THIS TIME THEY WERE easy to find. Around 4:45 Lieutenant Earl Gallaher sighted the telltale white wakes about 30 miles to the northwest. Several minutes later he could make out a carrier, half a dozen other ships, scurrying along on a westerly course. Gradually climbing to 19,000 feet, he circled around the Japanese fleet so as to attack from out of the sun. Far below, the ships steamed on, blissfully unaware.
At 4:58 all was ready. Neatly stacked down by divisions and sections, the dive bombers began a high-speed run-in. As they roared toward the target, Gallaher opened up on his radio: Enterprise planes would take the carrier, the Yorktown group the nearer battleship. Then a sharp, quick warning: Zeros, ahead and above.
They struck with that breath-taking rush the American pilots were getting to know so well. Some said there were 6, some 12; but they were everywhere at once and it was hard to tell. One pounced on Ensign F. T. Weber, lagging behind the rest of Bombing 6. Straggling was always fatal when Zeros were around, and this time was no exception.
Earl Gallaher almost collided with another as he pulled up out of the formation to start his dive. For a split second they squarely faced each other; then the Zero vanished as Gallaher pushed over. Next instant he was screeching down, leading his makeshift squadron against the last of Nagumo’s operating carriers.
Finally catching on, the ship twisted hard to port in a desperate evasion maneuver. It was too late for Gallaher to correct his dive; so he pulled up sharply just before release, hoping to lob his bomb at the vessel. The trick occasionally worked, but not this time. First Gallaher, then several other Scouting 6 pilots dropped near-misses just astern.
Seeing it happen, Lieutenant Dave Shumway made a fast decision. His Yorktown planes had been ordered to hit the battleship, but now he shifted to the carrier too. His first section swept past Dick Best’s Bombing 6, just getting ready for their own pushover. Best dived on schedule anyhow, his little group from the Enterprise all mixed up with the Yorktown crowd. It was another of those moments that would have given fits to the instructor back at Pensacola.
The Zeros tore at the group all the way down. Their last flight deck was at stake, and they knew it. They performed amazing stunts. One fighter made a pass on Ensign Cobb, pulled out, then made another—all while Cobb was in the same dive. Another turned himself into a “falling leaf” to keep Lieutenant Harold Bottomley in his sights.
Lieutenant Wiseman crashed, then Ensign Johnny Butler. In the Yorktown wardroom Butler had always said how much he wanted to be a fighter pilot and tangle with the Zeros. He got his chance—but in an SBD. It wasn’t nearly enough.
At first it looked as if the carrier might escape. Her sharp turn, the Zeros, a sudden dose of antiaircraft fire, all seemed to throw the dive bombers off. Ensign Hanson saw several misses ahead of him, then watched with dismay as his own bomb missed too. Disgusted, he looked back—and saw a sight that blotted out his disappointment. One, two, three bombs landed on the ship in quick succession.
They all claimed her. Scouting 6 probably got one hit … Bombing 3 certainly two … Bombing 6 another—but it was hard to tell. Toward the end everyone was diving at once, and in all that smoke the hits and misses looked pretty much alike. In any case, it was a thorough job. So much so that two of the last planes from Bombing 3 switched back to the battleship originally assigned. It seemed a waste to drop anything more on the carrier—her flight deck was a shambles.
GLASS showered down on Captain Kaku, navigator Cho, everyone else in the Hiryu’s wheelhouse. The first hit had landed squarely on the forward elevator platform, hurling it back against the island structure, breaking every window on the bridge. The blast blew Commander Kawaguchi clear off the air command post, down to the flight deck. Miraculously unhurt, he picked himself up just in time to be knocked down again by three more hits in the bridge area.
Down in the engineroom Ensign Mandai heard a bugle start sounding the antiaircraft alert over the loudspeaker system. It was still blowing when he felt a hard jolt, then two or three more. His heart sank. He could tell a miss because the shock always came from one side or the other; this time it came from directly above.
