At 10:22am on June 4, 1942, forty-eight US Navy dive bombers attacked Kido-Butai, the Japanese
carrier task force.
In just five minutes, those dive bombers sank three Japanese carriers, killing 1,789 crewmen.
Initially, the US dive bombers from Enterprise and Yorktown didn't suffer heavily.
The SBD Dauntless dive bombers lost only plane shot down during the attack and the pilot
and gunner were killed in the crash.
Having released their payloads, the other forty-seven planes made haste, fleeing the scene.
But that’s when losses among the SBDs began to increase.
It was not a tidy retreat.
All along the way, Japanese fighters gave chase.
At the time the dive bombers struck their crippling blow, there had been forty Japanese
fighter planes in the air.
Most of them had been cruising at low altitude and couldn't attack the SBDs until
they pulled out of their dives.
After seeing their home bases wrecked by American bombs, the Japanese fighter pilots relentlessly
hunted the escaping dive bombers, hoping to exact revenge before the Americans flew out
of sight.
The SBD pilots sought protection in numbers.
Whenever they sighted a friendly plane, they pulled up on its wing and matched speed with it.
The pilots turned to their devoted rear-seat gunners to keep the pursuing fighters at bay.
Each SBD dive bomber contained a rear cockpit with a swiveling .30-caliber machine gun.
Facing backwards, the SBD radiomen targeted the oncoming Japanese planes, trying to bring
them down.
All along the path of the retreating SBDs, the battle raged as enlisted gunners dueled
the best of the Japanese navy.
A group of six dive bombers from USS Enterprise’s Bombing Squadron Six had just formed up when
a pack of Japanese fighter planes caught them.
For miles, a running dogfight occurred.
The Japanese Zero pilots swooped in from behind the SBDs, making firing runs and then using
their momentum to pull up, gain altitude, and dive into another pass.
ENS George Goldsmith piloted one of the SBDs.
He remembered the ruthless pursuit of the Japanese fighters.
"They would climb above us, dive, make their firing run, and go on past and underneath us.
Then they would pull up in front of us in a sheer zoom.
We just had to sit there and take it.
They shot us to pieces!
My tail was chewed up, the elevator trim tab being completely shot away.
I wound up flying by holding the stick with both hands just to keep the nose down.
That’s a very difficult job when you have to do it for a long time.
Those Japs put a 20mm shell into my right wing fuel tank.
It made a hole as big as your fist."
The Japanese fighters damaged Goldsmith’s plane.
In addition to the hole put in the fuel tank, several slugs ripped into his plane’s rear
gun mount, destroying the plane’s radio and its homing beacon receiver.
Goldsmith’s gunner, Radioman James Patterson, was wounded, hit three times in the arm and hip.
Eventually, the Japanese fighter planes ran out of ammunition, and with that, they gave
up the hunt, returning to their one surviving carrier, the Hiryu.
But then, another problem emerged.
The Navy pilots began running out of fuel.
The extended morning search had dried up their planes’ tanks.
One by one, the SBDs’ engines ran cold and the crews ditched into the ocean.
In the end, of Bombing Six’s six-plane contingent, only ENS Goldsmith and one other pilot managed
to reach the American fleet.
Goldsmith remembered:
"After the Zeros ran out of ammunition they turned away and left us alone.
The heartbreaking losses from our formation started after that, because four of us ran
out of fuel and had to make landings on the sea.
One by one they dropped out, went down, and settled with a splash.
We circled one ship, saw the boys get out and into their rubber boat, but then we had
to go on.
In the end, everyone went down but Roberts and myself.
We got back to the Yorktown, and although it wasn’t our carrier, we made the emergency
signal and landed anyway.
Neither of us had any fuel left.
We both could see our own carrier only 20 miles away but neither of us thought we could
make it.
I was worn out from holding that nose down."
This photograph was taken right after ENS Goldsmith’s plane made its emergency landing
on USS Yorktown.
Radioman Patterson is standing up, pointing at the holes in the fuselage and in the right wing tank.
Goldsmith is looking backward from his front cockpit, examining the holes in the right
stabilizer, incredulous that he and his gunner had survived their deadly flight home.
But not every dive bomber pilot managed to land on a carrier deck.
ENS John McCarthy belonged to Scouting Squadron Six.
After bombing the Japanese carrier Kaga, McCarthy fled in the company of five other SBDs.
One by one, they too lost fuel, dropping off McCarthy’s wing and disappearing.
After more than five hours in the air, alone, McCarthy finally found his fleet.
But then, only a few miles from his carrier, his engine sputtered.
He had reached his home base just a few minutes too late.
McCarthy called out over his intercom, warning his gunner, Radioman Earl Howell, to prepare
for a water landing.
McCarthy remembered what happened next.
"About halfway from the carrier, with no more fuel, the engine quit.
I was 150 feet above the water.
I dropped the nose, leveled off, and waited.
However, I goofed the water landing, dropped a wing, and cartwheeled wingtip to wingtip.
When I woke up, Howell was forward on the catwalk yelling, 'Mac, you’re hurt!'
I started to feel water up to my belt.
Howell, who miraculously came out of this very poor landing without a scratch, had ejected
the life raft, gotten himself out of the complicated rear seat armor, and forced himself forward
on a 30-degree declining angle to find out why I was so slow in getting out.
In the cartwheel, I had literally wiped out on the cockpit dashboard.
Seventeen stitches were needed to close up my eyes and forehead.
A broken nose had to be set, and two black eyes were in evidence for a couple of weeks.
Our war weary SBD that had taken us through five hours plus of combat like a beautiful
lady was starting to fill rapidly with water.
Howell went back to inflate the raft floating in its container just aft of the catwalk.
To obtain leverage, he placed his foot in the channel area for the flap actuators and
it became lodged solidly.
He was literally anchored to a sinking airplane!
With the expression, 'this may hurt,' I twisted his ankle and turned his shoe enough
to release his foot.
I sure wasn’t going to lose this great guy at this point!
I tied my scarf around my forehead to keep the blood out of my eyes and we started to paddle.
The USS Hammann, a destroyer, was starting its turn toward our raft.
Within five minutes, she was throwing lines to us and we were being helped aboard and
sent down into the wardroom.
There, I received my share of stitches and bandages."
ENS McCarthy and Radioman Howell survived the Battle of Midway, but many of their shipmates
did not.
Seventeen dive bombers ran out of gas trying to return to the fleet.
Over the next few days, seaplanes or destroyers rescued seven crews; however, ten officers
and ten enlisted sailors were never seen again.
Dying lonely deaths out on the ocean, their sacrifice represented a portion of the heroic
gallantry that contributed to the U.S. victory at Midway.