12
At 7:00 a.m., about the time that Tomonaga was informing Nagumo that Midway needed a second strike, and while the Kidō Butai was fending off the first of the American bomber attacks from Midway, the two carriers of Spruance’s Task Force 16 were turning into the wind to launch. Mounting a coordinated attack by air groups from two different carriers was unusual—indeed nearly unprecedented—for the Americans, who continued to conceive of their carriers as independent units. While U.S. Navy doctrine called for the air squadrons from each carrier to cooperate, there was no established doctrine about how planes from multiple carriers might operate together in an integrated formation as the Japanese did routinely. Back in March, when planes from the Lexingtonand Yorktown had attacked Lae and Salamaua on New Guinea, and again in May when they attacked the Shōkaku and Zuikaku in the Coral Sea, the air groups from the two American carriers had flown to the targets separately, each under its own commander. Though Spruance and Browning had visions of a single, combined strike by planes from both Hornet and Enterprise, in the end each of the air groups flew to the target independently, and this meant that much of the responsibility for the conduct of the attack fell to the captains of those two carriers and to their respective air group commanders.
This was especially true in the case of the Hornet, the only American carrier that did not have a flag officer on board, though Pete Mitscher had been selected for Rear Admiral (and some members of his staff already referred to him as “Admiral Mitscher”). Mitscher had logged as many air miles as any other American officer afloat, and he may have been a bit miffed that Spruance had designated George Murray, captain of the Enterprise, as the tactical air officer for the combined task force. Murray was slightly senior as a pilot (he was Naval Aviator #22 and Mitscher was #33), but Mitscher was senior to Murray in rank. Spruance likely made this decision because Murray had more combat experience and was on the Enterprise and therefore closer to hand. In the end, Murray would have little influence over the Hornet’s attack against the Japanese carriers that day, an attack that would be orchestrated and managed by Mitscher and the Hornet’s air group commander, Stanhope C. Ring.
To all outward appearances, Mitscher and Ring were complete opposites. Mitscher, as we have seen, was short, slight, sun-ravaged, and bald; Ring was tall and movie-star handsome, with a full head of hair. Ring, as the expression went, wore the uniform well; one junior officer thought he was “the picture of the ideal naval officer.” The two men were also different in background and temperament. At the Naval Academy, where Mitscher had been a poor student and a discipline problem, Ring had graduated in the top 25 percent of his class and had few demerits. Ring was urbane and sophisticated, and a strong believer in protocol and discipline. As a sailor on the Enterprise put it, Ring “belonged to the starchy, do-it-by-the-book side of the Navy.”1
Stanhope C. Ring, shown here as a rear admiral in a 1954 photograph, was the commander of the Hornet air group (CHAG) in the Battle of Midway. (U.S. Naval Institute)
Ring’s Nordic good looks and polished manners very likely played a role in securing him a number of plum staff jobs during his career. After a tour on the Lexington, he became the aide to Rear Admiral William Moffett, and after that he served as the naval aide to President Herbert Hoover. Following tours on the Langley and Saratoga, Ring worked in the Bureau of Aeronautics, and then as the U.S. naval attaché in London, where he was the American observer on the staff of Admiral Sir James Somerville (whose fleet was subsequently decimated by the Kidō Butai in the Indian Ocean). Somerville had liked him and, at the end of Ring’s tour in October 1941, recommended him for the Order of the British Empire. For his part, Ring was so taken with the British way of doing things that he began carrying a swagger stick, a habit that led many to mock him behind his back. Promoted to the rank of full commander, he was assigned as the Hornet’s air group commander, or CHAG, an unfortunate acronym that was pronounced “sea hag.”2
Ring was generally well liked by his superiors, including Mitscher, but not by the young pilots in his charge. Even forty years later, they seethed with resentment. The main reason for this was that Ring led by authority rather than by example. He was quick to assert his rank, as, for instance, when he grounded several pilots because they failed to stand up when he entered the wardroom. During the brief stopover at Pearl Harbor before heading out to Point Luck, the pilots on Enterprise and Yorktown had been granted shore leave. Ring decreed that the Hornet pilots had to remain at Ewa Airfield on continuous alert. One pilot recalled that “there was much grumbling and a near ‘mutiny’ against the CHAG” as a result of that decision. A few pilots risked court martial by “expressing their opinion of CHAG to his face.”3
