IN THE CORAL SEA

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.

New Kind of Battle. Naval warfare has changed its ways since Jutland. The Battle of the Coral Sea was not a clash of a whole fleet against another whole fleet. It was a battle of relentless air bombing and the rapid parry-&-thrust of task forces.

The task force, a varied group of vessels strong enough to carry out a specific job, has become the sea weapon of World War II. Modern naval warfare in the Pacific has kept the slow-footed battleship in port, made the carrier the center of task-force operation, the long-range reconnaissance plane the eyes of the striking force. The airplane has so changed sea warfare that its apostles think they will soon see the day when the plane wall drive the battleship completely from the seas.

The plane has also vastly increased the risk of offensive warfare, even with an overwhelming surface force. A few squadrons of land-based bombers with surprise and skill on their side can knock the stuffing out of a task force in a couple of hours' attack, as the Jap did when he swarmed down on the mighty Prince of Wales and Repulse.

Thus Navy task missions out of Honolulu have become hell-for-leather, slam-bang affairs planned with the stealthy calculation of Indian raids, and executed with the bludgeon force of gang assassinations. For this kind of operation, well executed in the Gilbert and Marshall Islands and in the assault on Marcus Island only 1,200 miles from Tokyo, the U.S. public could thank Planner Nimitz.

And Admiral Nimitz could thank his task-force commanders, sea dogs like bushy-browed Vice Admiral William Frederick Halsey Jr., a naval aviator who knows the potency of the swift attack, sighted and powered from the air; and scholarly Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, who helped give the Jap a mauling in the Marshall Islands raids. These and others were the men who carried out his tasks: broad-stripers like Vice Admiral Robert Lee Ghormley, new commander in New Zealand, and Vice Admiral Wilson Brown, onetime Superintendent of the Naval Academy and now Commander of the Pacific Scouting Force.

Who the commander was in the Battle of the Coral Sea the Navy was not yet ready to announce. Probable it was that Vice Admiral Herbert Fairfax Leary, recently detached from Nimitz' command and placed under MacArthur in Australia, was in on the show. It was equally probable that some of Nimitz' commanders were there, too.

Intention Known. Both Army & Navy pilots, ranging far to sea from bases and carriers, had seen the battle building up. Three weeks ago the Jap had begun massing a task force in the Marshalls, 1,700 miles north of New Guinea, and his force there set Chester Nimitz and Douglas MacArthur to work at the deadliest guessing game they had ever sat in. Where would the Jap strike?

He gave himself away. He had to, because his rendezvous point was squarely under the eyes of MacArthurs pilots. For a fortnight the Jap, massed transports and fighting ships off Lae and Salamaua, the ports he had seized on the north side of New Guinea. For a fortnight he piled equipment, men and ships into the port of Rabaul on New Britain.

The Jap worked hard to hide what he was doing. He struck daily and with increasing fury at the Allied base at Port Moresby on the south shore of New Guinea, seemed willing to spend men and planes recklessly to drive the United Nations from their bases there. He also smashed at Darwin, but with less determination, presumably because it was harder to get to, and because it could wait its turn.

Its turn had not yet come. The Allies hung on to Port Moresby, went on scouting and raiding the Jap to the north. And finally it was time for the Jap to move south.

Destination Unknown? Where he was headed is still a layman's mystery, but the course of the battle indicated generally what he had in mind. In the first day of his movement south from his concentration area it looked as if he might be headed for a land attack on Port Moresby, which he had not been able to reduce by air raiding. But as he plowed south, it became clear that he was after a more important target. He was headed either for the northeast coast of Australia, or for the strategic prize of New Caledonia, 1,200 miles to the east on the Australian lifeline, where the U.S. had already landed.

The battle was divided into three phases, and in all three the striking force of U.S. aircraft, both Army & Navy, was predominant. It began on Monday, May 4, off the Solomon Islands, when a U.S. naval force jumped a light Jap force, probably a flanking screen, and hammered it hard.

Meanwhile MacArthur's Army airplanes from Australia and New Guinea had picked up the main Jap body moving south, presumably near the Louisiade Archipelago. In that first phase, while the U.S. naval force left the Jap to wonder where it had gone after striking him. Army aircraft plastered him continually, day after day.

