The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History) (38 page)

Captain Miles Browning, Halsey’s brash and confident chief of staff, also served as Spruance’s chief of staff during the Batt le of Midway. (U.S. Naval Institute)

Upon receipt of Fletcher’s order, Spruance told Browning “to launch everything they had at the earliest possible moment.” In accordance with the predetermined battle plan, he would hold back only a small CAP and send everything else—seventy-one dive-bombers, twenty-nine torpedo planes, and twenty Wildcats—to hit the Japanese first.
¹⁷

One practical problem remained. Task Force 16 had closed the range to the Kidō Butai slightly in the past half hour, but the enemy carriers were still at the extreme limit of the American torpedo bombers and fighters. Moreover, the wind that day was very light—only about five knots—and it was coming out of the east. In order to launch, the
Hornet
and
Enterprise
would have to turn into the wind,
away
from the target, and build up speed to at least 25 knots. It would take at least half an hour, and probably more, to launch those 120 airplanes, which would add back all the miles the Americans had gained since the first sighting. At Browning’s suggestion, Spruance decided to continue steaming southwest, toward the target, for another 45 minutes before launching at about 7:00 a.m. It would still be a long flight to the target. Nonetheless, this later launch was likely to allow the attack planes sufficient time over the target to get the job done and get back safely.
¹⁸

Meanwhile, Tomonaga’s strike force from the Kidō Butai was hammering Midway. The Japanese pilots had expected to catch the tiny atoll by surprise. The ambush by VMF-221 had disabused them of that expectation, and they were also disconcerted to encounter extremely heavy ground fire. They were greatly disappointed to find the airfield on Eastern Island nearly bare of airplanes. Nevertheless, their attack was ferocious—and effective. The sixty-six bombers that survived the intercept dropped a total of just over thirty-eight tons of explosive ordnance on the two tiny islands that made up Midway Atoll. They took out the power plant, the Eastern Island command post, the mess hall, and the post office; they wrecked the aircraft servicing area, cut the water lines, destroyed the seaplane hangar, and damaged the barracks. One bomb hit a rearming pit and set off eight more 100-pound bombs and 10,000 rounds of .50-caliber ammunition. Another set fire to the oil storage tanks, from which great clouds of black smoke roiled the sky. By the time the raid was over, the entire atoll appeared to be severely damaged. Nonetheless, the Japanese had missed the main aviation fuel supply, the runways were only superficially damaged, and only eleven Americans had been killed and eighteen wounded.
¹⁹

Tomonaga was among the first to drop his bomb. Then he circled the target to assess the damage by his strike force. Before he had left the Kidō Butai, he had been given several code messages designed to apprise Nagumo of the results of the raid. Several Japanese pilots broke radio silence during the attack to announce their success: “Hangar and runways have been hit,” reported one; “Great results obtained,” asserted another. Of course, because Simard had launched almost everything that would fly, few American planes were on the ground when the Japanese struck. As a result, at 7:00 a.m., Tomonaga radioed a code phrase back to the Kidō Butai. “There is need for a second attack.”
²⁰

The message reached Nagumo on the bridge of the
Akagi
at 7:05. It could hardly have surprised him. From the beginning, he had suspected that a single strike with half his force would not be sufficient to soften up Midway for the planned amphibious landing. Though Yamamoto’s principal goal was to get the American carriers, the plan also charged Nagumo with wrecking Midway’s defenses to prepare the way for invasion. As he considered Tomonaga’s report, however, Nagumo had other concerns, for at that moment the Kidō Butai itself was under attack. These were not the planes from
Hornet
and
Enterprise
—those planes were just then taking off 175 miles to the east. Instead, it was the first contingent of the diverse collection of bombers and torpedo planes that Simard had launched from Midway an hour before.

