TONY SCHNEIDER’S GAS WAS almost gone … Bill Pittman’s tank was getting low … and nearly everyone’s nerves were on edge, but Wade McClusky flew stubbornly on. He was sure the Japanese were up this way, even though he saw nothing so far. Now it was 9:55, and the Enterprise’s, dive bombers were nearing the northern end of their search pattern. If they found nothing within the next five minutes, McClusky would have to lead them back east—or they would never get home at all.
Suddenly, far below, he spied a lone warship going full speed toward the northeast. Anything kicking up that much wake must be on urgent business. He decided she might be some kind of liaison vessel between the occupation group and Nagumo’s Striking Force. He altered his course to that of the ship; the rest of the dive bombers followed.
Actually, the ship was no courier; she was the destroyer Arashi, part of Nagumo’s screen. Detached to deal with the American submarine, she had dropped a few depth charges and was now trying to catch up with the fleet. But if McClusky’s reasoning was a little off, his hunch was 100% right—her course would take him straight to the carriers.
At 10:05, Ensign Pittman—flying wing with one eye on his gas gauge—saw the skipper motion ahead. There, about 35 miles away and a little to port, he spotted the first wakes. Flying farther to the rear, Lieutenant Bill Roberts saw them too—at first just some “curved white slashes on a blue carpet,” then suddenly ships everywhere—he never saw so many at the same time in his life.
For Ensign Schneider, they were an especially welcome sight. He was just about out of gas, and he assumed they were friendly. Certainly it seemed logical: the Enterprise’s planes had been in the air three hours now; they were flying east; unable to find the enemy, Commander McClusky must be bringing them home.
At this point his engine gave a final gasp and quit. Starting a long glide down toward the fleet below, he was surprised to see a battleship there. The U.S. didn’t have any around. Tony Schneider needed no more hints. He veered sharply south, now hoping to land as far away from these ships as possible.
Ensign John McCarthy was another who first thought the “old man” had brought them all back to the Enterprise. Now his rear-seat man E. E. Howell asked tentatively, “Do you think we’re home?”
McCarthy took a closer look—the squirming wakes, the pagoda masts, the long yellow flight decks. “No,” he told Howell, “that’s not home.”
Wade McClusky could see them pretty well now. They seemed to be in a sort of big circle—the four carriers rather loosely spaced in the center. Two of them were fairly close … another to the east … the fourth, far off on the northern horizon. His binoculars were practically glued to his eyes, but they didn’t explain what impressed him the most: nobody was shooting at him. No fighters; no antiaircraft. Yet most of the ships were frantically turning. Too far down to see, but they must be dodging some torpedo attack going on below. Meanwhile the sky up here was empty, the target wide open.
Not a moment to lose. McClusky now broke radio silence, reporting his contact to the Enterprise and assigning targets to his two squadrons. Earl Gallaher’s Scouting 6 was flying right up with him; Dick Best’s Bombing 6 was a little below and behind.
Approaching from the southwest, McClusky picked the first two carriers in his line of advance. The nearer of these—the one on the left—he gave to Gallaher and himself. The other —farther off to the right—he gave to Dick Best.
Somehow Best never got the word. As the trailing squadron in the formation, he assumed that his group would take the nearer target—the usual practice. In fact, after radio silence was broken he opened up saying he planned to do this. But now it was McClusky’s turn not to get a radio message. The two squadrons roared on toward the attack point—both planning to hit the same carrier.
Best was almost ready now. He carefully strung out the planes in his own division, checked the position of the rest of his squadron. All were in place—a division on either side of him. He opened his flaps, about to push over and lead the way down.
Then without warning a series of blurs streaked down from above. McClusky and Scouting 6 were diving by him. To Best, they were taking his target—but there was nothing he could do about it. He closed his flaps, signaled Bombing 6 to close up again—they’d have to go on to the next carrier, farther to the east.
Dick Best wasn’t the only pilot surprised by McClusky’s dive. The skippers own wing man, Ensign Bill Pittman, was equally taken aback. Pittman had the squadron’s camera, and since he was to take pictures, he assumed that McClusky would be the last to dive, allowing a better chance to photograph the bombing.
Not at all. McClusky wasn’t about to follow anybody else down. At 10:22 he suddenly pushed over, leaving Pittman too astonished to do anything for a moment. As he hesitated, McClusky’s other wing man, Dick Jaccard, took Pittman’s place and also dived. But Jaccard must have been a little nervous himself. Instead of opening his diving flaps, he grabbed the wrong handle and let down his wheels.
Next, Pittman pushed over too. He remembered to switch on his camera, but that was all. He took pictures of nothing but sky and horizon.
Now Scouting 6 pushed over, Earl Gallaher leading the way. Then, unexpectedly, the second and third divisions of Bombing 6 too. Some of Best’s pilots didn’t see that he had moved on to the next carrier; they just dived where originally planned. Others followed Lieutenant Joe Penland, leader of the second division. He wasn’t sure of what Best wanted; he saw a lot of near-misses on the carrier below; so he used his discretion and joined McClusky. In all, some 25 dive bombers were hurtling down.
For incredible seconds the carrier seemed oblivious of them. Earlier she had been turning, but now she was heading into the wind getting ready to launch. Wade McClusky was half-way down before anybody saw him. Then she fired a few antiaircraft bursts, but that was all.
