The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History)
Page 28
In the four ready rooms (one for each squadron), time passed slowly. There was much less of the usual banter; a few pilots tried their hand at reciting or inventing bawdy limericks, but for the most part it was quiet. One recalled, “The boys were getting fidgety.” A few tried to read; several napped. Most kept one eye on the teleprinter that projected the sighting reports onto a 3-foot-by-3-foot screen. Not long after 6:00, they read Lieutenant Chase’s report of “many planes headed Midway,” and soon afterward Lieutenant Ady’s report of two enemy carriers 180 miles from Midway. The pilots copied the coordinates onto their plotting boards. The squadron commanders in particular focused on this data, for it would be their job to lead their pilots to the target. They wrote down the enemy position relative to Midway, the reported course and speed, plotted the Hornet’s own course and speed, then entered the usual variables: wind speed on the surface and at various altitudes, plus magnetic compass variation. Applying all these elements, each worked out for himself the navigational solution for a course from the Hornet to the reported enemy position.6
The only squadron commander who did not do so was the CO of the fighting squadron (VF-8), Lieutenant Commander Samuel G. “Pat” Mitchell. Given that the job of the fighters was to escort and protect the attack squadrons, Mitchell felt that he did not need to compute an independent course; he would necessarily conform to whatever course they chose. Mitchell himself had very little time as a fighter pilot—no more, in fact, than the young pilots he led—and it was a bit unusual that he had never served as a squadron executive officer before taking over as skipper of Fighting Eight. A 1927 Naval Academy graduate, he had spent most of his career piloting seaplanes and flying boats. He had worked for Pete Mitscher at the Bureau of Aeronautics, and when Mitscher got command of the Hornet, he brought Mitchell along.7
Thanks to the folding wings on the new Dash-4 Wildcats, there was room for twenty-seven fighter planes on board the Hornet, but since many of their pilots were inexperienced, and because some needed to stay behind to protect the task force, only ten would be committed to the strike. Mitchell’s main concern that day was which element of the strike force he would protect. The dive-bombers would fly at 20,000 feet, and the torpedo planes at 1,500 feet. Those ten Wildcats could therefore protect one group or the other, but not both—unless they split into two sections. Pat Mitchell felt that the old torpedo planes had first call on his fighters. Not only were the Devastators significantly slower, their heavy and ungainly torpedoes required them to approach the target at no more than 100 feet and to hold a steady course while they lined up on the target. All this made them sitting ducks for the Zeros that would be flying CAP. The American dive-bombers by contrast, came in high and dove on the target at nearly 250 knots. Moreover, the Dauntless dive-bombers carried twin .50-caliber machine guns and were better equipped to defend themselves. They were often used (without a bomb load) as additional fighters to protect the task force. In Mitchell’s view, these circumstances dictated that his fighters should go with the torpedo planes.8
Certainly that was the view of the skipper of the torpedo squadron, Lieutenant Commander John C. Waldron. Waldron was a twenty-year Navy veteran from South Dakota who at age 41 was nearly twice as old as some of his pilots. Born at a time when the West was still wild, he had grown up on a hardscrabble farm in Canada and then on an Indian reservation near Pierre, South Dakota. He was proud of being one-eighth Sioux, a heritage affirmed by his facial features, dark eyes, and prominent chin. At the Academy, his nickname was “Redskin,” and a few of his fellow officers on the Hornet referred to him simply as “the Indian.” Waldron claimed that this heritage gave him a kind of sixth sense about coming events. He had a reputation as a skilled pilot and an enthusiastic reveler. He worked and played hard. As one person who knew him put it, “He had his parties when he had his parties, and when he got aboard ship it was business.” He was a demanding taskmaster. Aware that his mostly rookie pilots had yet to complete all the training considered necessary before combat, he maintained a tough regimen of both classroom study and physical training. One pilot described it as “work, work, and more work.” His was the only squadron where the pilots reported for calisthenics every morning. Pilots in the other squadrons thought this was amusing and offered taunting suggestions during the exercises. That did not deter Waldron, who thought war no joke. To a nephew who was about to enter pilot training, Waldron wrote a letter advising him to “take this business seriously. It is a serious business and it is not a sport.”9
