The World War II Collection

by Lord, Walter;

  CHAPTER 4

  “Many Planes Heading Midway”

  IT MUST HAVE SEEMED like the whole Japanese Navy. After all those grim briefings—all those days of suspense—it was understandable that the 27 ships of the Transport Group now looked even more formidable than they were. At 9:25 Ensign Reid flashed a two-word contact report: “Main Body.”

  “Amplify,” Midway flashed back, and for the next two hours Reid played a desperate game of hide-and-seek, darting in and out of cloud puffs, sending additional scraps whenever he could. At 9:27 he radioed, “Bearing 262°, distance 700” … 10:40, he noted “six large ships in column” … 11:00, he made out “eleven ships, course 090, speed 19.” That seemed to do the job; base radio now told him to come on home.

  On Midway Colonel Sweeney could hardly wait to get going with his B-17s. Captain Simard was just as anxious, but first there were some things to clear up. Where were the Japanese carriers? Nimitz’s orders were, above all, to go for those carriers. None had been reported so far; the intelligence said they wouldn’t come till tomorrow, and then from the northwest. Should they hold back the B-17s until they definitely appeared? That would be playing it safe.

  On the other hand, Reid described this as the “Main Body.” That might well mean carriers there too. If there was any chance at all, Midway shouldn’t wait. “Hit before we are hit” remained the paramount rule.

  But even if the B-17s went out, where should they go? Contact reports were now coming from three different PBYs, pinpointing four different sightings to the southwest. They were all just fragments; it wasn’t easy to count ships when they were shooting at you. Was Reid’s contact really the big one? It was worth waiting a little while to see.

  Reid’s report at 11:00 A.M. settled the matter. Now it was clear he had at least 11 ships—a much bigger concentration than anyone else reported. Moreover, most of the other ships were converging that way, probably planning to link up. There was still no report of carriers, but even if there weren’t any, Sweeney could go out, get back and be ready again by the time they were promised tomorrow.

  At 12:30 he was on his way. One after another, nine olive-drab B-17s thundered down the Eastern Island runway and into the blue Pacific sky. With Colonel Sweeney leading in the Knucklehead, they roared west in loose formation. They carried only half a “pay load”—four 600-pound bombs apiece —for the range was so great they needed bomb-bay gas tanks if they were going to make the round trip.

  Six hundred miles was a long way to go to drop less than 11 tons of bombs on a squirming target, but this was the first attack these young men had made. For all of them it was a new and tremendously exciting experience. Sweeney himself had been to West Point—his father was a retired major general—but the men around him were typical of the adaptable amateurs America somehow finds to fight its wars. His co-pilot Everett Wessman was a truck driver; his navigator Bill Adams a lumber salesman.

  Three and a half hours went by. Then, 570 miles out and just where the Navy said to look, Sweeney made out a score of white streaks slashing the blue of the sea: the wakes of the Japanese ships. Another pilot, Lieutenant Edward Steedman, counted 26 of them, which was very good counting indeed. Contact time was exactly 4:23 P.M.

  At this point Sweeney veered off, circling around the ships so as to attack from out of the afternoon sun. The white streaks stayed steady and straight; apparently no one down there yet suspected. Now the B-17s were behind the Japanese, forming into three flights of three at 8,000, 10,000 and 12,000 feet. Turning into his bomb run, Sweeney picked up his microphone and called to the planes in his own flight, “I’ll go in at 8,000 feet—you follow me.”

  Lieutenant Wessman shuddered. He could only hope the Japanese weren’t tuned in. Or if they were listening, that they wouldn’t believe any foe could be so innocent of war as to broadcast his intentions in the clear.

  ON THE bridge of the Jintsu Commander Toyama casually studied the sky with binoculars. The Japanese ships didn’t have radar, and a good man’s eyes remained the best defense against a surprise bombing. An attack seemed likely, too, right after the PBY spotted them, but that was seven hours ago, and nothing had happened yet. Now everything was routine again as the Transport Group continued toward Midway, plodding along in two straight columns.

