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The World War II Collection

The Miracle of Dunkirk, Day of Infamy, and Incredible Victory

Walter Lord

Contents

The Miracle of Dunkirk

Day of Infamy

Incredible Victory

About the Author

The Miracle of Dunkirk

Walter Lord

FOR EDDIE RESOR

Contents

Foreword

1 The Closing Trap

2 No. 17 Turns Up

3 “Operation Dynamo”

4 Buying Time

5 “Plenty Troops, Few Boats”

6 The Gap

7 Torpedoes in the Night

8 Assault from the Sky

9 The Little Ships

10 “Bras-Dessus, Bras-Dessus!”

11 Holding the Perimeter

12 “I Have Never Prayed So Hard Before”

13 “BEF Evacuated”

14 The Last Night

15 Deliverance

Written Source Material

Acknowledgements

List of Contributors

Index

Image Gallery

List of Maps

The Channel Ports

May 10 - 20, The German Drive to the Sea

May 24, The Allied Pocket

May 24 - 30, The Allied Escape Corridor

May 27, The Perimeter

The Three Routes Across the Channel

Dunkirk Harbour

Foreword

THERE SEEMED TO BE NO ESCAPE. On May 24, 1940, some 400,000 Allied troops lay pinned against the coast of Flanders near the French port of Dunkirk. Hitler’s advancing tanks were only ten miles away. There was virtually nothing in between.

Yet the trapped army was saved. By June 4—just eleven days later—over 338,000 men had been evacuated safely to England in one of the great rescues of all time. It was a crucial turning point in World War II.

‘So long as the English tongue survives,’ proclaimed the New York Times, ‘the word Dunkerque will be spoken with reverence.’ Hyperbole, perhaps, but certainly the word—the event—has lived on. To the British, Dunkirk symbolizes a generosity of spirit, a willingness to sacrifice for the common good. To Americans, it has come to mean Mrs. Miniver, little ships, The Snow Goose, escape by sea. To the French, it suggests bitter defeat; to the Germans, opportunity forever lost.

There’s an element of truth in all these images, but they fail to go to the heart of the matter. It is customary to look on Dunkirk as a series of days. Actually, it should be regarded as a series of crises. Each crisis was solved, only to be replaced by another, with the pattern repeated again and again. It was the collective refusal of men to be discouraged by this relentless sequence that is important.

Seen in this light, Dunkirk remains, above all, a stirring reminder of man’s ability to rise to the occasion, to improvise, to overcome obstacles. It is, in short, a lasting monument to the unquenchable resilience of the human spirit.

1

The Closing Trap

EVERY MAN HAD HIS own special moment when he first knew that something was wrong. For RAF Group Captain R.C.M. Collard, it was the evening of May 14, 1940, in the market town of Vervins in northeastern France.

Five days had passed since “the balloon went up,” as the British liked to refer to the sudden German assault in the west. The situation was obscure, and Collard had come down from British General Headquarters in Arras to confer with the staff of General André-Georges Corap, whose French Ninth Army was holding the River Meuse to the south.

Such meetings were perfectly normal between the two Allies, but there was nothing normal about the scene tonight. Corap’s headquarters had simply vanished. No sign of the General or his staff. Only two exhausted French officers were in the building, crouched over a hurricane lamp … waiting, they said, to be captured.

Sapper E. N. Grimmer’s moment of awareness came as the 216th Field Company, Royal Engineers, tramped across the French countryside, presumably toward the front. Then he noticed a bridge being prepared for demolition. “When you’re advancing,” he mused, “you don’t blow bridges.” Lance Corporal E. S. Wright had a ruder awakening: he had gone to Arras to collect his wireless unit’s weekly mail. A motorcycle with sidecar whizzed past, and Wright did a classic double take. He suddenly realized the motorcycle was German.

For Winston Churchill, the new British Prime Minister, the moment was 7:30 a.m., May 15, as he lay sleeping in his quarters at Admiralty House, London. The bedside phone rang; it was French Premier Paul Reynaud. “We have been defeated,” Reynaud blurted in English.

A nonplussed silence, as Churchill tried to collect himself.

“We are beaten”; Reynaud went on, “we have lost the battle.”

“Surely it can’t have happened so soon?” Churchill finally managed to say.

“The front is broken near Sedan; they are pouring through in great numbers with tanks and armored cars.”

Churchill did his best to soothe the man—reminded him of the dark days in 1918 when all turned out well in the end—but Reynaud remained distraught. He ended as he had begun: “We are defeated; we have lost the battle.”

The crisis was so grave—and so little could be grasped over the phone—that on the 16th Churchill flew to Paris to see things for himself. At the Quai d’Orsay he found “utter dejection” on every face; in the garden elderly clerks were already burning the files.

It seemed incredible. Since 1918 the French Army had been generally regarded as the finest in the world. With the rearmament of Germany under Adolf Hitler, there was obviously a new military power in Europe, but still, her leaders were untested and her weapons smacked of gimmickry. When the Third Reich swallowed one Central European country after another, this was attributed to bluff and bluster. When war finally did break out in 1939 and Poland fell in three weeks, this was written off as something that could happen to Poles—but not to the West. When Denmark and Norway went in April 1940, this seemed just an underhanded trick; it could be rectified later.

Then after eight months of quiet—“the phony war”—on the 10th of May, Hitler suddenly struck at Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Convinced that the attack was a replay of 1914, the Supreme Allied Commander, General Maurice Gamelin, rushed his northern armies—including the British Expeditionary Force—to the rescue.

But Gamelin had miscalculated. It was not 1914 all over again. Instead of a great sweep through Flanders, the main German thrust was farther south, through the “impenetrable” Ardennes Forest. This was said to be poor tank country, and the French hadn’t even bothered to extend the supposedly impenetrable Maginot Line to cover it.

Another miscalculation. While General Colonel Fedor von Bock’s Army Group B tied up the Allies in Belgium, General Colonel Gerd von Rundstedt’s Army Group A came crashing through the Ardennes. Spearheaded by 1,806 tanks and supported by 325 Stuka dive bombers, Rundstedt’s columns stormed across the River Meuse and now were knifing through the French countryside.

General Corap’s Ninth Army was the luckless force that took the brunt. Composed mainly of second-class troops, it quickly collapsed. Here and there die-hard units tried to make a stand, only to discover that their antitank guns were worthless. One junior officer ended up at the Le Mans railroad station, where he committed suicide after penning a postcard to Premier Reynaud: “I am killing myself, Mr. President, to let you know that all my men were brave, but one cannot send men to fight tanks with rifles.”

It was the same story with part of General Charles Huntziger’s Second Army at Sedan, fifty miles farther south. As the German tanks approached, the men of the 71st Division turned their helmets around—a rallying sign of the Communists—and bolted for the rear.

Three brigades of French tanks tried to stem the tide, but never had a chance. One brigade ran out of gas; another was caught de-training in a railroad yard; the third was sprinkled in small packets along the front, where it was gobbled up piecemeal.

Now the panzers were in the clear—nothing to stop them. Shortly after 7:00 a.m., May 20, two divisions of General Heinz Guderian’s crack XIX Corps began rolling west from Péronne. By 10:00 they were clanking through the town of Albert, where a party of untrained English Territorials tried to hold them with a barricade of cardboard boxes. … 11:00, they reached Hédauville, where they captured a British battery equipped with only training shells … noon, the 1st Panzer Division had Amiens, where Guderian took a moment to savor the towers of the lovely cathedral.

The 2nd Panzer Division rolled on. By 4:00 p.m. they had Beauquesne, where they captured a depot containing the BEF’s entire supply of maps. And finally, at 9:10, they reached Abbeville and then the sea. In one massive stroke they had come 40 miles in fourteen hours, cutting the Allied forces in two. The BEF, two French armies, and all the Belgians—nearly a million men—were now sealed in Flanders, pinned against the sea, ready for plucking.

Deep in Belgium the British front-line troops had no way of knowing what had happened on their flank or to the rear. They only knew that they were successfully holding the Germans facing them on the River Dyle. On May 14 (the day Rundstedt routed Corap), Lance Bombardier Noel Watkin of the Royal Artillery heard rumors of a great Allied victory. That night he had nothing but good news for the diary he surreptitiously kept:

Enemy retreat 6 ½ miles. Very little doing till the evening. We fire on S.O.S. lines and prevent the Huns crossing the River Dyle. Many Germans are killed and taken prisoner. 27,000 Germans killed (official).

Next day was different. As the French collapsed to the south, the Germans surged into the gap. Soon shells were unaccountably pouring into the British flank. That evening a bewildered Noel Watkin could only write:

What a day! We are due to retreat at 10:30 p.m., and as we do, we get heavy shellfire, and we thank God we are all safe. … Except for the shock I am o.k.

Most of the BEF were equally mystified by the sudden change in fortune. Throughout the 16th and 17th, the troops began to pull back all along the line; more and more guns were shifted to face south and southwest. On the 18th, when the 2nd Essex was ordered to man the La Bassée Canal, facing south, the battalion commander Major Wilson was incredulous—wasn’t the enemy supposed to be to the east? “I can’t understand it, sir,” agreed Captain Long Price, just back from brigade headquarters, “but those are our orders.”

One man who could understand it very well was the architect of these stop-gap measures: General the Viscount Gort, Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force. A big burly man of 53, Lord Gort was no strategist—he was happy to follow the French lead on such matters—but he had certain soldierly virtues that came in handy at a time like this. He was a great fighter—had won the Victoria Cross storming the Hindenburg Line in 1918—and he was completely unflappable.

General Alphonse-Joseph Georges, his French superior, might be in tears by now, but never Gort. He methodically turned to the job of protecting his exposed flank and pulling his army back. His trained combat divisions were tied up fighting the Germans to the east. To meet the new threat to the south and the west, he improvised a series of scratch forces, composed of miscellaneous units borrowed from here and there. Gort appointed his intelligence chief, Major-General Noel Mason-MacFarlane, as the commander of one of these groups, appropriately called MACFORCE. Mason-MacFarlane was an able leader, but the main effect of his assignment was to raise havoc with the intelligence set-up at GHQ in Arras. That didn’t seem to bother Gort; always the fighting man, he had little use for staff officers anyway.

Meanwhile, using a timetable worked out by the French, on the evening of May 16 he began pulling his front-line troops back from the Dyle. The new line was to be the River Escaut,* 60 miles to the rear, the retreat to be carried out in three stages.

Crack units like the 2nd Coldstream Guards carried out their orders meticulously—generations of tradition saw to that. For others, these instructions—so precise on paper—didn’t necessarily work out in fact. Dispatch riders carrying the orders couldn’t always find the right headquarters. Some regiments started late. Others lost their way in the dark. Others made the wrong turn. Others ran into hopeless traffic jams. Still others never got the orders at all.

The 32nd Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, was hurrying toward the Dyle, unaware of any retreat, when word came to take position in a field some miles short of the river. Gunner R. Shattock was told to take one of the unit’s trucks and get some rations. This he did, but by the time he got back, the whole regiment had vanished. After a night of worry, he set out for the main road, hoping to find at least a trace of somebody he knew.

He was immediately swamped by a wave of running men. “Come on, get going,” they shouted; “the Jerries have broken through, and it’s every man for himself.” They swarmed over the truck, piling on the roof, the hood, the fenders.

Shattock headed west, flowing with the tide. At first he made good mileage, but gradually the drive became a nightmare. Stuka dive bombers poured out of a dazzling sun. They had let the British columns advance deep into Belgium without interference, but the trip back was different. With toy whistles attached to both planes and bombs (the Germans called them the “trumpets of Jericho”), they screeched down in an orgy of killing and terror. Pulling out of their dives, they flew along the roads at car-top height, strafing for good measure.

The hot, still air filled with black smoke and the smell of burning rubber; the traffic slowed to a crawl. Weeping refugees swarmed among the dazed troops. Discarded hand-carts, bicycles, baby carriages, burnt-out family cars lay cluttered along the roadside.

Finally the traffic stopped altogether. Shattock’s passengers, seeing they could make better time on foot, abandoned him, and soon he sat alone in his stalled truck. He climbed onto the roof, but could see no way out. Traffic had piled up behind as well as ahead, and deep ditches on either side of the road ruled out any cross-country escape. He was simply glued in place on this blazing hot, smoky May afternoon. He had never felt so alone and helpless. Before, there had always been someone to give orders. Here, there was no one.

Actually, he could not have been very far from his own regiment, which had disappeared so mysteriously the previous day. They had pulled out when a battery observer, sent up a telegraph pole, reported “a lot of soldiers with coal scuttles on their heads a couple of fields away.”

To Lance Bombardier H. E. Gentry, it was the chariot race in Ben-Hur all over again. The regiment hooked up their guns … roared out of the meadow … and swung wildly onto the main road, heading back the way they had come.

It was dark by the time they stopped briefly to fire off all their ammunition—at extreme range and at no particular target, it seemed. Then on again into the night. Gentry hadn’t the remotest idea where they were going; it was just a case of follow the leader.

Midnight, they stopped again. It was raining now, and the exhausted men huddled around a low-burning fire, munching stew and trading stories of the hell they had been through.

Dawn, the rain stopped, and they were off again into another beautiful day. A German Fieseler Storch observation plane appeared, flying low, hovering over them, clearly unafraid of any interference. The men of the 32nd understood: they hadn’t seen a sign of the RAF since the campaign began. From past experience, they also knew that rifles were useless. In exasperation Gentry blazed away anyhow, but he knew that the real time to worry was when the Storch left.

When it finally did veer off, a dozen bombers appeared from the right. The 32nd came to a jolting stop at the edge of a village, and the shout went up, “Disperse—take cover!” Gentry ran into a farmyard, deep in mud and slime; he dived into a hayrick as the planes began unloading. Bedlam, capped by one particularly awesome swoosh, and the ground shook like jelly. Then the silence of a cemetery.

Gentry crept out. There, stuck in the slime a few feet away, was a huge unexploded bomb. It was about the size of a household refrigerator, shaped like a cigar, with its tail fins sticking up. A large pig slowly waddled across the barnyard and began licking it.

On again. To Gentry, the 32nd seemed to be going around in circles. They always seemed to be lost, with no set idea where they were supposed to be or where they were going. Occasionally they would stop, fire off a few rounds (he never knew the target), and then, on their way again. His mind drifted back to last winter in Lille, where he and his friends would go to their favorite café and sing “Run Rabbit Run.” Now, he ruefully thought, We are the rabbits and are we running!

At the River Dendre the 32nd once again got ready to go into action. Traffic was particularly bad here—few crossings and everyone trying to get over. Gentry noticed a number of motorcycles with sidecars moving into a field on the left. The soldiers in the sidecars jumped out and began spraying the 32nd with machine guns.

Jerry had arrived. The British gunners scrambled into action, firing over open sights, and for five minutes it was a rousing brawl. Finally they drove the motorcyclists off, but there was no time to celebrate: a squadron of German fighters swooped down from out of the sun and began strafing the road.

As if this wasn’t enough, word spread of a new peril. Enemy troops masquerading as refugees were said to be infiltrating the lines. From now on, the orders ran, all women were to be challenged by rifle. What next? wondered Lance Bombardier Gentry; Germans in drag!

Fear of Fifth Columnists spread like an epidemic. Everyone had his favorite story of German paratroopers dressed as priests and nuns. The men of one Royal Signals maintenance unit told how two “monks” visited their quarters just before a heavy bombing attack. Others warned of enemy agents, disguised as Military Police, deliberately misdirecting convoys. There were countless tales of talented “farmers” who cut signs in corn and wheat fields pointing to choice targets. Usually the device was an arrow; sometimes a heart; and in one instance the III Corps fig leaf emblem.

The Signals unit attached to II Corps headquarters had been warned that the Germans were dropping spies dressed as nuns, clergy, and students, so they were especially on their guard as they pulled off the main road for a little rest one dark night during the retreat. Dawn was just breaking when they were awakened by the sentry’s shouts. He reported a figure trailing a parachute lurking among some trees. After two challenges got no response, the section sergeant ordered the sentry and Signalman E. A. Salisbury to open fire. The figure crumpled, and the two men ran up to see what they had hit. It turned out to be a civilian in a gray velvet suit, clutching not a parachute but an ordinary white blanket. He had died instantly and carried no identification.

The sergeant muttered something about one less Boche in the world, and the unit was soon on the road again. It was only later that Salisbury learned the truth: an insane asylum at Louvain had just released all its inmates, and one of them was the man he had shot. The incident left Salisbury heartsick, and forty years later he still worried about it.

There were, of course, cases of real Fifth Column activity. Both the 1st Coldstream and the 2nd Gloucesters, for instance, were harassed by sniper fire. But for the most part the “nuns” were really nuns, and the priests were genuine clerics whose odd behavior could be explained by pure fright. Usually the Military Police who misdirected traffic were equally genuine—just a little mixed up in their work.

Yet who could know this at the time? Everyone was suspicious of everyone else, and Bombardier Arthur May found that life could be deadly dangerous for a straggler. He and two mates had been separated from their howitzer battery. They heard it had pulled back to the Belgian town of Tournai on the Escaut, and now they were trying to catch up with it. As they drove the company truck along various back roads, they were stopped and interrogated again and again by the British rear guard, all of whom seemed to have itchy trigger-fingers.

Finally they did reach Tournai, but their troubles weren’t over. A sergeant and two privates, bayonets fixed, made them destroy their truck. Then they were escorted across the last remaining bridge over the Escaut, put in the charge of three more tough-talking riflemen, and marched to a farmhouse on the edge of town. Here they were split up and put through still another interrogation.

Cleared at last, the three men searched two more hours before they finally found their battery. Nobody wanted to tell them anything, and the few directions they pried loose were intentionally misleading. May found it hard to believe that all these unfriendly chaps were his own comrades-in-arms.

But it was so; and more than that, these grim, suspicious rear-guard units were all that stood between the confused mass of retreating troops and the advancing Germans. Some, like the Coldstream and the Grenadiers, were Guards regiments of legendary discipline. Others, like the 5th Northamptons and the 2nd Hampshires, were less famous but no less professional. The standard routine was to dig in behind some canal or river, usually overnight, hold off the German advance during the day with artillery and machine guns, then pull back to the next canal or river and repeat the formula.

They were as efficient as machines, but no machines could be so tired. Digging, fighting, falling back; day after day there was never time to sleep. The 1st East Surreys finally invented a way to doze a little on the march. By linking arms, two outside men could walk a man between them as he slept. From time to time they’d switch places with one another.

When Lieutenant James M. Langley of the 2nd Coldstream was put in charge of the bridge across the Escaut at Pecq, the Company commander, Major Angus McCorquodale, ordered a sergeant to stand by and shoot Langley if he ever tried to sit or lie down. Langley’s job was to blow the bridge when the Germans arrived, and McCorquodale explained to him, “The moment you sit or lie down, you will go to sleep, and that you are not going to do.”

The enemy advance was often no more than ten or fifteen minutes away, but by May 23 most of the troops somehow got back to the French frontier, the starting point of their optimistic plunge into Belgium only two weeks earlier. The first emotion was relief, but close behind came shame. They all remembered the cheers, the flowers, the wine that had greeted them; now they dreaded the reproachful stares as they scrambled back through the rubble of each burned-out town.

With the 1st East Surrey’s return to France, 2nd Lieutenant R. C. Taylor was ordered to go to Lille to pick up some stores. Lille lay far to the rear of the battalion’s position, and Taylor expected to find the assignment a peaceful change from the hell he had been through in Belgium. To his amazement, the farther back he drove, the heavier grew the sound of battle. It finally dawned on him that the Germans lay not only to the east of the BEF, but to the south and west as well. They were practically surrounded.

The scratch forces that General Gort had thrown together to cover his exposed flank and rear were desperately hanging on. South of Arras, the inexperienced 23rd Division faced General Major Erwin Rommel’s tanks without a single antitank gun. At Saint Pol a mobile bath unit struggled to hold off the 6th Panzer Division. At Steenbecque the 9th Royal Northumberland Fusiliers grimly bided their time. A scantily trained Territorial battalion, they had been building an airfield near Lille when “the balloon went up.” Now they were part of an improvised defense unit called POLFORCE. They had no instructions, only knew that their commanding officer had vanished.

At this point Captain Tufton Beamish, the only regular army officer in the battalion, assumed command. Somehow he rallied the men, dug them into good positions, placed his guns well, and managed to hold off the Germans for 48 important hours.

Things were usually not that tidy. Private Bill Stratton, serving in a troop-carrying unit, felt he was aimlessly driving all over northeastern France. One evening the lorries were parked in a tree-lined field just outside the town of Saint-Omer. Suddenly some excited Frenchmen came pouring down the road shouting “Les Boches! Les Boches!” A hastily dispatched patrol returned with the disquieting news that German tanks were approaching, about ten minutes away.

The men stood to, armed only with a few Boyes antitank rifles. This weapon did little against tanks but had such a kick it was said to have dislocated the shoulder of the inventor. Orders were not to fire until the word was given.

Anxious moments, then the unmistakable rumble of engines and treads. Louder and louder, until—unbelievably—there they were, a column of tanks and motorized infantry clanking along the road right by the field where Stratton crouched. The trees apparently screened the lorries, for the tanks took no notice of them, and the British never attracted attention by opening fire. Finally they were gone; the rumbling died away; and the troop-carrier commander began studying his map, searching for some route back that might avoid another such heart-stopping experience.

It was so easy to be cut off, lost—or forgotten. Sapper Joe Coles belonged to an engineering company that normally serviced concrete mixers but was now stuffed into MACFORCE east of Arras. They had no rations or water and were trying to milk some cows when Coles was posted off with a sergeant to repair a pumping station near the town of Orchies.

By the following evening the two men had the pumps going again and decided to go into Orchies, since they still had no rations, nor even a blanket. The place turned out to be a ghost town—citizens, defending garrison, everybody had vanished.

They did find a supply depot of the Navy, Army and Air Force Institute. British servicemen always regarded NAAFI as the ministering angel for all their needs, but even in his wildest dreams Coles never imagined anything like this. Here, too, all the staff was gone, but the shelves were packed with every conceivable delicacy.

A stretcher was found and loaded with cigarettes, whisky, gin, and two deck chairs. Back at the pumping station, Coles and the sergeant mixed themselves a couple of generous drinks and settled down in the deck chairs for their best sleep in days.

Next morning, still no orders; still no traffic on the roads. It was now clear that they had been left behind and forgotten. Later in the day they spotted four French soldiers wandering around the farm next door. The poilus had lost their unit too, and on the strength of this bond, Coles dipped into his NAAFI hoard and gave them a 50-pack of cigarettes. Overwhelmed, they reciprocated with a small cooked chicken. For Coles and the sergeant it was their first meal in days, and although they didn’t know it yet, it would also be their last in France.

At the moment they thought only about getting away from the pumping station. The disappearance of everybody could only mean they were in no-man’s-land. By agreement, Coles went down to the main road and began waiting on the off-chance that some rear-guard vehicle might happen by. It was a long shot, but it paid off when a lone British Tommy on a motorcycle came boiling along. Coles flagged him down, and the Tommy promised to get help from a nearby engineering unit, also lost and forgotten. Within twenty minutes a truck swerved into the pumping station yard, scooped up Coles and his companion, and sped north toward relative safety and the hope, at least, of better communications.

The communications breakdown was worst in the west—an inevitable result of slapping together those makeshift defense units—but the problem was acute everywhere. From the start of the war the French high command had rejected wireless. Anybody could pick signals out of the air, the argument ran. The telephone was secure. This meant stringing miles and miles of cable, and often depending on overloaded civilian circuits—but at least the Boches wouldn’t be listening.

Lord Gort cheerfully went along. Once again, the French were the masters of war; they had studied it all out, and if they said the telephone was best, the BEF would comply. Besides, the French had 90 divisions; he had only ten.

Then May, and the test of battle itself. Some telephone lines were quickly chewed up by Rundstedt’s tanks. Others were inadvertently cut by Allied units moving here and there. Other breaks occurred as various headquarters moved about. Gort’s Command Post alone shifted seven times in ten days. The exhausted signalmen couldn’t possibly string lines fast enough.

After May 17 Gort no longer had any direct link with Belgian headquarters on his left, with French First Army on his right, or with his immediate superior General Georges to the rear. Nor were orders getting through to most of his own commanders down the line. At Arras his acting Operations Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel the Viscount Bridgeman, soon decided it was hopeless to rely on GHQ. Living on a diet of chocolate and whisky, he simply did what he thought was best.

The only reliable way to communicate was by personal visit or by using dispatch riders on motorcycle. Driving through the countryside, the jaunty commander of 3rd Division, Major-General Bernard Montgomery, would jam a message on the end of his walking stick and hold it out the car window. Here it would be plucked off by his bodyguard, Sergeant Arthur Elkin, riding up on a motorcycle.

Elkin would then scoot off to find the addressee. But it was a tricky business, driving along strange roads looking for units constantly on the move. Once he rode up to three soldiers sitting on a curb, hoping to get some directions. As he approached, one of the soldiers put on his helmet, and Elkin realized just in time that they were German.

To Gort, the communications breakdown was one more item in a growing catalogue of complaints against the French. Gamelin was a forlorn cipher. General Georges seemed in a daze. General Gaston Billotte, commanding the French First Army Group, was meant to coordinate but didn’t. Gort had received no written instructions from him since the campaign began.

The French troops along the coast and to the south seemed totally demoralized. Their horse-drawn artillery and transport cluttered the roads, causing huge traffic jams and angry exchanges. More than one confrontation was settled at pistol-point. Perhaps because he had gone along with the French so loyally for so long, Gort was now doubly disillusioned.

It’s hard to say when the idea of evacuation dawned on him, but the moment may well have come around midnight, May 18. This was when General Billotte finally paid his first visit to Gort’s Command Post, currently in Wahagnies, a small French town south of Lille. Normally a big, bluff, hearty man, Billotte seemed weary and deflated as he unfolded a map showing the latest French estimate of the situation. Nine panzer divisions had been identified sweeping west toward Amiens and Abbeville—with no French units blocking their way.

Billotte talked about taking countermeasures, but it was easy to see that his heart was not in it, and he left his hosts convinced that French resistance was collapsing. Since the enemy now blocked any retreat to the west or south, it appeared that the only alternative was to head north for the English Channel.

At 6:00 a.m., May 19, six of Gort’s senior officers met to begin planning the retreat. It turned out that the Deputy Chief of Staff, Brigadier Sir Oliver Leese, had already been doing some thinking; he had roughed out a scheme for the entire BEF to form a hollow square and move en masse to Dunkirk, the nearest French port.

But this assumed that the army was already surrounded, and it hadn’t come to that. What was needed was a general pulling back, and as a first step GHQ at Arras closed down, with part of the staff going to Boulogne on the coast and the rest to Hazebrouck, 33 miles closer to the sea. For the moment the Command Post would remain at Wahagnies.

At 11:30 the Chief of Staff, Lieutenant-General H. R. Pownall, telephoned the War Office in London and broke the news to the Director of Military Operations and Plans, Major-General R. H. Dewing. If the French could not stabilize the front south of the BEF, Pownall warned, Gort had decided to pull back toward Dunkirk.

In London it was a serenely beautiful Sunday, and the elegant Secretary of State for War, Anthony Eden, was about to join Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax for a quiet lunch, when he received an urgent call to see General Sir Edmund Ironside, Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Ironside, a hulking, heavy-footed man (inevitably nicknamed “Tiny”), was appalled by Gort’s proposed move to Dunkirk. It would be a trap, he declared.

Ironside’s consternation was evident when at 1:15 p.m. a new call came in from Pownall. Dewing, again on the London end of the line, suggested that Gort was too gloomy, that the French might not be as badly off as he feared. In any case, why not head for Boulogne or Calais, where air cover would be better, instead of Dunkirk? “It’s a case of the hare and the tortoise,” Pownall answered dryly, “and a very simple calculation will show that the hare would win the race.”

Dewing now put forward Ironside’s pet solution: the BEF should turn around and fight its way south to the Somme. It was a theory that totally overlooked the fact that most of the British Army was locked in combat with the German forces to the east and couldn’t possibly disengage, but Pownall didn’t belabor the point. Instead he soothingly reassured Dewing—again and again—that the Dunkirk move was “merely a project in the mind of the C-in-C” … that it was just an idea mentioned only to keep London informed of Headquarters’ thinking … that any decision depended on whether the French could restore their front. Since he was already on record as saying that the French were “melting away,” London was understandably not mollified.

Dewing took another tack: Did Pownall realize that evacuation through Dunkirk was impossible and that maintaining any force there was bound to be precarious? Yes, Pownall answered, he knew that, but heading south would be fatal. The conversation ended with Pownall feeling that Dewing was “singularly stupid and unhelpful,” and with the War Office convinced that Gort was about to bottle himself up.

Ironside urged that the War Cabinet be convened at once. Messages went out recalling Churchill and Chamberlain, who had each gone off for a quiet Sunday in the country, and at 4:30 p.m. the Cabinet assembled in what Churchill liked to call “the fish room” of the Admiralty—a chamber festooned with carved dolphins leaping playfully around.

Churchill agreed with Ironside completely: the only hope was to drive south and rejoin the French on the Somme. The others present fell in line. They decided that Ironside should personally go to Gort—this very night—and hand him the War Cabinet’s instructions.

At 9:00 p.m. Ironside caught a special train at Victoria Station. … At 2:00 a.m. on the 20th he was in Boulogne … and at 6:00 he came barging into Gort’s Command Post at Wahagnies. With the War Cabinet’s order backing him up, he told Gort that his only chance was to turn the army around and head south for Amiens. If Gort agreed, he’d issue the necessary orders at once.

But Gort didn’t agree. For some moments, he silently pondered the matter, then explained that the BEF was too tightly locked in combat with the Germans to the east. It simply couldn’t turn around and go the other way. If he tried, the enemy would immediately pounce on his rear and tear him to bits.

Then, asked Ironside, would Gort at least spare his two reserve divisions for a push south which might link up with a French force pushing north? Gort thought this might be possible, but first they must coordinate the effort with General Billotte, the overall commander for the area.

Taking Pownall in tow, Ironside now rushed down to French headquarters at Lens. He found Billotte with General Blanchard of the French First Army—both in a state of near collapse. Trembling and shouting at each other, neither had any plans at all. It was too much for the volcanic Ironside. Seizing Billotte by the buttons on his tunic, he literally tried to shake some spirit into the man.

Ultimately it was agreed that some French light mechanized units would join Gort’s two reserve divisions in an attack tomorrow south of Arras. They would then meet up with other French forces pushing north. A command change at the very highest level should help: the placid Gamelin had finally been replaced by General Maxime Weygand. He was 73, but said to be full of fire and spirit.

Ironside now returned to London, convinced that once the two forces joined, the way would finally be opened for the BEF to turn around and head south—still his pet solution for everything. Gort remained unconvinced, but he was a good soldier and would try.

At 2:00 p.m., May 21, a scratch force under Major-General H. E. Franklyn began moving south from Arras. If all went well, he should meet the French troops heading north in a couple of days at Cambrai. But all didn’t go well. Most of the infantry that Franklyn had on paper were tied up elsewhere. Instead of two divisions he had only two battalions. His 76 tanks were worn out and began to break down. The French support on his left was a day late. The new French armies supposedly moving up from the Somme never materialized. The Germans were tougher than expected. By the end of the day Franklyn’s attack had petered out.

This was no surprise to General Gort. He had never had any faith in a drive south. Midafternoon, even before Franklyn ran into trouble, Gort was giving his corps commanders a gloomy picture of the overall situation. Franklyn’s attack was brushed off as “a desperate remedy in an attempt to put heart in the French.”

Meanwhile, at another meeting of staff officers, Lieutenant-General Sir Douglas Brownrigg, Gort’s Adjutant-General, ordered rear GHQ to move from Boulogne to Dunkirk; medical personnel, transport troops, construction battalions, and other “useless mouths” were to head there at once. Later, at still another meeting, a set of neat, precise instructions was issued for the evacuation of these troops: “As vehicles arrive at various evacuation ports, drivers and lorries must be kept, and local transport staffs will have to make arrangements for parking. …”

But neither Gort nor anyone from his staff attended the most important conference held this hectic afternoon. The new Supreme Commander General Weygand had flown up from Paris and was now at Ypres, explaining his plan to the commanders of the trapped armies, including Leopold III, King of the Belgians. But Gort couldn’t be located. He had once again shifted his Command Post—this time to Prémesques, just west of Lille—and by the time he and Pownall arrived at Ypres, it was too late. Weygand had gone home.

This meant that Gort had to learn about Weygand’s plan secondhand from Billotte, which was unfortunate, since the British were to play a crucial role. The BEF was to spearhead still another drive south, linking up with a new French army group driving north. If the French and Belgians could take over part of his line, Gort agreed to contribute three divisions—but not before May 26.

He agreed, but that didn’t make him a true believer. Once back in Prémesques, Pownall immediately summoned the acting Operations Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Bridgeman. The purpose, it turned out, was not to get Bridgeman working on the drive south. Rather, he was to draw up a plan for retiring north … for withdrawing the whole BEF to the coast for evacuation.

Bridgeman worked on it all night. Starting with the premise that an evacuation could take place anywhere between Calais and Ostend, he had to find the stretch of coast that could most easily be reached and defended by the three corps that made up the BEF. Which had the best roads leading to it? Which had the best port facilities? Which offered the best chance for air cover? Which had the best terrain for defense? Were there canals that could be used to protect the flanks? Towns that could serve as strong-points? Dykes that could be opened to flood the land and stop those German tanks?

Poring over his maps, he gradually decided that the best bet was the 27-mile stretch of coast between Dunkirk and the Belgian town of Ostend. By the morning of May 22 he had covered every detail he could think of. Each corps was allocated the routes it would use, the stretch of coast it would hold.

This same morning Winston Churchill again flew to Paris, hoping to get a clearer picture of the military situation. Reynaud met him at the airport and whisked him to Grand Quartier Général at Vincennes, where the oriental rugs and Moroccan sentries lent an air of unreality that reminded Churchill’s military adviser, General Sir Hastings Ismay, of a scene from Beau Geste.

Here the Prime Minister met for the first time Maxime Weygand. Like everyone else, Churchill was impressed by the new commander’s energy and bounce (like an India rubber ball, Ismay decided). Best of all, his military thinking seemed to parallel Churchill’s own. As he understood it, the Weygand Plan in its latest refinement called for eight divisions from the BEF and the French First Army, with the Belgian cavalry on the right, to strike southwest the very next day. This force would “join hands” with the new French army group driving north from Amiens. That evening Churchill wired Gort his enthusiastic approval.

“The man’s mad,” was Pownall’s reaction when the wire reached Gort’s Command Post next morning, the 23rd. The military situation was worse than ever: in the west, Rundstedt’s Army Group A was closing in on Boulogne, Calais, and Arras; to the east, Bock’s Army Group B was pushing the lines back to the French frontier. Churchill, Ironside—all of them—clearly had no conception of the actual situation. Eight divisions couldn’t possibly disengage … the French First Army was a shambles … the Belgian cavalry was nonexistent—or seemed so.

Worse, Billotte had just been killed in a traffic accident, and he was the only man with firsthand knowledge of Weygand’s plans. His successor, General Blanchard, seemed a hopeless pedant, lacking any drive or power of command. With all coordination gone, troops from three different countries couldn’t conceivably be thrown into battle on a few hours’ notice.

London and Paris dreamed on. After the meeting with Churchill, Weygand issued a stirring “Operation Order No. 1.” In it he called on the northern armies to keep the Germans from reaching the sea—ignoring the fact that they were already there. On May 24 he announced that a newly formed French Seventh Army was advancing north and had already retaken Péronne, Albert, and Amiens. It was all imaginary.

Churchill too lived in a world of fantasy. On the 24th he fired a barrage of questions at General Ismay. Why couldn’t the British troops isolated at Calais simply knife through the German lines and join Gort? Or why didn’t Gort join them? Why were British tanks no match for German guns, but British guns no match for German tanks? The Prime Minister remained sold on the Weygand Plan, and a wire from Eden urged Gort to cooperate.

The General was doing his best. The attack south—his part of the Weygand Plan—was still on, although the BEF contribution had been cut from three to two divisions. The German pressure in the east left no other course. As an extra precaution, Colonel Bridgeman had also been told to bring his evacuation plan up to date, and the Colonel produced a “second edition” on the morning of the 24th. Finally, Gort asked London to send over the Vice-Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Lieutenant-General Sir John Dill. Until April, Dill had been Gort’s I Corps Commander. He was more likely to understand. If he could see for himself how bad things were, he might take back a little sanity to London.

“There is no blinking the seriousness of situation in Northern Area,” Dill reported an hour and ten minutes after his arrival on the morning of May 25. His wire went on to describe the latest German advances. He assured London that the Allied drive south was still on, but added, “In above circumstances, attack referred to above cannot be important affair.”

At this point General Blanchard appeared. In a rare moment of optimism he said the French could contribute two or three divisions and 200 tanks to the drive. Dill returned to London in a hopeful mood—he had more faith than Gort in French figures.

This was the last good news of the day. Starting around 7:00 a.m., reports began coming in from the east that the Belgian line was cracking just where it joined the British near Courtrai. If this happened, Bock’s Army Group B would soon link up with Rundstedt’s Army Group A to the west, and the BEF would be completely cut off from the sea.

There were no Belgian reserves. If anyone were to stop the Germans, it would have to be the British. Yet they too were spread dangerously thin. When Lieutenant-General Alan Brooke, commanding the endangered sector, appealed to headquarters, the most that Gort could spare was a brigade.

Not enough. The news grew worse. The usually reliable 12th Lancers reported that the enemy had punched through the Belgian line on the River Lys. A liaison officer from the 4th Division said that the Belgians on his front had stopped fighting completely; they were just sitting around in cafés.

By 5:00 p.m. Gort had heard enough. He retired alone to his office in Prémesques to ponder the most important decision of his professional career. All he had left were the two divisions he had promised for the attack south tomorrow. If he sent them north to plug the gap in the Belgian line, he would be ignoring his orders; he would be reneging on his understanding with Blanchard; he would be junking not only the Weygand Plan but the thinking of Churchill, Ironside, and all the rest; he would be committing the BEF to a course that could only lead to the coast and a risky evacuation.

On the other hand, if he sent these two divisions south as promised, he would be cut off from the coast and completely encircled. His only chance then would be a last-minute rescue by the French south of the Somme, and he had no faith in that.

His decision: send the troops north. At 6:00 p.m. he canceled the attack south and issued new orders: one of the divisions would join Brooke immediately; the other would follow shortly. Considering Gort’s utter lack of faith in the French, it was a decision that should have required perhaps less than the hour it took. The explanation lay in Gort’s character. Obedience, duty, loyalty to the team were the mainsprings of his life. To go off on his own this way was an awesome venture.

If anything were needed to steel his resolve, it came in the form of a leather wallet stuffed with papers and a small bootjack, which had been found in a German staff car shot up by a British patrol. Brooke brought the wallet with him when he arrived at the Command Post for a conference shortly after Gort made his big decision. While he and Gort conferred, the intelligence staff examined the documents in the wallet. These included plans for a major attack at Ypres—confirming the wisdom of Gort’s decision to call off the drive south and shift the troops north.

There was only one worry. Could the papers be a “plant”? No, Brooke decided, the bootjack meant they were genuine. Not even Hitler’s brightest intelligence agents would have thought of that touch. Far more likely, the wallet belonged to some real staff officer whose boots were too tight.

Gort’s decision might not have been so difficult had he known that London was also going through some soul searching. Dill had returned, and his assessment finally convinced the War Office that Gort’s plight was truly desperate. Reports from liaison officers indicated that the French along the Somme couldn’t possibly help; the new armies were just beginning to assemble. Later that evening the three service ministers and their chiefs of staff met, and at 4:10 a.m., May 26, War Secretary Eden telegraphed Gort that he now faced a situation in which the safety of the BEF must come first.

In such conditions only course open to you may be to fight your way back to west where all beaches and ports east of Gravelines will be used for embarkation. Navy would provide fleet of ships and small boats and RAF would give full support. … Prime Minister is seeing M. Reynaud tomorrow afternoon when whole situation will be clarified, including attitude of French to the possible move. In meantime it is obvious that you should not discuss the possibility of the move with French or Belgians.

Gort didn’t need to be told. When he received Eden’s telegram he had just returned from a morning meeting with General Blanchard. There he reviewed his decision to cancel the attack south; he won French approval for a joint withdrawal north; he worked out with Blanchard the lines of retreat, a timetable, a new defense line along the River Lys—but never said a word about evacuation. In fact, as Blanchard saw things, there would be no further retreat. The Lys would be a new defense line covering Dunkirk, giving the Allies a permanent foothold in Flanders.

For Gort, Dunkirk was no foothold; it was a springboard for getting the BEF home. His views were confirmed by a new wire from Eden that arrived late in the afternoon. It declared that there was “no course open to you but to fall back upon the coast. … You are now authorized to operate towards the coast forthwith in conjunction with French and Belgian armies.”

So evacuation it was to be, but now a new question arose: Could they evacuate? By May 26 the BEF and the French First Army were squeezed into a long, narrow corridor running inland from the sea—60 miles deep and only 15 to 25 miles wide. Most of the British were concentrated around Lille, 43 miles from Dunkirk; the French were still farther south.

On the eastern side of the corridor the trapped Allied forces faced Bock’s massive Army Group B; on the western side they faced the tanks and motorized divisions of Rundstedt’s Army Group A. His panzers had reached Bourbourg, only ten miles west of Dunkirk. It seemed almost a mathematical certainty that the Germans would get there first.

“Nothing but a miracle can save the BEF now,” General Brooke noted in his diary as the pocket took shape on May 23.

“We shall have lost practically all our trained soldiers by the next few days—unless a miracle appears to help us,” General Ironside wrote on the 25th.

“I must not conceal from you,” Gort wired Anthony Eden on the 26th, “that a great part of the BEF and its equipment will inevitably be lost even in the best circumstances.”

Winston Churchill thought that only 20,000 or 30,000 men might be rescued. But the Prime Minister also had a streak of pugnacious optimism. In happier days he and Eden had once met at Cannes and won at roulette by playing No. 17. Now, as the War Cabinet met on one particularly grim occasion, he suddenly turned to Eden and observed, “About time No. 17 turned up, isn’t it?”

* This book uses the geographical names that were most common at the time. Today the River Escaut is generally known as the Scheldt; the town of La Panne has become De Panne.

2

No. 17 Turns Up

THE MEN OF THE 1st and 2nd Panzer Divisions would have been the first to agree with the British estimates—only a miracle could save the BEF. They had reached Abbeville so quickly that the bewildered French civilians in the villages along the way thought that these blond, dusty warriors must be Dutch or English. So quickly that OKW, the German high command, hadn’t planned what to do next—head south for the Seine and Paris, or north for the Allied armies trapped in Flanders.

North was the decision. At 8:00 a.m., May 22, OKW flashed the code words, “Abmarsch Nord.” The tanks and motorized infantry of Gerd von Rundstedt’s Army Group A were once again on the march.

The 1st and 2nd Panzer Divisions, soon to be joined by the 10th, formed the left wing of the advance. Together, they made up General Heinz Guderian’s XIX Corps, and their mission was in keeping with Guderian’s reputation as Germany’s greatest expert in tank warfare. They were to seize the Channel ports, sealing off any chance of Allied escape. The 2nd Panzer would head for Boulogne; the 10th for Calais; and the 1st for Dunkirk—farthest away but the busiest and most important of the three ports. On this first day they covered 40 miles.

At 10:50 a.m. on the 23rd General Lieutenant Friedrich Kirchner’s 1st Division tanks started out from the old fortified town of Desvres. Dunkirk lay 38 miles to the northeast. The way things were going, they should be there tomorrow, or the next day.

By noon the tanks were in Rinxent—33 miles to go. At 1:15 they reached Guînes—only 25 more miles. Around 6:00 they rumbled into Les Attaques—now the distance was down to 20 miles.

Here they had to cross the Calais–Saint-Omer canal, and anticipating that the Allies had blown the bridge, General Kirchner ordered up a company of engineers. They weren’t needed. Someone had forgotten, and the bridge was still intact. The tanks rolled across … and on into the Flanders evening, now bearing east.

At 8:00 p.m. Kirchner’s advance units reached the Aa Canal—at its mouth, only twelve miles from Dunkirk. The Aa formed a crucial part of the “Canal Line” the British were trying to set up to guard their right flank, but few troops had yet arrived. Around midnight the 1st Panzer stormed across, establishing a bridgehead at Saint Pierre-Brouck. By the morning of the 24th three more bridgeheads were in hand, and one battle group had pushed on to the outskirts of Bourbourg—just ten miles from Dunkirk.

Spirits were sky-high. Prisoners poured in, and the spoils of war piled up. An elated entry in the division’s war diary observed, “It’s easier to take prisoners and booty than to get rid of them!”

Higher up there was less elation. The Panzer Group commander General Ewald von Kleist fretted about tank losses—there was no chance for maintenance, and he estimated that he was down to 50% of his strength. The Fourth Army commander General Colonel Guenther Hans von Kluge felt that the tanks were getting too far ahead of their supporting troops. Everybody was worried about the thin, exposed flanks; and the faster and further they marched, the more exposed they became. The British sortie from Arras had been repulsed, but it caused a scare.

No one could understand why the Allies didn’t keep attacking these flanks. To commanders brought up on World War I—where successes were measured in yards rather than scores of miles—it was incomprehensible. Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill had very little in common, but in this respect they were as one. Neither appreciated the paralyzing effect of the new tactics developed by Guderian and his disciples.

It was the same at army group and army levels. At 4:40 p.m. on the 23rd, as the 1st Panzer Division rolled unchecked toward Dunkirk, the Fourth Army commander General von Kluge phoned General von Rundstedt at Army Group A headquarters in Charleville. Kluge, an old-school artilleryman, voiced his fears that the tanks had gotten too far ahead; “the troops would welcome an opportunity to close up tomorrow.” Rundstedt agreed, and the word was passed down the line. The panzers would halt on the 24th, but no one regarded the pause as more than a temporary measure—a chance to catch their breath.

From a mobile headquarters train, hidden in a forest near the Franco-German border, General Field Marshal Hermann Göring also followed the dash of the panzers with mounting concern. But his worries had little to do with exposed flanks or mechanical breakdowns. Göring, an exceptionally vainglorious man, was Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, and he was worried that these dramatic tactics were robbing his air force of its proper share in the coming victory.

On the afternoon of May 23 he was working at a big oak table that had been set up beside his train, when an aide arrived with the latest reports on the panzers’ exploits. It looked as though Dunkirk and the whole coast might be taken in a couple of days. Slamming his fist on the table, Göring bellowed, “This is a wonderful opportunity for the Luftwaffe! I must speak to the Fuehrer at once. Get me a line!”

A call was immediately put through to Hitler at his forest headquarters near the village of Münstereifel in northwestern Germany. Göring poured out his case: This was the moment to turn the Luftwaffe loose. If the Fuehrer would order the army to stand back and give him room, he guaranteed his planes would wipe out the enemy alone. … It would be a cheap victory, and the credit would go to the air arm, associated with the new Reich of National Socialism, rather than to the army generals and old-line Prussian aristocrats.

“There goes Göring, shooting off his big mouth again,” remarked General Major Alfred Jodl, Chief of Operations at OKW, who was one of several staff officers hovering around Hitler during the call.

Actually, Göring knew his man very well. He struck all the right chords. And his arguments found Hitler in a most receptive mood. For days the Fuehrer had been growing ever more nervous about the safety of his armor. At OKW, Generals Keitel and Jodl had been warning him that Flanders was not good tank country, and there was always the haunting memory of 1914, when the French, apparently beaten, staged “the miracle of the Marne.”

The shadow of World War I hung over him in another way too: France was the real enemy; Paris the real target. The great French city had dangled just out of reach for four years last time—it must not happen again. Faced with the choice of using his tanks to throw nine shattered British divisions into the sea, or saving them for 65 fresh French divisions blocking the road to Paris and the south, who wouldn’t go for Göring’s easy way out?

In this state of mind, Hitler flew down to Charleville the following morning, May 24, to consult with General von Rundstedt. It was a most satisfying meeting. The conservative Rundstedt explained he had stopped the panzers so the rest could catch up, and went on to suggest the next steps to take. The infantry should continue attacking east of Arras, but the panzers should hold fast on the Aa Canal Line. Here they could simply gather in the BEF as it was driven back by Army Group B, pushing from the other side of the pocket.

It was a plan that fitted Hitler’s own thinking exactly. He immediately approved, emphasizing that the tanks must be saved for future operations. In addition, he observed, any further narrowing of the pocket would only interfere with Göring’s bombers—a consideration that would have amazed the Stuka pilots, who prided themselves on their precision bombing.

At 12:41 p.m. new orders went out, backed by the Fuehrer’s own authority. They not only confirmed Rundstedt’s “halt order” of the previous day; they made it more explicit. The General had not specified any particular line to stop on, and some panzer commanders were already sneaking forward a few extra miles. Hitler corrected this oversight by spelling out exactly where the tanks were to hold:

the forces advancing to the northwest of Arras are not to go beyond the general line Lens–Béthune–Aire–St. Omer–Gravelines. On the west wing, all mobile units are to close up and let the enemy throw himself against the above-mentioned favorable defensive line.

“We were utterly speechless,” Heinz Guderian later declared, recalling the effect the halt order had on his tank commanders and crews. By now four panzer and two motorized infantry divisions had arrived at the Aa … six bridgeheads had been planted on the other side … the advanced patrols were meeting little opposition … just over the horizon lay Dunkirk. Colonel Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma, a staff officer attached to one of the most forward units, could even make out the massive square belfry of the Church of Saint Eloi. Why stop now?

General Colonel Walther von Brauchitsch, Chief of OKH—the Army’s high command—wondered about the same thing. He didn’t even hear of the order till midafternoon. It seemed an incredible step, and even more incredible to take it without consulting the Army’s top command. Summoned to Hitler’s headquarters that evening, he was prepared to argue his case.

He never had a chance. He got a chewing out instead. Hitler had learned that Brauchitsch had ordered the Fourth Army to be transferred from Army Group A to Army Group B, to put the final phase of the battle under one field command. The Fuehrer felt this was a mistake and was outraged that Brauchitsch had done it without consulting him first.

Ranting at the unfortunate General, he canceled the transfer and reconfirmed the halt order. At 8:20 p.m. Brauchitsch returned to OKH angry and humiliated. His Chief of Staff General Franz Halder was in an even worse mood. For the first time in anybody’s memory he was nearly an hour late for the OKH evening conference, and the intelligence officer Colonel Liss had never seen him in such a rage. He broke the news of the halt order, storming, “The General Staff is not guilty!”

Nor was he ready to take it lying down. After the meeting, when he had cooled off a little, he recruited his operations officer Colonel von Greiffenberg, and the two of them tried to figure out some way to get around the order. They mustn’t be too obvious, but the OKH—the normal source of all army orders—did at least give them a pipeline. Shortly after midnight they had their scheme ready: OKH issued new instructions supplementing the halt order and permitting (but not ordering) Army Group A to advance beyond the Canal Line. Under the normal chain of command, Rundstedt would pass the order on to Fourth Army, which would pass it on to Guderian’s XIX Corps, and “Fast Heinz” would get the hint.

But the normal chain of command didn’t function. The cautious Rundstedt didn’t pass along the new orders, pointing out that Hitler had delegated to him the decision on how operations were to be conducted, and he still didn’t think it was safe to lift the halt order. Besides, said Rundstedt, there wasn’t time to alert the Luftwaffe to adjust its morning targets.

Rundstedt was, of course, under OKH, and in the annals of the German Army it was unheard of for an army group commander to ignore an OKH order, but here both Halder’s and Brauchitsch’s hands were tied. Their only recourse was to run to Hitler, and everyone knew how he felt.

Nevertheless, on the morning of May 25 the two Generals went back to the Fuehrer for one more try. Prolonging the halt order, Brauchitsch argued, meant nothing less than risking certain victory. As the campaign had been planned, Army Group A was the hammer and B the anvil; now the hammer was being stopped in midair. Then Halder added his bit. Playing on the Fuehrer’s sense of history, he showed how OKH’s original plan would lead to “a little Cannae.”

Hitler would have none of it. The tanks must be saved for the future, and in the course of the discussion a new factor arose: he didn’t want the climax of the campaign to be fought on Flemish soil. He hoped to encourage a separatist movement there, and too much destruction wrought by the German war machine might be bad politics. The best way to avoid this was for Army Group B to push the British back into France.

As Brauchitsch and Halder sulked back to OKH empty-handed, others were trying to achieve the same goal by pulling strings. General von Kleist had initially favored the halt order, but no longer. During the morning of the 25th he called his good friend General Major Wolfram von Richthofen, commanding Fliegerkorps VIII, who called his good friend General Major Hans Jeschonnek, Göring’s Chief of Staff. Could he get Göring to ask Hitler to lift the halt order? Jeschonnek wasn’t about to touch such a hot potato, and the effort fell through.

During the day separate appeals were made by the Fourth Army commander, General von Kluge, by General Albert Kesselring of the 2nd Air Fleet, even by General von Bock, commanding Army Group B—all turned down cold.

By the evening of the 25th there were doubts even at OKW, normally a faithful echo of the Fuehrer’s voice. Colonel Lieutenant Bernard von Lossberg, a young staff officer, buttonholed General Jodl and reminded him of the old German military maxim, Never let up on a defeated enemy. Jodl mildly brushed aside the advice, explaining, “The war is won; all that is left is to finish it. It’s not worth sacrificing a single tank, if we can do it more cheaply by using the Luftwaffe.”

Lossberg had no better luck with the Chief of OKW, General Keitel, whom he found outside headquarters, sitting on a grassy bank enjoying a cigar. Keitel said he found it easy to agree with the halt order. He knew Flanders from World War I days: the ground was marshy and tanks could easily get stuck. Let Göring do the job alone.

By the 26th even Rundstedt had doubts about the order. The Luftwaffe hadn’t lived up to Göring’s promises, and Bock’s Army Group B, advancing from the east, was bogged down. More behind-the-scenes telephone calls followed: Colonel Lieutenant von Tresckow, Army Group A operations staff, phoned his close friend Colonel Schmundt, Hitler’s chief adjutant, and urged that something be done to get the tanks moving again.

The first break came around noon. OKW phoned Halder that the Fuehrer would now allow the panzers and motorized infantry to move within artillery range of Dunkirk “in order to cut off, from the land side, the continuous flow of shipping (evacuations and arrivals).”

Another order followed at 1:30, lifting the halt order completely. At OKH fresh objectives were set, new orders cut and transmitted by 3:30. Army Group A couldn’t raise Fourth Army headquarters either by radio or telephone; so at 4:15 a special courier plane carried the good news to General von Kluge: Guderian’s tanks could roll again.

The panzer crews were alerted; fuel tanks topped off; ammunition loaded; and the columns reassembled. All this took sixteen more hours, and it wasn’t until the predawn hours of May 27 that XIX Corps finally resumed its advance.

For the Wehrmacht, three full days had been lost. For Churchill, the roulette player, No. 17 had at last come up—a lucky and totally unexpected windfall. Whether the British would be able to profit by this stroke of good fortune would largely depend on how General Gort used the time.

Curiously, neither Gort nor any of his staff attached much significance to the halt order, although it was broadcast in clear and picked up by British eavesdroppers. General Pownall was briefly elated (“Can this be the turn of the tide?” he asked his diary), but he soon turned his mind to other things. There was much to worry about: Boulogne had probably fallen; Calais was cut off; the Belgians were crumbling; Weygand and London were still clamoring for a counterattack; the list was endless.

The situation along the Canal Line was particularly desperate. By May 22 the reliable 6th Green Howards were helping the French hold Gravelines, but to the south there was practically nothing. Only 10,000 men covered a 50-mile front, and these were mostly the cooks, drivers, and company clerks who made up the various scratch units Gort had pulled together.

There was one consolation. As the eastern wall of the corridor was pushed back by Bock’s massed infantry, it became easier to shift troops to bolster the west. On the evening of the 23rd Gort began transferring three of his seven eastern divisions.

When the 2nd Division moved on the night of May 24-25, the 2nd Dorsets were trucked westward for 25 miles to Festubert, a sleepy village near the La Bassée Canal. All was quiet as 2nd Lieutenant I.F.R. Ramsay’s C Company settled into their billets. The old lady who lived next door even dropped by to see how the boys were getting along. It was rumored that the battalion had been withdrawn for a rest.

To their left and right other 2nd Division units were digging in. They too found everything quiet, although the 1st Cameron Highlanders uneasily noted a concentration of enemy tanks and transport building up across the canal. To the north, the 44th and 48th Divisions also moved in; while the French 60th Division took over the area around the coast. Here and there additional corps and headquarter units, some spare artillerymen, a Belgian machine-gun company, a few French tanks fattened up the defense.

Even so, there weren’t enough troops to man the whole Canal Line. Gort hoped to minimize the shortage by concentrating his men in towns and villages just east of the canal. These strong-points—or “stops” as he called them—were to hold up the German tanks as long as possible.

On the evening of May 25 the 2nd Gloucesters arrived in Cassel, conspicuous because it sat on the only hill for miles around. It was a good position, but 2nd Lieutenant Julian Fane still felt badly as he turned the local people out of their houses and began punching holes in the walls for his guns. Life began looking up again when a foraging party brought back a case of Moët & Chandon, ten bottles of brandy, and assorted liqueurs.

By the afternoon of May 26—about the time Hitler finally lifted the halt order—tough, seasoned troops held all the key towns on the western side of the escape corridor. On the eastern side two fresh divisions, switched from the canceled counterattack south, joined the four already in place; while all the way south, the French First Army blocked the enemy advance at Lille.

Within this long, narrow passageway the rest of the trapped forces—over 150,000 troops—swarmed north toward the coast. There were no longer separate retreats from the east and from the west. The two streams merged into one swirling, turbulent river of men.

And all the while the Stukas continued their assault. “Stand up to them. Shoot at them with a Bren gun from the shoulder. Take them like a high pheasant. …” The advice came from Brigadier Beckwith-Smith, a throwback to the glory days of the Empire. But even those who understood what he was talking about found it hard to grasp the analogy. The Stukas had an implacable ferocity all their own.

No target seemed too small. Corporal Bob Hadnett, a dispatch rider with the 48th Division, was riding his motorcycle along an exposed stretch of road when a single Stuka spotted him. Machine guns blazing, it made two passes, but missed both times as Hadnett weaved wildly from side to side on the road. Still after him, the Stuka climbed, peeled off, and dived straight at him. Again it missed, and this time the pilot misjudged his dive. He tried to pull out too late and plunged into the road just ahead, exploding in a ball of fire. Hadnett turned off the road into a field, smoked a cigarette, and carried on.

Most of the men showed less nonchalance. The drivers of the 2nd Ordnance Field Park felt compelled to run for cover when attacked, but their officer felt that only attracted attention. “The next time one of you bastards runs,” he promised, “I will shoot him down.” After that the men lay flat, but Lance Corporal Reginald Lockerby discovered a new kind of fear. As the machine-gun bullets whacked into the earth around him, he felt an almost irresistible urge to draw his legs up under his body. He was always sure they would be cut off.

Numbed by the Stuka attacks, exhausted from lack of sleep, the men lost all sense of time and place. The days merged with one another. The towns ceased to have any identity of their own. Poperinge was remembered for its tangle of trolley wires; Armentières for the cats that howled all night. Carvin was the place where 60 convent girls, killed by a bomb, lay in neat rows in the moonlight. Tournai was the spot where the traveling circus got hit—a nightmare of wounded elephants and four plunging white horses dragging an unconscious girl rider.

Few of the men knew where they were going. Private Bill Warner, headquarters clerk in the 60th Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment, lost his unit in the dark, and had absolutely no destination in mind. He just wandered along, following the crowd, doing what everybody else did. Private Bob Stephens, 2nd Searchlight Battalion, was one of seven men in a lorry that somehow got separated from the rest of the battalion. They simply drove along without the vaguest idea where they were heading. Trying to find which way to go, they would occasionally get out and examine tire tracks in the dust, like Indian fighters in the old West.

Often the “brass” was almost as uninformed. Major Charles Richardson, Deputy Assistant Quartermaster General, 4th Division, gradually became aware that they were moving toward the coast, but evacuation never occurred to him. He vaguely thought that a bridgehead might be established somewhere, letting the Allies keep a foothold on the Continent.

There was no such thinking at General Gort’s headquarters in Prémesques. When Colonel Bridgeman, the acting Operations Officer, reported for duty early on the morning of May 26, General Pownall told him that evacuation was definite.

This was no surprise to Bridgeman. He had been developing his evacuation plan off and on for five days in the little operations office he shared with Colonel Philip Gregson-Ellis. The rest of his time he concentrated on shoring up the western wall of the corridor, while Gregson-Ellis took care of the east. In spare moments they would argue over who had the worst job: Gregson-Ellis, with the Belgians collapsing, or Bridgeman, with virtually no idea where his troops were or what they were good for.

But today would be no office day. With communications so bad, Bridgeman decided to tour the western sector personally to get a better idea of what needed to be done. It was a long day, which included a visit to Bastion 32, the reinforced concrete bunker that served as French headquarters at Dunkirk. Here he met General Marie B. A. Fagalde, commanding the French troops along the Aa Canal. He had once been a military attaché in London and spoke good English. It was a promising start: the Allies could at least communicate.

Near Bergues, a walled medieval town five miles south of Dunkirk, Bridgeman took a break for lunch. Climbing to the top of an artificial mound—the only rise in the area—he sat alone with his driver, munching his rations and contemplating the problem of defending this flat countryside. The south seemed the best tank country—fewer canals to cross—and he decided that the panzers would probably come that way. If so, Cassel was the main town that lay in their path. It was the place that must be held, while the BEF scrambled up the corridor to Dunkirk.

Bridgeman got back to Prémesques late that evening to learn he had a new job. He was now Operations Officer for Lieutenant-General Sir Ronald Adam, who had just been appointed to command the Dunkirk perimeter. So far both the perimeter and the troops holding it existed only on paper, but Bridgeman himself had drawn up the defense plans. Now he would have a chance to see how they worked. If practical, both Dunkirk and the area around it might be held long enough to get the BEF to the coast. After that, it would be the Navy’s job to get them home.

But did the Navy, or anyone in London, understand the size of the job? So far, Gort had little reason to feel that they did. The trumpet blasts from Churchill, the fruitless telephone talks with the War Office, Ironside’s visit on the 20th, even Dill’s visit on the 25th—none were very reassuring. Normally the most tactful of men, Dill actually left the impression that London felt the BEF wasn’t trying hard enough. Now Gort had a message that indicated to him that the Navy was assigning only four destroyers to the evacuation.

That afternoon—the 26th—he summoned RAF Group Captain Victor Goddard to the Command Post at Prémesques. Normally Goddard was Gort’s Air Adviser, but there were no longer any air operations to advise him on. In fact, there was only one RAF plane left in northern France. It was an Ensign transport that had brought in a special consignment of antitank shells. As it approached, it had been shot down by trigger-happy British gunners but fortunately crash-landed in a potato field just where the ammunition was needed.

Learning that the plane could be repaired, Gort asked Goddard to catch a ride in it to London that night and attend the meeting of the Chiefs of Staff the following morning as Gort’s personal representative. The Navy must be told that somehow a much bigger effort was needed. It would be improper for Goddard to speak directly to anybody at the Admiralty, and useless to speak to Ironside alone, but to speak to Ironside in the presence of the Chief of Naval Staff, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound, might accomplish something.

“It must be done,” stressed Gort, “in the presence of Dudley Pound. He must be there. He certainly will be in the Chiefs-of-Staff daily meeting, and he must be confronted with the task. You can’t tell the Admiral what to do, but you can tell Ironside what I want him to get the Admiral to do!”

Goddard quickly packed his kit and at 11:30 p.m. arrived in a staff car at the potato field where the crippled plane had landed. With him were five other airmen—the last of the RAF staff attached to Gort’s headquarters. They too were no longer needed. A brief search in the dark, and the plane was found. The crew were still working on it, but the pilot said he should be ready in an hour. The field was long enough—400 yards—all he needed were lights to guide him down the “runway.” The RAF car’s headlights would do nicely.

At 1:00 a.m. they were off, roaring down the field, barely clearing the hedges, leaving behind the car, abandoned with motor running and lights still burning. It was a brand new Chevrolet, and Goddard mused about the wastefulness of war.

By 3:00 they were over the Channel … 4:30, and they touched down briefly at Mansion … 7:00, and they were at Hendon, outside London. A staff car whisked Goddard into town, and it was about 8:10 when he arrived at Whitehall.

Thanks to a combination of lucky meetings with old friends, some persuasive talk, and the aura that went with an officer “just back from the front,” shortly after 9:00 Goddard was escorted down to the basement, ushered through a heavily guarded door marked CHIEFS OF STAFF ONLY, and into a large, rectangular, windowless room.

There they all were, the war leaders of the British Empire, seated at a number of tables arranged to form a hollow square. Here and there papers lay scattered over the dark blue tablecloth. The only unexpected twist; Ironside wasn’t there. He had just been replaced as Chief of the Imperial General Staff by General Dill.

Admiral Pound was presiding, and he was discussing the limited number of destroyers that could be used at Dunkirk—the very point that had so upset Gort. Unfortunately Dill had already contributed whatever he had to say, and there was no chance to give him the message from Gort that Pound was meant to hear. For a relatively junior RAF officer to appeal directly to the Chief of Naval Staff was, as Goddard well knew, an unpardonable breach of protocol.

Pound finished, asking, “Any more on that?” Only silence as Goddard watched his opportunity slip away, his mission turn into dismal failure. “Well, then,” said Pound, “we’ll go on to the next item.”

Suddenly Goddard heard his own voice speaking, directly to the Admiral of the Fleet: “I have been sent by Lord Gort to say that the provision made is not nearly enough. …” Pound gave him a startled look; the room rustled; and all eyes swung to him. Across the table Sir Richard Peirse, the Vice-Chief of Air Staff, sat bolt upright, aghast.

It was too late to stop now. Goddard went on and on, detailing the requirements of the hour, going far beyond anything Gort had told him to say. “You must send not only Channel packets, but pleasure steamers, coasters, fishing boats, lifeboats, yachts, motorboats, everything that can cross the Channel!”

He was repeating himself now: “Everything that can cross the Channel must be sent … everything … even rowing boats!”

At this point Peirse got up from his seat, slipped over, and whispered, “You are a bit overwrought. You must get up and leave here, now.”

Goddard knew that all too well. He rose, made a slight bow in Pound’s direction, and managed to leave the room with a reasonable degree of composure. But he felt utterly ashamed of his outburst, coupled with dejection at his failure to win any kind of sympathy or response.

Perhaps he would not have felt so badly had he known that at this very moment other men were acting along the lines he had proposed. They were men of the sea—Britain’s element—but they were not Chiefs of Staff, or famous admirals, or even sailors on ships. They were working at desks all over southern England, and it was their unannounced, unpublicized intention to confound the gloomy predictions of the warriors and statesmen.

3

“Operation Dynamo”

WHEN W. STANLEY BERRY reported to the London offices of Admiral Sir Lionel Preston on the morning of May 17, he didn’t know quite what to expect. A 43-year-old government clerk, he had just been engaged as the Admiral’s assistant secretary, and this was his first day on the job.

Admiral Preston was Director of the Navy’s Small Vessels Pool, a tiny blob on the organization chart that supplied and maintained harbor craft at various naval bases. Useful, but hardly glamorous. It was not, in fact, prestigious enough to be located in the Admiralty building itself, but rather in space leased in the adjoining Glen Mills bank block. Berry had no reason to suppose that he faced anything more than mundane office work.

He was in for a surprise. Six sacks of mail were waiting to be opened and sorted. These were the first answers to a BBC broadcast May 14 calling on “all owners of self-propelled pleasure craft between 30 and 100 feet in length to send all particulars to the Admiralty within 14 days. …” The call had been prompted not by events in Flanders but by the magnetic mine threat. To counter this, the country’s boatyards were absorbed in turning out wooden minesweepers. Finding its normal sources dried up, the Small Vessels Pool was requisitioning private yachts and power boats to meet its own expanding needs.

Stanley Berry dived into the job of processing the mountain of replies to the BBC announcement. He and the Admiral’s Secretary, Paymaster Lieutenant-Commander Harry Garrett, sorted them out by both type of vessel and home port. Garrett, a Newfoundlander, found himself getting a crash education in British geography.

This same day Winston Churchill for the first time began thinking of the possibility of evacuation. No one was more offensive-minded than Churchill—nobody prodded Gort harder—but every contingency had to be faced, and his visit to Paris on the 16th was a sobering experience. Now he asked Neville Chamberlain, former Prime Minister and currently Lord President of the Privy Council, to study “the problems which would arise if it were necessary to withdraw the BEF from France. …”

At a lower level, other men were taking more concrete measures. On May 19 General Riddell-Webster presided over a meeting at the War Office, taking up for the first time the possibility of evacuation. There was no feeling of urgency, and a representative from the Ministry of Shipping felt that there was plenty of time to round up any vessels that might be needed.

Calais, Boulogne, and Dunkirk would all be used, the meeting decided. The basic plan had three phases: starting on the 20th, “useless mouths” would be shipped home at a rate of 2,000 a day; next, beginning on the 22nd, some 15,000 base personnel would leave; finally, there was just possibly “the hazardous evacuation of very large forces,” but this was considered so unlikely that the conferees did not waste their time on it.

The Admiralty put Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay in charge of the operation. He was Vice-Admiral, Dover—the man on the spot—the logical man in the logical place. He had 36 vessels, mostly cross-Channel ferries, to work with.

Next day, the 20th, when Ramsay called a new meeting at Dover, events had changed everything. The panzers were pointing for the coast … the BEF was almost trapped … Gort himself was talking evacuation. “The hazardous evacuation of very large forces” no longer sat at the bottom of the agenda; now “the emergency evacuation across the Channel of very large forces” stood at the top.

The situation was still worse when the same group met on the 21st, this time in London again. Another plan was hammered out; more neat, precise figures. Ten thousand men would be lifted every 24 hours from each of the three ports—still Boulogne, Calais, and Dunkirk. The ships would work the ports in pairs, no more than two ships at a time in any of the three harbors. To do the job, Ramsay was now allotted 30 cross-Channel ferries, twelve steam drifters, and six coastal cargo ships—a bit better than yesterday.

By the following day, the 22nd, everything had changed again. Now the panzers were attacking Boulogne and Calais; only Dunkirk was left. There would be no more of these meticulous plans; no more general meetings of all concerned. Ramsay, an immensely practical man, realized that the battlefront was changing faster than meetings could be held. By now everybody knew what had to be done anyhow; the important thing was to be quick and flexible. Normal channels, standard operating procedures, and other forms of red tape were jettisoned. Improvisation became the order of the day; the telephone came into its own.

Ramsay himself was at his best in this kind of environment. He was a superb organizer and liked to run his own show. This quality had nearly cost him his career in 1935 when, as Chief of Staff to Admiral Sir Roger Backhouse, commanding the Home Fleet, he felt the Admiral had not given him enough responsibility. Always outspoken, he asked to be relieved and ended up on the Retired List. He stayed on the shelf for three years, enjoying horses and a tweedy country life with his wife Mag and their three children.

Then, with the sudden expansion of the Navy on the eve of World War II, he had been called back into service and put in charge at Dover. He knew the area well, had been skipper of a destroyer in the old Dover Patrol during the First War. At first the new job had not been too taxing—mainly antisubmarine sweeps, mine-laying, and trying to work out ways to counter the enemy’s new magnetic mines. The German breakthrough changed all that—Dover was only twenty miles from the French coast, practically in the front lines.

His staff was small but good. Ramsay did not suffer fools gladly—never was the cliché more applicable—and his officers were expected to show initiative. He was good at delegating responsibility, and they were good at accepting it. His Flag Lieutenant James Stopford, for instance, waged a monumental single-handed battle to get a direct telephone connection with Boulogne, Calais, and Dunkirk. It would cost £500 a year, the Admiralty complained, but Stopford persisted and finally got his way. Now, with the BEF pinned against the French coast, this phone line was a priceless asset.

As Vice-Admiral, Dover, Ramsay lived and worked at Dover Castle, but his office these days was not part of the magnificent ramparts and keep that towered over the port. Rather it was under the Castle, buried in the famous chalk cliffs just east of the town. During the Napoleonic wars French prisoners had cut a labyrinth of connecting casemates in the soft chalk as part of England’s coastal defense. Now they were being used to meet the threat of a new, twentieth-century invasion.

An inconspicuous entrance within the castle walls led down a long, steep ramp, which in turn joined a honeycomb of passages. Down one corridor leading toward the sea, a visitor came to a large gallery, then several offices separated by plywood, and finally to the Admiral’s own office, with a balcony cut right into the face of the cliff.

It was not the sort of office normally associated with a vice-admiral. The floor was concrete, partly covered by a thin strip of threadbare carpet. A couple of framed charts were all that decorated the whitewashed walls. A desk, a few chairs, a conference table, and a cot in one corner completed the furnishings. But the room did have one amenity. The balcony made it the only place in the whole complex that had any daylight, except for a small window in the women’s “head.” Here the WRENS, as the distaff members of the Royal Navy were nicknamed, could stand on the “thunder-box” and enjoy a view of the Channel every bit as good as the Admiral’s.

By far the biggest room was the large gallery that had to be passed going to and from Ramsay’s office. Its main piece of furniture was a huge table covered with a green cloth. Here Ramsay’s staff gathered to organize the evacuation. A hard-driving naval captain named Michael Denny was in charge, presiding over a compact collection of sixteen men and seven telephones. During World War I this cavelike room had housed an auxiliary lighting system for the castle, and it became generally known as the “Dynamo Room.” By the same process of association, on May 22 the Admiralty designated the evacuation now being planned as “Operation Dynamo.”

The basic need was ships and men. It was clear that the 30 to 40 vessels originally allocated by the Admiralty wouldn’t be nearly enough. A closer estimate would be everything that could float. By now Ramsay had practically a blank check to draw whatever he needed; so the staff in the Dynamo Room went to work on their phones—calls to the Ministry of Shipping to collect available vessels along the east and south coasts … calls to The Nore Command for more destroyers … calls to the Southern Railway for special trains … calls to the Admiralty for tugs … medical supplies … ammunition … rations … engine spare parts … grassline rope … diesel fuel … blank IT124 forms … and, above all, calls for men.

It was a knock on the door at 4:00 a.m., May 23, that awakened Lieutenant T. G. Crick in his quarters at Chatham Naval Depot. A messenger brought instructions that Crick was to be ready for “an appointment at short notice”—nothing more. At 6:30, word came to report at once to the Barracks. On arrival Crick found that he was one of 30 officers required to go to Southampton and man some Dutch barges lying there. Why? They were to “run ammunition and stores to the BEF.”

These barges, it turned out, were broad, self-propelled craft of 200 to 500 tons, normally used to carry cargo on the network of canals and waterways that laced Holland. After the German invasion some 50 of them had escaped with their crews across the Channel and were now lying at Poole and in the Thames estuary.

Captain John Fisher, the salty Director of Coastal and Short Sea Shipping at the Ministry of Shipping, knew about these schuitjes, as the Dutch called them, in the normal course of his work. It occurred to him that with their shallow draught they would be ideal for working the beaches off Dunkirk. Forty of them were immediately requisitioned for “Dynamo.” The striped flag of the Netherlands came down; the Royal Navy’s white ensign went up. The Dutch crews marched off; British tars took their place. And with the change in flag and crew came a change in name. The British couldn’t possibly master a tongue-twister like schuitje; from now on these barges were invariably called “skoots.”

At the Ministry of Shipping the search for the right kind of tonnage went on. The burden of the work fell on Captain Fisher’s shop and on W. G. Hynard’s Sea Transport Department, which controlled all overseas shipping used by the military. In lining up additional ferries and personnel vessels, the problem wasn’t so difficult. The Department knew all the passenger carriers, had used them in getting the BEF to France.

But there weren’t enough ferries in all the British Isles to do the job. What other vessels might be used? What ships had the right draught, the right capacity, the right speed? The Department alerted sea transport officers in every port from Harwich on the North Sea to Weymouth on the Channel: survey local shipping … list all suitable vessels up to 1,000 tons.

Back at the Department’s offices on Berkeley Square, staff members Basil Bellamy and H. C. Riggs worked around the clock, napping on a cot in the office, grabbing an occasional bite at “The Two Chairmen” pub around the corner. Life became an endless chain of telephone calls as they checked out the possibilities. Would the drifter Fair Breeze do? How about the trawler Dhoon? The coaster Hythe? The eel boat Johanna? The hopper dredge Lady Southborough?

At this moment acting Second Mate John Tarry of the Lady Southborough had no idea that his ship was under such careful scrutiny. She looked like a vessel that was good for absolutely nothing except what she was doing—dredging the channel in Portsmouth harbor. There was no reason to suppose she would ever go to sea. She wasn’t even painted wartime gray. Her rust-streaked funnel still sported the red and yellow stripes of the Tilbury Dredging Company.

It was quite a jolt to Tarry when the company agent Anthony Summers came aboard one evening and called the nine-man crew together. There was trouble across the Channel, he explained, and the Lady Southborough was needed. Who would volunteer to go? Nobody knew what to expect, but to a man they volunteered.

All Portsmouth harbor was coming alive. Besides the Lady Southborough, four other Tilbury dredges were alerted. The Hayling Island ferries, Pickford’s fleet of small coasters, Navy patrol boats, the battleship Nelson’s launch—all bustled with activity, loading fuel and supplies.

Little ships would be especially important if it came to evacuation from the shore itself. The larger vessels couldn’t get close enough to the gently shelving Flemish beaches. During the past week Ramsay’s requirements for small boats had been widely (though quietly) circulated, yet at dawn on May 26 he still had only four Belgian passenger launches, several Contraband Control boats from Ramsgate, and a few Dover harbor craft. Early that morning Rear-Admiral Sir Tom Phillips, the Vice-Chief of Naval Staff, held a meeting at the Admiralty, trying to speed things up. Among those present was Admiral Preston of the Small Vessels Pool.

The meeting had broken up and Preston was already back at the shop when the Admiral’s assistant secretary, Stan Berry, reported for work that morning. It was Sunday; most of the staff were off. Berry was looking forward to a quiet day, but the duty officer, Lieutenant Berrie, offered an ominous greeting: “Thank God you’ve come. I wouldn’t be in your shoes for a pension!”

“Why?” asked Berry.

“I don’t know what’s up, but the Old Man is here.” Whatever it was, it must be serious. Peacetime customs die slowly, and admirals normally didn’t come to the office on Sunday.

Preston himself said nothing to clear up the mystery. He simply greeted Berry, asking where was the regular secretary, Commander Garrett? Berry explained that Garrett was off, but the arrangement was for him to call in every two hours.

“Tell him to report immediately.” And the Admiral ordered Berry to call in all the rest of the staff, too.

This was no easy matter. For instance, Lieutenant-Commander Pickering, in charge of drifters and trawlers, was in Brighton. When Berry tried to phone him, word came back that he had gone to the cinema. Which cinema? Nobody knew. So Berry had him paged at every cinema in town until he was finally located.

Messages were now flying all over England, breaking into the normal routine of ships and men. Surgeon-Lieutenant James Dow was having a very pleasant war on the minesweeper Gossamer, based on the Tyne. The hours were easy, shore leave generous, the local girls all attractive. Suddenly on May 25 an Admiralty signal intruded: “Raise steam with all despatch. Proceed to Harwich. Do not wait for liberty men, who will rejoin at Harwich.” The ship buzzed with rumors, but nobody really knew what was up.

At Liverpool the destroyer Somali had just docked after a battering in Norwegian waters. Sub-Lieutenant Peter Dickens was counting on a little break, but the Somali had barely tied up when he was handed an Admiralty message: report to Chatham Barracks immediately. That meant going to the other end of England—why?

Chatham itself was in turmoil—or as near to turmoil as a Royal Navy training base ever gets. Seaman G. F. Nixon was attending gunnery school when his battalion was ordered to fall in at 4:00 a.m. on the 26th. At 7:00 they left for Dover in busses, singing, “We’ll Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line.” No one had a clue as to what was going on.

Deep within the white cliffs of Dover the staff of the Dynamo Room worked on. “No bed for any of us last night and probably not for many nights. I’m so sleepy I can hardly keep my eyes open,” Admiral Ramsay wrote his wife Mag on the 23rd. As he worked in his office, he would scribble a line or so between visitors, then stuff the letter into his desk drawer as some new crisis arose. Mag, in return, kept up a flow of gingerbread, asparagus from the garden, and tender words of support.

“Days and nights are all one,” he wrote her on the 25th, and indeed the men in the Dynamo Room had lost all track of time. The usual measuring rods were gone. Buried deep in their chalk cliff, they had no chance to know whether it was day or night. They had no regular meals—just an occasional sandwich or mug of tea taken on the run. There was no pace to their work; they were going flat out all the time. There was no variety; only a feeling of unending crisis that finally numbed the senses.

The strange fleet of ferries, hoppers, dredges, barges, coasters, and skoots now converging on Dover raised a whole set of new problems. First, they would have to be moored somewhere. Sheerness, on the Thames estuary, gradually became the main collecting point where the smaller ships were sorted out and prepared for the sea. Ramsgate became the final assembly point, where fuel tanks would be topped off, supplies loaded, and convoys organized.

Problems were solved, only to spawn new problems equally pressing. Mechanics had to be found who understood balky engines that defied the Navy’s experience … coal had to be obtained for some of the ancient coasters … 1,000 charts were needed for skippers who rarely went to sea. Routes could be marked on them, but data on the beaches was vague at best. Responding to a call for help from the Dynamo Room, Colonel Sam Bassett—head of the Interservice Topographical Department—toured London’s travel agencies, collecting brochures that might describe the French beaches in some detail. There had been nine months of war since the last holiday tripper made that sort of request; the clerks must have thought he was crazy.

Arms were another problem. This peacetime fleet had to have some sort of protection, and the Lewis machine gun seemed the best bet. But there was no single depot that could supply all Ramsay’s needs. They had to be scrounged from here and there—11 from London … 10 from Glasgow … 1 from Cardiff. . . 7 from Newcastle … 105 altogether.

If the Dynamo Room was a scene of “organized chaos,” as one staff officer later recalled, the majestic cliffs successfully hid the fact from the rest of the world. Dover never looked lovelier than it did this 26th of May. The guns could be heard rumbling across the Channel—Boulogne was gone; Calais was falling—but it all seemed very far away to the crews of the vessels riding peacefully at anchor in the Downs.

On the minesweeper Medway Queen, a converted paddle steamer lying just off the cliffs, Chief Cook Thomas R. Russell leaned against the rail, shooting the breeze with his assistant, a young man he knew only as “Sec.” It was strange, they decided, that the whole flotilla was in port this morning—no one at all was out sweeping. Right after breakfast a launch had made the rounds, picked up the captain, first officer, and wireless man from every ship, and taken them to the flagship for some sort of palaver. Now a naval barge eased alongside the Medway Queen and delivered case after case of food—far more than her 48 men could possibly eat. “Enough grub has been put aboard us,” observed Sec, “to feed a ruddy army.”

The men trapped in Flanders knew little more than the crew of the Medway Queen. Later this day, the 26th, Major-General E. A. Osborne, commanding the 44th Division near Hazebrouck, would get a quiet briefing from Brigadier G. D. Watkins of III Corps headquarters, but those of less exalted rank had to depend on rumor. Reginald Newcomb, a chaplain with the 50th Division, had a crony in Intelligence who hinted darkly that the BEF would make for the coast and embark for home—“that is, if Jerry doesn’t get there first.” Rumor spread through the 1st Fife and Forfar Yeomanry that they were going back to the sea, where they would embark, land farther down the coast, and attack the Germans from the rear.

Orders, when they finally came, were usually by word of mouth. In the varied units of the Royal Army Service Corps, especially, there was not much to go on, and many of the RASC officers simply vanished. The men of the 4th Division Ammunition Supply Company were merely told, “Every man for himself; make for Dunkirk, and good luck!” The No. 1 Troop Carrying Company was instructed to “get as near Dunkirk as you can, destroy vehicles, and every man for himself.” And again, for the 573rd Field Squadron, Royal Engineers, the familiar words: “Every man for himself. Make for Dunkirk.”

Often the orders came almost without warning. It was shortly after dawn in a small Belgian village when Sergeant George Snelgar, attached to a transport company, was awakened by voices shouting, “Get on Parade!” He heard the sound of marching feet, and looking out the window of the café where he was billeted, he saw his unit marching off to the vehicle park. Catching up, he learned that the orders were to smash their cars and motorcycles and go to Dunkirk. They couldn’t miss it: just head for that column of smoke.

At midnight it was harder. Corporal Reginald Lockerby of the 2nd Ordnance Field Park was groping north in a truck when an officer stepped out in the road and waved him down. He was heading right for the German lines 500 yards away. When Lockerby asked for directions to Dunkirk, the officer pointed to a star hovering above the horizon and said, “Just follow that star.” Others were guided by the gun flashes that lit up the night sky. By now they were on almost all sides. There was only one little gap to the north that remained black. That was Dunkirk.

Major Peter Hill, a transport officer, was one of the few who had a map. Not army issue—for some reason all rear area maps had been called in at the start of the campaign. What he did have was a map put out by the Daily Telegraph to help its readers follow the war.

Private W. S. Walker of the 5th Medium Regiment, Royal Artillery, could have better used an English-French dictionary. Coming to a signpost that pointed to “Dunkerque,” he wondered whether that was the same place as Dunkirk.

He need not have worried. Any road north would do, as long as it kept within the corridor held on the east by the Belgians and British; on the west by the French and the British; and at the foot—all the way south—by the French clinging grimly to Lille.

All the roads were still packed with troops in every sort of order and disorder—ranging from Welsh Guardsmen marching smartly with rifles at the slope to stragglers like Private Leslie R. Page, an artillery officer’s batman with the 44th Division. He had lost his unit when it scattered to dodge some strafing. Now he was plodding north alone, mixed with a crowd of soldiers and refugees. A big, open Belgian farm cart rumbled by. It was loaded with fleeing civilians, and there up front beside the driver, Page saw—of all people—his own father.

“What’s this, our Sunday school outing?” Page cracked as he climbed aboard for a brief family reunion. It turned out that the father, a warrant officer with the infantry, was just as lost as the son. Then the Luftwaffe struck again … the two were separated … and once more young Page wandered on alone. “Where are we going?” he asked someone and got the usual answer: “See that smoke in the sky? That’s Dunkirk. Make for it!”

There were women, too, in this great trek—not all of them ordinary refugees. A French liaison officer with the 2nd Ordnance Field Park brought along his mistress. Driver Gordon A. Taylor of the RASC tried to look after a young French girl he had found whimpering alone in the dark in a suburb of Lille. He managed to find a lorry, put her in it, and got her out of town. He felt quite the white knight and protector—until he lost her when the lorry got stuck in a traffic jam and they had to take to their feet. He never saw her again and would always wonder whether his “protection” did her more harm than good.

Private Bill Hersey of the 1st East Surreys had better luck. He had married the daughter of a French café owner in Tourcoing, and Augusta Hersey proved a determined bride indeed. As the East Surreys retreated through Roncq, she suddenly appeared and begged Bill to take her along. With the connivance of his company commander, Captain Harry Smith, Augusta was packed off in the headquarters truck.

Another war bride wasn’t as lucky. When Jeanne Michez married Staff Sergeant Gordon Stanley in February 1940, she became the first French girl to wed a member of the BEF. Stanley was attached to GHQ Signals at Arras; Jeanne moved into his quarters; and until May they lived an almost peacetime domestic life. When “the balloon went up,” he moved with Advanced GHQ into Belgium, and she went home to sit out the war at her mother’s café in the nearby village of Servins.

Jeanne Stanley knew very little of what was happening during the next two weeks, and she was astonished when suddenly one afternoon Gordon rolled up in a staff car with a machine gun mounted on the roof. The Germans were coming, he told her; they must leave right away. Jeanne flung a few things into a suitcase, plus two bottles of rum stuffed in by her mother. In an hour she was ready to go, dressed almost as if she was taking the afternoon train to Paris—blue dress, blue coat, matching blue broad-brimmed hat.

Off they went, the two of them up front and a corporal named Trippe in back. The roads were one huge traffic jam, and it didn’t help when Jeanne’s broad-brimmed hat blew out the window. Gordon stopped, and as he walked back to pick it up, the first Stukas struck.

They missed … the hat was rescued … the Stanleys drove on. They spent the first night in the car; other nights mostly in some ditch. Once they slept in the big barn of a Belgian farmer. He wouldn’t give them permission, but Gordon shot off the barn-door lock, and they settled in anyway.

Sleeping in the hay, diving into ditches to escape the Stukas, they got dirtier and dirtier. Once Jeanne managed to buy a bucket of water for ten francs, but most of the time there was no chance to wash. The broad-brimmed hat crumbled and vanished.

Eventually they reached the little French town of Bailleul. Here they stopped at the comfortable house of an elderly woman, Mlle. Jonkerick. Unlike many of the people they met, she was all hospitality and took them in for the night. Next day they moved on, still hounded by the inevitable Stukas.

Jeanne was now completely exhausted, her clothes in shreds. Gordon tried to put her in his battledress, complete with tin hat, but nothing fit. She finally told him that it was no use; she couldn’t go on. He took her back to Mlle. Jonkerick, who proved as hospitable as ever: Jeanne was welcome to stay till the roads cleared and she could return safely to Servins.

Now it was time to say good-bye. Gordon was a soldier; he had his duty; she understood that. Still, it was a hard moment, made just a little easier when he promised to come back and get her in two months. He would keep that promise, except for the part about two months. Actually it took him five years.

Jeanne Stanley was not the only one near the breaking point. A young lieutenant trying to lead a unit of the 2nd Ordnance Field Park got lost so many times he finally burst into tears. Corporal Jack Kitchener of the RASC found himself in a horrendous traffic jam, which turned into a pushing and shoving match between British and Belgian drivers. When a BEF officer tried to break it up, someone pushed him, too. He pulled his revolver and fired, hitting Kitchener in the left leg. “You've shot me, not the bloke who pushed you!” Kitchener exploded.

Private Bill Bacchus was driver-batman for a chaplain attached to the 13th Field Ambulance, and their trip north turned into an odyssey of bitterness and recrimination. Bacchus considered the padre a drunken coward; the padre charged Bacchus with neglect of duty and “dumb insolence.” Several times the padre drove off alone, leaving Bacchus to shift for himself. On two occasions Bacchus reached for his rifle, as if to use it on the padre. It seemed that even a man of God and his helper were not immune to the strain of defeat, the constant danger, the hunger and fatigue, the bombs, the chaos, the agony of this unending retreat.

Private Bill Stone had felt it all. He was a Bren gunner with the 5th Royal Sussex and had been in continuous action for two days holding off Jerry on the eastern side of the escape corridor. Now his section was ordered to make one more stand, giving time for the rest of the battalion to withdraw and reorganize farther to the rear.

They hung on for an hour, then pulled out in a truck kept for their getaway. It was dark now, and they decided to find some place where they could rest—they hadn’t had any sleep for three nights. They pulled up at a building which turned out to be a monastery. A robed monk appeared from out of the night, beckoned them to follow him, and led them inside.

It was another world. Monks padded quietly about in their robes and sandals. Flickering candles lit the stone passageways. All was tranquility, and the war seemed a thousand years away. The abbé indicated that it would be a pleasure to give food and rest to these new visitors, along with a party of Royal Engineers who had also discovered this heavenly oasis.

They were all led into the cloisters and seated at a long refectory table. Each British soldier had a monk to wait on him and attend to his needs. They had food and wine that the monks had produced themselves, and after days of army biscuits and bully beef, the meal was like a royal banquet.

There was only one hitch. The Engineers explained that they were going to blow every bridge in the area next morning. Stone and his mates would have to be on their way by 5:00 a.m. They didn’t mind; the stone floor of the cloisters seemed like a feather bed after what they had been through.

At dawn they were on their way. Driving over the bridges, they slowed to a crawl, lest they prematurely set off the demolition charges already laid. The men of the Royal Sussex were well clear of the area when the distant boom of explosives told them that their brief idyll was over and they were back in the war.

Along with blowing up bridges, canal locks, power stations, and other facilities of possible use to the Germans, the BEF was now demolishing its own equipment. To a good artilleryman, it seemed almost sacrilegious to destroy the guns he had so lovingly fussed over for years. As they smashed the breechblocks and destroyed the dial sights, many were openly crying.

Bombardier Arthur May of the 3rd Medium Regiment felt the agony even more deeply than the others. He had been posted to the same battery of howitzers his father had fought with in World War I, and this was a matter of infinite pride. Even the guns were the same, except that they now had rubber tires instead of the old steel rims. The battlefields were the same too. Armentières and Poperinge were familiar names long before this spring. In more ways than one, May felt he was following in Father’s footsteps.

But even in the darkest days of the First War things had never been so bad that the battery had to blow up its own guns. A gnawing conscience told him that somehow he had “let the old man down.”

There was little time for such sad reflections in the rush of self-destruction that now swept the BEF. In towns like Hondschoote and Oost Cappel on the road to Dunkirk, the paraphernalia of a whole army was going up in flames. Thousands of lorries, half-tracks, vans, heavy-duty trucks, motorcycles, Bren gun carriers, mobile kitchens, pick-ups, and staff cars were lined up in fields, drained of oil and water, with motors left running till they seized. Mountains of blankets, gas capes, shoes, wellingtons, and new uniforms of every kind lay burning in the fields. Passing one clothing dump about to be blown up, Lance Corporal W. J. Ingham of the Field Security Police raced in, ripped open a few bales, found his size in battledress, changed, and within a few minutes rejoined his unit—“the only well-dressed soldier in our mob.”

NAAFI stores—the source of the BEF’s creature comforts—lay deserted, open for the taking. Bombardier May walked off with his valise crammed with 10,000 cigarettes.

The chaplains, too, joined the orgy of destruction. Reginald Newcomb of the 50th Division kept busy smashing typewriters and mimeograph machines, while his clerk went to work on the company movie projector. Later, Newcomb burned two cases of army prayerbooks. It was Sunday, May 26, but there would be no Divine Service today.

The smoke that towered over Dunkirk twenty miles to the north was no part of any BEF demolition scheme. Hermann Göring was trying to keep his promise that the Luftwaffe could win the battle alone. For nearly a week the Heinkels, Dorniers, and Stukas of General Kesselring’s Luftflotte 2 had been pounding the town. At first the damage was spotty, but on May 25 a giant raid damaged the main harbor lock, knocked out all electric power, and left the port a wreck, with its forest of cranes leaning at crazy angles.

Corporal P. G. Ackrell, a 42-year-old Ordnance Corps man, had been waiting to evacuate with other “useless mouths”; now his unit was hastily drafted to help unload an ammunition ship by hand. The derricks weren’t working, and the regular stevedores had vanished.

Toward noon Ackrell’s mind began drifting to other matters. The enemy planes were gone for the moment, and he noticed some inviting warehouses nearby. He drifted over for a look-around and spied some large cardboard boxes that seemed especially enticing. He opened one up, but it didn’t contain wristwatches or cameras or anything like that. It was full of marshmallows.

Making the best of things, Ackrell took a carton of marshmallows back to the dock, where they proved an instant hit. Returning to the warehouses for more, he discovered a barrel of red wine. He filled his water bottle, then began to sample it. Once again he remembered his friends and took some wine back to them, too. They liked it enough to go back for more, and by the end of the day barely half the ammunition had been unloaded.

Next day, the 26th, the men went back to work, and once again Ackrell’s eye began to wander. This time he found a freight car full of underwear. Still exploring, in another car he located some shoes that were a perfect fit. Once again he shared his good fortune with his friends; once again the dock work stopped. That evening the ship put to sea with part of her cargo still unloaded.

Discipline was gone. Dunkirk was a shambles, and clearly the port could not be used much longer. As the Luftwaffe roamed the skies unchecked, bombing at will, a small British naval party launched an experiment that somehow symbolized the futility of the whole air defense effort. Commander J. S. Dove had arrived on the 25th, ordered by the Admiralty to erect what was called “a lethal kite barrage” around the port area. The kites would be flown somewhat in the manner of barrage balloons and, it was hoped, would ensnare unwary German planes. To accomplish this purpose, Dove had on hand 200 “lethal kites” and a small staff of assistants.

There was not enough wind to fly a kite on the morning of May 26, but early in the afternoon the breeze freshened, and Dove’s crew managed to rig two kites from the top of the two biggest cranes in the harbor. One bobbed uselessly up and down, but the other rose majestically to 2,000 feet.

No one ever knew what would happen if a Stuka flew into it, because jittery Tommies, ignorant of the experiment and leery of anything flying in the sky, brought it down with a fusillade of small arms fire. Commander Dove stayed on to help with the evacuation; his little team joined the ever-growing horde waiting for transportation home.

The Luftwaffe continued its methodical destruction. On the morning of the 26th alone it dropped 4,000 bombs on the city, plastering the docks, the ships, the roads leading to the port, the disorganized thousands streaming toward it.

“Where is the RAF?” The familiar cry went up again and again. In their exasperation one column turned on a hapless stray wearing air-force blue, who had fallen in with Corporal Lockerby’s unit. He was no pilot—just a clerk from some disbanded headquarters—but that didn’t help him. The enraged troops pushed and threatened him—the symbol of all their pent-up bitterness.

The man seemed in such danger that Lockerby tried to find a spare army uniform for him to change to, but ironically the search was interrupted by yet another Stuka attack. By the time it was over, the man had vanished, perhaps looking for more congenial companions.

Yet the RAF was there, although often out of sight and not yet very effective. For several days Fighter Command had been shifting its carefully hoarded squadrons of Hurricanes and Spitfires to airfields closer to the Channel, planning for a major effort to cover the evacuation.

When 19 Squadron was moved from Horsham to Hornchurch on May 25, Flying Officer Michael D. Lyne was immediately struck by the totally different atmosphere. Horsham had been all practice—little trace of the war—but at Hornchurch the field was full of battle-damaged planes, and the mess buzzed with talk of combat and tactics. For a young pilot with only 100 hours in Spitfires, it was a sobering change.

Early morning. May 26, Lyne was off on his first patrol over the beachhead. There was no special pep talk or briefing; the squadron just took off for France, as though they did it every day. They met some Stukas and Messerschmitt 109’s near Calais, gave better than they took, but lost two of their own, including the squadron commander.

That afternoon Lyne was back over Dunkirk on his second patrol of the day. Off Calais they again met a squadron of Me 109’s, and Lyne himself came under fighter fire for the first time, without at first even realizing it. Mysterious little spirals of smoke whisked past his wings; then came the steady thump-thump of an Me 109 cannon. It finally dawned on him that he, personally, was somebody’s target.

Lyne managed to dodge, but shortly afterward found himself in a duel with two Me 109’s circling above him. Trying to maneuver, he stalled, then went into a spin as a bullet or shell fragment hit his knee. The radio conked out … the cockpit filled with glycol fumes and steam … his engine quit.

His first thought was to crash-land in France and spend the rest of the war in some POW camp. On second thought he decided he didn’t want that; instead he’d splash down in the Channel, hoping someone would pick him up. Then he decided against that too—“I didn’t want to get wet”—and finally, his spirits returning, he decided he just might be able to nurse the plane back to the British coast.

He made it—barely. Gliding in a few feet above the sea, he crash-landed on the shale beach at Deal in a cloud of flying rocks and pebbles. Bloody and oil-soaked, he staggered from the cockpit into a totally different world.

It was Sunday, and Deal beach was filled with strolling couples—military men in their dress uniforms, girls in their frilliest spring creations—all enjoying a leisurely promenade under the warm May sun. Barging into this dainty scene, Lyne felt he was more than an interruption: he was an unwelcome intruder, thoughtlessly reminding the crowd that only twenty miles away there was a very different world indeed.

He was right. The people of Deal and Dover—all England, for that matter—were still living a life of peace and tranquility. The government had not yet announced any emergency, and the distant rumble of the guns across the Channel was not enough to break the spell. It was a typical, peacetime weekend: a Dover town team defeated the officers of the Dover Detachment at bowls, 88 to 35 … the local football club lost a match to Sittingbourne … roller skaters whirled about the rink at the Granville Gardens Pavilion … the weekly Variety show announced a new bill featuring those “comedy knockabouts” The Three Gomms.

The mood was different at Whitehall. A chilling awareness gripped the government that Britain was now on the brink of an appalling disaster. Reynaud, in town for a conference with Churchill, was gloomy, too. He felt that Pétain would come out for a cease-fire if a large part of France were overrun.

The time had come to act. At 6:57 p.m. this Sunday, May 26, the Admiralty signaled Dover: “Operation Dynamo is to commence.”

At this point Admiral Ramsay had 129 ferries, coasters, skoots, and small craft to do the job, but more were on the way and the staff in the Dynamo Room was clicking smoothly. Still, it was a monumental task. The Admiralty itself did not expect to lift more than 45,000 men in two days. After that, the evacuation would probably be terminated by enemy action.

“I have on at the moment one of the most difficult and hazardous operations ever conceived,” Ramsay wrote Mag late that night (actually 1:00 a.m. on the 27th), “and unless the bon Dieu is very kind there are certain to be many tragedies attached to it. I hardly dare think about it, or what the day is going to bring. …”

Yet the biggest crisis at the moment lay beyond Ramsay’s control. The crucial question was whether more than a smattering of men could get to Dunkirk at all. Hitler’s “halt order” had been lifted; the German armor was rolling again; thousands of Allied soldiers were still deep in France and Belgium. Could the escape corridor be kept open long enough for these troops to scramble to the coast? What could be done to help the units holding the corridor? How to buy the time that was needed?

4

Buying Time

TO WINSTON CHURCHILL, CALAIS was the key. The ancient French port, 24 miles west of Dunkirk, was besieged but still in British hands. The Prime Minister decided that it must be held to the last man. Taking it would chew up Rundstedt’s troops, slow down his advance, and buy the time needed to get the BEF back to the coast.

Still, it was not an easy decision. It meant deliberately sacrificing 3,000 highly trained troops at a time when Britain could ill afford to lose them. Rescuing any large part of the BEF was a long shot at best. Might not these men be better used on the home front in case of invasion?

For Anthony Eden the decision was especially bitter. He had long served in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, one of the regiments at Calais. Ordering them to fight to the end meant condemning to death or captivity some of his best friends.

It was a gloomy dinner at Admiralty House on the evening of May 25 when the step was finally taken. Churchill silently picked at his food, and on leaving the table, remarked to no one in particular, “I feel physically sick.” At 11:30 a last telegram went off to Brigadier Claude Nicholson, commanding the Calais garrison:

Every hour you continue to exist is of greatest help to the BEF. Government has therefore decided you must continue to fight. Have greatest possible admiration for your splendid stand.

For Brigadier Nicholson this was the latest in a bewildering series of messages that had tugged him this way and that. Until late April, his 30th Infantry Brigade had been slated for Norway. With the collapse of that campaign, Churchill decided it should be used to raid the German flanks along the French coast, the way his old Marine Brigade did in World War I.

The 30th was a brigade that should give the Germans a lot of trouble. Two of its three battalions—the 2nd King’s Royal Rifle Corps and the 1st Rifle Brigade—were crack regulars. The remaining battalion—the 1st Queen Victoria’s Rifles—was a Territorial unit of weekend soldiers; but one of the best in England. All were mechanized. To beef them up still more, Churchill added the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment, already heading for Calais under separate orders.

The tank squadrons and the Queen Victoria’s Rifles left first, sailing from Dover for Calais at 11:00 a.m. on May 22. In the rush to get going, the QVR left all their vehicles behind. The 3rd Tank Regiment brought their tanks, but they were stowed in the bottom of the ship, and unloading them at Calais seemed to take forever.

This work had scarcely begun when a disconcerting figure arrived on the scene. Lieutenant-General Brownrigg, Gort’s Adjutant General, had been in Boulogne setting up a rear GHQ. Now he suddenly appeared in Calais, en route to England. Acting on his own authority as senior officer present, he ordered the tanks to head west for Boulogne and join the troops defending that port. It was just as well that the battalion was still unloading, since Boulogne was already cut off.

Later that night Major Ken Bailey arrived from Gort’s headquarters with entirely different orders for the tanks: they were to head south, not west, and join the BEF at Saint-Omer. Then from Brownrigg, now at Dover: they were to go to Boulogne, as previously ordered. Pulled this way and that, a squadron of the tanks finally set out for Saint-Omer at 1:30 p.m. on the 23rd, but were hurled back by a panzer column blocking the way.

That afternoon Brigadier Nicholson reached Calais with the rest of the 30th Infantry Brigade. He too had orders from General Brownrigg to head west for Boulogne, but while his troops were still unloading, the War Office ordered him to head east for Dunkirk (the opposite direction) with 350,000 rations for Gort’s army. During the night of May 23-24 the convoy set off, but soon ran into the inevitable panzers. In a slam-bang night action three of the escorting tanks broke through to Gort’s lines, but the rest of the convoy was destroyed or thrown back to Calais.

Clearly the town was cut off. Whatever Brownrigg or the others ordered, there would be no forays in any direction. Nicholson would have his hands full holding Calais itself. This he proposed to do, deploying his own three battalions, plus the 21 remaining tanks, plus some scattered units to form an “outer” and “inner” perimeter defending the port.

Some 800 French troops also rallied around, manning the town’s ancient Citadel and four old forts. Built in the seventeenth century by the great French military engineer Vauban, they were still amazingly strong. A few antique coastal defense guns, worked by French marines, completed the garrison.

Nicholson’s plan was to stand fast as long as possible. When enemy pressure became too great, he would gradually pull back toward the harbor. He would then be in position for a fast getaway, since a new message sent by the War Office at 2:48 a.m. on the 24th said that evacuation had been agreed on “in principle.”

By afternoon his orders had changed again. During the day Churchill had agreed to the appointment of French General Fagalde as overall commander of the defense of the Channel ports. Adhering to Weygand’s idea that these ports should be held indefinitely as fortified bridgeheads on the Continent, Fagalde forbade any evacuation of Calais. Normally British commanders were given some loophole in such a situation, but not this time. At 11:23 p.m. on the 24th, the War Office sent Nicholson new instructions:

In spite of policy of evacuation given you this morning, fact that British forces in your area now under Fagalde who has ordered no repeat no evacuation, means that you must comply for sake of Allied solidarity. Your role is therefore to hold on, harbour being for present of no importance to BEF. …

When Winston Churchill saw this message on the morning of May 25, he exploded in indignation. To him, the role of Calais was to tie up as many Germans as possible. The French said no evacuation, and that could well mean no escape. If so, “Allied solidarity” and calling Calais harbor “of no importance” were not the arguments to use to make troops fight to the end.

Churchill now drafted the kind of message he felt was needed. It was full of ringing phrases, which Anthony Eden deftly edited into a strong personal appeal from himself to Nicholson. As a former member of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, Eden carried special weight:

Defence of Calais to the utmost is of highest importance to our country as symbolizing our continued cooperation with France. The eyes of the Empire are upon the defence of Calais, and H. M. Government are confident you and your gallant regiments will perform an exploit worthy of the British name.

Nicholson understood without being told. At the very moment when Eden was sending his message—2:00 p.m. on the 25th—a Lieutenant Hoffmann of the 10th Panzer Division was being escorted under a flag of truce into the British lines by a French officer and a Belgian soldier. They guided Hoffmann to Nicholson’s headquarters, now at the Citadel. The Lieutenant came to the point immediately: unconditional surrender, or Calais would be destroyed.

Nicholson was equally quick in writing his reply:

1. The answer is no, as it is the British Army’s duty to fight as well as it is the German’s.

2. The French captain and the Belgian soldier, having not been blindfolded, cannot be sent back. The Allied commander gives his word that they will be put under guard and will not be allowed to fight against the Germans.

The weary garrison fought on. For three days they had battled the Wehrmacht’s tanks and Stukas, gradually yielding inch by inch. Now they were holed up in Calais-Nord, the old part of town by the harbor. The noise of battle gradually faded—Germans have to sleep too—and the only sound was the incongruous trill of nightingales in the Jardin Richelieu.

London’s last message had wider distribution than anyone in Whitehall thought. It was picked up and read with the greatest interest by German radio intelligence—especially the ringing exhortation, “Every hour you continue to exist is of the greatest help to the BEF.” It was the first convincing evidence that the British planned to evacuate. Until now there had been much speculation that the increased shipping activity in the Channel might be due to some Allied plan to make a surprise landing behind the German advance. Others felt that it meant preparations for a permanent Allied beachhead based at Dunkirk. But this new message seemed to rule all that out. The phrasing pointed to evacuation and nothing else.

The message was interesting for another reason, too. The British obviously regarded holding Calais as more important than the Germans did. Army Group A had warned Guderian not to get involved in costly house-to-house fighting there. Guderian himself regarded the port as a distinctly secondary objective—of “less military than prestige importance.” He had taken it from the 1st Panzer Division, leading his advance, and reassigned it to the 10th Panzers trailing behind because it had “only local importance and no influence upon general operations.”

And now this curious intercept. For some reason London was calling on Calais to fight to the end. Around noon on May 26 Colonel Blumentritt, Operations Officer at Army Group A, phoned 10th Panzer Division headquarters, where Guderian was conferring with the Division commander, General Lieutenant Ferdinand Schaal. Blumentritt reminded them that the Division must not be wasted on Calais. If the going got tough, Calais should be left to the Luftwaffe.

Schaal felt that wouldn’t be necessary. He said his attack was “promising” and asked to be kept in the fight. He expected to have Calais by nightfall.

He had good reason for optimism. The day had begun with a devastating Stuka raid. Most of the British had never been through this ordeal before, and the screech of the planes was predictably terrifying. Private T. W. Sandford of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps ran for a cellar, scooping up an equally frightened small dog. Sandford and his mates crouched in the dark, while the dog lay cowering in a corner. They patted it and fussed over it, until it finally wagged its tail, which somehow made them feel better.

After the raid, they emerged into a street littered with bricks and broken glass. The bombing broke up many of the defending units, and Sandford never did find his own company again. At 10:50 a.m. the Germans broke into Calais-Nord and began systematically splitting up the defenders into pockets of resistance.

Communications collapsed, and Brigadier Nicholson was soon isolated in the Citadel with his staff and a handful of French defenders. By 3:00 p.m. it was completely surrounded, and around 3:30 a detachment of Schaal’s infantry broke through the south gate. That did it. With the enemy inside the walls, resistance vanished. Hands up, Brigadier Nicholson emerged from his command post to meet his captors.

Down by the harbor a few isolated units fought on. Colour Sergeant Fred Walter of the Queen Victoria’s Rifles found himself in a tunnel that ran through Bastion 1, a strong-point near the docks. Troops from other units were packed in here too, milling around, totally disorganized. An ever-growing number of wounded were also crowding into the place, part of which had been set aside as a first aid post.

A cool-headed officer finally appeared and sorted the men out. Some he sent to a nearby fort; others, including Walter, he stationed on top of the tunnel with a French machine gun. They kept it firing as the Germans drew steadily closer, mopping up resistance. The Gare Maritime went; then the nearby fort. At last a British staff officer appeared and told Walter’s group to cease fire: arrangements were being made to surrender.

They refused to obey. Lieutenant-Colonel L. A. Ellison-McCartney, commanding the QVR, now appeared, and the men appealed to him. Did he know of any cease-fire order? Ellison-McCartney said no; in fact he understood that if they could hold out another half-hour, the Navy would come in and get them. He asked if the group wanted to give in, and received a rousing “NO!”

Ellison-McCartney then left to find out who had given the cease-fire order … and why. He soon returned, and his news was all bad: they were the last group holding out; the Germans had them completely surrounded. Enemy guns enfiladed both ends of the tunnel, which was now choked with wounded, and these guns would immediately open fire if there was any further resistance. In addition, the Germans had all their artillery and tanks in position, and the Stukas stood ready to pay a return visit.

The surrender terms had already been concluded by another officer, the Colonel added, and the only thing he could do was follow along. The men must lay down their arms.

The group began breaking up their weapons, until a German officer suddenly appeared brandishing a pistol. He angrily told them to stop, and to march out of the bastion, hands up. In this way the surviving troops filed out, stumbling between two lines of German infantry, every other enemy soldier holding a machine pistol.

To Fred Walter, it was the most humiliating experience he could imagine. He didn’t even dare glance at his comrades, for fear he would see in their faces the same utter hopelessness he felt in all his heart and body.

Yet there were British soldiers still free in Calais. Signalman Leslie W. Wright had arrived from Dover on May 21 for communications duty. By the 26th his wireless set was destroyed and he was fighting as an infantryman with the QVR. Midafternoon, he found himself on the eastern breakwater of the harbor. A Red Cross launch had tied up there, and Wright was helping load it with wounded.

He and his mates saw the launch safely off, then started back along the breakwater toward the docks. But before they reached the jetty that led to the shore, the Germans captured that part of the harbor, marooning Wright’s group on the breakwater. They settled down among the piles and supporting beams, where they hoped they would be less conspicuous.

They forgot about the tide. It was rising, and soon the men would be forced into the open. Discouraged, the rest of the group headed for shore to surrender—but not Wright. He had heard the Germans didn’t take prisoners; so he decided to hang on a little longer. If discovered, at least he would die a free man.

Half an hour, and he changed his mind. He grew so lonely he decided he’d rather die with his friends. He too might as well give up. He worked his way among the piles toward the shore, where a large swastika flag now flew from the jetty. He had almost reached the first German outpost when a couple of British destroyers standing offshore began shelling the jetty.

This put new hope into him. In a flash he again changed his mind. Turning around, he now clambered seaward, scrambling from pile to pile at irregular intervals in order to confuse the enemy. At one point, where mortar fire had cut a gap in the breakwater, he tumbled into the sea. Swimming across the gap, he climbed back among the piles and continued on.

At the seaward end of the breakwater he was overjoyed to find a cluster of 46 British servicemen, hiding like himself among the piles and beams. Over their heads stood a small structure, normally used by port authorities, which served as an observation post. This had been taken over by a Royal Marines captain who was the senior rank present.

The sun was going down now, and it turned bitterly cold. Wright, still wet from his tumble into the harbor, suffered dreadfully. His new companions pulled off his clothing and crowded around him, trying to keep him warm. One young subaltern literally hugged him, and their helmets came together with a fearsome clang that seemed certain to attract the attention of every German in Calais.

But they were still undetected at nightfall, when Wright and most of the others climbed an iron ladder and joined the Royal Marines captain in the port authorities room. Clearly an enterprising man, he somehow made hot coffee for them all. Outside, a signalman with a lamp kept flashing an SOS, hoping some British ship would see it. Wright, warm at last but now hobbled by a badly bruised foot, dozed under a table.

“They are coming!” was the cry that woke him up. It was around 2:00 a.m., and a small British vessel was entering the harbor. It failed to spot the men on the breakwater and tied up down by the jetty. A landing party went ashore but wasn’t gone long. German machine guns opened up, and the shore party raced back to the boat. It slipped its lines and headed back to sea.

As the vessel again drew near, the men on the breakwater whooped and yelled and frantically waved their light. Never mind if the Germans saw them; this was their last chance. The boat again passed them by … then at the last possible moment turned and eased alongside the breakwater. Wright and the others scrambled aboard. Next instant they were off, pounding into the open sea, as every gun in the harbor erupted behind them.

Their craft was the naval yacht Gulzar, commanded by Lieutenant C. V. Brammall. Not knowing that Calais had fallen, he had taken his boat into the port, hoping to pick up some wounded. He was too late for that, but not for the little group on the breakwater. As the Gulzar chugged toward Dover, someone handed Wright a snack and some coffee. Safe at last, he decided it was the best meal he had ever had in his life.

Lieutenant Brammall wasn’t the only man that night who failed to realize Calais was gone. The top command in London were as much in the dark as ever. At 4:30 a.m. Winston Churchill telegraphed Gort suggesting—as he had so often done before—that “a column directed upon Calais while it is still holding out might have a good chance.”

Finally, at first light on the 27th, a force of 38 Lysanders flew over Calais on a drop mission. They lost three planes but managed to drop 224 gallons of water, 22,000 rounds of ammunition, and 864 grenades. Waiting below, the Germans were appropriately grateful.

The British people were deeply moved by the stand at Calais. For 400 years they had felt a special tie to the place. Every schoolchild knew how Queen Mary—“Bloody Mary”—had lost the port in 1558 through monumental carelessness, and how she died “with the word Calais written on my heart.” Now the city had been lost again, but this time in the noblest way for the noblest cause—to buy time for Gort’s army.

Yet that certainly wasn’t the original goal. At various times Nicholson’s force was to be used for raids on the enemy flanks … for relieving Boulogne … for defending Saint-Omer … for escorting rations to Dunkirk … for demonstrating “Allied solidarity.” It was only in the last 36 hours that buying time became the guiding purpose.

And how much time did it really buy? The best evidence suggests very little. The Germans used only one division at Calais, the 10th Panzer, and it could not have reached the Aa Canal Line before the “halt order” was issued. The advance did not resume until after Calais had been taken. The other panzer troops were idle throughout the siege.

One panzer division, the 1st, did take a passing swipe at Calais, as it led the dash eastward on the 23rd. It hoped to take the port by surprise without a fight. Finding this was impossible it was told not to waste any more time, but to continue the advance east. Calais, never considered very important, could be cleaned up by the 10th Panzers, still trailing behind everyone else.

Even after Calais had been taken, the 10th was not rushed forward to join the troops attacking Dunkirk. It was, in fact, sent the other way for the almost nominal task of guarding the coast from Calais to Audresselles. Another 24 hours would pass before Guderian decided that maybe he could use the Division’s tanks at Dunkirk after all.

Actually, OKH felt they already had enough troops to take the port. And this was certainly true at the time the “halt order” was issued. Six crack panzer divisions were poised on the Aa Canal Line, with the 1st and the 6th Divisions less than twelve miles from Dunkirk. This was easily enough to overwhelm the sprinkling of Allied defenders.

All these panzer divisions were still in place when the halt order was lifted on May 26. In the interim the French 68th Division had moved into the Gravelines area, and Gort had set up his system of “stops” and strong-points. But most of the BEF were still deep in France and Belgium, reeling back toward the coast.

To save them it was still necessary to buy time, but it would not be bought by the heroic defenders of Calais. That was all over. The job would have to be done by the troops holding the strong-points along the escape corridor. None of these towns and villages had the emotional pull of Calais; some were little more than dots on the map. …

At Hazebrouck on the morning of May 27 a discomforting report reached the 229th Field Battery: the panzers had turned the British flank, and there was nothing between the battery and the German Army. High time to get out, but one gun was detached and wheeled into position at a road junction just south of town. A forlorn hope, it might briefly cover the exposed flank. Captain John Dodd, second in command of the battery, climbed to the top of a nearby farmhouse to scan the horizon for any sign of the enemy.

A German tank stood half-hidden behind a hedge 200 yards away. Dodd rushed down the stairs to lay the gun, but Sergeant Jack Baker already had his crew of four giving a drill-hall performance. They got off two rounds before the German tank even replied. Then came an answering hale of machine-gun bullets. Two more tanks rumbled up, and all three blazed away at Baker’s gun.

Another British field piece joined in. It was under repair some yards off, but the battery sergeant major found several volunteers, including a cook and a motor mechanic. They swung the gun around and hammered away until they ran out of ammunition.

Baker’s gun carried on alone, giving as good as it got. Two of the crew fell; now there were only Baker and his layer left. Then the layer was hit, and there was only Baker. He continued firing, getting off six more shots on his own. Then he too ran out of ammunition.

But the issue was already decided. The three tanks turned and lumbered away. Baker had won. Captain Dodd rushed up, to be greeted by the wounded layer. Excitedly shaking the Captain’s hand, he cried, “We got the bugger, sir!” At Epinette, another Gort strong-point eight miles farther south, the determination was the same, but the weapon was different. Captain Jack Churchill had gone to war with three “toys”—his bagpipes, a sword, and a bow and arrow. On the 27th the bagpipes and sword were packed with his gear somewhere, but he had the bow and a few arrows with him as he and about 80 others, mostly 2nd Manchesters, prepared to defend the village.

When the German advance came in sight, Churchill climbed into the loft of a granary and peered through a vertical opening normally used for hauling up sacks of grain. There, only 30 yards away, he saw five enemy soldiers sheltering behind the corner of a house. He quickly fetched up two British infantrymen and ordered them to open rapid fire, but not until he had loosed an arrow at the center man. He lifted his bow, took aim, and let fly. Hearing the twang, the riflemen blasted away.

Churchill had a brief, satisfying glimpse of his arrow hitting home—right in the left side of the center man’s chest. The rifles brought down three of the other Germans, but the fifth escaped by dodging around the corner of the house. For perhaps the last time in history, the English bow—the weapon that turned the tide at Crécy and Poitiers six hundred years earlier—had again been used in battle.

Tradition was also in evidence at La Bassée, the southern anchor of Gort’s Canal Line defense system. The 1st Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, holding the town, were the last Scottish regiment to wear kilts in action. It was against regulations, but the Camerons wore them anyway, and in one case, at least, they served a practical purpose. The battalion adjutant, Major Peter Hunt, was hit in the leg, but the bullet’s effect was diminished by a fold in his kilt.

For two days the Camerons had been holding out, hurling back every German attempt to cross the canal. But it was a costly business. After one counterattack A Company had only six men left—nowhere near enough to hold the ground so dearly bought.

Now, on the morning of May 27, the enemy again stormed across the canal, and La Bassée was soon engulfed in flames and smoke. “Next door” at Festubert the 2nd Dorsets heard a last faint radio signal: the Camerons were completely surrounded and wanted permission to destroy their wireless.

The Dorsets sensed their turn was next. As the panzers approached, a strange cheerfulness—almost bravado—swept C Company headquarters. Someone wound up an ancient gramophone, and it ground out “Ramona” over and over again. For most people the tune might conjure up visions of moonlight and waterfalls, but 2nd Lieutenant Ivor Ramsay would always connect it with Festubert and those beetlelike tanks.

Making clever use of the village buildings, the Dorsets managed to hold out till dark, when orders were to fight their way back to Estaires. They were now deep in enemy-held territory; using the roads was impossible. They would have to go cross-country—at night, without maps. All that the battalion commander Lieutenant-Colonel E. L. Stephenson had was a compass.

At 10:30 p.m. they started out. Stephenson took the lead, followed by about 250 Dorsets and miscellaneous “odds and sods” who had lost their own units. It was a black, cloudy night, and the men soon had their first contact with the enemy when Stephenson ran head-on into a German infantry sergeant inspecting his own outposts. The Colonel pulled his revolver and killed the man with a single shot. Hearing the commotion, a nearby enemy sentry called, “Heinrich?”—but did nothing else. Relieved, the Dorsets stumbled on through the dark.

Next, they came to a road running directly across their line of retreat, packed with enemy tanks and motor transport. A whole armored division was driving past. Stephenson’s little troop lay down in the stubble and watched the show for over an hour—the German vehicles didn’t even bother to turn off their lights. Finally, there was a break in the flow, and the Dorsets scooted across the road, plunging back into the underbrush just as the next echelon rolled into view.

Guided by Colonel Stephenson’s compass, the men struggled on across ploughed fields, over barbed-wire fences, through ditches waist-deep and stinking of sewage. At dawn they came to a canal too deep to wade. The swimmers formed a human chain to help the nonswimmers across. Somehow they managed it, then had to do it all over again when the canal looped back a quarter-mile further on.

But Stephenson’s compass never failed them. Just as he had calculated, at 5:00 a.m. on the 28th the Dorsets stumbled into Estaires, completing an eight-mile odyssey. French troops were defending the town and cheerfully shared their flasks of vin rouge with the exhausted newcomers.

There was not always such a happy ending. German troops surging across the La Bassée Canal caught the 2nd Royal Norfolks at Locon, wiping out most of the battalion. About 100 survivors fell back on a farm in the nearby village of Le Paradis. Trying to keep his men together, the acting CO Major Ryder sent Private Fred Tidey to make contact with some troops holding out on another farm across the road.

Private Tidey accomplished his mission, then couldn’t get back. The machine-gun fire was now too heavy for him to cross the road. Ryder and 98 of his men were soon surrounded in a cowshed by troops of the SS Totenkopf Division. The Germans set fire to the farm, ultimately forcing the Norfolks to surrender. They were immediately marched to a nearby barnyard, where a couple of machine guns mowed them down. The SS finished off those still alive with pistol and bayonet—except for Privates Bill O’Callaghan and Bert Pooley. Though fearfully wounded, they managed to survive by hiding beneath the bodies.

Across the road Tidey had the good fortune to be taken prisoner by different troops, who were not SS but in the regular German Army. His war was over too, but at least he was alive. The road, it turned out, was the dividing line between the two different German units, and he still marvels at how this narrow strip of dirt and gravel almost certainly made all the difference between life and death.

Le Paradis … Festubert … Hazebrouck—it was the fight put up at villages like these that bought the time so desperately needed to get the trapped troops up the 60-mile corridor to Dunkirk. The British 2nd Division, supported by some French tanks, took a merciless beating, but their sacrifice enabled two French divisions and untold numbers of the BEF to reach the coast. As the battered battalions swarmed up the corridor, the Luftwaffe continued to roam the skies unopposed. Besides bombs, thousands of leaflets fluttered down, urging the Tommies to give up. The addressees reacted in various ways. In the 58th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, most men treated the leaflets as a joke and a useful supply of toilet paper. Some men in the 250th Field Company, Royal Engineers, actually felt encouraged by a map that featured the Dunkirk beachhead. Until now, they hadn’t realized there was still a route open to the sea so near at hand. A sergeant in the 6th Durham Light Infantry carefully read the strident wording several times, then observed to Captain John Austin: “They must be in a bad way, sir, to descend to that sort of thing.”

The jumbled masses were approaching Dunkirk now, coming in every way imaginable—members of the 1st East Surreys on borrowed bicycles … a farmboy in the 5th Royal Sussex riding a giant Belgian carthorse … a hatless brigadier tramping alone up the road from Bergues. Just outside Dunkirk, artilleryman Robert Lee saw one fellow sweep by on roller skates carrying an umbrella. Another chap was hustling along with a parrot in a cage. But far more typical was Gunner P. D. Allan. When his feet developed enormous blisters and he could no longer walk, two of his comrades acted as crutches, supporting him for the last five miles.

At Dunkirk nobody was ready for this impending avalanche. Admiral Jean Abrial, the French naval officer in overall command of the coast, was tucked away in Bastion 32, planning the defense of the port. Like Weygand and Blanchard, he saw Dunkirk as the base for a permanent foothold on the Continent. General Adam, appointed by Gort to organize the evacuation, hadn’t arrived yet.

Adam was supposed to act under the orders of General Fagalde, the military commander under Abrial, provided Fagalde’s orders “did not imperil the safety or welfare of the British troops”—an escape clause the size of Big Ben. Already there had been sharp disagreement over preparing various bridges for demolition.

In a try for better coordination, the British and French commanders met in Cassel at 7:30 on the morning of May 27. The town, situated on its isolated hill nineteen miles south of Dunkirk, was one of Gort’s most important strong-points, but as yet had not been attacked.

Adam and Fagalde arrived early, and before the main meeting began, they worked out between themselves how they would defend the beachhead. They would try to hold the coast from Gravelines on the west to Nieuport on the east—a distance of about 30 miles. Inland, the perimeter would make maximum use of the canals that laced the area, running from Gravelines southeast to Bergues … then east to Furnes … and finally northeast to Nieuport. The French would be responsible for the area west of Dunkirk, the British for everything east. As the troops fell back into the perimeter, the French should keep to the west, the British to the east. Nowhere was there any provision for the Belgians, who were desperately fighting still farther east; it was decided their situation was too “obscure.”

The main meeting now began in the Hôtel du Sauvage dining room, where several tables had been stripped of their cloths and bunched together. It was a bare, stark setting relieved only by a bottle of Armagnac sitting in the center. Besides Fagalde, the French commanders included Admiral Abrial, General Blanchard, and General Koeltz from Weygand’s headquarters. General Adam, representing Gort, had brought along Colonel Bridgeman and Lieutenant-General W. G. Lindsell, the BEF Quartermaster-General.

It turned out that the principal business of the meeting was not defense arrangements but a ringing order of the day from General Weygand, relayed by General Koeltz. It called on the embattled forces to swing over to the offensive and retake Calais. The French generals agreed to try, but the British considered the appeal preposterous. Survival was a matter of hanging on, not advancing. To Bridgeman, Koeltz spoke such nonsense that he stopped taking notes.

“Why aren’t you writing?” Lindsell whispered.

“There’s nothing being said worth writing down,” Bridgeman whispered back.

And so it proved. Far from retaking Calais, General Fagalde’s hard-pressed 68th Division had to pull back from the Gravelines end of the perimeter. Late on the 27th the French retired to a new line running from Mardyck to Spycker to Bergues.

But at least the beachhead was now blocked out and the responsibilities for its defense clearly defined. As the poilus hunkered down in the western half of the perimeter, General Adam began organizing the eastern half. Under Bridgeman’s plan it was divided into three sectors—one for each corps of the BEF. Specifically, III Corps would hold the Dunkirk end, next to the French; I Corps would be in the middle; and II Corps would defend the eastern end, which stretched across the frontier into Belgium. Two major canals—one running from Bergues to Furnes, the other from Furnes to Nieuport—would be the main defense line. For the most part, the line lay five or six miles back from the coast, which would protect the beaches at least from small arms fire. To command this defense line, Adam had the services of Brigadier the Honorable E. F. Lawson, a competent artilleryman.

There was only one ingredient missing—soldiers. As of 8:00 a.m. on the 27th, when the Cassel meeting broke up, the British defense line existed only on paper. Lawson would have to man it with troops plucked from the horde tumbling into Dunkirk, taking pot luck from what turned up. Later he could replace these pick-up units, when the regular divisions holding open the corridor fell back on the coast; but for the moment improvisation was once again the order of the day.

For immediate help he depended largely on artillerymen who had destroyed their guns during the retreat and could now serve as infantry. Several units manned the line between Bergues and Furnes, bolstered by a party of nineteen Grenadier Guards, who had somehow been separated from their battalion. Farther east, the 12th Searchlight Battery dug in at Furnes, and a survey company of Royal Engineers moved into Nieuport.

While Lawson patched together his defense line, Colonel Bridgeman concentrated on getting the troops back to the coast. Basically his plan called for three main routes—III Corps would head for the beach at Malo-les-Bains, an eastern suburb of Dunkirk … I Corps for Bray-Dunes, six miles farther east … and II Corps for La Panne, four miles still farther east and across the Belgian frontier. All three towns were seaside resorts and provided an unlikely setting of bandstands, carousels, beach chairs, push-pedal cycles, and brightly painted cafés.

Of the three, La Panne was the logical place to establish headquarters. It was where the telephone cable linking Belgium and England entered the Channel, and this meant direct contact with Dover and London not available anywhere else. Adam set up shop in the Mairie, or town hall, and it was from here that Bridgeman did his best to direct the withdrawal.

Naturally his plans meant issuing orders, and this in turn meant paper, and this in turn raised a brand new problem: there was no paper. GHQ’s entire supply had gone up in flames, as the BEF destroyed its stores and equipment to keep them from falling into enemy hands.

Major Arthur Dove, a staff officer under Bridgeman, finally managed to buy a pad of pink notepaper at a local stationery store. It was more suitable for billets-doux, but it was the only thing available. In payment Dove needed all his diplomacy to persuade Madame the proprietress to accept French instead of Belgian francs.

It’s doubtful whether many of the addressees ever saw the Major’s pink stationery. Dispatch riders did their best to deliver the orders, but communications were in a bigger shambles than ever. While the three corps did stick basically to their allotted sectors of the beachhead, many units remained unaware of any such arrangement, and thousands of stragglers went wherever whim—or an instinct for self-preservation—took them.

They swarmed into Dunkirk and onto the beaches—lost, confused, and all too often leaderless. In many of the service and rear area units the officers had simply vanished, leaving the men to shift for themselves. Some took shelter in cellars in the town, huddling together as the bombs crashed down. Others threw away their arms and aimlessly wandered about the beach. Others played games and swam. Others got drunk. Others prayed and sang hymns. Others settled in deserted cafés on the esplanade and sipped drinks, almost like tourists. One man, with studied indifference, stripped to his shorts and sunbathed among the rocks, reading a paperback.

And all the time the bombs rained down. The 2nd Anti-Aircraft Brigade was charged with protecting Dunkirk, and soon after arriving at La Panne, Colonel Bridgeman instructed the Brigade’s liaison officer, Captain Sir Anthony Palmer, to keep his guns going to the last. Any spare gunners to join the infantry; any incapacitated men to go to the beach. Palmer relayed the order to Major-General Henry Martin, commanding all Gort’s antiaircraft, but somewhere along the line the meaning got twisted. Martin understood that all antiaircraft gunners were to go to the beach.

He never questioned the order, although it’s hard to see why any force, as hard-pressed from the air as the BEF, would begin an evacuation by sending off its antiaircraft gunners. Instead, he merely reasoned that if the gunners were to leave, there would be no further use for their guns. Rather than have them fall into enemy hands, he ordered his heavy 3.7-inch pieces to be destroyed.

Sometime after midnight, May 27-28, Martin appeared at Adam’s headquarters to report that the job was done. With rather a sense of achievement, one observer felt, he saluted smartly and announced, “All the antiaircraft guns have been spiked.”

There was a long pause while a near-incredulous Adam absorbed this thunderbolt. Finally he looked up and merely said, “You … fool, go away.”

So the bombing continued, now opposed only by some light Bofors guns, and by the troops’ Brens and rifles. In exasperation some men even cut the fuses of grenades and hurled them into the air hoping to catch some low-flying plane. More were like Lance Corporal Fred Batson of the RASC, who crawled into a discarded Tate & Lyle sugar box. Its thin wooden sides offered no real protection, but somehow he felt safer.

Their big hope was the sea. The Royal Navy would come and get them. Gallipoli, Corunna, the Armada—for centuries, in a tight spot the British had always counted on their navy to save the day, and it had never disappointed them. But tonight, May 27, was different. …

Private W.B.A. Gaze, driver with an ordnance repair unit, looked out to sea from Malo-les-Bains and saw nothing. No ships at all, except a shattered French destroyer beached a few yards out, her bow practically severed from the rest of the hull.

After a bit, a single British destroyer hove into view … then three Thames barges, which moored 400 yards out … and finally fourteen drifters, each towing a couple of small boats. Not much for this mushrooming crowd on the beach.

The prospect was even worse to the east. At La Panne Captain J. L. Moulton, a Royal Marines officer attached to GHQ, went down to the beach to see what was going on. Three sloops lay offshore, but there were no small boats to ferry anybody out.

After quite a while a motor boat appeared, towing a whaler. As a Marine, Moulton knew something about boats and rushed to grab the gunwhale to keep the whaler from broaching to the surf. The skipper, sure that Moulton was trying to hijack the craft, fired a shot over his head.

Somehow Moulton convinced the man of his good intentions, but the incident underscored the ragged inadequacy of the whole rescue effort at this point. More ships were needed, and many more small boats.

Going to General Adam’s headquarters, Moulton reported the shortage of vessels. Adam phoned London, hoping to stir some action at that end, and then approved a suggestion by Moulton that he go to Dover, armed with a map showing where the troops were concentrated, and speak directly with Admiral Ramsay.

Moulton now went back to the beach, got a lift to one of the sloops lying offshore, and had the skipper take him across the Channel. Perhaps he could explain the true dimensions of the job. Without enough ships, all the time so dearly bought in Flanders would be wasted.

5

“Plenty Troops, Few Boats”

IN HIS OFFICE JUST off the Dynamo Room Admiral Ramsay listened politely as Captain Moulton described the desperate situation at Dunkirk, and the need for a greater naval effort if many men were to be saved. Moulton had the sinking feeling that he wasn’t getting his point across … that this was one of those cases where a mere Marine captain didn’t carry much weight with a Vice-Admiral of the Royal Navy.

His mission accomplished, Moulton returned to France, reported back to General Adam’s headquarters, and went to work on the beaches. Meanwhile, there were still few ships, but this wasn’t because Ramsay failed to appreciate the need. Relying mainly on personnel vessels—ferries, pleasure steamers, and the like—he had hoped to dispatch two every three and a half hours, but the schedule soon broke down.

The first ship sent was Mono’s Isle, an Isle of Man packet. She left Dover at 9:00 p.m., May 26, and after an uneventful passage tied up at Dunkirk’s Gare Maritime around midnight. Packed with 1,420 troops, she began her return journey at sunrise on the 27th. Second Lieutenant D. C. Snowdon of the 1st/7th Queen’s Royal Regiment lay in exhausted sleep below decks, when he was suddenly awakened by what sounded like someone hammering on the hull. This turned out to be German artillery firing on the vessel. Because of shoals and minefields, the shortest route between Dunkirk and Dover (called Route Z) ran close to the shore for some miles west of Dunkirk. Passing ships offered a perfect target.

Several shells crashed into Mona’s Isle, miraculously without exploding. Then a hit aft blew away the rudder. Luckily, she was twin-screw, and managed to keep course by using her propellers. Gradually she drew out of range, and the troops settled down again. Lieutenant Snowdon went back to sleep below decks; others remained topside, soaking in the bright morning sun.

Then another rude awakening—this time by a sound like hail on the decks. Six Me 109’s were machine-gunning the ship. All the way aft Petty Officer Leonard B. Kearley-Pope crouched alone at the stern gun, gamely firing back. Four bullets tore into his right arm, but he kept shooting, until the planes broke off. Mona’s Isle finally limped into Dover around noon on the 27th with 23 killed and 60 wounded. Almost as bad from Ramsay’s point of view, the 40-mile trip had taken eleven and a half hours instead of the usual three.

By this time other ships too were getting a taste of those German guns. Two small coasters, Sequacity and Yewdale, had started for Dunkirk about 4:00 a.m. on the 27th. As they approached the French coast, a shell crashed into Sequacity’s starboard side at the waterline, continued through the ship and out the port side. Another smashed into the engine room, knocking out the pumps. Then two more hits, and Sequacity began to sink. Yewdale picked up the crew, and with shells splashing around her, headed back for England.

By 10:00 a.m. four more ships had been forced to turn back. None got through, and Admiral Ramsay’s schedule was in hopeless disarray. But he was a resourceful, resilient man; in the Dynamo Room the staff caught his spirit and set about revamping their plan.

Clearly Route Z could no longer be used, at least in daylight. There were two alternatives, neither very attractive. Route X, further to the northeast, would avoid the German batteries, but it was full of dangerous shoals and heavily mined. For the moment, at least, it too was out. Finally there was Route Y. It lay still further to the northeast, running almost as far as Ostend, where it doubled back west toward England. It was easier to navigate, relatively free of mines, and safe from German guns; but it was much, much longer—87 miles, compared to 55 for Route X and 39 for Route Z.

This meant the cross-Channel trip would be twice as long as planned; or, put another way, it would take twice as many ships to keep Ramsay’s schedule.

Still, it was the only hope, at least until Route X could be swept clear of mines. At 11:00 a.m. on the 27th the first convoy—two transports, two hospital ships, and two destroyers—left Dover and arrived off Dunkirk nearly six hours later.

The extra effort was largely wasted, for at the moment Dunkirk was taking such a pounding from the Luftwaffe that the port was practically paralyzed. The Royal Daffodil managed to pick up 900 men, but the rest of the convoy was warned to stay clear: too much danger of sinking and blocking the harbor. With that, the convoy turned and steamed back to Dover.

During the evening four more transports and two hospital ships arrived by Route Y. The transport Canterbury picked up 457 troops at the Gare Maritime, but then the Luftwaffe returned for a nighttime visit, and it again looked as though the harbor might be blocked.

As Canterbury pulled out, she received a signal from the shore to turn back any other vessels trying to enter. She relayed the message to several ships waiting outside, and they in turn relayed it to other ships. There was more than one inexperienced signalman at sea that night, and garbles were inevitable. By the time the warning was flashed by a passing ship to the skoot Tilly, coming over by Route Y, it said, “Dunkirk has fallen and is in enemy hands. Keep clear.”

Tilly was one of six skoots that had sailed together from the Dover Downs that afternoon. Her skipper, Lieutenant-Commander W.R.T. Clemments, had no idea why he was going to Dunkirk. His only clue was a pile of 450 lifejackets that had been dumped aboard just before sailing—rather many for a crew of eleven. Now here was a ship telling him to turn back from a trip he didn’t understand anyhow. After consulting with the nearest skoot, he put about and returned to Dover for further orders.

The other skoots hovered off Nieuport for a while. They too received signals from passing ships that Dunkirk had fallen. They too turned back. To cap off the day, two strings of lifeboats being towed over by a tug were run down and scattered.

This chain of mishaps and misunderstandings explained why the men waiting on the beaches saw so few ships on May 27. Only 7,669 men were evacuated that day, most of them “useless mouths” evacuated by ships sent from Dover before Dynamo officially began. At this rate it would take 40 days to lift the BEF.

As the bad news flowed in, Admiral Ramsay and his staff in the Dynamo Room struggled to get the show going again. Clearly more destroyers were needed—to escort the convoys, to fight off the Luftwaffe, to help lift the troops, to provide a protective screen for the longer Route Y. Ramsay fired off an urgent appeal to the Admiralty: take destroyers off other jobs; get them to Dunkirk. …

HMS Jaguar was on escort duty in the cold, foggy waters off Norway when orders came to return to England at once. … Havant was lying at Greenock, tucked among the green hills of western Scotland. … Harvester was a brand new destroyer training far to the south off the Dorset coast. One after another, all available destroyers were ordered to proceed to Dover “forthwith.”

Saladin was a 1914 antique on escort duty off the Western Approaches when she got the word. The other escort vessels had similar orders, and all complied at once. The twelve to fourteen ships in the convoy were left to fend for themselves. These were dangerous waters, and Chief Signal Clerk J. W. Martin of the Saladin wondered what the commodore of the convoy thought as he watched his protection steam away.

On the destroyers few of the men knew what was up. On the Saladin Martin, who saw much of the message traffic, caught a reference to “Dynamo,” but that told him nothing. He just knew it must be important if they were leaving a convoy in this part of the Atlantic.

Speculation increased as the destroyers reached Dover and were ordered to proceed immediately to “beaches east of Dunkirk.” On the Malcolm the navigation officer, Lieutenant David Mellis, supposed they were going to bring off some army unit that had been cut off. With luck they should finish the job in a few hours. The Anthony passed a motor boat heading back to England with about twenty soldiers aboard. The officer of the watch shouted across the water, asking if there were many more to come. “Bloody thousands,” somebody yelled back.

It was still dark when the Jaguar crept near the French coast in the early hours of May 28. As dawn broke, Stoker A. D. Saunders saw that the ship was edging toward a beautiful stretch of white sand, which appeared to have shrubs planted all over it. Then the shrubs began to move, forming lines pointed toward the sea, and Saunders realized they were men, thousands of soldiers waiting for help.

The whole stretch of beach from Dunkirk to La Panne shelved so gradually that the destroyers couldn’t get closer than a mile, even at high tide. Since no small craft were yet on the scene, the destroyers had to use their own boats to pick up the men. The boat crews weren’t used to this sort of work, the soldiers even less so.

Sometimes they piled into one side all at once, upsetting the craft. Other times too many crowded into a boat, grounding or swamping it. All too often they simply abandoned the boat once they reached the rescue ship. Motors were clogged with sand, propellers fouled by debris, oars lost. Operating off Malo-les-Bains in the early hours of May 28, Sabre’s three boats picked up only 100 men in two hours. At La Panne, Malcolm’s record was even worse—450 men in fifteen hours.

“Plenty troops, few boats,” the destroyer Wakeful radioed Ramsay at 5:07 a.m. on the 28th, putting the problem as succinctly as possible. All through the day Wakeful and the other destroyers sent a stream of messages to Dover urging more small boats. The Dynamo Room in turn needled London.

The Small Vessels Pool was doing its best, but it took time to wade through the registration data sent in by owners. Then H. C. Riggs of the Ministry of Shipping thought of a short-cut. Why not go direct to the various boatyards along the Thames? With a war on, many of the owners had laid up their craft.

At Tough Brothers boatyard in Teddington the proprietor, Douglas Tough, got an early-morning phone call from Admiral Sir Lionel Preston himself. The evacuation was still secret, but Preston took Tough into his confidence, explaining the nature of the problem and the kind of boats needed.

The Admiral couldn’t have come to a better man. The Tough family had been in business on the Thames for three generations. Douglas Tough had founded the present yard in 1922 and knew just about every boat on the river. He was willing to act for the Admiralty, commandeering any suitable craft.

The first fourteen were already in the yard. Supervised by Chief Foreman Harry Day, workmen swiftly off-loaded cushions and china, ripped out the peacetime fittings, put the engines in working order, filled the fuel tanks.

Tough himself went up and down the river, picking out additional boats that he thought could stand the wear and tear of the job ahead. Most owners were willing; some came along with their boats. A few objected, but he commandeered their vessels anyhow. Some never realized what was happening, until they later found their boats missing and reported the “theft” to the police.

Meanwhile volunteer crews were also being assembled at Tough’s, mostly amateurs from organizations like the Little Ships Club or a wartime creation called the River Emergency Service. These gentleman sailors would get the boats down the river to Southend, where the Navy would presumably take over.

The Small Vessels Pool, of course, did not confine its efforts to Tough’s. It tried practically every boatyard and yacht club from Cowes to Margate. Usually no explanation was given—just the distance the boats had to go. At William Osborne’s yard in Littlehampton the cabin cruisers Gwen Eagle and Bengeo seemed to fill the bill; local hands were quickly rounded up by the harbor master, and off they went.

Often the Small Vessels Pool dealt directly with the owners in its files. Technically every vessel was chartered, but the paperwork was usually done long afterwards.

Despite a later legend of heroic sacrifice, some cases were difficult. Preston’s assistant secretary Stanley Berry found himself dealing interminably with the executor of a deceased owner’s estate, who wanted to know who was going to pay a charge of £3 for putting the boat in the water. But most were like the owner who asked whether he could retrieve some whisky left on board. When Berry replied it was too late for that, the man simply said he hoped the finder would have a good drink on him.

By now the Dynamo Room was reaching far beyond the Small Vessels Pool. The Nore Command of the Royal Navy, based at Chatham, scoured the Thames estuary for shallow-draft barges. The Port of London authorities stripped the lifeboats off the Volendam, Durbar Castle, and other ocean liners that happened to be in dock. The Royal National Lifeboat Institution sent everything it had along the east and south coasts.

The Army offered eight landing craft (called ALC’s), but some way had to be found to bring them from Southampton. Jimmy Keith, the Ministry of Shipping liaison man in the Dynamo Room, phoned Basil Bellamy at the Sea Transport Division in London. For once, the solution was easy. Bellamy flipped through his cards and found that the cargo liner Clan MacAlister, already in Southampton, had exceptionally strong derrick posts. She began loading the ALC’s on the morning of the 27th, and was on her way down the Solent by 6:30 p.m.

On board was a special party of 45 seamen and two reserve officers. They would man the ALC’s. Like the crews for the skoots, they were drawn from the Chatham Naval Barracks. Sometimes a ship was lucky and drew an experienced crew. More often it was like the skoot Patria, which had a coxswain who couldn’t steer and an engineer making his first acquaintance with marine diesels.

In the Dynamo Room, Admiral Ramsay’s staff worked on. There seemed a million things to do, and all had to be done at once: Clear Route X of mines. … Get more fighter cover from the RAF. … Find more Lewis guns. … Dispatch the antiaircraft cruiser Calcutta to the scene. … Repair damaged vessels. … Replace worn-out crews. … Send over water for the beleaguered troops. … Prepare for the wounded. … Get the latest weather forecast. … Line up some 125 maintenance craft to service the little ships now gathering at Sheerness. … Put some men to work making ladders—fast.

“Poor Morgan,” Ramsay wrote Mag, describing the effect on his staff, “is terribly strained and badly needs a rest. ‘Flags’ looks like a ghost, and the Secretary has suddenly become old. All my staff are in fact completely worn out, yet I see no prospect of any let up. …”

For Ramsay himself there was one ray of light. Vice-Admiral Sir James Somerville had come down from London, volunteering to take over from time to time so that Ramsay could get a bit of rest. Somerville had an electric personality, and was worshiped by junior officers. He was not only a perfect stand-in but a good trouble-shooter as well. Shortly after his arrival on May 27 morale collapsed on the destroyer Verity. She had been badly shelled on a couple of trips across the Channel, her captain was seriously wounded, and the crew had reached the breaking point. One sailor even tried to commit suicide. When the acting skipper reported the situation to Dover Castle, Somerville went back with him and addressed the ship’s company. Knowing that words can only accomplish so much, he also rested Verity overnight. Next morning she was back on the job.

To Somerville, to Ramsay—to the whole Dynamo Room contingent—the evacuation had become an obsession. So it seemed like a visit from another world when three high-ranking French naval officers turned up in Dover on the 27th to discuss, among other things, how to keep Dunkirk supplied.

From General Weygand on down, the French still regarded the port as a permanent foothold on the Continent. Admiral Darlan, the suave naval Chief of Staff, was no exception, and his deputy, Captain Paul Auphan, had the task of organizing a supply fleet for the beachhead. Auphan decided that trawlers and fishing smacks were the best bet, and his men fanned out over Normandy and Brittany commandeering more than 200 vessels.

Meanwhile, disturbing news reached Darlan. A liaison officer attached to Gort’s headquarters reported that the British were considering evacuation—with or without the French. It was decided to send Auphan to Dover, where he would be joined by Rear-Admiral Marcel Leclerc from Dunkirk and by Vice-Admiral Jean Odend’hal, head of the French Naval Mission in London. A firsthand assessment might clarify the situation.

Auphan and Odend’hal arrived first, and as they waited for Leclerc in the officers’ mess, Odend’hal noticed a number of familiar British faces. They were strictly “desk types”—men he saw daily at the Admiralty—yet here they were in Dover wearing tin hats. Odend’hal asked what was up. “We're here for the evacuation,” they replied.

The two visitors were astonished. This was the first word to reach the French Navy that the British were not merely “considering” evacuation—they were already pulling out. Leclerc now arrived, and all three went to see Ramsay. He brought them up to date on Dynamo. Auphan began rearranging the plans for his fleet of fishing smacks and trawlers. Instead of supplying the beachhead, they would now be used to evacuate French troops. The two navies would work together, but it was understood that each country would look primarily after its own.

Back in France next day, the 28th, Auphan rushed to French naval headquarters at Maintenon and broke the news to Darlan. The Admiral was so amazed he took the Captain to see General Weygand. He professed to be equally surprised, and Auphan found himself in the odd position of briefing the Supreme Allied Commander on what the British were doing.

It’s hard to understand why they all were so astounded. On the afternoon of May 26 Churchill told Reynaud that the British planned to evacuate, urging the French Premier to issue “corresponding orders.” At 5:00 a.m. on the 27th Eden radioed the British liaison at Weygand’s headquarters, asking where the French wanted the evacuated troops to be landed when they returned to that part of France still held by the Allies. At 7:30 a.m. the same day the French and British commanders meeting at Cassel discussed the “lay-out of the beaches” at Dunkirk—they could only have been talking about the evacuation.

Informally, the French had been aware of Gort’s thinking a good deal sooner. As early as May 23 a British liaison officer, Major O. A. Archdale, came unofficially to say good-bye to his opposite number, Major Joseph Fauvelle, at French First Army Group headquarters. Fauvelle gathered that evacuation was in the wind and told his boss, General Blanchard. He in turn sent Fauvelle to Paris to tell Weygand. The information was in the Supreme Commander’s hands by 9:00 a.m., May 25.

And yet, surprise and confusion on the 28th, when Captain Auphan reported that the British had begun to evacuate. Perhaps the best explanation lies in the almost complete breakdown of French communications. The troops trapped in Flanders were no longer in touch with Weygand’s headquarters, except by wireless via the French Navy, and their headquarters at Maintenon was 70 miles from Paris.

As a result, vital messages were delayed or missed altogether. The various commands operated in a vacuum; there was no agreement on policy or tactics even among themselves. Reynaud accepted evacuation. Weygand thought in terms of a big bridgehead including a recaptured Calais. Blanchard and Fagalde wrote off Calais, but still planned on a smaller bridgehead built around Dunkirk. General Prioux, commanding First Army, was bent on a gallant last stand down around Lille.

In contrast, the British were now united in one goal—evacuation. As Odend’hal noted, even senior staff officers from the Admiralty were manning small boats and working the beaches—often on the shortest notice.

One of these was Captain William G. Tennant, a lean, reserved navigation expert who normally was Chief Staff Officer to the First Sea Lord in London. He got his orders on May 26 at 6:00 p.m.; by 8:25 he was on the train heading for Dover. Tennant was to be Senior Naval Officer at Dunkirk, in charge of the shore end of the evacuation. As SNO he would supervise the distribution and loading of the rescue fleet. To back him up he had a naval shore party of eight officers and 160 men.

