Decision at Sea

by Symonds, Craig L.

  Once again, American radar proved invaluable. While the Japanese carrier crews learned of the American dive-bombing attack only as it was happening, the men on the Yorktown—the target of the Hiryu’s air strike—learned of the approaching enemy bombers well in advance thanks to the Yorktown’s CXAM radar. A few minutes before noon, radio electrician V. M. Bennett reported “thirty to forty bogeys” approaching, forty-six miles out on bearing two four zero. This advance warning gave Captain Elliott Buckmaster the opportunity to prepare. Refueling was halted at once, the auxiliary aviation fuel tank was dumped unceremoniously over the side, the hoses were purged, and all watertight doors were locked down and secured. In addition, the Yorktown launched a dozen Wildcat fighters, and Lieutenant Commander Oscar Pederson, acting as fighter director, vectored them out toward the incoming bombers.73

  The Yorktown under attack by planes from the Hiryu. A bomb has just exploded on the Yorktown’s flight deck, while to the right a Japanese bomber crashes into the sea. The black clouds filling the sky are the result of antiaircraft fire from the Yorktown’s escorts. (U.S. Navy)

  The American Wildcats intercepted the incoming enemy planes twenty miles out. Their counterattack immediately broke up the attack formation, as the Japanese bombers were forced to maneuver individually. An air battle is fast-paced and confusing; it is virtually impossible to follow the action as individual planes roil about the sky, each seeking an advantage. As one observer remarked, the battle seemed to “roll” toward the task force.74 As fighter director, Pederson sought to coordinate the action from the bridge of the Yorktown using the carrier’s radar and the radio. He had to track two plots simultaneously: a search plot to keep track of incoming bogeys, and a fighter director board to keep track of his own air assets. He addressed the fighters individually with the Yorktown’s call sign, Scarlett. In the radio chatter, Pederson’s directions mixed with the pilots’ responses:

  “All Scarlett planes keep a sharp lookout. . . .”

  “Twenty bandits approaching 305. Thirty miles, large group of bandits.”

  “All Scarlett planes, bandits eight miles 255.”

  “This is Scarlett 19. Formation seems to be breaking up.”

  “O.K. Break ’em up.”

  “Tally ho!”75

  One problem that manifested itself very soon was the relatively small size of the magazines on the American fighters. The F4F-4 version of the Wildcat carried six guns in its wings, but each gun had only 240 rounds of ammunition. In a frenzied dogfight, that could be used up very quickly. Since Pedersen was using the radio to direct the attack, pilots signaled ammunition and fuel problems by hand signals. “We’d fly by the bridge and shake our fist at them, that meant I’m low or out of ammunition,” Thach recalled. “If you were low on gas, you could stick your hand out of the cockpit and rake it along the gas tank.”76 The Yorktown’s twelve Wildcats thinned out the number of approaching bombers, splashing several of them as well as bagging a few of the fighters, but it was evident almost at once that the Yorktown needed help from Spruance’s carriers, and Pederson called for it:

  “Red from Scarlett. We need some VFs.”

  “Scarlett from Red, repeat.”

  “Red from Scarlett, we need relief for our combat patrols, getting low on ammunition.”

  “Scarlett from Red, We are sending the Blue patrol to assist. . . . Blue patrol being launched now.”

  The CXAM radar also allowed Pederson to vector specific planes out to investigate specific radar contacts:

  “Scarlett 19, investigate plane bearing 235. . . . Distance ten to twelve miles, altitude low. Go get ’em.”

  “O.K. Got him. Have bogey in sight. . . .”

