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

by Ian W. Toll

  The flyboys were shaken awake and sent to flight quarters in the small hours of the morning. Reveille for the torpedo aircrews was at 3 a.m. They pulled on their flight suits and filed down to the mess hall for coffee and breakfast. On the Yorktown they were served steak and eggs, much better than the usual fare, and one torpedo airman was overheard joking that it was a “feast for condemned men.” After eating they drifted back to their ready rooms, where the flight rosters were “grease-penciled on the Plexiglas schedule board.” Each aviator worked on his own navigational plotting board, and entered new data forwarded from AirPlot by teleprinter. He constantly checked and rechecked the position, course, and speed of the enemy fleet and of his own ship. He added corrections for the strength and direction of the wind, and for the magnetic deviations on his compass readings. He reckoned flight times and fuel consumption, and plotted his return course to “Point Option,” where he was to find his carrier at the end of his flight.

  Hours passed. New data churned out of the teleprinter, including a report of the PBY attack on the troop transportation group southwest of Midway. Clarence Dickinson, executive officer of Enterprise’s Scouting Six, recalled that the mood of his fellow aviators varied widely as they prepared to fly into battle: “Some were quiet, replying briefly, even curtly to any questions. Others were chattering. A few behaved, and with no pretense, as if this were just another day at sea.” Some dozed in their comfortable leather reclining chairs, while their colleagues sipped coffee and tinkered with their navigational solutions. The waiting seemed endless, and tension rose. “Five o’clock. Six o’clock. Seven o’clock,” wrote Dickinson. “Never as during those three hours had the men in those seven rows of chairs been so quiet. Yet the confidence was something one could feel. The squadron believed that when the carriers were found our group was good enough to put them on ice.”

  Before first light, the F4Fs of the combat air patrols took off, and ten scout bombers were sent off the Yorktown to fly search patterns to the north. The main airstrike was kept on deck, however—Fletcher had decided to close the distance on the enemy, and wait for a definite sighting report before sending the attack planes on their way. At 5:45 a.m., the task forces received word that a Midway-based PBY had sighted a small armada of Japanese planes winging in toward Midway from the northeast. “From that moment until they climbed into their cockpits,” Mears wrote of Torpedo Eight, “the pilots gobbled every sentence off the teletype.” They were on tenterhooks, awaiting a sighting report pinpointing the location of the Japanese carriers. Finally the order came, blared through the Enterprise and Hornet’s loudspeakers: “Pilots, man your planes!”

  The morning was fair, with fresh, cool air and a beautiful blue sky dotted with small, fleecy clouds. Visibility was superb.

  Task Force 16 turned southeast into the soft morning breeze and poured on speed to get wind across the deck. The aircrews filed out of their ready rooms in their flight suits—hands gloved, goggles pushed up on their foreheads, parachutes bouncing on their rumps—and made their way through the maze of close-parked gray-blue airplanes, each to his assigned “deck spot.” The Enterprise plane-pushers had spotted ten F4Fs to fly CAP, and twenty-two SBD dive-bombers to sortie against the enemy. The Wildcat engines were fired with explosive cartridges rammed into the starting system by a mechanic. The pilot hit the starter switch and the cartridge fired, bringing the big Pratt & Whitney radial engine to life. It was allowed to idle for several minutes at 1,000 rpm, warming itself. The pilots put on their oxygen masks and taxied forward in obedience to a hooded figure on deck. Upon receiving the signal for “wind up,” each fighter pilot pushed his throttle forward to the limit while holding foot pressure on the brakes to keep the plane rooted to its spot. A haze of blue exhaust fumes wafted toward the stern. A deck officer lowered a flag and the pilot released the brakes: the takeoff run began with a lurch and the plane accelerated toward the bow, its wheels rattling noisily along the teak planks. Its tail lifted, then its nose, and it was airborne.

  The screening cruisers and destroyers turned with the carriers and matched their speed, knifing into the oncoming waves, plunging and rolling, dropping their rails into the foam, kicking up spray at their sterns. The intersecting wakes of the fleet left intricate patterns on the sea. “It would seem that the carriers are sending up all they’ve got,” wrote Casey, as he watched from the deck of a nearby cruiser. “The sky over toward the starboard horizon is filling up with little black crosses. . . . It’s all spectacular and beginning to be thrilling. Few men, after all, have had a chance to look upon a spectacle like this. In the nature of things, few will look on anything like it again.”

