The Battle of Midway (63 page)

It was Stan Ring’s third opportunity to strike the enemy, and he was grimly determined that this time nothing should go wrong. He led eleven planes of VB-8 under Ruff Johnson and fourteen from VS-8 under Walt Rodee. Mitscher sent along eight Wildcats to strafe the target and to suppress antiaircraft fire. As Ring’s formation circled the
Hornet
and prepared to depart, the
Enterprise
was busy recovering planes from the morning search. From their pilots, Spruance learned that the sighting had involved a
battleship
, not a carrier, and, fearful that Ring might ignore the battleship and waste time seeking a nonexistent carrier, he authorized a radio message to tell him: “Target may be a battleship instead of a carrier. Attack.”
²⁹

Ring took his air group westward, and an hour later, at 9:30, Ruff Johnson was the first to spot the
Mogami
and
Mikuma
, plus their two destroyers.
He reported the sighting to Ring: “Stanhope from Robert, Enemy below on port bow.” Apparently, the Japanese were monitoring the same radio frequency, for soon afterward an unidentified radioman came on the circuit, speaking in “a very oriental tone,” to say, “Stanhope from Robert, Return to base.” It fooled no one, and Ring led his air group around to the east to attack out of the sun. At last, Ring had an opportunity to strike at a major element of the enemy fleet.
³⁰

The fourteen planes of Walt Rodee’s Scouting Eight dove on the
Mogami
, while the eight planes of Johnson’s Bombing Eight attacked the
Mikuma
, which most of the pilots reported as a battleship. Rodee’s bombers scored two hits. One bomb landed squarely on top of
Mogami
’s turret number five, blowing off the roof and killing every man inside, and another hit the cruiser astern. Neither hit was fatal, however, in part because Captain Soji had jettisoned all his torpedoes, and there were no secondary explosions. The
Mikuma
escaped altogether. Ruff Johnson himself scored a near miss (a “paint scraper” as he called it) on the
Mikuma
, but no one scored a direct hit, and the heavy antiair fire claimed two of the American pilots. Ensign Don Adams landed a 500-pound bomb on the destroyer
Asashio
, and the Wildcat pilots strafed both destroyers and cruisers.

On the whole, the strike was disappointing. Thirty-three planes had attacked two cruisers, one of them already crippled, and two destroyers, and failed to sink any of them. The already-damaged
Mogami
had been hit twice but continued to steam at better than 20 knots. Captain Sakiyama reported only “light damage” to the
Mikuma.
All four ships continued to steam southward, seeking to get inside the 700-mile radius from Wake Island and the protection of land-based air cover. Even at 28 knots, however, it would take them another twenty hours to get there, and there were still eight hours of daylight left.
³¹

As the
Hornet
planes were attacking, the
Enterprise
was launching a second strike of thirty-one more bombers, escorted by twelve Wildcats—forty-three planes in all, with Wally Short in command. In case there was a carrier out there after all, Spruance decided at the last minute to send along his last three torpedo planes as well. He worried about risking them; they were the last three operational torpedo bombers in the Pacific Fleet.
He told Lieutenant Junior Grade Robert Laub, who commanded the section, that he was not to attack unless the dive-bombers and fighters had completely suppressed enemy antiaircraft fire. “If there is one single gun firing out there,” he instructed Laub, “under no circumstances are you to attack. Turn around and bring your torpedoes home. I am not going to lose another torpedo plane if I can help it. Do you understand?”
³²

The forty-six planes from
Enterprise
were aloft by noon. The bombers climbed to 22,500 feet, with the three torpedo planes behind and below them at 1,500 feet. En route to the target, Johnny Nielsen saw a small motor boat, leaving “a tiny white wake, that was heading eastward in the direction of San Francisco.” It may have been the cutter from the
Hiry
ū
containing the last of the survivors from that ship, though why it would be heading east was a mystery.
³³

Soon after that, the pilots spotted a trail of oil on the surface that led off to the southwest, and they followed it to the two cruisers. By now the
Mogami
had worked her way back up to 28 knots, and both cruisers were trying desperately to get within the envelope of air cover from Wake. The American bombers flew past them for thirty miles to be sure there was neither a carrier nor a battleship in the area. Jim Gray took his Wildcat down to 10,000 feet to look over the cruisers, and noting that one was shorter than the other, he concluded, correctly, that they were the “battleship and cruiser” that had been reported earlier, and he radioed Short to that effect.