The lights went out, then came on again as the engineers switched over to emergency power. Other troubles weren’t so easily solved. Smoke poured down through the air ducts; the two men sent up for food came scrambling back through an open hatch—smoke and flames swept in after them.
In the ready room Lieutenant Hashimoto lay dozing on his sofa when a sudden “hammer blow” slammed into his back. He awoke with a start, stumbled onto the blazing flight deck, Winked at the incredible sight of the elevator platform leaning against the front of the bridge.
Captain Kaku, of course, could see nothing. The engines were all right—the ship still raced along at 30 knots—but with his view completely blocked it was impossible to maneuver. Anyhow, they could keep moving and go to work on the fires. Commander Kanoe ordered the magazines flooded; damage control parties tackled the flames from the only fire main still working.
Commander Kawaguchi stood near the island structure, watching the men battle the blaze. There was very little left for an air officer to do—the forward third of the deck was one big crater. Then, as he stood there, several big geysers of water shot up perhaps 50 yards off the ship. He looked up in astonishment. As if they didn’t have enough trouble already, B-17s were bombing them too.
IT WAS a tough assignment for Major George Blakey, leading his six B-17s from Hawaii to Midway. They were coming to beef up the base’s tiny force of heavy bombers—had been flying for over seven hours—and now, when almost in sight of Eastern Island, Midway was ordering them to attack the Japanese fleet before landing. Gas was low; the men were tired. It was a hard job under any circumstances, and even harder for men who had never been in combat before.
The flight leaders conferred by voice radio. Did they have enough gas? Midway said the Japs were 170 miles to the northwest—out and back meant perhaps 400 more miles of flying. They figured they could just about make it if they stuck to their present altitude of 3,600 feet. This was absurdly low (Colonel Sweeney’s Midway group was operating at 20,000 feet), but it had to be this or nothing. Blakey radioed they were on their way.
Shortly after 6:00 Captain Narce Whitaker, leading one of the three-plane nights, spotted a column of smoke on the horizon ahead. Drawing near, he could make out a burning carrier, surrounded by a milling swarm of cruisers and destroyers. But in the compartmentalized way of war, even now there were those who didn’t grasp the picture. Lieutenant Charles Crowell, a young officer in one of the B-17s, had no idea the Japanese were below. When the order came to prepare for the bomb run, he assumed the plane was lost and had to lighten its load.
At this point he learned. As the little squadron turned toward the carrier, all the ships in the screen opened up. Zeros swarmed around, and as one of the pilots put it, “With no place to land, these characters were really hopped up.” A shell burst in the wing of one plane; shrapnel smashed through the nose of another, sending the bombardier sprawling. Yet the B-17s had a way of coming through. Shaking off the fighters, they thundered in, dropped their bombs, and burst clear on the other side still intact. One of them, unable to release on the carrier, dropped instead on an unsuspecting destroyer.
Untried, a year or so out of school, it was a weird experience for most of the men. A dozen disconnected impressions raced through their minds: the sudden fright … how busy they were … the overwhelming thirst when it was all over—and then not being able to swallow a drop of water.
For those lucky or unlucky enough to peer outside, the sight was breath-taking. Major Blakey was fascinated by the way the shells and small-arms fire whipped the sea like an angry storm. All of a sudden some splashes shot up far bigger than the rest. “My Lord,” Blakey thought, “those are really big shells.” It never occurred to him that still another group of B-17s, completely unknown to himself, was bombing the Japanese fleet from a point directly above.
But it was so. The Midway-based planes were back on the job. First, Colonel Sweeney arrived at 5:30 with a group of four. The carrier below looked finished; so he settled on a heavy cruiser. Then Carl Wuertele turned up with two more B-17s from Midway. The carrier was still burning, but he took it anyhow, while his wingman picked a battleship. They were the ones who were causing the commotion when Major Blakey appeared on the scene.
