Sea of Thunder by Evan Thomas

Author:Evan Thomas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

From his bunker at Combined Fleet headquarters in Tokyo, Admiral Toyoda had, not unreasonably, wanted to go on the offensive with what little airpower he had left. He had made only a handful of planes available to defend Kurita’s fleet. But the navy had cobbled together about 200 planes, based at airfields around Manila, to attack Halsey’s carriers as they floated, in three separate groups spread over a hundred miles, in the warm waters of the Philippine Sea. The northernmost group, Task Group 38.3 under Adm. Frederick C. Sherman, was preparing to launch its planes to attack Kurita’s fleet when, shortly after 8:00 A.M., radar picked up a large blob of bogeys, enemy planes, to the northwest. Adm. Marc Mitscher, the overall commander of the carriers in Halsey’s fleet, was aboard his flagship, the Lexington, attached to Sherman’s Task Group 38.3. He sent out the signal, “Hey Rube!”—the old circus cry for help, adopted by the navy when its ships came under attack. The carriers in Sherman’s group scrambled to launch fighters to repel the invaders.

The Japanese pilots were a motley crew, mostly inexperienced and undertrained, and a single American pilot, Cdr. David McCambell off the Essex, was able to cut out and shoot down no fewer than nine Japanese planes (his wingman got six). But at about 9:30, a “Judy” bomber dropped out of a rain cloud and deposited a 500-pound bomb on the flight deck of the light carrier Princeton. The blast started a fire that set off a string of torpedoes in the bomb bays of Avengers waiting to take off. The carrier burned and then blew apart, slaughtering dozens still aboard and more than 200 men on a cruiser, the Birmingham, which had come alongside to help.

Aboard the New Jersey, sailing fifty miles to the south with Adm. Gerry Bogan’s Task Group 38.2, Admiral Halsey did not know that the planes attacking Sherman’s carrier group had been land-based. He guessed, wrongly, that they had flown from Japanese carriers. As always, Halsey was fixated on finding and sinking the Japanese carrier force. His staff was no less impatient and determined. Again and again, Halsey’s top staffer for air operations, Cdr. Doug Moulton, pounded the table in Flag Plot and demanded, “Where in the hell are those goddamn carriers?” (During the course of the day, Moulton must have said this “fifty times,” Halsey later wrote.)

The intelligence on the Japanese carriers was thin. That morning, an aide handed Halsey a red top secret folder containing ULTRA material, decrypts of Japanese signals sent from the code breakers at Pearl Harbor. By monitoring the messages sent to Japanese oil tankers, the code-breakers had determined that Admiral Ozawa’s carriers had left their safe haven of the Inland Sea in Japan and sortied through the Bungo Straits into the Pacific…but where? The best estimate was “the Formosa-Philippine Sea area,” not a very precise description.

The Department of Dirty Tricks pondered this intriguing scrap. Halsey’s self-effacing naval intelligence officer, Mike Cheek, studied the document, and, in his reticent way, wrote Halsey a little note, rather than speak up at the table.

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