A shaken Kusaka found himself strangely moved. He thought only Japanese pilots did things like that. He had no idea who this steadfast American was, but there on the bridge of the Akagi he silently said a prayer for him.
To the practical eye of Lieutenant Ogawa, it was really not a very professional effort—any of it. There was no coordination between the TBFs and the B-26s … the torpedoes were dropped too far out … the planes all approached from one side. No wonder they didn’t hit anything.
Yet the attack accomplished more than Ogawa knew. It ended all doubts about a second strike on Midway. That was where these planes came from—Nagumo needed no more convincing. At 7:15 the Admiral ordered his second attack wave to rearm: the torpedo planes to shift over to bombs, the dive bombers to switch from armor-piercing to instant-contact missiles. This was relatively easy for the Hiryu and Soryu—they were supplying the dive bombers this time—but on the Akagi and Kaga it meant a back-breaking job. The air crews rushed forward, lowered the torpedo planes to the hangar deck and began making the switch. It was a frantic scene: they hoped to get the second wave rearmed and into the air before Tomonaga got back.
They were hard at it when a startling message arrived from the Tone’s No. 4 plane, now on the dog-leg of its 300-mile search to the east. At 7:28 it reported: “Sight what appears to be 10 enemy surface ships in position bearing 10 degrees distance, 240 miles from Midway. Course 150 degrees, speed over 20 knots.”
Surface ships. So they were out there after all … and well within striking range. If Chuichi Nagumo had been more of a philosopher and less of an admiral, he might have pondered the fate that put the Tone’s plane a half-hour behind schedule. If there had been no catapult trouble—if only it had been on time—he would have known about this American fleet before Tomonaga asked for another strike at Midway. Then there would have been no doubt about his course: go for the ships right away. But as matters stood, it was no longer that easy. His torpedo planes were now belowdecks, being reloaded with bombs.
The Admiral shuffled his plans as best he could. He suspended the second strike on Midway, and at 7:45 signaled new orders to the Striking Force: “Prepare to carry out attacks on enemy fleet units. Leave torpedoes on those attack planes which have not as yet changed to bombs.”
Next step would depend on what the Americans had out there. The Tone’s pilot was exasperatingly vague. “Ten surface ships” certainly didn’t say much. Were there any carriers? If so, they must be hit right away. If not, maybe this enemy force could wait. Over half the torpedo planes were already switched to bombs: if the Americans had only cruisers and destroyers, Admiral Kusaka felt it might be better to go through with the second strike on Midway, then go after the ships. But to decide, they must know what they were up against. At 7:47 Nagumo brusquely radioed the search plane: “ASCERTAIN SHIP TYPES AND MAINTAIN CONTACT.”
Despite their quandary, there was no reason to panic. They had plenty of strength; all they really needed was a little time. Time to switch back to torpedoes and armor-piercing bombs, if there were carriers around. Time to finish changing to land bombs, if they were going to hit Midway again. Time to regroup the ships scattered by the enemy torpedo attacks. Time to replenish and tighten up the air patrol. Time to recover Tomonaga’s planes. And, above all, time to think and plan intelligently, without too many twists and unexpected pressures.
Nagumo was still waiting for more details from the Tone’s plane when, at 7:50, the Soryu’s air cover unit suddenly reported “about 15” single-engine dive bombers coming in from the southeast.
CORPORAL Eugene Card felt as though a bar of ice-coated lead were in his stomach. One consolation: in three hours it would all be over, one way or another. It was also good to have Captain Fleming flying the plane—a man so cool he took a nap during the on-again, off-again confusion at Midway just before VMSB-241 set out on its mission to bomb the Japanese carriers.
Now at last they were on their way, with Captain Fleming serving as navigator for the 16 SBDs led by Major Henderson. The other planes in the squadron—the 11 old Vindicators—would come separately under Major Norris. They were just too slow to operate with the rest.
Henderson’s group had enough problems already. Thirteen of the 16 pilots had never flown an SBD until a few days ago. Ten of them had been in the squadron only a week; they hardly knew each other and had little time to practice together. Like Card, most of the gunners were inexperienced. It was because of their greenness as a group that Major Henderson decided not to dive-bomb the Japanese, but to glide-bomb instead. It required less skill—but no less courage, for the planes would be exposed that much longer.