At 1,800 feet he reached for the handle on his left, pulled the bomb release, and cleared out as fast as he could. One after another the 25 planes did the same, as the whole world seemed to erupt beneath them. A ball of fire, flying debris, a brief glimpse of a Zero blown to bits—each pilot came away with his own impression, the way it was when he dropped his particular bomb. By the time the next man reached the same point, another explosion had rearranged the scene completely. Nobody saw the whole thing; no two men even saw it the same way.
Wade McClusky, leading the group, had a picture of a clean hardwood deck, an untouched island on the starboard side, some planes tuning up toward the stern. Earl Gallaher, coming in fourth, saw fountains of water from two near-misses, the blinding flash of his own bomb landing among the parked planes. Dusty Kleiss, seventh to dive, found the after end of the ship a sea of flames, the painted red circle up forward still untouched—then his own bomb changed that. And so it went until Ensign George Goldsmith, the 25th and last man down, had his turn too. By now the carrier was a blazing wreck, swinging hard to the right in a desperate effort to ward off further blows. Goldsmith kept her in his sights.
In the rear seat, Radioman James Patterson called off the altitude as they plunged down. During dive bombing practice they normally released at about 2,200 feet. This time 2,000 spun past the altimeter, and they were still going straight down. Then 1,500 and finally Goldsmith pulled the release. Patterson watched the results with amazement: “He had been the world’s worst dive bomber pilot during the practice hops I’d flown with him previously, but that day Ensign Goldsmith earned every dime invested in him as he put our bomb right through the flight deck, just aft of amidships.”
At 15,000 feet Dick Best turned right and headed for the next carrier farther east. Having missed McClusky’s instructions, he felt the skipper had “pre-empted” his target, but far worse than that, most of Bombing 6 had joined the others. He only had the five planes of his own division left to make his attack. Very well, they would have to do.
“Don’t let this carrier escape,” he called over his radio as they approached the new target. Still farther east, he could see a third flattop, and well north of that a fourth one too. He had a fleeting impression that the third carrier was just coming under attack, but at the moment he was concentrating all his attention on the second one below.
Now they were right over her. Incredibly, McClusky’s attack—well within sight—hadn’t stirred her up at all. There was no antiaircraft, and she too was holding course, heading into the wind, getting ready to launch. Best again strung out his other planes, opened his flaps, and this time he really dived… .
He could hardly believe it. For months he had pictured this moment, and here it was at last—the yellow flight deck, the big red circle, everything just the way he imagined. He always knew that this was a real war, that out there somewhere was a real enemy, that he would be sent on real missions to hunt and be hunted. Even so, it never seemed truly real until now—this moment—when he was actually doing it.
He coolly examined the Japanese flight deck through his sights, aiming the three-power telescope at a point just ahead of the bridge and in the center of the ship. At 3,000 feet a plane passed across the lens—it was a fighter taking off. Good: it still looked like business as usual down there.
Behind him streaked his other four planes, and it was not an easy job. All the pilots agreed that no one dived more suddenly or more steeply than Dick Best. But on they came, wondering whether the skipper would ever pull out. Apparently deciding that he never would, one of the planes released too soon, but the others hung on. If he could do it, they could. Best himself kept diving until he was good and ready; then at the last second he pulled his bomb release handle.
But even now he wasn’t leaving. He hadn’t trained all these years to miss the sight of his first bomb hit. He pulled back sharply, literally laid his plane on its side and tail, and sat there watching from his improvised front-row seat.
His bomb hit squarely abreast of the bridge. Two others seemed to land back toward the fantail. All three blew the carrier’s planes into a blazing heap; their gas tanks began going off like a string of firecrackers.
It was a fantastic sight. Yet here again no two men saw it quite the same way. In the excitement of the moment the eye played all kinds of tricks, even with respect to the simplest details. Dick Best saw “very clearly and unmistakably” that the carrier’s island was on the starboard side; his extremely capable No. 5 man, Bill Roberts, was equally sure it was to port.
Finally pulling away, Best was surprised to see a torpedo plane formation heading in on an opposite course. They were apparently some “tail-end Charlies” from the earlier TBD attack. Then he caught sight of that third carrier, farther to the east, that he had noticed just before diving. It was now taking a dreadful beating—any number of bomb bursts flaring through a wall of smoke. Somebody was doing a thorough job of gutting it.
COMMANDER Max Leslie banged on the side of his SBD, attracting the attention of Bill Gallagher in the rear seat. Gallagher looked down to where the skipper was pointing, and 15,000 feet below he spotted an aircraft carrier. The Yorktown’s planes had now been approaching the Japanese fleet for 15 minutes, but this was Gallagher’s first glimpse of the actual target Leslie had picked out for Bombing 3. She was the most easterly of three carriers he could see in the area.
Nothing ever looked bigger, especially the huge red circle painted on the deck up front. Until this moment Gallagher had been sitting facing forward—an informal arrangement the skipper often tolerated—but now he swung around to handle his gun.
Leslie was still trying to get Lem Massey on the radio to coordinate the attack. But he could no longer hear Torpedo 3 at all. There was just static and silence.
At 10:23 Gallagher, keeping an eye on the carrier, signaled that she was starting to launch planes. This was bad news, for until now the upper sky had been free of fighters. Leslie tried once again to reach Massey—still only silence. There was no more time to lose; he must attack alone.
It was just 10:25 when he patted his head—the standard signal for “follow me“—and pushed over from 14,500 feet. He picked up the target right away, and as he roared down there was no doubt in his mind: this was the best dive he had ever made. It seemed more ironic than ever that he had already dropped his bomb on the way out.
