Midway: Yorktown Struck
By David H. Lippman
March 2013

Kobayashi’s strike swoops down on USS Yorktown, whose guns blaze defiance and shrapnel. The guns tear apart a Val, but its bomb smacks down onto the flight deck, just 15 feet inboard aft of the island, near Mount No. 4. The red-yellow flash blooms 60 feet high, and shrapnel kills 19 of 20 men at Mount No. 3, 16 more at No. 4. The blast also cooks off three planes in the hangar deck below, two from Enterprise, one from Yorktown, loaded with a 1,000-lb. bomb. Lt. A.C. Emerson, the hangar-deck officer, yanks the sprinkler system valve, and cool water smothers the flames.

Yorktown under attack.

At Mount No. 3, Ensign John D’Arc Lorenz, who has been knocked out by concussion, staggers to his feet and realizes that his mount stands atop a ready magazine of 60,000 rounds. Smoke is coming out of the magazine. He jumps down to the flight deck and opens a hatch in the magazine, to find shells burning, spewing fire and smoke. He and two wounded sailors struggle to put out the fires. Gunner’s Mate Edward Zimmerle lies dying. The former Nashville Golden Gloves boxing champion, pale and exhausted, tells Lorenz, “Tell my folks this isn’t the end.” Also dead is Seaman 1st Rupert Davis, cut in half by a splinter, and Seaman 2nd Pearl Greison Prince of Bradenton, Fla. The latter lost his wife and baby a few months earlier in a car crash. But Seaman 2nd Harold Davies, unscratched, one of 12 kids from a Dillsboro, Indiana, farm, keeps firing his gun.

While medics care for the wounded, Yorktown’s guns continue to crackle, shooting down the second Val. Its bomb is a near miss close astern, with splinters flying in all directions, killing and wounding portside gunners. The next section of Japanese planes swings in from the portside, but only one releases its bomb, which has a delayed action fuse.

The bomb, which looks like “a big, black bowling ball” smashes through the flight deck’s wooden planks, the hangar deck, the XO’s office, and the VS-5 Ready Room, where Lt. j.g. Charlie N. Conaster is working out the flight schedule. The bomb hits the coffee percolator, flooding the compartment with brown goo, and keeps on going, finally exploding in the carrier’s stack. The explosion sends out a concussion wave that shuts down the fires in the boilers and ruptures the uptakes from Boilers One, Two, and Three. Yorktown drops speed from 20 knots to six.

Smoke and flame spew everywhere, into the galleys, the personnel files, and even the photo lab. A blast of heat and smoke rolls up the stack, setting paint on fire and hurling Signalman William Martin from his post on the stack searchlight. He floats through the air and comes to seconds later, hanging over the rail two levels down, unhurt.

Yorktown, however, is badly hurt. Even as she cuts her speed and spews smoke, another Val swings in and drops one last bomb from the starboard side. It smashes through the Number One elevator and explodes on the fourth deck, starting a fire in a rag storage room that happens to be next to gasoline and 5-inch shell storage. Damage Control Officer Cdr. Clarence E. Aldrich personally leads a firefighting team there to hose down the rags, while sprinklers flood the ammunition. The blast also pops open crates of powdered soap stored above the rags, which pour from the crates and help quell the fires.

	Yorktown's burning.

Up above, Yorktown carpenters, who have drilled endlessly for this occasion, break out heavy timbers, hammers, and saws, and start cleaning up the flight deck. Meanwhile Kobayashi’s survivors pull out. Ens. John Chase’s 20mm battery on destroyer Hughes chases a Val right over Hughes’ bridge, and Lt. Cdr. Donald Ramsey, the skipper, rushes to the bulwark to yell at the gunners. Astoria hurls 204 5-inch shells in 10 minutes, with even Chaplain Matthew Bouterse passing up cans of 1.1-inch ammo. Realizing it’s unusual for a chaplain to move ammunition, he thinks about Chaplain Howell Forgy's now- famous words, “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.”

One Japanese plane pulls out of its dive and flies by Astoria at bridge height. Astoria’s machine guns stitch it up, but the plane keeps coming. It passes along the starboard side, and the pilot turns, waves, and smashes into the sea. At least he’s had a look at his enemy.

Also still airborne is Lt. Harry Corl in his battered Devastator, hoping to land. His wounded radioman-gunner, ARM3 Lloyd Childers, is so weak from loss of blood, he passes out when he lifts his head. Corl says, “We can’t land on that ship.”

