Herman Wouk - War and Remembrance

by War

  Steaming out of the melancholy rain and fog that had screened him for a week, Nagumo had launched his strike against Midway at dawn: half of each carrier's fighters, dive-bombers, and Type-97 torpedo planes; these last, dual-purpose machines having been loaded with fragmentation bombs for a land strike. Then he had ordered the remaining one hundred eight planes in the four flattops spotted on deck in readiness to attack any enemy warships that might show up; these Type-97s armed with their usual torpedoes, and the dive-bombers with armor-piercing bombs.

  But Nagumo and his staff did not expect to encounter the enemy; this was just a conservative precaution.

  Just before the strike launch Nagumo in his own hand had drawn up an Estimate of the Situation: 1. The enemy fleet will probably sortie to engage once the Midway landing operations are begun.

  4. The enemy is not yet aware of our plan, and he has not yet detected our task force.

  5. There is no evidence of an enemy task force in our vicinity.

  6. It is therefore possible for us to attack Midway, destroy land-based planes there, and support the landing operation. We can then turn around, meet an approaching enemy task force, and destroy it.

  7. Possible counterauacks by e!teeny land-based air can surely be repulsed by our interceptors and antiaircraft fire.

  Radioed victory reports, familiar but exhilarating, began to pour in from the Midway strike aviators. The atoll had sent up a large fighter force, but the Zeroes were mowing them down, and the bombers, without a single loss, were laying waste to the two little islands of Midway. Hangars, power plant, barracks were aflame, guns were silenced, ammunition and fuel dumps were exploding skyward, and the whole garrison was a smoking shambles.

  There was one disappointing note. The Yank aircraft had not been caught on the ground as at pearl Harbor; they had taken the alarm and scrambled out of sight. The hangars and runways had been found empty. of course, those planes would soon have to land and refuel, and that would be the time to destroy them. So the strike commander had radioed, "There is need for a second strike."

  Here was the first snag of the day. The Nbdway airpower had to be smashed, or the landing would be a delayed and bloody one. But the planes now spotted on deck were armed to hit ships. The planes would certainly have to change weapons; torpedoes were no good for a strike on land. Nor were the armor-piercing shells in the dive-bombers as suitable as incendiary and fragmentation bombs.

  Nagumo and his staff were debating this pesky problem when air raid bugles sounded, black smoke poured from destroyers to signal Planes sighted, and roaring enemy aircraft swooped in low over the wave crests, unmistakable blue U.S. attackers with white-starred wings. Unescorted by fighters, the enemy craft fell like shot fowl under AA and Zero attack.

  A few launched torpedoes before they went down in flames, but these weapons porpoised, broached, or broke in pieces on striking the water. Not one hit or ran true. It was a miserable display of American ineptness, a brilliant clean sweep by Nagumo's combat air patrol. One plane crashed on the flight deck of the Akagi right before Nagumo's eyes, cartwheeg harmlessly over the side. The vice admiral and his staff saw the twin engines, the white star on the flaming blue fuselage, and inside the canopy the blood-soaked pilot, probably already dead. This plane was too big for carrier launching. It was a B-26 medium bomber, and it could only have come from Midway.

  That settled it for Nagumo. He would have to make that second strike. As for any enemy fleet nearby, search planes had been aloft since dawn and had reported nothing.

  Farfetched precautions had to go by the board. The planes now on deck would hit Midway, and to speed matters, only the Type-97 torpedo planes would be rearmed. The two big flattops of his division, the Akagi and the Kaga, had that chore to rush through. The Type-97s of the smaller Hiryu and Soryu in Division Two were all off over Midway.

  Their decks held only fighters and dive-bombers, ready to go. So the orders went out to Nagumo's division. The elevators whined up and down. The big Type-.97s were struck below to the hangar deck. Crack crews swarmed to switch the weapons.

