The Battle of Midway (56 page)

As Kobayashi’s strike force flew eastward, Nagumo reorganized what was left of the Kid
ō
Butai into two groups: a battleship-cruiser group in the lead, followed by Yamaguchi’s lone carrier, which was surrounded by a circular screen. Despite Yamaguchi’s “advice” to leave only one destroyer behind, Nagumo delegated six of them (two each) to try to save the stricken carriers, or, at worst, to rescue their crews. Meanwhile he directed his much-reduced and reorganized Kid
ō
Butai to steam to the northeast (course 060), toward the Americans, who, according to an 11:10 scouting report, were now only ninety miles away. That report inspired Nagumo to think about the possibility of getting close enough for a surface attack by his battleships and heavy cruisers. He was encouraged in this line of thought by a noon message from Admiral Kond
ō
, who reported that he was bringing his two battleships and four cruisers north to join the Kid
ō
Butai. If air strikes from the
Hiry
ū
crippled one or more of the American carriers, it might allow Kond
ō
’s battleships to get close enough to finish them off with their 14-inch guns, or so Nagumo imagined. Much, therefore, depended on the success of the air strike by Kobayashi’s eighteen Vals.
⁴

En route to the target, Kobayashi saw what he thought were four American torpedo bombers below him. They were, in fact, dive-bombers: a section of Earl Gallaher’s VS-6 under Lieutenant Charles Ware, returning to the
Enterprise
from the successful strike on the
Kaga.
Eager for a fight, Kobayashi’s escorting Zeros dove on them, expecting to make quick work of it. But the American pilots were flying low, which restricted the Zeros’ maneuvering room, and they were flying in formation, which meant the backseat gunners were able to put up a heavy curtain of .30-caliber machine
gun fire. In the ensuing fight, the Zeros not only failed to shoot down any of the American dive-bombers, two of the Zeros were badly mauled.
*
The two crippled Zeros turned back toward the
Hiry
ū
, and only one of them made it, the other crashing into the sea nearby. Moreover, the remaining four Zeros spent so much time vainly assailing Ware’s bombers that the eighteen Vals they were supposed to be escorting had to begin their attack on the
Yorktown
without fighter cover.
⁵

Yorktown
’s radar picked up Kobayashi’s inbound Vals forty-six miles out. At 11:59, Radio Electrician V. M. Bennett reported “thirty to forty” bogeys approaching. Buckmaster ordered preparations to receive them: the crew purged the fuel lines, locked down the watertight doors, and pushed an 800-gallon auxiliary gas tank over the side. Jimmy Thach’s six Wildcats had just been recovered on the
Yorktown
, but the last of them, flown by Machinist Tom Cheek, had failed to catch a wire and crashed into the barrier. That delayed the landing of the bombers of Max Leslie’s squadron, returning from their strike on the
S
ō
ry
ū
.
Pete Pederson, the
Yorktown
‘s air group commander, ordered them to stay aloft and join the Wildcats that were flying CAP, vectoring all of them out toward the inbound bogeys. Leslie himself could do little since his guns had jammed while he was diving on the
S
ō
ry
ū
, but other planes of his squadron, though already low on gas, joined the attack on the inbound bombers. Once again, radar had played a crucial role, for without it the
Yorktown
might easily have been caught recovering airplanes when the Japanese arrived. Instead, the attacking Vals came under a furious air attack while they were still twenty to thirty miles out from their target.
⁶

The onslaught of the American fighters broke up Kobayashi’s attack formation and the air battle turned into a free-for-all. From the deck of the
Yorktown
, the fight looked like a swirling, chaotic mass. Buckmaster reported that “planes were seen flying in every direction, and many were falling in flames.” Once the four Zeros that had survived the skirmish with Ware’s dive-bombers joined the fray, a total of some fifty airplanes swirled and looped in the crowded sky.
⁷

