CHAPTER 6
(JUNE 1942)
MIDWAY ATOLL
1,137 MILES NORTHWEST OF HAWAII
10 MAY 1942
Midway—1,100 miles west-northwest of Hawaii, an atoll of two tiny islands, is just 2.4 square miles of land barely above water. The highest terrain features are radio pylons on Sand Island and the control tower at the airfield on Eastern Island. Before the war Midway had been a weather station and refueling stop for the Pan American Airways Flying Clippers—the first trans-Pacific air service. In 1935, the U.S. Navy had worked a secret deal with Pan Am to significantly increase aviation fuel storage on Eastern Island and to have Pan Am service Navy PBYs that landed at the big seaplane ramp.
Before 7 December 1941, Midway had been practically defenseless. But it wasn’t anymore. At the very moment Fuchida’s aircraft were lifting off for Pearl Harbor, the Lexington had been delivering planes to the Marines assigned to protect Midway. Immediately afterward, the Navy took over the island and began to beef up its defenses.
By New Year’s Day, 1942, and for the next five months, Midway had a strong garrison of Marines equipped with anti-aircraft and coastal defense guns, a fighter squadron, and a scout-bomber squadron. Admiral Nimitz had given Midway all the troops, guns, and aircraft the atoll could hold until the runways and aprons were expanded and more barracks built.
Yamamoto tested the island’s defenses in late January, when one of his submarines surfaced and tried to take out Midway’s radio station with its deck gun. A Marine three-inch battery opened up and forced the sub to make a panicked dive just minutes after it had surfaced. There were two more sub attacks on the island during the next two weeks, with the same results.
On 1 March the two Marine air squadrons were melded into a new unit, dubbed Marine Air Group 22, and brought up to a full complement of sixty-four aircraft. The new group was formed from Fighter Squadron 221, flying antiquated, Navy cast-off F2A-3s, and Marine Scout Bombing Squadron 241, with hand-me-down Navy SB2U-3 Vindicators the Marines nicknamed “Vibrators” because the ancient engines were so ragged. Unfortunately, the Marine pilots assigned to fly the SB2s were fresh out of flight school and untrained in dive-bombing. So when they arrived on Midway they began practicing shallow-glide bombing attacks—a tactic that would prove to be lethal.
Airfield at Midway.
By 18 May 1942, Admiral Nimitz had done all he could with what he had available to improve Midway’s defenses. For more than a week, in the aftermath of the shootout in the Coral Sea, Commanders Edwin Layton and Joseph Rochefort had been telling him that they were “fairly sure” that the entire Imperial Combined Fleet was about to invade the place.
STATION HYPO
PAC FLEET SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE CENTER
OAHU, HAWAII
20 MAY 1942
On 5 May, as the battle in the Coral Sea was developing, an Australian radio intercept site—part of Rochefort’s “Magic” network—picked up and transcribed a long message in JN-25. The message was passed to Station Hypo still encrypted, but within two days, Rochefort’s code-breakers determined that it was an operations plan issued by Combined Fleet headquarters in Kure ordering an invasion of two widely separated U.S. installations.
By 10 May the team at Station Hypo had determined that the lightly defended U.S. bases on Adak, Attu, and Kiska in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands chain had been targeted for invasion.
A second target identified in the intercepted message was designated by the letters “AF” in the Japanese code. But the code books being so painstakingly assembled by Commanders Rochefort and Layton, Lt. Commander T. H. Dyer, and others in the Hypo bunker had no reference for “AF.” They simply did not know where it was—and yet, according to the Combined Fleet message, AF was to be attacked a day after the Aleutians. And what an attack it was planned to be!
Commander Joseph Rochefort
From the 5 May intercept and subsequent messages, the code-breakers determined that AF was to be struck by six heavy carriers, the Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu, Soryu, Shokaku, and Zuikaku, and the light carriers Hosho and Zuiho. Accompanying them were to be more than forty destroyers, fifteen submarines, seaplane tenders, and dozens of transports and support ships. After surprise air strikes to destroy U.S. aircraft on the ground, three cruisers and seven battleships would then bombard AF, including the biggest battleship in the world, the Yamato, Admiral Yamamoto’s flagship. After this “softening up,” AF would be assaulted and occupied by a force of 5,000 troops.
