The Soviet reactions at the local level and within the Kremlin would reveal much—and they did. Due to the unexpected internment, whatever York and Emmens learned would not make its way back to Washington soon, but the fact they were interned told Arnold, and Roosevelt, part of what they needed to know. There would be no second front against Japan from the Soviet Union because the Russians were more concerned with a Japanese threat to their east than with cooperating in a full Anglo-Soviet alliance to defeat Japan. Stalin’s reluctance to openly fight kept the specter of a separate peace with Tokyo alive and well, yet this may have been a blessing in the end. The Americans were forced to assume they would receive no material Allied assistance in the Pacific War, so if victory was to be achieved, then their force of arms would have to do it alone.
There was China, of course, but at the national political level she was an unreliable ally. The courage and fortitude of the Chinese people saved most of the raiders, and the civilians paid for it with their lives, but their leaders were a separate matter—the raid also made that clear. Chiang Kai-shek was not to be trusted, and it was evident that as soon as the conflict was over, China would once again descend into civil war. So, Washington decided to let America’s “allies” in the Far East serve a passive but essential role by pinning down a million Japanese soldiers and preying on Tokyo’s fear of what China or the Soviet Union might do. In the meantime, the United States would leapfrog up the Pacific to Japan’s front door, while Tokyo was always forced to look over its shoulder at the Asian continent.
As with Utsunomiya in Japan, without prior knowledge York could not have identified this obscure, specific location off American Bay to Colonel Johnston in 1943. The fact that he did so, expecting that such an intelligence debrief would remain classified, reveals the most significant facet of his assignment: landing at Unashi was preplanned, ergo the entire mission to the Soviet Union was not accidental but undertaken by request. Within the Army Air Forces there was only one man with enough reason to do so and enough authority to make such a request a reality—that man was Hap Arnold.
After the internment surprise, Ed York and his crew were loaded back into the three automobiles they had arrived in, and the little cavalcade moved off into the clear, cold night. Though dark and unlit, by the faint moon and the vehicle’s single headlight Emmens saw a run-down industrial town of unpaved streets pocked with holes, clogged with horse-drawn carts, and shabby people “dressed in rags,” who stared at them. High fences were everywhere and seemed to be the most substantial construction in the town, though men periodically stopped to urinate against them. If this was the workers’ paradise, then what must their hell look like? “Occasionally,” he wrote, “we saw a man or a woman gnawing at a three- or four-inch slice of very black bread.”
Bob Emmens was uneasy, as was Nolan Herndon. The Russians obviously considered the crew a liability and were not going to release them, and now they were driving off into the night far inside the Soviet Union. They were faced with that hollow, helpless feeling experienced by those who are thousands of miles from safety, deep in a foreign country, and at the mercy of others. Despite the dangers, until now there had been a connection with their lives, their mission, and their own country—Plane 8 itself. The Hornet, even while it brought them closer to Japan, was still America, and over Japan the crew had the Mitchell and thus, to some degree, control of their own fate. Even at Unashi the bomber was there, not too far away, and with it the illusion that they could still return to the freedom and safety of the sky. But it was chillingly apparent that this had been an illusion; reality was that there were armed Russians in all three cars and a darkness folding in around the car as Khabarovsk vanished behind them.
“I wish we had been shown some proof that our people in Moscow really did know we were here,” Emmens said, taking a deep, steady breath.
Herndon was staring at the last row of unpainted wooden fences and the nearest tower, where a heavily overcoated guard stood, rifle across his chest. “Yeah … I do too,” he replied quietly. “These people could stop anywhere along here, stand us up against a tree, shoot us, dig a hole … and no one would ever know the difference.”
9 LOOSE ENDS
While Plane 8 bombed Japan and landed in the Soviet Union, the Imperial Japanese Navy General Staff put its finishing touches on Operation Mo: the conquest of Australian New Guinea and the capture of Port Moresby. This would place most of Australia, including Darwin and Brisbane, within range of Japanese land-based bombers. Another arm of the operation would strike southeast into the Solomon Islands, occupying Tulagi, then establish an airfield on a delphic speck of ground few could name: Guadalcanal.
Once complete, the airfield would allow Japanese aircraft to control the surrounding area for a thousand miles in all directions and open further advances toward Fiji and New Caledonia. If these last islands fell, the sea route to North America would be severed and Australia completely isolated. As York’s crew pondered their fate in Khabarovsk, two Japanese submarines put into the Imperial Navy’s port in Rabaul, New Britain, to report the area south of New Guinea, named the Coral Sea, free of Allied warships.
