by Oliver North
B-17s at Midway
In the midst of this confusion on the Japanese carriers, a second strike launched from Midway arrived overhead. Marine Major Lofton Henderson, with a flight of brand new Dauntless SBD dive-bombers, led the way, followed by Army Air Corps B-17s and more of the ancient Vindicators. The experienced Japanese gunners and fighter pilots made short work of this raid, but as the Akagi, Soryu, Hiryu, and Kaga jinked and turned, leaving snakelike wakes in the Pacific—maneuvering to avoid the Marine attackers and the U.S. Army B-17s—it was impossible for the Japanese crewmen on the flight and hangar decks to complete the ordnance changeover that Nagumo had ordered.
And then, to compound the problem Nagumo had created by ordering the ordnance change for a second strike at Midway, his combat air patrol aircraft and the planes he had sent on the first Midway attack showed up overhead, urgently needing to land before they ran out of fuel.
Once again Nagumo ordered the aircraft preparing to launch to be shuffled out of the way to clear his carrier decks. For the second time that morning, fatigued and confused Japanese crewmen started shutting down aircraft, pushing them aside, and lowering them, fully fueled and armed, into the hangar decks of his carriers.
At 0830, in the midst of this new round of turmoil and disorder on the Japanese carriers, the USS Nautilus stuck up her periscope and fired off two torpedoes, which did no damage but did instigate a furious half hour, as Japanese destroyers churned around, tossing depth charges while Nagumo’s carriers zigged and zagged—still making it impossible to launch or recover aircraft. Then the first of 155 U.S. Navy carrier aircraft appeared over Nagumo’s head. Spruance had launched every bomber from the Hornet and the Enterprise—holding back just the three dozen fighters of the Task Force 16 combat air patrol. Half an hour later, Fletcher had sent up six Wildcats, sixteen Devastators, and seventeen Dauntlesses from the Yorktown. Despite withering anti-aircraft fire and the swirling Zeros, the Navy Devastator torpedo pilots attacked first, skimming over the whitecaps in three waves, aiming for the Japanese carriers.
As they had with the Marine raiders from Midway, the Japanese gunners and pilots in their more maneuverable Zeros blasted plane after plane out of the sky. Not one of the Devastators’ “fish” found their mark. All fifteen of the Hornet’s TBDs of “Torpedo 8” were downed, as were ten of the fourteen launched by Enterprise. But the bravery of the torpedo bomber pilots was not wasted. Their low-level attack drew the Japanese combat air patrols down to the wave tops—making it impossible for their fighters to gain enough altitude to engage the Enterprise’s Dauntless dive-bombers, led by Lt. Commander Clarence McClusky, Jr., when they appeared over the Akagi and the Kaga at 1025.
At almost the same moment, the Yorktown’s aircraft found the Soryu. The Yorktown’s torpedo bombers fared no better than those of the Enterprise or the Hornet, but the American dive-bombers scored hits on the decks of all three ships among the clutter of Japanese planes that were being fueled and re-armed. Not one of the U.S. Navy dive-bombers was engaged by a Japanese fighter until after it had dropped its bombs. In under six minutes, all three of the Japanese carriers were hit and awash in burning fuel, an inferno that spread as aircraft with live ordnance caught fire and exploded on the flight and hangar decks.
By 1030 on 4 June, the entire balance of naval power in the Pacific had shifted dramatically. Three of Japan’s biggest carriers were fiery wrecks heading for the ocean floor. Hundreds of the best pilots in the Japanese navy were perishing in the flames, and scores more would die before the day was done, for the battle was not yet over.
Lewis Hopkins was a twenty-three-year-old ensign from Georgia, flying a Douglas Dauntless SBD dive-bomber from the deck of the USS Enterprise during the Battle of Midway. To Hopkins and his squadron-mates, the initials SBD stood for “Slow But Deadly.” He recalls hoping that the planes would live up to the second part of their name on 4 June 1942.
ENSIGN LEWIS HOPKINS, USN
Aboard the USS Enterprise
155 Miles Northeast of Midway
4 June 1942
1050 Hours Local
The best thing about the SBD was that it was built for its mission capability—meaning it could do the job for which it was designed. As far as I’m concerned, there never was a better dive-bomber designed or built than the SBD.