Meanwhile Stebbins had arrived with the Hornet’s dive bombers. He too decided the carrier was through and went instead for two ships in the screen … one of them the same target Sweeney was bombing.
Mass confusion, but by now it didn’t matter. The strike was a picnic. Attacked from all sides—the Zeros finally used up—the Japanese had little left to put up a fight. When the American fliers finally headed home, their estimates matched the rosy glow of the Pacific sunset. Bombing 8 claimed three hits on a battleship, two on a cruiser. The B-17s were just as confident—hits on the burning carrier, a battleship, a cruiser; a destroyer sunk; plus an assortment of lethal near-misses.
CAPTAIN Michiso Tsutsumi, executive officer of the battleship Haruna, watched two dive bombers hurtle down toward the bridge. One of them looked as if it would never pull out—Tsutsumi could see the pilot’s face clearly. Then at the last second it zoomed safely away, still so low that its trailing antenna caught that of the Haruna.
Somehow the bombs missed, landing with huge explosions just astern. For the next hour much of the fleet endured the same thing: 5:30, dive bombers on the Tone … 5:46, B-17s on the Haruna … 5:40, dive bombers on the Chikuma … 6:15, B-17s on the Hiryu… .
It seemed to go on forever. But finally at 6:32 some weary yeoman on the Chikuma’s bridge noted that the last of the attackers were retiring, and the fleet had a chance to take stock. Incredibly, none of the ships had been hit by these final blows. The near-miss off the Haruna’s stern bent a few plates and jammed the main battery range finder, but repairs would be easy. The only other damage came when one of those low-flying B-17s strafed the Hiryu’s shattered flight deck, knocking out an antiaircraft battery and killing several gunners.
One antiaircraft gun, more or less, made little difference to the Hiryu now. Captain Kaku knew his only hope was to get clear of the battle area. Once beyond range of the U.S. planes, maybe the ship could lick her wounds and somehow make it back to Japan. The phone still worked, and Kaku called his chief engineer, Commander Kunizo Aiso. He urged the chief to keep giving him 30 knots.
Aiso was optimistic. The master control room was in good shape, and the flash fire in Engine Room No. 4 was out. He couldn’t get to the other three engine rooms—all hatches were blocked—but he could call them, and they said everything still was running. Their chief complaint seemed to be the fumes and smoke that steadily poured through the air ducts.
Soon they all noticed something else. Engine rooms were always hot, but now it was far hotter than usual … far hotter than it ought to be. In No. 4 Ensign Mandai looked up at the steel overhead and noticed that the white paint was starting to melt. It began dripping down on the engineers as they worked, burning them, causing little fires to flare up in the machinery. As the paint disappeared from the overhead, the bare steel began to glow. Finally it was bright red. Nobody mentioned it, but every man in the room knew they were now trapped beneath the fires raging above.
A few hundred yards off the burning carrier, the battleship Kirishima plowed along in the gathering dusk. She had been ordered to stand by for towing in case the Hiryu closed down her engines. As night fell, it became an increasingly unpleasant assignment. The fires on the Hiryu blazed up from time to time, offering a perfect beacon for enemy submarines. Finally the battleship’s skipper Captain Iwabuchi radioed Nagumo, describing the situation, pointing out the danger to his ship.
At 6:37 Nagumo radioed back the welcome word to break off and rejoin the Nagara. The Kirishima turned northwest, and as she slowly drew off, her executive officer Captain Honda thoughtfully looked back at the Hiryu. She stood black against the evening sky, fires twinkling in every port. From a distance the little pinpoints of flame reminded him of lanterns—hundreds of them—strung to mark some happier occasion at home.
LOOKING back at the Yorktown, listing heavily and silhouetted alone in the twilight, Commander Hartwig could barely stand the sight. For two years his destroyer Russell had been the carrier’s guard ship. He felt almost a part of her. Now he was steaming away. With the survivors rescued, Admiral Fletcher had ordered the ships in the screen to head east and join up with Admiral Spruance. Orders were orders, but it wasn’t easy to leave that sagging, lonely hulk. One thought, paraphrased from Hamlet, kept running through Hartwig’s mind: “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew her well.”
