The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History) (57 page)

While Spruance slept, Lieutenant Commander Tanabe Yahachi on the Japanese submarine I-168 was heading northward on the surface toward a set of coordinates that Nagumo had forwarded to him. Early that morning, the
Chikumas
number 4 floatplane had reported a Yorkfown-class carrier “listing to starboard and drifting,” and with the surviving Japanese surface ships now in full retreat, only Tanabe’s sub was close enough to respond. Concealed by darkness, Tanabe and the I-168 stayed on the surface under diesel power, both to save the batteries and to make better speed. Just before 4:00 a.m., only minutes before dawn on June 6, Tanabe identified the looming shadow of a big carrier, apparently under tow and surrounded by a screen of five destroyers, and as the eastern sky began to lighten, he submerged.

Buckmaster had ordered the evacuation of the
Yorktown
thirty-six hours earlier because it had seemed to him that she was about to capsize, which would have trapped the whole crew of nearly three thousand men under the water. Fletcher had ordered the destroyer
Hughes
to stay by the abandoned flattop on the night of June 4 and to sink her if there was any chance that the enemy might capture her. But she was still afloat on June 5, and during the day the minesweeper
Vireo
, ordered there from French Frigate Shoals by Nimitz, took her under tow. The big flattop, riding low in the water and somewhat down by the bow, was a lot of dead weight for the
Vireo.
In addition, the
Yorktown
’s rudder was jammed hard over so that she yawed badly; it was almost like towing her sideways. Consequently, during the night of June 5—6, there was little progress eastward.
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By then, Buckmaster had decided that since the
Yorktown
appeared to have stabilized, he would take a volunteer crew back aboard to try to salvage her. He called for volunteers from her former crew members who were with him on the
Astoria
and, ranging up alongside the destroyers
Benham
and
Balch
, solicited more volunteers. Those who raised their hands—twenty-nine officers and 141 enlisted men—were transferred to the destroyer
Hammann
by breeches buoy. Early on June 6, the
Hammann
closed on the
Yorktown
so that the volunteers could make their way back on board the ship that they had abandoned two days before. The big flattop was still canted over at a 26-degree angle, and a few fires were still burning, including the one in the rag storage area forward. But it was the quiet that was most disturbing. The big ship was “dark, dead, and silent” as the volunteers came aboard. Machinist Lew Williams experienced “an eerie, unearthly dream-like feeling” as he made his way through the ship. It soon passed as he and the others got to work.
²²

Using electric power and steam pressure supplied by the
Hammann
, which was tied up alongside, the volunteers suppressed the last of the fires and corrected some of the list with counterflooding. They cut away anything they could from the lower (port) side to reduce weight, and the
Yorktown
slowly began to right herself, listing now at only 22 degrees. By noon, Buckmaster and his hardworking volunteers began to believe that they were on their way to saving the ship. Fletcher had informed Nimitz that the
Yorktown
was “badly damaged and dead in the water,” but also that, unless Nimitz directed otherwise, he planned to “protect and salvage” his flagship. Nimitz agreed, and he informed Fletcher that he was sending tugs and salvage officers to the scene.
²³

By the time Fletcher got that message, it was already too late. At noon, the crew on the
Hammann
passed food over to the salvage crew, and many of the volunteers took a break to eat. It was a warm, calm day, with “a glassy sea with perfect visibility” and some of the men sat on the deck to eat. Then at 1:30, first one sailor, and then others, spotted the white wakes of torpedoes heading toward them. Tanabe had somehow managed to work his way through the screen of five destroyers to loose a spread of four Type 95 torpedoes from 1,200 yards. The
Yorktown s
klaxon sounded general quarters, and gunners manning the antiaircraft guns aimed their weapons at the head of the wakes, hoping to detonate the torpedoes prematurely.
²⁴

It was to no avail. The first torpedo hit the
Yorktown
near the bow, and the big ship shuddered. Seconds later another slammed into the destroyer
Hammann
tied up alongside. A third torpedo hit the
Yorktown
astern near frame 95, and a fourth missed astern. The
Hammann
was literally cut in half. Many in her crew were killed outright, knocked unconscious, or blown into the sea by the impact. The
Hammann
began to sink almost immediately, while on her stern men assigned to the depth-charge racks worked frantically to ensure that the safety forks were inserted into the canisters so that when the stern did sink, the charges would not explode. Their effort remained vivid to one witness sixty years later. “I can still see them,” William Burford recalled, “working on the depth charges on the stern … trying to put them on safety.” But there was not enough time, and the stern of the
Hammann
went down with at least some of her depth charges still set in the active mode. As the destroyer’s hull plunged downward, the depth charges began to go off, the big explosions damaging the hull of the
Yorktown
further and killing scores of men flailing in the water nearby.
²⁵

One of those men was the
Yorktown
’s gunnery officer, Commander Ernest J. Davis, who had been blown over the side of the carrier by the impact of the torpedo. He had grabbed a rope and was in the act of climbing back aboard the
Yorktown
when the depth charges went off. Only his lower torso was still submerged, which allowed him to survive, though he sustained a number of internal injuries. The concussion in the water was so great that the gold watch he had in his pocket was flattened to “the thickness of a silver dollar against his thigh.” Others, fully immersed in the water, were less fortunate. One witness recalled seeing the heads of swimming survivors simply disappear after the depth-charge explosion. One minute there were scores of swimmers in the water, and then “they were all gone.”
²⁶

