11
It was still full dark at 4:00 a.m. (local time) on June 4 when a bugle on Nagumo’s flagship Akagi called the crew to battle stations.* The fog had dissipated, though there was a low cloud cover over the Kidō Butai, and the seas were choppy. It was not ideal flying weather, but better than it had been for days. Was this a good omen? The strike force for the air attack on Midway was scheduled to begin launching a half hour later, at 4:30, in order to be over the target just after dawn. The air crews and maintenance crews had been at work since 2:45, servicing the Aichi Type 99 dive-bombers (Vals) and Nakajima Type 97 carrier attack planes (Kates). For this mission, instead of a torpedo, the Kates would each carry an 800 kg (1,760-pound) bomb. The planes had been manhandled onto the elevators and lifted up to the flight deck; some were already being warmed up by the flight crews, and the roar of engines could be heard throughout the ship as the men assumed their battle stations. The carriers turned away from each other to open the box-shaped formation, so that all four carriers could launch simultaneously without the planes getting into one another’s way.1
Altogether, Nagumo had some 225 combat aircraft on his four carriers, plus two more for reconnaissance. The four carriers also had twenty-one additional Zeros among them, earmarked to become the garrison squadron for Midway after it was occupied. Not all of those fighters could be used to augment the strike force or even to defend the Kidō Butai, since only about half of their pilots were carrier qualified. Still, adding those twenty-one Zeros gave Nagumo a theoretical total of 248 airplanes—a hundred fewer than he had used to attack Pearl Harbor back in December, but Midway was a less imposing target. Nor could Nagumo send all of those planes to strike Midway at once, for not only was it essential to keep back a number of fighters as CAP to protect the task force, there was Yamamoto’s requirement that Nagumo retain half of his attack planes—and his best pilots—for a strike against American surface forces, just in case. These factors contributed to Nagumo’s decision to send a strike force of 108 airplanes, thirty-six of each type—dive-bombers, torpedo planes, and fighters—for the attack on Midway.2
The first to take off that morning were eleven Zero fighters that would fly CAP over the task force. Immediately afterward, the strike force began to launch from all four carriers at once. There were no catapults on Japanese carriers, and the planes needed at least 27 knots of relative wind speed over the deck in order to launch. With the ships of the Kidō Butai steaming into the wind and the engines of the airplanes roaring, the air operations officer gave a signal to the flight-deck officer to launch. Crewmen pulled the chocks out from under the wheels, and the first plane surged toward the bow. The lightweight Zeros needed the shortest takeoff space and could get airborne in as little as 230 feet; the bombers, and especially the bigger Kate attack planes, needed more. Soon the planes were launching quickly, roaring past the tiny island amidships and lifting off every fifteen to twenty seconds, while members of the deck crew cheered and waved their caps.
Lieutenant Tomonaga Joichi led the Japanese morning attack on Midway Atoll on June 4. He was a last-minute replacement for Commander Fuchida Mitsuo, who suffered an attack of appendicitis. (U.S. Naval Institute)
Rather than send full deck loads from two of the four carriers, Japanese doctrine called for partial strikes from each of them. The carriers of CarDiv (Akagi and Kaga) each contributed eighteen Val dive-bombers, keeping their torpedo planes in reserve on the hangar deck; the carriers of CarDiv 2 (Hiryū and Sōryū) sent up eighteen Kate attack planes, keeping their dive-bombers on board. Each carrier also contributed nine Zeros to protect the attack force and to strafe the Midway airfield. The combined strike force of seventy-two attack planes and thirty-six fighters was led by Lieutenant Tomonaga Joichi, the handsome, baby-faced air commander on the Hiryū. Tomonaga was a veteran of the war in China but was participating in his first mission against the Americans. He was a last-minute replacement for Fuchida Mitsuo, the air commander on the Akagi and the man who had led the attack on Pearl Harbor. During the Pacific transit, Fuchida had suffered a severe attack of appendicitis. He begged the doctor to postpone the surgery so that he could take part in the battle, but the doctor had insisted on operating immediately, and on the morning of June 4, Fuchida was still recovering. He managed to struggle into his uniform and report to the bridge in time to see the planes depart. The planes circled over the Kidō Butai until all of them joined the formation, and then, with the eastern sky turning from full dark to a pinkish gray, they flew off toward the southeast.3
No sooner had the last plane lifted off than the loudspeaker on the Akagi blared out an order to “prepare second attack wave.” On the brightly lit hangar decks, workers began to arm the next cadre of planes with ship-killing ordnance. On the Akagi and Kaga, the big Kate torpedo bombers were armed with the seventeen-foot-long Type 91 torpedoes. Brought up from the magazine by elevators, the big torpedoes were placed onto hand trucks and manhandled across the crowded hangar deck to each plane. Then they had to be jacked up manually and attached to special brackets under each plane. On the Hiryū and Sōryū, the dive-bombers were armed with 551-pound armor-piercing bombs. Thus armed and fueled, the planes remained on the hangar decks. That way, Nagumo’s carriers could keep their flight decks clear for the rotating CAP and for the return of the strike force. By 5:00 a.m., with the rim of the rising sun appearing over the eastern horizon, the second wave of fighters, bombers, and torpedo planes was poised and ready in the hangars, awaiting news of any American surface forces that might be in the area.4
The Aichi E13A “Jake” floatplane, carried on the stern of Japanese battleships and heavy cruisers, was used primarily for reconnaissance. The delayed launch of one of these planes on June 4 played a key role in the ensuing battle. (U.S. Naval Institute)
