Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

by Ian W. Toll

It has been observed that if a sailor had climbed into a time machine in the year 1850, and was randomly transported through time, he would have found himself more at home as a foremast jack in the Spanish Armada, which had sailed against England in 1588, than in one of the big steel battleships of 1900. In those latter fifty years of the nineteenth century, a period brief enough to span one man’s career, the Industrial Revolution had utterly demolished and recreated the hardware and technology of naval warfare.

“I tackled the job much as I presume an immigrant begins a clearing in the wilderness, not troubling greatly which tree he takes first,”

“War, once declared, must be waged offensively, aggressively. The enemy must not be fended off, but smitten down.”

“In a dozen years,” Roosevelt predicted in 1905, “the English, Americans and Germans, who now dread one another as rivals in the trade of the Pacific, will have each to dread the Japanese more than they do any other nation.”

During his first term in office, using the “bully pulpit” of the presidency (a term he coined), President Roosevelt convinced Congress to build ten battleships, four armored cruisers, and seventeen smaller vessels. Naval spending rose nearly 40 percent, surpassing $100 million. It was the largest peacetime naval expansion in American history. By 1906, the United States had more battleships afloat than any other naval power except Britain.

The admirals and captains at the top of the naval hierarchy in those years had begun their careers before the Civil War.

Japan’s two-generation rise from feudal and pre-industrial origins to the status of a major economic and military power was more than remarkable—it was (and remains) unprecedented in the entire course of human history.

That Japan had beaten a European army in the field was surprising. That it had crushed a European navy at sea was astounding. That it had behaved with greater chivalry than Russia was dumbfounding, because it upended the Western premise that the East was a barbarous place populated by barbarous people.

Truthful appraisals of Japan’s limitations were rarely aired in public, and that was another part of the tragic pattern that would lead to the Second World War.

Japan had donated $246,000 in disaster relief for the stricken city, exceeding the combined relief pledges of every other nation in the world. When a prominent Japanese seismologist arrived from Tokyo to lend his expertise to the rebuilding effort, he was waylaid in the streets and beaten by a mob.

As the president saw it, the state’s leaders were foolishly provoking Japan “while at the same time refusing to take steps to defend themselves against the formidable foe whom they are ready with such careless insolence to antagonize.”

Witnesses were amazed at how low the attackers flew—so low (as one person remarked) that you could have thrown a baseball and hit a Japanese airplane; so low that witnesses on the third floor of the Navy Yard Hospital looked down on the torpedo planes as they began their runs on the American battleships.

“Things were so bad at Pearl Harbor,” Seaman Mason recalled, “that even the chiefs were working.”

The room, observed BBC correspondent Alistair Cooke, “already had that air of tobacco-choked energy that is the Washington odor of panic.”

The smell of burnt flesh permeated the hospital, especially at night when the blackout curtains prevented air from circulating. “I can still smell it,” recalled Lieutenant Erickson, many years afterward, “and I think I always will.”

Heads were obviously going to roll, and by Wednesday it seemed that one of those heads might belong to Navy Secretary Frank Knox. With timing that could not have been any worse, in the week immediately before the war, Knox had launched a media offensive to reassure the country that the navy had nothing to fear from the Japanese. He had been interviewed by Collier’s magazine, a week before Pearl Harbor, in an article lamentably titled “The Navy Is Ready.”

He had not intended a sneak attack. Indeed, Japanese historians have convincingly documented that the admiral was deeply bothered by Japan’s failure to declare war before the bombs fell.

On his flagship he lived as a fleet commander was expected to live—in ostentatious luxury, eating multi-course meals at a lavishly set table in a cavernous wardroom, entertained by a forty-piece band that played for his pleasure on the afterdeck.

Hirohito, who would ascend to the throne in 1926, was an unlikely candidate to be transmuted into a Japanese man-god.

From 1933 to 1936, according to the Japan Times, some 59,013 people were arrested and charged with “dangerous thoughts.”

1930 on, the 5:5:3 ratio was an incendiary popular cause, with the capacity to mobilize the Japanese “street.”

They would take action and then bully their superiors into acquiescing in the consequences. There was a name for that—gekokujo, “those below overcome those above,” and it had a venerated place in Japanese history. (In centuries past, lower-ranking samurai in unstable fiefdoms had used similar means to manipulate their superiors.)

In 1935, the Japanese navy built a full-size mock-up of the U.S. carrier Saratoga and practiced aerial attacks on her.

