Scratch One Flattop

The First Carrier Air Campaign and the Battle of the Coral Sea

Robert C. Stern

A study of the historic World War II naval battle, the first involving aircraft carriers and first in which neither warship was in sight of the other.
By the beginning of May 1942, five months after the Pearl Harbor attack, the US Navy was ready to challenge the Japanese moves in the South Pacific. When the Japanese sent troops to New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, the Americans sent the carriers Lexington and Yorktown to counter the move, setting the stage for the Battle of the Coral Sea . . .
In this book, historian Robert C. Stern analyzes the Battle of the Coral Sea, the first major fleet engagement where the warships were never in sight of each other. Unlike the Battle of Midway, the Battle of the Coral Sea has received remarkably little study. Stern covers not only the action of the ships and their air groups but also describes the impact of this pivotal engagement. His analysis looks at the short-term impact as well as the long-term implications, including the installation of inert gas fuel-system purging on all American aircraft carriers and the push to integrate sensor systems with fighter direction to better protect against enemy aircraft.
The essential text on the first carrier air campaign, Scratch One Flattop is a landmark study on an overlooked battle in the first months of the United States' engagement in World War II.
"His research into sources on both sides is exhaustive and he has used Japanese translators where necessary and appropriate to best illuminate materials. His effort has taken years of meticulous scholarship and it shows. . . . Highly recommended." —Lisle A. Rose, The Northern Mariner / Le marin du nord

1 | Part 1: Winning the Unwinnable War (1936–December 1941)

Looking backward from December 1941, it can appear to the dispassionate observer that from at least the middle of the 1930s, the Japanese had been marching like automata, step by step, into a war with America that no individual Japanese in authority believed could be won. The momentum for this came from the actions of a group of young staff officers in the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) and Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN), the bakuryo, who took it upon themselves to drive national policy by a series of foreign “incidents” and domestic coup attempts. The rapid rise of the Japanese military, particularly the IJN, from essentially nothing in 1850 to the point where it could challenge Tsarist Russia in 1904–1905 led to the creation of a very unusual power structure. At the turn of the twentieth century, the highest ranks of the Japanese navy were filled by aging samurai, veterans of the civil wars that had brought the Meiji Emperor to power. Their experience in modern military strategy or tactics was strictly limited, so they depended heavily on staffs of much younger, professionally educated bakuryo, who were allowed to act with virtual independence in the names of their superiors.

The tremendous, and in many ways wholly unexpected, success enjoyed by the Japanese in the war with the Russians had the perverse effect of establishing the role of the bakuryo as a permanent fixture in the Japanese military, even though the older generation of military leaders soon passed from the scene. By the mid-1930s, the admirals and generals running the IJN and IJA were the same men who had been the bakuryo of a generation earlier, but they seemed unwilling or unable to rein in the new bakuryo, who filled their old posts as lower-level staff officers. When, after an incident in South China in 1936, an IJN staff officer, Captain Nakahara Yoshimasa, pressed hard for the occupation of Hainan Island, its immediate execution was resisted, but his influence could not be entirely ignored.¹ Instead, the Japanese pushed south more gradually, but relentlessly nonetheless. Over the next three years, the Japanese occupied Amoy (Xiamen), Canton (Guangzhou), and other selected points on the southern China coast, invading Hainan only in February 1939. The French and British ambassadors in Tokyo protested this move, but this was little more than a formality and in no way slowed the occupation of the island and the construction of a naval airstrip at its southern end.²

As if to acknowledge this focus to the south, and to clearly distinguish their position from the army’s concentration on the Chinese mainland and Soviet Russia, the IJN reorganized its assets in November 1939, disbanding its existing Fourth Fleet, which had been tasked with patrolling the Chinese coast, and creating a new Fourth Fleet based at Truk (Chuuk) in the Carolines and at Kwajalein in the Marshalls. Initially comprising primarily minesweepers and submarines, within a year, Fourth Fleet had been brought under the aegis of Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku’s Combined Fleet, given the operational name “South Seas Fleet,” and assigned additional forces in the form of several old light cruisers and destroyers, all with the aim of providing a core force for possible future moves to the south and east.

These moves in no way satisfied Nakahara and the other bakuryo pushing for southern expansion. Having witnessed the defeat of France by Japan’s Axis partners in Europe, they were planning a push into the “orphaned” colonial possessions of the defeated European states, specifically French Indochina (what is today Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) and the Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia), with the ultimate aim of isolating the British possessions of Hong Kong, Malaya, and Singapore. A step-by-step process was enumerated in a proposal submitted to the Naval General Staff in August 1940 entitled “Policy toward French Indochina,” which laid out a two-stage occupation of the coastal zone of Indochina, first the northern half including Hanoi/Haiphong and later the southern part including Cam Ranh Bay, to be brought about by diplomacy backed up by the threat of military action.³ The fact that the Japanese had already pressured the French colonial authorities into shutting down the railroad linking Haiphong with China in June (and the British into closing the Burma Road in July), effectively isolating the Chinese Nationalists, only whetted the appetite of the bakuryo. They wanted nothing less than a Japanese occupation of French Indochina.

The policy paper laid out the advantages to be gained by carrying out this occupation, including the immediate access to the mineral deposits in the north of Indochina and the considerable rice production of the south, and stressed even more the strategic value of bases along the South China Sea for future operations against Malaya, the East Indies, Thailand, and the Philippines. The paper was also brutally honest about the likely risks of the proposed moves, predicting that they would trigger a strong reaction from the British and Americans, up to and including the likelihood of an American embargo on the export of oil and scrap iron to Japan. Were that to happen, the paper stated, Japan would have no option other than to occupy the Netherlands East Indies to ensure future oil supplies. Despite these risks, the paper recommended that Japan proceed with the plan.

