The real trick would be deciding when to turn east again. If he went too far south before turning, there would be nothing but ocean ahead of him for a thousand miles or more. He hoped his self-sealing fuel tanks hadn’t lost too much gas while swallowing all of those Japanese bullets.
USS Hornet
Torpedo Squadron Eight
0734
As an anxious Tex Gay waited in his cockpit for permission to take off, he glanced over to see a leather-helmeted pilot climbing onto his right wing. It was Whitey Moore. The little West Virginian’s plane was positioned right behind his in the line of Devastators on the flight deck. Moore’s freckled face leaned into the open cockpit with a broad grin.
“You would think at a time like this they’d get things straight,” he shouted over the roar of the engines.
Tex nodded in full agreement.
“Tell you what,” yelled Whitey. “You test the weight and I’ll test the wind.”
His jesting words again reminded Tex Gay that he had never taken off from a carrier flight deck with a two-thousand-pound torpedo before.
“I’ll do my best, Whitey,” he responded with forced jocularity. “If I go in the drink, that means she’s too heavy, so you can go tell the captain to speed up.”
“Just keep your eyes above water,” Whitey said.
Giving Tex a thumbs-up, he jumped down to the deck and jogged back to his plane.
Farther back in the line of Devastators, Bill Evans sat in his own cockpit. My luck can’t last much longer, he had written in his letter home. Would this be his final day? Would they soon be playing taps for him while the rest of the crewmen stood quietly on the flight deck in a memorial service, just as he had stood in the sun to honor his dead friends after they had made that last far journey across the horizon? I have had the unforgettable taste of the sea on my lips. It was a line he had hand-copied from Saint-Exupéry’s book. It is not danger I love. I know what I love. It is life.
Behind Evans, Commander Waldron’s plane wasn’t even spotted yet on the flight deck. The Skipper was slated to take off last out of the fifty-nine planes in the group. As each minute passed, Waldron’s frustration and anger mounted. All hope of surprise had probably been lost by now. And while they stood around waiting, the Hornet’s fighters and dive-bombers were using up precious fuel.
In the sky above him, Ensign H. L. “Hump” Tallman, who was flying one of the Grumman Wildcat escort fighters, wondered exactly the same thing. They had burned a ton of gas reaching twenty thousand feet, and now they were just flying around in circles.
Hump was the “tail-end Charlie,” the last man in the formation of ten fighters. So far, the visibility below him was almost crystal clear. All of the ships in the task force were spread out in a great tableau on the azure sea.
Flying in the same circular pattern a few thousand feet beneath him, Ensign Troy Guillory sat in the cockpit of his Dauntless dive-bomber and like Tallman wondered when the brass hats were going to get this show on the road.
Tex Gay watched as someone ran up to the takeoff control officer and yelled something in his ear. Turning away from him, the officer made eye contact with Tex and motioned at him with his black-and-white checkered flag.
Revving his engines again, Tex waited for the sign to take off. The control officer began wagging the flag faster and faster as if trying to keep up with the engine, and then swept it forward, which was the signal to go. Tex released the brakes. The Devastator rumbled down the deck and slowly lifted off into space.
He had made it. No big deal after all.
While waiting for the rest of the squadron to join him, he began to circle the carrier at an altitude of five hundred feet. One by one, the other fourteen Devastators came up after him. Waldron was the last.
On the flight deck, Lee Marona watched the Devastators circling above the carrier and said a silent prayer that they would all come back safely. A born-again Christian, Lee was a member of the Bible group that some of the enlisted men in the squadron had formed.
Across the flight deck, he saw his younger brother Jess as he stood with the other plane pushers watching the squadron depart. Their father had been killed in an accident when Lee was four, and he had practically raised Jess, convincing him to join the Navy after he did.
Once in the air, John Waldron led the squadron away from the carrier and its escort ships. Far above the Devastators, Ensign Lawrence French, who was flying one of the fighters providing air cover, saw Waldron head off to the west. As he watched, the rest of the Hornet’s air group stopped circling and headed west, too.
