Admiral Nimitz, and everybody else on our side, knew there was no way for us to win if that happened.
The only thing that could save us, and maybe even save the whole war, was if U.S. planes could take off from our hidden aircraft carriers to counterattack the Japanese ships — after the Japanese planes returned from their bombing mission on Midway, but before that second wave of the Japanese assault could get started.
There wouldn’t be much time, and everything had to go exactly right if we were going to have a chance of stopping them and maybe, just maybe, turning around the war.
I read for as long as I could, until my eyes wouldn’t stay open any longer, no matter what I did to try to make myself stay awake. I finally fell asleep around two o’clock in the morning and when I did I had this crazy dream where I was on a little boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. All around me were big ships and airplanes landing and taking off on their decks. Greg was right next to me, of course. He was steering and I was looking over the side, hoping nobody dropped any bombs on us or torpedoes or anything, and meanwhile trying to find William Foxwell in the middle of all of the chaos of battle.
I still hadn’t been able to find him when I woke up the next morning for school, and it bothered me all day.
Julie had made cupcakes again, and Greg and I scarfed ours down first thing at lunch the next day. No telling if Belman would be back, or what he and his friends would try to take from us. I made sure to thank Julie first this time. She even smiled at me.
As soon as his mouth wasn’t full anymore, Greg started talking about his book, which picked up the story where I had left off reading in mine — with the U.S. counterattack on the Japanese aircraft carriers.
“So this American pilot, the sole survivor, his name was George Gay and he was from Texas,” Greg said. He paused to lick icing off his fingers. “And the plane he flew, it was a torpedo bomber. They called the torpedo bombers ‘Devastators,’ which I thought was awesome until I read some more about how ridiculously slow they were, and how bad their aim was with their bombs.” He paused to take another bite of cupcake.
“And once they made it to their targets, in order to fire their torpedoes they had to slow down even more,” Greg added after swallowing. “They had to fly just barely above the ocean waves, so when the bombardiers finally released their bombs, the torpedoes would keep gliding fast through the water and keep going until they hit the side of whatever ship they were supposed to be aimed at.”
“Bombardiers?” Julie asked.
“Yeah,” said Greg. “They were the guys who would crawl into this really small space on the underside of the Devastators, where they would have to lie facedown and look through a little window at whatever was underneath the plane. They pulled a lever or something to let their bomb go when they thought they were lined up right to hit their target. Meanwhile, there was the pilot flying the plane, of course. And a guy with a mounted machine gun in a cockpit behind the pilot. He was supposed to protect the plane from enemy fighters — those Japanese Zeroes.
“Only, in the Battle of Midway, nearly all the TBDs — which was also what they called the torpedo bombers — either got shot down by the Zeroes or by the Japanese antiaircraft guns on the Imperial Navy ships. If they somehow managed to survive all that, most of them still ended up crashing into the ocean because they ran out of fuel, or because their steering mechanisms were so shot up that they couldn’t make it back to Midway or to one of the U.S. aircraft carriers that they had flown from.”
“Wow,” I said. “Greg, man, you’re starting to sound like an encyclopedia or something.”
He took it as a compliment and went on. He had apparently read his whole entire book in one night, which was definitely some sort of record.
“George Gay said the pilots and their machine gunners and their bombardiers actually knew, before they took off, that they probably didn’t have enough fuel to make it back,” he said. “They had to fly, like, a couple of hundred miles, to find the Japanese ships, drop their bombs, and try to make it all the way back, even though everybody knew that wasn’t going to happen. But they all went anyway.”
Julie asked if George Gay was on William Foxwell’s ship, the Yorktown, but it turned out he wasn’t. “His ship was the Hornet,” Greg said. “There was the Hornet and the Enterprise. Those were the first ships to send out their bombers. The Yorktown sent theirs out last.”
“So what happened?” I asked. “They sunk the Japanese ships, right?”
“Wrong,” Greg and Julie said at the same time.
