When the Japanese Navy’s powerful aircraft carrier striking force approached Midway Atoll on the morning of June 4, 1942, three U.S. Navy carriers were already waiting. The American fleet’s presence that morning was no accident. The role of Navy codebreakers in intercepting and reading Japanese messages, which enabled Pacific Fleet commander Chester Nimitz to surprise the Japanese at Midway, is well-known.

Though details of U.S. communications intelligence during World War II remained classified for many years, the work of codebreakers in uncovering Japanese plans at Midway was initially hinted at in a newspaper article by reporter Stanley Johnston within days of the battle. While hundreds – and by war’s end, many thousands – of military and civilian personnel participated in America’s radio intelligence effort, a mere handful performed the extraordinary intellectual feat of manually deciphering the enemy’s coded messages.  Although decoding machines were in use throughout the war, the navy’s critical codebreaking work in the first months of 1942 was performed almost entirely by hand.

No Machine Could do This

Throughout the Pacific War, the Japanese Imperial Navy used a series of manual book-based codes for operational message traffic. While Japanese diplomats used a machine-derived code – the famous ‘Purple’ machines – the navy, with many thousands of units sending radio messages, preferred their manual system.

Japanese Navy radio messages were transmitted using a modified version of Morse code. Messages that were intercepted by the allies were recorded as a series of digits, and it was up to codebreakers to turn the rows and rows of numbers into words and phrases. There was no machine that could do this. Though rudimentary tabulating machines might help detect patterns in the seemingly random digits, it was up to individual cryptanalysts to deduce the meaning of each enciphered word by studying thousands of messages, finding sequences of numbers that appeared in previous messages, recognizing patterns in the structure and formatting of the messages, and using their knowledge of Japanese naval procedures, strategy, and the Japanese language itself to make educated guesses. 

The work required painstaking concentration, faultless attention to minute details, the ability to recognize nearly invisible patterns, careful review of thousands of messages, meticulous recording of message details, outstanding memory, and unbreakable concentration. Historian David Khan, in his 1996 book The Codebreakers, wrote, “This work was the most excruciating, exasperating, agonizing mental process known to man.”

Progress was incremental. Each tiny success in uncovering the meaning of a code group – as the numbers that represented words or phrases were called – was carefully recorded and shared with other cryptanalysts as they struggled to read other messages. It was a slog. There was no cinematic moment where a flash of inspiration suddenly revealed the hidden secrets of a particular message. The daily experience of cryptanalysts was frustration and a gloomy sense of failure.

Ultimately, though, their efforts paid off. U.S. Navy successes at Coral Sea and Midway in early 1942 – a time when the Imperial Japanese Navy outclassed the U.S. Pacific Fleet in numbers of ships, training, tactics, and combat experience – were made possible by information gained through American radio intelligence, comprised of codebreaking, traffic analysis, direction finding, and intelligence analysis.

Felonious Beginning

That the U.S. Navy’s pre-war radio intelligence effort – in typical American fashion, undermanned, underequipped, under-resourced, and underappreciated – should have evolved into an organization that would change the direction of the Pacific War was something of a miracle.

The United States was one of several nations that conducted communications intelligence activities during World War I – the first war in which radio was widely used. Before the war, America had no organization that could intercept another nation’s radio signals. In 1917, as the U.S. entered the conflict, the U.S. Army established America’s first code-breaking office. The Navy did not follow suit, relying on the British Royal Navy for code-breaking support. During the final days of the war, however, the Navy set aside $100,000 in a secret Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) account to fund future code-breaking efforts.

It wasn’t the Navy or even the Army that scored America’s first big code-breaking victory. Instead, it was the U.S. Cipher Bureau, established in 1919 by the State and War Departments and capably headed by cryptologist Hebert O. Yardley. After a year’s effort, the Bureau broke Japan’s primary diplomatic code, giving the U.S. a priceless advantage during the 1921-1922 naval disarmament talks.

Although the Navy benefitted greatly from the Bureau’s success, the service was in no special hurry to develop their own code-breaking capability, especially since there were quicker ways to penetrate an adversary’s communications. By 1920 the secret ONI fund had financed a series of break-ins at the Japanese consulate in New York City. Later, in 1923, a similar operation struck codebreaking gold when Navy agents managed to steal a Japanese code book from the luggage of a visiting Japanese naval officer. The Navy responded by establishing a small code-breaking section to exploit the find and mount additional attacks on foreign codes and ciphers.

From that felonious beginning, the Navy’s code-breaking capability slowly grew. During the 1920’s and 30’s, many of the people who would later lead the Navy’s wartime effort entered the field. Notable among them were the indomitable Agnes Meyer Driscoll – who trained most of the Navy’s key wartime cryptanalysts during the interwar period – and the brilliant Joseph J. Rochefort – who would lead the organization that uncovered Japanese plans at Midway.

During this period, under the leadership of Laurence F. Safford and Rochefort, the Navy developed a network of radio intercept stations, devised methods of deciphering intercepted messages, and built a small staff of trained cryptanalysts and linguists. Depression-era spending limits and the fact that intercepting another nation’s radio communications was actually illegal during those years constrained the Navy’s efforts. Still, by the mid 1930’s the Navy had created the largest cryptological branch within the American military.

Building the Foundation

Under Safford and Rochefort, the Navy developed a three-pronged cryptologic program comprised of direction finding, traffic analysis, and cryptanalysis, or code-breaking. The program was managed from Navy headquarters in Washington DC and included radio intelligence stations at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines. Promising young officers were sent to Japan on three-year assignments to learn Japanese language, customs, and culture. This knowledge would be invaluable later as these officers attempted to glean Japanese intentions from the fragmentary information available through radio intelligence.

As cryptanalysis was not considered career-enhancing in the service, the Navy had some difficulty attracting and keeping talented officers in the field. While Rochefort spent most of the 1930’s studying Japanese and learning cryptanalysis, making him one of the most, if not the most, qualified cryptanalysts in the U.S. military, the service, made sure he remained a well-rounded officer by periodically taking him away from communications intelligence work and assigning him to sea duty. This was the pattern for other cryptanalysts, as well.

Still, during the 1920’s and 1930’s, the Navy succeeded in building a foundation that would support a vastly expanded and spectacularly successful communications intelligence effort during the Pacific War. That expansion began in earnest in the late 1930’s, as war with Japan became ever more likely, and accelerated after the Germans invaded Poland in 1939.

By the time the December, 1941 Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor ignited war between the United States and Japan, the Navy’s communications intelligence infrastructure in the Pacific included listening stations at Guam, the Philippines, Oahu, and Washington state; a network of high-frequency direction-finding stations at numerous sites throughout the region; and radio intelligence centers at Pearl Harbor and Cavite in the Philippines. A third radio intelligence center at Washington DC directed radio intelligence activities in the Pacific while a British radio intelligence group in Singapore shared information with the Americans.

During this period, the three stations – Cavite, Pearl Harbor, and Washington DC – worked well together. Later, personality clashes and a struggle for supremacy within the Navy would hinder cooperation and result in Rochefort spending a year in command of a self-propelled floating drydock, but in the months between Pearl Harbor and Midway, cooperation was excellent.

It Wasn’t All Codebreaking

The Cavite unit, located in Manila, had grown to nearly 70 officers and men by the end of 1941. At Pearl Harbor, Rochefort led an organization that included 100 officers and enlisted men. Nearly all were assigned to direction-finding and traffic analysis, with only a handful available for codebreaking work. 

As the United States and Japan edged closer to war in 1940 and 1941, the Navy relied primarily on radio direction finding and traffic analysis to monitor Japan’s war preparations.

Traffic analysis was the core of radio intelligence and it involved learning everything possible about an intercepted message without actually decoding it. By analyzing the identities of senders and receivers, the volume of radio activity, command relationships between senders and receivers, traffic patterns that matched previous operations, types of units being messaged, and other information, traffic analysts could uncover significant details of an adversary’s operations.

Sensitive direction-finding (DF) antennas located throughout the Pacific could receive radio signals from extremely long distances and identify the precise bearing of, or direction to, the radio transmitter. If a signal was received at two or more DF sites, technicians could plot the bearings from the sites and accurately locate the transmitter.

Though valuable, traffic analysis and direction finding could not match the potential of codebreaking, which promised to reveal far more information about Japanese activities and intentions.

Red, Blue, and Purple

Thanks to the theft of a Japanese code book in 1923, by the mid-1930’s the Navy had already made considerable progress against the Japanese Red Code – so named because the Navy bound copies of the purloined codebook in red. 

When the Japanese replaced the Red Code with a similar code – the Blue Code – the Americans were able to use their knowledge of the earlier code’s structure to break into the Blue Code. By 1939, the Americans had penetrated the Blue Code and several minor codes used for weather messages, shipping information, and harbormaster operations.

In late 1940, a cooperative effort by US Navy and Army codebreakers also succeeded in solving the primary Japanese diplomatic code. Unlike the manual Red and Blue codes, the diplomatic code – known as Purple – was a machine code, in that messages comprised of code groups were further enciphered by an electro-mechanical coding machine. Somehow, American cryptanalysts, despite never having seen the original machine, managed to deduce the operation of the coding machine through mathematical analysis of intercepted messages and build a working copy of the device that could strip away the encipherment of the code groups. Once the encipherment was removed, the Americans could attack the code groups manually using standard cryptanalysis techniques.

An Assembly-Line Process

So, how did manual code-breaking really work? How did collaboration, pattern recognition, record-keeping, trial and error, and perseverance lead to victory at Midway?

Beginning in June, 1939, Japan was using a new naval operations code, which the Americans called JN-25. Though based on the earlier Red and Blue Codes, JN-25 was more complex, providing three distinct layers of protection.

First, each word or numeral in the message was replaced by a five-digit number, called a code group. There were more than 33,000 individual code groups, each representing a word, phrase, letter, or number. Earlier codes had used four-character code groups.  

Second, the code groups, were further enciphered, or superenciphered, by adding random numbers to each group. These numbers were called ‘additives’ and 30,000 of them were provided in a separate book. The additive values were added to the code groups, changing the numbers and disguising the underlying code groups. The message drafter randomly selected a starting point in the additive book and then used the additives in sequence. A different additive value was applied to each code group.

Finally, the message contained the starting point in the additive book where the sequence of additives began, so the message recipient knew where to find the string of additives.  The receiver of the message subtracted the additives to reveal the underlying code groups, and then looked up the code groups in the code book to uncover the message content.

The task for the Navy’s radio intelligence team was to intercept the message, convert the Morse code to numbers, remove the additives to reveal the code groups, and figure out what the code groups meant. It was an assembly-line process where intercepted messages were catalogued, assessed, evaluated, and deciphered in turn by radiomen at the intercept stations and DF sites, and cryptanalysts, translators, linguists, data processing assistants, and intelligence analysts at the radio intelligencer centers.