After a brief stopover at Chatham Naval Barracks, he arrived in Dover at 9:00 a.m. on the 27th. Meanwhile buses were coming from Chatham, bringing the men assigned to the shore party. Most still had no idea what was up. One rumor spread that they were going to man some six-inch guns on the Dover cliffs. Seaman Carl Fletcher was delighted at the prospect: he then would be stationed near home.

He soon learned better. On arrival at Dover the men were divided into parties of twenty, each commanded by one of Tennant’s eight officers. Fletcher’s group was under Commander Hector Richardson, who explained that they would shortly be going to Dunkirk. It was a bit “hot” there, he added, and they might like to fortify themselves at a pub across the way. To a man they complied, and Seaman Fletcher belted down an extra one for the trip over.

The destroyer Wolfhound would be taking them across, and shortly before departure her skipper, Lieutenant-Commander John McCoy, dropped by the wardroom to learn what his officers knew about conditions at Dunkirk. Sub-Lieutenant H. W. Stowell piped up that he had a friend on another destroyer who was there recently and had a whale of a time—champagne, dancing girls, a most hospitable port.

At 1:45 p.m. Wolfhound sailed, going by the long Route Y. At 2:45 the first Stukas struck, and it was hell the rest of the way. Miraculously, the ship dodged everything, and at 5:35 slipped into Dunkirk harbor. The whole coastline seemed ablaze, and a formation of 21 German planes rained bombs on the quay as Wolfhound tied up. Commander McCoy dryly asked Sub-Lieutenant Stowell where the champagne and dancing girls were.

The Wolfhound was too inviting a target. Captain Tennant landed his shore party and dispersed them as soon as possible. Then he set off with several of his officers for Bastion 32, where Admiral Abrial had allotted space to the local British command.

Normally it was a ten-minute walk, but not today. Tennant’s party had to pick their way through streets littered with rubble and broken glass. Burned-out trucks and tangled trolley wires were everywhere. Black, oily smoke swirled about the men as they trudged along. Dead and wounded British soldiers sprawled among the debris; others, perfectly fit, prowled aimlessly about, or scrounged among the ruins.

It was well after 6:00 p.m. by the time they reached Bastion 32, which turned out to be a concrete bunker protected by earth and heavy steel doors. Inside, a damp, dark corridor led through a candle-lit operations room to the cubbyhole that was assigned to the British Naval Liaison Officer, Commander Harold Henderson.

Here Tennant met with Henderson, Brigadier R.H.R. Parminter from Gort’s staff, and Colonel G.H.P. Whitfield, the Area Commandant. All three agreed that Dunkirk harbor couldn’t be used for evacuation. The air attacks were too devastating. The beaches to the east were the only hope.

Tennant asked how long he would have for the job. The answer was not encouraging: “24 to 36 hours.” After that, the Germans would probably be in Dunkirk. With this gloomy assessment, at 7:58 p.m. he sent his first signal to Dover as Senior Naval Officer:

Please send every available craft East of Dunkirk immediately. Evacuation tomorrow night is problematical.

At 8:05 he sent another message, elaborating slightly:

Port continually bombed all day and on fire. Embarkation possible only from beaches east of harbour. … Send all ships and passenger ships there. Am ordering Wolfhound to anchor there, load and sail.

In Dover, the Dynamo Room burst into action as the staff rushed to divert the rescue fleet from Dunkirk to the ten-mile stretch of sand east of the port. …

9:01, Maid of Orleans not to enter Dunkirk but anchor close inshore between Malo-les-Bains and Zuydcoote to embark troops from beach. …

9:27, Grafton and Polish destroyer Blyskawicz to close beach at La Panne at 0100/28 and embark all possible British troops in own boats. This is our last chance of saving them. …

9:42, Gallant [plus five other destroyers and cruiser Calcutta] to close beach one to three miles east of Dunkirk with utmost despatch and embark all possible British troops. This is our last chance of saving them.

Within an hour the Dynamo Room managed to shift to the beaches all the vessels in service at the moment: a cruiser, 9 destroyers, 2 transports, 4 minesweepers, 4 skoots, and 17 drifters—37 ships altogether.

In Dunkirk, Captain Tennant’s naval party went to work rounding up the scattered troops and sending them to the nearest beach at Malo-les-Bains. Here they were divided by Commander Richardson into packets of 30 to 50 men. In most cases the soldiers were pathetically eager to obey anybody who seemed to know what he was doing. “Thank God we’ve got a Navy,” remarked one soldier to Seaman Fletcher.

Most of the troops were found crowded in the port’s cellars, taking cover from the bombs. Second Lieutenant Arthur Rhodes managed to get his men into a basement liberally stocked with champagne and foie gras, which became their staple diet for some time. But this did not mean they were enjoying the good life. Some 60 men, two civilian women, and assorted stray dogs were packed in together. The atmosphere was heavy … made even heavier when one of the soldiers fed some foie gras to one of the dogs, and it promptly threw up.

Some of the men took to the champagne, and drunken shouts soon mingled with the crash of bombs and falling masonry that came from above. From time to time Rhodes ventured outside trying to find a better cellar, but they all were crowded and he finally gave up. Toward evening he heard a cry for “officers.” Going up, he learned that the Royal Navy had arrived. He was to take his men to the beaches; ships would try to lift them that night.

Cellars couldn’t hold all the men now pouring into Dunkirk. Some, looking desperately for cover, headed for the sturdy old French fortifications that lay between the harbor and the beaches east of town. Bastion 32 was here, with its small quota of British staff officers, but the French units holed up in the area were not inclined to admit any more visitors.

Terrified and leaderless, one group of British stragglers wasn’t about to turn back. They had no officers, but they did have rifles. During the evening of the 27th they approached Bastion 32, brandishing their guns and demanding to be let in. Two Royal Navy officers came out unarmed and parlayed with them. It was still touch and go when one of Tennant’s shore parties arrived. The sailors quickly restored order, and this particular crisis was over.

Seaman G. F. Nixon, attached to one of these naval parties, later recalled how quickly the troops responded to almost any show of firm authority. “It was amazing what a two-badge sailor with a fixed bayonet and a loud voice did to those lads.”

Captain Tennant, making his first inspection of the beaches as SNO, personally addressed several jittery groups. He urged them to keep calm and stay under cover as much as possible. He assured them that plenty of ships were coming, and that they would all get safely back to England.

He was invariably successful, partly because the ordinary Tommy had such blind faith in the Royal Navy, but also because Tennant looked like an officer. Owing to the modern fashion of dressing all soldiers alike, the army officers didn’t stand out even when present, but there was no doubt about Tennant. In his well-cut navy blues, with its brass buttons and four gold stripes, he had authority written all over him.

And in Tennant’s case, there was an extra touch. During a snack at Bastion 32 his signal officer, Commander Michael Ellwood, cut the letters “S-N-O” from the silver foil of a cigarette pack, then glued them to the Captain’s helmet with thick pea soup.

Unfortunately no amount of discipline could change the basic arithmetic of Dunkirk. Far too few men were being lifted from the beaches. Tennant estimated he could do the job five or six times faster if he could use the docks. Yet one glance at Dunkirk’s blazing waterfront proved that was out of the question.

But he did notice a peculiar thing. Although the Luftwaffe was pounding the piers and quays, it completely ignored the two long breakwaters or moles that formed the entrance to Dunkirk’s harbor. Like a pair of protective arms, these moles ran toward each other—one from the west and one from the east—with just enough room for a ship to pass in between. It was the eastern mole that attracted Tennant’s special attention. Made of concrete piling topped by a wooden walkway, it ran some 1,400 yards out to sea. If ships could be brought alongside, it would speed up the evacuation enormously.

The big drawback: the mole was never built to be used as a pier. Could it take the pounding it would get, as the swift tidal current—running as high as three knots—slammed ships against the flimsy wooden planking? There were posts here and there, but they were meant only for occasional harbor craft. Could large vessels tie up without yanking the posts loose? The walkway was just ten feet wide, barely room for four men walking abreast. Would this lead to impossible traffic jams?

All these difficulties were aggravated by a fifteen-foot tidal drop. Transferring the troops at low or high water was bound to be a tricky and dangerous business.

Still, it was the only hope. At 10:30 p.m. Tennant signaled Wolfhound, now handling communications offshore, to send a personnel ship to the mole “to embark 1,000 men.” The assignment went to Queen of the Channel, formerly a crack steamer on the cross-Channel run. At the moment she was lifting troops from the beach at Malo-les-Bains, and like everyone else, her crew found it slow going. She quickly shifted to the mole and began loading up. She had no trouble, and the anxious naval party heaved a collective sigh of relief.

By 4:15 a.m. some 950 men crammed the Queen’s decks. Dawn was breaking, when a voice called out from the mole asking how many more she could take. “It’s not a case of how many more,” her skipper shouted back, “but whether we can get away with what we already have.”

He was right. Less than halfway across the Channel a single German plane dropped a stick of bombs just astern of the Queen, breaking her back. Except for a few soldiers who jumped overboard, everyone behaved with amazing calm. Seaman George Bartlett even considered briefly whether he should go below for a new pair of shoes he had left in his locker. He wisely thought better of it, for the ship was now sinking fast. He and the rest stood quietly on the sloping decks, until a rescue ship, the Dorrien Rose, nudged alongside and transferred them all.

The Queen of the Channel was lost, but the day was saved. The mole worked! The timbers did not collapse; the tide did not interfere; the troops did not panic. There was plenty of room for a steady procession of ships. The story might be different once the Germans caught on, but clouds of smoke hung low over the harbor. Visibility was at a minimum.

“SNO requires all vessels alongside east pier,” the destroyer Wakeful radioed Ramsay from Dunkirk at 4:36 a.m. on the 28th. Once again the staff in the Dynamo Room swung into action. They had spent the early part of the night diverting the rescue fleet from the harbor to the beaches; now they went to work shifting it back again. On the beach at Malo-les-Bains Commander Richardson got the word too and began sending the troops back to Dunkirk in batches of 500.

But even as the loading problem was being solved, a whole new crisis arose. Critical moments at Dunkirk had a way of alternating between the sea and the land, and this time, appropriately enough, the setting once again reverted to the battle-scarred fields of Flanders.

At 4 a.m.—just as the Queen of the Channel was proving that the mole would work—Leopold III, King of the Belgians, formally laid down his arms. The result left a twenty-mile gap in the eastern wall of the escape corridor. Unless it could be closed at once, the Germans would pour in, cut the French and British off from the sea, and put an abrupt end to the evacuation.

6

The Gap

GENERAL GORT HEARD THE news by chance. Hoping to confer with General Blanchard about the evacuation, he had driven to Bastion 32 around 11 o’clock on the night of May 27. No sign of Blanchard, but General Koeltz from Weygand’s headquarters was there, and casually asked whether Gort had heard that King Leopold was seeking an armistice.

Gort was amazed. He felt sure that the Belgians weren’t capable of prolonged resistance, but he didn’t expect them to crumble so soon. “I now found myself suddenly faced with an open gap of 20 miles between Ypres and the sea through which enemy armoured forces might reach the beaches.”

General Weygand was even more astonished. He got the word during a conference at Vincennes, when somebody handed him a telegram from his liaison officer with the Belgians. “The news came like a thunderclap, as nothing had enabled me to foresee such a decision, no warning, not a hint of it.”

Even Winston Churchill, who had his own special man, Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, at Leopold’s headquarters, seems to have been caught off-guard. “Suddenly,” the Prime Minister told a hushed House of Commons a few days later, “without prior consultation, with the least possible notice, without the advice of his ministers, and upon his own personal act, he sent a plenipotentiary to the German command, surrendered his Army, and exposed our whole flank and means of retreat.”

The mystery is why they were so surprised. As early as May 25 Leopold had telegraphed King George VI that Belgian resistance was on the point of being crushed, “and so the assistance which we can give to the Allies will come to an end if our Army is surrounded.” He added that he considered it his duty to remain with his people and not set up a government in exile.

On the 26th and 27th both Gort and the War Office received from their Belgian liaison contacts seven separate messages warning that the end was near, unless the British could counterattack—which was clearly impossible. In addition, Admiral Keyes telephoned Churchill on the morning of May 27 that “he did not think that the Belgian army’s resistance could be maintained much longer.” Keyes then wired Gort that Leopold

fears a moment is rapidly approaching when he can no longer rely upon his troops to fight or be of any further use to the BEF. He wishes you to realize that he will be obliged to surrender before a debacle.

Leopold, on the other hand, had been told nothing about Allied intentions. Although Gort felt that an active, fighting Belgian Army was “essential for our extraction,” its leaders were never consulted, and not one ship was allocated for the use of Belgian troops.

Finally, after a nudge from Eden, Churchill telegraphed Gort on the morning of May 27, “It is now necessary to tell the Belgians. …” He then included a personal message for Admiral Keyes, spelling out the approach to take with Leopold: “Impart following to your friend. Presume he knows that British and French are fighting their way to coast. …” Thus London explained away its failure to inform the King by simply “presuming” that he already knew.

Churchill’s message also urged Keyes to make sure that Leopold left the country and ended with a vague offer to include Belgian troops whenever the BEF returned to France.

The message never reached Keyes, but it didn’t matter By now Leopold had other ideas. Never an attractive personality—a haughty, aloof man who made his ministers stand in his presence—the King nevertheless had a strong sense of duty. On the mistaken assumption that he would continue to have influence under German occupation, he decided to surrender and remain with his people.

At 5:00 p.m. on the 27th a trusted staff officer, Major-General Derousseau, set out with a white flag for the German lines. Any hopes he had for favorable terms were quickly dashed. The Fuehrer insisted on unconditional surrender. Leopold agreed, and at 4:00 a.m. on May 28 Belgium formally laid down her arms.

Here and there a few fought on. After an exhausting day of retreat, Captain Georges Truffaut of the 16th Infantry Division was sleeping in the great hall of the chateau at Ruddervoorde when he woke up with a start at 4:30 a.m. The lights were on, and people were moving about. “The army has capitulated,” somebody explained.

“What?”

“The liaison officer attached to Corps headquarters has just brought the order.”

“Then I’m deserting.” Truffaut, a member of Parliament and one of the young leaders of the Walloon Socialist Party, was no man for blind obedience to military orders.

He “borrowed” a staff car and was soon on his way to Dunkirk. Coming to a French outpost, he learned that staying in the war would be no easy matter. Enraged by the Belgian surrender, the officer in charge called him a traitor, a coward, and warned that the guard would start shooting if he came any closer.

Turned back, Truffaut now tried another road farther south … and ran head-on into a German column. Racing north again, he reached the sea at Coxyde. Here he cautiously approached a British officer and carefully explained he was no traitor. Could he enter the lines?

“I’m afraid it’s impossible, sir. Sorry.”

On to Nieuport, which he found full of Belgian soldiers, some as frustrated as himself. Here Truffaut and a few others appropriated a fishing smack lying in the fairway. They had trouble with the engine, with the sail, and with a lone German plane that swooped down and buzzed them. It apparently decided they weren’t worth the ammunition, for it flew off and they safely reached the open sea.

It was now dark, and to attract attention they lit rags soaked in petrol. There were plenty of ships, but no one wanted to stop in these dangerous waters. Finally a British destroyer did pick them up, and once again Truffant faced a hostile reception.

This time he managed to sell his case. In fact, the destroyer was on its way to Dunkirk and could use these sturdy Belgians with their boat. It had been a long, hard day, but Georges Truffant was at last back in the war.

There were not many like him. Private W.C.P. Nye of the 4th Royal Sussex was on sentry duty at the Courtrai airfield when he saw a mass of men coming down the road away from the front. Hundreds of Belgian soldiers on bicycles swept by, shouting that the war was over. Tramping toward the coast from the River Lys, the men of the 2nd North Staffordshire passed swarms of disarmed Belgians standing by the roadside watching the retreat. Some looked ashamed, but many shouted insults and shook their fists at the weary Tommies. At Bulscamp a plump gendarme appeared at British headquarters, announced that Belgium had surrendered and he had been ordered to confiscate all British weapons. There is no record of the language used in reply.

All over the countryside white bedsheets blossomed from windows and doorways. At Watou Lieutenant Ramsay of the 2nd Dorsets started to enter an empty house to get a bit of rest. A woman who lived nearby rushed up crying, “Non, non, non!”

“C’est la guerre,” explained Ramsay, using the time-honored expression that had served so well in two world wars to explain any necessary inconvenience.

“C’est la guerre, oui, mais pas pour nous!” she retorted.

To most Belgians it was now indeed somebody else’s war, and they were relieved to be out of it. Many felt their country had become just a doormat, to be stamped on by larger, stronger neighbors in an apparently endless struggle for power. “Les anglais, les allemands, toute la même chose,” as one weary peasant woman put it.

Technically, the Belgian surrender suddenly created a huge gap at the northeastern end of the Allied escape corridor. Actually, the gap had been steadily growing as Belgian resistance crumbled, and for the past 48 hours Lieutenant-General Brooke, the II Corps commander defending the line, had been juggling his forces, trying to fill it. He worked miracles, but on the afternoon of May 27 (just when Leopold was tossing in his hand) there were still no Allied troops between the British 50th Division near Ypres and some French on the coast at Nieuport—a gap of over twenty miles.

All Brooke had left was Major-General Montgomery’s 3rd Division down by Roubaix near the bottom of the pocket. To do any good, it would have to pull out from its position near the right end of the line … move north for 25 miles across the rear of three other divisions … then slide back into place on the far left. The shift would be that most difficult of military maneuvers: a giant side-step by 13,000 men, made at night along back lanes and unfamiliar roads, often within 4,000 yards of the enemy. And it all had to be completed by daylight, when the moving column would make a prime target for the Luftwaffe.

Montgomery wasn’t in the least fazed by the assignment. Although virtually unknown to the public, he was probably the most discussed division commander in the BEF. Cocky, conceited, abrasive, theatrical, he had few friends but many admirers in the army. Whatever they thought of him, all agreed that he was technically a superb soldier and a master at training and inspiring troops. All winter his men had practiced this sort of night march. They had drilled and drilled, until every detail was down pat, every contingency foreseen. Now “Monty” was sure he could pull it off.

Late afternoon, his machine gunners and armored cars went ahead as a light advance force. Then at last light the red-capped Military Police moved out to mark the way and keep the traffic properly spaced. Finally, after dark, the main body—2,000 vans, lorries, pick-ups, staff cars, and troop carriers. There were, of course, no regular lights. Every driver had to watch the rear axle of the vehicle in front of him. It was painted white, faintly illuminated by a small shielded lamp. Monty himself was riding in his regular Humber staff car, with his bodyguard Sergeant Elkin close by on his motorcycle. On their right the front, running parallel, was marked by the constant flicker of guns. On their left some British artillery kept up a lively fire from Mont Kemmel. Shells and tracers were passing overhead in both directions, forming a weird archway for the moving troops. Once a British battery, positioned by the roadside, let loose just as Monty was passing. It practically blew the Humber off the road, but the General didn’t bat an eye.

By daylight on the 28th the 3rd Division was moving into position. Thanks to Montgomery’s giant side-step, British troops now held the eastern wall of the escape corridor as far north as Noordschote. For the rest of the way to the sea—some thirteen miles—he counted on the remaining Belgians, for they were still in the war, as far as he knew. Then, shortly after 7:30 a.m., he learned for the first time of Leopold’s capitulation.

“Here was a pretty pickle!” Montgomery later recalled in his memoirs. “Instead of having a Belgian Army on my left, I now had nothing. …” He quickly slapped together a scratch force of machine gunners plus some British and French armored cars. These fanned out and held the line until more substantial help could be mustered. It was often touch and go. Lieutenant Mann of the 12th Lancers barely managed to blow the bridge at Dixmude before Bock’s advance entered the town.

Then, in the afternoon, more bad news. The Germans were at Nieuport, the eastern anchor of the perimeter. The Belgians were gone; Montgomery was stretched to the limit; there was no organized unit to defend the line from Wulpen to Nieuport and the sea.

Once more, improvisation. Brigadier A. J. Clifton happened to be available. Brooke packed him off to Wulpen to organize the defense. On arriving, he took over a scratch force of 200 artillerymen, bolstered from time to time by “unemployed” fitters, surveyors, transport drivers, and headquarters clerks. The unit never had a name; the officers came from five different regiments. Most of the men had never seen their officers before, and the officers had never worked with Clifton.

Somehow he welded them together and they marched off to the front in amazingly good spirits. Along the way, they met the disbanded Belgians trooping back. The Belgians were throwing away their weapons and shouting that the war was over. Taking advantage of the windfall, Clifton’s men scooped up the discarded rifles and ammunition, and added them to their own meager arsenal. Positioned along the Furnes-Nieuport canal and the River Yser, they kept the enemy at bay for the next 30 hours. The hottest fighting swirled around the bridge at Nieuport. The Belgians had failed to blow it before the cease-fire, and the British sappers couldn’t reach the demolition wires at the eastern end. Again and again the Germans tried to cross, but Clifton concentrated all his “heavy stuff” (four 18-pounders and some Bren guns) at this point and managed to fend them off. Once again the eastern wall held.

The west held too. At Wormhout, a strong-point twelve miles south of Dunkirk, the British 144th Brigade held off Guderian’s troops all May 27 and most of the 28th. Every man was used. At the local chateau that served as Brigade headquarters, Private Lou Carrier found himself teaching some cooks and clerks how to prime a Mills bomb—even though he had never seen one before in his life.

Successfully completing this hazardous assignment, he was ordered to help man the chateau wall. As he made his way through the garden, he heard a terrible scream. Thinking some poor blighter had been hit, he spun around … and discovered that it came from a peacock perched in a tree.

“That is one bird who will frighten no one else,” Carrier said to himself as he raised his rifle to bring it down. Before he could fire, a young lieutenant knocked the rifle aside, saying that he should know better. Didn’t he realize it was unlucky to shoot peacocks? The officer added that Carrier would be courtmartialed if he disobeyed and shot the bird.

The next step was predictable. Carrier waited until the lieutenant moved out of sight, then took careful aim and fired. If shooting a peacock brought bad luck, he never noticed it.

But a large dose of bad luck did come to some men defending Wormhout who had probably never harmed a peacock in their lives. After a hard fight most of the 2nd Royal Warwicks were broken up and forced to surrender around 6:00 p.m. on the 28th. Prodded by their captors, the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler Regiment, about 80 men and one officer were herded into a small open-ended barn just outside the village.

As they crowded in, the officer Captain J. F. Lynn-Allen protested that there wasn’t enough room for the wounded. Speaking fluent English with a strong American accent, one of the SS guards snapped back, “Yellow Englishman, there will be plenty of room where you’re all going to!”

With that, he hurled a stick grenade into the barn, and the carnage was on. For fifteen minutes the guards blasted away with grenades, rifles, tommy guns, and pistols. As an extra touch two batches of prisoners were brought outside and executed by an impromptu firing squad. Amazingly, some fifteen men somehow survived amid the jumble of bodies.

Eight miles farther south Cassel continued to hold. Perched on its hill, it had become—as Colonel Bridgeman foresaw—the “Gibraltar” of the western wall. For two days Kleist’s tanks, artillery, and mortars battered the town … waves of Stukas pounded it … and still it stood. It was a minor miracle, for the principal defenders—the 5th Gloucesters—had little to fight with. Told to build a barricade, Lieutenant Fane could find only one farm wagon, one plough, a pony trap, and a water cart. When a tank broke into a nearby garden, he tried to stop it with a Boyes rifle—and watched his shots bounce off the armored plate.

The town was surrounded, yet on the evening of May 28 the Gloucesters’ quartermaster Captain R.E.D. Brasington managed to get some rations through. The defenders settled down to an odd meal of bully beef washed down by vintage wine.

All the way south, at the bottom of the pocket, units of General Prioux’s First Army still held Lille. In contrast to most of the French, they fought with passionate commitment, holding off six German divisions … meaning six fewer divisions to harass the BEF farther up the corridor.

Most of the escaping troops were now well on their way. The time had come to abandon the strong-points farthest south, and pull the defending units back toward the coast as a sort of rear guard.

On the morning of the 28th Corporal Bob Hadnett, in charge of dispatch riders at 48th Division headquarters, was ordered to get a message to the troops holding Hazebrouck, one of these southern strong-points. The defenders were to disengage and make for Dunkirk that night. Hadnett had already lost two messengers on missions to Hazebrouck; so this time he decided to go himself.

The main roads were jammed with refugees and retiring troops, but he had been a motorcycle trials driver in peacetime and had no trouble riding cross-country. Bouncing over fields and along dirt lanes, he reached Hazebrouck and delivered his message at 143rd Brigade headquarters. After helping the staff work out an escape route north, he mounted his motorcycle and started back.

This time he ran smack into a German column that was just moving into the area. No way to turn, he decided to ride right through. Bending low over the handlebars, accelerator pressed to the floorboards, he shot forward. The startled Germans scattered, but began firing at him as he roared by.

He almost made it. Then suddenly everything went blank, and when he came to, he was lying in the grass with a shattered leg and hand. An enemy officer was standing over him, and a trooper was holding a bottle of brandy to his lips. “Tommy,” the officer observed in English, “for you the war is over.”

As the British troops streamed up the corridor toward the coast, General Gort’s headquarters moved north too. On May 27 the Command Post shifted from Prémesques to Houtkerque, just inside the French border and only fourteen miles from the sea. For the first time since the campaign began, headquarters was not on the London-Brussels telephone cable. It made little difference: Gort wasn’t there much anyhow.

He spent most of the 27th looking for General Blanchard, hoping to coordinate their joint withdrawal into the perimeter. He never did find him, and finally returned to Houtkerque weary and frustrated at dawn on the 28th. Then, around 11:00 a.m., Blanchard unexpectedly turned up on his own.

There was much to discuss, and Gort began by reading a telegram received from Anthony Eden the previous day. It confirmed the decision to evacuate: “Want to make it quite clear that sole task now is to evacuate to England maximum of your force possible.”

Blanchard was horrified. To the amazement of Gort and Pownall, the French commander hadn’t yet heard about the British decision to evacuate. He still understood that the strategy was to set up a beachhead based on Dunkirk which would give the Allies a permanent foothold on the Continent. Somehow Churchill’s statement to Reynaud on May 26, Eden’s message to the French high command on the 27th, the decisions reached at Cassel and Dover the same day, the information given Abrial and Weygand early on the 28th—all had passed him by. Once again, the explanation probably lay in the complete collapse of French communications.

Now that Blanchard knew, Gort did his best to bring him into line. He must, Gort argued, order Prioux’s French First Army to head for Dunkirk too. Like the BEF, they must be rescued to come back and fight again another day. With the Belgians out of the war, there was no longer any possibility of hanging on. It was a case of evacuation or surrender.

Blanchard wavered briefly, but at the crucial moment a liaison officer arrived from Prioux, reporting that the First Army was too tired to move anywhere. That settled it. Blanchard decided to leave the army in the Lille area.

Gort grew more exasperated than ever. Prioux’s troops, he exclaimed, couldn’t be so tired they were unable to lift a finger to save themselves. Once again, evacuation was their only chance.

Blanchard remained adamant. It was all very well, he observed ruefully, for the British to talk evacuation. “No doubt the British Admiralty had arranged it for the BEF, but the French Marine would never be able to do it for French soldiers. It was, therefore, idle to try—the chance wasn’t worth the effort involved.”

There was no shaking him. He ended by asking whether the British would continue to pull back to Dunkirk, even though they knew that the French would not be coming along. Pownall exploded with an emphatic “OUI!”

Down at French First Army headquarters at Steenwerck a somewhat similar conversation took place that afternoon between General Prioux himself and Major-General E. A. Osborne, commanding the British 44th Division. Osborne was planning the 44th’s withdrawal from the River Lys and came over to coordinate his movements with the French, who were on his immediate left. To his surprise, he learned that Prioux didn’t plan to withdraw at all. Osborne tried every argument he knew—including the principle of Allied solidarity—but he too got nowhere.

Yet Prioux must have had second thoughts, for sometime later that afternoon he released General de la Laurencie’s III Corps, telling them to make for the coast if they could. He himself decided to stay with the rest of his army and go down fighting.

The idea of a gallant last stand—saving the honor of the flag, if nothing else—seemed to captivate them all. “He could only tell us the story of the honor of the drapeaux,” Pownall noted in his diary after hearing it from Blanchard one more time.

“I am counting on you to save everything that can be saved—and, above all, our honor!” Weygand telegraphed Abrial. “Blanchard’s troops, if doomed, must disappear with honor,” the General told Major Fauvelle. Weygand pictured an especially honorable role for the high command when the end finally came. Rather than retreat from Paris, the government should behave like the Senators of ancient Rome, who had awaited the barbarians sitting in their curule chairs.

This sort of talk, though possibly consoling at the top level, did not inspire the poilus in the field. They had had enough of antiquated guns, horse-drawn transport, wretched communications, inadequate armor, invisible air support, and fumbling leaders. Vast numbers of French soldiers were sitting around in ditches, resting and smoking, when the 58th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, passed by on May 28. As one of them explained to a French-speaking Tommy, the enemy was everywhere and there was no hope of getting through; so they were just going to sit down and wait for the Boches to come.

Yet there were always exceptions. A French tank company, separated from its regiment, joined the 1st Royal Irish Fusiliers at Gorre and proved to be a magnificent addition. The crews bristled with discarded British, French, and German weapons and were literally festooned with clanking bottles of wine. They fought with tremendous élan, roaring with laughter and pausing to shake hands with one another after every good shot. When the Fusiliers were finally ordered to pull back, the tank company decided to stay and fight on. “Bon chance!” they called after the departing Fusiliers, and then went back to work.

General de la Laurencie was another exuberant Frenchman not about to fold his tent. Exasperated by the indecision and defeatism of his superiors, on two separate occasions he had already tried to get his III Corps transferred to Gort’s command. Now, released by Prioux, he hurried toward Dunkirk with two divisions.

The first of the fighting contingents were already entering the perimeter. The 2nd Grenadier Guards moved into Furnes, still marching with parade-ground precision. The steady, measured tread of their boots echoed through the medieval market square. Here and there a uniform was torn, a cap missing, a bandage added; but there was no mistaking that erect stance, that clean-shaven, expressionless look so familiar to anyone who had ever watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace.

Not far behind came the 1st/7th Middlesex. They were a Territorial unit far removed from the professionalism of the Guards, but raffishly engaging in their own way. They too had seen their share of rear-guard action. Now they continued through Furnes, finally halting at Oostduinkerke three miles to the east. Here they were a mile or so from Nieuport, the eastern anchor of the perimeter and the point most exposed by the Belgian surrender. Colonel Clifton’s “odds and sods” were already in position, but spread very thin. The Middlesex battalion would beef up the line.

Spreading their camouflage nets and digging slit trenches, the new arrivals settled down in the dunes and scrub. As yet there was no sign of the enemy, and it was wonderful to flake out at last and sleep undisturbed. The war of movement had ended, and until the Regimental Sergeant-Major, “Big Ike” Colton, caught up with them and devised some new torment, it was a chance to soak up oceans of missed sleep. Private Francis Ralph Farley only hoped that “Big Ike” didn’t find them too soon.

General Gort was also moving into the perimeter. At 6:00 p.m., May 28, GHQ opened up at La Panne, housed in a beachside villa at the western end of town. The place was well chosen. It had been the residence of King Albert during the dark days of the First War, and later served as a summer home for the old King during the twenties. As a result it had a large, reinforced cellar, ample wiring, and the London-Brussels telephone cable, which ran practically by the front door. Once again Gort was only a phone call away from Churchill, the War Office, and Ramsay at Dover.

The Corps commanders also moved into the perimeter on the 28th: III Corps at Dunkirk, II Corps at La Panne, and I Corps in between at Bray-Dunes. Lieutenant-General Michael Barker, commanding I Corps, was by now utterly exhausted. An elderly veteran of the Boer War, he was no man to cope with a blitzkrieg. Reaching corps headquarters at the western end of the beach promenade, he retired to the cellar. From here he constantly called up to his assistant quartermaster, Major Bob Ransome, to come and tell him what was going on.

Ransome found the scene on the beach appalling. A mob of officers and men from various service units milled around, firing haphazardly at German planes. Ransome tried to get the crowd into some sort of order but had no luck, even though he jammed his pistol into some very senior ribs. Finally he sent for Captain Tom Gimson, an assistant operations officer at III Corps headquarters. Gimson was an old Irish Guardsman, and his solution was to order the mob to fall in, as on parade. He then solemnly drilled them, running through all the usual commands. Surprisingly, the men complied, and order was soon restored. To Ransome the incident revealed not only what drill could accomplish but also the workings of that most austere of human mechanisms, a Guardsman’s mind.

Reports of the confusion at Bray-Dunes soon reached Captain Tennant, busy organizing the embarkations at Dunkirk. So far he had no naval shore parties operating that far up the beach. But the eastern mole and Malo-les-Bains were now under control, and clearly Bray was the next problem to tackle. There were said to be 5,000 troops there, most without officers or any leadership.

Around 5:00 p.m. on the 28th Tennant met with Commander Hector Richardson and two of his other officers, Commanders Tom Kerr and Campbell Clouston. He explained that he wanted an officer to lead a party to Bray and embark the 5,000 men waiting there. At the moment all three commanders were available; so they decided to cut a deck of cards for the assignment—loser to get Bray-Dunes. Richardson lost, but said it was such a big job he really needed another officer to go with him. Kerr and Clouston then cut again. This time Kerr lost. Clouston, the “winner,” took what all three considered the easiest assignment—pier master of the mole.

Richardson and Kerr then set off for Bray with fifteen men in a lorry. It was only seven miles, but the roads were so clogged with traffic and pitted with craters that it took an hour to get there. Arriving around 9:00 p.m., the party headed down to the beach to start organizing the embarkation.

It was dusk now, and in the fading light Seaman G. F. Nixon saw what he first thought were several breakwaters, extending from the sand out into the water. Then he realized that the “breakwaters” were actually columns of men, eight thick, leading from the shore right into the sea. The men in front were standing up to their waists, and even to their shoulders, in water.

Five thousand troops? It was more like 25,000. Richardson immediately signaled the situation to Dover and the Admiralty via a destroyer hovering offshore. Once again, an urgent appeal for small boats and motor launches.

Meanwhile they must “make do.” Richardson set up headquarters in the back of the lorry. Some of his seamen began breaking up the troops into batches of 50; others rigged lifelines running down into the sea. The beach shelved so gradually that even small boats had a hard time getting in close.

“What a terrible night that was,” Kerr wrote his wife a few days later, “for we had got hold of the odds and ends of an army, not the fighting soldiers. There weren’t many officers, and those that were, were useless, but by speech and promise of safety and the sight of our naval uniforms we got order out of the rabble.”

Those manning the boats were having an equally difficult time. The skoot Hilda had arrived early in the afternoon, and because of her shallow draft, her skipper Lieutenant A. Gray managed to nurse her within wading distance of the shore. Troops swarmed out, surrounding the boat completely, trying to scramble up ladders tossed over the bow. But the ladders weren’t firmly secured; the men were exhausted; and the tide was rising. They began falling back into the sea. It took superhuman efforts by the Hilda’s, crew to haul them up and over the rail—a collection of inert, sopping bundles.

By 7:00 p.m. Gray had 500 men aboard—not many, considering that 25,000 were waiting—but all he could carry. These he ferried to a destroyer lying farther out, then returned for another load. The tide was now ebbing, and the Hilda soon sat on the sand in only two feet of water. Some 400 soldiers surged aboard, and he had another full load by the time the next tide refloated him around 1:30 a.m.

Not far away the skoot Doggersbank was doing similar work. Earlier her skipper Lieutenant Donald McBarnet had let go a kedge anchor, then ran himself aground. But he drew more than the Hilda, and he still lay in six feet of water—too deep for wading. He lowered his boat and a raft to ferry men out to the ship. On reaching shore, both were immediately mobbed and swamped. Bailed out, they went to work, and by 8:00 p.m. McBarnet had about 450 aboard. Enough. He then used the kedge to pull himself off the beach. Once afloat, he too carried his load to a destroyer farther out, then returned for more.

This became the pattern all along the beach—Bray, Malo-les-Bains, and La Panne as well. Dinghies, rowboats, and launches would load at water’s edge and ferry the troops to small ships waiting offshore. These would then ferry the men to the growing fleet of destroyers, minesweepers, and packets lying still farther out. When filled, these would head for England—and one more bit of the army would be home.

It was a practical, workable scheme, but it was also very slow. Each skoot, for instance, averaged only 100 men an hour. No wonder nerves were frayed.

Most of the troops were not up front where they could see what was going on. They stood far back in line or waited in the dunes behind the beach. They couldn’t imagine why it all took so long. In the blackness of the night they could see nothing, except the occasional silhouette of some boat caught in the glittering phosphorescence of the water. They could hear only the steady rhythm of the surf and every now and then the clank of oarlocks.

They were tired, cold, and hungry. May nights are chilly along the coast of Flanders, and the men longed for the greatcoats they had thrown away during the hot, dusty retreat. Regular rations had vanished, and it was no longer possible to live off the land. When Corporal R. Kay, a GHQ signalman, found a seven-pound tin of peas near the beach, it was a major discovery. He and a few lucky mates ate them with their fingers, like expensive chocolates.

At Malo-les-Bains Lieutenant-Colonel John D’Arcy was another who fretted over the seemingly endless delay. He had gathered his artillery regiment in a brickyard behind the dunes—splendid cover but no place to see what was going on. He finally ordered one of his officers, Lieutenant C. G. Payne, to take a signal lamp and “go down to the beach and call up the Navy.”

Payne had no idea how to go about this, but he did find a signal manual with a section headed, “Call to an Unknown Ship.” Pointing his lamp to sea, he carefully followed the instructions, little expecting any results. To his amazement, an answer came flashing out of the night. Instructed to bring the unit to the beach, he hurried back to the Colonel in triumph.

Around 1:30 a.m. on the 29th a stiff breeze sprang up, meaning much greater surf and even slower going. At Bray-Dunes Commander Richardson was making so little progress that he decided to suspend any further embarkations and began sending the troops back to Dunkirk. Maybe the mole would be faster.

Indeed so. Over 24 hours had now passed since Captain Tennant began using the eastern mole or breakwater of Dunkirk harbor as an improvised pier, and the gamble was paying off. A steady stream of destroyers, minesweepers, ferries, and other steamers eased alongside, loaded troops, then backed off and headed for England. The flow of men was regulated by Commander Clouston, who had won the “easy” assignment—pier master of the mole—when he, Richardson, and Kerr cut cards to decide who would be stuck with Bray-Dunes.

Clouston was a Canadian—big, tough, athletic, amusing. He was a fine ice hockey player, and when stationed at Portsmouth, typically he had organized the staff into a hockey team. He was a man bursting with energy, and in his new job he needed all of it.

Word of the mole had gotten around, and now thousands of disorganized troops were flocking there, queuing up for a chance to embark. To Private Bill Warner, a headquarters clerk with the Royal Artillery, it was like the endless queue at the cinema when talkies first came in. To others it was more like London at rush hour or a rugby scrum. Planting himself at the foot of the mole, Clouston squarely faced the crowd. Megaphone in hand, he shouted instructions, matching the flow of men to the flow of ships.

At first they were mostly destroyers. During the morning of May 28 no fewer than eleven loaded up, and Commander Brian Dean of the destroyer Sabre showed how fast they could work. Earlier he had lifted 100 men off the beaches in two hours. His turn-around at Dover took only 58 minutes, and now he was back again, tying up at the mole at 11:00 a.m. This time he loaded 800 men, and headed back to Dover at 12:30 p.m.—a rate of 540 men an hour, compared to 50 men an hour at the beaches.

And he wasn’t through yet. Reaching Dover at 6:20 p.m., he refueled and was on his way back to the mole at 10:30—his third trip of the day. This time he stayed only 35 minutes, picking up another 500 troops.

Dusk on the 28th, and the destroyers were joined by an assortment of other craft. The fleet minesweeper Gossamer arrived at 9:45 p.m., departed half an hour later with 420 aboard. The sweeper Ross loaded another 353 about the same time. The skoot Tilly, leading a procession of six small motor vessels, tied up at 11:15; they took on hundreds more. The paddle steamer Medway Queen arrived around midnight and picked up nearly 1,000. Her skipper Lieutenant A. T. Cook had warned Chief Cook Russell to expect “several hundred men who will no doubt feel somewhat peckish.” The warning scarcely prepared Russell for the assault on his galley. These men weren’t “peckish”—they were ravenous.

All through the night of May 28-29 ships kept coming, while the men streamed out the long wooden walkway like an endless line of ants. For a while the ebb tide slowed the pace—it was hard for untrained soldiers to crawl down the makeshift ladders and gangplanks—but the flow never stopped. Tennant estimated that Clouston was getting men off at a rate of 2,000 an hour.

At 10:45 p.m. he sent Dover his first optimistic situation report:

French general appreciation is that situation in port tomorrow will continue as for today. Provided aircraft fighters adequate, embarkation can proceed full speed. …

The Dynamo Room began to hope that more than a handful might be saved. The total evacuated on May 28 reached 17,804—more than twice the figure for the 27th. They would have to do far better than that, but at least they were moving in the right direction.

There was other good news too: the Admiralty had now released to Ramsay all destroyers in home waters. … Route X had at last been cleared of mines, cutting the passage to Dunkirk from 87 to 55 miles. … The beachhead was holding despite the Belgian surrender. … The surf was subsiding; a threatening storm veered away. … Smoke from the blazing oil refinery hid the port from the Luftwaffe. … Casualties were mercifully low.

Besides the Queen of the Channel, the only serious loss of the day was the little paddle steamer Brighton Belle. A charming antique looking like something out of a toy store, she was thrashing her way home with 800 men plucked from the sea at La Panne. Sapper Eric Reader huddled in the boiler room drying off, when the ship hit a submerged wreck with a frightful jolt. “Never touched us,” an old cockney stoker called out cheerfully, but the sea gurgled in and the Brighton Belle began to sink. The troops tumbled on deck as the whistle tooted an SOS. Happily other ships were nearby and took everybody off—even the captain’s dog.

If casualties could be kept at this level, there were valid grounds for the Dynamo Room’s optimism. On the whole the evacuation was proceeding smoothly, and the greatest crisis of the day—the gap created by the Belgian surrender—had been successfully met. For the troops still pouring up the escape corridor, there was additional reason to hope. On either side of the raised roadways, the fields were beginning to fill with water. The French were flooding the low-lying land south of the coast. Even German tanks would find the going difficult.

But already a new crisis had arisen, shifting the focus back from the land to the sea. It had been brewing for several days without anybody paying much attention. Now, in the early hours of May 29, it suddenly burst, posing a fresh challenge to Admiral Ramsay and his resourceful staff.

7

Torpedoes in the Night

WHAT COULD THE GERMAN Navy do to help prevent an evacuation? General Keitel asked Vice-Admiral Otto Schniewind, Chief of the Naval War Staff, in a phone conversation on May 26. Not much, Schniewind felt, and he formally spelled out the Navy’s views in a letter to OKW on the 28th. Large ships were not suitable in the narrow, confining waters of the English Channel; the destroyers had been used up in Norway; U-boats were restricted by shallow water and the enemy’s very effective antisubmarine measures.

There remained the Schnellboot, the small fast German motor torpedo boat. These “S-boats” were especially suited to narrow seas like the Channel, and new bases were now available in Holland, closer to the scene of action. The only problems were the possibility of bad weather and the short nights this time of year.

Overall, the prospects seemed so bright that SKL—the naval war command—had already shifted two flotillas, totaling nine boats, from the German island of Borkum to the Dutch port of Den Helder, 90 miles closer to Dunkirk. From here Captain-Lieutenant Birnbacher’s 1st Flotilla and Captain-Lieutenant Peterson’s 2nd Flotilla began operating along the coast.

They drew first blood on the night of May 22-23. The French destroyer Jaguar, approaching Dunkirk, rashly radioed that she would be arriving at 12:20 a.m. German intelligence was listening in, and when Jaguar turned up on schedule, an unexpected reception committee was waiting. S 21 and S 23 sank her with a couple of well-placed torpedoes, then slipped away unseen.

On the Allied side nobody was sure what caused the loss. A submarine seemed most likely. The British were still unaware of the S-boats’ nightly patrols as the destroyer Wakeful lay off the beach at Bray-Dunes, loading troops on the evening of May 28. Her skipper Commander Ralph Lindsay Fisher was chiefly worried about an air attack. This might require some violent maneuvering; he packed the troops as low in the ship as possible to get maximum stability. They crowded into the engine room, the boiler room, the store rooms, every inch of empty space.

At 11:00 p.m. Wakeful weighed anchor with 640 men aboard—all she could carry—and headed for Dover via the long Route Y. It was a black night, but the phosphorescence was brilliant. Under such conditions bombers often spotted ships by their wake; as Commander Fisher headed northeast on the first leg of his trip, he kept his speed down to twelve knots to reduce this danger.

Around 12:30 he spotted the winking light of Kwinte Whistle Buoy, where he would swing west for the final run to Dover. It was an important buoy; so important that it remained lit even in these dangerous times. It was also the most exposed point of the homeward journey—easy to reach for enemy planes, U-boats, or any other menace.

Fisher began to zigzag and increased his speed to twenty knots. You couldn’t get by Kwinte too soon.

Not far away other vessels were also watching the winking light of Kwinte Whistle Buoy. The two German Schnellboote flotillas were now alternating their nightly patrols, and tonight was the turn of Captain-Lieutenant Heinz Birnbacher’s 1st Flotilla. On S 30 the skipper, Lieutenant Wilhelm Zimmermann, searched the night with his binoculars. There ought to be plenty of targets out by the buoy, but so far he saw nothing.

Then suddenly, about 12:40, he spotted a shadow even darker than the night. “There, dead ahead!” He nudged the helmsman, standing right behind him. The shadows quickly took shape as a darkened ship rushing toward them. Zimmermann sized it up as a destroyer.

A few brief orders, and S 30 turned toward the target, leading it slightly. On a Schnellboot the torpedo was aimed by aiming the boat itself. The gap quickly narrowed between the two vessels as the S-boat crew tingled with excitement. Would they get close enough before they were seen?

Another order from Zimmermann, and two torpedoes slapped into the sea. The crew began counting the seconds, waiting interminably. …

On the bridge of the Wakeful, Commander Fisher saw them coming—two parallel streaks, one slightly ahead of the other, racing toward his starboard side. They gleamed like silver ribbons in the phosphorescence. He ordered the helm hard-a-port, and as the ship began to swing, the first torpedo passed harmlessly across his bow.

The second hit. It exploded with a roar and a blinding flash in the forward boiler room, breaking Wakeful in half. She sank in fifteen seconds … the severed ends resting on the bottom, the bow and stern sticking out of the water in a grotesque V.

The troops far below never had a chance. Trapped by the slanting decks, engulfed by the sea, they were all lost—except one man who happened to be topside sneaking a cigarette.

A few hundred yards away Lieutenant Zimmermann watched with satisfaction as his torpedo finally hit. He had almost given up hope. He toyed with the idea of picking up survivors for questioning, then thought better of it. Occasional shadows and flashes of phosphorescence suggested that other ships were rushing to the scene—certainly alert and maybe even looking for him. Withdrawal seemed his best bet. The S 30 eased off into the night and resumed its prowl.

Back at the wreck Commander Fisher floated clear of his ship, as did most of the gun crews. About 30 men ended up on the stern, some 60 feet out of the water. Fisher and the rest paddled about, hoping some friendly vessel would find them.

In half an hour they got their wish. Two small drifters, Nautilus and Comfort, appeared out of the night. Normally engaged in minesweeping, they were now part of Admiral Ramsay’s rescue fleet, bound for La Panne via Route Y. As they approached Kwinte Buoy, crew members heard voices crying “Help!” and saw heads bobbing in the sea.

Nautilus managed to pick up six men, Comfort another sixteen, including Commander Fisher. Other rescue ships began to appear: the minesweeper Gossamer, packed with troops from the eastern mole … next the sweeper Lydd, also crowded … then the destroyer Grafton, with a full load from Bray-Dunes. All lowered their boats and stood by. Few yet knew what happened—only that a ship had sunk—and there were a number of flares and flashing signal lights.

Hidden by the night, a thousand yards away Lieutenant Michalowski, commanding the German submarine U 62, watched the confusion of lights with interest. Like the Schnellboot, he had been lying near Kwinte Buoy, waiting for some fat target to come along. These were indeed shallow waters for a U-boat—but not impossible. The U 62 glided toward the lights.

Commander Fisher sensed the danger. Picked up by the Comfort, he had taken over from her regular skipper. Now he moved here and there warning the other ships. Hailing Gossamer, he shouted that he had been torpedoed and the enemy was probably still nearby. Gossamer got going so fast she left her skiff behind. Comfort picked up its crew, ordered Nautilus to get going too, then moved over to warn Grafton and Lydd. Easing alongside Grafton’s starboard quarter, Fisher once again called out his warning.

Too late. At that moment, 2:50 a.m., a torpedo crashed into Grafton’s ward room, killing some 35 army officers picked up at Bray-Dunes. Comfort, lying alongside, was hurled into the air by the blast, then dropped back into the sea like a toy boat. Momentarily swamped, she bobbed back to the surface, but all the crew on deck were washed overboard, including Commander Fisher.

With no one at the helm, but her engines set at full speed, Comfort now moved into a wide circle that took her off into the night. Fisher grabbed a rope’s end and hung on for a brief, wild ride. But she was going too fast, and there was no one to pull him aboard. He finally let go.

Just as well. Comfort, still in her circle came back into view and was sighted by the nearby Lydd. Her skipper, Lieutenant-Commander Rodolph Haig, had been warned by a Wakeful survivor that an enemy torpedo boat, rather than submarine, was probably to blame. Now this seemed confirmed by what he saw in the dark: a small vessel dashing about at high speed.

Lydd opened up with her starboard guns, raking the stranger’s wheelhouse and producing a satisfying cloud of sparks. The torpedoed Grafton joined in, and the stranger appeared disabled.

Swimming in the sea again, Commander Fisher realized that Lydd had mistaken Comfort for the enemy; but there was nothing he could do. On Comfort herself three survivors huddled below decks, equally helpless. Her engines had stopped now, probably knocked out by gunfire, and she wallowed clumsily in the Channel swell.

Suddenly something big loomed out of the night, racing toward her. It was Lydd again, coming to finish off the “enemy” by ramming. As her steel prow knifed into Comfort’s wooden side, two figures burst out of the hatch and leapt for Lydd’s bow.

“Repel boarders!” The ancient rallying cry rose above her decks as members of the crew grabbed rifles and pistols and blazed away. They fortunately missed the two survivors of Comfort who had climbed aboard, but a stray shot fatally wounded Able Seaman S. P. Sinclair, one of their own men. The mix-up was finally ironed out, and Lydd set course for home.

Meanwhile, confusion on the stricken Grafton. The torpedo hits (there was apparently a second) knocked out all her lights, and the 800 troops aboard blindly thrashed about. Among them was Captain Basil Bartlett of the Field Security Police, one of the last to board the ship at Bray-Dunes. There was no space left in the ward room, where the officers were assigned; he settled for a corner of the captain’s cabin. Stunned by the explosion, he came to, groping for some way out. There seemed practically no chance of escape; still he was not overly worried. He remembered similar scenes in countless American war movies. “Gary Cooper always finds a way out,” he consoled himself.

He finally stumbled onto the open deck, and found the night alive with gunfire. Grafton had joined Lydd in pounding the luckless Comfort, and probably other nearby ships were firing, too. Stray shots ripped into the Grafton’s bridge, killing the skipper, Commander Charles Robinson.

Gradually the firing died down, and a semblance of order returned. Word reached the sick bay to start sending the wounded up, and Private Sam Sugar, an RASC driver who had injured his hand, bolted for the ladder. He was stopped in his tracks by an orderly, who gave him a flashlight and told him to stay a bit. Someone was needed to hold the light while the orderly fixed a tourniquet on a sailor who had just lost both legs. Sugar had been on the verge of panic, but the sight of the orderly calmly going about his business at this desperate moment showed the power of example. He had to stay calm too; he just couldn’t let this good man down.

By the time Sugar reached deck, the ferry Malines lay alongside taking off the troops. The Grafton was listing now, slowly sinking, but the men kept in ranks, patiently waiting for their turn to transfer. Captain Bartlett was one of the last to cross over. Gary Cooper had found a way out.

The destroyer Ivanhoe finished off Grafton with two well-placed shells, and at last there was time for postmortems. For Bartlett there was the lucky break of getting on board so late. Any earlier, and he would have died with the other officers in the ward room.

For Sergeant S. S. Hawes, 1st Division Petrol Company, there was a more ironical twist. He had briefly left his unit at Bray-Dunes to help a wounded comrade. Understandable, but orders were to stick together. By the time he got back, the others had put out in a launch, heading for a destroyer lying offshore. It was the Wakeful, and every man in the company was lost. For disobeying orders, Hawes was rewarded with his life.

The luckiest man of all was the indestructible Commander Fisher. Washed off Wakeful, he was one of the few picked up by Comfort; washed off Comfort, he was again picked up, this time by the Norwegian freighter Hird. A battered old steamer out of Oslo, Hird was engaged in the timber trade and was not even part of Admiral Ramsay’s rescue fleet. She had made a routine stop at Dunkirk on May 13, and for the past two weeks had been taking her share of punishment as the Luftwaffe pounded the port. Now only one engine worked, and she could barely make six knots.

But these were desperate times. As the panzers approached, Hird was requisitioned by the French Navy to transfer some of the trapped poilus to Cherbourg, 180 miles to the southwest and presumably out of danger. They crowded aboard all through the evening of May 28, unofficially joined by some of the British soldiers pouring into Dunkirk. Sapper L. C. Lidster found the gangplank blocked by a queue of Frenchmen, so he grabbed a rope ladder hanging down. He and his mates scrambled aboard while the waiting poilus shouted in anger. In various ways other Tommies made it too—Private Sam Love of the 12th Field Ambulance … Corporal Alf Gill of the 44th Division … Staff Sergeant Reg Blackburn of the Military Police … maybe 1,000 men altogether.

The Hird finally crept out of the harbor about midnight, packed with 3,000 Allied troops and a handful of German prisoners. At six knots, her master Captain A. M. Frendjhem wasn’t about to challenge the enemy batteries planted along the coast to the west, so he first steered east along Route Y. At Kwinte Whistle Buoy he would then swing west and make his run down the Channel, beyond the range of the German guns.

It was while rounding Kwinte that he picked up Commander Fisher and several other swimmers—all probably survivors of the Wakeful. Exhausted, Fisher slumped against the after cargo hatch among a crowd of French colonial troops. He saw no British soldiers, nor did it occur to him that any might be aboard.

Regaining his strength, he went to the bridge to urge that he be landed at Dover. Important charts might have floated clear when the Wakeful sank, and Admiral Ramsay must be warned. Captain Frendjhem replied that his orders were to go straight to Cherbourg. Fisher didn’t persist: he knew that the Hird had to pass close to Dover breakwater anyhow; surely he could catch a ride into the harbor from some passing ship.

And so it proved. As the Hird approached the breakwater, Fisher hailed a passing naval trawler. It came alongside, and he jumped aboard.

Meanwhile on the Hird’s foredeck the British troops watched Dover draw near with mounting anticipation. It had been an exhausting trip—no food or water—made worse when one Tommy fell down an open hatch and lay groaning all night. Now at last life began perking up. The famous white cliffs never looked better.

Then to everyone’s surprise the Hird turned out again and headed westward along the coast, past Folkestone … Eastbourne … Brighton. The men decided they must be going to Southampton and settled back to make the best of things. Sapper Lidster tried eating a tin of uncooked fish roe. It tasted awful, “but God! I was so hungry!”

Then another surprise. The Hird didn’t go to Southampton after all. Instead, she veered off past the Isle of Wight and headed across the Channel toward France again. Howls of rage rose from the foredeck. Some men aimed rifles at the bridge, hoping to “persuade” Captain Frendjhem to change his mind. At the crucial moment an elderly British major named Hunt stood up in front of the Captain to protect him and try to calm the troops. He explained that the Hird was under French control, that the senior French officer aboard had ordered her to Cherbourg, that the poilus were desperately needed there, and finally that he personally would see that every British soldier got back to England. It was an inspiring performance, coming from an officer who was not a trained combat leader, but rather a mild father figure in the 508th Petrol Company of the supply troops.

The spell of mutiny was broken. The Hird continued on to Cherbourg, where the British troops each received two slices of dry bread and jam, then marched off to a transit camp outside of town. Here they settled down in tents, until Major Hunt—true to his word—got them all back to England.

Admiral Ramsay and the Dynamo Room staff were blissfully ignorant of the meandering Hird, but they were very much aware of the disastrous events off Kwinte Whistle Buoy. With characteristic energy they dived into the business of countermeasures.

At 8:06 a.m. on the 29th Ramsay radioed his entire armada: “Vessels carrying troops not to stop to pick up survivors from ships sunk but are to inform other near ships.”

Next he took two minesweepers off troop-carrying duties and ordered them to search the area around Kwinte for any lurking torpedo boats. This was a drastic but realistic move. He needed every possible ship for lifting the BEF, but what good did it do, unless he could get them safely home?

There was still some suspicion that U-boats might be involved, so the Admiral also established an antisubmarine patrol in the waters west of Kwinte. In addition, antisubmarine trawlers patrolling off the Thames estuary were brought down to the critical area east of Margate and Ramsgate. A speedboat flotilla at Harwich was ordered to stand by as a striking force in case these various probes turned anything up.

Most important of all, the middle Route X was finally cleared of mines and opened to traffic. During the morning three destroyers tried it out, pronounced it safe from the German shore batteries both east and west of Dunkirk. At 4:06 p.m. Ramsay ordered all ships to start using the new route exclusively in daylight hours. This not only shortened the trip from 87 to 55 miles, but shifted the traffic 26 miles farther west of Kwinte Buoy—meaning 26 miles farther away from the S-boats’ favorite hunting ground.

By midafternoon all possible countermeasures had been taken, and the Dynamo Room returned to what one staff officer called “its normal state of organized chaos.” There were always fresh problems. New German batteries were shelling the mole from the southeast—could the RAF mount a quick strike? The Army’s medical service had completely broken down on the beaches—could the Navy send over a team of good doctors? Refueling was becoming a major bottleneck. Peacetime Dover refueled commercial traffic at a leisurely pace of one ship at a time—how to cope with dozens of vessels, all clamoring for oil at once? The Admiralty reported twenty Thames barges, towed by five tugs, would be arriving at Ramsgate at 5:30 p.m.—could they be used on the beaches as an improvised pier?

Tennant was consulted about the barges, and he turned the idea down. The beach shelved so gradually that twenty barges weren’t enough to make a decent pier. Better to use them for ferrying troops out to the destroyers and coastal steamers waiting offshore. He still didn’t have the small boats he really needed for this work, but the barges were better than nothing.

Meanwhile the problems grew. Men were pouring onto the beach at a far faster rate than they could be lifted off. When Captain S. T. Moore led a mixed bag of 20 officers and 403 men into La Panne around 10:00 a.m. he hadn’t the faintest idea what he was meant to do with them. Someone suggested he check II Corps headquarters; he left his charges in a hotel garden and trudged to the headquarters dugout about a mile up the beach.

Inside, it was another world—three lieutenant-colonels, about six staff assistants, a battery of telephones, and papers being shuffled back and forth. He was given a ticket, neatly filled out, authorizing him to embark 20 officers and 403 men from “Beach A.” Presumably it was to be handed to some collector at some gate to some particular beach.

Then back to the beach the way it really was: no signposts, no ticket takers, just bewildered waiting. At La Panne, Bray-Dunes, and Malo-les-Bains, ever-growing lines of men curled over the sand and into the sea. The queues seemed almost stationary, and the troops whiled away the hours as best they could. The padre of the 85th Command Ammunition Depot moved among his flock, inviting them to join him in prayers and hymns. Some antiaircraft gunners at Bray-Dunes were calmly playing cards; they had run out of ammunition long ago. On the promenade east of the mole a group pedaled about on brightly-colored mini-bikes borrowed from some beachfront concession. Near Malo a soldier lay face down, clutching handfuls of sand and letting it run through his fingers, repeating over and over, “Please, God, have mercy …”

Some discovered a stiff drink could help. Corporal Ackrell of the 85th Command Ammunition Depot asked a comrade for a drink from his water bottle. He discovered, not entirely to his sorrow, that it was filled with rum. A few swigs, and he passed out. Others like Private Jack Toomey didn’t trust the drinking water and had depended on wine and champagne for a fortnight. This morning some vin blanc finally caught up with him: “I was drunk as a lord.”

As the queues inched into the water, panic sometimes took over. With so many thousands waiting, it was hard to remain calm when some skiff, holding perhaps ten people, finally came within reach. Working the beach at La Panne, Lieutenant Ian Cox of the destroyer Malcolm had to draw his revolver and threaten to shoot the next man who tried to rush the boats. Even so, one army officer went down on his knees, begging to be allowed off first. In another rush at La Panne a boat overturned, and seven men were drowned in four feet of water.

Wading out could be hell. Artillery Captain R. C. Austin felt his britches balloon out and fill with water till they were “heavy as masonry.” His sodden jacket and water-logged boots seemed to nail him down.

The sea was up to his chin when a ship’s lifeboat finally appeared, and Austin wondered how he could ever climb into it. He need not have worried. Strong arms reached out, grabbed him by the armpits and belt, and swung him over the gunwale. He heard someone in the boat shouting, “Come on, you bastards, wake up, blast you!”

Occasionally the more resourceful soldiers devised their own transportation. Separated from his artillery unit, Gunner F. Felstead discovered that none of the queues seemed to want stragglers, so he and six mates decided to go it alone. Walking along the beach, they found a canvas collapsible drifting offshore. It had only one oar, but using their rifles as paddles, the little group put to sea. They were ultimately picked up by a naval cutter and transferred to the paddle steamer Royal Eagle.

The minesweeper Killarney rescued three other adventurers about this time. Heading across the Channel, she encountered a raft made of a door and several wooden planks. Aboard were a French officer, two Belgian soldiers, and six demijohns of wine. All were safely transferred.

But it was Lieutenant E. L. Davies, skipper of the minesweeper Oriole, who had the most practical idea for breaking the bottleneck of the beaches this day. Oriole was an old River Clyde paddle steamer with a good, shallow draft. Taking advantage of this, Davies aimed her at the shore and drove her hard aground. For the rest of the day she served as a pier. The troops wading out scrambled aboard her bow and were picked up from her stern by a steady stream of boats from the larger vessels lying further out.

Even so, many of the soldiers stumbled and sank while trying to reach the Oriole. Sub-Lieutenant Rutherford Crosby, son of a Glasgow bookseller, dived overboard again and again, pulling them out. He got a rest when the tide went out, leaving the Oriole high and dry, but toward evening it flowed in again, ultimately refloating the ship. Her work done, she turned for Ramsgate with a final load of Tommies. Altogether on the 29th, some 2,500 men used her as a bridge to safety.

In Dunkirk Captain Tennant had his own solution to the problem of the beaches. The eastern mole was proving such a success, he asked that the whole evacuation be concentrated there. Admiral Ramsay turned him down. The BEF was now pouring into the perimeter in such numbers the Admiral felt that both the mole and the beaches were needed. Beyond that, he wanted to spread the risk. So far he had been lucky. Thanks to the smoke and a low cloud cover, the Luftwaffe had virtually ignored the mole. Ramsay wanted to keep it that way. A large concentration of shipping might draw unwelcome attention.

As it was, a steady stream of vessels pulled in and out all morning. The formula was working: a ship would come alongside … the pier master Commander Clouston would send out enough troops to fill it … the ship would load up and be off again—sometimes in less than half an hour. Working with Clouston was Brigadier Reggie Parminter, formerly of Gort’s staff and now army embarkation officer. Totally imperturbable, he disdained a helmet and jauntily sported a manacled in his left eye.

All the time the queue of men waiting at the foot of the mole continued to grow. To keep it manageable, Parminter devised a “hat-check” system. The waiting men were divided into batches of 50; the leader of each batch was assigned a number; and when that number was called, it was time to go.

“Embarkation is being carried out normally now,” Captain Tennant radioed Dover at 1:30 p.m. on the 29th. And everything was indeed “normal”—except for the number of ships alongside the mole. There were more than usual. On the harbor side the destroyers Grenade and Jaguar, the transport Canterbury, and a French destroyer were all loading troops. On the seaward side, the Channel packet Fenella was also loading.

Now at 11:30, just as Tennant was sending his message, six more ships arrived. Lieutenant Robin Bill was leading in a flotilla of small trawlers. Normally engaged in minesweeping, today they were bringing some badly needed ladders for the mole. They too tied up on the harbor side, between the two British destroyers and the Canterbury.

Then a big paddle steamer, the Crested Eagle, also arrived, tying up on the seaward side, just astern of the Fenella. Altogether, there were now twelve ships clustered around the end of the mole.

At the same time the weather began to clear and the wind changed, sending the smoke inland instead of across the harbor. It was turning into a sparkling afternoon.

All these details were unknown in the Dynamo Room, but the message traffic was certainly reassuring. Every possible precaution had been taken against those torpedo attacks in the night. There had been no serious ship loss since early morning, when Mona’s Isle had struck a mine. Fortunately, she was empty at the time. No fresh information was coming in from Dunkirk, but news from there was always late.

By the end of the afternoon spirits were soaring. At 6:22 p.m. Major-General H. C. Lloyd, doing liaison work with Ramsay, telegraphed the War Office in London:

Naval shipping plan now approaching maximum efficiency. Subject to weather and reasonable immunity enemy action, expect lift about 16,000 Dunkirk, and 15,000 from beaches. …

But even as the General wired his optimism, awesome events were unfolding at Dunkirk … staggering the rescue fleet, turning the mole into a shambles, and throwing Admiral Ramsay’s whole evacuation plan into wild disarray.

8

Assault from the Sky

TO CAPTAIN WOLFGANG FALCK, these would always be “the golden days.” As a Gruppe commander in Fighter Squadron 26, he flew an Me 110—a new two-engine fighter said to be even better than the fabled Me 109, but nobody really knew because there was so little opposition. So far the campaign had been a picnic: knocking down obsolete British Fairey Battle bombers … shooting French planes as they sat in neat rows on the ground … protecting the Stukas, the Heinkel 111’s, the Dornier 17’s from attacks that never came.

The only problem was keeping up with the panzers. As the army advanced, so did the squadron, and it required superb organization to keep fuel, spare parts, and maintenance flowing. Usually the ground personnel would move forward during the night, leaving a skeleton crew to service the planes before taking off on their morning missions. These skeleton crews would then move on too. When the squadron completed its mission, it would land at the new base, where everything would be set up and waiting.

Food and lodging were always the best. The squadron’s administrative officer Major Fritz von Scheve was an old reservist who had a real nose for finding decent billets—and where a good wine cellar might be hidden. He usually selected some local chateau whose owner had fled, leaving everything behind. Falck forbade any looting—the place must be left as they found it—but there was no rule against enjoying life, and the pilots found themselves eating off Limoges china and sleeping in canopied beds.

There was even time for nonsense. Near one captured airfield some member of the squadron found a number of French baby tanks, abandoned but full of petrol. Pilots tend to be good at tinkering, and they soon had the tanks manned and running. The men spent a glorious hour chasing and ramming one another—it was like a giant dodgem concession at some amusement park.

May 27, and the German flyers got their first inkling that the golden days would not last forever. Now the target was Dunkirk itself, and as the Stukas and Heinkels went about their usual business, a new throaty roar filled the air. Modern British fighters—Hurricanes and Spitfires—came storming down upon them, breaking up the neat formations, sending occasional bombers spinning down out of control. These British squadrons had been considered too valuable to base in France, but the fighting was in range of England now, and that was different. Taking off from a dozen Kentish fields, they poured across the Channel.

It’s hard to say who was more surprised—the Tommies on the ground or the Germans in the air. The ordinary British soldier had almost given up hope of ever seeing the RAF again; then suddenly here it was, tearing into the enemy. For the Luftwaffe pilots, these new air battles were an educational experience. Captain Falck soon discovered that the Me 110 was not better than the Me 109—in fact, it wasn’t as good. On one mission his plane was the only 110 of four to get back to base after tangling with the RAF. He landed, still quivering with fright, to find General Kesselring making an inspection. When they met again years later, the General still remembered Falck’s shaky salute.

Like many pilots, Falck was superstitious. On the side of his plane he had painted a large ladybug—the lucky symbol of his squadron in the Norwegian campaign. A big letter “G” also adorned the fuselage. G was the seventh letter of the alphabet and “7” was his lucky number. With the Spitfires around, he needed every talisman he could get.

Even the Me 109’s had met their match. The Spitfires could make sharper turns, hold a dive longer, and come out of it faster. They also had a way of appearing without warning—once so suddenly that Captain Adolf Galland, a veteran 109 pilot flying wing on his skipper, lost his usual cool. Momentarily shaken, he made a false turn, leaving the skipper a wide-open target. In anguish, Galland managed to shoot one of the Spitfires down, then returned to his base fearing the worst. But the skipper, a veteran World War I pilot named Max Ibel, turned out to be an indestructible old bird. Run to earth by the Spits, he managed to crash-land and “walked home.”

Happily for the Luftwaffe, there were never enough Spitfires and Hurricanes. The RAF’s Fighter Command had to think ahead to the coming defense of Britain herself, and Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding refused to allocate to Dunkirk more than sixteen squadrons at any one time. Even stretched thin, these planes could not provide full-time cover, and the Luftwaffe took full advantage of those moments when the beaches were without fighter protection. When the score for the 27th was finally added up, there were conflicting claims on British and German losses, but on one point there was complete agreement: the port of Dunkirk was wrecked.

May 28 promised to be an even more productive day for the Luftwaffe. The Belgian surrender, the crumbling French defenses, the capture of Calais—all released additional planes. But the weather turned sour; Fliegerkorps VIII, responsible for Dunkirk, remained on the ground. Its commanding officer General Major Wolfram von Richthofen (distant cousin of the famous Red Baron) had more than the weather to contend with. Hermann Göring was constantly on the phone. The General Field Marshal was now worried about his assurances to Hitler that the Luftwaffe could win the battle alone, and seemed to think that Richthofen could somehow chase away the clouds.

May 29 dawned even worse. A steady drizzle and ceiling only 300 feet. Fliegerkorps VIII steeled itself for another barrage of calls from Göring. But around noon it began to clear up. At 2:00 p.m. Richthofen gave the long-delayed orders to attack.

Gruppe leaders were summoned and briefed. The main point: by agreement with Army Group B only the beaches and shipping would be attacked. No targets inland. There was now too much danger of hitting friendly troops. At 2:45 the planes began taking off from various fields: Major Oskar Dinort’s Stukas from Beaulieu … Major Werner Kreipe’s Dornier 17’s from Rocrai … Captain Adolf Galland’s Me 109’s from Saint Pol … and so on.

It was no ordinary raid. Fliegerkorps VIII had been specially reinforced: planes from four other Fliegerkorps … a wing of new Ju 88’s from Holland … another all the way from Dusseldorf. Altogether some 400 aircraft headed for Dunkirk, led by 180 Stukas.

By 3:00 p.m. they were there. So far no sign of the RAF. Circling so as to come in from the sea, Corporal Hans Mahnert, a gunner-radio operator flying with Stuka Wing No. 3, looked down on a remarkable sight. Ships were crowded together everywhere. It reminded him, oddly enough, of an old print he had once seen of the English fleet gathered at Trafalgar.

Other more practiced eyes were also scanning the sea. They may have missed the eastern mole before, but not today. The smoke was blowing inland now, and there—directly below—was a sight no one could overlook. Clustered alongside the mole were a dozen ships. It was hard to imagine a better target. …

Lieutenant Robin Bill could easily see the bombs falling. They looked about the size of 15-inch shells as they tumbled out of the diving Stukas. No more time for comparisons: he threw himself face-down on the mole, as the world exploded around him.

One bomb landed squarely on the mole, twenty feet in front of him, hurling slabs of concrete into the air. A chunk sailed by his ears, killing a soldier further down the walkway. Shaken and covered with dust, Bill felt something oddly moist: it was a stray puppy licking his face. He glanced to his left, where his six trawlers were moored. They were still all right. But this was just the start. The planes seemed to attack in twos and threes, dropping a couple of bombs every time. There were occasional lulls, but the attack never really stopped.

May 29, 2:45 p.m., the eastern mole (drawn at the time by Lieutenant Robin Bill)

Lying at the very end of the mole, the destroyer Jaguar managed to cast off. Packed with troops, she headed for home as the Stukas dived on her again and again. They scored no direct hits, but several near misses did fearful damage. Shrapnel riddled her port side, slashing open fuel tanks and steam lines. Jaguar quickly lost headway and drifted toward the shore. Just in time the destroyer Express raced over, towed her clear, and took off the troops. Listing seventeen degrees, Jaguar ultimately crawled back to Dover empty—out of the evacuation for good.

At the mole it was the destroyer Grenade’s turn next. Standing by the forward capstan, Chief Stoker W. Brown watched a Stuka pass overhead, turn, and race in from the sea. It scored a near miss on the mole, spraying the Grenade with shrapnel. Brown fell wounded, and just as the ship’s medical officer finished patching him up, along came another Stuka. This time the aim was perfect. One bomb landed aft, another on the bridge, exploding in an oil tank below. A great sheet of flame shot up through the deck as Brown managed to clamber onto the mole.

Seaman Bill Irwin was on the Grenade just by chance. One of his mates had been wounded on the mole, and Irwin brought him aboard, looking for medical attention. As they waited in a small compartment on the upper deck, a sudden blast threw them off their feet. Somebody’s tin hat—turned literally red-hot—rolled crazily around on its rim as Irwin dodged out of the way.

He managed to get his friend back onto the mole, but had to leave behind a badly wounded petty officer lying in a bunk. Irwin promised to come back for him, but it was a promise he couldn’t keep. Already Commander Clouston’s men were loosening the ship’s lines so that she wouldn’t go down at her berth. Still blazing, Grenade drifted into the harbor channel. But if she sank here, it could be even worse. She might block the harbor completely. Finally one of Lieutenant Bill’s trawlers towed her out of the way. Grenade burned on for several hours … then blew up, vanishing in a mushroom cloud of smoke.

Able Seaman P. Cavanagh managed to scramble from the burning Grenade onto the mole just before she cast off. Momentarily he was safe—but only momentarily. A German plane swooped down, machine-gunning the troops that crowded the walkway. A quick-thinking soldier pushed Cavanagh down, then lay on top of him. When the plane had gone, Cavanagh asked the soldier to get off his back, but there was no answer—he was dead. He had given his life to save a man he never even knew.

Cavanagh now went on board the Fenella, a large wooden steamer lying on the other side of the mole. “If this gets hit,” someone observed, “it will go up like a box of matches.” With that, a bomb landed alongside, splintering the ship’s hull. Cavanagh hopped off, crossed the mole again, and decided to try one of Lieutenant Bill’s trawlers. He picked the Calvi, but before he could climb aboard a bomb landed on her, too. She went down at her berth with stately dignity, resting on the bottom completely upright. Her funnel and masts remained above water, her battle ensign still flying from the foremast.

Cavanagh moved on to another of the trawlers—he never knew the name—and this time nobody dropped anything on him. Bombed out of three ships and machine-gunned once (all in 45 minutes), he sat down on the deck for a moment’s rest. “Get off your arse and give us a hand,” someone called, and he went wearily back to work.

On the Fenella, riddled by the near miss alongside the mole, Gunner Mowbray Chandler of the Royal Artillery sat below-decks sipping cocoa. He had been in Commander Clouston’s queue since early morning; now that he was at last on board a ship, it was time to relax a little. Not even that near miss could interrupt his cocoa. Then someone looked out a porthole and noticed that the mole seemed to be rising. Since this was impossible, the ship must be settling. So it wasn’t time to relax after all. Chandler and his mates hurried back to the mole, as Fenella sank at her berth.

Three ships gone—the mole strafed and damaged—it was all very unnerving. This long arm jutting out into the sea, once the goal of everyone, was no longer so popular. Some of the troops waiting at the seaward end wavered, then surged back toward the land. Commander Clouston was at the shore end talking to Lieutenant Bill, but his quick eye caught the movement. Taking Bill with him, he pulled his revolver and hurried out to meet the mob.

“We have come to take you back to the U.K.,” he said quietly but firmly. “I have six shots here, and I'm not a bad shot. The Lieutenant behind me is an even better one. So that makes twelve of you.” A pause, and then he raised his voice: “Now get down into those bloody ships!”

That ended the incident. The men turned back again, most of them boarding the steamer Crested Eagle, which lay just astern of the unlucky Fenella. A big wooden paddle-wheeler, the Crested Eagle was a familiar sight to many of the troops. In happier days she had taken them on excursions up and down the Thames. Going aboard her was almost like going home. By 6:00 p.m. her decks were packed with 600 men, including a number of bedraggled survivors from the Grenade and Fenella.

Commander Clouston gave the signal to get going, and Crested Eagle’s big paddle wheels began churning the sea. Swinging clear of the mole, her skipper Lieutenant-Commander B. R. Booth headed east along the coast, planning to go home via Route Y.

It didn’t take long for the Luftwaffe to find her. Standing by one of the paddle boxes, Chief Stoker Brown, safely off the Grenade, once again heard the familiar screech of a Stuka’s bomb. It landed with a crash in the main saloon, sending tables, chairs, and bodies flying.

A deck below, Gunner Chandler, just off the Fenella, was watching the engines when the explosion came. It blew him along the deck until he hit the end bulkhead.

On the bridge Commander Booth noted that the paddles were still working, so he tried to hold his course. Maybe they could get out of this yet.

No such luck. The whole after end of the vessel was burning, and the engineer Lieutenant Jones came on the bridge to report that he couldn’t keep the paddles going much longer. Booth decided to beach the ship, and turned toward shore opposite the big sanitarium at Zuydcoote, just short of Bray-Dunes. On the beach the troops momentarily forgot their own troubles as they watched this blazing torch of a boat drive hard aground.

“Get off, mate, while you can,” a seaman advised Gunner Chandler as he stood uncertainly by the rail. Chandler decided it was good advice; he took off his shoes and jumped. There were other ships around, but none near, so he swam to the beach. It was easy; he had a life jacket and even managed to tow a nonswimmer along.

Once ashore he discovered for the first time how badly burned he was. In the excitement he hadn’t noticed that the skin was hanging in shreds from both his hands. He was bundled into an ambulance and taken to the Casino at Malo-les-Bains, currently serving as a collection point for the wounded. It’s hard to imagine a fuller day, yet he ended up only a few hundred yards from where he had started in the morning.

Except for the mole, the most inviting target this perilous afternoon was the 6,000-ton cargo liner Clan MacAlister. Loaded with eight assault landing craft and their crews, she had come over from Dover the previous night. Her skipper Captain R. W. Mackie felt that the prescribed route was unnecessarily dangerous, but when he complained to Captain Cassidie, in charge of the ALC’s, Cassidie simply replied, “If you don’t like to go, Captain, give me a course to steer, put the boats in the water, and I’ll take them over myself.” Mackie took this as a challenge to both his courage and his ability. On they went.

By 9:00 a.m. on the 29th they were lying off Dunkirk Roads discharging the boats. Two were damaged in lowering, but the other six were safely launched and soon hard at work. Clan MacAlister herself was told to wait around for further orders.

She was still waiting when the Luftwaffe struck. At 3:45 p.m. the Stukas scored three direct hits and set fire to No. 5 hold. Nearby the destroyer Malcolm dodged the same attack, and came alongside to help. Lieutenants Ian Cox and David Mellis leapt aboard the Clan MacAlister and began playing the Malcolm’s fire hose down the blazing hold. Everyone ignored the fact that the hold was full of 4-inch ammunition. If it went off, it would be certain death for both officers—and probably both ships.

Luck was with the brave. The ammunition did not explode—but neither could Cox and Mellis put the fire out.

They finally returned to the Malcolm, and the destroyer cast off. With her went the Clan MacAlister’s wounded and a number of troops who had ferried out to the big steamer on the mistaken assumption that size meant safety. Captain Mackie stuck with his ship, still hoping somehow to get her home. But the Stukas kept attacking, knocked out her steering, and finally Mackie called for help.

The minesweeper Pangbourne eased alongside and asked if he wanted to “abandon ship.” The sensitive Mackie refused to swallow that phrase. “Well, ‘temporarily abandon,’” the Pangbourne’s captain tactfully suggested. That was all right, and Mackie crossed over.

There was no need to feel ashamed or embarrassed. The Clan MacAlister was just beginning to play her most useful role. She sank upright in the shallow water off the beach, and for the next several days the Luftwaffe would waste tons of bombs on her deserted hulk.

The Clan MacAlister was an especially tempting target, but no ship was safe this May 29th. As the minesweeper Waverley headed for home with 600 troops around 4:00 p.m., twelve Heinkels plastered her with bombs. For half an hour Waverley twisted and turned, dodging everything, but the Heinkels were insatiable. Finally a near miss tore off her rudder; then a direct hit blasted a six-foot hole in the bottom of the ship. The Waverley sank by the stern with a loss of over 300 men.

Now it was the Gracie Fields’s turn. Formerly a much-beloved Isle of Wight ferry, she left La Panne in the evening with some 750 troops. Forty minutes later a bomb exploded in her boiler room, sending up a huge cloud of steam that enveloped the ship. It was impossible to stop the engines, and with her helm jammed, she began circling at six knots. The skoots Jutland and Twente rushed over—one on each side—and for a while the three vessels waltzed around and around together, while the troops were transferred.

The minesweeper Pangbourne, already loaded with survivors from the Crested Eagle and riddled with holes herself, joined the rescue effort. She got a line on Gracie Fields and began towing her home. They never got there. With her crew safely removed, “Gracie” finally went down during the night.

The raid tapered off at dusk, and on the mole Commander Clouston surveyed a doleful scene. There was not a sound ship left. The Fenella and Calvi were sunk at their berths, and the rest of the vessels were gone—some to destruction, others to England with what troops they already had aboard. The bombing and the shelling were over, and the only sound was the barking of stray dogs. Abandoned by their fleeing owners, “half the canine population of France” (as one man put it) had joined the BEF. Some were smuggled on the transports, but many had to be left behind and now forlornly prowled the waterfront—a continuing and melancholy phenomenon of the evacuation.

The mole itself was a sorry sight. Here and there it was pitted with holes and craters, not all of them made by bombs. At least two British ships rammed the walkway in their frantic maneuvers during the raid. Clouston went to work and soon had the gaps bridged with doors, hatch covers, and planking salvaged from the wrecked ships.

In the midst of these labors, the passenger steamer King Orry eased alongside. Her steering gear was gone and her hull badly holed by near misses. The last thing Clouston needed was another ship sunk at her berth; during the night her skipper took her out, hoping to beach her clear of the fairway.

He didn’t get very far. Outside the harbor, but still in deep water, King Orry rolled over and sank. The naval yacht Bystander appeared and began picking up survivors. Manning the ship’s dinghy, Able Seaman J. H. Elton dived into the sea to help the exhausted swimmers. He alone saved 25 men, and he was not done yet. He was the ship’s cook, and once back on board the Bystander, he headed straight for his galley. Normally Elton had to feed a crew of seven, but tonight there were 97 aboard. Undaunted, he made meals for them all, then raided the ship’s locker for dry clothes and blankets.

Often the evacuated troops were too exhausted to help themselves, but not always. Gunner W. Jennings of the Royal Artillery proved a tower of strength while transferring soldiers from the crippled Gracie Fields to the skoots alongside. Again and again he lifted men on his shoulders and carried them across, as if they were children.

When the escort vessel Bideford lost her stern off Bray-Dunes, Private George William Crowther, 6th Field Ambulance, gave up his chance to be rescued. He remained instead on the Bideford, helping the ship’s surgeon. He worked for 48 hours, almost without a break, while the Bideford was slowly towed back to Dover.

All through the afternoon of May 29 the Dynamo Room remained blissfully ignorant of these staggering events. As far as the staff knew, the evacuation was proceeding smoothly—“approaching maximum efficiency,” as liaison officer General Lloyd telegraphed the War Office at 6:22 p.m.

Three minutes later the roof fell in. The destroyer Sabre had been sent over with some portable wireless sets and reinforcements for the naval shore parties. Arriving at the height of the air attack, she wired Dover at 6:25:

Continuous bombing for 1½hours. One destroyer sinking, one transport with troops on board damaged. No damage to pier. Impossible at present to embark more troops.

Then, at 7:00 p.m. came a startling phone message. It was from Commander J. S. Dove, calling from La Panne on the direct line that linked Gort’s headquarters with London and Dover. Dove had been helping out at Tennant’s headquarters since the “lethal kite” fiasco, and was not part of the regular chain of command. He was calling on his own initiative, but it was not his status; it was what he said that seemed important. He reported that he had just come from Dunkirk, that the harbor was completely blocked, and that the whole evacuation must be carried out from the beaches.

Why Dove made this call remains unclear. He had apparently commandeered a car, driven it to La Panne, and talked the military into letting him use the phone—all on his own. He had been in Dunkirk since May 24, and had previously shown great coolness under fire. Perhaps, as Ramsay’s Chief of Staff later speculated, he was simply shell-shocked after five extremely hard days.

In any event, the call caused a sensation in the Dynamo Room. Taken together with Sabre’s signal (“Impossible at present to embark more troops”), it seemed to indicate that the harbor was indeed blocked and only the beaches could be used.

First, Ramsay tried to make sure. At 8:57 he radioed Tennant, “Can you confirm harbor is blocked?” Tennant replied, “No,” but the raid had left communications in a shambles, and the answer never got through. Not hearing from Tennant, he later tried the French commander, Admiral Abrial, but no answer there either.

At 9:28 Ramsay didn’t dare wait any longer. He radioed the minesweeper Hebe, serving as a sort of command ship offshore:

Intercept all personnel ships approaching Dunkirk and instruct them not to close harbor but to remain off Eastern beach to collect troops from ships.

Midnight, there was still no word from Dunkirk. Ramsay sent the destroyer Vanquisher to investigate. At 5:51 a.m. on the 30th she flashed the good news,

“Entrance to Dunkirk harbor practicable. Obstructions exist towards outer side of eastern arm.”

This welcome information was immediately relayed to the rescue fleet, but a whole night had gone by. Only four trawlers and a yacht used the mole during those priceless hours of darkness, despite calm seas and minimum enemy interference. “A great opportunity was missed,” commented Captain Tennant a few days later. “Probably 15,000 troops could have been embarked had the ships been forthcoming.”

But for Ramsay, the worst thing that happened on the evening of May 29 was not the false report from Dunkirk; it was a very real decision made in London. The day had seen heavy losses in shipping—particularly destroyers. The Wakeful, Grafton, and Grenade were gone; Gallant, Greyhound, Intrepid, Jaguar, Montrose, and Saladin damaged. The whole “G” class was now knocked out. To the Admiralty there was more than Dunkirk to think about: there were the convoys, the Mediterranean, the protection of Britain herself.

At 8:00 p.m. Admiral Pound reluctantly decided to withdraw the eight modern destroyers Ramsay had left, leaving him with only fifteen older vessels, which in a pinch could be considered expendable.

For Ramsay, it was a dreadful blow. The destroyers had come to be his most effective vessels. Withdrawing a third of them wrecked all his careful projections. Even if there were no further losses, he would now be able to maintain a flow of only one destroyer an hour to the coast—a pace that would lift only 17,000 troops every 24 hours.

The Admiralty’s decision couldn’t have come at a worse time. Every ship was desperately needed. The fighting divisions—the men who had defended the escape corridor—were now themselves moving into the perimeter. In the little Belgian village of Westvleteren, 3rd Division packed up for the last time. Headquarters was in a local abbey, and before pulling out, General Montgomery sought out the Abbot, Father M. Rafael Hoedt. Could the Father hide a few personal possessions for him? The answer was yes; so the General handed over a box of personal papers and a lunch basket he particularly favored. These were then bricked up in the abbey wall, as Monty drove off promising that the army would be back and he’d pick everything up later.

Only a general as cocky as Montgomery could make such a promise. Brigadier George William Sutton was more typical. He felt nothing but anguish and personal humiliation as he trudged toward Dunkirk, passing mile after mile of abandoned equipment. He was a career officer, and “if this was what it came to when the real thing came to a crisis, all the years of thought and time and trouble that we had given to learning and teaching soldiering had been wasted. I felt that I had been labouring under a delusion and that after all, this was not my trade.”

Despite the disaster, some units never lost their snap and cohesion. The Queen’s Own Worcestershire Yeomanry marched into the perimeter with the men singing and a mouth organ playing “Tipperary.” But others, like the 44th Division, seemed to dissolve. Officers and men tramped along individually and in small parties. Private Oliver Barnard, a signalman with the 44th, had absolutely no idea where he was heading. Eventually Brigadier J. E. Utterson Kelso came swinging by. Barnard fell in behind him with the comforting thought, “He’s a brigadier, he must know where he’s going.”

Parts of the French First Army north of Lille—finally released by General Prioux—were converging on Dunkirk, too. The plan was for the French to man the western end of the perimeter while the British manned the eastern end, but this caused all sorts of trouble where the poilus coming up the escape corridor had to cross over from east to west. It meant going at almost right angles to the generally north-south flow of the British.

There were some unpleasant collisions. As the Worcestershire Yeomanry approached Bray-Dunes, they met the main body of the French 60th Division moving west on a road parallel to the shore. Part of the Worcesters wriggled by, but the rest had to get down into a rugger scrum and smash their way through.

When a lorry fell into a crater, blocking the road north, Major David Warner of the Kent Yeomanry organized a working party to move it. French troops kept pushing the party aside, refusing to stop while the job was done. Finally, Warner drew his revolver and threatened to shoot the next man who didn’t stop when ordered. The poilus paid no attention, until Warner actually did shoot one of them. Then they stopped, and the lorry was moved.

There were clashes even among the brass. General Brooke ordered the French 2nd Light Mechanized Division, operating under him, to cover his eastern flank as II Corps made its final withdrawal on the night of May 29-30. General Bougrain, the French division’s commander, announced that he had other orders from General Blanchard, and that he was going to comply with them. Brooke repeated his previous instructions, adding that if the French General disobeyed, he’d be shot, if Brooke ever caught him. Bougrain paid no attention to this either, but Brooke never caught him.

All through this afternoon of tensions and traffic jams, the last of the fighting troops poured into the perimeter. Some went straight to the beaches, while others were assigned to the defenses, taking over from the cooks and clerks who had manned the line the past three days. As the 7th Guards Brigade moved into Furnes, cornerstone of the eastern end of the perimeter, the men spotted General Montgomery standing in the marketplace. In a rare lapse, the General had dropped his normally cocky stance and stood looking weary and forlorn. As the 7th swung by, they snapped to attention and gave Monty a splendid “eyes left.” It was just the tonic he needed. He immediately straightened up and returned the honor with a magnificent salute.

Farther west, the 2nd Coldstream Guards were moving into position along the Bergues-Furnes canal. Running parallel to the coast, about six miles inland, the canal was the main line of defense facing south. The Coldstream dug in along the north bank, making good use of several farm cottages that stood in their sector. The flat land across the canal should have offered an excellent field of fire, but the canal road on that side was littered with abandoned vehicles, and it was hard to see over them.

At the moment this made no difference. There was no sign of the enemy anywhere. The Coldstreamers whiled away the afternoon casting a highly critical eye on the troops still pouring into the perimeter. Only two platoons of Welsh Guards won their approval. These marched crisply across the canal bridge in perfect formation. The rest were a shuffling rabble.

The last of Lord Gort’s strong-points were closing up shop. They had kept the corridor open; now it was time to come in themselves—if they could. At the little French village of Ledringhem, fifteen miles south of Dunkirk, the remnants of the 5th Gloucesters collected in an orchard shortly after midnight, May 29. The sails of a nearby windmill were burning brightly, and it seemed impossible that these exhausted men, surrounded for two days, could get away undetected. But the Germans were tired too, and there was no enemy reaction as Lieutenant-Colonel G.A.H. Buxton led the party north along a stream bed.

They not only slipped through the German lines; they captured three prisoners along the way. At 6:30 a.m. they finally stumbled into Bambecque, once more in friendly country. The adjutant of the 8th Worcesters saw them coming: “They were dirty and weary and haggard, but unbeaten. … I ran towards Colonel Buxton, who was staggering along, obviously wounded. He croaked a greeting, and I saw the lumps of sleep in his bloodshot eyes. Our Commanding Officer came running out and told the 5th Gloucesters’ second-in-command to rest the troops a minute. I took Colonel Buxton indoors, gave him a tumbler of stale wine, and eased him gently to the floor on to a blanket, assuring him again and again that his men were all right. In a few seconds he was asleep.”

The men holding the strong-point at Cassel, 19 miles south of Dunkirk, were also trying to get back to the sea. For three days they had held up the German advance while thousands of Allied troops swarmed up the escape corridor. Now they finally had orders to pull back themselves, but it was too late. The enemy had gradually seeped around the hill where the town stood. By the morning of May 29 it was cut off.

Brigadier Somerset, commanding the garrison, decided to try anyhow. But not during the day. There were too many Germans. The only chance would be after dark. Orders went out to assemble at 9:30 p.m.

At first all went well. The troops quietly slipped out of town, down the hill, and headed northeast over the fields. Somerset felt there was less chance of detection if they traveled cross-country.

It really didn’t matter. The Germans were everywhere. With Somerset in the lead, the 4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry were overwhelmed near Watou; the East Riding Yeomanry were virtually wiped out in a minefield; the 2nd Gloucesters were trapped in a thick woods called the Bois Saint Acaire.

“Kamerad! Kamerad!” shouted the German troopers swarming around the woods, trying to flush out the Gloucesters. Crouching in the brush, the Tommies lay low. A pause, and then a voice speaking good English over a loudspeaker: “Come out! Come out! Hitler is winning the war, you are beaten. Come out, or we will shell you out. Lay down your arms and come out running.”

Second Lieutenant Julian Fane of B Company wasn’t about to buy that. He had heard of another British battalion that listened to such a broadcast, threw down its arms, and came out … only to be machine-gunned down. He told the men near him, and they decided to fight it out.

Since the Germans had them targeted, the first step was to find a new position. Fane led his men in a wild dash to another wood 100 yards away. It did no good. The enemy quickly spotted them, and they spent the rest of the day huddling under a hale of artillery and mortar fire.

Darkness at last, and the little group continued north. They moved in single file, keeping as silent as possible, making use of every bit of cover. But if they had any delusion that they were traveling unseen, it was dispelled when a red Very light suddenly soared into the night. Instantly machine guns, mortars, rifles, every kind of weapon opened up on them. They had been ambushed.

Tracers criss-crossed the sky; a nearby haystack burst into flames, illuminating the group perfectly. Men were falling on all sides, and Fane himself was hit in the right arm and shoulder. He finally reached a ditch, where he was relatively safe as long as he kept an 18-inch profile. He gradually collected about a dozen other survivors. Together they crept off into the darkness, managing somehow to work their way around the German flank. He didn’t know it, but his little band was all that remained of the 2nd Gloucesters.

One British soldier outside the perimeter was still very much in the fight. Private Edgar G. A. Rabbets had been just another Tommy in the 5th Northamptonshires until the great retreat. Then a German thrust almost caught the battalion near Brussels. A fire-fight developed, and at one point Rabbets raised his rifle and took a potshot at an enemy soldier about 200 yards away. The man dropped in his tracks.

“Can you do that again?” asked the company commander. Rabbets obligingly picked off another German.

Then and there Ted Rabbets was designated a sniper, and henceforth he acted entirely on his own. He had no previous training for his new work, but did enjoy one unusual advantage: he had once known a poacher who taught him a few tricks. Now he could move so quietly he could “catch a rabbit by the ears,” and he could make himself so small he could “hide behind a blade of grass.”

As a sniper, Rabbets soon developed a few trade secrets of his own: never snipe from tree tops—too easy to get trapped. Keep away from farmhouse attics—too easy to be spotted. Best vantage point—some hiding place where there’s room to move around, like a grove of trees.

Following these rules, Rabbets managed to survive alone most of the way across Belgium. He tried to keep in occasional touch with his battalion, but usually he was deep in German-held territory—once even behind their artillery. From time to time he matched wits with his German counterparts. One of them once fired at him from a hole in some rooftop, missed by six inches. Rabbets fired back and had the satisfaction of seeing the man plunge out of the hole. Another time, while prowling a village street late at night, Rabbets rounded a corner and literally ran into a German sniper. This time Ted fired first and didn’t miss.

Rabbets ultimately reached the coast near Nieuport and slowly worked his way west, dipping into the German lines on an occasional foray. On May 31 he finally rejoined the BEF at La Panne—still operating alone and perhaps the last fighting man to enter the perimeter.

All the way south, five divisions of General Prioux’s French First Army fought on at Lille. It was still early on the morning of May 29 when a French truck convoy, approaching the city from Armentières, met some armored vehicles moving onto the road. The poilus sent up a great cheer, thinking that at last some British tanks were coming to help them. Only when the strangers began confiscating their arms did the Frenchmen realize that they had run into the 7th Panzer Division.

Cut off from the north, General Prioux surrendered during the afternoon at his headquarters in Steenwerck. He had gotten his wish: to remain with the bulk of his army rather than try to escape. Most of his troops holed up in Lille, continuing to tie down six enemy divisions.

By now it didn’t matter very much. With the escape corridor closed, Rundstedt’s Army Group A and Bock’s Army Group B at last joined forces, and the Germans had all the troops they needed for the final push on Dunkirk.

But this May 29 saw an important change in the composition of the German forces. Once again the tanks were gone—pulled out this time on the urging of the panzer generals themselves. Guderian summed up the reasons in a report he submitted on the evening of the 28th after a personal tour of the front: the armored divisions were down to 50% of strength … time was needed to prepare for new operations … the marshy terrain was unsuitable for tanks … the Belgian surrender had released plenty of infantry—far more effective troops for this kind of country.

Added to these very practical arguments was perhaps an intangible factor. Guderian and the other panzer commanders were simply not temperamentally suited to the static warfare that was developing. Theirs was a world of slashing thrusts, breakthroughs, long rolling advances. Once the battle had turned into a siege, they lost interest. By the evening of the 28th Guderian was already poring over his maps of the lower Seine.

In any event, OKH agreed. At 10:00 a.m. on May 29 General Gustav von Wietersheim’s motorized infantry took over from Guderian, and later in the day General Reinhardt’s tanks were also pulled out. But this didn’t mean that the battered Allied troops were home free. On the contrary, ten German divisions—mostly tough, experienced infantry—now pressed against the 35-mile Dunkirk perimeter.

At the western end, the 37th Panzer Engineers hoisted a swastika flag over Fort Philippe around noon, and the port of Gravelines fell soon afterward. All the way east the 56th Division was marching on Furnes. About 3:30 p.m. Bicycle Squadron 25 reached the east gate of the old walled town. Here they ran into a French column trying to get into the perimeter. After a brief fire-fight, Captain Neugart of the 25th forced the Frenchmen to surrender.

Then along came two French tanks, so unsuspecting that their turrets were open. Corporal Gruenvogel of the bicyclists jumped on one of them, pointed his pistol down through the open turret, and ordered the crew to surrender. They complied … as did the crew of the second tank, even without such urging.

Captain Neugart now sent a captured French major along with two of his own men into Furnes to demand that the whole town surrender. But audacity has its limits, and this time he got only a scornful reply from the Allied troops now barricading the streets.

On the beaches no one knew how long the troops manning the perimeter could keep the Germans out. At Bray-Dunes Commander Thomas Kerr half-expected to see them burst onto the sands any minute. He and Commander Richardson continued loading the troops into boats; but they arranged for a boat of their own to lie off Bray, ready to rescue the naval shore party, “just in case.” This gave them some confidence, but talking quietly together that night, they agreed they’d probably end up in some German prison camp.

Dover and London knew even less. At one point on the 28th the Admiralty actually told Tennant to report “every hour” the number of people to be embarked—orders that could only have come from someone who hadn’t the remotest picture of the situation. Tennant patiently replied, “Am doing my best to keep you informed, but shall be unable to report for hours.”

But even at a distance one thing was clear: all too often the ships weren’t where they were needed the most. Sometimes there were plenty of vessels at the mole, but no troops on hand. Other times there were troops but no ships. The same was true at the beaches. Someone was needed offshore to control the flow of shipping, the same way Captain Tennant was directing the flow of men between the mole and the beaches.

Rear-Admiral Frederic Wake-Walker got the nod. Fifty-two years old, Wake-Walker was known as an exceptionally keen organizer, and a good seaman too. His last command had been the battleship Revenge—a sure sign of talent, for the Royal Navy gave the battleships to only its most promising officers. At the moment, he held down a staff job at the Admiralty; he was readily available for temporary assignment.

Returning to his office from lunch on Wednesday, May 29, Wake-Walker learned that he was wanted by Rear-Admiral Sir Tom Phillips, the Vice-Chief of Naval Staff. Phillips asked him if he would like to go to Dunkirk and “try and get some organization into the embarkation there.” Wake-Walker said that he’d be “delighted,” and the appointment was worked out. It was important that he should not seem to be superseding Tennant. The Captain would still be SNO on shore; Wake-Walker in charge of everything afloat.

An hour later he was on his way by car to Dover. Arriving about 6:00 p.m., he went directly to Ramsay’s casemate for a quick briefing. In the Dynamo Room he was shown a map, depicting the coast east of Dunkirk. The three beaches—Malo, Bray, and La Panne—had been optimistically numbered, with each beach in turn divided into three sections. The BEF would be coming down to these particular beaches, while certain others west of Malo were reserved for the French.

This neat map, with its careful delineations, little prepared him for the chaos he found when he arrived off Bray on the destroyer Esk at 4:00 the following morning, May 30. Transferring to the minesweeper Hebe, Wake-Walker soon learned about the “real war” from Captain Eric Bush, who had been filling in until he got there. At dawn Wake-Walker could see for himself the dark masses of men on the beaches, the long lines that curled into the sea, the men standing waist-deep in the water … waiting and waiting.

“The crux of the matter was boats, boat crews, and towage,” the Admiral later recalled. At 6:30 a.m. he radioed Dover that small boats were urgently needed, and at 7:30 he asked for more ships, and again stressed the need for small boats.

It was a familiar refrain, growing in volume these past few hours. At 12:10 a.m. Brigadier Oliver Leese of Gort’s staff had telephoned the War Office, stressing that the perimeter could only be held for a limited time. Send as many boats as possible—quickly. At 4:00 the War Office called back with the welcome word that Admiral Ramsay was “going to get as much small craft as possible across as soon as he can.”

But nothing came. At 4:15 the destroyer Vanquisher, lying off Malo, radioed, “More ships and boats urgently required off west beach.” At 6:40 the destroyer Vivacious echoed the plea: “Essential to have more ships and boats.”

By 12:45 pm.Brigadier Leese was on the phone again, this time with General Dill, Chief of the Imperial General Staff. No ships yet, he complained. Off La Panne, Admiral Wake-Walker was getting desperate. He now sent Captain Bush back to Dover in the Hebe, to explain in person the vital necessity of sending out boats and crews.

By 3:00 p.m. Gort himself was trying. He first phoned Admiral Pound, then General Dill, pointing out that there were still no ships. Every hour counted, he stressed.

Headquarters could at least complain to somebody. The troops waiting on the beaches didn’t even have that satisfaction. After a restless night curled up in the sand, Captain John Dodd of the Royal Artillery looked out to sea in the first light of dawn and saw—nothing. “No ships in sight,” he noted in his diary. “Something must have gone wrong.”

At Bray-Dunes Sapper Joe Coles felt “terrible disappointment” and resigned himself to a day of troubled sleep in the Dunes. At Malo Chaplain Kenneth Meiklejohn couldn’t understand it. There had been no air attacks, yet no one seemed to have embarked all night. A dreadful thought crossed his mind: “Has the Navy given us up?”

9

The Little Ships

LIEUTENANT IAN COX, FIRST Lieutenant of the destroyer Malcolm, could hardly believe his eyes. There, coming over the horizon toward him, was a mass of dots that filled the sea. The Malcolm was bringing her third load of troops back to Dover. The dots were all heading the other way—toward Dunkirk. It was Thursday evening, the 30th of May.

As he watched, the dots materialized into vessels. Here and there were respectable steamers, like the Portsmouth-Isle of Wight car ferry, but mostly they were little ships of every conceivable type—fishing smacks … drifters … excursion boats … glittering white yachts … mud-spattered hoppers … open motor launches … tugs towing ship’s lifeboats … Thames sailing barges with their distinctive brown sails … cabin cruisers, their bright work gleaming … dredges, trawlers, and rust-streaked scows … the Admiral Superintendent’s barge from Portsmouth with its fancy tassels and rope-work.

Cox felt a sudden surge of pride. Being here was no longer just a duty; it was an honor and a privilege. Turning to a somewhat startled chief boatswain’s mate standing beside him, he burst into the Saint Crispin’s Day passage from Shakespeare’s Henry V:

And Gentlemen in England, now abed

Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here.

The efforts of the Small Vessels Pool and the Ministry of Shipping were at last paying off. The trickle of little ships that began in Tough’s boatyard was turning into a deluge. There was still no public announcement of the evacuation, but England is a small place. In one way or another, the word reached those who were needed.

It was a midnight phone call from the Admiralty that alerted Basil A. Smith, a London accountant and owner of the 24-foot cabin cruiser Constant Nymph. Would Smith confirm that his boat was ready for sea and could sail on four hours’ notice? Early next morning, May 27, the summons came: take her down to Sheerness at once.

Captain Lemon Webb was nursing the Ipswich spritsailing barge Tollesbury up the Thames on an ordinary cargo run. Then a motorboat eased alongside, and a naval officer ordered him to a nearby jetty. There a tug took her in tow, and Tollesbury was on her way to Sheerness, too.

The crew of the Margate lifeboat Lord Southborough were playing darts at their favorite pub when their turn came. A cryptic message said report to the boathouse at once. Within hours they were heading direct for Dunkirk—no stop at Sheerness for them. For Coxswain Edward D. Parker it was almost a family outing. His brother and nephew were in his crew; a son had already gone over with the Margate pilot boat; another son was one of Commander Clouston’s men on the mole.

The cockle boat fleet of Leigh-on-Sea lay peacefully at anchor on May 30 when the call came for them. Bearing imposing names like Defender, Endeavour, Resolute, and Renown, they sounded like dreadnoughts; actually they were only 40 feet long with a 2 ½-foot draft. Normally they were engaged in the humblest of tasks—gathering in the cockle shellfish found in the mud flats of the Thames estuary. The crew were all civilians, but every man volunteered. Seventeen-year-old Ken Horner was considered too young and left behind, but he wasn’t about to buy that. He ran home, got his mother’s permission, and bicycled off in pursuit of the fleet. He caught up with his boat at Southend.

These vessels came with their crews, but that did not always happen. In the race against time, yachts were often commandeered before their owners could be located. Other weekend sailors just couldn’t drop everything and sign up in the Navy for a month—the standard requirement. As the little ships converged on Sheerness and Ramsgate, the main staging points, Admiral Preston’s Small Vessels Pool looked around for substitute crews.

Shipwright A. W. Elliott was working in Johnson & Jago’s boatyard at Leigh-on-Sea when a bobby pedaled up on a bicycle. He announced that volunteers were needed to get “some chaps” off the French coast. Elliott needed no urging.

At Lowestoft on the east coast the Small Vessels Pool commandeered taxis to bring down a contingent of commercial fishermen. In London, Commander Garrett of the Pool spent three straight nights calling up various clubs … rounding up yachtsman members … packing them off in Admiralty cars to Sheerness and Ramsgate.

It was during these hectic days that Sub-Lieutenant Moran Capiat arrived in London for a few days’ leave. An actor and yachtsman in peacetime, he was currently serving on a naval trawler in the North Sea, but the ship was being refitted, and for the moment he was free. He was aware that Dunkirk was coming to a boil, but felt it was no concern of his.

Going to the Royal Ocean Racing Club for breakfast, he was surprised to find nobody there. Even the steward was gone. He finally located the steward’s wife, who explained that everyone had vanished after a call from the Admiralty a day or so ago. Mildly mystified, he settled down in a chair to relax alone.

The phone rang, and he answered. It was the Admiralty. A voice said they wanted “still more hands” and asked who he was. Capiat identified himself, and the voice said, “You’re just what we need.” He was then told to go to Sheerness immediately. Still baffled, he caught a train at Waterloo Station within an hour.

Five minutes’ walk from the Royal Ocean Racing Club was the ship chandlers shop of Captain O. M. Watts on Albemarle Street. Downstairs the Captain cheerfully dispensed a hodgepodge of charts and nautical gear; upstairs he gave navigation lessons to young gentlemen who hoped for a commission in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. They were mostly professional men: solicitors, brokers, actors, bankers from the City, and such. Few knew much about the sea; some had never been out of sight of land.

John Fernald was a young American theatrical director attending the Captain’s classes every Thursday evening. Usually the session was blackboard work, but not on Thursday, May 30. When he arrived with his friend David Homan, a scenery designer, Watts took them aside for a private chat. Quietly he explained there would be no regular class tonight; the Navy needed volunteers immediately for a “hazardous job.”

Neither Fernald nor Homan liked the prospect of moving from navigational theory to practice so abruptly, but they couldn’t see any graceful way out; so they volunteered. Captain Watts told them to grab what gear they could and report immediately to the Port of London Authority down by the Tower.

Fernald rushed back to his flat, picked up an old pea jacket, and hurried down to Tower Hill, as directed. Most of the others were already there. Some didn’t even have time to change their clothes and were still wearing the cutaways and striped trousers of the City. Stockbroker Raphael de Sola, however, was resplendent in the jacket of the Royal London Yacht Club, blue trousers to match, a visored cap, and a greatcoat worthy of the First Sea Lord of the Admiralty.

Along with Captain Watts’s scholars, there were a number of more obviously waterfront types: lightermen, dock workers, deckhands, barge men. High and low together, they milled around the lobby of the Port Authority building, still not knowing what they were to do.

Then a Royal Navy commander appeared and gave them a quick briefing. They were to man ship’s lifeboats collected from vessels lying at the London docks. These would be towed down the river and across the Channel, where they would be used to help rescue the BEF.

A bus now took the group to Tilbury, where the lifeboats were waiting. The rule was four men to a boat; twelve boats to a tow. Fernald and Homan managed to stick together, and soon after midnight they were on their way. In the quiet of the night, broken only by the water rushing by and the throb of the tug up ahead, Fernald wondered at the incredible change in his life that had snatched him from a humdrum existence in London and put him in an open boat racing through the dark.

First stop was Sheerness. This bustling harbor on the Thames estuary had become the collecting point for all the little ships streaming down the river. Here they were sorted out and put into shape under the watchful eye of Commodore A. H. Taylor, a retired Rear-Admiral who could normally be found shuffling paper in the Economic Warfare Division of the Admiralty.

Engines were the big problem. Many of the boats had been laid up for the winter and were hard to get running again. Others had idiosyncrasies apparently known only to their absent owners. The Thames excursion steamers had boilers that couldn’t use salt water. It was a miracle that Captain T. E. Docksey and his engineers managed to get more than 100 boats in good enough shape to cross the Channel.

Every ship also needed someone on board who could keep the engine running. By now there were plenty of weekend-sailor volunteers, but few of these bankers and shopkeepers really understood machinery. The Shipping Federation, an organization of operators, was asked to help and issued a call for volunteers. About 350 marine engineers responded.

From Sheerness most of the little ships moved on to Ramsgate. Here fuel tanks were topped off, provisions loaded, and convoys made up. Many of the craft had no compass, and some of the skippers had never been out of sight of land. Lieutenant-Commander Raymond Grundage, the Routing Officer, issued more than 1,000 charts, 600 with routes lined off for neophyte navigators.

Problems could be enormous—or exasperatingly minute. Robert Hilton, a physical education specialist, and Ted Shaw, a red-headed cinema manager, had teamed up to bring the motorboat Ryegate II down the river. They expected to pick up supplies at Ramsgate, but all they received were two cans of water. Otherwise the boat was bare—not even a tumbler for the water. The naval supply depot at Ramsgate seemed unable to cope; they finally went to a pub, had a drink, and pocketed the glasses.

Each little ship had its own tale of troubles, but at the start they all suffered from one common problem: none of them were armed. Lieutenant C. D. Richards carefully hoarded his stockpile of 105 Lewis machine guns, doling them out only to the tugs and escort vessels.

Later the crews would scavenge the beaches, gathering a plentiful supply of discarded Bren guns; and sometimes a BEF gunner might even attach himself to a vessel, but at first they were defenseless. It was enough to make a member of the crew feel a bit uneasy. “Even a record of the 1812 Overture would be better than nothing,” observed one skipper.

It was 10:00 p.m., May 29, when the first convoy of little ships set out from Ramsgate on the long trip across the Channel. None of the eight launches in the group had any navigating instruments. Nevertheless, Lieutenant R. H. Irving, skipper of the escorting motorboat Triton, was confident. Unlike most, he knew these waters well. Waiting outside Ramsgate breakwater, he shouted to the other ships to close up and follow him. Three of the boats developed engine trouble and had to turn back, but the others stuck to Triton and arrived safely off La Panne at dawn.

At 1:00 a.m. on the 30th another convoy left Ramsgate—this time, nineteen launches led by the Belgian ferry Yser—and from then on the flow steadily increased. By late afternoon it was hard to tell where one convoy ended and the next began. All that night, and the 31st too, the little ships poured across the Channel.

Frequently they passed ships like the Malcolm heading back to England. Decks packed with troops, they were a sobering sight. For their part, the men on the returning vessels watched this armada of small craft with mounting excitement and pride. The very names seemed to say “England”: Swallow … Royal Thames … Moss Rose … Norwich Belle … Duchess of York … Blue Bird … Pride of Folkestone … Palmerston … Skylark … Nelson … Southend Britannia … Lady Hatg … New Prince of Wales.

Many of the names also had a personal quality, suggesting that this rescue effort was no mere naval operation; that it was really a family affair: Grace Darling … Boy Bruce … Our Maggie … Our Lizzie … Girl Nancy … Handy Billie … Willie and Alice … Auntie Gus.

Traveling in company, usually shepherded by an armed tug or skoot, the little ships moved across a smooth, gray carpet of sea. The English Channel has a reputation for nastiness, but it had behaved for four days now, and the calm continued on May 30. Best of all, there was a heavy mist, giving the Luftwaffe no chance to follow up the devastating raids of the 29th.

“Clouds so thick you can lean on them,” noted a Luftwaffe war diarist, as the Stukas and Heinkels remained grounded. At Fliegerkorps VIII General Major von Richthofen couldn’t believe it was that bad. At headquarters the sun was shining. He ordered Major Dinort, commanding the 2nd Stuka Squadron, to at least try an attack. Dinort took his planes up, but returned in ten minutes. Heavy fog over Dunkirk, he phoned headquarters. Exasperated, Richthofen countered that the day was certainly flyable where he was. If Herr General major didn’t believe him, Dinort shot back, just call the weather service.

But cloudy weather didn’t guarantee a safe passage for the little ships. Plenty of things could still go wrong. The Channel was full of nervous and inexperienced sailors.

“Periscope on the starboard bow,” shouted the lookout of the 80-foot excursion steamer New Prince of Wales. It turned out to be the mast of a sunken ship, standing fifteen feet out of the water, complete with shrouds.

Next, New Prince of Wales was almost run down by a destroyer that mistook her for a German S-boat. The skipper, Sub-Lieutenant Peter Bennett, managed to flash a recognition signal just in time. A little later he ran alongside an anchored French cargo ship, hoping to get some directions. “Où est l’armée britannique?” he called. The reply was a revolver shot. These were dangerous days for strangers asking questions.

Uncorrected compasses were another source of trouble. It was easy to find the French coast, but the right spot was another matter. Sub-Lieutenant William Ronald Williams anchored his lighter a few hundred yards off an empty stretch of beach and had a boat row him ashore. Walking a quarter-mile inland in search of somebody in authority, he hailed a couple of soldiers he saw silhouetted against a distant blaze.

“Lieber Gott!” one of them cried, and they began shooting at him. Williams ducked behind a dune and shot back. Both Germans fell, but there were other voices now, and Williams raced back to the beach. In less than five minutes he had his lighter under weigh at her full six knots.

One way or another, most of the little ships eventually reached the right part of the coast and went to work. Essentially they were ferries, carrying or towing troops from the beaches to the larger vessels lying further out. Sometimes it was easy—just a matter of towing some rowboat or inflated raft; other times it was difficult and dangerous—especially when they had to pluck men directly from the sea.

“Well done, motorboat, wait for me,” a voice hailed Lieutenant Irving, as he nursed Triton alongside a destroyer with one more load. An officer wearing a lambskin coat leapt aboard. It was Commodore Gilbert Owen Stephenson, a 62-year-old retired vice-admiral, who had been recruited for the crisis and put in charge of all offshore operations at La Panne. Hatless and wet through, he seemed oblivious to his own discomfort as he told Irving to carry on. He added that he might later have “one or two other jobs” for Triton to do.

Stephenson then threw himself into the rescue work too. Nothing was beneath him. He steered, passed lines, helped haul the exhausted troops aboard. Through it all he kept up a line of cheerful chatter. “Come on, the Army!” he would cry; or, to some half-drowned soldier, “Where have I seen you before? You’re so good-looking I’m sure I know you.”

Late in the afternoon Stephenson had Triton take him to a certain spot off the beach. Instructing Irving not to move, he explained he was going ashore to look for Lord Gort. If he brought back the General, Irving was to take him straight to England. With that, Stephenson plunged over the side and waded ashore through the surf, often up to his neck in water.

In an hour he was back, again wading through the surf, but there was no sign of Lord Gort. Stephenson offered no explanation, nor did Irving ask. They simply went back to their rescue work, the Commodore still hatless and soaked to the skin. Along with his words of cheer for the troops, he had plenty to say to Irving himself. Sometimes the lieutenant was a “good fellow”; other times, “a bloody fool.” Irving didn’t mind. He’d do anything for a senior officer like this.

Off Bray-Dunes to the west, the Constant Nymph was hard at work too. At first Basil Smith, her accountant-skipper, could find only French troops. These he ferried out to the skoot Jutland, which was serving as a “mother ship.” Then a British army officer swam out to say there was a whole division of the BEF waiting a little farther west. Smith shifted his boat slightly and began picking them up.

It was never easy. On top of all the other problems, the Germans were now within artillery range, and began shelling the beach. East of La Panne an enemy observation balloon rode unmolested in the sky directing the fire. Smith was one of the few who didn’t seem disturbed. As he later explained, he was deaf and had a lot to do.

Off Malo-les-Bains the Ryegate II was having less success. Coming over from Ramsgate, her engines broke down; then it turned out she drew too much water to get close to the beach; finally she fouled her propeller on some piece of wreckage. Disgusted, her skipper Sub-Lieutenant D. L. Satterfield tied up to the skoot Horst and assigned his crew to a couple of ship’s boats.

Bob Hilton and Ted Shaw, the pair who had brought Ryegate II down the Thames, manned the Horst’s own lifeboat. As they pulled toward the shore, they could hear the skoot’s radio blaring away. It was incongruously tuned into the BBC’s “Children’s Hour.”

Coming through the surf, Hilton and Shaw were immediately mobbed and capsized. Gradually they learned the art of successful ferry-work. Basically, it consisted of getting close enough to pick up men, but not so close as to be swamped. For seventeen straight hours they rowed, side by side, carrying troops to the Horst.

Hour after hour the little ships worked the beaches, returning to Ramsgate only when they could find no more fuel, or when the crews were too tired to carry on. Then they discovered that the trip home could be perilous too. The motor launch Silver Queen had neither charts nor compass, but the crew felt they had a good idea where England was, and they headed that way.

Halfway over they found a soldier’s compass, and this increased their confidence. Finally they sighted land, and then a friendly-looking harbor. Approaching the breakwater, they were greeted by a blast of gunfire. Hopelessly twisted around, they had stumbled into Calais by mistake.

Six batteries of German guns pounded away as Silver Queen frantically reversed course. One round crashed into her stern; another landed on the starboard bow. The Belgian launch Yser, traveling in company, was hit too. Someone on the Yser fired a Very pistol in a desperate call for help. Amazingly, a friendly destroyer did catch the signal, hurried over, and provided covering fire while the two strays crept out of range. Somehow Silver Queen limped back to Ramsgate, discharged a load of troops, and then quietly sank at her pier.

For most of the little ships, the time of greatest danger was not going over or coming back; it was at the beach itself. Even when the troops behaved perfectly, the boats were in constant danger of capsizing. The sea was still smooth, but the wind was veering to the east and the surf began rising. The loading went more slowly than ever.

At La Panne, Lieutenant Harold J. Dibbens of the Military Police had been puzzling over the loading problem ever since reaching the beach the previous afternoon. Unlike most of the BEF, Dibbens was thoroughly at home on the sea. He grew up on the Isle of Wight—always around boats—and even served a hitch in the Navy before settling into his career as a detective at Scotland Yard. When war came, his professional experience won him a direct commission in the Military Police, and until “the balloon went up” he spent most of his time fighting pilferage and chasing black marketeers. The great retreat ended all that, and now here he was, with the remnants of 102nd Provost Company, waiting on the beach like so many others.

Watching the confusion at the water’s edge—some boats overturning, others drifting away untended—Dibbens decided that the biggest need at the moment was a pier or jetty stretching out to sea. Then the boats could come alongside and be loaded far more efficiently. But where to find the materials for such a jetty? His eye fell on the mass of abandoned trucks and lorries that littered the beach. Now all he needed was a little manpower.

“Want a sapper unit! Need a sapper unit!” Dibbens shouted, stalking through the dunes, where many of the troops were waiting. He was acting on his own initiative—had no authority at all—but it was a time when resourcefulness was what counted, and a colonel would listen to a corporal, if his idea was good enough.

Captain E. H. Sykes of the 250th Field Company, Royal Engineers, stepped forward. What was wanted? Dibbens couldn’t order the Captain to do anything, but he suggested a deal: his own men would provide a supply of lorries, if Sykes’s men would use them to build a jetty out into the sea. As a “sweetener” the sappers could be the first group to use the completed jetty.

Sykes agreed and detailed 2nd Lieutenant John S. W. Bennett’s section to do the construction. These men threw themselves into the job with amazing enthusiasm, considering their mood until now. They had just completed a long march to the coast, and the last night had been hell. They had lost many of their officers somewhere in the dark, and most of the company just melted away. Normally 250 strong, they were down to 30 or 40 by the time they reached La Panne.

Lieutenant Bennett was one of the few officers who stuck with them all the way. He did his best, but in peacetime he was on the Faculty of Fine Art at Cambridge, and what they wanted right now was a professional soldier. There was a lot of grumbling, until in exasperation he finally told them, “If you want me to lead you, I’ll lead you; if you want me to leave you, I’ll leave you.”

“Frankly, I don’t give a damn what you do,” someone called out from the ranks.

But the art professor was a better leader than they realized. The men were soon working flat-out. They lined up the lorries side by side, leading into the sea. They loaded them with sandbags and shot out the tires to keep them in place. They scavenged timber from a lumberyard for staging. They ripped decking from stranded ships for a plank walkway. They even added the touch of a rope railing.

When they began the tide was out, but now it came rolling in. Soon the men were up to their waists in the surf, lashing the lorries with cable. Sometimes they had to hold the jetty together by linking arms until a lashing could be made. Buffeted by the surf, they were soaked to the skin and covered with oil and grease.

The men of 102nd Provost Company had been good scavengers—sometimes too good. At one point an irate brigadier stormed up to Dibbens. Somebody had stolen four lorries he had earmarked for use as ambulances. Dibbens expressed appropriate dismay, said he couldn’t imagine who could have done a thing like that, and quietly replaced the missing lorries with four others stolen from somebody else.

The “provost jetty,” as it came to be called, was finished during the afternoon of May 30 and proved a huge success. All evening, and all the next day, a steady stream of men used it to board the growing fleet of small boats and launches engaged in ferry work. Ironically, Bennett’s men were not among them. Corps headquarters decided that they had done such a splendid job, they now must maintain it. Down the drain went the promise that they would be the first “customers.” Instead, they learned the hard way the old military maxim: never do a task too well, or you’ll be stuck with it forever.

Later there would be considerable speculation over who first thought of the jetty. Besides Lieutenant Dibbens, credit has been given to Commodore Stephenson, Commander Richardson, and General Alexander, among others. Curiously, all these claims may be valid. It seems to have been one of those ideas “whose time had come,” for examination of Luftwaffe photographs shows that no fewer than ten different lorry jetties were slapped together on May 30–31 between Malo-les-Bains and La Panne.

This in turn meant there were many builders besides the long-suffering 250th Field Company. One such unit was A Squadron of the 12th Lancers, who built a jetty about three miles west of La Panne. They were anything but experienced in this sort of work—they were an armored reconnaissance unit—but the perimeter was now fully manned, and all surplus fighting troops were being funneled to the beaches.

With the regulars moving in, there was a striking improvement in discipline. At Bray-Dunes Commanders Kerr and Richardson had their first easy night. As Kerr explained a little unkindly, they were at last dealing with “real officers.”

The long shadow of tradition was now very much in evidence. When Colonel Lionel H. M. Westropp ordered the 8th King’s Own Royal Regiment to head down the beach toward the mole, he first assembled his officers. He reminded them that they wore the badge of one of the oldest regiments of the line. “We therefore will represent the Regiment as we march down the beach this afternoon. We must not let it down, and we must set an example to the rabble on the beach.”

The battalion set off in perfect step, arms swinging in unison, rifles correctly slung, officers and NCO’s properly spaced. The “rabble on the beach” were suitably impressed.

Nineteen-year-old 2nd Lieutenant William Lawson of the Royal Artillery knew that appearances were important, but he felt he had a good excuse for looking a little scruffy. His artillery unit had been badly mauled on the Dyle, again at Arras, and had barely made it back to the perimeter—two rough weeks almost always on the run.

Now at last he was at La Panne, and it was the Navy’s turn to worry. Wandering down the beach, he suddenly spied a familiar face. It was his own father, Brigadier the Honorable E. F. Lawson, temporarily serving on General Adam’s staff. Young Lawson had no idea his father was even in northern France. He rushed up and saluted.

“What do you mean looking like that!” the old Brigadier thundered. “You’re bringing dishonor to the family! Get a haircut and shave at once!”

The son pointed out that at the moment he couldn’t possibly comply. Lawson brushed this aside, announcing that his own batman, a family servant in prewar days, would do the job. And so he did—a haircut and shave right on the sands of Dunkirk.

At the mole Commander Clouston had standards, too. Spotting one of the shore patrol with hair far longer than it could have grown in the last three or four days, he ordered the man to get it cut.

“All the barbers are shut, sir,” came the unruffled reply. Clouston still insisted. Finally, the sailor drew his bayonet and hacked off a lock. “What do you want me to do with it now,” he asked, “put it in a locket?”

Under the Commander’s firm leadership, the mole continued to operate all day, May 30. A steady stream of destroyers, minesweepers, Channel steamers, and trawlers pulled alongside, loaded up, and were off again. For one two-hour stretch, Clouston had the troops trotting out the walkway on the double. He embarked over 24,000 during the afternoon and evening.

Clouston’s efforts got a big assist from a major policy reversal engineered in Dover. Early afternoon Admiral Ramsay phoned Admiral Pound in London, insisting that the modern destroyers be put back on the job. They were absolutely essential if he was to get everybody off in the time he had left. After a heated exchange, Pound finally relented. At 3:30 p.m. orders went out, sending the destroyers back to France.

German batteries were now firing on Dunkirk harbor from Gravelines, but the mole lay just out of range. German planes made occasional hit-and-run attacks on the shipping, but Kesselring’s great fleets of bombers remained grounded. In sharp contrast to yesterday’s fear and confusion, today the mood was cheerfully relaxed. While the Malcolm loaded some Cameron Highlanders, her navigator Lieutenant Mellis played his bagpipes on the foc’sle. As one party of Royal Dragoon Guards moved along the walkway, a big Royal Marine stood ladling out hot stew. One Dragoon officer had no cup, but he did produce a long-stemmed cocktail glass picked up somewhere. The Marine filled it with gravy, solemnly inquiring, “Can I put a cherry in it, sir?”

But the greatest change was on the beaches. Discipline continued to improve; the columns of waiting men were quiet and orderly; the ever-growing stream of little ships methodically ferried the troops to the larger vessels lying offshore. As Captain Arthur Marshall’s twelve-man internal security unit patiently waited their turn, a colonel bustled over. Apparently worried that the unit had nothing to do, he ordered the men to “tidy up the beach a bit.”

At first Marshall felt the colonel must be joking; but no, he was dead serious. The smaller the mess they left, he explained, the less likely the Germans would think that the BEF had left precipitously. The result would decrease the enemy’s feeling of triumph, thereby helping the war effort.

Finally convinced that the colonel meant what he said, Marshall’s party glumly went to work—piling abandoned overcoats here, stowing empty crates there, neatly coiling stray lengths of rope. They kept at it as long as the colonel was in sight.

Overall, May 30 proved a very good day. Thanks to better discipline, the lorry jetties, and above all, the surge of little ships, the number of men lifted from the beaches rose from 13,752 on the 29th to 29,512 on the 30th. A total of 53,823 men were evacuated on this gray, misty day—much the highest daily figure so far.

Casualties were mercifully light. Thanks to the heavy overcast, the rescue fleet streamed across the Channel unchallenged by the Stukas and Heinkels. First loss of the day came when the French destroyer Bourrasque, bound for Dover, struck a floating mine. Nearby ships saved all but 150 of her troops.

Later, during the night of May 30–31, another French destroyer, Siroco, was torpedoed by S-boats lurking off Kwinte Buoy. For a while her skipper, Gui de Toulouse-Lautrec (cousin of the painter), thought he might save his ship, but she let off a huge cloud of steam which attracted the attention of a passing German patrol bomber. A bomb crashed down on the vessel’s stern, igniting her ready ammunition. A column of flame shot 200 feet into the sky, and Siroco was gone.

But most of the ships reached England safely, landing their ragged passengers in Dover and other southeast coast ports. Herded toward waiting trains, their ordeal was mirrored in their faces—unshaven, hollow-eyed, oil-streaked, infinitely weary. Many had lost their equipment; but some clutched odd, new possessions picked up along the way. A pair of wooden sabots dangled from Private Fred Louch’s gas mask … a French poilu carried a live goose … Bombardier Arthur May still had 6,000 of his 10,000 cigarettes … 2nd Lieutenant R. C. Taylor’s batman had somehow rescued the Lieutenant’s portable gramophone. Along with the men, the inevitable dogs trooped ashore—170 in Dover alone.

Everything about this motley crowd said “evacuation,” but until now there had been a news blackout. With the men pouring home, this was no longer possible; so on the evening of the 30th London finally issued a communiqué announcing the withdrawal. It was, the Times sniffed, “what so many people in this country have seen with their own eyes.”

Among the thousands of soldiers brought back, a select few had been carefully hand-picked. Whatever else happened, Lord Gort hoped to get enough good men home to form the nucleus of a new army that might some day return and even the score. General Pownall, Gort’s Chief of Staff, left on the evening of May 29th, as did the Commander-in-Chief’s personal aide, Lord Munster. Now, on the 30th, it was General Brooke’s turn. After a lunch of petit poussin and asparagus, miraculously conjured up by his aide, Captain Barney Charlesworth, he paid a final visit to his division commanders.

It was not easy. Brooke was known as a brilliant but rather cold man; this afternoon he was all emotion. Saying good-bye to General Montgomery, who would take over the Corps, he broke into tears. Monty patted him on the back, said all the right things. Finally they shook hands, and Brooke trudged slowly away.

One man absolutely determined not to leave was Lord Gort. The General’s decision became known in London on the morning of May 30, when Lord Munster arrived from the beaches. Winston Churchill was taking a bath at the time, but he could do business anywhere, and he summoned Munster for a tub-side chat. It was in this unlikely setting that Munster described Gort’s decision to stay to the end. He would never leave without specific orders.

Churchill was appalled at the thought. Why give Hitler the propaganda coup of capturing and displaying the British Commander-in-Chief? After discussing the matter with Eden, Dill, and Pownall, he wrote out in his own hand an order that left Gort no choice:

If we can still communicate we shall send you an order to return to England with such officers as you may choose at the moment when we deem your command so reduced that it can be handed over to a corps commander. You should now nominate this commander. If communications are broken, you are to hand over and return as specified when your effective fighting force does not exceed the equivalent of three divisions. This is in accordance with correct military procedure, and no personal discretion is left you in the matter. Whoever Gort appointed was to fight on, “but when in his judgment no further organised evacuation is possible and no further proportionate damage can be inflicted on the enemy, he is authorised in consultation with the senior French commander to capitulate formally to avoid useless slaughter.”

These instructions reached Gort during the afternoon, and he read them aloud at a final GHQ, conference that assembled in his beachfront villa at 6:00 p.m. Besides General Barker, commanding I Corps, and Monty, now in charge of II Corps, the meeting included Brooke, who had not yet pushed off. The final plans for the evacuation were discussed: I Corps would be the last to go, and its commander, Barker, would take over from Gort as directed by London.

As the meeting broke up, Montgomery lingered behind and asked to see Gort privately for a moment. Once they were alone, Monty unburdened himself. It would be a dreadful mistake, he said, to leave Barker in charge at the end. The man was no longer fit to command. The proper course was to send Barker home and appoint instead the 1st Division commander, Major-General Harold Alexander. He had just the calm, clear mind needed for this crisis. With luck, he might even get the rear guard back safely to England.

Gort listened but didn’t commit himself.

Down on the beach General Brooke prepared to go. Usually a rather snappy dresser, he had discarded his new Huntsman breeches and Norwegian boots for a pair of old slacks and shoes. More practical, in case he had to go swimming. But he didn’t have to swim at all. Instead he rode piggy-back out to a rowboat on the broad shoulders of the faithful Charlesworth. By 7:20 he was on his way to a waiting destroyer.

Around 8:00 a new visitor turned up at GHQ. Admiral Wake-Walker had come to see Lord Gort. With the small craft starting to pour in, he wanted to work out better coordination with the army. During the past few days, all too often the available ships weren’t where the troops were, and vice versa.

Gort greeted him warmly. The Commander-in-Chief and his staff were about to have dinner; Wake-Walker must join them. They moved into a longish dining room with French windows opening on the sea. The conversation was mostly small talk, and as he sat there sharing the General’s last bottle of champagne, Wake-Walker found it a remarkable experience. They were on the brink of the greatest military disaster in British history, yet here they sat, chatting idly and sipping champagne as though it were just another social evening at the seashore. Only one thing seemed out of the ordinary: his trousers were soaking wet from wading ashore.

Gort was charm itself, cheerful and unperturbed. He assured the Admiral that just by being here he would have a great stabilizing effect. Wake-Walker found it hard to believe that the mere presence of a desk-bound sailor like himself could prove so inspirational.

After a final dish of fruit salad, they got down to business. It soon became clear to Wake-Walker that Gort and his staff felt that their part of the job was done. They had gotten the BEF to the coast more or less intact; now it was up to the Royal Navy to get them home—and so far, the Navy hadn’t tried very hard.

Wake-Walker said any lack of success was not through want of trying. He stressed the difficulty of lifting large numbers of men off the beaches and urged that more troops be shifted down to Dunkirk, where they could use the mole. Brigadier Leese remained unconvinced. The Army had marched enough. The ships should go where the men were. It should be perfectly possible to take men off the beaches … except for the “ineptitude of the Navy.”

Wake-Walker bristled. He told Leese he had no business or justification to talk that way.

The discussion turned to getting the rear guard off. No matter how the others were evacuated, this was going to be a tight squeak. The Germans were pressing Nieuport and Furnes hard, and it didn’t seem possible to hold the eastern end of the perimeter beyond the night of May 31–June 1. It was hoped to get everybody else off during the day, then quickly pull the rear guard back to the beaches at midnight. Ramsay had promised to make a supreme effort and was sending a whole new armada of small craft to lie off the coast. With luck they would be where needed, and the rear guard would swarm aboard before the enemy could interfere.

It was a very demanding timetable. Apart from the rearguard, estimated at 5,000, there were tens of thousands of other troops to come off beforehand. Wake-Walker’s heart sank at the prospect. The thought of that last-minute rush for the boats in the dark, with the enemy in hot pursuit, was not a pleasant picture.

By 10:00 p.m. they had talked themselves out. Wake-Walker headed back for the destroyer Worcester, which he was using at the moment as a flagship. Going down to the beach, he found a large inflated rubber boat, and recruited eight soldiers to paddle him out. As Tennant and Leese watched from the shore, they started off, but the boat was too crowded and began to swamp. They all jumped out and waded back to the beach for a new try with fewer paddlers. “Another example of naval ineptitude,” Wake-Walker dryly told Leese.

Back at GHQ, the staff prepared a situation report for the War Office, which went off at 11:20 p.m. It reported that the six remaining divisions in the beachhead were being thinned out tonight, and the eastern end of the perimeter should be completely clear some time tomorrow night, May 31–June 1. Evacuation of the rest of the BEF was proceeding satisfactorily. The report didn’t say, but at the present pace, the lift should be complete by the end of June 1.

Thirty-nine minutes later, at 11:59, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Dill, phoned from London. Gort assured him that the night was quiet … that all was going well on the beaches. Dill brushed this aside and got to the real purpose of his call. The Prime Minister wanted him to get off as many French as possible—not just a “fair” number, but an equal number. Winston Churchill himself came on the phone and confirmed the order.

It was an astonishing development. Instead of winding up the evacuation with a last-minute lift of a small rear guard on June 1, the whole French Army was now involved. Nobody—absolutely nobody—knew how many that meant, but it was clear that all the careful calculations and timetables worked out during the day were now meaningless.

10

“Bras-Dessus, Bras-Dessous!”

“LET’S HELP THE FROGGIES, too,” Bob Hilton suggested to Ted Shaw as they began their seventeen-hour stint, rowing troops from the beach to the ships lying off Malo-les-Bains. Shaw agreed, and from then on, they never worried whether a soldier was French or English. Both were on the same side. It seemed simple enough.

Higher up, it wasn’t that easy. When the evacuation began, the Admiralty simply assumed that British troops would be taken off in British ships, French troops in French ships. That was the way everything else had been done. Each of the Allies had conducted its own retreat to the coast, then manned its own part of the perimeter. In the same spirit the British had made their own decision to evacuate. Reynaud had been informed, and now it was up to the French to do the same.

As for the French, at this point they weren’t even thinking evacuation. On May 19, the day Weygand took over, Admiral Darlan told Supreme Headquarters that such a step could lead only to “disaster.” Darlan preferred to hold on to the beachhead, turn it into a continuing threat to the German flank. It was with this thought in mind that Captain Auphan began rounding up hundreds of French trawlers. They were to supply the beachhead, not evacuate it. In Dunkirk Admiral Abrial faithfully reflected the same point of view.

The French finally faced reality on May 27, when Auphan, Admiral Leclerc, and Admiral Odend’hal met with Ramsay at Dover Castle. They had come to discuss supplying Dunkirk, only to discover that the British were already leaving. Now the French would have to catch up. Auphan’s trawlers could be used, but they weren’t remotely enough. Few French warships were available; most were stationed in the Mediterranean by arrangement with the Royal Navy.

An agreement was hastily hammered out between the French officers and Admiral Ramsay. Paragraph 5 declared that “all naval means for evacuation shall be shared between Dover and Dunkerque.” This was admittedly vague, but to the French it seemed to promise at least some access to British shipping.

They soon learned what “sharing” could mean. When Belgium surrendered on May 28, General Champon, head of the French mission to King Leopold, made his way to La Panne. With him came the mission staff, numbering 100 to 150 men. They were a hand-picked lot, and the Allied area commander General Georges ordered “immediate evacuation.” Champon asked Lord Gort for space on some British ship.

Gort fired off a telegram to the War Office asking confirmation from Brigadier Swayne, British liaison officer at French Supreme Headquarters. “Swayne should point out,” Gort added helpfully, “every Frenchman embarked is a loss of one Englishman.” Why this argument would be persuasive at French headquarters, Gort didn’t say. But he did offer a final suggestion: “Why not send a French destroyer, using own boats?”

The next day—Wednesday, the 29th—found Champon and his staff still stranded at La Panne. General Georges again urged Gort to act, and Brigadier Swayne followed up with a telephone call to General Pownall, Gort’s Chief of Staff. Pownall reported that orders had been issued covering Champon and “some of his officers,” then asked rather pointedly if this mission was meant to have top priority, “thus displacing an equal number of British troops?”

No, said Swayne, he was certain that wasn’t what Georges meant. The General just wanted to make sure that the Champon mission had equal status with the British.

The problem dragged on. Thirty-six more hours would pass before Champon finally got off at 8:00 p.m., May 30.

If it was that hard to make room for 100 hand-picked men, the prospects weren’t bright for the thousands of ordinary poilus now pouring into the perimeter. From the south came remnants of the French First Army … from the east, the badly mauled 60th Division … from the west, the 68th Division retiring from Gravelines—all converging on the beaches at once. They were in for a long wait: on May 29 over 47,000 men were evacuated, but only 655 were French.

Winston Churchill understood both the arithmetic and the political ramifications. On the 29th he addressed a memo to Anthony Eden and to Generals Dill and Ismay:

It is essential that the French should share in such evacuations from Dunkirk as may be possible. Nor must they be dependent only upon their own shipping resources. Arrangements must be concerted at once … so that no reproaches, or as few as possible, may arise.

Meanwhile General Georges appealed again to Lord Gort. This time his message concerned not just the Champon mission, but all the troops now gathering on the beaches. As relayed over the telephone by the accommodating Brigadier Swayne, Georges urged that the evacuation be carried out by the British and the French “with mutual co-operation and support.”

“I am quite prepared to cooperate,” Gort wired General Dill in London, “but support—by which is implied resources—is all on our side. Strongly urge that the French should take their full share in providing naval facilities.”

This of course ignored the fact that the French had very little in the way of “naval facilities,” with their fleet down in the Mediterranean. Pointing out that he had already evacuated “small parties of French,” Gort once again reminded London: “Every Frenchman embarked is at the cost of one Englishman.” His instructions said that the safety of the BEF came first. In light of that, he asked, what was the government’s policy toward the French?

General Dill wrestled with this for some hours, finally wired Gort a little lamely that the safety of the BEF still came first, but he should try to evacuate “a proportion” of French troops.

In London that night, Churchill remained uneasy. Despite his directive, there was little evidence that the French were sharing in the evacuation. At 11:45 p.m. he shot off another telegram, this time for Reynaud, Weygand, and Georges:

We wish French troops to share in evacuation to fullest possible extent, and Admiralty have been instructed to aid French Marine as required. We do not know how many will be forced to capitulate, but we must share this loss together as best we can, and, above all, bear it without reproaches arising from inevitable confusion, stresses, and strains.

At this moment Admiral Wake-Walker, crossing the Channel to take charge offshore, had a very different view of Admiralty policy. Before leaving, he had been briefed by Admiral Pound, the First Sea Lord. Pound had told him that the French were not thought to be pulling their weight; he was to “refuse them embarkation, if British troops were ready to embark.”

Next morning, May 30, Churchill summoned the three Service Ministers and the Chiefs of Staff to a meeting in the Admiralty War Room. An important guest was General Pownall, just back from La Panne. Once again the Prime Minister stressed the importance of getting off more French troops.

Pownall spoke up, defending the present figures. As usual, he trotted out the familiar argument: so long as the French did not produce ships of their own, “every Frenchman embarked meant one more Englishman lost.”

Pownall felt that he had forced Churchill to face an “inconvenient truth,” but the Prime Minister had been hearing this argument for two days now, and if he showed displeasure, it more likely stemmed from exasperation.

More phone talks with Gort followed during the day. At 4:20 p.m. General Dill confirmed that Gort’s first consideration was the safety of the BEF, but he must also do his best to send off a “fair proportion” of the French. At 8:10 p.m. the War Office again notified Brigadier Swayne that French troops were to share in the evacuation “to fullest possible extent.”

Then came Admiral Ramsay’s figures for the total number rescued during the day: British 45,207; French 8,616.

Clearly phrases such as “fair share,” “fullest possible extent,” and “fair proportion” could mean what anybody wanted them to mean—thousands of troops, or just one soldier. If the French were really to share the British ships, the orders would have to be far more precise. It was almost midnight, May 30, when Churchill finally faced the matter squarely.

“British and French troops must now evacuate in approximately equal numbers,” General Dill stressed in his telephone call to Gort, relaying the Prime Minister’s new orders. Lest there be any misunderstanding, Dill repeated the instructions three different times in the conversation. When Churchill himself came on the wire, the Prime Minister emphasized that the whole future of the alliance was at stake.

He was right. Paris was full of rumors and recriminations these days, mostly to the effect that the British were running home, leaving the French holding the bag. Hoping to clear up any misunderstandings, Churchill flew to Paris the following morning, May 31, for a meeting of the Allied Supreme War Council. Accompanied by General Dill and a few top aides, he was met at the airport by his personal representative to Reynaud, Major-General Sir Edward Spears, who had been bearing the brunt of the French complaints these past few days.

At 2:00 p.m. the British and French leaders met at the Ministry of War on the rue Saint-Dominique. Joining the group for the first time was Marshal Pétain, an ancient gloomy figure in civilian clothes. General Weygand was there too, wearing a huge pair of riding boots that made him look, General Spears felt, like Puss in Boots. The French sat on one side of a large baize-covered table; the British on the other. Through the tall, open windows lay a garden basking in the sunshine. It was another of those glorious spring days—so many this year—that seemed to mock these grim statesmen and generals trying to ward off disaster.

Churchill opened the meeting on a cheerful note. The evacuation, he reported, was going far better than anyone had dared hope. As of noon this day, 165,000 men had been lifted off.

“But how many French?” Weygand asked sharply. The Prime Minister dodged a direct answer for the moment: “We are companions in misfortune. There is nothing to be gained from recrimination over our common miseries.”

But the question wouldn’t go away. After a brief survey of the Norwegian campaign, the discussion came back to Dunkirk, and it turned out that of the 165,000 evacuated, only 15,000 were French. Churchill did his best to explain this awkward disparity: many of the British were rear area troops already stationed near Dunkirk … the French had farther to come … if just the fighting divisions were counted, the disparity wasn’t so bad.

Reynaud broke in. Whatever the reasons, the hard facts remained: of 220,000 British, 150,000 had been rescued: of 200,000 French, the number saved was only 15,000. He couldn’t face public opinion at home with figures like these. Something had to be done to evacuate more French.

Churchill agreed and explained the new “equal numbers” directive. He also stressed that three British divisions still at Dunkirk would stand by the French until the evacuation was complete.

Darlan then drafted a telegram to Admiral Abrial in Bastion 32, describing the decisions taken by the Council. It mentioned that when the perimeter closed down, the British forces would embark first.

Churchill leapt to this feet. “Non!” he cried. “Partage—bras-dessus, bras-dessous!” His atrocious French accent was a legend, but this time there was no mistaking him. With dramatic gestures he vividly acted out an arm-in-arm departure.

Nor did he stop there. Emotionally carried away, he announced that the remaining British troops would form the rear guard. “So few French have got out so far,” he declared, “I will not accept further sacrifices by the French.”

This was a lot more than arm-in-arm, and to General Spears it was going too far. After more discussion, the final draft simply said that the British troops would act as rear guard “as long as possible.” It also said that Abrial would be in overall command. It was just as well that Lord Gort did not know of the Prime Minister’s outburst. It was difficult enough to swallow the policy of “equal numbers.” At least it wasn’t retroactive. London agreed that the rule only applied from now on. Still, it could be costly. The War Office had instructed him to hang on longer, so that as many French as possible could be evacuated. But how long? This morning, May 31, everything pointed to a heavy German attack on Furnes. If he hung on too long just to save more Frenchmen, he might lose the whole Guard’s Brigade.

He was still mulling over this problem when General Alexander—the calm, capable commander of the 1st Division—visited GHQ at 8:30 a.m. Gort glumly told him to thin out his division, since it looked as if he would have to surrender most of his men alongside the French. At least that was what the War Office’s instructions seemed to mean.

At 9:00 a.m. Anthony Eden came on the phone with an interpretation of these orders that must have greatly eased Gort’s mind. As Eden explained to Brigadier Leese:

The instructions sent the previous night to hold on so as to enable the maximum number of Allied troops to be evacuated must be interpreted to mean that [Gort] should only do so as long as he was satisfied that he could continue to hold his position with the forces at his disposal, but he should not prejudice the safety of the remainder of his force by trying to hold his position beyond that time.

In other words, hanging on for the sake of evacuating an equal number of Frenchmen was desirable—as long as it was safe.

Enlightened, Gort now drove down to Dunkirk to meet with Admiral Abrial at 10:00 a.m. The Admiral was, as usual, in Bastion 32. Besides his staff of naval officers, he had with him General Fagalde, commander of the French military forces in the perimeter, and General de la Laurencie, who had just arrived with the only French troops to escape from the German trap at Lille.

Gort’s sessions with Abrial were often strained. Tucked away in Bastion 32, the man never seemed to know what was going on. Today, all was cordial. Gort relayed the “equal numbers” policy, stated that he had already promised to evacuate 5,000 of de la Laurencie’s men. Abrial said that Weygand preferred to use the space for some mechanized cavalry units, and de la Laurencie made no objection. Gort also offered the French equal access to the eastern mole. If it seemed a little odd for the British to be offering the French free use of a French facility in a French port, Abrial was tactful enough to keep silent.

Gort and Fagalde now exchanged full information on each other’s positions along the perimeter—apparently the first time this had been done—and Gort announced that he had been ordered home. At this point General Blanchard turned up. Nominally the Army Group commander, these days he was virtually unemployed. Gort invited him and General de la Laurencie to accompany his own party to England. Both politely declined. As de la Laurencie put it: “My flag will remain planted on the Dunes, until the last of my men have embarked.”

There were farewell toasts. Everyone promised to meet in France soon again.

Returning to La Panne, Gort summoned General Alexander to the seaside villa that served as GHQ. The Commander-in-Chief had reached a major decision: Alexander, not Barker, would take over after Gort’s own departure for England. He never explained the switch. Perhaps he was impressed by Montgomery’s fervent protest the previous evening, but the stolid Gort was not known to be easily influenced by the mercurial Monty.

In any case the orders were ready and waiting when Alexander arrived around 12:30 p.m. Technically, he would relieve Barker as Commanding Officer of I Corps, consisting of three rather depleted divisions. His orders were to “assist our French Allies in the defence of Dunkirk.”

He would be serving under Abrial, as decided in Paris, but with an important escape clause added: “Should any order which he may issue to you be likely, in your opinion, to imperil the safety of your command, you should make an immediate appeal to His Majesty’s Government.”

That was all, as Gort originally dictated the orders to Colonel Bridgeman, still acting as the General’s Operations Officer. Yet there was an important omission. Gort had left out the War Office’s instruction authorizing surrender “to avoid useless slaughter.” Bridgeman felt it should be included, but didn’t dare say so to his chief. Finally, he got a copy of London’s original telegram, pointed to the passage in question, and asked whether he wanted it included, too. Gort said yes, and it was done. To the end they managed to avoid actually saying the dreaded word, “surrender.”

Technically, Gort’s orders would not take effect until 6:00 p.m., when GHQ was scheduled to close down. As a practical matter, they became operational almost right away. After a quick lunch, Alexander drove back to his headquarters and turned his division over to one of his brigadiers. Then he drove down to Dunkirk, accompanied by his Chief of Staff Colonel William Morgan and the ubiquitous Captain Tennant. At 2:00 p.m. they entered the candle-lit gloom of Bastion 32 for Alexander’s first meeting with Admiral Abrial and General Fagalde.

It did not go well. Abrial planned to hold a reduced beachhead, running as far east as the Belgian border, with French troops on the right and a mixed French-British force under Alexander on the left. This force would act as a rear guard, holding the beachhead indefinitely while the rest of the Allied troops embarked. Then, presumably, the rear guard itself would scurry to safety at the last minute.

Alexander felt it would never work. Protracted resistance was impossible. The troops were in no condition to fight indefinitely. The proposed perimeter was too near the harbor and the beaches. Enemy artillery fire at short range would soon stop the evacuation completely. Instead, he proposed to wind up the evacuation as fast as possible, with the last troops pulling back to the beach the following night, June 1–2.

Abrial was unimpressed. If the British insisted on leaving anyhow, he added, “I am afraid the port will be closed.”

Alexander decided it was time to invoke the escape clause in his orders. He announced that he would have to refer the matter to London. Then he drove back to La Panne, relieved to find that the telephone line was still open.

At 7:15 p.m. he managed to get through to Anthony Eden and quickly explained the problem. An hour later Eden called back with new and welcome instructions from the Cabinet:

You should withdraw your force as rapidly as possible on a 50-50 basis with the French Army, aiming at completion by night of 1st/2nd June. You should inform the French of this definite instruction.

