All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [158]
The Americans had suffered a shocking succession of disasters, which could easily have been fatal to the battle’s outcome. Instead, however, fortune changed with startling abruptness. Nagumo paid the price for his enforced failure to strike at Spruance’s task force even when he learned it was near at hand. Moreover, his Zeroes were at low level and running out of fuel when more American aircraft appeared high overhead, a few minutes after the last torpedo-bombers attacked.
The Dauntless dive-bomber was the only effective 1942 US naval aircraft; what followed changed the course of the Pacific war in the space of minutes. Dauntlesses fell on Nagumo’s carriers, wreaking havoc. ‘I saw this glint in the sun,’ said Jimmy Thach, ‘and it just looked like a beautiful silver waterfall, these dive-bombers coming down. It looked to me like almost every bomb hit.’ In reality, the first three bombs aimed at Kaga missed, but the fourth achieved a direct hit, setting off sympathetic detonations among munitions scattered across the carrier’s decks and in its hangars. Soryu and Akagi suffered similar fates. Wildcat pilot Tom Cheek was another fascinated spectator as the dive-bombers pulled out. ‘As I looked back to Akagi hell literally broke loose. First the orange-colored flash of a bomb burst appeared on the flight deck midway between the island structure and the stern. Then in rapid succession followed a bomb burst amidships, and the water founts of near-misses plumed up near the stern. Almost in unison Kaga’s flight deck erupted with bomb bursts and flames. My gaze remained on Akagi as an explosion at the midship water-line seemed to open the bowels of the ship in a rolling, greenish-yellow ball of flame … Soryu … too was being heavily hit. All three ships had lost their foaming white bow waves and appeared to be losing way. I circled slowly to the right, awe-struck.’
Equally fascinated – and appalled – was Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, Japanese hero of the Pearl Harbor strike, now an impotent spectator on the deck of Akagi: ‘I was horrified at the destruction that had been wrought in a matter of seconds. There was a huge hole in the flight deck just behind the midship elevator … Deck plates buckled in grotesque configurations. Planes stood tail up belching livid flames and jet-black smoke. Reluctant tears streamed down my cheeks.’
The dive-bomber attack sank two Japanese carriers immediately, and the third flaming hulk was scuttled that evening. It was an extraordinary achievement, not least because two squadrons of dive-bombers and their Wildcat escort were sent on the wrong course and failed to engage. All ten pilots in Hornet’s Wildcat squadron Fighting Eight ran out of fuel and splashed into the sea without sighting an enemy; the ship’s thirty-five Dauntlesses landed on Midway, having missed the battle.
The Japanese were enraged by the loss of their carriers, and vented their spleen on every American within reach. Wesley Osmus, a twenty-three-year-old torpedo-bomber pilot from Chicago, was spotted in the sea by a destroyer lookout, retrieved from the water and interrogated on the bridge by an emotional officer waving a sword. Towards sunset the Japanese, losing interest in their captive, took Osmus to the fantail of the ship and set about him with a fire-axe. He was slow to die, clinging to the rail until his fingers were smashed and he fell away into the sea. The Imperial Japanese Navy was as profoundly and institutionally brutalised as Hirohito’s army.
At mid-morning Nagumo’s sole surviving carrier, Hiryu, at last launched its own attack, which fell on Fletcher’s Yorktown. American radar detected