The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History)

by Craig L. Symonds

  * Because the Yorktown was out of action by the time these scouts returned, all of them had to land on board the carriers of Task Force 16. When Adams climbed out of his Dauntless on board the Enterprise still wearing his pajamas, he provoked a laugh when he claimed to be the only one who had come prepared to spend the night.

  * There was one more American air strike that night. At 5:00 p.m., a PBY from Midway reported a “burning carrier” off to the northwest—almost certainly the Kaga. Major Ben Norris lifted off with twelve planes from the Eastern Island airfield at 7:15, and Simard sent out eight PT boats, each of them carrying a 200-gallon auxiliary gas tank to enable them to make the long run out to the target. But by the time any of them arrived, the Kaga was no longer afloat. At 6:25 she suffered another massive explosion and went under at around 7:25, taking some eight hundred men out of her crew of 1,800 down with her. During the return flight, Norris got disoriented in the dark with no visual references and flew his plane into the sea.

  16

  Denouement

  The battle was not over. Though Yamamoto was a gambler, he was also a realist. Nonetheless, for several more hours he continued to behave as if victory were still possible. When Spruance turned Task Force 16 eastward after dark, Yamamoto sent a radio message to all units that the American fleet, which he announced had “practically been destroyed,” was retiring to the east and that the landing on AF (Midway) would proceed. His purpose in sending such a message may have been to boost morale, but his subsequent orders suggest that he was still clinging to the hope that he could make it happen. At 9:20 p.m. he ordered Kondō’s two battleships and four cruisers to head northeast at high speed, to seek a night surface engagement with the retiring American carrier task force. He also directed Kurita’s four heavy cruisers, which were covering the “Transport Group,” to proceed to Midway to shell the airfield. He announced that the main body, including his flagship, Yamato, was coming up to rendezvous with what was left of the Kidō Butai. Finally, he authorized Ugaki to relieve Nagumo of his command and put Kondō in charge of the battle. Kondō led his big surface ships to the northeast, spreading them out into a scouting line in anticipation of finding the American carriers in the dark.1

  Yamamoto also had to decide what to do about Nagumo’s wrecked flagship. Though the Akagi was virtually destroyed, she remained stubbornly afloat. It was unrealistic to imagine that she could be salvaged and towed all the way back across the Pacific, but the alternatives were appalling: abandoning her to the enemy or sinking her with torpedoes. One of Yamamoto’s staff officers worried that if she were abandoned, the Americans would turn her into “a museum piece on the Potomac River,” a horrifying scenario. But the idea of sinking one of the emperor’s capital ships was equally horrifying. The decision belonged to Yamamoto, and after listening to the discussion he told his staff, “I will apologize to the Emperor for the sinking of the Akagi” and he gave orders for her destroyer screen to send her to the bottom. After receiving those orders, the screen commander fired four torpedoes at the Akagi, one from each of his four destroyers, like a firing squad. At least two of them struck home, and the majestic Akagi slipped beneath the waves.2

  That made the Hiryū the last Japanese carrier afloat. For some time, Yamaguchi hoped that he could salvage his flagship and get her back to Japan, and throughout the evening and into the night her crews fought the fires. Then, just past midnight, the Hiryū was rocked by another internal explosion. The exhausted damage-control parties continued to labor, but it was now evident to all that it was hopeless. At 2:00 a.m., Yamaguchi ordered them to stop working and to assemble on the flight deck aft of the gaping holes left by the American bombs. There, he addressed them. He took full responsibility for the loss of the Hiryū and ordered the seven hundred or so survivors to live, so that they could become the core of a new and revitalized Imperial Navy. He asked them to face west, toward Tokyo, and called for three banzai cheers as the flag was lowered to the strains of the national anthem. Then, at 3:15 a.m., he ordered abandon ship. His last two messages consisted of an apology to Nagumo and an order to Captain Abe Toshio, commanding the destroyer screen, to sink the Hiryū with torpedoes once the crew had left the ship. Yamaguchi himself remained aboard. Several members of his staff came to him to say that they, too, wished to go down with the ship. No, Yamaguchi told them. They must survive so they could carry on the war. He did, however, accept the request of the Hiryū’s captain, Kaku Tomeo, to remain aboard, and the two of them stood together on what was left of the bridge to watch the orderly evacuation and admire the brightness of the moon.3

