The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History) (9 page)

Fletcher was yet another black shoe, having served in cruisers and destroyers for most of his thirty-six-year career. Graduating from the Naval Academy in 1906, one year after Nimitz and two years after Halsey, Fletcher had been a cruiser and battleship man from the start; his most recent sea service was the command of Cruiser Division 6. Called “Fletch” or “Flap Jack” while at the Academy, he had what the
Lucky Bag
called “a sunny disposition” and the habit of gesturing with his hands while talking. He was well decorated, having received a Medal of Honor as a lieutenant during the Navy’s expedition to Vera Cruz in 1914 (an honor somewhat diluted by the fact that the Navy had handed out no fewer than fifty-five Medals of Honor for that expedition, passing them out, as one critic put it, “like crackerjack charms”). More important was the fact that Fletcher was well connected. He had served as naval aide to Secretary of the Navy Claude Swanson in the early 1930s and as assistant chief of the Bureau of Navigation under Nimitz in the late ’30s. A biographer concedes that Fletcher’s “personal connections with the decision-makers of the war set him ahead of others for important assignments.” It was natural that the brown-shoe pilots on the
Yorktown
would feel an intense curiosity about their new boss.
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What they saw was an unremarkable man with a plain, open face, thinning dark hair, a generous nose, and dark eyes. Fletcher was neither flamboyant and outgoing like Halsey nor reserved and professorial like Wilson Brown. He was instead a straightforward, competent professional whose tight-lipped expression suggested the no-nonsense skepticism of a Midwestern farmer, which was fitting, as he had been born and reared in Iowa. He even smoked corncob pipes that he had shipped to him from the States a dozen at a time. Reporters seldom badgered him for interviews because he was not inclined to bloodthirsty pronouncements. Given his long service in battleships and cruisers, Fletcher would have preferred to make the heavy cruiser
Louisville
his flagship, but Nimitz wanted his task-force commanders to ride the carrier, and so in San Diego on New Year’s Day, 1942 (the day after Nimitz took formal command in Pearl Harbor), the black shoe Fletcher broke his flag on USS
Yorktown
. Fletcher may have felt somewhat out of place on board the big flattop. One historian suggests that “he was the proverbial stranger in a strange land.”
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Though Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher was a “black shoe” admiral—a surface warfare specialist—he commanded U.S. forces in both of the major carrier battles of the first six months of the Pacific war: Coral Sea and Midway. (U.S. Naval Institute)

