World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF THE PACIFIC: Ruin in Two Phases

BATTLE OF THE PACIFIC (See Cover) He could hardly have been charged with the defeat of the Japanese fleet in the Coral Sea in May 1942, nor with the decisive beating the fleet took from a desperate band of American last-ditchers at Midway, a month later. It was not mainly his fault that the Japanese Navy had been bloodily ejected from the Solomons, or that it was progressively driven back on its inner defenses by the overwhelming force of U.S. arms in the Pacific.

These disasters could not be blamed on dull, purse-lipped little Admiral Shigetaro Shimada, then, as now, His Imperial Jap Majesty’s Navy Minister. It was not he but Admiral Osami Nagano, Hirohito’s Chief of Naval Staff and thus top Navy planner, who was the first big failure in Japan’s once glamorous naval history.

But this week Shimada had to face the disconcerting fact that he, too, was a colossal failure. Shimada had met the U.S. fleet, tentatively and ineptly, in waters uncomfortably close to home between the Marianas and the inner bastion of the Philippines.

Result, as even the Jap civilian could guess: the worst defeat since Midway.

Against the massive armada commanded by the U.S.’s gimlet-eyed Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, little Shimada had thrown an inferior task force. He had planned the action so cautiously that his force did not come within hundreds of miles of Spruance’s guns. But it did poke its nose within range of Spruance’s naval aircraft. That was enough.

Tougher than Togo’s. The reason Shimada had no one to blame this time but himself was that old Nagano was no longer in the whipping-boy post. Last February he had been kicked upstairs to the job of senior adviser to the Emperor, the kind of post that navies the world over like to hand out to failures with broad stripes. When Nagano left, Shimada took over his job as Chief of Staff, thus made himself responsible for Navy strategy and grand tactics while retaining the safer administrative duties of Navy Minister.

By then even the regimented Japs were beginning to ask when their fleet would come out and fight. For the nonce, plump, taciturn Shimada said nothing; Tokyo’s radio fantasists explained to the homeland and to Greater East Asia that the thing to do was to wait and see: some time the U.S. fleet would find itself far from home. Then the Jap fleet would strike the crushing blow.

This reasoning seemed historically sound. Admiral Heihachiro Togo, the half-Nelson of Japan, had caught Russian Admiral Rozhestvensky’s fleet 18,000-miles off base in Tsushima Strait and destroyed it in 1905.

But Shimada knew that his problem was far tougher than Togo’s. It was all very well to wait for the U.S. fleet to steam in close to the sacred homeland. The trouble was that the more he waited, the more hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned he would be. The U.S. fleet had grown to monstrous size, and had developed a way of taking its bases along with it. The Pacific was dotted with them now.

When the U.S. made its latest leap 1,200 miles west from Kwajalein, into Saipan, key to the Marianas, Shimada had to put up or shut up. Caught in an impossible dilemma, he made the worst decision possible: a compromise.

While Radio Tokyo babbled that “the Japanese Navy in the near future will win a great victory,” Shimada, always a man for the safe way, decided on a half-measure designed to win the Japs the advantage of attack without incurring the liability of counterattack. The only thing that could be said in favor of the plan was that it was cunningly conceived.

Endurance Contest. The Jap’s reasoning was that Spruance’s forces, pegged down like a tent around the invaders of Saipan (see below), would be running short of fuel, ammunition, bombs and planes after the week of repeated heavy strikes they were making along the island chain—the Marianas, Volcano and Bonin Islands. Shimada’s Intelligence was good enough to tell him that Vice Admiral Marc A. Mitscher’s Task Force 58 (part of Spruance’s Fifth Fleet) was divided into three units or task groups.

Beyond this, Shimada’s Intelligence was wretched. It failed to tell him what the Navy Department soon told the U.S. people: “Task Force 58, the most powerful and destructive unit in the history of sea warfare . . . is able to carry its fuel, food, replacement aircraft and pilots wherever it goes. . . . Solved is the problem of supply.” But for this fact, Task Force 58 might have been as vulnerable as Shimada hoped.