There were many others who felt, as they left the scene, that “it didn’t seem right” to abandon the Yorktown. She was holding her own—the fires were contained, her list was no greater—and the Portland stood rigged to give her a tow. But there were other factors too, and Frank Jack Fletcher had to consider them all. It was getting dark … Japanese snoopers were about … Yamamoto’s heavy ships were somewhere … enemy subs might turn up … a task force guarding a derelict carrier made an ideal target.
Once again war turned into a matter of “groping around.” Fletcher weighed his chances, finally decided the odds were too dangerous. At 5:38 he issued his orders sending everybody east. For the next 35 minutes the Yorktown wallowed alone in the dusk; then at 6:13 new orders went out, detaching the destroyer Hughes to stand by her.
The rest of Task Force 17 continued on toward Spruance, who was just recovering his planes from the afternoon strike. Once again anxious faces turned skyward, counting the SBDs, searching for signs of damage or casualties. But this time there was much less tension than during the morning attack. The radio had seen to that. No one who listened could miss the note of jubilation as the pilots talked back and forth: “Hey, they’re throwing everything at us except the kitchen sink … oops, here comes the kitchen sink.”
Still, the Japanese had given some of them a bad time. Besides the three planes lost, several were badly damaged. Three Zeros teamed up on Lieutenant Shumway, wounding his gunner and smashing the right side of his plane. He managed to get it home, but it was certainly ready for the junk heap. Ensigns Cooner and Merrill had much the same experience.
Earl Gallaher, leading the Enterprise group, had a different kind of problem, but the way he felt, he would have traded it for Zeros. Pulling out from his dive, he started up an old back injury, and now the pain was killing him. He couldn’t even reach down to drop his landing hook. Yet he couldn’t come in without it, nor could he land in the water. With his back this way, he’d never get out of the cockpit.
He turned the lead over to his wing man and let everyone else land while he kept trying to get the hook down. There was no easy way, and in desperation he reached over anyhow. He got it, all right, but almost passed out from the pain. Finally set, he bounced down to a shaky landing at 6:34; the last of the Enterprise group was home.
EVERYTHING was falling apart on Admiral Nagumo’s temporary flagship Nagara. The Admiral had drifted back to his destroyer days and talked vaguely of night torpedo attacks. His chief of staff Kusaka was in agony with his badly sprained ankles. He finally retired to a small cabin at the stern, where a medical officer tried to give him first aid. (“But you are a dentist,” complained Kusaka. “I know,” the man said cheerfully, “but a dentist is really a doctor.”)
Most of the time Kusaka lay on a cot, but occasionally he was needed on the bridge. Then a sailor would carry him there piggyback. It was a ludicrous sight, somehow symbolizing the helpless plight of Nagumo’s whole fleet.
Far to the rear, Admiral Yamamoto sensed the chaos. In the small operations room on the Yamato’s bridge, he worked with his staff on plans to save the day.
He had taken the first step at 12:20, 90 minutes after learning of the debacle. At that time he radioed a crisp set of instructions to the rest of the fleet. The transports were to retire temporarily. The submarines were to take position on a line to the west. Admiral Kakuta was to leave the Aleutians and hurry south with the light carriers Ryujo and Junyo. No need to give any orders to Admiral Kondo; he was already racing north with his battleships, the carrier Zuiho, in fact, everything he had. Yamamoto himself was churning east through a dense fog, bringing the mighty Yamato, two other battleships and the carrier Hosho.
With any luck these various units, including four small carriers, would converge on Nagumo within a day or so. Kondo was especially promising. Only 300 miles away, he should arrive by 3:00 next morning.
