Approaching at fifteen hundred feet, Waldron was awestruck by the sight of the Japanese fleet spread out before him, but his seat-of-the-pants navigation apparently had been too good, for he could see no other American planes in the vicinity. Although Waldron didn’t know it, there were other American planes nearby: Nearly four miles straight up, Lieutenant James S. Gray’s squadron of Wildcats from the Enterprise was circling over the Japanese fleet at twenty-two thousand feet, waiting for the arrival of the dive-bombers. At such vertical distances, however, Gray was as ignorant of Waldron’s presence as Waldron was of Gray’s. All Waldron could see were Japanese ships—lots of them. At the back of the formation, Ensign Gay had a clear view. “The first capital ship I recognized was a carrier—the Soryu. Then I made out the Kaga and the Akagi. There was another carrier further on, and screening ships all over the damned ocean.” Waldron concluded that there was no use waiting for support. He broke radio silence to announce: “We will go in. We won’t turn back. Former strategy [coordination with the dive-bombers] cannot be used. We will attack. Good luck.” Gray might have swooped down to assist, but the planes from the Enterprise and Hornet were using different radio frequencies, and Gray never heard the call.58
Waldron led his squadron toward the carrier in the middle of the enemy formation, and as he did so the Japanese fighters swarmed to the attack. At once, the swift Zeroes began to score hits. Swooping in from astern, the faster and more nimble Zeros savaged the slow and level-flying torpedo bombers. One torpedo bomber went down, then two. “Zeros were coming in from all angles and from both sides at once,” Gay recalled. “They would come in from abeam, pass each other just over our heads, and turn around to make another attack.” The Zeros focused on the lead planes and worked their way back. Waldron’s plane was one of the first to go down. As the last plane in the formation, Gay managed to get closer than most. Since the target carrier was swinging its bow toward him to comb any torpedoes that might be launched, Gay looped out to starboard to try an approach on its port bow. Bullets from the Zeros and from intense antiair fire riddled his plane; he could hear and feel bullets smacking into the armored back of his pilot’s seat, and several smashed through the instrument panel in front of him. Bullets struck his leg and his left hand; his gunner slumped dead in the seat behind him. At eight hundred yards he triggered the electrical release to launch his torpedo. Nothing happened. Since he had been shot through the left hand, he shifted hands and tried to launch the torpedo manually with his right hand, but when he yanked on the manual release cable, it pulled out of the instrument panel. He had done everything he could to launch the torpedo, but he couldn’t tell if it had dropped or not. In any case, there was no more he could do here. He banked sharply left to get out of there as fast as he could.59
It was not fast enough. The Zeros had backed off when Gay had flown inside the envelope of the fleet’s antiair fire, but now they returned, and a twenty-millimeter cannon shell took out his left rudder control. As the plane careened toward the water, Gay tried to hold it level for a crash landing. He hit the water hard but managed to scramble out of the sinking plane before it went down. Inflating his life vest, he covered his head with the seat cushion from the bombardier’s middle seat to avoid being strafed. Peeking out from under it, he could see several Zeros overhead but no American torpedo planes. Though he didn’t know it yet, he was the only survivor from VT-8, and none of them had scored a hit on any of the Japanese ships.60
The rest of the planes from the Hornet never even found the Japanese task force. After flying 250 miles to the west, Ring turned south toward Midway, then east again, but, seeing nothing but empty sea below him, and low on gas, he decided to return to base. Most of the bombers in his squadron turned toward Midway; a handful made it back to the Hornet. The fighters who accompanied them mostly ran out of gas and had to ditch in the water.
Of course, there were still the planes from the Enterprise, and the next attack on the Kido Butai came from Lieutenant Commander Gene Lind say’s VT-6, approaching the Japanese carriers from astern. They, too, attacked without fighter cover. Patchy clouds and poor radio reception killed any hope of coordination with Gray’s Wildcats; Lindsay’s lumbering Devastators suffered nearly as much as Waldron’s, and once again the Americans scored no hits.
