H-Ref-AtWar
In the first week of July 1941, the
government of the United States made a historic mistake. It took an intercepted
message from the Japanese Foreign Ministry at face value and concluded that the
Second World War was on the point of spreading to the Pacific Ocean. The
American response, economic sanctions backed by military precautions, and
Japan's reaction to them, turned this misinterpretation into a self fulfilling
prophecy. The United States armed forces were therefore denied the full margin
of time they believed they needed to be ready for combat -- by March 1942 at
the earliest. Indeed, Japan's determination to pre-empt American interference
in its plan for expansion in East Asia plunged the USA into war three months
sooner, by knocking out the American battle fleet at Pearl Harbor on December
1, 1941. The Pacific Campaign which ensued -- the largest naval conflict in
history -- was inevitable in any case, because the ambitions of the two rivals
in China were irreconcilable. Japan had already been at war for a decade, in
pursuit of its imperialist goals on the Asian mainland. This fact, and the
diplomatic duplicity of the military which then ruled the Japanese Empire,
simply overrode the powerful American desire to stay out of the fighting.
So there was very probably no way in
which the United States could have avoided an armed confrontation with Japan.
But it could have delayed the inevitable for long enough to give Army and Navy
the extra months they had said they needed to achieve full readiness for
combat. The irony in all this, one of several in the historical background to
the war, is that the error of July 1941 -- precipitating the Pearl Harbor
disaster, from which the US has arguably never psychologically recovered --
would not have been possible but for a brilliant and sustained coup by the very
intelligence agencies that were later widely blamed for failing to save the
United States Pacific Fleet!
President Franklin D. Roosevelt's
third administration did not lead the American people into war in order to
rescue Great Britain, still less to salvage Europe's Asian colonies, but in
response to Japan's attacks on America's Pacific possessions, without warning
or declaration of war and in the midst of diplomatic negotiations. Japan struck
because it correctly identified the United States as the only power capable of
frustrating its aims in the Pacific Ocean region -- and because it wildly
misread and underestimated the enemy it thus chose to conjure up against
itself. It felt compelled to act in order to replace the strategic raw
materials needed for its unending struggle in China but no longer being supplied
by the United States.
These and related matters will be
considered in detail in part I. Meanwhile, this is how the Rising Sun of Japan
attempted half a century ago to immobilize the world's most powerful nation for
long enough to seize all the main European possessions in Southeast Asia and
the south western Pacific.
In the first week of December 1941,
Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, commander-in-chief of the Imperial Japanese Combined
Fleet, was aboard his flagship, the battleship Nagato, at Kure, on Hiroshima Bay in Japan's Inland Sea. He was
awaiting news from the Mobile Force of aircraft carriers he had sent to execute
an operation that he had personally insisted upon adding to Japan's war plans
for southward expansion.
The First Air Fleet -- core of the
Mobile Force -- was based on six carriers in three divisions (Akagi, fleet flagship, and Gaga; Shokaku and Zuikaku; Eiryu and Soyu) with a total of more than four hundred planes. There was a
screen of nine destroyers led by a light cruiser, a supporting force of two
battleships and two heavy cruisers plus a train of eight tankers and supply
ships. Three submarines provided reconnaissance, and two extra destroyers were
in company to watch out for American war planes based on Midway Island, the US
outpost north west of Hawaii. In command was Vice-Admiral Nagumo Chuichi, four
years younger than Yamamoto and rather more nervous. Barely eight months in the
job, his specialty was torpedoes, not aircraft, and he was prone to bouts of
anxiety which prevented him from sleeping; even the smallest decision caused
him stress. He tried to cover up these weaknesses by bluster. It is an
extraordinary irony that this man was about to lead his force on an
unprecedented rampage of maritime destruction lasting six months -- until he lost
his biggest battle and his nerve. Lieu tenant Commander Fuchida Mitsuo,
thirty-nine-year-old chief pilot on the Akagi
and designated operational leader of the attack, was obliged to visit Nagumo
several times during the preceding night and found his admiral in a condition
not far short of nervous collapse.
The force assembled by November 22,
1941, at Hitokappu Bay in the then Japanese Kurile Islands, immediately
northeast of Japan proper. It set sail four days later, running slowly eastward
through fog and heavy swell at first, then gales and massive seas. On December
3 the formation reached a point some nine hundred miles north of Midway and
turned southeast. On the morning of the 7th it altered course to due south.
After parting company with the tankers, all the warships put on speed until the
carriers reached the designated point of launch, 2 15 miles due north of Pearl
Harbor. It was just before 6:00 A.M. Hawaiian time (then ten and a half-hours
behind Greenwich) on Sunday, December 7, 1941; in Washington it was already
11:30 A.M.; in Tokyo, far on the other side of the international date line, it
was l:30 A.M. on Monday the 8th. Aboard the Akagi
speeches were made and traditional toasts drunk in sake on the broad, wood-lined flight deck. Behind the rows of
impassive pilots' faces mixed feelings seethed: pride, fear, devotion to duty,
contempt for the soon-to-be enemy, exultation. They were about to face the
unknown; but if meticulous preparation alone could guarantee success, they had
little to fear. The plan they were about to execute had been drawn up by
Commander Genda Minoru, air-staff officer of the First Air Fleet, known to the
service as "mad Genda" for his aggressiveness (which must have been
exceptional indeed to be marked in this way). He was now on hand aboard the
flagship Akagi and recalled
afterward:
In February 1941, at the order of Admiral Yamamoto... I
mate an investigation and concluded the attack was difficult but possible; I
thought the best plan was to attack by planes but not to land.... In June and
July I began to check on the details, First investigating only the employment
of torpedo attacks. With that in view I had a carrier pilot carry out test
flights at Kagoshima Bay to acquire data on shallow-water attacks and torpedo
arming. The carrier pilots' crews were trainer for the attack beginning in
September and going intensively into training in October.
