by James Scott
Akagi wasn’t the only victim. American planes dove on the 33,693-ton carrier Kaga, hitting it with at least four bombs that devastated the bridge, killed the skipper, and set the ship ablaze. Soryu turned into the wind to launch fighters. Lookouts scanned the skies as dive-bombers punched through the clouds. Three bombs tore into the carrier. The 18,800-ton flattop erupted in flames and came dead in the water. Within a span of barely six minutes American planes had set three of Japan’s carriers ablaze, the tip of the spear blunted. Admiral Nagumo had watched the catastrophic attacks unfold from the bridge of the battered Akagi. Black smoke clouded the skies over his wounded carriers. Nagumo’s chief of staff urged the reluctant admiral to escape and set up his headquarters on the light cruiser Nagara. Nagumo finally caved at 10:46 a.m. Fires blocked the passages below and tickled the bridge, forcing the fifty-five-year-old admiral to climb out of a forward window and down a rope. A boat from Nagara pulled alongside Akagi to retrieve Nagumo. Escorts moved in to protect Hiryu, Japan’s one undamaged flattop and last hope for victory.
Hiryu turned into the wind and launched six fighters and eighteen dive-bombers. Enemy pilots trailed the American planes home. Radar operators on Yorktown picked up the incoming air strike at a range of forty-six miles. Airborne fighters raced to intercept the Japanese as sailors on Yorktown scrambled to prepare for the attack. Crews closed and secured all compartments, drained fuel lines, and ditched an 8,000-gallon tank of aviation fuel in the sea. American fighters pounced on the enemy bombers and antiaircraft fire thundered across the sea. Sailors on Yorktown watched Japanese planes fall from the sky on fire. Some of the bombers slipped past and dove to attack Yorktown, releasing bombs at just 500 feet. Three hits rocked the carrier, sparking multiple fires and disabling some of the boilers. Crews had the damage under control when enemy torpedo planes arrived, ripping two holes in her port side. Yorktown lost all power and rolled twenty-six degrees. Afraid the carrier would capsize, the skipper ordered the ship abandoned.
But the battle was not over.
Just moments before the torpedo attack on the Yorktown, an American search plane had spotted Japan’s lone remaining carrier. Two dozen dive-bombers roared off the Enterprise. Hidden by the afternoon sun, the planes dove, landing four hits on the 20,250-ton Hiryu that set the flattop ablaze. All four of Japan’s carriers had been hit. The skipper of the burning Soryu refused to abandon ship. Sword in hand he sang Japan’s national anthem before the carrier sank at dusk with 718 officers and crew. Kaga vanished minutes later along with some 800 men. Japanese destroyers torpedoed the crippled Akagi, sending Nagumo’s former flagship to the bottom moments before sunrise on June 5. Hiryu suffered a similar fate several hours later. Before it slipped under the seas around 8:20 a.m. carrier division commander Rear Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi rallied his men, taking responsibility for the loss of Soryu and Hiryu. “I shall remain on board to the end,” he announced. “I command all of you to leave the ship and continue your loyal service to His Majesty, the Emperor.”
Yorktown in contrast refused to sink. The skipper along with twenty-nine officers and 141 crewmen returned at dawn on June 6 to salvage the abandoned carrier. Five destroyers circled the wounded flattop to guard against enemy submarines while the Hammann moored alongside to supply pumps, water, and electricity. Crews extinguished the fire in the forward rag storeroom and dropped several airplanes overboard on the port side along with a five-inch gun, measures that by around noon had helped reduce the list some two degrees. The Japanese submarine I-168 slipped through the destroyer screen that afternoon and fired four torpedoes. Two fish ripped into Yorktown while another broke Hammann’s back, sending the destroyer and eighty-one men down in just four minutes. The other destroyers hunted the Japanese submarine while the salvage party vacated the crippled flattop. In the predawn hours of June 7, sailors on the destroyers lowered flags to half-staff as Yorktown capsized around dawn and sank in some 3,000 fathoms, the battle flags still flying.
