The Battle of Midway (49 page)

Before they had taken off that morning, Huntington had suggested putting the plane’s life raft in the empty middle seat just in case. Now, as Gay flailed in the water, trying not to swallow too much of it, that raft and the seat cushion floated past him. He grabbed both of them. He threw off his goggles, fearing that the glass lenses would reflect in the bright morning sun and attract the attention of the circling Zeros, and decided not to inflate the raft until later since its bright orange color would also draw their attention. He pulled the seat cushion over his head and treaded water as the Zeros continued to circle for a few minutes, then left.
¹¹

On board the
Akagi
, Nagumo could feel pleased that yet another American air attack had been shattered—indeed, annihilated—and once again with no damage to his own force. On the other hand, Nagumo had to suspect that these fifteen torpedo bombers had come from a carrier, which meant that the American carriers were now within range and knew where he was. There was no time for detailed consideration of that, however, for no sooner had the Zeros splashed the last plane of this group than another
group showed up, this one flying in from the south. If nothing else, these Americans were persistent.

The planes of Gene Lindsay’s Torpedo Six on the flight deck of the
Enterprise
on the morning of June 4. Only four of the planes seen here returned from the strike. (U.S. Navy)

The new attack came from the torpedo squadron on the
Enterprise
(VT-6), led by 37-year-old Lieutenant Commander Eugene Lindsey, a thin-faced 1927 Naval Academy classmate of Pat Mitchell. Lindsey was a natural pilot who found flying a lot like gymnastics or diving, sports at which he had excelled at the Academy. That morning, however, there had been some doubt about whether or not he could fly at all. Six days earlier, in the flight out to the
Enterprise
after it left Pearl Harbor, Lindsey had come in too low and his left wing had clipped the big carrier’s stern ramp. His plane skidded across the deck and went over the side. Lindsey and his two crewmen were picked up by the destroyer
Monaghan
, which was acting as plane guard that day. The two crewmen were fine, but Lindsey was badly injured and confined
to sick bay; for a while the doctors feared that he had broken his back. On June 4 he was still in some pain, and his face was so swollen he couldn’t put on his goggles. When the air group commander, Wade McClusky, sat down at breakfast that morning, he was shocked when Gene Lindsey sat down next to him. McClusky asked him if could fly, and Lindsey answered, “This is what I have been trained to do.”
¹²

Like Waldron’s torpedo squadron from
Hornet
, Lindsey’s group was the last to take off from its host carrier that morning, and, like Waldron’s, it was the first of its air group to attack the Kid
ō
Butai. The circumstances, however, were very different. While Waldron had deliberately abandoned his air group commander, Lindsey had been left behind by his.

As on the
Hornet
, there were a few false starts on the
Enterprise
that morning as pilots were sent running to their aircraft more than once only to be recalled again a few minutes later. Wade McClusky remembered Spruance and Browning having a “heated discussion” about when to launch. Finally, at 7:00, Spruance gave the go order, and planes began to lift off a few minutes later. Browning mandated a deferred departure for the
Enterprise
air group as he had for the
Hornet
, but it didn’t work out that way. The eight Wildcats of the morning CAP began launching at 7:05. The Dauntless dive-bombers of Earl Gallaher’s VS-6 and Dick Best’s VB-6 were already spotted for takeoff, but as they warmed up, four of them developed engine problems and had to be struck below. This entailed manhandling them up to the forward elevator and lowering them down to the hangar deck.
¹³

There were other delays. Ordinarily, the deck crew would have begun bringing up the planes of the second deck load via the rear elevator while the last of the dive-bombers were launching forward. But the bombers of Best’s VB-6, each lugging a 1,000-pound bomb, needed a full deck run to get aloft, so the crew did not start bringing up the fighters and torpedo bombers for the second deck load until after the last of the dive-bombers was aloft. It took twenty minutes to bring up the ten Wildcats of VF-6 (via the forward elevator) and Lem Massey’s fourteen Devastators (via the rear elevator). The Wildcats launched without mishap, but then one of the torpedo bombers had engine trouble, and though it was eventually fixed, that, too, took time.
¹⁴

By 7:45, Spruance had run out of patience. Five minutes earlier, Gil Slonim, his radio intelligence officer, had reported that he had picked up a contact report from a Japanese snooper—almost certainly Petty Officer Amari in the
Tone
’s number 4 scout plane. Soon, the enemy would know where they were. Time was running out. Sensitive to the fact that he was not a naval aviator, Spruance had so far declined to interfere in the management of air operations. Nonetheless, deciding that enough was enough, he ordered that McClusky be sent a message by flashing light to “proceed on mission assigned.” It was the right decision. Had McClusky and the thirty-two other dive-bombers of VS-6 and VB-6 continued to circle and wait for the torpedo planes, they very likely would not have had enough fuel left to conduct a search at the end of their flight, a search that eventually proved decisive.
¹⁵

Of course, that decision also meant that McClusky’s dive-bombers headed off to the southwest while Lindsey’s big torpedo planes were still on the flight deck. By the time Lindsey got his fourteen planes into the air and headed off to find the Japanese, the dive-bombers were beyond sight, and Lindsey set his own course.

