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

by Ian W. Toll

  Even so, by interrupting flight operations and forcing a more rapid cycling of the CAP, the constant pressure of new air attacks had kept Kido Butai on its back foot. Within another twenty minutes or so, the first bombers would be lifted up on the elevators and spotted on the flight decks, and if the decks could be kept clear for about forty-five minutes, a powerful counterstrike could be launched against the American fleet, probably before 11 a.m. Until then, the Japanese carriers would remain in the treacherously vulnerable position of having their attack planes fueling and arming in their hangar decks.

  Most worrying to Admiral Nagumo and his officers, perhaps, was that Kido Butai had not yet been subjected to a proper dive-bombing attack. They knew that the SBD Dauntless dive-bomber was the most lethal carrier aircraft in the American inventory. Less than a month earlier, at Coral Sea, dive-bombing attacks had maimed the Shokaku and obliterated the Shoho. So the Japanese commanders must have asked themselves, where were the Dauntless squadrons, and what would happen if they appeared suddenly in the skies overhead?

  THIRTY-TWO SBDS FROM THE ENTERPRISE, the combined force of Scouting Six (under Lieutenant Wilmer Earl Gallaher) and Bombing Six (under Lieutenant Richard Halsey Best), had flown southwest from the task force at 231 degrees. After about a hundred miles, the air group leader, Lieutenant Commander McClusky, concluded he had passed the line of Nagumo’s advance on Midway. McClusky surmised that he was most likely to find the enemy to the northwest, and the two squadrons executed a right turn. Half an hour later, there was still no sign of the Japanese fleet. Fuel was low, and the risk was growing that none of the planes would make it back to the American task force. Shortly before 10 a.m., the squadrons turned again, this time to the east. Sharp-eyed pilots and gunners searched through the gaps in the clouds below, looking for ships or wakes—any telltale sign of the Japanese fleet. They were at 19,000 feet. Ensign Fred Mears of the Hornet later described the art of stalking an enemy fleet across a vast and unvarying seascape:

  Sometimes the carrier stack will stand out as the tiniest of regular smudges on the horizon. Sometimes the wake of a large vessel or the combination of several wakes forming straight white lines strikes the eye. A flash of sunlight reflection may give the force away, or the ships may suddenly emerge as small gray slivers on the water. Whenever there is a straight line or regular form on the water it can be taken as something more than the sea itself.

  At about five minutes to ten, McClusky spied a destroyer, later identified as the Arashi. She was south of Kido Butai, having chased and depth-charged the U.S. submarine Nautilus. She was knifing through the sea on a northward course, throwing mighty waves off her bows and leaving a long, frothing wake astern. Apparently her lookouts did not spot the bombers soaring far above. McClusky turned to follow her line of advance. Five minutes later, several pilots saw wakes in the sea about forty miles ahead—“thin, white lines; mere threads, chalk-white.” They flew on above the cumulus ceiling for a few minutes. As they approached a break in the clouds, the entire enemy fleet came into view beneath them, like a collection of toy boats on a pond. “Among those ships, I could see two long, narrow, yellow rectangles, the flight decks of carriers,” wrote Clarence Dickinson. “Apparently they leave the decks either the natural wood color or possibly they paint them a light yellow. But that yellow stood out on the dark blue sea like nothing you have ever seen. Then farther off I saw a third carrier.” Each of the flight decks was marked with a red hinomaru (the red “Rising Sun” disk) and Dickinson made a mental note to use it as a bull’s-eye.

  McClusky radioed the Enterprise: “This is McClusky. Have sighted the enemy.” He did not fly directly toward the enemy carriers, but led his thirty-two aircraft on a long detour around the enemy fleet to the northeast. He intended to attack with the sun behind them, hoping that it would conceal their approach and spoil the aim of the antiaircraft gunners. He nosed down slightly to pick up speed, and the rest of the formation followed his lead—the higher their airspeed, the better their chances against the enemy fighters they expected to encounter at any moment. They flew directly over several screening destroyers, but none of the Japanese lookouts raised an alarm, probably due to a combination of scattered cloud cover and the distraction afforded by yet a third wave of incoming torpedo planes boring in toward Kido Butai from the southeast, nearly 15,000 feet below.