Heading for the enemy position, they kept in tight formation at 9,000 feet except for Henderson himself. He flew detached, herding them along like an industrious shepherd dog. Craning his neck, Card could see the rest of the planes, stepped down in a giant staircase. Feeling a surge of new confidence, he looked over at Lieutenant Al Tweedy’s plane and gave Tweedy’s gunner, Sergeant Elza Raymond, the old four-oh sign. Raymond grinned and waved back.
Around 7:50 Lieutenant Daniel Iverson swung by and pointed down to the left. Card looked but couldn’t see anything. Fleming broke in on the intercom: “We’ve made contact. There’s a ship at ten o’clock.” Card looked again and sure enough, beneath a large hole in the clouds he saw a long, slender, black ship. It was heading for Midway and making knots.
The SBDs continued on, the clouds rapidly breaking up. Through the holes he could see more and more of these slim black ships, all heading in the same direction. Then a sight he would never forget. Through a large clear space he saw four carriers almost side by side, and near them a battleship with a pagoda-like superstructure. He watched utterly fascinated as the carriers turned in unison and began launching planes.
At 7:55 Henderson’s voice came calmly over the radio: “Attack two enemy CV on port bow… .” The SBDs began circling down.
“Here they come!” Captain Fleming yelled over the intercom. Card caught a glimpse of two streaks of smoke flying past the starboard wing; then a fighter flashed by, climbing almost straight up. Lieutenant Harold Schlendering, flying nearby, had a longer look and wondered at the odd white smoke rings made by the Zeros’ guns. As the first shell fragments slapped into Lieutenant Tom Moore’s plane, Moore thought to himself, “Here comes a hunk of the Sixth Avenue el.”
Major Henderson’s left wing began to burn. He fought it all the way, but he was soon out of control, plunging toward the sea. Off to the right, Corporal Card saw fragments from some other plane tumbling over and floating back like leaves in a breeze. A parachute blossomed out, but there was no time to see who it was.
Captain Elmer Glidden took over the lead, heading for a bank of clouds that might give greater protection during the descent. The Zeros hounded them all the way, while the Marine gunners did their best to fight back. Corporal McFeeley, flying with Captain Blain, grew so excited he fired through the tail of his own plane. Private Charles Huber found his gun hopelessly jammed, but Lieutenant Moore told him to aim it at them anyhow. Huber did, and put on such a pantomime of resolution that the Zeros kept a respectful distance.
Lieutenant Doug Rollow’s rear-seat man Reed Ramsey tried a different sort of guile. He knew that the Japanese liked to capitalize on the Marines’ careless habit of throwing empty ammunition cans overboard. Whenever a Zero saw this, it would quickly close in, since it took about 30 seconds for the Marine to reload. Ramsey decided that two could play this game. With his gun fully loaded, he threw out a beer can. As usual a Zero rushed over—and Ramsey got a hit at point-blank range.
Soon they had other troubles. Corporal Card heard something go “Wuf!” (It sounded, he later stressed, just the way a person would say “Wuf” in a normal voice.) Then he heard it again, and again. Big, black, soft-looking balls of smoke, began to appear. It meant that they were now within antiaircraft range too.
A moment’s relief when they hit the cloud bank—then worse than e
ver when they broke out on the other side. At 2,000 feet they nosed down and began their final run. Now there was nothing between them and the enemy, twisting and turning below.
Face to face with the Japanese carriers at last, every man had his own most vivid impression. For Lieutenant Moore it was the brilliant Rising Sun insignia on the flight deck. For Lieutenant Rollow it was the scattering crewmen. For Lieutenant Iverson it was the solid ring of fire that encircled the flight deck as every gun blazed away.
