by Ian W. Toll
To observers on the decks of the other ships of the task force, watching the wild aerial melee from a distance, it was difficult to tell what was happening or which side was winning. The sky was mottled with flak bursts; airplanes blew up and fell from the sky; the Yorktown turned sharply, first starboard and then port, and her deck heeled sickeningly. “The ack-ack was ragged but the thunderheads of it blackened the horizon,” wrote Robert Casey, who studied the scene through a pair of binoculars. Fred Dyer, a floatplane aviator on the cruiser Portland, felt a “wave of extreme patriotism.” “All the ships flew huge American battle flags from mastheads,” he said. “Ships knifing through huge breaking blue swells, boiling wakes from high-speed ships, flags flying. . . . It was a scene I will never forget.”
The second shutai, winging in on the Yorktown’s port bow, launched four torpedoes. The planes took heavy fire, from both the Wildcats and the antiaircraft gunners. Lieutenant Hashimoto compared the sound of the flak fragments striking his plane to hail falling on a metal roof. Ensign Maruyama’s rear-seat man was hit in the leg and “the tail of our aircraft looked like a honeycomb because it was full of holes.” One plane, after releasing its torpedo, flew across the Yorktown’s bow. It was so low and so close that American crewmen stationed on the flight deck made eye contact with the Japanese airmen. “I could see the pilot hunkered down in front,” said aircraft mechanic Bill Surgi. “The fellow in the second seat was holding a camera to take a picture of our ship. The third man, in the rear seat, was not using his gun. He held up his hand and I thought of stories I had read about chivalry. I thought he was saluting us.”
Two torpedoes slammed into the Yorktown on the port side, amidships. The first, recalled Lieutenant Joseph Pollard, caused “a sickening thud and rumble throughout the ship and the deck rose under me, trembled and fell away. . . . Then another sickening thud and the good ship shuddered and rapidly listed hard to port.” Tom Cheek, who had been ordered to take cover in the Fighting Three ready room, was twice lifted out of his seat by the successive blasts. “Although I was separated from the chair a mere fraction of an inch,” he wrote, “there was the impression that I’d risen high in the air. The entire ship twisted and whipped in a motion like a terrier shaking a rat.” After the second explosion, the lights cut out, the carrier listed heavily, and the ready-room chairs slid down the deck to pin men and chairs against the port-side bulkhead. “The only sounds in the compartment were those of squirming bodies and heavy breathing,” said Cheek. “Then, the sound of voices and curses in the dark as those nearest the exits attempted to open the hatches.” The hatches were wrenched open and the men exited one by one, quickly but without panic.
Below, the medical corpsmen were overwhelmed with wounded. With the lights cut out, they were forced to work with flashlights; they could do little but cover the suffering men with blankets, inject them with morphine, give them a drink of water, and apply bandages and tourniquets to stem the bleeding. A medical officer recalled: “Some men had one foot or leg off, others had both off; some were dying, some dead.” Stretcher bearers kept bringing men into the battle dressing stations and sickbay, which were soon filled to capacity, and stretchers were put down in the adjoining passageways.
The two torpedoes had done serious damage. The first, at frame 90, took three boilers out of commission and killed the engines. The second, at frame 75, flooded the forward generator room and cut electrical power. The emergency diesel generators started up but just as soon short-circuited. Without power, the pumps could not counterflood to correct the port list, which soon reached 30 degrees. Men on the flight deck had to find handholds to avoid sliding into the sea. There seemed a real risk that the ship would capsize and take hundreds of men down with her. At 3 p.m., Captain Buckmaster ordered abandon ship.
For the hundreds of Yorktowners stationed belowdecks, the escape from the crippled carrier was a harrowing ordeal. The electrical generators having failed, much of the ship was left in total darkness, or was lit only by the still-burning fires. The decks were canted as steeply as the roof of a house, and men had to look for hand and footholds, as if they were mountaineers; but the steel surfaces were so hot in places that they could not be touched by bare skin, and the climbers wrapped their hands with clothing or rags. The journey took them through a labyrinth of scuttles and ladders, with the voices of shipmates calling through the darkness to guide them. By all accounts, the crew behaved with great courage and self-possession, keeping their heads and working together. They made way for the medical corpsmen, who carried the wounded men out on wire-mesh stretchers. Emerging onto the steeply sloping hangar deck, they took in a scene through the shimmering heat haze—the twisted, blackened wrecks of aircraft, the grisly remains of slaughtered sailors. Lining up in orderly fashion to go down the knotted lines into the sea, they left their shoes in neat rows, as if they intended to return. The sharp list of the deck was unnerving. “At long intervals the ship would roll slowly to port,” said Cheek; “a few degrees at the most, yet each roll to port seemingly increased the angle of list in that direction. Scanning the faces of those around me, it was obvious the thought of capsizing was on everyone’s mind.”
