Part 2 Down but Not Out

By OTTO FRIEDRICH Research by Anne Hopkins

The ringing of the telephone awakened Douglas MacArthur just after 3:30 a.m. in his air-conditioned six-room penthouse atop the Manila Hotel. Japanese bombers had just ravaged Pearl Harbor, the caller said. "Pearl Harbor!" echoed MacArthur. "It should be our strongest point!"

The 61-year-old "Field Marshal" asked his wife Jean to bring him his Bible, and he read in it, as he did every morning, for about 10 minutes. It brought him little comfort. At this moment of crisis, facing a threat that imperiled his life, his command and his whole world, America's greatest living military hero, the bemedaled veteran of bayonet charges through no-man's-land in France, seemed paralyzed. When he did go to his nearby headquarters, he issued no orders to his forces. Officers seeking instructions found themselves barred from his presence.

When nearly 200 Japanese bombers finally arrived over Manila, fully 10 hours after the raid on Pearl Harbor, the pilots were amazed to find most of MacArthur's fleet of warplanes, the largest in the South Pacific, lined up like targets on the runways. They proceeded to destroy everything they saw.

"Instead of encountering a swarm of enemy fighters," recalled Saburo Sakai, pilot of a Zero fighter, "we looked down and saw some 60 enemy bombers and fighters neatly parked. They squatted there like sitting ducks. Our accuracy was phenomenal. The entire air base seemed to be rising into the air with the explosions. Great fires erupted, and smoke boiled upward."

Afterward Lieut. Colonel Eugene Eubank telephoned MacArthur's headquarters and said, "I want to report that you no longer have to worry about your Bomber Command. We don't have one. The Japanese have just destroyed Clark Field."

If Pearl Harbor was a disaster for the U.S., the Japanese attack on the Philippines that same day (Dec. 8 on the far side of the international date line) was in many ways worse. American casualties were much lower -- some 80 killed in the Philippines, vs. 2,433 in Hawaii -- but the strategic losses were higher. The raids on Clark and Iba fields outside Manila wrecked 18 out of MacArthur's fledgling force of 35 B-17 bombers, 56 of his 72 P-40 fighters and 25 other planes. In returning later to pound the airfields again, the Japanese also smashed the Cavite naval base. And while Pearl Harbor was a hit- and-run raid, the Japanese would seize and hold the Philippines for the next three years.

Pearl Harbor represented just one small part of the Japanese master plan for the conquest of Southeast Asia. Tokyo launched attacks in that same December week not only against U.S. outposts in the Philippines, Wake Island and Guam but also against the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and the British colonies of Malaya, Burma and Hong Kong. The methodical Japanese had printed the currencies for their occupation of all these lands as early as the spring of 1941. And they conquered this vast sweep of territory so easily that the immediate worry was whether they would strike next at ill-defended Australia, ill-defended India or ill-defended Hawaii. Japan now ruled nearly one-seventh of the world, and one of its generals warned against a new kind of overconfidence: "victory disease."

The first actual loss of U.S. territory was a small but symbolic one. Some 400 Japanese naval troops swarmed onto Guam at dawn on Dec. 10 and soon swept into the capital of Agana. After half an hour of gunfire, Guam's Governor, U.S. Navy Captain George McMillin, learned that an additional 5,000 Japanese were landing. He sounded three blasts on an auto horn to signal surrender. McMillin attempted negotiations in sign language, but he and his men finally had to strip to their undershorts and stand in embarrassed silence while the Rising Sun replaced the Stars and Stripes atop Guam's Government House.

More heroic but no less doomed was Wake Island, a tiny atoll between Hawaii and Guam. A Japanese fleet closed in to start landing troops at dawn on Dec. 11. U.S. Marines under Major James Devereux scored four direct hits on the flagship Yubari and sank two destroyers. The force withdrew -- the first small U.S. victory in World War II and the only time in the war that defenders beat back an invasion fleet. In reporting this small triumph to Pearl Harbor, according to a story that may be apocryphal, one of Devereux's men added a bit of bravado that became a popular propaganda slogan: "Send us more Japs."