The phrase “on a 50-50 basis with the French Army,” Eden explained, did not require Alexander to make up for any past discrepancies; it simply meant that equal numbers of French and British troops must be withdrawn from now on. Supported by the Cabinet, Alexander hurried back to Bastion 32.

Meanwhile, Abrial, too, had gone to his superiors. Wiring Weygand, he protested that Alexander—who had been placed under him—was refusing to follow instructions to fight on. Instead, the British commander planned to embark on the night of June 1–2, whatever happened, “thus abandoning the defence of Dunkirk.”

Weygand could do little but buck the complaint to London. At 9:00 p.m. he radioed Dill, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, reminding him of the decisions reached by the Supreme War Council that very afternoon. Paragraph 4 had specifically put Abrial in charge.

The Admiral was still waiting for some word from Weygand, when Alexander arrived back in Bastion 32 with the British Cabinet’s instructions. He announced that he would hold his sector of the perimeter until 11:59 pm. June 1—tomorrow night—then would withdraw to the beaches under cover of darkness. The French were welcome to come along and share the British shipping, but whatever they did, he was pulling out.

Faced with no alternative, Abrial agreed.

It was now after 11:00 p.m. Alexander had shifted his headquarters to the outskirts of Dunkirk, but the roads were strange and full of craters. It seemed safer to stay in Bastion 32 overnight, so he and Colonel Morgan curled up on the concrete floor—as hard and as cold as relations were getting to be between the two great Allies.

Completely oblivious to all this high-level wrangling, an old soldier sat in his quarters at La Panne on the afternoon of May 31, snipping medal and campaign ribbons from a uniform blouse. General Gort was getting ready to go home. The evacuation was Alexander’s headache now, and at the moment Gort’s main concern was to see that no German soldier made a souvenir out of anything he had to leave behind.

He was to go at 6:00 p.m. Two separate plans had been made for his embarkation, and it was typical of these trying days that neither group of planners knew of the other’s existence. Under one of these plans—developed by the Navy liaison at GHQ—four motor torpedo boats would dash over from Dover to pluck Gort and his staff off the beach. The orders were very vague. The commander of the little flotilla only knew that he was to pick up “a party.” When he arrived, he checked with Admiral Wake-Walker, in charge offshore, for further directions.

Wake-Walker knew even less. No one had briefed him, and it never occurred to him that these motor torpedo boats had been sent to pick up the Commander-in-Chief. He thought that was his responsibility. He assigned the MTB’s to courier chores and continued his own planning. Gort would leave his villa shortly after 6:00, going to a designated spot on the beach two miles west of La Panne. Here he and his staff would be met by a launch and taken out to the destroyer Keith lying offshore. The Keith would then run the party back to Dover. Commodore Stephenson would be in direct charge, with Wake-Walker himself supervising.

As planned, Gort’s party left his villa at 6:00 p.m., but that was as far as they followed the script. For some reason the two staff cars carrying the group did not go to the designated rendezvous, but to a spot much closer to La Panne. This meant no small boats were waiting, and the departure from the beach became a very ragged affair. Ultimately Gort’s staff wound up on the Keith, he himself on the minesweeper Hebe, and his batman, driver, and luggage all on the motor yacht Thele.

Safely aboard the Hebe, Gort went to the bridge to greet the skipper, Lieutenant-Commander J. S. Wemple. There was time for only the briefest exchange of niceties; then the sea, the sky, the ships all seemed to erupt with explosions. The weather had cleared, and the Luftwaffe was back—ten separate raids this evening. As the Hebe’s crew rushed to their gun stations, Gort learned how useless his role had at last become. He settled quietly in a corner of the bridge, raised his binoculars, and gazed absently around.

“Won’t you go below and take cover, sir?” suggested Captain Eric Bush, one of Ramsay’s coordinators working with Tennant and Wake-Walker.

“No, thank you, I’m quite happy where I am,” the General replied politely. Finally the raid tapered off, and Gort—unruffled as ever—went below for a bite to eat,

The Hebe still did not head for England with her distinguished passenger. By now hundreds of ordinary soldiers were swarming aboard, delivered from the beaches by the ever-growing swarm of little ships. Wake-Walker decided to wait until she had a full load before sending her back.

Dover and London grew restless, then frantic. Seven hours had passed since the Admiralty had dispatched the four MTB’s to pick up Gort, and still there was no sign of him. Those boats could do 40 knots; they should have been back long ago. Worse, the latest radio traffic indicated that the MTB’s hadn’t even been used to get the General. What had happened to him anyhow?

“Report immediately why MTB’s sent for Commander-in-Chief were diverted to other duties,” Admiral Phillips, the Vice-Chief of Naval Staff, radioed Wake-Walker at 11:36 p.m. “Take immediate action to embark Commander-in-Chief and report steps taken.”

On the Keith, Wake-Walker sent one of the MTB’s to the Hebe to get Gort, but he was no longer there. He had taken a launch, hoping to reach the Keith. A half-hour passed, and still no sign of the launch.

Now it was Wake-Walker’s turn to agonize. The night was black; no lights showing. Had the launch missed the Keith? Was Gort out there somewhere drifting in the dark? Wake-Walker had visions of the disgrace that would be his if he botched this job and lost the Commander-in-Chief of the BEF.

It was after midnight, the opening minutes of June 1, when the launch finally loomed out of the dark. Gort climbed aboard the Keith, reunited at last with his staff.

But only briefly. He and Brigadier Leese quickly transferred to the speedboat MA/SB 6 and headed For Dover. At 6:20 a.m. they landed at the Admiralty Pier, where Gort gulped a cup of tea and caught the next train to London.

Anthony Eden and members of the War Cabinet were on hand to greet him, but the little group passed almost unnoticed amid the crowds swirling around Victoria Station. By now bedraggled soldiers were tumbling off every train from the south coast into the waiting arms of friends and relatives. Gort seemed to be just one more of them. He was already a fading figure of the past.

Far more important than the escape of a discredited chieftain was the rescue on May 31 of 53,140 more men who could help form the nucleus of a new British Army.

Thousands of them used the lorry jetties that had been improvised at Bray-Dunes and La Panne. Despite the ingenuity of the builders, these were rickety affairs that heaved alarmingly in the surf and changing tides. Still, a steady stream of soldiers clambered out along the duck boards, dropping into the row-boats and launches that came alongside.

“Well, my lucky lad, can you row?” a sailor greeted Private Percy Yorke of the 145th Field Ambulance, as he tumbled into a boat. “No? Well, now’s your time to bloody well learn.” Yorke learned by doing, and managed to reach the excursion steamer Princess Elizabeth.

Major E. R. Nanney Wynn, 3rd Division Signals, reached the end of a jetty and peered down at a waiting motor whaler. Manning it, improbably, was a ship’s steward immaculate in his short white jacket. It was almost like going Cunard.

Other troops made use of the growing mountain of debris that littered the beaches. Private C. N. Bennett of the 5th Northamptonshires came across a discarded army boat made of canvas. It was designed to carry six men across a river; now ten men jumped into it and headed across the sea. Using their rifles as paddles, they hoped to get to England. It was just as well that a motor launch soon spotted them and look them to the destroyer Ivanhoe.

Brigadier John G. Smyth, commanding the 127th Infantry Brigade, rallied nineteen men around a big ship’s lifeboat stranded well up on the beach. A heavy, bulky thing, it required all their strength to shove it down to the water. Even then their troubles weren’t over: it was a sixteen-oared boat, and not one of Smyth’s recruits could row.

They shoved on anyhow, with Smyth at the tiller and the men at the oars. After a few strokes the “crew” began falling over backwards; the oars were tangled up; and the boat was turning in crazy circles. As he later recalled, “We must have looked like an intoxicated centipede.”

There couldn’t have been a worse time to give a lesson in basic rowing. The Luftwaffe chose this moment to stage one of its raids, and the Brigadier’s instructions were punctuated by gunfire, exploding bombs, and geysers of water. The men tried again, this time with Smyth shouting out the stroke, “One-two, in-out!” The crew caught on, and the boat moved steadily toward a waiting destroyer. They even made a real race out of it, beating an overloaded motor launch carrying their division commander.

Farther along the beach, Private Bill Stratton of the RASC helped haul an abandoned lifeboat to the water’s edge, then watched a stampede of men jump in and take it over. Determined not to let all his hard work go for nothing, Stratton made a flying leap and landed on top of the crowd. Predictably, the boat soon swamped. Stratton was a good swimmer, but his greatcoat dragged him down. He was about to go under when a navy launch appeared. Someone pulled him over the side and flung him down on the bottom, “like a fish.”

Inevitably there were confrontations. Near Malo-les-Bains a column of wading men retrieved two small rowboats lying offshore. Suddenly a voice called, “Halt, or I fire!” It was a Scots colonel heading up an adjoining column, and he clearly felt his men had first call on the boats. Finally, a compromise was worked out allowing both columns to use them.

Near La Panne, Yeoman Eric Goodbody set out in a whaler with eight naval signalmen from GHQ. As they shoved off, an officer on shore ordered him to bring back four soldiers who had also piled in. Goodbody refused—he was in charge of the whaler and everybody in her, he declared. The officer pulled a gun … Goodbody drew his … and for a moment the two stood face to face, aiming their pistols at each other. At this point the four soldiers quietly volunteered to go back, and another crisis was passed.

At Bray-Dunes Sapper Joe Coles was aroused by a friend who had found a large rowboat swamped and stranded on the beach. They bailed it out, then were hurled aside by a mob of soldiers piling in. About to swamp again, it was emptied by a Military Policeman at pistol point.

Order restored, Coles and his friend tried again. This time they shoved off safely and took a load of troops to a skoot, then headed back for another load. Dozens of men were swimming out to meet them, when they were hailed by an officer floating nearby on a raft. Brandishing his revolver, the officer ordered them to take him first. Coles felt the swimmers should have priority—the raft was in no trouble—but that pistol was very persuasive. The officer had his way.

One reason for frayed nerves was the state of the sea. For the first time since the evacuation began, the wind was blowing onshore, building up a nasty surf throughout the morning of May 31. The loading went more slowly than ever, and at Bray-Dunes Commander Richardson finally decided that nothing more could be done. He ordered the troops on the beach to head for Dunkirk: then he, Commander Kerr, and the naval shore party salvaged a stranded whaler, rounded up some oars, and began pulling for England.

They didn’t realize how tired they were. Every stroke hurt. Soon they were barely moving, and they probably would have broached to and swamped; but the Margate lifeboat spotted them in time. It hurried over and picked them up.

At 10:35 a.m. Admiral Wake-Walker radioed the situation to Ramsay at Dover.

Majority of pulling boats are broached to and have no crews: Conditions on beach very bad owing to freshening onshore wind. Only small numbers are being embarked even in daylight. Consider only hope of embarking any number is at Dunkirk. …

By “Dunkirk” he of course meant the eastern mole. For Tennant and his aides, the mole was more and more the answer to everything. They were constantly trying to concentrate the boat traffic in that direction. Ramsay knew its importance too, but he also guessed that there were still thousands to be evacuated, and everything had to be used—including the beaches, even though the going was slow.

At 11:05 a.m. Wake-Walker tried again. “Dunkirk our only real hope,” he telegraphed Ramsay. “Can guns shelling pier from westward be bombed and silenced?”

This was a new problem. Until May 31, the German guns had been a nuisance, but that was all. Their aim was haphazard; the shells usually fell short. Now, batteries had been planted this side of Gravelines; and the result was soon apparent.

At 6:17 a.m. the minesweeper Glen Gower lay alongside the mole, ready to receive her first troops of the day. As the skipper Commander M.A.O. Biddneph waited on the bridge, he suddenly heard a whistling noise … then a bang, quickly followed by several more bangs. A mass of black fragments leapt up on the foredeck, just where the gunnery officer, Sub-Lieutenant Williams, was standing. At first Biddneph thought it must be a stick of bombs, but there wasn’t a plane in the sky. Then he realized it was a salvo of shells, one of them piercing the deck exactly between Williams’s feet. Miraculously, the gunnery officer wasn’t touched, but twelve men were killed or wounded in the explosion below.

The mole itself continued to lead a charmed life. Since its discovery by the Luftwaffe on May 29 it had been bombed by Stukas, pounded by artillery, and battered by rescue ships coming alongside too heavily. Rammed by the minesweeper King Orry, the seaward tip was now cut off completely. Yet for most of its length, it remained usable. Here and there gaps appeared, but they were bridged with boards, doors, and ships’ gangplanks. The loading went on.

Still, the dash to the waiting vessels was always unnerving. None felt it more than Private Alfred Baldwin of the Royal Artillery. He was carrying on his shoulders his friend Private Paddy Boydd, who had smashed a foot. Stumbling along the walkway, Baldwin came to a gaping hole, bridged by a single plank. Two sailors standing by said, “Take a run at it, mate,” adding, “don’t look down.” Baldwin followed their advice, except that he did look down. Dark water swirled around the piles twenty feet below. Somehow he kept his balance, and another pair of sailors grabbed him at the far end, cheering him on: “Well done, keep going!”

He struggled on, panting and stumbling, until he ran into two more sailors, who helped him maneuver Boydd up the gangplank to a waiting ship. She turned out to be the Channel packet Maid of Orleans, the very same vessel that had brought him to France at the start of the war.

Baldwin made his dash when the tide was high. At low tide the mole could be even more trying. Corporal Reginald Lockerby reached the destroyer Venomous, only to find there was a fifteen-foot drop to the ship’s deck. Several telegraph poles leaned against the side of the mole, and the troops were expected to slide down them to get aboard. Trouble was, neither ship nor poles had been made fast. Both were unpredictably swaying and heaving up and down. One slip meant falling into the sea and being crushed between boat and dock.

“I can’t do it, Ern,” Lockerby gasped to his friend Private Ernest Heming.

“Get down there, you silly sod, or I’ll throw you down!” shouted Heming. “I’ll hold the top of the pole for you.”

Somehow Lockerby mustered the strength and courage. He slid down the pole, then held it from the bottom as Heming followed.

No French troops were yet using the mole, but starting May 31, the new policy of equal numbers was very much in evidence along the beaches. When the motor yacht Marsayru arrived from Sheerness about 4:00 p.m., her first assignment was to help lift a large number of French waiting at Malo-les-Bains. The yacht’s civilian skipper G. D. Olivier sent in his whaler, but it was stormed by about 50 poilus, and immediately capsized. He edged farther east, “where the French troops appeared to be a little calmer,” and tried again. This time no problem, and over the next 48 hours he lifted more than 400 French soldiers.

Nearby a small flotilla of Royal Navy minesweeping craft was doing its bit. The Three Kings picked up 200 Frenchmen … the Jackeve, 60 … the Rig, another 60. The same sort of thing was happening at Bray-Dunes and La Panne.

How many French troops remained to be evacuated under this policy of equal numbers? Neither Paris nor Admiral Abrial in Bastion 32 seemed to have any idea. To the weary organizers of the rescue fleet in London and Dover, it didn’t make much difference. They were already sending everything that could float. …

In all her working years the 78-foot Massey Shaw had never been to sea. She was a Thames fire boat—or “fire float,” as Londoners preferred to say—and until now her longest voyage had been down the river to fight a blaze at Ridham. She had no compass, and her crew were professional firemen, not sailors.

But the Massey Shaw drew only 3.9 feet, and to the Admiralty this was irresistible. There was also a vague notion that she might come in handy fighting the fires sweeping Dunkirk harbor, an idea that conveys less about her effectiveness than it does about the innocence still prevailing in some quarters at the Admiralty.

A call for volunteers went out on the afternoon of May 30. Thirteen men were picked, with Sub-Officer A. J. May in charge, and in two hours the Massey Shaw was on her way. There had barely been time to buy a small marine compass. On the trip down the river, the crew busied themselves boarding up the cabin windows and dabbing gray paint on the various brass fittings and hose nozzles. The situation must be serious indeed: the Massey Shaw’s bright work had always been sacred.

At Ramsgate she picked up water and a young Royal Navy sub-lieutenant with a chart. Then across the Channel with the additional help of a pocket tide table that somebody found. Arriving off Bray-Dunes late in the afternoon of May 31, the crew studied the beach with fascination. At first glance it looked like any bank holiday weekend—swarms of people moving about or sitting in little knots on the sand. But there was one big difference: instead of the bright colors of summer, everybody was dressed in khaki. And what first appeared to be “breakwaters” running down into the surf turned out to be columns of men, also dressed in khaki.

The Massey Shaw sent in a rowboat toward one of the columns. It was promptly swamped and sunk by the troops piling in. Then a stranded RAF speedboat was salvaged in the hope it might be used, but 50 men crowded aboard, putting it out of action too. Toward 11:00 p.m. still another boat was found. A line was now strung between the Massey Shaw and the beach, and the new boat was pulled back and forth along this line, rather like a sea-going trolley car. The boat carried only six men at a time, but back and forth it went, ferrying load after load.

Finally the Massey Shaw could hold no more. There were now 30 men packed in the cabin, which had seemed crowded with six the night before. Dozens more sprawled on the deck; there didn’t seem to be a square foot of empty space.

It was dark when the Massey Shaw finally weighed anchor and started back for Ramsgate. So far, she had led a charmed life. The Luftwaffe was constantly overhead, but not a plane had attacked. Now, as she got under weigh, her screws kicked up a phosphorescent wake that caught the attention of some sharp-eyed enemy pilot. He swooped down and dropped a single bomb. It was close, but a miss. The Massey Shaw continued safely on her way, bringing home another 65 men.

Like the Massey Shaw, the Tilbury Dredging Company’s steam hopper dredge Lady Southborough had never been to sea. Plucked from rust-streaked obscurity in Portsmouth harbor, she checked in at Ramsgate, then set out for Dunkirk with three other Tilbury hoppers early on the morning of May 31. Arriving at 12:30 p.m., Lady Southborough anchored off Malo-les-Bains, lowered her port lifeboat with three hands, and began lifting troops off the beach.

As the Lady Southborough hovered several hundred yards offshore, a German plane dropped a stick of four bombs. No hits, but they lifted the ship’s lifeboat clear out of the water and whacked it down again, springing every plank. Nobody was hurt, but the boat was finished. Seeing that it was ebb tide, skipper Anthony Poole now drove Lady Southborough head-first onto the beach, so that he could pick up the troops directly from the water. They swarmed out, and one Frenchman—who evidently had not heard of the new British policy of equal numbers—offered to pay acting Second Mate John Tarry to get aboard.

Nearby, another Tilbury hopper dredge, Foremost 101, lay at anchor. The usual signs of disorder were everywhere: boats swamped by the surf … others sinking under the weight of too many men … others drifting about without oars or oarsmen. Amid this chaos was a single note of serenity. A petty officer had found a small child’s canoe in some boating pond ashore. Now he was ferrying soldiers one by one out to the waiting ships. As he threaded his way through the debris, none of the swimmers ever bothered him. By common consent he seemed to have a laissez-passer to work in peace, without interference.

Going home in the dark was the hardest part. As Lady Southborough groped uncertainly through the night, a destroyer loomed up, flashing a signal. None of the dredge’s crew could read Morse; so there was no answer. The destroyer flashed again; still no answer. Finally one of the soldiers on board said he was a signalman: could he help? Some more flashes, and the soldier announced that the destroyer had now demanded their identity three times; if they didn’t answer at once, she would blow them out of the water. Watching the signalman flash back the ship’s name, Second Mate Tarry cursed the day she had been christened Lady Southborough. Those sixteen letters seemed to take forever. But at last the destroyer was satisfied, and Lady Southborough crawled on to Ramsgate.

Meanwhile the cascade of little ships continued in all its variety—the stylish yacht Quicksilver, which could make twenty knots … the cockle fleet from Leigh-on-Sea … the Chris Craft Bonnie Heather, with its polished mahogany hull … the Dutch eel boat Johanna, which came complete with three Dutch owners who couldn’t speak a word of English … to name just a few. Countless other boats, which Admiral Ramsay called “free lances,” were now heading out of south coast ports like Folkestone, Eastbourne, Newhaven, and Brighton. Most never bothered to check with Dover; no one would ever record their names.

The French and Belgian fishing vessels requisitioned by Captain Auphan were beginning to turn up too, adding an international flavor to the rescue effort. Names like Pierre et Marie, Reine des Flots, and Ingénieur Cardin joined Handy Billie, Girl Nancy, and at least nine Skylarks. The French mailboat Côte d’Argent began using the east mole like any British steamer.

Most of the French crews were from Brittany and as unfamiliar with these waters as the cockle boatmen from the Thames estuary, but there was the inevitable exception. Fernand Schneider, assistant engineer on the minesweeping trawler St. Cyr, came from Dunkirk itself. Now he had the agony of watching his hometown crumble into ruins, but at the same time the comfort of visiting his own house from time to time.

Knowing the area, Schneider also knew where food was to be had, and the St. Cyr’s skipper occasionally sent him on foraging expeditions to bolster the trawler’s meager rations. He was on one of these forays on May 28 when he decided to check his house on the rue de la Toute Verte. It was still standing, and better yet, his father Augustin Schneider was there. Augustin had come in from the family refuge in the country, also to see how the house was faring. They embraced with special fervor, for the occasion was more than a family reunion, more than a celebration that the house was intact—it was Fernand’s 21st birthday.

The old man went down in the cellar and brought up a bottle of Vouvray. Then for an hour the two forgot about the war while they joyfully killed the bottle. Parting at last, father and son would not see each other again for five years.

Fernand Schneider was the only sailor at Dunkirk who celebrated his birthday at home, but the rescue fleet was full of improbable characters. Lieutenant Lodo van Hamel was a dashing Dutch naval officer, always conspicuous because he flew the only Dutch flag in the whole armada. Lieutenant-Colonel Robin Hutchens was an old Grenadier Guardsman, mired in a dull liaison job at the Admiralty. An experienced weekend sailor, he headed for Dover on his day off; now he was in charge of the War Department launch Swallow. Captain R. P. Pim normally presided over Winston Churchill’s map room; today he wallowed across the Channel commanding a Dutch skoot. Samuel Palmer served on the Plymouth City Patrol, but he was an old navy “stripey,” and that was good enough. In charge of the seven-ton Naiad Errant, a cranky motor yacht that was always breaking down, he split up the cabin door and told the soldiers on board to start paddling.

Robert Harling was a typographical designer, but as a student in Captain Watts’s navigation class, he had volunteered with the rest. Now he found himself one of four men assigned to a ship’s lifeboat stripped from some liner at Tilbury docks. His companions turned out to be an advertising executive, a garage proprietor, and a solicitor. They had practically nothing in common—yet everything, joined as they were in an open boat on this strange adventure.

The boat was one of twelve being towed across the Channel by the tug Sun IV, skippered at the moment by the managing director of the tugboat company. The afternoon was beautiful, and the war seemed very far away. For a long time there was little to do but shoot the breeze. As they neared the French coast, marked by the pillar of black smoke over Dunkirk, the conversation fell off, and the mood in Harling’s boat became tense.

“There they are, the bastards!” someone suddenly called, pointing up at the sky. Harling looked, and soon made out more than 50 planes approaching with stately precision. They were perhaps 15,000 feet up, and at this distance everything seemed to happen in slow motion. Gradually the planes drew closer … then were directly overhead. Fascinated, he watched the bombs fall lazily toward the earth. Then suddenly they were rushing down at breakneck speed, crashing into the sea, just missing two nearby destroyers.

Soon some RAF fighters appeared, tearing into the German formation. Harling was mildly surprised that the Hurricanes and Spitfires really did rout the enemy—just as the communiqués said. But that wasn’t the end of it. In a last gesture of defiance, one of the German fighters swooped down, strafing the Sun IV and her tow. Watching it come, Harling felt mesmerized—he couldn’t even duck in time—then in a second it was over. The bullets ripped the empty sea; the plane zoomed up and out of sight. Sun IV and her charges steamed on untouched.

The sky was not the only source of danger. After a night of ferry work, the six cockle boats started back for Ramsgate at 3:00 a.m., June 1. Most had fared very well, but Letitia had now broken down and was being towed by the drifter Ben and Lucy. Then Renown’s engine went, and she latched onto Letitia. The three vessels limped along, with Renown yawing wide at the end of the tow.

It was about 3:30 when Renown brushed a German mine, freshly laid by some bomber or S-Boat. There was a blinding flash, and every trace of Renown and her crew of four vanished completely.

The methodical German shelling continued taking its toll too—often with frightening suddenness. As the pleasure steamer New Prince of Wales lay off Bray-Dunes on the 31st, Sub-Lieutenant Bennett left the bridge to help start a balky engine. He had just reached the deck when there was a shrieking, tearing sound, coming at him straight from above. There was a shattering explosion … a momentary glimpse of gray streamers of smoke laced with bits of shell … pain in his left foot, left thigh, and the left side of his face … and he found himself lying on deck. As he lost consciousness, he decided this must be the end. He had seen enough war movies showing men dying with blood running out of their mouths. That was the way they always went, and that was what was happening to him.

He came to a few minutes later, happy to find he was still alive. But two of his men were killed, and the New Prince of Wales was a write-off. The motor boat Triton was nearby, and Lieutenant Irving eased her over to take off the survivors. By now Bennett was on his feet again and even feeling belligerent. His face was a bloody mess, but his mind was clear, and he took over as coxswain for Lieutenant Irving.

They weren’t all heroes. Off Bray-Dunes one Dutch skoot lay motionless for hours, doing little or nothing. The skipper was tipsy, and the second in command seemed less than enthusiastic. Troops rowed out to her anyhow, and finally she was reasonably full. At this point Corporal Harold Meredith of the RASC heard the skipper explain, “I’m supposed to take you out to the destroyers, which are lying farther offshore, but I’ve had a very rough day, and tonight I am Nelson. I’ve unfortunately put my telescope to my blind eye, and I cannot see any destroyers; so I’m taking you all the way home.”

One way or another, 68,014 Allied troops were evacuated this May 31. As usual, the most dramatic incidents occurred off the beaches, but the most effective work was again done on the east mole. The destroyer Malcolm showed what one ship could do—1,000 men lifted at 2:15 a.m. … another 1,000 at 2:30 p.m. … still another 1,000 lifted in the early hours of June 1. Her efficiency made the job look easy, yet it was anything but that. Warrant Engineer Arthur George Scoggins nursed his machinery in a steam-filled engine room where the temperature hit 140° to 150°.

For the first time British ships were carrying a really respectable number of Frenchmen—10,842 were rescued this day. Not enough to satisfy Premier Reynaud, but it was a start. And the difficulties were more than the critics in Paris could ever realize. Usually the poilus wanted to bring all their equipment. Many refused to be separated from their units. They seemed unable to comprehend that if too many people got into a small boat at once, it might capsize or run aground. The British crews were inclined to think that the French were just naturally landlubbers, in contrast to “our island race.” The evidence suggests that much of the trouble stemmed from the language barrier.

“En avant mes héros! Courage mes enfants!” Sub-Lieutenant A. Carew Hunt summoned up his limited store of French, trying to tempt some hesitant soldiers to wade out to his boat. Minutes later he was waving his revolver at them to stop the rush.

“Débarquez! You bloody fools, get out! Get out! Nous sommes ensables!” shouted one of Captain Watts’s scholars as his boat grounded under the weight of too many Frenchmen. Nobody understood, and nobody moved. Finally a French NCO caught on, reworked the language, and the order was obeyed.

Sub-Lieutenant Michael Solomon, who knew French well, never had any trouble during a brief stint as interpreter for Commander Clouston on the eastern mole. English officers shouting “Allez!” got nowhere—that was insulting—but the right words, plus a little tact, could work wonders.

So the loading went on, and one more crisis was passed. The equal numbers rule did not upset Ramsay’s timetable after all. Thanks to Clouston’s organizing ability, far more men were evacuating from the mole than anyone had dared hope. The surge of little ships across the Channel helped too. By now there were enough boats for everyone—both French and British.

But already a new crisis was at hand. All day May 31, German shells had been falling on the beach and shipping at La Panne. Now, as dusk settled over the battered town, the bombardment grew worse than ever. It suggested that all was far from well along the eastern end of the perimeter. If it collapsed, Bock’s seasoned troops could break into the beachhead and end the evacuation for good.

11

Holding the Perimeter

GERMAN SHELLS SCREECHED OVERHEAD as Captain P. J. Jeffries of the 6th Durham Light Infantry leaned over and plucked a small flower in the garden of the chateau at Moeres, a Belgian village toward the eastern end of the perimeter. Jeffries didn’t know what this flower was—sort of a cross between an azalea and a rhododendron—but he vowed to find out and plant some in his own garden … if he ever got home again.

At the moment his chances didn’t look too good. Jeffries was second in command of the 6th DLI, one of the units assigned to hold off the Germans while the rest of the BEF and the French escaped to England. For two days enemy pressure had been growing on the Durhams’ section of the canal defense line, and now on the morning of May 31 German shells began landing uncomfortably close to battalion headquarters.

The first actual penetration came not at Moeres, but still farther east near Nieuport, the coastal town that served as the perimeter’s eastern anchor. Here at 5:00 a.m. German infantry crossed the canal in rubber boats and stormed the brickworks held by the 1st/6th East Surreys. By noon they were in danger of being outflanked. Their “sister” battalion, the 1st East Surreys, rushed to the rescue just in time. Together they managed to stop the enemy, but it took every man. At one point the two battalion commanders manned a Bren gun together. One colonel fired the gun, while the other acted as “No. 2,” feeding it with ammunition.

Next, an even closer squeak. While the Surreys were clinging to their brickyard, a new German attack hit the British 8th Brigade three miles to the west. At 12:20 p.m. a hysterical sapper stumbled into Furnes, the main town in the area, blurting that the front had been broken and the Germans were pouring across the canal unopposed.

No time to lose. Reinforcements from the crack 2nd Grenadier Guards were rushed to the scene under a quick-thinking 2nd lieutenant named Jones. He found two battalions of the brigade about to retire without orders. If this happened, a gaping hole would open up in the perimeter, allowing the Germans to pour in behind the defenders. The few remaining officers were trying to rally their men, but nobody would listen.

Jones took more drastic measures. He found it necessary to shoot some of the panic-stricken soldiers, and others were turned around at bayonet-point. He then reported back to headquarters that the brigade was once again stabilized but in desperate need of experienced officers and ammunition. Lieutenant J. Trotter of the 2nd Grenadier Guards was then sent to help him, along with 14,000 rounds of ammunition. By 3:00 p.m. the men were all back in position and morale was high—proving once again the importance of that elusive quality, leadership, in shaping the fortunes of war.

During the afternoon the Germans shifted their efforts to the area southwest of Furnes, but with no better results. They managed to storm across the canal at Bulscamp, but soon bogged down on the other side. Flooded terrain and a spirited defense blocked any further advance. In such a predicament the standard remedy was to soften resistance with artillery, and shells were soon raining on the Durham Light Infantry’s chateau at Moeres. Toward evening the DLI abandoned the place with few regrets. This country was meant to be an epicure’s delight, but for three days they had lived on a diet of tinned pilchards in tomato sauce.

Evening, and the target was Nieuport again. It’s doubtful whether the exhausted East Surreys could have stood up to any serious attack. Fortunately, just as the German columns massed, help came from an unexpected direction. Eighteen RAF bombers, supported by six planes from the Fleet Air Arm, swept in from the sea, smashing and scattering the enemy force. The British troops forgot their weariness; leapt and waved and shouted with excitement. Until now they thought that only the Germans could pull off this sort of stunt.

While the British brigades to the east desperately parried the German thrusts, the Allied troops to the west had a relatively quiet day. The line from Fort Mardyck to the ancient walled town of Bergues was a French responsibility; General Beaufrère’s 68th Infantry Division lay waiting behind a patchwork of ditches. A mixed garrison of French and British held Bergues itself. Some long-range guns were shelling the place, but the medieval walls stood up to modern artillery amazingly well.

It was the Bergues-Furnes Canal Line to the east of town that seemed most exposed. While the flat fields were bound to reveal an advancing enemy, they also gave away the defenders. There was no cover, except for an occasional tree or farmhouse.

The 2nd Coldstream Guards eyed uneasily the 2,200 yards assigned to them. Lieutenant Jimmy Langley of No. 3 Company moved his platoon into a small brick cottage directly north of the canal. He was anything but a picture-book guardsman—he stood only five feet eight—but he was lively and immensely resourceful. He lost no time converting the cottage into a miniature Gibraltar.

From scores of trucks and lorries abandoned along the canal bank, Langley’s men brought back a vast haul of booty. The weapons alone were impressive—12 Bren guns, 3 Lewis machine guns, 1 Boyes antitank rifle, 30,000 rounds of ammunition, and 22 hand grenades. Considering there were only 37 men left in the company, this was fire power indeed.

Nor was food neglected. Stacks of bully beef, canned vegetables, and tinned milk were piled in the kitchen. And since Langley was especially partial to marmalade and Wiltshire bacon, there was a liberal supply of these too. They might, he decided, be there a long time; so they should be prepared for the good life as well—he added two cases of wine and two crates of beer. During the afternoon the company commander, Major Angus McCorquodale, dropped by and made his contribution too: a bottle of whiskey and two bottles of sherry. McCorquodale was one of those throwbacks to a glorious earlier age in British military history. Gleaming with polished brass and leather, he scorned the new battle dress. “I don’t mind dying for my country,” he declared, “but I’m not going to die dressed like a third-rate chauffeur.”

He liked Langley’s set-up so much he decided to make the cottage the Company’s forward headquarters, and the two of them bedded down in a small back room for some rest. They were up before dawn, June 1, removing roof tiles and turning the attic into a machine-gun nest. Neither the roof nor the end walls were really strong enough, but it was too late to worry about that now. Langley settled down to wait for Jerry with a pair of binoculars and two buckets of cold water by his side. The buckets were for cooling the wine, or the beer, or the Bren gun barrels—whichever seemed to need it most.

There was no night of quiet waiting at Furnes. Shells poured down on the old Flemish town, as they had all day. The 1st Grenadier Guards huddled under an avalanche of falling slate and masonry from the seventeenth-century buildings that ringed the marketplace. The churchyard of venerable Saint Walburge was so thick with shrapnel that walking on the grass was like tramping over a carpet of jagged glass.

In the roomy cellar that served as battalion headquarters, Signalman George W. Jones hunched over a portable radio listening to the BBC evening news. It was the first voice he had heard from the outside world in three weeks. It assured him that two-thirds of the troops trapped at Dunkirk were now evacuated and safely back in England.

Jones felt anything but assured. Here he was, stuck with the rear guard in a collapsing town miles from home, and now he heard that the best part of the army was safely back in England. It was a very lonely feeling.

Lance Sergeant John Bridges, also of the 1st Grenadier Guards, was sure they would never get away. He had originally joined the regiment as a drummer boy, hoping to see the world, play a little football, and ultimately become a writer. But now the dream was buried in the rubble of Furnes. His company commander, Major Dickie Herbert, showed him how to dig a round foxhole, so he could shoot in any direction. That could only mean they were about to be surrounded.

Then an unexpected reprieve. Toward evening Major Herbert returned from a brigade conference and immediately called a meeting of his own officers and NCO’s. He lost no time getting to the point: his first words were, “We’re going home.” A map was produced, and a staff lieutenant lined off the route to the beaches. There were no histrionics, no exhortations. It was all so matter-of-fact that to Bridges it seemed rather like planning a family outing.

At 10:00 p.m. the battalion began “thinning out”—first the headquarters personnel, the signalers, the quartermaster units; then the infantry companies, one by one; and finally certain hand-picked parties from No. 2 and No. 4 Companies, especially skilled in rear-guard work. Everything went very smoothly. After all, they had been doing it since Brussels.

The premium was on silence. The enemy must not find out. The rear-guard parties wrapped sandbags around their boots to deaden the sound on the cobblestone streets. Still, there were heart-stopping moments as the columns, tramping single file, noisily scrambled over piles of rubble, bricks, broken glass, and tangled telephone wire. How could the Germans miss hearing them?

Yet there was no sound of unusual activity in the sections of town now occupied by the enemy. Only the steady pounding of shells that had gone on for two days. By 2:30 a.m., June 1, the last Grenadier had pulled out.

For Sergeant Bridges the march to La Panne was a three-mile nightmare. He especially hated mortar fire, and tonight every mortar in the German Army seemed concentrated on him. Most of the shells landed ahead of the column, which meant few casualties but gave the terrifying impression that the battalion was always marching straight into hell. At one point Bridges’s rifle got caught in a tangle of telephone wire, and the more he tried to get it loose, the more he himself became enmeshed in the tangle. On the verge of panic, he was finally freed by his sergeant major, who also brought him to his senses with a good slap.

Adding to the confusion, hundreds of abandoned cattle, sheep, pigs, and chickens were loose and running among the stumbling men. They reminded Bridges of the stories he had heard about wild animals fleeing before a great forest fire.

All along the eastern end of the perimeter—the II Corps area—the battalions were thinning out and falling back on La Panne. As with the 1st Grenadier Guards, the process usually began about 10:00 p.m. and continued to around 2:30 a.m., when the last rear-guard parties retired. Probably the last unit of all to pull out was the carrier platoon of the 1st Coldstream, which hung around Furnes till 2:50 a.m., covering the withdrawal of the battalion’s infantry.

As always, silence was the rule—which could fool a friend as well as foe. Private F. R. Farley was on sentry duty that night in a lonely copse east of Furnes. He knew his battalion, the 1st/7th Middlesex, would be withdrawing, and he was to be called in when the time came. Hours passed, and nothing happened. From time to time he heard faint sounds: a car starting, a muffled word of command. Then complete silence. He listened—a sentry did not leave his post lightly—then decided to slip back, and see what was happening.

Everyone had gone. The NCO had forgotten to call him in. Desperately he sprinted through the copse to the main road. He was just in time to leap onto the last truck of the last column of the battalion, as it started down the coastal road for La Panne.

The convoy stopped on the edge of town; the men piled out; and the trucks were disabled in the usual way—a bullet in the radiator, the engine left running until it seized. Moving into La Panne, Farley joined a flood of troops converging on the place from every direction. The whole eastern end of the perimeter was being abandoned; all had instructions to make for La Panne.

Beyond that, there seemed to be no orders. Some men slumped in doorways; others lay exhausted on the pavé; others wandered aimlessly about, as officers and NCO’s called out unit numbers and rallying cries, trying to keep their men together.

The shelling had unaccountably stopped, and for the moment all was relatively quiet. As the men waited to be told what to do, a thousand cigarettes glowed in the darkness.

Eventually there was a stirring, but instead of moving onto the beach, the troops were ordered back a couple of streets. They were now further from the sea, but much better dispersed. It was just as well, for at this moment a spotter plane droned overhead, dropping flares that brilliantly lit up the whole scene. Then came the thump of distant guns, followed by the shriek of falling shells.

There was a shattering crash as the first salvo landed at the intersection near the beach. The hotels and shops in the area were mostly built in the “modern” style of the 30’s, full of chrome and plate glass. Now the glass came cascading down, adding to the general din.

“Into the shops! Off the streets!” The cry went up, and the troops needed no further urging. Rifle butts went to work on the doors and windows remaining, and the men swarmed in, just as a second salvo was landing.

Farley and several others from the 1st/7th Middlesex broke into a large corner shop, and once inside were thankful to find stairs leading down to a basement. Here they crouched in comparative safety as the shelling swept methodically up and down the streets salvo after salvo, turning the town into a dust-choked ruin. Flames began to lick through upper windows as fires took hold.

It was important not to go entirely underground. There was always the danger of missing some important order. The men took turns keeping watch at the door—very unpleasant duty with the town collapsing around them. Farley found the knack was to leap back to the stairs whenever a salvo seemed likely to be close. He got very good at it.

After an hour and a half, Captain Johnson of Headquarters Company slipped in with the latest orders: listen for some whistle blasts as soon as there is a lull in the shelling … then clear out and run for the beach at the double … turn left at the bandstand and keep going for half a mile. That would be where the battalion would reassemble and embark.

No one was to stop for anything. Casualties to be left where they fell. The medical orderlies would take care of these. The essential thing was to clear the streets without delay at the first feasible moment.

Just before 2:45 a.m. Private Farley heard the whistle loud and clear. His group raced up the cellar steps and out into the street. Other units were pouring out of other buildings, too. Jumbled together, they all surged toward the beachfront. The flames from the burning buildings lit their way; the crash of bursting shells spurred them on. The “lull,” it turned out, meant only a shift in targets. But the most unforgettable sound—a din that drowned out even the gunfire—was the steady crunch of thousands of boots on millions of fragments of broken glass.

Soon they were by the bandstand … across the esplanade … onto the beach—and suddenly they were in a different world. Gone was the harsh, grating clatter; now there was only the squish of feet running on wet sand. The glare of the fire-lit streets gave way to the blackness of the dunes at night. The smoke and choking dust vanished, replaced by the clean, damp air of the seaside … the smell of salt and seaweed.

Then the shelling shifted again, aimed this time right at the beach where the men were running. Private Farley of the Middlesex saw a flash, felt the blast, but (oddly enough) heard no “bang” as a close one landed just ahead. He was untouched, but the four men running with him all went down. Three lay motionless on the sand; the fourth, propped up on one hand, pleaded, “Help me, help me.”

Farley ran on. After all, those were the orders. But he knew in his heart that the real reason he didn’t stop was self-preservation. The memory of that voice pleading for help would still haunt his conscience forty years later.

Half a mile down the beach was the point where the Middlesex had been ordered to reassemble for embarkation. Private Parley had imagined what it would be like. He pictured a well-organized area where senior NCO’s would stand at the head of gangway ladders taking name, rank, and serial number as the troops filed aboard the waiting ships. Actually, there was no embarkation staff, no waiting ships, no organization whatsoever.

Nobody seemed to be in charge. The 2nd Royal Ulster Rifles had been told that reception camps would be waiting for them when they got to the beach, that a Division Control Staff would take over from there and guide them to the ships. They found no trace of either the camps or the Control Staff, and of course no sign of the ships.

The 1st Grenadier Guards reached the beach intact, but with no further orders, the battalion soon broke up. Some men headed for Dunkirk; others joined the columns hopefully waiting at the water’s edge; Sergeant Bridges led a small group of six or eight into the dunes to wait for dawn. Maybe daylight would show them what to do.

But would they last that long? At one point Bridges heard an ominous rumble coming toward them. It sounded like the whole German Army, and he crouched in the sand, awaiting that final confrontation. It turned out to be only horses, abandoned by some French artillery unit, galloping aimlessly up and down the sand.

But the next big noise might always be the enemy, and still there was no sign of any ships. To Lieutenant-Commander J. N. McClelland, the senior naval officer remaining at La Panne, the situation was turning into a hideous exercise in arithmetic. It was now 1:00 a.m.; the British couldn’t expect to hold La Panne beyond dawn at 4:00. Some 6,000 troops were pouring onto the beach; they had lifted off only 150 since nightfall. At this rate, nearly the whole force would be lost.

He conferred briefly with Major-General G. D. Johnson, the senior army officer on the beach at this point. Yes, McClelland assured the General, he had made a personal reconnaissance both above and below the position. No, there weren’t any ships. Yes, they were meant to be there. No, he didn’t think they would come now—something must have gone wrong. To McClelland the Royal Navy’s absence was almost a matter of personal shame. He formally apologized to Johnson for the nonarrival of the boats.

They decided that the only course left was to march the bulk of the troops down the beach toward Dunkirk and try to embark from there. Or perhaps they would run across some ships at Bray-Dunes along the way.

A few men—mostly wounded and exhausted stragglers—were not fit to march. These would be left behind, and McClelland headed down to the lorry jetties to look after them, on the chance that some ships might still turn up.

More German guns were ranged on the beach now, and McClelland was twice knocked down by shell bursts. One smashed his signal lamp; the second wounded his left ankle. As often happens, it didn’t hurt much at first—just a numb feeling—and he hobbled on down the beach.

At the embarkation point it was the same old story: no boats for over half an hour. McClelland now ordered the remaining troops to join the trek to Dunkirk. Even if they couldn’t keep up with the main body, they must try. He himself rounded up all the stragglers he could find and sent them on their way. Then he limped off after the rest.

About two miles toward Bray-Dunes he suddenly saw what he had been searching for all night—ships! Three vessels lay at anchor not far from the shore. A small party of soldiers stood at the water’s edge firing shots, trying to attract attention. There was no response from the ships. They just sat there, dark and silent.

McClelland looked farther down the beach. The night was filled with explosions, and in the flashes he could make out swarms of troops, but no trace of any other boat. These three anchored ships were the only chance. Somehow they must be told that the troops were moving steadily westward toward Dunkirk. Once these ships knew, they could alert the others, and the rescue fleet could finally assemble at the right place.

He plunged into the sea and began swimming. He was dead tired; his ankle began acting up; but he kept on. As he thrashed alongside the nearest ship, somebody threw him a line and he was hauled aboard. She turned out to be HMS Gossamer, one of Ramsay’s hard-working minesweepers. Taken before the captain, Commander Richard Ross, McClelland managed to pant out his message: La Panne abandoned; all shipping should concentrate much farther west. Then he collapsed.

For Commander Ross, it was the first piece of solid intelligence to come his way since leaving Dover at 6:00 p.m. The Gossamer was one of the group of vessels earmarked for lifting the rear guard at the eastern end of the perimeter, amounting to some 4,000 men. The plan called for three big batches of ships’ lifeboats to be towed by tugs across the Channel and stationed at three carefully designated points off La Panne. The rear guard would be instructed where to go, and at 1:30 a.m. the lifeboats would start ferrying the men to minesweepers waiting at each of the three points. Escorting destroyers would provide covering fire if the enemy tried to interfere. (“All tanks hostile,” the orders reminded the destroyers.) The final directives were issued at 4:00 a.m., May 31, and the “special tows,” as Ramsay called them, began leaving Ramsgate at 1:00 p.m.

Every possible contingency had been covered—except the fortunes of war. German pressure on the perimeter was too great. The covering position could no longer be held by the 4,000-man rear guard. Under heavy enemy shelling the troops were pulling back sooner than expected, and farther west than planned. The special tows must be alerted to go to a different place at a different time.

But Dover no longer had any direct communication with the special tows. Ramsay could only radio the accompanying minesweepers, hoping that the change in plans would be passed along to the tugs and their tows. He did this, but predictably his message never got through.

The armada chugged on to the originally designated spots, but now, of course, there was no one there. With no further directions, they groped along the coast, hoping somehow to make contact. Gossamer had, in fact, just stumbled on a sizable contingent when McClelland swam out, gasping his advice to look farther west.

The alert radio interception unit at General Georg von Kuechler’s Eighteenth Army headquarters knew more than the BEF about the special tows and where they could be found. At 7:55 p.m. on the 31st, Captain Essmann of Headquarters phoned XXVI and IX Corps command posts, giving the latest information along with some instructions on what should be done.

Beginning at twilight, a heavy harassing fire was to be concentrated on the approach roads leading to the supposed embarkation points. … Armored reconnaissance patrols were to check whether the enemy had managed to evacuate. … If so, an immediate thrust was to be made to the coast.

Not exactly an inspiring blueprint for an army closing in for the kill. A lackadaisical mood, in fact, seemed to permeate most German military thinking these past two days. To Colonel Rolf Wuthmann, Operations Officer of General von Kluge’s Fourth Army at the western end of the perimeter, it was a cause for alarm. “There is an impression here that nothing is happening today, that no one is any longer interested in Dunkirk,” he complained to General von Kleist’s Chief of Staff on May 30.

Quite true. All eyes were now on the south. “Fall Rot”—Operation “Red”—the great campaign designed to knock France out of the war, would jump off from the Somme in just six days. Its immense scope and dazzling possibilities easily diverted attention from Dunkirk. Guderian and the other panzer generals—once so exasperated by Hitler’s halt order—now wanted only to pull out their tanks, rest their men, prepare for the great new adventure. Rundstedt, commanding Army Group A, had already shifted his entire attention to the Somme. On the 31st Bock, commanding Army Group B, received a fat bundle of papers from OKH regrouping his forces too. At OKH, General Haider, the Chief of Staff, spent most of the day far behind the lines, checking communications, the flow of supplies, the status of Army Group C—all for the great new offensive.

As for Dunkirk, it was hard to escape the feeling that it was really all over. Some ten German infantry divisions now pressed a few thousand disorganized Allied soldiers against the sea. Kluge’s Chief of Staff Kurt Brennecke might scold, “We do not want to find these men, freshly equipped, in front of us again later,” but no German command was more thoroughly preoccupied with the coming drive south than Brennecke’s own Fourth Army. General Haider might complain, “Now we must stand by and watch countless thousands of the enemy get away to England right under our noses,” but he didn’t stand by and watch very much himself. He too was busy getting ready for the big new push.

It always seemed that one more try would finish up Dunkirk, but no one was quite in the position to do it. With the closing of the trap, there were too many overlapping commands and too little coordination. Finally, in an effort to centralize responsibility, General von Kuechler’s Eighteenth Army was put in complete charge. On May 31, at 2:00 a.m., all the various divisions along the entire 35-mile length of the perimeter passed under his control.

It wasn’t long before Kuechler was getting advice. The following evening General Mieth of OKH telephoned a few “personal suggestions” from the highest levels. General von Brauchitsch suggested the landing of troop units from the sea in the rear of the British forces … also, the withdrawal of German units from the Ganal Line so as to open up opportunities for the Luftwaffe without endangering friendly troops. And finally, an idea from Adolf Hitler himself: Kuechler might consider the possibility of using antiaircraft shells with time fuses to compensate for the reduced effectiveness of ordinary artillery fire on the beaches, where the sand tended to smother the explosions. Like many shakers and movers of the earth, the Fuehrer occasionally liked to tinker.

For the moment, these intriguing ideas were put aside. Kuechler had already made his plan, and it called for nothing as offbeat as a landing behind the British forces, even if that were possible. Instead, he simply planned an attack by all his forces at once along the entire length of the perimeter on June 1.

First, his artillery would soften the enemy up with harassing fire, starting immediately and continuing the whole night. The attacking troops would jump off at 11:00 a.m., June 1, closely supported by General Alfred Keller’s Fliegerkorps IV.

Everything was to be saved for the main blow. During the afternoon of the 31st, Eighteenth Army issued a special directive warning the troops not to engage in any unnecessary action that day. Rather, their time should be spent moving the artillery into position, gathering intelligence, conducting reconnaissance, and making other preparations for the “systematic attack” tomorrow.

All very sound, but this inflexibility also suggests why so little use was made of the radio intercept about Ramsay’s special tows. It clearly indicated that the British were abandoning the eastern end of the perimeter this very night—leaving themselves wide open in the process—yet the German plans were frozen, and nothing was done.

If anybody at Eighteenth Army headquarters sensed a lost opportunity on the evening of May 31, there’s no evidence of it. Preparations went steadily ahead for the unified attack tomorrow. The artillery pumped out shells at a rate the British Tommies would never forget, and the Luftwaffe joined in the softening-up process.

Special emphasis had been placed on the Luftwaffe’s role, and for the duration of the attack Eighteenth Army was virtually given control of its operations. General Kesselring’s Air Fleet 2 was simply told to attack Dunkirk continuously until the Eighteenth told it to stop.

Making use of his authority, around noon on the 31st Kuechler requested special strikes every fifteen minutes on the dunes west of Nieuport, where the British artillery was giving his 256th Infantry Division a hard time. Kesselring promised to follow through, but later reported that ground fog was keeping some of the planes from taking off.

Bad weather was a familiar story. It had scrubbed almost all missions on the 30th, and curbed operations on the 31st. It was, then, good news indeed when June 1 turned out to be bright and clear.

12

“I Have Never Prayed So Hard Before”

AS THE GROWL OF approaching planes grew louder, veteran Seaman Bill Barris carefully removed his false teeth and put them in his handkerchief pocket—always a sure sign to the men on the destroyer Windsor that hard fighting lay ahead. It was 5:30 a.m., June 1, and the early morning mist was already burning off, promising a hot sunny day.

In seconds the planes were in sight, Me 109’s sweeping in low from the east. Gun muzzles twinkling, some strafed the eastern mole, where the Windsor lay loading; others hit the beaches … the rescue fleet … even individual soldiers wading and swimming out to the ships. Normally the German fighters did little strafing. Their orders were to remain “upstairs,” flying cover for the Stukas and Heinkels. Today’s tactics suggested something special.

Tucked away in the dunes west of La Panne, Sergeant John Bridges of the 1st Grenadier Guards safely weathered the storm. Around him clustered six to eight other Grenadier Guards, the little group he had formed when the battalion dissolved during the night. At that time nobody knew what to do, and it seemed best to wait till dawn.

Now it was getting light, and the choice was no easier. Joining the trek to Dunkirk looked too dangerous. Bridges could see nothing but gun flashes and towering smoke in that direction. On the other hand, joining one of the columns waiting on the beach below looked futile. There were so few boats and so many men. In the end, Bridges opted for the beach; perhaps the group could find some shorter queue where the wait would be reasonable.

A pistol shot ended that experiment. An officer accused the group of queue-jumping and fired a warning blast in the general direction of Bridges’s feet. Undaunted, the Sergeant turned his mind to the possibility of getting off the beach without queueing up at all. Noticing an apparently empty lifeboat drifting about 100 yards offshore, he suggested they swim out and get it. Nobody could swim.

He decided to go and bring it back himself. Stripping off his clothes, he swam out to the boat, only to find it was not empty after all. Two bedraggled figures in khaki were already in it, trying to unlash the oars. They were glad to have Bridges join them, but not his friends. They weren’t about to return to shore for anybody. Bridges hopped out and swam back to the beach.

But now the group had vanished, scattered by an air raid. Only Corporal Martin was left, faithfully guarding Bridges’s gear. Looking to sea, they saw yet another lifeboat and decided to make for that. Martin, of course, couldn’t swim, but Bridges—ever an optimist—felt that somehow he could push and pull the Corporal along.

It would have been easier if Bridges had been traveling light. But he was dressed again, carrying his pack and gas cape, and there was much on his mind besides Corporal Martin. While in Furnes, their unit had been stationed in a cellar under a jewelry and fur shop. There was much talk about not leaving anything for the Germans to loot, and first thing Bridges knew, he had turned looter himself. Now his pack and gas cape were filled with wristwatches, bracelets, and a twelve-pelt silver fox cape.

The two men waded into the sea, Bridges trying to help Martin and hang onto his riches at the same time. Somehow they reached the lifeboat, which turned out to be in the charge of a white-haired, fatherly-looking brigadier, still wearing all his ribbons and red trim. He was skillfully maneuvering the boat about, picking up strays here and there. Martin was hauled aboard, and Bridges prepared to follow.

“You’ll have to drop your kit, Sergeant,” the brigadier sang out. Every inch of space was needed for people. With a lack of hesitation that surprised even himself, Bridges let it all go—bracelets, watches, jewelry, furs, and perhaps most important, the load on his conscience.

Pulled aboard, he took an oar, and with the brigadier steering, they gradually approached a destroyer lying not far away. Planes began strafing, and the man rowing next to Bridges was hit. They crawled on, and were almost there when an officer on the ship called out to stay clear. She was stuck on a sandbar, running her screws full speed ahead to get free.

The brigadier tried, but whether it was tide, current, suction, or plain inexperience, they were relentlessly drawn to the side of the ship. A rising swell caught Bridges’s oar against the hull, and through some play of physics he could never hope to understand, he was catapulted upward, clear out of the boat. He caught hold of a grid, which served as a ship’s ladder, and willing hands hauled him on board.

Next instant the lifeboat plunged down again and was caught under the racing screws. The boat, the brigadier, Martin, and everyone else were chewed to bits. Bridges looked back in time to catch a brief, last glimpse of Martin’s startled face as it disappeared beneath the sea.

He sank to the deck, leaning against the bulkhead. The destroyer turned out to be the Ivanhoe, and as Bridges began stripping off his wet clothes, a sailor brought him a blanket and a pack of cigarettes. He did not have much time to enjoy them. Once again the sound of aircraft engines warned of new danger from the skies.

The German bombers had arrived. Luckily, the Ivanhoe had at last wriggled free of the sandbar, and Commander P. H. Hadow was able to dodge the first attacks, delivered by level-bombing Heinkels. No such luck with the Stukas. At 7:41 a.m. two near misses bracketed the ship, and a third bomb crashed into the base of the forward funnel.

Down in the boiler room Private J. B. Claridge, who had been plucked from the sea at La Panne, was drying out his uniform when the ship gave a violent shudder, the lights went out, and a shower of burning embers fell about him. He was standing near a ladder to the deck, and he raced up through a cloud of swirling steam. He and another man were the only two to get out alive.

Sergeant Bridges watched from his resting place against the bulkhead. He was still stunned by his own ordeal, but he was alert enough to note that the Ivanhoe’s crew were beginning to take off their shoes. That could only mean they thought the ship was sinking.

He needed no better proof. Slipping off his blanket, he went over the side, naked except for his helmet, which he always managed to keep. He swam slowly away from the ship, using a sort of combination breast-and-side stroke that he especially favored. He could keep it up forever—or at least until some ship appeared that looked like a better bet than the Ivanhoe.

But the Ivanhoe was not finished. The fires were contained; the foremost magazine flooded; and the damaged boilers sealed off. Then the destroyer Havant and the minesweeper Speedwell eased alongside and removed most of the troops. As Speedwell pulled away, she picked up one more survivor swimming alone in the sea. It was Sergeant Bridges.

On the Ivanhoe the engineering officer Lieutenant Mahoney coaxed some steam out of his one remaining boiler, as the ship started back to England. Creeping along at seven knots, assisted by a tug, she made an ideal target and was twice attacked by the Heinkels. Each time, Commander Hadow waited until the first bombs fell, then lit smoke floats inside various hatches to simulate hits. The ruse worked: both times the planes flew off, apparently convinced that the destroyer was finished.

On the Havant, the troops transferred from the Ivanhoe barely had time to settle down before the Stukas pounced again. Two bombs wrecked the engine room, and a third landed just ahead of the ship, exploding as she passed over it.

The lights went out, and once again hundreds of soldiers thrashed about in the dark, trying to get topside. Havant took a heavy list, compounding the confusion. But once again help lay close at hand. The minesweeper Saltash came alongside, taking off some troops. Others transferred to a small pleasure steamer, the Narcissa, which used to make holiday cruises around Margate.

The crew of the Havant stayed on for a while, but for her there was no clever escape. The hull was ruptured, the engine room blown to bits. At 10:15a.m. Havant vanished into the sea.

“A destroyer has blown up off Dunkirk,” someone laconically observed on the bridge of the destroyer Keith lying off Bray-Dunes. Admiral Wake-Walker looked and saw a ship enveloped in smoke just off Dunkirk harbor, six miles to the west. At the time he didn’t know it was the Ivanhoe—or that she would survive. He only knew that the German bombers were back on the job, and might be coming his way next. It would be hard to miss the concentration of ships working with the Keith off Bray: the destroyer Basilisk, minesweepers Skipjack and Salamander, tugs St. Abbs and Vincia, and the skoot Hilda.

Sure enough, a compact formation of 30 to 40 Stukas appeared from the southwest. Every gun in the fleet opened up, and a curtain of fire seemed to break up the formation. But not for long. Shortly before 8:00 a.m. three Stukas came hurtling down, right at the Keith.

The ship heeled wildly. In the wheelhouse everyone was crouching down, with the helmsman steering by the bottom spokes of the wheel. Teacups skidded across the deck. Then three loud explosions, the nearest just ten yards astern. It jammed the helm, and the Keith began steering in circles.

Captain Berthon switched to manual steering, and things were beginning to get back to normal, when three more planes dived. This time Wake-Walker saw the bombs released and watched them fall, right at the ship. It was an odd sensation waiting for the explosion and knowing that he could do nothing. Then the crash … the teeth-rattling jolt … a rush of smoke and steam boiling up somewhere aft.

Surprisingly, he could see no sign of damage. It turned out that one of the bombs had gone right down the second funnel, bursting in the No. 2 boiler room far below. Power gone, plates sprung, Keith listed sharply to port.

Not far away, Lieutenant Christopher Dreyer watched the hit from his motor torpedo boat MTB 102; he hurried over to help. Wake-Walker decided he was doing no good on the crippled Keith, and quickly shifted to Dreyer’s boat. It was the Admiral’s eighth flagship in twenty-four hours.

On the Keith, now wallowing low in the water, Captain Berthon gave the order to abandon ship. Scores of men went over the side, including most of General Gort’s staff. Colonel Bridgeman was sure of only one thing: he didn’t want to swim back to La Panne. He splashed about, finally joined two sailors clinging to a piece of timber. Eventually they were picked up by the tug Vincia and taken to Ramsgate.

The Stukas were far from finished. About 8:20 they staged a third attack on the Keith, hitting her again in the engine room, and this time they saved something for the other ships nearby. The minesweeper Salamander escaped untouched, but her sistership Skipjack was a different story. The leader of the German flight scored two hits; then a second Stuka came roaring down. On the range-finder platform Leading Seaman Murdo MacLeod trained his Lewis gun on the plane and kept firing even after it released its bombs. The Stuka never came out of its dive, plunging straight into the sea.

But the damage was done—three more hits. Skipjack lurched heavily to port, and the order came to abandon ship. It was none too soon. In two more minutes Skipjack turned turtle, trapping most of the 250 to 300 troops aboard. She floated bottom-up for another twenty minutes, then finally sank.

The Keith lingered on, attended by a typically mixed assortment of small craft picking up survivors. After a fourth visit from the Stukas, the Admiralty tug St. Abbs came alongside around 8:40 and took off Captain Berthon and the last of the crew. Before leaving, Berthon signaled Salamander and Basilisk to sink the ship, lest she fall into enemy hands.

Both vessels replied that they were out of control and needed help themselves. Concentrating on his own ship, Berthon apparently didn’t see the Stukas pounding the other two. Basilisk especially was in a bad way. A French trawler took her in tow, but she grounded on a sandbar and had to be abandoned around noon. The destroyer Whitehall picked up most of her crew, then finished her off with a couple of torpedoes.

Meanwhile the Stukas staged still another attack on the abandoned Keith—the fifth of the morning—and at 9:15 they finally sank her. The sea was now covered with fuel from sunken ships, and the surviving swimmers were a pathetic sight—coated black with oil, half-blind, choking and vomiting as they tried to stay afloat.

The tug St. Abbs poked about picking them up, twisting and turning, using every trick in the book to shake off the Stukas. Besides survivors from the sunken ships, she took aboard Major R.B.R. Colvin and a boatload of Grenadier Guards trying to row back to England. About 130 men jammed the tug’s deck—some dreadfully wounded, others unhurt but sobbing with fright. An army doctor and chaplain passed among them, dispensing first aid and comfort. As the bombs continued to rain down, the padre told Major Colvin, “I have never prayed so hard before.”

Eventually the Stukas moved off, and St. Abbs steamed briefly in peace. Then at 9:30 a single level-bomber passed overhead, dropping a stick of four delayed-action bombs right in the tug’s path. They went off as she passed over them, tearing her bottom out.

Knocked down by the blast, Major Colvin tried to get up, but one leg was useless. Then the ship heeled over, and everything came crashing down. He felt he was falling into a bottomless pit, pushed along by rushing water, surrounded by falling coal. Next thing he knew, he was swimming in the sea some 50 yards from a lot of wreckage. St. Abbs was gone, sunk in just 30 seconds.

There were only a few survivors. Most had originally been on the Keith or Skipjack; this was their second sinking of the morning. This time they found themselves struggling against a strong tide that carried them along the coast, almost due east. They would soon be in German-held waters, but there seemed nothing they could do about it. Suddenly they saw a chance. A wrecked steamer lay directly in the way. The more agile swimmers managed to get over to her.

Passing under the stern, Major Colvin grabbed a gangway hanging in the water, and despite his bad leg, he pulled himself aboard. The wreck turned out to be the cargo liner Clan MacAlister, bombed and abandoned on May 29. She now lay partially sunk and hard aground about two miles off La Panne.

Some fifteen other survivors of St. Abbs also reached the hulk. Climbing aboard, they found themselves in a setting worthy of the legendary Mary Celeste. In the deserted deckhouse everything was still in place. Some sailors helped Major Colvin into a bunk, found him a couple of blankets and a set of dry clothes.

Midshipman H. B. Poustie of the Keith did even better. Covered with oil, he wandered into the captain’s cabin and found the perfect uniform for an eighteen-year-old midshipman: the captain’s dress blues, resplendent with four gold rings around the sleeves.

There was food too. Exploring the galley, someone came up with a light luncheon of canned pears and biscuits. To the tired and hungry survivors, it seemed like a feast.

The big question was: What next? Clearly they couldn’t stay here much longer. It was ebb tide, and the Clan MacAlister now stood high out of the water on an even keel. From the air she looked undamaged, and the planes bombed her vigorously. Soon, the enemy artillery would be in La Panne, a stone’s throw away.

One of the ship’s boats still hung in the davits, and Captain Berthon—late of the Keith and senior officer present—ordered it loaded with provisions and lowered. With luck, they could row to England.

They were just about to start when a Thames lighter hove into view. She looked like a far better bet, and the castaways attracted her attention with yells and pistol shots. The lighter transferred them to a cement carrier so lowly she had no name—just Sheerness Yard Craft No. 63. She was, however, staunch enough to get them home.

On the beach west of La Panne, the 1st Suffolks had a grandstand view of the Stuka attack on the Basilisk. Still farther west, on a dune near Zuydcoote, the staff of the 3rd Grenadier Guards watched the Keith’s ordeal. All the way west, the sailors on the mole saw another swarm of Stukas sink the French destroyer Foudroyant in less than a minute. Captain Tennant himself watched the assault on the Ivanhoe and Havant.

There was something distant and unreal about it all—especially the battles in the sky that erupted from time to time. Any number of separate vignettes were frozen in the men’s minds, like snapshots in an album: the thunderclap of a fighter and bomber colliding … a plane’s wing fluttering to earth … the flash of flame as a Heinkel caught fire … the power dive of an Me 109, right into the sea … parachutes floating down … tracers ripping into the parachutes. It was hard to believe that all this was actually happening, and not just the familiar scenes from some old war film.

To Squadron Leader Brian Lane and the fighter pilots of No. 19 Squadron it was very real indeed. On June 1 their working day began at 3:15 a.m. at Hornchurch, a small field east of London. Still half-asleep, they gulped down tea and biscuits and hurried out onto the tarmac, where the Spitfires were already warming up. The roar of the engines rose and fell as the mechanics made final adjustments, and the exhaust flames still burned bright blue in the first light of the new day.

Lane climbed aboard his plane, checked his radio and oxygen, made sure that the others were ready, and waved his hand over his head—the signal to take off. Once airborne, he listened for the double thump that meant his wheels were up, and cast a practiced eye over the various dials and gauges that made up his instrument panel. It looked as though he had been doing this all his life; actually he had been a civilian making electric light bulbs until a short time before the war.

In fifteen minutes he was crossing the English coast, heading out over the North Sea. A glance at his mirror showed the other planes of the squadron, properly spaced behind him, and behind them were three more squadrons—48 Spitfires altogether—roaring eastward toward the sunrise and Dunkirk.

Ten more minutes, and they were over the beaches, bearing left toward Nieuport, the eastern limit of the patrol. It was 5:00 a.m. now, light enough to see the crowds waiting on the sand, the variety of vessels lying offshore. From 5,000 feet it looked like Blackpool on a bank holiday.

Suddenly the Spitfires no longer had the sky to themselves. Ahead and slightly to the right, flying toward Nieuport on a converging course, twelve twin-engine planes appeared. Lane flicked on his radio: “Twelve Me 110’s straight ahead.”

The Germans saw them coming. On both sides the neatly spaced formations vanished, replaced by the general melee that so reminded the men on the ground of something concocted by Hollywood. Lane got on the tail of a Messerschmitt, watched it drift into his sights, and pressed the firing button that controlled his eight machine guns. Eight streams of tracer homed in on the 110. Its port engine stopped. Then, as it turned to get away, he got in another burst, this time knocking out the starboard engine. He hung around long enough to watch it crash.

That job done, Lane searched for more targets, but could find nothing. His tanks only had enough petrol for 40 minutes over the beaches, and now he was getting low. Flying close to the water, he headed back across the Channel and home to Hornchurch. One by one the other members of the squadron came in too, until finally all were present and accounted for.

As they excitedly swapped experiences on the tarmac, the squadron intelligence officer toted up the score—7 Me 110’s claimed; also 3 Me 109’s, which had apparently turned up at some point during the free-for-all. Slowly the pilots drifted into the mess. It was hard to believe, but it was still only 7:00 a.m. and they hadn’t even had breakfast yet.

It’s worth noting that this aerial battle did not follow the standard script. Usually a very few British fighters took on a very great number of German planes, but this time the Spitfires actually outnumbered the Me 110’s, four to one.

This was no coincidence. It was part of a tactical gamble. Originally Fighter Command had tried to provide continuous cover over the beaches, but the few planes available were spread so thin, the result was virtually no protection at all. On May 27, for instance, 22 patrols were flown, .but the average strength was only eight planes. The Luftwaffe easily smothered this effort and devastated the port of Dunkirk.

After that disaster the RAF flew fewer patrols, but those flown were much stronger. There was also extra emphasis on the hours when the beachhead seemed most vulnerable—dawn and dusk. Hence the 48-plane patrol led by Brian Lane, and he in turn was followed by another patrol of similar strength.

But the total number of planes always remained the same—Air Marshal Dowding wouldn’t give an inch on that, for he was already thinking ahead to the defense of Britain herself. As a result, there were inevitably certain periods when there was no protection at all, and on June 1 the first of these periods ran from 7:30 a.m. to 8:50 a.m.—that harrowing hour and twenty minutes when the Keith and her consorts were lost.

By 9:00 a new patrol was on the line, and the German attacks tapered off, but there were four more periods during the day when the RAF could provide no fighter cover, and the Luftwaffe cashed in on them all. Around 10:30 a.m. bombs crippled the big railway steamer Prague and turned the picturesque river gunboat Mosquito into a blazing wreck.

Then it was the Channel packet Scotia’s turn. As she slowly capsized, 2,000 French troops managed to climb the deck against the roll, ending up perched on her hull. The destroyer Esk plucked most of them to safety. No such luck with the French destroyer Foudroyant. Hit during another gap in fighter protection, she turned over and sank in seconds.

The carnage continued. During the afternoon a 500-pound bomb landed on the deck of the minesweeper Brighton Queen, killing some 300 French and Algerian troops—about half the number aboard. Later the destroyer Worcester and the minesweeper Westward Ho were badly damaged but managed to get home. Westward Ho had 900 French troops aboard, including a general and his staff. When she finally reached Margate, the general was so overjoyed, he decorated two members of the crew with the Croix de Guerre on the spot.

Seventeen ships sunk or knocked out of action. That was the Luftwaffe’s score this June 1. All day the human residue—the hollow-eyed survivors, the pale wounded on stretchers, the ragged bundles that turned out to be bodies—were landed on the quays of Dover, Ramsgate, and other southeast coast towns. The effect was predictable on the men whose ships happened to be in port.

At Folkestone the crew of the railway steamer Malines were especially shaken by the ordeal of the Prague. The two vessels belonged to the same line, and there was a close association between the crews. Some of the Malines’s men were already survivors of a ship sunk at Rotterdam, and Malines herself had been heavily bombed there. After two hard trips to Dunkirk she was now at Folkestone waiting for coal, when nerves began to crack. The ship’s doctor certified that three engineers, the wireless operator, the purser, a seaman, and several engine room hands were all unfit for duty.

Malines was ordered to Dunkirk again on the evening of June l, but with the crew on the edge of revolt, her captain refused to go. He was supported by the masters of two other steamers also at Folkestone, the Isle of Man packets Ben-My-Chree and Tynwald. They too refused to go, and when the local naval commander sent a written inquiry asking whether Ben-My-Chree would sail, her skipper simply wrote back, “I beg to state that after our experience in Dunkirk yesterday, my answer is ‘No.’”

Trouble had been brewing for some time, particularly among the larger packets and passenger steamers. They were still manned by their regular crews and managed by their peacetime operators. These men had no naval training whatsoever, nor much of that special élan that the weekend sailors and other volunteers brought to the job.

As early as May 28 the steamer Canterbury refused to sail. She had been there twice, and that was enough. The Dynamo Room finally put a naval party aboard to stiffen the crew. This worked, and a hurried call was made to Chatham Barracks for 220 seamen and stokers. They would form a pool of disciplined hands, ready for duty on any ship where the crew seemed to be wavering-

When the St. Seiriol refused to sail on the 29th, an officer, armed guard, and seven stokers went on board at 10:00 a.m., and the ship left at 11:00. On the packet Ngaroma the engineers were the problem. They were quickly replaced by two Royal Navy stokers, and an armed party of six hands was added for good measure. Ngaroma went back to work.

But these were individual cases. The dismaying thing about Malines, Tynwald, and Ben-My-Chree was that the three ships seemed to be acting in concert. A hurried call was sent to Dover for relief crews and armed guards, but it would be some hours before they arrived. All through the night of June 1–2 the three ships—each able to lift 1,000 to 2,000 men—lay idle.

Other men were losing heart too. When the tug Contest was commandeered at Ramsgate for a trip to Dunkirk, the crew deliberately ran her aground. Refloated, the engineer refused to put to sea, claiming his filters would be blocked by sand.

Off Bray-Dunes, Admiral Wake-Walker signaled another tug to help a stranded minesweeper. The skipper paid no attention, wanted only to get away. Wake-Walker finally had to train a gun on him and send a navy sub-lieutenant to take charge.

There was also trouble with the vessels of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. The boat from Hythe flatly refused to go at all. The coxswain argued that he had been asked to run his boat onto the beach, and once aground he could never get off. He would not try at Dunkirk what he could not do at Hythe—apparently ignoring the fact that at Dunkirk the tide would do it for him.

He managed to talk the Walmer and Dungeness boats out of going too. In disgust the Navy then took over the whole RNLI fleet, except the Ramsgate and Margate craft. They had already sailed for Dunkirk with their own crews.

These lifeboat crews were no sniveling cowards. The coxswain of the Hythe boat had been risking his life in the service for 37 years, 20 of them in charge of the boat. He had won the Institution’s silver medal for gallantry. Yet there was something different about Dunkirk—the continuing danger, the inability to control events, the reality of being under fire. Such factors could undermine the resolve of even the staunchest men.

Nor was the Royal Navy immune. There was a tendency to feel that “it can’t happen here,” that naval training and discipline somehow insulated a man from the fear and uncertainty that beset civilian hearts. Yet this was not necessarily so. Morale on the destroyer Verity, shaky since May 27, seemed to collapse after a trip to Dunkirk on the 30th. Twelve men broke out of the ship, with six still absent on the 31st. Those who returned simply explained they couldn’t “stand it” any longer. Verity was ordered to remain in Dover harbor.

Acute fear could be like a disease—both physical and highly contagious. The minesweeper Hebe was hit perhaps worst of all. She had been a sort of command ship off Bray-Dunes; few of the crew slept for five days. On the evening of May 31 the ship’s sub-lieutenant collapsed, going into fits and convulsions. Next day, 27 members of the crew came down the same way. Finally, as Hebe returned to Dover on the morning of June 1, the ship’s surgeon collapsed too, mumbling that he could not face another trip to Dunkirk.

Rest was the answer, but rest was a luxury they couldn’t have. After especially grueling trips the Malcolm and the Windsor did get a day off, but usually the ships just kept going. The main hope for relief came from the steady stream of new vessels and fresh hands that kept pouring in.

The Navy continued to comb its lists, searching for officers who could be borrowed from other duties. Commander Edward K. Le Mesurier was assigned to the aircraft carrier Formidable, building at Belfast. Important, but he could be spared for a week. He arrived at Ramsgate at noon, June 1, and by 5:30 he was on his way to Dunkirk. He found he had exchanged carrier duty for command of a tug, a launch, and five rowboats.

Sub-Lieutenant Michael Anthony Chodzko was a young reserve officer attending navigational school at Plymouth. Buried in his books, he didn’t even know there was serious trouble until he was yanked out of class on May 31 and sent by train to Dover. Then, as the train ran along the chalk cliffs just before the station, he glanced out the car window and saw gunfire across the Channel. It was his first inkling of what lay ahead. Next morning, June 1, he was heading for Dunkirk with his first command—a small cabin cruiser called the Aura.

David Divine wasn’t in the Navy at all. He was a free-lance writer and amateur sailor who naturally gravitated to Dover at the end of May, because that’s where the big story was. Like the other journalists in town, he would stand in the grass that crowned the white cliffs and focus his binoculars on the incredible procession of vessels pouring across the Channel. But unlike the others, the sea ran in his blood, and the more he watched, the more he wanted to be part of this show.

It wasn’t hard to join. Through his naval writing he had plenty of contacts at the Admiralty, and by May 31 he had the necessary papers that put him in the Navy for 30 days. He went to Ramsgate, looked over the mass of small craft now piling up in the harbor, and picked out for himself a small motor sailor called the Little Ann. With no formal assignment whatsoever, he jumped aboard and began getting her ready for sea. He was soon joined by a kindred soul—Divine never learned his name—and the two of them, with a couple of others, set out for Dunkirk early on June 1.

Charles Herbert Lightoller was another man who liked to do things his own way. No stranger to danger, he had been Second Officer on the Titanic, where his coolness helped save countless lives that famous night. Now he was 66, retired from the sea, raising chickens in Hertfordshire, but he still had that combination of courage and good humor that served him so well in 1912.

And he still enjoyed life afloat. His 58-foot power cruiser Sundowner had been carefully designed to his exact specifications, and he liked nothing better than an occasional jaunt up and down the Thames with a party of friends. Once he even had 21 people aboard.

It was 5 p.m. on May 31 when Lightoller got a cryptic phone call from a friend at the Admiralty, requesting a meeting at 7:00 that evening. It turned out that the Navy needed Sundowner at once. Could he get her from the yacht basin at Chiswick down to Ramsgate, where a Navy crew would take over and sail her to Dunkirk?

Whoever had that idea, Lightoller bristled, had another guess coming. “If anybody is going to take her over, my eldest son and I will.”

They set out from Ramsgate at 10 on the morning of the 1st. Besides Lightoller and his son Roger, they also had aboard an eighteen-year-old Sea Scout, taken along as a deck hand. Halfway across they encountered three German fighters, but the destroyer Worcester was near and drove them away. It was just as well, because Sundowner was completely unarmed, not even a tin hat aboard.

Midafternoon, they were off Dunkirk. It was ebb tide, and as he drew alongside the eastern mole, Lightoller realized that the drop was too great from the walkway to Sundowner’s deck. The troops would never be able to manage it. Instead, he berthed alongside a destroyer that was already loading, and his troops crossed over from her. He loaded Sundowner from the bottom up, with Roger in charge below decks.

No one ever tackled such an unglamorous assignment with more verve than Roger. To lower the center of gravity, he made the men lie down whenever possible. Then he filled every inch of space, even the bath and the “head.”

“How are you getting on?” Lightoller called below, as the tally passed 50.

”Oh, plenty of room yet,” Roger airily replied. At 75 he finally conceded he had enough.

Lightoller now shifted his efforts to the open deck. Again, the troops were told to lie down and stay down, to keep the ship more stable. Even so, by the time 50 more were aboard, Lightoller could feel Sundowner getting tender. He called it a day and started for home.

The entire Luftwaffe seemed to be waiting for him. Bombing and strafing, the enemy planes made pass after pass. Fortunately Sundowner could turn on a sixpence, and Lightoller had learned a few tricks from an expert. His youngest son, killed in the first days of the war, had been a bomber pilot and often talked about evasion tactics. The father now put his lost son’s theories to work. The secret was to wait until the last instant, when the enemy plane was already committed, then hard rudder before the pilot could readjust. Squirming and dodging his way across the Channel, Lightoller managed to get Sundowner back to England without a scratch.

Gliding into Ramsgate at 10 that night, he tied up to a trawler lying next to the quay. The usual group of waterfront onlookers drifted over to watch. All assumed that the 50 men on deck would be Sundowner’s full load—an impressive achievement in itself. But troops continued to pour out of hatches and companionways until a grand total of 130 men were landed. Turning to Lightoller, an astonished bystander could only ask, “God’s truth, mate! Where did you put them?”

So the evacuation went on. Despite bombs and frayed nerves, 64,429 men were returned this June 1. They ranged from the peppery General Montgomery to Private Bill Hersey, who also managed to embark his French bride, Augusta, now thinly disguised in British battle dress. The number lifted off the beaches fell as the troops pulled back from La Panne, but a record 47,081 were rescued from Dunkirk itself. The eastern mole continued to survive the battering it took from bombs, shells, and inept shiphandling.

At 3:40 p.m. the small minesweeper Mare edged toward the mole, hoping to pick up one more load of British soldiers waiting on the long wooden walkway. Nothing unusual about that, but then something happened that was completely unprecedented. The captain of a British destroyer lying nearby ordered Mare to proceed instead to the western mole and embark French and Belgian troops. For the first time a British ship was specifically diverted from British to Allied personnel.

Mare crossed the harbor and found a Portsmouth steam hopper and drifter already working the western mole. Three more minesweepers joined in, and between them the six ships lifted 1,200 poilus in little more than an hour.

Such endeavors helped produce statistics that were far more significant than any single incident: on June 1 a total of 35,013 French were embarked, as against 29,416 British. At last Winston Churchill had some figures he could take to Paris without embarrassment. For the Royal Navy, bras-dessus, bras-dessous had become an accomplished fact.

All morning the top command at London, Dover, and Dunkirk watched the pounding of the rescue fleet with growing alarm. Around noon Admiral Drax of The Nore Command at Chatham called the Admiralty’s attention to the mounting destroyer losses. The time had come, he suggested, to stop using them during daylight. Ramsay reluctantly agreed, and at 1:45 p.m. flashed the message, “All destroyers are to return to harbour forthwith.”

The Malcolm was just starting out on one more trip across the Channel. No ship had better morale, but even Lieutenant Mellis’s bagpipes were no longer enough to lift the men’s spirits. The air was full of stories about sinking ships, and the general feeling was that Malcolm would get it next. Then, as she cleared the breakwater, Ramsay’s message arrived, ordering her back. Mellis felt he now knew how a reprieved prisoner feels.

The Worcester was just entering Dunkirk harbor, and her skipper, Commander Allison, decided it didn’t make sense to return without picking up one more load at the mole. Packed with troops, she finally pulled out at 5:00 p.m. and immediately came under attack. Wave after wave of Stukas dived on her—three or four squadrons of about nine each—dropping more than 100 bombs. They pressed their attacks home, too, diving as low as 200 to 300 feet. Miraculously, there were no direct hits, but near misses sent giant columns of water over the ship, and bomb splinters riddled her thin steel plates. By the time the attacks tapered off, 46 men lay dead, 180 wounded.

Watching Worcester’s ordeal from his command post at the foot of the mole, Captain Tennant decided this was enough. At 6:00 p.m. he radioed Ramsay:

Things are getting very hot for ships; over 100 bombers on ships here since 0530, many casualties. Have directed that no ships sail during daylight. Evacuation by transports therefore ceases at 0300. … If perimeter holds, will complete evacuation tomorrow, Sunday night, including most French. …

But could the perimeter hold another day? London had its doubts. “Every effort must be made to complete the evacuation tonight,” General Dill had wired Weygand at 2:10 p.m. At 4 o’clock Winston Churchill warned Reynaud by telephone that the evacuation might be stretched out a day longer, but “by waiting too long, we run the risk of losing everything.” As late as 8:00 p.m. Ramsay sent a ringing appeal to his whole rescue fleet, calling for “one last effort.”

At Dunkirk General Alexander originally felt the same way, but by now he wanted more time. He was determined to get the rest of the BEF home, yet on the morning of June 1 there were still 39,000 British troops in the perimeter, plus 100,000 French. Applying the equal numbers policy, that meant lifting at least 78,000 men in the next 24 hours—obviously impossible.

At 8:00 a.m. he dropped by Bastion 32 with a new withdrawal plan, extending the evacuation through the night of June 2–3. Admiral Abrial gladly went along: the French had always had greater confidence than the British in holding the perimeter. Toward evening Captain Tennant agreed too. There was no alternative once he made the decision to end daylight operations.

London still had its doubts, but in the end the chairborne warriors at the Admiralty and War Office had to face an unpleasant truth: they just didn’t know enough to make the decision. At 6:41 General Dill wired Alexander:

We do not order any fixed moment for evacuation. You are to hold on as long as possible in order that the maximum number of French and British may be evacuated. Impossible from here to judge local situation. In close cooperation with Admiral Abrial you must act in this matter on your own judgment.

So Alexander now had a green light. The evacuation would continue through the night of June 2–3, as he and Captain Tennant proposed. But success still depended on Tennant’s precondition: “if the perimeter holds.” This was a very big “if” and the answer lay beyond the control of the leaders in London, Dover, or Dunkirk itself.

13

“BEF Evacuated”

ON THE 2ND COLDSTREAM Guards’ segment of the defense line along the Bergues-Furnes Canal, Lieutenant Jimmy Langley waited in the cottage he had so carefully fortified and stocked with provisions. He had no idea when the British planned to pull out—company officers weren’t privy to such things—but his men were ready for a long siege. In the first light of the new day, June 1, Langley looked through the peephole he had made in the roof, but could see nothing. A thick mist hung over the canal and the flat meadows to the south.

Sunrise. The mist burned off, and there—600 yards away on the other side of the canal—stood a working party of German troops. There were perhaps 100 of them, armed only with spades, and what their assignment was, Langley never knew. A blaze of gunfire from the cottage mowed them down—the last “easy” Germans he would meet that day.

The firing steadily increased as the enemy troops joined in. At one point they wheeled up an antitank gun, and Langley watched with interest as they pointed it right at his cottage. A few seconds later an antitank shell came crashing through the roof, ricocheting wildly about the attic. The Coldstreamers tumbled down the stairs and out the front door as four more shells arrived. The enemy fire slackened off, and Langley’s men reoccupied their fortress.

The big danger lay to the right. At 11:00 a.m. General von Kuechler launched his “systematic attack,” and around noon the enemy stormed across the canal just east of Bergues. The 1st East Lancashires were forced back and might have been overrun completely but for the prodigious valor of a company commander, Captain Ervine-Andrews. Gathering a handful of volunteers, he climbed to the thatched roof of a barn and held off the Germans with a Bren gun.

Just to the left of the East Lanes were the 5th Borderers. Now across the canal in strength, the enemy smashed at them too. If they collapsed, the 2nd Coldstream, to their left, would be hit next. An officer from the Borderers hurried over to Major McCorquodale’s command post to warn that his battalion was exhausted and about to withdraw.

“I order you to stay put and fight it out,” the Major answered.

“You cannot do that. I have overriding orders from my colonel to withdraw when I think fit.”

McCorquodale saw no point in arguing: “You see that big poplar tree on the road with the white milestone beside it? The moment you or any of your men go back beyond that tree, we will shoot you.”

The officer again protested, but the Major had had enough. “Get back or I will shoot you now and send one of my officers to take command.”

The Borderer officer went off, and McCorquodale turned to Langley, standing nearby: “Get a rifle. Sights at 250. You will shoot to kill the moment he passes that tree. Are you clear?”

McCorquodale picked up a rifle himself, and the two Coldstreamers sat waiting, guns trained on the tree. Soon the Borderer officer reappeared near the tree with two of his men. They paused, then the officer moved on past McCorquodale’s deadline. Two rifles cracked at the same instant. The officer fell, and Langley never knew which one of them got him.

Such measures weren’t enough. The 5th Borderers fell back, leaving the Coldstream’s flank wide open. Jimmy Langley’s fortified cottage soon came under fire. The afternoon turned into a jumble of disconnected incidents: knocking out a German gun with the much-despised Boyes antitank rifle … washing down a delicious chicken stew with white wine … using the Bren guns in the attic to set three German lorries on fire, blocking the canal road for precious minutes. At one point an old lady appeared from nowhere, begging for shelter. Langley told her to go to hell; then, overcome by remorse, he put her in a back room where he thought she might be safe.

Another time he went to the battalion command post to see how McCorquodale was getting along. The Major was lying beside his trench, apparently hit. “I am tired, so very tired,” he told Langley. Then, “Get back to the cottage, and carry on.”

By now the Germans had occupied a house across the canal from Langley’s place, and the firing grew more intense than ever. In the attic one of the Bren guns conked out, and Langley ordered the other downstairs. It would be more useful there, if the enemy tried to swim the canal and rush the cottage. Langley himself stayed in the attic, sniping with a rifle.

Suddenly a crash … a shower of tiles and beams … a blast of heat that bowled Langley over. In the choking dust he heard a small voice say, “I’ve been hit”—then realized that the voice was his own.

It didn’t hurt yet, but his left arm was useless. A medical orderly appeared, slapped on a dressing, and began bandaging his head. So that had been hit too. He was gently carried down from the attic, put into a wheelbarrow, and trundled to the rear—one of the few Coldstreamers small enough to make an exit this way.

By now it was dark, and the battle tapered off. Firmly established across the canal, Kuechler’s infantry settled down for the night. Resumption of the “systematic attack” could wait until morning. The British began quietly pulling back to the sea. It was all very precise: each battalion took along its Bren guns and Boyes antitank rifles. The 2nd Hampshires marched by their commander, closed up in three’s, rifles at the slope. Most positions were abandoned by 10:00 p.m.

As the gunners of the 53rd Field Regiment marched cross-country toward Dunkirk, a sharp challenge broke the silence of the night, followed by a blaze of rifle fire. French troops, moving into defensive positions along the network of waterways that laced the area, had mistaken them for Germans.

No one was hit; the mix-up was soon straightened out; and the British gunners continued on their way, but with new respect for their ally. These Frenchmen were all business. Part of the 32nd Infantry Division, they had escaped with their corps commander, the feisty General de la Laurencie, from the German trap at Lille. Together with the local garrison troops of the Secteur Fortifié des Flandres, they were now taking over the center of the perimeter from the retiring BEF.

At the same time, the French 12th Division, which had also escaped from Lille, was moving into the old fortifications that lined the Belgian frontier. Dug in here, they would cover the eastern flank of the new shortened defense line. Since General Beaufrère’s 68th Division had always defended the west flank, the entire perimeter was now manned by the French.

It was hard to believe that only yesterday, May 31, Winston Churchill had emotionally told the Allied Supreme War Council that the remaining British divisions would form the rear guard so that the French could escape. Since then there had been, bit by bit, a complete turn-around. Instead of the British acting as rear guard for the French, the French were now acting as rear guard for the British.

Later the French would charge that the switch was yet another trick by “perfidious Albion.” Actually, the British weren’t all that pleased by the arrangement. They had little faith left in their ally. As the 5th Green Howards pulled back through the French guarding the new defense line along the Belgian border, Lieutenant-Colonel W. E. Bush collected his company officers and paid a courtesy call on the local French commander. The real purpose was not to cement Allied unity, but to see whether the French were up to the job. They turned out to be first-rate troops under a first-rate officer.

These French had their first test on the afternoon of the 1st, as Kuechler’s “systematic attack” cautiously approached from the east. General Janssen’s 12th Division stopped the Germans cold.

All the way west it was the same story. The Germans had some armor here—the only tanks that hadn’t gone south—but General Beaufrère’s artillery, firing over open sights, managed to hold the line.

Covered by the French, the remaining British units converged on Dunkirk all through the night of June 1–2. As the 6th Durham Light Infantry trudged through the ruined suburb of Rosendaël, the steady crunch of the men’s boots on broken glass reminded Captain John Austin of marching over hard ice crystals on a cold winter’s day. It was a black, moonless night, but the way was lit by burning buildings and the flash of exploding shells. The German infantry might be taking the night off, but not their artillery. The DLI’s hunched low, as against a storm, their steel helmets gleaming from the light of the flames.

Admiral Ramsay’s ships were already waiting for them. Lifting operations were to run from 9:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. but when the first destroyer reached the mole, few of the troops had arrived from the perimeter. Those who came down from Bray-Dunes were mostly huddled in the houses and hotels along the beach promenade, seeking cover from the rain of shells.

Commander E. R. Condor couldn’t see anybody at all when he brought the destroyer Whitshed alongside the mole soon after dark. Just smoke, flames, and a few dogs sniffing around. Spotting a bicycle lying on the walkway, Condor mounted it and pedaled toward shore looking for somebody to rescue. Eventually he found some poilus, and then some Tommies near the base of the mole. He sent them all out, along with a few other troops who now began to appear.

At 10:30 p.m. Major Allan Adair led out the 3rd Grenadier Guards, still carrying their Bren guns; they boarded the Channel steamer Newhaven … at 11:00 hundreds of French joined the crowd, and for a while the troops moved out four abreast—unconsciously symbolizing the troubled alliance … at 12:00 the gunners of the 99th Field Regiment marched out to the destroyer Winchelsea. Occasional shells prodded them along. “I’ve been hit,” the man next to Sergeant E. C. Webb quietly remarked, dropping out of line.

“Hand out the wounded” … “Lay out the dead” … “Wounded to the front” … “Watch the hole.” The sailors of the shore party kept up a running stream of orders and directions as they guided the troops along. An effort was made to keep a lane open for the stretcher bearers, but there was no time for the dead. They were simply pushed off the mole onto the pilings below.

It was after midnight when the 1st/6th East Surreys finally reached the mole. There was a long queue now, and the wait stretched into hours. The mole itself was so packed that the line barely moved, and the East Surreys were still inching forward when word came at 2:00 a.m. that the last two ships of the night were alongside—a big paddle steamer, and just ahead of her a destroyer. It was almost 3:00 by the time the East Surreys reached the paddle steamer. Deciding there was no time to lose, the battalion commander Colonel Armstrong quickly divided his men in two, sent the first half up ahead to the destroyer, and ordered the rear-guard half to go aboard the steamer. A few East Surreys were still waiting to embark, when the cry went up, “No more!” Armstrong emphatically pushed the last men down the gangway, then slid down himself as the vessel cast off.

The 5th Green Howards were halfway down the mole at 3:00. They had spent most of the night coming down from Bray-Dunes. It was only six miles, but the sand, the darkness, their utter weariness all slowed them down, and they took nearly five hours to make the march. Now, mixed in with other British units and a great horde of French, they slowly moved along the walkway, with frequent stops that nobody could explain. It was during one of these halts when the word came down, “No more boats tonight. Clear the mole!”

Bitterly disappointed, the Green Howards turned back, only to run headlong into other troops who hadn’t gotten the word yet. For a while there was much pushing and shoving, and all movement came to a standstill. At this point a salvo of German shells landed squarely on the base of the mole, mowing down scores of men.

If Commander Clouston had been on hand, things might have gone more smoothly, but he had returned to Dover for the night. He had served as pier master for five days and nights without a break—had sent off over 100,000 men—now he wanted to confer with Ramsay about the last, climactic stage of the evacuation, and perhaps get a good night’s sleep.

While the destroyers and Channel steamers lifted troops off the mole, Ramsay’s plan called for the minesweepers and smaller paddle-wheelers to work the beach just to the east, going as far as Malo-les-Bains. Thousands of British and French soldiers stood in three or four queues curling into the sea as far as a man could wade. Gunner F. Noon of the 53rd Field Regiment waited for two full hours, while the water crept over his ankles … his knees … his waist … and up to his neck. Then, as the first trace of dawn streaked the eastern sky, somebody shouted, “No more! The ships will return tonight!”

The 2nd Coldstream Guards was another unit to reach the harbor late. After their long stand on the canal, the men were bone-tired, but they still had their Brens. As they moved down the paved promenade at Malo-les-Bains, they marched in perfect step, arms swinging. Most of the waiting troops watched in awe and admiration, but not all. “I’ll bet that’s the bloody Guards,” called a caustic voice in the dark. “Try marching on tiptoes!”

One Coldstreamer who wasn’t late was Lieutenant Jimmy Langley. Groggy from his wounds, he was vaguely aware of being trundled from the battlefield by wheelbarrow and loaded into an ambulance. The ride was one of those stop-and-go affairs that seem to take forever. He still felt no pain, but he was thirsty and dreadfully uncomfortable. Blood kept dripping onto his face from the man above him.

At last the ambulance stopped, and Langley’s stretcher was lifted out. “This way,” somebody said. “The beach is 200 yards ahead of you.”

The stretcher party reached the water’s edge. A ship’s lifeboat lay waiting, rubbing gently against the sand. An officer in a naval greatcoat came over and asked Langley, “Can you get off your stretcher?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Well, I’m very sorry, we cannot take you. Your stretcher would occupy the places of four men. Orders are, only those who can stand or sit up.”

Langley said nothing. It was hard to be turned back after coming so close, but he understood. The stretcher bearers picked him up and carried him, still silent, back to the ambulance.

About this time another Coldstreamer, Sergeant L.H.T. Court, joined one of the queues on the beach. Attached to 1st Guards Brigade HQ, he was carrying the brigade war diary, an imposing volume inscribed on a stack of Army Forms C 2118. As he slowly moved forward into the sea, Court found his mind absorbed by three things: his bride of less than a year; his brother, just killed in Belgium; and the mountain of Forms C 2118 he was trying to save.

As the water reached his chest, he once again thought about his young wife. They had no children yet, and if he didn’t return she’d have nothing to remember him by. This lugubrious thought was interrupted by his sudden discovery that some of the Forms C 2118 were floating away. A good headquarters man to the end, he put aside all else, and frantically splashed around retrieving his files.

Eventually Court neared the front of the queue, where a naval launch was ferrying men to a larger vessel further out. Then, at 3:00 a.m. a voice called out from the launch that this was the last trip, but added that there would be another boat later on. Court continued waiting, but no other boat ever came. Some of the men turned back toward the shore, but Court and a few others waded over to a grounded fishing smack lying nearby. He was hauled aboard, still clutching the brigade war diary.

The tide was coming in, and around 4:30 the boat began to move. By now some 90 to 100 men were aboard, most of them packed in the hold where the fish were normally put. A few knowledgeable hands hoisted the sails, and a course was set for England. But there was no wind, and nearly twelve hours later they were still only a mile and a half from Dunkirk. At this point a passing destroyer picked them up, including Court and the lovingly preserved papers.

There were others, too, who weren’t inclined to wait eighteen hours for the Royal Navy to come back the following night. Thirty-six men of the 1st Duke of Wellington’s Regiment took over a sailing barge appropriately called the Iron Duke. Colonel L. C. Griffith-Williams salvaged another stranded barge, loaded it with artillerymen, and set off for Britain. He knew nothing about navigation, but he found a child’s atlas and a toy compass aboard. That would be enough. When a patrol boat later intercepted them, they were heading for Germany.

While the more adventuresome improvised ways to escape, most of the troops trudged back to the shore to wait out the eighteen hours. They passed the time in a variety of ways. It was now Sunday, June 2, and some men joined a chaplain celebrating Holy Communion on the beach at Malo-les-Bains. Ted Harvey, a fisherman stranded when his motor launch conked out, joined an impromptu soccer game. The 4th/7th Royal Dragoon Guards enjoyed motorcycle races in the sand and bet on which waterfront building would be hit by the next German shell.

But the most important game was to stay alive. Most of the waiting troops crowded into any place that seemed to offer the faintest hope of shelter. One group settled down in the shattered hulk of the French destroyer l’Adroit, lying just off Malo. Wrecked though she was, her twisted steel seemed to offer a measure of security. Others picked an old watchtower left over from Napoleon’s time; its thick stone walls also seemed to promise safety.

Others packed the cellars of nearby buildings. The remnants of the 53rd Field Regiment chose the Café des Fleurs—flimsy, but it was right on the plage. Headquarters of the 5th Green Howards was established at 22 rue Gambetta, a comfortable house about a block from the beach. Here the battalion also adopted a stray poilu, who made right for the kitchen. True to the great tradition of his country, he soon produced a superb stew of beef and wine. Promptly christened “Alphonse,” he was made an honorary member of the battalion and from now on sported a British tin hat.

The 5th Green Howards offered something very rare at Dunkirk: a sizable body of organized troops, complete with their own officers and accustomed to working together. Recalling the chaos at the mole when the loading stopped the previous dawn, the battalion commander Lieutenant-Colonel W. E. Bush decided the Green Howards had a useful role to play during the coming night, June 2–3. They would form a cordon to control the traffic and insure an orderly flow of men to the ships as they arrived. Four officers and 100 men should be enough to do the job. Those selected would, of course, be last off and might very well be left behind. The officers drew lots for the honor.

Plans for the evening were moving ahead at Dover loo. Early in the morning Admiral Wake-Walker came over by MTB from Dunkirk. After a couple hours’ rest, he attended a joint naval and military conference in the Dynamo Room. No one knew how many troops were left to be evacuated, but Wake-Walker gave an educated guess of 5,000 British and anywhere from 30,000 to 40,000 French.

Fortunately there were plenty of ships on hand. The suspension of daylight evacuation made it possible to collect virtually the whole fleet at Dover and the other southeast ports. Ramsay planned to use this vast concentration for what he called a “massed descent” on Dunkirk harbor. All troops to leave from Dunkirk itself; no more lifting from the beaches. Embarkation to start at 9:00 p.m. and continue until 3:00 a.m. Staggered sailings to insure a steady flow of ships. Three or four vessels to be alongside the mole continuously. Slow vessels to start first; fast ones later, to keep the flow even.

Captain Denny argued that the plan was too complicated—it would only result in confusion. It would be better simply to send everything over, and let the men on the spot work the details out. But most of the staff felt the scheme was worth trying.

As finally worked out, the plan provided for enough large ships to lift 37,000 men, plus whatever number might be picked up by the small craft that continued to ply across the Channel. In addition, the French would be using their own ships to lift troops from the beach just east of the mole, and from the west pier in the outer harbor. That should finish the job, and at 10:52 a.m., June 2, Ramsay signaled his whole command:

The final evacuation is staged for tonight, and the Nation looks to the Navy to see this through. I want every ship to report as soon as possible whether she is fit and ready to meet the call which has been made on our courage and endurance.

“Ready and anxious to carry out your order” … “Fit and ready”—the replies were bravely Nelsonian. But beneath the surface, most of the rescuers felt like Sub-Lieutenant Rutherford Crosby on the paddle-sweeper Oriole. His heart sank when he heard they were going back again. He thought the evacuation was all over. Ramsay had said as much yesterday, when he called for “one last effort.”

But, like Crosby, most of the others soon resigned themselves to facing another desperate night. “We were going,” he later wrote, “and that was all there was to it.”

Not everyone agreed. The three passenger steamers at Folkestone—Ben-My-Chree, Matines, and Tynwald—continued to give trouble. Most of the day they were kept anchored in the harbor, but at 6:50 p.m. Ben-My-Chree came alongside the jetty to be readied for the night’s work. The crew lined the rails, demonstrating and shouting that they were going to leave the ship. When they tried to go ashore a couple of minutes later, they were turned back by an armed naval guard advancing up the gangplank with fixed bayonets. A relief crew quickly took over, and Ben-My-Chree finally sailed at 7:05. Only the chief officer, three gunners, and the wireless operator remained from the original crew.

Then it was Tynwald’s turn. Her crew didn’t try to leave, but as she docked at 7:10 p.m., they hooted and shouted down at the naval sentries. At 7:30 she was still sitting at the pier.

Meanwhile, nobody had paid any attention to the Matines. At 4:30 p.m. she quietly weighed anchor, and without any authorization whatsoever, stood off for Southampton. Her master later explained, “It seemed in the best interests of all concerned.”

There was, in fact, good reason for the civilian crews on these Channel steamers to be afraid. They were virtually unarmed and presented the biggest targets at Dunkirk. If any further proof were needed, it was supplied by a series of incidents that began at 10:30 on the morning of June 2. At this time the Dynamo Room received an urgent message from Captain Tennant in Dunkirk:

Wounded situation acute. Hospital ship should enter during the day. Geneva Convention will be honourably observed. It is felt that the enemy will refrain from attack.

The plight of the wounded had been growing steadily worse for several days, aggravated by the decision to lift only fit men in the regular transports. Now Tennant was trying to ease the situation with this special appeal for hospital ships. He had, of course, no way of knowing whether the enemy would respect the Red Cross, but he sent the message in clear, hoping that the Germans would intercept it and order the Luftwaffe to lay off.

The Dynamo Room swung into action right away, and at 1:30 p.m. the hospital ship Worthing started across the Channel. Gleaming white and with standard Red Cross markings, it was impossible to mistake her for a regular transport. But that didn’t help her today. Two-thirds of the way across, Worthing was attacked by a dozen Ju 88’s. No hits, but nine bombs fell close enough to damage the engine room and force her back to Dover.

At 5:00 p.m. the hospital ship Paris sailed. She got about as far as the Worthing, when three planes tore into her. Again no hits, but near misses started leaks and burst the pipes in the engine room. As Paris drifted out of control, Captain Biles swung out his boats and fired several distress rockets. These attracted fifteen more German planes.

The Dynamo Room sent tugs to the rescue and continued preparing for the coming night’s “massed descent.” With so many vessels involved, it was essential to have the best men possible controlling traffic and directing the flow of ships and men. Fortunately the best was once again available. Commander Clouston, fresh from a night’s rest, would once more be pier master on the mole. To help him, Captain Denny assigned an augmented naval berthing party of 30 men. Sub-Lieutenant Michael Solomon, whose fluent French had been a godsend to Clouston since the 31st, would again serve as interpreter and liaison officer.

The Clouston party left Dover at 3:30 p.m. in two RAF crash boats: No. 243, with the Commander himself in charge, and No. 270, commanded by Sub-Lieutenant Roger Wake, an aggressive young Royal Navy regular. They were going well ahead of the other ships in order to get Dunkirk organized for the night’s work.

It was a calm, lazy afternoon, and as the two boats droned across an empty Channel, the war seemed far away. Then suddenly Lieutenant Wake heard “a roar, a rattle, and a bang.” Startled, he looked up in time to see a Stuka diving on Clouston’s boat about 200 yards ahead. It dropped a bomb— missed—then opened up with its machine guns.

No time to see what happened next. Seven more Stukas were plunging on the two motor boats, machine guns blazing. Wake ordered his helm hard to port, and for the next ten minutes played a desperate dodging game, as the Stukas took turns bombing and strafing him. In an open cockpit all the way aft, Lieutenant de Vasseau Roux, a French liaison officer, crouched behind the Lewis machine gun, hammering away at the German planes. He never budged an inch—not even when a bullet took the sight off his gun six inches from his nose. One of the Stukas fell, and the others finally broke off.

Now at last Wake had a moment to see how Clouston’s boat had weathered the storm. Only the bow was visible, and the whole crew were in the water. Wake hurried over to pick up the survivors, but Clouston waved him off … told him to get on to Dunkirk, as ordered. Wake wanted at least to pick up Clouston as senior officer, but the Commander refused to leave his men. There was no choice; Wake turned again for Dunkirk.

Clouston and his men continued swimming, clustered around the shattered bow of their boat. A French liaison officer clinging to the wreck reported an empty lifeboat floating in the sea a mile or so away. Sub-Lieutenant Solomon asked permission to swim over and try to bring it back for the survivors. Clouston not only approved; he decided to come along. This was their best chance of rescue, and Solomon alone might not be enough.

Clouston was a splendid athlete, a good swimmer, and confident of his strength. Perhaps that was the trouble. He didn’t realize how tired he was. After a short while, he was exhausted and had to swim back to the others clinging to the wreck. Hours passed, but Solomon never returned with the empty boat. As the men waited, they sang and discussed old times together, while Clouston tried to encourage them with white lies about the nearness of rescue. One by one they disappeared, victims of exposure, until finally Clouston too was gone, and only Aircraftsman Carmaham remained to be picked up alive by a passing destroyer.

Meanwhile Sub-Lieutenant Solomon had indeed reached the empty boat. He too was exhausted, but after a long struggle managed to climb aboard. He did his best to row back to the wreck, but there was only one oar. After an hour he gave up: the boat was too large, the distance too far; and it was already dark.

He drifted all night and was picked up just before dawn by the French fishing smack Stella Maria. Wined, rested, and wearing a dry French sailor’s uniform, he was brought back to Dover and transferred to the French control ship Savorgnan de Brazza. His story sounded so far-fetched he was briefly held on suspicion of being a German spy. Nor did his fluent French help him any. “Il prétend être anglais,” the French commander observed, “mais moi je crois qu’il est allemand parce qu’il parle français trop bien.” In short, he spoke French too well to be an Englishman.

An hour and a half after Clouston’s advance party left Dover on the afternoon of June 2, Ramsay’s evacuation fleet began its “massed descent” on Dunkirk. As planned, the slowest ships led the way, leaving at 5 p.m. They were mostly small fishing boats—like the Belgian trawler Cor Jésu, the French Jeanne Antoine, and the brightly painted little Ciel de France.

Next came six skoots … then the whole array of coasters, tugs, yachts, cabin cruisers, excursion steamers, and ferries that by now were such a familiar sight streaming across the Channel … then the big packets and mail steamers, the minesweepers and French torpedo boats … and finally, kicking up great bow waves as they knifed through the sea, the last eleven British destroyers of a collection that originally totaled 40.

The Southern Railway’s car ferry Autocarrier was a new addition. Lumbering along, she attracted a lot of attention, for in 1940 a car ferry was still a novelty in the cross-Channel service. The Isle of Man steamer Tynwald wasn’t new, but in her own way she was conspicuous too. At Folkestone her crew had balked at making another trip. Now here she was, steaming along as though nothing had happened.

It hadn’t been easy. Learning of the trouble, Ramsay sent over Commander William Bushell, one of his best trouble-shooters. The Commander arrived to find Tynwald tied up at the quay, her crew in rebellion. Dover’s instructions were a masterpiece of practical psychology: Bushell was on no account to consider himself in command of the ship, but was to make whatever changes were necessary to get her to Dunkirk. The chief officer relieved the master … the second relieved the chief … a new second was found … other substitutes were rushed down from London by bus … naval and military gun crews were added. At 9:15 p.m. Tynwald was on her way.

More than ever the ships were manned by a crazy hodgepodge of whoever was available. The crew of the War Department launch Marlborough consisted of four sub-lieutenants, four stokers, two RAF sergeants, and two solicitors from the Treasury who had come down on their day off. David Divine, the sea-going journalist, left the Little Ann stranded on a sand bar, hitched a ride home, shopped around Ramsgate for another boat, found a spot on the 30-foot motor launch White Wing.

“Where do you think you’re going?” a very formal, professional-looking naval officer asked, as White Wing prepared to shove off.

“To Dunkirk,” Divine replied.

“No you’re not,” said the officer, as Divine wondered whether he had broken some regulation. After all, he was new at this sort of thing. But the explanation had nothing to do with Divine. White Wing, of all unlikely vessels, had been selected as flagship for an admiral.

Rear-Admiral A. H. Taylor, the Maintenance Officer at Sheerness Dockyard, had now serviced, manned and dispatched over 100 small craft for “Dynamo.” He was a retired officer holding down a good desk job in London; he had every reason to go back feeling he had done his bit—so he went to Ramsgate and wangled his way across the Channel.

There was a rumor that British troops were still at Malo-les-Bains, somewhat blocked off from the mole. Taylor quickly persuaded Ramsay that he should lead a separate group of skoots and slow motor boats over to Malo and get them. He picked White Wing for himself; so it was that almost by accident David Divine became an “instant flag lieutenant” for a genuine admiral.

At 9:30 p.m. Captain Tennant’s chief assistant, Commander Guy Maund, positioned himself with a loudhailer at the seaward end of the eastern mole. As the ships began arriving, he became a sort of “traffic cop,” ordering them here and there, wherever they were needed. Admiral Taylor’s flotilla was directed to the beach at Malo, but there was nobody there. His ships then joined the general rescue effort centered on the mole. As Denny had predicted, it was impossible to draw up a detailed blueprint at Dover; Maund used his own judgment in guiding the flow of ships.

The mole itself got first call. As the destroyers and Channel steamers loomed out of the dusk, Maund gave them their berthing assignments. A strong tide was setting west, and the ships had an especially difficult time coming alongside. Admiral Wake-Walker, hovering nearby in the speedboat MA/SB 10, used her as a tug to nudge one of the destroyers against the pilings. At the base of the mole, Commander Renfrew Gotto and Brigadier Parminter, imperturbable as ever, regulated the flow of troops onto the walkway. The Green Howards, bayonets fixed, formed their cordon as planned, keeping the queues in order. There was plenty of light from the still-blazing city.

Shortly after 9:00 the last of the BEF started down the mole. Lieutenant-Colonel H. S. Thuillier, commanding the one remaining antiaircraft detachment, spiked his seven guns and guided his men aboard the destroyer Shikari. The 2nd Coldstream Guards filed onto the destroyer Sabre, still proudly carrying their Bren guns. With only a handful of men left, the Green Howards dissolved their cordon and joined the parade. The last unit to embark was probably the 1st King’s Shropshire Light Infantry.

These last detachments ignored the order to leave behind their casualties. On the Sabre there were only fourteen stretcher cases, but over 50 wounded were carried aboard by their comrades. Commander Brian Dean, Sabre’s captain, never heard a complaint “and hardly ever a groan.”

In the midst of the crowd streaming onto the mole walked two officers, carrying a suitcase between them. One was a staff officer, worn and rumpled like everyone else. The other looked fresh, immaculate in service dress. Calm as ever, General Alexander was leaving with the final remnants of his command. By prearrangement the MA/SB 10 was waiting, and Admiral Wake-Walker welcomed the General aboard. They briefly checked the beaches to make sure all British units were off, then headed for the destroyer Venomous, still picking up troops at the mole.

Commander John McBeath of the Venomous was standing on his bridge when a voice from the dark hailed him, asking if he could handle “some senior officers and staffs.” McBeath told them to come aboard, starboard side aft.

“We’ve got a couple of generals now—fellows called Alexander and Percival,” Lieutenant Angus Mackenzie reported a few minutes later. He added that he had put them with a few aides in McBeath’s cabin, “but I’m afraid one of the colonels has hopped into your bed with his spurs on.”

Venomous pulled out about 10:00 p.m., packed with so many troops she almost rolled over. McBeath stopped, trimmed ship, then hurried on across the Channel. At 10:30 the destroyer Winchelsea began loading. As the troops swarmed aboard, Commander Maund noticed they were no longer British—just French. To Maund that meant the job was over, and he arranged with Winchelsea’s captain to take him along on the trip back to Dover.

Captain Tennant also felt the job was done. At 10:50 he loaded the last of his naval party onto the speedboat MTB 102; then he too jumped aboard and headed for England. Just before leaving, he radioed Ramsay a final signal: “Operation completed. Returning to Dover.” Boiled down by some gifted paraphraser to just the words, “BEF evacuated,” Tennant’s message would subsequently be hailed as a masterpiece of dramatic succinctness.

Sub-Lieutenant Roger Wake was now the only British naval officer on the mole. With Tennant, Maund, and the other old hands gone—and with Clouston lost on the way over—Wake became pier master by inheritance, and it was not an enviable assignment. He was short-handed, and he was only a sub-lieutenant—not much rank to throw in a crisis.

At the moment it didn’t make much difference. The mole was virtually empty. The British troops had left, and there were no French. “Plenty of ships, cannot get troops,” Wake-Walker radioed Dover at 1:15 a.m. In two hours it would be daylight, June 3, and all loading would have to stop. Time was flying, but half a dozen vessels lay idle alongside the deserted walkway.

“Now, Sub, I want 700. Go and get them,” Lieutenant E. L. Davies, captain of the paddle-sweeper Oriole, told Sub-Lieutenant Rutherford Crosby, as they stood together on the mole wondering where everybody was. Crosby headed toward shore, ducking and waiting from time to time, whenever a shell sounded close. At last, near the base of the mole, he came to a mass of poilus. There was no embarkation officer in sight; so he summoned up his schoolboy French. “Venez ici, tout le monde!” he called, gesturing them to follow him.

The way back led past another ship berthed at the mole, and her crew did their best to entice Crosby’s group into their own vessel, like carnival barkers at a country fair. The rule was “first loaded, first away,” and nobody wanted to hang around Dunkirk any longer than necessary. Crosby made sure none of his charges strayed—let the other crews find their own Frenchmen.

They were trying. Captain Nicholson, substitute skipper of the Tynwald, walked toward the shore, shouting that his ship could take thousands. The Albury too sent out ambassadors, hawking the advantages of the big minesweeper. She eventually rounded up about 200.

But other ships could find no one. The car ferry Autocarrier waited nearly an hour under heavy shelling … then was sent home, her cavernous interior still empty. It was the same with the destroyers Express, Codrington, and Malcolm. Wake-Walker kept them on hand as long as he dared; but as dawn approached, and still no French, they went back empty too.

Where were the French anyhow? To a limited extent it was the familiar story of the ships not being where the men were. As Walker made the rounds on MA/SB 10, he could see plenty of soldiers at the Quai Félix Faure and the other quays and piers to the west, but very few ships. He tried to direct a couple of big transports over there, but that was a strange corner of the harbor for Ramsay’s fleet. When the steamer Rouen ran hard aground, the Admiral didn’t dare risk any more.

There were still the little ships, and Wake-Walker deployed them to help. The trawler Yorkshire Lass penetrated deep into the inner harbor, as far as a vessel could go. Her skipper Sub-Lieutenant Chodzko had lost his ship the previous night, but that didn’t make him any more cautious now. Smoke and flames were everywhere—buildings exploding, tracers streaking across the sky—as Yorkshire Lass ran alongside a pier crowded with Frenchmen. Chodzko called on the troops to come, and about 100 leapt aboard … then three Tommies, somehow left behind … then, as Yorkshire Lass threaded her way out again, a Royal Navy lieutenant-commander, apparently from one of the naval shore parties.

A little further out, Commander H. R. Troup nudged the War Department’s fast motor boat Haig against another pier. Troup was one of Admiral Taylor’s maintenance officers at Sheerness, but he too had wangled a ship for this big night. He picked up 40 poilus, ferried them to a transport waiting outside the harbor, then went back for another 39.

By now every kind of craft was slipping in and out, plucking troops from the various docks and quays. Collisions and near collisions were the normal thing. As Haig headed back out, a French tug rammed her. The hole was above the waterline; so Troup kept on. Two hundred yards, and Haig was rammed again by another tug. As Troup transferred his soldiers to the minesweeper Westward Ho, he was swamped when the minesweeper suddenly reversed engines to avoid still another collision. Troup now scrambled aboard Westward Ho himself, leaving Haig one more derelict in Dunkirk harbor.

Forty men here, 100 there, helped clear the piers, but most of the French weren’t in Dunkirk at all. They were still on the perimeter, holding back General von Kuechler’s “systematic attack.” To the east the 12th Division fought all day to keep the Germans out of Bray-Dunes. Toward evening General Janssen was killed by a bomb, but his men fought on. Southeast, flooding held the enemy at Ghyvelde. In the center, Colonel Menon’s 137th Infantry Regiment clung to Teteghem. Southwest at Spycker, two enterprising naval lieutenants commanded three 155 mm. guns, blocking the road for hours. All the way west, the 68th Division continued to hold General von Hubicki’s panzers. A French observer in the church tower at Mardyck had an uncanny knack of catching the slightest German movement.

Corporal Hans Waitzbauer, radio operator of the 2nd Battery, 102nd Artillery Regiment, was exasperated. The battery had been promised Wiener schnitzel for lunch, but now here they were, pinned down by that sharp-eyed fellow in the church tower.

Waitzbauer, a good Viennese, wasn’t about to give up his Wiener schnitzel that easily. With Lieutenant Gertung’s permission, he darted back, leaping from ditch to ditch, to the company kitchen. Then, with his pot of veal in both hands, a bottle of red wine in his trouser pocket, and half a loaf of white bread in each of his jacket pockets, he scurried back again. Shells and machine-gun bullets nipped at his heels all the way, but he made it safely and distributed his treasures to the battery. Lieutenant Gertung’s only comment was, “You were lucky.”

With Kuechler’s men pinned down in the east and west, the key to the advance was clearly Bergues, the old medieval town that anchored the center of the French line. If it could be taken, two good roads ran directly north to Dunkirk, just five miles to the north.

But how to take it? The town was circled by thick walls and a moat designed by the great military engineer Vauban. For a defense conceived in the seventeenth century, it was amazingly effective in the 20th. A garrison of 1,000 troops was well dug in, and they were supported by strong artillery plus naval guns at Dunkirk. The RAF Bomber Command gave help from the air.

Kuechler had been trying to take the place for two days, and it was still a stand-off. On the afternoon of June 2 it was decided to try a coordinated attack using Stukas and specially trained shock troops drawn from the 18th Regiment of Engineers.

At 3:00 p.m. the Stukas attacked, concentrating on a section of the wall that seemed weaker than the rest. Nearby the engineers crouched with flame-throwers and assault ladders. At 3:15 the bombers let up, and the men stormed the wall, led by their commander Lieutenant Voigt. Dazed by the Stukas, the garrison surrendered almost immediately.

Bergues taken, the Germans pressed on north toward Dunkirk, capturing Fort Vallières at dusk. They were now only three miles from the port, but at this point French General Fagalde scraped together every available man for a counterattack. It was a costly effort, but he managed to stop the German advance. Toward midnight the weary poilus began disengaging and working their way to the harbor, where they hoped the rescue fleet was still waiting.

Kuechler did not press them. In keeping with his orders for the “systematic attack,” he took no unnecessary risks, and the Germans did not usually fight at night anyhow. Besides, there was a feeling in the air that the campaign was really over. Outside captured Bergues, one unit of the 18th Division sat in the garden of a cottage “singing old folk-songs, soldier-songs, songs of love and home.” General Haider spent a good part of the day distributing Iron Crosses to deserving staff officers.

More than ever, all eyes were on the south. To the Luftwaffe, Dunkirk was now a finished story; it would be staging its first big raid on Paris tomorrow, June 3. Flying Officer B. J. Wicks, a Hurricane pilot shot down and working his way to the coast disguised as a Belgian peasant, noticed long columns of German troops—all heading south toward the Somme.

It was about 2:30 a.m. on the 3rd when the first of the French defenders, relieved from the counterattack, began filing onto the mole. Most of the ships had now gone back to Dover, but a few were still there. Sub-Lieutenant Wake struggled to keep order. He might lack rank, but he did have an unusual piece of equipment— a hunting horn.

It didn’t do much good. The French seemed to know a thousand ways to slow down the embarkation. They tried to bring all their gear, their personal possessions, even their dogs. Many of them had inner tubes around their necks—improvised life preservers—and this bulky addition slowed them down even more. They invariably tried to crowd aboard the first boat they came to, rather than space themselves out over the full length of the mole. They insisted on keeping their units intact, never seemed to realize that they could be sorted out later in England. Right now the important thing was to get going before daylight.

Wake and his handful of seamen did their best, but his schoolboy French never rose to the occasion. What he really needed was someone like Clouston’s assistant Michael Solomon, who was fluent in the language and could deal with the French officers. Lacking that, neither shouts of “Allez vite” nor blasts on the hunting horn could help. It was almost symbolic when some “damned Frenchman” (Wake’s words) finally stepped on the horn and put it out of commission for good.

As it grew light, Admiral Wake-Walker—still patrolling in MA/SB 10—ordered all remaining ships to leave. The minesweeper Speedwell cast off; in an hour alongside the mole she had taken aboard only 300 French soldiers. Sub-Lieutenant Wake caught a small French fishing smack, and transferred to a large Channel steamer outside the harbor. The skoot Hilda lingered long enough for a final check of the beach at Malo—nobody there.

At 3:10, as the last ships pulled out, three new vessels slipped in. These were block ships, to be sunk at the harbor entrance under the direction of Captain E. Dangerfield. The hope was, of course, to deny the Germans future use of the port. But nothing seemed to go right this frustrating night. When the block ships were scuttled, the current caught one of them and turned it parallel to the Channel, leaving plenty of room to enter and leave.

“A most disheartening night,” noted Admiral Wake-Walker on his return to Dover in the morning. He had hoped to lift over 37,000 men, actually got off only 24,000. At least 25,000 French—some said 40,000—were left behind. Wake-Walker tended to blame the French themselves for not providing their own berthing parties, but the British were the people used to running the mole. On May 31 Captain Tennant had, at Admiral Abrial’s request, taken charge of both the British and French embarkation. It was asking a lot now to expect the French to take over on the spur of the moment.

To General Weygand sitting in Paris, it was a familiar story. Once again “perfidious Albion” was walking out, leaving the French to shift for themselves. Even before the night’s misadventures, he fired oft” a telegram to the French military attaché in London, urging that the evacuation continue another night to embark the 25,000 French troops who were holding off the Germans. “Emphasize that the solidarity of the two armies demands that the French rearguard be not sacrificed.”

Winston Churchill needed little convincing. He wired Weygand and Reynaud:

We are coming back for your men tonight. Please ensure that all facilities are used promptly. For three hours last night many ships waited idly at great risk and danger.

In Dover at 10:09 on the morning of June 3, Admiral Ramsay signaled his command that their work was not over after all:

I hoped and believed that last night would see us through, but the French who were covering the retirement of the British rearguard had to repel a strong German attack and so were unable to send their troops to the pier in time to be embarked. We cannot leave our Allies in the lurch, and I call on all officers and men detailed for further evacuation tonight to let the world see that we never let down our Ally. …

On the destroyer Malcolm the morning had begun on a high note. She was just back from her seventh trip to Dunkirk, and was still in one piece. The last of the BEF had been evacuated, and everyone assumed that the operation was over. Breakfast in the ward room was a merry affair.

Lieutenant Mellis fell on his bunk hoping to catch up on his sleep. He was so tired he didn’t even take his clothes off. Several hours later he was awakened by the sound of men’s feet on the deck overhead. He learned that the crew was assembling for an important announcement by Captain Halsey, who had just returned from Ramsay’s headquarters. Halsey came quickly to the point: “The last of the BEF was able to come off because the French took over the perimeter last night. Now the French have asked us to take them off. We can’t do anything else, can we?”

No. But it was still a shock. For Mellis, it was the worst moment of the whole show. To enjoy that delicious feeling of relief and relaxation—and then to have it all snatched away—was almost more than he could stand. The ward room had planned a festive mess that evening, and decided to dress festively anyhow. When the Malcolm sailed on her eighth trip to Dunkirk at 9:08 p.m., June 3, her officers were wearing their bow ties and monkey jackets.

14

The Last Night

“IF YOU’VE NEVER SEEN any Germans, here they are.” The announcement sounded strangely calm and detached to Edmond Perron, a minor Dunkirk official who had fled the blazing city with his family. The Perrons had found shelter on the farm of M. Wasel at Cappelle-la-Grande, a couple of miles to the south. As the fighting surged toward them, the Wasels and their guests retired to the stable for added protection. Now it was 3:00 p.m., June 3, and M. Wasel was peeking through the stable door and issuing bulletins on what he saw.

M. Perron peered out, too. Men in green uniforms covered the plain to the south—running … lying down … getting up … crouching … always advancing. But they did not come to the Wasel farm. Reaching its edge, they veered to the left to get around a water-filled ditch, then continued north toward Dunkirk.

General Lieutenant Christian Hansen’s X Corps was closing in from the south. By 3:30 the 61st Division had passed the Wasel farm and occupied Cappelle itself. By evening the 18th Division, advancing from the southeast, had Fort Louis, an ancient landmark about a mile south of the port. Stukas helped reduce another little fort two miles to the east.

The French were also crumbling farther east. Colonel Menon’s 37th Infantry were finally overwhelmed at Teteghem. By this time his 1st Battalion was down to 50 men. One machine gunner was working two guns, feeding them with scraps of ammunition picked up on the ground. Held up the better part of two days, the battered victors joined the other German units now converging on the port.

General Fagalde threw in everything he had left: the last of the 32nd Division … the coastal defense troops of the Secteur Fortifié des Flandres … the remains of the 21st Division Training Centre … his own Gardes Mobiles. Somehow he stopped them, although machine-gun bullets were now clipping the trees of suburban Rosendaël.

The end seemed very near to Sergeant Bill Knight of the Royal Engineers, who had somehow missed getting away with the last of the BEF. Now he was holed up in a cellar in Rosendaël with four other men from his unit. They had a truck, arms, plenty of food, but the German firing was so heavy that Knight felt they could never get to the harbor, even assuming the evacuation was still on.

The little party was pretty much resigned to surrender when two Belgian civilians, who had also taken cover in the cellar, began talking about slipping through the lines to their farms near the village of Spycker. Listening to them, an idea suddenly occurred to Knight: they might be cut off from the harbor, but why not go the other way? Why not slip through the encircling German Army and rejoin the Allies on the Somme?

A deal was quickly struck. Knight would give the Belgians transportation, if they would show him the little lanes and cow paths that might get them through the enemy lines unnoticed. Knight felt sure that the Germans were sticking to the main roads, and once through the cordon, it wouldn’t be too hard to reach the Somme.

They set off at dusk, June 3, bouncing along the back streets that led southwest out of town. All night they continued driving, guided by the Belgians and by a road map picked up at a garage they passed.

Dawn on the 4th found them near Spycker. Here they dropped the two Belgians, and after a few final instructions continued heading southwest. They still used back roads, and when even these seemed dangerous, they lay low for a while in a field. Toward evening they had a lucky break. A German convoy appeared along the road, made up entirely of captured vehicles. They fell in behind, becoming the tail end of the convoy.

They made 20 to 25 miles this way, with only one narrow escape. A German motorcycle was escorting the convoy, and at one point it dropped back to make sure that none of the trucks were missing. Feeling that it would be just as jarring to find one truck too many, Knight slowed down, dropping far enough behind the convoy to appear to be no part of it. When the motorcycle returned to its regular position up front, Knight closed up again.

Wednesday, June 5, and the truck at last reached the Somme at Ailly. Here the British party had another break: a bridge still stood intact. It was not a highway bridge—just a cattle crossing—but it would do. Knight barreled across it into Allied lines.

No one else at Dunkirk was that enterprising. One and all believed that June 3 would be the last night, and at Bastion 32 the mood was heavy with gloom. There was no more fresh water; the medics had run out of bandages; communications were failing. “Enemy is reaching the outskirts,” ran Abrial’s last message, sent at 3:25 p.m. “I am having the codes burned, except for the M Code.”

At 4:00 p.m. Admiral Ramsay’s rescue fleet started out again. As before, the plan called for the big ships—the destroyers, the Channel steamers, the largest paddlers—to concentrate on the eastern mole. But this time the naval berthing party would be greatly strengthened. Commander Herbert James Buchanan would be in charge; four officers, fifty seamen, and several signalmen would be on hand. Four French officers were added to provide better communication. With luck, Ramsay hoped that 14,000 troops would be lifted off the mole between 10:30 p.m. and 2:30 a.m.

The minesweepers, skoots, and smaller paddle steamers would concentrate on the west pier, a shorter jetty just across from the mole, where crowds of French soldiers had waited in vain the previous night. This smaller flotilla should be able to take off another 5,000 men. The little ships—there were still scores of launches, motorboats, and small craft about—would again probe deep into the harbor where the larger vessels couldn’t go. They would ferry the troops they found to the gunboat Locust, waiting just outside the port.

The ever-growing fleet of French trawlers and fishing smacks would take care of the Quai Félix Faure, cover the outer mole all the way west, and make a final check of Malo beach. These French boats were late arrivals, but now seemed to be everywhere.

All understood that this really would be the last night, and Ramsay tried to make sure of it with a strongly worded telegram to the Admiralty:

After nine days of operations of a nature unprecedented in naval warfare, which followed on two weeks of intense strain, commanding officers, officers, and ships’ companies are at the end of their tether. … If, therefore, evacuation has to be continued after tonight, I would emphasize in the strongest possible manner that fresh forces should be used for these operations, and any consequent delay in their execution should be accepted.

It was true, but hard to tell from the jaunty procession of vessels that once again streamed across the Channel. The destroyer Whitshed pulled out, her harmonica band playing on the foredeck. The cabin cruiser Mermaiden was manned by a sub-lieutenant, a stoker, an RAF gunner on leave, and a white-haired old gentleman who normally helped take care of Horatio Nelson’s flagship Victory in Portsmouth. The motor launch Marlborough had lost her two solicitors—they only had the weekend off—but she boasted two equally dapper replacements: a retired colonel and an invalided army officer, said to be a crack shot with a Lewis gun.

The destroyer Malcolm looked especially dashing, with her officers dressed in their monkey jackets for the festive evening that never came off. The tug Sun IV, towing fourteen launches, was still skippered by Mr. Alexander, president of the tugboat company. The MTB 102, again carrying Admiral Wake-Walker, now sported a real admiral’s flag—made from a red-striped dish cloth.

Wake-Walker arrived off the eastern mole at 10:00 p.m. and was relieved to find that tonight plenty of French troops were waiting. But once again the wind and the tide were against him, and he couldn’t get alongside. When the Whitshed appeared at 10:20 with Commander Buchanan’s berthing party, she had no better luck. The other ships too were unable to land, and a huge traffic jam built up at the entrance to the harbor.

Nearly an hour passed before Wake-Walker managed to get some lines ashore, and the berthing party was able to move into action. By 11:00 loading operations were under way, but a whole hour had been lost. What had been planned for four hours would have to be done in three.

Fortunately the Luftwaffe had turned its attention to Paris, and there was little shelling tonight. Many of the guns too had gone south, and Kuechler’s advance was so close that his artillery were leery of hitting their own infantry. On the mole the British berthing party could hear machine-gun fire in the town itself. “Vite, vite,” a sailor shouted as the poilus tumbled aboard the Malcolm, “Vite, God damn it, VITE!”

Admiral Taylor’s flotilla of small craft headed deeper into the harbor, to the Quai Félix Faure. The Admiral himself had gone ahead in the War Department’s fast boat Marlborough to organize the loading. He understood there would be thousands of French waiting, but when he arrived, he found the quay deserted. Finally 300 to 400 French marines turned up and announced there was nobody else.

But they were enough, considering the size of Taylor’s little ships. Most held fewer than 40 at a time. The Mermaiden was so crowded the helmsman couldn’t see to steer. Directions had to be shouted over a babble of French voices.

As Taylor loaded the last of the marines, a German machine gun began chattering less than half a mile away. No more time to lose. Packing a final load into the Marlborough, he shoved off around 2:00 a.m. on the 4th. Dodging one of the many small craft darting about the harbor, Marlborough scraped over some fallen masonry and lost both her propellers and rudder. She was finally towed home by the large yacht Gulzar, piloted by a Dominican monk.

Mishaps multiplied. Nobody really knew the port, and the only light was from the flames consuming the waterfront. The Portsmouth Admiral’s barge ran into a pile of rubble and was abandoned… .The trawler Kingfisher was rammed by a French fishing boat… The minesweeper Kellet ran aground against the western breakwater. A tug towed her off, but she was too badly damaged to be of further use. Wake-Walker sent her home empty—one of only two ships not used this last hectic night.

The Admiral himself nipped about the harbor in MTB 102, busily juggling his fleet. The Quai Félix Faure was cleared … the eastern mole was under control … but the short jetty just west of the mole was a problem. The whole French 32nd Infantry Division seemed to be converging on it. At 1:45 a.m. Wake-Walker guided over a large transport, then the packet Royal Sovereign to help lift the crowd.

On the jetty, Commander Troup landed from the War Department’s boat Swallow, took one look at the confusion, and appointed himself pier master. His chief problem was the usual one: the French troops refused to be separated from their units. Enlisting the help of a French staff officer, Captain le Comte de Chartier de Sadomy, Troup urged the poilus to forget their organization. In two hours they would all meet again in England. Take any boat. They seemed to understand: the big Tynwald came alongside, loaded 4,000 men in half an hour.

2:00 a.m., June 4, two small French torpedo boats, VTB 21 and VTB 26, rumbled out of the harbor. Admiral Abrial and General Fagalde were leaving with their staffs. Behind them the massive steel doors of Bastion 32 now lay open and unguarded. Inside there was only a clutter of smashed coding machines and burnt-out candles.

2:25, gunboat Locust, stationed off the harbor mouth, received her last load of troops from Admiral Taylor’s little ships. Her skipper, Lieutenant-Commander Costobadie, had done his duty, and it must have been a temptation to run for Dover. But he still had room; so he went instead to the eastern mole and topped off with another 100 men. Finally satisfied that Locust could hold no more, he headed for home.

2:30, the last French ships, a convoy of trawlers commanded by Ensign Bottex, emerged from the innermost part of the harbor. Packed with troops fresh from the fighting, he too turned toward Dover.

2:40, “heartened by bagpipes playing us out,” the destroyer Malcolm slipped her lines at the eastern mole. Twenty minutes later the last destroyer of all, Express, left with a full load, including Commander Buchanan’s berthing party.

3:00, French troops still crowded the short jetty just west of the mole. Commander Troup had been loading transports all night, but the jetty continued to fill up with new arrivals. Now the last big transport had gone, and Troup was waiting for a motorboat assigned to pick up himself, General Lucas of the French 32nd Division, and the general’s staff at 3:00. The minutes ticked by, but no sign of the. boat—not surprising on a night like this when a thousand things could go wrong.

Troup was beginning to worry, when at 3:05 the War Department’s boat Pigeon happened by. She was miraculously empty, making a final swing through the harbor. Troup hailed her, and Sub-Lieutenant C. A. Gabbett-Mullhallen brought his craft alongside.

A thousand French soldiers stood at attention four deep, as General Lucas prepared to leave. Clearly they would be left behind—no longer a chance of escape—yet not a man broke ranks. They remained motionless, the light from the flames playing off their steel helmets.

Lucas and his staff walked to the edge of the pier, turned, clicked their heels, and gave the men a final salute. Then the officers turned again and made the long climb down the ladder to the waiting boat. Troup followed, and at 3:20 Sub-Lieutenant Gabbett-Mullhallen gunned his engines, quickly moving out of the harbor.

As these last ships left Dunkirk, they met a strange procession creeping in. Destroyer Shikari was in the lead. Following her were three ancient freighters, and flanking them were two speedboats, MTB 107 and MA/SB 10. Captain Dangerfield was once again trying to bottle up the harbor by sinking block ships across the entrance. As the little flotilla moved into position, they were buffeted by the bow waves of the last ships racing out. Lieutenant John Cameron, skipper of the MTB 107, pondered the trick of fate that had brought him, “a settled barrister of 40,” to be an actor in this awesome drama.

Suddenly an explosion. Enemy planes had apparently mined the channel—a parting present from the Luftwaffe. The first did no damage, but a second exploded under the leading block ship Gourko, sinking her almost instantly. As the two speedboats fished the survivors out of the water, the remaining block ships steamed on. But now there were only two of them, and the job would be that much harder.

While the block ships edged deeper into the harbor, Shikari paid a final visit to the eastern mole. It had been nearly empty when Express left, but now it was beginning to fill up again. Some 400 French troops tumbled aboard, including General Barthélémy, commanding the Dunkirk garrison. At 3:20 Shikari finally cast off—the last British warship to leave Dunkirk.

But not the last British vessel. Occasional motorboats were still slipping out, as Captain Dangerfield’s two block ships reached the designated spot. With helms hard over, they attempted to line up at right angles to the Channel, but once again the tide and current were too strong. As on the previous night, the attempt was largely a failure. Hovering nearby, MA/SB 10 picked up the crews.

Dawn was now breaking, and Lieutenant Cameron decided to take MTB 107 in for one last look at the harbor. For nine days the port had been a bedlam of exploding bombs and shells, the thunder of artillery, the hammering of antiaircraft guns, the crash of falling masonry; now suddenly it was a graveyard—the wrecks of sunken ships … abandoned guns … empty ruins … silent masses of French troops waiting hopelessly on the pierheads and the eastern mole. There was nothing a single, small motorboat could do; sadly, Cameron turned for home. “The whole scene,” he later recalled, “was filled with a sense of finality and death; the curtain was ringing down on a great tragedy.”

But there were still Englishmen in Dunkirk, some of them very much alive. Lieutenant Jimmy Langley, left behind because the wounded took up too much room in the boats, now lay on a stretcher at the 12th Casualty Clearing Station near the outskirts of town. The station—really a field hospital—occupied a huge Victorian house in the suburb of Rosendaël. Capped by an odd-looking cupola with a pointed red roof, the place was appropriately called the Chapeau Rouge.

The wounded had long ago filled up all the rooms in the house, then overflowed into the halls and even the grand staircase. Now they were being put into tents in the surrounding gardens. A French field hospital also lay on the grounds, adding to the crowd of casualties. The total number varied from day to day, but on June 3 there were about 265 British wounded at Chapeau Rouge.

Tending them were a number of medical officers and orderlies. They were there as the result of a curious but most fateful lottery. Even before the decision to leave behind the wounded, it had been clear that some would not be able to go. They were simply too badly hurt to be moved. To take care of them, orders had come down that one medical officer and 10 orderlies must be left behind for every 100 casualties. Since there were 200 to 300 wounded, this meant 3 officers and 30 orderlies would have to stay.

How to choose? Colonel Pank, the Station’s commanding officer, decided that the fairest course was to draw lots, and at 2:00 p.m. on June 1 the staff gathered for what was bound to be a very tense occasion. Two separate lotteries were held—one among the 17 medical officers, the other among the 120 orderlies.

In each case all the names were put in a hat, and appropriately enough an English bowler was found in the cellar and used for this purpose. The rule was “first out, first to go”; the last names drawn would be those left behind. The Church of England chaplain drew for the enlisted men; the Catholic padre, Father Cockie O’Shea, drew for the officers.

Major Philip Newman, Chief of Surgery, listened to the drawing in agonized silence as the names were read out. Ten … twelve … thirteen, and still his name remained in the hat. As it turned out, he had good reason to fear: he was number seventeen of seventeen.

Later that afternoon a farewell service was held in the cupola. At the end Father O’Shea took Newman by the hand and gave him his crucifix. “This will see you home,” the padre said.

One of those who stayed took no part at all in the lottery. Private W.B.A. Gaze was strictly a volunteer. An auctioneer and appraiser in peacetime, Gaze had been a machine gunner with a motor maintenance unit until the great retreat. Separated from his outfit, he had taken over an ambulance abandoned by its regular driver and was now a fixture at 12th CCS. The other men might know more about medicine, but he had skills of his own that came in handy at a time like this. He was a born scrounger, could fix anything, and had even located a new well, when Chapeau Rouge was running out of water. Major Newman regarded him as an “honorary member” of the unit, and Gaze reciprocated—of course he wasn’t going to leave.

Most of the staff pulled out on the night of June 1. The 2nd was largely spent making futile trips to and from the docks, as false reports circulated that a hospital ship had arrived. That night a dispatch rider roared up with the news that walking wounded could be evacuated, if brought to the eastern mole. This last chance of escape was seized by many men who, under any normal definition, were stretcher cases. They rose from their cots and limped, hobbled, even crawled to the waiting trucks. One man used a pair of crutches made from a coal hammer and a garden rake.

June 3 was a day of waiting. The French troops were falling back, and Newman’s main job was to keep them from occupying the house and using it for a last stand. A large red cross, made from strips of cloth, had been laid out on the lawn; the Luftwaffe had so far respected it; and Newman wanted to keep things that way. The French commandant seemed to understand. He didn’t occupy the house, but he did continue digging on the grounds. Occasional shells began falling on the garden.

At dusk the French began pulling out, retiring still further into Dunkirk, and it was clear to everyone at Chapeau Rouge that the next visitors would be German. When, was anybody’s guess, but the white German “victory rockets” were getting close.

While the wounded lay quietly on their cots and stretchers, the staff gathered in the basement of the house for a last dinner. They ate the best food they could find, topped off by some excellent red wine from the Chapeau Rouge cellar. Someone produced a concertina, but no one had the heart to sing.

Upstairs, Major Newman sought out a wounded German pilot named Helmut, who had been shot down and brought in several days earlier. It was clear to both that the roles of captor and captive were about to be reversed, but neither made much of it. What Newman did want was a crash course in German, to be used when the enemy arrived. Patiently Helmut taught him phrases like Rotes Kreuz and Nichts Schiessen—“Red Cross” … “Don’t shoot.”

By midnight, June 3–4, the last French defenders had retired toward the docks, and there was nothing to do but keep waiting. As a sort of reception committee, Newman posted two enlisted men by the gate. An officer was stationed on the porch outside the front door. They had orders to call him as soon as the first Germans appeared. Then he laid out a clean uniform for the surrender and curled up on the stone floor of the kitchen for a few hours’ sleep.

On the front steps Jimmy Langley lay on a stretcher just outside the front door. It was so hot and sticky—and the flies were so bad—he had asked to be moved into the open. He too was waiting, and even as he waited, he began thinking about what might happen next. He was a Coldstream Guards officer, and in the last war, the Coldstream were not known for taking prisoners. Had that reputation carried over? If so, there seemed a good chance that the Germans would pay him back in kind. He finally had a couple of orderlies carry his stretcher to a spot near the gate and set it down there. If he was going to be killed, he might as well get it over with.

15

Deliverance

“THE GERMANS ARE HERE!” a voice was shouting, as an unknown hand shook Major Newman awake at 6 o’clock on the morning of June 4. Dead tired, Newman had been deeply asleep, even though lying on the stone floor of the kitchen at Chapeau Rouge. He gradually pulled himself together and began putting on the clean uniform he had laid out for the surrender.

Down near the gate Jimmy Langley lay on his stretcher watching a small party of German infantrymen enter the grounds. They might be about to kill him, but they looked as tired as the British. As they walked up the drive toward him, Langley decided his best chance lay in playing to the hilt the role of “wounded prisoner.” Pointing to the Red Cross flag on the cupola, he gasped a request for water and a cigarette. The leader of the squad gave him both. Then Langley asked, a little tentatively, what would they like from him.

“Marmelade,” was the reply. For the first time Langley felt there was hope. No one about to kill him would be thinking primarily of marmalade.

Troops were pouring into the grounds now—some dirty and unkempt, but most freshly washed and cleanly shaven, the way Supermen should look. They fanned out over the yard, checking the tents and stretchers to make sure no armed Allied soldiers were still lurking about. “For you the war is over,” a trooper curtly told Guardsman Arthur Knowles, lying wounded on his stretcher.

Satisfied that Chapeau Rouge met the standards of Geneva, the Germans relaxed and were soon mixing with their captives, swapping rations and sharing family pictures. Major Newman stood on the porch watching the scene, resplendent in his clean uniform but with no officer to take his surrender.

In two hours these Germans pushed on, replaced by administrative personnel who were far less friendly. The curious bond that sometimes exists between enemies at the front is rarely felt in the rear.

“Wo ist das Meer?” a departing infantryman asked Jimmy Langley, still lying on his stretcher. Langley had no idea where the sea was, but pointed confidently where he thought it might be. This couldn’t be “helping the enemy”—they’d find it anyhow.

The French guns were completely silent now. As the Germans moved into town, white flags began sprouting everywhere. Sensing no opposition, Major Chrobek of the 18th Infantry Division piled his men into trucks and lurched through the debris-filled streets right to the waterfront. “Then our hearts leapt,” exulted the division’s normally staid Daily Intelligence Summary: “Here was the sea—the sea!”

At 8:00 a.m. a detachment of German marines took over Bastion 32. There was, of course, nobody there except a handful of headquarters clerks left behind by the departing generals and admirals.

Twenty minutes later a German colonel rolled up to Dunkirk’s red brick Hôtel de Ville in the center of town. Here he was met by General Beaufrère, commanding the 68th Infantry and senior French officer left in the city. Beaufrère had taken off his steel helmet and now sported a gold-leaf kept for the surrender ceremony. Sometime between 9:00 and 10:00 a.m. he met with General Lieutenant Friedrich-Carl Cranz, commanding the 18th Division, and formally handed over the city.

By 9:30 German units reached the foot of the eastern mole, but here they faced a problem. French troops were packed so tightly on the mole, it was impossible to round them up quickly. As late as 10:00 o’clock, a French medical officer, Lieutenant Docteur Le Doze, escaped from the seaward end of the mole with 30 men in a ship’s lifeboat.

It’s hard to say exactly when Dunkirk officially fell. The Army Group B war diary put the time at 9:00 a.m. … X Corps said 9:40 … the 18th Army, 10:15. Perhaps the most appropriate time, symbolically anyhow, was the moment the swastika was hoisted on the eastern mole—10:20 a.m.

Now it was a case of mopping up. While Beaufrère dickered with Cranz, small parties of his 68th Division tried to escape to the west, but they were soon run down and captured. General Alaurent led a group from the 32nd Division in an attempt to break out via Gravelines, but they were rounded up at Le Clipon, just outside Dunkirk.

By 10:30 the last shots had been fired and the city was at peace. At Chapeau Rouge Major Newman could hear a golden oriole singing from the top of the oak tree close to the mansion. “This was his day.”

A handful of dazed civilians began emerging from the city’s cellars. Staring at the blackened walls and piles of rubble, a gendarme—covered with ribbons from the First World War—cried like a child. On the rue Clemenceau a small fox terrier sat guarding the body of a French soldier. Somewhere in the ruins a portable radio, miraculously intact, was playing “The Merry Widow Waltz.”

Father Henri Lecointe, assistant curate of Saint Martin’s parish, picked his way through the rubble to his church. The door was blown in, the windows gone, but it still stood. Entering, he was surprised to hear the organ playing a Bach chorale. Two German soldiers were trying it out—one at the console, the other in the loft, pumping the bellows.

Foreign correspondents—never far behind when the Wehrmacht was victorious—poked among the ruins, interviewing survivors. The Assistant Chief of Police, André Noël, remarked that he was an Alsatian from Metz and had served in the German Army during the First War.

“Now you can go back to your old regiment,” dryly observed a lieutenant-colonel standing by.

As Georg Schmidt, one of Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda men, photographed the scene, his section chief drove up and reminded him that Goebbels expected pictures of British POW’s—did Schmidt have any?

Schmidt replied that the British were all gone.

“Well,” said his chief, “you’re an official photographer. If you don’t get any pictures of British POW’s, then you were an official photographer!”

Schmidt needed no further encouragement. He hurried over to the POW compound, where he found 30,000 to 40,000 French, but still no British. He looked harder and was finally rewarded. Scattered here and there were two or three dozen Tommies. Schmidt put them up front and began taking his pictures. The day was saved.

Most of the British were indeed gone, but they took an astonishingly large number of French troops with them. Over 26,000 jammed the decks of the last ships to leave Dunkirk. As the Medway Queen groped through an early-morning fog toward Dover, an officer strummed a mandolin on the after deck, trying to cheer up the already homesick poilus. On the destroyer Sabre Commander Brian Dean drew cheers by addressing his passengers in French. There was much banter comparing the accommodations on the crowded Sabre with those on the luxury liner Normandie.

Generally speaking, the passage back was uneventful—but not always. As the Belgian trawler Maréchal Foch neared the English coast, the minesweeper Leda loomed out of the fog and rammed her. The “Foch” sank instantly, pitching 300 soldiers into the water.

The French motorboat VTB 25, carrying Admiral Abrial and other high-ranking officers, heard cries and rushed to the scene. But the fog knew no favorites: VTB 25 ran into a piece of wreckage and lost her propeller. Now she wallowed helplessly in the sea.

Eventually the destroyer Malcolm came up. Captain Halsey’s smooth-working crew picked up 150 survivors and threw a line to VTB 25. Somewhat ignominiously, Admiral Abrial was finally towed into Dover around 6:00 a.m.

About this time the fog lifted, but that didn’t help a young French ensign named Tellier, commanding the auxiliary dredge Emile Deschamps. He was thoroughly lost, and when he asked directions from a passing ship, he couldn’t understand the answer. He tried to follow the crowd, and was just off Margate when the Emile Deschamps struck a magnetic mine and blew up. She sank in less than half a minute with most of the 500 men aboard.

Lieutenant Hervé Cras managed to swim clear of the wreck. He was getting accustomed to this sort of thing, having also gone down on the destroyer Jaguar the previous week. Now, as he tread water gasping for breath, he was hailed by a shipmate, Lieutenant Jacquelin de la Porte de Vaux: “Hello, Hello! Let’s sing.”

With that, de la Port de Vaux burst into “Le Chant du Depart”—“The Song of Departure”—a well-known French march. Cras was in no mood to join in, and gradually drifted away. Later, after both men were rescued, de la Porte de Vaux chided him for not singing in the water, “as all sailors with their hearts in the right place must do in such circumstances.”

Perhaps he was right. Certainly the men who manned the evacuation fleet needed every conceivable device to keep up their spirits. The Emile Deschamps was the 243rd vessel lost, and many of the crews had now reached the breaking point. During the morning of the 4th, Admiral Abrial met with Ramsay in Dover Castle, and they agreed that the time had come to end “Dynamo.” Abrial observed that the Germans were closing in; the French had now used up all their ammunition; and the 30,000 to 40,000 men left behind weren’t combat units. He was wrong only on the last point: the troops standing forlornly on the pierheads of Dunkirk included some of France’s best.

Paris gave its formal approval at 11:00, and at 2:23 p.m. the British Admiralty officially announced the end of Operation Dynamo. Released at last from the strain and tension, Ramsay drove up to Sandwich and celebrated with a round of golf. He shot a 78—by far the best score in his life.

