Battle
of Midway – Written by Gordon E. Douglass
April 25, 1942 – Admiral Halsey’s task force, which escorted
Colonel Doolittle’s B-25 bombers to attack Tokyo,
returned to Pearl Harbor. The war effort is moving right along. When we came in port we received more newly
commissioned officers. We now have a
surplus of officers on the flag allowance.
The “C” Communications Division on the ship has plenty of officers too. The “C” Division went to a watch in four so
Commander Dow had us go on a watch in five.
I told Cdr. Dow that we should carry as much load as the ship officers,
but he said, “No, being on the flag should have certain privileges that ship
officers don’t have. Some day you will
realize what I mean by this.” (I learned what he meant the following year when
the ship returned to the states and all of the flag personnel were dumped off
at Espiritu Santo to await another carrier.)
I am no
longer the scared young Ensign that first came aboard the Okie (USS Oklahoma)
on year ago. I now have lots of
responsibilities. I’m the Flag Division
Officer. I train the new officers and
make up the watch schedules. I’m
responsible for the radio room as well, but I rely on two enlisted men who know
a great deal more about it than I do.
Ensign Max Graham is in charge of the coding room and is in charge of
the registered publications. The
publications is an important job, but is very boring. I’m glad that he wanted that job.
April 29, 1942 – Admiral Halsey’s title was changed today
to: “Commander Carriers, U.S. Pacific Fleet.”
We are still using his old stationary, but as soon as new letterheads
are printed we will throw out all of this obsolete material. It seems to me to be a terrible waste. This is reams and reams of the best quality
bond paper.
April 30, 1942 – Two aircraft carriers, the USS Enterprise
and the USS Hornet along with the USS Vincennes and 3 other cruisers leave
Pearl Harbor and we are going to the Coral Sea.
May 4, 1942 – We Received word that the USS Yorktown
attacked enemy troops, which had been landed on May 3rd on
Tulagi. I have a friend aboard the Yorktown. His name
is Gordon Drummond. Everybody in our
unit at Northwest
University called him
“Bulldog Drummond’ which was the name of a character in a popular private-eye
detective novel.
May 8, 1942 – Until now, the Big E has been in every battle
in the Pacific since the start of the war.
We traveled at high speed, but were too late for the Coral Sea
Battle. The USS Lexington was sunk and
the USS Yorktown was hit. This was a
costly loss for us, but it is the first time in the war that a Japanese advance
has been stopped. The Japanese lost one
aircraft carrier and a second was damaged so their loss was about the same as
ours except they have 10 carriers left.
We now have only the Big E, the USS Hornet and the damaged USS
Yorktown. The Sara is still on the west
coast. We can’t afford to make trades
like this. We don’t know what to expect
because of our losses and then all of a sudden we are ordered back to Pearl.
The Yorktown and the Big E are twins or sister ships. The Japanese had hit the Yorktown at Coral Sea and presumed it was the Big E. Tokyo Rose was a broadcaster for a Tokyo radio station. On our way back to Pearl,
we heard her announce that the Enterprise had
been sunk at Coral Sea. The men made remarks like, “being sunk
doesn’t seem all that different” or “I wonder if we’ll still get paid now that
we’ve been sunk.” Tokyo Rose is popular
with us, because she plays good music between her propaganda. The men just laugh at her, because of the
blatant lies.
Daily on
our trip back to Pearl,
I took the dispatch board in to Admiral Halsey for him to read. Each day he looks worse. On about May 24th, his face is a
big blotch of red and he can’t refrain from scratching his hands, legs and
body. We all love Admiral Halsey like a
father and have sympathy for him. I
never heard a ship’s officer or enlisted man say anything against him. The two tourists that we took on the Tokyo raid were the only
ones who ever said anything negative.
All of us felt that he was going to do all he could to hurt the enemy
and protect us.
