The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History)

by Craig L. Symonds

  The message reached Nagumo on the bridge of the Akagi at 7:05. It could hardly have surprised him. From the beginning, he had suspected that a single strike with half his force would not be sufficient to soften up Midway for the planned amphibious landing. Though Yamamoto’s principal goal was to get the American carriers, the plan also charged Nagumo with wrecking Midway’s defenses to prepare the way for invasion. As he considered Tomonaga’s report, however, Nagumo had other concerns, for at that moment the Kidō Butai itself was under attack. These were not the planes from Hornet and Enterprise—those planes were just then taking off 175 miles to the east. Instead, it was the first contingent of the diverse collection of bombers and torpedo planes that Simard had launched from Midway an hour before.

  The first to arrive were six brand-new TBF Avenger torpedo bombers. Designed as a replacement for the slow and aging Devastators, the Avengers were bigger, had a greater range, and were much faster. When the Hornet had left Norfolk back in March, half of her VT pilots had remained behind to take delivery of the new Grumman-built aircraft. When the twenty-one new planes were delivered, the pilots flew them across the country in stages to San Francisco, where they were loaded aboard the transport Hammondsport for the trip out to Hawaii. The Avengers arrived there on May 29, one day after the Hornet left for Point Luck. Eager to get at least some of them into the fight, Nimitz ordered the air crews at Pearl to stay up all night in order to attach belly tanks to six of them so they could fly the 1,100 miles out to Midway. They made the eight-hour flight from Oahu to Midway on June 1, and there the belly tanks were removed and torpedoes attached. But they never did get to the Hornet. Instead, Simard ordered them to strike at the Kidō Butai directly from Midway.21

  The most senior of the six Avenger pilots was Lieutenant Langdon Fieberling, a naval reservist who had earned his wings in 1937. The others were young ensigns between the ages of 22 and 25, and a rare enlisted pilot, Aviation Machinist’s Mate First Class Darrel Woodside. Each plane carried a crew of three, and all eighteen men—over half of them teenagers—were heading into their first combat. As they flew out toward the coordinates, they passed Tomonaga’s Midway strike force going the other way, and though a Japanese fighter flew over for a look, neither group paid serious attention to the other. An hour later, the Avenger pilots found the Kidō Butai. Navy doctrine called for torpedo planes to coordinate with dive-bombers, in order to limit the target’s ability to effect evasive maneuvers. But the only dive-bombers assigned to this attack were Marine Corps planes, and no one had arranged for a Navy-Marine joint attack. Besides, the slower Marine bombers were well behind the Avengers, and Fieberling was in no mood to wait for them. He and his squadron mates began an immediate attack: six torpedo bombers against the entire Kidō Butai.22

  One of the Avenger pilots was Ensign Albert Earnest, a 25-year-old who had won his gold wings sixteen days before the Pearl Harbor attack. Now as he approached the awesome sight of the entire Kidō Butai spread out below him, it seemed to him that there were “20 or 30 Zeros waiting to shoot us down.” His estimate was remarkably accurate—at that moment there were twenty-eight Zero fighters flying CAP over the Kidō Butai, roughly five defenders for each attacker. As the Avengers nosed over to drop from their cruising altitude of 4,000 feet to 200 feet for the run-in to the target, the Zeros pounced on them. One Avenger, and then another, caught fire and dropped into the sea. “Bullets and anti-aircraft fire were coming at me from every direction,” Earnest recalled. A 20 mm cannon shell killed his 18-year-old turret gunner. The third man in the airplane, 17-year-old Harry Ferrier, who had lied about his age in order to join the Navy, was struck in the head and knocked unconscious. Bullets punched a score of holes in Earnest’s plane, destroying his hydraulic system and severing the elevator cables. The control stick went dead in his hand. Shrapnel from a 20 mm shell shattered his instrument panel, and his plane dived toward the water. Struggling to keep his plane in the air, Earnest dropped his torpedo in the general direction of a cruiser, hoping the loss of weight would allow him to remain airborne. The drop seemed to have no effect, however, and the plane continued to dive toward the water out of control. Earnest braced for a crash landing and, just before impact, reflexively reached down to adjust the four-inch wheel that controlled the trim tabs, something he routinely did before landing. When he did so, the nose of his plane came up, and the Avenger gained a bit of altitude. Zeros continued to make runs at him, and it was all Earnest could do to hold his plane in a more or less straight course. He felt like “a tin duck in a shooting gallery” as the Zeros made repeated runs at him. Relying on the trim tabs to remain airborne, he kept low and flew southward. “A couple of Zeros swooped in to finish me off,” he recalled, “but I was so close to the water, they couldn’t make a real good run at me.”23

