He had time to point
He had time to point.
He had time to open his mouth.
He did not have time to shout.
The bomb left the aircraft at 450 m.
It was 10:22 in the morning, June 4th, 1942.
The bomb weighed 1,000 lb, 454 kg of steel and high explosive, fused to penetrate before it detonated.
It separated from the belly of Richard Best’s Dauntless and fell.
It fell for 3 seconds.
It fell through the clear Pacific air, spinning slowly.
The painted yellow stripe on its tail flashing in the sunlight.
Below it, the flight deck of Akagi rose to meet it.
The white wake of the carrier streamed behind her as she turned to starboard trying to evade.
She could not turn fast enough.
The bomb struck the flight deck just aft of the amidships elevator.
It punched through the wooden planking.
It punched through the steel beneath.
It penetrated to the upper hangar deck.
And then, at a depth of approximately 7 m below the flight deck, surrounded by Kate torpedo bombers being refueled and rearmed, surrounded by torpedoes mounted to bellies and bombs stacked along the bulkheads, surrounded by hoses full of aviation gasoline, it exploded.
For one long second, nothing on the surface of Akagi changed.
Then the flight deck bulged upward.
The teak planks lifted as if pushed by a giant hand from below.
A geyser of flame, white at its core, orange at its edges, blasted up through the elevator opening and reached 50 m into the sky.
The chain reaction had begun.
Inside the hangar, the fireball traveled in every direction at once.
It reached the first Kate bomber.
The aviation fuel in its tanks flashed into vapor and ignited.
The torpedo mounted to its belly cooked off in the heat, then detonated.
200 kg of warhead exploded against the side of the next aircraft.
That aircraft’s torpedo detonated.
The next one followed.
The bombs stacked against the bulkheads were not in armored magazines.
They were in the open.
The heat reached them.
They began to explode in sequence, one after another, in a staccato roar that sounded like a single endless thunderclap.
The men working in the hangar did not have time to feel afraid.
Many of them did not have time to feel anything at all.
A petty officer, who had been 30 m from the impact, was found later, after the fires went out, fused to the steel deck where he had been standing.
The men closer to the explosion left nothing behind.
On the bridge, four decks above the inferno, Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo was thrown against the bulkhead.
He pulled himself upright.
He stared down at the flight deck through the bridge windows.
He saw a black column of smoke rising from the center of his flagship.
He saw flames pouring from the elevator opening.
He saw men running.
He did not speak.
Beside him, Rear Admiral Ryunosuke Kusaka watched the Admiral’s face.
He saw what no one else could see.
He saw a man whose career, whose honor, whose understanding of the world had just been incinerated in 3 seconds.
Kusaka touched his arm.
“We must transfer the flag”.
Nagumo did not move.
“Admiral, we must go now”.
Nagumo turned to him slowly.
His eyes were wet.
His mouth was a thin straight line.
“This is my flagship.
It will not be a flagship in 1 hour, Admiral”.
“Come”.
Nagumo did not come.
He looked [snorts] through the bridge window at the burning ship beneath him.
The ship he had commanded into Pearl Harbor.
The ship that had carried his flag from triumph to triumph across the Pacific.
The red dragon.
The pride of the Imperial Navy.
He reached for his sword.
Kusaka stepped in front of him.
“Admiral, the fleet still has three carriers.
The fleet still has you”.
“You will not do this.
You will come with me”.
There was a silence.
The bridge filled with smoke.
Somewhere below, another bomb cooked off.
The deck shuddered.
Nagumo’s hand fell away from the hilt.
He nodded once.
Two other Dauntless dive bombers had followed Best down.
Lieutenant Edwin Kroeger had released his bomb at the same moment Best released his.
So had Ensign Frederick Weber.
Two more 1,000-lb bombs had fallen on Akagi at almost exactly the same instant.
They missed.
Kroeger’s bomb struck the water 20 m off the port side of the bow.
It threw up a tower of spray.
It did no damage.
Weber’s bomb struck the water near the stern.
It detonated below the waterline, close enough to the hull to send a shockwave through the steel plates of Akagi’s rudder mechanism.
