The Battle of Midway (40 page)

No sooner had the last plane lifted off than the loudspeaker on the
Akagi
blared out an order to “prepare second attack wave.” On the brightly lit hangar decks, workers began to arm the next cadre of planes with ship-killing ordnance. On the
Akagi
and
Kaga
, the big Kate torpedo bombers were armed with the seventeen-foot-long Type 91 torpedoes. Brought up from the magazine by elevators, the big torpedoes were placed onto hand trucks and manhandled across the crowded hangar deck to each plane. Then they had to be jacked up manually and attached to special brackets under each plane. On the
Hiry
ū
and
S
ō
ry
ū
, the dive-bombers were armed with 551-pound armor-piercing bombs. Thus armed and fueled, the planes remained on the hangar decks. That way, Nagumo’s carriers could keep their flight decks clear for the rotating CAP and for the return of the strike force. By 5:00 a.m., with the rim of the rising sun appearing over the eastern horizon, the second wave of fighters, bombers, and torpedo planes was poised and ready in the hangars, awaiting news of any American surface forces that might be in the area.
⁴

The Aichi E13A “Jake” floatplane, carried on the stern of Japanese battleships and heavy cruisers, was used primarily for reconnaissance. The delayed launch of one of these planes on June 4 played a key role in the ensuing battle. (U.S. Naval Institute)

The Japanese conducted an air search that morning, though for a strike force operating deep in enemy waters, the search was somewhat slapdash. Perhaps because the op plan confidently proclaimed that the American carriers would remain in Pearl Harbor until after the strike on Midway, this dawn air search was largely pro forma. The Japanese often used their Kate attack planes (minus the torpedo) for search missions. This time Nagumo intended to rely primarily on the floatplanes from his escort ships. The Aichi E13A “Jakes,” which boasted huge pontoons nearly as large as the fuselage, had a longer range than combat aircraft (nearly 1,300 miles) and were specifically designed for the reconnaissance mission. Though Nagumo did send two Kates to search what he considered the most important quadrant—due south, the direction from which the American carriers would come, if they came at all—he relied on five floatplanes, carried on the sterns of his battleships and cruisers for the rest—a total of seven search planes altogether. (By comparison, not quite a month before, on May 7 in the Coral Sea, Fletcher had launched ten search planes, and Hara twelve; they had still failed to find each other.) Nagumo’s rather cavalier search betrayed his assumption that things would proceed pretty much as scripted.
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One way to envision the search that Nagumo ordered that morning is to imagine the Kid
ō
Butai as at the center of a clock face, with each hour of the clock comprising a sector of the search. Because the ships of the Kid
ō
Butai had come from the northwest (about 10:30 on our imaginary clock), and because other units of the Imperial Japanese Navy were behind them, there was no reason to search in that direction. The air search, therefore, would cover the quadrants
east
of the Kid
ō
Butai from roughly 1:00 o’clock (almost due north) to 6:00 o’clock (due south). Each search plane would fly three hundred miles out along its prescribed path, fly sixty miles counterclockwise, then fly back again. As noted above, Nagumo assigned the two Kates to the most important quadrants—at 5:00 and 6:00 o’clock; he assigned the shorter-ranged float plane from the battleship
Haruna
to the least likely quadrant—to the north at 1:00 o’clock. The other quadrants, from 2:00 to 4:00 o’clock, were the responsibility of four float planes from the heavy cruisers
Chikuma
and Tone.
⁶

Piloting a floatplane off the back of a cruiser was a lot like being shot from a cannon. Lacking a runway to build up speed, the planes were propelled off the ship with an explosive charge. Upon returning, they used their pontoons to land in the water, then they taxied up to the leeward side of the ship and were winched aboard by crane. On the morning of June 4, the cruiser
Tone
had trouble launching her floatplanes. Various reasons have been advanced to explain it—delayed orders, problems with the launching system, trouble on the plane itself, or perhaps all three. Whatever the cause, the first of
Tone’s
float planes did not launch until 4:45, and the second (officially the number 4 search plane) did not get away until 5:00 a.m. Curiously, the captain of the
Tone
, Okada Tametsugu, did not send a message to Nagumo reporting this tardy launch. And unlike the American PBYs from Midway that conducted their searches at 1,000 feet, the Japanese search planes flew near 5,000 feet in order to cover the broad swath of ocean assigned to them. At that altitude, even moderate cloud cover might conceal whole fleets of enemy ships, and
Chikuma’s
number 5 aircraft flew right past the Americans and saw nothing.