All formality was dispensed with as Shumway and Short prepared to attack. “Wally, this is Dave,” Shumway radioed. “I’ll take the cruiser to the northeast.” Short replied that he would take “the other one.” The Americans dove at nearly 90 degrees, and although there was heavy antiair fire, all the flak exploded well behind them. The pilots got two more hits on the
Mogami
and devastated the “battleship”
Mikuma
with five bombs. Johnny Nielsen watched as one bomb went down the smoke stack and detonated. “That stack just lifted up off the deck,” Neilsen recalled, “tumbled over in the air, splashed into the water, and disappeared.” White steam gushed up through the black smoke. The
Mikuma
slowed and then stopped, burning furiously. The almost giddy mood of the American pilots was evident in the
recorded message traffic. “Tojo, you Son-of-a-Bitch,” said one, “send out the rest and we’ll get those, too.”
³⁴

Even as this strike by the planes from the
Enterprise
was in progress, Spruance authorized the
Hornet
air group to rearm and go out again. In effect, he was tag-teaming the
Mogami
and
Mikuma
, with the two carriers taking turns. This time, however, Stanhope Ring did not go along with the
Hornet
air group. The radio on his plane was not working, and Mitscher used that as a reason to hold him back. Ring could have flown another plane had Mitscher deemed it useful. Instead, as Ring recalled it, “Capt. Mitscher decided … that I should not accompany the final attack group which was being readied for takeoff.” Perhaps Mitscher had finally concluded that Ring was not a particular asset.
³⁵

The wrecked and burning Japanese heavy cruiser
Mikuma
as photographed by Lieutenant Junior Grade Cleo Dobson on June 6. She sank soon afterward. (U.S. Naval Institute)

Walt Rodee led the
Hornet
’s second strike and found the smoking and burning cruisers at about 2:30 in the afternoon. The
Mikuma
was dead
in the water and burning furiously. The Americans hit it again and put another bomb into the
Mogami
, while strafing the two destroyers. Both cruisers were now badly hurt, but the
Mikuma
was in extremis, burning from end to end. On the radio net, one pilot blurted out, “Look at that battleship burn!”
³⁶

Back on
Enterprise
, Shumway and Short were pleading with Spruance to let them go back out for another strike. Spruance was pleased by their enthusiasm but uncertain what a fourth strike would accomplish. It was late afternoon by now, the target was getting closer to the envelope of air cover from Wake, and Spruance had to consider the fuel situation. As his destroyers had run low on fuel, Spruance had sent them back one by one to the fuel rendezvous site, and he now had only four destroyers left to accompany his two carriers. Finally, given the pilot reports, it was not clear that the target was worth another strike. In fact, Spruance did not know for sure what the target had been. Shumway thought they had hit a battleship and a cruiser; Short reported that both ships had been cruisers. Johnny Neilsen joined the group and Spruance turned to him to ask what kind of ship he had hit. “A heavy cruiser,” Neilsen answered. “Very much like our own Indianapolis class.”
*
Spruance asked him whether he was sure it wasn’t a battleship. Nielsen told him he was positive it was a cruiser.
³⁷

In the end, Spruance decided against a fourth strike, but he did send out two Dauntless bombers to reconnoiter and to take photographs of the damaged enemy ships. Flying one of those scout bombers, Lieutenant Junior Grade Cleo Dobson arrived at the coordinates and saw the wrecked and burning
Mikuma
with “lots of bodies lying on the deck, and lots more were lying on the stern.” There were also “about 400 to 500 saliors [sic] in the water all around the ship,” he recalled. On the way out, he had decided that if he saw any survivors in the water, he would strafe them, as the Japanese had done to American survivors. When he saw those heads bobbing in the water, however, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. “Boy
I would hate to be in
the shoes of those fellows”
he remembered thinking. “I
might be in their shoes some day”
He took his photographs and flew back.
³⁸

