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

by Ian W. Toll

  The first group came in low, from the south, directly onto the Japanese carriers’ bows—six new navy TBF Avenger torpedo planes, flying into combat for the first time ever, and four army B-26 medium bombers from Midway. Both flights were armed with torpedoes. On the Japanese ships, trumpets were blown to alert the crews. A swarm of about thirty Zeros came down to intercept, and battered the intruders with their 20mm guns. All but one of the Avengers were sent spinning into the sea. Ensign Albert K. Earnest, the sole survivor, said of the Zeros: “There were so many of them they were getting into each other’s way. You couldn’t help but be impressed by how maneuverable they were.” The B-26s fared only slightly better, because they were brawny enough to absorb more punishment. Three of the six managed to launch their torpedoes, but made poor drops—too far from their targets, with inadequate lead—and the Japanese carriers easily maneuvered to evade the incoming tracks. One of the shot-up B-26s seemed to bore directly in for the Akagi’s bridge—the pilot apparently knew his plane was finished, and tried to take some of the enemy’s reigning brass with him to the afterlife. Nagumo and his staff, astounded by the suicidal blitz, ducked for cover. But at the last second before impact, the big twin-engine bomber veered off, missing the flagship narrowly, and splashed into the sea.

  Yamamoto had ordered that a reserve strike be kept on board in case enemy aircraft carriers should suddenly materialize on Kido Butai’s exposed port flank, but Nagumo had received no sighting reports and expected none. His reconnaissance planes had been aloft for nearly three hours. Radiating north and east like the spokes of a wheel, they had reached the end of their outbound flights, turned on their dog legs, and most were now due to turn back toward home. It was theoretically possible, but not likely, that they would find enemy ships while flying their return legs. Nagumo, therefore, had no reason to believe American ships were in the vicinity. The near miss of the dying B-26, however, seems to have aroused him to the need to put Midway’s air force out of action. The Nakajima Type 97 (“Kate”) torpedo planes of the second strike were armed with torpedoes for anti-ship operations. If they were to attack Midway instead, they must be rearmed with Type 80 land bombs. At 7:15 a.m., Nagumo gave the order: “Planes in second attack wave stand by to carry out attack today. Reequip yourselves with bombs.”

  On the hangar decks, the hard-run armorers again sprang into action, and started the intricate process of removing torpedoes and attaching bombs to the bellies of the aircraft. The task would require at least an hour and a half.

  No sooner was the order given than one of the search planes reported a contact. The cruiser Tone’s No. 4 floatplane, which had flown a heading of 100 degrees from the Japanese force, radioed at 7:28 a.m.: “Sighted what appears to be the enemy composed of 10 (ships), bearing 10 degrees, distance 240 miles from Midway, on course 150 degrees, speed 20 knots.” Petty officer Hiroshi Amari, the pilot, had not mentioned carriers, and it was possible he had spotted a surface force which could pose no immediate threat at that range. On the other hand, the possibility that Tone No. 4 had stumbled across the outer screening vessels of a carrier task force could not be lightly dismissed. At 7:58, Amari reported that the enemy ships had changed course to 80 degrees, and Nagumo shot back: “Advise ship types.”

  This initial sighting report was too vague to be of much use to Nagumo, and it was very possibly mistaken. What did “ten enemy surface units” mean? Were there any enemy carriers? The reported location was off Amari’s assigned search line. Six months of naval war, and the Battle of the Coral Sea in particular, had given ample reason to distrust initial contact reports. Nonetheless, Nagumo ordered the plane crews to cease rearming the reserve strike. If subsequent contact reports persuaded him that an American carrier was within striking range, he needed those planes armed with anti-ship ordnance. So Nagumo hesitated, and awaited further information.

