The Battle of Midway (43 page)

This labor-intensive process had been under way for at least half an hour when Nagumo received a radio message from Petty Officer First Class Amari Yoji, piloting search plane number 4 from the cruiser
Tone.
This was the plane that had been delayed that morning and had left a half hour behind schedule. Now Amari sent a stunning report, one that was entirely unexpected: “Sight what appears to be ten enemy surface units, in position bearing ten degrees [almost due north], distant 240 miles from Midway.” The fact that the one plane that had been delayed by half an hour that morning was the very one assigned to search the quadrant where the American carriers lay in wait is one of the events that has led some students of the battle to dub the subsequent American victory a “miracle,” for it is hard to resist the notion that this was the moment when Providence put its finger on the scale of History. The Japanese thought so, too. After the war, Fuchida Mitsuo wrote in his memoir, “The delay in launching
Tone
’s planes sowed a seed which bore fatal fruit for the Japanese in the ensuing naval action.” And yet, an analysis of the morning’s events suggests that, if anything, that delay was a stroke of good luck for the Japanese.
²⁸

Amari’s orders that morning had been to fly three hundred miles nearly due east (100 degrees), then turn north for sixty miles before returning. After his late start, however, he was eager to get back on schedule, so rather than flying the prescribed three hundred miles, he instead turned north at about 6:45 when he was only 220 miles out and in doing so found Spruance’s Task Force 16 (see map, p. 223). Had he left on time and flown his assigned course, he very likely would not have sighted the Americans until he began his return leg sometime after 8:00. Consequently, the delay in launching Amari’s float plane that morning may have hastened the moment when Nagumo learned of the presence of American surface ships northeast of him.
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Exactly when Nagumo got that report has been disputed. Although Amari sent it at 7:28, he sent it to
Tone
, his host ship, where it was decrypted
in the radio room, rushed up to the bridge, and then blinkered over to the flagship. In his after-action report, Nagumo wrote that he got the message at “about 0500” (8:00 a.m. local time). In that same report, Nagumo also wrote, “The delay in the delivery of message from Tone’s #4 plane greatly affected our subsequent attack preparations.” Most evidence, however, puts the information in Nagumo’s hands by 7:45. First of all, there is the ambiguity of that “about 0500.” More significantly, the Japanese radio message log indicates that Nagumo received the message at 7:45, and it logged Nagumo’s reply to Amari at 7:47, a time confirmed by Hypo, which intercepted and recorded the reply.
*
Almost certainly, Nagumo received Amari’s message at about 7:45, and even though Amari did not say so, Nagumo had to suspect that there might be an American carrier operating with those “ten enemy surface units,” for there would be little reason for an American task force to be operating north of Midway without a carrier. Nagumo’s chief of staff, Rear Admiral Kusaka Ry
ū
nosuke, recalled thinking, “There couldn’t be an enemy force without carriers in the area reported and there must be carriers somewhere.” Finally, given the coordinates that Amari had sent, Nagumo also knew this target was just over two hundred miles away from his own carriers, already within striking distance because of the longer range of the Japanese attack planes.
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In response to this stunning information, Nagumo consulted with his staff, especially with Kusaka and Commander Genda Minoru. It was a bit awkward to hold a strategy conference in a crowded public space; Nagumo would doubtless have preferred to retreat somewhere more private for the conversation. But the pressure of the moment did not allow that. While
they discussed this new information, Nagumo suspended the changeover of armament down on the hangar deck and ordered the thirty-six Val bombers on the
Hiry
ū
and
S
ō
ry
ū
“to prepare to carry out attacks on enemy fleet units.” Before he sent them off, however, he needed to know more about those American ships. Nagumo had not been at the Battle of the Coral Sea. Nonetheless, he was certainly aware of Hara’s disastrous blunder in sending a full air strike against what turned out to be an oiler and a destroyer. Before he completely restructured his attack plan, Nagumo wanted to know what kind of American ships were out there two hundred miles away, and in particular if they included any aircraft carriers. He therefore ordered Amari to “ascertain [ship] types” and to “maintain contact.” For a few precious and irrecoverable minutes, the entire Japanese strike force was frozen in suspension while Nagumo waited for the answer.
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It came in at 8:09: “Enemy ships are five cruisers and five destroyers.” That seemed curious, to say the least, for—again—it made little sense that such a force should be operating at that location without a carrier. Still, cruisers and destroyers could be dealt with later, and even if an enemy carrier were with them, Nagumo knew that the Americans could not launch an attack against him from such a distance due to the limited range of the American torpedo planes and fighters. He did not need to scramble his reserve planes for an immediate strike, and this was just as well, for just at that moment, the Kid
ō
Butai came under renewed air attack from Midway, and his carriers needed to keep their flight decks clear in order to launch and recover Zero fighters. Indeed, over the next twenty minutes, the Japanese launched two dozen more Zeros to defend the Kid
ō
Butai. By 8:30 they had a total of thirty-six fighters aloft. Since Tomonaga had taken thirty-six fighters with him to hit Midway, Nagumo had now launched very nearly every fighter he had.
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They had plenty of work to do. First, came sixteen Marine Corps Dauntless dive-bombers, under the command of Major Lofton Henderson. Aware that his rookie pilots, virtually all of them on their first combat mission, had little or no training in dive-bombing techniques, Henderson felt compelled to order a glide-bombing attack. The 30-degree approach to the target made the Dauntlesses easy prey for the Zeros, which started by attacking
the lead plane and then working their way methodically back through the formation. Henderson’s plane was one of the first to go down. The survivors at the rear of the formation determinedly carried on through the blitz of bullets and 20 mm cannon fire to drop their bombs, some waiting (so they reported later) until they were a mere five hundred feet from the target. Their bombs bracketed the
Hiry
ū
, sending up great geysers of water, and afterward they reported three hits and several near misses. In spite of their reckless courage, however, none of their bombs struck home.
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Though Henderson’s attack, like its predecessors, had been futile, it greatly alarmed Admiral Yamaguchi Tamon. The commander of CarDiv 2 wondered if the appearance of carrier-type airplanes meant that an American carrier was nearby. If so, where was it? Though the Japanese had suffered no damage in this attack, their sense that everything was under control began to slip.

