The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History)

by Craig L. Symonds

  In the subsequent weeks and months, Japanese forces landed in the Philippines, on the Malay Peninsula, and on Borneo, Sumatra, and Java. Thailand surrendered on December 9; Hong Kong fell on Christmas Day; Manila on January 2; and, most shocking of all, the supposedly impregnable citadel at Singapore fell on February 15. The Kidō Butai attacked Darwin, Australia, on February 19. After that, the giant Kaga headed back to Japan for a refit after striking a submerged reef off Palau, but the other five carriers of the Kidō Butai, along with a substantial escort, steamed into the Indian Ocean. In the wake of this rampage, the Japanese conquered an island empire of more than ten thousand square miles and secured the resource base that they hoped would make them self-reliant and invulnerable. More cautious observers within the Japanese leadership might have noted that most of these dramatic naval victories had been raids—hit-and-run strikes—that the American battle fleet in Pearl Harbor had been at anchor, and that the Prince of Wales and Repulse had lacked air cover. It was hardly the time for carping, however, for the Kidō Butai and its unlikely commander had become the absolute master of the seas. In the early spring of 1942, the Japanese decision to go to war with Britain, Holland, and the United States seemed not “romantic and illogical” but shrewd—even brilliant.

  * Imperial Navy junior officers attempted a coup of their own in May 1932 when a group of them participated in the assassination of Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi. As in 1926, the long-term result was an effort to placate and appease the dissatisfied junior officers.

  * Initially the Japanese had planned to convert the battle cruiser Amagi into acarrier, but after the Amagi was damaged during a 1923 earthquake, the Japanese were allowed to substitute the even larger battleship Kaga. As shown in the next chapter, the Americans did much the same thing with two battle cruisers that they had under construction that subsequently became the carriers Lexington (CV-2) and Saratoga (CV-3).

  * Japan also had three large seaplane tenders (Ryuho, Chitóse, and Chiyoda) that were converted into aircraft carriers after the Battle of Midway. See Appendix A.

  * During 1942, the United States built 47,836 airplanes to Japan’s 8,861. Over the course of the war, the United States built more than four times as many combat airplanes as Japan: 324,750 to Japan’s 76,320.

  ** Though the Allied code names for Japanese aircraft did not come into use until 1943, these code names will be used throughout the text for the sake of clarity.

  3

  The Brown Shoe Navy

  And what of the American carriers? Where were they during this rampage by the Kidō Butai? In January of 1942 there were three American carriers in the Pacific. Two of them were big, oversize carriers equivalent to the Japanese Kaga and Akagi—and for much the same reason. They had been laid down as battle cruisers in 1916 as part of America’s buildup for possible involvement in World War I. By the time the United States entered the war in 1917, it had become clear that the most urgent need was for destroyers to protect the convoys, and the United States halted work on the big warships to concentrate on escorts. When the war ended, their big hulls lay unfinished on the building ways. American sponsorship of the 1922 Washington Naval Arms Limitation Treaty made it clear that they would never be completed as battle cruisers, and like the Japanese, the U.S. converted two of them into carriers, naming them for battles of the American Revolution: the Lexington (CV-2) and the Saratoga (CV-3). At 50,000 tons each, they were even larger than Kaga and Akagi and capable of carrying as many as ninety airplanes each.*

  In addition to these two behemoths, the United States had five other carriers on the Navy List. Two of them, Ranger (CV-4) and Wasp (CV-7), were smaller ships, generally equivalent to the Japanese Sōryū and Hiryū, but three of them, Yorktown (CV-5), Enterprise (CV-6), and Hornet (CV-8), were all relatively new, purpose-built carriers that displaced just under 20,000 tons empty and about 25,500 tons with their embarked air group of 60 to 80 planes, which made them roughly comparable to the Japanese Shōkaku and Zuikaku.

