RENDEZVOUS AT MIDWAY
THE TRUE STORY OF THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER U.S.S. YORKTOWN AND THE BATTLE OF
MIDWAY.

Pat Frank and Joseph D. Harrington

Forewords by Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher (U.S. Navy, retired) and Yahachi
Tanabe (Former Commander, Imperial Japanese Navy)

PAPERBACK LIBRARY, Inc.

New York
PAPERBACK LIBRARY EDITION

First Printing: April, 1968

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted, or reproduced or
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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 67-10829

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT'S

First thanks must go to Lieutenant Commanders Dave Cooney, Frank Steele, and
Dan Dagle at the Navy Department for their almost daily assistance over a
twenty-month research period. Master Chief Personnelman Edward Morosky and
Yeoman Harry Buckingham provided invaluable leads and information for
hundreds of letters and interviews. Mrs. Mildred Mayeux, longtime friend of
one of the authors, gave them the same total cooperation and attitude of
interest she gives all writers who use the Navy's operational archives.
Especially appreciated is the contribution made by Professor Thaddeus
Tuleja, whose scholarly research and lucid writing style have given readers
the best account of the Midway battle in print. Professor Tuleja graciously
made available to the authors some of his own personal research papers.
The editors of the United States Naval Institute Proceedings gave permission
to use material originally appearing in their publication.
The book could not have been written, nonetheless, without an outpouring of
information from many hundreds of other people, who took the time to write
letters, dictate tape recordings of their recollections, refer the authors to
innumerable additional sources of information, or endure lengthy interviews.
In addition to those whose names appear in these pages, the authors are
especially indebted to Frank J. Baldino, John S. Barnett, Charles C. Barr,
Floyd H. Bennett, Demetrio Bernal, Philip R. Blouin, Jules Bodenschatz,
Thomas S. Brent, Judson Brodie, Raymond G. Carlson, Joseph G. Chartier,
Benjamin F. Coopman, 5
Arthur W. Deike, Glyn G. Dillard, Eugene Domienik, Joseph Fazio, Dail Fine,
Bernard H. Forsting, Eugene R. Fortney, Arthur L. Foster, Robert Good, Jr.,
Paul W. Grubbs, Harry and Robert Grunow, Edwin C. Haywood, Edward H.
Hermanson, Clark L. Hertenstein, Louis B. Hess, Jr., Nelson M. Hollandsworth,
August W. Hovland, Ellis F. Jackson, Arthur G. Jacobs, Elton Jardell, Law-
rence M. Jarley, Irvin Jaworski, Edwin G. Johnson, Dale C. Jones, Michael
"Kaply" Kaplyawka, Dennis A. Kelly, Ludwig Koschak, Raymond O. Lewis, William
R. Lewis, George E. Lillicotch, Stanford E. Limey, Jr., Charles P. Lunn,
Clyde G. McClure, Thomas J. McGann, Kenneth A. McIntosh, Albert F. Medley,
Eldridge S. Mitchell, Jr., Peter Montalvo, Tivis Newberry, Robert R. Newcomb,
Earnest E. Parton, Dr. Joseph P. Pollard, Robert Ready, Orville L. Ritchie,
Duane E. Robertson, Donald R. Root, Robert J. Rudek, Louis Rulli, Tom Rush,
Edward B. Smolenski, Howard C. Stein, Melvin C. Stiller, John J. Strong, Dale
L. Stuart, John L. Tallman, Oliver C. Thore, Bernard F. Verboncouer, V. F.
Wadsworth, Harold C. Weaver, Elwood R. Wilson, Maurice E. Witting, Bryan C.
Woods, Bob S. Wray, George A. Wright, George H. Wright, James S. Xanders,
Doyle Yates, Robert H. Zander, and countless others who telephoned or passed
on information in conversations.
I hope our efforts merit theirs.

JOSEPH D. HARRINGTON Bowie, Maryland, 1966

6
FOREWORD

The war was only a few weeks old when I took my flag and my staff aboard
U.S.S. Yorktown at San Diego, arid our situation in the Pacific was indeed
unhappy. Hong Kong and Wake had fallen. The two British battleships on which
we had counted so much for stopping a Japanese southward advance had been
sunk off Malaya. Allied strength in the western Pacific was but a handful of
cruisers, some destroyers, and a few submarines, no match at all for the
onrushing Japanese fleet.
The Philippines had been invaded at many points. General Douglas MacArthur
had declared Manila an open city and was moving his forces into the Bataan
Peninsula. There, as the war plans ordered, he was to fight as long as he
could, then retreat into Fortress Corregidor and wait for us in California
and Hawaii to come to his aid.
We could give no help, of course. The battleships that were to crash through
the central Pacific and combine with the British and Dutch forces against the
Japanese lay in the mud of Pearl Harbor. The Japanese warlords, on the last
day of 1941, were free to strike wherever it pleased them to do so.
Few persons recognized then, or remember now, how grand the Japanese
strategy was and how close it came to being realized. Japan struck east in
early December, immobilizing the main strength of the U.S. fleet with a sur-
prise attack on Pearl Harbor. She was now striking south, to control or
isolate Australia, the only logical place from which a great counterattack
could be launched against her.
She was also getting ready to strike west, across India, 7
and into the Near East, joining up with German forces under General Rommel in
Africa.
A look at the globe will awe anyone who considers just how much of the world
the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis would have controlled had its master plan been
successful. Hitler's troops at that time, remember, were enjoying success
everywhere. They seemed well on their way to complete victory in Europe and
in North Africa.
With Japanese victories, the Axis Powers would have held the great Eurasian
landmass, with all its wealth and resources, the world island. America would
have been isolated and dealt with at leisure.
In the Pacific Ocean, at the beginning of 1942, the United States had no
means whatever of thwarting Japanese plans except for small task forces built
around four aircraft carriers-Enterprise, Saratoga, Lexington, and Yorktown.
A fifth carrier, Hornet, would soon be on its way from the Atlantic. So it
was that the carrier task force was thrust into war.
Our aircraft carriers had to perform two tasks: protect what holdings we
still had, and keep the Japanese fleet off balance and dispersed by widely
scattered, sudden attacks on enemy holdings. We had to keep this up until
replacement and supplementary warships could be constructed, until America's
industrial might could make itself felt. And Lord help us if the Japanese
fleet ever assembled against us, outnumbered as we were.
I had the privilege of commanding American sailors in two great carrier
battles of the Pacific-Corral Sea and Midway. The first battle saved
Australia and marked a new experience for the Japanese fleet, retreat. The
second battle broke the back of Japan's naval air arm, with four of her best
aircraft earners going down and hundreds of her best pilots lost.
In both battles, I fought from the bridge of U.S.S. Yorktown, a fine ship,
with whose officers and men it was an honor to serve. The full contribution
of Yorktown men to America's success in the Pacific has never been revealed
until now. Security precautions kept it secret at the time it happened, and
later happenings in the war, when we were 8
obviously on the road to victory, overshadowed it. After the war, when all
the facts became available and were cleared for release, they were not
reported fully. Certain myths were repeated so often that they became
accepted truths.
The authors of this book decided to tell Yorktown's story. They gathered and
documented all the facts obtainable concerning her, then assembled the
personal experiences of men who sailed in Yorktown, so that her story could
he told in their words. When I was first approached for an interview, I was
impressed with the wealth of information, some of it new even to me, that
these gentlemen possessed. I was also impressed with their meticulous method
of cross-checking every bit of information. I remain impressed with the final
result of their work.
U.S.S. Yorktown was in the thin line of aircraft corners which were all we
had to deter the Japanese with until our forces were built up. She helped
keep the enemy spread out. When he finally did concentrate his forces for
attack, she and her men helped meet and defeat them.
Once the Japanese Navy lost four aircraft corners at Midway, it lost its
momentum and never recovered it. Australia was never threatened again. Nor
was Hawaii. America was able to divert men and resources to Africa, England,
and Europe, to stop Hitler, and to send others to Burma and India to assist
in stopping the Japanese there. Victory became a matter of time.
Aircraft carriers like Yorktown added a new dimension to naval warfare. They
guarded supply lines, hunted down enemy submarines, protected convoys and
even their own escorting capital ships, beat off enemy air counterattacks,
softened up beaches for invasion, and rained destruction on enemy cities.
They became an integral part, indeed the core, of our naval power. They
remain so today. As I write this, they are off Vietnam, demonstrating their
unique ability to apply as much or as little force as is necessary in backing
up the foreign policy of the United States.
What carriers can do we first learned in ships like U.S.S. Yorktown, during
the tough, trying days of early 1942. The battle lessons of Coral Sea and
Midway were applied 9

with ever-increasing effectiveness later-with such effectiveness, in fact,
that we were able to reduce our pilot training program radically in. 1944.
Our pilots were so well trained and superior to the enemy by that time that
their losses were far below combat expectations.
Most Yorktown men lived through Corral Sea and Midway. Badly outnumbered in
the war's early days, they fought bravely and survived. They then trained and
led others in the ways of victory. I am pleased to know that, at last, their
story is being told in detail, just as it happened.

FRANK JACK FLETCHER U.S. Navy Admiral (Retired) Araby, La Plato, Maryland,
1966

FOREWORD

Before World War II, in the Japanese Navy, our submarine strategy was similar
to that of the American Navy. Submarine commanders were essentially attack
scouts. Their chief targets were to be enemy capital ships-battleships,
aircraft carriers, and cruisers.
If war threatened, our forest submarines were to lie off enemy anchorages.
When the enemy sailed out against Japan, they were to attack him at once, and
many times again along his route of advance. He would also be met by long-
range submarines from our home ports. Such attacks, theoretically, would
reduce the enemy fleet's strength to the point where our own main body, on
meeting the enemy, would destroy what was left of his naval forces. Japan
would be preserved.
Once the Pacific naval war started, the United States abandoned this
strategy. American submarines 10
concentrated their attacks on Japan's merchant shipping, with great effect.
As the years passed, they reduced the supply of materials coming into our
homeland to a trickle, then almost cut it off completely. Our nation was left
helpless. We ran out of materials with which to make war.
Japanese submarine strategy, however, did not change. Our boats were
continually ordered to attack American capital ships, which soon learned to
cope with us. Our submarines were almost always beaten off or sunk. As the
war went against us and it became too late to attack the Allied merchant
marine, Japanese submarines were used as supply transports and finally for
suicide missions, sending away kniten (human torpedoes) against the
ever-growing American fleet. After the first six months of war our submarines
made very few attacks on enemy merchant ships.
We started the war with a very fine submarine force, then wasted it. More
than 100 boats and many thousands of trained men were lost, with very little
real damage to the enemy to show for this terrible waste.
My participation in the Midway battle was one of the high points in tile war
for Japanese submarines. It was also the high point of my naval career and of
my life. I have relived many times what is told in these pages, always with
pride and wonder.
One of the authors interviewed me. The story of my submarine at Midway,
1-168, is included here. I hope that readers will recognize the bravery and
loyalty of the men who followed me into battle, obeying my orders at once and
unflinchingly. Of such men are great navies- composed.
Many of my Midway crewmen died in later battles and are now honored at
Yasukuni Shrine, in Tokyo. I will al-ways honor them in my heart.
YAHACHI TANABE
Tokyo, Japan, 1966 FormerCommander
Imperial Japanese Navy
11
PROLOGUE

The Roosevelts had always been good to the United States Navy. Teddy built
the modern Navy and sent its stubby battleships around the world to show what
wonders he had wrought. Franklin collected weathered old naval prints-
Constitution versus Guerriere, Wasp versus Reindeer, Enterprise versus
Boxer-became Secretary of the Navy, and, as President of the United States,
through the VinsonTrammel Act of 1934, gave new meaning to history; he
stepped up naval construction and, none too soon, built the ships that stood
off Japan in the desperate early months of World War II.
It was, of course, still a battleship Navy. American yards, in those balmy
prewar days, were building, at prodigious expense, the 35,000-tonners-North
Carolina, Washington, Indiana, Massachusetts, Alabama, and South Dakota.
Later they would begin building the 45,000-tonners-Iowa, New Jersey,
Missouri, and Wisconsin.

Like most weapons of destruction created in times of peace, [Richard Hough
has written] the first function of the battleship was to instill fear in the
hearts of men . . . . No instrument of war ever surpassed the battleship in
its menacing grandeur, or in its disastrous ability to condition man's mind
to the destruction of his fellows. And yet, for all the sacrifices, the
passions, the political manipulations and pressures it occasioned, the
battleship was scarcely ever used in combat.

It was scarcely to be used in combat in World War II and not to be used at
all in the role its admirers had envisioned, in the great fleet-to-fleet
encounters where the 12
future of the world would hang in the balance.
There is nothing very menacing about an aircraft carier's appearance. It
carries no great guns; it is simply a floating airfield, its superstructure
pushed to one side to give its airplanes a full deck for landing and taking
off. But in World War II, in the vast stretches of the Pacific Ocean, the
carrier was to be America's ultimate weapon.
Statistics tell part of the story. America went to war in 1941 with 19
battleships arid only 7 carriers. It emerged victorious in 1945 with more
than 100 carriers and only 24 battleships. Even today, in the advancing years
of the age of atomic weaponry, giant carriers roam the seas off the coast of
Vietnam. America's three remaining battleshipsMissouri, Iowa, and
Wisconsin-bob gently at dockside, neglected and forgotten.
This is the story of an aircraft carrier. Her name was Yorktown, third of
her line* in the U.S. Navy. Her wartime career spanned only 182 days, but
they were days (and nights) of wild and deadly combat. In Yorktown's brief
and stormy career, she compiled a record of almost unparalleled glory. Yet
for all she accomplished, history has dealt with her shabbily. Gallantry and
a thirst for truth require that her virtue be defended.
Yorktown's story begins with her birth, for ships, like people, are born.
Yorktown was christened on April 4, 1936, at the Naval Operating Base,
Norfolk, Virginia. There, in the same port where Teddy Roosevelt had waved
farewell to his coalburning Great White Fleet as it began its voyage around
the world, another Roosevelt, Eleanor, wife of the Commander in Chief,
splashed the traditional champagne across her bows. "I christen the
Yorktown," she said.
Yorktown-a ship her men nostalgically called Old Yorky-thus became the
nation's fifth aircraft carrier. The

* The first Yorktown, launched in 1839, was a 566-ton 16-gun sloop of war.
In 1850, while attached to the African Squadron, she was wrecked on one of
the Cape Verde Islands. The second Yorktown, a clumsy 1,710-ton gunboat, was
launched in 1888 and compiled a wholly undistinguished record. She was sold
out of the service in 1921.
13
first, Langley, an ungainly converted collier, joined the fleet in 1922.
Lexington and Saratoga, immense 33,000tonners, were commissioned as carriers
in 1927; both had been designed as battle cruisers. The fourth carrier,
Ranger, was the first this nation built from the keel up as an aircraft
carrier. Only 14,500 tons, she joined the Navy in 1934. Yorktown was next.
Then, not many months later, along came Enterprise, her sister ship. Hornet,
so similar to Yorktown and Enterprise that she was almost a sister ship, was
completed only six weeks before the war began.
These, then, were the carriers with which America went to war. One of them,
Langley, had been converted to an aircraft transport with practically no
flight deck; she was useless. The burden had to be carried by Yorktown, En-
terprise, Wasp, Hornet, Ranger, Lexington, and Saratoga. And in the early
months of the war in the Pacific almost the entire burden fell on four
ships-Yorktown, Enterprise, Hornet, and Lexington.
War, in those days following York-town's commissioning, seemed wildly
improbable. For Yorktown, in her early years, the greatest enemy was boredom.
A poem that appeared in the ship's newspaper, the Yorktown Crier, on January
13, 1940, thus summed things up:

Now here I stand and stand some more, This job's by now a beastly bore. My
muscles ache, my feet are sore, Why, I'd lots rather be at war.

Life, for the men of Yorktown, was indeed a bore, but it was not exactly a
hardship. An article in the program published on the occasion of Yorktown's
commissioning described what life aboard the new ship would be like; it
sounded almost idyllic. The anonymous author wrote:

To start their days, there won't be a boatswain's
mate shouting "Up all hammocks" in their ears, or a bugle poking down a hatch
to blow them out of their bunks: it will all be done with the aid of
loudspeakers . . . . And all of the crew will sleep in metal bunks; there 14
will be no hammocks or cots used.
There will be no main deck to scrub down with salt
water and sand. The flight deck is stained red and aside
from sweeping and an occasional new coat of stain it
needs no attention.

Breakfast, the author continued, would be served cafeteria-style, and
everyone would have a chance to read local newspapers (or the radio press
when at sea). Yorktowners would not even have to polish the brightwork, for
the fittings were stainless steel. "A fast wipe with a damp cloth, and
`Presto!' it's done."
Often, lunch would be followed by a band concert on the hangar deck. Later,
perhaps, the crew would be allowed to play basketball or even softball. "On
this ship, there should be no reason to curtail recreation because of cramped
quarters."
Then, before dinner, if ice cream looked better than the regular meal,
"there is a soda fountain aboard, stocked with all sorts of good things to
eat." After dinner, the author went on, the crew would be able to browse in
the library or play acey-deucey in the recreation room. Then, topping off the
day, movies would be shown every night starting at seven-thirty.
Even in peacetime, life aboard Yorktown would never be quite as easy as this
prophet suggested. There was, after all, work to be done; American sailors
did receive their share of valuable training. But as the article implied,
Americans in 1940 were not thinking about going to war. And the American Navy
was not eagerly preparing for it.
With the Japanese, things were different. The Japanese Navy, man for man,
was better trained than the U.S. Navy. Japanese ships were just as well built
as American ships; many were superior to their American counterparts. Jap-
anese battleships, for example, were 50 percent faster than their American
counterparts.
American ships maneuvered in the Caribbean, off Pearl Harbor, and off San
Diego, in warm, placid waters. The Japanese Navy maneuvered off its own
stormy shores and in and around the Kurile Islands. A famous Japanese 15
admiral in the 1930's, Nobumasa Suetsugu, was nicknamed "Seven Days" because
he kept his ships and his men working around the clock, week in and week out.
Saburo Sakai, the fighter pilot who shot down American hero Colin Kelly in
the opening days of the war, said that some Japanese sailors could not take
the pressure; they committed suicide by jumping overboard. Juzo Mori, a
torpedo plane pilot who sank the battleship California at Pearl Harbor,
pointed out that he and other Japanese pilots flew twelve hours every day for
three months before Pearl Harbor-four hours in the morning, four hours in the
afternoon, four hours at night. "We lost," he reported, "large numbers of
planes and pilots." In the two years preceding the start of war, the Japanese
lost three submarines by collision during high-speed maneuvers.
During all this time the American Navy operated under the strictest economy
measures. Training was actually cut back in 1938 because American ships had
used up more than their allotment of fuel in July, 1937, searching for Ameba
Earhart, the famous aviatrix. Equally typical was the refusal of the Navy
Department to allow U.S. ships to fire live torpedoes.
The Japanese were thinking war. They had gone to war with China in 1937.
Bombing attacks against the Chinese mainland had been launched from the
carriers Ryujo, Kaga, and Hosho. Japanese naval aviators had become the most
highly practiced in the world.
It was an old story with Japanese. They had bought their first warplanes in
Europe prior to 1914. Their experimentations were so intense that one expert
contends that all of Japan's pioneer airmen had been killed by 1916. All
kinds of people gave them a hand. An American gave Japan 90,000 dollars in
1919 for "the purchase of flying machines and the training of pilots." Great
Britain, in 1923, sent a mission of its naval pilots to Japan, to teach and
to be taught.
As early as 1915, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto had predicted that "the most
important ship of the future will carry airplanes." And as he saw things,
those airplanes would carry torpedoes. In the utmost secrecy the Japanese had
16
developed the torpedo that its ships and airplanes would employ with great
effectiveness in the opening months of World War II. It was the finest
torpedo of its kind in the world.
Japanese torpedo airplanes were almost as advanced and, by 1936, were able
to reach a maximum speed of 240 miles an hour. In 1939 an improved type was
capable of speeds up to 300 miles an hour. The American equivalent, the
Douglas Devastator, was no match for it, and one day the men who flew them
would pay a terrible price for the difference.
The Zero fighter plane being produced by the Japanese in 1940 had a maximum
speed of 320 miles an hour, could climb at a rate of 3,000 feet a minute, and
could range 500 miles from land bases and return. The American equivalent,
the Grumman F4F Wildcat, was inferior to it.
The Japanese dive bomber, the Val, was equally successful. It was faster
than its American counterpart, the Douglas SBD Dauntless, and it could carry
twice the bombload. Moreover, Japanese pilots had flown their Vals in actual
combat.
Japan, to he sure, still had its big battleships, in fact, the biggest
battleships ever built. Like other navies, the Imperial Japanese Navy was
torn by the argument between the advocates of air power and the defenders of
big guns. Still, while the argument droned on, Japan would do more to develop
its naval air power than any other nation. When World War II began, the
Japanese had ten aircraft carriers, three more than the United States
possessed, and if these ships were in some respects possibly inferior to the
big American carriers, their planes, their torpedoes, and their personnel
were almost surely superior.
Yorktown would come to know this enemy and perish in the knowing. The men of
Yorktown would come one day to hate the enemy and respect him. But in those
peacetime years, to the sailors spooning ice cream at Yorktown's soda bar,
war always seemed impossibly remote.

17
CHAPTER ONE

On December 7, 1941, Yorktown lay moored to Pier 7 at the Norfolk naval base.
In four years she had come a long way. There had been maneuvers off Cuba in
1939. Later in the same year, after Japan had seized Hainan and Spratly
Island, she had raced through the Panama Canal to reinforce the Pacific
fleet. It was in the same year, too, that she received the only major
overhaul she would ever get, at Bremerton, Washington.
In 1940 she was ordered from the Pacific to the Atlantic, transiting the
Panama Canal disguised as Wasp. The disguise (all the nameplates were
changed) would confuse spies, the Navy reasoned. In those days of tenuous
American neutrality, Yorktown was used to escort convoys across the Atlantic
and to guard against submarines. Perhaps it was not declared war, but the men
of Yorktown could hardly forget that two U.S. Navy ships, the destroyer
Reuben James and the tanker Saunas, had been sunk by German submarines not
far off American shores.
When Wasp, the carrier Yorktown had pretended to be, was finally "shaken
down" and ready to handle her share of defense duties in the Atlantic,
Yorktown was permitted to put into Norfolk for a routine refit.
On that infamous Sunday, Yorktown, secured to the pier by ten Manila lines
and two wire cables, had been in port for five of the ninety days that had
been allotted to her for reconditioning.
Because it was a Sunday, and a peacetime Sunday at that, inost of her crew
was ashore, either on leave or on liberty. The airplanes from Yorktown's four
squadrons were also ashore, parked at newly completed East Field.
18
It was 1:20 P.M., Norfolk time, when Commander Mitsuo Fuchida of the
Imperial Japanese Navy signaled 183 airplanes to begin the attack on the
great U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. It was 1:30 P.M. in Norfolk when Lew
Godfrey, a twenty-year-old seaman on watch in Yorktown's radio shack, picked
up an official message preceded by the high-priority call letters O O O. "Air
raid Pearl Harbor," it said. "This is no drill." Godfrey copied it on his
typewriter and, clutching the flimsies in his hand, raced down seven ladders
from his post high in Yorktown's superstructure of officers' country, where
he knew he would find Lieutenant Commander Clarence "Jug" Ray, Yorktown's
communications officer. Commander Ray took one look at the message and, with
Seaman Godfrey at his side, ran to the quarterdeck to alert Lieutenant Elgin
Hurlbert, the OOD (officer of the deck) and, as such, with the ship's captain
ashore, commander of Yorktown.
Yorktown's skipper, Captain Elliott Buckmaster, whose career was later to be
clouded by what history has held was a precipitous decision to abandon his
ship, was spending the weekend ashore with his wife at the Ghent Hotel. York-
town's executive officer, Commander Joseph "Jocko" Clark, flying on official
business from Norfolk to Jacksonville, Florida, was also out of touch.
Lieutenant Hurlbert-whose fellow officers called him Oxy after his alma
mater, Occidental College-was shocked by the news from Pearl Harbor. His
first action was to order the boatswain's mate of the watch to broadcast news
of the attack over Yorktown's public-address system. He then sent messengers
belowdecks to make sure the duty engineering officer, the duty gunnery
officer, and the acting heads of the ship's other departments had got the
word. Finally, he doubled the ship's guard as a precaution against sabotage
and lined Pier 7 with armed sailors. Boats filled with Marine sharpshooters
were lowered to cover the side of the ship facing open water. Satisfied that
he had done everything that he could on board, Hurlbert telephoned Captain
Buckmaster.
He had just hung up when he received a call from Leroy Gill, an
electrician's mate, who, half-asleep in the battery 19
room, had only dimly heard the public-address announcement.
"Who's the wise guy, Mr. Hurlbert?" Gill asked.
"Some Japanese admiral," Hurlbert replied curtly.
At first almost no one on board could believe the news. One member of
Yorktown's crew stuck his head into CPO (chief petty officer) quarters, where
Chief Torpedoman Bob Powell and a dozen others were napping, and shouted,
"Hey, you gents, the Japs just bombed Pearl Harbor!" Chief Powell and two or
three others threw shoes in the direction of the intruder.
Aerographer Joe Doiron was not a bit surprised. He got the news from Seaman
Godfrey as Godfrey was racing down the ladders to officers' country. "Gil was
right," Doiron said later to Seaman Harry Whidden, his companion in the
aerology shack. By Gil he meant his brother, Gilbert, a veteran of the
Asiatic Fleet, who had been predicting for years that one clay Japan and the
United States would go to war. But Gil had not lived to see that day. He had
been one of those who had died when the destroyer Reuben James had gone down
in the Atlantic thirty-seven days earlier.
Up on the quarterdeck, Lieutenant Hurlbert reflected on what the news meant
to hiin and to his ship. He had been with Yorktown for nine months, and his
first appearance aboard the carrier had been memorable. Anxious to make a
good appearance, he had stridden up to Captain Buckmaster, clicked his heels,
and tossed off a salute that a British Grenadier would have envied.
The captain had returned the salute in the spirit in which it had been
rendered, and the game-heel clicking and all-had continued thereafter each
time the two men met formally. But on December 7, when Captain Buckmaster
came striding up the gangway, the game was over. The salutes were
perfunctory, and they would be from that moment on. Buckmaster reviewed the
steps Hurlbert had taken, confirmed each of them, and then began issuing or-
ders of his own. He instructed the engine room to light off the boilers and
to make preparations for getting Yorktown 20
under way. He told Hurlbert to recall all the officers and key enlisted men,
and he ordered the reloading of Yorktown's airplanes.
Captain Buckmaster, a veteran with twenty-nine years' service, felt that he
must get Yorktown ready for action. Perhaps, he thought to himself, the
Japanese attack was part of a larger offensive; perhaps the Germans were on
the move, too. If Yorktown was to fight, she needed sea room.
The captain was an unusual officer. He had spent most of his career in the
big-gun Navy and had, in fact, served on six different battleships. Yet in
1936 he was able to realize the potential of air power, a singular mental
breakthrough for a man of his background. And so, at the age of forty-seven,
he took flight training and won his wings. He had joined Yorktown, as
skipper, in February, 1941.
One of the first officers to return to Yorktown was Lieutenant Commander
Jack Delaney, the chief engineer. Delaney had been dozing on a sofa in the
apartment his wife, Barbara, had rented just twenty-four hours earlier when
he heard the first news flash about Pearl Harbor. "I thought it was another
of those Orson Welles things," he recalled. "But when a neighbor came
pounding on our door, I found out it was Orson Yamamoto."
When the truth sank in, worries came tumbling after. Delaney knew better
than anyone the sorry plight of Yorktown's power plant. Six of Yorktown's
giant boilers were in deteriorating condition; she had steamed too far,
without major refit. Under this kind of relentless pressure, the mortar
between the insulating firebrick had begun to crumble. Until these boilers
could be rebricked, there would be no chance that Yorktown could make
anything approaching top speed.
Commander Delaney arrived aboard Yorktown just minutes ahead of Lieutenant
Charles Reed Cmdiff, his boiler officer. Cundiff, whose obsession with
physical fitness had made him something of a celebrity, pedaled his bicycle
from his home to Pier 7 in what must have been 21
record time, even for him. HP and Delaney hustled belowdecks to see about
stacking new firebrick near the inefficient boilers.
At 10 P.M. buses filled with 300 recruits fresh from boot camp at Norfolk
rolled up to Pier 7. In no time at all, the boots were put to work unloading
provisions from three railroad freight cars that had materialized as
unexpectedly as the recruits themselves. One of the boots, John Paige, from
the hill country of North Carolina, worked all night and into the morning. He
had twice been told to fall out of line and go below to the mess hall. Not
knowing how to get below, he just went on working.
The scene at East Field, where Yorktown's four squadrons of planes were
parked, was almost as hectic. Captain Buckmaster wanted every plane aboard by
Monday morning; efforts to comply with his wishes were spurred by rumors that
large formations of German bombers had been sighted off the tip of Long
Island. Millard Haley and other squadron CPOs began driving their men
mercilessly. Sunday night, engines started turning over at East Field, and
Yorktown's airplanes began to taxi off the airfield and down the streets of
the naval base to Pier 7, where cranes hauled them aboard.
Reason slowly returned. By December 9 rumors of German bomber fleets had
been dispelled, and Yorktown's airplanes were unloaded and taxied back to
East Field for final overhaul. Yorktown made a short run across the Elizabeth
River to the dry dock at Portsmouth. Civilian workmen-sailors derisively
called them yardbirds -swarmed aboard, and for once, the men of Yorktown were
glad to see them.
Seaman Paige, the wide-eyed boot from North Carolina, was handed a
long-handled scraper and told to help remove barnacles from Yorktown's hull.
He had been awake for fifty-two hours, and it was too much. He began crying.
"What the hell's the matter with you?" a boatswain's mate asked him. Paige
exclaimed as best he could. The boatswain's mate finally caught what he was
saying: that Paige had not eaten or slept in more than two days. In a rare
display of kindness the boatswain's mate took the 22
boot to a bunk below, fetched him a three-inch-thick meatloaf sandwich, and
told him to eat and sleep. For Seaman Paige, a two-day-old war was a very
long war indeed.
Wars come and go; bureaucracy goes on forever. So it was with Yorktown.
Bureaucrats at the Navy's Bureau of Ordnance and Gunnery fired off salvos of
queries and orders to Lieutenant Commander Ernest "Ernie" Davis, Yorktown's
gunnery officer. "At one point," Davis later recalled, "they ordered me to
send gun crews over to Dam Neck for training on the twenty-millimeter guns
they were giving us. Hell, we already had those guns aboard and were
replacing our fifty-caliber machine guns with them!"
When Davis told Washington about this, word came back to turn in the machine
guns to the navy yard immediately. Davis' inclination was to comply, what
with discipline and all that. But then he had another thought. "Somewhere,"
ha recalled, "I had read that a fifty could get off six thousand rounds
without a water jacket before the barrel began to curl. Twenty-four guns at
six thousand rounds apiece sounded like a lot of firepower to me. Between
protecting Norfolk and protecting York town, I figured we came out first. So
I kept the fifties, and I don't know if Washington ever did get its books
straight on the deal."
There was so much work to be done-and little time to do it. First, of
course, there was that firebrick for the faulty boilers. That would take
weeks, not days, but the job was started. Then the ship had to be both
replenished and lightened. Ordinarily, at full load, Yorktown drew 30 feet of
water but to get through the Panama Canal without scraping bottom, she could
not draw more than 18.5 feet. So, while ammunition and provisions were hauled
aboard, oil was pumped out. That-pumping out the oil-was a problem in itself,
for a carrier like Yorktown naturally lists seven degrees to starboard when
she is low on fuel; this is caused by the weight of her stacks and
superstructure, all located on the starboard side. To correct this natural
list, Chief Water Tender George Vavrek had to shift the fuel that remained to
portside tanks as a counterweight.
Yorktown's hull number was CV-5, because she was the fifth carrier built
(after Langley, Saratoga, Lexington, and 23
Ranger). This meant that her air squadrons-fighter, dive bomber, scout, and
torpedo-were numbered VF-5, VB-5, VS-5, and VT-5 respectively. But VF-5,
Yorktown's fighter squadron, had left the ship months earlier to participate
in Army maneuvers in Louisiana, and Fighting 42 from U.S.S. Ranger had come
aboard as a temporary replacement. The men of Fighting 42, on Sunday,
December 7, had been looking forward to Fighting 5's return and to a tour
ashore for themselves. It was not to be; Fighting 42 was equipped with
Grumman F4F-3 Wildcats, the latest model of that stubby little airplane, and
Yorktown's own squadron, Fighting 5, was still flying an earlier model.
Because Fighting 42 was available and because it had the better aircraft, it
had to go to war in a ship that was not its own.
To get to war, Fighting 42 had to scramble. Armor plate for the engines and
seats of its fighters, along with new selfsealing gasoline tanks, had been
lying around in East Field hangars for weeks. Now Fighting 42 had just a week
to get the. armor and gas tanks installed. Men from other squadrons pitched
in to help, and still it was touch and go. Seaman William Fed'erowicz, who
worked until he dropped from fatigue, remembers that 700 separate screws had
to be removed to install one of the new self-sealing tanks. Then all 700
screws had to be put back.
On December 16, Yorktown moved out of her dry dock and returned to Pier 7.
As she pulled alongside, her planes were already being taxied to the dock.
They all were aboard by evening, and the public-address system blared the
order: "Set the special sea detail!" In compliance with the order, the
officer of the deck's watch was shifted from Yorktown's quarderdeck to her
bridge.
Sailors hauled in Yorktown's mooring lines, one by one, as the dock gang
threw them clear. On the darkened pier the wives of the men of Yorktown
huddled in lonely clusters. At 9:08 P.M., Captain Buckmaster ordered, "All
engines back one-third!" The great carrier eased out into the stream; then
wheeling slowly, she headed for the channel and the fifty-two mile run down
to X-Ray Sugar, the outermost buoy of Hampton Roads.
Yorktown was on her way.
24
But, the men of Yorktown wondered, where? And for what purpose?
Great decisions, decisions an ordinary sailor could not hope to comprehend,
had been in the making. One of them was the ABC- l Staff Agreement, the "Beat
Hitler First" strategy that had been hammered out even before war began; it
had been ratified by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill in a
secret meeting aboard the cruiser Augusta, when the Atlantic Charter had been
signed.
The two Allied leaders had simply agreed that Hitler would have to be dealt
with first, while Hirohito was to be held off as best as the circumstances
might permit. Even the disaster at Pearl Harbor had not altered the basic
agreement.
But something had to be done about the Japanese, lest they grab so much that
there would be nothing left to defend. The response was to send Yorktown,
three battleships, and a destroyer squadron to the Pacific at once. The
battleships would presumably replace some of those destroyed or damaged at
Pearl Harbor: Arizona, California, and West. Virginia sunk; Oklahoma
capsized; Nevada heavily damaged; Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee
damaged.
In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor few people took note of the remarkable fact
that none of America's three carriers in the Pacific had even been grazed. At
the time of the Japanese attack, Enterprise was on her way to Pearl Harbor
from Wake Island, where she had delivered a squadron of Marine fighters. She
was due to arrive on Monday, December 8. The second carrier, Lexington, was
on her way to Midway, delivering a Marine bomber squadron. The third,
Saratoga, was off the California coast, preparing to put into San Diego. Now
Yorktown was on her way to join these three other warships; together, they
were supposed to carry the American burden in the Pacific.
And an American burden it would surely be, for Roosevelt and Churchill were
agreed that the United States would be responsible for the defense of the
entire Pacific, 25
including the British commonwealths of Australia and New Zealand.
The Japanese, too, had been making some decisions, all flowing naturally
enough from their original decision to go to war. The Japanese basic war plan
had been put together as early as 1938; now, with hardly a deviation (Japan's
inability to innovate has often been remarked), it was being carried out.
The war had opened with three major attacks. Bombers and torpedo planes,
operating from six Japanese carriers, had struck Pearl Harbor, with the
intention of knocking out the U.S. Pacific fleet. The carnage had been
terrible, but as has been noted, American carriers, in an extraordinary piece
of luck, had escaped. Next, Japanese bombers operating out of Formosa had
struck American airfields in the Philippines, easing the way for a Japanese
invasion. Third, Japanese troops had stormed ashore on the Malay peninsula.
All this was part of the Japanese fan-out strategy. With these sudden and
overpowering attacks, Japan would seize the raw resources she needed to wage
war. Then, having taken what she needed, she would consolidate her conquests
in a great defensive perimeter stretching all the way from the Arctic to
Australia.
Their initial success surprised even the Japanese. Admiral Yamamoto, the
grand architect of Japanese strategy, had anticipated heavy losses in the
war's opening phases.* But not a single Japanese warship had been lost in the
attack on Pearl Harbor. Moreover, resistance was crumbling on the Malay
Peninsula, and the Philippines seemed to offer no great difficulty.
Yet success was not at all what it seemed. Japan, in a

* The admiral, however, was a realist. He had estimated that Japan would run
up successes in the first six months and that thereafter American industrial
superiority would begin to assert itself. "I must tell you," he said to
Prince Fuminaro Konoye in 1940, "that should the war be prolonged for two or
three years, I have no confidence in our ultimate victory." Yamamoto was
killed in April, 1943, when his plane was shot down by American P-38
fighters.
26
way, had been too successful in destroying American battleships (and British,
too; Japanese torpedoes and bombs had sunk Prince of Wales and Repulse). No
American could any longer doubt that emergence of the carrier as the backbone
of the fleet. Thus, in American yards new carriers were laid down, and
battleship construction was cut back. The day when the gap would be closed
moved closer.
Japanese planes would have done more at Pearl Harbor had they destroyed the
immense oil tanks that fueled the U.S. fleet, the docks that maintained it,
and the shops that . repaired it. All these facilities remained relatively
un-scathed, and Japan was to pay dearly for it.
There was, too, the way in which Japan chose to open hostilities-striking
without a formal declaration of war while its diplomats still talked peace.
Americans became aroused; the will to fight built up overnight. It might have
been otherwise.
Japan's war hawks could not comprehend this kind of thinking. Ali' they
could see was victory after victory, all without serious cost. They saw no
reason to consolidate their success; they did see good reason to quicken
their effort. Thus, they decided to move against three more targets-Port
Moresby on the Papua Peninsula of New Guinea and the island of Tulagi in the
Solomons, to gain mastery of the air over the Coral Sea; Midway Atoll and the
western Aleutian Islands, to expand the outer perimeter and to challenge the
U.S. fleet to a decisive engagement; and New Caledonia, Fiji, and Samoa, to
isolate Australia from the United States. *
The Battle of the Coral Sea, Yorktown's first major encounter, was fought to
deny the Coral Sea to Japan. Midway, Yorktown's second (and final) battle,
was America's reply to the Japanese challenge. And there never was an in-
vasion of New Caledonia, Fiji, or Samoa because America won at Midway.

* Much of the basic strategy is discussed by .Samuel Eliot Morison in his
history of United States Naval Operations in World War Il. But as we shall
see, he is not always reliable on operational details.
27
Such, then, were the decisions that would shape Yorktown's future. As
Yorktown steamed out of Norfolk on December 16, 1941, no man aboard could
discern even the outlines of these mighty forces that would soon roll over
the carrier.

