Though Fletcher still believed the best idea was to hit first and to hit hard, two factors stayed his hand. The first was that the report indicated only one carrier. The Americans did not know if the Kido Butai was operating as a unit, or even how many carriers the Japanese might have. Rochefort had predicted four, but there still might be five, or even six. Where were the others? Then there was the range, over two hundred miles, beyond the capability of the American torpedo bombers.
Fifteen minutes later (at 5:45) the Yorktown intercepted another message, sent out in plain English by an excited PBY pilot: “Many airplanes headed Midway bearing three one five.” That meant Nagumo had launched his attack on Midway. Swiftly calculating the time it would take for those airplanes to complete their mission and return, Fletcher wondered if a delay in launching his own strike would enable him not only to close the range but also to catch the Japanese carriers while they were in the process of recovering the planes returning from that strike. So while the deck crew spotted the planes on the flight deck and the pilots waited impatiently in the ready room, Fletcher decided to hold off until he received further information.41
It came in twenty minutes later from the reliable Lieutenant Ady: “Two carriers and battleships bearing three two zero degrees, distance one eight zero, course one three five, speed twenty five.” With this report, Fletcher now knew that there were at least two enemy carriers and two battleships within maximum striking range. It was a worthwhile target. Then, too, further delay might squander the opportunity. After all, the longer he waited, the more likely it was that a Japanese patrol plane might find him and he would lose the element of surprise. (At that moment, approximately 5:50, the tardy floatplane from Tone was about halfway out its search leg, heading directly toward the American carriers.) On the other hand, Fletcher needed to recover the search planes that he had sent northward that morning, and he still hoped to catch Nagumo at sixes and sevens while the Japanese carriers were recovering aircraft. Fletcher decided to hedge his bets. At 6:07 he blinkered a message to Spruance in the Enterprise: “Proceed southwesterly and attack enemy carriers when definitely located. I will follow as soon as planes recovered.” Meanwhile, he would hold the Yorktown’s air wing “in reserve pending receipt of information on additional enemy carriers.”42
Over on the Enterprise, Spruance was ready. His volatile and impulsive chief of staff, Captain Miles Browning, had been urging an immediate strike since the first sighting, never mind the range. Now unleashed by Fletcher, Spruance did not hedge his bets; he decided to launch everything he had in the hope of inflicting an early knockout. He would keep only a handful of fighters for combat air patrol to protect the task force. Everything else would go into the air at once for an all-out attack on the enemy carriers. At 6:16 the klaxon on the Enterprise sounded general quarters, and a voice over the 1MC intercom system announced: “Pilots, man your aircraft.”43
The planes of Eugene Lindsay’s VT-6 on the flight deck of USS Enterprise on the morning of June 4. The 1,220-pound Mark 13 torpedoes can be seen slung under the fuselage of the foremost planes. Only four of the planes shown here returned from the strike against the Kido Butai. (U.S. Navy)
Taking off from a carrier is no more routine than landing on one. Though the carrier flight decks were over eight hundred feet long, the aft portion of the deck was crowded with airplanes, most of them already manned and with their engines running. The first planes to lift off, therefore, had only about four hundred feet of runway to get airborne. The Yorktown had hydraulic catapults that were theoretically capable of accelerating the planes to nearly a hundred miles per hour within a hundred feet of deck space. But it was a jarring and not always reliable system. The catapults shot the planes forward at full thrust from a dead start (“a real kick in the butt,” as one pilot recalled), then the boost tailed off as the hydraulic container lost pressure. The result was often a “cold cat shot” that failed to get the plane airborne. Because of that, there were no such catapult takeoffs on June 4; the planes got airborne on their own.44
Soon after receiving Fletcher’s order, Spruance ordered his two big carriers to turn into the wind and increase speed to twenty-five knots. The wind that day was light, only about five knots, and it was blowing directly toward the enemy, which meant that the carriers had to turn away from their objective in order to launch; even then the light winds made takeoff difficult. The pilots kept their wheel brakes on and revved their engines. Then, at a signal from the flight deck officer, the lead pilot released the brake and gave his engine maximum throttle. At exactly 7:00 A.M. the first planes on the Enterprise rumbled forward into the wind, picked up speed, and lifted off. Two minutes later the first plane from the Hornet also took to the air.45
