The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History) (49 page)

There was considerable confusion, however, between the two squadrons of McClusky’s air group. According to doctrine, each squadron was to attack a different capital ship. To do that, the lead squadron, which was Gallaher’s, should fly past the first carrier and attack the more distant one, while the trailing squadron (Best’s) attacked the near target. That would ensure that the attacks occurred nearly at the same time, so that the attack on the first ship did not alert the second. Another element of American divebombing doctrine was that the planes carrying the heavier 1,000-pound bombs should attack the nearest target simply because of their heavier ordnance load. On both counts, Dick Best, whose planes trailed Gallaher’s by a quarter mile and carried the heavy 1,000-pound bombs, assumed that McClusky and Gallaher would fly past the first carrier and attack the more distant one.

But McClusky, the former fighter pilot, had not internalized bombing doctrine in the same way Best had. He approached the situation with typical American straightforwardness. He saw the two carriers not as near and far but as left and right. To be sure, the
Akagi
was a few miles ahead of the plodding
Kaga
, but it was also five or six miles off to the right. McClusky could not give hand signals to Best, who was down at 15,000 feet, so he got on the radio and ordered Gallaher to take the carrier “on the left” (Kaga) and Best to take the carrier “on the right” (Akagi). Gallaher heard him loud and clear. He remembered McClusky telling him to follow him to the carrier on the left and that he told Best “to take the carrier on the right.” That is certainly what McClusky intended. But for such a simple order, it produced profound confusion. Best either never heard it, or, because he was so deeply steeped in standard doctrine, he processed it differently. In either case, he continued to assume that he would take the near carrier and that Gallaher would take the more distant one. In his subsequent report, Lieutenant Joe Penland, who led Best’s second division, wrote that “Commander Bombing Squadron Six
understood
his target to be the ‘left hand’ CV.”
¹⁹

For his part, Best radioed McClusky to tell him that he was attacking “according to doctrine.” It was a curious way to indicate his intentions, certainly less specific than McClusky’s left-right distinction. Such a declaration assumed that McClusky was sufficiently familiar with “doctrine” to know what that meant, and Best knew that McClusky “was not well informed on bomber doctrine.” That being the case, Best would have been better advised simply to say that he was planning to attack the “closest carrier,” or “the carrier on the left.” It hardly mattered, however, because McClusky never heard it. Best later speculated, “My radio didn’t work,” which is possible, but another explanation is that Best and McClusky sent their reports to each other simultaneously. Had both men pressed the transmit buttons on their radios at the same time, neither would have heard the other. In any event, this confusion meant that
both
squadrons under McClusky’s command prepared to dive on the
Kaga.
Though the Americans had gained a great advantage by arriving over the Kidō Butai at a critical moment, the confusion in assigning targets threatened to throw that advantage away.
²⁰

Flying at 15,000 feet, Best turned his squadron toward the
Kaga
and “put the planes in echelon so that they were no more than 150 feet apart.” His pilots prepared to dive by shifting to low blower and low prop pitch, cracking open the hatches of their cockpits to reduce the likelihood of the windscreen fogging up, and opening their split flaps. Best did not know that a mile above him, Gallaher’s pilots were doing the same thing until, just as he was about to push over, the sixteen bombers of VS-6, plus McClusky’s, all came flashing down past him, avoiding a catastrophic collision only by a matter of yards. In Best’s words: “God! Here came McClusky and Gallaher from Scouting Six pouring right in front of me.” Best’s first thought was: “They had jumped my target!” Thinking fast, he closed his flaps and waggled his ailerons as a signal to the rest of his squadron to hold back. Too late. Already committed to the dive, ten of the pilots of VB-6 joined the onslaught on the
Kaga. They
almost certainly never saw Best’s last-minute effort to recall them. Only Best’s two wingmen, Kroeger and Ensign Frederick Weber, were close enough to see his frantic signals and hold up. As a result, no fewer than twenty-seven Dauntless dive-bombers plunged out of the sky to target the
Kaga.
²¹

Until that moment, the Japanese on
Kaga
had been entirely unaware of this new threat. Lacking radar, they were fully dependent on the sharp eyes of their lookouts. This time, however, the lookouts on the screening vessels had let them down. At 10:22, with the first of the bombers already screaming down toward them at 250 knots, first one, and then many observers on the
Kaga
pointed skyward and shouted
“Kyukoka!”
(“Dive-bombers!”) Jimmy Thach, who was still trying to fend off the Zeros from Lem Massey’s few remaining torpedo bombers, looked up and saw the sun glinting off silver wings. To him “it looked like a beautiful silver waterfall, those dive-bombers coming down.”
²²

