The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History) (51 page)

In addition to the attacking bombers, the Americans also shot down three of the four Zeros—only Shigematsu himself survived. Indeed, so many Japanese planes were falling from the sky that one witness on the
Yorktown
thought “it looked like a curtain coming down.” The Dash-4 Wildcats had only about twenty seconds of firepower and quickly began to run out of bullets. To indicate they needed to land and reload, the pilots flew past the
Yorktown
f bridge and communicated using hand signals: they shook their fists if they needed ammo, or raked their hands along the outside of the fuselage where the gas tank was to show that they were low on fuel. Landing planes in the midst of an air attack was impossible, however, because the
Yorktown
was maneuvering radically to throw off the attacking bombers. Pederson directed the planes that were low on ammo or fuel to head for Task Force 16, some forty miles to the southeast, and he called on
Enterprise
(call sign Red) for help.
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“Red from Scarlet. We need some VFs.”
“Scarlet from Red. Repeat.”
“Red from Scarlet, we need relief for our combat patrols, getting low on ammunition”
“Scarlet from Red, we are sending the Blue patrol to assist. … Blue patrol being launched   now.”
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Before the Wildcats from Task Force 16 could arrive, seven of the Val bombers that had survived the air battle entered the envelope of the antiaircraft fire from the circle of surface ships screening the
Yorktown.
As the American pilots veered off to avoid being hit by friendly fire, Buckmaster ordered the
Yorktown
sharply to port to throw off the attackers. The two cruisers and five destroyers of her protecting screen opened up with scores of 5-inch guns, 1.1-inch “pom pom” guns, 20 mm guns, and .50-caliber machine guns. Leslie thought it looked like “a fire works display at a Fourth of July celebration.”
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Through this virtual cloud of antiair fire, the seven surviving Val dive-bombers of Kobayashi’s command pressed home their attack. Two more fell into the sea, victims of the heavy antiair fire, but not before one of them released its bomb, which hit the
Yorktown
“just abaft No. 2 elevator on the starboard side.” That bomb exploded near a 1.1-inch antiaircraft gun, slaughtering its crew and starting several fires. Only seconds later, a second bomb hit the
Yorktown
squarely amidships, passing through both the
Yorktown
f flight deck and hangar deck and exploding on level three among the engine uptakes, extinguishing the fires in five of the ship’s boilers. A third bomb hit near the
Yorktown
’s forward elevator, starting a fire in a rag-storage area. That one forced Buckmaster to flood the ship’s forward magazine.
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Like
Sōryū, Yorktown
had been hit by three bombs—one forward, one amidships, and one astern. One important difference was that the bombs that had hit the
Sōryū
had been 1,000-pound bombs; those that hit the
Yorktown
were 250-kilogram (551-pound) bombs. More importantly, unlike
Sōryū, Yorktown’s
hangar deck was not packed with volatile ordnance because of the advance warning provided by the
Yorktown
’s radar. Though a fully fueled Dauntless armed with a 1,000-pound bomb sat on the hangar deck near where the first bomb exploded, the hangar-deck officer, Lieutenant Alberto Emerson, quickly activated the sprinkler system, and the better-equipped American damage control parties successfully contained the fire before any ordnance cooked off.
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Nevertheless, it was a dire moment. With main propulsion out, the big
Yorktown
began to lose speed, and by 12:40 she was dead in the water. Black smoke from the mutiple fires roiled up so high into the air that it was visible from Task Force 16 forty miles away. Immobile, and with three gaping holes in her flight deck,
Yorktown
could not conduct air operations. Her radar had been knocked out, meaning that any future attack would find her a sitting duck. Driven from his battle station in flag plot by thick smoke, Fletcher assessed the situation. “I can’t fight a war from a dead ship,” he told Buckmaster, and soon afterward, just past one o’clock, he left the
Yorktown
in Buckmaster’s care and prepared to transfer to the heavy cruiser
Astoria.
The only way off the ship was to climb down a knotted rope. Fletcher was not sure he could do it. “I’m too damn old for this sort of thing,” he muttered. In the end, two sailors had to lower him down to the
Astoria
’s motor whaleboat.
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The damage to the
Yorktown
compelled all of her planes still aloft to seek sanctuary on
Hornet
and
Enterprise.
Aboard the
Hornet
, most of the planes from the “flight to nowhere” had landed by now except for Ruff Johnson’s bombers, which would return from Midway that afternoon. Unfortunately, the
Hornet
’s run of bad luck was not over. One of the
Yorktown
‘s refugee pilots was Ensign Daniel C. Sheedy, whose Wildcat had been badly shot up during the strike on the Kidō Butai, wounding him in the leg. As a result, he had trouble bringing his fighter in for a landing. Though Sheedy did not know it, one of the two Japanese bullets that had punched through his instrument panel had disabled the switch that put his own machine guns on “safe.” When his damaged Wildcat hit the deck, his left landing gear collapsed and his plane swerved toward the
Hornet’s
island. The impact also set off his machine guns. A burst of .50-caliber bullets sprayed both the island and a group of men standing nearby. Three Marines and a sailor were killed, as was Lieutenant Royal R. Ingersoll, son of the commander of the U. S. Atlantic Fleet, Admiral Royal E. Ingersoll.
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Meanwhile, back on board the wounded
Yorktown
, damage-control parties worked feverishly. Some fought the fires, others worked on the engines, and still others labored to repair the holes in the flight deck. To sustain them, the executive officer, Dixie Keefer, ordered the ship’s store opened and distributed candy (“gedunk”) to all hands, both to boost morale and to keep up their energy level. In place of the small national flag that normally flew from the bridge, Buckmaster ordered the crew to raise the fifteen-foot-long “holiday” flag, which provoked cheers from the crew. On the flight deck, men constructed a frame made of 4 by 6 wooden timbers across the gaping holes in the deck, then nailed quarter-inch steel plates over the framework. It was a makeshift patch, but it was good enough. Technicians managed to get the radar working again.

