Word: fleetly
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Admiral Nagumo discreetly refrained for hours from reporting the full extent of the disaster to Yamamoto. Only in late afternoon did he finally tell him that the Hiryu, the last of his carriers, was burning out of control. With that, Nagumo decided to withdraw the remnants of his fleet from the battlefield. Yamamoto sank into a chair and sat staring into space, as stupefied as MacArthur in his penthouse in Manila...
Finally stirring, Yamamoto sent a message of MacArthurian unreality: "The enemy fleet, which has practically been destroyed, is retiring to the east . . . Immediately contact and destroy the enemy." As a further measure, he also relieved Nagumo of his command. And imperial headquarters said a great triumph had been achieved, bringing "supreme power in the Pacific...
More heroic but no less doomed was Wake Island, a tiny atoll between Hawaii and Guam. A Japanese fleet closed in to start landing troops at dawn on Dec. 11. U.S. Marines under Major James Devereux scored four direct hits on the flagship Yubari and sank two destroyers. The force withdrew -- the first small U.S. victory in World War II and the only time in the war that defenders beat back an invasion fleet. In reporting this small triumph to Pearl Harbor, according to a story that may be apocryphal, one of Devereux's men added a bit of bravado...
Shortly before midnight of Feb. 8, under a heavy bombardment, 13,000 Japanese surged across the strait on a fleet of 300 collapsible plywood boats and landing craft. A battalion of 2,500 Australians fought them off all night, but by dawn the Japanese held their beachhead, and then the tanks started across. Though the Japanese were actually outnumbered about 2 to 1 overall, the martial spirit invoked in London hardly existed in Singapore -- at least not on the British side. At a point when the Japanese had conquered half the island, British staff officers could still be seen sipping...
...Navy still had one great secret weapon, though: its code breakers could read Japanese naval messages. From those, Pacific Fleet commander Chester Nimitz knew that the Japanese planned to seize the eastern approaches to Australia by attacking Port Moresby, on the tail of New Guinea, in the first week in May. Nimitz stripped bare Pearl Harbor's defenses to mount an all-out attack on the Japanese invaders as they entered the Coral...