  The Enterprise dive-bombers got aloft quickly, but the carrier’s plane-pushers were inexplicably slow to spot the next deckload, which would include the torpedo planes and ten Wildcats to fly with the outbound strike as a fighter escort. During each minute of the ensuing delay, the orbiting SBDs were burning precious fuel and progressively shrinking their flight radius. Meanwhile, the Enterprise radio shack intercepted Tone No. 4’s message to the Japanese fleet, revealing that the enemy was probably now aware of the presence of the American task forces. Spruance wisely chose to throw doctrine to the wind, and send the SBDs off without waiting for the rest of the strike to get aloft. The carrier signaled Lieutenant Commander Clarence “Mac” McClusky, Jr., the air group leader, by blinker light: “Proceed on mission assigned.”

  The dive-bombers coalesced into a single large formation—Bombing Six and Scouting Six, thirty-three planes in all—and set out on heading 231 degrees, where McClusky expected to find the enemy at distance of 142 miles. They flew in stepped-down, wedge-shaped sections of three planes each, with the sections stacked in a single integrated “Vee-of-vees” formation. Being dive-bombers, they climbed and climbed until they reached their cruising altitude, with the highest planes in the formation at 20,000 feet. “The visibility was excellent that day, as good as I have ever experienced,” wrote Lieutenant Dickinson. “Except for big, fleecy clouds there was nothing to mar it. We saw Midway Island while we were a hundred miles away. As we were flying almost four miles high there was a marvelous breadth of ocean within our view, and it was blue, as blue as a dye of indigo.”

  The Hornet’s launch went more smoothly, and the entire air group, under the command of Commander Stanhope C. Ring, was aloft by about 7:40 a.m. Traditional accounts held that Ring led the Hornet’s fifty-nine-plane strike group away on a heading of 240 degrees, the base course of the task force. But a convincing body of evidence suggests that he flew a heading of 265 degrees, almost due west—a course that would take the Hornet’s strike far north of the last reported position of the Japanese fleet. The issue remains controversial, and perhaps the truth will never be known. However, it is irrefutable that only one of the Hornet’s squadrons managed to find the enemy that day—and that squadron, Torpedo Eight, was annihilated. No battle report was filed by Ring, in violation of standing regulations. The omission was likely deliberate; Ring did not want to admit he had flown so far north of the last reported position of the enemy fleet.

  Earlier that morning, Yorktown had parted ways with her two sisters to recover her returning scouts at Point Option, some distance to the northeast. The diversion took her out of striking range of the enemy, and she had to steam southwest at 25 knots to rejoin Task Force 16. As a result, Fletcher did not begin launching his planes until 8:38 a.m., when the Enterprise and Hornet strikes were well on their way. Yorktown launched thirty-five aircraft, including six fighters, seventeen dive-bombers, and twelve torpedo planes. The SBDs of Bombing Three launched first, followed by the Devastators, which needed a full deck run to lift their heavy Mark 13 torpedoes into the air. The torpedo planes had orders to continue immediately on their outbound course toward the enemy, followed by the SBDs, and at last the fighters. The launch went smoothly, and all her planes were in the air by a few minutes after nine. The Yorktown air group was ordered to fly a course of 240 degrees to a distance
of 150 miles. If they had not located the enemy, they were to turn north and fly the reciprocal of Kido Butai’s known inbound course toward Midway. If all went well, the faster SBDs and fighters would overtake the torpedo planes and perhaps even arrive over the enemy ships simultaneously, allowing for a coordinated attack.

  The American strike, for better or worse, was airborne. By contrast with the Japanese carrier operations of that morning, it had been a chaotic and discombobulated process. Lieutenant Tomonaga’s 108-plane Midway attack force had required only fifteen minutes to rise en masse from the four flight decks of Kido Butai, and once aloft they had rendezvoused quickly and flown toward Midway in one huge, integrated formation. In June 1942, such a feat was simply beyond American capabilities. The Hornet and Enterprise had required a full hour to get their strikes in the air. Once aloft, they did not attempt to rendezvous; they did not even fly off in the same direction. Each air group took a different course according to their leaders’ independent and sharply varying navigation solutions. To confuse the picture further, none of the outbound groups managed to stay together. Many of the American planes would fail to find the enemy at all, and others would arrive over the Japanese fleet in small, splintered formations, rendering them vulnerable to the concentrated attention of the Zeros and the enemy antiaircraft gunners.