The Japanese took the Wake garrison at its word. Reinforced by two carriers homeward bound from Pearl Harbor, they struck again before dawn on Dec. 23. Devereux's Marines fought hand to hand on the beaches for more than five hours. The Stars and Stripes was shot down, then hoisted again on a water tower, but at about 8 a.m. a white bedsheet was raised next to it. Devereux's defenders had killed about 800 Japanese at a loss of 120; of the 400 Marine survivors, a couple were beheaded and the rest shipped into captivity.

The most important of the first Japanese assaults was the invasion of Malaya. The target there was not only the peninsula's wealth of tin and rubber but also the strategic citadel of Singapore. Built in the 1920s and '30s among the mangrove swamps of Johore Strait, at the then enormous cost of $270 million, Singapore stood as the theoretically impregnable naval headquarters of the whole British empire east of Suez. One symbol of the island's true strength, however, was its array of 15-in. guns that could not turn and fire into the supposedly impenetrable jungle behind them. Another was the 2,000 tennis courts built for the British, along with plenty of polo grounds and cricket pitches. There were also regiments of native servants to polish the boots and serve the pink gin.

The Japanese officer assigned to organize the overthrow of all this Blimpism was Colonel Masanobu Tsuji. A hard-eyed veteran of the Kwantung Army who made an intense study of jungle warfare, he tested what he had learned by training his troops in fierce heat, with little food or water. When they were crammed onto transport vessels for the stormy southward voyage, they carried pamphlets that said their mission was to free "100 million Asians tyrannized by 300,000 whites." To military headquarters in Tokyo, Tsuji confidently -- and pretty accurately -- predicted that if the war started on Nov. 3, "we will be able to capture Manila by the New Year, Singapore by Feb. 11, Java on Army Commemoration Day ((March 10)), and Rangoon on the Emperor's birthday ((April 29))."

With hardly a shot fired, General Tomoyuki Yamashita unloaded his main invasion force troops in rough waters off Singora Beach, just north of the Thai border. They had little trouble marching southward into Malaya. Orders from British headquarters in Singapore called for defending the border "to the last man," since "our whole position in the Far East is at stake," but the only force assigned to do so was an ill-trained, ill-equipped Indian division. It had neither tanks nor antitank guns, because the British had declared the jungle "impenetrable." As Japanese tanks pressed southward, the force retreated in disarray, abandoning most of its fuel and ammunition.

To take advantage of all the back roads through the rubber plantations, the Japanese resorted to thousands of bicycles. When the tires went flat, the invading army simply clanked forward on bare rims. That sounded laughable in Singapore, but the Japanese kept advancing. "We now understood," Colonel Tsuji said scornfully, "the fighting capacity of the enemy."

Clinging resolutely to the strategies of the past, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had recently sent to Singapore one of Britain's newest and biggest battleships, the 35,000-ton H.M.S. Prince of Wales, with the battle cruiser Repulse and the new carrier Indomitable. But the Indomitable ran aground off Jamaica, so when Admiral Sir Tom Phillips proudly set forth from Singapore to break up the Japanese invasion to the north, he scoffed at the critical need for air support, following his antiquated conviction that "bombers were no match for battleships."

On the morning of Dec. 10, more than 80 Japanese bombers caught the Prince of Wales on a glassy sea under a cloudless sky, vulnerable as a jeweled dowager surrounded by more than 80 switchblades. The warships zigzagged wildly as they unleashed a barrage of antiaircraft fire, but it was a hopeless mismatch. Two torpedoes tore apart the Prince of Wales' stern, disabling its rudder, filling its engine room with steam. The Repulse dodged nearly 20 torpedoes before four more ripped her open.

