A Dawn Like Thunder

by Robert J. Mrazek

  The author had an opportunity to closely examine the transcripts of more than fifty hours of taped interviews conducted by Bowen Weisheit with Hornet pilots Ben Tappan, Samuel G. Mitchell, Richard Gray, Johnny Talbot, Humphrey Tallman, John McInerny, Walter F. Rodee, and Troy Guillory. Weisheit also allowed the author to read the notes of his interviews with the Hornet’s air operations officer, Lieutenant Commander John G. Foster.

  At the Naval Historical Center in Washington, D.C., the author carefully reviewed the handwritten notes compiled by Walter Lord after meetings and/or correspondence with Edward Creehan, George Flinn, Robert “Ruff” Johnson, and Stan Ruehlow, all of which are part of the center’s newly cataloged collection. Also included in the Lord collection is a copy of a September 8, 1948, letter from Rear Admiral Apollo Soucek, Mitscher’s air officer on the Hornet, to Lieutenant Commander Joseph Bryan III, detailing Soucek’s recollections of the events of June 4.

  The author also solicited the most recent scholarship devoted to understanding these events, including conducting interviews with noted historians John Lundstrom, Robert Cressman, James Sawruk, and Mark Horan. Lundstrom generously provided the author with numerous letters written to him about these events from Hornet pilots Henry A. Carey, J. F. Sutherland, Stan Ruehlow, and John Adams. He also sent the author a thirty-two-page transcript of an official interview conducted less than two weeks after the Midway battle with Lieutenant Commander Edward O’Neill, a senior pilot aboard the Hornet, in which O’Neill provided his recollections of what he saw and heard during the battle.

  For the last few hours of Torpedo Eight’s existence aboard the Hornet, the author relied on Fred Mears’s Carrier Combat and George Gay’s Sole Survivor as they waited in the ready room for orders to launch, and their accounts of Lieutenant Commander Waldron’s periodically giving the squadron what little information he had received. These accounts were supplemented by the personal recollections of Hornet fighter pilot Henry A. Carey, who was not scheduled to fly the first mission on the morning of June 4, and who was in and out of the ready room visiting friends in Torpedo Eight. His recollections were incorporated in three lengthy letters to author John Lundstrom. A final source for John Waldron’s words to his pilots was George Flinn, who outlined his recollections in a letter to Walter Lord in 1966.

  At Midway Atoll, these same predawn hours were largely used by the pilots and crews of Torpedo Eight to make their final preparations for the mission. For their recollections of this period of time, the author relied principally on author interviews with Bert Earnest and Harry Ferrier.

  Material about Darrel Woodside’s early life was contributed by school classmates Helen Lyddon and Mary Lou Swartwood. The source for Woodside’s short-lived relationship with the singer Peggy Lee was an author interview with William Magee, who accompanied Woodside to the propeller school at Providence, Rhode Island, when Woodside and the singer met for the last time.

  Additional insight into the reasoning that led to Langdon Fieberling’s decision to attack the Japanese fleet alone was provided in Robert Cressman’s A Glorious Page in Our History (p. 47), in which General Hale expressed his increasing concern about Kimes’s mental stability under the stress of the impending invasion.

  The description of the dramatic events leading up to the takeoff from Midway Atoll of Langdon Fieberling’s Torpedo Eight detachment was drawn from author interviews with Bert Earnest.

  Back aboard the Hornet, the attempts to lighten the mood in the Torpedo Eight ready room prior to the order to launch, including the description of Rusty Kenyon’s limericks, were highlighted in Fred Mears’s Carrier Combat.

  The actions of Admiral Raymond Spruance aboard the USS Enterprise, including the scene in which he used his small chart board to determine the time to launch his attack, were drawn from Thomas Buell’s The Quiet Warrior.

  The author’s sketch of the final minutes in Ready Room Four prior to Torpedo Eight’s being ordered to man its planes was drawn from Mears’s Carrier Combat, Gay’s Sole Survivor, and the letters from Ensign Henry “Hank” Carey to John Lundstrom. In one of his letters to John Lundstrom, Ensign Carey also expressed how deeply moved he was by John Waldron’s last words to his squadron pilots.

