A Dawn Like Thunder

by Robert J. Mrazek

  Mitscher could only hope that the other two Hornet squadrons, Ruff Johnson’s dive-bombers and Johnny Waldron’s torpedo planes, had done some damage to the Japanese striking force.

  NORTHWEST OF MIDWAY ATOLL

  HORNET DIVE-BOMBER SQUADRON RUFF JOHNSON

  1120

  Still heading southeast, Ruff Johnson had spent a frustrating hour trying to locate the Japanese carriers after receiving Waldron’s last desperate radio transmission. He hadn’t found a trace of them. Now his squadron was running out of gas. As the fuel situation became critical, he decided to turn northeast in the hope that they could still reach the Hornet.

  Off to port, he spotted another aircraft. It was the first plane from outside his own air group that he had seen on the entire flight. Johnson quickly identified it as an American patrol plane, and signaled to its crew that they were lost. The PBY pilot used his blinking lamp to give Johnson a navigational course to follow to Midway Atoll.

  Johnson signaled the rest of his pilots that they were to follow him. Ignoring Johnson’s signal, Johnson’s executive officer, Lieutenant Alfred Tucker, continued flying northeast in the general direction of the Hornet. Two of the pilots followed him.

  Johnson continued southeast on the coordinates the PBY pilot had given him. Using his plotting board, he figured they were approximately one hundred twenty miles from Midway.

  A few minutes later, Ensign Troy Guillory felt his engine begin to sputter.

  He was one of the pilots who had been assigned to carry a thousand-pound bomb in the belly, instead of the five-hundred-pounder most of the dive-bombers were carrying. Even though he had conserved fuel, the extra weight had finally run him dry. His propeller began to windmill and Guillory started down. As the rest of the squadron continued flying south, he made a successful landing on a calm sea.

  In the distance ahead of him, Ruff Johnson saw a huge black fire plume emerge out of the haze. It was Midway. A few minutes later, another one of his dive-bombers ran out of fuel and headed down toward the sea.

  Johnson began to worry that some of his pilots would run out of gas while landing with live bombs aboard. He diverted course to jettison his own bomb on the reef protecting Midway Atoll. The other pilots dropped their bombs in the same place and followed Johnson in to land.

  Believing they were under attack, the antiaircraft gunners on Eastern Island opened fire on the Dauntlesses as they came into range, hitting three of the planes. Another Dauntless ran out of gas and ditched in the lagoon before Johnson was able to contact the ground controllers and convince them he was friendly.

  His men had finally been under fire, even if it was from American Marines.

  JAPANESE STRIKING FORCE

  LIGHT CRUISER NAGARA

  1630

  To Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, the indomitable air commander who had led the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the three dying Japanese carriers looked like spewing volcanoes as they belched flames and smoke into the azure blue sky. Reduced to tears, he sensed that Japan’s chance for the final victory was about to die with them.

  At least the Hiryu, the last of the four magnificent carriers in the striking force, remained miraculously untouched by the Dauntlesses. After avoiding a rain of bombs that morning, she had launched a counterstrike against the Americans, and her attack planes had reportedly sunk one of their carriers.

  The fires on the Akagi, the Kaga, and the Soryu had raged most of the day, with each one becoming a red-hot mass of twisted metal torn by explosions of aviation gas, bombs, and torpedoes. As Nagumo and his staff watched in mortified silence, the flames also incinerated two thousand of the empire’s finest sailors and airmen.

  Fuchida’s own escape from the flagship Akagi had been nothing less than miraculous. Still badly weakened from appendicitis, he was standing on the bridge of the Akagi at 1025 when a lookout had screamed, “Hell divers!”

  He immediately trained his binoculars skyward. Through a break in the high cloud cover, Fuchida could see three dive-bombers plunging toward the Akagi, their silhouettes growing larger as they plummeted straight down. Far above the first three, he saw more Hell Divers pushing their noses over to begin their own runs.

  Fuchida had flown dozens of dive-bombing missions himself. Watching them come, he felt like a judo master observing a brilliant and wholly unexpected pinning move by a slow, dull-witted novice.