The Japanese conducted an air search that morning, though for a strike force operating deep in enemy waters, the search was somewhat slapdash. Perhaps because the op plan confidently proclaimed that the American carriers would remain in Pearl Harbor until after the strike on Midway, this dawn air search was largely pro forma. The Japanese often used their Kate attack planes (minus the torpedo) for search missions. This time Nagumo intended to rely primarily on the floatplanes from his escort ships. The Aichi E13A “Jakes,” which boasted huge pontoons nearly as large as the fuselage, had a longer range than combat aircraft (nearly 1,300 miles) and were specifically designed for the reconnaissance mission. Though Nagumo did send two Kates to search what he considered the most important quadrant—due south, the direction from which the American carriers would come, if they came at all—he relied on five floatplanes, carried on the sterns of his battleships and cruisers for the rest—a total of seven search planes altogether. (By comparison, not quite a month before, on May 7 in the Coral Sea, Fletcher had launched ten search planes, and Hara twelve; they had still failed to find each other.) Nagumo’s rather cavalier search betrayed his assumption that things would proceed pretty much as scripted.5
One way to envision the search that Nagumo ordered that morning is to imagine the Kidō Butai as at the center of a clock face, with each hour of the clock comprising a sector of the search. Because the ships of the Kidō Butai had come from the northwest (about 10:30 on our imaginary clock), and because other units of the Imperial Japanese Navy were behind them, there was no reason to search in that direction. The air search, therefore, would cover the quadrants east of the Kidō Butai from roughly 1:00 o’clock (almost due north) to 6:00 o’clock (due south). Each search plane would fly three hundred miles out along its prescribed path, fly sixty miles counterclockwise, then fly back again. As noted above, Nagumo assigned the two Kates to the most important quadrants—at 5:00 and 6:00 o’clock; he assigned the shorter-ranged float plane from the battleship Haruna to the least likely quadrant—to the north at 1:00 o’clock. The other quadrants, from 2:00 to 4:00 o’clock, were the responsibility of four float planes from the heavy cruisers Chikuma and Tone.6
Piloting a floatplane off the back of a cruiser was a lot like being shot from a cannon. Lacking a runway to build up speed, the planes were propelled off the ship with an explosive charge. Upon returning, they used their pontoons to land in the water, then they taxied up to the leeward side of the ship and were winched aboard by crane. On the morning of June 4, the cruiser Tone had trouble launching her floatplanes. Various reasons have been advanced to explain it—delayed orders, problems with the launching system, trouble on the plane itself, or perhaps all three. Whatever the cause, the first of Tone’s float planes did not launch until 4:45, and the second (officially the number 4 search plane) did not get away until 5:00 a.m. Curiously, the captain of the Tone, Okada Tametsugu, did not send a message to Nagumo reporting this tardy launch. And unlike the American PBYs from Midway that conducted their searches at 1,000 feet, the Japanese search planes flew near 5,000 feet in order to cover the broad swath of ocean assigned to them. At that altitude, even moderate cloud cover might conceal whole fleets of enemy ships, and Chikuma’snumber 5 aircraft flew right past the Americans and saw nothing.
The Americans, too, were up early that morning. On Midway, Commander Ramsey, in charge of air ops on the atoll, sent up a CAP of five Dash 3 Wildcats (all he had) at 4:00 a.m., and the first of an eventual twenty-two Catalina PBYs lifted off from the lagoon at Midway to begin long-range searches north and west of the atoll. As soon as the Wildcats were airborne, fifteen Army Flying Fortress bombers took off for a second attack on Tanaka’s “Transport Group,” though they were prepared to shift targets if any of the patrol planes found the Kidō Butai. The rest of the Midway air crews congregated in the mess hall to wait for news. “It was pretty crowded in there,” one pilot recalled, “with various crews of different services.” There was not a lot of conversation. “The atmosphere was quiet and somber, more or less foreboding, you might say.” The soft-drink machines had been opened up and everything was free. At least one pilot thought the free drinks “gave you a ‘last meal’ feeling.”7
Meanwhile, 320 miles northwest of Midway, Fletcher also launched early that day, sending up a CAP of six Wildcats at 4:20, followed by ten Dauntless dive-bombers for a “security search” to cover the area north of him out to a hundred miles. He knew the Catalinas were patrolling out of Midway, and he relied on them to report any contacts to the west where, according to Hypo, the Kidō Butai would be found. He sent these ten Dauntlesses to the north, to ensure that the Japanese did not attempt an end run as they had in the Coral Sea. Spruance did not send up a CAP that morning because the two carriers of Task Force 16 were already loaded and cocked—the decks of both carriers spotted with the strike force intended for the Kidō Butai when it was discovered. Had Spruance launched fighters for CAP, he would not have been able to recover them without sending the attack planes below, thereby delaying the eventual launch. Fletcher’s need to steam into the wind to launch both the Wildcats for CAP and the Dauntlesses for the search drew him away toward the east, and soon Spruance’s two carriers were beyond sight.8
At 5:34 the Americans at Midway received a report from Lieutenant Howard P. Ady, piloting a PBY northwest of Midway. The first words of his report sent a jolt through the listeners: “Enemy Carrier bearing 320 [degrees], distance 180 [miles].” At 180 miles from Midway, this target was within easy range of the American bombers on Eastern Island. The pilots in the mess hall scrambled for their equipment anticipating an immediate order to attack. Before any of them could man their planes, however, another PBY pilot, Lieutenant William A. Chase, called in to report: “Many planes headed Midway.” Obviously, the Japanese carriers had already launched, and Midway would soon be the target of a bombing attack. The radar station picked up Tomonaga’s strike force ninety miles out. Captain Simard and Marine Corps Colonel Ira Kimes scrambled all the available fighters they had to contest them. Between 6:00 and 6:30, the Eastern Island airfield was a frenzy of activity, with planes taking off every few seconds. Simard and Kimes sent all their available bombers out toward the reported position of the Japanese carriers and all their available fighters out to intercept Tomonaga.9