  Had all five of America’s big carriers been deployed as a unit, they would have made a worthy opponent for the Kidō Butai. The United States, however, faced a two-ocean war, and consequently only one of those new carriers—the Enterprise—was in the Pacific. Until April 1941, the Yorktown had been there too, but that month Roosevelt had ordered her to the Atlantic to beef up the so-called neutrality patrols against Nazi U-boats. For its part, the Hornet was so new that, although she was commissioned in October, six weeks before Pearl Harbor, her final fitting-out kept her in Norfolk, Virginia, until March of 1942. In addition, both of the smaller carriers (Ranger and Wasp) were also in the Atlantic. Until the Yorktown returned to the Pacific and the Hornet was fitted out, Nimitz would have only three carriers: the Lexington and Saratoga, and the smaller but newer Enterprise.1

  Nimitz kept them busy, putting each at the center of a task force that conducted nearly constant patrols north, west, and south of Hawaii. In addition to the carrier, each task force had two or three cruisers and a squadron of destroyers to provide a screen, plus a fleet oiler to keep the warships (especially the fuel-guzzling destroyers) under way. A task force of one carrier, three cruisers, and six destroyers burned up 5,800 barrels of oil every day—and more when conducting high-speed flight operations. Throughout the Pacific War, fought as it was over a huge expanse of ocean, it was critical for both sides to pay close attention to the fueling needs of their warships; the loss of an oiler could severely restrict the operating capabilities of an entire task force.2

  The commanding officers of these task forces were a disparate lot, and only one of them was a brown shoe. When Congress created the Bureau of Aeronautics (BuAir) in 1921, it had mandated that all Navy flight squadrons were to be commanded by qualified pilots. In addition, a Navy board had recommended (but did not require) that only qualified aviators should command carriers. Because of that, a number of ambitious black-shoe officers, including several who were quite senior, applied for pilot training in order to have access to these new commands. Veteran pilots considered them opportunists and scornfully referred to them as “Johnny-come-latelys.” Even worse, from their point of view, other senior officers who never completed pilot training at all still managed to qualify for carrier command by going through a four-week familiarization program in Pensacola, Florida, to become “naval observers.” These men wore silver wings rather than gold, and though they were not certified to fly, they were authorized to command flight units, including carriers. Behind their backs, the pilots called them “kiwis” after the flightless New Zealand bird. Opportunism and careerism may have been factors for many, but some Johnny-come-latelys underwent a genuine conversion. One who did was William F. Halsey.3

  Halsey graduated from the Naval Academy in 1904, three years behind King and a year ahead of Nimitz. Like most officers of his generation, he had spent most of his career as a surface warfare officer, serving aboard the battleship Kansas during the world-circling cruise of Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet in 1907–9, and commanding destroyers during World War I. He commanded several more destroyers after the war until he was assigned to the Naval Academy in 1927 to take charge of the Reina Mercedes, a prize from the Spanish-American War that the Navy had turned into a training vessel for midshipmen. In that capacity, Halsey was responsible for all of the Academy’s floating property, including its small seaplane squadron. Eager to learn something about this new service, he asked the squadron’s young commander, Lieutenant Dewitt “Duke” Ramsey, to take him on a flight. More flights followed, some with Captain Halsey at the controls. “My whole naval career changed right then,” Halsey wrote later. “I became fascinated with it…. Soon I was eating, drinking, and breathing aviation.” Halsey was so excited by the potential of this new service that he applied for flight training at the end of his Naval Academy tour. He was hugely disappointed when he failed the eye test.4

  After a year as a student at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, and another at the Army War Coll
ege at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C., Halsey received an offer from King, then serving as chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, to command the carrier Saratoga if he completed the short observer’s course at Pensacola. Once he got there, however, Halsey managed to get himself transferred into the full pilot training program despite his age and his poor eyesight; he earned his gold wings as a 52-year-old grandfather. In January of 1942, he was the only vice admiral in the Navy who was a naval aviator. Officially he was commander, Aircraft Battle Force; operationally, he was the commanding officer of Task Force 8, built around the carrier Enterprise. Halsey did not command the ship itself—that responsibility fell to the ship’s captain, George D. Murray, a career naval aviator who had earned his gold wings in 1915. Murray was responsible for the day-to-day management of the vessel and its crew. Halsey was a kind of passenger on the Enterprise, having a suite of rooms known as flag quarters in the island amidships, and dispensing orders through a staff.

