The Battle of Midway (51 page)

By now, despite all their success, some of the Zero pilots must have felt a bit whipsawed. Having fought off one American attack from the northeast, then another from the south, here was yet another from the northeast. And not only were many of the Zero pilots nearly out of the 20 mm ammunition, they were now facing new attackers that had a fighter escort.

That fighter escort consisted of only six Wildcats. Of the eighteen Wildcats on the
Yorktown
, Fletcher had kept six for CAP and reserved another six to accompany Wally Short’s VS-5 for the attack on the two “missing” carriers if and when they were located. That decision annoyed Jimmy Thach; his defensive weave pattern could be executed only when his fighters maneuvered in groups of four. He complained to Arnold that six was not divisible by four. Arnold told him that the decision had come from the flag bridge. Thach, disappointed, was nonetheless determined to do the best
he could. When his fighters caught up with Massey’s torpedo bombers en route to the target, he signaled Warrant Officer Tom Cheek to position his two-plane section just behind the torpedo bombers while Thach himself, with a four-plane section, flew above them at about 5,500 feet.
³⁰

Thach first saw the outer screen of the Kid
ō
Butai about ten miles out. Colored shell bursts began to explode around him—directional signals from the screening warships to guide the Zeros to the new target. And soon enough, they came. Thach tried to count them and figured “there were around twenty.” In fact, there were more than twice that number. By now, Nagumo’s four carriers had launched every Zero they had, including the reserves, a total of forty-two. Because Thach’s Wildcats had launched last rather than first, and because they had flown at 5,500 feet instead of 20,000 feet, they arrived with enough fuel in their tanks to engage in aerial combat. But there was not a lot six Wildcats could do against forty-two Zeros.

The Japanese pilots attacked both the torpedo planes and the escorting fighters. Ensign Edgar Bassett, occupying the trailing spot in Thach’s fourplane formation, was attacked from below, and his plane fell smoking into the sea. Bassett never got out of the cockpit. Other Zeros “were streaming in right past us and into the torpedo planes,” Thach recalled. “The air was like a bee hive.” He found he could not seize the initiative against such overwhelming numbers. Though his mission was to protect the torpedo planes, it was all he could do to defend himself from the swarming Zeros. Because only one of his surviving wingmen was familiar with his “beam defense maneuver,” Thach had to improvise. When a Zero came up behind them, he led his three surviving planes in a sharp right turn, which forced the Zero pilot to attempt a side shot. Then, as the Zero followed him through the turn, Thach turned sharply left. As the swift Zero flew past them, it gave Thach a shot at him from behind. After a long burst from Thach’s .50-caliber machine guns, the Zero exploded and went down. Despite their agility, and the deadliness of their 20 mm cannons, the poorly armored Zeros succumbed quickly when they were hit.
³¹

Nonetheless, the Zeros had the numbers, and they savaged Massey’s torpedo bombers just as they had Waldron’s and Lindsay’s. Massey’s plane was one of the first to be taken out. “It just exploded,” Thach recalled.
Machinist Harry Corl, flying a Devastator in Massey’s section, remembered that it “went down in flames with no hope of anybody surviving.” The steadily decreasing number of torpedo planes tried to hold a straight course to give their own gunners, who were firing continuously, a steady platform. The value of having fighter cover was not that the Wildcats fended off the Zeros but rather that they occupied some of the Zeros that might otherwise have focused exclusively on the Devastators. Somewhat bitterly, Thach wrote in his after-action report that “six F4F-4 airplanes cannot prevent 20 or 30 Japanese VF from shooting down our slow torpedo planes.”
³²

Thach’s 21-year-old wingman, “Ram” Dibb, was the only pilot in the squadron to whom Thach had explained the principles of his “beam defense maneuver.” Before flying out that day, they had agreed to try it if circumstances allowed. In the midst of the air battle, Thach heard Dibb call out, “There’s a Zero on my tail! Get him off!” Dibb and Thach were flying side by side but widely separated, and in accordance with the plan, they turned toward each other. As they closed on one another, Thach ducked under Dibb’s plane to come up face-to-face with the onrushing Zero. The two planes sped toward each other at a combined 500 miles per hour. “I was really angry,” Thach remembered later. “I probably should have decided to duck under this Zero, but I lost my temper a little bit, and decided I’m going to keep my fire going into him and he’s going to pull out.” As the two planes flashed past each other, only feet apart, flames began spouting from the Zero, and Thach watched it fall away into the sea.
³³

The five planes of Massey’s squadron that survived this onslaught dropped their torpedoes, turned, and headed for home, seeking cloud cover to hide from the relentless Zeros. Wilhelm Esders recalled that the Zeros “continued to make passes at us” for more than twenty miles before they finally gave up the pursuit and returned to the Kid
ō
Butai. Esders planned to use his YE homing system to plot a course for the
Yorktown
, and asked his backseat radioman/gunner, Aviation Radioman Second Class Robert B. Brazier, to change the radio coils so he could activate the system. Brazier had been hit three times and had bullets through both legs and one in his back. He replied weakly that he didn’t think he could do it. Several minutes later, however, Brazier called Esders on the intercom to report that he had
changed the coils. Because of that, Esders was able to get a signal from
Yorktown
and he headed for home. As he approached the task force, however, he saw that the
Yorktown
was herself under air attack (it was 12:40 by now), and, virtually out of gas, he had to ditch in the water about ten miles away. He managed to get Braziers out of the cockpit and into the raft, but Braziers’ wounds were too serious for him to survive such rough handling; he died in the raft. A Japanese dive-bomber returning from his attack on the
Yorktown
flew past and turned back for a second look. Esders ducked under the water and waited for the inevitable strafing. But instead, Lieutenant Junior Grade Art Brassfield, flying CAP over Task Force 17, came to the rescue, shooting down the Val dive-bomber, his fourth of the day. Esders was picked up the next day by the destroyer
Hammann.
³⁴

