Annapolis, page 66
“Propeller coming closer,” said sonar.
“Take her down. One hundred feet.”
And Tom Stafford heard a noise that he would hear in nightmares for the rest of his life—a clanking sound, like an anchor chain scraping over the hull, or the chains of some Dickensian ghost calling him to his own grave. Someone said it was a drag wire that the Jap destroyers trailed in the water to find submarines.
Click-click.
“Shit,” said Steinberg.
“What?”
“That’s a depth-charge detonator. It just armed. Very close. Hold on.”
KA-BOOM!
“Mr. Steinberg, two hundred feet!” said Brockman calmly.
Click-click. KA-BOOM!
The sub sighed and sucked more water into its tanks, then tipped forward.
AKAGI, TURNING NORTHEAST, 0918
Hiroaki Tanaka thanked the gods of war.
His son’s Zero had just grabbed an arrester cable. Minoru was pushing back the canopy, running to deliver his report to the air officer in the ready room.
The defensive box formation had broken down. Akagi, Kaga, and Soryu were cruising in a wide triangle, with Kaga slightly astern of the other two. Hiryu had run ahead by several miles. But the birds were back in their nests. In another half hour, every one would be refueled and rearmed. So Nagumo ordered a turn to 70 degrees, straight at the American ships beyond the horizon.
And then they saw them. The first American carrier planes.
Somehow, a torpedo squadron, VT-8 from the Hornet, had found the Japanese fleet before anyone else, and they were beginning their own slow charge, without fighter cover, without hope.
After two attacks, it was all becoming as ritualized as a Kabuki play. The cruisers made smoke screens. Then the rhythmic one-two, one-two beat of the pom-pom batteries began. Then came the bup-bup-bup of the fifty-caliber machine guns, their tracers rising like delicate birds. Then the demonic scream of the Zeros roaring from 15,000 feet. And one by one, the Americans were sent spinning, tumbling, and spiraling into the sea.
How could they allow those planes to come in alone? Where were their fighters? Where were the dive-bombers?
“To starboard!” cried Genda.
One of the Americans, trailing fire and smoke, was diving straight at the island of Akagi, straight at Hiroaki Tanaka’s head.
“Hard aport!” cried the captain, and the huge Akagi swung so fast that Hiroaki fell against the admiral, who grabbed the binnacle to stay on his feet.
Bup-bup-bup. The American rear-seat gunner swung his machine guns at the bridge in a final, furious gesture of defiance. The slugs struck the island, shattered the glass in the bridge windows, buried themselves in the bomb-fragment padding.
But the big plane screamed past, missing the island, missing the deck, hitting the sea and disintegrating like all the others.
Fate was a matter of feet, thought Hiroaki, sometimes a matter of inches, sometimes of minutes.
He righted himself and offered a hand to Nagumo, who looked at him for a moment with that glimmer of diffidence in his eyes. Then the admiral stood on his own and wiped the sweat from his upper lip with a gloved hand.
A sailor delivered a message to Hiroaki. “From destroyer Arashi: Have depth-charged an American submarine trailing to the south of the fleet. Results unknown.”
VS-6, at 20,000 FEET, 142 MILES SOUTHWEST OF THE ENTERPRISE, 0930
The TBS—the voice radio telephone that enabled American fliers to talk to each other and to their ship—was crackling in Bill’s ear. As far as they knew, the Japanese could not monitor the channel, but they still kept its use to a minimum.
McClusky said to the rest of his squadron, “Here’s where we’re supposed to find them. See anything?”
“I see the Midway shoals off to port,” said Charlie Osterhausser, who was flying the last plane on the left. “Big columns of smoke risin’ from the Jap strikes.”
“Jap ships? Anybody?” said McClusky from the lead plane.
All Bill heard above the roar of his engine was silence.
“Any friendlies?” asked McClusky.
More silence.
What a disaster. The thirty-two Dauntlesses were still together. But where were the fighters? Where were the torpeckers? Where were the Japs?
