Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942 by Ian W. Toll

Author:Ian W. Toll [Toll, Ian W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Military, World War II, History
ISBN: 0393068137
Google: OrgxCfA5VjUC
Amazon: 0393343413
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

THE NITTO MARU’S CONTACT REPORT was received aboard the Yamato shortly after breakfast. The little sampan had reported sighting not two but three American aircraft carriers, a detail that must have seemed fantastic to the Combined Fleet staff. The Americans were thought to have only three carriers in the entire Pacific Ocean. Were they all now charging toward Tokyo, and from only a few hundred miles away? The absence of any follow-up transmissions from the Nitto Maru only seemed to confirm the report. Admiral Ugaki recorded that the fleet staff “plunged into activities at once.” From Yamato flashed the signal: “Enemy task force containing three aircraft carriers as main strength sighted 0630 this morning 730 miles east of Tokyo. . . . Operate against American fleet.” Yamamoto ordered Tactical Method No. 3, which involved sending units of both the First and the Second Fleet to sea to intercept the intruders. Admiral Nagumo, whose carrier force, Kido Butai, was off Formosa, on its way home from the Indian Ocean, was ordered to proceed at speed to the waters east of Japan.

Critically, however, the Nitto Maru’s crew had failed to note that one of the carriers was carrying twin-engine bombers. If they had, the fleet staff might have put one and one together, and concluded that an enemy airstrike was already en route to Tokyo. An ordinary carrier bombing raid could not be launched outside a radius of about 200 miles, so if the American carriers had just breached the outer picket line, it was safe to assume they were still 400 or 500 miles away from launch position. That meant the capital could not be threatened until the following morning. At 9:45 a.m., a Japanese patrol plane flying along the east coast of Japan reported the appearance of a strange twin-engine bomber. The report was not taken seriously, because (as everyone knew) such airplanes could not operate from carriers. Another Japanese picket vessel spotted incoming B-25s and radioed, “Three enemy planes, course southwest,” but that report was also shrugged off as an obvious error.

The first bombers arrived over Tokyo Bay shortly before noon on April 18. They had approached the coast at very low altitude, a measure to avoid detection from the air or ground, and to avoid the effective “cones” of the antiaircraft batteries. In an eerie reenactment of Pearl Harbor, Japanese observers on boats and on the ground assumed the intruders were friendly planes, and waved merrily at them. “You see,” Lawson wrote, “the emblems on our plane were the old style: blue circle with white star and a red ball in the middle of the white star. Maybe that’s what confused them. I’m sure we weren’t being hailed as liberators.” The B-25s passed near several Japanese military aircraft which made no attempt to engage or pursue them. Prime Minister Tojo himself was flying over the bay in a Japanese army plane that passed so near one of the incoming bombers that a fellow passenger could identify the pilot as a Caucasian.

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