By this time Fletcher had also unleashed the air group from the Yorktown, and it was the twelve Devastators of Lieutenant Commander Lance “Lem” Massey’s VT-3 that struck next. The Zeros were ready and waiting, and they pounced on the new arrivals fourteen miles out. But unlike Waldron or Lindsay, Massey had fighter support: six Wildcats of Jimmy Thach’s VF-3. As Ensign Gay watched, bobbing in his life vest in the middle of the Japanese task force, Massey’s twelve torpedo planes pressed home their attack, dropping down to 150 feet to make their torpedo runs while Thach’s fighters provided cover. Thach was angry that Fletcher had sent him off with only six of his twenty-five planes, keeping most of the fighters behind to protect the task force.* This was particularly bothersome because Thach had developed an innovative combat tactic—subsequently dubbed the “Thach weave”—that could be executed only when the American fighters maneuvered in groups of four. Six, Thach had pointed out angrily that morning, was not divisible by four! Still, he did the best he could with his half dozen planes, and in the process he demonstrated that innovative tactics could partially compensate for the Zero’s superior speed and agility—but only partially.61
The Zeros streamed in on the American fighters from behind. At first Thach was surprised that the Japanese would send their fighters after him instead of concentrating on the torpedo bombers. Then he saw that “they . . . were streaming in right past us and into the torpedo planes.” Even though he had only six planes, Thach ordered his small squadron to begin the “weave” pattern they had practiced. The Wildcats opened up their formation, and as the Zeros streamed in from behind, one of the Wildcats in each pair turned inward, toward its wingman, to confront the Zeros nose to nose. It worked; a Zero exploded and went down. But the Zeros had the numbers, and they were savaging the American torpedo planes. Somewhat bitterly, Thach wrote in his after-action report that “six F4F-4 airplanes cannot prevent 20 or 30 Japanese VF from shooting our slow torpedo planes.” Lem Massey’s plane was one of the first to be shot down. “It just exploded,” Thach remembered. “The air was just like a bee hive” as the fighters turned and twisted while the surviving torpedo bombers tried to hold a steady course for the Japanese carriers.62
The commander of VF-3, the fighter squadron on the Yorktown, Lieutenant Commander John S. “Jimmy” Thach, in the cockpit of his F4F-4 Wildcat. (U.S. Navy)
In the midst of the air battle, Thach’s wingman, twenty-one-year-old Robert A. M. Dibb (called “Ram” due to his initials), called out: “There’s a Zero on my tail.” Thach made the inside maneuver of the weave pattern and came up face-to-face with the onrushing Zero. The two planes raced toward each other at full speed. “I was really angry then,” Thach recalled. “I was mad because here’s this poor wing man who’d never been in combat before . . . and a Zero was about to chew him to pieces. I probably should have decided to duck under this Zero, but I lost my temper a little bit, and I decided I’m going to keep my fire going into him and he’s going to pull out.” The two planes closed each other at a combined five hundred miles an hour. At the last possible second the Zero pulled up, and the two planes missed one another by a matter of feet. It was, Thach recalled, like playing chicken while shooting.63
Thach’s fighters claimed several Zeros, but the Zeros claimed even more torpedo planes. Ten of Massey’s fourteen torpedo planes were splashed, and their sacrifice was in vain. Although several managed to launch torpedoes, none of them found a target. Altogether, of the forty-one Devastator torpedo bombers that the Americans launched against the Japanese carriers that day, only four returned, and none scored a hit.64
All this time, the Japanese carriers had been maneuvering wildly to avoid the torpedoes in the water. The
radical turns had slowed the work crews trying to complete the ordnance changeover from explosive bombs to armor-piercing bombs and torpedoes. Clad only in shorts and slippers, the Japanese crewmen had worked furiously to complete the changeover. Instead of taking the time to lower the removed ordnance back to the ship’s magazine, they had laid much of it aside while they armed the bombers with antiship ordnance. Fuel lines snaked across wooden decks; a small gasoline truck drove from plane to plane to top off their tanks. Now the planes for the air strike against the American carriers were at last spotted on their flight decks, fueled and ready to go, their engines already turning over. With the elimination of the American torpedo planes, Nagumo gave the order for his carriers to turn into the wind. Within fifteen minutes—twenty at the most—Nagumo’s strike group would be in the air. The first fighter planes were already rolling down the deck.