At 1:30 A.M. Tokyo time (used by all
Japanese warships wherever they might be) the carefully preserved signal flag
for the letter "Z" which had been hoisted by Admiral Togo at Tsushima
to signal the attack on the Russians was unfurled over the Akagi. Nagumo sent
the order to take off down the chain of command. Within fifteen minutes 183
aircraft from the six carriers obeyed: torpedo bombers, high-level bombers, and
dive bombers with Zero fighters as escort. Fuchida, wearing a blood-red shirt
to conceal any wound from his men, was already up, in an aircraft piloted by
Lieutenant Matsuzaki Mitsuo; this first wave was commanded by Lieutenant
Commander Nakaya Kenju. Fuchida shouted, "Tora, lord, lord."' into
the radio microphone built into the mouthpiece of his leather flying helmet at
0753 Hawaiian time -- the code word to report that total surprise had been
achieved (the word means "tiger"). He recalled:
Closing in on our objective, it was tricky adjusting the
course for the bombing run. It was time do drop now.... We were already into
Pearl Harbor and over Ford Island.... We were skimming over the streets of
Honolulu, turning again into the bombing run.... There was a huge explosion
close to our objective. A deep red flame burst up into the ski, followed by soaring dark smoke, then white
smoke to a height of what looked like three thousand feet. That must be the
magazine! A shock like an earthquake
went right through our formation and my aircraft shuddered with the force of
it. it was the Arizona going up.
It was indeed. The battleship lies
on the bottom of Pearl Harbor to this day, a permanent memorial of an attack
without warning -- the traditional opening gambit of the Japanese military.
As I was feasting my eyes on this scene [Nakaya recalled]
a terrific column of water flew up into the air from the side of a capital
ship. If was an excellent hit on the capital ship's side. The column of water
went up high enough do compete with the altitude of the clouds. Columns of
water continued to gush forth one after another.... The sunrise attack was a
complete success.
Aboard the light cruiser USS Helena, moored off the southern shore of
the harbor, Chief Petty Officer Leonard J. Fox was up betimes, writing to his
wife and daughter in Phoenix, Arizona. Hearing aircraft overhead at four
minutes to eight in the morning, he stepped out onto the main deck, looked
north toward Ford Island in mid-harbor close by, and saw the bombs raining
down.
I suddenly realizes that these planes were not our
own.... Within the next few moments all bell broke loose. The gaps had at last
done the impossible and were attacking our island fortress.... Torpedo planes
swooped in from almost over mg bead and started toward "Battleship Row" dropping their Lethal fish. First the
Oklahoma... then it was the West Virginia taking blows in her
innards....Now, as I looked on unbelievingly, the California erupted... and now it is the Arizona....Men were swimming for their lives in the fire-covered
waters of Pearl Harbor.
A Jap plane... spied the Helena. He made a fast turn and headed our way.... He was only
about 100 yards away when be releases his torpedo.... A tremendous shuddering
took place and billowing smoke and flame immediately shut all the sunlight out
of my life and I believed that my ship was no more but... the ship did not blow
up.....
Virtually every ship in the harbor that was able to, was
bearing guns on the enemy.. .. We could look up and see the bombs released....
One of these bombs made a very fantastic hit on the Arizona and went down her stack and blew up her forward magazine
and she was a blazing inferno within minutes.
The second wave of 170 attackers, the
mixture of types as before, arrived over Pearl Harbor at 8:40 A.M. local time.
Like the first, it concentrated on ships and airfields, including aircraft on
the ground, undeflected by stiffer anti-aircraft fire rising from the smoking
shambles of Pearl Harbor and its environs. In all, eighteen United States ships
were either sunk or badly damaged, including four battleships on the bottom and
four crippled; 164 Navy and Army aircraft were destroyed and 124 damaged. For
this the Japanese paid with twenty-nine planes destroyed with their crews and
seventy-four damaged. The Americans reported 2,403 killed and 1,178 wounded,
the vast majority from the Navy.
Amid the triumphant messages
exchanged between the flagships of Mobile Force and Combined Fleet, a bitter
dispute developed among the staff officers aboard each: whether, in view of the
overwhelming success of the first two waves, the planned third assault should
go in. A nervously jubilant Nagumo vetoed it, over the vehement objections of
Fuchida; Yamamoto backed the senior officer. Thus were the fuel tanks and other
vital shoreside facilities of Pearl Harbor saved from all but incidental
damage: they were to have been the prime target of wave number three; their
destruction would have rendered the base useless and forced the US Navy back to
the West Coast, over two thousand miles to the east. Further, although the bulk
of the American Pacific Fleet, its battleships, had been knocked out, the
Japanese had just demonstrated how aircraft carriers would dominate the
conflict so brutally begun. And of the three carriers then assigned to the
Pacific Fleet, none was in harbor at the time. Finally and worst of all, Japan
had roused up an invincible enemy against itself.
