Free The Battle of Midway by Craig L. Symonds Page A

rough that Leary cancelled flight operations for the day. Waves broke over the bow and washed the flight deck. At 7:00 that evening, in the midst of the storm, a terrific explosion jolted the big carrier. A pilot on board said, “It felt like the whole ship had been moved about five feet.” A Japanese submarine, the I-6, had slipped through the screen of cruisers and destroyers and delivered a deadly Type 95 torpedo. The blast killed six men and flooded three fire rooms. Though the Japanese submarine skipper reported to Tokyo that he had sunk a Saratoga-class carrier, the big flattop managed to stay afloat and steam back to Pearl Harbor under her own power, arriving on January 15. Nimitz saw that the necessary repairs could not be completed in Hawaii and two days later reluctantly ordered her back to Bremerton, Washington. 7
    That loss would have reduced Nimitz to only two carrier groups but for the return to the Pacific that same week of the USS
Yorktown
. After Pearl Harbor,
Yorktown
had been rushed into dry dock in Norfolk for a quick overhaul, and by December 16 she was en route back to the Pacific. After passing through the Panama Canal, she arrived in San Diego at the end of the month. There she joined the heavy cruiser
Louisville
, a light cruiser, and half a dozen destroyers, plus the essential oiler, to comprise Task Force 17. To command this new task force, Nimitz picked a man he knew well and who had commanded the
Saratoga
task force during the aborted relief expedition to Wake Island: Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher.
    Fletcher was yet another black shoe, having served in cruisers and destroyers for most of his thirty-six-year career. Graduating from the Naval Academy in 1906, one year after Nimitz and two years after Halsey, Fletcher had been a cruiser and battleship man from the start; his mostrecent sea service was the command of Cruiser Division 6. Called “Fletch” or “Flap Jack” while at the Academy, he had what the
Lucky Bag
called “a sunny disposition” and the habit of gesturing with his hands while talking. He was well decorated, having received a Medal of Honor as a lieutenant during the Navy’s expedition to Vera Cruz in 1914 (an honor somewhat diluted by the fact that the Navy had handed out no fewer than fifty-five Medals of Honor for that expedition, passing them out, as one critic put it, “like crackerjack charms”). More important was the fact that Fletcher was well connected. He had served as naval aide to Secretary of the Navy Claude Swanson in the early 1930s and as assistant chief of the Bureau of Navigation under Nimitz in the late ’30s. A biographer concedes that Fletcher’s “personal connections with the decision-makers of the war set him ahead of others for important assignments.” It was natural that the brown-shoe pilots on the
Yorktown
would feel an intense curiosity about their new boss. 8
    What they saw was an unremarkable man with a plain, open face, thinning dark hair, a generous nose, and dark eyes. Fletcher was neither flamboyant and outgoing like Halsey nor reserved and professorial like Wilson Brown. He was instead a straightforward, competent professional whose tight-lipped expression suggested the no-nonsense skepticism of a Midwestern farmer, which was fitting, as he had been born and reared in Iowa. He even smoked corncob pipes that he had shipped to him from the States a dozen at a time. Reporters seldom badgered him for interviews because he was not inclined to bloodthirsty pronouncements. Given his long service in battleships and cruisers, Fletcher would have preferred to make the heavy cruiser
Louisville
his flagship, but Nimitz wanted his task-force commanders to ride the carrier, and so in San Diego on New Year’s Day, 1942 (the day after Nimitz took formal command in Pearl Harbor), the black shoe Fletcher broke his flag on USS
Yorktown
. Fletcher may have felt somewhat out of place on board the big flattop. One historian suggests that “he was