It is seldom possible to pick a precise moment when the course of history changes, but this was one such moment. At 10:20 A.M. on June 4, 1942, the Japanese were not only winning the Battle of Midway, they were winning the war. The carriers of the Kito Butai had survived seven separate air attacks without a scratch. Their superior attack planes were armed and ready on the flight deck—victory lay before them. The first fighter plane of the attack force had already lifted off, and others were accelerating toward the bow. Then Thach, looking out his windscreen, saw a glint high up in the sky where the sun caught the edge of a dark blue wingtip. And down they came. “It looked like a beautiful silver waterfall,” Thach recalled, “those dive bombers coming down.”65
On board Nagumo’s flagship, the lookout screamed out a warning: “Hell divers!”66
Like the frustrated Dauntless pilots from the Hornet, the dive-bomber pilots from the Enterprise—two squadrons of thirty planes, all under Lieutenant Commander Wade McClusky—had found only empty ocean when they arrived at the coordinates given to them at the briefing that morning. While Commander Ring flew south with the bombers from Hornet, McClusky decided to go north. The need to maintain radio silence left this crucial decision up to him; because he was out of touch with his superiors, McClusky made his decision based on instinct, as Jack Waldron had done. His decision was fateful. As Nimitz wrote afterward in his battle report, “This was one of the most important decisions of the battle.”67
Boxing the compass in a general search pattern, McClusky spotted a lone Japanese destroyer speeding northward at thirty knots. Though he did not know it, this was the Arashi, which had been dispatched to deal with a pesky American submarine (the Nautilus) that had briefly penetrated the Japanese screen and fired several torpedoes at the Japanese carriers. After forcing the Nautilus to dive and dropping several depth charges to keep it down, the Arashi was now speeding northward to rejoin the fleet. In a flash of insight, McClusky realized its intent, and drawing a mental line northward along its track, he led his thirty dive-bombers in that direction. Sure enough, just past 10:00 A.M., nearly three hours after lifting off from the Enterprise, McClusky found the Kido Butai. Twenty thousand feet below him, intermittently visible through patchy white clouds, was the enemy strike force: a dozen or more battleships, cruisers, and destroyers protecting two large carriers, with other ships filling up the ocean to the horizon and beyond. The two carriers below him were “maneuvering radically” to avoid the torpedoes that the unlucky U.S. torpedo bombers had managed to launch before being shot down. As stunning as that panoramic image was, what was even more astonishing was that there were no Japanese fighters over the strike force. All of the Zeros flying combat patrol over the carrier force had descended to low altitude to deal with the torpedo bombers. Gray’s Wildcats, by then very low on fuel, had also departed. The skies were empty.68
Lieutenant Commander Clarence Wade McClusky, who commanded the dive-bombers from the Enterprise, shown here in a commander’s uniform in a photo taken after the battle. (U.S. Navy)
Doctrine called for the lead squadron in McClusky’s command (Earl Gallagher’s VS-6) to bypass the first target and take on the more distant one, which was Nagumo’s flagship Akagi. But in the excitement of the moment, both squadrons headed for the nearer Kaga. Unmolested by enemy fighters, the Dauntless pilots winged over into steep dives and flew almost straight down—like a “silver waterfall,” in Thach’s words—aiming along the “fore and aft line of the target” at the bright red sun painted prominently on the Kaga’s orange flight deck. McClusky held his dive to eighteen hundred feet before pulling the lever that released his bomb. With the Kaga maneuvering radically, that first bomb hit close alongside, as did the next two, but the fourth detonated among the planes spotted on the Kaga’s crowded flight deck and triggered a series of secondary explosions that turned the big carrier into a holocaust. Within seconds, two more bombs struck the wounded flattop, and within minutes the giant Kaga was a burning wreck.