By 15 May, Nimitz had learned through other intercepts that the carrier Shokaku wouldn’t be at AF. She was at Truk undergoing extensive repairs from the damage sustained during the Coral Sea battle. And his intelligence officer had other intelligence that the Zuikaku wouldn’t make it to AF—wherever it was—because the carrier had lost most of its air group in the same battle.
But to Nimitz, the lack of these two carriers hardly mattered. The Japanese force headed for AF was the biggest naval armada ever assembled—145 ships—and he still didn’t know where they were going.
By 19 May, Layton and Rochefort were convinced that AF was Midway. But others, including many on his staff, thought it could be Darwin, Australia, mainland Alaska, or even Hawaii itself. Nimitz had to know. His only two operational carriers, the Hornet and the Enterprise, were in the South Pacific, east of Australia. The badly battered Yorktown had limped to Tonga near the Fiji Islands and was now headed slowly back to Pearl Harbor—with estimates that repairs from the damage sustained in the Coral Sea would take three months. Nimitz knew that if he put his carriers in the wrong place he could precipitate a disaster worse than the Day of Infamy.
Commander Edward Layton
That night, aware of his commander’s desperation, Rochefort devised a brilliant and devious scheme to trap the Japanese into revealing their target. Using the secure underwater cable between Oahu and Midway, he sent instructions to Marine Air Group 22 on Midway to broadcast a routine radio message “in the clear”—meaning unencrypted—that they were running short of fresh water. The Marines complied, broadcasting the innocuous message over their standard high-frequency “administrative & logistics” radio.
Fewer than twelve hours later, early on the morning of 20 May, an Australian intercept site transcribed a Combined Fleet coded message to Yamamoto informing him that a Japanese submarine had reported hearing a radio call: “The aviation unit on AF is running short of fresh water.”
Thanks to Station Hypo, Nimitz finally knew the target. And later that day, Rochefort’s code-breakers gave him another piece of vital but frightening information: the attacks were scheduled for 3 June in the Aleutians, and for 4 June on Midway.
Nimitz now knew the targets and the dates of attack. He correctly judged that the Aleutian invasion for the third was a deception designed by Yamamoto to draw U.S. forces away from Hawaii and Midway. And while Nimitz didn’t want to lose even another inch of American territory to the Japanese, the tiny islands of Adak, Attu, and Kiska were expendable compared with the strategically valuable Midway. If Yamamoto managed to seize the little atoll, Hawaii itself would be vulnerable, and with Japanese long-range land-based patrol aircraft and submarines operating from the Aleutians in the north Pacific and from Midway in the central Pacific, he would have only one way of striking back—through the narrow channels of the South Pacific islands. By the morning of 21 May there was no doubt in the mind of Chester Nimitz: He had to hold Midway. The only questions now were: How? And with what?
Japanese codebooks
The commander of the Pacific Fleet wasn’t one to waste time worrying. Nimitz ordered the Midway harbor and beaches mined and barbed wire emplaced. Seventeen Army Air Force B-17s—all he had to spare—were ordered to Midway. On 25 May, the seaplane tender Kitty Hawk delivered additional fighter planes and dive-bombers to the island, bringing the little airstrip up to a complement of sixty old Navy and Marine fighters and dive-bombers that had been taken off carrier duty, along with six new TBD torpedo planes—the first to reach the Pacific—twenty-three land-based bombers, and thirty-two of the new but untested Catalina PBY bombers.
He ordered the Hornet and the Enterprise to steam at flank speed back to Hawaii to refuel and re-arm so that they could get in position northeast of Midway to meet the onslaught. He dispatched every available submarine in the Pacific Fleet—nineteen in all—to screen the island’s western approaches. To ensure that the Japanese wouldn’t have a free ride in the Aleutians, he ordered several smaller bases evacuated and sent a surface force of five cruisers, fourteen destroyers, and six submarines under the command of Rear Admiral Robert A. Theobald to do their best at disrupting the Japanese landings in Alaska.
