Max Hastings Two-Book Collection: All Hell Let Loose and Catastrophe. Max Hastings

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ helped him on the raft…It was a very hard night because most of the fellows were wounded badly, and they were in agony. You couldn’t recognize each other unless you knew a man very well before the ship went down.’ After three days, their party had shrunk from 140 men to fifty; on the ninth day after Juneau’s loss, the ship’s ten remaining survivors were picked up by a destroyer and a Catalina flying boat. Sometimes, vessels vanished with the loss of every man aboard, as was almost always the case with submarines.

      The Japanese began the war at sea with a corps of highly experienced seamen and aviators armed with the Long Lance torpedo, most effective weapon of its kind in the world. Their radar sets were poor, and many ships lacked them altogether. They lagged woefully in intelligence-gathering, but excelled at night operations, and in early gunnery duels often shot straighter than Americans. Their superb Zero fighters increased combat endurance by forgoing cockpit armour and self-sealing fuel tanks. The superiority of Japanese naval air in 1942 makes all the more astonishing the outcome of the next phase of the war in the Pacific.

      Admiral Yamamoto strove with all the urgency that characterised his strategic vision to force a big engagement. Less than a month after the bungled Coral Sea action, he launched his strike against Midway atoll, committing 145 warships to an ambitious, complex operation intended to split US forces. A Japanese fleet would advance north against the Aleutians, while the main thrust was made at Midway. Nagumo’s four fleet carriers – Zuikaku and Shokaku were left behind after their Coral Sea mauling – would approach the island from the north-west, with Yamamoto’s fast battleships three hundred miles behind; a flotilla of transports, carrying 5,000 troops to execute the landing, would close from the south-west.

      Yamamoto may have been a clever man and a sympathetic personality, but the epic clumsiness of the Midway plan emphasised his shortcomings. It required him to divide his strength; worse, it reflected characteristic Japanese hubris, by discounting even the possibility of American foreknowledge. As it was, Admiral Chester Nimitz, the US Navy’s Pacific Commander-in-Chief, knew the enemy was coming. By one of the war’s most brilliant feats of intelligence work, Commander Joseph Rochefort at Pearl Harbor used fragmentary Ultra decrypts to identify Midway as Nagumo’s objective. On 28 May the Japanese switched their naval codebooks, which thereafter defied Rochefort’s cryptographers for weeks. By miraculous luck, however, this happened just too late to frustrate the breakthrough that betrayed Yamamoto’s Midway plan.

      Nimitz made a wonderfully bold call: to stake everything upon the accuracy of Rochefort’s interpretation. Japanese intelligence, always weak, believed that Yorktown had been sunk at the Coral Sea, and that the other two US carriers, Hornet and Enterprise, were far away in the Solomons. But heroic efforts by 1,400 dockyard workers at Pearl Harbor made Yorktown fit for sea, albeit with a makeshift air component. Nimitz was therefore able to deploy two task groups to cover Midway, one led by Fletcher – in overall command – and the other by Raymond Spruance. This would be a carrier action, with Nagumo’s flat-tops its objectives; the slow old American battleships were left in Californian harbours. The navy’s planes were recognised as the critical weapons.

      Almost a century earlier, Herman Melville, America’s greatest novelist of the sea, wrote: ‘There is something in a naval engagement which radically distinguishes it from one on land. The ocean…has neither rivers, woods, banks, towns, nor mountains. In mild weather, it is one hammered plain. Stratagems, like those of disciplined armies, ambuscades – like those of Indians – are impossible. All is clear, open, fluent. The very element which sustains the combatants yields at the stroke of a feather…This simplicity renders a battle between two men-of-war…more akin to the Miltonic contests of archangels than to the comparatively squalid tussles of earth.’

