Midway: Abandon Ship
By David H. Lippman
March 2013

As the Japanese Kates line up to attack, the eight F4Fs on Yorktown’s deck take off. They splash three Zeroes immediately. Last aviator off Yorktown is Ensign Milton Tootle IV, son of a St. Joseph, Missouri, bank president. Moments after clearing the flight deck, he hangs on a Kate’s tail and shoots it down. Seconds later, American flak brings Tootle down. He bails out into the drink and is picked up by destroyer Anderson. He has the rest of the day to think about his 15 minutes of battle.

With the Kates roaring in on the deck, TF 17’s cruisers fire their 8-inch guns into the sea ahead of the Japanese, setting up reverse waterfalls. All but five Kates are kept away from Yorktown. At 2:32, Tomonaga yells into his radio, “Entire force attack!”

At that same time Lt. Sam Adams, leading a two-plane SBD section of Scouting 5, is heading back from a long, frustrating, three-hour mission to search for Hiryu. At 2:30 he peers down and sees white wakes. He swoops in to look, and spots four destroyers, three cruisers, two battleships, and Hiryu at the center, heading north at 20 knots. He works out the position, and tells his radioman, Karrol to send it by Morse as well. Karrol responds, “Just a minute, Mr. Adams. I have a Zero to take care of.”

Adams is so absorbed in his task, he is unaware of Hiryu’s combat air patrol. At 2:37 Adams pulls away, and at 2:45, Karrol bats out, “1 CV, 2 BB, 3 CA, 4 DD, 31°15’N, 179° 05’W, course 000, speed 15.” Hiryu is heading straight for the American fleet.

Hashimoto punches his release button abeam of Yorktown, 800 yards (500 meters) from the carrier, then races overhead to escape. “Head for the bow,” he yells at pilot Petty Officer Takahashi, and the Kate streaks off. “Did we get a hit?” Takahashi asks. Hashimoto looks back, to see a geyser of water shoot up from Yorktown. Hashimoto howls with joy.

Yorktown stricken amidships.

Jimmy Thach sees a Japanese torpedo plane swinging in on Yorktown. “I made a good side approach on him and got him on fire,” Thach recalls later. “The whole left wing was burning, and that devil stayed in the air until he got close enough and dropped his torpedo and that one hit the Yorktown. Even though he was shot down, he went ahead and dropped his torpedo. He fell in the water very close to the ship....” Thach’s memory of the battle and the testimony of a Japanese survivor indicate that Thach’s victim in this encounter is none other than the strike leader, the doomed Lt. Joichi Tomonaga.

Hashimoto sees Tomonaga’s last fight as well. Hashimoto reports later: “His plane, with its distinguishing yellow tail, was clearly discernible as he broke through the heaviest antiaircraft fire I have ever witnessed. He launched his torpedo, and then, in the next instant, his plane disintegrated. His assault on the carrier, in the face of that devastating gunfire, was tantamount to a suicide crash.”

Down below on Yorktown, Seaman Jerry Lemberger is setting switches to control the five-inch guns, when he hears the 1MC broadcast, “Torpedo attack. Port quarter. We’re going to be hit.” He and his fellow electricians exchange glances. Up above, BM2 Joseph Lewis hits the deck, falling on his stomach with arms outstretched.

The first two torpedoes miss Yorktown, but the third hits portside amidships at 2:43, the fourth just ahead of the third. The jolt rips paint flakes off the deck, pops holes in fuel lines and shakes Yorktown mightily. Explosions cook off the port fuel tanks. Water floods three firerooms and the forward generator room, shutting off electricity and killing every man there. Yorktown’s rudder jams at port 15, and she stops in her tracks and starts listing to port.

The second torpedo hurls a geyser of water into the air that rips a catwalk from its weldings and slams it against the hull, trapping crewman David Pattison against the hull in a mass of twisted metal, a scrap of angle iron slammed into his right thigh. Sailors standing on the port side who did not lie down suffer broken ankles, and others are killed when the concussion smacks them into the carrier’s steel hull.

The blast has more force than all the bombs that have hit the carrier. It knocks Lewis to his feet and explodes several compartments away from Lemberger. He and his pals hear and feel the shocks. Then the lights go out. Someone whips out a flashlight and the beam hits the water surface in a drinking jar — it’s tilting. The carrier’s list finally stabilizes at 26 degrees.

Among those killed by the torpedo is Water Tender 1st Charles Kleinsmith. He is posthumously promoted chief and awarded the Navy Cross.

Up above, the gunners maintain fire. One Kate flies along Yorktown’s port side, and the plane’s radioman-gunner, Giichi Hamada, shakes his fist in defiance at the Americans. Everyone targets that particular Kate, but it gets away. Fifty years later, Hamada says that he waved his fist in relief that his damaged plane was not going to crash into Yorktown’s side. On the way home Hamada takes a bullet in the leg, and says, “I keenly realized what war was.”

All the other ships in TF 17 are blazing away, too. On Russell, a 20mm crew keeps firing even though another ship has fouled the range. The skipper, Roy Hartwig, throws his helmet at the gunners to make his over-enthusiastic men cease fire. Signalman Houle on Hughes opens up with a Thompson .45 submachine gun from his ship’s bridge.