Defeat in detail. That was what the Japs had done for the last six months. Hold a powerful force together and catch pieces of the enemy before they could organize. Now it was happening to the individual air squadrons of the Enterprise, Hornet, and Yorktown.
Bill peered ahead, into the lead plane. McClusky had his head down, looking at something—fuel gauge? maneuvering board? Or was he just trying to make up his mind? Had they arrived ahead of the Japs? Had the Japs made a turn?
“This is Stafford. I’ve got about twenty minutes of fuel, sir, then I’ll have to turn back or splash.”
“Right.”
And several other pilots came on with the same information.
“Okay,” said McClusky, his voice snapping with authority. “I think the Japs have turned. We’ll stay on a 240-degree heading for another thirty-five miles. Then we swing northwest. Everyone stay in tight.”
Bill Stafford gave McClusky a thumbs-up. And on they flew.
CINCPAC, 0930
Jack Stafford had less difficulty than most newsmen getting past the marine guard, perhaps because his father was assistant operations officer.
Will was in the head, so, with a wink at Lieutenant Commander Walter Sullivan, his father’s assistant, Jack said he’d have a seat in his father’s office.
“Don’t open any desk drawers, don’t read anything, don’t touch anything,” said Sullivan, a big-jowled Irishman from Boston, with a quick temper and a sharp tongue, the perfect executive officer.
“Sometimes, Walter, I don’t think you like me.”
“I don’t like anyone who’s always askin’ questions.”
As soon as Jack sat down, he saw some papers on his father’s desk and tried to read them, though they were upside down.
Through the office door, Sullivan was giving him the eye.
Jack gave him a wink. Just doin’ my job.
Then Jack’s father stalked in trailing a Lucky Strike smoke screen. “What brings you to CINCPAC, with your notebook and your tongue hangin’ out?”
“I need a little background.”
His father dropped into his chair, snuffed out one cigarette, lit another. “First of all, what do you know?”
As Harry Dowd had once told Jack, play dumb whenever possible. Harry said he knew that couldn’t be easy for a Harvard man, but real reporters had to do it every day.
It didn’t work with his father. “No games, Jack. What do you know?”
“Not much more than I knew when they threw me off the Enterprise. But my guess is there’s a big battle under way somewhere. Midway, maybe? And judging from the pile of butts in your ashtray, it’s touch-and-go.”
“We’re not getting direct reports… radio silence. We’re just picking up transmissions between ships and planes.”
“How did we figure out that the Japs were coming to Midway?”
“Classified.”
The buzzer rang. “That’s Nimitz. Now, the last thing we need is reporters. Go play golf. Tee times are easy these days. When I can fill you in, I’ll call.”
The bum’s rush. Jack had gotten it before, but never from his own father. Of course, he had his prime source already.
vs-6, AT 20,000 FEET, 0952
“So, Lieutenant,” drawled Omer, “what you think’s a dog’s philosophy of life?”
“I don’t know. What?”
“If you can’t eat it or screw it, piss on it. And speakin’ of pissin’, I’ll be busy for a few minutes back here, so don’t let no Japs get on your—”
“Quiet.”
The TBS was crackling. Somebody from one of the fighter squadrons was radioing a Japanese position, but it was garbled, hard to read.
So Bill turned up the gain on his radio just as Miles Browning shot back on the powerful Enterprise transmitter, “Attack! Attack at once!”
And Wade McClusky cut in: “Wilco. As soon as we can find the bastards!”
Bill chuckled. The tension had long ago dissipated. His high-intensity adrenaline had run out. Now he expected that they would be back aboard the Enterprise before long, drinking coffee, complaining, and—
What was that? To the north. It looked like a scratch on the polished blue finish of the sea.
“Commander. It’s Stafford. I see a wake, bearing 350 degrees, about twenty miles.”
McClusky grabbed his binoculars and peered to the north. “It’s a Jap destroyer. Goin’ like hell. Must’ve been left behind. This could be it.”
McClusky swung his plane north, and the VS-6 formation, like a flock of geese, swung with him. Gallaher and Best’s VB squadron swung a moment later.
And Bill felt his stomach clench. He hadn’t run out of adrenaline after all.
