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

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While Radio Tokyo babbled that "the Japanese Navy in the near future will win a great victory," Shimada, always a man for the safe way, decided on a half-measure designed to win the Japs the advantage of attack without incurring the liability of counterattack. The only thing that could be said in favor of the plan was that it was cunningly conceived.

Endurance Contest. The Jap's reasoning was that Spruance's forces, pegged down like a tent around the invaders of Saipan (see below), would be running short of fuel, ammunition, bombs and planes after the week of repeated heavy strikes they were making along the island chain—the Marianas, Volcano and Bonin Islands. Shimada's Intelligence was good enough to tell him that Vice Admiral Marc A. Mitscher's Task Force 58 (part of Spruance's Fifth Fleet) was divided into three units or task groups.

Beyond this, Shimada's Intelligence was wretched. It failed to tell him what the Navy Department soon told the U.S. people: "Task Force 58, the most powerful and destructive unit in the history of sea warfare . . . is able to carry its fuel, food, replacement aircraft and pilots wherever it goes. . . . Solved is the problem of supply." But for this fact, Task Force 58 might have been as vulnerable as Shimada hoped.

Battleship Admiral. Shimada, versed in the ways" of battleships, cruisers and submarines, but with no experience in naval air power, did not plan to risk his ships within gun range of the Spruance-Mitscher powerhouse. Instead, aircraft from Jap carriers were to fly off at maximum range, and loose bombs and torpedoes against the presumably exhausted U.S. force. Then the planes were to land on Guam and Rota, refuel and get home to their mother ships, lying well off to the west.

U.S. Intelligence was working too: submarines and scout planes had kept Spruance and Mitscher well informed. For days they had known that a sizable enemy force was milling around, 500 to 800 miles west of Saipan. On Sunday, June 18 (Monday in Tokyo and the Marianas) five or six carriers in this force sent off virtually all their planes to the great attack. Others, from land bases, joined them. Spruance knew exactly what to do.

In full morning light the Japs arrived off the southern Marianas. They had flown so far that they were almost out of gas when they began to attack. Spruance, who had diagnosed their play, held his fleet of seagoing airdromes and ack-ack batteries within sight of Guam. Mitscher sent squadron after squadron of dive bombers to pock the runways and smash the gasoline stores of Guam and Rota, to deny the enemy planes a place to roost.

The First Phase. As the Jap planes drew near, Hellcat fighters swarmed up from U.S. carriers and took them on in one of the war's greatest air battles. Vapor trails strung across hundreds of miles of sky. Battleships, cruisers and destroyers appeared to be wreathed in fire as they turned the most powerful ack-ack defense in the world upon the few planes which got through the fighters' gauntlet. A quarter of the horizon was polka-dotted with black smoke puffs. The first attack was beaten off on the fringe of the fleet.