1 CLIMB MOUNT NIITAKA
One hundred and thirty-two days earlier, December 7, 1941, all six of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s fleet carriers swung into the wind 230 miles north off the Hawaiian island of Oahu.* Less than a week before, Admiral Chūichi Nagumo had received a coded message stating, “Climb Mount Niitaka.” He was now free to open his sealed orders confirming that the Empire of Japan was going to war against Britain and Holland—and the United States of America.
Lieutenant Commander Shigeru Itaya of the Akagi led the first of forty-three A6M Zero fighters into the air, followed by dive- bombers, torpedo bombers, and more fighters. All told, 353 aircraft struck the U.S. Pacific Fleet base at Pearl Harbor, and in less than two hours 18 warships were destroyed and 2,403 Americans killed in action. At 12:30 on December 8, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress to “ask that … since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.” Petty differences forgotten, legislators absorbed the seven-minute speech, and by 13:10 the declaration passed both houses; America was once again at war.
The Japanese armada of thirty-two ships that steamed from freezing, fog-wreathed Hitokappu Bay twelve days before the attack was the military solution to a perceived strategic emergency: Japan, Hideki Tojo declared, was being strangled by the West—specifically the United States. Bereft of essential minerals such as copper, iron ore for steel production, and bauxite for aluminum, Japan was forced to import almost everything required for heavy industry and military manufacturing. For a nation bent on imperial expansion, this was a critical and unacceptable weakness.
China had been the immediate solution for many of these resource issues, and conquest of that country served as a convenient foil for surging Japanese nationalism arising during the global depression of the 1930s. However, control of China brought Japan directly into conflict with Imperial Russia, then later the Soviet Union, and both nations were wary of the other. Through concessions granted by the Chinese Qing dynasty, the Russian empire built a single-track rail line through Inner Mongolia to the port of Vladivostok. Following its 1902 completion, Russia then constructed a 600-mile spur line from Harbin in the Heilongjiang Province and then south to Port Arthur on the Yellow Sea, an ice-free, deepwater harbor and burgeoning naval base. Later termed the South Manchurian Railway, this spur line and the threat it posed to Japanese ambitions in China was a major catalyst for the 1904 Russo-Japanese War.
Following the 1905 Japanese victory in this conflict, rights to the South Manchuria Railway system and its surrounding zones of control were granted to Tokyo as a prize. Rail transport was vital for transporting the riches from the Manchurian interior to Port Arthur, so Tokyo constructed hospitals, schools, power plants, and spur lines all along the six-hundred-mile main railroad. Protesting Japan’s widening encroachment, nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and Chang Hsüeh-liang, the “young marshal” of Manchuria, agreed to temporarily cooperate with each other to assert Chinese sovereignty over the contested areas.
Without orders from Tokyo, a small group of Japanese Kwantung Army officers decided to provide the Empire with an excuse for war. During the late evening of September 18, 1931, Lieutenant Suemori Kawamoto of the 29th Infantry Regiment detonated a small bomb near the railway tracks at Mukden, some 250 miles north of Port Arthur. The tiny blast did no physical damage, and despite a train passing safely through the area six minutes later, Japanese officers claimed that Chinese troops were responsible for the “attack.” The Kwantung Army had its pretext for invasion. Promptly occupying the rest of Manchuria, the Empire eventually created the resource-rich puppet state of Manchukuo, which also provided vital access to China’s interior and created a buffer zone against the Soviet Union. Japan answered swift global condemnation by withdrawing from the League of Nations in 1933 and, three years later, by signing the Anti-Communist International (Comintern) Pact with Nazi Germany.
On the night of July 27, 1937, a Japanese private named Shimura Kikujiro was on maneuvers with his unit north of Beijing when he supposedly went missing. His commander demanded permission from the Chinese garrison to enter and search the nearby town of Wanping, which was refused. A Chinese soldier panicked, firing a shot, and fighting immediately erupted. Tokyo, now firmly under nationalistic military control, had an ideal pretext for a full-scale invasion, and by mid-December 1937, Shanghai had fallen and Japanese soldiers were marching in a victory parade through Nanking, the former capital of the Republic of China.
