The Marshalls–Gilberts raids

At dawn on 1 February 1942 local time (in Hawaii it was still 31 January) aircraft from two American carriers attacked Japanese bases on the atolls of the central Pacific. Vice Admiral William Halsey’s task force with the carrier Enterprise struck Kwajalein, with the islands of Roi and Namur, Wotje, and Taroa in Maloelap atoll, while its cruisers bombarded the last two atolls. Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher’s task force with the carrier Yorktown attacked Jaluit and Mili in the Marshall Islands and Makin – that is, Butaritari atoll – in the Gilbert Islands. It was the first offensive operation of the US fleet in the Pacific war, carried out less than eight weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The damage it did was slight, but its importance for morale and for learning how to fight a carrier war proved far greater.

A fleet without battleships

After 7 December 1941 the Pacific Fleet could not contemplate a major battle. Its battleships lay on the bottom or in dock, while the Japanese were rapidly seizing one objective after another: Guam, Wake, Hong Kong, and in January 1942 they were advancing in Malaya, the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies. The carriers became the Americans’ main striking force, and there were few of them. On 11 January a Japanese submarine torpedoed Saratoga, putting her out of action for five months, and the first attempt at a raid, a strike on Wake by Lexington, was called off on 23 January when a submarine sank the oiler Neches accompanying the task force.

A strike on the Marshall Islands was not a new idea. Pre-war plans assumed that in a war with Japan the Pacific Fleet would attack Japanese bases on these islands to draw enemy forces away from Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. This was the task that Admiral Husband Kimmel was to carry out when he took command of the fleet in February 1941. After Pearl Harbor the grand plan lost its point, but Admiral Ernest King, commander of the entire United States Fleet since the end of December, pressed the new commander of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral Chester Nimitz, to take the offensive despite his weakness. The aim was to harass the Japanese, force them to disperse their forces and protect the sea route from Hawaii to Australia.

The Marshall Islands had been in Japanese hands since 1914, and after the First World War Japan administered them as part of the League of Nations’ South Seas Mandate. They formed the easternmost part of Japan’s defensive perimeter. The British-ruled Gilbert Islands had been seized by the Japanese in the first days of the war: on 9–10 December 1941 a detachment landed unopposed on Makin, where a base for long-range reconnaissance seaplanes was set up. The Americans feared that from these islands Japan would push on to the south-east, towards Samoa, Fiji and New Caledonia.

The plan

On 9 January 1942 Nimitz ordered Halsey to carry out a raid on the southern Marshall Islands and the northern Gilbert Islands. Two task forces then covering a convoy carrying Marines to Samoa were assigned to the operation: Halsey’s TF 8 with Enterprise, three heavy cruisers and destroyers, and Fletcher’s TF 17 with Yorktown, newly arrived from the Atlantic, two cruisers and four destroyers. Halsey was in overall command. Originally only the nearer atolls were to be targeted, but when the submarine Dolphin reconnoitred the area and reported that the Japanese defences were weaker than had been thought, Nimitz added Kwajalein, the main Japanese base in the Marshall Islands, to the list. American knowledge of the islands was nonetheless scanty: they did not know the location of many of the airfields or coastal batteries.

On 25 January the two task forces sailed from Pago Pago; on 28 January they refuelled at sea and parted company. TF 8 had to penetrate deep into the Japanese zone. The Japanese noticed nothing. Their patrol aircraft failed to detect the ships on 30 and 31 January, and according to Japanese studies a warning from the radio intelligence unit on Kwajalein that American carriers were at sea was disregarded at headquarters. On 31 January the garrison in the Marshall Islands even lowered its state of readiness.

The bases in the islands came under Vice Admiral Shigeyoshi Inoue’s Fourth Fleet. The defence of the Marshall Islands was the responsibility of Rear Admiral Sukeyoshi Yatsushiro’s 6th Base Force, headquartered on Kwajalein. Fighters and bombers of Rear Admiral Eiji Gotō’s 24th Air Flotilla were stationed on Roi and Taroa – mostly obsolete Mitsubishi A5M fighters and twin-engined G3M bombers, since the flotilla’s main strength had been moved to Truk for the attack on Rabaul. Anchored in Kwajalein lagoon were the training cruiser Katori, flagship of Vice Admiral Mitsumi Shimizu, commander of the submarine fleet, together with submarines and their supply ships.

The Enterprise strike

Before dawn on 1 February 37 Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bombers and 9 Douglas TBD Devastator torpedo bombers armed with bombs took off from Enterprise. The weather was perfect. Over the airfield on Roi the bombers of scouting squadron VS-6 ran into fighters and heavy anti-aircraft fire; they lost several aircraft, including that of the squadron commander. The rest attacked the ships in Kwajalein lagoon and the seaplanes on neighbouring Ebeye island. One of the first bombs hit the headquarters of the 6th Base Force; Rear Admiral Yatsushiro was killed, becoming the first Japanese admiral to die in the war. Vice Admiral Shimizu was also wounded.

On hearing that large ships were lying in the lagoon, Enterprise sent a second wave: nine Devastators, this time with torpedoes. It was the first attack by American torpedo aircraft in the war. The airmen reported many hits, but in reality none of the torpedoes did much damage. According to most accounts the transport Bordeaux Maru sank in the lagoon, while Katori, the old minelayer Tokiwa, the submarine tender Yasukuni Maru and the submarine I-23 suffered lighter damage.

At the same time Grumman F4F Wildcat fighters carrying small bombs attacked Taroa and Wotje. On Taroa the Americans discovered a new, well-equipped airfield with two long runways whose existence they had not suspected. Two further waves of dive bombers destroyed hangars, fuel tanks and several aircraft on the ground there, and over the atoll the first combats between American carrier fighters and Japanese fighters took place. Both sides greatly exaggerated their kills.