As they flew over the destroyer, he wondered why it was straggling so far behind. He could not have known that it was the Arashi, which had stopped to attack his brother’s submarine.
AKAGI, STEAMING NORTHEAST, 0958
Hiroaki Tanaka stood in the doorway of the ready room and glanced in at the pilots having their meal of rice, tea, and sweet crackers. It was a roomful of loud voices, quick gestures, the excitement of samurai after battle and the anger of warriors who had seen friends die. And there was Minoru, explaining his tactics to the flight leader.
He would let the boy have his moment. They could talk later.
He went instead to the hangar deck, to check on the rearming. Never had he seen men work with such frantic efficiency. The crews in their short-sleeved white shirts and short white pants madly did the business of refueling planes, removing bombs, replacing torpedoes, refilling machine-gun belts, rolling the loaded planes to the elevators, lifting them back to the flight deck. Ordnance lay everywhere—bombs on open racks, torpedoes, belts—and gasoline lines formed a snakepit across the deck. But there was no time to stow anything. Just get the planes back in the air.
Then the Klaxon sounded: general quarters.
And another act of the drama began.
The Americans once more were unprotected. But this group was tactically the best. They executed a perfect split, with seven planes peeling off after the Kaga, and seven making their run at the Hiryu.
Hiroaki grabbed his binoculars and watched them. One after another they splashed gallantly. But he was not admiring them. He wanted to see their markings: carrier planes. A second division of torpedo bombers. That meant…
“Admiral, I think there is a second American carrier.”
vs-6,AT 15,000 FEET, 1005
“Yeah,” said Omer, finishing a joke. “And if I had a dog as ugly as you—”
“Holy Christ.”
“What?”
“There.”
Bill Stafford knew that he would never forget that moment, or the strange godlike feeling that came over him. From three miles up and fifteen miles away, the striking force for the mightiest fleet that had ever sailed looked like a lot of slugs leaving white slicks on the surface of the sea.
“Tally-ho!” said McClusky into the TBS.
AKAGI, 1015
They were finally turning into the wind. The aft flight deck was once more crowded with torpedo bombers, which needed a long runway for takeoff, and the elevators were bringing back the last of the Zeros to lead the attack.
Engines were revving up to a roar that Genda called “the sound of victory.”
And now the lookouts were screaming that more torpedo planes were coming to port, this time with five fighters covering them.
These were carrier planes too. A third carrier? That was impossible.
The air was once more alive with screaming engines and thundering antiaircraft, with tracer fire and exploding swirls of smoke. The water was once again laced with the wakes of fast-maneuvering carriers and churning torpedoes.
But none scored. Of the forty-one torpedo bombers that attacked that morning, only four would even make it home. Kido Butai was still untouched, ready to deal a death blow to American naval power in the Pacific.
Nagumo nodded, and the signal was passed to launch.
Hiroaki looked down at his son’s plane. Minoru was in his cockpit, fourth on the deck. Hiroaki made a small sign to him and said a small prayer.
VS- 6, AT 15,000 FEET ABOVE KIDO BUTAI, 1025
When the Spartans stood in the pass at Thermopylae, when British sailors smashed the French line at Trafalgar, when a handful of farmers and fishermen from Maine held the Union left at Gettysburg, they may have known that they were turning history like a gate on a hinge. More likely, they knew only that if they fought well, they might survive to fight again.
And that was what Bill Stafford was thinking. That, and Don’t fuck up, because you’ll never get a chance like this again.
For the first time in six months, fate was pulling for the Americans. The enemy was disorganized. His fighter cover was down at sea level chasing the last of the torpedo bombers. His decks were covered with planes… and bombs… and fuel.
Bill Stafford leaned on his stick above the Akagi. Others peeled off toward the Kaga, and by some miracle of dumb-luck coordination, or by the grace of God, the York
town dive-bombers had just found the Soryu.
“Hold on, Omer!”
And don’t fuck up, because you’ll never get a chance like this again.
Two planes dropped ahead of Bill Stafford, straight at the yellow deck and the tiny silver planes.