The carrier’s rudder jammed.
She began to turn in a slow, helpless circle, her engine still driving her forward at 28 knots, her steering frozen in a hard turn to port.
She could not maneuver.
She could not run.
She could only burn.
For decades after the war, a story would be told about this moment.
The story said that two American bombs had struck the flight deck.
The story said the explosions had caught the Japanese aircraft sitting on the deck, fully fueled and fully armed, in the very moment they were about to launch their counterattack.
The story said it was a 5-minute miracle, a stroke of impossible luck, the gods of war reaching down at the precise instant.
The story was told first by Mitsuo Fuchida himself in a book published in 1955, 10 years after the war was lost.
It was not true.
The aircraft were not on the flight deck.
They were in the hangar.
They were not about to launch.
They were still being rearmed.
Only one bomb had struck Akagi, Best’s bomb, the bomb that found the elevator and the open hangar beneath.
The catastrophic secondary explosions that destroyed the ship were not American ordnance.
They were Japanese.
They were the torpedoes the Japanese themselves had been mounting.
They were the bombs the Japanese themselves had stacked along the bulkheads because there was no time to stow them properly.
They were the aviation fuel the Japanese themselves had been pumping into the aircraft when Best’s bomb arrived.
Akagi was killed by one American pilot.
She was destroyed by her own preparations.
Below decks in his cabin, Commander Mitsuo Fuchida heard the explosion that destroyed with ship.
He could not stand.
The surgery had left him too weak, but he could feel the deck shake beneath him.
He could hear the secondary explosions cooking off above.
He could smell the smoke beginning to filter through the ventilation ducts.
He pulled himself out of the bunk and crawled.
He crawled across the floor of his cabin.
He pulled himself up to the doorway.
He looked out into a passageway full of black smoke.
Men were running past him.
Some were on fire.
Some were screaming.
Some were silent.
The greatest air commander in the Imperial Navy crawled into the corridor on his hands and knees and tried to help.
He could not stand.
He could not lift.
He could barely breathe.
He would survive the day.
He would be carried off Akagi by sailors who did not know who he was.
He would live another 30 years, and for most of those years he would tell a story about the death of his ship that made it sound like fate, like cosmic injustice, like a miracle of bad timing rather than what it actually was.
What it actually was was the consequence of choices.
By 11:00 the fires on Akagi were beyond control.
The hangar deck had become a furnace.
The temperature inside had passed 1,000° C.
Aluminum melted.
Steel glowed red.
Paint burned off the bulkheads before flames touched them.
The damage control parties tried.
They tried for hours.
They dragged hoses into corridors full of smoke.
They poured foam into compartments that had become ovens.
They flooded the magazines before the fires could reach them.
267 men died in those hours.
Sailors, pilots, mechanics, cooks, boys who had joined the Navy because the Navy paid better than a rice farm, men who had survived Pearl Harbor and Darwin and Ceylon and would not survive this.
By 3:00 in the afternoon, Captain Taijiro Aoki gave the order to abandon ship.
Aoki was 50 years old.
He had commanded Akagi for just over 2 months.
And he did not intend to leave her at all.
When the order had been given and the men had been evacuated, Captain Aoki went to the anchor chains at the bow of his ship.
He carried with him a length of rope.
He sat down on the deck and he tied himself to the anchor.
He intended to go down with Akagi.
His officers found him there.
They argued with him.
He refused to move.
They argued more.
He still refused.
Finally, his executive officer drew his sword.
He cut the ropes that bound his captain to the chain.
He and another officer lifted Aoki bodily and carried him to the rail and lowered him over the side into a waiting boat.
Aoki wept as they rowed him away from his ship.
He would never command another.
The night of June 4th was very long.
Akagi drifted in the darkness listing to starboard.
Fires still burning along the length of her hull.
Four destroyers circled her like mourners around a body.
They could not help her.
They could only wait for orders.
The orders came at dawn.
They came from Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto himself, the 58-year-old commander of the entire combined fleet, aboard the battleship Yamato more than 500 km to the west.
Yamamoto had spent the night listening to reports of disaster.