After Captain William Tennant gave the order to abandon the Repulse, his officers had to wrestle him into joining the evacuation. Captain John Leach of the Prince of Wales refused to be saved. "Goodbye, thank you, good luck, God bless you," he kept saying as he bade his crew farewell. When the two ships capsized and sank, within three hours after the attack began, the 840 victims included both Leach and Admiral Phillips (some 2,000 were rescued). The loss of the warships, wrote Britain's Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Alan Brooke, "means that from Africa eastwards to America, through the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, we have lost control of the sea."

On the mainland, Yamashita's bicycle-riding invaders needed only 70 days to pedal and hack their way 600 miles down the Malayan peninsula. All through the night of Jan. 31, British troops marched out of Malaya and across the 1,100- ft.-long causeway to the island fortress of Singapore. The last 90 to leave were Argyll Scots marching to their bagpipers skirling Hielan' ((Highland)) Laddie. The British then blew a 70-ft. gap in the causeway -- but the inrushing waters proved to be only 4 ft. deep at low tide.

The British defenders of Hong Kong had already surrendered, after a spirited two-week defense that cost them 1,200 dead. But London strategists figured Singapore could endure a siege of six months with its 85,000 soldiers and those 15-in. guns that couldn't turn toward land. Churchill's instructions were explicit: "Singapore must be . . . defended to the death. No surrender can be contemplated." The Allied supreme commander in the southwest Pacific, General Sir Archibald Wavell, was even more explicit: "There must be no thought of sparing troops or the civil population . . . Senior officers must lead their troops and if necessary die with them . . . I look to you and your men to fight to the end to prove that the fighting spirit that won our Empire still exists to enable us to defend it."

Shortly before midnight of Feb. 8, under a heavy bombardment, 13,000 Japanese surged across the strait on a fleet of 300 collapsible plywood boats and landing craft. A battalion of 2,500 Australians fought them off all night, but by dawn the Japanese held their beachhead, and then the tanks started across. Though the Japanese were actually outnumbered about 2 to 1 overall, the martial spirit invoked in London hardly existed in Singapore -- at least not on the British side. At a point when the Japanese had conquered half the island, British staff officers could still be seen sipping drinks at the Raffles, and civilians stood in line to see Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story.

On the morning of Feb. 15, nearly out of ammunition, fuel and water, General Arthur Percival hoisted a white flag. The British commander tried to negotiate terms, but Yamashita, low on ammunition himself and worried that his own weakness might be discovered, insisted on an immediate unconditional surrender. "There is no need for all this talk!" he shouted at the exhausted Percival. "We want to hear 'Yes' or 'No' from you! Surrender or fight!"

"Yes, I agree," Percival muttered as he surrendered 85,000 British, Indian and Australian troops into captivity, one of the worst defeats in British history and virtually a death sentence for the enfeebled empire. Yamashita promised that his 30,000 victors would not mistreat their prisoners and civilians, but butchery and rape were becoming an all too common consequence of Japanese conquests. In Singapore, which the Japanese renamed Shonan (Bright South), an estimated 5,000 Chinese were put to death. Hong Kong and Manila fared no better.

In the Philippines, Douglas MacArthur's strange paralysis lasted only that first day -- and remains a mystery still. One theory is that MacArthur misunderstood Washington's orders against risking any military provocation of Japan. Another is that he and Philippines President Manuel Quezon thought the Philippines might somehow remain neutral in the erupting Pacific war. Still another theory is that MacArthur temporarily suffered the kind of breakdown that sometimes afflicts commanders in crisis -- as happened to Stalin when the Germans invaded in June 1941.

MacArthur's first moves were bluffs. His headquarters announced on Dec. 11 that the Filipino 21st Division had beaten off a major Japanese invasion in Lingayen Gulf (JAPANESE FORCES WIPED OUT IN WESTERN LUZON, said a New York Times banner headline). When LIFE's Carl Mydans traveled 120 miles north of Manila to photograph the battlefield, he found only a few Filipino soldiers idling on the peaceful beach. "There's no battle there," he reported to MacArthur's press chief in Manila. The officer pointed to his communique and retorted, "It says so here."

