It was Sunday, June 7—six months to the day after Pearl Harbor had been bombed—and the Battle of Midway was finished. Shortly before 0700, the battered carrier Yorktown finally rolled over and sank in about three thousand fathoms of water.
Admiral Spruance’s task force turned eastward to link up with the fleet tankers. During the refueling process, the destroyer Phelps sent Dick Dickinson and Joe DeLuca of Scouting Six and Joe Penland and Harold Heard from Bombing Six over to a tanker in bosun’s chairs. Other destroyers came alongside the tanker and deposited their collected airmen. Dickinson was pleased to meet up with Lieutenant Ray Davis from Hornet, whom he had known for years. That afternoon, Enterprise came alongside to fuel, and the tanker prepared to send the Big E’s pilots back over.
From the tanker, Dickinson spotted Ensign Bill Pittman standing on Enterprise. Well out of shouting distance, Dickinson used hand signals to run through his squadron’s eighteen planes, holding up fingers to see which SBDs had survived the battle. Pittman answered a surviving plane’s number with a nod. When they were finished, Dickinson was sick at heart. “This was my first knowledge of the price our squadron had paid for its share in the victory,” he said. Pittman had nodded only eight times. Dickinson soon spotted an officer of Bombing Six who had observed the little pantomime. He wearily held up four fingers, then turned his back.1
The return voyage to Pearl Harbor was sobering. Personal effects of those lost in action were gathered to be shipped home to their families. Mike Micheel of Scouting Six took the time to write a letter to the family of Johnny Lough, his best friend on Enterprise. Some of the SBD crews had been pulled from the water, but Micheel held little hope for Lough, who had been downed by Zeros on June 4.2
Ensign John Lough.
Nearly 110 U.S. carrier aircraft were lost to all causes during the Midway battle, or about half of what had departed Pearl Harbor. Scouting Six and Bombing Six had suffered the heaviest losses in terms of planes and personnel during the Japanese carrier strike on June 4. Most of the downed crews suffered a cruel fate adrift on the ocean; only the SBD crews of Dickinson, Penland, McCarthy, and Schneider were rescued by PBYs and destroyers over the first couple of days. One more VB-6 crew amazingly survived a grueling ordeal in the ocean before they were rescued. Ensign Tom Ramsay and his gunner, AMM2c Sherman Duncan, drifted in their life raft for a week before a Midway PBY found them on June 12. They were badly sunburned and malnourished, but alive. Ramsay—who had delivered dairy products for the Borden company after graduating from Mississippi A&M—climbed up to the cockpit to thank the pilot and was stunned. It was Lieutenant (j.g.) Al Barthes (who had also rescued Tony Schneider), a man he had not seen since the two had attended high school together in Biloxi, Mississippi.3
Tony Schneider and Glenn Holden had been kept on Midway for a day to recover from their experience. Medics declared them healthy enough to travel and they were taken back to Pearl Harbor in a big Consolidated flying boat. Schneider was hospitalized for observation and his roommate was Ensign George Gay, the sole survivor of the carrier-based portion of Torpedo Eight.