Meanwhile, as the Japanese Combined Fleet headed east, the battle-damaged USS Yorktown was making her way from Tonga to Pearl Harbor. Navy Aviation Mechanic Bill Surgi was still aboard.
AVIATION MECHANIC BILL SURGI, USN
Aboard the USS Yorktown
Pearl Harbor, Hawaii
27 May 1942
We went from the Coral Sea to Tonga to survey the damage. The Yorktown was pretty well shot up. We had near misses on the port side, which gave us an oil leak. After patching her up as well as we could with all hands working around the clock, we headed for Pearl. It took us over a week to get back, and the damage-control people and the engineers they flew down to Tonga estimated, “It’s gonna take ninety days to fix her.”
Well, we got to Pearl Harbor, working on her the whole way, and when we pulled into port, they never really repaired it. For all the shrapnel holes in the hull and the fuel and water tanks, they drilled wooden pegs of different sizes and shapes that would fit the holes and we drove them in with sledgehammers to make her watertight. In the spaces below decks where the bombs had gone off, they put in big timbers and welded beams across to shore up the decks and bulkheads. Nobody got shore leave like we usually did when we came into port. We had shipyard workers on board, and our working parties were going around the clock. Nobody slept.
To fix the holes that the bombs had made in the flight deck, they hoisted aboard big metal plates and we fastened them down with four big metal spikes, one in each corner. Then, after just three days, we got the word that we were going back out.
The ship was not what we call seaworthy, but the flight deck was operational. The Yorktown’s air group was still intact; the squadrons were brought up to full strength and everybody was on board. As we were leaving Pearl Harbor, the skipper comes over the ship’s address system and says, “We’re going to help out at Midway.”
PEARL HARBOR SHIPYARDS
OAHU, HAWAII
28 MAY 1942
Admiral “Bull” Halsey’s Task Force 16, composed of the USS Enterprise and USS Hornet and their escorts, arrived at Pearl Harbor on 26 May. The next day Task Force 17, with Admiral Fletcher shepherding the crippled USS Yorktown—trailing a miles-long oil slick—limped into Pearl for repairs. The damage assessment for fixing the Yorktown was ninety days. Halsey ordered them to make her ready for sea in three days. Working night and day, yard workers and the crew made repairs so that the carrier could launch and land aircraft again. They did it, and Nimitz came aboard to pronounce the vessel “ready for action” even though repairs continued as the ship sailed.
But when the Enterprise, the Hornet, and their screen of five heavy cruisers, one light cruiser, and nine destroyers constituting Task Force 16, sortied from Pearl Harbor en route to Midway on 28 May, Halsey wasn’t aboard. He had been taken to a hospital in Hawaii for a severe case of dermatitis—seemingly not a serious condition, but after months of combat at sea, it had become a problem for the hard-nosed admiral, keeping him from sleeping. The doctors ordered the tenacious commander to bed rest, and Rear Admiral Raymond A. Spruance took command of the two-carrier Task Force 16, while overall command was handed to Admiral Fletcher aboard the battered but bandaged Yorktown with Task Force 17.
The Yorktown left Pearl Harbor with Fletcher aboard on 29 May and rendezvoused with the Hornet and the Enterprise 150 miles northeast of Midway on 2 June.
The timing of the Americans’ departure from Pearl Harbor was impeccable. Though Yamamoto was fairly certain that Enterprise and Hornet were in the South Pacific, he had ordered Japanese submarines to be positioned in Hawaiian waters by 1 June to intercept any other carriers or major combatants that might have arrived from the U.S. mainland. If they couldn’t sink them, they were to at least warn the rest of the Combined Fleet if the Americans sailed when the Aleutians were attacked on 3 June. He also dispatched seaplanes from the Japanese-held Marshall Islands on 1, 2, and 3 June to scout Hawaii and carry out the same task. But neither the subs nor the scout planes arrived until well after the two American carrier task forces had already sailed. The Japanese, believing that they had sunk both the Yorktown and the Lexington in the Coral Sea battle—and now more convinced than ever that Halsey was still in the South Pacific with the Hornet and the Enterprise—thought they had nothing to fear as they closed in for a surprise attack on Midway.