Captain Fleming cut loose with a blast of his own, saw a whole gun crew topple over. Facing aft from his rear-seat position, Corporal Card could see very little, but he could hear more than enough. To the “wufs” of the antiaircraft there was now added the steady crackle of small-arms fire. The SBD lurched— “Somebody threw a bucket of bolts in the prop.” Small holes appeared all over the cockpit and a thousand needles pricked his right ankle. Swooping in, the Marines made their drops—Rollow at 400 feet … Schlendering at 500 feet … Fleming at 300 feet. There were ten of them left altogether. Columns of smoke and water billowed up, nearly hiding the carriers from view. It was a conservative pilot indeed who didn’t think he got at least a near-miss.
Then away, skimming the waves to make it harder for the Zeros and the ships’ guns. Nosing down to a few feet above the sea, Lieutenant Rollow suddenly faced huge towers of water shooting up in front of him. He was heading directly for the main battery of a Japanese battleship. He yanked the stick back and the SBD popped to 2,000 feet. As he tried to get his controls set again, a Zero came by. That should have been the end, but nothing happened. Apparently out of ammunition, the Japanese pilot merely gave him a casual wave.
Captain Fleming was running into still more trouble. Pulling out from his drop, another “bucket of nails” hit the prop. Something hard kicked Corporal Card’s left leg to one side, and more holes appeared all over the cockpit. Then as the plane leveled off, Card caught his only good look at the carrier—a “writhing monster” bristling with fast-firing guns, all pointing straight up, a steady jet of flame pouring from each.
The ice in his stomach had melted; hot anger was boiling up. The plane was hit; he was hit; he couldn’t see how they’d ever get out of this alive; the only hope was they’d take a few Japanese with them.
COMMANDER Fuchida couldn’t understand why those American planes came in that way. They were too low for dive bombing, too high for torpedoes. Those long shallow dives gave the Zeros a field day.
But certainly they never wavered. Concentrating on the Hiryu off to port, one after another they swooped in and dropped. Teiichi Makishima, a civilian newsreel photographer on the Akagi, watched with dismay as the Hiryu disappeared in a dense cloud of black smoke. It took forever, but finally she emerged. She was still at full speed, her white bow wave glittering in the sun. The men watching from the Akagi let out a shout of relief.
On the Hiryu it had been a frantic minute as Captain Tomeo Kaku tried to outguess the swooping planes. At 8:08 the ship was completely bracketed by four bombs. At 8:12 another near-miss landed just off to port. Down in the engine room Ensign Hisao Mandai shuddered as the ship took a terrific jolt. Topside they got a dose of strafing too—four men killed, several more wounded.
As Commander Amagai watched from the Kaga, his own ship’s lookout suddenly shouted, “Enemy planes, quarter!” The warning came none too soon. A final three U.S. bombers—either a separate division or planes somehow diverted from the main target—glided in from the port quarter, dropping three bombs just off the stern of the ship.
Then it was over. The Striking Force had done it again: a third American attack smashed with hardly a scratch to themselves. Satisfying, but at the moment Admiral Nagumo had other matters on his mind. He still needed to know what sort of ships the Tone’s No. 4 plane had seen. All during the American glide-bombing attack, he waited for some sort of answer. At 7:58 the search plane finally came on the air again, but it still didn’t identify the enemy ships. It merely reported that they had changed course from 150° to 180°.
The whole staff fumed. What could they do with that, unless they knew what they were up against? At 8:00 an exasperated Nagumo needled the pilot again: “Advise ship types.” At 8:09 he finally got an answer. A new message from the Tone’s plane reported: “Enemy is composed of five cruisers and five destroyers.”
So there were no carriers. Relief swept the flag bridge. The intelligence officer Commander Ono said he knew it all the time. Admiral Kusaka felt it would now be safe to get on with the second strike at Midway.
But this brought up a new complication. The three American attacks did no damage, but they certainly disrupted the fleet. The neat box formation was gone; the carriers were spread all over the place. To cover them adequately, many more fighters were needed. As Lieutenant Shindo, commanding the Combat Air Patrol, used up his reserves, he began drawing on the fighters assigned to the second attack wave. Now there were none left to support any strike it made.
Of course it could be remedied. All they needed was a little time to regroup the fleet—reassemble that compact box formation—then a little more time to refuel the fighters that would be freed from the air umbrella. The staff was still discussing it when at 8:14 the Tone’s port guns opened up—signaling a brand-new danger from the sky… .