The past several days had been so all-consuming that he never had time even to write “darling Mag,” but she had kept the asparagus and gingerbread coming, and now on June 5 he once again took up his pen: “The relief is stupendous, and the results beyond belief.” He tried to describe what had been achieved, but it sounded awkward and full of self-praise. He was really a man of action, not a man of letters. He quickly wrapped his effort up: “Tons of love, darling Mag, you are such a comfort to me.”

Along with relief went a deep feeling of vindication. Ramsay had never gotten over his years in eclipse; his break with Admiral Backhouse hurt too deeply. Now Dunkirk made up for everything, and the grateful letters that poured in seemed doubly sweet.

He cherished them all, including one from his barber. But the most touching was a letter signed simply “Mrs. S. Woodcock,” a British soldier’s mother he had never met:

As a reader of the Daily Express and after reading in today’s paper of your wonderful feat re Dunkirk, I feel I must send you a personal message to thank you. My son was one of the lucky ones to escape from there. I have not seen him, but he is somewhere in England, and that’s good enough. My youngest boy John Woodcock died of wounds received in Norway on April 26; so you can guess how thankful I feel and grateful to you. …

It was a nation already overflowing with gratitude and relief when Winston Churchill went to the House of Commons on the evening of June 4 to report on the evacuation. The benches were filled; the Public Gallery, the Peers Gallery, and the Distinguished Strangers Gallery all packed. The crowd welcomed him with a rousing cheer, then sat enthralled by that rarity—a speech devoted mainly to bad news but which, nevertheless, inspires men with hope and courage.

He thrilled the House with his ringing peroration—“We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets”—but what impressed astute observers the most was his frankness in facing unpleasant facts. The News Chronicle praised the speech for its “uncompromising candour.” Edward R. Murrow called it “a report remarkable for its honesty, inspiration, and gravity.”

This was as Churchill wanted it. The rescue of the Army must not lull the nation into a paralyzing euphoria. “We must be very careful,” he warned, “not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.”

For the moment his warnings did little good. The returning troops were greeted—often to their own amazement—like conquering heroes. Captain John Dodd of the 58th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, had expected sullen and angry faces, possibly hostile crowds, and a stigma that would stick for all time. Instead, he found nothing but joy and thankfulness, as if the BEF had been the victors, not the vanquished.

When the troops tumbled ashore at Ramsgate, the women of the town swamped them with cups of cocoa, buried them in sandwiches. The manager of the Pavilion Theatre gave away all his cigarettes and chocolate. A director of the Olympia Ballroom bought up all the socks and underwear in town, and handed them out as needed. A grocery store at Broadstairs gave away its entire stock of tea, soup, biscuits, butter, and margarine. A wealthy Scotsman at St. Augustines bought every blanket in town, sending them all to Ramsgate and Margate.

As fast as possible the returning troops were loaded into special trains and taken to assembly points scattered over England and Wales. Here the various units would be rested and reorganized. As the trains moved through the countryside, crowds gathered at the station platforms along the way, showering them with still more cigarettes and chocolate. Bedsheet banners hung from the windows of London’s suburbs with messages like “HARD LUCK, BOYS” and “WELL DONE, BEF.” Children stood at road crossings waving Union Jacks.

Lady Ismay, wife of Churchill’s military adviser, was changing trains at Oxford when one of these “Dunkirk Specials” pulled in. The people on the platform, until now bored and apathetic, saw the weary faces, the bandages, the torn uniforms, and suddenly realized who these new arrivals were. In a body the crowd rushed the station refreshment stand and showered the exhausted soldiers with food and drink. That night when General Ismay told her how well the evacuation was going, she replied, “Yes, I have seen the miracle with my own eyes.”

“Miracle”—that was the word. There seemed no other way to describe such an unexpected, inexplicable change in fortune. In his address to Parliament Winston Churchill called it a “miracle of deliverance.” Writing a naval colleague, Admiral Sir William James of Portsmouth could only “thank God for that miracle at Dunkirk.” Gort’s Chief of Staff, General Pownall, noted in his diary, “The evacuation from Dunkirk was surely a miracle.”

Actually, there were several miracles. First, the weather. The English Channel is usually rough, rarely behaves for very long. Yet a calm sea was essential to the evacuation, and during the nine days of Dunkirk the Channel was a millpond. Old-timers still say they have never seen it so smooth.

At one point a storm seemed to be heading for the coast, but veered up the Irish Channel. Northerly winds would have kicked up a disastrous surf, but the breeze was first from the southwest, later shifting to the east. On only one morning, May 31, did an on-shore breeze cause serious trouble. On June 5—the day after the evacuation was over—the wind moved to the north, and great breakers came rolling onto the empty beaches.

Overhead, clouds, mist, and rain always seemed to come at the right moment. The Luftwaffe mounted three all-out assaults on Dunkirk—May 27, 29, and June 1. Each time the following day saw low ceilings that prevented any effective follow-up. It took the Germans three days to discover the part played by the eastern mole, mainly because the southwesterly breezes screened it with smoke.

Another miracle was Adolf Hitler’s order of May 24, halting his tanks just as they were closing in for the kill. That day Guderian’s panzers had reached Bourbourg, only ten miles southwest of Dunkirk. Nothing stood between them and the port. The bulk of the BEF still lay near Lille, 43 miles to the south. By the time the tanks began rolling again in the predawn hours of May 27, the escape corridor had been established, the BEF was pouring into Dunkirk and Ramsay’s rescue fleet was hard at work.

Hitler’s “halt order” seems so mysterious that it has even been suggested that he was deliberately trying to let the BEF escape. With her army still intact, the theory runs, Britain might feel she could more honorably sit down at the peace table.

Anyone who was at Dunkirk will have a hard time believing that. If Hitler was secretly trying to let the British go home, he was slicing it awfully thin. He almost failed and caught them all. Nor did he confide this secret to the Luftwaffe, the artillery, or the S-Boats. All were doing their best to disrupt the evacuation; none were told to go easy. Finally, there were the ideas tossed off by Hitler himself, suggesting better ways to raise havoc on the beaches.

The most convincing evidence indicates that Hitler was indeed trying to block the evacuation, but wasn’t willing to risk his armor to do it. The British looked finished anyhow; Flanders was poor tank country; his lines were already stretched thin; the brief counterattack at Arras disturbed him; 50% of his tanks were said to be out of action; he needed that armor for the next phase of the campaign, the drive across the Somme and into the heart of France.

It was understandable, especially for any German who had been through the First War. France was crucial, and Paris was the key. It had eluded them then; there must be no mistake this time. Far better to risk a miracle at Dunkirk than risk a second “Miracle of the Marne.”

The decision was all the easier when Hermann Göring announced that his Luftwaffe could handle Dunkirk alone. Hitler didn’t buy this for very long—he lifted the “halt order” several days before it became clear that Göring couldn’t deliver—but the General Field Marshal’s boast certainly played a part.

By May 27, when the tanks got going again, the great German drive had lost its momentum, and the panzer generals themselves were thinking of the south. Guderian, once-an impassioned advocate for using his armor at Dunkirk, now only had eyes for the Somme.

Still another miracle was provided by the Luftwaffe itself. Perhaps Göring could never have stopped the evacuation, but he could have caused far more mischief. The German planes rarely strafed the crowded beaches; they never used fragmentation bombs; they never attacked tempting targets like Dover or Ramsgate. None of this was through lack of desire; it was through lack of doctrine. The Stuka pilots had been trained for ground support, not for interdiction. The fighters were expected to stay upstairs, covering the bombers, not to come down and mix it up. Whatever the reasons, these lapses allowed additional thousands of men to come home.

“Had the BEF not returned to this country,” General Brookelater wrote, “it is hard to see how the Army could have recovered from the blow.” That was the practical significance of Dunkirk. Britain could replace the 2,472 lost guns, the 63,879 abandoned vehicles; but the 224,686 rescued troops were irreplaceable. In the summer of 1940 they were the only trained troops Britain had left. Later, they would be the nucleus of the great Allied armies that won back the Continent. The leaders—Brooke, Alexander, and Montgomery, to name only three—all cut their teeth at Dunkirk.

But the significance of Dunkirk went far beyond such practical considerations. The rescue electrified the people of Britain, welded them together, gave them a sense of purpose that the war had previously lacked. Treaty obligations are all very well, but they don’t inspire men to great deeds. “Home” does, and this is what Britain was fighting for now.

The very sense of being alone was exhilarating. The story was told of the foreigner who asked whether his English friend was discouraged by the successive collapse of Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Lowlands, and now France. “Of course not,” came the stout-hearted reply. “We’re in the finals and we’re playing at home.”

Some would later say that it was all clever propaganda that cranked up the country to this emotional peak. But it happened too quickly—too spontaneously—for that. This was a case where the people actually led the propagandists. The government’s fears were the opposite—that Dunkirk might lead to overconfidence. It was Winston Churchill himself who stressed that the campaign had been “a colossal military disaster,” and who warned that “wars are not won by evacuations.”

Ironically, Churchill was a prime mover in creating the very mood he sought to dispel. His eloquence, his defiance, his fighting stance were almost bewitching in their appeal. Like Abraham Lincoln in the American Civil War, he was perfectly cast.

Another ingredient was the sense of national participation that Dunkirk aroused. Modern war is so impersonal, it’s a rare moment when the ordinary citizen feels that he’s making a direct contribution. At Dunkirk ordinary Englishmen really did go over in little boats and rescue soldiers. Ordinary housewives really did succor the exhausted troops reeling back. History is full of occasions when armies have rushed to the aid of an embattled people; here was a case where the people rushed to the aid of an embattled army.

Above all, they pulled it off. When the evacuation began, Churchill thought 30,000 might be saved; Ramsay guessed 45,000. In the end, over 338,000 were landed in England, with another 4,000 lifted to Cherbourg and other French ports still in Allied hands. “Wars are not won by evacuations,” but, for the first time, at least Adolf Hitler didn’t have everything his own way. That in itself was cause for celebration.

Curiously, the Germans felt like celebrating too. Years later, they would see it differently. Many would even regard Dunkirk as the turning point of the whole war: If the BEF had been captured, Britain would have been defeated. … If that had happened, Germany could have concentrated all her strength on Russia. … If that had happened, there would have been no Stalingrad. … and so on. But on June 4, 1940, none of these “ifs” were evident. Except, perhaps, for a few disgruntled tank commanders, the victory seemed complete. As the magazine Der Adler put it:

For us Germans the word “Dunkirchen” will stand for all time for victory in the greatest battle of annihilation in history. But for the British and French who were there, it will remind them for the rest of their lives of a defeat that was heavier than any army had ever suffered before.

As for the escape of “a few men” back to England, Der Adler reassured its readers that this was no cause for alarm: “Every single one of these completely demoralized soldiers is a bacillus of disintegration. …” The Völkischer Beobachter told how women and children burst into hysterical tears as the battered troops staggered home.

And they would never be back. Landing craft, “mulberries,” fighter-bombers, sophisticated radar, the whole paraphernalia of the 1944 counterstroke hadn’t even been invented. Viewed with 1940 eyes, it wasn’t all that important to annihilate the BEF. It had been thrown into the sea, and that was enough.

Only the French were bitter. Whether it was Weygand sniping at General Spears in Paris or the lowliest poilu giving upon the eastern mole, the overwhelming majority felt abandoned by the British. It did no good to point out that 123,095 French were rescued by Ramsay’s fleet, 102,570 in British ships.

Goebbels joyfully fanned the flames. The crudest propaganda poured out of Berlin. In a little book called Blende auf-Tiefangriff, correspondent Hans Henkel told how the fleeing British in one rowboat forced several Frenchmen at pistol-point to jump into the sea. The survivors now stood before Henkel, cursing the “sales anglais.”

Then I asked, “But why do you have an alliance with these ‘sales anglais,’ these dirty Englishmen?”

“But we didn’t do this! It was done by our wretched government, which then had the nerve to save them!”

“You didn’t have to keep that government!”

“What could we do? We weren’t asked at all.” And one added, “It’s the Jews who are to blame.”

“Well, fellows, what if we now fought the English together?”

They laughed and said with great enthusiasm, “Yes, we’d join up immediately.”

In London the French naval attaché Admiral Odend’hal did his best to put the matter in perspective. He was a good Frenchman, but at the same time tried to give Paris the British point of view. For his pains, Admiral Darlan wrote back asking whether Odend’hal had “gone into the British camp.”

“I have not gone into the British camp,” Odend’hal replied, “and I would be distressed if you believed it.” To prove his loyalty he then reeled off some of his own run-ins with the British, adding:

But it is not with the English but with the Boches that we are at war. Whatever may have been the British faults, the events of Dunkirk must not leave us with bitterness. …

His advice was ignored.

Such matters of state made little difference to the men of the BEF these early days of June. They only knew that they were home, and even that was hard to believe. As the train carrying Captain John Dodd of the Royal Artillery steamed slowly through the Kentish countryside, he looked out the window at the passing woods and orchards. “Good gun position … good hideout for vehicles … good billets in that farm,” he thought—then suddenly realized he was at last free from such worries.

Signalman Percy Charles, wounded at Cassel, boarded a hospital train for Northfield. It traveled all night and at 7:00 the following morning Charles was awakened by brilliant greenish lights streaming through the window. He glanced around and noticed that the other men in the compartment were crying. Then he looked out the window, and the sight he saw was “what the poets have been writing about for so many centuries.” It was the green English countryside. After the dirt, the blackened rubble, the charred ruins of northern France, the impact of all this fresh greenness was too much. The men simply broke down.

General Brooke, too, felt the contrast. After landing at Dover, he checked in with Ramsay, then drove up to London in a staff car. It was a lovely sunny morning, and he thought of the horror he had just left: burning towns, dead cows, broken trees, the hammer of guns and bombs. “To have moved straight from that inferno into such a paradise within the spell of a few anguished hours made the contrast all the more wonderful.”

In London he conferred briefly with General Dill, then caught the train to Hartley Wintney and home. He was overwhelmingly sleepy now, and walked up and down the compartment in a desperate effort to stay awake. If he so much as closed his eyes, he was afraid he’d fall asleep and miss the station.

His wife and children were waiting on the platform. They whisked him home for a nursery tea, and then to bed at last. He slept for 36 hours.

How tired they all were. Major Richardson of the 4th Division staff had managed only sixteen hours of sleep in two weeks. During one stretch of the retreat he went for 62 hours straight without even a nap. Finally reaching the Division assembly point at Aldershot, he threw himself on a bed and slept for 30 hours. Captain Tufton Beamish, whose 9th Royal Northumberland Fusiliers saved the day at Steenbecque, topped them all with 39 hours.

The rescuers were just as weary. Lieutenant Robin Bill, whose minesweepers were in constant demand, had five nights in bed in two weeks. Lieutenant Greville Worthington, in charge of unloading at Dover, stumbled groggily into the mess one morning. When bacon and eggs were put before him, he fell asleep with his beard in the plate. Commander Pelly, skipper of the destroyer Windsor, discovered that his only chance for a rest was during turn-around time at Dover. Even then he never took a nap, fearing that he wouldn’t have a clear head when he woke up. Instead, he simply sat on the bridge, nursing a whisky and soda. It must have worked, for he never went to sleep for ten days.

No one was more tired than civilian volunteer Bob Hilton. He and his partner, cinema manager Ted Shaw, had spent seventeen hours straight rowing troops out to the skoots and small paddlers from the beach near the mole. Not even Hilton’s training as a physical education instructor prepared him for a test like that, but somehow he managed it. Now the job was done, and they were back at Ramsgate.

They could have used some rest, but they were ordered to help take the little ships back up the Thames to London. To make matters worse, they were assigned the Ryegate II, the balky motor yacht they had sailed to Dunkirk and abandoned when her screws fouled. Wearily they set off, around the North Foreland … into the Thames estuary … and on up the river itself.

The cheering really began after Blackfriars Bridge. Docklands and the City had been too busy to watch the passing of this grimy, oil-stained fleet. But as Ryegate II passed the training ship Discovery, moored alongside the Embankment, her Sea Scouts set up a mighty cheer. It grew ever louder as the yacht continued upstream. Chelsea … Hammersmith … Twickenham … every bridge was lined with shouting people.

Hilton and Shaw ultimately delivered Ryegate II to her boatyard and walked to the tube, where they parted company. After rowing together, side by side, for seventeen hours, it would be reasonable to suppose they remained lifelong friends. As a matter of fact, they never met again.

Hilton took the tube home. As he entered the train, any idea he may have had that he would be greeted as a hero quickly vanished. He had a three-day growth of beard; his clothes were covered with oil; he reeked to high heaven. His fellow passengers quickly moved to the far end of the car.

He reached the front door and discovered he had forgotten his keys. He rang the bell, the door opened, and his wife Pamela was standing there. She took one look at “this tramp” and threw her arms around him. He was a hero to someone, after all.

Written Source Materials

“I AM SORRY I AM unable to get the details and events to dates,” writes Sapper Joe Coles of the 223rd Field Park Company, Royal Engineers. “That was an impossibility even a few days after Dunkirk. This I can only put down to continual fatigue and the atmosphere of continual emergency, 24 hours a day.”

He isn’t the only one with this problem. The days had a way of merging into one another for most of the participants, and the passage of more than 40 years doesn’t make memories any sharper. Personal recollections are indispensable in recapturing the atmosphere and preserving many of the incidents that occurred, but overreliance on human memory can be dangerous too. For that reason, I spent even more time examining the written source materials on Dunkirk than in interviewing and corresponding with those who were there.

The Public Record Office in London was the starting point. The basic Admiralty files dealing with the evacuation are ADM 199/786-796. These have been well mined, but fascinating nuggets still await the diligent digger. For instance, ADM 199/792 contains not only Admiral Wake-Walker’s familiar 15-page account, but an earlier, far more detailed 41-page account that has lain practically untouched through the years—apparently because it is so faint and hard to read. A powerful magnifying glass pays handsome dividends.

ADM 199/788-B and ADM 199/796-B, dealing with ships reluctant to sail, are still “off-limits” to researchers, but it is possible to work around this restriction and piece together the story from other documents.

Additional Dunkirk material pops up elsewhere in the Admiralty files. ADM 199/360 contains day-by-day information on the weather. ADM 199/2205-2206 includes much of the radio traffic between Dover and Dunkirk, and between ships and the shore. ADM 116/4504 has the story of the bizarre “lethal kite barrage.”

The RAF role at Dunkirk can be traced through the Operational Record Books at the PRO, but most of these are too detailed for all but the most exacting scholars. AIR 20/523 does include a useful overview of the Fighter Command’s contribution. The War Office records tend to mire the reader in the campaign, although occasionally some documents bear specifically on the evacuation. WO 197/119 has an excellent account of Brigadier Clifton’s improvised defense at Nieuport; also a report by Colonel G.H.P. Whitfield, area commandant, depicting the chaos in Dunkirk itself until Captain Tennant arrived.

In some ways the most valuable materials at the PRO are the War Cabinet Historical Section series, CAB 44/60-61 and CAB 44/67-69, not released until 1977. The telephone played an enormous role in the decisions involving Dunkirk, and these CAB files contain detailed accounts of many of the calls, along with the texts of pertinent letters and telegrams.

The PRO is not the answer to everything. Probably the most useful single source of information on the evacuation is the three-volume annotated index of participating ships at the Ministry of Defense’s Naval Historical Branch. Labeled “Alphabetical List of Vessels Taking Part, with Their Services,” these volumes are occasionally updated as new information trickles in. They include valuable data on the French ships contributed by the French naval historian Hervé Cras.

Another extremely useful source is an account of RAF operations prepared by historian Denis Richards for the Air Historical Branch. Entitled RAF Narrative: The Campaign in France and the Low Countries, September 1939–June 1940, this volume gives day-by-day coverage of the evacuation.

Then there are the records so lovingly kept by most of the famous British regiments. These usually include battalion war diaries and often individual accounts. I paid most rewarding visits to the regimental headquarters of the Coldstream Guards, the Grenadier Guards, the Queen Victoria’s Rifles, the Gloucestershires, and the Durham Light Infantry.

The formal dispatches of Lord Gort and of Admiral Ramsay complete the official side of the Dunkirk story. Gort’s dispatch appeared as a Supplement to the London Gazette, October 17, 1941; Ramsay’s account as a Supplement to the Gazette of July 17, 1947. They are helpful in fixing dates and places, but neither could be called a distinguished piece of battle literature.

There’s no end to the unofficial material on Dunkirk. The Imperial War Museum is a cornucopia of unpublished diaries, journals, letters, memoirs, and tapes. I found the following especially valuable: Corporal P. G. Ackrell’s account of early turmoil on the Dunkirk waterfront; W.B.A. Gaze’s recollections of the 12th Casualty Clearing Station; Commander Thomas Kerr’s letters to his wife on conditions at Malo and Bray-Dunes; Admiral Sir L. V. Morgan’s reflections as Ramsay’s Chief of Staff; Chaplain R. T. Newcomb’s impressions as a padre caught up in the great retreat; Signalman L. W. Wright’s manuscript, “Personal Experience in the Defence of Calais.”

Few of the shipping companies that provided vessels have saved their records (many were destroyed in the blitz), but the Tilbury Contracting Group has preserved accounts by three of its skippers. Tough’s Boatyard has a useful file of papers and clippings describing its contribution.

Numerous unpublished accounts have been made available to me by participants and their families. These include no fewer than fourteen diaries. Contemporary letters have been another important source, especially an almost-running commentary from Admiral Ramsay to his wife.

The voluminous published material on Dunkirk began to appear even before the evacuation was over. The Times and the other London papers are curiously bland, but not so the local press of the south and southeast coast. Their accounts make fresh, vivid reading even today. The cream of the crop: The Evening Argus (Brighton), June 5; Bournemouth Times and Directory, June 14; The East Kent Times (Ramsgate), June 5; The Kentish Gazette and Canterbury Press, June 8; Folkestone, Hythe and District Herald, June 8; Isle of Thanet Gazette (Margate), June 7; Sheerness Times and Guardian, June 7. The Dover Express is, of course, a “must” for the whole period.

A number of eyewitness accounts also appeared in various periodicals at the time. Some good examples: The Architectural Association Journal, September–November, 1940, “And So—We Went to Dunkirk” (Anonymous); Blackwood’s, August 1940, “Prelude to Dunkirk” by Ian Scott, and in November 1940, “Small Change from Dunkirk” by M.C.A. Henniker; Fortnightly Review, July 1940, “Dunkirk” by E. H. Phillips; King’s Royal Rifle Corps Chronicle, 1940, an important letter by Sub-Lieutenant Roger Wake, RN, who served as acting pier master on the eastern mole, night of June 2–3.

The magazine Belgium—published in London during the war and frankly Allied propaganda—occasionally carried articles on Belgian participants at Dunkirk. Georges Truffant’s piece in the issue of July 31, 1941, deserves special mention.

Through the years newspapers have often marked the anniversary of Dunkirk with fresh material. The Scarborough Evening News, for instance, commemorated the tenth anniversary with a splendid series by “A Green Howard,” appearing April 24, 26, and May 1, 1950. Just about every paper in England must have marked the 40th anniversary. Especially striking was the series in the Manchester Evening News, March 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 1980.

Magazines and service journals are another continuing source of information. Hitler’s role is analyzed in the Army Quarterly, January 1955, “The Dunkirk Halt Order—a Further Reassessment” by Captain B. H. Liddell Hart; and again in the Quarterly, April 1958, “Hitler and Dunkirk” by Captain Robert B. Asprey. The Belgian surrender is examined in History Today, February 1980, “The Tragedy of Leopold III” by James Marshall-Cornwall. Alexander’s takeover and the last days are recalled in the Army Quarterly, April 1972, “With Alexander to Dunkirk” by General Sir William Morgan. But beware of General Morgan’s contention that Admiral Abrial still didn’t plan to evacuate as late as May 31. Alexander himself refutes this in his report.

Particular ships get their due in a host of articles through the years: Malcolm, in “Mostly from the Bridge” by Captain David B. N. Mellis, Naval Review, October 1976; Harvester, in “Dunkirk: The Baptism of a Destroyer” by Hugh Hodgkinson, Blackwood’s, June 1980; Massey Shaw, in “New Bid to Save London Fireboat,” Lloyd’s Log, October 1981; the sprit-sailing barges, in “The Little Ships of Ipswich” by J. O. Whitmore, East Anglian Magazine, July 1950. The medical effects of continuing fear and exhaustion are intelligently discussed by James Dow in Journal of the Royal Naval Medical Service, Spring 1978.

No discussion of periodicals would be complete without some mention of the Dunkirk Veterans Association Journal. This little quarterly not only keeps the DVA members in touch, but serves as a clearinghouse for all sorts of questions and answers concerning the evacuation. It was through its columns, for instance, that the indefatigable Sam Love tracked down the story of the Hird, the ship that returned to France before unloading at Dover.

The books on Dunkirk could fill a warehouse. At least fifteen different titles are devoted entirely to the evacuation or the events leading up to it. From John Masefield’s Nine Days Wonder, 1941, to Nicholas Harman’s Dunkirk: The Necessary Myth, 1980, I have learned from them all. Two stand out especially: A. D. Divine’s Dunkirk, 1944, and Gregory Blaxland’s Destination Dunkirk, 1973. Mr. Divine was there himself with the little ships, while Mr. Blaxland has written the very model of a campaign history—clear, candid, and complete.

Not limited to Dunkirk, but covering the campaign in detail, are two official histories: Captain S. W. Roskill, The Navy at War, 1939-45, 1960; and Major L. F. Ellis, The War in France and Flanders, 1939—1940, 1953. Ellis’s maps should be the envy of every military historian.

Published memoirs and diaries abound, written by both the known and the unknown. The leaders include: Clement R. Attlee, As It Happened, 1954; Duff Cooper, Old Men Forget, 1953; Hugh Dalton, The Fateful Years, 1957; Anthony Eden, The Reckoning, 1965; General Lord Ismay, Memoirs, 1960; R. MacLeod,(ed.), The Ironside Diaries, 1962; Field-Marshal the Viscount Montgomery, Memoirs, 1958; Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Pownall, Diaries, 1972; Major-General Sir Edward Spears, Assignment to Catastrophe, 1954; Sir Arthur Bryant, The Turn of the Tide, 1957, based on the diaries of Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke. In a class by himself: Winston S. Churchill, Their Finest Hour, 1949.

Others are less famous but sometimes more revealing: Sir Basil Bartlett, My First War, 1940; Eric Bush, Bless Our Ship, 1958; Sir H. E. Franklyn, The Story of One Green Howard in the Dunkirk Campaign, 1966; Gun Buster (pseud.), Return via Dunkirk, 1940; Sir Leslie Hollis, One Marine’s Tale, 1956; J. M. Langley, Fight Another Day, 1974; A.R.E. Rhodes, Sword of Bone, 1942; General Sir John G. Smyth, Before the Dawn, 1957; Colonel L.H.M. Westropp, Memoirs, 1970.

Useful biographies cover some of the leading figures. For Admiral Ramsay, see David Woodward, Ramsay at War, 1957; and W. S. Chalmers, Full Cycle, 1958. Lord Gort is gently handled by Sir John Colville in Man of Valour, 1972. Lord Alanbrooke is examined by General Sir David Fraser in Alanbrooke, 1982. Field Marshal Montgomery gets full-dress treatment from Nigel Hamilton in Monty: The Making of a General, 1981.John Rutherford Crosby by George Blake, 1946, is a touching, privately published tribute to a young, little-known sub-lieutenant (later a casualty) that somehow captures the glow of Dunkirk better than many more ambitious books.

Then there are the unit and regimental histories. I have made use of 54 of these volumes, and have come to appreciate the loving care with which all have been prepared. I have relied especially on D. S. Daniell, Cap of Honour (Gloucestershire Regiment), 1951; Patrick Forbes and Nigel Nicolson, The Grenadier Guards in the War of 1939–1945, 1949; Jeremy L. Taylor, Record of a Reconnaissance Regiment, section headed “The Fifth Glosters,” by Anthony Scott, 1950. David Quilter, No Dishonourable Name (2nd Coldstream Guards), 1947; David Russik, The DLI at War, 1952; W. Whyte, Roll of the Drum (King’s Royal Rifle Corps), 1941; and Robin McNish, Iron Division: The History of the 3rd Division, 1978.

Other books are important for specific aspects of the story. The defense of Calais: Airey Neave, The Flames of Calais, 1972. The role of the railways: Norman Crump, By Rail to Victory, 1947, and B. Darwin, War on the Line, 1946. Reaction along the southeast coast: Reginald Foster, Dover Front, 1941. The air battles: Douglas Bader, Fight for the Sky, 1973, Larry Forrester, Fly for Your Life, 1956; B.J. Elian (pseud.), Spitfire! 1942, and Denis Richards, The Royal Air Force, 1939–1945, 1953.

Many of these titles concern the rescue fleet. The little ships: Nicholas Drew (pseud.), The Amateur Sailor, 1946; and A. A. Hoehling, Epics of the Sea, 1977. Role of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution: Charles Vince, Storm on the Waters, 1946. The MTB’s and MA/SB’s: Peter Scott, The Battle of the Narrow Seas, 1945. The Massey Shaw: H. S. Ingham, Fire and Water, 1942. The Medway Queen: The Paddle Steamer Preservation Society, The Story of the Medway Queen, 1975. The Clan MacAlister: G. Holman, In Dangers Hour, 1948.

For the French side of Dunkirk I found especially useful the official French Navy study, Les Forces Maritime du Nord, 1939–1940, prepared by Dr. Hervé Cras. It is not generally available to the public, but I was given access to a set, and also to several important letters written by Admiral J. Odend’hal, head of the French Naval Mission in London, to his superiors in Paris.

Published memoirs of the French leaders are not very satisfactory. Premier Reynaud’s In the Thick of the Fight, 1955, is heavy and self-serving. (He even calls it his “Testimony.”) General Weygand’s Recalled to Service, 1952, comes from an obviously bitter man. Jacques Mordal’s Dunkerque, 1968, tries to combine a memoir with straight history. ‘Jacques Mordal,” incidentally, is a pseudonym used by the historian Hervé Cras. Edmond Perron’s Journal d’un Dunkerquois, 1977, depicts what it was like to be an ordinary citizen of Dunkirk trapped in the battle.

Good general histories include Rear-Admiral Paul Auphan (with Jacques Mordal), The French Navy in World War II, 1957; General André Beaufre, 1940: The Fall of France, 1967; Guy Chapman, Why France Collapsed, 1968; and William L. Shirer, The Collapse of the Third Republic, 1969.

The German archival sources are amazingly complete. It’s difficult to understand how, in the final Götterdämmerung of the Third Reich, so much could have survived, but the very swiftness of the collapse enabled the Allied armies to seize vast quantities of records intact, to be examined and later returned to the owners.

It’s all now in the lovely city of Freiburg, meticulously filed in the Bundesarchiv/Militärarchiv, and the Dunkirk material can be easily located. I found most useful the war diaries and situation reports of Army Groups A and B; the Sixth and Eighteenth Armies; IX, X, XIV, and XIX Corps; 18th Infantry Division; 1st, 2nd, and 10th Panzer Divisions; Luftwaffe Air Fleet 2; Fliegerkorps VIII; First Naval War Command; the motor torpedo boat 550; and the submarine U 62.

The Bundesarchiv also contains a number of unpublished firsthand accounts covering the Dunkirk campaign. File Z A3/50 includes recollections of Field-Marshal Kesselring and Luftwaffe Generals Hans Seidemann and Josef Schmidt. File RH37/6335 contains a vivid account by an unidentified soldier in XIX Corps, covering the whole period from the dash to the sea on May 20 to the fall of Bergues, June 2. File Z 305 is the published diary of Hans Waitzbauer, an observant young radio operator serving in the 102nd Artillery Regiment.

The most important diary of all was that kept by General Franz Haider, Chief of the Army General Staff at the time of Dunkirk. It provides not only an hour-by-hour record of events but candid comments on the various personalities at OKH and OKW. The copy I used is an English translation on file at the Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte in Stuttgart.

The contemporary published material faithfully follows the Nazi line, but the press does convey the feeling of euphoria that swept Germany that intoxicating May and June of 1940. Three good examples: Der Adler, June 11 and 25; Die Wehrmacht, June 19; and Völkischer Beobachter, almost any day.

The German books of the period are just as slanted, but occasionally something useful turns up. Fritz Otto Busch, Unsere Schnellboote im Kanal (no date) gives a good picture of S Boat operations. Herbert W. Borchert, Panzerkampf im Westen (1940) has interesting anecdotes on the thrust of the panzers. Heinz Guderian, Mit den Panzern in Ost una West (1942) is really a compilation of eyewitness stories brought out under Guderian’s name, but it does include a good piece on Calais by a Colonel Fischer, who was there. Hans Henkel, Blende auf-Tiefangriff (1941) has a chapter on Dunkirk that gives a vivid picture of the utter desolation that greeted the entering German troops.

The years since the war have seen an enormous output of German articles and books touching on Dunkirk. The propaganda is gone, often replaced by wishful thinking, second-guessing, and buck-passing. Some of these sources have English translations: Guenther Blumentritt, Von Runstedt: The Soldier and the Man, 1952; Adolf Galland, The First and the Last, 1954; Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader, 1952; Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, Decisive Battles of World War II, 1965; Albert Kesselring, Memoirs, 1953; Werner Kreipe, The Fatal Decisions, 1956; Walter Warlimont, Inside Hitler’s Headquarters, 1964. Pertinent interviews can be found in B. H. Liddell Hart, The German Generals Talk, 1948.

Hitler’s “halt order” is picked apart by all these authorities, as it is by other, less familiar writers who have not yet been translated into English: Wolf von Aaken, Inferno im Westen, 1964; Peter Bor, Gespräche mil Haider, 1950; Gert Buchheit, Hitler der Feldherr; die Zerstörung einst Légende, 1958; Gerhard Engel, Heeres-Adjutant bei Hitler, 1938–1943, 1974; Ulrich Liss, Westfront 1939–1940, 1959.

For general background I often turned to Len Deighton’s Blitzkrieg: From the Rise of Hitler to the Fall of Dunkirk, 1980; William L. Shirer’s classic The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; Telford Taylor’s The March of Conquest, 1958; and John Toland’s immensely readable Adolf Hitler, 1978. All helped fill me in, and Taylor’s appendices proved indispensable.

Acknowledgments

“MY OWN FEELINGS ARE rather of disgust,” writes a member of the 67th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery. “I saw officers throw their revolvers away … I saw soldiers shooting cowards as they fought to be first in a boat.”

“Their courage made our job easy,” recalls a signalman with the Naval Shore Party, describing the same men on the same beaches, “and I was proud to have known them and to have been born of their generation.”

To a clerk in 11th Brigade Headquarters, the evacuation was “absolute chaos.” To a man in III Corps Headquarters, it was a “debacle” … a “disgrace.” But to a dispatch rider with the 4th Division, it was thrilling evidence “that the British were an invincible people.”

Could they all be talking about the same battle? As I pieced the story together, sometimes it seemed that the only thing the men of Dunkirk agreed upon was their desire to be helpful. Over 500 answered my “call to arms,” and there seemed no limit to the time and trouble they were willing to take.

Lieutenant-Colonel James M. Langley spent three days showing me around the perimeter, with special attention to the segment of the line held by the 2nd Coldstream Guards. Harold Robinson, Hon. General Secretary of the Dunkirk Veterans Association, arranged for me to join the DVA’s annual pilgrimage in 1978. It was a splendid opportunity to get to know some of these men personally, listen to their recollections, and feel the ties that bind them together. I’m especially grateful for the time given me by the Reverend Leslie Aitken, Fred Batson, and Arthur Elkin.

The DVA Headquarters in Leeds generously put me in touch with the organization’s branches all over the world, and as a result I’ve received valuable assistance from such varied places as Cyprus, Zimbabwe, Malta, Libya, Italy, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The London Branch was particularly helpful, which calls for an extra word of thanks to Stan Allen, Ted Rabbets, and Bob Stephens. For making my cause so widely known, I’m indebted to Captain L. A. Jackson (“Jacko”), editor of the DVA’s lively Journal.

Everyone was helpful, but as the work progressed, I found myself leaning more and more on certain individuals, whom I came to regard as “my” experts in certain areas. These included the Viscount Bridgeman on events at GHQ; Captain Eric Bush on the Royal Navy; Air Vice-Marshal Michael Lyne on the RAF; Captain Stephen Roskill on the Dynamo Room; John Bridges on the Grenadier Guards; Sam Love on the Hird; W. Stanley Berry on the Small Vessels Pool; and Basil Bellamy on the Ministry of Shipping. General Sir Peter Hunt gave me a crash course on British Regiments, and it’s a lucky American indeed whose tutor on such an intricate matter is a former Chief of the Imperial General Staff.

The participants not only poured out their recollections; they cheerfully rummaged through trunks and attics for long-forgotten papers that might throw further light on their experiences. Old diaries were dusted off by A. Baldwin, J. S. Dodd, F. R. Farley, A. R. Jabez-Smith, W. P. Knight, J. M. Langley, R. W. Lee, I.F.R. Ramsay, and N. Watkin. Others sent in detailed accounts originally written when memories were green—for instance, G. W. Jones, E. C. Webb, and R. M. Zakovitch. Fred Walter contributed a remarkable 31-page handwritten account of Calais, which gave a better picture of that controversial episode than anything else I’ve seen.

Families gallantly pitched in where the participants themselves had passed on. Mrs. E. Barker sent in the diary of her father, Major J. W. Gibson; Roy L. Fletcher contributed a fascinating account by his father, Seaman C. L. Fletcher. Mrs. D. Forward extracted an interesting letter from her brother Syd Metcalf. Helpful widows included Mrs. Nancy Cotton and Mrs. C. Smales.

Two cases deserve special mention. First, David F. Ramsay made available some personal correspondence of his distinguished father, Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, including a file of letters to Mrs. Ramsay that vividly depicts the blend of desperation and determination that permeated the Dynamo Room. Second, through the good offices of my friend Sharon Rutman, Mrs. Sylvia Sue Steell contributed a letter from her gallant uncle, Commander Charles Herbert Lightoller. It mirrors the spirit of the men who sailed the little ships, and shows that Commander Lightoller had lost none of the zeal that served him so well as Second Officer on the Titanic.

Other firsthand accounts were collected and forwarded to me by various branches of the DVA, and for this good work I’m particularly grateful to E. C. Webb of the Glasgow Branch and A. Hordell of the Stoke-on-Trent Branch. A special word of thanks, too, for my friend Edward de Groot, who called my attention to Lieutenant Lodo van Hamel, the only skipper in Admiral Ramsay’s rescue fleet to fly the Dutch flag. Further details on van Hamel’s service were generously provided by Commander F. C. van Oosten, Royal Dutch Navy, Ret., Director of Naval History.

In France I was lucky to have the all-out assistance of Hervé Cras, Assistant Director of the Musée de la Marine, who survived the destroyer Jaguar and the minesweeper Emile Deschamps, both lost at Dunkirk. Besides being a participant, Dr. Cras lent me important French records and arranged for two key interviews: one with Rear-Admiral Paul Auphan, who explained the thinking at Darlan’s headquarters; and the other with Vice-Admiral Gui de Toulouse-Lautrec, who described the loss of his destroyer, Siroco. I only wish Hervé Cras were still alive to read these words of heartfelt gratitude.

At a different level F. Summers (then Fernand Schneider) provided a fascinating glimpse of life on a French minesweeping trawler. Mr. Summers came from Dunkirk, and he enjoyed the unusual distinction of starting the war in the French Navy and ending it in the Royal Navy—all in all, a unique point of view.

In Germany I concentrated on old aviators, since so much of Dunkirk revolved around the successes and failures of the Luftwaffe. I felt my questions were answered with candor, and I’m deeply grateful to Wolfgang Falck, Adolf Galland, and Hans Mahnert. Colonel Rudi Erlemann was only a small boy in 1940, but by the time I cornered him he was Air Attaché at the German Embassy in Washington, and full of insight on the Luftwaffe’s performance.

For other glimpses of the German side, I’m indebted to Willy Feigner, a signalman with the 56th Infantry Division; Vice-Admiral Friedrich Ruge, a wise old sailor full of thoughtful comment on the German Navy’s performance; Georg Smidt Scheeder, photographer with Goebbels’s propaganda company; and Albert Speer, who had at least one conversation with Hitler touching on Dunkirk. Speer felt, incidentally, that anyone who believed that Hitler wanted to “let the English escape” didn’t understand the Fuehrer very well.

The written material on Dunkirk is voluminous; fortunately an army of dedicated archivists and librarians stands ready to aid the probing scholar. At the Imperial War Museum in London, Dr. Noble Frankland’s helpful staff made me feel like one of the family. Rose Coombs, Keeper of Special Collections, is a heroine to countless American researchers, and I’m no exception.

David Brown, head of the Naval Historical Branch, gave me a warm welcome, and his assistant, Miss M. Thirkettle, made available her encyclopedic knowledge of what ships were and what were not at Dunkirk. Andrew Naylor, Librarian of the Royal United Services Institute, and Richard Brech of the Royal Air Force Museum both had many useful suggestions.

The Secretaries of the various Regimental Headquarters scattered throughout Britain were invariably helpful. I’m especially grateful to Lieutenant-Colonel F.A.D. Betts of the Coldstream Guards; Major Oliver Lindsay of the Grenadier Guards; Lieutenant-Colonel R. E. Humphreys of the Durham Light Infantry; Lieutenant-Colonel H.L.T. Radice of the Gloucestershire Regiment; and Lieutenant-Colonel W.R.H. Charley of the Royal Irish Rangers. Miss E. M. Keen of the Queen Victoria’s Rifles Association not only produced records but organized a session where I could meet and talk with several of the veterans of Calais.

On the nautical side, the Association of Dunkirk. Little Ships was always helpful in identifying various vessels. This organization must be the most unusual yacht club in the world: the boat, rather than the owner, is elected to membership. Through the Association’s efforts, 126 of the Dunkirk little ships have now been carefully preserved. The group’s Archivist, John Knight, knows them all and generously shares his knowledge. A special word of thanks to Harry Moss, owner of Braymar, who hosted me at the 1978 Fitting-Out Dinner.

A visit to Tough’s Boatyard paid great dividends in learning how these little ships were collected and manned. Mr. Robert O. Tough, present head of the family enterprise, took time off from a busy day to dig out the yard’s files on the evacuation. I was unable to get to Tilbury, but that didn’t deter Mr. C. E. Sedgwick, Group Secretary of the Tilbury Contracting Group. He generously struck off for me photocopies of the actual reports submitted by the masters of three of the company’s dredges at Dunkirk.

The German archivists matched their British counterparts in patience and helpfulness. Nothing seemed too much trouble, as they tirelessly pulled books and records for my perusal. Heartfelt thanks to the splendid staffs at the Bundesarchiv/Militärarchiv in Freiburg, at the Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte in Stuttgart, and at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich. The Bundesarchiv in Koblenz is a treasure house of photographs, and I appreciate the effort here, too, in providing everything I needed.

A writer can always use helpful leads, and fortunately there were any number of knowledgeable people on both sides of the Atlantic willing to point me in the right direction. In England this loyal band included Leo Cooper, David Curling, David Divine, Dick Hough, Peter Kemp, Ronald Lewin, Roger Machell, Martin Middlebrook, Denis Richards, Stephen Roskill, and Dan Solon. In America there were Dolph Hoehling, Tom Mahoney, Sam Meek, Drew Middleton, Roger Pineau, Ed Schaefer, Jack Seabrook, Bill Stump, and John Toland. Some, like Ronald Lewin and John Toland, took time out from their own books to help me—a sacrifice that perhaps only another writer can truly appreciate.

One bit of unusual generosity deserves separate mention. In 1970 the late Robert Carse wrote Dunkirk—1940, an interesting book that made use of many firsthand accounts. Ten years later—to my grateful surprise—Mr. Carse’s daughter Jean Mitchell and a family friend, Vice-Admiral Gordon McLintock, USN (Ret.), turned over to me Mr. Carse’s notes and correspondence with various Dunkirk participants. Although in the end I did not include any of this material in my book, it served as valuable background and a useful cross-check on my own sources. I deeply appreciate the thoughtfulness of both Mrs. Mitchell and Admiral McLintock.

There remain those who worked directly on the project over the long haul. Marielle Hoffman performed all sorts of heroics as my interpreter/translator in France. Karola Gillich did the same in Germany. I’m also indebted to my friend Roland Hauser, who scanned for me the German press coverage of Dunkirk in 1940 and took on several special research assignments.

In England Caroline Larken excelled in lining up interviews, checking various points, and helping me screen the press. Alexander Peters did useful reconnaissance at the PRO. Susan Chadwick efficiently handled the traffic at Penguin as the accounts poured in. My editor there, Eleo Gordon, constantly performed services above and beyond the call of duty.

In New York Scott Supplee came to town intending to write short-story fiction—and stayed to become the city’s greatest authority on British regimental histories. Preston Brooks, whose father did research for me in 1960, carried on the family tradition. His fluent knowledge of French also came in handy at a critical time. Patricia Heestand not only carried out her share of research, but did yeoman work in compiling the List of Contributors and the Index. Colin Dawkins lent his shrewd eye to the selection and arrangement of illustrations. At Viking my editor, Alan Williams, was as patient and perceptive as ever.

Finally, there are those who lived with the book on an almost daily basis. Dorothy Hefferline handled the voluminous correspondence and helped out on all sorts of dire emergencies. The long-suffering Florence Gallagher deserves a medal for completing her 34th year of deciphering my foolscap.

But all these people—helpful as they were—would not have been enough without the cooperation of the participants listed on the following pages. They get no blame for my mistakes, but a full share of the credit for whatever new light is thrown on the events that unfolded at Dunkirk in the memorable spring of 1940.

List of Contributors

THE MIRACLE OF DUNKIRK was largely the achievement of British soldiers, sailors, fliers, and civilians—all working together—so it is fitting that the same combination has made possible this book. All contributors are listed alphabetically, regardless of rank or title. Where supplied, retired rank and honors are indicated.

Each name is followed by the participant’s unit or service, to give some idea of vantage point; where appropriate, ship names are also included. In a few cases the participant is no longer living, and his account has been made available by some member of the family. These names are marked by an asterisk.

Lt.-Col. G. S. Abbott, TD, JP—BEF, Royal Artillery, 57th Anti-Tank Regiment

Douglas Ackerley—BEF, The King’s Own Scottish Borderers

E. Acklam—BEF, Royal Artillery, 63rd Medium Regiment

L.J. Affleck—BEF, 2nd Division, Signals

Lt.-Cdr. J. L. Aldridge, MBE—HMS Express

Andrew Alexander—BEF, GHQ Signals; HMS Calcutta

P. D. Allan—BEF, Royal Artillery; HMS Vimy

George Allen—BEF

Stanley V. Allen—RN, HMS Windsor

H. G. Amphlett—BEF, 14th City of London Royal Fusiliers

Michael Anthony—RNVR, Aura, Yorkshire Lass

G. W. Arnold—BEF, Royal Engineers, 573rd Field Squadron

E.W. Arthur—RN, HMS Calcutta

Jean Gardiner Ashenhurst—nurse, Royal Victoria Hospital, Folkestone

C.J. Atkinson—RN, HMS Basilisk

Thomas Atkinson—BEF, RASC, 159th Welsh Field Ambulance Mrs. M. Austin—Red Cross nurse, southern England

William H. Bacchus—BEF, RAMC, 13th Field Ambulance

Lt.-Col. L.J.W. Bailey—BEF, Royal Artillery, 1st Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment

Alfred Baldwin—BEF, Royal Artillery; Maid of Orleans

Brigadier D. W. Bannister—BEF, Royal Artillery, 56th Medium Regiment

R. H. Barlow—BEF, RAOC, 11th Infantry Brigade; HMS Sandown

Oliver D. Barnard—BEF, 131st Brigade, Signals; Dorrien Rose

A. F. Barnes, MSM—BEF

Douglas Barnes—BEF, Royal Artillery, 1st Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment; HMS Javelin

S. Barnes—RN, HMS Widgeon

A. F. Barnett—BEF

R. Bartlett—personnel ships, detached duty from Royal Artillery, 64th Regiment, Queen of the Channel

D. F. Batson—BEF, RASC

R. Batten—BEF, 48th Division, Royal Engineers

F.A. Baxter—BEF, RAOC, No. 2 Ordnance Field Park; Bullfinch

H.J. Baxter, BEM—RN, HMS Sandhurst

Ernest E. Bayley—BEF, 3rd Division, Signals; HMS Mosquito

J. Bayliff—BEF, 2nd Division, RASC; HMS Mosquito

C. E. Beard—BEF, RASC; Bullfinch

J. Beardsley—BEF, Royal Engineers

L. C. Beech—BEF, 3rd Division, Signals

Basil E. Bellamy, CB—civilian, Ministry of Shipping

R. Bellamy—BEF, Middlesex Regiment

C. N. Bennett—BEF, 5th Northamptonshire Regiment; HMS Ivanhoe

Lt.-Col. John S. W. Bennett—BEF, Royal Engineers, 250th Field Company

Lt.-Cdr. the Rev. Peter H. E. Bennett—RN, New Prince of Wales, Triton, HMS Mosquito

Myrette Bennington—WRNS, Naval HQ, Dover

W. S. Berry—civilian, Admiralty, Small Vessels Pool

Herbert V. Betts—Constable, Police War Reserve, Ramsgate

Cdr. Robert Bill, DSO, FRICS, FRGS—RN, Naval HQ, Dover; HMS Fyldea

Tom Billson—BEF, RASC; Royal Daffodil

R. H. Blackburn—BEF, CMP; Hird

L. Blackman—BEF, Royal Artillery, 1st Light Anti-Aircraft Battery

Robert Blamire—BEF, Infantry

R.J. Blencowe—BEF, Royal Artillery

G. Bollington—BEF, RASC, 3rd Division

Capt. L.A.A. Border—BEF, RASC, 44th Division; Prudential

George Boston—BEF, 143rd Infantry Brigade

Frank H. Bound—BEF, 2nd Cameronians

D.Bourne—BEF, RASC; HMS Beatrice

Eric Bowman—BEF, 7th Green Howards

Cdr. V.A.L. Bradyll-Johnson—RN, Eastern Arm, Dover breakwater

E.P. Brett—BEF, Signals; HMS Calcutta

Maj. Anthony V. N. Bridge—BEF, 2nd Dorset Regiment Viscount Robert Clive Bridgeman, KBE, CB, DSO, MD, JP—BEF, GHQ acting Operations Officer; HMS Keith, Vivian

John Bridges—BEF, 1st Grenadier Guards; HMS Ivanhoe, HMS

Speedwell Maj.-Gen. P.H.W. Brind—BEF, 2nd Dorset Regiment; HMS

Javelin W. Brown—RN, HMS Grenade, Fenella, HMS Crested Eagle D. A. Buckland—BEF, Royal Artillery, 54th Light Anti-Aircraft

Regiment K. S. Burford—BEF, 1/7th Middlesex Regiment

Frederick J. Burgin—BEF, Royal Engineers Lord Burnham, JP, DL—BEF, 2nd Division, Royal Artillery; HMS Worcester

G. H. Burt—BEF, 2nd Dorset Regiment

Capt. Eric Bush—RN, Adm. Ramsay’s staff, Dunkirk beaches; HMS Hebe

Charles K. Bushe, SJAB—BEF, Royal Artillery, 52nd Field Regiment

R. G. Butcher—BEF, 1st Division

George H. Butler—BEF, Royal Artillery, 2nd Field Regiment; HMS Worcester

Olive M. Butler—civilian, Basingstoke, return of troops

Charles V. Butt—BEF, RASC

Capt. J.S.S. Buxey—BEF, Royal Artillery, 139th Field Regiment; Lady of Mann

Maj. Donald F. Callander, MC—BEF, 1st Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders

Lord Cameron, Kt, DSC, LLD, FRSE, HRSA, FRSGS, DI—RNVR, MTB 107

Lt.-Col. T.S.A. Campbell—BEF, 3rd Division, Signals

Moran Capiat—RNVR, Freshwater

David H. Caple—BEF, RASC, 3rd Division, 23rd Ammunition Company

Maj. B. G. Carew Hunt, MBE, TD—BEF, 1/5th Queen’s Royal Regiment

D. C. Carter—BEF, 2nd Division, 208th Field Company; Fisher Boy

Robert Carter—BEF, 48th Division, Signals

P. Cavanagh—RN, HMS Grenade

P. C. Chambers—BEF, Royal Engineers

Mowbray Chandler—BEF, Royal Artillery, 57th Field Regiment; Fenella, HMS Crested Eagle

R. Chapman—BEF

Percy H. Charles—BEF, 44th Division, Signals; Canterbury

J. Cheek—BEF, RASC, 44th Division; HMS Sabre

Lord Chelwood, MC, DL—BEF, 9th Royal Northumberland Fusiliers; HMS Malcolm

Col. J.M.T.F. Churchill, DSO, MC—BEF, 2nd Manchester Regiment; HMS Leda

J. B. Claridge—BEF, 4th Division, 12th Field Ambulance; HMS Ivanhoe

Charles Clark—BEF, 4th Royal Sussex Regiment

E.Clements—RN, HMS Gossamer

D.J. Coles—BEF, Royal Engineers, 223rd Field Park Company

Col. J.J. Collins, MC, TD—BEF, GHQ, Signals

Sir John Colville, CB, CVO—Assistant Private Secretary to Winston Churchill

A. Cordery—BEF, RASC; HMS Icarus

W. F. Cordrey—BEF, 2nd Royal Warwick Regiment

Henry J. Cornwell—BEF, Royal Engineers, 250th Field Company

Walter Eric Cotton—BEF, Signals

L.H.T. Court—BEF, 2nd Coldstream Guards

David F. Cowie—BEF, 1st Fife and Forfar Yeomanry

Lt.-Cdr. I.N.D. Cox, DSC—RN, HMS Malcolm

F.J. Crampton, RSM—BEF, II Corps, Signals, attached to 51st Heavy Regiment, RA

George Crane—BEF, 12th Royal Lancers

Joyce Crawford-Stuart—VAD Guildford, Surrey

Maj. H. M. Croome—BEF, 5th Division, Field Security

Thomas Henry Cullen—BEF, RAOC, 19th HQ, Field Workshops, attached to 1st Division

Frank Curry—BEF, 1st East Lancashire Regiment

R. G. Cutting—BEF, 44th Division, Signals

Maj. F. H. Danielli—BEF, RASC, 3rd GHQ, Company

George David Davies—RNR, Jacinta, Thetis

F.Davis—BEF, Royal Artillery, 4th Heavy Anti-Aircraft

John Dawes—RN, Naval Shore Party; HMS Wolfhound

H. Delve—BEF, RASC, II Corps; Westwood

Raphael de Sola—civilian, ship’s lifeboat

Charles James Dewey—BEF, 4th Royal Sussex Regiment

C.C.H. Diaper—RN, HMS Sandown

Harold J. Dibbens—BEF, I Corps, 102nd Provost Company;

HMS Windsor Robert Francis Dickman—BEF, 4th Division, Signals; Ben-My-Chree

G.W. Dimond—BEF, Royal Artillery, Brigade Anti-Tank Company

A. D. Divine—civilian, Little Ann, White Wing

K. Dobson—Infantry, Suffolk coast defense

John S. Dodd, TD—BEF, Royal Artillery, 58th Field Regiment; HMS Sabre

A. H. Dodge—BEF, Royal Artillery, 13th Anti-Tank Regiment

Harry Donohoe—BEF, 1st Division, Signals

Maj.-Gen. Arthur J. H. Dove—GHQ; HMS Wolfhound

James Dow—Royal Naval Medical Service; HMS Gossamer, HMS Mosquito

James F. Duffy—BEF, Royal Artillery, 52nd Heavy Regiment

F.G. Dukes—BEF, Signals, Division HQ HMS Shikari

Reginald E. Dunstan—BEF, RAMC, 186th Field Ambulance

Col. L. C. East, DSO, OBE—BEF, 1/5th Queen’s Royal Regiment

R. G. Eastwell—BEF, 5th Northamptonshire Regiment; HMS Niger

G.Edkins—civilian, Surrey, return of troops

R. Edwards—BEF, RASC, ambulance driver

R. Eggerton—BEF; HMS Esk

A. L. Eldridge, RMPA, RMH—BEF, 3rd Grenadier Guards

Arthur Elkin, MM—BEF, 3rd Division, Military Police, General Montgomery’s bodyguard

A. W. Elliott—civilian, Warrior

C. W. Elmer—BEF, 2nd Coldstream Guards

Charles J. Emblin—RN, HMS Basilisk

Lt.-Col. H. M. Ervine-Andrews, VC—BEF, 1st East Lancashire Regiment

Alwyne Evans—BEF, 5th Gloucestershire Regiment; hospital carrier Paris

Col. H. V. Ewbank—BEF, 50th Division, Signals; HMS Sutton

Cdr. R. G. Eyre—RN MA/SB 10

Julian Fane—BEF, 2nd Gloucestershire Regiment

F. R. Farley—BEF, RAOC, 1/7thMiddlesex Regiment; HMS Halcyon

F. A. Faulkner—BEF, 1st Division, Signals

H. W. Fawkes—BEF, RAOC, electrician

Rosemary Keyes Fellowes—WRNS, Naval HQ, Dover

F. Felstead—BEF, Signals; HMS Royal Eagle

John Fernald—civilian, ship’s lifeboat

Col. John H. Fielden—BEF, 5th Lancashire Fusiliers

Maj. Geoffrey H. Fisher—BEF, RASC

Rear-Adm. R. L. Fisher, CB, DSO, OBE, DSC—HMS Wakeful, Comfort, Hird

Carl Leonard Fletcher, DSM—RN, HMS Wolfhound, HMS Crested Eagle, Fenella, HMS Whitehall

B.G.W. Flight—BEF, RASC, No. 1 Troop Carrying Company

E. H. Foard, MM—BEF, Royal Engineers, No. 2 Bridge Company, RASC

Capt. R. D. Franks, CBE, DSO, DSC—RN, HMS Scimitar

K. G. Fraser—Merchant Navy, Northern Prince, London docks

Brig. A. F. Freeman, MC—BEF, Signals, HQ, II Corps

W. C. Frost—BEF, RAMC, 11th Casualty Clearing Station

Mrs. D. M. Fugeman—civilian, Wales, return of troops

Ronald Wilfred Furneaux—BEF, 1/5th Queen’s Royal Regiment

H. E. Gentry—BEF, Royal Artillery, 32nd Field Regiment; HMS Malcolm

Lottie Germain—refugee; Sutton

*Maj. J. W. Gibson, MBE—BEF, 2nd East Yorkshire Regiment; HMS Lord Howe

Alfred P. Gill—BEF, RASC, 44th Division, 132nd Field Ambulance; Hird

Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard, KCB, CBE, MA—RAF, Air Adviser to Lord Gort

Eric V. Goodbody—RN, Yeoman of Signals, GHO; HMS Westward Ho

Mark Goodfellow—BEF, RASC, 55th West Lancashire Division

Thomas A. Gore Browne—BEF, 1st Grenadier Guards

Bessie Gornall—civilian, London, return of troops

S. E. Gouge—BEF, RASC; HMS Intrepid

William Douglas Gough—BEF, Royal Artillery, 1st Medium Regiment

Captain J. R. Gower, DSC—RN, HMS Albury

Air Vice-Marshal S. B. Grant, CB, DFC—RAF, 65 Squadron, Hornchurch

Col. J.S.S. Gratton, OBE, DL—BEF, 2nd Hampshire Regiment

D.K.G. Gray—BEF, RAMC, 12th Casualty Clearing Station

A. H. Greenfield—BEF, Royal Artillery, Anti-Tank Regiment G. A. Griffin—BEF, RASC, driver

E. N. Grimmer—BEF, Royal Engineers, 216th Field Company; HMS Malcolm

Bob Hadnett, MM—BEF, 48th Division, Signals, Dispatch Rider

E. A. Haines—BEF, 1st Grenadier Guards; HMS Speedwell

David Halton—BEF, 1st Division, Signals

V. Hambly—civilian, Ashford, Kent, return of troops

M. M. Hammond—BEF, RAMC, 1st Field Ambulance

Lt.-Col. C. L. Hanbury, MBE, TD, DL—BEF, Royal Artillery, 99th Field Regiment

E. S. Hannant—BEF, Infantry, Machine-Gunner

W. Harbord—BEF, RASC

George Hare—BEF, I Corps, 102nd Provost Company; HMS Windsor

S. Harland—BEF, 2nd Welsh Guards

R. A. Harper—BEF, RAF, Lysander spotter plane, attached to 56th Highland Medium Artillery; HMS Grafton

K.E.C. Harrington—BEF, 48th Division, RAMC, 143rd Field Ambulance

E.Harris—BEF, Royal Engineers, 135th Excavator Company; HMS Calcutta

F.H. Harris—BEF, 4/7th Royal Dragoons

Leslie F. Harris—BEF, RAMC, 7th Field Ambulance

Tom Harris—BEF, Royal Engineers, I Corps, 13th Field Survey Company; hospital carrier Paris

Thomas Collingwood Harris—BEF, RAOC, No. 1 Recovery Section

Ted Harvey—civilian, Moss Rose, Cockle Boats, Letitia

Jeffrey Haward, MM—BEF, 3rd Division, Machine Gun Battalion

Maj. S. S. Hawes—BEF, RASC, 1st Division; HMS Grafton, HMS Wakeful

E. A. Hearl—BEF, RAMC, 132nd Field Ambulance

Ernest A. Heming—BEF, RAOC, Field Rank Unit

Oliver Henry—BEF, Infantry, Machine Gun Battalion

Col. J. Henton Wright, OBE, TD, DL—BEF, Royal Artillery, 60th Field Regiment; Royal Sovereign

Sam H. Henwood—BEF, 3rd Division, Signals; HMS Sandown

Maj. John Heron, MC, TD—BEF, 2nd Dorset Regiment

Thomas Hewson—BEF, RAOC, attached to Field Artillery Unit

Col. Peter R. Hill, OBE, TD—BEF, RAOC, II Corps, 2nd Ordnance Field Park

C.F.R. Hilton, DSC—civilian, Ryegate II

Michael Joseph Hodgkinson—BEF, RAOC, 14th Army Field Workshop

William Holden—BEF, 3rd Division, Signals; HMS Sandown

Robert Walker Holding—BEF, Royal Sussex Regiment; HMS Codrington

F. Hollis—BEF, 7th Green Howards

Brig. A. Eric Holt—BEF, 2nd Manchester Regiment

C. G. Hook—BEF, RASC; Tynwald

Alan Hope—BEF, Royal Artillery, 58th Field Regiment

R. Hope—BEF, 2nd Manchester Regiment

Ronald Jeffrey Hopper—BEF, RASC, 50th Division

Richard Hoskins—BEF, RASC, driver

Brig. D.J.B. Houchin, DSO, MC—BEF, 5th Division

H. Howard—BEF, RASC, 4th Division

Jeffrey Howard, MM—BEF, 1/7th Middlesex Regiment

Dennis S. Hudson—RN, signalman, HMS Scimitar

Mrs. Pat Hunt—civilian, Portland and Weymouth, return of troops

Gen. Sir Peter Hunt, GCB, DSO, OBE—BEF, 1st Cameron Highlanders

Major Frank V. Hurrell—BEF, RASC

Freddie Hutch—RAF, 4th Army Cooperation Squadron; Maid of Orleans

L. S. Hutchinson—BEF, Royal Artillery, Medium Regiment

W.J. Ingham—BEF, Field Security Police; HMS Sabre

A. R. Isitt—BEF, 2nd Coldstream Guards; HMS Vimy

Byron E.J. Iveson-Watt—BEF, Royal Artillery, 1st Anti-Aircraft Regiment; HMS Worcester

A. R. Jabez-Smith—BEF, 1st Queen Victoria’s Rifles

Albert John Jackson—Army sergeant attached to HMS Golden Eagle

Evelyn Jakes—civilian, return of troops

Maj. H. N. Jarvis, TD—BEF, Royal Artillery, 53rd Medium Regiment

Alec Jay—BEF, 1st Queen Victoria’s Rifles

E. Johnson—BEF, Royal Artillery

Walton Ronald William Johnson—RN, HMS Scimitar

Gen. Sir Charles Jones, GCB, CBE, MC—BEF, 42nd Division, 127th Brigade

George W. Jones—BEF, 1st Grenadier Guards

Dr. Adrian Kanaar—BEF, RAMC, Field Ambulance; HMS Calcutta

R. Kay—BEF, GHQ, Signals

Maj. E. E. Kennington—BEF, Royal Engineers, 203rd Field Park Company; HMS Wolsey

Professor W. E. Kershaw, CMG, VRD, MD, DSC-RNVR, HMS Harvester

A. P. Kerstin—BEF, RASC, 1st Division

A. King—BEF, III Corps HQ; HMS Impulsive

Major H. P. King-Frettš—BEF, 2nd Dorsetshire Regiment

John F. Kingshott—BEF, RAOC, First A.A. Brigade Workshop

F. W. Kitchener—BEF, Royal Artillery

Jack Kitchener—BEF, RASC; Isle of Gurnsey

William P. Knight—BEF, Royal Engineers, No. 1 General Base Depot

Arthur Knowles—BEF, 2nd Grenadier Guards, 12th Casualty Clearing Station

George A. Kyle—BEF, 1st Fife and Forfar Yeomanry; Killarney

A. E. Lambert—BEF, Royal Artillery, 5th Heavy Regiment

Col. C. R. Lane—BEF, 3rd Division, Signals

Lt.-Col. J. M. Langley—BEF, 2nd Coldstream Guards, 12th Casualty Clearing Station

A. Lavis—BEF, Royal Artillery, Anti-Tank Regiment

George Lawrence—BEF, Middlesex Regiment

John Lawrence—BEF, 42nd Division, 126th Brigade

W. G. Lawrence—BEF, Royal Artillery; HMS Vivacious

W. Lawson—RNVR, HMS Codrington, LDG Signalman

A. E. Lear—BEF, 2nd North Staffordshire Regiment; HMS Codrington

David Learmouth—BEF, RASC, Ammunition Company

Robert Lee—BEF, Royal Artillery, 57th Field Regiment; HMS Worcester

Robert W. Lee—BEF, RASC, 44th Division; Mersey Queen

T.J. Lee—BEF, 3rd Division, Royal Artillery, 7th Field Regiment; Isle of Thanet

Ron Lenthal—civilian, Tough’s Boatyard, Teddington

A. E. Lewin—BEF, 2nd Middlesex Regiment

W. C. Lewington—BEF, RASC, 2nd Corps

Cyril Lewis—BEF, Royal Artillery, 139th Anti-Tank Brigade, attached to Northamptonshire Regiment

G. E. Lille—RAF, 264th Fighter Squadron

Thomas H. Lilley—BEF, Royal Engineers, 242nd Field Company

Lt.-Col. S.J. Linden-Kelly, DSO—BEF, 2nd Lancashire Fusiliers; HMS Shikari

Maj. A. E. Lindley, RCT—BEF, 11th Infantry Brigade; Pangbourne

Margaret Loat—civilian, Warrington, Lancashire, return of troops

Reginald Lockerby, TD, Dip. MA, Inst. M—BEF, RAOC, 2nd Ordnance Field Park; HMS Venomous

Frederick Louch—BEF, RAMC, 13th Ambulance Train

S. V. Love—BEF, RAMC, 12th Field Ambulance; Hird

R.J. Lovejoy—BEF, RASC, 2nd Buffs

G. E. Lucas—BEF, Royal Artillery, 2nd Anti-Aircraft Battery

D. L. Lumley—BEF, 2nd Northamptonshire Regiment; Motor Torpedo Boat

Air Vice-Marshal Michael D. Lyne, CB, AFC, MBIM, DL—RAF, 19th Fighter Squadron

George M. McClorry, MM—RNR, Whale Island

Ivan McGowan—BEF, 57th Medium Regiment, Royal Artillery; HMS Express

Capt. B.D.O. Maclntyre, DSC—RN, HMS Excellent

Capt. A. M. McKillop, DSC—RN, Block Ships, Westcove

W. McLean—BEF, 1st Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders; St. Andrew

A. A. McNair—BEF, Royal Artillery, 5th Division

H. P. Mack—RN, HMS Gossamer, Comfort

Brig. P.E.S. Mansergh, OBE—BEF, 3rd Division, Signais

A.N.T. Marjoram—RAF, 220th Bomber Squadron

Frederick William Marlow—BEF, 44th Division, Signals; Royal Daffodil

Douglas J. W. Marr—BEF; HMS Venomous

R. W. Marsh—BEF, Royal Engineers, 698th General Construction Company

Arthur Marshall—BEF, 2nd Corps, Internal Security Unit

J. W. Martin—RN, HMS Saladin

A. J. Maskell—BEF, The Buffs

R. T. Mason—BEF, Signals, attached to 2nd Medium Regiment, Royal Artillery

Lt.-Cdr. W.J. Matthews—RN, Secretary to Commander of Minesweepers, Dover

Arthur May—BEF, Royal Artillery, 3rd Medium Regiment

H. T. May—BEF, 1st Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry

Pip Megrath—civilian, village near Guildford, return of troops

Kenneth W. Meiklejohn—BEF, Royal Artillery, 58th Field Regiment, and 65th Field Regiment, Chaplain; Isle of Man

Capt. D.B.N. Mellis, DSC—RN, HMS Malcolm

Harold Meredith—BEF, RASC, with Royal Engineers at Maginot Line

*Syd Metcalfe—BEF, Signals

N. F. Minter—BEF, RAMC, 4th Division, 12th Field Ambulance

Wilfrid L. Miron—BEF, 9th Sherwood Foresters

E. Montague—civilian, return of troops

Philip Moore—BEF, RASC, 50th Division, 11th Troop Carrying Company

Maj. S.T. Moore, TD—BEF, RASC, attached to 32nd Field Regiment; HMS Oriole, HMS Lord Collingwood

R. W. Morford—Merchant Navy, captain of Hythe

T.J. Morgan—civilian, Gallions Reach

Maj.-Gen. James L. Moulton, CB, DSO, OBE—Royal Marines, Staff officer, GHQ,

W. Murphy—civilian, Dover, return of troops

R. A. Murray Scott, MD—BEF, RAMC, 1st Field Ambulance, 1st Guards Brigade

Arthur Myers—BEF, RASC, Mobile Workshop

F. Myers—BEF, Royal Artillery, attached to 2nd Grenadier Guards

Lt.-Col. E. R. Nanney Wynn—BEF, 3rd Division, Signals; HMS Sandown

John W. Neeves—RN, HMS Calcutta

Eddie Newbould—BEF, 1st King’s Own Scottish Borderers

Philip Newman, MD—BEF, RAMC, 12th Casualty Clearing Station

R. Nicholson—BEF, GDSM Company Runner

G.F. Nixon—RN, naval shore party; Lord Southborough

F. Noon—BEF, Royal Artillery, 53rd Field Regiment, 126th Brigade; HMS Whitshed W.C.P. Nye—BEF, 4th Royal Sussex Regiment

W. Oakes—BEF, 7th Cheshire Regiment

W. H. Osborne, C. Eng., FRI, NA—civilian, William Osborne Ltd., boatyard, Littlehampton

George Paddon—BEF, 2nd Dorset Regiment; HMS Anthony

Leslie R. Page—BEF, RAOC, 44th Division

T. Page—BEF, RASC, II Corps

Mary Palmer—civilian, Ramsgate, return of troops

James V. Parker—RN, 2nd Chatham Naval Barracks, beaches; HMS Grenade

Maj. C. G. Payne—BEF, Royal Artillery, 69th Medium Regiment; Tynwald

Thomas F. Payne—BEF, 4th Royal Sussex Regiment; HMS Medway Queen

Grace Pearson—civilian, GPO, Bournemouth, return of troops

L. A. Pell—BEF, Royal Engineers

Rear-Adm. Pelly, CB, DSO—RN, HMS Windsor

N.J. Pemberton—BEF, 2nd Middlesex Regiment

Brig. G.W.H. Peters—BEF, 2nd Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment

Pamela Phillimore—WRNS, naval headquarters, Dover

Lt.-Col. John W. Place—BEF, 2nd North Staffordshire Regiment

H. Playford—civilian, Naval Store House of H. M. Dockyard, Sheerness

T. J. Port—RN, HMS Anthony

F.J. Potticary—BEF, 1st/5th Queen’s Royal Regiment; Royal Daffodil

J. W. Poulton—BEF, Royal Artillery, 65th Heavy And-Aircraft Regiment

Lt.-Cdr. H. B. Poustie, DSC—RN, HMS Keith, St. Abbs

Stan Priest—BEF, RAMC, III Corps; Mona’s Isle

Kathleen M. Prince—civilian, Bournemouth, return of troops

David W. Pugh, DSO, MD, FRCP—RNVR, HMS Whitshed, HMS Hebe

M. F. Purdy—civilian, London, return of troops

Edgar G. A. Rabbets—BEF, 5th Northamptonshire Regiment

Mrs. R. L. Raft—civilian, Ramsgate, return of troops

Maj. I.F.R. Ramsay—BEF, 2nd Dorset Regiment

R.R.C. Rankin—BEF, GHQ, Signals

Maj.-Gen. R. St. G. T. Ransome, CB, CBE, MC—BEF, I Corps HQ.

Col. M. A. Rea, OBE, MB—BEF, RAMC, Embarkation Medical Officer

Eric Reader—BEF, Royal Engineers, 293rd Field Park Company, III Corps; HMS Brighton Belle, HMS Gracie Fields

Edith A. Reed—ATS, BEF, GHQ, 2nd Echelon, Margate

James Reeves—BEF, 2nd Essex Regiment

A. G. Rennie—BEF, Royal Artillery, 140th Army Field Regiment; Côte d’Argent

Walter G. Richards—BEF, RASC, No. 2 L of C Railhead Company, based at Albert (Somme)

Gen. Sir Charles Richardson, GCB, CBE, DSO—BEF, 4th Division, Deputy Assistant Quartermaster General

D. G. Riddall—BEF, Royal Artillery, Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment

C. A. Riley—BEF, Royal Engineers; HMS Codrington

H.J. Risbridger—BEF, RASC; HMS Icarus

George A. Robb—RN, Isle of Thanet

Kenneth Roberts—BEF, RAMC, 141st Field Ambulance; HMS Worcester

W. Roberts, MM—BEF, 1st East Lancashire Regiment

Maj. R. C. Robinson—BEF, Royal Artillery, 85th Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment

H. Rogers—BEF, Royal Artillery, Signals

Alfred Rose—BEF, Royal Artillery, 63rd Medium Regiment

Capt. Stephen Roskill—RN, Dynamo Room, Dover

Tom Roslyn—BEF

P. H. Rowley—BEF, 4th Division, Signals

R. L. Rylands—BEF, HQ, 12th Infantry Brigade

F. C. Sage—BEF, RASC, I Corps, Petrol Company

E. A. Salisbury—BEF, 4th Division, Signals

Dr. Ian Samuel, OBE—BEF, RAMC, 6th Field Ambulance

A. D. Saunders, BEM—RN, HMS Jaguar

Frank Saville—BEF, 2nd Cameronians

Maj. Ronald G. H. Savory—RASC, Ramsgate, Dunkirk beaches; Foremost 101

W.J.U. Sayers—BEF, Royal Sussex Regiment; HMS Wolsey

E.A.G. Scott—BEF, Royal Engineers

Guy Scoular, OBE, MBChB, DPH—BEF, RAMC, 2nd North Staffordshire Regiment; HMS Codrington

Maj. M.C.P. Scratchley—BEF, RAOC, 3rd Army Field Workshop

Lt.-Col. W. H. Scriven—BEF, RAMC; HMS Shikari

Robert Seviour—BEF, 2nd Dorset Regiment

Herbert G. Sexon—BEF, RAOC, 1st East Surrey Regiment

R. Shattock—BEF, Royal Artillery, 32nd Field

Regiment Reginald B. Short—BEF, Royal Artillery, 57th Field Regiment

Leslie R. Sidwell—civilian, Cotswolds, return of troops

A. E. Sleight—BEF, Royal Artillery, 60th Army Field Regiment; HMS Salamander

Maj. A. D. Slyfield, MSM—BEF, Royal Artillery, 20th Anti-Tank Regiment; Hythe

B. Smales—BEF, headquarters clerk, Signals

Douglas H. Smith—BEF, 5th Northamptonshire Regiment

Evan T. Smith—BEF, RASC; HMS Jaguar

Leslie M. Smith—BEF, Royal Artillery, 58th Field Regiment; Beagle

Capt. George G. H. Snelgar—BEF, RASC, motor transport company

Col. D. C. Snowdon, TD—BEF, 1stQueen’s Royal Regiment; Mona ‘s Isle

Mrs. Gwen Sorrill—Red Cross nurse, Birmingham, return of troops

Christopher D. South—BEF, Hopkinson British Military Mission, Belgium; HMS Worcester

E.J. Spinks—BEF, Royal Artillery, gunner

H. Spinks—BEF, 1st King’s Own Scottish Borderers

James Spirritt—BEF, RASC, 4th Division; HMS Abel Tasman

Kenneth Spraggs—BEF, Royal Artillery, 92nd Field Regiment

Raie Springate—civilian, Ramsgate; Fervant

J. S. Stacey—RNR, HMS Brighton Belle

John W. Stacey—BEF, Signals, No. 1 HQ, Signals; HMS Javelin

A. Staines—RN, HMS Hebe

Wing Commander Robert Stanford-Tuck, DSO, DFC—RAF, 92nd Fighter Squadron

Jeanne Michez Stanley—French civilian married to BEF S/Sgt. Gordon Stanley

R.J. Stephens—BEF, Royal Artillery, 2nd Searchlight Regiment

Charles Stewart—BEF, Royal Engineers, 209th Field Company

Rowland Stimpson—civilian, Burgess Hill, return of troops

G. S. Stone—RAF, Lysander spotter plane W. Stone—BEF, 5th Royal Sussex Regiment

H.W. Stowell, DSC, VRD—RNVR, HMS Wolfhound

William Stratton—BEF, RASC, troop carrier; HMS Harvester

Samuel Sugar—BEF, RASC, 50th Division; HMS Grafton

F. Summers—French Navy, St. Cyr; Dunkirk itself

Mrs. E.J. Sumner—civilian, Kent, return of troops

S. Sumner—BEF, Royal Fusiliers

Lt.-Col. G. S. Sutcliff, OBE, TD—BEF, 46th Division, 139th Brigade; HMS Windsor

John Tandy—BEF, 1st Grenadier Guards

John Tarry—Merchant Navy, Lady Southborough

Lt.-Cdr. Arthur C. Taylor, MM, Chevalier de l’Or—RNR, Calais

Billy Taylor—BEF, Royal Artillery, Heavy Anti-Aircraft

Gordon A. Taylor—BEF, RASC, 1st Division

L. Taylor—civilian, Local Defence Volunteer Force, Isle of Sheppey

Maj. R. C. Taylor—BEF, ist East Surrey Regiment, Signals; St. Andrew

James E. Taziker—BEF, Royal Artillery, 42nd Division

Col. N.B.C. Teacher, MC—BEF, Royal Artillery, 5th Regiment Royal Horse Artillery

A. H. Tebby—BEF, 1st King’s Shropshire Light Infantry

Dora Thorn—civilian, Margate, return of troops

J. P. Theobald—BEF, Royal Artillery, 58th Medium Regiment

Syd Thomas—BEF, I Corp, 102nd Provost Company

S. V. Holmes Thompson—BEF, Royal Artillery, 3rd Searchlight Regiment; Queen of the Channel

D. Thorogood—BEF, 2nd Coldstream Guards

W. H. Thorpe—RNR, HMS Calvi

H. S. Thuillier, DSO—BEF, Royal Artillery, 1st Anti-Aircraft Regiment; HMS Shikari

F. Tidey—BEF, 2nd Royal Norfolk Regiment

S. V. Titchener—BEF, RASC

Col. Robert P. Tong—BEF, Staff officer, GHQ

C. W. Trowbridge—BEF, Royal Artillery, 1st Medium Regiment

Joseph Tyldesley—BEF, RASC, attached to No. 2 Artillery Company GHQ,

Derek Guy Vardy—BEF, Royal Artillery; HMS Dundalk

W. R. Voysey—BEF, 3rd Division, Signals

Maj.-Gen. D.A.L. Wade—BEF, GHQ, Signals

C. Wagstaff—BEF, Royal Artillery, searchlight detachment

Dr. David M. Walker—BEF, RAMC, 102nd Casualty Clearing Station; Prague

George Walker—RN, HMS Havant

William S. Walker—BEF, Royal Artillery, 5th Medium Regiment

Fred E. Walter—BEF, 1st Queen Victoria’s Rifles

Rupert Warburton—BEF, 48th Division, Provost Company

Alwyn Ward—BEF, RAOC, 9th Army Field Workshop

W.J. Warner—BEF, Royal Artillery, 60th Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment

Noel Watkin—BEF, Royal Artillery, 67th Field Regiment; Prague

J. T. Watson—BEF, RAMC, General Hospital No. 6

Maj. Alan G. Watts—BEF, 2nd Dorset Regiment

Capt. O. M. Watts—civilian, London, recruiting for Little Ships

E. C. Webb—BEF, Royal Artillery, 99th Field Regiment; HMS Vrede, HMS Winchelsea

S. G. Webb—BEF, Royal Artillery, 52nd Anti-Tank Regiment

Frank S. Westley—BEF, Signals

F.G.A. Weston—BEF, RASC; Maid of Orleans

George White—BEF, 7th Green Howards

Sir Meredith Whittaker—BEF, 5th Green Howards

H. Whitton—BEF, 4th Division, Signals

Miss G. E. Williams—nursing sister, hospital ship St. David

Maj. G. L. Williams—BEF, 3rd Division, 8th Field Ambulance

S/Sgt. W. G. Williams—BEF, RASC, 44th Division

Maj. Gordon D. Wilmot—BEF, 2nd Royal Scottish Fusiliers

George T. Wilson—BEF, King’s Own Royal Regiment

S.J. Wilson—BEF, Royal Engineers

Brigadier R. C. Windsor Clive—BEF, 2nd Coldstream Guards

C. E. Wingfield—BEF, 3rd Division, Royal Engineers

Mrs. F.A.M. Wood—Public Health Nurse, Bournemouth, return of troops

C. Woodford—BEF, Infantry, The Buffs; HMS Whitehall

G. N. Woodhams, TD—BEF, Royal Artillery, Anti-Aircraft

N. D. Woolland—BEF, Royal Engineers

Frank Woolliscroft—BEF, RASC, 42nd Division

E. S. Wright, MM—BEF, 42nd W/T Section, Signals

Percy H. Yorke—BEF, RAMC, 149th Field Ambulance; HMS Princess Elizabeth

Robert M. Zakovitch—BEF, French interpreter, attached to 4th Brigade

Index

A  |  B  |  C  |  D  |  E

F  |  G  |  H  |  I  |  J

K  |  L  |  M  |  N  |  O

P  |  Q  |  R  |  S  |  T

U  |  V  |  W  |  Y  |  Z

Aa Canal, 27, 29, 30, 36, 69, See also “Canal Line”

Abbeville, 6, 16, 26

Abrial, Admiral Jean, 76, 78, 94, 110, 143, 179-83, 229-30, 252, 256, 259, 268, 269

Ackrell, Corporal P. C. 55, 128

Adam, Lieutenant-General Sir Ronald. 37, 76, 78, 81

Admiralty: “Dynamo” implemented, 37, 41, 46, 58; French, relations with, 91, 109; destroyers, use of, 86, 144-45, 168, 228; Wake-Walker sent, 152; daylight operations ended; 229-30; “Dynamo” ends, 259, See also Little Ships; Small Vessels Pool

Ailly, 256

Alaurent, General. 267, 274

Albert, 3, 21

ALC (Army Landing Craft), 89, 140, See also Little Ships

Alexander, Major-General Harold; 166, 171, 180-83, 229-30, 246-47

Allan. Gunner P. D., 76

Allison, Commander, 228

Amiens, 6, 16, 18, 21

Anthony, 87

Antiaircraft guns, 80-81

Antitank guns, 3, 13, 21

Archdale, Major O. A., 92

Armentieres, 35, 54, 150

Arras, 1, 13, 14, 15, 16, 21, 29, 30, 51, 167; counterattack at, 18-19, 27, 273

Atrocities, by SS units, 74, 106-7

Audresselles, 69

Auphan, Captain Paul. 90, 92, 174, 175, 193

Aura, 225

Austin, Captain John, 76, 235

Austin. Captain R. C., 129

Autocarrier, 244, 248

Bacchus, Private Bill, 52

Backhouse, Admiral Sir Roger, 42, 270

Baker, Sergeant Jack, 70

Baldwin, Private Alfred, 189

Barker, Lieutenant-General Michael, 112, 171, 181

Barnard, Private Oliver, 145

Barris, Seaman Bill, 212

Barthélémy, General, 261

Bartlett, Captain Basil, 123-24

Bartlett, Seaman George, 98

Basilisk, 216-17, 219

Bassett, Colonel Sam, 48

Bastion 32 (French Headquarters, Dunkirk), 36, 76, 94, 100, 179-83, 229, 256, 259, 266

Batson, Lance Corporal Fred, 81

Beamish, Captain Tufton, 13, 278

Beaufrère, General, 200, 234, 266, 267

Beckwith-Smit, Brigadier, M B., 34

Belgium: Allied advance into, 8, 12; Allied withdrawal from, 2, 6, 8-12; participation in fighting, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 33, 36, 78; surrender of, 100-104, 134, 150, 175

Bellamy, Basil, 45, 89

Ben-My-Chree, 223, 241

Bennett. Private C. N., 186

Bennett, 2nd Lieutenant John S. W., 165

Bennett, Sub-Lieutenant Peter, 161, 196

Bergues, 36, 76, 78, 79, 200, 232, 250

Bergues-Furnes Canal, 147, 200, 231-33

Berry, W. Stanley. 40, 41, 46, 89

Berthon, Captain, 216-17, 219

Biddneph, Commander M. A. O., 189

Bideford, 142

Bill, Lieutenant Robin, 131, 135, 138-39, 278

Billotte, General Gaston, 16, 18, 20, 21

Birnbacher, Captain-Lieutenant Heinz, 119, 120

Blackburn, Staff Sergeant Reg, 125

Blanchard, General J. G. M., 18, 21, 22, 23, 24, 76, 78, 92, 100, 108, 110, 146, 181

Block ships, 251-52, 260-61

Blumentritt, Colonel Guenther, 64

Bock, General Colonel Fedor von, 3, 21, 22, 25, 32, 33, 105, 150, 197

Bonnie Heather, 193

Booth, Lieutenant-Commander B. R., 139

Border Regiment, 5th Battalion, 232

Bougrain, General, 146

Boulogne, 16, 17, 18, 21, 26, 33, 41-43, 48, 61, 62, 69

Bourbourg, 25, 27, 272

Bourrasque, 169

Boydd, Private Paddy, 189

Boyes Anti-Tank Rifles, 13, 107, 200, 233

Brammall. Lieutenant C. V., 68

Brauchitsch, General Colonel Walther von, 30, 31, 210

Brav-Dunes, 79, 112-15, 120, 122, 123, 124, 128, 139, 146, 151, 152, 153, 162, 186, 188, 190, 196, 207-8, 216, 224, 235, 249

Brennecke, General Major Kurt, 209

Bridgeman, Lieutenant-Colonel the Viscount, 15, 20, 22, 36, 37, 78, 79, 80, 107, 182, 217

Bridges, Lance Sergeant John. 201-2, 206, 212-15

Brighton Belle, 117

Brighton Queen, 222

British Expeditionary Force (BEF), 3, 6, 24 General Headquarters (GHQ): Arras. 1, 2, 7, 15, 16, 51; Boulogne, 19, 61; Hazebrouck, 16; la Panne, 80, 81, 111, 171, 180-82, 184; Dunkirk, 19, 183, Corps: I, 22, 79, 112, 171, 181; II, 10, 79, 104, 112, 128, 146, 171, 203: III, 10, 49, 79, 112, Divisions: 1st, 171, 180; 2nd, 33, 34, 74; 3rd, 15, 104-5, 145, 186; 4th, 22, 36, 49, 278; 23rd, 13; 44th, 34, 49, 50, 109, 125, 145; 48th, 34, 35, 107; 50th, 49, 54, 104, Brigades: 7th Guards, 146, 180; 8th, 199; 30th, 61, 62; 127th, 186; 143rd, 108; 144th, 106, Corps of Military Police, II, 104, 125, 188; 102nd Provost Company, 164-66, Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), Field Ambulance: 6th, 142; 12th, 125; 13th, 52; 145th, 186; RAMC. Casually Clearing Station: 12th, 261-66, Royal Army Ordnance Corps, 55; 2nd Ordnance Field Park, 35, 49, 50, 52, Royal Army Service Corps (RASC). 49, 52, 81;1st Division Petrol Company, 124; 508th Petrol Company, 126; 85th Command Ammunition Depot, 128; No. I Troop Carrying Company, 49, Royal Artillery, 6: Anti-Aircraft, 2nd Brigade, 80; Field Regiments: 32nd, 8-10; 53rd, 233, 237, 239; 58th, 76, 110, 271; 99th, 235; 229th Field Battery, 70; 60th Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment, 35; Medium Regiments: 3rd, 54; 5th, 50; Searchlight Regiments: 2nd Battalion, 35; 12th Battery, 79, Royal Corps of Signals (Signals), 10, Royal Engineers, Corps of, 53, 79, 106: 216th Field Company, 1; 250th Field Company, 76, 165-66; 573rd Field Squadron, 49, See also individual regiments

Brooke, Lieutenant-General A. F., 22, 23, 25, 104, 146, 170-71, 273-74, 277

Brown, Chief Stoker W., 137, 139

Brownrigg, Lieutenant-General Sir Douglas, 19, 61, 62

Buchanan, Commander Herbert James, 256, 258, 260

Bush. Captain Eric, 153, 185

Bush. Lieutenant-Colonel W. E., 234, 239

Bushell, Commander William, 244

Buxton. Lieutenant-Colonel G. A. H., 147

Bystander, 142

Calais, 17, 21, 26, 33, 41-43, 48, 57, 60-70, 92, 134

Calcutta, 90, 95

Calvi, 138, 141

Cameron. Lieutenant John, 260

Cameron Highlanders, Queen’s Own, 168; 1st Battalion, 34, 72

“Canal Line,” 27, 31, 33, 69, 72, See also Aa Canal; la Bassée Canal

Canterbury, 85, 130, 131, 223

Capiat, Sub-Lieutenant Moran, 157

Carew Hunt, Sub-Lieutenant A., 197

Carmaham. Aircraftsman, 243

Carrier, Private Lou, 106

Carvin, 35

Cassel, 34, 36, 76, 91, 107, 109, 147, 277

Cassidie, Captain, 140

Cavanagh, Able Seaman P., 137

Chamberlain, Neville, 18, 41

Champon, General, 175

Chandler, Gunner Mowbrav, 138-40

Chapeau Rouge, 261-66, 267

Charles, Signalman Percy, 277

Chartier de Sadomy, Captain le Comte de, 259

Chatham Naval Depot, 44, 47, 89, 92, 223

Cherbourg, 125-26

Chodzko, Sub-Lieutenant Michael Anthony, 225, 248

Churchill, Captain Jack. 70-72

Churchill, Winston: support of Weygand Plan, 18, 21-23, 28; decision to evacuate Dunkirk, 33, 37, 41, 109, 112; defense of Calais, 60-63, 68; meetings with Reynaud, 2, 20, 24, 58, 178-79; Belgian surrender, 100-101; policy on evacuating French, 91, 173, 177-79, 228, 234, 252; reports on evacuation, 170, 229, 270-72, 274

Clan MacAlister, 89, 140, 141, 218

Claridge, Private J. B., 214

Clemments, Lieutenant-Commander, W. R. T., 86

Clifton, Brigadier, A. J., 105

Clouston, Commander J. Campbell: at Dunkirk, 112-13; pier master at eastern mole, 113, 115, 116, 130, 137-39, 141, 142, 167-68, 197, 236; loss of, 242-43

Cockle boats, 156, 195

Coldstream Guards, 12, 264; 1st Battalion, 11, 203; 2nd Battalion, 7, 12, 146-47, 200-201, 231-33, 237-38, 246

Coles. Sapper D.J., 13-14, 154, 188

Collard, Group Captain R. C. M., 1

Colton, Sergeant-Major “Big Ike,” 111

Colvin. Major R.B.R, 218

Comfort, 122-24

Command Post, shifts of, 15-18, 20, 21, 23, 36, 108

Communications breakdown, 14-16, 65, 80, 92, 101, 109, 256

Condor. Commander E. R., 235

Constant Nymph, 156, 162

Contest, 223

Cook, Lieutenant A. T., 116

Corap, General André-Georges, 1, 3, 6

Costobadie, Lieutenant-Commander, 259

Court, Sergeant L. H. T., 237-38

Courtrai. 22, 103

Cox, Lieutenant Ian, 129, 140, 155

Cranz, General Lieutenant Friedrich-Carl, 266, 267

Cras, Lieutenant Hervé, 269

Crested Eagle, 131, 139, 141

Crick, Lieutenant T. S., 44

Crosby, Sub-Lieutenant John Rutherford, 130, 240, 247

Crowther, Private George William, 142

Dangerfield, Captain E., 252, 260

Darlan, Admiral Francois, 90, 91, 174, 179, 276

Davies, Lieutenant E. L., 129, 247

Day, Chief Foreman Harry, 88

Deal, 57, 58

Dean, Commander Brian, 116, 268

Demolitions, 53-55, 66, 106

Dendre, River, 10

Denny, Captain Michael, 43, 240, 242, 245

Destroyers: collecting and organizing, 38, 86; losses, 135-44; modern, withdrawn, 144-45, 228; returned, 168, See also ships’ names

Dewing, Major-General R. H., 17

Dibbens, Lieutenant Harold J., 164-66

Dickens, Sub-Lieutenant Peter, 47

Dill, Lieutenant-General Sir John, 22, 24, 37, 38, 153, 170, 173, 176-78, 183, 229, 277

Dinort, Major Oskar, 135, 161

Discipline problems, 55, 96-97, 112-13, 128-29, 138-39, 147, 166-69, 187-88, 199, 213, 232-34, 236-37

Dive bombing, 8-10, 34-35, 65, 94, 107, 135-40, 214-17, 219, 228, 242, See also Stuka

Divine, David, 225, 245

Docksey, Captain T. E., 159

Dodd, Captain John S., 70, 153, 271, 277

Doggersbank, 114

Dornier 17 (German plane), 55, 132, 135, See also Luftwaffe

Dorrien Rose, 98

Dorsetshire Regiment, 2nd Battalion, 33, 72-73, 103

Dove, Major Arthur, 80

Dove, Commander J. S., 56, 143

Dover, 48, 58

Dover Castle, 43-44

Dow, Surgeon-Lieutenant James, 47

Dowding, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh, 134, 221

Dreyer, Lieutenant Christopher, 216

Duke of Wellington’s Regiment, 1st Battalion, 238

Dunkirk, 17, 20, 24-26; decision to evacuate from, 95; destruction of port, 55, 251-52; last night, 244-49, 251-64; capture of, 266-67

Durham Light Infantry, 6th Battalion, 76, 198, 199, 235

Dyle, River, 6-8, 167

“Dynamo,” Operation: activating, 44, 58; collecting and manning ships, 44-46, 87, 223; equipping and provisioning ships, 47-49; communications, 142-44, 152; morale, 90, 117, 186-87, 222-25, 228, 241, 253; numbers lifted, xi, 116-17, 125, 168-69, 176, 178, 179, 197, 228, 252, 274-76; decision to end, 239-40, See also Admiralty; Chatham Naval Depot; Destroyers; Little Ships; Small Vessels Pool

Dynamo Room, 43-44, 47, 48, 58, 83, 84, 89-90, 95-96, 99, 152, 239, 242

East Lancashire Regiment, 1st Battalion, 232

East Riding Yeomanry, 148

East Surrey Regiment: 1st Battalion, 12, 51, 76, 198-200; 1st/6th Battalion, 198-200, 235-36

Eastern mole, 97-99, 112, 115-16, 130-31, 135-38, 142, 181, 188-90, 212, 227, 235-36, 251, 266-67, 272

Eden, Anthony, 17, 22, 24, 25, 60-63, 91, 101, 108, 109, 170, 176, 180, 182-83, 186

Elkin, Sergeant Arthur, 15, 104

Elliott. A. W., 157

Ellison-McCartney, Lieutenant-Colonel L. A., 66

Elton, Seaman J. H, 142

Emile Deschamps, 269

Epinette, 70-72

Ervine-Andrews, Captain H. M., 232

Escaut, River, 7, 11, 12

Esk, 153, 222

Essex Regiment, 2nd Battalion, 7

Estaires, 73, 74

Express, 137, 248, 260, 261

Fagalde, General Marie B. A., 36, 62, 63, 76, 78, 92, 180-82, 250, 255, 256

Falck, Captain Wolfgang, 132-34

“Fall Rot,” Operation, 209-11

Fane, 2nd Lieutenant Julian, 107, 148

Farley, Private Francis Ralph. 111, 203-5

Fauvelle, Major Joseph, 92, 110

Felstead, Gunner F., 129

Fenella, 130, 131, 138, 139, 141

Fernald, John, 158, 159

Festubert, 33, 72, 73, 74

Field Security Police, 54, 123

Fieseler Storch (German observation plane), 9

Fife and Forfar Yeomanry, 1st Battalion, 49

Fifth Columnists, 10-11

Fisher, Captain John, 44, 45

Fisher, Commander Ralph Lindsay, 120-25

Fletcher, Seaman Carl, 94, 96

Flooding, 20, 118, 199, 249

Folkestone, 126, 193, 222, 244

Foremost 101, 192

Fort Mardyck, 200

Fort Philippe, 151

Foudroyant, 219, 222

Franklyn, Major-General H. E., 19

French Army: Somme line, 19, 23, 24, 255-56, defense of Calais, 62-65:withdrawal to Dunkirk, 24, 109-11;holding the perimeter, 109-11, 145-46; reluctance to evacuate, 24, 76, 90-92, 109-10; discipline of, 197; rearguard, 182-83, 229-30, 234, 249-50, 255; evacuation of, 173-83, 190-91, 197, 228, 247-48, 251, 258-60; surrender of, 266-67, Armies: First, 15, 16, 18, 21, 24, 34, 92, 107-11, 145, 150, 176; Second, 3; Seventh, 21; Ninth, 1, 3, Corps: III, 110-11, Infantry Divisions: 12th, 234, 249; 21st, 255; 32nd, 234, 255, 259, 260, 267; 60th, 34, 146, 176; 68th, 69, 78, 176, 200, 234, 249, 266, 267; 71st, 3; 137th, 255, 2nd Light Mechanized Division, 146, See also Weygand Plan

French Navy: participation in evacuation, 90-92, 109, 125-26, 175, 176, 193, 244, 257, 259-60; casualties, 169, 222, 269

Furnes, 78, 79, 111, 146, 151, 172, 180, 199, 201, 203, 213

Furnes-Nicuport Canal, 106

Gabbett-Mullhallen, Sub-Lieutenant C. A., 260

Galland, Captain Adolf, 134, 135

Gallant, 95, 144

Gamelin, General Maurice, 3, 16, 18

Garrett, Paymaster lieutenant-Commander Harry, 41, 46, 156

Gaze, Private W. B. A., 81, 262-63

Gentry, Lance Bombardier H. E., 9-10

George VI, Kin, 101

Georges, General Alphonse-Joseph, 7, 15, 16, 175, 176, 177

German Army, Army Groups: A, 3, 21, 22, 25, 26, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 64, 150, 209; B, 3, 21, 22, 25, 29, 30, 31, 32, 135, 150, 197, 209, 267; C. 209, Armies: Fourth, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 209; Eighteenth, 208-10, Corps: IX, 208; X, 254, 267; XIX, 3, 26, 31, 33; XXVI, 208, Infantry Divisions: 18th, 210, 250, 254, 266, 267; 56th, 151; 61st, 254; 256th, 211, Panzer Divisions: 1st. 6, 26, 27, 28, 64, 69; 2nd, 6, 26; 6th, 13, 69; 7th, 150; 10th, 26, 63, 64, 69, SS Totenkopf Division, 74, Regiments: 102nd Artillery Regiment, 249; 18th Regiment of Engineers, 250; 37th Panzer Engineers, 151; SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, 106, Bicycle Squadron 25, 151

German Navy, 119

Gill, Corporal Alf, 125

Gimson, Captain Tom, 112

Glen Cower, 189

Gloucestershire Regiment: 2nd Battalion, 11, 34, 148; 5th Battalion. 107, 147-48

Goddard, Group Captain Victor, 37-39

Goebbels, Joseph. 267-68, 276

Goodbody, Yeoman Eric, 187-88

Göring, Hermann, 28-33, 55, 134, 273

Gorl, General the Viscount: early career, 7, 15; advance into Belgium, 2-3, 6-8; withdrawal toward coast, 7, 17, 37-39, 69, 70, 72, 78, 81, 153, Weygand Plan, 18-24; decision to evacuate, 16, 20, 22-24, 41, 76, 91, 92, 108; Belgian surrender, 100-6; policy on evacuating French, 91, 173-82; evacuated, 162, 170-73, 183-86

Gossamer, 47, 116, 122, 207

Gotto, Commander Renfrew, 246

Gracie Fields, 141, 142

Grafton, 95, 122-24, 144

Grand Quartier Général, 20

Gravelines, 30, 33, 69, 78, 151, 168, 176, 189, 267

Gray. Lieutenant A., 113, 114

Green Howards: 5th Battalion, 234, 236, 239, 246; 6th Battalion, 33

Gregson-Ellis, Colonel Philip, 36

Grenade, 130, 137, 139, 144

Grenadier Guards, 12, 79, 218; 1st Battalion, 201-3, 206, 212; 2nd Battalion, 111, 199; 3rd Battalion, 219, 235

Greyhound, 144

Griffith-Williams, Colonel L. C., 238

Grimmer, Sapper F. M., 1

Guderian, General Heinz, 3, 6, 26, 28-33, 64, 69, 106, 150-51, 209, 272, 273

Gulzer, 68, 258

Hadnett, Corporal Bob, 35, 107, 108

Hadow, Commander P. H., 214-15

Haig. 249

Haig. Lieutenant-Commander Rodolph, 123

Haider, General Franz, 30, 31, 32, 209, 250

Halsey, Captain T. E., 253, 268

Hall Order,” 29-33, 69, 209, 272-73

Hamel, Lieutenant Lodo van, 194

Hampshire Regiment, 2nd Battalion, 233

Hansen, General Lieutenant Christian, 254

Harling, Robert, 194-95

Harvester, 86

Harvey, Ted, 239

Harwich, 45, 127

Havant, 86, 215-16, 219

Hawes, Sergeant S. S., 124

Hazebrouck, 16, 49, 70, 74, 107, 108

Hebe, 144, 153, 184-85, 224

Heinkel III (German plane), 55, 132, 133, 141, 161, 169, 212, 214, 215, See also Luftwaffe

Heming, Private Ernest, 190

Henkel, Hans, 276

Herbert. Major Dickie, 202

Hersey, Augusta. 51, 227

Hersey, Private Bill. 51, 227

Hilda, 113, 114, 216, 251

Hill, Major Peter, 50

Hilton. Robert, 159, 163, 174, 278-79

Hird, 124-26

Hitler, Adolf, 2, 28: and Belgian surrender, 102; “Halt Order,” 29-33, 272-73; his suggestion for preventing evacuation, 210

Hoedt, Father M. Rafael, 145

Homan, David, 158

Hondschoote, 54

Hornchurch, 57, 220

Horner, Ken, 156

Hoist, 163

Hospital Ships, 241-42

Houtkerque, 108

Hubicki, General Major A. R von, 249

Hunt, Major (RASC), 126

Hunt, Major Peter, 72

Huntziger, General Charles, 3

Hurricane (British plane), 57, 133, 134, 195, 251, See also RAF

Hutchens, Lieutenant-Colonel Robin, 194

Hythe, 224

Ibel, Max, 134

Ingham, Lance Corporal W. J., 54

Interservice Topographical Department, 48

Iron Duke, 238

Ironside, General Sir Edmund, 17, 18, 19, 21, 23, 25, 37, 38

Irving. Lieutenant R. H., 160, 162, 196

Irwin. Seaman Bill, 137

Ismav, Major-General Sir Hastings, 20, 21, 176, 271

Ismav, Lady, 271

Ivanhoe, 124, 186, 214, 219

Jaguar (British), 86, 87, 130, 137, 144

Jaguar (French), 120, 269

James, Admiral Sir William, 272

Janssen, General, 234, 249

Jeffries, Captain P.J., 198

Jennings, Gunner W., 142

Jeschonnek, General Major Hans, 32

Jodl, General Major Alfred, 29, 32

Johnson, Major-General G. D., 206

Johnson & Jago’s Boatyard, 157

Jones, 2nd Lieutenant, 199

Jones, Signalman George W., 201

Jonkerick, Mile., 52

Ju 87 (German plane), See Stuka

Ju 88 (German plane), 135, 242, See also Luftwaffe

Kay, Corporal R., 115

Kearley-Pope, Petty Officer Leonard B., 84

Keitel, General Colonel Wilhelm, 29, 32, 119

Keith, 184-85, 216-19, 222

Keith, Jimmy, 89

Keller, General Alfred, 210

Kerr, Commander Tom, 112, 113, 115, 151, 166, 188

Kesselring, General Albert, 32, 133, 211

Keyes, Admiral Sir Roger, 100-101

King Orry, 142, 189

King’s Own Royal Regiment, 8th Battalion, 167

King’s Royal Rifle Corps, 2nd Battalion, 60, 61, 63, 65

King’s Shropshire Light Infantry, 1st Battalion, 246

Kirchner, General Lieutenant Friedrich, 27

Kitchener, Corporal Jack, 52

Kleist. General Ewald von, 27, 32, 107

Kluge, General Colonel Guenther Hans von, 27, 28, 32, 33, 209

Knight, Sergeant Bill, 255-56

Knowles, Guardsman Arthur, 266

Koeltz, General Louis M., 78, 100

Kuechler, General Georg von, 208-11, 232-34, 249-50, 258

Kwinte Whistle Buoy, 120-25, 169

La Bassée Canal, 7, 33, 72, 74

Lady Southborough, 45, 46, 192-93

Lane, Squadron Leader Brian, 220

Langley, Lieutenant James M., 12, 200-201, 232, 237, 261, 264, 265

La Panne: evacuation operations: 79, 81, 87, 88, 95, 112, 114, 117, 122, 128, 129, 141, 143, 150, 152, 153, 162-67, 175, 177, 186, 187, 190, 202-8, 212, 214, 217, 219; Gort establishes headquarters, 79-80, 111-12; withdrawal from, 207, 227

Laurencie, General Fourmel de la, 110, 111, 180, 181, 234

Lawson, Brigadier the Honorable, E. F., 79, 167

Lawson, 2nd Lieutenant William, 167

Leclerc, Rear-Admiral Marcel, 91, 175

Lecointe, Father Henri, 267

Le Doze, Lieutenant Docteur, 267

Ledringhem, 147

Lee, Gunner Robert, 76

Leese. Brigadier Sir Oliver, 16, 153, 172-73, 180, 186

Leigh-on-Sea, 156, 157, 193

Le Mesurier, Commander Edward K., 225

Leopold III, 19, 99, 100-102, 175

Le Paradis, 74

“Lethal Kite Barrage,” 56, 143

Letitia, 195

Lidster, Sapper L. C., 125-26

Lightoller, Commander Charles Herbert, 225-27

Lille, 10, 12, 16, 25, 34, 50, 51, 107-11, 145, 150, 180, 234, 272, See also French Army: First

Lindsell, Lieutenant-General W. G., 78

Little Ann, 225-27, 245

Littlehampton, 89

Little Ships: collecting, equipping, and manning of, 44-49, 88-89, 157; operations of, 155-64, 191-95, See also Ministry of Shipping; Small Vessels Pool; Tough Brothers Boatyard

Little Ships Club, 88

Lockerby, Lance Corporal Reginald, 35, 49, 56, 190

Locust, 257, 259

Long Price, Captain, 7

Looting, 34, 55, 134, 213-14, 263

Lord Southborough, 156

Lorry jetties, 164-66, 169, 186

Lossberg, Colonel Lieutenant Bernard von, 32

Louch, Private Fred, 169

Love, Private Sam, 126

Lucas, General, 260

Luftwaffe: early superiority of, 28, 31, 32, 50, 55, 56, 74, 132-33; mission to prevent evacuation, 104, 192, 204, 212-22, 228, 242, 273; raids on Calais. 64-66; raids on Dunkirk. 85, 97, 117, 125, 130, 133-42, 187, 221-22; RAF opposition to, 134-42, 195, 219-22; weather as a factor, 131, 134, 161, 168, 169, 184, 211, 272; shifts south, 251, 258; tactics, 135, 189, 195, 210-12, 273; 2nd Air Fleet (Luftflotte), 32, 55, 211; Fliegerkorps IV, 210; Fliegerkorps VIII, 32, 134, 135, 161; Fighter Squadron 26, 132; 2nd Stuka Squadron, 161, See also Göring; Stuka; and other German entries

Lydd, 122-24

Lyne, Flying Officer Michael D., 57-58

Lynn-Allen, Captain J F., 107

Lys, River, 22, 24, 103, 109

McBarnet, Lieutenant Donald, 114

McBeath, Commander John, 246

McClelland, Lieutenant-Commander J. N. N., 206-7

McCorquodale, Major Angus. 12, 201, 232-33

McCoy, Lieutenant-Commander John, 94

MACFORCE, 7, 13

Mackenzie, Lieutenant Angus, 247

Mackie, Captain R. W., 140-41

MacLeod, Leading Seaman Murdo, 217

Mahnert, Corporal Hans, 135

Maid of Orleans, 95, 190

Maintenon (French Naval Headquarters), 91, 92

Malcolm, 87, 88, 129, 140, 155, 160, 168, 196, 224, 228, 248, 253, 257, 258, 260, 268

Malines. 124, 222-23, 241

Malo-les-Bains. 79, 81, 87, 95-99, 112-15, 128, 140, 152, 153, 163, 166, 174, 187, 190, 192, 236-39, 245, 257

Manchester Regiment, 2nd Battalion, 72

Mann, Lieutenant, 105

Mardyck, 78, 249

Mare, 227-28

Maréchal Foch, 268

Margate, 89, 156, 224, 269, 271

Marlborough, 245, 257, 258

Marsayru, 190

Marshall, Captain Arthur, 168

Martin, Major-General Henry, 80, 81

Martin, Chief Signal Clerk J. W., 87

MA/SB 6 (motor antisubmarine boat), 186

MA/SB 10, 246, 248, 251, 260-61

Mason-MacFarlane, Major-General Noel, 7

Massey Shaw, 191-92

Maund, Commander Guy, 245, 247

May, Sub-Officer A. J., 191

May, Bombardier Arthur, 11, 54, 169

Medway Queen, 48, 49, 116, 268

Meiklejohn, Chaplain Kenneth W., 154

Mellis. Lieutenant David, 87, 140, 168, 228, 253

Menon, Colonel, 249, 255

Meredith, Corporal Harold, 196

Mermaiden, 257, 258

Messerschmidt (German plane): Me 109, 57, 84, 132-35, 212, 220; Me 110, 132-35, 220, 221

Meuse, River, 1, 3

Michalowski, Lieutenant, 122

Middlesex Regiment, 1st/7th Battalion, 111, 203-5

Military Polite. See British Expeditionary Force: Corps of Military Police

Ministry of Shipping, 41, 44, 45, 88, 89, 156

Moeres, 198

Mona’s Isle, 83, 84, 131

Montgomery, Major-General Bernard, 15, 104-5, 145, 146, 170-71, 227, 274

Moore. Captain S. T., 128

Morale problems: Belgian, 102-3; British, 90, 105; French, 16, See also “Operation Dynamo”: morale

Morgan, Lieutenant-Colonel William, 182, 183

Mosquito, 222

Motor Torpedo Boats, 184-85, 239; MTB 102, 216, 247, 257, 259; MTB 107, 260, 261

Moulton, Captain J. L., 81-83

Munster, Lord, 170

Münstereifel, 28

Naiad Errant, 194

Nanney Wynn, Major F. R., 186

Nautilus, 122

Naval shore parties, 92-94, 96-97

Navy, Army and Air Force Institute (NAAFI), 14, 54

Nelson, 46

Newcomb, Chaplain Reginald, 49, 54

Newhaven, 235

Newhaven, 193, 235

Newman, Major Philip, 262, 263, 265, 267

New Prince of Wales, 160, 161, 196

Ngaroma, 223

Nicholson, Brigadier Claude, 60-63

Nieuport. 78, 79, 86, 102, 104, 105, 106, 111, 150, 172, 198, 199, 211, 220

Nixon, Seaman C. F., 47, 97, 113

Noon, Gunner F., 237

Nore Command, 44, 89, 228

Northamptonshire Regiment, 5th Battalion, 149-50, 186

North Staffordshire Regiment, 2nd Battalion, 103

Nye, Private W.C.P., 103

O’Callaghan, Private Bill, 74

Odend’hal, Vice-Admiral Jean, 91, 92, 175, 276

OKH (Oberkommando der Heer), 30, 31, 150, 209, 210

OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht), 26, 28, 32, 119

Orchies, 14

Oriole, 129-30, 240, 247

Osborne, Major-General E. A., 49, 109, 110

Osborne, William, 89

O’Shea, Father Cockle, 262-63

Ostend, 20, 84

Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, 4th Battalion, 148

Page, Private Leslie R., 50

Palmer, Captain Sir Anthony, 80

Palmer, Samuel, 194

Pangbourne, 140-41

Pank, Colonel, 262

Panzers, 3, 16, 25, 29, 30, 36, 41, 61, 70, 72, 125, 132, See also German Army; Tanks

Paris, 242

Parker, Coxswain Edward D., 156

Parminter, Brigadier RHR., 95, 130, 246

Payne, Lieutenant C. G., 115

Peirse, Sir Richard, 39

Pelly, Commander P. D. H. R., 278

Perimeter; planning, 37, 78-79; manning, 79, 99; defending, 104-11, 145-51, 153, 172-73, 181, 197-211, 229-39, 249-51

Péronne, 3, 21

Perron, Edmond, 254

Potain, Marshal Henri, 58, 178

Peterson. Captain-Lieutenant, 119

Phillips, Rear-Admiral Sir Tom, 46, 152, 185

Pigeon, 260

Pim, Captain R. P., 194

POLFORCE, 13

Pooley, Private Bert, 74

Poperinge, 35, 54

Porte de Vaux, Lieutenant Jacquelin de la, 269

Portsmouth. 46, 155, 192, 257, 259, 272

Pound, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley, 37-39, 144, 168, 177

Poustie, Midshipman H. B., 219

Pownall, Lieutenant-General H. R., 16-18, 20-21, 33, 36, 108, 110, 170, 175, 177, 272

Prémesques. 20, 21, 23, 36, 37, 108

Preston, Admiral Sir Lionel, 40, 46, 88, 89

Princess Elizabeth, 186

Prioux, General R. J. A., 92, 107-11, 150

Quai Félix Faure. 248, 257, 258, 259

Queen of the Channel, 98, 99, 117

Queen’s Own Worcestershire Yeomanry, 145-46

Queen’s Royal Regiment, 1st/7th Battalion, 83

Queen Victoria’s Rifles, 1st Battalion, 61, 65-66

Rabbets, Private Edgar G. A., 149-50

Ramsay, Vice-Admiral Bertram, 41; early career, 42; letters to wife Mag, 47, 58, 90, 270; gathering ships, 41, 83, 86, 89; relations with the French, 91; dispatching ships, 99, 130, 143-44, 188-89, 236, 240, 252-53, 256; obtaining destroyers, 117, 168, 228-29; S-Boat threat, 126, 127; evacuating the French, 172-73, 178; “Special Tows”, 207-8; decision to end Dynamo, 257, 269-70

Ramsay, 2nd Lieutenant I.F.R., 33, 73, 103

Ramsgate. 46, 48, 127, 157, 159, 160, 163, 164, 191-93, 217, 222-26, 215, 271, 273, 278

Ransome, Major Bob, 112

Reader, Sapper Eric, 117

Refugees, civilian, 8, 103, 254

Reinhardt, General Lieutenant Georg-Hans, 151

Renown, 156, 195

Resolute, 156

Return of troops, 169-70, 186, 227, 271, 277-78

Reynaud, Paul, 2, 20, 24, 58, 91, 92, 109, 174, 177-79, 197, 229, 252

Rhodes. 2nd Lieutenant Arthur, 96

Richards, Lieutenant C.D., 160

Richardson, Major Charles. 36, 277

Richardson, Commander Hector. 94, 96, 99, 112, 113, 115, 151, 166, 188

Richthofen, General Major Wolfram von, 32, 134, 161

Rifle Brigade, 1st Battalion, 61

Riggs, H. C., 45, 88

River Emergency Service, 88

Robinson, Commander Charles, 124

Rommel, General Major Erwin, 13

Rosendaël, 235, 255, 261

Ross, Commander Richard, 207

Roubaix, 104

Rouen, 248

Routes across the Channel, 84-86, 90, 94, 117, 120, 122, 125, 127, 139

Roux. Lieutenant de Vasseau, 243

Royal Air Force (RAF), 9, 17, 20, 24, 37, 38, 46-58, 90, 117, 127, 133-35, 200, 219-22, 250; 19th Fighter Squadron, 57, 220-21, See also Dowding, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh

Royal Daffodil, 85

Royal Dragoon Guards, 168; 4th/7th Battalion, 239

Royal Eagle, 129

Royal Irish Fusiliers, 1st Battalion, 110

Royal Kent Yeomanry, 146

Royal Lancers Regiment, 12th Battalion, 22, 105, 166

Royal Marines. 67, 81, 168

Royal National Lifeboat Institution, 89, 224

Royal Norfolk Regiment, 2nd Battalion, 74

Royal Northumberland Fusiliers Regiment, 9th Battalion, 13, 278

Royal Ocean Racing Club, 157

Royal Sovereign, 259

Royal Sussex Regiment, 4th Battalion, 103; 5th Battalion, 53, 76

Royal Tank Regiment, 3rd Battalion, 6

Royal Ulster Rifles, 2nd Battalion, 205-6

Royal Warwickshire Regiment, 2nd Battalion, 106

Rundstedt, General Colonel Gerd von, 3, 6, 15, 21, 22, 25, 26, 28, 29, 31, 32, 60, 150, 209

Russell, Chief Cook Thomas R., 48, 116

Ryder, Major, 74

Ryegate II, 159, 163, 278

Sabre, 87, 116, 113, 246, 268

St. Abbes, 216-19

Saint Eloi, Church of, 30

Saint-Omer, 13, 30, 61, 69

Saint Pierre-Brouck, 27

Saint Pol, 13, 135

St. Seiriol, 223

Saladin, 87, 144

Salamander, 216-17

Salisbury, Signalman K. A., 11

Sandford, Private TW., 65

Saunders, Stoker A. D., 87

Savorgnan de Brazza, 244

Schaal, General Lieutenant Ferdinand, 64, 65

Scheve, Major Fritz von, 132

Schmidt, Georg. 267-68

Schmundt, Colonel, 32

Schneider, Augustin, 194

Schneider, Fernand, 194

Schnellboote (German speedboats), 119-21, 127, 169; S 21, 120; S 23, 120; S 30, 121

Schniewind, Vice-Admiral Otto, 119

Scotia. 222

Secteur Fortifié des Flandres, 234, 255

Sedan, 2, 3

Seine, River, 26, 150

Sequacity, 84

Servins, 51, 52

Shattock, Gunner R., 8

Shaw, Ted, 159, 163, 174, 278

Sheerness, 48, 90, 156; 157, 159, 190, 245

Shikari, 246, 260, 261

Shipping Federation, the, 159

Silver Queen, 163, 164

Siroco, 169

Skipjack, 216-18

SKL (German Naval War Command), 119

Skoots, 44-45, 86, 196

Skylark, 160, 193

Small Vessels Pool, 40-41, 46, 88-89, 156-57

Smith, Basil A., 156, 163

Smyth, Brigadier John O., 186-87

Snelgar, Sergeant George, 49

Snowden, Second Lieutenant D.C., 83, 84

Sola, Raphael de, 158

Solent, 89

Soloman, Sub-Lieutenant Michael, 197, 242-44, 251

Somali, 47

Somerset, Brigadier, 148

Somerville, Vice-Admiral Sir John, 90

Somme, River, 17, 18, 19, 23, 24, 209, 256, 273

Southampton, 44, 89, 126

Southend Britannia, 160

Spears, Major-General Sir Edward, 178, 179

“Special tows,” 208, 210

Speedwell, 215, 251

Spitfire (British plane), 57, 133-34, 195, 220, See also RAF

Spycker, 78, 249, 255

Stanley, Staff Sergeant Gordon, 51, 52

Stanley, Jeanne Michez, 41, 52

Steenbecque, 13, 278

Steenwerck, 109

Stephens, Private Bob, 35

Stephenson, Lieutenant-Colonel E. L., 73

Stephenson, Commodore Gilbert Owen, 162, 166, 184

Stone, Private Bill, 53

Stopford, Lieutenant James, 43

Stowell, Sub-Lieutenant H. W., 94

Stratton. Private Bill. 13, 187

Stuka (German plane), 3, 8, 10, 29, 34, 35, 51, 52, 55, 57, 64-66, 94, 107, 132-40, 161, 169, 189, 212, 214-17, 219, 228, 242, 254, 273, See also Dive bombing; Luftwaffe

Suffolk Regiment, 1st Battalion, 219

Sugar, Private Sam, 124

Sun IV, 195, 257

Sundowner, 226-27

Sutton, Brigadier George William, 145

Swallow, 160, 194, 259

Swayne, Brigadier J. C., 175, 176, 178

Sykes, Captain E. H., 165

Tanks: British, 19, 21, 61; French, 3, 22, 34, 110; German, 2, 3, 13, 15, 20, 26, 34, 64, 66, 107, 118, 133, 150, 234, See also Panzers

Tarry, acting Second Mate John, 45, 192

Taylor, Commodore A. H., 159, 245, 249, 258, 259

Taylor, Driver Gordon A., 51

Taylor, 2nd Lieutenant R. C., 12, 169

Tennant, Captain William C: sent to Dunkirk, 92-97; decision to use eastern mole, 97-99, 115; shore parties, 112, 130, 182, 188-89, 219, 241, 252; communications, 142, 152; stops daylight evacuation, 229-30; returns to England, 247

Teteghem, 249, 255

Thames estuary, 44, 89, 127, 156, 159, 193

Thames, River, 88, 156, 278

Thoma, Colonel Wilhelm Ritter von, 30

Thuiller, Lieutenant-Colonel H. S., 246

Tidey, Private Fred, 74

Tilbury, 158, 194

Tilbury Dredging Company, 45, 46, 192

Tilly, 85, 116

Titanic, 226

Tollesbury, 156

Toomey, Private Jack, 128

Tough Brothers Boatyard, 88, 156

Tough, Douglas, 88

Toulouse-Lautrec, Commander Gui de, 169

Tournai, 11, 35

Tresckow, Lieutenant-Colonel von, 32

Trippe, Corporal, 51

Triton, 160, 162, 196

Trotter, Lieutenant J., 199

Troup, Commander H. R., 249, 259

Truffaut, Captain Georges. 102-3

Twente, 141

Tynwald, 223, 241, 248, 259

“Useless Mouths.” 19, 41, 55, 86

Utterson Kelso, Brigadier J. E, 145

U-Boats, 122, 127, U 62, 122

Vanquisher, 144, 153

Venomous, 190, 246-47

Venty, 90, 224

Vervins, 1

Vincennes, 20, 100

Vinera, 216-17

Vivacious, 153

VTB 25 (French torpedo boat), 259, 268

VTB 26, 259

Wahagnies, 16

Waitzbauer, Corporal Hans, 249

Wake, Sub-Lieutenant Roger. 242-43, 247, 251

Wakeful, 88, 99, 120-25, 144

Wake-Walker, Rear-Admiral Frederic, 152-53, 171-73, 177, 184-85, 188, 216, 224, 239-40, 245, 251-52, 257-59

Walker, Private W. S., 50

Walter, Colour Sergeant Fred, 65, 66

War Office, 16, 17, 24, 37, 41, 62, 101, 11, 143, 153, 176, 180

Warner, Private Bill, 35, 116

Warner, Major David, 146

Watkin, Lance Bombardier Noel, 6

Watou, 103, 148

Watts, Captain O. M., 157-58, 194, 197

Waverley, 141

Weather, 272

Webb, Sergeant E. C., 235

Webb, Captain Lemon, 156

Welsh Guards. 50, 147

Wemple. Lieutenant-Commander J. S., 184

Westropp, Colonel Lionel H. M., 167

Westward Ho, 222, 249

Weygand, General Maxime, 19, 21, 33, 62, 76, 78, 90-92, 100, 110, 174, 177-79, 181, 183, 229, 252, 275-76

“Weygand Plan,” 19-23

Whitehall, 217

White Wing, 245

Whitfield, Colonel G. H. P., 95

Whitshed, 235, 257

Wietersheim, General Gustav von, 151

Williams. Sub-Lieutenant William Ronald, 161, 189

Wilson, Major, 7

Winchelsea, 235, 247

Windsor, 212, 224, 278

Wolfhound, 94, 98

Woodcock, Mrs. S., 270

Worcester, 173, 222, 226, 228-29

Worcestershire Regiment, 8th Battalion, 147

Wormhout, 106

Worthing, 242

Worthington, Lieutenant Greville, 278

Wounded, evacuation of, 237, 241-42, 246, 263

“Wrens” (Women’s Royal Naval Service), 43

Wright, Lance Corporal E. S., 1-2

Wright, Signalman Leslie W., 66-08

Wuthmann, Colonel Rolf, 209

Yewdale, 84

Yorke, Private Percy, 186

Yorkshire Lass, 248

Ypres, 19, 20, 23, 100, 104

Yser, 160, 104

Zimmermann, Lieutenant Wilhelm, 120-21

Zuydcoote, 95, 139, 219

Image Gallery

Plunging down from the sky, a German Stuka dive-bombs an Allied tank, as Hitler strikes west in May 1940. Together with the armored panzer division, the Stuka symbolized a new kind of lightning war—the Blitzkrieg—which the Allies were utterly unprepared to meet. German columns knifed through to the sea, trapping the British and French against the coast of Flanders. (Hergestellt im Bundesarchiv Bestand)

On the receiving end of the German onslaught were the Allied commanders, British General the Viscount Gort (left) and French General Maurice Gamelin. Within days Gamelin was fired and Gort was reeling back toward the French port of Dunkirk. Below, a file of British troops straggles into Dunkirk, hoping to escape by sea. (Top: Wide World Photos. Bottom: Hergestellt im Bundesarchiv Bestand)

Thousands of Allied soldiers soon crowded the beaches that stretched from Dunkirk to La Panne, a small Belgian resort ten miles to the east. Long lines of men curled out into the sea, patiently waiting to be picked up. (Times)

As the troops waited, German planes continued to pound them. For protection they dug foxholes in the dunes. Casualties were surprisingly light, since the sand tended to smother the exploding bombs. (Imperial War Museum)

Across the English Channel, a giant rescue operation was hastily organized under the command of Vice-Admiral Bertram H. Ramsay. Here Admiral Ramsay briefly relaxes on the balcony of his headquarters, carved out of the famous chalk cliffs of Dover. (Courtesy of Jane Evan-Thomas)

Command center for the evacuation was the austere “Dynamo Room,” buried deep in the Dover cliffs. Here Ramsay’s staff, using a battery of telephones, assembled and deployed a rescue fleet that ultimately totaled 861 ships. This photo is believed to be the only picture ever taken of the room. (Courtesy of W. J. Matthews)

Every kind of vessel was used for the evacuation, ranging from warships to small pleasure craft. Above, a “G” Class destroyer races toward Dunkirk “with a bone in her teeth.” This entire class was eventually knocked out. Below, the yacht Sundowner was luckier. She rescued 135 men and escaped without a scratch. Her owner-skipper, Commander C. H. Lightoller, had performed earlier heroics as Second Officer on the Titanic.(Top: Imperial War Museum. Bottom: courtesy of Patrick Stenson and Sharon Rutman)

Dunkirk was easy to find. A huge pall of smoke from burning oil tanks hung over the shattered port. The smoke seemed to symbolize defeat and disaster, but had the happy side effect of concealing the harbor from German bombers. (Courtesy of W. J. Matthews)

In contrast, La Panne, at the eastern end of the evacuation area, looked deceptively tranquil. Rescue ships can be seen here, picking up troops near the shore. Gort’s headquarters was in one of the detached houses on the far right. (Courtesy of J. L. Aldridge)

Picking up troops direct from the beach seemed to take forever—“loading ships by the spoonful” was the way one embarkation officer described it. Above, a trawler and a coaster take aboard men wading out from the shore. At right, British Tommies are up to their shoulders in water, approaching a rescue ship. (Top: Wide World Photos. Bottom: The Granger Collection)

Captain William G. Tennant (left) was finally appointed by Admiral Ramsay to take charge at Dunkirk and speed up the evacuation. As Senior Naval Officer (SNO), Tennant discovered that the eastern mole of Dunkirk harbor was ideal for loading ships. Here a destroyer could lift 600 men in 20 minutes, while it took 12 hours along the beaches. For most of the next week the mole was packed with an endless line of troops (below) trudging out to the waiting ships. (Top: ILN Pic Lib. Bottom: Times)

Ingenuity triumphed on the beaches too. Abandoned lorries were strung together, to form improvised piers leading out into the water. Here one of these “lorry jetties” is visible in the background. (Courtesy of D.C.H. Shields)

Soon an unbroken line of crowded ships could be seen carrying the men across the Channel to safety. (Culver Pictures)

The Luftwaffe did not leave the rescue fleet alone. These two pictures show how suddenly disaster could strike. In the top photo an Allied ship has just blown up, while two others lie nearby still untouched. In the bottom photo, taken an instant later (note that the configuration of smoke is still the same), the two nearby ships have now disappeared, obliterated by the rain of bombs. Troops on the beach are futilely firing their rifles at the planes. (Top: Imperial War Museum. Bottom: Fox Photos Ltd.)

The French destroyer Bourrasque joins the growing list of Allied casualties. Packed with troops, she struck a German mine and went down with a loss of 150 lives. (Imperial War Museum)

A fleet of French fishing trawlers was a late addition to Ramsay’s armada. They concentrated on the inner harbor of Dunkirk, where hundreds of poilus swarmed aboard. (Wide World Photos)

Bombs and mines were not the only perils faced by the rescue fleet. The Schnellboote, fast German motor torpedo boats, prowled the seas at night, sinking and damaging Ramsay’s ships. (Hergestellt im Bundesarchiv Bestand)

German artillery added to the toll. Nothing was safe—neither the ships, the harbor, the mole, nor the men on the beaches. “Greetings to Tommy” is the message painted on this shell. (Hergestellt im Bundesarchiv Bestand)

German troops finally broke into La Panne on June 1 and began moving down the beach toward Dunkirk itself. Below, the fall of Dunkirk, June 4, Weary but triumphant, German troops of the 18th Infantry Division stack their arms and rest. (Hergestellt im Bundesarchiv Bestand)

The quarry was gone. In nine desperate days Ramsay’s fleet brought back more than 338,000 Allied troops. Typical was this batch, disembarking from the minesweeper Sandown. Naval officer in the lower-left foreground is Lieutenant Wallis, the ship’s First Lieutenant. (Courtesy of J. D. Nunn)

Sometimes it seemed as if half the canine population of France had been evacuated too. Never was the Englishman’s legendary fondness for dogs more ringingly affirmed. At least 170 dogs were landed in Dover alone. (Wide World Photos)

Disheveled but happy, the Tommies were sent by train to assembly areas all over Britain for rest and reorganization. At every station a relieved populace showered them with cigarettes, cakes, candy, and affection. (Wide World Photos)

At Dunkirk, the captured French rear guard heard no cheers. They would soon be marching off to POW camp, most for the duration of the war. (Hergestellt im Bundesarchiv Bestand)

In another two weeks France was knocked out of the war. The new pro-German Vichy government lost no time charging that the British had run out, leaving the French holding the bag at Dunkirk. Actually, Ramsay’s rescue fleet saved over 123,000 French soldiers, 102,570 in British ships. Despite the statistics, French bitterness continues, even today. (Musée des Deux Guerres Mondiales—B.D.I.C., Universités de Paris)

Day of Infamy

Walter Lord

To Lanet Cody

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

CHAPTER I “Isn’t That a Beautiful Sight?”

CHAPTER II “A Dream Come True!”

CHAPTER III “Gate Open — White Lights”

CHAPTER IV “You’d Be Surprised What Goes On Around Here.”

CHAPTER V “Well, Don’t Worry About It”

CHAPTER VI “Joe, This One Is for the Tourist!”

CHAPTER VII “I Didn’t Even Know They Were Sore at Us”

CHAPTER VIII “I Can’t Keep Throwing Things At Them”

CHAPTER IX “You Don’t Wear a Tie to War”

CHAPTER X “I Want Three Volunteers: You, You, and You”

CHAPTER XI “Chief, My Mother and Dad Gave Me This Sword”

CHAPTER XII “We’re Leaving Now — Explode Gloriously!”

FACTS ABOUT THE ATTACK

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

INDEX

IMAGE GALLERY

FOREWORD

IT HAPPENED ON DECEMBER 7, 1941.

One part of America learned while listening to the broadcast of the Dodger-Giant football game at the Polo Grounds in New York. Ward Cuff had just returned a Brooklyn kickoff to the 27-yard line when at 2:26 P.M. WOR interrupted with the first flash: the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor.

Another part of America learned half an hour later, while tuning in the New York Philharmonic concert at Carnegie Hall. Artur Rodzinski’s musicians were just about to start Shostakovich’s Symphony Number 1 when CBS repeated an earlier bulletin announcing the attack.

The concertgoers themselves learned still later when announcer Warren Sweeney told them at the end of the performance. Then he called for “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The anthem had already been played at the start of the concert, but the audience had merely hummed along. Now they sang the words.

Others learned in other ways, but no matter how they learned, it was a day they would never forget. Nearly every American alive at the time can describe how he first heard the news. He marked the moment carefully, carving out a sort of mental souvenir, for instinctively he knew how much his life would be changed by what was happening in Hawaii.

This is the story of that day.

CHAPTER I

“Isn’t That a Beautiful Sight?”

MONICA CONTER, A YOUNG Army nurse, and Second Lieutenant Barney Benning of the Coast Artillery strolled out of the Pearl Harbor Officers’ Club, down the path near the ironwood trees, and stood by the club landing, watching the launches take men back to the warships riding at anchor.

They were engaged, and the setting was perfect. The workshops, the big hammerhead crane, all the paraphernalia of the Navy’s great Hawaiian base were hidden by the night; the daytime clatter was gone; only the pretty things were left — the moonlight … the dance music that drifted from the club … the lights of the Pacific Fleet that shimmered across the harbor.

And there were more lights than ever before. For the first weekend since July 4 all the battleships were in port at once. Normally they took turns — six might be out with Admiral Pye’s battleship task force, or three would be off with Admiral Halsey’s carrier task force. This was Pye’s turn in, but Halsey was out on a special assignment that meant leaving his battleships behind. A secret “war warning” had been received from Washington — Japan was expected to hit “the Philippines, Thai, or Kra Peninsula or possibly Borneo” — and the carrier Enterprise was ferrying a squadron of Marine fighters to reinforce Wake Island. Battleships would slow the task force’s speed from 30 to 17 knots. Yet they were too vulnerable to maneuver alone without carrier protection. The only other carrier, the Lexington, was off ferrying planes to Midway, so the battleships stayed at Pearl Harbor, where it was safe.

With the big ships in port, the officers’ club seemed even gayer and more crowded than usual, as Monica Conter and Lieutenant Benning walked back and rejoined the group at the table. Somebody suggested calling Lieutenant Bill Silvester, a friend of them all who this particular evening was dining eight miles away in downtown Honolulu. Monica called him, playfully scolded him for deserting his buddies — the kind of call that has been placed thousands of times by young people late in the evening, and memorable this time only because it was the last night Bill Silvester would be alive.

Then back to the dance, which was really a conglomeration of Dutch treats and small private parties given by various officers for their friends: “Captain Montgomery E. Higgins and Mrs. Higgins entertained at the Pearl Harbor Officers’ Club … Lieutenant Commander and Mrs. Harold Pullen gave a dinner at the Pearl Harbor Officers’ Club …” — the Honolulu Sunday Advertiser rattled them off in its society column the following morning.

Gay but hardly giddy. The bar always closed at midnight. The band seemed in a bit of a rut — its favorite “Sweet Leilani” was now over four years old. The place itself was the standard blend of chrome, plywood, and synthetic leather, typical of all officers’ clubs everywhere. But it was cheap — dinner for a dollar — and it was friendly. In the Navy everybody still seemed to know everybody else on December 6, 1941.

Twelve miles away, Brigadier General Durward S. Wilson, commanding the 24th Infantry Division, was enjoying the same kind of evening at the Schofield Barracks Officers’ Club. Here, too, the weekly Saturday night dance seemed even gayer than usual — partly because many of the troops in the 24th and 25th Divisions had just come off a long, tough week in the field; partly because it was the night of Ann Etzler’s Cabaret, a benefit show worked up annually by “one of the very talented young ladies on the post,” as General Wilson gallantly puts it. The show featured amateur singing and dancing — a little corny perhaps, but it was all in the name of charity and enjoyed the support of everybody who counted, including Lieut. General Walter C. Short, commanding general of the Hawaiian Department.

Actually, General Short was late. He had been trapped by a phone call, just as he and his intelligence officer, Lieutenant Colonel Kendall Fielder, were leaving for the party from their quarters at Fort Shafter, the Army’s administrative headquarters just outside Honolulu. Lieutenant Colonel George Bicknell, Short’s counterintelligence officer, was on the wire. He asked them to wait; he had something interesting to show them. The general said all right, but hurry.

At 6:30 Bicknell puffed up. Then, while Mrs. Short and Mrs. Fielder fretted and fumed in the car, the three men sat down together on the commanding general’s lanai. Colonel Bicknell produced the transcript of a phone conversation monitored the day before by the local FBI. It was a call placed by someone on the Tokyo newspaper Yomiuri Shinbun to Dr. Motokazu Mori, a local Japanese dentist and husband of the paper’s Honolulu correspondent.

Tokyo asked about conditions in general: about planes, searchlights, the weather, the number of sailors around … and about flowers. “Presently,” offered Dr. Mori, “the flowers in bloom are fewest out of the whole year. However, the hibiscus and the poinsettia are in bloom now.”

The three officers hashed it over. Why would anyone spend the cost of a transpacific phone call discussing flowers? But if this was code, why talk in the clear about things like planes and searchlights? And would a spy use the telephone? On the other hand, what else could be going on? Was there any connection with the cable recently received from Washington warning “hostile action possible at any moment”?

Fifteen minutes … half an hour … nearly an hour skipped by, and they couldn’t make up their minds. Finally General Short gently suggested that Colonel Bicknell was “too intelligence-conscious”; in any case they couldn’t do anything about it tonight; they would think it over some more and talk about it in the morning.

It was almost 7:30 when the general and Colonel Fielder rejoined their now seething wives and drove the fifteen miles to Schofield. As they entered the dance floor, they scarcely noticed the big lava-rock columns banked with ferns for a gala evening — they were still brooding over the Mori call.

General Short had a couple of cocktails — he never drank after dinner — and worried his way through the next two hours. Perhaps it was the Mori call. Perhaps it was his troubles with training and equipment (there was never enough of anything). Perhaps it was his fear of sabotage. To General Short, Washington’s warning had posed one overwhelming danger — an uprising by Hawaii’s 157,905 civilians of Japanese blood, which would coincide with any Tokyo move in the Far East. He immediately alerted his command against sabotage; lined up all his planes neatly on the ramps, where they could be more easily guarded; and notified the War Department. Washington seemed satisfied, but the fear of a Japanese Fifth Column lingered — that was the way the Axis always struck.

By 9:30 he had had enough. The Shorts and the Fielders left the officers’ club, started back to Shafter. As they rolled along the road that sloped down toward town again, Pearl Harbor spread out below them in the distance. The Pacific Fleet blazed with lights, and searchlight beams occasionally probed the sky. It was a moment for forgetting the cares of the day and enjoying the breathless night. “Isn’t that a beautiful sight?” sighed General Short, adding thoughtfully, “and what a target they would make.”

General Short’s opposite number, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet — known as CINCPAC in the Navy’s jargon of endless initials — had an even less eventful evening back in Honolulu. He was dining quietly at the Halekulani Hotel, a Waikiki landmark that maintained a precarious balance between charm and stuffiness. Several of the Navy’s top brass lived there with their wives, and tonight Admiral and Mrs. Fairfax Leary were giving a small dinner, attended by the commander in chief. It was anything but a wild party — so slow, in fact, that at least two of the wives retreated to a bedroom upstairs for some refreshment with a little more authority.

But Admiral Kimmel was no party admiral anyhow. Hard, sharp, and utterly frank, he worked himself to the bone. When he relaxed, it was usually a brisk walk with a few brother officers, not cocktails and social banter. Proudly self-contained, he looked and acted uncomfortable in easygoing surroundings — he even disapproved of the Navy’s new khakis as “lessening the dignity and military point of view of the wearer.”

He was a difficult man to know, and his position made him more so. He had been jumped over 32 admirals to his present job. Relations were utterly correct, but inevitably there was a mild awkwardness — a lack of informal give-and-take — between himself and some of the men who had always been his seniors. Finally, there was his responsibility as CINCPAC — enough to kill the social inclinations in any man: refitting the fleet with the new weapons that were emerging, training the swarm of new recruits that were arriving, planning operations against Japan if hostilities should explode.

Admiral Kimmel had spent the early afternoon discussing the situation with his staff. The Japanese were now burning their codes … their fleet had changed call letters twice in a month … their carriers had disappeared. On the other hand, the Japanese would naturally take precautions at a time like this; and the lost carriers might not mean anything — Navy intelligence had already lost them 12 times the past six months. Whatever happened, it would be in southeast Asia —Washington, the official estimates, the local press, everybody said so. As for Hawaii, nobody gave it much thought. To free Kimmel’s hands, defense of the base was left to the Army and to the Fourteenth Naval District, technically under Kimmel but run by Admiral Claude C. Bloch pretty much as his own show. Local defense seemed fairly academic anyhow. Only a week before, when Admiral Kimmel asked his operations officer, Captain Charles McMorris, what the chances were of a surprise attack on Honolulu, the captain firmly replied, “None.”

The staff meeting broke up about three o’clock. Admiral Kimmel retired to his quarters for the afternoon, went on to the Learys’ party around 5:45. While they dined under the big hau tree on the Halekulani terrace, the admiral’s driver waited in the car outside, slapping away at mosquitoes. At one point, Richard Kimball, the hotel manager, passed by and said he was sorry about the bugs. The driver replied he didn’t mind the mosquitoes — it was the boredom that got him. If only the car had a radio. But it turned out he didn’t need one tonight. The admiral left at 9:30, drove straight home, and was in bed by ten. It had been a long, tiring week, and tomorrow morning he had an early golf date with General Short.

Most of the officers stayed up later, but their evenings were hardly more spectacular. Rear Admiral Robert A. Theobald, commanding Destroyer Flotilla One, danced at the staid Pacific Club until midnight. Lieutenant Commander S. S. Isquith, engineering officer of the target ship Utah, played cards at the Hawaiian Bridge Center. Young Ensign Victor Delano — reared in the Navy and just out of Annapolis himself — spent a properly respectful evening at the home of Vice Admiral Walter Anderson, commander of Battleship Division Four.

The enlisted men were less circumscribed. Radioman Fred Glaeser from Pearl Harbor … Sergeant George Geiger from the Army’s bomber base at Hickam Field … two thirds of Company M, 19th Infantry, from Schofield Barracks … thousands of others from posts scattered throughout the island of Oahu converged on Honolulu in a fleet of buses, jalopies, and ancient taxis.

Most were dropped at the YMCA, a convenient starting point. Then, after perhaps a quick one at the Black Cat Café across the street, they fanned out on the town. Some, like Chief M. G. Montessoro, patroled the taverns of Waikiki Beach. Others watched “Tantalizing Tootsies,” the variety show at the Princess. Most swarmed down Hotel Street — a hodgepodge of tattoo joints, shooting galleries, pinball machines, barber shops, massage parlors, photo booths, trinket counters — everything an enterprising citizenry could devise for a serviceman’s leisure.

Jukeboxes blared from Bill Lederer’s bar, the Two Jacks, the Mint, the New Emma Café. Thin shafts of light escaped around the drawn shades of hotels named Rex … Ritz … the Anchor. Occasional brawls erupted as the men overflowed the narrow sidewalks.

The Shore Patrol broke up a fight between two sailors from the cruiser Honolulu; caught a seaman from the California using somebody else’s liberty card; arrested a man from the Kaneohe Naval Air Station for “malicious conversation.” But the night was surprisingly calm — only five serious offenses as against 43 for the whole month so far.

The MPs had a quiet time too. They found perhaps 25 soldiers passed out — out of 42,952 in the islands — and these were sent to the Fort Shafter guardhouse to sober up. Otherwise, nothing special.

A surprisingly large number stuck to their ships, bases, and military posts. As the Army and Navy swelled with reservists, an ever-growing number of men seemed to prefer the simpler pleasures. At the Hickam post theater Private Ed Arison watched Clark Gable outwit oriental chicanery in Honky Tonk. In the big new barracks nearby, Staff Sergeant Charles W. Maybeck played Benny Goodmans and Bob Crosbys on his new phonograph. Up at Schofield, Private Aloysius Manuszewski had some beer at the PX, spent most of the evening writing home to Buffalo.

At Pearl Harbor, Boatswain’s Mate Robert E. Jones joined the crowd at the Navy’s new Bloch Recreation Center. It was a place designed to give the enlisted man every kind of relaxation the Navy felt proper — music, boxing, bowling, billiards, 3.2 beer. Tonight’s attraction was “The Battle of Music,” the finals of a contest to decide the best band in the fleet. As the men stamped and cheered, bands from the Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Argonne, and Detroit battled it out. The Pennsylvania band won; everybody sang “God Bless America”; and the evening wound up with dancing. When the crowd filed out at midnight, many still argued that the battleship Arizona’s band — which had already been eliminated — was really the best of all.

Slowly the men drifted back to their ships; the Hotel Street bars closed down; the dances broke up — Honolulu’s strict blue laws took care of that. Here and there a few couples lingered. Second Lieutenant Fred Gregg of Schofield proposed to Evolin Dwyer and was accepted; Ensign William Hasler of the West Virginia was not so lucky, but he happily learned later that a woman can change her mind. Lieutenant Benning drove Monica Conter back to Hickam, where she was stationed. There they laid plans for the following day —lunch, swimming, a movie, some barbecued spareribs. Another engaged couple, Ensign Everett Malcolm and Marian Shaffer, drove to the Shaffer home high in the hills behind Honolulu. He arranged to meet her for golf at one.

About 2:00 A.M. Ensign Malcolm started back for Pearl Harbor but discovered he would never make the last launch to his ship, the Arizona. So he headed instead for the home of Captain D. C. Emerson. The old captain had been senior dentist on the Arizona, and his congenial bachelor establishment was a sort of shoreside bunk-room for the ship’s junior officers.

On arriving, Ensign Malcolm was quickly hailed in by the captain, who sat on the floor with three other officers, arguing about (of all things) Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Mildly bewildered, Malcolm joined in and they were all still at it when the clock touched three.

Only the people who had to be up were now abroad. Radioman Fred Glaeser couldn’t find a bed at the Y, resigned himself to a cramped night in his car. Lieutenant Kermit Tyler, a young pilot at Wheeler Field, was up too — but he was already starting for work. He had drawn the 4:00-8:00 A.M. shift in the Army’s new interceptor center at Fort Shafter. Now as he rolled along the road to town, he flicked on his car radio and listened to KGMB playing Hawaiian records.

About 320 miles to the north, on the Japanese aircraft carrier Akagi, Commander Kanjiro Ono listened intently to the same program. He was staff communications officer for Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, commanding a huge Japanese task force of six carriers, two battleships, three cruisers, and nine destroyers that raced southward through the night. Admiral Nagumo was about to launch an all-out assault on the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor, and everything depended on surprise. He felt that if the Americans had even an inkling, the radio would somehow show it.

But there was nothing — nothing whatsoever, except the soft melodies of the islands. Admiral Nagumo settled back, relieved. There seemed a good chance that a great deal of hard work would not be wasted.

CHAPTER II

“A Dream Come True!”

TEN MONTHS HAD NOW passed since Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander of the Japanese Combined Fleet, remarked almost casually to Rear Admiral Takajiro Onishi, Chief of Staff of the Eleventh Air Fleet, “If we are to have war with America, we will have no hope of winning unless the U.S. fleet in Hawaiian waters can be destroyed.”

Then he ordered Admiral Onishi to start studying the possibility of launching a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Onishi called in Commander Minoru Genda, a crack young airman, and ten days later Genda came up with his appraisal: risky but not impossible.

Yamamoto needed no further encouragement. A few trusted subordinates went quietly to work, and by May Rear Admiral Shigeru Fukudome of the Naval General Staff was able to toss a fat notebook at Rear Admiral Ryunosuke Kusaka.

“Go ahead, read it,” invited Fukudome. Kusaka plunged into a mass of statistics on Pearl Harbor, but missed any operational plans. “That,” said Fukudome, “is what I want you to do.”

The job seemed overwhelming. The U.S. strength looked enormous. Hawaii was thousands of miles from Japan. There were airfields scattered all around Oahu — Hickam, Wheeler, Ewa, Kaneohe, probably others. Pearl Harbor itself was narrow and shallow, making it extremely difficult to get at the ships. On top of everything else, Vice Admiral Nagumo, commander of the First Air Fleet, and slated to lead any attack, was dragging his feet. As his chief of staff, no wonder Kusaka was discouraged.

“Don’t keep saying, ‘It’s too much of a gamble,’ just because I happen to be fond of playing bridge and shogi,” Admiral Yamamoto cheerfully admonished. “Mr. Kusaka, I am fully aware of your arguments. But Pearl Harbor is my idea and I need your support.” He added that it would certainly help if Kusaka could win over Admiral Nagumo.

Kusaka worked on, and somehow the project began to make sense. Commander Genda did wonders with the torpedo problem. All summer he experimented on the Inland Sea, setting up short shallow torpedo runs. By August he was trying out shallow-draft torpedoes at Saeki. As for the short length of run — well, there was Southeast Loch, a narrow arm of water that led like a bowling alley straight to the battleship moorings in the center of Pearl Harbor.

Everything was done in the darkest secrecy. One afternoon late in August, Lieutenant (j.g.) Toshio Hashimoto, a young naval pilot, took some papers to his wing commander’s office and found a group of high-ranking officers poring over charts and maps of Pearl Harbor. They were stamped “Top Secret,” and Lieutenant Hashimoto was appalled at his intrusion. Nobody rebuked him, but he went away petrified by the mere knowledge of such an enormous secret.

By the end of August, Admiral Yamamoto was ready to unveil the scheme to a select few. Admiral Osami Nagano, Chief of the Naval General Staff, and 13 other key officers were called to Tokyo and given the word. Then, from September 2 to 13, they all tested the idea on the game board at the Naval War College.

The attacking team “lost” two carriers; Admiral Nagano began complaining that December was too stormy; Admiral Nagumo, commander of the all-important First Air Fleet, still had cold feet. Other officers argued that Japan could take southeast Asia without U.S. interference; that if America came in, the place to catch the fleet was nearer Japanese waters.

But Yamamoto stuck to his guns — if war came, America was bound to be in it … her fleet was Japan’s biggest obstacle … the best time to crush it was right away. By the time it recovered, Japan would have everything she needed and could sit back and hold out forever.

This logic won the day, and on September 13 the Naval Command issued the rough draft of a plan that combined Pearl Harbor, Malaya, the Philippines, and the Dutch East Indies in one huge assault.

Next, the training stage. One by one, men were tapped for the key jobs. Brilliant young Commander Mitsuo Fuchida was mildly surprised to be transferred suddenly to the carrier Akagi, having just left her the year before. He was far more amazed to be named commander of all air groups of the First Air Fleet. Commander Genda sidled up with the explanation: “Now don’t be alarmed, Fuchida, but we want you to lead our air force in the event that we attack Pearl Harbor.”

Lieutenant Yoshio Shiga and about a hundred other pilots got the word on October 5 from Admiral Yamamoto himself. He swore them to secrecy, told them the plan, urged them to their greatest effort.