Nearly three years later, during September 1940, following Germany’s defeat of France, Tokyo joined the Axis and sent units of their 22nd Army into French Indochina. At the end of the month there were imperial troops stationed in Hanoi and Haiphong Harbor, as the Vichy government “allowed” Japanese combat troops to transit its territory. By April 1941, over 140,000 imperial soldiers were massed in southern Indochina, poised to strike into Malaya and the Dutch East Indies.
To date, Washington had reacted to the steadily worsening situation through a series of weak diplomatic protests and ad hoc actions intended to economically pressure Japan into acquiescence. Clawing itself out of the Great Depression, the United States was overwhelmingly isolationist regarding war—at least a war in Europe. Following Hitler’s march into Poland in September 1939, fully 84 percent of Americans were against military intervention, though most supported contributing war materiel to fight the Axis. Becoming ensnared in another “European war” was an unpopular notion, and a majority agreed with Charles Lindbergh’s statement that Americans should not “fight everybody in the world who prefers some other system of life to ours.” Lindbergh, incidentally, did earnestly believe that the United States should fight in self-defense of the Western Hemisphere and itself.
However, by April 1941, American public opinion was changing. During the first twenty months of the Second World War, Hitler swallowed up western Europe and occupied the continental Atlantic coast from the Norwegian fjords to the Pyrenees. Italy had invaded Egypt, and Rommel was running wild in North Africa. Washington had passed the National Defense Act, initiated the nation’s first peacetime draft, and sold Lend-Lease to the public. Sales of many resources to Japan, including scrap iron, aluminum, and any aviation gas over 87 octane, were curtailed or eliminated. Not oil, however—not yet. President Roosevelt believed, probably correctly, that any such move would provoke a rapid Japanese invasion of the Dutch East Indies, and America desperately needed time to build up its withered military.
But April 1941 was the final straw.
There was no way to ignore Tokyo’s hubris, nor was there any ambiguity about such a troop buildup in southern Indochina. Congress passed H.R. 1776, “An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States,” better known as Lend-Lease, in March, which permitted the president to transfer arms as he saw fit to any nations he deemed necessary for American security. Fully convinced now that Tokyo would not respond to anything but force, and having very little physical force at his disposal, Roosevelt flexed his economic muscles accordingly. All Japanese assets within the United States were frozen on July 26 by Executive Order 8832, which “was designed among other things to prevent the use of the financial facilities of the United States and trade between Japan and the United States, in ways harmful to national defense and American interests.”
Japan outwardly protested, but her military leaders were largely nonplussed—they’d already decided to go to war, notwithstanding some drastic move for peace by the United States, so if anything, the embargo accelerated their timetable. The only obstacle to an imperial invasion of the Dutch East Indies and control over most of the South Pacific was the United States Pacific Fleet based in Oahu, Hawaii. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Imperial Navy’s Combined Fleet, had been formally planning an attack on Pearl Harbor since January 1941 but had been thinking of it much longer. He had also painstakingly analyzed Colonel Billy Mitchell’s 1925 report, titled “Winged Defense,” which detailed the harbor’s weaknesses. Sixteen years before the Japanese attack, Mitchell wrote, “Bombardment, attack to be made on Ford Island (Hawaii) at 7:30 A.M.… Attack to be made on Clark Field [Philippines] at 10:40 A.M.” He also predicted such an attack would be made on a Sunday morning, which it was.*
Yamamoto knew the Americans had conducted several war games against Pearl Harbor during the 1930s, including Grand Joint Exercise Number 4 in 1932, where Rear Admiral Harry Yarnell’s carrier aircraft suddenly appeared over Ford Island on February 7, 1932—a Sunday morning. Two additional Fleet Problems in 1933 and 1938 conclusively proved Hawaii’s vulnerability, and the efficacy of attacks by carrier-based aviation. Many American naval officers were well aware of this threat and opposed Roosevelt’s 1940 relocation of the fleet from Long Beach and San Diego to Hawaii. The president believed a base 2,500 miles closer to the Japanese would be a deterrent, but the professionals, particularly Admiral James O. Richardson, the Navy’s preeminent Asiatic expert, disagreed. Suffering from budget cuts and the Depression, the Navy was in no position to fight in 1940, and they were certain that moving the fleet away from the protection of the American mainland only made it a more attractive target.
