The World War II Collection

by Lord, Walter;

  Nagumo agreed, and at 1:30 P.M. the shortest of all possible radio signals went out: “Course 125.” On 26 ships the helms swung over, the engines paused briefly, then picked up again, as the First Carrier Striking Force turned southeast, now heading straight as a javelin for Midway.

  Down below there was hardly an interruption. In the Hiryu’s No. 1 boiler room the firemen made the adjustments chalked on a slate in the glass-enclosed control booth. The plane crews on the Soryu continued playing “Hanafuda” at 100 points a cigarette. On the Kaga Commander Takahisa Amagai ran through a blackboard session on antiaircraft defense. In the wardroom of the Akagi someone wound the gramophone, and the scratchy needle once again ground out the soaring strains of “Kirameku Seiza.”

  THE favorites were Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey and Mary Martin’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” as the U.S. carrier Enterprise steamed northeast of Midway this same 2nd of June. Task Force 16 had been at sea six days now, and life off duty was, on the surface at least, fairly routine: all the usual phonograph records, cribbage games, bull sessions and occasional pranks. On the Hornet Chaplain Eddie Harp playfully swiped a much-prized case of grapefruit from Dr. Sam Osterloh; on the New Orleans Seaman A. M. Bagley resumed his hobby of beating Seaman F. Z. Muzejka at rummy.

  On duty, the pattern seemed pretty normal too. The Enterprise “Plan of the Day” mechanically ticked off the chores for the 2nd: 0315 (ship’s time), call the Air Department … 0325, early breakfast … 0350, flight quarters … 0500, launch first patrols … and so on, through a steady sequence of patrols out and in, watches on and off, until finally that inevitable salute to a dying day, “2049, blow tubes.”

  It was all very normal—yet not normal at all, for beneath the surface routine Task Force 16 seethed with a tumbling variety of emotions. “Lord! This is the real thing,” Lieutenant Burdick Brittin breathlessly noted in his diary when the destroyer Aylwin’s sealed orders were opened May 29. And on the 30th his mind overflowed with awesome thoughts:

  We have history in the palm of our hands during the next week or so. If we are able to keep our presence unknown to the enemy and surprise them with a vicious attack on their carriers, the U.S. Navy should once more be supreme in the Pacific. But if the Japs see us first and attack us with their overwhelming number of planes, knock us out of the picture, and then walk in to take Midway, Pearl will be almost neutralized and in dire danger—I can say no more—there is too much tension within me—the fate of our nation is in our hands.

  To Brittin even the men on the tankers seemed to sense that destiny rode with these ships. They all refueled on the 31st, and as the tankers slipped astern and out of the picture, their men lined the rails, showing thumbs up for Task Force 16.

  There were other emotions too as the force plowed on. For some of the pilots there was that hollow, empty feeling as they thought of absolute radio silence and all that it meant—even if an engine conked out on patrol, they could no longer ask the ship for help. Others felt a strange tingle that harked back to college and the days of the big game. On the Enterprise dive bomber pilot Bill Roberts was normally scared before battle—but not this time. It was too exciting: the feeling of being in on the secret, of setting a trap, of watching and waiting. Others were just plain mad. Captain Marc Mitscher had a way of getting the Hornet’s men “up,” and this time he pulled all the stops— “They are even bringing the guns they captured from us at Wake.”

  For Lieutenant Richard H. Best, commanding the Enterprise’s Bombing Squadron 6, there was a personal worry all his own. He had a wife and child in Honolulu, and he thought of them more than once as he sat in Admiral Spruance’s cabin, listening to a special briefing on the Japanese plan. The Navy, he felt, was certainly banking a lot on all this neat, precise information—what if it was wrong? He finally asked Spruance what would happen if the Japanese bypassed Midway and came straight for Hawaii.

  The Admiral looked at him for a full half-minute in silence, then finally said, “We just hope that they will not.”

  Best said nothing more—admirals were close to God in those days—but privately he felt this was a pious hope and a rather poor basis for committing all the available strength of the United States Navy.

  Actually, of course, Spruance had very good reasons for the move he was making—he just didn’t care to tell them. Far from banking on “pious hopes,” he was a man with a passion for facts, who insisted on every scrap of evidence before making a decision. And far from failing to think things through, he never moved without weighing every possible consequence.