Intercepted messages were first examined for information that could be used in traffic analysis, including the message sender, recipients, call signs used, length of the message, time of day it was sent, circuit used, message format, radio direction-finding information and other external cues. After traffic analysis, the intercepts were sorted, duplicated, and provided to cryptanalysts who had the seemingly impossible task of identifying the additives, stripping them off to reveal the code groups, and deciphering the underlying code groups.

The Staring Process

Because details of America’s codebreaking effort remained classified for decades after the war, few published sources have discussed the actions cryptanalysts took to decipher the additives and code groups. But even in the few accounts that are available, codebreakers struggled to describe the process, although they all agree that it was grueling.

Rochefort said he would begin with “the staring process.”

“You look at all the messages that you have,” he said. “You line them up in various ways; you write them one below the other; you write them in various forms and you stare at them. Pretty soon you’d notice a pattern; you’d notice a definite pattern between these messages. That is the first clue.”

Some codebreakers would uncover additives by making up potential additives and subtracting them from a column of enciphered numbers pulled from messages. If the results were divisible by three – as all code groups were, as a check the Japanese used to guard against coding or transmission errors – then the codebreaker would know that they had discovered an additive.

Codebreakers arranged new messages on large sheets filled with numbers pulled from earlier messages to look for patterns. If they found a repeated sequence, they would pull the earlier messages and examine them for information that could help uncover the new message.

Sometimes codebreakers would make educated guesses about the meaning of words or phrases and replace code groups with those guesses – a process called ‘cribbing.’

Having searchable records of thousands of earlier messages was critical to the process. So was the careful preparation of charts, graphs, and tables to identify repeated sequences or patterns. But in the end, it sometimes came down to a flash of insight where the codebreaker suddenly saw what they had been looking for.

That insight, of course, would mean that a single additive, or – if additives had already been stripped off – a single code group might be identified. But there were more than 30,000 additives and more than 33,000 code groups, so reading a single word was usually a very small step forward. Plus, the Japanese periodically replaced their code groups and additive books with updated versions, sending American codebreakers back to square one.

Still, the American cryptanalysts carried on. Codebreakers at all of the radio intelligence centers worked together to create and share lists of the additives and code groups they had identified. Any flash of brilliance or inspiration occurred as part of a large-scale cooperative process.

“Codes are broken not by solitary individuals,” wrote Liza Mundy in her 2017 bestselling book Code Girls, “but by groups of people trading pieces of things they have learned and noticed and collected; little glittering bits of numbers and other useful items they have stored up in their heads like magpies, things they remember while looking over one another’s shoulders, pointing out patterns that that turn out to be the key that unlocks the code.” 

As more and more additives and code groups were identified, that knowledge helped uncover additional additives and code groups. The work was cumulative, and it was greatly assisted by painstaking maintenance of voluminous files of intercepted messages, identified additives, and deciphered code groups. The use of electro-mechanical sorting machines – rudimentary data processing devices – including punchers, sorters, and tabulators, also helped speed up the process. When additives were stripped from an intercepted message, the uncovered code groups were hand-punched on I.B.M cards, recorded, and the cards were hand-sorted. The meaning of deciphered code groups was also stored.

Decrypted messages were recorded by hand on index cards, with key information underlined. Multiple copies of the cards were made and the copies filed by in separate batches according to the underlined information. Later, when cryptanalysts were working a message, they might recall a similar message and they would have a way to find it.

The greater the number of messages intercepted and worked, the more information became available, and the easier the task became.  But the idea that at some point these codes were “broken,” and the Americans could read entire messages is false.

One Word Out of Five

The Japanese introduced the original version of their JN-25 operational code in June of 1939. As the version was significantly more complex than the code it replaced, it took the Americans more than a year to decrypt any significant information, but by November 1940 they were beginning to produce intelligible text from JN-25 intercepts. In December of 1940, however, the Japanese introduced a revised version (JN-25a), which set U.S. cryptanalysts back again.  The Americans were not able to read anything in the revised code until late 1941.

By December, 1941, American cryptanalysts could read less than 10 percent of the Japanese code groups. Messages that did not contain any of the recovered code groups would remain a total blank. So, in the critical months before Pearl Harbor, Navy radio intelligence was restricted to traffic analysis and direction finding. On December 4, 1941, as the Japanese carrier striking force bore down on the Hawaiian Islands, the Japanese introduced another revised version of JN-25.

Following the Pearl Harbor attack, the U.S. Navy reorganized its codebreaking operations, and assigned Rochefort’s Pearl Harbor unit to lead the JN-25b effort. Before that, Rochefort’s station had been assigned to different Japanese codes, while stations in Washington DC and the Philippines worked on JN-25. At that point, Washington DC and the Philippines had made only minor inroads into JN-25, and though they had determined the structure of the code and uncovered several thousand code groups, they were not yet able to read Japanese intercepts.

Shocked by the scale and speed of Japanese victories in the first weeks of the war, Rochefort and his unit, assisted by Washington and Cavite, redoubled their efforts against JN-25. By April 1942 – a month before the Battle of the Coral Sea and two months before the Battle of Midway – Rochefort’s cryptanalysts were able to read approximately one fifth of the code groups in the JN-25b code.

It was enough.

By combining information gained through traffic analysis, direction-finding, fragments of decrypted message traffic, and their understanding of Japanese language, military culture, capabilities and strategic intentions, the Americans were able to identify critical details of Japan’s Port Moresby operation and, more importantly, discover the existence of a larger operation being planned that would eventually be revealed as an invasion of Midway.

Traffic analysis and direction finding helped identify and locate units that were preparing for the operation, while cryptanalysis uncovered tantalizing shards of movement orders, requests for supplies, casualty reports, and other operational messages. Linguists and intelligence analysts pored over the partial decrypts, connecting the dots and filling in as many blanks as they could. Rochefort, especially, was adept at deriving Japanese intentions from the fragmentary clues available.

Pacific Fleet Intelligence chief Edwin Layton later wrote that “Rochefort’s sixth sense in assembling seemingly unrelated information in partially decrypted enemy messages and turning the puzzle into an accurate picture of enemy intentions” was the key to the American success at the Battle of the Coral Sea.

The battle also boosted Pacific Fleet Commander Chester Nimitz’s trust in radio intelligence.

The Next Big Thing

Even as the Coral Sea fight was raging, Rochefort was pushing his unit to uncover details of the next big operation. By the middle of May they were solving as many as forty percent of JN-25 code groups. Since the groups that were solved tended to be the code groups used most frequently, cryptanalysts were able to determine the meaning of – or at least, make a reasonably informed guess at the meaning of – a high percentage of intercepted messages.

Of course, only a fraction of Japanese radio traffic was intercepted. The number of messages being transmitted was far too high at that stage of the war for the Americans to intercept enough to provide a complete picture of Japanese plans. During the month before Midway, when the Americans were desperate to uncover additional details of Japanese plans, Navy radiomen intercepted no more than 60 percent of Japanese traffic and cryptanalysts decoded parts of just 40 percent of the messages copied.

Through the month of May, Rochefort’s team slowly discerned the outline of the Japanese Midway operation. Indications flowed to the intelligence analysts in seemingly unremarkable bits.

The volume of message traffic was extremely high, and traffic analysis placed key Japanese fleet units in home waters. Partially decrypted messages described the merging of several Japanese carrier groups into a single striking force. Other messages arranged refueling rendezvous, ordered destroyers to meet up with a carrier striking force, curtailed shipyard periods, mentioned a landing force and an occupation force, and requested charts for the Aleutians and the area around Midway.

Each scrap of information filled in another piece of the enormous puzzle that Rochefort and his team were struggling over. No message was completely understood. But words or phrases from many hundreds of messages, information from traffic analysis, and knowledge of previous Japanese operations were laboriously knitted together to create a recognizable picture of Japanese intentions.

By mid-May Rochefort could say with certainty that the Japanese Navy’s mighty Second Fleet was assembling an invasion force at Saipan. Meanwhile, at least four large carriers – the Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu, and Soryu – were to rendezvous in Japan’s Inland Sea, then head toward an unknown destination after 21 May.

Based on the use of a geographic designator that they knew had been used in previous message traffic to identify Midway, the Americans were virtually certain that the intended target was Midway. Nimitz and Admiral King in Washington agreed. While there was always a chance that some of the information that codebreakers had deduced was transmitted as part of a Japanese deception campaign, Nimitz would act based on Rochefort’s assessment.

Okay, But When?

But so far, Rochefort had not been able to uncover the planned dates of the Japanese attack. Without knowing when the Japanese force intended to strike Midway, Nimitz would be unable to place his three carriers in the proper position.

So, during the last week of May, Rochefort’s team began a meticulous review of all messages that had been intercepted in the period 19-20 May. While these messages had already been decoded, portions remained unbroken. Somewhere in the still-coded fragments was the date and time of the attack.

On 25 May, the Americans discovered a partially decrypted message that included the code groups for ‘Midway’ and ‘attack’ and also included a time-date group that had been separately enciphered in a highly complex and rarely used process that Navy cryptanalysts had not been able to solve.

Miraculously, two of Rochefort’s cryptanalysts, Joseph Finnegan and Wesley Wright, working through the night, were able to deduce the structure of the table that the Japanese had used to encipher the date/time group. The date of the planned strike at Midway was 4 June, while the Aleutians would be struck on 3 June.

This was the key. The U.S. Navy would be able to place its available striking power – the undamaged carriers Enterprise and Hornet and the damaged but still operational Yorktown – northwest of Midway, in position to launch a surprise air attack against Yamamoto’s carriers as soon as they could be located.

By the evening of June 4, American carrier airstrikes had destroyed all four of the Japanese carriers. The American victory would not have been possible without the contributions of the radio intelligence organizations.

Rochefort, in one of the great understatements of the war, explained simply, “We felt that we had earned our pay.”

February 4, 2021

Image credit: Painting: The Famous Four Minutes by R. G. Smith

Sources:

Layton, Edward; And I Was There; William Morrow and Company; NY; 1985.

Carlson, Elliot; Joe Rochefort’s War; Naval Institute Press; Annapolis, MD; 2011.

Mundy, Liza; Code Girls; Hachette Books; NY, Boston; 2017.

Kahn, David; The Codebreakers; Scribner; NY; 1967.

Prados, John; Combined Fleet Decoded; Random House; NY; 1995.

Haufler, Hervie; Codebreakers’ Victory: How the Allied Cryptographers Won World War II; Open Road Integrated Media, NY, 2003.

National Security Agency Central Security Service; Pearl Harbor Review: JN-25; National Security Agency Central Security Service > About Us > Cryptologic Heritage > Center for Cryptologic History > Pearl Harbor Review > JN-25 (nsa.gov); Retrieved 5.22.2020.

