Leslie's flight had begun with mishap. His aircraft recently had been equipped with new electrical bomb-release mechanisms. It was the practice for each pilot to arm his bomb after the squadron cleared the carrier and moved into formation. This action could cock the trigger device in the bomb's nose fuse so that it would detonate upon striking its target. When Leslie reached an altitude of 10,000 feet he signaled his squadron to arm bombs, and then leaned over to throw his own electrical arming switch. Either because of faulty wiring or perhaps because of mechanical failure, Leslie's 1000-pound bomb, instead of arming, fell away and dropped harmlessly into the sea.
Feeling his craft suddenly become lighter, Leslie turned in dismay to Lieutenant (j.g.) Paul "Lefty" Holmberg, who was riding in the squadron's Number Two position, just to Leslie's left. Holmberg made signs with his hands to tell Leslie what had happened, and then ordered his gunner to signal the mishap to Leslie's rear-seatman. For a few moments Leslie either could not understand or would not accept the meaning of Holmberg's gestures. Then Ensign Paul Schlegel, flying on Leslie's right side, began to wave his hands frantically, making it painfully clear to the squadron commander that he had lost his bomb.
For Maxwell Leslie this was a bitter twist of fate. He had been in the naval service for twenty years, twelve of which were spent in the air arm of the fleet. He had flown fighters, bombers and scout planes, and at different times during his career had been attached to the carriers Lexington, Ranger, Enterprise, Saratoga, and Yorktown. Since Pearl Harbor he had trained for this moment and had whipped his squadron into a state of splendid war readiness. Now with the supreme test awaiting him, he was entering the battle without a bomb. "When this bad news was confirmed," Holmberg was later to write, "the skipper made many frustrating motions with his hands and lips, as if to say his luck was damnable." Within a few minutes Leslie found out that three other aircraft of his squadron had suffered arming accidents, which meant that he had only thirteen planes with bombs. But t all cost he had to maintain the discipline of the squadron, and he decided to lead the dive anyway and assist in whatever way he could with his fixed machine guns.
He continued to climb until the squadron reached an altitude of 20,000 feet, and it was from this height that he eventually sighted smoke smudges on the horizon to the right of him and correctly assumed that they were from Nagumo's fleet speeding northward toward the American carriers. Immediately he signaled his squadron to wing over to the right to a northwesterly course, and by 10:20 the Japanese ships were only a few miles ahead of him. The mass of clouds which had previously concealed Nagumo were all to the left of Leslie now and he could see a number of large enemy ships starting what appeared to be full-speed evasive turns. Since the Japanese fighters had been busy at low altitudes for almost an hour butchering the torpedo planes, there were none at the upper level where Leslie was. He therefore had plenty of time to pick out his target–a fat carrier almost dead ahead of him.
In the meantime McClusky, having missed the Japanese force at the point of interception because of Nagumo's change of course, continued southward for a little while. Finding nothing in sight, he had decided at about 9:30 to turn to the northward, hoping that Nagumo was to the right of him. His eventual turn away from Midway proved to be a masterful stroke of judgement, for it closed the range between himself and the Japanese carriers. However, he was not able to see the smoke which had alerted Leslie because, being to the southwest of Yorktown's dive bombers, the cloud cover blocked his view. He might have flown over an empty ocean until his fuel gave out and then, after jettisoning his bombs, made the long glide downward to crash land on the sea. Had this happened, Leslie, with only thirteen effective dive bombers, would have had to face the full power of Nagumo's fleet alone. The planes that rode with Leslie and McClusky represented all that was left of the American air strike.
It had been more than an hour earlier, while Nagumo was driving off the last of Midway's air attacks, that the submarine Nautilus, having tried unsuccessfully to torpedo a Japanese battleship, came under a ferocious depth-charge attack by enemy destroyers. While the attack was going on, Nagumo turned his Striking Force away from the area, leaving one destroyer behind to hunt down the American submarine. This lone warship was the Arashi, skippered by Commander Yasumasa Watanabe. When after an intensive search Watanabe's sonar operator failed to regain sound contact with the Nautilus, he decided to give up the hunt and set course to overtake the rest of the fleet. He was now many miles behind Nagumo and he rang up for FULL SPEED AHEAD. The Arashi's bow plowed into the waves.