On the morning of 4 June, we got up at three o’clock in the morning, went to breakfast in the pilots’ wardroom, and pushed the eggs around the plate.
We had been told the night before that we would be attacking the Japanese fleet in the morning, and I thought about this being the first time I’d ever carried a live bomb. We launched at about 0720 in the morning and headed southwest to where the Japanese carriers were reported sighted.
Well, we got to where they were supposed to be at about 0920, and they weren’t there. So Lt. Commander McClusky, the flight leader, signals us that we’ll continue to search for another fifteen minutes. All the other ensigns and I are looking at our navigation plotting boards in our cockpits and thinking, “Hey, I’m going to be short of fuel! How am I gonna get us back?”
We made a box-pattern search—a series of right-hand turns—and then we saw smoke off in the distance. It was from all the firing that they were doing against our torpedo bombers. At 1020 we arrived over the Japanese fleet and the signal was given to attack.
We dove at 300 miles an hour from 22,000 feet down to 2,500 feet in forty-two seconds. When each SBD was right overhead, it would release its bombs. The ship was the carrier Akagi, and by the time I made my run, she was on fire and dead in the water, with people abandoning ship and jumping into the water all around. That didn’t stop us from dropping more bombs on it. This was one of the ships that had bombed Pearl Harbor.
As I pulled up from dropping my bomb, I was attacked by a Japanese fighter plane, so I had to take all the evasive maneuvers I ever learned. But after I shook the Zero, I looked back and could see three carriers—all of them with explosions on their decks and burning from bow to stern.
It was all over in just minutes.
None of us could look for long, though. We were all really low on fuel and had to think about getting back to the Enterprise.
ABOARD USS YORKTOWN
175 MILES NORTH OF MIDWAY
4 JUNE 1942
1205 HOURS LOCAL
The hair-raising battle wasn’t over yet. The USS Yorktown was the farthest from the Japanese fleet and the last of the three carriers to launch its strikes. It was only because the Yorktown’s squadrons flew a more direct route to their targets that they had hit the Soryu at the same time that Ensign Lewis Hopkins and his shipmates from the Enterprise were attacking the Kaga and the Akagi. And unfortunately for Rear Admiral Jack Fletcher and the Yorktown , his were the last aircraft to leave the area where the three Japanese carriers were on fire.
As his aircraft returned with stories of three Japanese carriers sunk, Admiral Fletcher had cause for concern. He knew from Station Hypo intercepts that there were four big carriers in Admiral Nagumo’s force—so there was a very strong likelihood that aircraft from the surviving carrier might have followed his aircraft home. If that was the case, the Yorktown was in trouble. She and her Task Force 17 escorts were closer now to the Hornet and the Enterprise, but if they had to run for it, Yorktown, with her Coral Sea damage, wouldn’t be able to keep up.
Fletcher’s concerns were valid. At 1000—while the American aircraft were en route to attack the Akagi, the Soryu, and the Kaga—the undamaged Hiryu had launched eighteen bombers escorted by six fighters. At 1100, while her three sister carriers were burning, the Hiryu also launched ten torpedo bombers and six more fighters. The bombers must have seen the Yorktown’s SBDs heading back to the east, for at 1205, while Fletcher was refueling the Yorktown’s combat air patrol, the ship’s radar detected the Hiryu’s planes fifty miles out and closing.
While the Yorktown hastily launched the planes on deck and waved away the bombers returning from the attack on the Soryu,
Fletcher called for help. Fighters from the Enterprise and the Hornet joined his—making a twenty-eight-plane combat air patrol—and they headed west to intercept the attackers. Only eight of the Japanese aircraft succeeded in getting through to the Yorktown, but three of their bombs hit home. One blew another hole in her patched flight deck, a second detonated deep inside, causing flooding, and the third knocked out her boilers.
