16

Denouement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Though none of them knew it, the Hiryū had already sunk, going down without any further assistance from either American bombs or Japanese torpedoes shortly after 9:00 that morning, less than twenty minutes after the last sighting had been called in. Stanhope Ring was bound on another “flight to nowhere.”*

The Americans flew low in a long scouting line to ensure that they did not miss the target. When they reached the reported coordinates at twilight, around 6:00 p.m., “the enemy was nowhere in sight.” Grimly determined, Ring pressed on. At 6:20, he spotted a single vessel, initially identified as a light cruiser but which was in fact the destroyer Tanikaze bound on the same mission he was: to find and sink the Hiryū. Ring led his air group past the Tanikaze, looking for bigger game. After flying more than three hundred miles and seeing nothing, Ring decided to go back and sink that light cruiser. It was the first enemy ship he had seen since the battle began, and he was not going back this time without striking a blow. He reported the sighting to both Shumway and Short, and since neither of them had found a target either, all sixty-five American dive-bombers prepared to attack the hapless Tanikaze. Her captain, Commander Katsumi Tomoi, may have wondered what he had done to merit such attention.¹⁶

Katsumi had been skeptical of his assignment from the outset. When ordered to return to the Hiryū, rescue her crew, and then sink her, he considered the mission “suicidal.” Now he announced to the crew on the ship’s loudspeaker that they “should be prepared to die with dignity.” At the same time, however, he was determined to make the best defense he could. He ordered lookouts to lean out the bridge windows, facing almost straight up, and to report the flight path of each approaching American bomber. They would call out, “Dive-bombers approaching from aft starboard!” and Katsumi would order the helmsman: “Port helm. Full speed.” When another dove from the port side, he reversed helm. “I never saw a ship go through such radical maneuvers at such high speed,” Ring later wrote.¹⁷

In the gathering darkness, the American dive-bomber pilots jostled among themselves to attack this one lone destroyer. One by one, sixty-five American dive-bombers plunged down to release their bombs, and they pressed the attack to the limit—the lookout on the Tanikaze later recalled that the bombers dove so low he could see the pilots’ goggles and white scarves. In spite of that, all the American bombs missed. Whether it was the small size of the target, the gathering darkness, or Katsumi’s maneuvers, not a single bomb hit home.* Lieutenant Abbie Tucker of Ruff Johnson’s squadron managed a near miss that damaged the Tanikaze’s hull near the waterline, but that was it. Moreover, Sam Adams, perhaps still in his blue pajamas, was shot down by antiair fire. He and his backseat gunner, Joseph Karrol, were never found. Because Adams was an especially popular member of Short’s VS-5, this loss significantly dampened the mood on the return trip. Johnny Nielsen thought, “We might better have lost a cruiser than lost Sam.”¹⁸

Returning low on gas after a very long flight, the pilots now had to find the carriers in the dark, and most of them had never attempted a night landing, even in training. At 7:30, worried that the pilots didn’t have time to look for the task force, and knowing they would be low on gas, Spruance ordered both carriers to turn on their big 36-inch searchlights, pointing them straight up like beacons despite the danger of attracting the attention of Japanese submarines. The searchlights were turned off at 8:00, but the Enterprisekept her sidelights burning for another two and a half hours.* As a result, Adams was the only pilot who failed to return, though in the dark some of the pilots landed on the wrong carrier. Only after the strike force was back aboard did Spruance learn that several of the planes from Hornet had flown off with 1,000-pound bombs despite his orders to carry 500-pounders. He said nothing at the time, but the news added to a lengthening list of concerns he had about the Hornet’s performance in the battle, and about Mitscher’s capacity for command.¹⁹

This time, instead of heading east during the night hours, away from the enemy, Spruance ordered the task force to maintain a westerly course, though he did so at a reduced speed, both to avoid running into Japanese battleships in the dark and to conserve fuel. Then he went to bed.²⁰

While Spruance slept, Lieutenant Commander Tanabe Yahachi on the Japanese submarine I-168 was heading northward on the surface toward a set of coordinates that Nagumo had forwarded to him. Early that morning, the Chikumas number 4 floatplane had reported a Yorkfown-class carrier “listing to starboard and drifting,” and with the surviving Japanese surface ships now in full retreat, only Tanabe’s sub was close enough to respond. Concealed by darkness, Tanabe and the I-168 stayed on the surface under diesel power, both to save the batteries and to make better speed. Just before 4:00 a.m., only minutes before dawn on June 6, Tanabe identified the looming shadow of a big carrier, apparently under tow and surrounded by a screen of five destroyers, and as the eastern sky began to lighten, he submerged.