CHAPTER TWO

On the morning of December 17, Yorktown, off Cape Hatteras, was as crowded as
a cattle boat. In addition to her own airplanes, she carried Consolidated PBY
Catalina amphibious airplanes for delivery to the Canal Zone defense force.
And besides her own crew, she carried hundreds of extras to be dropped off as
reinforcements for Navy patrol squadrons at Panama.
She also carried a number of stowaways. The Navy counts noses daily, and a
few minutes before 8 A.M. on the seventeenth, all hands not actually on watch
lined up for muster, for a nose count that no one expected to produce any
surprises. But when muster was finished, Yorktown's master-at-arms approached
Commander Jocko Clark, the executive officer. Lieutenant Bill Crenshaw,
Yorktown's main engines officer, was nearby and witnessed the exchange.
"There's something wrong here," the master-atarms said. "We got thirty more
men aboard than we oughta. They're wandering around the hangar deck like a
bunch of orphans."
"Get them up here!" Clark ordered.
The frightened sailors appeared one by one, lining up in ranks for the
commander's inspection. Clark hobbled up and down in front of them on his
game leg. It had been injured and reinjured in airplane crashes, but nothing
the 28
medics recommended could force him into retirement. He pushed his chin into
a sailor's face. "Who told you to come aboard this ship?" he asked.
"You did, sir," the sailor replied.
The same question brought the same reply as Clark went down the line.
It was nothing less than the truth. The stowaway sailors were boots who had
wandered down to Pier 7 from the recruit camp to watch Yorktown's departure.
Whenever Commander Clark had spotted one, he had roared, "Don't just stand
there! Get aboard and lend 'em a hand." They all had done just that, and once
aboard, they had been too frightened to ask about getting off. On the trip to
the Canal they slept on top of hangar deck cargo.
The five-day run for Norfolk to Colon was a time to get ready, and Yorktown
needed every minute she could find.
The ship's two best welders, Norris Hook and Paul Vander, were ordered by
Chief Shipfitter Joe Kisela to work on the new 20-millimeter gun mounts. The
welders crawled up on scailolds, teetering high above the sea, to anchor the
new guns. No sooner were they installed than the Marines from Yorktown's 5th
Division, who had been assigned to the old .50-caliber machine guns, were
taught to fire them. Like any good warship skipper, Captain Buckmaster had
only one policy on ammunition-shoot it.
Yorktown had eight 5-inch guns, mounted in pairs just below her flight deck,
at each of its four corners. These, Yorktown's biggest guns, were manned by
sailors from ship's company. For practice, the sailors would fire a round
from the big guns, and the Marines would use this shellburst as a target for
their 20-millimeter guns.
In addition, Yorktown had four quadruple sets of 1.1inch machine guns, two
forward and two aft of her
superstructure. Lieutenant Commander Ernie Davis, the
gunnery officer, despised them as Rube Goldbergs. They
were the same gun mounts that the British called Chicago
Pianos. They jammed constantly and rarely gave more
than two or three seconds' worth of uninterrupted fire. The
only way they could be fired was to place a gunner's mate
under each mount, flat on his back, armed with wrenches
29
and hammers. From that position, he could correct the jamming.
It was on the way to Panama, too, that Radioman Alvis "Speedy" Attaway began
installing a secret weapon on Yorktown's highest yardarm. It was called IFF,
for identification, friend or foe, and it was supposed to emit a special
electronic signal that would be answered by Yorktown's airplanes. In this
way, Yorktown's planes would not be shot at by their own ship when they
returned from missions.
There were other improvements. In Fighting 42, ordnancemen replaced the old
telescopic gunsights in the Wildcat fighters with more modern electric
gunsights. Training in Bombing 5, always unusually intensive, tightened up
even more. "Every man had to learn everyone else's job," Seaman Harry "Dutch"
Schanbacher recalled later. Among Bombing S's officers was Lieutenant Sam
Adams, a pioneer in developing the Navy's steep-dive bombing tactics. Before
Adams and a few others had set to work, Navy pilots had been trained to
spiral slowly toward their targets.
To the men of Yorktown, the ship was personified by Commander Clark. He was
everywhere in those first days at sea, passing wrenches to mechanics, pushing
planes across the deck. His gimpy leg was testament to his long service as a
carrier pilot. Junior officers often feared Clark, but the white-hatted
enlisted men loved him. "Let's go to Tokyo!" he roared. His enthusiasm was
infectious.
Prior to arrival at Colon, Yorktown was again disguised, this time as
Enterprise. The ship's lettering was changed, and the numbering, CV-5, was
changed to CV-6. Passengers scheduled to debark at Panama were cautioned to
keep Yorktown's secret. As final insurance, Captain Buckmaster passed word
that no one would get liberty.
Then, as Captain Buckmaster, impeccable in his dress whites, strode down
Yorktown's gangway to make his official courtesy calls at Colon, the
boatswain's mate of the watch stepped into a small cubbyhole off the
quarterdeck which housed a microphone for the ship's public-address system
and a ship's bell. From force of habit-he had done 30
the same thing a hundred times before-he rang the bell four times, one clang
for each of the skipper's stripes. Automatically he bellowed into the
microphone, "Yorktown, departing! Yorktown, departing!" This meant, in Navy
jargon, that the captain was departing. The boatswain's mate's voice,
amplified a dozen times, reverberated along Colon's waterfront and down its
narrow alleys.
Japanese agents, who had probably already guessed Yorktown's real identity,
now knew it for certain. And Buckmaster, the secret out, granted liberty to
a fourth of Yorktown's crew. For those lucky enough to get ashore, to Colon's
celebrated Cocoanut Grove district, it was a night to remennber and to savor
years later in stag retellings. Seaman George Weise, who did not make liberty
that night, later remembered that some Yorl<towners "were so bent out of
shape that they had to be swung aboard in cargo nets. The only time I ever
saw anything like it was years later, in the movie Afister Roberts."
Yorktown cleared the Canal in eleven hours. She was hardly through it on
December 22, when the destroyer Walke, patrolling off her port bow, reported
an underwater sound contact. Yorktown manned battle stations as Walke and two
other destroyers fired depth charges. With the emotions of the tune, everyone
was sure that a Japanese submarine had been sunk; more likely, a large whale
had been disturbed. Postwar records indicate that the Japanese had nine
submarines in the eastern Pacific at that precise moment, and all were
somewhere between San Pedro, California, and Vancouver, British Columbia.
They were primed to shell West Coast cities on Christmas morning. But that
order was canceled at the last moment when spies in Panama reported that
Yorktown had passed through the Canal and was loose in the Pacific.
Yorktown cleared the Panamanian coast, bending on twenty-seven knots, the
best she could do until her boilers were in top shape, and headed north for
San Diego. The dash for San Diego demonstrated the value of radar, for
Radioman Speedy Attaway's readings permitted Yorktown to cruise at best speed
in darkness, confident that she was well clear of the coastline.
31
Having cleared the Atlantic and entered the Pacific, the war-to the men of
Yorktown-suddenly seemed closer. Their egos, never entirely restrained, grew,
even as heroic Marine defenders surrendered on Wake Island, as Hong Kong
fell, as the Japanese pedaled down the Malay Peninsula on their foldaway
bicycles. Rear Admiral Chester Nimitz replaced the unfortunate Admiral
Husband Kimmel as Pacific fleet commander. And the transport Connecticut was
sunk by a Japanese submarine in the mouth of the Columbia River.
Commander Clark, circulating among Yorktowners, heard caustic comments about
Pearl Harbor, comments like "They sure must have been dopin' off out there"
and "They probably were all sacked out at the New Senator or one of them
other houses."
Clark did not like this kind of talk. On December 29, one day out of San
Diego, he published this memo:

To All Hands From the Executive Officer:
Due to the dastardly action of the Japanese, our Navy suffered a serious
reverse in the Hawaiian area on December 7, 1941. There will be much
discussion about this in the months to come, and particularly if we should
come in contact with those of the Navy who were present on that occasion.
All personnel of this vessel are enjoined to avoid any semblance of
criticism of any of our naval units then present in the Hawaii sector, or of
the personnel attached. It must be presumed that those who were on the spot
did the best they could under the circumstances, and that no one should be
blamed for what happened.
The events of that fateful day are past, water under the bridge, so to
speak; and the future will bring ample opportunity for us to even the score.
There is too much work ahead of us to indulge in fruitless or needless
criticism.
Rather, we should adopt the role of the listener,
and offer comfort and sympathy to those who have
suffered. We should ever look forward with grim 32
determination to the time when we will wrest from the enemy the temporary
advantage he has obtained through his treachery, and we should concentrate
our efforts and actions toward the righteous victory that will ultimately be
ours.

The message had a salubrious effect; for the time being at least, it
silenced some of the big talk.
When Yorktown arrived at San Diego on December 30, some of her planes were
ordered ashore to the North Island naval air station, to be available to
defend the port against a rumored enemy air attack.
Yorktown remained at San Diego for seven frantic days. It was during this
layover that she received the extra aircraft she would need in the weeks to
come for replacement of the planes she would lose in combat. Getting these
spares stowed was the responsibility of Lieutenant A. C. "Ace" Emerson,
Yorktown's hangar officer, and his strong right arm, Everett "Robbie"
Robinson, boatswain's mate.
It was the men who made Yorktown what she was. Topside, it was Jocko Clark.
Down in the hangar deck, it was Robinson. He had a voice like a bullhorn and
muscles like a wrestler. The men of Yorktown called him the Bulldog. The
hangar deck was his domain, and no man entered his kingdom with
irreverence-no man, no officer.
Robinson's family lived in San Diego, and he had not seen them in fourteen
months. But getting his ship ready for war came first. Every night his boss,
Lieutenant Commander Murr Arnold, had to push him-almost literally-down the
gangway. He never left Yorktown until 9:30 at night, and he was back with her
every morning at dawn.
Robinson and his crew hauled 42 spare aircraft aboard and strapped them-like
light bulbs-to the ceiling of the hangar deck. Wings and other spare parts
were stacked along the bulkheads. The 42 additional craft gave Yorktown 129
airplanes, more than any other carrier in the U.S. navy.
On New Year's Eve, Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher came up Yorktown's
gangway with his personal staff. 33
Yorktown was to be his flagship for newly formed Task Force 17. Fletcher was
leather-tough and spare; his face was creased from a thousand nights and days
on the bridges of warships. Sailors were to call him Black Jack Fletcher,
although his hair was blond and his eyes were blue. It was to be Black Jack
Fletcher who would take Yorktown and the ships accompanying her into the
battles of the Coral Sea and Midway.
Two other veterans joined Yorktown at San Diego. One was Chief Carpenter's
Mate Thomas Coleman. He had been piped over the side into retirement in
mid-1941 and had actually bought a chicken ranch. When war came, he wanted to
go back-and to Yorktown. With more than thirty years of service, he had no
trouble pulling the right strings to get orders assigning him to his old
ship. He was waiting for her at dockside when she pulled in.
The second old-timer to come aboard was Chief Quartermaster Henry Pettier,
who had seen service in World War I. He had reenlisted on December 8, fully
expecting to be assigned to a garbage scow in San Diego harbor. Posting to
Yorktown and to Fletcher's staff was an exhilarating bonus. His first
assignment was to inventory all charts and all sailing directions, documents
vital to sea navigation. "Complete," Pettier told Commander Gerard Galpin,
Fletcher's operations officer, "except for the South Pacific."
"Great Scott," said the commander, "that's where we're going!" He promptly
ordered Pettier ashore to requisition the missing materials.
Yorktown's destination, naturally enough, was supposed to be a closely
guarded secret. But the wardSamoa-soon made the rounds. Lieutenant Commander
Murr Arnold told Captain Buckmaster that he was surprised Yorktown was going
to Samoa. "I was positive," he told the skipper, "we'd be heading for Pearl."
"Where did you hear it was Samoa?" the captain demanded.
"I didn't hear it," Arnold replied. "I saw it. On the beach. There's a stack
of crates down at Broadway Pier marked `Samoa-Via Yorktown.'"
Yorktown was indeed bound for Samoa. She put to sea 34
at 1:17 P.M. on January 6, escorting the 7th Marine Regiment loaded aboard
the Matson excursion liners Monterey, Matsonia, and Lurline. Accompanying the
liners were the ammunition ship Lassen, the Navy tanker Kaskaskia, the repair
ship Jupiter, four destroyers that had traveled with Yorktown from the
Atlantic-Sims, Walke, Russell, and Hughes-and two light cruisers, St. Louis
and Louisville.
Yorktown lost her first plane on January 7, when Ensign Edward "Ed"
Bassett's Wildcat splashed after takeoff. Ensign William "Bill" Woollen made
it two in a row the next day, and Ensign Walter "Walt" Haas lost a third
fighter on January 12. All three pilots were recovered, but the planes were
gone forever, and some of Yorktown's officers began to wonder if there might
be something seriously amiss with the aircraft. Fears rose on January 14,
when Ensign Richard "Dick" Wright lost a fourth Wildcat. Lieutenant Commander
Oscar Pederson, skipper of Fighting 42, ordered his mechanics to tear a
Wildcat apart, if necessary, to find out what the trouble was. It would be
months before the answer was found.
On January 11, Yorktown's radio received news that a Japanese submarine was
shelling Pago Pago, Samoa, Yorktown's destination. Other Japanese submarines
were reported operating south of Hawaii; these were the same submarines that
had been stationed off the California coast for the Christmas shelling that
had never occurred. They were now heading back to their advance base at
Kwajalein, in the Marshall Islands.
That same evening Yorktown's radio picked up worse news. The carrier
Saratoga had been torpedoed about 350 miles southwest of Pearl Harbor and was
limping toward Bremerton for extensive repairs. That meant that the
operational carnet force in the Pacific was now right back to where it had
been when Yorktown had emerged from the Canal-three ships.
The men of Yorktown were further sobered the night of January 12, when
Seaman William Reckhouse fell overboard. One sailor saw the accident and
threw a cork life ring over the side. "I saw Reckhouse swim toward the ring,"
Seaman Ed Cavanaugh later recalled. "He was 35
about ten feet from it when he went down." There was nothing anyone could do.
Yorktown represented one-third of America's earner strength in the Pacific,
and she had the three Matson liners loaded with Marines to think about. The
task force steamed on. "It was the saddest moment of my life," recalled
Ensign John Lorenz. "This big ship with over two thousand men, and we
couldn't help just one man."
On Sunday, January 18, memorial services for Reckhouse were conducted by
Lieutenant Commander Frank Hamilton, Yorktown's chaplain. That same day, the
repair ship Jupiter, her condensers collapsing under the pace Yorktown was
setting, signaled that she could make no more than six knots. Yorktown pushed
ahead, and little Jupiter dropped out of sight.
As Yorktown approached Samoa, Admiral Fletcher decided that the submarine
danger was minimal. The Iboat that had shelled Pago Pago, he reasoned, would
not have surfaced and revealed herself if she had not been at the tag end of
her patrol. Surely, by now, she would be hundreds of miles away. On the night
of January 19, Fletcher ordered the transports to run into Pago Pago, while
Yorktown, the cruisers, and the destroyers stood offshore in a defensive
crescent.
To the north, over the horizon, was another task force, centered on
Yorktown's sister ship, Enterprise, under the command of Rear Admiral William
F. Halsey. On January 23, with the Marines safely ashore and new orders in
hand, Yorktown and Enterprise, just barely visible to each other, headed
northwest with their consorts.
Other forces were also on the move. Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, who had
commanded the strike against Pearl Harbor, was steaming from Truk Island, in
the Carolines, toward the Indian Ocean. He delayed long enough en route to
deliver a devastating sideswipe at Rabaul, the strategic port on New Britain
Island, north of New Guinea. The attack was so fierce that a follow-up
invasion encountered little more than token opposition.
American forces in the Philippines were withdrawing into Bataan and the
island of Corregidor. On January 25 the 36
Japanese submarine 1-73 boldly shelled Midway Atoll.
It was a time when the Japanese could do no wrong. Many Americans-not all of
them civilians-began to talk of Japanese invincibility. And it was at this
dramatic moment that Yorktown received new orders from Pearl Harbor. Captain
Buckmaster passed the word to a cheering crew. Yorktown was going on the
offensive, to smash Japanese bases in the Gilbert Islands.

CHAPTER THREE

Yorktown was ordered to strike three Japanese outposts-Makin, Mili, and
Jaluit. Admiral Halsey, with Enterprise, was ordered farther north, to attack
three more bases in the Marshall Islands. It was not much; but it was
something, and it might be enough to force the Japanese to disperse their
forces to defend against these irritating American hit-and-run tactics. That,
at least, was the hopeful thinking of American planners.
Enterprise parted company with Yorktown on January 28; she had twice as far
to go. While waiting for Enterprise to get into position, Yorktown tried to
deceive the enemy. Nights, she and her screen would dart toward the Gilberts;
before dawn, they would reverse course and steam slowly toward the point from
which they had started. Fletcher knew that long-range Japanese flying boats,
lacking radar, could spot him only during daylight hours. If they did see
him, he wanted them to report he was heading away from the Gilberts, not
toward them.
At dusk on January 30 the game ended, and York-town raced for the point from
which she was to launch her strike. That evening Fletcher summoned his
aerologist to Flag Plot, in Yorktown's superstructure. The aexologist was 37
Lieutenant Commander Hubert "Hubie" Strange, who had studied meteorology at
Cal Tech after his graduation from Annapolis.
"What's it going to be like in the morning?" Fletcher asked.
"A lot like now, Admiral," Strange replied. "Sloppy. This mass of frontal
weather will stay )yith the ship, going in and coming out. The air group
probably will have foul weather all the way into the targets. And back, too."
Fletcher decided to attack anyway. The plan called for simultaneous strikes
by both Yorktown and Enterprise. That way, Fletcher reasoned, enemy defense
forces would be fragmented. Strange was dismissed, with orders to bring his
final weather data to the bridge at 4 A.M.
Not long after dark, Ernie Davis, the gunnery officer, sent Ensign John
Lorenz to check the ready ammunition lockers for the five-inch guns. He
wanted to make sure that they were secure against foul weather. What he could
not do, however, was guarantee that the shells would fire properly. Davis had
received a secret dispatch from the Bureau of Ordnance and Gunnery listing
the lot numbers of defective five-inch ammunition. Some of this defective
ammunition had been fired at Pearl Harbor; it had exloded prematurely over
Honolulu, and its shrapnel had killed a number of civilians, for which the
Japanese were originally blamed. Yorktown's five-inch ammunition came from
other lots of that same defective shipment.
Yorktown started launching her planes before dawn, sending forty-two pilots
into weather worse than anything any of them had ever seen in the Atlantic.
Each dive bomber carried a single 500-pound bomb; each torpedo bomber carried
three 500-pound bombs.
First off was a twenty-eight-plane strike against Jaluit, presumed to be the
most important target. Lieutenant Commander Bob Armstrong led the seventeen
SBD Dauntless dive bombers; Lieutenant Commander Joe Taylor led the eleven
TBD Devastator torpedo planes. A second force, nine dive bombers under
Lieutenant Commander Bill Burch, was sent against Makin, and 38
lieutenant Wally Short took five dive bombers to Mili. All fighter planes
remained aboard, to protect Yorktown against a possible attack.
Intermittent thunderstorms made footing hazardous on the flight deck, and
sometimes visibility dropped to fifty yards. Electrician's Mate John Metcalf
of Bombing 5 noticed a flash and glow high in the sky ahead of Yorktown; it
was not until later that he realized what it was.
The major strike, against Jaluit (onetime capital of the Marshalls), was
under the overall command of Commander Curtis Smiley. Most of Smiley's
planes, slammed around by the horrendous weather, arrived over the target
alone. They managed to find a few holes in the overcast and pounced through
them to the targets below.
Hits were made on a seaplane tender and a cargo ship; near-misses, on a
third vessel. After dropping their bombs, the pilots swung back to strafe
with their forward-firing .50-calibcrs, then pulled up sharply to allow their
rear gunners to ao with .30-calibers. Not all the Jaluit-bound planes got to
drop their bombs; some never found the atoll. They had to jettison their
bombs and streak for home. Ensign Tom Ellison's TBD had only two gallons of
fuel left when he came aboard Yorktown.
The attack no doubt excited the Japanese below. Up above Jaluit it was
confusing enough. Because of the bad weather, the American planes had trouble
finding one another. Ensign Ben Preston of Bombing 5 had so many near
collisions that his rear gunner, Harry Cowden, finally offered a bit of
advice. "What do you say, Mister Preston, we get out of here and go fight the
Japs?" he shouted in the intercom.
At Makin, Commander Burch's planes cracked open, but failed to sink an
8,000-ton seaplane tender. They did manage to sink two large flying boats
moored in the lagoon. At Mili, Lieutenant Short's planes, failing to sight
any floating targets, unloaded on what they hoped was a military warehouse
and ammunition dump.
Yorktown's bullhorn was hooked into the tactical radio frequency being used
by her aircraft so that the flight- and 39
hangar-deck crews could get a blow-by-blow account of the attacks. At 8:11
A.M. a voice crackled over the speakers. The news was not good.
"This is five-T-seven," the voice said. "Five-T-seven and five-T-six are
landing alongside one of the northwest islands of Jaluit. That is all." The
men of Torpedo 5 knew that 5-T-7 belonged to their executive officer,
Lieutenant H. T. "Dub" Johnson; five-T-six was Ensign Herbert Hein,'s plane.
Years later, after his rescue from a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in 1945,
Hein told what had happened.
They had dropped their bombs and were heading back for Yorktown; Johnson was
leading. Then, with no sun visible to give him an obvious correction, Johnson
made a mistake not uncommon to mariners: he misread his compass by 180
degrees. Instead of heading east, he headed west, and he and Hein, following
behind, continued on that course for twenty minutes. When Johnson realized
what he had done, he turned around, passed over Jaluit again, but quickly
realized he did not have enough gasoline to get home. He and Hein dumped
their bombsights overboard; Johnson sent his radio message to Yorktown, and
the two planes ditched in the sea.
Each TBD carried a crew of three. None of the six men aboard the two planes
was hurt when they ditched. They inflated two life rafts and paddled to Gebu,
an island at the extreme northwestern corner of Jaluit Atoll. There they
found a small village and friendly Micronesians. Two days later the Japanese
landed fifty men on the island while a four-engine seaplane sat down in the
lagoon to seal their escape route toward the sea. All six men surrendered.
At 8:12 A.M., Yorktown began recovering her aircraft. When all who were
coming home were home, she turned east and began churning up speed to escape
pursuit. As the big warship moaned and rumbled from the high-speed vi-
brations, Captain Buckmaster began totting up the strike's cost.
It was then that everyone realized the significance of the flash in the sky
that Electrician's Mate Metcalf had seen. It had been the collision of two
TBDs; they had struck each 40
other minutes after takeoff. Neither plane was ever sighted; all men aboard
were lost. The two planes that ditched off Gebu pushed the count up to four.
Two other SBDs had collided over Jaluit; that made it six. A seventh plane,
an SBD piloted by Ensign T. A. Reeves, went down returning to Yorktown, but
a destroyer picked up Reeves and his gunner, Seaman Lonnie Gooch.
Seven aircraft lost, sixteen men gone, and none of this damage caused by the
enemy. Against that was the destruotion Yorktown's airmen had reported. But
as usual with young men in their first brush with war, the reports had been
hopelessly exaggerated. Intelligence reports, months later, confirmed that
Japan had little of military importance in the Gilberts except a few
seaplanes.
Farther north, although they had clear weather and better targets, Halsey
and Enterprise had done no better. Enterprise's planes made the mistake of
rendezvousing within sight of the enemy before attacking. This gave a nest of
Japanese submarines anchored at Kwajalein time to "pull the plug" and settle
safely to the bottom of the lagoon; it also gave defending Zeros time to get
into the air. Four of Enterprise's planes were shot down, and the war's first
kamikaze very nearly crashed into Enterprise's flight deck. One of the
accompanying cruisers took a bomb hit.
Such was the uninspiring record of America's first naval offensive in the
Pacific.* But the men aboard Yorktown were elated; after all, they had done
something, and they thought they had done a lot more. When the news was
published in the States, a similar kind of euphoria resulted. "Haul Out With
Halsey!" became a catchphrase in the newspapers. Yorktown men, noticing that
not much was being said about them, soon had an earthy paraphrase of their
own.
Still steaming eastward, Yorktown picked up a bogey on her radar screen at
11:17 A.M. General quarters was

* Lexington should have had the honor. She had headed for Wake Island to
blast the Japanese who had seized that outpost from the Marines. But on
January 23 her accompanying tanker was torpedoed. Her refueling source lost,
Lexington turned around and came home to Pearl Harbor.
41
sounded, and Lieutenant Vince McCormack of Fighting 42 was dispatched
(vectored, in Navy jargon) to hunt it down, but the snooper got away. At 1:07
P.M., Yorktown's cranky radar picked up another bogey; this one was dead
ahead, thirty-two miles away. General quarters was again sounded, and in
minutes an awesome collection of artillery was manned.
Four of Yorktown's twenty-four new 20-millimeter guns had been mounted on
the flight deck in a flat space formerly occupied by a nest of boats. The
other twenty guns were divided into groups of five, one near every pair of
5-inch guns. Strung out along Yorktown's catwalks and at her bow and stern
were the .50-caliber machine guns Ernie Davis had refused to turn in at
Norfolk. Davis also had somehow come up with more than fifty .30-caliber ma-
chine guns. Volunteers grabbed them and made a surprising discovery. The
.30-caliber rested in a fork mount which had a hollow handle. The posts
supporting Yorktown's catwalk lifelines were also hollow. The volunteers
discovered that a broom or swab handle, sawed to the right length, fitted
into the lifeline post and the gun handle. With a minimum of equipment, any
sailor could go into the machine gun business. Dozens of them did just that.
Yorktown bristled with more guns than a Mexican revolution movie.
Ensigns Scott "Scotty" McCuskey and John Adams were sent aloft to hunt down
the new intruder. They had hardly taken off when the bogey pulled into clear
sight of the men aboard Yorktown. She was an immense, waddling Kawanishi
flying boat, nicknamed Mavis, and she was heading straight for Yorktown. When
the big flying boat was still about ten miles away, Captain Buckmaster put
Yorktown into a hard right turn; the big ship heeled over like a motorboat
rounding a buoy.
Lieutenant Oxy Hurlbcrt was in Sky Control, a tiny, unprotected platform
just above Yorktown's bridge. Below Hurlbert, on a slightly larger platform,
was Ernie Davis. From these exposed points, the two men directed Yorktown's
gunnery.
Hurlbert and Davis watched in fascination as the Japanese flying boat ducked
into a cloud, McCuskey and
42
Adams in hot pursuit. Others who were tuned in to the pilots' radio frequency
reported that the two ensigns were yelling like cowboys. The flying boat
never came out of the cloud. Just its wreckage-chunks of wing and flaming
hits of fuselage-came tumbling down.
"Burn, you son of a bitch, burn!" Jocko Clark shouted. The crew cheered.
Another cheer went up when all hands on the flight and hangar decks heard
Scotty McCuskey's cry, amplified through loudspeakers, "We just shot his ass
off!�
Seconds after the remains of the flying boat dropped into the ocean, a
tremendous underwater explosion rocked Yorktown. It was, presumably, the
plane's bombs exploding. Machinist's Mate Worth Hare, stationed in Yorktown's
after engine room, later recalled the explosion vividly: "For the first time,
I felt I was at war."
Commander Delaney, the chief engineer, also stationed in the bowels of
Yorktown, called the smoke watch to ask what was going on. The watch was a
lone sailor stationed high in Yorktown's island; it was his job to compare
the color of the smoke coming from Yorktown's triple stack against a chart.
By the color of the smoke, Yorktown's engineers could judge the efficiency of
the boilers. The smoke watch also acted as the battle eyes for the men
sweating it out below. When Delaney asked what was going on, the excited
sailor replied, "Those must have been his bombs or depth charges, Mister
Delaney. They just shot his ass off!"
Weeks earlier, Fighting 42's maintenance men had prepared a special award
for the first pilot who shot down a Japanese plane. The prize was a
multicolored jacket emblazoned with dozens of strange and curious decorations
and a hat that looked something like a fez. When McCuskey and Adams landed,
the maintenance crews swarmed around them. The award was divided: one of the
victors got the jacket; the other got the hat.
Shortly before 11 A.M. on February 6, Yorktown came steaming up the narrow
channel to Pearl Harbor. It was the first time Yorktown had put into the
great base in ten months, and her men simply could not believe what they 43
saw. That day Dutch Schanbacher summed up the feelings of most Yorktowners in
his diary:

So this is Pearl Harbor, bastion of the Pacific. My God, this is a regular
graveyard for ships! Nevada is sticking in the mud of the channel. West
Virginia's cage mast is sticking out at a crazy angle. Only Arizona's main
deck is visible. Utah is on her side, and other hulls are spread around. Fuel
oil from sunken ships is so thick on the water that boats don't even make a
wake. Fumes are everywhere. No smoking is allowed on Ford Island except in
the club and the coffee shop. Buildings have no roofs. Hangars are a sorry
mess. Aircraft hulls are burnt to a crisp, and machinery in the shops is so
much rubble.

Captain Buckmaster must have been especially moved. One year earlier, before
he had taken command of Yorktown, he had been commanding officer of Ford
Island naval air station. Little was left of his old command.
Yorktown made a graceful full turn around Ford Island before she moved to
her berth. As she circled, other vessels cheered ship, an old British custom
almost unknown in the U.S. Navy. As she passed, Yorktowners could hear the
salutes: "Hip, hip," from a single voice, and then a mighty "Hooray!"
Realists aboard Yorktown may have wondered just what they had done to
deserve such a tribute. But it was not so much for what Yorktown had done;
the salute was for the fact that she was there. Yorktown, as every sailor
knew, was East Coast, and her arrival at Pearl Harbor meant that
reinforcements were beginning to come through.
In her ten days at Pearl Harbor, Yorktown replaced her stock of defective
five-inch ammunition, loaded up on provisions, and took aboard more spare
aircraft parts. And Fighting 42's mechanics continued their investigation of
those troublesome Wildcats.
Jocko Clark was promoted to captain and transferred out of the ship he had
done so, much for. The new executive officer was Commander Dixie Kiefer. No
one thought that Yorktown would be lucky enough to get two outstanding 44
executive officers in a row, but Kiefer relieved many doubts in his first
official order: he granted liberty to all hands, "commencing immediately."
On February 14, Honolulu newspapers recounted for the first time the story
of the Marshalls-Gilberts raid. That night, Yorktown's men were the toast of
Oahu. It was free drinks all around.
At 10:49 A.M. on February 16, Yorktown was under way. By midnight she was
well below Oahu, heading southwest. Escorting her were the same four
destroyers that had accompanied her through the Canal, along with the
cruisers Louisville and St. Louis. She was joined by two more destroyers,
Anderson and Hammann. One day Hammann was to die at her side.
While Yorktown and her escorts ran south of Oahu, her sister carriers were
also busy. Lexington, on February 20, hit Rabaul. The raid should have
worked, for all of Japan's carriers were then in the Indian Ocean or in their
home ports. Unfortunately, a snooper detected Lexington when she was still
far at sea. Bombers came out to meet her from New Britain, and the best
Lexington could do was to put up a brilliant defensive battle. Lieutenant
Edward "Butch" O'Hare distinguished himself by shooting down five Japanese
bombers in six minutes that day. Four days later, on February 24,
Enterprise's airplanes struck Wake Island while her escorting cruisers and
destroyers bombarded Japanese positions.
Yorktown's assignment was less exciting. She cruised back and forth south of
the Equator, protecting the lifeline to Australia. The news she picked up by
radio was all bad. Singapore had fallen. The Japanese had parachuted into
Sumatra and had invaded Bali, Borneo, and Java. The Allied naval force
defending Java had been madly mauled; five Allied cruisers and five
destroyers had gone down in two days of battle.
On March 6, Lexington eased over the eastern horizon, accompanied by four
cruisers and eight destroyers. "Our force filled the sea from horizon to
horizon. Everywhere you looked there were ships. It made us feel real good,"
reported Seaman Tom Edwards, who observed the 45
awesome sight from his Gun 7 position. He also remembers the birth of the
Yorktown remark "Haul ass with Halsey-but fight with Fletch!" It was the
Yorktown crew's sardonic reply to Enterprise's getting all the headlines.
Command centers in both carriers received orders from Admiral Nimitz to make
a strike against Rabaul and Gasmata, Japanese bases on New Britain Island, to
shield the movement of Allied troops into New Caledonia. But the orders were
hurriedly canceled. The Japanese were making their move, shelling Lac and
Salamaua, on the northern coast of New Guinea, after which their troops
stormed ashore.
Lac and Salamaua were across the rugged Owen Stanley Mountains from the
great Allied base of Port Moresby, sole remaining foothold north of
Australia. Port Moresby had to be held.
Thus far, Japan had pushed her troops ashore in Malaya, the Philippines,
Java, Sumatra, and the Celebes without interference. Now, U.S. strategists
reasoned, perhaps the enemy ships and men could be caught in the New Guinea
beaches and wiped out. The plan was to hit them with the few Army Air Corps
B-17's available in Australia and the more than 100 airplanes from Yorktown
and Lexington.
By March 10 the two U.S. carriers had moved into the Gulf of Papua, along
the southern coast of New Guinea. They dared not sail around the edge of the
Papua Peninsula, into the Bismarck Sea, for that would have put them within
easy range of the great Japanese base at Rabaul, on the island of New
Britain.
There was only one way to get at the Japanese-fly over the Stanleys and down
the mountains to the beaches. Planners of the attack had discovered a pass
through the mountains only 7,500 feet high, as against the usual mountain
elevation of 15,000 feet. But 7,500 feet was bad enough. Pilots of the
torpedo bombers were particularly worried: Could their sluggish TBDs, lugging
1,000 pounds of bombs, work their way up to that altitude?
At 7:11 A.M. on March 10, Yorktown put up a protective umbrella of six
Wildcat fighters, accompanied by four 46
Dauntless dive bombers carrying depth charges for antisubmarine defenses. By
8:15 the first section of the strike force-thirteen SBDs under Lieutenant
Commander Bill Burch and twelve TBDs under Lieutenant Commander Joe
Taylor-was away. Following close behind was Lieutenant Commander Bob
Armstrong with seventeen more SBDs. Lieutenant Commander Oscar Pederson,
leading ten Wildcats as cover, caught up with them later, and the slow climb
over the Stanleys began.
Each SBD carried one 500-pound bomb and two I00pound bombs. The TBDs carried
two 500-pound bombs. By 10 A.M. they all were making their ascent. At 10:15
lookouts aboard Yorktown had spotted eighteen U.S. Army B-17s overhead at
16,000 feet, heading northeast to coordinate their attack with that of the
earner planes.
The 104 planes from the two carriers were guided to the 7,500-foot pass by
Lieutenant Commander William Ault of Lexington, who circled above the gap to
provide a radio beacon. The TBDs, to the surprise of their pilots and crews,
made it up the mountains and through the pass. Radioman Bob Egger, rear
gunner for pilot Sid Quick, reported that on the way up they got an
unexpected, but welcome, lift from updrafts.
The attack was a fiasco. By the time the Americans arrived, most of the
Japanese transports had departed. The skippers of these ships had taken part
in invasions before and had learned how to get in and out fast. The final
score for the 122 planes (including the high-flying B17s, a type which never
was able to hit a ship 16,000 feet below) was one large transport, one large
minesweeper, and an ancient light cruiser that had been converted into a
repair ship.
By noon all of Yorktown's planes were safely home. Lexington had lost one
plane. The pilots were again convinced that they had hit the Japanese hard.
By their own inflated estimates, they had destroyed three cargo ships at Lae
and six at Salamaua.
All were to agree, however, that their equipment needed a lot of
improvement. Dive bomber pilots complained that their telescopic bombsights
tended to fog up from condensation during dives from high altitude. Just as
bad, 47
many of their electrical bomb releases failed to work. A number of the pilots
were forced to lean out of the cockpit, line up the target by seaman's eye,
and then yank on the manual bomb release.
In at least one SBD an altimeter jammed so that the radioman erroneously
advised his pilot to release his bombload when the plane was still two miles
above the target. Most radios were inoperative, apparently victims of
tropical humidity.
One might have wondered when things would begin to go right for the U.S.
Navy. But these young men were full of spirit, ready to make the best of
anything. They were sure that they had given the Japanese a pasting.

CHAPTER FOUR

The next seven weeks were in a way the worst of all for Yorktown. She
returned to patrol duty, endlessly sailing back and forth to guard the vital
lifeline between America and Australia. It was hot work in those southern
seas. "Nowhere in this world," Dutch Schanbacher wrote in his diary, "does
the sun rise so brilliantly, burn more brightly, and set so prettily as in
the Coral Sea. Here the moon rises swiftly, like a great searchlight, to
illuminate the sea."
But Yorktown began to feel sorry for herself, and that feeling was
accentuated when a rumor spread through the ship that Lexington was departing
for the States. If true, it would leave Yorktown alone in the South Pacific,
ringed with enemy ships, planes, and submarines. In truth, Lexington was
retreating only as far as Pearl Harbor, to have her enormous eight-inch
flight-deck gun turrets, holdovers of her conversion from a battle cruiser in
the 1920's, replaced with light antiaircraft guns.
48

Before Lexington departed, she and Yorktown made a trade. Yorktown gave up
some of her worn-out planes for an equal number of fresher planes from
Lexington. In the trade, Yorktown was supposed to get six Wildcats; she ended
up with only five. Ensign Walt Haas lost the sixth when its engine failed on
takeoff. The F4F was .the same one that Lieutenant Butch O'Hare had flown
when in a single day he had downed the five Japanese bombers off Rabaul.
Yorktown's mechanics returned to the riddle of the Wildcat malfunctioning. If
the problem were not solved, Yorktown might end up with no fighter protection
at all.
On March 16, Lexington and her consorts steamed off to Pearl Harbor, and
among Yorktown's crew there emerged a certain amount of beefing, not only
about Lexington but also about Saratoga, Lexington's sister ship. Just before
the war began, Saratoga had spent a full year in the Bremerton shipyard,
having immense antitorpedo blisters fixed to her sides. Now here she was,
back at Bremerton, undergoing extensive repairs for torpedo damage suffered
in the Pacific. Yorktowners could scarcely help thinking about Saratoga's
crew on liberty Stateside while they endured endless watches, heat rash, and
saltwater showers.*
The monotony of patrol duty was the worst of it all. Thousands of games of
pinochle, cribbage, and acey-deucey were played in tournaments organized by
Chaplain Hamilton.
For diversion other Yorktowners began making silver rings from fifty-cent
pieces. They did it by rotating each coin on its edge and tapping it with a
spoon. In time--a long time-the edge flattened out; then a center was bored
and filed. Yorktown's mess halls eventually ran short of spoons, and
Commander Kiefer had to threaten

* Yorktowners chuckled at a malicious cartoon circulated through their ship.
It showed Saratoga, steaming along encased in her Bremerton dry dock, with a
torpedo heading straight for her. A destroyer was racing to intercept the
torpedo, but on Saratoga's bridge an officer was waving at the destroyer and
shouting, "We'll take it! We'll take itl"
49
disciplinary action for anyone found in illegal possession of a ship's spoon.
Dimes were turned into earrings, and stainless-steel mess trays were used to
manufacture wristbands. A number of sailors even took to weaving chenille
bedspreads, a square foot at a time, on rude handlooms. And one man spent
hundreds of hours covering a onegallon water jug with an incredibly intricate
105-strand Turk's-head knot.
In the aerology shack, a retreat for Yorktown's intellectuals, Joe Doiron
argued that birth control was basically immoral. The rebuttal was furnished
by a sailor who professed to be a Communist. These thinkers even made ten-
tative plans to buy a farm in Arkansas after the war and turn it into a
Yorktown cooperative community.
In Yorktown's sail loft, Chief Electrician's Mate Walter "Red" Fox, a plank
owner (he had been with Yorktown since her commissioning), conducted classes
in hypnotism. Each pupil paid twenty dollars for the course.
Gambling went on covertly, as it always does. A marathon dice game was
played in the CPO washroom, but all the money the men had was forty-two
dollars, in one-dollar bills. "When one man had won it all," Chief Cal
Callaway later said, "he would parcel it out again, while he kept records of
what we owed one another." The temperature in the washroom was always more
than 100 degrees, so the money became, in Callaway's words, "so worn and
raggedy that we finally had to make a rule that no one could pick it up.
Instead, we pushed it around on the deck with a pencil."
Men began to bicker. Chief Petty Officers Bob Powell and Gerald Crowley,
both from Boston, argued the merits of East Boston and Dorchester to the
point where neither would speak to the other.
The monotony touched even Admiral Fletcher and Captain Buckmaster. One day
a passing comment led to a difference of opinion between the two men. The
object of the argument was a light switch; the enamel on its cover had been
painted so many times that the markings had become indistinguishable.
"I say it says Off-Dim-On," the admiral contended.
50
"I think you're wrong," the captain said. "I think it goes all the way
around and reads Off-On-Off-On."
Admiral Fletcher finally summoned the duty electrician's n;ate, Gotcher
Hampton, to the bridge. "Son," said the admiral, "just what are the readings
on that switch?"
"Well," said the nonplussed electrician, "let's have a look, Admiral. Anyone
got a knife?"
A knife was produced, and Hampton scraped away nearly a quarter inch of
paint, built up over the years. "Looks like you had it right, Captain," he
said. Buckmaster smiled; the admiral grunted. The ship sailed on.
Meals became monotonous. Lieutenant Commander Ralph "Bear" Arnold, the
supply officer (later to win a Navy Cross for his work as a volunteer gunnery
officer), reported to Captain Buckmaster that everything was in short supply
except Jello and canned tomatoes. Arnold had a good idea of what the crew
thought about the shortages, for his sleep was regularly interrupted by
anonymous telephone calls. "This is the ghost," a voice would tell him, "the
ghost of the poor son of a bitch you starved to death!"
Decent food became an obsession with the crew. Lew Godfrey and a friend,
returning from battle stations one evening, spotted part of a ham, untended,
in the officers' pantry. They grabbed it and stashed it out of sight in a
dismantled radio transmitter. The last ham sandwich, auctioned off, went to
Chief Radioman Jim Tindell, who recouped most of his money by selling small
bites for fifty cents each.
Seaman Tom Edwards and several others who stood
watch with him on Gun 7 became door shakers. As Edwards told it, "We'd sneak
below in the middle of the
night and rattle doorknobs. Whenever we found a door
open, we'd look inside for chow." One night the door
shakers came across an open escape hatch leading to Yorktown's bakery. They
squirmed through the hatch and
found scores of blueberry pies. "Well, I guess we glommed
onto thirty pies," Edwards recalled. "We passed them up
the ladder and tippy-toed through a couple of berthing
compartments with them." Edwards and his friends ate up
51
every pie. The next morning, before breakfast, the suspects, including
Edwards, were ordered into ranks and told to stick out their tongues. The
telltale purplish stain was a dead giveaway.
By early April, Yorktown's freezers were down to the last five steaks. Chief
Pay Clerk P. C. Dahlquist suggested to Commander Kiefer that they be raffled
off.
On April 10 Yorktown's amidships elevator was lowered to within a few feet
of the hangar deck, to serve as a stage, and the "Yorktown Jamboree" began.
The steaks were paraded around the deck under armed Marine guard. Then the
show began.* Acts included Seaman Sidney Flum as "Miss Fanny Flum, the only
Bearded Lady Jitterbug in Captivity." Chief Walter Fox, "The Swami of Granby
Street," doubled as master of ceremonies and hypnotist, and in no time at all
he had six shipmates mesmerized, wading and swimming around the deck, whip-
ping out of clothing they thought was afire, and eating onions they saw as
oranges.
As the evening's finale, the names of the raffle winners were drawn from a
box. The winners were seated at an elaborately arranged table. A
"waitress"-John Underwood, a fourteen-year-old in Fighting 42 who had lied
about his age to get into the Navy-served the sizzling steaks. His breasts
were two soup bowls, his blond hair was a wig made from an unraveled section
of hawser, and his delicate white knee-length hose had been borrowed from a
British naval observer.
After the show, it was back to work and a dreary diet cycle of baked beans,
canned Vienna sausage, canned corned beef, canned salmon, and chipped beef
and rice.
Not long after the steak raffle, the mystery of the defective Wildcat
fighter planes was finally solved. The trouble was traced to the quality of
aviation fuel with which Yorktown had been supplied and the self-sealing
gasoline tanks in the airplanes. The fuel, apparently of a lower quality