  What happened during the final conference between Pete Mitscher and his squadron commanders on the Hornet’s bridge before its fifty-nine-plane air group took off to attack the Japanese striking force will never be known in its entirety. The author reconstructed these events based on the direct testimony of the following:

  Harold Towne, the grandson of Lieutenant George M. Campbell, who flew to his death with Torpedo Eight on June 4, 1942, dedicated many years to learning the truth about his grandfather’s last mission. In the course of his research, he conducted three interviews with Ensign Fred Mamer, who was a watch officer on the bridge of the USS Hornet that morning. In author interviews, Towne related the detailed contents of his conversations with Mamer.

  Mamer witnessed the argument over what navigational course the air group would follow to intercept the Japanese carriers. According to Towne, Mamer confirmed that he had witnessed a “heated disagreement” on the bridge over the course the air group would follow, as well as over the separate issue of whether Waldron’s torpedo squadron would be given a share of fighter protection. Waldron was on one side of the argument, Mamer stated, and he was supported by at least one of the other air squadron commanders. Commander Ring and Captain Mitscher were on the other side of the argument.

  In the Towne interviews, Mamer did not recall the specific course the group was ultimately ordered to take, but had a clear recollection that Captain Mitscher ordered the fighter squadron to remain up with the dive-bombers. Mamer’s account is supported by George Gay, who spoke to Waldron immediately after the conference. The verbal dispute on the bridge was also chronicled in Cressman’s A Glorious Page in Our History (p. 84), Lundstrom’s The First Team (pp. 418–19), and in author interviews with Hornet dive-bomber pilot Roy Gee.

  Pat Mitchell participated in this bridge conference, and later spoke about what occurred that morning. In his interview with Bowen Weisheit in 1981, Mitchell, who commanded the fighter squadron, stated that he formally requested of Mitscher that his entire squadron be assigned to protect the torpedo planes, and that Mitscher ordered him and his squadron to remain with Commander Ring and the dive-bombers. In an interview with Walter Lord on April 11, 1966, Mitchell’s flight officer, Lieutenant Stan Ruehlow, asserted that Mitscher made the decision “against the recs of both Mitchell and Ruehlow.”

  The quest by amateur historian and retired Marine Corps navigator Bowen Weisheit to learn the truth about the course that Hornet air group actually flew on June 4, 1942, is explored in depth in Appendix One of this book. This appendix also seeks to answer the possible reasons for Pete Mitscher’s order to send his air group west on a course of 265 degrees, instead of 240 degrees southwest, which was the last reported position of the Japanese carriers. It was a decision that would eventually culminate in an official cover-up of the truth.

  Mitscher’s air staff certainly knew the group’s planned flight course, and at least one of these officers later confirmed this information after the war. In an interview with Bowen Weisheit in 1982, Lieutenant Commander John G. Foster, the Hornet’s air operations officer, stated that he tracked the air group formation on radar until it disappeared approximately sixty miles out from the carrier. According to Foster, the course it was following at that time was almost due west.

  In a 1982 taped interview with Weisheit, Walter Rodee, who commanded one of the Hornet’s two dive-bomber squadrons that morning, also weighed in on the question. The transcript reflects that at one point, Weisheit specifically asked Rodee what course the group had flown, even first prompting him with the falsified course of 240 degrees. “No,” Admiral Rodee answered. “It was about 265. . . . It was almost due west.”

  Rodee gave the identical answer in a separate telephone interview with historian James Sawruk after bein
g asked the same question. He told Sawruk that the group had flown out on a course of 265 degrees west and that he had written down the course in his log book.

  A number of eyewitnesses stated they saw the Hornet air group fly west that morning, including pilots who were in the air that day. In an interview questionnaire collected by Walter Lord in preparation for his book, Incredible Victory, Lawrence French, a fighter pilot who was flying cover that morning directly above the Hornet, stated that he watched the group, including both the high and low squadrons, move off to the “west northwest” until it disappeared from view.

  Another piece of direct evidence confirming the course of the Hornet air group can be found in the USS Hornet Deck Log (official source). It is an entry made by watch officer Lieutenant A. H. Hunker, recorded as the first group of Rodee’s dive-bombers were returning to the ship after their morning mission. At 1300 (local ship’s time), Lieutenant Hunker wrote in the log that radar operators reported to the bridge “a large group of planes bearing 260 true, distant 56 miles.” These were Walt Rodee’s dive-bombers returning to the Hornet on the reciprocal course of the one the group had flown out on three hours earlier. If Rodee had been coming up from the south, as later claimed in the USS Hornet After Action Report (official source), he would have been flying a course closer to 180 degrees.

