At Midway, all three U.S. aircraft carriers—USS Enterprise, USS Hornet, and USS Yorktown—launched
torpedo bomber squadrons from their carrier decks and sent them against the Japanese carrier
task force.
One hundred torpedo crewmen flew into battle on the morning of June 4, 1942.
They belonged to one of three squadrons: Torpedo Squadron Eight from USS Hornet, Torpedo Squadron
Six from Enterprise, and Torpedo Squadron Three from Yorktown.
The torpedo crewmen operated the Douglas TBD Devastator, a 5,600-pound, 35-foot-long monoplane
occupied by a pilot and a radioman/gunner.
During battle, torpedo planes were supposed to spread out.
Wafting 100 feet above the water and at close distance, they dropped a 2,000-pound torpedo
at an enemy ship.
Unfortunately, prior to the American entry into World War 2, the Navy had experienced
limited progress in the arena of torpedo gunnery.
The only American aerial torpedo, known as the Mark-13, performed poorly.
Inside the American carriers, the air group staff devised only one solution to fix these
dysfunctional torpedoes.
They recommended that torpedo pilots fly as slow as possible, so as not to disrupt the
delicate systems as the torpedoes dropped into the water.
Each pilot had to fly at 100 knots and release his torpedo only 500 yards from the target.
This advice made torpedo attacks especially dangerous.
At 100-knots, an American torpedo plane would be an easy target for Japanese fighters, and
if they charged within 500 yards of an enemy ship, Japanese antiaircraft gunners stood
a good chance of shooting them down.
To reduce potential losses, the American admirals recommended that torpedo bombers never attack
alone.
They should always go in with fighter protection and in concert with dive bomber squadrons
attacking from above.
A combined, coordinated assault would scatter Japanese defenses and give the torpedo bombers
a chance to execute a safe drop.
But at Midway, the torpedo squadrons went in alone.
When USS Enterprise launched its Torpedo Squadron Six at 8am, the torpedo pilots missed their
chance to rendezvous with the other squadrons.
The other squadrons launched first, and by the time Torpedo Six got off the deck, the
other planes were nowhere to be seen.
As soon as they got airborne, Enterprise’s fighter planes and dive bombers pulled up
to their standard cruising altitude of 20,000 feet and disappeared.
The pilots of Torpedo Six couldn't even use their radios because the Task Force admirals
demanded radio silence for all combat missions.
No one from USS Enterprise’s command staff gave the torpedo pilots instruction for how
to rendezvous with the other planes.
Like it or not, Torpedo Six was on its own.
For over an hour, the squadron commander, LCDR Eugene Lindsey, navigated his fourteen
planes across the wide, empty Pacific Ocean.
When the squadron reached the position where the Admirals had expected to find the Japanese
carrier fleet, the pilots found nothing.
Quickly, Lindsey guessed that the Japanese fleet must have changed direction.
Signaling to his pilots with hand gestures, Lindsey turned his squadron to the north.
In about thirty minutes, on this new heading, Torpedo Six caught sight of the Japanese fleet,
a mammoth battlegroup consisting of four carriers, two battleships, three cruisers, ten destroyers,
and five oilers.
Additionally, forty-five Japanese fighter planes prowled the skies above the fleet.
LCDR Lindsey swiveled his head, looking for the other American squadrons.
He saw nothing.
For ten minutes, he circled cautiously, awaiting the arrival of the other planes.
But soon, he became concerned about his fuel supply.
His pilots needed every drop to execute their attacks and return to the fleet.
Eventually, at 9:40, with no sign of reinforcements, he decided to attack.
With no fighter cover, everyone in Torpedo Six knew that the attack would be a slaughter,
yet none of the American pilots wavered.
Ensign Irvin McPherson was a pilot in Lindsey’s squadron.
Behind the controls of his TBD, he remembered how he felt when he heard his commander’s
order to attack.
"There wasn’t a thought of shirking.
For we each had to live with ourselves afterward, and we each knew that every other fellow in
the squadron would go in.
Maybe in the back of our minds, too, was a memory of the scenes at Pearl Harbor and of
flying over Jap-held Wake Island.
Individually, we couldn’t let the rest of the squadron down.
I suppose that is what morale means.
Anyway, it worked somewhat like that with me.
And so we went down.
We came in from the north-northwest, alone.
No fighter support, no dive bombers.
We all picked the same carrier, intending to get it regardless of the danger."
The Torpedo Six pilots barreled toward Kaga, a 38,000-ton Japanese carrier that had served
as part of the Pearl Harbor raid six months earlier.
LCDR Lindsey radioed for his squadron to split up.