Watanabe was driving hard on a northeasterly course; McClusky was heading to the northwest. Their course converged and at 9:55, when McClusky glanced down through a break in the clouds, he saw the Arashi's white trail. He could tell that she was making high speed and guessed that her captain was doing exactly what, at the crucial moment, he was doing–catching up with the rest of the Japanese force. Quickly he estimated the destroyer's course and put his thirty-seven dive bombers on it. So at 10 o'clock that morning, while Leslie was closing in on the Japanese carriers from one direction, McClusky was closing in from another.
Admiral Yamamoto, mastermind of the whole operation, had stationed himself to the northwest of Midway with a force including three battleships, one light cruiser, a light carrier and nine destroyers. This fleet, had it been in a position to help Nagumo, could have brought an assortment of well over two hundred anti-aircraft guns to battle with the American dive bombers. But Yamamoto, acting upon instincts which will forever confound naval analysts, positioned his fleet hundreds of miles to the west of Nagumo and therefore could bring no support to his carrier commander when he needed it most.
Leslie came upon the Japanese carriers just at the moment they were breaking formation to avoid Massey's torpedo planes. The Akagi, carryig her bridge island on the port side, had been steaming westward for several minutes at full speed and was now astern of the Soryu, whose sister ship Hiryu was far to the north and barely visible. The Kaga, with her bridge structure on the conventional starboard side, rolled northward and was almost abreast of the Soryu's starboard beam. When the dive bombers appeared, Akagi made a dash to the south. In the meantime, Kaga and Soryu put their rudders over hard and spun around in a tight clockwise turn.
Leslie had already descended to 14,500 feet and was preparing to attack with the bright morning sun at his back. The Akagi was to his distant left, so he studied the two carriers ahead of him, both of which were turning to the south. These radical course changes, besides being evasive, indicated that the enemy carriers were getting ready to launch an air strike, since their bows were now faced into the wind.
The 26,900-ton Kaga, even from Leslie's great height, looked huge to him when contrasted with the 10,000-ton Soryu. "Our target was one of the biggest damn things that I had ever seen," one of Leslie's officers said later. Using only a slight chance of course to the left or right, Leslie could have attacked either carrier, but the Kaga, because of her great size, was marked for destruction.
Leslie patted his head, a signal which told his wingmen that he was putting his bombless plane into a dive. From level flight he dove down at a 70˚ angle, with the wind rushing past his wings at 280 knots. Within seconds Holmberg arched over, a 1000-pound bomb beneath his fuselage. Then came the others. The large carrier was squarely in Leslie's sights. He saw dozens of planes spotted for takeoff, and forward there was a large red sun painted on the carriers flight deck on which he took careful aim. At 10,000 feet he opened fire with his machine guns, peppering the deck and bridge with 50-caliber bullets. At 4000 feet his guns jammed; he pulled out and began to climb. Behind him came Holmberg, who could now see the first flashes of gunfire from the fringe of the Kaga's flight deck. His dive was perfect as the red disk on the flight deck loomed in his sights. Shrapnel tore at his plane. At an altitude of 2,500 feet, he pushed the electric bomb-release button and immediately jerked at the manual release lever to make sure the bomb got away.
There was a tremendous burst of fire near the superstructure. Pieces of the Kaga's flight deck whirled in the air; a Zero taking off into the wind was blown into the sea; the bridge was a shambles of twisted metal, shattered glass and bodies. Captain Okada, his uniform torn and burned, lay dead amidst the smoking wreckage of his command post. Then came three more vicious explosions, hurling planes over the side, tearing huge holes in the flight deck and starting fires which spread to the hangar deck below. Screaming sailors ran around aimlessly, trailing flames. Officers shouted orders against the deafening blasts. Gasoline poured from the planes' ruptured fuel tanks, and some of the pilots who had not been lucky enough to escape the first bomb blast were cremated at their controls.