Hundreds of men needed to go over the side, but there were only half a dozen knotted lines. Some jumped. Many went into cargo nets, which were then lowered gently into the sea. Stretchers were winched down into the whaleboats, to be taken to the supporting ships of the screening force. The torpedoes had punctured the Yorktown’s fuel tanks, and the sea around the ship was covered with a 4-inch layer of bunker oil. Swimmers were pushed back against the Yorktown’s hull by wind and waves. “As each wave broke over my head, oil and gas vapors burned my eyes and nose, making it difficult to breathe,” photographer’s mate Bill Roy recalled. “I was covered with bunker oil. Some sailors swallowed oil and water, then vomited trying to hang on. Wind and waves kept all of us against the rough side of the steel hull, which was tearing at our skin. It was difficult to get away. We were all afraid the Yorktown would roll over, sink, and take us down.”
Whaleboats and destroyers moved in to rescue the swimmers. When the boats were filled to capacity, they towed lines behind them, with life jackets tied to the lines at intervals, and towed dozens of floating men to the ships, where they piled into the cargo nets. As the rescued sailors fell, dripping and exhausted, to the decks of the cruisers and destroyers, each was given a cursory examination. If no medical treatment was needed, he was given a cup of coffee with the order: “Drink this!” Fireman first class Herman A. Kelley was hauled aboard a destroyer, the Benham. As he reached the deck, he was handed a bottle of whiskey with instructions to take a swig and pass it on to the next man. It was, he recalled, “just what the doctor ordered.”
EVEN WITH YORKTOWN OUT OF ACTION, the Americans now held the high cards. The two Hiryu strike groups had each attacked the same target, leaving the Enterprise and Hornet unscratched and fully functional. The Americans had suffered catastrophic losses among their torpedo squadrons, but their dive-bomber squadrons were largely intact—and it was the dive-bombers that had done in three Japanese flattops, and posed the greatest threat to the fourth. More than five hours of daylight remained. The Hiryu was well within range, without means to escape by nightfall, and she had lost all but a few of her planes. If she could be destroyed, every carrier aircraft in the Japanese fleet would be destroyed with her, for as one American officer dryly observed, “If four carriers are smashed, their planes are going to have a hell of a time finding a place to land.”
Fletcher had descended into a whaleboat to take him to his new flagship, the cruiser Astoria, and for the moment the Enterprise and Hornet were operating independently. Admiral Spruance and the skipper of the Hornet, Marc Mitscher, were preparing two deckload strikes to attack the Hiryu, which had been sighted by a Yorktown scout bomber at 2:45 p.m., only 110 miles east.
Enterprise began launching her planes—twenty-five Dauntless dive-bombers, escorted by eight F4F Wildcats. The group was led
by Lieutenant Gallaher, skipper of Scouting Six. They lifted off, surged 400 yards ahead into the wind, gaining altitude, then banked wide to the left and flew low over the accompanying screening ships. In less than twenty minutes the entire strike was aloft. They did not have far to fly. Forty minutes after leaving the Enterprise, droning along at 19,000 feet, Gallaher sighted the Japanese fleet some thirty miles ahead.
The Hiryu’s remaining planes—four dive-bombers, five torpedo planes, and an experimental Type 2 dive-bomber from Soryu—were refueling in the hangar, which was therefore a tinderbox of fuel and munitions, leaving the ship in much the same vulnerable position as her sisters that morning. The pilots and plane crews had been driven too hard for too long, and were nearing the point of complete physical exhaustion. Yamaguchi ordered that the pilots be fed stimulants and given rice balls, which they devoured wolfishly.