The attack planes from Midway comprised an eclectic collection that included four Army medium bombers (armed with torpedoes), six Navy torpedo planes, and thirty Marine Corps dive-bombers of two different types. Kimes wanted all the planes to fly in a single formation and to attack together, but the three services had never practiced a coordinated assault against an enemy task force and did not even have a doctrine for doing so. Moreover, the four types of airplanes all flew at different speeds. In the end, therefore, the American attack on the Kidō Butai turned into a kind of free-for-all, with each group attacking on its own, employing whatever tactics seemed appropriate at the time. If the cavalier Japanese air search that morning reflected a cultural preference for combat, the haphazard American bombing strike betrayed the American tradition of service independence. Finally, because the Americans sent all of their available fighters out to challenge Tomonaga’s incoming attack force, this mixed bag of bombers and torpedo planes not only attacked piecemeal, it did so without any fighter cover. Perhaps the best that could be said of this effort was that at least the planes were not sitting passively on the runway when Tomonaga’s bombers arrived. By 6:45 the only planes left on Midway were the few that were undergoing repair or maintenance.10
While the American bombers flew off to find the reported enemy carriers, the fighters of Midway’s Marine Fighter Squadron (VMF-221), commanded by Major Floyd Parks, were vectored toward the incoming attackers. Parks was short and stocky, with dull red hair (his nickname was “Red”) and “lots of energy.” Twenty-one of the twenty-six Marine pilots, including Parks, flew the old and slow Brewster Buffaloes, and one of those had to turn back because of engine trouble. Five others flew the newer Dash 3 Wildcats.* They climbed to 16,000 feet and headed off to meet Tomonaga’s strike force. Forty miles out, they spotted the Japanese two thousand feet below them in a series of stacked V formations, with the Zero fighters on top. Marine Captain John F. Carey, leading a section of three Wildcats, radioed, “Tally ho! Hawks at Angels twelve supported by fighters,” and dove to the attack. Parks and the others attacked as well. For a few precious seconds the Marines had a tactical advantage, since the Zero pilots had been looking downward and were surprised when American fighters dove on them from above. Carey flew directly at the lead plane in the enemy bomber formation. A bullet punched a hole in Carey’s windshield, missing his head by inches, but he held his course and fired a long burst at the lead Japanese bomber, which caught fire and fell out of the formation. Carey’s wingman, Second Lieutenant Clayton Canfield, targeted the third bomber in the formation, and it, too, caught fire and fell away. Soon enough, however, the swarming Zeros overwhelmed the Americans. As one pilot put it, “After the first coordinated attacks the thing degenerated into a rat race.” Parks was one of the first to be hit. He successfully bailed out of his burning aircraft, but a Zero fighter strafed his chute as he descended and then strafed him again in the water. His body was later found on the rocks near Midway.11
One of the rear-seat gunners of a Kate peppered the right side of Carey’s airplane, and bullets smashed both of his legs. Carey executed a power dive almost straight down—the only chance he had to escape the swift Zeros—and managed to pull out just at wave height. Unable to perform combat maneuvers—indeed, barely able to maneuver at all—he nursed his crippled plane back to Midway, where he executed a controlled crash landing on the runway. Canfield also managed to get back to the airfield. His landing gear collapsed when his plane touched the runway, but he extricated himself from the wreck and rolled into a nearby slit trench to avoid the Japanese bombs that were already falling.12
Carey and Canfield were among the lucky ones. Though the Marine pilots claimed six kills that morning, the slow and clumsy Brewsters were easy pickings for the nimble Zeros. Of the twenty-five Marines who flew out to challenge Tomonaga’s strike force, fourteen were killed, and four more wounded—a loss rate of over 70 percent. Even those who survived did not come back unscathed. Second Lieutenant Charles Kunz had the disquieting experience of having Japanese bullets graze his scalp twice, one on each side of his head. That night, after treating him, the surgeon prescribed several “stiff shots” so that Kunz could get to sleep. As Carey reported afterward, “The ‘Zero’ fighters out-maneuvered, out-performed, and out climbed the Brewsters and Grummans in every respect.”13
Ady’s 5:34 sighting report did not reach the American carriers until 6:03, when it was relayed from Pearl Harbor. Officers on all three carriers bent over the chart tables and made a quick calculation. The reported location of the enemy carriers put them just over 200 miles southwest of their own position. Since the Wildcat fighters and Devastator torpedo bombers had an effective combat radius of about 175 miles, they were not quite within range. In his conversations with Nimitz, Fletcher had agreed that his best hope was to hit the Kidō Butai first, and hit it hard. It was understood that the two carriers of Task Force 16 under Spruance were to strike first, while Fletcher held his air group in reserve. But before Fletcher gave Spruance the “go” order, two factors stayed his hand. The first was that Ady’s report indicated the presence of only two carriers. Thanks to Rochefort and Hypo, Fletcher knew that the Japanese were almost certain to have at least four, and possibly five. Where were the others? If Fletcher unleashed Spruance’s two air groups at once, they might catch the two enemy flattops early and sink them; they might also miss the rest of the Kidō Butai. Not quite a month before, in the Coral Sea, Fletcher had sent ninety-three planes to savage the Shōhō while Hara’s two big carriers remained undiscovered and unscathed until the next day. He did not want a repeat performance now. In fact, all four Japanese carriers were there and Ady had simply not seen them, but there was no way for Fletcher to know that.