* Captain Buckmaster did not attend; after Yorktown departed Pearl Harbor,
he rarely left the bridge. All his meals were brought to him on a tray, and
he used no lights after dusk for fear of affecting his night vision.
52
than that which Yorktown had received in prewar days, was eating away the
rubber tank liners, and tiny bits of rubber were finding their way into the
airplanes' carburetors, choking the engines.
A plane was flown to the nearest friendly island, from which there was
relayed to Pearl Harbor a message requesting that replacement liners be sent
immediately and that Yori<town be allowed to put into port somewhere for
upkeep and replenishment. Back came a reply (also indirectly, because
Yorktown was maintaining radio silence) stating that new tank liners would
soon be on their way. An accompanying message that outraged Yorktown's
officers expressed amazement that Yorktown would "retreat in the face of the
enemy." Members of Fletcher's staff urged the admiral to send an acid
rejoinder. But Fletcher, wise in the ways of command staffs and certain of
the identity of the man who had drafted the offending message, cautioned
patience. A few days later, he received a more reasonable message and, with
it, orders to put into Tongatabu, in the Friendly Islands, for a week.
At 12:12 P.M. on April 20, Yorktown moored in NukualoFa Anchorage, off an
island that Ensign John Lorenz ecstatically described as "right out of
Nordhoff an Hall." Red Fox's hypnotism students chortled to one another as
they anticipated using their newly acquired skills on unsuspecting island
females.
As the first liberty boat neared shore, Fireman George Domienik let out a
delighted cry. "Just like the movies!" he said. "All those natives are bare
from the waist up!" But all the natives he had seen were men, most of them 6
feet tall and weighing more than 200 pounds. They were members of the
island's constabulary. Queen Salote, the widow giantess who ruled the island
nation, had removed nearly all the young women to remote inland hideaways.
There was practically nothing to buy on the island, a disappointment to
Yorktowners, for the day they arrived was payday. One Yorktowner, Boatswain's
Mate John Sharp, took all his pay ashore with him and came back with but one
purchase-a can of heat-rash powder. A brisk business did develop in tropical
fruit. Yorktowners ate all 53
the bananas they could hold and took an additional supply back with them to
the ship. "For days after in the engine room," George Bateman recalled, "you
could pluck bananas like they were hanging on trees. We had them hanging in
stalks from the overhead." A few Yorktowners managed to find women, who
recognized no U.S. dollar denomination less than twenty dollars. One intrepid
Yankee, according to Leroy Gill, did manage to pass off prewar cigar coupons
as legal tender.
As these Yorktowners were gamboling the best they could at Tongatabu, the
Imperial Japanese Navy continued to build on its already impressive fighting
record and, at the same time, to improve its tactics.
In the Indian Ocean, Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo worked to eliminate what
major opposition still remained. His carriers had perfected an unbeatable
technique: they would send off one strike wave of dive bombers, torpedo
planes, and fighters, immediately positioning a second comparable force on
the flight decks. As a new target was discovered, the second wave would be
launched. Since Japanese carriers carried a plentiful supply of fighter
planes, there were always sufficient Zeroes remaining to protect the ships
against attack while both forces were away. On one occasion a second wave
sank the British cruisers Dorsetshire and Cornwall; on another, a second wave
sank the British carrier Hermes and the destroyer Vampire. By April 10,
British strength in the Indian Ocean had shriveled to a few old battleships,
and they-stripped of air cover-retreated to Madagascar. When Nagumo decided
that his work was done, he headed for home. En route, he detached from his
Carrier Division 5, centered around the big new carriers Zuikalcu and
Shokaku, and ordered them to Turk Island in the Carolines. There they were to
stand by for another planned Japanese move.*

* Eight days later, on April 18, Army Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle's
B-25 bombers rumbled off the carrier Hornet's deck to strike at the Japanese
homeland. This daring and unexpected move gave an enormous lift to American
morale, especially when President Roosevelt told a mystified public that the
attack had been 54
In four short months, by mid-April Japan had achieved all her initial
military objectives. It was time, Japanese naval planners thought, to move
into the second phase, to invade Australia. They reasoned, quite properly,
that no serious counterattack could be launched against them from any other
quarter. However, Army planners demurred. Winter snows were melting on the
Asian mainland, and the Russian-German conflict was still in doubt. If they
weakened their Manchuria and Korea garrisons to supply troops in the south,
they might find Russian soldiers streaming in on those defenses from the
north.
A compromise was reached. The Imperial Army would provide a limited force to
work with the Imperial Navy, to take the Solomon Islands, and New Guinea.
That would give them control of the air over the Coral Sea. They would then
strike at Midway and the western Aleutians, thus bringino the U.S. fleet into
a decisive engagement. Finally, they would move against New Caledonia, Fiji,
and Samoa. Australia, even if it remained unoccupied, would thereby be
effectively isolated.
It was a reasonable plan. The only trouble was that Admiral Chester Nimitz
knew about it. Not long before, American intelligence had broken the Japanese
naval code, just as the Japanese diplomatic code had been broken in 1941.
On April 29 (Admiral Fletcher's birthday, as well as Emperor Hirohito's),
Yorktown received word that Lexington, her new antiaircraft guns installed,
was again at sea. Lexin,;ton's task force, commanded by Rear Admiral Aubrey
Fitch, was to join the Yorktown force, both forces to be under the command of
Admiral Fletcher. Also steaming to join the combined force was Rear Admiral
John C. Crace, Royal Australian Navy, with two cruisers.

launched from "Shangri-La," the mythical Tibetan retreat of James Hilton's
novel Lost Horizon. This explanation so captured the nation's imagination
that an aircraft carrier then under construction was given that name. Hornet,
accompanied by Enterprise, returned to Pearl Harbor.
55
Fletcher's orders were simple enough; by May 1 he was to start operating
with his combined force in the Coral Sea. Somehow he had to stop the Japanese
from taking Port Moresby, the essential Allied forward base on the southern
coast of the Papua Peninsula in New Guinea.
The Japanese thrust was divided into six forces:
1. The Tulagi invasion force was to run southeast down the Solomons chain
from Rabaul, take Tulagi, and set up a seaplane base there. This force was
made up of one large transport, two destroyers, and a number of minesweepers
and submarine chasers. From the seaplane base at Tulagi, the immense Japanese
Kawanishi flying boats would be able to cover the entire eastern reaches of
the Coral Sea.
2. The Misima island support group-composed of two light cruisers, a
seaplane carrier, and three gunboats-was to set up a second seaplane base at
Misima Island, off New Guinea's eastern tip, before the invasion of Port
Moresby. From that base, flying boats would be able to cover the western
reaches of the Coral Sea.
3. The Port Moresby invasion group-composed of five transports; assorted
minelayers, minesweepers, and oilers; and a defensive screen of six
destroyers-was to sail from Rabaul, round the eastern tip of New Guinea, and
land invasion troops at Port Moresby.
4. The Port Moresby covering group, made up of the light carrier Shoho,
accompanied by four heavy cruisers, was to stand off Port Moresby and protect
the invasion convoy.
S. The carrier task force-composed of the two big modern carriers Zuikaku
and Slwkaku, carrying a total of forty-two fighter planes, forty-one dive
bombers, and fortytwo torpedo planes, along with two heavy cruisers, six
destroyers, and an oiler-was to deal with American carriers should they try
to interfere with the landing operation.
6. The land-based air flotilla, with nearly 150 Japanese naval aircraft,
based at Rabaul, was under orders to back up the ships at sea whenever they
were needed. With a range of 600 miles, these planes could reach out to
Tulagi and Port Moresby and anything in between.
According to the Japanese timetable, Tulagi was to be 56
occupied on May 3. The Port Moresby invasion group was to leave Rabaul on May
4 and begin going ashore on May 7. Naturally, the Japanese expected that the
Americans would try to intervene. When they did appear, they would be
attacked by the covering group (centered on the light carrier Shoho) from the
west and the big strike force (the earners Zuikaku and Shokaku) from the
east. The Americans would be caught in a pincer and destroyed. That job
finished, the carriers would attack Allied air bases in northern Australia,
and the Tulagi invasion group would move northeast to occupy the islands of
Ocean and Nauru.
Unlike the Japanese, the Americans consolidated their strength. It included,
first of all, the carriers Yorktown and Lexington, supported by six American
cruisers, two Australian cruisers, thirteen destroyers, two oilers, and
seaplane tender. In addition, there were the 484 Army bombers and fighters in
Australia, but they all were under the command of General MacArthur and thus
might or might not be available for naval use.
Enterprise and Hornet were the remaining two U.S. carriers in the western
Pacific, and they were at Pearl Harbor, just back from Doolittle's B-25
strike against Japan. It is more than 3,000 miles from Pearl Harbor to the
Coral Sea, and even if they were rushed to sea, they would surely be too
late. The only other force in the Pacific was Task Force 1, at San Francisco,
made up entirely of ancient battleships, and no one could see what use it
would be in the coming action.
Thus, Admiral Nimitz was forced to rely on what ha had; there was simply
nothing else available to him. Nimitz would issue the combat orders; the rest
would be up to Black Jack Fletcher, in Yorktown.

57
CHAPTER FIVE

Official Navy record's show that May 1 was the day Lexington and Yorktown
joined forces, under orders to "destroy enemy ships, shipping, and aircraft
at favorable opportuniin order to assist in checking further advance by enemy
in the New Guinea-Solomons area." Members of Yorktown's crew recall that May
1 was also the day that Yorktown ran out of toilet paper. A substitute for
that personal need could be found; but there was no substitute for fuel oil,
and so Yorktown, the same morning, began taking fuel from the tanker Neosho.
Lexington, a few miles away, began filling up from another oiler, Tippecanoe,
whose kindly supply officer saw to it that Yorktown's other more delicate
need was also met.
At 3:17 P.M., Yorktown was still refueling when Lieutenant (jg) Stanley
"Stan" Vetjasa of Scouting 5, flying patrol with Ensign H. N. Ervin as
wingman, spotted a Japanese submarine. As the I-boat dived, Vetjasa carefully
noted her position and, maintaining radio silence, flew back over Yorktown
and dropped a message on her deck. Three torpedo bombers were loaded with
depth charges and hurried aloft to track down the submarine.
The TBDs sighted the submarine at 4:15 P.M., some twenty-five miles from
Yorktown. She had, postwar information revealed, already radioed the
whereabouts of Yorktown to Rabaul. The three bombers dropped six depth bombs
along the path the submarine was following (the water was so clear that the
fliers could actually see the submarine's outline). The pilots, returning to
Yorktown, reported that the depth bombs had exploded close enough to the
submarine to sink her or at least to register serious 58
damage. But in fact, the submarine escaped undamaged, and the Japanese-for
the first time in seventy-five days-knew Yorktown's precise location.
Somehow the message was never relayed from Rabaul to the Japanese ships at
sea searching for Yorktown. The Japanese command structure was rather
bizarre, with land commands not specifically bound to obey sea commands and
vice versa. There was no overall boss of the sweeping operation, so that no
one in Rabaul felt duty-bound to pass the word along.
Fletcher, in Yorktown, believing he had been discovered, headed northwest
toward the tip of New Guinea, hoping to find the Japanese transports and sink
them before he came under attack. But Lexington, and her escorts were still
taking on fuel; Fletcher was forced to leave them behind, with instructions
to join him two days later, at daylight on May 4. Admiral Crace and his
cruisers were to rendezvous then, too.
On the following day, May 2, Army B-17s spotted a Japanese force heading for
Tulagi, but the information-reminiscent of Japanese slackness-failed to reach
Fletcher until twenty-six hours later. When, on May 3, he did get the word,
Fletcher decided he could not wait a day for Lexington to catch up; he would
have to move alone against Tulagi. He instructed the destroyer Sims and the
tanker Neosho to keep the rendezvous appointment with Lexington and the
Australian cruisers and to inform them that he was attacking. By 8:30 P.M. on
May 3, Yorktown, accompanied by four cruisers and six destroyers, had turned
north and was making twenty-four knots toward Guadalcanal.
Captain Buckmaster called Radioman Vane Bennett, Yorktown's radar expert, to
the bridge and told him that a Japanese task force was on the prowl. He
ordered Bennett to double the radar watch and to remain stationed near the
equipment at all times. "The captain told me I could lie down on some life
jackets in a corner and get some sleep if my eyes got too blurry," Bennett
recalled later.
Yorktown pilots were eager for action but puzzled when told of Japanese
ships off Tulagi. They had never heard of 59
the place. "Finally," one of them reported, "we were shown what the place
looked like, from a copy of an old National Geographic magazine."
Night-before plans included being given a bearing along which to fly that
would take them over Guadalcanal Island on a south-tonorth heading. Tulagi
and the enemy ships should then be in- sight straight ahead.
At 7 A.M. on May 4, Yorktown, about fifty miles south of Guadalcanal, put up
an umbrella of six Wildcats (they had received new fuel tank self-sealers at
Tongatabu). Then, at 7:30, Yorktown began launching a strike-twelve torpedo
bombers under Lieutenant Commander Joe Taylor, thirteen dive bombers under
Lieutenant Commander Bill Burch, and another fifteen'dive bombers under
Lieutenant Wally Short. At 8:45 A.M. they were in sight of the enemy, and the
five-day Battle of the Coral Sea was begun.
Off Tulagi were a Japanese transport, two destroyers, and nine auxiliary
ships. Commander Burch and eight other SBDs of Scouting 5 dived on them.
Halfway down, Burch thought he saw a cruiser and two destroyers nesting
together; he shifted the direction of the attack toward them.
This sudden change in direction, along with a repetition of the fogging of
bombsights and windshilds that had plagued the same bombers at New Guinea,
reduced the attack's effectiveness. Still, when it was over, Burch was sure
that his men had scored a number of hits.
Joe Taylor and Torpedo 5 went in next, circling the targets to approach them
from the direction of the shore. Ed Williamson, an enlisted pilot, asked for
and received permission to break off and make his attack from still another
direction. Keeping well to the left of the Japanese ships, he flew over
Tulagi, came about, and made his run so that his TBD was bow to bow with the
nested ships. Williamson's torpedo struck the center ship, while his ra-
dioman, Joe Crawford, strafed enthusiastically as the TBD broke away. All the
other torpedo bombers, even though they had made their runs with little or no
enemy interference, missed their targets.
60
Watching the attack from above the action was Commander Walter "Butch"
Schindler, ordnance officer on Fletcher's staff. He had been sent along,
doubling as rear gunner for Ensign Hugh Nicholson, to make the coldest, most
objective kind of appraisal. "It was a disappointing sight," he later
recalled, "to see all those torpedo wakes crisscrossing the harbor and
exploding against the beaches." The trouble really was not so much the pilots
as it was the torpedoes. Their failure at Tulagi was to be experienced again
and again, until pilots could rightly argue that the Navy's inability to
produce an adequate torpedo was nothing short of a scandal.
Of the two strikes so far that day, little or no damage had been inflicted
against the enemy. Next in was Bombing 5-composed of more dive bombers. They,
too, had the same frustrating problem of sight reduced because of fogging.
The best they could report was that two pilots, Joseph "Jo-Jo" Powers and
Leif Larsen, had probably scored hits. As the planes made for their
poststrike rendezvous, a single float-equipped Zero rose to challenge them.
Nearly all of Bombing 5's rear gunners, including Commander Schindler, blazed
away at him. Finally, he spun away in flames.
At 10 A.M. all planes were back aboard Yorktown, and the only damage anyone
could find was a small-caliber bullet hole in the aileron of Ensign G. E.
Bottjer's dive bomber. This was cause for rejoicing indeed, but when all the
reports of returning pilots were put together, it became clear that the
overall attack in general had been a failure.
Fletcher may have had his failings, but he also had what every great
commander must have-the will to engage the enemy, again and again. At 11:06
A.M. he sent off another strike. Lieutenant Wally Short and fourteen dive
bombers were away first. When they arrived over Tulagi, they found the sound
between that island and Guadalcanal nearly empty of targets. Had they, after
all, sunk all the Japanese ships the first time around? Hardly. A few minutes
later they spotted what appeared to be three gunboats and a seaplane tender
hightailing it towards Rabaul. Short's dive bombers attacked and in a matter
of minutes sank two of 61
the gunboats. As the bombers peeled away to strafe Tulagi, the third a?so
appeared to be sinking.
Bill Burch's thirteen dive bombers were close behind Short's squadron. They
found a destroyer and reported later that they had hit it twice. During the
attack a singleengine seaplane fighter rose to challenge them. Burch reported
that the seaplane's rear gunner kept shooting every minute, even when the
ungainly plane was coming out of rolls and turns. It required nearly 3,000
rounds of machine gun fire from the thirteen bombers to kill off the single
seaplane. Yorktowners, more than ever before, began to appreciate the enemy's
flying skill.
Yorktown's cumbersome torpedo planes were launched last, and they, too,
found a Japanese destroyer. Six of the TBDs approached her from one side;
five, from the other. It was a textbook attack. "We had a dream torpedo pat-
tern," Ed Williamson, one of the pilots, recalled. "But every single fish
missed the stinker." It was no fault of Yorktown's. Depth settings of the
torpedoes had been double- and triple-checked prior to takeoff. Every one of
them apparently ran far too deep.
Last in line among the torpedo planes was the TBD piloted by Lieutenant
Leonard "Spike" Ewoldt, whose radioman was Ray Machalinski. Ewoldt lined up
against a Japanese destroyer and started his run. But when he tried to
release the torpedo electrically, nothing happened. "We're going around
again," he told Machalinski. The second time, Ewoldt reached down and yanked
the manual release. The torpedo fell away, but of course, it also ran too
deep.
Pulling clear of the destroyer, Ewoldt looked around for the other torpedo
planes; all of them had disappeared. He missed the rendezvous and then, in
the foggy weather, missed Yorktown, too. Gasoline almost gone, he had no
choice but to ditch his plane. He and Machalinski crawled out of the plane,
inflated their life raft, and waited for a rescue ship. The first ship to
appear, however, was a Japanese destroyer, but it steamed right past them.
Hours later a friendly sea washed them up on Guadalcanal's southern shore.
Natives and missionaries found them and somehow 62
kept them one step ahead of Japanese search parties. Ultimately, they were
given a small boat, an old sextant, a
worn star almanac, and some hand-drawn charts. Two
months after going down off Guadalcanal, they put safely
into Efate in the New Hebrides.
Yorktown had also launched four Wildcats to cover the
bombers and torpedo planes over Tulagi. The pilots were
Bill Leonard, Ed Bassett, Scotty McCuskey, and John
Adams.
"You know," McGuskey recalled later, "I wasn't even
supposed to go. I was just moving the aircraft on the flight
deck for a pilot who hadn't finished his lunch. Then, all of
a sudden, away we went." McCuskey and Adams were, it
should be remembered, Yorktown's original heroes; they
had registered the first kill in shooting down a Kawanishi
flying boat in the Gilbert Islands.
Passing over Guadalcanal, Bassett and Leonard encountered three Zero float
planes. Leonard went after one
of them, but the enemy wheeled and came at him head on.
Just when it seemed that the two planes would collide, the
Zero pulled up, nosed over, and dived past Leonard
straight into the sea. Bassett, meanwhile, had chased and
gunned down one of the two other Zeros. The third, amid
the confusion, latched onto Leonard's tail. Leonard gave
his Wildcat full throttle, wheeled around, and came roaring
back at the Zero in another nose-to-nose confrontation.
s The Zero ducked under him, pulled into a sharp climb,
spun over on one wing, and plunged into the sea. Bassett
and Leonard agreed later that the action had lasted no
more than three minutes.
McCuskey and Adams, for their part, came upon a Japanese gunboat and chased
it up on a beach. Later they
spotted the Japanese destroyer Yuzuki and began giving it
the same kind of treatment. In the midst of their attack
they were joined by Bassett and Leonard. The four
Wildcats pumped 4,000 rounds into the destroyer, killing
its captain and dozens of its crew. However, it got away,
severely but not mortally hurt.
Bassett and Leonard made it back to Yorktown, but
McCuskey and Adams, eager to find more targets, flew
63
around until they ran low on gas. Like Ewoldt, they had to ditch their
planes. The two fighter pilots landed on the southern shore of Guadalcanal
and rigged a tent from one of their parachutes. The destroyer Hammann spotted
the tent and swung out a boat to rescue the two pilots. The surf, however,
was too heavy for the whaleboat to make a landing, so Coxswain George Kapp,
a line in his hand, leaped into the sea and swam to shore. He hooked the line
to the pilots' life raft, then climbed aboard with McCuskey and Adams. All
three men were hauled out to the whale boat.
Following the launching of the four Wildcats, Yorktown put a third strike
aloft. Nine of its dive bombers found a cargo ship north of Savo Island; two
hits were recorded. The other twelve dive bombers, led by the redoubtable
Bill Burch, found two ships off Tulagi. One of them, a small craft, was sunk.
By 4:30 P.M. all of Yorktown's planes, except the two Wildcats and Ewoldt's
torpedo bomber, were back aboard; the strike against Tulagi was over. Once
again, results were disappointing. Yorktown aircraft, according to the
official action report, had launched twenty-three torpedoes and had dropped
seventy-six 1,000-pound bombs.
Yorktown now steamed to the south, to keep the appointment with Lexington
and the Australian cruiser. The Japanese were also on the move. Their
invasion force was already several hours out of Rabaul, with the two big car-
riers Zuikaku and Shokaku north of the Solomons, heading south from~Truk.
When they learned of Yorktown's activities, they turned on speed and headed
around the eastern end of the island chain, hoping to catch up with the
American ships. And they might have done just that, for Fletcher had at one
point decided to send his cruisers and several destroyers around Guadalcanal
"to clean up Tulagi." But he had had second thoughts about it, which was just
as well for him.
At 8:46 A.M. on May 5 (the day Japanese soldiers
stormed ashore on Corregidor Island in the Philippines),
Admirals Fletcher, Fitch, and Crace rendezvoused. An
uninvited guest, one of the ubiquitous Kawanishi flying
64
boats, also showed up. Four Yorktown pilots-Ed Mattson, Vince McCormack, Walt
Haas, and Art Brassfield-began to track it down. Brassfield attacked first,
conning in from the right. McCormick came in next from the left. Walt Haas,
third, came in right behind McCormick. Just as Mattson was preparing to make
his run, the flying boat began trailing smoke from all four engines. The
smoke soon turned into flame, and the Kawanishi began a long, gentle, flaming
glide into the ocean. The action lasted thirty seconds and required only 260
bullets.
For Fletcher and Buckmaster, May 5 was a day of interlude, a day to put the
pieces together. While Yorktown again refueled from Neosho, Fletcher studied
intelligence reports, from which, he concluded, it was obvious that the
Japanese were clustering a large number of ships, including at least three
aircraft carriers, near New Britain, the Solomons, and New Guinea. He
reasoned that the Japanese would probably try to establish a seaplane base
off New Guinea's eastern tip, from which they could keep a lookout for the
American carriers. He anticipated also that the invasion convoy would try to
slip through Jomard Passage, off the eastern tip of New Guinea, in order to
get at Port Moresby.
On the same day, when Fletcher received word that U.S. .Army planes had
sighted a Japanese carrier in the area, he halted the refueling and, at 7:30
P.M., headed northwest main. Besides Yorktown, the American fleet included
Lexington, eight cruisers, and eleven destroyers.
Yorktown, on May 5, had been out of Pearl Harbor for eighty days without
meaningful relief or replenishment. Seaman Russell Brown, who had charge of
Yorktown's clothing store, reported that his stock "was down to nothing but
some black socks and a few white shirts with size seventeen and a half and
eighteen collars." The crew was literally getting ragged. And the ship
itself, which had once had a reputation us a showboat, was beginning to look
ragged, too.
May 6 dawned, and still neither side knew the position of enemy forces. At
7:30 A.M., Fletcher formally combined his force, Admiral Fitch's force, and
Crace's cruisers 65
into Task Force 17. On paper, he divided his escorts into two groups. One,
under Admiral Crace, would be assigned to attack the invasion convoy once it
was sighted. The other would remain with the two carriers as a protective
screen.
Fletcher had no way of knowing it, but the Japanese were closing in. Shoho,
the light carrier, was preparing to weigh anchor in the Shortland Islands.
The Japanese troop-ships were a day out of Rabaul, and the two big carriers,
Zuikaku and Shokaku, had rounded the Solomons and were coming up, behind
Fletcher.
At 10:30 A.M. high-flying Army B-17s sighted Shoho and tried to bomb her.
They missed. In their official report the pilots reported that they had come
close to hitting "light cruisers." An hour later other B-17s sighted the in-
vasion convoy. (Thirty minutes earlier, a Japanese plane had sighted
Fletcher, but the word was once again not passed to the Japanese ships
commanders.) Before the afternoon was over, Fletcher had decided on a series
of moves. He sent Neosho south, with the destroyer Sims as escort, to wait
for the carriers at the next refueling rendezvous. Then, convinced that the
Japanese invasion convoy would start through Jomard Passage at the eastern
tail of New Guinea the next day, he ordered both his carriers to prepare for
an attack.
The Battle of the Coral Sea, the first great naval battle since Jutland, was
building to a climax, and Yorktowners knew that it was.
Hangar- and flight-deck crews gassed the aircraft, and ordnancemen broke out
bombs, hanging them from aircraft bellies. Torpedomen went over each fish,
checking its detonator and the air pressure in its flask. Gunner's mates
checked their ready ammunition lockers and exercised their guns. Fire
controlmen removed range finder covers and wiped the lenses clear with soft
tissue paper. Signalmen checked their flag bags to be sure all halyards,
hooks, and rings were clear for free running so that signal hoists could be
snapped to yardarms smartly.
All this did not take long. Yorktowners had already gone on the run to their
battle stations more than 160 times since 66
they had departed Pearl Harbor. Battle stations had been cleared of loose
gear, and the men knew their assignments. By the time the evening meal was
finished, they were as ready as they would ever be.
Many Yorktowners stayed up late. Ship's Cook Renzie Cardin, who had the late
galley watch, recalled that dozens of theno came in for coffee and
sandwiches. "And for once," he wrote later, "they didn't complain to me about
food. All their talk was about wives and sweethearts and families."
Storekeeper Tom Callaghan stayed up late, working. He checked the record of
every man in Fighting 42 for pay allotments and GI insurance. When he turned
in, Callaghan's mind was at ease-every man who could be persuaded to do so
had made provision for his family back home. The pay records served as legal
proof of it.
Lieutenant Commander Hubie Strange, studying the weather reports, liked what
he saw. As things stood, Yorktrnvn was protected by a weather front. But when
dawn broke, the enemy should, he believed, be nicely exposed under clear skis
just beyond the weather front's northern edge.

CHAPTER SIX

Hubie Strange, Yorktown's weather officer, had called it
neatly. At 6:15 A.M. on May 7, 1942, the day the Battle
of the Coral Sea began in earnest, Yorktown was running
through rainsqualls under thick cloud cover, but the
weather was broken sufficiently to allow the carrier to
launch ten dive bombers. They had orders from Lieutenant
Commander Oscar Pederson, who had become Yorktown's
67

air group commander, to search an area, northwest to east, for a distance of
250 miles.
The bombers were hardly over the horizon when Admiral Fletcher detached
Admiral Crace with three cruisers and three destroyers. Fletcher expected
that as many as a dozen Japanese troopships would be attempting to slip
through Jomard Passage, and he hoped that Crace could find them and sink
them.*
At 5:45 A.M. a search group had been launched from the two big Japanese
carriers, Ztcikaku and SMokaku, both well to the east of Yorktown. At 7:30
one of these planes spotted the slow, waddling oiler Neosho and her escort
destroyer, Sims.
The Japanese pilot mistook the broad flat oiler for an aircraft carrier, an
error that would prove generally costly to the Japanese and particularly
devastating to Neosho and Sims. Rear Admiral Tadaichi Hara, commander of the
Japanese carrier division, ordered an immediate strike against these two
relatively minor targets, which were hundreds of voles away from Yorktown and
Lexington, Hara's real quarry.
Japanese planes dropped three 500-pound bombs on Sims; she sank within
minutes. Neosho was hit seven times but somehow remained afloat. (Rescue
ships finally located her on May 11, took off the survivors, and scuttled
her.)
While the Japanese were concentrating on the wrong targets, Fletcher was
having his own troubles locating the enemy. At 7:35 A.M. one of the ten dive
bombers Yorktown had launched at 6:15 reported that it had sighted two

* Professor Morison, in his History of United States Naval Operations in
World War 11, questions this decision. By dispatching Crace, Morison argues,
Fletcher weakened his own antiaircraft screen. Moreover, if Fletcher had won,
he would have had ample time to destroy the Japanese convoy. If he had lost,
Crace would surely have been chewed up. Coral Sea, however, was the first big
battle, and U.S. tactics were still evolving. Fletcher understood the risk
involved, but he also recognized that his only purpose off New Guinea was to
sink those Japanese transports. He meant to do it. Port Moresby had to be
protected at whatever cost.
68
Japanese cruisers well to the northwest of Yorktown. Ten minutes later,
Lieutenant John Neilsen, searching a nearby sector, encountered a
float-equipped scout from one of the cruisers accompanying the old carrier
Shol2o. He shot it down. Later, Ensign Lloyd Bigelow met a carrier-based
torpedo plane and shot it down.
At 8:15 A.M., just after the seventy-eight-plane strike had roared away from
Zvikakie and Shokaku for Neosho and Sims, a Yorktown. pilot made another
sighting report. He radioed that he had two carriers and four cruisers in
view, all of them northwest of Yorktown. This, Fletcher concluded, was what
he had been waiting for. He ordered Yorktown's Buckmaster and Lexington's
Admiral Frederick C. "Ted" Sherman to launch strikes against them im-
inediately.
Fifteen minutes later, Yorktown's radar picked up a nearby snooper. Wildcats
were sent after it, but the Japanese pilot skipped from cloud to cloud;,
aboard Yorktown, radio interceptors heard him make his report of their
position. By 9 A.M. Fletcher was convinced that the Japanese carrier
commanders knew his whereabouts, and he was correct. What Fletcher did not
know was that Vice Admiral Shigeyoshi Inouye, commander of Japan's 4th Fleet,
had b,~cume so disturbed by the presence of the two American carriers that he
had ordered the Port Moresby invasion Convoy to turn back. Admiral Inouye,
land-based at Rabaul, reasoned that the convoy could wait out of harm's way
until the American carriers were destroyed, after which the invasion could be
resumed.
At 9:25 A.M. planes began taking off from Yorktown and Lexington in a
powerful strike against two Japanese carriers and four cruisers that had been
sighted a little more than an hour earlier. The ninety-four planes from the
two carriers were heading north at 10:13, Lexington's
planes slightly in the lead. All that was left behind aboard
Yorktown were nine Wildcats, a dive bomber that Lieutenant J. V1'. "Win"
Rowley had been unable to get started,
and two inoperative torpedo bombers. Still aloft, but not
part ef the strike, were the ten scout bombers that had been
searching for the Japanese carriers. Lexington retained
69

eight of her Wildcats for air defense, plus eight bombers for antisubmarine
defense.
At 10:22 A.M. an Army B-17 reported that it had sighted an aircraft carrier,
ten transports, and sixteen other ships. As Fletcher read the report, it
sounded authentic enough, but it showed the enemy carrier's position to be

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some sixty miles south of the position of the two carriers and four cruisers
the Yorktown plane had reported. If both reports were accurate, there were
not two but three aircraft carriers north of Yorktown. From available
intelligence reports Fletcher was convinced that he was indeed opposed by
three enemy carriers, but he was equally certain from the same reports that
two of the carriers should be to the east or northeast of him, in which case
somebody had made a mistake. Whom was he to believe?-The dilemma was resolved
a few minutes later, when the Yorktown scout landed and the pilot reported
that he had seen two cruisers and four destroyers; he had not seen a 70
single carrier. How had he made such a dreadful error is his report?
The explanation was simple. While trying to keep an eye on tile enemy ships
and, at the same time, to maintain a lookout for enemy planes, the pilot had
incorrectly matched the two circular sections of his encoding board. The
radioman, taking his information from the pilot, had reported "two carriers"
instead of "two cruisers" and "four cruisers" instead of "four destroyers."
Fortunately, there was still time to redirect the Yorktowrc-Lexington strike
to the position reported by the Army B-17. Such orders crackled from Yorktown
at 10:53 A.M.
Lexington's planes made contact with the enemy's ships first. Troopships
were nowhere in sight (they had, of course, been turned back), but there was
one large carrier below-Shoho, a 14,000-tonner-escorted by four cmisers and
a destroyer. Slzoho twisted and turned as best she could as twenty-seven dive
bombers from Lexington came down after her. This simple evasiveness was
enough; Lexington's planes made only a single hit, with what appeared to be
a bomb that took Shoho in the stern.
As things now developed, Lexington's torpedo planes (Torpedo 2) and dive
bombers from Yorktown (Scouting 5) joined in a simultaneous attack, although
it had not been planned that way. Torpedo 2 scored three hits on Sholro's
port side, the other torpedoes either missed or ran wild. Lieutenant
Commander Bill Burch's sixteen dive bombers came pounding in and hit Shoho
twelve times. Lieutenant Stan Vetjasa was immediately behind Burch. "The
skipper laid one right in the middle of her flight deck," Vetjasa reported.
"It was a beauty. I got a hit right after that. So did Hugh Nicolson, Art
Downing, Roger Woodhull, and Charlie Ware."
Yorktown's Scouting 5 had scarcely pulled away when Bombing 5 came in. Four
of the pilots-Jo-Jo Powers, Win Rowley, Bill Christie, and Ben Preston-scored
hits. "I was second to last of our twenty-seven dive bombers," Preston
recalled. "By the time I pushed over, the 71
carrier we thought she was the Ryulcaku at the time-was burning like mad.
Flames were pouring out from under her flight deck, all along both sides of
the ship."
The last of Bombing S~s planes was breaking away when Lieutenant Commander
Joe Taylor went in with ten of Yorktown's torpedo bombers. They spread out as
they approached Shoho, formed a long arc along her starboard side, and then
turned and arrowed in, using Shoho's island structure as a target.
"There never was so successful a torpedo pattern in the entire war, I
believe," claimed Tom Ellison, one of the pilots. "We went in at fifty or
sixty feet altitude against hardly any antiaircraft fire and launched from as
close as six hundred feet." Ellison, who did not trust the electrical torpedo
release, yanked hard on the manual release. He saw his torpedo boring
straight for Sholro as he turned away. Slzoho by then was so crippled that
she could not evade the swarm of attackers.
Ed Williamson went in on Slroho's starboard bow. He fired all the ammunition
from his fixed machine guns, kicking rudder pedals now and then "to sort of
spray ahead of me." Then he released his torpedo; it and three others from
the ten attacking Yorktowners caught Shoho along her starboard side. With
such an easy target, the fish that missed almost surely were defective.
Williamson, one of the last to attack, banked hard over to fly clear of the
area. "1 settled on a course for our rendezvous position," he reported. "1
took a quick look around for bogeys, then decided to check the target. Darned
if the thing wasn't gone!"
Gone she was indeed. Lieutenant Commander Bob Dixon, skipper of Lexington's
Scouting 2, was so excited about the kill that he broke radio silence.
"Scratch one flattop!" he shouted. Shoho was still making twenty knots when,
witnesses said, she went right under. She had been destroyed by ninety-four
planes in twenty-one minutes, taking more than 800 men to the bottom with
her.
Shoho had known the attack was coming and had
managed to get off a few fighters. Some of them went after
72
Burch's dive bombers, some after Taylor's torpedo planes. Yorktown fighters
under Lieutenant Commander Jimmy Flatley shielded the torpedo planes; they
shot down three Japanese planes and chased away a fourth.
Commander Butch Schindler was once again observing the action as Admiral
Fletcher's personal emissary; this time, he was Stan Vetjasa's gunner. When
the Japanese fighters came swarming in, Schindler-who had been having trouble
with gun jamming-managed to get off a burst that downed one of the attackers.
Win Rowley, the dive bomber pilot, became so exasperated with a Japanese
fighter that he called to his gunner, Seaman Demon Musgrove, "What do you say
we go get that guy?" Rowley peeled off after one of the enemy fighters and
chased it away. But when the chase was finished, Rowley found himself all
alone and low on gas. He broke radio silence to inform Yorktown of his
predicament, but the carrier either did not get the message or, to preserve
its anonymity, refused to answer. Rowley spotted an Australian ship a few
minutes later; Musgrove talked to it by blinker lamp to obtain information on
distance and direction to Port Moresby. But the plane ran out of fuel miles
short of the goal, and Rowley had to ditch. He and Musgrove drifted ashore,
where they were protected by friendly natives, and eventually made their way
to Australia.
At 1:09 P. M., Yorktown and Lexington began recovering their planes.
Commander Dixon's violation of strict radio silence had done no harm, for it
allowed both carriers to clear their flight decks for landings, instead of
spotting a new strike force on them.
Yorktown could not help being pleased with what she had accomplished. Her
planes could take credit for 90 percent of the sinking Shoho and the planes
that went down with her and for seven more planes shot from the sky.*
By 2 P.M., Yorktown's planes were ready to go again.