Buckmaster had ordered the evacuation of the Yorktown thirty-six hours earlier because it had seemed to him that she was about to capsize, which would have trapped the whole crew of nearly three thousand men under the water. Fletcher had ordered the destroyer Hughes to stay by the abandoned flattop on the night of June 4 and to sink her if there was any chance that the enemy might capture her. But she was still afloat on June 5, and during the day the minesweeper Vireo, ordered there from French Frigate Shoals by Nimitz, took her under tow. The big flattop, riding low in the water and somewhat down by the bow, was a lot of dead weight for the Vireo. In addition, the Yorktown’s rudder was jammed hard over so that she yawed badly; it was almost like towing her sideways. Consequently, during the night of June 5—6, there was little progress eastward.²¹

By then, Buckmaster had decided that since the Yorktown appeared to have stabilized, he would take a volunteer crew back aboard to try to salvage her. He called for volunteers from her former crew members who were with him on the Astoria and, ranging up alongside the destroyers Benham and Balch, solicited more volunteers. Those who raised their hands—twenty-nine officers and 141 enlisted men—were transferred to the destroyer Hammann by breeches buoy. Early on June 6, the Hammann closed on the Yorktown so that the volunteers could make their way back on board the ship that they had abandoned two days before. The big flattop was still canted over at a 26-degree angle, and a few fires were still burning, including the one in the rag storage area forward. But it was the quiet that was most disturbing. The big ship was “dark, dead, and silent” as the volunteers came aboard. Machinist Lew Williams experienced “an eerie, unearthly dream-like feeling” as he made his way through the ship. It soon passed as he and the others got to work.²²

Using electric power and steam pressure supplied by the Hammann, which was tied up alongside, the volunteers suppressed the last of the fires and corrected some of the list with counterflooding. They cut away anything they could from the lower (port) side to reduce weight, and the Yorktown slowly began to right herself, listing now at only 22 degrees. By noon, Buckmaster and his hardworking volunteers began to believe that they were on their way to saving the ship. Fletcher had informed Nimitz that the Yorktownwas “badly damaged and dead in the water,” but also that, unless Nimitz directed otherwise, he planned to “protect and salvage” his flagship. Nimitz agreed, and he informed Fletcher that he was sending tugs and salvage officers to the scene.²³

By the time Fletcher got that message, it was already too late. At noon, the crew on the Hammann passed food over to the salvage crew, and many of the volunteers took a break to eat. It was a warm, calm day, with “a glassy sea with perfect visibility” and some of the men sat on the deck to eat. Then at 1:30, first one sailor, and then others, spotted the white wakes of torpedoes heading toward them. Tanabe had somehow managed to work his way through the screen of five destroyers to loose a spread of four Type 95 torpedoes from 1,200 yards. The Yorktown s klaxon sounded general quarters, and gunners manning the antiaircraft guns aimed their weapons at the head of the wakes, hoping to detonate the torpedoes prematurely.²⁴

It was to no avail. The first torpedo hit the Yorktown near the bow, and the big ship shuddered. Seconds later another slammed into the destroyer Hammann tied up alongside. A third torpedo hit the Yorktown astern near frame 95, and a fourth missed astern. The Hammann was literally cut in half. Many in her crew were killed outright, knocked unconscious, or blown into the sea by the impact. The Hammann began to sink almost immediately, while on her stern men assigned to the depth-charge racks worked frantically to ensure that the safety forks were inserted into the canisters so that when the stern did sink, the charges would not explode. Their effort remained vivid to one witness sixty years later. “I can still see them,” William Burford recalled, “working on the depth charges on the stern … trying to put them on safety.” But there was not enough time, and the stern of the Hammann went down with at least some of her depth charges still set in the active mode. As the destroyer’s hull plunged downward, the depth charges began to go off, the big explosions damaging the hull of the Yorktown further and killing scores of men flailing in the water nearby.²⁵

