The three senior American commanders at Midway: Admiral Chester Nimitz (in pith helmet) talks with Raymond Spruance, commander of Task Force 16 that included the carriers Hornet and Enterprise; right: Frank Jack Fletcher who commanded Task Force 17 that included the Yorktown. (U.S. Navy)
Of course, Fletcher could not go to sea until the Yorktown was repaired, and Nimitz had no intention of keeping the Enterprise and Hornet waiting around for her. On May 28, therefore, even as the Yorktown eased into dry dock, the two undamaged American carriers left Pearl Harbor as Task Force 16, with the Enterprise flying the flag of Rear Admiral Raymond Spruance. Fletcher would exercise overall command when all three carriers operated together, but meanwhile Spruance, the “black shoe” admiral, would command two-thirds of America’s carrier force in the Pacific.
Nimitz’s orders to both Fletcher and Spruance suggested a lot about the commanding officer’s philosophy of combat: “In carrying out the task assigned,” Nimitz wrote, “you will be governed by the principle of calculated risk.” He didn’t need to point out that the decision to fight for Midway in the first place was already a calculated risk. Privately, he urged both task group commanders to do as much damage as they could to the enemy carriers without unduly risking their own. It was an assignment that required delicate judgment and, in Nimitz’s words, “delicate timing.” After all, the Japanese would have overwhelming superiority since they were sending more than 150 warships against only 26. On paper it looked hopeless.19
But battles are not won or lost on paper.
As the Yorktown turned north outside Pearl Harbor, it was surrounded by an escort of two cruisers and five destroyers, which formed a circular screen to provide both antisubmarine and antiair protection. For three hundred years and more, war fleets had gone to battle in a column—the line-ahead formation. But by 1942 the aircraft carrier had emerged as so critical a component of naval warfare that the standard formation was now a circle with smaller warships arranged around the one essential fighting platform of modern navies.
Once the task force (designated Task Force 17) was well on its way, with Oahu only a smudge on the southern horizon, Fletcher ordered the formation to turn into the wind to take aboard the carrier’s air wing. Though wind direction had been crucial to Oliver Hazard Perry on Lake Erie, it had been largely irrelevant to the combatants in Hampton Roads and Manila Bay. Now the wind mattered once again, because in order for a carrier’s planes to take off or land on its relatively short deck, it was necessary to maximize the relative wind speed across that deck from fore to aft. During the ensuing battle, and indeed throughout the Pacific War, the carriers of both navies had to turn into the wind in order to launch or recover airplanes.
The Yorktown’s air wing was commanded by Lieutenant Commander Oscar Pederson, who was concerned that he would not be taking his regular command into battle. The Yorktown’s air wing had suffered heavy losses during the fight in the Coral Sea—the Yorktown and the Lexington had lost a total of sixty-six planes in that fight, over 40 percent of their full complement—and as a result, Pederson now had a disproportionate number of rookies in his command. A few veterans from other squadrons made up a valuable cadre of experienced pilots, but most of those who flew in to land on the Yorktown that May 30 were relative novices, many of them straight out of flight school. Worse, at least in the opinion of some, the squadrons bore unit designations that did not even identify them as belonging to the Yorktown. In short, the Yorktown’s air wing was something of a lash-up.20
There is no such thing as a routine carrier landing. Approaching a landing platform that was itself moving at between twenty and thirty knots, the pilots dropped their landing gear, lowered their flaps, and throttled down to just above stalling speed. As they maneuvered, they kept one eye on the landing signal officer (LSO), who stood near the stern with large colored paddles in his hands. If a plane came in too fast or too high, if it was not lined up properly, or if the deck was not yet cleared from the previous landing, the plane got a “wave-off” from the LSO, and the pilot gunned the throttle to pull out of his glide and go around for another approach. If the LSO swept his paddles downward, giving the OK, the pilot throttled back the engine and dropped his plane down jarringly onto the carrier’s wooden deck, where it sped forward at sixty or seventy knots toward the crash barrier that guarded the parked aircraft on the bow, until a hook hanging from the plane’s fuselage caught one of several wires stretched across the carrier’s deck. The wire arrested the plane’s forward progress and brought it safely, if rather abruptly, to a stop. Crewmen on board the ship then rushed out to disengage the wire and directed the pilot to taxi forward beyond the crash barrier to clear the landing area for the next plane. Once forward, the plane’s wings folded back like those of a sleeping dove to conserve space on the crowded deck, and eventually it was lowered by a giant elevator to the hangar deck below.