  Suddenly Toyama’s glasses picked up nine planes flying toward them “in stately fashion.” There was only time to yank the alarm before the bombs began falling. Lieutenant Yunoki, gunnery officer on one of the destroyers, didn’t have that much time. His first inkling was a pattern of bombs crashing down near the ship. The Argentina Maru was a little more alert. The alarm sounded; the bridge cranked her up to 20 knots; and at 4:38 she opened fire—one minute before a rack of bombs exploded 200 yards astern. The convoy wriggled and squirmed, smoke pouring out of the stacks and guns. Antiaircraft fire speckled the sky, but before the defense really got going the attack was already over. Still flying “in stately fashion,” the nine B-17s disappeared into the northeast haze.

  The Transport Group took stock. No hits, except some splinters from a near-miss on one of the freighters. With the buoyancy a fighting man always feels when he has just pulled through an engagement, the executive officer of the Argentina Maru dashed off his combat report, noting that all hands were in “exceptionally high spirits.”

  THE ex-salesmen and truck drivers flying the B-17s were in high spirits too. To a man trained in banking at the University of Illinois, like Captain Paul Payne of the bomber Yankee Doodle, a transport at 10,000 feet could look like almost anything—he marked his target down as “hit and burning.”

  Taking the largest ship in the world for comparison, Lieutenant Robert Andrews said he bombed a transport of the “Normandie class.” Captain Clemence Tokarz thought he got a battleship or a heavy cruiser. Looking back when they were 30 miles off and homeward bound, Colonel Sweeney was sure he saw two ships burning: “They were both out of column, appeared motionless and were issuing huge clouds of dark smoke which mushroomed above them.”

  In contrast the trip back seemed more hair-raising than bombing the Japanese. Night soon fell, and nobody was used to flying formation in the dark. There were several near-misses. It was hard, too, for an Army pilot to find a dot like Midway in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. At 7:30 Eastern Island turned on its runway lights, but for an anxious hour there was no sign of anyone. Finally, the base heard the welcome drone of distant motors, but it was 9:45 before the last planes groped their way home—Captain Willard Woodbury felt he didn’t have enough gas left “to fill a cigarette lighter.”

  Even as they were landing, another strike was on its way out, aiming at the same Japanese force. It was the culmination of an amazing enterprise that began over 12 hours earlier at Pearl Harbor.

  It must have been about three o’clock that morning when Ensign Allan Rothenburg, a young PBY skipper, was suddenly shaken awake as he lay in his bed at the Ford Island BOQ. “Get up; you’re going to Midway.”

  “Midway to what?” was Rothenburg’s sleepy reaction. His patrols in Squadron 51 never carried him in that direction, and at first he didn’t even click on the name. But he pulled on his clothes, went to the field, and in the first light of dawn found his amphibian was one of four warming up. The other three were from Squadron 24, but the PBY men all knew each other, and as they briefly compared notes, it turned out none of them knew why they were going.

  They took off around 7:00, landing at the Eastern Island airstrip nine long hours later. By ordinary standards this was a day’s work—time for a hot meal, a good bed and maybe a stretch of routine patrols starting tomorrow. As the flight’s leader, Lieutenant (j.g.) Charles Hibberd, nudged his PBY into its revetment, the crew were surprised, then, to find an enlisted man waiting for them on a tractor with a torpedo mounted on the trailer behind. It was even more astonishing when he said the torpedo was for them—that the other three PBYs would be equipped too, that all four planes were a “striking force” to go out after the Japanese
fleet.

  Hibberd’s navigator, Ensign James Boyden, couldn’t take it seriously. The PBY amphibian was a wonderful patrol plane, but it only cruised 100 miles an hour, maneuvered with stately dignity, and offered as big and inviting a target as a Pennsylvania Dutch barn. Surely no one could dream of sending it on an attack mission. Shrugging the thought off, Boyden headed for the mess hall to get a snack.

  The place was crowded with other crews in flight gear—Army, Navy, Marine. The atmosphere was hushed, serious, almost gloomy. More of the new PBY men turned up, and they soon pieced together a sobering picture: a big Jap force to the southwest … the B-17s out bombing them now … the enemy sweeping toward Midway. All refreshments were on the house, creating a sort of “last supper” feeling.