The second factor was the timing. When Fletcher heard Chase’s report of “Many planes headed Midway,” he knew that an enemy carrier (or carriers) had launched a strike against the atoll. What he did not know was how many was “many.” Was it a deck load from one or two carriers, or an entire strike force from the combined Kidō Butai? More to the point, the news that the enemy had launched gave Fletcher a kind of timetable for their operations. He knew that it would take the Japanese planes about three hours—that is, until around 8:30 or so—to complete their mission over Midway and return to the Kidō Butai. Ideally, the best time to hit them would be when they were in the midst of recovering planes that were low on fuel and needing to land. Then, too, if Fletcher waited until that critical moment, it would give the Catalinas more time to find the rest of the Kidō Butai. If he could wait an hour, perhaps two, before launching, he might catch Nagumo’s force unready and vulnerable. On the other hand, Fletcher knew that his greatest advantage was that the Japanese still had no idea where the American carriers were, and he wanted to launch his attack before they found out. A Japanese snooper might discover them at any moment, and the element of surprise would be lost.14
That last concern proved decisive. At 6:07 Fletcher used the short-range TBS (talk between ships) radio to order Spruance: “Proceed southwesterly and attack enemy carriers when definitely located. I will follow as soon as planes recovered.” While Spruance attacked, Fletcher would hold the Yorktown’s planes in reserve, pending “receipt of information on additional enemy carriers.” In the meantime, Fletcher could recover the planes returning from the morning search. As the Yorktown continued northeast on the point option recovery course, Spruance headed southwest toward the enemy. Eventually the two task forces ended up some twenty miles apart.15
Over on the Enterprise, Spruance was ready. Ever since the first sighting report, Captain Miles Browning, the volatile and self-confident chief of staff he had inherited from Halsey, had been eager to attack. Browning was something of an eccentric in the aviation community. Tall and ruggedly handsome, and with the same kind of bad-boy allure that made Ernie King attractive to women, Browning was a temperamental loner on shipboard. An excellent pilot and an imaginative tactician, he was also cocky and dismissive, characteristics that did not endear him to subordinates. Lieutenant Richard “Dick” Best, who commanded the bombing squadron on the Enterprise, found Browning intolerable. “He was a bully,” Best recalled after the war. “I despised him.” The ebullient Halsey, however, got along very well with Browning and had recommended him for his promotion to captain. For his part, Spruance thought Browning was “smart and quick,” and he knew that Halsey trusted him. Moreover, because Spruance was not an aviator, he was bound to rely heavily on Browning for tactical advice. Six days earlier, soon after Task Force 16 had left Pearl Harbor for Point Luck, Spruance had called a meeting in his cabin to which he invited the air group commander and the four squadron commanders. Almost at once, Browning took charge of the meeting, outlining the plan to ambush four Japanese carriers north of Midway, even naming the four carriers that would be involved. He did not tell the pilots where the information came from—that was still classified—and the information was so detailed that some of the pilots were skeptical. Best thought it sounded “phony.” He asked Browning, “Suppose they don’t attack Midway, suppose they keep going east and hit Pearl Harbor again?” Browning looked at him with narrowed eyes for a long minute, then replied, “Well, we just hope they don’t.”16
Captain Miles Browning, Halsey’s brash and confident chief of staff, also served as Spruance’s chief of staff during the Batt le of Midway. (U.S. Naval Institute)
Upon receipt of Fletcher’s order, Spruance told Browning “to launch everything they had at the earliest possible moment.” In accordance with the predetermined battle plan, he would hold back only a small CAP and send everything else—seventy-one dive-bombers, twenty-nine torpedo planes, and twenty Wildcats—to hit the Japanese first.17
One practical problem remained. Task Force 16 had closed the range to the Kidō Butai slightly in the past half hour, but the enemy carriers were still at the extreme limit of the American torpedo bombers and fighters. Moreover, the wind that day was very light—only about five knots—and it was coming out of the east. In order to launch, the Hornet and Enterprise would have to turn into the wind, away from the target, and build up speed to at least 25 knots. It would take at least half an hour, and probably more, to launch those 120 airplanes, which would add back all the miles the Americans had gained since the first sighting. At Browning’s suggestion, Spruance decided to continue steaming southwest, toward the target, for another 45 minutes before launching at about 7:00 a.m. It would still be a long flight to the target. Nonetheless, this later launch was likely to allow the attack planes sufficient time over the target to get the job done and get back safely.18
Meanwhile, Tomonaga’s strike force from the Kidō Butai was hammering Midway. The Japanese pilots had expected to catch the tiny atoll by surprise. The ambush by VMF-221 had disabused them of that expectation, and they were also disconcerted to encounter extremely heavy ground fire. They were greatly disappointed to find the airfield on Eastern Island nearly bare of airplanes. Nevertheless, their attack was ferocious—and effective. The sixty-six bombers that survived the intercept dropped a total of just over thirty-eight tons of explosive ordnance on the two tiny islands that made up Midway Atoll. They took out the power plant, the Eastern Island command post, the mess hall, and the post office; they wrecked the aircraft servicing area, cut the water lines, destroyed the seaplane hangar, and damaged the barracks. One bomb hit a rearming pit and set off eight more 100-pound bombs and 10,000 rounds of .50-caliber ammunition. Another set fire to the oil storage tanks, from which great clouds of black smoke roiled the sky. By the time the raid was over, the entire atoll appeared to be severely damaged. Nonetheless, the Japanese had missed the main aviation fuel supply, the runways were only superficially damaged, and only eleven Americans had been killed and eighteen wounded.19
Tomonaga was among the first to drop his bomb. Then he circled the target to assess the damage by his strike force. Before he had left the Kidō Butai, he had been given several code messages designed to apprise Nagumo of the results of the raid. Several Japanese pilots broke radio silence during the attack to announce their success: “Hangar and runways have been hit,” reported one; “Great results obtained,” asserted another. Of course, because Simard had launched almost everything that would fly, few American planes were on the ground when the Japanese struck. As a result, at 7:00 a.m., Tomonaga radioed a code phrase back to the Kidō Butai. “There is need for a second attack.”20
The message reached Nagumo on the bridge of the Akagi at 7:05. It could hardly have surprised him. From the beginning, he had suspected that a single strike with half his force would not be sufficient to soften up Midway for the planned amphibious landing. Though Yamamoto’s principal goal was to get the American carriers, the plan also charged Nagumo with wrecking Midway’s defenses to prepare the way for invasion. As he considered Tomonaga’s report, however, Nagumo had other concerns, for at that moment the Kidō Butai itself was under attack. These were not the planes from Hornet and Enterprise—those planes were just then taking off 175 miles to the east. Instead, it was the first contingent of the diverse collection of bombers and torpedo planes that Simard had launched from Midway an hour before.
