It exploded with a brilliant red-yellow flash, 60 feet high, as it landed on the flight deck aft of the island. Shrapnel swept the area, mowing down the men at the nearest 1.1 guns: 19 out of 20 at mount No. 3, 16 more at No. 4. Ripping through the deck, the blast also set fire to three planes in the hangar below—one of them armed with a 1,000-pound bomb. The hangar deck officer, Lieutenant A. C. Emerson, yanked open the sprinkler system; a curtain of water smothered the flames.
At the 1.1 mounts, a dazed Ensign John d’Arc Lorenz scrambled to his feet, miraculously unhurt. Rallying three other survivors, he somehow managed to get one of the guns going again. Their firing was a little uneven, but four men— two of them wounded—were doing the work of twenty.
Whatever they could do, it would help. The rest of the Japanese were diving now, and it was easy to see (as one man put it) that this was their “varsity.” They were a far cry from the rather sloppy bunch the Yorktown met at Coral Sea—certainly sharper than most American pilots. While the Navy fliers normally released at 2,000 feet, these planes plunged below 1,000, then pulled out barely at mast top. Leading Seaman George Weise watched one come right at him. Manning a machine gun on the side of the smokestack near Signalman Martin’s searchlight, he fired at it all the way down. But it came on anyhow, dropping a bomb that slanted through the flight deck … through the hangar deck … through the second deck … finally exploding in the uptakes of the stack deep inside the ship.
Down in Emergency Boiler Control, Lieutenant (j.g.) Charles Cundiff never understood what premonition made him shout at this instant, “Hit the deck!” But he did, and as his men went flat, white-hot shrapnel ripped across his station from somewhere forward, passing on through the bulkhead aft. None of the men was even scratched.
But this bomb really hurt. Flames and smoke were everywhere—the boiler rooms … the exec’s office … the photo lab … the personnel files … the laundry … the oil and water test laboratories … the officers’ galley … the wardroom annex … the radar room … a whole cross-section of all the things that go into a modern warship. A roaring blast of heat swept up the smokestack, setting the paint on fire and jarring everything loose.
Signalman Martin was hurled from his searchlight platform. He had an odd feeling of floating lazily through the air, high enough to see the whole task force. He was sure he was dead and decided that dying wasn’t so hard after all. He came to seconds later, hanging halfway over the rail two levels below his light. Incredibly, he was unhurt.
Seaman Weise wasn’t as lucky. Legend says he was hurled so high he brushed the wing of the plunging Jap plane. Wherever he went, he ended up on the flight deck unconscious and with a fractured skull.
Heavy black smoke poured from the Yorktown; her speed fell off to barely six knots. Then another Japanese plane dived, this time from the starboard side forward. It was the first to come in that way, and almost made it unnoticed. There was a startled burst of antiaircraft fire, but the bomb was already on the way. It plunged through the forward elevator, exploding 50 feet down in the rag stowage space. The whole area flared up in a tough, persistent fire; but what really worried damage control was not the rag locker, but all the gasoline and 5-inch shells stored next to it
As the bombers pulled out, skimming across the water, the destroyers and cruisers blazed away with everything they had. There was something intoxicating about seeing the enemy right there. Men noticed the most minute details—a yellow stripe on some rudder, two red bands around somebody’s fuselage—and they fired away with abandon. On the destroyer Hughes Ensign John Chase’s 20 mm. battery followed one plane right over the ship; only the gun stop kept them from shooting up their own bridge. Even so, the skipper, Lieutenant Commander Donald Ramsey, was startled enough to rush to the rail and shake his fist at them all.
The Astoria gunners were yelling like wild men, slamming in shells as fast as they could—they fired 204 5-inchers in ten minutes. Chaplain Matthew Bouterse found himself passing cans of 1.1 ammunition to the ready room aft. It was perhaps an odd thing for a chaplain to be doing, but he thought of Pearl Harbor and Chaplain Forgy’s famous words, “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.”
Pulling out of its dive, one Japanese plane turned right toward the Astoria, flying not much more than bridge height. The machine guns went to work, began chopping the plane to pieces … but still it kept coming. As it passed along the starboard side, the pilot turned—waved—and slanted down into the sea just astern. His mission completed, he apparently wanted a look at his enemy before he died.