Ring’s strictness might have been tolerable but for the fact that he himself was an indifferent pilot. When the Hornet was first put in commission, he insisted on being the first to land a plane on her deck. Ensign Troy Guillory was in the rear seat of Ring’s SBC-4 scout biplane, and he remembered that Ring made his approach too high and too fast. Guillory heard “this little tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet” alarm and thought to himself that they were signaling the crash signal for somebody. In fact, it was for them. The plane hit the deck hard and much too fast, failed to catch a wire, and struck the crash barrier. It damaged the plane’s landing gear and broke the support wires on the wings. No one was hurt, but it was a bad omen for the first arrested landing on a new ship, and a poor augury for Ring’s credibility as CHAG. A week later, when a camera crew came on board Hornet to film carrier operations, Ring insisted on being the one photographed. As his plane accelerated down the flight deck, he turned his head to the camera and affected a pose, to the disgust of the pilots who witnessed it. Nor were Ring’s navigational skills up to par. On one occasion, he got lost while leading a training exercise in the Gulf of Mexico and had to turn the mission over to the executive officer of the scouting squadron, Gus Widhelm, to find the ship. As a result of these and other incidents, the pilots in the Hornet’s mostly inexperienced air group had limited confidence in Ring as a pilot or a navigator. At Midway, the extent of their confidence would be sorely tested.4
No aspect of the Battle of Midway is more controversial or enigmatic than the role of the Hornet air group under Stanhope Ring on June 4. Four squadrons took off from the Hornet that morning, but only one managed to find the Kidō Butai—and that one did so only because its squadron commander flagrantly disobeyed Ring’s direct orders. The rest of the air group—two squadrons of bombers and all of the fighters that were committed to the strike—forty-four planes altogether—failed to see the enemy at all. Worse, in trying to get back to the Hornet, thirteen of those planes ran out of gas and had to ditch in the ocean, subjecting the pilots to hours or days of terrible suffering and, in two cases, death. That flight has become known in the lore of the Battle of Midway as “the flight to nowhere.” In effect, despite Nimitz’s furious efforts to ensure that the Americans would have three carriers at Midway to confront the Kidō Butai, only two of them succeeded in attacking the enemy that morning.
Reconstructing how this came about is difficult. For one thing, Mitscher and Ring never wrote or spoke candidly about it. Mitscher’s official report not only avoids the key issues, it is manifestly incorrect in several elements. Ring either never wrote a report or Mitscher failed to forward it, for it has not surfaced in the seventy years since the battle. In addition, none of the reports of the four squadron commanders survive, if indeed they were ever written. Submitting an after-action report following a mission was mandatory under Navy regulations. Nevertheless, other than Mitscher’s flawed report, the only contemporary evidence of what happened to the Hornet’s air group that morning comes from the oral testimony of the survivors, much of it written decades afterward and some of it contradictory. Telling the story of the Hornet’s air group on the morning of June 4 therefore remains a daunting task.
Breakfast call for the pilots on the Hornet sounded at 3:30 that morning. Few of them had slept much anyway, and, knowing they would have a busy day, they headed down to the officer’s mess for “a hurried breakfast.” Some opted for a “one-eyed sandwich,” a slice of toast holed out to accommodate a fried egg, though others merely grabbed a mug of coffee and went directly to the ready room, their leather helmets and goggles close to hand, to wait for the call to man their planes. Many were understandably nervous; none of them had any combat experience, including the squadron commanders. Unlike the pilots on the other American carriers who had participated in the raids on the Marshalls, Wake, or New Guinea, or fought in the Coral Sea, those on the Hornet, including Ring, were facing their first combat mission. The Hornet had gone to sea only in March. The pilots had conducted air operations during the shakedown cruise, but new pilots had to make eight carrier landings to become carrier-qualified, and many had not yet met that standard by the time the Hornet passed through the Panama Canal on her way to the Pacific. In San Diego, the dive-bombing squadrons got new planes, so that even those who had qualified had yet to make an arrested landing in the plane they would fly in combat. Some had qualified off San Diego before the Hornet headed up to Alameda. From March 20 to April 18, however, the Hornet’sdeck was encumbered by the sixteen B-25 bombers that she had carried into the western Pacific for the Doolittle raid. Flight operations had resumed immediately afterward, but even with that, the Hornet pilots had a total of only about six weeks of on-board training. Many had still not completed the initial training syllabus. In short, they were rookies, and the Battle of Midway would be their trial by fire.5
In the four ready rooms (one for each squadron), time passed slowly. There was much less of the usual banter; a few pilots tried their hand at reciting or inventing bawdy limericks, but for the most part it was quiet. One recalled, “The boys were getting fidgety.” A few tried to read; several napped. Most kept one eye on the teleprinter that projected the sighting reports onto a 3-foot-by-3-foot screen. Not long after 6:00, they read Lieutenant Chase’s report of “many planes headed Midway,” and soon afterward Lieutenant Ady’s report of two enemy carriers 180 miles from Midway. The pilots copied the coordinates onto their plotting boards. The squadron commanders in particular focused on this data, for it would be their job to lead their pilots to the target. They wrote down the enemy position relative to Midway, the reported course and speed, plotted the Hornet’s own course and speed, then entered the usual variables: wind speed on the surface and at various altitudes, plus magnetic compass variation. Applying all these elements, each worked out for himself the navigational solution for a course from the Hornet to the reported enemy position.6