Rutherford, Heather: Codebreakers: From the Civil War to Midway to Virtual Reality; Chips, The Department of the Navy’s Information Technology Magazine; October-December 2014; https://www.doncio.navy.mil/Chips/ArticleDetails.aspx?ID=5628 Retrieved 5.22.2020.

Station Hypo Started Reading Japanese JN-25b; Blog post, StationHypo.com; https://stationhypo.com/2016/03/05/march-5-1942-station-hypo-started-reading-japanese-jn-25/#more-421  Retrieved 5.22.2020.

This article is also posted on the Military History Now website. https://militaryhistorynow.com/2021/02/03/u-s-navy-codebreakers-americas-cryptanalysis-coup-at-the-battle-of-midway-was-20-years-in-the-making/

They were the Navy’s last chance.

It was 10:20 am on Thursday, June 4, 1942. Forty-seven U. S. Navy dive bombers had found what they were looking for. Far below, four Japanese aircraft carriers were launching the first planes of a massive strike that could decide the Battle of Midway. Two days of American air and submarine attacks had failed to damage a single ship of the peerless Japanese Aircraft Carrier Striking Force. The priceless intelligence advantage the Americans had gained through years of backbreaking effort by Navy codebreakers was about to be squandered. The heroic sacrifice of Navy torpedo plane crews who had pressed home their slow-motion attacks in the face of deadly Japanese opposition looked to be in vain.

But now, at the last possible moment, three squadrons of SBD Dauntless dive bombers from the American aircraft carriers USS Yorktown and USS Enterprise had arrived unobserved and unopposed in the skies above the Japanese fleet.

Somehow, against all odds, the Americans had achieved precisely the situation that Navy commanders had dreamed of: dozens of American dive bombers screaming down on Japanese flight decks jammed with fueled and armed aircraft, fueling hoses snaked about, bombs and torpedoes scattered hastily throughout the hangar bays.

The broad flight decks of the Japanese carriers were perfect targets for the American pilots whose aircraft, training, and combat tactics had been designed for precisely this type of attack. Dive bombing had been developed by the U.S. Navy in the 1930’s, and in 1942 it was the most accurate form of air attack. That was one reason that Navy carrier air groups had more dive bombers than any other type of aircraft. By pointing his plane directly at the target until he released his weapon, a skilled pilot could keep his eye on the target throughout his dive and simplify his bomb’s trajectory.

No Easy Task

But success was far from certain. This was just the second great carrier versus carrier battle of the Pacific War, and no one yet knew what to expect. Pilots from Yorktown had fought at Coral Sea, but pilots from Enterprise had not. Dive bombers from the third US carrier at Midway, USS Hornet, hadn’t even found the Japanese fleet.

Pre-war doctrine supposed that aircraft carriers couldn’t survive a massed air strike. But at Coral Sea, one month earlier, three of the four fleet aircraft carriers that were attacked – two Japanese and two American – did survive.  Yorktown was one of those survivors. Pre-war doctrine also held that B-17s could effectively bomb ships from high altitude, but attacks against Japanese ships by B-17s at Midway scored no hits. It was becoming clear that the real war was going to be different from the war that was envisioned.

The dive bombing attacks themselves would be difficult. Carriers were big targets, but they were moving fast and the American pilots would have to fly precise flight profiles to hit them. During their 40-second dives, the aviators would have to continuously work their rudder pedals and sticks to correct their plane’s speed, heading, and dive angle to remain on target while the carriers maneuvered violently. For much of the dive, the pilots could track their targets through spotting scopes, similar to the scopes that snipers mounted on their rifles. But the scopes simply provided a 3X magnified view; it was up to the pilots to make the necessary adjustments in three axes to ensure a hit.

Today A Computer Would Do It

The plane’s dive flaps held the bomber’s speed to about 276 knots, giving the pilot a little more time to make adjustments, but also making the plane an easier target for enemy anti-aircraft gunners and defending fighters. For gunners on the targeted ships, a diving plane appeared motionless, slowly growing in size as it neared, which greatly simplified their aim. Fortunately for the dive bomber crews, most antiaircraft mounts lacked the ability to fire directly up, so the amount of fire the planes received from the targeted ship was limited.

American dive bombers typically approached their targets at an altitude of around 20,000 feet, flying at more than 200 knots. When they spotted their targets, dive bomber pilots increased speed and descended to about 8,000 feet. Since Japanese ships mostly lacked radar, whenever possible the Americans approached their targets from out of the sun. When over the target, pilots pulled the noses of their planes up to put the aircraft into a stall, opened their dive flaps, and raced down toward their target.

The ideal dive angle was 70 degrees, and the dive might take 30-40 seconds. During that time the rear seat radioman/gunner – on his back, facing the sky – would be nearly weightless, and gunners have described how spent shell casings that had fallen to floor of the plane would drift up past their eyes. The pilot hoped to release his bomb when he was between 2000 and 1500 feet above the target. At that altitude the bomb would fall for less than 10 seconds, but even during that short time a ship evading at 30 kts might move 500 feet.

So, the pilot had to fly a narrow flight profile, continuously adjusting his own deflection, speed, and dive angle to correct for the movement of the target, for the effect of gravity, and for the effect of the wind on his plane and on his bomb, once it was released. He had to correctly estimate the wind direction and speed and the target ship’s current course and speed and aim where the target ship would be when the bomb reached the surface. If the dive angle was slightly off, the bomb would land short or fly past the target. If the plane’s heading was slightly off, the bomb might miss to either side.

Cockpit of SBD-6 dive bomber
(Photo credit: https://airandspace.si.edu/webimages/collections/full/2009-12496.jpg)

Since aircraft – even dive bombers – are designed to fly horizontally, putting a plane into a 70-degree dive alters the forces affecting the aircraft and causes the attacking plane to drift across the target, decreasing accuracy. Dive flaps helped correct this problem, but it was just one more thing that pilots had to contend with.

Today a computer would instantly process the flood of incoming information and fly the correct profile, but in 1942 the pilot was the computer.

Insanely Dangerous

Once the bomb was released, the aviator pulled out of his dive, a maneuver that might leave him struggling to breathe as he experienced as much as six times the force of gravity. These stresses were considerable and dive bombers were built to handle them, but pilots could be rendered briefly unconscious by the forces. If everything went well, the bomber would level off at around 500 feet and the pilot would start jinking rapidly to avoid anti-aircraft fire from enemy ships and defending fighters.

This, of course, was the primary drawback to dive bombing.  Pointing your plane at an enemy ship and diving as close as possible before releasing your weapon sounded good in theory and was accurate in practice. But finishing your bombing run directly over your target at 500 feet altitude was insanely dangerous. Shipboard gunners probably couldn’t hit you as you flashed by, just above their masts. But your escape would leave you in antiaircraft range for a long time, and at an altitude of 500 feet you would have little room to maneuver if attacked from above by enemy fighters.

The vulnerability of dive bombers after releasing their weapons was a major reason why the Germans abandoned dive bombing attacks against land targets whenever enemy fighters were present. By mid-1942, a German dive bombers’ life expectancy in combat had fallen to less than five days.

There was nothing easy about hitting a moving target at sea in the face of anti-aircraft fire or defending fighters. The plane is moving, the target is moving, and the air around the plane is moving. It takes many hours of practice and considerable skill. At Midway, Marine Corps pilots who had just received new dive bombers attacked Japanese ships using glide bombing techniques because they had not been sufficiently trained in dive bombing. They scored no hits.

By Chance A Coordinated Attack

By the time the Navy dive bombers arrived above the Japanese carriers, U.S. land-based and carrier-based planes had been attacking the Japanese formation nearly continuously for two hours. While no hits had been achieved, and more than 35 American aircraft had been shot down, the uncoordinated attacks had disrupted Japanese operations, scattered their ships, and drawn Japanese fighter planes down to the surface of the sea.

Two SBD squadrons from Enterprise arrived together, while a third squadron from Yorktown arrived simultaneously from another direction. The coordinated attack was pure chance, as the Americans had made no effort to have all of their attacking planes arrive over the Japanese fleet at the same time. The Yorktown bombers had actually taken off an hour later than the Enterprise planes.

Dive bombers, torpedo bombers, and fighters all had different ranges and speeds, and coordinating their arrival over a moving target whose location at the time of arrival could only be guessed at was impossible in 1942.  Planes could only be launched one at a time, so it might take an hour to launch a full strike force. By then, the first planes launched would have used thirty minutes or more worth of fuel circling their own ships. Without knowing exactly where the enemy ships would be when the strike would arrive, it was impossible to calculate courses and speeds that would bring all the planes over the enemy at the same time. At Midway, desperate to strike the Japanese carriers before they could attack the U.S. carriers, American commanders sent their planes off in small groups as soon as they were launched. That decision doomed the torpedo bombers – 39 of 43 were shot down – but inadvertently opened the way for the dive bombers to attack unhindered by Japanese fighters.

Communications Failures Almost Saved a Japanese Carrier

Miscommunication between the attacking SBDs almost spared one of the Japanese carriers. LCDR Wade McClusky, Enterprise Air Group Commander, wanted one of his squadrons to attack the carrier Kaga, and the second to attack carrier Akagi. But the pilots didn’t hear his instructions and both squadrons dove on Kaga. At the last moment, one of the section leaders, Lt. Richard Best, realized what was happening and redirected his five-plane section to attack Akagi. The luckless Japanese carrier was struck with just one bomb, but the secondary explosions from fueled and armed aircraft ignited massive fires that couldn’t be contained. Kaga, attacked by more than twenty planes, was struck four or five times.

Meanwhile, Yorktown’s squadron, approaching from the other side of the formation, dove on a third Japanese carrier, the Soryu, striking her with at least three bombs and leaving her aflame.  The fourth Japanese carrier, Hiryu, was hidden by a rain squall and was not attacked. This would prove disastrous for the Yorktown later, as the undamaged Hiryu would launch a retaliatory strike that would cripple the American carrier. Yorktown would be sunk on June 7 by a Japanese submarine.

By 10:25 am, three of Japan’s front-line aircraft carriers were blazing wrecks.  Later that day, Hiryu would be attacked and destroyed as well. The Japanese canceled their planned invasion of Midway and withdrew. Their attempt to destroy the U.S. carriers in a decisive battle was a failure.

Eighteen Dive Bombers Were Lost

No one knows for sure how many attacking SBDs were shot down at Midway, but it is known that 18 of the 47 dive bombers that struck the Japanese carriers that morning never made it back to their ships. Two others had to ditch near their carriers because the pilots feared they didn’t have enough fuel to actually land. Some planes were shot from the sky, others crashed into the sea when they ran out of fuel. At least three aircrewmen were plucked from the sea by the Japanese and were interrogated and executed.