When Japanese transports actually reached Lingayen Gulf at 2 a.m. on Dec. 22, they met almost no resistance. Despite heavy seas, General Masharu Homma got a force of more than 40,000 men ashore and began marching south toward the capital. MacArthur, who had convinced Washington that his still largely imaginary 200,000-man Filipino army could defend the archipelago on its myriad beaches, now appealed desperately for air support from the U.S. Navy. CAN I EXPECT ANYTHING ALONG THAT LINE? he cabled Chief of Staff George Marshall. Learning that he could not, he unhappily issued the order, "WPO-3 is in effect."

War Plan Orange-3, granting that the Philippines' 21,000-mile coastline was indefensible, called for conceding the beaches and pulling back into defenses that, as in Singapore, theoretically could be held for six months. MacArthur declared Manila an open city the day after Christmas, moving his headquarters -- with his wife, his three-year-old son Arthur and the child's Chinese nurse -- to the fortress island of Corregidor in Manila Harbor.

Then he began moving his Luzon troops, 65,000 Filipinos and 15,000 Americans, into the mountainous Bataan peninsula, which juts out to the southwest of Manila. Admirers have praised MacArthur's skill in carrying out ! this tactical retreat. "A masterpiece," said his World War I commander, General John Pershing, "one of the greatest moves in all military history." Even the Japanese general staff called it a "great strategic move." But it was a great move only if reinforcements really were on the way. If not, MacArthur was simply marching his men into a death trap.

WE ARE DOING OUR UTMOST . . . TO RUSH AIR SUPPORT TO YOU, cabled Marshall, who specified that 140 planes had been shipped to Manila. But he never told MacArthur when they were later diverted to Australia. To Quezon and his people, Roosevelt publicly gave "my solemn pledge that their freedom will be retained. The entire resources . . . of the United States stand behind that pledge." Added Secretary of War Henry Stimson: "Your gallant defense is thrilling the American people. As soon as our power is organized, we shall come in force and drive the invader from your soil." So MacArthur told his trapped men, "Help is definitely on the way. We must hold out until it comes."

The promises from Washington were never kept. Roosevelt and Stimson had already told Churchill in private that the Philippines couldn't be saved. The defenders of Bataan had no real purpose except to delay the Japanese victory. Wrote Stimson in his diary: "There are times when men have to die."

The 80,000 troops and 26,000 civilians on besieged Bataan had less than a month's rations of rice, flour and canned meat. Medicine was in short supply. Malaria, dysentery and beriberi flourished. As the weeks dragged on, a chant grew popular:

We're the battling bastards of Bataan,

No mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam,

No aunts, no uncles, no cousins, no nieces,

No rifles, no planes or artillery pieces,

And nobody gives a damn.

When it dawned on MacArthur that he too was being abandoned, he spoke grandly of his destiny. "They will never take me alive," he said as he slipped a loaded pistol into his pocket. But MacArthur was just a pawn on an enormous political chessboard. Australia, threatened by the Japanese advances, demanded the return of three divisions sent to help Britain fight Germany. But the Australians said they would not insist if the U.S. promised troops and appointed an American supreme commander for the whole South Pacific. Churchill, unwilling to withdraw the Australians then battling Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps in Libya, suggested to Roosevelt that a general of MacArthur's eminence might prove valuable. In his sweltering cave on Corregidor, MacArthur received by radio on Feb. 23 a presidential order to get to Australia to "assume command of all United States troops."

MacArthur knew that his men on Bataan would never forgive him -- the name "Dugout Doug" haunted him ever after. He talked of resigning his commission and transferring to Bataan as "a simple volunteer," even dictating a draft of that resignation. But he never sent it. Orders were orders.