The first to arrive were six brand-new TBF Avenger torpedo bombers. Designed as a replacement for the slow and aging Devastators, the Avengers were bigger, had a greater range, and were much faster. When the Hornet had left Norfolk back in March, half of her VT pilots had remained behind to take delivery of the new Grumman-built aircraft. When the twenty-one new planes were delivered, the pilots flew them across the country in stages to San Francisco, where they were loaded aboard the transport Hammondsport for the trip out to Hawaii. The Avengers arrived there on May 29, one day after the Hornet left for Point Luck. Eager to get at least some of them into the fight, Nimitz ordered the air crews at Pearl to stay up all night in order to attach belly tanks to six of them so they could fly the 1,100 miles out to Midway. They made the eight-hour flight from Oahu to Midway on June 1, and there the belly tanks were removed and torpedoes attached. But they never did get to the Hornet. Instead, Simard ordered them to strike at the Kidō Butai directly from Midway.21
The most senior of the six Avenger pilots was Lieutenant Langdon Fieberling, a naval reservist who had earned his wings in 1937. The others were young ensigns between the ages of 22 and 25, and a rare enlisted pilot, Aviation Machinist’s Mate First Class Darrel Woodside. Each plane carried a crew of three, and all eighteen men—over half of them teenagers—were heading into their first combat. As they flew out toward the coordinates, they passed Tomonaga’s Midway strike force going the other way, and though a Japanese fighter flew over for a look, neither group paid serious attention to the other. An hour later, the Avenger pilots found the Kidō Butai. Navy doctrine called for torpedo planes to coordinate with dive-bombers, in order to limit the target’s ability to effect evasive maneuvers. But the only dive-bombers assigned to this attack were Marine Corps planes, and no one had arranged for a Navy-Marine joint attack. Besides, the slower Marine bombers were well behind the Avengers, and Fieberling was in no mood to wait for them. He and his squadron mates began an immediate attack: six torpedo bombers against the entire Kidō Butai.22
One of the Avenger pilots was Ensign Albert Earnest, a 25-year-old who had won his gold wings sixteen days before the Pearl Harbor attack. Now as he approached the awesome sight of the entire Kidō Butai spread out below him, it seemed to him that there were “20 or 30 Zeros waiting to shoot us down.” His estimate was remarkably accurate—at that moment there were twenty-eight Zero fighters flying CAP over the Kidō Butai, roughly five defenders for each attacker. As the Avengers nosed over to drop from their cruising altitude of 4,000 feet to 200 feet for the run-in to the target, the Zeros pounced on them. One Avenger, and then another, caught fire and dropped into the sea. “Bullets and anti-aircraft fire were coming at me from every direction,” Earnest recalled. A 20 mm cannon shell killed his 18-year-old turret gunner. The third man in the airplane, 17-year-old Harry Ferrier, who had lied about his age in order to join the Navy, was struck in the head and knocked unconscious. Bullets punched a score of holes in Earnest’s plane, destroying his hydraulic system and severing the elevator cables. The control stick went dead in his hand. Shrapnel from a 20 mm shell shattered his instrument panel, and his plane dived toward the water. Struggling to keep his plane in the air, Earnest dropped his torpedo in the general direction of a cruiser, hoping the loss of weight would allow him to remain airborne. The drop seemed to have no effect, however, and the plane continued to dive toward the water out of control. Earnest braced for a crash landing and, just before impact, reflexively reached down to adjust the four-inch wheel that controlled the trim tabs, something he routinely did before landing. When he did so, the nose of his plane came up, and the Avenger gained a bit of altitude. Zeros continued to make runs at him, and it was all Earnest could do to hold his plane in a more or less straight course. He felt like “a tin duck in a shooting gallery” as the Zeros made repeated runs at him. Relying on the trim tabs to remain airborne, he kept low and flew southward. “A couple of Zeros swooped in to finish me off,” he recalled, “but I was so close to the water, they couldn’t make a real good run at me.”23
Ensign Albert Earnest piloted one of the new Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bombers from Midway in the first attack on the Kido Butai on the morning of June 4. He and his enlisted radioman, Harry Ferrier, also seen here, were the only survivors of the mission. (U.S. Naval Institute)
Eventually the Zeros gave up the chase. Earnest still had to make it back to Midway with a plane that could barely fly. Badly wounded, with blood running from a neck wound, and all of his instruments out—even the compass—he used the angle of the sun to estimate which direction was south. He called his two gunners on the plane’s intercom, but got no response. He nursed the Avenger up to 3,000 feet and flew on. He did not know whether or not his torpedo had successfully dropped. After some time, Harry Ferrier regained consciousness and called him up on the intercom to report that he was still alive. Eventually, Earnest spotted a tall column of black smoke from the burning oil tanks on Midway. Ignoring a wave off from the airfield controller who didn’t think the crippled plane would survive a landing, he touched down on the runway on one wheel, his plane doing a ground loop before coming to a stop on the apron. Only later did he learn that he and young Harry Ferrier were the only survivors of the Avengers strike, and that none of the American torpedoes had struck an enemy ship.24
One reason the Zeros did not pursue Earnest’s crippled plane was that they had another target to deal with. Only seconds behind the Avengers were four Army medium bombers under Captain James Collins, Jr. The two-engine B-26 Marauders had been specially modified to carry torpedoes, which meant that they, too, approached the Kidō Butai at low altitude, around 200 feet. Collins flew through the swarming Zeros and the exploding flak to drop his torpedo, and as his plane passed over the Akagi his nose gunner strafed the big carrier, killing two of its crewmen. First Lieutenant James Muri followed Collins in. He heard “the shells coming into the side of the fuselage and near the turret.” Muri’s turret gunner, Corporal Frank Melo, saw “beads of sweat” on Muri’s forehead. Muri had a cigarette in his mouth, but he had bitten it in two, and “it hung by a slender strip of paper” as he focused on making the attack run. Like Collins, he came in very low to drop his torpedo, passing so low over the Akagi that Nagumo and his staff on the small bridge reflexively ducked. The other two planes in the formation were less lucky. Both of them, riddled with cannon shells and machine gun bullets, crashed into the sea. The two surviving planes, each with more than half their crew wounded, headed for home. Muri’s ground crew later counted more than five hundred bullet holes in his plane.25