One-third of America’s carrier power present for the Battle of Midway was sunk, while the Japanese lost one hundred percent of its Kido Butai. The U.S. lost half of its carrier planes in the battle, while four air groups of Japanese aircraft were destroyed. By sinking four carriers, the U.S. Navy’s SBD squadrons had deprived Japan of forty-seven percent of its first-line carrier tonnage. It was the ultimate payback for the Enterprise crews who had been ravaged on December 7.4
Replacement aircraft arrived just too late to partake in the Battle of Midway. The carrier Saratoga reached Pearl Harbor on June 6 after a four-month hiatus to repair her torpedo damage, and raced for Midway the following day with 107 aircraft, including forty-five dive-bombers. The Enterprise and Yorktown squadrons were down to half strength when the spare Dauntlesses reached Admiral Spruance on June 8.5
Jim Murray took note of some of the Midway SBDs that were slated to go to combat virgin Saratoga as replacements. The maintenance crews had a field day. They painted “all kinds of signs and sayings on the planes, showing the Sara what bullet holes looked like,” he said.6
The triumphant U.S. carrier task forces steamed back into Pearl Harbor on June 13, preceded by a massive fly-in of their aircraft. Stuart Mason, wounded in the face and legs on June 4 over the Japanese carriers, was back in the rear seat with Andy Anderson as their air group flew into Kaneohe Air Station. “As each plane taxied up to the line, two Marines would give the crew two cans of beer,” said Mason. “One SBD wasn’t able to get the gear down and landed wheels up. Two Marines ran out on the runway with two cans of beer for the crew.”7
Mason and his fellow aviators found a grand celebration awaiting them at the Kaneohe Air Station, including a Navy band. Bombing Six was a much-depleted unit upon its return. Since their war began six months earlier on December 7, 1941, the squadron had lost seven of its pilots. Only seven original VB-6 rear gunners remained: Jim Murray, Ed Garaudy, Mason, Herman Caruthers, Harold Heard, Bill Steinman, and Gail Halterman. Four of their peers had been transferred during the previous months (one wounded) and nine others had been killed in service. Scouting Six had paid even more dearly during the first six months of the Pacific War. A stunning fifty percent—nineteen out of thirty-eight—of the pilots flying missions during this period were killed, wounded, or captured by the enemy. Fourteen out of thirty VS-6 gunners flying combat missions during this period were similarly killed, wounded, or captured.8
Bombing Six’s Lieutenant Harvey Lanham would never forget “the hordes of Navy yard workers and others who lined the shores at Pearl Harbor and cheered our return after the battle.”9
Others saw their homecoming in a different light. Jim Murray remained on board ship, since his pilot, Dick Best, was in sick bay. As the Big E passed close to the USAAF air base at Hickam Field while negotiating the channel at Pearl Harbor, he heard Army personnel mockingly shouting, “Where was the Navy?” Murray heard other “derogatory, often obscene comments. We were dumbfounded by this exhibition—a far cry from the flag-waving and cheering by these same men who greeted the Big E on her return from the Marshalls raid in February,” he said.10
The answer to this peculiar behavior did not take the pilots long to decipher once ashore. They found that the Air Force pilots who had flown the B-17s from Midway had already been largely credited with smashing the Japanese fleet. “The Honolulu newspapers told the story,” Murray said. “The Army held an awards ceremony at Hickam Field June 12, taking upon itself responsibility for the victory at Midway.”11
The truth would eventually be found that the Air Force planes had hit absolutely nothing in three days of bombing. All hits had actually been made by Dauntless dive-bombers. The news greatly disturbed Murray. Once he was free to disembark Enterprise, he checked into the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and wandered across the street to the Wagon Wheel Restaurant and Bar for dinner and a nightcap.12
A group of Army Air Corps noncommissioned officers bragged loudly as Murray listened in about their heroics at Midway and the commendations they had already been given. Finally he had heard enough, and he explained exactly what the Navy dive-bomber crews had done at Midway. “There’s not even evidence that B-17 bombs landed close enough to splash water on the Japs, let alone damage them!” he said. Murray wisely finished his meal and retreated back to the Pink Palace before his words had time to stir a good fistfight.