Some 15-20 miles to the southeast the men on the Enterprise, Hornet and the rest of Task Force 16 strained to see how the battle was going. There were few clues—just the black puffs of antiaircraft fire in the distance, an occasional plane streaking into the sea. Then a heavy smudge of smoke appeared. It didn’t drift away like gun bursts; it clung to the horizon, steady and black. Admiral Spruance judged right away that the Yorktown had been hit.
He detached cruisers Pensacola and Vincennes, the destroyers Benham and Balch, to go over and help. But for most of Task Force 16 there was only frustration. The Yorktown was getting it—just 15 or 20 miles away—and there was nothing they could do.
It was especially frustrating for the men flying air cover over the Enterprise and Hornet. Unlike the rest of the force, they could do something—and right away. When the dive bombers broke through the Yorktown’s fighter defenses, Lieutenant Roger Mehle requested permission to lead his 12 fighters to the rescue. He was told to stay where he was— his job was to protect the Enterprise. But he stretched his orbit (and his orders) anyhow, circling over closer toward the Yorktown.
He finally got a go-ahead and raced over—just too late to intercept. The enemy planes were already in their dives. Adding agony to agony, his guns jammed as he led his flight down on the end of the Japanese column. He disengaged and pulled away, turning the attack over to the next section leader.
In the end they never accomplished much, and the Hornet fighters even less. Still, there were some satisfactions. Ensigns Provost and Halford ganged up on one dive bomber just as he pulled out and started for home. Making a high side attack, they quickly sent him spinning into the sea.
Suddenly it was over. Men blinked, shook their heads, unable to believe the silence. The firing seemed to have gone on forever, yet it was just 12:16—11 minutes since the first ships opened up.
On the Yorktown Admiral Fletcher and his staff stood around on the flight deck, driven from Flag Plot by the fire in the island structure. For the moment Radio Electrician Bennett was about the only person working up there in all the fire and smoke. Normally a dapper little man, he now sat rumpled and grimy, wearing a gas mask, desperately trying to get his radar going again. Down in the galley an old chief spotted another chief—his good friend—lying dead on the deck. He broke down and cried like a child.
Commander Laing stood quietly on deck, as imperturbable as a Royal Naval officer should be. Later he missed his little black notebook—and it was never found. He finally decided it was blown out of his hands when one of the bombs landed. He shrugged off the loss, observing with a delicacy that was entirely unnecessary in the U.S. Navy: “Those Jap baskets came rather a long way to ruin my month’s work.”
The hard statistics, at least, required no notebook to be remembered. Only 7 of the 18 Japanese bombers managed to dive, but 3 of the 7 had scored clean hits—a remarkable performance for so few planes. And even the near-misses took their toll. One landed just astern, killing and wounding many men on the fantail. Another came in so close that it sent Admiral Fletcher diving for cover. He cut his head on something, went back to work, dripping blood on his charts. He finally got a medic to slap on a bandage, and the next time he thought about it was long afterward when, to his astonishment, he got a Purple Heart.
So much for the losses they took. They gave plenty too. The men in Task Force 17 would long argue over who shot down what, but on one thing most were agreed: none
of the Japanese escaped. Of the seven that dived, the men said there was not one who lived to tell the tale.
“ENEMY carrier is burning,” radioed one of the Hiryu pilots at 12:45. His plane was now back at the rendezvous area, waiting to join up with any other dive bombers leaving the scene.
Spirits soared on the Hiryu. Lieutenant Hashimoto felt there was only one thing wrong with the message. It didn’t come from Lieutenant Kobayashi … it didn’t even come from a section leader like Lieutenant Kondo. It came, in fact, from a lowly petty officer (even now no one can remember his name) who flew the No. 3 plane in the second group. That meant all the senior pilots were killed; the toll must be very high.
He was right—but more escaped than any of the Americans believed. In the end five dive bombers and one fighter managed to scoot away from the blazing guns of Task Force 17. They escaped singly, in no particular order—just as their wits and luck happened to take them—but by 12:45 all six were heading back to the Hiryu.