Damaged VB-6 SBD-3 on USS Yorktown after the attack on Kaga at Midway.
(Official U.S. Navy photo from the U.S. Navy Naval History and Heritage Command)

During the Battle of Midway, the US deployed a total of 223 carrier aircraft and 113 land-based planes of various types, including B-17 bombers, torpedo bombers, fighters, and SBD dive bombers. But the only significant damage inflicted against the Japanese was by SBD dive bombers. Overall, the United States lost 92 officers, 215 enlisted men, an aircraft carrier, a destroyer, and approximately 150 aircraft at Midway.

A Rugged Little Plane

The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps would operate SBD Dauntless dive bombers for the rest of war, even though a replacement plane, the Curtis SB2C Helldiver, had been designed by mid-1941. But delays in development of the more powerful SB2C meant that SBD’s remained the Navy’s primary dive bomber until 1943. Marine Corps Dauntlesses operating from Henderson Field played a critical role in the Battle of Guadalcanal.

The SBD Dauntless was a rugged little plane that could absorb significant damage and still make it back, which made it popular with its crews. The plane possessed long range, good handling characteristics, maneuverability, a potent bomb load, and outstanding defensive armament. Early in the war, when US carriers operated only a single squadron of fighters, SBD’s were sometimes deployed to defend their carriers from torpedo bombers as part of a low-level combat air patrol. At the Battle of Coral Sea, while defending USS Lexington and Yorktown, SBDs shot down several Japanese torpedo bombers.

The Dauntless was one of the most successful and important US aircraft of the Pacific War. SBD’s sank more enemy shipping than any other aircraft, including six aircraft carriers, 14 cruisers, 6 destroyers, 15 transports or cargo ships, and countless smaller craft.

Nearly 6,000 SBD’s were built during the war.  A handful remain, including a veteran of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Midway at the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, FL.

SBD Bureau Number 2106, is a survivor of the attack on Pearl Harbor and participated in dive bombing runs against a Japanese carrier during the pivotal Battle of Midway,
Photo credit: National Naval Aviation Museum

March 5, 2020

For more information see:

The Dauntless Dive Bomber of World War II by Barrett Tillman (US Naval Institute Press, Annapolis Md, 1976)

This article was originally published on the Military History Now website: https://militaryhistorynow.com/2020/03/08/dive-bombers-at-midway-how-the-dauntless-sbd-turned-the-tide-in-the-pacific-wars-most-important-naval-battle/

The war was going badly for the North Koreans, and it was about to get worse.

It was September 14, 1950, more than 11 weeks after North Korea’s June 25 invasion of South Korea. The North’s military planners had expected that it would take just four weeks to crush the Republic of Korea (ROK) army and reunify the peninsula under the communist government of Kim Il-Sung. But now it was mid-September and South Korean forces and their American allies still held a toehold around the port of Pusan. A last-gasp North Korean offensive had failed to break the ROK/U.S. lines.

North Korea was not prepared to fight a long campaign, especially against an enemy that had complete control of the air and sea.

At first, the invasion had gone exactly as planned. North Korea’s army was better equipped, better trained, and more experienced than South Korea’s forces, and the communists had quickly smashed through the southern defenses and driven the disorganized and demoralized survivors 150 miles south toward the tip of the peninsula where they would surely be trapped and annihilated.

But North Korea’s timetable had been upended catastrophically when the United States intervened with air, sea, and ground forces.  Neither the North Koreans, nor the Soviets and the Chinese, who had both reluctantly agreed to support the invasion, believed that the United States would respond to the North Korean attack with military forces of its own.

A Shocking Decision

But within 72 hours of the invasion, President Truman, erroneously believing that the Soviet Union had ordered the invasion and fearing that it might be the opening move in a world-wide communist offensive, had ordered U.S. air and naval forces to intervene. Three days later he ordered American ground forces into action, shocking the North Koreans and their patrons. On July 3, 1950 American carrier-based planes launched their first strikes against North Korean targets and within weeks were attacking North Korean troops pushing south. U.S. ground forces – although shamefully ineffective at first – arrived in increasing numbers and showed increasing competence. Supplies and reinforcements flowed through Pusan and the U.S. and ROK forces gained strength, finally halting the North Korean advance near Pusan. The objective of the North Korean invasion plan was to smash the ROK forces and occupy the entire country before the United States could rearm or resupply their ally.  But they hadn’t expected the U. S. to join the fighting.

One Last Push

On September 1, weeks after the war was supposed to be over, North Korea had launched its last big push against the U.S. and ROK lines surrounding Pusan. For their Naktong offensive, the North Koreans threw everything they had left at the U.S. and ROK defenders. It wasn’t enough.

Two months of steadily increasing U.S. air attacks against North Korean supply lines and stiffening resistance by American and South Korean ground forces had bled the North Korean army dry. To launch their attack, they had stripped defending troops from most of the key places they had captured, including the port of Inchon, and thrown thousands of untrained conscripts into battle.

Though weakened by horrific casualties and shortages of food, ammunition, and fuel, the North Korean attackers pushed forward grimly. Initially they made encouraging gains, and in a few places they actually broke through. But American and South Korean forces patched the breaches and threw the North Koreans back. With U.S. and ROK forces growing stronger, and the North Koreans reeling, it looked like the next phase of the war would be a United Nations offensive that would break the siege of Pusan and force the North Koreans back up the peninsula’s harsh terrain, one bloody mile after another.

The North Koreans were exhausted, outnumbered and running out of everything, including time. They were facing complete destruction, and neither the Soviets nor the Chinese were willing to provide military forces.

Worse, they knew that the Americans and their United Nations allies were preparing for an amphibious landing and they had no way to prevent it.

The UN landing – codenamed Operation Chromite – would take place on September 15 at the port city of Inchon, halfway up the Korean peninsula on the Yellow Sea. Planned by the American General Douglas MacArthur in his role as United Nations commander, the invasion would succeed brilliantly and lead directly to the rout of the North Korean army.

Because the landing was so successful and was accomplished at such low cost to UN forces, many observers have assumed that the North Koreans were surprised. That was hardly the case.  In fact, the landing at Inchon was one of the worst-kept secrets of the Korean War.

Operation Common Knowledge

It didn’t take any actual espionage to realize what MacArthur was planning. First of all, an amphibious landing behind the North Korean lines was a glaringly obvious maneuver, especially since UN forces had complete air and naval supremacy.  MacArthur himself had conducted dozens of similar landings during World War II to bypass Japanese strongpoints on New Guinea and in the Philippines. His belief in the value of an amphibious capability was so strong that he made certain the Far East forces he commanded from Japan were trained to conduct amphibious operations.

Before the war was one week old, MacArthur had ordered his staff to begin planning an amphibious assault behind the North Korean advance at Inchon to relieve pressure on the retreating ROK/U.S. units. That landing, codenamed Operation Bluehearts, was to have taken place before the end of July.

But the North Korean advance was so rapid, the performance of the retreating ROK troops so lacking, and the combat readiness of the U.S. forces that had been hastily dispatched to Korea from occupation duty in Japan so abysmal, that by the end of July the North Koreans were threatening to push the ROK/U.S. forces right off the peninsula. MacArthur had to turn his immediate attention to holding Pusan and its priceless port, without which the war could not be won.

So Bluehearts was canceled, but would soon be resurrected as Operation Chromite, once the ROK/U.S. position at Pusan was stabilized. By the beginning of August, MacArthur began planning Chromite in earnest.

MacArthur needed troops, transport ships, landing craft, and supplies for a major landing, and there was no way to get them without the help of hundreds of military and civilian planners, logisticians, and schedulers from staffs in Tokyo, Pearl Harbor, Washington DC, and allied capitals. Hundreds of civilians in Japan and other locations were being contracted to provide supplies or services in support of the operation. The recall of Marine reservists, the stockpiling of supplies, and preparations to use Japanese-crewed landing ships for the assault ensured that even the most obtuse observer could divine what was about to happen. Operational security was so compromised that American officers in Tokyo began referring to the planned landing as “Operation Common Knowledge.”

Mao’s Warning Ignored

Alarmed by the massive build-up of troops and ships, two weeks before the Inchon landing China’s Mao Zedong warned Kim to prepare for a landing at Inchon and urged him to strengthen defenses there.  But Kim told a Chinese emissary that the North Koreans did not believe that the UN forces had the strength to mount an amphibious landing.

Whatever strength MacArthur could muster, it was clear, though unstated, that North Korea lacked the strength to defend Inchon and simultaneously break the ROK/American lines at Pusan. Documents captured at Pyongyang later in the war showed that the North Koreans knew about the landing at Inchon before the end of August, but could do little to stop it. They had already stripped their defenses there and almost everywhere else to reinforce their offensive at Pusan, and those troops weren’t coming back. Although the North Koreans had plans to mine the harbor at Inchon, they never got to it. But even unmined and nearly undefended, Inchon was going to be no easy task for the Americans.

The Worst Possible Place

While MacArthur’s decision to conduct an amphibious landing might have been more conventional wisdom than genius, his fierce conviction that Inchon was the one place where the landing must occur was, in fact, a masterstroke.  MacArthur could not have found a physically less suitable landing area for an amphibious attack if he had searched for ten years. Everyone who knew what Inchon was like was aghast. But MacArthur believed that landing at Inchon would place his forces in the best position to cut the North Korean supply lines and crush the North Korean army besieging Pusan. His eloquent and powerful defense of the plan persuaded the skeptics – which included his nominal bosses on the Joint Chiefs of Staff – and eventually the landing was approved.

Not that the skeptics were wrong. Inchon really was a terrible place for an amphibious landing. For one thing, there were no actual beaches. The landings would have to be made against stone sea walls which rose as high as eight feet above the decks of the landing craft, forcing assault troops to use ladders to get ashore.  The only possible landing zones were in the heart of the city, which meant that once ashore, MacArthur’s troops would immediately be faced with the possibility of building-to-building combat, a type of warfare that heavily favored the defenders and seemed certain to trap the Marines in a bloody urban battle of attrition.

Landing ships could only approach the sea walls at maximum high tide, which only occurred twice each month.  At all other times the approaches to the shore were blocked by miles of impassable mud flats.  Tides at Inchon ranged from an average of 23 feet to a maximum of 33 feet and the current in the channel reached eight knots.  The two landing “beaches” were located on either side of the main port, more than four miles apart, forcing the Americans to split their forces at the outset.

The city itself was located miles from the open sea and could be reached only after navigating a narrow 10-mile long channel, which could be mined and defended by shore batteries. Near the city the channel was protected by a rugged little island called Wolmi-Do that would have to be captured prior to the main landing, thus ensuring that the North Korean defenders were alerted.

As one naval officer involved in the planning famously recalled, “We drew up a list of every natural and geographic handicap—and Inchon had ’em all.”

Building the Force

But these obstacles were only part of MacArthur’s problems. First, he had to come up with a landing force and ships to bring them ashore. In the five years since the end of World War II, the United States had junked the most successful and best-equipped amphibious force in history. By the time North Korea invaded the south, the U. S. Marine Corps had shrunk from 474,000 marines in 1945 to just over 75,000 in 1950.  The Navy’s demobilization of its amphibious fleet was even more drastic, plummeting from 3,000 ships in 1945 to 148 in 1948.

