1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls

by Winston Groom

  The two other torpedo squadrons just behind Waldron fared little better. Of fourteen from the Enterprise only four made it to their launch points before being shot down, but the Japanese carriers dodged the agonizingly slow American torpedoes. Next, a flight of twelve from the late-starting Yorktown appeared and made a run at the Japanese carrier Hiryu. They faired worse than their Enterprise companions, losing ten of twelve planes, and even though they had managed to launch five torpedoes, all missed. Clearly there was something wrong with the American torpedoes.

  Of the forty-one torpedo-bomber aviators, all but seven were killed (along with their gunner-radioman crewmen), and thirty-five planes were lost, with Ensign Gay still bobbing in the cold Pacific, hiding under his cushion. No Japanese ship was as yet even touched; the Zeros had a field day.* So far, the American attacks had been a miserable disaster, from the slaughter of the Midway-based planes earlier that morning to the annihilation of three full carrier-based torpedo squadrons in the span of a few minutes. The Japanese naturally breathed a collective sigh of relief, but now the curtain was about to rise on the second act of the drama, with great surprises in store.

  The extremely violent high-speed maneuvering by Nagumo’s carriers trying to evade the torpedo planes had made it impossible for them to launch bombers of their own to go after the American carriers; if nothing else, this vindicated the awful sacrifice of the torpedo planes.† But there was another consequence, too, even more important. Because the torpedo planes had come in at wave-top level, all fifty covering Zeros had to get down on the deck to fire at them; thus they were still down low, trying to regain altitude, when American dive-bombers suddenly arrived on the scene.

  Earlier, Lieutenant Commander Clarence McClusky, with thirty-seven dive-bombers from the Enterprise, had arrived, like Commander Ring from the Hornet before him, at the spot where the Japanese fleet was supposed to be and, finding nothing, had decided to keep his force flying westward to see what that would yield. It yielded nothing, so McClusky decided to turn back north. He was pushing the limits of his return fuel capacity when suddenly through the clouds he saw below him the last tragic moments of the American torpedo-bomber attacks. He immediately ordered half of his planes to attack the Akagi and the other half to concentrate on the carrier Soryu. At almost the same instant, perhaps even a few moments earlier, Commander Maxwell Leslie with seventeen dive-bombers from the Yorktown arrived and saw the big carrier Kaga readying to launch planes.*

  For the Japanese carrier fleet it was the worst possible situation to be in—no high-altitude fighter cover, and planes all over the decks in the process of being refueled, rearmed with torpedoes, or waiting for takeoff to go after the American carriers. McClusky’s dive-bombers, in a long line one after the other, leveled off at an altitude of 14,500 feet, then pushed their sticks over and at full throttle began to plummet down hawklike at a seventy-degree angle, making for the big ships at three hundred miles per hour. One of the few American fighter pilots to witness the attack described it as “a beautiful silver waterfall.” Commander Leslie’s group was doing the same. The carrier Hiryu, far ahead of the other three and temporarily out of sight, was spared the ordeal—temporarily. The time was now ten-thirty A.M.

  Commander Fuchida, on the bridge of Akagi along with Admiral Nagumo and Commander Genda, the fleet air officer, remembered that the signal had just been given to have the planes take off when “a lookout screamed ‘Hell-Divers.’ I looked up to see three black enemy planes plummeting toward our ship. The terrifying scream of the dive-bombers reached me first, followed by a crashing explosion of a direct hit. There was a blinding flash and then a second explosion, much louder than the first. Then followed a startling quiet as the barking of guns suddenly ceased. I got up and looked at the sky. The enemy planes were already gone from sight.”15

  The damage wrought by McClusky’s attack “horrified” Fuchida. The bombs had blasted the midships flight elevator into a mass of molten metal, drooping into the hangar. Planes waiting to take off or being refueled had been set afire and turned the flight deck into an inferno. Then explosions from below rumbled through the ship as bombs, torpedoes, and fuel-storage tanks began to explode and hundreds of men were incinerated alive. Flames and black smoke poured out of every orifice, eventually enveloping the bridge. It was obvious that the ship was doomed.