  To suspend rearming was one thing; to reverse the rearming and rush the reserve strike up the elevators to be launched against the strange ships in the northeast was another. Nagumo did not choose the latter, more aggressive course of action, and for that he has been pilloried by generations of historians on both sides of the Pacific. Certainly, with the clarity offered by hindsight, Nagumo’s best option was to launch an immediate strike, with whatever airplanes he had on hand—even if that meant sending torpedo planes armed with land bombs, and even if Tomonaga’s planes returning from Midway found the flight decks congested, and were forced to ditch at sea. But at 7:45 on the morning of June 4, Nagumo did not have the benefit of hindsight. He had to act on the basis of what he knew. He knew that Midway’s airfields posed a threat to Kido Butai, and would continue to pose a threat until knocked out of action. He knew that Tomonaga’s force was inbound, with fuel tanks running dry, and needed clear flight decks on which to land. He knew, as of 7:40 a.m., that the Japanese fleet had a mere fourteen fighters flying combat air patrol, down from thirty-one earlier that morning—the ineffectual but troublesome attack of the Avengers and Marauders had forced the Zeros to consume fuel and expend ammunition, requiring them to land and replenish. On the other side of the ledger, he had a vague contact report from Tone No. 4, inconclusive as to ship types and very possibly mistaken. Less than a month earlier, in the Coral Sea, another Japanese carrier task force commander had been misled by a flawed contact report and sent a huge airstrike in the wrong direction. Based on what he knew and did not know, Nagumo could be forgiven for electing to await more definite information before deranging his entire order of operations.

  Nagumo’s scope of action was sharply limited by time and circumstances. His four flight decks were scarce resources, much in demand, and none could launch and recover airplanes simultaneously. The flight elevators were a bottleneck; the time required to rearm the reserve strike on the hangar decks was a bottleneck; the need to cycle the CAP was a bottleneck. Waves of attacking enemy planes had the effect of shrinking those bottlenecks, because they forced the Japanese carriers to maneuver evasively, closing their decks to flight operations, and because they forced the protecting Zeros to return to the carriers more frequently for fuel and ammunition.

  Nagumo’s entire naval career had led him to this point—his lofty post as commander of Kido Butai, the tepid support he had received from Yamamoto, the criticism he had absorbed for his supposed failures at Pearl Harbor; the delicate balance between the need to attack and the need to preserve his own force; his conviction that further airstrikes on Midway were needed to shut down that atoll’s air attacks on the Japanese fleet. Nagumo had many high-stakes decisions to make, and very little time to make them. He and his officers were stationed on Akagi’s cramped bridge, pressed cheek to jowl around a small chart table, and hemmed in by lockers and pedestal-mounted binoculars. Even when the flagship and her sisters were not maneuvering violently to avoid incoming enemy planes, there was a flood of new sightings of enemy aircraft and periscopes, some accurate and others bogus. In such an environment, without peace or privacy, the admiral must have found it difficult to hear himself think.

  At 7:53 a.m., Japanese lookouts spotted a group of sixteen incoming SBD Dauntless dive-bombers. This was a Midway-based U.S. Marine squadron, VMSB-241, led by Major Lofton R. Henderson. Most of Henderson’s marine flyboys had not seen the inside of an SBD until a week prior to the battle, and none had trained in dive-bombing tactics, so Henderson brought them down from 9,500 feet in a shallow dive. They pressed in bravely, flying through heavy flak, but the Zeros swooped in behind them and cut them up badly, splashing Henderson’s plane first. Several bombs narrowly missed the Hiryu, which was obscured by a curtain of high water spouts as the bombs detonated on impact with the sea, but she suffered no damage. The Zeros gave chase to the retreating Dauntlesses and shot down several more.

  Just as the surviving marine SBDs left the scene, fourteen B-17s under Lieutenant Colonel Sweeney soared high overhead at 20,000 feet. They had been vectored out to the west to bomb the same transports they had attacked the previous day, but
were subsequently instructed to turn east and attack Kido Butai. Lieutenant Commander Iyozo Fujita, a Zero pilot, began a steep climb to intercept the high-flying army bombers, but discovered that “their flying altitude was much too high for me.” Nor could Japanese antiaircraft fire reach that lofty height with any degree of success. The B-17s, unmolested, dropped their sticks of bombs on the carrier Soryu. Their aim was apparently much better than it had been the previous day, because several fell surprisingly close to the ship, though none hit. “Geysers of water engulfed the Soryu,” recalled Lieutenant Hiroshi Suzuki of the Akagi, “and since I couldn’t see the carrier, I thought it must have been hit very badly. However, after the water went back down it looked like the ship was okay.”