It was an inherently dangerous activity. Indeed, landing on an aircraft carrier was very likely the most dangerous noncombat activity in war; even a veteran pilot had to focus all his skills on the difficult job of bringing his airplane to a safe landing on a moving platform only eighty feet wide.
The fighters came in first. Lieutenant Commander John S. “Jimmy” Thach led the twenty-seven planes that made up the squadron that was designated as VF-3. The V simply referred to aircraft, the F stood for fighter, and the 3 indicated that the squadron belonged to the Saratoga (CV-3), though it had been hastily patched together from what was available. At least the squadron had relatively new airplanes: the F4F-4 Wildcats that Thach and his men flew were a singular improvement over the stubby, slow (and appropriately named) F2A-3 Buffalos that some of them had flown previously. It would soon become evident that even these newer Wildcats were no match for the nimble Japanese Zeros, but the Buffalos had been virtual sitting ducks. A veteran pilot reported bitterly that the Buffalo “is not a combat aeroplane. . . . Any commander that orders pilots out for combat in an F2A-3 [Buffalo] should consider the pilot as lost before leaving the ground.”21
Thach was more worried about the inexperience of his young pilots. They had been taught how to fly, but only a few of them had ever fired their guns in earnest, and “they knew practically nothing about fighter tactics.” In addition, though all of them had made at least one carrier landing in training, “none of them had landed a Wildcat aboard a carrier.” Thach and his executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Don Lovelace, had done what they could to instruct and encourage their young pilots in the few days they had with them before flying out to the Yorktown, but there was no real substitute for experience. Lovelace was one of the few who did have experience, which was why he had postponed his orders to rotate back to the States and take command of his own squadron in order to stay with VF-3.22
Lovelace’s wingman, a fresh young ensign named Robert Evans, had so little flight experience that Lovelace told him to follow him closely in the landing pattern and to copy his movements. Lovelace brought his Wildcat in for a clean landing and taxied safely beyond the crash barrier. But Evans brought his plane in too high and missed the wire; it bounced once, floated over the barrier, and crashed directly on top of Lovelace’s plane. Ensign Evans survived, but Commander Lovelace became the first mortal casualty of the Battle of Midway.* There was no time to stop and contemplate this tragedy; other planes were already circling into the pattern. After extricating Lovelace’s body from the wreckage, both wrecked planes were unceremoniously shoved over the side, and landing operations continued.23
Once all the fighters were aboard (twenty-five now instead of twenty-seven), the next to land were the thirteen TBD-1 Devastator torpedo bombers of VT-3 (T for torpedo). These planes were designed to be ship-killers. When armed for combat, the Devastators each carried a single twenty-two-hundred-pound Mark 13 torpedo slung under the fuselage. Because of that, they were relatively slow and subsequently vulnerable both to fighter attack and to antiair fire. They had a theoretical maximum speed of just over 200 mph
, but in practice they seldom topped 160 mph, and cruised at just over 100 mph.24 The Japanese Zero fighters that assailed them topped out at better than 330 mph. Moreover, to launch their large and cumbersome weapons, the Devastators had to approach their intended targets low and slow, flying just fifteen or twenty feet above the surface, and throttling back to about eighty knots before releasing their torpedoes. To be effective, therefore, the American torpedo bombers needed the protection of Thach’s fighters while they made their attack run. Even then, it took nerves of steel to fly a Devastator into its target, and as much nerve to man the rear-seat machine gun, sitting backward and fending off enemy fighters while the pilot lined up for a shot.*
