The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History)
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The report came from Ensign Jewell Reid, flying another PBY out of Midway. Near the end of his plotted search area, some seven hundred miles west of Midway, he saw some tiny specks on the horizon. At first he thought it was dirt on the windscreen. His copilot snatched up the binoculars and stared out the windscreen. Reid postponed his turn for home and maintained his course. As the range closed, he saw that they were indeed ships—many ships. At 9:05 he sent the message: “Sighted main body.”24
Back at Midway, Ramsey ordered Reid to amplify his report. Already near the edge of his plane’s maximum range, Reid dived toward the water, stayed low, and completed a wide circle out to the north. At about 9:30, he eased his plane up to about 800 feet and peered southward. At 9:35 he sent in a more complete report: “Six large vessels in column.” Again Ramsey asked for clarification: What kind of ships? What course? What speed? To get that information, Reid headed back to low altitude and maneuvered around behind the formation. He reasoned that the lookouts on the Japanese ships, which still lacked radar, would more likely be searching forward than aft. With the sun behind him, he crept back up to 800 feet to have another look. Finally he was able to deliver the information that Simard, Nimitz, and Fletcher needed: “Eleven ships, course 090 [due east] speed 19 [knots].” The formation included “one small carrier, one seaplane tender, two battleships, several cruisers, several destroyers.” He also requested instructions. By now, he was well past his optimum turnaround time for fuel use, and an entire Japanese fleet was between him and his base. His crew was therefore much relieved when the radio crackled out permission for him to return to Midway.25
Ensign Jewell “Jack” Reid (perched on the wheel strut) and his PBY crew were the first to make a visual sighting of the approaching Japanese force on June 3. (U.S. Naval Institute)
At Pearl Harbor, Nimitz was engaged in conversation with Layton when Arthur Benedict, who had just gotten off watch at Hypo, came running in waving a piece of paper. It was a copy of Reid’s sighting report. Nimitz had maintained his usual placid public demeanor through the past several days, though he confessed privately in a letter to his wife that his days were full of “anxious waiting.” Based on the initial Hypo intercepts, he had expected the enemy to begin the attack on June 3, and the absence of any sighting reports had been worrisome. Now, as he read Ensign Reid’s report, his weathered face broke into a broad grin. This must be Kondō’s “Invasion Force,” the “bait” that was supposed to lure the American carriers to their doom. Its composition was exactly what Rochefort had predicted, and it was almost exactly where Rochefort had said it would be. Nimitz handed the report to Layton. “This ought to make your heart warm.”26
Nimitz knew, however, that this was not the “main body,” as Reid had reported it. Technically, the “main body” was Yamamoto’s battleship force, which the Americans still did not know about, though the real target—the key piece in the entire puzzle—was the enemy’s carrier force, the Kidō Butai, and so far there was no word as to its whereabouts. Aware of that, Nimitz decided to forward Reid’s report to Fletcher even though he was certain that Fletcher’s own communications team had monitored it. He did so because forwarding the message allowed him to add his own comment at the end. “That is not, repeat not, the enemy striking force,” Nimitz wrote. “That is the landing force. The striking force will hit from the northwest at daylight tomorrow.” Nimitz did not want to micromanage his operational commanders, but neither did he want them to go off half-cocked. At Point Luck, Fletcher was still well beyond striking range of this target, and the subtext of Nimitz’s forwarded message was unmistakable: Wait. Be patient.27
Kondō’s force was, however, a perfectly appropriate target for the Army’s heavy bombers on Midway. If Fletcher’s position at Point Luck was still a secret, the location of Midway was never a secret, so launching an air strike from the atoll gave nothing away. As soon as word could be sent to the airfield, nine Army B-17s under the command of Colonel Walter Sweeny took off from Eastern Island and headed west to strike the first blow. It took them most of four hours to find the Japanese, and when they did it was not Kondō’s “Invasion Force” but the nearby “Transport Group” under Rear Admiral Tanaka Raizō, consisting of one light cruiser, ten destroyers, and thirteen transport ships filled with the 5,000 men of the landing force. Tanaka had outrun his air cover, and as a result all he could do now was try evasive maneuvers while his destroyers threw up as much antiaircraft fire as they could muster.*
The big American bombers dropped their ordnance from 10,000 feet. Each B-17 carried four 600-pound bombs—thus a total of nearly eleven tons of bombs fell among the ships of Tanaka’s command. The Japanese ships maneuvered radically under the rain of ordnance, most of which exploded when it hit the water. The flash of the explosions, the enormous geysers of water they generated, and the black smoke from the Japanese ships as they twisted and turned in the roiling water all looked pretty spectacular from 10,000 feet. Making accurate damage assessments is difficult in the best of circumstances, and especially so for Army pilots untrained in antiship operations. The returning pilots did the best they could. They reported five hits, one probable hit, and four near misses against two battleships and two large transports. Sweeny reported that one transport was on fire and that a battleship was on fire and sinking. Based on that report, American submarines were vectored toward the site to finish off the damaged battleship.28
In fact, there were no battleships in Tanaka’s group, only a light cruiser and several destroyers, and none of them had suffered any damage. Despite all the sound and fury, no ship had been hit; no one, on either side, had been injured.