Of the forty-one Devastator torpedo planes launched from three American aircraft carriers that morning, only four made it back to their carriers, and one of those was so badly damaged as to be of no further service. Three more ditched in the water trying to make it back to the carriers, though their crews were later rescued. Despite those horrific losses, not a single torpedo struck home. Indeed, since 7:00 that morning, the Americans had hurled a total of ninety-four airplanes at the Kid
ō
Butai in eight separate and uncoordinated attacks, and not a single bomb or torpedo had found its mark. The Japanese had shot down most of those planes and sent the rest fleeing. Nagumo had still not managed to get the planes of his own strike force up onto the flight deck for launch. To do so, all he needed was a short respite.

He was not going to get it. Three miles above the handful of retiring American torpedo planes, Max Leslie’s dive-bombers from
Yorktown
were preparing to attack, astonished that there was no enemy CAP over the target. Simultaneously, and coincidentally, the long-delayed bombing and scouting squadrons from
Enterprise
under Wade McClusky were arriving from the south. It was 10:20 a.m., and the battle had reached a pivotal moment.

*
The fact that Nagumo made his turn at 9:17is more evidence that Ring did not miss the Kid
ō
Butai because it turned northward during his flight as stated in Mitscher’s report. If Ring and his air group had flown a course of 240, he would very likely have found the Kid
ō
Butai
before
Nagumo’s turn northward, as Waldron did. See
appendix F
.

*
Gray’s second report, sent at 10:00 a.m., caused a moment of consternation on board the
Enterprise.
John Lundstrom notes that both Spruance and Browning initially thought the report had come from McClusky, and they were appalled that he might be returning to the task force without attacking. McClusky sent in his own sighting report at 10:02, but it is not clear that it was received at the task force. In any case, responding to one or the other of these reports, at 10:08 Miles Browning grabbed the handset and hollered: “McClusky, attack! Attack immediately!”

W
hile Japanese and American pilots had a frenetic morning on June 4, the submarine forces of both sides were considerably less active. The Japanese had committed nineteen submarines to the campaign, and the Americans twelve. Yet so far those subs had played no role in the engagement. As noted previously, the Japanese submarines got a late start leaving Japan, and a layover in Kwajalein put them hopelessly behind schedule; some were further delayed by the failed effort to reprise Operation K. The consequence was that the submarine cordons that Yamamoto counted on to give the Kid
ō
Butai advance warning of the approach of the American carriers were not fully established until June 4, by which time the carriers of both sides were already engaged.

For their part, the Americans committed a dozen submarines to the operation, yet to this point they had played no active role, or indeed any role, in the battle. The American subs were simply too slow to catch up to the swift Japanese carriers. Most American submarines could make 17—20 knots on the surface but only about eight knots submerged. Since the
Japanese surface ships operated routinely at 20—25 knots, they could simply outrun the American subs. Nimitz hoped that his submarines could be vectored toward enemy vessels that had been crippled by air attack, and after several of the planes operating from Midway reported that they had left Japanese warships burning, he ordered several submarines toward the coordinates. None of those reports proved accurate, however, and so far there had been no cripples for the American subs to attack. An old submarine hand himself, Nimitz lamented in his battle report that “all submarines were ordered to close on the enemy Striking Force but the only submarine attack of the day was by
Nautilus” That
one exception, however, proved to be very important indeed.
¹

At 7:00 a.m., as
Hornet
and
Enterprise
were preparing to launch their air groups, the USS
Nautilus
(SS-168), was running on the surface 150 miles north of Midway in the middle of a fan-shaped semicircle of ten submarines that Nimitz had placed north and west of the atoll. Launched back in 1930, the
Nautilus
had just completed an overhaul on the West Coast. She had arrived in Pearl Harbor on April 27 and put to sea on her first war patrol a month later, on May 24, four days before the
Hornet
and
Enterprise
left for Point Luck. If the
Nautilus
was not a new boat, she was a big boat. At 350 feet long and displacing more than 2,700 tons, she was as big as many destroyers. When commissioned in 1931, she had been the largest submarine in the world. She was also heavily armed. Her two big 6-inch guns (one on the foredeck and another aft of the conning tower) were more powerful than most of the guns on a destroyer. Her principal weapons, however, were the three dozen torpedoes that could be fired from her ten torpedo tubes. These torpedoes were the Mark 14 variety with the flawed detonators, though that fact was still unacknowledged by the Bureau of Ordnance.

The commanding officer of the
Nautilus
was 37-year-old Lieutenant Commander William H. Brockman, Jr., yet another member of the Naval Academy class of 1927. Brockman was a big man—at the Academy he had played both football and lacrosse. He no longer competed in athletics and had begun to put on weight. He had a round face, a genial manner, and a ready smile. He was also a determined warrior.
²