The Battle of Midway (54 page)

Flying at 15,000 feet, Best turned his squadron toward the
Kaga
and “put the planes in echelon so that they were no more than 150 feet apart.” His pilots prepared to dive by shifting to low blower and low prop pitch, cracking open the hatches of their cockpits to reduce the likelihood of the windscreen fogging up, and opening their split flaps. Best did not know that a mile above him, Gallaher’s pilots were doing the same thing until, just as he was about to push over, the sixteen bombers of VS-6, plus McClusky’s, all came flashing down past him, avoiding a catastrophic collision only by a matter of yards. In Best’s words: “God! Here came McClusky and Gallaher from Scouting Six pouring right in front of me.” Best’s first thought was: “They had jumped my target!” Thinking fast, he closed his flaps and waggled his ailerons as a signal to the rest of his squadron to hold back. Too late. Already committed to the dive, ten of the pilots of VB-6 joined the onslaught on the
Kaga. They
almost certainly never saw Best’s last-minute effort to recall them. Only Best’s two wingmen, Kroeger and Ensign Frederick Weber, were close enough to see his frantic signals and hold up. As a result, no fewer than twenty-seven Dauntless dive-bombers plunged out of the sky to target the
Kaga.
²¹

Until that moment, the Japanese on
Kaga
had been entirely unaware of this new threat. Lacking radar, they were fully dependent on the sharp eyes of their lookouts. This time, however, the lookouts on the screening vessels had let them down. At 10:22, with the first of the bombers already screaming down toward them at 250 knots, first one, and then many observers on the
Kaga
pointed skyward and shouted
“Kyukoka!”
(“Dive-bombers!”) Jimmy Thach, who was still trying to fend off the Zeros from Lem Massey’s few remaining torpedo bombers, looked up and saw the sun glinting off silver wings. To him “it looked like a beautiful silver waterfall, those dive-bombers coming down.”
²²

Because the Zeros were still focused on Massey’s torpedo bombers, they were unable to interfere even minimally with the attack. Moreover, the guns
of
Kaga’s
antiair battery were all still at low angle. With the shouted warnings, the gun crews furiously began to crank the ship’s sixteen five-inch guns up to the vertical position, but it took only about forty seconds for the first of the plunging American bombers to reach the release point. The skipper of the
Kaga
, Captain Okada Jisaku, ordered the ship hard to port in order to throw them off. However, the 42,000-ton
Kaga
was slow to respond and had barely begun her turn when the first bombs came hurtling down.
²³

The first three bombs all missed, but the fourth plane, piloted by Earl Gallaher himself, placed its 500-pound bomb squarely on the flight deck of the big flattop. It was the first time all morning that American ordnance had found a target. The 500-pound bombs had a fuse with a 0.01-second delay, so that it pierced the flight deck before exploding in the crew’s berthing compartments, starting the first of many fires that would eventually consume the big ship. That hit was followed by two more misses, and then by several hits in succession. One bomb struck on or near the forward elevator and penetrated to the hangar deck; another smashed into the flight deck amidships, and yet another hit squarely on the
Kaga
’s small island structure, killing Captain Okada and most of his senior officers, rendering the
Kaga
leaderless.
²⁴

As with the attack on the
Sh
ō
h
ō
a month before, the bombers simply overwhelmed the
Kaga.
Following these four hits by 500-pound bombs from Gallaher’s squadron, the ten bombers of Best’s VB-6 added several 1,000-pound bombs to the smoking wreck. Thach claimed later, “I’d never seen such superb dive bombing. It looked to me like almost every bomb hit.” Watching from 12,000 feet, Best tried to count the number of hits. “They were hitting from stem to stern,” he recalled later. At “four or five second intervals there would be a fresh blast and fire would come up and smoke would pour out.” At least one 1,000-pound bomb exploded on the packed hangar deck crowded with fully fueled planes armed with torpedoes. The historians Jon Parshall and Anthony Tully estimate that a total of 80,000 pounds of ordnance “lay scattered” there. Some of it was on the big Kate torpedo bombers, some was still on the bomb carts, and some was “simply shoved against the hangar bulkheads.” One of the first bomb hits had wrecked both of the
Kaga’s
fire mains, and the damage-control parties
were helpless against the raging fires. The leaderless ship became an inferno fed by explosives and aviation fuel. A series of secondary explosions rocked the big carrier—one of them so powerful it sent the
Kaga’s
forward elevator platform spiraling up hundreds of feet into the air.
²⁵

While most of McClusky’s dive-bombers assailed the doomed
Kaga
, Best led his three-plane section toward the carrier “on the right,” which was Nagumo’s flagship,
Akagi.
The three Dauntless bombers had dropped down to 12,000 feet before Best had been able to recall them, so now they had to climb back up to 14,000 feet for the attack run. As Best climbed, he was astonished that “there was no gunfire, no fighters aloft” Thanks to the sacrifice of the torpedo squadrons, the circling Zeros were all at low altitude and the ships’ antiaircraft guns all at low angle. As a result, Best’s three planes were entirely unmolested. Nonetheless, it was uncertain what his three airplanes might accomplish against the flagship. Despite his experience attacking targets in the Marshalls, and on Wake and Marcus Islands, this was the first time Best had ever attacked a carrier. Having only three planes meant that he could not order a conventional echelon attack or divide his command into sections to attack from different angles. Moreover, the fuel
situation dictated that there was no time to maneuver for a bows-on attack. Best and his two wingmen therefore approached the
Akagi
from abeam, which meant they would have only the carrier’s relatively narrow 100-foot width rather than its 850-foot length as a target. Even a slight misjudgment would result in a near miss rather than a hit.
²⁶