  At ten minutes past five, after the Hiryūs crew had been plucked from the water, and with the sun just coming up, Commander Fujita Isamu, captain of the destroyer Makigumo, fired a Type 93 “Long Lance” torpedo at the smoldering flattop. The first one ran underneath the hull and failed to detonate. A second struck home and exploded. Fujita, perhaps eager to wash his hands of this unpleasant duty, steamed off to the west. Some members of his crew reported that they saw survivors on board the Hiryū waving at them, but, perhaps assuming that these were patriots who preferred to go down with the ship, Fujita kept going.4

  By then Yamamoto had abandoned whatever hope he had had of forcing a surface action. By midnight, two things had become clear. First, that Kondō was not going to catch the American carriers before dawn, and second, that Kurita’s cruisers could not reach Midway before sunrise left them exposed to air attack. There was no avoiding what was now evident—he had to acknowledge defeat and call off the whole operation. Yamamoto’s gunnery officer, Watanabe Yasuji, who had argued so passionately for the Midway plan before the Naval General Staff back in April, suggested that the battleships Haruna and Kirishima could be sent to join Kurita’s four cruisers in the bombardment of Midway. Their big guns could neutralize the Midway airfield, he declared, and gain more time for Kondō’s battleships to catch up with and finish off the American carriers. Victory was still possible. Listening to his enthusiastic young staff officer, Yamamoto “turned very calm and quiet,” then replied, “It is too late now for such an operation.” He suggested to Watanabe, not unkindly, that as in shogi, “too much fighting causes all-out defeat.” Instead, Yamamoto recalled both Kondō and Kurita, ordering them to fall back on the main body.5

  There was a delay in the transmission of those orders, perhaps a deliberate one. Watanabe acknowledged that “everyone was crazy to recover the situation and fight the enemy.” Kurita’s recall order was sent first to the wrong cruiser division and he did not get his orders until 2:30 a.m. By then, his four cruisers were less than ninety miles from Midway—three more hours would have put them within gun range of the atoll. To be so close to the objective and have to turn around was galling, but orders were orders. Worse, dawn was now only two hours away, so that even at their top speed of 35 knots, Kurita’s four cruisers would be no more than 160 miles from Midway when the sun came up on June 5. They would be isolated, without air cover, and within easy range of the Midway airfield; Kurita knew it was unlikely he would get away undiscovered.6

  For Kurita and his cruiser force, however, there were other dangers that night besides airplanes. In the pitch darkness of the early hours of June 5, while Yamaguchi addressed the crew of the doomed Hiryū, the American submarine USS Tambor (SS-198) was running on the surface eighty-nine miles west of Midway. At 2:15 a.m., her commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander John W. Murphy, Jr., spotted “the loom of four large ships on the horizon.” They were, of course, Kurita’s four heavy cruisers, at that time still closing on Midway for a dawn shelling of the airfield. In the dark of night and three miles away, however, Murphy could not tell if the ships were friend or foe. His orders had cautioned him and all other sub commanders that “encounters with friendly surface forces during night [were] possible,” and that they should be sure of their targets. Murphy therefore turned the Tambor to the east to parallel the unidentified vessels, hoping to catch them in the moonlight so he could “identify t
hem by silhouette.” Instead he lost them in the dark. He did not regain contact until 2:38, by which time they had changed course to the north in response to Yamamoto’s recall order. Now they were heading almost directly toward him.7