Midway had proven a success for American carriers, but a wash for the submarine service. Normally tasked to hunt Japanese merchant ships, Midway represented the first time submarines had supported a major fleet battle. Of the twenty-nine boats based at Pearl Harbor, the Navy ordered twenty-five to help defend the coral atoll. This motley crew included six submarines that had never made a war patrol plus eight that had just returned in need of repairs. In preparation for the Japanese attack, the Navy divided the submarines into several groups. The Navy directed the first group of twelve submarines to patrol off Midway. A second group of three submarines—dubbed the “roving short-stops”—would stalk the waters between Midway and Hawaii while a group of four others would patrol 300 miles north of Oahu, an insurance policy against a possible diversionary strike on Pearl Harbor. The Navy directed six submarines returning from patrol, including Drum, to intercept the Japanese fleet in retreat.
The submarine force’s potential big break came when the skipper of Nautilus—alerted via radio of a damaged flattop—spotted smoke on the horizon at 10:29 a.m. on June 4, just minutes after American bombers dove on Japan’s carriers. Lieutenant Commander William Brockman, Jr., hungry to get in on the fight, closed the distance, spotting a burning carrier. Brockman identified the wounded flattop as Soryu, following repeated checks to guarantee the carrier was not American. The skipper fired three fish that afternoon—a fourth proved unsuccessful—and watched the wakes race across the water. All three fish ripped into the carrier—or so Brockman believed. Postwar analysis would show not only had he misidentified the carrier—he fired on Kaga, not Soryu—but that his first two fish missed. The third glanced off Kaga’s steel hull and broke in half. The torpedo’s warhead plunged to the bottom while the air flask floated serving, ironically, as a life preserver for several enemy sailors.
One of the submarine force’s few contributions in the battle proved unintentional. Lookouts on the Tambor spotted multiple large ships eighty-nine miles off Midway at 2:15 a.m. on June 5. Afraid the ships might be American, the skipper opted to shadow them, firing off a contact report. Lieutenant Commander John Murphy had intercepted four Japanese heavy cruisers and two destroyers tasked to bombard the coral atoll. New Japanese orders arrived—as Murphy tracked the warships—canceling the attack. Soon after the cruisers turned to the northwest, Japanese lookouts spotted the surfaced Tambor. The warships executed evasive turns to port, but in the confusion that followed the Mogami charged into the Mikuma. The glancing blow ruptured a Mikuma fuel tank and crushed Mogami’s bow. Murphy identified the wounded ships as Japanese, but he struggled to set up a shot and never fired. Carrier-based planes later pounced on the crippled cruisers, scoring six hits on Mogami and sending Mikuma to the bottom.
But the destruction of Mikuma had come at a big price. Murphy’s initial contact report stated that he had spotted “many unidentified ships.” While the skipper noted the position of the ships, he had failed to report a course. Senior leaders concluded that Japanese invasion forces would soon land on Midway, deploying America’s carriers north of the atoll and ordering all submarines to form a defensive line just a few miles offshore. Not until some four hours later did Murphy fire off a second report, identifying the ships he spotted and noting that the injured cruisers were steaming west. While American ships had hustled to prepare for an invasion, Yamamoto’s embattled forces steamed another 100 miles west. Searches that morning by Midway-based planes consumed several more hours—as Japan’s forces escaped west at about twenty-five miles an hour—only to confirm the absence of an invasion force. Tambor’s vague report had squandered America’s chance to pummel Japan’s retreating forces.
Midway had cost America the Yorktown, but the loss to Japan proved far greater: four of its best carriers and some 250 planes. Combined Fleet Commander Admiral Yamamoto gathered with his staff on the battleship Yamato. Despite his superiority in numbers Yamamoto knew that without air cover the battle was over. “But how can we apologize to His Majesty for this defeat?” one officer la
mented. “Leave that to me,” Yamamoto said. “I am the only one who must apologize to His Majesty.” The decisive June 1942 battle would halt Japan’s eastward expansion and help tilt the balance of power toward the United States, a realization captured by Yamamoto’s chief of staff. “How brilliant was the first stage operation up to April! And what miserable setbacks since Midway in June,” Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki would write in his diary at the close of 1942. “The invasions of Hawaii, Fiji, Samoa, and New Caldonia, liberation of India, and destruction of the British Far Eastern Fleet have all scattered like dreams.”
