The Battle of Midway (57 page)

Damage-control parties repair a hole in the flight deck of the Yorktown after the attack by Lieutenant Kobayashi’s dive-bombers from
Hiry
ū
.
(U.S. Naval Institute)

The biggest problem was in the engine spaces, where the second Japanese bomb had taken out five of the ship’s nine boilers. Water Tenderman First Class Charles Kleinsmith and a crew of volunteers donned gasmasks so they could stay in the engine room and maintain pressure in boiler number 1, which provided the power the damage-control parties needed to run their equipment. By 1:30, other crewmen of the “black gang” had boilers 4, 5, and 6 back on line, and ten minutes after that, the chief engineer reported that he could generate steam for twenty knots. As the crew cheered, the
Yorktown
began to move, slowly at first, then faster, and soon she was a warship
again. With the fires under control, Buckmaster ordered the crew to resume fueling the Wildcats of Jimmy Thach’s squadron.
¹⁷

The refueling had barely started, however, when the radar on the cruiser
Pensacola
picked up another group of inbound planes. The
Yorktown
‘s 1MC public address system blared out: “Stand by for air attack.” Once again, radar prevented the
Yorktown
from being caught unready. The fueling was halted immediately and the lines purged with CO
₂
gas. The
Yorktown
had only six Wildcats aloft, including several from Task Force 16. Pederson was eager to get Thach’s squadron back into the air as well. But there were two problems. The first was that although the
Yorktown
had by now worked its way up to about sixteen knots, the light winds that day meant that the fighters would have to get airborne with relatively low wind speed across the deck. The second problem was that since the refueling had been halted, most of the Wildcats had only about 23 gallons of gas in their tanks. They took off nonetheless.
¹⁸

The inbound bogeys were ten Kate torpedo bombers protected by six more Zeros. The Kate was the best weapon in the Japanese air arsenal, but Yamaguchi now had only these ten. As a measure of just how much and how quickly the fortunes of war had turned, early that morning Lieutenant Tomonaga had led 108 bombers and fighters in the attack on Midway Island, leaving 140 more behind as a reserve. Now the ten Kate torpedo bombers that Tomonaga led against the
Yorktown
represented almost the last available striking force of the Kid
ō
Butai, nearly the final arrow in the quiver.
¹⁹

Nagumo had agreed to hurl them against the enemy because at this point he was still clinging to the hope that he could turn the battle around by forcing a surface engagement. Only five of the eighteen dive-bombers that Yamaguchi had sent against the
Yorktown
had returned, but they reported that they had left a mortally wounded American carrier dead in the water and burning. If Tomonaga’s ten Kates could inflict similar damage on a second American carrier, a surface attack by Nagumo’s battleships and cruisers might be able to finish them off. Failing that, Nagumo would still have the opportunity to launch a night attack with his destroyers, armed with the deadly Type 93 “Long Lance” torpedoes that had a twenty-mile range.
He knew that the Kid
ō
Butai would be exposed to renewed American air attack in the interim, but he also knew, having witnessed it himself, that the Americans had suffered extremely heavy air losses that morning, including the near-annihilation of their torpedo squadrons, which significantly minimized the air threat. Attempting a surface battle was risky. Nonetheless, so long as there was even the least chance of success, Nagumo was determined to grasp it.

Even before Tomonaga took off, however, two key pieces of information ought to have brought Nagumo back to earth. At 12:40, a message from
Chikuma’s
number 5 scout plane reported an undamaged American carrier task force 130 miles away, much too far for any surface attack to be realistic. And twenty minutes after that, Nagumo received another piece of information from Commander Watanabe on the destroyer
Arashi.
Watanabe’s crew had plucked one of the pilots from Lem Massey’s VT-3 from the water. It was Ensign Wesley Frank Osmus, a 24-year-old product of the AVCAD program from Illinois. Osmus had apparently failed to retrieve the life raft from his Devastator, for the Japanese found him, weak and dehydrated, swimming all alone in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Hauled aboard the
Arashi
, the Japanese interrogated him aggressively, threatening him with a sword. Osmus revealed that there were three American carriers in the area, the
Hornet, Enterprise
, and
Yorktown
, and that the
Yorktown
was operating separately from the other two. Once they completed the interrogation, the Japanese carried Osmus to the stern to throw him back over the side. Realizing their intent, Osmus grabbed on to the ship’s stern railing, and to break his grip the Japanese smashed his head with a fire ax. Osmus’ body tumbled into the ship’s wake.
²⁰

Consequently, Nagumo now knew that there were two undamaged American carriers out there somewhere, and thus that there was no realistic hope of forcing a surface engagement. With only the
Hiry
ū
and its ten Kates, plus perhaps a score of Zeros, it was evident that it was now time—indeed past time—for the Kid
ō
Butai to cut its losses and run for i.t Nevertheless, Nagumo approved Yamaguchi’s decision to send Tomonaga and the ten Kates out to do what they could.