  Ensign Albert Earnest piloted one of the new Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bombers from Midway in the first attack on the Kido Butai on the morning of June 4. He and his enlisted radioman, Harry Ferrier, also seen here, were the only survivors of the mission. (U.S. Naval Institute)

  Eventually the Zeros gave up the chase. Earnest still had to make it back to Midway with a plane that could barely fly. Badly wounded, with blood running from a neck wound, and all of his instruments out—even the compass—he used the angle of the sun to estimate which direction was south. He called his two gunners on the plane’s intercom, but got no response. He nursed the Avenger up to 3,000 feet and flew on. He did not know whether or not his torpedo had successfully dropped. After some time, Harry Ferrier regained consciousness and called him up on the intercom to report that he was still alive. Eventually, Earnest spotted a tall column of black smoke from the burning oil tanks on Midway. Ignoring a wave off from the airfield controller who didn’t think the crippled plane would survive a landing, he touched down on the runway on one wheel, his plane doing a ground loop before coming to a stop on the apron. Only later did he learn that he and young Harry Ferrier were the only survivors of the Avengers strike, and that none of the American torpedoes had struck an enemy ship.24

  One reason the Zeros did not pursue Earnest’s crippled plane was that they had another target to deal with. Only seconds behind the Avengers were four Army medium bombers under Captain James Collins, Jr. The two-engine B-26 Marauders had been specially modified to carry torpedoes, which meant that they, too, approached the Kidō Butai at low altitude, around 200 feet. Collins flew through the swarming Zeros and the exploding flak to drop his torpedo, and as his plane passed over the Akagi his nose gunner strafed the big carrier, killing two of its crewmen. First Lieutenant James Muri followed Collins in. He heard “the shells coming into the side of the fuselage and near the turret.” Muri’s turret gunner, Corporal Frank Melo, saw “beads of sweat” on Muri’s forehead. Muri had a cigarette in his mouth, but he had bitten it in two, and “it hung by a slender strip of paper” as he focused on making the attack run. Like Collins, he came in very low to drop his torpedo, passing so low over the Akagi that Nagumo and his staff on the small bridge reflexively ducked. The other two planes in the formation were less lucky. Both of them, riddled with cannon shells and machine gun bullets, crashed into the sea. The two surviving planes, each with more than half their crew wounded, headed for home. Muri’s ground crew later counted more than five hundred bullet holes in his plane.25

  If this was the best the Americans could do, Nagumo had to feel fairly sanguine. To be sure, it had been a scary moment when that big two-engine American bomber seemed headed for his command bridge, but in the end the Americans had failed to inflict any damage on the Kidō Butai beyond the two men killed when Collins strafed the Akagi. The Zeros had shot down seven of the ten American airplanes and sent the other three limping home. Nagumo had already decided to send a second strike against Midway, but this attack by planes from that island base may have played a role in his decision about how to execute that second strike. According to Yamamoto’s oral instructions, he was supposed to keep half his airplane strength, and h
alf of his pilots, on hand in case any American surface ships appeared. Strict adherence to those orders, however, now meant that he would have to wait to recover Tomonaga’s attack force, strike them below to the hangar deck to be refueled and rearmed, and then send them back up to the flight deck for launch, while half his planes sat idle and his best pilots cooled their heels in the ready room. Surely Yamamoto did not expect Nagumo to keep half his planes unused throughout the battle? That would be like asking him to fight with one hand tied behind his back. As Nagumo’s chief of staff wrote after the war, it was “intolerable” to expect a frontline commander to keep half his strength idle “for an enemy force which might not be in the area after all.” It would be far more efficient to use the planes that were now on the hangar deck for the second strike, then recover Tomonaga’s planes and arm them with antiship ordnance in the unlikely event that any American surface ships appeared. At 7:15, therefore, as the few surviving American planes retreated over the horizon, Nagumo ordered that the planes on the hangar decks of his four carriers be rearmed with fragmentation bombs for a second strike against Midway.26