Just as planned, Waldron’s fifteen-plane torpedo squadron had formed up in two divisions. The Skipper led the first four two-plane elements, followed by the seven Devastators led by Jimmy Owens. Tex Gay brought up the rear.
Cruising at nineteen thousand feet, Stanhope Ring signaled the Hornet’s high air squadrons to form up in a group parade formation, with his own section of dive-bombers at the pointed apex of a giant “V.” From the deck of the Hornet, the formation looked like a massive flock of migrating geese.
Flying in the left wing of the “V,” Troy Guillory was grateful that all he had to do was follow the man in the position ahead of him, like a slow-witted elephant in a circus ring.
He was already apprehensive about how much gas they had used up circling above the carrier. So far, the whole mission had seemed to be a confused mess. His friend, Ensign Ben Tappan, who was flying wing on Stanhope Ring in another Dauntless, was feeling the same concern.
Three thousand feet above Guillory and Tappan, the Hornet’s ten Wildcat fighters were forced to alternately speed up and then slow down as they tried to provide high cover over the whole air group without overrunning it.
Ensign John “Mac” McInerny was the fighter squadron’s fuel expert. Based on the reported distance to the enemy carriers, the group would need to find the Japanese fleet pretty quickly if the Wildcats were going to be able to complete their escort mission and get back to the ship.
In the last fighter, Hump Tallman was checking his gas gauge, too. Their range was shorter than the dive-bombers’, and like McInerny he was wondering why they had taken off first.
Aboard the Hornet, Lieutenant Commander John Foster, the Annapolis-trained air operations officer, stared down at a radar screen and tracked Ring’s air group as it moved west on a course of 265 degrees away from the carrier. Although they were now no more than tiny blips on the monitor screen, the fifty-nine aircraft represented one-third of Admiral Nimitz’s striking force against the Japanese fleet, the other two-thirds being the air groups from the Enterprise and Yorktown.
There were no further sighting reports on the location of the Japanese fleet as the Hornet’s air staff continued to track the progress of Ring’s group on the radar screen. At sixty miles out, the group was still on Ring’s original course of 265 degrees when the last blips disappeared.
The only way for the carrier to communicate with the air group now would be by radio. Foster wasn’t expecting any transmissions, however, because the pilots were under strict orders to maintain radio silence.
Looking down from his Wildcat at the end of the fifty-nine-plane formation, Hump Tallman saw only an infinite expanse of ocean in every direction. Twenty thousand feet beneath him, he could see Waldron’s squadron of Devastators following the same course they were, the torpedo planes so low at around fifteen hundred feet that they looked like they were skimming the surface of the sea.
At 0816, Troy Guillory was startled to hear a voice coming through the earphones of his cockpit radio. He recognized it right away. He had heard it enough times aboard the Hornet. It was the voice of Lieutenant Commander John Waldron. Guillory noted that he hadn’t identified himself with his call sign.
They were heading in the wrong direction, Guillory heard Waldron say.
Flying on the wing of Commander Ring, Ben Tappan heard Waldron, too. When no one responded to his call, Tappan began to wonder if he might have
imagined it. Every pilot knew the order about radio silence. He decided he had probably been wrong. Then he heard the voice again.
“I know where the damn Jap fleet is,” said Waldron.
There was more silence before Troy Guillory heard another voice. He knew this voice even better than Waldron’s. It was the Hornet’s air group commander, Stanhope Ring. He sounded angry.
“You fly on us,” he said, also without identifying himself with his call sign. “I’m leading this formation. You fly on us.”
Troy Guillory had been one of the duty officers the previous night. One of the many lousy jobs ensigns had was to serve as mail censors, and he had been the one to read Commander Waldron’s last letter home to his wife. There had been nothing in it he had to censor, but he remembered that Waldron had written something about having Sioux in him. What’s going on here? he wondered.
Aboard the Hornet, the air staff had monitored the same radio transmissions, but the words were garbled. They were outraged that someone would be stupid enough to potentially compromise the security of the mission. Lieutenant Commander Foster thought it had to be coming from pilots in the group off the Enterprise.
