The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History)
Page 35
Like Sōryū, Yorktown had been hit by three bombs—one forward, one amidships, and one astern. One important difference was that the bombs that had hit the Sōryū had been 1,000-pound bombs; those that hit the Yorktown were 250-kilogram (551-pound) bombs. More importantly, unlike Sōryū, Yorktown’s hangar deck was not packed with volatile ordnance because of the advance warning provided by the Yorktown’s radar. Though a fully fueled Dauntless armed with a 1,000-pound bomb sat on the hangar deck near where the first bomb exploded, the hangar-deck officer, Lieutenant Alberto Emerson, quickly activated the sprinkler system, and the better-equipped American damage control parties successfully contained the fire before any ordnance cooked off.14
Nevertheless, it was a dire moment. With main propulsion out, the big Yorktown began to lose speed, and by 12:40 she was dead in the water. Black smoke from the mutiple fires roiled up so high into the air that it was visible from Task Force 16 forty miles away. Immobile, and with three gaping holes in her flight deck, Yorktown could not conduct air operations. Her radar had been knocked out, meaning that any future attack would find her a sitting duck. Driven from his battle station in flag plot by thick smoke, Fletcher assessed the situation. “I can’t fight a war from a dead ship,” he told Buckmaster, and soon afterward, just past one o’clock, he left the Yorktown in Buckmaster’s care and prepared to transfer to the heavy cruiser Astoria. The only way off the ship was to climb down a knotted rope. Fletcher was not sure he could do it. “I’m too damn old for this sort of thing,” he muttered. In the end, two sailors had to lower him down to the Astoria’s motor whaleboat.15
The damage to the Yorktown compelled all of her planes still aloft to seek sanctuary on Hornet and Enterprise. Aboard the Hornet, most of the planes from the “flight to nowhere” had landed by now except for Ruff Johnson’s bombers, which would return from Midway that afternoon. Unfortunately, the Hornet’s run of bad luck was not over. One of the Yorktown‘s refugee pilots was Ensign Daniel C. Sheedy, whose Wildcat had been badly shot up during the strike on the Kidō Butai, wounding him in the leg. As a result, he had trouble bringing his fighter in for a landing. Though Sheedy did not know it, one of the two Japanese bullets that had punched through his instrument panel had disabled the switch that put his own machine guns on “safe.” When his damaged Wildcat hit the deck, his left landing gear collapsed and his plane swerved toward the Hornet’s island. The impact also set off his machine guns. A burst of .50-caliber bullets sprayed both the island and a group of men standing nearby. Three Marines and a sailor were killed, as was Lieutenant Royal R. Ingersoll, son of the commander of the U. S. Atlantic Fleet, Admiral Royal E. Ingersoll.16
Meanwhile, back on board the wounded Yorktown, damage-control parties worked feverishly. Some fought the fires, others worked on the engines, and still others labored to repair the holes in the flight deck. To sustain them, the executive officer, Dixie Keefer, ordered the ship’s store opened and distributed candy (“gedunk”) to all hands, both to boost morale and to keep up their energy level. In place of the small national flag that normally flew from the bridge, Buckmaster ordered the crew to raise the fifteen-foot-long “holiday” flag, which provoked cheers from the crew. On the flight deck, men constructed a frame made of 4 by 6 wooden timbers across the gaping holes in the deck, then nailed quarter-inch steel plates over the framework. It was a makeshift patch, but it was good enough. Technicians managed to get the radar working again.
