by Hugh Ambrose
AFTER A WEEK SPENT IN THE SURF OF ONSLOW BEACH, CARRYING THEIR HEAVY mortar through the sand as they practiced landings, the crew of #4 gun got back to their hut to find they had a seventy-two-hour pass for Memorial Day weekend. They could leave as soon as they dressed appropriately. Sidney could have worn his dress green uniform. Since everybody knew without being told that they would ship out after this break, Sid wanted to go home wearing the dark blue uniform with the red stripe down the leg and the white barracks cap. He had not been issued a dress blue uniform, so he paid $20 to rent one. He and W.O. walked out to the highway that night and started hitching rides. Even though the fancy uniform stopped a lot of cars, it was still a long way to Mobile.
Upon arrival, Sid figured he had just over twenty-four hours to say hello and good-bye to family and friends before starting back. In the afternoon, his family got out the camera and took some photos out on the lawn: Sidney with his sister Katherine, Sidney with his parents. Eugene Sledge came by, clearly impressed by the uniform and envious of Sid's experiences. Eugene's parents had not relented. Having just completed high school, Gene would be allowed to attend Marion Military Institute in the fall. Around them, everything was changing. Thousands of workers were flooding into Mobile to build ships for the navy. Out in the gulf, German submarines were sinking U.S. ships. The Nazis had taken over Europe; the Japanese, the Pacific. Eugene was still chafing under his parents' control. Sidney Phillips, on the other hand, was part of the cataclysm. In a few hours W.O. would show up, and Sid would shake his father's hand and go do something about it.
ACT II
"EVEN UP AND SQUARED OFF"
May 1942-December 1942
THE EMPIRE OF JAPAN EXPECTED ITS MASSIVE VICTORY AT PEARL HARBOR AND elsewhere to convince the Americans to cede the Pacific Rim to them. The opposite occurred. Hatred of the Japanese knew no bounds. Americans gave their government carte blanche to exact vengeance. Part of the Roosevelt administration's challenge was to funnel some of that fury toward the campaign against America's biggest threat, Nazi Germany. The strategic goal, to hold the line against the empire while defeating the Third Reich, took a sharp twist because U.S. intelligence services decoded much of Japan's communications. These intercepts revealed first an attempt to lure the United States into a decisive carrier battle, followed by an attempt to sever the supply lines between the United States and Australia. These moves required decisive action, even when the empire's forces held a significant military advantage.
WHEN SCOUTING SIX TOOK OFF FROM FORD ISLAND TO MEET THE BIG E, ALREADY sailing toward their next mission, Ensign Micheel flew with his new permanent gunner, J. W. Dance. After flying with a few different airmen, Mike had hit it off with Dance. They flew a long scouting pattern that afternoon, May 28, returning hours later to their carrier task force. Within a mile of Enterprise sailed Hornet. A phalanx of cruisers and destroyers surrounded them as they headed north from Hawaii. After catching a wire with his tail hook, Mike left the engine running for the plane pushers. He and Dance climbed out and walked down to the ready room.
The room was abuzz with news. One of the torpedo planes had crashed on landing and gone in the drink. The crew had been fished out, but even though the pilot was a lieutenant commander and the skipper of the squadron, they would not be returned to their ship this day. The Big E was in a hurry. Something big was in the wind. Mike would have had the feeling that he was the last guy to hear this. He would have been right. The Big E had been in a hurry-up, high-alert mode for more than a week now and he hadn't noticed. Seamen in the engine room had heard something was up.1 The new ensign, however, had assumed it was always like this.
On June 1 the official word came from Admiral Spruance, the commander of the task force. Fleets of enemy battleships and enemy carriers and enemy troop transports would soon attack the island of Midway, about a thousand miles from Hawaii. Admiral Spruance planned to ambush them. The admiral did not feel the need to say much more. According to scuttlebutt in the ready room, the United States had broken the enemy's communication codes. Three different enemy task forces would hit the island on June 4. "Man," thought Mike as he heard these forces described, "they've got the whole fleet coming at Midway Island. . . ."