The Americans, too, were up early that morning. On Midway, Commander Ramsey, in charge of air ops on the atoll, sent up a CAP of five Dash 3 Wildcats (all he had) at 4:00 a.m., and the first of an eventual twenty-two Catalina PBYs lifted off from the lagoon at Midway to begin long-range searches north and west of the atoll. As soon as the Wildcats were airborne, fifteen Army Flying Fortress bombers took off for a second attack on Tanaka’s “Transport Group,” though they were prepared to shift targets if any of the patrol planes found the Kid
ō
Butai. The rest of the Midway air crews congregated in the mess hall to wait for news. “It was pretty crowded in there,” one pilot recalled, “with various crews of different services.” There was not a lot of conversation. “The atmosphere was quiet and somber, more or less foreboding, you might say.” The soft-drink machines had been opened up and everything was free. At least one pilot thought the free drinks “gave you a ‘last meal’ feeling.”
⁷

Meanwhile, 320 miles northwest of Midway, Fletcher also launched early that day, sending up a CAP of six Wildcats at 4:20, followed by ten Dauntless dive-bombers for a “security search” to cover the area north of him out to a hundred miles. He knew the Catalinas were patrolling out of Midway, and he relied on them to report any contacts to the west where, according to Hypo, the Kid
ō
Butai would be found. He sent these ten Dauntlesses to the north, to ensure that the Japanese did not attempt an end run as they had in the Coral Sea. Spruance did not send up a CAP that morning because the two carriers of Task Force 16 were already loaded and cocked—the decks of both carriers spotted with the strike force intended for the Kid
ō
Butai when it was discovered. Had Spruance launched fighters for CAP, he would not have been able to recover them without sending the attack planes below, thereby delaying the eventual launch. Fletcher’s need to steam into the wind to launch both the Wildcats for CAP and the Dauntlesses for the search drew him away toward the east, and soon Spruance’s two carriers were beyond sight.
⁸

At 5:34 the Americans at Midway received a report from Lieutenant Howard P. Ady, piloting a PBY northwest of Midway. The first words of his report sent a jolt through the listeners: “Enemy Carrier bearing 320 [degrees], distance 180 [miles].” At 180 miles from Midway, this target was within easy range of the American bombers on Eastern Island. The pilots in the mess hall scrambled for their equipment anticipating an immediate order to attack. Before any of them could man their planes, however, another PBY pilot, Lieutenant William A. Chase, called in to report: “Many planes headed Midway.” Obviously, the Japanese carriers had already launched, and Midway would soon be the target of a bombing attack. The radar station picked up Tomonaga’s strike force ninety miles out. Captain Simard and Marine Corps Colonel Ira Kimes scrambled all the available fighters they had to contest them. Between 6:00 and 6:30, the Eastern Island airfield was a frenzy of activity, with planes taking off every few seconds. Simard and Kimes sent all their available bombers out toward the reported position of the Japanese carriers and all their available fighters out to intercept Tomonaga.
⁹

The attack planes from Midway comprised an eclectic collection that included four Army medium bombers (armed with torpedoes), six Navy
torpedo planes, and thirty Marine Corps dive-bombers of two different types. Kimes wanted all the planes to fly in a single formation and to attack together, but the three services had never practiced a coordinated assault against an enemy task force and did not even have a doctrine for doing so. Moreover, the four types of airplanes all flew at different speeds. In the end, therefore, the American attack on the Kid
ō
Butai turned into a kind of free-for-all, with each group attacking on its own, employing whatever tactics seemed appropriate at the time. If the cavalier Japanese air search that morning reflected a cultural preference for combat, the haphazard American bombing strike betrayed the American tradition of service independence. Finally, because the Americans sent all of their available fighters out to challenge Tomonaga’s incoming attack force, this mixed bag of bombers and torpedo planes not only attacked piecemeal, it did so without any fighter cover. Perhaps the best that could be said of this effort was that at least the planes were not sitting passively on the runway when Tomonaga’s bombers arrived. By 6:45 the only planes left on Midway were the few that were undergoing repair or maintenance.
¹⁰

While the American bombers flew off to find the reported enemy carriers, the fighters of Midway’s Marine Fighter Squadron (VMF-221), commanded by Major Floyd Parks, were vectored toward the incoming attackers. Parks was short and stocky, with dull red hair (his nickname was “Red”) and “lots of energy.” Twenty-one of the twenty-six Marine pilots, including Parks, flew the old and slow Brewster Buffaloes, and one of those had to turn back because of engine trouble. Five others flew the newer Dash 3 Wildcats.
*
They climbed to 16,000 feet and headed off to meet Tomonaga’s strike force. Forty miles out, they spotted the Japanese two thousand feet below them in a series of stacked V formations, with the Zero fighters on top. Marine Captain John F. Carey, leading a section
of three Wildcats, radioed, “Tally ho! Hawks at Angels twelve supported by fighters,” and dove to the attack. Parks and the others attacked as well. For a few precious seconds the Marines had a tactical advantage, since the Zero pilots had been looking downward and were surprised when American fighters dove on them from above. Carey flew directly at the lead plane in the enemy bomber formation. A bullet punched a hole in Carey’s windshield, missing his head by inches, but he held his course and fired a long burst at the lead Japanese bomber, which caught fire and fell out of the formation. Carey’s wingman, Second Lieutenant Clayton Canfield, targeted the third bomber in the formation, and it, too, caught fire and fell away. Soon enough, however, the swarming Zeros overwhelmed the Americans. As one pilot put it, “After the first coordinated attacks the thing degenerated into a rat race.” Parks was one of the first to be hit. He successfully bailed out of his burning aircraft, but a Zero fighter strafed his chute as he descended and then strafed him again in the water. His body was later found on the rocks near Midway.
¹¹