Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942

by Ian W. Toll

  With a long return flight ahead of them, many of the American planes would again stagger back to Task Force 16 with night falling and fuel tanks running dry. At Spruance’s order, the Enterprise and Hornet turned on their searchlights to guide the wayward planes home. It was an unusual decision and a controversial one, as the lights could also draw enemy submarines. In his bland, reticent way, the admiral explained his decision thus: “If planes are to be flown so late in the day that a night recovery is likely, and if the tactical situation is such that the commander is unwilling to do what is required to get the planes back safely, then he has no business launching the attack in the first place.”

  The returning planes arrived in small groups, descending through heavy overcast, and entered the landing circles as the band of orange light across the western horizon faded to darkness. “The scene was reminiscent of a summer storm on a lake,” wrote Ensign Mears, “with the warm, buffeting wind, the darkening clouds, and the lightning stabs of light into the night.” Ensign Roy Gee of the Hornet had never trained for a night landing, and doubted he could do it safely. He spied a carrier’s lights in the distance, and followed the taillights of his squadron leader’s aircraft into the landing circle. Gee kept his head, mechanically ticking off the items on his checklist: “wheels down and locked, flaps down, tailhook extended.” As he flew the downwind leg of his approach, he made out the illuminated tips of the wands held by the landing signal officer, but could not see the LSO himself. Making his final turn, he received a cut and snagged the third arresting wire. Only after climbing out of his cockpit did he realize he had landed on the Enterprise, having mistaken her for the Hornet.

  FOR TWO NIGHTS AND A DAY, the abandoned Yorktown drifted and burned. Admiral Fletcher and the remaining units of Task Force 17 had followed Spruance east, then west, leaving a lone destroyer, the Hughes, to stand by the crippled flattop. The captain of the Hughes had been ordered to torpedo the Yorktown if the Japanese fleet should appear on the horizon; under no circumstances would she be permitted to fall into enemy hands. But Fletcher had not entirely given up on his former flagship. As long as she floated, there was hope of bringing her back into Pearl Harbor, and the admiral had summoned a tug for that purpose. With the Japanese fleet in retreat, there seemed a real possibility that she could be saved.

  On the morning of June 6, Captain Buckmaster assembled a 170-man salvage team and reboarded his blacked-out ship. The Yorktown was listing heavily to port—so heavily, indeed, that Buckmaster’s party could step directly from the gunwales of the motor launches onto the hangar deck, which was normally 25 feet above the sea. One sailor recalled: “It was weird to see all those pairs of shoes lined up around the hangar deck, some with cigarettes and matches, even a wristwatch, as though they were coming back soon.” The oil-smeared deck sloped as steeply as the roof of a house. Without electrical power, the lower reaches of the ship were lit only by firelight. The men inched down the ladders, probing ahead with the beams of their flashlights, as if descending into a cave. They shouted, but no one answered; apparently no survivors had been left aboard the Yorktown when she was abandoned two days earlier.

  The men got to work stamping out the fires and restoring power to the ship. Everything that could be removed from the upper decks was thrown over the side—the 5-inch guns on the flight deck, the spare aircraft stowed overhead on the hangar deck. The destroyer Hammann came close alongside to provide water, electrical power, and foamite. At Buckmaster’s order, the Yorktown’s starboard fuel tanks were counterflooded with water from the Hammann’s firehoses. Gradually, the list diminished, until the Yorktown was nearly on an even keel. Buckmaster presided over a burial service for thirty-five men who had been killed in the action of June 4, and had been left on the deck, covered with canvas sheets.

  By one o’clock in the afternoon, all remaining fires had been extinguished. A minesweeper, the Vireo, had managed to secure a towline to the bow and was towing the carrier through the water at about 3 knots. Suddenly there was hope—perhaps she might be brought into Pearl in one piece. Several more screening destroyers circled protectively at a distance of 2,000 yards.