They were dead wrong.
Six weeks earlier, while Doolittle and York were working out details of their Tokyo raid, the U.S. Navy Office of Naval Communications had deciphered enough of the Japanese JN-25B code to read 15 percent of the Combined Fleet’s encrypted messages. By April, while Hornet steamed west toward Japan, American code breakers had divined Port Moresby as the next enemy target, and Admiral Chester Nimitz saw an opportunity. On April 29, he dispatched Task Force 11, commanded by Rear Admiral Aubrey Fitch and centered on the carrier Lexington, to the Coral Sea south of the Solomon Islands. Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher’s Task Force 17 and the Yorktown was already en route, and both planned to rendezvous with Task Force 44, a joint surface battle fleet of three heavy cruisers with three destroyers commanded by Australian Rear Admiral John Crace. Finally, Bull Halsey’s Task Force 16, with Enterprise and Hornet, had safely returned to Pearl Harbor but was immediately refueled and sortied for the Coral Sea to join the other two American carriers.
On May 1, the Imperial Japanese Navy Carrier Strike Force, consisting of the carriers Zuikaku and Shōkaku and eight warships, departed Truk for the Coral Sea. On May 3 the Japanese captured Tulagi, which was undefended, and began converting it into a seaplane base while, some twenty miles across Savo Sound, they began building a runway on Guadalcanal that would shape the course of the Pacific war. The following day eleven Japanese transports carrying a five-thousand-man invasion force left Rabaul headed for Port Moresby via the Solomon Sea. By now, with the exception of Halsey’s two carriers, the Allied task forces had rendezvoused and steamed farther west into the Coral Sea. After some near misses, the first battle fought entirely beyond visual range of its opponents was joined in earnest on May 7, and both fleets would claw at each other until the next afternoon.
By evening on May 8, a mortally wounded Lexington was scuttled, sinking in over fourteen thousand feet to rest on the floor of the Coral Sea. Yorktown was badly damaged, but limped back to Pearl Harbor trailing oil and rounded Hospital Point for Drydock Number One on May 27, 1942. The Japanese lost the light carrier Shōhō, and both sides more or less broke even on aircraft and aircrew losses. Though they could replace aircraft, the Japanese had never considered it possible to lose so many trained pilots and did not have an adequate replacement training system in place—nor would they. Zuikaku had lost fully half of her air group and steamed for Japan in an attempt to replenish her aviators. Shōkaku was so critically damaged that she also headed slowly home, barely making it into Kure. Though the Japanese arguably won a tactical victory, the Port Moresby invasion force was ordered back to Rabaul without landing its troops. That, plus two fleet carriers put out of service for Yamamoto’s next operation, gave the Americans a resounding strategic victory.
York and his crew departed Khabarovsk on April 29, the same day Nimitz sent his carriers into the Coral Sea. While the great sea battle raged 4,500 miles to the south, the five Americans began a painfully slow, 4,700-mile trek across the Soviet Union via the Trans-Siberian Railway. Hunched down in unheated, dirty, and sparsely furnished cars, they had little to do all day except watch Russia unfold before them, drink rough potato vodka, and play chess. During their two days at Khabarovsk, York gave considerable thought to swimming across the Amur River into China at night. It was only 600–1,000 yards wide and appeared slow-moving. Fast or slow, wide or narrow, Ski reckoned he’d have a better chance now before he became physically weaker and geographically deeper into the Soviet Union. The thought was intoxicating: he could have his crew on “friendly” territory in a matter of hours. Surely, the Chinese would allow contact with the U.S. ambassador, and surely the Chinese were cleaner. Well, he didn’t know about that, but they certainly would smell better than the Russians. At any rate, he could be in China quickly, since Khabarovsk was less than five miles from the provincial border at Heilongjiang.
But they were closely watched. Not exactly prisoners, but hardly free. York got the impression from his escort, a Russian lieutenant, that if the Americans escaped or caused trouble of any sort, then their escorts would bear the brunt of it. In point of fact, there was no way to escape, and as the Trans-Siberian railcars shuffled away from Khabarovsk late in the evening of April 29, the whole crew was aboard. Heading northwest to Tynda, this was the beginning of an arc around Manchuria and Mongolia, then past Lake Baikal to Bratsk. The railroad was single-track, the unheated cars unfurnished, and the monotonous boredom was stupefying. Playing chess, writing letters they hoped to send, and talking, Plane 8’s crew was somewhere between Krasnoyarsk and Novosibirsk above the Mongolian border when Lexington went down in the Coral Sea.
