War and Remembrance (57 page)

URGENT. CONSIDER IT ADVISABLE TO LAUNCH ATTACK FORCE IMMEDIATELY.

The officer who had to hand Nagumo this paper probably did not dare look him in the face. In any navy in the world, such a message from a subordinate in the heat of battle would have been an insult; in the Imperial Japanese Fleet it was suicidal effrontery. This man Yamaguchi was considered the most brilliant officer in the navy after Yamamoto, whom he was destined to succeed. Surely he knew the gravity of his act. He apparently thought that the battle might hang on this moment, and that sacrificing his career didn’t matter.

Old men are not to be pushed that way. Nagumo immediately did the opposite: ordered all planes struck below —
including Yamaguchi’s
— and directed the entire task force to recover aircraft. So the die was cast; it would be a full coordinated attack.

And now for the first time he broke radio silence to inform Admiral
Yamamoto, idling three hundred miles away with the seven battleships and one carrier of the Main Body, that he was heading to destroy an enemy force of one carrier, five cruisers, and five destroyers. Until that moment, ten long days after leaving Hiroshima Bay, the commander-in-chief had been utterly in the dark about what was happening to his attack plan.

So once again the Type-97s rolled to the elevators; once again they sank to the hangar decks; once again switching commenced. Bombs had at first replaced torpedoes, now torpedoes were replacing bombs, and still these airplanes had never left the ships. Possibly some Japanese muttering about “the idiots up there” went with the loaders’ heavy labor, under the lash of loudspeakers howling exhortations from the flag bridge. But if so, it must have been good-natured. These sailors had seen American dive-bombers flying to pieces, dropping into the sea, streaking down afire like meteors, in defeated wave upon wave. They had watched the harmless fall of giant bombs from cowardly B-17s flying too high for the Zeroes, and the impotent American torpedoes floundering and breaking. Overhead they could hear the roar and the thud of the triumphant first strike returning from Midway. A more glorious victory than Pearl Harbor was in the making! So these hard-working youngsters, stripped to the waist and pouring sweat, undoubtedly felt as they scattered seventeen-hundred-pound bombs in disorder on the deck and feverishly strapped in place the heavy torpedoes.

In less than an hour the four carrier crews recovered all aircraft, rearmed them, refueled them, and spotted them on the flight decks ready to go. No doubt pleased with this superb performance, and with his own sturdy decision not to go off half-cocked, Nagumo was speeding northeast to pull away from Midway’s annoying bombers and to strike at the American carrier.

The sun had now been up for almost four and a half hours.

The unescorted
Enterprise
dive-bombers, reaching the point where the staff navigators had predicted that they would intercept the enemy, saw nothing but cloud-flecked ocean, fifty miles in every direction. Onward and westward they flew. Warren’s fuel-gauge needle was wobbling below the halfway mark. If within twenty minutes they turned back, he calculated, they might make it to the
Enterprise,
since it was steadily closing the range. But to go back with loaded bomb racks! For years he had imagined a combat dive at an enemy flattop, and now the reality was so goddamn close! Did anybody in charge, from Rear Admiral Spruance down to Lieutenant Commander McClusky, know what the hell he was doing? This harum-scarum Charge of the Light Brigade through the clouds was hardly a match for the Japs’ brute professionalism. Would he even see the
Enterprise
again, without first dropping in the drink?

It seemed such a pitiful, stupid trap — a great flight of dive-bombers
howling down the sky in disciplined echelons, loaded to strike, but heading nowhere except for the water. The enemy already lay behind and to the northeast, Warren was sure of that. Browning’s staff navigators must have assumed that the Japs would continue to close the atoll at full speed, but obviously they had slowed to evade bomber attacks from Midway, and perhaps to launch aircraft. Gagged by radio silence, how could he point this out to McClusky, whose plane led the serried blue bombers hundreds of yards up ahead and above; was it his place to do it, and would the group commander listen to him, anyway?