* Three by Flatley's fighters, one by Neilsen, one by Bigelow, and one by
Schindler. Dick Crommelin and Dick Wright, on stayat-home combat patrol, had
knocked down another Kawanishi.
73
But Fletcher, quite properly, concluded that Shoho was sunk, and the rest of
the ships with her were hardly worth the trouble. There was also the
possibility that Shoho might not have been the only big ship sunk in the
attack. When films of the strike were shown, viewers spotted an extraordinary
sight. "Hold on a minute!" someone shouted. "Back up there!" The projector
was put in reverse and rerun at a slower speed. The frames showed the bow of
a Japanese heavy cruiser underwater. The pilots looked around at one another
questioningly. Who had hit her?
"Finally," according to Admiral Fletcher, "one young fellow owned up to it.
I sent for him, to offer my congratulations. When he got to the slag bridge,
he was very apologetic. He explained that he had not reported the hit because
he was afraid he might be court-martialed for not having followed the rest of
the bombers. As he said, he had seen that the carrier was sinking, so he
decided to try for the cruiser."
The young pilot was Ensign Thomas Brown, a Bombing 5 replacement who had
come aboard Yorktown only nine days earlier; at Tongatabu, and had hardly
said a word to anyone since. He received a commendation for his act and from
that day forward was known to all Yorktowners as Cruiser Brown.
Fletcher, however, realized that the battle was far from over. Shoho had
been eliminated, but Zuilcaku and Shokaku, the equals of Yorktown and
Lexington, were still on the prowl. Too, Admiral Crace had not, as Fletcher
had hoped, been able to destroy the invasion convoy. Crace, in fact, had had
a bad time of it. As he had approached Jomard Passage, the Japanese had
jumped him with three waves of land-based aircraft and somehow managed to
evade all of their attackers' bombs and torpedoes. One of Crace's destroyers,
U.S.S. Farragut, had even been forced to dodge bombs dropped by three eager
American B-17s. When news that the invasion convoy had been turned back
finally reached Crace, he headed for Australia.
Yorktown and Lexington pilots managed to get a bit of rest in the afternoon
of May 7; but toward evening the 74
weather started to clear, and Yorktown began picking up enemy aircraft on
radar. The first report came at 5:47: enemy planes to the west, eighteen
miles distant. Lexington's fi`_htcrs were away first; they confirmed that the
planes were the enemy's and engaged them. Yorktown fighters were also
scrambled. The Japanese planes had been launched on the specific orders of
Vice Admiral Takeo Takagi, commander of the carrier striking force. Rear
Admiral Hara, commander of Zuikaku and Slvokaku, had chosen his most
experienced night-fighting pilots. The Japanese strike was made up of twelve
dive bombers and fifteen torpedo planes, led by Lieutenant Commander Kakuichi
Takahashi.
It was Takahashi's idea to strike the American carriers just after sunset
when, in the dusk, he hoped to have an advantage over the gunners aboard
Yorktown and Lexington. But the weather, as the Japanese planes approached
from the east, remained sloppy, and Takahashi had just decided to abandon the
attack when he was ambushed by Lexington's fighters. Soon after that, seven
Wildcats from Yorktown joined the fight. The duel lasted fifty-two minutes,
and Yorktown and Lexington pilots split evenly a total kill of eight enemy
aircraft.
At ~ about 6:55, Yorktown began recovering her Wildcats. A number were still
up when, a few minutes after sunset, Lieutenant Norwood "Soupy" Campbell
noticed that there appeared to be more planes circling over Yorktown than
there should have been. Three of them swooped in from astern as though to
catch Yorktown's arresting gear, then sheered away to starboard, and Campbell
was certain that something was wrong. All American carriers had their bridges
to starboard, and American pilots always turned to port to avoid the
superstructure when they failed to hook the arresting cable. Certain Japanese
carriers, however, were built with their superstructures on the port side,
causing their pilots to sheer away to the starboard.
Yorktown's gunnery officer, Lieutenant Commander Ernie Davis, sized up the
situation quickly. "Those aircraft in the landing pattern," he roared through
the bullhorn, 75
"are not friendly . . . repeat . . . not friendly." Yorktown fighters were
ordered to pull out of the landing pattern; then Davis bawled an order that
probably no American crew had heard in more than a century. "All hands," he
said, "stand by to repel boarders!"
No one will ever know who fired the first shot, but it was not long, in
coming. Most of Yorktown's gun crews were already at battle stations, trying
to get a little fresh air. One gun beg=an firing; this triggered other itchy
fingers. Seaman John Ginn was a loader on one of Yorktown's forward 1.1inch
mounts. "My gun jammed," he recalled later, "so I never got oil one round in
my first real battle action." Ginn was lucky, for he would never have to
wonder whether he had helped shoot down Ensign Leslie Knox. The gunners also
managed to shoot down one of the Japanese bombers.
After the threat of Japanese attack had subsided, the remainder of
Yorktown's fighter alight was summoned back to the ship. But nervous `Tanners
opened up again. The aircraft flown by Ensign Dick Enright was hit in the oil
cooler; he landed safely. Ensign William Barnes got aboard with a bullet in
his parachute pack and a wound in his lip.
Ensijn John Baker became lost in the dark. For sixtyeight minutes, on orders
from Captain Buckmaster, every available air officer, radarman, and radio
operator stood by to help steer Baker home. Admiral Fletcher came into Air
Plot to urge all hands to keep trying. Fletcher was a tough old surface ship
sailor who had won a Medal of Honor at Vera Cruz in 1914, but he had a
specially warm spot in his heart for young aviators.
By 8:28 P.M. the radar was no longer picking up Baker's plane. He was
apparently a good distance away and at low altitude, putting him under the
radar beam. Commander Pederson knew that Baker must be low on fuel. He spoke
to Baker on radio, giving him a course and
the distance to Tagula Island. "My telephone talker was in tears," Pederson
said afterward, "when I finally had to tell the pilot good-bye and good
luck."
John Baker was lost. So was Knox, and Lexinton lost a pilot who was also
named Baker. The Japanese paid 76
heavily for their deaths. Nine enemy planes went down near the American task
force. Pilots of the other eighteen finally straightened out on course for
their own carriers.* They were tired and short of gas. Only seven of the
total of twenty-seven planes got home. A sixth of Admiral Takagi's air
strength was gone, and it included some of the best pilots he had.
That night Admiral Fletcher and Captain Buckmaster considered a darting
destroyer attack against the enemy strike force. Ensign John Lorenz, on late
watch in Yorktown's bridge house, overheard the two American leaders drafting
an actual attack message. Then Fletcher thought better of it. Admiral Takagi,
remarkably enough, it is now known, was pursuing the same line of thought.
He, too, decided against such an attack.
Aboard Yorktown, Lieutenant Jo-Jo Powers, a brokennosed Irishman from New
York who had been a boxing champion at the Naval Academy, rounded up the men
of Bombing 5 and made a speech. The pilots and men listened respectfully, for
Powers was something of a legend; he had served in the Asiatic Fleet before
taking flight training. Each young Bombing S pilot, on first coming aboard
Yorktown, had received an indoctrination course from Powers, who guided them
over the entire ship, explaining how the guns worked, what the navigation
procedures were, even arranging for them to stand bridge watches, an unusual
duty for pilots. For some, it was the starting point of a career that led to
the command of an aircraft carrier of their own.
Powers, that night, strode up and down as he spoke, his dark eyes burning.
He recounted to them details of the strike on Tulagi and the attack on Shoho.
He reminded

* Earlier accounts, Morison's among them, suggest that the Japanese planes
that came so close to Yorktown actually mistook Yorktown for one of their own
carriers. This is improbable, for the pilots knew that their own ships were
at least 100 miles away. A more credible explanation is that the Japanese
planes, confused in the melee, joined up with some of the Wildcats, thinking
that they were Japanese. Instead of being led home, they were led to York-
town.
77
Bombing 5 that there were still two Japanese carriers on the loose.
He concluded with these words: "Remember what they did to us at Pearl
Harbor. The folks back home are counting on us. As for me, I'm going to get
a hit on a Jap carrier tomorrow if I have to lay my bomb right on her flight
deck." The men of Bombing 5 then turned in, little realizing that they would
have reason to remember Powers' words all their lives.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The tropic moon rose at about 1 A.M. on May 8, bathing Task Force 17 in its
soft glow. Fourteen ships-Lexin,.;ton, Yorktown, five cruisers, and seven
destroyers-were silhouetted like model ships on a painted ocean.
Yorktown and her escorts ran southeast, then turned west. Fletcher wanted to
stay within striking distance of the invasion convoy, should it star for Port
Moresby again. He knew that the two Japanese carriers (Zuikalcu and Shokaku)
were not far away, battered by the after-dark melee of the previous evening,
but still deadly. Fletcher also knew the precise losses the Japanese had
incurred through a message from the carriers to Rabaul that had been
intercepted and decoded.
May 8 dawned clear over Yorktown, clouding Hubie Stranee's weather outlook
for the clay. The weather front that had covered Yorktown on May 7 was now
moving to the northeast, where the Japanese carriers were. The advantage that
had been Yorktown's the day before would now be shielding the Japanese.
At 6 A.M., Shokaku and Zuikaku launched a search 78
group, fanning to the south and west. At 6:30, Lexington launched eighteen
dive bombers, scanning in a full circle around the American task force.
Yorktown put up her combat air patrol of F4F fighters. She then launched
eight dive bombers, each armed with a pair of depth charges. These planes
were to guard against possible enemy submarine attack and, in the event of an
enemy air attack, were under orders to jettison their depth charges and
engage incoming torpedo planes.
With the planes up, Harry Bobbitt and five other mechanics of Scouting 5
assumed that they could grab a little sleep. They had been up all night with
Chief Jake Ulmer, changing enoines on two of the dive bombers; it had been a
successful night's work, for both planes were now overhead on submarine
patrol. Bobbin, however, was so tired that he could not even make it
belowdecks to his bunk. He crawled under a nearby 1.1-inch gun mount, put a
life jacket under his head as a pillow, and fell into deep slumber.
The American task force zigzagged along a southeasterly course, awaiting
word of a sighting. It came in at 8:20 A.M. A Lexington scout had spotted the
Japanese. He remained on station, ducking in and out of clouds, amplifying
his reports until Fletcher knew that there were two carriers, four cruisers,
and many destroyers northeast of Yorktown, 175 miles away. At the same moment
a Japanese scout was over Task Force 17. Radio interceptors heard him send
his message, giving Admiral Takagi the precise location of the American fleet
and the precise number of ships in it.
At 9 A.M., Admiral Takagi launched his strike-sixtynine aircraft, including
Zero fighters, Aiclu-99 dive bombers, and Nakajima-97 torpedo planes, all
again under the command of Lieutenant Commander Kakuichi Takahashi. At 8:48,
twelve minutes earlier, Fletcher had ordered his strike-seventy-three
aircraft, including Wildcat fighters, Dauntless dive bombers, and Devastator
torpedo planes.
Never before had two opposing carrier forces launched such mighty attacks.
The first great earner battle was about to be joined, on almost precisely
equal terms. The fate of 79
New Guinea, perhaps of Australia, dangled precariously in the balance.
Fletcher, as he sent off his planes, radioed General MacArthur-in Australia,
giving him his position and the Japanese position, hoping, of course, for
help from the Army's B-17s, but hardly counting on it.
As the two strikes, the Americans heading northeast and the Japanese heading
southwest, sped toward their targets, an almost ludicrous event occurred:
they passed each other, in clear view of each other. Bill Fenton, leading six
Wildcats from Yorktown, saw a group of planes off to his right. "They were
too far away for us to identify," Fenton recalled later, "and we really
didn't have enough spare fuel to go over and investigate them, so we merely
waved at them and continued on our way."
By 10:32 A.M. the first of Yorktown's planes were over Shokakai and
Zr.rikalcu; they could see the great enemy carriers occasionally through
breaks in the heavy cloud cover. Lieutenant Commander Joe Taylor, desperately
trying to get into battle with his lumbering torpedo planes, radioed to Bill
Burch and his faster dive bombers, "Wait for me! Wait for me!"
Burch could not afford to wait very long, for every second he delayed gave
the Japanese more time to launch fighter cover. Still, the dive bombers did
have an opportunity to orbit for a few minutes in order to assemble in proper
order. It was this brief delay that allowed Zacikaku to slide under a nearby
rainsquall; she was not seen again for some time.
Burch decided that he had better go after Shokaku while she was still
visible. He nosed over from 17,000 feet, six other dive bombers of Scouting
5 hard on his tail. Two dozen fighters had been launched to protect the
Japanese carriers, and they had clawed their way into the sky while Burch was
orbiting. As Burch and his dive bombers nosed over to attack, the Japanese
hit them.
Burch's planes had a rough time of it. Japanese fighters swarmed around them
like bees. Ensign J. H. "Jorgy" Jorgenson's landing gear was so badly shot up
that he had to ditch later. Of Burch's seven bowers, five took hits in 80
their fuel tanks. The self-sealing liners saved every one of them. All seven
planes were dotted with 7.7-millimeter and 20-millimeter holes in wings and
fuselage. Somehow Burch's pilots and gunners managed to knock down four of
the Japanese fighters. Then, in the dive, they discovered that their
telescopes and windshields were again fogging up. The day before, in the
attack on Shoho, they had not had that problem, possibly because it had been
made in clear, sunny weather. It was no wonder that Burch's bombers failed to
score any hits.

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Bombing 5, led by Lieutenant Wally Short, had come in immediately behind
Burch's Scouting 5. Short found that he was too close to Shokaku to dive, for
he might overshoot, so he took his planes around in a 360-degree circle,
fighting off Zeros part of the way. When his bombers finally made their
attack, they had relatively little opposition because most of the Japanese
fighters had peeled off and were attacking )lurch's bombers.
Bill Guest, Ben Preston, and Hank McDowell, the last three of Short's pilots
to make the bombing run, saw one of the most dramatic sights of the war:
81
Far below, through the clouds and the gunsmoke, they could see the dive
bomber piloted by Jo-Jo Powers. It was staggering in its line of flight,
taking hit after hit. Both Powers and his radioman, Everett Hill, were
wounded, other pilots knew, because Powers had reported his condition by
radio. They watched as Powers manhandled his bomber back on course. His plane
was now in flames, and he was not much more than 200 feet above Shokal:u when
he dropped his 1,000-pound bomb. It crashed into Slzokaku's flight deck only
a second or two before Powers' bomber plunged into the ocean. Powers had kept
his promise of the night before and died in doing it. He was awarded the
Medal of Honor posthumously; anything less would have been unthinkable.
Yorktown's planes dropped twenty-three half-ton bombs over Shokaku. Besides
the one dropped by Powers, only one other struck home. Those two hits were
devastating. Fires broke out on the carrier almost immediately, and the
forward end of her flight deck buckled so badly that she was finished,
certainly for this battle. Zuikaku would have to recover her planes. Scouting
5 and Bombing 5 had done all they could-two bomb hits and nine enemy fighters
downed.
Now it was Torpedo 5's turn. That this squadron got into battle at all was
something of a wonder. Before taking off from Yorktown, the pilots were told
that they would have no fighter escort most of the way. Enlisted pilot Ed
Williamson listened attentively and was shocked when he heard that lumbering
Devastators were to proceed to their targets at an altitude of 5,000 feet.
When the briefing was over, Williamson explained to Lieutenant Commander Joe
Taylor that enemy planes could jump the vulnerable torpedo planes at that
height, diving past them and coming up under their unprotected bellies.
Williamson and Taylor agreed that Torpedo 5's twelve planes should hug the
ocean surface after takeoff, just high enough so that their slipstreams
wouldn't leave telltale wakes for high-flying enemy aircraft to see and low
enough so that Zeros could not Qet under them.
Their low altitude took them right under the Japanese 82
strike force. When Joe Taylor saw the enemy airplanes passim, them far
overhead, he blew Ed Williamson a kiss.
As the torpedo planes came within sight of the Japanese carriers, the Zeros
were so busy battling dive bombers that they scarcely noticed the new wave of
attackers. Taylor's planes managed, in fact, to go in with opposition from
only two Japanese fighters, and this pair was shot down by Wildcat pilots
Bill Woollen and John Adams. Yet even under these favorable conditions the
torpedo planes had no luck. A,_,ain the torpedoes ran wild or bounced
harmlessly off their target. Some of the torpedoes ran so slowly that Shokuku
was able simply to turn away from them.
On the way back to their carrier, Yorktown planes accounted for three more
enemy planes. Woollen and Adams teamed tooethcr again to knock down a
Japanese torpedo bomber that was returning from the attack on Yorktown. Two
other Yorktown pilots downed two Japanese bombers. Yorktown's total kill was
fifteen Japanese combat planes, plus another h'awanishi flying boat, caught
by the stay-at-hc:me combat air patrol.
Lexin>ton's aircraft came in behind Yorktown's and had almost no Luck.
Shortly after takeoff, one Torpedo 2 plane fell out of formation with engine
trouble and had to turn hack. Three Wildcats from Fighting 2 got lost and had
to return before they ran out of gas. Then, as the weather grew worse, all
the dive bombers in Scouting 2 got lost and had to turn back. Of the
thirty-six planes launched against Shrknko, only twenty-one found her. They
scored one bomb hit on her, at a cost of three Wildcats and three Dauntless
dive bombers.
By noon all but two of Yorktown's planes (never to return were Jo-Jo Powers
and Ensign D. C. Chaffee) were heading, home. A surprise awaited them, for
the enemy strike they had passed had done against Yorktown as well as and
probably better than they had done against Shokaku.
At about 10 A.M., Storekeeper Bob Milholin, one of the special operators
trained by Vane Bennett, had the scope watch in Yorktown's radar room. He was
about to be relieved by Bennett when he said, "Hey, look at that!"
83
"it was one heck of a pip," Bennett later recalled. "It covered about an
inch of our five-inch scope, so I knew it meant an awful lot of planes,
spread out deep."
Milholin will never forget what he saw in that primitive radarscope. "For
me," he said, "that sighting was the high point of the war. I remember that
when word was passed to the crew that radar had picked up the Japanese planes
while they were still sixty-eight miles away, they knew they had time to get
ready for them, and they sent up a great big cheer for us."
Here, for the first time in the war, Americans really began to appreciate
the tremendous advantage that their radar monopoly gave them in the Pacific.
Task Force 17, thanks to Milholin's radar sighting, was able to calculate
precisely when and from which direction the Japanese attack would come.
Control of all aircraft protecting Task Force 17 had
been assigned to Lexington's fighter-director officer. He or-dered more
planes aloft, and four Wildcats from Yorktown responded; they were piloted by
Jimmy Flatley, Brainard Macomber, Dick Crommelin, and Ed Bassett. Lexington,
when the attack began, had twenty-five planes in the. air; Yorktown had
sixteen. They would not be nearly enough.
Later in the war, fighter interceptors aplenty would be stacked in layers,
high and far out from their carriers, to meet and beat off an enemy attack.
No such defense was arranged on May 8. Flatley's fighters, like Lieutenant
Vince McCormack's, were sent out only 20 miles, stationed at 6;000 feet.
Flatley's flight, when it reached its station, found nothing but empty air.
What Flatley did not know was that the Japanese attack force had already
flown thousands of feet over his head. When he radioed Yorktown for
instructions, he was told to return to the task force and take station
directly above it. He and the three other pilots had barely climbed to 9,000
feet, to start home, when they ran into a score or more of Japanese dive
bombers and torpedo planes, all preparing to attack. He also noticed Zeros
hammering away at the dive bombers that Yorktown had assigned to submarine
patrol below him.
84
Flatley nosed over and began attacking the Japanese planes. He shot down a
Zero and drove several other planes away. Dick Crommelin followed him down to
6,000 feet; tangled with a Zero; leveled off in a fight with a second Zero;
and, finding himself at 3,000 feet, began climbing. He was soon on the tail
of a third Zero. He fired a burst, and it rolled into a smoking dive and
plunged into the ocean. As Crommelin watched his Zero go down, he found
himself close to another one. Kicking rudder and dropping a wing, he went
after it and sent it spinning toward the ocean. A fifth Zero suddenly
appeared right on Crommelin's tail. He shoved his Wildcat into a dive, build-
ing tip speed to run away. As he pulled out of the dive, he found himself in
the middle of a group of Zeros. He fired at every plane that flicked across
his gunsight, while the enemy planes maneuvered desperately to get into
attack position. He managed an escape but ran into still another Zero as he
began to climb. Again he had to dive to escape.
As he pulled out of his dive, the only planes he could see were Wildcats,
but a stream of oil was coming out of his wine. Bullets from one of the Zeros
had cut the oil line to his enLine cooler. Crommelin throttled back and
headed for Lo.v%ry,:ron, the nearer of the two carriers; but his engine died
short of his target, and he had to ditch. A destroyer picked him up.
Two ether Yorktown fighter pilots, Art Brassfield and Ed Mattson, joined the
battle just as Flatley's group began its attack. Brassfield and Mattson piled
in, only to find two Zeros on their tails. Brassfield threw his Wildcat into
a wild skid, and the Zero shot past him. He shot it down. Seconds later he
spotted a Japanese dive bomber below him. He shot it down, too. Pulling out
of his dive, he found three Zeros still with him. One round of 7.7 millimeter
smashed into his cockpit clock, showering him with broken glass. Another
round grazed his left leg. He escaped by flying into a cloud. Mattson went
after three Zeros and, each time he opposed one, found another on his tail.
He damaged one Zero but had his tail section badly shot up.
Thousands of feet below the fi~zhter action, Lieutenant
Roger Woodhull, leader of the eight dive bombers
85
deployed to protect Yorktown from torpedo plane attack, was having his own
troubles. Using dive bombers for antitorpedo-plane work was a makeshift
arrangement at best. A number of aviators, including Lieutenant Commander
Oscar Pederson, had long argued that American carriers needed more fighter
aircraft if bomber and torpedo strikes against the Japanese and the carriers
themselves were to have adequate protection. As things stood, there simply
were not enough fighters to do either job properly, when both had to be done
simultaneously. The need for additional fighters would be only one of the
many hard lessons of the Coral Sea.
Dive bombers had been assigned to anti-torpedo-plane work on the assumption
that Japanese torpedo planes would be at least as slow and as vulnerable as
the American Devastator was. Task Force 17 assumed that the Japanese would
lumber in, just above the surface, making the same maximum 100 knots the
armed Devastators were capable of. Thus, the American dive bombers, slow as
they were, being free of a bombload, should be able to cope with that kind of
enemy plane in such an attack.
That day at the Coral Sea Americans learned another lesson the hard way. The
Japanese Nakajima-97 shipbased bomber was a highly versatile airplane. It
could perform either high-level bombing or low-level torpedo missions. And it
had approximately twice the speed of the Devastator.
Woodhull and his dive bomber pilots could only watch in amazement as the
eighteen Japanese torpedo bombers raced toward Yorktown at 180 knots, 5,000
feet above the water. They roared over and past Woodhull's dive bombers, then
nosed into steep power glides, leveling off at altitudes of 100 to 500 feet.
Observers on the two American carriers were also stunned. What kinds of
planes were these to go so fast while lugging a torpedo? And what kinds of
torpedoes were they carrying to survive such a long fall, then to level off
and straighten out at proper depth on an attack course?
Each of the eighteen Japanese torpedo planes flew into attach position and
began its launching approach without 86
interference from a single American plane. Their escorting fighters, no
longer needed for protection, turned on Woodhull's eight dive bombers. It was
then the Japanese's turn for a surprise; the dive bombers had rear gunners,
every one of whom appeared to be a sharpshooter. Woodhull's planes got off
2,800 rounds and shot down four Japanese fighters. But only half the dive
bombers got home safely. Four Yorktown pilots, with their gunners, went down;
none was recovered.
In less than twenty-four hours Yorktown's aircraft had accounted for thirty
Japanese carrier planes, at a cost to themselves of seven dive bombers and
three fighters. The rest was now up to the carrier's ship's company.
Word of Milholin's radar sighting had been passed through Yorktown before I1
A.M. Captain Buckmaster estimates! that the attack would come at about 11:15.
Long before then, all hands-even Lieutenant Commander Ralph Arnold, the
supply officer-were at battle stations. Arnold had talked Ernie Davis into
letting him have command of a pair of .50-caliber machine guns on the bow.
On Yorktown's flag bridt!e Admiral Fletcher turned to an aide. "Well," the
admiral said, "we've done all we can. I guess the only thing left to do is
put on this tin hat." The defense of Yorktown, in keeping with ancient naval
custom, was now out of his hands. From this point on, it was the captain's
show. Elliott Buckmaster, Brooklyn-born sailor-aviator, was in charge.
Ernie Davis' voice came booming over the loudspeaker: "Air department take
cover. Gunnery department take over." At 11:06 A.M., Bennett and Milholin,
watching the radarscope, reported that the Japanese were twenty miles away.
Five minutes later, Yorktowrr lookouts could see the Japanese torpedo planes
through their binoculars, range fifteen. miles. Lieutenant Commander
Delaney's sweating engineers wound up Yorktown's four giant propellers until
the great ship was knifing through the water at thirty knots.
Both Yorktown and Lexington were running southeast, with Yorktown the
farther south of the two ships. Because she could accelerate faster than the
larger Lexington, she was able to draw ahead.
87
Along Yorktown's catwalks, gunners began removing from the muzzles of their
.SOs and .20s the covers used to keep gun barrels free of salt spray. At
11:17 the torpedo planes began turning in toward Lexington. A minute later,
other enemy planes headed for Yorktown.
Seaman Lew Godfrey, stationed in the radio direction finder room, peeked
through a port at the incoming Japanese planes and was astonished at what he
saw. Some weeks earlier Godfrey and other radiomen had been ordered to
assemble certain classified documents. Among them were tactical instructions
for the pilots of Torpedo 5. The Japanese torpedo planes, he now noted, were
using the same tactics recommended for Torpedo 5. The Japanese had formed a
large arc; then they all had turned simultaneously toward Yorktown. Godfrey
assumed that his ship was finished.
The heavy cruisers with Yorktown began firing their eight-inch guns, aiming
into the water at short range. The explosions created towering waterspouts.
Nello Tafi, a plane captain in Scouting 5, reported that a cruiser "laid her
shells right in front of one Jap torpedo plane, and a big column of water
spouted up. The torpedo plane hit it and did a complete somersault, landing
in the water on its back."
Quartermaster Howard Kiser, who was Yorktown's best helmsman, had the wheel
watch when the attack began. Kiser could steer "nothing to left or right"
when so ordered, and almost no one aboard could match his performance. When
the attack commenced, Kiser was inside Yorktown's armored wheelhouse,
responding to orders from Captain Buckmaster. The captain could also have re-
mained in the safety of the wheelhouse, peering out through slits in its
armor plating, but he did not. "I felt it was imperative," he said after the
battle, "that I have unobstructed visibility, to avoid torpedo and bombing
attacks."
Buckmaster fought his battle from the open bridge,
shouting wheel and engine orders to Kiser through the armor slits. His
telephone talker, Seaman Nathan Ogdon,
raced from side to side of Yorktown's island with the 88
captain, and Chief Yeoman Henry Statchen, who was keeping a written record of
the action, tried to keep up as best he could. Three other telephone talkers
were on the bridge, all of them hard put to prevent the tangling of their
lines.
Three planes came in from Yorktown's right rear, launching their torpedoes
after they passed behind her stern. The torpedoes came in from rear left and
were aimed for the carrier's port quarter. Buckmaster shouted an order
through an armor slit, and Quartermaster Kiser spun the wheel hard right.
This energized the huge motors in Yorktowrr's steering engine room, some 400
feet away. A giant piston retracted, another extended, and a mammoth steering
post pivoted, swinging the great blade of Yorktown's rudder to starboard.
Yorktown's stern dug into the sea, and the carrier's stern swung to port as
her bow came right. The torpedoes passed harmlessly behind her.
Four more Nakajimas dropped their torpedoes, followed by two others. Chief
Milt Wester of Fighting 42 was on Yorktown's hangar deck, waiting to service
his planes, when he saw a Japanese torpedo about twenty feet away to
starboard, maintaining a course parallel to Yorktown's.
Wester grabbed the nearest telephone talker and ordered him, "Tell the
bridge about that fish!"
The message was relayed to Captain Buckmaster, who replied to his talker,
"There's one on the port side, too."
Seaman Ed Cavanaugh, whose job ordinarily was to scoop ice cream in the
dairy bar, was manning the aftermost .SO-caliber machine gun on the port
catwalk. His station was just below the landing signal officer's platform. As
the battle began, Lieutenant Norwood Campbell, the LSO, jumped down to give
him a hand. Campbell pointed out the targets while Cavanaugh let fly. But
almost every time he opened up on an enemy plane, one of Yorktown's 5-inch
guns would knock down the target first. The after 5inchers nailed four
Japanese planes, and the forward mounts three mare before Cavanaugh got in a
decent shot. A Nakajima somehow managed to get through the 5-inch gunfire and
flew straight into Cavanaugh's sights. "I put a very long burst into him,"
Cavanaugh reported, "and he veered toward Lexington." The plane went into a
sudden 89
double snap roll and splashed into the water at Lexington's side.
Answering Buckmaster's commands, Yorktown veered sharply from side to side.
Nine torpedoes were fired at her, and he managed to evade them all. His
gunners shot down eight of the nine torpedo planes.*
At 11:24 A.M., the torpedo planes having completed their runs, Japanese dive
bombers were in their attack. Buckmaster, still running Yorktown from the
open bridge, watched the bombs start to fall, calling his orders to the
helmsman through the slits of the armored wheelhouse. Somehow the ship-
maneuvering like a destroyer-was able to dodge all the bombs. In the early
moments of the battle Buckmaster had called Jack Delaney, the chief engineer,
to order, "Give me everything you've got."
"You've got it, Captain!" Delaney had replied, for he had worked Yorktown up
to 32.7 knots, or about 38 miles an hour. She was moving at destroyer speed,
traveling so fast, in fact, that her escorting cruisers and destroyers,
spread around her in Cruising Disposition Victor, could
scarcely keep pace.
Bombs were falling all over the area. Seaman John Ginn, loading one of the
rapid-fire 1.1-inch gun mounts, happened to glance up front his work. "What
1 saw froze me," he recalled later. "A Jap pilot let his bomb go, and it
looked like it was coming right at me. My hesitation made me jam the barrel.
A gunner's mate kept pounding on my foot and shouting at me to clear the gun,
but it seemed a long time before he got through to me. I snapped out of it

* Lexington was less fortunate. Japanese planes attacked her just one minute
before the assault began on Yorktown. Lexington worked up to thirty knots
quickly, using the tremendous power plant with which she had supplied
electricity to the city of Tacoma, Washington, during a blackout a dozen
years earlier. At sea she answered her helm sluggishly, well enough perhaps
for a battle cruiser, which she was originally built to be, but not nearly
quickly enough for the carrier she had become. She managed to make one turn
to starboard and one to port and was just coming right again when two
torpedoes and four bombs slammed into her. Four more bombs, though
near-misses, were damaging anyway. Lexington was hurt; at the time no one
knew how badly.
90
and cleared the barrel just as the bomb passed over my head. It exploded
right below us, in the water."
Ginn's problem with jamming was not unusual. After the battle, gunnery
officers calculated that there had been more than fifty breakdowns or
stoppages in the ship"s sixtLen rapid-fire 1.1-inch guns.
Marine Corporal Emil Matkowski had a similar scare. He was firing across the
flight deck when his target released its 1,000-pound bomb. It headed straight
for Matkowski, passing so close that the corporal swore he could have struck
a match on it. The bomb severed a strand of a catwalk lifeline, a foot from
where Matkowski was stationed, before it plunged into the ocean.
When they exploded in the water, the bombs threw spray-and steel
fragments-across Yorktown's decks. At least a dozen Yorktowners were pinked
by this form of waterborne shrapnel.
By 11:24 Yorktown gunners had knocked down four of the dive bombers
(bringing the ship's total kill to forty-four Japanese planes) and had evaded
nine torpedoes and ten halt-ton bombs.
Then a Japanese pilot scored a hit.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Radioman Marlin Brock felt an odd thump originating not far from where he was
stationed; then he heard an excited voice in his headphones: "Bomb hit! Aft
the stack! Just forward of Number Two elevator!"
Captain Buckmaster had seen the plane approaching and had watched its bomb
as it was released. "Our antiaircraft fire cut the plane in two," he
reported, "and parts of the plane fell on each side of the ship." But the
bomb had 91
been released seconds before the plane, an Aichi-99, disintegrated.
Every Navy warship is divided into major sections and is further divided
into numbered and lettered subcompartments. Yorktown was divided into four
major sections--A, B, C, and D-working from the bow aft. :The Japanese bomb
plunged into the starboard side of I'orktown's flight deck, near the
beginning point of Section C, between her center line and bridge
superstructure.
Experts later concluded that the bomb was a twelve-inch armor--piercing
naval shell, fitted with fins, of the same type that the Japanese had used at
Pearl Harbor. It was designed to reach a ship's vitals before detonating, and
that was precisely what happened. The bomb left a hole only one foot in
diameter where it had penetrated Yorktown's flight deck.
The bomb plunged through Yorktown's flight deck and went into Bombing 5's
ready room, where her pilots were briefed before combat. With most of her
aircraft aloft, the room was nearly deserted. Budd Beistel, an aviation me-
chanic, was alone in the ready room, manning a telephone headset. He watched
in fascination as the bomb plunged into his compartment, struck a steel safe,
then glanced inboard and downward. Beistel pushed the button on his phone and
hesitatingly informed the bridge, "Sir, I think a bomb just passed through
here!"
Below the ready room was the hangar deck. On duty there was a group of men
called Repair 7. It was composed, like all repair groups, of an odd
assortment of sailors. Some of them were musicians and yeomen; others were
highly skilled electricians, shipfitters, carpenters, and machinist's mates.
Their job was to repair any damage inflicted by the enemy, minutes after it
occurred.
Seaman Emil Puksar, one of the members of Repair 7, later reported, "That
bomb came through the overhead and went into the deck about four feet from
me." But before it plunged farther into Yorktown's vital regions, it took
away half of Seaman Pat Palumbo's skull. Palumbo was the first member of
Yorktown's ship's company, as the men not in a 92
carrier's air group are called, to die as the result of enemy action.
Certain members of Repair 7, curious to see what had happened after the bomb
had torn through the hangar deck, ran to the hole the bomb had made and
peered through it. The uprushing explosion killed Seaman Walter Krupinski,
injured Fred Symonis, and cost Ed Pettipas an eye. Aviation Mechanic Bill
Josen, who had gone nowhere near the hole, was killed by shrapnel that came
out of it. The same shrapnel pierced the wallet in the rear pocket of. Chief
Art Powers and pinked him in a sensitive area of his body.
An aircraft carrier's hangar deck is also its main, or first, deck. Below,
other decks are numbered in sequence, all the way down to the ship's double
bottom. In the Japanese bomb's path, below the hangar deck, were the Marine
Corps berthing compartment, which was on the second deck; the ship's store
compartment on the third deck; and an aviation spare parts storeroom on the
fourth deck. Below the fourth deck, made of solid armor piating, was
Yorktown's main engine room.
The bomb pierced the fii-ht deck, ready room, hangar deck, Marines'
compartment, and ship's store compartment. It finally detonated when it
struck the armor plate in the aviation storeroom. It exploded, in fact,
almost directly over Commander Delaney's head.
The explosion gutted the aviation storeroom on the fourth deck; fortunately,
no one was in it at the time. On the second deck it wrecked lockers and
rifles in the Marines' compartment, which was also deserted. On the third
deck, in the ship's store compartment, a large one, running almost the full
width of the ship, fifty-four men, members of Repair 5, were on duty.
The bomb, bursting on the deck below, ripped up through this compartment and
killed the men of Repair 5, waiting there to repair damage occurring
elsewhere in the ship. Forty-one of the men were killed instantly.
Machinist's Mate Worth Hare survived the explosion, although he was badly
burned. He lost consciousness, 93
came to, then led survivors to safety in the next compartment, aft, where
Repair 4 was stationed.
Lieutenant Milton Ricketts, officer in charge of Repair 5, was knocked over
a fireplug and his skull was smashed; yet he managed to pay out hose and turn
on the water before he died, thereby probably saving a number of lives. He
was posthumously awarded Yorktown's second Medal of Honor for deeds done that
day.
Parts of the exploding bomb pierced bulkheads fore and aft of the Repair 5
compartment. One piece caught Arthur Triplett, ship's baker, in the ribs. "I
got to sick bay and sat down outside," Triplett reported, "figuring I could
wait until the serious cases were treated. A corpsman came by, jabbed me with
morphine, and gave me a shot of Ten High whiskey. Then he went off to tend
other wounded." But before departing, the corpsman set the bottle of whiskey
on the deck. "I figured I might as well be comfortable," Triplett said, "so
1 finished off the rest of the whiskey." He then dozed off. When he awoke, he
staggered into Yorktown's sick bay just as doctors were identifying a severed
head as his. "Like hell it is!" Triplett roared in shock and indignation.
From start to finish, Yorktown's battle lasted only thirteen minutes. By
11:31 A.M. the surviving Japanese planes had begun to head for their
rendezvous point. When the skis appeared clear of the enemy, Buckmaster
directed his executive officer, Commander Dixie Kiefer, to go below and make
a personal assessment of the battle damage.
A certain amount of damage was obvious from the fiiRht deck. One near-miss
had rocked Yorktown so hard that her radar antenna, towering 100 feet above
her waterline, had been damaged. Emergency repairs were quickly made.
Belowclecks, concussion had damaged the exhaust uptakes from Fire Rooms 7,
8, and 9, Yorktown's superhecrter boilers. Because the uptakes could not
carry smoke from the boilers up through the carrier's stacks, it was forced
into the firerooms, making them untenable. Volunteers, fighting through the
smoke, cleared the uptakes. Even with the upta'Kes not operating, Yorktown 94
managed to maintain a speed of twenty-four knots.
The most serious damage, Kiefer discovered, was on Yorktown's port side, the
result of two near-misses. There bombs exploding in the water had acted like
depth charges, blasting open seams in the carrier's portside fuel tanks, and
the carrier's lifeblood was gushing through the cracks. With the tanker
Neosho sunk, there was no way of knowing when Yorktown might get another
refueling. If she ran dry, she would be a helpless, floating hulk.
First, though, it was time to clean up the damage, carry away the bodies,
and collect the pieces. Musician Ed Oakley supervised the removal of the dead
from Repair 5 to the hangar deck. Corpsmen bribed sailors with shots of Ten
High to get the work done. Shipfitter Earl Fogarty found the body of Bill
Kowalcewski, a machinist's mate, and the dead man's brother, Victor, a
fireman, helped carry the body topside.
Most of the crew skipped supper that night, content to eat the 10,000 candy
bars passed around before the battle began. Those who did visit the galley
wished that they had not, for the trip involved passing the sick bay and
looking at a pile of severed arms and legs. Funeral services for Yorktown's
dead were held by Chaplain Frank Hamilton at midnight. Bodies were placed in
white mattress covers, then weighted down with five-inch shells. Only a
handful of Yorktowners could stomach the burial detail; most of those who did
were pharmacist's mates. The bodies were slipped over the side, but even when
that grisly job was done, Hospital Corpsman Vince Haley recalled, "We have a
pile of spare human parts left over. There was nothing to do but put all of
them into a sack and let it go."
At 12:31 P.M., while the wounded were being treated and the dead collected,
Yorktown began recovering her attack group. One of the first planes aboard
was Lieutenant Floyd Moan's dive bomber. Both the pilot and his radioman, Bob
Hodgens, were wounded. The plane crashed into Yorktown's island, a total
wreck. It had been hit by twenty-two Japanese slugs. The crew was pulled out
of the wreckage, and what was left of the plane was shoved over the side.
95
By 1 P.M. all of Yorktown's planes that were to return had come home.
Missing, never to be recovered, were seven dive bombers and one fighter. Dick
Crommelin was aboard a destroyer; so were Ensign Jorgenson and his gunner,
Tony Brunetti. Of the six other crews, only Lieutenant Rowley and Seaman
Musgrove were still alive.
Twenty-two of the planes that Yorktown recovered were damaged, some with as
many as twenty-six bullet and cannon holes in their self-sealing fuel tanks.
Of the twenty tanks hit by gunfire, only three had leaked, and of those
three, two did not begin to leak until the planes were safely back aboard the
carrier.
The Japanese, on the other hand, had been reduced to an effective aircraft
force ef only 9 bombers, 6 torpedo planes, and 24 fighters. More than 100
Japanese planes, including snoopers and those aboard Shoho when she went
down, had been destroyed. Perhaps even more serious for Japan, their veteran
pilots had been lost with them. Among them was Lieutenant Commander
Takahashi, leader of the two strikes a~ainst the American carriers and the
nian who had led the Japanese dive bombers against Pearl Harbor.
Still, the Japanese had succeeded better than they knew. Lexington, hit by
two torpedoes and four bornbs, seemed at first to be seaworthy enough. She
slowed down briefly following the attack, picked up speed again, and even
recovered some of her aircraft, a number of which were refueled and launched
again. Then, at 12:47, an immense explosion shook the 27,000-ton ship. Her
amidships elevator popped up above the flight deck and settled back with a
crazy bulge in it. Lexington's crew, like Shokaku's, was forced to fight a
series of fierce fires.
Even then, Lexington seemed to be holding her own. In
time she reported that all her fires had been put out. At
2:45 P.M. she was rocked by another major explosion;
fires again broke out all over her. This time there was no
quenching them. By 4:30 Lexington stopped dead in the
water. At 5:10 the crew began abandoning ship, destroyers
and cruisers picking up 2,700 men. As darkness fell, the
old ship was a mass of flames. The destroyer Phelps was
96
ordered to move in and sink her with torpedoes. She went down at 8 P.M.
Feelings aboard Yorktown were mixed; the crew hated to see her go, but they
had also been concerned by her flames, which had illuminated the ocean for
miles around.
Yorktown took aboard nineteen orphan planes from Lexington and, by late
afternoon, had repaired seventeen of theca. Fletcher reasoned that he might
need them, for he believed a Japanese task force was in hot pursuit. The next
day, May 9, one of Yorktown's scouts did, in fact, report the sighting of an
enemy aircraft carrier, 175 mites to the northwest.~Fletcher launched all
available dive bombers and. even sent Commander Butch Schindler flying to
Australia, to seek B-17 assistance from MacArthur. But when the American
carrier strike, accompanied by fourteen B17's, arrived over the target, the
enemy carrier turned out to be Lilian Reef, a small rock outcropping
northeast of Australia. From 20,000 feet it looked like a carrier task force,
streaming a white wake behind it.
Yorktown had her planes back aboard by noon, except for Ensign Lawrence
Traynor's dive bomber, which crashed over the side. Traynor and his radioman,
Jim Cales, were picked up by the destroyer Morris.
Then Yorktown's radar went dead again. Back up the mast went Vane Bennett
and Speedy Attaway to discover that explosions during the battle had loosened
the clamp holding the antenna to the mast. The antenna, a bulky bed-
spring-like apparatus, had fallen over at a slant. Bennett, conferring with
Buckmaster, worked out an ingenious plan to make repairs. The ship was turned
downwind, ;matching her speed with that of the prevailing wind, so that the
apparent wind across her flight deck was zero. With this artificial calm,
Bennett, Attaway, Chief Electrician's Mate Frank Flynn, and a working party
of eight climbed the mast and pushed the antenna upright again.
Bennett then instructed the working party to walk the antenna around and
around, unscrewing it fron-. its base. With that done, the antenna was tipped
to one side while Attaway and Flynn reached inside the base to make repairs.
Then the working party walked the antenna in the 97
opposite direction, screwing it firmly into place. As these repairs wer;, in
progress, the men stationed at Ensign John Lorenz's after 1.1-inch gun mounts
kept their eyes fastened on the radar antenna of the escort cruiser Portland.
If that antenna stopped, it meant that a target had been picked up.
Fortunately, Portland's antenna continued to revolve without interruption.
Yorktown need not have worried, for the Japanese, just as punched out as the
Americans, were also retreating. The Coral Sea was again quiet.
The first carrier-against-carrier battle was over. Was there a winner?
In terms of ships destroyed, the Japanese clearly had the edge. They had
sunk Lexington, a great carrier. American pilots had destroyed Slaolao, a
third-rate carrier. Two destroyers had been destroyed: Kikuzuki by the
Americans, Sinrs by the Japanese. The only other ship destroyed of any
consequence was the American oiler Neosho.
The whole point of the battle had been Port Moresby; the Japanese had wanted
to take it; the Americans had wanted to protect it from them. Port Morseby
had been saved, and Australia at the very least had been given a respite. The
Japanese had taken T'ulagi; getting it back, along with Guadalcanal, would be
a long, bloody, and sometimes uncertain business.
The Japanese were still preparing for a showdown naval battle at Midway, but
when that battle came, the two frontline carriers from the Coral Sea, Shokaku
and Zuikaku, would be absent, Shokaku because of battle damage and Zuikaku
because of a shortage of planes and pilots. Yorktown had been chiefly
responsible for this.

On May 10 the Navy Department issued a communique about the five-day battle,
reporting that twenty-five Japanese ships had been definitely sunk, five
probably sunk, and four possibly sunk. "Australia Saved!" headlines cried.
The Japanese, in an equally absurd communique, reported that both American
carriers, Yorktown and Lexington, had been sunk; they also reported they had
destroyed several battleships, even though none had been there.
98
The next day, May 11, Fletcher divided his forces. He ordered cruisers
Astoria, New Orleans, and Minneapolis, and four destroyers to put into
Noumea, New Caledonia. Yorktown and the other ships, carrying the crew
members from Le rinoton, headed once again for Tongatabu. Yorktowners
speculated that Fletcher did not want the carrier at Noumea for fear that
word of her damaged condition would slip out. New Caledonia was in Free
French hands, but the place, it was said, also harbored Nazi sympathizers.
Far to the northeast of Yorktown, Admiral Nimitz was still worried,
needlessly, about the security of Port Moresby. One of his carriers in the
southwest Pacific was sunk; the ether was damaged. That left him only Hornet
and Enterprise, operating out of Pearl Harbor. Although he suspected that the
Japanese were preparing to start somethin,., at Midway, he rushed Hornet and
Enterprise southwest, leaving a vulnerable flank unprotected.
Yorktown dropped anchor at Ton gatabu on May 17 and no one was happier about
it than Commander Delaney. Re had used all of Yorktown's fuel to get there
and was burning diesel fuel as he pulled into Nukualofa Anchorage. The first
order of business was refueling, and the only fuel available was in a British
ship that had recently put into the harbor. "The stuff was lousy, loaded with
sulfur or something," a Yorktown engineer recalled. Still, it would burn, and
Yorktown and her escorts took all of it they could get.
An inspection of Yorktown's fuel tank damage revealed that permanent repairs
could be made only in dry dock. Yorktowners, with the nearest dry dock
thousands of miles away, did the best they could.
As fuel was being taken aboard and as temporary
repairs were being made; Yorktown remained on battle
alert, for Fletcher was still not convinced that the enemy
might not be near at hand. All the guns were manned, and
Ensign John Lorenz was assigned to patrol the seventyfive-foot-wide entrance
to the channel in a forty-foot motor
launch. His crew was armed with Springfield rifles and
several Browning submachine guns. One night, ludicrously,
the coxswain managed to run the launch on some rocks,
99
and the crew was marooned there for two hours.
On May 24, Fletcher, as commander of Task Force 17, received a high-priority
top-secret message from the commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific fleet.
"What it said," Fletcher recalled, "was simply this: Get the hell back here,
quick."

