The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History) (16 page)

Faced with the Army’s refusal to support invasions, Nagano and the General Staff fell back on their plans to send the Kidō Butai on a hit-and-run raid against British bases in Ceylon. In late March, Nagumo took five carriers and their escorts westward, south of Sumatra, and into the Indian Ocean. (The
Kaga
, having struck a submerged reef, went to Sasebo, near Nagasaki, for repairs.)

Thanks to a warning from Allied intelligence, the British knew they were coming. In anticipation of the Japanese strike, Admiral Sir James Somerville mobilized his fleet, which included four old and slow battleships, but also two modern carriers—the
Indomitable
and the
Formidable
—and took up a position south of Ceylon, from where he hoped to threaten the flank of the Japanese fleet as it approached. He knew he could not slug it out toe-to-toe with the Kidō Butai; he hoped he might be able to inflict some damage with night torpedo attacks. For three days he waited. When the Kidō Butai didn’t appear, he sent two heavy cruisers—
Dorsetshire
and
Cornwall
—to the naval base at Colombo on Ceylon’s western coast, and withdrew the rest of the fleet to Addu Atoll in the Maldives, six hundred miles southwest of Ceylon, to refuel.

Two days later, on April 5, Easter Sunday morning, 315 planes from the Kidō Butai struck Colombo. The British commander there, Vice Admiral Sir Geoffrey Layton, had sent most of the shipping to the north to get it out of harm’s way, and the two heavy cruisers sent to him by Somerville headed back for Addu Atoll. Layton also ordered out a squadron of Hawker Hurricane fighter planes—older cousins of the more famous Spitfire—plus half a dozen Fairey Swordfish biplanes armed with torpedoes for a counterattack. The Swordfish had performed well during a Royal Navy torpedo attack on the Italian naval base at Taranto the previous November, but they were helpless against the nimble Zeros. The Hurricanes, too, got much the worst of the encounter. In barely half an hour, the British lost twenty-seven aircraft, including fifteen Hurricanes, while the Japanese lost only seven bombers. The rest of the Japanese strike force, piloted by their superbly trained enlisted pilots, flew through the intercept and attacked the naval base, dropping their bombs on ships and yard facilities. They sank three British warships and wrecked the repair shops and the rail yard (something they had neglected to do at Pearl Harbor). The Kidō Butai was never threatened. It was not as decisive a blow as the one against the Americans, but once again the Japanese had demonstrated their air superiority over the West.
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Worse was to come. The two heavy cruisers Layton had sent back toward Addu Atoll were en route there on April 6 when a Japanese search plane found them and radioed their location back to the Kidō Butai. Within twenty minutes, Nagumo had eighty-eight planes in the air winging their way toward the reported coordinates.
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The cruisers never had a chance. Like the
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
the previous December, they had no air cover and were therefore sitting ducks. Gun crews on the cruisers threw up all the antiaircraft fire they could muster, and the ships twisted and turned in the hope of confusing the dive-bombers, but with so many planes attacking—and from different directions at that—it was hopeless. The
Dorsetshire
went down first. Hit by ten bombs and concussed by several near misses, she sank in minutes. The
Cornwall
, hit by nine bombs, followed her a few minutes later. Once again, aircraft had proved their dominance over surface warships.
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The Kidō Butai was not finished. Three days later, on April 9, the Japanese struck again, this time at the British naval base at Trincomalee on Ceylon’s east coast. Again, the British put up all the planes they had—twenty-three altogether, including seventeen Hurricane fighters—but they were brushed aside or sent spinning toward the sea in flames by the Zeros. The British also sent nine land-based Blenheim bombers to attack the Japanese carriers. Five were shot down over the target by the patrolling Zeros; the others limped back with serious damage. None scored a hit.

As he had at Colombo, Layton sent most of his ships to sea to get them out of the way. The small aircraft carrier
Hermes
, with an escort of one destroyer, steamed southward along the coast. The Japanese found her nonetheless, and Nagumo sent ninety planes to the attack. The Val dive-bombers blanketed her with bombs, and the
Hermes
virtually disappeared under a rainstorm of hits and near misses. Within ten minutes, she and her escorting destroyer were dead in the water and sinking. After that, Somerville decided to send part of his force to Kenya on the east coast of Africa and took the rest, including the two carriers, north to Bombay, effectively surrendering the eastern Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal to the Japanese. “I am convinced,” he wrote, “that it is not good policy to take excessive chances with the Eastern Fleet for the sake of Ceylon.” Having secured Japan’s southern flank, Nagumo turned the Kidō Butai back toward the Pacific.
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Even as the big carriers and their escorts steamed through the Straits of Malacca back into the South China Sea, the Japanese high command feuded over their next assignment. One option was to complete the isolation of Australia by seizing the islands of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Samoa—exactly what Ernie King and Franklin Roosevelt feared they would do. Even Japanese Army leaders supported these limited moves because they required fewer troops than the proposed alternatives.