The men practiced harder than ever —mostly the low, short torpedo runs that had to be mastered. The torpedoes themselves continued to misbehave in shallow water, diving to the bottom and sticking in the mud. Commander Fuchida wondered whether they would ever work. But Genda only grew more excited — once perfected, they would be the supreme weapon. And by early November he had succeeded. Simple wooden stabilizers were fitted on the fins, which would keep the torpedoes from hitting even the shallow 45-foot bottom of Pearl Harbor.

Meanwhile, other pilots practiced bombing techniques, for nobody except Genda was completely sold on torpedoes. Besides, the meticulous intelligence now pouring in from Consul General Nagao Kita in Honolulu showed that the battleships were often moored in pairs; torpedoes couldn’t possibly reach the inboard ship. To penetrate tough armor-plated decks, ordnance men fitted fins on 15-inch and 16-inch armor-piercing shells. These converted missiles would go through anything.

While the pilots practiced and the inventors worked their miracles, Admiral Kusaka battled the red tape that snarls anybody’s navy. Some time during October he flew to Tokyo to argue headquarters into giving him eight tankers for the task force that was now taking shape. It meant the difference between using four or six carriers, and at a time like this it seemed incredible that there should be any question about it. But headquarters hemmed and hawed, and it took several weeks to wangle the extra ships.

Thirty-three-year-old Suguru Suzuki, youngest lieutenant commander in the service, had a more stimulating job. Around the end of October he boarded the Japanese liner Taiyo Maru for an interesting journey to Honolulu. Instead of following her usual course, the ship sailed far to the north, crossed over between Midway and the Aleutians, and then cut south to Hawaii —exactly the course the task force planned to follow to avoid detection.

Lieutenant Commander Suzuki whiled away the trip taking reams of notes. He checked the winds, the atmospheric pressure, the roll of the vessel. Could a scouting seaplane be launched in these seas? It could. Would any special refueling problems arise? They would. He observed that during the entire voyage the Taiyo Maru didn’t sight a single ship.

In Honolulu, Lieutenant Commander Suzuki spent a busy week. From occasional visitors to his ship he learned that the fleet wasn’t now assembling at Lahaina Anchorage as it used to. He confirmed that the weekend was a universally observed American institution. He picked up some choice titbits — structural data on the Hickam Field hangars, interesting aerial shots of Pearl Harbor taken October 21. These were made from a private plane that took up sightseers at nearby John Rogers Airport. Anybody could do it.

Then back to Tokyo again, guardedly comparing notes with Lieutenant Commander Toshihide Maejima, who was also on board. Commander Maejima seems to have had much the same interests, but directed rather more toward submarines.

By now things were moving fast in Tokyo. November 3, Admiral Nagano’s final blessing … November 5, Combined Fleet Top Secret Order Number 1, spelling out the plan … November 7, Admiral Nagumo officially named commander of the Pearl Harbor Striking Force. The same day Yamamoto tentatively set the date — December 8, or Sunday, December 7, Hawaii time. Good for a number of reasons: favorable moonlight … perfect coordination with the Malay strike … the best chance to catch the ships in port and the men off duty.

A few more people were let in on the secret. Admiral Kusaka confided in Commander Shin-Ichi Shimizu, a middle-aged supply officer. The problem: how to draw winter gear without attracting attention, when everybody else was getting ready for the tropics. Commander Shimizu’s solution: requisition both summer and winter gear. He glibly told the startled depot that if war came, you never knew where you might go. Then he piled everything on the freighter Hoko Maru and chugged off to sea about November 15. Once out of sight, he swung north and made for Hitokappu Bay in the bleak, cold Kuriles — the secret rendezvous point for the Pearl Harbor Striking Force.

Admiral Nagumo himself was not far behind. His flagship, the carrier Akagi, left Saeki in the late evening of the 17th. His chief of staff, Admiral Kusaka, tingled with optimism. Only the day before, he had received a letter from his old housekeeper, telling of a pleasant dream — the Japanese submarine fleet had achieved a splendid surprise victory at Pearl Harbor. A strange dream for a housekeeper, but Admiral Kusaka thought it was a good omen.

On November 19 Lieutenant Commander Suzuki arrived back from his junket to Honolulu and took a fast launch to the battleship Hiei, anchored off Yokohama. Suzuki climbed aboard with his bulging briefcase, and the Hiei, too, steamed off for Hitokappu.

One by one they slipped away. Always separately, never any apparent connection. Once out of sight, the sea simply swallowed them up. At the great Kure naval base a lively radio traffic crackled from the rest of the ships, designed to give the impression that the fleet was still at home. The regular carrier operators stayed behind to give these signals their usual “swing.” (A wireless operator’s touch is as distinctive as his handwriting.) The camouflage was so good it even fooled Admiral Kusaka, who bawled out his communications man for breaking radio silence, only to find the “message” was a fake concocted back home.

One by one they glided into Hitokappu Bay — the lumbering carriers Akagi and Kaga; the huge new flattop Zuikaku; the light carriers Hiryu and Soryu; the old battleships Hiei and Kirishima; the crack new cruisers Tone and Chikuma; nine destroyers led by the light cruiser Abukuma; three screening submarines; the eight tankers finally wangled from headquarters. Last to arrive in the twilight of November 21 was the great carrier Shokaku, which had put on such an effective masquerade of turbine trouble that she was almost late.

Now they were all there — 32 ships incongruously packed in a desolate harbor. Snow crowned the mountains that ringed the cold, gray bay. Three lonely radio masts stood against the sky. Three small fishermen’s huts and one bare concrete pier were the only other traces of civilization. Even so, Nagumo took no chances — no shore leaves, no rubbish overboard. When Seaman Shigeki Yokota got the Kagas garbage detail, he had to burn it right beside the pier.

Commander Shimizu and the other supply ship skippers gradually transferred food, clothes, and thousands of drums of fuel oil to the task force. Five-gallon tins of oil were crammed into every empty space. When all was loaded, Shimizu told his crew to stay put until December 10: “Go fishing. Do anything you want, but you can’t leave the area.” Then he transferred to the Akagi — he couldn’t resist going along for the ride.

Admiral Nagumo held a last conference on the Akagi on the night of the 23rd. Lieutenant Commander Suzuki told about his interesting trip to Honolulu. Commander Fuchida, who would lead the air strike, scribbled away at his notes. The meeting ended with a toast of sake and three banzais for the emperor.

On the 25th Yamamoto ordered the fleet to get going the following day, and inevitably Admiral Nagumo spent a restless last night. At 2:00 A.M. he finally called in Lieutenant Commander Suzuki, apologized for waking him, and said he just had to check one point again: “You’re absolutely certain about not spotting the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Lahaina?”

“Yes, Admiral.”

“Nor is there any possibility that it might assemble at Lahaina?”

Suzuki reassured him and went back to bed, deeply moved by the sight of the old admiral, all alone with his worries, pacing away the night in his kimono.

At dawn Suzuki left the Akagi and stood on the shore waving goodbye as the anchor chains rattled upward and the ships got under way. On the bridge of the Akagi Admiral Kusaka tugged at his coat collar to escape the bitter wind that swept the cheerless morning.

An unexpected hitch arose when a piece of cable snarled in the Akagi’s propeller, but a diver got it free in half an hour, and by 8:00 A.M. the whole task force was clear of the harbor. As the Akagi glided by, a patrol boat’s blinkers flashed through the gloom, “Good luck on your mission.”

Commander Gishiro Miura, the Akagi’s navigation officer, certainly needed it. He had no easy job in weather like this —pounding seas, steady gales, the thickest kind of fog. Miura was famous throughout the fleet for his sloppy, easygoing amiability; but it was all gone now. He stood stern and tense on the bridge. He wore a pair of shoes instead of his usual carpet slippers.

Most of the time the ships managed to keep in formation: the carriers in two parallel columns of three … the eight tankers trailing behind … the battleships and cruisers guarding the flanks … the destroyers screening the whole force … the subs scouting far ahead. But at night the tankers, not used to this sort of work, would stray far and wide. Every morning the destroyers herded them back to the fleet.

The second day out, Admirals Nagumo and Kusaka clung to the plunging bridge of the Akagi, trying as usual to round up the tankers. Suddenly Nagumo blurted, “Mr. Chief of Staff, what do you think? I feel that I’ve undertaken a heavy responsibility. If I had only been more firm and refused. Now we’ve left home waters and I’m beginning to wonder if the operation will work.”

Admiral Kusaka came up with the right answer: “Sir, there’s no need to worry. We’ll make out all right.”

Nagumo smiled. “I envy you, Mr. Kusaka. You’re such an optimist.”

Admiral Nagumo must have felt even more discouraged when they first tried refueling on the 28th. This turned out to be dangerous, backbreaking work. As the ships bucked and plunged, the big hoses running from the tankers would snap loose and whiplash across the deck. Several crewmen were swept overboard, but nothing could be done about it.

By the 30th they were getting better at refueling, but now they had another problem. As the weather grew worse, oil drums stored on the deck of the light carrier Hiryu spilled, turning her into a skating rink. Commander Takahisa Amagai, the flight deck officer, wrapped straw rope around his boots to keep from falling, but barked his shins anyhow.

On they plowed, through nerve-wracked days and sleepless nights. Admiral Kusaka catnapped in a canvas chair on the Akagi’s bridge. Her chief engineer, Commander Yoshibumi Tanbo, did the same far below. He and his 350 men rarely left the engine room, lived in a life of oil and sweat beside their beloved machines. Mess attendants carried down all their meals —usually rice balls with pickled plums and radishes, wrapped in bamboo bark.

Everyone grew more and more restless. From the bridge of the Akagi Admiral Kusaka watched the pilots endlessly check their planes, warm up the engines, run through daily calisthenics. On the Shokaku, Commander Hoichiro Tsukamoto never knew that time could pass so slowly — his mind was always wandering to his watch or clock. Captain Tadataka Endo, the ship’s doctor, whiled away the hours playing shogi and go. On the Hiryu, everyone speculated about the gauze mask that Group Leader Lieutenant Haita Matsumura wore over his mouth. He mumbled something about the unhealthy climate, and they marked him off as a hopeless hypochondriac.

But they speculated most of all on where they were going. Fighter pilot Yoshio Shiga on the Kaga was sure it would be in the north — all the planes had been changed to winter oil. Lieutenant (j.g.) Sukao Ebina, the Shokaku’s junior medical officer, guessed Dutch Harbor. Commander Tanbo down in the Akagi’s engine room enjoyed a special advantage: he knew how far she could go on the fuel she carried. It all added up to the Philippines.

Hardly anybody yet knew the truth. Last-ditch negotiations were being conducted by Japanese envoys in Washington, trying to win for Japan a free hand in Asia. If these talks unexpectedly succeeded, orders would be sent to Nagumo to turn around and come home. And if this were done, the world must never know what almost happened. So at this point Nagumo couldn’t risk telling anybody.

But it was far more likely that the attack would come off; so the main job was to keep the fleet from being discovered. No waste could be thrown overboard — it might leave a telltale track. The ships used the highest grade fuel to keep smoke at a minimum. The empty oil drums were carefully stowed away. Complete blackout and strict radio silence. On the Hiei, Commander Kazuyoshi Kochi, chief communications officer for the whole task force, disconnected an essential part of his transmitter, put it in a wooden box, and used it as a pillow whenever he managed to get in some sleep.

They had several bad scares. Once Tokyo radioed that an unknown submarine had been detected. The fleet hastily changed course, only to discover that it was all a mistake. Another night Admiral Kusaka suddenly spotted a light in the sky, thought it might be an unknown aircraft. It turned out to be a spark from the Kaga’s runnel. She got a stiff warning to be more careful.

One morning the report spread that a Soviet ship was cruising nearby, en route from San Francisco to Russia. Every ship went on alert, but nothing came of it. Nor was there any way of checking such reports — Nagumo would not allow any planes in the air for fear of disclosing the fleet’s presence.

Arguments rambled over what to do if they were spotted by a neutral ship. At least one member of Nagumo’s staff cheerfully advised, “Sink it and forget it.”

On December 2 this sort of bull session ended abruptly. The day before, the imperial council had decided on war, and now Admiral Yamamoto radioed the task force: “Climb Mount Niitaka.” It was code for “Proceed with the attack.”

Another message later that day confirmed the date: “X-Day will be 8 December” — which was, of course, Sunday, December 7, in Hawaii.

At last the men were mustered and told. On the Kaga, Seaman Shigeki Yokota, a 23-year-old farm boy, was frightened but philosophical. Down in the heat and noise of the Akagi’s engine room Commander Tanbo’s men drank a quiet toast of sake … somehow no one felt like more than one cup. But most of the crew howled banzais and shared Seaman Iki Kuramoti’s ecstasy: “An air attack on Hawaii! A dream come true!”

Next morning everyone seemed to take a new lease on life. The pilots were briefed on their specific assignments — the Army airfields at Hickam and Wheeler … Schofield Barracks … the naval air stations at Kaneohe and Ford Island … the Marine base at Ewa … the U.S. fleet. On the Akagi, Admiral Kusaka produced a beautiful plaster-of-Paris relief map of Pearl Harbor. Previously, he had kept it under lock and key in his stateroom, accessible only to a few top officers; now he had it installed on the hangar deck, where everybody could use it. On the Kaga the pilots played identification games. An air officer would hide silhouettes of the American ships behind his back. Then he would flash them one at a time for the fliers to name. Lieutenant Yoshio Shiga just never could get the Utah.

The fliers were now pampered by everybody — daily baths, special rations of fresh milk and eggs. Despite all the Shinto cult could do, these were promptly converted into American milkshakes.

On the flagship, Admiral Nagumo worried more than ever about being discovered. He was indeed in a ticklish spot. If sighted by the enemy at any time before December 6, he was to turn around and go home. If sighted on the 6th, he was to use his own judgment. Only on the 7th was he committed, no matter what happened.

In the radio room of the Hiei, Commander Kochi listened intently to detect any sign that the Americans were on to the game. The intercepts were very reassuring.

Soon a flow of messages began to arrive from home, so important that Kochi let his staff do the monitoring, and devoted his own attention entirely to Tokyo. Yamamoto was relaying the latest Honolulu intelligence on the U.S. fleet. On December 3 he radioed:

“November 28-0800 (Local Time) Pearl Harbor: 2 Battleships (Oklahoma, Nevada); 1 Aircraft carrier (Enterprise); 2 Class-A Cruisers; 12 Destroyers Depart. 5 Battleships; 3 Class-A Cruisers; 3 Class-B Cruisers; 12 Destroyers; 1 Seaplane Carrier Enter …”

The following day Nagumo refueled and crossed the international date line. This made no difference to the Japanese, who always kept their watches on Tokyo time, but to an American it explains why it is December 3 again.

By evening the fleet was 900 miles north of Midway… 1300 miles northwest of Oahu. Admiral Nagumo began veering southeast. On the Hiei, Commander Kochi caught another useful message relayed by Tokyo from Honolulu: “November 29 P.M. (Local Time) Vessels Anchored in Pearl Harbor: A-Zone (Between Navy Arsenal and Ford Island) KT (NW dock Navy Arsenal) Battleships, Pennsylvania, Arizona; FV (Mooring buoy) Battleships, California, Tennessee, Maryland, West Virginia. KS (Navy Arsenal Repair Dock) Class-A Cruiser Portland …”

More refueling on the 4th, and another morsel from Honolulu: “Unable to ascertain whether air alert has been issued. There are no indications of sea alert …”

On the 5th, part of the fleet refueled most of the day and night. Admiral Kusaka then ordered three of the tankers to withdraw and wait for him to return. It was one of those sentimental moments the Japanese love so well, and the crew kept waving their caps as the tankers slowly disappeared. Down below Commander Shimizu — the supply officer who was just along for the ride — wistfully listened to a Japanese program, Mrs. Hanako Muraoka’s “Children’s Hours.” It was now so faint that he finally gave up and twirled the dial until he caught some American music. It came in bright and lively.

At dawn on the 6th Kusaka refueled the rest of the task force, then once again the ships that had been refueled the day before. His idea was to have the tanks as full as possible for the day of the attack. By late morning the job was done, and the five remaining tankers also withdrew. More fond farewells.

Meanwhile Yamamoto had radioed a final, stirring call to arms: “The moment has arrived. The rise or fall of our empire is at stake …”

Everyone who could be spared assembled on deck, and on each ship the message was read to all hands. Speeches followed, and cheers split the air. Then up the Akagi’s mast ran the same “Z” flag flown by Admiral Heihachiro Togo at his great victory over the Russians in 1905. Down in the Akagi’s engine room Chief Engineer Tanbo couldn’t see it happen, but as he listened over the voice tube, his heart pounded and tears came to his eyes. He still regards it as his most dramatic single moment during the entire war.

It was hardly the moment for an earache. But as Group Leader Lieutenant Rokuro Kijuchi resumed briefing a group of pilots on the flight deck of the Hiryu, he felt a throbbing pain. He went to the ship’s doctor and got the bad news — he couldn’t go; he had mastoids.

The fleet was now some 640 miles due north of Oahu. With the slow tankers gone, it could make its final thrust southward. Shortly before noon Admiral Kusaka turned his ships and gave the order: “Twenty-four knots, full speed ahead!”

By 3:00 P.M. they had closed the gap to 500 miles. And in the radio room of the Hiei, Commander Kochi had a new message from Honolulu: as of 6:00 P.M., December 5, Pearl Harbor contained “8 battleships; 3 Class-B Cruisers; 16 Destroyers. Entering Harbor, 4 Class-B Cruisers (Honolulu Type); 5 Destroyers.”

At 4:55 P.M. the submarine I-72, already on the scene, sent some up-to-the-minute information: “American fleet is not in Lahaina waters.”

So they were either still at Pearl or had just left for sea. Nagumo’s staff hashed it over. Lieutenant Commander Ono, the admiral’s intelligence officer, pointed out that five of the battleships had been in port eight days; he was afraid they would be gone now. But Chief of Staff Kusaka, who was a bug on statistics, didn’t think they would leave on a weekend.

Commander Genda, the enterprising torpedo specialist, bemoaned the absence of carriers, but Ono comforted him that a couple of them might return at the last minute. Genda cheered up: “If that happened, I don’t care if all eight battleships are away.”

Late that evening another reassuring message from Honolulu: “No barrage balloons sighted. Battleships are without crinolines. No indications of an air or sea alert wired to nearby islands …”

The deceptive measures obviously were working. And Tokyo must have felt quite self-satisfied, for everything possible had been done. The authorities had even brought busloads of sailors from the Yokosuka Naval Barracks and paraded them conspicuously all over town on sight-seeing tours.

At 1:20 A.M. a last message was relayed by Tokyo from Honolulu:

“December 6 (Local Time) Vessels moored in Harbor: 9 Battleships; 3 Class-B Cruisers; 3 Seaplane Tenders; 17 Destroyers. Entering Harbor are 4 Class-B Cruisers; 3 Destroyers. All Aircraft Carriers and Heavy Cruisers have departed Harbor … No indication of any changes in U.S. Fleet or anything else unusual.”

More regrets that the carriers were gone. Some even wondered whether the raid should be called off. But Admiral Nagumo felt there was no turning back now. Eight battleships were bound to be in port, and it was time to stop worrying “about carriers that are not there.”

A last restless night of peace settled over the darkened ships as they pounded on toward Oahu, now less than 400 miles away. On the Kaga, Fighter Pilot Shiga took a tub bath, prepared a complete new change in clothing before retiring. Pilot Ippei Goto, who had just been promoted, laid out his new ensign’s uniform for the first time. On the Hiryu, Bomber Pilot Hashimoto put his things in order and tried to get some sleep. But he kept tossing in his bunk. Finally he got up, went to the ship’s doctor, and talked him out of some sleeping pills.

They must have worked, for when Commander Amagai, the Hiryu’s flight deck officer, dropped by a little later to see how his boys were getting on, they were all sound asleep.

He then went up to the hangar deck and carefully checked the wireless in each plane. To make doubly sure that nobody accidentally touched a set and gave away the show, he slipped small pieces of paper between each transmitter key and its point of contact.

On the Akagi, Lieutenant Commander Ono hunched over his radio and continued his all-night vigil, monitoring the Honolulu radio stations. Two … 2:30 … 3:00 A.M. passed; still there was just KGMB playing Hawaiian songs.

Some 360 miles to the south, Lieutenant Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto, special torpedo officer of the Japanese submarine I-24, sat listening to the same radio program. The I-24 was one of 28 large cruising subs that had been stationed off Oahu. They were to catch any U.S. warships lucky enough to escape to sea.

Also listening to the program in the I-24 was Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki, who had just turned 23 the day they left Japan. Sakamaki lived dreams of naval glory, but so far he was just a passenger. He was skipper of a two-man midget sub, which the I-24 carried papoose-style on her afterdeck.

There were five of these midgets altogether, each carried by a mother sub. The plan was to launch them shortly before the air attack. With luck they might sneak inside the harbor and bag a ship or two themselves.

The whole idea had an implausible touch that didn’t appeal to the superpractical Admiral Yamamoto. But it also had that touch of military suicide dear to the Japanese heart, and finally Commander Naoji Iwasa persuaded the high command to incorporate the midgets — by now called the “Special Naval Attack Unit” — into the overall plan. Then, since Iwasa had thought it up, he was put in charge.

At first Yamamoto set an important condition — the midgets couldn’t enter Pearl Harbor itself … they might give away the show before it began. But Commander Iwasa insisted that they could sneak in undetected, and finally Yamamoto relented on this point too.

Commander Iwasa quickly whipped his project into shape. Five long-range cruising subs were stripped of their aircraft and catapults and fitted instead with the new secret midgets. Four big clamps and one auxiliary clamp held them in place. Each of the midgets was about 45 feet long, carried two torpedoes, ran on storage batteries, and required a two-man crew.

The crews — handpicked and trained for more than a year — gathered in the Naval Command’s private room at Kure Naval Base on the morning of November 16. There they learned that the great day was at hand, that they would sail on the 18th for Hawaii.

The following night Ensign Sakamaki took a last stroll through Kure with his classmate and fellow skipper, Ensign Akira Hirowo. At a novelty shop they each bought a small bottle of perfume. In the best tradition of the old Japanese warriors, they planned to put it on before going to battle. Then they could die gloriously — as Sakamaki explained, “like cherry blossoms falling to the ground.”

Next morning they were off. Straight across the Pacific they sailed, cruising about 20 miles apart. Usually they ran submerged by day, on the surface at night. During these evening runs Sakamaki and his crewman, Seaman Kyoji Inagaki, would climb all over the midget, making sure that everything was all right. In his enthusiasm, Sakamaki was twice washed overboard. Fortunately he had remembered to tie himself to the big sub with a rope; so each time he was hauled in, dripping but full of pep, ready to go back to work.

On December 6 they sighted Oahu. After nightfall they surfaced and eased closer to shore. Finally they lay to in the moonlight, about ten miles off Pearl Harbor. From the conning tower Commander Hashimoto studied with interest the red and green lights off the port … the glow of Honolulu itself … the illuminated twin towers of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel … and all the way to his right the Elks Club that glittered and twinkled at the foot of Diamond Head.

So at last they were there. Sakamaki and Inagaki ran through the million details that needed last minute checking. Suddenly they discovered the gyrocompass wasn’t working. This was important — without it they couldn’t navigate under water. Sakamaki corralled the I-24’s gyrocompass man, ordered Inagaki to help him on the repair job, and went below for a last nap.

About 12:30 A.M. he left his bunk and wandered up to the conning tower for a little fresh air. Oahu was darker now and seemed wrapped in haze. The stars were out, and the moon beat on a choppy, restless sea.

He went below and checked on the gyrocompass. Inagaki and the specialist were getting nowhere. Sakamaki’s heart sank and he wondered whether this was just bad luck or if he had somehow failed. In any case, he was determined to go on.

He packed his personal belongings and wrote a farewell note to his family. In it he thoughtfully included a lock of hair and one of his fingernail parings. He cleaned up and changed to his midget submarine uniform —a leather jacket and fundoshi, which was a sort of Japanese G-string. He sprinkled himself with the perfume he bought at Kure and put on a white hashamaki, the Japanese warrior’s traditional headband. Then he made the rounds of the sub, embracing the crew. By now it was well after 3:30 A.M., the time the midgets were meant to start for Pearl Harbor.

CHAPTER III

“Gate Open — White Lights”

AT 3:42 A.M. THE small mine sweeper Condor was plying her trade just outside Pearl Harbor, when watch officer Ensign R. C. McCloy suddenly sighted a strange white wave to port. It was less than 100 yards away, gradually converging on the Condor and moving toward the harbor entrance. He pointed it out to Quartermaster B. C. Uttrick, and they took turns looking at it with McCloy’s binoculars. They decided it was the periscope of a submerged submarine, trailing a wake as it moved through the water.

Soon it was only 50 yards away —about 1000 yards from the entrance buoys. Then it apparently saw the Condor, for it quickly veered off in the opposite direction. At 3:58 the Condor’s signal light blinked the news to the destroyer Ward, on patrol duty nearby: “Sighted submerged submarine on westerly course, speed nine knots.”

The message came to Lieutenant (j.g.) Oscar Goepner, a young reserve officer from Northwestern University, who had just taken over the watch. He had been on the Ward doing this sort of inshore patrol work for more than a year, but tonight was the first time anything like this had ever happened. He woke up the skipper, Lieutenant William W. Outerbridge.

For Outerbridge it was more than his first sub alert — it was his first night on his first patrol on his first command. Until now his naval career had been very uneventful, considering a rather colorful background. He had been born in Hong Kong — the son of a British merchant captain and an Ohio girl. After his father’s death, the widow moved back home, and Outerbridge entered Annapolis, Class of 1927. He managed to scrape through, and spent the next 14 years inching up from one stripe to two — it was always a slow climb in the prewar Navy.

Until a few days before, he had been executive officer on the destroyer Cummings, where all the officers were Academy men except one reservist. Now he was the only Academy man on a ship full of reservists. He recalled how sorry he had felt for the Cummings’ lonely reserve officer. Now the tables were turned — Goepner still recalls how sorry everybody on the Ward felt for Outerbridge, alone among the heathens.

On reading the Condors message, Outerbridge sounded general quarters, and the men tumbled to their battle stations. For the next half hour the Ward prowled about — her lookout and sonar men straining for any sign of the sub. No luck. At 4:43 A.M. the crew were released, and most of them went back to bed. The regular watch continued to search the night.

Four minutes later the gate in the antitorpedo net across the harbor entrance began to swing open. This always took eight to ten minutes; and it wasn’t until 4:58 A.M. that a crewman noted in the gate vessel log, “Gate open — white lights.”

At 5:08 the mine sweeper Crossbill, which had been working with the Condor, passed in. Normally the gate would now be closed again — this was always supposed to be done at night — but the Condor was due in so soon, it just didn’t seem worth the trouble.

By 5:32 the Condor was safely in, but still the gate stayed open. The tug Keosanqua was due to pass out around 6:15 A.M. Once more it didn’t seem worth the trouble to close the gate, only to open it again in a little while.

As the Condor closed up shop, the Ward radioed for a few final words of advice that might help her carry on the search: “What was the approximate distance and course of the sub you sighted?”

“The course was about what we were steering at the time, 020 magnetic, and about 1000 yards from the entrance.”

This was far to the east of the area first indicated, and Outerbridge felt he must have been looking in the wrong place. Actually, the Condor was talking about two different things. Her first message gave the sub’s course when last seen; this new message gave it when first seen. She never explained that in between times the sub had completely changed course.

So the Ward moved east, combing an area where the sub could never be. And as she scurried about, she remembered at 5:34 to acknowledge the Condor’s help: “Thank you for your information … We will continue search.”

The radio station at nearby Bishops Point listened in on this exchange, but didn’t report it to anybody — after all, a ship-to-ship conversation between the Ward and the Condor was none of their business. The Ward didn’t report anything either — after all, the Condor didn’t, and she was the one who said she saw something. She must have decided it wasn’t a sub after all.

In any event, it wasn’t the sub piloted by Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki. He wasn’t even ready to leave until 5:30, a good two hours behind schedule. Meanwhile there had been more futile last-minute efforts to fix the broken gyroscope. Then another round of ceremonial good-byes.

When the I-24’s skipper, Lieutenant Commander Hiroshi Hanabusa, asked if the broken gyrocompass had altered his plans, Sakamaki proudly replied, “Captain, I am going ahead.” And then, carried away by it all, they both shouted, “On to Pearl Harbor!”

Dawn was just breaking when Sakamaki and Inagaki left the bridge of the I-24 and scrambled aft along the catwalk to their midget. Each man held a bottle of wine and some lunch in his left hand, and shook a few more hands with his right. As Sakamaki’s friend, Ensign Hirowo, observed when climbing into his midget on the I-20, “We must look like high school boys happily going on a picnic.”

Sakamaki was far beyond such mundane thoughts. He and Inagaki said nothing as they climbed up the side of the small sub, squirmed through the hatch in the conning tower, and slammed it shut behind them.

The I-24 slowly submerged, and the crew took their stations to release the four big clamps that held the midget. Quietly they waited for the signal.

Sakamaki and Inagaki were waiting too. Their electric motor was now purring, and they could feel the mother sub picking up speed to give them a better start.

Suddenly there was the terrific bang of the releasing gear, and they were off on their own. Immediately everything went wrong. Instead of thrusting ahead on an even keel, the midget tilted down, nearly standing on end. Sakamaki switched off the engines and began trying to correct the boat’s trim.

CHAPTER IV

“You’d Be Surprised What Goes on Around Here”

LIEUTENANT HARAUO TAKEDA, 30-year-old flight officer on the cruiser Tone, was a disappointed, worried man as the Japanese striking force hurtled southward, now less than 250 miles from Oahu.

He was disappointed because last-minute orders kept him from piloting the Tone’s seaplane, which was to take off at 5:30 A.M., joining the Chikuma’s plane in a final reconnaissance of the U.S. fleet. And he was worried because — as the man in charge of launching these planes — he feared that they would somehow collide while taking off. True, the two ships were some eight miles apart, but it was still pitch black. Besides, when the stakes are so high, a man almost looks for things to worry about.

Nothing went wrong. The planes shot safely from their catapults and winged off into the dark — two small harbingers of the great armada that would follow. Admiral Nagumo planned to hit Pearl Harbor with 353 planes in two mighty waves. The first was to go at 6:00 A.M. — 40 torpedo planes … 51 dive-bombers … 49 horizontal bombers … 43 fighters to provide cover. The second at 7:15 A.M. — 80 dive-bombers … 54 high-level bombers … 36 more fighters. This would still leave 39 planes to guard the task force in case the Americans struck back.

By now the men on the carriers were making their final preparations. The deck crews — up an hour before the pilots —checked the planes in their hangars, then brought them up to the flight decks. Motors sputtered and roared as the mechanics tuned up the engines. On the Hiryu, Commander Amagai carefully removed the pieces of paper he had slipped into each plane’s wireless transmitter to keep it from being set off by accident.

Down below, the pilots were pulling on their clean underwear and freshly pressed uniforms. Several wore the traditional hashamaki headbands. Little groups gathered around the portable Shinto shrines that were standard equipment on every Japanese warship. There they drank jiggers of sake and prayed for their success.

Assembling for breakfast, they found a special treat. Instead of the usual salted pike-mackerel and rice mixed with barley, today they ate sekihan. This Japanese dish of rice boiled with tiny red beans was reserved for only the most ceremonial occasions. Next, they picked up some simple rations for the trip — a sort of box lunch that included the usual rice balls and pickled plums, emergency rations of chocolate, hardtack, and special pills to keep them alert.

Now to the flight operations rooms for final briefing. On the Akagi Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, leader of the attacking planes, sought out Admiral Nagumo: “I am ready for the mission.”

“I have every confidence in you,” the admiral answered, grasping Fuchida’s hand.

On every carrier the scene was the same: the dimly lit briefing room; the pilots crowding in and spilling out into the corridor; the blackboard revised to show ship positions at Pearl Harbor as of 10:30 A.M., December 6. Time for one last look at the enemy lineup; one last rundown on the charts and maps. Then the latest data on wind direction and velocity, some up-to-the-minute calculations on distance and flying time to Hawaii and back. Next a stern edict: no one except Commander Fuchida was to touch his radio until the attack began. Finally, brief pep talks by the flight officers, the skippers, and, on the Akagi, by Admiral Nagumo himself.

A bright dawn swept the sky as the men emerged, some wearing small briefing boards slung around their necks. One by one they climbed to the cockpits, waving good-bye — 27-year-old Ippei Goto of the Kaga, in his brand-new ensign’s uniform … quiet Fusata Iida of the Soryu, who was so crazy about baseball … artistic Mimori Suzuki of the Akagi, whose Caucasian looks invited rough teasing about his “mixed blood.” When it was Lieutenant Haita Matsumura’s turn, he suddenly whipped off the gauze mask which had marked him as such a hypochondriac. All along, he had been secretly growing a beautiful mustache.

Commander Fuchida headed for the flight leader’s plane, designated by a red and yellow stripe around the tail. As he swung aboard, the crew chief handed him a special hashamaki headband: “This is a present from the maintenance crews. May I ask that you take it along to Pearl Harbor?”

In the Agaki’s engine room, Commander Tanbo got permission and rushed topside for the great moment — the only time he left his post during the entire voyage. Along the flight decks the men gathered, shouting good luck and waving good-bye. Lieutenant Ebina, the Shokaku’s junior surgeon, trembled with excitement as he watched the motors race faster and the blue exhaust smoke pour out.

All eyes turned to the Akagi, which would give the signal. She flew a set of flags at half-mast, which meant to get ready. When they were hoisted to the top and swiftly lowered, the planes would go.

Slowly the six carriers swung into the wind. It was from the east, and perfect for take-off. But the southern seas were running high, and the carriers dipped 15 degrees, sending high waves crashing against the bow. Too rough for really safe launching, Admiral Kusaka thought, but there was no other choice now. The Pearl Harbor Striking Force was poised 230 miles north and slightly east of Oahu. The time was 6:00 A.M.

Up fluttered the signal flags, then down again. One by one the fighters roared down the flight decks, drowning the cheers and yells that erupted everywhere. Commander Hoichiro Tsukamoto forgot his worries as navigation officer of the Shokaku, decided this was the greatest moment of his life. The ship’s doctors, Captain Endo and Lieutenant Ebina, abandoned their professional dignity and wildly waved the fliers on. Engineer Tanbo shouted like a schoolboy, then rushed back to the Akagi’s engine room to tell everybody else.

Now the torpedo planes and dive-bombers thundered off, while the fighters circled above, giving protection. Plane after plane rose, flashing in the early-morning sun that peeked over the horizon. Soon all 183 were in the air, circling and wheeling into formation. Seaman Iki Kuramoti watched, on the verge of tears. Quietly he put his hands together and prayed.

For Admiral Kusaka it had been a terrible strain, getting the planes off in these high seas. Now they were on their way, and the sudden relief was simply too much. He trembled like a leaf — just couldn’t control himself. And he was embarrassed, too, because he prided himself on his grasp of Buddhism, bushido, and kendo (a form of Japanese fencing) — all of which were meant to fortify a man against exactly this sort of thing. Finally he sat on the deck — or he thinks possibly in a chair — and meditated Buddha-fashion. Slowly he pulled himself together again as the planes winged off to the south.

At the main target of this onslaught, the only sign of life was a middle-aged housewife driving her husband to work. Mrs. William Blackmore headed through the main Pearl Harbor gate … past the Marine sentry, who checked her windshield sticker … and headed down to the harbor craft pier. Mr. Blackmore — 16 years in the Navy and presently chief engineer of the tug Keosanqua — was to get under way at 6:00 A.M. to meet the supply ship Antares and take over a steel barge she was towing up from Palmyra.

As Mrs. Blackmore dropped her husband, the first gray light of morning gave the rows of silent warships an eerie, ghostly look. “This,” she observed, “is the quietest place I’ve ever seen.”

“You’d be surprised what goes on around here,” Blackmore replied cheerfully, and he jumped aboard the tug for another day’s work.

The Keosanqua moved down the harbor, through the long narrow entrance channel, and past the open torpedo net, which was kept open still longer for whenever the rug should return. It was now 6:30 A.M. and the Antares was already in sight, towing the barge about a hundred yards behind her. The Ward hovered about a mile away, and a Navy PBY circled above, apparently looking at something.

Seaman H. E. Raenbig, the Ward’s helmsman, was looking at something too. As the Antares came up from the southwest and crossed the Ward’s bow to port, he suddenly noticed a curious black object that seemed to be fastened to the towline between the Antares and her barge. They were about a mile away, and so he asked Quartermaster H. F. Gearin to use his glasses for a closer look.

Gearin immediately saw that the black object was not hanging on the hawser but was merely in line with it. Actually, the object was in the water on the far side of the Antares. He showed it to Lieutenant Goepner, who said it looked like a buoy to him, but to keep an eye on it.

Gearin did, and about a minute later said he thought it was a small conning tower. It seemed to be converging on the Antares’ course, as though planning to fall in behind the barge. At this point the Navy patrol bomber began circling overhead. Goepner needed no further convincing.

“Captain, come on the bridge!” he shouted. Outerbridge jumped from his cot in the chartroom, pulled on a Japanese kimono, and joined the others. He took one look and sounded general quarters. It was just 6:40 A.M.

Seaman Sidney Noble stumbled out of his bunk in the forecastle for the second time in three hours — so sleepy he could hardly wipe the sand from his eyes. He pulled on dungarees, shoes but no socks, and a blue shirt, which he didn’t bother to button. Then he joined the other men racing up the ladder to their battle stations.

Gunner’s Mate Louis Gerner stayed below long enough to slam and dog the hatch leading to the anchor engine room, then dashed after the rest. As he ran aft toward his station in the after well deck, Outerbridge leaned over the bridge railing and frantically waved him away from Number 1 gun, which was now swinging out, trained on the conning tower ahead.

Along the afterdeck Ensign D. B. Haynie ran past Number 2, 3, and 4 guns, shouting to the men to break out the ammunition. He might have spared himself the trouble at Number 3. Seaman Ambrose Domagall, the first loader, had been on duty as bridge messenger. As soon as general quarters sounded, he went directly to the gun, yanked open the ready rack, and was waiting with a three-inch shell in his arms when the rest of the crew rushed up.

Outerbridge had signaled “All engines ahead full,” and the old Ward was now surging forward — bounding from five to ten to 25 knots in five minutes.

“Come left,” he called to Helmsman Raenbig, and the 1918 hull wheezed with the strain as she heeled hard to port. Outerbridge headed her straight for the gap between the barge and the conning tower, now some 400 yards off the Ward’s starboard bow.

At this point the Antares caught on —her blinker flashed the news that she thought she was being followed. Up above, the PBY dropped two smoke pots to mark the sub’s position.

To Ensign William Tanner, pilot of the PBY, this was simply the act of a good Samaritan. He had been on the regular morning patrol when he first spotted the submarine. It was well out of the designated area for friendly subs. His immediate reaction — “My God, a sub in distress!”

Then he saw the Ward steaming in that direction. Quickly he swooped down and dropped his two smoke bombs. They would help the Ward come to the rescue. From his position this was the best he could do for the sub.

The Ward didn’t need any markers —the submarine was just to starboard, pointing straight at the ship. It was running awash, with the conning tower about two feet out of water. In the choppy sea the men caught brief glimpses of a small cigar-shaped hull. They were utterly fascinated. Chief Commissary Steward H. A. Minter noticed that it was painted a dingy green. Quartermaster Gearin saw a layer of small barnacles … Helmsman Raenbig noticed moss on the conning tower … most of the men thought it looked rather rusty. Everyone agreed there were no markings on the squat, oval conning tower.

Curiously enough, the sub didn’t seem to see the Ward at all. It just kept moving ahead, trailing the Antares at about eight or nine knots.

“Commence firing,” Outerbridge ordered. They were now only 100 yards away and Boatswain’s Mate A. Art, captain of Number 1 gun, knew they were much too close to use his sights. So he aimed the gun like a squirrel rifle and let her go. It was exactly 6:45 A.M. when this first shot whistled over the conning tower and plunged into the sea beyond.

They were better squirrel hunters at Number 3 gun on the galley house roof. Gun Captain Russell Knapp gave his order to fire about 30 seconds later, with the target less than 50 yards away. The shell hit the base of the conning tower, just where it touched the water. The sub staggered but came on.

Now it was right alongside, sucked almost against the ship. For an instant it seemed to hang there — long enough to give Gunner’s Mate Louis Gerner an indelible picture of the glass in its stubby periscope — and then it was behind them, writhing and spinning in the Ward’s wake.

Four quick whistle blasts told Chief Torpedoman W. C. Maskzawilz to release his depth charges. One … two … three … four rolled off the stern. Huge geysers erupted and the sub was instantly swallowed in a mountain of foam. Maskzawilz, who set the pistols at 100 feet, noted with satisfaction that the sub “seemed to wade right into the first one.”

Up in the PBY Ensign Tanner was doing some soul-searching. Helping the sub might be the decent thing to do, but his orders were very strict —“Depth bomb and sink any submarines found in the defensive sea area without authority.” Now he looked down, the Ward was doing just that. A pang of hesitation, and Tanner made another run. This time he dropped some depth bombs of his own.

All these fireworks were watched with mild interest by the men on the tug Keosanqua. She loafed about two miles away, just off the harbor mouth, still waiting to pick up the Antares’ barge. Like everybody else on board, Engineer Blackmore thought it was merely some early-morning practice.

On the Ward, Lieutenant Goepner had a far more harrowing thought. He had the awful feeling that it might be an American sub. Of course, it shouldn’t have been there and, of course, it didn’t look like anything he had ever seen before; but could there have been a mistake?

In the PBY, Ensign Tanner had the same feeling. He and his copilot, Ensign Clark Greevey, assured each other that orders were orders. But if Tanner’s judgment was wrong, a lot of good that would do. He could see the court-martial now. And he could see himself labeled for the rest of his life as the man who sank the American sub. In a wave of youthful self-pity he began picturing himself trying to get any job anywhere. As the plane resumed its patrol, he grimly reported the sinking to the Kaneohe Naval Air Station and settled back to await the inevitable end of his career.

Only Outerbridge seemed absolutely confident. In fact, he decided that the report radioed at 6:51 A.M. wasn’t strong enough. It ran: “Depth-bombed sub operating in defensive sea area.” This might imply just a periscope sighting or a sonar contact. Throughout the years there had been too many spars and whales bombed for headquarters to get overly excited about a message like that. But the Ward had seen the sub itself, and that was the all-important point to put over. It was the one hope of stirring up some action, instead of the standard “verify and repeat.”

So Outerbridge quickly drafted another message. At 6:53 he again radioed the Fourteenth Naval District Headquarters. This time the report ran: “Attacked, fired on, depth-bombed, and sunk, submarine operating in defensive sea area.” He felt that “fired on” was the key phrase. Now they would know he used his guns. Now they would know that he at least saw something.

Even Outerbridge didn’t go all the way. He might have reported this extraordinary encounter in the clear instead of in code, and thus saved a few minutes. He might have used his blinker to signal the harbor control tower. He might have sent the more jolting message that was drafted but ended up crumpled in his file — it began with the words: “Sighted conning tower of strange sub, fired two rounds at point-blank range …” But at least he did something. At least he was willing, when other men were hypnotized by peace, to announce that he had blasted the daylights out of someone.

Whoever it was, it wasn’t Ensign Sakamaki. At 6:30 he and Inagaki were still trying to correct their boat’s trim. It was no easy job. Only one man at a time could wriggle on his stomach along the cramped tunnel that led fore and aft from the control room. They took turns slithering back and forth … shifting lead ballast, twisting the dials that released the air and filled the tanks with water. It took an hour to get the sub back on an even keel.

At last they started off again and even found time for a spot of lunch. They sat facing each other in the tiny control room, munching rice balls and exchanging cups of grape wine. As they finished, they grasped each other’s hands and again pledged success.

Ten minutes later Sakamaki, peeking through the periscope, was appalled to see that they were approximately 90 degrees off course. With the gyrocompass out of order, he was depending on an auxiliary compass, which he thought would at least show the right directions. Apparently it was out of order too.

He tried to reset his course with his periscope, but it wasn’t much help. Blindly the sub moved this way and that, always seeming to end up in the wrong direction. His hands grew wet with sweat. It was now about 7:00 A.M., and Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki was still a long way from the mouth of Pearl Harbor.

CHAPTER V

“Well, Don’t Worry About It”

IT WAS AN UNEVENTFUL morning at the Army’s Opana radar station near Kahuku Point on the northern tip of Oahu. Normally Privates Joseph Lockard and George Elliott made 25 plane contacts during the regular 4:00 to 7:00 A.M. watch, but this Sunday there was hardly anything.

The Opana station was one of five mobile units set up at strategic points around the perimeter of Oahu. They were all linked to an information center at Fort Shafter, which kept track of the plots picked up by the stations. The system could pick up any plane within 150 miles — when it worked. But it had just started operating around Thanksgiving and was still full of bugs. Lockard, Elliott, and the others spent most of their time training and making repairs.

At first they practiced from 7:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. But after Washington’s warning of November 27, they went on duty every morning from four to seven — General Short felt these were the critical hours. Then they trained until 11:00 and knocked off for the day. On Sundays they worked only the four-to-seven shift. To the men this was simply a change in hours, not a change in routine or approach.

It was all very casual at Opana. This was the most remote of the five stations, and the six men who ran it were left pretty much to themselves. They had a small camp at Kawaiola, nine miles down the coast, and commuted to work by pickup truck. They were meant to work in three-man shirts, but this Sunday they decided that a two-man shift would do. Lockard served as operator, Elliott as both plotter and motorman. The regular motorman stayed in the sack.

They went on duty at noon December 6. They had the double job of guarding the set with a .45 pistol and seven rounds of ammunition, and running it during the four-to-seven watch the following morning. That night they set the alarm for 3:45 A.M., tuned in the set on schedule at 4:00, and spent the next three hours waiting for something to happen. There was a flicker or so around 6:45 — apparently a couple of planes were coming in from the northeast about 130 miles away — but nothing more than that. They weren’t surprised when the Shafter Information Center phoned at 6:54 and told them they could start closing up.

At the information center, Lieutenant Kermit Tyler, the only officer on duty, was having an equally quiet time. Usually the place was quite busy as the five stations phoned in their contacts and the spotters moved little arrows around the big wooden plotting table. It was all make-believe, for the other services hadn’t yet assigned liaison officers to help screen out friendly planes, but still it made for lively practice. The control officer would plan the interception of the “enemy.” His assistant, the pursuit officer, would relay his orders to mythical squadrons of Army fighters. Sometimes they even practiced with real planes.

But this Sunday there was little action. Few contacts; nobody to evaluate the planes that were spotted; no control officer to direct any interception. Except for the enlisted men at the plotting table, only the pursuit officer, Lieutenant Tyler, was on hand. But with nobody to give him orders and no planes to relay orders to, he had nothing to do. Nor did he really know what he was meant to do — he had only drawn this duty once before.

Actually, he was there purely for training. Major Kenneth Bergquist — in charge of the radar network — wanted the young pilots to learn as much about the systems as possible, so they could use it more effectively in interception work. Since the center had to operate from four to seven anyhow, this was a good chance to brush up. Today was Tyler’s turn, and it was enough if he kept his eyes peeled.

For the first two hours nothing happened. Around 6:10 one of the stations finally phoned in a contact, and the spotters began shoving their arrows around the board. At 6:45 some plots began to show up 130 miles north of Oahu — not much, but enough to make Lieutenant Tyler wander over and see how the clerk would mark them on the daily record. They showed up as little hen scratches pointing toward Oahu. Then suddenly it was 7:00 A.M., and everyone went off to breakfast.

Tyler was left alone in the room. For one of those reasons known only to the Army, his orders ran from 4:00 to 8:00 — an hour beyond everybody else’s. He settled back alone — no one to obey … no one to command … and now no one even to talk to.

The 7:00 A.M. closing time made little difference to Privates Lockard and Elliott at Opana. They were at the mercy of the breakfast truck. It usually came about seven, but a man couldn’t set his watch by it. With this in mind, they decided to keep the set running until the truck came. Elliott wanted to practice operating the set. After two weeks in the outfit, he could do the plotting pretty well, but still was no operator. Lockard was willing to teach him.

At 7:02 Elliott sat down and began fiddling with the controls. Lockard leaned over his shoulder and started explaining the various echoes or blips. Suddenly a blip flashed on the screen far bigger than anything Lockard had ever seen before. It was almost as big as the main pulse the unit always sent out. So big he thought the set was broken … that somehow the main pulse and mileage scale had gotten out of kilter. It was a pinball machine gone haywire.

He shoved Elliott aside and took over the controls himself. Quickly he saw there was nothing wrong with the set — it was just a huge flight of planes. By now Elliott was at the plotting table, and in a few seconds they nailed down the position: 137 miles to the north, three degrees east.

At 7:06 Elliott tried the headphones that connected directly with one of the spotters in the information center. The line was dead. Then he tried the regular Army circuit. After the clicks and hums and wheezes that are the overture to any phone call in Hawaii, he finally got through to the information center switchboard operator, Private Joseph McDonald. McDonald worked in a small cubicle just outside the plotting room and remained on duty even though the center was now closed.

Breathlessly Elliott broke the news: “There’s a large number of planes coming in from the north, three degrees east.”

McDonald thought there was nobody left at the information center, so he wrote down the message and turned around to time it by the big clock on the plotting room wall. Through the open door he suddenly noticed Lieutenant Tyler, sitting alone at the plotting table — there was someone in the building after all.

McDonald took the message to the lieutenant. Helpfully he explained that it was the first time he had ever received anything like this — “Do you think we ought to do something about it?” He suggested they call the plotters back from breakfast. They didn’t get too much practice, and this certainly seemed “an awful big flight.”

Tyler was unimpressed. McDonald returned to the switchboard and called back Opana. This time he got Lockard, who was excited too. The blips looked bigger than ever; the distance was shrinking fast — 7:08 A.M., 113 miles … 7:15 A.M., 92 miles. At least 50 planes must be soaring toward Oahu at almost 180 mph.

“Hey, Mac!” he protested when McDonald told him the lieutenant said everything was all right. Then Lockard asked to speak directly to Tyler, explaining he had never seen so many planes, so many flashes, on his screen.

McDonald traipsed back to Tyler: “Sir, I would appreciate it very much if you would answer the phone.”

Tyler took over, listened patiently, and thought a minute. He remembered the carriers were out — these might be Navy planes. He recalled hearing the radio on his way to work; remembered that it stayed on all night whenever B-17s came in from the coast — these might be Flying Fortresses. In either case, the planes were friendly. Cutting short any further discussion, he told Lockard, “Well, don’t worry about it.”

Lockard was now in no mood to keep on; he thought they might as well shut down the set. But Elliott wanted to practice some more, so they followed the flight on in —7:25 A.M., 62 miles.. . 7:30 A.M., 47 miles… 7:39 A.M., 22 miles. At this point they lost it in the “dead zone” caused by the hills around them.

Conveniently, the pickup truck arrived just then to take them back to Kawaiola for breakfast. They slammed shut the doors of the mobile unit, turned the lock, hopped in the truck, and bounced off down the road at 7:45.

At the Shaffer Information Center Private McDonald was still uneasy. He asked Lieutenant Tyler what he really thought of the blips, and was glad to hear the lieutenant say, “It’s nothing.” Shortly after 7:30 another operator took over the switchboard, and as McDonald left the building he suddenly stuck the original Opana message in his pocket. He had never done anything like this before, but he wanted to show it to the fellows.

Alone again in the plotting room, Lieutenant Tyler settled back to wait out the last dragging minutes of his own tour of duty. He had no qualms about the Opana message, and although he didn’t know it, on one count at least he was absolutely right —the all-night radio did mean some B-17s were coming in from the mainland. At this very moment 12 of the big bombers were approaching from the northeast.

But the planes that showed up on the Opana screen were a little less to the east, far more numerous, and at this moment infinitely closer.

Commander Mitsuo Fuchida knew they must be nearly there — they had been in the air now almost an hour and a half. But a carpet of thick white clouds stretched endlessly below, and he couldn’t even see the ocean to check the wind drift. He flicked on the radio direction finder and picked up an early-morning program from Honolulu. By twisting his antenna he got a good bearing on the station and discovered he was five degrees off course. He made the correction, and the other planes followed suit.

They were all around him. Behind were the other 48 horizontal bombers. To the left and slightly above were Lieutenant Commander Kakwichi Takahashi’s 51 dive-bombers. To the right and a little below were Lieutenant Commander Shigeharu Murata’s 40 torpedo planes. Far above, Lieutenant Commander Shigeru Itaya’s 43 fighters provided cover. The bombers flew at 9000 feet, the fighters as high as 15,000. All of them basked in the bright morning sun that now blazed off to the left.

But below, the clouds were still everywhere. Fuchida began to worry —would it be as bad over Pearl Harbor? If so, what would that do to the bombing? He wished the reconnaissance planes would report — they should be there by now. And then through the radio music he suddenly heard a weather broadcast. He tuned closer and caught it clearly: “… partly cloudly … mostly over the mountains … ceiling 3500 feet … visibility good.”

Now he knew he could count on the clouds to break once he reached Oahu. Also that it would be better to come in from the west and southwest — those clouds over the mountains made an eastern approach too dangerous. Then, as if to cap this run of good luck, the clouds below him parted, and almost directly ahead he saw a white line of surf breaking against a rugged green shore. It was Kahuku Point, Oahu.

Lieutenant Toshio Hashimoto, piloting one of Fuchida’s bombers, was simply charmed. The lush green island, the clear blue water, the colored roofs of the little houses seemed in another world. It was the kind of scene one likes to preserve. He pulled out his camera and snapped some pictures.

For fighter pilot Yoshio Shiga, this warm, sunlit land had a deeper meaning. Back in 1934 he had been to Honolulu on a naval training cruise … a visit full of good times and pleasant memories. To see Oahu again, still so green and lovely, gave him a strange, nostalgic feeling. He thought about it for a moment, then turned to the business at hand.

The time had come to deploy for the attack, and Commander Fuchida had a difficult decision to make. The plan provided for either “Surprise” or “Surprise Lost” conditions. If “Surprise,” the torpedo planes were to go in first, then the horizontal bombers, finally the dive-bombers, while the fighters remained above for protection. (The idea was to drop as many torpedoes as possible before the smoke from the dive-bombing ruined the targets.) On the other hand, if the raiders had been detected and it was “Surprise Lost,” the dive-bombers and fighters would hit the airfields and antiaircraft defenses first; then the torpedo planes would come in when resistance was crushed. To tell the planes which deployment to take, Commander Fuchida was to fire his signal gun once for “Surprise,” twice for “Surprise Lost.”

Trouble was, Commander Fuchida didn’t know whether the Americans had caught on or not. The reconnaissance planes were meant to tell him, but they hadn’t reported yet. It was now 7:40 A.M., and he couldn’t wait any longer. They were already well down the west coast and about opposite Haleiwa. Playing a hunch, he decided he could carry off the surprise.

He held out his signal pistol and fired one “black dragon.” The dive-bombers began circling upward to 12,000 feet; the horizontal bombers spiraled down to 3500; the torpedo planes dropped until they barely skimmed the sea, ready for the honor of leading the assault.

As the planes orbited into position, Fuchida noticed that the fighters weren’t responding at all. He decided that they must have missed his signal, so he reached out and fired another “black dragon.” The fighters saw it this time, but so did the dive-bombers. They decided it was the second “black dragon” of the “Surprise Lost” signal. Hence, they would be the ones to go in first. In a welter of confusion, the High Command’s plan for carefully integrated phases vanished; dive-bombers and torpedo planes eagerly prepared to slam into Pearl Harbor at the same time.

They could already see it on their left. Lieutenant Shiga was attracted by the unusual color gray of the warships. Commander Itaya was struck by the way the battleships were “strung out and anchored two ships side by side in an orderly manner.” Commander Fuchida was more interested in counting them — two, four, eight. No doubt about it, they were all there.

CHAPTER VI

“Joe, This Is One for the Tourist!”

THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD JAMES B. Mann, Jr., stood with his father, squinting at the planes that circled high above their beach house at Haleiwa on the northwest coast of Oahu. The Manns liked to come to Haleiwa for a restful weekend, but this morning there was no rest at all. First the planes set off their two pug dogs; then the barking woke the family up. Mrs. Mann thought it might be that Lieutenant Underwood from Wheeler Field — he was always buzzing the beach — but Mr. Mann and Junior quickly discovered that it was a much bigger show.

More than 100 planes were orbiting about, gradually breaking up into smaller groups of three, five, and seven. Soon, several fighters dropped down low enough for Junior to observe, “They’ve changed the color of our planes.” Then the fighters sped off to the east, down the road toward Schofield and Wheeler Field. Now the other groups were flying away too, and by 7:45 A.M. they had all disappeared.

Twelve miles farther south, another 13-year-old, Tommy Young, was surf casting with his father off Maile Beach. Suddenly Tommy’s attention was attracted by the drone of airplane motors. Looking up, he saw a big formation of silvery planes flying southeast. His father counted 72 of them.

Fourteen miles to the southeast, two other young fishermen were trying their luck in Pearl Harbor. Thirteen-year-old Jerry Morton and his kid brother Don, 11, sat on the enlisted men’s landing at Pearl City, a peninsula that juts southward into the middle of the anchorage. Like most service children, Jerry and Don regarded Pearl Harbor not as a naval base but as a huge, fascinating play pool. Almost every morning when they weren’t at school, they ran down to the landing — only 200 yards from the house — and let out a ball of string. Occasionally a gullible perch took a chance; rarely anything worthy of the dinner table. But there were always the ships, the planes, the sailors — a wonderful kaleidoscope that never grew dull.

This morning they set out as usual — barefoot, khaki pants rolled up, T-shirts stuffed in their pockets as soon as their mother wasn’t looking. Little gusts of wind stirred the harbor waters, but the sun poked through the clouds often enough to make the day hot and lazy. It was a typical Sunday morning, except for one thing: incredibly, the fish were biting. By 7:45 the boys had used up all their bait, and Don was dispatched to the house for more. Jerry, the senior partner, lolled in the morning sun.

Around him, the ships of the Pacific Fleet lay in every direction. To the north and east, little nests of destroyers clustered about their tenders at anchor. To the southeast, most of the cruisers pointed into the Navy Yard piers. Still farther to the south, the cruiser Helena lay at 1010 dock … then the battleship Pennsylvania, sharing Drydock No. 1 with two destroyers. To their west was another destroyer, high in the floating drydock … and finally, completing the circle, more destroyers, the repair ship Medusa, and the aircraft tender Curtiss lay moored offshore.

Dominating the whole scene — and squarely in the middle of the harbor — was Ford Island, where Don and Jerry’s stepfather, Aviation Ordnanceman Thomas Croft, had duty this Sunday at the seaplane hangars. The Navy PBY patrol planes were based here; also the carrier planes when they were in port. The carriers themselves moored along the northwest side of the island, while the battleships used the southeast side.

This Sunday, of course, the carriers were all at sea, and the moorings opposite Pearl City offered little in the way of excitement — only the old cruisers Detroit and Raleigh … the ex-battleship Utah, now demoted to target ship … the seaplane tender Tangier. But on the far side of the island a thrilling line of masts and funnels sprouted from “Battleship Row” — Nevada, Arizona, Tennessee, West Virginia, Maryland, Oklahoma, and California were all there.

Other less glamorous craft elbowed their way into the picture. The “honey barge” YG-J7 crawled from ship to ship, collecting garbage. The tanker Neosho squatted toward the southern end of Battleship Row. The cruiser Baltimore — a veteran of Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet — lingered in rusty retirement, anchored among the sleek destroyers in East Loch. The poky little seaplane tender Swan perched on a marine railway near the cruisers (Radio Operator Charles Michaels estimates she could do 12.6 knots with a clean bottom and all laundry aloft). The old gunboat Sacramento hovered nearby — her tall, thin smokestack looked like something designed by Robert Fulton. The ancient mine layer Oglala lay next to the cruiser Helena at 1010 dock. She had the romantic past of a Fall River liner, but it was all over now. These days she was almost always tied up; once so long that a family of birds built a nest in her funnel.

The large and the small, the mighty and the meek, they all added up to 96 warships in Pearl Harbor this Sunday morning.

Assembled together, the U.S. Pacific Fleet was a big family — yet it was a small family too. Most of the men knew everybody else in their line of work, regardless of ship. Walter Simmons, who served a long hitch as mess attendant on the Curtiss, recalls that it was almost impossible for him to board any other ship in the fleet without meeting someone he knew.

In these prewar days everybody stayed put. Chief Boatswain’s Mate Joseph Nickson had been on the San Francisco nine years; Chief Jack Haley on the Nevada 12 years. Ensign Joseph Taussig, brand-new to the ship, thought that several of the chief petty officers on the Nevada had been there before he was born. These old chiefs played an important part in keeping the family spirit. They were almost like fathers to the young ensigns — taught them beer baseball in the long, dull hours when nothing was happening; called them “Sonny” when no one else was listening. But they were also the first to accept an officer’s authority, and believed implicitly in the Navy chain of command.

For the officers it was a small world too. Year after year they had come from the same school, taken the same courses, followed the same careers, step by step. They too knew one another’s service records and “signal numbers” by heart. They all shared the same hard work, wardroom Cokes, starched white uniforms, Annapolis traditions. Like all true professionals, they were a proud, sensitive, tightly knit group.

But signs were beginning to appear that this small, little world might be in for a change. Reservists were now pouring in from the various training programs. They were enthusiastic enough, but they lacked the background of Navy tradition. Where they were involved, sometimes the old way of doing things just wouldn’t work.

Doris Miller, a huge mess attendant on the West Virginia, was one of the regulars faced with this problem of reconciling the old with the new. Every morning he had the colossal job of waking up Ensign Edmond Jacoby, a young reservist from the University of Wichita. At first Miller used to yank at Jacoby, much like a Pullman porter arousing a passenger. This was fine with Jacoby, but an Annapolis man reminded Miller that an enlisted man must never touch an officer. Faced with the problem of upholding an ensign’s dignity and still getting Jacoby up, Miller appeared the following morning with a brilliant solution. Standing three inches from Jacoby’s ear, he yelled, “Hey, Jake!” and fled the room.

This Sunday morning Doris Miller had no problems. Ensign Jacoby was off duty and free to sleep. Miller was working as mess attendant in the junior officers’ wardroom, but there were only two officers on hand and there wasn’t much to do.

It was just about as easy for the other men on duty. At 1010 dock Coxswain Ralph Haines was touching up the bright work on Admiral William Calhoun’s gig. The admiral, who gloried in the title “COMTRAINRON 8” (Commander, Training Squadron Eight), ran a group of supply ships. He had been scheduled to arrive this morning on the Antares, but for some reason was late.

On the Nevada, Ensign Taussig was officer of the deck. He whiled away the time trying to think of something useful to do. It occurred to him that one boiler had been carrying the burden all four days the ship had been in port. He ordered another lit off.

On the Arizona, Coxswain James Forbis had a working party on the fantail, rigging the ship for church services. The awning flapped and snapped in the breeze, and standing on the shore waiting to go out, Fleet Chaplain William A. Maguire made a mental note to have an extra windbreak rigged to keep his altar things in place. But the sun was warm, the clouds were high, and all things considered, the day was perfect. Turning to his assistant, Seaman Joseph Workman, Maguire burst out, “Joe, this is one for the tourist!”

The men off duty seemed to agree. On ship after ship they were getting ready to go ashore. Some, like Seamen Donald Marman of the cruiser Honolulu, were preparing for Catholic mass at the base arena. Others, like Signalman John Blanken on the San Francisco, were headed for swimming at Waikiki. Ensign Thomas Taylor on the Nevada hoped to get in some tennis. The Helena marine detachment was warming up for softball. Ensign William Brown had a very special project in mind as he stood on the deck of his PT boat, which was loaded on the tanker Ramapo for shipment to the Philippines. His wife was coming over in two weeks, and he had just rented a little house in town. This would be the perfect day to fix the place up.

The less ambitious loafed about the decks. On the St. Louis, Seaman Robert McMurray watched his mates playing checkers. Pharmacist’s Mate William Lynch on the California remembered this was his sister’s birthday, and began planning a letter to her. Machinist’s Mate R. L. Hooton sat on a bucket in front of his locker on the West Virginia, enjoying some snapshots just received from his wife. They were of his eight-month-old son whom he had never seen.

Storekeeper Felder Crawford sat on his desk in the Maryland’s supply room, absorbed in that great American institution, the Sunday comics: Dagwood was having his usual troubles with Mr. Dithers … Daddy Warbucks’ private plane made a forced landing, leading the Asp to observe, “I have never trusted the air” … Navy Bob Steele successfully deflected a surprise air attack on his destroyer by an unidentified navy.

A number of the men turned their thoughts to Christmas —there were only 15 more shopping days left. Yeoman Durrell Conner sat in the flag communications office of the California wrapping presents. Seaman Leslie Short climbed up to one of the Maryland’s machine-gun stations, where he wasn’t likely to be disturbed, and addressed his Christmas cards.

On every ship there were men still at breakfast. Captain Bentham Simons of the Raleigh lounged in a pair of blue pajamas, sipping coffee in his cabin. On the Oklahoma, Ensign Bill Ingram, son of Navy’s great football coach, ordered poached eggs. Quartermaster Jim Varner took a large bunch of grapes from the serving line on the repair ship Rigel, then retired below to enjoy them properly. He hung them from the springs of an empty upper bunk and climbed into the lower, lay there happily plucking the grapes and wondering what to do the rest of the day.

The shoreside breakfasts offered more variety, fewer restrictions. At the target repair base, Seaman Marlin Ayotte’s meal showed real faith in his cooking — four eggs, bacon, two bowls of cereal, fruit, toast, three cups of coffee. At the civilian workers’ cantonment — affectionately known to the residents as “Boystown” — Ben Rottach entertained a couple of friends from the Raleigh at a breakfast of ham and eggs with whisky chasers.

In the repair shops and at Drydock No. 1, a few luckless souls had duty. Civilian yard worker Harry Danner struggled to align the boring bars on the Pennsylvania’s starboard propeller shafts. But there was a Sunday spirit even about the men at work. At the main Pearl Harbor gate, for instance, the Marine guard was getting ready to have its picture taken by Tai Sing Loe, who seemed to be the whole Navy’s unofficial photographer. He was a wonderfully colorful Chinese, who stalked his prey wearing a huge elephant hunter’s hat.

Just down the road from the Pearl Harbor gate — a few hundred yards closer to Honolulu — lay the main entrance to Hickam Field, where the Army bombers were based. Normally there was a good deal of practice flying here, including some friendly buzzing of the Navy next door. The carrier planes, in turn, would occasionally stage mock raids on Hickam. But this morning all was quiet. The carriers were at sea, and the bombers were lined up in neat rows beside the main concrete runway.

General Short’s sabotage alert was in full force, and obviously the best way to guard the planes was to group them together, out in the open. So there they all were — or at least all that mattered, for only six of the B-17s could fly … only six of the 12 A-20s… and only 17 of the 33 outmoded B-18s.

Their hangars stood silent and empty along the Pearl Harbor side of the field (there were only boondocks on the Honolulu side); but the control tower, near the left end of the hangar line, hummed with excitement. Captain Gordon Blake, the tall, young base operations officer, had been in his office since seven. Next, his friend, Major Roger Ramey, arrived. Then Colonel Cheney Bertholf, adjutant general of the Hawaiian Air Force. Finally, even the base commandant, Colonel William Farthing, steamed up. Everybody who was in the know wanted to see the B-17s arrive from the mainland. They were new, fabulous planes; to have 12 of them come at once was a big event indeed. Down on the field, Captain Andre d’Alfonso, medical officer of the day, prepared his own special welcome. As soon as they arrived, his job was to spray them with Flit guns.

Elsewhere hardly anything was going on. Sergeant Robert Hey began dressing for a rifle match with Captain J. W. Chappelman. Captain Levi Erdmann mulled over the base tennis tournament. Nurse Monica Conter — in between dates with Lieutenant Benning — took pulses and temperatures at the new base hospital. Private Mark Layton squeezed under the 7:45 breakfast deadline, but most of the men didn’t even try. At the big new consolidated barracks, Staff Sergeant Charles Judd lay in bed, reading an article debunking Japanese air power in the September issue of Aviation magazine.

It was the same story at Wheeler Field  — the Army fighter base in the center of the island. Here, too, the planes were lined up in neat rows — 62 of the Army’s brand-new P-40s. Here, too, most people were still in bed. Two exceptions — Lieutenants George Welch and Ken Taylor, a couple of pilots stationed at the small Haleiwa airstrip on the west coast of the island. Welch and Taylor had come over for the weekly Saturday dance. Then they got involved in an all-night poker game. Now Welch was arguing that they should forget all about bed and drive back to Haleiwa for an early-morning swim. This debate was perhaps the liveliest thing happening at Wheeler.

Just to the north, the five big quadrangles of Schofield Barracks were equally quiet. Many of the men in the 24th and 25th Divisions were on weekend pass to Honolulu; others had straggled home in the early hours and were dead to the world. A few, like Sergeant Valentine Lemanski, were in the washroom fumbling with toothpaste, towels, and shaving kits. There never seemed enough space on the washbowl shelves. But in the nearby officers’ housing area, Colonel Virgil Miller’s little girl Julia was up, fed, and dressed in her Sunday best. Now she was about to enter the family car on her way to church with her mother and brother.

It was also time for church at Fort Shatter, the Army’s administrative center near Honolulu. Pfc. William McCarthy joined a group approaching the Catholic chapel. But many of the men stayed in bed or lolled in the morning sunshine. Colonel Fielder, feeling fresh and rested after his early evening with General Short, had pulled on blue slacks and a blue sport shirt. He was about to drive over to the windward side of the island for a picnic at Bellows Field.

Bellows was a small Army fighter base near the eastern end of Oahu. It had only two small squadrons, and only 12 of the planes were modern P-40s, but all of them were lined up just as neatly as the planes at Hickam and Wheeler. The men were all taking it easy or planning the usual Sunday projects.

Five miles farther up the coast lay the Kaneohe Naval Air Station, the only other post on the windward side of Oahu. Thirty-three of the Navy’s new PBYs operated out of here. This morning three of them were out on patrol. The others were in the hangars or riding at anchor in the choppy blue water of Kaneohe Bay.

At 7:45 this lazy Sunday morning Kaneohe looked as serene as any of the Army airfields. Mess Attendant Walter Simmons was setting the table in the officers’ wardroom, but nobody had turned up to eat. Lieutenant Commander H. P. McCrimmon, the post medical officer, was sitting in his office with his feet on his desk, wondering why the Sunday paper was late.

That was what the people in Honolulu were wondering, too. Normally they counted on the Advertiser as an indispensable part of Sunday breakfast, but this morning the presses had broken down after running off only 2000 copies. The papers already printed had gone to Pearl Harbor for distribution among the ships. Everyone else was simply out of luck. Getting something repaired on Sunday in Honolulu was a tall order, although Editor Ray Coll worked hard at the problem.

Across town, Editor Riley Allen of the Star-Bulletin had no press troubles and his afternoon paper didn’t come out on Sunday, but he was miles behind on his correspondence. This morning he hoped to catch up, and now sat in his office dictating to his secretary, Winifred McCombs. It was her first day on the job, and at 7:45 A.M. she perhaps wondered whether she had been wise in leaving her last position.

Most of the people in Honolulu were enjoying more civilized hours, many of them sleeping off the island’s big football weekend. Saturday afternoon the University of Hawaii beat Willamette 20-6 in the annual Shrine game, and the victory had been celebrated in standard mainland fashion. Now the fans bravely faced the morning after. Webley Edwards, manager of radio station KGMB and a popular broadcaster himself, tackled a grape and soda. It looked like a constructive way to start the new day.

In sharp contrast to Oahu’s Sunday morning torpor, the destroyer Ward scurried about off the entrance to Pearl Harbor. A lot had happened since she polished off the midget sub. At 6:48 A.M. she sighted a white sampan well inside the restricted area. She scooted over to investigate, and the sampan took off. Quickly overhauled, the sampan’s skipper, a Japanese, shut off his engines and waved a white flag. This struck Outerbridge as rather odd — these sampans often sneaked into the restricted area for better fishing, but when caught the surrender was rarely so formal. On the other hand, the skipper had already heard plenty of firing and might be just emphasizing his own peaceful inclinations. In any case, the Ward started escorting the offender toward Honolulu to turn him over to the Coast Guard.

At 7:03 A.M. the Ward picked up another sub on her sound apparatus. Outerbridge raced over to the spot indicated, unloaded five depth charges, and watched a huge black oil bubble erupt 300 yards astern. Then back to the sampan. Everyone remained at general quarters, and Outerbridge alerted Fourteenth Naval District Headquarters to stand by for further messages.

At headquarters, all of this fell into the lap of Lieutenant Commander Harold Kaminsky, an old reservist who had been in the Navy off and on ever since he was an enlisted man in World War I. Regularly in charge of net and boom defenses, he took his Sunday turn as duty officer like everyone else. This morning he held down the fort with the aid of one enlisted man, a Hawaiian who understood little English and nothing about the teletype.

Due to various delays in decoding, paraphrasing, and typing, it was 7:12 by the time Commander Kaminsky received the Ward’s 6:53 message about sinking the submarine. First he tried to phone Admiral Bloch’s aide but couldn’t reach him. Then he put in a call to the admiral’s chief of staff, Captain John B. Earle. The phone woke up Mrs. Earle, and she immediately put her husband on the wire. To Kaminsky, the captain sounded astonished and incredulous. Captain Earle later recalled that he first felt it was just one more of the sub “sightings” that had been turning up in recent months. On the other hand, this did seem too serious to be brushed off — it was the first time he heard of a Navy ship firing depth charges or anything else at one of these contacts. So he told Kaminsky to get the dispatch verified, also to notify the CINCPAC duty officer and Commander Charles Momsen, the Fourteenth Naval District operations officer. Earle said he would take care of telling Admiral Bloch.

The admiral was on the phone by 7:15. Captain Earle relayed the news, and the two men spent the next five or ten minutes trying to decide whether it was reliable or not. In the course of passing from mouth to mouth, the message had lost the point Outerbridge tried to make by saying he “fired on” the sub, hence must have seen it. Now neither Bloch nor Earle could tell whether this was just a sound contact or whether the Ward had actually seen something. Finally they made up their minds. Since they had asked the Ward to verify, since Commander Momsen was investigating, and since they had referred the matter to CINCPAC, they decided (using Captain Earle’s phrase) “to await further developments.”

Meanwhile Kaminsky had notified CINCPAC Headquarters over at the sub base. The assistant duty officer, Lieutenant Commander Francis Black, estimated that he got the call around 7:20. He relayed the report to the duty officer, Commander Vincent Murphy, who was dressing in his quarters on the spot. Murphy asked, “Did he say what he was doing about it? Did he say whether Admiral Bloch knew about it or not?”

Nothing had been said on these points, so Murphy told Black to call back and find out. He dialed and dialed, but the line was always busy. By now Murphy was dressed and told Black, “All right, you go to the office and start breaking out the charts and positions of the various ships. I’ll dial one more time, and then I’ll be over.”

The line was still busy, so Murphy told the operator to break in and have Kaminsky call the CINCPAC office. Then he ran on down to get there in time for the call.

Small wonder Kaminsky’s line was busy. After talking to Black, he had to phone Commander Momsen, the district operations officer. Then Momsen said to call Ensign Joseph Logan. Then a call to the Coast Guard about that sampan the Ward caught. Then Momsen on the line again at 7:25 —have the ready-duty destroyer Monaghan contact the Ward. Then a call to Lieutenant Ottley to get the Honolulu harbor gate closed. Phone call by phone call, the minutes slipped away.

Commander Murphy dashed into his office a little after 7:30 to find the phone ringing. But it wasn’t the call that he expected from Kaminsky; it was a call from Commander Logan Ramsey, the operations officer at Patrol Wing (Patwing) 2, the Ford Island headquarters for all Navy patrol plane work. Ramsey was bursting with news — a PBY reported it had just sunk a sub about a mile off the Pearl Harbor entrance. Murphy told him he already had a similar report, and for the next minute or so the two men compared notes.

The PBY message had been sent by Ensign Tanner. It was logged in at seven o’clock, but there had been the usual delays in decoding, then the usual incredulity. Commander Knefler McGinnis, who was Tanner’s commanding officer and in charge of Patwing 1 at Kancohe, felt it must be a case of mistaken identity. He checked to make sure that all information on U.S. subs was in the hands of the patrol planes. Ramsey himself received the message around 7:30 from the Patwing 2 duty officer, and his first reaction was that some kind of drill message must have gotten out by mistake. He ordered the duty officer to request “authentication” of the message immediately. But to be on the safe side he decided to draw up a search plan and notify CINCPAC — that was what he was doing now.

As Murphy hung up, the phone began ringing again. This time it was Kaminsky, finally on the wire. He assured Murphy that Bloch had been told … that the ready-duty destroyer was on its way to help … that the stand-by destroyer had been ordered to get up steam. Murphy asked, “Have you any previous details or any more details about this attack?”

“The message came out of a clear sky,” Kaminsky replied.

Murphy decided he’d better call Admiral Kimmel, and by 7:40 CINCPAC himself was on the telephone. The admiral, who had left Mrs. Kimmel on the mainland as a defensive measure against any diverting influences, lived alone in a bare new house at Makalapa, about five minutes’ drive away. As soon as he heard the news, he told Murphy, “I’ll be right down.”

Next, Ramsey phoned again, asking if there was anything new. Murphy said there wasn’t, but warned him to keep search planes available, in case the admiral wanted them.

Now Kaminsky was back on the wire, reporting the Ward’s run-in with the sampan. He had already told Earle, and the captain regarded it as evidence that nothing was really the matter — if there was a submarine around, what was the Ward doing escorting a mere sampan to Honolulu? He apparently didn’t realize that the submarine incident was at 6:45, and the Ward had considered it definitely sunk.

Commander Murphy thought the sampan report was sufficiently interesting to relay to Admiral Kimmel, and he put in another call about 7:50.

Out in the harbor, Lieutenant Commander Bill Burford made the best of things as skipper of the ready-duty destroyer Monaghan. She was due to be relieved at eight o’clock, and Burford had planned to go ashore. In fact, the gig was already alongside. Then at 7:51 a message suddenly came in from Fourteenth Naval District Headquarters to “get under way immediately and contact Ward in defensive sea area.” The message didn’t even say what he should prepare for, but obviously it might be a couple of hours before he would be free again to go ashore.

Whatever was in store for the Monaghan, the other ships in Pearl Harbor had only morning colors to worry about. This ceremony was always the same. At 7:55 the signal tower on top of the Navy Yard water tank hoisted the blue “prep” flag, and every ship in the harbor followed suit. On each ship a man took his place at the bow with the “jack,” another at the stern with the American flag. Then, promptly at 8:00, the prep flag came down, and the other two went up. On the smaller ships a boatswain piped his whistle; on the larger a bugler sounded colors; on the largest a band might even play the National Anthem.

As the clock ticked toward 7:55, all over the harbor men went to their stations. On the bridge of the old repair ship Vestal, Signalman Adolph Zlabis got ready to hoist the prep flag. On the fantail of the sleek cruiser Helena at 1010 dock, Ensign W. W. Jones marched to the flagstaff with a four-man Marine honor guard. On the big battleship Nevada, the ship’s band assembled for a ceremony that would have all the trimmings. The only trouble was, the officer of the deck, Ensign Taussig, had never stood watch for morning colors before and didn’t know what size American flag to fly. He quietly sent an enlisted man forward to ask the Arizona people what they were going to do. While everybody waited around, some of the bandsmen noticed specks in the sky far to the southwest.

Planes were approaching, and from more than one direction. Ensign Donald L. Korn, officer of the deck on the Raleigh, noticed a thin line winging in from the northwest. Seaman “Red” Pressler of the Arizona saw a string approaching from the mountains to the east. On the destroyer Helm, Quartermaster Frank Handler noticed another group coming in low from the south. The Helm — the only ship under way in all of Pearl Harbor — was in the main channel, about to turn up West Loch. The planes passed only 100 yards away, flying directly up the channel from the harbor entrance. One of the pilots gave a casual wave, and Quartermaster Handler cheerfully waved back. He noticed that, unlike most American planes, these had fixed landing gear.

As the planes roared nearer, Pharmacist’s Mate William Lynch heard a California shipmate call out, “The Russians must have a carrier visiting us. Here come some planes with the red ball showing clearly.”

Signalman Charles Flood on the Helena picked up a pair of binoculars and gave the planes a hard look. They were approaching in a highly unusual manner, but all the same there was something familiar about them. Then he recalled the time he was in Shanghai in 1932, when the Japanese Army and Navy invaded the city. He remembered their bombing technique — a form of glide bombing. The planes over Ford Island were diving in the same way.

In they hurtled — Lieutenant Commander Takahashi’s 27 dive-bombers plunging toward Ford Island and Hickam …. Lieutenant Commander Murata’s 40 torpedo planes swinging into position for their run at the big ships. Commander Fuchida marked time off Barbers Point with the horizontal bombers, watching his men go in. They were all attacking together instead of in stages as originally planned, but it would apparently make no difference — the ships were sitting ducks.

A few minutes earlier, at 7:49 A.M., Fuchida had radioed the signal to attack: “To … to … to … to …” Now he was so sure of victory that at 7:53 — even before the first bomb fell — he signaled the carriers that the surprise attack was successful: “Tora … tora … tora …”

Back on the Akagi, Admiral Kusaka turned to Admiral Nagumo. Not a word passed between them. Just a long, firm handshake.

CHAPTER VII

“I Didn’t Even Know They Were Sore at Us”

COMMANDER LOGAN RAMSEY JUMPED from his desk at the Patwing 2 Command Center on Ford Island. He had been working out a search plan for the sub reported by the PBY when a single dive-bomber screamed down on the seaplane ramp at the southern tip of the island. It looked like a young aviator “flathatting,” and both he and the duty officer tried to get the offender’s number. But they were too late, and Ramsey remarked that it was going to be hard to find out who it was. Then a blast … a column of dirt and smoke erupted from the foot of the ramp.

“Never mind,” said Ramsey, “it’s a Jap.”

The plane pulled out of its dive and veered up the channel between Ford Island and 1010 dock. It passed less than 600 feet from Rear Admiral William Furlong as he paced the deck of his flagship, the antique mine layer Oglala. The admiral took one glance at the flaming orange-red circle on the fuselage and understood too. He shouted for general quarters, and as SOPA (Senior Officer Present Afloat), he hoisted the signal, “All ships in harbor sortie.” The time was 7:55 A.M.

Now two more planes screeched down. This time the aim was perfect. Parts of the big PBY hangar at the head of the ramp flew in all directions. Radioman Harry Mead, member of a utility plane squadron based on the island, couldn’t understand why American planes were bombing the place. Seaman Robert Oborne of the same outfit had a plausible explanation: it was an Army snafu. “Boy,” he thought, “is somebody going to catch it for putting live bombs on those planes.”

All this passed unnoticed by Ensign Donald Korn of the cruiser Raleigh, moored on the northwest side of Ford Island at one of the berths normally used by the carriers. He was turning over his deck watch to Ensign William Game and couldn’t see much of anything happening down by the seaplane ramp. But he did have a fine view of the valley leading up the center of Oahu. At 7:56 he noticed some planes flying in low from that direction.

Now they were gliding past the algarroba trees at Pearl City. Splitting up, two headed for the Utah just astern, one for the Detroit just ahead, and one for the Raleigh herself. Ensign Korn, thinking the planes were Marines on maneuvers, called out his antiaircraft crews to practice with them. The men were just taking their stations when the torpedo struck home about opposite the second funnel. A shattering roar, a sickening lurch. Through a blinding mixture of smoke and dirt and muddy water, men caught a brief glimpse of the Raleigh’s splintered church launch; it had been easing alongside where the torpedo hit. The Detroit got off scot-free, but the Utah shuddered under two solid blows. Watching from the destroyer Monaghan several hundred yards to the north, Boatswain’s Mate Thomas Donahue thought that this time the U.S. Army really had a hole in its head.

A fifth plane in this group saved its torpedo, skimmed across Ford Island, and let fly at the Oglala and Helena, moored side by side at 1010 dock — the berth normally used by the battleship Pennsylvania, flagship of the whole Pacific Fleet. The torpedo passed completely under the Oglala, moored outboard, and barreled into the Helena midships — her engine-room clock stopped at 7:57. The concussion burst the seams of the old Oglala alongside, hurling Musician Don Rodenberger from his upper bunk. He could only think that the ancient boilers had finally exploded.

Ensign Roman Leo Brooks, officer of the deck on the West Virginia across the channel, was thinking along these same lines. He, too, was in no position to see the plane diving on the seaplane hangars or on the ships moored across Ford Island. All he saw was the sudden eruption of flames and smoke at 1010 dock. He lost no time — in seconds the ship’s bugler and PA system were blaring, “Away the fire and rescue party!”

Even the men who saw the planes couldn’t understand. One of them was Fireman Frank Stock of the repair ship Vestal, moored beside the Arizona along Battleship Row. Stock and six of his mates had taken the church launch for services ashore. They moved across the channel and into Southeast Loch, that long, narrow strip of water pointing directly at the battleships. On their right they passed the cruisers, nosed into the Navy Yard piers; on the left some subs tucked into their berths. As they reached the Merry’s Point landing at the end of the loch, six or eight torpedo planes flew in low from the east, about 50 feet above the water and heading down the loch toward the battleships.

The men were mildly surprised — they had never seen U.S. planes come in from that direction. They were even more surprised when the rear-seat gunners sprayed them with machine-gun bullets. Then Stock recalled the stories he had read about “battle-condition” maneuvers in the Southern states. This must be the same idea — for extra realism they had even painted red circles on the planes. The truth finally dawned when one of his friends caught a slug in the stomach from the fifth plane that passed.

On the Nevada at the northern end of Battleship Row, Leader Oden McMillan waited with his band to play morning colors at eight o’clock. His 23 men had been in position since 7:55, when the blue prep signal went up. As they moved into formation, some of the musicians noticed planes diving at the other end of Ford Island. McMillan saw a lot of dirt and sand go up, but thought it was another drill. Now it was 7:58 — two minutes to go — and planes started coming in low from Southeast Loch. Heavy, muffled explosions began booming down the line … enough to worry anyone. And then it was eight o’clock.

The band crashed into “The Star-Spangled Banner.” A Japanese plane skimmed across the harbor … dropped a torpedo at the Arizona … and peeled off right over the Nevada’s fantail. The rear gunner sprayed the men standing at attention, but he must have been a poor shot. He missed the entire band and Marine guard, lined up in two neat rows. He did succeed in shredding the flag, which was just being raised.

McMillan knew now but kept on conducting. The years of training had taken over — it never occurred to him that once he had begun playing the National Anthem, he could possibly stop. Another strafer flashed by. This time McMillan unconsciously paused as the deck splintered around him, but he quickly picked up the beat again. The entire band stopped and started again with him, as though they had rehearsed it for weeks. Not a man broke formation until the final note died. Then everyone ran wildly for cover.

Ensign Joe Taussig, officer of the deck, pulled the alarm bell. The ship’s bugler got ready to blow general quarters, but Taussig took the bugle and tossed it overboard. Somehow it seemed too much like make-believe at a time like this. Instead he shouted over the PA system again and again, “All hands, general quarters. Air raid! This is no drill!”

Ship after ship began to catch on. The executive officer of the supply ship Castor shouted, “The Japs are bombing us! The Japs are bombing us!” For an instant Seaman Bill Deas drew a blank and wondered whether the man was speaking to him. On the submarine Tautog, the topside anchor watch shouted down the forward torpedo hatch, “The war is on, no fooling!”

Everybody was racing for the alarm signals now. On the little gunboat Sacramento in the Navy Yard, Seaman Charles Bohnstadt dashed over to pull the switch, lost the race to a mess attendant. On the cruiser Phoenix, out where the destroyers were moored, the loudspeaker had just announced, “Lay up to the quarter deck the Catholic church party” — then the general alarm bell drowned out anything else. On Battleship Row the Maryland’s bugler blew general quarters over the PA system, while the ship’s Klaxon lent added authority.

The Oklahoma’s call to arms needed no extra punch. First came an air-raid alert; then general quarters a minute later. This time the voice on the PA system added a few well-chosen words, which one crew member recalls as follows: “Real planes, real bombs; this is no drill!” Other witnesses have a less delicate version of the last part. The language alone, they say, convinced them that this was it.

But on most ships the men down below still needed convincing. Even as the torpedo hit, Fireman Joseph Messier of the Helena was sure the alarm bell was just another of the executive officer’s bright ideas to get the crew to go to church.

“This is a hell of a time to hold general drills,” echoed through the firemen’s quarters of the California, the signalmen’s compartment on the San Francisco, the after “head” on the Nevada. On the destroyer Phelps Machinist’s Mate William Taylor engaged in a sort of one-man slowdown. He deliberately took plenty of time getting dressed. Then he ambled topside, yawned, and strolled toward the stern to get a drink of water before going below to his station in the boiler room. As he started down the after gangway, a chief gunner’s mate came charging down behind him, shouting, “Get to hell out of the way — don’t you know we’re at war?” Taylor thought to himself, “You mumbling jackass, isn’t this drill enough without added harassment from you?”

Commander Herald Stout, skipper of the destroyer-minecraft Breese, was even more annoyed. He had left standing orders never to test general quarters before eight on Sunday. When the alarm sounded, he left his breakfast to chew out the watch.

Captain Harold C. Train, Admiral Pye’s chief of staff on the California, was sure the alarm had been set off by mistake. And on the destroyer Henley it really was a mistake. Her crew was normally mustered on Sundays at 7:55 by sounding the gas-attack alarm; this morning someone pressed the wrong button — general quarters.

Chaplain Howell Forgy of the cruiser New Orleans also thought someone had blundered. He drifted to his station in sick bay completely unconcerned. A moment later the ship’s doctor arrived and hesitantly remarked, “Padre, there’s planes out there and they look like Japs.”

The word spread faster. A boatswain dashed into the CPO wardroom on the Maryland, sat down white as a sheet: “The Japs are here …” As Ensign Charles Merdinger of the Nevada pulled on his clothes, someone outside his stateroom yelled, “It’s the real thing; it’s the Japs!” With that, Merdinger stepped completely through his sock. Watertender Samuel Cucuk looked into the “head” on the destroyer tender Dobbin, called to Fireman Charles Leahey, “You better cut that short, Charlie, the Japs are here.”

A few skeptics still held out. In the Honolulu’s hoist room Private Roy Henry bet another Marine a dollar that it was the Army, pulling a surprise on the Navy with dummy torpedoes. The men in the repair ship Rigel’s pipe and copper shop remained unperturbed when a seaman wearing only underwear burst in with the news — they figured the fellow was pretending he was crazy so he could get back to the Coast. When a sailor on the Pennsylvania said the Japs were attacking, Machinist’s Mate William Felsing had a snappy comeback: “So are the Germans.”

The last doubts vanished in an avalanche of shattering evidence. Pharmacist’s Mate William Lynch took a skeptical metalsmith to his porthole on the California, pointed to the chaos erupting outside. The man sagged away, sighing, “Jesus Christ … Jesus Christ.” On the West Virginia a sailor spattered with fuel oil ran by Ensign Maurice Featherman shouting, “Look what the bastards did to me!”

One and all, they accepted it now —some with a worldly grasp of affairs, some with almost ingenuous innocence. Captain Mervyn Bennion, skipper of the West Virginia, calmly remarked to his Marine orderly, “This is certainly in keeping with their history of surprise attacks.” A seaman on the destroyer Monaghan told Boatswain’s Mate Thomas Donahue, “Hell, I didn’t even know they were sore at us.”

Down the corridors … up the ladders … through the hatches the men ran, climbed, milled, and shoved toward their battle stations. And it was high time. The alarm was no sooner given when the Oklahoma took the first of five torpedoes … the West Virginia the first of six. These were the golden targets — directly across from Southeast Loch. Next the Arizona took two, even though a little to the north and partly blocked by the Vestal. Then the California got two, even though far to the south and a relatively poor target. Only the inboard battleships seemed safe — Maryland alongside Oklahoma and Tennessee beside West Virginia.

As the torpedoes whacked home, the men struggled to keep going, sometimes fell in jumbled heaps. On the West Virginia Ensign Ed Jacoby went out like a light when one of the first explosions toppled a steel locker over on his head. Seaman James Jensen kept his feet through the first two blasts, but the next two hurled him into another compartment, and a fifth knocked him out. Quartermaster Ed Vecera, trying to get from the quarterdeck aft to his post on the bridge, ran a regular obstacle course: torpedoes … Japanese strafing … watertight doors slammed in his face … a tide of men who always seemed headed the other way. Finally he fell in behind Captain Bennion, and for a while everything opened up to let the skipper pass. But soon they were separated, and Vecera was shunted off in another direction. Somehow he got to the main deck and was stopped again. He never made it to the bridge.

On the Helena, the mess hall crashed around Machinist’s Mate Paul Weisenberger, as he struggled toward his post in the forward engine room. A table, unhooked from the overhead, bounced off his shoulder. By the time he picked himself up, the next door forward was dogged shut. He had to settle for the after engine room instead.

The mess hall on the Oglala — racked up by the same torpedo — was a shambles too. Broken glass and china littered the deck, as Musician Frank Forgione dashed through barefoot on his way to his station in the sick bay. He cut his feet terribly — never even noticed it until hours later.

Worst of all was the Oklahoma. The second torpedo put out her lights; the next three ripped open what was left of her port side. The sea swirled in, driving Seaman George Murphy from his post in the print shop on third deck as soon as he got there. His group retreated midships, slamming a watertight door behind them. The list grew steeper, and within seconds the water was squirting around the seams, filling that compartment too.” As the ship heeled further, Chief Yeoman George Smith shifted over to a starboard ladder to reach his battle station. Everybody else had the same idea. In the flicker of a few emergency lamps men pushed and shoved, trying to climb over and around each other on the few usable ladders. It was a dark, sweat-smeared nightmare.

No matter how bad things were, men remembered to take care of absurd details. Radioman Robert Gamble of the Tennessee ignored the old shoes beside his bunk, went to his locker, and carefully put on a brand-new pair to start the war right. The Nevada musicians put their instruments away before going to their stations. (Exception — one man took along his cornet and excitedly threw it into a shell hoist along with some shells for the antiaircraft guns above.)

On the other hand, there was always the danger of forgetting something important. As Radioman James Lagerman raced for his battle station in the Ford Island Administration Building, he kept saying again and again to himself, “Just gotta try to remember this date …”

In the confusion many of the ships —unlike the Nevada — never carried out morning colors. Others did, but in somewhat unorthodox fashion. On the sub alongside the oil barge YO-44, a young sailor popped out of the conning tower and ran to the flagstaff at the stern. Just then a torpedo plane roared by, the rear-seat man swiveling his guns. The sailor scurried back to the conning tower, hugging the flag. Next try, he clipped it on; then another plane sent him diving back to shelter. Third time he got it up — just before another plane sent him ducking for cover again. The men on YO-44 laughed and clapped and cheered.

But at the sub base headquarters a few yards away, Chief Torpedoman’s Mate Peter Chang, in charge of the Navy’s Submarine Torpedo School, could only watch with sickened admiration as the Japanese planes grooved one strike after another down the narrow alley of Southeast Loch. It was a real demonstration for the reluctant students who had to watch it, and Chang didn’t hesitate to draw on it for material to be used in future lectures.

At CINCPAC Headquarters in the sub base administration building, Commander Vincent Murphy was still phoning Admiral Kimmel about the Ward’s sampan report when a yeoman burst into the room: “There’s a message from the signal tower saying the Japanese are attacking Pearl Harbor, and this is no drill.” Murphy relayed the message to his boss, then told the communications officer to radio the Chief of Naval Operations, the C-in-C Atlantic Fleet, the C-in-C Asiatic Fleet, and all forces at sea: AIR RAID ON PEARL HARBOR, THIS IS NO  DRILL. The message went out at 8:00 A.M., but Admiral Bellinger had radioed a similar message to all ships in the harbor at 7:58; so Washington already knew.

Murphy now phoned Commander Ramsey over at Patwing 2 and optimistically asked how many planes were available. The commander showed a keen grasp of the situation: “I don’t think I have any, but I’m scraping together what I can for search.”

In the Navy housing areas around Pearl Harbor, people couldn’t imagine what was wrecking Sunday morning. Captain Reynolds Hayden, enjoying breakfast at his home on Hospital Point, thought it was construction blasting — then his young son Billy rushed in shouting, “They’re Jap planes!” Lieutenant C. E. Boudreau, drying down after a shower, thought an oil tank had blown up near his quarters behind Bloch Arena until a Japanese plane almost grazed the bathroom window. Chief Petty Officer Albert Molter, puttering around his Ford Island flat, thought a drill was going on until his wife Esther called, “Al, there’s a battleship tipping over.”

As 11-year-old Don Morton scuffed back to his house in Pearl City for more fishing bait, an explosion almost pitched him on his face. Then another, and still another. He scrambled home and asked his mother what was happening. She just told him to go fetch his brother Jerry. He ran out to find several planes now gliding by at house-top level. One was strafing the dirt road, kicking up little puffs of dust. Don was scared to go any farther. As he ran back to the house, he saw his next-door neighbor, a Navy lieutenant, standing in his pajamas on the grass, crying like a child.

Up on the hill at Makalapa, where the senior officers lived, Admiral Kimmel ran out to his yard right after Commander Murphy reported the attack. He stood there for a minute or two, watching the planes make their first torpedo runs. Near him stood Mrs. John Earle, wife of Admiral Bloch’s chief of staff. At one point she remarked quietly, “Looks like they’ve got the Oklahoma.”

“Yes, I can see they have,” the admiral answered.

In a house directly across the street —and just a little down the hill — Mrs. Hall Mayfield, wife of Admiral Bloch’s intelligence officer, buried her head in the pillow and tried to forget the noise. Makalapa was just being developed, and since it was on the side of an old volcano, they had to do a lot of dynamiting through the lava. It occurred to Mrs. Mayfield that they must now be blasting the hole for her mailbox post.

But the pillow was useless. Mrs. Mayfield surrendered and opened her eyes. Her Japanese maid Fumiyo was standing in the doorway … each hand clutching the frame, the long sleeves of her kimono making her look curiously like a butterfly. Fumiyo was trying to say something, but the noise drowned it out. Mrs. Mayfield jumped out of bed and went to her. “Oh, Mrs. Mayfield,” Fumiyo was saying, “Pearl Harbor is on fire!”

Glancing through a window, she saw her husband in pajamas, standing on the back lawn. He was leveling binoculars on the harbor, which lay below the house. Seconds later the two women joined him. Mrs. Mayfield’s first words were a bit of wifely advice: “Hall, go right back inside and put in your teeth.”

The captain’s dentures were quickly forgotten as she watched the smoke billow up in the harbor. His wishful suggestion that it might be a drill failed to convince her. When two planes flashed by with the rising-sun insignia, all three of them turned and dashed back to the house.

Captain Mayfield was now pawing about his closet, hurling clothes and hangers in every direction. Mrs. Mayfield chose this moment to make a fatal mistake. “Why,” she asked, “don’t the Navy planes do something?”

The captain’s glare showed that her question was treason. “Why,” he yelled back, “doesn’t the Army do something?”

In the control tower of Hickam Field just east of Pearl Harbor, Colonel William Farthing was still waiting for the B-17s from the mainland when he saw a long, thin line of aircraft approaching from the northwest. They looked like Marine planes from Ewa Field. As they began diving, Farthing remarked to Colonel Bertholf, “Very realistic maneuvers, I wonder what the Marines are doing to the Navy so early Sunday.”

Watching the same show from the parade ground nearby, Sergeant Robert Halliday saw a big splash go up near Ford Island; he decided the Navy was practicing with water bombs. Then one of the bombs hit an oil tank, which exploded in a cloud of smoke and flames. A man said some poor Navy pilot would get into trouble for that. At this point a plane suddenly swooped down on Hickam — a rising sun gleamed on its fuselage. Somebody remarked, “Look, there goes one of the red team.”

Next instant, the group was scattering for cover. The plane dropped a bomb and followed it into the huge maintenance hangar of the Hawaiian Air Depot. It was the first in a long line of bombers diving on Hickam from the south. No one is completely sure whether these planes, or those pulling out of their dives on Ford Island, reached Hickam first. Within seconds, both groups were everywhere at once — strafing the men and the neat rows of planes … dive-bombing the hangars and buildings.

In the mess hall at the center of Hickam’s big, new consolidated barracks, Pfc. Frank Rom yelled a frantic warning to the early risers eating breakfast. It was too late. Trays, dishes, food splattered in all directions as a bomb crashed through the roof. Thirty-five men were wiped out instantly; the injured crawled to safety through the rubble — including one man wounded by a gallon jar of mayonnaise.

In the barracks, where most of the men were still asleep, the first explosions at Pearl Harbor woke up Corporal John Sherwood. Cursing the Navy, he got up and looked for something to read. As he padded about, he glanced out the window just in time to see the Hawaiian Air Depot get pasted. He took off in his shorts for a safer place, shouting, “Air raid! It’s the real thing!”

Someone dashing through the barracks woke up Sergeant H. E. Swinney. Only then did he notice the bomb bursts and low-flying aircraft. Even so, he was more curious than alarmed. But he half sensed something was wrong — the barracks were never that empty on Sunday. He got up and slipped downstairs to investigate. In the hallway a group of men were chattering in excited whispers. He could get nothing out of them and looked around for a better clue. Near a doorway he saw a man with a Springfield rifle; then another man came in with blood running down his face. Swinney peeked out just in time to see a Zero fighter streak by Hangar 7. At last he caught on — he recalls it was almost the way an idea used to come to a comic-strip character, complete with lightbulb above the head.

The men were desperately trying to get to their stations now. Some never made it —Private Mark Creighton, pinned down by strafers, dived into a latrine and hugged a toilet bowl for shelter. Others got there too late — Pfc. Emmett Pethoud found that the plane he had to guard was already blown to bits. More bombs were coming, so he ducked under a table — but not before he carefully replaced a phone receiver that had fallen off its hook.

A few were able to carry out their duties. Pfc. Joseph Nelles, the Catholic chaplain’s assistant, was returning from early-morning mass when the planes struck. His first thoughts were to safeguard the Blessed Sacrament in the chapel. He ran back and must have just reached the altar when the chapel took a direct hit and vanished in the blast.

While Pearl and Hickam rocked with explosions, all was still quiet at Wheeler Field, the Army’s fighter base in the center of the island. Staff Sergeant Francis Glossen, changing his clothes for a date at Waikiki, glanced out his third-floor window in the main barracks, saw a line of six to ten planes come through Kole Kole Pass to the west. They banked left and disappeared, blending into the background of the Waianae Mountains.

They circled back, joined others coming in from the northwest, and charged down on the field. At 8:02 A.M., Pfc. Arthur Fusco, guarding some P-40s with his rifle, froze in his tracks as the first dive-bomber peeled off. He recognized those red balls and rushed into the hangar for a machine gun. He couldn’t break the lock of the armament shack, but by now it made no difference.

Pfc. Carroll Andrews flattened against his barracks wall as bullets tore through the men’s lockers, shattered and splintered the windows around him. Somebody yanked Pfc. Leonard Egan from his cot in one of the tents along the hangar line, and for a moment he stood dazed and naked watching the dive-bombers and strafers at work. Then he grabbed his shoes and a pair of coveralls and started running.

In the housing areas families poured into their backyards in pajamas and bathrobes. A man wrapped in a bath towel raced up the post’s main street. In the officers’ club, Lieutenants Welch and Taylor stopped debating whether to go swimming. Welch grabbed the phone and called Haleiwa, where their P-40s were kept. Yes, the planes were all right… yes, they would be gassed up and loaded right away. Welch slammed down the receiver, hopped into Taylor’s car, and the two careened off to Haleiwa, prodded along by a strafing Zero.

Just north of Wheeler, Major General Maxwell Murray, commanding the 25th Division, heard a plane diving over his quarters in the General’s Loop at Schofield Barracks. He rushed to the window determined to report the pilot. The plane zoomed by only 75 yards away, but the general couldn’t catch the number. So he ran to the front door, glancing at his watch — he would at least get the landing time. To his surprise the plane dropped a bomb.

Private Lester Buckley was unloading manure nearby at the Schofield compost heap. He took one look at flames billowing up from Wheeler, jumped in his wagon, and raced back to the barracks so fast that the pitchforks rattled out.

In the barracks, Pfc. Raymond Senecal, jolted from his sleep, thought the engineers were blasting. He got out of bed and found the air full of strange-looking airplanes with fixed landing gear. Soon they were diving on the big Schofield quadrangles, where most of the men ate and slept. Senecal saw the bright red circles clearly, but still he couldn’t quite believe it. Turning to his sergeant, he offered the advice of a true citizen-soldier: “Get someone on the telephone …”

Corporal Maurice Herman ran out on his barracks porch and started cranking away at the air-raid siren. Down below, the Sunday morning chow lines wound through the quadrangle. It was an incongruous picture — heads raised to view the planes … excited discussions … questions being yelled to Herman on the porch … and every man reluctant to give up his place in the chow line. Then a plane swept by, raking the lines of men. Wild confusion, as the men scattered for their guns and stations.

Bugles began sounding. Corporal Harry Foss thought the old call to arms did more than anything else to pull the men together in the 65th Combat Engineers. Private Frank Gobeo of the 98th Coast Artillery didn’t know how to blow call to arms, but he made a brilliant substitution that brought the men swarming from the barracks — he blew pay call.

Supply Sergeant Valentine Lemanski of 27th Infantry rocketed down the stairs of Quadrangle D, found the men in his company had already smashed open the supply room doors. A young private in the 19th Infantry seized a Browning Automatic Rifle (known as a BAR in the Army) and shot off a clip while still in the building. Some men in the 27th Infantry couldn’t get guns at all — their sergeant refused to issue the ammunition because a sign said it couldn’t be released without orders from the adjutant.

In the radar information center at Fort Shaffer, Lieutenant Tyler had heard the first explosions just before his watch ended at eight. He strolled outside and for a moment or so watched what appeared to be “Navy practice at Pearl.” Then he heard a few bursts of antiaircraft fire, somewhat closer. He hung around even though his watch was now over, and a few minutes after eight got a call from Sergeant Storry up at the base: “There’s an air attack at Wheeler Field.” Tyler knew just what to do: he instantly recalled the headset operators.

General Short listened with interest to the bedlam in his quarters nearby. He decided that the Navy must be having some kind of battle practice. The explosions increased, and he wandered out on his lanai for a look. There was a lot of smoke to the west, but he couldn’t make much out of it. Then Colonel Philips, his chief of staff, burst in at 8:03 with the news — Hickam and Wheeler had just phoned that this was “the real thing.”

Pfc. William McCarthy felt the Catholic chapel at Shafter shake and tremble with every explosion. The windows rattled all through mass and the sermon. Right after the sermon a GI ran up to the priest and told him what was happening. Quickly the padre turned to the congregation: “God bless you all, the Japanese are attacking Pearl Harbor. Return to your units at once.”

Twelve miles away — across the Koolau Mountains and on the windward side of Oahu — Lieutenant Commander H. P. McCrimmon heard some low-flying planes roar past the dispensary at the Kaneohe Naval Air Station.

Someone in the room mentioned Army maneuvers, and McCrimmon got up to get a better look. Three planes were flying in close formation at about treetop height, shooting tracer bullets. They made three separate passes at the hangars two blocks away, always firing their guns as they approached. Soon black smoke began pouring from one of the buildings. McCrimmon immediately sent an ambulance to the fire in accordance with base regulations.

Another plane flew by, flashing those telltale red circles. This time McCrimmon told his yeoman to “call up Pearl Harbor and ask for some help.” The call went through, but Pearl said this was one day they couldn’t lend a hand. McCrimmon next called his wife and told her not to pick him up when his duty ended — the place was under attack. Her cheerful reply: “Oh, come on home; all is forgiven.”

In the officers’ mess a little farther away from the hangars, Attendant Walter Simmons had just finished setting up the tables when the firing began. He had a few minutes to kill and went out to watch the show. After he saw the burning hangar, he darted back in, collared an officer who had just appeared for breakfast, and the pair of them rushed off to the pilots’ sleeping quarters — a two-man task force faced with the formidable job of waking up several hundred aviators Sunday morning.

Ensign George Shute burst into Ensign Hubert Reese’s room, shouting, “Some damn Army pilot has gone buster — he’s diving on BOQ and shooting!” He held out a warm bullet as evidence.

Reese looked out the window, saw the red circles, and joined the little group spreading the alarm. He woke up Ensign Bellinger, who reacted promptly: “Are you guys drunk? Get out and leave me alone!” Now it was Bellinger’s turn to look. Then he too was running up and down the halls, banging on doors, spreading the word.

“They is attacking! They is attacking!” shouted a cook, who had joined the group, as he crashed into Ensign Charles Willis’ room beating a cake pan with a spoon.

Five pilots crowded into Willis’ car and started off for the hangars. Bullets ripped through the roof, the men piled out, then back in again when Willis found that the car still worked. They reached the hangar this time, but just barely. As they got out, another strafer hit the car and this time the gasoline tank went up. It was nothing compared to the blaze they found around them: 33 planes — everything at Kaneohe except the three PBYs on patrol — were burning.

The story was much the same at Ewa Field, the Marine base west of Pearl Harbor. Captain Leonard Ashwell, officer of the day, first sensed something was wrong when he saw two lines of torpedo bombers cruising eastward along the coast toward the Navy base. Unlike almost everybody else in Hawaii, he instantly recognized them. As he ran to sound the alarm, 21 Zeroes barreled in over the Waianae Mountains and began shooting up the base.

Some headed for the planes parked in neat rows; others for the hangars and roadways. One strafer caught Lieutenant Colonel Claude Larkin, base commander, just coming to work in his 1930 Plymouth jalopy. Larkin didn’t even turn off the motor — he catapulted out of the car and into a roadside ditch as the plane swept past. Then he scrambled back in and raced for the base about a mile away. He arrived by 8:05, but 33 of his 49 planes were blazing wrecks.

At Waikiki Mrs. Larkin had already put in a big day. She and the colonel had finally found an apartment, and this morning she was moving everything over from the Halekulani Hotel, where they had set up temporary quarters. Other Halekulani guests were enjoying a typical, quiet Sunday morning. Captain J. W. Bunkley of the California slipped into his swimming trunks for a prebreakfast dip. Correspondent Joseph Harsch of The Christian Science Monitor awoke hearing sounds of explosions in the distance. They immediately reminded him of the air raids they used to have when he was in Berlin the winter before. He woke his wife and told her, “Darling, you often have asked me what an air raid sounds like. Listen to this — it’s a good imitation.”

“Oh, so that’s what it sounds like,” she replied. Then they both dozed off to sleep again.

Most of Honolulu was equally uninterested. Author Blake Clark heard the noise at his home on Punahou Street, wrote it off as artillery practice. When he came down to breakfast, he was disturbed only because the Sunday Advertiser hadn’t come. He walked down to Blackshear’s drugstore, picked up an early edition, and came back to enjoy it. When the Japanese cook began talking about planes outside, he strolled onto the lanai with Mr. and Mrs. Frear, who shared the house. There were plenty of planes, all right, and Mr. Frear observed that it was just as well in times like these.

Some civilians couldn’t help learning. Jim Duncan, foreman for a private contractor at Pearl, was taking flying lessons from Tommy Tommerlin, an inter-island pilot who gave instruction on the side. This was the day for Duncan’s cross-country check flight, and now they were cruising leisurely around the island in the Hui Lele Flying Club’s yellow Aeronca.

They had just passed the Mormon Temple near Kahuku Point when they heard machine-gun fire and the plane gave a heavy lurch. Then it happened again. At first Duncan thought some playful Army pilot was trying to scare him, but he changed his mind as he saw the red tracers pouring toward him and heard the bullets chopping into his fuselage. Two planes had come up from below, firing and passing so close that they tossed him about in their backwash. Now they turned and were charging back down on him. As they swerved by, he saw for the first time the orange-red circles on the wings. Nothing ever looked bigger.

Duncan dived for the shoreline, hoping to find cover by hugging the steep hills that came almost down to the sea. It was a good decision — the Japanese planes circled once or twice, then flew off to rejoin the armada heading for Pearl. The crippled Aeronca limped down the coast, over the pali, and back to the John Rogers Airport, the civilian field just east of Hickam and Pearl Harbor.

Another amateur pilot, lawyer Roy Vitousek, had almost as much trouble right over John Rogers. He, too, had gone up in an Aeronca for an early-morning spin, taking along his son Martin. They were just getting ready to land again when they saw the first explosion on Ford Island. Some planes were circling nearby, but Vitousek didn’t link them to the blast. Now more explosions ripped the harbor … then the hangars at Hickam … and if he still had any doubt, he knew for certain when he saw some planes flying below him and caught a glimpse of the rising sun.

Two of the planes came after Vitousek, and he gunned the Aeronca out to sea, hoping nobody would go to very much trouble just to get him. He was right — the two Japanese gave him a perfunctory burst and turned to John Rogers instead. At the first break Vitousek himself went into Rogers, landed, and found the place seething with indignation: “Did you see those fools? They must be drunk, practicing with live ammunition!”

For a long time the field tried its best to conduct normal business. When the dispatcher announced the 8:00 A.M. inter-island flight to Maui, the passengers filed through the gate as usual. Among them went Dr. Homer Izumi, a physician from the Kula Sanitarium on Maui, who had been in Honolulu on business. His hosts, Dr. and Mrs. Harold Johnson, saw him off as he boarded the plane, gingerly carrying a box of his favorite cookies. Waving good-bye through the cabin window, he noticed somebody running across the field from the Andrew Flying Service hangar. The plane door opened and everyone was ordered out.

Dr. Izumi climbed down and went back to the Johnsons. There had been more strafing — civilian pilot Bob Tyce had been killed — and the Johnsons urged Dr. Izumi to drive home with them. But he guessed it was nothing … the plane was sure to leave soon.

Dr. Izumi guessed wrong. The place was soon in chaos — smoke, shrapnel, strafers everywhere. When a big plane droned toward him from the sea, he dived for a palm tree in the middle of the parking circle. His first thought — protect the cookies; his second — if only he had kissed his son Allen good-bye the day he left Maui.

CHAPTER VIII

“I Can’t Keep Throwing Things at Them”

UP IN THE MARYLAND’S foretop, Seaman Leslie Vernon Short had abandoned his hopes of a quiet morning addressing Christmas cards. After a quick double-take on the planes diving at Ford Island, he loaded the ready machine gun and hammered away at the first torpedo planes gliding in from Southeast Loch.

In the destroyer anchorage to the north, Gunner’s Mate Walter Bowe grabbed a .50-caliber machine gun on the afterdeck of the Tucker and fired back too. So did Seaman Frank Johnson, who was sweeping near the bridge of the destroyer Bagley in the Navy Yard. Seaman George Sallet watched the slugs from Johnson’s gun tear into a torpedo plane passing alongside, saw the rear gunner slump in the cockpit, and thought it was just like in the movies.

Others were firing too — the Helena at 1010 dock … the Tautog at the sub base … the Raleigh on the northwest side of Ford Island. Up in the Nevada’s “bird bath,” a seaman generally regarded as one of the less useful members of the crew seized a .30-caliber machine gun and winged a torpedo plane headed directly for the ship. It was to be an important reprieve.

Here and there other guns joined in, but at first they were pitifully few. A “Number 3 condition of readiness” was in effect — that meant one antiaircraft battery in each sector — and orders had been given to man additional guns on the battleships. But whatever the official directives, the men actually on the ships recall no difference from any other peacetime Sunday.

On some ships key men were still ashore — five of the battleship captains … 50 percent of the destroyer officers. On others, men were pinned down by strafing, blocked by watertight doors, dazed by the suddenness of it all. Seaman Robert Benton, a sight-setter of a five-inch gun on the West Virginia, stood helplessly at his post — the rest of the gun crew never did appear. Yeoman Alfred Home waited alone so long on the signal bridge of the sub tender Pelias that he finally gave up. He started back down the ladder, almost into the arms of the skipper, who thundered, “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

There were more delays once the men reached their stations. First, the canvas awnings that stretched over the decks and guns. On the Sacramento Watertender Gilbert Hawkins found himself carefully untying each knot — he just couldn’t shake off the peacetime way of doing things. Finally a cook ran up and slashed the lines with a butcher’s knife.

Other men struggled to get guns and ammunition. At Ford Island a supply officer took a firm stand: no .30-caliber machine guns without a BuSandA 307 Stub Requisition. On the Helm a gunner’s mate asked Commander Carroll’s permission to get the keys to open the magazine locks. The skipper said, “Damn the keys — cut the locks!”

On the New Orleans they used fire axes to smash open the ammunition ready boxes. The Pennsylvania locks were knocked off by a gunner’s mate who walked around swinging a big hammer — he had been bombed by the Japanese on the gunboat Panay in 1937 and announced he wasn’t going to be caught again. On the Monaghan Boatswain’s Mate Thomas Donahue —relieved of all duties to return to the mainland — ran back to his old job as the captain of No. 4 gun. While the ammunition locks were being sawed off, Donahue whiled away the time slinging wrenches at low-flying planes. Then somebody called up from the magazine and asked what he needed. “Powder,” he called back, “I can’t keep throwing things at them.”

They took him literally and sent up powder without shells. Nothing daunted, he used a drill shell for his first shot at the enemy — at least it was better than a wrench.

On the afterdeck of the Detroit, men banged their three-inch shells against the gun shields to get the protector caps off the fuses, and Aviation Metalsmith George Dorfmeister wondered why the whole ship didn’t go up in smoke. On the Bagley, a five-inch-gun crew trained on a low-flying strafer … Seaman George Sallet squeezed the trigger … and nothing happened. Somebody on the Honolulu just astern yelled and pointed to the barrel — nobody had taken out the tampion, a decorative brass plug that seals the barrel when not in use. Whereupon, the crew on one of the Honolulu’s after guns forgot their own tampion — but here it didn’t seem to matter: the first shot blew it out, and on they fought.

More and more guns were firing now, but ten priceless minutes had passed. At a time like this, they made a life-and-death difference on Battleship Row.

Another plane glided toward the Nevada. Again the machine guns in her foretop blazed away. Again the plane wobbled and never pulled out of its turn. The men were wild with excitement as it plowed into the water alongside the dredge pipe just astern. The pilot frantically struggled clear and floated faceup past the ship. But this time they got him too late. Marine Private Payton McDaniel watched the torpedo’s silver streak as it headed for the port bow. He remembered pictures of torpedoed ships and half expected the Nevada to break in two and sink enveloped in flames. It didn’t happen that way at all. Just a slight shudder, a brief list to port.

Then she caught a bomb by the starboard antiaircraft director. Ensign Joe Taussig was at his station there, standing in the doorway, when it hit. Suddenly he found his left leg tucked under his arm. Almost absently he said to himself, “That’s a hell of a place for a foot to be,” and was amazed to hear Boatswain’s Mate Allen Owens, standing beside him, say exactly the same words aloud.

In the plotting room five decks below, Ensign Charles Merdinger at first felt that it was all like the drills he had been through dozens of times. But it began to seem different when he learned through the phone circuit that his roommate Joe Taussig had been hit.

The men on the Arizona, forward of the Nevada, hardly had time to think. She was inboard of the Vestal, but the little repair ship didn’t offer much protection — a torpedo struck home almost right away —and nothing could stop the steel that rained down from Fuchida’s horizontal bombers now overhead. A big one shattered the boat deck between No. 4 and 6 guns — it came in like a fly ball, and Seaman Russell Lott, standing in the antiaircraft director, had the feeling he could reach out and catch it. Another hit No. 4 turret, scorched and hurled Coxswain James Forbis off a ladder two decks below.

The PA system barked, “Fire on the quarterdeck,” and then went off the air for good. Radioman Glenn Lane and three of his shipmates rigged a hose and tried to fight the fire. No water pressure. They rigged phones and tried to call for water. No power. All the time explosions somewhere forward were throwing them off their feet.

Alongside, the Vestal seemed to be catching everything that missed the Arizona. One bomb went through an open hatch, tore right through the ship, exploding as it passed out the bottom. It flooded the No. 3 hold, and the ship began settling at the stern. A prisoner in the brig howled to be let out, and finally someone shot off the lock with a .45.

Forward of the Arizona and Vestal, the Tennessee so far was holding her own; but the West Virginia on the outside was taking a terrible beating. A Japanese torpedo plane headed straight for the casemate where Seaman Robert Benton waited for the rest of his gun crew. He stood there transfixed —wanted to move but couldn’t. The torpedo hit directly underneath and sent Benton and his headphones flying in opposite directions. He got up … ran across the deck … slipped down the starboard side of the ship to the armor shelf, a ledge formed by the ship’s 15-inch steel plates. As he walked aft along the ledge, he glanced up, saw the bombers this time. Caught in the bright morning sun, the falling bombs looked for a fleeting second like snowflakes.

The men below were spared such sights, but the compensation was questionable. Storekeeper Donald Brown tried to get the phones working in the ammunition supply room, third deck forward. The lines were dead. More torpedoes — sickening fumes — steeper list — no lights. Men began screaming in the dark. Someone shouted, “Abandon ship!” and the crowd stampeded to the compartment ladder. Brown figured he would have no chance in this clawing mob, felt his way to the next compartment forward, and found another ladder with no one near it at all. Now he was on the second deck, but not allowed any higher. Nothing left to do, no place else to go — he and a friend brushed a bunch of dirty breakfast dishes off a mess table and sat down to wait the end.

Down in the plotting room — the gunnery nerve center and well below the waterline — conditions looked just as hopeless. Torpedoes were slamming into the ship somewhere above. Through an overhead hatch Ensign Victor Delano could see that the third deck was starting to flood. Heavy yellowish smoke began pouring down through the opening. The list grew steeper; tracking board, plotting board, tables, chairs, cots, everything slid across the room and jumbled against the port bulkhead. In the internal communications room next door, circuit breakers were sparking and electrical units ran wild. The men were pale but calm.

Soon oily water began pouring through the exhaust trunks of the ventilation system. Then more yellow smoke. Nothing further could be done, so Delano led his men forward to central station, the ship’s damage control center. Before closing the watertight door behind him, he called back to make sure no one was left. From nowhere six oil-drenched electrician’s mates showed up —they had somehow been hurled through the hatch from the deck above. Then Warrant Electrician Charles T. Duvall called to please wait for him. He sounded in trouble and Delano stepped back into the plotting room to lend a hand. But he slipped on some oil and slid across the linoleum floor, bowling over Duvall in the process. The two men ended in a tangled heap among the tables and chairs now packed against the “down” side of the room.

They couldn’t get back on their feet; the oil was everywhere. Even crawling didn’t work — they still got no traction. Finally they grabbed a row of knobs on the main battery switchboard, which ran all the way across the room. Painfully they pulled themselves uphill, hand over hand along the switchboard. By now it was almost like scaling a cliff.

In central station at last, they found conditions almost as bad. The lights dimmed, went out, came on again for a while as some auxiliary circuit took hold. Outside the watertight door on the lower side, the water began to rise … spouting through the cracks around the edges and shooting like a hose through an air-test opening. Delano could hear the pleas and cries of the men trapped on the other side, and he thought with awe of the decision Lieutenant Commander J. S. Harper, the damage control officer, had to make: let the men drown, or open the door and risk the ship as well as the people now in central station. The door stayed closed.

Delano suggested to Harper that he and his men might be more useful topside. For the moment Harper didn’t even have time to answer. He was desperately trying to keep in touch with the rest of the ship and direct the counterflooding that might save it, but all the circuits were dead.

The counterflooding was done anyhow. Lieutenant Claude V. Ricketts had once been damage control officer and liked to discuss with other young officers what should be done in just this kind of situation. More or less as skull practice, they had worked out a plan among themselves. Now Ricketts began counterflooding on his own hook, helped along by Boatswain’s Mate Billingsley, who knew how to work the knobs and valves. The West Virginia slowly swung back to starboard and settled into the harbor mud on an even keel.

There was no time for counterflooding on the Oklahoma, lying ahead of the West Virginia and outboard of the Maryland. Lying directly across from Southeast Loch, she got three torpedoes right away, then another two as she heeled to port.

Curiously, many of the men weren’t even aware of the torpedoes. Seaman George Murphy only heard the loudspeaker say something about “air attack” and assumed the explosions were bombs. Along with hundreds of other men who had no air defense stations, he now trooped down to the third deck, where he would be protected by the armor plate that covered the deck above. Seaman Stephen Young never thought of torpedoes either, and he was even relieved when the water surged into the port side of No. 4 turret powder handling room. He assumed that someone was finally counterflooding on that side to offset bomb damage to starboard.

The water rose … the emergency lights went out … the list increased. Now everything was breaking loose. Big 1000-pound shells rumbled across the handling rooms, sweeping men before them. Eight-foot reels of steel towing cable rolled across the second deck, blocking the ladders topside. The door of the drug room swung open, and Seaman Murphy watched hundreds of bottles cascade over a couple of seamen hurrying down a passageway. The boys slipped and rolled through the broken glass, jumped up, and ran on.

On the few remaining ladders, men battled grimly to get to the main deck. It was a regular logjam on the ladder to S Division compartment, just a few steps from open air. Every time something exploded outside, men would surge down the ladder, meeting head-on another crowd that surged up. Soon it was impossible to move in either direction. Seaman Murphy gave up even trying. He stood off to the side — one foot on deck, the other on the corridor wall, the only way he could now keep his footing.

Yeoman L. L. Curry had a better way out. He and some mates were still in the machine shop on third deck amidships when the list reached 60 degrees. Someone spied an exhaust ventilator leading all the way to the deck, and one by one the men crawled up. As they reached fresh air, an officer ran over and tried to shoo them back inside, where they would be safe from bomb splinters. That was the big danger, he explained: a battleship couldn’t turn over.

Several hundred yards ahead of the Oklahoma — and moored alone at the southern end of Battleship Row — the California caught her first torpedo at 8:05. Yeoman Durrell Conner watched it come from his station in the flag communications office. He slammed the porthole shut as it struck the ship directly beneath him.

Another crashed home farther aft. There might as well have been more — the California was wide open. She was due for inspection Monday, and the covers had been taken off six of the manholes leading to her double bottom. A dozen more of these covers had been loosened. The water poured in and surged freely through the ship.

It swept into the ruptured fuel tanks, contaminating the oil, knocking out the power plant right away. It swirled into the forward air compressor station, where Machinist’s Mate Robert Scott was trying to feed air to the five-inch guns. The other men cleared out, calling Scott to come with them. He yelled back, “This is my station — I’ll stay here and give them air as long as the guns are going.” They closed the watertight door and let him have his way.

With the power gone, men desperately tried to do by hand the tasks that were meant for machines. Yeoman Conner joined a long chain of men passing powder and shells up from an ammunition room far below. Stifling fumes from the ruptured fuel tanks made their work harder, and word spread that the ship was under gas attack. At the wounded collecting station in the crew’s reception room Pharmacist’s Mate William Lynch smashed open lockers in a vain search for morphine. Near the communications office a man knelt in prayer under a ladder. Numb to the chaos around him, another absently sat at a desk typing, “Now is the time for all good men …”

Around the harbor nobody noticed the California’s troubles — all eyes were glued on the Oklahoma. From his bungalow on Ford Island, Chief Albert Molter watched her gradually roll over on her side, “slowly and stately … as if she were tired and wanted to rest.” She kept rolling until her mast and superstructure jammed in the mud, leaving her bottom-up — a huge dead whale lying in the water. Only eight minutes had passed since the first torpedo hit.

On the Maryland Electrician’s Mate Harold North recalled how everyone had cursed on Friday when the Oklahoma tied up alongside, shutting off what air there was at night.

Inside the Oklahoma men were giving it one more try. Storekeeper Terry Armstrong found himself alone in a small compartment on the second deck. As it slowly filled with water, he dived down, groped for the porthole, squirmed through to safety. Seaman Malcolm McCleary escaped through a washroom porthole the same way. Nearby, Lieutenant (j.g.) Aloysius Schmitt, the Catholic chaplain, started out too. But a breviary in his hip pocket caught on the coaming. As he backed into the compartment again to take it out, several men started forward. Chaplain Schmitt had no more time to spend on himself. He pushed three, possibly four, of the others through before the water closed over the compartment.

Some men weren’t even close to life as they knew it, but were still alive nevertheless. They found themselves gasping, swimming, trying to orient themselves to an upside-down world in the air pockets that formed as the ship rolled over. Seventeen-year-old Seaman Willard Beal fought back the water that poured into the steering engine room. Seaman George Murphy splashed about the operating room of the ship’s dispensary … wondering what part of the ship had a tile ceiling … never dreaming he was looking up at the floor.

Topside, the men had it easier. As the ship slowly turned turtle, most of the men simply climbed over the starboard side and walked with the roll, finally ending up on the bottom. When and how they got off was pretty much a matter of personal choice. Some started swinging hand over hand along the lines that tied the ship to the Maryland, but as she rolled, these snapped, and the men were pitched into the water between the two ships. Seaman Tom Armstrong dived off on this side — his watch stopped at 8:10. Tom’s brother Pat jumped off from the outboard side. Their third brother Terry was already in the water after squeezing through the porthole on the second deck. Marine Gunnery Sergeant Leo Wears slid down a line and almost drowned when someone used him as a stepladder to climb into a launch. His friend Sergeant Norman Currier coolly walked along the side of the ship to the bow, hailed a passing boat, and stepped into it without getting a foot wet. Ensign Bill Ingram climbed onto the high side just as the yardarm touched the water. He stripped to his shorts and slid down the bottom of the ship.

As Ingram hit the water, the Arizona blew up. Afterward men said a bomb went right down her stack, but later examination showed even the wire screen across the funnel top still intact. It seems more likely the bomb landed alongside the second turret, crashed through the forecastle, and set off the forward magazines.

In any case, a huge ball of fire and smoke mushroomed 500 feet into the air. There wasn’t so much noise — most of the men say it was more a “whoom” than a “bang” — but the concussion was terrific. It stalled the motor of Aviation Ordnanceman Harand Quisdorf’s pickup truck as he drove along Ford Island. It hurled Chief Albert Molter against the pipe banister of his basement stairs. It knocked everyone flat on Fireman Stanley H. Rabe’s water barge. It blew Gunner Carey Garnett and dozens of other men off the Nevada … Commander Cassin Young off the Vestal … Ensign Vance Fowler off the West Virginia. Far above, Commander Fuchida’s bomber trembled like a leaf. On the fleet landing at Merry’s Point a Navy captain wrung his hands and sobbed that it just couldn’t be true.

On the Arizona, hundreds of men were cut down in a single, searing flash. Inside the port antiaircraft director, one fire control man simply vanished — the only place he could have gone was through the narrow range-finder slot. On the bridge Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd and Captain Franklin Van Valkenburgh were instantly killed. On the second deck the entire ship’s band was wiped out.

Over 1000 men were gone.

Incredibly, some still lived. Major Allen Shapley of the Marine detachment was blown out of the foremast and well clear of the ship. Though partly paralyzed, he swam to Ford Island, detouring to help two shipmates along the way. Radioman Glenn Lane was blown off the quarterdeck and found himself swimming in water thick with oil. He looked back at the Arizona and couldn’t see a sign of life.

But men were there. On the third deck aft Coxswain James Forbis felt skinned alive, and the No. 4 turret handling room was filling with thick smoke. He and his mates finally moved over to No. 3 turret, where conditions were a little better, but soon smoke began coming in around the guns there too. The men stripped to their skivvie drawers and crammed their clothes around the guns to keep the smoke out. When somebody finally ordered them out, Forbis took off his newly shined shoes and carefully carried them in his hands as he left the turret. The deck was blazing hot and covered with oil. But there was a dry spot farther aft near No. 4 turret, and before rejoining the fight, Forbis carefully placed his shoes there. He lined them neatly with the heels against the turret — just as though he planned to wear them up Hotel Street again that night.

In the portside antiaircraft director, Russell Lott wrapped himself in a blanket and stumbled out the twisted door. The blanket kept him from getting scorched, but the deck was so hot he had to keep hopping from one foot to the other. Five shipmates staggered up through the smoke, so he stretched the blanket as a sort of shield for them all. Then he saw the Vestal still alongside. The explosion had left her decks a shambles, but he found someone who tossed over a line, and, one by one, all six men inched over to the little repair ship.

At that particular moment they were lucky to find anyone on the Vestal. The blast had blown some of the crew overboard, including skipper Cassin Young, and the executive officer told the rest to abandon ship. Seaman Thomas Garzione climbed down a line over the forecastle, came to the end of it, and found himself standing on the anchor. He just froze there — he was a nonswimmer and too scared to jump the rest of the way. Finally he worked up enough nerve, made the sign of the cross, and plunged down holding his nose. For a nonswimmer, he made remarkable time to a whale boat drifting in the debris.

Signalman Adolph Zlabis dived off the bridge and reached a launch hovering nearby. He and a few others yelled encouragement to a young sailor who had climbed out on the Vestal’s boat boom and now dangled from a rope ladder five feet above the water. Finally the man let go, landed flat in the water with a resounding whack. The men in the launch couldn’t help laughing.

Still on board the Vestal, Radioman John Murphy watched a long line of men pass his radio room, on their way to abandon ship. One of the other radiomen saw his brother go by. He cried, “I’m going with him,” and ran out the door. For no particular reason Murphy decided to stay, but he began feeling that he would like to get back home just once more before he passed on.

At this point Commander Young climbed back on the Vestal from his swim in the harbor. He was by no means ready to call it a day. He stood sopping wet at the top of the gangway, shouting down to the swimmers and the men in the boats, “Come back! We’re not giving up this ship yet!”

Most of the crew returned and Young gave orders to cast off. Men hacked at the hawsers tying the Vestal to the blazing Arizona. Inevitably, there was confusion. One officer on the Arizona’s quarterdeck yelled, “Don’t cut those lines.” Others on the battleship pitched in and helped. Aviation Mechanic “Turkey” Graham slashed the last line with an ax, shouting, “Get away from here while you can!”

Other help came from an unexpected source. A Navy tug happened by, whose skipper and chief engineer had both put in many years on the Vestal. They loyally eased alongside, took a line from the bow, and towed their old ship off toward Aiea landing, where she could safely sit out the rest of the attack.

When the Arizona blew up, Chief Electrician’s Mate Harold North on the Maryland thought the end of the world had come. Actually he was lucky. Moored inboard of the Oklahoma, the Maryland was safe from torpedoes and caught only two bombs. One was a 15-inch armor-piercing shell fitted with fins — it slanted down just off the port bow, smashing into her hull 17 feet below the water-line. The other hit the forecastle, setting the awnings on fire. When a strafer swept by, Chief George Haitle watched the firefighters scoot for shelter. One man threw his extinguisher down a hatch, where it exploded at the feet of an old petty officer, who grabbed for a mask, shouting, “Gas!”

The Tennessee, the other inboard battleship, had more trouble. Seaman J. P. Burkholder looked out a porthole on the bridge just as one of the converted 16-inch shells crashed down on No. 2 turret a few feet forward. The porthole cover tore loose, clobbered him on the head, and sent him scurrying through the door. Outside he helped a wounded ensign, but couldn’t help one of his closest friends, who was so far gone he only wanted Burkholder to shoot him.

Another armor-piercing bomb burst through No. 3 turret farther aft. Seaman S. F. Bowen, stationed there as a powder carman, was just dogging the hatch when the bomb hit. It wasn’t a shattering crash at all. Just a ball of fire, about the size of a basketball, appeared overhead and seemed to melt down on everyone. It seemed to run down on his skin and there was no way to stop it. As he crawled down to the deck below, he noticed that his shoestrings were still on fire.

Splinters flew in all directions from the bombs that hit the Tennessee. One hunk ripped the bridge of the West Virginia alongside, cut down Captain Mervyn Bennion as he tried to direct his ship’s defense. He slumped across the sill of the signal bridge door on the starboard side of the machine-gun platform. Soon after he fell, Ensign Delano arrived on the bridge, having finally been sent up from central station. As Delano stepped out onto the platform, Lieutenant (j.g.) F. H. White rushed by, told him about the captain, and asked him to do what he could.

Delano saw right away it was hopeless. Captain Bennion had been hit in the stomach, and it took no medical training to know the wound was fatal. Yet he was perfectly conscious, and at least he might be made more comfortable. Delano opened a first-aid kit and looked for some morphine. No luck. Then he found a can of ether and tried to make the captain pass out. He sat down beside the dying man, holding his head in one hand and the ether in the other. It made the captain drowsy but never unconscious. Occasionally Delano moved the captain’s legs to more comfortable positions, but there was so little he could do.

As they sat there together, Captain Bennion prodded him with questions. He asked how the battle was going, what the West Virginia was doing, whether the ship and men were badly hit. Delano did his best to answer, resorting every now and then to a gentle white lie. Yes, he assured the captain, the ship’s guns were still firing.

Lieutenant Ricketts now turned up and proved a pillar of strength. Other men arrived too — Chief Pharmacist’s Mate Leak … Ensign Jacoby from the flag radio room … Lieutenant Commander Doir Johnson from the forecastle. On his way up, Johnson ran across big Doris Miller, thought the powerful mess steward might come in handy, brought him along to the bridge. Together they tenderly lifted Captain Bennion and carried him to a sheltered spot behind the conning tower. He was still quite conscious and well aware of the flames creeping closer. He kept telling the men to leave him and save themselves.

In her house at Makalapa, Mrs. Mayfield still couldn’t grasp what had happened. She walked numbly to a window and looked at Admiral Kimmel’s house across the street. The Venetian blinds were closed and there was no sign of activity. Somehow this was reassuring … surely there would be some sign of life if it was really true. It didn’t occur to her that this might be one morning when the admiral had no time for Venetian blinds.

By now Captain Mayfield was in his uniform. He took a few swallows of coffee, slopping most of it in the saucer, and dashed for the carport. He roared off as the CINCPAC official car screeched up to the admiral’s house across the street. Admiral Kimmel ran down the steps and jumped in, knotting his tie on the way. Captain Freeland Daubin, commanding a squadron of submarines, leaped on the running board as the car moved off, and Captain Earle’s station wagon shot down the hill after them.

In five minutes Admiral Kimmel was at CINCPAC Headquarters in the sub base. The admiral thought he was there by 8:05; Commander Murphy thought it was more like 8:10. In either case, within a very few minutes of his arrival, the backbone of his fleet was gone or immobile — Arizona, Oklahoma, and West Virginia sunk … California sinking … Maryland and Tennessee bottled up by the wrecked battleships alongside … Pennsylvania squatting in drydock. Only the Nevada was left, and she seemed a forlorn hope with one torpedo and two bombs already in her.

Nor was the picture much brighter elsewhere. On the other side of Ford Island the target ship Utah took a heavy list to port as her engineering officer, Lieutenant Commander S. S. Isquith, pulled his khakis over his pajamas. The alarm bell clanged a few strokes and stopped; the men trooped below to take shelter from bombing. Isquith sensed the ship couldn’t last, and he had the officer of the deck order all hands topside instead.

The men were amazingly cool —perhaps because they were used to being “bombed” by the Army and Navy everyday. When Machinist’s Mate David Gilmartin reached the main deck, he found the port rail already under water. Twice he crawled up toward the starboard side and slid back. As he did it a third time, he slid by another seaman who suggested he throw away the cigarettes. To Gilmartin’s amazement he had been trying to climb up the slanting deck while holding a carton of cigarettes in one hand. Relieved of his handicap, he made the starboard rail easily.

As the list increased, the big six-by-twelve-inch timbers that covered the Utah’s decks began breaking loose. These timbers were used to cushion the decks against practice bombing and undoubtedly helped fool the Japanese into thinking the ship was a carrier unexpectedly in port. Now they played another lethal role, sliding down on the men trying to climb up.

As she rolled still farther, Commander Isquith made a last check below to find anyone who might still be trapped — and almost got trapped himself. He managed to reach the captain’s cabin where a door led to the forecastle deck. The timbers had jammed the door; so he stumbled into the captain’s bedroom where he knew there was a porthole. It was now almost directly overhead, but he managed to reach it by climbing on the captain’s bed. As he popped his head through the porthole, the bed broke loose and slid out from under him. He fell back, but the radio officer, Lieutenant Commander L. Winser, grabbed his hand just in time and pulled him through. As Isquith got to his feet, he slipped and bumped down the side of the ship into the water. Half dead with exhaustion, harassed by strafers, he was helped by his crew to Ford Island.

Others never left the ship — Fireman John Vaessen in the dynamo room, who kept the power up to the end; Chief Watertender Peter Tomich in the boiler room, who stayed behind to make sure his men got out; Lieutenant (j.g) John Black, the assistant engineer, who jammed his foot in his cabin door; Mess Attendant Smith, who was always so afraid of the water.

Of the other ships on this side of Ford Island, the Tangier and Detroit were still untouched, but the Raleigh sagged heavily to port. Water swirled into No. 1 and 2 firerooms, flooded the forward engine room, contaminated the fuel oil, knocked out her power. In the struggle to keep her afloat, no one even had time to dress. As though they went around that way every day, Captain Simons sported his blue pajamas … Ensign John Beardall worked the port antiaircraft guns in red pajamas… others toiled in a weird assortment of skivvies, aloha shirts, and bathing trunks. Somehow they didn’t seem even odd: as Signalman Jack Foeppel watched Captain Simons in the admiral’s wing on the bridge, he only marveled that any man could be so calm.

Ford Island, where all these ships were moored, was itself in chaos. Japanese strafers were now working the place over, and most of the men were trying to make themselves as small as possible. Storekeeper Jack Rogovsky crouched under a mess hall table nibbling raisins. The men in the air-photo laboratory dived under the steel developing tables. Some of the flight crews plunged into an eight-foot ditch that was being dug for gas lines along the edge of the runway. This is where Ordnanceman Quisdorf’s unit was hiding when he and another airman arrived in the squadron truck. But they didn’t know that — they thought they had been left behind in a general retreat. They decided their only hope was to find a pair of rifles, swim the north channel, and hole up in the hills until liberation.

Nor was there much room for optimism in the Navy Yard. On the ships at the finger piers, the stern gunners had a perfect shot at the torpedo planes gliding down Southeast Loch, but most of them had little to shoot with. The San Francisco was being overhauled; all her guns were in the shops; most of her large ammunition was on shore. The repair ship Rigel was in the same fix. The St. Louis was on “limited availability” while radar was being installed; her topside was littered with scaffolding and cable reels; three of her four five-inch antiaircraft guns were dismantled.

The little Sacramento had just come out of drydock, and in line with drydock regulations most of her ammunition lockers had been emptied. The Swan plugged away with her two three-inch guns, but a new gun earmarked for her top deck was still missing. A pharmacist’s mate stood on the empty emplacement, cursing helplessly. The other ships were having less trouble, although there was little power on the New Orleans, and to Seaman L. A. Morley on the Honolulu just about everything seemed to be “secured for the weekend.”

On all these ships the men had more time for reflection than their mates along Battleship Row. On the New Orleans the ship’s gambler and “big operator” sat at his station, reading the New Testament. (Later he canceled his debts and loans; threw away his dice.) A young engineer on the San Francisco — with nothing to do because her boilers were dismantled — appeared topside, wistfully told Ensign John E. Parrott, “Thought I’d come up and die with you.” Machinist’s Mate Henry Johnson on the Rigel remarked that now he knew how a rabbit felt and he’d never hunt one again. A few minutes later he lay mortally wounded on the deck.

Their very helplessness turned many of the men from fear to fury. Commander Duncan Curry, strictly an old Navy type, stood on the bridge of the Ramapo firing a .45 pistol as the tears streamed down his face. On the New Orleans a veteran master at arms fired away with another .45, daring them to come back and fight. A man stood near the sub base, banging away with a double-barreled shotgun.

A young Marine on 1010 dock used his rifle on the planes, while a Japanese-American boy about seven years old lit a cigarette for him. The butt of his old cigarette was burning his lips, but he never even noticed it. As he fired away, he remarked aloud, “If my mother could see me now.”

Ten-ten dock itself was a mess, littered with debris from the Helena and Oglala alongside. In the after engine room of the torpedoed Helena, Chief Machinist’s Mate Paul Weisenberger fought to check the water that poured aft through the ship’s drain system. The hit had also set off the ship’s gas alarm; its steady blast added to the uproar. Marine Second Lieutenant Bernard Kelly struggled to get ammunition to the guns. In keeping a steady supply flowing, it was a toss-up whether he had more trouble with the damage or with conscientious damage control men, who kept shutting the doors.

Topside was a shambles. The Helena’s forecastle, which had been rigged for church, looked as if a cyclone had passed. The Oglala, to starboard, listed heavily; her signal flags drooped over the Helena’s bridge. Across the channel, Battleship Row was a mass of flames and smoke. Above the whole scene, a beautiful rainbow arched over Ford Island.

Just below 1010 dock, the Pennsylvania and destroyers Cassin and Downes sat ominously unmolested in Drydock No. 1. Likewise the destroyer Shaw in the floating drydock, which was a few hundred yards to the west. Aboard the Pennsylvania the men waited tensely. Lieutenant Commander James Craig, the ship’s first lieutenant, checked here and there, making sure they would be ready when the blow came — or at least as ready as a ship out of water could be. He told Boatswain’s Mate Robert Jones and his damage control party to lie facedown on the deck. He warned them that their work was cut out, and to be prepared for the worst.

On deck, the gunners were getting in a few licks in advance. For Gunner’s Mate Alvin Gerth, captain of one antiaircraft gun crew, it was already hard, dangerous work. The electrical system had gone haywire, and he could fire by percussion only. On top of that, the ammunition was so old, he had a lot of misfires. Normally he could throw them over the side, but the ship was in drydock, so that was out of the question. He piled them on deck behind the mount, gradually transferring the area into a little arsenal wide open to the sky. Not very safe to do, but he figured his time was up anyhow.

It was much the same on the ships anchored in the harbor. Radioman Leonard Stagich sat by his set on the destroyer Montgomery writing prayers on a little pad. In the transmitter room of the aircraft tender Curtiss, Radioman James Raines sat with three other men listening to the steady booming outside. No orders, so they just waited. With the doors and portholes dogged down and the ventilators off, it grew hotter and hotter. They removed their shirts and took turns wearing the heavy headphones. Still no orders. They kept moving about the room, squatting in different places, always wondering what was going on outside. From time to time the PA system squawked meaningless commands to others on the ship, which only made them wonder more. Still no orders.

But the most exasperating thing to those at anchor was just sitting there. It took time to build up enough steam to move — an hour for a destroyer, two hours for a larger ship. Meanwhile, they could only fire their guns manually, dodge the strafers, and watch (to use their favorite phrase) “all hell break loose.”

The destroyer Monaghan had a slight edge on the others. As the ready-duty destroyer, her fires were already lit; and then of course she had been getting up steam since 7:50 to go out and contact the Ward. Commander Bill Burford would be able to take her out in a few minutes now, but at a time like this, that seemed forever.

At the moment the destroyer Helm was still the only ship under way. Twenty minutes had passed since Quartermaster Frank Handler genially waved at that aviator flying low up the channel. After the first explosion Commander Carroll quickly sounded general quarters … swung her around from West Loch … caught Admiral Furlong’s sortie signal … and was now ready to get up and go. Turning to Handler, he said, “Take her out. I’ll direct the battery.”

Handler had never taken the ship out alone. The channel was tricky — speed limit 14 knots — and the job was always left to the most experienced hands. He took the wheel and rang the engine room to step her up to 400 rpm. The engine room queried the order and he repeated it. The ship leaped forward and raced down the channel at 27 knots. To complicate matters, there wasn’t a single compass on board; everything had to be done by seaman eye. But Handler had one break in his favor — the torpedo net was still wide open. So the Helm rushed on, proudly guided by a novice without a compass breaking every speed law in the book.

By this time Handler was game for anything; so he took it in his stride when at 8:17 he came face to face with a Japanese midget sub. He saw it as the Helm burst out of the harbor entrance — first the periscope, then the conning tower. It lay about 1000 yards off the starboard bow, bouncing up and down on the coral near the buoys. The Helm’s guns roared, but somehow they never could hit the sub. Finally it slid off the coral and disappeared. The Helm flashed the news to headquarters: “Small Jap sub trying to penetrate channel.”

Signal flags fluttered up all over Pearl Harbor, telling the ships of the fleet. From the bridge of the burning West Virginia, Ensign Delano read the warning and sighed to himself, “Oh, my God — that too!”

As the Helm began patrolling off the harbor entrance, Quartermaster Handler noticed several big Army bombers circling Hickam Field, trying to land. Japanese planes nipped at them from all sides — Handler could see the bullets ripping off big chunks of metal — but the pilots went about their business as though it happened every day.

The B-17s were coming in from the mainland — 12 planes in the 38th and 88th Reconnaissance Squadrons under Major Truman Landon. It was a long flight for those days — 14 hours’ flying time. To save gas, the planes were flying separately instead of in formation. They also were stripped down — no armor or ammunition, their guns in cosmoline.

Even so, some of the B-17s barely made Oahu. On Lieutenant Karl Barthelmes’ plane one of the crew accidentally flicked a switch, which threw the plane north of its course, and by the time they figured out why, the gas needle wobbled at zero. Barthelmes turned hard south, and as he approached Oahu around 8:00 A.M., he was suddenly overtaken by 12 to 15 light planes marked with large red circles. They flew above, under, and alongside the B-17, apparently escorting the big plane in. The bomber’s crew sighed with relief, removed the lifebelts they had put on while the plane was off course. They waved their thanks, but the pilots of the other planes were apparently too preoccupied to respond.

About the same time Major Landon was also flying in from the north. He had let one of his crew practice navigation most of the way, and they were heading west 150 miles north of Oahu when Landon finally took over. As he turned southward and approached the island, a flight of nine planes came straight at him, flying north. For an instant he too thought it was a reception committee. Then a burst of gunfire, a quick glimpse of the red circles told him the truth. He pulled up into the clouds and shook off any pursuit.

Most of the B-17s had no advance notice. Major Richard Carmichael flew in over Diamond Head, pointing out the sights to his West Point classmate Colonel Twaddell, the weather officer. As they passed along Waikiki Beach, they could see the smoke over Pearl, but assumed the Navy was practicing. Other pilots saw the smoke too — Lieutenant Bruce Allen thought there was an unusual amount of cane burning … Lieutenant Robert Ramsey thought it was some sort of big celebration.

They drew closer, and the devastation spread below them. Sergeant Albert Brawley gazed at the blazing rows of planes at Hickam and wondered whether some hot fighter pilot had crashed, setting them all on fire. Lieutenant Charles Bergdoll still thought it was a drill, complete with smoke pots and mock bombing, until he saw the remains of a smashed B-24 burning beside the runway. He knew the Army would never wreck anything so expensive.

Now the planes were asking for landing instructions from the tower. A calm, flat voice gave wind direction, velocity, the runway on which to land, as though it were any other day. Occasionally the voice observed without emotion that the field was under attack by “unidentified enemy planes.”

Lieutenant Allen was the first to land. Then came Captain Raymond Swenson’s plane. As it circled in, a Japanese bullet exploded some magnesium flares in the radio compartment, which set the whole plane on fire. It bounced down heavily … the blazing tail section broke off … and the forward half skidded to a stop. Lieutenant Ernest Reid, the copilot, reacted to habit and set the parking brakes as usual. The crew all reached shelter except Flight Surgeon William Schick. A Zero riddled him as he ran down the runway.

Now it was Major Landon’s turn to come in. The same nasal voice in the tower told him to “land from west to east” and added laconically that there were three Japanese planes on his tail. With this encouraging news he came on in, landing safely at 8:20.

As the planes rolled to a stop, the men jumped out and raced for the boondocks on the Honolulu side of the field. Sergeant Brawley lay in the keawa bushes, listening uneasily as the bullets thudded around him. Lieutenant George Newton picked a swamp, Lieutenant Ramsey a drainage ditch. Lieutenant Allen tried to disappear into grass three inches high. Lieutenant Homer Taylor ran the opposite way, winding up in some officer’s house under a couple of overturned sofas. The officer’s wife and children huddled there too, and every time a Japanese plane roared by, a small boy tried to get out from under the sofa and look outside. He would nearly get to the end of the sofa, then Taylor would grab an ankle and drag him back just in time. This duel continued until the end of the raid.

Taylor had the right idea — nothing was immune. Even the Snake Ranch, the new beer garden for enlisted men, exploded in a shower of glass and lumber. The only thing saved was a recording of “San Antonio Rose” — when the place was later rebuilt, it was the only record the old-timers allowed.

The base fire department was now in action, but no firemen ever operated under greater handicaps. Bombs blasted the water mains, then the firehouse itself. As Hoseman Howard King manned one of the engines, his crew chief, Joe Clagnon, suddenly yelled to look out. Before King could move, there was a blinding flash and something that felt like a ton of bricks. Lying in the smoke, he saw dimly the twisted engine, Clagnon dying, his own leg shattered. He begged a passing GI to put a tourniquet around his leg; the man said dazedly that he was sorry but he didn’t have a handkerchief.