Even as the Marines were completing their ill-fated attack, fifteen Army B-17 Flying Fortress bombers appeared three miles above them at 20,000 feet. These were the planes that had been sent out from Midway before dawn to attack Tanaka’s transport force; they had been redirected to the Kid
ō
Butai after Ady’s sighting report. Though the B-17s were unmolested by the Zeros, precision bombing from 20,000 feet was impossible. Sticks of 600-pound bombs exploded in rows all around the big enemy carriers, but none of them actually struck a ship. Despite that, the returning pilots again reported that they had made several hits and that they had left three aircraft carriers burning.

The B-17 s were unmolested, but the Marine Dauntless pilots were savaged by the Japanese CAP, and the survivors had a difficult time getting back to Midway. With Henderson killed and the formation scattered, each pilot was on his own. Many stayed low and skimmed the surface; others sought to hide in the cloud cover. None escaped unscathed. Captain Richard Blain nursed his Dauntless for twenty miles before his fuel pump went out. Then the engine stopped altogether. It recaught momentarily, then went out again. He crash-landed in the sea, and he and his rear-seat gunner, Sergeant Robert Underwood, scrambled into their tiny life raft. Finding that it had a hole in it, they put ersatz makeshift patch on it and spent
much of the next two days bailing. After two days and two nights, they were rescued by a PBY. In the end, only eight of the sixteen planes that set out from Midway made it back. On one of them, maintenance crews found 179 bullet holes; on another they counted 219.
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The Americans were not done yet. After the Dauntlesses departed, a dozen antiquated Marine Corps SB2U Vindicators made a run at the Japanese carriers. These aged canvas-covered monoplanes were even older than the Brewster Buffaloes and literally held together by adhesive tape. The pilots derisively referred to them as “Wind Indicators” since the tag ends of the tape fluttered in such a way as to indicate the wind direction. Many of the pilots had never flown one before. They came out of the cloud cover over a Japanese battleship, and immediately came under attack by the Zeros, which convinced Major Benjamin Norris, who commanded the group, to target the battleship rather than take the time to look for the carriers. Three of his planes were shot down almost at once. It would have been worse except that by now many of the Zeros had expended their 20 mm cannon ammunition and had only their lighter 7.7 mm machine guns. Two more Vindicators were hit by bursts of antiair fire from the battleship. The shell explosions buffeted the flimsy planes so violently that, as one pilot recalled, “it was practically impossible to hold the ship in a true dive.” Nevertheless, they grimly persisted and dropped their ordnance. Once again, none of them scored a hit.
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Thus it was that between 7:55 and 8:35 that morning, the Kid
ō
Butai endured three separate attacks by more than forty American aircraft from Midway. The Americans had hurled themselves on the Kid
ō
Butai in a series of uncoordinated attacks, heedless of danger and profligate with their lives, but none of them managed to land any of their ordnance on target. Eighteen of the attackers were shot down, and most of the rest were so badly damaged that they were of questionable further use. Only the high-flying B-17s had been spared.