  The Wildcats splashed seven bombers before the attackers even came within anti-aircraft range of the task force. Then the cruisers and destroyers opened fire. Once the bombers entered the envelope of the antiair fire from the task force, the Wildcats peeled off, and, nearly out of gas as well as ammunition, they now needed a place to land. The Yorktown could not recover airplanes, for it was maneuvering to avoid bombs and torpedoes. Pederson had to advise his pilots to head for Spruance’s carriers over the northern horizon; if they could not make it that far, they would have to ditch in the water. Even worse, Max Leslie’s dive-bombers, returning from the strike on the Soryu, had to circle overhead, unable to land, and eventually they, too, had to seek the carriers of Task Force 16 or land in the water.77

  Fierce antiair fire splashed three more Japanese bombers as they closed on the task force, but five planes got through and dropped their bombs. Two missed, but the next three all found their target. The first, tumbling in flight, hit the Yorktown “just abaft No. 2 elevator on the starboard side.” It smashed through the flight deck and exploded on the hangar deck, where three planes caught fire, one of which was armed with a thousand-pound bomb. Quick action by the hangar deck officer triggered the sprinklers, and the fire was contained. The second bomb passed through both the flight deck and the hangar deck and exploded on level three, among the engine uptakes from the boilers. The Yorktown’s speed immediately dropped to six knots, and twenty minutes later, at 12:40P.M., the Yorktown was dead in the water. The third bomb also did damage, but it was the loss of the engines that was critical.78

  The damage control crews immediately got to work. There was no sense of panic; the damage control parties simply went to work with a calm professionalism. The fifteen minutes of warning provided by the radar had made a world of difference. Fires were quickly contained, the holes in the deck were patched, and the boiler technicians worked to repair the uptakes on three of the boilers. Within ninety minutes the boilers were back on line, and ten minutes after that the engine room reported that the Yorktown could make twenty knots, enough to resume air operations.79

  The Yorktown’s damage control team begins patching a hole in the big carrier’s flight deck. Seventy minutes after being struck by three bombs, the Yorktown was again operational, launching and recovering aircraft. (U.S. Navy)

  The Yorktown, it seemed, had survived yet again. Then, just ten minutes later, the Yorktown’s radar reported another set of bogeys inbound. This time it was ten torpedo planes and more fighters. Again the Yorktown’s fighters were scrambled, though since the Yorktown was making only about sixteen knots, several of the planes struggled to get into the air. Some were still in the process of taking off when the torpedo bombers began their attack run. A twenty-two-year-old ensign with the unlikely name of Milton Tootle IV had barely cleared the bow in his takeoff and did not even have time to manipulate the hand crank to wind up his landing gear when he wheeled toward an attacking torpedo plane and shot it down with one long burst. When he pulled up, he was struck by the Yorktown’s own antiair fire and crashed into the sea. His whole flight lasted about sixty seconds, but he got his bogey.80

  The leader of the Japanese torpedo planes was Lieutenant Joichi Tomonaga. Even before he left the Hiryu, he knew that he would not be coming back. The left wing fuel tank on his aircraft had been punctured during the Midway raid, and as a result, he had only enough gas for a oneway trip. He approached the Yorktown very low, almost at wave-top height. But Jimmy Thach spotted him and made a side approach. Thach fired several quick bursts, and Tomonaga’s plane caught fire. Thach could see the ribs of the plane showing through the flames, and yet somehow Tomonaga kept his plane on course. “That devil still stayed up in the air,” Thach later recalled in amazement, “until he dropped his torpedo.” Tomonaga crashed into the sea, but his torpedo ran straight and true and struck the Yorktown flush on its port side.81

  “It was a real WHACK,” Ensign John “Jack” Crawford recalled. “You could feel it all through the ship. . . . I had the impression that the ship’s hull buckled slightly.”82 Then, just moments later, another torpedo struck the carrier, also on the port side near frame 75. The lights blinked and went out as the ship lost power. Once again the Yorktown was dead in the water. Commander Clarence E. Aldrich, the damage control officer, rep
orted that without power, none of the damage control equipment was working. The big flattop began to list over to port and continued to list until by 3:00 it reached twenty-six degrees. Men on the flight deck could barely keep their feet. Unable to make repairs and fearing that “the ship would capsize in a few minutes,” Buckmaster ordered the crew to abandon ship.83

  While the Hiryu’s bombers sought to dispatch the Yorktown, search planes from Spruance’s Task Force 16 were looking for the Hiryu. At nearly the same moment that Tomonaga’s torpedo slammed into the Yorktown, an American lieutenant with the patriotic name of Samuel Adams reported sighting one carrier, two battleships, and three cruisers heading due north, and he gave the coordinates. Immediately the Enterprise launched twenty-four bombers, half with thousand-pound bombs, half with five-hundred-pound bombs, but with no fighter escort since the fighters had their hands full over the Yorktown.