All this gunfire has its effect. One shot from Pensacola blasts a torpedo out of the water, and flak from Vincennes sends a Kate hurtling into the sea.

On the ships, many men can only stand and wait, doing jobs below decks. Pensacola’s Repair II team, clutching axes and hammers, waits for orders in a darkened messdeck. They listen to the boom of 5-inchers and the clatter of machine guns, and wonder what’s going on, wishing they could do something.

Jimmy Thach also has to find somewhere to land, and he does so on Enterprise. Spruance wants to see him on the flag bridge. “Well, how do you think we’re doing?” the admiral asks the aviator.

“Admiral, we’re winning this battle,” Thach says in his Arkansas drawl. “We’ve already won it, because I saw with my own eyes three big carriers burning so furiously they’ll never launch another airplane.

“Of course, that fourth one ... an unfound carrier is a dangerous thing. We certainly ought to be able to get him. I think we ought to chase them, because we’ve got the advantage now.”

Spruance smiles at Thach. “Well, you know we don’t have any battleships. All we have is cruisers, and if we start chasing them, it’s going to get dark pretty soon. If we suddenly catch up with them, they may be able to chew us up before we get within gun range at night, and we don’t have much of a night attack capability.”

“I think they’re on the run, and I think we ought to chase them,” Thach says. Spruance sends his eager and aggressive fighter leader to take over Hornet’s fighter group, which is humorously known as VF 3-42-8, to reflect its mixed origins.

As the Japanese pull out, Adams’ message arrives on Yorktown. The radiomen try to send it by TBS to Astoria, but that’s broken, too. They blinker it to Fletcher, who passes it on to Spruance on Enterprise.

At 2:52, after 12 minutes of battle, Portland becomes the last American ship to cease fire. The Americans are certain they have splashed every attacker. They’re wrong. Hashimoto’s plane is clawing for altitude. He meets up with CPO Nakane’s Kate, an Akagi orphan that still has its torpedo. “You fool,” Hashimoto says to himself, “what did you come here for anyhow?” He pulls back his canopy and yells at Nakane’s rear-seater, pointing at the torpedo. The rear-seat man waves and pulls the lever to jettison the fish into the sea. Hashimoto is angrier than ever.

The two planes streak to the rendezvous point to await the rest. Five of Hashimoto’s planes and three Zeroes show up, but Tomonaga’s entire section is gone. And three of Hashimoto’s planes will be write-offs when they reach Hiryu. Even so, Hashimoto is sure that he attacked a different carrier from the previous strike. He radios Hiryu, “Two certain torpedo hits on an Enterprise-class carrier. Not the same one as reported bombed.”

On Hiryu, the message is greeted with jubilation. Two American carriers punched out means it’s one against one — a fair fight.

Yorktown slows to a halt. On a nearby cruiser, New York Times reporter Foster Hailey, working on a story Navy censors will hold up for three months, sees “where the torpedoes had hit, girders could be seen, twisted and broken like match sticks. Debris littered her deck. Slowly she began to turn on her side.” An officer next to Hailey says, “My God, she’s going to capsize.”

On Yorktown’s bridge, Buckmaster orders his AA gunners to reload their weapons and prepare for another attack. He calls Cdr. Clarence Aldrich, the damage control officer and Lt. Cdr. John F. Delaney, the engineering officer on the sound-powered phones. Neither have good news. Delaney reports that seawater has flooded the engine room and put out all boiler fires. All power is lost. The electrical switchboards have also been destroyed, which knocks out the pumps. With many hatches and bulkheads not properly repaired in the Pearl Harbor rush job, Aldrich doesn’t know the ship’s condition. It could turn turtle.

Having heard these two reports, Buckmaster paces up and down on his bridge for several minutes. He says that he hates to give the order to abandon ship. But he does order all personnel to “lay up on deck and put on life preservers.”

Seconds later, the ship lunges to port. The list stabilizes at 26 degrees, but Buckmaster has seen enough. “I didn’t see any sense in drowning 2,000 men just to stick with the ship,” he says later. His after-action report is less emotional: “In order to save as many of the ship’s company as possible, the commanding officer ordered the ship abandoned. The ship was in total darkness below decks, and it was very difficult to move around because of the heavy list.” At 2:55 p.m., Buckmaster gives the order to abandon Yorktown.

Yorktown listing.

With no power, the word is passed by sound-powered phones and mouth. Training and drill kick in. Sailors drop ropes over the high side, away from the direction the carrier threatens to capsize. Thousands of kapok life jackets are stored in large canvas bags overhead on the hangar deck. Crewmen pull ropes attached to the bags and life jackets rumble down on the deck.

Down in sick bay, doctors and corpsmen haul stretchers loaded with 50 to 60 seriously wounded patients up ladders and across oil-streaked decks. Senior medical officer Capt. W.E. Davis and chief surgeon Lt. Cdr. French don’t get the word at all — they’re too busy treating a wounded sailor.