      In 1942, Melville’s lyrical vision of the sea remained recognisable to another century’s sailors, but two factors had transformed his image of naval battle. First, communication and interception made possible ‘ambuscades and stratagems’, such as that which took place at Midway – the location and pre-emption of the enemy before his figurative sails were sighted. Superior American radar conferred another important advantage over the Japanese. Meanwhile, the advent of air power meant that all was no longer ‘clear, open, fluent’: rival fleets became vulnerable to surprise while hundreds of miles apart. But exactitude of knowledge was still lacking. In a vast ocean, it remained hard to pinpoint ships, or even fleets. Rear-Admiral Frank Fletcher said: ‘After a battle is over, people talk a lot about how the decisions were methodically reached, but actually there’s always a hell of a lot of groping around.’ This had been vividly demonstrated by the Coral Sea engagement; despite Commander Rochefort’s magnificent achievement, uncertainty and chance also characterised Midway.

      The engagement was fought only six months after Pearl Harbor, when the US Navy still had fewer carriers than the British, though they carried many more planes. The two American task groups were deployed too far apart to provide mutual support, or effectively to coordinate their air operations. On 3 June, the first skirmish took place: at 1400, nine land-based B-17 Flying Fortresses delivered an ineffectual attack on the Japanese amphibious force. Early that morning also, Japanese aircraft launched a heavy attack on the Aleutians. For tens of thousands of men on both sides, a tense night followed. The garrison of Midway prepared to sell their lives dearly, knowing the fate that had already befallen many other island defenders at Japanese hands. On the US carriers three hundred miles to the north-east, aircrew readied themselves to fight what they knew would be a critical action. One of them, Lt. Dick Crowell, said soberly as they broke up a late-night craps game on Yorktown: ‘The fate of the United States now rests in the hands of 240 pilots.’ Nimitz was satisfied that the scenario was unfolding exactly as he had anticipated. Yamamoto was troubled that the US Pacific fleet remained unlocated, but he remained oblivious that any carriers might close within range of Nagumo.

      Before dawn next morning, ‘a warm, damp, rather hazy day’, American and Japanese pilots breakfasted. Yorktown’s men favoured ‘one-eyed sandwiches’ – an egg fried in a hole in toast. Nagumo’s fliers enjoyed rice, soybean soup, pickles and dried chestnuts before drinking a battle toast in hot sake. At 0430 seventy-two Japanese bombers and thirty-six fighters took off to attack Midway island. At 0545, a patrolling Catalina signalled the incoming attack, then spotted Nagumo’s carriers. Fletcher needed three hours’ steaming to close within attack range. Meanwhile, Midway-based Marine and army torpedo-bombers and bombers took off immediately, as did Wildcat and Buffalo fighters. The latter suffered terribly at the hands of Zeroes: all but three of twenty-seven were either shot down or so badly damaged that they never flew again. But the Japanese attackers, in their turn, lost 30 per cent of their strength.

       The Battle of Midway

      Nagumo’s bomber attack, at 0635, inflicted widespread damage but failed to knock out Midway’s airfields. Its leader signalled the fleet: ‘Second strike necessary.’ Thereafter, nothing went right for the Japanese admiral. His first mistake of the day had been to dispatch only a handful of reconnaissance aircraft to search for American warships; one seaplane, from the heavy cruiser Tone, was delayed taking off – and it was vectored to search the sector where Fletcher’s carriers were steaming. Thus, Nagumo was still ignorant of any naval air threat when he received the signal from his Midway planes. At 0715 he ordered ninety-three ‘Kate’ strike aircraft, ready with torpedoes on his decks, to be struck below and re-armed with high-explosive bombs to renew the attack on the island, meanwhile clearing the way for the returning Midway planes to land on.

      Even as they did so, ships’ buglers sounded another air-raid alarm. Between 0755 and 0820, successive small waves of Midway-based US aircraft attacked Nagumo’s fleet. They had no fighter cover, and were ruthlessly destroyed by AA fire and Zeroes without achieving СКАЧАТЬ