Well, he still had his guns. At 10,000 feet he opened fire with his fixed mount, raking the carrier’s bridge. Then at 4,000 feet his guns jammed. With his bomb already gone, he now had nothing at all to throw at the enemy. He kept diving anyhow.
Commander Max Leslie took his men down all the way. Only when completely satisfied that he could do no more, did he pull out and leave the squadron to deliver their bombs.
Lieutenant Lefty Holmberg, flying No. 2, now took over. Studying the carrier, he decided the red circle painted on her flight deck made a good aiming point, and he set his sights on it.
She was still holding course, but he began to see little lights sparkling around the periphery of her flight deck. They reminded him of candles on a birthday cake back home. Then shrapnel began rattling off his plane. No doubt about it: they were shooting at him and getting close.
At 2,500 feet he pressed the electrical bomb release button, then pulled the hand release just to make sure. As he flattened out from his dive, his rear-seat man G. A. LaPlant practically blew his earphones off, yelling with joy, shouting that it was a hit, urging him to see for himself. Holmberg made a shallow turn to the left, and did take a look. A huge column of orange, black and dirty gray smoke was billowing up from the center of the ship.
One after another, the members of Bombing 3 pushed over, dived, released, pulled out. And one after another they caught their own little vignettes of the scene below. So alike yet so different, depending on the exact instant when each man’s eye stopped the action long enough to record his picture.
For Joseph Godfrey, rear-seat man in No. 5 plane, there was the Zero that belatedly turned up just as the squadron pushed over: “So close I felt I could have spit in the pilot’s eye.” For Lieutenant Dave Shumway there was the fighter plane blown over the carrier’s side by the blast from Holmberg’s bomb. For Ensign Charles Lane it was the pullout after the dive—yanking on the stick with both hands and thinking he would never make it. For Ensign Philip Cobb there were the chunks of flight deck and planes thrown into the air. If he ever got back to the Yorktown, he knew this was one Japanese ship he wouldn’t have to worry about for the rest of the battle.
The last four men to dive thought so too. The carrier was now a mass of flames, and it seemed a waste to drop any more bombs on her. So Ensigns Elder and Cooner picked out a nearby “cruiser” (actually a destroyer), while Lieutenant Wiseman and Ensign Butler went after a battleship. All had the satisfaction of seeing smoke and flames around the stern of their new targets.
Max Leslie was clearing out now. Going to the squadron rendezvous just over to the southeast, he circled for five or ten minutes waiting for other planes to show up. Only Ensign Alden Hanson appeared; the rest were probably going home on their own. But while he waited, Leslie watched with satisfaction as explosions continued to rock the carrier attacked by Bombing 8. Then he saw other huge explosions erupting from two ships some 10-12 miles to the west. They looked like carriers too and somebody was thoroughly wrecking them.
The dive bomber pilots from the Enterprise and the Yorktown would long argue who struck the first blow at Midway. Coming in from different directions—unaware that anyone else was there—each group told very much the same story. Each found Nagumo’s carriers untouched. Each attacked in the same six-minute span. Pulling out, each suddenly noticed the other at work. And, it might be added, there were enough unprovable claims to remove any fears that the debate might end. No one would ever really know.
TAKAYOSHI MORINAOA could see it coming. The first three bombs were near-misses just off the Kaga’s port bow, but there was no doubt about this fourth one. It was heading right at the flight deck … in fact, right at him.
He threw himself down on the deck, closed his eyes, held his hands over his ears. It landed with a splintering crash by the after elevator. Raising his head, Morinaga looked around: only three of the large group standing with him were still alive.
Captain Jisaku Okada probably never even knew about it At almost the same instant he was killed by another bomb landing just forward of the bridge. It happened to hit a fuel cart, temporarily parked there to service the planes back from Midway. The whole thing exploded in a ball of fire, drenching the bridge with flaming gasoline. Nobody up there escaped.
Standing a little aft in the air command post, Commander Amagai ducked the torrent of fire. He didn’t know about the fuel cart and assumed the whole inferno came from an “awful new kind of Yankee bomb.”
More hits were coming. As Petty Officer Yokochi tried to reach his plane; one blast stunned him, then another hurled him over the side of the ship like a ball. He came to seconds later, bobbing about in the water.
Commander Yamasaki, the Koga’s chief maintenance officer, wasn’t so lucky. As he raced for cover across, the flight deck, a bomb seemed to land right on top of him. He simply disappeared in the flash—not a trace of him left. Watching from the air command post, Commander Amagai had a curiously philosophical reaction: “Those who vanish like the dew will surely be quite happy.”
There was such an element of fate about it all, Amagai no longer felt frightened. With resignation he now looked unconcernedly at the falling bombs, even thought he could distinguish colors painted on them.
To some it seemed forever, but actually it was all over in a couple of minutes. As the last of those dark blue planes pulled out, the Kaga had been squarely hit by at least four bombs, and probably more, for in the chaos of exploding planes and ammunition nobody could really make a careful count.
On the Akagi Teiichi Makishima ground away with his movie camera. As the only newsreel man brought along, he had the run of the flagship, and now he was out on the air command post catching every dreadful detail of the Koga’s agony. The censors would have something to say about it later, but at the moment he was taking everything.
At first he thought the Kaga might somehow survive. The towering columns of water from those early near-misses looked hopeful. But then came the terrible moment when the whole front of her bridge turned yellow with flame, and he found himself muttering aloud, “She is beaten at last.”
It was at this dramatic point that he ran out of film. Ducking into the chart room, he spent the next two or three minutes frantically threading a new cartridge. Then back on deck just in time to hear the Akagi’s own lookout scream, “Dive bombers!”
