Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (47 page)

The Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 provides stunning examples of Zulu bravery pitted against British discipline. But whereas the Zulu military was often as brave as the British, no one would claim it was as disciplined:

The key invention is that of the state, that is, civil in contrast with kin-based social control. Civil government is the dividing line, the threshold, the horizon between that which is civilized and that which is not. Only the state can raise large armies. It alone can discipline and train men into soldiers rather than warriors. Only government can command, not request, and can punish those who do not feel like fighting that day. . . . The primitive warrior was without the backing of an organized, structured government. He was unwilling to submit to discipline, and incapable or impatient of obeying definite command. He discovered only the tactical principles inherent in animal hunting. . . . He was too immediately concerned with the engagement just ahead to plan campaigns instead of battles. (H. Turney-High,
Primitive War,
258)

There were eleven Victoria Crosses awarded at Rorke’s Drift—one for almost every ten soldiers who fought. None were awarded on the basis of “kills,” though we have several eye-witness accounts of individual British marksmen shooting dozens of Zulus at great ranges. Modern critics suggest such lavishness in commendation was designed to assuage the disaster at Isandhlwana and to reassure a skeptical Victorian public that the fighting ability of the British soldier remained unquestioned. Maybe, maybe not. But in the long annals of military history, it is difficult to find anything quite like Rorke’s Drift, where a beleaguered force, outnumbered forty to one, survived and killed twenty men for every defender lost. But then it is also rare to find warriors as well trained as European soldiers, and rarer still to find any Europeans as disciplined as the British redcoats of the late nineteenth century.

FLOATING INFERNOS

THERE WERE TWO deadly places to be on the morning of June 4, 1942, during the first day of the battle of Midway—at that point the greatest aircraft carrier battle in the history of naval warfare. The first was on four Japanese aircraft carriers under aerial attack from American dive-bombers. All had their planes parked on their decks being refueled and rearmed when they were unexpectedly attacked. Gasoline tanks, high explosives, and ammunition were recklessly exposed to a shower of American 500- and 1,000-pound bombs. The hangar decks below were also littered promiscuously with munitions and torpedoes. Frantic crews tried in vain to switch their armaments from a planned land attack on Midway to a sudden impromptu assault on the newly located American carrier fleet a little less than two hundred miles to the east.

Under those rare circumstances of carrier vulnerability, a single 1,000-pound bomb that hit the targeted deck full of gassed and armed planes might trigger a series of explosions that could incinerate the entire ship and send it to the bottom in minutes—1,000 pounds of explosives ruining in a minute or two what five years of labor and 60 million pounds of steel had created. During the battle of Midway, three of the imperial Japanese prized fleet carriers—the
Akagi, Kaga,
and
Soryu,
all veterans of an unbroken string of Japanese successes during the prior six months— were precisely in that rare state of absolute defenselessness when American dive-bombers began their headlong plunges from as high as 20,000 feet, entirely unseen from below. In less than six minutes—from 10:22 to 10:28 A.M. on June 4, 1942—the pride of the Japanese carrier fleet was set aflame and the course of World War II in the Pacific radically altered. Unlike the great naval battles of the past—Artemisium (480 B.C.), Salamis (480 B.C.), Actium (31 B.C.), Lepanto (1571), Trafalgar (1805), and Jutland (1916)—Midway was fought in the open seas: once sailors lost their platform of safety, unscathed and burned orphaned crewmen alike would find neither shore nor small boats to pick them up.

The 33,000-ton
Kaga
(“Increased Joy”), with its arsenal of seventy-two bombers and fighters, was probably attacked first by twenty-five American SBD Dauntless dive-bombers of squadrons VB-6 and VS-6, led by the skilled pilot Wade McClusky from the American carrier
Enterprise.
Nine of McClusky’s planes made it through the horrendous antiaircraft defenses. All dived toward the carrier at more than 250 mph. Four bombs hit their target. Within seconds Japanese planes, gassed, armed, and ready for takeoff, instead began exploding, causing gaping holes in the flight deck and killing almost anyone in their general vicinity. Anything metal on deck—wrenches, pipes, fittings—simply became deadly shrapnel that shredded all flesh in its path. Two subsequent American bombs ripped apart the ship’s elevator and ignited all the armed planes waiting below on the hangar deck. One bomb blew apart the carrier’s island, killing all the officers on the bridge, including the captain of the
Kaga.