The captain of the
Yorktown
was 52-year-old Elliott Buckmaster. Tall and handsome, Buckmaster was also quiet and reserved, even cold—though, as with Nimitz, that first impression often changed after close association. Buckmaster was a brown shoe with gold wings on his chest, but he was also a Johnny-come-lately, having passed the aviation course only five years before as a full commander. His first aviation assignment had been as executive officer (second in command) on the
Lexington
, and he had little experience as a carrier pilot. Perhaps because of this, the
Yorktown
’s executive officer, Commander Joseph “Jocko” Clark, who did have significant flight experience, was skeptical of both his commanding officer and the task-force commander. An acolyte of Ernie King, Clark thought that Fletcher and Buckmaster failed to enforce the kind of discipline he admired. That assessment, however, said more about Clark than it did about either Fletcher or Buckmaster. Clark found a lot to complain about on the
Yorktown
, writing later, “Yorktown’s hopeless department heads needed a lot of King’s brand of discipline.” It was probably just as well that Clark did not stay long on the
Yorktown
, though when he returned to Washington after his promotion to captain, he continued to disparage the
Yorktown
and her officers, including Fletcher, and over the subsequent months his comments very likely affected King’s assessment of both the ship and the task-force commander.
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Nimitz had hoped that the arrival of the
Yorktown
would give him four carrier groups, and the ability to begin a meaningful counterattack against the Japanese, but the loss of the
Saratoga
meant that he would have to carry on with only three: the big
Lexington
and the newer sister ships,
Enterprise
and
Yorktown
.
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On board those three carriers, the Americans, like the Japanese, relied on three kinds of combat airplanes. The workhorse American carrier bomber was the SBD Douglas Dauntless, a relatively new (1940) monoplane with a crew of two: a pilot in the front seat, almost always a commissioned officer, and an enlisted radioman/gunner who sat behind him and was responsible for communications as well as a .30-caliber machine gun, later increased to movable twin machine guns. Compared with the Japanese Val dive-bomber, the Dauntless was both bigger and sturdier, and its pilots referred to it affectionately as “the barge.” Though the Dauntless was 25 percent heavier than the Val (thanks in part to its armor protection), it nevertheless had a slightly greater range because of its more powerful engine. It could also carry a bigger bomb load, consisting of either one 1,000-pound bomb or a 500-pound bomb plus two 100-pound bombs under the wings. The Dauntless was marginally faster than the Val, though slower than Japanese fighters. Officially, its top speed was 217 knots (250 mph), but it cruised at 130 knots (152 mph) and attained maximum speed only during an attack dive, when it might reach 250 knots (288 mph). (Its pilots joked that SBD stood for “Slow but Deadly.”) The Dauntless also boasted two .50-caliber machine guns in the cowling, and on occasion it was used to augment the combat air patrol (CAP).
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The idea behind dive-bombing was for the pilot to approach his intended target at high altitude, say 20,000 feet, and preferably from out of the sun to avoid detection. To spot the target, the SBD had a small glass window in the floor beneath the pilot’s seat, although it was rarely usable due to oil thrown off by the plane’s engine. After lining up on the target as best he could, the squadron leader deployed perforated “dive brakes” on the trailing edge of his wings and went into a steep dive, around 70 degrees, with the pilots of his squadron following his lead. During the dive, the pilots felt weightless, “like you were floating,” as one put it. The Dauntless did not have shoulder straps, only a seat belt, so it was “like you were hanging out on a string.” Between 2,000 and 1,500 feet, the pilot released his bomb by pulling back on a bomb release lever. When he did that, it was instinctive to pull back on the control stick at the same time, and that often threw the bomb off line. To prevent this, newer SBDs were equipped with an electric trigger that allowed the pilot to release the bomb merely by pushing a button on top of the control stick. Then he pulled out of the dive, usually doing a “snap pullout” that sometimes resulted in his briefly blacking out.
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Dive bombing an enemy ship that was twisting and turning at 25 or 30 knots was, as one pilot recalled, “similar to dropping a marble from eye height on a scampering cockroach.” It was especially difficult because often during these steep dives, the windscreen would fog up at about 8,000 feet, all but obscuring the target. One pilot said it was “like putting a white sheet in front of you and you have to bomb from memory.” “Believe me,” he recalled, “that’s a helpless feeling when you try to dive bomb and [can] hardly see your target.” All in all, it was both a physical and mental challenge to dive almost three miles straight down at nearly three hundred miles an hour with a fogged windscreen and with the target ship throwing up a wall of antiaircraft fire.
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It was equally challenging for the enlisted man in the back seat, whose job during the dive was to call out the readings from the altimeter, especially important when the windscreen was fogged and the pilot could not see. The backseat crewman was also the radio operator and gunner. When the pilot released the bomb and pulled out of the dive, the rear-seat gunner was pushed down into his seat with, as one recalled, “a force of one ton at eight G’s,” or eight times the force of gravity. Nonetheless, he had plenty to do. “Then the pilot tells you to go on the air, or switch to the homing frequency, or give hand signals to nearby crews in Morse code. All of this requires securing the guns, reaching forward, changing radio coils, and moving dials accurately and quickly.” Morse-code messages were sent by hand signal in order to maintain radio silence. The radiomen/gunners smacked their palm with their fist for a dot and slapped open handed for a dash. Those in nearby planes had to watch this and translate to their pilots. It required both intense concentration and a strong stomach to perform all these tasks flawlessly.
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Dauntless dive-bombers made up about half of an American carrier’s complement of sixty to eighty airplanes and were divided into two squadrons: one was officially a “scouting squadron” and the other a “bombing squadron.” Each squadron carried a numerical designation that bound the pilots, gunners, and crew into a unit. Every American air squadron was first designated by the letter V (which simply meant that it involved heaVier-than-air aircraft). The scouting squadron bore the additional designation S and the bombing squadron B, followed by the hull number of the carrier to which it was assigned. Thus the scouting squadron on the
Lexington
(CV-2) was VS-2, and the bombing squadron was VB-2. Colloquially, these units were known as “Scouting Two” and “Bombing Two.”

The men in these units developed a bond akin to the men in an infantry company, though the fact that the pilots were mostly officers and the rear-seat gunners were all enlisted men sometimes made for an awkward partnership. While in the air, the junior officer pilots depended heavily on their enlisted gunners, literally trusting them with their lives, yet aboard ship they were all but strangers. The gunners never came into the wardroom and seldom ventured into the squadron ready rooms except for “special sessions.” They never played cards with the pilots or sat around with them to “shoot the shit.” In the air, the relationship was fraternal and interdependent; on the ship, each man went his separate way. The gunners called the pilots “sir” or “mister,” and the pilots referred to the gunners by their last names only. As one pilot put it, “Pilots were treated as one class, gunners were treated as another class.” Another recalled, “We hardly ever got to talk to our gunners until we were ready to climb into the cockpits.” If they accidentally ran into each other aboard ship, there might be a moment of awkwardness. One pilot recalled seeing a group of gunners reloading machine gun ammunition belts and noticed that their conversation became instantly more profane as if “they were trying to impress me with how tough they thought they were.”
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