The Battle of Midway (42 page)

The message reached Nagumo on the bridge of the
Akagi
at 7:05. It could hardly have surprised him. From the beginning, he had suspected that a single strike with half his force would not be sufficient to soften up Midway for the planned amphibious landing. Though Yamamoto’s principal goal was to get the American carriers, the plan also charged Nagumo with wrecking Midway’s defenses to prepare the way for invasion. As he considered Tomonaga’s report, however, Nagumo had other concerns, for at that moment the Kid
ō
Butai itself was under attack. These were not the planes from
Hornet
and
Enterprise
—those planes were just then taking off 175 miles to the east. Instead, it was the first contingent of the diverse collection of bombers and torpedo planes that Simard had launched from Midway an hour before.

The first to arrive were six brand-new TBF Avenger torpedo bombers. Designed as a replacement for the slow and aging Devastators, the Avengers were bigger, had a greater range, and were much faster. When the
Hornet
had left Norfolk back in March, half of her VT pilots had remained behind to take delivery of the new Grumman-built aircraft. When the twenty-one new planes were delivered, the pilots flew them across the country in stages to San Francisco, where they were loaded aboard the transport
Hammondsport
for the trip out to Hawaii. The Avengers arrived there on May 29, one day after the
Hornet
left for Point Luck. Eager to get at least some of them into the fight, Nimitz ordered the air crews at Pearl to stay up all night in order to attach belly tanks to six of them so they could fly the 1,100 miles out to Midway. They made the eight-hour flight from Oahu to Midway on June 1, and there the belly tanks were removed and torpedoes attached. But they never did get to the
Hornet.
Instead, Simard ordered them to strike at the Kid
ō
Butai directly from Midway.
²¹

The most senior of the six Avenger pilots was Lieutenant Langdon Fieberling, a naval reservist who had earned his wings in 1937. The others were young ensigns between the ages of 22 and 25, and a rare enlisted pilot, Aviation Machinist’s Mate First Class Darrel Woodside. Each plane carried a crew of three, and all eighteen men—over half of them teenagers—were heading into their first combat. As they flew out toward the coordinates, they passed Tomonaga’s Midway strike force going the other way, and though a Japanese fighter flew over for a look, neither group paid serious attention to the other. An hour later, the Avenger pilots found the Kid
ō
Butai. Navy doctrine called for torpedo planes to coordinate with dive-bombers, in order to limit the target’s ability to effect evasive maneuvers. But the only dive-bombers assigned to this attack were Marine Corps planes, and no one had arranged for a Navy-Marine joint attack. Besides, the slower Marine bombers were well behind the Avengers, and Fieberling was in no mood to wait for them. He and his squadron mates began an immediate attack: six torpedo bombers against the entire Kid
ō
Butai.
²²

One of the Avenger pilots was Ensign Albert Earnest, a 25-year-old who had won his gold wings sixteen days before the Pearl Harbor attack. Now as he approached the awesome sight of the entire Kid
ō
Butai spread out below him, it seemed to him that there were “20 or 30 Zeros waiting to shoot us down.” His estimate was remarkably accurate—at that moment there were twenty-eight Zero fighters flying CAP over the Kid
ō
Butai, roughly five defenders for each attacker. As the Avengers nosed over to drop from their cruising altitude of 4,000 feet to 200 feet for the run-in to the target, the Zeros pounced on them. One Avenger, and then another, caught fire and dropped into the sea. “Bullets and anti-aircraft fire were coming at me from every direction,” Earnest recalled. A 20 mm cannon shell killed his 18-year-old turret gunner. The third man in the airplane, 17-year-old Harry Ferrier, who had lied about his age in order to join the Navy, was struck in the head and knocked unconscious. Bullets punched a score of holes in Earnest’s plane, destroying his hydraulic system and severing the elevator
cables. The control stick went dead in his hand. Shrapnel from a 20 mm shell shattered his instrument panel, and his plane dived toward the water. Struggling to keep his plane in the air, Earnest dropped his torpedo in the general direction of a cruiser, hoping the loss of weight would allow him to remain airborne. The drop seemed to have no effect, however, and the plane continued to dive toward the water out of control. Earnest braced for a crash landing and, just before impact, reflexively reached down to adjust the four-inch wheel that controlled the trim tabs, something he routinely did before landing. When he did so, the nose of his plane came up, and the Avenger gained a bit of altitude. Zeros continued to make runs at him, and it was all Earnest could do to hold his plane in a more or less straight course. He felt like “a tin duck in a shooting gallery” as the Zeros made repeated runs at him. Relying on the trim tabs to remain airborne, he kept low and flew southward. “A couple of Zeros swooped in to finish me off,” he recalled, “but I was so close to the water, they couldn’t make a real good run at me.”
²³

