Vin Suprynowicz

When Americans boys are sent off to war — when war is thrust upon us, as it was on Dec. 7, 1941, and again on Sept. 11, 2001 — we ask our young men to put their lives on the line. Then, the college debaters in charge at the White House proceed to spend more time worrying about how to avoid civilian casualties (actually proposing to award medals to soldiers who manage to avoid hurting anyone) than we do mobilizing to grind our brutal assailants into the dust of history.

When our leaders suck their thumbs and decline to commit “too much force” (a few years back it was Mr. Aspin refusing to send tanks to back up the rangers in Mogadishu, today it’s a, Afghan “war” with a pre-designated surrender date) because it would “look bad” and the polls “might turn against them,” one can’t help but wonder if America has ANYONE left in long pants still willing to take over.

In such moments, it bears remembering that within living memory, a desperate nation entrusted to untested Rear Admirals Jack Fletcher and Ray Spruance three of its four remaining front-line aircraft carriers (the Saratoga arriving two days late) in a desperate gamble to turn the tide of Japanese conquest at a little mid-ocean sandspit called Midway Island.

On June 4, 1942 — 68 years ago — a few dozen lonely fliers aboard the USS Enterprise, Yorktown, and Hornet were America’s last line of defense. A more timid commander might have hoarded those minimal forces until the war factories just churning into high gear could supply him with some reserves. Not Chester Nimitz. Chester Nimitz had had enough. He sent Spruance and Fletcher to Midway — the workers still aboard the Yorktown, trying to patch up the damage she’d sustained in the Coral Sea, just a month before … just as the civilian workers had remained aboard the Hood, reinforcing her deck plating as she’d raced in pursuit of the Bismarck, in the spring of 1940.

Not an auspicious comparison. The Hood did not return.

The Japanese hoped to lure the last remnants of the American fleet out of Pearl Harbor to defend Midway. But the American code-breakers intercepted their plans, and Spruance and Fletcher were in position early enough to ambush the ambushers. If only, by some miracle, the green American pilots could get their bulky planes through the vaunted air defenses of the four front-line carriers of Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo’s First Air Wing.

At 4:30 in the morning of June 4, while 240 miles northwest of Midway, Vice Admiral Nagumo’s four carriers began launching more than 100 planes to attack the U.S. base there. But unknown to the Japanese, three U.S. carriers were steaming 215 miles to their east, their scout planes probing the rosy-fingered dawn for a sign of the culprits of Dec. 7.

Just as Admiral Nagumo was re-arming his planes for a second strike at Midway, a tardy Japanese scout plane spotted the U.S. fleet and reported the startling presence of an American carrier only a few hundred miles away. Changing his plans on the fly, Nagumo ordered the planes on his carriers’ decks rearmed with torpedoes to attack what he now correctly saw as the primary threat, the “lone” offensive American warship.

Spruance launched first. Struggling fully-loaded into the air between 7 and 9 a.m., three squadrons of torpedo bombers and five squadrons of dive bombers, plus a pitiful few F-4 fighter escorts, vectored toward the Japanese fleet’s last known position. But these slapped-together forces (many of Yorktown’s planes and air crews were actually borrowed from the Saratoga) were badly coordinated.

At 9:15 a.m. the first U.S. carrier planes sighted their targets and began their uncoordinated attacks. Fifteen TBD-1 “Devastators” of Lieutenant Commander John C. Waldron’s Torpedo Squadron Eight from the Hornet dove unhesitatingly into combat against the more maneuverable Zeroes of the Japanese combat air screen.

They were all shot down.

They scored not a single hit.

One man, Ensign George Gay, baled out and survived, acquiring history’s greatest (if not necessarily most comfortable) box seat as he watched the rest of the battle from sea level, bobbing in his life vest.

The Enterprise’s Torpedo Squadron Six, led by Lieutenant Commander Eugene E. Lindsey, bored in next next, attacking the Japanese carrier Kaga. Lindsey’s squadron scored no hits, while losing all but five of its 14 TBDs.

Lieutenant Commander Lance E. Massey’s Torpedo Squadron Three from the USS Yorktown was next. Two planes survived. Two.

And still no hits.