  Nor did his long silence before answering Best mean uncertainty; he was just considering all the factors before speaking—another Spruance characteristic. On the one hand, here was a young officer who had asked a legitimate question; on the other, he was a pilot who might fall into enemy hands. It was clear which way the scales finally went.

  Dick Best wasn’t the only one who had trouble grasping this new Admiral. The whole staff found it hard to adjust. Halsey had been so outgoing; Spruance preferred channels. Halsey paid little attention to detail; Spruance spent hours poring over charts and plotting the course. Halsey left so much to their discretion; Spruance left so little. Halsey was so free-wheeling; Spruance so precise and methodical.

  Morning coffee somehow symbolized the change. In the old days everyone just slopped it down together. But Spruance—a genuine connoisseur—brought his own green coffee beans aboard. Every, morning he carefully ground it himself, made precisely two cups, and then courteously asked if some member of the staff cared to join him. In the end they drew lots, with the loser getting the honor, not because they disliked Spruance but because they couldn’t stand his coffee.

  Yet there was much more method to this little ritual than appeared on the surface. Spruance was trying to educate himself. A man with no carrier experience, he had only a week to learn the trade before facing the greatest master of them all, Isoroku Yamamoto. In his quest for knowledge he picked the brains of his staff at coffee or anyplace else.

  A great walker, he also collared them one by one and paced the flight deck with them. Searching questions probed what they did, how they did it, how each job fitted into the whole. He walked their legs off, but with his great ability to absorb detail, he was learning all the time.

  The walks went on, fair weather or foul … as the staff soon discovered. June 1 was a wretched day, damp and foggy. Flying was out, gunnery practice called off; just the wiry Admiral and his latest victim tirelessly trudging the wet, empty flight deck. Task Force 16 was now 345 miles NNE of Midway—marking time, waiting for Admiral Fletcher and the Yorktown.

  June 2 was another dreary day; more clouds and rain. But late in the morning two Yorktown planes suddenly appeared from the south. Swooping low over the Enterprise, they dropped a message. It was from Fletcher: rendezvous time would be 3:30 P.M. At 12:08 searchlights blinked, Task Force 16 swung around and slowly began doubling back east. Then shortly before 4:00, at exactly Latitude 32° 04’ N, Longitude 172° 45’ W, masts were sighted ahead on the horizon. The moment had come—Spruance and Fletcher were joined at Point Luck.

  Task Force 17’s trip out had been a smooth one—except for a single harrowing moment. As the Yorktown was taking on her planes from Hawaii the first afternoon out, an F4F jumped the landing barrier and plowed into the next plane ahead, killing Fighting 3’s executive officer, Lieutenant Donald Lovelace.

  It was a shaken group of fighter pilots who assembled in the ready room shortly afterward. They were a pickup squadron; they had never worked together; some of them had never operated from a carrier. Lovelace, an old hand, was expected to do so much to pull them together. Now, in an instant, he was gone. It was a savage blow, and none felt it worse than the squadron leader, Commander Thach. He was not only depending on Lovelace; they were also close friends and contemporaries at Annapolis.

  This was no time for emotion, Thach quietly told his men, they had to do a job. Then he turned quickly to the ba
ttle coming up, and what he expected of them. If it was a matter of saving the ship, he stressed, he expected them even to ram an enemy plane. There were no histrionics—he was utterly calm. But his strength gave them strength, and they felt a new sense of being welded together. By the time he was finished, one of them later recalled, there wasn’t a pilot in the room who wouldn’t do anything “Jimmy” Thach asked. Meanwhile, each of the other squadrons was also briefed, and Captain Buckmaster spoke to the whole crew over the loudspeaker. He explained he knew three days at Pearl weren’t enough to complete repairs, but the Japanese were coming to Midway and the Yorktown was going to be there to surprise them. True to Nimitz’s instructions, he then promised they’d all go to the West Coast after this “little scrap.”

  Cheers rocked the ship, although at least two men weren’t that easily convinced. Seamen John Herchey and Bill Norton noticed there was a Royal Navy officer aboard as an observer. Superstitious in the grand manner of all true sailors, they decided that boded no good. “We will have to swim if we want to get back from this one,” they told their friend Seaman Louis Rulli.