MacArthur needed more than 40,000 men for his planned assault and most of the readily available combat troops had already been sent to bolster the forces fighting at Pusan. To find two more divisions of troops, the Joint Chiefs would have to dip into America’s strategic reserve, reducing the nation’s ability to fend off another attack elsewhere.

But the chiefs and the president agreed, and by recalling thousands of Marine reservists, rebuilding the Army’s half-strength Seventh Division by stripping units from other commands, increasing America’s military personnel limits, and augmenting the Seventh Division with 8,000 untrained South Korean conscripts, the Joint Chiefs found the troops MacArthur needed.

The Navy didn’t have enough active landing ships in the Pacific to bring the two divisions ashore, so MacArthur assigned fifteen LSTs and two cargo ships that had been turned over to the Army in 1945 to support the occupation forces. These ships had been decommissioned from the Navy and were operated by Japanese crews, much of the specialized equipment needed for a landing had been removed and they were in deplorable condition, but they would have to do. The Navy quickly recommissioned the ships, made some hasty repairs, assigned new commanding officers – although most were frighteningly inexperienced – and added a few signalmen and quartermasters to the Japanese crews to assist with communications and beaching operations.  Smaller landing craft were brought out of storage and reactivated and experienced sailors were flown out from the United States to operate them.

In the end, MacArthur’s Inchon assault force included the First Marine Division, the Seventh Infantry Division, several units of ROK troops, and Corps-level support units, including artillery; supported by a multi-national naval force of 261 ships including amphibious ships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, fire support ships, and minesweepers.

There would, of course, be no time for a rehearsal, and many of the troops were scarcely trained, but though hastily planned, the landing was superbly executed. Less than 90 days from North Korea’s surprise invasion, MacArthur, the U. S. and ROK militaries, and a handful of allies had turned back the North Korean attackers at Pusan and delivered a powerful counterstroke at Inchon.

Another Chinese Warning

As MacArthur had predicted, the landing faced little opposition and U. S. casualties were light.  Despite receiving explicit warnings from the Chinese that a landing at Inchon was possible, the North Koreans had gambled that they could crush the UN forces at Pusan before the Americans could land at Inchon and failed to establish an adequate defense.  Within ten days of the landings the Marines recaptured Seoul.

At Pusan, the strengthening UN forces launched an offensive on 16 September and within days were driving the North Koreans northward.  Trapped between the two UN forces, the already-weakened North Korean army collapsed with astonishing speed.   Fewer than 40,000 stragglers made their way, without equipment, back to North Korea.

The suddenness of the North Korean collapse made the reunification of North and South Korea under the South Korean government look temptingly easy, and despite receiving their own explicit warnings from the Chinese, the Joint Chiefs and President Truman gave MacArthur permission to invade the North.

But the Chinese weren’t bluffing. They would not accept a reunified Korea that was allied with the United States. As MacArthur’s forces charged north, Chinese troops flowed south. By late October, some ROK patrols had reached within a few miles of the Yalu River, the boundary between North Korea and China. On November 25 the Chinese attacked with overwhelming force, driving the U.S. and ROK forces south, over the South Korean border and beyond. Seoul, or what was left of it after being captured and liberated during the summer, was captured again.

Finally, the UN forces stiffened, and slowly pushed the North Koreans back. Once the UN forces had forced the Chinese back into North Korea, the exhausted armies of both sides settled in for a bloody two-year stalemate that was finally ended by an armistice in 1953.

“We shall land at Inchon and I shall crush them.”

– GEN Douglas MacArthur, 23 August 1950

October 11, 2019

Three Japanese bombs saved the USS Marblehead from total destruction in February 1942.

Nearly sunk by Japanese land-based bombers at the battle of Makassar Strait on 4 February 1942, the American light cruiser Marblehead was kept afloat by heroic damage control, inspiring leadership, rigorous training, and the unrelenting courage of her crew. Though grievously damaged – a nine-foot hole in her hull, thirty-four compartments flooded, steering inoperable, electical power reduced, speed nearly halved – during the next 89 days Marblehead sailed more than 20,000 miles to the U.S. east coast for repairs that allowed her to return to the fight before the end of 1942.

Had Japanese pilots missed their target and had Marblehead remained in the combat theater, she almost certainly would have shared the fate of the American cruiser Houston, the Dutch cruisers De Ruyter and Java, the British cruiser Exeter, and the Australian cruiser Perth, all of which were sunk in the doomed allied attempt to defend the the Netherlands East Indies from Japanese invaders during the first three months of 1942.

But Marblehead survived, and her crew of more than 450 men avoided death or years of brutal captivity as prisoners of war.

USS Marblehead was an Omaha-class light cruiser, designed during the First World War and commissioned in 1923. Intended to serve as a long-range scout for the main force of battleships and heavy cruisers, Marblehead and her sisters were optimized for speed and endurance. They originally carried twelve 6-inch guns, mounted in a pair of two-gun turrets and eight casement mounts, an arrangement more appropriate to the Spanish-American War than to World War II.

By the late 1930’s the Omaha cruisers were thoroughly obsolete, though Marblehead herself could still approach her designed speed of 34 knots.

Marblehead had been assigned to the U. S. Asiatic Fleet in 1938, as China’s peasant armies struggled to stem the Japanese invasion of their country. For the next three years Marblehead and the rest of the Asiatic Fleet could only watch nervously as diplomatic relations between America and Japan deteriorated and the Imperial Japanese Navy strengthened its fleet with modern ships and aircraft, gained combat experience, and perfected the world’s most potent aircraft carrier strike force.

Throughout this period the Asiatic Fleet remained woefully weak, with just a pair of cruisers – Marblehead and Houston – twelve aging destroyers, fifteen submarines, and a motley collection of obsolete river craft, escort vessels, minesweepers, tenders, and patrol planes.

But even as war with Japan drew ever-more certain, the U. S. Navy could not spare additional vessels to shore up the Asiatic Fleet. U. S. war plans called for the Asiatic Fleet to fight a rear-guard delaying action, supporting American ground forces in the Philippines as long as possible, then retreating south to support the defense of Singapore and the Dutch East Indies. If those efforts failed, the Asiatic Fleet would retreat further to Australia.

But when war came, the power and speed of the Japanese advance shocked American and allied planners. Eight U. S. battleships were sunk or damaged at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, and British naval power in Asia was broken with the loss of HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales to Japanese air attacks on 8 December. U. S. airpower in the Philippines was virtually destroyed the same day, and the American naval base at Cavite in Manila Bay was wrecked by Japanese air attacks on 10 December. Before the war was four days old, any hope for an effective naval defense of the Philippines was lost.

Within weeks the Asiatic Fleet became part of the hastily organized American, British, Dutch, and Australia (ABDA) command. Unsurprisingly, ABDA’s aging ships and untrained crews would prove to be no match for the disciplined, superbly trained, and well-equipped Japanese.

If ABDA had been created a year or two sooner, if its units had ever worked together and established communications and operational protocols, if the nations involved had agreed on a common strategy, and if the various senior leaders had put aside personal animosities, perhaps ABDA could have put up a stouter defense.

As it was though, the brief, inglorious history of ABDA was a sad tale of neglect, hubris, and hopeless courage in the face of overwhelming Japanese power, leaving the crews of individual ships – including Marblehead – to pay the price.

The end would come quickly for ABDA, but not without a fight. On 24 January 1942, four U. S. destroyers attacked a Japanese landing force at Balikpapan, sinking four transports and a patrol boat.

Marblehead had originally been assigned to participate in the attack, but engine problems forced her out of the line-up. She was replaced by USS Boise, a recent addition to the ABDA fleet. But on the day before the attack, Boise struck an uncharted coral head in the Sapi Strait, damaging her hull and forcing her to withdraw to Ceylon for repairs. She, too, survived the coming disaster. Marblehead was quickly assigned in her stead, but was not able to reach Balikpapan in time to join the attack.

A second attack against Japanese transport shipping planned for 31 January was cancelled when a U. S. scout plane discovered that the Japanese force at Balikpapan had been reinforced by additional cruisers and destroyers. So, the allies assembled a larger force of four cruisers – including Marblehead – and seven destroyers and headed for Makassar Strait.

They never got there.

Japanese aircraft spotted the allied ships near Cape Maduro in the Java Sea and at 9:50 am on 4 February 1942, 36 Japanese bombers attacked the ABDA ships. No allied ships were sunk, but USS Houston suffered a hit that killed 48 sailors and disabled her aft eight-inch gun turret and Marblehead was nearly destroyed.

For more than thirty minutes Marblehead dodged Japanese bombs, twisting and turning at full speed, and throwing up as much anti-aircraft fire as her furious gunners could manage. But at 10:26 am, eight single-engine Japanese bombers passed directly overhead, dropping eight bombs that straddled the ship. One bomb struck Marblehead’s stern, another struck amidships, and a third exploded close aboard forward. Large fires erupted amidships and at the stern and the ship quickly listed eight degrees to starboard. Unseen from the bridge, the near miss off the port bow had ruptured the cruiser’s hull and tons of seawater were rushing into the ship.

Below decks the cruiser was a flaming wreck. The bombs had destroyed the wardroom, which was being used as an emergency medical station, the sick bay below, and the emergency steering room, jamming the ship’s rudders at hard left. Engines racing, Marblehead could only circle to port as gunners peered skyward to spot any further attacks. The main deck was ripped open at the stern; power, water, and communications lines were cut; most berthing areas were smashed; and the after turret was inoperable.

Damage control parties rushed to extinguish fires, shore up damaged compartments, and take stock of the ship’s condition. Twelve crewmen were dead and more than 70 were wounded, some mortally. By noon – less than two hours after the bomb strikes – the fires were out and the rudder had been nearly centered at nine degrees left, although it was still immobile.

But the engines were working and if she held together and stayed afloat Marblehead could still make better than twenty knots. She could be steered on a general course by adjusting the speed of the engines, although she was continually swinging 40 to 50 degrees off course. Twenty-six compartments were flooded completely and eight others were partially flooded. Although the list had been corrected, Marblehead was down by the head by ten feet, and was continuing to flood. She was, in fact, sinking. Already the bow was barely above the sea.

With no reserve buoyancy, all that was keeping her afloat was the creaking efforts of the overworked pumps and desperate bailing by the crew. Any further battle damage would almost certainly sink the ship, and Marblehead was unlikely to survive even moderately heavy seas. In addition, many of the wounded needed treatment that the damaged ship could not provide – they would die if they could not get to a hospital soon. The nearest port with a hospital and rudimentary repair facilities was Tjilitjap, more than 400 miles away. Getting there would require taking the unsteerable, sinking ship through narrow Lombok Strait, with its rushing four-knot current and uncharted shoals. Marblehead would be escorted by two destroyers, but she would remain within range of Japanese bombers the entire way and would be crossing waters that were likely to harbor Japanese submarines.