Despite the new damage, the Yorktown was under way again, making twenty knots, when the Hiryu torpedo bombers came skimming over the waves at 1425. Two of the Japanese torpedoes struck her amidships on the port side, and she immediately lost power and took a twenty-degree list to port. With fires raging belowdecks and without power for her pumps or generators, her list increased to twenty-six degrees, and the ship was in imminent danger of capsizing. Her skipper, Captain Elliott Buckmaster, ordered abandon ship.
Admiral Fletcher shifted his flag to the cruiser Astoria and turned over tactical command of the two task forces to Admiral Spruance. Many of Yorktown’s aircraft were able to make it to Midway or to the deck of one of the other two American carriers.
As for the crew of the Yorktown, it was the second time in a month that their ship had taken a terrible beating from the Japanese. To Bill Surgi, it felt like déjà vu.
AVIATION MECHANIC BILL SURGI, USN
USS Yorktown
150 Miles North of Midway
4 June 1942
1500 Hours Local
The first attack came at about noon, from Japanese dive-bombers. The anti-aircraft fire was fierce but a few planes got through and they hit us with three bombs. The first one hit on the flight deck and blew a big hole in it. A second bomb went through the flight deck and started a small fire belowdecks, but the third bomb went down the stack and exploded in the same vicinity where we’d been hit before. This one did the most damage; it blew down bulkheads and opened up a space inside about the size of a stadium.
But as bad as we were hit, we had her back in business in under two hours. The fires belowdeck were mostly out, and we patched the flight deck again and then got the fires in the boilers going. We were under way and launching and recovering aircraft when the second Japanese attack came in about 1430. This time it was torpedoes and they both hit right under me.
The detonation was so big it threw me straight up into the overhead. If I hadn’t been wearing my steel helmet, it would have splattered me all over the overhead. But even so, it knocked me unconscious and when I came to I was covered with water and oil—I guess from some ruptured pipes.
By the time I’m able to get up and move around, the ship has a really bad list and is dead in the water. A few minutes later, the captain passes the word to abandon ship. Even though there were lots of guys hurt, it went much better than I thought it would. It was all very orderly. I put on a life jacket and went down the side on a rope—or maybe it was a rope ladder—and grabbed hold of a net on a life raft. I was only in the water a little while when a destroyer came up beside us and threw a net over the side for us to climb up. So I grabbed that net and there was no way I was going to let go.
ABOARD USS ENTERPRISE
45 MILES EAST OF MIDWAY
4 JUNE 1942
2030 HOURS LOCAL
At 1700 hours, twenty-four dive-bombers from the Enterprise and the Yorktown found the Hiryu about a hundred nautical miles west-northwest of the two remaining American carriers. The crew of the Japanese carrier, exhausted from a full day’s fighting, had just started to eat when the first of four Dauntless bombs struck the carrier, instantly igniting an aviation gasoline tank on the hangar deck. The ship went up like a torch. By 1930 the Kaga and the Soryu were on the bottom.
Aboard the Enterprise, Admiral Spruance ordered the Yorktown’s escorts to join the screen for the Enterprise and the Hornet, and then headed east to avoid a surface engagement with Yamamoto’s battleships and cruisers.
AFTERMATH
As darkness fell on 4 June, as Admiral Spruance withdrew to the east, Yamamoto canceled the order to take Midway and turned toward Japan with the entire Japanese Combined Fleet, taking advantage of the few remaining hours of darkness.
Japanese aircraft carrier AKAGI
When dawn broke on 5 June, the severely damaged Yorktown was still afloat. But Japanese destroyers sank their own Akagi and Hiryu with torpedoes just after first light. Admiral Nimitz, hopeful that Yorktown could make it back to Pearl Harbor’s dry dock for repairs, ordered the vessel taken under tow.
Later that day, two Japanese cruisers, the Mikuma and the Mogami, collided, trying to avoid torpedoes fired from an American submarine. On 6 June, aircraft from the Enterprise and the Hornet attacked these same two cruisers, still dead in the water. The Mikuma was sunk, but the Mogami managed to stay afloat and escape to Japan for repairs.