Things did not end so peacefully for a group of Scouting Six pilots in the dining room of the Royal Hawaiian. The loud boastings from a table of nearby Army pilots claiming to have won the battle at Midway soon became too much for them to bear. Ensigns Dick Jaccard, Bill Pittman, and others found themselves in a brawl that took the shore patrol some twenty minutes to subdue.13
The Dauntless aviators made the most of their liberty upon reaching Pearl Harbor. “The gang went wild,” Dusty Kleiss wrote in his diary. “Seems as though a big Saturday night is in the offing.” Scouting Five’s Lynn Forshee joined a group of enlisted men in hitting the bars and awoke the next morning to find a new souvenir of his former ship emblazoned on his arm. “I decided to be sociable and had a drink, then blotto—I awoke next morning in the hotel with my arm in a bandage,” he said. He assumed he must have gotten in a bar fight that he could not recall. Forshee removed his bandages and found a rather large tattoo of a skull with a flying helmet and the words U.S.S. YORKTOWN. “I discovered later that these friends, and I use the term loosely, had slipped me a Mickey,” he said.14
George Goldsmith, who had been forced to abandon ship after landing on Yorktown on June 4, made his way back on board Enterprise at Pearl Harbor. He found to his surprise that his Bombing Six squadron mates had packed up all of his personal gear for shipment back to his parents. “I was very fortunate in being able to call my mother after first arrival,” he recalled. “Of course, the call was carefully censored and all I could really say was, ‘No matter what you hear, I am okay.’” Goldsmith found out later that his phone call was preceded by a telegram from the Navy Department to his parents by about four hours. The telegram had simply stated that Ensign Goldsmith was “missing in action” following engagement with the enemy.15
Ensign Fred Mears, a junior pilot of Hornet’s Torpedo Eight who had not flown at Midway, was reunited with many of his flight school buddies while on liberty on Oahu. He heard countless stories of the dive-bombing attacks from Dick Jaccard, Jim Dexter, Bill Pittman, and Jerry Richey. Mears also encountered Tom Durkin of Scouting Six, who was freshly returned from fourteen days at sea after his SBD had gone down in late May.16
Dusty Kleiss made his way back stateside to begin training new dive-bomber pilots. He had been gone longer than the twelve months he had expected, but he wasted no time in starting his new life. Detached from Enterprise on June 22, he headed for San Francisco on a transport ship, where he took the first train to Los Angeles to reunite with his beautiful fiancée, Jean Mochon, who met him at the station. Jean and Dusty piled into a car with her sister and brother-in-law and immediately headed to Las Vegas. There, the Kleisses were married on July 3—just weeks after the battle of Midway. It was the beginning of sixty-four wonderful years of marriage that would produce five children for the couple.
• • •
Seven of Kleiss’s fellow Scouting Six pilots had been lost at Midway. All had ships named after them, and the six who had been lost on the June 4 carrier strike all received the Navy Cross posthumously. Lieutenant Charlie Ware, who had brilliantly guided his Scouting Six division through two Zero attacks, disappeared en route home at Midway. On April 12, 1945, his mother christened the destroyer Charles R. Ware (DD-865) in his honor. Four other warships were launched during the war in honor of Ware’s four fellow missing VS-6 aviators: USS Lough (DE-586) for John Lough, USS O’Flaherty (DE-340) for Frank O’Flaherty, USS Shelton (DE-407) for Jim Shelton, and USS Peiffer (DE-588) for Carl Peiffer.17
Wade McClusky and sixteen men from VS-6 received the Navy Cross (some posthumously). Three other pilots received the Distinguished Flying Cross. Bombing Six pilots were awarded sixteen Navy Crosses for Midway (six posthumously) and three Distinguished Flying Crosses. Bombing Six’s radiomen-gunners received seventeen DFCs (six posthumously) and three Air Medals. Four destroyer escorts were later named for VB-6 personnel killed at Midway: Frederick T. Weber (DE-675), Norman F. Vandivier (DE-540), Bertram S. Varian Jr. (DE–798), and Ernest L. Hilbert (DE–742).18
The Navy honored other lost Dauntless crews from the first six months of the Pacific War with ships in their names. Destroyer escorts served during the war that were the namesakes of William C. Miller and Walter M. Willis, two VS-6 aviators killed at Pearl Harbor. In 1943, another destroyer escort was converted to a high-speed transport—USS Hopping (APD-51)—named in honor of VS-6’s late skipper, Hal Hopping. Two other VS-6 aviators killed on February 1 were also honored with destroyer escorts: USS Fogg (DE-57) for Ensign Carl Fogg and USS Dennis (DE-405) for his gunner, Otis Lee Dennis.
