The Battle of Midway (41 page)

One of the rear-seat gunners of a Kate peppered the right side of Carey’s airplane, and bullets smashed both of his legs. Carey executed a power dive almost straight down—the only chance he had to escape the swift Zeros—and managed to pull out just at wave height. Unable to perform combat maneuvers—indeed, barely able to maneuver at all—he nursed his crippled plane back to Midway, where he executed a controlled crash landing on the runway. Canfield also managed to get back to the airfield. His landing gear collapsed when his plane touched the runway, but he extricated himself from the wreck and rolled into a nearby slit trench to avoid the Japanese bombs that were already falling.
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Carey and Canfield were among the lucky ones. Though the Marine pilots claimed six kills that morning, the slow and clumsy Brewsters were easy pickings for the nimble Zeros. Of the twenty-five Marines who flew out to challenge Tomonaga’s strike force, fourteen were killed, and four more wounded—a loss rate of over 70 percent. Even those who survived did not come back unscathed. Second Lieutenant Charles Kunz had the disquieting experience of having Japanese bullets graze his scalp twice, one on each side of his head. That night, after treating him, the surgeon
prescribed several “stiff shots” so that Kunz could get to sleep. As Carey reported afterward, “The ‘Zero’ fighters out-maneuvered, out-performed, and out climbed the Brewsters and Grummans in every respect.”
¹³

Ady’s 5:34 sighting report did not reach the American carriers until 6:03, when it was relayed from Pearl Harbor. Officers on all three carriers bent over the chart tables and made a quick calculation. The reported location of the enemy carriers put them just over 200 miles southwest of their own position. Since the Wildcat fighters and Devastator torpedo bombers had an effective combat radius of about 175 miles, they were not quite within range. In his conversations with Nimitz, Fletcher had agreed that his best hope was to hit the Kid
ō
Butai first, and hit it hard. It was understood that the two carriers of Task Force 16 under Spruance were to strike first, while Fletcher held his air group in reserve. But before Fletcher gave Spruance the “go” order, two factors stayed his hand. The first was that Ady’s report indicated the presence of only two carriers. Thanks to Rochefort and Hypo, Fletcher knew that the Japanese were almost certain to have at least four, and possibly five. Where were the others? If Fletcher unleashed Spruance’s two air groups at once, they might catch the two enemy flattops early and sink them; they might also miss the rest of the Kid
ō
Butai. Not quite a month before, in the Coral Sea, Fletcher had sent ninety-three planes to savage the
Sh
ō
h
ō
while Hara’s two big carriers remained undiscovered and unscathed until the next day. He did not want a repeat performance now. In fact, all four Japanese carriers were there and Ady had simply not seen them, but there was no way for Fletcher to know that.

The second factor was the timing. When Fletcher heard Chase’s report of “Many planes headed Midway,” he knew that an enemy carrier (or carriers) had launched a strike against the atoll. What he did not know was how many was “many.” Was it a deck load from one or two carriers, or an entire strike force from the combined Kid
ō
Butai? More to the point, the news that the enemy had launched gave Fletcher a kind of timetable for their operations. He knew that it would take the Japanese planes about three hours—that is, until around 8:30 or so—to complete their mission over Midway and return to the Kid
ō
Butai. Ideally, the best time to hit them
would be when they were in the midst of recovering planes that were low on fuel and needing to land. Then, too, if Fletcher waited until that critical moment, it would give the Catalinas more time to find the rest of the Kid
ō
Butai. If he could wait an hour, perhaps two, before launching, he might catch Nagumo’s force unready and vulnerable. On the other hand, Fletcher knew that his greatest advantage was that the Japanese still had no idea where the American carriers were, and he wanted to launch his attack before they found out. A Japanese snooper might discover them at any moment, and the element of surprise would be lost.
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That last concern proved decisive. At 6:07 Fletcher used the short-range TBS (talk between ships) radio to order Spruance: “Proceed southwesterly and attack enemy carriers when definitely located. I will follow as soon as planes recovered.” While Spruance attacked, Fletcher would hold the
Yorktown’s
planes in reserve, pending “receipt of information on additional enemy carriers.” In the meantime, Fletcher could recover the planes returning from the morning search. As the
Yorktown
continued northeast on the point option recovery course, Spruance headed southwest toward the enemy. Eventually the two task forces ended up some twenty miles apart.
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Over on the
Enterprise
, Spruance was ready. Ever since the first sighting report, Captain Miles Browning, the volatile and self-confident chief of staff he had inherited from Halsey, had been eager to attack. Browning was something of an eccentric in the aviation community. Tall and ruggedly handsome, and with the same kind of bad-boy allure that made Ernie King attractive to women, Browning was a temperamental loner on shipboard. An excellent pilot and an imaginative tactician, he was also cocky and dismissive, characteristics that did not endear him to subordinates. Lieutenant Richard “Dick” Best, who commanded the bombing squadron on the
Enterprise
, found Browning intolerable. “He was a bully,” Best recalled after the war. “I despised him.” The ebullient Halsey, however, got along very well with Browning and had recommended him for his promotion to captain. For his part, Spruance thought Browning was “smart and quick,” and he knew that Halsey trusted him. Moreover, because Spruance was not an aviator, he was bound to rely heavily on Browning for tactical advice. Six days earlier, soon after Task Force 16 had left Pearl Harbor for Point Luck,
Spruance had called a meeting in his cabin to which he invited the air group commander and the four squadron commanders. Almost at once, Browning took charge of the meeting, outlining the plan to ambush four Japanese carriers north of Midway, even naming the four carriers that would be involved. He did not tell the pilots where the information came from—that was still classified—and the information was so detailed that some of the pilots were skeptical. Best thought it sounded “phony.” He asked Browning, “Suppose they don’t attack Midway, suppose they keep going east and hit Pearl Harbor again?” Browning looked at him with narrowed eyes for a long minute, then replied, “Well, we just hope they don’t.”
¹⁶

