The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History) (34 page)

A few of the bombers had been equipped with ship-killing torpedoes, but the Army pilots, inexperienced with such weapons, released them, too, from high altitude, all but ensuring that they would break apart upon striking the water. (One Army pilot claimed that he landed his torpedo square on the deck of a carrier, though that proved false.) Some pilots failed to locate the enemy at all and returned to base still carrying their heavy torpedoes. To avoid landing with such volatile cargo, they jettisoned them on the rocks offshore. Unaware that the torpedo warheads became armed only after the torpedo ran for a prescribed distance in the water, they reported them as “duds” because they didn’t explode. Theobald was willing to forgive their ignorance of torpedo ordnance but regretted the loss of the torpedoes themselves, since they were scarce and expensive. By the end of the day, the Navy had lost six PBY Catalinas; the Army had lost two bombers and two P-40 pursuit planes. The Japanese lost four scout planes—shot down by Army P-40s operating from the field on Umnak—yet suffered no damage to their strike force. Having conducted the required attack on Dutch Harbor, Kakuta turned west to cover the landings on Attu and Kiska. The ever-present fog delayed those landings, and he decided to send a second strike against Dutch Harbor on June 4. This time his planes destroyed several oil tanks and a few more buildings, though they again failed to knock out the base.
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Theobald was so disgusted with the performance of the Army bombers that he decided to return personally to Kodiak in his flagship to talk again with Butler. He arrived there on the morning of June 5 and immediately went to see a somewhat chagrinned Butler, who was aware of how little his bombers had accomplished. Theobald formally requested that Butler allow the pilots to strike without waiting for permission and suggested that they make concentrated and coordinated attacks rather than isolated high-altitude bombings. He left that same afternoon, believing, or at least hoping, that the problems had been resolved. Nonetheless, Butler’s planes never did manage to strike the Japanese fleet. Indeed, so feeble was the American attack on Kakuta’s carrier force that the Japanese commander may have been unaware that he had been under attack at all. As one senior naval officer reported to King regarding the Army bombers: “Either they were too slow in taking off, or the weather was too bad, or the distance was too great, or they couldn’t find the enemy.” In the conditions that prevailed off the Aleutian archipelago, some of this was not altogether surprising. Still, the Navy was inclined to attribute it, in part at least, to Army timidity.
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Kakuta, too, was disappointed with the effect of his air attacks on Dutch Harbor. Far more distressing, however, was the radio message he received the afternoon of June 5 from Yamamoto. For the commander in chief to break radio silence at all was astonishing enough; the message he sent was even more so. Hosogaya and Kakuta were to break off their attacks in the Aleutians, cancel the landings, send the transports back to Japan, and close in on the Kidō Butai near Midway. Four hours later, Yamamoto reversed himself and cancelled those orders, telling his northern force commanders to complete their mission after all. But clearly, something had gone very wrong with the Kidō Butai.
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In fact, nearly everything had gone wrong, starting with the fact that the Japanese had failed to determine whether the American carriers they hoped to lure out to their destruction were even present in Pearl Harbor. They did have a plan to find out. Nearly three months earlier, well before the fateful conference in Tokyo at which Nagano and Fukudome had capitulated to Yamamoto’s blackmail and approved the Midway plan, the Japanese had conducted a long-range reconnaissance of Pearl Harbor using two giant Kawanishi flying boats. These remarkable four-engine seaplanes, called “Emilys” by the Allies, were 92 feet long (30 feet longer than the American Catalinas) and had an astonishing range of over 4,500 miles, which meant that, theoretically at least, they could fly from the Marshall Islands to Pearl Harbor and back without stopping. Such a flight would leave no margin for error, however, and so Commander Miyo (who a month later would strenuously oppose Yamamoto’s Midway plan) suggested that their range could be extended even further by refueling them at sea from submarines. This notion hinted at using them to bomb American cities along the continental West Coast. More immediately, it provoked discussions about a second attack on Pearl Harbor, a scheme that was code-named Operation K.
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Americans were very much aware of the possibility of long-range air strikes by seaplanes refueled at sea. Three months before Pearl Harbor, Hypo analyst Jasper Holmes, writing under the pen name “Alec Hudson,” had published a story in the
Saturday Evening Post
about American seaplanes refueled by submarines striking enemy bases three thousand miles away. In Holmes’s fictional tale, “twelve big bombers” attacked an enemy base “with machinelike precision,” wrecking an invasion convoy. Edwin Layton later speculated that Holmes’s story might have given the Japanese the idea for Operation K, but in fact the Japanese had begun experimenting with a seaplane-submarine partnership as early as 1939. After the war began, the Japanese planned to conduct a whole series of seaplane raids against Pearl Harbor—to keep track of the comings and goings of American warships, as well as to keep the Americans on edge and off balance by bombing them periodically. In the end, however, this dual objective undermined Japanese ambitions, for it focused American attention on the program and therefore compromised it.
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The first (and, as it turned out, only) seaplane attack on Pearl Harbor occurred in the first week of March 1942, before Yamamoto even submitted his Midway plan to the Naval General Staff. Two Kawanishis, each of them armed with four 500-pound bombs, took off from Wotje Island in the Marshalls on March 2 and in thirteen and a half hours flew 1,605 miles to an unoccupied atoll called French Frigate Shoals, halfway between Pearl Harbor and Midway. There they refueled from two prepositioned submarines, then flew on to Oahu, another 560 miles to the southeast, arriving just past midnight on the morning of March 4. By then the weather had thickened, and visibility over the American naval base was virtually zero. The pilot of the lead plane, Lieutenant Hashizume Hisao, could see a slight glow through the cloud layer, but not much else. Thinking that he had glimpsed the outline of Ford Island in Pearl Harbor through a gap in the clouds, he dropped his bombs. His consort did the same. Then both planes headed back for the Marshall Islands, another two thousand miles and fifteen nonstop hours away.