Battleship Admiral. Shimada, versed in the ways” of battleships, cruisers and submarines, but with no experience in naval air power, did not plan to risk his ships within gun range of the Spruance-Mitscher powerhouse. Instead, aircraft from Jap carriers were to fly off at maximum range, and loose bombs and torpedoes against the presumably exhausted U.S. force. Then the planes were to land on Guam and Rota, refuel and get home to their mother ships, lying well off to the west.

U.S. Intelligence was working too: submarines and scout planes had kept Spruance and Mitscher well informed. For days they had known that a sizable enemy force was milling around, 500 to 800 miles west of Saipan. On Sunday, June 18 (Monday in Tokyo and the Marianas) five or six carriers in this force sent off virtually all their planes to the great attack. Others, from land bases, joined them. Spruance knew exactly what to do.

In full morning light the Japs arrived off the southern Marianas. They had flown so far that they were almost out of gas when they began to attack. Spruance, who had diagnosed their play, held his fleet of seagoing airdromes and ack-ack batteries within sight of Guam. Mitscher sent squadron after squadron of dive bombers to pock the runways and smash the gasoline stores of Guam and Rota, to deny the enemy planes a place to roost.

The First Phase. As the Jap planes drew near, Hellcat fighters swarmed up from U.S. carriers and took them on in one of the war’s greatest air battles. Vapor trails strung across hundreds of miles of sky. Battleships, cruisers and destroyers appeared to be wreathed in fire as they turned the most powerful ack-ack defense in the world upon the few planes which got through the fighters’ gauntlet. A quarter of the horizon was polka-dotted with black smoke puffs. The first attack was beaten off on the fringe of the fleet.

An hour later, more enemy bombers broke through. One bomb missed the stern of the great battleship which wore Spruance’s four-star flag. Batteries of 40-mm. guns mounted on the ship’s stern caught the Jap bomber fairly: it hesitated for a moment like a tired bird, then fell slowly into the sea. A torpedo bomber was dismembered by a destroyer’s gunfire; a wing fell off; its engine fell out before the fuselage dived in flames. The attack died.

In those furious few hours, 369 Jap aircraft fell to the Hellcats—the war’s biggest bag for a single day. Eighteen were knocked down by flak; 15 more were destroyed on the ground.

Shimada’s thrust had become a ghastly failure. Only 27 U.S. planes were lost in the first phase, and a third of their pilots were saved. Two U.S. carriers, one battleship, had “superficial damage” but their battle efficiency was unimpaired.

The Second Phase. The last U.S. planes were not taken aboard the carriers until after dark. Then Spruance turned much of his force west, steamed under forced draft all night and much of the next day. He was trying to close the range and engage the enemy fleet, now stripped of air cover.

Long before Task Force 58 could come within reach, the Japs were being attacked by other Pacific Fleet units. A sub put three torpedoes into a Zuikaku-class flattop (variously estimated at 17,000 to 28,000 tons). Cautious Pacific Fleet officers listed the vessel as probably sunk.

The westering sun was full in the eyes of lookouts aboard U.S. ships before scout planes gave a fix on the Jap force. It was not the “Imperial Grand Fleet” (which may exist only in the imaginations of U.S. analysts), but most likely the Southern Expeditionary Fleet under Vice Admiral Denshichi Okochi. It had four or more second-string battleships, at least six assorted carriers, with the appropriate screen of cruisers and destroyers and a badly misplaced train of tankers.

Long Strike. Hundreds of Helldivers, Avengers and Hellcats swarmed off U.S. carriers’ decks. There were only two hours of daylight remaining. This, too, was to be a strike at maximum range. But better planning, better aircraft and better men made it a victory. For agonized hours the waiting fleet steamed and listened for word from their aircraft. Long after dark, an American voice broke the radio silence : “Two carriers smoking.” That was all. More hours passed. Then the planes came thundering back.

Star-Spangled Sea. Task Force 58 was blacked out. As the first returning plane was spotted, the fleet below sprouted lights: red at the mastheads of battleships, cruisers and destroyers; faint glows on the runways of the carrier decks. A searchlight beacon thrust its beckoning finger straight up into the sky to guide homing planes.

All of them were desperately low on gas. Some ran dry as they waited their turn to land; their pilots set them down on the Philippine Sea. Pilots and crewmen clambered out aboard rafts, blinked flashlights at rescuing destroyers. Star shells burst above the riot of light, a seagoing Coney Island in enemy waters where normally a carelessly handled match would bring a man “before the mast.”