CHAPTER NINE

Midway Atoll is a miserable handful of land. Surrounded on almost all sides
by a barrier reef, it contains only two pieces of high ground-Sand Island,
barely two miles long, and Eastern Island, hardly a mile long. In the center
of the atoll is a lagoon, with a narrow ship's channel leading into it. On
the atoll's western edge is an open harbor of sorts. Yet this atoll, this
flyspeck of neglected real estate, became in late May, 1942, the object of
the greatest naval confrontation the world had ever seen.
The capture of Port Moresby, thwarted (only temporarily, the Japanese
thought) by the Battle of the Coral Sea, was a part of phase two of Japanese
strategy. The same phase two dictated the capture of Midway and Kiska in the
western Aleutians. Phase three, for which planning was already in its final
stages, involved the capture of Samoa, Fiji, and New Caledonia.
The Japanese idea was to develop an outer perimeter, an
inviolable defensive line, that no American force would
ever be able to penetrate. The line, when phase three had
been completed, would run from Kiska far in the north,
south (and even a little east) to Midway, southwest to
Wake Island, the Marshalls, and the Gilberts; loop around
100
Samoa, Fiji, and New Caledonia; and anchor finally at Port Moresby.
Part of the Japanese strategy-an essential part-was a showdown battle with
the U.S. Pacific fleet. A move against Midway, Admiral Yamamoto reasoned,
would bring that fleet into action. The Americans, he thought correctly,
would never allow Midway to fall, as earlier they had allowed Wake to fall.
Midway, after all, was the far outpost of the Hawaiian Islands, little more
than 1,000 miles from Pearl Harbor itself.
For the combined action against Midway and the Aleutians, the Japanese
assembled almost everything they had except the carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku,
the former having put into the Inland Sea for repairs and the latter being
immobile at Truk, awaiting new planes and new pilots. The backbone of the
Japanese force, as a result, was four big carries, instead of six-Akagi,
Kaga, Hiryu, and Soryu, carrying a total of 93 fighters, 86 bombers, and 93
torpedo planes, 272 aircraft in all. All four carriers had taken part in the
attack on Pearl Harbor and were under command of Admiral Chuichi Nagumo. The
assignment of the carrier force was to hunt down and destroy the U.S. Pacific
fleet. Accompanying the carrier force were two battleships, two cruisers, and
twelve destroyers.
There were, in addition, two occupation forces. The Midway force,
transporting 5,000 soldiers, consisted of one small carrier, two battleships,
eight cruisers, and ten destroyers. The Aleutians force consisted of two
small carriers, six cruisers, and thirteen destroyers. It transported 500
soldiers and 700 labor troops.
The heavy Japanese surface ships were concentrated into a main body, which
was to take up a position between

* The "one decisive battle" objective was a key factor in both Japanese and
American prewar naval strategy in the Pacific. Destroy the Japanese Navy,
American officers reasoned, and the path was clear to Tokyo. Destroy the U.S.
Pacific fleet, Japanese officers reasoned, and it would be years before their
homeland could be threatened. This would allow time for making defenses so
strong that America, stymied, might agree to a negotiated peace, with Japan
gaining all her Asian objectives.
101
Midway and the Aleutians. It consisted of seven battleships, a very small old
carrier, two cruisers, and thirteen destroyers. It also included two ships
loaded with midget submarines, which would be based ashore after Midway was
taken, for its defense. The great Japanese Admiral Yamamoto was sailing in
the main body, flying his flag from the immense 60,000-ton battleship Yamato.
The Japanese Navy, obviously, was spread widely over the Pacific Ocean. All
postbattle critics have varying views on the advisability of this strategy.
Admiral Morison, in History of United States Naval Operations in World War
11, suggests that Yamamoto did not anticipate that the Americans would oppose
him in the initial phases of the invasion of Midway. Thus, says Morison,
Yamamoto would have time to consolidate his forces and crush the Americans.
Looking at plans from Yamamoto's viewpoint, however, things may be seen
differently. Even without the main body, he had far more than sufficient
strength to crush the American forces. So his battleship force was actually
right where it ought to be, acting as a powerful roving linebacker, ready to
rush in where needed. If the American fleet, as he hoped it would be, was
lured toward the Aleutians, the main body could combine with other forces
there to sink it. If it moved on Midway, that would be the main body's line
of march. And it could be used in either place as a mop-up force.
Admiral Chester Nimitz, at Pearl Harbor, counted up what he had to oppose
this mighty armada. It was not much. Task Force 17, again, would be commanded
by Admiral Fletcher in Yorktown, but with Lexington gone, Yorktown was the
only carrier in the task force. With Yorktown would be two cruisers and six
destroyers. One of those destroyers would again be Hammann. Task Force 16,
under the command of Rear Admiral Raymond A. Spruance (Halsey had been
hospitalized with a skin disease), consisted of the carriers Enterprise and
Hornet, six cruisers, and nine destroyers.
Both sides also had a number of submarine squadrons to take up picket-line
duty north of Hawaii, but the boats in 102
both squadrons were old and slow; submarine officers pleaded with members of
Yamamoto's staff to substitute faster, fresher boats in their place. The plea
was turned down. The result was that by the time the Japanese submarines
arrived on station, the three American carriers had already slipped through
their net.
One submarine, not part of the net, was 1-168, commanded by Lieutenant
Commander Yahachi Tanabe, who had orders to scout close to Midway. By May 31
she was on station, ready for action. 1-168 was to play a vital part in
Yorktown's fate.
Yorktown, the ship that almost alone had reduced the odds in the approaching
battle from impossible to merely overwhelming, hoisted anchor at Tongatabu on
May 24 and began steaming for Pearl Harbor. May 26, was a day to note; it
marked Yorktown's hundredth day at sea without proper replenishment, a record
no other modern major American warship had even approached.
That evening, before the movie on the hangar deck began, Yorktown's band
broke its instruments out of a month's storage and gave the crew a concert.
Special guests, seated front and center, were the burned and blackened
survivors of Repair 5.
Movie time aboard a Navy ship is attended by an unchanging protocol when the
commanding officer is aboard. The captain waits until just before showtime to
make his appearance. He is preceded by a master-at-arms who roars, "Attention
on deck!" All officers and men then rise to respectful attention until the
captain is seated and the master-at-arms thunders, "Seats!" Seconds later the
film starts rolling.
On the night of May 26 the sailors of Yorktown did notmerely rise
respectfully when Captain Elliott Buckmaster made his appearance. They leaped
to their feet, plunging into a frenzy of cheering, stamping, whistling, and
shouting. It was an ovation to the man who had steered them through the Coral
Sea and might now have to steer them through they knew not what. For all that
she had been through, there was still plenty of spirit in bedraggled Old
Yorky.
103
Japanese sailors, too, were cheering that night, for it was their Navy
Day, the thirty-seventh anniversary of Admiral Heihachiro Togo's annihilation
of a Russian fleet at the Battle of Tsushima.*
On May 27, Yorktown steamed up Pearl Harbor's narrow channel to the
accompaniment of whistles, sirens, and cheers, circled Ford Island, and
headed straight into dry dock. Water was drained from the basin until
Yorktown was resting on keel blocks; more water was drained away until the
torn plates from which her oil had been gushing were fully exposed. Admiral
Nimitz carne aboard to inspect damage personally. Then the carrier was turned
over to the yard's workmen.

To this day, the story has persisted that 1,400 shipyard workmen fully
repaired Yorktown in three days and three nights. Admiral Morison, for one,
implies that Yorktown's "structural strength," including her bulkhead
stanchions, was adequately restored. These workmen were chiefly a supply and
reprovisioning force. It is far from accurate to presume that the repairs
were anything but very rough, what sailors call jury rig. Welders did, in
fact, patch Yorktown's hull, and damaged compartments were braced with
timbers. But only a few of the sprung watertight doors were fixed, and
Commanded Delaney's three superheater boilers, knocked out at the Coral Sea,
were not even touched. Yorktown would never be able to top twenty-seven
knots, her engineers decided.
Yorktowners hoped, understandably enough, that their ship would be ordered
back to the West Coast, where they would get liberty and rest. Seaman Warren
Woodard was one of the many hopeful crew members, but he began to

* For the Japanese, however, it was May 27, not May 26, because the Japanese
Navy used the East Longitude date and set their clocks on Tokyo time. This
sort of thing makes researching the Battle of Midway a nightmare. Japanese
log entries are twenty-one hours later than Midway time. Task Forces 16 and
17 used the same West Longitude date as Midway, but their time of day was
Zone plus ten, two hours later than Midway's. fn the account that follows,
all times, for both sides, are those used at Midway.
104
have his doubts as he watched a big crane lift the undersized railroad cars
of the Oahu Railway Company to the fii,-,ht deck for unloading. Yorktown,
Woodard suddenly decided, was taking on far too much in the way of stores for
a trip to a Stateside yard. The one man elated by Yorktown's provisioning was
Chief Commissary Steward Cal Callaway. Wherever Yorktown was going, the crew
was going to eat well; Callaway signed delivery orders for seventy-five days'
worth of provisions.
Not all these provisions reached Yorktown's food lockers. Seaman Emit
Puksar, recalling the old maritime adage "One hand for yourself, one hand for
the ship" managed to make off with a canned ham and several gallon cans of
peaches, pineapples, and pears while he was working with a provisioning
party. Ship's Cook Tomas Saxon, one of the few Yorktowners allowed liberty
ashore, smuggled a rabbit aboard. No one was sure whether it was a pet or the
makings of a stew.
As Yorktown had approached Pearl Harbor, all her planes that would fly had
been sent ashore. A few days later disturbing news came back from shore
headquarters: some of the aircraft would not be coming back.
Torpedo 5, with the important exception of her pilots, radiomen, and
bombardiers, would remain aboard. The airmen would be replaced by Torpedo 3,
a Saratoga squadron that had been put ashore months before when their carrier
had limped off to Bremerton shipyard in the state of Washington with a
torpedo hole in her side. Yorktown's torpedo airmen were under orders to
start checking out in the new Grumman TBF Avengers with which the carrier was
being provided.
Bombing 5 was to come back aboard following the completion of repairs, but
this time it would be acting as Yorktown's scout squadron, assuming,
temmorarily, the designation Scouting 5. The old Scouting 5, which had taken
a very bad beating at the Coral Sea, would remain ashore, to be replaced by
another Saratoga squadron, Bombing 3. Last, Fighting 42's name would be
changed to Fighting 3, with a new skipper and a new executive officer. Even
so, sixteen of its pilots would be Yorktown veterans.
105
The fighting squadron's strength was being increased, and that was good
news. Apparently someone had finally listened to complaints and suggestions
from frontline aviators. This time out, Yorktown would carry twentyseven
Wildcats, instead of only eighteen.
On balance, however, Yorktowners were upset. Commander Oscar Pederson, air
group commander, was furious. No good coach, he argued, ever broke up a win-
nin~ team, and Yorktown's old team had seen more combat ~than any other air
group in the Navy. Pederson even went ashore to complain to Rear Admiral
Leigh Noyes, commander of the Navy's Pacific air arm. It did no good; the
orders stood as written.
Ten days earlier, Pederson had written a prophetic note in his account of
the Coral Sea action, in which he recorded that the Japanese escort ships
scattered during attacks instead of closing in around their carriers. "In the
event that the Japanese change their system and put a heavy cordon of ships
around their large vessels," Pederson wrote, "it is doubtful whether a
successful torpedo attack could be launched by TBDs without loss of the major
part of the squadron."
Yorktown would have to go into her final battle with the obsolescent
Devastator torpedo planes. At least, however,
she was getting a better version of the Wildcat fighter plan,,,, the F4F-4.
Assigned as chief engineering officer for Fighting 3, ne Fighting 42, was
Chief Milt Wester. When he heard that Yorktown was going to get F417-4s in
place of F4F-3s, he began itching to inspect the new version, for after all,
it would be his job to tend the planes. But in a typically infuriating
example of bureaucratic red tape, he was not allowed to go ashore to look at
the new aircraft. "I was really in trouble," Wester stated. "These were
new-type aircraft, which we knew nothing about, and I couldn't go ashore to
get a little indoctrination because the word had been passed that no one was
to leave the ship."
On May 28, Hornet and Enterprise steamed out of Pearl Harbor. A number of
Yorktowners, watching them depart, still labored under the impression that
those two carriers 106
would fight the next battle while Yorktown headed Stateside for overhaul and
repair. At 9 A.M. on May 30 the dry dock was reflooded and Yorktown eased out
of it, under way again, thereby maintaining her reputation as a steamer.
Since January 1, 1941, she had logged more than 450 days at sea.
Yorktown was well out from Oahu when Captain Buckmaster picked up a
microphone and addressed the crew. The ship, he said, was going to fight one
more battle. When that was over, he had personal orders from Admiral Nimitz
to take Yorktown and her crew "back to the States." His voice, normally so
dispassionate, rose as he concluded: "And not just for any two weeks,
either!" Yorktowners burst into cheers. They began counting the time. In two
weeks, surely three at most, they would be heading home.
Not long after the captain made his speech, Vane Bennett's radar picked up
a flight of aircraft coming out from Hawaii, and lookouts soon had them in
their binoculars. Men crowded the catwalks to view a heartwarming sight: more
than six dozen airplanes were heading for Yorktown's teakwood deck. Here came
the muscle, the power. The planes passed over Yorktown in salute, then began
peeling off to join the landing circle. Lieutenant Commander Lance Massey led
in the fourteen old TBDs of Saratoga's Torpedo 3. Lieutenant Commander Max
Leslie led in Saratoga's Bombing 3, with eighteen planes in all. Lieutenant
Commander John S. Thach had taken over the fighter squadron, adding himself,
a new executive officer, and nine young pilots to the sixteen veteran pilots
from Fighting 42 (now Fighting 3). Lieutenant Wally Short, an old Yorktowner,
led in nineteen Dauntless dive bombers, now designated Scouting 5.
The planes fell into line and began flying down the carrier's port side.
Each made its turn under her stern, the pilot watching the landing signal
officer's paddles to determine whether he was high or low or had a wing down.
Then, when the LSO gave him the throat cutting signal, he knew he could
safely throttle his engine back and land. When Lieutenant Donald Lovelace,
Fighting 3's executive 107
officer, swooped in, his Wildcat's tail hook was quickly fr:c; from the
arresting cable, and he taxied forward, out of the way. As he reached a point
below Lieutenant Oxy Huribert's gunnery platform, catwalk men pulled on their
levers, and a flight-deck barrier rose into place behind him.
The barrier, a flue-foot-hiZh fence of cables, was there to prevent incoming
planes that had missed connecting with the arresting cables from crashing
into planes that had already landed. The fighter that followed Lovelace's
plane came in high, missing the arresting cable. The pilot tried to
accelerate to pick up flying speed, but he stalled out and floated over the
barrier fence, plunging into the back of Lovelace's Wildcat. One propeller
blade smashed through Lovelace's headrest, fracturing his skull. The next
blade severed the great arteries in his neck. A pharmacist's mate rushc:l to
the plane and pinched shut the gash in Lovelace's neck, but it was too late.
"There was nothin- that 1 or anyone else could do," Dr. Edward Kearney, one
of the medical officers, said afterward.
Chief Wester, who was supposed to know all about the new fighter planes, had
his own problems. These new Wildcats had folding wings so that more of them
could be stowed aboard aircraft carriers. But when the first Wildcat was
freed from the arresting gear, Wester and his men discovered that they did
not know how to fold the wings back, and he had been given only a single copy
of the new instructional manual to tell him how to operate them. Even more
perplexing, he had no spare parts for the planes, and the guns had not been
boresii-,hted.
The guns were a disappointment. Although the new Wildcat was equipped with
six .50-caliber machine guns, instead of four, the gain in firepower was
almost academic. The an3munition supply for the six new guns was only 240
rounds per barrel; each of the four guns on the earlier version had had 450
rounds per barrel.
Yorktown would have to do with what she had, for
events were building to a climax. Japanese plans called for
the northern force to launch an air attack a,-,ainst Dutch
Harbor, in the Aleutians, on June 3. The next day Admiral
Naguaao's four big carriers would strike Midway. A day or
108
two later the invasion force would storm ashore.* Only then, Yamamoto
probably reasoned, would the American fleet move into action. Nagumo's
carriers would hit it hard, and then the great Yamamoto and his battleships
would move in for the kill.
Shortly before noon on June 2, Yorktown and her escorts, officially called
Task Force 17, rendezvoused with
Enterprise and Hornet and their escorts, officially called
Task Force 16. Once again, as at the Coral Sea, Admiral Fletcher, in
Yorktown, took command of the combined fleet. Machinist's Mate George
Bateman, up from Yorktowfa's engine room for a breath of air, was impressed
by what he saw. "It sure looked like a lot of power to me," he recalled
later, "no matter how big the Jap fleet might be."

Far to the northwest Admiral Nagumo reviewed his final plans in the plotting
room aboard his flagship, the carrier Akagi. Nagumo decided to send 100
planes against Midway on June 4 and to hold back an equal number for a second
wave, part of which would be composed of Torpedo planes. It was the same
tactic he had worked to perfection against the British in the Indian Ocean,
when he had sunk new targets of opportunity while smashing his main objec-
tives.
Nagumo had many long-ranged scouts working for him, althout=h none of them
would be land-based, as at the Coral Sea. 'The scouts included cruiser and
battleship float planes with a range of 600 miles or more. He ordered that
seven of these scouts were to keep an eye open for an Enemy task force while
Midway was being hit; they would cover an arc from due south to northeast. He
reasoned that any American force that hoped to strike him while he was

* The invasion never took place, but if it had, the defenders on Midway were
ready. The atoll was dotted with artillery, and the Marines stationed there
were protected by bombproof shelters. The island had almost 3,000 defenders,
probably more than enough to stand off the 5,000 Japanese soldiers who were
supposed to come ashore. Midway was as carefully prepared for attack as
Tarawa would he later in the war, and the attacking force wasn't nearly as
impressive as the American force that finally took Tarawa.
109
attacking Midway would have to be somewhere in that area. If the scouts found
such a force, an unlikely ;,vent, he thought, the second wave would be
dispatched against it. Surety it would be sunk.
Nagutno, all his plans made, turned into his bunk the night of June 2
certain that he had done all he could do. He tray even have ceased to worry
about the absence of Shokaku and Zuikaku.

CHAPTER TEN

The Battle of Midway opened at 3 A.M. on June 3, more than 1,000 miles north
of the atoll itself. Planes from two medium Japanese carriers took off from
a point south of the Near and Rat Islands to strike the American base at
Dutch Harbor, approximately 250 miles east of the outermost ed,-,e of the
Aleutian chain.*
Admiral Nimitz, at his Pearl Harbor headquarters, was not f.;oled by this
maneuver. He knew that the main Japanese thrust was heading for Midway, and
he wanted to find the enemy ships as quickly as possible. The American search
began early on the morning of June 3, when waddling pBY Catalina patrol
bur,:bers rumbled down the runways at Midway.
The Catalina was both the joy and despair of American pilots. Parasol-winged
and high-tailed, it climbed, flew, and landed at nearly the same speed-about
sixty-five knots.

* The Aleutian campaign is outside the scope of this book. Suffice it to say
that both sides blundered in the fog and rain. The Americans were never able
to find the enemy ships, and the Japanese failed to entice major U.S. forces
from Pearl Harbor to assist the frustrated defenders of the Aleutians. The
Japanese did seize Attu and Kiska islands, encountering no resistance
whatever, but it was a meaningless conquest.
110
Armed only with .30-caliber machine guns in side blisters, the Catalinas were
deathtraps when cornered by Japanese fighters. But they had one redeeming
feature: they could fly almost all day long without being refueled.
Twenty-three of the amphibians were stationed at Midway, assigned to search
op, rations.
The first sighting report was received at 8:43 A.M. from a Catalina pilot,
Ensign Jewell Reid, who radioed: "Am investigating suspicious vessels."
Twenty-nine minutes later he reported that he could identify "two Japanese
cargo vessels," bearing 2,47 degrees true from Midway. Recd kept shadowing
the Japanese vessels until 11 A.M., amplifying his reports until the Midway
forces and Admiral Fletcher knew that eleven Japanese ships were west of
Midway, steaming toward the island at nineteen knots. Fletcher decided that
these ships were unconnected with the carrier striking force he was hoping to
find, and he was right-trey were part of the Midway occupation force. Nine
Army B- 17s took off from Midway to attack the convoy, reporting later that
they had hit two large warships. They had. in tact, missed again.
Fletcher was certain that the Japanese carriers would approach Midway from
the northwest. As soon as the enemy planes began their strike against the
island, he hoped to launch an attack against their carriers from his position
on their left clank. But at 7:31 P.M. on June 3, with the Japanese attack
expected to begin at dawn on June 4, Fletcher had still not located the
enemy's carrier force. He ordered Yorktown, Enterprise, and Hornet, along
with their escorts, to change course to the southwest, bringing him closer to
Midway, where he could be more certain of intercepting the enemy.
That evening Ship's Cook Renzie Cardin wrote long,
loving letters to both the girls to whom he was engaged. Sal
Monteleone and a few other diehards started a clandestine
crap game. Lieutenant Commanders Jack Delaney and Hubie Strange sat down in
Yorktown's wardroom for cups of
coffee and a discussion of the morrow's weather. As
aerologist, Strange had to find prevailing winds to facilitate
the launching of planes. If the air was calm, Delaney, as
111
chief engineer, had to turn up enough speed so tt, at Yorktown could produce
her own wind across the fiitht deck. As they were discussing these
possibilities, Jug itay, the communications officer, came into the wardroom.
He had just left the bridge, and he knew more about Midway battle strategy
than most Yorktowners did.
The Alaska strike, he explained to Delaney and Strange, was just a
diversionary feint. The ships sighted to the west had been mostly transports;
the Japanese carriers had still not been located, not even by the American
submarine screen north of Midway. But, said Ray, the carriers would certainly
be spotted the next day.
Chief Milt Wester and his mechanics worked through the night on Yorktown's
fighter planes. By dawn twentyfive would be ready to go, with the two wrecked
earlier in the Lovelace landing accident stowed below. Trouble had developed
in two torpedo planes during earlier search operations, but they, too, were
reported to be repaired and read), to go. At 9 P.M., in a briefing of all
pilots, radiomen, and gunners, Lieutenant Dick Cromwell of Fighting 3 gave a
speech a bit reminiscent of the talk Jo-Jo Powers had given just before the
Coral Sea battle. "The fate of the United States," Cromwell, member of a
famous fighting Navy family, said, "now rests in the hands of two hundred and
forty pilots" aboard Yorktown, Enterprise., and Hornet. He exhorted each man
to do his best.
At 1:30 A.M. on June 4 all Yorktown airmen ate breakfast. Afterward,
Radioman Wendell Anderson, who flew as gunner for Lieutenant Fred Herriman of
Torpedo 3, decided to check the condition of his plane, one of the two that
had developed trouble the day before. On the night deck he counted only
twelve TBDs; he tried again and still got the same total; it was two fewer
than should have been on the line.
He scampered down the ship's ladders to the hangar deck. There were no
torpedo planes there, either. Then, looking up, he saw his plane strapped to
the overhead where spare or dama0ed planes were ordinarily hung. "Perhaps,"
he thought to himself, "they just haven't taken it down yet." To make sure
that everything was all right, 112
Anderson climbed up to look the plane over. To his consternation, he found
that it had not been touched. He ran to report what he had found to his
pilot, .Lieutenant Herriman, who in turn reported the news to Lieutenant Com-
mander Lance Massey, the squadron's skipper. Massey soon ran down the
trouble-in an almost incredible blunder, no one had been assigned to work on
the two torpedo planes. Thus, Torpedo 3 would go into action with twelve
planes, instead of fourteen.
At 4:30 A.M. (times used, it should be remembered, are Midway time), the sun
rose on Yorktown's horizon, just fifteen minutes after eleven Catalinas had
taken off from Midway in an attempt to locate the Japanese carriers. At that
precise moment, Admiral Chuichi Nagumo's ships were making twenty knots on
the final run to their launching point. Akagi, Nagumo's flagship, was only a
little more than 200 miles west of Yorktown.
Rising with the sun were ten of Lieutenant Wally Short's dive bombers,
ordered to search 100 miles in a northern semicircle, west to east. The rest
of the dive bombers, on the three carriers, were standing by to go after
whatever Short's SBDs might find. All Short's flight encountered, however,
were enemy float plants. Ensign Ben Preston tangled with one, without
discernible result.
At the sane time that Short's search party was taking off, 36 Zeros were
rising from the decks of Nagumo's four carriers. They circled overhead while
36 torpedo planes (carrying bombs for this strike) and 36 dive bombers rose
to join then. Then, at 5 A.M., all 108 planes steadied on a course for
Midway. Lieutenant Joichi Tomonaga, air group commander from Hiryes, led them
in.
Sixteen B-17s were taking off at the same time from Midway on a
search-strike effort. Also in the air were two Japanese float planes from the
heavy cruiser Tone, two from the heavy cruiser Chikunan, one from the
battleship Haruna, and a torpedo plane from each of the two carriers, Kaga
and Akagi.
At 5:20 A.M., Nagumo signaled all his ships that he might send a second wave
against Midway soon after the first wave attacked. As signalncn blinked his
message, 152 113
aircraft from both sides were already in the air, itching for a fight.
At 5:30 A.M., Nagumo was spotted by a Catalina. The pilot radioed Midway
that he had one Japanese carrier in sight, bearing 320 degrees from the
island, distance 150 miles. Enterprise intercepted the message and relayed it
to Yorktown. Although Nagumo's fleet had now kicked its speed up to
twenty-six knots, both Fletcher and Spruance knew roughly what his location
was. Minutes later a second PBY radioed a message, this one not even coded.
"Many planes headed Midway," the pilot reported, in clear English. "Repeat,
Midway, bearing three hundred and twenty degrees true, distance one hundred
and fifty miles."
Every plane on Midway was ordered into the air, some to attack the enemy
carriers, some to intercept the incoming planes, some simply to be removed
out of the way.
Fighters from all four Japanese carriers were sent aloft to track down the
Catalina that was giving away their location. But the amphibian evaded them
all by ducking in and out of the clouds. It was not long before it was joined
by

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114
other Catalinas. From that moment on, Nagumo's carriers were kept under
almost constant surveillance.
At 6 A.M. the only plane left on Midway was an ancient Grumman single-float
biplane. Six new Grumman Avenger torpedo bombers, accompanied by four Army
B-26 bombers, were streaking northwest toward the enemy carriers. Midway
radio also ordered the sixteen B-17s already in the air to turn north and
strike the enemy force. At 6:Q7 Fletchcr ordered Spruance to steam southwest
with Enterprise and Hornet and attack the enemy carriers as soon as he saw
fit. "I will follow," Fletcher said, "as soon as our search planes are
recovered." Once committed, Fletcher planned to dispatch one strike group,
holding back a second to await developments.
By 6:30 A.M. Yorktown's crew was at battle stations, and bombs had begun
dropping on Midway. Marine Corps fighters---obsolescent Brewster
Buffalos-tried to fend off the Japanese attackers, but they were no match for
the Zeros. Fifteen of the twenty-five Buffalos were shot down, and of the ten
that survived, seven were so battered that they would never fly again.
Lieutenant Commander Yahachi Tanabe, skipper of the Japanese submarine
I-168, had a ringside seat for the Midway show. His submarine was prowling
ten miles south of Sand Island. "The island," he wrote after the war, "turned
into a mass of flames, with exploding fuel tanks and military buildings. We
saw it become covered with flames and a thick, black smoke. I let my
navigator, communications officer, gunnery officer, and a few others take a
turn looking through the periscope." A cheer burst from the crew when Tanabe
announced that a large fuel tank had exploded.
At 6:55 A.M. the Japanese strike, nearly intact, was heading back to its
carriers. Damage to Midway had been considerable. Barracks buildings, mess
halls, and even the hospital had been hit. The explosion that Commander
Tanabe had seen had been from oil tanks on Sand Island. But the island's
ability to fight back had been little impaired. Only a few bombs had landed
on the runway, and the damage they had caused was easily and quickly 115
repaired. Casualties on the ground were remarkably light.
Lieutenant Joichi Tomonaga, leading the Japanese strike back to the
carriers, radioed Admiral Nagumo that another strike would be needed to
soften up the island for a ship-to-shore assault. Admiral Nagumo had already
spotted his second strike on his decks; it was composed of fighters, dive
bombers, and torpedo planes. He knew, of course, that if he sent them away,
he would have hardly anything left to send against enemy surface ships,
should his scouts spot any. Nagumo began to miss Zuikaku and Shokaku and the
120 to 140 additional planes they would have provided him.
As the admiral paced the flag bridge of Akagi, pondering his next move, over
the horizon there came American planes-the torpedo-carrying Avengers and
B-26s from Midway, ten in all. They dropped their torpedoes, and Aka,;i
nimbly dodged three of them. Other carriers dodged the rest. Zeros then shot
down five of the Grummans and two of the B-26s; only three planes of the
original ten made it back to Midway. They had not scored one hit on the
enemy.
At 7:15 A.M., Nagumo reached his decision. He would hit Midway again and
eliminate the possibility of more land-based attacks on his fleet. To all
carriers went a message from the flag bridge: "Planes in the second wave,
stand by to carry out attack." Then he added: "Reload with bombs."
This second order threw the decks of Kaka and Akagi into crazy confusion.
Each of those two carriers had eighteen planes loaded with torpedoes and
spotted ready for takeoff in case an enemy surface fleet was sighted. Now all
thirty-six planes had to be taken below, their torpedoes removed, and bombs
slung in their places. Then the planes had to be brought back up to the
flight decks.
Most writers insist that this was a colossal blunder, perhaps even the
mistake that lost the war. Yet in context it was a reasonable decision.
Midway obviously had to be struck again, for after all, planes from Midway
had just attacked Nagumo's own ship. Besides, at the moment the decision was
made, Japanese scouts had found no sign of 116
an enemy surface fleet in the area where Nagumo thought such a fleet was most
likely to be.
So, Nagumo reasoned, sending another wave against Midway would be no gamble.
His first wave would soon be back, to replace those planes he would now send
away. He could load bombs and torpedoes on the planes of the first wave as
soon as they came home and be ready for surface ships whenever his scouts
found them. Viewed objectively, it was a logical decision. At 7:15 A.M.,
Japanese flight officers on Kaga and Akagi broke the spot-that is, pulled
apart the arrangement of planes on their decks.
The versatile IvTakajima-97 bombers were swiftly taken below, their
torpedoes were rapidly removed and trundled away to be stacked along the
sides of the hangar decks. There was no time to observe even the most
fundamental safety precautions, no time at all to stow the torpedoes below in
armored magazines. They were going right back on other planes within the
hour. The important task, Japanese officers knew, was to get the Nakajimas,
now armed with bombs, back up to the flight deck and into the air.
At 7:28 A.M., while this was going on, Nagumo received the worst possible
news. A scout plane from the cruiser Tone radioed: "Have sighted an estimated
ten ships, bearing zero ten degrees true, distance two hundred and forty
miles from Midway." He added that they were heading southwest, at more than
twenty knots. Aboard Astoria, one of the ships spotted by the scout, a quar-
termaster logged at about this time that the sea was calm and the sky clear,
except for a small sprinkling of clouds on the horizon. Those clouds
concealed the Japanese snooper.
Nagumo began pacing the flag bridge again. At 7:45 he issued more orders.
The first went to the patrolling scout: "Ascertain the types of ships." So
far he did not know whether the enemy fleet contained aircraft carriers. In
his second order he instructed his own fleet to "prepare to carry out attack
on enemy fleet units." He added: "Leave torpedoes on those planes which have
not already changed to bombs."
Just as Nagumo was trying to think out his plans, he was interrupted again
by American bombers. This time it was 117
sixteen Marine Corps Dauntless dive bombers from Midway. Their commander,
knowing that his young pilots had no experience in steep diving, had brought
the planes in on a glide. Zeros knocked eight of them down almost instantly.
The rest barely made it back to Midway. Not a single hit was scored on the
Japanese fleet. No sooner had the dive bombers been beaten off than the
sixteen Army B17s appeared over Nagumo's fleet and began dropping bombs from
20,000 feet. Pilots of the B-17s, watching the bombs splash almost 4 miles
below, were certain that they had scored important hits; they wheeled around
and headed triumphantly home. Before the battle was even over, one Army pilot
managed to get to Honolulu and claim over Honolulu radio that the B-17s had
scored heavily. But it was the same old story. They had not even come close
to doing so.
Other planes came roaring out of Midway. This time it was a flight of eleven
Vought SB2U Vindicators, manned by Marines. These old planes, partly covered
by canvas, had long been rejected by Navy carrier pilots. The Vindicators,
making their runs, were severely punished by Zeros, to the point where the
pilots could hardly take aim. All their bombs missed, and the Vindicators
limped back toward Midway. The surprise was that nine of them got back home
again.
At this point Nagumo had been attacked by fifty-two American planes and one
submarine and had not been scratched.* Nagumo, it seemed, could congratulate
himself on the way the battle was going. At 8:20 A.M. he heard again from his
scout, who reported to him that the enemy force was accompanied "by what
appears to be an aircraft carrier." (It was an aircraft carrier-Yorktown.)
Still, Nagumo could measure distance accurately enough, and even if the scout
were right, the carrier was still at extreme fighting range. He had time to
consider his next moves.
The time was approaching 8:30, and the returning Jap-
* The submarine was Nautilus. She got off one torpedo at a battleship and
then, amid the crash of depth bombs, ran for her fife. But she was to return
to fight another time.
118
anew attack wave was beginning to arrive overhead. Fresh thoughts began to
occur to Nagumo. If he recovered these planes and rearmed them, he would be
as strong as he had been when he had launched the first wave. He would again
have two strike waves at the ready. At 8:30 he issued further orders. Clear
the flight decks, he commanded, and bring in the first wave. Had it not been
for the iron discipline taught early to all Japanese sailors, the men aboard
the four carriers might have cursed Nagumo aloud. As it was, they went back
to work, breaking the spot all over again. More haste and carelessness were
the result on Kaga and AMagi. Bombs, as well as torpedoes, were now stacked
alone the sides of the hangar deck, instead of being stowed safely below.
Nagumo could not know it, but his carriers were shortly to pay dearly for
his hesitation and the crews' haste.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

First, however, the Americans were to offer their torpedo planes in bloody
sacrifice.
Three torpedo squadrons took after the Japanese fleet-Torpedo 6 from
Enterprise (fourteen planes), Torpedo 8 from Hornet (fifteen planes), and
Torpedo 3 from Yorktown (twelve planes).
The skipper of Torpedo 8, Lieutenant Commander John C. Waldron,. was a brave
and stubborn man. He had no sooner taken off from Hornet than he decided to
ignore his orders and set his own course for the point where he was convinced
he would find the Japanese fleet. He veered right soon after takeoff, whereas
Hornet's dive bombers and fighters pushed straight ahead. Within minutes they
had lost Waldron and his torpedo planes in the clouds.
Torpedo 8 found the Japanese sooner than anyone else,
119
but Waldron and his men were all alone, without a single fighter plane as
cover. At 9:25 A.M. the fifteen TBDs began their attack. As Oscar Pederson
had feared, the Japanese had learned to protect their earners properly, so
Waldron's squadron was forced to push through fire from the widespread
escorts, from the carriers themselves, and from a defending swarm of Zeros.
In five minutes the Japanese had shot down all fifteen planes. Of the thirty
men from Torpedo 8, courageous men who had taken an oath to defend the United
States "against all enemies, whomsoever," twenty-nine died. The only survivor
was Ensign George Gay, pilot of the last plane in line. Gay pressed forward,
trying for a hit, until Zeros killed his radioman and shot down his plane.
Wounded, he crawled from the TBD and clung for hours to a seat cushion that
had floated free from the plane. It was not until darkness descended that Gay
dared inflate his life raft. No Torpedo 8 plane scored a hit.
Hornet's dive bombers and fighters,, forty-five in all, missed the battle
entirely. When they reached the projected path of the Japanese fleet, they
swung southeast, thinking that the enemy fleet had already passed the
interception point. Thirteen of the dive bombers, short on fuel, had to make
forced landings on Midway. Two of them ran out of gas and had to ditch. All
of Hornet's fighters ran out of gas and ditched in the ocean. Hornet was out
of it, all her strike planes either shot down or forced down.
Left in the air, however, were the squadrons from Yorktown and Enterprise.
This was the first team, and it was going to score.
After Torpedo 8's attack, events began to pile up in rapid and confusing
order, and it may well be advantageous to take a moment to set the scene.
Yorktown had laid back to collect her ten search scouts. Enterprise and
Hornet, at Fletcher's behest, had dashed ahead. Soon the two task forces lost
visual contact with each other. From that moment on, they functioned almost
as independent units. By the time Japanese scouts sighted Yorktown, the other
two carriers had slipped over the horizon. The,Japanese did not find those
two carriers until it 120
was much too late to do anything about it. Yorktown, however, could not shake
the enemy snoopers, particularly the float plane from the cruiser Tone. Its
pilot radioed the word when Yorktown launched its strike, and he then began
to beam a homing radio signal to be used, when the time came, to guide a
Japanese strike directly to Yorktown. Thus, Yorktown, from the moment the
battle began, was a marked ship.
A major problem aboard all three American carriers was navigational-how best
to intercept the Japanese fleet. Of all the three ships, Yorktown solved it
best, so that, alone, her strike went in with all planes present and ac-
counted for. It was a splendid piece of work, and the credit goes to Hubie
Strange, the weatherman, and Oscar Pederson, the air group commander, two men
never before mentioned in any published account of the Midway battle.
Strange was unable to prepare a reliable weather map because the United
States had no weather station west of Midway. He knew, however, that the
winds were blowing between Yorktown and the Japanese fleet and that these
winds could be of different altitudes. Strange advised Yorktown's pilots to
watch the wind streaks on the surface of the ocean and to correct for drift
by observing any windchanges. This observation would be made by the torpedo
squadron under Lieutenant Commander Lance Massey, for it flew much lower than
the dive bombers and fighters. The higher F4Fs and SBDs, simply by keeping
tabs on the TBDs thousands of feet below them, could easily stay on proper
course, too.
Pederson, just prior to the takeoff of Yorktown's strike, determined that
the enemy fleet would be 156 miles southwest of Yorktown, heading southeast
into the wind and toward Midway. The Japanese would continue on that course,
he believed, because they had to head into the wind to launch and to retrieve
their planes. Pederson proposed that Yorktown's pilots assume that the
Japanese fleet was steaming at very high speed. An interception point was
then plotted out, based on the best speed the Japanese could possibly make.
If, when Yorktown's planes arrived over the interception point, the Japanese
fleet was nowhere 121
in sight, there could be only one answer: the Japanese fleet was sure to be
directly to the northwest, steaming down the preplotted line of advance. All
Yorktown's planes would have to do, according to Pederson's theory, would be
to turn up that line of advance and watch for the enemy's smoke.
Admiral Fletcher, at 8:30 A.M., had come to a decision of his own.
Remembering Admiral Nimitz's orders to "inflict maximum damage . . . by the
principle of calculated risk," Fletcher ordered Buckmaster to throw more than
half his aircraft into the battle, even though he was not certain that other
Japanese carriers were not lurking over the horizon still unreported.
Buckmaster ordered the seventeen planes of Bombing 3, under Lieutenant
Commander Max Leslie, the twelve planes of Torpedo 3, under Lance Massey, and
six Wildcats, under Lieutenant Commander John S. Thach, to make the attack.
Nineteen Wildcats were held back to rotate over Yorktown as air cover. Wally
Short's Scouting 5 remained aboard to await developments. Max Leslie's dive
bombers took off first and circled overhead as Lance Massey's torpedo planes
were launched. Seaman John Ginn, from his station at a forward 1.1-inch gun
mount, waved wildly to a hometown friend, Radioman Raymond Darcy, as Darcy's
plane rolled by. Neither Darcy nor his plane would return. Yorktown's strike
was in the air at 9:06 A.M. No sooner had they gone than Yorktown respotted
the flight deck with six fighters and Wally Short's seventeen dive bombers.
Fletcher wanted to be ready to strike a second blow. .
Strikes from Enterprise and Hornet were already in the air. They had got off
in some disarray because Fighting 6, the Wildcat squadron from Enterprise,
had mistakenly attached itself to Torpedo 8 from Hornet. Fighting 6's com-
mander, Lieutenant James Gray, had been instructed prior to takeoff to remain
at high altitude to protect the attacking dive bombers from both Hornet and
Enterprise. But Hornet's planes had turned the wrong way, and Enterprise's
dive bombers were late getting into battle. Gray, as a result, found himself
over the Japanese fleet with no dive 122
bombers to protect; down below, he could see the torpedo planes making their
suicidal runs. He was at the point of no return, owing to the mix-up, and did
not have enough spare gas left to attempt to help them. Gray finally radioed
Lieutenant Commander Clarence McClusky, skipper of Enterprise's dive bombers,
that he was short of fuel and had to head home. He could do nothing else.
So it was that the fourteen planes of Torpedo 6, from Enterprise, attacked
without fighter cover. Enterprise's planes began their runs at 9:51 A.M. Nine
minutes later, ten of them, including Skipper Eugene Lindsay's, were down.
The remaining four were badly battered and only barely made a getaway. Again,
not a single torpedo had scored a hit on the enemy.
Yorktown's planes, despite their late start, began arriving over the
Japanese fleet by 10 A.M., thanks to the advice the pilots had received from
Strange and Pederson.
Four of Yorktown's dive bombers had no bombs, for not long before the battle
began, the Yorktown dive bombers had been equipped with a new device to arm
and release their bombs. Lieutenant Commander Max Leslie, Bombing 3's
skipper, reached down to pull the arming lever as he was en route to the
target. As soon as he pulled it, he felt his Dauntless leap upward. On
Leslie's wing, Lieutenant Paul "Swede" Holmberg watched in dismay as Leslie's
1,000-pound bomb fell away into an empty ocean. The same thing happened to
Ensigns Roy Isaman, Charles Lane, and Bud Merrill. After the battle the
trouble was diagnosed: someone had erroneously crossed the wires when he had
installed the electric bomb armors so that a pull on the arming lever
actually released the bomb instead of arming it.
Of the Yorktown squadrons, Torpedo 3 was the first to
sight the enemy. Lance Massey, because he was close to
the water, had a clear view, and he spotted the smoke that
had been laid down by Japanese destroyers during the
earlier attack by Torpedo S. Massey changed his squadron's course about
thirty degrees to the right to make an
attack from the north of the Japanese squadron, nose to
nose with the enemy carriers. About 5,000 feet above
123
Yorktown's torpedo planes were Commander Thach's six Grumman Wildcats, hoping
to cover their shipmates below.
They never had a chance. A shellburst, probably from a Japanese cruiser,
pinpointed their location and led Zeros right to the little group. Thach and
the five other pilots were jumped by about fifteen Zeros. A wild scramble
followed-the only fighter plane action that occurred over the Japanese
fleet-and one Wildcat, piloted by Ed Bassett, was shot down.
Thach's dogfight and the Torpedo 3 attack that began minutes later had an
exceedingly important relationship to the final outcome of the battle, even
though both these incidents have been almost totally neglected by naval
historians. All accounts of the battle, including Admiral Morison's, state
flatly that Torpedo 8 and Torpedo 6, in sacrificing themselves, drew
defending Zeros swarming down to sea level, thus permitting the American dive
bombers to make their target runs almost unmolested. This is not so; Torpedo
8 and Torpedo 6 did not perform this useful service. In fact, most of the
Zeros had plenty of time to regain attitude after the two torpedo attacks.
What drew many of them away from the dive bombers was the six Wildcats led by
Commander Thach. Most of the remaining Zeros were drawn away by the attack
launched by Torpedo 3, also from Yorktown.
It is important to place the Japanese carriers in their proper positions. At
first sighting by Yorktown planes, they were in a loose box formation,
heading north. Hiryu and Kaga were deployed to the east, Soryu and Akagi to
the west. To put it another way, Hiru and Soryu, the two medium carriers,
were out ahead, followed by Kaga and Akagi. Both of the latter carriers, like
Lexington and Saratoga, were immense ships that had been converted from
battle cruisers.
Hiryu was far ahead of the three other carriers, and the higher-flying
American planes could not see her because she had moved under some clouds.
Lance Massey, leading Yorktown's Torpedo 3, spotted her, however, and made
his attack against her. He formed Torpedo 3 into two 124
divisions of six planes each. Leslie wanted to catch Hlryu between a cross
fire from these two divisions.
Harry Corl was one of two Torpedo 3 pilots who survived the attack. Japanese
fighter planes began to jump them, he reported, even before Torpedo 3 reached
the outer screen of Japanese ships. He estimated that Torpedo 3 was attacked
by about twenty-four Zeros. With another dozen or so dogfighting Thach, this
means that thirty-six Japanese fighters, almost all the Japanese fleet's air
cover, were working over the sixteen planes from Yorktown. And that is why
the Yorktown (and, later, Enterprise) dive bombers were able to start their
runs without interference.
Small consolation it was to the men of Torpedo 3. The other pilot who
survived was Wilhelm Esders, whose position was just to the rear and left of
Commander Massey. The Zeros began attacking the formation when it was still
14 miles northeast of the main Japanese fleet and when the torpedo planes
were still flying at 2,600 feet.
"I saw the Zero that shot the skipper down as he made his approach," Esders
said. "I was slightly step-down, and two Zeros had both the skipper's and my
plane in line when they began firing, approaching from the skipper's
starboard bow. Realizing they could get us both in one pass, I immediately
stepped up in formation, and the bullets, including tracers, passed just
below my place. Both Zeroes came from the same direction. The skipper's plane
immediately burst into flames." Esders watched as Massey tried to climb out
of his plane, apparently hoping to parachute. But he was only 150 feet off
the water. Esders, when his skipper went down, took over lead spot in the
formation. He heard what "sounded like hundreds of bullets" passing through
his plane, some of them exploding inside it. He was thankful for the homemade
armor-boiler plate from the shops at Kaneohe, Oahu-that had recently been
installed. Esders could hear the bullets bouncing off it.
Esders continued to press the attack, just as the hopeless men of Torpedo 8
and Torpedo 6 had done before him. Friendly planes disappeared-first Massey;
then Richard Suesens, Wesley Osmus, and David Roche. Harry Corl, the other
survivor, tried to follow Esders, but his elevator 125
controls were so damaged by gunfire that he could not keep his plane's nose
down. He had to jettison his torpedo and break away.
The second division, led by Lieutenant Pat Hart, was wiped out. Down with
his went the planes of John Haas, Oswald Powers, Leonard Smith, Curt Howard,
and Carl Osberg. "I recall seeing four planes of the second division off to
my right," Elders said, "and I saw two of them crash. I don't believe any of
those planes ever arrived in position to drop their torpedoes, and I don't
think any of the firstdivision planes got to position to drop their torpedoes
except my own plane." Esders, a chief petty officer (this was in the day when
many Navy pilots were still enlisted men), let go his torpedo about 500 yards
from Hiryu, but somehow the carrier evaded it. Elders then swung 180 degrees
to the right and headed away from Hiryu. To his left he could see three
surviving torpedo planes. One of them probably was Harry Corl's. Two of the
three planes were shot down a few minutes later.
Elders and Corl ran north, trying to lure the Zeroes still farther away from
the main concentration of ships. All the time both rear gunners-Lloyd
Childers for Corl and Mike Brazier for Elders-kept shooting, even though they
were both wounded. Childers, when his .30-caliber machine gun jammed, opened
up on the pursuing Zeros with a .45 caliber pistol.
It was now past 10:20 A.M., and the Japanese fleet was still untouched, even
though 52 planes had attacked from Midway, a submarine had fired a torpedo,
and 41 torpedo planes had flown strikes against it from American carriers.
Altogether, Fletcher's carriers sent 152 planes against the Japanese task
force. Of these, 45 from Hornet went the wrong way. That left 107. Waldron
and all but one of his Torpedo 8 comrades were dead, and their planes gone.
That left 92. Of these, 10 torpedo planes from Enterprise were gone, and 4
others were limping home. That left 78. Thach's Wildcats were trying to fight
off a swarm of Zeros; that made it 72. Enterprise's 10 fighters, low on fuel,
were heading home. So 62 were left. And now 10 of Massey's 126
planes were in the ocean, with two survivors trying to get home.
That left only 50 planes, less than a third of the American strike, to start
the jab, for so far no one had inflicted any damage at all.
Shortly after 10 A.M. the 33 dive bombers from Enterprise got a break.
Lieutenant Commander Clarence McClusky, their skipper, spotted an enemy
destroyer through the clouds; the destroyer, alone, was hightailing it for
somewhere. The destroyer Arashi, speeding northeast to rejoin Nagumo's
formation after trying to run down an American submarine contact. McClusky
reasoned that the destroyer was probably heading for the Japanese fleet, so
he pointed himself in the same direction. He arrived over the task force at
10:24 A.M.
Of the many accounts that have been written about the Battle of Midway, all
but one credit Enterprise's dive bombers with being the first to hit a
Japanese carrier on that historic June 4, 1942. Japanese postwar accounts
agree. No doubt about it, everyone has said, Enterprise was first. The lone
dissenter, until now, has been Professor Thaddeus V. Tuleja, of St. Peter's
College, Jersey City, New Jersey. The professor is correct. Enterprise-the
glamorous Big E--did not score the first hit. Yorktown-neglected, ragged Old
Yorky-was the first to do so.