The long range of the big four-engine Kawanishi H8K Type 2 seaplanes, called “Emilys” by the Allies, encouraged Japanese planners to consider long-range raids against American bases. (U.S. Naval Institute)

For all the effort and expended fuel, the raid did no damage whatever. Hashizume’s four bombs fell on the forested slopes of Mount Tantalus behind Honolulu, and the four from the other plane fell into the water near the entrance to Pearl Harbor. Moreover, the heavy cloud cover meant that Hashizume could not report with much certainty about what ships were or were not in the harbor, though he claimed to have seen at least one carrier.
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The most important consequence of this raid was that it drew Nimitz’s attention to the threat. Nimitz asked Layton how the Japanese had managed to drop four bombs on Oahu (the four that fell into the harbor had disappeared altogether, and no one was even aware of them until after the war). Layton was fairly sure that they had done it with seaplanes refueled from submarines, and he told Nimitz about Jasper Holmes’s story in the
Saturday Evening Post
. Layton also speculated that the Japanese had used French Frigate Shoals to refuel. As a result, Nimitz stationed an American seaplane at French Frigate Shoals, sending the USS
Ballard
, a destroyer recently converted to a seaplane tender, there in late March.
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For a variety of reasons, the Japanese did not continue their planned series of raids on Hawaii, but when Yamamoto sought reassurance that the American carriers were still in Pearl Harbor on the eve of the Battle of Midway, his staff suggested a reprise of Operation K. Again Hypo was able to alert Nimitz to the Japanese plan. On May 10, Layton informed Nimitz about an intercepted message that referred to the “K campaign” involving both aircraft and submarines, and three days later he reported that “the K campaign [was] underway.”
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The Japanese committed six submarines to the project: two filled with aviation fuel, two as radio beacons, one as a plane guard, and one as a command boat. The first of them, the I-123 commanded by Lieutenant Commander Ueno Toshitake, arrived at French Frigate Shoals on May 26. When Ueno approached the atoll and peered into the lagoon through his periscope, he saw a U.S. Navy warship anchored there. When the two fuel-laden submarines showed up the next day, the American warship was still there. In fact, another converted seaplane tender, the
Thornton
, had joined her. The submarines were in no position to challenge them—the Type KRS submarine had been designed as a minelayer and did not have torpedoes or torpedo tubes. A surface attack would be suicidal, since each of the American surface ships boasted four 4-inch guns. Besides, the whole point of Operation K was stealth. The Japanese could only hope that the Americans would simply go away. Ueno radioed the circumstances back to his superior in the Marshalls and received orders to wait one more day. On May 31, several Catalina PBYs landed in the lagoon to join the tenders. Informed of this, Vice Admiral Tsukahara Nishizo cancelled Operation K. There would be no reconnaissance of Pearl Harbor before the Battle of Midway; the Japanese would simply have to trust that the American carriers were still there. Of course, the day before that, on May 30, the
Yorktown
had left Pearl Harbor to join Task Force 16 at Point Luck.
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