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By Root 1111 0

to matching the scale of those waged against Germany. The struggle engaged relatively few men, though it was conducted over vast distances and involved large naval commitments. Most of the Japanese army stayed in China. Tokyo’s Asian and Pacific conquests were achieved by small forces, dispersed across the hemisphere. The United States, Australia and Britain, in their turn, contested mastery of islands and densely forested wildernesses with modest ground contingents of two or three divisions, while on Russian battlefields hundreds of formations clashed. The critical factors in each successive Pacific encounter were the supporting naval and air forces. Both sides’ soldiers and marines knew that their blood and sweat must go for nothing unless sea supply routes could be held open and dominance of the sky denied to the enemy. The United States Navy became the decisive force in the war against Japan.

2. The Coral Sea and Midway

IN JANUARY 1942, the Japanese seized Rabaul, on New Britain, and transformed it into a major air and naval hub. In the full flight of euphoria following their triumphs—“victory disease,” as sceptics among Hirohito’s people came to call it—they determined to extend their South Pacific holdings to embrace Papua, the Solomons, Fiji, New Caledonia and Samoa. The navy persuaded the army to agree to an advance to a new imperial outer perimeter with Midway Atoll in the centre and the Aleutians in the north, both of which should be seized from the Americans. They would then have bases from which they could interdict supply routes to Australia, now the Allies’ main staging post for the Asian war.

Even before Corregidor fell, the Americans made a gesture which dismayed and provoked their enemies, because it provided an early hint of Japan’s vulnerability and lent urgency to their further endeavours. Lt. Col. James Doolittle’s 18 April air strike against Tokyo by sixteen B-25 bombers, launched from the carrier Hornet 650 miles from Japan, was materially insignificant but morally important. Heartening the Allied peoples in a season of defeats, it was an imaginative act of military theatre, of the kind Churchill often indulged. It persuaded the Japanese that they must seize Midway, America’s westernmost Pacific foothold, held since 1867. Once Adm. Isokoku Yamamoto had aircraft based on Midway, these could frustrate further Doolittle-style adventures.

Japan’s objectives would prove disastrously overambitious; but the alternative, from Tokyo’s perspective, was to concede to the Americans freedom to mass forces for a counterstroke. Yamamoto and his colleagues knew that, unless the United States could be kept under relentless pressure, Japanese defeat was inevitable. Their only credible strategy, they believed, was to strike at the Allies again and again, until Washington bowed to the logic of Japanese dominance and negotiated a settlement. Above all, the Imperial Navy sought to engage and destroy U.S. warships at sea.

Before addressing Midway, the Japanese moved against Papua and the Solomons. At the beginning of May 1942, three invasion convoys set sail for Port Moresby, protected by powerful strike and covering forces including three carriers. Vice Adm. Shigeyoshi Inoue, directing operations, hoped that an American fleet would seek to intervene, for he expected to destroy it. The amphibious force destined for Tulagi Island, in the south Solomons a few miles off Guadalcanal, landed unopposed on 3 May. Next day, aircraft from the carrier Yorktown struck Japanese ships offshore, sinking a destroyer and two smaller vessels, but the destruction was disappointing because the attackers enjoyed almost ideal conditions.

On 5 May a U.S. fleet with a small Australian contingent, led by Rear Adm. Frank Fletcher and forewarned by Ultra intelligence of Japanese intentions, steamed to intercept Inoue’s main force. At dawn on 7 May in the Coral Sea, Fletcher dispatched his cruisers, led by British rear admiral John Crace, to attack the enemy’s transports. Fletcher was misinformed about enemy locations. U.S. air squadrons,