  Chasing north after Task Force 16, the Yorktown and her escorts moved into the same dirty weather on the 31st, refueled from the same tankers all through the 1st, and now at last were ready for the same great gamble—all linked together at Point Luck.

  As senior officer, Admiral Fletcher took command of both forces, and they began their quiet wait—usually closing Midway during the night, then heading off during the day. They steamed separately but within sight of each other, about ten miles apart.

  As fleets go, they weren’t very much, but they were nearly everything the United States had left in the Pacific—3 carriers, 8 cruisers, 14 destroyers … 25 fighting ships altogether. Yet a fleet at sea, even a rather modest one, is much more than ships and guns. Here it was Captain Buckmaster of the Yorktown, never allowing a light in his cabin after dark, so he could see at his best if called unexpectedly to the bridge. It was Lieutenant (j.g.) Bill Roberts on the Enterprise trying to wade through Freud, his mind not too much on the text. It was Seaman Stan Kurka on the Hornet, trying to do his work in a shirt three times too big for him. It was Marine Captain Malcolm Donohoo on the cruiser Portland, down at this moment (of all times) with the mumps. It was Lieutenant Brittin of the Aylwin scribbling in his diary, “Waiting, just waiting.”

  FIVE hundred miles behind them, toward waters Fletcher had just crossed yesterday, Lieutenant Commander Tamori Yoshimatsu skillfully maneuvered the Japanese submarine I-166. He was late—they all were late—but it should not matter. By tomorrow, the 3rd, the seven I-boats of Squadron 5 would all be on station, directly across the line from Hawaii to Midway. That should be time enough to see and report the U.S. fleet as it sped from Pearl Harbor toward its destruction.

  “It is not believed that the enemy has any powerful unit, with carriers as its nucleus, in the vicinity,” ran paragraph (e) of Admiral Nagumo’s intelligence estimate, as the First Carrier Striking Force drove on toward Midway. The Admiral was confident, and he felt with good reason. There was no word from the sub cordon, no word from Operation K, no word from anybody—it could only mean that everything was still going smoothly.

  On the bridge of the Akagi Admiral Kusaka studied his chief with satisfaction. It was so much better than that Pearl Harbor trip. Then Nagumo had been nervous and gloomy. Now he was his old self again—fierce, tough, the very embodiment of the samurai spirit.

  The darkened ships rushed on, and even the weather was now breaking right. Late on the night of the 2nd the fog began to lift, and through the broken clouds an occasional star was shining.

  “Is THERE anything we haven’t done?” Colonel Shannon asked his staff as they relaxed for a moment under the stars this same June night on Midway.

  There were no suggestions. By now the defenders had done everything they could imagine to beat off a Japanese landing. And if—as many of them secretly believed—the enemy finally came anyhow, they were also ready for that. Their five tanks were hidden in the Sand Island woods to make it a hot reception. Most of their codes were shipped back to Pearl Harbor; other files were burned. Sledge hammers were stored around the base to smash essential machinery. Drivers were coached to wreck their trucks, leaping out just before impact. Caches of food were buried here and there for last-ditch pockets of resistance.

  They were prepared for the very end too. Taking all the left-over steel scrap, Captain McGlashan strung it along the high ground on the north side of Sand Island. When all else was gone, here the defenders would rally for Midway’s, last stand. It was promptly dubbed “The McGlashan Line.”

  On the “heights” in the center of this ridge (perhaps 30 feet, but on Midway that was a mountain) even the Navy cooks and typists would dig in. Specifically they were assigned the northeast flank, where there seemed less danger of their shooting the Marines by mistake. Of course, a landing on the north shore might still push the Marines that way, and to strengthen the leathernecks’ resolve, they were warned of armed sailors lying behind them.

  This last precaution was almost certainly needless. No group ever looked more ready for a fight than Carlson’s Raiders did now. To the rest of the defenders they were rarely visible—just a pack of men glimpsed now and then in the woods. The naval reservists regarded them with cautious awe. They knew that it was worth a man’s life to go near there after dark without knowing the password.