Incredibly, they were all caught by surprise. Admiral Kusaka was watching the Akagi’s first fighter take off for the coming attack on the U.S. fleet—that was still his chief concern. Captain Aoki was concentrating on the last of the American torpedo planes—a few were still hovering about. On the battleship Kirishima, some 5,000 yards away, they even saw the planes above the Akagi. The executive officer grabbed the radiophone, but by the time he got through it was too late.
Teiichi Makishima gamely swung his camera on the planes he saw hurtling down. He could make out three of them, getting bigger every second. Then he had enough—he was a landlubber cameraman, not a sailor—and he hit the deck.
Commander Fuchida watched a little longer. Suddenly he saw some black objects fall from the bombers’ wings. Then he too had enough and scrambled behind a protective mattress.
A blinding flash—the whole ship shuddered—as a bomb ripped through the radio aerial and exploded only five yards off the port side forward. A mighty column of filthy black water rose twice as high as the bridge, cascaded down on the officers huddled there. For a brief, terrifying second Nagumo’s navigation officer, Commander Sasabe, gazed at this water column and thought he saw his mother’s face.
Right afterward—some say just before—a second bomb landed on the flight deck opposite the bridge. This time the shock wasn’t so bad—but only because it cut so easily through the elevator amid ships and exploded on the hangar deck below. There it set everything off—planes, gas tanks, bombs, torpedoes. Flames gushed up, spreading to the planes spotted on the flight deck.
Then a third bomb smashed the very stern of the ship, hurling the planes parked there into a jumbled heap. Worse, it jammed the ship’s rudder so she could no longer steer.
That was all. Seconds later the planes were gone, and for a brief moment, anyhow, there was no sound but the crackling flames. Looking down at the blazing wreckage, Mitsuo Fuchida began to cry.
At about the same time Teiichi Makishima was taking his movies, Commander Hisashi Ohara stood on the navigation bridge of the Soryu, also watching the Kaga under attack. Bombs were hitting her, and he could see the fires breaking out. Then a sudden yell from the lookout on his own ship: “Enemy dive bombers—hole in the clouds!”
He looked up in time to see about a dozen planes screaming down on the Soryu. Next instant the first bomb hit the port side of the flight deck by the forward elevator … then another right in front of the bridge. The blast blew Ohara backward about five yards. It didn’t particularly hurt—felt rather like being tossed in a steam bath. It wasn’t until he returned to his post and everyone began throwing towels over his face that he realized how badly burned he must be.
By now a third bomb had landed aft, and the whole flight deck was blazing. There may have been other hits too, but it was hard to tell—planes and ammunition were exploding all over the ship. Within three minutes she was obviously gone, and some of the U.S. dive bombers shifted to the screening vessels. The destroyer Isokaze took a near miss off her stern.
It all happened so quickly many on the Soryu had no warning at all. Juzo Mori was down in the ready room with the other pilots from the Midway strike. They couldn’t get anybody to hear their report, and now they were lounging in the big leather chairs, munching rice balls and griping about the mysterious ways of the bridge. Then the battle bugle blew, and a voice came over the loudspeaker saying the Kaga was under attack.
Some of the younger pilots rushed out to watch, but the debonair Mori preferred to take it easy. They’d call when they needed him. He was still relaxing with about a dozen others when, without warning, there was a frightful jar. The ship heeled violently to starboard, apparently in an emergency turn to port. Next instant the whole wall of the ready room split with a crash, and flames poured in.
The pilots made a mad dash for the single door. Mori happened to be last, but he remembered his Rugby—a game he enjoyed—and by the time they emerged, he was first.
Tatsuya Otawa, another of the pilots in the group, stumbled onto the flight deck to find it already a mass of flames. Everything was blowing up—planes, bombs, gas tanks. He had time for only the briefest glance. Then a roaring explosion blasted him over the side of the ship. Still perfectly conscious, he had the presence of mind to tuck his legs up under him and clasp his hands under his knees. He sailed into the water “cannonball-style.”
On the Hiryu Lieutenants Tomonaga and Hashimoto had spent a busy hour getting ready for the coming strike against the U.S. fleet. Now everything seemed under control, and Hashimoto was catching a breather in the torpedo squadron ready room. A few minutes later Lieutenant Yasuhiro Shigematsu, leader of the Hiryu’s fighters, came bursting in: “Hey, the Akagi’s damaged; the Kaga and Soryu are burning—we’re the only ship that hasn’t been hit!”
Hashimoto could hardly believe it. He hurried to the flight deck and looked around. It was hard to see much: during the morning’s maneuvering the Hiryu had somehow drawn steadily ahead of the other three carriers. Now they were perhaps 10,000 yards astern. But they weren’t so far off that Lieutenant Hashimoto missed the towering smoke and three separate fires on the horizon.
The Hiryu’s executive officer, Commander Kanoe, saw it all from the bridge. It was awful the way everything seemed to happen at once. As he watched those mounting columns of smoke, he was completely heartsick. He could only whisper to himself, “What will become of us?”
LEFTY HOLMBERG didn’t care what happened now. Even if they never got back to the Yorktown, they had accomplished their mission. So when oil began to spatter all over his cockpit, it didn’t make too much difference. He assumed the AA fire had cut his oil line, and he’d soon crash. Never mind. He still had gotten that hit. At worst, he felt like a football player who breaks his leg scoring the winning touchdown.
