The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History) (47 page)

14

The Tipping Point
(7:00 a.m. to 10:30 a.m.)

W
hile Japanese and American pilots had a frenetic morning on June 4, the submarine forces of both sides were considerably less active. The Japanese had committed nineteen submarines to the campaign, and the Americans twelve. Yet so far those subs had played no role in the engagement. As noted previously, the Japanese submarines got a late start leaving Japan, and a layover in Kwajalein put them hopelessly behind schedule; some were further delayed by the failed effort to reprise Operation K. The consequence was that the submarine cordons that Yamamoto counted on to give the Kidō Butai advance warning of the approach of the American carriers were not fully established until June 4, by which time the carriers of both sides were already engaged.

For their part, the Americans committed a dozen submarines to the operation, yet to this point they had played no active role, or indeed any role, in the battle. The American subs were simply too slow to catch up to the swift Japanese carriers. Most American submarines could make 17—20 knots on the surface but only about eight knots submerged. Since the Japanese surface ships operated routinely at 20—25 knots, they could simply outrun the American subs. Nimitz hoped that his submarines could be vectored toward enemy vessels that had been crippled by air attack, and after several of the planes operating from Midway reported that they had left Japanese warships burning, he ordered several submarines toward the coordinates. None of those reports proved accurate, however, and so far there had been no cripples for the American subs to attack. An old submarine hand himself, Nimitz lamented in his battle report that “all submarines were ordered to close on the enemy Striking Force but the only submarine attack of the day was by
Nautilus” That
one exception, however, proved to be very important indeed.
¹

At 7:00 a.m., as
Hornet
and
Enterprise
were preparing to launch their air groups, the USS
Nautilus
(SS-168), was running on the surface 150 miles north of Midway in the middle of a fan-shaped semicircle of ten submarines that Nimitz had placed north and west of the atoll. Launched back in 1930, the
Nautilus
had just completed an overhaul on the West Coast. She had arrived in Pearl Harbor on April 27 and put to sea on her first war patrol a month later, on May 24, four days before the
Hornet
and
Enterprise
left for Point Luck. If the
Nautilus
was not a new boat, she was a big boat. At 350 feet long and displacing more than 2,700 tons, she was as big as many destroyers. When commissioned in 1931, she had been the largest submarine in the world. She was also heavily armed. Her two big 6-inch guns (one on the foredeck and another aft of the conning tower) were more powerful than most of the guns on a destroyer. Her principal weapons, however, were the three dozen torpedoes that could be fired from her ten torpedo tubes. These torpedoes were the Mark 14 variety with the flawed detonators, though that fact was still unacknowledged by the Bureau of Ordnance.

The commanding officer of the
Nautilus
was 37-year-old Lieutenant Commander William H. Brockman, Jr., yet another member of the Naval Academy class of 1927. Brockman was a big man—at the Academy he had played both football and lacrosse. He no longer competed in athletics and had begun to put on weight. He had a round face, a genial manner, and a ready smile. He was also a determined warrior.
²

Lieutenant Commander William H. Brockman, Jr., was the skipper of the American submarine
Nautilus
(SS-168) at Midway. His prolonged duel with Commander Watanabe’s destroyer
Arashi
proved crucial. (U.S. Naval Institute)

At exactly 6:58, the topside lookout on the
Nautilus
reported a northbound flight of six aircraft. They were flying low, he reported, but aside from determining that they were friendlies, the lookout could not identify the airplane type. They were, in fact, the six new Avenger torpedo planes of VT-8 under “Fieb” Fieberling, en route to make the first of five attacks on the Kidō Butai by Midway-based aircraft. Minutes later, the lookout reported black puffs of antiaircraft gunfire bursts in the sky to the north, and what looked like smoke from falling bombs. Clearly the American planes had found a worthwhile target. Brockman ordered his crew to general quarters and altered course to approach what could only be a Japanese surface force.
³

At the time, the Kidō Butai was still steaming southward toward Midway and was therefore on a converging course with the northbound
Nautilus.
At five minutes to eight, with the
Nautilus
now at periscope depth, Brockman spotted the masts of big ships “dead ahead.” He had little time to study them, for at almost the same moment, a Japanese Zero, spotting the shadow of his sub just below the surface, began a strafing run, and Brockman had to dive. As he maneuvered underwater, he could hear the ominous pinging sound of echo ranging—what the Americans called sonar—which meant that enemy surface ships were searching for him. Nevertheless, he crept back up to periscope depth to have a look. Through his viewfinder, he saw “a formation of four ships.” He was pretty sure that one of them was a battleship and that the other three were cruisers. They were, in fact, the battleship
Kirishima
, the cruiser
Nagara
, and two destroyers—the advance screen of the Kidō Butai. Deciding to attack the battleship, which was on his starboard bow, Brockman maneuvered to obtain an angle on the bow. As he did so, however, the wake created by his periscope breaking the surface—called a feather—was spotted by one of the circling Zeros and he was again forced to dive. After that, a ship that Brockman identified as a cruiser of the
Jintsu
class closed on his position and began to drop depth charges. That attacking surface ship was actually the destroyer
Arashi
, skippered by Commander Watanabe Yasumasa, and at that moment Brockman and Watanabe began a duel that would last almost two hours and have a profound effect on the outcome of the Battle of Midway.
⁴