Built around the Hiryu and the hard-hitting Yamaguchi, this makeshift fleet could, Yamamoto hoped, still take care of the U.S. Navy. But there remained Midway, the original objective. With the greater part of the Imperial Combined Fleet now steaming into range, could the Americans turn the base into an “unsinkable carrier”? Captain Kuroshima, “the God of Operations,” thought so. He persuaded Yamamoto that the base must be neutralized, even at the expense of some of the gathering strength. The Admiral agreed, and at 1:10 P.M. radioed Admiral Kondo, “The Invasion Force will assign a portion of its force to shell and destroy enemy air bases on AF. The occupation of AF and AO are temporarily postponed.”
The Aleutian phase (AO) was soon revived, but Midway remained tabled, at least until Kondo could soften up the place. That should come soon enough. He was sending the cruisers Kumano, Suzuya, Mikuma and Mogami to do the job. They were the newest, fastest heavy cruisers in the Japanese Navy, perfect for the assignment. With Admiral Takeo Kurita commanding, they raced northeast at 32 knots.
A good start, but planning would be a lot easier if they knew a little more about conditions on Midway. Nagumo had yet to send a single message describing the morning raid. Of course, the man had his problems, but Combined Fleet really needed to know. At 4:55 a new message was fired off, needling Nagumo for some sort of progress report. It was never even acknowledged, perhaps because it arrived at a most inconvenient time: The U.S. dive bombers were just swooping down on the Hiryu.
Yamamoto remained unaware. He had heard nothing directly from Nagumo since 11:30 A.M.—almost six hours ago. He restlessly wandered to the front of the bridge, absent-mindedly raised his binoculars and peered east—as though that could possibly do any good.
The ax fell at 5:30.
“Hiryu burning as a result of bomb hits,” Nagumo radioed. Yamamoto sank down heavily on a chair in the center of the battle command post. He said nothing. Lost in his own private thoughts, for minutes he sat motionless as a rock.
On the Nagara Admiral Nagumo continued to tinker with the idea of a night surface engagement. His scheme at the moment was to retire west, then reverse course in the dark and catch the Americans by surprise. Studying Nagumo’s expression, Commander Yoshioka thought the old sea dog looked cheerful for the first time since morning.
Then at 6:30 the Chikuma blinkered a message which blasted every hope: “The No. 2 plane of this ship sighted 4 enemy carriers, 6 cruisers, and 15 destroyers in position 30 miles east of the burning and listing enemy carrier at 5:13. This enemy force was westward bound… .”
That changed everything. Previously Nagumo had assumed the Americans were badly hurt too. Now it appeared he had knocked out only one carrier, that four others were steaming straight for him. An old-fashioned sea battle was one thing, but neither Nagumo nor his staff had any appetite for this sort of aerial avalanche.
Nor did they doubt the news. Stunned by the unexpected American assault, they were now ready to believe anything. Nobody even bothered to double-check. Had they done so, they might have been far more skeptical. The information was based on two supposedly separate sightings by the Chikuma’s plane—but the second “sighting” was clearly the pilot trying to correct and amplify his original flash.
But Nagumo’s officers were no longer in a mood to analyze contact reports. Their only reaction was to run for it. At 7:05 the remnants of the Striking Force turned tail and fled northwest.
Admiral Yamamoto sensed there might be a morale problem. He had been shocked himself by these stunning blows, but resiliency was one of the Admiral’s fighting qualities. Soon he was ready to jump into the fight, but he wasn’t so sure about his unit commanders. Maybe they needed something to buck them up until he could get there and take over himself. At 7:15 he radioed all commands:
Admiral Nagumo must have found it bitterly ironical: at the same moment he received another message reporting that the Soryu had gone down.
All afternoon she had smoldered away, racked by occasional explosions, while the stand-by destroyers circled helplessly about. Toward sunset the fires died down enough to send Chief Petty Officer Abe aboard in an attempt to rescue Captain Yanagimoto. Abe was a Navy wrestling champion, and his orders were to bring Yanagimoto off by force. But the Captain refused to budge, and Abe couldn’t bring himself to lay hands on his skipper. He returned from the carrier in tears and alone.