America’s submarine offensive in contrast had suffered a slower start, in part because of the failure of torpedoes. Since the opening shots of the war, skippers had griped that the fish malfunctioned. The submarine Sargo, departing Manila for its first patrol within hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor, had served as the canary in the mine, executing eight attacks in the waters off Indochina only to record thirteen straight misses. Similar problems had plagued Drum’s early patrols. The analytical Rindskopf in assisting with Drum’s third patrol report went so far as to create a chart, illustrating the duds, premature explosions, and unexplained misses. Out of twenty-three torpedoes fired, his chart showed nine malfunctioned. “Not one of the attacks was hasty; not one was fired from extreme range or from a poor initial position,” Rice wrote in his report. “No one likes to blame his tools. I cannot but feel that we accomplished only half of what we earned, and even a smaller fraction of what we were capable of doing.”
Rather than investigate the problem, the Bureau of Ordnance blamed the skippers. But Rear Admiral Lockwood refused to shrug off the complaints as simple poor marksmanship. Too many skippers described setting up the perfect shot only to watch the torpedo’s trail of bubbles run right under a target and fail to detonate. Lockwood and his staff feared there was only one answer—the fish ran too deep to trigger the magnetic exploder. As boats returned from patrol—Salmon, Triton, Grenadier, Gudgeon, and Skipjack—the evidence mounted. Morale plummeted as skippers questioned themselves. A few even quit. America’s long retreat from the Philippines had temporarily prevented the submarine force from probing the problem, so as soon as Lockwood had unpacked in Australia he set out to solve the crisis. A submarine without torpedoes was as worthless as an aircraft carrier without planes. America was spending too much money and risking too many lives on a weapon that apparently wasn’t working.
Lockwood had turned to his trusted chief of staff, Captain James Fife, Jr. The forty-five-year-old Nevada native—and member of the Naval Academy’s class of 1918, though the class actually graduated in June 1917 because of the outbreak of the Great War—had a reputation as a dogmatic hard worker and teetotaler. Fife’s rigorous style had earned the respect though not always the adoration of his men. “There is a difference,” one of his subordinate officers later noted, “between love and respect.” Lockwood needed just such a man for this job. Fife knew he had no choice but test a torpedo. The western Australian town of Albany boasted sandy white beaches that from the air looked like snow, a perfect spot to beach a torpedo. All Fife needed was a net—a very large one. Unable to find a net for sale he hired four Portuguese fishermen to fashion one. Lastly, to replicate an actual war shot meant Fife couldn’t use an exercise warhead filled with water because its buoyancy differed from the negative buoyancy of a live warhead. Fife and his team improvised, weighting a dummy warhead with a calcium chloride solution.
The men had planned the test for June 20. Skipjack torpedomen set the fish to run at a depth of ten feet. With the net in place in Frenchman’s Bay, Lieutenant Commander James Coe fired at a distance of 850 yards. The divers’ inspection of the net showed that the torpedo had actually run at twenty-five feet, more than double its depth setting. The test continued the next day. Skipjack torpedomen set the first fish to run again at ten feet. This one sliced through the net at a depth of eighteen feet. Crews set the second torpedo to run on the surface only for the divers to discover that it pierced the net at eleven feet. Further inspection of the beached torpedo indicated that the fish had actually hit the bottom in sixty feet of water on its initial deep dive out of the tube. The rudimentary test proved that the skippers were right: the fish ran an average of eleven feet too deep. Lockwood and his men fumed. “Here we had this magnificent submarine and we had slipped on the torpedo,” Fife recalled. “We had an ineffective torpedo—it was worse than ineffective.”