  But the column of smoke trailed by the stricken flattop had attracted a stalker—Japanese submarine I-168, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Yahachi Tanabe. Tanabe approached skillfully and with great audacity, slipped beneath the destroyer screen undetected, and raised his periscope to discover that he was ideally positioned for a close-range attack on the Yorktown’s starboard beam. At 1:36 p.m., I-168 launched four torpedoes. At that range, fired on a target that was nearly dead in the water, they could hardly miss. One torpedo hit the Hammann; two more passed under the Hammann’s keel and detonated against the hull of the luckless Yorktown. The fourth fish narrowly missed both ships, astern.

  The Hammann’s lookouts spotted the incoming torpedo tracks. All at once, the destroyer’s 20mm guns opened up, her alarms sounded, and men on her decks rushed to cut away all the lines, cables, and hoses connecting her to the Yorktown. Navy chief machinist’s mate Dwight G. DeHaven, standing on the stern of the Yorktown, recalled that the destroyer’s turbines were screaming and her port propeller was clanging against the Yorktown’s hull, which “rang like a bell” each time the blade struck. But from that range, there was no time to get clear of the incoming fish. The Hammann was struck amidships; the impact lifted more than a hundred sailors off her decks and flung them into the sea; the explosion cut the little tin can in half. The bow section sank in seconds. The stern section, DeHaven recalled, “was standing vertically with her screws coasting to a stop. I could see the damaged flukes flashing in the sunlight.”

  Fatefully, the Hammann’s depth charges were fully charged and armed—they would detonate when they reached the depths for which they had been set. A quick-thinking sailor rushed to disarm them, but there was no time. The stern sank from sight, and a few seconds later, the entire rack of depth charges detonated with a tremendous underwater blast that threw men on the Yorktown off their feet. Many suffered broken bones in their feet and legs. The men thrown into the sea by the initial torpedo strike had been treading water. “Great walls of water and fuel oil rolled over us and about the time you caught your breath and wiped the oil out of your eyes another wave would hit you,” recounted Fireman first class Elmer Jones. Clarence C. Ray, a communications officer, remembered seeing “perhaps a hundred heads, floating on the water as she went under.” Most of these were Hammann sailors who had been catapulted off the destroyer by the initial torpedo strike. “Just then, the depth charges all exploded. All those heads that had been on the water just before the depth charges exploded suddenly disappeared, something like a windshield wiper erases the droplets from your windshield when it’s raining. They were all gone.” Eighty-one of the Hammann’s complement of 251 men were lost in the action.

  Two other torpedoes passed under the Hammann and detonated against the starboard side of the Yorktown at frames 84 and 95. As they hit, said Bill Roy, the carrier “rocked up and rolled hard. Great explosive sheets of fire, oil, water, and metal blew up between the two ships.”

  The Japanese submarine dived to her maximum depth and passed directly under the Yorktown. The vengeful U.S. destroyers hunted her for two hours, depth-charging her so furiously that she was brought to the brink of destruction. Her batteries were nearly exhausted and toxic acid fumes permeated the ship. But she made good her escape, and returned intact to Kure. Hers had been the most devastating torpedo attack up to that point in the war.

  At first it seemed that the Yorktown might take these fresh wallops in stride. I-168’s torpedoes had struck her starboard side, whereas the wounds she had suffered on June 4 were on her port side. The natural counterflooding effect brought the Yorktown back onto an even keel, though she was much lower in the water, and it was no longer possible to tow her. The salvage teams secured every watertight door they could reach, but the flooding continued, and she continued to settle lower into the sea. As dusk approached, Buckmast
er prudently ordered every man off the ship. They would pass the night aboard the Vireo, with hopes of returning and continuing to fight for the carrier’s life the next morning.

