The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History) (12 page)

The weather was better for the
Enterprise
pilots, but it was still pitch dark at 4:34 a.m. when the first planes took off. Carrier launches are dangerous under any circumstances with each plane having a full fuel tank and carrying 700 pounds of bombs, and they are particularly dangerous in the dark. To keep the
Enterprise
concealed from prowling Japanese submarines, only a few hooded lights offered a dim and ghostly illumination of the flight deck as the pilots warmed up their engines. Taking off in such circumstances was like accelerating through a tunnel into black oblivion. One recalled that it was “like being inside a black felt hat,” and most of the pilots felt a “touch of vertigo” as they launched into the darkness.
¹⁰

After takeoff, the bombers had to form up over the task force, which meant finding the other planes in the strike group as they all circled overhead in the dark. The planes, too, were blacked out except for a single white taillight. Finding their proper position in the formation was like groping blindfolded at 130 knots. Once all the Dauntless bombers were in the air, nine heavy Devastator torpedo bombers took off. Like the Devastators launched from
Yorktown
, they carried bombs rather than torpedoes. Lieutenant Commander Eugene Lindsey led this contingent, slotted for the attack on Kwajalein Island, some forty miles south of Roi-Namur and over 150 miles away. It took more than twenty minutes before the planes assembled into a formation that resembled a series of stacked Vs. Then the whole group headed off toward Kwajalein Atoll.
¹¹

As the attack planes flew off to the west, Halsey brought up the twelve remaining Wildcats of VF-6 from the hangar deck. Instead of keeping them so he could rotate his CAP, as Fletcher did, or sending them off as protection for the attack planes, he planned to use them offensively. Deck crews had attached 100-pound bombs under each wing, and Halsey sent the fighters off to attack the nearby islands of Wotje and Maloelap. Lieutenant Commander Wade McClusky led six Wildcats against nearby Wotje, and Lieutenant Jim Gray led six more against Maloelap. During the launch, one of the pilots in Gray’s section lost his bearings in the dark, and instead of lifting off, his plane slid sideways into the sea. The pilot was rescued, but it left Gray with only five airplanes.
¹²

Like the
Yorktown
force that targeted Mili Island, McClusky’s fighters found little that was worthy of their ordnance at Wotje. At Maloelap, by contrast, the five pilots of Gray’s section found much more than they had bargained for. On the small island of Taroa, part of Maloelap Atoll, the Japanese had built a new concrete airfield. Constructed by prisoner labor over two years, it was large enough to host two dozen fighters and bombers, many of which were parked in rows along the apron, and several of which were at that moment taking off to defend the airstrip. There were, in fact, fifteen Japanese fighters at Taroa—older models than the vaunted Zero—and nine twin-engine bombers. To Gray it seemed like there were “thirty or forty” planes in sight.
¹³

Gray’s five Wildcats dropped their ordnance on the airfield and began strafing, but the attackers became targets almost at once as Japanese fighters swarmed down on them. Worse, the guns on several of the Wildcats jammed, and under such circumstances there was nothing to do but to retire as fast as possible after they had dropped their small bombs. Gray’s guns did not jam, and he made three strafing runs on the airfield before he ran out of ammunition. By then there were eight Japanese fighters in the air, and Gray became the target of all of them. Bullets perforated his Wildcat’s wings and fuselage and thudded into the armor plate behind his seat. After he returned to the
Enterprise
, his plane crew counted more than forty bullet holes in the plane itself, and fifteen dents in the armor plate that had been installed behind his seat only days before.
¹⁴