May 26, 1942 – Before our task force 16 entered Pearl today, we received a fox broadcast (plain language)
from CINCPAC which had been received from Midway Island. The message said that their fresh water
condensers had broken down. Ensign
Woltemate asked me what this meant. I
answered that it must be very serious for the message to come to us in plain
language. In other words, the message
hadn’t been encoded. We later learned that this was all a part of the CINCPAC
Intelligence Officer’s plan to learn where the next Japanese offensive would
be. It worked, because the Japanese sent
a message that our cryptographers decoded.
Instead of saying Midway’s fresh water distiller had broken down, it
said that AF’s distiller had broken down.
From previously decoded Japanese messages we knew that AF was to be the
next target operation. So we now planned
for the Japanese attack on Midway
Island. Today, Admiral Halsey or Bull Halsey was sent
to the hospital for treatment of his eczema.
May 27, 1942 – Task Force 17: The Yorktown struggled into Pearl today. She is estimated to be out of action for 90
days.
May 28, 1942 – Admiral Halsey stayed in the hospital by
orders of CINCPAC. This was to be the
last we would see of Admiral Halsey.
Everyone feels less comfortable now that he isn’t with us anymore. Rear Admiral Ray Spruance has assumed command
of Task Force 16 and we got underway today for our next operation. In the coding room, we are privileged with
lots of secret information, but none of us know that Midway will be our next
big battle. Admiral Spruance is not a
naval aviator and so the aviators don’t see him as capable to run this task
force. This reasoning seems silly to me
because even though Halsey is not an aviator, his actual flying experience is
minimal. Personally, I would like to see
Admiral Halsey back aboard the ship with us.
We will also miss the Yorktown. The new carrier, USS Wasp, will be joining us
in about a month, but that doesn’t do us any good for this operation.
May 31, 1942 – Good news!
The Yorktown had some rapid repairs on
her and instead of going to dry dock for 90 days; she will join us for what
will become known as “The Battle of Midway”.
Lucky for us, Admiral Fletcher aboard the Yorktown
will keep far enough away from us that we can act as an independent task group
under Admiral Spruance.
June 3, 1942 – Everyone seems nervous today. Our search planes return from their sector
searches with negative results. It is
believed that the enemy is out there somewhere, but we just can’t find
them. We received reports of radio
traffic in the Aleutians. Some speculate that we are in the wrong place
and should be defending Alaska. Finally one of our Midway based PBYs reported
a taskforce SW of Midway.
Jun 4, 1942 – We normally have GQ at 5:00 AM. Today it was at 3:30 AM. Ensign Lovelace in true form was the first to
arrive asking, “What is it? What is it? What is it?” Actually it was just our routine early
morning GQ. Admiral Spruance was
antsy. He just wanted us to be ready for
action so he had GQ 1 and ½ hours earlier than usual. Everyone knows that today will be the day of
a huge battle. We had sunrise at about
7:00 AM. Everyone is tense. We are hoping to see the enemy before he
detects us. About 7:30, our radio room
received a simple message from a PBY. It
simply said “enemy carriers”. Often
inexperienced people are so anxious to give a report that they leave out all
the essentials. That PBY could be up
north or south, east or west. Ten
minutes later the PBY gave a position report which was good enough that we sent
planes out to locate the target. Don’t
ask me anything about the actual battle, because I was in the coding room the whole
time. Once in awhile we would hear on
out intercom voices of aviators talking to each other. It was probably about 4:00 PM when we had
retrieved all of our aircraft. Rumors
were going around the ship that the Big E’s torpedo squadron was almost completely
wiped out. The torpedo squadron of the
Hornet was all wiped out. My heart sank
as it had on Pearl Harbor day. During the two weeks that I was on the
Hornet, I had met most of their torpedo pilots.
I knew them better than I did the ones on the Big E. They never did get to fly except upon
entering port. Now that they did
actually get to fly, every one of them was shot down. Of the approximately 45 men in the TBD
squadron, Ensign Gay was the only survivor.
He didn’t immediately inflate his boat.
He held on to it to keep him afloat until he felt safe after dark. He was able to watch the entire attack.