All the pilots kept a sharp eye on the Teletype screen at the front of the ready room. As soon as contact reports came in, the air operations office above them would receive and process information, then send it across their screen. So far, only the latest meteorological and navigational information appeared. Although the task force continued to move, it was holding station at 32 degrees north latitude, 173 degrees west longitude. This location, about 325 miles northeast of Midway Island, had been chosen by Admiral Nimitz, the commander of the Pacific Fleet. Under his direction, Admiral Spruance's forces would wait for the Japanese carriers here, an area Nimitz had named Point Luck.
The skipper of Scouting Six, Earl Gallaher, did not seem to get excited. He delivered neither a pep talk nor a long discourse on the various possible tactical situations. He stuck to what was known. The main scouting duties would be handled by the army's B- 17 bombers and the navy's PBY scout planes based on Midway Island. These big four- engine planes could fly great distances. These planes would find the enemy carriers, which were expected to attack from the northwest. Marine Corps dive-bombers and army air corps bombers on Midway would meet the enemy head-on; the dive-bombers from Enterprise, Yorktown, and Hornet would ambush them. To pass the time, the skipper had them watch a slide show of profiles of Japanese ships and planes. He wanted his pilots to differentiate between enemy fighters and dive-bombers.
The next day, the flight officer scheduled Micheel and Dance to fly a scouting mission. The aggressive scheme of zigzagging by the task forces would make returning more difficult. He had been ordered to maintain absolute radio silence. If his motor quit, the skipper told him, he had to crash "and hope for the best in your rubber boat."2 Mike pulled alongside the launch officer thinking the spot a bit too far forward. It would be nice to have a longer runway. He jammed the brakes, revved the engine, and began reciting lines from the 23rd Psalm, "And yea though I go through the valley of the shadow of death, thou art with me . . . ," before the launch officer pointed to the bow and ducked out of the way. The weather was terrible, though. It forced an early return. The only new ships on the horizon were USS Yorktown and her escorts, sailing a few miles away. The U.S. force now comprised three fleet carriers plus the squadrons on Midway. Four or five enemy carriers were expected, plus a fleet of main battleships and the invasion force. No one had ever seen a battle like this before. The key to victory over the enemy, as was self-evident, lay in finding them first. Since the Japanese could be expected to launch their attack on Midway at dawn, the dive-bombers would endeavor to hit their carriers before the enemy planes returned.
Other scouts flew on June 3, as the rest of the squadron waited, making sure the U.S. carriers were not ambushed. In the morning a Midway-based scout plane reported that the "main body" of the enemy's fleet was approaching Midway from the west. This caused a sensation for a time, but soon enough the word was delivered from the front of the room: "this task force was the landing force, not the carriers." The enemy landing forces would be ignored for the time being. Since the report included course and speed, Mike plotted it anyway. So far as he could tell, that task force was well out of range, which is what mattered to him. In the late afternoon a report came in that army aircraft had located four large enemy ships and left one "burning furiously."3 Sketchy as they were, the reports received throughout the day served to confirm their understanding. Tomorrow was the day. The last navigational information to appear at the front of the ready room at seven forty p.m. showed a general course change toward Midway. To make itself a hard target for submarines, however, Enterprise would spend the night zigzagging according to plan number seven.4 The next morning would find her and the other carriers about two hundred miles north-northeast of Midway.
Scouting Six and the other flight cre
ws had reveille at three thirty a.m. on June 4. Tension in the ready room started out high. As time passed Mike was, in his own estimation, "starting to pucker." He sat in the back, smoking cigarettes and taking it easy on the coffee, so he wouldn't make himself uncomfortable during a long flight. Few men spoke. Just after seven thirty a.m., the Teletype punched out "carriers sighted" by a reconnaissance plane.g The "This is it" moment faded, however, as information on the Japanese carriers' position, course, and speed failed to appear. Tension and frustration spiked. Without position, speed, or direction, Micheel figured the scout's report amounted to "We've got a bunch of ships out here going someplace." Ten minutes later, another scout report came across the screen: "many enemy planes heading Midway, bearing 320, distance 150." The pilots calculated the enemy squadrons were about 230 miles southwest of them. While this news confirmed the presence of enemy carriers, Scouting Six still lacked the information needed to plot a course to intercept the flattops. Assuming the enemy aircraft were flying in a straight line, the Big E changed course to intercept. The "talker" (a yeoman with a telephone draped around his neck) shouted: "Pilots, man your planes!" The men of Scouting Six stood up and did something unusual. They shook one another's hands and, while walking out the door, wished one another good luck. The yeoman yelled, "Belay that. All pilots return to the ready room."5
"What the hell is going on?" someone asked as they filed back in. As Ensign Micheel considered the situation, it occurred to him that neither he nor, he guessed, any of the other replacement pilots had ever flown off a carrier with a 500-pound bomb under the fuselage and a 100-pound bomb under each wing. He had flown scouting missions with a 350- pound depth charge strapped to the belly, but he had never tried to take off with 700 pounds beneath him. Judging from the low wind speed displayed on the Teletype, he prepared himself to drop ten to twelve feet off the bow before his Dauntless attained flying speed.
