Midway: What Really Happened

[MIflyer]

There has been a great deal written about the Battle of Midway but some new books have come out in the last 20 years that add a great deal of information.

The Battle of Midway – What Really Happened

1. Prior to the battle there was no planning meeting held among the leadership of the three US Navy aircraft carriers that were preparing to strike the IJN fleet. The USS Enterprise, USS Yorktown, and USS Hornet were supplied with the last confirmed location of the IJN fleet and each left to make their own plans on how best to conduct airstrikes.
2. Aboard the USS Enterprise and the USS Hornet the leadership of both carriers extrapolated the course and speed of the IJN fleet and concluded the course to intercept it would be to the Southwest. But aboard the Hornet Lt Cmdr John Waldron of Torpedo Squadron 8 (VT-8) disagreed. He argued that the IJN ships would be operating under combat conditions, launching and recovering aircraft, and thus their net progress would be significantly less. He recommended a course to the West rather than the Southwest. In the discussion that followed Lt Cmdr Waldron was unable to convince the Hornet Air Group commander and the senior leadership. He was told that the course for the strike would be to the Southwest and that he would follow that direction.
3. Aboard the USS Yorktown the leadership reached exactly the same conclusion as Lt Cmdr Waldron (without knowing what the other carriers were going to do), planned to fly a course to the West. The plan was to launch later than the other two carriers in order to first recover scout planes that had been out looking for the IJN fleet as well as make sure that all the IJN carriers had been located. As it turned out, the Yorktown Air Group and Lt Cmdr Waldron were exactly correct as to the location of the IJN fleet.
4. On both the Enterprise and the Hornet they chose to plan to keep all their escorting F4F fighters at high altitude, along with the SBD dive bombers. The TBD torpedo bombers would go in at low altitude, not only because their mission required it but also because they were the oldest, lowest powered, slowest aircraft and were carrying the heaviest load. But on the Yorktown they chose to follow the lessons of the Battle of the Coral Sea and station the only six F4F's they could send down low with the TBD's. At the Coral Sea battle putting four F4F's down close to the TBD's had proved to be an effective approach; while all four F4F's were shot down no TBD's were lost. As it turned out, the Enterprise and Hornet approach would mean that the vast majority of F4F's available would never even engage the enemy while only the Yorktown F4F's would fight but be very badly outnumbered by IJN Zeros.
5. When the Hornet Air Group launched early the next morning VT-8 flew the Southwest course they had been ordered to use, but about 30 min after launch Lt Cmdr Waldron said over the radio that they were not flying the correct course to find the enemy. The Hornet Air Group Commander replied that they would fly the course they were on. Lt Commander Waldron repeated he claim that they were flying the wrong course and was given the same response by the Air Group Commander. Then Waldron came up on the radio again, said, "Hell, I know where the Japanese are. Follow me." And with that he turned away from the course that he had been ordered to fly and led his men on what he thought was the correct course to hit the IJN, to the West.
6. Meanwhile, the Enterprise F4F's, after taking off well behind their own SBD's due to a deck problem, sighted VT-8 far below, and thinking they were their own TBD's, followed them on their "wrong" course.
7. The rest of the Hornet Air Group flew their original Southwesterly course, sighted no IJN ships, but just kept going on that same course. The ten F4F's from the Hornet ran low on fuel, turned back before the SBD's did, but were unable to find the Hornet; all ten ditched. The Hornet SBD's eventually ran low on fuel, turned back, and made it back to their carrier.
8. Meanwhile, Lt Commander John Waldron, leading VT-8, encountered an IJN floatplane, which flew alongside the TBD's and no doubt relayed information on their course, speed, and number to the IJN fleet. In response, the IJN fleet launched additional Zeros, augmenting the seven they already had in the air until there were almost 50 aloft. While the rest of the Hornet and the Enterprise strike forces wandered around looking for the enemy, VT-8 hit the IJN fleet dead nuts accurate and went into attack alone, with no fighter support and no dive bombers attacking at the same time. It was a suicide mission; they got no hits and even if they had their badly flawed government factory produced torpedoes probably would not have worked.
9. High overhead VT-8, the Enterprise F4F's stayed at altitude, able to see the IJN fleet but per the agreement between the ship's fighter and torpedo leader, were awaiting the call from their own torpedo planes to come help. Of course, VT-8 was not on the same radio frequency; the F4F's had only one communication frequency and each carrier's aircraft had its own assigned. The fighter pilots apparently did not see VT-8's desperate battle down below and sent no one down to have a look see. The Enterprise F4F leader did not try to contact the carrier or other aircraft and report the location of the IJN fleet until, after about an hour of circling, when the fighters were low on fuel and had to depart; he reported the location of the enemy fleet and that they were departing for home. The Enterprise F4F's recovered at Midway, which was closer than their carrier.