Lieutenant Commander John C. Waldron, who some nicknamed “the Indian,” commanded Torpedo Squadron Eight on the Hornet on June 4. (U.S. Naval Institute)
At a meeting of officers four days earlier, on May 31, Waldron had taken the opportunity to argue that his torpedo squadron had a greater need for fighter protection than the bombers. Pat Mitchell had supported him, but Pete Mitscher shook his head. Not only were there more than twice as many bombers (34) as torpedo planes (15), but Mitscher knew that the great weakness of the Wildcats—especially the new Dash-4 version on the Hornet—was their indifferent climbing ability. The light and nimble Zeros could climb at nearly three times the rate of the Wildcats, and the best chance the American fighters had in dealing with their Japanese counterparts—maybe the only chance—was to dive on them from above. To Mitscher, this meant the fighters had to come in high. This would allow them to protect the dive-bombers and the torpedo planes too, because when the Zeros attacked the lumbering Devastators, the Wildcats could come screaming down on them from altitude. Of course, one option was to split the difference and send some fighters with each group, as Fletcher had done in the Coral Sea. The outcome there had been disappointing, however, for there had not been enough fighters to protect either group fully, and the bombers had suffered far more than the Devastators from the Zeros. The Wildcats had experienced their best success when they dove on the Zeros during the attack on the Shōhō. Whether or not Mitscher was aware of this, he chose not to divide Mitchell’s fighters into two sections and declared that all ten Wildcats would go with the dive-bombers. The torpedo planes, at least at the outset, would be on their own. Mitchell and especially Waldron were unhappy with the decision. They were overruled.10
There were two false alarms that morning when the teleprinter in the ready rooms clicked out orders for the pilots to man their planes, provoking a quick scramble for equipment and plotting boards, until in the same message a correction appeared: “Do not man planes until directed.” Apparently, when Mitscher heard Fletcher’s 6:07 order to Spruance to attack, he anticipated an immediate launch order. Instead, as we have seen, Spruance decided to wait until 7:00 in order to close the range. Mitscher had to order his pilots to stand down. During that hiatus, at about 6:30 Mitscher called Ring and the four squadron leaders to the bridge for final instructions. There, Waldron tried once again to convince Mitscher to send the fighters with his torpedo planes, and once again Mitchell supported him. Mitchell later recalled that he went up to the bridge that morning expressly to “recommended to Captain Mitscher that we [the fighters] go in with protection for the torpedo planes alone.” But it was Waldron who was so persistent that he verged on insubordination. If Mitscher would not send all ten fighters with his squadron, Waldron argued, he could at least send some of them. When that plea failed, he begged Mitscher to send just one fighter. (It is possible to imagine the emotional Waldron holding up a single finger and demanding “one, just one” fighter.) If Mitscher didn’t want to commit a fighter pilot, Waldron argued, he could have one of his own pilots fly a Wildcat, though none of them had ever been up in one before. This was an absurd argument, and by now Mitscher was surely becoming annoyed. He was not the type to negotiate with junior officers. The answer was still no. Mitchell recalled Mitscher telling him to “go out and stay with the bombers.” The planes were already warming up on the flight deck and there was no room for another discussion of alternatives. It was time to go. The squadron commanders wished each other good l
uck and good hunting and went down to man their airplanes.11
A more critical issue than deciding the role of the fighter planes was the launch sequence and the departure plan used on the Hornet that day. At 6:38, Mitscher finally got orders from Spruance to launch aircraft at 7:00 a.m., and those orders specified that the air groups were to “use deferred departure.” Instead of having the planes head off toward the target as they launched and effecting a rendezvous en route, the first of them would circle the task force until all the planes in the strike group were in the air; then they would assemble into one grand formation and fly to the target together. The intent of a deferred departure was to ensure unity, attack discipline, and a coordinated strike against the enemy. Almost certainly this order came from Miles Browning, for it is highly unlikely that the black shoe Spruance would have dictated to the brown shoes the type of departure they should use.12