  Murphy sent out a contact report, but it was necessarily vague and specified only that he had spotted “many unidentified ships.” He was hoping that Midway could tell him whether these vessels were likely to be friends or enemies. Meanwhile, he maintained intermittent contact but was unable to get in position for an attack mainly because the cruisers were barreling along at 28 knots and the Tambor had a top speed of 21 knots. At 3:06 a.m., Murphy got an acknowledgment to his initial report, which did not contain any news about whether any U.S. surface forces were in the area. Not until 4:12, when the sky had lightened enough to enable him to study the profile of the ships against the gray dawn, was Murphy satisfied that these were enemy cruisers. He had no time for an updated report, however, because one of the two accompanying destroyers detached itself from the column and came charging toward him. Murphy stepped back from the periscope and yelled out: “Dive! Dive! Dive! Take her down and rig for depth charge attack!”8

  Murphy took the Tambor deep and stayed down for twenty minutes before easing back up to periscope depth. In the growing light of dawn, he saw two cruisers of the Mogami class, moving now at only about 17 knots and signaling to one another. Murphy tried to get close enough for an attack. Despite his efforts, however, the range actually increased from 9,000 yards to 13,000 yards (over seven miles). He sent in an updated contact report noting that the two cruisers were now headed due west on a course of 270 degrees. He also reported that “the trailing cruiser had about forty feet of her bow missing.”9

  Though he did not know it, Murphy and the Tambor were primarily responsible for that missing bow section. The wounded ship was, in fact, the heavy cruiser Mogami, namesake of the class. The Mogami-class cruisers were big ships, heavily armed with ten 8-inch guns in five two-gun turrets packed into a 661-foot long hull. At 2:35, Kurita’s cruisers had just completed their turn northward in response to Yamamoto’s recall order when one of the lookouts on Kurita’s flagship, Kumano, spied the low silhouette of the Tambor almost dead ahead on the northern horizon. Kurita ordered an emergency simultaneous turn to port. The Kumano, at the head of the column, and the Mikuma, which was third in line, both turned sharply left at near 90 degrees, but the number 2 ship (Suzuya) and the trailing ship (Mogami) each turned at 45 degrees. The Suzuya barely missed colliding with the Kumano, and the Mogami drove herself headlong into the fourinch-thick armor belt on the port side of the Mikuma, just forward of her bridge. The Mikuma was only superficially damaged, but warships of the Second World War were not built for ramming, and the sheer bow of the Mogami crumpled like a crash-test car hitting a concrete wall.10

  Quick and effective damage control prevented the Mogami from going down, but she could no longer make 28 knots, or even 20. With dawn approaching, Kurita could not slow the whole formation to wait for her. He ordered the two lead ships to proceed, and directed the wounded Mogami, accompanied by the Mikuma and the two destroyers, to follow at best speed. At first that best speed was only about eight or ten knots, as the Mogami pushed her blunt bow into the sea. Her captain, Soji Akira, did everything he could to regain speed: his men cut away the wreckage and threw overboard all nonessential materials, including all twenty-four of the expensive and valuable Type 93 torpedoes (a decision that would have important consequences later). Gradually the Mogami worked her way back up to 20 knots, which allowed her to run away from the Tambor. But when dawn arrived at 4:15, Midway was only a hundred miles away. It was only a matter of time before an American patrol plane found these two ships struggling along under the bright sun.11

  Sure enough, at 6:30, a PBY out of Midway reported sighting “two battleships” 125 miles to the west. Simard ordered out what was left of his attack group: six Dauntlesses under Marine Captain Marshall Tyler and six Vindicators under Marine Captain Richard Fleming. They found the two cruisers and dropped their bombs, but the poor luck of the Marine bombers continued. Fleming’s plane was shot down, and despite the cruisers’ relatively slow speed, all of the American bombs missed. Eight Army B-17s from Midway tried their luck next, but they, too, failed to make any hits. The commanding officers of the two cruisers began to hope that they might get away after all.12

  Spruance also got word of the two “battleships” west of Midway, and his task force now possessed a robust strike force of more than sixty bombers with the addition of Wally Short’s Scouting Five from Yorktown and the return of Ruff Johnson’s Bombing Eight from Midway. Spruance did not launch at once, however. Battleships were valuable targets but not as important as carriers, and another report at 8:00 a.m. indicated a crippled Japanese carrier off to the northwest. It was, in fact, the Hiryū. Despite the torpedo from the Makigumo that was supposed to have sunk her, the Hiryū continued to drift along, powerless but afloat. Moreover, forty or so men from the engine rooms who had been overlooked when she was abandoned had made their way up to the flight deck and were still on board. Spruance did not know any of this; all he knew was that there was still an enemy carrier out there, and he wanted to go get it.