The Soryu wallowed lower in the water. On the Makigumo, standing by, somebody began singing the Japanese national anthem “Kimigayo.” Others took it up. As the strains pealed out over the water, the Soryu’s stern dipped under, her bow rose high—paused for a second—and at 7:13 she was gone.
Twelve minutes later it was the Kaga’s turn. She had been drifting all afternoon, while a small bucket brigade remained aboard fighting the flames. It was a hopeless battle, and around sunset the destroyer Hagikaze sent a cutter over to get the men off. They merely sent it back for a hand pump. The cutter went over again, this time with a written order for the men to return. They now obeyed, but it was hard. As one old warrant officer climbed aboard the Hagikaze, he kept looking back at his burning ship. Tears streamed down his cheeks, even running down his beautifully trimmed mustache. Shortly afterward two mighty explosions ripped the dusk, and at 7:25 the Kaga too was gone.
At this same moment a few miles away, Captain Aoki of the Akagi summoned all hands to the anchor deck. Hope was gone for saving the carrier, and now Aoki praised the men’s courage, bade them farewell, and ordered all to abandon ship. The destroyers Nowaki and Arashi moved near, and at 8:00 a flotilla of small boats began transferring the survivors.
A message was sent to Admiral Nagumo, asking permission to scuttle her. Nagumo never answered, but Yamamoto did. The Commander in Chief monitored the request and at 10:25 radioed a brief order not to sink the ship. Partly it was Yamatomo’s fighting spirit, but partly it was sentiment too. The Akagi was a great favorite of his—in younger days he had served on her for years—now he was determined to tow her back if he could.
The Akagi’s navigator Commander Miura got Yamamoto’s message on the Nowaki, where he was directing the rescue operations. He quickly took a launch over to the Akagi, found Captain Aoki waiting to go down with his command (some say tied to the anchor). Miura was a great talker, and he used all his art now. Instead of mournful pleading—which might have been expected—he scolded Aoki, told him he was making a nuisance of himself, above all pointed to Yamamoto’s order not to scuttle the ship. It would be far more useful, Miura observed, to come over to the Nowaki, and help save her.
Aoki remained utterly dispirited (he would for the rest of his life), but he nodded and dropped down into the Nowaki’s launch. The party shoved off, leaving behind the black, silent Akagi—now truly abandoned—lying helpless in the moonlit sea.
A few scattered swimmers remained—combat air patrol pilots who had run out of gas, occasional crewmen from the three carriers. All afternoon and into the evening destroyers scurried about, picking them up: Raita Ogawa, the Zero pilot from the Akagi, treading water in his life jacket … Tatsuya Otawa from the Soryu, hugging a piece of timber … Takayoshi Morinaga of the Kaga, clinging to a floating hammock … a handful of others. At first there was a good deal of shouting to attract attention, but as evening drew near the cries grew thinner. At last all was silent; the darkened destroyers ended their search and rushed northwest to rejoin the fleet.
ENSIGN George Gay was all alone under the mid-Pacific stars. He had been anything but that during most of the afternoon. Once a patrolling destroyer came so close he could see white-clad sailors moving about the decks. (“If there had been anybody on board that I knew I could have recognized them.”) Gay tried to make himself smaller than ever as he hid in the water under his black cushion.
His burned leg hurt dreadfully … his hand was bleeding … he began to think of sharks. Then he had a comforting thought. He had heard somewhere that sharks didn’t like explosions—well, there’d been plenty of those. In the distance he could still see ships, but he didn’t look very often. The salt water hurt his eyes so much he could hardly see anything. He finally kept them shut most of the time, opening them only occasionally for a quick glance around the horizon. He noticed that the Japanese were gradually moving out of the area.