Kasumigaura aimed to create a cadre of super-athletes, men endowed with superior physical traits honed in a punishing training regimen.

On September 29, 1941, with the fleet preparing to sail for their rendezvous in the Kurile Islands, Yamamoto told Nagano bluntly that the pending war would be a catastrophe.

A few days after Pearl Harbor, BBC correspondent Alistair Cooke walked into the department through a side door, where he found no guards. He visited the officer he had come to see, but when he tried to leave the building, “a guard lowered his rifle and barred the way.” Cooke had been ensnared in one of those distinctive military-bureaucratic paradoxes that Joseph Heller would later describe as a “catch-22.” “The theory,” Cooke wryly observed, “was that if you were not wearing a visitor’s button, you never in the first place came in and were technically not present. This was reasonable but uncomfortable to anybody who hoped soon to resume his life in the world outside the Navy Department.”

Kimmel and his army counterpart, General Walter Short, would be relieved of duty, unjustly pilloried in the press, and condemned to spend the rest of the war running an obscene gauntlet of investigations rigged to deflect blame away from Washington.

The word hawaii was overprinted on all paper currency—in the event of invasion the U.S. Treasury would declare the bills worthless.

True, the navy had lost 1,999 killed and 710 wounded, three times its combined losses in the Spanish-American War and First World War. (Including all services and civilians, the attack had left 2,403 dead and 1,178 injured.)

Perhaps Mahan would have turned over in his grave to hear it said, but the loss of the American battleships was no catastrophe. It might have even been entered on the ledger as a net gain, because their crews—thousands of the best trained and most experienced men in the service—were released to serve in other capacities. The battleships were too slow to operate with the carriers, and incapable of defending themselves against air attack. As one officer put it, the Japanese had converted the American fleet from “a seventeen knot fleet to a twenty-five knot fleet.” Losing them on the opening day of the war forced the American naval high command to acknowledge the ascendancy of aviation and submarines. The Japanese navy, with its magnificent line of battleships intact, would be slow to make the same adjustment.

But by the following March, Stark would be edged out and King would hold both of the navy’s two top jobs, making him the most powerful admiral in American history.

King’s first act as C-in-C of the fleet was to get rid of the acronym denoting his command, which would appear under his name on all his outgoing orders and communications. “CINCUS” looked fine on the page, but when pronounced out loud—“Sink us”—it sounded too much like the punch line in a Bob Hope routine.

King’s policy throughout the war would be to rotate officers in and out of Washington; he insisted on “continuous turnover,” sending staff officers out to the theaters of war, and bringing others in from sea duty to headquarters. He argued, persuasively, that the experience and perspective thus disseminated would improve the performance of the entire service.

Lord Moran (Sir Charles Wilson), the prime minister’s personal physician, was impressed by the size of Roosevelt’s head. “I suppose that is why Winston thinks of him as majestic and statuesque, for he has no legs to speak of.”

How long might it take to win the war? “If we manage it well,” the prime minister replied, “it will only take half as long as if we manage it badly.”

“I cannot help reflecting,” he began, “that if my father had been American and my mother British, instead of the other way round, I might have got here on my own.” The observation received a hearty laugh, and established a friendly tone for a speech that would range across some sensitive territory.

“No fighter ever won by covering up—by merely fending off the other fellow’s blows,” said the COMINCH, by way of analogy. “The winner hits and keeps on hitting even though he has to take some stiff blows in order to be able to keep on hitting.”

In 1942, the nation would manufacture 45,000 tanks, 20,000 antiaircraft weapons, 60,000 aircraft, and 6 million deadweight tons of cargo shipping. Those targets, Roosevelt added, “will give the Japanese and the Nazis a little idea of just what they accomplished in the attack at Pearl Harbor.” The numbers had been revised by Roosevelt himself, apparently with no actual basis in the estimates that had been given to him—he simply crossed out the estimates he had received and rewrote them with his own hand on the night before the speech. When Hopkins worried that these arbitrary, back-of-the-envelope figures might not be feasible, the president serenely replied: “Oh—the production people can do it, if they really try.” Roosevelt, Bob Sherwood observed, “was never afraid of big, round numbers.”