  The new group was Torpedo Three of the Yorktown, led by Lieutenant Commander Lance E. Massey. Massey’s twelve lumbering airplanes were no better than those of VT-8 or VT-6, but VT-3 had the advantage of a fighter escort—six F4F Wildcats of VF-3 under Lieutenant Commander Jimmy Thach. Thach, one of the best fighter pilots in the U.S. Navy, had developed a group formation that he called the “beam defense” maneuver, which would later take the more popular name “Thach weave.” Now it was put into practice for the first time in the war, with results that must have come as a nasty surprise to the veteran Zero pilots who had grown accustomed to having their way with all types of American planes. The technique involved close cooperation between wingmen. When a pilot saw a Zero on his beam, approaching in a typical high side run, he simply banked his plane away from the attacker. His wingman, tipped off by the sight of the neighboring Wildcat turning toward him, turned toward the turning Wildcat and passed it in a weaving pattern. This brought the attacking Zero into his sights, setting up a head-on shot.

  Thach’s F4Fs were flying about 2,000 feet above and slightly behind Massey’s TBDs. Thach’s six fighters were beset by about fifteen Zeros, and Thach recalled thinking that not one of his aircraft would survive the fight. But the weave seemed to catch the Japanese pilots off balance, and for the first time in the battle, flaming and spinning Zeros were seen going into the ocean. “A number of them were coming down in a string on our fighters,” wrote Thach; “the air was just like a beehive. It didn’t look like my weave was working, but then it began to. I got a good shot at two of them and burned them. One had made a pass at my wing man, pulled out to the right and then came back. We were weaving continuously, and I got a head-on shot at him.”

  Tom Cheek, one of Fighting Three’s pilots, recalled his amazement at the Zero’s performance. When he fired on two, they rolled out of his sights and began to climb away. “Their climbing ability was stunning to watch, they were out of sight and mind in seconds as I rolled to the right, reversing course. . . . The thought struck home, this was not one to tangle with in a dogfight, at least not with an overweight F4F-4.”

  Massey’s Devastators droned gamely on toward Hiryu, the closest of the four carriers and the only one in range. Despite Thach’s gallant efforts, he could not draw all the Zeros away from VT-3. Perhaps a dozen swarmed on the torpedo planes and began sending them down into the sea in flames, one by one. No hits were scored by VT-3, while ten of twelve aircraft were shot down. “That first attack on us and the torpedo planes was beautifully coordinated,” Thach later said. “It was something I had to admire. It was beautifully executed. This was their first team and they were pros.”

  Far above, the Enterprise dive-bombing squadrons neared their pushover points. McClusky did not yet realize it, but by a lucky accident the seventeen SBDs of Yorktown’s Bombing Three were arriving on the scene at the same time, and from a different direction: east. The Japanese fleet, caught between two large waves of enemy dive-bombers, was utterly unprepared to repel the attack. No Zeros were at high altitude, having descended to fight off the torpedo planes. The four carriers of Kido Butai, in maneuvering to avoid the past hour’s successive attacks, had deranged their favored box formation and were now strung out in a ragged line, spreading the defending Zeros over a long axis, and diluting the concentration of the screening ships’ antiaircraft fire. In any event, it seems that no one in the Japanese task force even spotted the dive-bombers until they were screaming out of the sky, and by that time it was too late.

  McClusky’s division leaders signaled the moment by kicking their rudders back and forth, causing each plane’s tail to “wag.” T
he lead Dauntlesses in the formation nosed up in a stalled position and opened their flaps, then peeled off to one side and pushed over. They dived steeply, at a 70-degree angle, centering their optical bombsights on the flight decks of their chosen targets. It was 10:20 a.m. The Enterprise planes dived on the Kaga and the Akagi; Lieutenant Commander Maxwell F. Leslie’s Yorktown planes attacked the Soryu. “I was making the best dive I had ever made,” recalled Lieutenant Dickinson, who attacked the Kaga. “The people who came back said it was the best dive they had ever made. We were coming from all directions on the port side of the carrier, beautifully spaced.” The Kaga was tearing through the water at 28 knots, but her tormentors were numerous and plummeting down on her at an ideal angle. Thach, still fighting off Zeros while trying to shepherd the two remaining torpedo planes of VT-3 to safety, detected a “glint in the sun, and it just looked like a beautiful silver waterfall, these dive bombers coming down . . . I’d never seen such superb dive-bombing.”

