The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History) (55 page)

*
Because the
Yorktown
was out of action by the time these scouts returned, all of them had to land on board the carriers of Task Force 16. When Adams climbed out of his Dauntless on board the
Enterprise
still wearing his pajamas, he provoked a laugh when he claimed to be the only one who had come prepared to spend the night.

*
There was one more American air strike that night. At 5:00 p.m., a PBY from Midway reported a “burning carrier” off to the northwest—almost certainly the
Kaga.
Major Ben Norris lifted off with twelve planes from the Eastern Island airfield at 7:15, and Simard sent out eight PT boats, each of them carrying a 200-gallon auxiliary gas tank to enable them to make the long run out to the target. But by the time any of them arrived, the
Kaga
was no longer afloat. At 6:25 she suffered another massive explosion and went under at around 7:25, taking some eight hundred men out of her crew of 1,800 down with her. During the return flight, Norris got disoriented in the dark with no visual references and flew his plane into the sea.

16

Denouement

T
he battle was not over. Though Yamamoto was a gambler, he was also a realist. Nonetheless, for several more hours he continued to behave as if victory were still possible. When Spruance turned Task Force 16 eastward after dark, Yamamoto sent a radio message to all units that the American fleet, which he announced had “practically been destroyed,” was retiring to the east and that the landing on AF (Midway) would proceed. His purpose in sending such a message may have been to boost morale, but his subsequent orders suggest that he was still clinging to the hope that he could make it happen. At 9:20 p.m. he ordered Kondō’s two battleships and four cruisers to head northeast at high speed, to seek a night surface engagement with the retiring American carrier task force. He also directed Kurita’s four heavy cruisers, which were covering the “Transport Group,” to proceed to Midway to shell the airfield. He announced that the main body, including his flagship,
Yamato
, was coming up to rendezvous with what was left of the Kidō Butai. Finally, he authorized Ugaki to relieve Nagumo of his command and put Kondō in charge of the battle. Kondō led his big surface ships to the northeast, spreading them out into a scouting line in anticipation of finding the American carriers in the dark.
¹

Yamamoto also had to decide what to do about Nagumo’s wrecked flagship. Though the
Akagi
was virtually destroyed, she remained stubbornly afloat. It was unrealistic to imagine that she could be salvaged and towed all the way back across the Pacific, but the alternatives were appalling: abandoning her to the enemy or sinking her with torpedoes. One of Yamamoto’s staff officers worried that if she were abandoned, the Americans would turn her into “a museum piece on the Potomac River,” a horrifying scenario. But the idea of sinking one of the emperor’s capital ships was equally horrifying. The decision belonged to Yamamoto, and after listening to the discussion he told his staff, “I will apologize to the Emperor for the sinking of the
Akagi”
and he gave orders for her destroyer screen to send her to the bottom. After receiving those orders, the screen commander fired four torpedoes at the
Akagi
, one from each of his four destroyers, like a firing squad. At least two of them struck home, and the majestic
Akagi
slipped beneath the waves.
²

That made the
Hiryū
the last Japanese carrier afloat. For some time, Yamaguchi hoped that he could salvage his flagship and get her back to Japan, and throughout the evening and into the night her crews fought the fires. Then, just past midnight, the
Hiryū
was rocked by another internal explosion. The exhausted damage-control parties continued to labor, but it was now evident to all that it was hopeless. At 2:00 a.m., Yamaguchi ordered them to stop working and to assemble on the flight deck aft of the gaping holes left by the American bombs. There, he addressed them. He took full responsibility for the loss of the
Hiryū
and ordered the seven hundred or so survivors to live, so that they could become the core of a new and revitalized Imperial Navy. He asked them to face west, toward Tokyo, and called for three banzai cheers as the flag was lowered to the strains of the national anthem. Then, at 3:15 a.m., he ordered abandon ship. His last two messages consisted of an apology to Nagumo and an order to Captain Abe Toshio, commanding the destroyer screen, to sink the
Hiryū
with torpedoes once the crew had left the ship. Yamaguchi himself remained aboard. Several members of his staff came to him to say that they, too, wished to go down with the ship. No, Yamaguchi told them. They must survive so they could carry on the war. He did, however, accept the request of the
Hiryū
’s captain, Kaku Tomeo, to remain aboard, and the two of them stood together on what was left of the bridge to watch the orderly evacuation and admire the brightness of the moon.
³