  Author interviews with Bert Earnest and Harry Ferrier were the primary sources for what occurred on the early-morning mission led by Langdon Fieberling from Midway Atoll on the morning of June 4. The author also relied on the written account by Captain Mitsuo Fuchida in Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan, when he witnessed the arrival and subsequent destruction of the remaining Avengers from the bridge of the Akagi.

  Brief glimpses of what happened during the final minutes of the Avengers’ attack were later recalled by two B-26 pilots, James Collins and James Muri. Both of them provided this information in written questionnaires submitted to Walter Lord for Incredible Victory. In addition, Pete Peterkin happened to meet Major Collins on his way back to the States after Peterkin’s time on Guadalcanal, and Peterkin confided in his diary what Collins had observed.

  For the factors that went into Admiral Nagumo’s decision to rearm his planes for a second strike on Midway, including his reaction to the attack by Fieberling’s Avengers, the author relied on the narratives in Lord’s Incredible Victory, Fuchida’s Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan, and Prange’s Miracle at Midway.

  Anecdotal material about the last few minutes on the Hornet’s flight deck, including the conversations between crew members of Torpedo Eight, was provided in an author interview with William Tunstall, and also drawn from Lloyd Wendt’s “The True Story of Heroic Squadron 8.”

  The events that occurred on the controversial “Flight to Nowhere” by the Hornet air group will undoubtedly continue to be the subject of speculation and further analysis in the years ahead. What cannot be disputed is the fact that the Hornet air group was sent in a direction significantly divergent from the course that would have led them to the Japanese carriers, and that there were profound consequences to this failure.

  The breaking of radio silence by Lieutenant Commander Waldron and the content of his verbal confrontation with Commander Ring was confirmed in the transcripts of Bowen Weisheit’s taped interviews (each sixty-two pages) with Ensign Troy Guillory and Ensign Ben Tappan, who both flew Dauntless dive-bombers on June 4 in close proximity to Commander Ring. Fifteen years prior to his Weisheit interview, Guillory went on the record in a February 21, 1967, letter to author Walter Lord, stating his recollection of the verbal confrontation between Waldron and Ring shortly before Waldron pulled away from the rest of the group. Lord chose not to include the information in his book, Incredible Victory. Although there is no official record of the actual words spoken by Waldron and Ring, the account in this book is consistent with Guillory’s and Tappan’s independent recollections after the war.

  Additional confirmation of the radio exchange between Waldron and Ring can be found in the classified report prepared by Lieutenant Commander John G. Foster, the Hornet’s air operations officer, entitled “Defects Observed During the Action off Midway on June 4, 1942” (official source). Foster reported that at exactly 0816 (local adjusted time), radio silence had been broken on the “combat patrol frequency.” Due to the garbled nature of the transmission, and his belief that none of the Hornet pilots would disobey the orders on maintaining radio silence, Foster concluded it was coming from pilots flying from the Enterprise.

  Troy Guillory also stated in his interview with Weisheit that he had been one of the censors who had reviewed John Waldron’s last letters to his wife and daughters on the night before the squadron’s last mission. In a letter to John Lundstrom dated June 1, 1981, Ensign Henry Carey confirmed that he had also reviewed the letters.

  After Lieutenant Commander Waldron radioed Commander Ring that he was breaking away from the rest of the group, Radioman Richard Woodson watched them leave the formation, and then reported the news to his pilot. Woodson provided his account to the Battle of Midway Roundtable Web site (www.midway42.org) on March 4, 2004. His account is also included in Russell’s No Right to Win.

  In 1982, Bowen Weisheit interviewed Hornet fighter pilot Humphrey Tallman about what Tallman saw that day from his Wildcat fighter and the story of his subsequent ditching in the Pacific along with the rest of his squadron. In his taped recollections, Tallman told of watching Waldron’s squadron pull away to the south. “I can see them now,” he said to Weisheit.

  The harrowing passage of Bert Earnest’s return flight to Midway, culminating in the crash landing of his battered Avenger on one wheel, was drawn from the many hours of author interviews with both Earnest and Ferrier.