  On the Kaga, crewmen on the flight deck were cheering the Zeros as they cut the torpedo planes to pieces. The antiaircraft gunners had depressed their weapons to the horizontal to fight off the low-altitude attack. One of the carrier’s pilots, standing on the catwalk, recalled that “one of our machine gun commanders pointed his baton to the sky and shouted something. When I looked up, several dive-bombers appeared between the clouds and were plunging down on us.” Several voices shouted: “Enemy dive-bombers!”

  The first group of Dauntlesses descended on her port quarter, and her captain, Jisaku Okada, ordered hard astarboard to send the big carrier into a clockwise turn. But the Kaga was slow to respond to her helm, and the SBDs made the needed corrections to keep the flight deck in their sights. The Japanese crew watched in dismay as the bombs separated from the bellies of the diving planes and fell directly toward them. The first three missed narrowly, throwing huge towers of water up on either side of the ship. But the next four hit in quick succession, two amidships and two forward. The results were cataclysmic. The carrier’s small superstructure was almost completely destroyed, killing most of the ranking officers, including Captain Okada. The island’s windows were blown out, its outer skin was stripped off, and its interior spaces were flooded with so much smoke that the survivors were driven out on deck. No one manned the bridge; no one was left at the helm. The forward elevator took a direct hit and was smashed downward, never to operate again. A bomb pierced the flight deck amidships and exploded in the crew’s quarters adjacent to the hangar, killing unknown scores (hundreds?) of men in a few seconds. Fuel tanks and munitions detonated on the hangar deck. Ensign Maeda sought cover under the flight deck near the stern. As the bombs struck, he shouted to some of his fellow pilots in their staterooms—“It is dangerous here, get the hell out!” As he climbed the ladders, he noticed the ship was taking on a dangerous list; then an explosion flung him to the deck and pierced his leg with shrapnel.

  Lieutenant Dickinson, whose bomb struck forward near the elevator, saw “the deck rippling and curling back in all directions exposing a great section of the hangar below. I knew the last plane had taken off or landed on that carrier for a long time to come.” Thach, still watching the scene from the cockpit of his Wildcat, saw pink and blue flames burst up through the Kaga’s flight deck: “I remember looking at the height of the flames from the ship and noticing that it was the same as the length of the ship—just solid flame going up, and, of course, there was a lot of smoke on top of that.”

  Soryu had just begun to turn into the wind to launch Zeros, and most of the crew was still looking in the direction of the still-developing attack of the torpedo planes, when lookouts shouted that Kaga was under attack. Heads turned, and stunned crewmen watched in horror as the Kaga’s flight deck erupted in a chain of massive explosions. Broken cloud cover overhead apparently concealed the final approach of Leslie’s Yorktown dive-bombers, but now they appeared through a hole in the clouds—one by one, evenly spaced, obviously about to push over. The antiaircraft guns were cranked up quickly and the frantic fire director tried to set up a firing solution, but as on the Kaga, there was simply not enough time. The Soryu swung hard to port, but the diving planes turned with her, and a moment later they began peeling off the formation, one by one, and pushing over into steep dives.

  The first bomb struck on the starboard side, forward, and caused the ship’s entire hull to lunge violently to port. Another landed almost dead center amidships on the flight deck and passed right through the wood and steel skin to detonate in the hangar deck. A third struck aft on the flight deck and made a blinding flash. Many of the men on deck were killed outright or blown overboard by the blast. Commander Hisashi Ohara, the ship’s executive officer, felt a wave of heat, not particularly painful, but realized that he must have been badly burned when men brought wet towels to press against his face.

  The Soryu’s engines cut out and she went dead in the water. A column of smoke rose from the great wound that had been torn in her flight deck. Burning sections of eviscerated Zeros were strewn across the deck amidst bodies and parts of bodies. To the survivors, these terrible scenes appeared through a shimmering heat haze.