For the second time in three days, Buckmaster ordered abandon ship. The tug
Vireo
cut the towing cable and came alongside to collect the survivors (plus sixteen bodies) from the
Yorktown
. Even then, however, Buckmaster wondered if the big ship could be saved. The torpedoes had blasted holes in the
Yorktown
’s starboard side so that while she now lay very low in the water, her list was less pronounced—only about 17 degrees. But the big ship continued to settle lower and lower in the water, until at two minutes before 5:00 a.m. on June 7, as Buckmaster saluted from a nearby destroyer, she disappeared.
²⁷

While Buckmaster and his volunteer crew sought to save the
Yorktown
, Spruance and the pilots of Task Force 16 were seeking to complete the destruction of the Japanese armada—or as much of it as was still within range. Just past dawn on June 6, while Tanabe was studying the silhouette of the
Yorktown
through his periscope, Spruance sent eighteen scout bombers from the
Enterprise
to conduct a search to the westward. At 6:45, Ensign William D. Carter sighted what he thought was a battleship or battlecruiser and a cruiser screened by three destroyers 128 miles away and heading west at a leisurely ten knots. It was the crippled
Mogami
and the
Mikuma
with two (not three) destroyers, looking like a battleship and a cruiser because one was forty feet longer than the other. Carter told his radioman, Oral “Slim” Moore, to send the message “Sighted one CA [cruiser] and one CB [battlecruiser]” But Moore had never heard of a “CB” and over the intercom it sounded like “CV” [carrier], so that’s what he sent. Spruance did not react at once. Having dispatched his planes on a wild goose chase the day before, he wanted to make sure of the target this time. Rather than order an immediate launch, he directed floatplanes from two of the cruisers in his screen
(Minneapolis
and
New Orleans)
to verify the contact and stay in the area, so that they could guide the strike to the target, which they could do because of their long-range capability.
²⁸

At 7:30, with the float planes still en route to the sighting, Ensign Roy Gee, whose flying skills had drawn Mitscher’s ire back in March during the
Hornet’s
shakedown cruise, flew over the
Enterprise
and dropped a beanbag on the deck. The attached note accurately reported two cruisers and two destroyers 133 miles to the southwest. Though this was a confirmation of the same group reported earlier, Spruance now wondered if there were
two
groups of enemy ships out there, one of them with a carrier. He decided to hedge his bets, ordering
Hornet
to launch her air group at once, but keeping the planes of the
Enterprise
back as a reserve, as Fletcher had done two days before, on the morning of June 4. The
Hornet
began launching at 8:00 a.m.

It was Stan Ring’s third opportunity to strike the enemy, and he was grimly determined that this time nothing should go wrong. He led eleven planes of VB-8 under Ruff Johnson and fourteen from VS-8 under Walt Rodee. Mitscher sent along eight Wildcats to strafe the target and to suppress antiaircraft fire. As Ring’s formation circled the
Hornet
and prepared to depart, the
Enterprise
was busy recovering planes from the morning search. From their pilots, Spruance learned that the sighting had involved a
battleship
, not a carrier, and, fearful that Ring might ignore the battleship and waste time seeking a nonexistent carrier, he authorized a radio message to tell him: “Target may be a battleship instead of a carrier. Attack.”
²⁹

Ring took his air group westward, and an hour later, at 9:30, Ruff Johnson was the first to spot the
Mogami
and
Mikuma
, plus their two destroyers. He reported the sighting to Ring: “Stanhope from Robert, Enemy below on port bow.” Apparently, the Japanese were monitoring the same radio frequency, for soon afterward an unidentified radioman came on the circuit, speaking in “a very oriental tone,” to say, “Stanhope from Robert, Return to base.” It fooled no one, and Ring led his air group around to the east to attack out of the sun. At last, Ring had an opportunity to strike at a major element of the enemy fleet.
³⁰

The fourteen planes of Walt Rodee’s Scouting Eight dove on the
Mogami
, while the eight planes of Johnson’s Bombing Eight attacked the
Mikuma
, which most of the pilots reported as a battleship. Rodee’s bombers scored two hits. One bomb landed squarely on top of
Mogami
’s turret number five, blowing off the roof and killing every man inside, and another hit the cruiser astern. Neither hit was fatal, however, in part because Captain Soji had jettisoned all his torpedoes, and there were no secondary explosions. The
Mikuma
escaped altogether. Ruff Johnson himself scored a near miss (a “paint scraper” as he called it) on the
Mikuma
, but no one scored a direct hit, and the heavy antiair fire claimed two of the American pilots. Ensign Don Adams landed a 500-pound bomb on the destroyer
Asashio
, and the Wildcat pilots strafed both destroyers and cruisers.

On the whole, the strike was disappointing. Thirty-three planes had attacked two cruisers, one of them already crippled, and two destroyers, and failed to sink any of them. The already-damaged
Mogami
had been hit twice but continued to steam at better than 20 knots. Captain Sakiyama reported only “light damage” to the
Mikuma.
All four ships continued to steam southward, seeking to get inside the 700-mile radius from Wake Island and the protection of land-based air cover. Even at 28 knots, however, it would take them another twenty hours to get there, and there were still eight hours of daylight left.
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