TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/120291/1202995.000

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                                                                                PEARL HARBOR, Page 48

PART 2

Down but Not Out


Against all odds, as Japan marched to one overwhelming triumph
after another, the U.S. scored a memorable victory

By OTTO FRIEDRICH -- Research by Anne Hopkins


    The ringing of the telephone awakened Douglas MacArthur
just after 3:30 a.m. in his air-conditioned six-room penthouse
atop the Manila Hotel. Japanese bombers had just ravaged Pearl
Harbor, the caller said. "Pearl Harbor!" echoed MacArthur. "It
should be our strongest point!"

    The 61-year-old "Field Marshal" asked his wife Jean to
bring him his Bible, and he read in it, as he did every morning,
for about 10 minutes. It brought him little comfort. At this
moment of crisis, facing a threat that imperiled his life, his
command and his whole world, America's greatest living military
hero, the bemedaled veteran of bayonet charges through
no-man's-land in France, seemed paralyzed. When he did go to his
nearby headquarters, he issued no orders to his forces. Officers
seeking instructions found themselves barred from his presence.

    When nearly 200 Japanese bombers finally arrived over
Manila, fully 10 hours after the raid on Pearl Harbor, the
pilots were amazed to find most of MacArthur's fleet of
warplanes, the largest in the South Pacific, lined up like
targets on the runways. They proceeded to destroy everything
they saw.

    "Instead of encountering a swarm of enemy fighters,"
recalled Saburo Sakai, pilot of a Zero fighter, "we looked down
and saw some 60 enemy bombers and fighters neatly parked. They
squatted there like sitting ducks. Our accuracy was phenomenal.
The entire air base seemed to be rising into the air with the
explosions. Great fires erupted, and smoke boiled upward."

    Afterward Lieut. Colonel Eugene Eubank telephoned
MacArthur's headquarters and said, "I want to report that you
no longer have to worry about your Bomber Command. We don't have
one. The Japanese have just destroyed Clark Field."

    If Pearl Harbor was a disaster for the U.S., the Japanese
attack on the Philippines that same day (Dec. 8 on the far side
of the international date line) was in many ways worse.
American casualties were much lower -- some 80 killed in the
Philippines, vs. 2,433 in Hawaii -- but the strategic losses
were higher. The raids on Clark and Iba fields outside Manila
wrecked 18 out of MacArthur's fledgling force of 35 B-17
bombers, 56 of his 72 P-40 fighters and 25 other planes. In
returning later to pound the airfields again, the Japanese also
smashed the Cavite naval base. And while Pearl Harbor was a
hit-and-run raid, the Japanese would seize and hold the
Philippines for the next three years.

    Pearl Harbor represented just one small part of the
Japanese master plan for the conquest of Southeast Asia. Tokyo
launched attacks in that same December week not only against
U.S. outposts in the Philippines, Wake Island and Guam but also
against the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and the British
colonies of Malaya, Burma and Hong Kong. The methodical Japanese
had printed the currencies for their occupation of all these
lands as early as the spring of 1941. And they conquered this
vast sweep of territory so easily that the immediate worry was
whether they would strike next at ill-defended Australia,
ill-defended India or ill-defended Hawaii. Japan now ruled
nearly one-seventh of the world, and one of its generals warned
against a new kind of overconfidence: "victory disease."

    The first actual loss of U.S. territory was a small but
symbolic one. Some 400 Japanese naval troops swarmed onto Guam
at dawn on Dec. 10 and soon swept into the capital of Agana.
After half an hour of gunfire, Guam's Governor, U.S. Navy
Captain George McMillin, learned that an additional 5,000
Japanese were landing. He sounded three blasts on an auto horn
to signal surrender. McMillin attempted negotiations in sign
language, but he and his men finally had to strip to their
undershorts and stand in embarrassed silence while the Rising
Sun replaced the Stars and Stripes atop Guam's Government House.