The only squadron commander who did not do so was the CO of the fighting squadron (VF-8), Lieutenant Commander Samuel G. “Pat” Mitchell. Given that the job of the fighters was to escort and protect the attack squadrons, Mitchell felt that he did not need to compute an independent course; he would necessarily conform to whatever course they chose. Mitchell himself had very little time as a fighter pilot—no more, in fact, than the young pilots he led—and it was a bit unusual that he had never served as a squadron executive officer before taking over as skipper of Fighting Eight. A 1927 Naval Academy graduate, he had spent most of his career piloting seaplanes and flying boats. He had worked for Pete Mitscher at the Bureau of Aeronautics, and when Mitscher got command of the Hornet, he brought Mitchell along.7
Thanks to the folding wings on the new Dash-4 Wildcats, there was room for twenty-seven fighter planes on board the Hornet, but since many of their pilots were inexperienced, and because some needed to stay behind to protect the task force, only ten would be committed to the strike. Mitchell’s main concern that day was which element of the strike force he would protect. The dive-bombers would fly at 20,000 feet, and the torpedo planes at 1,500 feet. Those ten Wildcats could therefore protect one group or the other, but not both—unless they split into two sections. Pat Mitchell felt that the old torpedo planes had first call on his fighters. Not only were the Devastators significantly slower, their heavy and ungainly torpedoes required them to approach the target at no more than 100 feet and to hold a steady course while they lined up on the target. All this made them sitting ducks for the Zeros that would be flying CAP. The American dive-bombers by contrast, came in high and dove on the target at nearly 250 knots. Moreover, the Dauntless dive-bombers carried twin .50-caliber machine guns and were better equipped to defend themselves. They were often used (without a bomb load) as additional fighters to protect the task force. In Mitchell’s view, these circumstances dictated that his fighters should go with the torpedo planes.8
Certainly that was the view of the skipper of the torpedo squadron, Lieutenant Commander John C. Waldron. Waldron was a twenty-year Navy veteran from South Dakota who at age 41 was nearly twice as old as some of his pilots. Born at a time when the West was still wild, he had grown up on a hardscrabble farm in Canada and then on an Indian reservation near Pierre, South Dakota. He was proud of being one-eighth Sioux, a heritage affirmed by his facial features, dark eyes, and prominent chin. At the Academy, his nickname was “Redskin,” and a few of his fellow officers on the Hornet referred to him simply as “the Indian.” Waldron claimed that this heritage gave him a kind of sixth sense about coming events. He had a reputation as a skilled pilot and an enthusiastic reveler. He worked and played hard. As one person who knew him put it, “He had his parties when he had his parties, and when he got aboard ship it was business.” He was a demanding taskmaster. Aware that his mostly rookie pilots had yet to complete all the training considered necessary before combat, he maintained a tough regimen of both classroom study and physical training. One pilot described it as “work, work, and more work.” His was the only squadron where the pilots reported for calisthenics every morning. Pilots in the other squadrons thought this was amusing and offered taunting suggestions during the exercises. That did not deter Waldron, who thought war no joke. To a nephew who was about to enter pilot training, Waldron wrote a letter advising him to “take this business seriously. It is a serious business and it is not a sport.”9
Lieutenant Commander John C. Waldron, who some nicknamed “the Indian,” commanded Torpedo Squadron Eight on the Hornet on June 4. (U.S. Naval Institute)
At a meeting of officers four days earlier, on May 31, Waldron had taken the opportunity to argue that his torpedo squadron had a greater need for fighter protection than the bombers. Pat Mitchell had supported him, but Pete Mitscher shook his head. Not only were there more than twice as many bombers (34) as torpedo planes (15), but Mitscher knew that the great weakness of the Wildcats—especially the new Dash-4 version on the Hornet—was their indifferent climbing ability. The light and nimble Zeros could climb at nearly three times the rate of the Wildcats, and the best chance the American fighters had in dealing with their Japanese counterparts—maybe the only chance—was to dive on them from above. To Mitscher, this meant the fighters had to come in high. This would allow them to protect the dive-bombers and the torpedo planes too, because when the Zeros attacked the lumbering Devastators, the Wildcats could come screaming down on them from altitude. Of course, one option was to split the difference and send some fighters with each group, as Fletcher had done in the Coral Sea. The outcome there had been disappointing, however, for there had not been enough fighters to protect either group fully, and the bombers had suffered far more than the Devastators from the Zeros. The Wildcats had experienced their best success when they dove on the Zeros during the attack on the Shōhō. Whether or not Mitscher was aware of this, he chose not to divide Mitchell’s fighters into two sections and declared that all ten Wildcats would go with the dive-bombers. The torpedo planes, at least at the outset, would be on their own. Mitchell and especially Waldron were unhappy with the decision. They were overruled.10
