Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942 Read online

  ALSO BY IAN TOLL

  Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy

  To Henry,

  who will read this later.

  CONTENTS

  List of Maps

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Epilogue

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  PHOTO INSERT

  LIST OF MAPS

  The Pacific, 1942

  Mahan’s Worst-Case Scenario

  Sinking of HMS Prince of Wales and Repulse: December 10, 1941

  Principal Ports and Naval Bases of Japan

  Wake Atoll: December 11, 1941

  U.S.–Australian Lifeline, 1942

  Halsey’s Raid in the Marshalls: February 1, 1942

  Japanese Advance into the East Indies: January–February 1942

  The Doolittle Raid: April 18, 1942

  Operation MO: Japanese Plan to Take Port Moresby

  Battle of the Coral Sea: May 1–4, 1942

  Battle of the Coral Sea: May 7–8, 1942

  Japanese Naval Forces: Advance on Midway and Aleutians, May 24–June 3, 1942

  Enterprise and Yorktown Dive-Bombers Ambush Kido Butai: June 4, 1942

  Carrier Task Forces: Track Charts, June 4, 1942

  PROLOGUE

  Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,

  Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;

  But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,

  When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!

  —RUDYARD KIPLING, The Ballad of East and West

  It has been observed that if a sailor had climbed into a time machine in the year 1850, and was randomly transported through time, he would have found himself more at home as a foremast jack in the Spanish Armada, which had sailed against England in 1588, than in one of the big steel battleships of 1900. In those latter fifty years of the nineteenth century, a period brief enough to span one man’s career, the Industrial Revolution had utterly demolished and recreated the hardware and technology of naval warfare. Even so, there was to be no intermission, no respite in the pace of change. At the turn of the twentieth century, the world’s navies stood on the verge of parallel revolutions in ship design, engine design, weapons systems, communications, and doctrine. Turbine engines would replace inefficient reciprocating engines. Fuel oil would replace coal. Fire director systems would allow one man to train all of a ship’s guns on a target, and to correct for the pitch and roll of the ship. The self-propelled torpedo, designed to strike an enemy ship at the waterline, was improving in range and dependability. Radio communications would link fleets at sea to their shore-based commands. Several nations were experimenting successfully with submarines. In 1903, the Wright brothers made their historic first flight at Kitty Hawk, and farsighted officers could envision the future possibilities of these new “flying machines.” In 1906, Great Britain launched a new battleship, the HMS Dreadnought. She had 12-inch guns and a 21-knot cruising speed, and from the day she slid down the ways every other battleship in the world was obsolete.

  All the ranking American admirals of the Second World War began their naval careers during that era of stupendous technological change. Between about 1900 and 1910, as fresh-faced teenagers leaving home for the first time, they entered the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. To win admission, they had passed punishing entrance examinations and survived a ruthless selection process. They were Protestant and middle class, almost to a man. There were no blacks, no Jews, and precious few Catholics. A few were “navy juniors,” following in the footsteps of fathers or grandfathers. They came from every region of the country, but within a year or two their accents and dialects were wrung out of them, and they spoke in an efficient, superregional version of English, so that their family and friends at home would shake their heads in wonder at the changes the navy had wrought. “Now he belongs to his country,” his parents were told, and the implication was clear—their influence over him was all part of the past. He had crossed a threshold into a new life, from which there was no return except by the disgraceful act of failing and flunking out.

  At Annapolis they entered an austere, inward-looking, highly regimented social order, hermetically sealed off from the cacophonous civilian society in which they had been raised. From reveille at six-thirty to lights-out at nine-thirty, their days were parceled out in exacting increments of time. They drilled and marched for hours in all kinds of weather on the academy grounds, and conducted physically exhausting amphibious drills in open boats on the Chesapeake. Plebes learned to “double time down the corridor, change directions at sharp right angles, and sit rigidly at attention while sitting on the forward two inches of [their] chair.” Wayward behavior was kept in check by a combination of stern discipline and social pressure. Demerits were assessed against a long list of violations—tardiness, talking in ranks, smoking, failing to “square away” one’s room, or sneaking into town for a beer. They learned basic seamanship, first by practicing on rigging and spars erected in a drill hall, later by cruising in old schooners and cutters on the Severn River.

  Academic coursework emphasized seamanship, navigation, gunnery, tactics, and engineering. The key to a high class ranking lay in rote memorization of data supplied in classroom lectures and textbooks, followed by regurgitation on command. There was little occasion for analysis or independent thought, and the midshipmen were not encouraged to grapple too daringly with the major naval-military-technical-doctrinal issues of the day. The great emphasis was on character. Referring both to West Point and Annapolis, President Theodore Roosevelt told the Congress: “We do not need to have these schools made more scholastic. On the contrary we should never lose sight of the fact that the aim of each school is to turn out a man who shall be above everything else a fighting man . . . the best part of the education is the high standard of character and of professional morale which it confers.” What was imperative, in those first years of a naval career, was to cultivate the right set of attitudes, the correct personal bearing, to cut a good figure in dress blues or whites, immaculately turned out in fore-and-aft hat and crisp white gloves, with a ceremonial sword at the hip. In short, to be well-liked: to fit in.