They were correct.
Yamamoto had taken a keen interest in the British Royal Navy’s November 11, 1940, assault on the Italian battle fleet at Taranto. It was a large, relatively shallow, and well-defended anchorage similar to Pearl Harbor, and in the span of several hours obsolete British Fairey Swordfish had disabled half the enemy fleet. The Japanese admiral dispatched Lieutenant Commander Takeshi Naito from Berlin to make a personal survey, and this reaffirmed the viability of a surprise attack on the Hawaiian base. Though the Japanese considered the Soviet Union its greatest land-based threat, the American fleet had long been in the Imperial Navy’s crosshairs.
In fact, Yamamoto had a hypothetical assault on Oahu added to the Imperial Naval Academy syllabus in 1936, the same year the Type 91 torpedo was modified with kyoban, wooden stabilizers that permitted aerial operations against shallow water targets—like Pearl Harbor. By 1938 a heavier warhead was added, along with improved, detachable wooden stabilizers, and by August 1941 an experienced pilot could ensure the Type 91 dove no deeper than thirty feet during an attack. Nazi Germany was so impressed with the torpedo that a technology transfer—torpedoes for radar—was proposed.*
While the summer and fall of 1941 was an anxious time for the United States, it was a heady period for the Axis and a doctrinal vindication of German national socialism, Italian fascism, and Japanese imperialism. Rommel’s Afrika Korps controlled the Gulf of Sirte as far west as El Agheila, and he crossed Libya’s eastern border heading toward Cairo and the Suez Canal. But the Axis suffered setbacks as well, which should have been a warning that, although surprised and often routed, the Allies were not as weak as expected and were capable of fighting back. Hermann Göring’s vaunted Luftwaffe had been unable to destroy the Royal Air Force, and with increased American aid, Britain was hanging on. Then, during May, the Royal Navy succeeded in the impossible by sinking the Bismarck, pride of the German Kriegsmarine.
But the Paris Protocols had been signed that same month, which gave the Nazis access to all French military facilities in Syria. If Rommel could join through North Africa, this would effectively trap the British forces in Egypt in a vise and cost the Allies the Suez Canal. Hard-pressed though they were, the British responded in early June with an offensive aimed at neutralizing the threat from turncoat Vichy forces. Having surrendered thirteen months before to the Germans, the French commander of the Army of the Levant had no qualms about surrendering again, asked for an armistice, and signed the Convention of Acre on July 14, 1941. Yet Greece, Yugoslavia, and Crete had fallen to the Germans, and on June 22 Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. By late July his legions had swept through the Balkans and charged past Kiev in the south toward the Black Sea. Smolensk had fallen, with some three hundred thousand Russians taken prisoner, and Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Center was now less than four hundred miles west of Moscow.
Tokyo watched this particular offensive with great satisfaction and noted that with Moscow reeling from the heavy, multipronged German assault, the Russians were suddenly much less of a threat to Japanese actions in China and the Pacific. Well aware that Washington was at last rearming its emasculated military, Tokyo judged there would never be a better time to attack the United States. The oil embargo clenched it. Eighty percent of Japan’s oil came from America, and without this incoming supply, Tokyo had only a three-year reserve stockpiled, which would be reduced to eighteen months or less under wartime conditions. Also, during the fall of 1941, German U-boats had torpedoed three neutral U.S. Navy destroyers, and American public opinion was swinging toward war.*
The Japanese had to move soon.