The first to arrive were six brand-new TBF Avenger torpedo bombers. Designed as a replacement for the slow and aging Devastators, the Avengers were bigger, had a greater range, and were much faster. When the
Hornet
had left Norfolk back in March, half of her VT pilots had remained behind to take delivery of the new Grumman-built aircraft. When the twenty-one new planes were delivered, the pilots flew them across the country in stages to San Francisco, where they were loaded aboard the transport
Hammondsport
for the trip out to Hawaii. The Avengers arrived there on May 29, one day after the
Hornet
left for Point Luck. Eager to get at least some of them into the fight, Nimitz ordered the air crews at Pearl to stay up all night in order to attach belly tanks to six of them so they could fly the 1,100 miles out to Midway. They made the eight-hour flight from Oahu to Midway on June 1, and there the belly tanks were removed and torpedoes attached. But they never did get to the
Hornet.
Instead, Simard ordered them to strike at the Kidō Butai directly from Midway.
²¹

The most senior of the six Avenger pilots was Lieutenant Langdon Fieberling, a naval reservist who had earned his wings in 1937. The others were young ensigns between the ages of 22 and 25, and a rare enlisted pilot, Aviation Machinist’s Mate First Class Darrel Woodside. Each plane carried a crew of three, and all eighteen men—over half of them teenagers—were heading into their first combat. As they flew out toward the coordinates, they passed Tomonaga’s Midway strike force going the other way, and though a Japanese fighter flew over for a look, neither group paid serious attention to the other. An hour later, the Avenger pilots found the Kidō Butai. Navy doctrine called for torpedo planes to coordinate with dive-bombers, in order to limit the target’s ability to effect evasive maneuvers. But the only dive-bombers assigned to this attack were Marine Corps planes, and no one had arranged for a Navy-Marine joint attack. Besides, the slower Marine bombers were well behind the Avengers, and Fieberling was in no mood to wait for them. He and his squadron mates began an immediate attack: six torpedo bombers against the entire Kidō Butai.
²²

One of the Avenger pilots was Ensign Albert Earnest, a 25-year-old who had won his gold wings sixteen days before the Pearl Harbor attack. Now as he approached the awesome sight of the entire Kidō Butai spread out below him, it seemed to him that there were “20 or 30 Zeros waiting to shoot us down.” His estimate was remarkably accurate—at that moment there were twenty-eight Zero fighters flying CAP over the Kidō Butai, roughly five defenders for each attacker. As the Avengers nosed over to drop from their cruising altitude of 4,000 feet to 200 feet for the run-in to the target, the Zeros pounced on them. One Avenger, and then another, caught fire and dropped into the sea. “Bullets and anti-aircraft fire were coming at me from every direction,” Earnest recalled. A 20 mm cannon shell killed his 18-year-old turret gunner. The third man in the airplane, 17-year-old Harry Ferrier, who had lied about his age in order to join the Navy, was struck in the head and knocked unconscious. Bullets punched a score of holes in Earnest’s plane, destroying his hydraulic system and severing the elevator cables. The control stick went dead in his hand. Shrapnel from a 20 mm shell shattered his instrument panel, and his plane dived toward the water. Struggling to keep his plane in the air, Earnest dropped his torpedo in the general direction of a cruiser, hoping the loss of weight would allow him to remain airborne. The drop seemed to have no effect, however, and the plane continued to dive toward the water out of control. Earnest braced for a crash landing and, just before impact, reflexively reached down to adjust the four-inch wheel that controlled the trim tabs, something he routinely did before landing. When he did so, the nose of his plane came up, and the Avenger gained a bit of altitude. Zeros continued to make runs at him, and it was all Earnest could do to hold his plane in a more or less straight course. He felt like “a tin duck in a shooting gallery” as the Zeros made repeated runs at him. Relying on the trim tabs to remain airborne, he kept low and flew southward. “A couple of Zeros swooped in to finish me off,” he recalled, “but I was so close to the water, they couldn’t make a real good run at me.”
²³

Ensign Albert Earnest piloted one of the new Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bombers from Midway in the first attack on the Kido Butai on the morning of June 4. He and his enlisted radioman, Harry Ferrier, also seen here, were the only survivors of the mission. (U.S. Naval Institute)