The Battle of Midway (53 page)

While Brockman dueled with Watanabe, Wade McClusky’s thirty-three dive-bombers from the
Enterprise
were winging their way southwestward toward a presumed intercept of the Kid
ō
Butai. McClusky had been a naval aviator his entire career, most of it as a fighter pilot. Based on his looks alone, few would have picked him out as one. Short and stout, he had neatly parted dark hair, a generous nose, full lips, and just a hint of a double chin. McClusky had been an effective commander of Fighting 6 during the several raids on the Marshall Islands, Wake, and Marcus Islands. Then in April he had fleeted up to become the commander,
Enterprise
air group, or CEAG. He was the oldest active pilot on board, having turned forty just three days before on June 1.

As CEAG, McClusky traded his Wildcat for a Dauntless, and his airplane was in the lead as the two squadrons of dive-bombers flew toward the presumed coordinates of the Japanese carrier force. McClusky flew with the seventeen planes of Earl Gallaher’s Scouting Six, with two of those planes acting as his wingmen. Each plane was armed with one 500-pound bomb and two 100-pound bombs under the wings. Behind and above this formation were the fifteen planes of Dick Best’s Bombing Six—each of his planes armed with one 1,000-pound bomb. Early on, one of the planes in Gallaher’s squadron developed mechanical problems and had to return to the ship, so in the end, a total of thirty-two bombers, including McClusky’s, flew to the target.
¹²

Lieutenant Commander Clarence Wade McClusky was the air group commander on the USS
Enterprise
and led the strike of VS-6 and VB-6 against
Kaga and Akagi
on June 4. (U.S. Naval Institute)

Visibility was good, with light winds and only light scattered clouds between 1,500 and 2,500 feet. For more than an hour, this two-tier formation flew toward the southwest. Best recalled that he could see the ocean “getting a lighter and lighter blue then turning to a light green” as the water shoaled toward Midway. He could see the plume of black smoke from the Midway airfield and wondered if they had gone too far to the south. At around 9:20 McClusky arrived in the general area where he had calculated that the Kid
ō
Butai would be. Nothing was below him but empty ocean. At that moment, seventy or so miles to the north, John Waldron was ordering his torpedo bombers to attack the Kid
ō
Butai, but neither McClusky nor anyone else in his bomber group picked up his transmissions. Moreover, because of the circling and waiting above the
Enterprise
before Spruance had turned them loose, as well as the long climb to altitude, the fuel gauges on some of the bombers already showed less than half full. Ensign Lew Hopkins, in Best’s squadron, looked at his fuel gauge and concluded that it was going to be a one-way flight. “I knew, and most everybody else knew,” he recalled later, “that we didn’t have enough fuel to get back.” Despite that, McClusky decided to continue the search until the fuel situation became hopeless. Had Spruance not decided to send him off without waiting for the Devastators, he would not have been able to do even that.
¹³

McClusky turned the formation slightly to the right and flew due west for thirty-five miles; then he turned right again to the northwest, intending to conduct a standard box search. He scanned the horizon eagerly for a sign of any surface ships, his binoculars “practically glued” to his eyes. After fifteen more minutes, he turned right again to the northeast. By now, fuel had become a serious problem, especially for the pilots in Best’s squadron, who were lugging the big 1,000-pound bombs. Two of them, Ensign Eugene Greene and Ensign Troy Schneider, fell out of the formation, out of fuel, and landed in the water. Schneider and his radioman/gunner were rescued three days later, but Greene and his backseat gunner were never found.
¹⁴

Nor was fuel the only problem. Best’s wing man, Lieutenant Junior Grade Ed Kroeger, used hand signals to indicate to Best that his cylinder had run out of oxygen. Best could simply have signaled Kroeger to drop down to a lower level where he could breathe the air without an oxygen mask, but he did not want to break up what was left of his squadron. Instead he removed his own mask, holding it up to show Kroeger that he had done so and then began a gradual descent, leading his thirteen remaining planes down to 15,000 feet where the air was still thin, but breathable. That downward glide put him well below McClusky and Gallaher, and about a quarter mile behind them.
¹⁵

Then, at about 9:55, well north of the plotted intercept position, McClusky noticed a ship, all by itself, proceeding northward at great speed, its bow wave making a broad wake that looked for all the world like a white arrow painted on the surface of the blue sea. It was, of course, Commander Watanabe in the
Arashi
, racing northward at 35 knots to catch up to the main body. Mc-Clusky guessed at once that it was a laggard from the Kid
ō
Butai, and using that V-shaped bow wave as a guide, he altered course and followed the arrow just east of due north. Ten minutes later, at 10:05, he saw dark specks on the horizon ahead of him. As he flew closer, the specks resolved themselves into surface ships. Thanks to Brockman’s persistence, Watanabe had provided the crucial signpost that enabled McClusky’s air group to find the Kid
ō
Butai.
¹⁶