Another claimant on the Kidō Butai was Vice Admiral Inoue Shigeyoshi, commander of the South Seas Force. Inoue until recently had been head of the Naval Aviation Division, and he was a ferocious advocate of air power, especially land-based air. For most of his career, he had insisted that airplanes had made much of the Navy obsolete. “The days of the battleship are gone,” he had declared in 1937. “It has been replaced by the aircraft.” Inoue even argued that the effectiveness of long-range land-based airplanes made carriers obsolete. If that were not sufficiently heretical, he had declared in January of 1941 that it was “impossible … for Japan to defeat America,” and that the United States could “wipe out Japanese forces.” After that bit of apostasy, he was dispatched to the South Seas command, with his headquarters on the isolated island of Truk in the Carolines. In part, his reassignment was an aspect of the reshuffling of commands in anticipation of war, but in addition, like Yamamoto, he was banished to sea duty for his unwelcome ideas and his unwillingness to keep quiet about them.
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It was Inoue’s Fourth Fleet, with support from the Kidō Butai, that had seized Rabaul back in January. He had been shocked on February 20 when only two of the seventeen bombers he had sent out against Wilson Brown’s
Lexington
task force had returned. After all, the ability of land-based aircraft to defend the perimeter of the empire was at the heart of his strategic vision and the foundation of Japan’s entire defensive strategy. Inoue’s shock turned to alarm after the Allied raid on Lae and Salamaua left him without enough shipping to continue the campaign. He notified both the Naval General Staff (Nagano) and Combined Fleet (Yamamoto) that before he advanced any further, he would need carrier support. He requested two carriers, but, given that the Kidō Butai was still in the Indian Ocean when he submitted this request, he declared that he would settle for the damaged
Kaga
, then undergoing repairs in Sasebo.
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Another demand on the Kidō Butai soon arose in connection with a plan to occupy at least some of the Aleutians, the long chain of frozen rocky islands that trailed out from Alaska across much of the North Pacific. The westernmost of those islands was within theoretical bombing range of the northernmost of Japan’s home islands; the occupation of at least some of them would serve as an early-warning system in Japan’s defensive perimeter and also prevent the Americans from using them to stage air raids against the homeland. Thus by the end of March, even before the Kidō Butai had returned from the Indian Ocean, Japan’s naval leaders were considering two separate initiatives that would require its participation: one to break communications between Hawaii and Australia by seizing Port Moresby, the Australian base on the south coast of New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands, followed by an attack on Fiji and Samoa; and another to extend the defensive perimeter of the empire and protect Japan’s northern flank by seizing the westernmost of the Aleutian Islands.
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Complicated as this was, it would soon get much more so, for none of this took Yamamoto into account. The apparent success of his calculated gamble at Pearl Harbor and the string of naval victories that followed had added greatly to his prestige and had given him unprecedented informal authority in crafting Japanese strategy for the “Second Operational Phase.” Once the Kidō Butai returned from the Indian Ocean, Yamamoto knew exactly what he wanted to do with it, and it did not involve Australia, New Guinea, or the Aleutians. He wanted to finish the job that Nagumo had left uncompleted at Pearl Harbor.

Even before the Americans began their series of carrier-based raids on Japanese bases in the Marshall Islands and elsewhere, Yamamoto had concluded that it was essential to eliminate the danger of such raids by finding and sinking the American flattops. Though the Japanese public had celebrated Pearl Harbor as a great victory, Yamamoto himself, as noted above, had been hugely disappointed that Nagumo had not remained in the area long enough to wreck the base or to find and sink the American carriers. Nagumo had seen the American battle fleet as his most important target, and once that had been dispensed with he had broken off the raid. At the time, the young and aggressive commander of the Second Carrier Division, Rear Admiral Yamaguchi Tamon, blinkered Nagumo a signal that he had “completed preparations” for another attack, a not-so-subtle hint that there was more work to be done. But Nagumo was immune to such suggestions. Once he had recovered his airplanes, he turned the Kidō Butai around and headed for home. Had he launched a third strike, he might have destroyed the repair facilities on Oahu and especially the oil tank farm, which would have crippled the Americans far more than the loss of their battle fleet.
¹⁶

Since then, the consequences of having missed the carriers had been vividly demonstrated by American raids on the Marshalls, Wake, Lae/Salamaua, and elsewhere. In addition, Yamamoto was haunted by the thought that so long as the American carriers roamed the Pacific, there was always a chance, however remote, that they might find a way to launch a raid against the Japanese homeland. His chief of staff confided to his diary that protecting Tokyo from air raids was “the most important thing to be borne in mind.” Halsey’s raid on Marcus Island, only 999 nautical miles from Tokyo, was a reminder that such a catastrophic event was not impossible. As early as January of 1941, Yamamoto had expressed the fear that “we cannot rule out the possibility that the enemy would dare to launch an attack upon our homeland to burn our capital city and other cities.” He feared that the Americans might strike while the Kidō Butai was still in the Indian Ocean, and as a precaution he ordered the establishment of a picket line of small vessels seven hundred miles off the Japanese coast, well beyond the maximum range of American carrier bombers. However, there was always a chance that one or more American carriers might sneak past those pickets and find a way to launch. Since the protection of the homeland—and especially protecting the life and safety of the emperor—was the Navy’s first mission, such a possibility was unacceptable.
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