“Why not?” Childers mumbles.

“Can’t you see that hole in the deck?” Corl replies. No, Childers can't even lift his head. The hundreds of sailors on the flight deck watching, who include Childers' brother Wayne, assume that since Lloyd is not moving in the rear seat, he is dead.

Corl, short of fuel, heads for Task Force 16, just 40 miles away. But he can’t make it. “Stand by to hit the water,” he says a few minutes later, and splashes into the drink near the destroyer Monaghan. Corl tries to open his life raft, but oil has blown it over the canopy, making it too slick to open. Childers sees a whaler coming from Monaghan to save them.

“We don’t need the life raft,” Corl says. “Let’s go.” Corl jumps into the water and Childers slides into the water. Corl drags Childers away as the TBD sinks, and paddles for a few minutes. When the whaleboat arrives, he tells them to take Childers first. There is a doctor on the whaleboat and he begins pressing Childers’ back, squirting water of out his mouth. The doctor tells Corl that if Childers had gone another 30 minutes without medical attention, he would have died.

Childers recovers from his wounds and reports to flight training in December 1942. He is commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Marines. He fights in Korea and makes lieutenant colonel in 1962, despite not having a college degree. He gains it later, anyway. After retiring from the Marines in 1968, he earns his Ph.D. and starts a second career as a college administrator, becoming administrative dean of Chapman College in Orange County, California.

Corl is shot down and killed at Guadalcanal a few months later.

Twenty miles to the southeast, the men on Enterprise, Hornet and the other Task Force 16 ships can only see the puffs of AA smoke to tell them that a battle is going on. Then a heavy smudge of smoke appears, clinging to the horizon. Spruance figures Yorktown has been hit. He detaches the cruisers Pensacola and Vincennes and the destroyers Benham and Balch to help. But he holds his 12 Enterprise combat air patrol fighters back until the battle is nearly over. When Lt. Roger Mehle’s 12 F4Fs are released, they catch the Japanese just as they are pulling out. To Mehle’s annoyance, his guns jam. But they splash one Val.

As the Enterprise fighters plunge into the fight, Cdr. Leonard “Ham” Dow, Spruance’s communications officer, hears a Japanese pilot say, in English, “All planes return to base, all planes return to base.” Dow is enraged, “That was a Jap!” He yells into his microphone. “Disregard the order to return to base — that was a Jap!”

The Japanese pilot repeats his “order,” hoping to empty the skies of American planes. But Dow shouts, “The bastards are using this frequency,” and continues to denounce the Japanese trickery, doing so with increasingly colorful metaphors and terminology that amuse and impress everyone listening to the tactical circuit.

At 12:16 the last Japanese plane is gone, 11 minutes after the attack started. The only sound now is the rumble of Yorktown’s fires and the pounding of hammers and saws. Cdr. Laing looks for his lost notebook. He figures it was blown out of his hands by the Japanese bombs. “Those Jap baskets came rather a long way to ruin my month’s works.”

Yorktown after the attack.

Fletcher and his staff stand on the flight deck, refugees from a smoke-filled Flag Plot. They have a lot to think about; only seven of 18 Japanese bombers were able to attack, but they scored three major hits. Fletcher himself is wounded, too, his head cut, but he keeps working, dripping blood. A medic slaps on a bandage, and Fletcher forgets about his condition until he gets a Purple Heart some time later.

The Japanese have also taken a beating. Only five dive-bombers and one Zero fighter escape Fletcher’s fuming muzzles. Kobayashi is not one of them. One of the pilots reports to Hiryu, “Enemy carrier is burning,” at 12:45. Jubilation on Hiryu’s bridge, but Yamaguchi observes that one carrier could not have punched out Akagi, Kaga, and Soryu. There has to be another one, maybe more.

Anyway, the torpedo strike will deal with that. Hiryu is readying nine of its own torpedo planes, plus an orphan from Akagi; four Zeros as escorts, plus one from Kaga. Yamaguchi has no time to scrape up more planes. He will win or die with 15 aircraft.

At 12:20, Yamamoto radios a stream of orders to his shaken subordinates. The invasion of AF and the Aleutians is temporarily postponed. Kakuta’s carriers are to head south and hook up with Nagumo. The transports bound for Midway will retire temporarily to the southwest. Kondo will hook up with Nagumo. Kondo reports that he will be in position by 3 a.m. the next morning.

