to be losing way. I circled slowly to the right, awe-struck.’
Equally fascinated – and appalled – was Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, Japanese hero of the Pearl Harbor strike, now an impotent spectator on the deck of Akagi: ‘I was horrified at the destruction that had been wrought in a matter of seconds. There was a huge hole in the flight deck just behind the midship elevator…Deck plates buckled in grotesque configurations. Planes stood tail up belching livid flames and jet-black smoke. Reluctant tears streamed down my cheeks.’
The dive-bomber attack sank two Japanese carriers immediately, and the third flaming hulk was scuttled that evening. It was an extraordinary achievement, not least because two squadrons of dive-bombers and their Wildcat escort were sent on the wrong course and failed to engage. All ten pilots in Hornet’s Wildcat squadron Fighting Eight ran out of fuel and splashed into the sea without sighting an enemy; the ship’s thirty-five Dauntlesses landed on Midway, having missed the battle.
The Japanese were enraged by the loss of their carriers, and vented their spleen on every American within reach. Wesley Osmus, a twenty-three-year-old torpedo-bomber pilot from Chicago, was spotted in the sea by a destroyer lookout, retrieved from the water and interrogated on the bridge by an emotional officer waving a sword. Towards sunset the Japanese, losing interest in their captive, took Osmus to the fantail of the ship and set about him with a fire-axe. He was slow to die, clinging to the rail until his fingers were smashed and he fell away into the sea. The Imperial Japanese Navy was as profoundly and institutionally brutalised as Hirohito’s army.
At mid-morning Nagumo’s sole surviving carrier, Hiryu, at last launched its own attack, which fell on Fletcher’s Yorktown. American radar detected the incoming dive-bombers fifty miles out, and fighters began to scramble. Eleven ‘Val’ bombers and three Zeros were shot down by Wildcats, two more ‘Vals’ by anti-aircraft fire; three Japanese bombs hit Yorktown, but energetic damage control enabled the carrier to continue landing its dive-bombers, even as the crew fought huge fires. Admiral Fletcher transferred his flag to the cruiser Astoria, and surrendered overall command to Spruance.
At 1430, a wave of Japanese torpedo-bombers from Hiryu closed on Yorktown, which again flew off fighters. Ensign Milton Tootle had just cleared the deck of the carrier in his Wildcat when the attackers closed in. Tootle turned through the American anti-aircraft barrage, shot down an enemy plane, then was himself downed by a Zero after a flight lasting barely sixty seconds; he was lucky enough to be rescued from the water. Several attackers were shot down, but four launched their torpedoes, two of which struck the carrier. The ocean flooded in, and the ship took on a heavy list. Just before 1500, the captain ordered Yorktown abandoned. The decision was possibly premature, and the ship might have been saved, but in 1942 less was known about damage control than the US Navy had learned two years later. Destroyers rescued the entire crew, save those who had perished during the attacks.
At 1530, Spruance launched another strike of his own, by twenty-seven dive-bombers, including ten Yorktown planes which had landed on his flat-tops while their own ship was being attacked. Just before 1700, these reached Hiryu while its crew were eating riceballs in their messdecks. The ship had sixteen aircraft left, ten of them fighters, but only a reconnaissance plane was airborne, and the Japanese now lacked radar to warn of the Americans’ coming. Four bombs struck the carrier, starting huge fires. Little Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi, the senior officer aboard, mounted a biscuit box to deliver a farewell address to the crew. Then he and the captain disappeared to their cabins to commit ritual suicide, while the remaining seamen were taken off. The stricken ship was scuttled with torpedoes: four of the six carriers that had attacked Pearl Harbor were now at the bottom of the Pacific. On the American side, Hornet’s ill-fortune persisted when a pilot, returning wounded, accidentally nudged his gun button as he bumped down heavily onto the flight deck. A burst of fire killed five men on the superstructure. The returning aircrew were shocked by their losses, but in Jimmy Gray’s words, ‘We were too tired and too busy to do more than feel the pain of an aching heart.’