Impulsively he slid back his oil-streaked canopy. The thin frigid air swept cigarette smoke and stale machine smells from the heated cockpit. He was breathing hard as on a mountain top, but he did not want to use oxygen; the soppy mask was irksome, and he preferred to smoke. His fuel predicament did not worry him too much. On the return from the Marcus raid his damaged engine had quit, and he had ditched, hitting into a foaming swell with an impact like a crash on land; but he and his rear gunner, Cornett’s predecessor, had gotten the raft out of the sinking bomber and had floated for six hours, eating chocolate and swapping stories, before a destroyer had picked them up. Ditching was a nasty but manageable maneuver.

But this futile wandering of the two dive-bomber squadrons angered him to his heart. Stoically, he hoped that the
Hornet
and
Yorktown
planes, and maybe Gene Lindsey’s torpedo squadron, would find the son-of-a-bitching Japs and do some harm; or that McClusky would turn northeast, or else go back and gas up for another try, instead of deep-sixing thirty-three Dauntlesses.

At this point, Wade McClusky did turn northeast.

Warren could not know — happily for him — what a sorry farce the whole American attack was degenerating into.

In the Japanese strike on Midway, one hundred eight aircraft from four carriers — fighters, dive-bombers, Type-97s — had joined up and flown out as a single attack group, performed their mission like clockwork, and returned in a disciplined formation. But in this American strike each carrier had sent off its own planes at odd times. The slow torpedo squadrons had soon lost contact with the fighters and the dive-bombers. No American pilot knew what other squadrons than his own were doing, let alone where the Japanese were. Disorganization could go little further.

The
Hornet
dive-bombers and fighters, in abysmal futility, had already fallen out of the fight. At the vacant intercept point their group leader had turned south toward the atoll, away from Nagumo’s force. This group had then broken apart, some flying on to Midway to refuel, others turning back to the
Hornet.
Most of the latter would splash with dead engines.

While the
Enterprise
squadrons under McClusky were blundering westward, the
Yorktown
had finally launched, well after nine o’clock — but it had sent off only half its planes. Rear Admiral Fletcher was saving the rest for some emergency. Nagumo’s carriers meanwhile were plowing northward, his intact air force fueled and rearmed, preparing to launch at half past ten a total coordinated attack with a hundred two planes.

Only one eccentric element — as it were, one wild card — remained in this all but played-out game: the three slow American torpedo squadrons. These were operating out of sight of each other, in a random and quite unplanned way. No torpron had any idea where another torpron was. The commanders of these weak and outmoded machines, three tough mavericks named Waldron, Lindsey, and Massey, were doing their own navigation. It was they who found the Japanese.

“Fifteen torpedo planes, bearing 130!”

Nagumo and his staff were not caught by surprise, though the absence — again! — of fighter escort must have astounded them. The bearing showed the planes were coming from the carrier Nagumo was closing to destroy. Fifteen planes, one squadron; naturally the Yank carrier would try to strike first. But the vice admiral, with an advantage, as he believed, of four to one in ships and planes, was not worried. He had no idea that he was closing three carriers. The float plane pilot from the cruiser
Tone
had never reported the other two.

There was an ironic fatality about this search pilot. He had been launched half an hour late, and so had made his crucial sighting late. He had failed at first to recognize the flattop he saw; and thereafter he had not mentioned the other carriers. Having turned in this sorry performance, he vanished from history; like the asp that bit Cleopatra, a small creature on whom the fortunes of an empire had briefly and sadly turned.

The fifteen aircraft sailing in against Nagumo were Torpedo Squadron Eight of the
Hornet.
Their leader, John Waldron, a fierce and iron-minded aviator, led his men in on their required straight slow runs — with what feelings one cannot record, because he was among the first to die — through a thick antiaircraft curtain of smoke and shrapnel, and a swarming onslaught of Zeroes. One after another, as they tried to spread out for an attack on both bows of the carriers, Waldron’s planes caught fire, flew apart, splashed in the sea. Only a few lasted long enough to drop their torpedoes. Those who did accomplished nothing, for none hit. In a few minutes it was over, another complete Japanese victory.