If this was the best the Americans could do, Nagumo had to feel fairly sanguine. To be sure, it had been a scary moment when that big two-engine American bomber seemed headed for his command bridge, but in the end the Americans had failed to inflict any damage on the Kidō Butai beyond the two men killed when Collins strafed the Akagi. The Zeros had shot down seven of the ten American airplanes and sent the other three limping home. Nagumo had already decided to send a second strike against Midway, but this attack by planes from that island base may have played a role in his decision about how to execute that second strike. According to Yamamoto’s oral instructions, he was supposed to keep half his airplane strength, and half of his pilots, on hand in case any American surface ships appeared. Strict adherence to those orders, however, now meant that he would have to wait to recover Tomonaga’s attack force, strike them below to the hangar deck to be refueled and rearmed, and then send them back up to the flight deck for launch, while half his planes sat idle and his best pilots cooled their heels in the ready room. Surely Yamamoto did not expect Nagumo to keep half his planes unused throughout the battle? That would be like asking him to fight with one hand tied behind his back. As Nagumo’s chief of staff wrote after the war, it was “intolerable” to expect a frontline commander to keep half his strength idle “for an enemy force which might not be in the area after all.” It would be far more efficient to use the planes that were now on the hangar deck for the second strike, then recover Tomonaga’s planes and arm them with antiship ordnance in the unlikely event that any American surface ships appeared. At 7:15, therefore, as the few surviving American planes retreated over the horizon, Nagumo ordered that the planes on the hangar decks of his four carriers be rearmed with fragmentation bombs for a second strike against Midway.26
The changeover in armament was a major task, especially for the carriers of CarDiv 1, where the Kate torpedo planes were armed with the big 1,870-pound Type 91 antiship torpedoes. Because there were a limited number of hand trucks on each carrier, the crews could rearm only six planes at a time. The carts had to be positioned under the planes; then, after the arming device had been removed, the torpedoes had to be gingerly lowered by hand crank down onto the carts. Because the ammunition handlers were busy bringing up the heavy bombs that would replace those torpedoes, the torpedoes themselves were not returned to the magazine. Instead, they were pushed over to the bulkhead and lifted by hand onto holding racks. Even after the torpedo was removed, the crew still had to remove the mounting brackets that kept the torpedo attached to the plane and replace them with mounting brackets for the 800-kilogram (1,760-pound) fragmentation bombs, which also had to be maneuvered under the planes by hand cart and then cranked up into place.27
This labor-intensive process had been under way for at least half an hour when Nagumo received a radio message from Petty Officer First Class Amari Yoji, piloting search plane number 4 from the cruiser Tone. This was the plane that had been delayed that morning and had left a half hour behind schedule. Now Amari sent a stunning report, one that was entirely unexpected: “Sight what appears to be ten enemy surface units, in position bearing ten degrees [almost due north], distant 240 miles from Midway.” The fact that the one plane that had been delayed by half an hour that morning was the very one assigned to search the quadrant where the American carriers lay in wait is one of the events that has led some students of the battle to dub the subsequent American victory a “miracle,” for it is hard to resist the notion that this was the moment when Providence put its finger on the scale of History. The Japanese thought so, too. After the war, Fuchida Mitsuo wrote in his memoir, “The delay in launching Tone’s planes sowed a seed which bore fatal fruit for the Japanese in the ensuing naval action.” And yet, an analysis of the morning’s events suggests that, if anything, that delay was a stroke of good luck for the Japanese.28
Amari’s orders that morning had been to fly three hundred miles nearly due east (100 degrees), then turn north for sixty miles before returning. After his late start, however, he was eager to get back on schedule, so rather than flying the prescribed three hundred miles, he instead turned north at about 6:45 when he was only 220 miles out and in doing so found Spruance’s Task Force 16 (see map, p. 223). Had he left on time and flown his assigned course, he very likely would not have sighted the Americans until he began his return leg sometime after 8:00. Consequently, the delay in launching Amari’s float plane that morning may have hastened the moment when Nagumo learned of the presence of American surface ships northeast of him.29
Exactly when Nagumo got that report has been disputed. Although Amari sent it at 7:28, he sent it to Tone, his host ship, where it was decrypted in the radio room, rushed up to the bridge, and then blinkered over to the flagship. In his after-action report, Nagumo wrote that he got the message at “about 0500” (8:00 a.m. local time). In that same report, Nagumo also wrote, “The delay in the delivery of message from Tone’s #4 plane greatly affected our subsequent attack preparations.” Most evidence, however, puts the information in Nagumo’s hands by 7:45. First of all, there is the ambiguity of that “about 0500.” More significantly, the Japanese radio message log indicates that Nagumo received the message at 7:45, and it logged Nagumo’s reply to Amari at 7:47, a time confirmed by Hypo, which intercepted and recorded the reply.* Almost certainly, Nagumo received Amari’s message at about 7:45, and even though Amari did not say so, Nagumo had to suspect that there might be an American carrier operating with those “ten enemy surface units,” for there would be little reason for an American task force to be operating north of Midway without a carrier. Nagumo’s chief of staff, Rear Admiral Kusaka Ryūnosuke, recalled thinking, “There couldn’t be an enemy force without carriers in the area reported and there must be carriers somewhere.” Finally, given the coordinates that Amari had sent, Nagumo also knew this target was just over two hundred miles away from his own carriers, already within striking distance because of the longer range of the Japanese attack planes.30