One factor in that decision may have been that Admiral Yamamoto had at last put his oar in. He had considered breaking radio silence at 7:45 a.m. that morning, when the
Yamato
had picked up the report by Petty Officer Amari that there were ten American ships to the northeast. At the time, Yamamoto had turned to his chief of staff and said, “I think we had better order Nagumo to attack at once.” But in the end he had decided not to interfere, and now he very likely regretted it. At 12:20 Yamamoto broke radio silence to send a series of orders directing Kond
ō
’s battleships and heavy cruisers to close on the Kid
ō
Butai from the south and Kakuta’s two carriers off the Aleutians to abort their mission, send the transports back to Japan, and steam south. Rather than cut his losses, Yamamoto was prepared to double down in the hope of winning the pot. As for Nagumo, by dispatching Tomonaga’s handful of torpedo bombers against the Americans at 1:30, he had staked everything on their success.
²¹

When Tomonaga took off from the
Hiry
ū
, he knew that he would not be coming back. During the attack on Midway that morning, his left-wing fuel tank had been punctured and was no longer serviceable. Consequently, though he had enough gas to find the enemy, he would not have enough to return. He joked with his fellow pilots that with the Americans only ninety miles away, he would have enough fuel to make it, but everyone recognized it as bravado. Yamaguchi himself came down to the flight deck to shake Tomonaga’s hand and tell him goodbye, and to remind him that it was essential to find and cripple a second American carrier. One had been badly wounded, perhaps sunk, but there were two more out there.
²²

After leading his small squadron eastward for not quite an hour, Tomonaga saw the wakes of an American task force on the surface. At the center of that task force was an apparently undamaged carrier making an estimated twenty knots and launching aircraft. Clearly this could not be the cripple that Kobayashi’s dive-bombers had left dead in the water and burning only two hours ago. He used hand signals to indicate the target and split his ten planes into two divisions to conduct a classic anvil attack. Despite outward appearances, his target was indeed the
Yorktown
, returned to operational status by her efficient damage-control teams. Consequently, instead of hitting a second carrier, Tomonaga’s Kates were about to expend their fury on the same carrier that Kobayashi had hit, while the two carriers of Task Force 16 remained undiscovered and unharmed.

Tomonaga led one division of five planes against the
Yorktown
’s starboard side, while Lieutenant Hashimoto Toshio took the other five planes out to the left to attack its port side. As the Kates bore down on the
Yorktown
, Thach’s eight Wildcats were struggling to get airborne. The
Yorktown
’s own 5-inch guns had already started firing when the first of the Wildcats rolled down the deck, and the pilots could feel their jolting recoil as they took off. On the one hand this launch at the last possible moment was fortuitous because, with only twenty-three gallons of gas, the Wildcats were spared having to burn fuel flying out to the contact. On the other hand, it also meant that the air battle took place inside the envelope of the antiair fire from the escorts of the task force. That escort was even more powerful now than it had been two hours before, for Spruance had sent two cruisers
(Pensacola
and
Vincennes)
and two destroyers
(Benham
and
Balch)
to reinforce
Yorktown
’s screen. Consequently, Wildcats, Zeros, and Kates maneuvered and shot at each other from close range as thousands of rounds of ordnance flew past them from the screening cruisers and destroyers. It was like fighting an air battle in the middle of a target range.
²³

One of the Wildcats was piloted by a 22-year-old ensign with the unlikely name of Milton Tootle IV, the son of a prominent St. Louis banker. Tootle’s plane had barely cleared the deck in his takeoff when he made a hard right turn and saw a Kate making its torpedo run on the
Yorktown
. Tootle did not even have time to crank up his landing gear before he fired a long burst at the Kate and shot it down. When he pulled up, however, he entered the free-fire zone of the
Yorktown
’s own antiaircraft battery, and his plane was hit by friendly fire. As his cockpit filled with smoke, he knew he was too low to bail out, so he climbed to 1,500 feet before jumping. His whole flight had lasted less than five minutes.
²⁴

Jimmy Thach almost didn’t get airborne at all. He flew the only Wildcat that had been fully fueled, which made it heavier, and in the light winds, it virtually fell off the end of the flight deck; Thach had to nurse it up into the air. As he began to gain altitude, he too saw an enemy torpedo plane streaking
in toward the
Yorktown
, and he turned to go after it. As he closed in, he saw that its tail bore “a bright red colored insignia shaped like feathers … that no other Japanese aircraft had.” It was Tomonaga’s command plane, flying very low, barely fifty feet off the water, and heading straight for
Yorktown
’s starboard side. Thach made a side approach and triggered a long burst of .50-caliber bullets. The Kate began to smoke, and flames issued from the engine, but Tomonaga somehow held his course. Thach recalled that “the whole left wing was burning, and I could see the ribs [of the plane] showing through the flames,” but still Tomonaga flew on. Thach was impressed in spite of himself. “That devil still stayed in the air until he got close enough and dropped his torpedo.” Only after that did Tomonaga’s plane smash into the sea and disintegrate. No doubt Tomonaga died satisfied that he had done his full duty. But despite his sacrifice, his torpedo missed, as did those of the other planes in his section.
²⁵