Winter of the World (81 page)

And the USA would ask for peace talks.

Nimitz planned to nip the scheme in the bud by ambushing the strike force before they could take Midway.

Chuck was now part of the ambush.

He packed his kitbag and kissed Eddie goodbye, then they went together to the dockside.

There they ran into Vandermeier.

‘There was no time to repair the watertight compartments,’ he told them. ‘If she’s holed, she’ll go down like a lead coffin.’

Chuck put a restraining hand on Eddie’s shoulder and said: ‘How’s your eye, Captain?’

Vandermeier’s mouth twisted in a grimace of malice. ‘Good luck, faggot.’ He walked away.

Chuck shook hands with Eddie and went on board.

He forgot about Vandermeier instantly, for at long last he had his wish: he was at sea – and on one of the greatest ships ever made.

The
Yorktown
was the lead ship of the carrier class. She was longer than two football pitches and had a crew of more than two thousand. She carried ninety aircraft: elderly Douglas
Devastator torpedo bombers with folding wings; newer Douglas Dauntless dive bombers; and Grumman Wildcat fighters to escort the bombers.

Almost everything was below, apart from the island structure, which stood up thirty feet from the flight deck. It contained the ship’s command and communications heart, with the bridge,
the radio room just below it, the chart house and the aviators’ ready room. Behind these was a huge smokestack containing three funnels in a row.

Some of the repairmen were still aboard, finishing their work, when she left the dry dock and steamed out of Pearl Harbor. Chuck thrilled to the throb of her colossal engines as she put to sea.
When she reached deep water and began to rise and fall with the swell of the Pacific Ocean, he felt as if he were dancing.

Chuck was assigned to the radio room, a sensible posting that made use of his experience in handling signals.

The carrier steamed to a rendezvous north-east of Midway, her welded patches creaking like new shoes. The ship had a soda fountain, known as the Gedunk, that served freshly made ice cream. There
on the first afternoon Chuck ran into Trixie Paxman, whom he had last seen at The Band Round The Hat. He was glad to have a friend aboard.

On Wednesday 3 June, the day before the predicted attack, a navy flying boat on reconnaissance west of Midway spotted a convoy of Japanese transport ships – presumably carrying the
occupation force that was to take over the atoll after the battle. The news was broadcast to all US ships, and Chuck in the radio room of the
Yorktown
was among the first to know. It was
hard confirmation that his comrades in the basement had been right, and he felt a sense of relief that they had been vindicated. That was ironic, he realized: he would not be in such danger if they
had been wrong and the Japanese were elsewhere.

He had been in the navy for a year and a half, but until now he had never gone into battle. The hastily repaired
Yorktown
was going to be the target of Japanese torpedoes and bombs. She
was steaming towards people who would do everything in their power to sink her, and sink Chuck too. It was a weird feeling. Most of the time he was strangely calm, but every now and again he felt
an impulse to dive over the side and start swimming back towards Hawaii.

That night he wrote to his parents. If he died tomorrow, he and the letter would probably go down with the ship, but he wrote it anyway. He said nothing about why he had been reassigned. It
crossed his mind to confess that he was queer, but he quickly dismissed that idea. He told them he loved them and was grateful for everything they had done for him. ‘If I die fighting for a
democratic country against a cruel military dictatorship, my life will not have been wasted,’ he wrote. When he read it over it sounded a bit pompous, but he left it as it was.

It was a short night. Aircrew were piped to breakfast at 1.30 a.m. Chuck went to wish Trixie Paxman good luck. In recompense for the early start, the airmen were eating steak and eggs.

Their planes were brought up from the below-decks hangars in the ship’s huge elevators, then manoeuvred by hand to their parking slots on deck to be fuelled and armed. A few pilots took
off and went looking for the enemy. The rest sat in the briefing room, wearing their flying gear, waiting for news.

Chuck went on duty in the radio room. Just before six he picked up a signal from a reconnaissance flying boat:

A few minutes later he got a partial signal:

It had started.