There were two false alarms that morning when the teleprinter in the ready rooms clicked out orders for the pilots to man their planes, provoking a quick scramble for equipment and plotting boards, until in the same message a correction appeared: “Do not man planes until directed.” Apparently, when Mitscher heard Fletcher’s 6:07 order to Spruance to attack, he anticipated an immediate launch order. Instead, as we have seen, Spruance decided to wait until 7:00 in order to close the range. Mitscher had to order his pilots to stand down. During that hiatus, at about 6:30 Mitscher called Ring and the four squadron leaders to the bridge for final instructions. There, Waldron tried once again to convince Mitscher to send the fighters with his torpedo planes, and once again Mitchell supported him. Mitchell later recalled that he went up to the bridge that morning expressly to “recommended to Captain Mitscher that we [the fighters] go in with protection for the torpedo planes alone.” But it was Waldron who was so persistent that he verged on insubordination. If Mitscher would not send all ten fighters with his squadron, Waldron argued, he could at least send some of them. When that plea failed, he begged Mitscher to send just one fighter. (It is possible to imagine the emotional Waldron holding up a single finger and demanding “one, just one” fighter.) If Mitscher didn’t want to commit a fighter pilot, Waldron argued, he could have one of his own pilots fly a Wildcat, though none of them had ever been up in one before. This was an absurd argument, and by now Mitscher was surely becoming annoyed. He was not the type to negotiate with junior officers. The answer was still no. Mitchell recalled Mitscher telling him to “go out and stay with the bombers.” The planes were already warming up on the flight deck and there was no room for another discussion of alternatives. It was time to go. The squadron commanders wished each other good luck and good hunting and went down to man their airplanes.11
A more critical issue than deciding the role of the fighter planes was the launch sequence and the departure plan used on the Hornet that day. At 6:38, Mitscher finally got orders from Spruance to launch aircraft at 7:00 a.m., and those orders specified that the air groups were to “use deferred departure.” Instead of having the planes head off toward the target as they launched and effecting a rendezvous en route, the first of them would circle the task force until all the planes in the strike group were in the air; then they would assemble into one grand formation and fly to the target together. The intent of a deferred departure was to ensure unity, attack discipline, and a coordinated strike against the enemy. Almost certainly this order came from Miles Browning, for it is highly unlikely that the black shoe Spruance would have dictated to the brown shoes the type of departure they should use.12
With the order to man their planes, the pilots wished each other good luck, quit their ready rooms, and hurried up the ladders to the flight deck. There they met briefly with their back seat gunners, went over the mission and recognition charts, and gave their planes a quick inspection before climbing into the cockpits. It was habit, and perhaps superstition, that led them to kick the tires. For most of them, this would be the first time they had ever taken off from a carrier while carrying a live bomb. One recalled that as he sat in his plane waiting for the signal to start engines, he “got the same feeling of apprehension and butterflies in the stomach” that he used to get “at the start of competition in high school.”13
The ten Wildcat fighters went first—they needed the shortest runway to get airborne. The air officer watching from the ship’s island gave the go order to the officer on the flight deck who was designated as Fly One. That individual waved his take-off wand in a circle as the pilot revved his engines to full power. When the pilot gave a thumbs-up sign to show that he was ready, Fly One dropped into a crouch and pointed toward the bow. The pilot released his brakes and the plane roared forward. The process was repeated with the next plane. Once all ten Wildcats were in the air and began their climb to their assigned cruising altitude of 20,000 feet, the fifteen Dauntless dive-bombers of VS-8, each of them armed with a 500-pound bomb, began to take off. Next came the CHAG, Stanhope Ring, whose plane also carried a 500-pound bomb, and following him were the eighteen bombers of VB-8, which carried 1,000-pound bombs. The big Devastator torpedo planes of Waldron’s VT-8, each with a 2,200-pound Mark 13 torpedo, needed the longest deck run to get aloft, and because of that they were spotted at the back. Only six of them fit on the crowded flight deck, so the other nine had to be brought up from the hangar deck afterward and launched separately. This launch sequence meant that the Wildcats, which had the shortest range, were in the air first, burning up fuel while they circled and waited, and the Devastators, which were the slowest, launched last and were therefore certain to lag behind the rest of the formation.