Ben Tappan was waiting intently for Lieutenant Commander Waldron’s response to Ring’s order to stay in formation. A minute or two passed before he heard Waldron’s voice for the last time.
“The hell with you,” he said.
It was 0825.
Richard Woodson, the gunner in Ensign Don Kirkpatrick’s dive-bomber, looked down and saw the lead torpedo plane slowly turn off to the left. As Woodson watched, the rest of the pilots in the torpedo squadron turned to follow their leader. He called Don Kirkpatrick on the intercom to report the news.
Hump Tallman, flying the last fighter in the high cover formation, watched them go, too. He hadn’t heard any of the radio transmissions, but prior to takeoff Hump had plotted the course they would need to follow to find the Japanese fleet based on its last sighting. He checked the heading he had written down on his plotting board. It was the same general direction Waldron was going. He wondered why they weren’t all following him.
Troy Guillory was wondering the same thing.
West of Midway Atoll
The Last Avenger
0835
Amazingly, Bert’s Avenger continued to fly. Just about everything inside the plane had been smashed, but so far the engine hadn’t faltered. It had been the first one off the Grumman assembly line. Maybe it was charmed.
He tried calling Ferrier and Manning again over the intercom, but there was no response. After the pasting they had received from the Zeroes, he had to assume they were either dead or wounded. There would be no way to find out until he landed.
Since leaving Midway Atoll, they had been in the air for better than two hours. Checking his watch, he figured that he had gone sixty or seventy miles south since the Zeroes had left him alone. Dodging in and out of the scattered clouds, he hadn’t seen another aircraft. Below him, there was only the trackless sea.
Back in the tail section, Harry Ferrier slowly came alive to the harsh scream of the wind through the shredded fuselage. He was still draped over the tunnel gun. It was red with his blood.
There was an awful raw coppery smell in the air, and he had a terrible headache. When he reached up to gingerly touch his wound, it felt like there was a hole in his forehead. There was. A bullet had torn through the bill of his baseball cap and creased the front of his skull.
Sitting up, he tried to regain his bearings. The engine appeared to be running strong, and the plane remained steady on a level course. Turning the switch on the intercom, he called up to the cockpit.
“Are you okay, Skipper?” he asked weakly.
Bert was overjoyed to discover that Ferrier was still alive.
“I’m fine. . . . How about you?”
“I’m wounded in the head, but I think I’ll be all right,” he said.
“What about Manning?” asked Bert.
Harry tried to blot out the mental image of what he had seen after looking up into the turret.
“I think Jay’s dead,” he said.
The reality of it slowly sunk in.
“I want you to see if the torpedo dropped,” Bert said a few minutes later. “I don’t want us to land with it hanging out of the bomb bay.”
There was a small glass port in the floor of the radio compartment that allowed Harry to look into the bomb bay. It was almost directly under the gun turret. When he crawled over to check, Harry saw that it was covered by Jay’s blood.
He reported to Bert that there was no way to see into the bomb bay. He then asked if it would be all right for him to crawl up to the middle seat behind the cockpit. Since their tail gun was useless, Bert told Harry to come up.
Staring into the distance, Bert suddenly saw another plane emerge from the cloudy haze. It was heading in the general direction of the Japanese fleet. He was in no shape for another showdown with a Zero, or any other enemy plane for that matter. Without waiting to confirm whether it was friend or foe, Bert slid inside the nearby cloud.
Approaching Japanese Striking Force
Torpedo Squadron Eight
0908
Waldron’s fifteen-plane squadron flew southwest in right echelon formation, the second division close in behind the first. At one point, Tex Gay looked up and saw the pale reflection of the moon centered in the middle of his cockpit windshield. It continued to hover there as the minutes slowly passed. Tex didn’t know it, but from the point at which Waldron had broken away from the rest of the air group, the moon’s azimuth was 234 degrees true.
The Skipper had always told Tex that as a navigation officer it was his duty to keep track of everything he could on their flights. He was in the process of trying to estimate the rate of their fuel consumption when Waldron’s voice came through his earphones, taut and harsh.