He felt the crushing pressure of the dive in his chest, heard the scream of his own engine in his ears. If there was AA fire, he didn’t notice it. If there were Zeros coming at him, he was counting on Omer to hold them off.
The first plane dropped its bomb. And an explosion of water geysered up. A near miss.
The second plane released from 2,400 feet, and a moment later there was a tremendous blast just forward of the island.
Now came Bill Stafford, dropping out of the sky, straight at the red Rising Sun painted on the midships elevator.
5,000… 4,000… 3,000…
The plane sounded like all the vengeful furies released in the volcanic blast of the Arizona six months before.
2,000…
Omer was whooping like a cowboy in a rodeo.
1,500… Release. The plane kicked up and Bill pulled back on the stick. Then, against the best advice, he glanced over his shoulder to watch. The yellow bomb was falling… falling… like a petal or a seed… and…
A tremendous ball of flame blossomed upward, followed by an even larger one that blew men and airplanes into the air and over the side.
Omer Royal shouted, “Yahooooo! Look at that bastard burn!”
AKAGI, 1027
No! It did not happen!
The second bomb had blown up twenty feet from his son’s plane, blown it to pieces, but the gods would not take Minoru so young, with so much to give.
Hiroaki looked at Nagumo and the others—all slack-jawed, stunned, their faces blackened by the blasts. And he was gripped with a need to do what a father should. Instead of controlling his emotions and assisting the direction of damage control, he left the bridge. By the time he reached the flight deck, he knew they would never control the damage all around them.
And from some strange place in his mind, an old saying ran through his head, one that he used to recite when teaching his little boy to mind the details of whatever he did, and one that told the story of this day, from the moment that the Tone’s scout plane catapult malfunctioned: “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe, the horse was lost, for want of a horse went the king, for want of a king went the kingdom.”
He ran to the middle of the deck, where his son’s plane had been. Now there was nothing but a hole in the flight deck.
His son was gone. His wide-eyed little boy. His serious young man. And with him, all hope. All for what? For the empire? For the emperor? Let the snow crush the roof of the Imperial Palace.
Suddenly the ship shuddered with a tremendous belowdecks blast that sent fire and debris up through the hole like water in a fountain.
Hiroaki’s uniform burst into flames, and his last rational thought was to thank the gods for taking him to his son.
STAFFORD’S DAUNTLESS, UNDER ATTACK, 1030
“We got two on our tail, Lieutenant.”
Bup-bup-bup-bup.
“Keep it comin’, Omer. Keep it comin’.”
Like bees whose nest has been kicked over, the Zeros attacked with redoubled fury.
Bill felt the bullets hitting his armored seat and drilling into his engine cowling.
He climbed back to 5,000 feet, and two of them were still on his tail. At 10,000, he was going to dive and try to lose them, if he could make it.
Bup-bup-bup.
Omer Royal poured a tremendous fire stream as the Zeros swung in behind him one after the other, then pulled out to dodge the tracers and armor-piercing bullets from his twin thirty-calibers until finally he yelled, “Yahoo! Yahooo! One down, one to go.”
Bill screamed, “Hold on, Omer!” Then he tipped the plane straight for the water… straight for the water… straight… for… the… water.…
At five hundred feet, he pulled out of the dive, then threw down the flaps, spinning the Dauntless into a skid, as if she had hit an ice patch in the air. The Zero shot past, and Bill Stafford nailed him with his own fifty-calibers, right in the gas tanks.
Yes! All he’d needed was a shot. The Zero could hunt like a hawk because it was built like a bird, light and flimsy, with no armored seats, no self-sealing gas tanks. Bill Stafford’s shot had literally blown that Zero out of the sky.
Now they could go home.
But a few miles south, their oil pressure began to drop.
NAUTILUS, AT PERISCOPE DEPTH, 1145
After an hour of depth-charging, she had no more than a ruptured hydraulic line, and no injuries.
Brockman put his face to the eyepiece and whistled softly, then he said to Steinberg, “Have a look at this.”
“Holy shit.” After a few moments, Steinberg let Tom Stafford have a look.