When the full report came in a minute later, it placed the Japanese strike force almost exactly where the cryptanalysts had forecast. Chuck felt proud – and scared.

The three American aircraft carriers –
Yorktown
,
Enterprise
and
Hornet –
set a course that would bring their planes within striking distance of the Japanese
ships.

On the bridge was the long-nosed Admiral Frank Fletcher, a fifty-seven-year-old veteran who had won the Navy Cross in the First World War. Carrying a signal to the bridge, Chuck heard him say:
‘We haven’t seen a Japanese plane yet. That means they still don’t know we’re here.’

That was all the Americans had going for them, Chuck knew: the advantage of better intelligence.

The Japanese undoubtedly hoped to catch Midway napping, in a repeat of the Pearl Harbor scenario, but it was not going to happen, thanks to the cryptanalysts. The American planes at Midway were
not sitting targets parked on their runways. By the time the Japanese bombers arrived they were all in the air and spoiling for a fight.

Tensely listening to the crackling wireless traffic from Midway and the Japanese ships, the officers and men in the radio room of the
Yorktown
had no doubt that there was a terrific air
battle going on over the tiny atoll; but they did not know who was winning.

Soon afterwards, American planes from Midway took the fight to the enemy and attacked the Japanese aircraft carriers.

In both battles, as far as Chuck could make out, the anti-aircraft guns had the best of it. Only moderate damage was done to the base at Midway, and almost all the bombs and torpedoes aimed at
the Japanese fleet missed; but in both encounters a lot of aircraft were shot down.

The score seemed even – but that bothered Chuck, for the Japanese had more in reserve.

Just before seven the
Yorktown
, the
Enterprise
and the
Hornet
swung around to the southeast. It was a course that unfortunately took them away from the enemy, but their
planes had to take off into the southeasterly wind.

Every corner of the mighty
Yorktown
trembled to the thunder of the aircraft as their engines rose to full throttle and they powered along the deck, one after another, and shot up into the
air. Chuck noticed the tendency of the Wildcat to lift its right wing and wander left as it accelerated along the deck, a characteristic much complained of by pilots.

By half past eight the three carriers had sent 155 American planes to attack the enemy strike force.

The first planes arrived in the target area, with perfect timing, when the Japanese were busy refuelling and rearming their own planes returning from Midway. The flight decks were littered with
ammunition cases scattered in a snakes’ nest of fuel hoses, all ready to blow up in an instant. There should have been carnage.

But it did not happen.

Almost all the American aircraft in the first wave were destroyed.

The Devastators were obsolete. The Wildcats that escorted them were better, but no match for the fast, manoeuvrable Japanese Zeroes. Those planes that survived to deliver their ordnance were
decimated by devastating anti-aircraft fire from the carriers.

Dropping a bomb from a moving aircraft on to a moving ship, or dropping a torpedo where it would hit a ship, was extraordinarily difficult, especially for a pilot who was under fire from above
and below.

Most of the airmen gave their lives in the attempt.

And not one of them scored a hit.

No American bomb or torpedo found its target. The first three waves of attacking planes, one from each American carrier, did no damage at all to the Japanese strike force. The ammunition on
their decks did not explode, and their fuel lines did not catch fire. They were unharmed.

Listening to the radio chatter, Chuck despaired.

He saw with new vividness the genius of the attack on Pearl Harbor seven months earlier. The American ships had been at anchor, static targets crowded together, relatively easy to hit. The
fighter planes that might have protected them were destroyed on their airstrips. And by the time the Americans had armed and deployed their anti-aircraft guns, the attack was almost over.

However, this battle was still going on, and not all the American planes had yet reached the target area. He heard an air officer on the
Enterprise
radio shout: ‘Attack!
Attack!’ and the laconic response from a pilot: ‘Wilco, as soon as I can find the bastards.’

The good news was that the Japanese commander had not yet sent aircraft to attack the American ships. He was sticking to his plan and concentrating on Midway. He might by now have figured out
that he must be under attack from carrier-borne planes, but perhaps he was not sure where the American ships were located.

Despite this advantage, the Americans were not winning.