  The Raiders were tough, and better still they worked hard. At first they had indicated that unloading ships was somewhat beneath them, but a blast from Colonel Shannon cured that. Soon they set records. More to their personal tastes, they also turned to manufacturing antitank mines. With advice from several who had been involved in the Spanish Civil War, their demolitions officer Lieutenant Harold Throneson devised a beauty—all it needed was a little dynamite, a flashlight battery and 40 pounds of pressure. Company “C” tore into the job of mass-producing them—1,500 altogether.

  One of Throneson’s group offered his services to a kindred soul—Marine Gunner “Deacon” Arnold, still engaged in making his own booby traps. Arnold happily added the Raider to his team, and the boy responded by devising a new antipersonnel mine. This was a sort of cigar box loaded with nails, spikes, glass and rocks with a small charge of TNT. Scattered by the dozen along the beaches, they could be exploded either electrically or by firing a rifle at a bull’s-eye neatly painted on the side of the box.

  Yet Midway’s best hope still lay in catching the Japanese first. “Hit before we are hit,” the CINCPAC planners advised, and so the 22 PBYs continued their daily runs. They were flying 15° pie-shaped sectors now—700 miles out, 700 miles back, 15 hours in the air altogether. Then a quick bite, a squadron briefing, a few hours in the sack, and the whole business all over again.

  Lieutenant Commander Bob Brixner’s Patrol Squadron 44 was putting in an 80-hour week; Commander Massie Hughes’s Squadron 23 was matching him. Lieutenant Colonel Sweeney’s B17s flew 30 hours in two days, looking for signs of that enemy rendezvous CINCPAC seemed to smell. And when the day’s flying was done, they had to help service their own planes too—refueling them by hand from 55-gallon drums. They were all tired—dead tired—but somehow they carried on.

  This June 2 seemed especially frustrating. If the intelligence was sound, the Japanese should be coming into range, yet there was no sign of them at all. To the northwest a curtain of fog still hid the ocean—no chance of finding anything beyond 400 miles. To the west it was clear, but despite CINCPAC’s tip about the rendezvous, there was absolutely nothing to see. A specially equipped B-17 went out 800 miles; still not a ship in sight.

  Wednesday, June 3, began as usual for the PBY crews—as, in fact, it did for all of Midway’s fliers. Reveille at 3:00 A.M… . a swallow of toast and coffee that didn’t go down so well … then to the planes by jeep and truck in the damp predawn darkness. By 3:50 motors were roaring, exhausts flaring blue, in the first pale light of another new day. At 4:15 th
e PBYs took off, fanning out on their assigned patrols. Fifteen minutes later the B-17s followed, not as part of the search, but just to get clear—no one wanted them caught on the ground in case of a surprise raid at dawn. The rest of Midway’s planes just waited—motors idling, pilots and gunners standing by—until they got the daily all-clear. Only when the PBYs had searched 400 miles out and still found nothing did Midway seem safe till another dawn.

  This morning, as usual, there was nothing 400 miles out. But at 470 miles Lieutenant (j.g.) J. P. O. Lyle, searching to the southwest, spotted two small gray patrol boats steaming toward Midway. He investigated and got a burst of antiaircraft fire for his pains. At 9:04 A.M. he flashed the first report of contact with enemy ships.

  Farther to the west, Ensign Jack Reid piloted another PBY, across an empty ocean. He had started earlier than the rest, was now 700 miles from Midway, nearing the end of his outward leg. So far, nothing worth reporting. With the PBY on automatic pilot, Reid again studied the sea with his binoculars. Still nothing—occasional cloud puffs and a light haze hung over the Pacific, but not enough to bother him. It was shortly before 9:25 A.M., and Ensign Reid was a man with no problems at all.

  Suddenly he looked, then looked again. Thirty miles dead ahead he could make out dark objects along the horizon. Ships, lots of them, all heading toward him. Handing the glasses to his co-pilot Ensign Hardeman, he calmly asked, “Do you see what I see?”

  Hardeman took one look: “You are damned right I do.”

  COMMANDER Yasumi Toyama looked up from his charts on the bridge of the light cruiser Jintsu. For once all the transports were keeping in column, but the destroyer on the port side forward was raising a fuss. She hoisted a signal, then fired a smoke shell. Toyama rushed out on the bridge wing, and there was no need to ask what had happened. Everyone was looking and pointing. There, low and well out of range on the port horizon, hovered a PBY.