The Battle of Midway (10 page)

The most senior of Nimitz’s task-force commanders was Vice Admiral Wilson Brown, who was in charge of Task Force 11, built around the big carrier
Lexington
. Brown was three years older than Halsey or Nimitz, having graduated from the Academy in the class of 1902. Brown was, in the words of one modern scholar, “an intelligent paragon of old school formality.” In the 1902 yearbook,
Lucky Bag
, his classmates described him as “modest and unassuming … with a sweet voice and a sweeter smile.” In short, he was a dramatic contrast to Halsey in almost every way. Like Halsey, however, Brown had started out in destroyers and commanded the destroyer
Parker
in the First World War. After the war, while Halsey was still commanding destroyers, Brown occupied a series of staff positions, including a tour as naval aide to President Calvin Coolidge. When Halsey underwent flight training, Brown remained in the black-shoe community and commanded the battleship
California
, then served a tour as the superintendent of the Naval Academy, a position in which his headmasterly qualities served him well. In February of 1941, ten months before Pearl Harbor, he was promoted to vice admiral and made commanding officer of the Scouting Force. His health was suspect. Though only a few years older than Nimitz and Halsey, he looked at least a decade older. Thin and pallid, he had a slight tremor that caused his head to twitch, leading irreverent junior officers to dub him “Shaky” Brown. As events would show, he was
an intelligent and thoughtful officer, but he lacked the boldness and the energetic self-confidence of Bull Halsey.
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The third of Nimitz’s task-force commanders was Rear Admiral Herbert Fairfax Leary, who commanded the
Saratoga
group, dubbed Task Force 14. Leary was another black shoe, a 1905 classmate of Nimitz, a tall, thin, lantern-jawed man whose tenure was destined to be short. On January 11, a month after Pearl Harbor, the
Saratoga
was operating near Johnston Island five hundred miles southwest of Hawaii in seas so rough that Leary cancelled flight operations for the day. Waves broke over the bow and washed the flight deck. At 7:00 that evening, in the midst of the storm, a terrific explosion jolted the big carrier. A pilot on board said, “It felt like the whole ship had been moved about five feet.” A Japanese submarine, the I-6, had slipped through the screen of cruisers and destroyers and delivered a deadly Type 95 torpedo. The blast killed six men and flooded three fire rooms. Though the Japanese submarine skipper reported to Tokyo that he had sunk a Saratoga-class carrier, the big flattop managed to stay afloat and steam back to Pearl Harbor under her own power, arriving on January 15. Nimitz saw that the necessary repairs could not be completed in Hawaii and two days later reluctantly ordered her back to Bremerton, Washington.
⁷

That loss would have reduced Nimitz to only two carrier groups but for the return to the Pacific that same week of the USS
Yorktown
. After Pearl Harbor,
Yorktown
had been rushed into dry dock in Norfolk for a quick overhaul, and by December 16 she was en route back to the Pacific. After passing through the Panama Canal, she arrived in San Diego at the end of the month. There she joined the heavy cruiser
Louisville
, a light cruiser, and half a dozen destroyers, plus the essential oiler, to comprise Task Force 17. To command this new task force, Nimitz picked a man he knew well and who had commanded the
Saratoga
task force during the aborted relief expedition to Wake Island: Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher.

Fletcher was yet another black shoe, having served in cruisers and destroyers for most of his thirty-six-year career. Graduating from the Naval Academy in 1906, one year after Nimitz and two years after Halsey, Fletcher had been a cruiser and battleship man from the start; his most
recent sea service was the command of Cruiser Division 6. Called “Fletch” or “Flap Jack” while at the Academy, he had what the
Lucky Bag
called “a sunny disposition” and the habit of gesturing with his hands while talking. He was well decorated, having received a Medal of Honor as a lieutenant during the Navy’s expedition to Vera Cruz in 1914 (an honor somewhat diluted by the fact that the Navy had handed out no fewer than fifty-five Medals of Honor for that expedition, passing them out, as one critic put it, “like crackerjack charms”). More important was the fact that Fletcher was well connected. He had served as naval aide to Secretary of the Navy Claude Swanson in the early 1930s and as assistant chief of the Bureau of Navigation under Nimitz in the late ’30s. A biographer concedes that Fletcher’s “personal connections with the decision-makers of the war set him ahead of others for important assignments.” It was natural that the brown-shoe pilots on the
Yorktown
would feel an intense curiosity about their new boss.
⁸

What they saw was an unremarkable man with a plain, open face, thinning dark hair, a generous nose, and dark eyes. Fletcher was neither flamboyant and outgoing like Halsey nor reserved and professorial like Wilson Brown. He was instead a straightforward, competent professional whose tight-lipped expression suggested the no-nonsense skepticism of a Midwestern farmer, which was fitting, as he had been born and reared in Iowa. He even smoked corncob pipes that he had shipped to him from the States a dozen at a time. Reporters seldom badgered him for interviews because he was not inclined to bloodthirsty pronouncements. Given his long service in battleships and cruisers, Fletcher would have preferred to make the heavy cruiser
Louisville
his flagship, but Nimitz wanted his task-force commanders to ride the carrier, and so in San Diego on New Year’s Day, 1942 (the day after Nimitz took formal command in Pearl Harbor), the black shoe Fletcher broke his flag on USS
Yorktown
. Fletcher may have felt somewhat out of place on board the big flattop. One historian suggests that “he was the proverbial stranger in a strange land.”
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Though Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher was a “black shoe” admiral—a surface warfare specialist—he commanded U.S. forces in both of the major carrier battles of the first six months of the Pacific war: Coral Sea and Midway. (U.S. Naval Institute)