  In those last fleeting moments before the bombs struck, Fuchida sensed that the battle was about to be lost. The carriers had been caught flat-footed, focused on the successive frontal attacks from the low-flying torpedo planes, and oblivious to the danger from this high-altitude threat. Without opposition from fighters or the concentrated antiaircraft firepower of the screening ships, the dive-bomber pilots might as well have been flying a training mission.

  Like all the previous attackers, these pilots were undeniably brave, only letting their bombs go at the last possible moment to ensure the best chance of success. As they pulled out of their screaming dives, he watched three ugly black cigar shapes come slanting in toward the Akagi.

  Knowing what was about to happen, he threw himself down behind a cushioned barrier near the bridge railing. A moment later, he felt the bone-rattling concussion of a direct hit, followed almost immediately by a second hit off to the port side of the ship. A third bomb struck somewhere close to the stern.

  Daring to stand at the railing as splinters of hot metal flew in every direction, Fuchida found his gaze drawn to the enormous black hole in the flight deck. The fifty-foot crater was adjacent to the amidships elevator that lifted the Akagi’s planes up from the hangar deck. The elevator was completely wrecked.

  Fuchida rushed down from the bridge to better survey the damage. Through the jagged hole in the steel plates, he could see the bodies of mechanics and armorers strewn near the wreckage of shattered aircraft along the hangar floor. Secondary explosions began going off deep within the ship.

  Returning to the bridge through dense black smoke, Fuchida saw that the sky was now empty. The American dive-bombers had come and gone in a span of less than ten minutes. Perhaps they had missed the other carriers, he thought, as he trained his binoculars toward the rest of the striking force.

  To his horror, he saw that the Kaga and Soryu were both spouting columns of black smoke. They, too, had taken direct hits. He could only hope that the damage wasn’t mortal. Aboard the carriers were the Japanese Empire’s finest pilots, the men he had personally led in the attack on Pearl Harbor.

  One of the bombs had jammed the Akagi’s rudder, and the ship began to steam in a wide circle. At 1042, she came to a dead stop. Fire control teams stood with hoses ready to try to extinguish the fires beneath the flight deck, but there was no water pressure in the pumps to operate them.

  Belowdecks, hundreds of men in the engine rooms were dead or dying, suffocated by the smoke that had been drawn into the ship’s internal ventilation ducts. On the bridge, a communications officer reported that the ship’s radio transceivers were no longer working. There was now no way for Admiral Nagumo to contact the other ships in his striking force.

  Flames began surging up the closed passageways to the bridge, and the heat became almost unbearable. As secondary explosions continued to rock the innards of the ship, the bridge structure began to shudder.

  Admiral Nagumo appeared to be in shock, and Commander Fuchida understood why. The admiral had never lost a ship under his command to an enemy force. Now he was about to lose his flagship, the jewel of the carrier fleet, and possibly the rest of his carriers, too, along with hundreds of their finest combat planes and crew.

  It fell to a senior member of Nagumo’s staff to respectfully suggest that it was time to transfer his flag to another ship. Fuchida waited along with the others for the admiral to respond. Nagumo stood frozen-faced, his powerful arms stiffly at his sides, staring out of a bridge window.

  “It is not time yet,” he said.

  “You are the commander-in-chief of the first
carrier striking force,” persisted the staff officer. “It is your duty to carry on the battle.”

  Nagumo finally agreed to leave the sinking carrier, but by then, the passageways from the bridge were choked with fire and smoke. There was no way to escape except through a forward window.

  Someone secured a line to one of the bridge stanchions and flung the other end of it through the open window. Nagumo went out first. A former jujitsu expert, he dropped smoothly to the gun deck before climbing down a monkey ladder to the flight deck.

  Fuchida was one of the last to leave. In his weakened state, he could barely hold on to the smoldering straw line as he went down hand-over-hand to the gun deck. The monkey ladder that connected it to the flight deck was now red-hot.