Greg continued, “Not one of them — not a single, solitary one of the Devastators, and there were dozens of them that launched from the American aircraft carriers — managed to hit a Japanese ship with their torpedoes. Their main targets were these four Japanese aircraft carriers. None got so much as a scratch. At least not from the Devastators.”
“What about George Gay and his torpedo bomber?” I asked.
Greg shook his head and stirred around some of his lunch with his fork. “After George Gay missed with his bomb — even though he thought he was dead on target — he got shot down, too. His machine gunner and bombardier were both killed. But George Gay survived. He was the only one in his whole squadron who did.”
“So he really was the sole survivor, like the title of his book?” I said.
“Yeah,” Greg replied.
He went on to tell us how George Gay somehow managed to stay alive the entire rest of the naval battle, too — fourteen long hours, including one very long, lonely night, at sea — by hiding under a seat cushion from his plane. Even though Japanese ships were constantly going past him and he could hear their sailors shouting. “It was a miracle one of them didn’t run him over,” Greg said. “Anyway, he was finally rescued by a U.S. scout plane — a seaplane — after the fighting ended, though a lot of Japanese ships were still close by in the area.”
Greg stabbed at some corn on his lunch tray, but the kernels just rolled to the side. “It’s like something out of a movie,” he said. “I mean, the U.S. was so much weaker than the Japanese fleet and all. It was like David and Goliath. They already kicked our butt, and they were coming in with this enormous fleet of ships to finish off the job. The U.S. was all wobbly, but then got this secret information about what was about to happen. And then they set this ambush. But then they got their butts kicked all over again.”
“Yeah, I know, right?” I said, picking up where Greg left off. “And did you read the part where the Japanese also attacked Alaska, of all places, at the same time, to try to fake out the Americans about what they were actually after?”
Greg hadn’t, but Julie had. “Of course, the cryptanalysts had deciphered that information as well from the coded communications,” she said.
Greg blinked. “Could you say that again in English?”
Even Julie had to laugh. “The code-breakers,” she explained. “They knew that, too, and told Admiral Nimitz. So the U.S. could be ready for the attack on those Alaskan island bases, but didn’t send their ships there. The Japanese never knew any of this, of course. They thought they had the element of surprise.”
Once again the bell rang, interrupting us. I couldn’t believe how quickly lunch was over — and none of us seemed to have eaten a thing. My stomach rumbled as I carried my tray to drop it off on the conveyor belt that sent it back to the kitchen, and I knew I was going to be hungry all afternoon.
Julie, Greg, and I agreed to meet up after school for band practice — and to fill one another in on the rest of what we’d read — and then we took off in three different directions.
I wished William Foxwell had been there to hear everything we’d been talking about. I wondered if one of the reasons he hadn’t been around so much lately was because maybe he was already starting to remember a lot of this stuff himself. On one hand, I hoped so. On the other hand, I really wanted to be the one to tell him.
In the middle of sixth period that day, I remembered something, or
rather someone, who was probably the biggest clue we’d been given since Betty Corbett. It was William Foxwell’s friend on the Yorktown — Dewey Tomzak — the guy who had told him about the secret U.S. plan for the Battle of Midway. I couldn’t believe we hadn’t already tried to find him and ask if he knew what happened to William Foxwell.
I wanted to kick myself for forgetting such an important clue. Some kind of history detective I was turning out to be. I wrote the name down in my notebook before I could forget it again — Dewey Tomzak — and couldn’t wait to get to band practice that afternoon to tell Julie and Greg.
They were as excited as I was when we met up at the Kitchen Sink, although once Greg and I finished high-fiving each other, Julie gave us a lecture about how we should start writing everything down so we wouldn’t forget any more important things.
I showed her my notebook. “Already did,” I said, but she just rolled her eyes.
We spent the next ten minutes trying in vain to get Internet reception in the basement. When that didn’t work, we went upstairs, where we could actually pick up the Wi-Fi connection. Julie went right to work looking up Dewey Tomzak on her phone.