While the December 7 attack was successful, it was not the crushing blow Yamamoto planned. True, in addition to 2,403 lives lost there were four American battleships resting in the mud at the bottom of Pearl Harbor, and four others were damaged—but no aircraft carriers.† In 1941 the United States had only seven carriers in commission, and four were assigned to the Atlantic Fleet.‡ In the Pacific, the Saratoga (CV-3) was preparing to embark her air group from Naval Air Station San Diego just as Pearl Harbor was attacked. Task Force 8, centered on the Enterprise, lay 215 miles west of Hawaii that Sunday morning, while the Lexington and Task Force 12 were another eight hundred miles to the northwest. Both carriers had ferried Marine aircraft to Wake Island and Midway Atoll, respectively, and were steaming home to Oahu.
Representing the bulk of America’s remaining striking strength in the Pacific, the three carriers were irreplaceable targets, both strategic and tactical, and failing to destroy them would directly contribute to Japan’s reversals during the battles of Coral Sea and Midway. Yet most of the Imperial Navy’s battleship admirals, Yamamoto excluded, largely failed to grasp this. In their haste to declare victory, they also overlooked the disastrous error made by leaving the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard’s vital infrastructure generally intact. Machine and repair shops, some two hundred thousand square feet of hangar space on Ford Island, and the coaling station were all unscathed. If the Japanese had bothered to hit the nearby 4.5-million-gallon fuel farm, not only would the Pearl Harbor Submarine Base and its four fleet boats have been destroyed, but also Pacific Fleet Headquarters, which was only a quarter mile to the west on Quarry Loch.*
There were also five hundred thousand barrels of cement, stockpiled during 1940 in preparation for naval expansion, that were immediately put to use. Companies like Utah Construction and Pacific Bridge leapt into the cleanup by repairing the drydocks, and within a few weeks two new runways were laid out on Ford Island. Of the four sunken battleships, two would be raised and refitted to see action, with the West Virginia (BB-48) eventually steaming into Tokyo Bay for Japan’s 1945 surrender. The remaining battleships would be back at sea by the end of 1944, along with all the heavy cruisers damaged during the attack.
Prescient imperial officers were aware of the risks incurred from not finishing their December 7 attack, but “victory fever” brought on by Japan’s string of easy victories mocked their concerns. Why did it really matter, the argument surged through wardrooms, officer’s billets, and staff headquarters? Hideki Tojo, Japan’s prime minister and minister of war, believed that America would certainly sue for peace after her defeat at Pearl Harbor and that, if she didn’t, the Imperial Navy would lure the Pacific Fleet into open water and rapidly crush them. A humorless, unimaginative man, Tojo was a fervent ethnocentric who absolutely believed in the racial superiority of his people and in America’s soft, decadent weakness. This underestimation of American tenacity, ability, and national rage would eventually prove fatal for the Japanese.
Yet for the weeks following Pearl Harbor and the early months of 1942, the United States faced several crucial, overarching challenges—namely, how to survive against Japan’s onslaught while hastily mobilizing for total war. As of December 11, 1941, America faced not only the Japanese but also now Germany and Italy. Hitler’s declaration of war was read aloud to Leland Morris, the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Berlin. “Your President has wanted this war,” Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister screamed. “Now he has it!”
Indeed he did.
December 8, 1941, saw elements of the Japanese 25th Army come ashore below the Thai border on the northern Malay Peninsula and begin thrusting south toward Singapore. That afternoon, Sir Tom Phillips sortied from Keppel Harbor commanding Task Force Z. With his flagship, HMS Prince of Wales; the battle cruiser Repulse; and four destroyers, Phillips steamed north to intercept and annihilate the imperial invasion fleet in the South China Sea. Unfortunately, the British were sighted by a Japanese submarine and, on the morning of December 10, were attacked by over eighty aircraft operating from Japan and Korea. Riddled with bombs and pierced by torpedoes, both big warships went down by early afternoon. Stunned by the defeat, Prime Minister Winston Churchill stated: “In all the war, I never received a more direct shock … as I turned over and twisted in bed the full horror of the news sank in upon me. There were no British or American ships in the Indian Ocean … across this vast expanse of waters, Japan was supreme, and we everywhere were weak and naked.”