  For all of that, the American strike was in the air and on its way to the enemy. The enemy had not yet replied. As it would turn out, that single fact mattered more than any other.

  THE HORNET’S DAUNTLESSES began a long slow climb to altitude, straining to lift the weight of their 1,000-pound and 500-pound bombs. The SBD aircrews, wearing lightweight summer flight suits, shivered as the temperature in their cockpits dropped. Ice accumulated in their oxygen masks. The fifteen Devastators of Waldron’s Torpedo Eight cruised far below, at 1,500 feet—they did not have the fuel to make the climb while carrying their even heavier Mark 13 torpedoes, and at any rate they would attack the enemy fleet at low altitude. The entire air group had left the Hornet on an initial course of 265 degrees, but Waldron had disagreed with Ring’s navigational solutions, and shortly after departing the carrier he broke radio silence to urge Ring to turn south on heading 240 degrees. Ring either refused the request or did not copy the transmission, and Waldron banked to port to follow his own nose to the enemy fleet. His squadron turned with him. They flew in formation for about 100 miles. Waldron signaled the squadron to spread out in a scouting line, to increase their chances of sighting the enemy fleet. At about 9:15 a.m., several of the pilots saw black smudges against the sky on the horizon. In a few seconds, the gray figures of Japanese ships came into distant view. Waldron altered course and closed the Japanese fleet in a shallow glide.

  Ensign Gay recalled that Waldron had urged his men, before they climbed into their cockpits that morning, “not to worry about our navigation but to follow him as he knew where he was going. And it turned out just exactly that way. He went just as straight to the Jap Fleet as if he’d had a string tied to them.”

  To the Japanese lookouts, the squadron first appeared as a constellation of black specks, low on the northeast horizon, sunlight occasionally glinting off their wings. Their low altitude gave them away as torpedo planes. According to Fuchida, the mood among his shipmates darkened—though the Japanese fleet had thus far brushed off a series of attacks by many different kinds of planes, they had been lucky, and their luck could not last forever. But the carriers had just completed their recovery of the Midway strike, so they were free to maneuver evasively. They turned away from the sluggish TBDs, thus lengthening the time and distance the attackers would have to fly. The Zeros closed in from overhead, on all sides, executing wingovers and half-loops to line up their killing shots on the incoming American planes.

  Waldron had demonstrated temerity and skill in leading his squadron directly to the Japanese fleet, when Ring had taken the rest of the Hornet’s air group on a fool’s errand to the northwest. But Torpedo Eight now found itself in dire circumstances. Obsolete planes flown by unprepared pilots were approaching a powerful enemy fleet, in clear visibility, with no fighter escort and no dive-bombing attack to divert the attention of a swarm of superbly handled Zeros. Inevitably, Torpedo Eight’s attack has drawn comparisons to the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War, described in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s famous poem. Both would be celebrated as exhibitions of supreme valor against desperate odds. Both were tactically rash, a waste of young lives to no good purpose, and both would be blamed on inept decisions up the chain of command. (“Was there a man dismay’d? / Not tho’ the soldier knew / Some one had blunder’d.”) Waldron’s parting words in the Hornet’s ready room the previous evening were still fresh in Ensign Gay’s mind: “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.” Worse had most definitely come to worst, but like Tennyson’s light cavalrymen, it was “Their’s not to make reply, / Their’s not to reason why, / Their’s but to do and die.”

