The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [143]
8
Five Minutes at Midway
June 1942–October 1944
Five minutes! Who would have dreamed that the tide of battle would shift completely in that amount of time?
Captain Mitsuo Fuchida and Commander Masatake Okumiya of the Imperial Japanese Navy, 19551
With the important exception of Burma, the next stage in the Allies’ war against Japan can be told largely in terms of aircraft carriers, which became the key weapon in deciding whether the Japanese could retain the sprawling empire they had won in the six months after Pearl Harbor. Although the monsoon had halted the Japanese advance towards India in May 1942 – at least for the time being – it was their catastrophic loss of no fewer than four aircraft carriers at the battle of Midway (to the Americans’ one) the following month that evened up the odds between Axis and Allies. Midway ended any hope of Japan – whose carrier production lagged far behind that of the United States – continuing her whirlwind progression in the east. Captain Mitsuo Fuchida and Commander Masatake Okumiya subtitled their 1955 history of Midway The Battle that Doomed Japan; nor was this unacceptable hyperbole.
The indecisive battle of the Coral Sea, fought 800 miles north-east of Queensland on 7 and 8 May 1942, had resulted in the sinking of the Japanese light carrier Shoho, which capsized after being hit by thirteen bombs, seven torpedoes and a crashing dive-bomber, and of the American carrier Lexington, which exploded two hours after the last Japanese plane left, the victim of a spark from a generator that was left running accidentally, with fires ignited by petrol fumes from tanks ruptured in the attack. The evacuation of the Lexington was orderly and 2,735 crew members – over 90 per cent – survived. Two heavy Japanese carriers, the Shokaku and Zuikaku, were damaged, and so the plans to take Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea – from where Australia could be threatened – had to be abandoned. (Lieutenant James Powers won a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor for bombing the Shokaku’s deck from only 300 feet, which along with his Dauntless dive-bomber comrades’ efforts meant that aircraft could not land on it. As there was not enough room on Zuikaku for both carriers’ aircraft, Japanese planes had to be physically manhandled over the side into the sea to make room. In all, 564 American sailors and airmen died and sixty-six aircraft were lost, compared to 1,074 Japanese and seventy-seven aircraft.2 Crucially, the US carrier Yorktown had only been damaged in the battle rather than sunk, as Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the commander of the Japanese Combined Fleet, believed. He therefore assumed that his invasion of the atoll of Midway would not be opposed by American air power, and assembled 165 warships, the most powerful armada ever seen in the history of the Pacific Ocean, to take the island. With Midway in Japanese hands, Pearl Harbor could be bombed, and along with the Aleutian Islands, another part of the ‘ribbon defence’ of the Southern Resources Area could be protected.
Intelligence was key to the American victory at Midway, both the accurate and timely information that Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, the Commander-in-Chief in the Pacific, was given by his code-breakers, and the halting and inaccurate reports that Admirals Yamamoto and Nagumo got from their intelligence officers, who did not have the luxury of reading their enemy’s signals. To make matters worse the Japanese failed to pool what little information they did have, partly because Nagumo’s radio transmitter was weaker than Yamamoto’s and partly because of the need for radio silence.3 Nimitz knew that Nagumo had four aircraft carriers in service after the battle of the Coral Sea, with one damaged there and another stripped of aircraft, whereas Yamamoto did not know that Rear-Admiral Frank ‘Jack’ Fletcher had three carriers – Enterprise, Hornet and Yorktown – which