Midway: The Battle That Made the Modern World by Richard Freeman

Author:Richard Freeman [Freeman, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2020-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

The Turning Point: 10.25 am 4 June 1942

What happened next possibly has no parallel in the history of warfare.

Lieutenant Commander Clarence McClusky had led Enterprise’s planes in the unsuccessful search for the Japanese carriers. When he realised they were not at their reported location, he rightly assumed that they had gone north, so he turned his planes around at 9.45 am. This, said Nimitz, ‘was one of the most important decisions of the battle’. McClusky soon spotted a Japanese destroyer, also going north, and he concluded that it must be returning to its carrier. Setting his course to match that of the Arashi McClusky soon sighted the Kaga.

Now came the consequences of Yamamoto’s ambitious plan to both invade Midway and attack the American carriers simultaneously. There below was the Kaga, her planes now rearmed and refuelled, but almost all still on the hanger deck. (This was true for all four carriers. Pilots’ reports of flight decks covered in planes have since been shown to be much exaggerated.) In the air there was hardly a Zero in sight. As the crew on the Kaga’s deck saw the American planes coming into view, the cry went up: ‘Hell divers.’ And so they were.

McClusky pilots dived down like ‘a silver waterfall’. The first three bombs missed but the fourth plunged into a few planes at the end of the flight deck. The mass of machines, bombs and fuel became an instant inferno. Then two more bombs hit the carrier, one reaching the hanger deck. It detonated in a gigantic explosion of fuel and bombs. By now the Kaga was a mass of flame from stem to stern. It was at this point that Lieutenant Commander Richard Best realised that, in their enthusiasm, all the planes had attacked the Kaga, while the Akagi lay unmolested a little way off. Best led off three planes to deal with the equally unprotected carrier. With only his anti-aircraft guns for retaliation, Captain Okada swung round Akagi to present her beam to Best’s planes – that meant the planes would pass more rapidly over the ship. Despite this precaution, the Akagi’s rudder was soon hit and then a bomb from Richard Best’s plane went through the flight deck and exploded amongst the planes in the hanger. As Best looked down he saw planes hurled into the air by the force of the blast. Within minutes the Akagi was a burning wreck.

It was now the turn of Yorktown’s scout bombers to move in on the Sōryū. Lieutenant Commander Maxwell Leslie arrived with his Dauntless bombers just as McClusky was finishing off Akagi and Kaga. Nearby was the as yet untouched Sōryū. Encountering little resistance Leslie’s planes flew in low over the carrier at about 10.25 am. Leslie took the lead, even though his bomb had been lost earlier in the mission. He was followed by Lieutenant Paul Holmberg, whose bomb dropped perfectly into the midst of the few planes on the flight deck. A huge ball of flame and smoke shot to the sky.

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