  The account of Torpedo Eight’s flight after John Waldron broke away from the rest of the Hornet air group, the pilots’ first sighting of the Japanese striking force at 0917, and the squadron’s subsequent destruction in the minutes that followed was provided by George Gay in Sole Survivor, Lloyd Wendt’s “The True Story of Heroic Squadron 8,” and in Gay’s After Action Report (June 7, 1942). His recollection of seeing the moon centered in the middle of his windshield provided former navigator Bowen Weisheit with another piece of information he needed to extrapolate their actual course based on the moon’s azimuth at that time.

  Further confirmation that Waldron’s squadron was heading in a southerly rather than northerly course as it approached the enemy fleet can be found in Japanese official records, which were incorporated into Parshall and Tully’s Shattered Sword. The records state that at 0917, one minute before Waldron’s squadron was sighted by Japanese lookouts, Admiral Nagumo had turned onto a course of 070 degrees, or a northeast heading. These reports also state that Waldron’s attack came from “almost dead ahead,” which could only have been the case if Torpedo Eight was coming from the north rather than the south.

  The actions of Ensign John McInerny in leading the Hornet’s fighter squadron away from Commander Ring’s air group were well chronicled in the forty-six-page transcript of his interview with Bowen Weisheit in 1982. The most riveting account of his actions can be found in Lundstrom’s The First Team (pp. 435–37). Personal details about McInerny’s life and exploits in the Navy were drawn from author interviews with Smiley Morgan. According to Weisheit’s The Last Flight (p. 18), McInerny also contended that he saw the Japanese fleet far to the south when he was leading the rest of the fighters away from the group.

  The brief narrative describing the laborious process undertaken by the Japanese carrier crews to rearm their planes with torpedoes following Admiral Nagumo’s discovery that American carriers were within attacking range was drawn from a number of sources, including Parshall and Tully’s Shattered Sword, Lord’s Incredible Victory, Prange’s Miracle at Midway, Lundstrom’s The First Team, and Fuchida’s Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan.

  Further insights into what occurred during the squadron’s subsequent attack on the Japanese carriers we
re gleaned from the radio transmissions made by John Waldron, most if not all of which were received by Gay, among others. On June 5, one day after the battle, Radioman Leroy Quillen, who had been monitoring radio transmissions while flying in a dive-bomber directly behind Commander Ring in the Hornet air group, filed an official report of everything he heard Lieutenant Commander Waldron say before he was killed. In a lengthy oral interview provided to a naval historian on October 12, 1943, George Gay asserted that he heard Waldron calling Ring on the radio, and that there was no answer. In Incredible Victory (p. 144), Walter Lord stated that Waldron repeatedly called “Stanhope from Johnny One,” with no apparent success.

  A description from the Japanese point of view of the squadron’s final attack on the striking force was provided by Commander Minoru Genda, Admiral Nagumo’s operations officer aboard the Akagi. This part of the story appeared in a detailed statement Genda submitted to author Gordon Prange prior to the publication of his Miracle at Midway.

  In their monumental Midway battle study, Shattered Sword, Jon Parshall and Anthony Tully deliver a compelling narrative of the moment when Lieutenant Commander “Ruff” Johnson, who was leading the dive-bomber squadron on the left wing of Ring’s formation, received word of John Waldron’s radio transmission that Waldron was under attack by enemy fighters. Realizing that the Japanese carriers were well to the south of them, Johnson quickly turned his seventeen-plane squadron southeast to find the enemy (p. 272). In an interview with the author, Hornet dive-bomber pilot Roy Gee confirmed that until Ruff Johnson led their Dauntless squadron off to the southeast, the carrier’s air group had never deviated from its original course.

  The final minutes of George Gay’s penetration of the Japanese escort screen in the last surviving Devastator, and the launching of his torpedo at the Japanese carrier Soryu, were drawn from Gay’s account in Sole Survivor, as well as his first detailed After Action Report (June 7, 1942; official source). In the Japanese battle reports, officers on the carrier Soryu confirmed the specifics of Gay’s attack, including the launching of his torpedo from approximately eight hundred yards, his flight down the length of the ship’s deck, and the destruction of his plane by Japanese Zeroes, according to Shattered Sword (p. 207).