Another ten minutes elapsed. Then definitive news came. Another PBY patrol radioed Midway Island, which then forwarded it to the Big E. " Two carriers and other ships bearing 320, distance from Midway 180 [nautical miles]." Scouting Six added this data to their plotting boards--their course and speed and that of the enemy--to produce a probable intercept point. The plot put the enemy force about two hundred miles west of Mike's task force. The aircraft carriers of the Imperial Japanese Fleet were twenty-five miles out of the Dauntless's strike range.
With the tactical situation in view, Gallaher returned from a meeting with the air operations staff to brief his squadron. While Yorktown awaited events, Enterprise and Hornet had been ordered to sail southeast to close with the enemy. The air group commander would order the squadrons to sortie at the first opportunity, which would be soon. With calm seas and clear skies, the weather affected the strike in one way. The direction of the wind, coming out of the southwest, meant that the carriers would steam away from Midway (and the enemy) to launch their squadrons. Upon takeoff, the four Enterprise squadrons would join up as a coordinated strike. The formation would fly a heading roughly southwest to intercept.
As part of their routine, the pilots noted the location of the nearest island in case of emergency. That was Midway. Instead of providing a specific Point Option, a spot to meet Enterprise after the mission, Gallaher told them to expect it to continue to steam toward Midway Island. Reports of Japanese planes bombing Midway began to filter in. The torpedo squadrons would fly at a low altitude of fifteen hundred feet, the dive-bombers would cruise at twenty thousand feet, while the fighter pilots in their Wildcats positioned themselves higher still. In view of the Wildcats' more limited range, Mike heard the skipper say, "the fighters are going to take us three-fourths [of ] the way there and then come back." This did not make much sense to him. The communications officer told Mike not to bother turning on his YE/ZB; the ship was not going to switch the homing beacon on. Mike did not get a chance to ask why the hell not.h It was time to go.
He wrote down the ship's final course corrections and speed as Gallaher told his men to expect the enemy carriers to continue to steam toward Midway. As each pilot completed his navigation on his Ouija Board, he reached the same conclusion. "Wow," Mike said, "we're going to be pretty close to maximum range." The order to man his plane came again about nine a.m. As Mike filed out, his section leader told him, "Stay close. Don't be a straggler, stay close." Micheel walked past most of Scouting Six's planes to find his in the pack. A few fighters, the combat air patrol, were taking off.
Behind his squadron sat the Dauntlesses of Bombing Six, which carried thousand-pound bombs underneath. Rear seat gunners and plane captains waited next to each of the light blue shapes. Mike met Dance and climbed into 6-S-17, a plane he had not flown previously. She started easily. He taxied up as the others departed and eventually became number two for takeoff. Just as the pilot ahead of him began to race his engine, he noticed a new board being hung over the PriFly balcony. The air group staff was notifying those pilots still on the deck of new information about the location of the enemy carriers. This was crazy. He taxied forward. With seconds left before he made his first attempt at taking off with a full load, and perhaps midway through the 23rd Psalm, Mike did not copy any of the updated information onto his Ouija Board. He gave the high sign and released his brakes.