USS Yorktown
Meanwhile, Station Hypo was in high gear. Layton and Rochefort’s team went two days straight without sleep, taking catnaps at their radio sets. Having provided the strategic intelligence Nimitz needed, they now wanted to give the commanders at sea good information on the tactical situation.
STATION HYPO
PAC FLEET SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE CENTER
OAHU, HAWAII
2 JUNE 1942
On 2 June, Rochefort’s code-breakers had cracked enough JN-25 messages that he was able to tell Layton the dispositions of the enormous Japanese fleet as it closed on Midway—including the intended sequence of attack from the seven different subordinate commands that Yamamoto had established for the operation. And as if the Navy at sea and the Marines at Midway needed any more motivation, the Station Hypo crew let the Americans lying in wait know that the first attack aimed at the atoll would be commanded by Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, heading the First Carrier Strike Force, the very man and unit that had devastated Pearl Harbor on 7 December.
But neither Yamamoto nor Nagumo had considered two important factors : One, they no longer held the element of surprise—American code-breakers had seen to that. And second, they misjudged the Americans’ response, thinking that Nimitz would race to defend the Aleutians with everything he had available out of some sense of “military honor.”
JNS YAMOTO, IMPERIAL COMBINED FLEET FLAGSHIP
700 MILES NORTHWEST OF MIDWAY ATOLL
3 JUNE 1942
1930 HOURS LOCAL
The Japanese struck the Aleutians right on the schedule that Rochefort’s code-breakers had predicted. Bombers from the Imperial Navy’s Second Carrier Strike Force attacked Dutch Harbor, the biggest target off the Alaskan mainland, and two Japanese invasion forces captured the tiny uninhabited islands of Attu and Kiska. Dutch Harbor suffered only moderate damage.
Yamamoto received word of Admiral Kakuta’s successful attack against Dutch Harbor and cautioned his forces to be on alert, certain that the Americans would deploy to protect their territory and that the “decisive engagement to destroy U.S. naval power in the Pacific” was just ahead in the waters around Midway. And, Yamamoto reasoned, once that battle was over, no one in Japan—not the emperor, not the politicians—need ever fear another embarrassment like the Doolittle Raid in April.
It was this event, more than anything else, that had led Tokyo to approve Yamamoto’s audacious plan. The desire to avenge the Doolittle attack—and ensure that nothing like it would ever happen again—had also clouded the Japanese High Command’s otherwise successful strategic and tactical judgment.
Until the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Japanese had applied sound strategic and tactical doctrine in their naval engagements. They had insisted on gathering good intelligence before committing to action, required the use of overwhelming force against their enemy, operated from relatively simple, understandable, and straightforward plans, concentrated their forces at the main point of attack, and mandated strict radio discipline to preserve the element of surprise.
But in the Coral Sea fight, the Japanese had split their forces—and suffered losses as a consequence. And now, as the Combined Fleet closed on Midway, Yamamoto had constructed an elaborate plan, splitting his force into seven separate groups with two objectives: the Aleutians and Midway. Either from arrogance or from fatigue, they had little good intelligence, a very complicated plan, and no radio discipline whatsoever.
Yet with all this, the sheer number of ships—145 in total, all with experienced crews and pilots, still gave him a powerful advantage over the U.S. Pacific Fleet. To carry out the mission of destroying the U.S. Navy in Japan’s ocean, Yamamoto had personally chosen the First Carrier Strike Force—Kido Butai—the same force that had led the attack on Pearl Harbor. These were the same indomitable Bushido warriors who had led the attack on the American base, the very same commanders and pilots who had been victorious in every encounter with Japan’s enemies, from the Hawaiian Islands to the Indian Ocean: Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo and Air Officer Mitsuo Fuchida.
Against all this, Nimitz could only muster the Marines on the ground at Midway and the Army, Navy, and Marine pilots based on the atoll; nineteen submarines with defective torpedoes; eight cruisers; eighteen destroyers; two battle-untested carriers—the Hornet and the Enterprise—and the battered hull and patched flight deck of the USS Yorktown. And, of course, the American pilots who would fly from those carrier decks.