Nevertheless, the apparent success of the raid inspired Rear Admiral Patrick N. L. Bellinger, commander of PBY Patrol Wing Two, to attack as well. Bellinger was a career aviator who had sent the famous radio report that had informed the world of the Japanese attack back in December: “Air Raid, Pearl Harbor—This is no drill.” Now, eager to retaliate, he devised a way to use his PBYs to strike at the foe in a night torpedo attack. He had four of his Catalinas modified to carry the heavy Mark 13 torpedo, and he called for volunteers to fly them out to attack the enemy. As Gordon Prange remarked forty years later, this was an idea “straight out of a comic strip,” but it illustrated the American willingness and ability to improvise.29
More important, it worked. Despite the darkness and the range, the four Catalinas, led by Lieutenant William L. Richards, actually found Tanaka’s “Transport Group.” At about 1:00 a.m. Richards saw “what appeared to be [an] endless line of Japanese ships” silhouetted against a bright full moon. He told his crew, “Drop that damn thing and let’s get the hell out of here.” They did, and even scored a hit—the first of the battle—on the small tanker Akebono Maru. The Japanese antiaircraft guns opened up, and, in the words of one witness, “it was like the fourth of July with tracers coming through the plane.” The PBYs escaped without significant damage, though the pilots had trouble staying awake during the long flight back to Midway. “One of us would fly the plane,” a crewmember recalled, “and the other would whack him in the face to keep him awake.” Their torpedo strike had killed eleven men and wounded thirteen more, though the damage to the tanker was limited. One Japanese officer concluded that the torpedo’s warhead had failed to detonate (not unusual with the Mark 13 torpedo), for the Akebono Maru stayed a float and even managed to maintain her place in the convoy.30
These air attacks on Tanaka proved that the Americans now knew of the approach of the Japanese. Since there seemed little reason to maintain radio silence any longer, Kondō reported the attacks to Yamamoto. The commander in chief, however, did not pass the information on to Nagumo. For one thing, Yamamoto was maintaining radio silence so that the Americans would not be aware of him. Moreover, he very likely assumed that Nagumo was paying attention and had heard the report himself. As it happened, Nagumo had not, and he remained unaware that the Americans were alerted, or that they had already dispatched two air st
rikes to contest the approach of the transport force. Even had he known, it is not clear it would have made any difference. After all, the American air attacks had proved fruitless. The various elements of the Japanese armada remained essentially unharmed, and they continued to close in on Midway in accordance with the operational timetable drafted by Combined Fleet back in April. At noon on June 3, the Kidō Butai, still enshrouded by the convenient weather front, altered its course from east to southeast and increased speed to 26 knots to close on its predetermined launching point for a dawn strike the next morning. For their part, the American carriers at Point Luck moved westward at an easy fourteen knots in anticipation of an imminent sighting by the patrol planes from Midway. The real battle was yet to be joined.31
The American forces at Point Luck operated two hours ahead of the clocks on Midway. The ships of the Kidō Butai were still on Tokyo time, their clocks twenty-one hours ahead. Nevertheless, as all the clocks moved toward midnight on the ships on both sides that cleaved the waters of the Pacific Ocean, officers and enlisted men prepared for the changing of the watch: in the engine room, in the radio shack, on the topside lookout, and on the bridge. It was a ritual that had taken place a hundred thousand times before, and would a hundred thousand times again. By tradition, the man coming to assume the watch arrives early. On the bridge, he familiarizes himself with the ship’s course and speed and all other pieces of pertinent information. When he feels he has a firm grasp of the circumstances, he salutes the officer of the deck and pronounces the words that make him responsible for the ship over the next four hours: “I relieve you, sir.” His watch will last until 4:00 that morning when another officer will appear to take his place, but for now, at this moment, he is driving the ship. The night slips silently past. With the ship blacked out and all but invisible, it seems to exist in a world of its own. Of course, it is actually part of a complex pattern that stretches over half of the central Pacific, with more than 150 ships—carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, transports, supply vessels, and submarines—each moving at its own speed toward its destiny.