He waited for the engine to sputter and stop, but it kept running smoothly, the gauges all normal. Finally he realized there was nothing wrong with his engine after all; it was only hydraulic fluid from the system that worked his landing gear and flaps.
He flew on, safely dodging the Japanese destroyer screen. Soon he fell in with other planes from Bombing 3, and together they headed back for the Yorktown. The whole time he kept his eyes peeled for Zeros, but never saw a single one. Others found them all too easily. Down low, working over the torpedo planes, the Zeros couldn’t break up the dive-bombing attack, but they were in a perfect position to strike the bombers pulling out. Goaded by the three blazing carriers, they tried hard for revenge.
A stream of tracer bullets chopped the water around Wade McClusky’s plane. Two Zeros began taking turns, diving on him. They were so much faster, McClusky could think of only one thing to do. Every time one dived, he’d turn sharply toward it. This at least gave the Jap a tougher target and his own gunner Chochalousek a chance to try out the skills he had recently picked up at gunnery school.
Back and forth the three planes went for maybe five minutes. Then a Japanese burst caught McClusky’s plane. The left side of the cockpit was shattered, and he felt as though his left shoulder had been hit with a sledge hammer. He was sure it was the end; he was a goner.
The gunfire died away. Did they get Chochalousek too? McClusky called out over the intercom, but there was no answer. His shoulder was killing him, but he managed to turn around. Chochalousek was still there—unharmed, facing aft, guns at the ready. He had finally picked off one Zero, and the other called it quits.
The SBD flew on, boasting numerous souvenirs of the duel. The plane had been hit 55 times, not counting a few extras contributed by Chochalousek. Noting that the twin barrels on his gun were about eight inches apart, he saw no reason why he couldn’t shoot straight back on both sides of the rudder at the same time. Fortunately, there was enough of the rudder left to get them home.
Machinist’s Mate F. D. Adkins, the rear-seat man in Ensign Pittman’s plane, had a different kind of adventure with his twin gun mount. It broke loose from its rack during Pittman’s dive, but Adkins managed to grab and hang on to it. Then, as they pulled out, a Zero attacked. Steadying the gun on the fuselage, Adkins opened fire and somehow shot down the fighter. No one ever knew how he did it: the gun weighed 175 pounds, and he was a very slight young man who couldn’t even lift the gun when they later got back to the Enterprise.
And, of course, there were those who couldn’t get clear at all. A Zero riddled Lieutenant Penland’s tanks, forcing him down 30 uncomfortable miles from the Japanese. Others simply vanished—sometimes without a word, sometimes with a brief radio call to say they were going down. But for those who did get clear—who dodged the flaming guns of the carriers, who broke through the hail of fire from the screen, who escaped the last snarling Zero—there was a new lift to life as they headed safely home. Men like John Snowden, gunner in Dusty Kleiss’s plane, felt a sudden glow of gratitude — “a good feeling that it was warm and sunny; that the airplane was apparently all in one piece and we had come through it alive.”
FOR Stan Ring, leader of the Hornet’s Air Group, there was only dark disappointment. His fruitless search to the south had yielded nothing; now he was heading back to the ship, all bombs still neatly tucked under the wings of his planes.
To make matters worse, most of Bombing 8 couldn’t pick up the Hornet’s homing signal and were groping around using up what little gas they had left. Fortunately Midway itself was only 60-70 miles away; so the skipper, Lieutenant Commander Ruff Johnson, decided to gas up there before flying on.
Even this was too late for three of the planes. Ensign Guillory’s tank went dry 40 miles out … then Ensign Wood went down 10 miles out … and finally Ensign Auman in the lagoon itself. The remaining eleven planes came gingerly in, rightly suspecting that Midway’s garrison was more than trigger-happy.
They jettisoned their bombs on the reef, hoping this would be interpreted as a friendly gesture—but it almost had the opposite effect. It was one of Colonel Shannon’s favorite theories that the invasion force would begin operations by blasting a hole in the reef, and this certainly looked like it. A few scattered bursts of AA fire nicked three of the planes; then some sharp eyes detected the familiar dumpy silhouette of the SBD.
Lieutenant Stan Ruehlow, leading Fighting 8 back toward the Hornet, wasn’t about to try Midway. It was an easy hop—and he knew the squadron could never make it to the ship—but that big column of smoke over the atoll just looked too dangerous. It could mean almost anything—even that the invasion was on.
Far better to play it safe and get as close to the Hornet as possible. His radio wasn’t working, and the YE-ZB homing device was on the blink, but if he got close enough, maybe the ship could somehow catch his call.
So they all flew on. The minutes passed, the tanks drained lower, and finally the first fighter fell. Then a second. Ruehlow watched them go one after another—some singles, some pairs—till finally there was only the skipper Pat Mitchell, Ensign Dick Gray and himself left. Then Mitchell and Gray went too.
Now Ruehlow was all alone. In a few minutes he’d be down anyway; so deciding there was strength in numbers, he pulled around and slapped heavily into the sea near Mitchell and Gray. By 11:00 A.M. all the planes of Fighting 8 were gone.
There was only one consolation. About half an hour earlier Ruehlow had looked to the north and seen in the distance what he had spent all morning searching for: the Japanese fleet. As frustrating as it must have been to find them only now—when Fighting 8’s tanks were almost dry—it was “a beautiful sight” to see those three carriers burning.
