The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [145]
Yet at 10.26, before the Zekes had time to regain altitude after devastating the Devastators, thirty-seven dive-bombers from the Enterprise appeared directly above Nagumo’s four carriers. Cloud cover at 3,000 feet masked the American approach, but below that the visibility was ideal for the attackers. The hero of Pearl Harbor, Mitsuo Fuchida, believed that because the Japanese fighters had no time to regain altitude while they were shooting the US torpedo planes out of the sky, ‘It may be said that the Americans’ dive-bombers’ success was made possible by the earlier martyrdom of their torpedo planes.’7 Soon after the Enterprise dive-bombers attacked, planes from first the Hornet and then the Yorktown arrived. Thousands of feet below, the crews were still changing the bombers’ armaments, and so were caught with the maximum amount of ordnance in the most exposed place possible. The carriers’ decks were strewn with bombs, fuel and planes, with little stowed away, so when Enterprise’s dive-bombers hit the result was carnage. On board Nagumo’s flagship, the Akagi, Zero fighters were just beginning to be launched. Fuchida, who could not fly at Midway because he had recently had his appendix out, and who was then wounded during the attack, recalled that:
[as] the first Zero fighter gathered speed and whizzed off the deck, at that instant a lookout screamed ‘Hell-divers!’ I looked up to see three black planes plummeting towards our ship. Some of our machine-guns managed to fire a few frantic bursts at them, but it was too late. The plump silhouettes of the American Dauntless dive-bombers quickly grew larger, and then a number of black objects suddenly floated eerily from their wings. Bombs! Down they came straight at me!8
Akagi took two direct hits, the first on the aft rim of the amidship lift, the second on the port side of the flight deck, the effects of which might have been controlled if the deck had not been wing-tip to wing-tip full of burning planes loaded with exploding torpedoes. ‘The entire hangar area was a blazing inferno,’ wrote Fuchida, ‘and the flames moved swiftly towards the bridge.’ By 10.46 Nagumo – who had made one of the worst decisions in military history – was persuaded to transfer his flag to the light cruiser Nagara, which he did with reluctance. Below decks on the Akagi, survivors had to use hand-pumps and:
Fire-fighting parties, wearing gas masks, carried cumbersome pieces of equipment and fought the flames courageously. But every explosion overhead penetrated to the deck below, injuring men and interrupting their desperate efforts. Stepping over fallen comrades, another damage-control party would dash in to continue the struggle, only to be mown down by the next explosion.9
Not a single man from the engine room escaped from this Dantean hell. The ship was abandoned at 18.00 hours, except for Captain Taijiro Aoki, who lashed himself to an anchor ‘to await the end’.
‘We had been caught flat-footed in the most vulnerable position possible,’ wrote Fuchida and Okimiya, ‘decks loaded with planes armed and fuelled for an attack.’10 Meanwhile, the aircraft carrier Kaga slipped beneath the waves at 19.25, with 800 of her crew dead, and another carrier, Soryu, which had suffered three hits from thirteen planes in three minutes, sank at 21.13, with her captain Ryusaku Yanagimoto singing the ‘Kimigayo’, the Japanese national anthem. Nagumo ordered the fourth carrier, Hiryu, to sail off north-eastwards and send forty planes to attack Yorktown and, although only seven made it through the American defences, they were able, with ‘skill, gallantry and determination’, to land three bombs on her. Later on Yorktown was also hit by two torpedoes from planes returning from Midway, forcing the listing carrier to be taken in tow and set off back to Pearl Harbor and Fletcher to transfer to the cruiser Astoria, with Spruance taking over tactical command.11 Hiryu was not going to escape retribution, however, for at 17.00 hours twenty-four planes from Enterprise