He had lost three carriers already.
Kaga, Soryu, and during the afternoon, Hiryu, the last of them struck by aircraft from Enterprise and Yorktown.
Akagi was the last and Akagi was dying.
The order Yamamoto sent was the hardest order an admiral could give.
Scuttle Akagi.
At 5:00 in the morning on June 5th, 1942, four Japanese destroyers, Arashi, Hagikaze, Maikaze, and Nowaki, turned their torpedo tubes toward the burning flagship of the Imperial Navy.
On each destroyer, the crews stood at attention.
Some of them wept openly.
None of them looked away.
The torpedoes were the Type 93.
They were the finest torpedoes in the world.
The Japanese had developed them in secret over a decade.
They had never before been fired against a ship of the Imperial Navy itself.
The first torpedo struck Akagi near the bow.
The second struck amidships.
The third and fourth struck the stern.
The Red Dragon shuddered.
She listed harder.
She rolled onto her side.
For a moment, she seemed to hesitate as if she did not want to go.
At 20 minutes past 5:00, she went.
The bow slipped under first, then the bridge, the island, the great flight deck where so many aircraft had taken off to so many victories.
The stern lifted high, the four bronze propellers turning slowly in the air.
Then it, too, slid down.
The Pacific closed over the place where she had been.
Only oil and debris remained on the surface.
She fell for more than 10 minutes through the dark water before she reached the bottom.
She came to rest at a depth of 5,490 m.
Lieutenant Richard Best did not know any of this.
He was already in the air again.
5 hours after his attack on Akagi, that same afternoon, he led another flight from Enterprise against the last surviving Japanese carrier, Hiryu.
He dove again.
He released again.
His bomb struck the flight deck near the forward elevator.
Hiryu burned through the night and was scuttled the next morning.
Richard Best had hit two Japanese aircraft carriers in a single day.
No other pilot in history would ever do it.
But something else had happened to him during that morning attack on Akagi, something he had not noticed at the time.
The oxygen tank in his cockpit had been damaged.
Caustic soda from the system had vaporized at altitude.
He had inhaled it.
By the time he landed back on Enterprise that evening, he was coughing blood.
A week later, in the sick bay at Pearl Harbor, the doctors diagnosed tuberculosis.
His lungs have been scarred by the soda.
The disease would take advantage of the injury.
He was 32 years old.
His flying career was over.
He would never sit in the cockpit of a combat aircraft again.
He spent more than a year recovering in a naval hospital.
He lived the rest of his life on the ground in California with his wife and his children and his quiet routines.
Never famous, never wealthy, never seeking attention.
He died in October of 2001 at the age of 91.
When asked in his last years about the morning of June 4th, 1942, he did not speak of glory.
He did not speak of victory.
He spoke instead of the men who had died that day, the Japanese sailors who had been working in the hangers of Akagi when his bomb came through the deck.
267 of them, men he had never seen, men who had been ordered to be there, who had not chosen the war, who had simply been doing their jobs.
He had killed them with a single bomb dropped from 450 m.
He did not feel proud.
In October of 2019, 77 years after the battle, the research vessel Petrel located the wreck of Akagi.
She lies upside down on the floor of the Pacific Ocean.
The bow points northwest.
The propellers point at the sky that is no longer above her.
The hull is largely intact.
The teak of the flight deck is gone, eaten by deep sea creatures over the decades.
But the steel beneath remains.
And in the center of the hull, just aft of where the amidships elevator used to be, the cameras of the deep sea submersibles found a single ragged hole.
It is the hole the bomb made.
It is still there.
It has been there for more than seven decades, and it will be there for thousands of years more in the cold, dark water 5 and 1/2 km below the surface.
A a small dark wound in the belly of a dead ship.
This is where the war turned.
Not in the sky over Midway, not on the burning decks of the carriers.
Not in the radio rooms or the planning rooms or the war rooms.
Here, in this hole made by one bomb.
Dropped by one man in three seconds at 10:22 in the morning on a clear day on the 4th of June in 1942, the red dragon never rose again.
Neither did Japan.