As darkness fell— “maybe a little earlier than was wise”—he broke out his yellow life raft, inflated it and scrambled in. His eyes felt better now, and at last he could rest. He lay back exhausted—sometimes dozing, sometimes watching the glow of’ searchlights far to the north, where the Japanese still struggled to salvage something from their wreck.
COMMANDER Yoshida eased his destroyer Kazagumo alongside the blazing Hiryu. His men worked fast in the night, unloading fire-fighting equipment and a rather grim supper of hardtack and water for the carrier’s crew. The destroyer Yugumo headed over too, bringing extra fire hose picked up from the Chikuma. Two other destroyers hovered nearby, ready to help if needed.
The Hiryu herself lay dead in the water. She had finally lost power around nine o’clock. The phones still worked, though faintly, and down in Engine Room No. 4 Commander Aiso eventually got a call from the bridge. Someone up there wanted to know whether the engineers could get out. Aiso glanced up at the red hot steel overhead and said no. A long pause … then the bridge asked if the men had any last messages.
This infuriated Aiso. He knew the situation was bad, but surely not hopeless. The Hiryu seemed in no danger of sinking, and once the fires were out, he felt they could somehow get her back to Japan. With the passion of a man trapped far below, he urged the bridge not to give up. He never knew whether they heard. The phone faded and went dead.
Whatever the actual situation at the time of this exchange, it became all too clear at 11:58. At this moment something touched off a great blast. The fires—which had begun to die down—flared up again, spreading everywhere out of control.
This new crisis posed an important decision for Ensign Sandanori Kawakami. He was a young paymaster on the Hiryu, but tonight he had a far greater responsibility. He was also custodian of the Emperor’s portrait. Normally it hung in the captain’s cabin, but at Midway certain precautions had been taken. When general quarters sounded, Kawakami placed it in a special wooden box, and a petty officer carried it by rucksack down to the chronometer room below the armored deck. Here it should be safe. But that was as far as planning went. No one dreamed it might have to leave the ship.
Now Kawakami had to act on his own. He couldn’t raise the bridge, and there was no time to lose. The petty officer again buckled on his rucksack, and guarding their treasure, the two men fought their way forward through the flames. They broke out onto the anchor deck, where Kawakami tenderly transferred the portrait to the destroyer Kazagumo.
None too soon. The Hiryu was listing 15°—shipping water constantly—and there was serious question how long she could last. At 2:30 A.M. on June 5 Captain Kaku finally turned to Admiral Yamaguchi and said, “We’re going to have to abandon ship, sir.”
Yamaguchi nodded, sent a message to Admiral Nagumo reporting that he was ordering off the Hiryu’s crew. Then he directed Kaku to summon all hands to the port quarter of the flight deck. Some 800 survivors reported, crowding around their two leaders in the flickering glare of the flames.
The Captain spoke first. “This war is yet to be fought,” Kaku declared, and he urged them to carry on the struggle. They must live and serve as the nucleus of an ever stronger navy.
Now it was Yamaguchi’s turn. He told the men how much he admired their bravery—how proud he was of their achievements in the battles they had fought together. As for this time, “I am fully and solely responsible for the loss of the Hiryu and Soryu. I shall remain on board to the end. I command all of you to leave the ship and continue your loyal service to His Majesty, the Emperor.”
With that, they all faced toward Tokyo, and Yamaguchi led them in three cheers for the Emperor. Then they solemnly lowered the national ensign, followed by the Admiral’s own flag. As the Rising Sun fluttered down from the yardarm, a flourish of bugles rang out in the night. They were playing the national anthem, “Kimigayo.”
As the men began leaving, Captain Kaku turned to Admiral Yamaguchi: “I am going to share the fate of the ship, sir.”
The Admiral understood. He repeated that he too planned to stay till the end. Then they drifted off into a colloquy that meant little outside Japan. “Let us enjoy the beauty of the moon,” Yamaguchi remarked.
“How bright it shines,” Kaku agreed. “It must be in its twenty-first day… .”