CHAPTER TWELVE

It is typical that Yorktown should have scored first against the Japanese at
Midway; she had been first all along. But it is also typical that the man who
led the attack should have been flying a dive bomber with no bomb. Yorktown
had never done things the easy way.
Max Leslie, shipper of York-town's Bombing 3, had 127
turned north, too, when Lance Massey and the forlorn torpedo bombers veered
to make their run. Leslie radioed Massey, trying to find out whether the
torpedo planes had seen anything, but he received no reply. An answer became
unnecessary when Leslie's gunner, W. E. Gallagher, called to him and pointed
out ships, dead ahead, about thirty miles away. Yorktown's planes, every one
of them, had found the enemy, and they were, more or less, together when they
did it.
Leslie began easing down to 14,500 feet, wondering what to do next. Here he
was in the lead, but he had no bomb. Should he give over his lead position to
one of the thirteen planes that still had bombs? He thought about it a moment
and rejected the idea. Bombing 3, he concluded, should have its dive course
set by the most experienced pilot in the squadron-himself.
At 10:23 A.M. Yorktown's dive bombers were over the easternmost portion of
the Japanese fleet. No Zeros were there to oppose them, for they were busy
with Thach's Wildcats above the center of the Japanese force and Massey's
torpedo planes well to the northeast. Below Leslie's squadron was an immense
aircraft carrier. Despite what others have written, this carrier was Kaga,
one of the former battle cruisers.' Two other carriers - Akagi (Nagumo's
flagship) and Soryu-were well to the west. Hiryu, the carrier attacked by
Yorktown's torpedo planes, was under clouds and out of sight to the north.
Leslie glanced out of his cockpit and caught the eye of his wingman, Swede
Holmberg. Then he patted his helmet in the familiar aviator's signal meaning
"I've got it." He nosed his Dauntless over and began his dive, Yorktown's
sixteen other bombers falling into line behind him. Leslie aimed straight at
the big red rising sun that decorated Kaga's flight deck. During his dive he
opened up with his forward-firing .50-caliber machine guns, pumping 400 to

* Morison says that Enterprise's McClusky was the first to attack and that
he went after Kaga. Yorktown, Morison writes, came in later and went after
Soryu. In fact, the situation was just the reverse. Professor Tuleja, again,
has reconstructed the actual events correctly.
128
500 rounds into the area around the carrier's starboard bridge. Seconds after
his guns jammed at 4,000 feet, he began pulling out.
Right behind him was Swede Holmberg, who later recalled watching in
fascination "lights blinking all around the edge of the dark red flight
deck." It was antiaircraft fire, of course, and Holmberg soon heard shrapnel
rattling through his plane "like rocks on a tin roof." When Leslie pulled
out, Holmberg got a clear look at his target. "It was the biggest thing I
ever saw," Holmberg said. Taking no chance on equipment failure, he pulled
both his electrical and manual bomb releases. A 1,000-pound delayed-action
bomb fell gently away from the plane's belly.
The bomb, first American blow at Midway to land, hit squarely in the middle
of the rising sun insignia on Kaga's flight deck. Right behind Holmberg was
Ensign Paul Schlegel. He saw Kaga's deck "burst apart." Then he released his
bomb; so did Bob Campbell, Oley Hansen, Bob Benson, and Gordon Sherwood.
Eighth in line was Ensign Roy Isaman, piloting another bombless bomber. He
sprayed with his machine guns, just as Leslie had done. Next came Phil Cobb,
Sid Bottomley, and Charles Lane. Lane, bombless too, sprayed more machine gun
fire over Kaga.
At this point eight bombs had been dropped. Leslie, pulling away, looked
back and saw the explosion from Holmberg's bomb. It had crashed through the
Right deck and detonated in the hangar deck. The explosion was followed by
two more, each successively larger. The bombs and torpedoes which had been
pushed aside by Kaga's ordnancemen after they had twice broken the spot were
going off. Airplanes were blowing up on both the flight and the hangar decks.
The last six SBDs in the line of attack were piloted by John Butler, David
"Dave" Shumway, Bob Elder, Randy Cooner, Obie Wiseman, and Bud Merrill.
Butler saw that the carrier was in very bad shape, so he veered off toward a
battleship. Wiseman followed him after the same target. Elder and Cooner went
after what they thought was a light cruiser. Shumway, the squadron's
executive officer, 129
maintamed his course for Kaga, hoping to deliver the crusher. Merrily last in
the line, flew almost in Shumway's prop wash, pushing the attack, even though
he, too, had no bomb. Because his was the last plane in, Kaga's gunners
concentrated all their fire on him; somehow, he survived.
Yorktown's dive bombers, their work done, headed for home as fast as they
could go, hugging the ocean's surface so that enemy fighters could not get
under them. Ensign Roy Isaman's plane was attacked by a twin-float seaplane,
but his gunner, Sidney Weaver, drove it off. Behind Bombing 3, Kaga was an
"inferno of flame," as Lieutenant Shumway later noted in his action report.
Bombing 3 had done incredibly well. Captured Japanese documents later showed
that the squadron's planes scored four hits out of nine bombs dropped at Kaga
and that three of the misses were very close indeed, exploding just off the
carrier's port side, forward. The other two bombs came almost as close on
Kaga's starboard side. Kaga, when attacked, was twisting at thirty knots;
scoring four hits out of nine attempts on that kind of target and laying five
more close aboard were a performance even the Japanese could admire. They
did, later, in reports and postwar interviews.
Yorktown pilots struck Nagumo the first blow. Enterprise pilots struck the
second and third blows. Aboard Akagi, there was hardly time to note in the
ship's log that "Kaga is under attack" before bombs began dropping on the
flagship.
Commander McClusky, leading the thirty-three bombers from Enterprise, split
his force in two, sending one division after Akagi and the other after Soryu
(he did not know the names of the earners at the time of the attack, of
course). By 10:26 Akagi had been hit twice and Soryu three times. By 10:30
all the Japanese carriers, except Hiryu, were burning furiously. Hiryu, still
protected by the clouds she had run under, was not seen by any of the fifty
American dive bombers until their attacks were over and they were heading
home, at low altitude. Some of the American planes made her out, on the
northern horizon, but it was too late to do anything about it; none of them
had any bombs left.
All of Yorktown's dive bombers got away. Enterprise's
130
planes were not so lucky. Only eighteen out of the original force of
thirty-three made it back to their ship. "it may have been because they were
over a thicker group of ships than we were and had more opposition," Yorktown
pilot Sid Bottomley theorized. Another factor was a shortage of fuel; some of
Enterprise's planes, not as well directed to the Japanese ships as Yorktown's
were by Strange and Pederson, simply ran out of gas. Six pilots and five rear
gunners were later plucked from the sea.
Yorktown's Commander Thack, fighting off Zeroes, managed to get an
occasional lack at what was happening below. When he finally started back for
Yorktown, he had a clear picture of three Japanese carriers burning wildly
and shuddering from explosions that sent flames and smoke billowing into the
sky.
The Japanese situation was as desperate as it looked. Kaoa's planes were
blowing up like a string of firecrackers. Akagi was in such bad shape that
Nagumo was forced to abandon her. He took his flag and the sacrosanct
portrait of the emperor to the light cruiser Nagara. The captain of Soryu
abandoned ship at 10:45 A.M. But Hiryu, still untouched, had a fighting
commander on board-Rear Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi-and he had no intention of
giving up. Yamaguchi, involved in a spy scandal while serving in Washington
in the 1-930's, had been touted as the logical successor to the great
Yamamoto as commander in chief of the Japanese fleet. Earlier in the day,
when the first sighting of American ships had been reported, Yamaguchi had
urged Nagumo to strike immediately; his message had been worded in language
that bordered on the insulting. Rebuffed then, he now seized his opportunity.
At 11:09 A.M. he notified all the ships in the fleet that Hiryu's planes were
going to "destroy the American aircraft carrier." A minute latex he signaled
that his first air strike was off and that it would be followed by a second
within the hour.
Still on the job were the snoopers--Catalinas over the Japanese fleet,
Japanese float planes over Yorktown. The original Japanese scout, from the
cruiser Tone, remained on station until its courageous pilot, who has never
been identified, reported that he had only fifty-one gallons of 131
fuel left. He then turned for home, and his place was taken by a float plane
from the cruiser Chikuma and a special high-speed scout from Hiryu. Two of
these scouts never saw Enterprise or Hornet; the third did, but his radio
messages apparently failed to get through. The result was that all the
available surviving Japanese planes concentrated on Yorktown.
At 11:15 A.M. Yorktown's returning dive bombers began arriving over their
ship. Two Enterprise planes, badly damaged, were taken aboard, and Thach's
five surviving Wildcats landed.* One of them, piloted' by T. F. Cheek,
crash-landed. "The plane did a cartwheel right below my battle station on the
stack and then slammed into the barrier," Seaman George Weise later recalled.
The accident delayed landing operations; the seventeen dive bombers had to
circle overhead while the flight deck was being cleared. Circling not far
away, too, was the float plane from the cruiser Chikuma. The pilot radioed a
weather report. "Clear," it said, "with half of the sky covered by clouds.
Their [the clouds] bases are twenty-four hundred to three thousand feet above
the surface. Wind is from the east, fifteen meters per second, and visibility
is thirty miles." Conditions for a dive bomber attack could hardly have been
better.
Yorktown's flight deck was cleared at 11:50 A.M., and ten of Lieutenant
Wally Short's dive bombers were ordered out on a search for the fourth
carrier that the attacking planes had belatedly sighted. Short's planes were
to search a distance of 250 miles in an arc from due west to a little past
north. With the scouts away, Commander Pederson set about recovering Bombing
3. He never got the chance, for at 11:59 A.M. Yorktown's radar picked up
enemy planes coming in from just south of west, distance 46 miles.
Vane Bennett, the radar boss, turned to his assistant, Speedy Attaway, and
said, "Well, here we go again!"

* Thach immediately reported to Admiral Fletcher. Yorktown jubilantly
signaled other ships that her planes had sunk a carrier. The claim was
premature, but, ultimately, accurate enough.
132
The Japanese planes had got within forty-six miles of Yorktown without being
spotted by flying low; that put them under the straight-line beam of
Bennett's crude radar. At the Coral Sea they had been flying high and had
been picked up at sixty-eight miles. This, not explained in earlier accounts
of the Midway battle, shows why they got closer, undetected, in the second
battle. At about the time that they were picked up, they began climbing to
the altitude from which they would begin their dives.
Aboard Yorktown certain precautions suggested by Machinist Oscar Myers after
the Battle of the Coral Sea were put into effect. Fueling of Wildcats on the
flight decks was stopped. All gasoline lines were drained, then charged with
nonflammable carbon dioxide at 20 pounds' pressure. Myers saw to it that an
auxiliary gasoline tank, loaded with 800 gallons of high octane fuel, was
pushed over Yorktown's stern. Lexington, Myers remembered, had been swept by
fires sparked by ruptured gas lines and gas tanks. The same thing would not
happen to Yorktown if he could help it.
Below, in Yorktown's main engine room, Jack Delaney watched in near
disbelief as the pitometer log indicator crept up toward thirty knots. When
the temporary repairs had been made at Pearl Harbor, no one, not in his
wildest dreams, had thought that Yorktown would be able to make anything
above twenty-seven knots without her superheater boilers.
The heavy cruisers Astoria and Portland and the destroyers Hammann,
Anderson, Russell, Morris, and Hughes took Cruising Disposition Victor, a
defensive ring around Yorktown. This screened the carrier from submarine
attack and added their guns to the antiaircraft defense. At high noon Captain
Buckmaster ordered a quartermaster to break out Yorktown's battle flag, the
largest national ensign aboard the ship. Seaman Warren Woodard hauled it up
to the gaff. Electrician's Mate Leroy Gill, at his battle station on the
bridge, remembered thinking: "Now what did we do that for? Ain't they mad
enough at us already?"
Max Leslie's seventeen dive bombers were still circling 133
over Yorktown at 12:07 P.M., when their pilots heard an imperative order:
"All planes, get clear! The ship is about to be attacked!" The dive bombers
moved out of the landing pattern and outside the range of Yorktown's guns.
Yorktown put up twelve Wildcats to engage the attacking Japanese; they were
piloted by Scatty McCuskey, Bill Woollen, Harry Gibbs, Dick Wright, Art
Brassfield, Bill Barnes, Ed Mattson, D. C. ("Daddy") Barnes, Dick Crommelin,
J. B. Bain, D. C. Sheedy, and H. A. Bass. One six-plane division was led by
Crommelin; the other by Brassfield. Joining them were several Wildcats rushed
to Yorktown from Hornet. Before they took on the Japanese, the Hornet
fighters made firing runs against Leslie's dive bombers; luckily, the Hornet
planes missed.
The twenty-four Japanese planes-eighteen dive bombers and six Zeroes led by
Lieutenant Michio Kobayashi-arrived over the target at 12:10 P.M., drawn to
Yorktown by t4e guiding radio beam from Tone's snooping float plane.
Commander Chauncey Crutcher, executive officer of the cruiser 'Astoria,
watched the enemy squadron as it flew into a cloud bank. "Immediately after
they had disappeared into the clouds," he wrote after the battle, "six of
them were observed to fall from the clouds and crash into the sea in fumes."
Yorktown's Wildcats, although outnumbered two to one, were giving everything
they had. "We broke radio silence," recalled Lieutenant Ed Mattson, "because
it had no further significance once that Japanese had us in sight. It was a
scramble for altitude for those of us just launched. Our planes were never
noted for their ability to climb, and we just made it."
A Zero caught Mattson from behind and began pumping slugs into his right
wing. Mattson's wingman, Ensign Bass, came tearing in and plucked off the
Zero with a burst from his machine guns. Seconds later, Mattson encountered
a Val dive bomber nose to nose. The Val pushed over to get under Mattson's
fire. Mattson rolled over and got the Japanese plane in his sights again. He
was pouring bullets into its front cockpit when he noticed that the rear
gunner had his canopy closed, his 7.7-millimeter machine gun still 134
immobile in the locked position. Mattson's bullets moved back and into the
rear cockpit. "I could clearly see the bright orange tracers pouring through
the shattered cockpit and into his body," Mattson reported. "It made me
slightly sick." As Mattson pulled into a climbing turn, he and Bass, his
wingman, saw the Val dive vertically into the ocean. The two pilots then
began to look for new targets, but all the Japanese planes had passed them
by. "Air action," noted Mattson, "is fast."
Other Yorktown pilots were scoring, too. Scotty McCuskey, one of Yorktown's
original heroes (for shooting down a Japanese plane, a Kawanishi flying boat,
so long ago), trailed Bill Woollen and Daddy Barnes in a rush against the
Japanese formation. Harry Gibbs, a little farther behind, was McCuskey's
wingman.
Woollen and Barnes were the first to open fire, but they both must have
missed, for McCuskey saw no planes fall from the enemy formation. Then it was
his turn. "The dive bombers," he reported, "were flying in a V of V's, and
there were eighteen of them, the fixed landing gear Vals." He and Gibbs came
in from the left of the Japanese squadron. One V was to McCluskey's left;
another was to his right, much closer; and the third V was farther away, but
almost straight ahead. "I went straight through the first V and took the
outside man." McCluskey shot that plane down and then turned slightly to his
right, aiming for three other Japanese planes. "I swung right across, and I
mean I was looking them right in the eye." He nailed the two rear Japanese
planes. in the second V and kept rift on going. From then an, he stated, "it
was just shooting from the hip, and I found myself in the damndest dogfight
you ever saw. I ended up with two of those Vals right on my tail."
McCuskey put his Wildcat into a deep-dive spiral to get away from the two
dive bombers. When he started to climb for altitude, he found that he was out
of ammunition. He began to swear at the plane that someone had believed to be
an improved version of the Wildcat he had flown at the Coral Sea. The old
F4F-3 was a four-gun fighter, 450 rounds for each gym. The new F4F-4 was one
of those which, with two additional machine guns, carried less 135
ammunition per gun. As if that were not bad enough, the old Wildcat, it
suddenly seemed to McCuskey (and to some of the other pilots), had been more
maneuverable than the new one.
McCuskey informed Yorktown by radio that he was coming in for more
ammunition; the carrier instructed him to hold off. Then McCusl:ey found
himself on the tail of another Japanese bomber; it would have been a sure
kill if he had had some ammunition. "Then I remembered that Thach had told
us, `When you run out of ammunition, chop their tails off!' We'd heard that
the Germans or someone did this." McCluskey actually tried. He swung from one
side to the other of the Val, only feet from its tail; the Val's rear gunner
swung his weapon back and forth, too, in metronomic time. It was then that
McCluskey began to have doubts about this system. "If I chop this guy's tail
off with my propeller," he recalled saying to himself, "I won't even have
time to get out of this airplane. So I decided to give that idea up for the
day."
Commander Crutcher of Astoria watched as the Japanese planes emerged from
the clouds. "They were still being attacked by our planes," he wrote.
All the Yorktown pilots, with the exception of Harry Gibbs and Dick Wright,
got at least one enemy plane. A number of the kills, however, were listed as
probables because Hornet's fighters also claimed some successes. Yorktown's
Art Brassfield-"the teacher and steadying influence among us young ensigns,"
according to one Fighting 42 pilot, and "beyond all question the best damned
pilot in the squadron," according to another-shot down three dive bombers,
including one that was trying to strafe a downed Yorktown torpedo plane.
Barnes, Haas, Mattson, and Bass wire credited with a dive bomber apiece.
Crommelin, Bain, and Sheedy were credited with a Zero apiece.
When Lieutenant Kobayashi's squadron finally came into range of Task Force
1Ts guns, its strength had been whittled from eighteen dive bombers and six
fighters to eight bombers and three fighters. Thirteen planes had been shot
down. More, perhaps many more, would have been 136
destroyed, had Yorktown's fighters been able to fire more rounds.
It was May 8 at the Coral Sea all over again. Yorktown's attack planes had
struck the enemy surface force hard. Her defending aviators had performed
magnificently against superior numbers. This time the Japanese carriers had
started the day with 272 fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo planes. Of all
these airplanes, only 11 were now close enough to attack one American
aircraft earner. And of those 11 planes, only 8-fixed landing gear Vals-car-
ried striking power: eight 550-pound bombs.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Eight Japanese Vals, their taps a muddy brown, their bottoms silver, and
their tails a gleaming yellow, plunged down at Yorktown at a dive angle of
seventy degrees. They came in from the earner's port side, abaft the beam,
smart tactically because both heavy-gunned cruisers were positioned on
Yorktown's starboard.
Yorktown had been through this sort of thing before, and she was ready.
Every gun on the ship, including a number of Springfield rifles distributed
to the mess stewards, was turned toward the attackers.
Telephone talkers gave and relayed instructions. Musician Frank Thompson was
at Repair 4, in Yorktown's galley, hooked in with Musician Hank Fogle on the
bridge. Water Tender Frank Luckiesh had the smoke watch up in the stack, just
as he had had it at the Coral Sea. Both Lieutenants Norwood Campbell and John
Preston, Yorktown's landing signal officers, were at their station on the LSO
platform when the Japanese attack began. Preston, remembering Captain
Buckmaster's caution that the two men should separate during battle so that
they would not be killed together, turned to Campbell and said, "So long, 137
Soupy, I'll see you later." Then he started forward along the flight deck.
Yorktowners, in fact, were surprisingly calm. "We were blooded and
confident," recalled Lieutenant (jg) Harry Glick, who commanded the five-inch
guns aft on Yorktown's starboard catwalk.
Once Yorktown's Wildcats had peeled away, their ammunition spent, the
carrier's gunners opened up on the Vals. The sky was soon filled with black
puffs, and Lieutenant Commander Ernie Davis' voice again came booming over
the loudspeakers: "Air department take cover! Gunnery department take over!"
It is hard to say who scored, for both Yorktown and the portside destroyers
were firing, and then the cruisers and the destroyers on the starboard side
joined in. Two of the Vals, however, were nailed on the way down. The plane
piloted by Lieutenant Koboyashi, leader of the strike, disintegrated in
midair. His pilots were well trained, rigidly disciplined; they kept coming
on.
A11 six remaining planes dropped their bombs. One of the Vals was destroyed
as he pulled out. Seaman Rudy Yirok, manning a .30-caliber machine gun just
aft of Yorktown's island, claimed a piece of him. "I put nearly two hundred
rounds into that plane," Yirok said, "and was so excited by the time he went
into the sea that I swallowed my chew of tobacco."
Ensign Harvey Lasell, who earlier had done well in directing his five-inch
fire at the Coral Sea, had trouble this time. "Smoke from the stack and from
gunfire obscured the visibility of my director." Lasell reported that Lloyd
Rice, who controlled the elevation sights, suddenly cried, "I can't see!"
Yorktown's fantail, at the time the attack began, was about one-third
covered with wooden trash. A warship, in a time of action, rarely burns trash
at sea for fear that its incinerator smoke will reveal her position. Nor is
the trash thrown overboard, lest it give enemy submarines a direct trail to
follow. Seaman Bill Federowicz, the man in charge of the trash, was under
orders to throw it over the side only when battle was joined. But as the Vals
began their attack, 138
the trash was still sitting there on the fantail. "I was told that all those
guys with battle stations on the fantail were supposed to help me, but no one
did," Federowicz wrote, "so I stopped heaving the stuff over." He had, in
fact, left the trash to help man a gun. He was removing an empty ammunition
magazine from it when a Japanese near-miss exploded just off Yorktown's
stern.
"Shrapnel from that miss killed men near me," according to Federowicz, "and
it cut some of the lifelines. That made a bunch of our antisplinter mats fall
over the side. A couple of pieces also started a fire in the stack of crates;
some punctured a barrel of aviation tube oil, and some knocked a lot of holes
in the bulkhead between us and the hangar deck. When I saw smoke coming from
that pile of boxes, I yelled and got everyone to help me throw them
overboard. Pretty soon there was a long line of boxes drifting astern."
Three near-misses lifted Yorktown's stern clear of the water, and the
violent spinning of her screws made her tail shimmy. Seaman Ed Cavanaugh was
at his .50-caliber machine gun below the landing signal officer's platform.
Fragments from a portside near-miss took a leg off his loader, lacerated the
soles of another man's feet, and punctured Cavanaugh in twenty-two places.
His left hand shattered, Cavanau,,h tried to get across the flight deck for
help. As he staggered across the deck, he was hit three more times by slugs
from a dive bomber's machine guns. By the time a corpsman got him to sick
bay, Cavanaugh was bleeding from a hand, both arms, a knee, and a hip.
On Yorktown's bridge, Paul Kroll, Wally Whalers, and Charles Thomas were
blazing away with .50-caliber machine guns Lieutenant Commander Ernie Davis
had reluctantly turned over to them after the Coral Sea. Each gun had a
wooden plug to seal its water jacket. When the guns overheated, as they were
now doing, the plugs popped out like champagne corks. Each time it happened,
someone would grab a coffeepot full of water, refill the sizzling jacket, and
hammer the plug back in. The guns, sizzling and popping, never stopped firing
for very long.
Captain Buckmaster, racing Yorktown through her 139
paces again, managed to evade three Japanese bombs. The carrier was turning
and twisting at thirty knots. "it felt like we were inside a cocktail
shaker," Storekeeper Tom Callaghan reported.
The Japanese pilots kept on coming against all this firepower. They were
doing just what Jo-Jo Powers had done at the Coral Sea-flying in so close
that they could almost lay their bombs right on the carrier's deck. Ensign
Harvey Las;.ll saw all three of the bombs that hit. The first one barely
missed him.
"I watched that bomb," he said later. "It was heading straight for our
director (a computer-connected firing device). Its line didn't move a bit to
either side. In those few seconds I thought of all the wonderful things there
were to experience in this life, and I had a sense of utter regret that I
wasn't going to live to enjoy them."
Lasell and Fire Controlman Charles Tyson exchanged glances, and then they
shook hands. "See you in hell," said Tyson. Just then Yorktown lurched to
starboard from the shock of a near-miss on her port quarter, and the bomb
Lasell had been watching "went right by us, inboard. It pierced the flight
deck at the base of the island structure, directly in line with the foot of
the director. It had passed within ten feet of us."
The second bomb struck Yorktown's flight deck about fifty feet aft of Ensign
Laselt's gun mount. "I had my helmet on," Lasell reported, "and I was
standing up, so my head just cleared the top of our splinter shield. Suddenly
I felt as though I had been hit in the side of my head with a sledgehammer.
My right ear was numb." When someone told Lasell that he was wounded, he
touched the right side of his head and felt blood streaming down it. A minute
or two later he heard someone asking his telephone talker if he were dead.
"Our report," said Lasell, "was negative."
Lasell's guns, had they been able to fire accurately through the smoke,
might have been able to get the third plane that had scored the hit, for it
had made its approach directly in line with the five-inchers. It laid its
bomb on Yorktown's forward elevator.
Printer Jimmy Mertens was mesmerized by one of the
140
dive bombers. He stood on the flight deck and watched it come straight at
him. "It looked like a speck up there in the sky," he said later. "Then he
got bigger and bigger as he came down." Mertens finally realized his own
peril and dived headfirst down a short ladder. "I landed on a bunch of guys
who had outguessed me." Then the bomb exploded.
The man underneath Mertens had both legs almost blown away. The man on top
of Mertens, the last to dive down the ladder, had shrapnel in his side.
Mertens crawled back up the ladder to a terrible scene. The ladder was next
to the 1.1-inch guns. "I could see that the entire crew of the guns had
literally been blown to pieces. Arms and legs and parts of bodies were lying
around inside the shield of each mount. All the blood I found on me was that
of my shipmates." The bomb, which had detonated on impact, exploded inboard
of the guns, and its concussion had caught the gunners inside the
antisplinter shield.
Ensign John Lorenz, in charge of the two after 1.1-inch mounts, was knocked
unconscious. When he later came to, his eyes met a sight forever to remain
with him. A score of the men with whom he had spent so many nights and days
on watch were dead, parts of their bodies scattered about. In one trainer's
seat rested the hips and legs of a man. The rest of him had disappeared.
Chief Gunner's Mate Albert Noland reacted from long training. He soon had
cooks, musicians, and seamen up from belowdecks. They removed the bodies and
parts of bodies of those killed and took their places. It was not long before
the guns were again ready far action.
Seaman Tony Blazaukas was manning a machine gun just forward of the 1.1-inch
mounts. The blast killed his loader and blew him, dazed but otherwise unhurt,
into an ammunition loading room. Working near Blazaukas were Gunner's Mates
Ted Metcalf and Jack Magan. Metcalf was blown into a clipping room, where
bullets were loaded on belts. When he staggered outside, he almost stepped on
Magan's dead body. The two men had been standing almost shoulder to shoulder.
Chief Milt Wester of Fighting 42 (now 3) was at a 141
firefighting station on Yorktown's hangar deck. Most of his own planes were
in the air, and Wester had been helping get seven dive bombers ready for an
attack. The seven planes were loaded and fueled and parked in the after end
of the hangar deck. Then the bomb that had wiped out the 1.1 gun crews came
blasting through the overhead into the hangar deck. "The bomb," reported
Wester, "had some kind of phosphorous content, and this sprayed over some of
the planes. They caught fire. Being loaded and fueled, they were in danger of
exploding. There were also live bombs and torpedoes on the hangar deck. Water
wouldn't put the fire out, so the danger was terrific. I had my crew chop the
burning wing off one plane, so the fire wouldn't reach its fuel tanks."
When the fires broke out, Lieutenant Ace Emerson turned on all the sprinkler
systems. The hangar deck was divided into four giant bays; the sprinklers
dropped curtains of water across the ship's width, isolating each bay. By his
quick action, Emerson confined the fire to Bay Number 4, and fire-fighting
teams eventually put it out.
Seaman Carl Tyler, a crewman of Torpedo 5 kept aboard to service planes of
Torpedo 3, was wounded by the blast. "I was wearing one of those World War I
soup plate helmets," he reported, "and I was flattened out on the deck when
the blast came. I saw a bright flash of fire and heard the explosions and
then felt a sharp pain in my hip. My helmet was stripped from my head,
although I had a strap under my chin. I saw the helmet go clattering away,
down the deck, aft. My left leg began to go numb, so I reached back to see if
I had one. I wished I hadn't. There was a gaping hole in the hip, and when I
looked around. I could see blood running out on the deck. I rolled over and
tried to get up. That's when I saw two SBD's on fire, not forty feet from me.
That helped me get up, believe me!"
Tyler hobbled toward two friends, seeking assistance.
But both of them were in shock, too frightened to move. Dazed, Tyler
staggered to Yorktown's port side and looked out through an opening. "That's
when I got clobbered main, with a hit in my right shoulder Made." lie was
knocked down, to be picked up later by someone and 142
carried to sick bay. Medics found a piece of steel sticking half an inch out
of his shoulder. "The doctor poured some kind of red fluid on my wounds,
and-wow!-I bet I smoked for five minutes." Corpsmen then removed Tyler's
clothing, promising him they would bring some pajamas later. They never did;
Tyler went through the rest of the battle naked.
The first bomb had killed and maimed, but it had not impaired Yorktown's
fighting ability. The 1.1-inch guns were operating again, minutes after the
blast. And the great ship was still steaming at thirty knots.
It was another bomb that seriously hurt Yorktown, although it killed no one.
This one came down on a port-tostarboard slant, punctured the flight deck,
and exploded in the uptakes from Yorktown's firerooms. It was, in effect, a
pilot's dream-a down-the-stack shot.
"The most serious effect of this bomb hit," wrote Captain Buckmaster in his
action report, "was that it ruptured the uptakes from Boilers 1, 2, and 3;
completely disabled Boilers 2 and 3, and extinguished fires in Boilers 2, 3,
4, 5, and 6."
Steam was the giant that powered Yorktown. The steam came from water in the
boilers, heated by the intense fuel fires. Smoke from these fires was carried
away through uptakes that led ultimately to Yorktown's stacks-her chim-
neys-which were enclosed in her superstructure. Three of Yorktown's boilers,
the superheaters that gave an extra push to her turbines, had not been
repaired at Pearl Harbor, so that they were not operating at all. Of the six
remaining boilers, five had been blown out by the Japanese bomb. Without the
boilers, Yorktown could not move.
When a 20,000-ton warship making thirty knots starts to lose way, it can be
felt all over the ship. The decks, the overheads, and the bulkheads vibrate
first at lesser frequencies and finally not at all. Eight minutes after this
bomb struck Yorktown, she was helpless. There was no power to work her guns,
no power to run her elevators. Even the motor powering the gyrocompass slowed
down, and the wheel on the bridge was useless.
The third bomb pierced Yorktown's forward elevator 143
and rammed deeply-as deeply as the bomb that had done the damage at the Coral
Sea. It exploded in a room set aside for the storage of bales of rags in the
forward part of the ship. Only a handful of men were at battle stations in
that section, and no one was killed. A small hole the bomb left in the flight
deck was quickly patched with boiler plate.
But with all those rags to feed it, a troublesome fire broke out. Worse, the
rag room was close to ammunition magazines and a compartment full of
high-octane gasoline. If the ammunition and the fuel were set off, the entire
forward section of the ship would be blown away. That might have happened,
except for the fact that Lieutenant Emerson, only minutes earlier, had spread
a blanket of carbon dioxide around the gasoline storage space. Then, too,
Chief Gunner's Mate Vardie Taylor was quick-witted: after figuring out where
the fire was located, he turned a valve and flooded the ammunition magazines
with seawater. The danger from fire was averted, but the fire in the rag room
burned on. Because of choking smoke, the rag room could be approached only
through one compartment, and it was accessible only through one of the narrow
chimneylike trunks that rise vertically through certain sections of a war-
ship.
Commander Dixie Kiefer was ordered by Buckmaster to assess the damage. He
looked things over, turned to the members of the repair party, and said,
"Well, boys, the only thing for us to do is run this hose down that trunk and
get at it." He pointed at the trunk opening, from which smoke was drifting.
Humor never deserts some men, no matter what the circumstance, and a sailor
standing between the commander and the hatch leaped gracefully aside, bowed,
and swept an arm toward the opening. "After you, Commander," he said. Kiefer
grinned, swung the nozzle of the hose over his shoulder, and started down the
trunk. The sailor followed him.
If Yorktown were to be saved, it would have to be done below in the
firerooms, where the real damage was and where the real battle now began.
When the bomb blew out five of Yorktown's six boilers, it also blasted stack
gas back 144
into all the firerooms. Only one who has grappled with stack gas can
appreciate its ghastly qualities. Once in a man's eyes, it cannot be rubbed
out; the particles are too big. It must be sluiced out or removed with a
cotton swab. Inhaling stack gas is like sucking in fire; it parches the
throat and sears the stomach. Because of the gas, Yorktown's firerooms had to
be evacuated, all except Fire Room 1, where Water Tender Charles Kleinsmith
was boss. Boiler 1 was the only boiler that had survived the explosion, but
gas was seeping into the fire room, and Kleinsmith and his men-Water Tender
Cliff Snell and Firemen Earl Jansen, Ray Ellison, Jim Benton, Bill Brewer,
and Cecil Brooks-were ordered to evacuate.
The crew was just leaving when Kleinsmith bellowed, "Where the hell do you
think you're going? They're going to need this boiler!"
Even though the boiler was red-hot, its insulating brick was knocked away,
and fuel registering 180 degrees Fahrenheit was spitting from damaged oil
heaters, Kleinsmith's men turned to with a will-perhaps with too much of a
will. They began working Boiler 1 so fast that smoke from it was sucked into
other firerooms. Lieutenant Reed Cundiff, the boiler officer, had to pass
word to hold it down a little. Kleinsmith's crew eased the steam pressure a
bit-a very little bit.
Boiler 1, even at its low level of output, was producing enough electric
power to run Yorktown's auxiliary machinery. Blowers, ever so slowly, removed
stack gas from the other firerooms. After a while, other gangs were able to
return to their posts. By itself, Kleinsmith's crew kept things going until
1:20 P.M., an hour after Yorktown had stopped dead in the water. Number 4
boiler was cut back in; the fires were restarted under 5 and 6.
At 1:50 P.M., his sweaty face broken by a grin, Commander Delaney called the
bridge. "Captain," he said, "the engine room reports ready to make twenty
knots or better."
Buckmaster acknowledged the message crisply. "Very well," he said. It had
been all of that-and more.
Topside, Yorktowners tended the wounded and carried away the dead. The
living shook hands with one another. 145
Seaman Tom Edwards, near Gun 7, especially congratulated a machine gunner.
The gunner, whose issue dungarees had worn out long ago, had been given a
pair of pants contrived from canvas sailcloth by Boatswain's Mate John Sharp.
The crotch in the pants went all the way down to the gunner's knees. Edwards
noted that a bullet had passed cleanly through the canvas, between the
gunner's knees.
Inside Yorktown's bridge structure Seaman Warren Woodard was torn by
indecision. He watched as Chief Signalman Demps Gordy and Ensign Harvey Vogel
clawed frantically at a raincoat locker, from which they had seen what they
thought was blood dripping to the deck. Gordy and Vogel assumed that someone,
in fright, had hidden in the locker and had been hit badly. Seaman Woodard
knew better. He and some friends had "liberated" three gallons of tomato
juice at Pearl Harbor and had stored it in the locker. He decided to allow
the two men to break open the locker and discover the truth for themselves.
Other Yorktowners went to work patching a large hole in the flight deck.
Timbers were placed on exposed girders, and then smaller timbers were placed
on them. In this way, wooden braces were built up to a level with the deck.
Boiler plates were then laid over the timber and secured in place with
railroad spikes to match the flat deck surface. The hole in the forward
elevator, being small-for the bomb that had made it was of the delayed-action
type-was quickly repaired.
At the point when Yorktown had been dead in the water, without radio and
without radar, Admiral Fletcher had come to a reluctant decision. Without
proper communications facilities, he could not command, and he had no choice
but to transfer, with his staff, to another ship. Yorktown sent a signal to
Astoria, which lowered a boat, and shortly after 12:40 P.M. the admiral and
his staff climbed aboard the cruiser. Also coming aboard Astoria were two
Yorktown pilots, Max Leslie and Swede Holmberg, who had ditched their planes
after they had run out of gas and been picked up by a whaleboat from the
cruiser.
Yorktown's other planes were taken in by Hornet and 146
Enterprise. In a tragic accident the wounded pilot of a Yorktown Wildcat
landed on Hornet without turning off his gun switch. The shock of the landing
activated his guns, spraying the carrier's superstructure and killing a
number of men, among them Lieutenant Royal Ingersoll, the son of an admiral.
The Japanese were also working. Admiral Yamamoto was still hundreds of miles
away, his flag in the battleship Ynmato. The news he had received from Nagumo
was desperate, and at 12:20 P.M. he decided that he would have to commit his
surface ships if the battle were to be won. He then radioed his northern
force, off the Aleutians, and ordered its two carriers to make all speed for
Midway. Next, he directed the commander of his invasion force to send the
transports to the northwest, out of harm's way, and to rush his heavy
cruisers to Midway.
Yamamoto intended to hit Midway with the four heavy cruisers from the
invasion convoy. First, however, the submarine I-68, still prowling off the
island, would have the honor of firing the opening shot from her four-inch
deck gun. At about 2:30 A.M. on the following morning, a surface attack on
Midway would begin. The island would be flattened; all danger of air attack
from that quarter would be removed. Then, if his capital ships could catch up
with the American fleet, it, too, would be destroyed.
At 2 P.M., Yorktown got under way again. No longer burning, she resumed the
fueling of her on-deck fighters. By 2:17 P.M. she was making almost seventeen
knots, and her escorts had once again surrounded her in Cruising Disposition
Victor. Nine minutes later Astoria's radar picked up a second Japanese strike
from the carrier Hiryu, just thirty-three miles away, winging straight for
Yorktown. This low-flying attack, like the first, had come in under
Yorktown's straight-line radar beam, demonstrating that the Japanese, too,
had benefited from the experiences of the preceding battles.