  The past was always present. They were never allowed to forget that they were heirs to a proud warrior tradition; that they were charged personally and collectively with upholding the honor of their flag. The halls at Annapolis were decorated with tattered ensigns and faded oil paintings depicting naval scenes of the American Revolution and the War of 1812, the age of “wooden ships and iron men,” when the ancient heroes—Jones, Perry, Decatur, Preble, Stewart—had won and defended the nation’s independence at sea. Heavy emphasis was laid on the social graces. The young men were taught to cultivate good manners, to balance teacups in a parlor, to compose a handwritten letter that would not embarrass the sender or recipient, and to dance a passable waltz without treading on a lady’s toes. They were encouraged to speak a little French and earn at least a nodding acquaintance with the classics. As naval officers they would perform quasi-diplomatic roles in ports of call around the world, and it was thought important that they should ca
rry themselves with grace and confidence in every social setting, and never risk being looked down upon by any man or his wife, be they civil or military, foreigners or Americans.

  Above all, Annapolis functioned as an engine of assimilation. Those who would not or could not fit in were spat out. Those who stayed and saw it through were bonded to each other and to the navy, with a deeply felt esprit de corps, overpoweringly and for life.

  As for the big doctrinal questions of fleet strategy, these were the glory days of Alfred Thayer Mahan, the American naval officer–turned–historian and strategic guru whose doctrines had been embraced and put into practice by every major navy in the world. Mahan had been catapulted into international fame with the publication in 1890 and 1892 of his first major work, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. In these and subsequent books and essays he set forth the three “Mahanian dogmas” that governed the thinking of naval strategists right up until the beginning of the Second World War—the cult of the big gun battleship, the iron rule of concentration, and the annihilation of the enemy fleet in a single decisive battle.

  In looks, Mahan was the caricature of a bookish intellectual—tall, lanky, and spare, with posture very erect; his face sallow and sad, with pale blue eyes, a weak chin concealed under a graying beard, and a bulbous forehead merging into a majestic bald dome. He was abstemious, self-disciplined, pious, and reserved with strangers even to the point of seeming shy. He had graduated Annapolis in 1859 (when the institution was only fourteen years old) and entered the old wooden-hull sailing navy in time for the election of Lincoln and the secession of the southern states. He passed the four years of the Civil War in uneventful blockade duty off the rebel coast. In the postwar period his duties took him around the globe, with cruises on various ships throughout Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia. By 1884, Mahan had twenty-five years of honorable but otherwise unremarkable naval service behind him. He was a forty-five-year-old captain with no great hope of attaining flag rank (admiral). There was nothing to stop him drifting along for twenty more years and retiring with a comfortable pension. But he was heartily tired of the sea, where he had spent more than half his career, and keen to try a new direction. So when he was offered a position as history lecturer at the newly founded U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, he took the job at once.

  Mahan believed himself to be utterly unqualified for the job—“profoundly ignorant,” as he put it. But he had a voracious appetite for knowledge and a monastic temperament that suited him to long hours of solitary study. He pillaged bookshops, haunted libraries, and bored through hundreds of years of history—the ancient Greeks and Romans, the colonial rivalries of Britain, Holland, France, and Spain, the rise and fall of Napoleon. “I tackled the job much as I presume an immigrant begins a clearing in the wilderness, not troubling greatly which tree he takes first,” he later wrote. “I laid my hands on whatever came along, reading with the profound attention of one who is looking for something.” One afternoon in the fall of 1885, while working in the library of the English Club in Lima, Peru (where his ship had put in), Mahan was engrossed in a history of the Punic Wars of Rome and Carthage in the second and third centuries bc. A question entered his mind, arriving with the force of a revelation. What if Hannibal had invaded Italy by sea, rather than by the long overland route through Spain and the Alps? Would Rome have fallen and the entire course of Western history been diverted? “The light dawned first on my inner consciousness,” he wrote, “that control of the sea was an historic factor which had never been systematically appreciated and expounded.” His mind took hold of the idea and did not let go, and soon afterward he began to write. The press of time required that he complete his Naval War College lectures for the fall of 1886, and the trial of putting his ideas into words forced him to clarify his essential thesis. As the pages flew, he recalled, “Every faculty I possessed was alive and jumping.” The lectures were committed to paper by September 1886, and subsequently published by Little, Brown under the famously stilted title: The Influence of Sea Power Upon History.

  The timing was propitious. Industrialization and technological change had prompted many nations to begin overhauling their fleets. National rivalries and imperial ambitions, especially among the great powers of Europe, threatened to provoke the mother of all naval arms races. The world was grasping toward a better understanding of seapower. What was it? What was its value? How was it attained? How should it be used? Mahan was not the first to ask those questions, but he framed them cogently and elegantly, and set out to answer them in a methodical way, with examples taken from the naval wars of the past.

