The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History) (48 page)

The sound of enemy echo ranging was now “continuous and accurate” as Brockman dove to 150 feet, and as the boat angled downward, depth charges began exploding all around him. The explosions, he reported later, “sounded like a severe hammer blow on the hull.” Nonetheless, the sub’s hull remained intact, and after waiting several minutes Brockman began once again to ease back up to periscope depth. The battleship and the other large ships were still in sight, but out of range. Only the
Arashi
remained nearby, still echo sounding; she had clearly been left behind to hunt him down. Brockman remained submerged for ten more minutes, then took another look. The battleship was now out of sight, but almost due north and only about eight miles away he spotted the unmistakable profile of an aircraft carrier. He noted that it “was changing course continually,” and that it “was overhung by anti-aircraft bursts.” Though Brockman could not know it, the Zeros from the Kidō Butai were chasing off the last of the American attackers from Midway, and the carriers were maneuvering to avoid them.
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Brockman could not surface to chase the carrier because the
Arashi
was still lurking above him. He decided to take care of his tormentor first, maneuvering to fire a torpedo at the
Arashi.
Watanabe was expecting it and easily avoided it. Moreover, the wake of that torpedo gave Watanabe a guide to the
Nautilus
’s likely position, and the
Arashi
closed in to drop six more depth charges. Brockman noted laconically that “these were more accurately placed than previous charges.” Brockman ordered the
Nautilus
back down to 150 feet (her maximum depth was 300). He then changed course and ordered silence about the boat while it crept away. Watanabe guessed that Brockman had gone deep and adjusted the settings on his depth charges. Two more exploded quite near the
Nautilus;
gauges jumped, lights flickered, and deck plates rattled—but the hull remained intact.
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This time Brockman stayed down for forty minutes. He did not know that at almost the very moment that he dove—around 9:17—Nagumo and the Kidō Butai had changed course and turned north. While Brockman was submerged, the Zeros flying CAP were busy tearing apart the American torpedo planes. At five minutes to ten, Brockman could no longer hear the noise of echo ranging. He eased back up to periscope depth. As he turned the view finder around 360 degrees, he saw that “the entire formation first seen, including the attacking cruiser
[Arashi]
had departed.” “The carrier previously seen was no longer in sight.” Brockman no doubt feared that he had lost his chance to fire a torpedo at an enemy carrier, though later that day he would have a second chance. In fact, however, without knowing it he had already made his greatest contribution to American victory.
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Watanabe and the
Arashi
had persecuted the
Nautilus
for nearly two hours—from 8:00 to almost 10:00. When the Kidō Butai turned north, Watanabe had stayed behind, determined to keep his foe submerged and therefore impotent. Just before 10:00, not having seen or heard anything of the American sub for forty minutes, and with the Kidō Butai well away over the northern horizon, Watanabe concluded that he had done his job. He may also have run out of depth charges. The
Arashi
carried thirty-six depth charges, and Brockman reported twenty-eight explosions, plus another attack by an unspecified number. None of those depth charges had proved fatal, but this hardly mattered, for even if the American sub was still down there, by now it would never be able to catch up to the Kidō Butai. Watanabe ordered the helm over and turned the
Arashi
northward. To catch up with the main body, now steaming to the northeast at 25 knots, he would have to go at nearly full speed, which for the
Arashi
was 35 knots. At that speed, his ship generated a broad white V-shaped wake.

While Brockman dueled with Watanabe, Wade McClusky’s thirty-three dive-bombers from the
Enterprise
were winging their way southwestward toward a presumed intercept of the Kidō Butai. McClusky had been a naval aviator his entire career, most of it as a fighter pilot. Based on his looks alone, few would have picked him out as one. Short and stout, he had neatly parted dark hair, a generous nose, full lips, and just a hint of a double chin. McClusky had been an effective commander of Fighting 6 during the several raids on the Marshall Islands, Wake, and Marcus Islands. Then in April he had fleeted up to become the commander,
Enterprise
air group, or CEAG. He was the oldest active pilot on board, having turned forty just three days before on June 1.

As CEAG, McClusky traded his Wildcat for a Dauntless, and his airplane was in the lead as the two squadrons of dive-bombers flew toward the presumed coordinates of the Japanese carrier force. McClusky flew with the seventeen planes of Earl Gallaher’s Scouting Six, with two of those planes acting as his wingmen. Each plane was armed with one 500-pound bomb and two 100-pound bombs under the wings. Behind and above this formation were the fifteen planes of Dick Best’s Bombing Six—each of his planes armed with one 1,000-pound bomb. Early on, one of the planes in Gallaher’s squadron developed mechanical problems and had to return to the ship, so in the end, a total of thirty-two bombers, including McClusky’s, flew to the target.
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Lieutenant Commander Clarence Wade McClusky was the air group commander on the USS
Enterprise
and led the strike of VS-6 and VB-6 against
Kaga and Akagi
on June 4. (U.S. Naval Institute)