  As these planes sped toward the Hiryu, the commander of that vessel, fifty-year-old Rear Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi, was planning a third attack on the Americans. Yamaguchi, who had completed two years of graduate study at Princeton just before the war, was by nature the most aggressive of the Japanese carrier commanders (he was the one who had urged Nagumo to make an immediate strike at 8:30 that morning), and despite the virtual destruction of three-fourths of the Japanese carrier force, he remained stubbornly optimistic. His bomber pilots reported that they had left one carrier dead in the water and on fire, and soon afterward his torpedo bombers reported that they had delivered a mortal blow to an apparently undamaged carrier that was still launching aircraft. Yamaguchi quite naturally assumed that his planes had struck and destroyed two different American carriers. By his reckoning, each side now had one carrier left, and he hoped that one more effective strike against that lone American carrier could still secure a victory for the Kido Butai. Because he had only fifteen planes left (five bombers, four torpedo planes, and six fighters), Yamaguchi planned to wait for dusk, both to give his pilots a much-needed rest and to catch the Americans by surprise. He would launch his third strike at 6:00.84

  Instead, the American dive-bombers from the Enterprise arrived over the Hiryu at 5:00. The Hiryu at once began twisting and turning to throw off the attackers, and the first several American bombs fell harmlessly into the sea. But there were too many bombers, and the most daring of the American pilots held their dives until they were only a few hundred feet above the target before releasing their bombs. The first bomb that struck the Hiryu blew the forward elevator back against the ship’s island and opened a huge crater in the flight deck. The almost giddy mood of the American pilots was evident in the recorded message traffic on the open radio net:

  “That scared the hell out of me. I thought we weren’t going to pull out.”

  “Your bomb really hit them on the fantail. Boy that’s swell.”

  “Look at that Son-of-a-Bitch burn!”

  “Hit the Son-of-a-Bitch again!”

  “Those Japs are easy as shooting ducks in a rainbarrel.”

  “Gee, I wish I had just one more bomb.”

  “Tojo, you son-of-a-bitch, send out the rest and we’ll get those too.”85

  Hit by four bombs, and enduring several secondary explosions, the Hiryu was a wreck. After heroic but hopeless damage control efforts, Yamaguchi, his hopes now utterly shattered, ordered abandon ship at 2:30 in the morning. Twenty minutes later, Yamamoto officially canceled the Midway operation.*

  It was not quite over. Throughout the night there would be hundreds of individual stories of survival as sailors and airmen in the water tried to hang on while awaiting rescue, and there would be hundreds of other stories that would never be told, by those who were never found. There would be more attacks on disparate elements of the far-flung Japanese force as it retreated. Yet another American air strike sank one heavy cruiser and severely damaged another. But all that was epilogue. The outcome of the battle had been decided in the five minutes between 10:20 and 10:25 on the morning of June 4, when dive-bombers from the Enterprise and Yorktown screamed down out of the sun, at the precise moment when they would have maximum impact, to lay their bombs on the decks of three Japanese carriers. The Soryu and the Kaga went down that same evening. The Akagi stubbornly remained afloat and was scuttled by the Japanese at dawn the next day to prevent the Americans from claiming it as a prize. The Hiryu went down four hours later, its shattered wreck sent to the bottom by “friendly” torpedoes.

  The Japanese carrier Hiryu dead in the water and burning on June 5. This photo, taken by a Japanese scout plane sent by Yamamoto to assay the damage to the Hiryu, shows the gaping hole in the Hiryu’s bow. (U.S. Navy)

  As for the Yorktown, Captain Buckmaster toured the badly listing ship from the catwalk to the hangar deck to ensure that there were no more crewmen on board. He later wrote in his report that “by this time, the port side of the Hangar Deck was in the water.” He had no thought of going down with his ship; to him such traditions were melodramatic nonsense. After one last look, he went over the stern, rappelling down a rope line to a small boat, which took him to the destroyer Hammann and then to the cruiser Astoria, where Fletcher was now flying his flag.86

  But the Yorktown didn’t roll over. Instead, it stabilized at twenty-six degrees, and Fletcher and Buckmaster decided to put a salvage team on board to see if it could still be saved. At first light (about when the Japanese were scuttling the Akagi) Buckmaster led a team of volunteers on board, and they worked all morning to stabilize the big ship. They put out the worst of the fires, and to compensate for the list to port, they dumped the charred planes over the side and cut away a five-inch gun mount from the port side, which disappointingly brought the ship back only to a twenty-four-degree list.