Then the picture changed. A flight of thirty-seven Dauntless dive bombers from the
Enterprise
sighted the Japanese. The Zeroes protecting the ships had come down almost to sea level in
their dog-fights with previous attackers, so the bombers found themselves fortunately above the fighters, and able to come down at them out of the sun. Just minutes later another eighteen
Dauntlesses from the
Yorktown
reached the target area. One of the pilots was Trixie.

The radio exploded with excited chatter. Chuck closed his eyes and concentrated, trying to make sense of the distorted sounds. He could not identify Trixie’s voice.

Then, behind the talk, he began to hear the characteristic scream of bombers diving. The attack had begun.

Suddenly, for the first time, there were cries of triumph from the pilots.

‘Got you, you bastard!’

‘Shit, I felt that go up!’

‘Eat that, you sons of bitches!’

‘Bullseye!’

‘Look at her burn!’

The men in the radio room cheered wildly, but they were not sure what was happening.

It was over in a few minutes, but it took a long time to get a clear report. The pilots were incoherent with the joy of victory. Gradually, as they calmed down and headed back towards their
ships, the picture emerged.

Trixie Paxman was among the survivors.

Most of their bombs had missed, as previously, but about ten had scored direct hits, and those few had done tremendous damage. Three mighty Japanese aircraft carriers were burning out of
control:
Kaga
,
Soryu
and the flagship
Akagi
. The enemy had only one left, the
Hiryu
.

‘Three out of the four!’ Chuck said elatedly. ‘And they still haven’t come anywhere near our ships!’

That soon changed.

Admiral Fletcher sent out ten Dauntlesses to scout for the surviving Japanese carrier. But it was the
Yorktown
’s radar that picked up a flight of planes, presumably from the
Hiryu
, fifty miles away and approaching. At noon, Fletcher sent up twelve Wildcats to meet the attackers. The rest of the planes were also ordered up so they would not be on deck and
vulnerable when the attack came. Meanwhile the
Yorktown
’s fuel lines were flooded with carbon dioxide as a fire precaution.

The attacking flight included fourteen ‘Vals’, Aichi D3A dive bombers, plus escorting Zeroes.

Here it comes, Chuck thought; my first action. He wanted to throw up. He swallowed hard.

Before the attackers could be seen, the
Yorktown
’s gunners opened up. The ship had four pairs of large anti-aircraft guns with five-inch-diameter barrels that could send their
shells several miles. Plotting the enemy’s position with the aid of radar, gunnery officers sent a salvo of giant fifty-four-pound shells towards the approaching aircraft, setting the timers
to explode when they reached their target.

The Wildcats got above the attackers and, according to the pilots’ radio reports, shot down six bombers and three fighters.

Chuck ran to the flag bridge with a signal to say the remainder of the attack force were diving in. Admiral Fletcher said coolly: ‘Well, I’ve got my tin hat on – I can’t
do anything else.’

Chuck looked out of the window and saw the dive bombers screaming out of the sky towards him at an angle so steep they seemed to be falling straight down. He resisted the impulse to throw
himself to the floor.

The ship made a sudden full-rudder turn to port. Anything that might throw the attacking aircraft off course was worth a try.

The
Yorktown
deck also had four Chicago pianos – smaller, short-range anti-aircraft guns with four barrels each. Now these opened up, and so did the guns of
Yorktown
’s
escort of cruisers.

As Chuck stared forward from the bridge, terrified and helpless to do anything to defend himself, a deck gunner found his range and hit a Val. The plane seemed to break into three pieces. Two
fell into the sea and one crashed into the side of the ship. Then another Val blew up. Chuck cheered.

But that left six.

The
Yorktown
made a sudden turn to starboard.

The Vals braved the hail of death from the deck guns to chase after the ship.

As they got closer, the machine guns on the catwalks either side of the flight deck also opened up. Now the
Yorktown
’s guns played a lethal symphony, with deep booms from the
five-inch barrels, mid-range sounds from the Chicago pianos, and the urgent rattle of machine guns.