Visibility was good, with light winds and only light scattered clouds between 1,500 and 2,500 feet. For more than an hour, this two-tier formation flew toward the southwest. Best recalled that he could see the ocean “getting a lighter and lighter blue then turning to a light green” as the water shoaled toward Midway. He could see the plume of black smoke from the Midway airfield and wondered if they had gone too far to the south. At around 9:20 McClusky arrived in the general area where he had calculated that the Kidō Butai would be. Nothing was below him but empty ocean. At that moment, seventy or so miles to the north, John Waldron was ordering his torpedo bombers to attack the Kidō Butai, but neither McClusky nor anyone else in his bomber group picked up his transmissions. Moreover, because of the circling and waiting above the
Enterprise
before Spruance had turned them loose, as well as the long climb to altitude, the fuel gauges on some of the bombers already showed less than half full. Ensign Lew Hopkins, in Best’s squadron, looked at his fuel gauge and concluded that it was going to be a one-way flight. “I knew, and most everybody else knew,” he recalled later, “that we didn’t have enough fuel to get back.” Despite that, McClusky decided to continue the search until the fuel situation became hopeless. Had Spruance not decided to send him off without waiting for the Devastators, he would not have been able to do even that.
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McClusky turned the formation slightly to the right and flew due west for thirty-five miles; then he turned right again to the northwest, intending to conduct a standard box search. He scanned the horizon eagerly for a sign of any surface ships, his binoculars “practically glued” to his eyes. After fifteen more minutes, he turned right again to the northeast. By now, fuel had become a serious problem, especially for the pilots in Best’s squadron, who were lugging the big 1,000-pound bombs. Two of them, Ensign Eugene Greene and Ensign Troy Schneider, fell out of the formation, out of fuel, and landed in the water. Schneider and his radioman/gunner were rescued three days later, but Greene and his backseat gunner were never found.
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Nor was fuel the only problem. Best’s wing man, Lieutenant Junior Grade Ed Kroeger, used hand signals to indicate to Best that his cylinder had run out of oxygen. Best could simply have signaled Kroeger to drop down to a lower level where he could breathe the air without an oxygen mask, but he did not want to break up what was left of his squadron. Instead he removed his own mask, holding it up to show Kroeger that he had done so and then began a gradual descent, leading his thirteen remaining planes down to 15,000 feet where the air was still thin, but breathable. That downward glide put him well below McClusky and Gallaher, and about a quarter mile behind them.
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Then, at about 9:55, well north of the plotted intercept position, McClusky noticed a ship, all by itself, proceeding northward at great speed, its bow wave making a broad wake that looked for all the world like a white arrow painted on the surface of the blue sea. It was, of course, Commander Watanabe in the
Arashi
, racing northward at 35 knots to catch up to the main body. Mc-Clusky guessed at once that it was a laggard from the Kidō Butai, and using that V-shaped bow wave as a guide, he altered course and followed the arrow just east of due north. Ten minutes later, at 10:05, he saw dark specks on the horizon ahead of him. As he flew closer, the specks resolved themselves into surface ships. Thanks to Brockman’s persistence, Watanabe had provided the crucial signpost that enabled McClusky’s air group to find the Kidō Butai.
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By now, the box formation of the four Japanese carriers had completely disintegrated. Each ship had maneuvered independently to avoid the persistent torpedo attacks of the Americans, and any resemblance to the original formation had long since disappeared. The southernmost of the four carriers, and therefore the first one spotted by McClusky’s bombers, was the giant
Kaga.
Two miles ahead of it and “five to seven miles” off to the right was Nagumo’s flagship,
Akagi.
Another fourteen miles beyond them, the
Hiryū
was under attack from Lem Massey’s torpedo planes, and another six miles beyond her and all but out of sight was the
Sōryū.
Cruisers, battleships, and destroyers maneuvered between and around these four behemoths apparently at random.
¹⁷

Unbeknownst to McClusky, Max Leslie’s dive-bomber squadron from
Yorktown
was nearing the Kidō Butai at the same moment. Though the
Yorktown
planes had launched almost two hours after McClusky’s, the more efficient launch sequence and the more accurate course of her air group put her bombers over the target at the same moment. (It is noteworthy that while the
Hornet’s
air group flew some eighty miles north of the Kidō Butai, and the
Enterprise
bomber group flew eighty miles south of it, the
Yorktown
’s air group flew almost directly to it.) Despite the near simultaneous arrival of McClusky and Leslie over the Kidō Butai, the Americans did not conduct a coordinated attack. McClusky approached from the south and Leslie from the east, each of them unaware that the other was there. Had they targeted the same ships, there might have been great confusion when they intruded into one another’s air space. Instead, each targeted the first carrier he saw: Leslie the
Sōryū
, and McClusky the
Kaga
and
Akagi
, and because those carriers were widely dispersed, the Americans did not interfere with each other.
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