Twenty-four hundred miles northwest of the stricken warships, 504 American defenders stranded on a wretched flyspeck watched the horizon beyond the Marianas Islands. They did not wait long. Within an hour of the Pearl Harbor attack, Japanese land-based bombers from Saipan rolled in to attack Guam, and before dawn on December 10, a thirty-ship enemy armada appeared off the coast and landed 5,900 imperial troops at various points on the island. Equipped with Great War vintage Lewis guns and 1903 Springfield rifles, the 153 Marines, 271 sailors, and 80 natives of the Insular Guard Force were quickly overwhelmed. George J. McMillin, naval governor of Guam, surrendered the island that morning.
Thirteen hundred nautical miles northeast of Guam lay a heart-shaped coral atoll surrounding a pristine turquoise lagoon ringed with palms and tan beaches. Idyllic as it appeared, Wake Island was destined to crack the myth of Japan’s invincibility and demonstrate quite clearly that the Empire could bleed. Wake had belonged to the United States for forty-two years and was used regularly by Pan American Airways clippers as they transited the Pacific. In December 1941, its five-thousand-foot crushed coral runway and two adjoining islets were defended by Marines of the 1st Defense Battalion, a handful of sailors, and a detachment of Army Air Corps communications personnel. Also, ferried in three days before Pearl Harbor were twelve Grumman F4F-3 Wildcat fighters of VMF-211. All told, the atoll counted thirty-eight officers and 485 enlisted men, of which 449 were combat trained, plus 1,145 Morris-Knudsen Corporation civilians of the Contractors, Pacific Naval Bases (CPNAB) detailed to Wake for various construction projects.
On Monday, December 8, Pan Am’s Philippine Clipper lifted off from the lagoon bound for Guam, but was recalled twenty minutes later by Major James P. S. Devereux, commander of the 1st Marine Defense Battalion detachment, who had just learned of the attack on Oahu. Commander Winfield Scott Cunningham, the senior officer on the island, put Wake on full alert while Major Paul Putnam, VMF-211’s commanding officer, ordered all his planes dispersed and his pilots ready to launch. Four fighters were fueled, armed, and ordered off to sweep the sky around Wake. When the clipper splashed down, her pilot, Captain John Hamilton, immediately volunteered to conduct a long-range air search. Putnam agreed, and takeoff was set for early afternoon.
They were too late.
Just before noon, thirty-four G3M Nell land-based naval bombers from Kwajalein’s Twenty-Fourth Air Flotilla arrived overhead. With no radar, and with the engine noise drowned out by crashing waves, the Marine anti-aircraft guns had little warning, and bombs, glittering in the bright sunlight, tumbled down on Wake. Their first target was the airfield, and this initial attack mauled seven of the parked Wildcats, destroyed both 25,000-gallon fuel tanks, and killed or wounded thirty-three men from VMF-211. The fighter squadron, and Wake’s best defense, was tactically emasculated, but the defenders were determined to hold on. Most of the civilians volunteered to help in any manner required: they transported ammunition and the wounded and repaired fortifications, and many chose to fight. For two days Japanese bombers ravaged the island, pocking the runway, destroying communications, and leveling the hospital. To a man, the defenders kept faith that they would not be deserted, that reinforcements were on the way from Pearl Harbor, and that these would arrive before the Japanese attempted a seaborne assault.
They were wrong on all counts.
During the night of December 10, the fleet submarine USS Triton picked up flashing surface lights south of Wake, as did the Marine lookouts on nearby Wilkes Island, and as the sun rose on December 11, three imperial cruisers with six destroyers appeared to the south. There were also two armed transports for the 450 men Rear Admiral Sadamichi Kajioka believed could subdue Wake, in addition to a pair of old patrol boats for close escort. Eight thousand yards off Wake’s south shore, the light cruiser Yūbari ran parallel to the beach receiving no fire and observing no movement. Watched all the way by the concealed Marines, at 0615 when she reversed and moved into 3,500 yards, the American five-inch shore batteries opened up. Kajioka’s flagship took four solid hits at the waterline, sending Yūbari limping away listing heavily to port. From Wilke’s Island, three salvos from Battery L’s guns slammed into the destroyer Hayate, which promptly blew up and sank with her entire 167-man crew. Another destroyer was damaged, and both transports put about then, hastily headed out to sea in the face of Wake’s fire.
