The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History)

by Craig L. Symonds

  After primary flight training, aviation candidates received fourteen weeks of intermediate training, which included twenty-two hours of solo flying, usually in an open-cockpit Stearman N3N biplane, which, since it was covered in yellow fabric, was dubbed the “Yellow Peril” by the students. Advanced training included instrument flying and specialization, including acrobatics. Pilots had to learn how to do “snap rolls, loops, wingovers, the Immelmann, split-S, and falling leaf.”26

  Then, for those selected, came carrier qualifications at Opa-Locka near Miami, Florida. Mostly this consisted of field-carrier landing practice: taking off from and landing on carrier-sized outlines painted on a runway. The student pilots learned to control their aircraft while watching the landing signal officer (LSO), who stood on the deck of the faux carrier holding colorful paddles the size of tennis rackets to indicate if the pilot was coming in too high, too fast, or off line. If the approach was too high, the LSO held out his paddles in a V, bringing them down slowly as the pilot leveled out; if the plane was coming in too low, the LSO made an inverted V. If he was on track for a good landing, the LSO gave him the “cut” sign, slashing a paddle across his throat, and the pilot landed. Otherwise, the LSO gave him a “wave off” and the pilot had to go around again for another try. Mastering landing on that small a space was difficult and frustrating, as much for the LSO instructors as it was for the pilots. On one occasion, the LSO at Opa-Locka simply dropped his paddles to the ground and stood there with “a disgusted look on his face” as a rookie pilot who had ignored his signals roared past. At least once, he threw a paddle at a plane out of annoyance. Difficult as it was, however, these practice landings were much easier than landing on an actual carrier that was moving at 20 to 30 knots and heaving as much as ten or fifteen feet with the rolling sea.27

  Finally, the pilots-to-be headed for San Diego or Norfolk for Advanced Carrier Training. Eventually every pilot-in-training had to make an arrested landing on a carrier deck. As he approached the stern of a carrier that was steaming into the wind, he had to maneuver so that a hook hanging from the plane’s tail section caught one of several wires stretched across the carrier’s deck; this brought the plane to a stop. Even when the new pilots successfully learned to perform this maneuver, they often did so in trainers. As a result, many new pilots who reported to the fleet in early 1942 had never made an arrested carrier landing in the type of plane they would fly in combat. After December 7, the Navy opened a number of additional training facilities and converted several vessels into practice carriers to provide more realistic training. In the first few months of the war, however, most of the American carrier pilots were relatively green.28

  They were also relatively young. In early 1942, the fighter pilots assigned to the Navy’s three Pacific aircraft carriers averaged 25.3 years of age, and the ensigns and junior-grade lieutenants averaged 23.8. The oldest fighter pilot in the fleet was 39-year-old Wade McClusky, who subsequently became the air group commander on the Enterprise. The youngest was Ensign Robert A. M. Dibb, a product of the AVCAD program, whom everyone called “Ram” because of his initials, and who would not turn 21 until April 1942. Dibb’s debut as a fleet pilot occurred in March. Making his first carrier landing in a Wildcat, he hit the deck hard and bounced. His hook failed to catch a wire, and, still airborne, he crashed into the barrier erected across the flight deck to protect the planes parked forward. “A bright blanket of flame” shot from the nose of the plane, and Dibb jumped from the cockpit, did a shoulder roll off the wing, and landed sprawling on the deck.29

  Dibb was not the only pilot sent to the fleet with little or no experience. Seventy percent of the fighter pilots on the American carriers had less than three years in service, and nearly a third had joined the Navy within the last year. Everything was new to them. Reporting aboard a carrier for his first sea service in December 1941, one new pilot expressed surprise that the dining area was called the “wardroom.” Along with their youth and inexperience, however, they also displayed the confidence of their years, flying their trainers with joyful abandon, and often guilty of what one called “damned fool, scatter-brained flathatting.” They believed they were immortal. “You understand you can be hurt or killed,” one recalled after the war, “but emotionally [you think] there’s not a chance in the world. Not me, anybody else but me. Not a chance in the world.”30

  Commissioned officers they might be, but in the winter of 1942, these young brown-shoe officers, and their sometimes even younger backseat gunners and radiomen, for all their daredevil courage and enthusiasm, had nowhere near the length of service, the physical and mental training, or the combat experience of their Japanese counterparts. Nevertheless, in January of 1942, the three American carrier groups, with their embarked aircraft flown by young and untested pilots, were the only offensive weapons Nimitz had to hand, and he planned to use them aggressively. The Kidō Butai was supreme in the Pacific Ocean, but there were other targets of opportunity available to the American brown shoes.