One of the absent carriers, the Enterprise (Captain George D. Murray,
USN), flagship of Vice-Admiral William F. Halsey's Task Force 8, had delivered
a squadron of twelve Marine Corps fighters to reinforce the garrison on Wake
Island, an isolated American outpost about two thousand miles west of Pearl
Harbor. She was due back at Pearl on Saturday, December 6, but, lucky ship that
she was, had the good fortune to be delayed by bad weather. On Sunday morning,
less than two hundred miles west of Pearl, Enterprise
routinely flew off some of her planes to precede her to Pearl Harbor. Their
pilots reported breathlessly by radio that the base was under Japanese attack
and joined the fray; four or five were shot down, some by American fire. Even
so, they and their Pearl Harbor comrades were not the first Americans to shoot
at the enemy, any more than Pearl Harbor was the first place outside China
attacked by the Japanese. That dubious honor fell to Kota Bharu, at the
northern end of British Malaya, nearly two hours earlier; and at 6:37 A.M.
Hawaiian time on the 7th, off the entrance to Pearl Harbor, the destroyer USS Ward sank one of five midget submarines
launched by conventional submarines in support of the air raid (all five were
lost).
A dogfight over Hawaii during the
Pearl Harbor attack led to the first -- and shortest -- Japanese occupation of
US territory. The brief air battle pitted seaplanes from naval squadron VCS-5,
divided among three USN cruisers, in an unequal contest with IJN Zeros. But the
Americans forced one Japanese pilot to land on the island of Nijhau, northwest
of Oahu, the main island.
He took the machine guns out of his plane and with the
aid of two Japanese gardeners actually captured the island and held it for a
couple of days [Lieutenant Commander Earl A. Junghans, USN, squadron leader,
recalled later]. They bad no radio or cable or telephone there. They didn't
know what was going on. just a bunch of natives. But this Japanese was finally
killed by a native Hawaiian who resented this machine gun being set up in the
square in the village. So be just charged it -- and although he was hit three
times be finally got in on this Jap and bashed his bead in with a rock.
Two minutes after the attack began,
Rear Admiral Patrick Bellinger, commander of the naval air station on Ford
Island in the middle of Pearl Harbor, was the first to broadcast the
electrifying message: "Air raid, Pearl Harbor. This is not drill" It
went round the world by radio, telephone and teleprinter in minutes dread proof
that the struggle in the West and Japan's war in the Far East had merged into
one enormous global conflict, much bigger than 1914-18, which now truly lost
its label as the "Great War." The sneak, hit-and-run attack on the
American fleet was not Japan's first move, but that is a technicality: the news
of it was the first intimation America and the world received of Japan's
intentions, and it could hardly have been a more dramatic shock. If the
Japanese wanted to galvanize the Americans into action, they could not have
chosen a more effective way of doing it. Such is the true historical
significance of Pearl Harbor.
Handed Bellinger's message in
Washington, Frank Knox, secretary of the Navy, exclaimed: "My God, this
can't be true, this must mean the Philippines "' He was premature, but
only by a matter of hours.
The signal that so badly shocked
Knox was intercepted by the US Marine Corps radio operator on night duty at the
Marsman Building in downtown Manila, capital of the Philippines, at 2:30 A.M.
on Monday, December 8, local time (seven minutes after the attack on Pearl
Harbor began). The radioman recognized the sender's "fist" no two
operators have quite the same touch when using a Morse-code key as belonging to
a friend and therefore knew the monitored message was genuine. He alerted the
duty officer, who first telephoned Admiral Hart, the Asiatic Fleet commander,
to say he was coming over with a message that had to be personally delivered,
and then rushed the news to him at the Manila Hotel, some three hundred yards
away. At 3:00 A.M. Hart was up and drafting an alert to all his ships; he was
hard at work in his office at the Marsman an hour later. He sent his chief of
staff, Rear Admiral W. R. Purnell, to liaise with Army headquarters in the
Walled City, a short drive away. This was a fortunate inspiration, because
Major General Richard K. Sutherland, chief of staff to General Douglas
MacArthur, American commander-in-chief in the Philippines, had not heard the
news. He picked up the telephone and called his commander at the penthouse
suite in the Manila Hotel, which MacArthur used as a residence.
The conflicting accounts of what
happened next among the general's entourage have never been reconciled, but
much precious time was wasted. Major General Lewis H. Brereton, his air
commander, independently told of the Pearl raid, was denied access to the
C-in-C for hours by Sutherland. Brereton had thirty-four operational B-17s (the
largest concentration of America's most modern heavy bombers at the time) and
eighty-seven fighters and urgently wanted orders for their deployment. His
instinct was sound enough: he wanted to bomb the air bases on Formosa (now
Taiwan ), the Japanese-occupied Chinese island some seven hundred miles north
of Manila, from which a land-based air offensive against the Philippines was
most likely to be mounted. Sutherland could not give permission for such a
step; Mac Arthur would not. Brereton therefore limited himself to using his
bombers for reconnaissance. At 8:30 he sent up virtually all his aircraft, in
response to a general alarm at Clark Field; this was canceled at 10:00 A.M. The
planes landed again, and the crews went for refreshment as ground staff carried
out maintenance and refueling. At 11:00 A.M. Brereton got permission from
Sutherland to attack Formosa, and the armorers at last began to load the B-17s.