Another sailor unaware of abandonment is Chief Water Tender George Vavreck, of Portsmouth, Virginia. Down in the engine room, he and his team don’t realize the situation until they hear men scrambling up ladders. Someone opens a hatch and yells out, “What’s everybody doing?”

A sailor yells back, “Hell, we’re abandoning ship!” Vavreck and his colleagues head for the exits.

In the darkness and mayhem, sailors forget some portions of the drill. Yorktown’s rough log is left on the bridge. The radiomen leave safes open, and code books and secret messages lying around. In squadron ready rooms, aviators leave 70 sets of air contact codes all over the place.

But in a few minutes, hundreds of crewmen are milling around the slanting flight deck. Some sailors wait by their abandon-ship stations for power launches to be lowered, even though there is no power. Others toss life rafts overboard. And some try to cope with the concept of leaving their beloved home with jokes. Cook Thomas L.J. Saxon stuffs his pet white rabbit in a gas mask bag and saves both himself and the bunny. Chicken Underwood saves his poker winnings from his locker. Ens. John Lorenz refuses to leave until he saves the photograph of Delight McHale — the woman he wants to marry — from his cabin, slipping it in his cap. Aviation Ordnanceman Bill Surgi sees damaged F4F No. 23, his plane, on the flight deck, and suggests he and Aviation Machinist’s Mate Joe Fazio take out the plane’s clock as a souvenir. Surgi later says that Fazio answered, “Oh no, I could never do that,” while Fazio remembers saying, “To hell with the clock.”

Soon the sailors start climbing down the ropes to the waiting destroyers. Cdr. Ralph Arnold has gone over this procedure with Lexington survivors. He carries a knife, gloves, and keeps his shoes on. Machinist’s Mate George Bateman arranges a neat pile on the deck of shoes, shirt, gloves, and flashlight. Many sailors line up their shoes meticulously on the deck before going overboard, expecting to return. Buckmaster tells his men to hurry. “You know, I can’t leave until you leave,” he says.

With dozens of knotted ropes hanging down, hundreds of sailors climb down. Lt. William Crenshaw remembers his Annapolis training and inches down hand over hand. It doesn’t work — the Yorktown rope is covered with oil. He plummets into the sea. Others have trouble, too. Worth Hare burns his hands. A man above Seaman Melvin Frantz falls onto Frantz’s shoulders, and both fall into the sea. Boatswain’s Mate C.E. Briggs falls into the sea. While pushing to the surface, he remembers that he has given away his life jacket, and has on his shoes, sweater, pistol, and two ammunition clips. He still pops to the surface.

Wounded gunner Pete Montalvo reaches the flight deck, his left shoulder and arm all bandaged. Once there, he realizes he can’t climb down a rope, but his boot camp pal, Seaman 1st John Pallay, of Linden, N.J., is there. He takes Montalvo on his shoulders into the water.

Other seamen look for buddies. James “Chuck” Liner hunts for his pal, Curtis Owens, whose Gun Mount Four has suffered every man killed or wounded. He learns that Owens is in sickbay. Liner finds Owens, head covered in bandages. Liner identifies his pal by his enormous nose “When I saw his big old long nose, I knew it was him.... He was shot all to pieces. They’d knocked him out with morphine.” Not knowing if his friend is alive or dead, Liner carries him over his shoulder like a sack of corn and up to the flight deck, and back down to the hangar deck, and onto a stretcher, and down to a life raft. Then Liner joins Owens in the raft.

The torpedo hits split open fuel tanks and Yorktown is now surrounded by a giant oil slick. Sailors are forced to swim through it, and become sick from the fumes or choke on it.

Seaman 1st Louis Rulli, of Astoria in New York, climbs down a fire hose. He drops off of it 15 feet above the water, swallows a mouthful of oil when he hits, and starts choking. He struggles to get the oil out of his mouth, and is seen by Liner. Liner grabs Rulli’s life jacket and pulls him onto the raft. Rulli holds on and cleans out his mouth.

Other sailors find humor in the situation, waving hitchhike thumbs at debris and yelling, “Taxi!” Survivors on one raft kill time by singing the “Beer Barrel Polka.” Cdr. “Jug” Ray goes down with his brier pipe in his teeth. A young fireman asks permission to dive from the flight deck, something he had always wanted to do. Permission granted.

Lorenz goes to the dressing room to make sure everyone has left. He finds Seaman 2nd Bill Sullivan, of Grand Rapids, Michigan, alive among a pile of dead bodies. With another officer, he wraps Sullivan in a blanket, and drags him across the flight deck. However, the list puts the deck 60 feet above the ocean. The two officers tie their jackets to Sullivan. Then they lower him down on a line. When Lorenz hits the water, his cap slides off, along with the photo he sought to retrieve. Lorenz and Sullivan hang on to a passing piece of timber, left over from flight deck repairs earlier that morning, and Lorenz keeps Sullivan’s spirits alive by talking about the girl he intends to marry. “If you survive,” Lorenz says, “I’ll name my son after you when I have one.”

Sullivan survives. So does Lorenz. When he gets home to Portland, Oregon, he talks Delight McHale into marrying him, and they name their second son William Sullivan.

Continued in Part 13.

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