Fixing the run depth magnified other problems, including premature detonations. Such blasts just a few hundred yards into a torpedo’s run rattled the crew and ruined the element of surprise, giving a target precious seconds to evade. Escorts used the blasts to home in on the submarine’s position and depth-charge the boat. The problem was not as pronounced when torpedoes ran deep, but the turbulent water close to the surface triggered the sensitive exploders. In addition to premature detonations, skippers reported a rise in duds. One watched a fish hit the side of a ship and shoot up out of the water. Lockwood again searched for a remedy. A torpedo fired into a cliff off Hawaii revealed that the firing pin failed to hit the primer with enough force to detonate. The Navy next filled warheads with concrete instead of explosive Torpex, then dropped them ninety feet onto a steel plate, a height designed to replicate a torpedo’s force when striking a ship’s hull. Out of the ten warheads dropped, seven failed to detonate.
The problems with the Navy’s torpedo would stretch on for much of the first two years of the war. Proof of flaws that Lockwood and his staff confirmed in June 1942 buoyed morale. Despite the technical problems that marred the first year, the force had enjoyed some success. Submarines sank 147 ships greater than 500 tons—Silversides and Drum destroyed ten—and damaged fifty-six others. Skippers fired 1,442 fish in 1942, a number that would more than triple when the force reached its peak strength two years later. Submarine bases had now opened at Midway, Dutch Harbor, and Kodiak and a refueling station at Johnston Island, more than 800 miles southwest of Hawaii. Thirty-seven new fleet boats had reported to Pearl Harbor—an average of about one every other week—since the war’s outbreak, bringing America’s total fleet boats and World War I–era boats to about ninety. The war to date had cost America eight submarines, a small fraction of the number the conflict would ultimately claim.
Against the backdrop of America’s success, McMahon and his crew prepared to celebrate on board the Drum. This would prove the first Christmas away from home for many young submariners, while for others it would be the first of several before the war would finally end. Many had learned to handle the long absences from wives, parents, and loved ones by refocusing their priorities. At sea the mission—and only the mission—mattered; its safe conclusion the ticket home. Twenty-four-year-old Lieutenant Ira Dye, Jr., captured that sentiment in a letter days earlier to his wife back home in Seattle. “These patrols sort of do something to a man,” he wrote. “For the first week or so, you are in fairly friendly waters, so there is no mental strain. Also, the memories of civilization are very fresh. This seems to make everyone sort of lonesome, wishing for the beach. After a week or so, however, when the strain is on, & the work intensifies, we sort of forget about civilization—how good the one-&-only girl looked, how good that beer tasted, how good it was to sleep in the morning, etc.”
Dye and his shipmates were not alone this holiday. Some 1.7 million American service members would spend Christmas 1942 overseas in sixty-five different countries and islands, from the sweltering jungles of New Guinea and the arid deserts of North Africa to Greenland’s frozen glaciers. The war had now raged for 383 days and had touched most lives, including that of President Roosevelt, who would celebrate Christmas without any of his five children. The president’s four sons—all in the armed forces—served around the world. Travel restrictions barred his daughter from making the trip east from her home in Seattle. The war translated into more than just empty seats at dinner tables. Rationing forced schoolchildren to bake sugarless holiday cookies while tins
el and Christmas trees proved scarce, the latter the result of the loss of manpower and railcars to ship them. The president refused even to light the White House tree in a move to save power as the War Production Board urged families to collect waste fat from ducks, geese, and turkeys that could be converted into medical supplies and gunpowder.
But none of these wartime measures—or the thousands of miles—could dampen the Christmas spirit off the coast of Japan. Drum executive officer Lieutenant Commander Nicholas Nicholas had planned ahead, packing a box of holiday decorations. Nicholas had broken out his yuletide bounty and recruited volunteers just a few days earlier. Within a few hours the men had redecorated the crew’s mess and wardroom with red and green streamers, silver bells, and even imitation holly. Nicholas topped it off with Santa Claus masks. “We can hardly eat,” Dye wrote in a letter, “without getting tinsel in our tea.” Drum’s speakers this holiday morning belted out “Jingle Bells” and “White Christmas”—as well as the out-of-season “Good Friday” from the Wagner opera Parsifal—while the warm smell of roast turkey, gravy, and vegetables permeated the boat. The ship’s unofficial calendar—designed and illustrated by crewmembers—captured the holiday. “Christmas Day is here at last,” the calendar stated. “We’re fighting for the right to remember the past.”