Earl Gallaher, skipper of Scouting Six, found that the most difficult part of his job after Midway was writing letters to the families of the men he had lost. “It was the one thing I hated more than anything else,” he said. To Zena Ware, mother of his late division leader Charlie Ware, Gallaher wrote that he was “very proud indeed to have commanded such a fine bunch of men.” Offering some consolation to Mrs. Ware, he told her that Charlie went out in a “blaze of glory” during his action at Midway. Gallaher was approached sometime later in Pensacola by the former girlfriend of Ware. She was still distraught, not wanting to believe that her future husband was truly gone. “It was awfully hard to talk to people like that,” Gallaher felt.19
Bombing Six skipper Dick Best—sidelined late on June 4 with tuberculosis that would eventually force his medical retirement—had landed bomb hits on two Japanese carriers that day. After Best passed away in 2001, a serious effort was made to recommend him posthumously for the Congressional Medal of Honor. Spearheaded by Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, a former chief of naval operations and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Vice Admiral Bill Houser, a former deputy CNO for Air Warfare, this movement to further honor Best was not fulfilled.
Best’s gunner, Jim Murray, was transferred along with Walter Chocalousek to Carrier Aircraft Service Unit One (CASU-1) at NAS Ford Island upon his return from Midway. Murray was rightfully proud of the fact that his Bombing Six was the only U.S. carrier squadron that participated in the destruction of all three first-line Japanese carriers in the decisive battle. The only Midway veterans to remain with the reorganized Bombing Six that would later serve at Guadalcanal in 1942 were ensigns Don Ely and Harry Liffner. The reconstituted VB-6 would, however, include many of the veteran gunners who had helped earn the victory at Midway: Ed Anderson, Gene Braun, Herman Caruthers, Sherman Duncan, Ed Garaudy, Gail Halterman, Harold Heard, Lew Jones, Milo Kimberlin, Stuart Mason, Jim Patterson, and Glenn Holden.20
Ed Anderson completed another tour of duty on Enterprise at Guadalcanal and began dating his future wife upon his return stateside. He flew as a gunner with an escort squadron, VC-40, for most of 1943 into early 1944. Approached a number of times to go through flight training to become a pilot, he declined on account of an old injury. During high school basketball, he had suffered an impaired retina and was fearful that if the Navy found out it could jeopardize his ability to continue serving as an aerial gunner. Ed was honorably discharged from the Navy in September 1945. He began his civilian life in California as a claims adjustor and raised two daughters with his wife. In November 2001, he was inducted into the Enlisted Combat Air Crew Roll of Honor during a ceremony aboard Yorktown’s Naval & Maritime Museum at Patriots Point, South Carolina. He was not presented with the many Air Medals and Distinguished Flying Crosses that he had earned during the war because of a mix-up in his personnel files. This was finally rectified in a 2007 ceremony at the U.S. Naval and Marine Corps Reserve Center in Alameda before his proud family. Anderson’s love for the ocean never ceased, and upon his death in April 2013, his family scattered his ashes in San Francisco Bay.
Gunner Don Hoff, awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his valor at Midway, served on Saratoga late in 1942 into the next year. In June 1943, he went stateside to flight school with VS-6 buddy Johnny Snowden. In the end, he opted to remain an enlisted man while radiomen/gunner comrades like Snowden, Joe DeLuca, Stuart Mason, Joe Godfrey, Jim Patterson, and Earl Howell became commissioned officers. After leaving the Navy, Hoff worked three years as a draftsman and twenty-three years for the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office before settling into the relaxed life of a retired square-dance caller.21
After the war, Jim Murray became a commissioned officer, retiring as a lieutenant commander in November 1957 after thirty years of service. In civilian life, he spent another decade working for the Ryan Aeronautical Company before retiring in Imperial Beach, California.