USS ENTERPRISE
155 NAUTICAL MILES NORTH-NORTHEAST OF MIDWAY ATOLL
4 JUNE 1942
1045 HOURS LOCAL
At 0415 on 4 June 1942, the Marine air base on Eastern Island was still covered in predawn darkness but alive with the roar of PBY Catalina and Army Air Corps B-17 aircraft engines. The patrol pilots were given their orders: find the Japanese fleet some 200 to 250 miles northwest of Midway, just across the International Date Line, somewhere near 180° longitude and 39° latitude, and report their exact position. The B-17s were told to hit any capital ships they could find west of Midway.
Fifteen minutes later, 108 strike aircraft were launched from four of Admiral Nagumo’s First Strike Force carriers hiding in the fog banks 150 miles northwest of Midway—where the PBYs were heading. Nagumo gave the order for his carriers to close on Midway so that his pilots wouldn’t have to fly so far when they returned from destroying the sleeping Americans and their airfield.
At about the time Nagumo launched his first strike, the Midway-based B-17s, flown by inexperienced pilots and crews, spotted a group of Japanese support vessels and dropped their bombs, failing to score a single hit. Four of the Catalinas drew first blood in the fight by sinking a Japanese oiler, though. Hearing the report of the attack, Admiral Fletcher ordered search planes aloft from the Yorktown, hoping to pinpoint the rest of the Japanese fleet and get the word back to the American carriers.
Nearly two hours after the B-17s, Catalina bombers, and PBY search planes launched from Midway, the Japanese attackers arrived over the atoll, hoping to catch the Americans with their aircraft on the parking aprons, as they had at Pearl Harbor. But most of the U.S. Marine fighters, dive-bombers, and torpedo bombers of Marine Air Group 22 were already aloft.
The Japanese air attack was fierce, but the Marines on the ground were ready and responded with a furious anti-aircraft barrage. The Marines of VMF-221, however, flying combat air patrol in the old Brewster Buffalos, were cut to pieces by the far superior Japanese carrier-based planes. Two-thirds of the squadron was gone in five minutes of air-to-air combat. At 0645, ten minutes after it started, it was over. Only six Japanese aircraft had been downed, but when the leader of the Japanese strike made one last pass over the air base in the gathering daylight, he saw that their bombs had started a fuel tank fire and destroyed a hangar. It was what he didn’t see that alarmed him. There were only a few burning American airplanes on the ground—and worse, the runways were still intact. It would require another bombing attack. He headed back to his carrier to inform Admiral Nagumo to prepare another bombing run against Midway.
Meanwhile, a Midway-launched PBY spotted the Japanese carriers. Almost simultaneously, a Japanese scout plane found the Hornet and the Enterprise. Both pilots radioed back the locations to their respective fleets, and both the Japanese and American admirals prepared to attack each other’s ships.
With half his aircraft heading back from attacking Midway, Nagumo was beginning to fuel and arm his remaining planes with torpedoes and high-explosive bombs fused for an anti-shipping attack. Suddenly, two waves of Marine dive-bombers and torpedo bombers that had launched from Midway before the Japanese assault arrived overhead.
Though the Marine attacks were totally unsuccessful—no Japanese ships were hit—the attack by land-based aircraft convinced Nagumo that he first had to deal with the aircraft and runways on Midway before taking on the American carriers. He therefore ordered the armament on his planes changed back to ordnance for a ground attack. For almost an hour, there was chaos on the Japanese flight decks as pilots, plane crews, ordnance men, and deck handlers—already shaken by the violent maneuvers to avoid the American torpedo attacks—tried to comply with Nagumo’s order.
B-17s at Midway
In the midst of this confusion on the Japanese carriers, a second strike launched from Midway arrived overhead. Marine Major Lofton Henderson, with a flight of brand new Dauntless SBD dive-bombers, led the way, followed by Army Air Corps B-17s and more of the ancient Vindicators. The experienced Japanese gunners and fighter pilots made short work of this raid, but as the Akagi, Soryu, Hiryu, and Kaga jinked and turned, leaving snakelike wakes in the Pacific—maneuvering to avoid the Marine attackers and the U.S. Army B-17s—it was impossible for the Japanese crewmen on the flight and hangar decks to complete the ordnance changeover that Nagumo had ordered.