At 12:40 they were still on the
ground when two V-shaped formations of twin-engined bombers, fifty-four in all,
appeared high over Clark. Five minutes later, or ten hours and nineteen minutes
after the attack on Pearl, the Japanese Naval Air Force began to bomb and
strafe. At a stroke, twelve B-17s were destroyed and five crippled; the other
half of the 19th Bombardment Wing took lighter damage. Just four American
fighters managed to take off, but they were destroyed by the formidable Zero
fighters escorting the bombers. In all, one hundred US Army aircraft were
knocked out at Clark, ninety-six of them in their serried ranks on the airfield
"on the ground, on the ground!" as a furious Roosevelt exclaimed when
the news was broken to him.
The Japanese attackers were handed
this strategic triumph on a plate, despite the serious disruption of their
operational plan, intended to be synchronized with Pearl and the other opening
moves, caused by bad weather in Formosa.
Because
of the fog we were delayed [said Commander Shibata Sunzo, staff officer with
the Navy's 21st Air Flotilla on Formosa]. We intended to attack at dawn but
actually delivered the attack on Clark field... about 12:30. The purpose of the
first attack was do destroy enemy planes and installations on the ground. The
fighters were to provide coverage for the bombers and intercept any American
planes which arose in the air. After the bombers successfully completed their
mission they were to withdraw and the fighters were to strafe.
[The fog had] really no effect,
although we were very worrier because we were sure [that the Americans,] after
learning of Pearl harbor... would disperse... or make an attack on our base at
Formosa. At Formosa we put on gas-masks and prepared for an attack by American
aircraft. [Japanese fliers from Formosa half expected to pass their American
contemporaries from the Philippines heating in the opposite direction, the
commander said.]
Lieutenant Howard W. Brown of the US
Army Signal Corps was sent to Mac Arthur's office by Sutherland at about 1:00
P.M. on the 8th to explain why an important intelligence message had been
delayed to the point of uselessness. He had to wait in front of the imposing
desk because Mac Arthur was shouting at Clark Field in his powerful, sonorous
voice even as it was under attack. "The general had the commanding officer
on the phone giving him hell," said Brown (Mac Arthur also blamed
Brereton, who heartily reciprocated). Brown duly made his report to an expressionless
C-in-C, who answered, "Thank you, son," and dismissed him.
Lieutenant "Tex" Wymer of
the US Army Air Corps, in charge of the radar station at Iba, on the west coast
of Luzon Island, on the morning of the 8th, reported unidentified aircraft coming
"from China" at a range of 140 miles at about noon. He repeated his
alert when the planes were eighty, sixty, fifty, forty and twenty miles out. It
was only when they were in sight that the twenty-four P-40 fighters stationed
locally began to scramble. About fourteen were destroyed on the ground, killing
ten pilots. Six got into the air, of which four were promptly shot down.
"This was our first lesson in the Air Corps... refusing to believe that
the Japs were coming until [we] could see, count, and identify the enemy planes
in the sky," Wymer said later. He relieved his frustration, caused by the
widespread mistrust of the new-fangled radar among his colleagues, by taking
his personal, high-powered hunting rifle to a sandbagged position on the beach
and firing at the Japanese intruders. He was convinced that he hit a Zero with
his third shot: at any rate it flew out to sea and did not return to the
attack.
Thus was American air power in the
Philippines effectively eliminated; and with it went the strategy of defending
the island of Luzon at all costs until the Pacific Fleet arrived ( after
traversing five thousand miles of dangerous ocean in defiance of a stronger
enemy fleet! ). Three hours earlier, smaller Japanese formations had bombed and
strafed two military bases in the north of Luzon, the principal island of the
Philippines; no report of these attacks had reached Manila, in the south of
that island. But this has no bearing on the salient fact that Mac Arthur and
his senior commanders had known of Pearl Harbor for eight and a half hours by
the time the bulk of their air power was caught helpless on the ground, at a
cost to the enemy of just seven planes.
In the circumstances, it can only be seen as fortunate that the Americans had
not had the time to build up their B-17 force in the Philippines to the planned
one hundred aircraft. Two days later, only thirty -five American fighters were
available to challenge a double raid on the airfields north of Manila and the
Asiatic Fleet's main base at Cavite. They were swept aside.
Soon landings by Japanese amphibious
troops secured two airfields elsewhere on Luzon, to be used as forward bases
for the occupation of all the Philippines; the forty thousand men, two
reinforced divisions, of Lieutenant General Homma Masaharu's 14th Army
(equivalent to a corps in the West) were able to land without difficulty at
Lingayen Gulf on December 22. Notwithstanding the brave and bitter last stand
of the rump of Mac Arthur's 140,000 ill-prepared Filipino and American troops (described
later), the inability of American air and naval forces to obstruct Homma had
sealed the fate of the archipelago in advance. It was an infinitely greater
strategic setback than the loss of the US battle fleet; and, unlike Hawaii, the
Philippines command had received an invaluable warning which it chose to
ignore.
Yet it was Pearl Harbor, back in
business almost overnight, that became the subject of eight official
investigations, crowned by a vast congressional probe after the war; it arouses
heated controversy to this day. The catastrophic loss of the Philippines for
three cruel years (and the gigantic effort which went into recapturing them )
passed forever unexamined in Washington. Instead, the administration was to
make Mac Arthur the most famous American never to occupy the White House.