Once all the fighters and bombers were in the air, they began jockeying into formation. Ring mandated a double V-shaped “parade” formation with himself at the point and the two bombing squadrons on either side of him. Mitchell’s ten fighters flew above and slightly behind them. Assembling this large formation took longer than it should have. Ensign Ben Tappan, piloting a Dauntless in Walt Rodee’s Scouting Eight, felt that “they were doing too much fiddle faddling around … waiting to get permission to go.”14
Even after they were finally assembled into formation, they had to continue their climb up to 20,000 feet. That climb to altitude took more time—and a lot of gas. While a Dash-4 Wildcat consumed 42 gallons of fuel per hour in level flight, it could burn up as much as 300 gallons per hour in a vertical climb (five gallons a minute). The fact that they had launched first and then had to climb up to 20,000 feet meant that some of the Wildcats used up a significant percentage of their 144-gallon fuel capacity even before the air group headed out for the target. Then, in order to maintain their position above the bombers, which flew at 130 knots, the Wildcats, which cruised at 150 knots, had to serpentine back and forth in a series of lazy’S curves to avoid overrunning the bombers flying below them, and that, too, wasted fuel. The bombers also used up extra gas in an effort to maintain the precise formation of the air group. One pilot recalled, “We flew parade formation and the throttle was in use constantly to maintain position.”15
While the fighters and bombers climbed to altitude, the pilots in Waldron’s torpedo squadron formed up nearly three miles below them, at 1,500 feet. By the time all fifty-nine planes of the Hornet’s strike group were in the air, with the bombers and fighters at 20,000 feet and the torpedo planes at 1,500 feet, it was nearly eight o’clock. The launch had taken most of an hour. By contrast, earlier that morning the Kidō Butai had launched 108 planes in just over seven minutes, though they had used four carrier decks to do it. Nevertheless, the Hornet air group was at last aloft, formed up, and on its way.
But in what direction?
Without doubt, the most puzzling aspect of the “flight to nowhere” is the course flown by the Hornet air group when it did finally set out. A week after the battle, Mitscher submitted an after-action report in which he wrote, “The objective, enemy carriers, was calculated to be 155 miles distant, bearing 239° T[rue] from this Task Force.” Based on that, students of the battle long assumed that Ring led the Hornet’s bombers and fighters on a course of 239 degrees—that is, to the southwest. This was also the course indicated on the battle map that Mitscher submitted with his report (shown in gray on the map opposite). According to that report, Ring’s air group missed finding the Kidō Butai that morning because Nagumo reversed course and turned north, and Ring consequently flew south of him. Nonetheless, most other evidence indicates that the Hornet’s air group did not fly southwesterly at 239 degrees but instead flew almost due west at 265 degrees; it missed the Kidō Butai because that course led the air group eighty to a hundred miles north of the target. In addition, the distance to the target may have been very near 155 miles at 7:00 a.m. when the Hornet turned into the wind to launch, but because the Hornet steamed away from the target at 25 knots for more than an hour in order to launch the air strike, by the time the air group departed, the range to the target was closer to 180 miles.16
While there is no way to know for certain precisely how and why the Hornet air group adopted a course of 265 degrees that morning, there are essentially two possibilities. One is that Ring, who was an indifferent navigator, simply miscalculated the course, and Mitscher did not question it amid the haste and eagerness of the morning launch, despite protests from at least two of the squadron commanders. The other is that Mitscher himself calculated the 265 course and ordered Ring to take it in the hope that it would lead him to the two “missing” carriers that none of the American search planes had so far reported.
That first scenario is plausible but unlikely. It assumes that Mitscher, an experienced and self-confident aviator, would not have made his own calculation to the target. Though the black shoe Spruance essentially turned air operations on the Enterprise over to his brown-shoe chief of staff, Miles Browning, it would have been highly uncharacteristic for Mitscher on the Hornet to turn critical decisions about the air group over to Stanhope Ring or anyone else.