“Everyone we saw, on and off the train, was in rags,” Emmens recalled. “Everyone … in every station we passed seemed to be a pauper.” Each day the train lumbered westward with the Americans receiving a valuable look at Russia’s interior, and visible proof of communism’s reality. Times were hard due to the war, but these people looked as if they had always lived this way. Stopping in Omsk near the Kazakhstan border, Bob Emmens especially noted the children begging pitifully for food. “Bands of them dressed in absolute tatters, no shoes, and covered with filth.” Armed soldiers on the platforms swiped at them with their rifle butts.
The Russian officers accompanying the crew warned them explicitly about giving food away to anyone as there were not enough soldiers to deal with an angry, desperate mob. “It is bad … very dangerous. It must only be given to those who deserve to have it.” York took that to mean those in combat deserved food, yet the Russians with them certainly were not fighting, and they ate heartily at every meal. Black bread, red caviar, and vodka—though sometimes there was some type of dubiously canned meat. Doubts grew as the miles passed by. Obviously, they were not going to be quietly shot someplace and left to rot in a ditch, yet the Soviets were notoriously fond of imprisoning those they did not murder but could not keep in plain sight. Once the train turned west after Tynda, York breathed a bit easier knowing they were not heading for Siberia.
He had been assured the U.S. government was aware of their location; after all, Washington had agreed to the internment. York was also told they would be able to meet with Americans from the embassy once their final destination was reached, but he did not believe either statement. “Very quickly,” Ski recalled, “I made up my mind that whatever they told you, if anything, wouldn’t be necessarily true or correct. It is just a way of life to those people.”
The Russian lieutenant was fond of exhorting the virtues of the Soviet Union, despite the daily visual contradictions the Americans observed. He picked up newspapers at each station, and would practice his English by translating stories from Ivestia, Red Star, and Pravda to his captive audience. The articles were all variations on the same theme: the unconquerable Red Army was destroying the Hitlerite rat invaders on all fronts and driving them out of Russia through a series of brilliant campaigns.
The truth was drastically different.
Stalin believed the German halt before Christmas was due to his prowess and the skill of his fighting men rather than bad weather and overstretched logistics. As the ground dried and the weather warmed, 765,000 Russians began an offensive from their bridgehead at Izium on the Donets River in Ukraine. Marshal Simyon Timoshenko drove far enough west to create a salient between the German 6th and 17th Armies south of Kharkov, but he overestimated his capabilities while underestimating his enemy. Friedrich Paulus let the Russians lunge, then closed in around their flanks with a massive air, artillery, and armored counterattack that cut off the Soviet 9th, 57th, and 6th Armies. As York’s crew trundled west toward the Urals, 170,958 Red Army soldiers were killed, went missing, or became prisoners of war, while another 106,232 were wounded in action. Three complete Russian field armies were annihilated, leaving the Germans free to advance toward the Caucasus and its desperately needed oil fields. Only one final obstacle stood in their way: a city on the Volga River called Stalingrad.
Ed York knew nothing of this, nor, in all likelihood, did his escorts. By mid-May the train was approaching Yekaterinburg in the Urals, where Tsar Nicholas and his family were murdered in 1918. Here at last the Americans were told they were headed to Kuybyshev, 480 miles away on the west side of the mountains, where Stalin evacuated his government during October 1941. This seemed to be good news, as the remaining foreign embassies, including that of the United States, had also relocated to the city. The Russian officer said he would contact the U.S. embassy, and Plane 8’s crew was hopeful that this would get them off the train and finally back in American hands.
Pulling into Kuybyshev at 0530 on May 18, York asked to leave the train and go see the defense attaché at the embassy, but the lieutenant refused. “It is unwise and unsafe for you to go into towns. You see, we have many Japs in our country and we must protect you from them.” That wasn’t quite believable, but the crew was certain that if they couldn’t get to the embassy, at least the Russians would bring the attaché to the train. They put on what clean clothes were available, shined their shoes, and made a list of things that were running short of, like soap, toothpaste, and shaving cream. The men also carefully put together the letters they’d written so the embassy could send them home to their loved ones. Then they waited.
And waited.
All day the train sat on the siding and the Americans watched the crowded platform. As with every other station, this one was “crowded with the poorest, hungriest, and saddest looking people we’d ever seen,” Emmens recalled. No one ever came from the embassy, and about ten hours after he’d left, the lieutenant reappeared, stinking of vodka and flushed from a hot steam bath. Both pilots cornered him and asked if he’d contacted the embassy. “No,” he seemed surprised by their anger. “Why should I?”