Half his group received orders to hit Kaga from the starboard bow, while Lindsey took
the other half and aimed for the port bow.
As the pilots charged at Kaga, every ship in range unleashed a volcanic barrage of antiaircraft
fire.
Ensign McPherson was with Lindsey’s portside group:
"We shifted into right echelon as we started down and I was on the end of the line, the
cracker position.
We expected fighter attack as we started in and we got it, along with devastating AA fire.
Winking tongues of flame were aimed our way from all directions as we did our turning
power glide into position for our runs, for every ship in range was shooting fast.
We seemed to be riding in on waves of tracer fire.
The water ahead and below and around us was being beaten into foam by shell fragments
from bursting AA.
It gives you a funny feeling to know that all those guns are aimed at you.
You wonder how close their fire will be—and you think every moment will be your last."
As the torpedo planes charged ahead, the Japanese fighter protection descended upon them.
The torpedo planes began going down in flames.
Radioman Douglas Cossitt was twenty-three-years-old.
He was in the rear seat of one of the torpedo bombers accompanying the starboard side group.
Using his plane’s rear-facing .30-caliber machine gun, Cossitt tried to keep the swarms
of Japanese fighters at bay.
Cossitt remembered: "From then on things started to happen very
fast.
Before we ever got to the destroyer screen, the Zeros got on us.
We had five of them on us.
They had us in a scissors.
Two on the right rear, two on the left rear, and one right down the slot.
When I would swing my guns on one group, the other group would make a run.
I remember us flying over a destroyer and the flak popping all around us, but I was
too busy with the fighters to see when we crossed over the cruiser screen.
I remember seeing Ensign Brock, our wingman, pull up to try to get a shot at Zero with
his nose gun.
Then, a TBD off on our starboard side blew up.
It must have taken a direct hit on its torpedo.
I kept thinking, 'I wish Walt would hurry up and drop the fish so the damn fighters
would leave us alone.'
What I didn’t know was that he had already dropped it, but the fighters were still trying
to knock us down.
After what seemed like an eternity, Walt was able to get us clear of the action and the
remaining fighters left us.
However, there wasn’t another friendly plane in sight.
I had been hit by 20mm shell fragments which exploded inside my cockpit.
All of it—18 pieces—was in my legs, arm, and wrist.
I was sure that I had been mortally wounded."
Of fourteen planes, only five got close enough to drop their torpedoes and all five torpedoes
missed.
Ensign McPherson was one of the lucky ones who managed to drop his torpedo.
As he beat his hasty retreat, he observed the next phase of the battle.
Forty-eight US dive bombers began their attack, destroying three Japanese carriers in the
space of a few minutes.
In that moment, it appeared as if the American torpedo attack had yielded at least one positive
result, distracting the Japanese fighters and antiaircraft gunners so that the Navy’s
dive bombers could deliver the knockout blow.
McPherson remembered: "As we were leaving, the dive bombers were
just attacking.
And they were doing a marvelous job.
They didn’t have to contend with the Jap fighters that were down low after us.
Nor did they get as much AA fire because the gunners didn’t have time to readjust their
sights and swing the barrels into position for vertical shooting.
We saw their bombs start towering fires.
Explosions were tearing up the flight decks and sending up huge spouts of water all around
the three carriers.
Great billows of smoke and flame were flowing and folding over each other as they mounted
into the sky behind us."
Of twenty-eight crewmen, Torpedo Six had lost eighteen men killed in action and two missing
at sea.
Meanwhile, the other torpedo bomber squadrons counted up their own egregious losses.
When all the numbers were tallied, 100 sailors had flown on the morning mission,
and eighty-four had been killed.
After the battle, as he sat inside his empty ready room on USS Enterprise, Ensign McPherson
experienced conflicting emotions.
On one hand, he was happy to celebrate an incredible victory, the first decisive triumph
by US forces in the Pacific.
But on the other hand, he was deeply saddened by the battle’s cost.
Eighteen close friends had paid the ultimate price for that victory.
This is what McPherson wrote in his war journal that evening:
"June 4.
The Japanese fleet is crushed, but what a terrific price we have paid!
Out of my own squadron—14 of us took off for the attack—only four got back and one
of these airplanes was so badly shot up that it is a wonder that it held together to land
aboard the carrier.
Tonight everything is too confused.
We are all hurt too badly by the losses of dear friends and comrades whom we have known
and flown beside for years to be able to decide just how it all happened.
It was a day of victory for our forces but a tragic one because of the losses of personal
friends."
The Battle of Midway involved sacrifice.
No one can doubt that the sailors of Torpedo Squadrons Three, Six, and Eight paid that
sacrifice in full.