The Battle of Midway (30 page)

The Japanese light carrier
Sh
ō
h
ō
on fire and sinking in the Battle of the Coral Sea on May 7, 1942. (U.S. Naval Institute)

Fletcher gave some thought to ordering a second strike aimed at the other ships in the invasion fleet, but launching a strike after 2:00 in the afternoon meant that the attack planes would have to return in the dark. Besides, the remaining Japanese carriers were still out there somewhere and had not been located. Finally, given the activity of several Japanese “snoopers” in the last few hours, there was a good chance that Task Force 17 could soon expect an attack of its own. He decided to retire southward and await more information. That decision did not sit well with Lieutenant Forrest Biard, one of Rochefort’s Hypo analysts, who had been placed on board the
Yorktown
as a Japanese linguist, to intercept and translate messages sent in the clear. Biard worked in a small radio shack adjacent to Fletcher’s command post at flag plot, where he listened to the Japanese radio traffic and reported directly to Fletcher. The easygoing Fletcher and the intense and abrasive Biard did not get along well. Though Biard insisted passionately that the Japanese carriers were off to the east and within range, he could not provide a bearing or a distance, and he failed to convince Fletcher to launch.
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At 5:47 p.m., the radar on the
Yorktown
picked up a number of bogeys, and the Americans scrambled more fighters to join the CAP already circling above the task force. Altogether, the two carriers were able to put thirty fighters in the air to meet an incoming attack by twenty-seven bombers and fighters. In fact, the attackers had no idea that the American carriers were there. Despite the snoopers, the
Yorktown
and
Lexington
remained hidden under heavy cloud cover. Instead, Hara had sent this late-afternoon strike toward the reported position of those “battleships” off the Jomard Passage, which Takagi believed also included a carrier. Crace’s cruisers had been the recipients of an attack by land-based Japanese bombers that afternoon; now Hara’s carrier planes sought to find them as well. The Japanese bombers were flying low amid the clouds and in the growing darkness and not expecting to find carrier-based fighters in their flight path. When the American Wildcats came screaming down on them from 5,000 feet, they were thrown into confusion. One excited Japanese pilot reported, “Enemy
fighters have completely destroyed the attack group.” This was an exaggeration, but the Americans did shoot down seven planes and damaged two others. The rest fled.
²⁵

Or at least they tried to. As dusk turned to full dark around 6:30 p.m., the
Lexington
and
Yorktown
were recovering the fighters that had driven off this ill-fated sortie when several unidentified planes flew past the
Yorktown
with their running lights on and began flashing messages in code. It was not a code that anyone on the
Yorktown
recognized. Then the planes swung around and entered the landing pattern, as if preparing to come aboard. By now it was evident that these were hostile planes whose pilots had mistaken the
Yorktown
for one of their own. A few of the American escorts opened fire, and then the
Yorktown
’s own antiaircraft guns joined in, sending a curtain of ordnance into the group of circling planes, both friendly and hostile. When that happened, Ted Sherman recalled, “aircraft disappeared into the darkness like a flock of birds flushed by hunters.” Twenty-three-year-old Ensign Richard Wright was startled to see tracers from his own ship fly past the cockpit of his Wildcat fighter. He insisted that “some of those tracers came between my face and the instrument panel,” and he shouted into his transmitter, “What are you shooting at me for?” As the Japanese planes fled, so did the American pilots, including Wright. One of them, Ensign John D. Baker, was subsequently unable to find his way back again in the dark. Pete Pederson, the
Yorktown’s
air group commander acting as fighter control director, watched Baker’s blip on radar and radioed him a course to follow to get back, but Baker never answered and was never seen again. When Pederson could not raise him on the radio, he wept.
²⁶

That Japanese planes would mistake the
Yorktown
for one of their own carriers suggested that their flattops might not be far off. Those manning the radar on the
Yorktown
watched as the blips representing the surviving Japanese planes retired eastward. A few of them began to circle only about thirty miles away before disappearing off the screen, as if they were landing. That led some to surmise that the Japanese carriers might be very close indeed. It was too dark now for an air mission, but Fletcher toyed with the idea of sending his cruisers and destroyers for a night surface attack. The problem was that the location of the Japanese carriers was only speculative,
and if it were incorrect, dawn would find his surface ships well off to the east—sitting ducks for a Japanese air strike. Then, too, a high-speed run to the east would use up a lot of fuel, an important consideration now with the
Neosho
smashed and no other tanker expected until May 13. Once again, Fletcher decided to wait for more information. Despite subsequent criticism, it was the correct decision, for in fact the Japanese planes had
not
been landing; they were lost. Many never did find their host carrier. Of the twenty-seven planes Hara had sent out, only eighteen managed to return to their own ships, which were, in fact, more than a hundred miles northeast of Task Force 17.
²⁷