10. The Japanese had been conflicted over what to do next after their initial airstrikes on Midway Island. They were hit by B-17's, B-26's, TBF's, SBD's and SB2U's from Midway but wanted most of all to go after the US carriers - if they could only find them. They had decided to hit Midway again and armed their Kate aircraft with bombs rather than torpedoes. Then a radio message came in from a scout plane that the US carriers had been found and the order was given to rearm the Kates with torpedoes. This was not such a lengthy process; some estimates were that it would only take 30 min. But then VT-8 showed up.
11. The IJN lacked radar and depended on visual sighting of enemy aircraft. So the normal practice was for everyone to drop what he was doing and go out to be lookouts when the ship was under attack. Aside from that, trying to re-arm airplanes with the ships dashing to and fro probably was rather difficult at best. The VT-8 attack stalled the IJN airstrike on the US carriers; this would prove to be a fatal delay.
12. The Enterprise Air Group found only one IJN ship in what was supposed to be the target area, a destroyer that had stayed behind to deal with the submarine USS Nautilus after it had attacked the fleet. Lt Cmdr Wade McClusky, Jr, the SBD leader decided to take up the heading being used the by the destroyer and see if it led to the IJN fleet.
13. The Yorktown launched its attack after the Enterprise and Hornet, and the fighter leader, "Jimmy" (NHRN) Thatch was distressed to find that he would have only six F4F's to defend the strike force. The Yorktown had become separated by about 50 miles from the Hornet and Enterprise during the strike preparations and thus could not rely on mutual air defense support from the other two carriers. The decision was made to retain more Wildcats to defend the carrier. Even worse, Thatch did not have all the highly experienced pilots that had fought at Coral Sea and had learned his Thatch Weave tactic; some were rookies originally supposed to go aboard the USS Saratoga when it arrived a few days later. A highly experienced pilot volunteered to help Thatch train his new pilots but was killed when one of the rookies landed on top of him. Thatch chose to put his 6 Wildcats down to cover the TBD's.
14. Next, at the IJN fleet their preparations to launch a strike were interrupted again by more TBD attacks; the Yorktown torpedo planes were inbound. They had their only six F4F's as escort, which were utterly overwhelmed by the Zeros and in the end could only focus on their own survival. The Yorktown TBD's scored no effective hits but their attacks caused the IJN still more delay. One Yorktown torpedo apparently did hit an IJN carrier but failed to explode and reportedly ended up being used as a float by IJN crewmen. And then as the few surviving Yorktown TBD's struggled to escape, the Enterprise TBD's showed up as well.
15. The IJN needed perhaps no more than five minutes respite to get their attack off but then the Enterprise SBD's showed up. The Yorktown SBD's arrived at about the same time. But there is no way the Yorktown's six F4F's trying to cover their TBD's could have defended the dive bombers against over 40 Zeros. The Yorktown F4F's defending their torpedo bombers claimed a few Zeros, as did the TBD's, and even VT-8 shot down at least one, but the newly arriving Wildcats were still far outnumbered. Fortunately the Zeros were engaged in a wild feeding frenzy amongst the TBD's far down below and were not in a position to intercept the dive bombers.
16. The SBD's sank three IJN carriers in their initial attack and then the fourth one later that day. The Yorktown was hit by two attacks, was abandoned initially, and might have even recovered but an IJN submarine torpedoed it.
17. The USS Nautilus found the IJN Akagi still afloat and torpedoed it. All of the torpedoes failed to explode.
18. It is axiomatic that at Midway the IJN's best came up against the USN's best and we got lucky. But that's not really true. There were many mistakes made by the US and bad luck as well, including a failure to coordinate, poor communications, and bad decisions by leadership at various levels.
19. But it was courage that carried the day! And that courage included Lt Commander John Waldron's decision to disobey his orders. "Hell, I know where the Japanese are! Follow me!" was crucial. All of the TBD crews pressed on in the face of almost certain death and while they did not sink a single enemy ship they enabled the SBD's to do so.
20. You can't help but wonder that if the Hornet leadership had chose to assign even only four F4F's to cover VT-8 they very well could have shot down the IJN floatplane before it got off its sighting report. VT-8 could have attacked with fighter cover to counter the seven Zeros that were over the IJN fleet. Admittedly, the poor torpedoes the TBD's carried would have greatly limited their ability to damage the IJN even if everything else went well.
21. The commander of the Hornet Air Group, did his job, followed his orders, and eventually was promoted to full Captain (O-6), serving in positions of increasing responsibility until he retired after a full career.
22. Lt Cmdr John Waldron was KIA in June 1942, but in 1944, the USN commissioned a new destroyer, the USS Waldron, and it served well into the 1970's. So in reality John Waldron had a full, very long, and indeed, glorious career in the USN.