The big scrap was in the battle's second phase. At Army Air Forces fields, bomber crews sprinted from their huts, swung into parachute harness. "This is it," airmen called as they climbed in. "This is it." ground crews agreed as the bombers became light-footed on the runways and sped into the air.

Tuesday and Wednesday from dawn to dark they hammered at the Jap. He kept coming, and the harder he came the easier it was to get at him, for he was coming closer & closer to U.S. land bases. Thursday they hit him harder than ever, and tired-eyed pilots reported to their operations officers that the enemy had been badly hurt.

Friday morning before dawn's crack they headed for him again. To their surprise, 450 miles off the coast, they saw below them not just the Jap Fleet but a Donnybrook Fair that had all the earmarks of a private fight between the Jap and U.S. Navies. A U.S. flotilla had taken on the Jap by sea and by air.

That day on the sunbathed Coral Sea the Jap caught hell. The bombers piled in after the Navy, and planes from both branches went after the enemy hot & heavy with flat bombers, dive-bombers and torpedo-carriers. It was too much. Airmen finally saw the Jap swing around to the north. He had had enough.

High above him a bomber circled, while an observer took movies of one of the great naval battles of World War II. He caught the zigzag wakes of six warships, dodging a shower of bombs, the telltale circulars of two stricken aircraft carriers steaming out of control, the streaking course of bellowing dive-bombers blasting at stricken ships.

It did not end when the enemy turned around. Unlike the Battle of Java, where Allied naval forces potted Jap merchantmen, were themselves knocked off by Jap warcraft, the fighters in the Coral Sea concentrated on the enemy's warcraft. They were at it until Saturday night.

After the first three days of battle, Radio Tokyo claimed a great victory, hissed excitedly about two U.S. carriers and a battleship sunk, a battleship of the British Warspite class heavily damaged (Britain tersely and immediately replied that no Warspite or other British battlewagon had been sunk or damaged). Then Tokyo began to hedge.

Airmen still pounding at the Jap task force knew why. The Jap was confused, in disorder, slowing up by the time Tokyo aired its first brag. By the time the real returns began to come in, the task force was on the run.

No Time for Rejoicing. The Jap had taken a shattering defeat. The Navy listed his losses: sunk, one aircraft carrier, one heavy cruiser, one light cruiser, two destroyers, one seaplane tender, four gunboats, two submarines, three supply vessels; damaged, a carrier, heavy cruiser, light cruiser, seaplane tender, two merchantmen.

On the U.S. side there had been losses in planes, and probably in ships. It took Douglas MacArthur's angry prose to as sure the U.S. people that the victory had not been too expensive: "The enemy version of the battle off, the northeast coast of Australia is entirely fictional and has no semblance of a true communique of fact. . . . His claims of damage ... are fantastic. Our losses compared to his own are relatively light."

In Australia's fighting forces there was no time for rejoicing. The Jap had lost only a small part of his Navy. He might, probably would, be back. He had to be kept under bombing, under ceaseless reconnaissance. On that tense battlefront men could see, hear and feel the enemy.

"Mothers of America," said the radio voice, not the least bit tense, "this Mother's Day finds your sons fighting for freedom on world wide battlefronts...Victory in this war cannot be won in a day...There will be long periods of silence when your boys will be active at their stations in far places from which no word can come... There will be losses along the road to victory. If it is God's will that your son or mine be called to make the supreme sacrifice, I know that we will face this stern reality as bravely as they do themselves... As they serve, you also are serving your nation at your...post."

There was more than comfort for the mothers of America in what Admiral Nimitz said. There was also, perhaps unwittingly, an expression of his own lot as Commander of the Fleet whose task force had just won the battle he helped to plan.

Jellicoe and Scheer commanded from their bridges at Jutland, but today things are different. Chester Nimitz has commanded submarines, and cruiser and battleship divisions, but he has never trod the bridge of the fleet flagship in action. And under today's condition of warfare he probably never will. That is why Texas-born Chester Nimitz had need of his famed, monumental patience last week.

Patiently, when the excitement abated, Admiral Chester William Nimitz pulled all the threads together into the big pattern that spelled victory. That particular task was over; now for the next one. He busied himself with the endless detail of new plans for operations over his vast domain, from Alaska to the continental shelf of Australia. There would be more battles, other carefully calculated sallies against the Jap. Some would be victories. Some might be defeats. Chester William Nimitz would send out the orders--and wait.

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