  A messenger came, summoning the new arrivals to the command post. They crowded into Colonel Kimes’s dimly lit dugout—Lieutenant Hibberd, Al Rothenburg, the other pilots and navigators. Logan Ramsey took over the briefing. He explained they were selected to launch a night torpedo attack, and although it had never been done before, “we have to throw everything we have at them.”

  He went on to say it would be on a volunteer basis. If they didn’t think they could do it, they wouldn’t be required to go. He waited, studying their faces.

  Not a word was said. Ensign Gaylord Propst grimly stared at the floor. Lieutenant (j.g.) Douglas Davis was mute, more from shock than from any burning desire to charge out on a suicide mission. Ensign Boyden silently stared back at Ramsey, trying to read the Commander’s thoughts. All too clearly Ramsey’s face betrayed how little he expected ever to see them again, how much he hated doing what he had to do.

  The briefing continued: target, course, speed, position, technical procedures on signals and communications. Yes, it was the “Main Body”—they should look for a carrier. The attack would be led by Lieutenant W. L. Richards, the tall, redheaded executive officer of Patrol Squadron 44, already based on Midway. Outside, mechanics buckled the torpedoes onto the PBYs—one under each plane’s starboard wing.

  At 9:30 they took off, Richards leading the way in Charlie Hibberd’s plane. It was not a graceful departure. The PBYs—laboring under the unbalanced load—struggled painfully into the air. Rothenburg, delayed by trouble with his ladder, was late getting off and tagged along after the rest.

  Turning southwest, they headed into a beautiful moonlit night, flying in loose formation at 3,000 feet. On Lieutenant Davis’s plane coffee was brewed and served. Taking a sip, Davis pondered his chances of coming through this, night alive—and became slightly nauseated.

  The hours droned by. The planes flew on, now through scattered clouds that made it difficult to follow Richards—the others had only his exhausts and a small white light on his fuselage to guide them. Rothenburg, still trailing far in the rear, lost the rest completely. Then Propst too drifted off. But just after that, at 1:20 A.M., Richards’s radarman picked up some targets about seven miles away. At the controls, Charlie Hibberd calmly said he had already spotted them.

  Directly ahead, bathed in the moonlight, two columns of darkened ships were steaming toward them. A ring of destroyers guarded both columns, but there was no sign that they suspected danger. Disdaining evasive moves of any kind, they held to a course that would ultimately take them straight to Midway.

  Richards had Hibberd circle once to alert the others, then let down to a point off the port beam of the northern column. Now the enemy ships were silhouetted perfectly—black beads in the silvery moon path. Looking for the “carrier,” he picked out a long, low ship toward the rear of the column. Charlie Hibberd began his final run-in.

  The job was all his. He had to fly the plane and manipulate the torpedo director at the same time. The rest crouched at their posts, peering through the windows and blisters at the sea rushing past them. Now they were only 200 … 150 … 100 feet from the water. Still no sign that the Japanese suspected anything, but this run-in was taking forever.

  “Drop that damn thing and let’s get the hell out of here!” someone finally yelled. But Hibberd wasn’t ready yet. At 1,000 yards he knew this wasn’t a carrier after all—it looked like some sort of merchant ship—but they hadn’t come this far for nothing. On they roared, now only 50 feet off the sea. At 800 yards Hibberd finally released the torpedo, rammed the controls forward, and the PBY heaved up and over the target as a few scattered shots blazed out. Looking back, the man at the waist hatch saw a muffled explosion followed by a second and clearer flash. It looked like a hit, and they were home free.

  Lieutenant Davis was close behind. But he didn’t like his position, turned away, circled and came on again. Starting his second approach, he too flew straight up the moon path toward a ship in the rear of the north column. He too faced no return fire as he raced in, now at 50-75 feet.

  But they certainly saw him. The target veered hard to starboard and put on speed. Too late to do anything about that; just get as close as possible. At 200 yards Davis released the torpedo almost dead astern of the ship. He had a fleeting glimpse of her thrashing screws and rudder jammed hard to starboard.