  The changeover in armament was a major task, especially for the carriers of CarDiv 1, where the Kate torpedo planes were armed with the big 1,870-pound Type 91 antiship torpedoes. Because there were a limited number of hand trucks on each carrier, the crews could rearm only six planes at a time. The carts had to be positioned under the planes; then, after the arming device had been removed, the torpedoes had to be gingerly lowered by hand crank down onto the carts. Because the ammunition handlers were busy bringing up the heavy bombs that would replace those torpedoes, the torpedoes themselves were not returned to the magazine. Instead, they were pushed over to the bulkhead and lifted by hand onto holding racks. Even after the torpedo was removed, the crew still had to remove the mounting brackets that kept the torpedo attached to the plane and replace them with mounting brackets for the 800-kilogram (1,760-pound) fragmentation bombs, which also had to be maneuvered under the planes by hand cart and then cranked up into place.27

  This labor-intensive process had been under way for at least half an hour when Nagumo received a radio message from Petty Officer First Class Amari Yoji, piloting search plane number 4 from the cruiser Tone. This was the plane that had been delayed that morning and had left a half hour behind schedule. Now Amari sent a stunning report, one that was entirely unexpected: “Sight what appears to be ten enemy surface units, in position bearing ten degrees [almost due north], distant 240 miles from Midway.” The fact that the one plane that had been delayed by half an hour that morning was the very one assigned to search the quadrant where the American carriers lay in wait is one of the events that has led some students of the battle to dub the subsequent American victory a “miracle,” for it is hard to resist the notion that this was the moment when Providence put its finger on the scale of History. The Japanese thought so, too. After the war, Fuchida Mitsuo wrote in his memoir, “The delay in launching Tone’s planes sowed a seed which bore fatal fruit for the Japanese in the ensuing naval action.” And yet, an analysis of the morning’s events suggests that, if anything, that delay was a stroke of good luck for the Japanese.28

  Amari’s orders that morning had been to fly three hundred miles nearly due east (100 degrees), then turn north for sixty miles before returning. After his late start, however, he was eager to get back on schedule, so rather than flying the prescribed three hundred miles, he instead turned north at about 6:45 when he was only 220 miles out and in doing so found Spruance’s Task Force 16 (see map, p. 223). Had he left on time and flown his assigned course, he very likely would not have sighted the Americans until he began his return leg sometime after 8:00. Consequently, the delay in launching Amari’s float plane that morning may have hastened the moment when Nagumo learned of the presence of American surface ships northeast of him.29

  Exactly when Nagumo got that report has been disputed. Although Amari sent it at 7:28, he sent it to Tone, his host ship, where it was decrypted in the radio room, rushed up to the bridge, and then blinkered over to the flagship. In his after-action report, Nagumo wrote that he got the message at “about 0500” (8:00 a.m. local time). In that same report, Nagumo also wrote, “The delay in the delivery of message from Tone’s #4 plane greatly affected our subsequent attack preparations.” Most evidence, however, puts the information in Nagumo’s hands by 7:45. First of all, there is the ambiguity of that “about 0500.” More significantly, the Japanese radio message log indicates that Nagumo received the message at 7:45, and it logged Nagumo’s reply to Amari at 7:47, a time confirmed by Hypo, which intercepted and recorded the reply.* Almost certainly, Nagumo received Amari’s message at about 7:45, and even though Amari did not say so, Nagumo had to suspect that there might be an American carrier operating with those “ten enemy surface units,” for there would be little reason for an American task force to be operating north of Midway without a carrier. Nagumo’s chief of staff, Rear Admiral Kusaka Ryūnosuke, recalled thinking, “There couldn’t be an enemy force without carriers in the area reported and there must be carriers somewhere.” Finally, given the coordinates that Amari had sent, Nagumo also knew this target was just over two hundred miles away from his own carriers, already within striking distance because of the longer range of the Japanese attack planes.30