There were some bad landings and planes were wrecked on the packed decks; many pilots chose the wrong carriers. But from 95 planes lost to enemy action and “extreme range,” all but 22 pilots and 27 crewmen were saved.

In the middle of the night, weary flyers slumped in ready-room armchairs, told Intelligence officers what they had hit:

One Hayataka-class* carrier sunk; two tankers sunk; a destroyer sunk; another Hayataka-class carrier “severely damaged and left burning furiously”; a Zuikaku-class carrier hit by three 1,000-lb. bombs; a light Zuiho-class carrier hit by two aerial torpedoes; another light carrier perforated by seven 500-pounders; a Kongo-class battleship, three cruisers, two destroyers and three tankers damaged. Of the few Jap planes remaining to defend their ships 26 had been shot down.

The battered southern fleet had escaped through Luzon Strait (between Luzon and Formosa). It had a choice of bases (see map) for repairs and refits. The Battle of the Eastern Philippines was ended.

The Big Score. For the two weeks of U.S. campaigning in the far Pacific, from the Bonins to the Philippine Sea, the summary of Jap losses, released this week by the U.S. Navy, was even more horrific for Shimada to contemplate.

In 14 baleful days the Jap Navy:¶ Lost 30 ships sunk, plus two probably sunk. Fifty-one more were damaged. ¶ Lost 13 landing barges, complete with packed crews, most of them on the way to reinforce the garrison at Saipan. ¶ Lost 757 aircraft destroyed by U.S. aircraft and ack-ack.

For this price the enemy had got almost nothing. The U.S. Navy, in addition to four ships damaged, lost only 151 aircraft, rescued all but 98 of their crews.

Delimited Liability. In these weeks, Shimada had learned a lesson he should have known: there are no bargain counters in the marts of war.

This week even his own people could see that the entire Pacific, as far west as the meridian of Tokyo (140° E. Long.), was now an American lake. Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, commander in chief of three Pacific fleets, had said: “I don’t know anything more we could do to provoke those people into a fleet action.”

This week Shimada had to make a new set of plans to stave off the Americans, who certainly intend to plow into his inner defenses. Except for his German counterpart, no leader had the impossible alternatives that lay before Shimada. He could come out and fight, hurl his whole force against the U.S. fleet. The result would be destruction. Or he could stand on his one thrust at the enemy and keep his fleet in being, a threat that might never be used but that would have to be reckoned with. Or he could spend his fleet piecemeal in harassing action, postponing the day of defeat. His choice was between bad, worse and worst.

Cherry Ripe., Stubby, troubled Shimada, with his Prussian hairdo and his overripe cherry mouth, was not going to feel the warm smile of history. But he had worked hard to win it. No less than six times he had been assigned to the General Staff; the first five were considered successful. Between these tours of duty he had commanded a submarine division, a cruiser, the battleship Hiei, finally (in 1940 and early 1941) the Third Fleet, entrusted with blockade of the China coast toward which Nimitz now aims.

When Shimada was recalled from China, the Emperor gave him a special purse. He used it with scrupulous correctness to buy 70 memorial swords for his staff.

He had been named to the soft berth of commandant, Yokosuka Naval Station. But soon General Tojo called upon him to take the Navy Ministry in the new War Cabinet. “The right man in the right place,” said a superannuated Taisho (admiral).

Although a disciple of the violently anti-foreign Admiral Nobumasa Suetsugu, Shimada refrained then, as usual, from rattling his tongue. He sedulously avoided embroilment in domestic Jap politics. He won the confidence of Jap Army leaders because he had the reputation of being “regular Navy”—only more so—and minding his business.

It was a safe and, for a Jap, a sane, solid way to build a reputation. The only trouble was that, no matter how safely an officer tried to set his course, there were obstacles—like calculating Spruance and wizened, air-wise Marc Mitscher. And they were not passive obstacles: they were closing around him like a tightening clamp. They were closing inexorably on the Empire where Shimada had worked so hard and dully to be a great naval captain.

Shimada Taisho’s brow was furrowed. He looked more than ever like a puzzled little man about to whistle.

* Converted Nippon Yusen Kaisha liners.