147
CHAPTER FOURTEEN

It seemed hardly fair. No American warship had ever before been attacked so
often or so hard. Now driving toward Yorktown were sixteen Japanese planes
led by a gallant fighter, Lieutenant Joichi Tomonaga, who had taken off from
Hiryu fully aware that one of his fuel tanks had been damaged in the earlier
attack on Midway and that he would never return to his slop. He had only
enough gas for a one-way trip.
Later in the war an attack such as Tomonaga's would have been chewed apart
miles from its target, but not now, in spite of the fact that Yorktown and
the other American ships with her had both the planes and the firepower to
fend off their attackers. Orbiting over the carrier were six of her own
Wildcats, three from Enterprise, and three more of her own that had taken off
from Enterprise.
One of the Yorktowners from Enterprise was the intrepid Scotty McCuskey. "We
were given a vector," he stated, "and we went out on it. But in those days
radar couldn't tell you the height of the incoming aircraft. We naturally
figured it was a high-altitude flight, and so we started climbing. Well,
those so-and-so's slipped in beneath us. That coukf3iave been my day all
right, if we hadn't missed those torpedo planes. With Bill Woollen and Harry
Gibbs, with my four planes, and with what Thach brought up, we had enough to
do the job." Unable to find the enemy, McCuskey and three Enterprise planes
had to put about and return to their carriers.
Ten other Wildcats were among the planes being refueled on Yorktown's deck
when Astoria's radar first picked up the Japanese strike. With another attack
imminent, refueling had to be canceled and fuel lines drained and filled
again with carbon dioxide. Four of the ten fighters, piloted by John Thach,
Bill Leonard, John 148
Adams, and G. F. Hopper, roared off. All had less than twenty-five gallons of
gasoline in their tanks. Technically at least, Yorktown had a fighter cover
of sixteen planes-one fighter for each enemy plane. The odds, on paper, were
even for a change.
At 2:26 P.M., Lieutenant Tomonaga instructed his fliers to deploy for
attack. Four minutes later, Yorktown lookouts spotted the Nakajimas, nine
miles to the west. At 2:33 P.M., Tomonaga shouted into his microphone, "All
planes, go in!" The Japanese planes, in beginning their attack, ran through
a cloud formation. The quartermaster of the watch on board Astoria noted in
the ship's log that four enemy planes were observed falling out of the clouds
in flames.
One of them was probably Bill Woollen's victim. "I was at about seven
thousand feet when I spotted a torpedo plane ahead of me and below me,"
Woollen reported. "I overtook him and shot him down at about four thousand
feet. After watching him spin, 1 went straight ahead for a few moments, and
then I felt a heavy jolt in my left wing. I looked out, to see oil from the
cooler in that wing spilling out."
Woollen knew that he had only a few minutes left before the engine
overheated and cut out. "My first thoughts were to get out of there before I
got hit again. I never did see the guy who got me. I noticed that Yorktown
was heading into the wind, so I figured my best bet would be to land as far
ahead of the task force as possible, where the ships would pass me by and
lend a hand." Woollen ditched about five miles ahead of Yorktown and was
picked up by a destroyer.
Because Yorktown planes and pilots had been scattered among three ships,
records of their performance are confused. But Woollen got one plane; Thach
claimed a torpedo plane, as did Bill Leonard and John Adams.
Adams, one of the four pilots who took off from Yorktown short of fuel just
as the Japanese began their attack, stated, "By the time I was launched, our
ship's guns were blasting. I never will forget trying to roll up my wheels,
charge my guns, and get my plane sighted in on a torpedo plane, all at the
same time." He hit one Nakajima before it 149
could drop its torpedo, poured slugs into another that had already dropped
its torpedo, and suddenly found that he was in the middle of the Japanese
formation, under a hail of fire from the Japanese and from the cruisers,
destroyers, and Yorktown. "One of the destroyers seemed to have it in for me.
He kept firing at me long after the attack was over. I can't remember which
one it was, but my buddy Dick Crommelin nearly got into a fight with its
gunnery officer in Hawaii a week later."
Ensign Melvin Tootle, like Adams, was forced to take off from Yorktown in
haste. He had barely cleared Yorktown's bow when he made a violent turn to
engage an incoming enemy torpedo plane; he began firing almost before his
wheels were up. His ejected .50-caliber shells rattled like hailstones on the
decks of the destroyer Balch. Then he was hit, perhaps by the Japanese, more
likely by the Americans. He pulled his Wildcat into a half-loop and radioed
that he was bailing out. Tootle, who was picked up later, still holds the
world record for short-duration combat: he was in the air for only thirty
seconds.
By 2:40 P.M. Yorktown's fighters could do nothing more to forestall the
attack, for the Japanese were in range of American surface gunfire. To pursue
the enemy into that holocaust would be suicidal. Yorktown pilots, after the
battle, reported that they had downed seven enemy planes; the records,
however, are imperfect. This much is clear: six of the ten Japanese torpedo
planes were able to get close enough to launch their missiles at Yorktown.
Sharp gunnery from the defending ships might have brought them all down, but
the shooting was poor. Gunnery doctrine in mid-1942 was crude compared with
the art it had become by V-J Day. In the early stages of the Pacific war,
guns were not radar-directed and the proximity fuze, to become so deadly
later, was still only a laboratory project. Yorktown and her consorts did the
best they could with barrage fire, in which fuzes were set to explode at a
predetermined distance from the defending ships. The guns kept firing at a
fixed range until enemy planes flew into their bursts or until the fuzes were
reset. But Yorktown, having been worked up to 20.5 knots and 150
dodging frantically once again, was a difficult platform from which to direct
gunfire. The escorting ships had to keep station on her, and this made
accuracy difficult for their pointers and trainers. Too, the Japanese came in
very low, so that a fast-moving cruiser or destroyer sometimes blocked the
firing path of another ship. Again, the unexpectedly high speed of the
Japanese torpedo planes led gunnery officers astray because ranges closed
much faster than they had estimated, so that b=unbursts appeared behind the
attackers. Deflection as well was off because the gunners were estimating the
speed of the Nakajimas at 125 to 130 knots, when they actually were making
closer to 180 knots. As a result, the gunners failed to lead their targets
enough.
Mack Helmerich of Bombing 5 was at his fire-fighting station on the hangar
deck. "1 saw one flight of three Japanese planes come in," he recalled. "Only
one of them got his fish away. The other two were knocked down before they
could release. Out of a second flight of three planes, two got their fish
away." Hclmerich watched the torpedoes head for Yorktown's port side. He
lined up their trajectory and then ducked for shelter as far away from the
estimated point of impact as he could get.
Two groups of Japanese planes tried to cross over Yorktown and attack her
from the starboard side, in a maneuver the reverse of that which Torpedo 3
had attempted earlier against Hiryu. The two groups never made it, but four
or perhaps five Japanese torpedo planes were able to launch their torpedoes
with a chance of scoring; all of them attacked from the port side. As soon as
their torpedoes hit the water, Captain Buckmaster spun Yorktown into a hard
left turn. He intended to comb the torpedo tracks-that is, run between them-
as he had done successfully at the Coral Sea.
This time success was only partial. Buckmaster
managed to evade one torpedo; it passed astern. Another
missed to port. Both of them had been released by the
planes attacking from the sternmost position. Two other
Nakajima pilots attacked from farther ahead, one coming
151
to within 500 yards of Yorktown before he let his torpedo go.
At 2:41 P.M. every man aboard Yorktown felt the ship lurch to starboard,
then shudder violently. Two torpedoes crashed into her part side, less than
sixty feet apart. An immense puff of white smoke gushed from her stacks as
she swung left. She continued to swing in a tight circle, listed sharply to
port, and stopped dead in the water.
There are only two ways in which a major warship like Yorktown could be
badly hurt. One was to put a bomb down her stacks, knocking out her power
plant, which the Japanese had done earlier, on June 4, only to be foiled by
the heroic efforts of Bill Kleinsmith and his helpers in Fire Room 1. The
second was to put a torpedo into the ship's firerooms, which would also knock
out the power plant, perhaps even open up a hale large enough for tons of
seawater to pour in and drag the slop to the bottom.
The Japanese, in a combination of skill and courage, had managed to put not
one but two torpedoes into Yorktown's fireroams. The first burst through the
fuel tanks outboard of Fire Rooms 2 and 6, close to the bulkhead that
separated them, then exploded. These two immense rooms, each nearly the size
of a three-story house, were blown apart. The intervening bulkhead was
shattered, and seawater rushed in to fill the void.
The second torpedo hit forward of Fire Room 2, in a generator room. All
hands in the room must have been killed instantly.
Yorktown now lay open to the sea for some sixty-five feet along her port
side. Tons of water streamed in, and she began to lean heavily to her port
side where the weight of the water was concentrated. For a few seconds it
appeared that she would roll over on her left side or capsize.
The fires under all her boilers were extinguished as water poured into the
firerooms on the port side and resulting concussion blew out fires on the
starboard side. Her entire power output was shut down; her four screws slowed
and then stopped. The rudder was jammed fifteen degrees to the left. For the
second time in 155 minutes Yorktown was completely helpless.
152
This time Kleinsmith and his gang would not be around to save her. After the
dive bomber attack, he and his men had staggered, sooty-black and exhausted,
to the post office compartment, where they had dropped in their tracks. This
compartment was directly above the explosion of the first torpedo. Kleinsmith
and his gang, along with two telephone takers from the ship's band, Musicians
Gordon Roop and John Seymour, were killed instantly.
Water Tender George Handford and his gang, stationed in a fireroom other
than Kleinsmith's, had also gone to the post office compartment for a brief
rest. Like all belowdecks men, they rested at the ready, prepared to move
wherever needed. Handford, memories of Repair S's fate at the Coral Sea fresh
in his mind, decided that the compartment was too crowded. He took his men
into the adjoining compartment aft and closed the watertight door behind him.
Minutes later the torpedo struck Yorktown. Handford and the three men with
him were not scratched.
The two blasts were stunning. Yorktown rolled over to thirty degrees as
water lapped at her hangar deck. She faltered, then eased back, settling in
at a twenty-six-degree angle.
Reports came funneling into the bridge. Commander Delaney's was one of the
first. "All boiler fires are out, Captain," he told Buckmaster. Ernie Davis
reported that all his gunners were still at their stations, despite the
ship's wild extreme inclination. Manual controls would have to be used to
fire the guns, he explained, but it could be done.
Other reports came in.
"Fire Rooms Two and Six flooded."
"Forward generator room flooded. Crew does not acknowledge transmissions.
Think they're all dead."
"Leaks in Fire Rooms One and Four. Shipping water."
"All power lost."
"After emergency diesel generator operating, but she keeps cutting out."
(The emergency system, running on diesel fuel, was hardly enough to sustain
lighting.)
"Damage incurred in sick bay. We've got to get the wounded out of there
quick."
"Switchboard destroyed."
153
At this point Buckmaster could not have distributed electric power
throughout his ship had it been available to him.
Capping all the discouraging news was that from Lieutenant Commander
Clarence Aldrich, the ship's damage control officer. It was his duty to
assess the damage and to direct the attempt to repair it.
If Yorktown were to fight again in this battle, even to try to get away, she
had somehow to be brought back to an even keel so that her boiler fires could
be relighted. To right her, those compartments now open to the sea must be
sealed off, then pumps put to work, sucking water from spaces made secure
against the sea. Some of the pumps would drain this water over the side;
others would shift it into empty starboard fuel and ballast tanks to increase
the ship's weight on that side. Still others would be needed to transfer
hundreds of tons of fuel oil from port to starboard to serve as a
counterweight. Chief George Vavrek, the "oil king," was intimately familiar
with the ship's maze of pipes, lines, valves, tanks, and fuel storage spaces,
and he knew how to do the job. But there was one drawback, as Aldrich
explained to Captain Buckmaster: "Without power to the pumps, I see no hope
of correcting this list."
The ship's listing was frighteningly erratic. It would first increase, then
ease back, then increase again. No one could be sure just what might happen
next.
Captain Buckmaster conferred with his department heads as he tried to
analyze the ship's condition objectively. He could not right the ship in
order to light off the boilers without power, and power would come only from
functioning boilers. Second, although the ship's guns were manned, tilted at
a twenty-six-degree angle, they were unable to hit anything. Third, the ship
might roll over on her beam ends at any moment, taking most of the crew to
the bottom with her. On the one hand, she might remain afloat-one of only
three corners opposing Japan's ambitions in the Pacific. On the other, more
than 2,000 men, battle-tested, courageous, expert-The decision was
Buckmaster's alone. Admiral Fletcher was in the cruiser Astoria, but even had
he still been 154
aboard, the decision would have been Buckmaster's. At 2:58 P.M. the captain
turned to Dixie Kiefer, his executive officer, and gave the fateful order:
"Pass the word to abandon ship."
Men who have never borne the weight of command have derided Buckmaster for
this decision, pointing out that Yorktown, after all, did not sink. That fact
is irrefutable, now. Buckmaster listened to the expert advice that was
available to him, he weighed alternatives, and he concluded that Yorktown was
in danger of sinking. No man who was aboard Yorktown that day disagreed. The
ship, by all objective analysis, was in danger of sinking.
From the bridge of Astoria, Fletcher saw what was happening. He supported
Buckmaster's decision, and he later reported to Admiral Nimitz that he had
done so.
Orders to abandon ship were passed by word of mouth. When they got to
Yorktown's main engine room, where no one had been killed or wounded,
Commander Delaney said, "O.K., boys, up you go." The only way out was through
an escape trunk, in which the ladder was on the starboard side. With Yorktown
tilted so sharply to port, climbing the ladder was alinost like trying to
crawl across a ceiling.
Although the abandon-ship order had been passed, Rex Quillan, aviation
mechanic in Scouting 5 and plane captain for Lieutenant (jg) C. N. Conatser's
dive bomber, stepped up smartly to Commander Oscar Pederson and kept an-
pouncing, "Mister Canatser's plane is ready for takeoff, sir." His job was to
help Conatser fight, and so far as he was concerned, the plane was ready
despite the flight deck's cant.
The first man to leave Yorktown was Electrician's Mate Pete Newberg, blown
through a hangar-deck opening when the torpedoes hit. Still told is the story
that Chief Boatswain's Mate "Pop" Austin, Yorktown's master-at-arms, leaned
over the side and hollered, "Who gave you permission to depart this ship?"
Vane Bennett was not at all sure that he was going to be able to abandon
ship. As he opened the door from the radar room, he was met by a wall of
smoke and flame in 155
the passageway. He ducked back inside and opened a port on the starboard
side, pulled himself through, and slid down to the hangar deck. While Bennett
stood there wondering what to do next, Bill Kelso, a boatswain's mate, edged
up to him and said, "I've always wanted to dive off this flight deck. May I
have permission to do so now?"
"Be my guest," said Bennett, half-joking. To his utter astonishment, Kelso
posed at the deck's edge and then excuted a graceful swan dive into the ocean
seventy-five feet below.
What Tom Edwards remembered most vividly about abandoning Yorktown was the
silence of the ship: "It was real eerie. You couldn't hear any of those
blower sounds you usually hear on a ship or the creaking of the expansion
joints. There was nothing except sort of shuffling sounds, as men headed for
their abandon-ship stations."
Ship's Cools Tomas Saxon left Yorktown clutching the pet rabbit he had
brought aboard at Pearl Harbor. Both nearly drowned when a sailor jumped into
the water on top of them. Saxon's back was injured; complications developed,
ultimately to prove fatal, and the rabbit outlived its master.
When everyone else had left the ship, Captain Buckmaster went over the side
and grabbed hold of a raft loaded with wounded. The raft was being towed by
a whaleboat to the destroyer Hammann when Buckmaster heard a cry for help. He
looked around and saw a mess attendant thrashing wildly in the water.
Buckmaster swam to the man and pulled him back to the raft. As Lieutenant
Hulbert later described the scene, "he looked like a great walrus, swimming
along and holding the man's head out of the water."
Hundreds of pairs of shoes were lined up on Yorktown's flight and hangar
decks, in neat and orderly rows, as men prepared to abandon ship. The same
thing had happened aboard Lexington when she had been abandoned at the Coral
Sea. Much has been made of this, and the phenomenon is usually attributed to
military discipline. Not so. As several Yorktowners have explained, "We saw
some 156
..
.guys take off their shoes, so we did, too." It was as simple as that.
Lieutenant Hurlbert, who had watched his skipper rescue the mess attendant,
eventually paddled alongside the destroyer Benham, where he grabbed the lines
of a cargo net that had been draped over the side. He was just starting to
climb aboard when he heard the destroyer's publicaddress system announce,
"Stand by for enemy air attack!" It was a false alarm, one of several that
occurred during the rescue of Yorktown's crew, most of them touched off by
the return of friendly planes.
"Benham was supposed to be the fastest ship in the Navy," Hurlbert noted.
"The talk was that she had made forty-five knots in her sea trials when she
was first built. Anyway, when that air-defense alarm sounded, she dug her old
tail in and started to take off. I clutched at the cargo net automatically,
of course. Before I could think of letting go, Benham was really picking up
speed. With one arm poked through that cargo net, I didn't dare let go, for
fear of getting caught in Benham's screws. So there I was, flipping up and
down on the wave tops as she dashed along. I'd hit, bounce up about ten feet,
and then come back down with a mighty whap! Finally, on about my tenth
bounce, someone reached out, grabbed me in midair, and pulled me aboard."
Most of Yorktown's crew had been recovered by midafternoon, and all who were
going to be rescued had been picked up by 6:45 P.M. Astoria took in a handful
of York, towners, and Buckmaster transferred to the cruiser at 5:44 P.M.
Benham rescued 721; Balch, 545; Russell, 492; Anderson, 203; Morris, 246;
Hammann, 85; and Hughes, 24. All together, more than 2,300 Yorktowners were
saved.

157
CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Even as Yorktown was being torpedoed by planes from Hiryu, her dive bombers
were seeking out the enemy. At 2:30 P.M., Lieutenant Sam Adams-his squadron
mates called him the blond Viking-spotted the last remaining Japanese
carrier. He circled in and out of the clouds, taking his time, checking and
double-checking his position. At 2:45 P.M. he communicated his discovery by
radiotelephone in plain English. As a double check, his radioman sent out the
same information by telegraphic key.
Enterprise picked up the message. "Have sighted one enemy carrier," it read,
"one battleship, ptwo heavy cruisers, and four destroyers. Position is
thirty-one degrees, fifteen minutes north; one hundred seventy-five degrees,
five minutes west. Steaming due north at fifteen knots."
Adams' report was nearly perfect. He had pinned down Hiryu's location
precisely, and the battleship he had seen was Haruna.* The heavy cruisers
were Tone and Chikuma. There were only three destroyers, KazaBumo, Yugumo,
and Makigumo. The fourth destroyer reported by Adams was, in fact, Nagara, a
light cruiser that looked very much

like the big destroyers.
At 2:50 P.M. Enterprise put up her strike-ten of her own dive bombers
commanded by Lieutenant Wilmer Gallaher and fourteen of Yorktown's refugees
led by Lieutenant Dave Shumway, senior officer in Bombing 3 now that Leslie
and Holmberg were out of it. Gallaher, as
leader of both groups, ordered Yorktown's planes to stand

* Haruna was supposedly sunk at the outset of the war by American hero Colin
Kelly. However, she led a charmed life; many claimed that they had sunk her;
no one ever did. She finished her war, decks awash, but superstructure above
water, at the Japanese naval base at Kure.
158
off when they sighted the fourth Japanese carrier, while he and five
Enterprise shipmates went for it. The idea was that once Gallaher's planes
had taken care of Hiryu, Shumway and his Yorktown planes could go after the
battleship and the cruisers.
Both sides were by now close to exhaustion. Hiryu's log shows that so far
that day her Zeros and gunners had battled nearly six dozen American
aircraft. Now here were two dozen more. The Americans were just as tired.
Ensign Sid Bottomley of Yorktown had started the day with a scanty breakfast
and an early-morning search flight. He had come back to Yorktown, snatched a
single cup of coffee while his Dauntless was being refueled, and joined Lieu-
tenant Commander Max Leslie in the attack on the carrier Kaga; he had scored
one hit. He had escaped through a hail of gunfire and a swarm of Zeros only
to find on returning that his own ship was under attack. He had orbited near
Yorktown until he had nearly run out of gas, then had landed on Enterprise.
Bottomley had been awake for eleven hours and in the air most of that time.
Before he took off against Hiryu, he went to Enterprise's ready roam, his
throat parched and his stomach groaning. Someone handed him a sandwich, and
he bolted down three or four immense bites before he realized that he was
eating, of all things, peanut butter. So, here he was, over a Japanese
carrier again, hungry, thirsty, and tired, bits of peanut butter sticking to
his teeth.
Six Enterprise planes, led by Gallaher, came out of the clouds and almost
caught Hiryu by surprise. The carrier's captain, however, was agile; he spun
Hiryu hard right, and at thirty knots, she swiftly shifted course from north
to southeast. Gallaher and his men, outmaneuvered, missed their target.
Yorktown's Shumway, suspecting that this might happen, led his planes around
so that they could attack Hiryac from the southwest, out of the sun. This
pilot had no intention of being left to attack the battleship or the
cruisers; he wanted Hiryu, the carrier that had struck Yorktown.
Eleven of Shumway's planes carried 1,000-pound bombs; the other three, along
with the Enterprise planes, 159
carried 500-pounders. All of Shumway's planes began their attack, with at
least a dozen Zeros tyring to cut them down, for Hiryu was, after all, the
only landing field they had to return to within thousands of miles.
Lieutenant (jg) Gordon Sherwood began his dive at 18,000 feet. "Fighters in
echelon," he recalled later, "made sweeping scissors back and forth across my
tail." The Zeros used their 7.7-millimeter guns to mark the range and only
then began firing with their heavier 20-millimeter cannon. Sherwood also
remarked the skill with which they flew. "At the top of my dive a Zero
fighter pulled up from the tail of the preceding plane and dove at me."
The Zeros did the best they could. Shumway's plane was evidence enough of
that; the diving and landing flaps, the stabilizer, elevator, right main gas
tank, rudder, fuselage, and engine all were hit. His gunner, Ray Coons, was
shot in the arm. Randy Cooner's dive bomber was peppered by 7.7 fire, and two
20-millimeter shells damaged his radio equipment, shredded his life raft, and
wounded his gunner, C. R. Bassett, who kept right on firing, bringing down a
Zero and driving off a float plane. Bud 1Vcrrill's plane was hit from
underneath, and his gunner, D. J. Bergeron, was wounded; shrapnel from a
cannon burst cut his feet.
Ensign John Butler and Lieutenan (jg) Obie Wiseman were shot down. Their
gunners, D. D. Berg and G. V. Dawn, died with them.
In spite of the fierce opposition, Shumway and his Yorktowners scored hits
on Hiryu. Four 1,000-pound bombs burst on the forward part of the carrier's
flight deck, just ahead of the portside bridge structure, and she was left
"burning furiously," Shumway reported later. He and the other pilots
hightailed it to the northeast, rendezvousing in groups for mutual protection
against enraged Zero pilots.
Two of Shumway's pilots, Ensigns Bob Campbell and Bob Benson, went for the
battleship and one of the cruisers once they had seen how badly the carrier
had been hurt. Several hits were claimed, but in fact they both had scored
only near-misses. Toward the end of the attack three pilots from Yorktown's
other squadron-they had been scouting when they heard Adams' radio report of
the Japanese 160
position showed up to lend a hand. They were Ensign Ben Preston, Lieutenant
Wally Short, and Lieutenant (jg) John Neilsen. Preston stated later that he
was almost certain that he had struck Hiryu and that Short and Neilson had
scored near-misses.
Fires broke out on Hiryu's hangar and flight decks. Below, her engineers
battled furiously to save the ship, but it was hopeless. In a few hours Hiryu
stopped dead in the water and listed heavily. Captain Tomeo Kaku ordered her
abandoned; he and Rear Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi, heartbroken, elected to go
down with the ship. The two lashed themselves to the helm and waited for her
to sink. But Hiryu was almost as stubborn about sinking as Yorktown had been;
hours went by, and she was still afloat. Impatient at this state of affairs,
the two officers went below and committed suicide. It was not until 5:10 A.M.
the next morning that Hiryu finally went down. Even then she had to be given
a hand as she was scuttled.* Yorktown, halfcrippled when she had left Pearl
Harbor, could chalk up her third enemy carrier.
Shumway and the eleven other surviving Yorktown planes made it safety back
to Enterprise, although Shumway's, Cooper's, and Merrill's planes were so
badly shot up that they would never fly again. The pilots were exhilarated,
for although their own ship was smoking and abandoned, they had extracted a
telling measure of revenge.
The Japanese situation by now was desperate indeed, but Yamamoto was not yet
prepared to concede the battle. Enemy hopes were higher than they should have
been because Admiral Nagumo, as darkness fell, was misled into thinking that
two American earners had been destroyed. Earlier in the day his pilots had
reported that an American carrier was "burning fiercely." Nagumo wrote off
the car-
` Soryu sank at 7:13 P.M. on June 4. Kaga sank twelve minutes later. 4kagi,
like Hiryu, had to be scuttled, going down at S A.M. on June 5, just ten
minutes ahead of Hiryu. By dawn on the morning of June 5 all four carriers in
the enemy's main striking force were at the bottom of the Pacific. Yorktown,
although abandoned, was still afloat.
161
rier; it was Yorktown. Now, at the end of the day, a float plane from Chikuma
reported sighting an American carrier of the Yorktown class, adrift, Nagumo
concluded that this was a second carrier, when actually it was again
Yorktown.
Nagumo's hopes were crushed not much later when the same pilot from Chickuma
spotted Enterprise and Hornet and reported his finding at once. The pilot,
taking cover in cloud formations when necessary in evading American fighters,
found the two American carriers a second time. But somehow he must have lost
his bearings-everyone by this point was weary and confused. Whatever the
reason, he reported his second finding as two more carriers.
Nagumo, whose heart had never been entirely in this battle to begin with,
was now totally confused. He was very certain that his pilots had knocked out
two carriers. Yet here was a scout pilot reporting four more carriers, all of
them operational. That would mean the Americans had opened the battle with
six carriers, and Japanese intelligence had never indicated that the
Americans could put together that kind of force.
Shortly before 11 P.M., Nagumo sent a message to Yamamoto: "There are still
four enemy aircraft carriers, possibility including light aircraft carriers,
six cruisers, and sixteen destroyers. They were steaming westward. None of
our aircraft carriers is operational. We plan to contact the enemy with scout
aircraft tomorrow morning."
Tomorrow morning? That would never do, for hours
earlier Yamamoto had radioed Tokyo that the American
fleet was nearly destroyed and that what was left of it was
retreating eastward. It was more a hopeful prophecy than a
statement of fact. To make it foolproof, Yamamoto had
ordered his two carriers in the Aleutians, Ryujo and Junyo,
to join him; they were on the way. The carrier Zuiho, with
the troop convoy, was moving up from the southwest. And
within sight of the flagship Yarnato was the ancient Hosho,
the world's first carrier built from the keel up. Perhaps, Yamamoto thought,
he was inferior to the Americans in aircraft strength, even with these
reinforcements, but he still
had overwhelming superiority in total number of ships and
guns. 162
What Yamamoto had wanted all along=and what he wanted now-was a decisive
fleet engagement. Nagumo's state of mind, he had decided, was hardly
conducive to a slashing night attack. Thus, Yamamoto fired off a message,
relieving Nagumo of the command of the main carrier force and its escorting
ships. Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondo, commander of the invasion force, was
ordered to take over. Kondo, at the time, was steaming full speed with his
heavy surface warships to join Nagumo.
Yamamoto wanted first to destroy Midway, to eliminate it as an aircraft
base. To do this, he sent out orders at 8:30 P.M. to Lieutenant Commander
Yahachi Tanabe and his submarine, 1-168, still patrolling off Midway, to
close in on the island and, with its four-inch deck gun, to begin shelling
the airfield. It was to maintain its attack until joined by the four heavy
cruisers from Kondo's invasion group-Mikuma, Mognmi, Suzuya, and Kumano, then
the most powerful ships of their class in the world.
At 1 A.M. an June 5, Commander Tanabe poked his periscope above the ocean's
surface just off Midway. He was anxious to get into the fight, for since the
war had begun he had taken part in no real combat. In the months just before
and after Pearl Harbor, he had been the skipper of the record-line submarine
RO-.59, training officers and men within the placid confines of the Japanese
Inland Sea. He had taken command of 1-168 in January, 1942, after Lieutenant
Commander Otoji Nakamura had brought her home from sentry duty off the island
of Oahu in Hawaii.
At 1:30 A.M., Tanabe surfaced, and the first deck gun round winged toward
Midway. Five more followed in quick succession before two searchlights on
shore pinpointed the submarine. Shore batteries began firing back, and their
aim was very effective. Shells bracketed 1-168 almost at once; a disappointed
Tanabe had no choice but to

* They were the famous cheat cruisers, supposedly built with sixinch guns
and tonnage within limits imposed by the Washington Naval Disarmament Treaty
(1922). In 1938 these ships had been secretly refitted with the eight-inch
guns for which they had been designed. Carrying a total of forty of these big
rifles, they could have given Midway a very bad time of it.
163
"pull the plug" and beat a hasty retreat. He headed south, away from the
island, shaking off surface pursuers. Angry and disappointed, Tanabe assumed
that I-168 had finished its job for this battle.
At this point Yamamoto was almost prepared to admit defeat. He might
question I`dagumo's will to fight, but he knew that he could not escape
Nagiimo's professional judgment, and that judgment indicated to Nagumo, and
now to Yamamoto, that the enemy still had four aircraft carriers. If
Yaniamoto pushed east to engage the enemy ships, he mieht not find them until
dawn, and again those deadly dive bombers would be upon him. At 2:55 A.M.,
Yamamoto reached the most difficult decision of his long and celebrated
career: "Occupation of Midway is canceled," he signaled his fleet. The four
heavy cruisers that were steaming to join the submarine I-168 off Midway
turned back, and the entire remainder of the Japanese fleet began to withdraw
from the area. Yamamoto, who had been a shrewd, aggressive cardplayer when he
had been stationed in Washington in the 1920's, was folding his hams: he or-
dered all his ships to rendezvous with rear-echelon tankers to take on the
fuel they would need for the long, sad voyage home.
Admiral Spruance, to whom Admiral Fletcher had by now largely given
over.command (Spruance retained in his task force the only two operational
carriers), was not aware of these developments, but he did sense the danger
of a night action. The Japanese were trained intensively in night combat, and
Yamamoto had eleven battleships with him. Anainst them, at night, American
aircraft, without radar and without special training, were almost entirely
useless.
Thus, the American ships withdrew to the east, in order to avoid a showdown
with superior Japanese guns in a night action. Spruance was prepared to turn
west again at dawn, and then-and only then-to look for the enemy.
The ships standing by Yorktown began moving to the east at 6 P.M. on June 4,
leaving the carrier alone except for the destroyer Hvghes, which had orders
to sink her if she began to burn, for fire would give her position away 164
and make possible her capture by the Japanese.
There is no question that Spruance acted properly in withdrawing to the
east. There has ever since been some sharp challenging of the decision to
leave Yorktown with only a single destroyer for defense. She was still afloat
and, to some, seemed to be listing at a less dangerous angle. Fletcher and
Buckmaster, some critics still contend, should have put a salvage party
aboard her on the night of June 4. This is, of course, another after-the-fact
judgment. One thing can be said: early in the evening of June 4, Buckmaster
was making plans to salvage his ship. Perhaps even more to the point, the
Navy in those days had no standard operation for salvage parties. Yorktown
did not have a group specifically organized for such an activity. And her
crew, it must be remembered, were scattered, most of them exhausted and
shoeless, among eight different ships.
Buckmaster, aboard the cruiser Astoria, never gave up the idea that Yorktown
might still be saved. He and the officers most intimately concerned with
salvage operations stayed up most of the night of June 4 and 5 studying
methods for doing the job. Lieutenant Hurlbert changed ships twelve times
that night, searching out key men to make up a salvage party; all of them
were gathered into a group aboard Astoria.
First, it was decided, the flight decks and hangar decks would have to be
cleared of debris, including aircraft, to lighten ship. Next, gunner's mates
and shipfitters would cut loose and cast away the four five-inch guns on the
port side. With power furnished by escorting ships, water and oil could be
pumped from Yorktown's port tanks to the starboard. This, it was reasoned,
would bring Yorktown back to an almost even keel. Finally, water tenders
would light off the boilers, and Yorktown could limp -to port under her own
power. All this might be hastened because the fleet tug Vireo, moored at
French Frigate Shoal, between Midway and Oahu, was already on her way to take
Yorktowre in tow while the work progressed.
What Yorktown needed was a great deal of hard work and a little bit of luck.
At 6:26 A.M. on Tune 5, the destroyer Hughes, maintaining her lonely patrol
around 165
Yorktown, picked up a Japanese scout plane on her radar. It was another float
plane fjoill the cruiser Chi,',,; lr;a. The pilot, at 6:52 A.M., radioed to
his forces: "I see an enemy aircraft carrier of the Yorktown-class. It is
listing to starboard [sic] and drifting. Position is one hundred and eleven
degrees true bearing, distance two hundred and forty miles from my takeoff
point. One destroyer is nearby."
The Japanese immediately radioed Submarine I-168 and Commander Tanabe:
"1-168 will locate and destroy the American carrier." Yorktown's position was
given as 150 miles northeast of Midway. "We set off at once," Tanabe reported
after the war. "My electrical officer, Lieutenant Mochizuki, gave amulets to
each member of the crew." Mochizuki, a religious man, had obtained the good
luck charms at Suitengu Shrine, a temple in Fukuoka on the southern Japanese
island of Kyushu. Each of the 104 members of the crew was wearing one of them
as Tanabe circled Midway and set course for Yorktown's estimated position.
Aboard the destroyer Hughes, at almost the same time that I-168 was clearing
Midway, machine gun fire was heard, and men on deck noticed splashes in the
water near them. They followed the line made by the splashes until they saw
a man in Yorktown's port catwalk, firing one of her machine guns. A whaleboat
crew from Hughes promptly boarded the carrier and picked up Seaman Norman
Pichette, who had been wounded in the stomach by shrapnel and had somehow
been overlooked when Yorktown had been abandoned. The original wound had not
been serious, but peritonitis had set in, and Pichette died, less than
twenty-four hours after he whispered to his rescuers that there was still
another man aboard Yorktown.
The whaleboat returned to Yorktown and picked up Seaman George Weise,
unconscious and suffering from a skull fracture and other injuries. Both he
and Pichette had been in the carrier's sick bay and had probably been
overlooked in the darkness or had been presumed dead. Weise, who recovered,
regained consciousness in Hughes' sick bay as a doctor was giving him blood.
Minutes later 166
Ensign Harry Gibbs came paddling up to Hughes in a rubber life raft. He and
his Wildcat had been shot down the day before, and he had been trying to get
to Yorktown all night. "I must have rowed six or seven miles," Gibbs
estimated.
A short time later the fleet tug Vireo, from French Frigate Shoal, came over
the horizon and began to make preparations to take Yorktown in tow. Sailors
from Hughes, after making a third trip to Yorktown, reported that the carrier
seemed to he holding her own. The fire in the rag room had flared up again,
but that did not seem to pose serious danger.
Almost simultaneously, miles to the east, Captain Buckmaster, 28 of his
officers, and 133 enlisted min had transferred aboard the destroyer Hammann
and started west to reboard the carrier.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The destroyer Hammann, carrying Captain Buckmaster
and 161 members of his crew, pulled alongside Yorktown
at 4:40 A.M. (Midway time) on June 6, a'most thirtyeight hours from the time
that the abandon-ship order had
been given. By then nearly all the other Yorktowners were
on their way to Pearl Harbor aboard the submarine tender
Fulton, which had been sent out specifically to fetch them
home. Also alongside Yorktown, by dawn on June 6, were
the destroyers Hughes, Monaghan, Gwin, Balch, and Benham. The fleet tug Vireo
had put a line over Yorktown's
bow, but with the carrier's mdder jammed to port, towing
167

her was slow and tedious. The best speed Vireo could make was three knots.*
Frank Boo, a yeoman on Admiral Fletcher's staff and a member of the salvage
party, later reported, "I convinced the admiral that I should go back and
recover the important Coral Sea battle report. It was like going aboard a
ghost ship. Everything was so still. The only sound I heard was the lapping
of water against her deck. It was dark everywhere belowdecks, and the upper
decks were slippery from oil and water. It was impossible to walk without a
handhold on something. All kinds of stuff was adrift-life jackets, shoes,
torpedoes, airplanes, the personal gear of the men who had abandoned two days
before."
Lieutenant Commander Aldrich and his assistant, Oxy Hurlbert (transferred
from gtmnery to damage control just prior to the Battle of Midway), made a
quick appraisal of Yorktown's condition and reported their findings to
Buckmaster.
The only damage of consequence from the first bomb attack was confined to
the rag stowage locker forward, where the fire was still burning. Aldrich and
Hurlbert were able to report to Buckmaster that they thought it probably
could be put out easily. The most serious damage was a consequence of the
torpedo hits from the second attack. All three firerooms on the port side,
including a superheater fireroom, were flooded. The generator room just
forward of them was also flooded. Berthing compartments and two mess hails
immediately above the firerooms were demolished and flooded to a height of
eight feet. A number of quick-closing watertight doors, weakened by the bombs
taken during Coral Sea, had been sprung, so that water was leaking into the
two main engine rooms. Yorktown was open to the sea for almost one-sixth of
her length on the

"` Yorktown's planes were still in action which had now turned into pursuit
of the enemy. Members of Wally Short's Scouting 5 accompanied Hornet planes
on a strike in midafternoon on June 5. They missed the main enemy fleet, but
all joined in attacking a lone destroyer, Tanikaze, which they came across on
the way back to Hornet. During the engagement Lieutenant Sam Adams was shot
down and killed.
168
port side, but with the watertight doors leaking, she was taking water into
compartments that made up one-third of her length. Nothing could be done, it
was decided, until the ship's list, now estimated at about twenty-seven
degrees, was corrected.
Gunner's mates and shipfitters, under Gunner Maurice Wining, started cutting
away the first (most forward) of the four five-inch guns on Yorktown's port
side. Another detail began jettisoning debris over the site, and engineers
worked out a plan to shift fuel supplies from the port side to starboard.
Harrarnann, the most powerful of the escorting destroyers, pulled alongside
and moored to Yorktown's starboard side, which was jutting high out of the
water. Two hoses charged with foamite were pulled aboard the carrier and
worked forward for fighting fires. As a precaution, another was attached to
the flight deck fire-fighting system. A fourth was connected to Yorktown's
empty starboard fuel tanks; through this hose, Hammann pumped her own bilge
into the carrier.
Chief Joe Kisela, with four of his best shipfitters-Vanic Brazile, Paul
Vander, Norris Hook, and Clyde Upchurch-went forward to battle the fire in
the stowage locker, and with surprising ease, it was eventually extinguished.
With a pump from Hammann, water was sucked from the after engine room. On
the hangar deck, detonators were removed from torpedoes, and damaged planes
stowed overhead on the port side were given the "deep six."
Yeoman Boo recovered the Coral Sea battle report, and Commander Ralph
Arnold, the supply officer, recovered the crew's pay records.
At about 1 P.M. Midway time, Yorktown's salvage crew knocked off for lunch.*
Most of the crew gathered on the

* Yorktown's pilots had already put in a good day's work, seventeen of her
dive bombers having taken part in an attack on two of the Japanese cheat
cruisers, Mogami and Mikuma, which had earlier collided in their attempts to
pull away from the American submarine Tambor. Six hits were made on the two
ships, one of them by Ensign Ben Preston of Yorktown. Mikuma was sunk, and
169
hangar deck for sandwiches, warm Coca-Cola, and tomato juice. The destroyer
Balch stood in to send over a whaleboat to the carrier with a message, and as
soon as the whaleboat returned, Balch resumed her place in the defending
screen of destroyers, steaming counterclockwise around Yorktown and Hammann,
one mile distant. Each of the five destroyers carried sonar equipment, and
the sonar set of each was working, listening for submarines.
Shipfitter Earl Fogarty, one of several members of the salvage crew eating
lunch on the starboard side of Yorktown's hangar deck, near the Number 1
elevator, later recalled that Chief Joe Kisela, glancing out to sea past
Hammann, said, "Hey, look! There's some blackfish," and that Shipfitter Clyde
Upchurch, looking where Kisela was pointing, shouted, "Blackfish, hell. Those
are torpedoes."
Torpedoes they were, from Commander Tanabe's 1-168, which had penetrated the
destroyer screen and fired from what was almost point-blank range. It was one
of the great submarine exploits of the war, and Tanabe has described how he
did it in his own words:*

We set off at once (after receiving orders to sink Yorktown), running
submerged in daylight hours at the best speed we could make and still nurse
our batteries. After dark I ran on the surface, but could not use top speed
for fear of missing our target in the blackness. So it was that at 5:30 A.M.,
on June 6 . . . my besttrained lookout picked up Yorktown. She was a black
shape an the horizon, about 11 miles distant. It was the easiest intercept a
submarine commander ever made. My course had not changed, from beginning to
end.

although Mogami got away, she was so badly damaged that after reaching Japan,
she did not put to sea again for two years. * He told his story after the war
to Joseph D. Harrington, coauthor of this book, in Japan, where Harrington
was stationed as a chief journalist in the Navy. Tanabe's first-person story,
related with Mr. Harrington's assistance, first appeared in the United States
Naval Institute Proceedings.
170
Yorktown was approximately eleven miles distant and slightly to the right of
I-168's course, when first sighted. Tanabe submerged, changed course to the
northeast, reduced speed to six knots, and leveled his submarine off at a
depth of ninety feet. As he closed in, he further reduced speed until it was
below three knots. Periodically he took the boat up to a depth of sixty feet,
from which point its periscope could be raised above the surface. It required
only a few small adjustments in course to keep I-168's bow and her torpedo
tubes headed straight for Yorktown's starboard beam. Tanabe explained:

Our screws were barely turning over as we drew closer, and I hoped they were
not giving off enough turbulence for the American ships to detect us on their
sound equipment. I had sighted one destroyer ahead of the carrier with a
towline out to her (actually the fleet tug Vireo) and another destroyer
nestled close to Yorktown's side. Three more kept station on the side I was
approaching, which made me feel certain there must be at least two more on
the opposite side. This meant seven of them against one of us.
Each time I took a sight, the sun was higher in the sky. Yorktown appeared
to be making just a little headway. I kept making minor changes of course to
keep 1168 headed at her midship section. I knew that we might get sunk in
this action, but before that happened, I meant to do the maximum possible
damage to this ship. I wanted my torpedoes to plow into her midsection, not
her bow or stern.
All I-168 men limited their movements to the most necessary ones only,
fearing to create some sound the American detectors might pick up. By 11
A.M., I had decided that the enemy equipment was not very sensitive. This
gave ma confidence as the range shortened; I kept moving in.
Suddenly my sound operator reported that the Americans had stopped emitting
detection signals. I couldn't understand this but, since it was nearly noon,
I tried to make my voice light and told my crew, "It 171
appears the Americans have interrupted their war for lunch. Now is our chance
to strike them good and hard while they are eating!" There were small jokes
made about what to give them for dessert. Shortly thereafter I raised the
periscope again.
Abaft my beam, each about 1,000 yards distant, were a pair of American
destroyers, one to port, one to starboard. 1-168 had safely pierced the
protective screen of escorts; I could now give the order to fire.
Then I took another look. Yorktown and her hugging destroyer filled my
periscope lens. I was too close! At that moment I estimated my range at 600
yards or less. It was necessary to come around again and open up the range.
What I had to do now was to try to escape detection by those destroyers above
us and get far enough away so that my torpedoes, fired from a 60-foot depth,
would have enough running space to stabilize themselves at a 19-foot depth
for hitting.*
I kept 1-168 in a right hand circle, easing the rudder a little so that I
could return to my original track at a point about one mile from Yorktown. I
didn't dare put up the periscope until the compass showed us back on our
original course. So I concentrated instead on a torpedo tactic I wanted to
use. Though some submarines in 1942 had Model 95 torpedoes-underwater
versions of the very powerful Model 93 "Long Lance" used on surface ships-my
torpedoes were an older type. Model 95s had 991-pound warheads; mine had
446-pound ones. So I planned to make two torpedoes into one. If I followed
usual procedure and fired my four torpedoes all at once, with a two-degree
spread, they would cover six degrees. But I wanted very badly to deprive the
Americans of this carrier. I intended to limit my salvo to a twodegree
spread. I would fire No. 1 and No. 2 first, two degrees apart, then send No.
3 and No. 4 in their wakes,

* Tanabe was never picked up by American detection equipment during his
approach. Oil leaking from Yorktown could have affected conditions, or there
may have existed a thermal gradient, a layer of warm water below the surface
that will deflect sound beams upward before they strike a target and are
reflected back again.
172
on the same courses. This way, I could achieve two large hits instead of four
small ones. I could thus deliver all my punch into the carrier's midsection
rather than spread it out along her hull.
When I was back on my approach course, I took another look, and shook my
head at how the destroyers still seemed unaware of us. Either they were poor
sailors, had poor equipment, or 1-168 was a charmed vessel. At a range of
1,200 yards, my periscope up, I sent my four torperoes away as planned. I did
not lower the periscope then, either. The wakes of my torpedoes could be
seen, so their source could be quickly established. And, if I-168 was going
to die, I at least wanted the satisfaction of seeing whether our fish hit
home.
Less than a minute later we heard the explosions. "Ban4ai!" someone
shouted. "Go ahead at full speed!" I ordered, and then, "Take her down to 200
feet!"

