BATTLE OF THE PACIFIC (See Cover)
On the desk in the breezy, rambling headquarters building in Pearl Harbor Navy Yard lay charts, reconnaissance reports, intelligence advices. These charts, reports, advices were the hither end of a great sea battle—what promised to be the greatest battle in the history of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Leaning over the desk was a bronzed, white-haired, austere figure.
Admiral Chester William Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, was tenser than usual. For four months now he had been in command of a fleet on the defensive, a fleet of whose very whereabouts the U.S. had asked impatient, taunting questions. Now, at last, the chance was at hand to write in battle smoke across the Pacific sky the world-taunting reply: "Who wants to know where the Fleet is?" But in this modern naval battle Chester Nimitz' job kept him from taking personal part. With the ships under way, with all but the last-minute orders sent, his job was to wait here, in exquisite suspense, for the good or bad news, while men of lesser rank did the fighting, won the medals, and risked his ships in action. That was enough to make any man tense.
Finally Admiral Nimitz gave his orders. The charts were put away, the last messages sent. The Admiral took up radio-grams dealing with other matters. He began thinking seriously about the Mother's Day radio address he was going to have to give. . . .
It was, in truth, the greatest battle in the history of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. It was fought below the equator, in the Coral Sea off Australia's northeast coast. For five days, smudged with belching smoke screens and roaring with bomb bursts, a U.S. naval force and Army bombers from land bases took turns tearing into a heavy Jap task force, invasion-bound.
For the Jap the going was too tough. His fleet was badly shot up, largely by one of the greatest concentrations of air power ever sent against a naval force. The straw that broke his back was the unhappy accident of piling into the main U.S. naval force no more than 450 miles off the northeast Australian coast.
Punished until he could stand no more, he turned tail, while 500 airplanes, U.S. and Japanese, roared through the bright subtropical sun over his uneasy head. The U.S. aircraft had the edge. They burst through the Jap fighters again & again, rained bombs and aerial torpedoes at the surface craft.
The battle ended in a nightmare of retreat, with U.S. aircraft hacking at the enemy every step of the way back to the questionable shelter of the islands trailing off the east coast of New Guinea. When the Jap finally got there, only he could count his losses accurately. But by conservative U.S. count he had lost 21 ships, sunk or disabled. And he had unquestionably taken a beating—the first serious defeat of his headlong career through the South Pacific.
The defeat may even have been decisive, for in the far-flung adventures of Nippon, where empires are won by shoestring forces and strength is spread perilously thin, there is no room for crushing defeats. It was not a naval battle on the scale of Jutland; but it might in the end prove to have had a farther-reaching effect.