The American sacrifice had been heavy, but victory was the reward. Admiral Nagumo opted for withdrawal, only to have his order countermanded by Yamamoto, who demanded a night surface attack on the Americans. This was frustrated when Spruance turned away, recognising that his fleet had accomplished everything possible. The disengagement was finely judged: Yamamoto’s battleships, of which the Americans knew nothing, were closing fast from the north. Spruance had achieved an overwhelming balance of advantage. His foremost priority was to maintain this, protecting his two surviving carriers. Yamamoto acknowledged failure, and ordered a Japanese retreat. Spruance again turned and followed, launching a further air strike which sank one heavy cruiser and crippled another. This was almost the end of the battle, save that on 7 June a Japanese submarine met the burnt-out Yorktown under tow, and dispatched her to the bottom. This blow was acceptable, however, set against the massive Japanese losses.
Both Nimitz and Spruance had displayed consummate judgement, contrasted with Yamamoto’s and Nagumo’s errors, even though it was Fletcher, and not Spruance, who made the important decision to launch the second strike that caught Hiryu. The courage and skill of America’s dive-bomber pilots overbore every other disappointment and failure. The US Navy had achieved a triumph. Nimitz, with characteristic graciousness, sent his car to bring Commander Rochefort to a celebration party at Pearl Harbor. Before his assembled staff, the Commander-in-Chief said: ‘This officer deserves a major share of the credit for the victory at Midway.’ Luck, which favoured the Japanese in the war’s first months, turned dramatically in favour of the Americans during the decisive naval battle of the Pacific war. But this does not diminish the achievement of Nimitz and his subordinates.
The Japanese fleet remained a formidable fighting force: in the months that followed, it inflicted some severe local reverses on the Americans in the Pacific. But the US Navy had displayed the highest qualities at a critical moment. Japanese industrial weakness made it hard to replace the losses of Midway. One of the cardinal misjudgements of the Axis war effort was failure to sustain a flow of trained pilots to replace casualties. The Americans, by contrast, soon began to deploy thousands of excellently trained aircrew, flying the superb new Hellcat fighter. Nimitz remained short of carriers until well into 1943, but thereafter America’s building programme delivered an awesome array of new warships. The pattern of the Pacific war was set, wherein the critical naval actions were fought between fleets whose major surface elements seldom engaged each other. Carrier-borne aircraft had shown themselves the decisive weapons, and the US would soon employ these more effectively and in much larger numbers than any other nation in the world. Marc Mitscher, captain of the Hornet, feared that his career was finished, so poorly had his ship’s air group performed at Midway; it is widely believed that he falsified the log record of his squadrons’ designated attack course, to conceal his own blunder, which kept them out of the battle. Nimitz and Spruance, together with the aircrew of Yorktown and Enterprise, were the heroes of Midway, but Mitscher went on to become the supreme American carrier leader of the war.
3 GUADALCANAL AND NEW GUINEA
The next phase of the Pacific campaign was driven by expediency and characterised by improvisation. The US, committed to ‘Germany first’, planned to dispatch most of its available troop strength to fight in North Africa. MacArthur, in Australia, lacked men to launch the assault on Rabaul which he favoured. Instead, Australian troops, slowly reinforced by Americans, were committed to frustrate Japanese designs on the vast jungle island of Papua New Guinea. Separated from the northern tip of Australia by only two hundred miles of sea, this became the scene of one of the grimmest struggles of the war.
Meanwhile, six hundred miles eastwards in the Solomons, Japanese who had occupied Tulagi island moved on to neighbouring Guadalcanal, where they began to construct an airfield. If they were allowed to complete and exploit this, their planes could dominate the region. An abrupt American decision was made to pre-empt them, by landing 1st Marine Division. Such a stroke fulfilled the US Navy’s driving desire, promoted by Admiral Ernest King in Washington, to engage the enemy wherever opportunity allowed. The Marines were staging through Wellington,