  The Zeros fired well-aimed salvos with their 20mm cannon, punching holes in the cockpit canopies, fuselages, and wings of the underpowered Devastators. One by one they caught fire, broke in pieces, blew up, or cartwheeled into the sea. “The Zeros that day just caught us off balance,” Ensign Gay later said in his debriefing. “We were at a disadvantage all around.” Waldron’s plane was struck in the fuel tank and burst into flames. Gay glimpsed the skipper as he stood up in his cockpit and tried to climb out, but there was not enough time, and his plane tumbled into the sea. Gay’s plane was hit several times, and Gay himself was struck in the arm by machine-gun fire, but he somehow survived the approach long enough to fly into range of the antiaircraft fire, and the Zeros peeled off. On Akagi’s flight deck, Fuchida recalled, “all attention was fixed on the dramatic scene unfolding before us, and there was wild cheering and whistling as the raiders went down one after another.”

  Gay bore in on the Soryu, launched his torpedo from 800 yards, and kept his aircraft headed right toward the fantail of the big carrier, into the teeth of heavy antiaircraft fire. The tracer lines reached up and past him, but his aircraft, he believed, was not hit. He cursed his feeble .30-caliber machine gun—a “pea shooter”—then pulled up and over the ship, narrowly missing the superstructure. He later recounted that as he flashed past the bridge, he “could see the little Jap captain up there, jumping up and down, raising Hell.” He dropped down on the other side of the ship and flew low, hoping to beat a lucky retreat, but another group of Zeros pounced on him and “shot my rudder control and ailerons out and I pancaked into the ocean. The hood slammed shut, I couldn’t keep the right wing up. It had hit the water first and snapped the plane in, and bent it all up and broke it up and the hood slammed shut and it was in the sprained fuselage. I couldn’t hardly get it open. That’s when I got scared. I was afraid I was going to drown in the plane.” Gay managed to clamber out onto his TBD’s one remaining wing, clutching his rubber life raft and seat cushion. He tried but could not pull his rear gunner out of the backseat before the sea closed over his airplane; then he dropped into the water and concealed himself as best he could behind his seat cushion.

  Soon the eagle-eyed Japanese lookouts spotted another group of black specks in the south, on Kido Butai’s port beam. This was Torpedo Six of the Enterprise, led by Lieutenant Commander Eugene Lindsey. As it flew into the outer circumference of the Japanese fleet, the squadron separated into two divisions and advanced on the bows of the nearest flattop, the Kaga. The four carriers turned in unison to starboard (north), presenting their sterns to the slow-approaching Devastators.

  “A stern chase is a long chase” was a centuries-old naval adage, and in this case it held—for although the slowest airplane could outpace the fastest ship, these particular airplanes were only about four times faster than the Japanes
e carriers. To execute an “anvil” attack on the fleeing flattops, it was not enough merely to catch them; the torpedo planes had to overtake their prey, to loop around them, and approach on both bows simultaneously. This stern chase would be a long and deadly chase, but the obsolete torpedo planes of VT-6 would have it easier than their colleagues of VT-8, for two reasons. First, the Zeros had bunched up on the northern perimeter of the fleet, where VT-8 had attacked, and had to fly about thirty miles south to intercept VT-6; and second, some of the Japanese fighters had apparently expended most of their 20mm ammunition on Waldron’s group, and would have to shoot more deliberately in this round. Even so, few of the hapless Devastators of VT-6 would survive the attack. Two aircraft of the division sent to the Kaga’s starboard bow managed to release their torpedoes, but the carrier easily dodged the incoming tracks. The second division, led by Lindsey himself, flew into a group of nine Zeros that swooped down and shot down four planes, including Lindsey’s. Five VT-6 planes survived the retreat; four landed safely on the Enterprise, while one ditched at sea—the aircrew was rescued some days later by a PBY.

  As the lucky few survivors of VT-6 sped away, the Japanese officers and crewmen must have felt relieved and at least relatively confident. Since seven that morning, they had seen a virtual air show of American warplanes—six different kinds of aircraft, including four different single-engine carrier-type planes, a twin-engine medium bomber, and a four-engine heavy bomber. Though the Japanese did not know it at the time, they had been attacked by airmen representing three branches of the American services—army, navy, and marines. They had been level-bombed, glide-bombed, and torpedo-bombed. They had caught their first glimpse of the Grumman TBF Avenger, and although the new torpedo plane’s combat debut had been none too impressive, it would inflict plenty of misery on the Imperial Japanese Navy in the three years to come. No Japanese ship had yet been scratched, and the Zeros had brushed off every successive wave of attackers while losing only a few planes.