By now, the box formation of the four Japanese carriers had completely disintegrated. Each ship had maneuvered independently to avoid the persistent
torpedo attacks of the Americans, and any resemblance to the original formation had long since disappeared. The southernmost of the four carriers, and therefore the first one spotted by McClusky’s bombers, was the giant
Kaga.
Two miles ahead of it and “five to seven miles” off to the right was Nagumo’s flagship,
Akagi.
Another fourteen miles beyond them, the
Hiry
ū
was under attack from Lem Massey’s torpedo planes, and another six miles beyond her and all but out of sight was the
S
ō
ry
ū
.
Cruisers, battleships, and destroyers maneuvered between and around these four behemoths apparently at random.
¹⁷

Unbeknownst to McClusky, Max Leslie’s dive-bomber squadron from
Yorktown
was nearing the Kid
ō
Butai at the same moment. Though the
Yorktown
planes had launched almost two hours after McClusky’s, the more efficient launch sequence and the more accurate course of her air group put her bombers over the target at the same moment. (It is noteworthy that while the
Hornet’s
air group flew some eighty miles north of the Kid
ō
Butai, and the
Enterprise
bomber group flew eighty miles south of it, the
Yorktown
’s air group flew almost directly to it.) Despite the near simultaneous arrival of McClusky and Leslie over the Kid
ō
Butai, the Americans did not conduct a coordinated attack. McClusky approached from the south and Leslie from the east, each of them unaware that the other was there. Had they targeted the same ships, there might have been great confusion when they intruded into one another’s air space. Instead, each targeted the first carrier he saw: Leslie the
S
ō
ry
ū
, and McClusky the
Kaga
and
Akagi
, and because those carriers were widely dispersed, the Americans did not interfere with each other.
¹⁸

There was considerable confusion, however, between the two squadrons of McClusky’s air group. According to doctrine, each squadron was to attack a different capital ship. To do that, the lead squadron, which was Gallaher’s, should fly past the first carrier and attack the more distant one, while the trailing squadron (Best’s) attacked the near target. That would ensure that the attacks occurred nearly at the same time, so that the attack on the first ship did not alert the second. Another element of American divebombing doctrine was that the planes carrying the heavier 1,000-pound bombs should attack the nearest target simply because of their heavier ordnance load. On both counts, Dick Best, whose planes trailed Gallaher’s by a quarter mile and carried the heavy 1,000-pound bombs, assumed that McClusky and Gallaher would fly past the first carrier and attack the more distant one.

But McClusky, the former fighter pilot, had not internalized bombing doctrine in the same way Best had. He approached the situation with typical American straightforwardness. He saw the two carriers not as near and far but as left and right. To be sure, the
Akagi
was a few miles ahead of the plodding
Kaga
, but it was also five or six miles off to the right. McClusky could not give hand signals to Best, who was down at 15,000 feet, so he got on the radio and ordered Gallaher to take the carrier “on the left” (Kaga) and Best to take the carrier “on the right” (Akagi). Gallaher heard him loud and clear. He remembered McClusky telling him to follow him to the carrier on the left and that he told Best “to take the carrier on the right.” That is certainly what McClusky intended. But for such a simple order, it produced profound confusion. Best either never heard it, or, because he was so deeply steeped in standard doctrine, he processed it differently. In either case, he continued to assume that he would take the near carrier and that Gallaher would take the more distant one. In his subsequent report, Lieutenant Joe Penland, who led Best’s second division, wrote that “Commander Bombing Squadron Six
understood
his target to be the ‘left hand’ CV.”
¹⁹

For his part, Best radioed McClusky to tell him that he was attacking “according to doctrine.” It was a curious way to indicate his intentions, certainly less specific than McClusky’s left-right distinction. Such a declaration assumed that McClusky was sufficiently familiar with “doctrine” to know what that meant, and Best knew that McClusky “was not well informed on bomber doctrine.” That being the case, Best would have been better advised simply to say that he was planning to attack the “closest carrier,” or “the carrier on the left.” It hardly mattered, however, because McClusky never heard it. Best later speculated, “My radio didn’t work,” which is possible, but another explanation is that Best and McClusky sent their reports to each other simultaneously. Had both men pressed the transmit buttons on their radios at the same time, neither would have heard the other. In any event, this confusion meant that
both
squadrons
under McClusky’s command prepared to dive on the
Kaga.
Though the Americans had gained a great advantage by arriving over the Kid
ō
Butai at a critical moment, the confusion in assigning targets threatened to throw that advantage away.
²⁰