One of those men was the Yorktown’s gunnery officer, Commander Ernest J. Davis, who had been blown over the side of the carrier by the impact of the torpedo. He had grabbed a rope and was in the act of climbing back aboard the Yorktown when the depth charges went off. Only his lower torso was still submerged, which allowed him to survive, though he sustained a number of internal injuries. The concussion in the water was so great that the gold watch he had in his pocket was flattened to “the thickness of a silver dollar against his thigh.” Others, fully immersed in the water, were less fortunate. One witness recalled seeing the heads of swimming survivors simply disappear after the depth-charge explosion. One minute there were scores of swimmers in the water, and then “they were all gone.”²⁶

For the second time in three days, Buckmaster ordered abandon ship. The tug Vireo cut the towing cable and came alongside to collect the survivors (plus sixteen bodies) from the Yorktown. Even then, however, Buckmaster wondered if the big ship could be saved. The torpedoes had blasted holes in the Yorktown’s starboard side so that while she now lay very low in the water, her list was less pronounced—only about 17 degrees. But the big ship continued to settle lower and lower in the water, until at two minutes before 5:00 a.m. on June 7, as Buckmaster saluted from a nearby destroyer, she disappeared.²⁷

While Buckmaster and his volunteer crew sought to save the Yorktown, Spruance and the pilots of Task Force 16 were seeking to complete the destruction of the Japanese armada—or as much of it as was still within range. Just past dawn on June 6, while Tanabe was studying the silhouette of the Yorktown through his periscope, Spruance sent eighteen scout bombers from the Enterprise to conduct a search to the westward. At 6:45, Ensign William D. Carter sighted what he thought was a battleship or battlecruiser and a cruiser screened by three destroyers 128 miles away and heading west at a leisurely ten knots. It was the crippled Mogami and the Mikuma with two (not three) destroyers, looking like a battleship and a cruiser because one was forty feet longer than the other. Carter told his radioman, Oral “Slim” Moore, to send the message “Sighted one CA [cruiser] and one CB [battlecruiser]” But Moore had never heard of a “CB” and over the intercom it sounded like “CV” [carrier], so that’s what he sent. Spruance did not react at once. Having dispatched his planes on a wild goose chase the day before, he wanted to make sure of the target this time. Rather than order an immediate launch, he directed floatplanes from two of the cruisers in his screen (Minneapolis and New Orleans) to verify the contact and stay in the area, so that they could guide the strike to the target, which they could do because of their long-range capability.²⁸

At 7:30, with the float planes still en route to the sighting, Ensign Roy Gee, whose flying skills had drawn Mitscher’s ire back in March during the Hornet’s shakedown cruise, flew over the Enterprise and dropped a beanbag on the deck. The attached note accurately reported two cruisers and two destroyers 133 miles to the southwest. Though this was a confirmation of the same group reported earlier, Spruance now wondered if there were two groups of enemy ships out there, one of them with a carrier. He decided to hedge his bets, ordering Hornet to launch her air group at once, but keeping the planes of the Enterprise back as a reserve, as Fletcher had done two days before, on the morning of June 4. The Hornet began launching at 8:00 a.m.

It was Stan Ring’s third opportunity to strike the enemy, and he was grimly determined that this time nothing should go wrong. He led eleven planes of VB-8 under Ruff Johnson and fourteen from VS-8 under Walt Rodee. Mitscher sent along eight Wildcats to strafe the target and to suppress antiaircraft fire. As Ring’s formation circled the Hornet and prepared to depart, the Enterprise was busy recovering planes from the morning search. From their pilots, Spruance learned that the sighting had involved a battleship, not a carrier, and, fearful that Ring might ignore the battleship and waste time seeking a nonexistent carrier, he authorized a radio message to tell him: “Target may be a battleship instead of a carrier. Attack.”²⁹

Ring took his air group westward, and an hour later, at 9:30, Ruff Johnson was the first to spot the Mogami and Mikuma, plus their two destroyers. He reported the sighting to Ring: “Stanhope from Robert, Enemy below on port bow.” Apparently, the Japanese were monitoring the same radio frequency, for soon afterward an unidentified radioman came on the circuit, speaking in “a very oriental tone,” to say, “Stanhope from Robert, Return to base.” It fooled no one, and Ring led his air group around to the east to attack out of the sun. At last, Ring had an opportunity to strike at a major element of the enemy fleet.³⁰