    More heroic but no less doomed was Wake Island, a tiny
atoll between Hawaii and Guam. A Japanese fleet closed in to
start landing troops at dawn on Dec. 11. U.S. Marines under
Major James Devereux scored four direct hits on the flagship
Yubari and sank two destroyers. The force withdrew -- the first
small U.S. victory in World War II and the only time in the war
that defenders beat back an invasion fleet. In reporting this
small triumph to Pearl Harbor, according to a story that may be
apocryphal, one of Devereux's men added a bit of bravado that
became a popular propaganda slogan: "Send us more Japs."

    The Japanese took the Wake garrison at its word.
Reinforced by two carriers homeward bound from Pearl Harbor,
they struck again before dawn on Dec. 23. Devereux's Marines
fought hand to hand on the beaches for more than five hours. The
Stars and Stripes was shot down, then hoisted again on a water
tower, but at about 8 a.m. a white bedsheet was raised next to
it. Devereux's defenders had killed about 800 Japanese at a
loss of 120; of the 400 Marine survivors, a couple were
beheaded and the rest shipped into captivity.

    The most important of the first Japanese assaults was the
invasion of Malaya. The target there was not only the
peninsula's wealth of tin and rubber but also the strategic
citadel of Singapore. Built in the 1920s and '30s among the
mangrove swamps of Johore Strait, at the then enormous cost of
$270 million, Singapore stood as the theoretically impregnable
naval headquarters of the whole British empire east of Suez. One
symbol of the island's true strength, however, was its array of
15-in. guns that could not turn and fire into the supposedly
impenetrable jungle behind them. Another was the 2,000 tennis
courts built for the British, along with plenty of polo grounds
and cricket pitches. There were also regiments of native
servants to polish the boots and serve the pink gin.

    The Japanese officer assigned to organize the overthrow of
all this Blimpism was Colonel Masanobu Tsuji. A hard-eyed
veteran of the Kwantung Army who made an intense study of jungle
warfare, he tested what he had learned by training his troops
in fierce heat, with little food or water. When they were
crammed onto transport vessels for the stormy southward voyage,
they carried pamphlets that said their mission was to free "100
million Asians tyrannized by 300,000 whites." To military
headquarters in Tokyo, Tsuji confidently -- and pretty
accurately -- predicted that if the war started on Nov. 3, "we
will be able to capture Manila by the New Year, Singapore by
Feb. 11, Java on Army Commemoration Day [March 10], and
Rangoon on the Emperor's birthday [April 29]."

    With hardly a shot fired, General Tomoyuki Yamashita
unloaded his main invasion force troops in rough waters off
Singora Beach, just north of the Thai border. They had little
trouble marching southward into Malaya. Orders from British
headquarters in Singapore called for defending the border "to
the last man," since "our whole position in the Far East is at
stake," but the only force assigned to do so was an ill-trained,
ill-equipped Indian division. It had neither tanks nor antitank
guns, because the British had declared the jungle
"impenetrable." As Japanese tanks pressed southward, the force
retreated in disarray, abandoning most of its fuel and
ammunition.

    To take advantage of all the back roads through the rubber
plantations, the Japanese resorted to thousands of bicycles.
When the tires went flat, the invading army simply clanked
forward on bare rims. That sounded laughable in Singapore, but
the Japanese kept advancing. "We now understood," Colonel Tsuji
said scornfully, "the fighting capacity of the enemy."

    Clinging resolutely to the strategies of the past, British
Prime Minister Winston Churchill had recently sent to Singapore
one of Britain's newest and biggest battleships, the 35,000-ton
H.M.S. Prince of Wales, with the battle cruiser Repulse and the
new carrier Indomitable. But the Indomitable ran aground off
Jamaica, so when Admiral Sir Tom Phillips proudly set forth from
Singapore to break up the Japanese invasion to the north, he
scoffed at the critical need for air support, following his
antiquated conviction that "bombers were no match for
battleships."

    On the morning of Dec. 10, more than 80 Japanese bombers
caught the Prince of Wales on a glassy sea under a cloudless
sky, vulnerable as a jeweled dowager surrounded by more than 80
switchblades. The warships zigzagged wildly as they unleashed
a barrage of antiaircraft fire, but it was a hopeless mismatch.
Two torpedoes tore apart the Prince of Wales' stern, disabling
its rudder, filling its engine room with steam. The Repulse
dodged nearly 20 torpedoes before four more ripped her open.