MacArthur decided to leave by submarine at sundown on March 11. No sub could get through to Corregidor, so he used a flotilla of four dilapidated PT boats. With him he took his wife and son and the Chinese nurse and a dozen staff officers. To Major General Jonathan Wainwright, he made a promise: "I'm leaving over my repeated protests. If I get through to Australia, you know I'll come back as soon as I can with as much as I can. In the meantime you've got to hold."

"You'll get through," said Wainwright.

". . . and back," said MacArthur.

After a rough and perilous trip of nearly 600 miles in 35 hours, MacArthur landed at dawn near a Mindanao pineapple plantation, where a B-17 bomber picked him up and flew him to Australia. On landing, he asked the first American officer he saw about the U.S. reinforcements he thought were awaiting his arrival. "So far as I know, sir," said the officer, "there are very few troops here." Said MacArthur to an aide: "Surely he is wrong."

He was, of course, not wrong. The general's party was chuffing southward on a single-track railroad from Alice Springs to Adelaide when MacArthur got the official word. In all of Australia, there were fewer than 32,000 Allied troops, including many noncombatants -- far fewer than MacArthur had left behind on Bataan. "God have mercy on us," he said. He later called this his "greatest shock and surprise of the whole war."

MacArthur expected that there would be reporters awaiting his arrival in Adelaide, so he prepared a few words: "I came through, and I shall return." That made headlines, but Washington asked MacArthur to amend his prophecy to "We shall return." He ignored the request. And unlikely as it seemed in the far reaches of Australia, he would arise from the ignominy of flight and return in triumph to make his prophecy come true.

It would be too late, though, for the starving soldiers trapped on Bataan. On April 3, Good Friday, 50,000 Japanese launched a fierce assault against the Americans entrenched at the foot of Mount Samat, a 1,900-ft. peak dominating the entry to the Bataan peninsula. On Easter morning they planted their flag atop it.

When Wainwright ordered a new attack, his field commander, Major General Edward King, sent an officer from Bataan to Corregidor to explain the hopeless situation. "You will go back and tell General King he will not surrender," said Wainwright. "Tell him he will attack. Those are my orders."

"You know what the outcome will be," said King's envoy.

"I do," said Wainwright.

By then Americans were retreating in disorder, and King decided that the lives of his men required a surrender. "Tell him not to do it!" Wainwright cried on learning of the decision, the biggest defeat in U.S. military history. "They can't do it! They can't do it!"

"Will our troops be well treated?" King asked the Japanese commander as he surrendered on April 9. "We are not barbarians," said the victor.

The Japanese had planned on taking 25,000 prisoners to the nearest camp. But they numbered more than 75,000, many sick and starving. When they lagged on the 65-mile march in the broiling sun, Japanese guards beat them with whips and rifle butts. Only 60,000 survived the three-day horror known to history as the Bataan Death March.

Invulnerable Corregidor, laced with huge concrete-walled tunnels and bristling with long-range artillery, soon proved vulnerable to concentrated bombardment. Japanese gunners blasted the tiny island around the clock (16,000 shells in one day), and finally 600 invaders got ashore during the night of May 4. U.S. Marines fought for every inch, but it was hopeless. Wainwright had already radioed, "Situation here is fast becoming desperate." In reply came a message from Roosevelt loftily praising the defenders as "the symbols of our war aims." But Wainwright finally decided that he had no choice. "With broken heart and head bowed in sadness but not in shame," he told Roosevelt, "I report . . . that today I must arrange terms for the surrender . . . There is a limit of human endurance and that limit has long since been passed."

Americans badly needed some kind of victory during those last days in the Philippines. Roosevelt had asked shortly after Pearl Harbor whether there was some way of bombing the Japanese mainland, and the Navy soon dreamed up the idea of adapting long-range B-25 Mitchell bombers so that they could take off from a carrier.

