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Chapter 1: What led to the Battle of the Coral Sea?
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It's mid-morning, May 7th, 1942, and 20-year-old Naval fireman, third class, Bill Lew, is in the depths of the oil tanker USS Neosho, hard at work with two other sailors in the stuffy and cramped number one magazine as their vessel cuts through the waters of the Southwest Pacific's Coral Sea. You can only imagine what exact duties he might be fulfilling at the moment.
Is he assisting in moving ammunition to the guns above? Perhaps he's inspecting for fire hazards. After all, the Neosho may have just refueled the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown and the cruiser USS Astoria yesterday, but it's still the case that one little spark here could easily send this 25,000-ton ship and its nearly 300 souls to the depths.
But whatever typical task he's doing, it comes to an end as he picks up the JV phone and a sailor describes the action above. Here comes three. Three off our bow. Okay, time out. Before we get too deep into this battle, the Battle of the Coral Sea, let's get just a touch more background.
As we know from recent past episodes, the Japanese Empire has spread rapidly through the Pacific, perhaps especially after its attack on Pearl Harbor last year, December 7th, 1941. the Japanese have swept through the Dutch East Indies, taken the U.S. Commonwealth of the Philippines, and pushed into the British Crown's territories everywhere, from Singapore to those on eastern New Guinea.
And right now, on May 7th, the Japanese are a few days into a multi-pronged action called Operation Moe, intended to take Port Moresby. Located on Australia-administered Papua's southern coast and just across the Coral Sea from the land down under, Port Moresby would position the Japanese well to cut off U.S. supplies to Australia and then to move in for the kill.
But this hasn't gone as smoothly as Japanese leadership had hoped, not with the Americans having cracked Japan's operational code system, JN-25. Fully aware of the general strokes of the Japanese forces' plans, Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher's aircraft carrier, USS Yorktown, surprised the Japanese at their newly established base on the island of Tulagi on May 4th.
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Chapter 2: How did American codebreakers influence the Pacific War?
In Japanese, the saying to put miso on food idiomatically means to make a mess of things. Well, unlike his steward, the optimistic Yamamoto doesn't make much of the mistake. He and his officers drink to Japanese victory all night.
Only days later, Vice Admiral Nagumo Chuichi, the very same who led the attack on Pearl Harbor, once again sails out of Japanese waters with his massive naval force, Kido Butai.
Though lacking the two aircraft carriers damaged in the Coral Sea, he still has four of these massive, powerful, plane-carrying vessels, the Ikagi, Kaga, Hiryu, and Soryu, as well as a few battleships and cruisers, and roughly a dozen destroyers. Meanwhile, another part of the Japanese combined fleet sails off to make its near simultaneous attack on Alaska's Aleutian Islands.
Yamamoto's plan is now officially in motion. Back in America this same May 1942, the newly appointed Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, otherwise called the Sink Pack, Admiral Chester Nimitz, knows something's fishy. Chester's had a long Navy career.
In 1909, he became a submariner and rose quickly through the ranks during World War I before eventually being entrusted with the role of Sink Pack after husband Kimmel's perceived failures at Pearl Harbor. A fast bio, I know, but the key thing to follow is that Chester is a proper Navy man, now holding one of the most coveted, or feared, depending on how you see it, positions in the U.S. Navy.
Basically, he's running everything in the Pacific outside of Douglas MacArthur's command. And Chester is busy crossing his fingers that his codebreakers, the Combat Intelligence Unit under the command of Joseph John Rochefort, has figured out what the Japanese Navy is up to. It's pretty clear that the Kido Butai has been practicing maneuvers for a great battle.
The million-dollar question is, where do they plan to have it? And I guess the second million-dollar question then becomes, when do they want to have it? It's Thursday, May 14th, 1942.
We're in Captain Joe Rochefort's windowless basement, dubbed The Dungeon, an office in the old administration building of Pearl Harbor's Navy Yard, where the expert codebreaker has been working basically around the clock to crack the subsect of Japanese JN-25 code they've termed JN-25B. And it seems like he's getting close.
Hmm.
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