Ensign Albert Earnest piloted one of the new Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bombers from Midway in the first attack on the Kido Butai on the morning of June 4. He and his enlisted radioman, Harry Ferrier, also seen here, were the only survivors of the mission. (U.S. Naval Institute)

Eventually the Zeros gave up the chase. Earnest still had to make it back to Midway with a plane that could barely fly. Badly wounded, with blood running from a neck wound, and all of his instruments out—even the compass—he used the angle of the sun to estimate which direction was south. He called his two gunners on the plane’s intercom, but got no
response. He nursed the Avenger up to 3,000 feet and flew on. He did not know whether or not his torpedo had successfully dropped. After some time, Harry Ferrier regained consciousness and called him up on the intercom to report that he was still alive. Eventually, Earnest spotted a tall column of black smoke from the burning oil tanks on Midway. Ignoring a wave off from the airfield controller who didn’t think the crippled plane would survive a landing, he touched down on the runway on one wheel, his plane doing a ground loop before coming to a stop on the apron. Only later did he learn that he and young Harry Ferrier were the only survivors of the Avengers strike, and that none of the American torpedoes had struck an enemy ship.
²⁴

One reason the Zeros did not pursue Earnest’s crippled plane was that they had another target to deal with. Only seconds behind the Avengers were four Army medium bombers under Captain James Collins, Jr. The two-engine B-26 Marauders had been specially modified to carry torpedoes, which meant that they, too, approached the Kid
ō
Butai at low altitude, around 200 feet. Collins flew through the swarming Zeros and the exploding flak to drop his torpedo, and as his plane passed over the
Akagi
his nose gunner strafed the big carrier, killing two of its crewmen. First Lieutenant James Muri followed Collins in. He heard “the shells coming into the side of the fuselage and near the turret.” Muri’s turret gunner, Corporal Frank Melo, saw “beads of sweat” on Muri’s forehead. Muri had a cigarette in his mouth, but he had bitten it in two, and “it hung by a slender strip of paper” as he focused on making the attack run. Like Collins, he came in very low to drop his torpedo, passing so low over the
Akagi
that Nagumo and his staff on the small bridge reflexively ducked. The other two planes in the formation were less lucky. Both of them, riddled with cannon shells and machine gun bullets, crashed into the sea. The two surviving planes, each with more than half their crew wounded, headed for home. Muri’s ground crew later counted more than five hundred bullet holes in his plane.
²⁵

If this was the best the Americans could do, Nagumo had to feel fairly sanguine. To be sure, it had been a scary moment when that big two-engine American bomber seemed headed for his command bridge, but in the end
the Americans had failed to inflict any damage on the Kid
ō
Butai beyond the two men killed when Collins strafed the
Akagi.
The Zeros had shot down seven of the ten American airplanes and sent the other three limping home. Nagumo had already decided to send a second strike against Midway, but this attack by planes from that island base may have played a role in his decision about how to execute that second strike. According to Yamamoto’s oral instructions, he was supposed to keep half his airplane strength, and half of his pilots, on hand in case any American surface ships appeared. Strict adherence to those orders, however, now meant that he would have to wait to recover Tomonaga’s attack force, strike them below to the hangar deck to be refueled and rearmed, and then send them back up to the flight deck for launch, while half his planes sat idle and his best pilots cooled their heels in the ready room. Surely Yamamoto did not expect Nagumo to keep half his planes unused throughout the battle? That would be like asking him to fight with one hand tied behind his back. As Nagumo’s chief of staff wrote after the war, it was “intolerable” to expect a frontline commander to keep half his strength idle “for an enemy force which might not be in the area after all.” It would be far more efficient to use the planes that were now on the hangar deck for the second strike, then recover Tomonaga’s planes and arm them with antiship ordnance in the unlikely event that any American surface ships appeared. At 7:15, therefore, as the few surviving American planes retreated over the horizon, Nagumo ordered that the planes on the hangar decks of his four carriers be rearmed with fragmentation bombs for a second strike against Midway.
²⁶

The changeover in armament was a major task, especially for the carriers of CarDiv 1, where the Kate torpedo planes were armed with the big 1,870-pound Type 91 antiship torpedoes. Because there were a limited number of hand trucks on each carrier, the crews could rearm only six planes at a time. The carts had to be positioned under the planes; then, after the arming device had been removed, the torpedoes had to be gingerly lowered by hand crank down onto the carts. Because the ammunition handlers were busy bringing up the heavy bombs that would replace those torpedoes, the torpedoes themselves were not returned to the magazine. Instead, they were pushed over to the bulkhead and lifted by hand
onto holding racks. Even after the torpedo was removed, the crew still had to remove the mounting brackets that kept the torpedo attached to the plane and replace them with mounting brackets for the 800-kilogram (1,760-pound) fragmentation bombs, which also had to be maneuvered under the planes by hand cart and then cranked up into place.
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