  In response to this stunning information, Nagumo consulted with his staff, especially with Kusaka and Commander Genda Minoru. It was a bit awkward to hold a strategy conference in a crowded public space; Nagumo would doubtless have preferred to retreat somewhere more private for the conversation. But the pressure of the moment did not allow that. While they discussed this new information, Nagumo suspended the changeover of armament down on the hangar deck and ordered the thirty-six Val bombers on the Hiryū and Sōryū “to prepare to carry out attacks on enemy fleet units.” Before he sent them off, however, he needed to know more about those American ships. Nagumo had not been at the Battle of the Coral Sea. Nonetheless, he was certainly aware of Hara’s disastrous blunder in sending a full air strike against what turned out to be an oiler and a destroyer. Before he completely restructured his attack plan, Nagumo wanted to know what kind of American ships were out there two hundred miles away, and in particular if they included any aircraft carriers. He therefore ordered Amari to “ascertain [ship] types” and to “maintain contact.” For a few precious and irrecoverable minutes, the entire Japanese strike force was frozen in suspension while Nagumo waited for the answer.31

  It came in at 8:09: “Enemy ships are five cruisers and five destroyers.” That seemed curious, to say the least, for—again—it made little sense that such a force should be operating at that location without a carrier. Still, cruisers and destroyers could be dealt with later, and even if an enemy carrier were with them, Nagumo knew that the Americans could not launch an attack against him from such a distance due to the limited range of the American torpedo planes and fighters. He did not need to scramble his reserve planes for an immediate strike, and this was just as well, for just at that moment, the Kidō Butai came under renewed air attack from Midway, and his carriers needed to keep their flight decks clear in order to launch and recover Zero fighters. Indeed, over the next twenty minutes, the Japanese launched two dozen more Zeros to defend the Kidō Butai. By 8:30 they had a total of thirty-six fighters aloft. Since Tomonaga had taken thirty-six fighters with him to hit Midway, Nagumo had now launched very nearly every fighter he had.32

  They had plenty of work to do. First, came sixteen Marine Corps Dauntless dive-bombers, under the command of Major Lofton Henderson. Aware that his rookie pilots, virtually all of them on their first combat mission, had little or no training in dive-bombing techniques, Henderson felt compelled to order a glide-bombing attack. The 30-degree approach to the target made the Dauntlesses easy prey for the Zeros, which started by attacking the lead plane and then working their way methodically back through the formation. Henderson’s plane was one of the first to go down. The survivors at
the rear of the formation determinedly carried on through the blitz of bullets and 20 mm cannon fire to drop their bombs, some waiting (so they reported later) until they were a mere five hundred feet from the target. Their bombs bracketed the Hiryū, sending up great geysers of water, and afterward they reported three hits and several near misses. In spite of their reckless courage, however, none of their bombs struck home.33

  Though Henderson’s attack, like its predecessors, had been futile, it greatly alarmed Admiral Yamaguchi Tamon. The commander of CarDiv 2 wondered if the appearance of carrier-type airplanes meant that an American carrier was nearby. If so, where was it? Though the Japanese had suffered no damage in this attack, their sense that everything was under control began to slip.

  Even as the Marines were completing their ill-fated attack, fifteen Army B-17 Flying Fortress bombers appeared three miles above them at 20,000 feet. These were the planes that had been sent out from Midway before dawn to attack Tanaka’s transport force; they had been redirected to the Kidō Butai after Ady’s sighting report. Though the B-17s were unmolested by the Zeros, precision bombing from 20,000 feet was impossible. Sticks of 600-pound bombs exploded in rows all around the big enemy carriers, but none of them actually struck a ship. Despite that, the returning pilots again reported that they had made several hits and that they had left three aircraft carriers burning.