  A blaze of antiaircraft fire erupted as he pulled up with full power over the stern of the ship. On the port waist gun Machinist’s Mate Ted Kimmell fired back at the forest of masts, funnels and ventilators directly below. In seconds the whole convoy seemed to be shooting at them. Strange pink and red tracers ripped the night; shrapnel and machine-gun fire raked the PBY. One blast smashed through the nose bubble, shattering Navigator J. I. Foster’s goggles, but miraculously not hurting him. They picked up 58 bullet holes altogether … but they too were home free.

  Now it was Ensign Propst’s turn. Though he had lost Richards on the way out, he found the Japanese anyhow. He circled down on their port side and, like the others, attacked up the moon path. It proved to be another of those low, harrowing run-ins. At one point he almost rammed one of the escort. “Don’t run into that destroyer!” someone yelled. They hopscotched over it, skimmed on in, releasing at 800 yards. Then with everything bent to the fire wall, Propst did a mad, climbing turn to the left. Co-pilot B. L. Amman had a brief glimpse of a flash that looked like a hit, as the whole Japanese fleet opened up. To Propst it was “Coney Island on the 4th of July.”

  They caught some shrapnel, once exchanged shots with a prowling Japanese seaplane. But with a little luck and a friendly cloud, they too managed to get clear and were home free.

  Only Rothenburg missed the show. Lost early in the game, he kept on course but never found the others again. By the time he reached the scene, the attack was in full swing. Tracers laced the sky, and there was absolutely no chance to get near enough for a successful run. Hoping for an opening, he milled around for 30 minutes. Finally—his gas half gone—he broke off and headed home, winding up a thoroughly frustrating evening.

  ON THE transport Argentina Maru, Commander Yonai never expected an attack at night. It was astonishing the way those big PBYs came in from nowhere. Commander Toyama was just as surprised on the escort flagship Jintsu. After a hectic day, he was finally relaxing in the operations room—even time for an action meal of rice balls—when a destroyer flashed the first warning.

  As the bugle blared general quarters over the loudspeaker, Toyama rushed out on the bridge. He was just in time to see a big, black enemy plane come skimming across the water. Then another … and another. Antiaircraft fire exploded everywhere, but they were gone as suddenly as they appeared.

  Happily there was little damage. The tanker Akebono Maru—bringing up the rear of the north column—caught a torpedo in the bow, killing 13 and wounding 11. The transport Kiozumi Maru lost a few men from strafing. The other ships weren’t touched, but Admiral Tanaka spent some anxious moments worrying whether the Akebono Maru could continue. Finally word came that she could make 12-14 knots—more than enough to keep in line. Still intact, the convoy plodded on toward Midway.

  All this was promptly radioed to the Yamato, where Admiral Yamamoto’s staff reacted with co
nsiderable surprise. It was all very puzzling—first, getting sighted at nine o’clock that morning … then the B-17s … and now this torpedo attack. Certainly nobody expected the Americans to move so quickly. In fact, Captain Kuroshima had hoped they wouldn’t find the convoy at all until after Nagumo’s attack on the 4th. Here they were a day too soon, already lashing at the transports 600 miles out.

  The question again rose whether to relay all this news to Admiral Nagumo, now starting his final run-in, but once again it was decided radio silence was just too important. Nothing must give those carriers away.

  Perhaps more thought might have been given to the matter, but too many things were happening. In all its complexity the great operation was beginning to unfold. On May 31 midget subs had staged a brief, diversionary raid at Diégo-Suarez, Madagascar … then on June 1, others raided Sydney Harbor … and now in the early hours of June 3 Admiral Hosogaya’s Northern Force launched its major attack against the Aleutians. Long before Admiral Yamamoto sat down to breakfast, he got the welcome word that the Ryujo’s bombers had plastered Dutch Harbor.

  At 8:30 he detached an important part of the Main Force in a pre-arranged plan to back up this effort in the Aleutians. Vice Admiral Shiro Takasu took his flagship Hyuga, three other battleships, two light cruisers, a handful of destroyers and headed for northern waters. But not too far. His “Aleutian Screening Force” would hover halfway between the Northern Force and Yamamoto himself—ready to jump either way, depending on how the U.S. fleet reacted. The Commander in Chief continued east with the rest of the Main Force, now about 500 miles astern of Nagumo’s carriers.