The second scenario takes into account the likelihood that Mitscher would have considered the broader operational circumstances in order to determine how the Hornet air group could best contribute to American success. A key concern was the location and disposition of all four of the Japanese carriers. Though they were, in fact, operating as a unit that morning, the Americans did not know that. All the sighting reports so far had indicated that there were only two carriers at the coordinates that had been sent in by the search planes. Like Fletcher, Mitscher very likely asked himself, “Where are the others?”17
Indeed, all of the American flag officers assumed that the Japanese carriers were operating in two groups that morning. In his initial orders to the task-force commanders, as well as to Simard on Midway, Nimitz had suggested that “one or more [of the Japanese] carriers may take up closein daylight positions” for the attack on Midway, while “additional carrier groups” operated against American surface forces. In the briefing that he gave to the pilots the night before the battle, Lieutenant Stephen Jurika, Mitscher’s intelligence officer, announced that “there were at least two carriers, two battleships, several cruisers and about five destroyers in the attack force which would attempt to take Midway. The support force some distance behind contained the rest of their forces”(emphasis added). And at 6:48 on the morning of the battle, just before the Hornet began launching, Fletcher sent a message to Spruance by TBS (a message which Mitscher no doubt monitored) to remind him that “two carriers [are] unaccounted for.” All of that may have encouraged Mitscher to send his air group to the west rather than the southwest in the expectation of finding that second enemy carrier group. In the only comment Ring ever made about the course he flew that day, he wrote: “Departure from Hornet was taken on predetermined interception course, Group Commander leading.” Predetermined by whom he does not say.18
If this is indeed what happened, it is curious that neither Mitscher nor Ring shared the object of the mission with the squadron commanders, and because of that Waldron became even more frustrated and unsatisfied. He knew that a course of 265 degrees would not lead them to the carriers that had been reported and plotted by all the squadron commanders. As he made his way down to the flight deck, he pulled aside his squadron’s navigator, Ensign George Gay, and told him that he thought the assigned course was wrong. If necessary, he told Gay, he would fly his own course to the target. “Don’t think I’m lost,” Waldron said. “Just track me so that if anything happens to me the boys can count on you to bring them back.”19
Rear Admiral (Select) Pete Mitscher observes flight operations from the bridge wing of the USS Hornet. (U.S. Naval Institute)
Over the next hour, the Hornet was fully occupied in launching aircraft, and the pilots were busy jockeying into formation. By 7:55 a.m. the entire air group was in the air, and Ring led it westward on a course of 265 degrees. The radar operator on the Hornettracked them as they flew westward until they disappeared off the scope. The pilots flew under radio silence, yet only about fifteen minutes into this flight, Ring’s radio crackled to life and he heard Waldron’s voice: “You’re going the wrong direction for the Japanese carrier force.” Ring was furious that Waldron had broken radio silence, and equally furious to be challenged like this on an open radio net, in effect in front of the entire command. “I’m leading this flight,” he snapped back. “You fly with us right here.” Waldron was not intimidated. “I know where the damned Jap fleet is,” he insisted. Ring was adamant, as well as angry: “You fly on us. I’m leading this formation; you fly on us.” There was a brief silence, and then one more broadcast from Waldron: “Well, the hell with you. I know where they are and I’m going to them.” Three miles below, Waldron banked his plane off to the left, heading southwest, and his entire squadron, most of whom had probably heard the radio exchange, went with him. It was just past 8:30. At about that moment, Nagumo was making his decision to recover the Midway strike force before launching his attack against the Americans.20
Stanhope Ring—perhaps with clenched teeth—flew on with the forty-four bombers and fighters. Below them, nothing was visible save patchy clouds and open ocean. By now the fuel gauges on some of the Wildcats were nearing the halfway mark. Ensign Ben Tappan kept one eye on his gas indicator as he flew. He remembered thinking they’d never make it back. He wasn’t the only one. Ensign John E. McInerny was also unsettled. He looked over to his wingman, Ensign Johnny Magda, and made an openhanded shrug, as if to ask, “What’s going on?” Magda shook his head, which McInerny interpreted as, “I don’t know either.” They flew on.21
A half hour later, with his fuel gauge now well below the halfway mark, McInerny broke formation, climbed up to Pat Mitchell’s lead Wildcat, and settled in next to him. When Mitchell looked over, McInerny gesticulated forcefully toward his gas gauge. Mitchell simply shook his head. McInerny went back into his position on Madga’s wing, but he continued to stew. After a few more minutes, he tried it again. This time Mitchell reacted angrily, waving him back into position and pointing to him (in Mitchell’s words) “as a warning.”22
If Mitchell was angry, so was McInerny. He went back to his position in the formation. Getting Magda’s attention, he mouthed, “Come with me.” He then banked out of the formation and began to fly a reciprocal course back toward the Hornet. He was essentially abandoning the formation and his commanding officer, and even as he did it he assumed that he would be court-martialed for it. Magda went with him. One by one, so did all the other Wildcat pilots of VF-8. Abandoned by his squadron, Pat Mitchell turned too. He insisted later that he did it on his own. “I broke off,” he claimed in 1981, “when I saw … that it would be foolish to go any farther.” In fact, Mitchell had lost control of his command and had to hurry back to the front of his mutinous squadron to remain a part of it. All ten fighters now headed back toward the Hornet, leaving the thirty-four bombers on their own. It was around nine o’clock.23
It is not certain that Ring was even aware of the moment when his fighter cover left him. The Wildcats were flying above and behind him, and no one had broken radio silence. Even a few of the fighter pilots were unaware of it. Focused on keeping their position in the formation, some made the slow turn to the left without realizing they were doing it until they noticed that instead of the sun being at their backs, it was now in their faces.