Gallaher led his group in a wide circle off to the north. Peering down through scattered cloud cover, he could see three stricken Japanese flight decks, all still blazing furiously. Finally he spotted the Hiryu, his target. He flew farther west to set up an up-sun approach, in hopes of spoiling the aim of the antiaircraft gunners. With so many dive-bombers in his formation, Gallaher judged that he did not need them all to attack the Hiryu, and directed the fifteen planes of Yorktown’s Bombing Three to attack the battleship Haruna. Lookouts on the cruiser Chikuma spotted the approaching planes at 5 p.m., right before Gallaher reached his pushover point. The Hiryu went into a hard port turn, forcing the first dive-bombers to steepen their dives. Flak bursts mottled the sky, and the Zeros dived with the first SBDs, shooting down several with their 20mm cannon. The combination of fighters, flak, and the carrier’s evasive maneuvers spoiled the aim of the first bombers in the dive, and their bombs splashed harmlessly into the sea. Lieutenant Dewitt W. Shumway, who had been detached to attack the Haruna, saw that the attack on the Hiryu was going awry, and made the quick-headed decision to turn his attack against the carrier.
The Hiryu was well defended, but with three groups of bombers attacking her, she was simply overwhelmed. Four 1,000-pound bombs struck the flight deck forward, punching through to the hangar deck and igniting fires below. The forward elevator was blown upward and sent hurtling through the air to hit the side of the carrier’s island. The electrical power cut out, and the pilot ready rooms were flooded with smoke, forcing the inhabitants out onto the flight deck. Taisuke Maruyama felt “very strong vibrations, which sounded like the ship was split into two parts. Those intense vibrations continued on and on.” The stern, which had remained largely undamaged, was used as a base for the firefighters and damage control teams—but the water mains had ruptured, reducing water pressure to the hoses, and what little water could be brought to bear on the flames tended to evaporate before it could do any good. The Hiryu was still able to make 30 knots, but the wind created by her speed through the water fanned the flames and pushed them back toward the stern. “When I saw the sun through the smoke on the deck it looked red, which made me miserable,” Maruyama said. “I felt it was like a castle being burned, once the battle was lost, back in the samurai days.”
The last few SBDs from Hornet, arriving late, realized that the Hiryu was done for, and concentrated their attack on two nearby cruisers, Chikuma and Tone. To make matters even more confused, Lieutenant Colonel Sweeney’s B-17s had returned from Midway, refueled and rearmed, and they dropped bombs on the task force from high altitude. As usual, these high-altitude bombs would score no hits on the enemy, but some fell right through the formation of SBDs, giving the navy pilots the strange sensation that they were being bombed from above.
One glance at the Hiryu was enough to know that her flight deck had been closed for good, and the Zero pilots who remained aloft now had to reckon with the knowledge that they were marooned in the air, with no friendly airfield within thousands of miles, and would have to fly around until their fuel tanks ran dry, and then execute that oxymoronic trick known as a “water landing.”
Yamamoto received Nagumo’s unwelcome report at 5:55 p.m.: “Hiryu hit by bombs and set afire, 1730.” Four out of four of Kido Butai’s flight decks were crippled, but the commander in chief and his staff were not yet ready to consider withdrawal; indeed, they seemed to believe the battle could still be retrieved. Admiral Ugaki inquired of Nagumo’s staff “whether or not friendly units will be able to use shore bases on Midway tomorrow.” As if the invasion of Midway was still a possibility! The very notion, as Parshall and Tully write, “demonstrated just how out of touch Yamamoto and his staff were. . . . Blissfully ignorant, or simply unwilling to admit the true nature of the combat conditions then pertaining, and physically located so as to be of no use whatsoever to the ongoing operation, Yamamoto’s staff was clearly having difficulty coming to grips with reality. This trend would only get worse as the evening continued.”
At 7:15 p.m., Yamamoto sent an upbeat assessment to his entire command: “The enemy task force has retired to the east. Its carrier strength has practically been destroyed.” He ordered his forces to concentrate and finish off the American fleet. The surface ships of Nagumo’s Striking Force were to hunt the American carriers down and destroy them in a night action. Other fleet elements were to attack and occupy Midway. The Main Body raised speed to 20 knots and charged east through coagulating fogs, in hopes of bringing their big guns into action.