Five other American spectators had a much closer view. Tony Schneider of Bombing 6 now knew all too well that he had run out of gas over the Japanese, not the U.S. fleet. Gliding down as far away as he could, he watched the dive bombers strike. He was proud of the boys and chagrined at himself that he hadn’t done a better job of managing his fuel. His glide finally carried him to a dead-stick landing beyond the sight of the Japanese. But he was close enough to see the smoke and sometimes, he thought, hear the highly satisfying sound of explosions in the distance.
Three other Americans were less fortunate. A pilot and his gunner from Scouting 6 were fished out of the water by the Japanese destroyer Makigumo, and a young ensign from Torpedo 3 was picked up by the Arashi. Little is known about what followed, but it could not have been very pleasant. By now Nagumo’s hopes and ships were shattered; chances are that the interrogation was less than polite. In any case, the men began to talk.
There was still one other American witness left. Peeping from beneath the black cushion that bobbed harmlessly amid the floating debris, Ensign George Gay of Torpedo 8 was very much alive and free.
Until the dive bombers came, he spent most of his time watching a nearby carrier with almost clinical interest. It was engaged in landing Zero fighters, and Gay carefully noted that the approaches were made from far and high (about 1,000-1,500 feet altitude) and coming in from straight astern. The landing intervals were longer than the American, but he was most impressed by the arresting gear.
His studies were somewhat interrupted when a screening cruiser passed within 500 yards of him. She didn’t see him, and he continued his observations.
Then the dive bombers arrived. Gay watched these too with professional interest, and they never looked better. The SBDs seemed to dive faster and lower than he had ever seen them do in practice. He found himself cheering and hollering with every hit
CAPTAIN Ryusaku Yanagimoto fought to get the Soryu under control. Three hits had knocked out the voice tubes, the bridge telephones, the engine room telegraph—there was no way to give orders at all.
Although badly burned, Commander Ohara took over the fire-fighting job. With the bridge communications out, he went down a deck to the air command post, hoping it might be easier to operate from here. No use—all the fire mains were out. He retreated down to the flight deck, where he finally fainted from his burns. At this point he either fell or was blown over the side of the ship. When he came to, he was in the water. A pharmacist’s mate was swimming alongside him, slapping his face to keep him from fainting again and drowning.
By 10:40 both engines had stopped and the whole ship was in flames. The fire reached the torpedo storage room, and the blast almost tore the Soryu apart. At 10:45 a badly injured Captain Yanagimoto shouted orders to abandon ship.
When the order came, CPO Mori was with the rest of the pilots from the ready room, jammed into a small corner of the boat deck below the bridge. They were so tightly packed together they couldn’t even raise their arms. As still more men crammed in, they began climbing on each other’s shoulders to make more room. All the time the flames crept closer.
Somebody tried to lower a cutter; it stuck in the davits, one end dropping. Soon many of the men were jumping. Mori himself hung on; the distance down just looked too far. Finally he noticed that the long Pacific swell occasionally brought the sea within safer reach. Timing himself carefully, he leaped clear of the deck and grabbed the fall of an empty davit, hoping to lower himself into the water. But nothing was attached to the other end of the line; it simply shot through the pulley, and Mori plummeted straight down.
He bobbed to the surface and cleared the ship. Next instant a boat, loosened from somewhere, plunged into the water nearby. It landed upside down, but Mori helped some men right it, and he baled it out with his flying boot. They all climbed in and began paddling away. This proved a slow business, for they only had one oar.
CWO Otawa didn’t even have that, as he treaded water some distance away. But he had something else, maybe better. In the pocket of his flight jacket he still carried his lucky talisman from the Narita Shrine near Tokyo.
He continued swimming—alone yet not alone. Every, time the swell lifted him up, he could look “downhill” and see hundreds of heads dotting the water all around. In the distance he could see the Soryu, and farther off the burning Kaga.
The fire was now so hot on the Kaga that Commander Amagai could no longer hang on at the air command post. No one was around to give any orders, so on his own initiative he led a working party to a lower deck to try and organize the fire-fighting.
Huge explosions were ripping through the side of the ship, hurling out men and chunks of planes like projectiles. Amagai couldn’t reach the hangar deck, where the fire was worst, but it looked like an inferno.
Indeed it was. Hearing shouts that the hangar deck was on fire, CWO Morinaga had rushed there right after the bombing, but the situation was already hopeless. None of the fire mains was working. In desperation Morinaga organized a bucket brigade, using the latrines alongside the deck. The results were as pitiful as might be expected. Then he tried throwing “combustibles” overboard—but on a carrier almost everything is combustible. The fires and explosions steadily spread, finally cornering him on a small open deck right under the bridge.
Above, everything was in flames. Below, he still had a chance if he could only get down to the next deck. The ladder was red-hot, but there was a cutter lashed to the side of the ship. The canvas lashing was taut, but he clutched at it and lowered himself by his fingers. Painfully he worked his way down the outside of the boat, finally swinging onto the deck below. He still wonders how he did it.
At last he was safe for a moment—better than that, with friends. Commander Amagai was here, along with many of the other pilots. The Kaga’s air officer had given up any hope of stopping the fire; he was now mainly concerned with saving his pilots for some better day. He heard no orders to abandon ship, but what difference did it make? On his own initiative he told his men, “Jump into the sea.”
Moringaga yanked off his summer flying suit, his flight boots, even his senim bari. Stripped to his shorts, he leaped out as far as he could. A few of the new conscripts said they didn’t know how to swim, but Amagai had them jump anyhow—it was better than staying here. Only the assistant air officer Lieutenant Ogawa didn’t go. He was just too badly hurt by one of the first bomb hits. He said good-bye to Amagai and hobbled back toward the fire.