  Nagumo’s chief of staff urged the admiral to transfer his flag to one of the nearby cruisers, but the commanding admiral seemed in a state of shock and waved off his second-in-command. The captain and others pleaded with him, but to no avail. By this time the ritual removal of the emperor’s picture from its sacred place on the bridge was already under discussion. The chief of staff then informed the admiral that all communications were out: “Sir, most of our ships are still intact. You must command them.” Nagumo finally agreed but, because all the passageways below were afire, the only way he and his staff could make their escape was by climbing down a rope from a window on the bridge and then making their way down through masses of strewn bodies to where a boat was waiting to take them to the cruiser Nagara, which Dr. Morison rightly points out “must have been a severe strain on Japanese dignity.”16 During this ignominious boat ride, Admiral Nagumo and the others could see their companion ships the Kaga and Soryu, as well as their own, burning furiously from stem to stern. It had been scarcely fifteen minutes since American bombers had visited the fleet; such were the fortunes of war.

  Kaga had been hit with four 500- and 1,000-pound bombs and Soryu with three, which started uncontrollable fires on both ships, and survivors described seeing many screaming men running around in flames, cremated alive in the burning aircraft. The Kaga sank about three hours later. Soryu, ablaze from the dive-bombing attacks, was also hit by three torpedoes from the submarine U.S.S. Nautilus, which had been lurking in the area for just such an opportunity; she blew in half and sank shortly after sunset. Akagi lingered on till past midnight, burning and out of control, until Admiral Yamamoto, still four hundred miles to the west, reluctantly gave orders for torpedo-destroyers to scuttle the ship, which had been his old command. Upon learning this news the Akagi’s captain returned to his carrier from the cruiser and “lashed himself to an anchor to await the end.” Likewise, the captain of the Soryu, after the abandon ship order had been carried out, returned to his bridge and, sword in hand, began screaming, “Banzai! and singing Kimigayo, the Japanese national anthem,” as the ship went down.17

  For his part Commander Fuchida, still weakened from his appendix operation a week earlier, tried to follow the exodus of the admiral’s staff, but when he began to climb down hand over hand he found that the rope itself was already smoldering. He got as far as the gun deck but then, when he began climbing down a metal monkey ladder to the flight deck, he found to his horror that the rungs too were red-hot from the fierce fires raging inside the ship. He let go and fell ten feet, breaking both of his ankles. Some sailors nearby helped Fuchida down to the anchor deck, where he was strapped onto a bamboo stretcher and joined with the others on the long boat ride to the Nagara.18

  Surprisingly, the Japanese were still full of fight. They had one remaining carrier task force, Hiryu, which had pulled far ahead of the other three and thus was not seen by the American dive-bombers. Even while Nagumo was making the unenjoyable boat ride to his new flag headquarters, orders were issued by his chief of staff for Hiryu to attack the enemy carriers. By eleven A.M. eighteen Japanese dive-bombers had lifted off deck and by a stroke of good luck managed to find flying ahead of them several of the planes from Commander Leslie’s Yorktown squadron and followed them home, the distance between the two fleets having now closed to 110 miles.

  Admiral Fletcher was on his bridge studying a chart when an aide told him, “The attack is coming in, Sir!” Fletcher, who like everyone else had been alerted fifteen or twenty minutes earlier by a radar sighting, continued at his chart work. “Well,” he said, “I’ve got on my tin hat. I can’t do anything else now.” The returni
ng flight of Commander Leslie had already been waved off to either join the overhead combat patrol or land on the other carriers and the Yorktown began to take violent evasive measures.