Would you have kept on? Would any of us? Dozens of precious, brave, American planes and air crews lost — nearly the last of their kind between Tokyo and San Francisco — and nothing accomplished.

Nothing.

Well … unless you count that one thing, so seemingly insignificant it might hardly have borne mentioning, on any other day. Through their dogged, relentless, suicidal attacks, the slow and outdated Yankee torpedo planes had pulled down the Japanese air cover to sea level, where the covering Zero fighters now skipped off at wavetop height, chasing the last, escaping American stragglers.

That, and the fact that the desperate maneuvering of the Japanese carriers had slowed the rearming and refueling of their planes on deck, so that fuel hoses and piles of bombs and torpedoes still being off-loaded and on-loaded were piled everywhere, up top and also on the hangar decks below.

If only the Americans had just a few more planes in reserve, somewhere up in those clouds. Anywhere, just a few more American planes. If just a dozen had been held back …

Admiral Nagumo knew that was impossible, of course. His scouts had spotted just the one enemy carrier. The Yorktown, he was convinced, had been sunk with the Lexington at the Coral Sea, a month before. How many carriers could the Americans HAVE? They couldn’t possible have sent every carrier they had left on the face of the earth to this one featureless spot in the middle of the God-forsaken Pacific ocean. America was a nation of soft-headed cowards. Who there would authorize such a gamble?

Led by Lieutenant Commander Clarence W. McClusky, the Enterprise’s luckless Bombing Squadron Six and Scouting Squadron Six had missed the Japanese carriers entirely, steering too far south. They did finally spot the little Japanese destroyer Arashi, speeding north with a bone in her teeth. But she wasn’t much of a target, and McClusky’s planes were nearing the point of fuel depletion which would require them to turn back to their mother ship.

McClusky could have turned for home. Instead, on a hunch, he decided to take a bearing from the course of the fast-moving destroyer, turning north to see where she was headed in such a rush. The Arashi, speeding north to rejoin her fleet after depth charging the USS Nautilus, led him directly to four Japanese aircraft carriers, their decks littered with planes, bombs, torpedoes and fuel … and no air cover in sight.

That was the vision that greeted Lt. Cmdr. McClusky just as Lieutenant Commander Maxwell F. Leslie arrived from the east, with Bombing Squadrom Three from that “sunken” American carrier, the USS Yorktown.

And so at about 10:25, with the Japanese fighter cover still down at wavetop height chasing off the last American torpedo planes, “blessed with an extremely lucky degree of coordination” (in the gentle words of the official U.S. Naval historians) Lieutenant Commander Clarence W. McClusky and Lieutenant Commander Maxwell F. Leslie “commenced one of history’s most dramatically decisive attacks.”

It took five minutes. By 10:30 a.m., the battle — and the eventual course of the naval war in the Pacific — was decided. Hit repeatedly and with deadly accuracy, the carriers Soryu, Kaga, and Akagi erupted in flames, and perished. Of the once proud Japanese First Air Wing, only the carrier Hiryu remained — the Japanese hadn’t even thought it necessary to adopt a rotation plan which would have distributed some of their best pilots into training programs elsewhere in the fleet.

Five minutes. Three gone.

The Hiryu managed to launch two successful flights against the already-damaged Yorktown, putting her out of action. But a flight of 10 Yorktown SBDs located the last surviving Japanese carrier of the force even as their mother ship was being attacked. Ray Spruance’s carriers soon had 40 SBDs in the air, vectoring in on the radioed position. The Hiryu was rearming the nine planes she still had fit to fly when the American bombers found her at 5 p.m.

And then there were none.

All his carriers gone, a stunned Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto called off the invasion of Midway the next day. The Japanese military had ruled the Pacific for almost exactly the six months during which Yamamoto had promised his Pearl Harbor raid would “give them a free hand.” The Japanese days of conquest were over.

June 4, 1942. Lieutenant Commander John C. Waldron. Lieutenant Commander Eugene E. Lindsey. Lieutenant Commander Lance E. Massey. Lieutenant Commander Clarence W. McClusky. Lieutenant Commander Maxwell F. Leslie.

Will we live to see their like again?

I think so.