The fourteen planes of Walt Rodee’s Scouting Eight dove on the Mogami, while the eight planes of Johnson’s Bombing Eight attacked the Mikuma, which most of the pilots reported as a battleship. Rodee’s bombers scored two hits. One bomb landed squarely on top of Mogami’s turret number five, blowing off the roof and killing every man inside, and another hit the cruiser astern. Neither hit was fatal, however, in part because Captain Soji had jettisoned all his torpedoes, and there were no secondary explosions. The Mikuma escaped altogether. Ruff Johnson himself scored a near miss (a “paint scraper” as he called it) on the Mikuma, but no one scored a direct hit, and the heavy antiair fire claimed two of the American pilots. Ensign Don Adams landed a 500-pound bomb on the destroyer Asashio, and the Wildcat pilots strafed both destroyers and cruisers.

On the whole, the strike was disappointing. Thirty-three planes had attacked two cruisers, one of them already crippled, and two destroyers, and failed to sink any of them. The already-damaged Mogami had been hit twice but continued to steam at better than 20 knots. Captain Sakiyama reported only “light damage” to the Mikuma. All four ships continued to steam southward, seeking to get inside the 700-mile radius from Wake Island and the protection of land-based air cover. Even at 28 knots, however, it would take them another twenty hours to get there, and there were still eight hours of daylight left.³¹

As the Hornet planes were attacking, the Enterprise was launching a second strike of thirty-one more bombers, escorted by twelve Wildcats—forty-three planes in all, with Wally Short in command. In case there was a carrier out there after all, Spruance decided at the last minute to send along his last three torpedo planes as well. He worried about risking them; they were the last three operational torpedo bombers in the Pacific Fleet. He told Lieutenant Junior Grade Robert Laub, who commanded the section, that he was not to attack unless the dive-bombers and fighters had completely suppressed enemy antiaircraft fire. “If there is one single gun firing out there,” he instructed Laub, “under no circumstances are you to attack. Turn around and bring your torpedoes home. I am not going to lose another torpedo plane if I can help it. Do you understand?”³²

The forty-six planes from Enterprise were aloft by noon. The bombers climbed to 22,500 feet, with the three torpedo planes behind and below them at 1,500 feet. En route to the target, Johnny Nielsen saw a small motor boat, leaving “a tiny white wake, that was heading eastward in the direction of San Francisco.” It may have been the cutter from the Hiryū containing the last of the survivors from that ship, though why it would be heading east was a mystery.³³

Soon after that, the pilots spotted a trail of oil on the surface that led off to the southwest, and they followed it to the two cruisers. By now the Mogami had worked her way back up to 28 knots, and both cruisers were trying desperately to get within the envelope of air cover from Wake. The American bombers flew past them for thirty miles to be sure there was neither a carrier nor a battleship in the area. Jim Gray took his Wildcat down to 10,000 feet to look over the cruisers, and noting that one was shorter than the other, he concluded, correctly, that they were the “battleship and cruiser” that had been reported earlier, and he radioed Short to that effect.

All formality was dispensed with as Shumway and Short prepared to attack. “Wally, this is Dave,” Shumway radioed. “I’ll take the cruiser to the northeast.” Short replied that he would take “the other one.” The Americans dove at nearly 90 degrees, and although there was heavy antiair fire, all the flak exploded well behind them. The pilots got two more hits on the Mogami and devastated the “battleship” Mikuma with five bombs. Johnny Nielsen watched as one bomb went down the smoke stack and detonated. “That stack just lifted up off the deck,” Neilsen recalled, “tumbled over in the air, splashed into the water, and disappeared.” White steam gushed up through the black smoke. The Mikuma slowed and then stopped, burning furiously. The almost giddy mood of the American pilots was evident in the recorded message traffic. “Tojo, you Son-of-a-Bitch,” said one, “send out the rest and we’ll get those, too.”³⁴

Even as this strike by the planes from the Enterprise was in progress, Spruance authorized the Hornet air group to rearm and go out again. In effect, he was tag-teaming the Mogami and Mikuma, with the two carriers taking turns. This time, however, Stanhope Ring did not go along with the Hornet air group. The radio on his plane was not working, and Mitscher used that as a reason to hold him back. Ring could have flown another plane had Mitscher deemed it useful. Instead, as Ring recalled it, “Capt. Mitscher decided … that I should not accompany the final attack group which was being readied for takeoff.” Perhaps Mitscher had finally concluded that Ring was not a particular asset.³⁵