Her first moments in the strait were hardly promising. As soon as Marblehead entered the rushing current she was pushed fifty degrees off course. Rather than try to recover, Marblehead’s commanding officer, Captain Arthur Robinson, let the ship complete a full circle before trying again. Marblehead made it into the strait on the second try, and somehow stayed off the rocks, even as rain squalls reduced visibility to zero.

They cleared the strait just after midnight and headed west for Tjilatjap. During the long night the crew struggled to keep their ravaged ship afloat. They gained an edge when they manhandled a 3.5-ton pump from the engine room to the main deck where it could match the water rushing in through the breached hull.

That afternoon another flight of Japanese bombers sighted Marblehead and her escorts. But the Japanese planes focused their attacks on the destroyer Paul Jones, possibly mistaking her for the cruiser, and no planes made runs at Marblehead. Undamaged and fully maneuverable, Paul Jones escaped unscathed. Finally, at dawn on February 6, nearly two days after the battle, Marblehead reached Tjilatjap.

But Marblehead’s troubles were far from over. Although there was a Dutch hospital that could care for the most seriously wounded, and a cemetery for the dead, the only drydock in the small port was a floating dock that was too short to accommodate the 550-foot-long cruiser. Unless they could get the ship’s damaged bow out of the water, they had no hope of patching the hole in her bottom.

So they did.

The drydock crew flooded the dock, sinking it below the keel of Marblehead. They then hauled the cruiser’s bow across the threshold, secured the ship as best they could, and pumped out the dock’s tanks, raising the dock and lifting the forward half of Marblehead. The cruiser slanted alarmingly, but the stern remained afloat and the damaged bow was clear of the water. This was no one’s idea of a proper docking and Marblehead was as likely to slide sternward off the dock or capsize the whole rig as it was to remain upright.

But there were no other options and somehow Marblehead stayed put. The docking took three tries, but the third was successful and workers were able to patch the nine-foot hole the near-miss had opened in the ship’s hull. With the massive main engines located near the stern, it was too risky even for Marblehead’s dauntless engineers to try to raise the stern, so repairs to the steering gear would have to wait.

The rudder was still inoperable and not all the leaks could be fixed, but Marblehead’s crew could continue to steer by engines and the ship’s pumps might conceivably keep the vessel afloat during the long voyage to the nearest allied shipyard. Most guns were operable, a temporary patch had been placed over the damaged deck at the stern, additional liferafts had been installed, tons of debris were removed from the ship’s interior, and a device was constructed that would measure the flexing of the damaged hull to give the crew some warning if the ship were about to break apart. It was time to go.

On 13 February 1942, after six days in Tjilatjap under constant threat of Japanese air attack, Marblehead got underway for Ceylon, nearly 4,000 miles distant. Left behind were more than 30 badly wounded sailors who remained at the Dutch hospital and fourteen Marblehead crewmen who had been buried in the European Cemetery at Tjilatjap.

The cruiser hadn’t gone a mile when fresh disaster nearly struck. Unable to steer a straight course, Marblehead was being towed through the minefield protecting Tjilatjap when the towline parted, leaving the damaged cruiser adrift in the narrow channel, surrounded by mines. As the tug backed toward the cruiser to remake the tow, she struck Marblehead’s stem hard, bending the cruiser’s bow and opening a hole near the waterline in the only forward compartment that was still watertight. Miraculously, the Dutch pilot was able to steer Marblehead out of the minefield using the engines.

One more leak wasn’t going to make much difference, so the barely seaworthy and only marginally steerable Marblehead headed for Ceylon, escorted by the submarine tender USS Otus. The tender provided little combat capability, but she wasn’t there to fight; her task was to pick up any survivors if Marblehead went down during the transit, an eventuality which seemed entirely possible, if not exactly likely.

During the voyage, Marblehead’s crew continued to make repairs. Electricians restored electrical power to more parts of the ship while engineers restored fresh water to much of the vessel. They even constructed a make-shift ice machine. These repairs helped, but the ship still needed extensive repairs and drydocking.

But upon arriving at Ceylon on 21 February, Marblehead’s crew was dismayed to learn – though they could hardly have been surprised – that the dockyard was booked for the next month and major repairs would have to wait. So they continued to work on their ship themselves, and by 2 March they managed to repair the steering motors by using parts salvaged from other equipment that had been damaged in the battle. The rudder wouldn’t have full range of motion, and it would have to be operated from the steering engine room, but it was vastly better than steering by engines.

Within an hour of the successful test of the steering gear Marblehead was underway. On 15 March they reached South Africa, where they refueled before entering the Royal Navy dockyard at Simonstown on 24 March.

On 15 April, the freshly patched, fully steerable, and agreeably habitable Marblehead left Simonstown for the final leg of her voyage home. Around the Cape of Good Hope, to Recife, Brazil, and finally, on 4 May 1942, to the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York Harbor, where permanent repairs and modernizing updates were completed. On 14 October 1942 Marblehead rejoined the U. S. fleet. She served until the end of the war, oulasting virtually the entire Imperial Japanese Navy.

Marblehead’s journey from the Java Sea to New York took 89 days and covered more than 20,000 miles, much of it with inoperable steering, uncontrolled leaks, limited electrical power, and almost no habitable bething areas. Her arrival at New York was heralded by the Navy and the press.

But acclaim for the remarkable dedication and resourcefulness of Marblehead’s crew couldn’t overshadow the grim news from the Pacific theater. While Marblehead was limping halfway around the world, Singapore, Java, and Bataan fell to the Japanese. Corregidor surrendered on 6 May, two days after Marblehead reached New York. More than one hundred thousand American, Filipino, British, Indian, Dutch, and Australian military personnel were thrown into barbaric captivity. Before the end of the war, tens of thousands had died from malnutrition, disease, overwork or had been executed.

The ABDA Afloat command was dis-established in early March, having lost five cruisers, twelve destroyers, and more than 4,500 men, including more than 1,800 Americans. USS Houston was gone – sunk with HMAS Perth at Sunda Strait on 1 March 1942 – and the remnants of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet fled to Australia. Dutch naval power in the Pacific was broken beyond repair and the Royal Navy retreated to the Indian Ocean. British warships wouldn’t return to the Pacific until 1944.

The crew of Marblehead and the other ships of the ABDA naval component fought on long after it was obvious that their force was too weak to stop the Japanese advance. Written off by their own nations, they demonstrated extraordinary courage and an unimaginable devotion to duty that continues to resonate today.

A version of this post was originally published on the Military History Now website.

https://militaryhistorynow.com/?s=uss+marblehead

War is hard, especially if you have to learn on the job.  But that was the task American and Japanese naval officers faced in May 1942, as they fought the world’s first carrier versus carrier naval battle in the Coral Sea.

Usually described as a tactical victory for Japan but a strategic victory for the allies, the Battle of the Coral Sea can only be evaluated as one part of the year-long allied campaign to halt Japanese expansion – a campaign that included the American carrier raid on Rabaul in April 1942, the Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942, the Battle of Midway in June 1942, and the invasion of Guadalcanal in August 1942.

That campaign – conducted primarily by American forces but including support from Australian surface ships, aircraft, and ground troops – stopped the Japanese advance, changed the character of the Pacific War, and, more importantly, sealed Japan’s fate.

Japan had but one chance to survive war against America and Britain.  She somehow had to force America to give up the struggle while she herself was still intact. If the war was prolonged Japan stood no chance of overcoming America’s vast industrial capacity. In mid-1941, as Japanese naval leaders were putting the finishing touches on their plans to attack Pearl Harbor, the United States Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy were nearly equal in strength. But while the Japanese had an additional three battleships, seven aircraft carriers, and five cruisers under construction, the U. S. Navy was building 17 battleships, 12 Essex-class aircraft carriers, 54 cruisers, 197 destroyers, 74 submarines and many hundreds of auxiliary ships, minesweepers, and small escort-type vessels.

America’s naval construction program was no secret. Japanese strategists knew that by 1944, when this building program was complete, Japan, its empire, and the whole East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere would be annihilated, as long as America maintained the will to do so.

Admiral Yamamoto knew it. He famously said before Pearl Harbor that if Japan attacked America, it would win victories for six months to a year, but after that, he had no confidence.

Winston Churchill knew it. In his six-volume history of the war he wrote that upon hearing of the Pearl Harbor attack, his first thoughts were that victory over Germany and Japan was assured and that Japan “would be ground to a powder.”

So, Japan’s only hope was to break America’s will at the outset of the war. They hoped to do this by smashing the Pacific Fleet in a decisive battle, driving the survivors back to the West Coast, while constructing a vast interconnected network of island airbases (unsinkable carriers) that would make any U. S. counter-offensive so costly that America would lose heart and negotiate a peace that preserved the empire and Japan.

Thus, having secured their initial objectives in a series of lightning conquests in Malaysia and Indonesia, in early 1942 Japan attempted to create a major air base at Rabaul, cut American supply lines to Australia by seizing Port Moresby, lure the U.S. fleet into a decisive battle at Midway, and strengthen their defenses by building an airbase on Guadalcanal.

In the end, all four Japanese efforts failed. Rabaul was neutralized as an airbase by American carrier raids; the invasion of Port Moresby was turned back at Coral Sea; Midway was a decisive defeat for Japan; and the United States seized Guadalcanal’s valuable airstrip before the Japanese could finish it.

Here are a few significant facts about the Battle of the Coral Sea:

It was fought by pre-war forces.

Before Coral Sea, neither side had lost an aircraft carrier in the Pacific War, although Japanese carrier aircraft had sunk the HMS Hermes in the Indian Ocean in April 1942. The U.S. had lost the bulk of its pre-war battleship fleet at Pearl Harbor, but pre-war battleships were unsuitable as carrier escorts and did not participate at Coral Sea for either side. Japan employed three carriers at Coral Sea, while the United States deployed two, but the striking power of the fleets was almost identical as the three Japanese carriers had 127 planes while the two U.S. carriers had 128.  The results of the battle reflected the pre-war training, professionalism, and preparation of Japanese and American pilots. Japanese pilots had an advantage in training and combat experience and they outperformed their American opponents.

It was the first carrier-carrier battle, and no one knew how to fight it.

At Coral Sea neither side understood the best tactical formation for protecting their carriers. Later in the war both sides understood that concentrating carriers and escorts to achieve massed defensive fire was the best course of action, but at Coral Sea neither side effectively massed its firepower.

During the two days of air strikes at Coral Sea, neither side was able to coordinate its attacks. U.S. bombers and torpedo planes did conduct simultaneous attacks against Shoho on the first day, but that coordination was unplanned and accidental. On the second day USS Yorktown dive bombers and torpedo bombers did conduct a coordinated attack against At Midway, one month later, the U.S. would again fail to coordinate its strikes.