  A decided surprise came at half past seven. The heavy cruiser Tone relayed word from its search plane that ten ships, "apparently enemy," had been sighted about two hundred miles to the east, heading southeast, away from Nagumo and the atoll. The message said nothing about carriers. Surface ships two hundred miles distant could not rescue Midway now. Once the atoll's air force had been obliterated, these vessels could be picked off; but first things first. The rearming of the Type-97s with bombs for land attack went on apace.

  Then Nagumo or a Etaff officer had alarming second thoughts.

  Enemy course southeast-that course was into the wind. Could that float plane pilot have seen carriers and idiotically failed to specify them?

  To the carriers: "Suspend rearming! Leave torpedoes in Type-97 bombers!"

  To the float plane: "Ascertain ship types and maintain contact."

  SO the chances of war froze the whole vast Japanese operation to the vagaries of one young pilot in one obsolescent cruiser scout plane.

  Half the Type-97s were already respotted on the flight decks with bombs. The rest were still below with their torpedoes. Now the air raid bugles blared once more, destroyers puffed black smoke balls, and dots in the sky grew to Douglas dive-bombers, approaching from the direction of Midway-again, with no fighter escort-at a peculiar shallow angle, contrary to the usual tactics of U.S. "hell-divers."

  These planes were in fact being flown for the first time by raw Marine pilots, last-minute reinforcements for Midway, and their commander was trying to glide-bomb. A second massacre ensued; to the cheers of Japanese deckhands and gun crews, Zeroes picked off the blue planes one after another, and they burst into pretty rosettes of flame and arched smoking into the sea. Not a single bomb landed.

  Perhaps this cold-blooded squandering of American pilots' lives in a second attack without fighter escort surprised Nagumo- It was not what one might expect of a soft decadent democracy. But then, the Zeroes had probably shot down all the fighters Midway had started with.

  The main point stood out: the skies this day were his. The Americans, though brave, were outmatched.

  Now the far-Off bumbler in the float plane answered up: Enemy ships consist of five cruisers and five destroyers. Well!

  No carriers; the rearming of Type-97s could proceed. But the air raid bugles sounded again, and this time a formation of gigantic land planes came drumming high, high overhead: B-17s by their silhouettes, the dreaded "Flying Fortresses."

  A harsh apparition; tiny Midway was peculiarly set for air combat!

  Yet what could the monsters actually do against moving ships with their high-level bombing? The test of this long peacetime debate was at hand as the huge bombers approached at twenty thousand feet.

  They had no fighter escort. With their terrible gun-blisters they needed none. The Zeroes did not rise to challenge them.

  Ponderously, the four carriers scattered as heavy black bombs came showering down, plain to see, on the two smaller flattops, the Soryu and the Hiryu. Dark watery explosions engulfed them, again and again.

  The high-flying giants grumbled away in the sky, the splashes subsided; and out of the smoke into the sunlight, unscathed, the two carriers steamed!

  With this historic defensive success, after slaughtering two low-level bomber waves, Nagumo was riding high. Obviously, however, Midway crawled with bombers. The second strike was imperative. He had been right to switch the Type-97s to bombs, and that process must now be speeded up.

  Before he could act, four almost simultaneous jolts threw the old hero off balance again.

  There was always much uproar around Nagumo during operations-clang of elevator warning bells, bark of flight deck loudspeakers, roar of engines warning up, chatter of radio receivers, shouts of flag bridge signalmen. Long habit enabled him to shut out this familiar racket, but the cataract of crises and tumult that burst on him now was something new. He had to make de
cision after decision-on some of which hung the future of his country, and indeed of the world order-in haste, in uncertainty, in a very hurricane of noise, alarm, confusion, upsets, and contradictory advice. A high commander lives for such moments, and he began to breast the storm with veteran calm.

  First, still another wave of bombers came diving out of the clouds.

  Second, as the bugles were shrilling and the remaining fighter planes on deck were scrambling to reinforce the combat air patrol, a stricken-faced officer brought Nagumo

  AL an addendum from the Tone pilot: Enemy appears to be accompanied by a carrier bringing up the rear.