Lieutenant Richard Best commanded Bombing Six (VB-6) in the Battle of Midway. He and Norman “Dusty” Kleiss of VS-6 were the only pilots to land bombs on two Japanese carriers in the same day. (U.S. Navy)

His two wingmen tucked in behind their commanding officer, one on each side, and flew toward the
Akagi
in a shallow V formation. Best signaled, and they opened their flaps and nosed over into “a long easy dive.” It was “a calm placid morning,” he recalled, and he remembered thinking that it felt just like “regular individual battle practice drill.” He put his bombsight in the middle of the
Akagi’s
flight deck, just forward of her small island. Like
Kaga, Akagi
had only a few Zero fighters on her flight deck because she was still actively rotating CAP for the air battle. As he dove, Best saw a Zero taking off to rejoin the CAP. He remembered thinking,
“Best, if you’re a real hero, when you’ve dropped your bomb, you’ll aileron around and shoot that son-of-a-bitch”
But he knew that his job was to bomb carriers, not shoot at fighters. There were other Japanese flattops out there, and he decided that after he hit this one he would head back to the
Enterprise
to get another bomb.
²⁷

Best released his bomb at about 1,500 feet. His wingmen dropped at almost the same moment. Though doctrine called for them to retire at once at low level, Best could not resist turning to look back and see the results. He watched his 1,000-pound bomb land squarely in the middle of the
Akagi’s
flight deck. Other explosions erupted at her bow and stern as well, and he subsequently reported “three 1000 lb bomb hits.” In fact, however, the bombs from Kroeger and Weber had both hit close alongside. While they probably opened up holes in the skin of the
Akagi
’s hull below the water line, Best’s was the only direct hit. But it was enough.
²⁸

Best’s 1,000-pound bomb penetrated the flight deck and exploded on the
Akagi’s
crowded hangar deck. The immediate damage was extensive. The secondary damage was catastrophic. As on the
Kaga, Akagi’s
hangar deck was crowded with big Kate torpedo bombers, eighteen of them, every one with fuel tanks filled to the top and armed with the big Type 91 torpedoes. Other ordnance lay on the carts and on the racks along the
bulkhead. Within minutes, that ordnance began to cook off. Once the explosions started, the aviation fuel from the wrecked planes fed the fires. Under most circumstances, a big carrier like
Akagi
could be expected to absorb four or five bomb hits and still function, but Best’s one bomb had hit at just the right moment and in just the right place to do the most damage. By 10:25, both
Kaga
and
Akagi
were burning out of control. Ensign Weber’s near miss astern had jammed the
Akagi
’s rudder hard over, so that she continued to turn in a tight circle out of control, burning furiously.
²⁹

Best did not try to shoot down the enemy Zero after dropping his bomb. Having descended to low altitude, however, there were now plenty of them around. Several flashed by just below him as they continued to target the hapless Devastators of Lem Massey’s VT-3 from
Yorktown
. Instead of lingering to join the fray, Best led his three planes eastward back toward the
Enterprise.
His last view of the Kid
ō
Butai left him with the impression that “everything was blowing up.”
³⁰

The death throes of the
Kaga
and
Akagi
were terrifying and spectacular, but there were two more Japanese carriers a dozen miles away with enough striking power to turn the battle around.

While Best was diving on the
Akagi
, twenty miles to the north Max Leslie was preparing to dive on the
S
ō
ry
ū
.
There was some initial confusion there, too. When Leslie led the seventeen bombers of VB-3 away from the
Yorktown
at 9:00 that morning, he had assumed that Wally Short’s VS-5 was right behind him, unaware that Fletcher had decided to keep Short’s squadron on board as a reserve. Consequently, when the Kid
ō
Butai came into view at about 10:00, Leslie called Short on the radio and ordered him to attack the carrier to the west
(Hiry
ū
)
while he took the other (S
ō
ry
ū
). He got no reply. Next he called Massey to ask if he was ready to begin a coordinated attack. Massey replied that he was. Then, almost immediately, Massey reported that he was under furious attack from Japanese Zeros. Massey’s radio went dead. Leslie concluded that the planned coordinated strike was not going to happen and decided he “had better get going before our presence was discovered.” While Massey’s surviving torpedo bombers attempted to fight their way through the intercept to attack the
Hiry
ū
, and
Jimmy Thach tried out his “beam defense maneuver” in their support, Leslie took his bombers off to the right, to approach the
S
ō
ry
ū
from out of the sun. He gave the signal and pushed over from 14,500 feet at 10:25.
³¹