The newly commissioned Hornet sailed from San Francisco April 2 with 16 twin-engine B-25s and a lieutenant colonel who could fly anything anywhere: Jimmy Doolittle, star stunt pilot of the 1930s. Neither Doolittle nor any of his pilots had ever taken off from a carrier, and gale winds whipped waves across the flight deck at the takeoff point nearly 700 miles from Japan. "When ((Jimmy's)) plane buzzed down the Hornet's deck at 7:25," recalled Admiral William ("Bull") Halsey, commander of the mission, "there wasn't a man topside who didn't help him get into the air."

The raid on April 18 proved such a surprise that Tokyo schoolchildren waved cheerily at the bombers as they roared overhead. Aiming for military targets, factories and power stations, Doolittle's planes dropped bombs on the Japanese capital and made symbolic strikes on five other cities. Lacking fuel to return to the Hornet or to reach any safe haven, the American pilots had to head for Nationalist-held areas of China, bail out and hope for the best. Most of them made it, but three were killed in crashes and eight captured.

Though the damage was not great -- about 50 civilians killed and 90 buildings wrecked -- the demonstration of vulnerability infuriated the Japanese. ENEMY DEVILS STRAFE SCHOOL YARD, cried a headline in the Asahi Shimbun, which excoriated the "inhuman, insatiable, indiscriminate bombing." Several of the eight captured airmen were tortured to tell where they had come from, and three were executed by firing squad. Worse, the Japanese army tried to punish all Chinese who might have helped the downed pilots, and the slaughter in Chekiang and Kiangsu provinces took a toll estimated at more than 200,000. As often happened in this hate-filled era, each side angrily denounced the other's actions as atrocities.

Despite Doolittle's feat, the Japanese victories throughout the South Pacific could now be halted and reversed only by the U.S. Navy, and the Navy had been badly wounded. On top of the losses at Pearl Harbor, it had to abandon its base at Cavite, outside Manila, and it lost a cruiser and two destroyers in the Battle of the Java Sea (Feb. 27-March 1, 1942).

The Navy still had one great secret weapon, though: its code breakers could read Japanese naval messages. From those, Pacific Fleet commander Chester Nimitz knew that the Japanese planned to seize the eastern approaches to Australia by attacking Port Moresby, on the tail of New Guinea, in the first week in May. Nimitz stripped bare Pearl Harbor's defenses to mount an all-out attack on the Japanese invaders as they entered the Coral Sea.

It was the first naval battle in history in which the rival fleets never saw each other. The two carrier forces maneuvered between 100 and 200 miles apart while their planes attacked. The result included some absurd errors. Several Japanese planes tried unsuccessfully to land on the deck of the Yorktown; several American pilots tried unsuccessfully to bomb the cruiser Australia. In the first U.S. attack on a major Japanese warship, though, bombers from the Lexington and the Yorktown trapped and sank the 12,000-ton light carrier Shoho; nearly 700 of her 900 crewmen went down with her. Lieut. Commander Robert Dixon triumphantly radioed, "Dixon to carrier, scratch one flattop."

At dawn the next morning, both fleets sent off their planes again. The Yorktown's bombers started a fuel fire on the Shokaku, but were chased by fighters. Though the Lexington and the Yorktown similarly fought off Japanese bombers, a mysterious explosion in the generator room crippled the 42,000-ton Lexington. THIS SHIP NEEDS HELP, said the banner run up her mainmast. In late afternoon, the captain gave the order to abandon ship.

Both sides claimed victory in the Battle of the Coral Sea. The U.S. had lost the Lexington plus a destroyer and a tanker; the Japanese had lost the carrier Shoho, plus a tanker and a destroyer, more aircraft (77 vs. 66) and more men (1,074 vs. 543). But in strategic terms, the key fact was that the Japanese troop transports bound for Port Moresby had to turn back.

The Japanese empire had reached its outer limits.