Pederson sought to bring order out of the chaos. Though he would have preferred to lead his air group in person, his role as onboard fighter director foreshadowed future Navy doctrine in which commanders managed air battles from a shipboard Combat Information Center. Pederson did not have a Combat Information Center, but he anticipated its function by using a search plot to keep track of inbound bogeys and a fighter director board to keep track of his own air assets. Using the
Yorktown
‘s call sign “Scarlet,” he addressed the pilots collectively and individually over the radio as he sought to turn a chaotic free-for-all into a coordinated attack. The transcript of the radio transmissions suggests something of the nature of the fight:

“All Scarlet planes keep a sharp look-out, a group of planes is coming in at 255 unidentified.”
“All Scarlet planes, bandits eight miles, 255.”
“This is Scarlet 19. Formation seems to be breaking up.”
“O.K. Break ‘em up.”
“Tallyho!”

The radar allowed Pederson to vector specific planes to particular contacts.

“Scarlet 19, investigate plane bearing 235. … Distance ten to twelve miles, altitude low.
   Go get ‘em.”
“O.K. got him. Have bogey in sight.”
⁸

Thus directed, the Wildcats were able to splash eleven of the inbound bombers. Lieutenant Junior Grade Arthur J. Brassfield (who was “Scarlet 19”) shot down the lead bomber, then pulled left into a wingover and found another Val at close range. “I watched my tracers going into the engine and lacing on back into the cockpit,” he remembered; then, “suddenly it blew up.” A third bomber headed for cloud cover. Brassfield chased it, fired off two short bursts, and it, too, fell in flames.

Occasionally Pederson forgot to use the call sign and lapsed into the familiar: “Art,” he radioed to Brassfield, “go out and investigate a bogey down low, 3,000 feet.” It turned out to be the plane that was closing in on downed pilot Bill Esders and his badly wounded gunner in their raft. If the Japanese pilot had been planning to strafe the downed flyers, he changed his mind when Brassfield came charging at him, and he instead fled for home at high speed. Pederson warned Brassfield not to chase him too far, but Brassfield’s blood was up and he took off in pursuit. Because of the extreme range, he tried lifting the nose of his plane and arcing his tracers in toward the target. He remembered that the tracers “looked like a swarm of bees looping high through the sky.” Soon the Val began smoking, and Brassfield had his fourth kill of the day.
⁹

In addition to the attacking bombers, the Americans also shot down three of the four Zeros—only Shigematsu himself survived. Indeed, so many Japanese planes were falling from the sky that one witness on the
Yorktown
thought “it looked like a curtain coming down.” The Dash-4 Wildcats had only about twenty seconds of firepower and quickly began to run out of bullets. To indicate they needed to land and reload, the pilots flew past the
Yorktown
f bridge and communicated using hand signals: they shook their fists if they needed ammo, or raked their hands along the outside of the fuselage where the gas tank was to show that they were low on fuel. Landing planes in the midst of an air attack was impossible, however, because the
Yorktown
was maneuvering radically to throw off the attacking bombers. Pederson directed the planes that were low on ammo or fuel to head for Task Force 16, some forty miles to the southeast, and he called on
Enterprise
(call sign Red) for help.
¹⁰

“Red from Scarlet. We need some VFs.”
“Scarlet from Red. Repeat.”
“Red from Scarlet, we need relief for our combat patrols, getting low on ammunition”
“Scarlet from Red, we are sending the Blue patrol to assist. … Blue patrol being launched   now.”
¹¹

Before the Wildcats from Task Force 16 could arrive, seven of the Val bombers that had survived the air battle entered the envelope of the
antiaircraft fire from the circle of surface ships screening the
Yorktown.
As the American pilots veered off to avoid being hit by friendly fire, Buckmaster ordered the
Yorktown
sharply to port to throw off the attackers. The two cruisers and five destroyers of her protecting screen opened up with scores of 5-inch guns, 1.1-inch “pom pom” guns, 20 mm guns, and .50-caliber machine guns. Leslie thought it looked like “a fire works display at a Fourth of July celebration.”
¹²

