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By Jack Sweetman
Admiral Yamamoto’s Central Pacific offensive ended in a staggering defeat.
On 4-8 May 1942 the Imperial Japanese Navy suffered its first serious setback of the war at the Battle of the Coral Sea. Operationally, the most serious consequence for Japan was the sidelining of two of its fleet carriers, the Shokaku and the Zuikaku, the former of which sustained bomb damage and both of which lost most of their air groups. Under these circumstances, it might have been prudent to postpone the Central Pacific offensive scheduled to be launched at the end of the month until these vessels could rejoin the Combined Fleet. There is, however, no evidence that the fleet commander, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, ever considered awaiting their return. On 27 May—Japan’s Navy Day and the 37th anniversary of Togo’s victory over the Russian Baltic Fleet at the Battle of Tsushima—the First Carrier Striking Force led the fleet out of Hashirajima and on the way to defeat by the U.S. Pacific Fleet at the Battle of Midway.
The offensive upon which Yamamoto was intent had as its territorial objective the expansion of the Japanese defensive perimeter by the seizure of Midway Atoll, 1,100 miles west of Pearl Harbor (Operation MI), and Adak, Attu, and Kiska in the western Aleutians (Operation AL). The occupation of these points—Midway, in particular—would lessen the possibility of a recurrence of the humiliating Halsey- Doolittle Raid of April 1942. Even more important, the reappearance of the Combined Fleet in the Central Pacific was calculated to coerce the Americans into a battle in which the carriers absent from Pearl Harbor six months earlier could be destroyed.
As had been the case before the Battle of the Coral Sea, Operation Magic provided the Pacific Fleet commander,
Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, with advance knowledge of Japanese intentions. U.S. signals intelligence continued to benefit from the Japanese Navy’s delay in making the change originally scheduled for 1 April in the code known as JN-25. There remained the critical problem of identifying the enemy objective designated by the code-group AF. Both the commander of Magic’s Station Hypo at Pearl Harbor, Lieutenant Commander Joseph J. Rochefort, and the Pacific Fleet intelligence officer, Lieutenant Commander Edwin T. Layton, believed AF stood for Midway. To confirm their suspicion, they arranged to have the atoll send a plain-language radio report that its water distillation plant had broken down. Two days later, Hypo intercepted a message from the Japanese listening post on Wake Island that AF was running short of fresh water.
By the time a new version of JN-25 went into effect on 24 May, Nimitz had read 85% of Yamamoto’s operations order. He had also pinned Layton to the prediction that the enemy carriers would be sighted about 175 miles from Midway at 0600 on 4 June approaching from the northwest on bearing 325 degrees. When the Japanese appeared almost on schedule, Nimitz told Layton, “Well, you were only five miles, five degrees,
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and five minutes off.”
Hurried repairs to the Yorktown (CV-5), damaged at the Coral Sea, enabled Nimitz to deploy three fleet carriers organized in two task forces: the Yorktown in TF-17, commanded by Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, who also acted as officer-in-tactical-command of both forces; and the Enterprise (CV-6) and Hornet (CV-8) in TF-16, under Rear Admiral Raymond A. Spruance (The Quiet Warrior of Thomas Buell’s superb biography), a surface line officer who had been called on to stand in for Vice Admiral William “Bull” Halsey when the latter was hospitalized for acute dermatitis. These formations were to rendezvous approximately 325 miles northeast of Midway, in position to launch a surprise attack on the left flank of the Japanese carrier forces coming from the northwest.
A comparison of the opposing orders of battle would mdicate that, even with the intelligence edge conferred by Magic, U.S. forces were destined for defeat. All told, in Operations AL and MI, the Combined Fleet deployed 113 surface warships and 16 submarines against the Pacific Fleet’s 47 warships and 26 submarines. In carriers, the Japanese enjoyed an advantage of 8 to 3; in battleships, 11 to 0; and in cruisers and destroyers, 73 to 44.