The fire racing along rivulets of gasoline, spreading disaster below decks. Men trapped behind blistering bulkheads were roasted alive. Hoses rolled out in a frantic effort to hold back the flames caught fire. Some officers and men, their uniforms smoldering and their faces blackened by smoke, were driven back to the edge of the flight deck and from there leaped into the sea. Then the fire traveled to the bomb storage lockers. Suddenly there was a thunderous detonation, and sheets of glowing steel were ripped like so much tin foil from the bowels of the ship. The hangar deck was a purgatory within a few minutes, and great clouds of black smoke rose from the Kaga, carrying with them the smell of burning gasoline, paint, wood, rubber and human flesh.
Less than two minutes after Leslie's bombes transformed the Kaga into the flaming cauldron, McClusky's squadron was ready to pounce on the Akagi and Soryu. The destroyer Arashi had led the Enterprise's dive bombers directly to the Japanese Striking Force. Even before Leslie had winged over into his dive, McClusky was picking out his victims. He saw two carriers just ahead turning into the wind to launch aircraft. Dividing his flight into two sections, he called out targets and then signaled his descent. One flight pushed over toward the Akagi, the other toward the Soryu. It was 10:26.
The first of McClusky's 1000- and 500-pound bombs whistled toward their targets. One bomb crashed near Akagi's after elevator and detonated with a hellish blast in the hangar, where a number of planes were waiting to be lifted to the flight deck. The shock wave exploded torpedo warheads, tearing men to bits and starting dozens of gasoline fires. Damage control parties struggled heroically to isolate the flames, but clouds of hot black smoke enveloped them and one by one the men collapsed from the fumes. Another bomb struck the flight deck, scattering planes and pilots into the sea. Within a few minutes the flagship was a floating pyre.
Because of the inferno, damage reports were slow in coming to the bridge, but the Akagi's skipper, Captain Taijiro Aoki, hearing the dull thunder below decks, had no illusions about the fate of his ship; nor did Rear Admiral Ryunosuke Kusaka, Nagumo's Chief of Staff. Both men understood that the bomb hits were fatal and that the Akagi was doomed.
Nagumo, however, was unwilling to accept the fact that the tide of battle was shifting with such appalling speed in his disfavor. Aoki politely told him that the ship was finished and would have to be abandoned. Nagumo's anger flared up. The situation had to be brought under control; he would not leave the ship. Kusaka, who was well acquainted with Nagumo's fiery temper, tried to intervene as diplomatically as possible.
"Sir, our radio is smashed and we cannot communicate with the other ships. Should you not transfer your command to another vessel so that you can continue to direct the battle?"
Nagumo still refused to abandon ship. Finally Kusaka directed several officers to take the Admiral by the hand and pull him away. By now the fires were swirling around the bridge, blocking their decent by ladder, and they had to make their escape by a line hanging from the bridge structure.
The scene on the flight deck was grotesque: craters belching smoke, twisted wreckage, and the bodies of officers and men scattered everywhere. The unmanned machine guns, heated by the fires, began to spray bullets in all directions. Now and then a dull explosion came from deep inside the ship.
A destroyer came alongside the Akagi and took the Admiral and his staff to the cruiser Nagara, from whose mast Nagumo broke his flag. From her bridge he watched his splendid command disintegrate.
The Soryu had been bombed too. Her engines were stopped, water poured into the bilges, the pumps failed to work, and hundreds of scorched sailors, fleeing before the flames, threw themselves into the sea. Soryu's commanding officer, Captain Ryusaku Yanigimoto, stood resolutely on his blackened bridge. A destroyer pulled alongside and an attempt was made to persuade him to leave the doomed ship. He refused to be rescued and was last heard calmly singing the Japanese national anthem, while clouds of smoke closed about him.
