…
But 30 minutes earlier, the leader of the Midway strike had radioed that a second attack on the island would be necessary.
And Nagumo had given the order to rearm the reserve aircraft with land attack bombs.
Below deck, in the cavernous hangars of Akagi and her sister ships, hundreds of ordnance men were already at work.
They were unbolting torpedoes from the bellies of bombers.
They were lowering them onto wheeled trolleys.
They were rolling them away.
They were lifting bombs into place.
The scout plane’s message reached Nagumo in the middle of this.
He stared at it.
He did not yet know that the report was incomplete.
The scout had said “enemy ships”.
The scout had not said “carriers”.
It would take another 50 minutes before the truth arrived.
At 8:20 in the morning, the scout plane sent a second message.
“Enemy force appears to be accompanied by what appears to be a carrier”.
Nagumo read this one in silence.
The bridge officers around him went very still.
On the hangar decks below, the work had reversed itself.
The land bombs were now being removed.
The torpedoes were being mounted again.
Ordnance men sweated in the close air, surrounded by high explosives, working faster than safety regulations allowed.
Bombs that should have been returned to the magazines were instead piled against the bulkheads because there was no time to stow them properly.
Above this, on the flight deck, the first wave was returning from Midway.
They circled the carrier, low on fuel, some of them damaged.
They had to land.
They had to land soon.
The deck had to be cleared.
Nagumo gave the order.
The reserve aircraft, half-armed, were sent back down on the elevators.
The deck was opened to receive the returning planes.
It was the only decision he could have made.
It was also the wrong one.
Because at that moment, 300 miles to the east, the dive bombers of USS Enterprise were already in the air.
And Lieutenant Richard Best was leading three of them toward a point in the ocean that did not yet have a name.
A point that, in less than 2 hours, would be marked by a column of black smoke rising 15,000 ft into the clear Pacific sky.
The column that would announce the death of the red dragon.
The sea was bright now.
The Pacific had turned from black to gray to that hard-hammered blue that old sailors knew was the color of a good day to die.
The sun was climbing.
The wind was steady from the southeast.
Visibility, 30 miles.
Cloud cover, scattered cumulus at 1,500 ft.
Perfect flying weather.
On the bridge of Akagi, Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo watched the last of his Midway strike aircraft settle onto the flight deck.
The deck crews ran to them, chalked the wheels, folded the wings, pushed them toward the elevators.
The aircraft disappeared down into the hangers one after another, like coins dropping into a slot.
It was almost 9:00 in the morning.
Nagumo had been awake for 6 hours.
He had not eaten.
He had not sat down.
His staff officer, Rear Admiral Ryūnosuke Kusaka, stood beside him.
Kusaka was 49 years old.
He was Nagumo’s friend.
He had served with him for years.
He watched the admiral now and saw what no one else could see.
The small tremor in the left hand, the slight stoop in the shoulders, the eyes that did not quite focus.
Nagumo turned to him.
“We will recover the strike.
We will rearm.
We will launch a full attack on the American carriers”.
Kusaka nodded.
He did not speak.
There was nothing to say.
The decision had been made.
The aircraft were below in the hangers.
The ordnance men were working.
The torpedoes were being remounted.
Below deck in the cavernous hangers of Akagi, the air was thick with the smell of aviation gasoline.
Fuel hoses snaked across the steel floor.
Mechanics moved between the aircraft, topping off tanks, checking magnetos, wiping oil from cowlings.
Ordnance men strained under the weight of torpedoes that weighed nearly a ton apiece.
Their faces were slick with sweat.
Their backs were bent.
They did not speak.
They worked.
Around them, piled along the walls, were the bombs that had been removed an hour earlier.
250 kg land attack bombs, 800 kg general purpose bombs.
They should have been returned to the armored magazines four decks below.
There was no time.
A boatswain’s mate, 22 years old, looked at the pile of explosives and said something to the man beside him.
The man laughed.
They went back to work.
Neither of them would survive the day.
200 miles to the east, the American attack was coming.
It came not as one fist, but as a series of separate, desperate punches.
The American carriers had launched their aircraft in haste, in confusion, with poor coordination.
The squadrons had taken off at different times.
They had flown different courses.
Some of them had lost their way entirely.
They were not arriving as a single coordinated strike.
They were arriving piecemeal, and they were dying piecemeal.
The first to find the Japanese fleet were the torpedo bombers of Torpedo Squadron 8 from USS Hornet.
They were led by Lieutenant Commander John Waldron.
He was 41 years old, part Sioux by ancestry, raised in South Dakota.
A career naval officer, a man with a wife and two daughters waiting for him in California.
He had told them before he left Pearl Harbor that he would come home.
He had also told his pilots the night before the battle, in a handwritten note he passed to each of them, that if only one plane was left to make a final attack, he wanted that man to go in and get a hit.
Waldron had flown without fighter escort.
His fighters had been delayed.
He had not waited for them.
He found the Japanese fleet at 9:20 in the morning.
Four carriers spread across the sea below him, the biggest target any American pilot had ever seen.
He led 15 devastators down.
The devastator was an old aircraft, slow, underpowered, carrying a torpedo, it could barely manage 200 km per hour.
The Japanese Zero fighters that came down on Waldron’s squadron could fly nearly three times that speed.
The zeros came out of the sun.
They came in waves.
They tore the devastators apart in the air.
One plane exploded, then another, then another.
Pieces of aluminum fluttered down toward the ocean like leaves in autumn.
Bodies fell with them.
Waldron’s plane was hit.
It caught fire.
The men on the Japanese ships watched him try to hold his course toward Akagi.
They watched him fail.
The plane rolled over and went into the sea.
All 15 Devastators of Torpedo 8 were shot down.
30 men flew with them.
29 died.
The only survivor was a 25-year-old Ensign named George Gay.