  There was no alternative but to jump the last ten feet. As he launched himself out from the railing, another explosion from the hangar deck hurled him even higher into the air. In the resulting fall, both his ankles were broken.

  As he lay in agony on the fire-ravaged deck with ammunition exploding around him, Fuchida was sure it was the end. Seeing him in distress, two brave sailors raced across the burning flight deck and carried him to safety.

  Medics strapped him to a bamboo stretcher, and he was put in the launch with Nagumo’s staff before it was ferried over to the light cruiser Nagara, the admiral’s new flagship.

  All of that afternoon, Fuchida watched the carriers go through their death throes. The Soryu had gone first. Hit by three one-thousand-pound bombs, she had become a pillar of flame within twenty minutes of the attack, and had gone down with her captain, all of her aircraft, and seven hundred crewmen.

  The flagship Akagi was abandoned early in the evening. By then, she was nothing more than a drifting hulk, waiting only for her final ignominious sinking at the hands of Japanese destroyers. The ceremonial portrait of Emperor Hirohito that graced the wardroom of every Japanese warship had already been removed from its place of honor and ferried over to the destroyer Nowake.

  The burned-out carrier Kaga was also dead in the water after having received five direct hits in the morning attack. Eight hundred members of its crew were entombed inside when the orders were given for the Japanese destroyer Hagikaze to sink her, too.

  And then came the crowning blow, the bitterest pill of all. Shortly before sunset, the American Hell Divers had returned, this time concentrating solely on the Hiryu, the final carrier in the Japanese striking force, the last floating platform for all its remaining pilots and planes.

  When the Americans were finished, four bombs had penetrated deep inside the hull. Although her crew endured a horrific night battling the internal fires, the Hiryu joined her three sister carriers in the deep Pacific abyss. The only reminders that these once majestic ships had ever existed lay in the debris fields of dead sailors and wreckage scattered across a thirty-mile stretch of sea.

  The Hiryu’s remaining aircraft were forced to land in the ocean, joining the hundreds already littering the bottom from the Akagi, the Kaga, and the Soryu. Japanese destroyers picked up as many of the pilots and crews as they could find.

  For Commander Fuchida and the other senior officers watching the catastrophe from the cruiser Nagara, the lost carriers represented far more than four of their most powerful warships.

  They were emblematic of Japan’s national pride, the culmination of bone-wearying sacrifice over the course of three decades to build Japan into a world-class power. The fast carriers had formed the heart of their bold new military philosophy that airpower, not battle-ships, would win the war.

  The carriers had led the way in destroying the fleets of the European powers across the Pacific, and conquering lands and territory beyond their wildest ambitions. Now they had been wiped out in a single day.

  It had to be fate, Fuchida concluded, right from the first unsupported attack by the six torpedo planes that had persuaded Admiral Nagumo to rearm his reserve planes with bombs instead of torpedoes.

  And when Admiral Nagumo was finally ready to launch his counterstrike, the next torpedo plane squadrons had arrived, beginning their crude series of frontal attacks that never allowed the Japanese time to launch their own coordinated response.

  Yes, it was the martyrdom of those unsupported torpedo planes that had sealed the carriers’ doom. The Zeroes had been so busy killing the hedgehog they hadn’t noticed the lurking tiger.

  When the Sea

  Shall Give Up Its Dead

  4 JUNE 1942

  EASTERN ISLAND, MIDWAY ATOLL

  BERT EARNEST

  Bert’s Avenger sat like a blue metal Lazarus where it had finally come to rest at the edge of the runway. As word spread of its condition, men came from around the field to look at it, pausing for a few moments to stare at the shredded fuselage and wonder how the plane had made it back to Midway.

  Marines had removed Jay Manning’s body from the turret, and reverently placed him in the back of a truck. He was transported to the edge of the lagoon where the rest of the dead from the morning attack had been laid out side-by-side under blankets and tarps.

  Eastern Island was littered with bomb rubble, and the choking smell of burning aviation gas permeated the air. Personal belongings and pieces of equipment were scattered everywhere. The mess tent where the officers in Torpedo Eight had eaten their meals was leveled, along with the shack where Bert and Charlie Brannon had bought their warm beers with paper chits the previous night.