Before December 7, most of those internal spaces had been painted white or gray, but now that the Japanese attack had dramatized the flammability of paint, working parties were put to the tedious work of chipping it all away, inch by square inch, with iron scrapers. They tore up the linoleum tiles and scraped smooth the steel underneath. They worked in the sweltering, airless heat—exacerbated by the wartime requirement of keeping the watertight doors and hatches dogged down—and found that they sweated through their uniforms so quickly they might as well strip them off and work in their underwear. It was brutal, hateful, thankless work— “a labor of the damned,” one wrote.

They were Japan’s “mystery islands,” and the American fleet did not even possess accurate maps for them. They were relying upon crudely enlarged photostatic prints of old charts, many dating back to Lieutenant Charles Wilkes’s “U.S. Exploring Expedition” (“Ex-Ex”) survey cruise of 1838–42. It was with a distinct sense of foreboding that they prepared for their mission.

He encouraged Churchill to take time away from his duties to relax: “Once a month I go to Hyde Park for four days, crawl into a hole, and pull the hole in after me. I am called on the telephone only if something of really great importance occurs. I wish you would try it, and I wish you would lay a few bricks or paint another picture.”

Destroyer skipper Tameichi Hara, whose ship and crew had returned in triumph from the Java Sea, recalled that no geishas were available to perform at his ship’s banquet, so several of the enlisted men performed their own drunken singing and dancing routines. “I don’t know how much sake I consumed in the process,” he wrote. “Nothing but my rugged physique pulled me through the chain drinking that lasted until the banquet ended around midnight.”

Neither the Nashville nor the Enterprise air group could take much pride in the action. The Nashville had fired no fewer than 928 6-inch rounds at the little sampan, an expenditure of ammunition that her captain described as“ridiculous” and “excessive.” (It is possible that some of those shells struck the vessel but did not detonate, passing cleanly “through and through.”) One of the F4F Wildcats fired a full 1,200 rounds of .50-caliber ammunition at the vessel.

A camera crew headed by the Hollywood director John Ford recorded the scene from a post high on the Hornet’s island.

Though the details would not be publicized until much later, those searing events of April 1942—the murder of surrendered prisoners on the road out of Bataan, the bombing of a Japanese city by Doolittle’s B-25s, and the subsequent execution of three captured American airmen—did much to embitter both sides and brutalize the war.

In China, the Japanese army launched an operation called “Sei-Go,” with the goal of capturing the airfields that had been constructed to receive Doolittle’s planes. The Japanese were well aware that B-25 airmen had been sheltered by local civilians or guerrillas, and the offensive seems to have degenerated into a mass reprisal against the population of Chekiang and Kiangsu provinces. Japanese troops laid waste to the region, routinely slaughtering the inhabitants of entire towns suspected of aiding the American aviators. Biological warfare units spread cholera, typhoid, and dysentery pathogens. Chiang Kai-shek cabled FDR: “The Japanese troops slaughtered every man, woman, and child in those areas—let me repeat—these Japanese troops slaughtered every man, woman, and child in those areas.” It is impossible to know precisely how many were murdered, but the toll certainly ran into the tens of thousands.

Throughout the era before the Second World War, the field of cryptanalysis was unproven, little understood, and shrouded in secrecy. It had even been condemned as unethical, most famously in 1929 by Henry Stimson, who was secretary of state at the time and refused to read decrypted foreign communications because “gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail.”

After Pearl Harbor, Rochefort and his key lieutenants worked around the clock. Rochefort went home once every third or fourth night. Most nights he slept on a cot in his office, fueled by coffee and sandwiches. Twenty- or twenty-two-hour days were routine. Dyer sometimes worked two or three days straight, keeping his eyes open by swallowing handfuls of benzedrine tablets that he kept in a bucket on his desk and offered freely to his colleagues. (Asked about this later, Dyer explained: “I figured there were people out there getting shot at. If it should happen that it turned out to inflict some injury on my health in the long run, so what?”) Most of the enlisted men and clerks worked in twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, or what Holmes called a “normal” eighty-four-hour week.

The entire military band from the battleship California, knocked out of action on December 7, was selected and assigned the task of transferring the code groups from the raw radio intercepts onto the IBM punch cards. They were soon producing millions of these cards every week, and running the big IBM machines without supervision. The musicians took to the work so readily, said Holmes, that “a theory was advanced that there must be a psychological connection between music and cryptanalysis.”

Through May 4, 1942, U.S. Navy pilots could claim a cumulative score of twenty-four Japanese aircraft shot down. There was just one navy ace—Butch O’Hare, who would give his name to the busiest commercial airport in the world.