Through this virtual cloud of antiair fire, the seven surviving Val dive-bombers of Kobayashi’s command pressed home their attack. Two more fell into the sea, victims of the heavy antiair fire, but not before one of them released its bomb, which hit the
Yorktown
“just abaft No. 2 elevator on the starboard side.” That bomb exploded near a 1.1-inch antiaircraft gun, slaughtering its crew and starting several fires. Only seconds later, a second bomb hit the
Yorktown
squarely amidships, passing through both the
Yorktown
f flight deck and hangar deck and exploding on level three among the engine uptakes, extinguishing the fires in five of the ship’s boilers. A third bomb hit near the
Yorktown
’s forward elevator, starting a fire in a rag-storage area. That one forced Buckmaster to flood the ship’s forward magazine.
¹³

Like
S
ō
ry
ū
, Yorktown
had been hit by three bombs—one forward, one amidships, and one astern. One important difference was that the bombs that had hit the
S
ō
ry
ū
had been 1,000-pound bombs; those that hit the
Yorktown
were 250-kilogram (551-pound) bombs. More importantly, unlike
S
ō
ry
ū
, Yorktown’s
hangar deck was not packed with volatile ordnance because of the advance warning provided by the
Yorktown
’s radar. Though a fully fueled Dauntless armed with a 1,000-pound bomb sat on the hangar deck near where the first bomb exploded, the hangar-deck officer, Lieutenant Alberto Emerson, quickly activated the sprinkler system, and the better-equipped American damage control parties successfully contained the fire before any ordnance cooked off.
¹⁴

Nevertheless, it was a dire moment. With main propulsion out, the big
Yorktown
began to lose speed, and by 12:40 she was dead in the water. Black smoke from the mutiple fires roiled up so high into the air that it was visible from Task Force 16 forty miles away. Immobile, and with three gaping
holes in her flight deck,
Yorktown
could not conduct air operations. Her radar had been knocked out, meaning that any future attack would find her a sitting duck. Driven from his battle station in flag plot by thick smoke, Fletcher assessed the situation. “I can’t fight a war from a dead ship,” he told Buckmaster, and soon afterward, just past one o’clock, he left the
Yorktown
in Buckmaster’s care and prepared to transfer to the heavy cruiser
Astoria.
The only way off the ship was to climb down a knotted rope. Fletcher was not sure he could do it. “I’m too damn old for this sort of thing,” he muttered. In the end, two sailors had to lower him down to the
Astoria
’s motor whaleboat.
¹⁵

The damage to the
Yorktown
compelled all of her planes still aloft to seek sanctuary on
Hornet
and
Enterprise.
Aboard the
Hornet
, most of the planes from the “flight to nowhere” had landed by now except for Ruff Johnson’s bombers, which would return from Midway that afternoon. Unfortunately, the
Hornet
’s run of bad luck was not over. One of the
Yorktown
‘s refugee pilots was Ensign Daniel C. Sheedy, whose Wildcat had been badly shot up during the strike on the Kid
ō
Butai, wounding him in the leg. As a result, he had trouble bringing his fighter in for a landing. Though Sheedy did not know it, one of the two Japanese bullets that had punched through his instrument panel had disabled the switch that put his own machine guns on “safe.” When his damaged Wildcat hit the deck, his left landing gear collapsed and his plane swerved toward the
Hornet’s
island. The impact also set off his machine guns. A burst of .50-caliber bullets sprayed both the island and a group of men standing nearby. Three Marines and a sailor were killed, as was Lieutenant Royal R. Ingersoll, son of the commander of the U. S. Atlantic Fleet, Admiral Royal E. Ingersoll.
¹⁶

Meanwhile, back on board the wounded
Yorktown
, damage-control parties worked feverishly. Some fought the fires, others worked on the engines, and still others labored to repair the holes in the flight deck. To sustain them, the executive officer, Dixie Keefer, ordered the ship’s store opened and distributed candy (“gedunk”) to all hands, both to boost morale and to keep up their energy level. In place of the small national flag that normally flew from the bridge, Buckmaster ordered the crew to raise the fifteen-foot-long “holiday” flag, which provoked cheers from the crew. On
the flight deck, men constructed a frame made of 4 by 6 wooden timbers across the gaping holes in the deck, then nailed quarter-inch steel plates over the framework. It was a makeshift patch, but it was good enough. Technicians managed to get the radar working again.