Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

At this dark moment, mid-April of 1942, the tide of battle in the Pacific began to turn. The three American aircraft carriers which had been spared at Pearl Harbor ( Lexington , Enterprise , and Saratoga ) were joined by one of the two carriers from the Atlantic ( Yorktown ). These, with cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and supply ships, became nuclei for “task forces” which relentlessly prowled the Pacific. On April 2, 1942, the new carrier Hornet, with sixteen United States Army Mitchell bombers (B-25’s) wedged on its deck, sailed from San Francisco with a message for Tokyo. Escorted by the Enterprise Task Force to a point 850 miles from the Japanese capital (and thus 2,100 miles from their assigned landing fields in China) the sixteen B-25’s were taken off the plunging deck of the carrier by their army crews of eighty men led by Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle. Four hours later they dumped sixteen tons of bombs on the Japanese capital, and continued westward to China. Fifteen planes crashed in China after running out of gasoline, while the sixteenth found internment in Siberia. With Chinese help, seventy-one of eighty crew members returned to America. The whole episode was more spectacular than fruitful, but it did give a great boost to American morale, and frightened the Japanese so badly that they kept four Japanese air groups in Japan for defense.

During this period of the war the United States had amazingly correct information regarding Japanese war plans. Some of this came from our control over the Japanese codes, but much of the most critical intelligence came from other sources which have never been revealed. Through these channels, while Admiral William Halsey was still en route back from the Tokyo raid with two carriers, American naval authorities learned of two Japanese projects. The first of these planned to send an invasion force from Rabaul in New Britain, north of New Guinea, to capture Port Moresby on the southern shore of New Guinea. The second plan hoped to extend the Japanese defense perimeter eastward by seizing the Aleutian Islands and Midway Island in the northern Pacific. The former project was frustrated in the Battle of the Coral Sea, May 7-8, 1942, while the second project was disastrously defeated in the decisive Battle of Midway, June 4, 1942.

The Coral Sea, brilliantly blue and white, forms a rectangle more than 1,000 miles wide from east to west and slightly longer from north to south. Open on the south, it is boxed in on the other three sides with Australia to the west, the New Hebrides and New Caledonia to the east, and New Guinea and the Solomon Islands to the north. On May 8th, as the Japanese invasion force for Port Moresby came into this area from the northwest, it was intercepted by an American task force, including the carriers Lexington and Yorktown . The invasion force was turned back, a small Japanese carrier was sunk, and a large carrier severely damaged, while fires on both American carriers were extinguished. After the battle, however, the Lexington blew apart from gasoline fires ignited by an electric-motor spark deep within its hull.

The Turning Tide, 1942-1943: Midway, El Alamein, French Africa, and Stalingrad

The Second World War was a gigantic conflict because it was an agglomeration of several wars. Each of these wars had a different turning point, but all of these occurred in the year following the surrender of Corregidor on May 6, 1942. The first turning point to be reached, in the war between the United States and Japan, occurred at Midway on June 4, 1942, while the second was reached in the defeat of the Italo-German attack on Egypt on November 2, 1942. The American war on Germany took a turn for the better with the successful American invasion

of French North Africa on November 8, 1942, while, at the same time, the crucial struggle between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union reached its turn in the long agony at Stalingrad from November 1942 to February 1943. Needless to say, long and bitter exertions were needed to push the three aggressor states back from their points of farthest advance.

The Battle of Midway arose from a Japanese trap which was supposed to destroy the rest of the Pacific Fleet but resulted quite differently. Whatever illusions the Japanese Army may have had, the Japanese Navy fully recognized that it could not possibly win in the Pacific until the American fleet was totally destroyed. To achieve this, a trap was set to draw the fleet out from Pearl Harbor by the threat of a Japanese amphibious invasion of Midway Island from the southwest. When the Americans hurried out to attack this invasion fleet at Midway, they were to have been destroyed by the planes from four Japanese’ carriers lying in ambush 200 miles northwest of Midway. The ambush was reversed because Admiral Chester Nimitz at Pearl Harbor had a clear picture of the Japanese plans and sent his own carriers out to spring on the Japanese carriers from a point 200 miles northeast of their position.

The American counterambush worked because of a most extraordinary series of fortunate chances. The four Japanese carriers expected the American counterattack to come from Pearl Harbor after several days’ delay, and accordingly felt free to use their own carrier planes to bombard the Midway defenses, softening them up for the benefit of the invading force coming up on Midway from the southwest. These bombardment planes had returned from Midway to their carriers and were still feverishly refueling on the flight decks when the American carrier “strike” came in: 116 planes from Enterprise and Hornet were followed shortly after by 35 planes from Yorktown .

Caught in a horrible tactical position, the Japanese defended so skillfully that 37 out of 41 American torpedo-bombers were lost, but, as wave after wave of dive-bombers continued to come in, the Japanese defense was “saturated,” and soon all four carriers were sinking in flames. Before the fourth Japanese carrier went down, it sent off 40 planes which torpedoed the Yorktown . The American carrier was incapacitated and mistakenly abandoned, so that it was easily sunk by a Japanese submarine two days later. This loss, even in combination with the loss of the Lexington in the Coral Sea a month earlier, was a cheap price to pay for the destruction of five Japanese carriers in these two areas in the space of five weeks, since the United States had the industrial capacity to replace its losses, while Japan did not.

Two events of November 1942, the British victory at El Alamein and the Anglo-American invasion of French North Africa, provided tactical lessons and strategic reversals fully as great as those provided in the Pacific five months earlier. During most of 1942, the British clung to their lifeline across the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to Malta and Egypt by no more than a fingernail’s margin. Italo-German submarine and air attacks were steadily intensified. While the whole northern shore of the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to the Aegean was under Axis control or sympathetic to it, the Italian foothold on the southern shore of the Mediterranean in Libya was steadily strengthened, largely by German reinforcements, and German pressure was brought to bear on Vichy France to increase Nazi influence in French North Africa.

As long as the British were opposed only by Italian forces in the Mediterranean, they were able to keep convoys moving, but on January 10, 1941, the German Air Force intervened in the central Mediterranean with devastating effect. From that point onward, for a period of two years (until May 1943) it was impossible to get a merchant convoy through the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to Alexandria; accordingly, the British imperial forces in Egypt had to be supplied by the longer route around Africa. Even British naval vessels found it difficult to pass through the Mediterranean; in the course of 1941 all the British capital ships and carriers in the central and eastern Mediterranean were sunk or damaged so badly that they had to be withdrawn.