  But at dawn on the 7th, the Yorktown had settled still further in the water, and her port list had returned. Gradually she rolled all the way onto her beam ends, so that her flight deck was vertical. Her surviving crew watched sadly from the circling destroyers. The two huge wounds torn in her hull by I-168’s torpedoes were exposed to view. “We could hear the heavy machinery tearing loose and crashing thunderously into the bulkheads, tearing herself apart internally,” said DeHaven. At 7 a.m., the great ship began going down by the stern, “and as she did the bow slowly lifted out of the water about one-third of her length and tons of water cascaded out of the flooded compartments on the forecastle deck. The ship rolled back and forth until the bow stem was plumb, and as she rocked back and forth, she looked like she was waving goodbye. I’ve never seen so many grown men cry; we all had tears in our eyes.” For a few moments, her bow stood straight up out of the sea, like a tombstone. Then the sea closed over the Yorktown and she set out on her three-mile voyage into the abyss.

  Captain Buckmaster, watching silently from one of the destroyers, asked the helmsman to drive the ship through the foam and debris. In silent tribute it was done. Then the destroyers formed up in a column and retired toward Pearl Harbor.

  EPILOGUE

  TASK FORCE 16 (ENTERPRISE, HORNET, AND THEIR ACCOMPANYING surface ships) might have chased the retreating Japanese fleet far into the west, but to do so would have entailed various risks. Admiral Spruance was wary of bringing his ships within air-striking range of Wake Island’s land-based bombers. Nor did he want to blunder under the 18-inch guns of the Yamato or the 16-inch guns of the other mighty Japanese battlewagons. He later wrote that he had “a feeling, an intuition perhaps, that we had pushed our luck as far to the westward as was good for us.” The destroyers, having run at high speed for days, were short of fuel. Barring some dramatic and unlikely reversal of fortune, the Battle of Midway had been decisively won. As night fell on June 6, Spruance decided to let well enough alone. The task force turned back toward Oahu.

  The remnants of Admiral Fletcher’s Task Force 17 were congested with survivors and wounded men of the late Yorktown and Hammann. These ships retired toward Pearl Harbor at high speed, to foil enemy submarines—but with their engines dialed up to 25 knots, the destroyers shuddered violently and unremittingly, causing the wounded men terrible agony. The worst casualties were those who had been caught in the water when the Hammann’s depth charges exploded. Many died during the three-day passage back to Oahu, and were buried at sea. “When they were ready to send one over,” an injured sailor on the destroyer Benham recalled, “they would blow a whistle and everyone was supposed to come to attention. My stretcher bearers set me down right in line with the dead bodies. I let them know I was still alive!” When the doctors cut open some of the dead, “in order to see what they were dealing with,” they discovered that the intestines were perforated with tiny holes, as if filled with buckshot.

  They had won the battle—that much the American officers and sailors understood. But they did not yet know the dimensions of their victory, and whatever elation they felt was tempered by uncertainty, disorientation, sorrow, and exhaustion. In his journal, Robert Casey observed that the whole story of the Battle of Midway would not be told for some time to come. “This was a cataclysm observed by tens of thousands of eyes and yet a spectacle that no man saw,” he wrote. “Hundreds of men brought back their little bits of it—bits that sometimes fitted together and sometimes didn’t—to make the mosaic in which we may one day see the picture of what happened at Midway.” Ensign Mears, one of the few survivors of Torpedo Eight (he had not been assigned to fly), recalled that the Hornet aviators tried to collate their experiences into a coherent account, but there remained many questions that none could answer. “Bit by bit, as one fits pieces into a jigsaw puzzle, we learned from one individual and another, by rumor and hearsay, what squadrons had attacked what objectives, and the results.”

  They knew nothing of what had happened to the defenders on Midway itself, or in the Aleutians, or what the army airmen had achieved. What did it all mean? What was the relative significance of these events? No one could say with confidence.