And then, to compound the problem Nagumo had created by ordering the ordnance change for a second strike at Midway, his combat air patrol aircraft and the planes he had sent on the first Midway attack showed up overhead, urgently needing to land before they ran out of fuel.
Once again Nagumo ordered the aircraft preparing to launch to be shuffled out of the way to clear his carrier decks. For the second time that morning, fatigued and confused Japanese crewmen started shutting down aircraft, pushing them aside, and lowering them, fully fueled and armed, into the hangar decks of his carriers.
At 0830, in the midst of this new round of turmoil and disorder on the Japanese carriers, the USS Nautilus stuck up her periscope and fired off two torpedoes, which did no damage but did instigate a furious half hour, as Japanese destroyers churned around, tossing depth charges while Nagumo’s carriers zigged and zagged—still making it impossible to launch or recover aircraft. Then the first of 155 U.S. Navy carrier aircraft appeared over Nagumo’s head. Spruance had launched every bomber from the Hornet and the Enterprise—holding back just the three dozen fighters of the Task Force 16 combat air patrol. Half an hour later, Fletcher had sent up six Wildcats, sixteen Devastators, and seventeen Dauntlesses from the Yorktown. Despite withering anti-aircraft fire and the swirling Zeros, the Navy Devastator torpedo pilots attacked first, skimming over the whitecaps in three waves, aiming for the Japanese carriers.
As they had with the Marine raiders from Midway, the Japanese gunners and pilots in their more maneuverable Zeros blasted plane after plane out of the sky. Not one of the Devastators’ “fish” found their mark. All fifteen of the Hornet’s TBDs of “Torpedo 8” were downed, as were ten of the fourteen launched by Enterprise. But the bravery of the torpedo bomber pilots was not wasted. Their low-level attack drew the Japanese combat air patrols down to the wave tops—making it impossible for their fighters to gain enough altitude to engage the Enterprise’s Dauntless dive-bombers, led by Lt. Commander Clarence McClusky, Jr., when they appeared over the Akagi and the Kaga at 1025.
At almost the same moment, the Yorktown’s aircraft found the Soryu. The Yorktown’s torpedo bombers fared no better than those of the Enterprise or the Hornet, but the American dive-bombers scored hits on the decks of all three ships among the clutter of Japanese planes that were being fueled and re-armed. Not one of the U.S. Navy dive-bombers was engaged by a Japanese fighter until after it had dropped its bombs. In under six minutes, all three of the Japanese carriers were hit and awash in burning fuel, an inferno that spread as aircraft with live ordnance caught fire and exploded on the flight and hangar decks.
By 1030 on 4 June, the entire balance of naval power in the Pacific had shifted dramatically. Three of Japan’s biggest carriers were fiery wrecks heading for the ocean floor. Hundreds of the best pilots in the Japanese navy were perishing in the flames, and scores more would die before the day was done, for the battle was not yet over.
Lewis Hopkins was a twenty-three-year-old ensign from Georgia, flying a Douglas Dauntless SBD dive-bomber from the deck of the USS Enterprise during the Battle of Midway. To Hopkins and his squadron-mates, the initials SBD stood for “Slow But Deadly.” He recalls hoping that the planes would live up to the second part of their name on 4 June 1942.
ENSIGN LEWIS HOPKINS, USN
Aboard the USS Enterprise
155 Miles Northeast of Midway
4 June 1942
1050 Hours Local
The best thing about the SBD was that it was built for its mission capability—meaning it could do the job for which it was designed. As far as I’m concerned, there never was a better dive-bomber designed or built than the SBD.
On the morning of 4 June, we got up at three o’clock in the morning, went to breakfast in the pilots’ wardroom, and pushed the eggs around the plate.
We had been told the night before that we would be attacking the Japanese fleet in the morning, and I thought about this being the first time I’d ever carried a live bomb. We launched at about 0720 in the morning and headed southwest to where the Japanese carriers were reported sighted.
