The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History) (26 page)

On May 7, in the full darkness before dawn, the opposing carrier forces, running blacked-out to avoid being seen by enemy submarines, groped uncertainly toward each other. Fletcher detached a surface force of three cruisers and three destroyers under Rear Admiral John G. Crace of the Royal Australian Navy and sent it to guard the southern exit from Jomard Passage, which the Port Moresby invasion force was almost certain to use. In case his own force was badly crippled in the anticipated duel with the Japanese carriers, he wanted something there to blunt the invasion force.
*
It was a bit of a risk, for Crace’s detached surface force would be without air cover, but Fletcher did not want to separate his two carriers with the Japanese so near, and he could not be in both places at the same time.

The most important job now was to find those enemy carriers. To do that, Fletcher ordered search planes out a half hour before dawn. Based on a decrypted Japanese message forwarded to him by Nimitz, Fletcher believed that the Japanese would be approaching from the north, and he sent ten search planes fanning out in that direction. However, Rochefort’s analysts had confused the invasion force with the covering force; Hara’s carriers were actually some 210 miles to the
east
of him. Both American carriers also launched Wildcats as CAP, and Dauntless bombers for anti torpedo plane control; after that, Fletcher could only wait.
¹⁴

Hara also sent out predawn patrols, but he sent them mostly to the south. With the Americans searching northward and the Japanese searching southward, neither carrier force spotted the other—though pilots from both sides soon found other targets.

Lieutenant John L. Nielsen, flying a Dauntless dive-bomber from the
Yorktown
, was searching amid the islands off the eastern tip of New Guinea when he spotted an Aichi E-13A “Jake” float boat—a “snooper” in the parlance of carrier operations. Fearing that it would alert the Japanese to the presence of an American carrier plane, if given time to send a contact report, he determined to shoot it down before it could transmit. With both planes firing, Neilsen chased it down out of the clouds and finished it off at low level. “He couldn’t have been 20 feet off the water when I hit him,” Neilsen recalled, “and he went down and under like a rock.”

About 15 minutes later, near the island of Misima in the Louisiade archipelago, his back-seat gunner, Walter Straub, spotted the wakes of surface ships below. Nielsen looked them over carefully before telling Straub to call in the report of “two cruisers and four destroyers,” giving their bearing and range from Point Zed.
*
Straub used the code table to transcribe the message, but when he tried to send it he found that their plane’s antenna was gone, apparently shot away by the Japanese float plane. Only the short-range radio was operating. Nielsen flew back toward the task force to close the range while Straub repeatedly broadcast the sighting report until finally, at 8:15, he got a “Roger” from the
Yorktown
. What he did not know was that the code table Straub had used was misaligned, and instead of reporting two cruisers and four destroyers the message that arrived on board the flagship was that he had spotted
two carriers and four cruisers.
¹⁵

The report triggered a burst of excitement on board the
Yorktown
. Both Fletcher and Fitch knew that whoever got in the first blow had a tremendous advantage, and here was a chance to get a jump on the Japanese. The problem was that the range was too great. The reported sighting was 225 miles to the north—much too far for the torpedo planes or fighters, and a stretch for the dive-bombers. Fletcher therefore put the task force on a northerly course to close the range, and launched the first attack plane at 9:26. Just before the pilots climbed into their planes, Fletcher came out onto the bridge wing of the
Yorktown
with a bullhorn in his hand to tell them: “Get that goddamn carrier!”
¹⁶
By 10:15, Task Force 17 had ninety-three planes in the air heading toward the contact sent in by Lieutenant Nielsen.

Then, disaster. Neilsen’s returning scout plane reached the task force soon afterward and, flying low over the
Yorktown
, Straub dropped a beanbag onto the deck with an attached note that confirmed the location of the Japanese force. When the note reached the flag bridge, however, Fletcher was horrified to read that it reported the sighting of two
cruisers
and four
destroyers
. When Nielsen reported to him after landing, Fletcher asked him, “What about the carriers?” Neilsen looked back at him and asked, “What carriers?” It is possible to imagine the blood draining from Fletcher’s face upon hearing that response. He had just sent his full strike force off to attack a relatively unimportant group of surface ships; the Japanese carriers were still out there somewhere. He thought briefly about recalling the strike, but if enemy carrier planes were headed his way, which was at least possible, given that a number of Japanese scout planes had been spotted nearby, he did not want to be caught in the middle of recovering airplanes. One witness later claimed that Fletcher told Neilsen, “Young man, do you know what you have done? You have just cost the United States two carriers.”
¹⁷

Maybe not. Soon after that exchange, and with a humiliated Neilsen still standing on the flag bridge, an officer rushed in to tell Fletcher that a land-based Army bomber from Australia was reporting a Japanese carrier and twenty or more other ships only thirty miles away from the sighting that Neilson had sent in. This was no sure thing, for Army pilots were notoriously unreliable in identifying ship types; anything from a cargo vessel to a light cruiser might be reported as a carrier. Still, if this
was
a carrier, it was a more important target than the two cruisers that Neilsen had found. Fletcher decided that given the circumstances he had no choice but to break radio silence and vector the whole attack group toward the new sighting, which he did at 10:53, sending the message in the clear. His decision was made easier by the fact that it was likely that Takagi and Hara already knew where Task Force 17 was. But if they didn’t before, they would now.
¹⁸

As it happened, a Japanese snooper had reported Fletcher’s location at 8:20 that morning. The report came too late, however. Like the Americans, Takagi and Hara had already shot their bolt, having sent their attack planes toward an inaccurate sighting. An hour earlier at 7:22, Hara had received a report from another of his scouts who spotted the huge silhouette of the loitering oiler
Neosho
below him, along with its escorting destroyer, and reported them as a carrier and a cruiser. An excited Hara ordered a full strike of seventy-eight planes from both of his carriers. The Japanese dive-bombers and torpedo planes flew southward to the reported coordinates for the American “carrier,” only to find the
Neosho
and
Sims
. After conducting a search for better targets—a search that used up more valuable time—they settled for blasting these two hapless victims, sinking the
Sims
with three bombs, and hitting the
Neosho
with seven, damaging her so badly that she stayed a float only because of the reserve buoyancy of her partially empty oil tanks.

