Kirov III: Pacific Storm

He received a most disheartening reply. Hara’s 5th Carrier Division had started the campaign with fifty-four D3A dive bombers. They had seven left, and six more in reserve flying in from Kendari. He had all of forty-eight B5N1 torpedo bombers, and only twenty of those remained. Only in his fighter element was there any real strength left. He reported fifty operational A6M2s out of an initial allotment of sixty-six. The losses to the strike planes were staggering! Seventy-three percent! And all this against a single enemy ship that was still reported at large, poised to enter the Coral Sea at that very moment, and being pursued by Captain Sanji Iwabuchi leading a small task force aboard the battleship Kirishima.

The report made no sense. Hara’s force was as seasoned and skilled as any in the fleet. They had savaged the Americans just months ago and assured a victory at Port Moresby. That thought set his mind to that airfield, where he knew several squadrons of G3M2 and G4M1 bombers were mustering. But those planes had only a modest capability against naval targets at sea, particularly a fast moving capital ship as this one was reported to be. It was given the code name Mizuchi, and the word was flashed from one fleet command to another. Where was it heading? Was it merely fleeing for a friendly port, trying to escape the Japanese trap sprung at Darwin, or did it have a darker purpose? How could intelligence have missed its presence in Darwin in the first place? There were too many unanswered questions.

Yamamoto thought hard that night, aboard the massive solid presence of the battleship Yamato. He could send Yamaguchi’s carrier division after this enemy ship, but that would mean confronting the American carriers at Guadalcanal with only his own force under Nagumo. Something warned him not to dilute his naval air striking power, particularly after the loss of the airfield at Lunga. So he made a decision that he believed adequate to the requirements of both tasks before him.

“Send to Yamaguchi. He is to detach the light carrier Ryuho, two cruisers and two destroyers and send them northwest towards the Torres Strait to operate in conjunction with Admiral Hara in pursuit of this enemy ship. The remainder of his task force, including Hiryu and Soryu will proceed immediately to Guadalcanal to coordinate air strikes with Admiral Nagumo’s force. I am taking my heavy units due west into the Solomons and will position the invasion force northwest of Guadalcanal off New Georgia pending the destruction of the American carrier task force covering their invasion. Admiral Nagumo will proceed to Guadalcanal from our present position, and the two carrier task forces will crush the Americans between them. After that is accomplished we can proceed with the invasion of Guadalcanal in force, but this cannot be risked with American carriers at large.”

It was to be a fateful and decisive moment in the newly written history of WWII, a good plan considering the agility with which it had been surmised. The loss of only one light carrier to reinforce Hara’s group seemed insignificant, though somewhat embarrassing considering that Hara already commanded a full fleet carrier division! It would lead to a disaster that was simply impossible for Yamamoto to see in the confident light of his own military mind at that point.

Chapter 17

Novak had to say it was one of the most unusual happenings of the entire war, an informal meeting to review routine photo intercepts from coastwatchers that had blossomed into a major “incident,” as he ended up calling it. The meeting was being held at FRUMEL Headquarters in the Monterey Apartments of Queens Road, Melbourne Australia. FRUMEL itself was an acronym for Fleet Radio Unit MELbourne, one of two major cryptanalysis units still active in the Pacific, the other being Fleet Radio Unit H or ‘Hypo’ in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. There had once been three such units, but the third had been hastily evacuated from Manila Bay as the Japanese closed in on that city in February of 1942. Many of the specialists that once staffed that unit had slipped away on the submarine Sea Dragon, along with 1.5 tons of equipment and materials vital to their operations, and now they served to augment the vital intelligence work here at FRUMEL. Novak was one of them.

The unit occupied most all of the third floor of the posh Monterey Apartments, and he looked lazily out the window at the green lawns and breezy foliage of the trees as he waited for his associate to review the dispatch.

“British have something in the Coral Sea we don’t know about?” The question was tossed across the desk like a piece of loose paper, by Commander Oscar Osborne, another specialist in cryptanalysis called in to review some very unusual photography that morning. Sometimes called “Ozzie” by his associates, or simply “The Wizard” after the popular 1939 movie ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ he had been part of the group ever since the submarine Sea Dragon made it safely away from their old intelligence unit on Corregidor.

“Waters got his hands on that photo yesterday,” said Novak. “He’s one of our boys up at Darwin. God knows what’s happened to him by now. Probably half way to Katherine on that hell of a road if he managed to get out. Lucky for us these photos made it out on a plane. Funny thing about this one…It went right to the very top. A journalist, fellow named Longmore up there on a whim, well he kicked it all the way up to the PM’s office. Looks like he was an old friend of John Curtain.”

“Curtain is an old newspaper man,” said Osborne. “The two were probably thick as thieves.”

“Well good for that. Have you taken a look at that photo?” Novak gestured to the packet that had come in on the morning motorcycle run from the airfield, and Osborne obliged.

“What the devil is that?” Osborne was staring intently now, and looking around for a magnifying glass. “Get the British silhouette book over there.”

Novak smiled. “Don’t bother,” he said. “It’s not British. I went through the whole Royal Navy this morning and even called Perth as well to talk to their liaison officer. They assure me they had nothing at sea on the Kimberly Coast when that was taken—nothing at Darwin either before the Japs hit the place—nothing they know of, that is. This fish is something else entirely.”

Osborne was looking at the image closely now. “Good size ship,” he said in a low voice. “Not much in the way of big guns.”

“Well this tale becomes quite a riddle, Ozzie,” said Novak. “This ship isn’t British, but apparently no one bothered to tell the Japanese that. They’ve been after the damn thing hammer and tongs ever since they spotted it. Those are Jap torpedo planes in those photos. It seems the ship ran afoul of their operation against Darwin. Coast watchers have had the show of a lifetime up there. They say the Japs hit this thing with every plane they had. One report says he counted over sixty planes attacking this ship, and there was a hell of a lot of fireworks.”

“I see…” Osborne kept staring at the photo. “Did they sink it?”

“They hit the damn thing, but it slipped away. So the Japs went after it with their screening force for the Darwin operation. Coastwatchers reported a surface action too. Japs have a fast battleship and several cruisers out after this ship, and it’s running for the Torres Strait, should be there tonight and into the Coral Sea if it managed to survive. Radio intercepts have picked up a name that seems to repeat every time they reference this ship, so we think it’s a convenient handle, or code word they’re using for it: Mizuchi.”

“What does it mean?”

“Sea dragon.” Novak smiled, the reference to the submarine by that same name that had brought them all here obvious and glaring.

“Sea dragon?” Osborne allowed himself a smile, then looked closely at the photo again. “Well it’s not a British ship.” Osborne finally realized the importance of that simple fact. “It’s certainly doesn’t belong to the U.S. Navy either, that much I can tell you from this photo alone.”

“I followed up on that one too,” said Novak. “You’re correct. And the Dutch haven’t got anything in the area either, in fact they haven’t got anything that big at all. It’s every bit a battleship from the looks of it.”

Osborne raised his eyebrows. Every so often the tedious routine of radio intercepts and decoding actually morphed into something really interesting. But this was more than that. It had an air of downright mystery about it, and a thrum of excitement stirred in him as he looked at the photo. Then he recalled something he had gotten wind of through channels…something about a ship that had given the British fits just days ago in the Med.

“Say Novak…” he was reaching to recall the information. “I heard talk about a ship in the Med that raised quite a ruckus last week. It seems everyone and their mother was after it. Italians tangled with it up near Bonifacio Strait, and then it ran west for Gibraltar.”