All three carriers were fiery derelicts now, and fire fighting parties left on board fought a losing battle against the flames. Many sailors from the Kaga were swimming in the oily water when a torpedo from an American submarine streaked toward their burning ship. Instead of exploding it broke apart, the warhead sinking and the buoyant after section floating free. Immediately several Japanese sailors swam over to the floating part and hung on.
The Kaga burned fiercely throughout the entire afternoon and by twilight was a gigantic torch lighting up the evening sky. At 7:25 she was shaken by heavy explosions, and slipped beneath the waves with hundreds of her crew.
Akagi's fire fighters were able to do no better against the searing flames which gutted their ship. At 5:15 that evening Captain Aoki ordered the Emperor's portrait removed. With a solemn ceremony, the picture was unhooked from the bulkhead, carried through an honor guard, and then placed on board a destroyer which carried it away. Two hours later the raging fires had reached the engine rooms, and Aoki ordered his crew to abandon ship. All through the long night she drifted, throwing her flickering light against the black sky. She was still drifting the next day when dawn broke, and she was finally sent to the bottom by a torpedo from a Japanese destroyer, in order to prevent her from being boarded and salvaged by the enemy. She went down about twenty miles to the westnorthwest of Kaga, but many of her crew were saved.
The Soryu, last to be hit during the morning dive bombing attack, was the first to go. Flames engulfed her, and at 7:13 that evening she rolled under, carrying her captain and over 700 of her crew with her. She went down only twenty-five miles to the northwest of Kaga.
Although the three carriers managed to stay afloat for hours the battle had early been decided by Leslie and McClusky. The dive bombing attack had taken place between 10:24 and 10:26, and in those two crucial minutes Nagumo lost seventy-five percent of his carrier force–marking the beginning of the end of Japan's imperial ambitions in the Pacific.
However, even while the three carriers were burning, the Japanese tried to wrest an ultimate victory from defeat. While Nagumo shifted his flag to the Nagara, tactical command was assumed temporarily by Rear Admiral Hiroaki Abe, who rode in the cruiser Tone. At 10:50 he informed Yamamoto and Kondo, commander of the Midway invasion fleet, that fires were raging aboard the Akagi, Kaga and Soryu, but that he planned to attack the enemy carriers with the surviving Hiryu. This Japanese carrier, because she had been so far north when the American dive bombers arrived, was not immediately sighted and therefore enjoyed immunity for another six and a half hours. From her masthead flew the flag of Rear Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi. While several destroyers circled about the three burning carriers, Abe signaled Yamaguchi, a forceful and farsighted individual, had already given the command. At 10:40, just sixteen minutes after Leslie had led his own attack against the Kaga, eighteen Japanese dive bombers, under Lieutenant Michio Kobayashi, with a light fighter escort, were taking off from the Hiryu's flight deck, and by 11:00 they were speeding northeastward. The bombers climbed to 13,000 feet and took their heading from several American planes which were returning from their recent attack, unwittingly leading the enemy to their carrier.
The American carrier which Admiral Abe decided to attack was the Yorktown, for the Japanese scout planes which sighted Task Force Seventeen did not discover Spruance's two carriers. At 11 o'clock that morning, the Yorktown, hull down to the northwest, was spotting ten planes for a reconnaissance flight which was to fan out from 280˚ to 020˚ (for Fletcher was still convinced that there was a fourth enemy carrier somewhere to the northwest). Following the launching of the search group, the Yorktown's hangar deck was spotted with seven aircraft fully gassed and loaded with 1000-pound bombs. Thirteen more were readied on the flight deck for immediate launching, while a dozen fighters rose into the wind to orbit above the Yorktown's wake of combat air patrol. These planes had just been launched when two bombers from the Enterprise attack group, with tanks almost dry, touched down on the Yorktown's own fighters landed with sputtering engines and wobbly wings. Some exhausted pilots landed on the wrong carriers; but they were they lucky ones. Many never got back.