Meanwhile preparations raced ahead for the torpedo strike. Commander Kawaguchi had been working on this ever since the dive bombers left. Now he was almost ready. It would be a patchwork affair: nine torpedo planes from the Hiryu, plus an orphan from the Akagi; four fighter escorts from the Hiryu, and one transferred from the burning Kaga.
Anything more would take longer, and Admiral Yamaguchi couldn’t afford the time. Intelligence still said there was only one U.S. carrier, but he now doubted it. No single ship could have done all that to the Akagi, Kaga and Soryu. There must be a second one out there somewhere. Even so, that left it one to one; and the Hiryu would fight on these terms any day. One of the U.S. carriers, anyhow, was now burning—it would be out of action for a long, long time.
COMMANDER Clarence Aldrich seemed everywhere at once. As the Yorktown’s damage control officer he had his work cut out for him—three separate hits, four serious fires belowdecks. Somehow he managed to tackle them all.
There was not a moment to lose—especially with the burning rag locker up forward, next to all that gasoline and ammunition. Aldrich had the magazine flooded with sea water, the gas tank filled with C02. Other fire fighters smothered the flames in the island structure, while repair parties went to work on the holes in the flight deck. The big one aft—12 feet wide—called for extra ingenuity. Wooden beams were laid across … a quarter-inch steel plate put over them … then more steel plates tacked down on top of that. In 20 minutes the Yorktown’s flight deck was again open for business.
And all the time the work went on of clearing the dead, caring for the wounded. They were all kinds. There was George Weise, still unconscious from his fall, carried below to the main sick bay. There was the young boy, physically untouched but scared literally speechless. There was Boatswain’s Mate Plyburn, raked across the stomach by a strafing machine gun. He had $500 in his pockets—saved for the day he planned to marry. Now he was dying and he knew it. He begged his friends to take the money and have a good time with it.
Far below, the engineers struggled to get the Yorktown going again. The bomb that exploded in the stack had wrecked two boilers and blown out the fires in the others. Heavy black smoke poured into the firerooms, choking the men at their posts.
Water Tender Charles Kliensmith, the short rough-tough sailor in charge of boiler No. 1, hung on anyhow. The hit had knocked down most of his boiler’s interior brickwork, but otherwise did little perceptible damage. He and his men relit the fires.
None of the other boilers would relight at all. More smoke poured through the forced-draft intakes, smothering the fires. Kliensmith’s gang kept working, although the place was now stifling, and the bare casing glowed red-hot. They knew they were the only source of power for the pumps and auxiliaries needed to keep the Yorktown alive.
But their boiler was not enough to run the ship, and the engine room was clamoring for steam to get the uninjured turbines running again. The boiler division officer Lieutenant Cundiff had been painfully burned, but something had to be done right away. Bandages and all, he crawled into the uptake-intake space, full of the pipes that normally draw the smoke up the stack and bring new air back down again.
A quick look around, and it was all too clear what had happened. The bomb had ruptured the uptake on Kliensmith’s boiler, the intake on the others that could still give steam. Instead of continuing up the stack, Kleinsmith’s smoke was being drawn back down and into the other boiler rooms. Kliensmith was ordered to reduce his fires to the bare minimum necessary to keep the auxiliaries running, while repairs were made and the other boilers relit. In time they’d again build up enough steam to get the Yorktown moving.
Admiral Fletcher couldn’t wait. He had a fleet to run, and a ship dead in the water was no place to do it. Besides, his radio was out, and smoke still billowed up, making flag hoists and the blinkers impractical. About 12:30 he decided to transfer to the Astoria and signaled her for one of her boats.
By 1:00 the Astoria’s No. 2 whaleboat was alongside. Knotted lines were dropped down from the Yorktown’s flight deck, and several staff officers lowered themselves hand over hand. Fletcher was about to go the same way, then thought better of it. After all, he was 56 years old. “Hell,” he said to himself, “I can’t do that sort of thing any more.” So they rigged a line with a bowline in it and lowered the Admiral in style.