In military time, 2400 became 0001 as a new day began. To the Japanese, operating on Tokyo time, it was now June 5, but for the Americans, it was now officially June 4,1942.
* After the raid, one Japanese Zero pilot attempted to land his crippled plane on a nearby island. His wheels stuck in the spongy tundra, and the abrupt landing broke his neck. The plane, however, was barely damaged, and five weeks later it was recovered by Americans and sent back to the States, where it was repaired and flight-tested. That helped American aircraft designers assess its strengths and weaknesses.
* There is some uncertainty concerning the identification of Kondō’s and Tanaka’s units. Some students of the battle assume that Sweeny’s B-17s struck at the same force that Reid had reported that morning. However, the makeup of each force, as well as the Japanese battle reports, suggest that while Reid saw Kondō’s “Invasion Force,” which included two battleships (Kongo and Hiei) as well as four heavy cruisers (“Six large vessels in column”), Sweeny’s B-17s actually struck at the “Transport Force” guarded by one light cruiser and ten destroyers.
11
Nagumo’s Dilemma
(4:00 a.m. to 8:30 a.m.)
It was still full dark at 4:00 a.m. (local time) on June 4 when a bugle on Nagumo’s flagship Akagi called the crew to battle stations.* The fog had dissipated, though there was a low cloud cover over the Kidō Butai, and the seas were choppy. It was not ideal flying weather, but better than it had been for days. Was this a good omen? The strike force for the air attack on Midway was scheduled to begin launching a half hour later, at 4:30, in order to be over the target just after dawn. The air crews and maintenance crews had been at work since 2:45, servicing the Aichi Type 99 dive-bombers (Vals) and Nakajima Type 97 carrier attack planes (Kates). For this mission, instead of a torpedo, the Kates would each carry an 800 kg (1,760-pound) bomb. The planes had been manhandled onto the elevators and lifted up to the flight deck; some were already being warmed up by the flight crews, and the roar of engines could be heard throughout the ship as the men assumed their battle stations. The carriers turned away from each other to open the box-shaped formation, so that all four carriers could launch simultaneously without the planes getting into one another’s way.1
Altogether, Nagumo had some 225 combat aircraft on his four carriers, plus two more for reconnaissance. The four carriers also had twenty-one additional Zeros among them, earmarked to become the garrison squadron for Midway after it was occupied. Not all of those fighters could be used to augment the strike force or even to defend the Kidō Butai, since only about half of their pilots were carrier qualified. Still, adding those twenty-one Zeros gave Nagumo a theoretical total of 248 airplanes—a hundred fewer than he had used to attack Pearl Harbor back in December, but Midway was a less imposing target. Nor could Nagumo send all of those planes to strike Midway at once, for not only was it essential to keep back a number of fighters as CAP to protect the task force, there was Yamamoto’s requirement that Nagumo retain half of his attack planes—and his best pilots—for a strike against American surface forces, just in case. These factors contributed to Nagumo’s decision to send a strike force of 108 airplanes, thirty-six of each type—dive-bombers, torpedo planes, and fighters—for the attack on Midway.2
The first to take off that morning were eleven Zero fighters that would fly CAP over the task force. Immediately afterward, the strike force began to launch from all four carriers at once. There were no catapults on Japanese carriers, and the planes needed at least 27 knots of relative wind speed over the deck in order to launch. With the ships of the Kidō Butai steaming into the wind and the engines of the airplanes roaring, the air operations officer gave a signal to the flight-deck officer to launch. Crewmen pulled the chocks out from under the wheels, and the first plane surged toward the bow. The lightweight Zeros needed the shortest takeoff space and could get airborne in as little as 230 feet; the bombers, and especially the bigger Kate attack planes, needed more. Soon the planes were launching quickly, roaring past the tiny island amidships and lifting off every fifteen to twenty seconds, while members of the deck crew cheered and waved their caps.