While these aircraft were winging homeward, Lieutenant Michio Kobayashi's eighteen dive bombers and six Zeros were dropping down to lower altitudes to avoid detection by enemy lookouts. Precisely at 11:59 the Yorktown's radar officer, Vance M. Bennett, watched a group of photophorescent "pips" moving in from the left on the scope. Their speed told him that they were returning echoes from approaching planes. For a few seconds he tracked them. They were fourty-six miles away, coming in on a course of 250˚, which would bring them directly to the Yorktown. Immediately he called to the bridge, warning both Admiral Fletcher and Captain Buckmaster of the impending attack. At the moment there were several fighters being gassed. Refueling was stopped instantly. On the Yorktown's stern there was an auxiliary fuel tank holding 800 gallons of aviation gasoline. Buckmaster ordered it dumped over the side. Fuel lines were drained and then refilled with carbon dioxide gas under twenty pounds of pressure. Watertight doors were slammed shut and dogged down, and the fighters which had been circling over the Yorktown were vectored out to meet the incoming Japanese.
Lieutenant Commander Leslie, who had already led his dive bombers triumphantly into the carrier's landing circle, was ordered to form a combat air patrol and to stay clear of the Yorktown's anti-aircraft fore. Doctors and pharmacists mates rushed to the wardroom, where they waited for wounded shipmates to be carried in; gunners cocked their weapons; and damage control parties, stationed throughout the ship, were poised for the first explosion. On the flag bridge, Admiral Fletcher, helmet pushed down over his head, pored over a large chart and plotted his next move, while the officers and men about him buttoned up their shirts to the neck, rolled down their sleeves, and tucked trouser legs into their socks as a precaution against flash burns.
In a few minutes the Yorktown was ready for action. Her cruisers and destroyers were maneuvering at 25 knots into an anti-aircraft screening formation, 2000 yards away from her. Every gun that could be trained toward the western sky was fixed on the tiny cluster of Kobayashi's planes rising from the distant sea. American fighter pilots, with guns blazing, intercepted the Japanese squadron when it was still twenty miles to the west of the Yorktown. Captain Buckmaster, through his binoculars, could see a long trail of black smoke with a bright spot of flame leading it downward to the sea. Then came others as his fighter planes lashed furiously at Kobayashi's bombers.
Marc Mitscher, staring northward from the Hornet's bridge, could also see the falling planes. Suddenly he sighted several aircraft heading for his ship and braced himself for an attack; but after a few tense moment they were identified as Amrican dive bombers. They were, in fact, planes from Leslie's flight which, having been waved off from the Yorktown because of the Japanese attack, were trying to land on the Hornet before all their fuel was gone. Mitscher cleared the deck for them, but one aircraft, flown by a wounded pilot, crash-landed with such force that all its machine guns began firing, spattering the bridge and deck with .50 caliber bullets which killed an admiral's son and four enlisted men and knocked down twenty others to the deck.
Far away on the horizon Yorktown's fighters took a heavy tool of Kobayashi's bombers. Eleven plummeted into the sea, and only seven of the original eighteen were able to break through the combat air patrol and the anti-aircraft fire from the carrier's screening cruisers and destroyers. As the Japanese planes approached their diving position, Captain Buckmaster had his 5-inch guns firing, his engines turning for their maximum speed of 30.5 knots, and his helmsman shifting the rudder from the left to right to throw off the enemy's aim. Then the lead plane arched over to begin its dive.
Everyone dropped instinctively as the first bomb came down, but it missed the Yorktown, throwing up a geyser of gray water on the carrier's starboard side. The pilot never pulled out of his dive. After leveling off, he flew close aboard the port side of the ship, thumbing his nose at the Yorktown's bridge. A bullet ripped into his tail and he plunged into the sea off the carrier's bow. The second Japanese pilot released his bomb just before his plane drove through a withering anti-aircraft cross-fire and disintegrated in its flight, part of its wing falling on the Yorktown's deck. The bomb crashed on the starboard side of the ship near the Number Two elevator and tore a huge hole in the flight deck. Many of the men who were manning the guns in this area of the ship were killed, and bomb fragments, spattering the deck below, starting fires in three stored aircraft. Lieutenant A. C. Emerson, the hangar deck officer, made a desperate lunge for the sprinkler system, releasing a curtain of water which doused the flames.
