Lexington was far more serious than the sinking of the 12,000-ton Shoho. And the small Japanese destroyer-transport and barges sunk at Tulagi hardly equaled the loss of the Neosho and the Sims, as far as the U.S. Navy was concerned.
But from a strategic perspective, Nimitz considered this first engagement, in which the opposing ships never saw each other, as a victory for the Americans. For the first time since the war began, the Japanese had been forced to turn back an invasion force. He and his commanders had validated the use of Station Hypo intercepts in “near-real” time—meaning that the intelligence was useful in the midst of a battle, not just in planning one.
Now, on 9 May, as dawn was breaking in Hawaii, Nimitz had even bigger concerns. On 5 May, just before the battle was joined in the Coral Sea, Station Hypo had intercepted a message from Imperial Fleet headquarters in Kure to the Combined Fleet. The message, now almost totally decrypted by Rochefort’s code-breakers, ordered the invasion of a place designated as “AF” to commence on 4 June.
Nimitz was now down to two undamaged carriers. He had only the Enterprise and the Hornet, which had not yet engaged in anything except the Doolittle Raid. Now he needed them to stop a major Japanese invasion of a place called AF. And as of 9 May, he didn’t even know where AF was. He decided to press Rochefort and Layton a little bit harder to come up with the answer before it was too late.