Damage-control parties repair a hole in the flight deck of the Yorktown after the attack by Lieutenant Kobayashi’s dive-bombers from Hiryū. (U.S. Naval Institute)
The biggest problem was in the engine spaces, where the second Japanese bomb had taken out five of the ship’s nine boilers. Water Tenderman First Class Charles Kleinsmith and a crew of volunteers donned gasmasks so they could stay in the engine room and maintain pressure in boiler number 1, which provided the power the damage-control parties needed to run their equipment. By 1:30, other crewmen of the “black gang” had boilers 4, 5, and 6 back on line, and ten minutes after that, the chief engineer reported that he could generate steam for twenty knots. As the crew cheered, the Yorktown began to move, slowly at first, then faster, and soon she was a warship again. With the fires under control, Buckmaster ordered the crew to resume fueling the Wildcats of Jimmy Thach’s squadron.17
The refueling had barely started, however, when the radar on the cruiser Pensacola picked up another group of inbound planes. The Yorktown‘s 1MC public address system blared out: “Stand by for air attack.” Once again, radar prevented the Yorktown from being caught unready. The fueling was halted immediately and the lines purged with CO2 gas. The Yorktown had only six Wildcats aloft, including several from Task Force 16. Pederson was eager to get Thach’s squadron back into the air as well. But there were two problems. The first was that although the Yorktown had by now worked its way up to about sixteen knots, the light winds that day meant that the fighters would have to get airborne with relatively low wind speed across the deck. The second problem was that since the refueling had been halted, most of the Wildcats had only about 23 gallons of gas in their tanks. They took off nonetheless.18
The inbound bogeys were ten Kate torpedo bombers protected by six more Zeros. The Kate was the best weapon in the Japanese air arsenal, but Yamaguchi now had only these ten. As a measure of just how much and how quickly the fortunes of war had turned, early that morning Lieutenant Tomonaga had led 108 bombers and fighters in the attack on Midway Island, leaving 140 more behind as a reserve. Now the ten Kate torpedo bombers that Tomonaga led against the Yorktown represented almost the last available striking force of the Kidō Butai, nearly the final arrow in the quiver.19
Nagumo had agreed to hurl them against the enemy because at this point he was still clinging to the hope that he could turn the battle around by forcing a surface engagement. Only five of the eighteen dive-bombers that Yamaguchi had sent against the Yorktown had returned, but they reported that they had left a mortally wounded American carrier dead in the water and burning. If Tomonaga’s ten Kates could inflict similar damage on a second American carrier, a surface attack by Nagumo’s battleships and cruisers might be able to finish them off. Failing that, Nagumo would still have the opportunity to launch a night attack with his destroyers, armed with the deadly Type 93 “Long Lance” torpedoes that had a twenty-mile range. He knew that the Kidō Butai would be exposed to renewed American air attack in the interim, but he also knew, having witnessed it himself, that the Americans had suffered extremely heavy air losses that morning, including the near-annihilation of their torpedo squadrons, which significantly minimized the air threat. Attempting a surface battle was risky. Nonetheless, so long as there was even the least chance of success, Nagumo was determined to grasp it.
Even before Tomonaga took off, however, two key pieces of information ought to have brought Nagumo back to earth. At 12:40, a message from Chikuma’s number 5 scout plane reported an undamaged American carrier task force 130 miles away, much too far for any surface attack to be realistic. And twenty minutes after that, Nagumo received another piece of information from Commander Watanabe on the destroyer Arashi. Watanabe’s crew had plucked one of the pilots from Lem Massey’s VT-3 from the water. It was Ensign Wesley Frank Osmus, a 24-year-old product of the AVCAD program from Illinois. Osmus had apparently failed to retrieve the life raft from his Devastator, for the Japanese found him, weak and dehydrated, swimming all alone in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Hauled aboard the Arashi, the Japanese interrogated him aggressively, threatening him with a sword. Osmus revealed that there were three American carriers in the area, the Hornet, Enterprise, and Yorktown, and that the Yorktown was operating separately from the other two. Once they completed the interrogation, the Japanese carried Osmus to the stern to throw him back over the side. Realizing their intent, Osmus grabbed on to the ship’s stern railing, and to break his grip the Japanese smashed his head with a fire ax. Osmus’ body tumbled into the ship’s wake.20