The fighters went first, then the dive-bombers—half of them armed with thousand-pound bombs, half with five-hundred-pound bombs— then the torpedo planes. It took about an hour to launch all 119 planes of the strike force. Those that launched first circled above the task force until the others could join the formation. Just over halfway through the launch cycle, at about 7:30, Spruance was handed a report that a long-range enemy floatplane had been spotted. The fighter control director, Lieutenant Commander Leonard “Ham” Dow, vectored several fighters toward it, but the enemy plane disappeared into the clouds. This, of course, was the long-delayed scout plane from Tone, and the Americans had to suspect that it would report their position. It was too late now to rethink the decision to attack. Presumably the enemy carriers would have to maintain course and speed in order to recover the planes they had sent to Midway. So the launching continued, and when all 119 planes were formed up, the entire formation flew off westward toward the intercept point that had been calculated by extrapolating the enemy’s course and speed from the last sighting. As soon as the last plane was airborne, Spruance reversed course in order to close the enemy as quickly as possible. The decision to launch at this distance meant that some of the planes might easily run out of fuel on the return trip. Spruance’s maneuvering also took him out of visual distance from the Yorktown and Task Force 17. From this point on in the battle, the two American task forces operated independently.46
While Fletcher wrestled with his options and Spruance turned his carriers into the wind to launch his air wing, the 108 planes of the Japanese strike force were closing in on Midway. The defenders were ready for them. Historians have paid a lot of attention to the importance of decrypted intelligence in the Battle of Midway, and rightly so, but less attention has been paid to another critical source of American intelligence, and that was that the Americans had radar—on each of their carriers as well as at Midway— and the Japanese did not. The radar station on Midway picked up the signal of the approaching enemy planes ninety miles out, and the Marine Corps pilots based on Midway—most of them flying old F2A-3 Buffalos—immediately took off, climbed to fourteen thousand feet, and headed out in the direction of the approaching enemy to intercept them. Afterward the rest of the planes on the island also took off. The scout planes and heavy bombers not already dispatched on combat missions were ordered to fly south simply to get out of the way. The principal objective of the Japanese air strike at Midway was to eliminate the threat from Midway’s airfield, but by 6:00 A.M. there were no planes left on the ground at Midway for the Japanese to target. The last to leave was an old PBY that took off and lumbered southward just as the Japanese were coming in from the north.47
Forty miles out, the Marine fighter pilots spotted the approaching Japanese planes flying below them in six nine-plane V formations. Because the Japanese expected to catch the American planes just taking off, the Zero fighter pilots were looking down and were surprised when the Marines swooped down on them from fourteen thousand feet, sending half a dozen enemy bombers down in flames. The Marines’ good fortune did not last. Despite the skill and determination of the pilots, the F2A-3 Buffalos they flew were easy meat for the Japanese Zeros. One by one the American planes were shot from the sky, and the rest of the Japanese b
ombers flew through the intercept to complete their mission.48
Smoke from a burning oil tank hit by the Japanese during their air raid on Midway fails to impress the gooney birds in the foreground. (U.S. Navy)
They were hugely disappointed, however, to find that the runways on Eastern Island were bare. They hit the base power plant, blew up the fuel tanks and hangars, and did as much damage as they could, but because the American airplanes had been removed from harm’s way, it was evident that the attack had not eliminated Midway as a threat to the approaching invasion force. En route back to the carriers, at 7:00 A.M., the Japanese flight commander, Lieutenant Joichi Tomonaga, reported: “There is need for a second attack.” At that precise moment, though none of the Japanese decision makers knew it, the first planes were lifting off from the Enterprise and Hornet to attack the Japanese carriers.49
Tomonaga’s report gave Nagumo something to think about. He already had the other half of his air wing spotted on the decks of his carriers. But they were armed with antiship weapons: torpedoes and armor-piercing bombs. To launch a second attack on Midway, those planes would have to be rearmed. While he thought about it, the bugle call for air raid sounded on board his flagship.50 The attack was not by planes from the American carriers—it would take them two more hours to reach the intercept point—it was more land-based bombers from Midway. This time it was four Army twin-engine B-26 bombers that had been rigged to carry torpedoes, and six Navy TBF torpedo bombers.* The Japanese Zeros swarmed down on them and shot down seven of them even as three others managed to launch their torpedoes. None of those torpedoes scored a hit, however, and the three surviving planes headed back toward Midway. It was another American failure, as fruitless as the B-17 attack the day before, though more costly to the attackers. But the attack had an impact on the battle nevertheless, for it very likely helped Nagumo decide that a second strike on Midway was indeed necessary, since these planes had obviously come from Midway’s airfield. A few minutes later Nagumo ordered that the planes already spotted on the flight decks of his four carriers be rearmed with explosive ordnance for a second strike on Midway.