Abandoned by both the torpedo bombers and the fighter escort, Ring and the thirty-four dive-bombers continued to fly westward. At about 9:20, a few of the bomber pilots, or rather their radiomen, overheard a call from Waldron: “Stanhope from Johnny One.” If he heard it, Ring did not reply. Waldron tried again: “Stanhope from Johnny One.” Again there was no response. But there was more from Waldron, including, “Watch those fighters!” and then later, “Attack immediately!” After that, there was this: “My two wing men are going in the water.” Then nothing. To those who heard it, it was now evident that Waldron had been correct about the bearing to the target, and that he had found the enemy—and they had found him.24
Lieutenant Commander Robert “Ruff” Johnson, the commander of VB-8, may or may not have heard Waldron’s broadcasts. Johnson was a popular squadron commander with a “genial disposition.” One of his classmates said of him: “To know him is to like him.” Johnson’s greatest concern now was that the planes of his squadron were running out of fuel. Though his pilots flew the longer-range Dauntless dive-bomber, they had each been armed with a 1,000-pound bomb, which cut into their fuel efficiency. Now after flying over two hundred miles, well beyond the presumed intercept point, he concluded that they had missed the target. He worried that his pilots would not be able to make it back to the carrier. He decided to fly south toward Midway, partly to see if he could find the Japanese carriers, and partly in the hope of making it to the landing field on Eastern Island. He signaled to his wingman and turned southward. His squadron followed. Ring went on the radio to order the bombers to stay with him, but only his assigned wingman, Ensign Clayton Fisher, did so. The other sixteen planes of VB-8 went with Johnson to the southeast. Now Ring led a strike force composed only of the fifteen dive-bombers of Walt Rodee’s scouting squadron, plus Fisher.25
Ring and what was left of his command continued to fly westward. Soon even the scout bombers, loaded with the lighter 500-pound bombs, were beginning to run low on fuel. Rodee and his squadron had stuck with Ring for 225 miles. Now, past ten o’clock, having been in the air for most of three hours, Rodee, too, turned his squadron around. Every other plane in the formation followed him. In his only postbattle writing on this event, Ring claimed that he “attempted to rally the departing aircraft of VB-8 and VF-8 in order to lead them back to Hornet, but I could not catch them.” As a result, he headed for the Hornet (in his words) “proceeding singly at 20,000 feet.” In other words, he flew back to the Hornet completely alone. One can only imagine his emotional state.26
Since neither Browning nor Mitscher had established a point option for the recovery, Ring and the others were dependent on the Hornet’s YE-ZB homing system. Using a dedicated YE transmitter, the ship sent out a single Morse-code letter to various quadrants—a different letter for each 30-degree arc of the compass. Pilots who received the signal in their ZB receivers could then determine a course back to the ship. Ring got a reading on his ZB receiver, but it was the signal from Enterprise, not Hornet. As a result, Ring relied on “dead reckoning” to find the carrier, and he flew—unerringly for once—back to the task force. His was the first plane to land on the Hornet’s deck at 11:18 a.m., after four hours in the air. Not noticing that Ring’s plane still carried its 500-pound bomb, the Hornet’s crew assumed he was returning from a successful strike and cheered when he climbed out of the cockpit. Ring did not acknowledge the cheers and went straight to his stateroom without reporting to the bridge. Not until Walt Rodee landed a few minutes later and climbed up to the bridge to report did Mitscher find out what had happened.