But even as the fifteenth plane burst into flames off the
Akagi’s
bow and tumbled smoking into the blue water, a strident report from a screening vessel staggered everybody on the flag bridge:
“Fourteen torpedo planes approaching!”

Fourteen MORE? The dead, risen from the sea as in some frightful old legend, to fight on for their country in their wrecked planes? The Japanese mind is poetic, and such a thought could have flashed on Nagumo, but the reality was plain and frightening enough. American carriers each had but one torpedo squadron; this meant that
at least one more carrier was coming at him.
The report of the accursed
Tone
float plane was therefore worthless. There might be four more carriers, or seven. Who could tell what devilry the ingenious Americans were up to? Japanese intelligence had flatly failed. As Nagumo had once sneaked up on Pearl Harbor, could the enemy not have sneaked several new carriers into the Pacific Ocean?

“Speed all preparations for immediate takeoff!”

The panicky order, abandoning coordinated attack, went out to the four carriers. The air raid bugles brayed, the thick black-puffing AA thumped out from the screen, the carriers broke formation to dodge the attackers, and the Zeroes, halting the slow climb to combat patrol altitude, dove at this new band of unescorted craft. These were Gene Lindsey’s squadron from the
Enterprise.
The scarred, unwell commander had led them straight to the enemy while McClusky groped westward. Ten planes went down, Lindsey’s among them. Four evaded the slaughterers, dropped their torpedoes, and headed back for their ship. If any torpedo hit, it did not detonate.

Yet another big victory! But all steaming order was now gone from the Carrier Striking Force. Evasive maneuvering had pulled the
Hiryu
almost out of sight to the north, and strung the
Akagi,
the
Kaga,
and the
Soryu
in a line from west to east. The screening vessels were scattered from horizon to horizon, streaming smoke and cutting across each other’s long curved wakes. The sailors and officers were working away on the carrier flight decks with unabated zest. They had already cheered the flaming fall of dozens of bombers from Midway, and now two waves of Yank torpedo craft had been minced up by the Zeroes! The four flight decks were crammed with aircraft; none quite set for launch, but all fueled and bomb-loaded, and all in a vast tangle of fuel lines, bombs, and torpedoes, which the deck crews were cheerfully sweating to clear away, so that the airmen could zoom off to the kill.

Warren Henry had thought of the
Enterprise
as an eggshell eight hundred feet long, full of dynamite and human beings. Here were four such eggshells; more nearly, four grandiose floating fuel and ammunition dumps, uncovered to the touch of a match.

“Enemy torpedo planes, bearing095.”

This third report came after a short quiet interval. The Zeroes were heading up to the station whence they could repulse dive-bombers from on high, or knock down more low-skimming torpedo planes, whichever would appear. The four carriers were turning into the wind to launch; but now they resumed twisting and dodging, while all eyes turned to the low-flying attackers,
and to the combat patrol diving in a rush for more clay-pigeon shooting. Twelve torpedo planes were droning in from the
Yorktown.
These did have a few escort fighters weaving desperately above them, but it made little difference. Ten were knocked down; two survived after dropping torpedoes in vain. All three torpedo squadrons were now wiped out, and the Nagumo Carrier Striking Force was untouched. The time was twenty minutes past ten.

“Launch the attack!”

The order went out all through the force. The first fighter escort plane soared off the deck of the
Akagi.

At that very moment the almost unrecognizable voice of a staff officer uttered a scream which perhaps rang on in Nagumo’s ears until he died two years later on the island of Saipan, under attack by another Raymond Spruance task force:

“HELL-DIVERS !”

In two slanting lines stretching upward into the high clouds, unopposed by a single fighter, dark blue planes were dropping on the flagship and on the
Kaga.
The Zeroes were all at water level, where they had knocked down so many torpedo planes and were looking for more. A more distant scream came from a lookout pointing eastward:
“HELL-DIVERS!”
A second dotted line of dark blue aircraft was arrowing down toward the
Soryu.