Lieutenant Tomonaga Joichi led the Japanese morning attack on Midway Atoll on June 4. He was a last-minute replacement for Commander Fuchida Mitsuo, who suffered an attack of appendicitis. (U.S. Naval Institute)
Rather than send full deck loads from two of the four carriers, Japanese doctrine called for partial strikes from each of them. The carriers of CarDiv (Akagi and Kaga) each contributed eighteen Val dive-bombers, keeping their torpedo planes in reserve on the hangar deck; the carriers of CarDiv 2 (Hiryū and Sōryū) sent up eighteen Kate attack planes, keeping their dive-bombers on board. Each carrier also contributed nine Zeros to protect the attack force and to strafe the Midway airfield. The combined strike force of seventy-two attack planes and thirty-six fighters was led by Lieutenant Tomonaga Joichi, the handsome, baby-faced air commander on the Hiryū. Tomonaga was a veteran of the war in China but was participating in his first mission against the Americans. He was a last-minute replacement for Fuchida Mitsuo, the air commander on the Akagi and the man who had led the attack on Pearl Harbor. During the Pacific transit, Fuchida had suffered a severe attack of appendicitis. He begged the doctor to postpone the surgery so that he could take part in the battle, but the doctor had insisted on operating immediately, and on the morning of June 4, Fuchida was still recovering. He managed to struggle into his uniform and report to the bridge in time to see the planes depart. The planes circled over the Kidō Butai until all of them joined the formation, and then, with the eastern sky turning from full dark to a pinkish gray, they flew off toward the southeast.3
No sooner had the last plane lifted off than the loudspeaker on the Akagi blared out an order to “prepare second attack wave.” On the brightly lit hangar decks, workers began to arm the next cadre of planes with ship-killing ordnance
. On the Akagi and Kaga, the big Kate torpedo bombers were armed with the seventeen-foot-long Type 91 torpedoes. Brought up from the magazine by elevators, the big torpedoes were placed onto hand trucks and manhandled across the crowded hangar deck to each plane. Then they had to be jacked up manually and attached to special brackets under each plane. On the Hiryū and Sōryū, the dive-bombers were armed with 551-pound armor-piercing bombs. Thus armed and fueled, the planes remained on the hangar decks. That way, Nagumo’s carriers could keep their flight decks clear for the rotating CAP and for the return of the strike force. By 5:00 a.m., with the rim of the rising sun appearing over the eastern horizon, the second wave of fighters, bombers, and torpedo planes was poised and ready in the hangars, awaiting news of any American surface forces that might be in the area.4
The Aichi E13A “Jake” floatplane, carried on the stern of Japanese battleships and heavy cruisers, was used primarily for reconnaissance. The delayed launch of one of these planes on June 4 played a key role in the ensuing battle. (U.S. Naval Institute)
The Japanese conducted an air search that morning, though for a strike force operating deep in enemy waters, the search was somewhat slapdash. Perhaps because the op plan confidently proclaimed that the American carriers would remain in Pearl Harbor until after the strike on Midway, this dawn air search was largely pro forma. The Japanese often used their Kate attack planes (minus the torpedo) for search missions. This time Nagumo intended to rely primarily on the floatplanes from his escort ships. The Aichi E13A “Jakes,” which boasted huge pontoons nearly as large as the fuselage, had a longer range than combat aircraft (nearly 1,300 miles) and were specifically designed for the reconnaissance mission. Though Nagumo did send two Kates to search what he considered the most important quadrant—due south, the direction from which the American carriers would come, if they came at all—he relied on five floatplanes, carried on the sterns of his battleships and cruisers for the rest—a total of seven search planes altogether. (By comparison, not quite a month before, on May 7 in the Coral Sea, Fletcher had launched ten search planes, and Hara twelve; they had still failed to find each other.) Nagumo’s rather cavalier search betrayed his assumption that things would proceed pretty much as scripted.5