The mission was not yet over for everyone. Ruff Johnson’s heavily laden bombers flew to the southeast until it was obvious they had missed the enemy, and then Johnson turned them northeast hoping to get back to the Hornet. Shortly before 10:00, they encountered an American PBY, which blinkered them a course to Eastern Island. At about the same time, the squadron exec, Lieutenant Alfred B. Tucker, picked up the YE homing signal from the Hornet. At this point, the squadron broke up: Johnson with fourteen planes flew on to Midway; Tucker and his section of three planes turned northeast to try to find the task force. Of Johnson’s fourteen planes, two ran out of fuel en route and had to ditch; a third plane ran out of gas just as it approached the airfield and ditched in the Midway lagoon. The rest encountered “friendly” AA fire as they attempted to land at Midway, though it stopped once they were recognized. The eleven surviving planes were refueled, rearmed (they had jettisoned their 1,000-pound bombs), and eventually sent back to the Hornet. Tucker’s three-plane section also found the Hornet, so that in the end only three bombers were lost on the mission. None, however, had dropped a bomb on the enemy.
The Wildcat pilots were less fortunate. Mitchell did not pick up the Hornet’s YE homing signal, though several other Wildcat pilots did. Mitchell therefore turned the lead over to Lieutenant Stan Ruehlow, who led the loose formation of fighters eastward at a comfortable 150 knots. The fighters dropped gradually from 20,000 feet down to 8,000 feet, not only to conserve fuel but also because below 8,000 feet they did not need their oxygen canisters, which were also running low. Unfortunately, at low level the ZB receivers were less efficient, and the fighters flew past the Hornet without spotting it. As they continued eastward, their engines began to cough and sputter, and then one by one they stopped altogether, the propellers windmilling in silence as the planes ran out of fuel. The heavy Wildcats were poor gliders, and it required some skill to bring them down onto the water for a controlled crash landing. Each man sent out a perfunctory Mayday message and then focused his attention on all the things he had to do once the plane hit the sea: throw open the cockpit cover, unbuckle his seat belt, grab his canteen, climb out onto the wing, manipulate the hatch cover to release the small life raft and inflate it along with his “Mae West” (life preserver), and then clamber into the raft—all before the plane sank.27
Most of them grouped up for company. When McInerny’s plane went down, his wingman, Johnny Magda, still had power, though his gas gauge showed empty. Magda calculated his chances of finding the task force at zero and decided he was better off sticking with his wingman, so he ditched in the water alongside Mac. Mitchell, too, went down near two other pilots, Dick Gray and Stan Ruehlow. It was fortunate for him that he did, for Mitchell couldn’t get his life raft out of its compartment and ended up as the third man sharing two tiny one-man rafts. Over the next four days, they rotated, taking turns in the water. That was particularly dicey during the several shark attacks. The sharks were especially aggressive on the third night, pushing and bumping the rafts; once a shark’s fin cut the fabric on one of the rafts and it began losing air, though the men were able to patch it. There was also only one set of emergency rations, and the three pilots allowed themselves only one sip of water each day. “We watched each other take this drink,” Mitchell recalled. Small fish swam near the rafts occasionally, and Dick Gray was able to grab one with his bare hands and eat it raw. The sun was merciless, and all of them suffered severe sunburn. The rafts were slowly losing air. Soon instead of sitting, they had to straddle them with their feet dangling in the water. Mitchell got blisters on his head from sunburn, as well as swollen feet from constant immersion in the water.28
Eleven PBY Catalinas from Midway were committed to the search for the downed pilots. Eight of the ten fighter pilots were rescued on June 8 and 9. After Lieutenant Junior Grade Frank Fisler’s PBY touched down in the water to rescue Johnny Talbot, Ensign Jerry Crawford helped Talbot into the plane. Talbot’s face and hands were completely covered with huge blisters from sunburn, and the blisters themselves were encrusted with salt. Crawford knew Talbot well but did not recognize the man in the raft. Talbot eventually recovered, as did the others. The downed bomber pilots were rescued as well, though two of the fighter pilots were never found, and of course all ten of the fighter planes were lost.29
On board the Hornet, Pete Mitscher was no doubt horrified to learn from Walt Rodee what had happened. In its first mission against the enemy, the Hornet’s air group had literally fallen apart. First the torpedo planes, then the fighters, and finally the bombers had all abandoned their commanding officer, who had returned alone. None of the torpedo planes or fighters had returned at all, and by noon, after five hours, Mitscher had to know they never would. Of the fifty-nine planes that had launched from the Hornetthat morning, only twenty had come back. Eleven more bombers of VB-8 would eventually fly in from Midway, but for all those losses in both men and machines, not one bomb had been dropped on the Japanese.
Neither Mitscher nor anyone else on the Hornet yet knew what had happened to Waldron’s torpedo squadron.