Murray felt that certain individuals and even the devastated torpedo squadrons received the lion’s share of the praise for helping the U.S. Navy achieve its stunning victory over Japan at Midway. Yet he believed that there were many “unsung heroes” among the Dauntless squadrons, particularly those who gave their lives in the missions against the IJN’s flattops.22
• • •
The naval aviators who achieved the great payback at Midway received at first only lukewarm praise. At Pearl Harbor they found that CinCPac’s public relations office had allowed the Army Air Corps to release their version of the Battle of Midway to the media before the carriers even returned to port. The B-17 crews reveled in their celebrity for days as the heroes of the grand carrier conflict.23
The Navy fliers, in contrast to the Army Air Corps’ award ceremony held on June 12 at Hickam Field, had to wait until September 1942. Then the media injustice was reversed as Admiral Nimitz himself presented awards to many Dauntless veterans on the flight deck of Enterprise. Murray considered it a further discrepancy that Hornet’s Torpedo Squadron Eight was the only Navy carrier squadron to be awarded the Presidential Unit Citation for its heroism at Midway. Torpedo Eight had lost fifteen of fifteen Devastators and twenty-nine of thirty aviators while inflicting no damage on Japanese shipping. Yorktown’s Torpedo Three and Enterprise’s Torpedo Six, which suffered losses nearly as traumatic, received no such award. Murray, for one, wondered why the Dauntless squadrons were passed over for the PUC award. His Bombing Six had participated in the destruction of three Japanese flattops and a heavy cruiser. “In achieving this heroic deed, Bombing Six suffered the loss of eleven aircraft and twelve aircrewmen,” Murray said.24
Many of the Yorktown rear seat gunners were also given awards for their valor at Midway. Bombing Three’s brothers Dallas and Fred Bergeron each received a Distinguished Flying Cross, and the elder Bergeron was later pinned with a Purple Heart for his bullet wounds sustained on June 4. News of the victory at Midway was kept under tight wrap for some time, so the men could not share explicit details of their involvement. Fred Bergeron sent a brief cable back home, saying simply, “Dallas has been injured and is doing well. Don’t worry. Tell all hello.” His intended reassurance fell far from bestowing the comfort he had hoped. The next wire dispatch from his mother firmly demanded, “Dallas injured? How? Where?”25
All of Max Leslie’s Bombing Three pilots who flew on June 4 received the Navy Cross, several posthumously. Wally Short’s Scouting (Bombing) Five pilots earned nine Navy Crosses. From Hornet’s air group, DFCs went to five Bombing Eight pilots and eight gunners. Another five VB-8 gunners would be pinned with the Air Medal. From Scouting Eight, four pilots received the Navy Cross and nine pilots earned the Distinguished Flying Cross. Scouting Eight gunners received an additional four DFCs and three Air Medals.
• • •
The SBD pilots and their rear gunners were heroes all. Unfortunately, many of them would later be lost in combat or operational accidents as the long war played out. Among the SBD pilots active during the first six months of the Pacific War and at Midway who later died during World War II were Dave Berry, Leonard Check, Larry Comer, Randy Cooner, Jim Dexter, Rockey Dickson, Phil Grant, Dick Jaccard, Paul Tepas, Abbie Tucker, and Harold White.
On the positive side of the tally sheet, two early 1942 Dauntless heroes shot down during enemy action finally made their way back home from prisoner-of-war camps in Japan. Dale Hilton and radioman Jack Leaming, lost from Enterprise’s Scouting Six during the March 1942 Marcus strike, survived three and a half years of slave labor, malnutrition, beatings, and various forms of abuse as they were moved through different POW camps during the war. After the atomic bombs were dropped and Japan surrendered, Hilton and Leaming finally made it on board one of the hospital ships in Tokyo Bay for medical evaluation. The officer of the deck told the newly freed Americans that they had their choice of entrées for their first real meal in years. “Most of us chose filet mignon,” said Leaming, who later retired to Las Vegas.26
Junior dive-bomber pilots from the first six months of war who later commanded SBD squadrons during World War II were Gus Widhelm, Dave Shumway, Ray Davis, and Moe Vose. A number of the early 1942 SBD pilots also went on to command squadrons of the newer Helldiver carrier bomber during the war. Among them were Vose, Dave Berry, Tony Schneider, Harvey Lanham, Andy Anderson, Lloyd Smith, and Jack Blitch. From Scouting Six, Cleo Dobson completed the war in command of a fighter squadron, VF-86, aboard the new Wasp (CV-18).