  As the hapless B-17s removed themselves from the picture, eleven SB2U Vindicator scout bombers of VMSB-241 attacked the battleship Haruna. No hits were scored, and three of the American planes were shot down. To add to the excitement, at 8:24 a.m., the periscope of an American submarine, the Nautilus, peeked up through the waves in the heart of the Japanese fleet. She was sighted by lookouts on several Japanese ships, and the alarm went out in plain language on the short-range radio. A destroyer moved in to depth-charge her, and a Zero swooped low to strafe her. She crash-dived.

  Thus far, the Japanese had brushed off every successive wave of attacking planes with seeming ease, and no American bomb or torpedo had so much as scratched any ship in the carrier force. “Frankly,” Fuchida said, “it was my judgment that the enemy fliers were not displaying a very high level of ability, and this evaluation was shared by Admiral Nagumo and his staff. It was our general conclusion that we had little to fear from the enemy’s offensive tactics.” On the other hand, said Takeshi Maeda of the Kaga, “We were very impressed by the enemy aviators’ sheer determination to fight, as they kept on coming to attack us.” No American squadron had yet arrived with a fighter escort. What if one did? Moreover, the Japanese had not yet seen a proper dive-bombing attack, the most dangerous anti-ship tactic in the American arsenal—but such an attack could arrive at any time. Maeda also realized that the relentless pressure was hindering flight operations, and would make it difficult to get the reserve strike off before Tomonaga’s return. He said: “To me things looked pretty dim.”

  Even in the midst of these aerial melees, the Japanese carriers had to cycle the CAP, so as to keep their air defenders fueled up and freshly armed. Kaga managed to land some of her planes right as the B-17 attack was beginning, though it required her to hold course into the wind. The first planes of Tomonaga’s force began arriving while American planes were still in the area and the carriers were still making evasive turns. They could do nothing but circle at low altitude and wait for the American attacks to disperse. None of the returning planes could stay aloft for long, as all were low on fuel—some were damaged, and some of the aircrews were injured. To allow them to land safely, the carriers would have to steam into the wind for at least fifteen minutes; another thirty minutes would be needed to move the aircraft down to the hangar decks.

  Such was the state of play at 8:20 a.m., when Tone No. 4 radioed: “The enemy is accompanied by what appears to be a carrier in a position to the rear of the others.” The report must have made Nagumo’s blood freeze. In the first six months of the war, Kido Butai had always dictated events, forced the enemy to react, inflicted heavy punishment, and then withdrawn before any real danger could materialize. There had been tense moments, as in the Indian Ocean, but this was an entirely new and perilous set of circumstances. For the first time in its renowned career, Kido Butai was compelled to react to events dictated by a foe.

  The cardinal rule of carrier warfare, the rule that ruled over all others, was to strike first. But Tomonaga’s planes had been orbiting patiently, their engines running on fumes, and if they were not recovered immediately, they would go into the sea. Japanese carrier doctrine did not allow for one group of airplanes to be warmed up forward of the crash barriers while another group was recovered. Nagumo was now forced to choose between two disagreeable alternatives. The first was to order Tomonaga’s entire strike to make a water landing (ditch their planes in the sea and hope to be rescued), in which case the reserve strike might have been ready to launch by about 9:15 a.m. But that would involve the certain loss of all orbiting planes, and the probable death of some portion of the aircrews. Nagumo chose his second option: to recover the morning strike and move them to the hangar decks, in which case the reserve strike would be ready to launch against the American fleet shortly after 10 a.m. With a bit of luck, Kido Butai would be left in relative peace for the next hour and a half.

  Below, in the hangar decks, the rearming of the reserve strike proceeded. When the exhausted mechanics received Nagumo’s order to switch the ordnance back to anti-ship types, maintenance petty officer Kaname Shimoyama recalled, “There was utter confusion on Akagi. . . . Inside our hangar there was very little room, and it was very hard to do this job. Our torpedoes also were very heavy and were manually loaded on our aircraft. In general, there were two groups of men; one group worked on the torpedoes, while the other group had the specific job of loading the torpedoes on the aircraft. When I looked at all this confusion, even though I was a low-ranking person, I thought, is it really wise to be doing this?” According to Lieutenant Suzuki, also on the Akagi, “It was very difficult to do this job while our ships were under attack, and there was a lot of noise around us.” Ensign Maeda recalled that their work was interrupted by the steep heeling of the deck while the Kaga was under air attack. Loading torpedoes onto planes was intricate work, and demanded to be done with care, but a voice on the loudspeaker ordered: “Speed up the loading of the torpedoes!” In the rush to complete the job, bombs removed from the airplanes were stored in racks on the hangar deck, rather than lowered back into the magazine on hoists. That oversight would pose a mortal hazard if the ship should be hit by an untimely enemy airstrike.