One factor in that decision may have been that Admiral Yamamoto had at last put his oar in. He had considered breaking radio silence at 7:45 a.m. that morning, when the Yamato had picked up the report by Petty Officer Amari that there were ten American ships to the northeast. At the time, Yamamoto had turned to his chief of staff and said, “I think we had better order Nagumo to attack at once.” But in the end he had decided not to interfere, and now he very likely regretted it. At 12:20 Yamamoto broke radio silence to send a series of orders directing Kondō’s battleships and heavy cruisers to close on the Kidō Butai from the south and Kakuta’s two carriers off the Aleutians to abort their mission, send the transports back to Japan, and steam south. Rather than cut his losses, Yamamoto was prepared to double down in the hope of winning the pot. As for Nagumo, by dispatching Tomonaga’s handful of torpedo bombers against the Americans at 1:30, he had staked everything on their success.21
When Tomonaga took off from the Hiryū, he knew that he would not be coming back. During the attack on Midway that morning, his left-wing fuel tank had been punctured and was no longer serviceable. Consequently, though he had enough gas to find the enemy, he would not have enough to return. He joked with his fellow pilots that with the Americans only ninety miles away, he would have enough fuel to make it, but everyone recognized it as bravado. Yamaguchi himself came down to the flight deck to shake Tomonaga’s hand and tell him goodbye, and to remind him that it was essential to find and cripple a second American carrier. One had been badly wounded, perhaps sunk, but there were two more out there.22
After leading his small squadron eastward for not quite an hour, Tomonaga saw the wakes of an American task force on the surface. At the center of that task force was an apparently undamaged carrier making an estimated twenty knots and launching aircraft. Clearly this could not be the cripple that Kobayashi’s dive-bombers had left dead in the water and burning only two hours ago. He used hand signals to indicate the target and split his ten planes into two divisions to conduct a classic anvil attack. Despite outward appearances, his target was indeed the Yorktown, returned to operational status by her efficient damage-control teams. Consequently, instead of hitting a second carrier, Tomonaga’s Kates were about to expend their fury on the same carrier that Kobayashi had hit, while the two carriers of Task Force 16 remained undiscovered and unharmed.
Tomonaga led one division of five planes against the Yorktown’s starboard side, while Lieutenant Hashimoto Toshio took the other five planes out to the left to attack its port side. As the Kates bore down on the Yorktown, Thach’s eight Wildcats were struggling to get airborne. The Yorktown’s own 5-inch guns had already started firing when the first of the Wildcats rolled down the deck, and the pilots could feel their jolting recoil as they took off. On the one hand this launch at the last possible moment was fortuitous because, with only twenty-three gallons of gas, the Wildcats were spared having to burn fuel flying out to the contact. On the other hand, it also meant that the air battle took place inside the envelope of the antiair fire from the escorts of the task force. That escort was even more powerful now than it had been two hours before, for Spruance had sent two cruisers (Pensacola and Vincennes) and two destroyers (Benham and Balch) to reinforce Yorktown’s screen. Consequently, Wildcats, Zeros, and Kates maneuvered and shot at each other from close range as thousands of rounds of ordnance flew past them from the screening cruisers and destroyers. It was like fighting an air battle in the middle of a target range.23
One of the Wildcats was piloted by a 22-year-old ensign with the unlikely name of Milton Tootle IV, the son of a prominent St. Louis banker. Tootle’s plane had barely cleared the deck in his takeoff when he made a hard right turn and saw a Kate making its torpedo run on the Yorktown. Tootle did not even have time to crank up his landing gear before he fired a long burst at the Kate and shot it down. When he pulled up, however, he entered the free-fire zone of the Yorktown’s own antiaircraft battery, and his plane was hit by friendly fire. As his cockpit filled with smoke, he knew he was too low to bail out, so he climbed to 1,500 feet before jumping. His whole flight had lasted less than five minutes.24
Jimmy Thach almost didn’t get airborne at all. He flew the only Wildcat that had been fully fueled, which made it heavier, and in the light winds, it virtually fell off the end of the flight deck; Thach had to nurse it up into the air. As he began to gain altitude, he too saw an enemy torpedo plane streaking in toward the Yorktown, and he turned to go after it. As he closed in, he saw that its tail bore “a bright red colored insignia shaped like feathers … that no other Japanese aircraft had.” It was Tomonaga’s command plane, flying very low, barely fifty feet off the water, and heading straight for Yorktown’s starboard side. Thach made a side approach and triggered a long burst of .50-caliber bullets. The Kate began to smoke, and flames issued from the engine, but Tomonaga somehow held his course. Thach recalled that “the whole left wing was burning, and I could see the ribs [of the plane] showing through the flames,” but still Tomonaga flew on. Thach was impressed in spite of himself. “That devil still stayed in the air until he got close enough and dropped his torpedo.” Only after that did Tomonaga’s plane smash into the sea and disintegrate. No doubt Tomonaga died satisfied that he had done his full duty. But despite his sacrifice, his torpedo missed, as did those of the other planes in his section.25