Both sides suffered from inaccurate scouting reports and exaggerated and conflicting damage reports from pilots. Again, and again, scout planes inaccurately reported the location and disposition of enemy forces. This was a problem throughout the war, but at this early stage, naval leaders did not realize that the wildly inflated damage claims made by pilots were, in fact, erroneous. War is hard enough when the fragments of information available to commanders are accurate. It is nearly impossible when the only information commanders get is wrong.  Throughout the battle Japanese and American commanders didn’t know who they were attacking, or how much damage their strikes had inflicted.

The air groups of both sides had too many strike planes and too few fighters to mount an effective defense. This would be corrected later in the war.

The outcome was unexpected

Pre-war doctrine had assumed that lightly built carriers could not survive a strike by aircraft. That belief was reinforced by the destruction of the heavily-armored and stoutly constructed warships HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales off Malaysia in December 1942 and the destruction of the British aircraft carrier HMS Hermes in April 1942.

But three of the five carriers attacked at Coral Sea survived, and one – USS Yorktown – played a key role in the battle of Midway one month later. Carriers could be hit by dive bombers, but damage from above was unlikely to disable their engines or breach their hulls. Torpedoes were far more destructive to carriers, but torpedo attacks were more difficult to carry off. Carriers were most vulnerable when fueled and armed aircraft were caught on board, as the Japanese would learn to their sorrow at Midway.

The battle was badly managed by both sides

Naval commanders from both nations had a lot to learn about managing the carrier air war.

Compared to surface combat, air war required fast – almost instantaneous – decision-making, while the battle space had expanded enormously.  Japanese commanders compounded their own problems by directing their forces from ashore at Rabaul, while the American forces were commanded by ADM Fletcher aboard USS Yorktown.

Neither side managed to strike their primary target on the first day. Both launched strikes against secondary targets due to target misidentification.

Although the U.S. carriers were equipped with radar, their crews were inexperienced and had difficulty vectoring defending fighters to the correct altitude against Japanese strikes.

The United States allowed its only oiler to be destroyed, severely limiting their ability to operate for extended periods. With USS Neosho gone, U.S. ships could operate only as long as they had fuel, which would be a few days at most.

It influenced the battle of Midway, perhaps decisively

At Coral Sea Japan lost the use of three aircraft carriers that had already been assigned to the Midway operation force. The loss of these ships and their aircraft significantly reduced the Japanese advantage at Midway and likely contributed to the Japanese defeat.

The loss of carrier pilots at Coral Sea was far more damaging to Japan than the loss of flight decks.  

Japanese pilot losses were heavy in the opening months of the war and Coral Sea and Midway cost Japanese naval aviation another 200 skilled and experienced pilots.  Japan had started the war with more than 2,000 trained naval aviators, so the loss of 200 pilots need not have been disastrous. But Japan never developed a system for training replacement pilots, so losses at Coral Sea, Midway, Eastern Solomons, and Santa Cruz crippled Japanese naval aviation for the remainder of the war.

Before the war Japanese carrier pilots averaged more than 800 hours of flying time, with some exceeding 2,000 hours. By early 1943, Japan was sending replacement pilots to the fleet who had fewer than 150 hours of experience. In the words of British military historian H. P. Wilmot, sending such inexperienced fliers into combat, “was tantamount to a death sentence.”

Code breaking greatly assisted U.S. forces

While codebreaking’s role in the U.S. victory at Midway is widely celebrated, codebreaking’s role at Coral Sea is less well-known. U.S. codebreakers had penetrated the Japanese naval code JN-25 in April 1942 and were able to read as much as 85 percent of signals. Of course, they could only read what the Japanese transmitted, and not all of that, so the information gained was fragmentary at best.  But signals analysis, intuition developed through long experience, and fragments obtained by codebreaking – abetted by Japanese carelessness – convinced the Americans that the Japanese were planning an operation in the Southwest Pacific. Forewarned, the Americans were able to send carrier forces to the Coral Sea before the Japanese arrived.

For a detailed discussion of the Battle of the Coral Sea, see: H. P. Willmott’s The Barrier and the Javelin: Japanese and Allied Pacific Strategies February to June 1942; Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD; 1983.
https://www.usni.org/press/books/barrier-and-javelin

May 9, 2019

Inside Oliver Hazard Perry’s Triumph at the Battle of Lake Erie

There would be no second chance, and U. S. Navy Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry knew it.

As he approached six British warships on the morning of September 13, 1813, Perry was determined to end the naval campaign on Lake Erie that day. The nine-ship fleet he commanded had been built for this exact moment, and this moment only. If he lost the coming battle his ships would be destroyed, the British would control the lake, and America’s Northwest Territory would likely be lost. There would be no opportunity to try again.

That Perry’s fleet existed at all was something of a miracle, comprised of equal parts tenacity, back-breaking labor, British mistakes, and luck. For more than a year the United States and Britain had engaged in dual arms races on Lakes Ontario and Erie, struggling to build and man warships that could control the critical waterways. The tiny frontier settlements on both sides of the lakes lacked virtually everything needed to build, equip, and crew fighting ships. Skilled workers, sailors, sails, rigging, guns, powder, metal fittings: all had to brought hundreds of miles to the lakes over forest trails, unpaved roads, and barely navigable waterways.

The armies of the War of 1812 fought most battles within sight of the Great Lakes. These inland waterways were often the only way to move troops and control of them was vital.

The British had actually won the race – they had a small force of warships ready to sail by the end of 1812, more than six months before the Americans were able to field their fleet – but they failed to use their naval superiority to halt the American building effort.

Perry knew that the year-long effort to build and crew his ships and the British failure to intervene when they had the chance could not be repeated. His ships were literally irreplaceable.

So, when two hours of combat left his flagship shot to pieces all around him – rigging destroyed, half his guns out of action, blood pooling on the decks – Perry had no thought of quitting the fight. Clambering into his ship’s last surviving boat, he made his way to the largest U.S. vessel remaining and coolly steered her through the British line, raking their decks, ruining their ships, and forcing their surrender.

Oliver Hazard Perry (Image source: WikiCommons)

His victory saved America’s Northwest Territories and opened the way for General William H. Harrison’s invasion of Canada. Harrison’s eventual victory at the Battle of the Thamesbroke the British and Native American alliance and helped shape the peace termsbetween the United States and Great Britain. A remarkable achievement for a small fleet of hastily-constructed ships, manned by untrained crews, led by inexperienced officers.

A New Command

Perry’s part in the Lake Erie campaign began in February, 1813, when he was summoned by U. S. Navy Captain Isaac Chauncey, commander of American naval forces on the lakes. British ships on Lake Erie were threatening American settlements and the lack of U. S. warships derailed American plans to defend the region and invade Canada. The Americans were converting several unarmed schooners into gunboats at Black Rock, near Buffalo, New York, and were building four small armed schooners at Presque Isle Bay, at Erie, Pennsylvania. But resources were limited and progress was slow. Chauncey was preoccupied preparing for operations on Lake Ontario and he needed a capable and experienced officer to oversee the work on Lake Erie.

Oliver Hazard Perry seemed an obvious choice. A well-regarded officer, the 28-year-old Perry was splitting his time commanding a mostly-idle squadron of gunboats at Newport, Rhode Island and agitating for a seagoing assignment.

But while Perry’s appointment might have seemed obvious to Chauncey, Perry, and the Navy Department, it was not at all obvious to Lieutenant Jesse Elliott, already serving on the lakes and who had recently led a daring raid on the Niagara River that captured one British brig and destroyed another.

Unsurprisingly, Elliott and Perry would have a frosty relationship that would deteriorate markedly after Elliott’s lacklustre performance at the Battle of Lake Erie. But as Perry prepared to journey overland to Erie, he had more pressing concerns than Elliott’s feelings.

Far from the busy shipyards of New York or Boston, American commanders needed to construct miniature navies on the remote frontier of the Great Lakes. (Image source: WikiCommons)

Chauncey realized that the converted merchant ships and the small schooners being built would not be powerful enough to wrest control of the lake from the British, so he ordered Dan Dobbins, a skilled Lake Erie pilot who was overseeing construction at Erie, to build a pair of 20-gun brigs that would outgun the largest British ships on the lake. These sister ships would eventually become the USS Niagara and the USS Lawrence, and they would win the Battle of Lake Erie

Shipyard in the Wilderness

When Perry arrived at Lake Erie in mid-March, following an arduous 20-day journey from Newport, trees had been felled for the brigs, but construction had not yet begun. Building those ships would be Perry’s priority that spring and summer. But the obstacles he would face would be daunting.

The brigs were to be built to plans that had been drawn up for construction of the USS Hornet in Baltimore nearly ten years earlier. Captain Chauncey had been Hornet’s first commanding officer and he knew the capabilities of the ship. If actually built, the Lawrence and the Niagara would outclass any vessel the British had on Lake Erie.

But building two brigs in poorly-equipped “shipyards” in the thinly-populated forests surrounding the Great Lakes was nothing at all like building warships in well-provisioned seaports like Baltimore. Wood was certainly plentiful around the lakes – the trackless forests stretched for hundreds of miles in every direction – but skilled workers, sails, rigging, chains, nails, anchors, metal fittings, paint, guns, ammunition, and all the other necessary items were not. The town of Erie could not even provide housing for the workers who were arriving to build the vessels. In fact, the influx of laborers led to food rationing. Even the wood was problematic. The brigs were to be fashioned from trees that had been growing in the forest just a few weeks before. Planks from green or unseasoned wood was prone to warping or splitting once the ships were launched.

HMS Detroit was typical of the sorts of sloops found on Lake Erie. (Image source: WikiCommons)

Perry didn’t have a year to wait for the timber to dry. The fleet wasn’t being constructed to rule the waves for the next 40 years; they were being hastily thrown together to defeat the British in one decisive battle. They would win, and gain control of the lake, or lose, and be destroyed or captured as prizes. Either way, the use of freshly cut wood wasn’t going to make much difference, as long as the ships held together long enough to fight.

Of course, with British warships already operational, Perry would need a large measure of luck and some timely British errors just to get his ships onto the lake. Remarkably, he got both.

The yards at Black Rock and Presque Isle were vulnerable to British amphibious raids. With no ships of his own on the lake, Perry was powerless to stop them. But the local British army commander, Brigadier General Henry Proctor, was operating against American forces near the Maumee River at the western end of the lake, and he could not spare the men.

Even without a ground assault, the British naval commander on Lake Erie, Commodore Robert H. Barclay, believed he could prevent Perry from getting his ships onto the lake. For one thing, geography favored the British. The building yard at Black Rock was on the Niagara River, two miles upstream from Lake Erie. The Niagara doesn’t flow into Lake Erie, it drains into Lake Ontario, plunging over Niagara Falls on the way. To reach Lake Erie from Black Rock, the Americans would need to tow their gunboats against a racing four-knot current and pass beneath the guns of Fort Erie, a British fortification on the Canadian side of the Niagara River. And if they made it past the enemy batteries, the Americans would likely have to contend with Barclay’s ships, as he planned to remain nearby and attack any American ships that made it out of the river.