In the water Amagai pulled away from the ship, using a stately breast stroke that was rather out of keeping with his reputation as one of Nagumo’s more dashing airmen. He was none too soon. He looked back and could see the paint on the Kaga’s starboard side was starting to burn. Ahead in the distance, he noticed for the first time that the Akagi was on fire too.
“Anybody who isn’t working, get below!” Commander Masuda shouted above the general confusion on the Akagi’s bridge. The fire was bad enough without a lot of bystanders in the way. Commander Fuchida, still too weak from appendicitis to be of much use, went down to the ready room. So did a thoroughly shaken Teiichi Makishima, who had stopped taking his newsreel shots.
But the ready room was no place to be. Already jammed with burn cases, it quickly filled with smoke and heat, driving both Fuchida and Makishima back to the air command post Clearly the fire was spreading fast.
No one knew it better than the Akagi’s damage control officer Commander Dobashi. He strung out his hoses, but the power was out and the pumps didn’t work. He tried flooding the ammunition storage rooms, but the valves were too badly damaged in the all-important after areas. In helpless rage he buckled on his samurai sword; if he could do nothing else, he’d at least go down in the ancient tradition.
On the bridge the Akagi’s navigator, Commander Miura, found it impossible to steer the ship. The bomb that landed by the fantail jammed her rudder 20° to port, and her speed was falling off. She was going around in circles. He rang the telegraph to stop engines, but nothing happened. Since the voice tube and phones were all out, he finally sent a man below to find out what was wrong.
The machinery was all right, but it turned out that every man in the starboard engine room was dead—suffocated by fire sucked down through the exhaust system. The engines themselves were still running in eerie fashion, completely unattended.
Miura did the only thing he could do. With his rudder jammed and half the engineers gone, at 10:42 he shut off the boilers and stopped the ship.
As the Akagi lost headway, the flames roared forward. At 10:43 Zero parked right below the bridge caught fire, and the blaze quickly spread to the bridge itself. Flames licked into the windows, and the heat was unbearable.
It was clear to Admiral Kusaka that the Akagi could no longer serve as flagship. She couldn’t steer; the fires were spreading; the radio was out, and it was impossible to direct the battle, by semaphores and signal flags from a burning bridge. He urged Admiral Nagumo to transfer to some other ship.
“It’s not time yet,” Nagumo muttered, standing transfixed near the compass.
Captain Aoki came over. Tears in his eyes, he begged, “Leave the Akagi to me; you must shift the flag.”
Nagumo still refused.
It was too much for the pragmatic Kusaka. The samurai spirit was all very well, but a burning flagship was no place to run a fleet. “You are Commander in Chief of the First Carrier Striking Force as well as the Akagi,” he scolded the Admiral. “It’s your duty to carry on the battle… .”
A long silence; then with a barely perceptible nod, Nagumo agreed to go.
No time to lose. The destroyer Nowaki was hovering close by; they would go there. Kusaka had a signalman semaphore the decision and ordered her to send a boat. At the same time, he told the flag secretary Commander Nishibayashi to scout around, find the best way out of this furnace. Nishibayashi soon came running back: all the passages below were on fire.
The only escape was by window. At 10:46 they opened one on the leeward side, tossed out a couple of lines, and began to leave that way. Nagumo went first. An expert in judo, he landed lightly on the flight deck. Kusaka went next, using the other line. Plump and anything but agile, it was too much for him. He lost his grip and fell heavily to the deck, spraining both ankles.
At the moment, he didn’t even notice it. Ammunition was exploding, bullets were flying about, and worst of all, he had lost his left shoe. It flew off as he landed, ending up on a part of the deck that was burning. Would it hurt more trying to retrieve it, or running after the others over a red-hot deck with one shoe off?
He hesitated interminable seconds while the rest of the staff—now waiting on the anchor deck—yelled at him to hurry up. In the end he dashed after them … half-running, half-hopping, burning his foot as expected.
The Nowaki’s launch was alongside, and they all piled in. But instead of going to the destroyer, they headed for the light cruiser Nagara. She had also come up, was bigger and much better equipped. But wherever they went, it couldn’t remove the sting. As they shoved off from the blazing Akagi— every second wracked by some new explosion—Commander Chuichi Yoshioka felt as if he’d left his heart behind.
At 11:30 the Nagara dropped her Jacob’s ladder, and Nagumo climbed aboard with his staff. They were met on the quarterdeck by Rear Admiral Susumu Kimura, who commanded Destroyer Squadron 10 and used the cruiser as his flagship.
“Kimura, do you think the Nagara could tow the Akagi?” were Nagumo’s first words.
“It may be difficult,” Kimura replied, choosing his words tactfully, “in view of the actual circumstances of the Akagi.”
Kusaka went immediately to the bridge to break out a vice admiral’s flag for Nagumo. It turned out there was none on board, so he took the flag Kimura flew as a rear admiral. It looked the same except for a red strip across the bottom. This was ripped off, and the remains hoisted to the yardarm. The effect was a bit tattered, but certainly no worse than the fleet.
ADMIRAL Isoroku Yamamoto was apparently feeling much better. Under the weather the day before, he had his usual breakfast this morning—boiled rice, miso soup, eggs and dried fish. His touch of vanity seemed to be thriving too. Most of the staff were dressed in fatigues or their regular blues (a few dandies wore British-type shorts), but the Commander in Chief—along with his chief of staff and Captain Takayanagi—was resplendent in starched whites. Yamamoto even wore his gloves.
