The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [144]
Yamamoto split his invading force into three, which was an error as the squadrons were too far apart to support one another. As well as Nagumo’s First Air Fleet, there was a Midway Occupation Force carrying 51,000 men, and his own main force comprising one carrier, four cruisers, seven battleships, twelve destroyers and eighteen submarines. As well as taking Midway, Yamamoto was hoping to lure the American Pacific Fleet into a massive engagement that it could not win. Nagumo’s First Air Fleet approached the atoll under heavy cloud cover, masking it from Midway’s reconnaissance planes, and was able to launch a dawn attack with 108 of its 201 planes. This was successful, although the runway was not attacked, as the Japanese wanted to use it as soon as they had captured the atoll. The ninety-three planes in the reserve were fitted with bombs and torpedoes in case of an appearance by the fifty-vessel American fleet. Through what Fuchida and Okumiya call ‘a fantastic chapter of accidents and blunders’, this was to be decisive.4
Having finally spotted Nagumo’s fleet at 07.00 hours, Rear-Admiral Raymond Spruance, who commanded the Enterprise and Hornet battle group, sent 116 planes into an all-out attack from 175 miles away. (As in the battle of the Coral Sea, neither side’s ships even came within sight of each other, in this new form of naval engagement.) At exactly the same time, Nagumo, having heard reports from Midway that another wave of attacks was needed, but nothing about the American fleet, which he had every reason to believe had sailed off north to deal with the diversionary attack against the Aleutian Islands, ordered his ninety-three reserve planes to be refitted with incendiary and fragmentation bombs. The change-over would take an hour to carry out, yet only fifteen minutes into the job a reconnaissance plane reported ten American ships to the north-east. ‘For a mauvais quart d’heure he pondered the problem, and then decided to re-arm his reserve aircraft with torpedoes. Order; counter-order; disorder.’5 Meanwhile, his first wave of bombers and fighters were on their way back from Midway. It was a pivotal moment in the war in the Pacific. With half of his reserve planes loaded with ordnance to attack Midway and the other half armed to attack the American carriers, Nagumo took the fateful decision to land his Midway first-strike planes before launching the others.
While the flight crews on the carriers were therefore struggling to detach the incendiary and fragmentation bombs and reattach the torpedoes, at 09.05 Nagumo turned 90 degrees east-north-east to engage the American task force. This had the effect of allowing him to evade, for the moment, the US dive-bombers and fighters from the Hornet, which had launched her planes at 07.00. Yorktown, to the east, launched half her planes at 07.30. Fifteen Devastator torpedo-bombers from the Hornet did spot Nagumo’s force, and went straight into the attack. Much is made of the fanatical courage of the Japanese kamikaze (divine wind) airmen later on in the war, but to have flown unescorted into the anti-aircraft guns and Zeke fighters of Nagumo’s fleet took tremendous bravery, and only one of the fifteen survived, with no hits scored. The torpedo-bombers of the Enterprise (nicknamed ‘the big E’) and Yorktown were also badly mauled without any positive results, and at 10.24 hours the attack was broken off with only eight Devastators still in the air out of an initial attacking force of forty-one. ‘For about one hundred seconds the Japanese were certain they had won the battle of Midway,’ wrote the US Navy’s official