    After Captain William Tennant gave the order to abandon
the Repulse, his officers had to wrestle him into joining the
evacuation. Captain John Leach of the Prince of Wales refused
to be saved. "Goodbye, thank you, good luck, God bless you," he
kept saying as he bade his crew farewell. When the two ships
capsized and sank, within three hours after the attack began,
the 840 victims included both Leach and Admiral Phillips (some
2,000 were rescued). The loss of the warships, wrote Britain's
Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Alan Brooke, "means
that from Africa eastwards to America, through the Indian Ocean
and the Pacific, we have lost control of the sea."

    On the mainland, Yamashita's bicycle-riding invaders
needed only 70 days to pedal and hack their way 600 miles down
the Malayan peninsula. All through the night of Jan. 31,
British troops marched out of Malaya and across the
1,100-ft.-long causeway to the island fortress of Singapore. The
last 90 to leave were Argyll Scots marching to their bagpipers
skirling Hielan' [Highland] Laddie. The British then blew a
70-ft. gap in the causeway -- but the inrushing waters proved
to be only 4 ft. deep at low tide.

    The British defenders of Hong Kong had already
surrendered, after a spirited two-week defense that cost them
1,200 dead. But London strategists figured Singapore could
endure a siege of six months with its 85,000 soldiers and those
15-in. guns that couldn't turn toward land. Churchill's
instructions were explicit: "Singapore must be . . . defended
to the death. No surrender can be contemplated." The Allied
supreme commander in the southwest Pacific, General Sir
Archibald Wavell, was even more explicit: "There must be no
thought of sparing troops or the civil population . . . Senior
officers must lead their troops and if necessary die with them
. . . I look to you and your men to fight to the end to prove
that the fighting spirit that won our Empire still exists to
enable us to defend it."

    Shortly before midnight of Feb. 8, under a heavy
bombardment, 13,000 Japanese surged across the strait on a fleet
of 300 collapsible plywood boats and landing craft. A battalion
of 2,500 Australians fought them off all night, but by dawn the
Japanese held their beachhead, and then the tanks started
across. Though the Japanese were actually outnumbered about 2
to 1 overall, the martial spirit invoked in London hardly
existed in Singapore -- at least not on the British side. At a
point when the Japanese had conquered half the island, British
staff officers could still be seen sipping drinks at the
Raffles, and civilians stood in line to see Katharine Hepburn
in The Philadelphia Story.

    On the morning of Feb. 15, nearly out of ammunition, fuel
and water, General Arthur Percival hoisted a white flag. The
British commander tried to negotiate terms, but Yamashita, low
on ammunition himself and worried that his own weakness might
be discovered, insisted on an immediate unconditional surrender.
"There is no need for all this talk!" he shouted at the
exhausted Percival. "We want to hear `Yes' or `No' from you!
Surrender or fight!"

    "Yes, I agree," Percival muttered as he surrendered 85,000
British, Indian and Australian troops into captivity, one of the
worst defeats in British history and virtually a death sentence
for the enfeebled empire. Yamashita promised that his 30,000
victors would not mistreat their prisoners and civilians, but
butchery and rape were becoming an all too common consequence
of Japanese conquests. In Singapore, which the Japanese renamed
Shonan (Bright South), an estimated 5,000 Chinese were put to
death. Hong Kong and Manila fared no better.

    In the Philippines, Douglas MacArthur's strange paralysis
lasted only that first day -- and remains a mystery still. One
theory is that MacArthur misunderstood Washington's orders
against risking any military provocation of Japan. Another is
that he and Philippines President Manuel Quezon thought the
Philippines might somehow remain neutral in the erupting Pacific
war. Still another theory is that MacArthur temporarily suffered
the kind of breakdown that sometimes afflicts commanders in
crisis -- as happened to Stalin when the Germans invaded in June
1941.

    MacArthur's first moves were bluffs. His headquarters
announced on Dec. 11 that the Filipino 21st Division had beaten
off a major Japanese invasion in Lingayen Gulf (JAPANESE FORCES
WIPED OUT IN WESTERN LUZON, said a New York Times banner
headline). When LIFE's Carl Mydans traveled 120 miles north of
Manila to photograph the battlefield, he found only a few
Filipino soldiers idling on the peaceful beach. "There's no
battle there," he reported to MacArthur's press chief in Manila.
The officer pointed to his communique and retorted, "It says so
here."

