In this incredible six-minute period a third Japanese carrier, the 18,000-ton Soryu (“Green Dragon”), was about to experience the same inferno inflicted on her two sister ships. This time the damage was done by Max Leslie and his Bombing Squadron 3 from the American aircraft carrier Yorktown, itself now little more than a hundred miles away. Of Soryu’s crew, 718 were soon incinerated. None of the ordnance from the American dive-bombers were effective armor-piercing weapons, which under most circumstances was a clear drawback, as such ordnance were often unable to smash unimpeded through even the wooden flight decks to explode among the interior magazines, engines, and fuel tanks below. Given the absolute failure of forty-one American torpedo planes minutes earlier, there seemed little chance to reach the vulnerable insides to sink the carriers through the Dauntlesses’ small bombs alone. But, as in the case of the Akagi and Kaga, for once the lighter American bombs had an unexpected windfall: since all three carriers were caught preparing planes for takeoff, the most vulnerable targets on the Japanese carriers at 10:22 A.M. were in fact their wooden decks. The explosions of the exposed and loaded Japanese bombers and fighters would send the blasts from their own fiery gasoline and bombs downward right into their own ships. One American bomb under these rare conditions might set off dozens more on deck.
When hit, Soryu was about ten to twelve miles north and east of two other burning carriers, likewise about to launch planes for a massive air strike against the three American fleet carriers. Leslie’s thirteen dive-bombers came in from more than 14,000 feet unnoticed—the Japanese fighters were too busy at sea level finishing their slaughter of Lem Massey’s last few lumbering American torpedo bombers to patrol the clouds above. At least three bombs from the Yorktown’s pilots hit the Soryu—1,000-pound ordnance released from little more than 1,500 feet—quickly turning the smaller carrier into an inferno, as the blasts from the bombs themselves, exploding Japanese planes, gas lines, and ammunition tore the ship to pieces. Within seconds she lost power entirely. After thirty minutes the call went out to abandon ship. The captain of the Soryu, Admiral Yanagimoto, was last seen yelling “Banzai” on the engulfed bridge. The last four planes in Leslie’s attack squadron felt that further bombing of the wrecked Soryu was redundant and so altered their dives to focus on a battleship and destroyer. Belowdecks Tatsuya Otawa, one of the Soryu pilots, saw that “everything was blowing up—planes, bombs, gas tanks” (W. Lord, Incredible Victory, 174)—before he, too, was blasted over the side of the ship into the sea.
The fourth and last Japanese carrier, the more modern 20,000-ton Hiryu (“Flying Dragon”), which had gradually drifted to the southeast during the morning attacks from army and marine bombers based on Midway, largely escaped the first morning wave of American carrier divebombers.
Within minutes Hiryu was able to launch her own devastating attack on the Yorktown, which contributed to the eventual sinking of the American carrier. However, late in the day of June 4, a returning formation of American dive-bombers without fighter escort from the Enterprise and Yorktown finally found her too. At a little before 4:00 P.M. twenty-four SBDs from the Enterprise, ten of them orphaned from the disabled and listing Yorktown, led by Lieutenants Earl Gallagher, Dick Best, and Dewitt W. Shumway, dived unnoticed from the clouds. Four bombs were direct hits, and once more the Americans ignited Japanese fighters and bombers that were ready for takeoff. The Hiryu’s plane elevator was blown out of the deck and against the bridge. Almost all of the dead were caught below the deck and engulfed in raging fires—more than four hundred perished. The Hiryu’s captain, Rear Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi, one of the brightest and most aggressive commanders in the Japanese navy, remained on the bridge and went down with his ship—an irreplaceable loss, since he was believed by many to be groomed as the successor to Admiral Yamamoto himself, Commander in Chief of the imperial fleet. When told by an aide that there was still money in the ship’s safe that might be saved, Yamaguchi ordered it left alone. “We’ll need money for a square meal in hell,” he murmured (W. Lord, Incredible Victory, 251).