They shoved off at 1:13—Fletcher, part of his staff, several enlisted men, including the Admiral’s yeoman Frank Boo. The trip took only 11 minutes, but that seemed plenty to Boo. The sea was calm—no enemy in sight—but he felt sure they’d be strafed if a new Japanese attack caught them there. A whaleboat just didn’t go from one ship to another in mid-Pacific, unless it was important.
To make matters worse, countless 5-inch shell cases bobbed up and down in the water—all looking like submarine periscopes. The Astoria’s crew were especially sensitive about these, for they too felt like sitting ducks while they waited for their Admiral. When he finally climbed aboard at 1:24, everyone breathed more easily.
The Yorktown’s planes also had to transfer. Even with the flight deck repaired, they couldn’t use it while the ship was standing still. Max Leslie’s 17 dive bombers had been ordered to stay clear during the Japanese attack. Now they were told to land and refuel on the Hornet or Enterprise. They’d fly from there until the Yorktown got going again.
It was a relief to have someplace to go. For most of the SBDs it had been a nerve-racking noon hour—part of it spent in dodging bullets from both sides. As one Japanese pilot pulled out of his dive on the Yorktown, he made right for them with all guns blazing. A U.S. fighter appeared from nowhere and shot him down. But next minute it was a “friendly” pilot that attacked them. He veered away at the last second as somebody yelled over the radio, “You silly bastard! Can’t you see these white stars?”
His confusion was understandable. Apart from the problem of split-second identification, everything was getting more and more mixed up: planes from one carrier plopping down on another … combat air patrols overlapping each other’s sector … relays of fighters called in and taking off.
Radio traffic filled the air—a jumble of orders, questions and remarks tossed back and forth in airman’s jargon. Tuned in on the Enterprise’s fighter-director circuit, an enemy eavesdropper heard “Ham” Dow call in a three-plane section for refueling. This gave the Japanese an inspiration: why not clear the sky of every American fighter? Breaking in, he called in English, “All planes return to base, all planes return to base.”
“That was a Jap!” Dow yelled. “Disregard that order to return to base—that was a Jap!”
The Japanese repeated his order.
“The bastards are using our frequency,” Dow cried, and that was the mildest thing he said. This was the first time during the Pacific War that anybody had used radio deception. Later it would be an old story on both sides, but right now it fitted perfectly the standard Western conception of the crafty Oriental. It was also fitting that Americans should se
e through the trick, and as Dow cursed away, the pilots listened with enjoyment and ever-increasing respect for the wide range of his vocabulary.
Max Leslie had a different kind of problem. Like the rest of his Yorktown dive bombers, he was about to shift over to the Enterprise or Hornet, when Bill Gallagher in the rear seat spotted something in the water maybe eight or ten miles away. They flew over to investigate, with Lefty Holmberg tagging along. It turned out to be a swamped U.S. torpedo plane; its crew were nearby in a rubber raft. Leslie alerted the destroyer Hammann, went back to the carrier to get a new bearing on Task Force 16. By the time he was squared away, he was nearly out of gas, and Holmberg was even lower. They’d probably never make the Enterprise; far better to play it safe and splash beside the Astoria directly below.
The men in Bombing 3 always considered Max Leslie the most methodical pilot in the world, and according to squadron legend, he landed so close to the Astoria he simply walked the wing to the ship’s ladder. It was almost that good. He came down about 50 yards off the cruiser, but as Bill Gallagher launched the rubber boat, he noticed that Leslie was still in the cockpit, apparently slumped over his instruments. Thinking the skipper was stunned by the landing, Gallagher scrambled alongside to lift him out. But there was nothing wrong. The methodical Leslie was just flicking every button on the instrument panel to an “off” position before abandoning his sinking SBD.
It wasn’t as easy for CAP Esders, pilot of the swamped torpedo plane Leslie had spotted. Flying one of the two TBDs in Torpedo 3 to escape the Japanese, Esders started home with a leaking gas tank and his rear-seat man Mike Brazier desperately wounded. Then Machinist Corl joined up with the squadron’s other surviving plane, and for a while the two flew together in the general direction of the U.S. fleet.
Esders asked Brazier if he could possibly change the coils on the radio so he could pick up the Yorktown’s homing device. Brazier answered weakly that he was in very bad shape and didn’t think he could.
The World War II Collection Page 83