The prewar idea --
"delusion" might be a better word -- of a majestic progress by the
United States fleet from the West Coast and Pearl Harbor across the Pacific to
the Philippines, wisely abandoned until rashly revived in modified form on the
urging of General MacArthur, envisaged the use of Wake Island and Guam as
staging posts. The Japanese took this as read and therefore included these
isolated islands on their list of objectives for the opening phase of the war,
well before Pearl Harbor was added. Both were to be taken by Vice-Admiral
Inouye Shigeyoshi's Fourth Fleet, based at Truk, the principal Japanese mid
Pacific naval base in the Caroline Islands. The Americans had prudently removed
all families, dependents, and other nonessential personnel some weeks before
hostilities began.
After two days of heavy air attacks
on Guam, the lone US possession in the otherwise Japanese Mariana Islands, the
Japanese, led by Rear Admiral Goto, flying his flag on the heavy cruiser Aobu,
landed five thousand men on December 9 and 10 --including one troop of cavalry
complete with horses. To resist this sledgehammer, the Americans could muster
365 Marines and about three hundred Chamorros -- island indigenes -- in the
local militia, three naval patrol boats, and a few machine guns. Congress had
consistently refused to provide funds for a stronger garrison; but on the
orders of the president himself an advance party had arrived a few weeks
earlier to prepare the ground for the construction of a military airfield. When
the Japanese forces found the garrison, the island's governor, Captain G. J.
McMillin, USN, let the fighting go on for twenty five minutes for honor's sake
before ordering the Stars and Stripes hauled down, forty -two years after Guam
had become an American possession. US military and civilian personnel were held
for a month on the island and then shipped to detention in Japan. Lieutenant
(J.G.--junior grade) Leona Jackson of the Navy Medical Corps got over the shock
of the invasion (and of hearing from a smiling Japanese naval captain, "So
sorry to tell you -- your fleet all sunk") and studied her captors:
There are a number of things I observed about the
Japanese [Mrs. Jackson reported after repatriation as a noncombatant in 1942].
I think they have staked practically everything on this war, and I think they
realize....that if they lose they are lost for a long time. it is going to be a
nasty fight, and it is going to be a dirty fight, because they don't fight according
to our rules, they make their own as they go along and they aren't pretty. They
are not a nice people to be at war with. I think it is going to take an awful
lot, I think we all know. It is just a dirty job that we have to get done.
[Mrs. Jackson added that she was very keen "to get back and get a few
licks in."]
After Pearl Harbor on the 7th, the
opening attacks on the Philippines on the 8th and the capture of Guam on the
10th, there remained one American possession in the Pacific to tackle: Wake Island,
roughly halfway between Guam and Hawaii. The Japanese sent Rear Admiral Kajioka
Sadamichi with a force of three old light cruisers and six destroyers, plus
transports carrying 450 Special Naval Landing troops (Marines), supplies, and
equipment, to occupy it on December 11. Their gross overestimation of what was
needed to subdue Guam was now offset by serious underestimation of what was
required to take Wake.
Wake Island, actually an atoll of
three islands round a lagoon, lies about six hundred miles north of the
Marshall Islands, one of which, Kwajalein, was at that time the most important
air base in all the Pacific islands mandated to Japan after the First World
War. Wake had been designated, like Midway Island, for development as an air
and submarine base for the American Navy in 1940. Work was well advanced on the
airfield late in 194 1: its commander arrived at the end of November, and Major
Paul Putnam's Marine fighter squadron VMF-211 was delivered by the Enterprise
on December 4. The military garrison consisted of thirteen officers and 365
Marines from the First Defense Battalion, commanded by Major James Devereux,
USMC. Among their weapons were six five-inch ex-naval guns in three batteries,
and three more of four three-inch anti-aircraft guns each. In overall command
was Commander Winfield S. Cunningham, USN, head of the new naval air station.
The atoll was subjected to a series
of air raids from Kwajalein for the three days preceding the invasion. In the
first raid, not long after the attack on Pearl, seven out of twelve Marine
fighters, Grumman "Wildcats," were destroyed on the ground (yet
again) and an eighth was wrecked (patched up later); twenty-three air and
ground crewmen were killed. In the early hours of the 11th the invasion force
approached in a heavy swell, firing a short barrage which did little damage.
The American coastal-defense Battery A hit Kajioka's flagship, the light
cruiser Yubari, and drove her off
badly damaged. Battery L sank the destroyer Hayate
and hit three other ships in quick succession. Battery B caused three other
destroyers to retire. The four surviving Wildcat fighters damaged another
cruiser and sank the destroyer Kisaragt
as well as driving off another air attack with several losses to the Japanese
(and two to themselves). Only one American died; the Japanese lost about five
hundred sailors and airmen. Admiral Kajioka ignominiously with drew to
Kwajalein. But this was the only setback for the Japanese in the opening phase
of their enormously broad southward advance. The gallant garrison meanwhile was
jubilant, and looked forward to relief from the east.