As Tanabe had guessed, the wakes from his torpedoes were spotted by the
Americans, first by the men having lunch on Yorktown's hangar deck, then by
sailors aboard the destroyer Hammann. One of Hammann's sailors ran to a
twenty-nullimeter gun and opened fire at the torpedoes, hoping that the slugs
would detonate their warheads. The gunfire was heard on board both ships, and
frantic warnings were sounded.
Lieutenant Hurlbert, on Yorktown's bridge when Hammann's gun began firing,
ran down to the hangar deck, joining Buckmaster. He later clearly remembered
seeing the torpedoes heading for Yorktown. Somehow they reminded him of the
view from the foot of San Francisco's Market Street. The wakes, he said,
looked like "two pairs of streetcar tracks."
Lieutenant Cundiff was outboard of the hangar deck, in a boat pocket, when
the torpedoes were first spotted. With him was William "Pinky" Davis, a water
tender. Davis, seeing that Hammann was casting off her mooring lines to get
out of the line of fire, swung down to the destroyer's deck. Cundiff, making
a more careful assessment of the situation, decided that Harnrnann had no
chance to get 173
clear, and he leaped through a porthole into Yorktown's photographic
laboratory. Moments later Davis was thrown into the sea and suffered fatal
injuries when Hamrnann's depth charges went off.
One of the four torpedoes fired by I-168 ran wild, passing ahead of Yorktown
and astern of the destroyer Balch. Another ran shallow, catching Hammann
amidships and exploding in her Number 2 fireroom. Tanabe's two remaining
torpedoes passed under Hammann and struck Yorktown in her unarmored belly,
exposed by the heavy list to port, where, at 1:34 P.M., they exploded almost
exactly opposite the point at which the two aircraft torpedoes had penetrated
two days earlier.
Hammann, her back broken, sank within two minutes. At 1:38, Yorktown was
rocked again by two more intense explosions, one occurring as seawater
reached the sinking Hammann's hot boilers, the other from the destroyer's own
depth charges.*
The two explosions from Hammann rocked Yorktown almost as forcefully as the
two 1-168 torpedoes. Lieutenant

* Commander Arnold True, Hamrnann's skipper, believes that the depth charges
may have been set off by one of the destroyer's own torpedoes, which could
have been driven free of its tube with the steering apparatus damaged when
Hammann was hit. The torpedo then could have made a circular run, returning
to strike Hammann and starting a chain detonation among the destroyer's depth
charges. The explanation is somewhat questionable. When Hammann first went
alongside Yorktown on June 6, her depth charges were reported to Commander
True as having been set on "safe," meaning that they would not go off even if
they were cast overboard. When the torpedo wakes from 1-168 were sighted,
Hammann began casting loose in order to pursue the enemy submarine. This
means that two explanations are possible: either the earlier report to True
on the "safe" setting of depth charges was erroneous, or as Hammann was being
cast off from Yorktown, a crew member began readying the depth charges for
attacking 1-168, thus putting them in a condition other than "safe" at the
moment Hammann sank. Chief Bob Powell, of Yorktown, reported seeing on Ham-
mann's stern someone (later identified as Torpedoman Berlyn Kimbrel, awarded
the Navy Cross) who was bath helping other destroyermen get off their ship
and working on the depth charges at the time Hammann disappeared from sight.
174
Commander Davis, thrown from a Yorktown catwalk into the ocean when the
torpedoes went off, had his back broken when Hammann exploded. The effect of
the Hammann underwater explosions on the men thrown into the ocean by the
preceding torpedo blasts was devastating. Yorktown's Meade Murphy reported,
"I saw bodies come to the surface afterward. Some had their insides blown out
through their mouths. Some had no arms."..
Of Hamrnann's 251-man ship's company, 81 were dead or missing, and another
85 were injured. Of the injured, 26 died after being taken out of the sea.
Only one-third of her crew escaped death or injury. Commander True suffered
two broken ribs when he was smashed against a chart table and thrown
overboard. When he recovered from the shock, he discovered that he was
holding two men's heads above water; both of them were dead.
The destroyers Gwin, Monaghan, and Hughes immediately formed a scouting line
and began to search for I168.* The destroyer Balch continued to patrol around
Yorktown, while Benham and the fleet tug Vireo moved in to recover survivors.
The Japanese torpedoes that gutted Yorktown could not have been more
perfectly placed. Six of the carrier's nine boiler rooms, plus both her
engine rooms, wire now flooded, and she began settling in the water. "The
only good thing about it," said Signalman Charles Thomas, "was that the list
was lessened to about seventeen degrees, and we could walk around the decks
a little better."

* Tanabe estimates that the American destroyers dropped sixty depth charges
in an effort to sink him; his count is probably high, but the attack was
indeed spirited. "The sixtieth depth charge," Tanabe reported, "landed just
off my bow. It put out all the lights, causing small leaks in many places,
and this made chlorine gas form in my forward battery room." The deadly gas
is a submariner's greatest fear. Tanabe watched as a mouse "staggered
drunkenly across my foot." Then, unexpectedly, the American destroyers broke
off the attack. They had been ordered back to Yorktown to investigate sound
contacts picked up by Balch and Benham. Tanabe, puzzled but relieved, took
I-168 to the surface, thus using up most of his remaining compressed air.
"When I got to the bridge, there was no sign of the enemy carrier. But
between 175
Still aboard Yorktown, Buckmaster called for volunteers to spend the night
aboard the carnet, expecting that the destroyers-once they had sunk the
Japanese submarine-would be able to return to her side to supply the power
needed to continue to right her. But conditions were now far too dangerous,
Buckmaster's officers advised him. For the second time, Buckmaster
reluctantly ordered Yorktown abandoned. The captain, in keeping with ancient
naval tradition, waited until he thought he was the last to leave his ship
before he lowered himself into a rescue boat. Unknown to Buckmaster,
Lieutenant Commander Delaney and Machinist P. N. MacDonald had remained
aboard to close any watertight doors they found open.
When Buckmaster saw Delaney and MacDonald appear on Yorktown's fantail, he
attempted to climb back up the line to his ship, but he was too exhausted to
make it. He and the other Yorktowners spent the rest of the night in the
patrolling destroyers, waiting for dawn and another chance to save their
carrier.
Hurlbert spent the night in the wardroom of the destroyer Gwin, when one of
her officers nudged him awake the next morning as the sun edged over the
horizon. "You'd better get topside if you want to get a last look at your big
silver baby," the officer said to Hurlbert. "She's about to go over."

myself and the eastern horizon I could see three American destroyers." One of
them, Hughes, saw 1-168 surface. All three destroyers-Hughes, Gwin, and
Monaghan-came about and started pursuit. Tanabe, taking advantage of every
second, continued to charge his batteries and refill his air tanks, even as
Hughes came within range and opened up with her forward five-inch gun. At the
last moment Tanabe submerged, turned 180 degrees, and ran directly under the
American destroyers. The trick worked, and 1168 escaped. Tanabe arrived at
Kure, his home port, with one ton of fuel oil remaining. He and 1-168 were
hailed as heroes, and Midway was celebrated as a great Japanese victory. One
of Japan's great sailors, he later commanded another submarine, 1-176,
managed a number of daredevil escapes, and survived the war.
176
A great ship, when she goes down, is supposed to be a noble sight.
Yorktown's death was noisy and ugly. She lay on the Pacific exhausted, her
back broken by four torpedoes and one of Hammann's depth charges. She turned
over slowly and sank, airplanes and heavy equipment rattling and grinding
around inside her, four years, eight months, and seven days after she had
been commissioned.

EPILOGUE

The destroyers Gwin and Benham combed the debris for suvivors and then turned
for Pearl Harbor, carrying the living from Yorktown and Hammann. The other
three destroyers rejoined Enterprise and Hornet, and Vireo set course for
Midway.
The decisive battle for the Pacific was over. Yamamoto, defeated and
frustrated, began his ultimate retreat at 5 A.M. on June 7, at precisely the
hour Yorktown sank.
Captain Buckmaster wrote his loss-of-ship report with mingled sorrow and
pride. "I have nothing but praise for the fighting, aggressive spirit of the
Yorktown personnel," he said. Then he listed the engagements the ship had
taken a part in:

Marshall and Gilbert islands-Jan. 31, 1942.
Salamaua and Lae-March 10, 1942.
Tulagi (3 attacks)-May 4, 1942.
Sinking of enemy CV, Misima Island=May 7, 1942.
Night action with enemy earner planes--May 7, 1942.
Battle of Coral Sea-May 8, 1942.
Battle of Midway-June 4-7, 1942.

The engagements in the Gilberts, at Salamaua and Lae
177

(the attack over the Owen Stanley Mountains), and at Tulagi had been a good
bit less than impressive. But Yorktown had learned from her mistakes. That
learning had paid off, as Captain Buckmaster indicated, in the "sinking of
enemy CV" on May 7. What he was referring to was the sinking of the Japanese
carrier Shoho; planes from both Lexington and Yorktown had attacked Shoho.
Yorktown planes had scored with twelve bombs and four torpedoes and surely
deserved at least 80 percent of the credit for the kill. The following day
Yorktown's planes had dropped two bombs on the big Japanese carrier Shokaku;
one of them fell from Jo-Jo Powers' crippled dive bomber. Sholcaku was badly
damaged and was forced to put back to the Inland Sea for repairs. That same
day Yorktown was badly damaged by a Japanese bomb that exploded in an
aviation storeroom, directly above the main engine room.
Yorktown had returned to sea after temporary repairs and, on June 4, dropped
four bombs on the Japanese carrier Kaga. Later that same day she was hit by
three bombs and two aircraft torpedoes and abandoned. Even after she had been
abandoned, her pilots and planes, flying from Enterprise, dropped four bombs
on the Japanese carrier Hiryu. On June 6, Yorktown was finished off by two
torpedoes from 1-168.
By ordnance statistics, Yorktown gave more than she took. She scored with
twenty-two bomb hits on four enemy carriers, sank Kaga and Hiryu without
help, and sank Shoho with only a little help. She helped chew up Zuikaku's
air complement so badly that the ship could not fight at Midway, and she put
Shokaku out of action without assistance, all within a period of twenty-three
days. In the same time span she was hit by four bombs and four torpedoes.
Never before had one American warship suffered so much and dealt out so much
punishment to others.
In writing his report, Buckmaster had this to say:

It is our sincerest wish to man another carrier as
soon as possible. It is strongly urged that an organiza-tion which has worked together under war conditions for 178
more than a year should be kept together if possible. Results count-and it is
recommended that a crew which has already produced such results be given the
opportunity to keep counting.

Buckmaster himself never held another command at sea; perhaps that was only
coincidental, or perhaps it was a reflection on the loss of Yorktown. He
later held shore commands at Norfolk, Kansas City, and San Diego, moved on to
become Commander, Western Carolines and Southern Area, and finished out the
war as Commander, South China Naval Forces. He retired as a vice admiral in
November, 1946, and twenty years later was living in peaceful Coronado,
California. On a sunny afternoon a visitor might find him there on the golf
course, relaxing with one or more of his former Yorktown shipmates and
reminiscing about a certain aircraft carrier and the part she played in the
battles of the Coral Sea and Midway.

179
INDEX

ABC-1 Staff Agreement, 25 81, 97, 98
Adams, Ensign John, 42-43, 63, Australian Navy, 55
64, 83, 148, 149
Adams, Lieut. Sam, 30, 158, B-17s, Army, 46, 47, 59, 66, 70168n.-71,
74, 81, 97, 111, 113, 118
Aichi-99 dive bombers, 79, 91- B-20s, Army, 115, 116
92, 94 Bain, J. B., 134, 136
Akagi, Japanese carrier, 101, Baker, Ensign John, 76
109, 113, 116, 117, 119, 124, Balch, U.S.S., 150, 157, 167,
127, 128, 130-132, 161 170, 174, 176
Aldrich, L i e u t . Commander Bali, 45
Clarence, 154, 168 Barnes, D. C. "Daddy," 134,
Aleutian Islands, 27, 55, 100, 135, 136
101, 102, 109, 110, 162 Barnes, Ensign William, 76, 134
American Navy, 16, 48, 102 Bass, Ensign H. A., 134, 136
Anderson, U.S.S., 15, 133, 157 Bassett, C. R., 160
Anderson, Wendell, 112 Bassett, Ensign Edward "Ed,"
Arashl, Japanese destroyer, 127 35, 63, 84, 123
Arizona, U.S.S., 25, 44 Bataan, 7, 36
Armstrong Lieut. Commander Bateman, George, 54, 109
Bob, 38, 47 Beistel, Budd, 92
Arnold, L i e u t . Commander Benham, U.S.S., 157, 167, 176,
Murr, 33, 34 178
Arnold, Lieut. Commander Bennett, Vane, 59, 83, 87, 97Ralph "Bear,"
51-52, 87, 16998, 107, 132, 155-156
Astoria, U.S.S., 99, 117, 133, Benson, Ensign Bob, 129, 160
134, 136, 146, 147, 154, 157, Benton, Jim, 145
165 Berg, D. D., 160
Attaway, Alvis "Speedy," 30, Bergeron, D. J., 160
31, 97-98, 132Bigelow, Ensign Lloyd, 69, 73 n.
Attu Island, 110Blazaukas, Tony, 141
Ault, Lieut. Commander Bobbitt, Harry, 79
William, 47 Boo, Frank, 168
Austin, "Pop," 155 Borneo, 45
Australia, 7, 9, 10, 26, 45, 55, Bottjer, Ensign G. E., 61
181
Bottomley, Ensign Sid, 129, "Jocko," 19, 28-29, 30, 32-33,
131, 159 43, 44
Brassfield, Art, 65, 85, 134, 136, Cobb, Phil, 129
139 Coleman, Thomas, 34
Brazier, Mike, 126 Colon, Panama, 29, 30-31
Brazile, Vance, 169. Consater, Lieut. C. N., 155
Brewer, Bill, 145Connecticut, U.S.S., 32
Brewster Buffalos, 115 Consolidated PBY Catalinas,
Brock, Marlin, 9128, 109, 112, 113, 131
Brooks, Cecil, 145 Cooner, Randy, 129, 130, 160,
Brown, Russell, 65 161
Brown, Ensign Thomas, 74 Coons, Ray, 160
Brunetti, Tony, 96 Coral Sea, 18, 55, 56; Battle of
Buchmaster, Captain Elliott, 19, the, 8, 9-10, 27, 60, 66, 67-78,
20-21, 22, 24, 29, 30-31, 34, 78-91, 91-100; (map) 70, 81
37, 40, 42, 44, 50-51, 52, Cori, Harry, 125, 126
59, 65, 69. 76, 77, 87, 88-89, Cornwall, H.M.S., 54
90, 91, 92, 94, 97, 103, 107, Corregidor, 7, 36, 64
122, 133, 138, 139, 143, 145, Cowden, Harry, 39
151, 153, 154-155, 156, 157, Crace, Rear Admiral John C.,
165-166, 167, 168, 173, 176, 55, 59, 64, 65, 68, 74
177, 179 Crawford, Joe, 60
Burch, Lieut. Commander Bill, Crenshaw, Lieut. Bill, 28
38-39, 47, 60, 61, 69, 71, 80. Crommelin, Dick, 73, 84-85, 96,
81 134, 136, 150
Butler, Ensign John, 129, 160 Cromwell, Dick, 112
Crowley, Gerald, 50
Cales, Jim, 97Cruising Disposition Victor,
California, U.S.S., 16, 25 133, 147
Callaghan, Tom, 67, 140 Crutcher, Commander ChaunCallaway, Bob,
50 cey, 134, 136
Call away, Cal, 105 Cundiff, Lieut. Charles Reed,
Campbell, Ensign Bob, 129, 160 21-22, 145, 173
Campbell, Lieut. N o r w o o d
"Soupy," 75, 89, 137 Dahlquist, P. C., 52
Cape Hatteras, 28Darcy, Raymond, 122
Cardin, Renzie, 67, 111 Davis, L i e u t . Commander
Cavanaugh, Ed, 35-36, 89, 139 Ernest, 23, 29, 38, 42, 75-76,
Celebes, 46 87, 138, 139, 153, 175
Chaffee, Ensign D. E., 83 Davis, William "Pinky," 173
Cheek, T. F., 132 Dawn, G. V., 160
Chikuma, Japanese cruiser, 113 Delaney, Lieut. Commander
132, 133, 158, 162, 166 Jack, 21-22, 44, 87, 90, 93,
Childers, Lloyd, 126 99, 100, 104, 111, 133, 145,
Christie, Bill, 71 153, 155, 176
Churchill, Winston S., 25, 26 Dixon, Lieut. Commander Bob,
Clark, Commander Joseph 72, 73
182
Doiron, Gilbert, 20 Fiji, 27, 55, 100, 101
Doiron, Joe, 20, 50 Fitch, Rear Admiral Aubrey,
Domienik, George, 53 55, 64, 65-66
Doolittle, Lieut. Colonel James, Flatley, L i e u t . Commander
54, 57 James, 73, 84-85
Dorsetshire, H.M.S., 54 Fletcher, Rear Admiral Frank
Douglas Dauntless, 17, 42, 55, Jack, 33-34, 36, 37-38, 46, 5060, 80, 85,
106, 118, 122, 128, 51, 53, 55, 57, 58, 64, 65, 66,
148, 15968, 69, 70, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78,
Douglas Devastators, 17, 39, 80 79, 80, 87, 97, 99, 100, 102,
84, 88, 106109, 111, 114, 120, 122, 126,
Downing, Art, 71132, 137, 147, 155, 164, 168
Dutch Harbor, Aleutian Islands, foreword by, 7-10
108-109, 110Fox, Walter "Red," 50, 52, 53
Friendly Islands, 53-54
Earhart, Ameba, 16 Fuchida, Commander Mitsuo,
East Field, Norfolk, 20, 24, 27 19
Edwards, Tom, 45, 51-52, 145, Fulton, U.S.S., 167
156
Efate, New Hebrides, 63 Gallagher, Lieut. W. E., 128,
Egger, Bob, 47 159, 160
Elder, Bob, 129, 130 Galpin, Commander Gerard, 34
Ellison, Roy, 145Gasmata, New Britain, 45
Ellison, Ensign Tom, 39, 72 Gay, Ensign George, 120
Emerson, Lieut. A. C. "Ace," Gebu, 40
33, 142, 144Gibbs, Ensign Harry, 134, 135,
Enright, Ensign Dick, 76 136, 148, 161
Enterprise, U.S.S., 8, 14, 25, 30, Gilbert Islands, 36, 37-41, 100
36, 37, 41, 45, 55, 57, 99, 102, Gill, Leroy, 19-20, 54, 133
106, 109, 111, 112, 114, 119, Ginn, John, 76, 90, 122
120, 123, 125, 126, 127, 130, Glick, Lieut. Harry, 138
131, 132, 147, 148, 158, 159, Godfrey, Lew, 19, 21, 51, 88
161, 162, 177, 178 Gooch, Lonnie, 41
Ervin, Ensign, H. N., 58 Gordy, Demps, 146
Esders, Wilhelm, 125-126 Gray, Lieut. James, 122-123
Ewoldt, Lieut. Leonard "Spike," Gruman Avengers, 105, 115,
62-63, 64 116
Gruman Wildcats, 17, 24, 29,
Farrcrgttt, U.S.S., 74 34-35, 44, 47, 50, 50-51, 60,
Federowicz, William, 24, 138- 63, 64, 69, 71, 75, 77, 79, 81,
139 83, 84, 85, 105, 106, 108, 122,
Fenton, Bill, 81124, 126, 128, 132, 133, 134,
Fighting 3, 105, 112, 143 135, 138, 147, 149, 150, 161
Fighting 5, 24Guadalcanal, 59, 62-63, 64, 98
Fighting 6, 121 Guest, Bill, 81-82
Fighting 42, 24, 30, 35, 42-43, Gunnery doctrine, 151-152
52, 67, 90, 105, 137, 141 Gwin, U.S.S., 167, 175, 176, 177
183
Hughes, U.S.S., 35, 133, 157,
Haas, John, 126, 136 164, 165, 166, 167, 175
Haas, Ensign Walter "Walt," 35, Hurlbert, Lieut. Elgin "Oxy,"
49, 6519, 20, 21, 108, 165, 168Haley, Millard, 221-164, Japanese submarine, 171Haley,
Vince, 95 175
Halsey, Rear Admiral William 1-168, Japanese submarine, 11,
F., 37, 41, 46, 102 102, 115, 147, 163, 166
Hamilton, Lieut. Commander 1-176, Japanese submarine, 176n
Frank, 36, 49> 95 India, 7
Hammann, U.S.S., 45, 64, 102, Indian Ocean, 36, 45, 54-55,
133, 156, 157, 167, 169, 170; 109
173, 174-176, 177 Ingersoll, Lieut. Royal, 147
Hampton, Gotcher, 51 Inouye, Vice Admiral ShigeyoHandford,
George, 153 shi, 69
Hansen, Oley, 129 lowa, U.S.S., 13
Hara, Rear Admiral Tadaichi, Isaman, Ensign Roy, 123, 129,
68, 75 130
Hare, Worth, 43, 93-94
Harrington, Joseph D., 170 Jaluit, 37, 38-40
Hart, Lieut. Pat, 126 James, U.S.S., 18, 22
Haruna, Japanese battleship, Jansen, Earl, 145
113, 158Japanese basic war plans, 26-28,
Hein, Ensign Herbert, 40 54-57, 100-102, 108-109
Helmerich, Mack, 151 Japanese Navy, 8, 10, 11, 15-17,
Hermes, H.M.S., 54 19, 35-36, 54-55, 62, 65, 66,
Herriman, Lieut. Fred, 112 96, 104, 112, 115-120, 123,
Hill, Everett, 82126, 129, 132-135, 148, 159Hirohito, Emperor, 55167
Hiryu, Japanese carrier, 101, Java, 45
113, 124, 125, 126, 128, 130, Johnson, Lieut. H. T. "Dub," 40
131, 132, 147, 148, 151, 158, Jomard Passage, 65, 66, 68, 74
159-161, 178Jorgenson, Ensign J. H., 80-81,
Hodgens, Bob, 95 96
Holmberg, Lieut. Paul "Swede," Josen, Bill, 93
123, 128-129, 146, 158 Junyo, Japanese carrier, 162
Hong Kong, 7, 32Jupiter, U.S.S., 35, 36
Hook, Norris, 29, 169
Hopper, G. F., 148 Kaga, Japanese carrier, 16, 101,
Hornet, U.S.S., 8, 14, 42, 54, 57, 113, 116, 117, 119, 124, 12899, 102, 106,
109, 111, 112,130,n., 131, 159, 161, 178
114, 119, 120, 126, 132, 134, Kaku, Captain Tomeo, 161
136, 146, 156-157, 161, 167, Kamikaze pilots, 40
168, 173, 176, 177 Kapp, George, 64
Hosho, Japanese carrier, 16, 162 Kaskaskia, U.S.S., 35
Hough, Richard, 12 Kawanishi flying boats, 42-43,
Howard, Curt, 12656, 63, 64-65, 73, 83
184
Kazagurna, Japanese destroyer, Lindsay, Eugene, 12~?~
158 Lorenz, Ensign Jolt'
Kearney, Dr. Edward, 108 77, 98, 99-100, 14_
Kelley, Colin, 16, 158 Louisville, U.S.S., 35, 4.,
Kelso, Bill, 156Lovelace, Lieut. Donald,
Kiefer, Commander Dixie, 44- 108, 112
45, 49-50, 52, 94-95, 144-145, Luckiesh, Frank 137
155 Lurline S.S., 35
Kikuzuki, Japanese destroyer,
98 MacArthur, General Douglas,
Kimbrel, Berlyn, 174 n. 7, 57, 81, 97
Kimmel, Admiral Husband, 32 MacDonald, P. N., 176
Kisela, Joe, 29, 169, 170 Machalinski, Ray, 62-63
Kiser, Howard, 88-89 Macomber, Brainard, 84
Kiska island, 100, 110 Magan, Jack, 141
Kleinsmith, Bill, 152, 153 Makigumo, Japanese destroyer,
Kleinsmith, Charles, 145 158
Knox, Ensign Leslie, 76 Makin, 37, 39
Kobayashi, Lieut. Michio, 134, Malay Peninsula, 26, 32
136, 138 Manila, 7
Kondo, Vice A d m i r a 1 Marine Corps, U.S., 29, 30, 32,
Nobutake, 16335, 36, 41, 93, 101, 115, 118,
Konoye, Prince Fuminaro, 26 n. Marshall Islands, 37-41, 100
Kowalcewski, Bill, 95 Massey, L i e u t . Commander
Kowalcewski, Victor, 95 Lance, 107, 112, 121, 122,
Kroll, Paul, 139 123, 124-125, 126-127, 128
Kmpinski, Walter, 93 Matkowski, Emil, 91
Kumano, Japanese cruiser, 163 Matsonia, S.S., 35
Kwajalein, Marshall Islands, 35, Mattson, Ed, 65, 85, 134, 135,
41 136
McCuskey, Ensign Scott "ScotLae, New Guinea, 46, 47ty,"
42-43, 63, 64, 134, 135Lane, Ensign Charles, 123, 129136, 148
Langley, U.S.S., 14, 23 McClusky, Comm a n d e r
Larsen, Leif, 61 Clarence, 123, 127, 130
Lasell, Ensign Harvey, 138, 140 McCormack, Lieut. Vince, 42,
Lassen, U.S.S., 35 65, 84
Leonard, Bill, 63, 148-149 McDowell, Hank, 81-82
Leslie, Lieut. Commander Max, Merrily Ensign Bud, 123, 129,
107, 122, 123, 125, 127-129 160, 161
133-134, 146, 158 Mertens, James, 140-141
Lexington, U.S.S., 8, 14, 23, 25, Metcalf, John, 33, 39, 141
41, 45, 46, 47, 48, 55, 57, 58, Midway Atoll, 27, 37, 55, 100,
59, 64, 65, 68, 69, 71, 73, 74, 101, 102, 109, 112, 113, 114,
75, 76, 78-79, 83, 84, 85, 87, 115, 116, 118, 121, 146, 163,
88-89, 90, 96-97, 98, 99, 164, 225; Battle of, 8, 9, 10,
102, 124, 133, 157, 178 11, 27, 98, 110-119, 120-127,
185
128-137, 137-147, 147-157,100, 101
168 n., 170 n., 176 n., (map) New Guinea, 36, 46, 54, SS, 56,
114 60, 65, 80
Mikuma, Japanese cruiser, 163, New Orleans, U.S.S., 99
164, 169 New Zealand, 34
Milholin, Bob, 83-84, 87 Nicholson, Ensign Hugh, 61, 71
Mili, 37, 39Nimitz, Rear Admiral Chester,
Minneapolis, U.S.S., 99 32, 46, SS, 57, 99-100, 102,
Missouri, U.S.S., 12 103, 104, 107, 110, 122, 1SS
Moan, Lieut. Floyd, 95 Noland, Albert, 141
Mochizuki, Lieutenant, 166 Norfolk (Va.) naval base, 13,
Mogami, Japanese cruiser, 163, 18-19, 27
164, 169 n. North Africa, 8
Monaghan, U.S.S., 167, 175 Noumea, New Caledonia, 99
Monotony of patrol duty, 48-52 Noyes, Rear Admiral Leigh,
Monteleone, Sal, 111 106
Monterey, S.S., 35 Nukualofa Anchorage, 53, 99
Mori, Juzo, 16
Morison, Admiral Samuel Oakley, Ed, 95
Eliot 27 n., 68 n., 77 n., 102, Ogdon, Nathan, 88
104, 124, 128 n.O'Hare, Lieut. Commander EdMorris, U.S.S., 97, 133, 157ward "Butch," 45, 49
Murphy, Meade, 175 Osberg, Carl, 126
Musgrove, Demon, 73, 96 Osmus, Wesley, 125
Myers, Oscar, 133
Pago Pago, 35, 36
Nagara, Japanese cruiser, 131, Paige, John, 22-23
158 Palumbo, Pat, 92-93
Nagumo, Vice Admiral Chui- Panama, 28, 31
chi, 36, 54, SS, 101, 108-109, Panama Canal, 18, 23, 31, 35
110, 113, 115-119, 125, 128, Papua Peninsula, New Guinea,
130, 132, 147, 161-162, 163 27, 46, S6
Nakajima-97 torpedo planes, Pearl Harbor naval base, 43-44,
79, 85, 89, 90, 147, 149, 151, 104-10'6; Japanese attack on,
1S2 7, 8, 19, 2S, 26, 92, 96, 101
Nakamura, Lieut. Commander Pederson, Lieut. Commander
Otoji, 163Oscar, 35, 47, 67-68, 76, 86,
Nautilus, U.S.S., 118 n. 106, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123,
Navy Department, U. S., 16, 98 131,132,155
Near East, 8 Peltier, Henry, 34
Neilsen, Lieut. John, 69, 73, 161 Pettipas, Ed, 93
Neosho, U.S.S., 58, 59, 65, 68, Phelps, U.S.S., 96-97
95, 98Philippine Islands, 7, 26, 36-37,
Nevada, U.S.S., 25, 44 46
Newberg, Pete, 155 Pichette, Norman, 166
New Britain, 36, 45, 46, 65 Portland, U.S.S., 98, 133
New Caledonia, 27, 46, SS, 99, Port Moresby, New Guinea, 27,
186
46, 56, 57, 65, 78, 98-99, 100, Saunas, U.S.S., 18d
lOl Salote, Queen, 53-5
Powell, Bob, 2.0, 50, 174 n. Samoa, 27, 34, 35, 3~,
Powers, Art, 93 101
Powers, Joseph "Jo-lo," 61, 71, San Diego, California, 32-34
77-78, 82, 83, 112, 140, 178 Sand Island, Midway, 100, 115
Powers, Oswald, 126 Saratoga, U.S.S., 8, 14, 23, 25,
Preston, Ensign Ben, 39, 71-72, 35, 49, 105, 124
81-82, 113, 161, 169 n. Savo Island, 64
Preston, John, 137-138 Saxon, Tomas, 105, 156
Prince of Wales, H.M.S., 27 Schanbacher, Harry "Dutch,"
Puksar, Emil, 92, 105 30, 44, 48
Schindler, Walter "Butch," 61,
Quick, Sid, 47 72, 73, 97
Quillan, Rex, 155 Schlegel, Ensign Paul, 129
Seventh Marine Regiment, 34
Rabaul, New Britain, 36, 45, 49, Seymour, John 153
Sharp, John, 56, 146
56, 58, 61-62, 78Sheedy, D. C., 134 136
Ranger U.S.S., 14, 24 Sherman, Admiral Frederick
Ray, Lieut. Commander C, 69
Clarence "Jug," 19, 112 Sherwood, Lieut. Gordon, 129,
Reckhouse, William, 35-36 160
Reeves Ensign T. A., 41 Shoho, Japanese carrier, 56, 57,
Reid, Ensign Jewell, 111 66, 69, 71-73, 77, 81, 96, 98,
Repulse, H.M.S., 28 178
Rice, Lloyd, 138 Shokaku, Japanese carrier, 54,
Ricketts, Lieut. Milton, 94 56, 57, 64, 66, 68, 69, 75, 78,
RO-59, Japanese submarine, gl~ 82, 83, 96, 98, 101, 110,
163 116, 178
Robinson, Everett "Robbie," 33 Short, Lieut, Wally, 38-39, 60;
Roche, David 12561, 81, 107, 113, 122, 132,
Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis, 8 161, 168
Rommel, General Erwin, 8 Shortland Islands, 66
Roop, Gordon, 153 Shumway, Lieut. David, 129,
Roosevelt, Eleanor, 13 130, 158, 159-160, 161
Roosevelt Franklin D., 12, 25 Sims, U.S.S., 35, 59, 66, 68, 98
26, 77-78 Singapore Malaya, 45
Roosevelt Theodore, 12, 13 Smiley, Commander Curtis, 39
Rowley, Lieut. J. W. "Win," 69, Smith, Leonard, 126

71, 73, 96 Smoke watch 42, 138
Russell U.S.S., 35, 133, 157 Snell, Cliff, 145
Ryujo, Japanese carrier, 16, 162 Solomon Islands, 27, 55, 65
Soryu, Japanese carrier, 101,
St. Louis, U.S.S., 45 124, 128, 130, 161
Sakai, Saburo, 16Spruance, Rear Admiral RaySalamaua, New Guinea, 46, 47mood A., 102, 114, 164
187
atanley Mountains, New Gui- Togo, Admiral Heihachiro, 104
nea, 46-47Tomonaga, Lieut. Joichi, 113,
Statchen, Henry, 89 116, 148, 149
Stowaways, 28-29Tone, Japanese cruiser, 113,
Strange, L i e u t . Commander 117, 121, 131, 134, 158
Hubert "Hubie," 37-38, 67, Tongatabu, Friendly Islands,
68, 78, 111, 121, 124, 131 54, 60, 99, 103
Submarines, American, 1 1 1 , Tootle, Ensign Melvin, 151
120, 125, 170 n; German, 18; Torpedoes, 15, 16, 26, 61, 62,
Japanese, 13, 17, 32, 33, 34, 82, 86, 89-90, 96, 116, 119,
35, 40, 58, 103, 115, 169, 162, 129, 152-153, 170, 172, 177
166, 171-175Traynor, Ensign Lawrence, 97
Suesens, Richard, 125 Triplett, Arthur, 94
Suetsugu, Admiral Nobumasa, True, Commander Arnold, 174
16 Truk Island, 36, 54, 64, 101
Sumatra, 45 Tsushima, Battle of, 105
Suzuya, Japanese cruiser, 163, Tulagi, 27, 56, 59, 60, 61, 64,
164 77, 98
Symonis, Fred, 93'Iuleja, Thaddeus V., 127, 179
Tyler, Carl, 142-143
Tafi, Nello, 88 Tyson, Charles, 140
Takagi, Vice Admiral Takeo,

75, 77, 79 Ulmer, Jake, 79
Takahashi, Lieut. Commander Underwood, John, 52
Kakuichi, 75, 79, 96 Upchurch, Clyde, 169, 170
Tambor, U.S.S., 169 n. Utah, U.S.S., 44
Tanabe, L i e u t . Commander
Yahachi, 103, 115, 163-164, Vander, Paul, 29, 169
166, 170-173; foreword by, Vavrek, George, 23, 154
10-11Vetjasa, Lieut. Stanley "Stan,"
Tanikaze, Japanese destroyer, 58, 71, 72
168 Vietnam, 10, 19
Tarawa, 109Vinson-Trannel Act (1934), 17
Task Force 1, 57Vireo, U.S.S., 164, 166, 167,
Task Force 11, 102, 103, 109 n. 171, 176, 177
Task Force 34, 69, 78, 79, 84, Vogel, Ensign Harvey, 146
86, 100, 102, 104, 109, 136 Vought Vindicators, 118
Taylor, Lieut. Commander Joe,
38, 47, 60, 71, 80, 82-83 Wake Island, 7, 25, 32, 41, 45,
Taylor, Vardie, 144 100
Thach, Lieut. Commander John Waldron, Lieut. Commander
S., 107, 122, 124-125, 128, John C., 117-118, 126
130, 148, 149 Walke, U.S.S., 31, 35
Thomas, Charles, 139, 175 Ware, Charlie, 71
Thompson, Frank, 137 Wasp, U.S.S., 14, 18
Tindell, Jim, 51 Weaver, Sidney, 130
Tippecanoe, U.S.S., 58 Weise, George, 31, 132, 166
188
Wester, Milt, 89, 106, 108, 112, Battle of Coral Sea, 60-61,
141 64, 66, 67-78, 78-91,; Battle
West Virginia, U.S.S., 25, 44 of Midway, 91-100, 110-116,
Whalen, Wally, 139 115, 117-127, 128-137, 137Williamson, Ed,
60, 62, 72, 82-147, 148-157; bomb hits on,
83 91-95, 174-177; death of,
Whidden, Harry, 20 174-178; engagements o f ,
Wisconsin, U.S.S., 13 177-178;Marshall-Gilbert
Wiseman, Lieut. Obie, 128, 129, Islands raid, 37-46, 45; New
163 Guinea raid, 46-48; patrol
Wining, Maurice, 169 duty, 45-46, 48-54; Pearl HarWoodhnll,
Lieut. Roger, 71, 85- bor attack news received by,
86 19-25; Pearl Harbor refitting
Woodward, Warren, 104-105, visits, 44-45, 103-107; salvage
133, 146attempted, 171-174; transferWoolen, Ensign William "Bill,"red to the Pacific
Fleet, 25
35, 83, 134, 135, 148-149 27, 28-37; Tulagi raid, 57-64
Wright, Ensign Richard "Dick," Yorktown Crier, 14
35, 73, 134, 136"Yorktown Jamboree," 52-53
Yugumo, Japanese destroyer,
Yama-Michi, Rear Admiral Ta- 158
mon, 131, 161Yuzuka, Japanese destroyer, 60
Yamamoto, Admiral Isoroku,
16, 26, 101, 102, 109, 131, Zero fighters, 17, 41, 54, 61, 63
147, 161, 164, 177 72-73, 79, 82-83, 84-85, 113,
Yamato, Japanese battleship, 116, 118, 120, 124, 125, 134,
102, 147, 162 159, 160, 161
Yasukuni Shrine, Tokyo, 11 Zuiho, Japanese carrier, 162
Yirol:, Rudy, 138Zuikaku, Japanese carrier, 54,
Yorktown, U.S.S., 7, 8, 9, 10, 56, 57, 64, 66, 68, 69, 74, 78,
13-15, 18; abandoment of, 80, 81, 82, 98, 101, 110, 116,
155-157, 164-165, 167-170; 178

189