The yard at Presque Isle posed fewer problems for the Americans, but not by much. There was no current to fight, and the British occupied no forts on the American shore, but the entrance to the bay was blocked by a sandbar. While the bar kept Barclay’s ships from sailing into the bay and pulverizing the American shipyard, it also prevented Perry from getting his ships out.

But getting his vessels into the lake was a problem for another day. Perry’s immediate task was to build them, and to do that he needed to find a way to protect them from possible British attack.

The British weren’t coming, but Perry didn’t know it. What he did know was that there were no fortifications or soldiers at Presque Isle. As soon as he arrived, he ordered construction of a blockhouse to defend the shipyard and arranged for the deployment of troops from the local Pennsylvania militia.

With rudimentary defences in place, and Dobbins on hand to manage construction of the brigs, Perry set out on a series of trips to Pittsburgh to obtain whatever building materials and supplies he could scrape up. He was also hoping to locate 200 carpenters and shipbuilders who had been sent from the east coast to work on the brigs at Erie, but who had not yet arrived. Each journey to Pittsburgh, by road and water, took three days.

A U.S. fleet lands and army at York. (Image source: Toronto Public Library)

With more than 5,000 residents – ten times Erie’s population – Pittsburgh was already an industrial city, boasting metalworking shops, foundries, glass works, textile mills, warehouses, and a wide range of businesses. Much of what Perry needed could be found there, although some items, as well as experienced shipbuilders, would have to come from cities with large shipyards, like Philadelphia and New York.

The Strategic Situation

Though it was likely small comfort to Perry, Barclay’s supply problems were even worse. The British commander based his ships at Amherstberg, on the Detroit River at the western end of the lake. His building materials and men for his crews had to come from York – now Toronto – on Lake Ontario, or Montreal, more than 500 miles away. While the British enjoyed freedom of movement on Lake Erie, American forces on Lake Ontario were a constant threat.

Barclay’s situation was made immeasurably worse in April when Chauncey attacked York, destroying armaments and other supplies that were intended for Barclay’s ships.

Perry eventually secured iron, canvas, cordage, rigging, anchors, cannon balls, and other equipment at Pittsburgh. Soon, 150 ship carpenters reached Erie from New York City and sailmakers, block-makers, and riggers arrived from Philadelphia. A total of 65 cannons were sent to Erie, most from Washington and some from Sackett’s Harbor. The journey from Washington with the guns took more than a month.

As supplies, equipment, and workers trickled into Erie, progress on the ships quickened. Two small schooners were launched in April, and another in May. The Lawrence was launched on June 25 and the Niagara and the last of the smaller ships were launched on July 4.

The Niagara River connects lakes Erie and Ontario. Because of Niagara Falls, no warship could pass between the two water bodies, yet control of the Niagara Peninsula made the region the site of much fighting. (Image source: WikiCommons)

By then, one of Perry’s bigger problems had been partially solved by Chauncey. In May, American ships ferried U. S. soldiers across the mouth of the Niagara River on Lake Ontario, where they captured Fort George. The loss of the fort forced the British to abandon the entire Niagara Peninsula, including Fort Erie, and retreat towards York, opening the way for Perry to sail his gunboats onto Lake Erie.

Even without the threat of British cannon fire, however, getting the gunboats from Black Rock to Lake Erie was a Herculean task. Using oxen to tow the ships against the strong current and uncooperative winds, the transit took an entire week. Once on the lake, Perry, and the 55 sailors he brought with him, set sail for Erie. On the way, they narrowly avoiding Barclay’s more powerful force by staying close to shore and slipping past the British during a fortunate lake fog.

By mid-July, construction of Perry’s little fleet of three brigs, four schooners and six gunboats was complete, though the Lawrence and the Niagara remained on the wrong side of the sand bar. Now, Perry needed to find crews for his vessels.

Perry had enough sailors to get the gunboats to Erie, but naval warfare in the age of sail was a labor-intensive business, and he needed more than 500 men to properly crew his fleet. He had fewer than one hundred. Throughout the winter and spring, the Navy Department had dispatched hundreds of sailors to the lakes, ostensibly to crew American ships on both Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. But Chauncey, whose ships were already sparring with the British on Lake Ontario, kept nearly all of them.

But now it was July, Perry’s ships were ready, and Barclay’s fleet was somewhere on the lake. Both Perry and the Navy Department ordered more sailors to Lake Erie, but Chauncey hesitated. In early July he promised Perry that he would send 120 men, far fewer than what Perry needed. The Navy Department responded with another letter, pointing out that Perry needed more than 400 additional sailors and directed Chauncey to send Perry at least enough men to crew all of the smaller ships and one of the brand-new brigs.

In mid-July, Chauncey did send 115 men to Perry – not quite the promised 120, and still far too few, but it was something. By now though, Perry was thoroughly aggravated and he responded with an ill-advised letter complaining about the quality of the sailors Chauncey had sent.

It seems likely that Chauncey’s officers, when directed to send members of their crews to Perry, picked the men that they would miss the least, so there was probably some basis for Perry’s complaint. But in the meantime, Perry would have to make do with what he could get. His biggest problem was obtaining enough hands to get his ships underway. And if the men he received needed more training, he would have to provide it. Realizing that he wasn’t likely to get the crews he needed from Chauncey, Perry asked for volunteers from the local militia. Around 60 men volunteered while another 35 signed up to serve as marines aboard the ships.

A map illustrating the American port at Presque Isle. (Image source: William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan)

Still critically short of trained hands, Perry now turned his attention to his last major problem: moving Niagara and Lawrence over the sandbar and onto the lake. Perry and his shipbuilders had had six months to think about how they would accomplish this next task.

Perry’s Big Gamble

In those days before accurate nautical charts, professional sailors all knew the basic technique for crossing a sandbar or freeing a grounded vessel: lighten the ship by removing everything that wasn’t permanently attached and haul the vessel – rocking it if necessary – to deeper water.

But the water over the bar at Presque Isle was nearly four feet too shallow for the brigs. The ships could not be lightened enough to get over the sand. So, Noah Brown, the master shipbuilder who had been overseeing construction of the brigs, decided to use wooden “camels” — large, rectangular boxes or barges — to lift the brigs over the bar. Each would be filled with water and attached to the sides of the ships. When the water was pumped out of the camels they would float higher in the water, pulling the brigs up with them. When the ships were high enough, they could be hauled over the sandbar.

While workable, the technique had one significant drawback for Perry. The brigs would still need to be lightened as much as possible, so when they crossed the bar they would be without sails, rigging, guns, and powder. This would be disastrous if Barclay and his fleet appeared before the ships’ equipment and armaments could be returned aboard.

Robert Heriot Barclay. (Image source: UpperCanadaHistory.ca)

Which is exactly what happened.

Throughout July, Barclay’s squadron had remained in the vicinity of Presque Isle, preventing Perry from passing his ships over the bar. But on July 31, the British departed, presumably to obtain fresh supplies. Perry considered that his opponent’s movement might be a ruse, but seized the opportunity anyway. On Aug. 1, he sent his smaller ships over the bar into the lake, where they formed a protective screen. Perry’s men then set to work bringing the Lawrence over the sand. It took three tries, and the removal of the ship’s masts and yards, in addition to guns, ballast, and everything else they had taken off earlier, but by mid-morning on Aug. 3 Lawrence was across. By midnight her armament was back aboard.

The next day, the Americans brought Niagara across, too. Having learned a great deal during their struggle with Lawrence, Perry’s men got Niagara across in one try. But halfway through, while the unarmed Niagara was still stuck on the sand, Barclay reappeared.

For the British, this was the payoff — the reward for all the effort they had spent building their ships and blockading the Americans. Barclay may have failed to destroy Perry’s ships while they were still being built, and he had allowed the Americans to slip past him at Black Rock, but now he only needed to close the distance, scatter the smaller ships, and wreck the immobile and un-armed American brig with cannon fire.

But surprisingly, Barclay hesitated. The American gunboats formed a line of battle, and from a distance he could not tell if the larger brigs were ready for action. Wary of the American ships and aware that his own crews were understrength and undertrained he suddenly found himself reluctant to risk his fleet. He withdrew. Energized by their close call with disaster, the Americans completed the movement of Niagara and rapidly re-armed the vessel.

Perry’s fleet now outgunned Barclay’s. The British were nearly finished building the brig Detroit at Amherstberg, and her completion would give the British a slight advantage. But until then, with a more powerful fleet and more secure supply lines, Perry could dictate the course of events on the lake.

Perry still needed men to fill out his ships’ crews, and on Aug. 9 he received a final group of 101 officers and men from Chauncey. Perry now had more than 400 men. Not as many as he would have liked, but it was clear he wasn’t going to get any more from Chauncey.

On Aug. 11, he set sail for Put-in-Bay, an island at the western end of the lake, where he would continue to prepare his ships and crews for battle and monitor British naval activity. On arrival, he received 100 frontier militiamen from General William H. Harrison, commander of American ground forces, to serve aboard the American ships as marines.

130906-N-ZZ999-002
WASHINGTON (Sept. 6, 2013) A painting shows a scene from the Battle of Lake Erie, Sept. 10, 1813. The battle took place between the opposing forces of the U.S. and Britain on the contested waters of Lake Erie during the War of 1812. The Battle of Lake Erie was one of the pivotal points of the war, with the United States trying to invade parts of Canada to use as a bargaining chip against the British in order to gain Sailor’s rights and Free Trade. (U.S. Navy photo/Released)

Perry’s presence in the lake’s western basin cut the British supply line between their base at Fort Malden on the Detroit River and their source of supply on Long Point. As food stocks dwindled, Barclay had no choice but to come out and fight. As soon as the Detroit was completed, he sailed.

Beat to Quarters

Though the six British ships mounted more guns than the nine American ships – 63 to 54 – Perry was eager to fight. Once the battle began, even the near-destruction of his flagship, the USS Lawrence, didn’t stop him. His audacious maneuvering through the British line aboard the Niagara won the battle. “We have met the enemy and they are ours,” he famously wrote to Harrison. “two ships, two brigs, one schooner and one sloop.”

The victory at Lake Erie was a remarkable achievement for the Americans. They built six wooden warships in eight months in a scarcely populated wilderness where, except for wood, nothing they needed was available. Of the hundreds of Americans who participated in the campaign, Oliver Hazard Perry is best-remembered, though many other men made critical contributions. Yet it was Perry’s relentless determination in building and manning his ships and his unwavering courage at the Battle of Lake Erie that won the Lake Erie campaign.