“Take her down. One hundred feet.”
And Tom Stafford heard a noise that he would hear in nightmares for the rest of his life—a clanking sound, like an anchor chain scraping over the hull, or the chains of some Dickensian ghost calling him to his own grave. Someone said it was a drag wire that the Jap destroyers trailed in the water to find submarines.
Click-click.
“Shit,” said Steinberg.
“What?”
“That’s a depth-charge detonator. It just armed. Very close. Hold on.”
KA-BOOM!
“Mr. Steinberg, two hundred feet!” said Brockman calmly.
Click-click. KA-BOOM!
The sub sighed and sucked more water into its tanks, then tipped forward.
AKAGI, TURNING NORTHEAST, 0918
Hiroaki Tanaka thanked the gods of war.
His son’s Zero had just grabbed an arrester cable. Minoru was pushing back the canopy, running to deliver his report to the air officer in the ready room.
The defensive box formation had broken down. Akagi, Kaga, and Soryu were cruising in a wide triangle, with Kaga slightly astern of the other two. Hiryu had run ahead by several miles. But the birds were back in their nests. In another half hour, every one would be refueled and rearmed. So Nagumo ordered a turn to 70 degrees, straight at the American ships beyond the horizon.
And then they saw them. The first American carrier planes.
Somehow, a torpedo squadron, VT-8 from the Hornet, had found the Japanese fleet before anyone else, and they were beginning their own slow charge, without fighter cover, without hope.
After two attacks, it was all becoming as ritualized as a Kabuki play. The cruisers made smoke screens. Then the rhythmic one-two, one-two beat of the pom-pom batteries began. Then came the bup-bup-bup of the fifty-caliber machine guns, their tracers rising like delicate birds. Then the demonic scream of the Zeros roaring from 15,000 feet. And one by one, the Americans were sent spinning, tumbling, and spiraling into the sea.
How could they allow those planes to come in alone? Where were their fighters? Where were the dive-bombers?
“To starboard!” cried Genda.
One of the Americans, trailing fire and smoke, was diving straight at the island of Akagi, straight at Hiroaki Tanaka’s head.
“Hard aport!” cried the captain, and the huge Akagi swung so fast that Hiroaki fell against the admiral, who grabbed the binnacle to stay on his feet.
Bup-bup-bup. The American rear-seat gunner swung his machine guns at the bridge in a final, furious gesture of defiance. The slugs struck the island, shattered the glass in the bridge windows, buried themselves in the bomb-fragment padding.
But the big plane screamed past, missing the island, missing the deck, hitting the sea and disintegrating like all the others.
Fate was a matter of feet, thought Hiroaki, sometimes a matter of inches, sometimes of minutes.
He righted himself and offered a hand to Nagumo, who looked at him for a moment with that glimmer of diffidence in his eyes. Then the admiral stood on his own and wiped the sweat from his upper lip with a gloved hand.
A sailor delivered a message to Hiroaki. “From destroyer Arashi: Have depth-charged an American submarine trailing to the south of the fleet. Results unknown.”
VS-6, at 20,000 FEET, 142 MILES SOUTHWEST OF THE ENTERPRISE, 0930
The TBS—the voice radio telephone that enabled American fliers to talk to each other and to their ship—was crackling in Bill’s ear. As far as they knew, the Japanese could not monitor the channel, but they still kept its use to a minimum.
McClusky said to the rest of his squadron, “Here’s where we’re supposed to find them. See anything?”
“I see the Midway shoals off to port,” said Charlie Osterhausser, who was flying the last plane on the left. “Big columns of smoke risin’ from the Jap strikes.”
“Jap ships? Anybody?” said McClusky from the lead plane.
All Bill heard above the roar of his engine was silence.
“Any friendlies?” asked McClusky.
More silence.
What a disaster. The thirty-two Dauntlesses were still together. But where were the fighters? Where were the torpeckers? Where were the Japs?
Defeat in detail. That was what the Japs had done for the last six months. Hold a powerful force together and catch pieces of the enemy before they could organize. Now it was happening to the individual air squadrons of the Enterprise, Hornet, and Yorktown.