  Only the atoll’s natural inhabitants appeared oblivious to the destruction that had taken place that morning. With calm detachment, the gooney birds silently plodded around the wreckage of machines and buildings.

  Bert still thought there was an outside chance that Fieberling and the other pilots might have had enough gas to make it back. As planes continued to land, he kept checking to see if any of them were Avengers.

  An intelligence officer asked Bert to accompany him to the flight operations tent where they were debriefing the returning pilots. There, the officer asked him to describe what had happened on his mission.

  Bert told him they had found the Japanese fleet about one hundred fifty miles out on a heading of 320 degrees, and that Lieutenant Fieberling had led them in against one of the carriers. He had no idea whether the others had scored any hits against the enemy ships or what had happened to them.

  The officer never asked him why Lieutenant Fieberling had chosen to lead the six-plane detachment against the Japanese fleet alone instead of waiting for the air group to rendezvous. It remained a mystery to Bert.

  Beyond the walls of the tent, he could hear military aircraft continuing to take off and land on the hastily repaired runways. It suddenly struck him that they might be short of pilots.

  “You know, I’m checked out on dive-bombers, too,” he said. “If you still need pilots, I can fly one of those.”

  The staff officer glanced at Bert’s wound and said, “Why don’t you have that taken care of first?”

  At the hospital tent, one of the medics cleaned the wound and put a compression bandage on Bert’s neck, holding it in place with his fingers while wrapping several layers of white gauze and tape around the back of his head and below his jaw. When he was finished, Bert looked like the apparition of Jacob Marley’s ghost in A Christmas Carol.

  Not knowing what else to do, he walked back to the plane. There, one of the Marines told him he had counted more than a hundred machine gun and cannon holes in the wings, fuselage, and tail section.

  Bert heard someone call out his name. Turning, he was surprised to see several dive-bomber pilots he knew from the Hornet air group. They were from Ruff Johnson’s bombing squadron, and said they had just landed on Midway after a mission from the carrier. That was when Bert learned that American carrier forces had been part of the battle.

  When the Dauntless pilots got finished staring at his bandages and bloody flight suit, they began to look over the battered Avenger. Bert asked them whether they had found the Japanese carriers, and they shook their heads no
.

  “What was it like?” one of them asked him about his own flight.

  5 JUNE 1942

  FLOATING IN THE CENTRAL PACIFIC

  TEX GAY

  All of that first day, Tex had treaded water in the sea, afraid to inflate his yellow life raft for fear of attracting one of the Japanese ships that were still steaming back and forth to pick up survivors from the burning carriers.

  When darkness finally descended, he took the chance of inflating it. The raft had been perforated with bullet holes, but the CO2 canister filled enough of the airtight compartments to keep him afloat. He tried to patch the holes, but soon gave up.

  That night, the temperature dropped and his wet flight suit gave him little protection from the cold wind. The burns on his left leg began to ache. Lying in several inches of seawater, he looked through the small survival kit that was attached to the raft.

  It held no potable drinking water, but he found some candy, which kept saliva working in his mouth. He thought about discarding his wet boots, but they were Justin jodhpur riding shoes and he had paid a lot for them. They stayed on his feet.

  The long night seemed almost interminable, and he never slept, keeping vigil against sharks and Japanese ships. As dawn broke, Tex saw that the enemy fleet had disappeared. He was alone on the sea, drifting through a field of floating wreckage. He decided to take off his flight suit to let it dry in the sun. Shortly after that, he heard the sound of a distant aircraft.

  The plane flew almost directly over him, and he saw that it was a PBY patrol plane. Someone in the plane’s crew must have seen his yellow raft because the plane began making a slow circle above him. When Tex spread his arms horizontally, which was the “roger” sign for being okay, the pilot rocked his wings before continuing his flight to the northwest.

  He knew then that someone would be coming back for him. It was only a matter of time. He silently prayed that they would get there before a Japanese ship happened along.