Because the Zeros were still focused on Massey’s torpedo bombers, they were unable to interfere even minimally with the attack. Moreover, the guns of
Kaga’s
antiair battery were all still at low angle. With the shouted warnings, the gun crews furiously began to crank the ship’s sixteen five-inch guns up to the vertical position, but it took only about forty seconds for the first of the plunging American bombers to reach the release point. The skipper of the
Kaga
, Captain Okada Jisaku, ordered the ship hard to port in order to throw them off. However, the 42,000-ton
Kaga
was slow to respond and had barely begun her turn when the first bombs came hurtling down.
²³

The first three bombs all missed, but the fourth plane, piloted by Earl Gallaher himself, placed its 500-pound bomb squarely on the flight deck of the big flattop. It was the first time all morning that American ordnance had found a target. The 500-pound bombs had a fuse with a 0.01-second delay, so that it pierced the flight deck before exploding in the crew’s berthing compartments, starting the first of many fires that would eventually consume the big ship. That hit was followed by two more misses, and then by several hits in succession. One bomb struck on or near the forward elevator and penetrated to the hangar deck; another smashed into the flight deck amidships, and yet another hit squarely on the
Kaga
’s small island structure, killing Captain Okada and most of his senior officers, rendering the
Kaga
leaderless.
²⁴

As with the attack on the
Shōhō
a month before, the bombers simply overwhelmed the
Kaga.
Following these four hits by 500-pound bombs from Gallaher’s squadron, the ten bombers of Best’s VB-6 added several 1,000-pound bombs to the smoking wreck. Thach claimed later, “I’d never seen such superb dive bombing. It looked to me like almost every bomb hit.” Watching from 12,000 feet, Best tried to count the number of hits. “They were hitting from stem to stern,” he recalled later. At “four or five second intervals there would be a fresh blast and fire would come up and smoke would pour out.” At least one 1,000-pound bomb exploded on the packed hangar deck crowded with fully fueled planes armed with torpedoes. The historians Jon Parshall and Anthony Tully estimate that a total of 80,000 pounds of ordnance “lay scattered” there. Some of it was on the big Kate torpedo bombers, some was still on the bomb carts, and some was “simply shoved against the hangar bulkheads.” One of the first bomb hits had wrecked both of the
Kaga’s
fire mains, and the damage-control parties were helpless against the raging fires. The leaderless ship became an inferno fed by explosives and aviation fuel. A series of secondary explosions rocked the big carrier—one of them so powerful it sent the
Kaga’s
forward elevator platform spiraling up hundreds of feet into the air.
²⁵

While most of McClusky’s dive-bombers assailed the doomed
Kaga
, Best led his three-plane section toward the carrier “on the right,” which was Nagumo’s flagship,
Akagi.
The three Dauntless bombers had dropped down to 12,000 feet before Best had been able to recall them, so now they had to climb back up to 14,000 feet for the attack run. As Best climbed, he was astonished that “there was no gunfire, no fighters aloft” Thanks to the sacrifice of the torpedo squadrons, the circling Zeros were all at low altitude and the ships’ antiaircraft guns all at low angle. As a result, Best’s three planes were entirely unmolested. Nonetheless, it was uncertain what his three airplanes might accomplish against the flagship. Despite his experience attacking targets in the Marshalls, and on Wake and Marcus Islands, this was the first time Best had ever attacked a carrier. Having only three planes meant that he could not order a conventional echelon attack or divide his command into sections to attack from different angles. Moreover, the fuel situation dictated that there was no time to maneuver for a bows-on attack. Best and his two wingmen therefore approached the
Akagi
from abeam, which meant they would have only the carrier’s relatively narrow 100-foot width rather than its 850-foot length as a target. Even a slight misjudgment would result in a near miss rather than a hit.
²⁶

Lieutenant Richard Best commanded Bombing Six (VB-6) in the Battle of Midway. He and Norman “Dusty” Kleiss of VS-6 were the only pilots to land bombs on two Japanese carriers in the same day. (U.S. Navy)