    When Japanese transports actually reached Lingayen Gulf at
2 a.m. on Dec. 22, they met almost no resistance. Despite heavy
seas, General Masharu Homma got a force of more than 40,000 men
ashore and began marching south toward the capital. MacArthur,
who had convinced Washington that his still largely imaginary
200,000-man Filipino army could defend the archipelago on its
myriad beaches, now appealed desperately for air support from
the U.S. Navy. CAN I EXPECT ANYTHING ALONG THAT LINE? he cabled
Chief of Staff George Marshall. Learning that he could not, he
unhappily issued the order, "WPO-3 is in effect."

    War Plan Orange-3, granting that the Philippines'
21,000-mile coastline was indefensible, called for conceding the
beaches and pulling back into defenses that, as in Singapore,
theoretically could be held for six months. MacArthur declared
Manila an open city the day after Christmas, moving his
headquarters -- with his wife, his three-year-old son Arthur and
the child's Chinese nurse -- to the fortress island of
Corregidor in Manila Harbor.

    Then he began moving his Luzon troops, 65,000 Filipinos
and 15,000 Americans, into the mountainous Bataan peninsula,
which juts out to the southwest of Manila. Admirers have praised
MacArthur's skill in carrying out this tactical retreat. "A
masterpiece," said his World War I commander, General John
Pershing, "one of the greatest moves in all military history."
Even the Japanese general staff called it a "great strategic
move." But it was a great move only if reinforcements really
were on the way. If not, MacArthur was simply marching his men
into a death trap.

    WE ARE DOING OUR UTMOST . . . TO RUSH AIR SUPPORT TO YOU,
cabled Marshall, who specified that 140 planes had been shipped
to Manila. But he never told MacArthur when they were later
diverted to Australia. To Quezon and his people, Roosevelt
publicly gave "my solemn pledge that their freedom will be
retained. The entire resources . . . of the United States stand
behind that pledge." Added Secretary of War Henry Stimson: "Your
gallant defense is thrilling the American people. As soon as our
power is organized, we shall come in force and drive the invader
from your soil." So MacArthur told his trapped men, "Help is
definitely on the way. We must hold out until it comes."

    The promises from Washington were never kept. Roosevelt
and Stimson had already told Churchill in private that the
Philippines couldn't be saved. The defenders of Bataan had no
real purpose except to delay the Japanese victory. Wrote Stimson
in his diary: "There are times when men have to die."

    The 80,000 troops and 26,000 civilians on besieged Bataan
had less than a month's rations of rice, flour and canned meat.
Medicine was in short supply. Malaria, dysentery and beriberi
flourished. As the weeks dragged on, a chant grew popular:



    We're the battling bastards of Bataan,

    No mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam,

    No aunts, no uncles, no cousins, no nieces,

    No rifles, no planes or artillery pieces,

    And nobody gives a damn.



    When it dawned on MacArthur that he too was being
abandoned, he spoke grandly of his destiny. "They will never
take me alive," he said as he slipped a loaded pistol into his
pocket. But MacArthur was just a pawn on an enormous political
chessboard. Australia, threatened by the Japanese advances,
demanded the return of three divisions sent to help Britain
fight Germany. But the Australians said they would not insist
if the U.S. promised troops and appointed an American supreme
commander for the whole South Pacific. Churchill, unwilling to
withdraw the Australians then battling Erwin Rommel's Afrika
Korps in Libya, suggested to Roosevelt that a general of
MacArthur's eminence might prove valuable. In his sweltering
cave on Corregidor, MacArthur received by radio on Feb. 23 a
presidential order to get to Australia to "assume command of all
United States troops."

    MacArthur knew that his men on Bataan would never forgive
him -- the name "Dugout Doug" haunted him ever after. He talked
of resigning his commission and transferring to Bataan as "a
simple volunteer," even dictating a draft of that resignation.
But he never sent it. Orders were orders.