“There’s a fighter on our tail,” he said.
The Japanese plane was well out to the right of them and moving fast in the same direction they were. To Tex, it looked more like a float plane, the kind that could be catapulted off a Japanese battleship or cruiser. It quickly overtook them and moved past.
The Japanese pilot was almost certainly radioing their position back to his fleet. It only made Waldron angrier. With even one Wildcat flying cover for them, they could have shot him down before he had time to set up a reception committee for them. Now any chance of surprise was lost.
Grant Teats was busy trying to solve a more immediate problem. His engine was leaking oil, and it had fouled his windshield. Leaning forward, he reached around the open cockpit with his left hand to clean it with a rag while continuing to fly the plane with his right.
Reversing hands, he inadvertently hit the trigger button on his nose gun and fired a short burst past Abbie Abercrombie. Abbie took it in good humor, melodramatically wiping his brow as if narrowly escaping death.
North of Japanese Striking Force
Hornet Air Group
0910
Flying high cover with the rest of Pat Mitchell’s fighter squadron above the Hornet’s thirty-four dive-bombers, Mac McInerny decided it was time to take matters into his own hands, even if that meant his own court-martial.
The son of a blacksmith, Mac had never been afraid to take chances. Sporting an Errol Flynn mustache and muscled like a steer, the big Irishman had a reputation as a hard-partying woman-chaser. The other pilots in his squadron also knew him as one hell of a fighter pilot.
McInerny had spent a lot of time studying the fuel consumption traits of the Grumman Wildcat, and he knew his plane was running out of gas. The fighters were at the point of no return, if they hadn’t already passed it.
After taking off from the Hornet, he had firewalled his throttle and redlined the manifold pressure, but the settings for minimum fuel consumption didn’t necessarily correlate with long-distance flights. And on this flight, the fighters had been forced to fly in “S” turns in order not to outrun the dive-b
ombers, which further wasted precious fuel.
It was time to do something. Gunning his engine, McInerny left his position in the formation and pulled up alongside Lieutenant Commander Pat Mitchell. Getting the squadron commander’s attention, he pointed animatedly to his gas gauge. Mitchell slowly shook his head at him and resumed staring forward.
McInerny cut back on the throttle and dropped back into his position as wingman to Johnny Magda. After another five minutes of droning westward into the empty sky, McInerny had had enough.
Flying up alongside Mitchell again, he pointed to his gas gauge once more to convey that they were beyond the point of no return. This time, Mitchell reacted with visceral anger, waving McInerny back into his position in the formation.
The big Irishman went back just long enough to signal Johnny Magda that it was time to go. Banking his plane to the left, he began to swing around in a 180-degree turn to return to the Hornet.
As he was turning, he looked off to the south and saw what appeared to be a rising column of smoke from a fleet of ships. He briefly thought about radioing the news to the air group, but he had cotton stuffed in his ears against the engine noise, and they were flying under strict radio silence anyway.
When Johnny Magda peeled off to go after him, the other fighter pilots watched them go. Then, section by section, they turned to follow him. McInerny looked back one last time. Mitchell, who by then was flying all alone, was turning to come after them.
I’m going to be court-martialed for this, McInerny thought.
Japanese Striking Force
Flagship Carrier Akagi
0914
The laborious process of rearming his planes with torpedoes was finally completed. For Admiral Nagumo it had been a brutally frustrating morning. After the first attack by the six American torpedo planes at 0700, he had ordered his reserve aircraft armed with contact bombs for a second strike on the air garrison at Midway.
This process necessitated not only removing the torpedoes, but changing the mounting hardware on each plane, which was different for launching a torpedo than for dropping a bomb. It was hard, time-consuming work. There were a limited number of crewmen to carry out the tasks and a limited number of trolleys to carry the torpedoes off the deck and bring up the bombs. For much of the time, the flight crews had to stand around waiting for someone else to finish his part of the process.
A Dawn Like Thunder Page 13