The next bomb came down in a perfect trajectory, ripped through the flight deck, and detonated with a hollow roar deep inside the smoke stack. The sudden flash of heat was intense. Shards of burning paint flaked off the stack; photographic film in the ship's dark room caught fire; flames spread into the Executive Officer's compartment, and the uptakes were ruptured. Clutching the weather screen of the flag bridge, Commander Walter G. Schindler, Fletcher's Gunnery Officer, watched the attack with a British naval observer, Commander Michael B. Laing, who, between bomb drops, jotted down hasty notes.
The third and last bomb to hit the Yorktown speared through the starboard side and exploded below decks. The terrific heat generated by the detonation started wild fires in a rag stowage compartment which was alarmingly close to a forward magazines and gasoline tanks. The fuel storage compartment was quickly bathed in carbon dioxide and the magazines flooded. Meanwhile damage control parties tried to smother the burning rags.
This was the extent of Kobayashi's spirited attack. His decimated flight returned to the Hiryu, while smoke billowed from the Yorktown. The retreating Japanese air strike cosisted of only five dive bombers and three fighters, and it was not Kobayashi who led them away, for he had fallen in flames.
The second bomb had stabbed its way into the very bowels of the Yorktown. Three uptakes, which carried combustion gases away from the fire rooms, were severely shattered; two boilers were completely disabled, and the fires under three others were snuffed out; and choking, acrid smoke in several of the fire rooms drove personnel up the ladders. The ship's speed dropped abruptly: twenty knots, fifteen, ten, then six.
The officers and men in the Number One boiler room sweated behind their gasmasks. With two burners working, they managed to keep a head of steam in the boiler, restoring to the battered ship a limited amount of her former strength. At 12:20, however, all engines stopped and the Yorktown came to a halt.
Admiral Fletcher now faced the same unpleasant necessity which Nagumo had faced less than two hours before when the Akagi was hit. The Yorktown's radar was crippled, leaving her blind; planes in the air, in need of refueling, were dircted to land on the Enterprise and Hornet; and Yorktown's immobility, which transformed her into a sitting duck, rendered her useless as a flagship. It became imperative for Fletcher to transfer his flag to another ship so that he could direct the battle and maintain communications with Admiral Spruance. Reluctantly he signaled Rear Admiral William W. Smith, Cruiser Group Commander riding in the Astoria, to take him off the burning carrier, and then he ordered Spruance to send air cover to the Yorktown.
While Fletcher rounded up several key people of his staff, the astoria's motor launch was lowered to the water's edge, then bucked through the slight swells, finally positioning itself below the massive gray wall of the carrier's side. Manila lines dangled from the flag bridge to the launch and officers and men began the long seventy-five-foot descent, hand over hand. Admiral Fletcher put a leg over the weather screen, got a grip on the line and then thought better of it. "I'm too damn old for this sort of thing," he said. "Better lower me." A bowline was tied in another line, looped around his waist, and he made the descent to the launch with several sailors paying out the line from the smoking flag bridge. Once on board the Astoria, Fletcher said, "Tell the Portland to take the Yorktown in tow." The Portland was another cruiser attached to Task Force Seventeen.
Admiral Spruance, whose Enterprise was hull down on the horizon, had sighted the smoke pouring from Fletcher's flagship, and at 12:35 he signaled the cruisers Pensacola and Vincennes, both of his own screen, plus two of his destroyers to strengthen the Yorktown's anti-aircraft barrage in case another Japanese air attack developed. And one did.
Before Leslie's and McClusky's bombs fell, Nagumo had ordered a new, fast scout plane to take off from the Soryu and shadow the American force. This pilot managed to see thing which the pilots of the Hiryu attack group had missed. Kobayashi's fliers, after bombing the Yorktown, reported enthusiastically by radio that the enemy carrier–the only one the Japanese knew anything about at the time–was smoking and dead in the water. This news, of course, cheered the Japanese admirals, but only temporarily. When the pilot of the Soryu scout plane returned from his search mission and found his carrier in flames, he immediately landed on the undamaged Hiryu, rushed to the bridge and informed Admiral Yamaguchi that his radio had not been working and he could only now report that the American force was composed not of one carrier but three!