The imperial navy's Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto was still determined to do what he had failed to do at Pearl Harbor: draw the U.S. Pacific Fleet into a high- seas confrontation where he could destroy it. His strategy, which he hoped would win the war for Japan or at least open the way to California, was to seize the two tiny islands known as Midway. A lonely outpost 1,100 miles northwest of Pearl Harbor, this was the westernmost U.S. base now that Guam, Wake and the Philippines were lost. The U.S. Navy would have to defend Midway, Yamamoto figured, and then he would attack it with the most powerful fleet ever assembled: 11 battleships, 8 carriers, 23 cruisers, 65 destroyers -- 190 ships in all, plus more than 200 planes on the strike-force carriers.

Yamamoto, who had stayed in Japan during Pearl Harbor, took personal command of this huge armada. His flagship was the largest battleship in creation, the 64,000-ton Yamato, whose 18.1-in. guns had a range of more than 25 miles. His carrier chief was once again Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, the Pearl Harbor commander who had gone on to wreak havoc on the British fleet. With virtually no losses, Nagumo's planes had bombed British bases at Darwin, Australia, and Colombo, Ceylon; sunk the carrier Hermes and two cruisers; and driven the Royal Navy all the way across the Indian Ocean.

Once again, cautious staff admirals in Tokyo opposed Yamamoto's strategy as too risky. Once again, he threatened to resign if he did not get his way. Once again, the admirals gave in.

Against Yamamoto's overwhelming force, Nimitz could send only a pitiable remnant -- 76 ships in all, no battleships to Japan's 11, three carriers to Japan's eight (and one was the Yorktown, barely patched together at Pearl Harbor after its mauling in the Coral Sea). And his most redoubtable skipper, Admiral Bull Halsey, whose combative spirit was worth several warships, suddenly had to repair to the hospital with a skin disease.

But Nimitz still had Lieut. Commander Joseph Rochefort's code-breaking team in Pearl Harbor, which told him that Midway was Yamamoto's main target, that there would be a secondary attack against the Aleutians, and that the strike at Midway was set for June 4. Now the fates that had condemned the U.S. to blind complacency at Pearl Harbor visited the same punishment on Japan. Declared Nagumo as he neared his launching point: "The enemy is not aware of our plans."

That Japanese blindness enabled the outnumbered Americans to plan an ambush as decisive as that of the Concord Minutemen of 1775, when they fired their "shot heard round the world." In the new style of naval warfare, which admirals around the world were just beginning to learn, aircraft carriers were supreme. They could destroy anything but were highly vulnerable, so the key was to find and attack the enemy's carriers.

Keeping his enormous "main fleet" in reserve for the future battle that would never materialize, Yamamoto sent Nagumo ahead with four of the six carriers from the task force that had devastated Pearl Harbor. Before dawn on June 4, Nagumo launched 108 planes, half his force, to pulverize Midway's defenses. But his scout planes failed to spot two U.S. carriers, the $ Enterprise and the Hornet, lying in wait less than 200 miles to the northeast under the command of Halsey's replacement, Rear Admiral Raymond Spruance. Taking an immense risk, the normally prudent Spruance committed virtually all his planes -- 67 Dauntless dive bombers, 29 Devastator torpedo bombers and 20 Wildcat fighters -- to a desperate counterattack.

By some combination of inspired calculations and pure luck, Spruance's planes reached Nagumo's fleet just as the carriers were taking in their returning bombers and reloading for a second strike at Midway. To exploit that moment of supreme vulnerability, the Devastator torpedo bombers roared in. Despite the Americans' advantage of surprise, they too encountered a shock: the overwhelming superiority of the Zero fighters defending the Japanese carriers. As each torpedo bomber lumbered toward a carrier, it was shot to pieces. Fifteen torpedo bombers left the Hornet; the only survivor was Ensign George Gay, who was shot down and wounded in the arm and leg but managed to float until rescuers found him the next day.