  Vice Admiral William F. Halsey sports gold wings on the breast of his forest-green aviator’s uniform. Note the cigarette in his right hand. (U.S. Naval Institute)

  As a midshipman at the Academy, Halsey had played fullback on the football team and he possessed something of a fullback’s attitude. He was direct, often blunt, occasionally profane, and utterly fearless. Some thought his facial features resembled those of a bulldog, and not only did that give him his nickname, it added to his reputation for ferocity. To balance that, he was outgoing and gregarious, a bit of a showman and, like Yamamoto, willing to speak his mind openly. Once the war began, he became a favorite of newspaper reporters, who counted on him to provide some fiery rhetoric for their columns. He seldom let them down. After Pearl Harbor, he claimed that he had always distrusted “Japs,” and vowed that by the time he was through with them, the Japanese language would be spoken only in hell.5

  The most senior of Nimitz’s task-force commanders was Vice Admiral Wilson Brown, who was in charge of Task Force 11, built around the big carrier Lexington. Brown was three years older than Halsey or Nimitz, having graduated from the Academy in the class of 1902. Brown was, in the words of one modern scholar, “an intelligent paragon of old school formality.” In the 1902 yearbook, Lucky Bag, his classmates described him as “modest and unassuming … with a sweet voice and a sweeter smile.” In short, he was a dramatic contrast to Halsey in almost every way. Like Halsey, however, Brown had started out in destroyers and commanded the destroyer Parker in the First World War. After the war, while Halsey was still commanding destroyers, Brown occupied a series of staff positions, including a tour as naval aide to President Calvin Coolidge. When Halsey underwent flight training, Brown remained in the black-shoe community and commanded the battleship California, then served a tour as the superintendent of the Naval Academy, a position in which his headmasterly qualities served him well. In February of 1941, ten months before Pearl Harbor, he was promoted to vice admiral and made commanding officer of the Scouting Force. His health was suspect. Though only a few years older than Nimitz and Halsey, he looked at least a decade older. Thin and pallid, he had a slight tremor that caused his head to twitch, leading irreverent junior officers to dub him “Shaky” Brown. As events would show, he was an intelligent and thoughtful officer, but he lacked the boldness and the energetic self-confidence of Bull Halsey.6

  The third of Nimitz’s task-force commanders was Rear Admiral Herbert Fairfax Leary, who commanded the Saratoga group, dubbed Task Force 14. Leary was another black shoe, a 1905 classmate of Nimitz, a tall, thin, lantern-jawed man whose tenure was destined to be short. On January 11, a month after Pearl Harbor, the Saratoga was operating near Johnston Island five hundred miles southwest of Hawaii in seas so rough that Leary cancelled flight operations for the day. Waves broke over the bow and washed the flight deck. At 7:00 that evening, in the midst of the storm, a terrific explosion jolted the big carrier. A pilot on board said, “It felt like the whole ship had been moved about five feet.” A Japanese submarine, the I-6, had slipped through the screen of cruisers and destroyers and delivered a deadly Type 95 torpedo. The blast killed six men and flooded three fire rooms. Though the Japanese submarine skipper reported to Tokyo that he had sunk a Saratoga-class carrier, the big flattop managed to stay afloat and steam back to Pearl Harbor under her own power, arriving on January 15. Nimitz saw that the necessary repairs could not be completed in Hawaii and two days later reluctantly ordered her back to Bremerton, Washington.7

  That loss would have reduced Nimitz to only two carrier groups but for the return to the Pacific that same week of the USS Yorktown. After Pearl Harbor, Yorktown had been rushed into dry dock in Norfolk for a quick overhaul, and by December 16 she was en route back to the Pacific. After passing through the Panama Canal, she arrived in San Diego at the end of the month. There she joined the heavy cruiser Louisville, a light cruiser, and half a dozen destroyers, plus the essential oiler, to comprise Task Force 17. To command this new task force, Nimitz picked a man he knew well and who had commanded the Saratoga task force during the aborted relief expedition to Wake Island: Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher.

  Fletcher was yet another black shoe, having served in cruisers and destroyers for most of his thirty-six-year career. Graduating from the Naval Academy in 1906, one year after Nimitz and two years after Halsey, Fletcher had been a cruiser and battleship man from the start; his most recent sea service was the command of Cruiser Division 6. Called “Fletch” or “Flap Jack” while at the Academy, he had what the Lucky Bag called “a sunny disposition” and the habit of gesturing with his hands while talking. He was well decorated, having received a Medal of Honor as a lieutenant during the Navy’s expedition to Vera Cruz in 1914 (an honor somewhat diluted by the fact that the Navy had handed out no fewer than fifty-five Medals of Honor for that expedition, passing them out, as one critic put it, “like crackerjack charms”). More important was the fact that Fletcher was well connected. He had served as naval aide to Secretary of the Navy Claude Swanson in the early 1930s and as assistant chief of the Bureau of Navigation under Nimitz in the late ’30s. A biographer concedes that Fletcher’s “personal connections with the decision-makers of the war set him ahead of others for important assignments.” It was natural that the brown-shoe pilots on the Yorktown would feel an intense curiosity about their new boss.8