Between 8:00 and 8:10, while Nagumo was contemplating his response to the news that there was at least one American carrier to the north of him, and while his Zeros fought off the attack by Joe Henderson’s dive-bombers, Watanabe and the
Arashi
dropped five depth charges on the
Nautilus.
Japanese depth charges were smaller than the American version, with a 220-pound charge (American depth charges had a 290-pound charge), but they were deadly enough to the fragile hull of a submarine. The real weakness of Japanese depth charges, however, was that they had only two depth settings: forty feet and two hundred feet. Since Watanabe knew that the American boat had not had time to go deep, he almost certainly set the charges for forty feet. Brockman went to ninety feet and stayed there, but while that protected him from the worst effects of the depth charges, it also meant that the valuable targets above him had a chance to speed past him at 25 knots or more. Even if Watanabe did not destroy this pesky American sub, he would be doing his job if he simply kept it underwater, where its top speed was only eight knots, and where it could not fire any torpedoes, until after the Kidō Butai had moved on.
⁵

This was the first time that anyone on board the
Nautilus
had experienced a depth-charge attack, and it was a particularly unpleasant experience. First of all, it was impossible to fight back. “Once you have to go down,” one sub skipper recalled, “you don’t have any offensive weapon. You just feel like you’re a sitting duck.” Second, the aural and physical sensations were terrifying. When a depth charge exploded, the concussion hit the boat twice. First came the shock wave, which made a sharp metallic clang, “like a hammer hitting the hull.” Then, a second or two later, came the sound wave. That was much louder—a giant wham—but if you heard it, you could breathe out, because it meant the shock wave had not opened the hull of the boat. Indeed, as long as there were two distinct sounds for each detonation—the metallic bang of the shock wave, followed by the much louder boom of the sound wave—the charge had exploded at a relatively safe distance. It was when the two sounds came close together that there was cause for worry. And if they occurred simultaneously, it was probably the last thing anyone on board ever heard. In this case, the two sounds were separate and distinct, and Brockman estimated that the Japanese were dropping their charges about 1,000 yards away.
⁶

After the explosions stopped, Brockman again heard the pinging sound of underwater echo ranging as Watanabe continued to search for him. The Japanese skipper waited seven minutes to see if any debris floated to the surface or if his echo ranging could locate the American sub, and then he dropped six more depth charges. During this second attack, the concussion from one explosion sheared off the retaining pin on one of the torpedoes on the
Nautilus.
The torpedo’s propeller began spinning, generating a loud, high-pitched whine that Brockman feared would be picked up by Japanese sensors. At the same time, bubbles of escaping exhaust gas left a telltale mark on the surface. There was also a chance that the spinning propeller would arm the warhead, which had a magnetic exploder. No one on board the
Nautilus
knew for sure whether the sub’s own metal hull would trigger the detonator. There was nothing to do but wait it out. As it happened, the warhead did not explode, though Brockman continued to worry that the whine of the spinning propeller would betray their position.
⁷

Brockman kept the
Nautilus
at ninety feet, at which depth he hoped its shadow would not be seen by circling enemy planes. Guided, perhaps, by the noise of the torpedo running hot inside the
Nautilus
, Watanabe closed in and dropped nine more depth charges. The first was fairly close, though each successive one exploded further away. When the pinging faded and the torpedo’s propeller finally stopped running, Brockman eased back up to periscope depth to have another look. When he put his face to the rubber gasket around the viewfinder, what he saw shocked him. While he had played possum at ninety feet, the Kidō Butai, still moving southward, had closed with his position. He now found himself in the middle of the Japanese fleet. As he peered through the lens, he saw an image that he had “never experienced in peacetime practices.” As one of his officers put it, “There were ships all over the place.” They were moving at high speed and signaling to one another by flag hoist and blinker signal; searchlights from several of them were aimed directly at his periscope. The battleship
Kirishima
fired her broadside at the feather of his periscope, and the
Arashi
charged in again, this time from astern. Despite all that, Brockman made a quick estimate of the course and speed of the battleship before dropping the periscope. He estimated the range at 4,500 yards, which was the maximum range for the Mark 14 torpedo at the high-speed setting. He reported the angle on the bow at 80 degrees and her speed at 25 knots. He fed that information into the boat’s torpedo data computer,
*
and when it generated a solution, he ordered “Fire one!” and then almost immediately, “Fire two!” with a one-degree offset on the second torpedo. Then he dove. The torpedo room reported that the number 1 tube did not fire, and only one torpedo was running. He did not know that as soon as he had fired, the battleship changed course away from him; in accordance with doctrine, the Japanese battleship skipper was presenting his ship’s stern to the threat to narrow the target and extend the range. And, once again, here came the
Arashi.
⁸