Through it all Fire Chief William Benedict calmly directed his men, munching an apple. Soon he was hit but the wound was minor. Then he was hit worse, but he got up again and continued supervising the work. The third time he stayed down, but as they carried him away badly injured, he was still munching the apple.

Some of the casualties were needless. One first sergeant, in a well-meaning attempt to organize his unit, lined them up on the edge of the parade grounds just outside the big barracks. The target was too inviting to miss — a couple of Zeroes peeled off and strafed the men.

Perhaps it didn’t make much difference — the strafers seemed just as interested in individuals. One Zero caught a lineman up a telegraph pole. He yanked out his spurs and slid down the pole, as the wood splintered around him. Another strafer stitched up Hangar Avenue, sawed right through the cab of a swerving truck. Searching out targets, the planes swooped unbelievably low. Completely absorbed in his work, one pilot forgot about flying. As he skimmed along the parking ramp, his propeller tips flecked the asphalt … his belly tank scraped off and went scooting down the ramp. He finally pulled up — hitting the hills beyond the field, according to one man … crashing into the sea, according to another … getting away with it completely, according to a third.

It’s a wonder anybody noticed. The dive-bombers were concentrating on the hangars, and most men were trying to get out of the area. A pack of men headed across the ball field for the post school building. A strafer caught up with them as they crossed the diamond—Private J. H. Thompson got two bullet holes in his canteen, one of his buddies in the bill of his cap, and others got off far worse. Corporal John Sherwood joined 200 others in a wild dash from the big barracks, which were perilously close to the hangars. They headed across the parade grounds for the post exchange, encouraged along by the inevitable Zero. Sherwood, a compact little man, was clad only in undershorts and must have been a spectacular figure. His sergeant, Wilbur Hunt, still recalls how he paused in his work and wondered how anybody that short could run that fast. Today Sherwood denies he ran, but says he passed at least a hundred who did.

From the shelter of the PX, Corporal Sherwood watched a master sergeant pedal furiously by on a bicycle. Head down, feet pumping hard, all the time shooting a .45 pistol in the air, he seemed curiously like a cowboy in a Wild West movie. Perhaps there was something of that spirit in the air, for out in the open near the married men’s quarters a group of small children were leaping up and down shrieking, “Here come the Indians!”

Gradually, fear and panic gave way to anger. A wounded man outside Hangar 15 kept shaking his fist at the sky in helpless rage. Sergeant George Geiger was bitterly mad, searched for a gun — any gun. He found one in the barracks supply room, but there was no ammunition. Then he heard there was a supply of arms at the main gate. When he got there, everything was gone except a .45 pistol holster. He took it, later gave it to a man who had a pistol but no holster.

Guns began to appear. Sergeant Stanley McLeod stood on the parade ground, hammering away with a Thompson submachine gun … Staff Sergeant Doyle King fired another from under a panel truck … Technical Sergeant Wilbur Hunt set up 12 .50-caliber machine guns in fresh bomb craters near the barracks. His gunners turned up from an unexpected source. A bomb had blown off a corner of the guardhouse, releasing everybody. The prisoners dashed over to Hunt and said they were ready to go to work. It was just as he thought — the ones who are always in trouble are the ones you want with you when the going gets tough. He put them on the guns right away.

Wheeler had its guardhouse heroes too. All the prisoners were turned loose, and two of them helped man a machine gun on the roof. At the main barracks men broke down the supply room doors, and three guns were firing from the narrow back porch. Somebody had set up another out in the open, toward the main road. Pfc. Arthur Fusco helped set one up in front of a hangar, but by now all the smoke made it useless. At one point he took cover in the hangar office, and was surprised to hear the phone ringing. He automatically picked up the receiver. A post wife was on the other end, asking what all the noise was about.

Most of the men had no idea what to do or where to go. Staff Sergeant Francis Glossen, like the men at Hickam, was at least sure the hangar line was a poor choice. He ran toward the road, fell down, limped on. Then a solicitous chaplain stopped him, thinking he was wounded. That out of the way, he climbed a fence … lost his shoes … and plunged into some keawa bushes. At least a dozen others had reached the patch before him.

Pfc. Carroll Andrews was one man with a definite objective. A sergeant told him to hit for Schofield. He and a buddy started off through the noncom housing area, running in short spurts between the strafing. Once they ducked into the kitchen of an empty house. Bullets ripped the stove, and they marveled at the splintering porcelain —it was the first time they realized how the stuff could shatter.

On they ran, and then another interruption. This time it was a soldier who had seen Andrews playing the organ for Catholic services. He asked Andrews to help him say the Catholic’s Act of Contrition. He explained he hadn’t been to mass or confession for years and needed to make an emergency peace. Andrews stopped and repeated the words with him.

They dashed on. Soon a Filipino woman ran up with a tiny baby. She too had seen Andrews in Church, wanted him to baptize the baby. By now mildly exasperated, Andrews asked her why she didn’t do it herself. She said she wasn’t sure how. So he went in another empty house, tried the kitchen faucets (they didn’t run), found a bottle of cold water, and baptized the baby. The mother burst into tears and ran off.

They finally reached Schofield about 8:30. At this point it was an odd place to go for protection. The planes were gone now —they were finished with this whole area by 8:17 — but the post was in enormous confusion. The various antiaircraft units were trying to get going to their assigned positions, but there were often difficulties. The men in Battery B, 98th Coast Artillery, couldn’t get trucks to tow their guns to Wheeler Field until the raid was all over. When they were issued machine-gun ammunition, they found it was 1918 stuff—so old the belts came to pieces in the loading machine. With the Japanese likely to return any minute, Private Lester Buckley — back safely from his compost heap — opened the gates of the corral, so that at least his mules would have a chance.

At Wahiawa, a small town next to Wheeler and Schofield, Mr. and Mrs. Paul Young listened to the explosions nearby. The Youngs were Koreans and ran a small laundry in a shed attached to their house. They had just put in a big night at mah-jongg, and Mr. Young was all for staying in bed. But Mrs. Young was curious and finally walked down to the Wheeler gate to find out what was going on. The sentry had a quick answer: “Get back home. Don’t you know there’s a war on?”

Mrs. Young ran back, calling out the news. Mr. Young and his brother, Sung do Kim, then got up and came down to watch the show. Suddenly they saw a plane flying up the road from Pearl Harbor, looking for something to strafe. Mrs. Young sensed trouble, and they all took cover, except for their old Chinese hired man. He stayed outside, nonchalantly rolling some Bull Durham. The plane got him before he could finish making the cigarette.

They ran out and dragged the old man in. Mrs. Young scolded him like a naughty child, asked him why he didn’t come inside with them. He replied he couldn’t talk because it hurt so much.

Now a dogfight began. Stray bullets whined about the house — one smashed a window; another nicked the washing machine; another bored a hole through the door where Mrs. Young was peeking out. The family, crouched under the ironing table, caught occasional glimpses of the planes through the skylight. Suddenly there was an earsplitting roar. A Japanese plane sheared off the top of the eucalyptus tree in their yard, crashed in a pineapple field just beyond. The American fighter that shot it down disappeared off toward the mountains. Mrs. Young, of course, couldn’t know it, but Lieutenants Welch and Taylor had reached Haleiwa, taken off in their P-40s, and were now in business.

At Haleiwa, eight miles away, there was now plenty of other action. Two B-17s had lumbered up from the south and were circling above. Captain Chaffin and Major Carmichael had given up trying to land in the shambles at Hickam. After rejecting Wheeler and Ewa for the same reasons, they finally decided on Haleiwa, which the Japanese apparently didn’t know about. The little strip was only 1200 feet long —certainly not inviting — but they were almost out of gas and there was no other choice. Down they came, somewhat surprisingly, to perfect landings.

They taxied as close as they could to a clump of trees, but they were already too late. A Zero had seen them land and came over to investigate. Somebody yelled a warning, and Major Carmichael and his classmate, Colonel Twaddell, dived under a big rock on the beach. The Zero was probably low in ammunition — he gave Haleiwa a perfunctory burst and flew off. But a Pacific comber took care of Carmichael and his friend. It rolled in, completely drenching them. It even ruined Carmichae’s watch. At Kaneohe on the windward side, a strafing Japanese plane cost Ordnanceman Homer Bisbee his watch too, but much more indirectly. As he dived for cover off the seaplane ramp, he noticed he was swimming with his good watch on. At first he held his arm up out of the water; next, he put the watch in his white cap and laid it on the ramp. When he came out from under a few minutes later, the cap was still there, but the watch was missing.

Almost anything could have happened to it — the ramp was an inferno. Again and again the dive-bombers strafed the 26 PBYs lined up in neat rows, the four others moored in the bay. Several small boats servicing the planes at anchor were riddled too, and one man had to swim all the way across Kaneohe Bay to reach safety. Only one gun was firing back — Chief Aviation Ordnanceman John Finn had mounted a machine gun on an instruction stand far out on the ramp. He hammered away at the strafers in a shower of blazing gasoline from the planes parked around him. A bullet clipped him in the heel, but he kept on firing.

The pilots and flight crews struggled to salvage what was left. Ensign C. S. Malwein got a tractor, and with two other men struggled to save a plane that wasn’t burning yet. A Japanese fighter swooped down to stop them, and the wing fabric was soon a mass of flames.

Another Zero cut down Aviation Machinist’s Mate Robert Ballou as he ran out on the ramp with a rifle. Two of his buddies put him on a cot and set off for a truck being used as an ambulance. They were spotted right away. Flat on his back, Ballou watched the tracer bullets smoke by; he found it especially disconcerting when he realized the men had set the cot down and were running for cover. He jumped up and outran them both.

About 8:15A.M. the planes flew off to the north. The quiet was anything but restful. So far there had been no bombing, and everyone sensed that this was what would happen next. Sure enough, around 8:30 — Ensign Reese remembered glancing at his watch — nine horizontal bombers appeared, flying in close formation. Dirt, metal, cement, glass flew in all directions as they dropped their load. Then another formation appeared but saved their bombs perhaps for a better target — Kaneohe’s two new hangars were wrecked by now.

All was still serene at Bellows Field, the Army’s fighter base only six miles down the coast. Captain John P. Joyce, the officer of the day, was shaving in the officers’ club just before 8:30, when a single plane buzzed the field once, firing about 50 rounds. A private of the medical detachment was hit in bed in the tent area. A messenger drove off to tell Major L. D. Waddington, the base commander, who lived about a mile away, but even this rather startling event didn’t seem to stir much excitement. Certainly not enough to keep Private Raymond McBriarty from going to church as usual at 8:30. Like everybody else, he hadn’t paid much attention to the strafing plane. But then as he sat in the pew with more time to meditate, he began to think how strange it was.

Outside, a big B-17 was coming in downwind on the short 2600-foot strip. Lieutenant Robert Richards was another of the bomber pilots who wanted no part of Hickam — three of his crew had been wounded already. So on the tower’s advice, he was now trying Bellows. With a damaged plane almost out of gas, he decided to get down as quickly as possible, and got away with a downwind landing.

At this point Hickam finally notified Bellows about the attack. Major Waddington hurried on over to get the defense organized, and about the same time nine Japanese planes — apparently attracted by Richards’ B-17 — dropped by and shot up the field.

Other enemy planes kept on top of Ewa, the Marine air base west of Pearl. There were no antiaircraft guns, no planes that could fly, no chance to do anything. Lieutenant Colonel Larkin, the base commander, watched from under a truck, and most of his men were pinned down just as effectively.

Up above, Lieutenant Yoshio Shiga raked Ewa with his Zero fighter. He noticed a Marine standing beside a disabled plane and charged down, all guns blazing. The man refused to budge … kept firing back with a pistol. Shiga still considers him the bravest American he ever met.

Lieutenant Shiga was also impressed by the B-17. He watched one of the big bombers shake off a swarm of Zeroes and lumber on safely to Hickam. He made a mental note that in the days ahead the Flying Fortress was going to be a hard plane to knock out.

Perhaps the visitors’ biggest surprise was the antiaircraft fire, which was now coming to life. As Commander Fuchida’s 50 horizontal bombers approached Battleship Row in a long, single line from the south, he felt they looked entirely too much like ducks in a shooting gallery. If he were doing it again, they would come in some other way.

As they neared the target, Fuchida traded positions with the leadbomber in his squadron. This plane had a specially trained bombardier, and when he released his bombs the other planes would follow suit. All the squadrons operated the same way.

Everything depended on perfect timing. When Fuchida saw the third plane in his group get out of line and prematurely drop its bomb, he was thoroughly annoyed. The man had a reputation for carelessness anyhow. Fuchida scribbled, “What happened?” on a small blackboard and waved it at the culprit. The pilot indicated that he had been hit, that the bomb lines had been shot away, and Fuchida was filled with remorse.

The squadron flew on. The Nevada was its particular target, and everybody waited for the lead plane to release. It never did. They ran into clouds at the crucial moment and had to try again. Next time around there was too much smoke over the Nevada, so Fuchida picked the Maryland instead. This time there was no trouble. The lead plane released and the others followed suit. Fuchida peeked down and felt sure he had two hits.

Lieutenant Toshio Hashimoto, leading one of the rear squadrons, had an even more difficult time. The backwash of the planes in front kept throwing his group off. Then the lead plane miscalculated its range and signaled the others to hold everything. As they circled for another run, the expert bombardier Sergeant Umezawa bowed his apologies.

There were other errors over which the planes had no control. Their map of the area was made in 1933, and the efforts to update it hadn’t been too successful. The new Navy tank farm was noted, but a 1936 artist’s conception of Hickam had been accepted as gospel, so that the map showed eight pairs of hangars instead of the five actually built. The map also put the underground gasoline system where the baseball field was — at one time it had indeed been planned for there. Also, the administration building — a vital center — was labeled the officers’ club and hence not touched. This mistake arose because dances were held there while the permanent club was being built. Whatever the other successes of Japanese agents, apparently they weren’t invited to dances at Hickam.

But all in all, Fuchida had good reason to be satisfied. As the first attack wave wound up its work around 8:30, he could weigh what had been done to the fleet and the airfields against his own losses: five torpedo planes … one dive-bomber … three fighters.

Admiral Nagumo was also taking stock of the striking force, now hovering about 200 miles north of Oahu. Brief radio flashes from the planes gave a pretty good picture: 8:05 A.M., torpedoes successfully dropped … 8:10 A.M., 30 planes hit, 23 on fire … 8:16 A.M., large cruiser hit … 8:22 A.M., battleship hit …

Once again everyone went into ecstasy. In the Akagi’s engine room Commander Tanbo’s firemen hugged each other with joy as the news filtered down. Up on deck, Seaman Iki Kuramoti shouted in glee. But tough Commander Hoichiro Tsukamoto, navigation officer of the Shokaku, lived in fear of being caught by American planes. He knew the carriers were easy targets; he didn’t know how little was left to hit them.

Admiral Yamamoto was also serious as he waited for results in the operations room of his flagship Nagato back at Kure. The minutes ticked away on the large nautical clock that hung on the wall. Yamamoto had almost finished his second cigarette when the first word came in. As the results piled up, the rest of the room buzzed with excitement, but Yamamoto rarely changed expression. One intercepted U.S. message spoke of ships operating around the harbor. “Good!” exclaimed Rear Admiral Matome Ugaki, “that means our midget subs are getting through!” Yamamoto merely nodded. Actually he still felt the midget submarines were a mistake, that it was a waste of manpower to sacrifice men at the outset of war.

He may have been right — certainly Ensign Sakamaki was getting nowhere. Coming in for another try at the harbor entrance, he got close enough to a patrolling destroyer to see the white uniforms of the crew. It apparently picked him up too, for several depth bombs thoroughly shook up the sub. One of them stunned Sakamaki and filled the sub with fumes and a thin white smoke. When he came to, he withdrew to check his damage. Nothing seriously wrong, so he tried again. According to Sakamaki, he made three separate attempts to get by charging, depth-bombing American destroyers before ending up briefly on the coral reef just outside the harbor entrance.

American memories and records suggest no such spirited engagement. Between the Ward’s contact at 6:45 and the time the Helm saw the midget on the coral at 8:17, there was only one sub report — the sound contact made by the Ward at 7:03.

If Sakamaki was confused or mistaken, it’s quite understandable. The air in the sub was vile, the batteries were leaking, the smoke getting worse. And there is certainly no question about one thing he recalls seeing. Once, as he twisted his periscope toward Pearl Harbor, he saw columns of black smoke towering toward the sky. “Look! Look!” he cried.

Seaman Inagaki was completely overjoyed: “Just look at that smoke!”

They clasped each other’s shoulders and solemnly pledged, “We’ll do the same!”

CHAPTER IX

“You Don’t Wear a Tie to War”

THE BREESE SAW IT first. From her anchorage off Pearl City, the old destroyer-minecraft sighted a conning tower turning up the west side of Ford Island just after 8:30. The Medusa and Curtiss saw it a few minutes later, and signal flags fluttered from all three yardarms.

The Monaghan caught the warning right away. The ready-duty destroyer had now cleared her nest and was heading down the west channel, the first ship to get going. A signalman turned to Commander Bill Burford: “Captain, the Curtiss is flying a signal that means, ‘Submarine sighted to starboard.’”

Burford explained it was probably a mistake … such a thing could easily happen in all the confusion of gunfire and burning ships.

“Okay, Captain — then what is that thing dead ahead of us that looks like an over-and-under shotgun?”

The skipper squinted through the smoke and was amazed to see a small submarine moving toward them on the surface several hundred yards ahead. In its bow were two torpedo tubes, not side by side as usual, but one directly above the other. They seemed to be pointed directly at the Monaghan.

By now everybody was firing. The Curtiss pumped a shell right through the conning tower at 8:40 — decapitating the pilot, according to her gunners; clipping off his coat button, according to Monaghan men. The Medusa was firing too, but at the crucial moment the powder hoist broke on the gun that had the best shot. The Monaghan’s own guns were blazing as she rushed at the sub, but the shot missed and hit a derrick along the shore.

The midget missed too. It failed to get the Curtiss with one torpedo; the other whisked by the charging Monaghan and exploded on the Ford Island shore. The Monaghan rushed on, and everybody else held their fire as Burford tried to ram. He grazed the conning tower, not really a square blow, but hard enough to spin the sub against the Monaghan’s side as she surged by. Chief Torpedoman’s Mate G. S. Hardon set his depth charges for 30 feet and let them go. They went off with a terrific blast, utterly destroying the sub and knocking down nearly everybody on deck. Fireman Ed Creighton thought the ship had at least blown up its own fantail.

But she hadn’t. Instead, the Monaghan rocketed on, now too late to make her turn into the main channel leading to sea. She drove ashore at Beckoning Point, piling into the derrick already set on fire by her guns. Fireman Creighton ran to the bow and manned a hose; others wrestled the anchor free. Burford backed off, turned, and steamed out to sea while the nearby ships rang with cheers.

The whole harbor was on the upsurge. A trace of jauntiness — even cockiness —began to appear. Three men in a 50-foot launch hawked .30- and .50-caliber ammunition off the foot of Ford Island as if they were selling vegetables. A bomb hit a mobile “gedunk” wagon on 1010 dock, and men from the Helena dashed ashore to gather up the free pies, ice cream, and candy bars. A number of seamen sneaked away from their regular stations on the Whitney to take a turn at the machine guns — like patrons of a shooting gallery. When a gun crew on the Blue winged a plane, everyone stopped work, danced about shaking hands with one another.

A strange exhilaration seized the men at the guns. Not knowing of war, they compared it to football. Marine Gunner Payton McDaniel on the Nevada sensed the tingle of going onto the field at game time. Ensign Martin Burns on the Phoenix felt the excitement of the scrimmage. When the Honolulu and St. Louis winged a plane, Machinist’s Mate Robert White could only compare the cheers to Navy scoring against Army. And in fact, when the Marine gunners on the Helena knocked down a plane, Captain Bob English shouted from the bridge, “The Marine team scored a touchdown!”

In their excitement men performed astonishing feats. Woodrow Bailey, a sailor on the Tennessee, chopped a ten-inch hawser in half with one stroke. Gun Captain Alvin Gerth and two other men did the job of 15 men at one of the Pennsylvania’s five-inch guns. Kenneth Carlson ran up vertical ladders on the Selfridge with a bandoleer of .50-caliber machine-gun shells slung over each shoulder — normally he could handle just one of the 75-pound belts. A man on the Phelps adjusted a blue-hot 1.1 gun barrel by twisting it with his hands — didn’t even notice the heat.

There were fiascoes too. When an old chief on the St. Louis cleared some Navy Yard rigging from the ship’s foremast, other crew members paused to watch with delight a Mack Sennett classic — he was chopping away the scaffold he stood on. The Argonne gunners shot down their own antenna, then almost got the Fourteenth Naval District signal tower. Next a hole appeared in the powerhouse smokestack. Seaman Don Marman says the Helena fired the shot; Marine Gunner McDaniel of the Nevada also claims the honor. Other shells — with the fuses defective or not set at all —whistled off toward downtown Honolulu.

Little matter. At the moment all anybody cared about was keeping the guns going. The Tennessee’s five-inch guns fired so fast that paint hung from the overheated barrels in foot-long strips. On the Pennsylvania Gunner’s Mate Millard Rucoi was busy ramming shells when a man at the next five-inch gun began waving his arms, as though describing a shapely woman. Rucoi was too busy for frivolity and there was too much noise for conversation, so he just shook his fist and went on ramming. Finally the man came over and shouted to come and look at his gun barrel — it was so hot it was wavy. He asked Rucoi whether he should keep shooting. The answer was easy: “Hell, yes, keep her going.”

Nothing was allowed to interfere. At 1010 dock, tugs towed the sinking Oglala clear of the Helena to a new berth farther astern. As the lines between the two ships were cast off, Admiral Furlong appeared on the Oglala’s bridge and wandered into the line of fire of a Helena five-incher. A very young boatswain’s mate stuck his head out of the gunport: “Pardon me, Admiral, sir! Would you mind moving from the wing of the bridge so we can shoot through there?”

Lieutenant Commander Shigekazu Shimazaki got a real reception when he arrived with the second attack wave at 8:40. There were no torpedo planes this time —just 54 high-level bombers, 80 dive-bombers, and 36 fighters. The level bombers would concentrate on Hickam and Kaneohe, but the dive-bombers screamed down on Pearl, searching for targets that hadn’t been plastered.

The Maryland and Helena’s newly installed 1.1 guns now swung into action and bagged three planes right away. On the Castor, Quartermaster William Miller listened with clinical interest to the new weapon. It wasn’t a bark like the three-inch guns, or an ear-blasting crack like the five-inchers — just a muffled, persistent pom-pom that was somehow very reassuring. On the West Virginia, Ensign Ed Jacoby was more surprised than reassured; these guns had been a constant headache in practice —they were always breaking down — but this morning they worked like a charm.

A dive-bomber crashed near Ford Island, just off the dock normally used by the Tangier … another into the main channel near the Nevada … another off Pearl City, not far from the destroyer-minecraft Montgomery. Chief Machinist’s Mate Harry Haws sent Seaman D. F. Calkins in the destroyer’s whaleboat to investigate. The pilot was sitting on the wing, but refused to be rescued. As the gig drew alongside, he pulled a pistol. He had no chance to use it — Calkins shot first.

In their anger and excitement the men shot at anything that flew. This had already been learned by the B-17s coming into Hickam. Now it was discovered by 18 planes flying into Ford Island on a routine scouting mission from the carrier Enterprise.

The big ship had been due back at 7:30 A.M. from her trip to Wake, but heavy seas held up the refueling of her destroyers, and at 6:15 she was still some 200 miles west of Oahu. So the early-morning scouting flight took off as usual — 13 planes from Scouting Squadron 6; four from Bombing Squadron 6; one additional reconnaissance plane. They were to sweep the 180-degree sector ahead of the ship, then land at Ford Island. Ensign Cleo Dobson and the other married pilots were delighted — they couldn’t go ashore until the Enterprise docked, but they could at least call their wives.

The planes droned off. It must have been about 8:00 A.M. when they all heard Ensign Manuel Gonzales yell over the radio, “Don’t shoot! I’m a friendly plane!” No one ever saw him again.

Lieutenant (j.g.) F. A. Patriarca’s patrol took him north to Kaui, and as he swung back toward Oahu shortly after eight, he noticed planes orbiting northward in the distance. It looked like the Army on maneuvers. When he reached Oahu, he learned the truth and gunned his plane out to sea, calling again and again over the radio: “White 16 — Pearl Harbor under attack. Do not acknowledge.” He headed back for the Enterprise, but the carrier — now under radio silence — had changed course and disappeared. Running out of gas, Patriarca finally crash-landed in a pasture at Kauai.

The warning was too late for some of the pilots. Japanese fighters racked up Ensigns Bud McCarthy, John Vogt, and Walter Willis; only McCarthy escaped alive. Navy antiaircraft fire took care of Ensign Edward Deacon; he crashed into the sea, but both he and his rear-seat man were saved. Then a Zero caught Lieutenant (j.g.) Clarence Dickinson’s plane. The rear-seat man was shot, but Dickinson bailed out. Landing in a dirt bank just west of Ewa Field, he stumbled to the main road. He hoped at least to catch a ride to Pearl.

The rest of the pilots somehow squeaked into Ewa or Ford Island. Lieutenant Earl Gallaher arrived over Pearl about 8:35, decided it was hopeless and made for Ewa instead. Ensign Dobson happened along and decided that was a good idea too. They touched down, and a Marine ran up shouting, “For God’s sake, get into the air or they’ll strafe you too!” Taking off again, they circled about for a few minutes, finally headed into Ford Island when it looked like a lull.

As Dobson dropped his wheels to land, every gun in the Navy seemed to open up on him. Tracers flew by. A pom-pom shell burst under his right wing, throwing the plane on its side. He dropped his seat down … hid behind the engine … and dived for the runway. At 50 knots extra speed, he shuddered to think that his tires might be shot. But he made it all right, scooted the whole length of the runway, ground-looped to a stop just short of a ditch.

There was nothing dazed or stunned about Ford Island now. Some of the men were dragging damaged planes clear of the burning hangars. Others were salvaging the guns and setting up pillboxes. One ordnanceman had to improvise his mount out of some sewer pipe. There still weren’t enough guns to go around, and Chief Storekeeper Bonett — a quiet, unassuming man who was supposed to know nothing about weapons — was busy assembling .30-caliber machine guns in the paint storage building.

Others rallied around the oil-soaked men who struggled ashore from Battleship Row. Many of them headed for a spot near the gas dock, where the beach shelved off gradually. Chief Albert Molter dragged in a tall ensign, still wearing binoculars, who had passed out just short of the beach. As he tugged away, he saw another man swimming in, using only one arm. Molter thought he must be using a cross-chest carry on someone else, and helpfully called out that the water was shallow. The man murmured his thanks and stumbled to his feet — he was carrying a large canned ham.

The wounded were quickly taken in tow — some to the tennis courts, which had been turned into a receiving station; others to the mess hall, where they lay on tables yet to be cleared of breakfast. Seaman Thomas Malmin, who drove the bus that ran around the island, took the worst hit to the dispensary. Once he picked up an ensign —no apparent wounds but in a state of complete shock. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t hear, fought desperately to stay in the bus when it reached the building. Another time he gave four colored men a lift. They were all badly hurt but wouldn’t let anybody touch them or aid them in any way. They kept together in the bus and helped each other out at the end — still going it alone.

The dispensary was quickly swamped, and the men piled up in the patio —sprawling, sopping bundles that looked completely out of place on the bright, clean tiles. A young girl, perhaps 14, went around trying to get their names, but she just couldn’t bear to look.

The service families opened their larders and wardrobes for the men who weren’t wounded. An officer walked about in seaman’s jumpers; a sailor with him wore a T-shirt, swallow-tailed coat, and full-dress “fore and aft” admiral’s hat. Like the other good Samaritans, Mrs. Pat Bellinger had raided her husband’s trunk.

Off Ford Island, a weird flotilla dodged Japanese strafers, darted in and out of the burning oil, picking up the men still swimming. Boatswain’s Mate A. M. Gustchen maneuvered Admiral Leary’s barge with all the professional polish an admiral’s coxswain should have. Musician Walter Frazee, who had never steered a boat before, handled a launch from the Argonne. Chief Jansen brought his honey barge in close, fighting fires on the West Virginia. A water barge turned up to redeem a mildly tarnished past. For some time it had been the crew’s custom to give any ship more than its quota of fresh water — if the ship made it worthwhile. A suggested rate of exchange was 10,000 gallons for a big dressed turkey, sixty dozen eggs, with a few extra items to sweeten the deal. Just the day before, such a transaction was worked out with the Curtiss; in fact, the turkey was in the oven at the very moment the Japanese struck. Now, all thoughts of a Sunday feast were forgotten, as the barge rushed to help the swimmers.

They were all types. When Seaman Albert Jones idled his motor for a second to spread sand for better footage, a sailor in the water screamed hysterically — he was sure he would be forgotten. Another man swam over and did his best to help. It wasn’t easy, for he had just lost his own arm.

Ensign Maurice Featherman of the West Virginia lay exhausted on the deck of a harbor tug and didn’t care whether he lived or died. His shipmate, Ensign John Armstrong, appeared from nowhere in starched whites — looking as if he had just stepped out of the Harvard Club. Kneeling at Featherman’s side, he set about injecting his friend with the will to live: “Mo, history is being made now, and you and I are in the middle of it, and our actions might affect the outcome.”

Few men thought in such terms, but more and more acted as if they did. Chief Radioman Thomas Reeves hung on alone in a burning passageway of the California, trying to pass ammunition by hand, until he fell unconscious and died. The ship had taken a bad hit around 8:25, and flames raged along the second deck. As Ensign Herbert Jones lay wounded in their path, he calmly explained to two friends that he was done for anyhow and they must leave him.

On the bridge of the tanker Neosho — lying between the California and the rest of Battleship Row — Commander John Phillips prepared to move his ship from the area. As her engineers lit off the boilers and the blowers cut in, Aviation Machinist William Powers jumped with fright — that rising whine sounded just like bombs in the movies. By 8:35, some of the Neosho’s crew had joined air station personnel in the job of chopping the lines. Slowly she cleared the dock and backed up Battleship Row to the fuel depot on the other side of the channel.

Actually the Japanese weren’t interested in the Neosho. When one strafer flew down Battleship Row, he even held fire while passing the tanker — just a waste of good bullets. He might have cared more had he known she was still half loaded with high-octane aviation gas.

Next up the line, the Oklahoma lay bottom-up, but her men were by no means out of the fight. Marine Sergeant Thomas Hailey reached Ford Island, volunteered for a mission in a small unarmed plane. They gave him a rifle and sent him up. The mission: locate the Japanese fleet. The plane had no luck and returned five hours later. For Hailey it was an especially uncomfortable trip because he still had on only the oil-soaked underwear he wore from the Oklahoma.

Most of her survivors settled for the Maryland. A seaman covered with oil tagged after Chief Gunner’s Mate McCaine, calling, “What can we do, Chief?” Marine Sergeant Leo Wears found a shorthanded gun on the main deck, appointed himself a member of its crew. Ensign Bill Ingram took over another gun that seemed to need help. As he worked away, someone on the bridge hollered down, telling him that on the Maryland an officer was expected to wear his cap when he fought. There were plenty of them lying around, so Ingram put one on, paused long enough to wave cheerfully in the general direction of the bridge.

The Maryland’s own crew were just as busy. Mess Attendant Arvelton Baines, who had been in the brig for fighting with civilians, worked to get ammunition topside until he passed out from exhaustion. A hulking Marine sergeant — nicknamed “Tiny,” as usual — rammed a five-inch antiaircraft gun with his hand when the hydraulic hammer got stuck. The men sweated away, oblivious of the flames blown toward them, above them, in fact all around them from the burning West Virginia and Arizona. Under the circumstances, Chief George Haitle was mildly astonished when an officer drew a gun and threatened to shoot the first man caught lighting a cigarette.

Men on the West Virginia were even more surprised when they too were chewed out for smoking. The ship was now a sea of flames — ammunition exploding everywhere, bullets and shells flying all over the place. Everything aft of the foremast was lost in choking smoke. Abandon ship had been ordered, and her port bow was level with the water, when Ensign Thomas A. Lombardi arrived from shore leave around 8:50. He stepped aboard and stood rooted in his tracks — could this litter of clothing, bedding, bodies, and debris be the same neat deck he had left the night before?

It was no weirder a picture than the one he made himself. As he pitched in to help the wounded, he was still wearing his white dinner jacket, black tie, and tuxedo pants. They didn’t matter, but he needed something far more effective than the black evening pumps he still wore. Then a miracle — he stumbled over a pair of rubber boots lying on deck. And an even greater miracle (for Lombardi was an old Syracuse football player with frame and feet to match) — they were size 13, a perfect fit.

On the signal bridge, Ensign Delano also had an unexpected windfall in the way of apparel — he picked up the only helmet he ever found that fitted. He clapped it on and checked two idle machine guns mounted forward of the conning tower. They seemed in good shape, so he recruited a young officer, a seaman, and Mess Attendant Doris Miller to get them going. The first two would do the firing; Miller would pass the ammunition. Next time Delano looked, Miller had taken over one of the guns and was happily blazing away. The big steward had no training whatsoever in machine guns, and at least one witness felt he was a bigger menace than the Japanese. But there was nothing wrong with his heart, and it was the only time Delano had ever seen him smile, except the day he won that big fight as the West Virginia’s heavyweight boxer.

As fast as men could be spared, Delano packed them off to help the Tennessee alongside. Others thought of it themselves and crawled across on the ten-inch hawsers. When a Tennessee gun captain asked one West Virginia ensign what fuse setting to use, he got an impatient reply: “To hell with fuse settings — shoot!” More shells sailed off for downtown Honolulu.

Everyone at least agreed there was no time for technicalities. Captain Charles E. Reordan fought the Tennessee in his Panama hat. Crew members gladly recruited Private Harry Polto, a soldier who happened to be visiting aboard, and assigned him to a five-inch gun. Men tossed scores of empty shell cases overboard with carefree abandon, forgetting completely the swimmers struggling alongside. But through all the scorn for details, the seaman’s prerogative to gripe was carefully preserved. Few seemed to mind Yeoman Duncan grumbling that his new whites had been ruined by a broken steam pipe.

Even the twisted, burning Arizona still showed signs of fight. Boatswain’s Mate Barthis and most of those still living stood on the fantail, dropping life rafts to the men in the water. Coxswain Forbis gave a hand until Barthis said nothing more could be done. Then he dived in — his watch stopped at 8:50. Radioman Glenn Lane was already in the water, had been swimming ever since the big explosion blew him overboard. He could have reached the shore easily but wanted some more interesting way to stay in the fight.

Suddenly he saw it right before his eyes. The Nevada was swinging out … getting under way … moving down the harbor. He paddled over to meet her. Someone tossed him a line, yanked him aboard. Two other Arizona seamen were hauled up the same way, and all three were assigned to a five-inch gun on the starboard side. The Nevada steamed on down the channel, gliding past the burning wrecks, proudly heading for the sea.

It seemed utterly incredible. A battleship needed two and a half hours to light up her boilers, four tugs to turn and pull her into the stream, a captain to handle the whole intricate business. Everybody knew that. Yet here was the Nevada — steam up in 45 minutes, pulling away without tugs, and no skipper at all. How could she do it?

She had certain advantages. It might normally take two and a half hours to get up steam, but two of her boilers were already hot. One was the boiler that normally provides power for a ship at her mooring. Ensign Taussig had lit the second during that last peacetime watch, planning to switch the steam load later. Now his efficiency paid off. Both boilers had plenty of steam — giving the Nevada some 90 minutes’ jump in getting away. Hard work in the fire room made up the difference.

And four rugs might normally be needed to ease the ship out, but in a pinch their role could be filled by a good quartermaster. The Nevada had a superb one — Chief Quartermaster Robert Sedberry.

It was the same with leadership. Captain Scanland and his executive officer might be ashore, but the spark was supplied by Lieutenant Commander Francis Thomas, the middle-aged reservist who was senior officer present. As damage control officer, Thomas was down in central station when he heard that the engine room was ready. He put a yeoman in charge of central station, vaulted up the tube to the conning tower, and took over as commanding officer.

Chief Boatswain Edwin Joseph Hill climbed down to the mooring quay, cut loose an ammunition lighter alongside, and cast off. The Nevada began drifting away with the tide, and Hill had to swim to get back on board. But after 29 years in the Navy, he wasn’t going to miss this trip.

In the wheelhouse Sedberry backed her until she nudged a dredging pipeline strung out from Ford Island. Then ahead on the starboard engines, astern on the port, until the bow swung clear of the burning Arizona. Now ahead on both engines, with just enough right rudder to swing the stern clear too. She passed so close, Commander Thomas felt he could almost light a cigarette from the blazing wreck.

So she was on her way — and the effect was electric. Photographer J. W. Burton watched from the Ford Island shore … Lieutenant Commander Henry Wrayfrom 1010 dock … Quartermaster William Miller from the Castor in the sub base — but wherever men stood, their hearts beat faster. To most she was the finest thing they saw that day. Against the backdrop of thick black smoke, Seaman Thomas Malmin caught a glimpse of the flag on her fantail. It was for only a few seconds, but long enough to give him an old-fashioned thrill. He recalled that “The Star-Spangled Banner” was written under similar conditions, and he felt the glow of living the same experience. He understood better the words of Francis Scott Key.

It was less of a pageant close up. All kinds of men compose even a great ship’s crew, and they were all there on the Nevada. As the Japanese planes converged on the moving ship, Seaman K. V. Hendon spied a pot of fresh coffee near the after battle dressing station; he paused and had a cup. A young seaman stood by one of the five-inch casemate guns, holding a bag of powder close to his chest — he explained that if he went, it was going to be a complete job. One officer beat on the conning tower bulkhead, pleading, “Make them go away!” Ensign Taussig, his left leg hopelessly shattered, lay in a stretcher near the starboard antiaircraft director. Turning to Boatswain’s Mate Allen Owens, he remarked, “Isn’t this a hell of a thing — the man in charge lying flat on his back while everyone else is doing something.”

As the Nevada steamed on, all the Japanese planes at Pearl Harbor seemed to dive on her. At 1010 dock, Ensign David King watched one flight of dive-bombers head for the Helena, then swerve in mid-attack to hit the battleship instead. Another group shifted over from Drydock No. 1. Soon she was wreathed in smoke from her own guns … from bomb hits … from the fires that raged amidships and forward. Sometimes she disappeared from view, when near-misses threw huge columns of water high in the air. As Ensign Delano watched from the bridge of the West Virginia, a tremendous explosion erupted somewhere within her, blowing flames and debris far above the masts. The whole ship seemed to rise up and shake violently in the water.

Another hit on the starboard side slaughtered the crew of one gun, mowed down most of the next group forward. The survivors doubled up as best they could —three men doing the work of seven. It was all the more difficult because Chief Gunner’s Mate Robert E. Linnartz — now acting as sight-setter, pointer, and rammerman — had himself been wounded.

In the plotting room far below, Ensign Merdinger got a call to send up some men to fill in for the killed and wounded. Many of the men obviously wanted to go — it looked like a safer bet than suffocating in the plotting room. Others wanted to stay — they preferred to keep a few decks between themselves and the bombs. Merdinger picked them at random, and he could see in some faces an almost pleading look to be included in the other group, whichever it happened to be. But no one murmured a word, and his orders were instantly obeyed. Now he understood more clearly the reasons for the system of discipline, the drills, the little, rituals, the exacting course at Annapolis, the gold braid — all the things that made the Navy essentially autocratic but at the same time made it work.

The Nevada was well beyond Battleship Row and pretty far down 1010 dock when she encountered still another obstacle. Half the channel was blocked by a long pipeline that ran out from Ford Island to the dredge Turbine, lying squarely in midstream. Somehow Quartermaster Sedberry snaked between the dredge and the shore. It was a fine piece of navigation and a wonderful arguing point for Captain August Persson of the dredge. The Navy had always made him unhook the pipeline every time the battleships came in or out, claiming there wasn’t enough room to pass. Captain Persson had always claimed they could do it if they wanted. Now he had his proof.

The Japanese obviously hoped to sink the Nevada in the entrance channel and bottle up the whole fleet. By the time she was opposite the floating drydock, it began to look as though they might succeed. More signal flags fluttered on top the Naval District water tower — stay clear of the channel. Still lying in his stretcher near the starboard director, Ensign Taussig was indignant. He was sure they could get to sea. In fact, he felt the ship was all right — she looked in bad shape only because someone down below was counterflooding her starboard bow instead of stern. Sitting by his five-inch casemate gun, Marine Sergeant Inks had different ideas. He had been in the Corps forever and knew trouble when he saw it. He was gloomily muttering that the ship would never get out.

In any case, orders were orders. Thomas cut his engines and nosed her into Hospital Point on the south shore. The wind and current caught her stern and swung her completely around. Chief Boatswain Hill, who had cast off a long 30 minutes before, now went forward to drop anchor. Then another wave of planes dived on the Nevada in one final, all-out fling. Three bombs landed near the bow. Hill vanished in the blast — the last time Thomas saw him, he was still working on the anchor gear.

It was now nine o’clock, and the hour had come for the ships in drydock — the flagship Pennsylvania in Drydock No. 1, with the destroyers Cassin and Downes lying side by side just ahead of her; the destroyer Shaw in the new floating drydock a few hundred yards to the west.

The three ships at the main drydock fought under a special handicap. The water had been pumped out, dropping their decks to a point where the high sides of the drydock blocked most of the view. This was noticed right away by George Walters, a civilian yard worker operating a traveling crane that ran on rails along the side of the dock. From his perch 50 feet up, Walters saw the first planes dive on Ford Island. Like everybody else he thought it was a drill and caught on only when he saw the PBYs crumble.

He looked down and realized that the men lolling in the sun on the Pennsylvania, Cassin, and Downes were aware of none of this. He yelled but nobody paid attention. He threw a wrench, but that only made them angry. As the attack spread all over the harbor, they finally understood.

When the Japanese turned their attention to the Pennsylvania, Walters decided to capitalize on the ship’s predicament. He devised a unique defense. He ran his crane back and forth along the ship, hoping to protect it and ward off low-flying planes. A forlorn hope perhaps, but after all this was a crane taking on an air force.

At first, Walters’ contribution infuriated the Pennsylvania gunners, who felt he was only spoiling their aim. Gradually they learned to use him. They discovered that, sitting in their trough, they couldn’t see the planes soon enough anyhow. The crane’s movements at least gave them a lead on where a plane might next appear. Then they could set their guns and be ready when it came. Walters was just completing his transition from goat to hero when a Japanese bomb blasted the dock, putting him out of business.

It, of course, made no real difference: planes were swarming on the drydock from every direction. On the Pennsylvania, Gun Captain Alvin Gerth pumped out shells directly over the heads of the next gun crew forward. He had adjusted the gun to shoot a little below the safety cutout, and every time he fired, the blast would knock down the other gun captain. He in turn would jump up, run back, and kick Gerth in the seat of his pants. This went on and on.

On the Pennsylvania, too, there was a new jauntiness in the air. Electrician’s Mate James Power took time out for a quick glance at his hometown paper, the Odessa, Texas, Times. He just had to know the score of the big Thanksgiving game between Odessa High and Midland. When he saw that Odessa had won for the first time in ten years, he jumped and hollered with joy.

More bombs rained down, and Captain Charles Cooke of the Pennsylvania began to worry about the drydock gate. He realized that a direct hit would let in a rush of water, pushing his ship into the destroyers lying ahead. To guard against this, he ordered the drydock partially flooded and sent Lieutenant Commander James Craig to tighten up the mooring line. Craig carried out the job in nimble, skillful fashion … paying no attention to the bullets that whipped the ground around him. He seemed to live a charmed life. At 9:06 he stepped back on board, just in time to be killed by a 500-pound bomb that shattered the starboard casemate he was passing through.

Boatswain’s Mate Robert Jones rushed up to help the men hit by the blast. He gently pulled a blanket over one seaman who was obviously dead. The man thrashed out with both hands, yanked the blanket from his face: “I’ve got to breathe, ain’t I?”

The dock was flooding fast when yard worker Harry Danner suddenly realized he had left his lunch tin down in the pit. He started back but was too late. It was sailing away into the Cassin and Dowries, carried along by the inrush of water, just the way Captain Cooke figured a loosely moored battleship might do. When Danner finally reached the top of the dock, the Pennsylvania was still smoking from her bomb hit. He decided she could use some help and rushed up the gangplank. After a brief encounter with the duty officer, who couldn’t grasp the idea of a civilian manning a gun, he got on board and joined one of the five-inch antiaircraft crews.

As the Pennsylvania fought on, a record player could be heard in one of the ship’s repair shops. It had apparently been on when the attack started, and no one bothered to turn it off. Now, in the midst of this early-morning nightmare, it repeated over and over again the pleasant strains of Glenn Miller’s “Sunrise Serenade.”

Up ahead the Cassin and Downes seemed to catch everything that missed the Pennsylvania — a bad hit at 9:06 … another at 9:15. By the time the drydock was flooded, both destroyers were heavily on fire. Explosions racked their decks, and a big blast ripped the Cassin at 9:37. She sagged heavily to starboard and rolled slowly over onto the Downes. Seaman Eugene McClarty got out from under just in time, and as he streaked onto the drydock, another bomb crashed behind him, shaking the gangway loose. It fell into the drydock as McClarty pulled one sailor to his feet; but two other shipmates were too late, and plunged on down into the blazing caldron.

On the quarterdeck of the Downes a single sailor hung on, manning a .50-caliber machine gun. Watching from the Pennsylvania, Gunner’s Mate Millard Rucoi wondered how long any man could stand that kind of heat. He soon had his answer. As the flames swept closer, the sailor seemed to have a harder and harder time keeping his head up. Finally he dropped to his knees, head down, but with one hand still hanging on the trigger of the gun. That’s the way Rucoi last saw him when the flames and smoke closed off the view.

The Shaw was having just as much trouble in the floating drydock to the west. A bad hit around 9:12 … fire spreading toward her forward magazine … a fantastic explosion about 9:30. It was the Fourth of July kind — a huge ball of fire ballooned into the air; bits of flaming material arched and snaked across the sky, trailing white streamers of smoke behind. Once again the whole harbor paused to take in the scene. Seaman Ed Waszkiewicz watched from the Ford Island seaplane ramp, nearly half a mile across the bay. At this distance he knew he was at least safe — until he looked up at the sky. One of the Shaw’s five-inch shells was tumbling end over end, arching directly at him. He dived behind a fire truck as the shell hit the concrete ramp several feet away. It didn’t explode, merely bounced a hundred yards along the ramp and clanged into one of the hangars.

Ensign David King also took in the show from his station on the Helena. The gun mounts, mattresses, and bodies flying through the air reminded him strangely of the dummies and clowns fired from a gun in a circus. Only this time, he mused, no one would land in a net.

By now many of the planes were shifting over to the seaplane tender Curtiss, lying off Pearl City on the other side of Ford Island. A little earlier the Curtiss had clipped a bomber, which crashed into her starboard seaplane crane — perhaps the war’s first kamikazi. In any case, it started bad fires, and these may have attracted the pilots hungry for a new kill.

Scaled in the transmitter room, the Curtiss’ four radiomen couldn’t see any of this, but they could hear the bombs coming closer and they could feel the ship shudder from near-misses. Radioman R. E. Jones was on the battle phones and couldn’t move, but the other three could and did. James Raines squatted between the transmitters; on his left crouched Dean B. Orwick; right in front of him, Benny Schlect — three men packed together in a space 30 inches wide.

Raines never really noticed any noise — the incredible thing was the hole that suddenly appeared in the deck right in front of him and no hole above. How could a bomb do this without coming through the overhead?

Then he noticed his left shoe was missing … then that Schlect was dead and Orwick hurt. The room filled with smoke as Jones ran over to help. Together they got Orwick to the door, undogged it, and laid him outside. Jones went back to try to move Schlect, and Raines stayed with Orwick. There was little he could do — a shot of morphine … a tourniquet … a few comforting words. Orwick asked quietly, “My foot’s gone, isn’t it?” Raines said yes it was, but everything would be all right. Corpsmen were there now, and they carried Orwick away. To his deep sorrow, Raines later learned that Orwick didn’t pull through. Also, he was quite surprised to hear that he had broken his own back.

On the beleaguered Raleigh, Captain Simons watched the bomber crash into the Curtiss around 9:10, saw another plane in the same formation let go two bombs at his own ship. The first missed; the second was a perfect strike. It landed aft between a couple of gun crews … grazed an ammunition ready box … passed through the carpenter shop … through a bunk on the deck below … through an oil tank … through the bottom of the ship … and exploded in the harbor mud.

The Raleigh took a bad list to port, and from then on the battle was to keep from capsizing. The first step was to get rid of all topside weight. The planes went off on a scouting trip; everything else went over the side — catapults, torpedo tubes, torpedoes, booms, ladders, boat skids, chests, stanchions, anchors, chains, rafts, boats, everything. All the time Captain Simons kept a yeoman busy with pencil and paper, carefully plotting where everything fell, so it could be recovered later. Then he got some pumps from the Navy yard, another from the Medusa … stuffed life belts into the holes … borrowed four pontoons … warped a lighter alongside. He also found time to send Carpenter R. C. Tellin with an acetylene torch to help Commander Isquith investigate some mysterious tappings coming from inside the hull of the overturned Utah.

While this work was getting under way, the Raleigh never stopped firing. Captain Simons thought his 1.1 guns had a lot to do with the plane that struck the Curtiss … another that crashed north of Ford Island … two more that fell near Pearl City … and a fifth that blew to bits in midair.

But there always seemed to be more —Simons watched another plane bomb the Dobbin, moored with her destroyers off the northern end of Ford Island. The bomb just missed the big tender, exploding off her starboard side. But a near-miss could do a lot of damage. Shrapnel slashed across her afterdecks, gouging the mainmast and smokestack … ripping a whaleboat to splinters … wrecking a refreshment stand … cutting down the crew at No. 4 gun.

Twenty-two-year-old Fireman Charles Leahey watched the blood trickle around the corner of the gun mount, and he thought about the Navy planes that drowned out the sound track every night there was a movie: “They always come around when we’re having a show; where in the hell are they now?”

Just east of the Dobbin, the hospital ship Solace was getting ready for a busy day. In the main operating room, Corpsman T. A. Sawyer was breaking out drapes, getting the sterilizers started. Near him a nurse stood by, occasionally peeking through an uncovered porthole at the battle raging outside. Heavily influenced by the movie comedian Hugh Herbert, she would exclaim, “Woo-woo, there goes another one!” whenever a Japanese plane was hit. Another nurse was tearing long strips of adhesive for holding dressing in place after surgery; a near-miss rocked the ship, hopelessly entangling her in the tape. Out on the promenade deck a chief petty officer, clearly all thumbs, was hard at work rolling bandages.

A steady stream of launches began unloading the injured, sometimes escorted by shipmates and friends. Seaman Howard Adams of the Arizona helped carry a buddy to the operating room. He took one look, turned to the rail, and was sick. But he came back, asking if he could help. It was a big decision, for that day he chose his career —medical work.

A few hundred yards north of the Solace, the destroyer Blue cast off and moved slowly down the east channel toward the harbor entrance. As she passed Battleship Row, Machinist’s Mate Charles Etter helped toss lines to the men still swimming in the water. Some were hauled aboard, but others couldn’t hang on and fell back into the thick oil that spread over the channel. There was no time to stop for a second try.

The men on the blazing wrecks cheered the Blue, and the other destroyers, too, as one by one they glided by. As fast as they built up enough steam to move, they got under way —no waiting for skippers who still were on shore. The Blue sailed under Ensign Nathan Asher —his complement of officers was three other ensigns. Aylwin was handled by Ensign Stanley Caplan, a 26-year-old University of Michigan chemistry graduate in civilian life.

Outside the harbor, Quartermaster Frank Handler watched and waited on the bridge of the Helm. For 40 long minutes she and the Ward had been out there alone. For all anyone knew, the whole Japanese Navy might be just over the horizon. When would help come?

The first destroyer burst out of the channel just about nine o’clock. It was the Monaghan, fresh from her brush with the midget. Then the Dale … the Blue … the Henley … the Phelps … men soon lost track. Perhaps not much to start a war on, but there would be more to follow.

With a splintering crash Admiral Leary’s special mahogany gangway sailed over the side of the cruiser Honolulu and broke in half on the dock. It was the first thing 30 men headed for, when word was passed to strip the ship of unnecessary equipment and prepare to sortie.

The Honolulu was warped alongside the St. Louis in one of the Navy Yard’s finger piers, and as the men cast off the lines between the two ships, a dive-bomber charged down on them. Seaman Don Marman ducked under the narrow space between the Number 1 turret overhang and the deck — there was about a two-foot clearance. He never knew so many men could get in so small a spot at one time. The bomb plunged through the concrete pier on the port side and exploded next to the ship. It holed her oil tanks, pushed in the armor plating, and made any sortie impossible. Perhaps she couldn’t have gone anyhow, for in the excitement of casting off, one man chopped away the power line to the dock. Since the Honolulu didn’t have enough steam yet to supply her own power, this knocked out her lights and all the electrical gear for operating the guns.

The same thing happened on the New Orleans at the next pier. Hot cables danced on the decks, the lights went out, the ammunition hoists ground to a halt. So the men formed human chains to pass the shells and powder from the magazines to the guns. As they sweated away in the dark, Chaplain Howell Forgy did his best to encourage them. He passed out apples and oranges … stopped and charted with the gun crews … patted Seaman Sam Brayfield on the back … told him and the others that they couldn’t have church this morning, but “praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.”

Nobody chopped the cables that gave the St. Louis power, but nothing else was spared. A shopfitter dropped down over the starboard side and burned off the gangway with an acetylene torch. Somebody else chopped loose the water hose, leaving a 12-inch hole in the side of the ship; Shopfitter Bullock welded a plate over it in ten minutes. Up on the bridge, Captain George Rood signaled the engine room, and the St. Louis began backing out at 9:31A.M. — the first cruiser under way.

As she pulled out, Captain Rood called down to the wardroom and requested some water. The strafing was especially heavy, but Pharmacist’s Mate Howard Myers took pitcher and glass up the exposed ladder and served it properly. For the men on the St. Louis, nothing was too good for Captain Rood.

As the ships began pulling out, the men caught on shore raced to get back in time. Admiral Anderson tore through red lights in his official car. Admirals Pye and Leary got a lift from Richard Kimball, manager of the Halekulani. When Admiral Pye noticed one of the B-17s circling above, Kimball recalls him exploding: “Why they’ve even painted ‘U.S. Army’ on their planes!”

Ensign Malcolm of the Arizona drove his overnight host, Captain D. C. Emerson, and as the car hit 80, the old captain tapped Malcolm on the shoulder: “Slow down, kid; let’s wait’ll we get to Pearl to be killed.”

Commander A. M. Townsend of the St. Louis chugged along as best he could in a ’29 jalopy. Entering the main gate, he gradually overhauled a man running toward the fleet landing. It was a friend he hadn’t seen for ten years.

Yeoman Charles Knapp of the Raleigh and eight other sailors piled into a taxi at the YMCA. Hundreds of others caught in town did the same. Manuel Medeiros’ Pearl Harbor Drivers’ Association kept at least 25 cabs shuttling back and forth — Driver Tony Andrade alone took six loads.

There were no taxis on the dusty country road where Lieutenant (j.g.) Clarence Dickinson stood after parachuting from his burning plane. He resorted to an old American expedient — hitchhiking. After a while a pleasant middle-aged couple drove up in a blue sedan. Mr. and Mrs. Otto F. Heine were on their way to breakfast with friends at Ewa, completely unaware of any battle. It took a few minutes to grasp that this hitchhiker was different — that he had just been shot down from the sky. At first Mrs. Heine said politely that there really wasn’t time to help him, that their friends were already waiting. But when the facts sank in, she bubbled with solicitude. Mr. Heine drove on toward Pearl without saying much. As they rounded the closed end of the harbor, strafers raked the car in front of them. He took one hand from the wheel and gently pushed Mrs. Heine’s head under the dashboard.

The strafing planes were doing their best to paralyze the traffic now converging on Pearl Harbor. Radioman Frederick Glaeser wasn’t convinced it was a real attack until a dive-bomber gave his car a burst about three miles from the main gate. Jack Lower, a civilian electrician, was a little closer when the planes got interested in him. He was with a group of other workers, riding in the back of an open truck. Every time a plane approached, the men would hammer on the cab roof, the truck would stop, and everybody would scatter —behind palm trees, in the bushes, under the truck, anywhere. When the plane was gone, they would jump back in and start off again. It took 20 minutes to go two miles.

Even more snarls resulted from the average American’s knack of creating his own traffic jams. A vegetable truck stalled and tied everybody up for a while. Word spread that a Fifth Columnist did it, but more likely some frightened farmer was trying to get to safety. About a mile from the gate everyone was held up by cross-traffic slanting off to Pearl City and Ewa. Two columns of cars sat bumper to bumper. In one line Commander Jerry Wiltse, skipper of the Detroit, waited in his station wagon. The car opposite him in the other line contained an old chief and his wife. When Wiltse’s line began to move, it was too much for the chief. He jumped out and got in the commander’s car, as his abandoned wife screamed, “But you know I don’t know how to drive!”

Near the gate Commander Wiltse stopped again, this time picked up an aviator running alongside the road. It was Lieutenant Dickinson, who had left the Heines’ sedan at the Hickam turnoff rather than involve them in the Pearl Harbor jam. When Wiltse reached the officers’ club landing, Dickinson hopped out and eventually found still another ride to the landing opposite Ford Island.

Out on the main road, more jams developed. Finally Captain A. R. Early, commanding Destroyer Squadron One, jumped from his car and told a traffic cop to throw all cars without Pearl Harbor tags into the cane fields. To his surprise, the officer did it. There had been a feud between the Navy and the local police for years, and ordering that cop around was the only pleasure Captain Early got from the day.

When he finally reached the Navy Yard, Captain Early methodically put his car in its assigned parking space, carefully locked it, and then went on to the officers’ landing. It was full of men trying to get rides to their ships … trying to find where their ships were … and, in some cases, trying to grasp the fact that their ships were gone forever. Commander Louis Puckett, supply officer of the Arizona, sat in the grass near the landing with four or five other officers from the ship. They just didn’t know what to do.

A steady stream of launches ferried the men out to the ships and Ford Island. Commander McIsaac, skipper of the McDonough, gave Admiral Anderson a lift to the Maryland in his launch. The admiral marveled at the fearless, debonair spirit of the men in the launch; Commander McIsaac was pretty impressed by the admiral’s own poise — he even had the little bag he liked to carry ashore.

It wasn’t always possible to show such poise. A dive-bomber screeched down on Seaman P. E. Bos’ launch, and it was a toss-up whether to dive overboard or stay in and take a chance. Bos was one of the ones who stayed — the machine gun missed them by inches. Shrapnel holed the crash boat taking Seaman Joseph Smith to the Dale, and the men abandoned it by the old coal docks. They all switched to another boat and chased the Dale out to sea. They never caught up with her. Nor did Lieutenant Commander R. H. Rogers, skipper of the Aylwin, who pursued Ensign Caplan in a motor launch.

It was all right with Captain Early, the squadron commander. He only wanted to get his destroyers out, and he was quite satisfied as he stood on the shore at 9:30 and saw that he now had on his hands more unemployed skippers than ships.

Pearl Harbor had no monopoly on hectic efforts to get back to duty. The men who pulled on their clothes, gulped coffee, kissed their wives, and dashed off to Hickam were just as frantic. Master Sergeant Arthur Fahrner couldn’t find any collar insignia, and Mrs. Fahrner didn’t help — she was forever handing him a tie.

“We’re at war,” he kept telling her; “you don’t wear a tie to war.”

First Lieutenant Warren Wilkinson meticulously pinned on all his insignia but started his car too abruptly. His chin banged against the horn button and it stuck. For a few seconds he drove on toward his squadron hangar, then couldn’t stand it any longer. In the midst of the bombing and strafing he got out, raised the hood, and disconnected the horn.

By the time Wilkinson reached the hangar area, the dive-bombing had tapered off and the field seemed strangely quiet. Sergeant H. E. Swinney wandered out from Hangar 11 and joined a group of men looking at a big bomb crater nearby. Sidewalk superintendents appeared everywhere, inspecting the damage, taking uneasy sidelong glances at the bodies that sprawled on the grass.

Near the barracks across the street, Sergeant Robert Hey put down his Tommy gun for a breather; then about nine o’clock he got word that the high-level bombers were coming. At first he couldn’t see them at all. Then he saw antiaircraft bursts to the south above Fort Kamehameha. Soon he could make out the planes themselves — tiny specks far above the puffs of smoke. They were flying in a perfect V, never had to break formation. As he watched the planes pass over, he heard a faint rustling sound which kept getting louder. He yelled a warning, dived across the sidewalk into the dirt next to the barracks. Two of the bombs hit less than 50 feet away, and the fragments whizzed by, just over his head.

There was no warning in Hangar 15. Sergeant Swinney had returned from his inspection tour and was checking a damaged B-18. Under the plane some men were changing a bullet-riddled tire. Nearby the crew chief was explaining how the wheel was assembled to some mechanic who had chosen this particular moment to learn his trade a little better.

The bomb plunged through the roof with a deafening roar. The hangar went totally dark, and Swinney thought to himself that this was the end. Then the smoke and dust cleared, and an encouraging shaft of sunlight streamed through the hole. So he was alive after all — but he now had the terrifying feeling that everyone else had completely disintegrated. It was an illusion, however, for after he had groped his way out — alive but unhurt — he saw several dead lying where he had stood.

Corporal John Sherwood was working outside Hangar 15 when the high-level attack began. For some reason he headed for Hangar 13 — a poor choice, since it had not yet been damaged. But he found a good corner in the engineering office, lay down, and waited. For the first time that morning he even had a chance to pray. As the bombs thundered closer, two young lieutenants —both crying like children — ran in and tried to dislodge him. Sherwood told them to go find their own corner. The hangar took several hits, and Sherwood realized he was in the wrong place after all. He ran out, leaving the lieutenants free to take any corner they liked.

At the base hospital Nurse Monica Conter also had to fight for her cover. Lying on the floor with other nurses, doctors, and patients, she had seized the galvanized lid of a brand-new garbage can and was holding it over herself. Someone kept tugging, trying to get it, but she managed to hang on.

Once again, good shelter was at a premium. Private Bert Shipley joined four men in a manhole who were firing at the planes with rifles. They knew they wouldn’t hit anything, but it made them feel better. Some cooks in the bombed-out mess hall holed up in the freezer. More bombs hit the building, and they were all killed by concussion. Private John Wilson dived under the edge of a one-story frame building. He was glad to find the shelter, but it was even better to be there with his buddy Stan Koenig. He kept thinking if he was going to be killed, he wanted some friend to know about it.

Hickam couldn’t do much about the high-level attack, but when the dive-bombers returned around 9:15, the men fought bitterly with what was left. One airman manned a .30-caliber machine gun in the nose of a damaged B-18 and kept firing until the plane burned out from under him.

As fast as men fell at the machine guns on the open parade ground, others rushed out to take their place, and then they too would fall. Old-timers, like Sergeant Stanley MeLeod … young recruits, like Corporal Billy Anderson of Virginia, lay there side by side. A few men somehow survived. Staff Sergeant Chuck Middaugh, a burly 235-pound roughneck always in trouble, grabbed a .30-caliber machine gun in his hands and fired away until he got a plane.

On the ball diamond two men set up a machine gun on a tripod between home plate and some trees along the edge of the field. It looked like a pretty safe spot with a good field of fire. Suddenly a wave of planes roared out of the sky, saturating the field with bombs … scoring a direct hit on the gun … killing both men instantly. They had no way of knowing that the Japanese were sure the ball diamond was clever camouflage for Hickam’s underground gasoline system.

Other bombs did put the system briefly out of action. They hit a water main near its real location, and since it worked by water, it could no longer operate. The damage was serious, but Staff Sergeant Guido Mambretti, the Petroleum Section’s maintenance man, bet Major Robbins a bottle of cognac he could get the thing working again. He did too, but he still hasn’t collected.

While Mambretti toiled away, volunteers rushed up and moved several loaded tank trucks out of the storage area. Other volunteers turned up who had no connection at all with Hickam. Major Henry Sachs, an ordnance specialist passing through on his way to the Middle East, dashed to the Hickam cargo pier and took on the job of unloading the SS Haleakala, a munitions ship full of dynamite and hand grenades. A Hawaiian motorcycle club appeared, on the hunch they might be useful. One of the members, a huge, fat native, attached himself to Captain Gordon Blake, who was trying to disperse the B-17s. They made quite a pair bouncing along the runway — the Hawaiian resplendent in aloha shirt and rhinestone-studded cyclist belt; Blake seated behind, hanging on for dear life.

In between motorcycle trips, Blake tried to guide the B-17s still in the air to someplace where they could land. One put down on Kahuku Golf Course; another suddenly turned up at Wheeler. As the pilot climbed out, Colonel William Flood, Wheeler base commander, told him dead-pan to get back up and find the Japanese fleet. The pilot looked depressed: “You know, Colonel, we just came over from California.”

“I know, but, son, there’s a war on.”

“Okay,” the pilot sighed, “if I can just get a cup of coffee, we’re off.”

Flood couldn’t bear to keep the joke going any longer, told the pilot to get some sleep and he’d use him tomorrow.

It’s hard to say how many planes really did get up from Wheeler. General Howard Davidson, commanding all the fighters, thought about 14. Air Force records indicate no P-40s and only a handful of worthless P-36s. Perhaps the general was counting in Welch and Taylor, who landed three different times for ammunition and then took off again.

These two were having a busy morning. After reaching Haleiwa, they had rushed straight for their planes. No briefing or checking out — Major Austin, the squadron commander, was off deer hunting, and they didn’t bother with Lieutenant Rogers, the acting CO. They just took off.

First they flew down to Barbers Point, where the Japanese were said to be rendezvousing. Nobody there. Just as well — there hadn’t been time to belt up enough ammunition. So they dropped by Wheeler to get some more. By nine o’clock they were almost ready to take off again when seven Japanese planes swept in from Hickam for one last strafing run. Welch and Taylor gunned their P-40s and flew straight at them. Both men were up and away before the Japanese could give chase. Instead, the P-40s managed to get into the Japanese flight pattern and shot two down — one was the plane that grazed the eucalyptus tree behind Mr. Young’s laundry.

Then Welch and Taylor headed for Ewa, where they had seen some dive-bombers at work. It was a picnic. Between them, they got four more before Taylor had to land with a wounded arm. Welch stayed on and picked off another.

They had plenty of cooperation from the ground. Ewa, like the other airfields, was bounding back. Sergeant Emil Peters and Private William Turner manned a machine gun in one of the disabled planes; Sergeant William Turrage manned another; Sergeant Carlo Micheletto was firing too, until a low-flying strafer cut him down.

A piece of shrapnel nicked Lieutenant Colonel Larkin, the base commander, and Captain Leonard Ashwell became another casualty when he sped off on a bicycle to check some sentries. He forgot about a barbed-wire fence, careened into it, and arose somewhat the worse for wear. As Pharmacist’s Mate Orin Smith treated the wounded, he himself was hit in the leg. He patched it up and rejoined his ambulance, which eventually accumulated 52 bullet holes.

On the windward side of the island, Bellows tried to fight back too, but a group of Japanese fighters gave the men little chance. Lieutenant George Whitman took up the first P-40 about nine o’clock, and six Zeroes got him right away. Next they pounced on Lieutenant Hans Christianson before he could even get off the ground. Then they caught Lieutenant Sam Bishop just after he took off. He managed to crash-land into the ocean and swim to safety. The attack was over before anybody else tried his luck.

None of the planes could even fly at nearby Kaneohe. The horizontal bombers took care of everything the strafers missed. Then there was a lull, and the bull horn bellowed for all hands to fight the hangar fires. Aviation Ordnanceman Henry Popko joined a wave of men who surged forward to answer the call. Halfway there, the strafers met them, and the men had to scatter. Seaman “Squash” Marshall raced for cover with the bullets snapping at his heels. It was another of those classic dashes that seemed to catch everyone’s fancy. He actually outran a Zero for 100 yards, according to one man, then zagged to one side as the bullets plowed straight on. The men who watched set up a huge cheer — just as if someone had hit a home run at a ball game.

By 9:30 the dive-bombers were back, but now everybody seemed to have some kind of gun. Ensign Hubert Reese and his friend Joe Hill sat in their clump of weeds, popping away with rifles. Others had mounted machine guns on water pipes, on tail-wheel assemblies, on anything. Big, friendly Aviation Machinist’s Mate Ralph Watson cradled a .30-caliber weapon in his arms, kept it going long after he was hit.

Suddenly all guns began to concentrate on one fighter. Everyone had the same idea at once — it seemed like telepathy. Smoke began pouring from the plane. It kept on diving, motor wide open. Ensign Reese wondered if the pilot was crazy — it was hard to believe they were actually shooting one down. But it was true. The pilot never pulled up. As he hit the hillside, there was a cloud of dirt, a burst of fire in the air, and the plane completely disintegrated.

It wasn’t the gunfire or bombing; it was the door that swung to and fro from the concussion that bothered Lieutenant Commander McCrimmon as he operated on his third patient at the Kaneohe dispensary. The man had a bad stomach wound, and Commander McCrimmon just couldn’t concentrate. Finally he had a sailor hold the door steady so he could finish the operation.

He was scrubbing up for the next patient, when he suddenly realized what he had done. The door had distracted him so much he had sewed the wrong parts of the stomach together. Before the man came out of ether, McCrimmon had him back on the table, reopened the wound, corrected the error, and sewed him back up.

Three miles away, Mrs. McCrimmon stood in the yard beside the house, watching the planes dive on Kaneohe. The McCrimmons lived on the beach, and pretty soon 27 Japanese planes came flying down the coast, so low overhead she could see the white scarves worn by some of the pilots. Her two little boys waved and waved, but none of the pilots took any notice.

The Navy families on Ford Island had no time to watch and wave. The war surged all around them. Some huddled in the strong, concrete Bachelor Officers’ Quarters. Others brought Cokes and cigarettes for the men swimming ashore. Chief Albert Molter turned his home into a first-aid station. He had about 40 there — all soaking wet, all covered with oil, most suffering from shock, some burned very badly. He borrowed a first-aid kit from the big crate the Boy Scouts used as a clubhouse. He broke open the canned fruit and juice he was keeping in case of emergency. He raided the linen closet for sheets, towels, blankets. He gave away all his civilian clothes — he didn’t expect to wear them soon again anyhow.

At the senior officers’ housing quarters on Makalapa, Mrs. Mayfield and her maid Fumiyo went next door, to sit out the raid with Mrs. Earle. They were soon joined by Mrs. Daubin, the only other wife on the hill. In the Fades’ living room the women built a makeshift shelter by turning over two big bamboo sofas and piling all the cushions on top. In the course of this construction work Fumiyo whispered: “Mrs. Mayfield, is it —is it the Japanese who are attacking us?”

Mrs. Mayfield told her yes, as kindly as she could.

The shelters and defensive measures varied from house to house. Mrs. Mary Buethe, a young Navy wife, grabbed her children and hid in a clothes closet every time she heard a plane. At the Hickam NCO quarters, Mrs. Walter Blakey preferred her bathtub. Mrs. A. M. Townsend filled her tub with water and some pails with sand at her house in the “Punchbowl” section of town. Mrs. Claire Fonderhide, whose husband was at sea in a submarine, sat with a .45 automatic and waited. Mrs. Joseph Cote’s little boy Richard used his gun too — he filled a water pistol with green paint and fired it all over the place.

Mrs. Carl Eifler, wife of an infantry captain, couldn’t find her little boy. He had completely disappeared, the way little boys will. She busied herself, packing a suitcase, filling jugs with water, emptying the medicine cabinet, all the time wondering where her child could be. He finally sauntered home, but things looked so black by now, her thoughts were following a new channel: “Do I allow myself and my boy to be taken or do I use this pistol?” While she tried to make up her mind, she washed the bathroom woodwork.

Mechanically, other wives also went about their daily chores. Mrs. William Campbell, whose husband was in the Navy, carefully washed his whites and was hanging them on the line when an amazed Marine sentry saw her and chased her to cover.

Mrs. Melbourne West, married to an Army captain, did her ironing. She had this incessant feeling that her husband would need a lot of clean shirts if there was going to be a war.

As the service families numbly adjusted to war, much of Honolulu carried on as usual. The people in close touch with the Army and Navy knew all too well by now; but for the thousands with little contact — or perhaps out of touch for the weekend — the world was still at peace.

Mrs. Garnett King called her local garage: could they wash the family car? They said they were pretty busy right now, but could take it in the afternoon. While explosions boomed in the distance, civilian Arthur Land helped transfer 20 gallons of salad from a caterer’s truck to his own car — this was the day of the Odd Fellows Picnic. As the noise gradually subsided later in the morning, Mr. Hubert Coryell remarked to another civilian friend, “Well, that was quite a show.” Then he went off to archery practice.

People somehow ignored the most blatant hints. Second Lieutenant Earl Patron, off duty for the day, was out with friends in a chartered fishing boat when a plane plunged into the sea nearby. Assuming it was an accident, they headed for the spot to help the pilot. Then another plane swooped by, strafing them with machine guns. One of the party was even nicked, but Parton charitably assumed the second plane was just attracting their attention to the first.

Walking home from church, Mrs. Patrick Gillis saw the side of a house blown in … figured someone’s hot-water heater had exploded. Mrs. Cecilia Bradley, a Hawaiian housewife, was in the yard feeding her chickens when she was wounded by a piece of flying shrapnel. She thought it was somebody deer hunting in the hill behind her house. Mrs. Barry Fox, living on Kaneohe Bay, awoke to the sound of explosions, looked out, and saw strange-looking planes circling the base, flames boiling up, a wall of smoke. She decided it was a smoke-screen test. She didn’t become really alarmed until she turned on the radio at 9:30 and didn’t hear the news. That was the time she always listened to the latest bulletins, and this morning there was only music.

One by one they gradually learned. Stephen Moon, a Chinese 12-year-old, was at early mass on Alewa Heights — he planned to go on to the school club picnic at Kailua. Near the end of the service his mind began to wander, and his eyes strayed out the window. Right above Alewa Heights two planes were in a dogfight. But that was common, and he thought nothing of it. He glanced a little to the left and saw black puffs of smoke in the sky. That was strange — he knew the practice ammunition always left white smoke. As his attention drifted back to church, he became aware of a completely changed atmosphere. Right in the middle of the service, parents were slipping in and hurriedly taking their children out. He knew there was something wrong now, for the grownups were whispering and acting very mysteriously. The mass ended, and instead of the regular hymn, everyone stood and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

But it was all too deep for Stephen. Still thinking about the picnic, he strolled off toward a friend’s house. Then a plane roared down from the sky and shot at a car driving toward Pearl. He spun around and ran home as hard as he could. His mother was glad to see him too; she had been looking for him everywhere.

Captain Walter Bahr, one of Honolulu’s crack harbor pilots, also noticed the black puffs of smoke as he went out to meet the Dutch liner Jagersfontein, inbound from the West Coast. The pier watchman explained it was probably the Navy practicing. But he had a curious sense of urgency when he boarded the ship at 9:00 A.M. No one told him anything, but he sensed danger in all that noise and smoke. He brought her in fast. They were about at the harbor entrance when bombs began to fall, and columns of water shot up around them. Since Holland was already at war, the Jagersfontein was armed and the Dutch crew knew exactly what to do. They peeled the canvas covers from their guns and began firing back — the first Allies to join the fight.

A scrappy young flyweight boxer named Toy Tamanaha listened to the gunfire as he walked down Fort Street to the Pacific Café for breakfast around 9:30. He didn’t think much of it — there was always shooting going on. Somebody in the café said it was war, but Toy remained unconvinced. Then somebody said all carpenters had been called to their jobs. Toy’s close friend Johnny Kawakami was a carpenter, so Toy advised him to get going, and sauntered off himself to the Cherry Blossom Sweet Shop on Kukui Street for a popsicle. He was just inside when it happened — a blinding blast hurled him right out into the street. Vaguely he heard yells of help. He noticed his left leg was missing. He thought, “Maybe I only lost one leg.” He was wrong — the other was gone too — but just before he blacked out, it was nice to hear someone come up and say, “Toy, you’ll be all right.”

There were explosions all over Honolulu — the Lewers and Cooke Building in the heart of town … the Schuman Carriage Company on Beretania Street … Kuhio Avenue near Waikiki Beach … a Japanese community out McCully Street. Four Navy Yard workers were blown to pieces in their green ’37 Packard at the corner of Judd and Iholena. The same blast killed a 13-year-old Samoan girl sitting on her front porch watching the gunfire.

Many of the people in Honolulu later believed the explosions were bombs. (Some of them still do: in the words of one witness, “As the years pass, the bombs keep dropping closer.”) But careful investigation by ordnance experts revealed that antiaircraft shells caused every one of the 40 explosions in Honolulu, except for one blast near the Hawaiian Electrical Company’s powerhouse.

In their excitement, gunners on the Tennessee, Farragut, and probably other ships forgot to crank in fuses. Other ships like the Phoenix had trouble with bad fuses. Others like the Nevada fired some shells that exploded only on contact. As one Nevada gunner explained, if the shell missed, it still had to come down somewhere.

But even the shells didn’t do a complete job of waking up Honolulu. At Police Headquarters, Sergeant Jimmy Wong’s blotter reflected a good deal of consternation about the explosions — the first was a complaint phoned in at 8:05 by Thomas Fujimoto, 610 E Road, Damon Tract, that a bomb had interrupted his breakfast. But there were also more familiar entries, indicating normalcy far into the morning: “10:50 A.M. A man reported to be drunk and raising trouble at Beretania and Alapai.”

As the uproar increased, Editor Riley Allen of the Star-Bulletin gallantly struggled to get out an extra. He was a fast, if unorthodox, typist. This morning he was at his best—one hand punching madly, the other rooting out the keys that piled up in a hopeless snarl. The papers were on the street by nine-thirty; the headline: WAR! OAHU BOMBARDED BY JAPANESE PLANES.

At her home on Alewa Drive, Mrs. Paul Spangler heard the newsboys shouting “Extra!” She had no ready change and debated whether to raid the money she set aside for church collection. She finally did.

Back at the Star-Bulletin office, Editor Allen got a call from an exasperated policeman. Would he recall his newsboys —they might get hurt. They had gone to Pearl Harbor to sell their papers.

Anyone still in doubt learned by radio. At 8:04 KGMB had interrupted a music program with the first word — a call ordering all Army, Navy, and Marine personnel to report to duty. The call went out again at 8:15 and 8:30. By then KGU was on the air too, calling doctors, nurses, defense workers to report for emergency duty. The first explanation came at 8:40 —“A sporadic air attack has been made on Oahu … enemy airplanes have been shot down … the rising sun has been sighted on the wingtips.” This only confused many listeners, who thought “sporadic” meant “simulated.”

It took time to sink in, even if a person understood “sporadic.” Some people tuned in between bulletins, heard only a gospel service or the incidental music that was used to fill in. Reassured, they turned off their sets again. Others harked back to Orson Welles’ broadcast of the Martian invasion … they weren’t going to bite on this one.

Webley Edwards was at KGMB by now and did his best to gear the station to the crisis. But it was hard to drop some peacetime practices that were done almost by instinct. The records played between the bulletins sometimes seemed hideously incongruous. Once the song was “Three Little Fishes,” a popular melody of the time that began:

“Down in the meadow in the iddy biddy poo.

“Thwam thwee little fishies and a mama fishie too.”

As people continued to phone, continued to ask questions, continued to be doubtful, Edwards grew more and more exasperated. Finally a call came from Allan Davis, a prominent businessman and member of the station’s Board of Directors. When he too asked if it wasn’t really a maneuver, Edwards burst out, “Hell, no, this is the real McCoy!”

Davis sounded really shocked … mumbled “Oh, oh,” and hung up.

The effect was so impressive that Edwards decided to use the same words on the air. That might be the way to get people to really believe the news. Starting about 9:00 A.M., he repeated again and again that the attack was the “real McCoy” — so often that most people who listened to the Honolulu radio that day remember little else.

As they sat by their sets, many of the listeners found themselves paying special attention to the tone in Edwards’ voice. They seemed to be searching for some extra clue that would tell them how serious the situation was. Mrs. Mayfield thought he sounded hoarse with suppressed excitement. Joan Stidham thought he was terse.

Edwards had at least one very disappointed listener. Sitting in the wardroom of the Japanese carrier Akagi, Commander Shin-Ichi Shimizu tuned in the radio to see how the Americans would react to the attack. Soon the announcer began breaking in with orders for different units to report to duty, but his voice was calm, and in between times the station continued to play music. It was a big anticlimax. The announcer wasn’t nearly as excited as Shimizu.

CHAPTER X

“I Want Three Volunteers: You, You, and You”

HIGH ABOVE PEARL HARBOR, the last raiders wheeled off to the west, vanishing as mysteriously as they had appeared. On the Nevada, Commander Thomas moved off the mud of Hospital Point, and with the aid of tugs backed across the channel to the hard, sandy bottom of Waipio Peninsula. Word was passed releasing the men from battle stations, and Musician C. S. Griffin began groping his way up from the third deck forward. When he finally stepped into the bright morning sun, he glanced at his watch — it said 10:00 A.M.

For the first time men realized what a strain it had been. Boatswain’s Mate K. V. Hendon ran into one of his best friends, who had been working a five-inch gun all morning. The man was so dazed he couldn’t recognize anybody — all he could still see were planes. The men in the antiaircraft gun shack passed cigarettes around, omitting as usual the clean-cut member of the team, who, as far as they knew, didn’t smoke or drink or even take coffee. Shakily he said, “I think I’ll have one of those.”

Ensign John Landreth emerged from the port antiaircraft director, felt a curious numbness. Training and discipline had seen him through, but in the back of his mind the question kept revolving, “What is this really? A dream, perhaps, or is it really me shooting at other men and they shooting at me? What is this really?”

Perhaps indeed it was a dream, thought Pfc. John Fisher, a young MP at Fort Shafter. And when no one was looking, he even pinched himself, hoping he would wake up and find everything was all right. As Staff Sergeant Frank Allo surveyed Hickam’s smoldering wreckage, he felt like a small boy looking at his dog lying in the road after it had been hit by a car: it was simply unbelievable that such a thing could have happened.

But there was little time for reflection. A man had to think fast just to stay alive on the burning, sinking ships. When the Oglala finally rolled over on her port side at ten o’clock, Admiral Furlong slid down toward the low side of her deck. He showed the timing of a trapeze artist, hopping nimbly ashore as the side of the deck rolled flush with the edge of 1010 dock. Officially, it was said the Oglala’s seams had been sprung by the torpedo that holed the Helena; but there are men who still claim the old Fall River boat really “sank from fright.”

Across the channel, it was time to abandon the West Virginia too. Fires raged out of control around the conning tower and foremast, igniting the paint work, trapping Lieutenant Ricketts and the others still on the bridge. Ensign Lombardi got a hose going, and a seaman played it on the little group. Then Ensign Hank Graham tossed up a line, and the men came down hand over hand to the deck. Ensign Delano was cut off from the rest; he finally crawled forward on the searchlight platform and used the turrets as a giant stepladder to reach the deck. He jumped overboard and swam for Ford Island, trying to keep ahead of the oil burning on the water.

“Help! Help! I can’t swim any farther,” called a familiar voice somewhere behind. It was an old chief petty officer, known to be a poor swimmer. Delano was now too weak to do any towing, but at least he could encourage the man. As he turned his head, the old chief thrashed by, arms and legs flying through the water, still yelling that he couldn’t swim any longer. He reached shore five minutes before Delano.

Ensign Jacoby plunged off the West Virginia’s forecastle, still wearing shoes, uniform, and even cap. He swam under the burning oil, emerged beyond it, and headed for a launch from the Solace. But his waterlogged clothes dragged him down, and the burning oil crept after him faster than he could swim. A sailor in the launch dived in to help — apparently forgetting that he couldn’t swim at all. They were rapidly drowning each other when someone else in the launch knotted some sheets together, tossed out the improvised line, and dragged them both in. It was close — as they were hauled aboard, the bow of the launch was already starting to burn.

Ensign Vance Fowler, the West Virginia’s disbursing officer, abandoned ship far more stylishly. He pushed off in a raft and moved swiftly to shore, using his cash ledger as a paddle.

Seaman George Murphy had no use for a paddle, trapped in the dispensary of the overturned Oklahoma. He and some 30 others were in a triangular-shaped air space with about a three-foot ceiling. Carpenter John A. Austin had a flashlight, and they played it around, trying to figure out where they were. None of them yet understood that the ship had turned over … that the tile overhead was really the deck.

For over an hour they didn’t even try to get out. They could cling to a coaming around the tile without constant swimming, and it seemed best just to wait. They all assumed help was on the way — never dreaming they were far below the surface of Pearl Harbor.

Time went on, and they began to wonder. Eventually someone kicked a porthole under the water, and the men took turns ducking down and investigating it. They were still reluctant to dive through, because many of the ship’s portholes led only to void space, and nobody wanted to get trapped that way.

Finally there was no choice. The air grew foul, and it was clear they couldn’t live in the compartment. One by one they began squeezing through. It was a slow process. The porthole hung the wrong way (that’s how they learned the ship was upside down), and every time anybody tried it, one man had to go under water and hold it open for the other to escape.

Nothing could help the man who first found the porthole. He was simply too big for the 14-inch opening. He bobbed back up, completely broken. Several others began shouting and calling out prayers.

Seaman Murphy barely made it. He had to try three times before he finally squeezed through and kicked out from the ship. He popped to the surface and was picked up by a launch from the Dobbin shortly after ten o’clock. The thing that really amazed him was not his escape but the scene in the harbor. The men in the compartment had all assumed that the Oklahoma was the only ship damaged.

There was no problem abandoning the California. As the burning oil drifted down the harbor, engulfing her stern, Captain Bunkley gave the order at 10:02 A.M. and the men swarmed ashore. But the wind blew the burning oil clear, and by 10:15 Captain Bunkley was trying to get everybody on board again to fight the fires. Yeoman Durrell Conner abandoned his efforts to evacuate some files, and watched an officer appeal to the men on shore. He gave quite a pep talk, saying that the California was a good ship, and if they would all come back and fight the fire, he thought they could save her.

The men seemed a little slow, and Conner had an inspiration. Noting the flag had not been raised, he grabbed a seaman and together they hoisted the colors on the fantail. A big cheer went up, and men began streaming back.

The upturned Utah was of course beyond hope, but the banging within her hull told Commander Isquith that he might at least save someone trapped inside. So he worked away with Machinist Szymanski, who knew all about welding … Watertender H. G. Nugent, who knew the structure of the ship’s hull … and Chief Motor Machinist Terrance MacSelwiney, who wanted so much to help. Strafers bothered them at first, but then the raid died down, and cutting outfits arrived from the Raleigh and Tangier. They traced the noise to the dynamo room and went to work. After an hour they had an 18-inch hole and yelled to whoever was inside to stand clear so they could pound the plating in. When they finished, out popped Fireman John Vaessen, who had kept the lights going until it was too late to get out.

Unlike the men in the Oklahoma dispensary, Vaessen knew right away that the ship was upside down. He set out for the bottom with a flashlight and an open-end wrench for tapping signals. When he reached the double bottom, he had to undo 20 bolts to get through to the outer skin of the ship. Here he enjoyed a stroke of the incredible luck that sometimes helps a brave man in danger. His wrench just happened to fit the bolts.

Down in the plotting room of the Nevada, Ensign Merdinger wasn’t yet trapped, but his agile mind began thinking along those lines. The room was five decks down. The regular lights were out, and the emergency system cast a weird green glow. The ventilation was gone, and to save their breath, the men lay down, phones strapped to their heads. Some were stripped to the waist; others still wore their shirts. Merdinger noted the beads of sweat glistening in the pale green light and thought what a dramatic movie it would make of men trapped in a submarine.

His thoughts passed through various phases, taking the form of silent prayers. At first he hoped he wouldn’t be wounded. As things grew worse, he hoped that, if wounded, he at least wouldn’t be permanently crippled. Finally, he reached the point where he was completely prepared to give his life. He prayed only that he might die — and he knew he was guilty of a cliché — like an officer and a gentleman, an inspiration to his men.

Certainly there was nothing to encourage him in the reports drifting down from above. The plotting room was a sort of clearinghouse for information, and all the news seemed bad. He heard about the Oklahoma — and the Nevada started to list. The Arizona blew up — and fire spread close to the Nevada’s magazines. Every disaster on the other ships seemed to stalk his own. And now, to top it off, the bridge was calling for anyone who could speak Japanese. That suggested even more unpleasant possibilities.

Topside, Ensign John Landreth heard the radio say the Japanese were landing on Diamond Head. Radioman Peter La Fata of the Swan picked up even worse news: they had taken Waikiki.

The danger lay not to the east but to the west, according to rumors heard by the Arizona survivors at the Navy receiving station — in fact, 40 Japanese transports were off Barbers Point. It was worse than that; they were already landing men at Waianae Beach, someone told Gunner’s Mate Ralph Carl on the Tennessee.

Others claimed the Japanese were really landing to the north. At the Navy Yard, civilian worker James Spagnola heard that the entire north shore was lost. At Schofield, Lieutenant Roy Foster got word that a major assault would be launched on Schofield and Wheeler within 30 minutes to an hour. Marine Sergeant Burdette Odekirk heard that Schofield had fallen.

As if seaborne invasion wasn’t enough, other reports spread that Japanese paratroopers were raining down from the skies — at Nanakuli Beach to the northwest … in the sugarcane fields southwest of Ford Island … in the Manoa Valley, northwest of Honolulu. A man could spot them by the rising sun sewed on their backs … or by the red patch on the left breast pocket … or by the rising sun shoulder patch. In any case, they were wearing blue coveralls.

At Kaneohe, Mess Attendant Walter Simmons lost no time taking off his own blue dungarees. Orders were to change to khakis, but Simmons and most of the others had none. So they boiled vats of strong coffee, dipped in their whites, made khakis that way. Next report — the Imperial Marines landing on the west shore were in khaki. All hands change to whites. Later, the force landing to the east was in white. Back to blues.

These were not men who had lost their heads — they were acting on the best information available. An official Army circuit monitored at Kaneohe reported sampans landing troops at the Navy Ammunition Depot … transports to the north … eight enemy battleships 70 miles away. The Navy’s harbor circuit was just as active. On the Vestal Radioman John Murphy logged in messages that Japanese troops were landing on Barbers Point … paratroopers dropping in Nuuanu Valley … Honolulu’s water supply had been poisoned.

Later, some radiomen felt the Japanese must have used Army and Navy frequencies, filling the air with false reports. But the outgoing logs of the various official message centers show that most, if not all, of the traffic was authentic:

1146. From Patwing. Enemy troops landing on north shore. Blue coveralls, red emblems.

1150 COM14 to CINCPAC. Parachutists landing at Barbers Point.

In the present frame of mind, small incidents were easily misinterpreted and then exaggerated. The Helm firing at the midget quickly became a Japanese task force bombarding the shore. When Fort Kamehameha, under the same illusion, began firing at the Helm, that just proved it.

It was the same with the paratroopers. Lieutenant Dickinson and Ensign McCarthy bailing out of their flaming planes were quickly spotted as two … 20 … 200 enemy soldiers. And once the idea was planted, the power of suggestion did the rest. Honolulu Police Headquarters got a frantic call that parachutists were landing on St. Louis Heights. Sergeant Jimmy Wong called for a National Guard Company and sent up Patrolman Albert Won. The Guard never arrived, but Won got there, armed with a .38. Luckily, all he found was a kite dangling from a tree.

Even more frightening reports were now pouring in. The local Japanese were rising, it was said, and Fifth Columnists were on the loose. Sergeant Wong got a call at 10:08 A.M. that two Japanese with a camera were on Wilhelmina Rise. He sent a squad car, found only a couple out walking. McKinley High School reported saboteurs — two pedestrians happened to be passing the ROTC building. But the stories spread faster than they could possibly be disproved or checked.

On the seaplane tender Swan, Radioman Peter La Fata heard that Japanese drivers were making milk deliveries at Pearl Harbor with radio transmitters concealed in the cans to beam in the raiding planes. Mrs. McCrimmon heard that it happened at Kaneohe. Private Sydney Davis heard that it was Hickam where the milk trucks went, and that they drove up and down the hangar line knocking the tails off planes. Lieutenant George Newton also heard it was Hickam, and that a warrant officer shot the milkman when he boasted, “Well, I guess we Japanese showed you.” Radioman Douglas Eaker heard that the sides of the truck dropped down and Japanese machine gunners sprayed the field.

Other rumors described how the local Japanese had ringed Oahu with white sampans — presumably to show the pilots that they had the right island. Additional reports told of arrows cut in the cane fields, helpfully pointing out the last 20 miles to Pearl Harbor. Under the circumstances, Corporal Maurice Herman wasn’t surprised when all communications failed at his infantry outfit’s command post. Along with everybody else, he supposed Japanese saboteurs had cut the wires. A careful check uncovered the break right next to the command post itself. A soldier pitching a pup tent had needed a piece of line and cut it out of the unit’s radio coil.

Worst of all was the report that Fifth Columnists were poisoning the water. At Ewa the post dentist spread a canvas cover over the base water tower, hoping to frustrate the saboteurs. Others heard that it was too late for preventive measures — the water was already contaminated. Mrs. Arthur Gardiner, a Navy wife, tried in vain to find a way of explaining the development to her thirsty two-year-old. Fifteen-year-old Jackie Bennett ordinarily didn’t drink much water — now she was never thirstier. Storekeeper H. W. Smith heard the rumor after he had already quenched his thirst. He became violently ill and thought what an inglorious way to die for his country. They were quite clinical at the Hickam dispensary. Lieutenant Colonel Frank Lane had Saliva, the hospital’s mascot dog, nailed up in a crate, then gave him a pan of water to see what would happen. The experiment failed when Saliva wouldn’t drink. As the day wore on, people grew too thirsty to care … drank the water anyhow and, of course, with no aftereffects.

In all the excitement over spies and Fifth Columnists, almost everybody forgot about Japanese Consul General Kita. Soon after the attack started, Reporter Lawrence Nakatsuka of the Star-Bulletin went up to the consulate to get Mr. Kita’s comments, but had little luck. The consul simply said he didn’t believe there was an attack. Nakatsuka returned to the office, and as soon as the Star-Bulletin’s extra was run off, he went back to the consulate with a copy. If it wasn’t adequate evidence, it might at least be a conversation piece.

Meanwhile AP Correspondent Eugene Burns tipped off the police that the consulate might be worth checking. Robert Shivers, the local FBI man, was urging the same thing, having failed to interest the Army or Navy in the matter. It was around eleven o’clock by the time Lieutenant Yoshio Hasegawa — the ranking officer of Japanese ancestry — got under way. He arrived with two carloads of men, to find Consul General Kita lounging around the backyard in slacks, with Reporter Nakatsuka still trying to get his story.

Hasegawa and Kita entered the consulate, and other police trailed along. Smoke was coming from behind a door, and somebody asked if there was a fire. “No,” Kita replied vaguely, “there is just something in there.”

The police opened the door and found two men burning papers in a washtub on the floor. They stamped out the fire and managed to salvage one brown Manila envelope full of documents. The tour continued, and behind another door they found three or four men getting ready to burn five burlap bags of torn papers.

Hasegawa posted guards around the place, confined the staff to one room, arranged for the files to be turned over to the FBI and the Navy. He also asked Kita and the other Japanese the same question that Reporter Nakatsuka had found so fruitless: did they know there was a Japanese attack on? No, they said solemnly, they didn’t know.

By now there was time for some of the formalities of war. At 11:15, 72-year-old Governor Joseph E. Poindexter read his Proclamation of Emergency over KGU. His voice trembled badly, but perhaps with good reason. One antiaircraft shell had already exploded in his driveway; another pursued him to his office, bursting in a corner of the Iolani Palace grounds. As the governor wound up his address, a phone call came through from the Army — get off the air; another attack was expected. The Governor’s aides complied with startling vigor — seizing him the instant he finished, rushing him down the stairs, into his car and away. The bewildered old man thought he must have done something very wrong on the broadcast and was under arrest.

In line with the Army’s order, both KGU and KGMB went off the air at 11:42. This was done, of course, to prevent enemy planes from beaming in on either station —undoubtedly a sound precaution, considering how useful Commander Fuchida had found the local radio. But the silence only added to the misery of the service wives, huddled in their homes, lonely and afraid, longing for any news. Most of them kept their radios on — listening for the occasional orders that still came over the regular stations, or to the harrowing Fifth Column rumors that poured out over the police radio.

Many of the wives were more than ready when formal evacuation of the Hickam and Pearl Harbor areas began at noon. The plan had been worked out long in advance — buses and car pools would take everyone to the University of Hawaii, the various public schools, the YWCA; from there the evacuees would eventually move in with families in safe areas who had volunteered to take them. Now the plan was under way — loudspeaker cars rolled up and down the post streets, bellowing out instructions to get ready.

At Hickam, Mrs. Arthur Fahrner struggled to load her five children into the family car. But as fast as she packed them in, they would squirm out and run back to the house for some favorite toy. Finally she was ready, but just as she started off, ten-year-old Dan came running out — nearly left behind when he made a last trip back for his swimming medal.

At Schofield, Major Virgil Miller’s family faced a different problem. A Chinese GI had been sent to their house to tell them where to go, and the Millers weren’t taking any chances. Fearing he was a Japanese soldier in American uniform, they made him shout his instructions through the locked front door.

Some didn’t wait for formal evacuation. When the planes strafing Pearl City discouraged 11-year-old Don Morton from searching for his brother Jerry, their mother lost no time. She just scooped Don up in the family car and set off for the landing where the boys had been fishing. There was no traffic, but she kept honking the horn anyhow. It finally stuck, adding to the general din. Near the landing, Jerry emerged from the algarroba bushes and climbed aboard — a Marine corporal had pushed him to safety just before getting hit himself.

The boys’ mother, Mrs. Thomas Croft, now turned the car around and headed for Honolulu. Huge explosions mushroomed up on their right. Thoroughly frightened, they stopped the car and ran into a cane field. There they sat for the next two hours … hands over their ears, heads between their knees. Whenever a plane flew by, Mrs. Croft would ask one of the boys to peek up and see if it was American. It never was.

Everyone had a different idea of safety. Mrs. Gerald Jacobs, another Pearl City Navy wife, stopped her car and stuck her head in a roadside bush — literally like an ostrich. Mrs. James Fischer stayed indoors, just as her husband told her to do. But for only so long. She suddenly put on her winter coat, ran out of Navy Housing Unit 1, and began hitchhiking to Honolulu. A family friend saw her and gently led her back to shelter. Mrs. E. M. Eaton joined a group of friends who zigzagged madly down back roads to the Mormon church.

They took along the things they thought would come in handy. Mrs. Joseph Cote picked up a loaf of bread, a can of tuna, but no can opener. Mrs. Arthur Gardiner carried a blanket, a can of orange juice, a butcher knife, and Pinocchio. She and her two children then joined several other families in a small railroad ravine behind the junior officers’ duplex quarters. Pinocchio proved a good idea, and the mothers took turns reading. Occasionally there were interruptions — cheers when a plane crashed, or an uneasy glance at some low-flying strafer —then back to the book again. As they read, they all did their best to keep a calm voice.

Once some Hawaiian-Japanese cane-field workers came running down the railroad track toward the little group. Everyone was sure the local Japanese had captured the island and this was the end. Mrs. Gardiner grabbed her butcher knife, ready to fight for her children’s lives. But the field hands veered off and bid in the cane, equally terrified that they were going to be massacred by an aroused white population.

The local Japanese had heard some rumors too. Early in the day the story spread that the Army planned to kill them all. Later this was modified — the Army would kill only the men, leave the women to starve.

There had already been some close calls. Five Japanese civilians had an especially narrow escape walking down a peaceful country road far from the fighting. They were spotted by Seaman George Cichon and several shipmates, who were bringing a truckload of ammunition from Lualualei Depot to Pearl Harbor. The driver stopped the truck, and one of the sailors wanted to shoot them all. At first the others more or less agreed, but suddenly someone said, “We are not beasts; these people had nothing to do with the attack.” The men sheepishly got back in the truck and drove on. During the entire incident not a word was spoken by the five Japanese.

It was in this atmosphere that a young Japanese named Tadao Fuchikami, wearing a green shirt and khaki pants, chugged up to Fort Shafter on a two-cylinder Indian Scout motorcycle at 11:45 A.M.

Fuchikami was an RCA messenger, and this morning his day had started as usual. He punched in around 7:30, killed a little time, then picked up a batch of cables waiting for delivery. The cables had been put in pigeonholes, according to district, and Fuchikami just happened to take Kalihi, which included Fort Shafter. He thumbed through the envelopes to plan his best route — one of his first stops should be the doctor on Vineyard Street. The one for Fort Shafter would come later — there was nothing on the envelope that indicated priority; it just carried the two words “Commanding General.”

As he started off, he was already aware of the war. The operator had said something about planes dogfighting; he could see the antiaircraft burst over Pearl; he knew it was the Japanese. But war or no war, he still felt he had his regular job to do.

This morning it was slow going. The traffic was a nightmare. Then as he headed toward Shafter, he ran into a National Guard roadblock. They advised him to go home, told him they almost mistook him for a Japanese paratrooper. This was quite a jolt — Fuchikami hadn’t realized how much his messenger’s uniform resembled what the parachutists were supposed to be wearing. From now on he felt very conspicuous.

Next he hit a police roadblock on Middle Street. Only defense workers could get through. He rode his motorcycle on the sidewalk up to the barrier, showed the police his Shafter message, and they finally let him pass. When he got to Fort Shafter itself, he surprisingly had no trouble at all. A sentry waved him right on in. He drove straight to the message center and delivered the cable.

The message was decoded and delivered to the adjutant at 2:58 P.M. He saw that it reached General Short right away, who in turn sent a copy to Admiral Kimmel. It was a cable from General Marshall in Washington, filed at the Army Signal Center for transmission via Western Union at 12:01 (6:31 A.M., Hawaii time) and received by Honolulu RCA at 7:33 A.M., just 22 minutes before the attack. It said that the Japanese were presenting an ultimatum at 1:00 P.M., Eastern Standard Time (7:30 A.M. in Honolulu) and helpfully explained, “Just what significance the hour set may have we do not know, but be on the alert accordingly …”

Admiral Kimmel told the Army courier that it wasn’t of the slightest interest any more and threw it in the waste basket.

He could have better used a message saying what the Japanese were up to now. They had disappeared completely. No one seemed to have the slightest idea where they had come from or where they had gone.

At first Kimmel thought they probably came from the north. He had always felt there was more possibility of an attack from the north than from the south. At 9:42 A.M. he even radioed Halsey on the Enterprise that there was “some indication” of enemy forces to the northwest.

But soon all the information ran the other way. At 9:50 A.M. CINCPAC reported two enemy carriers 30 miles southwest of Barbers Point. Already maneuvering in the area, the Minneapolis knew it wasn’t so, tried to scotch the report by radioing, “No carriers in sight.” The message came through, “Two carriers in sight.”

At 12:58 P.M. four Japanese transports were reported to the southwest … at 1:00 P.M. an enemy ship four miles off Barbers Point. A bearing on a Japanese carrier, which had briefly broken radio silence, could be read as coming from either directly north or directly south. The interpreter figuratively tossed a coin, called it directly south.

Recalling that two Japanese carriers had recently been detected at Kwajalein, Admiral Halsey played a hunch that fitted in nicely with the meager intelligence available — he began concentrating his search to the south and southwest.

The ships emerging from Pearl Harbor did their best to chase down the leads. When a message arrived reporting the enemy off Barbers Point, Admiral Draemel hoisted the signal “concentrate and attack.” There weren’t many ships to “concentrate” — just the St. Louis, Detroit, Phoenix, and a dozen destroyers — but they all dashed bravely forward. They, of course, found nothing, and as they steamed on to join Halsey, they were themselves identified as the enemy by an Enterprise scouting plane. This generated more reports pointing to the southwest, some of which were relayed to Admiral Draemel. Without realizing it, his ships were at one point searching for themselves.

The air search was having no better luck. At first the only planes available were some old unarmed amphibians based on Ford Island. They belonged to Utility Squadron One, which performed chores like carrying mail, towing targets, and photographing exercises. Nothing else could fly, so they had to be used; but it wasn’t an appealing assignment — even after rifles were provided for protection.

“I want three volunteers — you … you … and you,” Chief G. R. Jacobs told three of the squadron’s radiomen. Aviation Radioman Harry Mead soon found himself airborne in one of the planes. They had no luck, but they did establish that the Japanese weren’t lying off Oahu. It made no difference; the rumors rolled on.

The Army couldn’t get up any search planes in the early stages, but by mid-morning Major General Frederick Martin called Patwing 2 to put some bombers at the Navy’s disposal. That was what he was meant to do under the Army-Navy plan for “cooperation.” Nobody would give him a mission.

But General Martin heard somewhere that two carriers were south of Barbers Point, so he sent out four light bombers at 11:27 A.M. They found nothing. Then he sent some other planes a few miles to the north. They didn’t find anything either. That afternoon he made one more try — this time at the Navy’s request. He sent six B-17s to look for a carrier that was rumored to be 65 miles north of Oahu. They too found nothing.

On Ford Island, nine of the planes just in from the Enterprise were still undamaged, and Ensign Dobson rushed to get them in shape. Each one was loaded with a 500-pound bomb, and tank trucks stood by to gas them up. The pilots waited at the command center, swapping experiences and joyfully greeting latecomers who trickled in from forced landings all over the island. Lieutenant Dickinson arrived, having hitched one last ride — this time in a launch from the Navy Yard. He was surprised at the way men who had never been particularly close now fell on one another’s shoulders. One senior officer, who had always seemed a crotchety martinet, threw an arm around Dickinson and even produced a nickel, calling, “Somebody go and get this officer a cup of coffee …” (It was great while it lasted, but Dickinson also noted that within a couple of days relationships were back to normal.)

By 12:10 the planes were ready, the pilots climbed in, and Lieutenant Commander Halstead Hopping led them on a flight that scouted a wide sector 200 miles to the north. The right direction, but by now just a little too late.

As they returned to Pearl late that afternoon, the sun blazed unmercifully in Ensign Dobson’s face. He was dead tired, and it made him so very sleepy. He tried to concentrate, but his mind kept drifting off. Could it be, he wondered, that this day was just a dream … that when he got back to Ford Island, he could go home to his family after all?

As the search dragged on, the best clues lay untouched. Major Truman Landon couldn’t interest anybody in the Japanese planes he saw flying north when he was bringing in his B-17. Lieutenant Patriarca had seen Japanese planes flying north too, but he was so concerned about alerting the Enterprise that he didn’t think of anything else. The Opana radar plot had quite a story to tell, but when the Navy asked the Army radar people whether they had any information on the Japanese flight in, nobody knew anything. And everyone forgot that radar not only can track planes in but also track them out. Opana carefully plotted the planes returning to the north — and the information center was manned by now —but in the excitement no one did anything with this data.

It made no difference to Commander Fuchida. The Japanese leader didn’t even try to cover his tracks on the flight back to the carriers. There just wasn’t enough gas for deception. As fast as the bombers finished their work, they rendezvoused with the fighters 20 miles northwest of Kaena Point, then flew back in groups. The fighters had no homing device and depended on the larger planes to guide them to the carriers.

Fuchida himself hung around a little while. He wanted to snap a few pictures, drop by all the bases, and get some idea of what was accomplished. The smoke interfered a good deal, but he felt sure four battleships were sunk and three others badly damaged. It was harder to tell about the airfields, but there were no planes up, so perhaps that was his answer.

As he headed back alone around eleven o’clock, a fighter streaked toward him, banking from side to side. A moment of tension — then he saw the rising sun emblem. One of the Zuikaku’s fighters had been left behind. It occurred to Fuchida that there might be others too, so he went back to the rendezvous point for one last check. There he found a second fighter aimlessly circling about; it fell in behind, and the three planes wheeled off together toward the northwest — last of the visitors to depart.

At his end, Admiral Kusaka did his best to help. He moved the carriers to within 190 miles of Pearl Harbor. He wasn’t meant to go closer than 200 miles, but he knew that even an extra five or ten miles might make a big difference to a plane short of gas or crippled by enemy gunfire. He wanted to give the fliers every possible break.

Now everything had been done, and Admiral Kusaka stood on the bridge of the Akagi anxiously scanning the southern horizon. It was just after 10:00 A.M. when he saw the first faint black dots — some flying in groups, some in pairs, some alone. On the Shokaku, the first plane Lieutenant Ebina saw was a single fighter skimming the sea like a swallow, as it headed for the carrier. It barely made the ship.

Gas was low … nerves were frayed … time was short. In the rush, normal landing procedures were scrapped. As fast as the planes came in, they were simply dragged aside to allow enough room for another to land. Yet there were few serious mishaps. As one fighter landed on the Shokaku, the carrier took a sudden dip and the plane toppled over. The pilot crawled out without a scratch. Lieutenant Yano ran out of gas and had to ditch beside the carrier — he and his crew were hauled aboard, none the worse for their swim.

Some familiar faces were missing. Twenty-seven-year-old Ippei Goto, who this morning had donned his ensign’s uniform for the first time, failed to get back to the Kaga. Baseball-loving Lieutenant Fusata Iida didn’t reach the Soryu. Artistic Lieutenant Mimori Suzuki never made the Akagi — he was the pilot who crashed into the Curtiss. In all, 29 planes with 55 men were lost.

But 324 planes came safely home, while the deck crews waved their forage caps. The men swarmed around the pilots as they climbed from their cockpits. Congratulations poured in from all sides. As Lieutenant Hashimoto wearily made his way to his quarters on the Hiryu, everyone seemed to be asking what was it like … what did he do … what did he see.

Now that it was all over, many of the pilots felt a curious letdown. Some begged for another chance because they missed their assigned targets. Others said they were dissatisfied because they had only “near-misses.” Commander Amagai, flight deck officer of the Hiryu, tried to cheer them up. He assured them that a near-miss was often an effective blow. Then he had an even brighter idea for lifting their spirits: “We’re not returning to Tokyo; now we’re going to head for San Francisco.”

At the very least, they expected another crack at Oahu. Even while Commander Amagai was cheering up the pilots, he was rearming and refueling the planes for a new attack. When Lieutenant Hashimoto told his men they would probably be going back, he thought he detected a few pale faces; but, on the whole, everyone was enthusiastic. On the Akagi, the planes were being lined up for another take-off as Commander Fuchida landed at 1:00 P.M. — the last plane in.

When Fuchida reported to the bridge, a heated discussion was going on. It turned out another attack wasn’t so certain after all. For a moment they postponed any decision, to hear Fuchida’s account. After he finished, Admiral Nagumo announced somewhat ponderously, “We may then conclude that anticipated results have been achieved.”

The statement had a touch of finality that showed the way the admiral’s mind was working. He had always been against the operation, but had been overruled. So he had given it his very best and accomplished everything they asked of him. He had gotten away with it, but he certainly wasn’t going to stretch his luck.

Commander Fuchida argued hard: there were still many attractive targets; there was virtually no defense left. Best of all, another raid might draw the carriers in. Then, if the Japanese returned by way of the Marshalls instead of going north, they might catch the carriers from behind. Somebody pointed out that this was impossible — the tankers had been sent north to meet the fleet and couldn’t be redirected south in time. Fuchida wasn’t at all deterred; well, they ought to attack Oahu again anyhow.

It was Admiral Kusaka who ended the discussion. Just before 1:30 P.M. the chief of staff turned to Nagumo and announced what he planned to do, subject to the commander’s approval: “The attack is terminated. We are withdrawing.”

“Please do,” Nagumo replied.

In the home port at Kure, Admiral Yamamoto sensed it would happen. He sat impassively in the Nagato’s operations room while the staff buzzed with anticipation. The first attack was such a success everyone agreed there should be a second. Only the admiral remained noncommittal. He knew all too well the man in charge. Suddenly he muttered in almost a whisper: “Admiral Nagumo is going to withdraw.”

Minutes later the news came through just as Yamamoto predicted. Far out in the Pacific the signal flags ran up on the Akagi’s yardarm, ordering a change in course. At 1:30 P.M. the great fleet swung about and headed back home across the northern Pacific.

South of Oahu, Ensign Sakamaki was still trying. But despite all the vows he exchanged with Seaman Inagaki their midget sub was no nearer Pearl Harbor. A brief encounter with a reef had damaged one torpedo tube beyond repair. About noon they ran on another reef and smashed the other tube. They worked clear again, but now they had no weapon left.

“What are we going to do, sir?” asked Seaman Inagaki.

“We’re going to plunge into an enemy battleship, preferably the Pennsylvania. We’re going to crash against the ship and if we’re still alive, we’re going to kill as many as we can.”

To Sakamaki’s surprise, Inagaki bought the idea. He tightened his grip on the wheel and shouted, “Full speed ahead!” But it was no use. The afternoon turned into a jumbled series of frustrations. Sakamaki was dimly aware of trying and trying but just not getting anywhere. The sub wouldn’t steer … the air pressure was more than 40 pounds … the hull reeked with the smell of bitter acid. He choked for air; his eyes were smarting; he was only half-conscious. Occasionally he could hear Inagaki sobbing in the dark, and he was crying too.

“Let’s make one more try,” he gasped, but the next thing he knew he saw Diamond Head off to port. It was dusk and he had wandered a good ten miles from Pearl Harbor. He was beaten and he knew it. With his last strength he set his course for the rendezvous point off Lanai Island, where he was to meet the mother sub I-24. Then he passed out.

CHAPTER XI

“Chief, My Mother and Dad Gave Me This Sword”

SUNDAY AFTERNOON, PEARL HARBOR was sure of only one thing — wherever the Japanese were, they would be back.

The Pennsylvania, still squatting in Drydock No. 1, trained her big 14-inch guns down the channel mouth. Fireman H. E. Emory of the California teamed up with an officer who had found an old Lewis machine gun. They made a swivel mount from the wheel of an overturned cart and established themselves on a mooring quay. On Ford Island, Seaman James Layman joined a working party filling and loading sandbags. He skinned his knuckles on the burlap, got blisters shoveling the sand; but the situation was desperate and he worked until it was too dark to sec.

At the Navy Yard a Coxey’s Army of servicemen, civilian yard workers, and 100 percent amateurs struggled to get the undamaged ships in condition to fight. An officer of the Pennsylvania asked civilian yard worker Harry Danner to help find extra men to load ammunition. There were a number of yard hands around, but even on December 7 a vestige of protocol remained — the officer didn’t feel he could give orders to a civilian. So the two men went around together, Danner serving as ambassador. They soon had enough volunteers, and a human chain was formed between three loaded whaleboats and the Pennsylvania’s ammunition hoist. They transferred over a thousand bags of powder.

Danner next headed for the Honolulu to help get her engines reassembled. He had banged up a foot and thrown away his shoes, but he hobbled across the Navy Yard as fast as he could with another worker. They might as well have been the Japanese invasion force. Trigger-happy sentries were now stopping anybody not in uniform, and it took a lot of persuading to get through. But the work was finished by 10:30 that night.

At the next pier other yard workers struggled to install the San Francisco’s antiaircraft batteries. James Spagnola clambered around the guns, still sporting the golf shoes he wore when the attack began. It was a job that normally took two weeks, but this time it was done in one day.

Through all the pounding and hammering and the clatter of pneumatic drills, a jukebox blared away at the pier canteen. Most of the time it played “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire.”

There was music on the Maryland too — her band tooted bravely on the quarterdeck while her gunners got ready for the next attack. The Tennessee was just as ready, but the rest of Battleship Row — once the core of the fleet’s strength — was now out of the game.

The Arizona sprawled twisted and burning. A small boat eased alongside her fantail; Lieutenant K. S. Masterson climbed aboard and hauled down the torn, oil-stained colors still flying from her stern. He felt they should be saved as a war memento. Quartermaster Edward Vecera replaced the West Virginia’s battle colors with a fresh flag borrowed from another ship. He asked an officer what to do with the dirty, ragged bunting just hauled down. The officer replied that normally all battle colors were sent to Annapolis, where they would be displayed in a glass case, but this time —well, maybe it would be better to burn them. Vecera carried out the suggestion.

On the West Virginia’s quarterdeck a devoted band of officers still fought the fires that raged throughout the ship. Lieutenant Comander Doir Johnson looked at the melted porthole glass and thought of the limp watches painted by Salvador Dali. Against fire that hot, nothing could be done. The group was finally forced off about five o’clock. But men still lived on the West Virginia. Far below decks three sailors sat, hopelessly trapped in the pump room. They clung to life until the day before Christmas Eve.

It was a different story on the upturned Oklahoma. Little knots of men swarmed over her bottom — tracing the steady tapping that came from within … pounding back signals of encouragement … calling for more cutting equipment. Teams from the Maryland, the salvage ship Widgeon, the Rigel, the Solace, the Navy Yard, the Oklahoma herself worked at half a dozen different places along the huge hull.

The job wasn’t just a matter of cutting a hole and pulling somebody out. The tapping echoed and reverberated through the hollow space along the keel until nobody could say where it really came from. The cutters had to make an educated guess and, once inside the hull, search out the source. They had to stumble back and forth through a dark, eerie, upside-down world … tapping and listening for answering taps … until they could pinpoint the right spot. Then more cutting to get finally through to the trapped men.

There were bitter disappointments. The first two men located were asphyxiated because the acetylene torch ate up all the oxygen. A call went out for pneumatic cutting equipment — slower but perhaps less dangerous. Julio DeCastro, a Navy Yard foreman and expert chipper, took out a crew of 21 yard hands, went to work with drills and air hammers. But a new danger arose —this slower cutting method let the trapped air escape faster than the hole could be made. As the air hissed out, the water would rise, threatening to drown the men before they could be freed. The cutters used rags, handkerchiefs, anything to keep the air from escaping too fast. They weren’t always successful.

The teams lost all track of time. At one point the Maryland sent over some stew, and Fireman John Gobidas of the Rigel paused long enough to grab a bite. There were no spoons or plates; he just dipped his hands —foul with oil and muck — into the stew and spread it on some bread. He thought it tasted very good.

Inside the Oklahoma the trapped men waited. Eight seamen buried in the steering engine room set up a curious democracy. Every move or decision affecting their lives was decided by vote. Their first step was to pool their clothing and their mattresses — the room was where they always slept — and plug an air vent that spouted a steady stream of water. Next, they investigated possible routes of escape, but water gushed through every door they tried, so they voted to sit back and wait. They found some tools and banged the sides of the ship, but most of the time they just sat. They had plenty of chance to meditate, and 17-year-old Seaman Willard Beal thought of all the mean things he had ever done to anyone.

Just forward, in the passageway off the handling room of No. 4 turret, 30 other men were also waiting. They sat in their shorts, covered with oil, with one flashlight between them. The only hope seemed to lie in an escape hatch that led to the top deck, which now, of course, was straight down. Conceivably, a man might hold his breath … pull himself 30 feet down the hatch … cross the deck … and come up into the harbor outside the ship. But it was a very long shot. Several tried and came back, unable to do it. One succeeded — a nonswimmer, nonathlete from Brooklyn named Weisman. He told the rescue crews where to look, and a cutting team was organized.

The men in the handling-room passageway had no way of knowing this. They only knew that the air was growing worse and the water was slowly rising as the air was used up. By late afternoon there were just ten men left, and Seaman Stephen Young bet money they would suffocate before they drowned. His friend Seaman Wilber T. Hinsperger took up the bet.

They had by now lost all hope of ever getting out. Still, no one cracked. Instead, they opened a door into the “Lucy Bag” (the ship’s lost and found locker) … got out pea coats and mattresses … and lay down to await the end.

More hours passed. Then suddenly —incredibly — they heard distant banging and hammering echo down from above. At first it would come and go; then it drew closer. Young picked up a dog wrench and pounded back “SOS.” The banging grew steadier until finally it was right outside. A voice yelled through the bulkhead, asking the men if they could stand a hole being drilled. Everyone shouted back yes, but it was a close thing. The air rushed out, the water surged up, and as the plate was twisted off, the men scrambled out just in time. Grinning Navy and civilian workers boosted them up through the ship’s bottom; and they emerged into the cool, fresh air to find it was — Monday.

Rescuers rushed up with oranges and cigarettes, and a few minutes later Commander Jesse Kenworthy, the Oklahoma’s executive officer, came by to see if they were all right. He had been on the ship’s bottom directing rescue work ever since the attack. He would still be there at 5:30 Monday afternoon when Willard Beal emerged from the steering engine room; in fact, he wouldn’t leave until the last of 32 survivors was pulled from the Oklahoma’s hull some 36 hours after she rolled over into the Pearl Harbor mud.

But all this lay in the future. That Sunday afternoon the survivors were just starting to emerge. Three men were hauled out of a cofferdam, one of them clutching a basketball. He clung to it fiercely, wouldn’t give it up even after reaching the Maryland’s sick bay. Speculation ran wild — some said he had saved it as a reserve supply of oxygen … others that he planned to use it as a lifebuoy … others that he was just a typical basketball player. Ensign Charles Mandell heard that, while waiting for rescue, he had even shot a few baskets through a hole in the cofferdam beam.

Men were also trapped on the listing California. About three o’clock a rescue party cut into a compartment that was flooded with oil, hauled out two hospital corpsmen. They slumped on deck, looking like two bundles of sodden, oil-soaked rags. Pharmacist’s Mate William Lynch walked by, calling the names of men still missing from his unit. One of the bundles suddenly popped up, crying “That’s me!”

Other crew members waged a losing fight to keep the California afloat. The tender Swan drew alongside, contributed some pumps, and Radioman Charles Michaels helped drag up mattresses in a futile effort to plug some of the leaks. It was hopeless. A diver from the salvage ship Widgeon reported a hole as big as a house. Someone asked him if a collision mat would help, and he gloomily replied, “I don’t believe they make them that big.”

Later more salvage experts turned up from the Vestal, but even their skill was not enough. Finally it was decided that the ship couldn’t stay afloat but could be kept in an upright position with planned flooding. Gently the California settled to the bottom of the harbor.

The Nevada sat on the bottom too, and in the wreckage of the captain’s quarters a sword lay twisted and burned behind a charred bureau. Later, when Captain Scanland found it there, he held it out in both his hands and turned to CPO Jack Haley, who happened to be standing nearby: “Chief, my Mother and Dad gave me this sword when I graduated from the Naval Academy many years ago.”

Haley could sense all the captain’s pent-up emotion and grief at being away from his ship during the attack. The chief understood perhaps better than most, for the Nevada meant everything to him too — she was his first and only ship, his home for the past 12 years. He couldn’t hold back the tears.

Down in the Nevada’s plotting room, Ensign Merdinger stubbornly stuck to his post. He knew from the water dripping into the room that the deck above was flooded. And he knew from the silent phones that few hands were left below decks. There was no longer any need for an information center; still he hated to leave. At three o’clock a rush of water through the seams of the door left no other choice. He phoned topside and was told to come on up. While the water poured in and swirled around the crew’s feet, they carefully unplugged the phones, neatly coiled the extension lines, and hung them on their usual hooks.

But the casual approach had its limits. As the men scrambled up the shaft to the conning tower, it occurred to Merdinger that normally some of them might have difficulty making the climb; this time there was no trouble at all.

On deck, preparations were being made for a last-ditch stand. Someone handed Marine Private Payton McDaniel a rifle and two rounds of ammunition. Slender rations, but McDaniel later discovered the rifle had no firing pin anyhow. A Marine detail was sent to the beach to dig emplacements for the World War I machine guns and BARs that had been salvaged. The basic defense plan — hold the ship as long as possible, then take to the hills.

At Hickam, Corporal John Sherwood and Master Sergeant Bonnie Neighbors were also preparing for a last stand. They dragged an old C-33 into the boondocks, dug a good position around it, and set up two machine guns. Private J. H. Thompson joined another man from the 50th Reconnaisance Squadron, who had established a machine-gun nest near the ruined Snake Ranch. The man had taken the trouble to stock it with beer and wine salvaged from the wreckage. Some of the bottles were broken, and the bugs had to be strained out, but this was a minor hardship. The two men cheerfully defended the position all afternoon.

“Help yourself” was also the rule at the officers’ club. Everyone expected the Japanese that night, so the food and refreshments might as well be free. At base headquarters Colonel Cheney Bertholf, the post adjutant, carted out his files and burned them. Even Colonel Farthing, the base commander, was sure the Japanese planned to take over Hickam — that was why they didn’t bomb the runways or control tower. Master Sergeant M. D. Mannion felt the place would fall so soon that he might as well pull out and go to Schofield. Up there he might at least be of some service in standing off the enemy.

Actually, Schofield was on the move. Most of the infantry and artillery were now at assigned defense positions around the island — the 98th Coast Artillery at Wheeler … the 28th Infantry at Waikiki … the 27th farther down the shore … other units along the north coast, on the heights above Pearl, and at the bases on the windward side.

As the long column of troops rolled into Kaneohe around 2:30 P.M., Mess Attendant Walter Simmons had only one thought: they had been run out of Schofield. But he too was prepared for a final stand. He now carried an old Springfield rifle and had bandoleers of ammunition strung over his shoulder and around his waist. He felt ready for anything and fancied that he looked just a little like Pancho Villa.

The men shoveled out foxholes —Simmons dug his in the unfinished bottom of the officers’ swimming pool — and set up machine guns all over the steep hill in the center of the base. By sundown Kaneohe was prepared for the next attack.

The island’s scattered defenses were now being directed by General Short from Aliamanu Crater, three miles west of Fort Shatter. The command post was established in a deep ordnance storage tunnel — ideal for holding out against the coming assault. The general had moved in during the morning, trailed by the usual retinue of staff and communications men.

Lieutenant Samuel Bradlyn was establishing the link with Hickam, and as he set up his code equipment, he watched General Short, General Martin, and other high-ranking officers huddle together. They looked terribly worried, and for the first time Bradlyn realized that even generals were human beings who didn’t always know what to do and had to pace back and forth while making decisions.

Of one thing they were certain — there had to be martial law. General Short approached old Governor Poindexter on this shortly after noon. The governor dragged his feet — he thought it was probably necessary, yet he hated to do it. He finally said he wanted to check with the White House first, would give Short his answer in an hour. He put through a call to the President at 12:40 P.M., and it didn’t help when the operator — now acting under the Navy censor — kept insisting, “What are you going to talk about?” The governor had been shoved aside already.

The President was properly soothing, agreed that martial law was all for the best. Then Short reappeared to press the point: for all he knew landing parties were on the way … the raid was probably the prelude to all-out attack … he couldn’t afford to take chances. The governor finally signed the Proclamation, and martial law was announced at 4:25 P.M.

The civilians considered themselves in the front lines anyhow. Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan, joined a group of men digging slit trenches along the shore. Others rallied to the Territorial Guard, which was hastily built around the University of Hawaii ROTC unit. As the 2nd Battalion mobilized at Wahiawa, a sergeant drove up in a command car with some welcome news — the Army had sent him over from Schofield to help. He was a godsend: the unit had no equipment, and the sergeant knew how to get everything: blankets, mess gear, guns. He proved an ingenious, tireless worker and ultimately stayed with the outfit a whole month. Then one day he commandeered some whisky from a padlocked liquor store, and that proved his undoing. When the proprietor complained, it turned out the man was no sergeant at all — just a prisoner released from the Schofield stockade during the raid. He had immediately stolen a sergeant’s uniform … then the command car … and had been stealing ever since, filling the home guards’ desperate needs. He was a sort of military Robin Hood.

Nearly every organized group on Oahu staked out something to do. Boy Scouts fought fires, served coffee, ran messages. The American Legion turned out for patrol and sentry duty. One Legionnaire struggled into his 1917 uniform, had a dreadful time remembering how to wind his puttees and put on his insignia. He took it out on his wife, and she told him to leave her alone —go out and fight his old enemy, the Germans. The San Jose College football team, in town from California for a benefit game the following weekend, signed up with the Police Department for guard duty. Seven of them joined the force, and Quarterback Paul Tognetti stayed on for good, ultimately going into the dairy business.

A local committee, called the Major Disaster Council, had spent months preparing for this kind of day; now their foresight was paying off. Forty-five trucks belonging to American Sanitary Laundry, New Fair Dairy, and other local companies sped off to Hickam as converted ambulances. Dr. Forrest Pinkerton dashed to the Hawaii Electric Company’s refrigerator, collected the plasma stored there by the Chamber of Commerce’s Blood Bank. He piled it in the back of his car, distributed it to various hospitals, then rushed on the air, appealing for more donors. Over 500 appeared within an hour, swamping Dr. John Devereux and his three assistants. They took the blood as fast as they could, ran out of containers, used sterilized Coca-Cola bottles.

All kinds of people went through the line. Navy wife Maureen Hayter was shocked when offered a swig of Old Grand Dad afterward — it just didn’t seem right. Another woman was a well-known prostitute. She couldn’t give blood but wanted to do something. Dr. Devereux put her to work cleaning bottles and tubes. She turned out to be his most faithful volunteer.

Civilian doctors and nurses converged on the Army’s Tripler Hospital. Among them went Dr. John J. Moorhead, a distinguished New York surgeon who happened to be in Honolulu delivering a series of lectures. Some 300 doctors had attended his first talk Thursday morning, half of them Army and Navy men. Dr. Moorhead had been an Army surgeon in World War I, loved the service, and took great pains to see they were invited. The service doctors accepted with enthusiasm —Dr. Moorhead was a world-famous specialist and, unlike almost everyone else, he could speak from actual battle experience.

On Friday night the doctor was slated to speak on “Back Injuries” but at the last minute the schedule was juggled and he spoke instead on “The Treatment of Wounds.” If the Program Committee had known the attack was coming, it couldn’t have lined up a better subject.

Dr. Moorhead had Saturday off, but he was to speak on “Burns” at 9:00 A.M. Sunday. As he ate his breakfast, guns boomed in the distance. Walking through the hotel lobby, he heard that Pearl Harbor was under attack. He told Dr. Hill, who was driving him to the lecture, but the local doctor was unimpressed: “Oh, you hear all kinds of stories around this place.”

They turned on the car radio and picked up the 8:40 bulletin. That convinced them and they dropped by Dr. Hill’s house while he told his wife and children to take shelter. Then they drove on to the Mabel L. Smyth Auditorium so that Dr. Moorhead could give his talk. The two doctors were having the same trouble as everyone else making the lightning adjustment to war … realizing that it also affected their own day.

The lecture hall was almost empty —only 50 doctors instead of the usual 300, and no Army or Navy men. As Dr. Moorhead reached the platform shells began landing outside. He cheerily told the audience that the noise reminded him of Chateau-Thierry. Then he pointed out that this was Sunday, so he would give a sermon with an appropriate text: “Be ye also ready, for in the hour that ye know not …”

At this point Dr. Jesse Smith, a local physician, burst into the hall shouting that 12 surgeons were needed at Tripler right away. That did it — speaker and audience bolted from the room together.

Dr. Moorhead and his pickup team of civilian surgeons spent the next 11 hours operating with hardly any break. Once during the afternoon he dropped down to the mess hall for a bite, ran into Colonel Miller, the hospital commandant. The doctor suggested — perhaps a little wistfully — that maybe he should go on active duty. Miller said he would see what he could do, and a little later poked his head into the operating room: “You’re in the Army now!” To Dr. Moorhead, this wonderful service was even more wonderful — no forms, questionnaires, or fingerprints; yet he had become a full colonel in two hours.

As he worked away, Colonel Moorhead displayed a mixture of competence and optimism that did wonders for the wounded. “Son,” he told one boy, “you’ve been through a lot of hell, and you’re going into some more. This foot has to come off. But there’s been many a good pirate with only one leg!”

The wounded needed this kind of cheerfulness. Without it another boy who had lost a leg wanted only to die — he was sure his girl would no longer have him. Private Edward Oveka had a shattered leg too; and after he came out of ether, he was afraid to see if he still had his foot. He finally worked up his courage and took a look — it was still there.

Whatever their feelings, the men were incredibly quiet and uncomplaining. At Queens Hospital, one man lay riddled with shrapnel. When Dr. Forrest Pinkerton began explaining that he would have to delay treating the less serious wounds, the man calmly broke in, “Just do what you can, I know there are other people waiting.”

Occasionally the mildest of disagreements would arise. At Hickam, Captain Carl Hoffman thought a drink might buck up a badly wounded major. He was telling someone to measure a shot when the major interrupted, “Don’t tell him how much to put in the glass — fill it up.” At the Navy Hospital, a seaman with a bad stomach wound wanted orange juice, but the doctor thought this would be fatal and ordered water instead. When the man objected, the doctor finally whispered to the nurse to get the juice — he would probably die anyway. “I heard you, Doctor,” called the seaman, “and I still want orange juice.” Perhaps due to this sort of determination, a week later the man was doing fine.

Everyone did his best to make the wounded comfortable. Morphine did its work too, and many drifted off to fitful sleep. Radioman Glenn Lane awoke long enough on the hospital ship Solace to see an attendant bending over him with some soup. The man was Filipino, and Lane started with fright — he was sure he had been captured by the Japanese.

A man didn’t need narcotics to see himself in enemy hands. Dark, dreary thoughts ran through the minds of many still able to fight. Chief Peter Chang saw himself pulling a rickshaw. Fireman John Gobidas expected to be a corpse or a prisoner, but he prayed that Chief Metalsmith Burl W. Brookshire would somehow survive, to inspire others with the courage he had given the men on the Rigel. Electrician’s Mate James Power thought about those oriental brain tortures, then remembered he was a Texan and decided to make this another Alamo.

Actually, the only Japanese invasion of the Hawaiian Islands was by now well under way. It was just about church time when it all began on Niihau, westernmost island of the Hawaiian chain. Niihau was privately owned by the Robinson family, who operated the island mainly as a sheep and cattle ranch and lovingly preserved it as a pure Polynesian paradise — no visitors, no modern conveniences, no Western gadgets like guns, telephones, or radios. Once a week a boat came over from Kauai, 20 miles away, and left supplies at Kii Landing on the island’s northern tip. There was no other communication with the outside world. In case of serious trouble, it was arranged that a signal fire would be built on a mountain in sight of Kauai. Otherwise, it was just assumed that everything was all right.

And this Sunday everything was all right, as the islanders flocked to the little church in Puuwai, about 15 miles down the west shore from Kii Landing. Puuwai was the only village on the island — a collection of small houses scattered among the rocks, cactus, and keawa trees. Everybody lived there except the Robinsons, who had a homestead at Kie Kie, two miles away.

But just as everyone was entering the church, two planes flew overhead. The islanders all noticed that one plane was sputtering and smoking; they all saw red circles under the wings. And even though they were just ranch hands and cowboys, carefully protected from the problems of the world, many of them sensed trouble far more quickly than their sophisticated neighbors on Oahu. Most recognized the Japanese insignia; some even guessed an attack on Pearl Harbor.

About two o’clock one of the planes reappeared, circling low over the pastures and hedges. The pilot picked out a spot and bounced to a heavy landing. He bumped over some rocks, through a fence, and stopped near the house of Hawila Kaleohano.

There was trouble right away. Hawila ran up and yanked open the canopy; the pilot reached for a pistol; Hawila grabbed it first and pulled the aviator from the plane. Then the pilot began searching inside his shirt; Hawila tore it open and snatched out some papers and a map.

By now the whole island was crowding around. The villagers were shouting questions, and the pilot was shaking his head, trying to show that he didn’t understand English … he could only speak Japanese.

There was just one thing to do — send for Harada, one of the two Japanese on Niihau. He was a 30-year-old Nisei who had come to the island a year ago as a housekeeper, now worked as both the Robinsons’ caretaker and an assistant beekeeper. The head beekeeper was the other Japanese, an old man named Sintani, who had lived on Niihau for many years.

Even with Harada’s help, no one got much out of the pilot. He said he flew over from Honolulu; he denied any raid; he was vague about the reason for his trip and all those bullet holes in the plane. Finally the islanders decided to hold him for Mr. Aylmer Robinson himself, who was due in Monday on the weekly boat from Kauai. He would know what to do.

Monday morning they escorted the pilot to Kii Landing and guarded him there all day. But the boat never came.

Tuesday they tried again. Still no boat.

Wednesday and Thursday passed, and by now the islanders were thoroughly alarmed. Harada came up with a bright idea: Wouldn’t it help to move the pilot from Puuwai to his place at Kie Kie; this might calm down the village. Everyone agreed, and it was done.

By Friday it was high time for a signal fire. A group of men went off to build it, and everyone else settled down for another tense day of waiting. At Kie Kie a lone Hawaiian, named Haniki, watched the pilot. In the last day or so the Japanese had opened up a good deal. At first he admitted that he could read and write English, even if he couldn’t speak it … later that there had indeed been a raid on Pearl Harbor. But, he said, he liked it here and hoped to settle down on Niihau after the war was over. He apparently wasn’t such a bad fellow after all.

The pilot asked if he could see Harada, and Haniki took him over to the honey house. The two Japanese talked together for a few minutes, then all three men strolled into an adjoining storehouse, where the nets and hives were kept.

Haniki suddenly found himself facing two guns. Harada had stolen a revolver and shotgun from the Robinson house … hidden them in the storehouse until the right moment … and now the battle for Niihau was on.

The two Japanese locked up Haniki in the storehouse and dashed through the underbrush to the road. They held up a passing sulky, forcing out a Hawaiian woman and seven children. Then they jumped in, pointed the gun at a young girl on the horse, made her drive them to Puuwai as fast as she could. As they neared the village, they jumped off and raced for Hawila’s house to get the pilot’s papers. Hawila saw them coming and bolted for the fields.

Harada and the airman searched the house but found nothing. After an unsuccessful attempt to recruit Sintani, Niihau’s other Japanese, the two men started searching through all the houses in the village. Again and again they shouted for Hawila, threatened to shoot everyone unless he was immediately produced. But this was an empty threat because almost all the villagers were now hiding in the fields. They did find an ancient woman, Mrs. Huluoulani, who stayed behind reading her Bible. She ignored their threats, and not knowing quite how to handle her, they left her.

They had a better idea anyhow. They stripped the Japanese plane of its machine guns and once again walked among the houses. This time they yelled that they would shoot up the whole place unless they found Hawila. As it grew dark, they began ransacking the homes in earnest. They ripped apart Hawila’s house and finally discovered the pilot’s pistol and map — but still no sign of his papers. They worked on through the night, turned the houses inside out, one after the other. Toward dawn on Saturday the thirteenth, they were back at Hawila’s house, for one last search. Again no luck. So they burned the place down, hoping to destroy the papers too.

All this time, except for a brief period around 3:00 A.M., curious eyes peeked at the two Japanese from the bushes and weeds that grew in the rocky fields. The islanders had by no means accepted the capture of Puuwai, but after all, the Japanese had the only guns on Niihau. At a strategy meeting in the cactus grove behind the village it was decided to send the women and children to some caves in the hills, then return after dark and try to capture the two men. Somehow this plan fell through, but Beni Kanahali and another Hawaiian did manage to steal all the machine-gun ammunition, and that was a big step forward.

Meanwhile Hawila had hurried up the mountain to tell the men to get the signal fire going. But when they heard the news, they decided the fire wouldn’t tell enough of the story. They must go themselves. So six of the men ran to Kii Landing, jumped in a whaleboat, rowed off for help.

After sixteen hours of steady rowing, they reached Kauai at three o’clock Saturday afternoon. They found Aylmer Robinson; he found the military authorities; and a detachment of soldiers, the six Hawaiians, and Mr. Robinson himself were soon racing back to the rescue in the lighthouse tender Kukui.

Long before they got there the invasion had reached its climax. About 7:00 A.M. Beni Kanahali, having succeeded in stealing the ammunition during the night, tried his luck again. He sneaked back to the village to see what was going on. His wife came with him, and they both were promptly captured. There were the usual demands for Hawila, but Beni was now tired of the whole thing. He told Harada to take the gun away from the pilot before he hurt somebody. Harada said he couldn’t, so Beni jumped the man himself. Then his wife piled in, then Harada on top of her, and for a few seconds the four of them scuffled about.

Harada pulled the woman away. She kicked and clawed as hard as she could. Beni yelled to leave her alone — or it would be Harada’s turn next. The pilot jerked his arm free and shot Beni three times — groin, stomach, and upper leg.

According to legend, at this point Beni got mad. As a matter of fact, he was mad already. But he did now think he might die, and he decided to kill the pilot before he could hurt anyone else. With a great heave he picked the man up by his neck and one leg — he had often done it to a sheep — and smashed his head against a stone wall. Harada took one look, let Beni’s wife go, pointed the shotgun at himself, and pulled the trigger.

CHAPTER XII

“We’re Leaving Now — Explode Gloriously!”

IT WAS JUST SUNSET when Ensign Ed Jacoby trudged ashore after losing the fight against the West Virginia’s fires. As he started toward the Ford Island BOQ for a sandwich, a bugle sounded evening colors. He snapped to attention, and the simple ceremony — taking place as always, despite the day’s disasters — reminded him that the country lived on … that it had survived blows in the past and could do so again.

Nurse Valera Vaubel stood at attention, too, as the flag was lowered at the Navy Hospital. Then she joined some others in a spontaneous cheer. At least this sundown she was still free.

But how much longer no one knew. Certainly not Ensign Cleo Dobson, as he sat on the veranda of the old BOQ, talking over the future with some of the other Enterprise pilots. About all they could decide: they were in a real shooting war and right on the front line. Somebody suggested food, and that seemed a good idea, for they had eaten nothing since leaving the Enterprise at 6:00 A.M. They raided the deserted kitchen and found some steaks in the refrigerator. The salt and utensils had all disappeared, but they cooked the steaks anyhow on the big range and ate them sitting on the veranda. It was dark now, but they could see well enough by the flickering light of the flames on the Arizona.

Farther down Battleship Row, acetylene torches flared on the upturned hull of the Oklahoma, but the rest of the harbor was dark. Within the blacked-out ships, men had their first chance to rest … and worry. On the Raleigh everything had happened so fast during the day that Yeoman Charles Knapp didn’t have a chance to be scared. But now he was off watch, and as he lay on a desk for a few minutes’ rest, his mind flooded with questions. Would he ever see his mother and sister again, or watch a football game or love a girl or drink a beer or drive a car?

Certainly the outlook wasn’t encouraging. Knapp heard that paratroopers were now dropping on Waikiki … that more landings were in progress on the north shore … and as if the Japanese weren’t enough, that Germans were flying the planes. There was no doubt about it — one seaman swore that he had seen one of the captured pilots … a big, blond-headed Prussian … even heard him talking German.

On the gunboat Sacramento, word also spread that one of the pilots was blond, but he was apparently some kind of blond Japanese. Others spoke of huge six-footers, quite different from the Japanese everyone was used to.

Even more terrifying were the stories that the pilots were Hawaiian-born or American-educated. Seaman Frank Lewis of the Dobbin heard that the Japanese who crashed on the Curtiss was wearing a University of Oregon ring. At the Marine Barracks Private E. H. Robison heard that he was a University of Southern California man — Class of ’37 or ’39, people weren’t quite sure which. At Fort Shaffer, Lieutenant William Keogh heard that the pilots were wearing McKinley High School sweaters (they were all apparently letter-men). The cards seemed stacked against the defenders. The men at Fort Shafter could well believe the story that a Japanese admiral boasted he would dine at the Royal Hawaiian next Sunday.

And what was to stop him? Rumors spread that the ships at sea had also suffered. Quartermaster Handler of the Helm heard that the whole Enterprise task force was sunk; on the Tangier, Boatswain’s Mate William Land heard that the Lexington was gone too. Not just the Lexington but the Saratoga as well, according to a story picked up by Signalman Walter Grabanski of the California.

Nor would there be any help from home, judging from another raft of rumors. The Panama Canal was bombed and blocked, someone told Chief Jack Haley of the Nevada, and this of course cut off the Atlantic Fleet. But worst of all, California itself was said to be under attack. On the Helena men heard that San Francisco was bombed … on the Tennessee that an invasion fleet lay off the city … on the Rigel that the city had been taken and a beachhead established. It might even be a two-prong attack, because word reached the Pennsylvania that a Japanese landing force had occupied Long Beach and was working its way toward Los Angeles.

True, there were a few encouraging reports. California seamen heard that the Russians had bombed Tokyo, and among the West Virginia men word spread that the Japanese had so little steel, they had filled some of the bombs with oyster shells. Perhaps the best news of all circulated among men from the Oklahoma: survivors of the attack would get 30 days’ leave.

Also, the Maryland PA system announced that two Japanese carriers had been sunk, and a more lurid version of this story spread through the Navy Hospital: the Pennsylvania had captured two carriers and was towing them back to Pearl. But how could a man believe the good news when even a quick check showed the Pennsylvania still sitting in drydock?

About the best that could be believed was the report, spread on the Nevada, that the Japanese had landed on Oahu, but the Army was holding its own. The men on the ship were told to be doubly alert for any movement in the cane that ran down to the shore where the ship lay beached. No one remembered to tell them that the ship’s own Marine detachment was patrolling the same area. As Private Payton McDaniel crunched through the cane, a man on the ship shouted he saw something move. A spotlight flicked on, and McDaniel froze, praying it wouldn’t find him. Other Marines grasped the situation and passed word to the Nevada gunners to hold their fire. But it was a terrifying moment, for McDaniel knew that this was a night when men were inclined to fire and ask questions later.

At the sub base, one sentry fired so often at his relief that he ended up with the duty all night. In the Navy Yard, a fusillade of shots erased a small spotlight that was snapped on briefly by the men installing the San Francisco’s antiaircraft batteries. Every time such shots were fired, they would set off other guns, until the whole harbor echoed with the shots of men who had no idea what they were shooting at. “You want to get in on this?” yelled a Marine sentry as Pfc. Billy Kerslake dozed off duty in the front seat of a sedan parked near Landing Charley. Kerslake nodded, reached his arm out the window, fired five pistol shots into the air, and fell back to sleep.

The firing quickly spread to nearby Hickam and added to the misery of the B-17 flight crews. It had been a tough day — first the long 14-hour trip from San Francisco … then getting the planes in shape … bivouacking out in the boondocks … fighting mosquitoes … trying to keep dry in the drizzle that began after dark … and now this. But the firing couldn’t be ignored. During one outburst someone shouted, “The Japs are making a landing!” Tired men poured from their cots as the sky blazed with tracers. Sergeant Nick Kahlefent added to the din when he jumped out of bed on some thorns.

It was an equally sleepless night at Wheeler. Everybody had been evacuated from the barracks area, and no one found a very satisfactory alternative. Private Rae Drenner of the base fire department tossed and turned with 20 other men on the floor of the fire chiefs living room. Every time shooting broke out, the men would dash off in their fire truck, dodging the hail of bullets aimed at them by jittery sentries. On the eastern edge of the field the 98th Coast Artillery let go a covering barrage … kept it up until the 97th at Schofield telephoned to complain that the shrapnel was ripping their tents.

Schofield got even when the 27th Infantry took pot shots at the 98th’s guard detail. Two other Schofield units engaged in a pitched battle across a gully — it ended when one of the GIs, nicked by a ricochet, exploded into language which the other side knew could come from no Japanese. Down near the pack-train corral a sentry challenged three times (showing remarkable forbearance for this night), got no answer, and shot one of his own mules.

The guard at Aliamanu Command Post bagged a deer, and Mess Attendant Walter Simmons figures that in the fields around Kaneohe more mongooses died than on any other night in history. About 1:30 A.M. a small flare burst above Kaneohe — no one yet knows where it came from — and men all over the base began shooting at “parachutists.” It made no difference that no one could see them or even hear a plane. A more tangible target was millionaire Chris Holmes’ island in the middle of the bay. The story spread first that paratroopers had landed there; later it was only that the Japanese servants had revolted. In any case, a group of men chugged out in one of the few planes that could still taxi arid sprayed the place with machine guns.

At Ewa a sentry saw a match flicker and almost shot his base commander, Lieutenant Colonel Larkin, who — against his own orders — was absentmindedly lighting a cigarette.

As the shooting crackled all over Oahu, sooner or later someone was bound to get hurt. An elderly Japanese fisherman, Sutematsu Kida, his son Kiichi, and two others were killed by a patrol plane as their sampan passed Barbers Point, returning with the day’s catch. They had gone out before the attack and probably never knew there was a war. In Pearl Harbor itself, a machine gun on the California accidentally cut down two Utah survivors while they stood on the deck of the Argonne during one of the false alarms.

Lieutenant (j.g.) Fritz Hebel sensed this kind of thing might happen, as he led six Enterprise fighters toward Ford Island around 7:30 P.M. They had been searching for a Japanese carrier, arrived back over the Enterprise when it was too dark to land, were told to go on to Oahu. Now at last they were coming in.

Cautiously Hebel asked Ford Island for landing instructions. He was told to turn his lights on, “come on over the field and break up for landing.” Down in the harbor, Marine Sergeant Joseph Fleck on the New Orleans heard the word passed to hold fire —friendly planes coming in. Ensign Leon Grabowski was told too at his 1.1 gun station on the Maryland; so was Radioman Fred Glaeser on Ford Island. So, probably, were others.

The planes moved in across the south channel and swung toward the mountains. Somewhere a BAR opened up … then two … then just about every ship in Pearl Harbor. Tracers crisscrossed the sky — 30s … 50s … 1.1s … everything that could shoot. On Ford Island an officer desperately ran up and down the sandbags by Utility Squadron One’s position: “Hold your fire! Hold your fire! Those are our planes!”

In the air, Lieutenant Hebel yelled over his radio: “My God, what’s happened?” Ensign James Daniels dived for the floodlights at the southwest edge of the field, hoping to blind the gunners. The stunt worked and he swooped off toward Barbers Point. The others weren’t as quick or lucky. Ensign Herb Menges plunged down out of control, crashing into a Pearl City tavern called the Palm Inn. Ensign Eric Allen fell near Pearl City too; he managed to bail out, but was riddled by gunfire as he floated down. Lieutenant Hebel tried to land his damaged plane at Wheeler, crashed, and was killed. Ensign Gayle Hermann spun his smashed plane 1200 feet down onto Ford Island, survived. Ensign D. R. Flynn bailed out over Barbers Point, was picked up alive days later by the Army.

Daniels hovered alone off Barbers Point. After about ten minutes the firing died down, and he blandly asked the tower for landing instructions. They were different this time — come in as low and as fast as possible, show no lights. Since he couldn’t come in as a friend, he would have to try it like an enemy. He did and landed safely.

On the destroyer tender Whitney, crewman Waldo Rathman felt a good deal better: they really showed the Japanese this time. The gunnery was excellent, and it was a thrill to see those planes fall in flames. It made the drubbing of the morning seem a thing of the past.

Watching from her home near Makalapa, Navy wife Jeanne Gardiner couldn’t judge the gunnery, but she prayed the antiaircraft fire would get the enemy. As Mrs. Mitta Townsend, another Navy wife, looked on from her home on the “Punchbowl,” the moon emerged briefly, bathing Oahu in soft but revealing light. She prayed it would go behind a cloud.

Mrs. Joseph Galloway prayed too, pacing the floor at a friend’s house in Honolulu. She had no idea what had happened since her husband left for his ship in the morning. Her portable radio blared occasional alerts about planes, but most of the time it was dead. In the background a distant station faded on and off with dance music from Salt Lake City.

In their desperate search for news other wives made the mistake of tuning in Japanese stations. Mrs. W. G. Beecher heard that her husband’s destroyer Flusser had been sunk with the entire Lexington task force.

Mrs. Arthur Fahrner, wife of Hickam’s mess supervisor, didn’t need to fish for news. She knew all too well. Someone had told her of the bomb that hit the Hickam mess hall, said no one escaped alive. She took it for granted that Sergeant Fahrner died at his post, and now her job was to get the five children back to the mainland, into school, and find a way to support them.

The Fahrners had been evacuated to the University of Hawaii auditorium, and while the Red Cross performed miracles, there still weren’t enough cots for the scores of families that sprawled on the floor. Sunday night Mrs. Fahrner and three other mothers formed a “hollow square” of adults and dumped their ten children in the middle. This at least kept them in one spot, but it still was a night of whimpering … of restless tossing … of endless trips to the bathroom over and around sleeping people.

Just when everything quieted down, some new disturbance would break out. One little girl lost a kitty with a bell around its neck. Soon it was hard to tell which caused the most commotion — the cat roaming and ringing its bell or the child calling and searching in the dark. The little girl had a way of turning up wherever the kitty had just left.

Slowly the hours dragged by. The children gradually dozed off, but the mothers were wide-eyed all night. Sometimes they talked together; other times they just lay quietly holding one another’s hands, waiting for daylight.