Yamaguchi immediately decided to launch another attack, but there were only ten torpedo planes and six fighters ready for immediate take-off. Feeble as the strike was, Yamaguchi could not waste a moment, for he had to cripple the other two American carriers before they crippled him. He ordered the flight launched without delay.
The strike was put under the command of Lieutenant Tomonaga, who had led the attack on Midway earlier that morning. He climbed into his cockpit with Oriental calm, although he must have known that for him this flight had no return. His left wing tank had been shot full of holes over Midway and he roared off the Hiryu's flight deck with only his right tank topped off.
At 12:45 Tomonaga's flight was headed eastward while the Yorktown's repair parties, with feaverish speed, put out the fires, cleared away the charred wreckage and patched up the holes in the flight deck. By 13:40 the jagged holes in the exhaust uptakes were closed off and repairs deep inside the ship were well enough along to allow the engineers to cut in four boilers. A coppery haze drifted from the lip of the Yorktown's stack. Slowly she began to move; men cheered; the blue and yellow breakdown flag, flying from the foretruck since the attack, was hauled down with a jerk, and then the engine room reported: "We're ready to make twenty knots or better."
Fighters on combat air patrol were called down for refueling, and the ship turned majestically into the wind. Leslie and Holmberg, who had been waved off during the first attack were now signaled to land. Only moments before, their fuel tanks had run dry and they were forced to glide down near the Astoria, crashing into the sea. Leslie and his gunner climbed into their rubber raft and were soon picked up by the cruiser's launch. Holmberg, who made a fine water landing despite the fact that one wheel would not retract, stepped out on the wing of his plane with his chartboard and parachute. His gunner dragged out the rubber raft, inflated it, and they both stepped inside just as the plane sank. The raft had been punctured by a piece of shrapnel and within a few minutes both men were treading water. However, the launch arrived quickly, hauled them in and brought them to the Astoria.
Fighters had already landed on the Yorktown and were being refueled when the ship's radar operator picked up another flight of planes on a bearing of 340˚, thirty-three miles away. The alarm clanged throughout the ship, fueling was stopped, guns were manned, and Buckmaster braced himself for another attack. Gasoline lines were again drained and refilled with carbon dioxide; six fighters orbiting overhead were vectored out to meet the incoming attack, and eight of the ten fighters on board, each with little more than twenty gallons of gasoline in their tanks, began rolling off the flight deck and climbing into the bright northwestern sky.
Tomonaga's air strike was intercepted when it was about ten miles from the Yorktown. While the American fighters engaged the Zeros, Tomonaga ordered his torpedo planes to break formation and attack the carrier from different angles. Two or three, spattered with machine-gun bullets, crashed before they could launch their torpedoes; Tomonaga was able to drop his only an instant before his plane took a direct hit and exploded, scattering pieces of wing and fuselage over the sea. The encircling cruisers and destroyers looked like a mass of flame as every gun fired at the attackers.
The last Yorktown fighter to take off was in the battle before its wheels were cranked up. The pilot banked to the right, opened fire on a torpedo plane, climbed and was hit in turn by a diving Zero. With his aircraft out of control he looped over, bailed out, floated down to the water and was rescued by a destroyer after he had been in the air only about sixty seconds.
Of the five enemy planes which survived the attack, four made fairly accurate torpedo drops. The Yorktown twisted violently and avoided two torpedoes, but the other two crashed into her port side. There were muffled explosions, like rolling thunder, and it seemed to those on the deck that the Yorktown had been lifted a foot or two out of the water. Paint flew off the bulkheads, books toppled from their racks, and electrical power failed, plunging the lower decks into darkness. The whine of the generators petered out; the rudder, turned to the left at the time of the explosions, was jammed tight, and the steam pressure which had given the Yorktown a momentary reprieve vanished.