Admiral Husband E. Kimmel,
commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet, was still suffering from shock after
the attack on Pearl Harbor, but his brain was functioning. He had urged a very
strong garrison for Wake in the spring of 1941, big enough to oblige the
Japanese to send a substantial force against it in case of war. He had argued
that this might well earn the Navy a chance to destroy a significant element of
the enemy fleet. Immediately after the Pearl raid Kimmel had emotionally torn
off two of his acting full admiral's four stars, correctly anticipating
demotion to his substantive rank of rear admiral. His last major decision as
CINCPAC was to order all three Pacific Fleet carrier task-forces to the relief
of Wake. But over caution, breakdowns, fueling problems and general confusion
over the enemy's whereabouts caused the group due to deliver the augmented
Marine fighter squadron of eighteen planes and more troops -- Rear Admiral
Frank Jack Fletcher's Task Force 14 including carrier Saratoga with three heavy cruisers and eight destroyers -- to turn
back 425 miles northeast of Wake, on the evening of December 23. Kimmel had
already been dismissed six days earlier. His designated successor, Admiral
Chester W. Nimitz, was stuck in Washington; and the acting CINCPAC,
Vice-Admiral William S. Pye, was not about to rush strategic forces to the
relief of Wake without a direct order. The only guidance Pye had from Washington
was permission to evacuate the island at his discretion -- and the considered
opinion of his superiors that the place was a liability.
By then too, Admiral Najioka had
returned in the patched-up Yubari with
two more light cruisers, eight destroyers, four transports, and two troopships.
This time he was covered by a support force of four heavy cruisers and
attendant destroyers led by Admiral Goto, recently in Guam, whose role was to
engage any relieving force coming from the east. To make assurance doubly sure,
a division of two fleet carriers with supporting heavy cruisers and destroyers
under Rear Admiral Abe Koki was detached from Admiral Nagumo's Mobile Force,
still on its way home from the Pearl Harbor raid. This formidable lineup
completely vindicated Kimmel's prediction of what the Japanese would do against
a heavily defended Wake. Faster and more resolute deployment by the Americans
might conceivably have enabled them to confront the enemy with forces strong
enough to secure an early victory. But Admiral Pye was more concerned with
keeping the residual Pacific Fleet intact and with protecting Hawaii. His order
to pull back was received with in credulity and rage bordering on mutiny in the
Saratoga group. But it was obeyed;
and since US naval intelligence had no idea where the bulk of Nagumo's ships
were but did believe that at least two carriers, two battleships and two heavy
cruisers were within reach of Wake and the Saratoga,
it still seems the only sensible course. Had the fight for Wake become an
auction, the Japanese ultimately had six carriers and two battleships at sea to
the Americans' three and none. Fortunately for the US Navy and public morale,
the story of the on-off expedition fiasco did not get out at the time.
Meanwhile, Abe's aircraft had joined
in the raids to which Wake Island had been repeatedly subjected from Kwajalein
ever since the repulse of the first assault. The Marines were now without any
service able aircraft, and the ground defenses were being steadily worn down.
At 2:b5 A.M. on the 23rd the Japanese landings began in several places at once.
With commendable understatement, Commander Cunningham at 5:00 A.M. sent a
signal to Pearl Harbor: "The enemy is on the island. The issue is in
doubt." This helped to make up the agonized Admiral Pye's mind in favor of
a general withdrawal. Having got Cunningham's permission to surrender, Major
Devereux did so and then toured as many Marine strong points as he could reach,
persuading his men to lay down their arms. The Japanese, having lost more than
eight hundred dead and three hundred wounded against 120 American dead in the
second attack on Wake, none too gently took 470 military and 1,146 civilian
prisoners. The Marine Corps publicity machine, one of the most aggressive and
skilled operations of its kind in a war that, for the United States, was very
much a PR man's battlefield, immediately made a hero of Major Devereux. He was
presented in the handouts, and even in a later motion picture, as the leader of
the unquestionably heroic defense, to the apparent detriment and real
disappointment of Cunningham, the island commander. The major was reported to
have sent a signal during the first attack saying, "Send us more
japs"; even though some Japanese saluted this as an excellent morale-boosting
ruse by their enemy, Samuel Eliot Morison, the quasi-official war historian of
the Navy, says flatly that it "was never sent by him or anyone else."
More distortions took place when the two officers returned from their ordeal in
Japanese prison camps after the war, but at least Cunningham was finally
awarded a Navy Cross for his role on Wake Island.
The fall of Wake, though not as
important as it might have been because of the neglect of the defenses of Guam,
its strategic counterpart to the west, effectively put the Philippines out of
reach of the US Navy. The archipelago was now wide open to a full -scale
Japanese invasion following the annihilation of the local American airpower.
The Japanese had not only incapacitated the US battle fleet; even if it
recovered overnight, they had also deprived it of all the bases it needed for a
serious counterstroke.
But the Japanese Navy did not
content itself with pre-emptive strikes against its most formidable enemy in
Hawaii and the Philippines. It also seized the opportunity to preclude any
serious interference from America's strongest potential ally in the Far East
the United Kingdom, with its great naval base at Singapore and its airfields in
Malaya. The first move in a series that was quickly to knock Britain out of the
war in the Pacific was an exemplary piece of aggressive opportunism by the
Japanese Naval Air Force a fortuitous embellishment of the Japanese Army's
long-standing plan to take Singapore. This principal British bastion in Asia,
with its southward-facing, heavy coastal batteries, was to be attacked from the
rear, which is to say from the north, through Malaya.
Before going to war, the British,
like the Americans, had a one ocean fleet. The Royal Navy was already fighting
in the Mediterranean as well as the Atlantic and was therefore badly
overstretched. Incapable since the First World War of doing more at sea than
matching the strongest foreign navy (with difficulty), the British Navy had in
effect strategically withdrawn from the Far East, despite the home government's
promise to defend Australia and New Zealand. The odd cruiser and smaller
vessels apart, the Royal Navy concentrated on home waters and the
Mediterranean, through which passed the sea route to India via the Suez Canal.
