Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942

by Ian W. Toll

  The young Spruance had been doe-eyed and slightly built, but with age he developed a more formidable bearing. He was a reserved man who smiled little, but he did not (like Ernest King) come across as cold or arrogant. He kept himself fit with long daily hikes, holding a fast, steady pace. He did so even while at sea, by walking endless circuits of the deck of his flagship. Spruance has often been described as “cerebral,” and the adjective is fitting—he was a naval intellectual who had read deeply into the art of war at sea in all its aspects. He communicated with penetrating clarity, both verbally and in writing; he asked questions and absorbed the full meaning of the answers he received; he was quick to grasp all the elements of any assignment given him. A navy doctor, upon first meeting Spruance, “saluted a trim, perhaps underweight, average-height officer . . . his face deeply tanned, strikingly calm, almost a poker face. He had extraordinary piercing blue eyes that seemed to see and read your very thoughts.” He was, added the doctor, “a true Spartan in every sense.”

  Like many of history’s great sea warriors, Spruance was prone to seasickness. But he never regarded the ailment as more than a nuisance. Standing on his bridge, his ship laboring in heavy seas, he might suddenly approach the rail and launch the contents of his stomach over the side, and then go on about his business as if nothing had happened. He had a valuable quality of endurance and durability while serving at sea, never succumbing to the sort of physical or nervous exhaustion that claimed so many other commanders (and that had just landed Halsey in the hospital). Like every career officer of his vintage, Spruance had rotated through seagoing assignments and shore billets, but he much preferred to serve at sea. He would accept the burden of coming ashore, as Nimitz’s chief of staff, without enthusiasm but also without complaint.

  Later in the war, Spruance and Halsey’s careers would remain closely intertwined. In 1944 and 1945, the two admirals would alternate in the Pacific’s top seagoing command—that of commander of the Third Fleet, which was designated the Fifth Fleet whenever Spruance held the post. Halsey would be far better known to the American public, and he would attain the exalted five-star rank of “Fleet Admiral,” an honor Spruance equally deserved but never received. But the officers and men of the fleet would rate Spruance as the more reliable and effective of the two leaders, a judgment that has been largely ratified by historians of the Pacific War.

  In May 1942, however, Spruance was still a wild card. The crew of the Enterprise regarded the loss of their beloved Admiral Halsey not only as sad but disconcerting. Who was this slim cruiser commander, this junior admiral who had never flown an airplane or skippered a carrier? Naturally, wrote dive-bomber pilot Clarence Dickinson, “the men in the ship were piecing together their various scraps of information about this man with two stars on his collar. Would he be as ready as Admiral Halsey to put us into battle?” Spruance was seen out on the flight deck for hours each day, pacing for exercise. As he walked, he beckoned other officers to walk alongside him. Though Spruance could certainly “walk the legs off any man on the ship,” he used those long miles of walking and talking to educate himself. “We saw with satisfaction,” wrote Dickinson, “that this man whose flag flew overhead asked questions and listened.”

  The Yorktown, having been ordered to make her way back to Pearl Harbor as quickly as her condition would allow, crept into the ship channel on the afternoon of May 27. She had made 20 knots of sustained speed, and could dial up 30 knots to launch and recover planes. Her elevators were working normally, and her flight operations were unimpeded. The hole in her flight deck had been patched over so neatly that no one could have guessed, by looking down on the ship from above, that she had been hit by a Japanese bomb. The only sign of her suffering was a long oil slick trailing in her wake, the result of the fuel tank ruptured by the blast force of one of the Japanese dive-bombers’ near misses. As she limped into the crowded harbor, the fleet welcomed her home with an ovation of steam whistles and sirens.

  The Yorktown had been ordered directly into Drydock No. 1. The huge caissons (gates) closed behind her, and the pumps began expelling water into the harbor. The carrier settled onto the concrete blocks, and the lowering waterline gradually revealed the gaps in her hull plates where rivets had been torn out. Nimitz pulled on a pair of waders and descended to the dry-dock floor, a long entourage of officers following behind him. Slogging through water knee-deep, the great gray, oil-streaked shape of the hull looming above him, he scrutinized the damage and listened to the engineers.