  The fighter patrol flying over Yorktown did yeoman’s work that early afternoon, destroying or crippling ten of the eighteen enemy dive-bombing planes; antiaircraft fire from cruisers and destroyers shot down another two. Six, however, came through and that was enough to cause serious and gruesome damage. A doctor aboard the Yorktown reported going onto the flight deck not long after the attack and passing a gun emplacement: “A pair of legs attached to the hips sat in the trainer’s seat. A stub of spinal column was hanging over backwards. There was nothing else remaining. The steel splinter shield was full of men, or rather portions of men, many of whom were not identifiable. Blood was everywhere. I turned forward and saw great billows of smoke rising from our stack region. We were dead in the water.”19 Three Japanese bombs had struck the big ship in less than a minute, one of them actually falling right down the smokestack, setting fires from soot and paint. So many boilers were knocked out by deep exploding bombs that the Yorktown’s speed slowed to six knots, then she went dead. Fletcher promptly transferred his flag to the cruiser Astoria because, like Nagumo on the Akagi, the Yorktown’s communications and radar had been put out of business.

  Within an hour and a half after the initial attack, however, a Herculean effort by engineers and damage-control parties got the big ship up and running again at twenty knots, all big fires out, her radar repaired, and already refueling and launching planes. No sooner had these happy events transpired than radar picked up another flight of Japanese planes about twenty minutes away. These were a flight of ten torpedo bombers from Hiryu, and even though the fighter cover from Yorktown knocked down six of them, four got through. Two of their torpedoes missed, but two did not, and thus the ship was soon to be doomed. People aboard later recorded that it seemed as if the Yorktown was lifted a foot or more out of the water. All power was lost, the rudder was jammed, and the ship took on an immediate seventeen-degree list. Twenty minutes later the list had increased to twenty-six degrees and the captain, Elliott Buckmaster, fearing that the Yorktown would capsize with all aboard, ordered abandon ship. Some of the thousands of men who took to the water seemed amazingly cheerful, considering what they had just been through, calling out “Taxi! Taxi!” to the rescue boats from the destroyers and singing “Beer Barrel Polka.”20

  Others, however, suffered immensely, especially those many who had been wounded and were now weak and floundering in the water, and most everyone was covered by a thick and nauseating black slime of fuel oil, which could not be scrubbed away with soap and water. Captain Buckmaster remained aboard the Yorktown alone, wandering among the bodies, trying to find anyone alive, which he did not. He went down into the hangar deck to see how bad the damage was and found it likely fatal. But unlike the suicide-prone Japanese captains, Buckmaster had no intention of going down with the ship if he could help it and, after finding out everything he could, he summoned a whaleboat from a destroyer to take him off.*

  While this was going on, Spruance on the Enterprise began launching a strike of his own. He had always suspected there was a fourth Japanese carrier and the attack on Yorktown had just proved it. Now one of the Yorktown’s search planes, sent out earlier, reported back the position of the Hiryu and her complement of battleships, cruisers, and destroyers. Meantime, Spruance contacted Fletcher asking if there were any further instructions for him. Fletcher, aboard the cruiser and now having lost his second carrier (the first was the Lexington in the Battle of the Coral Sea), messaged back, “None. Will conform to your movements,” thereby effectively turning over command of the battle to Spruance. Using the same successful dive-bombing attacks they’d employed that morning, pilots from Spruance’s Enterprise and Hornet soon had the Hiryu in uncontrollable flames from four direct hits as the sun sank in the west over the hard, gray Pacific Ocean.

  Thus went the Battle of Midway on June 4, 1942. By shortly after dawn next day, all four Japanese carriers, which had formed the backbone of the Pearl Harbor attack, lay on the ocean floor, three miles beneath the surface. Like the commanders of the Akagi and the Soryu, the captain of the Hiryu went down with his ship, along with the division commander, Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi, who was said to be favored as Yamamoto’s successor. These two lashed themselves to the Hiryu’s bridge in order not to be floated away when she sank. As the last of the eight hundred or so survivors of the Hiryu began departing the burning and sinking carrier, Yamaguchi declared to them that he was “solely responsible” for the loss of the ship, and that they must live to fight again another day, “for His Majesty, the emperor.” To his staff, who pleaded to remain with him, Yamaguchi said the same thing. Then they all drank a silent toast from a water pitcher.21 The captain of the Hiryu tried to persuade the admiral to leave the ship, but Yamaguchi’s only reply was, “The moon is so bright in the sky!” The captain thought about it for a moment, then said, “We shall watch the moon together,” and strapped himself onto the bridge beside his commander.22 There is little doubt that the captain of the Kaga would likewise have committed himself to a watery hara-kiri, but he had been killed on his bridge in the first American dive-bomb attack that morning.*