Captain Miles Browning, Halsey’s brash and confident chief of staff, also served as Spruance’s chief of staff during the Batt le of Midway. (U.S. Naval Institute)

Upon receipt of Fletcher’s order, Spruance told Browning “to launch everything they had at the earliest possible moment.” In accordance with the predetermined battle plan, he would hold back only a small CAP and send everything else—seventy-one dive-bombers, twenty-nine torpedo planes, and twenty Wildcats—to hit the Japanese first.
¹⁷

One practical problem remained. Task Force 16 had closed the range to the Kid
ō
Butai slightly in the past half hour, but the enemy carriers were still at the extreme limit of the American torpedo bombers and fighters. Moreover, the wind that day was very light—only about five knots—and it was coming out of the east. In order to launch, the
Hornet
and
Enterprise
would have to turn into the wind,
away
from the target, and build up speed to at least 25 knots. It would take at least half an hour, and probably more, to launch those 120 airplanes, which would add back all the miles the Americans had gained since the first sighting. At Browning’s suggestion, Spruance decided to continue steaming southwest, toward the target, for another 45 minutes before launching at about 7:00 a.m. It would still be a long flight to the target. Nonetheless, this later launch was likely to allow the attack planes sufficient time over the target to get the job done and get back safely.
¹⁸

Meanwhile, Tomonaga’s strike force from the Kid
ō
Butai was hammering Midway. The Japanese pilots had expected to catch the tiny atoll by surprise. The ambush by VMF-221 had disabused them of that expectation, and they were also disconcerted to encounter extremely heavy ground fire. They were greatly disappointed to find the airfield on Eastern Island nearly bare of airplanes. Nevertheless, their attack was ferocious—and effective. The sixty-six bombers that survived the intercept dropped a total of just over thirty-eight tons of explosive ordnance on the two tiny islands that made up Midway Atoll. They took out the power plant, the Eastern Island command post, the mess hall, and the post office; they wrecked the aircraft servicing area, cut the water lines, destroyed the seaplane hangar, and damaged the barracks. One bomb hit a rearming pit and set off eight more 100-pound bombs and 10,000 rounds of .50-caliber ammunition. Another set fire to the oil storage tanks, from which great clouds of black smoke roiled the sky. By the time the raid was over, the entire atoll appeared to be severely damaged. Nonetheless, the Japanese had missed the main aviation fuel supply, the runways were only superficially damaged, and only eleven Americans had been killed and eighteen wounded.
¹⁹

Tomonaga was among the first to drop his bomb. Then he circled the target to assess the damage by his strike force. Before he had left the Kid
ō
Butai, he had been given several code messages designed to apprise Nagumo of the results of the raid. Several Japanese pilots broke radio silence during the attack to announce their success: “Hangar and runways have been hit,” reported one; “Great results obtained,” asserted another. Of course, because Simard had launched almost everything that would fly, few American planes were on the ground when the Japanese struck. As a result, at 7:00 a.m., Tomonaga radioed a code phrase back to the Kid
ō
Butai. “There is need for a second attack.”
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