The Battle of Midway (44 page)

By the time Nagumo made that decision, it was 8:35. The planes from the
Hornet
and
Enterprise
had been in the air for more than half an hour.

*
To avoid confusion, all times used in the text will reflect the local time in the area of the Battle of Midway, which was two hours earlier than the time kept on board U.S. ships. The Japanese maintained Tokyo time on their ships, which was twenty-one hours ahead of Midway time.

*
All five operable Wildcats on Midway were launched as CAP at 4:00 a.m., but Ramsey recalled them once all of the long-range search planes had departed. Two of the pilots did not hear the recall order and continued to circle. They finally landed at 6:15, just as all the other fighters and attack planes on Midway were being launched. Quickly refueled, they sped north to join their squadron mates.

*
In his book
Midway Inquest
, Dallas Isom makes a strong case that Nagumo did not receive this information until 8:00 a.m. He argues that the 7:45 time given in the radio traffic log was reconstructed from memory because the original radio traffic log went down with the
Akagi.
Isom also asserts that the time noted on the Hypo intercept log was added after the war based on the reconstructed (and inaccurate)Japanese log. The timing was important, Isom argues, because if Nagumo did not receive the message until 8:00, it meant that the rearming had been going on for forty-five minutes instead of half an hour, and as a result it took longer to reverse the process. It is an interesting and plausible argument, but also highly speculative, and the preponderance of noncircumstantial evidence puts the message in Nagumo’s hands by 7:45.

A
t 7:00 a.m., about the time that Tomonaga was informing Nagumo that Midway needed a second strike, and while the Kid
ō
Butai was fending off the first of the American bomber attacks from Midway, the two carriers of Spruance’s Task Force 16 were turning into the wind to launch. Mounting a coordinated attack by air groups from two different carriers was unusual—indeed nearly unprecedented—for the Americans, who continued to conceive of their carriers as independent units. While U.S. Navy doctrine called for the air squadrons from each carrier to cooperate, there was no established doctrine about how planes from multiple carriers might operate together in an integrated formation as the Japanese did routinely. Back in March, when planes from the
Lexington
and
Yorktown
had attacked Lae and Salamaua on New Guinea, and again in May when they attacked the
Sh
ō
kaku
and
Zuikaku
in the Coral Sea, the air groups from the two American carriers had flown to the targets separately, each under its own commander. Though Spruance and Browning had visions of a single, combined strike by planes from both
Hornet
and
Enterprise
, in the end
each of the air groups flew to the target independently, and this meant that much of the responsibility for the conduct of the attack fell to the captains of those two carriers and to their respective air group commanders.

This was especially true in the case of the
Hornet
, the only American carrier that did not have a flag officer on board, though Pete Mitscher had been selected for Rear Admiral (and some members of his staff already referred to him as “Admiral Mitscher”). Mitscher had logged as many air miles as any other American officer afloat, and he may have been a bit miffed that Spruance had designated George Murray, captain of the
Enterprise
, as the tactical air officer for the combined task force. Murray was slightly senior as a pilot (he was Naval Aviator #22 and Mitscher was #33), but Mitscher was senior to Murray in rank. Spruance likely made this decision because Murray had more combat experience and was on the
Enterprise
and therefore closer to hand. In the end, Murray would have little influence over the
Hornet’s
attack against the Japanese carriers that day, an attack that would be orchestrated and managed by Mitscher and the
Hornet’s
air group commander, Stanhope C. Ring.

To all outward appearances, Mitscher and Ring were complete opposites. Mitscher, as we have seen, was short, slight, sun-ravaged, and bald; Ring was tall and movie-star handsome, with a full head of hair. Ring, as the expression went, wore the uniform well; one junior officer thought he
was “the picture of the ideal naval officer.” The two men were also different in background and temperament. At the Naval Academy, where Mitscher had been a poor student and a discipline problem, Ring had graduated in the top 25 percent of his class and had few demerits. Ring was urbane and sophisticated, and a strong believer in protocol and discipline. As a sailor on the
Enterprise
put it, Ring “belonged to the starchy, do-it-by-the-book side of the Navy.”
¹

Stanhope C. Ring, shown here as a rear admiral in a 1954 photograph, was the commander of the
Hornet
air group (CHAG) in the Battle of Midway. (U.S. Naval Institute)

Ring’s Nordic good looks and polished manners very likely played a role in securing him a number of plum staff jobs during his career. After a tour on the
Lexington
, he became the aide to Rear Admiral William Moffett, and after that he served as the naval aide to President Herbert Hoover. Following tours on the
Langley
and
Saratoga
, Ring worked in the Bureau of Aeronautics, and then as the U.S. naval attaché in London, where he was the American observer on the staff of Admiral Sir James Somerville (whose fleet was subsequently decimated by the Kid
ō
Butai in the Indian Ocean). Somerville had liked him and, at the end of Ring’s tour in October 1941, recommended him for the Order of the British Empire. For his part, Ring was so taken with the British way of doing things that he began carrying a swagger stick, a habit that led many to mock him behind his back. Promoted to the rank of full commander, he was assigned as the
Hornet’s
air group commander, or CHAG, an unfortunate acronym that was pronounced “sea hag.”
²