“WE SHOULD be sighting them now,” said Lieutenant Bill Adams, the lumber salesman turned navigator, as Lieutenant Colonel Walter Sweeney led his 15 B-17s toward Nagumo’s position. It was 7:32, and more than an hour had passed since they were diverted from another blow at the transports to hitting the carriers instead.
Adams couldn’t have timed it better. Next moment Colonel Sweeney pointed through the broken clouds, and there in the distance were the white waves of many ships. To Captain Don Kundinger, piloting one of the planes, it was an astonishing sight: “a panoramic view of the greatest array of surface vessels any of us had ever seen—they seemed to stretch endlessly from horizon to horizon.”
But which were the carriers? Leading the group in, Sweeney looked hard … saw nothing. It was all so difficult. None of these Army fliers had any experience in ship identification. Broken clouds were everywhere, making it still harder to see. Ships would pop out, then disappear again before anyone could get a decent look.
Most important of all, there was this matter of height. After several close calls attacking the transports at 8,000 feet, Sweeney felt his men would be sitting ducks if they tried to do the same against carriers. So now they were coming in at 20,000 feet—quite a distance for an inexperienced eye to pick out anything.
But they could see the Japanese were busy. Enemy ships were turning in evasion maneuvers. Yet no antiaircraft fire was coming their way. It took some extra squinting, but finally the Army fliers understood. There, far below, Major Henderson’s glide bombers were going in.
The B-17s continued searching. Then suddenly Captain Cecil Faulkner spotted something. Beneath a thin wisp of clouds steamed a ship—not an ordinary ship, but one with an oblong shape, a flat yellow deck, a Rising Sun insignia painted in the middle. Then he saw another like it … then two more. There was no doubt what they were.
No time to lose. Sweeney was far ahead, probing the northwest, so Faulkner signaled the other two bombers in his unit, and they left the formation to attack on their own. By now Captain Carl Wuertele had also found the carriers, and so had Captain Paul Payne in the Yankee Doodle. It was Payne who finally got the word to Sweeney, still searching to the northwest. The Colonel told him to start attacking and hurried to the scene with the rest of the planes.
Officially the strike began at 8:14, but it was a more ragged affair than that might suggest. The three-plane elements bombed pretty much on their own, and in several cases the planes attacked individually. But what they lacked in finesse they made up in enthusiasm. As the Hel-En-Wings unloaded its bombs, Captain Wuertele’s crew whooped in triumph.
The Japanese gunners replied immediately, and the very first round exploded just to
the right of Sweeney’s plane, smashing the co-pilot’s window. To the co-pilot Lieutenant Wessman, it underlined the wisdom of such high-level bombing. “From then on,” he recalled, “all of us were sorry we stopped at 20,000 feet.”
Next some Zeros appeared. Three ganged up on Captain Faulkner, ripped his fuselage, disabled his No. 4 engine. Another dueled with Captain Payne but never really closed for a fight. The Zero pilots always respected the B-17, and today was no exception.
It all added up to a hot ten minutes, but no serious damage. The only casualty was Captain Faulkner’s tail gunner, who suffered a wounded index finger.
The Army fliers were jubilant. The price seemed small indeed. The carriers looked finished. Captain Faulkner thought his group got at least two hits; Captain Wuertele and Lieutenant Colonel Brooke Allen each claimed one. Colonel Sweeney’s own crew were no less optimistic: they felt sure all eight bombs were on target, and the carrier’s stern rose up most convincingly. A shrewd student of human nature, Sweeney cut back on all these claims in his official report, but he felt at least one of the carriers must have been hit.
CAPTAIN Aoki watched with dismay from the Akagi. There were so many columns of water around the Soryu he couldn’t see her at all. He thought she might well be sunk. The Hiryu was in trouble too, also lost in spray and smoke. Everyone was of course firing back, but the B-17s were too high to bring down. The Striking Force would just have to sweat it out.
None found it harder than the fliers returning from the Midway strike. They arrived back, by chance, just at this moment. Waved off their carriers, they orbited uselessly around, praying that the bombs would miss. For Lieutenant Tomonaga there was an extra problem: he was very low on gas, thanks to the hit that holed his wing tank at Midway.