Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [112]
The raid, harmless as it was, got banner headlines in the Allied world, but its greatest effect was on the Japanese leaders. They had blithely assumed that the home islands were inviolate. Where had those planes come from? They were army bombers; they were too big to fly off carriers. It was barely possible they had come from the Aleutians, or from Midway, though both seemed pretty far. President Roosevelt would say only that they were from “Shangri-la”; wherever they came from, it was obvious that the vaunted “defensive perimeter” was either too thin, or not far enough out, to be secure. The Japanese began planning a further extension in the northern Pacific.
Three weeks later they ran into trouble off Australia. Here too they had decided to extend a bit farther than originally planned. Everything had gone so well that the Japanese were now wildly overconfident. They had pushed out along the northern coast of New Guinea and taken the Bismarck Islands with the great harbor of Rabaul on the eastern end of New Britain. Rabaul was to be their major base in the area and the southeastern anchor of the defense line before it swung northward. To secure the approaches to Rabaul, they began to push down into the Solomons. They also decided on an end run around New Guinea, to take Port Moresby on the southern side of the island. New Guinea has some of the worst terrain in the world, its central spine formed by a range called the Owen Stanley Mountains. The Japanese had tried to cross this, and been held up by a handful of desperate Australians. The two spearpoints of empire, both racked by malaria and dysentery, had fought each other to a standstill on the track to Kokoda, so the Japanese sought to go by sea and cut the Australians’ base out from under them.
Instead they got ambushed. An American carrier task force was operating in the Coral Sea; the Americans had long broken the Japanese operating codes, and knew something was going on in the area. The resulting battle of the Coral Sea, fought from May 4 to 8, was the first naval action in history in which the surface ships never sighted each other. The aircraft carrier took its place as the dominant element in naval warfare. Both sides flew off a series of air strikes, and traded punches somewhat like prize fighters in the dark. The Japanese, who had three aircraft carriers, lost a small one, Shoho; the Americans, with two, lost a big one, Lexington. Their second carrier, Yorktown, took heavy damage and limped off to Pearl, out of action for the immediate future. When the smoke finally cleared, it was the Americans who were worse hurt, but they won the day: the Japanese turned back, and the threat to Port Moresby and northern Australia was gone, as it turned out, forever. The only positive fruit of the action for Japan was a new holding down in the Solomons, a seaplane base at Tulagi, and the start of an airfield on a larger, all but unknown island called Guadalcanal.
The Japanese believed they had a clearcut material victory; they thought they sank both American carriers. They knew the remaining two were last seen in the north Pacific—these were Doolittle’s “bases,” though they did not know that—and therefore the central Pacific was wide open. Still supremely confident, the Japanese now launched the extension of their perimeter; they aimed operations at the Aleutians, and at Midway, the western end of the Hawaiian chain.
They planned to use virtually the entire Imperial Fleet in this, and they scattered ships all over the map. As a battle, Midway was fairly simple in broad outline, extremely complex in detail. As a human drama it conformed to most of the dictates of great literature in plot, scene, and characters, and a great deal has been written about it.
Using their by now standard eccentric strategy, the Japanese planned a diversion that eventually took the unmanned Aleutian islands of Attu and Kiska. The effort diverted more of their forces than it did of the Americans, so although the gain in territory