The mothers were busier in the Navy storage tunnel at Red Hill, where other families were evacuated. Clouds of mosquitoes swarmed down the air vents, and the women spent most of the night shooing them off so their children could sleep. Then, an unexpected crisis arose. One young mother forgot to bring any bottles for her month-old baby. Cups were tried, but of course the baby was too young. Someone suggested a sugar shaker, but the spout was too large. Finally Mrs. Alexander Rowell came up with the solution — she soaked a clean rag in milk and let the baby suck on it. That was what the pioneers did, she explained; she had read all about it in Drums Along the Mohawk.

Generous people opened up their homes to other evacuees. One Navy commander’s wife at Waipahu took in 20 or 30 women and children, including Don and Jerry Morton and their mother, Mrs. Croft. Everyone made a point of being cheerful, but the rumors were frightening — it was said resistance was weak against the enemy advance from Kaneohe. Some of the mothers talked as though they were already prisoners, but Don and Jerry vowed to take to the hills and fight to the end.

Here and there a few families stubbornly refused to evacuate. Mrs. Arthur Gardiner had no great faith in the construction of the junior officers’ duplex quarters near Makalapa, but it was home, and she wanted to be there when Lieutenant Gardiner returned. She pushed the dining room table against a wall, dragged four mattresses downstairs with the help of five-year-old Keith. She placed them strategically around the shelter and crawled in with Keith and two-year-old Susan. Keith was sick with worry and excitement but tried wonderfully to cooperate; Susan was in open rebellion and went along only when convinced it was part of a new game.

Mrs. Paul Spangler thought it might help to read to her four children as they sat in their blacked-out living room on Alewa Heights. So she rigged her coat over a floor lamp, gathered everybody around her, and picked up a book. Instantly a man was pounding on the door, shouting: “Put out that light!” She gave up and they all went to bed. Navy wife Lorraine Campbell dealt more successfully with the blackout at her home near Pearl Harbor — she turned off all the lights and put a Band-Aid on the radio dial.

Some blackout problems were insurmountable. As Allen Mau, a 12-year-old Hawaiian, tried to make cocoa for the evacuees at his home, he found he couldn’t get the milk out of the refrigerator without turning on the automatic light inside. He could get his hand in all right, but not out with the milk bottle too. Finally he went ahead anyhow … and almost lost his arm when the whole family dived at the door to shut the light off.

In the darkness many turned their thoughts to the men who had rushed off in the morning. Days would pass before most of the families heard of them again. On Tuesday Mrs. Arthur Fahrner learned that a box of chocolate bars had mysteriously appeared at a friend’s house — usually a sure sign that Sergeant Fahrner had been around. Yet she scarcely dared to hope. The following day she found out — the sergeant had been in the bakery getting bread when the Hickam mess hall was hit; he escaped without a scratch. On Wednesday Nurse Monica Conter still had no word of Lieutenant Benning, but she was doing her best to carry on. As she walked down the third-floor corridor of the Hickam Hospital, the elevator door opened and there he was in full combat uniform — looking even dirtier than any soldier she had seen in the movies.

It was Thursday morning when Mrs. Joseph Cote heard the chaplain call her name at the university auditorium. She slipped into the ladies’ room and prayed for the strength to bear the bad news. When she emerged, the chaplain told her Chief Cote was fine. Later that day Mrs. W. C. Wallace was back on her civilian job at Pearl Harbor, trying not to look out the window at the charred ships that depressed her so. But a familiar shadow passed the window, and she instinctively looked up — it was her husband, Ensign Wallace, last seen Sunday morning. She threw herself across the desk, halfway through the window and into his arms. Then they slipped into the first-aid shack, where no one could see them, and cried.

It wasn’t until Sunday, December 14, that Don and Jerry Morton learned their stepfather had been killed on the seaplane ramp at Ford Island by one of the first bombs to fall.

But the waiting, the gnawing uncertainty, all lay ahead. This black Sunday night the families on Oahu had other worries. In the eerie darkness, Japanese seemed to lurk behind every bush. Betty and Margo Spangler, two teenage sisters, normally slept out on the lanai, but this night they took over their mother’s bed. Mrs. W. G. Beecher got her children to sleep, lay awake herself, listening uneasily as the palm trees brushed against the side of the house. Navy wife Reiba Wallace took in a frightened single girl who insisted she heard someone on the roof. Mrs. Wallace spied a rifle in the corner, promised to shoot both the girl and herself if the Japanese came in. This was somehow reassuring; the girl calmed down, and Mrs. Wallace kept it to herself that the gun wasn’t loaded. Mrs. Patrick Gillis, a young Army wife, was sure she saw someone skulking outside her apartment house; so did the other five wives who had joined her. The police combed the grounds in vain.

About 4:00 A.M. another alarm went direct to Colonel Fielder in the intelligence office at Fort Shafter: Someone was signaling with a blue light up behind the base. Fielder grabbed a pistol, a helmet, and a sentry. Sure enough, a light was flashing up the mountain. He called for reinforcements, and the squad deployed through buffalo grass … crossed a stream … surrounded the area … and moved in. Two elderly farmers were milking a cow, using a blue light as instructed. A palm frond, swaying in the breeze, occasionally hid the light and made it look like secret code.

Colonel Fielder couldn’t know it, but the danger was all over. Oahu was perfectly safe this gusty, squally night.

The Islands’ 160,000 people of Japanese blood pulled no sabotage, probably no important espionage. Even Dr. Mori’s phone call to Tokyo Friday night — when he talked so mysteriously of poinsettias, hibiscuses, and chrysanthemums — may have been aboveboard. He always claimed it was just an atmosphere piece for the Tokyo newspaper Yomiuri Shinbun, and certainly the interview did appear in the paper the following morning — complete with reference to flowers. Actually, Consul General Kita didn’t need outside intelligence help — he had more than 200 consular agents, and he himself could get a perfect view of the fleet any time he chose to take a ten-minute drive.

Nor was there any danger from the great Japanese task force north of Oahu. Admiral Nagumo’s ships were 500 miles away … pounding silently home … steaming through heavy mist, slightly south of their outbound course. The crews were strangely quiet. Down in the Akagi’s engine room, Commander Tanbo’s men didn’t even take a ceremonial drink of sake. He later learned this was typical — the men whooped it up only over the small, insignificant victories; the big ones always left them sober and reflective.

The Japanese submarines south of Oahu were no threat either. Most of them had lapsed into the role of observers. Comander Katsuji Watanabe casually studied Pearl Harbor from the conning tower of the I-69, lying several miles off shore. He watched the flames still licking the Arizona and at 9: 01 P.M. noted a heavy explosion aboard her. This respite was welcome, for the commander had spent a hard day dodging destroyers. Some of them probably thought they had sunk him, for Watanabe was a master at deception. He would pump out made-to-order oil slicks; and as final, conclusive evidence of his destruction, he liked to jettison Japanese sandals into the sea.

Lieutenant Hashimoto aboard the I-24 reflected on the change one day had made in the shoreline. The twinkling lights were all gone; Oahu was now just a gloomy shadow. The I-24 turned east and hurried off for her rendezvous with Ensign Sakamaki’s midget. The whole Special Attack Unit was to reassemble at a point seven miles southwest of Lanai, and one by one the mother subs arrived. All night long they waited, riding gently up and down in the ocean swell within easy sight of each other. No midgets ever appeared.

On the I-24 it was discovered that Sakamaki never expected to come back. His belongings were neatly rolled up; his farewell note (with the fingernail and lock of hair) lay ready to be mailed. There were complete instructions what to do, including some yen for the postage.

But Sakamaki was not dead. After his collapse at dusk, the midget cruised lazily eastward by itself. At some point he must have recovered long enough to surface and open the hatch. In any case, when he finally came to around midnight, he noticed first the moonlight, then a soothing breeze that filtered down from above. He poked his head out the hatch and gulped the cool night air.

Seaman Inagaki woke up and also took a few deep breaths. But he was still groggy and soon fell back to sleep. Sakamaki stayed awake, drinking in the night, letting the sub go where it wanted. The sea wasn’t rough, but an occasional wave washed his face. Stars twinkled through the drifting clouds, and moonlight danced off the water. He began having dangerous thoughts for a man on a suicide mission: he got to thinking it was good to be alive.

About dawn the motor stopped, and the midget just drifted. As the light grew brighter, Sakamaki saw a small island to the left. He decided it was Lanai — a remarkable display of faith in the sub’s ability to steer itself. Actually, the boat had drifted far off course, rounded the eastern end of Oahu, and was now heading northwest along the windward side of the island.

Sakamaki shook Inagaki awake and pointed out the land — they might still be in time for the rendezvous. He ordered full speed ahead. The sub started and stopped … started and stopped again. White smoke poured from the batteries; they were just about shot. Sakamaki waited a few minutes (like a man attempting to start a car on a low battery) and tried again. Nothing happened. Once more. The motor caught, and the midget bolted ahead. Almost instantly there was another jolt … a frightful scraping … a shuddering stop. They had run her onto a reef again.

This time they were stuck for good. There was nothing to do but scuttle the sub. It carried explosives for just this emergency, and Sakamaki quickly lit the fuse. For a few seconds he and Inagaki watched it sputter, to make sure it didn’t go out. Then they scrambled up the hatch.

They climbed out on the cigar-shaped hull, wearing only G-string and loincloth. The moon was sinking in the west, a new day lighting up the eastern sky. Around them the surf foamed and pounded. About 200 yards ahead they could just make out a dark, empty beach. Sakamaki had a final pang of conscience — shouldn’t he stay with the midget … was this the way of a naval officer? Then he thought, why not try to live; he was not a weapon but a human being. He bade the sub good-bye, almost as though it were a person: “We’re leaving now — explode gloriously.”

He dived into, the sea about 6:40 A.M. — his watch, which he had loyally kept on Tokyo time, stopped at 2:10. The water was colder than he expected, the waves higher than they looked. They spun him helplessly about as he struck out for shore. Inagaki had jumped with him but was nowhere to be seen. Sakamaki hailed him, and a voice called back, “Sir, I’m over here.” Sakamaki finally spied a head bobbing up and down in the combers. He yelled a few words of encouragement, but no one knows whether Inagaki heard. His drowned body later washed up on the beach.

As Sakamaki struggled through the surf, he realized that the charge had not gone off in the sub. Five … ten minutes passed. The hideous truth dawned — on this too he had failed. He wanted to swim back but just couldn’t make it. He had lost all his strength. He no longer swam at all. He just swirled about — coughing, swallowing, spitting up salt water. He was utterly helpless. Everything went blank.

When he came to, he was lying on the beach near Bellows Field, apparently cast up on the sand by a breaker. He glanced up into the curious eyes of an American soldier standing beside him. Sergeant David M. Akui was on guard, packing a pistol at his hip. The war that was just beginning for so many men had just ended for Prisoner of War Kazuo Sakamaki.

At this moment it was 12:20 P.M. in Washington, D.C., and ten highly polished black limousines were just entering the Capitol grounds. The first was convoyed by three huge touring cars, nicknamed Leviathan, Queen Mary, and Normandie. These were filled with Secret Service men guarding President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was on his way to ask Congress to declare war on the Japanese Empire.

The cars stopped at the south entrance of the Capitol, and the President got out, assisted by his son Jimmy. Roosevelt wore his familiar Navy cape, Jimmy the uniform of a Marine captain. Applause rippled from a crowd that stood behind sawhorse barricades in the pale noonday sun. The President paused, smiled, and waved back. It was not his campaign wave — this was no time for that — but it wasn’t funereal either. He seemed trying to strike a balance between gravity and optimism.

The Presidential party moved into the Capitol, and the crowd lapsed back into silence. Here and there little knots clustered about the portable radios which the more enterprising remembered to bring. All were facing the Capitol, although they couldn’t possibly see what was going on inside. They seemed to feel that by studying the building itself, a little history might somehow rub off onto them.

Like the President, the people were neither boisterous nor depressed. They had seen movies of the cheering multitudes that are supposed to gather outside chancelleries whenever war is declared, but they didn’t feel that way at all. Occasionally someone made an awkward, halfhearted attempt to follow the script. “Gee,” said a teenage girl, clinging to a bespectacled, rather unbelligerent-looking sailor, “ain’t there some way a woman can get into this thing?”

It was almost painful, yet it was typical. Like the men at Pearl, who kept linking their experiences to football and the movies, the people had nothing better to go by. A nation brought up on peace was going to war and didn’t know how.

Ever since the news broke early Sunday afternoon, they had groped none too successfully for the right note to strike. “Happy Landings!” cried a man who phoned a Detroit paper for confirmation — and the editor detected the tone of false gaiety. “Gotta whip those Japs!” a Kansas City newsboy chanted self-consciously as he passed out extras. And at Herbert’s Drive-Inn Bar in the San Fernando Valley, a customer pulled one of a thousand forced, flat jokes: “You guys with Japanese gardeners — how do you feel now?”

Along with the awkwardness went a naïveté which must have seemed strange to the more sophisticated warring nations of the world. The Vassar faculty passed a resolution formally offering its “special training” to the service of the country. A Washington cab-driver phoned the White House, offering to carry any government worker to his job free — a proposal likely to astonish any official who did time in Washington during the ensuing years. Members of the Pilgrim Congregational Church in St. Louis debated whether to bomb Tokyo, decided not to — “we’re a people of higher ideals.” A man in Atlanta wired Secretary of Navy Frank Knox to hold Japanese envoy Kurusu until all Navy officers on Wake were released, and ex-Ambassador to Russia Joseph Davies seriously discussed the possibilities of using Vladivostok as a base.

But most people didn’t worry about bases; they were sure the United States could defeat Japan with absurd case. The country at large still regarded the Japanese as ineffectual little brown men who were good at imitating Occidentals but couldn’t do much on their own. “I didn’t think the Japs had the nerve,” said Sergeant Robert McCallum when interviewed on a Louisville street corner. As reports spread of disquietingly heavy damage at Pearl Harbor, many agreed with Professor Roland G. Usher, a German authority and head of the History Department at Washington University in St. Louis-Hitler’s Luftwaffe may have helped the Japanese out.

But rising above the awkwardness, the naïveté, and the over-confidence ran one surging emotion — fury. The day might come when formal declarations of war would seem old-fashioned, when the surprise move would become a stock weapon in any country’s arsenal, but not yet. In December, 1941, Americans expected an enemy to announce its intentions before it fought, and Japan’s move — coming while her envoys were still negotiating in Washington — outraged the people far beyond the concept of any worldly-wise policymaker in Tokyo.

Later, Americans would argue bitterly about Pearl Harbor — they would even hurl dark charges of incompetence and conspiracy at one another — but on this day there was no argument whatsoever.

Young Senator Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts had been an ardent “neutralist” (just a month earlier he had voted against allowing U.S. merchant ships to enter Allied ports), but right after he learned of Pearl Harbor from a filling-station attendant, he was on the air … urging all Americans, no matter how isolationist they might have been, to unite against the attack. Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, leader of the isolationist bloc, had heard the news in his bedroom, where he was pasting up clippings about his long, hard fight against U.S. involvement in the war. He immediately phoned the White House, assuring President Roosevelt that whatever their differences, he would support the President in his answer to Japan.

It was the same with the press. The isolationist, rabidly anti-Roosevelt Los Angeles Times bannered its lead editorial, “Death Sentence of a Mad Dog.” Some papers tried to prod isolationist leaders into controversial statements, but none were coming. Senator Burton Wheeler of Montana, for instance, snapped back, “The only thing now is to do our best to lick hell out of them.”

And the sooner the better. There was an overwhelming urge to get going, even though no one knew where the road might lead. At Fort Sam Houston, Texas, Brigadier General Dwight D. Eisenhower got the word as he tried to catch up on his sleep after weeks of long, tough field maneuvers. He was dead tired, had left orders not to be disturbed, but the phone rang and his wife heard him say, “Yes? … When? … I’ll be right down.” As he rushed off to duty, he told Mrs. Eisenhower the news, said he was going to headquarters, and added that he had no idea when he would be back.

The Capitol swelled with the same spirit of angry unity and urgency as the Senators filed into the House Chamber to hear the President’s war message. Democratic leader Alben Barkley arrived arm in arm with GOP leader Charles McNary; Democrat Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma linked arms with the old isolationist Senator Hiram Johnson of California.

Next the Supreme Court marched in, wearing their black robes, and then the members of the Cabinet. Down front sat the top military leaders, General Marshall and Admiral Stark. Farther back, five Congressmen held children in their laps, lending the curious touch of a family gathering. In the gallery Mrs. Roosevelt, wearing black with a silver fox fur, peeked from behind a girder — she had one of the worst seats in the House. Not far away sat an important link with the past — Mrs. Woodrow Wilson.

At 12:29 P.M. President Roosevelt entered, still on Jimmy’s arm. There was applause … a brief introduction by Speaker Sam Rayburn … and the President, dressed in formal morning attire, stood alone at the rostrum. He opened a black loose leaf notebook — the sort a child uses at school — and the Chamber gave him a resounding ovation. For the first time in nine years Republicans joined in, and Roosevelt seemed to sense the electric anger that swept the country, as he grasped the rostrum and began:

Yesterday, December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked ….

The speech was over in six minutes and war voted in less than an hour, but the real job was done in the first ten seconds. “Infamy” was the note that struck home, the word that welded the country together until the war was won.

FACTS ABOUT THE ATTACK

MOST AMERICANS CAUGHT IN the Japanese attack on Oahu went through successive stages of shock, fear, and anger — a poor climate indeed for pinning down exactly what happened. And even about the basic statistics it’s dangerous to be dogmatic. There are different ways of counting things: should, for instance, an obsolete airplane that is out of commission anyhow be counted as “destroyed by the enemy”? Keeping these cautions in mind, here are the answers to some basic questions that are bound to arise:

How many ships were in Pearl Harbor? Best answer seems to be 96. Most maps show 90 ships, but omit the Ontario, Condor, Crossbill, Cockatoo, Pyro, and the old Baltimore.

What was U.S. air strength? Some 394 planes, according to Congressional investigation, but many were obsolete or being repaired. Available aircraft: Army —93 fighters, 35 bombers, 11 observation; Navy — 15 fighters, 61 patrol planes, 36 scout planes, 45 miscellaneous.

How big was the Japanese Striking Force? There were 31 ships — six carriers, two battleships, two heavy cruisers, one light cruiser, nine destroyers, three submarines, eight tankers. Air strength — 432 planes used as follows: 39 for combat air patrol, 40 for reserve, 353 for the raid.

What was the strength of the Japanese Advance Expeditionary Force? Probably 28 submarines — 11 with small planes, five with the famous midget subs. (The Congressional investigation set the figure at 20, but this is too low, according to the Japanese.)

When did various events occur? Most reliable sources agree the raid began about 7:55 A.M., ended shortly before 10 o’clock. At Pearl and Hickam few noticed the five neat phases spelled out in the CINCPAC Official Report. To the men it was a continuing battle, flaring up and down in intensity, with a 15-minute lull around eight-thirty. The most stunning single moment — the Arizona blowing up — seems to have taken place about 8:10. Some eyewitnesses feel that the explosion came at the very start of the attack, yet this couldn’t be so, judging from the experiences of the five Arizona survivors who were located.

In fixing the time for various events, this book depends on both official records and the memory of eyewitnesses. Neither source is infallible. Logs and reports were sometimes worked up long after the event, and in the excitement of battle a fighting man could lose all track of time.

The time range at the top of each left-hand page is intended only as a rough guide. Some incidents necessarily start before or continue beyond the period indicated.

What were the American casualties? Navy — 2008 killed, 710 wounded, according to the Navy Bureau of Medicine. Marines — 109 killed, 69 wounded, according to Corps Headquarters. Army —218 killed, 364 wounded, according to Adjutant General’s figures. Civilian — 68 killed, 35 wounded, according to the University of Hawaii War Records Depository. Of the 2403 killed, nearly half were lost when the Arizona blew up.

What was the damage? At Pearl Harbor 18 ships were sunk or seriously damaged. Lost: battleships Arizona and Oklahoma, target ship Utah, destroyers Cassin and Downes. Sunk or beached but later salvaged: battleships West Virginia, California, and Nevada; mine layer Oglala. Damaged: battleships Tennessee, Maryland, and Pennsylvania; cruisers Helena, Honolulu, and Raleigh; destroyer Shaw; seaplane tender Curtiss; repair ship Vestal.

At the airfields 188 planes were destroyed — 96 Army and 92 Navy. An additional 128 Army and 31 Navy planes were damaged. Hardest-hit airfields were Kaneohe and Ewa. Of the 82 planes caught at these two fields, only one was in shape to fly at the end of the raid.

During the attack there were about 40 explosions in the city of Honolulu — all, except one, the result of U.S. antiaircraft fire. These explosions did about 500,000 dollars’ worth of damage.

What were the Japanese losses? Tokyo sources agree that the Striking Force lost only 29 planes — nine fighters, 15 dive-bombers, and five torpedo planes. In addition, the Advance Expeditionary Force lost one large submarine and all five midgets. Personnel lost: 55 airmen, nine crewmen on the midget subs, plus an unknown number on the large submarine.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

“UNIFORMS MEANT NOTHING,” RECALLS Chief Albert Molter, reflecting on Pearl Harbor. Others agree that it was a day when rank was forgotten, when all that counted was the good idea, when people wanted only to pitch in together.

They have shown the same spirit in contributing to this book. Admirals, sailors, generals, privates, ordinary civilians —some 577 participants — have unselfishly joined forces to help me piece together this picture of that famous Sunday.

Some of these people are still in Oahu, and sitting down with them on that balmy, tranquil island conveys best of all what a shock the attack must have been. You feel it when Brigadier General Kendall Fielder painstakingly reviews that last peacetime evening with General Short … when James B. Mann describes seeing the first planes in the early sunlight above Haleiwa … when Webley Edwards explains how he desperately tried to make his radio audience believe the news … when Tadao Fuchikami tells of his motorcycle ride with the famous message from General Marshall to General Short.

As they tell stories, nothing seems to be too much trouble. Vivid impressions still linger — Richard Kimball delving into old registration books at the Halekulani Hotel; George Walters rooting through his papers on Drydock No. 1; Dr. Robert Faus wading through dusty files on the emergency ambulance service. And there was the evening Master Sergeant Robert McMurtrie dug out the letter which explained better than a dozen investigations how little grasp anyone had of radar at the time. Six weeks before Pearl Harbor, McMurtrie (then a private) had been shifted from radar work to KP, and he joyfully wrote home, “In the kitchen you can take pride in what you’re doing.”

Sometimes nothing short of a personally conducted tour would explain a point, and I want to thank Master Sergeant Francis Clossen for showing me around Wheeler; Technical Sergeant Billy Kerslake for guiding me through Kaneohe; Mrs. Anne Powlison for a tour of the Kailua area; Colonel Robert G. Fergusson for going over the old Coast Artillery setup; and Mrs. Paul Young for re-enacting her harrowing morning in the family laundry at Wahiawa. The Army, Navy, and Air Force public information offices, of course, paved the way at Pearl, Hickam, Schofield, and Fort Shatter; and though I must have stretched their patience to the breaking point, I never found any limit to their help.

Many of the participants are now far from Hawaii, but they were no less willing to take time out and talk about Pearl Harbor —sometimes under circumstances that must have been trying, to say the least. Lieutenant General Truman Landon was on the verge of leaving for Latin America, but he seemed to have all the time in the world as he recalled the B-17 flight from California. Rear Admiral William Burford was cornered on the golf course near San Diego, but was as amiable as if he had just broken par, while he described how the Monaghan rammed the midget sub. And I’ll never know what lunch plans Admiral Halsey sacrificed to sit with me instead, relating the story of the Enterprise planes.

Some of these people gradually evolved into my “experts” on certain localities … and found themselves more ruthlessly imposed upon than ever. These unsung heroes included Commander Victor Delano on Battleship Row … Edmond Jacoby on Ford Island … Master Sergeant John Sherwood on Hickam … Master Sergeant Francis Clossen on Wheeler … Chief Walter Simmons on Kaneohe … Chief Charles Leahey on Pearl Harbor.

Others I depended on greatly for their specialized knowledge on certain points: Vice Admiral Walter Anderson for background on fleet organization; Dr. John Moorhead for the medical side of the story; Admiral Charles M. Cooke for incidents on the flooding of Drydock No. 1; Admiral Claude Bloch for information on the midget submarine penetration of the harbor. I especially appreciate the time Joseph Lockard and Joseph McDonald spent, helping on the riddle of the Opana radar contact.

Often eyewitnesses not only gave me their time but lent me personal papers to fill out the story. Among them: Lieutenant Colonel George Bicknell, Brigadier General Kendall Fielder, Rear Admiral William Furlong, Rear Admiral Peyton Harrison, Rear Admiral S. S. Isquith, and Captain William Outerbridge. Invaluable diaries were contributed by Commander J. G. Daniels, Thomas Lombardi, and Henry Sachs. Mrs. Hubert K. Reese also made available the diary of her gallant son Lieutenant Hubert K. Reese, Jr., who was lost on convoy duty in 1943.

Most of the Japanese participants were later killed in the war, but fifteen were located and contributed firsthand accounts. Their task was not easy, but they tackled it with vigor and frankness, and the result is a vital part of the story. I am extremely grateful to Takahisa Amagai, Dr. Sukao Ebina, Dr. Tadataka Endo, Shigeru Fujii, Mochitsura Hashimoto, Toshio Hashimoto, Lieutenant Colonel Masanobu Ibusuki, Kazuyoshi Kochi, Vice Admiral Ryunosuke Kusaka, Kazuo Sakamaki, Yoshio Shiga, Shin-Ichi Shimizu, Suguru Suzuki, Yoshibuni Tanbo, and Hoichiro Tsukamoto.

Where eyewitnesses were not available, and in some cases to supplement their accounts, I have relied on a mountain of written material. The 40 volumes of the U.S. Congressional investigation are full of nuggets. The War Records Depositor) of the University of Hawaii has much data, including a priceless collection of schoolchildren’s themes. The Honolulu Harbor Master’s records have essential facts on wind, weather, and shipping. The Honolulu Board of Water Supply has the best information on damage to the city.

The Honolulu papers had lively coverage, and I’m indebted to Editors Ray Coll of the Advertiser and Riley Allen of the Star-Bulletin for letting me rummage through their files. Special thanks go to Managing Editor Thurston Twigg-Smith of the Advertiser for digging out material on Niihau.

Numerous books contain valuable information on the attack. The Rising Sun in the Pacific by Samuel E. Morison (Little, Brown, 1948) and Battle Report: Pearl Harbor to Coral Sea by Walter Karig and Welbourne Kelley (Farrar & Rinehart, 1944) have detailed overall accounts. Blake Clark’s Remember Pearl Harbor (Harper, 1942) preserves many colorful incidents. The civilian side is thoroughly covered by Gwenfread Allen’s Hawaii’s War Years (University of Hawaii Press, 1945). On the question of responsibility, Admiral Kimmel’s Story by the Admiral himself (Henry Regnery, 1955), The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor by Rear Admiral Robert A. Theobald (Devin-Adair, 1954), and Walter Millis’ fascinating This Is Pearl (William Morrow, 1947) should all be read by anyone trying to understand this knotty problem. Lieutenant Clarence Dickinson’s Flying Guns (Scribner’s, 1942) and Eugene Burns’ Then There Was One (Harcourt, Brace, 1944) both touch on the story of the Enterprise planes.

Various aspects of the Japanese side are covered in Midway by Mitsuo Fuchida (U.S. Naval Institute, 1955); Sunk by Mochitsura Hashimoto (Cassell & Company, 1954); Attacked Pearl Harbor by Kazuo Sakamaki (Association Press, 1949); Zero! by Masatake Okumiya and Jira Horikoshi with Martin Caidin (Dutton, 1956).

Additional information can be found in many magazine articles that have been written on the subject. To name a few of the best: Robert Ward’s account of Japanese planning in the December, 1951, issue of the United States Naval Institute Proceedings; Captain Fuchida’s own story of leading the air attack in the September, 1952, issue of the same magazine; Barry Fox’s touching reminiscences of a housewife’s feelings in the January, 1943, issue of Harper’s.

A more personal kind of help has come from every side. Vice Admiral John F. Shafroth graciously arranged off-the-record interviews with various key figures. Richard MacMillan and Adney Smith gave indispensable guidance in Honolulu. Captain Ralph Parker generously shared his deep understanding of Navy life. Eugene Burns, Russell Starr, and Captain Joe Taussig offered invaluable leads. Lieutenant (j.g.) Herbert E. Hetu and Chief William J. Miller proved that they could locate anybody who had ever been in the Navy. Lieutenant Commander Herb Gimpel worked miracles in getting pictures on a moment’s notice. Rear Admiral and Mrs. Hall Mayfield helped in more ways than I could ever list.

In pulling the story together, Life magazine supplied wonderful research assistance, and in this connection I am especially indebted to Charles Osborne of the Life staff. Roger Pineau, Malcolm Boyd, and Harold Daw contributed other valuable research. Miss Florence Cassedy joined that brave band of typists who have faced my handwriting, and my mother performed as valiantly as ever on the index.

But all these contributions, great as they are, would not be enough without the 464 eyewitness accounts written especially for my use by the people listed on the following pages. These are the heart of the matter, for while no one person is necessarily infallible, the consensus of several hundred is very likely to approach the truth. Like the Armed Services and the individuals mentioned in this Acknowledgment section, these people share no responsibility for my thoughts and conclusions, no blame for my errors or inadequacies, but all the credit for whatever new understanding may emerge from this story of December 7, 1941.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

EACH NAME IS FOLLOWED by the vantage point from which the account was written. Where supplied, the present rank of those still on active duty is also included.

Charles H. Abrams, Pearl Harbor

Edwin W. Adams, Wheeler Field

Carp. Harry R. Adams, Vestal

FPC Wayne Lax Adams, Vestal

Donald B. Addington, Phoenix

CPO Enrique S. M. Aflague, Minneapolis

E. H. Akins, Wheeler

Donald B. Alexander, Kaneohe NAS

Bruce G. Allen, B-17 flight

Frank Allo, Hickam Field

Walter C. Anderson, Nevada

V. Adm. Walter S. Anderson, USN (Ret.), Maryland

Carroll T. Andrews, Wheeler

John V. Armstrong, Oklahoma

Terrance J. Armstrong, Oklahoma

Thomas E. Armstrong, Oklahoma

Kenneth Atwell, Hickam

Marlin G. Ayotte, Pearl Harbor

Charles O. Backstrom, Hickam

M/Sgt. John W. Baker, Tripler

General Hospital

Woodrow Baily, Tennessee

Robert W. Ballou, Kaneohe NAS

QMC Willard A. Beal, Oklahoma

Cdr. John R. Beardall, Raleigh

Earnest T. Bedell, Shaw

Mrs. Monica Conter Benning,

Michigan hosp.

Robert S. Benton, West Virginia

Charles E. Bergdoll, B-17 flight

Joseph Berry, Helena

S 1/c Ben Bill, Navy housing

HMC V. G. Biskup, Naval Hosp.

H. E. Blagg, Maryland

Maj. Gen. Gordon A. Blake, USAF, Hickam

QMC John D. Blanken, San Francisco

Stanley J. Blazenski, Naval Mobile Hosp. No. 2

Alec C. Boatman, Tennessee

Erwin J. Bohenstiel, Ford Island

Charles M. Bohnstadt, Sacramento

Nicholas T. Bongo, Hickam

P. E. Bos, Ford Island

C. E. Boudreau, Navy Receiving Station

S. F. Bowen, Tennessee

Maj. Samuel Bradlyn, USAF, Hickam

Clarence Bruhl, Submarine Base

Albert E. Brawley, B-17 flight

Samuel Lester Brayfield, New Orleans

Brainard J. Brewer, construction work near Schofield

Chester L. Brighton, Helena

Donald W. Brown, West Virginia

E. F. Brown, Pearl Harbor

K. R. Brown, Tucker

W. M. Brown, PT boats

Norman C. Brunelle, Pearl Harbor

Wilfred J. Brunet, Honolulu

Lester T. Buckley, Schofield

Mrs. Mary Buethe, Navy housing

R. Adm. J.W. Bunkley, USN (Ret.), California

R. Adm. William P. Burford, USN (Ret.), Monaghan

Joseph John Burke, Patterson

J. P. Burkholder, Tennessee

Martin T. Burns, Phoenix

J.W. Burton, Ford Island

Max E. Butterfield, Hickam

PNC Edward P. Campbell, Tennessee

Mrs. Lorraine Campbell, Navy housing

CWO W. M. Canavan, St. Louis

Chief Gunner Ralph A. Carl, Jr.,

Tennessee

Kenneth D. Carlson, Selfridge

Brig. Gen. Richard H. Carmichael, USAF, B-17 flight

Richard M. Carse, Schofield

Peter A. Chang, Submarine Base

S. B. Chatfield, Wright

Donald C. Christensen, Phoenix

George A. Cichon, California

Erwin F. Cihak, B-17 flight

Fred R. Claesson, Ft. Kamehameha

Henry B. Clark, Jr., Cockatoo

Peter M. Clause, Schofield

M/Sgt. William M. Cleveland, Hickam

E. J. Clifton, Sumner

Chandler Cobb, Pearl Harbor

Leslie Coe, Nevada

Charles Coleman, St. Louis

TEC Durrell E. Conner, California

Charles R. Cunningham, Jarvis

Carl E. Currey, Maryland

A. J. Corizzo, Bagley

Mrs. Aletha Cote, Hickam housing

Felder Crawford, Maryland

Edward G. Creighton, Monaghan

Capt. Mark Creighton, USAF, Hickam

John Crockett, Navy Yard

George V. Cruise, Helena

Carlos J. Cunningham, Ford Island

PNC L. L. Curry, Jr., Oklahoma

Mrs. Iva Daniels, Navy housing

Cdr. J. G. Daniels, Enterprise flight

Henry R. Danner, Drydock No. 1

Sydney A. Davis, Hickam

William H. Deas, Castor

Cdr. Victor Delano, West Virginia

W. E. Dellegar, Oglala

George E. Denning, Schofield

Thomas A. Denton, 1010 dock

Fred L. Dickey, Wheeler

Cdr. Cleo J. Dobson, Enterprise flight

James W. Dollar, Phoenix

Ambrose A. Domagall, Ward

Thomas J. Donahue, Monaghan

George A. Dorfmeister, Detroit

Raeburn D. Drenner, Wheeler

Ivan C. DuBois, Hickam

James Duncan, civilian plane

Y. Dupre, Dobbin

Mrs. Rhea Dupre, Navy housing

M/Sgt. J. H. Dykema, Hickam

Albert A. Dysert, Helena

Douglas A. Eaker, Submarine Base

Mrs. F. M. Earle, Navy First Aid Sta.

R. Adm. A. R. Early, USN (Ret.), Pearl

Harbor

Mrs. E. M. Eaton, Navy housing

Charles P. Eckhert, Hickam

AD1 George W. Edmondson, Ford Island

Leonard T. Egan, Wheeler

Wilfred Eller, Naval Mobile Hosp. Unit

Fred R. Elliott, West Virginia

BTC H. E. Emory, California

Walter F. England, Oiler Y.O. 44

ENI Charles W. Etter, Blue

G. Taylor Evans, Jr., California

Mrs. Florence E. Fahrner, Hickam housing

Maurice Featherman, West Virginia

MMC William R. Felsing, Pennsylvania Ernest L. Finney, Nevada

Mrs. Joseph G. Fischer, Navy housing

John P. Fisher, Ft. Shafter

Joseph W. Fleck, New Orleans

Don Flickinger, Wheeler

Charles A. Flood, Helena

Brig. Gen. William J. Flood, USAF (Ret), Wheeler

Charles L. Flynn, Pruitt

Jack F. Foeppel, Raleigh

Mrs. Claire Fonderhide, Hickam housing

James L. Forbis, Arizona

Frank G. Forgione, Oglala

Cdr. Howell M. Forgy, USN (Ret.), New Orleans

Roy Foster, Schofield

Cdr. Vance Fowler, West Virginia

W. R. Frazee, Argonne

Dr. Arthur F. Fritchen, Naval Hosp.

Arthur W. Fusco, Wheeler

John M. Gallagher, Solace

Capt. Wilmer E. Gallaher, Enterprise flight Mrs. Joseph Callaway, Navy housing

RMC R. L. Gamble, Tennessee

LeRoy V. Gammon, Ft. Shafter

Mrs. Jeanne D. Gardiner, Makalapa housing

Carey L. Garnett, Nevada

BM1 Thomas Garzione, Vestal

L. George Geiger, Hickam

Antonio Gentile, Jr., Hickam

M/Sgt. J. D. Gentry, Pennsylvania

Alvin Gerth, Pennsylvania

Fiore Gigliotti, St. Louis

Roy W. Gillette, Ft. Shafter

Mrs. Alice N. Gillis, Honolulu

David Wynne Gilmartin, Utah

ATC Frederick W. Glaeser, Ford Island

John M. Gobidas, Rigel, Oklahoma rescue

Daucy B. Goza, Ford Island

John D. Grabanski, California

Cdr. Leon Grabowski, Naval Hosp.

C. A. Grana, California

Capt. Lawrence C. Grannis, USN (Ret.), Antares

Tony J. Gregory, Schofield

MUC C. S. Griffin, Nevada

Edward J. Gronkowski, Hickam

A. M. Gustchen, Honolulu

Glenn W. Haag, Argonne

Robert Paul Hagen, PT boats

Ralph B. Haines, motor launch

George H. Haitle, Maryland

Francis L. Haley, Nevada

Joe Hallet, Tautog

Maj. Robert W. Halliday, Hickam

George W. Halterman, Hickam

LCDR Frank S. Handler, Helm

Joseph Patrick Hanley, Rigel

G. S. Hardon, Monaghan

Verdet Windford Harpin, New Orleans

Joseph C. Harsch, Waikiki

C. J. Harrold, Honolulu, Ft. Shafter

Fred C. Hart, Submarine Base

Alfred B. Hauft, Ft. Shafter

CMC Gilbert J. Hawkins, Sacramento

Harry Haws, Montgomery

Dr. Will Hayes, Waikiki, Hickam, Pearl Harbor

Mrs. Maurine K. Hayter, Alewa Heights

Maj. Gen. Leonard D. Heaton, Schofield hosp.

BMC K. V. Hendon, Nevada

John E. Henry, Hickam

Roy Henry, Honolulu

Thomas A. Henry, Bagley

Maurice J. Herman, Schofield

John E. Hewitt, Widgeon

Robert L. Hey, Hickam

Robert F. Hilbish, Schofield

Ralph F. Hinkle, Navy Yard

Carl Hoffman, Hickam

William Hole, Medusa

M/Sgt. John K. Hollwedel, Honolulu, Hickam

Mrs. John K. Hollwedel, Honolulu

Henry H. Homitz, Hickam

Otto Honegger, Honolulu

LCDR R. L. Hooton, West Virginia

James C. Hornberger, Jr., Ft. Shafter

Alfred D. Home, Jr., Pelias

Wilbur K. Hunt, Hickam

Joseph S. Hydrusko, Solace, Oklahoma rescue

William T. Ingram, Oklahoma

R. Adm. S. S. Isquith, USN (Ret), Utah

C. H. Jackson, Submarine Base

LCDR Gerald ML Jacobs, Pearl City, Ford Island

Edmond M. Jacoby, West Virginia

1st Lt. Haile H. Jaekel, USAF, Salt Lake City

John Jaskowski, Hickam

BM/1 James H. Jensen, USCG, West Virginia

Glenn A. Jewell, Ontario

CWO R. E. Johnsen, Rigel

Doir C. Johnson, West Virginia

H. G. Johnson, Schofield

James Albert Jones, motor launch

Mrs. Imogen Jones, Wahiawa

BMC R. E. Jones, Pennsylvania

M/Sgt. Nicholas H. Kahlefent, USAF, B-17 flight

Capt. J. B. Karstein, USAF,

Hickam

Warren G. Kearns, Kaneohe NAS

Lt. Col. Bernard T. Kelly, USMC, Helena

Maj. William T. Keogh, Ft. Shafter

Francis X. Kiefer, Helena

Richard L. Kile, Avocet

Cdr. David L. G. King, Helena

Howard E. King, Hickam

Lewis A. Kirk, Honolulu

Oliver A. Kirkeby, Tennessee

Charles W. Knapp, Raleigh

Joseph F. Kneeland, Helena

Richard P. Knights, Oklahoma

Wilbur F. Kohnle, St. Louis

EMC Jan Kolodziej, Oklahoma

James Korthe, Navy housing

Mrs. James Korthe, Navy housing

George C. Kovak, Maui, Hickam

Arnold E. Krause, New Orleans

Kenneth Krepps, Wheeler

Peter A. La Fata, Swan

James C. Lagerman, Ford Island

Mrs. Bess Lalumendier, Wheeler

William D. Land, Tangier

Lt. Gen. Truman H. Landon, USAF, B-17 flight

John Landreth, Nevada

Col. Frank H. Lane, USAF,

Hickam hosp.

Glenn Harvey Lane, Arizona

Ansell C. LaPage, Blue

Lt. Cen. Claude C. Larkin, USMC (Ret.), Ewa Field

C.J. Lawrence, Phoenix

Howard L. Lawson, Schofield

ATC James S. Layman, Ford Island

EMC W. R. Leckemby, Shaw

Vance B. Leneave, Medusa

Charles A. Leonard, Schofield

Frank A. Lewis, Dobbin

Cdr. Julien E. Lindstrom, St. Louis

GMC Robert E. Linnartz, Nevada

William C. Long, Honolulu

Russell A. Lott, Arizona

Charles Lowe, Maryland

Jack C. Lower, Navy Yard

Jack J. Luscher, Detroit

William A. L. Lynch, California

James W. McAdams, Wheeler

William E. McCarthy, Jr., Ft. Shafter

TMC Eugene N. McClarty, Downes

Malcolm J. McCleary, Oklahoma

J. E. McColgan, Ford Island

Dr. H. P. McCrimmon, Kaneohe NAS

Mrs. A. C. McCullaugh, Navy housing

W. Payton McDaniel, Nevada

James H. McDonough, Honolulu

R. Adm. John M. McIsaac, USN (Ret.), MacDonough

Lt. Oden L. McMillan, USN, Nevada

Robert L. McMurray, St. Louis

Kenneth Magee, Hickam

Fleet Chaplain William A. Maguire, Pearl Harbor

Cdr. Everett A. Malcolm, Arizona

TDC Cecil S. Malmin, Kaneohe NAS

TDC Thomas S. Malmin, Ford Island

LeRoy G. Maltby, Kaneohe NAS

Guido J. Mambretti, Hickam

Charles Mandell, Maryland

Aloysius J. Manuszewski, Schofield

Vern L. Marcum, Schofield

Donald J. Marman, Honolulu

Orion C. May, San Francisco

Mrs. Hall Mayfield, Makalapa housing

ALC Harry R. Mead, Ford Island

Stanley Meldrum, Schofield

Cdr. Charles J. Merdinger, Nevada

Kenneth M. Merrill, Hickam

Mrs. Annette E. Merritt, Honolulu

Joseph C. Messier, Helena

Charles J. Michaels, Jr., Swan

Harvey H. Milhorn, Arizona

Edward Miller, Submarine Base

Russell F. Miller, Maryland

Walter Miller, Jr., tug in Pearl Harbor

JOC William J. Miller, Castor

Albert J. Miskuf, Helena

Albert H. Molter, Ford Island

M. G. Montessoro, Castor

Joseph T. Moore, Hickam

Rev. F. E. Morgan, Pearl Harbor

L. A. Morley, Honolulu

Shirl P. Morrill, Pennsylvania

ADC Russell C. Morse, Ford Island

Lt. (j.g.) Don Morton, Pearl City

George Murphy, Jr., Oklahoma

John A. Murphy, Vestal

Howard E. Myers, St. Louis

Charlie Ross Naylor, Breese

George L. Newton, Jr., B-17 flight

Joseph F. Nickson, San Francisco

R. N. Nilssen, Kaneohe NAS

Raymond B. Nolde, Ward

Quentin P. Norcutt, St. Louis

J. Harold North, Maryland

John R. Nugent, Schofield

Burdette E. Odekirk, Maryland

Robert A. Oborne, Jr., Ford Island

Edward F. J. O’Brion, Arizona

Carroll J. Oliver, Pennsylvania

Persifor S. Oliver, Bagley

Edward M. Ovecka, Hickam

BMC Allen S. Owens, Nevada

John E. Parrott, San Francisco

Gilbert R. Patten, Nevada

Maj. Earl S. Patton, USAF, deep-sea fishing GMC L. R. Peacock, Enterprise patrol boat

Capt. Carl A. Peterson, USN, California Robert J. Peth, Ford Island

Emmett Pethoud, Jr., Hickam

R. Adm. John S. Phillips, USN (Ret.), Neosho

John F. Plassio, Wheeler

ADC Henry Popko, Kaneohe NAS

James H. Power, Jr., Pennsylvania

William Power, West Virginia

ADC William N. Powers, Neosho

Louis A. Puckett, Navy Yard

Charles T. Putnam, Navy tug

CPO Harand N. Quisdorf, Ford Island

Stanley H. Rabe, harbor craft

James G. Raines, Curtiss

M/Sgt. Walter T. Raisner, USAF, Schofield

Lt. Col. R. L. Ramsay, USAF, B-17 flight

R. Adm. Logan C. Ramsey, USN (Ret.), Ford Island

Weldon V. Rash, St. Louis

Waldo H. Rathman, Whitney

Lt. Col. Ernest L. Reid, USAF, B-17 flight

Glenn Homer Robinson, Oklahoma

Joseph H. Robinson, MacDonough

Robert J. Robinson, Ft. Shafter

E. H. Robison, Pearl Harbor Marine Barracks

Don E. Rodenberger, Oglala

Jack Rogo, Ford Island

F.A. Rogue, San Francisco

John J. Romanczyk, Vestal

Mrs. Alexander Rowell, Pearl City, Red Hill

Raymond G. Roy, Selfridge

Vernon C. Rubenking, Wheeler

Millard J. Rucoi, Pennsylvania

George J. Sallet, Bagley

W. V. Samples, Honolulu, Navy Yard

Brig. Gen. LaVerne G. Saunders, USAF, Hickam

HMC T. A. Sawyer, Solace

Albert F. Sandall, Oklahoma

George Santella, Allen

Cdr. D. S. Schroeder, Pearl Harbor

Walter H. Schuh, Maryland

Raymond Senecal, Schofield

Marion T. Shepherd, Hickam

M/Sgt. John P. Sherwood, Hickam

Bert F. Shipley, Hickam

Thomas F. Shook, Jr., Phoenix

Carl W. Shrader, Wheeler

Capt. W. B. Sieglaff, USN, Tautog

R. Adm. R. B. Simons, USN (Ret.), Raleigh

CPO Walter Simmons, Kaneohe NAS

Eldon E. Smart, Pearl Harbor

Capt. Billie J. Smith, USAF, Hickam

YNC George B. Smith, Oklahoma

Gordon F. Smith, Wheeler

CWO Hugh W. Smith, Jr., Navy Receiving Sta.

Joseph W. Smith, Dale

Ray C. Smith, Vestal

Robert W. Snyder, Detroit

Frederick Sommer, Schofield

James A. Spagnola, Navy Yard

Capt. Paul E. Spangler, USN, Naval Hosp. Mrs. Paul E. Spangler, Alewa Heights

Mrs. Jackie Bennett Sprague, Hickam housing

Leonard M. Stagich, Montgomery

Arnold J. Stengtein, Nevada

Mrs. Barry Fox Stevens, Kaneohe Bay

Virgil A. Stewart, Hickam

John G. Stirnemann, Solace

Frank P. Stock, Vestal

Capt. Herald F. Stout, USN, Montgomery

Anthony Sudano, Pearl Harbor

Douglas Sugate, Medusa

Charles A. Super, MacDonough

John Swanson, Submarine Base

Capt. H. E. Swinney, USAF, Hickam

Cdr. William P. Tanner, PBY patrol

Homer R. Taylor, B-17 flight

Hoyle A. Taylor, San Francisco

William E. Taylor, Phelps

Gordon E. Tengwall, Oklahoma

R. Adm. William R. Terrell, USN (Ret.), Tucker

R. Adm. Francis J. Thomas, USNR (Ret.), Nevada

J. H. Thompson, Hickam

Luther Thompson, Hickam

Mrs. Margrett S. Timmons, Waikiki

E. A. Titsworth, Hickam

A. M. Townsend, St. Louis

Mrs. A. M. Townsend, Honolulu

CTC Earle K. Van Buskirk, Ford Island

BMGC Elmer A. Vandenberg, Solace

JOC H. C. Varner, Rigel

LCDR Valera C. Vaubel, Naval Hosp.

QMC Edward M. Vecera, West Virginia

Mrs. Robert B. Vokac, Schofield housing

R. A. Wadsworth, Vestal

Mrs. Ellison Wallace, Tripler

Cdr. W. G. Wallace, St. Louis

Mrs. W. G. Wallace, Honolulu

Maj. Leo G. Wears, USMC, Oklahoma

Harold R. Webb, Nevada

Paul J. Weisenberger, Helena

Mrs. Elizabeth S. White, Honolulu

ENI Robert W. White, Ontario

QMC Robert J. Whited, Antares

Ralph E. Wiley, Hickam hosp.

Frank B. Wilkes, Tangier

Warren S. Wilkinson, Hickam

Donald R. Williams, Argonne

Robert D. Williams, Wheeler

John W. Wilson, Hickam

V. Adm. L. J. Wiltse, USN (Ret.), Detroit

Blaine K. Wolff, Narwhal

Henry T. Wray, Argonne

Charles A. Yokom, PT boats

Stephen B. Young, Oklahoma

Adolph J. Zlabis, Vestal

INDEX

A  |  B  |  C  |  D  |  E

F  |  G  |  H  |  I  |  J

K  |  L  |  M  |  N  |  O

P  |  Q  |  R  |  S  |  T

U  |  V  |  W  |  Y  |  Z

Abukuma, 15

Adams, Seaman Howard, 136

Advertiser, Honolulu, 2, 57, 81

Akagi, 9, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21-22, 23-24, 32, 33, 34, 63, 115, 154, 171, 172, 174, 202

Akui, Sgt. David M., 205

Alerts: Army against sabotage, 4, 55; Navy against aircraft, 84-85; Navy against submarines, 38

See also Radar, Army

Alewa Heights, 150, 152, 199

d’Alfonso, Capt. Andre, 56

Aliamanu Crater, 182, 196

Allen, Lieut. Bruce, 105, 106

Allen, Ens. Eric, 197

Allen, Riley, 57-58, 152

Alio, S/Sgt. Frank, 156

Amagai, Cdr. Takahisa, 17, 23, 32, 172

Anderson, V. Adm. Walter S., 6, 138, 141

Anderson, Cpl. William, 143

Andrade, Tony, 139

Andrews, Pfc. Carroll, 76, 109

Antares, 34-38, 53

Antitorpedo net, Pearl Harbor, 28, 35

Argonne, 8, 119, 123, 196

Arison, Pvt. Ed, 7

Arizona, 8, 21, 51, 53, 62, 66, 67, 70, 87, 93-94, 95, 98, 125, 127, 128, 136, 139, 141, 159-60, 176, 193, 203

Armstrong, Ens. John, 124

Armstrong, Seaman Pat, 93

Armstrong, Storekeeper Terry, 92, 93

Armstrong, Seaman Tom, 93

Art, Boatswain’s Mate A., 37

Artillery: 97th Coast, 196; 98th Coast, 78, 110, 182, 196

Asher, Ens. Nathan, 137

Ashwell, Capt. Leonard, 80, 146

Austin, Maj. (at Haleiwa), 145

Austin, Chief Warrant Carpenter John A., 157

Aylwin, 137, 141

Ayotte, Seaman Marlin, 54

B-17s: based at Hickam, 55, 169; flight from the West Coast, 45, 55-56, 74, 104-106, 111, 113, 120, 139, 144-45, 195

Bagley, 84, 86

Bahr, Capt. Walter, 150

Bailey, Seaman Woodrow, 119

Baines, Mess Attendant Arvelton, 125

Ballou, Aviation Machinist’s Mate Robert, 112

Baltimore, 51

Barbers Point, 63, 145, 160, 161, 168, 169, 196, 197

Barkley, Sen. Alben, 208

Barthelmes, Lieut. Karl, 104

Barthis, Boatswain’s Mate (of Arizona), 127

“Battle of Music,” 8

Battleship Row, 51, 66, 68, 86, 101, 102, 122, 124, 130, 137, 176-80, 193; damage to, 70, 98

Beal, Seaman Willard, 92, 178, 179

Beardall, Ens. John, 100

Beecher, Mrs. W. C., 198, 201

Bellinger, Ens. (at Kaneohe), 79-80

Bellinger, R. Adm. P. N. L. (“Pat”), 72; Mrs., 123

Bellows Field, 57, 112-13, 116, 205

Benedict, Fire Chief William, 106-7

Bennett, Jackie, 162

Benning, 2nd Lieut. Barney, 1, 2, 8, 56, 200

Bennion, Capt. Mervyn, 70, 96-97

Benton, Seaman Robert, 85, 87-88

Bergdoll, Lieut. Charles, 105

Bergquist, Maj. Kenneth, 42-43

Bertholf, Col. Cheney, 55, 74, 181

Bicknell, Lieut. Col. George, 3-4

Bill Lederer’s bar, 7

Billingsley, Boatswain’s Mate (on West Virginia), 90

Bisbee, Av. Ordnanceman Homer, 111

Bishop, Lieut. Sam, 146

Bishop’s Point, 29

Black Cat Café, 7

Black, Lieut. Cdr. Francis, 59-60

Black, Lieut, (j.g.) John, 99

Blackmore, William, 34-35, 38; Mrs., 34

Blake, Capt. Gordon, 55, 144

Blakey, Mrs. Walter, 148

Blanken, Signalman John, 53

Bloch, Adm. Claude C., 6, 59, 61, 73

Bloch Recreation Center, 8, 73

Blue, 118, 136-37

Bohnstadt, Seaman Charles M., 67-68

Bonett, Chief Storekeeper (on Ford Island), 122

Bos, Seaman P. E., 141 Boudreau, Lieut. C. E., 73

Bowe, Gunner’s Mate Walter, 84

Bowen, Seaman S. F., 96

Bradley, Mrs. Cecilia, 149

Bradlyn, Lieut. Samuel, 182

Brawley, Sgt. Albert, 105, 106

Brayfield, Seaman Sam, 138

Breese, 68, 117

Brooks, F.ns. Roman Leo, 66

Brookshire, Chief Metalsmith Burl W., 187

Brown, Storekeeper Donald, 88

Brown, Ens. William, 53

Buckley, Pvt. Lester, 77, 110

Buethe, Mrs. Mary, 148

Bullock, Shopfitter (on St. Louis), 138

Bunkley, Capt. J. W, 80, 158

Burford, Lieut. Cdr. William P., 61-62, 103, 117, 118, 123

Burkholder, Seaman J. P., 96

Burns, Eugene, 163

Burns, Ens. Martin, 119

Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 183

Burton, Photographer J. W., 128

Calhoun, R. Adm. William, 53

California, 21, 51, 54, 63, 68, 69, 80, 91-92, 98, 124, 158, 175, 179-80, 194, 196

Calkins, Seaman D. F., 120

Campbell, Mrs. William, 148-49, 200

Capitol, U. S., 205-6, 208

Caplan, Ens. Stanley, 137, 141

Carl, Gunner’s Mate Ralph, 160

Carlson, Seaman Kenneth, 119

Carmichael, Major Richard H., 105, 111

Carroll, Cdr. C. F., 85, 103

Cassin, 102, 131, 133

Castor, 67, 120, 128

Chaffin, Capt. (B-17 pilot), 111

Chang, Chief Torpedoinan’s Mate Peter, 72, 187

Chappelman, Capt. J. W., 56

Chikuma, 15, 31

Chris Holmes’ island, 196

Christianson, Lieut. Hans, 146

Cichon, Seaman George, 166

CINCPAC, 5, 59-60, 61, 72, 98, 161, 168

Civilian volunteers, 183-86

Clagnon, Joe, 106

Clark, Blake, 81

Clossen, S/Sgt. Francis, 76, 109

Coll, Ray, 57

COMTRAINRON 8, 53

Condor, 27-29

Conner, Yeoman Durrell, 54, 91-92, 158

Consulate, Japanese, 163-64

Conter, Lieut. Monica, 1, 2, 8, 56, 143, 200-1

Cooke, Capt. Charles M., 132

Coryell, Hubert, 149

Cote, Mrs. Joseph, 148, 166, 201; Richard (son), 148

Craig, Lieut. Cdr. James, 102, 132

Crawford, Storekeeper Felder, 54

Creighton, Fireman Ed, 118

Creighton, Pvt. Mark, 75-76

Croft, Aviation Ordnanceman Thomas, 50; Mrs., 165, 199

Crossbill, 28

Cucuk, Watertender Samuel, 69

Cummings, 28

Currier, Sgt. Norman, 93

Curry, Cdr. Duncan, 101

Curry, Yeoman L. L., 91

Curtiss, 50, 51, 102, 117-18, 123, 134-355, 172, 193

Dale, 137, 141

Daniels, Ens. James, 197-98

Danner, Harry, 55, 132-33, 175-76

Daubin, Capt. Freeland, 98; Mrs., 148

Davidson, Brig. Gen. Howard C., 145

Davies, Ex-Ambassador Joseph, 207

Davis, Allan, 153

Davis, Pvt. Sydney, 162

Deacon, Ens. Edward, 121

Deas, Seaman Bill, 67

DeCastro, Julio, 177

Deception measures, Japanese, 15, 22-23

Delano, Ens. Victor, 6, 88-89, 97, 104, 126, 129, 156-57

Detroit, 8, 51, 65, 86, 99, 169

Devereux, Dr. John, 184

Diamond Head, 25, 105, 160, 174

Dickinson, Lieut, (j.g.) Clarence, 121, 139, 161, 170

Dobbin, 69, 136, 158, 193

Dobson, Ens. Cleo, 121-22, 169, 170, 192

Domagall, Seaman Ambrose, 36

Donahue, Boatswain’s Mate Thomas, 65, 70, 85-86

Dorfmeister, Aviation Metalsmith George, 86

Downes, 102, 131, 133

Draemel, R. Adm M. F., 168

Drenner, Pvt. Rae, 195

Drydock, floating, 50, 102, 131, 133-34

Drydock No. 1, 50, 55, 102, 129, 131, 175

Duncan, Yeoman (of Tennessee), 127

Duncan, James, 81-82

Dutch Harbor, 18

Duvall, Warrant Electrician Charles, 89

Dwyer, Miss Evolin, 8

Eaker, Radioman Douglas, 162

Earle, Capt. John B., 59, 61, 98; Mrs., 59, 73, 148

Early, Capt. A. R., 140

Eaton, Mrs. E. M., 165-66

Ebina, Lieut, (j.g.) Sukao, 18, 33, 34, 171

Edwards, Webley, 58, 153-54

Egan, Pfc. Leonard, 76

Eifler, Mrs. Carl, 148

Eisenhower, Brig. Gen. Dwight D., 208; Mrs., 208

Elks Club, 25

Elliott, Pvt. Ceorge, 41-45

Emerson, Capt. D. C., 8, 139

Emory, Fireman H. E., 175

Endo, Capt. Tadataka, 18, 34

English, Capt. Robert, 119

Enterprise, 2, 20, 121, 168, 169, 170, 192, 194, 197; morning flight from, 121-22, 169, 170, 192; evening flight from, 197-98

Erdmann, Capt. Levi, 56

Espionage, Japanese, 12-14, 15-16, 20, 20-23, 115, 202; Mori phone call, 3-4, 202

Etter, Machinist’s Mate Charles, 137

Evacuation of women and children, 164-66, 198-99

Ewa Field, 11, 19, 74, 80, 113, 121, 139, 140, 145, 162, 196

Fahrner, M/Sgt. Arthur, 141, 198, 200; Dan (son), 165; Mrs., 141, 165, 198-99, 200

Farragut, 151

Farthing, Col. William, 55, 74, 181

F.B.I., 3, 163, 164

Feathcrman, Ens. Maurice, 69, 124

Felsing, Machinist’s Mate William, 69

Fielder, Lieut Col. Kendall, 3, 57, 201-2; Mrs., 3

Fifth Column rumors, 140, 162-63

Finn, Chief Aviation Ordnanceman John, 111-12

First Air Fleet (Japanese), 11

Fischer, Mrs. James, 165

Fisher, Pfc. John, 156

Fleck, Sgt. J. W., 197

Flood, Signalman Charles, 63

Flood, Col. William, 144-45

Flusser, 198

Flynn, Ens. D. R., 197

Foeppel, Signalman Jack, 100

Fonderhide, Mrs. Claire, 148

Football, comparing the attack to, 118-19, 206

Forbis, Coxswain James, 53, 87, 94, 127

Ford Island, 19, 50-51, 60, 63, 64, 65, 66-67, 71, 73, 74, 82, 84, 85, 93, 98, 99-100, 102, 117, 118, 120, 121-22, 123, 125, 128, 130, 131, 134, 136, 140, 141, 147, 156, 160, 169-70, 175, 192, 197, 201

Forgione, Musician Frank, 71

Forgy, Chaplain Howell, 69, 138

Ft. Kamehameha, 142, 161

Ft. Shafter, 3, 7, 56-57, 78, 156, 167, 182, 193, 201-2; Information Center, 9, 41, 42-45, 78

Foss, Cpl. Harry, 77-78 Foster, Lieut. Roy, 160

Fourteenth Naval District, 6, 39, 58-62, 119

Fowler, Ens. Vance, 93, 157

Fox, Mrs. Barry, 149-50

Frazee, Musician Walter, 123

Frear, Mr. (civilian in Honolulu), 81; Mrs., 81

Fregg, 2nd Lieut. Fred, 8

Fuchida, Cdr. Mitsuo, 12, 16, 32, 33, 46-48, 63, 87, 93, 113-15, 164, 171, 173

Fuchikami, Tadao, 166-67

Fujimoto, Thomas, 152

Fukudome, R. Adm. Shigeru, 10

Fumiyo (Japanese maid), 73-74, 148

Furlong, R. Adm. William, 64, 103, 120, 156

Fusco, Pfc. Arthur, 76, 108

Gallaher, Lieut. Earl, 121

Galloway, Mrs. Joseph, 198

Gamble, Radioman Robert, 71

Game, Ens. William, 65

Gardiner, Mrs. Arthur, 162, 165, 198, 199-200; Keith (son), 200; Susan (daughter), 200

Garnett, Gunner’s Mate Carey, 93

Garzione, Seaman Thomas, 95

Gearin, Quartermaster H. F., 35, 37

Geiger, Sgt. George, 6, 108

Genda, Cdr. Minoru, 10, 11, 12, 22

Gerner, Gunner’s Mate’ Louis, 36, 37

Gerth, Gunner’s Mate Alvin, 102, 119, 132

Gillis, Mrs. Patrick, 149, 201

Gilmartin, Machinist’s Mate David, 98-99

Glaeser, Radioman Fred, 6, 9, 139, 197

Gobidas, Fireman John, 178, 187

“God Bless America” (song), 8

Goepner, Lieut, (j.g.) Oscar, 27, 28, 35, 38

Gonzales, Ens. Manuel, 121

Goto, Ens. Ippei, 23, 33, 172

Grabanski, Signalman Walter, 19

Grabowski, Ens. Leon, 197

Graham, Ens. Hank, 156

Graham, Aviation Mechanic “Turkey,” 95

Greevey, Ens. Clark, 38

Griffin, Musician C. S., 155

Gustchcn, Boatswain’s Mate A. M., 123

Hailey, Sgt. Thomas, 125

Haines, Coxswain Ralph, 53

Haitle, CPO George, 96, 125

Haleakala, 144

Haleiwa, 47, 49, 56, 77, 111, 145

Halekulani Hotel, 5, 80, 138

Haley, CPO Francis (“Jack”), 52, 180, 194

Halliday, Sgt. Robert, 74

Halsey, V. Adm. William F., Jr., 1, 168

Hanabusa, Lieut. Cdr. Hiroshi, 29

Handler, Quartermaster Frank, 63, 103-4, 137, 194

Haniki (native on Niihau), 189

Harada (Japanese on Niihau), 188-91

Hardon, Chief Torpedoman’s Mate G. S., 118

Harper, Lieut. Cdr. J. S., 89

Harsch, Joseph, 80; Mrs., 80

Hasegawa, Lieut. Yoshio, 163-64

Hashimoto, Lieut. Cdr. Mochitsura, 24, 25, 203

Hashimoto, Lieut, (j.g.) Toshio, 11, 23, 46-47, 114, 172-73

Hasler, Ens. William, 8

Hawkins, Watertender Gilbert, 85

Haws, Chief Machinist’s Mate

Harry, 120

Hayden, Capt. Reynolds, 72; Billy (son), 72-73

Haynie, Ens D. B., 36

Hayter, Mrs. Maureen, 184

Hebel, Lieut, (j.g.) Fritz, 197

Heine, Otto F., 139, 140; Mrs., 139, 140

Helena, 50, 51, 53, 62, 63, 65, 68, 70-71, 84, 101-2, 118, 119, 120, 129, 134, 156, 194

Helm, 62-63, 85, 103-4, 116, 137, 161, 194

Hendon, Boatswain’s Mate K. V., 129, 155

Henley, 69, 137

Henry, Pvt. Roy, 69

Herman, Cpl. Maurice, 77, 169

Hermann, Ens. Gayle, 162

Hey, Sgt. Robert, 56, 142

Hickam Field, 6, 7, 8, 10, 13, 19, 55, 63, 74-76, 78, 82, 104, 105-8, 111, 113, 114-15, 120, 141-44, 145, 148, 156, 162, 163, 164, 165, 181, 184, 186, 195, 198, 200-1

Hiei, 14, 18, 20, 22

Higgins, Capt. Montgomery E., 2; Mrs., 2

Hill, Chief Boatswain Edwin Joseph, 128, 131

Hill, Ens. Joseph, 146

Hill, Dr. (Honolulu physician), 185

Hinsperger, Seaman Wilber T., 178

Hirowo, Ens. Akira, 25, 30

Hiryu, 15, 17, 18, 22, 23, 32, 172

Hoffman, Capt. Carl, 186

Hoko Maru, 14

Honolulu (city), 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 13, 16, 20, 22, 23-24, 25, 46, 47, 56, 57-58, 60, 61, 81-82, 119, 148-54, 198; explosions in, 119, 126, 152, 164

Honolulu (cruiser), 22, 53, 69, 86, 101, 119, 137-38, 176

Hooton, Machinist’s Mate R L., 54

Hopping, Lieut. Cdr. Halstead, 170

Horne, Yeoman Alfred, 85

Hospital Point, 72, 130, 155

Hotel Street, 7, 8, 94

Hui Lele Flying Club, 81

Huluoulani, Mrs. (native on Niihau), 190

Hunt, T/Sgt. Wilbur, 107, 108

I-20, 30

I-24, 24-26, 29-30, 174, 203

I-69, 203

I-72, 22

“I Don’t Want to Set the World on ire” (song), 176

Iida, Lieut. Fusata, 33, 172

Inagaki, Seaman Kyoji, 25-26, 29-30, 39, 116, 174, 203-4

Infantry: 24th Div, 2, 3, 56; 25th Div., 3, 56, 77; 19th Reg., 78; 27th Reg., 78, 182, 196; 28th Reg., 182

Ingram, Ens. William G., 54, 93, 125

Inks, Sgt. (of Nevada), 130

Intelligence, faulty Japanese, 114-15, 144

Isquith, Lieut. Cdr. S. S., 6, 98, 99, 135, 158

Itaya, Lieut Cdr. Shigeru, 46, 48

Iwasa, Cdr. Naoji, 24

Izumi, Dr. Homer, 82-83; Allen (son), 83

Jacobs, CPO G. R, 169

Jacobs, Mrs. Gerald, 165

Jacoby, Ens. Edmond, 52-53, 70, 97, 120, 157, 192

Jagersfontein, 150-51

Jansen, Chief Boatswain’s Mate L. M., 123

Jensen, Seaman James, 70

John Rogers Airport, 13, 82

Johnson, Lieut. Cdr. Doir, 97, 176-77

Johnson, Seaman Frank, 84

Johnson, Dr. Harold, 82; Mrs., 82

Johnson, Machinist’s Mate Henry, 101

Johnson, Senator Hiram, 208

Jones, Radioman R. E., 134-35

Jones, Ens. W. W., 62

Jones, Seaman Albert, 123

Jones, Ens. Herbert, 124

Jones, Boatswain’s Mate Robert E., 8, 102, 132

Joyce, Capt. John P., 112

Judd, S/Sgt. Charles, 56

Kaga, 15, 18, 19-20, 23, 33, 172

Kahlefant, Sgt. Nick, 195

Kahuku Point, 41, 46, 81; golf course, 144

Kaleohano, Hawila, 188, 189, 190, 191

Kaminsky, Lieut. Cdr. Harold, 58-61

Kanahali, Beni, 191; Mrs., 191

Kaneohe Naval Air Station, 10, 19, 38, 57, 60, 79, 111-12, 120, 146-47, 149, 160-61, 162, 182, 196, 199

Kauai, 121, 187, 188, 190

Kawaiola, 42, 45

Kawakami, Johnny, 151

Kelly, 2nd Lieut. Bernard, 101

Kenworthy, Cdr. Jesse L., 179

Keogh, Lieut. William, 193

Keosanqua, 28, 34, 35, 38

Kerslake, Pfc. Billy, 195

KGMB (radio station), 9, 24, 58, 152-54, 164

KGU (radio station), 152, 164

Kida, Sutematsu, 196; Kiichi (son), 196

Kidd, R. Adm Isaac C., 94

Kie Kie, 187, 189

Kii Landing, 187, 188, 190

Kijuchi, Lieut. Rokuro, 22

Kimball, Richard, 6, 138-39

Kimmel, Adm. Husband E., 4-5, 61, 72, 73, 97-98, 167-68; Mrs., 61

King, Ens. David, 129, 134

King, S/Sgt. Doyle, 108

King, Mrs. Garnett, 149

King, Howard, 106

Kirishima, 15

Kita, Consul General Nagao, 12-13, 163-64, 202

Knapp, Yeoman Charles, 139, 193

Knapp, Gun Captain Russell, 37

Knox, Sec. of Navy Frank, 206

Kochi, Cdr. Kazuyoshi, 18, 20, 22

Koenig, Pvt. Stan, 143

Kole Kole Pass, 76

Koolau Mountains, 79

Korn, Ens. Donald L., 62, 65

Kukui, 190

Kuramoti, Seaman Iki, 19, 34, 115

Kure Naval Base, 15, 25, 115, 173

Kuriles, 14

Kusaka, R. Adm. Ryunosuke, 10-11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18-19, 21, 22, 33, 34, 63, 171, 173

La Fata, Radioman Peter, 160, 162

Lagerman, Radioman James, 71

Lahaina, 13, 16, 22

Lanai, 174, 203, 204

Land, Arthur, 149

Land, Boatswain’s Mate William, 194

Landon, Maj. Truman H., 104, 106, 170

Landreth, Ens. John, 155-56, 160

Lane, Lieut. Col. Frank, 163

Lane, Radioman Glenn, 87, 94, 127, 186-87

Larkin, Lieut. Col. Claude, 80, 113, 146, 196; Mrs., 80

Layman, Seaman James, 175

Layton, Pvt. Mark, 56

Leahey, Fireman Charles, 69, 136

Leak, Chief Pharmacist’s Mate (on West Virginia), 97

Leary, R. Adm. H. Fairfax, 5, 123, 137, 138; Mrs., 5

Lemanski, Sgt. Valentine, 56, 78

Lewis, Seaman Frank, 193

Lexington, 2, 194, 198

Linnart, Chief Gunner’s Mate Robert E., 129

Lockard, Pvt. Joseph, 41-45

Lodge, Sen. Cabot, 207-8

Logan, Ens. Joseph, 60

Lombardi, Ens. Thomas A., 125-26, 156

Long Beach, 194

Los Angeles, 194

Lott, Seaman Russell, 87, 94

Lower, Civilian Electrician Jack, 139-40

Loyalty of local populace: Army fears, 4; fears unjustified, 202

Lualualei (Naval arsenal), 166

Lynch, Pharmacist’s Mate William, 54, 63, 69, 91, 179-80

MacSelwiney, Chief Motor Machinist Terrance, 158

Maejima, Lieut. Cdr. Toshihide, 14

Maguire, Fleet Chaplain William A., 53

Maile Beach, 49

Major Disaster Council, 184

Makalapa, 61, 73, 97, 148, 198, 200

Malcolm, Ens. Everett, 8, 139

Malmin, Seaman Thomas, 122-23, 128

Malwein, Ens. C. S., 112

Mambretti, S/Sgt. Guido, 144

Mandell, Ens. Charles, 179

Mann, James B, 49; Mrs., 49, son, 49

Mannion, M/Sgt. M. D., 181

Manoa Valley, 160

Manuszewski, Pvt. Aloysius, 7

Marman, Seaman Donald, 53, 119, 137

Marshall, Gen. George C., 167, 208

Marshall, Seaman “Squash,” 146

Martin, Maj. Gen. Frederick, 169, 182

Maryland, 21, 51, 54, 68, 69, 70, 84, 90, 92, 93, 96, 98, 114, 120, 125, 141, 176, 177, 179, 194, 197

Maskzawilz, Chief Torpedoman W. C., 37

Masterson, Lieut. K. S., 176

Matsumura, lient. Haita, 18, 33

Mau, Allen, 200

Maybeck, S/Sgt. Charles W., 7 Mayfield, Capt. Hall, 73-74, 98; Mrs., 73-74, 97-98, 148, 154

McBriarty, Pvt. Raymond, 112

McCaine, Chief Gunner’s Mate (on Maryland), 125

McCallum, Sgt. Robert, 207

McCarthy, Ens. Bud, 121, 161

McCarthy, Pfc. William, 57, 78

McClarty, Seaman Eugene, 133

McCleary, Seaman Malcolm, 92

McCloy, Ens. R. C., 27

McCombs, Winifred, 58

McCrimmon, Lieut. Cdr. H. P., 57, 79, 147; Mrs., 79, 147, 162

McDaniel, Pvt. Payton, 86, 118-19, 181, 195

McDonald, Pvt. Joseph, 44-45

McDonough, 141

McCinnis, Cdr. Knefler, 60

McIsaac, Lieut. Cdr. John M., 141 McKinley High School, 162, 193

McLeod, Sgt. Stanley, 108, 143

McMillan, Band Leader Oden, 66-67

McMorris, Capt. Charles, 6

McMurray, Seaman Robert, 54

McNary, Sen. Charles, 208

Mead, Radioman Harry, 65, 169

Medeiros, Manuel, 139

Medusa, 50, 117-18, 135

Menges, Ens. Herb, 197

Merdinger, Ens. Charles, 69, 87, 129-30, 159, 180

Merry’s Point, 66, 93

Messier, Fireman Joseph, 68

Michaels, Radioman Charles, 51, 180

Micheletto, Sgt. Carlo, 146

Middaugh, S/Sgt. Chuck, 143-44

Midget submarines, 24-26, 29-30, 35-40, 103-4, 115-16, 117-18, 174, 202-5

Midway, 2, 13, 20

Miller, Col. (at Tripler), 185

Miller, Mess Attendant Doris, 52-53, 97, 126

Miller, Col. Virgil, 56, 165; Julia (daughter), 56

Miller, Quartermaster William J., 120, 128

Minneapolis, 168

Mint, The (café), 7

Minter, Chief Commissary Steward H.A., 37

Miura, Cdr. Gishiro, 16

Molter, CPO Albert, 73, 92, 93, 122, 147-48; Mrs., 73

Momsen, Cdr. Charles, 59, 60

Monaghan, 61-63, 65, 70, 85-86, 103, 117-18, 137

Montessoro, CPO M. G., 7

Montgomery, 102, 120

Moon, Stephen, 150

Moorhead, Dr. John J., 184-86

Mori, Dr. Motokazu, 3-4, 202

Morley, Seaman L. A., 101

Mormon Temple, 81

Morton, Don, 50, 73, 164-65, 199, 201; Jerry, 50, 73, 164-65, 199, 201

Movies, comparing the attack to, 84, 108, 124, 201, 206

Murata, Lieut. Cdr. Shigeharu, 46, 63

Murphy, Seaman George, 71, 90, 92, 157-58

Murphy, Radioman John, 95, 161

Murphy, Cdr. Vincent, 59-61, 72, 73

Murray, Maj. Gen. Maxwell, 77

Myers, Pharmacist’s Mate Howard, 138

Nagano, Adm. Osami, 11, 14

Nagato, 115, 173

Nagumo, V. Adm. Chuichi, 9, 11, 14, 15-16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 31, 32, 63, 115, 173, 174, 202

Nakatsuka, Lawrence, 163-64

Nanakuli Beach, 160

Navy Hospital, 186, 192, 194

Navy Yard, 50, 62, 66, 67, 84, 100-1, 135, 137-38, 140-41, 160, 170, 175-76, 177, 195

Neighbors, M/Sgt. Bonnie, 181

Nclles, Pfc. Joseph, 76

Neosho, 51, 124

Nevada, 20, 51, 52, 53, 62, 66-67, 68, 69, 71, 84, 86-87, 93, 98, 114, 118, 120, 127-31, 152, 155, 159-60, 180-81, 194-95; sortie of, 127-31

New Emma Café, 7

New Orleans, 69, 85, 101, 138, 197

Newton, Lieut. Ceorge, 106, 169

Nickson, Chief Boatswain’s Mate Joseph, 51-52

Niihau, 187-91

Noble, Seaman Sidney, 35

North, Chief Electrician’s Mate Harold, 92, 96

Nugent, Watertender H. G., 158-59

Nuuanu Valley, 161

Oahu, 7, 10, 22, 24, 25, 31, 33, 41, 43, 44, 46, 47, 49, 57, 58, 65, 79, 104, 115, 121, 152, 162, 169, 172, 173, 174, 183-84, 188, 194, 196, 197, 198, 201, 202, 203, 204

Oborne, Seaman Robert, 65

Odekirk, Sgt. Burdette E., 160

Officers’ Clubs: Hickam, 114-15, 181; Pearl Harbor, 1, 2; Schofield Barracks, 2-3; Wheeler, 56, 76-77

Oglala, 51, 64, 65, 71, 101, 102, 120, 156

Oklahoma, 20, 51, 54, 68, 70, 71, 73, 90-91, 92-93, 96, 98, 124-25, 157-58, 159, 177-79, 193, 194

Onishi, R. Adm. Takajiro, 10

Ono, Cdr. Kanjiro, 9, 22, 23-24, 26

Opana (radar station), 41-45, 170

Orwick, Radioman Dean B., 134-35

Ottley, Lieut, (at Honolulu harbor), 60

Outerbridge, Lieut. William W, 27-29, 35-39, 58, 59

Oveka, Pvt. Edward, 186

Owens, Boatswain’s Mate Allen, 87, 129

P-40s, 77, 111, 145, 146

Pacific Café, 151

Pacific Club, 6

Pacific Fleet, U.S., 1-2, 50-51, 65

Panay, 85

Parrott, Ens. John F., 101

Patriarca, Lieut, (j.g.) F. A., 121, 170

Patton, 2nd Lieut. Earl, 149

Pafwing 2, 60, 64, 72, 169

PBYs: at Kaneohe, 57, 80, 111; at Ford Island, 50, 60, 131; sub contacted by, 35, 36, 37-38, 60, 64

Pearl City, 50, 51, 65, 73, 117, 120, 134, 136, 140, 165, 197

Pearl Harbor (main references), 1-2, 27-29, 34, 50-55, 61-63, 84-104, 117-38, 155-60, 175-81, 192-95, 196-98

Pearl Harbor Striking Force, 9, 14, 15, 33; number of planes used, 31

Pelias, 85

Pennsylvania, 8, 21, 50, 55, 65, 69, 85, 98, 102, 119, 131-33, 174, 175, 194

Persson, Capt. August, 130

Peters, Sgt. Emil, 145-46

Pethoud, Pfc. Emmitt, 76

Phelps, 68, 119, 137

Philippines, 1, 12, 18, 53

Phillips, Cdr. John, 124

Phillips, Col. Walter C., 78

Phoenix, 68, 119, 151-52, 169

Pinkerton, Dr. Forrest, 184, 186

Planning, Japanese, 10-14

Poindexter, Gov. Joseph E., 164, 182-83

Polto, Pvt. Harry, 126

Popko, Aviation Ordnance Mate Henry, 146

Portland, 21

Power, Electrician’s Mate James, 132, 187

Powers, Aviation Machinist’s Mate William, 124

Precautions, Japanese, 15, 16, 18-19

Pressler, Seaman “Red,” 62

Puckett, Cdr. Louis, 141

Pullen, Lieut. Cdr. Harold, 2, Mrs., 2

Puuwai, 187, 189, 190

Pye, V. Adm. William S, 1, 69, 138-39

Queens Hospital, 186

Quisdorf, Aviation Ordnanceman Harand N., 93, 100

Rabe, Fireman Stanley H., 93

Radar, Army, 41-45, 170

Raenbig, Seaman H. E., 35, 36, 37

Raines, Radioman James, 102, 134-35

Raleigh, 51, 54, 62, 65, 84, 99, 135, 139, 159, 193

Kamapo, 53, 101

Ramey, Maj. Roger, 55

Ramsay, Lieut. Robert, 105, 106

Ramsey, Cdr. Logan, 60, 61, 64, 72

Rathman, Waldo H, 198

Rayburn, Speaker Sam, 208

Reconnaissance Squadron: 38th, 104; 50th, 181; 88th, 104

Red Hill, 199

Reese, Ens. Hubert, 79-80, 112, 146

Reeves, Chief Radioman Thomas, 124

Reid, Lieut. Ernest, 105

Reordan, Capt. Charles E., 126

Rescue work; on California, 179-80; on Ford Island, 122-23; on Oklahoma, 177-79; on Utah, 158-59; on the water, 123

Richards, Lieut. Robert, 113

Ricketts, Lieut. Claude V., 89-90, 97, 156

Rigel, 54, 69, 100, 101, 177, 178, 187, 194

Robbins, Maj. (at Hickam), 144

Robinson family, 187, 188, 189; Aylmer, 188, 190

Robinson, Pvt. E. H., 193

Rodenberger, Musician Don, 66

Rogers, Lieut, (at Haleiwa), 145

Rogers, Lieut. Cdr. R. H., 141

Rogovsky, Storekeeper Jack, 100

Rom, Pfc. Frank, 75

Rood, Capt. Ceorge, 138

Roosevelt, President Franklin Delano, 182-83, 205-6, 208-9; Mrs., 208

Roosevelt, Capt. James, 205, 208

Rottach, Ben, 54-55

Rowell, Mrs. Alexander, 199

Royal Hawaiian Hotel, 25, 193

Rucoi, Gunner’s Mate Millard, 119-

20, 133

Rumors, 159-60, 161-63, 164, 166, 168, 193, 194; of poisoned water, 162-63; of American-educated Japanese pilots, 193

Sabotage, Japanese, U.S. precautions against, 4, 55

Sachs, Maj. Henry, 144

Sacramento, 51, 67-68, 85, 100

Saeki, 11, 14

St. Louis, 53-54, 100, 119, 137, 138, 139, 168-69

St. Louis Heights, 161

Sakamaki, Ens. Kazuo, 24-26, 29-30, 39-40, 115-16, 174, 203-4

Sallet, Seaman George, 84, 86

“San Antonio Rose” (song), 106

San Francisco (city), 194, 195

San Francisco (cruiser), 52, 53, 68, 101, 176, 195

Saratoga, 194

Sawyer, Corpsman T. A., 136

Scanland, Gapt. FrancisW., 128, 180

Schick, Flight Surgeon William, 105

Schlect, Radioman Benny, 134-35

Schmitt, Lieut, (j.g.), Aloysius, 92

Schofield Barracks, 2-3, 4, 6, 7, 19, 49, 56, 77, 109, 160, 181, 182, 183, 196

Search for Japanese fleet, 125, 168-69

Sedberry, Chief Quartermaster Robert, 128, 130

Selfridge, 119

Senecal, Pfc. Raymond, 77

Shaffer, Marian, 8

Shafter. See Ft. Shafter.

Shapley, Maj. Allen, 94

Shaw, 102, 131, 133-34

Sherwood, Cpl. John, 75, 107-8, 143, 181

Shiga, Lieut. Yoshio, 12, 18, 20, 23, 47, 48, 113

Shimazaki, Lieut. Cdr. Shigekazu, 120

Shimizu, Cdr. Shin-Ichi, 14, 15, 21, 154

Shipley, Pvt. Bert, 143

Shivers, Robert, 163

Shokaku, 15, 18, 33, 34, 115, 172

Short, Seaman Leslie V., 54, 84

Short, Lieut. Gen. Walter C., 3-4, 6, 41, 55, 57, 78, 167, 182-83; Mrs., 3, 4

Shrine football game, 58

Shute, Ens. George, 79

Silvester, Lieut. Bill, 2

Simmons, Mess Attendant Walter, 51, 57, 79, 160, 182, 196

Simons, Capt. R. Bentham, 54, 99-100, 135-36

Sintani (Japanese on Niihau), 188, 189

Smith, Mess Attendant (of Utah), 99

Smith, Storekeeper H. W., 162-63

Smith, Chief Yeoman George, 71

Smith, Dr. Jesse, 185

Smith, Seaman Joseph, 141

Smith, Pharmacist’s Mate Orin, 146

Snake Ranch, 106, 181

Solace, 136, 157, 177, 186-87

Sorties: cruisers, 144, 168-69; destroyers, 136-37, 141; Nevada, 127-31; St. lams, 138

Soryu, 15, 33, 172

Southeast Loch, 11, 66, 67, 70, 72, 84, 90, 100

Spagnola, James A., 160, 176

Spangler, Mrs. Paul, 152, 200; Betty (daughter), 201; Margo (daughter), 201

Special Naval Attack Unit, 24, 203

Stagich, Radioman Leonard, 102

Star-Bulletin, Honolulu, 57-58, 152, 163

“Star-Spangled Banner,” 67, 128, 150

Stark, Adm. Harold R., 208

Stidham, Joan, 154

Stock, Fireman Frank, 66

Stout, Cdr. Herald, 68

Strafing, 66, 67, 106, 107, 110, 111-12, 123, 124, 139-40, 145, 146

Submarine base, 72, 84, 101, 128, 195

Sung do Kim, 110

“Sunrise Seranade” (song), 133

Suzuki, Mimori, 33, 172

Suzuki, Lieut. Cdr.

Suguru, 13, 14, 15-16

Swan, 51, 100, 160, 162, 180

“Sweet Leilani” (song), 2

Swenson, Capt. Raymond, 105

Swinney, Sgt. H. E., 75, 142

Szymanski, Machinist (on Utah), 158

Tai Sing Loe, 55

Taiyo Maru, 13

Takahashi, Lieut. Cdr. Kakwichi, 46, 63

Takeda, Lieut. Harauo, 31

Tamanaha, Toy, 151

Tanbo, Cdr. Yoshibumi, 17, 19, 21-22, 33, 34, 115, 202

Tangier, 51, 99, 120, 159, 194

Tanner, Ens. William, 36, 37-38, 60

Taussig, Ens. Joseph, 52, 53, 62, 67, 86-87, 127, 129, 130

Tautog, 67, 84

Taylor, Lieut. Homer, 106

Taylor, Lieut. Kenneth, 56, 77, 111, 145

Taylor, Ens. Thomas, 53

Taylor, Machinist’s Mate William, 68

Tellin, Carpenter R. C., 135

Tennessee, 8, 21, 51, 70, 71, 87, 96, 98, 119, 126, 151, 160, 176, 194

Ten-Ten (1010) dock, 50, 51, 53, 62, 64, 65, 66, 84, 101, 118, 120, 128, 130, 156

Territorial Guard, 183

Theobald, R. Adm. Robert A., 6

Thomas, Sen. Elmer, 208

Thomas, Lieut. Cdr. Francis J., 128, 130, 155

Thompson, Pvt. J. H., 107, 181

“Three Lirde Fishes” (song), 153

Tognetti, Paul, 184

Tokyo, 11, 13, 14, 18, 20, 22-23, 194, 202, 206, 207

Tomich, Chief Watertender Peter, 99

Tommerlin, Tommy, 81

Tone, 15, 31

Torpedo attacks, 11, 12, 70

Townsend, Cdr. A. M., 139; Mrs., 148, 198

Traffic jams, 138-41

Train, Capt. Harold C., 69

Tripler General Hospital, 184-85

Tsukamoto, Cdr. Hoichiro, 18, 33-34, 115

Tucker, 84

Turbine, 130

Turner, Pvt. William, 146

Turrage, Sgt. William, 146

Twaddell, Lieut. Col. James W., 105, 111

Two Jacks (café), 7

Tyce, Bob, 82

Tyler, 1st Lieut. Kermit A., 9, 42-45, 78

Ugaki R. Adm. Matome, 115

Umezawa, Sgt. (Japanese bombardier), 114

Underwood, Lieut, (at Haleiwa), 49

University of Hawaii, 58, 164, 183, 198, 201

U.S. reactions, 205-9

Usher, Prof. Roland G., 207

Utah, 6, 20, 51, 65, 98-99, 135, 158, 196

Utility Squadron One, 169, 197

Uttrick, Quartermaster B. C., 27

Vaessen, Fireman John, 99, 159

Vandenberg, Sen. Arthur, 207-8

Van Valkenburgh, Capt. Franklin, 94

Varner, Quartermaster H. C. (“Jim”), 54

Vaubel, Nurse Valera, 192

Vecera, Quartermaster Edward, 70, 176

Vestal, 62, 66, 70, 87, 93, 94-96, 161, 180

Vitousek, Roy, 82; Martin (son), 82

Vogt, Ens. John, 121

Waddington, Maj. L. D., 112

Wahiawa, 110, 183

Waianae Beach, 160

Waianae Mountains, 76, 80

Waikiki Beach, 5, 7, 53, 76, 80, 105, 160, 193

Waipahu, 199

Waipio Peninsula, 155

Wake Island, 2, 121

Wallace, Ens. W. G., 201; Mrs., 201

Walters, George, 131

Ward, 27-29, 36-39, 58, 59, 60, 61, 72, 103, 116, 137

Warnings, from Washington, 2, 4, 41, 167-68

Washington, D.C., 1, 4, 6, 18, 41, 72, 167, 205, 206, 207, 208

Waszkiewicz, Seaman Ed, 134

Watanabe, Cdr. Katsuji, 202-3

Watson, Aviation Machinist’s Mate Ralph, 147

Wears, Sgt. Leo, 93, 125

Weisenberger, Chief Machinist’s Mate Paul, 70-71, 101

Weisman (seaman on Oklahoma), 178

Welch, Lieut. George, 56, 76-77, 110-11, 145

West, Mrs. Melbourne, 149

West Virginia, 8, 21, 51, 52, 54, 66, 69-70, 85, 87-90, 93, 96-97, 98, 104, 120, 123, 124, 125-26, 129, 156-57, 176-77, 192, 194

Wheeler, Sen. Burton, 208

Wheeler Field, 10, 19, 49, 56, 76-77, 78, 108-9, 110, 144, 145, 160, 182, 196, 197

White, Lieut, (j.g), F. H., 97

White, Machinist’s Mate Robert, 119

Whitman, Lieut. George, 146

Whitney, 118, 198

Widgeon, 177, 180

Wilkinson, 1st Lieut. Warren, 141-42

Willis, Ens. Charles F., 80

Willis, Ens. Walter, 121

Wilson, Brig. Gen. Durward S., 2, 3

Wilson, Pvt. John, 143

Wilson, Mrs. Woodrow, 208

Wiltse, Cdr. Jerry, 140

Winser, Lieut. Cdr. L., 99

Won, Patrolman Albert, 161

Wong, Police Sgt. Jimmy, 152, 161-62

Workman, Seaman Joseph, 53

Wounded, treatment of, 122-23, 185-87

Wray, Lieut. Cdr. Henry, 128

Yamamoto, Adm. Isoroku, 10, 11, 12, 14, 16, 19, 20, 21, 24, 115, 173-74

Yano, Lieut, (pilot on Shokaku), 172

YG-17, 51

Y.M.C.A., 7, 139

Yo-44, 71-72

Yokosuka Naval Barracks, 23

Yokota, Seaman Shigeki, 15, 19

Yomiuri Shinbun (Tokyo newspaper), 3, 202

Young, Cdr. Cassin, 93, 95

Young, Paul, 110, 145; Mrs., 110

Young, Seaman Stephen, 90, 178

Young, Tommy, 49

Y.W.C.A., 164

Zlabis, Signalman Adolf, 62, 95

Zuikaku, 15, 171

IMAGE GALLERY

Official U.S. Navy Photo

Japanese crewmen cheer the attacking planes on their way, as they take off in the early-morning light of December 7. Commander Tsukamoto, navigation officer of the carrier Shokaku, decided this was the greatest moment of his life.

The American commanders who received the attack: at top, Admiral Husband E. Rimmel, commanding the U.S. Pacific Fleet, and, below, Lieut. General Walter C. Short, commanding U.S. Army ground and air forces in Hawaii.

The Japanese commander who delivered the attack: Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo.

This Japanese chart marks the supposed position of various ships in Pearl Harbor. Although quite inaccurate, it was relied on faithfully — the old target ship Utah, mislabeled the carrier Saratoga, took two torpedoes right away. The proposed course of a Japanese midget sub is plotted around Ford Island, leading to later reports that the map was recovered from one of these subs. But Japanese comments scribbled on the chart — for instance, that the tanks circled at the bottom can be seen “at about five nautical miles” — indicate that it really came from a plane shot down. This is in line with the recollection of General Kendall Fielder, who helped recover the chart.

The raid begins. Japanese torpedo plane peels off after direct hit on the Oklahoma … the torpedoed Utah lists to port off the near side of Ford Island … smoke boils up from dive-bombed hangars at extreme right. This and the next two pictures were later captured from the Japanese.

Battleship Row through Japanese eyes. Telltale torpedo tracks lead straight to the listing West Virginia and Oklahoma. Gray smoke across the channel is from the torpedoed Helena; white smoke in the background, from dive-bombing at Hickam Field.

Top, looking straight down on Battleship Row from a Japanese bomber. Oil gushes from the torpedoed Oklahoma and West Virginia. Astern, the Arizona has just been hit by a bomb. The same scene, below, viewed three days later from a U.S. Navy plane. The Oklahoma has turned turtle, the West Virginia is awash, the Arizona blown apart. Fifteen years later oil still seeped from Arizona’s hulk.

Height of the attack. The West Virginia lies sunk but still upright, thanks to Lieutenant Ricketts’ impromptu counterflooding. Inboard is the Tennessee, less seriously damaged but threatened at the moment by burning oil.

Rescue launch edges in to pick up swimmers from the West Virginia. One survivor needed no such help: Ensign Fowler, the ship’s disbursing officer, pushed off on a raft, using his cash ledger as a paddle.

No one ever finished raising the American flag, as the torpedoed Utah rolls over at her berth on the northwest side of Ford Island.

From the Army-Navy game program, November 29, 1941: “despite the claims of air enthusiasts no battleship has yet been sunk by bombs.”

Eight days later — the Arizona exploding from direct bomb hit.

The Arizona burning after the great explosion.

After the attack the shattered Arizona lies, a tomb for 1102 men.

Japanese fighters cruise by one of the unarmed B-17S that arrived from California during the raid. Most of the bombers were attacked, but this one led a charmed life —the enemy pilots apparently thought Staff Sergeant Lee Embree’s camera was a gun and veered away whenever he pointed it at them.

Lieutenant Robert Richards’ H-17 couldn’t make Hickam, ground-looped into tiny Bellows Field across the island.

Captain Ray Swenson’s B-17 was the only one from the Coast destroyed. Japanese bullets set off some flares, which burned the ship in half as it crash-landed at Hickam.

Wheeler Field, viewed from a Japanese plane. The Army fighters are parked in neat rows on the runway to prevent sabotage.

At Ewa Field, Marine ground crews fire back at the raiders with rifles.

While men grimly fought back at the bases, the average civilian awakened to noise and smoke, gradually shook off his Sunday morning torpor, and tried to grasp what was happening. This local resident investigates the smoke at Kaneohe Naval Air Station.

A wall of antiaircraft fire meets the second Japanese attack wave as it arrives over Pearl Harbor.

The Nevada starts her famous sortie. At top, she pulls out from her berth at the north end of Battleship Row. In the middle, she glides by the blazing Arizona. At bottom, she heads on down the channel. These pictures are believed never before published.

The Nevada ends her sortie aground at Hospital Point. The current has swung her around, so that she now faces back up the channel; but the flag still flies from her fantail — reminding at least one witness of Francis Scott Key and “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

After the raid the Nevada pulled clear of Hospital Point and backed across the harbor, where she is shown beached on the firm sand of Waipio Peninsula.

Late in the attack, bombs rained down on the destroyers Cassin and Dowries in Drydock No. 1, wrecking both ships. Some of their machinery was later salvaged.

Drydock No. 1 after the raid, showing the Cassin rolled over on the Dowries, with the battleship Pennsylvania just astern. At the right is Crane 51, which civilian yard worker George Walters ran back and forth alongside the Pennsylvania, trying to ward off low-flying planes.

Toward the end of the attack the destroyer Shaw exploded in the floating drydock. Debris sailed through the air, and one five-inch shell arched half a mile across the channel, landing on Ford Island a few feet from where this picture was taken.

The cruiser St. Louis passes the upturned hull of the Oklahoma, on her way to sea around 9:40 A.M. She was the only large ship to get out during the attack. To the left, burning oil from the Arizona drifts down toward the torpedoed California.

The burning oil engulfs the California’s stern at ten o’clock. “Abandon ship” has just been sounded, and the men are swarming down her side, making their way to Ford Island.

Four American participants: (top left) Captain Mervyn Bennion of the battleship West Virginia, who died on his bridge; (top right) Bandleader Oden McMillan of the battleship Nevada, who led his men in “The Star-Spangled Banner” as the attack began; (below, left to right) Lieutenants Kenneth Taylor and George Welch, who together bagged seven of the eleven planes shot down by Army pilots.

Four Japanese participants: (top left) Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, who led the attacking planes; (top right) Commander Shin-Ichi Shimizu, who organized the necessary supplies: (lower left) Commander Takahisa Amagai, who was flight deck officer on the Hiryu; and (lower right) Rear Admiral Ryunosuke Kusaka, who made a key decision that led to Japanese withdrawal after the raid.

Ten-ten dock after the attack, showing the capsized mine layer Oglala. Her seams were sprung by the torpedo that holed the cruiser Helena (at left), but there are men who still claim that the ancient mine layer really “sank from fright.”

The torpedoed Raleigh. In his successful battle to stay afloat, Captain Simons jettisoned everything movable, wangled extra pumps, stuffed life belts into the leaks, borrowed four pontoons and the lighter that can be seen alongside. Astern is the capsized Utah.

Pearl Harbor from Admiral Kimmel’s lawn. It was here the admiral stood, watching the first blows fall on Battleship Row in the background. Photographed around noon by a neighbor, Mrs. Hall Mayfield.

During the attack forty Navy shells, hut only one Japanese bomb, fell on Honolulu proper. This scene shows one of the areas hit by accident.

While barracks burn in the background, the American flag — shredded by machine-gun fire — still flies at Hickam.

At top, Japanese painting commemorates the heroes of the midget submarine attack. Missing from the picture is Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki, the only member of the group who survived. He beached his sub after the raid and became U. S. Prisoner of War No. 1. Ensign Sakamaki’s photo appears at the left.

Ensign Sakamaki’s midget sub lies beached off Bellows Field, where it was discovered the morning after the raid.

The midget sub rammed by the Monaghan was also recovered. It was eventually dredged up from the harbor bottom and is shown here, about to be used as filling for a new sea wall. The bodies of its two crewmen are still inside.

Long after the raid was over, rescuers clambered about the hull of the upturned Oklahoma, cutting through to the crew members trapped inside. Thirty-two men were ultimately pulled out alive — the last some thirty-six hours after the big ship rolled over into the Pearl Harbor mud.

Incredible Victory

Walter Lord

To William Rushton Calfee

Contents

Foreword

1. A Single Stroke

2. The Code and the Target

3. Ready

4. “Many Planes Heading Midway”

5. “Hawks at Angels 12”

6. The Target Attacks

7. “Pilots, Man Your Planes!”

8. “Don’t Let This Carrier Escape”

9. Dead in the Water

10. Abandon Ship

11. The Emperor’s Portrait

12. Winners and Losers

13. Home Again

The Riddles of Midway

Acknowledgments

List of Contributors

Index

Illustrations

Foreword

BY ANY ORDINARY STANDARD, they were hopelessly outclassed.

They had no battleships, the enemy eleven. They had eight cruisers, the enemy twenty-three. They had three carriers (one of them crippled); the enemy had eight. Their shore defenses included guns from the turn of the century.

They knew little of war. None of the Navy pilots on one of their carriers had ever been in combat. Nor had any of the Army fliers. Of the Marines, 17 of 21 new pilots were just out of flight school—some with less than four hours’ flying time since then. Their enemy was brilliant, experienced and all-conquering.

They were tired, dead tired. The patrol plane crews, for instance, had been flying 15 hours a day, servicing their own planes, getting perhaps three hours’ sleep at night.

They had equipment problems. Some of their dive bombers couldn’t dive—the fabric came off the wings. Their torpedoes were slow and unreliable; the torpedo planes even worse. Yet they were up against the finest fighting plane in the world.

They took crushing losses—15 out of 15 in one torpedo squadron … 21 out of 27 in a group of fighters … many, many more.

They had no right to win. Yet they did, and in doing so they changed the course of a war. More than that, they added a new name—Midway—to that small list that inspires men by shining example. Like Marathon, the Armada, the Marne, a few others, Midway showed that every once in a while “what must be” need not be at all. Even against the greatest of odds, there is something in the human spirit—a magic blend of skill, faith and valor—that can lift men from certain defeat to incredible victory.

CHAPTER 1

A Single Stroke

PETTY OFFICER HEIJIRO OMI didn’t have a word to say in excuse. As the Admiral’s chief steward, he was responsible for the food at this party—and that included the tai, a carefully selected sea bream cooked whole. It had been a happy inspiration, for tai broiled in salt meant good luck in Japan. But this time the chef had broiled it in bean paste—miso, to be exact—and as every superstitious Japanese knew, that extra touch meant crowning good luck with bad.

Obviously it was just a slip. The chef hadn’t been thinking, and Omi had been off attending to some other detail of the party. Still, even the smallest mistake was humiliating when one had the privilege of personally serving Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the universally worshiped Commander in Chief of the Combined Fleet of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Now Omi stood forlorn and silent as Commander Noboru Fukusaki, the Admiral’s flag secretary, dressed him down. The Admiral himself hovered in the background; a humorless half-smile flickered across his face.

Well, no time to brood about it. The guests were already swarming aboard the flagship Yamato, riding gracefully at her red buoy in the anchorage of Hashirajima. Some 200 officers soon packed the quarterdeck—dark, scowling Admiral Nagumo of Pearl Harbor fame … a dozen young destroyer skippers … the enormously popular Captain Yanagimoto of the carrier Soryu … promising staff officers like Commander Sasabe, whose Naval Academy Class of ‘23 seemed to be getting so many good jobs.

Admiral Yamamoto had invited them all this spring evening of May 25, 1942, to help celebrate a very auspicious occasion. A huge Japanese armada was about to set forth across the Pacific, and its goal was in keeping with its size: capture the American base at Midway, lure the U.S. fleet to destruction, and hopefully win the war for Japan at a single stroke.

Cheers and banzais echoed across the water, past the scores of ships that packed the quiet anchorage. If anyone noticed the tai served with miso, it was long since forgotten. Toasts to the nation; toasts to the fleet; toasts to past triumphs and future hopes. The warm sake stirred visions of limitless glory, and even the flowered cups seemed auspicious—they had been presented to Admiral Yamamoto by the Emperor himself.

Victory was in the air … not just at Hashirajima but throughout Japan. For six months she had enjoyed an unbroken string of triumphs beyond the wildest imagination—Pearl Harbor … the Repulse and the Prince of Wales … Hong Kong … Manila … Singapore … Bataan. By April Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo’s big carriers were ravaging the Indian Ocean, smashing Colombo, sinking two British cruisers, plus the carrier Hermes off Trincomalee. Then Coral Sea and still more glory. Later, men would call it a strategic defeat—it permanently blunted the Japanese thrust toward Australia—but who could see that now? A generously inflated communiqué ticked off a satisfying toll of smashed U.S. carriers, battleships and cruisers.

Heady stuff, making it easy to believe still more. The village radios crackled with bulletins of a demoralized America. Newspapers described U.S. cities “ghostlike” under a new blackout law. Reports told how “unwilling American women are dragged from their homes into munitions factories.” (Years later any American would recognize that this referred to the robust “Rosie the Riveter.”)

Best of all, the press described how the American people were beginning to waver. One article told how Cordell Hull was desperately trying to rally a war-weary people, but “it is like trying to drive an unwilling horse into a bull fight arena.” Another report said that a San Francisco radio announcer stammered when he tried to defend democracy. “DISSATISFACTION WITHIN CAMP OF ALLIES CONTINUES TO MOUNT,” happily announced the Japan Times and Advertiser, quoting Father Charles E. Coughlin, “the brave and well-known Catholic missionary in America.”

One Japanese who did not buy all this was Admiral Yamamoto. Born in 1884 during the great awakening of the “Meiji Restoration,” blooded at Tsushima under the heroic Admiral Togo, and now the leading apostle of naval air power, Yamamoto stood perfectly for all the greatness of new Japan. But he also knew his America. He had studied at Harvard, served as naval attaché in Washington, traveled around the country. Don’t take taxis, take the bus, he used to tell new Japanese arrivals.

He knew America’s resilience and optimism too. His enemies would later make much of a “boast” that he’d sign peace in the White House. Actually, he said that Japan could never win short of signing peace in the White House.

Above all, he understood American production. He may not have known that in 1940 the United States turned out 4,500,000 automobiles, while Japan made only 48,000; but he wouldn’t have been surprised. He knew all too well that Japan was overmatched, and that it was only a matter of time before American production would begin to tell. “If I am told to fight regardless of the consequences,” he confided to Premier Konoye in 1941, “I shall run wild for the first six months or a year, but I have utterly no confidence for the second and third years of the fighting.”

To Yamamoto there was only one solution: a quick, decisive victory before America got rolling. If he could crush the weakened U.S. fleet—especially those carriers missed at Pearl Harbor—he’d control the whole Pacific. Then just possibly Washington might settle for a peace favorable to Japan, rather than face the agony of the long road back.

Admittedly it was a long shot, but what was so wrong with that? He had always been a gambler. In his American days two of his favorite diversions were bridge and poker. “Do you like to gamble?” he once asked an apprentice secretary at the Embassy in Washington. When the young man hesitantly said he hadn’t yet tried, Yamamoto shut him off: “People who don’t gamble aren’t worth talking to.”

So the stakes were right. Trouble was, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, commanding the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, refused to play along. Well aware that his crippled force was still in no shape to risk an all-out test, Nimitz contented himself for the moment with hit-and-run carrier thrusts and morale-building raids. Yamamoto decided that the only way to draw him out was to take something the Americans couldn’t afford to lose. Then when their fleet emerged to meet the challenge, he’d pounce on it with everything he had.

Midway seemed the perfect bait. It was only a small U.S. outpost in the central Pacific, but its capture offered several advantages—it would strengthen the homeland’s defenses; it would be a useful patrol plane base—but above all, it would lure the U.S. fleet out. Standing only 1,136 miles from Pearl Harbor, Midway was a place the Americans would just have to defend. They would come; and he would get them.

The idea first began brewing as early as February 1942. Japan was nearing the end of what it called the “first phase” of its conquests, and the problem was what to do next. One school wanted to go west—seize Ceylon, eventually link up with Rommel in the Near East. Another group—the bright desk boys at Naval General Staff—wanted to head south; they’d isolate Australia by taking New Caledonia, Samoa and Fiji.

Midway was the product of Combined Fleet Headquarters, and this fact alone meant a certain amount of jealous sniping from the Naval “General Staff. But apart from the traditional rivalry between deck and desk sailors, the plan seemed open to several objections. Midway was far away—the attack would have no shore-based air support. By the same token, it was well within the range of U.S. planes based in Hawaii. To many it seemed too small and remote to be a good patrol base. Holding it would use shipping badly needed elsewhere. Above all, there wasn’t enough time to gather all the supplies and equipment needed for such a long jump—the proposed June deadline was a killer.

Yet Midway had one great advantage that outweighed everything else: Yamamoto was for it. No one would openly stand up against him; so on April 5 the Naval General Staff finally gave the plan a somewhat reluctant blessing. As a conciliatory gesture, Yamamoto tied in the Fiji-Samoan operation as the next step afterward. Then, since the Naval Genera] Staff was worried about possible bombings from the Aleutians, he also added an Aleutian attack to the Midway plan. He had plenty of ships, and it might help confuse the Americans.

But intraservice rivalries die hard, and by mid-April it was clear the Naval General Staff was still dragging its feet. Now they wanted to postpone the attack for a month.

All the squabbling ended on April 18. It was just another spring day when Prime Minister Hideki Tojo took off that morning on a routine inspection trip. Then, as his party headed toward the small port of Mito, suddenly a “most curious” brown plane was seen flying toward them. A moment of puzzling … then the frantic realization that it was an American bomber. Tojo’s plane veered wildly out of the way as the bomber flashed by, intent on its business.

All Japan was just as surprised, as Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle’s 16 B-25s swept in on their famous raid. The Japanese had sighted the U.S. task force, indeed expected a visit the following day when the carriers were close enough to launch their regular planes. But nobody dreamed the Americans could launch long-range bombers from a carrier’s flight deck. The damage was small, but the shock and wounded pride were enormous.

No one took it harder than Admiral Yamamoto. The Emperor’s safety was an obsession with him. After the raid he holed up in his cabin on the Yamato and brooded alone for a day. Chief Steward Omi had never seen him so pale or downhearted.

No more doubts about Midway now. The operation took on new importance as a way to strengthen Japan’s defensive perimeter, while Yamamoto was more determined than ever to bring on the battle that would finish off the U.S. fleet. The Naval General Staff stopped their sniping, urged the Admiral to get going.

On the Yamato Senior Operations Officer Captain Kameto Kuroshima went into one of his trance-like periods of contemplation. It was his function to hammer together the operation, and all agreed he was born for the job. He ate, slept, lived only for operations. While working on an idea, he’d disappear into his cabin for days. Sometimes he’d burn incense and ponder in the dark; other times he’d sit at his desk, buried in paper, as the cigarette butts piled up. (He put them in a glass half filled with water because the crew wouldn’t trust him with an ashtray.) Lost in thought, he’d forget everything else—people said he even slept in his shoes. The orderlies rather irreverently called him Boke-Sambo— “foggy staff officer”—but Yamamoto knew better. The Admiral put up with any amount of outlandish behavior because the brilliant Kuroshima was, the whole staff agreed, “the God of Operations.”

The plan that emerged was worthy of the man. It called for an intricate naval ballet, involving no less than 16 different groups of ships performing with perfect coordination. All was built around “N-Day”—the day scheduled for the landings on Midway. On N-3 Day Admiral Hosogaya would open the show with his attack on the Aleutians. Then on N-2 Day Admiral Nagumo’s superb Striking Force of six carriers would hit Midway from the northwest, softening the place up for easy capture. On N-Day itself the Invasion Force would arrive from the west, supported by Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondo’s Second Fleet. Meanwhile the Main Force—Admiral Yamamoto’s great array of battleships—would lie between the two … lurking about 300 miles in the rear, waiting to jump the U.S. fleet when it rushed out to rescue Midway. To the north, some of Hosogaya’s supporting ships would lie near enough to join Yamamoto when he moved in for the kill.

To be on the safe side, Kuroshima also arranged for reconnaissance. Two cordons of submarines would be placed between Hawaii and Midway. They would spot and report the U.S. fleet as it came out, and maybe get a little target practice.

Of course, these were just the bare bones of the plan. Now the scene shifted from the scented gloom of Kuroshima’s cabin to the bright linoleum of the operations room, where the staff would contribute its expertise. Commander Yoshiro Wada, the chief signal officer, struggled to work out a feasible communications system … Commander Yasuji Watanabe labored over tactical problems … Commander Akira Sasaki projected planes and pilot requirements … Others took on headaches like fueling, navigation and support for the troop landings.

Admiral Yamamoto often joined them. In the last analysis it was his plan, and he wasn’t the kind of leader who used his staff for advice; they were there to carry out his decisions. For large meetings they pulled together the desks in the operations room to form a sort of conference table; for smaller sessions they sat around in a square of brown leather sofas. On a table in the center there was always a box of Sakura cigarettes, some cheese, and that great symbol of their victories—a bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label whisky “liberated” from Singapore.

Yamamoto himself didn’t drink or smoke, but he was no prig. He could joke with his staff and was always considerate of the enlisted men. Rather formal on the job (no one ever saw him take off his coat), he was disarmingly human off duty. His sweet tooth, his zest for shogi, his weakness for Hechima cologne, all made him so much more a creature of flesh and blood than the national monument he had now become.

Toward the end of April he received his two top commanders, Admirals Nagumo and Kondo, in his red-carpeted office just aft of the operations room. They were back from the Indian Ocean, knew nothing of Midway; now they had come to get the word. Nagumo was indifferent—his carriers could do anything—but Kondo began rattling off some of the old objections. Yamamoto cut him short—all that was settled long ago.

May 1, and the days of planning were over. That morning the various task force commanders swarmed aboard the Yamato for four days of briefing and table-top maneuvers. As they tried out the plan on the game board, Red Team (the U.S. fleet) unexpectedly caught Blue Team (Nagumo’s carriers) while their planes were off bombing Midway. Under the rules nine hits were scored, the Akagi and Kaga sunk. Rear Admiral Matome Ugaki, Yamamoto’s shrewd chief of staff, hastily reversed the umpire; six hits were erased and the Akagi refloated.

Success thus assured, the mimeograph machines began rolling. May 5, Imperial General Headquarters Navy Order No. 18 directed the Combined Fleet to “carry out the occupation of Midway Islands and key points in the western Aleutians in cooperation with the Army.” Other orders followed, and finally that ultimate badge that changed any military plan from dream to reality, an official code name. From now on the project would be the “MI Operation,” with the Aleutians to be referred to as “AO” and” Midway itself as “AF.”

One final touch. Thinking back on those table-top maneuvers, Captain Kuroshima did feel it might be useful to know just a little bit more about what the U.S. fleet was doing. So around May 8 he added an extra precaution: seaplanes refueled from submarines would reconnoiter Pearl Harbor the week before the attack, to give up-to-the-minute information on enemy movements.

Ships began creeping out. Early May several submarines quietly headed south, each carrying a midget sub piggyback. Hopefully they could stage diversionary attacks on Sydney and Madagascar, throwing the enemy even more off guard. Other submarines glided east—they would refuel the seaplanes to reconnoiter Pearl Harbor. Others went to set up the cordons that would alert the fleet when the Americans came out. Still another moved east alone—the clever Lieutenant Commander Yahachi Tanabe was taking the I-168 to the enemy’s very doorstep. It would reconnoiter Midway itself and report what was going on.

Commander Yasumi Toyama could use a little good intelligence. He was responsible for working out the actual landings, yet he knew depressingly little about Midway. As he later confessed, “It was just a spot on the ocean.” He had no photos; the plane meant to take them had been shot down as it approached. His maps were sketchy and ancient. Idly, he decided to land on the south side where the reef was close to the shore. He never realized that there was a large gap in the reef to the north.

He had no better idea what they’d find when they got there. A Navy estimate suggested 750 U.S. Marines; the Army thought 1,700. Most sources agreed Midway might have 50-60 planes, maybe ten antiaircraft guns, about the same number of shore-defense guns. Not much else.

In any case, the Japanese were bringing enough. It would be a joint Army-Navy affair, amounting to some 4,600 men altogether. Colonel Ichiki’s 28th Infantry could take care of themselves anywhere; so could his engineers and rapid-fire gun company. Captain Ota’s 2nd Combined Special Naval Landing Force was equally tough, as were the Navy construction men and even the weather team. They all had plenty of fire power too—the Navy alone was bringing 94 guns.

The only real problem was landing craft, and that was more an embarrassment. Commander Shiro Yonai, chief of staff for the Navy contingent, knew they’d need flat-bottomed boats to get over the reefs, yet there wasn’t a single one in the whole Japanese Navy. Finally he buried his pride and borrowed some from the Army Infantry School.

May 15, and the Navy occupation force began moving out, bound for the staging area at Saipan. May 18, Colonel Ichiki visited the Yamato for a personal briefing from Admiral Yamamoto. Then he and his troops were on their way too.

That same day Chief Warrant Officer Takayoshi Morinaga, torpedo pilot on the carrier Kaga, swooped down in a mock attack on some cruisers maneuvering in the Inland Sea. The fliers were getting in some final practice, and Morinaga was a good example why they were the best at their trade in the world. Starting with the China incident in 1937, he had now been flying combat for five years.

On the Akagi, flagship of the carrier fleet, Admiral Nagumo’s staff bustled about pulling together supplies, planes and pilots. The attack was now firmly set for June 4, and Nagumo’s roly-poly chief of staff, Rear Admiral Ryunosuke Kusaka, thought this was much too soon. The pilots should have 40-50 days ashore to rest and help train the new men coming up. But like everyone else who counseled delay, he got a quick brush-off from Combined Fleet Headquarters.

Nor was even Kusaka overly concerned. They might have too little time to prepare, but he spent much of it trying to put through posthumous promotions for the naval aviators killed at Pearl Harbor. Truth was, he felt it really didn’t matter anyhow: “We can beat the Yankees hands down with a single blow.”

They would soon have their chance. May 20, Admiral Yamamoto fixed the final tactical grouping of his forces, and now the heart of the fleet—70 great warships—gathered at Hashirajima anchorage for the last time. Dwarfing them all was the 64,000-ton Yamato, back from a quick trip to Kure for supplies. Biggest battleship in the world, her 18.1-inch guns could hurl a broadside more than 25 miles. But big as she was, the center of attention was Admiral Nagumo’s Striking Force of massive carriers—the Akagi, 30,000-ton ugly dowager of the carrier fleet … the Kaga, most powerful of them all … the more modern Hiryu and Soryu, listed as 10,000-tons for purposes of the old London Naval Treaty, but actually a good 18,000 tons each.

At that, there should have been two more of them. The superb new carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku were meant to be on hand, but detached for the Coral Sea affair, they had run into a little trouble. On May 17 Shokaku limped back into Kure, her flight deck shattered and her bow burnt out by American bombs. Zuikaku followed two days later, undamaged but her air group badly mauled. Between them, the two ships had only six torpedo planes and nine dive bombers left.

So there was no question of bringing them along. Four carriers should be enough anyhow. The Americans had little left. That “Saratoga-type” carrier was certainly sunk at the Coral Sea, and the Yorktown probably so. Even if she survived, it would make no difference. If Shokaku couldn’t make Midway, how could Yorktown?

Far from giving pause, Coral Sea actually strengthened everyone’s confidence. After all, that fight had been carried on by the 5th Air Squadron, generally scorned as the worst in the fleet. If this group of nobodies could hold their own against the best the Americans could offer, it should be child’s play for the 1st and 2nd Air Squadrons now heading out—they were the cream of Japanese naval aviation. “Son of concubine gained a victory,” ran the mildly coarse joke that swept the wardrooms, “so sons of legal wives should find no rival in the world.”

Convinced of this, one headquarters told the post office at Yokosuka Naval Base simply to forward its mail to Midway. Combined Fleet sent down a new name for the islands: “Glorious Month of June.” Officers who had brought ashore their personal belongings at the time of Pearl Harbor now lugged them all on board again—cameras, trinkets, framed pictures of the family, sets of go and shogi. Chief Warrant Officer Morinaga thought how different it was from the start of the war. Then he lay awake all night. Now he slept perfectly. Midway would be simple … “as easy as twisting a baby’s arm.”

No wonder spirits were high at the gala send-off party on May 25. No wonder they clinked the Emperor’s cups and shouted their toasts. In contrast, the 26th was a day of quiet briefing, a last chance to button down the million details that went into winning a great victory. Far to the south, the transports were now assembled at Saipan. The troops busily practiced landings, splashing ashore through the surf. The mine sweepers, subchasers and patrol boats began streaming out of the harbor that afternoon, getting a head start so they could refuel at Wake. From the northern port of Ominato, the first units of the Aleutian force were pulling out too. Led by the light carriers Ryujo and Junyo, they soon disappeared east, lost in a swirling fog.

Six A.M. Wednesday, May 27, at the Hashirajima anchorage. A signal flag suddenly fluttered from the mast of Nagumo’s flagship Akagi: “Sortie as scheduled.” Anchor chains clattered, and the Striking Force began moving: first the light cruiser Nagara, leading the 11 destroyers of the protective screen … then the cruisers Tone and Chikuma … then the battleships Haruna and Kirishima with their odd pagoda masts … and finally the Akagi, the Kaga, the Hiryu, the Soryu.

As they crept single file past the ships still at anchor—Yamamoto’s and Kondo’s great collection of battleships and cruisers—sailors lined the rails, cheering and waving their caps. The sun blazed down, and it seemed a good omen after the cloudy, muggy days they’d been having. But the best omen of all, as everyone knew, was the day itself. For this 27th of May, 1942, was Navy Day—the 37th anniversary of Admiral Togo’s great victory over the Russians at Tsushima.

Slowly they moved down the Inland Sea, through the Bungo Strait, and into the great blue swells of the open Pacific. Gradually the homeland faded into the haze; shipboard routine picked up; some men began doing calisthenics on the Akagi’s flight deck. The engines pounded faster … they were on their way.

Back at Hashirajima anchorage that evening Admiral Yamamoto retired as usual to his cabin on the Yamato. This was when he liked to write letters, and it was always quite a ritual. The orderly would lay out brush and ink on a table; then, neatly spreading his paper on the carpet, Yamamoto would kneel down and start to write in a beautiful Chinese script. His letters were of all kinds—many to children—but some were on a special stationery used for no other purpose. These were the ones for Chiyoko Kawai, the geisha girl he kept in Tokyo.

Tonight his letter to her was serious; he was clearly still aware of his all-or-nothing risk. He told her he would like to give up everything, escape the world and be alone with her. But now he was off again, commanding all the fleet in the Pacific. The days ahead would be critical— “I imagine that very delightful moments may be few.”

May 28, the Attu and Kiska invasion forces slipped out of Ominato harbor. Down at Saipan the Midway Invasion Force was starting too. Promptly at 5 P.M. the light cruiser Jintsu led 12 grimy transports and the tanker Akebono Maru out of the harbor. Several patrol boats joined up, and the seaplane tenders Chitose and Kamikawa Maru brought up the rear. They were to peel off later, hoping to take the tiny island of Kure just west of Midway and set up a seaplane base to support the invasion.

That same afternoon Admiral Kurita’s supporting group of heavy cruisers steamed out of Guam and took a parallel course. They were superb ships—the Kumano, Suzuya, Mikuma and Mogami—and should play a big part in covering the landings.

At Hashirajima the Main Force still rode quietly at anchor. On the Yamato the band gathered as usual outside the staff dining room at 11:50 A.M. Five minutes later the officers entered, stiff in their starched whites, and took their places. Then promptly at noon Chief Steward Omi knocked on Admiral Yamamoto’s door as the band broke into a march. The Admiral emerged—he was always ready—and strode down the corridor into the dining room while the staff bowed their heads in respect. It was a daily ceremony when the flagship was in port, and today was no exception—but it would be the last time for a long, long while.

May 29, at the first light of day, the remaining ships began moving out too. First came Admiral Kondo’s powerful force, designed to add still more beef to the invasion: a couple of battleships, five tough cruisers, the light carrier Zuiho, a swarm of destroyers.

And finally, the Main Force itself. Promptly at 6:00 A.M. the engines began turning over, and Admiral Yamamoto’s 34 ships—heart of the Combined Fleet—got under way. Led by the mighty Yamato, seven great battleships glided through the Bungo Strait and headed into the Pacific. Around them bustled the usual screen of destroyers, cruisers and planes from the escort carrier Hosho. They were the last to leave, but that was just the point—these were the ships that would lurk in the wings while Nagumo and Kondo drew the enemy out; then they’d move in and deliver the knockout.

“The chief gunnery officer delivered a stirring appeal,” wrote Takeo Ikemoto, a young seaman in the Main Force. “We will keep it in our minds forever.”

“A beautiful day, a most appropriate day for such a cheerful departure,” an engineer on the Fuso scribbled in his diary. The whole crew, he went on to say, were in high spirits.

And why not? How could this huge armada lose? It all added up to 11 battleships, 8 carriers, 23 cruisers, 65 destroyers, scores of auxiliaries—some 190 ships altogether. Advancing eastward across the Pacific, they stretched over 1,800 miles in a great arc from the Kuriles to Guam. On this one operation their engines were using more oil than the peacetime Japanese Navy used in a year. Supporting them in this new age of aerial warfare were 700 planes, sea- and land-based—261 on Nagumo’s crack carriers alone. Manning them were 100,000 men, including a dazzling army of 20 admirals. Commanding them was Isoroku Yamamoto himself.

And what was against them? The Combined Fleet estimate put the U.S. strength at 2 or 3 carriers (also possibly 2 or 3 escort types), perhaps 2 battleships, 11-13 cruisers, maybe 30 destroyers. Not much; and latest reports indicated there would be even less than that. On May 15 a patrol plane spotted two U.S. carriers down by the Solomons.

That meant there might well be no carriers at all in the Midway area. Then the operation would be even easier than expected, although, of course, they would also lose the chance of including carriers in the bag.

All that remained was for the U.S. fleet to do as planned. It must be in Pearl Harbor, then come out and fall into the trap. But of course this would happen. Even the orders said so. As Imperial General Order No. 94 explained, “We will destroy the enemy fleet which will appear when our operation is under way.”

But what if the Americans knew what was up? Not a chance. Admiral Nagumo laid it on the line as his carriers raced toward the launching point. In his own intelligence estimate of the situation, paragraph (d) flatly declared, “The enemy is not aware of our plans.”

JUST about this time, 7,000 miles to the east, in a chart room at the Navy Department in Washington a small group of officers were putting the finishing touches on a large chart of the Pacific Ocean. It was labeled in firm block letters, “STUDY OF AF AND AOB CAMPAIGNS, MAY 29, 1942.”

The route of the Aleutian force was clear now, and it was carefully traced in magenta pencil, with the added note, “Assumed departure 0800, May 26.” The movements of the Invasion Force were clear too—a red line headed out from Saipan, neatly marked, “Depart 28 May.” Admiral Nagumo’s Striking Force was causing a little more trouble. The May 27 departure date was clear enough, but the green line that slanted down from the northwest toward Hawaii was marked, “This course can be rejected.” A new line ran more directly east, heading straight for Midway.

At the headquarters of the Commander in Chief, United States Pacific Fleet, in Pearl Harbor (CINCPAC), other officers worked on a similar chart. Experts at both places were in close touch with each other, exchanging data, comparing notes, sometimes differing in their interpretations. At Pearl, for instance, Admiral Nagumo’s route ran farther to the north, then slanted southeast toward Midway, compass bearing perhaps 135°.

But here too there were uncertainties. Nobody seemed sure, for instance, just what was scheduled to happen at 6:00 P.M. on June 2 at a particular point some 650 miles west of Midway. It was obviously some sort of rendezvous, but the exact nature was hard to tell.

It seemed there were a few details that even a brilliant intelligence team couldn’t work out.

CHAPTER 2

The Code and the Target

VISITORS WERE NEVER WELCOME. To see anyone in the Navy’s Combat Intelligence Unit at Pearl Harbor, it was first necessary to buzz a locked door at the top of some cellar steps. Eventually a man would appear and, if credentials were in order, the door would open. At the bottom of the steps was another locked door, and the same procedure would be repeated. When this second door opened, the visitor was finally in.

At first glance, the place seemed a shambles—about two dozen people working on top of each other, wading through a sea of paper. Any trace of a filing system had long since vanished. Stacks of folders simply piled up on the desks and chairs, then flooded out over the floor. Presiding over it all was a tall, thin, humorously caustic man in a red smoking jacket and carpet slippers—Commander Joseph J. Rochefort, Jr.

Joe Rochefort had been breaking codes for a long time now. In the early 1920s he helped another gifted young officer, Laurence F. Safford, set up the Navy’s first center. In the doldrums of the ‘30s he amused himself by breaking the State Department’s “gray” code. (“They were mad as hell.”) In the fall of 1940 he helped crack the top Japanese naval code JN-25—by now he knew the language well.

May 1941, and he was at Pearl Harbor, setting up his Combat Intelligence Unit. Known in the trade as station “Hypo,” it listened to Japanese traffic along with another station at Cavite (“Cash”) and the home base in Washington (“Negat”). Technically Washington was headquarters, but the three stations really operated as a unit. Code-breaking was still a small world; the men in the business had worked together for years, sharing their findings, their theories, their hunches.

None of it did any good December 7, 1941. Japanese naval traffic had petered out, and Tokyo had also changed the key to JN-25, throwing everyone off for a few days. But the circuits soon started up again; the new key was solved by December 10, and once more there was plenty of good listening. Rochefort had spent the fall concentrating on the Japanese flag officers’ system; now his unit joined the other stations in attacking JN-25.

Not that anyone understood much directly. The actual process of code-breaking rarely yielded more than 10%-15% of a message. The rest was all analysis: perhaps the name of a ship suggested another usually with it … or a past operation might help next time when the place names cropped up again … or a familiar operator’s touch might give the source away; call letters could change, but a particular operator’s “fist”—never.

It took a curious combination of talents to fathom all this—ideally a man should be sailor, linguist and puzzle fiend in about equal proportion—so it was not surprising that the Combat Intelligence Unit was known as an outfit of individualists. Nominally under the 14th Naval District, actually they were left on their own to exercise their special brand of genius. They lived for their work, and as the Japanese offensive rolled on, they got plenty of it. Gradually they absorbed a remarkable amount of unique knowledge.

One day toward the middle of April a totally unexpected message arrived from Washington. It was, in fact, the first and only communication Rochefort ever received directly from Admiral Ernest J. King, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Fleet. COMINCH wanted Rochefort to give, based on the current flow of intercepts, his long-range estimate of Japanese naval intentions.

It was unusual, to say the least, for King to dip so far down the line in asking a question; yet it was understandable too at this particular moment. The Japanese had just raided Ceylon. Did this mean a major shift in the war toward India, or would they soon be back in the Pacific? A great deal depended on the answer.

Rochefort came up with a four-point estimate, reflecting the combined opinion of his staff: (1) Japanese operations in the Indian Ocean were over; the fleet was on its way home; (2) they weren’t going to attack Australia; (3) they were planning an operation south of Rabaul, with forces already assigned; (4) there were signs of something else brewing in the Pacific, but he couldn’t say when or where.

By late April the missing pieces were beginning to fall into place. The operation south of Rabaul was definitely aimed at Port Moresby—U.S. units headed for the Coral Sea. The other operation remained something of a mystery, but the Central Pacific seemed a strong possibility, and it was hard to look at the map without noticing Midway. Serving at various times as a coaling station, commercial cable relay point, and Pan American Clipper rest stop, Midway was currently a very useful but highly exposed Navy patrol plane base. It consisted of just two tiny islets, Sand and Eastern, lying side by side in a beautiful blue lagoon. There was nothing else worth anything for a thousand miles around. Midway was out in the Pacific alone—all alone.

Admiral Nimitz made a brief visit there May 2, spending a day with the officers in charge, Navy Commander Cyril T. Simard and Marine Lieutenant Colonel Harold Shannon. Nimitz mentioned no specific threat but did ask what they’d need to defend Midway against an attack. The two men poured out their requirements.

“If I get you all these things you say you need, then can you defend Midway against a major amphibious assault?”

“Yes, sir.”

Another week passed, and at Pearl Harbor Rochefort began to get a better picture. As always, it was a matter of piecing together the scraps gathered by all three stations—Pearl, Washington and a new unit in Australia replacing the one lost with the Philippines. Even so, there was nothing conclusive. It was all spotty … but nonetheless revealing. For instance, it was clear that Admiral Kondo’s Battleship Division 3 was talking a lot to Nagumo’s First Carrier Force … that certain transports were getting orders to Saipan, and BatDiv 3 was talking to them too … that Cruiser Division 7 was also heading for Saipan. Was there any connection between these things?

The traffic never gave any clear-cut answer. Often the pertinent messages were days apart. Yet Joe Rochefort had a knack of remembering them all, and as he pieced the picture together, it pointed to a massive operation involving most of the Imperial Combined Fleet.

But again, where? The Japanese never mentioned any particular spot, but gradually one name began cropping up more and more often—sometimes as a destination, sometimes as a place calling for certain equipment. In a sort of code-within-the-code this place was always called “AF.”

Rochefort’s little group racked their brains. Finally someone remembered that AF had also appeared in messages last March, at the time a couple of Japanese seaplanes made an abortive attack on Pearl Harbor. Papers flew as the whole office dug through the piles of intercepts, trying to track this vague clue down. Finally, there it was. The Japanese had indeed mentioned AF. Those seaplanes had refueled from a submarine at French Frigate Shoals, a tiny atoll lying toward Midway, and one of the messages spoke of passing near AF.

For Rochefort, that settled it. AF must lie in the Midway area … and the only place worth taking around there was Midway itself. From now on, his estimates began stressing Midway as the probable target.

Not everyone saw it that clearly. The intercepts also referred to “AL,” “AO,” “AOB”—all definitely in the Aleutian area—and some high officers, especially in Washington, thought that the real target was Alaska or the West Coast. Admiral King himself leaned for a time toward Hawaii as a possibility, and the Army Air Force was always worried about a raid on San Francisco.

It was hard to change their minds. As usual, Rochefort’s unit rarely managed to “read” more than 15% of an intercept, and to the average professional officer 15% seemed mighty little to go on. It was different in the old days when offices were smaller and the men knew each other better. Now there was tremendous turnover; whole new layers of command moved in, often staffed by men who knew little about radio intelligence. It was too much to expect them to understand the intricacies of cryptoanalysis. Nor did it help that the cryptoanalysts were so secretive. They had to be, of course, but that didn’t make it any easier to sell their wares to the bright new faces at COMINCH.

So the Navy Department had its skeptics … and so did the Army Air Force … and so, for that matter, did the high command in Hawaii.

But Rochefort also had his allies, and one of them was Nimitz’s intelligence officer, Lieutenant Commander Edwin T. Layton. He too knew the Japanese and their language well. He spent two years at the Embassy in Tokyo just before the war, then was Admiral Kimmel’s intelligence chief at the time of the Pearl Harbor disaster. Like the rest of Kimmel’s staff, Layton wondered what would become of himself when Nimitz took over; and like the others, he felt that tremendous surge of morale when Nimitz asked them all to stay with him.

Intelligence, Nimitz told Layton, was something he knew nothing about. He had only this one suggestion: He hoped Layton would approach his job as though he were Admiral Nagano, or Yamamoto, or whoever was calling the tune in Tokyo. With the information at hand, he should put himself in Japanese shoes and come up with his best estimate of their plans and intentions.

With such sailing orders, it was easy to fall under the spell of Joe Rochefort’s shop. Layton was completely sold, did his best to sell Nimitz too. The Admiral himself was half convinced, but no more.

Around May 8 Layton finally begged Nimitz to visit the Combat Intelligence Unit. Then he could see for himself. Layton was sure that once the Admiral watched the place in operation—saw how carefully the information was pieced together—then he too would become a true believer.

Nimitz couldn’t come. Swamped with work on the Coral Sea battle, he was just too busy. But he did send Captain L. D. McCormick, his war plans officer. McCormick said he was busy too, but finally agreed to set aside two hours.

Down the stairs they went, and into the basement room, which for once the staff had made a halfhearted effort to clean up. On a makeshift table of planks and sawhorses Rochefort had spread all his intercepts. He patiently showed how one led to another, and how they all fitted together to form a composite picture.

McCormick was fascinated. In the end, he spent not two but three and a half hours poking around, flipping the material, asking a thousand tough, show-me questions. There were no velvet gloves on either side… .

“How do you know the Kamikawa Maru isn’t just heading for her home port?”

“Well, if she is, that would be doing a tonsillectomy through the rectum.”

In the end, McCormick came away completely convinced, and to sell McCormick was to sell Nimitz. From that day on, the Admiral was the staunchest ally Rochefort and Layton could hope to have.

Washington remained skeptical. For one thing, they still hadn’t pinned down exactly what the Japanese meant by “AF.” Rochefort was always sure it was Midway but he needed proof. Around May 10 he went to Layton with an idea. Could Midway be instructed to radio a fake message in plain English, saying their fresh-water machinery had broken down? Nimitz cheerfully went along with the ruse … Midway followed through … and two days later a Japanese intercept was picked up, reporting that AF was low on fresh water.

May 14, Nimitz filled in Major General Delos Emmons, the local Army commander, and declared a state of “Fleet Opposed Invasion.” On the 15th, he began assembling his meager collection of ships. He had only three carriers and all were thousands of miles away in the South Pacific. Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher’s Task Force 17 was at Tongatabu, licking its wounds from the Coral Sea battle. The carrier Yorktown had not been sunk, as the Japanese claimed, but she was far from healthy. One bomb had ripped out her innards, and two near-misses had opened some seams. Vice Admiral William F. Halsey’s Task Force 16 was marking time off the Solomons; he had arrived with the carriers Enterprise and Hornet just too late for Coral Sea. Nimitz radioed them all to hurry back.

At Tongatabu Fletcher quickly made a few patchwork repairs—then he was on his way. East of the Solomons, Halsey got the message May 16, local time, and immediately began collecting his scattered ships. He was rounding up the last of them on the 18th when a new message arrived from Nimitz. This one was only two words: “EXPEDITE RETURN.”

As they swung northeast for Pearl, the Enterprise’s navigation officer, Commander Richard Ruble, had a satisfying thought. He recalled how, on the 15th, they had discovered an enemy patrol plane snooping about on the western horizon. Visibility was perfect, and it had plenty of time to get off a good contact report to Japanese headquarters firmly placing Task Force 16 deep in the South Pacific.

Back at Pearl Harbor the Combat Intelligence Unit labored on. Rochefort himself concentrated on the translations—so much depended on the nuances of the Japanese language even after a message was broken. He was now putting in 20-21 hours a day, curling up in some corner for occasional naps, going home “only when someone told me I ought to take a bath.” The rest of the staff worked just as hard—Jasper Holmes, slaving over his ship positions; Tommy Dyer gulping keep-awake pills by the fistful; the brilliant Ham Wright buried in paper.

At CINCPAC, staff officers carefully noted the information on their charts. By now the composition of Nagumo’s Striking Force was down pat—CarDivs 1 and 2, CruDiv 8, all the familiar names—but the route was more uncertain. Some clues suggested they’d come straight across; other clues said no, they’d go considerably to the north, then slant down. There was a theory they might even strike from the east. From all this, time was clearly another question mark.

There was less mystery about the Occupation Force coming up from the southwest. The route was clear; the only question was when it would arrive. Well, somebody figured, if the transport Goshu Maru left the Marshalls May 17, it could link up at Saipan on the 22nd, and the whole convoy would be at Midway on the 30th. On the other hand, there was much radio traffic about exercises, and maybe these would push the whole operation back a little… .

Carried away by the mounting excitement, it was hard for the insiders at CINCPAC to realize that some people were still dubious about the whole business. On May 16 or 17 Nimitz received a letter from General Emmons saying he appreciated the intelligence, but felt he ought to point something out. These estimates were based on enemy intentions rather than capabilities. It was safer to plan in terms of capabilities, and the Japanese were certainly capable of attacking Hawaii.

Nimitz called Commander Layton in—the Admiral’s blue eyes twinkling with amusement as Layton exploded with exasperation. Yet Emmons’s misgivings were understandable. Like most others, he knew little about Rochefort’s work. Beyond that, there was the matter of Nimitz’s order directing a state of “Fleet Opposed Invasion.” This put all his Seventh Air Force bombers under CINCPAC control. But if the Navy was wrong and the Japanese did come to Hawaii, it would be Emmons, not Nimitz, who would feel the full blast from the War Department at being caught with no planes on hand.

Nimitz was not about to reverse course, but he did make a move typical of this most careful and conciliatory of men. He assigned one of his staff, Captain J. M. Steele, to the specific job of keeping an eye on the Combat Intelligence Unit’s material. Steele became a sort of “devil’s advocate,” deliberately challenging every estimate, deliberately making Rochefort and Layton back up every point.

Steele really threw himself into the job. Layton rued the day it ever happened, but from Nimitz’s point of view the assignment served two very useful purposes. First, it did something specific about General Emmons’s letter without any real change in course; second, it provided a genuine check just in case they all were wrong, and the Japanese really did have an extra trick or two.

No more time for debating. The latest intercepts indicated that the attack might come as early as May 28. Nimitz warned Midway, and preparations at Pearl moved into high gear. Decisions were made in hours that normally might take days. What to do about the Aleutian side show? Nimitz decided to counter it with a small force that would keep the Japanese occupied and guard his own flank. How to use the submarines? Put them in an arc west of Midway to try and intercept the Japanese fleet coming in. What about the battleships on the West Coast? Keep them there; they only got in the way. How about the Yorktown’s damage? Take a chance on repairing her at Pearl Harbor; an urgent message listed the things they’d need: arresting gear … 50 pneumercator gauges … and so on. In any other navy it might have seemed strange that this priority list also included a new freezer for the soda fountain.

The Army was now in high gear too. On May 18 the entire Seventh Air Force went on special alert for an attack on Midway or (the old fear persisted) an air raid on Hawaii. B-17s began pouring in from the West Coast. At the same time, big new PBYs were arriving for the Navy—these, in turn, hurried on to Midway.

They were all part of a sudden rush to beef up the place—a far cry from the old days when Midway seemed at the bottom of every supply depot’s priority list. For months the Marines just couldn’t get any barbed wire; now they got “hundreds of miles of it.” Sandbags, antiaircraft guns, impregnated clothing, PT boats, reinforcements, all poured out in a steady stream. When the big railroad ferry Kittyhawk left for Midway on May 23, her decks bulged with fighters and dive bombers, even five light tanks.

But how to use this growing strength? And how best to coordinate it with the three precious carriers racing up from the South Pacific? On the 23rd Nimitz asked Admiral Pat Bellinger, his patrol plane chief, and Captain A. C. Davis, his staff aviation officer, to confer with the Army immediately on how to make best use of all the planes available—both Army and Navy, ashore and afloat. They should think in terms of possibly five Japanese carriers, and they must hurry, “TIME IS EVERYTHING.”

The submarines were already moving out. The big Nautilus was lying in dry dock when her skipper Lieutenant Commander Bill Brockman was asked how soon he could get going. Brockman said about 48 hours. Everyone worked around the clock, and at 9:00 A.M. on May 24 she slipped down the channel, bound for her station in the arc west of Midway. Eleven other subs were out there too; seven more patrolled to the east in case Nagumo tried an unexpected dash for Hawaii.

May 25, there was new excitement at Pearl Harbor. This day the Combat Intelligence Unit came through with its hottest item yet—a long Japanese intercept that really laid it on the line. This message ticked off the various units, the ships, the captains, the course, the launching time—everything.

Rochefort was hard at work on the translation when word came that Nimitz wanted to see him personally at a certain time. Completely absorbed and wanting to finish it, he turned up at the Admiral’s office half an hour late. This was too much for even the placid Nimitz, and his manner was chilly, to say the least. But he soon warmed up as Rochefort gave him, point by point, the exact battle order and operating plan of the Japanese Striking Force.

Nimitz rushed a new message to Midway, giving all the details. There were only two bright spots: Nagumo’s Force no longer included the carrier Zuikaku; and the date of the attack would be later than they originally thought—it should fall some time around June 3-5.

Washington still had its skeptics. Now the big fear was a Japanese ruse; the enemy might be just feeding Nimitz these messages to cover up a major raid on Hawaii or the West Coast. After all, they used fake radio signals to fool CINCPAC just before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Maybe this was the same sort of thing. Nimitz should plan his defenses with this threat in mind.

There was something to the argument. The Japanese had indeed used radio deception before Pearl Harbor. Nor was radio traffic analysis infallible. A week before the December 7 raid CINCPAC had placed one Japanese carrier division in the South Pacific because the destroyers that usually guarded it were down there—yet, as everyone soon found out, this guess had been all too wrong.

But, Nimitz’s intelligence men argued, this time was different. There were only isolated messages before Pearl Harbor; now there was a mountain of intelligence. And besides, there was the make-up of the Japanese force—it clearly involved a landing. They wouldn’t be bringing all those troops and transports for an air raid on San Francisco.

The argument dragged on. At the bottom, it was really just the old controversy over enemy intentions or capabilities. Sacred to the Naval War College was the doctrine that all decisions must be based on what the enemy could do, rather than what it probably would do. Nimitz knew the risks of outguessing the Japanese as well as anyone, but, as he often told Layton, he felt the Navy’s planning should put more stress on what was most likely to happen, rather than just the worst that could happen.

This time, moreover, he had a source of intelligence never dreamed of by the men who wrote the textbooks. Those intercepts gave him a priceless advantage that must not be wasted. He was sure the Japanese were coming to Midway, and all countermeasures should be based on this assumption. He stood firm—and won.

Just in time too. That key intercept of May 25 was the last message in the JN-25 code that Rochefort’s group managed to unravel. Right afterward the Japanese changed their system, and everything went black. It would be weeks before the Combat Intelligence Unit began “reading” this sort of material again. Meanwhile, they could only fill in some gaps and continue to break ship-to-ship traffic—useful, but it gave no overall picture. That remained blank, but by now it was all decided. Nimitz could place his ships and planes where he wanted.

“Assume 4 CV, each with 36 VF plus 27 VSB (63 planes each) attack Balsa from short range, say 50 to 100 miles, with view of knocking out at once the air defense,” wrote the Admiral in a hasty note to Captain Davis. “Visualize as clearly as possible his method of operating and OUR best countertactics. Give me brief pencil memo on this, and then we will discuss.”*

The harried staff was bombarded with questions, often getting down to hard details, for Nimitz was not just a planner, but a careful, meticulous fighter. What would be the best positions for the 12 additional 3-inch AA guns now being rushed to Midway? Where should the U.S. carriers be placed to give the greatest support? Where should the subs be stationed after the attack began? Should Midway’s planes avoid fighting the Japanese bombers and go all out for the carriers? Should more planes be based on Midway?

“The problem at Midway is one of hitting “before we are hit,” wrote Admiral Bellinger, submitting a search plan worked out with General Tinker of the Seventh Air Force. It called for patrolling 700 miles out every day, covering the whole 180° west of Midway. To do the job, they needed 23 PBYs … eight more than they already had. Endorsing the scheme on May 26, Captain Davis noted an intriguing possibility: “The plan will leave an excellent flanking area northeast of Midway for our carriers.”

And they were coming in now. That same morning on the southwest horizon a single speck appeared … then 2 … 5 … 21 altogether, as Admiral Halsey’s Task Force 16 pounded up from the Solomons. It had been an exciting trip back, full of speculation. Some, like Commander Ed Creehan, the Hornet’s engineering officer, had a good pipe line—his old shipmate Captain Marc Mitscher tipped him off. Others could only guess. On the Enterprise Ensign Lewis Hopkins of Bombing Squadron 6 noted that even the plane radio transmitters were wired off—it must be really big. Seamen on the destroyer Balch wondered why Commander Tiemroth had them working so hard rigging life lines and rescue nets—whatever it was, it looked dangerous.

The man who knew best was in no mood to see anyone. Admiral Halsey had come down with a skin disease, and the itch was driving him crazy. He tried everything—even oatmeal water baths—but nothing helped. He couldn’t eat, he couldn’t sleep. Completely exhausted, he now lay in his cabin, a bundle of nerves and temper.

At 11:33 A.M. the Enterprise entered Pearl Harbor channel, and was soon tied up at Ford Island. Dr. Hightower put Halsey on the sick list, but the Admiral—never a good patient—went over to CINCPAC anyhow. Nimitz took one look, ordered him to the hospital immediately. But first he wanted Halsey’s recommendation on who should take over Task Force 16 for the coming battle. Without-a second’s hesitation, the normally ebullient Halsey named the man perhaps least like him in the entire Pacific fleet—the quiet, methodical commander of his cruisers and destroyers, Rear Admiral Raymond Ames Spruance.

Spruance himself had no inkling what was up. After his flagship Northampton made fast, he went around to the Enterprise to report to Halsey as usual. Only then did he find that the Admiral had been taken to the hospital. He joined the rest of the task force commanders as they sat in the flag cabin, restlessly waiting to learn who would take over.

Halsey’s aide Lieutenant William H. Ashford arrived, sent by the Admiral to tip Spruance off. The place seemed a little public, so Ashford took the new commander into Halsey’s bedroom and told him there. Spruance was thoroughly surprised. He was junior to several other possibilities, was a nonaviator, had never even served a day on a carrier. Yet he was used to following Halsey around the Pacific, and he’d have Halsey’s fine staff to back him up.

He hurried to CINCPAC, where Nimitz formally told him of his appointment. A quick briefing followed on the Japanese advance; then the two men sat around planning the U.S. countermove. To Spruance there was only one thing to do: take the carriers and lie in wait northeast of Midway. Normally he might head northwest—straight for the Japanese—and engage them somewhere west of the atoll, but the stakes seemed too high. Even accepting that miraculous intelligence, the Japanese just might change their plans and go for Hawaii or the West Coast. Then he’d find himself caught on the wrong side of them, out of the fight and useless. He could have it both ways by waiting in the northeast: he’d be safe against an end run, and he had a marvelous chance for an ambush.

It was fine with Nimitz.

Back on the Enterprise, Lieutenant Clarence E. Dickinson noticed his old Academy classmate Lieutenant R. J. Oliver coming up the gangway. Oliver was Spruance’s flag lieutenant on the Northampton—what was he doing here? It turned out he was arranging to bring over the Admiral’s personal gear. One way or another the news raced through the task force: Spruance was taking over; Halsey was on the beach.

It was hard to believe. In the past six months Bill Halsey had become a part of them. From the wreckage of Pearl Harbor, he had lifted them—both the frightened recruits and the disillusioned old-timers—and given them new faith in themselves. Gradually he gave them other things too—skills, strength, endurance, spirit. They knew all this, and they loved him for it. Even now they could picture him sitting up by the bow watching take-offs—they said he knew every plane. It was almost impossible to think of being without him.

Not that they disliked Spruance—they hardly knew the man—but that was just the trouble. There were stories that he was from the “gun club”—part of the conservative battleship crowd that looked down on the jaunty aviators and their sporty brown shoes. That sounded like bad news. As one long-time machinist’s mate on the Enterprise later explained, “We had nothing against him, but we knew we had a black-shoe admiral in our midst.”

Well, they’d see. Meanwhile, they were far too busy to brood. A great sense of urgency hung in the air. People were frozen in their jobs; even Captain Marc Mitscher, slated to be an admiral, would stay on as skipper of the Hornet. His replacement, Captain Charles Perry Mason, came aboard as observer and reminded Mitscher, “Take good care of her—this is my ship.”

The harbor was alive with activity. Fuel and ammunition barges tooted impatiently, jockeying to come alongside the ships. The destroyer Aylwin’s entire crew worked all night, loading and stowing fresh supplies. On the Hornet Machinist’s Mate J. E. Hoy sweated away, shifting provisions to the kitchen. When they were one can of Spam short, the cook refused to sign for anything, and all work stopped amid angry bickering. Word reached the bridge, and Marc Mitscher exploded—unless this was settled by the time he got there, everybody would be court-martialed. The men got the point; the cook signed and the work raced on— “Mitscher was a guy you didn’t fool with.”

Ashore, another member of the Hornet’s company had a different kind of supply problem. Lieutenant Commander John Waldron, skipper of Torpedo Squadron 8, was laying siege to the Aircraft Matériel Office. He heard they had a supply of newly designed twin machine-gun mounts; now he was determined to get some for his slow, highly vulnerable torpedo planes. The guns were really meant for dive bombers, but there was something about this impassioned, almost mystical man—others noticed it too—and in the end Captain Lyon relented and gave him the guns. Waldron rushed off, so elated he forgot his flight gloves.

On the Enterprise, work stopped long enough May 27 for a brief ceremony on the flight deck. In a flurry of ruffles and bosun calls, Admiral Nimitz came aboard to decorate three of the pilots. Pinning the Distinguished Flying Cross on the chest of Lieutenant Roger Mehle, the Admiral paused and looked him straight in the eye: “I think you’ll have a chance to win yourself another medal in the next several days.”