As it turned to full dark on June 6, Spruance assessed the value of continuing the pursuit. Despite the remarkable successes of the past three days, there were a number of reasons for caution. By the time the sun came up on June 7, whatever targets were left would very likely be protected by landbased air from Wake Island, and with tired pilots, low fuel, and only four destroyers on hand, he decided to call it off. As he wrote later, “I had a feeling, an intuition perhaps, that we had pushed our luck as far to the westward as was good for us.” Once the two scout planes were recovered, he turned Task Force 16 back east toward the fuel rendezvous.
³⁹

*
Before the
Hiry
ū
went down, the roughly forty Japanese survivors still on board her (though not Yamaguchi or Captain Kaku) successfully evacuated in a cutter stocked with supplies. They spent the next two weeks hoping to be rescued by their countrymen. Instead they were spotted by a PBY out of Midway and picked up by the U.S. submarine tender USS
Ballard
on June 19. Not until then did Spruance learn for certain that the
Hiry
ū
had sunk.

*
For Ring himself it was another day of hair-pulling frustration. As he dove at last on an enemy warship, he discovered to his horror that his bomb would not release. Frantically, he continued to press the release butt on, to no avail, and in the end he had to return to the Hornet with his bomb still att ached. Afterward, a rumor circulated within Ruff Johnson’s squadron that Ring did not know how to drop a bomb. While perhaps unfair, it suggested how alienated Ring had become from the pilots he commanded. That night in his quarters, Ring asked Ensign Clayton Fisher to demonstrate to him how to use the emergency bomb release lever in case it ever happened again.

*
Just over two years later, during the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June of 1944, Marc Mitscher, by then commanding the American fast carrier task force of fifteen carriers and seven fast battleships, ordered the carriers to turn on their lights to assist pilots returning from a long-range strike. Almost certainly, his inspiration for that decision was Spruance’s action during the Battle of Midway.

*
Neilson’s comparison was spot on. The
Portland-class Indianapolis
displaced 12,000 tons and carried nine 8-inch guns. The Mogami-class cruisers displaced 11,200 tons and carried ten 8-inch guns.

“The efforts and sacrifices of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps forces involved in the Battle of Midway have been crowned with glorious success and I firmly believe have already changed the course of the war.”

—Admiral Chester Nimitz

J
une 7 was a Sunday morning, and it dawned on a changed world. It was six months to the day after that other Sunday morning when the Japanese had surprised the world by attacking the American battle fleet in Pearl Harbor. Now the instrument of that attack had been smashed beyond recovery. Japan still had the
Shokaku
and
Zuikaku
, as well as a number of smaller carriers, plus her large battleship and cruiser fleet, but the concentrated Kid
ō
Butai that had dominated the Pacific for half a year was no more. The only prize the Japanese had won for their massive effort and astounding losses was the occupation of the tiny islands of Attu and Kiska in the Aleutian archipelago, and, as Commander Miyo had prophesied back in April, those outposts proved more of a burden than a benefit. The living conditions were horrible. The Japanese occupiers spent most of their time huddled in poorly insulated barracks trying not to freeze to death. Rear Admiral Theobald could not figure out why they wanted the islands in the first place, or why they stayed there. “There is no manner in which a force could be made self-sufficient in this area,” he wrote. “Food,
ammunition, and military supplies … have to flow to the Japanese forces in a steady stream and in considerable volume.” It just made no sense. He wondered whether the Japanese wanted to fish the surrounding waters. More likely they remained simply because it was all they had to show for the loss of five capital ships,
¹
hundreds of combat airplanes, and thousands of men.
²