In less than twelve hours 2,155 Japanese seamen were dead, four fleet aircraft carriers were wrecked and soon to sink, and more than 332 aircraft, along with their most skilled pilots, were gone. Before the battle was over, a heavy cruiser was sunk, and another heavily damaged. The Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu, and Soryu, the pride of the imperial fleet, veterans of campaigning against the Chinese, British, and Americans, were resting at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. In six minutes the momentum in the Pacific naval war had swung for good to the Americans as the worst fears of the Japanese admiralty of massive American retaliation were realized after only six months of fighting.
In strictly military terms the number of dead at Midway was not large—fewer than 4,000 in the two fleets. The losses were a mere fraction of what the Romans suffered at Cannae, or the Persians at Gaugamela, and much less costly than the bloodbaths of the great sea battles of Salamis, Lepanto, Trafalgar, and Jutland—or the Japanese slaughter to come at Leyte Gulf. But the sinking of the carriers represented an irreplaceable investment of millions of days of precious skilled labor, and even scarcer capital—and the only capability of the Japanese to destroy both the American fleet and Pacific bases. More than one hundred of the best carrier pilots perished in one day, equal to the entire graduating class of naval aviators that Japan could turn out in a single year. Never had the Japanese military lost so dramatically when technology, matériel, experience, and manpower were so decidedly in its favor. Back in Washington, D.C., Admiral Ernest J. King, chief of all U.S. naval operations, concluded of the action of June 4 that the battle of Midway had been the first decisive defeat of the Japanese navy in 350 years and had restored the balance of naval power in the Pacific.
Again, the carriers themselves were irreplaceable. During the entire course of World War II the Japanese launched only seven more of such enormous ships; the Americans in contrast would commission more than one hundred fleet, light, and escort carriers by war’s end. The Americans would also build or repair twenty-four battleships—despite losing nearly the entire fleet of the latter at Pearl Harbor—and a countless number of heavy and light cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and support ships. During the four years of the war the Americans constructed sixteen major warships for every one the Japanese built.
Worse still for the Japanese, the highest monthly production of all models of Japanese navy and army aircraft rarely exceeded 1,000 planes, and by summer 1945 the sum was scarcely half that due to American bombing, the need for factory dispersal, and matériel and manpower shortages. In contrast, the Americans soon turned out a sophisticated B-24 heavy bomber of some 100,000 parts every sixty-three minutes; American aircraft workers, who vastly outnumbered the Japanese, were also four times more productive than their individual enemy counterparts. By August 1945, in less than four years after the war had begun, the United States had produced nearly 300,000 aircraft and 87,620 warships. Even as early as mid-1944, American industry was building entire new fleets every six months, replete with naval aircraft comparable in size to the entire American force at Midway. After 1943, both American ships and airplanes—sixteen new Essex-class carriers outfitted with Helldiver dive-bombers, Corsair and Hellcat fighters, and Avenger torpedo bombers— were qualitatively and quantitatively superior to anything in the Japanese military. The modern Iowa-class battleships that appeared in the latter half of the war were better in speed, armament, range, and defensive protection than anything commissioned in the Japanese navy and were far more effective warships than even the monstrous Yamato and Mushasi. Within a few months after Midway, not only had the United States naval and air armies made up all the losses from Midway, but its entire armed forces were growing at geometric rates, while the Japanese navy actually began to shrink as outmoded and often bombed-out factories could not even replace obsolete ships and planes lost to American guns, let alone manufacture additional ones. This was the Arsenal of Venice and Cannae’s aftermath all over again.
THE ANNIHILATION OF THE DEVASTATORS
The battle of Midway can be understood by two inextricably connected events: the destruction of an entire American air arm by Japanese fighter pilots which moments later led directly to the demise of Japan’s own carriers. Just as deadly a predicament as being on the Japanese carriers at the battle of Midway was the piloting of lumbering obsolete TBD Devastator torpedo bombers, which early in the morning of June 4 had inaugurated the American carrier attack. In some sense, their annihilation by the Japanese Zero fighters, together with the dogfighting of a few American Wildcat fighters, allowed their unseen dive-bombing comrades the opportunity to attack unmolested. All the American torpedo bombers would make gallant approaches against the Japanese fleet; none would hit their targets; and almost all, with their two-man crews, would be shot down. Out of the eighty-two men who headed for the Japanese carriers in the TBDs, only thirteen survived. Yet one of the two Japanese air commanders at Midway, Mitsuo Fuchida, scoffed in his official report on the eve of the battle that the Americans lacked the will to fight.