There were, however, two important consequences of these attacks that greatly affected the subsequent course of the battle. First, because the big Japanese torpedoes and fragmentation bombs could not be moved about on the hangar decks of the carriers while they maneuvered radically
under air attack, the American onslaught slowed the transfer of armament for most of that forty-minute period. And second, because Nagumo felt compelled to commit virtually all of his remaining Zero fighters to the defense of the Kid
ō
Butai, he would have to recover, rearm, and refuel those fighters before they could be used to accompany his bombers and torpedo planes in an attack on the American warships.

In the midst of these attacks, at about 8:20, Nagumo received an update from Amari. Apparently the clouds had parted enough to give him a better look at the ships below him, and he now reported: “Enemy force [is] accompanied by what appears to an aircraft carrier to the rear of the others.” Though Nagumo had suspected as much, this was nevertheless critical news. Kusaka later asserted that though he knew it was likely, he was still “shocked” by the report, describing it as “a bolt from the blue.” Here was not only a worthy target but also the primary objective of the whole mission. This was the moment to launch those ship-killing attack planes Nagumo had been hoarding on the hangar decks. The problem was that by now Tomonaga’s strike force was returning from Midway and needed to land. In addition, the Zeros that had fended off the American air attacks from Midway were low on both fuel and ammunition and also needed to land. Nagumo had used all four carriers to launch the planes of his Midway attack force; he would need all four decks to recover them. He could not recover planes and launch at the same time. He seemed to have two choices: order the returning strike force and his own Zero fighters to circle the task force (and risk having them run out of fuel as they did so) while he brought up the reserve planes for an attack on the American surface forces—an attack that would have to go with little or no fighter cover—or recover his CAP and Tomonaga’s planes, rearm and refuel them, and dispatch a fully coordinated strike.
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On
Hiry
ū
, Rear Admiral Yamaguchi Tamon, the commander of CarDiv 2, had also received Amari’s updated report. He was bold enough to offer Nagumo some unsolicited advice by blinker signal: “Consider it advisable to launch attack force immediately.” Back in December, Yamaguchi had been the one who had blinkered Nagumo that he was ready to launch another strike at Pearl Harbor. Nagumo hadn’t taken the hint then, and he was
disinclined to accept Yamaguchi’s impertinent advice now. It was not just a matter of pique, however, for launching “immediately” was not really an option. Yamaguchi’s dive-bombers on
S
ō
ry
ū
and
Hiry
ū
, which were armed with the smaller 551-pound bombs, were ready (or nearly ready) to go, but the big torpedo-carrying Kates of CarDiv 1 were not, and even after they were armed, they would have to be brought up from the hangar deck and spotted for launch. That would take half an hour at least, and likely longer, and by then Tomonaga’s returning planes might well run out of gas.
³⁷

Of course, Nagumo could order a partial strike by Yamaguchi’s thirty-six Val diver-bombers, and that may have been what Yamaguchi had in mind. The difficulty was that those bombers would have to proceed not only without the cooperation of the torpedo bombers but also with little fighter protection. An attack by only thirty-six dive-bombers (less than a quarter of his available force) without any coordinating torpedo planes or fighter cover would violate Japanese doctrine to strike the enemy with full strength in a combined and coordinated attack. Moreover, Nagumo had just watched the Americans hurl their odd collection of bombers and torpedo planes at him without fighter protection, and not only had they failed, they had been all but obliterated. As Kusaka put it later, “I witnessed [how] enemy planes without fighter cover were almost annihilated. … I wanted most earnestly to provide them [our bombers] with fighters by all means.” Nagumo made his decision: He would recover his CAP and Tomonaga’s returning planes, and then prepare his entire strike force for an all-out death blow against the American flattop.
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