Almost immediately, power went out. The
Kaga
stopped dead in the water and began exploding. Carriers seldom broke in two and sank quickly. They were not often caught and targeted by the huge shells of battleships and were among the most seaworthy of capital ships even when torpedoed—which was rare, given their protective net of cruisers and destroyers. Nevertheless, in minutes eight hundred of the
Kaga’
s crew were burned alive, dismembered, or vaporized into nothingness. Ship-to-ship air warfare, with its lethal combination of bomb, torpedo, machine-gun fire, and aviation fuel, even without the horrific shelling of sixteen-inch naval guns, could be an ungodly experience. Whereas the Japanese had done precisely the same thing to American battleships half a year earlier at Pearl Harbor, their own blazing carriers now were not at dock, but on the high seas, hundreds of miles from Japanese-held territory. Their slight hope of rescue and medical attention lay only with other Japanese ships, themselves under aerial attack and thus wary of approaching too close to the exploding and flaming carriers. A few officers chose to go down with their vessels, out of shame of disappointing their emperor.

At nearly the same time the
Kaga
was struck, her sister ship the 34,000-ton
Akagi
(“Red Castle”)—Admiral Nagumo’s flagship—with most of its sixty-three planes, was caught in exactly the same manner by Dick Best and at least five SBD dive-bombers of the 1st Division of Bombing Squadron VB-6, also from the carrier
Enterprise.
While this smaller group of airborne attackers had only 5,000 pounds of ordnance among them, the
Akagi
was likewise in the midst of launching at least forty fully gassed and armed planes heading out to demolish the
Yorktown.
At least two and maybe three of the Americans’ bombs hit the carrier. The explosions incinerated the Japanese planes as they were taking off and blasted holes throughout the deck before reaching the volatile fuel tanks and magazines below. Rear Admiral Kusaka recorded that the deck was on fire and anti-aircraft and machine guns were firing automatically, having been set off by the fire aboard ship. Bodies were all over the place, and it was not possible to tell what would be shot up next. . . . I had my hands and feet burned—a pretty serious burn on one foot. That is eventually the way we abandoned the
Akagi—
helter-skelter, no order of any kind. (W. Smith, Midway, 111)

Unlike those who are attacked in land warfare, men shelled and bombed on carriers at sea have little avenue of flight, their escape limited by the small perimeter of the flight deck. An infantryman subject to the hellish shelling on Guadalcanal might run, dig, or find shelter; a Japanese sailor on an exploding carrier at Midway had to choose from among being burned alive, suffocating inside the ship, being strafed and engulfed on a red-hot flight deck, or jumping overboard to drown, be burned on the high seas, or on occasion be attacked by sharks in the warm waters of the Pacific. The best hope of a Japanese man in the water was to be rescued by American ships, which meant life and safety in a prisoner-of-war camp in the United States. The worst nightmare of an American sailor or airman in the seas of Midway was capture by the Japanese navy, which spelled a quick interrogation, followed by either beheading or being thrown overboard bound with weights.

As for the attackers, unlike high-altitude “precision” bombing by multiengine aircraft at 20,000 feet and above, naval dive-bombers were far more likely to hit the target—if the pilots were not themselves engulfed by their own explosions, shot down, or simply unable to pull out of a dive that brought them within feet of the enemy deck. At Midway a single Dauntless dive-bomber closing to a thousand feet above the target with a 500-pound bomb would prove more lethal than an entire squadron of fifteen B-17s three or four miles above, despite each dropping 8,500 pounds of explosives.

One such bomb from one of the American dive-bombers plowed into the hangar and ignited the
Akagi’
s stored torpedoes, which immediately began to rip the ship open from the inside out. Unlike British aircraft carriers, neither the faster and more agile Japanese nor the American flattops had armored decks. Their wooden runways offered poor protection for the fuel, planes, and bombs in storage below—and themselves were easily ignited along with the planes preparing for takeoff. More than two hundred men from the
Akagi
were either killed or lost in seconds. A Japanese naval officer and celebrated pilot, Mitsuo Fuchida, on the
Akagi
recalled the general calamity inside the carrier:

I staggered down a ladder and into the ready room. It was already jammed with badly burned victims from the hangar deck. A new explosion was followed quickly by several more, each causing the bridge structure to tremble. Smoke from the burning hangar gushed through passageways and into the bridge and ready room, forcing us to seek other refuge. Climbing back to the bridge I could see that
Kaga
and
Soryu
had also been hit and were giving off heavy columns of black smoke. The scene was horrible to behold. (M. Fuchida and M. Okimiya,
Midway, the Battle That Doomed Japan
, 179)

The best naval pilots of the imperial fleet were being slaughtered in a matter of minutes. Just as important was the loss of the most skilled flight crews in the Japanese navy, the rare and irreplaceable experts who had mastered with long experience the difficult arts of rapidly arming, maintaining, and fueling aircraft on a bobbing carrier.