That work was well under way when, sometime after 7:30, the tardy floatplane from the Tone finally made a report: “Ten ships, apparently enemy, sighted. Bearing zero one zero, distant two four zero from Midway. Course one five zero, speed more than twenty knots.” This was, of course, Spruance’s Task Force 16, which consisted of seventeen warships, including two carriers, but apparently distance and cloud cover obscured the size and character of Spruance’s command. Like the officers on Yorktown, the bridge team on the Akagi immediately bent over the chart. A quick triangulation showed that the enemy ships were less than two hundred miles away, already within range of the Japanese attack planes. Nagumo immediately suspended the rearming of the planes and ordered the thirty-six torpedo planes that he had ready to “prepare to carry out attacks on enemy fleet units.” Before he committed himself, however, he needed more information. To the pilot of the Tone’s search plane pilot he radioed: “Ascertain ship types and maintain contact.” For a few precious and irrecoverable moments the entire Japanese strike force was frozen in suspension while Nagumo waited for the answer.51
It came ten minutes later: “Enemy ships are five cruisers and five destroyers.” Nagumo breathed out. Cruisers and destroyers could safely be ignored until Midway was dispatched. He ordered work to resume at once on the changeover from torpedoes to bombs for a second strike on Midway. That order proved difficult to execute, however, because during the next thirty minutes the Kido Butai was attacked three times by more planes from Midway. The first attack came from Army B-17s bombing from high altitude. Bombs fell all around the Hiryu and the Soryu, sending up great plumes of water, but none of them scored a hit, though once again the pilots reported severe damage to both carriers.
Then, almost immediately afterward, sixteen Marine Corps dive-bombers attacked. All but three of the pilots in this group were rookies; none of them had ever flown a Dauntless before or had practiced dive-bombing. Their only training had been in “glide bombing,” which called for a descent toward the target at a modest thirty-degree angle. Because of that, the commanding officer, Major Lofton “Joe” Henderson, “decided to use a glide bombing attack.” Starting from eight thousand feet, the Marines power-glided down to four hundred feet before releasing their bombs. The Zeros were all over them, shooting down exactly half of the planes, including Henderson’s, and riddling the others with bullet holes (one managed to return to Midway with no fewer than 210 holes in its fuselage). Rookies though they were, the Marines pressed the attack and released their bombs. The Hiryu all but disappeared in water spouts from the bomb explosions, but when the water settled, it was steaming along as before. Once again, despite determination and sacrifice, the Americans had made no hits.52
Finally, a dozen antiquated Marine Corps Vindicators tried their hand. The aged fabric-covered Vindicators (which their pilots dismissively referred to as either “Vibrators” or “Wind Indicators”) fared no better. Two were splashed by the Zeros, two more were damaged, and none scored a hit. Thus between 8:10 and 8:30 the carriers of the Kido Butai survived unscathed three separate attacks by Midway-based bombers. The only advantage gained by the Americans in these otherwise futile attacks was that the armament shift from armor-piercing to explosive ordnance on Japanese aircraft was slowed by the violent maneuvering of the carriers.53