Ring was generally well liked by his superiors, including Mitscher, but not by the young pilots in his charge. Even forty years later, they seethed with resentment. The main reason for this was that Ring led by authority rather than by example. He was quick to assert his rank, as, for instance, when he grounded several pilots because they failed to stand up when he entered the wardroom. During the brief stopover at Pearl Harbor before heading out to Point Luck, the pilots on
Enterprise
and
Yorktown
had been granted shore leave. Ring decreed that the
Hornet
pilots had to remain at Ewa Airfield on continuous alert. One pilot recalled that “there was much grumbling and a near ‘mutiny’ against the CHAG” as a result of that decision. A few pilots risked court martial by “expressing their opinion of CHAG to his face.”
³

Ring’s strictness might have been tolerable but for the fact that he himself was an indifferent pilot. When the
Hornet
was first put in commission, he insisted on being the first to land a plane on her deck. Ensign Troy Guillory was in the rear seat of Ring’s SBC-4 scout biplane, and he remembered that Ring made his approach too high and too fast. Guillory heard “this little tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet” alarm and thought to himself that they were signaling the crash signal for somebody. In fact, it was for them. The plane hit the deck hard and much too fast, failed to catch a wire, and struck the crash barrier. It damaged the plane’s landing gear and broke the support wires on the wings. No one was hurt, but it was a bad omen for the first arrested landing on a new ship, and a poor augury for Ring’s credibility as CHAG. A week later, when a camera crew came on board
Hornet
to film carrier operations, Ring insisted on being the one photographed. As his plane accelerated down the flight deck, he turned his head to the camera and affected a pose, to the disgust of the pilots who witnessed it. Nor were Ring’s navigational skills up to par. On one occasion, he got lost while leading a training exercise in the Gulf of Mexico and had to turn the mission over to the executive officer of the scouting squadron, Gus Widhelm, to find the ship. As a result of these and other incidents, the pilots in the
Hornet’s
mostly inexperienced air group had limited confidence in Ring as a pilot or a navigator. At Midway, the extent of their confidence would be sorely tested.
⁴

No aspect of the Battle of Midway is more controversial or enigmatic than the role of the
Hornet
air group under Stanhope Ring on June 4. Four squadrons took off from the
Hornet
that morning, but only one managed to find the Kid
ō
Butai—and that one did so only because its squadron commander flagrantly disobeyed Ring’s direct orders. The rest of the air group—two squadrons of bombers and all of the fighters that were committed to the strike—forty-four planes altogether—failed to see the enemy at all. Worse, in trying to get back to the
Hornet
, thirteen of those planes ran out of gas and had to ditch in the ocean, subjecting the pilots to hours or days of terrible suffering and, in two cases, death. That flight has become known in the lore of the Battle of Midway as “the flight to nowhere.” In
effect, despite Nimitz’s furious efforts to ensure that the Americans would have three carriers at Midway to confront the Kid
ō
Butai, only two of them succeeded in attacking the enemy that morning.

Reconstructing how this came about is difficult. For one thing, Mitscher and Ring never wrote or spoke candidly about it. Mitscher’s official report not only avoids the key issues, it is manifestly incorrect in several elements. Ring either never wrote a report or Mitscher failed to forward it, for it has not surfaced in the seventy years since the battle. In addition, none of the reports of the four squadron commanders survive, if indeed they were ever written. Submitting an after-action report following a mission was mandatory under Navy regulations. Nevertheless, other than Mitscher’s flawed report, the only contemporary evidence of what happened to the
Hornet’s
air group that morning comes from the oral testimony of the survivors, much of it written decades afterward and some of it contradictory. Telling the story of the
Hornet’s
air group on the morning of June 4 therefore remains a daunting task.

Breakfast call for the pilots on the
Hornet
sounded at 3:30 that morning. Few of them had slept much anyway, and, knowing they would have a busy day, they headed down to the officer’s mess for “a hurried breakfast.” Some opted for a “one-eyed sandwich,” a slice of toast holed out to accommodate a fried egg, though others merely grabbed a mug of coffee and went directly to the ready room, their leather helmets and goggles close to hand, to wait for the call to man their planes. Many were understandably nervous; none of them had any combat experience, including the squadron commanders. Unlike the pilots on the other American carriers who had participated in the raids on the Marshalls, Wake, or New Guinea, or fought in the Coral Sea, those on the
Hornet
, including Ring, were facing their first combat mission. The
Hornet
had gone to sea only in March. The pilots had conducted air operations during the shakedown cruise, but new pilots had to make eight carrier landings to become carrier-qualified, and many had not yet met that standard by the time the
Hornet
passed through the Panama Canal on her way to the Pacific. In San Diego, the dive-bombing squadrons got new planes, so that even those who had qualified had yet to make an arrested landing in the plane they would fly in
combat. Some had qualified off San Diego before the
Hornet
headed up to Alameda. From March 20 to April 18, however, the
Hornet’s
deck was encumbered by the sixteen B-25 bombers that she had carried into the western Pacific for the Doolittle raid. Flight operations had resumed immediately afterward, but even with that, the
Hornet
pilots had a total of only about six weeks of on-board training. Many had still not completed the initial training syllabus. In short, they were rookies, and the Battle of Midway would be their trial by fire.
⁵