  At 8:45 a.m., Tone No. 4 radioed a new contact: “Sight what appears to be two additional enemy cruisers in position bearing 8 degrees, distance 250 miles from Midway.” Amari’s plane was now emerging over the edges of the second American carrier group, Task Force 16. Though Nagumo did not immediately realize it, these fragmentary reports were pointing to the presence of two separate enemy carrier task forces, both within striking range, offering the specter of a large and coordinated air attack on the Japanese flattops. Though his little floatplane was running low on fuel, Amari was ordered to remain on station above the American fleet and gather additional information about its composition. He was to turn on his radio transmitter and leave it on, so that Kido Butai’s radio receivers could use it for direction finding. This left Tone No. 4 vulnerable to interception by American planes, but the survival of one cruiser floatplane was not a priority in the big scheme.

  Amari did as he was told. At 8:55 a.m., he radioed another update. He had sighted ten American torpedo bombers on a heading that would take them directly to the Japanese fleet.

  FOR THE AMERICAN TASK FORCES, pushing north from Oahu through rough seas and biting winds, the first three days of June had brought cold, wet air and a gray, dirty sky. Throughout the long hours of daylight, the ships zigzagged prodigiously, a measure against enemy submarines. They steamed at 20 knots, rising and plunging through white-flecked chop, heeling sharply as they turned in unison every few miles. On Wednesday, June 3, the word was passed that Japanese carrier planes had attacked Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians. Admiral Spruance’s dispatch to Task Force 16 had forecast that the battle would pit “four or five” enemy carriers against the Enterprise, Hornet, and Yorktown. Robert Casey, a passenger on one of the task force’s faithful cruisers, did not like the odds. “I knew our limitations a couple of days ago,” he confided in his journal, “but it didn’t look then as if we should be called upon to monkey with more than three carriers. Our present position is what you might call interesting but unpromising.”

  That night, on the Hornet, the aviators o
f Torpedo Squadron Eight filed into their ready room and sat for Lieutenant Commander Waldron’s final briefing. “The approaching battle will be the biggest of the war and may well be the turning point also,” he told them. “It is to be known as the Battle of Midway. It will be a historical and, I hope, a glorious event.” Waldron projected an air of relaxed confidence, but Ensign Mears detected an undertone of cold realism. The skipper knew that his squadron was unseasoned and undertrained, and would fly into battle in slow, outdated airplanes. In all likelihood, they would arrive over the enemy fleet without a fighter escort, leaving them at the mercy of a swarm of deadly Zeros. Waldron’s closing speech sounded unnervingly like a valediction. “We have had a very short time to train,” he said, “and we have worked under the most severe difficulties. But we have truly done the best humanly possible. I actually believe that under these conditions, we are the best in the world. My greatest hope is that we encounter a favorable tactical situation, but if we don’t and worse comes to worst, I want each one of us to do his utmost to destroy our enemies. If there is only one plane left to make a final run-in, I want that man to go in and get a hit. May God be with us all. Good luck, happy landings, and give ’em hell.”

  Waldron urged them all to get a good night of sleep, but few aviators of any American squadron slept soundly that night. Ensign Gay recalled feeling “a little bit nervous, kind of like before a football game.” Warrant Officer Tom Cheek, one of the Yorktown’s fighter pilots, lay awake in his bunk and listened to the “faint vibration of machinery through the hull” and the “swish and hissing surge of water past the skin of the ship.” Clayton Fisher, dive-bomber pilot on the Hornet, wrote letters to his wife and mother before turning in, privately reflecting that his “odds of survival the next morning were minimal, even if we achieved our planned surprise attack on the Japanese carriers with all their experienced air groups.”