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By Root 1135 0

Pacific battles saw much of failure, loss and defeat. The horrors of ships’ sinkings were often increased by fatal delays before survivors were located and rescued. The Pacific is a vast ocean, and many of those who fell into it, even from large warships, were never seen again. When the damaged light cruiser Juneau blew up after a magazine explosion on passage to the repair base at Espiritu Santu, gunner’s mate Allan Heyn was one of those who suddenly found himself struggling for his life: ‘There was oil very thick on the water, it was at least two inches thick, and all kinds of blueprints and documents floating around, roll after roll of toilet paper. I couldn’t see anybody. I thought: “Gee, am I the only one here” … Then I heard a man cry and I looked around it was this boatswain’s mate … He said he couldn’t swim and he had his whole leg torn off … I helped him on the raft … It was a very hard night because most of the fellows were wounded badly, and they were in agony. You couldn’t recognize each other unless you knew a man very well before the ship went down.’ After three days, their party had shrunk from 140 men to fifty; on the ninth day after Juneau’s loss, the ship’s ten remaining survivors were picked up by a destroyer and a Catalina flying boat. Sometimes, vessels vanished with the loss of every man aboard, as was almost always the case with submarines.

The Japanese began the war at sea with a corps of highly experienced seamen and aviators armed with the Long Lance torpedo, most effective weapon of its kind in the world. Their radar sets were poor, and many ships lacked them altogether. They lagged woefully in intelligence-gathering, but excelled at night operations, and in early gunnery duels often shot straighter than Americans. Their superb Zero fighters increased combat endurance by forgoing cockpit armour and self-sealing fuel tanks. The superiority of Japanese naval air in 1942 makes all the more astonishing the outcome of the next phase of the war in the Pacific.

Admiral Yamamoto strove with all the urgency that characterised his strategic vision to force a big engagement. Less than a month after the bungled Coral Sea action, he launched his strike against Midway atoll, committing 145 warships to an ambitious, complex operation intended to split US forces. A Japanese fleet would advance north against the Aleutians, while the main thrust was made at Midway. Nagumo’s four fleet carriers – Zuikaku and Shokaku were left behind after their Coral Sea mauling – would approach the island from the north-west, with Yamamoto’s fast battleships three hundred miles behind; a flotilla of transports, carrying 5,000 troops to execute the landing, would close from the south-west.

Yamamoto may have been a clever man and a sympathetic personality, but the epic clumsiness of the Midway plan emphasised his shortcomings. It required him to divide his strength; worse, it reflected characteristic Japanese hubris, by discounting even the possibility of American foreknowledge. As it was, Admiral Chester Nimitz, the US Navy’s Pacific Commander-in-Chief, knew the enemy was coming. By one of the war’s most brilliant feats of intelligence work, Commander Joseph Rochefort at Pearl Harbor used fragmentary Ultra decrypts to identify Midway as Nagumo’s objective. On 28 May the Japanese switched their naval codebooks, which thereafter defied Rochefort’s cryptographers for weeks. By miraculous luck, however, this happened just too late to frustrate the breakthrough that betrayed Yamamoto’s Midway plan.

Nimitz made a wonderfully bold call: to stake everything upon the accuracy of Rochefort’s interpretation. Japanese intelligence, always weak, believed that Yorktown had been sunk at the Coral Sea, and that the other two US carriers, Hornet and Enterprise, were far away in the Solomons. But heroic efforts by 1,400 dockyard workers at Pearl Harbor made Yorktown fit for sea, albeit with a makeshift air component. Nimitz was therefore able to deploy two task groups to cover Midway, one led by Fletcher – in overall command – and the other