They all caught his spirit. No one ever dug harder at the Marne than the 6th Defense Battalion did on Sand Island—building up emplacements, scooping out shelters, sandbagging new positions for the guns Nimitz promised. And on Eastern Island across the lagoon, the Marine airmen were digging too—bunkers for the planes, holes to store bombs, fuses, gas and water, to say nothing of slit trenches for themselves. They were soon down to three or four hours’ sleep a night.
All the while barbed wire was sprouting along the coral beaches. Major Robert Hommel strung so much his friends called him “Barbed Wire Bob.” Yet there could never be enough for Colonel Shannon. It stopped the Boches; it would stop the Japs. “Barbed wire, barbed wire!” exploded a weary Marine. “Cripes, the Old Man thinks we can stop planes with barbed wire.”
But they worked with little complaint, for Shannon’s sheer guts had captured them all. Captain Robert McGlashan, his young operations officer, trudged 11 hours a day in the blinding sun, checking positions, checking communications, checking camouflage, checking fields of fire. Once he even took to a submarine to see how it all looked from a periscope.
Yet they still had so little, considering the size of the juggernaut hurtling toward them. They needed ingenuity too, and Captain McGlashan knew just where to turn. He went to Marine Gunner Arnold. These old-time gunners were legends in the Corps. They had been everywhere, could do anything. “Deacon” Arnold himself dated back to the Siberian expedition. Now McGlashan asked him to cook up some antiboat mines and booby traps. All it would take was an old-timer’s knowledge of explosives… .
Actually Arnold knew almost nothing about explosives. But that didn’t faze him—he once read a book on the subject. Recruiting a routine headquarters detail, he tackled the job with the kind of relish that could only come from someone not used to playing with dynamite.
He and his men located some blasting gelatin—brown stuff that looked and felt a little like dough. This they kneaded and rammed into lengths of sewer pipe. Sealing the ends with hot tar, they ended up with a sort of mammoth firecracker. Altogether they made 380 of them. These they strung together in bunches of six and planted offshore to discourage any landing attempt. Electrically detonated, they made a highly satisfactory explosion. More primitive was the impressive stockpile of Molotov cocktails they gradually built up from Midway’s rather generous supply of empty whisky bottles.
And so the work went on, never stopping, for in a sense they were already under siege. The guns were always manned—meals served beside them—and the whole garrison now lived underground. Both the Navy and Marine command posts were dugouts near the center of Sand Island—Captain Simard giving orders by a white telephone that looked incongruously fashionable; Colonel Shannon holding forth in a deep dugout covered with beams and 12 feet of sand.
Every night both commanders met with their staffs to review the day and plan for tomorrow. The Marine sessions, at least, were often quite stormy, for the staff was perky and the Colonel not easily moved from his favorite theories. At one point he wanted a smoke screen, and it was quite a fracas before McGlashan and Arnold convinced him it would draw the Japs rather than hide the island. Another time he clashed with Captain Simard over shifting some barbed wire long enough to let the Navy fill a few sandbags. Touching that barbed wire was really inviting trouble, and it finally took a mild display of rank by the Captain before he got his sand.
In the end, of course, they always patched up their quarrels. The staff would go off to their bunks … the Colonel would gulp a last cup of coffee before turning in … and all would be up again at 5:00 A.M., ready to take on another hard day.
May 25, they got some good news. First came Nimitz’s message, giving a new date for the attack. Now it would be June 3-5—a whole extra week to prepare. Then the light cruiser St. Louis tied up at Sand Island, bringing the first reinforcements from Hawaii.
Captain Ronald K. Miller’s fine battery of eight 37 mm. guns was a welcome addition to the antiaircraft defense. Four went to Eastern, and Miller planted the other four in the woods on Sand Island. He was still at it when some trucks roared up, throwing sand in all directions. A gang of men piled out, howling slogans and singing Chinese Communist songs.
Carlson’s Raiders had arrived. This outfit—officially known as the 2nd Raider Battalion—was something of an experiment. Organized by Major Evans F. Carlson, its training reflected many ideas he had picked up during his days as a civilian observer with the Communist forces in North China. It had White House blessing, but its gung-ho philosophy smacked of indiscipline to many old Marines. To say the least, Carlson’s Raiders were controversial.