    MacArthur decided to leave by submarine at sundown on
March 11. No sub could get through to Corregidor, so he used a
flotilla of four dilapidated PT boats. With him he took his wife
and son and the Chinese nurse and a dozen staff officers. To
Major General Jonathan Wainwright, he made a promise: "I'm
leaving over my repeated protests. If I get through to
Australia, you know I'll come back as soon as I can with as much
as I can. In the meantime you've got to hold."

    "You'll get through," said Wainwright.

    ". . . and back," said MacArthur.

    After a rough and perilous trip of nearly 600 miles in 35
hours, MacArthur landed at dawn near a Mindanao pineapple
plantation, where a B-17 bomber picked him up and flew him to
Australia. On landing, he asked the first American officer he
saw about the U.S. reinforcements he thought were awaiting his
arrival. "So far as I know, sir," said the officer, "there are
very few troops here." Said MacArthur to an aide: "Surely he is
wrong."

    He was, of course, not wrong. The general's party was
chuffing southward on a single-track railroad from Alice Springs
to Adelaide when MacArthur got the official word. In all of
Australia, there were fewer than 32,000 Allied troops, including
many noncombatants -- far fewer than MacArthur had left behind
on Bataan. "God have mercy on us," he said. He later called this
his "greatest shock and surprise of the whole war."

    MacArthur expected that there would be reporters awaiting
his arrival in Adelaide, so he prepared a few words: "I came
through, and I shall return." That made headlines, but
Washington asked MacArthur to amend his prophecy to "We shall
return." He ignored the request. And unlikely as it seemed in
the far reaches of Australia, he would arise from the ignominy
of flight and return in triumph to make his prophecy come true.

    It would be too late, though, for the starving soldiers
trapped on Bataan. On April 3, Good Friday, 50,000 Japanese
launched a fierce assault against the Americans entrenched at
the foot of Mount Samat, a 1,900-ft. peak dominating the entry
to the Bataan peninsula. On Easter morning they planted their
flag atop it.

    When Wainwright ordered a new attack, his field commander,
Major General Edward King, sent an officer from Bataan to
Corregidor to explain the hopeless situation. "You will go back
and tell General King he will not surrender," said Wainwright.
"Tell him he will attack. Those are my orders."

    "You know what the outcome will be," said King's envoy.

    "I do," said Wainwright.

    By then Americans were retreating in disorder, and King
decided that the lives of his men required a surrender. "Tell
him not to do it!" Wainwright cried on learning of the decision,
the biggest defeat in U.S. military history. "They can't do it!
They can't do it!"

    "Will our troops be well treated?" King asked the Japanese
commander as he surrendered on April 9. "We are not barbarians,"
said the victor.

    The Japanese had planned on taking 25,000 prisoners to the
nearest camp. But they numbered more than 75,000, many sick and
starving. When they lagged on the 65-mile march in the broiling
sun, Japanese guards beat them with whips and rifle butts. Only
60,000 survived the three-day horror known to history as the
Bataan Death March.

    Invulnerable Corregidor, laced with huge concrete-walled
tunnels and bristling with long-range artillery, soon proved
vulnerable to concentrated bombardment. Japanese gunners blasted
the tiny island around the clock (16,000 shells in one day), and
finally 600 invaders got ashore during the night of May 4. U.S.
Marines fought for every inch, but it was hopeless. Wainwright
had already radioed, "Situation here is fast becoming
desperate." In reply came a message from Roosevelt loftily
praising the defenders as "the symbols of our war aims." But
Wainwright finally decided that he had no choice. "With broken
heart and head bowed in sadness but not in shame," he told
Roosevelt, "I report . . . that today I must arrange terms for
the surrender . . . There is a limit of human endurance and that
limit has long since been passed."

    Americans badly needed some kind of victory during those
last days in the Philippines. Roosevelt had asked shortly after
Pearl Harbor whether there was some way of bombing the Japanese
mainland, and the Navy soon dreamed up the idea of adapting
long-range B-25 Mitchell bombers so that they could take off
from a carrier.