After all of the torpedo bombers landed safely and without incident, the dive-bombers came in. The Yorktown had two squadrons of dive-bombers: thirty-seven planes divided into two squadrons labeled VB-3 (B for bomber) and VS-5 (S for scouting). The planes in both squadrons were relatively new SDB-3 Dauntless dive-bombers, which their pilots called either “the beast” or “the barge.” Despite these unheroic nicknames, the Dauntless constituted the principal strike arm of the American carrier force. They could attack an enemy more than two hundred miles away, flying down out of the sun from twenty thousand feet to drop either a single thousand-pound bomb or one five-hundred-pound bomb and two hundred-pound bombs. The bombs were gravity-guided, so doctrine called for the pilot to fly nearly straight down at a seventy-degree angle toward the target, then release a bomb so that it plunged downward on that same trajectory before the pilot pulled out of his dive. No wonder they were called “hell divers.” Like the Devastator, the Dauntless had a two-man crew: a pilot in front and a gunner/radioman in the rear seat who handled a twin-barreled .30-caliber machine gun. Even with that rear-seat gunner, however, the Dauntless was most effective when it was accompanied by Wildcats so that the pilots could focus on their targets rather than on dodging enemy fighters.25
By late afternoon, the Yorktown had taken seventy-seven airplanes on board, and Task Force 17 resumed its northward course. A patched-up ship and a patched-together air wing escorted by seven survivors of the Pearl Harbor attack all headed north at twenty-four knots toward Point Luck. There, some 325 miles north of Midway, they would rendezvous with the two American carriers of Task Force 16 to lie in wait for the Japanese fleet.
The same day that the Yorktown had limped into Pearl Harbor, the Japanese First Mobile Strike Force—the Kido Butai—got under way from its anchorage in Hiroshima Bay on southern Honshu and steamed out the Bungo Strait to begin its long trek across the Pacific to Midway. As Rochefort had predicted, the Japanese strike force included four carriers, not six. The Shokaku and Zuikaku, Japan’s newest carriers, stayed behind. The Shokaku had been seriously damaged in the Coral Sea by three bomb hits that had bent her deck plates so badly that she could not launch or recover airplanes. Repairing them would take time, though if the Japanese had been willing to jury-rig the repairs on the Shokaku the way the Americans did on the Yorktown, they might have made her serviceable in time to operate with the fleet. The Zuikaku had not been harmed at all in the Coral Sea, but she had lost most of the planes from her air wing and, more importantly, many of her veteran pilots. Rather than go to sea with a reorganized or undermanned air wing (like Yorktown), she, too, stayed behind. The Japanese would have occasion to reconsider and regret these decisions later, but at the time it hardly seemed to matter. According to Japanese estimates, the Americans had only two carriers, and surely four Japanese carriers would be more than a match for them, especially considering that the Japanese would have the element of surprise on their side—or so they believed.26
Nagumo’s four carriers had a significantly different look than their American counterparts. For one thing, two of them—the flagship Akagi and the Kaga—had been constructed on top of battle cruiser and battleship hulls and were therefore significantly larger, each of them displacing more than forty thousand tons. That circumstance also gave them a distinctive profile, since their flight decks, instead of being integral to the hull, were built on top of stiltlike structural supports and were consequently high off the water, a fact that, combined with their heavy hulls, made them slower than most frontline warships—the Kaga had a top speed of only twenty-seven knots. In addition, their “islands” were comparatively tiny. Nagumo’s other two carriers, the Soryu and Hiryu, were both slightly smaller and faster, having been built from the keel up as carriers. Among them the four carriers of Nagumo’s command carried a total of some 249 aircraft, and as they moved out into the broad Pacific they were surrounded by a substantial screen of heavy cruisers, light cruisers, and destroyers.27
As this armada put to sea, cheered on by men in the small fishing boats bobbing offshore, the morale of the officers and sailors was sky high. And why not? They had been masters of the western Pacific for more than half a year. They had literally conquered an empire, grabbing the Philippines from the Americans; Borneo, Sumatra, and Java from the Dutch; Singapore and Malaysia from the British. These conquests were critical to Japanese grand strategy. They had gone to war in the first place to secure a reliable source of raw materials for Japan’s burgeoning industry—foodstuffs, iron, and especially the oil that was essential to Japan’s economy— launching a knockout blow at America’s battle fleet in Pearl Harbor to buy the time necessary to establish and consolidate their Pacific empire.