  Four hundred miles to the east, Yamamoto with his vast and powerful fleet of surface ships received the news of Nagumo’s annihilation with surprising composure. In fact, he remarked only “Ah so,” and resumed the game of chess he was playing with one of his staff officers. Concluding the game an hour and a half later, he calmly ordered the two small carriers then attacking Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians to sail southwest and join with the Nagumo force. Almost as an afterthought he instructed the Midway invasion force to turn around, and also to send up its two small carriers to the Midway scene.23 Yamamoto must have been thinking that when those four carriers arrived, along with his own gargantuan battlefleet, he would have enough forces to deal with the Americans.

  Meantime, Nagumo had also composed himself and was itching for revenge. Always a “big gun ship” sailor he still had a number of undamaged battleships and cruisers of his own to give Fletcher and Spruance a taste of their own medicine—if he could get in range of them, especially at night when their planes could do him no harm. So he ordered the remains of his striking force to head east at full speed to challenge the U.S. fleet.

  Problem for the Japanese was that Spruance wasn’t having any of it. He knew they had highly perfected night-fighting capabilities and that his cruisers were no match for their battleships. Accordingly, he retired eastward, out of harm’s way, but just far enough so that the following day he could return to the Midway battle area in case the Japanese somehow went on with their intended invasion of the island. Also there had been reports of a fifth Japanese carrier, after some Midway-based planes went out late to see what they could catch and found a number of Japanese fighters and bombers still circling around the area where the Hiryu was experiencing her final death rattle. It turned out that these were only the remnants of the Hiryu’s own fighter cover and the few returning planes from the Yorktown strike, hovering pathetically over their stricken mother ship with nowhere else to go until their fuel ran out.

  Yamamoto, meanwhile, was having second thoughts about his plan to get at the U.S. fleet. It would take several days for the carriers from the Aleutians operation to arrive and, during that time, they would have been subjected to all sorts of bombing from Midway, submarines, and probably from Spruance too. So Yamamoto reluctantly ordered a general withdrawal westward, back toward Japan. As with Nagumo’s staff, there were angry and hysterical protests and one officer demanded to know, “How can we apologize to the emperor for this defeat!” Yamamoto quieted them down, saying evenly, “I am the only one who must apologize to His Majesty.”

  That night Nagumo’s ships plowed all over hell and back where they thought the Americans would be and, finding nothing but dark ocean, finally retired northwestward. The
re was much hand-wringing among Nagumo’s staff over this. One officer went around saying they should all commit hara-kiri and another foolishly suggested that they should take the big battleships and shell Midway, leaving themselves naked against air strikes from both the island and Spruance’s fleet, as well as from submarine attacks. He was quickly disabused of the notion by more senior officers. In any case he conformed to Yamamoto’s orders and began the general retreat westward.

  Next day brought the first major American tragedy of the battle. Even after all the damage that had been done to the Yorktown, her captain, Buckmaster, still thought there was a slim chance to save her. Late in the afternoon of June 4, the destroyer Hammann tied up alongside and work began with an all-volunteer damage-control party of 29 officers and 141 enlisted men to try to correct the terrible list by counterflooding and pumping from the Hammann’s electric power. Just maybe, if they could get her upright and stabilized, she could be towed back to Pearl and repaired. Meantime, Captain Buckmaster boarded, intending to identify all the dead and conduct a funeral service at sea.

  But this was not to be, for while the damage-control party made good headway all day on June 5, and had begun to correct the list, the next day a Japanese submarine sighted the Yorktown drifting helplessly and ducked under the destroyer screen to fire four torpedoes at the big carrier. One missed, one hit Hammann amidships, breaking her almost immediately in half with a terrible loss of life, and the other two torpedoes went underneath the destroyer to slam into the Yorktown’s hull.