But there was no doubt about their fighting qualities; and when Midway’s hour came, Nimitz hurried out two companies. Arriving on the St. Louis along with Captain Miller’s guns, “D” Company went off to Eastern; “C” joined Miller in the Sand Island woods. Both were a wild-looking lot. Bandoleers of cartridges hung from bronzed shoulders. Their pockets bulged with grenades. Their belts bristled with knives, which they flung at the trees with casual skill. Even the medics were armed—no stenciled red crosses for this bunch.
Still more help came on the 26th. That evening the big ex-railroad ferry Kittyhawk arrived with the guns, tanks and planes that formed Nimitz’s biggest contribution. Midway could use these new 3-inchers and 20 mm. twin mounts borrowed from the 3rd Defense Battalion; it could use the five tanks too; but most welcome of all were the new planes—18 SBD dive bombers and 7 F4F fighters.
“New” was, of course, a relative term. Actually they were carrier castoffs. But they were infinitely better than the ancient relics already on hand. Until now Midway’s “air force” had consisted of 16 antique Vindicator dive bombers and 21 equally antique Buffalo fighters. The Vindicators (“Wind Indicators,” the Marines called them) had a tendency to ground-loop. When the pilots tried diving them earlier in the year, the wing fabric began peeling off—a hurry call went to the hospital for all available adhesive tape. The Buffalo fighters were just as inadequate. The new planes—whatever their credentials—were a vast improvement on these.
“New” in a different sense were the fliers who arrived too. Seventeen of the 21 pilots were just out of flight school. Some hadn’t even had four hours’ flight time since the end of their training. Nor did they know why they were here. Second Lieutenant Jack Cosley thought they were merely coming to an out-of-the-way island for further practice.
“You’re just in time for the party!” called the old hands cheerfully as the newcomers unloaded their gear on Eastern Island. Second Lieutenant Allan Ringblom, one of the new dive bomber pilots, assumed this was the standard kidding he could expect from a buddy perhaps a few months ahead of him at flight school. At his first squadron briefing on May 28, he learned differently… .
The skipper, Major Lofton Henderson, pulled no punches. The Japs were not only coming; they were overdue. The new SBDs were assigned the experienced pilots; the Vindicators were given the green recruits. None of them had ever flown one before, and there was little time to practice. They ground-looped two the first day. The equipment was wretched too—no charts and only four plotting boards for a dozen flyable planes.
So most of the time they just waited—restless hours of cards, cribbage, and watching Midway’s famous “gooney birds.” A kind of large albatross, the gooneys were a graceful delight in the air, but a clumsy absurdity on the ground. They were utterly tame, fascinated all the fliers, and inadvertently caused the squadron’s first casualty. In a whimsical moment Lieutenant Eke slipped one into Lieutenant Bear’s bunk, and it indignantly nipped Bear’s thumb getting out.
May 29 brought still more help—four Army B-26s rigged to carry torpedoes. Led by Captain James Collins, these were the first Army planes to arrive and caused quite a sensation. Everyone crowded around, but it turned out the pilots knew little more about their mission than the new Marines.
First Lieutenant James Muri had been at Hickam expecting to join the rest of h
is squadron in Australia. Suddenly all that was canceled and he was told to take a plane over to Pearl Harbor instead. Three other B-26s joined his, and when they arrived there, they found a collection of Navy officers waiting for them with several very large torpedoes—the first Muri had ever seen in his life.
The torpedoes, they learned, would be slung on the planes, and the four crews briefly practiced take-offs and landings. They never tried any drops, and none of their compasses were corrected. When they started out a couple of days later, the four B-26s began by fanning out in four different directions. Fortunately a friendly patrol plane happened along and set them on the right course. No greener torpedo plane pilots ever flew a mission, but at least they got to Midway.