Commissioned in the mid-1930s, the TBD Devastators were by the outbreak of the war incapable of devastating anything; in reality, they were little more than flying coffins for both pilot and rear gunner. When loaded with their sole 1,000-pound obsolete torpedo—itself unreliable and as likely to plow harmlessly beneath the target as to fail to explode even when it did hit—the planes themselves could barely manage a hundred mph. Fully loaded, they had a combat range of only 175 miles. When attacking ships that were headed in the opposite direction at thirty knots, the TBDs were forced to hug the sea to ensure a proper launching approach as they narrowed the gap at real speeds of less than sixty mph—if there were no head winds. The loaded planes could scarcely climb. Such agonizingly long and exposed runs made them easy targets for Japanese Zero fighters, which sometimes at Midway were swarming in masses of forty or more and diving from far above at three hundred miles an hour. In contrast to the Americans’ obsolete craft, Japanese torpedo planes by 1941 could dive at nearly three hundred mph and carry a far heavier and more effective torpedo at greater range.
Thirty-five of forty-one Devastators on June 4 were shot down attacking the Japanese carriers—a fact today scarcely comprehensible under the protocols of contemporary American military practice, in which troops enjoying overwhelming technological, material, and numerical superiority are sometimes not committed to battle out of fear of losing a handful of combatants. Most of the Devastator crews had never taken off armed with a torpedo from the deck of an aircraft carrier—and now they were sent on a mission in their decrepit aircraft, with scarcely enough fuel to return home, against a mostly unknown and unlocated target. The American military was later aghast over the use of Japanese kamikaze planes in the last year of the war; but the orders for the Devastator attacks at Midway were themselves little more than suicidal.
Midway was the last major battle in which the obsolete torpedo bombers were used; on Midway itself a few marine pilots were already flying a small number of the new replacement Grumman TBF Avengers, which, armed with new torpedoes, by war’s end would compile a formidable record of low-level attacks on the Japanese fleet. The Avengers could nearly double the speed of the Devastators, carried twice as much armament, and could take far more punishment. But none had yet replaced the ancient TBDs on any of the carriers at Midway—indeed, nineteen of the replacement Avengers arrived from Norfolk, Virginia, at Pearl Harbor on May 29, one day after the Hornet had sailed out to Midway. Only six were ferried to the marines at Midway. Had the Avengers replaced the Devastators on all three carriers, the American tally of sunken ships might have been even greater, and the loss of pilots surely less—although, as we shall see, the ultimate decision of Midway, in some sense, rested with the sheer vulnerability of the obsolete planes, which drew in the greedy Zeros in droves, when the real danger to the Japanese fleet was high, not low, in the skies. In any case, the naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison, in remarks reminiscent of Livy’s summation of Cannae, entitled an entire section of his narrative “The Slaughter of the Torpedo-Bombers.” Abject slaughter it was.
On the morning of June 5 Lieutenant Commander John C. “Jack” Waldron, commander of the VT-8 torpedo squadron on the Hornet, distributed copies of his final message to his crews shortly before takeoff. The mimeographed papers ended on a melancholy note:
MY GREATEST HOPE IS THAT WE ENCOUNTER A FAVORABLE TACTICAL SITUATION, BUT IF WE DON’T AND WORST COMES TO WORST, I WANT EACH ONE OF US TO DO HIS UTMOST TO DESTROY OUR ENEMIES. IF THERE IS ONLY ONE PLANE LEFT TO MAKE A FINAL RUN-IN, I WANT THAT MAN TO GO IN AND GET A HIT. MAY GOD BE WITH US ALL. GOOD LUCK, HAPPY LANDINGS, AND GIVE ’EM HELL! (G. Prange, Miracle at Midway, 240)
Jack Waldron took off for the last flight of his life from the Hornet at 8:06 A.M. to lead fifteen Devastators against the Japanese fleet. Problems arose almost immediately after launching. The Hornet’s accompanying thirty-five dive-bombers and ten Wildcat fighters, obscured by cloud cover, quickly overflew the lumbering Devastators. Waldron was left to find and attack the carriers himself—an almost impossible task, since there would be neither Wildcats to ward off the attacking Zeros nor highflying Dauntless dive-bombers to divert the antiaircraft fire of the imperial fleet. Instead, the entire air and sea defenses of the Japanese ships would be trained on Waldron’s slow planes coming in over the water at one hundred mph. The Hornet’s dive-bombers fared even worse, never finding the Japanese fleet at all and thus not dropping a single bomb. The failure of the Hornet’s fighters and dive-bombers to find their targets was perhaps not as baffling an event as some historians note, when we remember that the individual planes had neither effective radar nor advanced navigation instruments and were mostly piloted by inexperienced airmen—none of the Hornet ’s pilots had ever seen action—who flew over a nondescript endless Pacific looking for tiny dots below.