When McClusky’s dive-bombers flew off to the southwest on a course of 231 degrees, the Wildcats did not go with them; unlike Mitscher, Browning wanted the fighters to stay on top of the Devastators. The CO of VF-6, James S. Gray, was only six years out of the Naval Academy and, at age 27, the youngest of the squadron commanders. He recalled Browning telling him that his fighters should “go to high altitude so they could come down to the torpedo planes’ defense if they gave a signal.” Gray went to see Lindsey’s second in command, Lieutenant Arthur Ely, and the two of them agreed that if the torpedo bombers needed support, Lindsey or Ely would simply radio, “Come on down, Jim,” and Gray would dive from altitude to assail the attacking Zeros.
¹⁶

Because of the delay in launching the torpedo bombers, however, Gray’s Wildcats were halfway up to 22,000 feet by the time Lindsey’s squadron of fourteen planes got airborne. As with Mitchell’s squadron, that climb to altitude used up a lot of gas, a fact that would play an important role later. Now, however, looking down from about two miles above, with patchy
cloud cover in between, Gray had an imperfect view of what was going on with the task force. He saw a torpedo squadron below him, lost it for a while under the overcast, then found it again, and followed it, weaving back and forth so as not to overrun it as he continued to climb. What he did not know was that he had picked up not Gene Lindsey’s VT-6 but John Waldron’s VT-8.
¹⁷

The whole time that Torpedo Squadron Eight was being annihilated by the Japanese Zeros, American fighter cover was nearby and available. Four miles above Waldron and a few miles to the northeast, Gray’s squadron of ten Wildcats circled slowly overhead waiting for a call from below. Gray saw the fifteen torpedo planes enter a cloudbank ten miles out from the carrier force and assumed that there was no call for help because the torpedo bombers were using the clouds to conceal their approach. Besides, he was also waiting for the arrival of McClusky’s dive-bombing group. Though Waldron left his radio on throughout the subsequent fight, and his various calls were picked up not only by the planes in his own squadron but also by at least some of those in Ring’s group eighty miles away, neither Gray nor anyone else in his fighter squadron heard anything. As Gray wrote in his after-action report, “Prearranged distress signal from torpedo planes was not given.” Gray was convinced that it was not a radio problem. “Our radios were working perfectly on this flight,” he wrote in 1963. “There wasn’t one peep from any of them [Waldron’s planes] during their run in.” Of course Waldron knew nothing about a prearranged signal because Gray and Waldron were from different carriers, which also meant that they were using different radio frequencies. As a result, Gray and his fighters circled uselessly above the Kid
ō
Butai for most of an hour (9:10 to 10:05) while the Japanese methodically shot down all of Waldron’s planes.
¹⁸

Meanwhile, Gene Lindsey’s group of torpedo bombers was approaching the target from the south. Lindsey might have missed the Kid
ō
Butai altogether, because he had selected a course that took him just to the south of it. (Wade McClusky, as it turned out, took a course even further south.) What turned Lindsey toward the target was the black smoke that
Tone
and
Chikuma
had generated to signal Nagumo that they had spotted Waldron’s planes. Thus, indirectly, Waldron did manage to lead other squadrons to the target. At about 9:30, Lindsey saw the smoke over his starboard wing and turned his squadron northward. Ten minutes later, about when the last of Waldron’s planes was spinning into the sea, Lindsey ordered his squadron to separate into two seven-plane sections in order to conduct an anvil attack on the southernmost Japanese carrier, the
Kaga.
¹⁹

The ships of the Kid
ō
Butai had changed course from north to west to present their sterns to Waldron’s attack, and now with Lindsey’s approach from the south, they turned north again so that Lindsey, like Waldron, had to overtake a force that was steaming away from him. A few minutes after 10:00, Lindsey took seven planes out to the left; Ely took the other seven off to the right. Lindsey also radioed Jim Gray to “come on down,” but though Lindsey and Gray
were
on the same radio frequency, Gray either did not hear the call or did not respond. One fellow pilot characterized Gray as “a L’il Abner type,” by which he meant that he was “big, dark, and … a little square.” But he was no coward. This was the same man who had led a section of five Wildcats against a Japanese airfield on Taroa back in February. When the guns had jammed on all the planes except his, Gray had completed his mission alone while under attack by eight Japanese fighters, returning to the
Enterprise
with more than forty bullet holes in his plane. On this occasion, though, he believed he had to choose between diving down to join the attack on the Kid
ō
Butai and saving his own command.
²⁰

The reason was fuel. By now, Gray’s Wildcats were perilously low on gas. The heavier Dash 4 Wildcats, issued to them in Pearl Harbor just before Task Force 16 departed for Point Luck, burned up gas much faster than the older Dash 3 models, and the climb to altitude had used up a lot of it. McInerny and the Wildcats of VF-8, which had launched at about the same time, had turned back toward the
Hornet
an hour before for the same reason. Gray had stayed at altitude, waiting for the dive-bombers under Mc-Clusky to show up. When they didn’t, he had to choose between diving down to engage the Zeros and perhaps strafe the carriers or heading home to refuel. Gray later justified his decision not to join the fight by insisting that his planes were simply incapable of doing so. “In a dogfight,” he wrote, “throttles are ‘two blocked’ at full, and propeller revolutions are at high R.P.M. Under this kind of demand, gasoline disappears as though there is
a hole in the tank. We simply were now without that capability.” Years later, Gray explained his dilemma to a group of Midway veterans. “If I went down to mix it up,” he said, “all of us would have landed [in the water] out of gas, I had enough gas to get home, nothing more. So I elected to go home and refuel.” He sent two messages back to the task force, one a sighting report describing the target as including two carriers, two battleships, and eight destroyers, thus perpetuating the notion that the Japanese might be operating in two carrier groups, and another, a few minutes later, announcing that he was “returning to the ship due to the lack of gas.”
²¹
*