Bill peered ahead, into the lead plane. McClusky had his head down, looking at something—fuel gauge? maneuvering board? Or was he just trying to make up his mind? Had they arrived ahead of the Japs? Had the Japs made a turn?
“This is Stafford. I’ve got about twenty minutes of fuel, sir, then I’ll have to turn back or splash.”
“Right.”
And several other pilots came on with the same information.
“Okay,” said McClusky, his voice snapping with authority. “I think the Japs have turned. We’ll stay on a 240-degree heading for another thirty-five miles. Then we swing northwest. Everyone stay in tight.”
Bill Stafford gave McClusky a thumbs-up. And on they flew.
CINCPAC, 0930
Jack Stafford had less difficulty than most newsmen getting past the marine guard, perhaps because his father was assistant operations officer.
Will was in the head, so, with a wink at Lieutenant Commander Walter Sullivan, his father’s assistant, Jack said he’d have a seat in his father’s office.
“Don’t open any desk drawers, don’t read anything, don’t touch anything,” said Sullivan, a big-jowled Irishman from Boston, with a quick temper and a sharp tongue, the perfect executive officer.
“Sometimes, Walter, I don’t think you like me.”
“I don’t like anyone who’s always askin’ questions.”
As soon as Jack sat down, he saw some papers on his father’s desk and tried to read them, though they were upside down.
Through the office door, Sullivan was giving him the eye.
Jack gave him a wink. Just doin’ my job.
Then Jack’s father stalked in trailing a Lucky Strike smoke screen. “What brings you to CINCPAC, with your notebook and your tongue hangin’ out?”
“I need a little background.”
His father dropped into his chair, snuffed out one cigarette, lit another. “First of all, what do you know?”
As Harry Dowd had once told Jack, play dumb whenever possible. Harry said he knew that couldn’t be easy for a Harvard man, but real reporters had to do it every day.
It didn’t work with his father. “No games, Jack. What do you know?”
“Not much more than I knew when they threw me off the Enterprise. But my guess is there’s a big battle under way somewhere. Midway, maybe? And judging from the pile of butts in your ashtray, it’s touch-and-go.”
“We’re not getting direct reports… radio silence. We’re just picking up transmissions between ships and planes.”
“How did we figure out that the Japs were coming to Midway?”
“Classified.”
The buzzer rang. “That’s Nimitz. Now, the last thing we need is reporters. Go play golf. Tee times are easy these days. When I can fill you in, I’ll call.”
The bum’s rush. Jack had gotten it before, but never from his own father. Of course, he had his prime source already.
vs-6, AT 20,000 FEET, 0952
“So, Lieutenant,” drawled Omer, “what you think’s a dog’s philosophy of life?”
“I don’t know. What?”
“If you can’t eat it or screw it, piss on it. And speakin’ of pissin’, I’ll be busy for a few minutes back here, so don’t let no Japs get on your—”
“Quiet.”
The TBS was crackling. Somebody from one of the fighter squadrons was radioing a Japanese position, but it was garbled, hard to read.
So Bill turned up the gain on his radio just as Miles Browning shot back on the powerful Enterprise transmitter, “Attack! Attack at once!”
And Wade McClusky cut in: “Wilco. As soon as we can find the bastards!”
Bill chuckled. The tension had long ago dissipated. His high-intensity adrenaline had run out. Now he expected that they would be back aboard the Enterprise before long, drinking coffee, complaining, and—
What was that? To the north. It looked like a scratch on the polished blue finish of the sea.
“Commander. It’s Stafford. I see a wake, bearing 350 degrees, about twenty miles.”
McClusky grabbed his binoculars and peered to the north. “It’s a Jap destroyer. Goin’ like hell. Must’ve been left behind. This could be it.”
McClusky swung his plane north, and the VS-6 formation, like a flock of geese, swung with him. Gallaher and Best’s VB squadron swung a moment later.
And Bill felt his stomach clench. He hadn’t run out of adrenaline after all.