At twenty thousand feet overhead, Major Putnam and the three remaining Wildcats waited until the enemy ships were beyond the range of the shore batteries, then pounced. Captain Henry Elrod put a hundred-pound bomb into the destroyer Kisaragi, which slewed to a stop, afire and covered by black smoke. Shocked by the vicious American defense, Kajioka broke off the action by 0700 and retreated toward Kwajalein. The forty-five-minute battle cost the Imperial Navy two destroyers sunk and three damaged along with a transport. All three cruisers were mangled by Wake’s shore batteries. Battered but still fighting, the atoll’s defenders gave the Imperial Navy its first bloody nose and unequivocally punctured the aura of Japanese invincibility. Heartened by the victory, Cunningham, Devereaux, and Putnam believed they could, in fact, survive until reinforcements arrived.
So they might have, if the current commander in chief, Pacific Fleet (CincPac) at Pearl Harbor had acted immediately and decisively. Still reeling from the Pearl Harbor disaster, and correctly expecting to be relieved of command, Admiral Husband Kimmel dithered. The seaplane tender Tangier (AV-8) was readied to evacuate the atoll’s civilian personnel, but Kimmel was rightly hesitant to send her out to Wake unprotected. The carriers Lexington (CV-2) the Saratoga (CV-3) were patrolling in a triangle formed by Oahu and Johnston and Palmyra Atolls southwest of Hawaii. They could make a run to Wake in less than four days by refueling at sea, but Kimmel, shaken and timid, recalled both carriers. While this occurred, Vice Admiral Shigeyoshi Inoue, Commander of the Fourth Fleet’s South Seas Force, realized he had underestimated American tenacity and requested reinforcements to reattack Wake.
On December 16, Yamamoto dispatched the carriers Hiryū and Sōryū, which were accompanied by two heavy cruisers and several destroyers to the atoll. The same day (December 15 at Pearl) the Saratoga, flying Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher’s flag, sortied for Wake from Oahu leading Task Force 14. Three days later, Kimmel was relieved, and Vice Admiral William S. Pye took over temporarily while the Pacific Fleet awaited its new commander: Admiral Chester Nimitz.
As the warships steamed toward the beleaguered atoll, the Japanese continued to attack from the air and steadily weaken Wake’s defenses. By December 20, Putnam’s fighter squadron was down to a single F4F and morale, especially among the civilians, was ebbing as most of the defenders realized that a reinforcing action, or an evacuation, should have occurred by now. So the sight of a Navy PBY Catalina landing in the lagoon that very afternoon was welcome to all. Word quickly spread that ships were en route to Wake with medical supplies, ammunition, and a pair of radars: an SCR-270 for long range and early warning and a SCR-268 for fire control. Most of the civilians would be taken off, and the Marine Fourth Defense Battalion would land to strengthen the garrison. Saratoga, now less than a thousand miles east, would also bring in Major Verne McCaul’s VMF-221, so Wake would again have air cover. The atoll’s defenders watched the PBY lift off at dawn the following morning bearing dispatches and bound for Midway, followed by Pearl Harbor. Two days. They only had to hold on another two days, and hopes were high.
But not for long.
At 0700 on December 21, near the time the PBY lifted off, Hiryū and Sōryū swung into the wind and launched every available aircraft toward Wake. The new Japanese plan called for two days of concentrated air attacks to more effectively “soften” the American defenses, followed by a much heavier amphibious assault. This same morning, Admiral Kajioka put out from Kwajalein steaming north for the two-day run up to Wake. This time he brought six heavy cruisers, six destroyers, and one thousand men of the Maizaru Special Naval Landing Force (SNLF) to breach the American defenses.* Additionally, four destroyers with augmented crews would, if necessary, beach themselves to provide additional manpower.
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