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

the proverbial stranger in a strange land.” 9

    Though Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher was a “black shoe” admiral—a surface warfare specialist—he commanded U.S. forces in both of the major carrier battles of the first six months of the Pacific war: Coral Sea and Midway. (U.S. Naval Institute)
    The captain of the
Yorktown
was 52-year-old Elliott Buckmaster. Tall and handsome, Buckmaster was also quiet and reserved, even cold—though, as with Nimitz, that first impression often changed after close association. Buckmaster was a brown shoe with gold wings on his chest, but he was also a Johnny-come-lately, having passed the aviation course only five years before as a full commander. His first aviation assignment had been as executive officer (second in command) on the
Lexington
, and he had little experience as a carrier pilot. Perhaps because of this, the
Yorktown
’s executive officer, Commander Joseph “Jocko” Clark, who did have significant flight experience, was skeptical of both his commanding officer and the task-force commander. An acolyte of Ernie King, Clark thought that Fletcher and Buckmaster failed to enforce the kind of discipline he admired. That assessment, however, said more about Clark than it did about either Fletcher or Buckmaster. Clark found a lot to complain about on the
Yorktown
, writing later, “Yorktown’s hopeless department heads needed a lot of King’s brand of discipline.” It was probably just as well that Clark did not stay long on the
Yorktown
, though when he returned to Washington after his promotion to captain, he continued to disparage the
Yorktown
and her officers, including Fletcher, and over the subsequent months his comments very likely affected King’s assessment of both the ship and the task-force commander. 10
    Nimitz had hoped that the arrival of the
Yorktown
would give him four carrier groups, and the ability to begin a meaningful counterattack against the Japanese, but the loss of the
Saratoga
meant that he would have to carryon with only three: the big
Lexington
and the newer sister ships,
Enterprise
and
Yorktown
. 11

    On board those three carriers, the Americans, like the Japanese, relied on three kinds of combat airplanes. The workhorse American carrier bomber was the SBD Douglas Dauntless, a relatively new (1940) monoplane with a crew of two: a pilot in the front seat, almost always a commissioned officer, and an enlisted radioman/gunner who sat behind him and was responsible for communications as well as a .30-caliber machine gun, later increased to movable twin machine guns. Compared with the Japanese Val dive-bomber, the Dauntless was both bigger and sturdier, and its pilots referred to it affectionately as “the barge.” Though the Dauntless was 25 percent heavier than the Val (thanks in part to its armor protection), it nevertheless had a slightly greater range because of its more powerful engine. It could also carry a bigger bomb load, consisting of either one 1,000-pound bomb or a 500-pound bomb plus two 100-pound bombs under the wings. The Dauntless was marginally faster than the Val, though slower than Japanese fighters. Officially, its top speed was 217 knots (250 mph), but it cruised at 130 knots (152 mph) and attained maximum speed only during an attack dive, when it might reach 250 knots (288 mph). (Its pilots joked that SBD stood for “Slow but Deadly.”) The Dauntless also boasted two .50-caliber machine guns in the cowling, and on occasion it was used to augment the combat air patrol (CAP). 12
    The idea behind dive-bombing was for the pilot to approach his intended target at high altitude, say 20,000 feet, and preferably from out of the sun to avoid detection. To spot the target, the SBD had a small glass window in the floor beneath the pilot’s seat, although it was rarely usable due to oil thrown off by the plane’s engine. After lining up on the target as best he could, the squadron leader deployed perforated “dive brakes” on the