This same day 12 Navy PBYs also arrived—latest in a steady stream that had been building up since May 14. Like the others coming in, these men had little idea what was up, but they brought a skipper who knew a great deal indeed. Commander Logan Ramsey was one of the Navy’s most colorful professionals. Physically a hulking, slow-moving man, mentally he was a genius. A great bridge player, he could do navigational problems while holding a hand of cards. He was completely unorthodox and often the despair of the Old Breed, but the patrol plane boss, Admiral Bellinger, thought the world of him and made him his chief of staff. With the Midway crisis coming to a head, Bellinger could think of no one he’d rather have out there than Logan Ramsey.
As is often the case with such men, Ramsey had a knack of attracting lively junior officers, and there was no lack of volunteers when he recruited a staff to help him. Ensign Edmond Jacoby had little idea why he was going, but with Ramsey it wouldn’t be dull. As they boarded the PBY at Pearl Harbor, Admiral Bellinger came down to see them off. Knowing Jacoby wanted to be a pilot, the Admiral called out, “If you get back, I’ll see you get to flight school.”
“If I get back,” thought Jacoby. “What could he mean by that?”
He found out that night almost as soon as they landed at Midway. Captain Simard called a meeting at the BOQ, explained briefly why they were there. Then Logan Ramsey took over, filling them in on the latest intelligence: the blow at the Aleutians on the 3rd … the transports coming in from the southwest … the carriers striking from the northwest, probably on the 4th. And he told them their job. No more one-day patrolling, then two days off. Starting tomorrow, they would go out every day, 700 miles. This was the moment all their training had been leading to.
Next morning, the 30th, as the first pink trace of dawn streaked the eastern sky, 22 PBYs lumbered into the air. Some were seaplanes, some the new amphibious kind, but all looked ungainly and slow. Briefly they circled the base as they got their bearings, then headed out on the spokes of a massive arc, running from just west of south to just east of north. Midway’s great search for the enemy had begun.
It was shortly after chow that noon when one of the PBYs limped back to Eastern Island, one engine out, and made an emergency landing. Then another cripple fluttered in. It seemed the Japs were also on patrol. They were down toward the southwest, flying out of Wake, snarling and spoiling for a fight. Both PBYs were riddled with bullets; from the first to land, the Marines gently lifted a gunner shot through the back.
Eight more Army planes arrived that same afternoon from Hawaii, and then another nine on May 31—all B-17 long-range bombers. There was some shuttling back and forth, but from now on about 15 were generally on hand. Led by Lieutenant Colonel Walter C. Sweeney, who invariably flew in his stocking feet, they gave a powerful boost to Midway’s striking power.
As with the B-26s, the big bombers were pulled into bunkers and the crews roughed it beside them in tents … but that didn’t stop First Lieutenant Everett Wessman from sleeping in his usual silk pajamas. The Air Force always had a flair about it
Another welcome arrival on the 31st was the freighter Nira Luckenbach with some last-minute equipment and 3,000 drums of high-test gas to help replace the fuel lost when Midway’s tanks blew up. It was Sunday, but nobody thought about that until a dispute erupted over extra pay for the ship’s merchant crew. Word spread that she couldn’t unload until Monday. Summoned to the scene, Captain Simard explained that the Japs were on the way, that the ship couldn’t leave until she was unloaded, and that there’d be quite an explosion with all that gas aboard. The crew bent to it, and the Nira Luckenbach was gone by 7:40 next morning.
There was little more Nimitz could do; it was now up to Midway to use what it had. What steps would be most effective? In the underground Navy command post on Sand Island, Captain Simard probed for new answers every night with his staff. At some point Brigadier General Willis Hale of the B-17s would come in. He’d bring over a bottle of Old Crow bourbon; they’d set it out on the table, and the work would go on. Should the B-17s be held back as a long-range striking force, or should they be used more right now to beef up the search? How to get everything off the ground fast, when the Japs finally did attack?
Far into the night they talked and planned, while the junior officers went about their regular duties—making search assignments for the morning, writing up reports, handling communications with CINCPAC over the cable. To a communications officer this direct cable link with Pearl was a thing of beauty and a priceless asset. It meant that Midway could be in safe, instant contact with Nimitz without using radio. No risk of intercepts, no codes to break, no heavy flow of messages to start some eavesdropper thinking. To the radio-traffic analyst in Tokyo, nothing was happening on Midway at all.