Because of the numerous diversionary maneuvers to avoid early morning air attacks from Midway, the Japanese carriers under Admiral Nagumo were not exactly cruising where the American staff had calculated their position to be when the American fleet’s bombers and fighters were scheduled to arrive. Instinctively, Waldron anticipated the enemy’s change in course; he immediately veered to the north and so commanded the first American naval air squadron to find the Japanese fleet.
Without fighter cover or friendly bombers above, realizing that he was the first American carrier pilot to attack, and reconciled that after torpedoing the Japanese fleet his planes would not have enough gasoline to reach their home carrier even if they survived their bombing runs, Waldron radioed his intention to the Hornet that he was pressing ahead anyway. Captain Marc Mitscher recalled that Waldron “promised he would press through against all obstacles, well knowing his squadron was doomed to destruction with no chance whatever of returning safely to the carrier” (S. Morison, Coral Sea, Midway, and Submarine Actions, May 1942–August 1942, 117).
The first incoming Zero shot down one of Waldron’s TBDs, and for the next few minutes fourteen planes of Torpedo 8 in succession were also riddled with machine-gun and cannon bursts. The few planes that closed to drop their torpedoes missed the Akagi and the Soryu entirely. Those crippled Devastators that did not explode through machine-gun fire disintegrated when they hit the sea, clipping the waves and cartwheeling at one hundred mph. Waldron himself was last seen standing upright in his blazing cockpit. His intuition and navigational skill had at last led Torpedo 8 directly to the Japanese carriers, but unfortunately the Hornet’s supporting bombers and fighters were still behind him, mostly lost, and spread far distant above—and he was flying a TBD Devastator.
Flying a loaded Devastator at Midway would be similar to driving a Ford Pinto in the slow lane, with its trunk and seats loaded with dynamite, as other, far faster drivers shot at it with machine guns as they passed by. Unlike the care of the wounded in land warfare, even ostensibly non-fatal injuries could not be quickly treated, as the pilot could not be evacuated to the rear. Being shot was the beginning, not the end, of the misery—the same gunfire that drew blood also damaged or destroyed the plane itself, promising in a few seconds an even worse crash and ensuing fireball of exploded gasoline. Even in peacetime the site of a downed passenger plane at sea is littered with tiny scraps of aircraft metal—the far more fragile bodies of the occupants often pulverized or burned beyond recognition by the force of impact and ensuing fire.
In an ideal carrier attack, the Devastators were to come in last, after the SBD Dauntless dive-bombers first screamed down from 15,000 feet, with their faster Wildcat fighters descending from even higher above to cover their assault. Then once the enemy ships and planes were occupied, the lumbering torpedo planes in theory might sneak into the melee unmolested at sea level to launch their torpedoes. But given the American mix-up in navigation, all of Waldron’s Devastators bore the full brunt of the Japanese antiaircraft and air attack. Not a single plane of Torpedo 8 survived. Of thirty crewmen who left the Hornet at eight that morning, only Ensign George H. Gay outlived the massacre; though wounded, he somehow crawled free once his Devastator hit the sea, and then floated unnoticed by the Japanese ships until picked up in the water by an American rescue plane the next afternoon. The fate of Torpedo 8 was only the first of the three slaughters of the torpedo squadrons on June 4, but we have only Gay’s later account to learn what transpired in the last minutes of the lives of his twenty-nine squadron members.
Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power Page 45