 The wrecked and burning Japanese heavy cruiser Mikuma as photographed by Lieutenant Junior Grade Cleo Dobson on June 6. She sank soon afterward. (U.S. Naval Institute)

Walt Rodee led the Hornet’s second strike and found the smoking and burning cruisers at about 2:30 in the afternoon. The Mikuma was dead in the water and burning furiously. The Americans hit it again and put another bomb into the Mogami, while strafing the two destroyers. Both cruisers were now badly hurt, but the Mikuma was in extremis, burning from end to end. On the radio net, one pilot blurted out, “Look at that battleship burn!”³⁶

Back on Enterprise, Shumway and Short were pleading with Spruance to let them go back out for another strike. Spruance was pleased by their enthusiasm but uncertain what a fourth strike would accomplish. It was late afternoon by now, the target was getting closer to the envelope of air cover from Wake, and Spruance had to consider the fuel situation. As his destroyers had run low on fuel, Spruance had sent them back one by one to the fuel rendezvous site, and he now had only four destroyers left to accompany his two carriers. Finally, given the pilot reports, it was not clear that the target was worth another strike. In fact, Spruance did not know for sure what the target had been. Shumway thought they had hit a battleship and a cruiser; Short reported that both ships had been cruisers. Johnny Neilsen joined the group and Spruance turned to him to ask what kind of ship he had hit. “A heavy cruiser,” Neilsen answered. “Very much like our own Indianapolis class.”* Spruance asked him whether he was sure it wasn’t a battleship. Nielsen told him he was positive it was a cruiser. ³⁷

In the end, Spruance decided against a fourth strike, but he did send out two Dauntless bombers to reconnoiter and to take photographs of the damaged enemy ships. Flying one of those scout bombers, Lieutenant Junior Grade Cleo Dobson arrived at the coordinates and saw the wrecked and burning Mikuma with “lots of bodies lying on the deck, and lots more were lying on the stern.” There were also “about 400 to 500 saliors [sic] in the water all around the ship,” he recalled. On the way out, he had decided that if he saw any survivors in the water, he would strafe them, as the Japanese had done to American survivors. When he saw those heads bobbing in the water, however, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. “Boy I would hate to be in the shoes of those fellows” he remembered thinking. “I might be in their shoes some day” He took his photographs and flew back.³⁸

As it turned to full dark on June 6, Spruance assessed the value of continuing the pursuit. Despite the remarkable successes of the past three days, there were a number of reasons for caution. By the time the sun came up on June 7, whatever targets were left would very likely be protected by landbased air from Wake Island, and with tired pilots, low fuel, and only four destroyers on hand, he decided to call it off. As he wrote later, “I had a feeling, an intuition perhaps, that we had pushed our luck as far to the westward as was good for us.” Once the two scout planes were recovered, he turned Task Force 16 back east toward the fuel rendezvous.³⁹

* Before the Hiryū went down, the roughly forty Japanese survivors still on board her (though not Yamaguchi or Captain Kaku) successfully evacuated in a cutter stocked with supplies. They spent the next two weeks hoping to be rescued by their countrymen. Instead they were spotted by a PBY out of Midway and picked up by the U.S. submarine tender USS Ballard on June 19. Not until then did Spruance learn for certain that the Hiryū had sunk.

* For Ring himself it was another day of hair-pulling frustration. As he dove at last on an enemy warship, he discovered to his horror that his bomb would not release. Frantically, he continued to press the release butt on, to no avail, and in the end he had to return to the Hornet with his bomb still att ached. Afterward, a rumor circulated within Ruff Johnson’s squadron that Ring did not know how to drop a bomb. While perhaps unfair, it suggested how alienated Ring had become from the pilots he commanded. That night in his quarters, Ring asked Ensign Clayton Fisher to demonstrate to him how to use the emergency bomb release lever in case it ever happened again.

* Just over two years later, during the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June of 1944, Marc Mitscher, by then commanding the American fast carrier task force of fifteen carriers and seven fast battleships, ordered the carriers to turn on their lights to assist pilots returning from a long-range strike. Almost certainly, his inspiration for that decision was Spruance’s action during the Battle of Midway.

* Neilson’s comparison was spot on. The Portland-class Indianapolis displaced 12,000 tons and carried nine 8-inch guns. The Mogami-class cruisers displaced 11,200 tons and carried ten 8-inch guns.