At sunset the train lurched forward, and after crossing the Volga River made its way west out of Kuybyshev. This incident hardened York’s feelings toward the Russians, and from then on he took whatever they said with less than a grain of salt. “They can be friendly, even generous,” he recounted. “But don’t take that to mean they wouldn’t turn on you and stab you in the back or cut your throat. I wouldn’t trust any one of them as an individual or collectively. You have to make up your mind that that is the way it is.”
All night long they continued west, and during the following late afternoon the Americans were told they would be arriving at their destination in about an hour. Crossing the Sura River, the train pulled into Penza on May 19, 1942, and stopped. There was no station. Their car, the last on the train, was disconnected and tugged onto a siding, where four dilapidated automobiles and a half dozen Soviet officers waited. The newcomers smiled and everyone shook hands while the crew’s baggage was transferred to the vehicles. York was told they would be going to a “pleasant village which contains rest homes where Soviet officers are assigned for rest periods.” Pleasant. Both pilots doubted that, given what they’d seen so far, but there was no discussion or choice in the matter. Ski asked the name of the place, and a Soviet captain answered, “Okhuna … a small village about fifteen kilometers from the city of Penza.”
And that was that.
It was a small village—about five hundred people. Living far below the poverty level, the villagers were all emaciated from hunger or malnutrition, and “rags constituted their clothing.” For the next two and a half months, York and his men would be generally confined to a three-building compound surrounded, as always, by a high, sturdy fence. The house had been whitewashed, so it appeared in better condition than it was, and the bedrooms were large with a large open porch on three sides. The inside was unpainted but boasted the mandatory busts of Lenin and Stalin, and the food was a vast improvement. Unlimited black bread, of course, but also fresh vegetables, butter, and meat—and vodka. Lots of vodka. Several women cooked and cleaned, and the crew watched Russian movies and learned local folk dances and a game called “Garrotky.”*
There had still been no word about contact with the embassy. However, on June 3 their Russian escorts were quite excited that the commander of the Volga Military District was paying a call the following day.† Accompanied by two colonels, Lieutenant General Stepan Kalinin arrived at 1230 on June 9, 1942. Shaking hands with each American, he seemed cordial enough, and his chief concern was their treatment. Ski told him through the interpreter that the quarters were fine, but they weren’t allowed outside the compound except to visit the bathhouse. Kalinin apologized and quietly berated the escort, who then told York they would certainly be permitted to swim in a nearby river if they wished.‡ He also told Ski that he would be happy to convey any messages to the U.S. embassy. Cheered considerably, but always cautious, York and Emmens hoped to speak to another American and at last have their families informed. Embassy officers would also hopefully know about the other raiders, and certainly tell them what was happening in the world beyond Russia.
The day after York was told of the upcoming visit by General Kalinin, a battle was joined six thousand miles away in the Central Pacific that altered the Pacific War. Admiral Yamamoto had conceived an operation that he believed, and certainly hoped, would finish off the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Time, he well knew, was running out for Japan’s supremacy in the Pacific, and the admiral needed to decide the matter now before America’s vast military production capability mirrored its rage. The Battle of the Coral Sea had cracked the Imperial Navy’s cult of invincibility, but it was the audacious and embarrassing Doolittle Raid that worried him the most since it conclusively revealed the Home Island’s vulnerability to air attack. If the Americans could do this now, five months after Pearl Harbor, what would they do once their shipyards and factories reached full capacity?
Thus, Operation MI was born. The plan centered on taking Midway Island, which would extend Japan’s defensive perimeter and, more important, lure the U.S. Pacific Fleet into battle, where this time it would be destroyed. With no navy to protect the West Coast, Washington would have to consider a negotiated peace, and Japan would be safe to consolidate its newly acquired resource-rich territorial gains. With America neutralized, Tokyo could concentrate on subduing China and, perhaps, the Far East Soviet Union. But the admiral’s plan, like most imperial plans, had an overarching flaw: it would work only if the enemy did exactly what was expected, and this was a dangerous assumption when dealing with Americans.