It was part of the old transpacific cable system, and was what gave Midway its chief importance before the war. Now all that was gone, although oddly enough the next link westward to Japanese-held Guam was still intact. Occasionally someone in the dugout would wander over to the key and bat out an obscenity in that direction. Usually there’d be a pause, then some angry-sounding gibberish would come snapping back.
June 1, and Ensign George Fraser, the versatile young communications officer under Logan Ramsey, got a new kind of problem. Word came that a wonderful Navy torpedo plane was being added to Midway’s defenses—the TBF. Six of them would be flying in that day, and since nobody would expect a plane that looked like these, he was to alert the antiaircraft batteries not to shoot them down.
“What’s a TBF?” was the first question he got. There were no silhouettes, no recognition books, no trained observers. The best Fraser could do was take his cue from the familiar F4F fighter. The new plane looked, he explained, “like a pregnant F4F.” The word was passed, and when the six TBFs duly appeared, not a finger touched a trigger.
It was just as well, for these men had come a long way to be in this show. They belonged to the Hornet’s Torpedo Squadron 8, and had been in Norfolk breaking in these new planes for the carrier. They were still at it May 8, when they got orders to come to Pearl. There were 19 planes in the detachment altogether, and led by Torpedo 8’s executive officer, they flew to the West Coast, then were ferried to Hawaii. They arrived on May 29—just a day too late to join the Hornet.
Next, a call came for volunteers to fly six of the planes to Midway. No problem here, although the men had no idea why they were going. They just set out on the 1st, happy to be led by Lieutenant Langdon K. Fieberling—a stylish, handsome, prematurely gray pilot, who was the idol of all the young fliers. None had been in combat; Ensign A. K. Earnest had never even flown out of sight of land before.
On arrival Fieberling reported to Lt. Colonel Ira E. Kimes, commanding the Marine air group. Then back to his unit with all the grim facts, plus an extra touch: don’t expect any help from the U.S. carriers; they were off trying to save Hawaii.
But nothing could cool the ardor of these young men. They whiled away the time making imaginary wing guns for their TBFs. Noting that the planes with real wing guns usually had masking tape over the holes to keep the dust out, they put tape on their wings too. Then they inked “holes” in the tape where the “guns” had fired through.
Some 560 miles to the southwest, there w
as again some real shooting. At 9:40 A.M. a big patrol bomber out of Wake pounced on Ensign J. J. Lyons’s PBY, and fifty minutes later the same Jap riddled Ensign R. V. Umphrey’s plane in the next sector. Both Americans scrambled to safety—by now everyone knew the PBY was no match for any Japanese plane whatsoever.
They talked it over in the staff meeting that night at the Navy command post. But the enemy that bothered them most at the moment was not the Japanese, it was the weather. A low front was closing in to the northwest, hiding the ocean below. Under that blanket of gray almost anything could be lurking… .
ON THE bridge of the Akagi, Admiral Nagumo stood with his staff, silently staring into the mist. It was getting worse—changing to heavy fog—and by daybreak June 2 visibility was practically zero. Fine protection from enemy patrol planes, but hell on navigation.
Off to the left of the Admiral, Captain Taijiro Aoki conferred with Commander Gishiro Miura, his navigating officer. Miura, as always, was wearing his carpet slippers. From time to time they leaned through the bridge windows, as though the extra six inches just might help a little.
They were all concerned, for this was the day they had to turn southeast for the final dash on Midway. At the moment they were steaming in single column, able to keep in formation only because each ship trailed a marker buoy for the next in line to follow. But this was too risky when making a major change in course—too easy to lose some ships altogether.
They faced a difficult choice. They could slow down, hoping for better weather before signaling the change, or they could break radio silence and do it that way. If they slowed down, they would upset the whole invasion timetable. If they broke radio silence, they might give away their position and spoil the great ambush planned for the U.S. fleet. In the end Captain Oishi, Nagumo’s senior staff officer, urged they use low-power radio and hope for the best. They just couldn’t afford to alter the schedule—too many other units depended on that—but the ambush was a more flexible matter. The U.S. fleet was probably still in Pearl Harbor—anyhow it was many days away—so a brief radio signal, even if picked up, wouldn’t do much harm.
The World War II Collection Page 68