His plane hit the water at full speed.
He climbed out of the wreckage as it sank.
He inflated a small rubber from his seat.
He hid beneath it.
And for the next several hours, he floated alone in the Pacific Ocean watching the battle unfold around him.
He would see things that day that no other American would see.
He would see them up close.
Around 9:40 in the morning, the second wave came in.
Torpedo Squadron 6 from USS Enterprise.
14 Devastators led by Lieutenant Commander Eugene Lindsey.
The zeros were waiting.
10 of the 14 aircraft were shot down.
Lindsey was killed.
Not a single torpedo found its mark.
A few minutes past 10, the third wave.
Torpedo Squadron 3 from USS Yorktown.
12 Devastators led by Lieutenant Commander Lance Massey.
10 of the 12 were shot down.
Massey was killed.
41 torpedo planes.
Six returned.
No hits.
On the deck of Akagi, the sailors cheered.
Three American attacks.
Three American defeats.
The mighty torpedo bombers, the supposed killers of warships, had been swept from the sky by Japanese fighters and Japanese anti-aircraft fire and Japanese skill.
The men of the Imperial Navy looked at each other and grinned.
Some of them slapped each other on the back.
The cooks brought up rice balls and tea to the gun crews.
It seemed impossible that the day could go any better.
It could not.
Because high above them at 15,000 ft in the thin cold air where but zero fighters were not, Something was approaching.
The Zeros could not see it.
They were down low where the torpedo planes had drawn them.
They had spent the morning chasing slow aircraft just above the wavetops.
Their fuel was lower than they realized.
Their guns were hotter.
Their pilots were tired.
The combat air patrol of the Japanese fleet, the shield that should have been at every altitude, at every quarter of the compass, had collapsed downward.
The sky above the carriers was empty.
It would not be empty for long.
Wade McClusky was lost.
The 40-year-old commander of the Enterprise air group had been flying for nearly 3 hours.
He had 32 Dauntless dive bombers behind him.
Each one of them carried a 1,000 lb bomb.
Each one of them was running out of fuel.
He had flown to the intercept point on his chart.
The Japanese fleet was not there.
He had flown a search pattern.
The Japanese fleet was not there, either.
He looked at his fuel gauge.
He looked at his chart.
He looked at the empty ocean below him.
He had a decision to make.
Standard doctrine said to turn around, to return to the carrier, to save the aircraft, save the pilots, fight another day.
McClusky did not turn around.
He flew on.
It was the most important decision any American officer made that day.
Possibly that year.
Possibly that war.
A few minutes later, at 5 minutes before 10, he saw it.
A long white wake on the dark blue ocean far below him, drawn straight as a chalk line across the sea.
A Japanese destroyer running at full speed.
Her name was Arashi.
She had been hunting an American submarine, the USS Nautilus, for the last hour.
She had broken off the hunt.
She was racing now to rejoin the main fleet.
She was traveling at 30 knots.
And in her hurry, she was leaving behind her a wake that pointed like an arrow toward the place McClusky had been looking for all morning.
McClusky her.
For 20 minutes, he flew above the Arashi watching that white line on the water.
The destroyer never looked up.
Our lookouts never saw the American formation directly overhead at 15,000 ft.
At 20 minutes past 10:00, McClusky saw them.
Four Japanese aircraft carriers spread out across the sea in a loose diamond.
He pressed his radio microphone, “Attack”.
Behind him in his own Dauntless, Lieutenant Richard Best was looking down at the same site.
He saw two carriers clearly.
He saw two more in the distance.
He understood immediately the doctrine.
The squadron commander would take his aircraft against the far carrier.
The squadron behind him would take the near carrier.
Best was the executive officer of Bombing Six.
He was preparing to lead his squadron against the near carrier, the closest one, the one directly below them.
The one called Akagi.
He pushed his stick forward.
He opened his dive brakes.
He began the dive.
And then he saw something that made his blood go cold.
McClusky ahead of him was diving on the near carrier.
The entire group commander’s section was diving on Akagi.
The squadron behind Best, Scouting Six, was following them down.
They were all attacking the same ship.
The far carrier, the bigger one, the more important one, the flagship, was being left untouched.
Best had a fraction of a second to decide.
He pulled out of his dive.
He pulled up so hard the airframe groaned.
He climbed back to altitude.
He looked behind him.
Of his entire squadron, only two aircraft had seen his signal and followed him up.
Two pilots, Lieutenant Edwin Kroeger, 25 years old from Iowa, a quiet man, dependable, the kind of pilot who never made the headlines and never made mistakes.
Ensign Frederick Weber, 26 years old from Pennsylvania, a new pilot.
This was his first combat mission.
Three aircraft, 3,000-lb bombs.
One Japanese flagship.
Best banked his Dauntless and pointed the nose at Akagi.
Below him, the sailors on the deck of the great carrier were still cheering the defeat of the American torpedo planes.
The hangars below them were still a maze of fuel hoses and half-armed aircraft.
The reserve strike was almost ready.
In another 10 minutes, 15 at most, the carriers would turn into the wind and launch.
The aircraft warmed their engines below.
The zeros patrolled the wavetops.
The sky above was empty.
Best pushed the stick forward.
The dive began.
He saw the deck of Akagi grow in his bombsight.
He saw the rising sun emblem painted on the wood, white and red, the size of a small house from this altitude, growing larger every second.
He felt the airframe shake.
He felt the wind tear at the cockpit.
He felt the blood pool in the back of his head as the aircraft accelerated past 250 knots, past 300, past 350.
He held the dive.
He held it longer than the manual said to hold it.
He held it until the deck of Akagi filled his entire field of vision.
Behind him, Kroeger and Weber held their dives, too.
On the deck of Akagi, a lookout finally looked up.