  According to one of the many myths of the Battle of Midway, the engineers asked Nimitz for three months to repair the Yorktown, and Nimitz grandly replied that they must finish the job in three days. The truth is more nuanced and less cinematic. It was not Nimitz’s style to demand the impossible of men who had been working to the utmost limit of their physical and mental capacities since the first day of the war. It was enough to make his priorities understood. When the CINCPAC told the repair party, “We must have this ship back in three days,” he had already been advised that he could have her. The repair superintendent and a small team of engineers had been flown out to the carrier the day before her arrival, and had already made their assessment. No, the Yorktown did not require three months of work (as Admiral Fitch had apparently predicted). She would not even need to return stateside to have the repairs done. Pearl Harbor could have her as good as new in a month—and in a pinch, she could be patched up and sent back to sea in three days. They would meet the deadline not by completing the needed repairs quickly, but by not doing them at all. Rather than repairing each ruptured seam, the yard would simply weld a single enormous steel plate over her wounds. As for the internal bulkheads which had buckled, they would be reinforced with heavy wooden beams. It was an interim patch-up job rather than a proper restoration of the ship, but the Yorktown would be battleworthy for the coming campaign.

  The yard put 1,400 men on the job. They worked in shifts, night and day, with floodlights rigged at night in defiance of the blackout. Some went sleepless for forty-eight hours. Hundreds of the ship’s crew were pressed into service, going without relief or liberty. At the same time that she was repaired, the carrier had to be reprovisioned, having consumed all her victuals with the exception of a few powdered eggs, powdered milk, and pasta. In those three days, Otis Kight recalled, the Yorktown “did a humongous amount of resupplying.” Early on the morning of May 29, water began surging back into Drydock No. 1, and the patched-up carrier was lifted off the blocks and floated free. At 11 a.m. the gates opened and she was towed to her berth, no longer leaking oil.

  The crew of the Enterprise was denied liberty during the carrier’s brief stay in her berth. All hands worked at provisioning the ship. Food and provisions were lifted aboard from lighters. Ammunition was hoisted onto the ship and secured in her magazines. Fueling lines filled her tanks. Teams of men unpacked machine-gun rounds from their crates and inserted them into ammunition belts. The work went on all night, with the ship illuminated by floodlights. On the 27th, Admiral Nimitz came aboard and presented medals to several white-clad aviators and sailors, while the ship’s company stood to attention and the Marine Guard presented arms.

  Though all the carriers and their escort ships had been long at sea, few officers or men were granted liberty during their brief stopover at Pearl. Even those who were allowed to leave their ships were largely confined to base, and many of the aviators were sequestered at other bases on Oahu. The Hornet’s dive-bomber squadrons flew into Ewa Field. Upon descending from their planes, the airmen were told that they would be confined to base for the duration of their stay. Other members of the Hornet’s crew were let loose in Honolulu the day they flew in, but the following night they were all recalled: “All liberty cancelled. Report at once to the ship.” The Enterprise pilots moved into the Royal Hawaiian Hotel on Waikiki and devoted their liberty to a bout of hard drinking, but they too were summoned back to base early.

  Fear of leaks undoubtedly explained those curious
restrictions. The fleet was pulsating with rumors about the pending operation, and much of the scuttlebutt was apparently on the mark. It was obvious from the hurried provisioning and loading of the ships that something big was about to happen. Ordnanceman Kernan recalled that the entire crew of the Enterprise knew in advance that a large Japanese fleet was to attack Midway, that “the strategy and tactics for the coming battle were learnedly discussed by the admirals of the lower deck, who were, on the whole, as always, of the opinion that the officers would screw it up.” Robert Casey, being a civilian, was permitted to leave his ship and hitchhike into Honolulu. While there he spoke to an army colonel who informed him that army pilots had been standing watches in their cockpits, and that an air attack on Oahu was expected at any time. The colonel “had it on good authority that an advance detachment of the Japanese navy, complete with carriers, battleships and transports, had been sighted off Midway.” Casey correctly dismissed the report as “cockeyed”—the Japanese fleet would not be sighted for several more days—but the focus on Midway was dead to rights.