In response to this stunning information, Nagumo consulted with his staff, especially with Kusaka and Commander Genda Minoru. It was a bit awkward to hold a strategy conference in a crowded public space; Nagumo would doubtless have preferred to retreat somewhere more private for the conversation. But the pressure of the moment did not allow that. While they discussed this new information, Nagumo suspended the changeover of armament down on the hangar deck and ordered the thirty-six Val bombers on the Hiryū and Sōryū “to prepare to carry out attacks on enemy fleet units.” Before he sent them off, however, he needed to know more about those American ships. Nagumo had not been at the Battle of the Coral Sea. Nonetheless, he was certainly aware of Hara’s disastrous blunder in sending a full air strike against what turned out to be an oiler and a destroyer. Before he completely restructured his attack plan, Nagumo wanted to know what kind of American ships were out there two hundred miles away, and in particular if they included any aircraft carriers. He therefore ordered Amari to “ascertain [ship] types” and to “maintain contact.” For a few precious and irrecoverable minutes, the entire Japanese strike force was frozen in suspension while Nagumo waited for the answer.31
It came in at 8:09: “Enemy ships are five cruisers and five destroyers.” That seemed curious, to say the least, for—again—it made little sense that such a force should be operating at that location without a carrier. Still, cruisers and destroyers could be dealt with later, and even if an enemy carrier were with them, Nagumo knew that the Americans could not launch an attack against him from such a distance due to the limited range of the American torpedo planes and fighters. He did not need to scramble his reserve planes for an immediate strike, and this was just as well, for just at that moment, the Kidō Butai came under renewed air attack from Midway, and his carriers needed to keep their flight decks clear in order to launch and recover Zero fighters. Indeed, over the next twenty minutes, the Japanese launched two dozen more Zeros to defend the Kidō Butai. By 8:30 they had a total of thirty-six fighters aloft. Since Tomonaga had taken thirty-six fighters with him to hit Midway, Nagumo had now launched very nearly every fighter he had.32
They had plenty of work to do. First, came sixteen Marine Corps Dauntless dive-bombers, under the command of Major Lofton Henderson. Aware that his rookie pilots, virtually all of them on their first combat mission, had little or no training in dive-bombing techniques, Henderson felt compelled to order a glide-bombing attack. The 30-degree approach to the target made the Dauntlesses easy prey for the Zeros, which started by attacking the lead plane and then working their way methodically back through the formation. Henderson’s plane was one of the first to go down. The survivors at the rear of the formation determinedly carried on through the blitz of bullets and 20 mm cannon fire to drop their bombs, some waiting (so they reported later) until they were a mere five hundred feet from the target. Their bombs bracketed the Hiryū, sending up great geysers of water, and afterward they reported three hits and several near misses. In spite of their reckless courage, however, none of their bombs struck home.33
Though Henderson’s attack, like its predecessors, had been futile, it greatly alarmed Admiral Yamaguchi Tamon. The commander of CarDiv 2 wondered if the appearance of carrier-type airplanes meant that an American carrier was nearby. If so, where was it? Though the Japanese had suffered no damage in this attack, their sense that everything was under control began to slip.
Even as the Marines were completing their ill-fated attack, fifteen Army B-17 Flying Fortress bombers appeared three miles above them at 20,000 feet. These were the planes that had been sent out from Midway before dawn to attack Tanaka’s transport force; they had been redirected to the Kidō Butai after Ady’s sighting report. Though the B-17s were unmolested by the Zeros, precision bombing from 20,000 feet was impossible. Sticks of 600-pound bombs exploded in rows all around the big enemy carriers, but none of them actually struck a ship. Despite that, the returning pilots again reported that they had made several hits and that they had left three aircraft carriers burning.
The B-17 s were unmolested, but the Marine Dauntless pilots were savaged by the Japanese CAP, and the survivors had a difficult time getting back to Midway. With Henderson killed and the formation scattered, each pilot was on his own. Many stayed low and skimmed the surface; others sought to hide in the cloud cover. None escaped unscathed. Captain Richard Blain nursed his Dauntless for twenty miles before his fuel pump went out. Then the engine stopped altogether. It recaught momentarily, then went out again. He crash-landed in the sea, and he and his rear-seat gunner, Sergeant Robert Underwood, scrambled into their tiny life raft. Finding that it had a hole in it, they put ersatz makeshift patch on it and spent much of the next two days bailing. After two days and two nights, they were rescued by a PBY. In the end, only eight of the sixteen planes that set out from Midway made it back. On one of them, maintenance crews found 179 bullet holes; on another they counted 219.34
The Americans were not done yet. After the Dauntlesses departed, a dozen antiquated Marine Corps SB2U Vindicators made a run at the Japanese carriers. These aged canvas-covered monoplanes were even older than the Brewster Buffaloes and literally held together by adhesive tape. The pilots derisively referred to them as “Wind Indicators” since the tag ends of the tape fluttered in such a way as to indicate the wind direction. Many of the pilots had never flown one before. They came out of the cloud cover over a Japanese battleship, and immediately came under attack by the Zeros, which convinced Major Benjamin Norris, who commanded the group, to target the battleship rather than take the time to look for the carriers. Three of his planes were shot down almost at once. It would have been worse except that by now many of the Zeros had expended their 20 mm cannon ammunition and had only their lighter 7.7 mm machine guns. Two more Vindicators were hit by bursts of antiair fire from the battleship. The shell explosions buffeted the flimsy planes so violently that, as one pilot recalled, “it was practically impossible to hold the ship in a true dive.” Nevertheless, they grimly persisted and dropped their ordnance. Once again, none of them scored a hit.35
Thus it was that between 7:55 and 8:35 that morning, the Kidō Butai endured three separate attacks by more than forty American aircraft from Midway. The Americans had hurled themselves on the Kidō Butai in a series of uncoordinated attacks, heedless of danger and profligate with their lives, but none of them managed to land any of their ordnance on target. Eighteen of the attackers were shot down, and most of the rest were so badly damaged that they were of questionable further use. Only the high-flying B-17s had been spared.