  * America’s only other carrier at the time was the small converted collier Langley (CV-1). Thirteen steel girders supported a 523-foot-long flight deck some forty feet above her hull, giving her the appearance of a long building with a flat roof and no walls. This gave rise to her nickname, “The Old Covered Wagon.” In 1937, she was converted into a seaplane tender (AV-3).

  * Grumman claimed that the F4F-4 could climb at a modest but respectable 1,950 feet per minute, but in combat conditions, pilots complained their Dash 4s could ascend only at about 1,000 feet per minute.

  * The Ranger was the first U.S. Navy warship to be built from the keel up as a carrier, but her designers conceived of her as a way to provide air cover for the battle fleet rather than as an independent strike platform. As a result, she lacked both armor and internal watertight integrity. A single bomb could sink her. Thus she was kept in the Atlantic, where she subsequently provided air cover for the landings in North Africa.

  4

  American Counterstrike

  The key question for Nimitz at the beginning of 1942 was how to employ his scarce resources. With only three carrier groups—and little else—he was in no position to seek battle with the Kidō Butai. Nor did he need to. Within a year he could expect the arrival of the first of the new-construction carriers and other warships that would give him a significant materiel superiority over the Japanese. That suggested that one possible strategy was simply to conserve his strength, hold on to Hawaii, and wait for those ships. That would have been consistent with the principle of “Germany First,” the strategic concept adopted by the government just weeks before the war began. Of course that was before the Japanese had struck at Pearl Harbor, which had immediately created public pressure to strike back. Moreover, Nimitz was unwilling to concede the initiative to the Japanese. He planned to use his carriers to hit their bases in the central Pacific, striking targets of opportunity to keep them back on their heels.

  His boss, Ernie King, had similar thoughts. If anything, King was more eager than Nimitz to begin a counteroffensive. He shared with Nimitz the instinct (in King’s words) to “hold what you’ve got and hit them when you can.” But unlike Nimitz, who could focus his attention and energies exclusively on the Pacific, King had to fight a global war, including the ongoing Battle of the Atlantic against German U-boats. In addition, King was under pressure from America’s allies, including Australian prime minister John Curtin, to maintain the communications and supply link between Hawaii and Australia. King was acutely sensitive to the fact that Japanese occupation of New Caledonia, Fiji, or Samoa in the South Pacific would sever that link, and he wanted Nimitz to focus his attention southward, writing his Pacific commander that the protection of the lifeline to Australia (see map 1, p. 68) was second only to the defense of Hawaii itself, and not by much. He ordered Nimitz to commit both Halsey’s Task Force 8 and Fletcher’s new Task Force 17—two-thirds of America’s carrier force in the Pacific—to protecting and screening a convoy that was carryi
ng reinforcements from San Diego to Samoa. Only after Samoa was secure would those carrier task forces become available for offensive operations.1

  Nimitz perforce complied, but when King also ordered him to send a squadron of patrol planes to Australia, Nimitz pushed back. He protested that the reduction of aircraft in Hawaii left it “dangerously weak,” and he reminded King of the central importance of Hawaii to the Allied cause. Instead of rebuking Nimitz for his temerity, King replied that the transfer was isolated and temporary; he assured Nimitz that he fully understood the “paramount importance” of Hawaii. Over the next several months, however, there would be a subtle but steady push and pull between King and Nimitz about how, and especially where, to employ the three carrier task forces in the Pacific.2

  By January 23 the American reinforcements had been safely landed at Samoa, and the Enterprise and Yorktown were freed up to operate against Japanese targets. Nimitz ordered Halsey to strike Japanese bases in the Marshall and Gilbert Islands. King not only approved, he urged that the strikes “be driven home” and suggested that Wilson Brown’s Lexington force should also raid Wake Island a few days afterward. His notion was that when Halsey struck at the Marshalls, the Japanese would pull coverage away from Wake, and Brown could exploit that. Though some members of Nimitz’s staff worried about sending all three carriers out simultaneously, Nimitz overruled them. For all his placid demeanor, Nimitz was perfectly willing to act boldly, taking what more conservative officers considered significant risks in order to regain the initiative. In this first American counterattack since Pearl Harbor, a robust offensive was crucial to improving morale both at home and in the fleet. As it happened, Brown’s raid on Wake had to be scrubbed after a Japanese submarine sank the oiler Neches, which left Brown with barely enough fuel to get to Wake and back. Deciding that there was too small a margin of error, Nimitz recalled him. He was willing to act boldly, but he also knew the difference between boldness and foolishness.3

  No one was sure how extensive, or well protected, the Japanese bases in the Marshalls were. The former German colony had been granted to the Japanese as a mandate by the League of Nations after the First World War, and since then few Westerners had been allowed to visit them, much less prepare detailed charts. For some of those islands, the most recent charts available to the Americans had been made by Charles Wilkes, who had led the first U.S. Navy exploration expedition of the Pacific in 1840. King and Nimitz assumed that behind this veil of secrecy the Japanese had built up substantial defenses in the Marshall Islands. The American raid was therefore a shot in the dark.4

  Fletcher’s Yorktown group made a fast run in toward the target, crossing over the international date line on January 29 and skipping at once to the 31st. Shortly before 6:00 a.m. on February 1, Fletcher turned the Yorktown into the wind to launch. The weather was terrible. Squalls surrounded the task force, and flashes of lightning could be seen on the western horizon in the direction of the principal target at Jaluit Atoll. The first planes spotted for launch were four Wildcat fighters that would act as combat air patrol (CAP) and protect the task force during the raid. Fletcher planned to keep the rest of his fighters aboard so he could rotate the CAP, and to act as a reserve in case of a Japanese counterattack.5

  After the fighters were airborne, Yorktown launched seventeen Dauntless dive-bombers and eleven Devastator torpedo planes (armed with bombs for this mission), all of them under Commander Curtis Smiley. These planes were to strike the Japanese seaplane base at Jaluit, which was some 140 miles away. It was dawn by now, but the sky remained dark and filled with heavy clouds. The visibility was so poor that the pilots had difficulty finding one another over the task force. Smiley never did manage to gather all his planes into one group, and some of the pilots ended up flying off toward Jaluit on their own. While en route there, the Americans encountered a powerful thunderstorm with “sheet lightning and torrential rains” that reduced visibility to near zero. They pressed on nonetheless and dropped their bombs on or near the assigned target. Under these conditions it was hard to know with certainty whether they hit anything. They bombed a radio tower and strafed two small vessels in the lagoon. The advertised “seaplane base” turned out to be little more than a corrugated-tin hut. Several pilots, despairing of finding a worthy target, simply jettisoned their bombs.6

  After that first group flew off toward Jaluit, Fletcher ordered the launch of fourteen more dive-bombers: nine for a strike on Makin, 120 miles to the south, and five more for Mili, forty miles to the north, about which virtually nothing was known. The weather was better over Makin than Jaluit, but the only targets of any value there were a minelayer and two large seaplanes, both of which were destroyed. It was all somewhat anti-climactic after the weeks of anticipation. At Mili the disappointment was even greater. It was the largest island in the Mili Atoll, and later in the war the Japanese would build an airstrip there and turn it into a major base, but in February of 1942 it was virtually unoccupied. Lacking targets worthy of their bombs, the Yorktown pilots did what they could, shooting up anything that looked worthwhile. For the most part, however, it was a wild goose chase.7

  Then the attack planes had to go back through that appalling weather to find the task force. By then, the storm had caught up with the Yorktown. Winds gusted up to 50 knots, and the carrier pitched and rolled so wildly that Captain Buckmaster called back the circling Wildcats of the CAP. The attack pilots had to execute a landing under extremely perilous conditions and while low on fuel. When Ensign Tom Ellison landed his Dauntless, there was not enough fuel left in his tank to taxi. Several pilots didn’t make it back at all and had to ditch in the water. Fletcher ordered four destroyers to search for them, but in that storm-tossed sea not all the pilots could be recovered. After two hours, Fletcher broke radio silence to recall the destroyers, reformed his task force, and retired to the northeast. Though he had initially planned a second strike, the dearth of targets and the worsening weather convinced him to scrap it.8

  For the fighter pilots on the Yorktown, the highlight of the whole raid was the downing of a big Kawanishi flying boat (“Emily”) that had been hovering near the task force and reporting its position. The Wildcat pilots chased the giant four-engine plane from one patch of clouds to another, riddling it with .50-caliber bullets. When a pilot shot off its tail section, the exultant pilot radioed: “We just shot his goddamned ass off!” Nonetheless, there was no disguising the fact that overall the Yorktown’s initial raid had been largely unproductive.9

  Halsey’s Enterprise group, by contrast, had far better luck, and Halsey’s natural bellicosity allowed him to take full advantage of it. The first sign that things might be going his way came the day before the strike, when a Japanese scout plane, identified on radar, flew past without spotting the task force. Ever the showman, Halsey composed a sarcastic message thanking the pilot for failing to see him, had it translated into Japanese, ran off copies on the ship’s mimeo machine, and gave the copies to his pilots to drop along with their bombs. It was the wartime version of a playground taunt, and risky, too, since it could have revealed to the Japanese the effectiveness of American radar.

  Nimitz had ordered Halsey to attack Japanese bases at Wotje and Maloelap in the Marshall Islands, but as Halsey moved toward the targets the skipper of the American submarine Dolphin reported that the defenses at the main Japanese base at Kwajalein were less extensive than previously believed, and, pressed by his eccentric and pugnacious chief of staff, Commander Miles Browning, Halsey added Kwajalein to the target list.

  In the predawn darkness, twenty minutes ahead of Fletcher and some three hundred miles to the northwest, the Enterprise turned into the wind and increased speed to 30 knots. As on the Yorktown, the first planes to launch that morning were six Wildcats, to serve as CAP. Then came thirty-six Dauntless dive-bombers of VS-6 and VB-6 under Commander Howard “Brigham” Young. Their principal target was the pair of islands called Roi and Namur at the north end of Kwajalein Atoll.

  The w
eather was better for the Enterprise pilots, but it was still pitch dark at 4:34 a.m. when the first planes took off. Carrier launches are dangerous under any circumstances with each plane having a full fuel tank and carrying 700 pounds of bombs, and they are particularly dangerous in the dark. To keep the Enterprise concealed from prowling Japanese submarines, only a few hooded lights offered a dim and ghostly illumination of the flight deck as the pilots warmed up their engines. Taking off in such circumstances was like accelerating through a tunnel into black oblivion. One recalled that it was “like being inside a black felt hat,” and most of the pilots felt a “touch of vertigo” as they launched into the darkness.10

  After takeoff, the bombers had to form up over the task force, which meant finding the other planes in the strike group as they all circled overhead in the dark. The planes, too, were blacked out except for a single white taillight. Finding their proper position in the formation was like groping blindfolded at 130 knots. Once all the Dauntless bombers were in the air, nine heavy Devastator torpedo bombers took off. Like the Devastators launched from Yorktown, they carried bombs rather than torpedoes. Lieutenant Commander Eugene Lindsey led this contingent, slotted for the attack on Kwajalein Island, some forty miles south of Roi-Namur and over 150 miles away. It took more than twenty minutes before the planes assembled into a formation that resembled a series of stacked Vs. Then the whole group headed off toward Kwajalein Atoll.11

  As the attack planes flew off to the west, Halsey brought up the twelve remaining Wildcats of VF-6 from the hangar deck. Instead of keeping them so he could rotate his CAP, as Fletcher did, or sending them off as protection for the attack planes, he planned to use them offensively. Deck crews had attached 100-pound bombs under each wing, and Halsey sent the fighters off to attack the nearby islands of Wotje and Maloelap. Lieutenant Commander Wade McClusky led six Wildcats against nearby Wotje, and Lieutenant Jim Gray led six more against Maloelap. During the launch, one of the pilots in Gray’s section lost his bearings in the dark, and instead of lifting off, his plane slid sideways into the sea. The pilot was rescued, but it left Gray with only five airplanes.12