With the order to man their planes, the pilots wished each other good luck, quit their ready rooms, and hurried up the ladders to the flight deck. There they met briefly with their back seat gunners, went over the mission and recognition charts, and gave their planes a quick inspection before climbing into the cockpits. It was habit, and perhaps superstition, that led them to kick the tires. For most of them, this would be the first time they had ever taken off from a carrier while carrying a live bomb. One recalled that as he sat in his plane waiting for the signal to start engines, he “got the same feeling of apprehension and butterflies in the stomach” that he used to get “at the start of competition in high school.”13
The ten Wildcat fighters went first—they needed the shortest runway to get airborne. The air officer watching from the ship’s island gave the go order to the officer on the flight deck who was designated as Fly One. That individual waved his take-off wand in a circle as the pilot revved his engines to full power. When the pilot gave a thumbs-up sign to show that he was ready, Fly One dropped into a crouch and pointed toward the bow. The pilot released his brakes and the plane roared forward. The process was repeated with the next plane. Once all ten Wildcats were in the air and began their climb to their assigned cruising altitude of 20,000 feet, the fifteen Dauntless dive-bombers of VS-8, each of them armed with a 500-pound bomb, began to take off. Next came the CHAG, Stanhope Ring, whose plane also carried a 500-pound bomb, and following him were the eighteen bombers of VB-8, which carried 1,000-pound bombs. The big Devastator torpedo planes of Waldron’s VT-8, each with a 2,200-pound Mark 13 torpedo, needed the longest deck run to get aloft, and because of that they were spotted at the back. Only six of them fit on the crowded flight deck, so the other nine had to be brought up from the hangar deck afterward and launched separately. This launch sequence meant that the Wildcats, which had the shortest range, were in the air first, burning up fuel while they circled and waited, and the Devastators, which were the slowest, launched last and were therefore certain to lag behind the rest of the formation.
Once all the fighters and bombers were in the air, they began jockeying into formation. Ring mandated a double V-shaped “parade” formation with himself at the point and the two bombing squadrons on either side of him. Mitchell’s ten fighters flew above and slightly behind them. Assembling this large formation took longer than it should have. Ensign Ben Tappan, piloting a Dauntless in Walt Rodee’s Scouting Eight, felt that “they were doing too much fiddle faddling around … waiting to get permission to go.”14
Even after they were finally assembled into formation, they had to continue their climb up to 20,000 feet. That climb to altitude took more time—and a lot of gas. While a Dash-4 Wildcat consumed 42 gallons of fuel per hour in level flight, it could burn up as much as 300 gallons per hour in a vertical climb (five gallons a minute). The fact that they had launched first and then had to climb up to 20,000 feet meant that some of the Wildcats used up a significant percentage of their 144-gallon fuel capacity even before the air group headed out for the target. Then, in order to maintain their position above the bombers, which flew at 130 knots, the Wildcats, which cruised at 150 knots, had to serpentine back and forth in a series of lazy’S curves to avoid overrunning the bombers flying below them, and that, too, wasted fuel. The bombers also used up extra gas in an effort to maintain the precise formation of the air group. One pilot recalled, “We flew parade formation and the throttle was in use constantly to maintain position.”15
While the fighters and bombers climbed to altitude, the pilots in Waldron’s torpedo squadron formed up nearly three miles below them, at 1,500 feet. By the time all fifty-nine planes of the Hornet’s strike group were in the air, with the bombers and fighters at 20,000 feet and the torpedo planes at 1,500 feet, it was nearly eight o’clock. The launch had taken most of an hour. By contrast, earlier that morning the Kidō Butai had launched 108 planes in just over seven minutes, though they had used four carrier decks to do it. Nevertheless, the Hornet air group was at last aloft, formed up, and on its way.
But in what direction?
