Rendezvous at Midway: U.S.S. Yorktown and the Japanese Carrier Fleet by Frank Pat

Author:Frank, Pat [Frank, Pat]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: WWII Nonfiction, History
ISBN: 9780446659307
Amazon: B0007EE2AI
Goodreads: 2354877
Publisher: Warner
Published: 1968-04-01T08:00:00+00:00

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.

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 Lexington, 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 other was damaged. That left him only Hornet and Enterprise, operating out of Pearl Harbor. Although he suspected that the Japanese were preparing to start something at Midway, he rushed Hornet and Enterprise southwest, leaving a vulnerable flank unprotected.

Yorktown dropped anchor at Tongatabu on May 17 and no one was happier about it than Commander Delaney. He 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 seventy-five-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, 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."

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