  As the rumors circulated, a pervasive sense of foreboding settled over the American fleet. Without knowing all the particulars of the coming battle, many assumed that they would be heavily outnumbered by the enemy. “As usual we seem to be holding the short end of the stick, this time shorter than usual,” wrote Casey in his diary. “We muster carriers, cruisers, and about half a dozen destroyers to face one of the biggest fleets ever turned loose on the Pacific. An armada that rates as a good half of the Jap fleet and we’re meeting it as usual with a fly swatter and a prayer.”

  The Yorktown air group, having suffered heavy losses in Coral Sea, was largely reorganized and rebuilt in the week before battle. Squadrons were cobbled together with sundry planes and newly trained pilots who happened to be on hand at Pearl. Saratoga’s Bombing Three (VB-3) replaced Yorktown’s Scouting Five (VS-5), which had lost too many planes and aircrew to remain viable. A new fighter squadron, Fighting Three (VF-3), absorbed several of the planes, pilots, and mechanics of VF-42, which had served on the Yorktown since late 1941. A newly constituted Torpedo Three (VT-3) replaced Torpedo Five (VT-5), which also went ashore for a period of rest and training.

  Jimmy Thach, skipper of the new Fighting Three, had become a lonely evangelist for the F4F Wildcat. He was one of the few American fighter pilots (Jimmy Flatley was another) to say outright that the F4F, if handled properly, was superior to the Zero. The key was to match the Wildcat’s strengths against the Zero’s weaknesses. He believed that the Americans were better gunners, and were armed with better guns. To ensure that the guns could be brought to bear on a Zero in aerial combat, it was essential that the American pilots conserve altitude before engaging the enemy, and they must fight as a team, relying on wingmen to shoot pursuers off their flanks. His formation maneuver, the “Thach weave,” would prove highly effective in aerial combat.

  Thach’s squadron was being equipped with a new version of the Wildcat, the F4F-4, which had folding wings. Because it occupied less space on the hangar deck, each carrier could accommodate twenty-seven fighters, nine more than before. But there was a cost—the F4F-4’s .50-caliber machine guns fired only for twenty-two seconds before ammunition was expended, down from forty seconds on the earlier version of the plane. The sacrifice of precious firepower on the eve of the big showdown was considered an ominous development.

  Lieutenant E. Scott McCuskey, a veteran fighter pilot of VF-42, remembered “a profound feeling of doom. This whole situation looked desperate. Admiral Nimitz was throwing everything he had against the superior Japanese force approaching Midway Island—including the battle-damaged Yorktown.” McCuskey expected to be ordered to cover the low-altitude approach of the obsolete Devastators, and he did not like the Wildcats’ chances against the Zeros at low altitude. “I had been shocked by the performance of the Zeros in the Coral Sea,” said McCuskey. “They had flown around me like a swarm of bees.”

  Some of the rookies were barely out of flight training and had only a few hours of flight time in the planes to which they would be assigned. Clayton Fisher, a dive-bomber pilot on the Hornet’s Bombing Squadron Eight, had flown the SBD Dauntless for the first time in late March, just two months earlier. He was twenty-two years old. “It’s hard to describe the mental pressure we were all under at that time,” he said. “You know you were going into a battle completely outnumbered. . . . How many of us would survive?” Sequestered at Ewa, Bombing Eight’s airmen finagled a few bottles of whiskey, and a drunken wrestling match turned ugly when punches were thrown. Fisher wrote home, as they all did. He mulled over the prospect that it was the last letter he would ever write, as they all did. “I was worried and just plain scared,” he confessed. “Nobody wants to die.”

  But it was the torpedo squadrons who had the most to fear in the looming struggle. They knew perfectly well that their lumbering TBD Devastators were overdue for retirement. Flying into the heart of an enemy task force at a little over 100 knots, a few hundred feet above the sea, they would be cold meat for the Zeros. The Devastator’s successor, the Grumman TBF Avenger, was just then entering the fleet—a few would actually operate from Midway in the upcoming battle. But the carriers would sail with the older aircraft. A strong fighter escort might provide some hope, but the Battle of the Coral Sea had revealed that the Americans had much to learn about keeping air groups together while outbound to an enemy target.