Though most of his command had followed McClusky in his furious attack on the Kaga, Richard Best, commanding VB-6, had held back when it became evident that both squadrons were going after the same ship. When he was sure that the Kaga was mortally wounded, he led a small group of only five planes to attack the Akagi. It was enough. Best landed his own thousand-pound bomb directly on the Akagi’s flight deck near the forward elevator, and two other bombs hit on or near the ship’s fantail. Fires enveloped Nagumo’s flagship and triggered several secondary explosions. From his vantage point in his circling Wildcat, Thach thought he had never seen “such superb dive bombing. It looked like almost every bomb hit.” The flames from the Akagi reached higher into the sky than the carrier was long, and at 880 feet, the Akagi was the longest carrier in the Japanese fleet.69
By coincidence, at almost the same moment that McClusky’s pilots winged over to attack the Kaga and Akagi, the dive-bombers of Lieutenant Commander Max Leslie’s VB-3 from Yorktown also arrived over the Kido Butai. Fletcher had delayed the takeoff of his strike force by an hour and a half, not only so that he could recover his scout planes but also to ensure that all the carriers of the Kido Butai had been located. Leslie’s planes had flown a more direct route to the target, however, and therefore arrived over the Kido Butai only seconds after McClusky. Leslie himself could not deliver a bomb onto the inviting target he saw spread out below him, for his bomb had prematurely jettisoned en route when he had armed his electronic release trigger. The same thing had happened to three other planes of his command before Leslie had broken radio silence briefly to order his pilots to forget the electronic release and rely on the manual release. Though Leslie had lost his bomb, he was nevertheless determined to lead the attack. He picked out what he thought was the Japanese flag-ship but which was, in fact, her sister ship, the Soryu. Leslie noted that “its flight deck was covered with planes spotted aft.” Those planes were warming up and ready to go, but they would never take off. Leslie circled the target once to give Lem Massey’s torpedo bombers a chance to attack, but hearing Massey’s frantic report that he was being overwhelmed by Zeros, he waited no longer. At 10:22, at virtually the same moment that McClusky’s pilots began their dive on the Kaga, Leslie pushed his stick forward, putting his Dauntless into a steep dive.70
Though Leslie himself could only strafe the big flattop (at least until his guns jammed), the next plane, piloted by Lieutenant Paul “Lefty” Holm-berg, landed its thousand-pound bomb square in the middle of the fully armed and refueled planes on the Soryu’s flight deck. Instantly the whole after part of the Japanese carrier was turned into a “flaming inferno.” A Zero fighter, accelerating toward the bow for takeoff, was blown over the side by the force of the explosion. One by one, the other pilots of VB-3 landed their bombs on the flight deck or scored near misses that shook the giant carrier from stem to stern. Within minutes, the Soryu, like the Kaga and the Akagi, was transformed from a terrible weapon of war into a burning wreck. It was so thoroughly shattered that the rest of Leslie’s bombers shifted their target to what they thought was a light carrier acting as plane guard astern of the Soryu but which was actuall
y a destroyer. On the Japanese carrier, Captain Ryusaku Yanagimoto continued to call out encouragement to his men, but he refused to leave the bridge, and eventually he went down with his ship, softly singing the Japanese national anthem.71
A dive-bomber’s-eye view of the Japanese carrier Soryu taken by one of the planes of Max Leslie’s VB-3 from Yorktown just prior to the attack, around 10:20A.M. The Soryu has initiated a radical turn to starboard in the hope of throwing off the attacking dive-bombers. Note the rising sun painted on the forward part of the flight deck. (U.S. Navy)
In less time than it takes to read about it, three of Nagumo’s four carriers were utterly destroyed. The damage control teams never had a chance. A carrier might survive three, four, or even five bomb hits, but the first of the American bombs had set off dozens of secondary explosions as the bombs and torpedoes on the Japanese planes spotted on the deck cooked off one by one. One deck below, where ordnance had been hastily laid aside on the hangar decks during the rearming process, the flames found more fuel, and soon the entire hangar area was ablaze. Within minutes it was clear that all three carriers were lost. Yanagimoto was not the only commander who considered going down with his ship. Nagumo himself felt the sting of shame and failure. But his staff convinced him that he had duties yet to fulfill, and with some reluctance he allowed himself to be transferred to the cruiser Nagara. The Kido Butai, which had ruled the western Pacific for six months, had been reduced in five minutes to a single carrier.72
That single carrier, however, still posed a very real threat. Though Nagumo’s plan for a coordinated strike by all four carriers had been interrupted in the most spectacular way by the onslaught of the American dive-bombers, some twenty-four planes (eighteen bombers and six fighters) lifted off Hiryu without interference, and by 11:00 they were winging their way toward the American carriers, though it is worth noting that this was a less potent strike force than the thirty-six planes Nagumo could have launched at 8:30, when he first heard that an American carrier was in the vicinity.
Decision at Sea Page 27