    The newly commissioned Hornet sailed from San Francisco
April 2 with 16 twin-engine B-25s and a lieutenant colonel who
could fly anything anywhere: Jimmy Doolittle, star stunt pilot
of the 1930s. Neither Doolittle nor any of his pilots had ever
taken off from a carrier, and gale winds whipped waves across
the flight deck at the takeoff point nearly 700 miles from
Japan. "When [Jimmy's] plane buzzed down the Hornet's deck at
7:25," recalled Admiral William ("Bull") Halsey, commander of
the mission, "there wasn't a man topside who didn't help him get
into the air."

    The raid on April 18 proved such a surprise that Tokyo
schoolchildren waved cheerily at the bombers as they roared
overhead. Aiming for military targets, factories and power
stations, Doolittle's planes dropped bombs on the Japanese
capital and made symbolic strikes on five other cities. Lacking
fuel to return to the Hornet or to reach any safe haven, the
American pilots had to head for Nationalist-held areas of China,
bail out and hope for the best. Most of them made it, but three
were killed in crashes and eight captured.

    Though the damage was not great -- about 50 civilians
killed and 90 buildings wrecked -- the demonstration of
vulnerability infuriated the Japanese. ENEMY DEVILS STRAFE
SCHOOL YARD, cried a headline in the Asahi Shimbun, which
excoriated the "inhuman, insatiable, indiscriminate bombing."
Several of the eight captured airmen were tortured to tell where
they had come from, and three were executed by firing squad.
Worse, the Japanese army tried to punish all Chinese who might
have helped the downed pilots, and the slaughter in Chekiang and
Kiangsu provinces took a toll estimated at more than 200,000.
As often happened in this hate-filled era, each side angrily
denounced the other's actions as atrocities.

    Despite Doolittle's feat, the Japanese victories
throughout the South Pacific could now be halted and reversed
only by the U.S. Navy, and the Navy had been badly wounded. On
top of the losses at Pearl Harbor, it had to abandon its base
at Cavite, outside Manila, and it lost a cruiser and two
destroyers in the Battle of the Java Sea (Feb. 27-March 1,
1942).

    The Navy still had one great secret weapon, though: its
code breakers could read Japanese naval messages. From those,
Pacific Fleet commander Chester Nimitz knew that the Japanese
planned to seize the eastern approaches to Australia by
attacking Port Moresby, on the tail of New Guinea, in the first
week in May. Nimitz stripped bare Pearl Harbor's defenses to
mount an all-out attack on the Japanese invaders as they entered
the Coral Sea.

    It was the first naval battle in history in which the
rival fleets never saw each other. The two carrier forces
maneuvered between 100 and 200 miles apart while their planes
attacked. The result included some absurd errors. Several
Japanese planes tried unsuccessfully to land on the deck of the
Yorktown; several American pilots tried unsuccessfully to bomb
the cruiser Australia. In the first U.S. attack on a major
Japanese warship, though, bombers from the Lexington and the
Yorktown trapped and sank the 12,000-ton light carrier Shoho;
nearly 700 of her 900 crewmen went down with her. Lieut.
Commander Robert Dixon triumphantly radioed, "Dixon to carrier,
scratch one flattop."

    At dawn the next morning, both fleets sent off their
planes again. The Yorktown's bombers started a fuel fire on the
Shokaku, but were chased by fighters. Though the Lexington and
the Yorktown similarly fought off Japanese bombers, a mysterious
explosion in the generator room crippled the 42,000-ton
Lexington. THIS SHIP NEEDS HELP, said the banner run up her
mainmast. In late afternoon, the captain gave the order to
abandon ship.

    Both sides claimed victory in the Battle of the Coral Sea.
The U.S. had lost the Lexington plus a destroyer and a tanker;
the Japanese had lost the carrier Shoho, plus a tanker and a
destroyer, more aircraft (77 vs. 66) and more men (1,074 vs.
543). But in strategic terms, the key fact was that the Japanese
troop transports bound for Port Moresby had to turn back.

    The Japanese empire had reached its outer limits.