Eight times the American planes attacked Nagumo's carriers, and eight times they were beaten off. When the last torpedo bomber was shot down at about 10:25 a.m., it looked as though Nagumo had won the Battle of Midway. But the Zeros embroiled in low-level combat against the torpedo bombers didn't see what was happening high overhead. At 15,000 ft. above the carrier Kaga, Lieut. Commander Clarence Wade McClusky, nearly out of gas from searching for his quarry, nosed his Dauntless dive bomber into a screaming plunge. Behind him, 25 of his pilots did the same. At 1,800 ft., McClusky pulled the bomb release. He later remembered the image of the Kaga's clean, empty hardwood deck, then the tremendous explosion. Bleeding from five bullet wounds, McClusky barely got back to the Enterprise, with less than 5 gal. of gas in his tank.

Lieut. Richard Best took on the next carrier, which he didn't realize was the Akagi, Nagumo's flagship. "Don't let this carrier escape," he shouted over his radio to the four remaining bombers as he started his dive. His bomb landed next to Nagumo's bridge, starting a huge fire. At almost that very moment, the dive bombers received reinforcements from a third carrier, the patched-up Yorktown. Lieut. Commander Maxwell Leslie led 17 more bombers from the Yorktown in a dive that smashed and crippled a third carrier, the Soryu.

In less than 10 minutes, Nagumo had seen three of his four carriers transformed into blazing hulks. And he had been transformed from the commander of all he surveyed into a desperate survivor who had to clamber out a window to escape from his burning flagship to a nearby cruiser.

But Nagumo still had one carrier left, the Hiryu, and one carrier could still sting, fatally. "Bogeys, 32 miles, closing!" cried the Yorktown's radar officer. A dozen fighters from the Yorktown were circling overhead, and more than twice as many antiaircraft guns were firing, when the Hiryu's dive bombers and torpedo bombers struck. As the Yorktown's guns demolished one attacking bomber, its bomb exploded with a huge orange flash behind the carrier's bridge. Then another two bombs penetrated deep below decks, and the carrier's whole bow went up in flames. The Yorktown was doomed (though 2,270 men -- nearly all the crew -- were rescued).

No sooner had the Hiryu's torpedo bombers returned to their ship than they were ordered out again. But few were in shape to go -- five dive bombers and four torpedo planes -- and their crews were so exhausted that the commander ordered a break before the next takeoffs. The rice balls were just being served when the alarm sounded: "Enemy dive bombers directly overhead." Swooping down, planes from the Enterprise and the dying Yorktown started the fires that would destroy the Hiryu.

Admiral Nagumo discreetly refrained for hours from reporting the full extent of the disaster to Yamamoto. Only in late afternoon did he finally tell him that the Hiryu, the last of his carriers, was burning out of control. With that, Nagumo decided to withdraw the remnants of his fleet from the battlefield. Yamamoto sank into a chair and sat staring into space, as stupefied as MacArthur in his penthouse in Manila.

Finally stirring, Yamamoto sent a message of MacArthurian unreality: "The enemy fleet, which has practically been destroyed, is retiring to the east . . . Immediately contact and destroy the enemy." As a further measure, he also relieved Nagumo of his command. And imperial headquarters said a great triumph had been achieved, bringing "supreme power in the Pacific."

What the outnumbered Americans had accomplished at the Coral Sea and Midway was even greater than they at first realized. Describing "this memorable American victory," Churchill wrote, "At one stroke, the dominant position of Japan in the Pacific was reversed . . . The annals of war at sea present no more intense, heart-shaking shock than these two battles, in which the $ qualities of the United States Navy and Air Force and of the American race shone forth in splendor."

Before MacArthur finally received the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay, though, would come three grinding years of "island hopping," the slow and painful campaign across the South Pacific from the fetid jungles of New Guinea to the barricaded caves of Okinawa. The first of these battles, and one of the worst, occurred at the southern tip of the Solomon Islands, where the U.S. Marines made their first landing of the war early in the morning of Aug. 7, 1942. There was no opposition. The Japanese, who would fight more than six months to hold that desolate island, called it Gadarukanaru. It entered American history under the name of Guadalcanal.