 

[fliger747]

Marc Mischer was lucky he had already been selected for rear Admiral as his performance as Hornet's Captain at Midway wasn't particularly stellar. Stanhope Ring, the Hornet CAG, was eventually promoted post war to Vice Admiral...

 

[MIflyer]

Mischer and Ring got together and produced a map of the flight paths that showed they had barely missed the IJN. This was wrong but it was not figured out until the 1990's. The map also caused the rescue planes to look in the wrong place for the downed Wildcat pilots.

The day after their first strike attempt the Hornet SBD's went back out, found the IJN fleet, which no longer had any carriers, and still failed to do any significant damage.

And it appears that Mischer shared your opinion. He ordered that his diaries covering that period of time be destroyed after his death.

One odd aspect was that the USN had a hell of a time locating the IJN fleet but the USAAF seemed to have no problem at all. The reason? "Please Mr. Please, Don't Play B-17". The B-17's could fly way up high where they had a much better view than the Navy's PBY's and the Zeros had a very hard time shooting them down. The USN commander on Midway put Navy officers on board the B-17's, since the typical USAAF crewman could hardly tell the difference between a PT Boat and a battleship. This led to the USN getting a few B-17's, a lot more B-24's and eventually the PB4Y-2 Privateer.

I read that Ring had ended his career as the vice commander of a USN base in the Pacific, where the Navy basically owned the whole island, but not that he made Admiral. Thanks!

 

[MIflyer]

By the way I just noticed that the webpage changed all my MS Word 1,2,3,4,... paragraph markings to something nonsensical.. So I went back and fixed that.

 

[pinehilljoe]

History is not kind to Stanhope Ring's performance at Midway. Hornet's air group did not make a significant contribution to the battle.

 

[MIflyer]

Ring made exactly the same mistake as McClusky by flying the SW course. But McClusky went looking elsewhere when he found the IJN was not where he expected, got lucky by spotting that IJN destroyer, and modified his plans accordingly.

Ring apparently just kept going on a SW heading when he did not find the IJN fleet and even when he got a radio call from Waldron saying that he had found the IJN he did not respond by asking where they were.

 

[fliger747]

What seems a little bizarre is that with all the attacks on the carrier group from Midway, the fleet had been well located, and somehow USN didn't get the word? Of course radio communications in the day could be quite unreliable. Typically in the Pacific there is a low scattered/broken cloud layer, which is why the PBY's often flew low, just below the clouds, from above easy to miss a whole fleet!