In the midst of the last of these attacks, the Tone’s search plane radioed a correction—or rather an addition. Apparently the clouds had cleared sufficiently to give him a better look at Spruance’s command: He now reported: “Enemy force accompanied by what appears to be aircraft carrier bringing up the rear.” A carrier! That changed everything. Or maybe not. After all, the report indicated that it “appears to be” a carrier. Nagumo had little time to contemplate his response to this news, for by now the planes from his own strike on Midway were returning, and they would need clear decks on which to land. An immediate decision was necessary. Nagumo had thirty-six torpedo planes armed and ready to go against the American carrier, but if he sent them now, they would have to attack without fighter cover, and during the last half hour he had just witnessed the futility of air attacks made without fighter cover on his own carriers. Assuming there was time, it would be better to send off a coordinated attack. Rear Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi, the eager commander of the Second Carrier Division, had the temerity to offer unsolicited advice by blinker: “Consider it advisable to launch attack force immediately.” But Nagumo would not be rushed. He also did not want to do things by halves. He made his decision: instead of launching a partial attack at once, he would strike the planes that were then on deck back down to the hangar deck, recover the planes returning from Midway, rearm and refuel the entire wing, and then send a full coordinated air strike toward the American position.54
By the time he made this decision, it was 8:30; the planes from the Hornet and Enterprise had been in the air for an hour and a half.
Among the fifty-eight planes launched from the Hornet that morning were the fifteen torpedo bombers of VT-8, led by Lieutenant Commander John C. “Jack” Waldron, a twenty-one-year Navy veteran from South Dakota who was particularly proud of being one-eighth Sioux. Waldron was eager to tangle with the enemy. He had argued for an earlier launch that would catch the Japanese by surprise, and he had been disappointed when he was told to wait. He was even more disappointed when the Hornet’s captain, Marc “Pete” Mitscher, decided that the Wildcats of the Hornet’s fighter squadron (VF-8) would accompany the dive-bombers rather than the torpedo planes. The rationale was that because the Wildcats could not climb as effectively as the Zeros, it was better for them to come in high so that they could fly down on the Zeros, rather than have to struggle up from low altitude.55
Lieutenant Commander Jack Waldron, who had a gut feeling about the location of the Japanese carriers, poses in front of his TBD-1 Devastator torpedo bomber. Every plane of Waldron’s
VT-8 squadron was lost in the ensuing strike. (U.S. Navy)
Waldron claimed to have a “sixth sense” that was a product of his Indian heritage, and that sixth sense was at work that morning, for he was convinced that the coordinates of the Japanese carriers given at the briefing that morning were in error. He believed that instead of continuing south, the Japanese carriers would turn north as soon as they learned there were American carriers in the area. On his way to his aircraft he stopped Ensign George Gay, the squadron navigator, and told him that “the Japs will not be going toward Midway. . . . The Group commander [Commander Stanhope Ring] is going to take the whole bunch down there. I’m going more to the north. . . . Don’t think I’m lost. Just track me so that if anything happens to me the boys can count on you to bring them back.”56
Ring took the Hornet’s bombers almost due west; Lieutenant Commander Wade McClusky, with the Enterprise bombers, flew a more southerly course. Neither Ring nor McClusky, however, found the Japanese carriers where they were supposed to be. Ring actually passed well north of the Kido Butai and, concluding that the enemy must be closing Midway, he turned south. McClusky was well south of the target, but, unaware of that, he commenced a standard search patrol, boxing the compass in gradually expanding circles while searching the horizon. But Jack Waldron, leading the Hornet’s torpedo bombers, followed his gut and split the difference, flying, as it turned out, directly toward the enemy. At 9:20 he found the Kido Butai.57
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