Uncle Dex was curious, of course. “And why are you trying to find this guy?” he asked.
“It’s for school,” I said, as if I actually thought that would be enough for Uncle Dex.
“And what’s his name again?” he asked.
I told him. “He was kind of famous in World War II,” I lied.
Uncle Dex frowned. “Never heard of him. But, hey, I’ll see what I can find, too.” He got busy on his own computer at the counter. There were just a couple of people in the store, but neither one looked as if they were actually interested in buying anything. They might as well have had the words “Just looking around” tattooed on their foreheads.
“Found something!” Uncle Dex shouted after a few minutes. Julie looked annoyed. She clearly didn’t like anybody beating her at anything, including Internet searches.
“Wow!” Uncle Dex exclaimed. “He was on the Yorktown with your old pal, William Foxwell. Another seaman second-class. This says he was honorably discharged after the war.”
“Does it say where he lives?” I asked. “Does it give his address or say where he was from or if he’s still alive — stuff like that?”
“No address,” Uncle Dex said. “He was from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, when he joined the navy. But that was a long time ago.”
“We know,” Julie said. Then, to me and Greg, she said, “I found him, too.” She smiled a sort of triumphant smile. “And I found a Dewey Tomzak who still lives in Harrisburg.”
Nobody wanted to look at Uncle Dex and invite any more questions. Julie put her phone in her back pocket, and we all trooped back down to the basement to figure out what we should do next.
Julie thought we should call Dewey Tomzak right away, but I didn’t want to risk Uncle Dex getting suspicious.
“I’m not sure he totally bought into that war hero stuff,” I said. “And I can’t exactly tell him we’re doing all this because of a ghost.”
Julie poked my arm with her index finger. “You explained it to us,” she said.
“Well,” said Greg, “technically it was the ghost himself who explained it to us, so it’s kind of different. I mean, we could see him, so, you know, once we got finished freaking out it all made sense. Sort of.”
We decided we’d wait until Uncle Dex left for the day, then go upstairs to call Dewey Tomzak. Meanwhile, Julie said she had a new song to teach us. It wasn’t one of her originals, as it turned out. Instead it was a really old song neither Greg nor I had ever heard of, but that apparently used to be popular a long time ago. Julie knew about it from her dad, who seemed to know a lot of weird and obscure American songs. It was called “How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away?”
Uncle Dex must have heard us practicing — or else he came down to eavesdrop. However it happened, he came bursting into the practice room with his ukulele and a small amplifier, “ready to jam,” as he put it.
The next thing we knew, Julie and Uncle Dex had pretty much taken over the song, while Greg and I struggled through the chord progression that Julie had printed out for us. Greg, who was our lead singer, or was supposed to be, anyway, tried to both sing and play the new song but had to concentrate too hard on the music, so Uncle Dex took over singing. Julie didn’t seem to mind, but Greg and I cringed — especially when Uncle Dex started yodeling. I actually shuddered. Greg did, too.
“Well,” Uncle Dex said after we ran through it a couple of times, “guess it’s time for me to close up shop.” And with that, he packed up his uke and amp and clomped back upstairs.
“Don’t forget to lock up behind you,” he yelled back to me. He had given me a key after forgetting he had to lock up that first time Greg and I were down there.
After he left, we went upstairs and called the number for Dewey Tomzak in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I put my phone on speaker so everybody could hear, but we agreed that I would do all the talking.
“Hello?” an elderly man’s voice answered on the first ring. I wasn’t prepared for that, but I guess some people are just always sitting with their phones, waiting for somebody to call.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Hello, sir. Is this Mr. Tomzak? Mr. Dewey Tomzak from World War II?”
Julie and Greg both smacked their foreheads at the stupid thing I had just said. I wanted to smack my own forehead, too.