While the American fighters were extricating themselves, the bombers and torpedo planes were flying westward toward Kwajalein. After about an hour, the pilots identified a line of surf marking the perimeter of the giant atoll. Like most of the atolls in the Pacific, Kwajalein was essentially a thin strip of coral reef surrounding a central lagoon. From 14,000 feet it looked like a silver necklace that had been tossed carelessly onto a blue carpet. Though the atoll was more than sixty miles long end to end, only a few pieces of dry ground were large enough to accommodate an airfield—Ebadon at the western end, Kwajalein at the eastern end, and the twin islands of Roi and Namur at the northern tip. The dive-bombers of VB-6 and the nine Devastators of Gene Lindsey’s VT-6 broke off from the attack formation and headed south for Kwajalein Island; the scout bombers of VS-6 under Young continued westward toward the larger island of Roi. The Americans had assumed that Roi was Japan’s main base and expected the anchorage to be choked with shipping. Instead, when the dive-bombers arrived there at about 7:00 a.m., the sun now fully up, they found a small airfield and several support buildings, but no ships.
¹⁵

Lieutenant Commander Halstead Hopping, the commander of Scouting Six, led the attack. Because his was the lead plane, antiaircraft fire concentrated on him. So did one of the Japanese fighters that came up behind him almost as soon as he pulled out of his dive. The fighter fired a long burst, and Hopping’s plane went spinning into the sea. The other planes in his squadron pressed home their attack, dropping smaller 100-pound bombs on the buildings and parked airplanes while fending off the Japanese fighters. One bomb hit an ammunition dump, creating a satisfying explosion, but there were few targets that justified use of a 500-pound bomb. The Americans destroyed eleven planes, more than half of them on the ground. Nonetheless, they no longer expected to find anything of greater value to attack.
¹⁶

Then they heard Commander Young’s voice in their headsets—now that the bullets were flying, there was no longer any need to maintain radio silence. Young passed on a message he had received from Gene Lindsey, who reported that there were plentiful shipping targets at Kwajalein Island, forty miles to the south. One of his pilots even reported that there were “two carriers” in the lagoon. Young relayed the message to his squadron: “Targets suitable for heavy bombs at Kwajalein.” The Dauntless pilots regrouped and sped southward.
¹⁷

Halsey, too, heard the report. The
Enterprise
maintained radio silence throughout the operation—essential when operating so close to enemy territory, or indeed at any time—but he could listen in as the pilots talked to one another. When he heard Young repeat the report about the “two carriers,” he launched nine more torpedo planes, armed this time with ship-killing torpedoes, under Lieutenant Lance “Lem” Massey, sending them to Kwajalein.

As Gene Lindsey had promised, the lagoon at Kwajalein was filled with Japanese shipping, including a light cruiser, several submarines, and a dozen or more freighters. There were, however, no carriers. The Japanese had no fighter cover, which meant that the American pilots could make their runs targeted only by ground fire. The first wave of bombers dropped their ordnance, shot up the shipping in the turquoise waters of the lagoon, then flew back to the
Enterprise
for more fuel and ammo. As they were returning to the carrier, they passed Massey’s torpedo planes going in the other direction. Unharried by Japanese fighters, the low and slow American Devastators had time to line up on their anchored prey. There was even some competition among the pilots for the big prizes. Halsey smiled when he heard one of the pilots radio to another: “You ease off to the right; that big one is mine.” In addition to wreaking havoc on Japanese shipping, one of the American bombs killed Rear Admiral Yatsushiro Sukeyoshi, an Eta Jima classmate of Yamamoto’s chief of staff and the first Japanese flag officer to die in the war.
¹⁸

Meanwhile, back at the task force, Halsey had the first group of bombers rearmed and refueled and sent them to hit the airfield on Taroa that Gray’s fighters had found. Aware that the bombers parked there were the most proximate threat to his task force, he wanted to neutralize as many of them as possible. Other groups were vectored there as they became available. Lieutenant Richard Best dropped his bomb on a hangar at Taroa and then fought off several fighters, one of which clipped him in the fuel tank. The escaping vapor looked like smoke, and Best’s rear-seat gunner, Aviation Radioman First Class Lee McHugh, called him on the intercom: “Mr. Best, Mr. Best, we’re on fire!”

“Where? Where? Where?” Best called back.

“The right wing!”