Circling above the carrier, the pilots of Scouting Six formed up into sections of three, into divisions of nine, the three divisions at last joining their wedges into a large V of Vs. Bombing Six had to repeat the process, then the torpedo planes. Knowing that his target lay somewhere out near the edge of his plane's maximum range, it galled Micheel to burn gas circling the ship. After all the Dauntlesses on the flight deck had taken off, he watched as the Devastators and Wildcats started coming up on the elevator. Men pushed these into takeoff position. All Mike could think was, "Golly, I don't know if I'm going to have enough gas, and here they are, circling us around the aircraft carrier. . . ." Enterprise had pulled away from Hornet; each carrier was ringed by a few heavy cruisers, a number of destroyers, and a lot of airplanes. Yorktown steamed a little farther away. Before the squadrons of Devastators and Wildcats had formed up, though, the commander of the Enterprise air group and his two wingmen led both squadrons of Dauntlesses away in a southwesterly direction at about nine forty- five a.m. The formation began its climb to twenty thousand feet at a higher speed than the usual 120 knots for a scouting mission. After all the wasted time, now they were in a hurry.
Climbing to twenty thousand feet required Micheel and Dance to put on their oxygen masks. The ocean four miles below them became a broad expanse of indigo blue under a clear sky dotted by the occasional small cumulus cloud. Mike obeyed his orders and stuck close to his section leader. He kept the tip of his wing within a few feet of his leader. Flying a tight formation required Mike's attention. He did not compare his actual heading with the one written on his board, nor did he make other notes. He kept his plane in the proper spot. He did keep an eye on the passage of time and his gas gauge; two hours in the air meant the Dauntlesses were reaching their maximum range. He saw nothing below them. He could not see any of the Hornet's squadrons. The planes droned on. He started eyeing his watch more often as it edged toward noon. Scouting Six should have arrived at the intercept point but no one turned around. Every passing second made a safe return more and more improbable.
The air group commander made a sharp right turn. It did not become a 180-degree turn back to the carriers. It resembled the turn in a dogleg search. Mike could not radio for instructions. He waited. A pilot caught his eye and signaled him to look down. There was a ship. He could barely see the tiny thing, but he could clearly see a long white streak behind it. That ship must be in a hurry to churn that kind of stern water. Given its position, it could not be a U.S. ship. The squadron made a slight course correction as the skipper adopted the ship's heading. They quickly flew well ahead of the little ship and arrived at the edge of the Imperial Japanese Fleet. Screened by destroyers and flanked by battleships and crui
sers, four flattops steamed northwest, well spaced from one another. Ensign Micheel had never seen that many ships.
The enemy fleet was steaming along, cutting bright swaths in the ocean.6 No Japanese fighter planes could be seen. The air group commander did not take time to set up for a classic attack. He started a descent toward bombing altitude, twelve thousand feet, which also increased the group's speed. As they flew over the escorts ringing the fleet and approached two carriers, Mike's section leader, Lieutenant West, pointed down to one, then patted his head. Their target was the large flattop on the left, closest to them. Scouting Six's three divisions edged away from one another. Each would attack the long yellow oblong from a different angle. Mike's division turned farther to port (left). They had no time to assume the prescribed echelon (stair step) attack formation. Scouting Six flew right over the top carrier, one large enough to be of the Kaga class, and the first division began to disappear, followed quickly by the second division.
Ensign Micheel had a lot to do. The air at one thousand feet differed greatly from the thin air at fifteen thousand, so he dialed in a slightly different trim with his trim tabs, closed the cowling, and changed the propeller's pitch (the degree to which it catches air). He set his arming switches so his bomb fuses would arm upon their release. West saluted Mike, the signal to dive, then peeled off and dove himself. In the final seconds, Micheel put his left hand on the throttle. He looked over at his friend John Lough, flying just off his starboard wing, ready, and saluted. With his right hand on the stick and his feet on the rudder, Mike pulled his nose up and cut the engine to idle, opened the dive brakes, and rolled his plane over. The nose sank and the Dauntless plunged. He put the plane into a seventy-degree dive. Gravity took hold and the harness bit into his shoulders. For the first few thousand feet, he aimed his plane with the naked eye. At about six thousand feet Mike looked into his 3x telescopic sight. Along the bottom of that sight ran a tiny ball in a semicircular track.