This was still the main artery of an empire whose days were numbered, not least
because the 1914-18 war left Britain too poor to sustain it militarily. But
between the wars the British built up Singapore as their main naval base in the
Far East "the Gibraltar of the Orient" to which a battle squadron was
meant to be sent in the event of tension or worse with Japan. The much-vaunted
"fortress" was completed in February 1938 at a cost of L60 million
(then worth nearly $300 million). The Japanese chose to regard it not as a
defensive measure but as an active threat to them: a naval officer published a
book called Japan Must Fight Britain
in 1936 -- in English as well as his own language.
As the threat of war with Japan
mounted in the summer of 1941, the British cast about for a means of fulfilling
their undertaking to deter the Japanese fleet, by now immensely strong and with
the unanswerable advantage of being concentrated entirely in the Far East. The
Royal Navy had already lost six capital ships (three fleet carriers, two battle
ships and one battle cruiser) in two years of war; others had been knocked out
by damage or breakdown. The British fleet had to guard against strong enemy
naval forces in Norway, northwestern France, and Germany itself. Yet, when the
time came to face Japan, London scraped together three big ships for its
eastward-bound "Force G" the old battle cruiser Repulse, the new battleship Prince
of Wales, and the latest carrier, HMS Indomitable
(twenty-three thousand tons) to provide air cover. The last-named however ran
aground on November 3, 1941, off Jamaica, on her way east. Her diversion to
Norfolk, Virginia, for twelve days of repairs ensured that she would be unable
to join the other two before war broke out in the Far East. Her designated
companions had to make do without the protection of her forty-five aircraft
which doubtless saved the planes, the pilots and their carrier from destruction
by superior Japanese forces.
The Repulse
(Captain W. G. Tennant, RN), at thirty -six thousand tons all up, was as
imposing as a battleship but rather less well armored. Launched and completed
in 1 9 1 6 and twice modernized in the lean interwar years, she had been in
action just once, in the North Sea in 1917. Her main armament was six
fifteen-inch guns in three turrets, plus a dozen four-inch. Her anti-aircraft
armament was poor: just eight four inch high-angle guns and only two
eight-barrel "pom-pom" batteries firing two-pound shells. She carried
a crew of 1,240 men and sixty-nine officers. Her captain was known as
"Dunkirk Joe," because he had been senior naval officer ashore there
in the great evacuation of the summer of 1940 and was one of the last to leave.
The Prince of Wales (Captain J. C. Leach, RN) was a "Treaty"
battleship, limited to thirty-five thousand tons displacement in accordance
with the Treaty of Washington of 1 922. She carried ten of the latest,
rapid-firing fourteen-inch guns with a range of eighteen miles, eight pairs of
5.25-inch heavy anti-aircraft guns, six pom-pom batteries, and an array of
heavy and medium machine guns. Hit by a German bomb before her launch, she ran
aground soon after joining the fleet in January 1941 and was damaged in the
Battle of the North Atlantic in May, when the British fleet flagship, battle
cruiser Hood, and the German fleet
flagship, battleship Bismarck, were
sunk. She was therefore regarded by superstitious sailors as an unlucky ship (
although she was surely lucky to escape from the Bismarck). She had been
repaired in haste before going east with her crew of 1,502 men and 100
officers. Her captain had a large nose and was therefore called
"Trunky" by the British sailors, who were wont to find a nickname for
everybody.
The flag officer responsible for the
British Navy's forlorn hope in the Far East was known to the bluejackets as
"Tom Thumb," from the coincidence of his first name and his small
stature. Admiral Sir Thomas Phillips, vice-chief of the Naval Staff, had last
seen action in 1917, like Repulse,
and had most recently been in a seagoing command in 1939, just before the war
began. He was naturally delighted with his orders to take command of the
British Eastern Fleet. Force G was to be its nucleus, with more capital ships
to follow when necessary and/or possible, together with cruisers, destroyers and
other supporting vessels. The Prince of
Wales and the Repulse joined up
in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where they were restyled "Force Z," at the
end of November. They reached Singapore with their escort of four destroyers on
December 2.
At lunchtime on Monday, December 8,
Phillips took the chair at a council of war on the Prince of Wales, his flagship. The preceding twelve hours had
brought a bewildering series of shocks as the Japanese executed their plan of
coordinated attacks across six thousand miles. At forty-five minutes past
midnight on the 8th (Tokyo time, one hour ahead of Singapore) Japanese troops
took possession of the inter national settlement at Shanghai, on China's east
coast. At 1:40 A.M. they landed troops at Kota Bharu, northeastern Malaya, and
at 3:05 they invaded southern Thafland; at 3:26 they were bombing Pearl Harbor,
and two hours later they sank a British gunboat in Chinese waters. Not until
6:10 had Singapore been attacked by bombers late and in effectually because of
poor visibility. At 8:05 the Japanese landed on Guam. At 9:00 A.M. the Japanese
Army attacked the unfortified British crown colony of Hong Kong, in
southeastern China. Only at 11:40 Tokyo time did Emperor Hirohito get round to
issuing his rescript declaring war, by then of academic interest. Phillips
decided to take his two big ships and four destroyers on a sweep up the eastern
side of the Malayan Peninsula as far north as the Gulf of Siam that night, to
see if he could disrupt Japanese landings. He asked the local RAF command to
have land based fighter cover standing by. A squadron of twelve ancient Royal
Australian Air Force Brewster Buffaloes was allocated.