“Dammit, McHugh, that’s our gasoline leaking. Don’t you ever scare me like that again.”
¹⁹

For nearly nine hours, Halsey kept the
Enterprise
maneuvering within easy range of four Japanese bases. For part of that time, Wotje Island was actually in sight; columns of smoke could be seen rising from it. Finally, after returning from yet another strike, the commander of Bombing Six, Lieutenant Commander William Hollingsworth, climbed up to the bridge and said to Halesy, “Admiral, don’t you think it’s about time we got the hell out of here?” A grinning Halsey agreed, and after recovering the last of its planes, Task Force 8 began its withdrawal.
²⁰

And just in time. Soon, five twin-engine Nell bombers appeared. There would have been nine of them, but the strikes on the Taroa airfield had destroyed two and damaged two more. Rather than wait until those last two could be repaired, the Japanese commander had sent out all the operational aircraft he had. The Nell was an older airplane, designed in the early 1930s for the war in China, and while several Nells had taken part in the sinking of HMS
Prince of Wales
in December, the aircraft was not an ideal weapon for precision bombing. Rather than trying to place one bomb directly on the target, as the dive-bombers did, Japanese doctrine called for the twin-engine bombers to pass over the ship in a tight formation and to release all their bombs simultaneously so that at least one struck the target. This time, however, the Japanese squadron commander, Lieutenant Nakai Kazuo, decided on a more direct attack. He tipped his Nell over into a shallow glide with the four other planes following his lead. At two thousand feet, they released their bombs. Explosions erupted all around the
Enterprise
, showering the flight deck with sea spray and shrapnel. Though there were no direct hits, a piece of shrapnel from a near miss mortally wounded a sailor and cut a fuel line that started a fire, though it was quickly contained.
²¹

Lieutenant Nakai ordered his plane out of formation and directed it at the stern of the
Enterprise
where a dozen or more planes were parked. The Japanese would not adopt deliberate suicide as a war tactic until several years later, but Nakai’s plane had been badly damaged by two of the Wildcats, and he may have concluded that he could not make it back to base. Seeing his maneuver, Aviation Machinist’s Mate Third Class Bruno P. Gaido ran across the deck of the
Enterprise
, jumped into the back seat of the rearmost plane, and manned its .30-caliber guns. He fired continuously at the nose of the oncoming bomber as it flew straight toward him. The captain of the
Enterprise
, George Murray, ordered the carrier hard to starboard. Nakai—if he was still alive—was unable to match the turn. His wing sliced off the tail of the bomber from which Gaido continued to fire, and the Nell scraped forty feet of the flight deck before crashing into the sea.
²²
*

There was more to come. Two hours later, as the
Enterprise
steamed northeast at 30 knots, a second attack came. The Japanese at Taroa had managed to patch up their two damaged bombers and send them out as well. These two conducted a more conventional level-bombing attack, though they, too, failed to score a hit. McClusky’s Wildcat pilots went after them. Halsey grinned again when he heard Lieutenant Junior Grade James Daniels blurt out over the radio net, “Bingo! Bingo! I got one!” The second Nell, though crippled, managed to escape because the Wildcats were too low on fuel to pursue it. After this second scrape with Japanese land-based air, Halsey changed course to the northwest, using a weather front to cover his withdrawal.
²³

The
Enterprise
task force returned triumphantly to Pearl Harbor on February 5. Halsey’s planes had sunk a transport and a sub chaser and damaged six other ships, including the cruiser. The raid was little more than a pinprick to the vast Japanese empire, but as Halsey noted in his after-action report it was “the first instance in history of offensive combat by U.S. carriers,” and “the first offensive operation by Task Forces of the Pacific Fleet in the current war.” Because of that, when the
Enterprise
task force entered Pearl Harbor, it received a hero’s welcome. Ships blew their whistles as their crews lined the rails to wave their caps and cheer. Nimitz himself came on board the
Enterprise
to shake Halsey’s hand.
²⁴

By contrast, the return of Fletcher’s
Yorktown
group the next day was anticlimactic. Fletcher reported honestly that “no objectives of any real military value were known in the vicinity,” and because of that, and the poor conditions, he had decided “to withdraw and refuel.” It was the correct decision, but it meant that there were no whistles or waving caps for the men and the ships of Task Force 17.
²⁵