Then Yamamoto and his staff start piecing together the situation from fragmentary reports. Yamamoto needs to know if Midway has been flattened. Ugaki radios Nagumo on Nagara to that effect, and gets no answer. Obviously the attack on Midway was not a great success, Yamamoto deduces. Kuroshima suggests a surface force bombard the atoll by night. Yamamoto mulls that over.

On Yorktown, Aldrich faces a damage control officer’s worst nightmare — three separate hits, four major fires. He fills the forward magazine with seawater and the gas tank with CO2. Firefighters smother flames in the island structure, while repair teams attack the flight deck. The hit abaft, 12 feet across, requires wooden beams laid over them, a quarter-inch steel plate over that, and more steel plate on top. It takes 20 minutes, but Yorktown’s flight deck is ready for business.

In the engine room, two boilers are out, the rest full of smoke. Chief Water Tender Charles Kleinsmith re-lights the boiler fires amid smoke and red-hot bare casing. Boiler division officer Lt. Cundiff, wrapped in bandages from his burns, crawls into the uptake-intake space, to see why he can’t get up steam. The answer: The bomb has ruptured the uptake on Kleinsmith’s boiler, and the smoke is going into other boiler rooms. He orders Kleinsmith to reduce the fires to bare minimum while repairs are made.

Kleinsmith, a native of Zionsville, Pa., is a 37-year-old veteran with 20 years on his ticket, on the battleship USS Wyoming and cruisers Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and Portland. His wife Mary and three-year-old son, Charles Jr., live in Long Beach.

Kleinsmith exhorts, cajoles, and threatens his crew of six — a 20-year Navy veteran can be good at that — to stay at their posts and repair the boilers. Father of a three-year-old son back in Long Beach, Kleinsmith and his crew manage to close the throttle and get the heat under control in Boiler No. 1, the only source of steam for the carrier’s generators. His team manages to keep 180 pounds of steam pressure and run auxiliaries. The compartment is full of smoke, fumes, soot, and unbearable temperatures. But Kleinsmith and his gang struggle on.

At 12:30, Akagi captain Aoki blinkers Nowake: “All safe except on flight deck. Every effort being made to fight the fires.”

On Yorktown’s flight deck, Fletcher decides that he can’t fight a battle from an immobile and burning aircraft carrier. Fletcher and his staff are just getting in the way of Buckmaster’s efforts to save his ship. Fletcher summons USS Astoria alongside at 12:30, and by 1 p.m., her No. 2 whaleboat is alongside. At 1:13 Fletcher’s staff slide down knotted lines from Yorktown’s flight deck, and other staff officers lower themselves hand over hand. Fletcher is about to do the same, then remembers he is 56 years old. “Hell, I’m too damn old for this sort of thing. Better lower me.” Two seamen rig a line with a bowline in it for the admiral.

	Yorktown's crew tend to their own.

Another task: caring for the wounded. Some are beyond help, though. Boatswain’s Mate Plyburn lies dying. He has $500 in his pockets, saved for the day he plans to marry. Now he begs his friends to take the money and have a good time.

A whaleboat takes Fletcher and his team through a Pacific Ocean full of empty brass powder casings from five-inch guns. The casings have turned into a vertical position, and look like submarine periscopes. Yeoman Frank Boo remembers the half-hour ride to Astoria as the most tense event of the day.

Also awaiting somewhere to go are Max Leslie and his 17 circling dive-bombers, gulping fuel and dodging bullets. Yorktown orders them to land on Enterprise or Hornet. Leslie and his fliers head northwest. En route, Leslie spots a swamped U.S. TBD in the water, its crew in a rubber raft. He and Holmberg stay with the raft until the destroyer Hammann arrives to pick up the castaways. However, that’s it for the fuel, and Leslie and Holmberg have to splash into the sea near Astoria. Leslie lands so close to Astoria that he walks down the wing to the ship’s ladder. Before abandoning his SBD, Leslie flicks every button to the “off” position.

Another American aviator is out of the game, the determined Dick Best. While flying, he tests an oxygen bottle to be sure it isn’t leaking caustic soda. He snorts out the inhalation with no ill effects. But tomorrow, he will start coughing up blood. It’s not the canister. He has activated latent tuberculosis, and is hospitalized. He will be retired for physical disability, but will survive until 2001.

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