At ten minutes past five, after the
Hiryūs
crew had been plucked from the water, and with the sun just coming up, Commander Fujita Isamu, captain of the destroyer
Makigumo
, fired a Type 93 “Long Lance” torpedo at the smoldering flattop. The first one ran underneath the hull and failed to detonate. A second struck home and exploded. Fujita, perhaps eager to wash his hands of this unpleasant duty, steamed off to the west. Some members of his crew reported that they saw survivors on board the
Hiryū
waving at them, but, perhaps assuming that these were patriots who preferred to go down with the ship, Fujita kept going.
⁴

By then Yamamoto had abandoned whatever hope he had had of forcing a surface action. By midnight, two things had become clear. First, that Kondō was not going to catch the American carriers before dawn, and second, that Kurita’s cruisers could not reach Midway before sunrise left them exposed to air attack. There was no avoiding what was now evident—he had to acknowledge defeat and call off the whole operation. Yamamoto’s gunnery officer, Watanabe Yasuji, who had argued so passionately for the Midway plan before the Naval General Staff back in April, suggested that the battleships
Haruna
and
Kirishima
could be sent to join Kurita’s four cruisers in the bombardment of Midway. Their big guns could neutralize the Midway airfield, he declared, and gain more time for Kondō’s battleships to catch up with and finish off the American carriers. Victory was still possible. Listening to his enthusiastic young staff officer, Yamamoto “turned very calm and quiet,” then replied, “It is too late now for such an operation.” He suggested to Watanabe, not unkindly, that as in
shogi
, “too much fighting causes all-out defeat.” Instead, Yamamoto recalled both Kondō and Kurita, ordering them to fall back on the main body.
⁵

There was a delay in the transmission of those orders, perhaps a deliberate one. Watanabe acknowledged that “everyone was crazy to recover the situation and fight the enemy.” Kurita’s recall order was sent first to the wrong cruiser division and he did not get his orders until 2:30 a.m. By then, his four cruisers were less than ninety miles from Midway—three more hours would have put them within gun range of the atoll. To be so close to the objective and have to turn around was galling, but orders were orders. Worse, dawn was now only two hours away, so that even at their top speed of 35 knots, Kurita’s four cruisers would be no more than 160 miles from Midway when the sun came up on June 5. They would be isolated, without air cover, and within easy range of the Midway airfield; Kurita knew it was unlikely he would get away undiscovered.
⁶

For Kurita and his cruiser force, however, there were other dangers that night besides airplanes. In the pitch darkness of the early hours of June 5, while Yamaguchi addressed the crew of the doomed
Hiryū
, the American submarine USS
Tambor
(SS-198) was running on the surface eighty-nine miles west of Midway. At 2:15 a.m., her commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander John W. Murphy, Jr., spotted “the loom of four large ships on the horizon.” They were, of course, Kurita’s four heavy cruisers, at that time still closing on Midway for a dawn shelling of the airfield. In the dark of night and three miles away, however, Murphy could not tell if the ships were friend or foe. His orders had cautioned him and all other sub commanders that “encounters with friendly surface forces during night [were] possible,” and that they should be sure of their targets. Murphy therefore turned the
Tambor
to the east to parallel the unidentified vessels, hoping to catch them in the moonlight so he could “identify them by silhouette.” Instead he lost them in the dark. He did not regain contact until 2:38, by which time they had changed course to the north in response to Yamamoto’s recall order. Now they were heading almost directly toward him.
⁷