  Third, even as Nagumo was digesting this shocker, a different alarm signal flashed through the task force: "Submarine!".

  Fourth, at precisely this juncture, his own first-strike airplanes began arriving back from Midway, winging in sight, low on fuel, some shot up and in distress, demanding to land on the cluttered carrier decks.

  Nagumo found himself driven to the wall. A second strike on Midway? No, not now; not with an enemy aircraft carrier full of elite pilots within range! The order of his two missions was rudely reversed. No longer was he attacking the atoll; he himself was threatened with a crossfire of land-based bombers and carrier aircraft.

  Before anything else, he had to get that carrier, The air raid proved to be only some old-type scout bombers buzzing a battleship of the screen and then running away from the Zeroes into the light clouds.

  Destroyers swarming over the supposed submarine found nothing.

  What to do now? The obvious course was to hit out at that carrier at once: Turn into the wind, order the SorYu and the Hiryu to launch their planes all spotted and ready to go, and send off the Type-97s crowding his own decks. These now were armed with bombs, of course, not torpedoes-the ones with torpedoes were below-but bombs were better than nothing.

  That would clear the decks to recover the first strike, while getting right after the foe.

  But it was such a weak gesture for the great Nagumo Force!

  A fraction, of his power, without the punch of torpedoes, without fighter escort, for the fighters were mostly aloft and low on fuel.

  All morning Nagumo had been watching the slaughter of unescorted bombers. And What about that cardinal rule of war, the concentration of force?.

  Then again, he could keep calm, and call for cool heads and quick hands; clear all decks, including the Soryu and. the Hiryu, by striking aircraft below; recover all planes from Midway, and all fighters of the combat air patrol; refuel and arm all aircraft, while closing the enemy at flank speed; and then hit him in the coordinated attack prescribed by doctrine, with his massed air might.

  Of course, that would take time; perhaps as much as an hour.

  Delay in carrier warfare could be risky.

  As Vice Admiral Nagumo weighed this momentous choice, surrounded on the flag bridge by the anxious faces of his staff -while all over the task force antiaircraft guns still rattled, and ships heeled and turned in a tangle of crisscrossing white wakes on the remarkably smooth blue sea, and the planes returning from Midway roared low, round and round the Akagi, and Zeroes drove off the last of the slow enemy bombers, and the thousand noises of a carrier in action rose all around him-at-this fateful moment Nagumo got a message from his subordinate, the division commander of the Soryu and the.Hiryu: URGENT. CONSIDER YT ADVISABLE TO LAUNCH ATTACK FORCE IMMEDIATELY.

  The officer who had to hand Nagumo this paper probably did not dare look him in the face. In any navy in the world, such a message from a subordinate in the heat of battle would have been an insult; in the Imperial Japanese Fleet it was suicidal effrontery. This man Yamaguchi was considered the most brilliant officer in the navy after Yamanioto, whom he was destined to succeed. Surely he knew the gravity of his act.

  He apparently thought that the battle might hang on this moment, and that sacrificing his career didn't matter.

  Old men are not to be pushed that way. Nagumo immediately did the opposite: ordered all planes struck belowincluding Yamaguchis -and directed the entire task force to recover aircraft. So the die was cast; it would be a full coordinated attack.

  And now for the first time he broke radio silence to inform admiral Yamamoto, idling three hundred miles away with the seven battleships and one carrier of the Main Body, that he was heading to destroy an enemy force of one carrier, five cruisers, and five destroyers. Until that moment, ten long days after leaving Hiroshima Bay, the commander-in-chief had been utterly in the dark about what was happening to his attack plan.

  So once again the Type-97s rolled to the elevators; once again they sank to the hangar decks; once again switching commenced. Bombs had at first replaced torpedoes, now torpedoes were replacing bombs, and still these airplanes had never left the ships. Possibly some Japanese muttering about "the idiots up there" went with the loaders, heavy labor, under the lash of loudspeakers howling exhortations from the flag bridge. But if so, it must have been good-natured. These sailors had seen American dive-bombers flying to pieces, dropping into the sea, streaking down afire like meteors, in defeated wave upon wave.