Well, we got to where they were supposed to be at about 0920, and they weren’t there. So Lt. Commander McClusky, the flight leader, signals us that we’ll continue to search for another fifteen minutes. All the other ensigns and I are looking at our navigation plotting boards in our cockpits and thinking, “Hey, I’m going to be short of fuel! How am I gonna get us back?”
We made a box-pattern search—a series of right-hand turns—and then we saw smoke off in the distance. It was from all the firing that they were doing against our torpedo bombers. At 1020 we arrived over the Japanese fleet and the signal was given to attack.
We dove at 300 miles an hour from 22,000 feet down to 2,500 feet in forty-two seconds. When each SBD was right overhead, it would release its bombs. The ship was the carrier Akagi, and by the time I made my run, she was on fire and dead in the water, with people abandoning ship and jumping into the water all around. That didn’t stop us from dropping more bombs on it. This was one of the ships that had bombed Pearl Harbor.
As I pulled up from dropping my bomb, I was attacked by a Japanese fighter plane, so I had to take all the evasive maneuvers I ever learned. But after I shook the Zero, I looked back and could see three carriers—all of them with explosions on their decks and burning from bow to stern.
It was all over in just minutes.
None of us could look for long, though. We were all really low on fuel and had to think about getting back to the Enterprise.
ABOARD USS YORKTOWN
175 MILES NORTH OF MIDWAY
4 JUNE 1942
1205 HOURS LOCAL
The hair-raising battle wasn’t over yet. The USS Yorktown was the farthest from the Japanese fleet and the last of the three carriers to launch its strikes. It was only because the Yorktown’s squadrons flew a more direct route to their targets that they had hit the Soryu at the same time that Ensign Lewis Hopkins and his shipmates from the Enterprise were attacking the Kaga and the Akagi. And unfortunately for Rear Admiral Jack Fletcher and the Yorktown , his were the last aircraft to leave the area where the three Japanese carriers were on fire.
As his aircraft returned with stories of three Japanese carriers sunk, Admiral Fletcher had cause for concern. He knew from Station Hypo intercepts that there were four big carriers in Admiral Nagumo’s force—so there was a very strong likelihood that aircraft from the surviving carrier might have followed his aircraft home. If that was the case, the Yorktown was in trouble. She and her Task Force 17 escorts were closer now to the Hornet and the Enterprise, but if they had to run for it, Yorktown, with her Coral Sea damage, wouldn’t be able to keep up.
Fletcher’s concerns were valid. At 1000—while the American aircraft were en route to attack the Akagi, the Soryu, and the Kaga—the undamaged Hiryu had launched eighteen bombers escorted by six fighters. At 1100, while her three sister carriers were burning, the Hiryu also launched ten torpedo bombers and six more fighters. The bombers must have seen the Yorktown’s SBDs heading back to the east, for at 1205, while Fletcher was refueling the Yorktown’s combat air patrol, the ship’s radar detected the Hiryu’s planes fifty miles out and closing.
While the Yorktown hastily launched the planes on deck and waved away the bombers returning from the attack on the Soryu, Fletcher called for help. Fighters from the Enterprise and the Hornet joined his—making a twenty-eight-plane combat air patrol—and they headed west to intercept the attackers. Only eight of the Japanese aircraft succeeded in getting through to the Yorktown, but three of their bombs hit home. One blew another hole in her patched flight deck, a second detonated deep inside, causing flooding, and the third knocked out her boilers.
Despite the new damage, the Yorktown was under way again, making twenty knots, when the Hiryu torpedo bombers came skimming over the waves at 1425. Two of the Japanese torpedoes struck her amidships on the port side, and she immediately lost power and took a twenty-degree list to port. With fires raging belowdecks and without power for her pumps or generators, her list increased to twenty-six degrees, and the ship was in imminent danger of capsizing. Her skipper, Captain Elliott Buckmaster, ordered abandon ship.
Admiral Fletcher shifted his flag to the cruiser Astoria and turned over tactical command of the two task forces to Admiral Spruance. Many of Yorktown’s aircraft were able to make it to Midway or to the deck of one of the other two American carriers.