As it happened, however, the offensive potential of the American fleet had not been destroyed at Pearl Harbor, for the American carriers were still out there. The Japanese thought they had sunk four of them. They had, in fact, sunk two—the Langley and the Lexington—but the Japanese also listed both the Saratoga and Yorktown as sunk in their battle damage estimates. Of course that still left two more, or possibly three, and Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander in chief of the combined fleet, was determined to finish them off. At a strategy planning session in early April, a spokesman for Yamamoto declared, “In the last analysis, the success or failure of our entire strategy in the Pacific will be determined by whether or not we succeed in destroying the United States fleet, more particularly its carrier task forces.”28 So determined was Yamamoto to finish off the remnants of the American fleet that he threatened to resign if his plan for an attack on Midway was not accepted. The bluff—if it was a bluff—worked. In early April the Japanese committed formally to an all-out attack on Midway in order to lure out and destroy the American carriers. The dramatic raid by Doolittle’s bombers over Tokyo two weeks later added a sense of urgency to the planning, for that raid nominally threatened the life of the emperor and embarrassed the Imperial Japanese Navy.
In planning the Midway operation, however, the Japanese made two fundamental errors that in the end proved fatal. First, they lost focus on their primary objective. The whole point of the operation was to destroy the American carriers using Midway as bait. But in the planning process, the occupation of Midway as an advanced outpost, or even as a preliminary step to an invasion of Hawaii, grew more and more prominent until the tail began to wag the dog. Those in charge of the landing operation insisted that the landings had to be made in the first week of June in order to take advantage of a full moon, which would allow night operations. That factor then drove the rest of the planning until the landing, as much as the battle against the carriers, emerged as a primary goal of the operation.29
Second, the plan that finally emerged was overly complex, and it completely ignored the Mahanian doctrine that to achieve sea control, a nation should keep its main battle fleet concentrated. Though the Japanese had overwhelming naval superiority, they planned to divide their forces into no fewer than ten battle groups for the coming operation and, even worse, to deploy them so distant from one another that they would not be able to provide mutual support. One example of this was the notion that a simultaneous attack on several of the Aleutian Islands would somehow distract and confuse the Americans. The Japanese planned to commit four battle groups to American positions in the Aleutian
s: the islands of Attu and Kiska at the far end of Alaska’s long tail, and Dutch Harbor, the small U.S. naval base nearly a thousand miles further east. The force assigned to Dutch Harbor included one full-sized carrier and one light carrier, which, if they had accompanied the Nagumo Force instead, might have changed the outcome of the battle for Midway.*
Five other, much larger naval groups would focus on Midway, but they would not operate together. Appropriately, the Kido Butai, with Nagumo’s four carriers plus two battleships and a screen of cruisers and destroyers, would lead the attack. More than five hundred miles behind, beyond not only gun range but also the range of combat aircraft, Yamamoto himself would command the main body of seven battleships, including the brand-new and enormous Yamato, at seventy thousand tons the biggest warship on the planet, as well as a substantial screen that included another light carrier. In addition to separating the main body from the strike force, Yamamoto’s decision to command the operation from his flagship was ill-considered, since in order to achieve surprise, his battle group, like all the others, would have to operate under radio silence at least until the battle began. If he had remained at Saipan or even in Japan, he could have sent out or forwarded an unlimited number of radio orders without fear of disclosing the location of any of his forces. At sea, however, he had to maintain radio silence for fear of giving away his own position. Too distant to support Nagumo and not distant enough to provide him with either orders or information, he might as well have stayed at home.*
Decision at Sea Page 24