The captain of the
Yorktown
was 52-year-old Elliott Buckmaster. Tall and handsome, Buckmaster was also quiet and reserved, even cold—though, as with Nimitz, that first impression often changed after close association. Buckmaster was a brown shoe with gold wings on his chest, but he was also a Johnny-come-lately, having passed the aviation course only five years before as a full commander. His first aviation assignment had been as executive officer (second in command) on the
Lexington
, and he had little experience as a carrier pilot. Perhaps because of this, the
Yorktown
’s executive officer, Commander Joseph “Jocko” Clark, who did have significant flight experience, was skeptical of both his commanding officer and the task-force commander. An acolyte of Ernie King, Clark thought that Fletcher and Buckmaster failed to enforce the kind of discipline he admired. That assessment, however, said more about Clark than it did about either Fletcher or Buckmaster. Clark found a lot to complain about on the
Yorktown
, writing later, “Yorktown’s hopeless department heads needed a lot of King’s brand of discipline.” It was probably just as well that Clark did not stay long on the
Yorktown
, though when he returned to Washington after his promotion to captain, he continued to disparage the
Yorktown
and her officers, including Fletcher, and over the subsequent months his comments very likely affected King’s assessment of both the ship and the task-force commander.
¹⁰

Nimitz had hoped that the arrival of the
Yorktown
would give him four carrier groups, and the ability to begin a meaningful counterattack against the Japanese, but the loss of the
Saratoga
meant that he would have to carry
on with only three: the big
Lexington
and the newer sister ships,
Enterprise
and
Yorktown
.
¹¹

On board those three carriers, the Americans, like the Japanese, relied on three kinds of combat airplanes. The workhorse American carrier bomber was the SBD Douglas Dauntless, a relatively new (1940) monoplane with a crew of two: a pilot in the front seat, almost always a commissioned officer, and an enlisted radioman/gunner who sat behind him and was responsible for communications as well as a .30-caliber machine gun, later increased to movable twin machine guns. Compared with the Japanese Val dive-bomber, the Dauntless was both bigger and sturdier, and its pilots referred to it affectionately as “the barge.” Though the Dauntless was 25 percent heavier than the Val (thanks in part to its armor protection), it nevertheless had a slightly greater range because of its more powerful engine. It could also carry a bigger bomb load, consisting of either one 1,000-pound bomb or a 500-pound bomb plus two 100-pound bombs under the wings. The Dauntless was marginally faster than the Val, though slower than Japanese fighters. Officially, its top speed was 217 knots (250 mph), but it cruised at 130 knots (152 mph) and attained maximum speed only during an attack dive, when it might reach 250 knots (288 mph). (Its pilots joked that SBD stood for “Slow but Deadly.”) The Dauntless also boasted two .50-caliber machine guns in the cowling, and on occasion it was used to augment the combat air patrol (CAP).
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The idea behind dive-bombing was for the pilot to approach his intended target at high altitude, say 20,000 feet, and preferably from out of the sun to avoid detection. To spot the target, the SBD had a small glass window in the floor beneath the pilot’s seat, although it was rarely usable due to oil thrown off by the plane’s engine. After lining up on the target as best he could, the squadron leader deployed perforated “dive brakes” on the trailing edge of his wings and went into a steep dive, around 70 degrees, with the pilots of his squadron following his lead. During the dive, the pilots felt weightless, “like you were floating,” as one put it. The Dauntless did not have shoulder straps, only a seat belt, so it was “like you were hanging out on a string.” Between 2,000 and 1,500 feet, the pilot released his bomb by pulling back on a bomb release lever. When he did that, it was instinctive to pull back on
the control stick at the same time, and that often threw the bomb off line. To prevent this, newer SBDs were equipped with an electric trigger that allowed the pilot to release the bomb merely by pushing a button on top of the control stick. Then he pulled out of the dive, usually doing a “snap pullout” that sometimes resulted in his briefly blacking out.
¹³

Dive bombing an enemy ship that was twisting and turning at 25 or 30 knots was, as one pilot recalled, “similar to dropping a marble from eye height on a scampering cockroach.” It was especially difficult because often during these steep dives, the windscreen would fog up at about 8,000 feet, all but obscuring the target. One pilot said it was “like putting a white sheet in front of you and you have to bomb from memory.” “Believe me,” he recalled, “that’s a helpless feeling when you try to dive bomb and [can] hardly see your target.” All in all, it was both a physical and mental challenge to dive almost three miles straight down at nearly three hundred miles an hour with a fogged windscreen and with the target ship throwing up a wall of antiaircraft fire.
¹⁴