Without doubt, the most puzzling aspect of the “flight to nowhere” is the course flown by the Hornet air group when it did finally set out. A week after the battle, Mitscher submitted an after-action report in which he wrote, “The objective, enemy carriers, was calculated to be 155 miles distant, bearing 239° T[rue] from this Task Force.” Based on that, students of the battle long assumed that Ring led the Hornet’s bombers and fighters on a course of 239 degrees—that is, to the southwest. This was also the course indicated on the battle map that Mitscher submitted with his report (shown in gray on the map opposite). According to that report, Ring’s air group missed finding the Kidō Butai that morning because Nagumo reversed course and turned north, and Ring consequently flew south of him. Nonetheless, most other evidence indicates that the Hornet’s air group did not fly southwesterly at 239 degrees but instead flew almost due west at 265 degrees; it missed the Kidō Butai because that course led the air group eighty to a hundred miles north of the target. In addition, the distance to the target may have been very near 155 miles at 7:00 a.m. when the Hornet turned into the wind to launch, but because the Hornet steamed away from the target at 25 knots for more than an hour in order to launch the air strike, by the time the air group departed, the range to the target was closer to 180 miles.16
While there is no way to know for certain precisely how and why the Hornet air group adopted a course of 265 degrees that morning, there are essentially two possibilities. One is that Ring, who was an indifferent navigator, simply miscalculated the course, and Mitscher did not question it amid the haste and eagerness of the morning launch, despite protests from at least two of the squadron commanders. The other is that Mitscher himself calculated the 265 course and ordered Ring to take it in the hope that it would lead him to the two “missing” carriers that none of the American search planes had so far reported.
That first scenario is plausible but unlikely. It assumes that Mitscher, an experienced and self-confident aviator, would not have made his own calculation to the target. Though the black shoe Spruance essentially turned air operations on the Enterprise over to his brown-shoe chief of staff, Miles Browning, it would have been highly uncharacteristic for Mitscher on the Hornet to turn critical decisions about the air group over to Stanhope Ring or anyone else.
The second scenario takes into account the likelihood that Mitscher would have considered the broader operational circumstances in order to determine how the Hornet air group could best contribute to American success. A key concern was the location and disposition of all four of the Japanese carriers. Though they were, in fact, operating as a unit that morning, the Americans did not know that. All the sighting reports so far had indicated that there were only two carriers at the coordinates that had been sent in by the search planes. Like Fletcher, Mitscher very likely asked himself, “Where are the others?”17
Indeed, all of the American flag officers assumed that the Japanese carriers were operating in two groups that morning. In his initial orders to the task-force
commanders, as well as to Simard on Midway, Nimitz had suggested that “one or more [of the Japanese] carriers may take up closein daylight positions” for the attack on Midway, while “additional carrier groups” operated against American surface forces. In the briefing that he gave to the pilots the night before the battle, Lieutenant Stephen Jurika, Mitscher’s intelligence officer, announced that “there were at least two carriers, two battleships, several cruisers and about five destroyers in the attack force which would attempt to take Midway. The support force some distance behind contained the rest of their forces” (emphasis added). And at 6:48 on the morning of the battle, just before the Hornet began launching, Fletcher sent a message to Spruance by TBS (a message which Mitscher no doubt monitored) to remind him that “two carriers [are] unaccounted for.” All of that may have encouraged Mitscher to send his air group to the west rather than the southwest in the expectation of finding that second enemy carrier group. In the only comment Ring ever made about the course he flew that day, he wrote: “Departure from Hornet was taken on predetermined interception course, Group Commander leading.” Predetermined by whom he does not say.18
If this is indeed what happened, it is curious that neither Mitscher nor Ring shared the object of the mission with the squadron commanders, and because of that Waldron became even more frustrated and unsatisfied. He knew that a course of 265 degrees would not lead them to the carriers that had been reported and plotted by all the squadron commanders. As he made his way down to the flight deck, he pulled aside his squadron’s navigator, Ensign George Gay, and told him that he thought the assigned course was wrong. If necessary, he told Gay, he would fly his own course to the target. “Don’t think I’m lost,” Waldron said. “Just track me so that if anything happens to me the boys can count on you to bring them back.”19