Fortunately for their adversaries, Admiral Yamamoto nnd his Combined Fleet staff dissipated their ostensibly overwhelming strength by a campaign plan that carried the Imperial Navy’s predilection for the baroque to Wretched excess. Excluding the Advanced Expeditionary f orce of submarines (which arrived on station too late to intercept the U.S. carriers) but including the forces committed to Operation AL, the Combined Fleet was divided 'nto no fewer than 10 separate formations, of which only 3 assigned to the Midway Invasion Force were not so far separated as to preclude mutual support. These dispositions inevitably entailed the dispersion of Japan’s carriers, two of which, the newly commissioned fleet carrier Junyo and the light carrier Ryujo, were detailed to the Aleutian sideshow. In the Central Pacific the light carrier Zuiho escorted the Invasion Force and the light carrier Hosho accompanied the Main Body, a surface action §roup under Yamamoto’s personal command. None was within immediate supporting range of the four fleet earners comprising Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo’s First Carrier Striking Force—the Akagi (flag), Hiryu, Kaga, and Soryu. In sum, its planning reduced the Combined nleet to a point-of-contact superiority of 4 to 3 in carriers; virtual parity in carrier aircraft (229 to 234); and, "'hen Japanese seaplanes and Midway-based U.S. Army Air Forces and Marine Corps aircraft are taken into actant, an aerial inferiority of 246 to 344.
The carrier action opened at 0430 on 4 June, when biagumo launched 108 aircraft against Midway. At that hme neither carrier force knew for certain that the other nearby. A Catalina patrolling from Midway alerted wtcher to the proximity of enemy carriers at 0552, but ^agumo’s reconnaissance flights did not inform him of lbe presence of a hostile formation until 0728 and did n°t add that it included at least one carrier until 0820. The difference in discovery times proved crucial. The
Enterprise and Hornet air groups began launching at 0656; the Yorktown's, initially held in reserve, at 0838. Their arrival caught Nagumo’s carriers, having just completed recovering the Midway strike force, in the most inflammable of all conditions: their flight decks filled with aircraft on the verge of being launched against the U.S. force and their hangar decks littered with unsecured ordnance and gasoline trolleys left from the hasty preparations for that launch.
First into the fray were three squadrons of TBD Devastator torpedo bombers, which delivered a succession of independent attacks between 0920 and 1020. The U.S. Navy’s flight operations had yet to attain the choreographic precision that would characterize them in 1944-45. Not a single fighter escorted the Hornet and Enterprise squadrons, while the six Wildcats accompanying the Yorktown'% were quickly dispersed by the Zeroes of the enemy’s combat air patrol. Coming in low and slow, the Devastators pressed their attacks with suicidal gallantry. Of 41 planes, 35 were destroyed, including all 15 of the Hornet's Torpedo 8. Less than half survived long enough to launch torpedoes, and none of these found their mark.
Yet the torpedo squadrons’ sacrifice was not in vain. Their attacks had drawn the Zeroes down to the wave- tops. By a stroke of that fortune alleged to favor the brave, it was precisely at this moment that the Enterprise and Yorktown SBD Dauntless dive-bomber squadrons reached the scene. Before the enemy fighters could regain altitude, 54 Dauntlesses came hurtling down at the carriers. In five fateful minutes commencing at 1024, they scored mortal hits on the Akagi, Kaga, and Soryu. Only the Hiryu remained intact. Around 1045 she launched the first of two strikes that seriously damaged the Yorktown, at the cost of her own ensuing destruction. The Soryu went under around 1920; the Kaga followed five minutes later; the Akagi received the coup de grace from a Japanese destroyer at sunrise on 5 June; and the Hiryu, which had burned throughout the night, disappeared at 0900.
The next day, the Japanese submarine 1-168 sank the crippled Yorktown with a four-torpedo spread that also claimed a destroyer, the Hammann (DD-442), secured alongside; and on 7 June Operation AL’s invasion forces landed unopposed on Attu and Kiska, the planned occupation of Adak having been canceled upon the discovery of the U.S. airfield on Umnak. But these actions were insignificant compared to the destruction of nearly two-thirds of the Imperial Navy’s fleet carriers. The war in the Pacific had entered a new phase.
For further reading: Thomas B. Buell, The Quiet Warrior: A Biography of Admiral Raymond A. Spruance (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1987); Mit- suo Fuchida and Okumiya Masatake. ed. Clarke H. Kawakami and Roger Pineau. Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan. The Japanese Navy's Story (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1992); E. B. Potter, Nimitz (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1976); H. P. Willmott, The Barrier and the Javelin: Japanese and Allied Pacific Strategies, February to June 1942 (Annapolis, MD; Naval Institute Press, 1983)
Professor Sweetman is a naval historian and writer.
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r°ceedings / June 1992
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