Now he stood on the navigation bridge of the great Yamato, receiving reports, searching the seas, casually watching the 18 ships of the Main Body. It was just 7:00 A.M. and they were steaming along some 450 miles behind Nagumo’s carriers.
So far there was not much excitement. Nagumo was still operating under radio silence, and on the Yamato they only knew what they could pick up by monitoring the planes. They learned that a PBY had found the carriers … that Tomonaga wanted a second strike … that the Midway-based planes were attacking. And at 7:28 they heard the Tone’s No. 4 plane report that U.S. ships were already on the scene.
Considering that all their planning had been based on completely the opposite assumption, the Admiral and his staff adjusted to the new situation with surprising ease. Far from being alarmed, they were delighted. If the American fleet was already out, they’d polish it off that much sooner. And when the Tone’s plane reported “what appears to be a carrier,” they grew even more excited. Captain Kuroshima assured everyone that Nagumo had a reserve wave of torpedo planes with just this contingency in view.
“It all turned out just as we wanted,” thought Commander Watanabe of the operations staff. Nothing that happened during the next two hours changed his opinion. By now, Nagumo had opened up his radio, and while he was in direct touch with Yamamoto only twice, the gist was completely reassuring: he had taken many blows; he had suffered no damage; he was hot after the enemy fleet.
Then, just before 10:30, an unexpected message came up from the radio room. Watanabe caught it over the voice tube —there was nothing formal about it—just something monitored over the air that the radio room thought the bridge should know right away. A hurried voice reported, “The Akagi is on fire!” Watanabe rushed to the battle command post and passed the word directly to Admiral Yamamoto. The Admiral asked Captain Kuroshima whether it might not be wise to confirm that the carriers had actually launched their torpedo strike at the U.S. fleet. If this hadn’t been done, it could mean trouble.
No need to do that, said Kuroshima. Of course the attack had been launched. It was all in his plan.
More traffic was monitored—a fire on the Kaga, on the Soryu too. Still, Yamamoto’s staff refused to get too worried. No reason to suppose the damage was serious … ships were bound to get hit in action … the Hiryu was going strong … the real battle was just beginning.
At 10:50 the Yamato’s communications officer hurried up to the bridge, handed a new message to Yamamoto’s signal officer Commander Wada. He took a look, silently gave it to the chief of staff, Admiral Ugaki. He also looked and just as silently handed it to the Commander in Chief.
It was from Rear Admiral Hiroaki Abe on the Tone. Second in command of the Striking Force, he had automatically taken over while Nagumo was shifting his flag to the Nagara. Abe pulled no punches:
Fires are raging aboard the Kaga, Soryu, and Akagi resulting from attacks carried out by land-based and carrier-based attack planes. We plan to have the Hiryu engage the enemy carriers. In the meantime, we are temporarily retiring to the north, and assembling our forces… .
Yamamoto handed it back without a word. He seemed stunned. Searching his face for some kind of clue, Yeoman Noda felt it was utterly “frozen”—not even an eyebrow moved.
AT THE same time that Admiral Abe radioed the Commander in Chief, he also sent a message to Admiral Yamaguchi On the Hiryu, now almost out of sight to the north. “Attack enemy carriers,” he ordered.
Yamaguchi didn’t need to be told. That was what he had wanted to do all morning. After taking one look at the billowing smoke far astern, he had already given the orders. He simply blinkered back to Abe: “All our planes are taking off now for the purpose of destroying the enemy carriers.”
Men raced about the Hiryu’s decks getting ready. If there was anyone in the crew who failed to appreciate the crisis, he soon got the word. The loudspeaker tersely described the damage to the other three carriers and announced it was “now up to the Hiryu to carry on the fight for the glory of greater Japan.”
The air officer, Commander Kawaguchi, hammered out the plan of attack. Ideally, of course, both dive bombers and torpedo planes should go together on a coordinated strike. But it would take an hour to put torpedoes on the planes back from Midway, and the time had passed for games like that. The dive bombers were ready; they’d go at once. The torpedo planes would follow later. The all-important thing was to launch an attack—any kind of attack—as soon as possible.
Lieutenant Michio Kobayashi understood all this well. He would be leading the dive bombers, and he was a good choice. A veteran of Pearl Harbor, he had been flying missions since the earliest days. Tall and taciturn, he had a kind of quiet drive that Kawaguchi could trust. Trouble was, he had only 18 dive bombers in his little force.
They were even worse off for fighter escort. They had used up too many trying to cover the carriers during the morning attacks. Now the best that Kawaguchi could do was scrape together six Zeros.
By 10:50 all was set. The dive bomber pilots poured out of the ready room as always, but then came an unusual step. Before manning their planes, they were assembled on the flight deck under the bridge, and Admiral Yamaguchi addressed them. He pointed out they all knew how “critical” the situation was—they were all that was left—hence everything depended on their efforts. But for this very reason, he stressed, they mustn’t be reckless. It would be a temptation to do something foolhardy, but Japan’s hopes depended on their coolness and skill.
The little group broke up, and the 18 men made for their planes as the motors began turning over. On impulse Commander Kawaguchi rushed up to his Academy classmate Lieutenant Takenori Kondo, leader of a bomber section. They shook hands as Kawaguchi urged his friend on. “I’ll do my best,” Kondo smiled. Then with a wave he was off.
At 10:54 the first Zeros roared off the deck, and by 10:58 the whole force was in the air. They wasted no time in climbing and circling; every minute counted as they quickly headed east.
Watching them go from the air command post, Commander Kawaguchi prayed for revenge.