  What they saw was an unremarkable man with a plain, open face, thinning dark hair, a generous nose, and dark eyes. Fletcher was neither flamboyant and outgoing like Halsey nor reserved and professorial like Wilson Brown. He was instead a straightforward, competent professional whose tight-lipped expression suggested the no-nonsense skepticism of a Midwestern farmer, which was fitting, as he had been born and reared in Iowa. He even smoked corncob pipes that he had shipped to him from the States a dozen at a time. Reporters seldom badgered him for interviews because he was not inclined to bloodthirsty pronouncements. Given his long service in battleships and cruisers, Fletcher would have preferred to make the heavy cruiser Louisville his flagship, but Nimitz wanted his task-force commanders to ride the carrier, and so in San Diego on New Year’s Day, 1942 (the day after Nimitz took formal command in Pearl Harbor), the black shoe Fletcher broke his flag on USS Yorktown. Fletcher may have felt somewhat out of place on board the big flattop. One historian suggests that “he was the proverbial stranger in a strange land.”9

  Though Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher was a “black shoe” admiral—a surface warfare specialist—he commanded U.S. forces in both of the major carrier battles of the first six months of the Pacific war: Coral Sea and Midway. (U.S. Naval Institute)

  The captain of the Yorktown was 52-year-old Elliott Buckmaster. Tall and handsome, Buckmaster was also quiet and reserved, even cold—though, as with Nimitz, that first impression often changed after close association. Buckmaster was a brown shoe with gold wings on his chest, but he was also a Johnny-come-lately, having passed the aviation course only five years before as a full commander. His first aviation assignment had been as
executive officer (second in command) on the Lexington, and he had little experience as a carrier pilot. Perhaps because of this, the Yorktown’s executive officer, Commander Joseph “Jocko” Clark, who did have significant flight experience, was skeptical of both his commanding officer and the task-force commander. An acolyte of Ernie King, Clark thought that Fletcher and Buckmaster failed to enforce the kind of discipline he admired. That assessment, however, said more about Clark than it did about either Fletcher or Buckmaster. Clark found a lot to complain about on the Yorktown, writing later, “Yorktown’s hopeless department heads needed a lot of King’s brand of discipline.” It was probably just as well that Clark did not stay long on the Yorktown, though when he returned to Washington after his promotion to captain, he continued to disparage the Yorktown and her officers, including Fletcher, and over the subsequent months his comments very likely affected King’s assessment of both the ship and the task-force commander.10

  Nimitz had hoped that the arrival of the Yorktown would give him four carrier groups, and the ability to begin a meaningful counterattack against the Japanese, but the loss of the Saratoga meant that he would have to carry on with only three: the big Lexington and the newer sister ships, Enterprise and Yorktown.11

  On board those three carriers, the Americans, like the Japanese, relied on three kinds of combat airplanes. The workhorse American carrier bomber was the SBD Douglas Dauntless, a relatively new (1940) monoplane with a crew of two: a pilot in the front seat, almost always a commissioned officer, and an enlisted radioman/gunner who sat behind him and was responsible for communications as well as a .30-caliber machine gun, later increased to movable twin machine guns. Compared with the Japanese Val dive-bomber, the Dauntless was both bigger and sturdier, and its pilots referred to it affectionately as “the barge.” Though the Dauntless was 25 percent heavier than the Val (thanks in part to its armor protection), it nevertheless had a slightly greater range because of its more powerful engine. It could also carry a bigger bomb load, consisting of either one 1,000-pound bomb or a 500-pound bomb plus two 100-pound bombs under the wings. The Dauntless was marginally faster than the Val, though slower than Japanese fighters. Officially, its top speed was 217 knots (250 mph), but it cruised at 130 knots (152 mph) and attained maximum speed only during an attack dive, when it might reach 250 knots (288 mph). (Its pilots joked that SBD stood for “Slow but Deadly.”) The Dauntless also boasted two .50-caliber machine guns in the cowling, and on occasion it was used to augment the combat air patrol (CAP).12