Murphy sent out a contact report, but it was necessarily vague and specified only that he had spotted “many unidentified ships.” He was hoping that Midway could tell him whether these vessels were likely to be friends or enemies. Meanwhile, he maintained intermittent contact but was unable to get in position for an attack mainly because the cruisers were barreling along at 28 knots and the
Tambor
had a top speed of 21 knots. At 3:06 a.m., Murphy got an acknowledgment to his initial report, which did not contain any news about whether any U.S. surface forces were in the area. Not until 4:12, when the sky had lightened enough to enable him to study the profile of the ships against the gray dawn, was Murphy satisfied that these were enemy cruisers. He had no time for an updated report, however, because one of the two accompanying destroyers detached itself from the column and came charging toward him. Murphy stepped back from the periscope and yelled out: “Dive! Dive! Dive! Take her down and rig for depth charge attack!”
⁸

Murphy took the
Tambor
deep and stayed down for twenty minutes before easing back up to periscope depth. In the growing light of dawn, he saw two cruisers of the
Mogami
class, moving now at only about 17 knots and signaling to one another. Murphy tried to get close enough for an attack. Despite his efforts, however, the range actually increased from 9,000 yards to 13,000 yards (over seven miles). He sent in an updated contact report noting that the two cruisers were now headed due west on a course of 270 degrees. He also reported that “the trailing cruiser had about forty feet of her bow missing.”
⁹

Though he did not know it, Murphy and the
Tambor
were primarily responsible for that missing bow section. The wounded ship was, in fact, the heavy cruiser
Mogami
, namesake of the class. The
Mogami-class
cruisers were big ships, heavily armed with ten 8-inch guns in five two-gun turrets packed into a 661-foot long hull. At 2:35, Kurita’s cruisers had just completed their turn northward in response to Yamamoto’s recall order when one of the lookouts on Kurita’s flagship,
Kumano
, spied the low silhouette of the
Tambor
almost dead ahead on the northern horizon. Kurita ordered an emergency simultaneous turn to port. The
Kumano
, at the head of the column, and the
Mikuma
, which was third in line, both turned sharply left at near 90 degrees, but the number 2 ship
(Suzuya)
and the trailing ship
(Mogami)
each turned at 45 degrees. The
Suzuya
barely missed colliding with the
Kumano
, and the
Mogami
drove herself headlong into the fourinch-thick armor belt on the port side of the
Mikuma
, just forward of her bridge. The
Mikuma
was only superficially damaged, but warships of the Second World War were not built for ramming, and the sheer bow of the
Mogami
crumpled like a crash-test car hitting a concrete wall.
¹⁰

Quick and effective damage control prevented the
Mogami
from going down, but she could no longer make 28 knots, or even 20. With dawn approaching, Kurita could not slow the whole formation to wait for her. He ordered the two lead ships to proceed, and directed the wounded
Mogami
, accompanied by the
Mikuma
and the two destroyers, to follow at best speed. At first that best speed was only about eight or ten knots, as the
Mogami
pushed her blunt bow into the sea. Her captain, Soji Akira, did everything he could to regain speed: his men cut away the wreckage and threw overboard all nonessential materials, including all twenty-four of the expensive and valuable Type 93 torpedoes (a decision that would have important consequences later). Gradually the
Mogami
worked her way back up to 20 knots, which allowed her to run away from the
Tambor.
But when dawn arrived at 4:15, Midway was only a hundred miles away. It was only a matter of time before an American patrol plane found these two ships struggling along under the bright sun.
¹¹

Sure enough, at 6:30, a PBY out of Midway reported sighting “two battleships” 125 miles to the west. Simard ordered out what was left of his attack group: six Dauntlesses under Marine Captain Marshall Tyler and six Vindicators under Marine Captain Richard Fleming. They found the two cruisers and dropped their bombs, but the poor luck of the Marine bombers continued. Fleming’s plane was shot down, and despite the cruisers’ relatively slow speed, all of the American bombs missed. Eight Army B-17s from Midway tried their luck next, but they, too, failed to make any hits. The commanding officers of the two cruisers began to hope that they might get away after all.
¹²