Fuchida and Okumiya judged the message “so strangely optimistic as to suggest that Commander in Chief Combined Fleet was deliberately trying to prevent the morale of our forces from collapsing.” Destroyer skipper Tameichi Hara agreed: “Even with my limited view of events in this battle,” he wrote, “I did not understand how Yamamoto could have issued that order. It now appears that he was trying to prevent the morale of his forces from collapsing, but at the time I thought he must have taken leave of his senses.” Yamamoto’s staff was slightly manic, with “jangled nerves and bloodshot eyes,” and apparently no man wanted to be the first to warn that the Americans could use their now absolute air supremacy to wipe out the remnants of the Japanese fleet.
ENSIGN GEORGE GAY, lone survivor of Torpedo Eight, treaded water in the midst of the Japanese task force. He concealed his head under a float cushion whenever a ship came near, and rejoiced as he watched the enemy carriers burn. Gay, a Texan, compared the Soryu to “a very large oil field fire, if you’ve ever seen one. The fire coming out of the forward and aft end of the ship looked like a blow torch, just roaring white flame and the oil burning . . . I don’t know how high, and just billowing, big red flames belching out of this black smoke.” The stricken carriers would “burn for a while and blow up for a while and I was sitting in the water hollering ‘Hooray, Hooray.’”
Firefighting efforts persisted on all four carriers, to varying degrees—but in every case the fires steadily prevailed. Japanese damage control equipment and training was unequal to the task—the navy, with its all-consuming devotion to offensive warfare, simply had not emphasized it. Even when the firefighters could get hoses on the fires, the water pressure was too weak to make much of an impression; in some cases, it actually made matters worse, by spreading spilled aviation fuel to as-yet-undamaged portions of the ships. Fire-suppressing foam would have been better, but the Japanese ships were not equipped with it. Firefighters descended into the lower reaches of the ships, where the passageways were choked with smoke and heated to ovenlike temperatures. Lacking gas masks, they held wet rags to their mouths, or they crawled on all fours, to breathe the slightly better air near the deck, across steel plates that seared their hands and knees. But on all four carriers, no matter how bravely the firefighters persisted in their hellish labors, they could not extinguish the fires. Their only real hope was to outlast them. The conflagrations would persist so long as there was fuel to feed them—and between the aviation gasoline, the bunker oil, and the munitions, there was no shortage of fuel on the burning flattops.
The doctors did their best to cope with the wounded, often wi
thout medical supplies because the fires had put them out of their reach. Burn cases were numerous, and not much could be done for them, even to ease their pain. There were reports of dreadfully burned men taking their own lives by staggering into the fires. Toxic fumes emitted by the burning of paint and other materials filled men’s lungs, sickening or killing them. On all of the stricken flattops, the sailors were thirsty, but in many cases there was no water to drink; they were exhausted but they could not rest; they were hungry but there was no food. The fires drove them back—pushed them inexorably to the edges of the decks, to the catwalks and anti-torpedo bulges on the hulls.
Soryu was the first of the four to be abandoned. The order was given at 10:45 a.m., just twenty minutes after Bombing Three’s devastating attack. Hundreds of her crew had been driven back to the edges of the bow and stern, or to the catwalks—and these extremities became so crowded that men had to hold their arms above their heads to move. When the order came, many were reluctant to comply and had to be urged to go by their officers. Finally, with three cheers of “Soryu Banzai!,” they began to leap into the sea. It was a long drop, about 35 feet, but they felt the heat radiating from the fires, and their mates pushed from behind. Each man hit the sea hard, feet-first, and was yanked back to the surface by his vest. He then had to swim away from the ship as quickly as he could, to avoid being struck by the jumpers dropping from overhead.
On the Kaga, fires raged out of control, and the surviving crew retreated to the edges of the flight deck. The hangar, completely engulfed by flames, was so hot and choked with smoke that not even the firefighters could descend into it. The rungs of the ladders leading up from the hangar deck glowed bright orange, and the steel surface of the flight deck melted the rubber soles of men who walked on it. “The inside of the hangar was bright red,” said Haruo Yoshino, the Kaga pilot. “The series of explosions were still going on. An extraordinary flame appeared with each explosion.” The carrier’s last remaining electrical power was lost for good by 1 p.m. At 4:40 p.m., when it was abundantly clear that nothing could be done to save the ship, Commander Takahisa Amagai, the senior surviving officer, ordered all survivors into the sea. Most men leapt 30 feet or more into the oily sea, and clung to oil-soaked debris until they could be picked up by one of the circling destroyers.