There were, however, two important consequences of these attacks that greatly affected the subsequent course of the battle. First, because the big Japanese torpedoes and fragmentation bombs could not be moved about on the hangar decks of the carriers while they maneuvered radically under air attack, the American onslaught slowed the transfer of armament for most of that forty-minute period. And second, because Nagumo felt compelled to commit virtually all of his remaining Zero fighters to the defense of the Kidō Butai, he would have to recover, rearm, and refuel those fighters before they could be used to accompany his bombers and torpedo planes in an attack on the American warships.
In the midst of these attacks, at about 8:20, Nagumo received an update from Amari. Apparently the clouds had parted enough to give him a better look at the ships below him, and he now reported: “Enemy force [is] accompanied by what appears to an aircraft carrier to the rear of the others.” Though Nagumo had suspected as much, this was nevertheless critical news. Kusaka later asserted that though he knew it was likely, he was still “shocked” by the report, describing it as “a bolt from the blue.” Here was not only a worthy target but also the primary objective of the whole mission. This was the moment to launch those ship-killing attack planes Nagumo had been hoarding on the hangar decks. The problem was that by now Tomonaga’s strike force was returning from Midway and needed to land. In addition, the Zeros that had fended off the American air attacks from Midway were low on both fuel and ammunition and also needed to land. Nagumo had used all four carriers to launch the planes of his Midway attack force; he would need all four decks to recover them. He could not recover planes and launch at the same time. He seemed to have two choices: order the returning strike force and his own Zero fighters to circle the task force (and risk having them run out of fuel as they did so) while he brought up the reserve planes for an attack on the American surface forces—an attack that would have to go with little or no fighter cover—or recover his CAP and Tomonaga’s planes, rearm and refuel them, and dispatch a fully coordinated strike.36
On Hiryū, Rear Admiral Yamaguchi Tamon, the commander of CarDiv 2, had also received Amari’s updated report. He was bold enough to offer Nagumo some unsolicited advice by blinker signal: “Consider it advisable to launch attack force immediately.” Back in December, Yamaguchi had been the one who had blinkered Nagumo that he was ready to launch another strike at Pearl Harbor. Nagumo hadn’t taken the hint then, and he was disinclined to accept Yamaguchi’s impertinent advice now. It was not just a matter of pique, however, for launching “immediately” was not really an option. Yamaguchi’s dive-bombers on Sōryū and Hiryū, which were armed with the smaller 551-pound bombs, were ready (or nearly ready) to go, but the big torpedo-carrying Kates of CarDiv 1 were not, and even after they were armed, they would have to be brought up from the hangar deck and spotted for launch. That would take half an hour at least, and likely longer, and by then Tomonaga’s returning planes might well run out of gas.37
Of course, Nagumo could order a partial strike by Yamaguchi’s thirty-six Val diver-bombers, and that may have been what Yamaguchi had in mind. The difficulty was that those bombers would have to proceed not only without the cooperation of the torpedo bombers but also with little fighter protection. An attack by only thirty-six dive-bombers (less than a quarter of his available force) without any coordinating torpedo planes or fighter cover would violate Japanese doctrine to strike the enemy with full strength in a combined and coordinated attack. Moreover, Nagumo had just watched the Americans hurl their odd collection of bombers and torpedo planes at him without fighter protection, and not only had they failed, they had been all but obliterated. As Kusaka put it later, “I witnessed [how] enemy planes without fighter cover were almost annihilated. … I wanted most earnestly to provide them [our bombers] with fighters by all means.” Nagumo made his decision: He would recover his CAP and Tomonaga’s returning planes, and then prepare his entire strike force for an all-out death blow against the American flattop.38
By the time Nagumo made that decision, it was 8:35. The planes from the Hornet and Enterprise had been in the air for more than half an hour.
* To avoid confusion, all times used in the text will reflect the local time in the area of the Battle of Midway, which was two hours earlier than the time kept on board U.S. ships. The Japanese maintained Tokyo time on their ships, which was twenty-one hours ahead of Midway time.
* All five operable Wildcats on Midway were launched as CAP at 4:00 a.m., but Ramsey recalled them once all of the long-range search planes had departed. Two of the pilots did not hear the recall order and continued to circle. They finally landed at 6:15, just as all the other fighters and attack planes on Midway were being launched. Quickly refueled, they sped north to join their squadron mates.
* In his book Midway Inquest, Dallas Isom makes a strong case that Nagumo did not receive this information until 8:00 a.m. He argues that the 7:45 time given in the radio traffic log was reconstructed from memory because the original radio traffic log went down with the Akagi. Isom also asserts that the time noted on the Hypo intercept log was added after the war based on the reconstructed (and inaccurate)Japanese log. The timing was important, Isom argues, because if Nagumo did not receive the message until 8:00, it meant that the rearming had been going on for forty-five minutes instead of half an hour, and as a result it took longer to reverse the process. It is an interesting and plausible argument, but also highly speculative, and the preponderance of noncircumstantial evidence puts the message in Nagumo’s hands by 7:45.