    The imperial navy's Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto was still
determined to do what he had failed to do at Pearl Harbor: draw
the U.S. Pacific Fleet into a high-seas confrontation where he
could destroy it. His strategy, which he hoped would win the war
for Japan or at least open the way to California, was to seize
the two tiny islands known as Midway. A lonely outpost 1,100
miles northwest of Pearl Harbor, this was the westernmost U.S.
base now that Guam, Wake and the Philippines were lost. The
U.S. Navy would have to defend Midway, Yamamoto figured, and
then he would attack it with the most powerful fleet ever
assembled: 11 battleships, 8 carriers, 23 cruisers, 65
destroyers -- 190 ships in all, plus more than 200 planes on the
strike-force carriers.

    Yamamoto, who had stayed in Japan during Pearl Harbor,
took personal command of this huge armada. His flagship was the
largest battleship in creation, the 64,000-ton Yamato, whose
18.1-in. guns had a range of more than 25 miles. His carrier
chief was once again Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, the Pearl
Harbor commander who had gone on to wreak havoc on the British
fleet. With virtually no losses, Nagumo's planes had bombed
British bases at Darwin, Australia, and Colombo, Ceylon; sunk
the carrier Hermes and two cruisers; and driven the Royal Navy
all the way across the Indian Ocean.

    Once again, cautious staff admirals in Tokyo opposed Yama
moto's strategy as too risky. Once again, he threatened to
resign if he did not get his way. Once again, the admirals gave
in.

    Against Yamamoto's overwhelming force, Nimitz could send
only a pitiable remnant -- 76 ships in all, no battleships to
Japan's 11, three carriers to Japan's eight (and one was the
Yorktown, barely patched together at Pearl Harbor after its
mauling in the Coral Sea). And his most redoubtable skipper,
Admiral Bull Halsey, whose combative spirit was worth several
warships, suddenly had to repair to the hospital with a skin
disease.

    But Nimitz still had Lieut. Commander Joseph Rochefort's
code-breaking team in Pearl Harbor, which told him that Midway
was Yamamoto's main target, that there would be a secondary
attack against the Aleutians, and that the strike at Midway was
set for June 4. Now the fates that had condemned the U.S. to
blind complacency at Pearl Harbor visited the same punishment
on Japan. Declared Nagumo as he neared his launching point: "The
enemy is not aware of our plans."

    That Japanese blindness enabled the outnumbered Americans
to plan an ambush as decisive as that of the Concord Minutemen
of 1775, when they fired their "shot heard round the world." In
the new style of naval warfare, which admirals around the world
were just beginning to learn, aircraft carriers were supreme.
They could destroy anything but were highly vulnerable, so the
key was to find and attack the enemy's carriers.

    Keeping his enormous "main fleet" in reserve for the
future battle that would never materialize, Yamamoto sent
Nagumo ahead with four of the six carriers from the task force
that had devastated Pearl Harbor. Before dawn on June 4, Nagumo
launched 108 planes, half his force, to pulverize Midway's
defenses. But his scout planes failed to spot two U.S. carriers,
the Enterprise and the Hornet, lying in wait less than 200 miles
to the northeast under the command of Halsey's replacement, Rear
Admiral Raymond Spruance. Taking an immense risk, the normally
prudent Spruance committed virtually all his planes -- 67
Dauntless dive bombers, 29 Devastator torpedo bombers and 20
Wildcat fighters -- to a desperate counterattack.

    By some combination of inspired calculations and pure
luck, Spruance's planes reached Nagumo's fleet just as the
carriers were taking in their returning bombers and reloading
for a second strike at Midway. To exploit that moment of supreme
vulnerability, the Devastator torpedo bombers roared in. Despite
the Americans' advantage of surprise, they too encountered a
shock: the overwhelming superiority of the Zero fighters
defending the Japanese carriers. As each torpedo bomber lumbered
toward a carrier, it was shot to pieces. Fifteen torpedo bombers
left the Hornet; the only survivor was Ensign George Gay, who
was shot down and wounded in the arm and leg but managed to
float until rescuers found him the next day.