  Every carrier aviator knew, as a matter of cold statistical fact, that his profession was among the most dangerous in the navy. From the earliest stages of their flight training, and many times since, they had been warned that they would lose friends and squadron mates. But the “irrevocable finality of death,” as one young dive-bomber pilot put it, came as a terrible shock. There was never a body to bury. The slain airmen were simply never seen again. Their deaths were potently symbolized by the rows of empty chairs in the carrier ready rooms. “The reaction of the pilots to the annihilation of their comrades was one of bewilderment,” wrote Mears. “There was no evidence that they had been killed. The dead just were not there, and it was hard for the others to realize that they never would be.” Ensign Clay Fisher recalled entering the Torpedo Eight ready room and finding it “completely empty except for the pilots’ uniforms hanging on the hooks, left there after they had changed into their flight suits.” Both young ensigns—Mears and Fisher—were assigned to sort through their fallen colleagues’ personal possessions and pack them off to the next of kin. They did the job with heavy hearts. Mears: “Going through every person’s private effects—seeing a characteristically battered cap, a girl’s picture, an earmarked Prayer Book, or a wallet with various cards in it—made us realize how much each one would be missed at home.”

  On the other hand, there was no arguing with the fact that the Japanese navy had sent an enormously powerful fleet into battle, and lost four first-line carriers. The American colors still flew over Midway atoll, and the remnants of the enemy fleet were in abject retreat toward Japan. “It turns out that we have fought a major engagement—one of the biggest naval battles of all time,” Casey observed. “And miracle of miracles, we have won. It was too stupendous to contemplate as we lolled in a mist of nervous exhaustion, mumbling to one another in senseless monosyllables, falling to sleep over our coffee.”

  Nimitz had followed the course of the battle from the operation plot room in the CINCPAC headquarters. The room, as Layton described it, was “a rather primitive affair that consisted of a large chart of the Pacific laid over plywood across a pair of sawhorses.” Over that chart was placed a large sheet of tracing paper, and a staff officer continually drew, in blue crayon, the known position and tracks of American and Japanese fleet units. Scattered radio intercepts had told the tale of the battle. Nimitz and the staff had alternated between elation and anxiety as the action progressed. On the morning of June 4, Nimitz learned of the massacre of Torpedo Eight. Layton recorded that he was “as frantic as I have ever seen him. He appeared agitated and called for his communications officer, Commander Curtis, to know why we were not getting any messages or hearing something. Although they must have known by now that they could break radio silence, it seemed that our task force commanders were neglecting to keep Nimitz informed of what was going on.”

  Later that afternoon, Spruance broke radio silence to report that four Japanese carriers were hit and burning. A relieved Nimitz sent a dispatch to all units: “You who have participated in the battle of Midway today have written a glorious page in our history. I am proud to be associated with you. I estimate that another day of all-out effort on your part will complete the defeat of the enemy.” On June 6 he issued a communiqué, which appeared the next day in the American newspapers: “Pearl Harbor has now been partially avenged. Vengeance will not be complete until Japanese seapower is reduced to impotence.” The CINCPAC allowed himself a bit of uncharacteristic levity. “Perhaps we will be forgiven if we claim we are about midway to our objective.”

  THE REMNANTS OF Kido Butai crawled westward to fall in with the Main Body. Admiral Nagumo, w
hose flag now flew on the light cruiser Nagara, told his staff officers that he was inclined to take his own life, and some vowed to join him. But Admiral Ryunosuke Kusaka, Nagumo’s chief of staff, rejected suicide as a coward’s exit. “You are just like hysterical women,” he told them; “first you get excited over easy victories, and now you are worked up to commit suicide because of a defeat! This is no time for Japan for you to say such a thing. Why not think of turning a misfortune into blessing through your efforts?” Nagumo listened but was not immediately persuaded, replying in low tones, “You must understand that everything a Commander in Chief does cannot be by reason.” After further discussion, Nagumo relented. “Very well. I will never commit a rash act.”

  The surface ships were crowded with survivors of the late carriers, and many slept on cramped decks, exposed to the weather. Miyasato Yoshihito of the Chitose recalled burying the ship’s dead at sea. The crew stood to attention while the naval anthem Umi Yukaba—“Across the Sea”—was played over the loudspeaker. An honor guard fired a salute. A casket was released into the sea. “It didn’t sink for quite a while,” he recalled, “and we could see it drifting farther and farther away, in and out of the waves.”