In order to win government approval, the IJA would have to agree to the proposed occupation of Indochina. There is no doubt the Imperial Navy assumed the army would veto this plan as they had most previous attempts to move to the south, unwilling to supply the needed troops to back up a primarily naval adventure. However, conditions had changed in China over the preceding year. It was now clear to the army leadership that a quick victory in China, indeed any victory in China, was likely impossible. The best that could be hoped for was a stalemate while diplomatic and economic isolation strangled the Chinese military effort. To the navy’s surprise (and dismay), the August 1940 policy proposal received enthusiastic army support.⁴ By the end of September, the Japanese had occupied the northern half of French Indochina, despite a formal warning from the United States on 4 September. The Fourth Fleet transferred a number of small craft to Palau as a token prepositioning of forces in the event of further moves to the south.

Here matters stood for another nine months, until the German invasion of Soviet Russia in June 1941. Realizing there was no longer a Russian threat to Manchuria, the IJA began pushing for the occupation of the remainder of French Indochina, with the intent to use this as the first step in the take-over of British and Dutch possessions in the south. The IJN found itself caught in a trap of its own making. Having for years pressed for expansion in that direction, it could not object now without considerable loss of face. Yet the senior leadership of the Imperial Navy knew that the moves proposed by the IJA would lead inevitably to war with the United States and that Japan lacked the means to win such a war. Finally, to stand up now against the occupation of southern Indochina would expose the IJN leadership—Admirals Nagano Osami, Chief of the Naval General Staff, and Yamamoto in particular—to humiliation and perhaps even to real physical danger from hot-headed bakuryo.⁵ The IJN’s leading admirals resorted to their typical tactic of speaking out privately against the coming war but supporting it (or remaining silent) on all critical public occasions. The United States and Great Britain reacted to the Japanese occupation of the southern half of French Indochina in July 1941 exactly as the August 1940 paper had predicted, and by December 1941, Japan and the Allies were at war in the Pacific.

The Imperial Japanese Navy had been left with a second, equally dangerous legacy of the Russo-Japanese War. The Battle of Tsushima, fought in late May 1905, pitted the Japanese Fleet against a Russian squadron that had been sent halfway around the world to relieve their Pacific Fleet. That squadron, arriving worn out after an arduous seven-month, 16,000 nm voyage and discouraged by the surrender of their compatriots at Port Arthur (Lüshunkou) four months earlier, was soundly defeated by a Japanese squadron superior in virtually every tangible and intangible factor. (To the Japanese, the superiority of their fleet in fighting spirit was seen as being at least as important as any material advantage.) Most importantly, the victory at Tsushima appeared to end the war decisively in Japan’s favor.

The whole world was impressed by this unexpected victory, none more so than the Japanese themselves. This was in part because it fit neatly into an important cultural trope in Japanese history: the decisive victory won at the critical moment against long odds. So complete was the victory at Tsushima and so important was it in the history of modern Japan and particularly in the development of the IJN, that all Japanese naval planning from then on had at its core the setup for and the winning of a single great victory.

Indeed, so great an article of faith was this belief in the great decisive naval battle, that it underpinned the strategy by which the IJN hoped to win the coming “unwinnable” war against the Western Allies, particularly the United States. The Japanese plan was simplicity itself. They would seize the Philippines in the opening days of the war, and their battle fleet would wait somewhere west of the Marianas for the US Navy to rush and attempt to reclaim them. The idea was that Japanese small forces—submarines and destroyers—and aircraft based on a network of island bases would whittle away at the rapidly advancing American fleet, which might initially be one-third or more larger than the Japanese battle fleet, so that when the decisive battle was fought, it would be Tsushima all over again. The American fleet—wounded, exhausted, and reduced to a manageable size—would be destroyed by the materially and spiritually superior Japanese.

Yamamoto knew that this plan stood very little chance of working.⁶ It was far more likely, in his opinion, that the Americans would opt for a deliberate, island-by-island advance across the Pacific, never giving the Japanese the chance to reduce the Americans’ numerical advantage in larger ships. Toward the end of 1940, once it became clear to him that war with the United States was inevitable, he thought hard about the subject and concluded that it was imperative for the Japanese to act aggressively to gain and retain the initiative in the upcoming naval war. Further, he believed he had devised the plan for how to do this. The idea for an air strike at the American naval base at Pearl Harbor had been discussed by Japanese naval planners since at least 1927, but the move of the US Pacific Fleet from San Diego to Pearl Harbor in May 1940, the British raid on Taranto in November, and plans for the creation of the Kido Butai (Mobile Striking Force, officially...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Part 1: Winning the Unwinnable War (1936–December 1941)
• 2. Beyond Rabaul (21 February–10 March 1942)
• 3. Setting the Board (9 March 1942–23 April 1942)
• 4. Opening Moves (23 April–3 May 1942)
• 5. “. . . disappointing” (4 May 1942)
• 6. Chasing Shadows (5–6 May 1942)
• 7. Scratch One Flattop (7 May 1942)
• 8. Seconds Out (8 May 1942)
• 9. Mopping Up & Dispersal (9–27 May 1942)
• 10. Afterword
• Appendix: Dramatis Personae
• Sources
• Index
• About the Author