Those brave pilots who flew the Douglas Dauntless in the early Pacific actions went on to lengthy Navy careers in many cases. Twenty-one of them retired as rear admirals: Bob Armstrong, Bill Burch, Clarence Dickinson, Bob Dixon, Earl Gallaher, Bill Guest, Herbert Hoerner, Bill Hollingsworth, Paul Holmberg, Lew Hopkins, Roy Isaman, Ruff Johnson, Harvey Lanham, Max Leslie, John Lynch, Wade McClusky, Bill Roberts, Walt Rodee, Wally Short, Curt Smiley, and Howard Young. Five of the SBD pilots retired as vice admirals: Pete Aurand, Turner Caldwell, Edgar Cruise, Stan Ring, and Ralph Weymouth. Two—Ralph Cousins and Don Felt—fleeted all the way up to full admiral during their careers.
The Battle of Midway was the most decisive naval victory for the United States during World War II, and it was decided by carrier aviators flying the Douglas SBD Dauntless. The war was still young, and four more major carrier battles would be fought in the Pacific, three of which also included SBD dive-bombers. Dauntless alumni from the first six months of the Pacific War participated in each of those clashes. Yet the prospect for an American victory in World War II was achieved by the carrier aviators who took the fight to the Japanese during those first six months. By June 1942, the advance of the Japanese war machine had been checked at times, and was forcibly thrown back at Midway.
Many forces had contributed to the early efforts during America’s desperate hours—including surface sailors, the Submarine Force, Marines, Army soldiers, and Air Force crews. The U.S. Navy’s fighter pilots had developed into a lean fighting team, while the Navy’s torpedo bomber crews paid dearly in human lives for the victories that were earned. But there is no denying the brave spirit of the determined young men who flew the Navy’s latest carrier dive-bombers into action during the first six months of the Pacific War. They had provided that determining extra edge that was the Dauntless factor.
My only regret with this tribute to the Dauntless airmen of early 1942 is in not starting my research sooner. Many of the radiomen/gunners I had the privilege of interviewing are now in their late nineties. Willard “Rocky” Glidewell of Yorktown’s Scouting Five is a hundred years of age as of early 2013. With the passing of Bombing Eight’s Clay Fisher in January 2012, only two Dauntless pilots who flew at Midway are still living as I complete this tribute to their services: Austin “Bud” Merrill of Yorktown’s Bombing Three and Jack “Dusty” Kleiss of Enterprise’s Scouting Six.
Texas resident Kleiss recently pondered why the good Lord had blessed him with such strength and endurance. He reflected on the “many brave souls who gave everything for our wonderful country and who gave unbelievable strength when needed.” He considered himself fortunate to have had the best aviation instructors, to have had the best rear seat gunner in 1942, and to have been kept safe throughout the battle of Midway.27
The ninety-six-year-old, retired in San Antonio, was as sharp-minded in late 2012 as he was seventy years before at Midway. “The only thing I can presume is that He has not yet found me worthy to reach all those other saints above us,” Kleiss said.
He is one of the Dauntless heroes who helped hold the line in the Pacific during six trying months, and who helped change the course of World War II for America on one unforgettable day of retribution near Midway. “Without the SBDs, we would certainly have lost the Battle of Midway,” Kleiss stated to me in the fall of 2012. “No question about it. If we had lost the Battle of Midway, there would probably be a lot of Japanese and German being spoken in the United States and in London.”