Phillips duly went north, found
nothing, and put about on the evening of the 9th. On his way back to Singapore
overnight, he received a radio report of another Japanese landing -- at
Kuantan, halfway down Malaya's eastern coast. He decided on a surprise attack
at, dawn. But there was to be no surprise: the Japanese submarine I58
(Lieutenant Commander Kitamura Sohichi, IJN) had seen Force Z at 11:52 P.M. on
the 9th, Singapore time. His torpedo attack failed so completely that the
British did not notice it or his boat, but his sighting report was gratefully
received by the 22nd Air Flotilla of the Japanese Naval Air Force, based north
of Saigon in French Indochina since late October and commanded by Rear Admiral
Matsunaga Sadaichi. The unit had been sent on the orders of Admiral Yamamoto,
who realized that the Army, originally responsible for local air cover, had
neither the long-range aircraft nor the maritime skills needed for operations
in the Singapore area. "This is an opportunity which comes but once in a
thousand years," Matsunaga told his pilots. "Put forth everything
that you have. All of you, come back dead." Only the crews of three
bombers were forced to obey this death-or-glory order. Seventy-six aircraft,
fifty-two armed with torpedoes and the rest with bombs, took off from the
Saigon area and flew south as other aircraft ran intensive reconnaissance in
poor weather, looking for the British ships. If these managed to evade
discovery, the plan was to go on to bomb Singapore, in which case many of the
attackers would not have enough fuel to get back to base. This had no effect on
the enthusiasm of the naval pilots for the chance of a fight with the Royal
Navy. One squadron of nine planes sighted a merchantman, dropped its bombs,
missed and returned to base. The rest flew on, past their "point of no
return" where they had only half their fuel deft, still without a
sighting. But at 10:45 A.M. Singapore time the British were located from a
reconnaissance aircraft flown by Ensign Hoashi Masame; the bomber force
reversed course and approached them from the south, sighting them at about
noon. Lieutenant Commander Nakanishi Niichi, the wing commander, ordered the
attack. The Japanese pilots were astonished that there were no enemy planes to
be seen.
A series of attacks swamped the weak
British anti-aircraft defenses. At 12:30 the Repulse turned over and sank. Forty-eight minutes later, the Prince of Wales followed her tragic
example. Ensign Hoashi broad cast a blow-by-blow account of an unprecedented
battle, ensuring that the Japanese knew for certain they no longer had to
reckon with the British "battle squadron," which had comfortably
outclassed the two old Japanese battleships in the area. The report of the
"landing at Kuantan," fifty miles to the west of the scene, had,
sadly, proved false. Only when the Battle off Kuantan was over did eleven of
the RAAF Buffaloes from Singapore drone over the spot. One of the few messages
from Phillips as his ships shuddered to the blasts of bomb and torpedo had
been: "Send destroyers." Another plea from Force Z asked for tugs.
Nobody requested fighters during the battle, in which 840 British sailors died.
A total of 2,081 survivors were rescued by the British. The Japanese captured
three. One of them, James Mflne (rank unknown, a pom-pom gunner from the Prince of Wales), told Japanese
reporters:
Admiral Sir Thomas Phillips stood on the bridge frorn the
beginning to the end. A destroyer drew near just before his ship sank and
signaled, "Come aboard" But he answered, "No thank you".
Raising his arm in salute from the bridge, be went down with the ship. Captain
beach stayed with Admiral Phillips at salute [sic] and... they disappeared into
the sea as if swallowed by it.
With them went what should have been
America's strongest support in the new theater of war, Britain's strategic
naval presence in the Far East. Also sunk was the strategic role of the
battleship, unequivocally exposed for the first time as fatally vulnerable to
maritime air power, even when maneuvering with great skill and high speed on
the open sea. Admiral Yamamoto, the inveterate gambler who had decided to prove
his point about airpower at sea by using planes rather than battleships against
the British, happily gave his air staff officer, Commander Miwa Yoshitake, a
case of beer to honor a ten-to-one bet. The aide had wagered that his fellow
pilots would get both ships; his chief bet that only one would be sunk. Yet,
just eleven days later, HIJMS Yamato,
new and gleaming, joined the Combined Fleet as its flagship: seventy-two
thousand tons all up with nine monstrous guns of 18.1-inch caliber, the biggest
battleship ever built. Even she was not to restore her class of warship to
pride of place at the heart of the fleet. Those days were gone forever, as the
United States Navy was soon to confirm.
On the day after the Battle off
Kuantan a Japanese aircraft piloted by Lieutenant Iki, leader of a
torpedo-bomber squadron, flew over the scene and dropped a wreath. Whether it
was for the two comrades he lost to British gunfire in the action or for a
routed enemy was never made clear.
The first few days of Japan's war of
expansion to the south and east had been, the strategically insignificant
underestimation of Wake aside, a sensational success. Divided forces inflicted
crushing defeats on the two leading navies of the world, opening the way to the
spectacular territorial conquests described in chapter 3. But we should now
forsake the field of battle to consider the political, economic, diplomatic,
and social developments which led Japan to go to war and made America its enemy
number one in the Pacific Campaign.