Three enemy carriers, the Kaga, Akagi and Soryu are all
burning and out of action. The enemy
carrier Hiryu was damaged. The USS
Yorktown has been attacked and was given up for lost. I hope Ensign Drummond got off OK. Later we learned that the Yorktown’s
crew had put out the fires and saved the ship.
June 5 – The Hiryu sunk this morning.
June 7 – Bad news this morning. The Yorktown
rescue efforts failed and the ship sunk.
I again remembered my friend, Ensign Drummond and I hope that he is
OK. Late in the afternoon we were
secured from GQ. I went to the wardroom
for a sandwich and then wandered over towards my room. I heard the phone ring in my room and it was
Ensign Lovelace. He told me that Admiral
Spruance was extremely worried about an Operational Priority dispatch that we
had received. None of the CWOs on duty
could decode it. A ‘jig’ had been sent
to other ships in visual range. None of
them could decode it. If the dispatch
didn’t respond on the first try they would put the dispatch on a clipboard
which hung on the bulkhead (wall). These
were the ones that I worked on when I started my shift. They couldn’t put this one on the clipboard,
because the Admiral was anxiously waiting for it.
I ran
toward the ladders, which would take me up to the coding room. As I ran, I thought about what might be wrong
with the message that would render it indecipherable. I offered a silent prayer as I ran, because I
knew the message must be important. The
answer came to me that if nobody in the entire task force could break the
message that it must have two mistakes in it.
When I got to the coding room, I took the message and quickly looked it
over. I thought that the date might be
for the previous day. Also, a letter “S”
was used which I changed to “H”. “S” is
three dots in the Morse code and “H” is four dots. As coding officers, we were not required to
know Morse code, but I had learned it while I was on the USS Oklahoma. In fact, I learned it sufficiently to copy
the NPM Fox broadcast.) My prayer was
answered and the message decoded.
Admiral Spruance was looking over my shoulder as I typed it out. The message was not what was expected so I
just turned the message over to Ensign Lovelace to complete the decoding.
Ensign
Woltemate asked me what I did to decode it.
I said that I just figured out the mistakes of the radioman. The coding room was a small place and I heard
Admiral Spruance ask Commander Dow what my name was and that he was going to
give me a commendation. (Actually, each
of the flag coding officers was given a commendation.) As far as I have been able to learn, we were
the only non-aviators in our task force to receive a commendation for the
Battle of Midway. There were probably
commendations given to members of the USS Yorktown for the good work that they
did to save the ship.
The reason
that it was important to decode this dispatch was because our task force was
milling around waiting for the message to be decoded. We didn’t know whether or not the dispatch
was instructions for us to proceed with further attacks on the transports and
battleships of the Japanese or whether it was instructions to high tail it back
to Pearl. I was a committee of one who felt that we
should carry on with the attack on the enemy ships, who now had no aircraft to
protect them.
June 15, 1942 – The following is a quote from the Ships Data
Section of the Navy Department: “On 2 June, Task Forces 16 and 17 joined and
two days later encounted the Japanese armada.
US Navy air power aboard Enterprise,
Hornet and Yorktown and based ashore at Midway
and US Marine Corp and US Army air power also based on Midway inflicted a
tolling defeat upon the enemy forces.
Japanese casualties amounted to 4 carriers, 2 cruisers, 3 destroyers, 1
transport and an estimated 275 aircraft.
Commander Air Group 6, (Wade McClusky) aboard Enterprise during the action, made what
CINCPAC later termed one of the greatest decisions of the war when he took his
planes out beyond a safe fuel limit in search of the Japanese fleet. He found the enemy force just as its carriers
were about to launch an all out attack against Midway and the US task
force. The Japanese planes never left the
deck of their carriers. The Enterprise aircraft sent
2 carriers to the bottom, damaged 4 more ships and destroyed 9 planes in the
air. On 13 June, Enterprise
arrived back in Pearl Harbor.”
(Footnote) – Many historians believe that if we had
pursued the Japanese invasion force, like I felt that we should, that the
Japanese submarines
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