 

[MIflyer]

The PBY's used the clouds to hide in. Their long range cruise speed was 75 kts. In the words of the head USN officer on Midway, "Every type of Japanese aircraft could and did attack the PBY's." Even Betty bombers based on Wake Island attacked the PBY's. I suspect that if any IJN aircraft other than a Zero saw a B-17, even assuming they could climb to its altitude, they knew to stay away from it.

The USN fighters had only one frequency for communications and had to retune their receiver to a different band to receive the ZB navigational signals and then tune the radios back to the comm frequency. They could not retune their transmitters in flight.

And no doubt that the USN's mania about maintaining radio silence had its effects as well. When the Enterprise F4F's got over the IJN fleet, led by VT-8, you'd have thought they would have announced the fact to everyone. Instead they circled over the fleet for an hour until they hit bingo on fuel and only then announced they were over the IJN and leaving. If they leader had just sent two Wildcats down to see what was going on that would have helped VT-8 a lot. And if the Enterprise SBDs and TBD's had heard those communications they could have come straight there instead of wandering around.

The later ARC-5 system the USN adopted was much better, with one HF frequency and five VHF. You could have at least one channel where everyone could talk to each other. But that was over a year in the future.

 

[MIflyer]

 

[pinsog]

Seems like a bombless B17 could have just orbited the Japanese fleet at 25-30,000 feet constantly transmitting its location to Midway, Pearl Harbor, whoever. Zero's would have a lot of trouble dealing with a B17 at that height especially 30,000 feet. In hindsight, I might have put an IFF transmitter on the B17's. Whenever they made contact with the Japanese carriers they could have turned it on as they orbited, using the same frequency as the US carriers used. Not sure if that would work or not.

 

[The Basket]

One issue that had confused me was where were the Wildcats?
Doing not much.
And they called Nagumo a fool.

 

[MIflyer]

In fact the Navy put USN observers on board the B-17's at Midway. One reason is that the USN is never satisfied with reports from other than its own people. But the other reason was that the USAAF B-17 crews proved to be incapable of telling the difference between a submarine and a cruiser (to give an actual example). In 1945 the USAAF crews in B-29's were given special slide rules so they could use their gunsights to measure the actual size of ships they encountered on the way to and from Japan.

A few months later B-17 crews in the southwest Pacific developed techniques for low altitude night attacks on Japanese shipping that proved to be devastatingly effective, even without radar.

Yes, just think. Hornet launched 10 F4F's and all of them ditched without seeing the IJN. Enterprise launched its F4F's, and while all of them found the IJN "accidentally" by following VT-8, none engaged in combat. The six Yorktown F4F's that escorted the Yorktown TBD's were the only one to fight the Zeros over the IJN fleet and were so hopelessly outnumbered they could not even defend themselves. Back at the US fleet the Enterprise and Hornet were 50 miles from the Yorktown and sent no CAP help when the carrier was attacked twice by IJN airplanes. The USMC F4F's and F2A's fought defending Midway but most of the USN Wildcats were essentially no-shows for the battle.

 

[pinsog]

Thach's 4 Wildcats fought, 3 of them returned. The other group of Wildcats were at altitude with SBD's. They were supposed to go down and assist the torpedo squadron if called but they never heard the call. The leader thought about going down and strafing but was concerned about fuel and getting back to defend the carriers, not getting lost and having enough altitude that the IFF would help guide him back, and the limited effect strafing would have.

 

[MIflyer]

According to No Higher Honor, all six of Thatch's F4F's were down with the TBD's and none were up with the SBD's. It was the first combat that the Thatch Weave was used, and it was successful, but not all of the pilots were familiar with it. One F4F was shot down right away but the other 5 managed to survive. I have not seen any accounting of how many Zeros the Yorktown F4F's and TBD's shot down; it was a wild melee and Thatch was trying to keep count but was a tad busy to take notes. Only four TBD's made it back, three from Enterprise and one from Yorktown.