On the whole, May 7 had been a good day for the American pilots. They had sunk the
Sh
ō
h
ō
in a textbook attack and shot down a total of nineteen planes while losing only three bombers and three fighters of their own. For his part, Admiral Hara was devastated. He felt that he had been unlucky in not finding the Americans first. He was so frustrated that, as he said later, he “felt like quitting the navy.” The Americans were as elated as Hara was despondent. As Bill Burch put it, “Despite the pounding we had given them on former occasions, we all felt that this, our first opportunity to try our punch against a major unit of the enemy fleet, was our compensation for the years of training and the weary months of steaming over trackless tropic seas.” It was, however, only the prologue.
²⁸

The next day, the opposing carrier forces finally found one another. As they had the day before, both sides sent out pre-dawn air searches. The first sighting of the day came from Lieutenant Junior Grade Joseph Smith flying a Dauntless from the
Yorktown
. He reported sighting “Two carriers, two battleships.” Then, before he could complete the report, his radio cut out. Nevertheless, Fletcher knew what sector Smith had been searching, and at 9:08 he turned tactical command over to Fitch, who ordered a full strike by seventy-five airplanes. The location of the target was confirmed a half hour later by Bob Dixon, who had sent the “Scratch one flattop” report the day before, and who was searching the sector next to Smith’s. He flew over to Smith’s area and was able to complete the report: “Two carriers, two battleships, four heavy cruisers, several destroyers, 170 miles to the northwest.”
The actual distance was closer to two hundred miles, but luckily for the Americans, Hara was steaming toward them as fast as he could go. He, too, had received a sighting report from his patrol planes, and at 9:15, he sent sixty-nine planes to attack Fletcher. En route to the target, flying at 17,500 feet, Bill Burch looked down and saw the Japanese attack force below him headed in the other direction.
²⁹

The
Yorktown
dive-bombers arrived over the Japanese carrier force at 10:32. Hara’s two carriers were about eight miles apart, one ahead of the other, steaming at high speed almost due south toward the American task force. The lead carrier
(Zuikaku
) was about to enter a cloud, but the trailing carrier
(Sh
ō
kaku
) was in the open. The dive-bomber pilots were eager to strike, but they waited for the slower torpedo planes to arrive so that they could conduct the kind of coordinated attack that had proved so successful the day before. While they waited, they could see Japanese fighters taking off from the
Sh
ō
kaku
and begin climbing up from sea level. It was agonizing to watch, Johnny Neilsen remembered. “We sat up there 20 minutes waiting for those torpedo planes, watching the Zeros climbing up toward us.” Worse, all that time, the lead carrier was getting closer to the protective cover of the weather front.
³⁰

Finally, around 11:00, the torpedo planes arrived. Burch waved his arm and waggled his ailerons as a signal, and peeled over into a dive. The Japanese Zeros circled and waited, making side runs at the bombers as they flew past. Burch and the other bombers had been almost directly above the
Sh
ō
kaku
, and they dove nearly vertically, their planes corkscrewing as they plunged downward. As Burch passed through a thermal layer at about 8,000 feet, his windscreen fogged up so badly he couldn’t see at all. He tried sticking his head out of the cockpit; though at 250 knots that was impossible. Meanwhile, the carrier turned and twisted so that, instead of making a bombing run along her length, he had to attack from abeam, which gave him a much narrower target. As a result, the
Yorktown
bombers made only two hits. One of them was by Lieutenant John J. Powers, who had sworn before he left the
Yorktown
that morning that he was going to lay his bomb on the flight deck of a Jap carrier. Powers kept his Dauntless in a full dive until he was barely five hundred feet from the target before releasing his
bomb. His plane was destroyed by the ensuing blast. He was subsequently awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor.
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Meanwhile Joe Taylor’s Devastators dropped down to fifty feet for their torpedo attack. The Wildcat fighters drove off the first assault by six Zeros, but this time there were more Zeros than Wildcats. Their fire was so heavy that Taylor thought the bullets striking his plane “sounded like rain on the roof.” As a result, most of the torpedo bombers dropped their fish from too great a distance. Though the pilots reported making four hits, this was wishful thinking. One problem was that because the American torpedoes ran at only 33.5 knots; the 34-knot
Sh
ō
kaku
could simply outrun them.
³²

The
Lexington
strike force, arriving later, had even less luck. By now the
Zuikaku
had made it under the cover of the weather front and only the
Sh
ō
kaku
was visible. Moreover, amid the thickening weather there was a lot of confusion, and most of the
Lexington
’s bombers never found a target at all. Those that did encountered a sky full of Japanese fighters and cloud bursts from antiaircraft fire. “It was an incredible scramble,” one pilot recalled. “People yelling over the radio, mixed up, and you never knew who the hell was on top of whom.” In the end, only four bombers from the
Lexington
dove on the
Sh
ō
kaku
, and only one got a hit. The American pilots reported a total of six hits, but the
Sh
ō
kaku
was actually hit only three times, though all three were by 1,000-pound bombs, which damaged her deck so badly that she could no longer launch or recover airplanes. After that, Takagi decided to send her northward, out of the fight. Hara directed the planes from the
Sh
ō
kaku
that were still airborne to land on the
Zuikaku
, which had escaped entirely.
³³