Yamamoto, who, from his time in the United States should have known better, underestimated his opponent and had not absorbed the lessons from Wake Island and the Coral Sea. Also, he knew the Saratoga was in California but incorrectly believed the Yorktown had been sunk in the Coral Sea, so he would have planned to face only Enterprise and Hornet. He did not order the surviving aircraft from Shōkaku and Zuikaku to combine and sail with the latter, and with four of his six fleet carriers remaining, the admiral considered the risk justifiable.* Nor did Yamamoto know that Admiral Nimitz had three thousand workers swarm aboard Yorktown upon her arrival at Pearl Harbor and that she was back at sea in seventy-two hours. Most damning, he did not suspect that the JN-25B code had been compromised. Nimitz and Rear Admiral Ray Spruance, who commanded Task Force 16, made an educated tactical guess and placed Enterprise and Hornet northeast of Midway to ambush the Combined Fleet. Joined by Yorktown, the three American carriers watched and waited.
Yamamoto’s First Mobile Striking Force, again commanded by Admiral Nagumo, appeared northwest of Midway as expected and launched a 108-aircraft strike that was detected on the island’s radar at 0535 on the morning of June 4, 1942. Of the available Marine fighters, only two remained flyable after trying to blunt the attack, yet the Japanese assault did not neutralize the island’s runway or defenses. A second strike was called for, which was unexpected, thus forcing Nagumo to adjust his plan. Little did he know, the Americans had launched an attack from Enterprise and Hornet, and they were now searching for the Japanese carriers northwest of Midway. Rearming his reserve aircraft with bombs, Nagumo was informed at 0740 that a scout plane had just sighted the U.S. fleet. The admiral countermanded his original rearming order and switched back to torpedoes in order to attack the American warships.
Launched piecemeal in order to catch the Japanese unawares, the U.S. strike did not assemble for a coordinated assault. This was expeditious, but forced each of the three torpedo squadrons to attack individually, and they were annihilated. Only seven of thirty-one Devastator torpedo bombers survived, and there were no hits on the Japanese carriers. However, their sacrifice accomplished three critical items. First, the enemy carriers could not recover or launch while under attack; second, due to Nagumo’s dithering, explosive ordnance was stacked haphazardly about and completely exposed. Fuel lines snaked across each flight deck, also terribly vulnerable to any sort of attack. Finally, the combat air patrol (CAP) protecting the carriers was not well controlled, so the Zero fighters were now all down at low altitude, out of fuel and ammunition.
When the dive-bomber squadrons from all three American carriers suddenly appeared overhead, there was little the Japanese could do to prevent an attack. Within six minutes Kaga, Akagi, and Sōryū were afire and burning out of control. Only Hiryū remained undamaged, and she immediately launched a twenty-four-aircraft strike that followed the U.S. aircraft back to the Yorktown. Sixteen of Hiryū’s aircraft were shot down by anti-aircraft fire and the CAP’s Wildcat fighters, but three managed to hit the big carrier, which left her drifting and ablaze. But U.S. Navy damage control was second to none, and she had partial power restored by the time Hiryū’s second wave of sixteen aircraft appeared.
Though they lost nearly half the strike force, the Japanese got two torpedoes into Yorktown, which again left her adrift. Later that day, Hiryū’s luck finally ran out as twenty-four U.S. dive-bombers from Enterprise and Yorktown put four bombs into the flattop causing her to sink within hours. The following day, Yorktown was under tow and despite her horrific damage, looked to be clear of the battle when she was spotted by I-168 and took a pair of Long Lance torpedoes. The valiant veteran hung on through the night but rolled over and sank at 0530 on Sunday, June 7, 1942.
In the end, the Imperial Navy lost 3,057 men, including 110 aviators and over 700 highly trained mechanics and technicians that could not be easily replaced from a largely rural, agrarian population. Four of her six fleet carriers were gone forever, as well as a heavy cruiser and 248 combat aircraft. The U.S. Navy lost Yorktown, the destroyer Hammann, 157 aircraft, and 307 men killed in action. The Battle of Midway represents one of those points in any conflict that are termed pivotal, though an analysis of why is largely beyond the scope of this work.* Nonetheless, the battle’s ramifications reverberated through the next twelve to eighteen months, because the Japanese no longer had the same options after losing four fleet carriers in a single battle. Also, an oft overlooked facet of the loss was that the Imperial Navy concealed the disaster from the Imperial Army, which continued to plan and operate assuming the full weight of naval support was available. This would, especially in the upcoming Solomon Islands campaign, cost them dearly.
York’s crew certainly did not know about the victory, but the rest of the world found out on the same Sunday that Yorktown sank. The Los Angeles Examiner headline proclaimed:
