At 5:47 p.m., the radar on the Yorktown picked up a number of bogeys, and the Americans scrambled more fighters to join the CAP already circling above the task force. Altogether, the two carriers were able to put thirty fighters in the air to meet an incoming attack by twenty-seven bombers and fighters. In fact, the attackers had no idea that the American carriers were there. Despite the snoopers, the Yorktown and Lexington remained hidden under heavy cloud cover. Instead, Hara had sent this late-afternoon strike toward the reported position of those “battleships” off the Jomard Passage, which Takagi believed also included a carrier. Crace’s cruisers had been the recipients of an attack by land-based Japanese bombers that afternoon; now Hara’s carrier planes sought to find them as well. The Japanese bombers were flying low amid the clouds and in the growing darkness and not expecting to find carrier-based fighters in their flight path. When the American Wildcats came screaming down on them from 5,000 feet, they were thrown into confusion. One excited Japanese pilot reported, “Enemy fighters have completely destroyed the attack group.” This was an exaggeration, but the Americans did shoot down seven planes and damaged two others. The rest fled.25
Or at least they tried to. As dusk turned to full dark around 6:30 p.m., the Lexington and Yorktown were recovering the fighters that had driven off this ill-fated sortie when several unidentified planes flew past the Yorktown with their running lights on and began flashing messages in code. It was not a code that anyone on the Yorktown recognized. Then the planes swung around and entered the landing pattern, as if preparing to come aboard. By now it was evident that these were hostile planes whose pilots had mistaken the Yorktown for one of their own. A few of the American escorts opened fire, and then the Yorktown’s own antiaircraft guns joined in, sending a curtain of ordnance into the group of circling planes, both friendly and hostile. When that happened, Ted Sherman recalled, “aircraft disappeared into the darkness like a flock of birds flushed by hunters.” Twenty-three-year-old Ensign Richard Wright was startled to see tracers from his own ship fly past the cockpit of his Wildcat fighter. He insisted that “some of those tracers came between my face and the instrument panel,” and he shouted into his transmitter, “What are you shooting at me for?” As the Japanese planes fled, so did the American pilots, including Wright. One of them, Ensign John D. Baker, was subsequently unable to find his way back again in the dark. Pete Pederson, the Yorktown’s air group commander acting as fighter control director, watched Baker’s blip on radar and radioed him a course to follow to get back, but Baker never answered and was never seen again. When Pederson could not raise him on the radio, he wept.26
That Japanese planes would mistake the Yorktown for one of their own carriers suggested that their flattops might not be far off. Those manning the radar on the Yorktown watched as the blips representing the surviving Japanese planes retired eastward. A few of them began to circle only about thirty miles away before disappearing off the screen, as if they were landing. That led some to surmise that the Japanese carriers might be very close indeed. It was too dark now for an air mission, but Fletcher toyed with the idea of sending his cruisers and destroyers for a night surface attack. The problem was that the location of the Japanese carriers was only speculative, and if it were incorrect, dawn would find his surface ships well off to the east—sitting ducks for a Japanese air strike. Then, too, a high-speed run to the east would use up a lot of fuel, an important consideration now with the Neosho smashed and no other tanker expected until May 13. Once again, Fletcher decided to wait for more information. Despite subsequent criticism, it was the correct decision, for in fact the Japanese planes had not been landing; they were lost. Many never did find their host carrier. Of the twenty-seven planes Hara had sent out, only eighteen managed to return to their own ships, which were, in fact, more than a hundred miles northeast of Task Force 17. 27
On the whole, May 7 had been a good day for the American pilots. They had sunk the Shōhō in a textbook attack and shot down a total of nineteen planes while losing only three bombers and three fighters of their own. For his part, Admiral Hara was devastated. He felt that he had been unlucky in not finding the Americans first. He was so frustrated that, as he said later, he “felt like quitting the navy.” The Americans were as elated as Hara was despondent. As Bill Burch put it, “Despite the pounding we had given them on former occasions, we all felt that this, our first opportunity to try our punch against a major unit of the enemy fleet, was our compensation for the years of training and the weary months of steaming over trackless tropic seas.” It was, however, only the prologue.28
The next day, the opposing carrier forces finally found one another. As they had the day before, both sides sent out pre-dawn air searches. The first sighting of the day came from Lieutenant Junior Grade Joseph Smith flying a Dauntless from the Yorktown. He reported sighting “Two carriers, two battleships.” Then, before he could complete the report, his radio cut out. Nevertheless, Fletcher knew what sector Smith had been searching, and at 9:08 he turned tactical command over to Fitch, who ordered a full strike by seventy-five airplanes. The location of the target was confirmed a half hour later by Bob Dixon, who had sent the “Scratch one flattop” report the day before, and who was searching the sector next to Smith’s. He flew over to Smith’s area and was able to complete the report: “Two carriers, two battleships, four heavy cruisers, several destroyers, 170 miles to the northwest.” The actual distance was closer to two hundred miles, but luckily for the Americans, Hara was steaming toward them as fast as he could go. He, too, had received a sighting report from his patrol planes, and at 9:15, he sent sixty-nine planes to attack Fletcher. En route to the target, flying at 17,500 feet, Bill Burch looked down and saw the Japanese attack force below him headed in the other direction.29
The Yorktown dive-bombers arrived over the Japanese carrier force at 10:32. Hara’s two carriers were about eight miles apart, one ahead of the other, steaming at high speed almost due south toward the American task force. The lead carrier (Zuikaku) was about to enter a cloud, but the trailing carrier (Shōkaku) was in the open. The dive-bomber pilots were eager to strike, but they waited for the slower torpedo planes to arrive so that they could conduct the kind of coordinated attack that had proved so successful the day before. While they waited, they could see Japanese fighters taking off from the Shōkaku and begin climbing up from sea level. It was agonizing to watch, Johnny Neilsen remembered. “We sat up there 20 minutes waiting for those torpedo planes, watching the Zeros climbing up toward us.” Worse, all that time, the lead carrier was getting closer to the protective cover of the weather front.30
Finally, around 11:00, the torpedo planes arrived. Burch waved his arm and waggled his ailerons as a signal, and peeled over into a dive. The Japanese Zeros circled and waited, making side runs at the bombers as they flew past. Burch and the other bombers had been almost directly above the Shōkaku, and they dove nearly vertically, their planes corkscrewing as they plunged downward. As Burch passed through a thermal layer at about 8,000 feet, his windscreen fogged up so badly he couldn’t see at all. He tried sticking his head out of the cockpit; though at 250 knots that was impossible. Meanwhile, the carrier turned and twisted so that, instead of making a bombing run along her length, he had to attack from abeam, which gave him a much narrower target. As a result, the Yorktown bombers made only two hits. One of them was by Lieutenant John J. Powers, who had sworn before he left the Yorktown that morning that he was going to lay his bomb on the flight deck of a Jap carrier. Powers kept his Dauntless in a full dive until he was barely five hundred feet from the target before releasing his bomb. His plane was destroyed by the ensuing blast. He was subsequently awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor.31
Meanwhile Joe Taylor’s Devastators dropped down to fifty feet for their torpedo attack. The Wildcat fighters drove off the first assault by six Zeros, but this time there were more Zeros than Wildcats. Their fire was so heavy that Taylor thought the bullets striking his plane “sounded like rain
on the roof.” As a result, most of the torpedo bombers dropped their fish from too great a distance. Though the pilots reported making four hits, this was wishful thinking. One problem was that because the American torpedoes ran at only 33.5 knots; the 34-knot Shōkaku could simply outrun them. 32
The Lexington strike force, arriving later, had even less luck. By now the Zuikaku had made it under the cover of the weather front and only the Shōkaku was visible. Moreover, amid the thickening weather there was a lot of confusion, and most of the Lexington’s bombers never found a target at all. Those that did encountered a sky full of Japanese fighters and cloud bursts from antiaircraft fire. “It was an incredible scramble,” one pilot recalled. “People yelling over the radio, mixed up, and you never knew who the hell was on top of whom.” In the end, only four bombers from the Lexington dove on the Shōkaku, and only one got a hit. The American pilots reported a total of six hits, but the Shōkaku was actually hit only three times, though all three were by 1,000-pound bombs, which damaged her deck so badly that she could no longer launch or recover airplanes. After that, Takagi decided to send her northward, out of the fight. Hara directed the planes from the Shōkaku that were still airborne to land on the Zuikaku, which had escaped entirely.33
Meanwhile, 150 miles to the south, Hara’s planes were hitting Task Force 17. By now, the cloud cover no longer protected the American carriers, and both of them were clearly visible in the bright sunshine. Thanks to radar, the Americans had spotted the incoming bogeys at 68 miles, and they braced for the attack. All available fighters, seventeen of them (the rest had gone with the attack force), were put in the air, bolstered by twenty-three Dauntless bombers (without bombs). On board the carriers, watertight doors were secured, gasoline was purged from the fuel lines, and fire hoses and first aid kits were made ready.34
The Japanese used a coordinated attack with torpedo planes coming in from both sides in an “anvil” attack while their bombers prepared to dive out of the sun. Ted Sherman, skipper of the Lexington, wrote admiringly that their attack was “beautifully coordinated.” Soon, the water around both carriers was filled with erupting geysers from near misses and the tracks of swiftly running torpedoes. The two carriers maneuvered radically in an attempt to avoid the torpedoes. The Lexington, however, was not a nimble ship. According to Sherman, “it took 30 to 40 seconds just to put the rudder hard over. When she did start to turn, she moved majestically and ponderously.” Despite that, she seemed for a time to lead a charmed life. On one occasion, a torpedo ran alongside on the port beam while another streaked past the starboard beam, both missing. Two more ran directly under her without exploding. But the Lexington’s luck could not last forever. Within minutes, she was struck by two bombs and two torpedoes. Several fires broke out, and the ship gradually took on a 7-degree list.35
The Yorktown also received attention from the attackers. She was repeatedly shaken by several near misses, including one explosion that was so violent it lifted the stern of the big carrier clear out of the water so that her four brass propellers could be seen spinning in the air. She also took one direct bomb hit amidships, fifteen feet from the ship’s island. That bomb penetrated the flight deck and exploded deep inside the ship. The “main steam lines vibrated excessively for a few seconds then steadied.” The lights blinked and went out, and three of the ship’s nine boilers had to be secured. Buckmaster called down to the engine room to ask what speed the engines could produce under these circumstances. The engineer told him he could generate steam for 24 knots. Buckmaster wondered if they should back off from that to avoid overtaxing the remaining boilers. “Hell no!” was the answer. “We’ll make it.”36
Back in Hawaii, Nimitz was kept appraised of the action by Rochefort and the “roofers” at Hypo who listened in on the radio traffic, both friendly and hostile. The Japanese pilots were reporting the destruction of one carrier and serious damage to another. Soon afterward, Fletcher reported damage to both American carriers, but also that they both continued to operate.37
Then, as quickly as it started, it was over. The attack had lasted about half an hour—from 11:13 to 11:40. On the Yorktown, Buckmaster allowed some members of the crew to go down to the mess deck to get something to eat. When they got there, they found that the ship’s surgeons had used the mess tables to lay out some of the fifty-five men who had been killed in the attack. Yeoman Second Class Sam Laser remembered, “They hadn’t been covered yet, and many of them had horrible wounds—blood streaming from their eyes, missing limbs, and so on. We had to walk past all that to get to the chow line, and the only thing they had was crackers and salmon. For five years after that I couldn’t eat salmon.”38
This photograph captures the moment at 12:47 p.m. on May 8, 1942, when an internal explosion on the Lexington triggered the sequence of events that led to her destruction. (U.S. Naval Institute)