As for the crew of the Yorktown, it was the second time in a month that their ship had taken a terrible beating from the Japanese. To Bill Surgi, it felt like déjà vu.
AVIATION MECHANIC BILL SURGI, USN
USS Yorktown
150 Miles North of Midway
4 June 1942
1500 Hours Local
The first attack came at about noon, from Japanese dive-bombers. The anti-aircraft fire was fierce but a few planes got through and they hit us with three bombs. The first one hit on the flight deck and blew a big hole in it. A second bomb went through the flight deck and started a small fire belowdecks, but the third bomb went down the stack and exploded in the same vicinity where we’d been hit before. This one did the most damage; it blew down bulkheads and opened up a space inside about the size of a stadium.
But as bad as we were hit, we had her back in business in under two hours. The fires belowdeck were mostly out, and we patched the flight deck again and then got the fires in the boilers going. We were under way and launching and recovering aircraft when the second Japanese attack came in about 1430. This time it was torpedoes and they both hit right under me.
The detonation was so big it threw me straight up into the overhead. If I hadn’t been wearing my steel helmet, it would have splattered me all over the overhead. But even so, it knocked me unconscious and when I came to I was covered with water and oil—I guess from some ruptured pipes.
By the time I’m able to get up and move around, the ship has a really bad list and is dead in the water. A few minutes later, the captain passes the word to abandon ship. Even though there were lots of guys hurt, it went much better than I thought it would. It was all very orderly. I put on a life jacket and went down the side on a rope—or maybe it was a rope ladder—and grabbed hold of a net on a life raft. I was only in the water a little while when a destroyer came up beside us and threw a net over the side for us to climb up. So I grabbed that net and there was no way I was going to let go.
ABOARD USS ENTERPRISE
45 MILES EAST OF MIDWAY
4 JUNE 1942
2030 HOURS LOCAL
At 1700 hours, twenty-four dive-bombers from the Enterprise and the Yorktown found the Hiryu about a hundred nautical miles west-northwest of the two remaining American carriers. The crew of the Japanese carrier, exhausted from a full day’s fighting, had just started to eat when the first of four Dauntless bombs struck the carrier, instantly igniting an aviation gasoline tank on the hangar deck. The ship went up like a torch. By 1930 the Kaga and the Soryu were on the bottom.
Aboard the Enterprise, Admiral Spruance ordered the Yorktown’s escorts to join the screen for the Enterprise and the Hornet, and then headed east to avoid a surface engagement with Yamamoto’s battleships and cruisers.
AFTERMATH
As darkness fell on 4 June, as Admiral Spruance withdrew to the east, Yamamoto canceled the order to take Midway and turned toward Japan with the entire Japanese Combined Fleet, taking advantage of the few remaining hours of darkness.
Japanese aircraft carrier AKAGI
When dawn broke on 5 June, the severely damaged Yorktown was still afloat. But Japanese destroyers sank their own Akagi and Hiryu with torpedoes just after first light. Admiral Nimitz, hopeful that Yorktown could make it back to Pearl Harbor’s dry dock for repairs, ordered the vessel taken under tow.
Later that day, two Japanese cruisers, the Mikuma and the Mogami, collided, trying to avoid torpedoes fired from an American submarine. On 6 June, aircraft from the Enterprise and the Hornet attacked these same two cruisers, still dead in the water. The Mikuma was sunk, but the Mogami managed to stay afloat and escape to Japan for repairs.
That same day the Japanese submarine I-168 found the Yorktown as she was being towed slowly toward Hawaii. The destroyer Hammann had been lashed to the carrier’s starboard bow to provide power and firefighting foam for damage-control parties struggling to save the vessel. When the I-168 fired a spread of four torpedoes at the damaged carrier, one of them struck the Hammann and she sank at once, taking most of her crew down with her.
The Yorktown stayed afloat until early on 7 June, when she finally succumbed and went down. When Yamamoto and Nimitz added up their gains and losses, the score looked like this:
|
Japanese Losses |
U.S. Losses |
|
4 carriers |
1 carrier |
|
1 heavy cruiser |
1 destroyer |
|
322 aircraft |
147 aircraft |
|
3,500 lives |
307 lives |