As they flew over the destroyer, he wondered why it was straggling so far behind. He could not have known that it was the Arashi, which had stopped to attack his brother’s submarine.
AKAGI, STEAMING NORTHEAST, 0958
Hiroaki Tanaka stood in the doorway of the ready room and glanced in at the pilots having their meal of rice, tea, and sweet crackers. It was a roomful of loud voices, quick gestures, the excitement of samurai after battle and the anger of warriors who had seen friends die. And there was Minoru, explaining his tactics to the flight leader.
He would let the boy have his moment. They could talk later.
He went instead to the hangar deck, to check on the rearming. Never had he seen men work with such frantic efficiency. The crews in their short-sleeved white shirts and short white pants madly did the business of refueling planes, removing bombs, replacing torpedoes, refilling machine-gun belts, rolling the loaded planes to the elevators, lifting them back to the flight deck. Ordnance lay everywhere—bombs on open racks, torpedoes, belts—and gasoline lines formed a snakepit across the deck. But there was no time to stow anything. Just get the planes back in the air.
Then the Klaxon sounded: general quarters.
And another act of the drama began.
The Americans once more were unprotected. But this group was tactically the best. They executed a perfect split, with seven planes peeling off after the Kaga, and seven making their run at the Hiryu.
Hiroaki grabbed his binoculars and watched them. One after another they splashed gallantly. But he was not admiring them. He wanted to see their markings: carrier planes. A second division of torpedo bombers. That meant…
“Admiral, I think there is a second American carrier.”
vs-6,AT 15,000 FEET, 1005
“Yeah,” said Omer, finishing a joke. “And if I had a dog as ugly as you—”
“Holy Christ.”
“What?”
“There.”
Bill Stafford knew that he would never forget that moment, or the strange godlike feeling that came over him. From three miles up and fifteen miles away, the striking force for the mightiest fleet that had ever sailed looked like a lot of slugs leaving white slicks on the surface of the sea.
“Tally-ho!” said McClusky into the TBS.
AKAGI, 1015
They were finally turning into the wind. The aft flight deck was once more crowded with torpedo bombers, which needed a long runway for takeoff, and the elevators were bringing back the last of the Zeros to lead the attack.
Engines were revving up to a roar that Genda called “the sound of victory.”
And now the lookouts were screaming that more torpedo planes were coming to port, this time with five fighters covering them.
These were carrier planes too. A third carrier? That was impossible.
The air was once more alive with screaming engines and thundering antiaircraft, with tracer fire and exploding swirls of smoke. The water was once again laced with the wakes of fast-maneuvering carriers and churning torpedoes.
But none scored. Of the forty-one torpedo bombers that attacked that morning, only four would even make it home. Kido Butai was still untouched, ready to deal a death blow to American naval power in the Pacific.
Nagumo nodded, and the signal was passed to launch.
Hiroaki looked down at his son’s plane. Minoru was in his cockpit, fourth on the deck. Hiroaki made a small sign to him and said a small prayer.
VS- 6, AT 15,000 FEET ABOVE KIDO BUTAI, 1025
When the Spartans stood in the pass at Thermopylae, when British sailors smashed the French line at Trafalgar, when a handful of farmers and fishermen from Maine held the Union left at Gettysburg, they may have known that they were turning history like a gate on a hinge. More likely, they knew only that if they fought well, they might survive to fight again.
And that was what Bill Stafford was thinking. That, and Don’t fuck up, because you’ll never get a chance like this again.
For the first time in six months, fate was pulling for the Americans. The enemy was disorganized. His fighter cover was down at sea level chasing the last of the torpedo bombers. His decks were covered with planes… and bombs… and fuel.
Bill Stafford leaned on his stick above the Akagi. Others peeled off toward the Kaga, and by some miracle of dumb-luck coordination, or by the grace of God, the York
town dive-bombers had just found the Soryu.
“Hold on, Omer!”
And don’t fuck up, because you’ll never get a chance like this again.
Two planes dropped ahead of Bill Stafford, straight at the yellow deck and the tiny silver planes.