In this incredible six-minute period a third Japanese carrier, the 18,000-ton
Soryu
(“Green Dragon”), was about to experience the same inferno inflicted on her two sister ships. This time the damage was done by Max Leslie and his Bombing Squadron 3 from the American aircraft carrier
Yorktown,
itself now little more than a hundred miles away. Of
Soryu’
s crew, 718 were soon incinerated. None of the ordnance from the American dive-bombers were effective armor-piercing weapons, which under most circumstances was a clear drawback, as such ordnance were often unable to smash unimpeded through even the wooden flight decks to explode among the interior magazines, engines, and fuel tanks below. Given the absolute failure of forty-one American torpedo planes minutes earlier, there seemed little chance to reach the vulnerable insides to sink the carriers through the Dauntlesses’ small bombs alone. But, as in the case of the
Akagi
and
Kaga,
for once the lighter American bombs had an unexpected windfall: since all three carriers were caught preparing planes for takeoff, the most vulnerable targets on the Japanese carriers at 10:22 A.M. were in fact their wooden decks. The explosions of the exposed and loaded Japanese bombers and fighters would send the blasts from their own fiery gasoline and bombs downward right into their own ships. One American bomb under these rare conditions might set off dozens more on deck.

When hit,
Soryu
was about ten to twelve miles north and east of two other burning carriers, likewise about to launch planes for a massive air strike against the three American fleet carriers. Leslie’s thirteen dive-bombers came in from more than 14,000 feet unnoticed—the Japanese fighters were too busy at sea level finishing their slaughter of Lem Massey’s last few lumbering American torpedo bombers to patrol the clouds above. At least three bombs from the
Yorktown’
s pilots hit the
Soryu—
1,000-pound ordnance released from little more than 1,500 feet—quickly turning the smaller carrier into an inferno, as the blasts from the bombs themselves, exploding Japanese planes, gas lines, and ammunition tore the ship to pieces. Within seconds she lost power entirely. After thirty minutes the call went out to abandon ship. The captain of the
Soryu,
Admiral Yanagimoto, was last seen yelling
“Banzai”
on the engulfed bridge. The last four planes in Leslie’s attack squadron felt that further bombing of the wrecked
Soryu
was redundant and so altered their dives to focus on a battleship and destroyer. Belowdecks Tatsuya Otawa, one of the
Soryu
pilots, saw that “everything was blowing up—planes, bombs, gas tanks” (W. Lord, Incredible Victory, 174)—before he, too, was blasted over the side of the ship into the sea.

The fourth and last Japanese carrier, the more modern 20,000-ton
Hiryu
(“Flying Dragon”), which had gradually drifted to the southeast during the morning attacks from army and marine bombers based on Midway, largely escaped the first morning wave of American carrier divebombers.

Within minutes
Hiryu
was able to launch her own devastating attack on the
Yorktown,
which contributed to the eventual sinking of the American carrier. However, late in the day of June 4, a returning formation of American dive-bombers without fighter escort from the
Enterprise
and Yorktown finally found her too. At a little before 4:00 P.M. twenty-four SBDs from the Enterprise, ten of them orphaned from the disabled and listing
Yorktown,
led by Lieutenants Earl Gallagher, Dick Best, and Dewitt W. Shumway, dived unnoticed from the clouds. Four bombs were direct hits, and once more the Americans ignited Japanese fighters and bombers that were ready for takeoff. The
Hiryu’
s plane elevator was blown out of the deck and against the bridge. Almost all of the dead were caught below the deck and engulfed in raging fires—more than four hundred perished. The
Hiryu’
s captain, Rear Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi, one of the brightest and most aggressive commanders in the Japanese navy, remained on the bridge and went down with his ship—an irreplaceable loss, since he was believed by many to be groomed as the successor to Admiral Yamamoto himself, Commander in Chief of the imperial fleet. When told by an aide that there was still money in the ship’s safe that might be saved, Yamaguchi ordered it left alone. “We’ll need money for a square meal in hell,” he murmured (W. Lord, Incredible Victory, 251).