  They had watched the harmless fall of giant bombs from cowardly B-17s flying too high for the Zeroes, and the impotent American torpedoes floundering and breaking. Overhead they could hear the roar and the thud of the triumphant first strike returning from Midway. A mOre glorious victory than Pearl Harbor was in the making!

  So these hard-working youngsters, stripped to the waist and pouring sweat, undoubtedly felt as they scattered seventeenhundred-pound bombs in disorder on the deck and feverishly strapped in place the heavy torpedoes.

  In less than an hour the four carrier crews recovered all aircraft, rearmed them, refueled them, and spotted them on the flight decks- ready to go. No doubt pleased with this superb Performance, and with his own sturdy decision not to go off half-cocked, NagumO was speeding northeast to pull away from Midway's annoying bombers and to strike at the American carrier.

  The sun had now been up for almost four and a half hours.

  The unescorted Enterpris,- dive-bombers, reaching the point where the staff navigators had predicted that they would intercept the enemy, saw nothing but cloud-flecked ocean, fifty miles in every direction.

  Onward and westward they flew. Warren's fuel-gauge needle was wobbling below the halfway mark. If within twenty minutes they turned back he calculated, they might make it to the Enterprise, since she was steadily closing the range. But to go back with loaded bomb racks!

  For years he had imagined a combat dive at an enemy flattop, and now the reality was so goddamn close! Did anybody in charge, from Rear Admiral Spruance down to Lieutenant Commander McClusky, know what the hell he was doing? This harum-scarum Charge of the Light Brigade through the clouds was hardly a match for the Japs' brute professionalism. Would he even see the Enterprise again, without first dropping in the drink?

  It seemed such a pitiful, stupid trap-a great flight of dive-bombers howling down the sky in disciplined echelons, loaded to strike, but heading nowhere except for the water.

  The enemy already lay behind and to the northeast, Warren was sure of that. Browning's staff navigators must have assumed that the Japs would continue to close the atoll at full speed, but obviously they had slowed to evade bomber attacks from Midway, and perhaps to launch aircraft. Gagged by radio silence, how could he point this out to McClusky, whose plane led the serried blue bombers hundreds of yards up ahead and above; was it his place to do it, and would the group commander listen to him, anyway?

  Impulsively he slid back his oil-streaked canopy. The thin frigid air swept cigarette smoke and stale machine smells from the heated cockpit. He was breathing hard as on a mountain top, but he did not want to use oxygen; the soppy mask was irksome, and he preferred to smoke. His fuel predicament did not worry him too much. On the return from the Marcus raid his damaged engine had quit, and he had ditched, hitting into a foaming swell with an impact like a crash on land; but he and his rear gunn
er, Cornett's predecessor, had gotten the raft out of the sinking bomber and had floated for six hours, eating chocolate and swapping stories, before a destroyer had picked them up. Ditching was a nasty but manageable maneuver.

  But this futile wandering of the two dive-bomber squadrons angered him to his heart. Stoically, he hoped that the Hornet and Yorktown planes, and maybe Gene Lindsey's torpedo squadron, would find the son-of-a-bitching Japs and do some harm; or that McClusky would Turn northeast, Or else go back and gas up for another try, instead of deep-mixing thirty-three Dauntlesses.

  At this point, Wade McClusky did turn northeast.

  Warren could not know-happily for him-what a sorry farce the whole American attack was degenerating into.

  In the Japanese strike on Midway, one hundred eight aircraft from four carriers-fighters, dive-bombers, type 97s-had joined up and flown OUt as a single attack group, performed their mission like clockwork, and returned in a disciplined formation. But in this American strike each carrier had sent off its own planes at odd times. The slow torpedo squadrons had soon lost contact with the fighters and the dive-bombers. No American pilot knew what other squadrons than his own were doing, let alone where the Japanese were. Disorganization could go little further.