He felt the crushing pressure of the dive in his chest, heard the scream of his own engine in his ears. If there was AA fire, he didn’t notice it. If there were Zeros coming at him, he was counting on Omer to hold them off.
The first plane dropped its bomb. And an explosion of water geysered up. A near miss.
The second plane released from 2,400 feet, and a moment later there was a tremendous blast just forward of the island.
Now came Bill Stafford, dropping out of the sky, straight at the red Rising Sun painted on the midships elevator.
5,000… 4,000… 3,000…
The plane sounded like all the vengeful furies released in the volcanic blast of the Arizona six months before.
2,000…
Omer was whooping like a cowboy in a rodeo.
1,500… Release. The plane kicked up and Bill pulled back on the stick. Then, against the best advice, he glanced over his shoulder to watch. The yellow bomb was falling… falling… like a petal or a seed… and…
A tremendous ball of flame blossomed upward, followed by an even larger one that blew men and airplanes into the air and over the side.
Omer Royal shouted, “Yahooooo! Look at that bastard burn!”
AKAGI, 1027
No! It did not happen!
The second bomb had blown up twenty feet from his son’s plane, blown it to pieces, but the gods would not take Minoru so young, with so much to give.
Hiroaki looked at Nagumo and the others—all slack-jawed, stunned, their faces blackened by the blasts. And he was gripped with a need to do what a father should. Instead of controlling his emotions and assisting the direction of damage control, he left the bridge. By the time he reached the flight deck, he knew they would never control the damage all around them.
And from some strange place in his mind, an old saying ran through his head, one that he used to recite when teaching his little boy to mind the details of whatever he did, and one that told the story of this day, from the moment that the Tone’s scout plane catapult malfunctioned: “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe, the horse was lost, for want of a horse went the king, for want of a king went the kingdom.”
He ran to the middle of the deck, where his son’s plane had been. Now there was nothing but a hole in the flight deck.
His son was gone. His wide-eyed little boy. His serious young man. And with him, all hope. All for what? For the empire? For the emperor? Let the snow crush the roof of the Imperial Palace.
Suddenly the ship shuddered with a tremendous belowdecks blast that sent fire and debris up through the hole like water in a fountain.
Hiroaki’s uniform burst into flames, and his last rational thought was to thank the gods for taking him to his son.
STAFFORD’S DAUNTLESS, UNDER ATTACK, 1030
“We got two on our tail, Lieutenant.”
Bup-bup-bup-bup.
“Keep it comin’, Omer. Keep it comin’.”
Like bees whose nest has been kicked over, the Zeros attacked with redoubled fury.
Bill felt the bullets hitting his armored seat and drilling into his engine cowling.
He climbed back to 5,000 feet, and two of them were still on his tail. At 10,000, he was going to dive and try to lose them, if he could make it.
Bup-bup-bup.
Omer Royal poured a tremendous fire stream as the Zeros swung in behind him one after the other, then pulled out to dodge the tracers and armor-piercing bullets from his twin thirty-calibers until finally he yelled, “Yahoo! Yahooo! One down, one to go.”
Bill screamed, “Hold on, Omer!” Then he tipped the plane straight for the water… straight for the water… straight… for… the… water.…
At five hundred feet, he pulled out of the dive, then threw down the flaps, spinning the Dauntless into a skid, as if she had hit an ice patch in the air. The Zero shot past, and Bill Stafford nailed him with his own fifty-calibers, right in the gas tanks.
Yes! All he’d needed was a shot. The Zero could hunt like a hawk because it was built like a bird, light and flimsy, with no armored seats, no self-sealing gas tanks. Bill Stafford’s shot had literally blown that Zero out of the sky.
Now they could go home.
But a few miles south, their oil pressure began to drop.
NAUTILUS, AT PERISCOPE DEPTH, 1145
After an hour of depth-charging, she had no more than a ruptured hydraulic line, and no injuries.
Brockman put his face to the eyepiece and whistled softly, then he said to Steinberg, “Have a look at this.”
“Holy shit.” After a few moments, Steinberg let Tom Stafford have a look.
