The Battle of Midway (50 page)

While Gray led his fighters back toward the
Enterprise
, Lindsey’s Devastator pilots, like Waldron’s, flew low and slow toward the Kid
ō
Butai without fighter cover. The pilots of Torpedo Six, however, had three advantages that Waldron’s men did not. The first was that Lindsey’s pilots were mostly experienced veterans, having participated in several previous missions. They also benefited from the fact that when they flew in from the south, the Japanese Zeros were a dozen miles away, north and east of the Kid
ō
Butai, finishing off the last of Waldron’s planes, and it took them several crucial minutes to hurry back southward to fend off this new attack. Most important of all, however, was that many of the Zero pilots had used up much of their 20 mm cannon shells in smashing Waldron’s squadron. Each Zero carried only sixty rounds of this heavy ammunition, and once it was gone, they had only their light (7.7 mm) machine guns.

The arriving Zeros found Ely’s section first. Using the tactics that had worked so well against Waldron, they scissored back and forth over the Americans, making side runs in pairs. One of the surviving American pilots recalled that the Zeros attacked “from overhead and rear,” but that the attacks “were not pressed home in face of free gun fire” from the American
backseat gunners. Nevertheless, one by one, the American torpedo planes began smoking and headed for the water. One exploded spectacularly when a 20 mm cannon shell detonated its torpedo. Soon, only two of Ely’s seven planes were still aloft. Those two got close enough to drop their torpedoes, and despite heavy damage they turned and headed for home. The Zeros let them go and turned on Lindsey’s section. By now, few of the Zeros had any 20 mm cannon shells left, and they had to rely on their machine guns. The American Devastators were struck again and again, and four of them, including Lindsey’s, succumbed, but the American gunners were firing too and claimed at least one Zero. The three Devastators that survived this onslaught successfully launched their torpedoes. For all that effort and sacrifice, however, none of the American torpedoes found its mark. By 10:15, the five planes that had survived the strike, all of them shot through with dozens of 7.7 mm rounds, headed back for the
Enterprise.
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Four of them made it; one of them was so riddled with bullet holes that the air crews simply pushed it over the side the next day. A fifth plane, that of Machinist Albert W. Winchell, an enlisted pilot, and his backseat gunner, Aviation Radioman Third Class Douglas M. Cossett, didn’t get back at all. Their engine began to labor and vibrate, and Winchell realized he was losing power. He elected to land in the water. The two men scrambled into their little raft. Like Mitchell and the fighter pilots of VF-8, they battled sharks, sunburn, dehydration, and starvation while waiting to be found. For the first few days, whenever a distant plane flew past without sighting them, Winchell would shake his fist and say, “All right you bastards, see if I buy you a drink at the O Club.” Soon it wasn’t funny any more. After twelve days, they saw a submarine and signaled frantically until they saw that it was Japanese. Then they stopped waving and sat quietly in their raft, waiting to see what the sub would do. It came near and stopped. Members of its crew came out on deck to look at them for a few moments, then, apparently deciding that the Americans were not valuable enough to capture, and not worth shooting, they went below. The sub turned and moved away. After seventeen days of surviving on rainwater and an albatross that they had managed to catch and eat raw, they were picked up on June 21 by a PBY that had spotted their orange raft.
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Once again, Nagumo’s Zeros had fought off a determined and courageous attack by American torpedo bombers, and once again the Americans had scored no hits. Nagumo may have been more relieved than exultant. He still had to rotate his CAP, refuel and resupply the Zeros with 20 mm ammunition, and complete the rearming of his strike force. But instead of a respite, there came another attack by yet another American torpedo squadron. This time it was twelve Devastators from the
Yorktown
under Lieutenant Commander Lance “Lem” Massey.

After ordering Spruance to attack at 6:07 that morning, Fletcher had continued steaming eastward with the
Yorktown
task force until he recovered the ten planes of the morning search. He had hoped that by then the patrolling PBYs might have found the two missing carriers of the Kid
ō
Butai, but there was still no word beyond Ady’s initial sighting of “two carriers and two battleships.” Nimitz had received a number of combat reports from the Midway planes that had attacked the Kid
ō
Butai; none of them had indicated that there were more than two enemy carriers at the target location, and, as a result, the information that all four Japanese carriers were operating together never reached the task force commanders. Even now, as Fletcher steamed toward the known target to close the range, he anticipated that at any moment a new sighting report would locate those two missing carriers. His course brought him to within 160 miles of the estimated position of the “two carriers and two battleships” of the initial sighting, and by 8:30, he decided he could wait no longer. He would hold back Wally Short’s scouting squadron (VS-5, formerly VB-5) in case a late report located the missing flattops, but he would send his other bombing squadron, Max Leslie’s VB-3, and all the torpedo planes, plus a fighter escort, to attack the two carriers that had been sighted.
²⁴