That same day the Japanese submarine I-168 found the Yorktown as she was being towed slowly toward Hawaii. The destroyer Hammann had been lashed to the carrier’s starboard bow to provide power and firefighting foam for damage-control parties struggling to save the vessel. When the I-168 fired a spread of four torpedoes at the damaged carrier, one of them struck the Hammann and she sank at once, taking most of her crew down with her.
The Yorktown stayed afloat until early on 7 June, when she finally succumbed and went down. When Yamamoto and Nimitz added up their gains and losses, the score looked like this:
Japanese Losses U.S. Losses
4 carriers 1 carrier
1 heavy cruiser 1 destroyer
322 aircraft 147 aircraft
3,500 lives 307 lives
CHAPTER 7
THE FLYING TIGERS
(1937–1945)
Long before the successful battles of the Coral Sea and Midway—when the tide of war began to change for the Allies—Americans had been fighting Japanese imperialism without the glare of the media spotlight. A small group of U.S. volunteers—an air force called the Flying Tigers—had been helping the Chinese in their skirmishes with the Japanese since 1938. Few Americans knew very much about them until five months after Pearl Harbor, following the Doolittle Raid.
When Jimmy Doolittle planned that first American air raid against Japan, he hoped that his sixteen B-25 aircrews would be able to land safely in China on airfields controlled by Chiang Kai-shek’s National Chinese Army. It was a logical assumption. Chiang was an American ally in the war against Japan and had been fighting the Imperial Army since soldiers marching beneath the banner of the Rising Sun had invaded his homeland in 1931. Better still from Doolittle’s perspective, a good number of American “advisors” were also in China—and many of them had been there for years.
Most histories mark the start of World War II as 1 September 1939, when Adolf Hitler’s legions invaded Poland, but Chiang and the Chinese people knew better. For them, the bloodiest conflict in history began in September 1931, when the Japanese Imperial Army marched into coal- and iron-rich Manchuria and occupied Mukden, the provincial capital, on the pretext that the troops had come to protect a Japanese-built railroad.
The Chinese government in Peking (now Beijing), a signatory to the League of Nations charter, protested the Japanese incursion and called on the international community for help. Distracted by the global economic disruptions of the Great Depression, the League took the matter “under consideration.” Tokyo’s response to this vacillation was a demand that “all Chinese associations of an anti-Japanese nature” be disbanded. On 28 January 1932, when the Chinese government refused, Japanese troops landed at Shanghai.
Though lacking aircraft or tanks, the Chinese put up a spirited defense—and again appealed to the League of Nations. While the diplomats dithered, Tokyo set up a puppet regime in Mukden, renamed the entire territory “Manchukuo,” and claimed that Japanese troops would remain at the request of the government of this new and “independent” state. The League of Nations responded by censuring Tokyo and demanding the withdrawal of Japanese troops. Japan promptly withdrew from the League.
Rea
lizing that they could act in China with virtual impunity, unhindered by intervention from the rest of the world, the Japanese began a methodical troop buildup on the Chinese mainland. By March 1933, they had annexed the Chinese province of Jehol and Japanese troops had penetrated all the way to the Great Wall.
For the next four years, much of what Americans knew about events in China came less from newspapers or radio than it did from their churches. American missionaries of every Christian denomination had been flooding into China and building churches, schools, hospitals, and orphanages for decades. Now the correspondence between those religious institutions in China and their counterparts in the United States coupled spiritual matters with what was happening to the Chinese people, caught in the crossfire of a civil war and menaced by the increasingly hostile Japanese.
Many letters and telegrams from China in the early 1930s describe the fight between the revolutionaries led by Mao Tse-tung and the Nationalist followers of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek as a struggle between godless Communism and the future of Christianity in the world’s most populous country. It was a description that Chiang sought to exploit as he looked for help contending with Mao and the Japanese.
In this effort, the Nationalist leader had a formidable ally. His beautiful wife, Soong Mei-ling, known to the rest of the world as Madame Chiang, was the American-educated daughter of a Christian missionary. A graduate of Wellesley College, fluent in English, with considerable connections in Washington, she dispatched a constant stream of letters and telegrams to friends in the United States begging for help against the Communists and the Japanese.
