World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF THE PACIFIC: Ruin in Two Phases

BATTLE OF THE PACIFIC (See Cover) He could hardly have been charged with the defeat of the Japanese fleet in the Coral Sea in May 1942, nor with the decisive beating the fleet took from a desperate band of American last-ditchers at Midway, a month later. It was not mainly his fault that the Japanese Navy had been bloodily ejected from the Solomons, or that it was progressively driven back on its inner defenses by the overwhelming force of U.S. arms in the Pacific.

These disasters could not be blamed on dull, purse-lipped little Admiral Shigetaro Shimada, then, as now, His Imperial Jap Majesty's Navy Minister. It was not he but Admiral Osami Nagano, Hirohito's Chief of Naval Staff and thus top Navy planner, who was the first big failure in Japan's once glamorous naval history.

But this week Shimada had to face the disconcerting fact that he, too, was a colossal failure. Shimada had met the U.S. fleet, tentatively and ineptly, in waters uncomfortably close to home between the Marianas and the inner bastion of the Philippines.

Result, as even the Jap civilian could guess: the worst defeat since Midway.

Against the massive armada commanded by the U.S.'s gimlet-eyed Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, little Shimada had thrown an inferior task force. He had planned the action so cautiously that his force did not come within hundreds of miles of Spruance's guns. But it did poke its nose within range of Spruance's naval aircraft. That was enough.

Tougher than Togo's. The reason Shimada had no one to blame this time but himself was that old Nagano was no longer in the whipping-boy post. Last February he had been kicked upstairs to the job of senior adviser to the Emperor, the kind of post that navies the world over like to hand out to failures with broad stripes. When Nagano left, Shimada took over his job as Chief of Staff, thus made himself responsible for Navy strategy and grand tactics while retaining the safer administrative duties of Navy Minister.

By then even the regimented Japs were beginning to ask when their fleet would come out and fight. For the nonce, plump, taciturn Shimada said nothing; Tokyo's radio fantasists explained to the homeland and to Greater East Asia that the thing to do was to wait and see: some time the U.S. fleet would find itself far from home. Then the Jap fleet would strike the crushing blow.

This reasoning seemed historically sound. Admiral Heihachiro Togo, the half-Nelson of Japan, had caught Russian Admiral Rozhestvensky's fleet 18,000-miles off base in Tsushima Strait and destroyed it in 1905.

But Shimada knew that his problem was far tougher than Togo's. It was all very well to wait for the U.S. fleet to steam in close to the sacred homeland. The trouble was that the more he waited, the more hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned he would be. The U.S. fleet had grown to monstrous size, and had developed a way of taking its bases along with it. The Pacific was dotted with them now.

When the U.S. made its latest leap 1,200 miles west from Kwajalein, into Saipan, key to the Marianas, Shimada had to put up or shut up. Caught in an impossible dilemma, he made the worst decision possible: a compromise.