Men stared at each other; a few looked over the side, dumbfounded, and saw beneath the yellowish haze of the explosion a pool of black oil which was pouring from the Yorktown's ravaged side. The deck was no longer even. Shortly after the torpedo attack the clinometer showed a list of seventeen degrees, and this continued to increase until it reached an alarming twenty-six degrees. Chairs in the officers' wardroom glided along the deck and tumbled in disorder against the port bulkhead, and the pots an pans in the galley hung at a rakish angle. It was difficult to walk and many sailors could not get their bearings in the darkness below and bumped into one another as they tried to find a way out of the listing compartments. Up on the flight deck hoses were being run out, and a mess attendant, member of a gun crew, was running around with a 5-inch projectile cradled in his arms.
Commander C. E. Aldrich, the ship's damage control officer, informed Captain Buckmaster that without power for counterflooding he could do nothing to correct the list. Lieutenant Commander J. F. Delaney, the engineering officer, had already reported that all the fire rooms were dead and all power lost. The list had diminished Yorktown's righting movement and the flooding reduced her stability.
The torpedo had plowed into Yorktown's side fifteen feet below the waterline, and the concussion wave warped the quick-acting doors on the third deck. Many of the living compartments on the fourth deck were flooded, and gurgling sea water had already reached the first platform level in the forward and after engine rooms. She was heeled over so far to port now that Buckmaster felt she might turn turtle in a few minutes. Wearily he turned to an officer nearby. "Pass the word to abandon ship," he said.
--Thaddeus V. Tuleja
From: The United States Navy in World War II
Compiled and Edited by: S. E. Smith
Part III: Chapter 10: Turning of the Tide
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Due to the heavy number of references in this work, references will be published separately.
![[Pride - September 1945]](http://www.cv6.org/images/sliders/barr-001-c-400x300.jpg "Pride - September 1945")
![[Enterprise CV-6 - Spring 1942]](http://www.cv6.org/images/sliders/barnhill-14-400x300.jpg "Enterprise CV-6 - Spring 1942")
![[Enterprise and Hornet Approach Japan - April 1942]](http://www.cv6.org/images/sliders/barr-277-400x300.jpg "Enterprise and Hornet Approach Japan - April 1942")
![[Direct Hit - August 1942]](http://www.cv6.org/images/sliders/bomb-august-24-1942-400x300.jpg "Direct Hit - August 1942")
![[Enterprise at Santa Cruz - October 1942]](http://www.cv6.org/images/sliders/santa-cruz-400x300.jpg "Enterprise at Santa Cruz - October 1942")
![[Nearing Home - July 1943]](http://www.cv6.org/images/sliders/awo-0038-400x300.jpg "Nearing Home - July 1943")
![[Crash Landing on Enterprise CV-6 - November 1943]](http://www.cv6.org/images/sliders/crash-landing-chewning-400x300.jpg "Crash Landing on Enterprise CV-6 - November 1943")
![[SBD Preparing for Landing - March 1944]](http://www.cv6.org/images/sliders/barr-295-400x300.jpg "SBD Preparing for Landing - March 1944")
![[Ordnancemen Load Fragmentation Bombs - October 1944]](http://www.cv6.org/images/sliders/barr-292-400x300.jpg "Ordnancemen Load Fragmentation Bombs - October 1944")
![[Enterprise CV-6 - July 1944]](http://www.cv6.org/images/sliders/enterprise-july-1944-400x300.jpg "Enterprise CV-6 - July 1944")
![[Kamikaze - Near Miss - April 1945]](http://www.cv6.org/images/sliders/awo-0001-400x300.jpg "Kamikaze - Near Miss - April 1945")
![[The Divine Wind - May 1945]](http://www.cv6.org/images/sliders/barr-087-0-400x300.jpg "The Divine Wind - May 1945")
![[Enterprise CV-6 Approaches New York City - October 1945]](http://www.cv6.org/images/sliders/barr-227-400x300.jpg "Enterprise CV-6 Approaches New York City - October 1945")