By the way, in No Higher Honor on P201 it says that the Enterprise F4F's were up at altitude with that ship's SBD's. But in reality while they were at 20,000 ft they had followed VT-8 by mistake. The SBD's took off from Enterprise first to be followed by the TBD's and then the F4F's. But there was a deck problem with a delay in launching the TBD's so the Enterprise SBD's went on ahead without waiting for the rest of the force.

 

[pinsog]

The 'other group' of F4F's I mentioned in my post was the Enterprise group. I thought Thach fought with only 4 F4F's and 1 of those was lost early on. I need to refresh my memory

 

[MIflyer]

I have not checked but I do not thonk the Enterprise or Hornet were ever threatened by IJN aircraft so the Yorktown F4F's would have been the only ones that saw combat from the carriers.

 

[Barrett]

There's been many threads about Ring's search course on the Battle of Midway internet roundtable. Consensus is that he actually flew nearly due west and now SW (as I believe the Hornet action report stated. Waldron of course broke off independently and went SW.) Ring was not well regarded, especially by his JOs who learned in workups that he was an inept navigator who didn't even know how to drop a bomb from an SBD. Moreover, he was a hard-core Navy Tech graduate with a low opinion of reservists. However, he and Mitscher went to the same college and MM kept him on staff even after the Midway debacle when M went to Air Sols.

I knew two VF-8 pilots who survived Ring and the fighter CO, Mitchell. One of my contacts was the first I heard ask the question: "Why let rank lead when ability does so much better?"

 

[The Basket]

A few issues would be what cooperation was there between the carriers pre war. And what cooperation between not only the squadrons on ship but between other carriers.

Unless this was nailed down before Midway then learning on the job was not going to work.

The idea of an individual promoted beyond their ability will come as no surprise to any ex military. Or the idea of trying to cover up weaknesses not due to aliens or moon landings but because the military exists to promote ideas and individuals based on family and friends and who is having sexual relations with who.

I was under the impression that an officer was promoted on merit. I was very wrong once I was in.

 

[MIflyer]

One problme at Midway in terms of coordination was that the task Force with the Enterprise and Hornet was commanded by Adm Spruance, but when the Yorktown's Task Force 17 approached the rendezvous location after the ship's hasty repair at Pearl Harbor, Adm Fletcher, as the senior officer, too command. So Spruance was set up to fight without the Yorktown but is arrival changed things. If that were not confusing enough the Saratoga was on the way and was supposed to arrive at Pearl Harbor about 3 days later. That resulted in some of the Yorktown's experienced fighter pilots being held back to staff the Saratoga; they were replaced by rookie pilots.

When I was on active duty in the USAF I served with a couple of especially exceptional officers. They were top notch all the way and had all the proper tickets punched. Before I met them they were assigned to an incredibly exciting and highly advanced new project that would revolutionize the way we did things. It was so clearly superior that plans were implemented for it to replace the current systems and organizations even before it proved itself.

I was not lucky enough to get assigned to that fabulous new system. No, I was enormously luckier that that! Because that new system turned out to be a horrible idea, an utter failure, in truth. The SECAF even said it was a huge mistake that would take years to recover from.

Next those two outstanding gentlemen became key to the implementation of another thrilling new concept that would also revolutionize the way we did things. And in an even shorter time period it proved to be a disaster as well. A former USAF Chief of Staff was brought in to review the situation and gave as blunt an assessment as could be imagined, "We used to be able to do this mission. Now we can no longer. Your problem is obvious. Fire the people you put in charge a decade ago and go rehire the ones you fired."

What do you think happened to those two outstanding officers with two consecutive utter disasters on their records, as confirmed by a SECAF and a CSAF?

They both made general officer, pinned on stars. After all, they did not think up those crackpot failed horrible ideas, both of which were based largely on carreerism. All they did was try their best to implement those inevitable failures. They flew the wrong course - but it was for the right reasons. And so it was with Commander Ring.