  The Hornet’s Torpedo Eight was skippered by Lieutenant Commander John C. Waldron, a lean, hatchet-faced South Dakotan, bronzed by long exposure to the tropical sun. At forty-one years old, he was one of the older flyboys in the carrier squadrons, but he kept himself in superb physical shape with vigorous daily calisthenics routines. Waldron often led his airmen in group exercises on the flight deck while at sea, to the amusement of the Hornet’s crew. Many of Torpedo Eight’s pilots were raw ensigns, barely out of flight school. When Ensign George Gay and his fellow newcomers joined the squadron shortly before the Battle of Midway, none had ever carried a torpedo on a plane before, let alone dropped one on a target. They were ludicrously unprepared, and they knew it. “Quite a few of us were a little bit skeptical and leery,” Gay later said, “but we’d seen Doolittle and his boys, when they hadn’t even seen a carrier before, and they took the B-25s off, [and] we figured by golly if they could do it, well we could too.”

  With so many inexperienced men in the squadron, and so little opportunity for training flights in the rushed prelude to the battle, Waldron conveyed as much knowledge as he could in daily classroom sessions. He chalked out diagrams on a blackboard, and then posed questions. “After asking a question,” wrote Ensign Fred Mears, another of Torpedo Eight’s rookies, “the skipper had a characteristic way of leering out of the corner of his eyes at the squadron, his head cocked, his mouth open in a silly, almost idiotic, fashion. Suddenly he would snap his mouth shut like a trout after a fly, straighten his head, and begin to stroke his chin, staring at them from under his bushy eyebrows and beseeching the answer.” The aircrews discussed the finer points of target leads, angles of attack, fighter evasion tactics, antiaircraft defense, and how to escape an enemy task force after dropping a torpedo. Waldron invited them to play the devil’s advocate, to probe for flaws in his reasoning. “Then,” wrote Mears, “in a few masterful sentences he proves definitely that his theory is the only one which could be correct. This process keeps the pilots on the alert and rivets in their minds the point he is trying to get across.”

  Waldron took care to convey confidence, to assure his men that they were the best torpedo squadron in the fleet, and even to guarantee that the squadron would score hits on the Japanese carriers in the coming battle. But he also emphasized that they should arrange their personal affairs and write letters to their families, “just in case some of us don’t get back.”

  NIMITZ’S ORDERS TO HIS TASK FORCE COMMANDERS began famously: “In carrying out the tasks assigned . . . you will be governed by the princ
iple of calculated risk, which you shall interpret to mean the avoidance of exposure to attack by superior enemy forces without good prospect of inflicting, as a result of such exposure, greater damage to the enemy.” The orders included very specific information about the Japanese plan, and as officers throughout the fleet perused them, there was much speculation about the source of the intelligence. Some assumed that the Americans must have a “mole” in Japan. “That man of ours in Tokyo is worth every cent we pay him,” remarked an Enterprise officer to Layton.

  Late on the morning of May 28, Task Force 16 put to sea. The antisubmarine nets at the harbor entrance opened, and the long line of ships began filing down the “slot.” The destroyers went first, then the cruisers, finally the Enterprise and Hornet. The gunners at Fort Weaver were practicing antiaircraft drill, and the angry black bursts hung in the air as the task force steamed past. Admiral Halsey watched the scene from his hospital window, as the ships passed one by one off Hospital Point. Mears recalled watching from the flight deck of the Hornet and feeling “amazed at the size of our force and at the way the cruisers and destroyers were boiling around the sea in all directions about us. The Hornet itself wheeled sharply once or twice, and the flat surface of the flight deck made a crazy angle with the horizon.” When the planes flew out from Oahu, Mears noted that they were so numerous “the sky seemed to be filled with them.”

  The task force turned northwest, and on each ship an announcement was made to the crew. On the Hornet, a voice on the loudspeaker said only, “We are going out to intercept a Jap attack on Midway.” The task forces would rendezvous at “Point luck,” 32 north by 173 west, about 300 miles northeast of Nagumo’s expected position at daylight on June 4. Spruance’s message, as usual, eschewed any effort at memorable oratory; he stuck to the cold hard facts:

  An attack for the purpose of capturing Midway is expected. The attacking force may be composed of all combatant types, including four or five carriers plus transports and train vessels. If the presence of [Task Forces 16 and 17] remains unknown to the enemy, we should be able to make surprise flank attacks on the enemy carriers from a position northeast of Midway. Further operations will be based on the result of these attacks, damage inflicted by Midway forces, and information of enemy movements.