  Nagumo’s flagship, the Akagi, very nearly escaped the unwelcome attentions of the American dive-bombers. This was due to a tactical error committed by McClusky, who was a recent convert to the dive-bombing ranks, having switched from fighter planes. Doctrine held that when two divisions of dive-bombers arrived over multiple targets, the lead division should take the farther of the two. But McClusky took his division down on the Kaga, the nearer of the two. As a result, the entire thirty-two-plane armada almost concentrated all of their bombs on the Kaga while leaving the Akagi alone.

  Lieutenant Dick Best, commander of VB-6, saw what was happening and led his two wingmen to attack the Akagi. Because he had not had time set up the attack properly, Best’s dive angle was shallower than that taken by the planes over the Kaga, placing his three planes in greater danger as they approached. They did not attack in textbook fashion, by diving in an evenly spaced file of planes, but maintained their “Vee” formation throughout the dive.

  On the deck of the Akagi, lookouts shouted in alarm and a warning trumpet sounded harshly over the loudspeakers, but the antiaircraft guns were slow to respond, and what little fire they threw up missed widely. A few alert crewmen, with a well-founded sense of self-preservation, managed to fling themselves flat on deck. Captain Taijiro Aoki put the ship into a hard starboard turn, but that merely turned the flagship’s port beam toward the attackers, and they were able to make the necessary adjustments to stay on target. The first bomb to drop struck the water close to the hull, sending up a towering geyser that came down near the island and soaked the officers stationed there to the skin. Though it had missed, its blast force was strong enough to throw men to the deck, and its heat sufficient to blacken their skin.

  Only one bomb struck the Akagi, near the center of the flight deck. That hit, probably the 1,000-pound bomb dropped by Best, hit on the middle elevator. Had it missed, the entire course of the battle might have been turned, because the Japanese might have dealt a more severe retaliatory attack on the American carriers. But not only did Best’s bomb hit the target, it penetrated through the Akagi’s flight deck to the upper hangar deck, where its destructive force was amplified and multiplied by secondary explosions among the fueled-up strike planes, the fuel in the fuel lines, and the hastily stored bombs and torpedoes. Fuchida saw “a huge hole in the flight deck just behind the amidships elevator. The elevator itself, twisted like molten glass, was drooping into the hangar. Deck plates reeled upward in grotesque configurations. Planes stood tail up, belching livid flame and jet-black smoke.”

  Kaname Shimoyama, stationed in the Akagi’s hangar deck, described the chain of devastating explosions. “It all happened so quickly,” he recalled. “The hangar was very dark, but engulfed in a sea of fire . . . I thought that our carrier would sink at any moment. I saw some men who could not keep their co
mposure and they lost all self control. They just went crazy and tried to escape.” A few Zeros, spotted on the flight deck, were picked up and flung into the sea. Hiroshi Suzuki remembered that the fire blew the fuel tanks of several of the parked Zeros, and also ignited shells in their 20mm guns, which began to fire. “Due to the intense heat,” he recalled, “the rivets from the steel plates started to pop out like they were bullets. One of my classmates was wounded because he was hit by some of these lethal rivets flying through the air.” The third bomb, a near miss off the Akagi’s stern, detonated close enough aboard to wrench the flight deck up and jam the rudder at 20 degrees port, forcing the stricken flagship to travel helplessly in a wide turn until she came to a dead stop.

  Tom Cheek, one of the F4F pilots in Thach’s squadron, had dived down to sea level to escape pursuing Zeros. When he leveled off, just above the wavetops, his plane’s nose happened to be pointed directly at the carrier force. Spread out across the horizon above his engine cowling, Cheek could see Kaga, Akagi, and Soryu, and was able to confirm that they were traveling at speed by the size of their bow waves. Almost at once, he saw a “brilliant orange flash” on Akagi’s deck, followed by water spouts indicating near misses. A few seconds later came a “rolling, greenish-yellow ball of flame” that seemed to “open the bowels of the ship.” His peripheral vision registered a series of explosions that seemed to envelop the full length of Kaga’s flight deck, which “erupted with bomb bursts and flames.” Beyond and to the right of Akagi, the Soryu was pouring out a column of black, oily smoke. He also noted that all three ships had lost propulsion, as their bow waves had diminished markedly.