Bombardment from the sea

Wotje and Maloelap were threatened not only by aircraft. Rear Admiral Raymond Spruance, with the cruisers Northampton and Salt Lake City and the destroyer Dunlap, bombarded Wotje. A Japanese patrol vessel managed to fire a warning flare before it was sunk by the destroyer. Fire against ships manoeuvring in the lagoon, partly screened by islets, was hard to direct; in the end several small auxiliary vessels were sunk or badly damaged. The Japanese coastal batteries returned fire but scored no hits.

The cruiser Chester with two destroyers bombarded Taroa, where the airfield remained in action. Japanese fighters and bombers attacked the group several times, and one bomb hit Chester, piercing her deck, killing eight men and wounding several dozen. She was the only American ship to suffer casualties that day. The damage, however, was slight, and the cruiser returned to service after a short repair.

The attack on Enterprise

In the afternoon, as Halsey was withdrawing eastwards, G3M bombers arrived from Taroa. They bombed from level flight; the nearest bomb fell right alongside Enterprise, and its splinters started a small fire. Lieutenant Kazuo Nakai’s aircraft, hit by anti-aircraft fire, turned back and tried to ram the carrier. Aviation Machinist’s Mate Bruno Gaido jumped into a dive bomber parked on the deck and fired at the approaching aircraft with its machine gun. The bomber clipped the deck with its wing, sliced off the tail of the parked aircraft and plunged into the sea. Halsey promoted Gaido two grades on the spot. In Japan, by contrast, the ramming attempt was presented as an act of heroism.

Halsey made off at full speed, burning more fuel than he had planned. An anecdote attached to his task force has it that before the raid he had leaflets prepared thanking the Japanese air force for failing to spot his ships.

Yorktown in the storm

Fletcher’s task force fared worse. Clouds hung over Jaluit, Mili and Makin, there was heavy rain and a strong wind. Two torpedo bombers collided in the darkness over their own task force, and their crews were killed. Some aircraft failed to find their targets and returned with their bombs. Over Jaluit the Americans slightly damaged a transport; on Makin they destroyed two flying boats and damaged an auxiliary gunboat; on Mili, where the airfield was still under construction, they bombed storehouses. Two torpedo bombers ditched off Jaluit for lack of fuel, and their six airmen were taken prisoner by the Japanese. Fletcher called off a planned second strike on Jaluit because of the weather. Fighters from Yorktown shot down a Japanese seaplane that approached the carrier.

The balance

Both sides exaggerated their successes. According to Japanese figures 161 men were killed, one transport and several small auxiliary vessels were sunk, several others were damaged, and some 18 aircraft were lost. American airmen, meanwhile, reported more than a dozen ships sunk and several dozen aircraft destroyed. The American press even wrote of the sinking of an aircraft carrier, though there had been none in the lagoon. American losses amounted to more than a dozen aircraft – six from Enterprise and seven from Yorktown, not counting the cruisers’ floatplanes – more than a dozen airmen killed (the exact figures vary between sources), six prisoners, eight sailors killed aboard Chester and light damage to two ships.

The Japanese tried to pursue the American task forces. Submarines from Kwajalein and cruisers of the Fourth Fleet went after them, and some of the carriers of Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo’s force sailed from Truk, but they found no one. The big carriers soon returned to operations in the west. The Americans were already far away: on 5 February Enterprise entered Pearl Harbor, cheered by the crews of the ships in port.

Morale and lessons

The raids’ direct effect on the course of the war was slight – the Japanese did not pause for a moment in their conquest of the Dutch East Indies. But in the United States, which for two months had heard of nothing but defeats, news of a successful strike on Japanese islands was greeted with great joy. Halsey became a hero of the press and received a high decoration. On board ship and at headquarters, the sense that the fleet could strike again was perhaps more important than the ships sunk.

The raid was also the first real school of carrier warfare. It showed that dive bombers were effective, while the obsolete torpedo aircraft and their torpedoes let them down; that torpedo bombers needed fighter cover; that ships needed stronger anti-aircraft armament and better communications with aircraft; and that reconnaissance before an attack could decide everything. The airmen who first came under fire on 1 February were fighting a few months later in the Coral Sea and at Midway.

The Japanese drew their own conclusions. Scattered garrisons on widely separated atolls could not support one another, and the few aircraft available could not detect carriers in time. But there were not enough aircraft or men to change that. The chief of staff of the Combined Fleet, Rear Admiral Matome Ugaki, wrote in his diary that it had been fortunate that the enemy had not struck straight at Tokyo but had merely inflicted a “scratch” in the south-east and taught the Japanese a lesson. The high command kept some of its carriers in reserve in case of further raids.

Significance

The raid of 1 February opened a series of American carrier strikes in the first half of 1942. On 20 February Lexington tried to attack Rabaul; on 24 February Halsey’s task force struck Wake, and on 4 March Marcus Island (Minamitori), less than two thousand kilometres from Tokyo; and on 10 March aircraft from Lexington and Yorktown attacked the Japanese landings at Lae and Salamaua in New Guinea. The culmination was the Doolittle Raid of 18 April 1942, in which bombers took off from the carrier Hornet and bombed Tokyo.

These raids strengthened Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto in his conviction that the American carriers must be drawn into a decisive battle and destroyed as soon as possible. From this conviction grew the plan to seize Midway, and the Battle of Midway in June 1942, in which Enterprise and Yorktown fought and Spruance was in command, changed the course of the Pacific war. The Marshall and Gilbert Islands themselves were taken from the Japanese only in the fighting in the Gilbert Islands in November 1943 and in the Marshall Islands at the beginning of 1944, this time with a powerful fleet of new carriers.