“What’s that you say?” the man asked.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Is this Mr. Tomzak? My name is Anderson Carter, and I’m trying to get in touch with Mr. Dewey Tomzak. It’s for a school project. About World War II. That’s what I meant to say.”
There was a short pause. And then, “Yes. Yes. This is Dewey Tomzak. Now what’s this about again? Is this a solicitation? You want money for what?”
“No, sir,” I said. “We’re not looking for money. I was looking for someone named Dewey Tomzak who was in the navy.”
“Yes,” he said. “I was in the navy. And who is this again?”
I introduced myself again and explained that I was in middle school in Virginia and working on a history project for one of my classes. “I found a navy peacoat and an old letter belonging to a man — a sailor who I believe served with you on the Yorktown. I was hoping you might be able to give me some information about him. About what happened to him.”
Mr. Tomzak seemed to be breathing kind of hard all of a sudden. I asked if he was okay and he said he was, but he needed to sit down in his chair to finish the conversation. I heard his footsteps and then the sounds of him sinking into a chair. I even heard him pull the lever so it leaned back. It was kind of a loud chair. It occurred to me that getting a phone call like this might be a pretty big deal for Mr. Tomzak — a pretty big deal for anybody who had fought in the war a long time ago.
“Okay,” he said. “Now who’s this sailor you’re calling about. You say we were on the same ship? On the Yorktown? You know that was a doomed ship, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” I said, although I hadn’t read enough yet about the rest of the Battle of Midway to actually know that. It sent a chill up my spine when he said it.
“The name of this fellow?” he asked again. “You were just saying?”
I took a deep breath and then told him: “William Foxwell.”
There was another long pause, and then a whistling sound — which I guess was Mr. Tomzak whistling. And then he said, “William Foxwell. Well, I’ll be.”
“You know, I didn’t like him at first,” Mr. Tomzak said. “When I was a boy I lived in Philadelphia, and anybody who had a Southern accent like Foxy — that’s what we all called him — I just figured they must be a dumb hillbilly.”
He laughed. “Of course, that was just prejudiced and Foxy was nothing of the sort,” he continued. “And it turned out, he thought I must be one of those pushy, obnoxious Northerners because of my accent. But that’s the great thing about the
service. It put a lot of us fellows together from all over, and we got to see that once you get past how somebody talks, or what they like to eat, or what sports team they root for, we’re all pretty much the same. Every one of us on the Yorktown, I’d have to say we were all good Americans. We were all proud to serve our country.”
I liked when Mr. Tomzak said that. And I bet William Foxwell must have felt the same way.
Mr. Tomzak laughed again. “Another thing we had in common was we all hated the food on board and couldn’t wait for shore leave so we could get some real food. That was the worst thing about returning to Hawaii after that Battle of the Coral Sea. Here we all thought we were going to get us some shore leave and everything that came with it, and instead nobody got to leave the ship. We were all too busy helping with the repairs, getting ready for Midway!”
I asked how well he had known William Foxwell and Mr. Tomzak said pretty well. “I heard so much about his girl back home I was about ready to marry her myself,” he said. “Of course, I didn’t have a girl of my own at the time, so I was envious of anybody who did. Especially somebody like Foxy with a girl that pretty.” He gave a small chuckle before continuing, “He used to show me her picture all the time.”
I smiled, thinking about Betty Corbett and William Foxwell way back then.
Mr. Tomzak cleared his throat and started talking again. “I’ll tell you what else I knew about Foxy. I knew that more than anything he wanted to be a navy pilot up in one of our fighter planes. Or if not a pilot, then a bombardier or machine gunner on one of those torpedo bombers. Heck, even a scout plane. He didn’t care. He must have put in applications for flight school once a month, even though he knew they wouldn’t even process that many requests. Plus, he hadn’t finished high school, so there was no way he’d be accepted. But Foxy just kept hoping they’d get desperate for him. The painful truth was he wasn’t going anywhere. But he still dreamed about it.”
The Secret of Midway Page 8