To calculate a course to the target, Fletcher depended heavily on his staff air officer, Commander Murr E. Arnold, a 1923 Academy graduate who had previously commanded the bombing squadron on
Yorktown
, and who had been central to all the operations in the Coral Sea, including the battle of May 7—8. By now, Fletcher and Arnold had developed a close friendship and mutual confidence. In collaboration with Pete Pederson,
the Yorktown’s air group commander (CYAG), Arnold calculated a course of 230 to the enemy. More important, he and Pederson sat down with all four of the squadron commanders to discuss it. Arnold and Pederson told the pilots that if they arrived at the coordinates and didn’t find the enemy, it might mean that the Kid
ō
Butai had turned north. Under those circumstances, they suggested, they should probably turn to the northeast. This, of course, was exactly right, but equally important was the fact that all the participants had a chance to talk it over fully beforehand. Pederson recalled that “they all agreed that this made good sense.”
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Equally important was the decision by Fletcher and Buckmaster that morning to employ a “normal departure” rather than the deferred departure that Miles Browning had imposed on the carriers of Task Force 16. In a normal departure, the slower and most heavily laden planes launched first and proceeded immediately toward the target while the lighter and faster planes launched afterward and caught up with the others in a “running rendezvous.” Consequently, the Dauntless dive-bombers of Leslie’s VB-3, each carrying a 1,000-pound bomb, went first, followed in the same deck load by the Devastators of Lance “Lem” Massey’s VT-3. Leslie’s bombers were to circle for only fifteen minutes before heading off toward the target; Massey’s torpedo planes were not to circle at all but to proceed with the mission as soon as they formed up. The speedy Wildcat fighters were launched in the second deck load and caught up with the attack planes en route. Because of this, there was a minimum of circling and waiting, and the entire air group successfully executed a running rendezvous on the way to the target.

Finally, the
Yorktown
’s air attack differed from those of the other two carriers in the role assigned to the escorting fighter planes. The fighters of VF-3 were commanded by Lieutenant Commander John S. “Jimmy” Thach. Like most Academy grads, Thach had acquired his nickname during plebe summer. Thach’s older brother James had graduated from the Academy in 1923, the same year that John became a plebe. The upperclassman who introduced the new plebe to the customs of the institution insisted on calling him Jimmy—his brother’s nickname—perhaps as a reminder that he was nothing special. Like most Academy nicknames, it stuck. Jimmy Thach was a thoughtful and creative fighter pilot. Just
before the war, he had developed an innovative defense maneuver for fighters flying in groups of four. He called it the “beam defense position,” though it subsequently became universally known as the Thach weave. Thach had commanded VF-3 on the
Saratoga
until she was torpedoed in January and sent stateside for repairs. His squadron was then transferred to the
Lexington
until she was sunk in the Coral Sea. Now he and his squadron were on the
Yorktown.
A superstitious person might have worried about that track record, but Thach was a confident pilot with a “sunny disposition.”
²⁶

Like his Naval Academy classmate Pat Mitchell on the
Hornet
, Thach thought that his fighters should go with the torpedo planes. But unlike John Waldron, who had lobbied hard for fighter cover, Lem Massey, the commander of VT-3, demurred. Because the Zeros were likely to be high, he proposed that the fighters go with the dive-bombers. No, no, said Leslie, the dive-bomber commander, the fighters should go with the torpedo planes because they were more vulnerable. Amused by this Alphonse-and-Gaston routine, Thach said, “How about letting me decide it?” Both Massey and Leslie said that was fine with them, but as it happened none of them got the final say. Instead, it was Pete Pederson, the CYAG, who made the decision.
²⁷

In his official report on the Battle of the Coral Sea, Pederson had recommended that in future engagements the escorting fighters “should take position up sun from, and at least 5—6,000 feet above the torpedo planes. From this position,” he wrote, “they can readily observe any attack coming in and can dive down and break it up.” At Midway, Pederson took his own advice and ordered that Thach’s Wildcat fighters should fly in between the high-flying bombers and the low-flying Devastators at 5,000 to 6,000 feet. That way Thach would be high enough to dive down on any Zeros that attacked the torpedo planes, but not so high as to be out of touch with them. It also meant that Thach’s planes didn’t have to burn all that fuel climbing to 20,000 feet. As a result of collaborative decision making, battle experience, and efficient execution, the
Yorktown
air group was the only one that arrived over the target in a timely fashion and effected a coordinated attack without any argument, insubordination, or error.
²⁸

Jimmy Thach in the cockpit of his Wildcat. Thach was a creative tactical innovator, but with only six Wildcats, he was unable to protect the lumbering Devastators of Lem Massey’s VT-3. (U.S. Naval Institute)

The planes of the
Yorktown
air group flew almost directly to the Kid
ō
Butai and found it in just over an hour, at about 10:00 a.m. Massey’s low-flying Devastators saw the Japanese first, led to the target by the black smoke generated by the Japanese cruisers. Massey led his squadron from 2,500 feet down to 150 feet as he prepared to make his torpedo run. Two and a half miles above him, Max Leslie, leading the dive-bombers, called him on the radio to ask if he was ready to start a coordinated attack. Massey replied that he was. Almost at once, however, Massey reported “frantically” that he was under attack by enemy fighters. As a result, in the end there was no coordinated attack, for, as one Devastator pilot put it, “We were forced to go in on our own attack as soon as possible to prevent all of the torpedo planes from being shot down.”
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