Damage-control parties repair a hole in the flight deck of the Yorktown after the attack by Lieutenant Kobayashi’s dive-bombers from
Hiryū.
(U.S. Naval Institute)

The biggest problem was in the engine spaces, where the second Japanese bomb had taken out five of the ship’s nine boilers. Water Tenderman First Class Charles Kleinsmith and a crew of volunteers donned gasmasks so they could stay in the engine room and maintain pressure in boiler number 1, which provided the power the damage-control parties needed to run their equipment. By 1:30, other crewmen of the “black gang” had boilers 4, 5, and 6 back on line, and ten minutes after that, the chief engineer reported that he could generate steam for twenty knots. As the crew cheered, the
Yorktown
began to move, slowly at first, then faster, and soon she was a warship again. With the fires under control, Buckmaster ordered the crew to resume fueling the Wildcats of Jimmy Thach’s squadron.
¹⁷

The refueling had barely started, however, when the radar on the cruiser
Pensacola
picked up another group of inbound planes. The
Yorktown
‘s 1MC public address system blared out: “Stand by for air attack.” Once again, radar prevented the
Yorktown
from being caught unready. The fueling was halted immediately and the lines purged with CO
₂
gas. The
Yorktown
had only six Wildcats aloft, including several from Task Force 16. Pederson was eager to get Thach’s squadron back into the air as well. But there were two problems. The first was that although the
Yorktown
had by now worked its way up to about sixteen knots, the light winds that day meant that the fighters would have to get airborne with relatively low wind speed across the deck. The second problem was that since the refueling had been halted, most of the Wildcats had only about 23 gallons of gas in their tanks. They took off nonetheless.
¹⁸

The inbound bogeys were ten Kate torpedo bombers protected by six more Zeros. The Kate was the best weapon in the Japanese air arsenal, but Yamaguchi now had only these ten. As a measure of just how much and how quickly the fortunes of war had turned, early that morning Lieutenant Tomonaga had led 108 bombers and fighters in the attack on Midway Island, leaving 140 more behind as a reserve. Now the ten Kate torpedo bombers that Tomonaga led against the
Yorktown
represented almost the last available striking force of the Kidō Butai, nearly the final arrow in the quiver.
¹⁹

Nagumo had agreed to hurl them against the enemy because at this point he was still clinging to the hope that he could turn the battle around by forcing a surface engagement. Only five of the eighteen dive-bombers that Yamaguchi had sent against the
Yorktown
had returned, but they reported that they had left a mortally wounded American carrier dead in the water and burning. If Tomonaga’s ten Kates could inflict similar damage on a second American carrier, a surface attack by Nagumo’s battleships and cruisers might be able to finish them off. Failing that, Nagumo would still have the opportunity to launch a night attack with his destroyers, armed with the deadly Type 93 “Long Lance” torpedoes that had a twenty-mile range. He knew that the Kidō Butai would be exposed to renewed American air attack in the interim, but he also knew, having witnessed it himself, that the Americans had suffered extremely heavy air losses that morning, including the near-annihilation of their torpedo squadrons, which significantly minimized the air threat. Attempting a surface battle was risky. Nonetheless, so long as there was even the least chance of success, Nagumo was determined to grasp it.

Even before Tomonaga took off, however, two key pieces of information ought to have brought Nagumo back to earth. At 12:40, a message from
Chikuma’s
number 5 scout plane reported an undamaged American carrier task force 130 miles away, much too far for any surface attack to be realistic. And twenty minutes after that, Nagumo received another piece of information from Commander Watanabe on the destroyer
Arashi.
Watanabe’s crew had plucked one of the pilots from Lem Massey’s VT-3 from the water. It was Ensign Wesley Frank Osmus, a 24-year-old product of the AVCAD program from Illinois. Osmus had apparently failed to retrieve the life raft from his Devastator, for the Japanese found him, weak and dehydrated, swimming all alone in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Hauled aboard the
Arashi
, the Japanese interrogated him aggressively, threatening him with a sword. Osmus revealed that there were three American carriers in the area, the
Hornet, Enterprise
, and
Yorktown
, and that the
Yorktown
was operating separately from the other two. Once they completed the interrogation, the Japanese carried Osmus to the stern to throw him back over the side. Realizing their intent, Osmus grabbed on to the ship’s stern railing, and to break his grip the Japanese smashed his head with a fire ax. Osmus’ body tumbled into the ship’s wake.
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