The U.S.S Yorktown And the Japanese Carrier Fleet
RENDEZVOUS AT MIDWAY
by Pat Frank and Joseph D. Harrington

FOREWORD
Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher (retired)

    The war was only a few weeks old when I took my flag and my staff aboard U.S.S. Yorktown at San Diego, and our situation in the Pacific was indeed unhappy. Hong Kong and Wake had fallen. The two British battleships on which we had counted so much for stopping a Japanese southward advance had been sunk off Malaya. Allied strength in the western Pacific was but a handful of cruisers, some destroyers, and a few submarines, no match at all for the onrushing Japanese fleet.
    The Philippines had been invaded at many points. General Douglas MacArthur had declared Manila an open city and was moving his forces into the Bataan Peninsula. There, as the war plans ordered, he was to fight as long as he could, then retreat into Fortress Corregidor and wait for us in California and Hawaii to come to his aid.
    We could give no help, of course. The battleships that were to crash through the central Pacific and combine with the British and Dutch forces against the Japanese lay in the mud of Pearl Harbor. The Japanese warlords, on the last day of 1941, were free to strike wherever it pleased them to do so.
    Few persons recognized then, or remember now, how grand the Japanese strategy was and how close it came to being realized. Japan struck east in early December, immobilizing the main strength of the U.S. fleet with a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. She was now striking south, to control or isolate Australia, the only logical place from which a great counterattack could be launched against her.
    She was also getting ready to strike west, across India, and into the Near East, joining up with German forces under General Rommel in Africa.
    A look at the globe will awe anyone who considers just how much of the world the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis would have controlled had its master plan been successful. Hitler’s troops at that time, remember, were enjoying success everywhere. They seemed well on their way to complete victory in Europe and in North Africa.
    With Japanese victories, the Axis Powers would have held the great Eurasian landmass, with all its wealth and resources, the world island. America would have been isolated and dealt with at leisure.
    In the Pacific Ocean, at the beginning of 1942, the United States had no means whatever of thwarting Japanese plans except for small task forces built around four aircraft carriers -- Enterprise, Saratoga, Lexington, and Yorktown. A fifth carrier, Hornet, would soon be on its way from the Atlantic. So it was that the carrier task force was thrust into war.
    Our aircraft carriers had to perform two tasks : protect what holdings we still had, and keep the Japanese fleet off balance and dispersed by widely scattered, sudden attacks on enemy holdings. We had to keep this up until replacement and supplementary warships could be constructed, until America’s industrial might could make itself felt. And Lord help us if the Japanese fleet ever assembled against us, outnumbered as we were.
    I had the privilege of commanding American sailors in two great carrier battles of the Pacific -- Coral Sea and Midway. The first battle saved Australia and marked a new experience for the Japanese fleet, retreat. The second battle broke the back of Japan’s naval air arm, with four of her best aircraft carriers going down and hundreds of her best pilots lost.
    In both battles, I fought from the bridge of U.S.S. Yorktown, a fine ship, with whose officers and men it was an honor to serve. The full contribution of Yorktown men to America’s success in the Pacific has never been revealed until now. Security precautions kept it secret at the time it happened, and later happenings in the war, when we were obviously on the road to victory, overshadowed it. After the war, when all the facts became available and were cleared for release, they were not reported fully. Certain myths were repeated so often that they became accepted truths.
    The authors of this book decided to tell Yorktown’s story. They gathered and documented all the facts obtainable concerning her, then assembled the personal experiences of men who sailed in Yorktown, so that her story could be told in their words. When I was first approached for an interview, I was impressed with the wealth of information, some of it new even to me, that these gentlemen possessed. I was also impressed with their meticulous method of cross-checking every bit of information. I remain impressed with the final result of their work.
    U.S.S. Yorktown was in the thin line of aircraft carriers which were all we had to deter the Japanese with until our forces were built up. She helped keep the enemy spread out. When he finally did concentrate his forces for attack, she and her men helped meet and defeat them.
    Once the Japanese Navy lost four aircraft carriers at Midway, it lost its momentum and never recovered it. Australia was never threatened again. Nor was Hawaii. America was able to divert men and resources to Africa, England, and Europe, to stop Hitler, and to send others to Burma and India to assist in stopping the Japanese there. Victory became a matter of time.
    Aircraft carriers like Yorktown added a new dimension to naval warfare. They guarded supply lines, hunted down enemy submarines, protected convoys and even their own escorting capital ships, beat off enemy air counterattacks, I softened up beaches for invasion, and rained destruction on enemy cities. They became an integral part, indeed the core, of our naval power. They remain so today. As I write this, they are off Vietnam, demonstrating their unique ability to apply as much or as little force as is necessary in backing up the foreign policy of the United States.
    What carriers can do we first learned in ships like U.S.S. Yorktown, during the tough, trying days of early 1942. The battle lessons of Coral Sea and Midway were applied with ever-increasing effectiveness later -- with such effectiveness, in fact, that we were able to reduce our pilot training program radically in 1944. Our pilots were so well trained and superior to the enemy by that time that their losses were far below combat expectations.
    Most Yorktown men lived through Coral Sea and Midway. Badly outnumbered in the war’s early days, they fought bravely and survived. They then trained and led others in the ways of victory. I am pleased to know that, at last, their story is being told in detail, just as it happened.

FRANK JACK FLETCHER        
U.S. Navy Admiral (Retired)        

Araby, La Plata, Maryland, 1966

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