  Then at 3:30 the salvage workers on board saw the wakes of four torpedoes headed directly for the Yorktown. There was nothing anyone could do; without power, the Yorktown was quite literally a sitting duck. The men on the destroyer Hammann alongside got ready to attack the submarine— for it could only be a submarine—by removing the safety forks from the depth charge racks. But before the Hammann could even get under way, a torpedo virtually cut her in half, and she immediately began to sink. Two other torpedoes hit the Yorktown amidships, this time on her starboard side. As the Hammann began to settle, her armed depth charges began to go off, concussing many of the men of her own crew who had abandoned ship and were struggling in the water. The force of the underwater explosions was so great that one survivor’s pocket watch was flattened to “the thickness of a silver dollar.”87

  The Yorktown lists at 28 degrees as a salvage team attempts to save it. Note the ropes off the side used by the crew to abandon ship. The destroyer at right is USS Balch. (U.S. Navy)

  Even then, the Yorktown refused to sink. Indeed, because the torpedoes had struck her starboard side, the damage reduced the list to seventeen degrees, though the ship was now very heavy in the water and the structural damage was massive. Sections of the flight deck crashed down through to the hangar deck as the ship began to break apart. The Yorktown stayed afloat through the night, but there seemed little chance now that it could be saved. Having used the last of its nine lives, it finally went down just before 5:00 A.M. on June 7.88

  That dawn broke on a new world. History itself had tipped on the fulcrum of the Battle of Midway. The destruction of the Kido Butai ended the six-month period of Japanese domination in the western Pacific. The war would go on for another three years and two months as U.S. forces fought their way from Guadalcanal to the Philippines and from Tarawa to Iwo Jima and Okinawa. But in all of these engagements, it was American forces that were on the offensive. The period of Japanese expansion—of Japanese offensives—was over. As Mitsuo Fuchida stated after the war, “The catastrophe of Midway definitely marked the turning of the tide in the Pacific War, and thenceforward that tide bore Japan inexorably on toward final capitulation.” But Midway did more than that. As former U.S. defense secretary James Schlesinger declared at a 2003 Midway Ni
ght dinner: “It was far more than the turning of the tide in the Pacific War. In a strategic sense, Midway represents one of the great turning points of world history.” Victory at Midway enabled the United States and its allies to maintain at least the pretense of a Europe First strategy in the Second World War. It allowed the United States to send much-needed support to the British in North Africa, to commit more forces to the Battle of the Atlantic, and to increase supplies to the Soviet Red Army, which was carrying the brunt of the fight against Hitler’s armed legions in Europe. Without the victory at Midway, it is at least conceivable that public opinion would have forced President Roosevelt to commit some of those assets to the Pacific instead. Secretary of State Henry Stimson noted that success at Midway meant that “we could reverse our rush of reinforcements to the West Coast and send back the forces that we had diverted from BOLERO [a projected early invasion of Europe].” Midway provided the sea change that allowed the allies to carry the war forward to victory not just in the Pacific but around the world.89

  Midway was both the first step toward American victory in the Pacific War and a crucial element of Allied victory in World War II. But as Wellington said of Waterloo, it was a very near-run thing, for it came at a time when the United States did not yet have the matériel superiority that would eventually win the war, forcing Nimitz, Fletcher, and Spruance to rely instead on better intelligence, bold decision making, and more than a little luck. Nor did the American counteroffensive against Japan begin immediately after Midway. Before that could happen, American industry had to mass-produce the weapons of war that made possible both the Central Pacific Drive and eventually the landings in northern France on D-Day.