Over on the Lexington, Sherman corrected the ship’s list with counter flooding, and by 12:30 both carriers were recovering the planes returning from the strike against the Shōkaku. Then at 12:47 p.m., there was a huge internal explosion deep inside the Lexington. The big carrier had linear gas tanks that went from the bottom of the ship up several decks, and they had been ruptured by a number of near misses. Gas fumes had accumulated, and a spark from an electric generator ignited a massive explosion. It was so powerful that the huge forward elevator platform flew into the air and crashed down onto the flight deck “with a great bang” on top of an airplane. The explosion also started a number of fires that the damage control teams struggled to contain. An hour later came a second explosion that destroyed the Lexington’s ventilation system. Sherman had to order the engine rooms evacuated before the men there were asphyxiated. At 2:50 p.m., he blinkered a message to Fletcher on the Yorktown: “This ship needs help.” Destroyers came alongside to help fight the raging fires, but it was a losing battle. The Lexington had no power, and the fires were burning out of control. At 4:00 there was a third blast. The out-of-control fires were cooking off the stored ammunition. As the big torpedoes exploded, one officer thought that it “sounded like a freight train rumbling up the hangar deck.” Fitch leaned over the rail of the flag bridge and told Sherman that he had better “get the boys off the ship.”39
Discipline held. Sherman recalled that as the crew came topside and prepared to go over the side, “some of them lined up their shoes in orderly fashion on the deck before they left, as if they expected to return.” Most of the crew was saved—more than 2,700 men. Sherman made sure he was the last one off, and by nightfall, as one witness recalled, “the whole sky was lit up red with that ship burning from stem to stern.” That night, Fletcher sent the destroyer Phelps to sink her with torpedoes. It took five of them. As the Lexington sank, there was one more “tremendous explosion” underwater as she broke apart.40
Again, Fletcher considered another strike. Though the Yorktown now trailed a fifty-mile long oil slick behind her, she could still make 25 knots, more than enough to launch and recover aircraft. The problem was that although most of his attack planes had returned, they were, in the words of one pilot, “all shot to hell,” and of questionable utility. Fletcher decided instead to retire southward, and Fitch agreed.41
Takagi and Hara also considered a second strike. But they had only nine bombers and torpedo planes left, and the Zuikaku was running low on fuel. Admiral Inoue had ordered Gotō’s invasion force to turn around and head north soon after the Shōhō went down, and now he sent the same order to Takagi and Hara. For his part, Hara was glad to get it. He admitted later in a private conversation with Yamamoto’s chief of staff that the battle with the Americans had broken his confidence. Consequently, while Fletcher and the Yorktown retired to the south, Hara and the Zuikaku steamed north. That afternoon, about the time that Sherman ordered the crew of the Lexington to abandon ship, Inoue postponed Operation MO indefinitely.42
There was one more tense moment for the Americans on May 9, when Lieutenant Junior Grade Frederic Faulkner report
ed sighting undamaged Japanese carriers only 170 miles away. Fletcher rang up 28 knots and sent Bob Dixon with four dive-bombers (of the sixteen he had left) to try to pinpoint their location. Dixon returned, having spotted nothing but coral reefs. Fletcher began to suspect that what Faulkner had seen was a series of small islands. He called Faulkner to the flag bridge and spread out a chart of the area.
“Here’s a chart that shows a chain of small islands at the identical spot at which you made your contact,” he told Faulkner. “Do you think you could have made a mistake?” A chastened Faulkner replied that he might have been wrong. Fletcher expressed no anger. He merely replied, “That’s all I wanted to know.” He reduced speed to 15 knots to conserve fuel and headed for Noumea in New Caledonia.43
In the Battle of the Coral Sea—the first engagement in history between opposing carrier forces—the Japanese inflicted more damage on the Americans than the Americans did on the Japanese. The United States lost its largest carrier (Lexington), a fleet oiler (Neosho), and the destroyer Sims, and suffered damage to the Yorktown; the Japanese lost only the small carrier Shōhō and suffered significant but not mortal damage to the Shōkaku. On the other hand, Japanese airplane losses were heavier. The Americans lost 81 planes while the Japanese had lost 105. Moreover, while the Americans recovered all but a few of their pilots, the Japanese did not. Many of their best frontline pilots had been killed, a loss they could ill afford. When Hara sent the twenty-seven-plane attack toward the American “battleships” on the afternoon of May 7, he had handpicked his best pilots for the mission because of the difficult conditions. Nine of them had failed to return.
The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History) Page 19
