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By Root 1981 0

threw back his canopy and crawled out onto the starboard wing. As Collett was whisked away into the airstream, never to be seen again, Nelson abandoned the radioman’s compartment in the belly of the plane. He was the only survivor. The aerial scrimmage cost the Enterprise air group four Wildcats and four Avengers shot down or forced to turn back. The babel of voices on the pilots’ radio frequency told Admiral Kinkaid in the Enterprise of the fracas that developed as the outbound American and Japanese air strikes ran into each other. Connecting the dots, he sketched a picture of an inbound attack and ordered his carriers, still steaming about ten miles apart, to hustle the rest of their planes into the air.

Shortly before nine o’clock, the inbound Japanese strike was bathed in the transmissions of the air-search radar of the heavy cruiser Northampton, assigned to escort the Hornet in Task Force 17. Somehow neither the Hornet’s nor the Enterprise’s electronic eyes ever saw the bogeys. The Northampton’s skipper, not knowing this, relayed word to the Hornet in a leisurely way, by signal flags rather than by a faster but less secure radio broadcast. As a result, the Enterprise never received word at all. Worse, the Enterprise’s inexperienced fighter director officer, responsible for guiding the combat air patrol to its targets, whiffed completely. He reported the angle of approach of the Japanese strike with reference to the relative heading of his ship. Such a pole star was of little use to any pilot who couldn’t see the reporting vessel. And so on that cloudy day most of the thirty-seven Wildcat jockeys flying combat air patrol failed to intercept the attack before it was already over their carrier. Fortunately for the Enterprise, she found concealment in a rain squall. As a result, the first Japanese air strike fell on the perpetrator of the Doolittle raid, the Hornet.

As the Hornet’s outbound strike group left its task force behind, some of the pilots saw the black puffs of flak dotting the skies behind them. That’s when they knew the Japanese had found their ship. A flight of twenty-one Val dive-bombers from the Zuikaku, under command of Lieutenant Sadamu Takahashi, were the first to attack the Hornet.

To the dismay of the carrier’s crew, half of her powerful five-inch antiaircraft battery was effectively disabled when the young officer who supervised the after five-inch battery “drove the guns into the stops,” freezing them in a horizonal elevation just as the first enemy dive-bomber appeared overhead. “Believe you me, the gun captains took this very, very personal. All his training, everything, right out the window,” gunner’s mate first class Alvin Grahn remembered. “Five of our most lethal guns now sat with their barrels locked in place. They would have made mincemeat out of that plane.”

As the Wildcats on combat air patrol tangled with the escorting Zeros, the Japanese dive-bombers concentrated on their target, hitting the Hornet with three bombs. A Val struck by antiaircraft fire fell burning and crashed into the island superstructure in a wash of flames. The plane penetrated several decks, spreading fire as it went, straight down into a squadron ready room one deck below the flight deck. Its five-hundred-pound bomb was found later, unexploded and rolling around in a passageway outside. As the Vals were doing their work, torpedo bombers from the Shokaku were down low on the water, closing on the Hornet from two directions, off the starboard bow and the port quarter. The textbook “anvil” attack would expose the carrier to torpedoes from one group of Kates or the other, no matter which way she turned. In short minutes, two torpedoes were crashing into the carrier’s starboard side, flooding both fire rooms and snuffing out her propulsion and power. The time was 9:15 a.m.

Several hundred miles to the north, Admiral Nagumo was in no place to celebrate. Overhead, pilots from the Hornet’s two Dauntless-equipped squadrons had found his carriers.

As the commander of Scouting Squadron 8, Lieutenant Commander William “Gus