    Eight times the American planes attacked Nagumo's
carriers, and eight times they were beaten off. When the last
torpedo bomber was shot down at about 10:25 a.m., it looked as
though Nagumo had won the Battle of Midway. But the Zeros
embroiled in low-level combat against the torpedo bombers didn't
see what was happening high overhead. At 15,000 ft. above the
carrier Kaga, Lieut. Commander Clarence Wade McClusky, nearly
out of gas from searching for his quarry, nosed his Dauntless
dive bomber into a screaming plunge. Behind him, 25 of his
pilots did the same. At 1,800 ft., McClusky pulled the bomb
release. He later remembered the image of the Kaga's clean,
empty hardwood deck, then the tremendous explosion. Bleeding
from five bullet wounds, McClusky barely got back to the
Enterprise, with less than 5 gal. of gas in his tank.

    Lieut. Richard Best took on the next carrier, which he
didn't realize was the Akagi, Nagumo's flagship. "Don't let this
carrier escape," he shouted over his radio to the four remaining
bombers as he started his dive. His bomb landed next to Nagumo's
bridge, starting a huge fire. At almost that very moment, the
dive bombers received reinforcements from a third carrier, the
patched-up Yorktown. Lieut. Commander Maxwell Leslie led 17 more
bombers from the Yorktown in a dive that smashed and crippled
a third carrier, the Soryu.

    In less than 10 minutes, Nagumo had seen three of his four
carriers transformed into blazing hulks. And he had been
transformed from the commander of all he surveyed into a
desperate survivor who had to clamber out a window to escape
from his burning flagship to a nearby cruiser.

    But Nagumo still had one carrier left, the Hiryu, and one
carrier could still sting, fatally. "Bogeys, 32 miles, closing!"
cried the Yorktown's radar officer. A dozen fighters from the
Yorktown were circling overhead, and more than twice as many
antiaircraft guns were firing, when the Hiryu's dive bombers and
torpedo bombers struck. As the Yorktown's guns demolished one
attacking bomber, its bomb exploded with a huge orange flash
behind the carrier's bridge. Then another two bombs penetrated
deep below decks, and the carrier's whole bow went up in flames.
The Yorktown was doomed (though 2,270 men -- nearly all the crew
-- were rescued).

    No sooner had the Hiryu's torpedo bombers returned to
their ship than they were ordered out again. But few were in
shape to go -- five dive bombers and four torpedo planes -- and
their crews were so exhausted that the commander ordered a break
before the next takeoffs. The rice balls were just being served
when the alarm sounded: "Enemy dive bombers directly overhead."
Swooping down, planes from the Enterprise and the dying Yorktown
started the fires that would destroy the Hiryu.

    Admiral Nagumo discreetly refrained for hours from
reporting the full extent of the disaster to Yamamoto. Only in
late afternoon did he finally tell him that the Hiryu, the last
of his carriers, was burning out of control. With that, Nagumo
decided to withdraw the remnants of his fleet from the
battlefield. Yama moto sank into a chair and sat staring into
space, as stupefied as MacArthur in his penthouse in Manila.

    Finally stirring, Yamamoto sent a message of MacArthurian
unreality: "The enemy fleet, which has practically been
destroyed, is retiring to the east . . . Immediately contact and
destroy the enemy." As a further measure, he also relieved
Nagumo of his command. And imperial headquarters said a great
triumph had been achieved, bringing "supreme power in the
Pacific."

    What the outnumbered Americans had accomplished at the
Coral Sea and Midway was even greater than they at first
realized. Describing "this memorable American victory,"
Churchill wrote, "At one stroke, the dominant position of Japan
in the Pacific was reversed . . . The annals of war at sea
present no more intense, heart-shaking shock than these two
battles, in which the qualities of the United States Navy and
Air Force and of the American race shone forth in splendor."

    Before MacArthur finally received the Japanese surrender
in Tokyo Bay, though, would come three grinding years of
"island hopping," the slow and painful campaign across the South
Pacific from the fetid jungles of New Guinea to the barricaded
caves of Okinawa. The first of these battles, and one of the
worst, occurred at the southern tip of the Solomon Islands,
where the U.S. Marines made their first landing of the war early
in the morning of Aug. 7, 1942. There was no opposition. The
Japanese, who would fight more than six months to hold that
desolate island, called it Gadarukanaru. It entered American
history under the name of Guadalcanal.