Oddly enough, this sort of talk was not unusual between two close Japanese friends. By itself, it had no connotation of death. Rather, it was a traditional, almost ceremonial way of saying that they shared much in common.
But tonight that certainly included going down with the Hiryu; and overhearing their talk, the executive officer Commander Kanoe felt that the principal officers should also remain. He put the matter to them, and all agreed. Captain Kaku couldn’t have been less sympathetic. He said he alone would stay and flatly ordered them, “All of you—leave the ship.”
Then Admiral Yamaguchi’s senior staff officer, Commander Seiroku Ito, proposed the same thing on behalf of the Admiral’s staff. Yamaguchi too rejected the idea.
From time to time, other officers also came up—there were countless details to attend to. “There’s a lot of money in the ship’s safe,” the chief paymaster reported. “What shall I do with it?”
That one was easy. “Leave the money as it is,” Captain Kaku ordered, “we’ll need it to cross the River Styx.”
Yamaguchi joined in the joke: “That’s right. And we’ll need money for a square meal in hell.”
Now it was time for parting. Ito confirmed the Admiral’s decision to stay, then asked if he had any last messages. Yamaguchi said yes, he had two. The first was for Admiral Nagumo: “I have no words to apologize for what has happened. I only wish for a stronger Japanese Navy—and revenge.” The second was for Captain Toshio Abe, commanding Destroyer Division 10 on the nearby flagship Kazagumo. This one was crisp and to the point: “Scuttle the Hiryu with your torpedoes.”
Finally, a farewell toast. Someone noticed a cask sent over earlier by the Kazagumo. Taking the lid, they filled it with water and silently passed it from one to another. That was all, except as Commander Ito left, Yamaguchi handed him his cap as a keepsake for his family.
It was 4:30—the first light of dawn glowed in the east—when the transfer of the Hiryu’s crew was complete. Commander Kanoe was last off, and as the cutter carried him away he could see Yamaguchi and Kaku waving from the bridge.
At 5:10 Captain Abe carried out his final orders. The destroyer Makigumo turned toward the Hiryu and fired two torpedoes. One missed; the other exploded with a roar. Losing no more time, Abe turned his destroyers northwest and hurried off after the fleeing Admiral Nagumo.
It had been a bad night for Nagumo too. It took more than a hearty message from the Commander in Chief to steady his nerves. At 9:30 he radioed Yamamoto the grim news about all those American carriers steaming toward him. He added that he himself was now retiring northwest at 18 knots. No answer, so at 10:50 he sent the report again, in slightly modified form.
This time he got an answer in five minutes. Yamamoto removed him from command, replacing him with the aggressive Admiral Kondo, rushing up from the south with his battleships and cruisers. As Chief of Staff Ugaki put it, Nagumo seemed to have “no stomach” for the work.
Nagumo took it without comment. Not so his staff. In the excitement of battle—even while going down to defeat—there hadn’t been much time to think. Now there was plenty. During the evening the senior staff officer Captain Oishi visited Admiral Kusaka. “Sir, we staff officers have all decided to commit suicide to fulfill our own responsibility for what has happened. Would you please inform Admiral Nagumo?”
The pragmatic Kusaka saw it differently. Summoning the whole staff, he scolded, “How can you do such a thing? You go into raptures over any piece of good news; then say you’re going to commit suicide the first time anything goes wrong. It’s absurd!”
He went immediately to Nagumo and reported the incident. It turned out the Admiral was toying with the same idea himself. “What you say is certainly reasonable,” he remarked, “but things are different when it’s a question of the chief.”
“Not at all,” Kusaka said. And then once again he launched into his lecture: it was nothing but weakness to commit hara-kiri right now. The thing to do was to come back and avenge the defeat.
Nagumo finally agreed, and the First Carrier Striking Force—now bereft of all four of its carriers—raced on through the night, ever farther away from the scene of the day’s disaster.