  Above all, Mahan preached the importance of “capital ships,” or heavily armed battleships of the largest class. Frigates, cruisers, and destroyers might perform useful supporting roles, such as scouting, or protecting convoys—but a nation lacking big ships armed with big guns could never be more than a second-rate naval power. Mahan was adamant that this fleet of battleships must act at all times as a single, concentrated unit. To divide or disperse the fleet was the classic and recurring error of naval strategy—again and again, throughout the pages of history, a united fleet had hunted down and destroyed the scattered elements of a divided fleet. To those Mahan added a third precept: an emphasis on the offensive. The battle fleet should not be deployed as a kind of coast guard, to be kept close to one’s harbors. A navy’s supreme purpose, he declared, must be to range across the oceans, relying upon secure overseas bases if necessary; to hunt and destroy the enemy fleet. “War, once declared, must be waged offensively, aggressively. The enemy must not be fended off, but smitten down.” The enemy must be met and destroyed in a “decisive battle,” like those of Salamis, Actium, Lepanto, the Nile, or Trafalgar—an engagement in which the victors sink or capture all (or substantially all) of the enemy’s ships, putting an end to his ability to wage naval war. Big ships with big guns, concentrated into a single, undivided battle fleet, and infused with an overriding purpose to wipe the enemy off the face of the sea—that was Mahan’s formula for seapower.

  Recognition came quickly and globally. Reviews were adulatory, and admiring letters poured in from around the world. Influence and his subsequent works were swiftly translated into French, German, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish. Two years after he had broken into print, Mahan was acclaimed as the most influential scholar of seapower ever to have picked up a pen, and a foreign policy sage whose statements were parsed and pondered and brooded over as if they had been handed down from Mount Olympus. “From 1892 on, everyone quoted him,” wrote an admiring Frenchman, “and those who debated the subject endeavored to show their views were in agreement with his.” In Britain, it was said that every officer in the Royal Navy had either read the book or was pretending that he had. Prime Minister William Gladstone labeled Influence “the book of the age,” and in the Houses of Parliament Mahan’s name was thrown around in such a way as to cut off all debate. In 1894, Mahan received honorary degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge, and at a Royal Navy Club banquet a toast was offered: “We owe to [Captain Mahan] the three million pounds sterling just voted for the increase of the navy.” In Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II reported to a friend: “I am just now not reading but devouring Captain Mahan’s book and am trying to learn it by heart. It is a first class book and classical in all points.” The Kaiser ordered his naval minister, Alfred von Tirpitz, to place translated copies of Influence aboard every ship in the German navy, and to let it be known that every officer was expected to read it. The Anglo-German naval arms race that preceded (and by some lights provoked) the First World War unfolded under the deep influence of Mahan.

  But in no nation did Mahan’s writings make so deep and lasting an impression as in Japan. Mahan himself believed that to be the case: he remarked that “more of my works have been done into Japanese than into any other one tongue,” and said no other country had showed “closer or more interested attention to the general subject.” In 1894, Influence was translated an
d distributed through the association of Imperial Japanese Navy officers. Both the navy and army staff colleges adopted it as a textbook. Copies were presented to the Meiji emperor and the crown prince, Yoshihito. The Japanese Naval Staff College attempted (unsuccessfully) to recruit Mahan to join its faculty. Mahan’s doctrine of the “decisive battle” echoed Miyamoto Musashi, the great samurai philosopher and swordsman of the sixteenth century, who had extolled the power of “total absorption in a single telling blow.” Admiral Heihachiro Togo wrote in his own brush-hand, in exquisite calligraphy, a tribute: “Naval strategists of all nations are of one opinion that Mahan’s works will forever occupy the highest position as a worldwide authority in the study of military science. I express my deep and cordial reverence for his far-reaching knowledge and keen judgment.”

  As Japan’s political elites fell under the sway of Mahan’s ideas, its navy’s never-ending crusade for a greater share of the national budget gained momentum and adherents. Japan was an island-nation like Britain, declared the admirals: and like Britain, Japan could be attacked only by enemies who must come from over the sea. The army’s imperial ambitions would come to nothing unless troops could be delivered safely to the Asian mainland. The Japanese navy, they insisted, should hold status equivalent to that of the British Royal Navy—it should be reconstituted as the primary branch of the nation’s military forces, with a prior claim on policy-making influence and state funding.

  In his own country, Mahan’s most ardent champion was Teddy Roosevelt, who upon finishing the first volume of Influence in May 1890 wrote to congratulate the captain: “During the last two days I have spent half my time, busy as I am, in reading your book, and that I found it interesting is shown by the fact that having taken it up I have gone straight through and finished it.” Roosevelt published an admiring review in the Atlantic Monthly, reserving special praise for Mahan’s conclusion that the United States should build a new fleet of heavy battleships. Their partnership grew more intimate in 1897–98, during Roosevelt’s stint as assistant secretary of the navy, when the two collaborated in planning the fleet deployments that would lead to a quick American victory in the Spanish-American War. During Roosevelt’s presidency (1901–09), Mahan was one of an inner circle of the president’s advisers, allies, and fellow imperialists, a group that included John Hay, Elihu Root, and Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Roosevelt sometimes lifted passages out of Mahan’s essays and wove them into his speeches nearly word for word. Mahan was “only too glad” that his work should be put to use in that way: he told the president, “The question of credit in such connection is to me quite immaterial.”