  The Hiryū, as photographed by a scout pilot from Hōshō on June 6. When Yamamoto learned that the Hiryū was still afloat, he dispatched the destroyer Tanikaze to finish her off. (U.S. Naval Institute)

  Yamamoto found out that the Hiryū was still afloat about the same time that Spruance did. At 7:20 that morning, a search plane from the small carrier Hōshō, which was accompanying Yamamoto’s Main Body, sent in a sighting report of the Hiryū, including the information that there were still men on board her who had waved when the scout plane flew past. The pilot’s backseat gunner took pictures of the crippled carrier, still smoking and with a gigantic hole in her forward flight deck, but on an even keel and in no apparent danger of sinking. Yamamoto was displeased, for now he had to order a destroyer to go back and rescue the men on the carrier and then ensure that the Hiryū was sent to the bottom. Ironically, as Spruance was pondering sending a force to find and sink the Hiryū, the Japanese destroyer Tanikaze was dispatched on a mission to accomplish precisely the same goal.13

  Conflicting sighting reports led Spruance to hold off from attacking immediately, and by the time these reports were sorted out, it was early afternoon. Another problem was that the sighting reports put the Hiryū some 230 miles away, and the need to turn away from the target into the wind to launch meant that it would be closer to 270 miles away by the time the strike force set out. Though this was well beyond the ideal range of the Dauntless dive-bombers, Browning wanted to launch at once. He pointed out that if Task Force 16 steamed toward the target during the outbound flight, it would reduce the length of the return trip. Moreover, he wanted all the planes to carry 1,000-pound bombs, which were unquestionably more effective than 500-pound bombs, but which significantly reduced the fuel efficiency—and therefore the range—of the bombers. The planes on Enterprise that would be assigned this task were mostly refugees from the Yorktown, and the two squadron commanders, Dave Shumway and Wally Short, were leery of lugging 1,000-pound bombs to a target more than 250 miles away. After talking it over between themselves, they decided to talk to the CEAG, Wade McClusky, who was down in sick bay recovering from his wounds of the day before. McClusky listened to their concerns and agreed that the order was unwise. He got out of bed to go with them back up to the bridge to see Browning.14

  Browning was annoyed at having his orders challenged. He was not only the senior aviator on board, in his mind he was the representative—in spirit, if not in fact—of the absent Bull Halsey, and he refused to reconsider. As McClusky put it, “Browning was stubborn.” Unintimidated by his blunt refusal, McClusky pressed the issue. He reminded Browning that most of the planes in his own squadron had run out of gas returning from their attack on the Kaga and Akagi the day before—and those targets had been only 170 miles away. He
pointedly asked Browning whether he had ever flown an SBD carrying a 1,000-pound bomb and a full load of gas from a carrier deck. Browning admitted that he had not. McClusky then formally requested a one-hour delay in the launch in order to close the range, and, further, that the bomb loads on all the planes be changed to 500-pounders. Browning was starting to reject McClusky’s request when Spruance, who had been quietly listening nearby, interrupted him, saying evenly, “I will do what you pilots want.” Browning was furious to be publicly overridden. Without another word, he left the bridge and stalked off to his cabin. A contemporary likened it to Achilles sulking in his tent.15

  Spruance’s decision meant not only an hour’s delay in the launch but rearming all the strike planes with 500-pound bombs, which took additional time. As a result, the strike against the Hiryū was not launched until after 3:00 in the afternoon. The Hornet launched first—and this time Stanhope Ring made sure that he was not left behind. He led Walt Rodee’s VS-8 and Ruff Johnson’s VB-8 (plus one orphan from Wally Short’s VS-5), thirty-two planes altogether. At about the same time, Shumway and Short led thirty-three planes from the Enterprise. Thus a total of sixty-five bombers headed out to finish off the crippled Hiryū.