Hashimoto’s second division had better luck. Threading their way through the heavy antiair fire, four of the Kates in his section managed to get close enough to launch their torpedoes. That morning, Petty Officer Hamada Giichi had watched the destruction of Kaga, Akagi, and Sōryū from the deck of the Hiryū and had resolved to make the Americans pay. Now, after his pilot dropped his torpedo and pulled out over the Yorktown’s flight deck, Hamada leaned out of the cockpit and shook his fist at it. The Americans who saw him yelled and gestured back. It was an intensely personal moment in a battle dominated by impersonal weapons. Within seconds, at 2:43 p.m., the first torpedo struck the Yorktown flush on the port side at about frame 90.26
“It was a real WHACK,” Ensign John “Jack” Crawford remembered. “You could feel it all through the ship. … I had the impression that the ship’s hull buckled slightly.” The blast knocked out six of the ship’s nine boilers and opened a large hole in the hull fifteen feet below the water line. Fires spread into the other boiler rooms and knocked out all propulsion. The Yorktown began to slow and take on a slight list. Then, just moments later, a second torpedo struck near frame 75. The two strikes were so close together that combined they created a single giant sixty-by-thirty-foot hole in the Yorktown’s port side. The inrushing sea flooded the generator room and knocked out power throughout the ship; the emergency generators failed too, and the ship went dark. The Yorktown continued to lose way and the list became more pronounced. Soon she was again dead in the water. Eventually the ship heeled over at a 26-degree angle—so steep that it was difficult to walk on the flight deck. Commander Clarence Aldrich, the damage-control officer, reported to Buckmaster that without power none of the pumps feeding the fire hoses were working, nor could he effect counterflooding to prevent the Yorktown from listing further. Charles Kleinsmith, whose crew had kept boiler number one in operation after the first attack, had been killed. Lacking power, unable to fight the fires, and fearing that the big flattop “would capsize in a few minutes,” trapping the whole crew underwater, at 2:55, Buckmaster ordered abandon ship.27
There was no panic. Men came up from the darkened spaces below, some carrying the wounded. The kapok-filled life vests were stowed in g
iant canvas bags suspended from the overhead on the hangar deck, and they spilled onto the deck in a heap. As they had on the Lexington in the Coral Sea, men stripped off their shoes for swimming and lined them up on the deck. Because Buckmaster feared the ship might roll over at any moment, he directed the men to evacuate from the starboard (high) side. From there, it was some sixty feet from the flight deck to the sea, and the men had to lower themselves down knotted ropes thrown over the side. One recent graduate of the Naval Academy began to lower himself with his legs splayed out at a 45-degree angle as he had been taught to do in gym class. Then, appreciating that this was not gym class, he wrapped his legs tightly around the rope as he continued his descent. Seaman E. R. “Bud” Quam successfully lowered himself down into the sea, then found that the water soaking into his heavy anti-flash overalls made them heavy and threatened to drag him down. He was floundering badly when a pair of strong arms pulled him out of the water and into a rubber raft. He looked up at his rescuer and was astonished to see that it was Peter Newberg, a high school classmate from Willmar, Minnesota.28
Morale remained high, even in the water. Those bobbing in life vests put out their thumbs to those in the rafts, as if hitching a ride. A few called out “Taxi! Taxi!” and there was a lot of joshing and joking—one group began singing “The Beer Barrel Polka.” The escorting destroyers closed in to pick up the survivors, and eventually some 2,280 men were recovered; USS Balch alone picked up 725. Buckmaster wanted to ensure that he was the last one off the Yorktown. All alone, he conducted a tour of the spaces that were still above water to make sure that no one had been overlooked. With the Yorktown listing near 30 degrees and the decks and ladders slippery with oil, he had to move “hand-over-hand” to stay vertical. By now the water was lapping at the hangar deck. Buckmaster made his way to the stern, stepped off into the sea, and swam away from the ship. He was soon picked up and taken on board Fletcher’s new flagship, Astoria.29