While the loss of the tanker would inhibit Fletcher’s movements somewhat, it was not the death blow Hara had hoped for.
*
Worse, while his strike planes were thus engaged, Takagi and Hara got a report of another enemy surface force composed of battleships and cruisers near the exit from Jomard Passage. This, of course, was Crace’s cruiser-destroyer force. Hara assumed that these “battleships” were operating with the American carrier and that it must be there, too. Because of the range, he would have to steam westward for several hours to get close enough to launch another attack, and in the meantime he still had to recover the planes he had sent after the
Neosho
.
¹⁹

While the Japanese strike force flew southward toward the
Neosho
and
Sims
, the air group from
Yorktown
and
Lexington
flew northward toward the reported location of the Japanese carrier. At 11:00 a.m., the pilots spotted the MO screening force under Rear Admiral Gotō Arimoto that included the carrier
Shōhō
. The
Shōhō
was a new carrier, having been converted from the sub tender
Tsurugisaki
only months before, and she was significantly smaller than the big carriers of the Kido Butai, carrying only about twenty airplanes. When the American strike force arrived, the
Shōhō
’s escorts maneuvered to separate themselves from one another. Unlike American doctrine, which called for the escorts to close in on the carrier to provide additional antiaircraft fire, Japanese doctrine was to spread out so the carrier would have plenty of room for evasive maneuver.

By arrangement, the
Lexington
dive-bombers of Bill Ault’s Scouting Two attacked first. The
Shōhō
maneuvered radically, completing a full circle to port and managing to avoid all the bombs from Ault’s squadron. The
Shōhō
then turned into the wind and launched three more fighters to join the four she had flying CAP, but it was her last hurrah. At 11:15 the
Lexington’s
torpedo planes split into two groups for an “anvil attack,” dropping down to fifty feet above the water and slowing to under 100 knots to make their run. At the same time, 16,000 feet above, the dive-bombers of Lieutenant Commander Weldon Hamilton’s Bombing Two pushed over, opening their dive brakes and flying down at a steep 70-degree angle before releasing their 1,000-pound bombs at about 2,500 feet. For once, everything worked the way it had been drawn up in the training manuals. The windscreens did not fog up and the bombing was unusually accurate. Hamilton laid his own 1,000-pound bomb squarely in the middle of the
Shōhō’s
flight deck, and this was followed by several other hits by his squadron mates.
²⁰

Only minutes later, the
Yorktown
dive-bombers had their turn. The commander of Scouting Five, Lieutenant Commander William Burch, later claimed, “It was the best attack I ever made in my life.” “I never saw such beautiful bombing,” another rhapsodized. Even the American fighters held their own against the few Zeros. Wildcat pilot Lieutenant Junior Grade Walter Haas recalled, “We’d push over, single out a plane, and come down with all the speed we could build up in eight or ten thousand feet. We’d make a quick pass and find ourselves in a melee of twisting, dog-fighting planes.” Using these tactics, Haas got the war’s first confirmed kill of a Japanese Zero by an American Wildcat. By the time the
Yorktown
’s torpedo planes arrived, the
Shōhō
was mortally wounded and burning fiercely. They pumped ten more torpedoes into her anyway.
²¹

Altogether,
Lexington
pilots claimed five bomb hits and nine torpedo hits, and
Yorktown
pilots claimed fourteen bomb hits and ten torpedo hits. Even allowing for exaggeration, the
Shōhō
had been smothered by bombs and torpedoes, and she all but disappeared under a blizzard of exploding ordnance. With black smoke pouring out of her, she continued to steam at high speed until she literally drove herself under the surface. “She went straight ahead,” recalled Burch, “sinking as she went, and was under the waves seven minutes after our first bomb hit her.” Out of a crew of 736, only 204 survived. Lieutenant Commander Robert Dixon, commanding the
Lexington’s
scouting squadron, continued to circle the area to watch the
Shōhō’s
death plunge. At 11:35, he went on the radio to send a prearranged message back to the task force: “Scratch one flattop.”
²²

The flight back to the task force was jubilant. There was some concern that the torpedo bombers might run out of fuel on the long flight home, but they all made it. Only three Dauntless bombers had been lost in the attack. When Lieutenant Commander Joe Taylor, who commanded the
Yorktown’s
torpedo squadron, touched down on the flight deck at about 1:00 p.m., Dixie Kiefer, the ship’s executive officer, ran up to him and lifted him off the deck in a big bear hug. Taylor and Bill Burch, the skipper of Scouting Five, hurried up to the flag bridge to give their report.

“Well, Joe, what did you see?” Fletcher asked.

“I’ll show you in a minute,” Taylor answered mysteriously.