That afternoon a new set of specks appeared on the southwestern horizon. Admiral Fletcher’s Task Force 17 was coming in too. It had been a hard trip, full of suspense as the wounded Yorktown trailed a telltale oil slick for miles behind her. But they were safe at last, and the crew was in high spirits. They certainly didn’t wish the “Old Lady” ill, but the damage from that bomb should keep her in dry dock for a long time; and after 101 days at sea they could use a little liberty. As the big carrier limped up the channel, the men could almost taste the Hotel Street beer.

A special reception committee was waiting at Dry Dock No. 1. Yard worker Cyril Williams and a crew of other hands had spent all the past night getting blocks manufactured and secured, ready to receive the Yorktown. They finished just in time, watching with satisfaction as the big carrier nosed through the gates.

On board, the men learned with dismay that there’d be no liberty after all. Far from it: working parties were already loading fresh supplies of food and ammunition. No one knew what was up; the ship’s Marine Detachment caustically agreed, “The navigator has lost the charts to the American waters.”

Even before the dock had drained, a little group could be seen sloshing around, examining the bent and crumpled plates. The yard manager, Captain Claude Gillette, conferred with his hull repair expert, Lieutenant Commander H. J. Pfingstag, and other technicians. Talking with them—in hip boots like the rest—was Admiral Nimitz himself.

It was clear the damage was very serious. The two near-misses hadn’t done much—the leaks could be quickly patched —but the direct hit was another matter. It had exploded four decks down, spreading havoc for 100 feet—decks blistered, doors and hatches blown off, bulkheads ripped open, frames and stanchions twisted. It should take weeks to fix;

“We must have this ship back in three days,” Nimitz told the group. His voice was quiet, his manner very, very serious. The men hesitated, looked at one another, and finally Pfingstag gulped, “Yes, sir.”

Nimitz was back in his office at the sub base by the time Admiral Fletcher checked in a little later. Perhaps it was because they knew each other so well, but Fletcher immediately sensed that his boss—normally the calmest of people—was deeply disturbed. Nimitz started off by asking Fletcher how he felt. “Pretty tired,” was the answer. Nimitz nodded; yes, he understood and normally he’d send him back to the West Coast, but he couldn’t do it this time. The Japanese were on their way to Midway; Task Force 17 had to go right out again.

Nimitz then poured out the details, ship by ship, of the Japanese operation. “Do you know,” he added with just a touch of irritation, “they’ve even named the officer who is to take over the Naval Station there on August 1?”

Gradually he filled in Fletcher on everything else: Halsey was out … Spruance now had the Enterprise and Hornet … they’d be starting off soon … Fletcher would follow with the Yorktown … the two forces would join up with Fletcher taking over-all command as senior officer … then they’d lie in wait off Midway.

Fletcher understood. He had only one misgiving. The Yorktown had lost a lot of fliers at Coral Sea, and he was worried about the new bombing and torpedo squadrons Nimitz planned to give him. It wasn’t a question of quality—he was sure they were excellent—but they hadn’t worked with the ship before. Couldn’t he keep his regular group, filling it out with replacements? No, said Nimitz; the old fliers needed a rest, and new complete squadrons promised better coordination.

At some point Spruance joined them, and the question arose whether the Yorktown could really make it. “She’ll be joining you,” Nimitz said firmly.

It certainly didn’t look like it. The Yorktown now lay high out of the water. Yard workers swarmed over her, hammers clattering, acetylene torches flaring in the growing dusk. During the evening a courier came aboard, climbing over the wires and cables, and delivered a thick document to Lieutenant (j.g.) John Greenbacker, the ship’s secretary. Greenbacker signed for it and thereby became the first person on board to see CINCPAC Operation Plan no. 29-42, the official blueprint setting forth all the thinking and decisions of the past two weeks.

“The enemy is expected to attempt the capture of Midway in the near future,” it explained. “For this purpose it is believed that the enemy will employ approximately the following: 2-4 fast battleships: 4-5 carriers; 8-9 heavy cruisers; 16-24 destroyers; 8-12 submarines; a landing force with seaplane tenders… .”

This catalogue of chilling details was followed by the American answer: an outline of the tactics CINCPAC proposed to follow. Specific tasks were assigned each of the various U.S. forces. The carriers would “inflict maximum damage on the enemy by employing strong attrition tactics.” As decided, they would operate northeast of Midway, hoping to catch the Japanese by surprise. Submarines would go for the enemy carriers; Midway itself would concentrate on defense and patrols; Hawaii would contribute a long-range striking force. In listing these tasks, the language was usually general (Midway’s first job was simply, “hold Midway”), but there was no doubt that everybody had enough to do.

There were 86 copies of Op Plan 29-42, and as they were distributed throughout the various commands, selected officers studied the details with fascination. To those eligible to see it, the meticulous intelligence on the Japanese movements seemed almost incredible. Not knowing where it came from —and perhaps having read too many spy thrillers—the Enterprise’s navigator, Commander Ruble, could only say to himself, “That man of ours in Tokyo is worth every cent we pay him.”

A bright sun sparkled off the water next morning, May 28, as the destroyers of Task Force 16 slipped their moorings and glided single file down Pearl Harbor Channel toward the open sea. Behind them came a pair of tankers, then the cruisers, and finally the Enterprise and Hornet.

On the bridge of the Enterprise the “black-shoe Admiral” Raymond Spruance thoughtfully watched his first command of carriers move down the harbor. In the words of the master plan, he was on his way “to inflict maximum damage on the enemy.” And to guide him he now had a last-minute Letter of Instructions just issued by Nimitz to his two commanders: “In carrying out the task assigned on Op Plan 29-42, you will be governed by the principle of calculated risk, which you will interpret to mean the avoidance of exposure of your force to attack by superior enemy forces without good prospect of inflicting, as a result of such exposure, greater damage to the enemy.”

To achieve this most delicate of formulas was now up to him. At 11:59 the Enterprise cleared the channel, swung toward Barbers Point, and headed for those lonely waters northeast of Midway.

Back at Pearl Harbor, a rebellious but helpless patient watched from a lanai at the Naval Hospital. For the utterly frustrated Halsey, seeing them go without him was even worse than the itch.

In contrast to the antiseptic quiet of the hospital was the bedlam at Dry Dock No. 1. Hundreds of men now swarmed over the Yorktown—she seemed even more alive out of the water than afloat. Clouds of smoke poured up from the acetylene torches burning away her damaged plates. The clatter of drills and hammers never stopped.

Deep inside the ship Bill Bennett, the burly supervisor of Shop 11-26, bore down on his gang of 150 shipfitters. One qualification of a Navy yard boss was to be even tougher than his men, and Bennett easily met the test. He was in charge all the way as they sweated to erase the devastating direct hit.

There was no time for plans or sketches. The men worked directly with the steel beams and bars brought on the ship. Coming to a damaged frame, burners would take out the worst of it; fitters would line up a new section, cut it to match the contour of the damage; riggers and welders would move in, “tacking” the new piece in place. Then on to the next job—there seemed no end to the grind.

And it was hell down there besides—120° temperature, little light, lots of smoke. When a man looked really ready to drop, Bennett would send him topside for a sandwich and a breath of air. He himself never bothered with any of that. Occasionally sucking an orange, he worked for 48 hours straight.

All over the ship it was the same story. Ellis Clanton, chief quarterman at Shop 31, didn’t leave the ship for three days, as he struggled to repair the weird assortment of fixtures that are part of a great carrier—elevator shoes, arresting gear rams and so forth. Working on the hull, Ed Sheehan grew so tired he finally fell asleep on the scaffolding.

At one point a group of welders seemed about ready to fold. Out of nowhere a naval officer appeared and asked them to gather around. The Japanese, he explained, were on their way to Midway … they thought the Yorktown was sunk … wouldn’t they be surprised if they found her fit and ready to fight? His psychology worked; the men rushed back to their jobs.

All the night of the 28th the pace continued, the Yorktown spouting sparks and blue flashes as the welders worked on. It was a nightmare for the ship’s crew, but few had time to rest anyhow. Gunner’s Mate Jefferson Vick was typical—he spent 48 hours straight hauling bombs aboard, with only one five-hour break.

While the work went on, an odd thing was happening in nearby Honolulu. First the electric power failed in the Kahala district. Then when that was fixed, it failed in the Nuuanu Valley. The same thing happened from time to time in other parts of town. The local citizens were used to the erratic ways of the Hawaiian Electric Company, but this time was no accident. Needing extra power to run the enormous amount of repair equipment, the Navy Yard contacted Leslie Hicks, president of the company, and explained the emergency in confidence. Hicks said he thought he could help, and quietly staged “failures” in one district after another, diverting the desperately needed electricity to the Yard.

By midmorning on the 29th they had run out of time. At 11:00 the cocks were opened, the dry dock flooded, and the Yorktown towed back into the harbor. It was a slow, delicate job getting her out—much too slow for the tower, which kept flashing, “EXPEDITE! EXPEDITE!” Hundreds of men still worked on her; Bill Bennett’s shipfitters were gone, but the electricians and mechanics were everywhere.

In his cabin Captain Elliott Buckmaster labored over a million last details. Commander Dixie Kiefer, the ship’s colorful executive officer, dropped by at one point, urging the Captain to put his own personal belongings ashore. No, said Buckmaster, he was too old a sea dog for that—never get separated from your personal gear.

The work went on, ashore as well as afloat. The Yorktown’s landing signal officer, Lieutenant Norwood Campbell, struggled to get the new squadrons in shape for carrier landings. The pilots were mostly from the Saratoga. She had been torpedoed in January, and since then they had spent a good deal of time kicking around. Lieutenant Commander Max Leslie’s Bombing Squadron 3 was sharp—they had spelled the Enterprise’s bombers on the Doolittle raid. But Lieutenant Commander Lance Massey’s Torpedo 3 was rusty, and Lieutenant Commander John S. Thach’s Fighting 3 was very much a mixed bag: some were Yorktown veterans; some hadn’t seen a carrier for months; some had never served on one.

At the moment all were at Kaneohe on the other side of the island. Most still didn’t know what was up, except that they were suddenly practicing a lot. But that day word began to get around. Commander Leslie took his rear-seat man, Radioman W. E. Gallagher, aside and told him they had a new assignment: they were joining the Yorktown and going out to meet the Japs. He didn’t say where, but Gallagher was to be ready in the morning.

Saturday, May 30, dawned clear at Pearl Harbor. On the Yorktown the shrill call of a bosun’s whistle was the first signal for many that Admiral Nimitz was coming aboard. They had won their fight to get her ready; now it was time to wish them “good luck and good hunting.” Turning to Buckmaster, the Admiral said to announce to all hands that he was sorry they couldn’t go back to the mainland yet. They had a job to do. But when it was over, he’d send the Yorktown to the West Coast for liberty, and he didn’t mean peanuts.

At 9:00 the engines began turning over. Far below, yard hand Fred Rodin and his gang were still wrapping insulation around some newly installed pipes. Suddenly someone yelled down the shaft, “OK, boys, all ashore that’s going ashore—we’re pulling out.” Rodin and his mates bolted topside—this was one trip they didn’t want to make. The Yorktown was already gliding downstream as the last of them dropped down into a launch and bobbed off toward the shore. On she went, picking up speed as she moved down the channel. On the flight deck the ship’s band—with perhaps just a touch of sly humor—lustily blared out, “California, Here I Come.”

That afternoon she picked up her revamped air group—flown out as usual from the base—and by nightfall the whole task force was far beyond the sight of land. They had accomplished wonders—the Yorktown was there—but the odds were still long this brilliant moon-swept night. It would take more than the best intelligence, planning and determination to beat Yamamoto’s huge armada. They knew it at CINCPAC too, and it had a lot to do with naming the rendezvous point where Spruance and Fletcher were slated to meet. This dot on the map—this mythical spot on a trackless ocean—they wishfully called “Point Luck.”

FOR Lieutenant Commander Toshitake Ueno, this same moonlit night brought only bad news. As the darkened U.S. ships pounded north, his submarine I-123 lay idle and useless off French Frigate Shoals, several hundred miles to the west. According to the final version of the Japanese plan, the I-123 was meant to help refuel two seaplanes, up from Kwajalein, for a last-minute look at Pearl Harbor—but there would be no refueling tonight. A big American patrol plane lay anchored in the lagoon.

It was odd. When first tried in March, “Operation K” (as they called it) went off very well. Then the two big seaplanes came up from Kwajalein, refueled from the tanker-submarines, and flew on to Pearl Harbor without any hitch. True, they didn’t accomplish much, but that wasn’t the fault of the arrangements. The rescue sub stood by; the radio beam worked; the refueling went smoothly; and above all nobody bothered them at French Frigate Shoals.

This time was different from the start. When the I-121—first sub to arrive—reached the Shoals on May 26, she found a U.S. seaplane tender already sitting at anchor. Soon the I-122 and I-123 also came up, and the next three days were spent peeking through periscopes, waiting patiently for the tender to go away. But she didn’t, and by the night of May 29 something had to be done. Tomorrow was the big day: the planes would be leaving Kwajalein during the night, planning to arrive and refuel at dusk on the 30th. As senior officer, Commander Ueno took one last look—two ships were there now—and reluctantly radioed the situation to Kwajalein. Vice Admiral Eiji Goto understood; he radioed back that the operation was postponed a day; expect the planes on the 31st.

Now it was the night of the 30th, and pretty much the same story. As Commander Ueno searched the moonlit anchorage, he couldn’t see the tender, but there was no mistaking that PBY—the Americans were still there. Around midnight he again radioed Kwajalein that the place was being watched. This time the answer came from Goto’s boss, Vice Admiral Nishizo Tsukahara commanding the 11th Air Fleet: the planes wouldn’t be coming at all; Operation K was “suspended.”

It meant there would be no reconnaissance of Pearl Harbor, but little matter: Nimitz’s ships were safely at their berths. And there they would stay, until the great attack smashed at Midway and brought them rushing out into Yamamoto’s great trap.

AT PEARL it seemed strangely empty with the fleet gone, but there was still plenty of activity at CINCPAC. Coming to work that evening, Commander Layton brought along his helmet for the first time since December 7. From Rochefort’s intercepts he knew this was the night for Operation K. French Frigate Shoals were under close watch, but if something went amiss there might be a lot of flak flying about. Nothing happened, of course, except that several of Layton’s colleagues kidded him for bringing his helmet to work for no reason at all.

* The official records are naturally full of abbreviations and code words. “CV” is Navy lingo for carriers, “VF’ for fighters, “VSB” for scout-bombers. “Balsa” is a code name for Midway. For simplicity’s sake, this book will usually translate such designations into layman’s terms, but they seemed too much a part of the flavor of the note to do so here.

CHAPTER 3

Ready

NOBODY TOLD ADMIRAL NAGUMO that Operation K had failed. Radio silence seemed too important. So the First Carrier Striking Force plowed on toward Midway, the staff free from worry. They would get the word if “K” turned up anything useful … they heard no results, so there was nothing worth reporting.

Spirits were high on every ship. In the golden weather the first days out, the pilots practiced their bombing and torpedo runs, thrilling the men on deck. Watching them from the guard destroyer Nowaki, Commander Magotaro Koga couldn’t imagine anyone beating them. “Our hearts burn with the conviction of sure victory,” he scribbled that night in his diary.

Even the little things were turning out right. Through one of those happy accidents that can occur in any navy, three months of PX rations had been distributed at once—joyful bargaining filled the air. Only one man was having bad luck: first night out, Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, leader of the Akagi’s air group, came down with appendicitis. Now he wouldn’t be able to lead the planes against Midway, duplicating his great feat at Pearl Harbor.

The weather turned sour on the afternoon of June 1—fortunately they had just finished refueling—and for the moment the flyers had little to do. Fighter pilot Raita Ogawa relaxed in the Akagi’s wardroom while a scratchy gramophone ground out the popular song, “Kirameku Seiza”; its lilting strains reminded them all of planes high in the sky. Torpedo pilot Takayoshi Morinaga lay in his bunk on the Kaga reading modern Japanese history. The Hiryu’s assistant air officer, Toshio Hashimoto, could be found deep in a game of contract bridge. On the Soryu bomber pilot Juzo Mori amused himself playing a sort of bamboo flute called a shaku-hachi. Several others aboard liked doing this too, and they’d gather together in a corner of the flight deck, their plaintive music floating incongruously over the deck as the big carrier charged on.

Hundreds of miles to the southeast the Invasion Force lumbered along at a slower pace. On the bridge of the Jintsu Commander Toyama struggled to keep the 13 transports in some sort of order. The formation was quite simple—just two parallel columns of ships—but the convoy had been slapped together so quickly there wasn’t time to learn the signals, and the transports had a way of straying. The troops couldn’t have cared less. They practiced weapons handling and landing-craft procedures when they could, but there wasn’t much room, and most of the time they were just jammed together, squatting on the open decks talking of girls and home.

Far to the rear—600 miles behind Nagumo—steamed Yamamoto’s great Main Force of 34 ships. On the seven big battleships the men whiled away their free hours sunbathing, doing calisthenics and simply puzzling. The Japanese Navy always kept Tokyo time, wherever it was; now many of the new recruits, fresh off the farm, felt they were entering a strange part of the world indeed, where the sun rose at three o’clock in the morning.

On the Yamato Admiral Yamamoto moodily dabbed at a bowl of rice porridge. His huge appetite had finally caught up with him, and he now had a mild case of diarrhea. A more serious problem was the intelligence coming in. Starting May 29, his radio-traffic people had noted a heavy increase in U.S. messages in the Hawaiian and Aleutian areas, much of it from aircraft and submarines. It suggested a U.S. task force might be at sea.

The disturbing signs multiplied. A U.S. submarine just ahead of the Transport Group was sending long coded messages to Pearl. Wake Island reported American patrol planes operating far out of Midway. A fresh radio traffic analysis showed 72 of 180 intercepts were “urgent”—a suspiciously high percentage. On the other hand, a new intelligence estimate from Tokyo on the 31st again placed U.S. carriers off the Solomons. It was all very baffling … enough to make a man wish that Operation K had worked out.

And now it appeared the submarine cordons were fouled up too. Three of the four subs assigned to the line west of Hawaii were involved in the “K” fiasco; they’d be late getting on station. Worse, all seven assigned to the cordon northwest of the Islands would also be late. They were the ones meant to take position across the Hawaii-Midway line on June 1, but fitting out took longer than planned, and now they wouldn’t get there till June 3.

Should any of this information be relayed to Nagumo and the carriers? Admiral Yamamoto was inclined that way, but Captain Kuroshima was strongly opposed. As in the case of reporting on “K,” he felt radio silence was too important. Besides, the Akagi’s own radio must be picking it all up anyhow. Nothing was done.

The question again arose a day or so later. Tokyo’s radio intelligence now definitely suspected a U.S. carrier force somewhere off Midway. Once again Yamamoto was inclined to relay the word on to Nagumo; once again the “God of Operations” preached the gospel of radio silence; once again nothing was done.

Six hundred miles ahead, Nagumo’s carriers steamed on. In the Akagi’s radio room, the operators bent low but heard nothing. The Yamato wasn’t talking and Tokyo was too far away. With its small superstructure, the Akagi had a comparatively weak wireless; it just couldn’t catch those distant signals. And now the weather was failing too. All day June 1 it grew steadily worse—a fine rain mixed with heavy mist. The ships plunged ahead, dim blurs in the gathering gloom.

THE view was sharp and clear at Midway, as Commander Tanabe of the submarine I-168 swung his periscope toward the dazzling coral sands of the atoll. He had been hanging around for three days now, making meticulous observations. These he carefully radioed to Tokyo, to be relayed on to the advancing fleet.

There was much to report. Patrol boats came and went. Some 90-100 planes landed in a day … including a number of bombers. The PBYs took off at dawn, returned in the evening—suggesting patrols at least 600 miles out. Several construction cranes were at work: the garrison must be strengthening its defenses.

Most of the time Tanabe stayed submerged two or three miles offshore, his eyes glued to the periscope. Around him the crew hopefully fingered the good luck charms that Ensign Mochizuki had just given them all from Kameyama Shrine. They hadn’t been seen yet, but it was risky business poking around this way; once they sneaked within 800 yards of the beach.

At night the I-168 surfaced and Tanabe continued his studies with binoculars. Midway was under blackout; still it was possible to see a little. At one point he counted nine work lights burning. Clearly something was up.

THE past month had been a hectic one for the defenders of Midway. They still had a long way to go, but at least they could look with some satisfaction on what they had already done.

Certainly it all began with Nimitz’s visit. Until then the base felt itself pretty well forgotten, except for an occasional shelling by some Japanese submarine. But that May 2 was a revelation. Nimitz was everywhere—and into everything. On Sand Island he rummaged through the underground command posts … he poked around the big seaplane hangar where the PBYs were serviced … he crawled into every gunpit of the Marines’ 6th Defense Battalion. Then over to Eastern Island, twenty minutes across the lagoon. Here he examined the Marine airstrip and shook hands with all the pilots. When he finally flew off, the Marines conferred upon him their highest accolade: he was, they all agreed, a “Goddamned gentleman.”

About two weeks later equipment began pouring in. Commander Simard and Lieutenant Colonel Shannon had filed a list of their needs on May 7, but the first thing to come wasn’t on any list at all. It was a pair of shoulder eagles for Simard—giving him a spot promotion to captain. At the same time Shannon was promoted to full colonel.

Both soon learned they’d be earning those eagles the hard way. About May 20 Admiral Nimitz’s letter arrived, addressed to Simard and Shannon jointly, spelling out the Japanese plan. It was all there, every step, as far as Nimitz then knew it. Most sobering of all, he put the date at May 28—only one week away.

No one felt the pressure more than Shannon. Though under Simard, he was the Marine commander and directly responsible for Midway’s defense. Next evening he called his key men together at the “Castle,” an unpretentious house left over from Midway’s civilian past. Here he told the group that the Japanese were coming, and outlined the steps to be taken to meet them. Adjutant W. P. Spencer then covered various matters in more detail, including instructions on what to do if taken prisoner.

At this point Marine Gunner Dorn E. Arnold, who had been in the Corps forever, closed his notebook. Shannon asked if he wasn’t interested. Arnold replied that he didn’t need this information since he didn’t intend to be taken prisoner. He was damned if he’d end up “pulling some Japanese Pfc around in a rickshaw.”

As finally outlined, Shannon’s plans reflected his past. He was an old-time Marine, up from the ranks, of Belleau Wood vintage. Barbed wire, barrages, dugouts had all left an indelible impression, and sometimes it seemed he wanted to turn Midway into another Hindenburg Line. But he also had the hard-nosed tenacity that went with this kind of warfare, and that more than anything else was what Midway needed right now.

They had a good test of their spirits the very next morning. May 22 began calmly enough—Captain Simard was buried in work at his command post … the 81 mm. mortars were practicing on the south shore … Pharmacist’s Mate Edwin Miller was swiping a snack from the hospital kitchen. Then suddenly it happened. A terrific explosion shook Sand Island; a cloud of dust and smoke billowed into the sky.

The Japs were here—everyone was sure of it. The men grabbed their helmets and raced for their battle stations. But it wasn’t the Japs; it was far more discouraging. Some sailor, testing connections, had crossed the wrong wires and tripped a demolition charge under Midway’s gasoline supply. Half the tanks, about 400,000 gallons, were gone. It damaged the distribution system too; from now on they’d have to fuel the planes by hand from 55-gallon drums.

It was enough to dishearten any one, but Captain Simard didn’t panic. No heads rolled; no scapegoats; no angry recriminations. He calmly cabled the bad news to CINCPAC and asked for any help they could give. As for Colonel Shannon, airplanes were another world anyhow. “Wreck ‘em on the beach,” he growled, and it seemed more comforting than ever to have this tough old leatherneck as a rallying point.

They all caught his spirit. No one ever dug harder at the Marne than the 6th Defense Battalion did on Sand Island—building up emplacements, scooping out shelters, sandbagging new positions for the guns Nimitz promised. And on Eastern Island across the lagoon, the Marine airmen were digging too—bunkers for the planes, holes to store bombs, fuses, gas and water, to say nothing of slit trenches for themselves. They were soon down to three or four hours’ sleep a night.

All the while barbed wire was sprouting along the coral beaches. Major Robert Hommel strung so much his friends called him “Barbed Wire Bob.” Yet there could never be enough for Colonel Shannon. It stopped the Boches; it would stop the Japs. “Barbed wire, barbed wire!” exploded a weary Marine. “Cripes, the Old Man thinks we can stop planes with barbed wire.”

But they worked with little complaint, for Shannon’s sheer guts had captured them all. Captain Robert McGlashan, his young operations officer, trudged 11 hours a day in the blinding sun, checking positions, checking communications, checking camouflage, checking fields of fire. Once he even took to a submarine to see how it all looked from a periscope.

Yet they still had so little, considering the size of the juggernaut hurtling toward them. They needed ingenuity too, and Captain McGlashan knew just where to turn. He went to Marine Gunner Arnold. These old-time gunners were legends in the Corps. They had been everywhere, could do anything. “Deacon” Arnold himself dated back to the Siberian expedition. Now McGlashan asked him to cook up some antiboat mines and booby traps. All it would take was an old-timer’s knowledge of explosives… .

Actually Arnold knew almost nothing about explosives. But that didn’t faze him—he once read a book on the subject. Recruiting a routine headquarters detail, he tackled the job with the kind of relish that could only come from someone not used to playing with dynamite.

He and his men located some blasting gelatin—brown stuff that looked and felt a little like dough. This they kneaded and rammed into lengths of sewer pipe. Sealing the ends with hot tar, they ended up with a sort of mammoth firecracker. Altogether they made 380 of them. These they strung together in bunches of six and planted offshore to discourage any landing attempt. Electrically detonated, they made a highly satisfactory explosion. More primitive was the impressive stockpile of Molotov cocktails they gradually built up from Midway’s rather generous supply of empty whisky bottles.

And so the work went on, never stopping, for in a sense they were already under siege. The guns were always manned—meals served beside them—and the whole garrison now lived underground. Both the Navy and Marine command posts were dugouts near the center of Sand Island—Captain Simard giving orders by a white telephone that looked incongruously fashionable; Colonel Shannon holding forth in a deep dugout covered with beams and 12 feet of sand.

Every night both commanders met with their staffs to review the day and plan for tomorrow. The Marine sessions, at least, were often quite stormy, for the staff was perky and the Colonel not easily moved from his favorite theories. At one point he wanted a smoke screen, and it was quite a fracas before McGlashan and Arnold convinced him it would draw the Japs rather than hide the island. Another time he clashed with Captain Simard over shifting some barbed wire long enough to let the Navy fill a few sandbags. Touching that barbed wire was really inviting trouble, and it finally took a mild display of rank by the Captain before he got his sand.

In the end, of course, they always patched up their quarrels. The staff would go off to their bunks … the Colonel would gulp a last cup of coffee before turning in … and all would be up again at 5:00 A.M., ready to take on another hard day.

May 25, they got some good news. First came Nimitz’s message, giving a new date for the attack. Now it would be June 3-5—a whole extra week to prepare. Then the light cruiser St. Louis tied up at Sand Island, bringing the first reinforcements from Hawaii.

Captain Ronald K. Miller’s fine battery of eight 37 mm. guns was a welcome addition to the antiaircraft defense. Four went to Eastern, and Miller planted the other four in the woods on Sand Island. He was still at it when some trucks roared up, throwing sand in all directions. A gang of men piled out, howling slogans and singing Chinese Communist songs.

Carlson’s Raiders had arrived. This outfit—officially known as the 2nd Raider Battalion—was something of an experiment. Organized by Major Evans F. Carlson, its training reflected many ideas he had picked up during his days as a civilian observer with the Communist forces in North China. It had White House blessing, but its gung-ho philosophy smacked of indiscipline to many old Marines. To say the least, Carlson’s Raiders were controversial.

But there was no doubt about their fighting qualities; and when Midway’s hour came, Nimitz hurried out two companies. Arriving on the St. Louis along with Captain Miller’s guns, “D” Company went off to Eastern; “C” joined Miller in the Sand Island woods. Both were a wild-looking lot. Bandoleers of cartridges hung from bronzed shoulders. Their pockets bulged with grenades. Their belts bristled with knives, which they flung at the trees with casual skill. Even the medics were armed—no stenciled red crosses for this bunch.

Still more help came on the 26th. That evening the big ex-railroad ferry Kittyhawk arrived with the guns, tanks and planes that formed Nimitz’s biggest contribution. Midway could use these new 3-inchers and 20 mm. twin mounts borrowed from the 3rd Defense Battalion; it could use the five tanks too; but most welcome of all were the new planes—18 SBD dive bombers and 7 F4F fighters.

“New” was, of course, a relative term. Actually they were carrier castoffs. But they were infinitely better than the ancient relics already on hand. Until now Midway’s “air force” had consisted of 16 antique Vindicator dive bombers and 21 equally antique Buffalo fighters. The Vindicators (“Wind Indicators,” the Marines called them) had a tendency to ground-loop. When the pilots tried diving them earlier in the year, the wing fabric began peeling off—a hurry call went to the hospital for all available adhesive tape. The Buffalo fighters were just as inadequate. The new planes—whatever their credentials—were a vast improvement on these.

“New” in a different sense were the fliers who arrived too. Seventeen of the 21 pilots were just out of flight school. Some hadn’t even had four hours’ flight time since the end of their training. Nor did they know why they were here. Second Lieutenant Jack Cosley thought they were merely coming to an out-of-the-way island for further practice.

“You’re just in time for the party!” called the old hands cheerfully as the newcomers unloaded their gear on Eastern Island. Second Lieutenant Allan Ringblom, one of the new dive bomber pilots, assumed this was the standard kidding he could expect from a buddy perhaps a few months ahead of him at flight school. At his first squadron briefing on May 28, he learned differently… .

The skipper, Major Lofton Henderson, pulled no punches. The Japs were not only coming; they were overdue. The new SBDs were assigned the experienced pilots; the Vindicators were given the green recruits. None of them had ever flown one before, and there was little time to practice. They ground-looped two the first day. The equipment was wretched too—no charts and only four plotting boards for a dozen flyable planes.

So most of the time they just waited—restless hours of cards, cribbage, and watching Midway’s famous “gooney birds.” A kind of large albatross, the gooneys were a graceful delight in the air, but a clumsy absurdity on the ground. They were utterly tame, fascinated all the fliers, and inadvertently caused the squadron’s first casualty. In a whimsical moment Lieutenant Eke slipped one into Lieutenant Bear’s bunk, and it indignantly nipped Bear’s thumb getting out.

May 29 brought still more help—four Army B-26s rigged to carry torpedoes. Led by Captain James Collins, these were the first Army planes to arrive and caused quite a sensation. Everyone crowded around, but it turned out the pilots knew little more about their mission than the new Marines.

First Lieutenant James Muri had been at Hickam expecting to join the rest of his squadron in Australia. Suddenly all that was canceled and he was told to take a plane over to Pearl Harbor instead. Three other B-26s joined his, and when they arrived there, they found a collection of Navy officers waiting for them with several very large torpedoes—the first Muri had ever seen in his life.

The torpedoes, they learned, would be slung on the planes, and the four crews briefly practiced take-offs and landings. They never tried any drops, and none of their compasses were corrected. When they started out a couple of days later, the four B-26s began by fanning out in four different directions. Fortunately a friendly patrol plane happened along and set them on the right course. No greener torpedo plane pilots ever flew a mission, but at least they got to Midway.

This same day 12 Navy PBYs also arrived—latest in a steady stream that had been building up since May 14. Like the others coming in, these men had little idea what was up, but they brought a skipper who knew a great deal indeed. Commander Logan Ramsey was one of the Navy’s most colorful professionals. Physically a hulking, slow-moving man, mentally he was a genius. A great bridge player, he could do navigational problems while holding a hand of cards. He was completely unorthodox and often the despair of the Old Breed, but the patrol plane boss, Admiral Bellinger, thought the world of him and made him his chief of staff. With the Midway crisis coming to a head, Bellinger could think of no one he’d rather have out there than Logan Ramsey.

As is often the case with such men, Ramsey had a knack of attracting lively junior officers, and there was no lack of volunteers when he recruited a staff to help him. Ensign Edmond Jacoby had little idea why he was going, but with Ramsey it wouldn’t be dull. As they boarded the PBY at Pearl Harbor, Admiral Bellinger came down to see them off. Knowing Jacoby wanted to be a pilot, the Admiral called out, “If you get back, I’ll see you get to flight school.”

“If I get back,” thought Jacoby. “What could he mean by that?”

He found out that night almost as soon as they landed at Midway. Captain Simard called a meeting at the BOQ, explained briefly why they were there. Then Logan Ramsey took over, filling them in on the latest intelligence: the blow at the Aleutians on the 3rd … the transports coming in from the southwest … the carriers striking from the northwest, probably on the 4th. And he told them their job. No more one-day patrolling, then two days off. Starting tomorrow, they would go out every day, 700 miles. This was the moment all their training had been leading to.

Next morning, the 30th, as the first pink trace of dawn streaked the eastern sky, 22 PBYs lumbered into the air. Some were seaplanes, some the new amphibious kind, but all looked ungainly and slow. Briefly they circled the base as they got their bearings, then headed out on the spokes of a massive arc, running from just west of south to just east of north. Midway’s great search for the enemy had begun.

It was shortly after chow that noon when one of the PBYs limped back to Eastern Island, one engine out, and made an emergency landing. Then another cripple fluttered in. It seemed the Japs were also on patrol. They were down toward the southwest, flying out of Wake, snarling and spoiling for a fight. Both PBYs were riddled with bullets; from the first to land, the Marines gently lifted a gunner shot through the back.

Eight more Army planes arrived that same afternoon from Hawaii, and then another nine on May 31—all B-17 long-range bombers. There was some shuttling back and forth, but from now on about 15 were generally on hand. Led by Lieutenant Colonel Walter C. Sweeney, who invariably flew in his stocking feet, they gave a powerful boost to Midway’s striking power.

As with the B-26s, the big bombers were pulled into bunkers and the crews roughed it beside them in tents … but that didn’t stop First Lieutenant Everett Wessman from sleeping in his usual silk pajamas. The Air Force always had a flair about it

Another welcome arrival on the 31st was the freighter Nira Luckenbach with some last-minute equipment and 3,000 drums of high-test gas to help replace the fuel lost when Midway’s tanks blew up. It was Sunday, but nobody thought about that until a dispute erupted over extra pay for the ship’s merchant crew. Word spread that she couldn’t unload until Monday. Summoned to the scene, Captain Simard explained that the Japs were on the way, that the ship couldn’t leave until she was unloaded, and that there’d be quite an explosion with all that gas aboard. The crew bent to it, and the Nira Luckenbach was gone by 7:40 next morning.

There was little more Nimitz could do; it was now up to Midway to use what it had. What steps would be most effective? In the underground Navy command post on Sand Island, Captain Simard probed for new answers every night with his staff. At some point Brigadier General Willis Hale of the B-17s would come in. He’d bring over a bottle of Old Crow bourbon; they’d set it out on the table, and the work would go on. Should the B-17s be held back as a long-range striking force, or should they be used more right now to beef up the search? How to get everything off the ground fast, when the Japs finally did attack?

Far into the night they talked and planned, while the junior officers went about their regular duties—making search assignments for the morning, writing up reports, handling communications with CINCPAC over the cable. To a communications officer this direct cable link with Pearl was a thing of beauty and a priceless asset. It meant that Midway could be in safe, instant contact with Nimitz without using radio. No risk of intercepts, no codes to break, no heavy flow of messages to start some eavesdropper thinking. To the radio-traffic analyst in Tokyo, nothing was happening on Midway at all.

It was part of the old transpacific cable system, and was what gave Midway its chief importance before the war. Now all that was gone, although oddly enough the next link westward to Japanese-held Guam was still intact. Occasionally someone in the dugout would wander over to the key and bat out an obscenity in that direction. Usually there’d be a pause, then some angry-sounding gibberish would come snapping back.

June 1, and Ensign George Fraser, the versatile young communications officer under Logan Ramsey, got a new kind of problem. Word came that a wonderful Navy torpedo plane was being added to Midway’s defenses—the TBF. Six of them would be flying in that day, and since nobody would expect a plane that looked like these, he was to alert the antiaircraft batteries not to shoot them down.

“What’s a TBF?” was the first question he got. There were no silhouettes, no recognition books, no trained observers. The best Fraser could do was take his cue from the familiar F4F fighter. The new plane looked, he explained, “like a pregnant F4F.” The word was passed, and when the six TBFs duly appeared, not a finger touched a trigger.

It was just as well, for these men had come a long way to be in this show. They belonged to the Hornet’s Torpedo Squadron 8, and had been in Norfolk breaking in these new planes for the carrier. They were still at it May 8, when they got orders to come to Pearl. There were 19 planes in the detachment altogether, and led by Torpedo 8’s executive officer, they flew to the West Coast, then were ferried to Hawaii. They arrived on May 29—just a day too late to join the Hornet.

Next, a call came for volunteers to fly six of the planes to Midway. No problem here, although the men had no idea why they were going. They just set out on the 1st, happy to be led by Lieutenant Langdon K. Fieberling—a stylish, handsome, prematurely gray pilot, who was the idol of all the young fliers. None had been in combat; Ensign A. K. Earnest had never even flown out of sight of land before.

On arrival Fieberling reported to Lt. Colonel Ira E. Kimes, commanding the Marine air group. Then back to his unit with all the grim facts, plus an extra touch: don’t expect any help from the U.S. carriers; they were off trying to save Hawaii.

But nothing could cool the ardor of these young men. They whiled away the time making imaginary wing guns for their TBFs. Noting that the planes with real wing guns usually had masking tape over the holes to keep the dust out, they put tape on their wings too. Then they inked “holes” in the tape where the “guns” had fired through.

Some 560 miles to the southwest, there was again some real shooting. At 9:40 A.M. a big patrol bomber out of Wake pounced on Ensign J. J. Lyons’s PBY, and fifty minutes later the same Jap riddled Ensign R. V. Umphrey’s plane in the next sector. Both Americans scrambled to safety—by now everyone knew the PBY was no match for any Japanese plane whatsoever.

They talked it over in the staff meeting that night at the Navy command post. But the enemy that bothered them most at the moment was not the Japanese, it was the weather. A low front was closing in to the northwest, hiding the ocean below. Under that blanket of gray almost anything could be lurking… .

ON THE bridge of the Akagi, Admiral Nagumo stood with his staff, silently staring into the mist. It was getting worse—changing to heavy fog—and by daybreak June 2 visibility was practically zero. Fine protection from enemy patrol planes, but hell on navigation.

Off to the left of the Admiral, Captain Taijiro Aoki conferred with Commander Gishiro Miura, his navigating officer. Miura, as always, was wearing his carpet slippers. From time to time they leaned through the bridge windows, as though the extra six inches just might help a little.

They were all concerned, for this was the day they had to turn southeast for the final dash on Midway. At the moment they were steaming in single column, able to keep in formation only because each ship trailed a marker buoy for the next in line to follow. But this was too risky when making a major change in course—too easy to lose some ships altogether.

They faced a difficult choice. They could slow down, hoping for better weather before signaling the change, or they could break radio silence and do it that way. If they slowed down, they would upset the whole invasion timetable. If they broke radio silence, they might give away their position and spoil the great ambush planned for the U.S. fleet. In the end Captain Oishi, Nagumo’s senior staff officer, urged they use low-power radio and hope for the best. They just couldn’t afford to alter the schedule—too many other units depended on that—but the ambush was a more flexible matter. The U.S. fleet was probably still in Pearl Harbor—anyhow it was many days away—so a brief radio signal, even if picked up, wouldn’t do much harm.

Nagumo agreed, and at 1:30 P.M. the shortest of all possible radio signals went out: “Course 125.” On 26 ships the helms swung over, the engines paused briefly, then picked up again, as the First Carrier Striking Force turned southeast, now heading straight as a javelin for Midway.

Down below there was hardly an interruption. In the Hiryu’s No. 1 boiler room the firemen made the adjustments chalked on a slate in the glass-enclosed control booth. The plane crews on the Soryu continued playing “Hanafuda” at 100 points a cigarette. On the Kaga Commander Takahisa Amagai ran through a blackboard session on antiaircraft defense. In the wardroom of the Akagi someone wound the gramophone, and the scratchy needle once again ground out the soaring strains of “Kirameku Seiza.”

THE favorites were Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey and Mary Martin’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” as the U.S. carrier Enterprise steamed northeast of Midway this same 2nd of June. Task Force 16 had been at sea six days now, and life off duty was, on the surface at least, fairly routine: all the usual phonograph records, cribbage games, bull sessions and occasional pranks. On the Hornet Chaplain Eddie Harp playfully swiped a much-prized case of grapefruit from Dr. Sam Osterloh; on the New Orleans Seaman A. M. Bagley resumed his hobby of beating Seaman F. Z. Muzejka at rummy.

On duty, the pattern seemed pretty normal too. The Enterprise “Plan of the Day” mechanically ticked off the chores for the 2nd: 0315 (ship’s time), call the Air Department … 0325, early breakfast … 0350, flight quarters … 0500, launch first patrols … and so on, through a steady sequence of patrols out and in, watches on and off, until finally that inevitable salute to a dying day, “2049, blow tubes.”

It was all very normal—yet not normal at all, for beneath the surface routine Task Force 16 seethed with a tumbling variety of emotions. “Lord! This is the real thing,” Lieutenant Burdick Brittin breathlessly noted in his diary when the destroyer Aylwin’s sealed orders were opened May 29. And on the 30th his mind overflowed with awesome thoughts:

We have history in the palm of our hands during the next week or so. If we are able to keep our presence unknown to the enemy and surprise them with a vicious attack on their carriers, the U.S. Navy should once more be supreme in the Pacific. But if the Japs see us first and attack us with their overwhelming number of planes, knock us out of the picture, and then walk in to take Midway, Pearl will be almost neutralized and in dire danger—I can say no more—there is too much tension within me—the fate of our nation is in our hands.

To Brittin even the men on the tankers seemed to sense that destiny rode with these ships. They all refueled on the 31st, and as the tankers slipped astern and out of the picture, their men lined the rails, showing thumbs up for Task Force 16.

There were other emotions too as the force plowed on. For some of the pilots there was that hollow, empty feeling as they thought of absolute radio silence and all that it meant—even if an engine conked out on patrol, they could no longer ask the ship for help. Others felt a strange tingle that harked back to college and the days of the big game. On the Enterprise dive bomber pilot Bill Roberts was normally scared before battle—but not this time. It was too exciting: the feeling of being in on the secret, of setting a trap, of watching and waiting. Others were just plain mad. Captain Marc Mitscher had a way of getting the Hornet’s men “up,” and this time he pulled all the stops— “They are even bringing the guns they captured from us at Wake.”

For Lieutenant Richard H. Best, commanding the Enterprise’s Bombing Squadron 6, there was a personal worry all his own. He had a wife and child in Honolulu, and he thought of them more than once as he sat in Admiral Spruance’s cabin, listening to a special briefing on the Japanese plan. The Navy, he felt, was certainly banking a lot on all this neat, precise information—what if it was wrong? He finally asked Spruance what would happen if the Japanese bypassed Midway and came straight for Hawaii.

The Admiral looked at him for a full half-minute in silence, then finally said, “We just hope that they will not.”

Best said nothing more—admirals were close to God in those days—but privately he felt this was a pious hope and a rather poor basis for committing all the available strength of the United States Navy.

Actually, of course, Spruance had very good reasons for the move he was making—he just didn’t care to tell them. Far from banking on “pious hopes,” he was a man with a passion for facts, who insisted on every scrap of evidence before making a decision. And far from failing to think things through, he never moved without weighing every possible consequence.

Nor did his long silence before answering Best mean uncertainty; he was just considering all the factors before speaking—another Spruance characteristic. On the one hand, here was a young officer who had asked a legitimate question; on the other, he was a pilot who might fall into enemy hands. It was clear which way the scales finally went.

Dick Best wasn’t the only one who had trouble grasping this new Admiral. The whole staff found it hard to adjust. Halsey had been so outgoing; Spruance preferred channels. Halsey paid little attention to detail; Spruance spent hours poring over charts and plotting the course. Halsey left so much to their discretion; Spruance left so little. Halsey was so free-wheeling; Spruance so precise and methodical.

Morning coffee somehow symbolized the change. In the old days everyone just slopped it down together. But Spruance—a genuine connoisseur—brought his own green coffee beans aboard. Every, morning he carefully ground it himself, made precisely two cups, and then courteously asked if some member of the staff cared to join him. In the end they drew lots, with the loser getting the honor, not because they disliked Spruance but because they couldn’t stand his coffee.

Yet there was much more method to this little ritual than appeared on the surface. Spruance was trying to educate himself. A man with no carrier experience, he had only a week to learn the trade before facing the greatest master of them all, Isoroku Yamamoto. In his quest for knowledge he picked the brains of his staff at coffee or anyplace else.

A great walker, he also collared them one by one and paced the flight deck with them. Searching questions probed what they did, how they did it, how each job fitted into the whole. He walked their legs off, but with his great ability to absorb detail, he was learning all the time.

The walks went on, fair weather or foul … as the staff soon discovered. June 1 was a wretched day, damp and foggy. Flying was out, gunnery practice called off; just the wiry Admiral and his latest victim tirelessly trudging the wet, empty flight deck. Task Force 16 was now 345 miles NNE of Midway—marking time, waiting for Admiral Fletcher and the Yorktown.

June 2 was another dreary day; more clouds and rain. But late in the morning two Yorktown planes suddenly appeared from the south. Swooping low over the Enterprise, they dropped a message. It was from Fletcher: rendezvous time would be 3:30 P.M. At 12:08 searchlights blinked, Task Force 16 swung around and slowly began doubling back east. Then shortly before 4:00, at exactly Latitude 32° 04’ N, Longitude 172° 45’ W, masts were sighted ahead on the horizon. The moment had come—Spruance and Fletcher were joined at Point Luck.

Task Force 17’s trip out had been a smooth one—except for a single harrowing moment. As the Yorktown was taking on her planes from Hawaii the first afternoon out, an F4F jumped the landing barrier and plowed into the next plane ahead, killing Fighting 3’s executive officer, Lieutenant Donald Lovelace.

It was a shaken group of fighter pilots who assembled in the ready room shortly afterward. They were a pickup squadron; they had never worked together; some of them had never operated from a carrier. Lovelace, an old hand, was expected to do so much to pull them together. Now, in an instant, he was gone. It was a savage blow, and none felt it worse than the squadron leader, Commander Thach. He was not only depending on Lovelace; they were also close friends and contemporaries at Annapolis.

This was no time for emotion, Thach quietly told his men, they had to do a job. Then he turned quickly to the battle coming up, and what he expected of them. If it was a matter of saving the ship, he stressed, he expected them even to ram an enemy plane. There were no histrionics—he was utterly calm. But his strength gave them strength, and they felt a new sense of being welded together. By the time he was finished, one of them later recalled, there wasn’t a pilot in the room who wouldn’t do anything “Jimmy” Thach asked. Meanwhile, each of the other squadrons was also briefed, and Captain Buckmaster spoke to the whole crew over the loudspeaker. He explained he knew three days at Pearl weren’t enough to complete repairs, but the Japanese were coming to Midway and the Yorktown was going to be there to surprise them. True to Nimitz’s instructions, he then promised they’d all go to the West Coast after this “little scrap.”

Cheers rocked the ship, although at least two men weren’t that easily convinced. Seamen John Herchey and Bill Norton noticed there was a Royal Navy officer aboard as an observer. Superstitious in the grand manner of all true sailors, they decided that boded no good. “We will have to swim if we want to get back from this one,” they told their friend Seaman Louis Rulli.

Chasing north after Task Force 16, the Yorktown and her escorts moved into the same dirty weather on the 31st, refueled from the same tankers all through the 1st, and now at last were ready for the same great gamble—all linked together at Point Luck.

As senior officer, Admiral Fletcher took command of both forces, and they began their quiet wait—usually closing Midway during the night, then heading off during the day. They steamed separately but within sight of each other, about ten miles apart.

As fleets go, they weren’t very much, but they were nearly everything the United States had left in the Pacific—3 carriers, 8 cruisers, 14 destroyers … 25 fighting ships altogether. Yet a fleet at sea, even a rather modest one, is much more than ships and guns. Here it was Captain Buckmaster of the Yorktown, never allowing a light in his cabin after dark, so he could see at his best if called unexpectedly to the bridge. It was Lieutenant (j.g.) Bill Roberts on the Enterprise trying to wade through Freud, his mind not too much on the text. It was Seaman Stan Kurka on the Hornet, trying to do his work in a shirt three times too big for him. It was Marine Captain Malcolm Donohoo on the cruiser Portland, down at this moment (of all times) with the mumps. It was Lieutenant Brittin of the Aylwin scribbling in his diary, “Waiting, just waiting.”

FIVE hundred miles behind them, toward waters Fletcher had just crossed yesterday, Lieutenant Commander Tamori Yoshimatsu skillfully maneuvered the Japanese submarine I-166. He was late—they all were late—but it should not matter. By tomorrow, the 3rd, the seven I-boats of Squadron 5 would all be on station, directly across the line from Hawaii to Midway. That should be time enough to see and report the U.S. fleet as it sped from Pearl Harbor toward its destruction.

“It is not believed that the enemy has any powerful unit, with carriers as its nucleus, in the vicinity,” ran paragraph (e) of Admiral Nagumo’s intelligence estimate, as the First Carrier Striking Force drove on toward Midway. The Admiral was confident, and he felt with good reason. There was no word from the sub cordon, no word from Operation K, no word from anybody—it could only mean that everything was still going smoothly.

On the bridge of the Akagi Admiral Kusaka studied his chief with satisfaction. It was so much better than that Pearl Harbor trip. Then Nagumo had been nervous and gloomy. Now he was his old self again—fierce, tough, the very embodiment of the samurai spirit.

The darkened ships rushed on, and even the weather was now breaking right. Late on the night of the 2nd the fog began to lift, and through the broken clouds an occasional star was shining.

“Is THERE anything we haven’t done?” Colonel Shannon asked his staff as they relaxed for a moment under the stars this same June night on Midway.

There were no suggestions. By now the defenders had done everything they could imagine to beat off a Japanese landing. And if—as many of them secretly believed—the enemy finally came anyhow, they were also ready for that. Their five tanks were hidden in the Sand Island woods to make it a hot reception. Most of their codes were shipped back to Pearl Harbor; other files were burned. Sledge hammers were stored around the base to smash essential machinery. Drivers were coached to wreck their trucks, leaping out just before impact. Caches of food were buried here and there for last-ditch pockets of resistance.

They were prepared for the very end too. Taking all the left-over steel scrap, Captain McGlashan strung it along the high ground on the north side of Sand Island. When all else was gone, here the defenders would rally for Midway’s, last stand. It was promptly dubbed “The McGlashan Line.”

On the “heights” in the center of this ridge (perhaps 30 feet, but on Midway that was a mountain) even the Navy cooks and typists would dig in. Specifically they were assigned the northeast flank, where there seemed less danger of their shooting the Marines by mistake. Of course, a landing on the north shore might still push the Marines that way, and to strengthen the leathernecks’ resolve, they were warned of armed sailors lying behind them.

This last precaution was almost certainly needless. No group ever looked more ready for a fight than Carlson’s Raiders did now. To the rest of the defenders they were rarely visible—just a pack of men glimpsed now and then in the woods. The naval reservists regarded them with cautious awe. They knew that it was worth a man’s life to go near there after dark without knowing the password.

The Raiders were tough, and better still they worked hard. At first they had indicated that unloading ships was somewhat beneath them, but a blast from Colonel Shannon cured that. Soon they set records. More to their personal tastes, they also turned to manufacturing antitank mines. With advice from several who had been involved in the Spanish Civil War, their demolitions officer Lieutenant Harold Throneson devised a beauty—all it needed was a little dynamite, a flashlight battery and 40 pounds of pressure. Company “C” tore into the job of mass-producing them—1,500 altogether.

One of Throneson’s group offered his services to a kindred soul—Marine Gunner “Deacon” Arnold, still engaged in making his own booby traps. Arnold happily added the Raider to his team, and the boy responded by devising a new antipersonnel mine. This was a sort of cigar box loaded with nails, spikes, glass and rocks with a small charge of TNT. Scattered by the dozen along the beaches, they could be exploded either electrically or by firing a rifle at a bull’s-eye neatly painted on the side of the box.

Yet Midway’s best hope still lay in catching the Japanese first. “Hit before we are hit,” the CINCPAC planners advised, and so the 22 PBYs continued their daily runs. They were flying 15° pie-shaped sectors now—700 miles out, 700 miles back, 15 hours in the air altogether. Then a quick bite, a squadron briefing, a few hours in the sack, and the whole business all over again.

Lieutenant Commander Bob Brixner’s Patrol Squadron 44 was putting in an 80-hour week; Commander Massie Hughes’s Squadron 23 was matching him. Lieutenant Colonel Sweeney’s B17s flew 30 hours in two days, looking for signs of that enemy rendezvous CINCPAC seemed to smell. And when the day’s flying was done, they had to help service their own planes too—refueling them by hand from 55-gallon drums. They were all tired—dead tired—but somehow they carried on.

This June 2 seemed especially frustrating. If the intelligence was sound, the Japanese should be coming into range, yet there was no sign of them at all. To the northwest a curtain of fog still hid the ocean—no chance of finding anything beyond 400 miles. To the west it was clear, but despite CINCPAC’s tip about the rendezvous, there was absolutely nothing to see. A specially equipped B-17 went out 800 miles; still not a ship in sight.

Wednesday, June 3, began as usual for the PBY crews—as, in fact, it did for all of Midway’s fliers. Reveille at 3:00 A.M… . a swallow of toast and coffee that didn’t go down so well … then to the planes by jeep and truck in the damp predawn darkness. By 3:50 motors were roaring, exhausts flaring blue, in the first pale light of another new day. At 4:15 the PBYs took off, fanning out on their assigned patrols. Fifteen minutes later the B-17s followed, not as part of the search, but just to get clear—no one wanted them caught on the ground in case of a surprise raid at dawn. The rest of Midway’s planes just waited—motors idling, pilots and gunners standing by—until they got the daily all-clear. Only when the PBYs had searched 400 miles out and still found nothing did Midway seem safe till another dawn.

This morning, as usual, there was nothing 400 miles out. But at 470 miles Lieutenant (j.g.) J. P. O. Lyle, searching to the southwest, spotted two small gray patrol boats steaming toward Midway. He investigated and got a burst of antiaircraft fire for his pains. At 9:04 A.M. he flashed the first report of contact with enemy ships.

Farther to the west, Ensign Jack Reid piloted another PBY, across an empty ocean. He had started earlier than the rest, was now 700 miles from Midway, nearing the end of his outward leg. So far, nothing worth reporting. With the PBY on automatic pilot, Reid again studied the sea with his binoculars. Still nothing—occasional cloud puffs and a light haze hung over the Pacific, but not enough to bother him. It was shortly before 9:25 A.M., and Ensign Reid was a man with no problems at all.

Suddenly he looked, then looked again. Thirty miles dead ahead he could make out dark objects along the horizon. Ships, lots of them, all heading toward him. Handing the glasses to his co-pilot Ensign Hardeman, he calmly asked, “Do you see what I see?”

Hardeman took one look: “You are damned right I do.”

COMMANDER Yasumi Toyama looked up from his charts on the bridge of the light cruiser Jintsu. For once all the transports were keeping in column, but the destroyer on the port side forward was raising a fuss. She hoisted a signal, then fired a smoke shell. Toyama rushed out on the bridge wing, and there was no need to ask what had happened. Everyone was looking and pointing. There, low and well out of range on the port horizon, hovered a PBY.

CHAPTER 4

“Many Planes Heading Midway”

IT MUST HAVE SEEMED like the whole Japanese Navy. After all those grim briefings—all those days of suspense—it was understandable that the 27 ships of the Transport Group now looked even more formidable than they were. At 9:25 Ensign Reid flashed a two-word contact report: “Main Body.”

“Amplify,” Midway flashed back, and for the next two hours Reid played a desperate game of hide-and-seek, darting in and out of cloud puffs, sending additional scraps whenever he could. At 9:27 he radioed, “Bearing 262°, distance 700” … 10:40, he noted “six large ships in column” … 11:00, he made out “eleven ships, course 090, speed 19.” That seemed to do the job; base radio now told him to come on home.

On Midway Colonel Sweeney could hardly wait to get going with his B-17s. Captain Simard was just as anxious, but first there were some things to clear up. Where were the Japanese carriers? Nimitz’s orders were, above all, to go for those carriers. None had been reported so far; the intelligence said they wouldn’t come till tomorrow, and then from the northwest. Should they hold back the B-17s until they definitely appeared? That would be playing it safe.

On the other hand, Reid described this as the “Main Body.” That might well mean carriers there too. If there was any chance at all, Midway shouldn’t wait. “Hit before we are hit” remained the paramount rule.

But even if the B-17s went out, where should they go? Contact reports were now coming from three different PBYs, pinpointing four different sightings to the southwest. They were all just fragments; it wasn’t easy to count ships when they were shooting at you. Was Reid’s contact really the big one? It was worth waiting a little while to see.

Reid’s report at 11:00 A.M. settled the matter. Now it was clear he had at least 11 ships—a much bigger concentration than anyone else reported. Moreover, most of the other ships were converging that way, probably planning to link up. There was still no report of carriers, but even if there weren’t any, Sweeney could go out, get back and be ready again by the time they were promised tomorrow.

At 12:30 he was on his way. One after another, nine olive-drab B-17s thundered down the Eastern Island runway and into the blue Pacific sky. With Colonel Sweeney leading in the Knucklehead, they roared west in loose formation. They carried only half a “pay load”—four 600-pound bombs apiece —for the range was so great they needed bomb-bay gas tanks if they were going to make the round trip.

Six hundred miles was a long way to go to drop less than 11 tons of bombs on a squirming target, but this was the first attack these young men had made. For all of them it was a new and tremendously exciting experience. Sweeney himself had been to West Point—his father was a retired major general—but the men around him were typical of the adaptable amateurs America somehow finds to fight its wars. His co-pilot Everett Wessman was a truck driver; his navigator Bill Adams a lumber salesman.

Three and a half hours went by. Then, 570 miles out and just where the Navy said to look, Sweeney made out a score of white streaks slashing the blue of the sea: the wakes of the Japanese ships. Another pilot, Lieutenant Edward Steedman, counted 26 of them, which was very good counting indeed. Contact time was exactly 4:23 P.M.

At this point Sweeney veered off, circling around the ships so as to attack from out of the afternoon sun. The white streaks stayed steady and straight; apparently no one down there yet suspected. Now the B-17s were behind the Japanese, forming into three flights of three at 8,000, 10,000 and 12,000 feet. Turning into his bomb run, Sweeney picked up his microphone and called to the planes in his own flight, “I’ll go in at 8,000 feet—you follow me.”

Lieutenant Wessman shuddered. He could only hope the Japanese weren’t tuned in. Or if they were listening, that they wouldn’t believe any foe could be so innocent of war as to broadcast his intentions in the clear.

ON THE bridge of the Jintsu Commander Toyama casually studied the sky with binoculars. The Japanese ships didn’t have radar, and a good man’s eyes remained the best defense against a surprise bombing. An attack seemed likely, too, right after the PBY spotted them, but that was seven hours ago, and nothing had happened yet. Now everything was routine again as the Transport Group continued toward Midway, plodding along in two straight columns.

Suddenly Toyama’s glasses picked up nine planes flying toward them “in stately fashion.” There was only time to yank the alarm before the bombs began falling. Lieutenant Yunoki, gunnery officer on one of the destroyers, didn’t have that much time. His first inkling was a pattern of bombs crashing down near the ship. The Argentina Maru was a little more alert. The alarm sounded; the bridge cranked her up to 20 knots; and at 4:38 she opened fire—one minute before a rack of bombs exploded 200 yards astern. The convoy wriggled and squirmed, smoke pouring out of the stacks and guns. Antiaircraft fire speckled the sky, but before the defense really got going the attack was already over. Still flying “in stately fashion,” the nine B-17s disappeared into the northeast haze.

The Transport Group took stock. No hits, except some splinters from a near-miss on one of the freighters. With the buoyancy a fighting man always feels when he has just pulled through an engagement, the executive officer of the Argentina Maru dashed off his combat report, noting that all hands were in “exceptionally high spirits.”

THE ex-salesmen and truck drivers flying the B-17s were in high spirits too. To a man trained in banking at the University of Illinois, like Captain Paul Payne of the bomber Yankee Doodle, a transport at 10,000 feet could look like almost anything—he marked his target down as “hit and burning.”

Taking the largest ship in the world for comparison, Lieutenant Robert Andrews said he bombed a transport of the “Normandie class.” Captain Clemence Tokarz thought he got a battleship or a heavy cruiser. Looking back when they were 30 miles off and homeward bound, Colonel Sweeney was sure he saw two ships burning: “They were both out of column, appeared motionless and were issuing huge clouds of dark smoke which mushroomed above them.”

In contrast the trip back seemed more hair-raising than bombing the Japanese. Night soon fell, and nobody was used to flying formation in the dark. There were several near-misses. It was hard, too, for an Army pilot to find a dot like Midway in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. At 7:30 Eastern Island turned on its runway lights, but for an anxious hour there was no sign of anyone. Finally, the base heard the welcome drone of distant motors, but it was 9:45 before the last planes groped their way home—Captain Willard Woodbury felt he didn’t have enough gas left “to fill a cigarette lighter.”

Even as they were landing, another strike was on its way out, aiming at the same Japanese force. It was the culmination of an amazing enterprise that began over 12 hours earlier at Pearl Harbor.

It must have been about three o’clock that morning when Ensign Allan Rothenburg, a young PBY skipper, was suddenly shaken awake as he lay in his bed at the Ford Island BOQ. “Get up; you’re going to Midway.”

“Midway to what?” was Rothenburg’s sleepy reaction. His patrols in Squadron 51 never carried him in that direction, and at first he didn’t even click on the name. But he pulled on his clothes, went to the field, and in the first light of dawn found his amphibian was one of four warming up. The other three were from Squadron 24, but the PBY men all knew each other, and as they briefly compared notes, it turned out none of them knew why they were going.

They took off around 7:00, landing at the Eastern Island airstrip nine long hours later. By ordinary standards this was a day’s work—time for a hot meal, a good bed and maybe a stretch of routine patrols starting tomorrow. As the flight’s leader, Lieutenant (j.g.) Charles Hibberd, nudged his PBY into its revetment, the crew were surprised, then, to find an enlisted man waiting for them on a tractor with a torpedo mounted on the trailer behind. It was even more astonishing when he said the torpedo was for them—that the other three PBYs would be equipped too, that all four planes were a “striking force” to go out after the Japanese fleet.

Hibberd’s navigator, Ensign James Boyden, couldn’t take it seriously. The PBY amphibian was a wonderful patrol plane, but it only cruised 100 miles an hour, maneuvered with stately dignity, and offered as big and inviting a target as a Pennsylvania Dutch barn. Surely no one could dream of sending it on an attack mission. Shrugging the thought off, Boyden headed for the mess hall to get a snack.

The place was crowded with other crews in flight gear—Army, Navy, Marine. The atmosphere was hushed, serious, almost gloomy. More of the new PBY men turned up, and they soon pieced together a sobering picture: a big Jap force to the southwest … the B-17s out bombing them now … the enemy sweeping toward Midway. All refreshments were on the house, creating a sort of “last supper” feeling.

A messenger came, summoning the new arrivals to the command post. They crowded into Colonel Kimes’s dimly lit dugout—Lieutenant Hibberd, Al Rothenburg, the other pilots and navigators. Logan Ramsey took over the briefing. He explained they were selected to launch a night torpedo attack, and although it had never been done before, “we have to throw everything we have at them.”

He went on to say it would be on a volunteer basis. If they didn’t think they could do it, they wouldn’t be required to go. He waited, studying their faces.

Not a word was said. Ensign Gaylord Propst grimly stared at the floor. Lieutenant (j.g.) Douglas Davis was mute, more from shock than from any burning desire to charge out on a suicide mission. Ensign Boyden silently stared back at Ramsey, trying to read the Commander’s thoughts. All too clearly Ramsey’s face betrayed how little he expected ever to see them again, how much he hated doing what he had to do.

The briefing continued: target, course, speed, position, technical procedures on signals and communications. Yes, it was the “Main Body”—they should look for a carrier. The attack would be led by Lieutenant W. L. Richards, the tall, redheaded executive officer of Patrol Squadron 44, already based on Midway. Outside, mechanics buckled the torpedoes onto the PBYs—one under each plane’s starboard wing.

At 9:30 they took off, Richards leading the way in Charlie Hibberd’s plane. It was not a graceful departure. The PBYs—laboring under the unbalanced load—struggled painfully into the air. Rothenburg, delayed by trouble with his ladder, was late getting off and tagged along after the rest.

Turning southwest, they headed into a beautiful moonlit night, flying in loose formation at 3,000 feet. On Lieutenant Davis’s plane coffee was brewed and served. Taking a sip, Davis pondered his chances of coming through this, night alive—and became slightly nauseated.

The hours droned by. The planes flew on, now through scattered clouds that made it difficult to follow Richards—the others had only his exhausts and a small white light on his fuselage to guide them. Rothenburg, still trailing far in the rear, lost the rest completely. Then Propst too drifted off. But just after that, at 1:20 A.M., Richards’s radarman picked up some targets about seven miles away. At the controls, Charlie Hibberd calmly said he had already spotted them.

Directly ahead, bathed in the moonlight, two columns of darkened ships were steaming toward them. A ring of destroyers guarded both columns, but there was no sign that they suspected danger. Disdaining evasive moves of any kind, they held to a course that would ultimately take them straight to Midway.

Richards had Hibberd circle once to alert the others, then let down to a point off the port beam of the northern column. Now the enemy ships were silhouetted perfectly—black beads in the silvery moon path. Looking for the “carrier,” he picked out a long, low ship toward the rear of the column. Charlie Hibberd began his final run-in.

The job was all his. He had to fly the plane and manipulate the torpedo director at the same time. The rest crouched at their posts, peering through the windows and blisters at the sea rushing past them. Now they were only 200 … 150 … 100 feet from the water. Still no sign that the Japanese suspected anything, but this run-in was taking forever.

“Drop that damn thing and let’s get the hell out of here!” someone finally yelled. But Hibberd wasn’t ready yet. At 1,000 yards he knew this wasn’t a carrier after all—it looked like some sort of merchant ship—but they hadn’t come this far for nothing. On they roared, now only 50 feet off the sea. At 800 yards Hibberd finally released the torpedo, rammed the controls forward, and the PBY heaved up and over the target as a few scattered shots blazed out. Looking back, the man at the waist hatch saw a muffled explosion followed by a second and clearer flash. It looked like a hit, and they were home free.

Lieutenant Davis was close behind. But he didn’t like his position, turned away, circled and came on again. Starting his second approach, he too flew straight up the moon path toward a ship in the rear of the north column. He too faced no return fire as he raced in, now at 50-75 feet.

But they certainly saw him. The target veered hard to starboard and put on speed. Too late to do anything about that; just get as close as possible. At 200 yards Davis released the torpedo almost dead astern of the ship. He had a fleeting glimpse of her thrashing screws and rudder jammed hard to starboard.

A blaze of antiaircraft fire erupted as he pulled up with full power over the stern of the ship. On the port waist gun Machinist’s Mate Ted Kimmell fired back at the forest of masts, funnels and ventilators directly below. In seconds the whole convoy seemed to be shooting at them. Strange pink and red tracers ripped the night; shrapnel and machine-gun fire raked the PBY. One blast smashed through the nose bubble, shattering Navigator J. I. Foster’s goggles, but miraculously not hurting him. They picked up 58 bullet holes altogether … but they too were home free.

Now it was Ensign Propst’s turn. Though he had lost Richards on the way out, he found the Japanese anyhow. He circled down on their port side and, like the others, attacked up the moon path. It proved to be another of those low, harrowing run-ins. At one point he almost rammed one of the escort. “Don’t run into that destroyer!” someone yelled. They hopscotched over it, skimmed on in, releasing at 800 yards. Then with everything bent to the fire wall, Propst did a mad, climbing turn to the left. Co-pilot B. L. Amman had a brief glimpse of a flash that looked like a hit, as the whole Japanese fleet opened up. To Propst it was “Coney Island on the 4th of July.”

They caught some shrapnel, once exchanged shots with a prowling Japanese seaplane. But with a little luck and a friendly cloud, they too managed to get clear and were home free.

Only Rothenburg missed the show. Lost early in the game, he kept on course but never found the others again. By the time he reached the scene, the attack was in full swing. Tracers laced the sky, and there was absolutely no chance to get near enough for a successful run. Hoping for an opening, he milled around for 30 minutes. Finally—his gas half gone—he broke off and headed home, winding up a thoroughly frustrating evening.

ON THE transport Argentina Maru, Commander Yonai never expected an attack at night. It was astonishing the way those big PBYs came in from nowhere. Commander Toyama was just as surprised on the escort flagship Jintsu. After a hectic day, he was finally relaxing in the operations room—even time for an action meal of rice balls—when a destroyer flashed the first warning.

As the bugle blared general quarters over the loudspeaker, Toyama rushed out on the bridge. He was just in time to see a big, black enemy plane come skimming across the water. Then another … and another. Antiaircraft fire exploded everywhere, but they were gone as suddenly as they appeared.

Happily there was little damage. The tanker Akebono Maru—bringing up the rear of the north column—caught a torpedo in the bow, killing 13 and wounding 11. The transport Kiozumi Maru lost a few men from strafing. The other ships weren’t touched, but Admiral Tanaka spent some anxious moments worrying whether the Akebono Maru could continue. Finally word came that she could make 12-14 knots—more than enough to keep in line. Still intact, the convoy plodded on toward Midway.

All this was promptly radioed to the Yamato, where Admiral Yamamoto’s staff reacted with considerable surprise. It was all very puzzling—first, getting sighted at nine o’clock that morning … then the B-17s … and now this torpedo attack. Certainly nobody expected the Americans to move so quickly. In fact, Captain Kuroshima had hoped they wouldn’t find the convoy at all until after Nagumo’s attack on the 4th. Here they were a day too soon, already lashing at the transports 600 miles out.

The question again rose whether to relay all this news to Admiral Nagumo, now starting his final run-in, but once again it was decided radio silence was just too important. Nothing must give those carriers away.

Perhaps more thought might have been given to the matter, but too many things were happening. In all its complexity the great operation was beginning to unfold. On May 31 midget subs had staged a brief, diversionary raid at Diégo-Suarez, Madagascar … then on June 1, others raided Sydney Harbor … and now in the early hours of June 3 Admiral Hosogaya’s Northern Force launched its major attack against the Aleutians. Long before Admiral Yamamoto sat down to breakfast, he got the welcome word that the Ryujo’s bombers had plastered Dutch Harbor.

At 8:30 he detached an important part of the Main Force in a pre-arranged plan to back up this effort in the Aleutians. Vice Admiral Shiro Takasu took his flagship Hyuga, three other battleships, two light cruisers, a handful of destroyers and headed for northern waters. But not too far. His “Aleutian Screening Force” would hover halfway between the Northern Force and Yamamoto himself—ready to jump either way, depending on how the U.S. fleet reacted. The Commander in Chief continued east with the rest of the Main Force, now about 500 miles astern of Nagumo’s carriers.

Nagumo himself was less than 700 miles from Midway, girding for his final dash. At 6:07 A.M. Captain Masanao Oto’s five oilers dropped astern. The carriers inched up to 12 knots. No more right now—it was folly to go any deeper into patrol plane range than necessary during daylight hours. But by 3:00 P.M. the Admiral had to make his move if he was going to launch tomorrow at dawn. The engine room telegraphs rang, and the First Carrier Striking Force leaped forward at 24 knots.

Down in the Akagi’s engine room Commander Yoshibumi Tanbo watched the great turbines respond. How he loved that place. He even took his meals there—rice balls with pickled plums amid the hot oil and pounding machinery. Topside, working parties were rigging stacked hammocks and coils of rope to protect the most exposed equipment from flying shrapnel. Overhead there were still plenty of clouds, but the weather was steadily improving, and at 7:30 Admiral Kusaka stood on the bridge watching the last rays of a magnificent Pacific sunset.

A crash of gunfire shattered the evening calm—the escorting cruiser Tone began blazing away with her antiaircraft batteries. Three fighters roared off from the Akagi to investigate, and the whole task force scanned the sky. At 7:40 the Tone’s blinker explained she had spotted about ten enemy planes, but then lost them. Fourteen minutes later the Akagi’s fighters returned after a fruitless search. Clearly some lookout was getting the jitters.

Not so the fliers. The months of solid victory had built that rarest kind of confidence—the faith that lets a man rest easily the night before a battle. The Kaga’s pilots turned in early, and when the air officer Commander Amagai checked a little later, they were all fast asleep. On the Soryu Juzo Mori inspected his bomber one last time, then went to bed as usual with his mother’s picture by the pillow.

By midnight the Striking Force was less than 340 miles from Midway—about 110 from the launching point. At 2:30 A.M. on the 4th a lookout on the Akagi sounded another alert—a “light” from an enemy plane on the starboard beam. Another flurry of excitement; another false alarm. It wasn’t the first time in history a sailor had been fooled by a star.

Admiral Nagumo knew better. The halfhearted Americans weren’t about to cause any trouble at this point. Later they might be goaded into action. His intelligence estimate explained it nicely: “Although the enemy lacks the will to fight, it is likely that he will counter attack if our occupation operations progress satisfactorily.”

“LOGAN, I just know I can get them,” Massie Hughes urged in his deep Southern drawl as he talked with Commander Ramsey in the Midway command post dugout. It was around 3:00 A.M.; word had come through that the PBYs had hit the Japanese force hard; and now Hughes wanted to take some more PBYs and finish them off. He was a real fighter—an aggressive little middleweight boxer from Alabama—and sitting still was always hard for him.

Ramsey was gently discouraging. It was now clear that this was only the Transport Group, that the Sunday punch was coming from the carriers hidden under those clouds to the northwest. He explained all this, but still it was difficult; they were only a few years apart at Annapolis, and he didn’t want to make it a question of rank. But he remained firm, and beyond tactical grounds there was another reason: Ramsey wanted Hughes to take over if anything happened to himself during the coming attack. He didn’t want to risk killing the next-in-line chasing a group of transports.

Not that Ramsey didn’t appreciate the difficulty of just waiting. “I feel like a June bride,” he remarked. “I know it’s going to happen, but I don’t know what it will be like.”

They all felt the same. It was a tense night, for everything was turning out exactly as the intelligence boys had said— first the raid on Dutch Harbor … then the invasion force discovered to the southwest … now, according to the same script, they’d really get it in the morning from that big force of carriers.

Intelligence said they’d be coming in on a 320° bearing; so it was a serious group of PBY pilots who studied their patrol sector assignments that evening. When. Lieutenant Howard Ady of Squadron 23 checked the blackboard at the Sand Island BOQ, he saw he drew 315°. That meant he’d be flying out on 322½°, back on 307½°. As far as he was concerned, he was “elected.”

After briefing, the usual bull session. Squadron 23 had a great collection of talkers, and tonight there was an extra treat: John Ford, the distinguished movie director, was on hand. In an imaginative stroke, Nimitz had sent him out to film whatever might happen. Now he was in the middle of everything, exasperating the supply people but delighting everyone with his tremendous enthusiasm. Far into the night he helped ease the tension with tales of glamorous Hollywood.

“Oh, my God—now I’ve got a movie-ite!” was Captain Simard’s somewhat quaint reaction when Ford first appeared, but he too was soon won over, and now the problem was where to put this celebrity and still keep him alive. Simard finally decided the best place would be the upper part of the main powerhouse on Sand Island. It was relatively well protected and at the same time offered a superb vantage point. From there Ford could take his movies and at the same time give the underground command post a useful running account of what was going on.

This solved, Captain Simard’s preparations were practically over. Everything had been done that could be done—even a touching talk to the navy yeomen and pharmacist’s mates chosen to make the last stand. With great feeling in his voice, Simard wished them all “good-bye and good luck.”

Nearly everyone now seemed resigned to “another Wake Island”—that base’s capture remained a bitter memory. The officers removed their insignia to keep Japanese snipers from picking them off. In the harbor the PT boat crews prepared to make the landings as expensive as possible. One of the squadron’s officers had always refused to buy GI insurance; that afternoon he asked for the full $10,000 worth. Sorry, he was told, no forms available.

The Marines were grimly determined. Captain McGlashan carefully burned most of the remaining classified documents. The men in the gun positions swapped chilling bits of scuttlebutt—the Japs had a marvelous new landing barge that could drop a gate right over the reef … the big blow would be a night gas attack. Carlson’s Raiders busily armed themselves with a new weapon—the 14-inch screwdriver that was part of a PT boat’s standard equipment. As one of the Raiders explained, it was “good for the ribs, if you know what I mean.”

One and all, they continued working on Midway’s defenses to the end. On Sand Island men were still placing the last mines on the northwest beach in the early evening twilight. At Eastern, “Barbed Wire Bob” Hommel anchored his last concertinas offshore after dark. Private Joseph E. Love, normally relegated to garbage collection and the gooney bird burial detail, found himself stringing telephone lines until nearly midnight.

It was after 12:00 when Colonel Shannon and Captain McGlashan finished one last tour of inspection and trudged back to the command post. McGlashan was satisfied: he felt that come what may, the Marine garrison had done all it could.

The fliers were ready too. During the evening Colonel Kimes called a meeting of all the personnel in Marine Air Group 22. “This is it, boys,” he said, and not knowing how things would turn out, he simply told them, “Give it all you’ve got, and good luck to you all.”

The fighter pilots in Squadron VMF-221 would need all the luck they could get. The seven F4Fs seemed so pitifully few, the 16 Brewster Buffaloes so hopelessly obsolete. Major Red Parks, the squadron commander, knew how long the odds were. Normally he was an aggressive, intelligent extrovert, not too concerned with psychology or the vulnerabilities of mankind. He would rather slit his throat than admit to anything that might be construed as longing for solace. Tonight was different. As he sat with his executive officer Captain Kirk Armistead in the Eastern Island snack bar, he seemed very serious and disturbed. Armistead tried to cheer him up, saying something like, “By this time tomorrow, it’ll all be behind us.”

“Yeah,” Parks gloomily nodded, “for those of you who get through it.”

The outlook wasn’t much brighter for the dive bomber pilots in Squadron VMSB-241. During the evening Major Henderson called them together and gave them a few of his thoughts. He said he knew how poor the equipment was; the flight tomorrow would be strictly a voluntary proposition. However, he was taking off as soon as the enemy fleet was within range, and the others could follow him if they wished. Henderson was like a father to most of the squadron, and there was little doubt what they’d do.

“Sleep in your clothes tonight,” Captain Richard Fleming, one of the pilots, told his rear-seat man Corporal Eugene T. Card. “They may come in at any time, so be ready to turn out.”

Card was ready. He had gone over his machine gun once again. He checked and rechecked the radio frequencies and various dial settings. He even stocked the plane with cans of corned beef and pineapple juice in case they were forced down at sea. Now if only the Japs would attack or go away—anything, as long as they did something.

The young Navy pilots “on loan” from Torpedo 8 were ready too. During the day they kept posted on the various sightings and strikes; they knew their turn would soon be coming up. But Ensign Bert Earnest felt he had a good omen. Walking alongside the Eastern Island runway just after dark, he found a two-dollar bill. He carefully tucked it in his wallet, hoping that any powers it had would help bring him through.

The B-26 crews remained utterly casual. Probably nobody is less informed than an Army flier at a Navy base (unless it’s a Navy flier at an Army base), and these men were no exceptions. Lieutenant Muri had yet to learn of any enemy sighting, still had only the haziest idea why he was at Midway. That evening as he and his crew sat beside their plane, a Marine private wandered by who knew just as little. The private was happy, said he was about to go Stateside on leave, and demonstrated a “gooney-bird dance” which he planned to introduce back home. The crew laughed and clapped, agreed that it would soon be all the rage. They hadn’t a worry in the world.

By the end of the day, seven more B-17s had arrived from Hawaii—a final “gift” from Admiral Nimitz. Altogether, some 120 planes now jammed the base, along with 11 PT boats, 5 tanks, 8 mortars, 14 shore-defense guns, 32 antiaircraft guns, and 3,632 defenders. For two tiny islets in mid-Pacific—one two miles long, the other about a mile—it all added up to quite a show. Midway, as one Marine put it, “looked like an asparagus patch.”

Even so, they felt very much alone. In some cases the defenders were warned they were strictly on their own; in others they just assumed it. Only a few knew there was any chance for help from the outside. One of these exceptions was Ensign Jacoby, Logan Ramsey’s aide in the command post. Jacoby wasn’t making the big decisions, but he listened a lot, and nothing intrigued him more than the talk about Point Luck.

FOR Admiral Fletcher on the Yorktown, it just didn’t add up right. Ensign Jack Reid’s contact report, intercepted by the carriers, clearly said “Main Body,” yet it was the wrong direction. According to Nimitz’s briefing, the carriers should be coming down from the northwest, and certainly the intelligence had been right so far about everything else— Dutch Harbor was hit exactly on schedule.

“That is not repeat not the enemy striking force,” warned a radio message that soon arrived direct from Nimitz, ending all doubts on the matter. CINCPAC’s signal went on to stress that only the Invasion Force had so far been sighted, that the carriers would still strike from the northwest tomorrow.

Task Forces 16 and 17 continued marking time, cruising slowly north under gray, broken clouds. On the carriers the fliers went over their planes, checked the firing circuits, cleaned their charts and plotting boards for tomorrow’s data. The fighter pilots saw that their guns were loaded bullet by bullet. The bomber and torpedo pilots once again went over their signaling and firing procedures with their rear-seat men. No relationship was closer—and none more of a life-and-death matter—than the teamwork between these two. The crew captains fussed over the planes, and when there was nothing more to be done, polished them one more time. Woe to the mechanic on the Yorktown whose maintenance work didn’t come up to Leading Chief V. J. Feigenbutz’s standards. The old chief had a passion for Bombing Squadron 3 and a volcanic vocabulary to express it.

All afternoon Fletcher and his staff waited for word that Nagumo had been sighted, but nothing ever came. At 7:50 P.M. he changed course to the southwest. This would take him to a point about 200 miles north of Midway at dawn. Assuming Nagumo was still following the script, the U.S. carriers would be in perfect position for launching a surprise attack on the Japanese flank.

The ships steamed on into the night, dark forms cutting a calm, moonlit Pacific. If the battened ports and hatches suggested inactivity, that was deceptive, for there was plenty going on. It has been said that running a carrier for an air group was a little like running a hotel for a crowd of conventioneers, and this was never truer than the night before a major strike.

On the Enterprise the supply officer, Commander Charles Fox, faced a hundred extra problems feeding and servicing the ship. Tomorrow, most of his men would be at battle stations far from their regular jobs—the day’s needs must be met in advance. Spares and plane parts were brought up from below; battle rations prepared and packaged. In the kitchen the cooks turned out stacks of sandwiches, and no less than 10,000 spiced ginger cookies.

The fliers themselves had little to do but wait … and think about tomorrow. There was no single, dominant mood. Every man had his own private mixture of feelings. For Ensign Charles Lane, a young but experienced dive bomber pilot on the Yorktown, it was not a feeling of fear exactly, but apprehension and regret that he might not return. On the Enterprise Lieutenant Bill Roberts felt a strange sense of excitement. It was the element of trapping the Japanese, he thought, that made this time so different. Ensign Thomas J. Wood on the Hornet bubbled with high spirits. Like the rest of the ship’s pilots, he knew nothing of combat, had never even had a chance to learn about fear. He was young, aggressive, and boasted to anyone who would listen that he personally would sink the Akagi.

The dive bomber pilots, at least, shared one thing in common. They were ready. They had trained months for this, worked hard, now felt prepared to give a really decent account of themselves. The new men, in particular, yearned to go out and show what they could do.

Not so, some of the older torpedo pilots. They had been around too long to be carried away by the excitement. By now they had been in enough scrapes to know that even the finest spirit can’t make up for poor equipment. And they knew these TBDs were death traps—the 100-knot speed, the slow rate of climb, the wretched torpedoes.

None knew the truth better than Lieutenant Commander Massey, skipper of the Yorktown’s Torpedo 3. Lem Massey was a shambling, lovable character who enjoyed good company and went out of his way to find it. Tonight he recruited a couple of nonfliers in the squadron and brought them into his cabin. Bringing out a bottle of scotch (illegal but not unknown on carriers), he told them how long the odds were against the squadron. He probably shouldn’t be talking this way, he said, but he just had to share his gloom with someone. When they went out tomorrow, he didn’t see how they’d ever get back.

Another man who knew about” these torpedo planes was John Udell Lane on the Enterprise. He was a rear-seat man in Torpedo 6, and he too had a premonition of what tomorrow offered. Visiting a friend’s compartment, he talked long and sadly of his home in Illinois. Putting on a favorite record of soprano Miliza Korjus, he moodily played it over and over again.

Against this almost bittersweet mood of resignation, the blazing spirit of the Hornet’s brand-new Torpedo Squadron 8 seemed all the more striking. Lieutenant Commander John Waldron was a hard-driving taskmaster with a fierce passion for getting at the enemy. Whenever the big day came, he was determined to be ready. He drilled his men mercilessly, ran their legs off, fought for extra equipment—anything to win. “If we run out of gas,” he once remarked, “we’ll piss in the tanks.”

He also knew how to blow off steam. The squadron parties that he and his wife Adelaide gave in Norfolk were famous. Then he put aside his toughness, royally entertained the young ensigns, and sometimes allowed a deep streak of tenderness to shine through. There was the night when he took Ensigns Jim Cook and Corwin Morgan to a darkened room where his children were sleeping: “Cookie, you and Morgan look in this room. Did you ever see such pretty little girls?”

The following morning he’d be all business again, pounding away at his tactical theories. They were often unorthodox. Ensign George Gay considered him “foxy”; Waldron himself lightly referred to his extra intuition, thanks to a streak of Sioux blood. In any case, he hammered home his ideas till, as Gay put it, “We could almost look at the back of Commander Waldron’s head and know what he was thinking.”

His men griped a lot—no one else had to work that hard —but they believed in him completely. Soon they were a compact, closely knit, team as fiery and determined as their skipper. They ran laps around the flight deck and did group calisthenics, while the other fliers hooted and loafed. They tucked knives in their belts, wore shoulder holsters, and didn’t give a damn about the taunts of “Circus” and “Mexican Panchos.”

And all the time they worked. There wasn’t much chance to fly, but no squadron ever spent more hours in the ready room. Waldron was a fanatic on detail, and he’d go over the smallest point again and again. Like a schoolteacher, he’d toss sharp, unexpected questions at any pilot who seemed to be daydreaming.

This night of June 3 the briefing stressed one of the skipper’s favorite subjects: the proper angle of attack on a hard-turning target. As usual he was all business, but when the meeting broke up, he turned almost shy as he handed out a final mimeographed message along with his plan of attack:

Just a word to let you know I feel we are all ready. We have had a very short time to train and we have worked under the most severe difficulties. But we have truly done the best humanly possible. I actually believe that under these conditions we are the best in the world. My greatest hope is that we encounter a favorable tactical situation, but if we don’t, and the worst comes to worst, I want each of us to do his utmost to destroy our enemies. If there is only one plane left to make a final run in, I want that man to go in and get a hit. May God be with us all. Good luck, happy landings and give ‘em hell.

Torpedo 8 drifted back to its quarters. Most of the men puttered, read or played records. Ensign Abercrombie won $45 at poker. Waldron himself wrote a tender note to “Dearest little Ann,” one of his children, and endorsed a small check to his father-in-law. He had already written Adelaide everything he could say: “… I love you and the children very dearly and I long to be with you. But I could not be happy ashore at this time. My place is here with the fight.”

Only Ensign Gay was still busy. As navigation officer he was attending to the last-minute job of getting some charts run off for the rest. Finally it was time to turn in, but he found it hard to sleep. Bulletins on the battle were beginning to come in … the PBYs were out making their midnight attack. Gay felt “a little bit nervous, kind of, like before a football game.”

Throughout the fleet others had the same trouble. On the Enterprise Dick Best slept “like a baby,” but more were like Lieutenant Dickinson of Scouting 6, restlessly visiting back and forth, talking the night away. One thing was true of them all. As Lieutenant Jim Gray, skipper of Fighting 6, has put it: “It is doubtful that there were any atheists in Enterprise on the night of 3 June 1942.”

Through the night and into the first hour of June 4, the U.S. force steamed on, always edging southwest toward Midway. On the Yorktown’s bridge Admiral Fletcher’s staff were “biting their nails” wondering why the Japanese carriers were still unreported—they should be well within Midway’s range by now. “After a battle is over,” Fletcher later remarked, “people talk a lot about how the decisions were methodically reached, but actually there’s always a hell of a lot of groping around.”

He finally decided to launch a search to the north at dawn, just in case the enemy might be sneaking down that way. Certainly they were out there somewhere; everyone knew that by now. Belowdecks, Seaman Melvin Frantz slipped down to his locker and switched his money to his wallet: “By tomorrow night I might be swimming.”

Up in sky control on the Enterprise the assistant gunnery officer, Lieutenant Elias Mott, restlessly flicked on a portable radio. Wherever it happened to break out, he knew battle would be joined in the morning. Maybe a little music and news from home might help. Honolulu came in strong and clear: the news said a leading entertainer had just been commissioned a lieutenant commander. Mott bitterly snapped it off— “That’s all I need from home tonight.”

ACTUALLY, “home” was taking things far more seriously than Lieutenant Mott thought. The Army had never completely given up thinking that the real Japanese target was the West Coast, and tonight was a time of great jitters. Leaves were canceled; West Coast radio stations were silenced for a while; a nine-minute “blue” alert was sounded in the San Francisco Bay area. Radar had picked up an unidentified target 60 miles off the Golden Gate. Whatever it was, it soon faded away, but not the feeling of fear and alarm.

To get early warning of any assault, the Navy’s Western Sea Frontier Command established a picket line of patrol boats and yachts 400 miles off the California coast. Ashore, the Fourth Army and the Western Defense Command urged the public to report immediately any Japanese seen wearing the uniform of an American soldier. There was little chance of mistaken identity, because all Japanese-Americans in uniform had been shifted to other areas, except three men on special duty at Fort Ord.

Conditions were even more tense in Hawaii. By now every one knew “something was up,” and the wilder rumors had a big Japanese fleet heading straight for Pearl Harbor. Army patients were discharged from the hospital at Schofield in anticipation of battle casualties. The Civilian Defense Volunteers were called to duty. General Emmons urged all women and children living in downtown Honolulu to evacuate to a safer place. A strange silence seemed to hang everywhere— a mixture of hope and fear.

At Pearl Harbor the Marine guards manned the machine guns atop the concrete pillars of the Navy Yard gate. Trucks were parked as roadblocks across the entrance before dark. On all ships the gun crews were at their posts.

Shortly after dark there was an A-l, all-out “red” alert. All repairs came to a stop. Workers manned machine guns on the shop roofs: others stood by the fire hoses. The yard was completely blacked out and sealed off. When the graveyard shift came they were told to go home; the swing shift, caught by the alert, sat around in the shelters. They tried to sleep or smoked and talked about the coming invasion.

Behind blackout curtains, the CINCPAC staff worried the night away. Commander Layton found himself thinking of the people he knew on the other side. He wondered what an old friend like Takashi Kanoe was doing right now.

ON THE Hiryu Commander Takashi Kanoe paused briefly before the ship’s shrine outside Captain Kaku’s cabin, then hurried on to the bridge. As executive officer, this was Kanoe’s battle station, and looking down, he could already see the planes warming up in the pre-dawn darkness.

Below decks the ship was springing to life. The fliers were up at 4:00 and had breakfast on trays in the ready room. Normally they had just an action meal before battle, but this time they got the full treatment—rice, soybean soup, pickles, everything. And to top it off there were dry chestnuts and cold sake—a traditional combination served from the earliest times to Japanese warriors entering battle.

The Hiryu’s air officer, Lieutenant Commander Susumu Kawaguchi, had never heard of such a breakfast. All this symbolism suddenly made him take Midway far more seriously. In his final briefing, he made a special plea, urging the pilots to “put their nerve into it.”

Beyond that, there was little to say. The men were all veterans, knew their jobs perfectly, and Kanoe had complete faith in their leader Lieutenant Joichi Tomonaga. A tough, silent, hard-drinking man, Tomonaga was an expert torpedo plane pilot. He had seen no action since Pearl Harbor and was champing at the bit. When he said good-bye to his wife at Beppu, he seemed particularly glad to get aboard the Hiryu and head for battle. Kanbe noticed this, and when Fuchida came down with appendicitis, he immediately thought of Tomonaga as the ideal man to take over. Kanoe put it to his old Academy classmate Commander Minoru Genda, who was Nagumo’s operations officer, and the matter was quickly settled.

The briefing over, the pilots headed for their planes. Overhead a few stars lingered in the sky. It was still quite cloudy, but the eastern horizon glowed orange, promising clear weather ahead.

On all the carriers the scene was much the same … yet as varied as human nature. On the Soryu CPO Mori and his friends engaged in the nervous banter that fighting men find useful at such times. “You’re going to get it today,” someone told Mori. “No, you’re the one,” he retorted exactly as expected. Then they turned to joking about who would end up with each other’s savings accounts. On the Kaga serious, thoughtful CWO Morinaga quietly adjusted his senim bari around his waist. According to ancient tradition, its thousand stitches—each sewn by a different well-wisher—would give him divine protection.

On the flagship Akagi a wobbly Mitsuo Fuchida struggled topside to see them off. Then Commander Genda arrived on the bridge in pajamas; he too had been sick, down with a wretched cold, but was determined to be on hand today. And no one could have been more welcome. Admiral Nagumo depended enormously—some said too much—on the brilliant mind of his operations officer. On practically any subject Nagumo accepted Genda’s recommendations without question. Indeed, cynics referred to the striking force as “Genda’s fleet.’’ But his appearance at this moment was a shot in the arm for them all. In a rare display of sentiment by that dour old sailor, Nagumo threw his arm around the Commander’s shoulder.

“All hands to launching stations,” blared the Akagi’s loudspeaker.

“Start engines.”

A sudden roar, and the soft gray of dawn blazed with unexpected color. Exhausts flared white … wing lights flicked on, red and blue … floodlights bathed the yellow flight deck. “Commence launching,” ordered the bridge, and the air officer Commander Shogo Masuda swung his green signal lamp in a great arc over his head.

Lieutenant Shirane’s Zero crawled forward … gathered speed … thundered down the deck and into the air. Eight more fighters followed, then 18 dive bombers. As Lieutenant Chihaya’s plane flashed by, he had his canopy open and waved to the cheering men on deck.

The other carriers were launching too, their planes orbiting slowly around the fleet till they were all in formation. From the Hiryu’s bridge, the ship’s only passenger watched with more than academic interest. He was Lieutenant Commander Asaichi Tamai, appointed to command the air wing of the new naval base to be established at Midway.

By 4:45 they were all formed up and on their way—36 level bombers from the Hiryu and Soryu; 36 dive bombers from the Akagi and Kaga; 36 fighters, 9 from each carrier. Heading southeast, they soon faded into the brightening sky. All was quiet again on the carriers, but not for long. Orders went out to prepare the second attack wave—Nagumo’s insurance policy in case a U.S. fleet unexpectedly turned up. In total strength these reserves matched the force now winging toward Midway. The main difference lay in the arming. This time the level bombers would carry torpedoes, and the dive bombers would switch to armor-piercing missiles for use against ships. It all added up to 36 dive bombers from the Hiryu and Soryu; 36 torpedo planes from the. Akagi and Kaga; and, again, 36 fighters from all four carriers.

In the first rays of the morning sun, the elevators brought the new planes up … flight deck crews wheeled them into position … mechanics shackled on the torpedoes. The pilots stood by, loafing and relaxed. It seemed almost a waste to hold back so many good men this way—Lieutenant Takashige Egusa on the Soryu was the finest dive-bomber pilot in the Navy—but Nagumo wanted to be safe. Anybody could bomb an island, but a moving ship took skill. As long as there was any chance of the Americans appearing, however unlikely, he wanted to have his best men available.

On the same unlikely chance, he had also ordered search planes to scout generally eastward for 300 miles. There were only seven of them—a motley collection from five different ships—and they had to cover an arc of 165°, but nobody was taking this effort too seriously. Nagumo remained convinced that there were no U.S. carriers around, and Genda had a reputation for always slicing reconnaissance rather thin. Every plane used for patrol work meant one less for the slashing attacks that were his specialty.

Today the search also had a ragged start. The planes were meant to leave at 4:30, same as the Midway strike, but it didn’t work out quite that way. The cruiser Tone, which was contributing her No. 1 and No. 4 float planes, had catapult trouble, and that held her up awhile. But finally all was fixed, and at 5:00 A.M. the Tone’s No. 4 plane—last of the seven to leave—soared eastward into the sunrise. It was a half hour late, but to Lieutenant Takeda, the Tone’s hard-working air officer, that shouldn’t make very much difference.

IT WAS breakfast as usual—almost—in the Enterprise wardroom, as the U.S. fleet hovered 200 miles north and slightly east of Midway. Although only 1:30 A.M., Steward Collins had everything ready. Lieutenant Best had his invariable shirred eggs … Lieutenant Gray had his “one-eyed sandwich”—an Enterprise specialty consisting of a slice of toast holed to accommodate a fried egg.

For some of the old hands it seemed like any other day. But for others it was different. Lieutenant Commander Wade McClusky, leading the Enterprise Air Group, felt the usual quips were missing; a hushed note of expectancy hung over the room. On the other hand, Commander Fox sensed a note of nervous gaiety. In any case, as supply officer, Fox knew for a fact that appetites were below par.

As McClusky sampled his scrambled, eggs, he was surprised to see Lieutenant Commander Gene Lindsey slide into the seat beside him. Skipper of Torpedo 6, Lindsey had cracked up coming in the other day. Fished out of the Pacific with a badly wrenched back, he was meant to be sidelined indefinitely. Now here he was, not only up but planning to fly in a spare torpedo plane. When one of his pilots asked how he felt, Lindsey obliquely replied, “This is the real thing today, the thing we have trained for, and I will take my squadron in.”

Breakfast over, the pilots drifted off to their ready rooms. There was one for each squadron on every carrier, and they looked more like classrooms than anything else—rows of seats with writing arm attached, a blackboard up front for the latest dope on position, wind, course, target and the all-important “Point Option” where the ship could be found again after a strike. There was also a teletype machine that clacked out bulletins which were projected on a screen.

At the moment there was little on the blackboard and the teletype, was silent—Nagumo’s force still hadn’t been found. On all three carriers the pilots hauled out their plotting boards from drawers under their seats, checked a few odds and ends, then sat back and waited. Cards and paperbacks appeared. Seats were adjustable, and a man like Ensign Whitey Moore of Torpedo 8 was soon leaning back, grabbing a little extra sleep—he could never get enough.

Commander Waldron slipped down to the Hornet’s wardroom for morning coffee with Commander Ed Creehan, the ship’s engineering officer. They were old Annapolis classmates, and this was a daily custom. Today Waldron was in an exalted mood—Torpedo 8 would at last have a crack at the enemy. He said he was going to “get a Jap carrier” or he wouldn’t be back.

The minutes crawled by. On the Yorktown Ensign Charles Lane of Bombing 3 decided to leave behind his Clemson ring and Hamilton watch in case he didn’t return. On the Enterprise Commander McClusky began assembling his flight gear in the little office he used outside the squadron ready rooms. At this point his regular rear-seat man stumbled in to report he had just broken his glasses. Of all times. McClusky put in a hurried call to Bombing 6 for a spare gunner who didn’t need glasses, and in a few moments a bright-looking lad named Chochalousek appeared. He had no combat experience, but he was just out of aerial gunnery school—welcome news on this particular day.

The U.S. force continued southwest—the Yorktown trailing about ten miles behind the Enterprise and Hornet. On the Yorktown’s bridge Admiral Fletcher still wondered where Nagumo could be. He had sent out his “just-in-case” search to the north, but there was no word from that direction. No word from the Midway planes either.

LIEUTENANT Ady was an hour out of Midway now, and still no sign of the Japanese. “Elected” to patrol the all-important 315° segment, so far he was having a milk run. The big PBY droned on, the long rays of the rising sun lighting the broken clouds ahead.

Then around 5:10 a small seaplane came whistling along from out of the west. It was on an opposite course and didn’t swerve an inch—just hurried on toward Midway about 120 miles away. Ady radioed the single word “aircraft,” then followed it up with a longer description.

To the crew in the PBY, it meant only one thing: the Japanese fleet must be close. On they flew through occasional squalls. By 5:30 the weather was clearing “upstairs,” but there were still some cloud banks near the water. As Ady approached one of these, two aircraft carriers burst through from the other side—just 20 miles away and steaming directly toward him. It was, he thought, like a curtain going up at the theater.

In the next patrol sector to the south, Lieutenant William Chase had also spent an uneventful first hour. His PBY was flying about 15 minutes behind Ady’s, but the sunrise, the clouds, even the coffee were much the same. Then around 5:40—probably just after Ady discovered his carriers—Chase found something too. There to the north was a huge formation of fighters and bombers flying toward Midway. Standard procedure called for a carefully encoded contact report, but this was no time for that. In plain English, he shot off a fast warning: “MANY PLANES HEADING MIDWAY, BEARING 320, DISTANCE 150.”

“THAT’S him!” Relief, excitement, elation, anticipation were all mingled together in Admiral Spruance’s first reaction, as news of the contact reached him on the flying bridge of the Enterprise. It was the same on the Yorktown, where Admiral Fletcher thankfully realized the long wait was over.

So the Japanese carriers were found … but where? The first brief contact reports were agonizingly sketchy. Task Forces 16 and 17 were both tuned to the PBY frequencies, so there was no delay, but there was certainly confusion. For one thing, the fact was quickly lost that two different PBYs were reporting two different sightings; messages were mixed together. making for inconsistencies. More important, there was nothing yet on enemy course and speed—absolutely vital for launching an attack.

LIEUTENANT Ady was doing his best. After that electrifying discovery of the carriers, he veered to the left, circling slowly around the Japanese fleet. He used the clouds as much as he could, sending back bits of information as fast as he gathered it: “5:34, enemy carriers” … “5:40, ED 180, sight 320°” … “5:52, two carriers and main body of ships, carriers in front, course 135, speed 25.”

That was enough. Somehow the full picture didn’t reach the Yorktown’s bridge until 6:03, But once in hand Admiral Fletcher lost no time. At 6:07 he signaled Spruance, “Proceed southwesterly and attack enemy carriers when definitely located. Will follow as soon as search planes recovered.”

Task. Force 16 plunged forward at 25 knots. On all ships general quarters began sounding—at 6:15, the harsh staccato of the buzzer on the Enterprise; at 6:26, the urgent clang of the Hornet’s gong. It varied from ship to ship but the effect was always the same: the scrambling, the pounding of feet, and always in the background the insistent clamor of the alarm itself.

ON SAND ISLAND the powerhouse whistle blasted away; the siren on Eastern added its wail. Private Love, just lining up for chow, dropped all thoughts of breakfast and raced for his antiaircraft battery. Lieutenant Donald Cooksey, 6th Battalion dental officer, rushed to his first-aid post, well aware of Colonel Shannon’s sharp reminder, “A dead or wounded doctor is no damn good to me.” In his Eastern Island dugout Captain W. M. Bell, platoon leader of I Battery, recalled an old Marine dictum that it was an officer’s duty to look calm and well-groomed at all times. He carefully shaved, dressed, and sipped a glass of pineapple juice before going to his platoon.

Confusion was everywhere along the Eastern Island runway. When the first contact reports came in around 5:30, the Marine CP ordered all planes to start engines. Enemy bombers were said to be only 100 miles away. But when minutes went by and nothing appeared on radar, new orders went out: cut engines. Then at 5:53 Navy radar broke in: “MANY BOGEY AIRCRAFT BEARING 310°, DISTANCE 93.”This was it all right, and as the siren went off at 5:55 new orders went out to get going. But by now some of the pilots had cut engines; others were still warming up and couldn’t hear the alarm. The CP truck raced along the runway, its own siren shrieking, Captain Bob Burns shouting to everyone to stand by for take-off.

At least the B-17s were no problem. They had gone out as usual at dawn, but instead of merely using up gas, this morning they had been ordered to attack the Japanese transports again. Now the new threat changed everything. Captain Simard radioed Colonel Sweeney to divert his bombers to the carriers sweeping down from the northwest. At the same time, orders went out to the PBYs on patrol: stay clear of Midway; after completing mission, go to French Frigate Shoals, or one of the outlying reefs.

But there were still 66 planes at Midway; none must be caught on the ground. At 6:00 the 26 fighters began taking off. One of them soon returned with engine trouble, but the other 25 climbed toward the northwest. Major Parks led the way with two divisions; Captain Kirk Armistead followed with the rest, heading out on a slightly different bearing as a hedge against radar error. About 30 miles out they were all ordered to orbit. They would not have long to wait: at 6:04 Navy radar put the “bogeys” only 74 miles away.

Next it was the six TBFs’s turn to take off. Captain Burns raced up in his jeep and spoke to Lieutenant Fieberling. The skipper sent a mechanic running to each plane; he scrambled on the wing and yelled above the roar of the motors, “320°, 150 miles out!” One by one the TBFs thundered down the runway, rising gracefully despite the torpedoes. It was 6:10, and radar had the Japanese 47 miles out.

Now the four B-26s. Major Jo K. Warner, the Army liaison man, drove up and gave Captain Collins the dope. But as the crews scrambled into their planes, Lieutenant Jim Muri still wasn’t sure what this was all about. He only knew he had a torpedo, a position, and there was some “target” out there. Rolling down the runway, he hoped it would be a nice fat, easy merchantman.

Only the Marine bombers were left. Major Benjamin Norris went first, taking out his 12 decrepit Vindicators. One immediately returned when a cowling blew off. The squadron’s skipper Major Henderson brought up the rear, leading the relatively new SBDs. By now there was no field organization left—no radio, no briefing officer, no directions. Just a wild scramble to get into the air. But Joe Henderson somehow knew what to do, and his young pilots were more than willing to follow. At the last minute two of the SBDs broke down, but the other 16 took off. Colonel Kimes fixed the time at 6:15; some put it a few minutes later. In any case it was none too soon—at 6:16 the radar had the Japanese at 29 miles.

With the last planes gone, an overwhelming silence hung over Eastern Island. Men crouched quietly in the gun pits, the slit trenches, the observation posts—all eyes fixed on the empty blue sky to the northwest. It was almost hypnotizing, and at E Battery Captain James O’Halloran sharply reminded his lookouts that there were other sectors too—that the Japanese had been known to pull some surprises.

In the shelters and dugouts hundreds of other men quietly waited, hidden by sand and camouflage. As WO Bill Lucius hurried toward his slit trench near the mess hall, Major William Benson called out from the command post dugout: “Bill, I have the best dugout on the island, as well as the best communications equipment. Why don’t you stay with me?”

“I was so scared at Pearl Harbor,” Lucius replied, “that I hardly saw the Japanese planes: I don’t want to miss them now.”

From the piers and moorings a small flotilla of boats slipped into the lagoon between Eastern and Sand. Lieutenant Clinton McKellar neatly dispersed his 11 PTs. Boatswain Olivier carefully positioned his collection of launches, all loaded with machine guns and rifles. Chief Boatswain’s Mate Stanley Engels took his tug Tamaha and tied up to an old sunken scow that looked like the last thing the Japanese would want to bomb.

In the dugout hospital on Sand Island Pharmacist’s Mate E. B. Miller began boiling coffee on a hot plate. It was far too strong to drink; he was making it for a “Murphy drip,” an old-fashioned remedy used rectally in treating shock.

At the command post Captain Simard couldn’t resist temptation. He should be in the dugout by now, but he hung back —fascinated like so many others—straining his eyes to the northwest. Logan Ramsey kept urging him to get under cover.

On the upper decks of the powerhouse Simard’s “movie-ite” John Ford was searching the northwest too. He was now equipped with cameras, film, binoculars and a phone direct to the CP. His vantage point was perfect, but so far there was nothing to see. In fact Midway looked deserted—nothing moving—just a lazy, peaceful tropical island.

Outside Colonel Shannon’s command post the Marine guard, Pfc Ed D. Winslow, stood watch by the doorway. It was a distracting assignment this morning. The radar station was hard by, and as the Japanese drew closer, someone kept calling out the miles. Inside, the radar operators watched closely as two sets of blips—one enemy, one friendly—swept together just beyond the horizon.

CHAPTER 5

“Hawks at Angels 12”

LIEUTENANT HASHIMOTO KNEW THEY were getting close from an outlying reef he sighted below. Riding as observer in Lieutenant Tomonaga’s lead plane, he pointed it out to the attack commander.

The trip in had been uneventful; one Hiryu bomber turned back with engine trouble, but something like that always happened. The other 107 planes carried on, the bombers in two separate V-of-Vs, the fighters flying cover above them. At 6:16 CPO Juzo Mori, leading his three-bomber division from the Soryu, sighted a dark blot on the glittering horizon —Midway.

Next instant two of the Hiryu’s bombers, flying just ahead of his own, suddenly burst into flames. Mori, Hashimoto—everybody—looked up just in time to see several American fighters swooping down on them, guns blazing.

“TALLYHO! Hawks at angels 12 … supported by fighters.” Captain John Carey was the first to spot them, and in the verbal shorthand of the Marine fliers, his words told the others that he had spotted the Japanese coming in at 12,000 feet. All 25 fighters converged on the scene.

Carey didn’t wait. Leading his three-plane division of F4Fs, he made a wide turn and dove at 90° on the enemy formation. His guns hammered away at a Japanese section leader; it fell out of line burning. Captain Marion Carl and Lieutenant Clayton Canfield followed Carey down; Canfield set his sights on the third plane in the third section; it exploded in flames.

Major Parks piled into the melee with the rest of his group. Most of the Marines got in one good pass; then as they climbed for a second run, the Zeros tore into them. Bullets ripped Captain Carey’s cockpit, smashing both his legs; a 20 mm. cannon shell tore Canfield’s wing flaps to shreds. Parks himself went reeling into the sea.

Captain Armistead, arriving with his division a few minutes later, fared little better. After one pass at the bombers, he saw three fighters climbing toward him, steep and fast. For a second he thought they were Marines, but no such luck. Cannon and machine-gun shells blasted him out of the fight.

Seeing a Zero on his tail, Lieutenant Darrell Irwin tried to escape by diving. He plunged down from 16,500 feet at 300 miles an hour … pulled out at 3,500—the Zero was still there. Down again, this time out at 500 feet—the Zero was still there. He finally crash-landed what was left of the plane—with the Zero still there.

Captain Herbert Merrill caught it from above and behind. At 8,000 feet he lost partial control. Then two more hits, and the gas tank blew up in his face. He bailed out, but his worries weren’t over. He had heard the Japanese often strafed parachutists; so he didn’t pull the ripcord for another 3,000 feet. Finally he hit the water a couple of miles offshore, got rid of his chute and inflated his Mae West. Midway looked a long way off—how could he swim that far? Then he thought of home and his new baby twins, and began to try.

Occasionally a trick worked. When Marion Carl couldn’t shake off a Zero, he suddenly cut the throttle, threw his plane into a skid, and the Jap raced by. Captain William Humberd couldn’t shake his Zero either, finally turned and gave it a burst head on. The Zero staggered and fell into the sea.

Usually the Japanese were much too clever—and sometimes had a trick of their own. When Lieutenant William Brooks saw two planes dogfighting at one point, he went over to help the American. Both planes turned on him—he had been fooled by a sham battle between two enemy pilots. Brooks finally escaped with 72 bullet holes in his plane.

But it wasn’t deception, skill or even numbers that made the big difference. As the Marine fighters fluttered down to the sea, or staggered back toward Midway, it was clear that the greatest Japanese advantage lay in the Zero itself. The Marine pilots were astonished. Like most Americans, they had been taught to think of the Japanese as an imitative people who couldn’t do much on their own. Now here was a fighter that could outclimb, outrun, outmaneuver any plane the U.S. had. If it was also highly vulnerable, they rarely had a good enough shot at it to find out. Even the F4Fs were completely outclassed, and the ancient Buffaloes —as Lieutenant Charles Hughes sadly remarked— “looked like they were tied to a string while the Zeros made passes at them.”

For their part, Nagumo’s pilots also got a surprise. They too had some fixed ideas about their enemy. Like most Japanese, they believed Americans had little heart for fighting and would quickly fold once the going got rough. Yet here the Marines were, hurling themselves into battle with a spirit worthy of the samurais. They also showed better tactics than expected; Hashimoto, for one, was amazed how they dived from overhead so unexpectedly.

Anyhow, Lieutenant Suganami’s Zeros now had everything under control, and the attacking force continued on. Under “Organization No. 5” they would strike in three waves: first a dose of level bombing by the Hiryu’s and Soryu’s units; next the Akagi’s and Kaga’s dive bombers would come; finally the fighters from all four carriers would strafe anything left. The Hiryu and Kaga would concentrate on Sand Island; the Soryu and Akagi on Eastern. Still in two V-of-Vs—with the fighters re-forming above—the whole force curled around the atoll and began its final run from the north.

To PFC Philip Clark at D Battery, they looked like three wisps of clouds far out on the horizon. To Pharmacist’s Mate Miller, up from his dugout for a look, they seemed more stretched out in a single line. But there was no doubt they were coming on fast. At 6:29 the radar fixed them at eight miles … 6:30, Battalion said fire when within range … 6:31, all guns opened up.

A dozen black puffs erupted 200-300 yards behind the advancing planes. At D Battery Sergeant Evitts, who knew more about fire control than all the brass, cranked in an arbitrary adjustment. A single string of bursts left the main group and “walked through” the formation, setting one plane on fire. Then another blazed up, but kept flying in flames, for an interminable period. As it fell a great cheer went up; even the men deep in the Navy command post could hear it. At the entrance Captain Simard watched transfixed, while Logan Ramsey urged him again and again to get under cover: “Skipper, this is no place for you to be.”

At 6:34 the planes were directly overhead. On Sand Island Sergeant Jay Koch studied them through the F Battery telescope as the bomb bay doors opened and the first bombs dropped out. He felt a moment of terror as he wondered where they were going to hit.

High in the powerhouse John Ford didn’t see them unload, but assuming the seaplane hangar would be one of the first Japanese targets, he already had his camera trained on it. He was right. A stick of bombs hit home, spewing fragments in all directions. Ford not only filmed the scene, but perhaps too smart for his own good, he caught a load of shrapnel in his shoulder. Stunned for a moment, he was soon back on the job, shooting pictures and phoning his blow-by-blow account to Captain Simard’s command post.

Another stick of bombs crashed down on D Battery. Captain Jean Buckner didn’t see them coming … never knew what extra sense made him yell over the command phone, “Take cover.” But he did, and his men ducked just in time —except Corporal Osa Currie, hanging on at the exposed height finder. He fell fatally wounded.

Yet war is a matter of wild contrasts. The same moment on Eastern Island found Warrant Officer Lucius dodging a barrage of knives, forks, cigars and cigarettes, as the first bombs there smashed the PX and mess hall. And even before the dust settled, one old-timer ran out from his shelter and gathered in all the cans of beer he could carry.

Now it was 6:40, and the dive bombers’ turn. To Carpenter’s Mate William Schleis, battling a fire on the roof of the seaplane hangar, it looked as though every plane was diving directly for him. Huddling against a heavy beam, he put his hands over his face, but peeked through his fingers and saw how it came out. The bombs just missed.

No such luck at the powerhouse on Eastern. It was a small building, heavily bunkered, but that didn’t help. A perfectly aimed bomb landed squarely on the roof, wiping out the inside completely.

Major Benson’s command post got it next. Seeing it go, Warrant Officer Lucius thought of the Major’s invitation to spend the attack there, where it was “safe.” Now Lucius was untouched in his slit trench, and Benson’s CP was lost in dust and smoke. He rushed over to help, but it was too late—his friend was already dead in the rubble.

In a way it was hardest on the men underground. They could only listen and wonder. In the first-aid dugout on Sand Island, Pharmacist’s Mate Miller tried to concentrate on his Murphy drip, while the light bulb blinked and swayed. Smelling the coffee, Lieutenant Commander A. E. Ady, the doctor in charge, cheerily announced he would like some. It wasn’t fit to drink, but this seemed a brave attempt to keep up morale; so Miller poured them each a cup. They stood up and solemnly toasted each other. Then hanging onto a stanchion as the dugout rocked with explosions, they tried to drink it down. Still going strong, Dr. Ady launched into a series of jokes. Miller—now as sick as he was nervous—vaguely heard him ramble on, “Well, that reminds me of the old fat woman in Arkansas… .”

Outside it was the Zeros’ turn. In they swept—strafing the oil tanks, the gun pits, anything that moved. One fighter came so close to D Battery that Captain Buckner yearned for a full-choke shotgun. Another skimmed by F Battery as Sergeant Carl Fadick ducked low … but not low enough. A bullet smacked into the back of his helmet—then miraculously came out the front without even scratching him.

A man could “be unlucky too. When a Zero swooped down on PT 23 out in the lagoon, a bullet entered the bell of the boat’s bull horn, made a 370° turn, and hit a machine gunner in the back while he was shooting at the plane.

In Colonel Shannon’s command post a phone began ringing. It was some quartermaster who noticed that in the confusion no one had yet raised the American flag—shouldn’t it be up? It was a morning of a million problems, but here was one where the answer was easy. “Yes,” said Captain McGlashan, “run her up!”

Pfc Billecheck, a handful of others raced out to the pole … snapped on the flag … and heedless of the Zeros streaking by, raised the colors for all to see.

The men fought back with everything they had. Not just the regular antiaircraft guns, but small arms too. Anything. “Deacon’“ Arnold used a Browning automatic rifle. A sailor at the Sand Island Fire Station had a Colt .45. At E Battery on Eastern, Pfc Roger Eaton popped away with his 1903 Springfield.

Of course, they usually missed … but not always. A Zero staggered over the southwest tip of Sand Island, fell in a blazing heap 50 yards from H Company. A dive bomber caught another blast, careened wildly down—almost taking out the water tower—and crashed by the entrance to Captain Simard’s command post.

But there was little anyone could do about the Zeros shooting at the few Marine fighters left. They were usually too far away. The men at E Battery watched helplessly as one Buffalo, returning with a badly sputtering engine, went after a circling strafer. The Marine, coming in quite low, tried to climb up under the Japanese. The Zero simply stood on its tail and executed a beautiful loop. A few short bursts, and the Buffalo fell in the ocean.

Two Zeros went after another Marine fighter off the northern edge of Eastern Island. The Buffalo began burning, and the pilot bailed out. The Zeros followed him all the way down, blazing away as he dangled in his chute … then strafing the sea where he landed.

Somehow a few of the Marine fighters limped home. Shot in both legs. Captain Carey “proved the hard way that you could fly an F4F with just the stick and no rudder.” Lieutenant Canfield’s flaps were gone, and when he touched ground his landing gear collapsed. Sliding to a stop, he dived into a trench while a Zero slashed away at the abandoned plane.

A crippled Buffalo came in low, a Zero in hot pursuit. With a last effort the Marine climbed a few feet, forcing the Japanese even lower. Every gun on Eastern Island seemed to open up. The Zero wavered, then slammed down burning on the runway. As it skidded along, Pfc Clester Scotten had a fleeting, indelible glimpse of the pilot throwing his arms over his face. Then he was lost from sight in flames. But the one they remembered best of all was the really “hot” pilot who wasn’t content with bombing and strafing, Sweeping in alone, he turned bottoms-up and stunt-flew the runway upside down. He nearly got away with it. For long seconds the Marines watched in amazement, too surprised even to fire. Then the spell broke, and guns opened up everywhere. The antiaircraft finally, got him, and he spun off into the lagoon.

LIEUTENANT Rokuro Kikuchi knew the end had come. The antiaircraft guns had found the range; now his horizontal bomber was bathed in fire and falling out of line. He pulled back the canopy and waved a last good-bye to his friends from the Hiryu.

The ground fire was far worse than expected. Not especially accurate—it rarely was—but the tremendous volume was enough to throw everyone off a little. Lieutenant Tomonaga’s lead bomber took a near-miss at the moment of release, jarring the plane and hurting its accuracy. More serious, another burst punctured the left-wing gas tank.

Looking down, Lieutenant Hashimoto was fascinated by the activity below—especially the little PT boats that scurried around like water bugs on the ponds back home. But above all he noticed one thing: there were no planes left at Midway. The Japanese had attacked “an empty target.” It reminded him of the way a snake sheds its skin; here the snake had crawled away, leaving only the cast-off skin behind.

Well, they must make the best of it. As planned, the Hiryu and Kaga units concentrated on Sand Island while the Soryu and Akagi took care of Eastern. If one could forget there were no planes, the results were not at all bad. Lieutenant Hashimoto’s own squadron got a good hit among the oil tanks on Sand, and Lieutenant Ogawa’s dive bombers really pasted the seaplane hangar. On Eastern, CPO Mori at first feared his bomb had missed—it seemed to land in some bushes—but a great explosion went up; so maybe he did some good after all.

By 6:48 they’d done all they could and were on their way to their rendezvous point. A few Zeros lingered, perhaps looking for some last easy kill, but by 7:01 they too were gone—disappearing, as they had come, into the northwest.

FOR PFC Morris McCoy at E Battery, the sudden silence was worse than the bombs and the gunfire. Major Warner, the Air Force man, had never known such an eerie quiet. No sound whatsoever, except the occasional wail of a tern, or the mournful honk of a gooney bird.

In the dugouts the men waited … and waited … then cautiously began to emerge, blinking in the bright morning sun. Almost the first thing Ensign Jacoby saw was the wreckage of the Japanese plane that crashed near the entrance of Captain Simard’s command post. The pilot’s body was lying nearby, a symbolic Rising Sun flag tied around his waist. It was the very first “enemy” Jacoby had ever seen, but with the foe right before him, his mood was empty of hate. It was just another man, whose teeth were pushed in the way his would have been, had the tables been somehow reversed.

The all-clear sounded at 7:15, and Midway began to pick up the pieces. On Eastern Island Colonel Kimes radioed his VMF-221 pilots: “Fighters land, refuel by divisions, 5th Division first.”

There was no answer. Kimes tried again. Still no answer. After trying several more times he began to understand, and new orders were sent: “All fighters land and reservice.”

One by one they straggled in—six altogether. Added to the four that crash-landed during the raid, it meant only ten had survived the fight … and only two of these were in shape to fly. VMF-221 was virtually wiped out: of the 25 planes that took on the Japanese, 23 were shot down or put out of action.

“It is my belief,” Captain Philip White observed in his action report, “that any commander that orders pilots out for combat in an F2A-3 [Brewster Buffalo] should consider the pilot as lost before leaving the ground.” Understandably bitter, yet a commander must fight with what his country gives him.

In any case, VMF-221 was gone. Nor was that all. The thick black smoke rolling skyward told the story on Sand Island’s fuel tanks, and the seaplane hangar was burning too. The Navy dispensary was a total loss; other buildings like the parachute loft were badly damaged. In the shell of the laundry, a five-gallon glass water cooler stood majestically intact amid the rubble and shredded shirts.

On Eastern the CP, the powerhouse, the mess hall and PX were all demolished, but what really hurt were the gas lines. True, they were always breaking down, but now some bomber had finished them for good—just when they were needed the most. Colonel Kimes shuddered to think of the bucket brigade he’d have to organize to refuel those thirsty B-17s.

Casualties were a happier story. Colonel Shannon’s reproduction of the western front had paid off well. Thanks to all his sandbags and dugouts, there were only 11 dead and 18 wounded among the islands’ defenders.

Best of all was the way they handled their planes. Only one was caught on the ground—an obsolete biplane used for utility work. The only other aircraft lost was a decoy plane made of packing crates and tin roofing. Dubbed the “JFU” (“Jap Fouler-Upper”), it played its role to perfection.

So they were still in business; But Midway’s biggest fear lay in what was yet to come. When would the Japanese be back? What would they bring next time? Were the battleships and transports just over the horizon, waiting to close in? Even the cheerful Dr. Ady, casting aside his jokes and bad coffee, grabbed a Springfield rifle and headed for the beach.

Two miles offshore a highly interested observer enjoyed the morning’s events—the antiaircraft puffs, the diving planes, the column of smoke rolling up. Commander Tanabe was still watching Midway from the Japanese submarine I-168. He was, of course, at the periscope, and from this vantage point he gave the crew a running account of the whole attack. They were overjoyed, and a great cheer rang out when he described the fuel tanks blowing up.

Leading the air strike, Lieutenant Tomonaga knew better. It didn’t matter that the damage was great; it didn’t matter that the losses were small. What did matter was Midway’s air strength… and that was still intact. Somehow the Americans had suspected something and cleared the field. Well, they couldn’t stay up forever. Soon they’d have to land and refuel… .

At 7:00, as the Japanese planes turned for home, Tomonaga radioed the First Carrier Striking Force: “THERE IS NEED FOR A SECOND ATTACK.”

CHAPTER 6

The Target Attacks

COMMANDER GENDA WASN’T SURPRISED by Tomonaga’s call for another attack. From an earlier message he rather suspected it might be necessary. And as Nagumo’s operations officer, he had no hesitation recommending the step.

The Striking Force had been at sea more than a week, and not a word of warning about any U.S. ships. The morning’s search planes had been out two hours, and they hadn’t found anything either. Even the Tone’s No. 4 plane—the late one—must be on its return leg by now. With no sign of the American fleet, it was folly to hoard the reserve air strength any longer. They should use it to finish off Midway.

Admiral Kusaka hesitated. Nagumo’s chief of staff was always prepared to carry out a second strike—if the U.S. Navy wasn’t around. So far everyone had assumed it wasn’t, but nobody really knew. Until now it hadn’t been crucial. If wrong, they could adjust—but no longer. These were the only reserves. He suddenly felt “a little like a hunter chasing two hares at once.” There was the United States fleet to catch … now there was this call for another go at Midway.

As he talked it over with Genda and Admiral Nagumo, the Striking Force raced on toward a point about 140 miles northwest of Midway. Here it expected to start recovering Tomonaga’s planes a little after 8:00 A.M. The force was steaming in regular battle disposition: the carriers formed a sort of square box—Akagi leading on the right, followed by Kaga; Hiryu leading on the left, followed by Soryu—with the screen of battleships, cruisers and destroyers deployed around in a large, loose circle.

The crew were all at battle stations … had been since 5:32 when the Nagara first sighted that PBY. They never managed to shoot it down—or another that joined it—and plenty of contact reports must have gone back to Midway. Now there was nothing to do but wait and watch. On the Akagi alone, 20 lookouts stood on top of the bridge scanning the sky.

At 7:05 everything seemed to happen at once: a destroyer up forward hoisted a flag signal; the Tone’s main battery opened fire; the Akagi’s bugler began sounding the air-raid alarm… .

ENSIGN Earnest understood that the six TBFs would rendezvous, link up with the Marine bombers and fighters, and all go out together—but it wasn’t that way at all. Once clear of Midway, the dashing Lieutenant Fieberling turned northwest and led his torpedo planes straight for the Japanese position.

About five minutes out there was a moment’s excitement when they met an enemy fighter inbound for Midway. The Japanese made a single pass and continued on. The TBFs didn’t even shoot back; they too had other business. Still, here was the enemy. Feeling they had been “blooded” and passed the test, Earnest and Ensign Charles Brannon, flying alongside, exchanged a salute, playfully spoofing the squadron’s clenched-fist insignia.

They hurried on. For nearly an hour nothing happened—just a quiet trip at 4,000 feet through occasional puffy clouds. Around 7:00 Earnest noted what looked like a nondescript steamer plodding along below. Then another … then no end of them. He never saw anything like it. They were literally spread all over the ocean. In the distance he could make out two carriers steaming side by side and behind them still more ships—too far away to tell what they were. He had little time to drink it all in. Even as he called out the contact, his turret gunner Jay Manning warned that enemy fighters were closing in. At the same moment Lieutenant Fieberling signaled, and they all headed full throttle toward the two carriers. It was a long way down to 150 feet, with the Zeros snapping at them all the way.

At the second enemy pass, Manning’s turret gun stopped firing. Working the tunnel gun, Radioman Harry Ferrier looked back over his shoulder. He was horrified to see Manning’s body slumped at his post. In all his 18 years, Ferrier had never seen death before, and here in a single shattering instant he was staring right at it. All at once, he felt very scared and old.

He turned back to his own gun, only to find it useless. By now the TBF’s hydraulic system was shot away, dropping the tail wheel and blocking his field of fire. Another burst raked the plane, and a bullet tore through the bill of the baseball cap he was wearing. It creased his scalp, and he fell back dazed.

In the cockpit Ensign Earnest was having his own troubles. First the radio went … next the compass … then the controls began to go. He glanced out the canopy—large holes appeared in the wing. A sliver of shrapnel caught his right jaw and there was blood everywhere.

At 200 feet he was still boring in, when another burst got the elevator wires. The stick went limp; nothing responded, and Earnest was sure this was the end. There was no hope left of getting the carrier—no hope of coming out alive—but he still had rudder control, and he would do something with that. He gave it a hard kick and swerved toward the only Japanese ship near him, a three-stack light cruiser. He let the torpedo go.

Now he was down to 30 feet and steeling himself for the crash. At this point some instinct made him put his hand on the wing tab—perhaps to adjust for hitting the water—In a flash he realized he could fly the plane this way, even if the stick was gone. As he later put it, “Suddenly it was a brand new ball game.”

He zipped up and away from the scene. The Zeros, having written him off, were gone. Looking back, Earnest couldn’t see what had happened to his torpedo or to the other TBFs. He was all alone. He had no compass, no radio, and was on the far side of the Japanese fleet. But he hadn’t come this far to give up now. He headed for the morning sun, as Ferrier—the old man at 18—crawled up through the wreckage and nestled down behind him.

CLOSE behind the TBFs—so close he could see them going in for their attack—Captain Collins led his four B-26s. They too had flown out on their own: no rendezvous, no plans to work with the TBFs, B-17s or the Marines. They simply got their target and here they were.

The first thing Lieutenant Muri saw was some smoke on the horizon … then many destroyers … and there went his hopes for an easy morning. Studying the situation, he plucked a Chesterfield from a can he kept at his feet and put it in his mouth.

He was still fumbling for a match when a horde of Zeros appeared from nowhere. Captain Collins held his course, heading for the carriers he could now see at the center of the Japanese formation. Trouble was, the carriers were too well protected on the near side. It was necessary to curl around to their starboard to get a good crack at them. And that meant hedge-hopping a whole line of escorting destroyers.

But it had to be done. Veering to the left, Collins led his group over the escort, through a curtain of antiaircraft fire. Then hard to the right again, and straight for the carriers. As they raced in at 200 feet, an unknown voice yelled out in one plane, “Boy, if mother could see me now!”

There was no formal attack plan—not even time for assignments—the four planes just made a mad rush at the leading carrier. Collins alternately climbed and dropped, throwing the Japanese aim off, and Muri did his best to follow. Now they were in the middle of the formation; as Muri’s co-pilot Lieutenant Pete Moore glanced quickly around, every ship seemed a solid sheet of gunfire. The Japanese gunners would shoot at the water to see where the bullets hit. Using the splashes as tracers they would “walk” their fire right into the B-26s.

But they came on anyhow. Collins finally released at 800 yards and zoomed away to the right. Muri came hard behind, with the Zeros flying right into their own fleet’s line of fire in a desperate effort to stop him. Bullets smashed the Plexiglas turret; a ricochet clipped Sergeant Gogoj’s forehead.

Muri shouted to Moore to release the torpedo. But the improvised switch was something that Rube Goldberg might have invented—a trigger, a cable, a plug with innumerable prongs. Moore frantically squeezed the trigger, twisted the plug, still couldn’t tell whether the torpedo was gone.

“Is it away?” Muri kept shouting.

“How the hell do I know?” Moore answered.

Keeping one hand on the controls, Muri fiddled with the plug and trigger too. They never felt the welcome surge of the plane rising, relieved of the torpedo. Later they learned that at some point they had indeed released it.

Right now, they could only hope, and there wasn’t much time to do that. They were almost on top of the carrier. Banking hard, Muri flew straight down the middle of the flight deck. His bombardier Lieutenant Russ Johnson grabbed the nose gun and strafed in all directions. They had a brief, vivid glimpse of white-clad sailors scattering for cover.

Pulling out, Muri caught a fleeting glimpse of Lieutenant Herbie Mayes’s plane boring in too. It came all the way, almost hit the carrier, careened into the sea alongside. None of the group ever saw what happened to the fourth B-26.

No time to look, either. The Zeros were diving at them again. They riddled the landing gear, the fuel tanks, the propeller blades, the radio, the entire top edge of one wing. They wounded Pfc Ashley in the tail turret and Corporal Mello at the side guns. With an extra surge of effort Mello crawled up to the cockpit, covered with blood, to report the plane was on fire and “everybody’s hit back there.” Lieutenant Moore scrambled back, put out the fires, gave sulfa to Ashley and manned a gun.

At one point Muri thought to himself that the plane was really gone, and he’d rather splash than be shot down in flames. He moved to ditch the ship, but as sometimes happens, an extra ounce of reserve spirit seemed to grasp him and hold back his hand.

Finally the fighters broke off. Heading for Midway, Muri realized he still hadn’t lit the cigarette he put in his mouth just when the Zeros struck. But it was almost too late now. In his excitement, he had bitten it in two and swallowed half of it.

Thinking back, it was ironic that the only moment he felt safe was when he was directly over the Japanese carrier. Flying down her flight deck, he was simply too close to be shot at. Even so, it was anything but comforting to see that large Japanese battle flag streaming from her mast. After all those newsreels, here it really was. Nothing ever looked bigger.

LIEUTENANT Ogawa couldn’t get over how big the white star looked on those B-26s. So much larger than he expected. Until these American torpedo planes appeared, he had spent an easy morning policing the skies above the Striking Force with two other Zeros in his unit. The PBYs were gone—at least temporarily—and they had little to do but orbit with similar units from the other three carriers.

Then unexpectedly Ogawa’s No. 2 man began firing his machine guns to attract attention. Ogawa looked and saw two separate flights of torpedo planes approaching through a hole in the clouds. The rest of the Combat Air Patrol saw them too, and Zeros began diving from all directions. Most piled into the leading flight of six TBFs; the rest, including Ogawa’s unit, headed for the other four American planes: the B-26s with the big white stars.

The carrier crews watched in excitement as the Zeros methodically picked off the TBFs. On the Akagi a storm of hand-clapping went up with every splash. It was almost like a theater audience watching a superbly skillful performance—which in a sense it was. None of the TBFs got close enough to make an effective drop, and five of the six were shot down well clear of the carriers.

With the B-26s it was another matter. The Zeros got on them, but they had more speed than anyone guessed, and they really knew how to use it. One of them fell, but the others kept coming … right at the Akagi, leading the right side of the box formation. But the Hiryu was in danger too, and on both ships men watched breathlessly as the torpedoes dropped. Happily they were very slow. The Hiryu, especially, dodged them easily—some sailors even picked one off with a machine gun.

The highly exposed Akagi had more trouble. At 7:11 Captain Aoki gave her a hard right rudder, heading into the approaching planes. As the first one dropped, he made a full turn to escape a torpedo to starboard, then another full turn to escape a second torpedo to port. All within two minutes.

More was to come. As the B-26s pulled out, heavy strafing ripped the Akagi’s deck, killed two men, knocked out the No. 3 AA gun, cut the transmitting antenna. And just when it looked as if the danger was over, the last B-26 didn’t pull out at all: instead it hurtled straight for the Akagi’s bridge. No one saw how it could miss. Admiral Kusaka felt sure they were done for. He instinctively ducked as the plane came right at him. But it didn’t hit: it cleared the bridge by inches, cartwheeling into the sea just off the port side. The whole bridge let out a yell of relief that meant the same in any language: “Wow!”

A shaken Kusaka found himself strangely moved. He thought only Japanese pilots did things like that. He had no idea who this steadfast American was, but there on the bridge of the Akagi he silently said a prayer for him.

To the practical eye of Lieutenant Ogawa, it was really not a very professional effort—any of it. There was no coordination between the TBFs and the B-26s … the torpedoes were dropped too far out … the planes all approached from one side. No wonder they didn’t hit anything.

Yet the attack accomplished more than Ogawa knew. It ended all doubts about a second strike on Midway. That was where these planes came from—Nagumo needed no more convincing. At 7:15 the Admiral ordered his second attack wave to rearm: the torpedo planes to shift over to bombs, the dive bombers to switch from armor-piercing to instant-contact missiles. This was relatively easy for the Hiryu and Soryu—they were supplying the dive bombers this time—but on the Akagi and Kaga it meant a back-breaking job. The air crews rushed forward, lowered the torpedo planes to the hangar deck and began making the switch. It was a frantic scene: they hoped to get the second wave rearmed and into the air before Tomonaga got back.

They were hard at it when a startling message arrived from the Tone’s No. 4 plane, now on the dog-leg of its 300-mile search to the east. At 7:28 it reported: “Sight what appears to be 10 enemy surface ships in position bearing 10 degrees distance, 240 miles from Midway. Course 150 degrees, speed over 20 knots.”

Surface ships. So they were out there after all … and well within striking range. If Chuichi Nagumo had been more of a philosopher and less of an admiral, he might have pondered the fate that put the Tone’s plane a half-hour behind schedule. If there had been no catapult trouble—if only it had been on time—he would have known about this American fleet before Tomonaga asked for another strike at Midway. Then there would have been no doubt about his course: go for the ships right away. But as matters stood, it was no longer that easy. His torpedo planes were now belowdecks, being reloaded with bombs.

The Admiral shuffled his plans as best he could. He suspended the second strike on Midway, and at 7:45 signaled new orders to the Striking Force: “Prepare to carry out attacks on enemy fleet units. Leave torpedoes on those attack planes which have not as yet changed to bombs.”

Next step would depend on what the Americans had out there. The Tone’s pilot was exasperatingly vague. “Ten surface ships” certainly didn’t say much. Were there any carriers? If so, they must be hit right away. If not, maybe this enemy force could wait. Over half the torpedo planes were already switched to bombs: if the Americans had only cruisers and destroyers, Admiral Kusaka felt it might be better to go through with the second strike on Midway, then go after the ships. But to decide, they must know what they were up against. At 7:47 Nagumo brusquely radioed the search plane: “ASCERTAIN SHIP TYPES AND MAINTAIN CONTACT.”

Despite their quandary, there was no reason to panic. They had plenty of strength; all they really needed was a little time. Time to switch back to torpedoes and armor-piercing bombs, if there were carriers around. Time to finish changing to land bombs, if they were going to hit Midway again. Time to regroup the ships scattered by the enemy torpedo attacks. Time to replenish and tighten up the air patrol. Time to recover Tomonaga’s planes. And, above all, time to think and plan intelligently, without too many twists and unexpected pressures.

Nagumo was still waiting for more details from the Tone’s plane when, at 7:50, the Soryu’s air cover unit suddenly reported “about 15” single-engine dive bombers coming in from the southeast.

CORPORAL Eugene Card felt as though a bar of ice-coated lead were in his stomach. One consolation: in three hours it would all be over, one way or another. It was also good to have Captain Fleming flying the plane—a man so cool he took a nap during the on-again, off-again confusion at Midway just before VMSB-241 set out on its mission to bomb the Japanese carriers.

Now at last they were on their way, with Captain Fleming serving as navigator for the 16 SBDs led by Major Henderson. The other planes in the squadron—the 11 old Vindicators—would come separately under Major Norris. They were just too slow to operate with the rest.

Henderson’s group had enough problems already. Thirteen of the 16 pilots had never flown an SBD until a few days ago. Ten of them had been in the squadron only a week; they hardly knew each other and had little time to practice together. Like Card, most of the gunners were inexperienced. It was because of their greenness as a group that Major Henderson decided not to dive-bomb the Japanese, but to glide-bomb instead. It required less skill—but no less courage, for the planes would be exposed that much longer.

Heading for the enemy position, they kept in tight formation at 9,000 feet except for Henderson himself. He flew detached, herding them along like an industrious shepherd dog. Craning his neck, Card could see the rest of the planes, stepped down in a giant staircase. Feeling a surge of new confidence, he looked over at Lieutenant Al Tweedy’s plane and gave Tweedy’s gunner, Sergeant Elza Raymond, the old four-oh sign. Raymond grinned and waved back.

Around 7:50 Lieutenant Daniel Iverson swung by and pointed down to the left. Card looked but couldn’t see anything. Fleming broke in on the intercom: “We’ve made contact. There’s a ship at ten o’clock.” Card looked again and sure enough, beneath a large hole in the clouds he saw a long, slender, black ship. It was heading for Midway and making knots.

The SBDs continued on, the clouds rapidly breaking up. Through the holes he could see more and more of these slim black ships, all heading in the same direction. Then a sight he would never forget. Through a large clear space he saw four carriers almost side by side, and near them a battleship with a pagoda-like superstructure. He watched utterly fascinated as the carriers turned in unison and began launching planes.

At 7:55 Henderson’s voice came calmly over the radio: “Attack two enemy CV on port bow… .” The SBDs began circling down.

“Here they come!” Captain Fleming yelled over the intercom. Card caught a glimpse of two streaks of smoke flying past the starboard wing; then a fighter flashed by, climbing almost straight up. Lieutenant Harold Schlendering, flying nearby, had a longer look and wondered at the odd white smoke rings made by the Zeros’ guns. As the first shell fragments slapped into Lieutenant Tom Moore’s plane, Moore thought to himself, “Here comes a hunk of the Sixth Avenue el.”

Major Henderson’s left wing began to burn. He fought it all the way, but he was soon out of control, plunging toward the sea. Off to the right, Corporal Card saw fragments from some other plane tumbling over and floating back like leaves in a breeze. A parachute blossomed out, but there was no time to see who it was.

Captain Elmer Glidden took over the lead, heading for a bank of clouds that might give greater protection during the descent. The Zeros hounded them all the way, while the Marine gunners did their best to fight back. Corporal McFeeley, flying with Captain Blain, grew so excited he fired through the tail of his own plane. Private Charles Huber found his gun hopelessly jammed, but Lieutenant Moore told him to aim it at them anyhow. Huber did, and put on such a pantomime of resolution that the Zeros kept a respectful distance.

Lieutenant Doug Rollow’s rear-seat man Reed Ramsey tried a different sort of guile. He knew that the Japanese liked to capitalize on the Marines’ careless habit of throwing empty ammunition cans overboard. Whenever a Zero saw this, it would quickly close in, since it took about 30 seconds for the Marine to reload. Ramsey decided that two could play this game. With his gun fully loaded, he threw out a beer can. As usual a Zero rushed over—and Ramsey got a hit at point-blank range.

Soon they had other troubles. Corporal Card heard something go “Wuf!” (It sounded, he later stressed, just the way a person would say “Wuf” in a normal voice.) Then he heard it again, and again. Big, black, soft-looking balls of smoke, began to appear. It meant that they were now within antiaircraft range too.

A moment’s relief when they hit the cloud bank—then worse than ever when they broke out on the other side. At 2,000 feet they nosed down and began their final run. Now there was nothing between them and the enemy, twisting and turning below.

Face to face with the Japanese carriers at last, every man had his own most vivid impression. For Lieutenant Moore it was the brilliant Rising Sun insignia on the flight deck. For Lieutenant Rollow it was the scattering crewmen. For Lieutenant Iverson it was the solid ring of fire that encircled the flight deck as every gun blazed away.

Captain Fleming cut loose with a blast of his own, saw a whole gun crew topple over. Facing aft from his rear-seat position, Corporal Card could see very little, but he could hear more than enough. To the “wufs” of the antiaircraft there was now added the steady crackle of small-arms fire. The SBD lurched— “Somebody threw a bucket of bolts in the prop.” Small holes appeared all over the cockpit and a thousand needles pricked his right ankle. Swooping in, the Marines made their drops—Rollow at 400 feet … Schlendering at 500 feet … Fleming at 300 feet. There were ten of them left altogether. Columns of smoke and water billowed up, nearly hiding the carriers from view. It was a conservative pilot indeed who didn’t think he got at least a near-miss.

Then away, skimming the waves to make it harder for the Zeros and the ships’ guns. Nosing down to a few feet above the sea, Lieutenant Rollow suddenly faced huge towers of water shooting up in front of him. He was heading directly for the main battery of a Japanese battleship. He yanked the stick back and the SBD popped to 2,000 feet. As he tried to get his controls set again, a Zero came by. That should have been the end, but nothing happened. Apparently out of ammunition, the Japanese pilot merely gave him a casual wave.

Captain Fleming was running into still more trouble. Pulling out from his drop, another “bucket of nails” hit the prop. Something hard kicked Corporal Card’s left leg to one side, and more holes appeared all over the cockpit. Then as the plane leveled off, Card caught his only good look at the carrier—a “writhing monster” bristling with fast-firing guns, all pointing straight up, a steady jet of flame pouring from each.

The ice in his stomach had melted; hot anger was boiling up. The plane was hit; he was hit; he couldn’t see how they’d ever get out of this alive; the only hope was they’d take a few Japanese with them.

COMMANDER Fuchida couldn’t understand why those American planes came in that way. They were too low for dive bombing, too high for torpedoes. Those long shallow dives gave the Zeros a field day.

But certainly they never wavered. Concentrating on the Hiryu off to port, one after another they swooped in and dropped. Teiichi Makishima, a civilian newsreel photographer on the Akagi, watched with dismay as the Hiryu disappeared in a dense cloud of black smoke. It took forever, but finally she emerged. She was still at full speed, her white bow wave glittering in the sun. The men watching from the Akagi let out a shout of relief.

On the Hiryu it had been a frantic minute as Captain Tomeo Kaku tried to outguess the swooping planes. At 8:08 the ship was completely bracketed by four bombs. At 8:12 another near-miss landed just off to port. Down in the engine room Ensign Hisao Mandai shuddered as the ship took a terrific jolt. Topside they got a dose of strafing too—four men killed, several more wounded.

As Commander Amagai watched from the Kaga, his own ship’s lookout suddenly shouted, “Enemy planes, quarter!” The warning came none too soon. A final three U.S. bombers—either a separate division or planes somehow diverted from the main target—glided in from the port quarter, dropping three bombs just off the stern of the ship.

Then it was over. The Striking Force had done it again: a third American attack smashed with hardly a scratch to themselves. Satisfying, but at the moment Admiral Nagumo had other matters on his mind. He still needed to know what sort of ships the Tone’s No. 4 plane had seen. All during the American glide-bombing attack, he waited for some sort of answer. At 7:58 the search plane finally came on the air again, but it still didn’t identify the enemy ships. It merely reported that they had changed course from 150° to 180°.

The whole staff fumed. What could they do with that, unless they knew what they were up against? At 8:00 an exasperated Nagumo needled the pilot again: “Advise ship types.” At 8:09 he finally got an answer. A new message from the Tone’s plane reported: “Enemy is composed of five cruisers and five destroyers.”

So there were no carriers. Relief swept the flag bridge. The intelligence officer Commander Ono said he knew it all the time. Admiral Kusaka felt it would now be safe to get on with the second strike at Midway.

But this brought up a new complication. The three American attacks did no damage, but they certainly disrupted the fleet. The neat box formation was gone; the carriers were spread all over the place. To cover them adequately, many more fighters were needed. As Lieutenant Shindo, commanding the Combat Air Patrol, used up his reserves, he began drawing on the fighters assigned to the second attack wave. Now there were none left to support any strike it made.

Of course it could be remedied. All they needed was a little time to regroup the fleet—reassemble that compact box formation—then a little more time to refuel the fighters that would be freed from the air umbrella. The staff was still discussing it when at 8:14 the Tone’s port guns opened up—signaling a brand-new danger from the sky… .

“WE SHOULD be sighting them now,” said Lieutenant Bill Adams, the lumber salesman turned navigator, as Lieutenant Colonel Walter Sweeney led his 15 B-17s toward Nagumo’s position. It was 7:32, and more than an hour had passed since they were diverted from another blow at the transports to hitting the carriers instead.

Adams couldn’t have timed it better. Next moment Colonel Sweeney pointed through the broken clouds, and there in the distance were the white waves of many ships. To Captain Don Kundinger, piloting one of the planes, it was an astonishing sight: “a panoramic view of the greatest array of surface vessels any of us had ever seen—they seemed to stretch endlessly from horizon to horizon.”

But which were the carriers? Leading the group in, Sweeney looked hard … saw nothing. It was all so difficult. None of these Army fliers had any experience in ship identification. Broken clouds were everywhere, making it still harder to see. Ships would pop out, then disappear again before anyone could get a decent look.

Most important of all, there was this matter of height. After several close calls attacking the transports at 8,000 feet, Sweeney felt his men would be sitting ducks if they tried to do the same against carriers. So now they were coming in at 20,000 feet—quite a distance for an inexperienced eye to pick out anything.

But they could see the Japanese were busy. Enemy ships were turning in evasion maneuvers. Yet no antiaircraft fire was coming their way. It took some extra squinting, but finally the Army fliers understood. There, far below, Major Henderson’s glide bombers were going in.

The B-17s continued searching. Then suddenly Captain Cecil Faulkner spotted something. Beneath a thin wisp of clouds steamed a ship—not an ordinary ship, but one with an oblong shape, a flat yellow deck, a Rising Sun insignia painted in the middle. Then he saw another like it … then two more. There was no doubt what they were.

No time to lose. Sweeney was far ahead, probing the northwest, so Faulkner signaled the other two bombers in his unit, and they left the formation to attack on their own. By now Captain Carl Wuertele had also found the carriers, and so had Captain Paul Payne in the Yankee Doodle. It was Payne who finally got the word to Sweeney, still searching to the northwest. The Colonel told him to start attacking and hurried to the scene with the rest of the planes.

Officially the strike began at 8:14, but it was a more ragged affair than that might suggest. The three-plane elements bombed pretty much on their own, and in several cases the planes attacked individually. But what they lacked in finesse they made up in enthusiasm. As the Hel-En-Wings unloaded its bombs, Captain Wuertele’s crew whooped in triumph.

The Japanese gunners replied immediately, and the very first round exploded just to the right of Sweeney’s plane, smashing the co-pilot’s window. To the co-pilot Lieutenant Wessman, it underlined the wisdom of such high-level bombing. “From then on,” he recalled, “all of us were sorry we stopped at 20,000 feet.”

Next some Zeros appeared. Three ganged up on Captain Faulkner, ripped his fuselage, disabled his No. 4 engine. Another dueled with Captain Payne but never really closed for a fight. The Zero pilots always respected the B-17, and today was no exception.

It all added up to a hot ten minutes, but no serious damage. The only casualty was Captain Faulkner’s tail gunner, who suffered a wounded index finger.

The Army fliers were jubilant. The price seemed small indeed. The carriers looked finished. Captain Faulkner thought his group got at least two hits; Captain Wuertele and Lieutenant Colonel Brooke Allen each claimed one. Colonel Sweeney’s own crew were no less optimistic: they felt sure all eight bombs were on target, and the carrier’s stern rose up most convincingly. A shrewd student of human nature, Sweeney cut back on all these claims in his official report, but he felt at least one of the carriers must have been hit.

CAPTAIN Aoki watched with dismay from the Akagi. There were so many columns of water around the Soryu he couldn’t see her at all. He thought she might well be sunk. The Hiryu was in trouble too, also lost in spray and smoke. Everyone was of course firing back, but the B-17s were too high to bring down. The Striking Force would just have to sweat it out.

None found it harder than the fliers returning from the Midway strike. They arrived back, by chance, just at this moment. Waved off their carriers, they orbited uselessly around, praying that the bombs would miss. For Lieutenant Tomonaga there was an extra problem: he was very low on gas, thanks to the hit that holed his wing tank at Midway.

By 8:20 the danger was over. The B-17s flew off; the Soryu and Hiryu emerged untouched; and the orbiting planes waited for the signal to start landing. On the Akagi Admiral Nagumo had good reason to feel satisfied. Four times the Americans had attacked; four times they were beaten off. For over an hour the Striking Force had taken everything the enemy could give—and every ship remained intact.

At this moment a new message arrived for Nagumo from the Tone’s No. 4 plane, still shadowing the U.S. task force: “The enemy is accompanied by what appears to be a carrier bringing up the rear.”

This was a stunning surprise. The last thing, anyone expected. Originally—when the Tone’s plane first reported the American force—Admiral Kusaka had half-suspected there might be a carrier out there. But that was 52 minutes ago. Surely if there was one, the pilot would have seen it almost right away—nobody could miss anything that big for long. Yet the fellow had sent several messages since then, and never a hint of a carrier. Now here he was saying there was one after all.

No more thoughts about a second attack on Midway. They must strike that carrier instead. The only question was when. Should they attack immediately? Or should they wait till they switched the second wave back to torpedoes and armor-piercing bombs? Or until they recovered Tomonaga’s planes? Or until they refueled the fighters that had been flying air cover? Or maybe some combination of these possibilities?

Nagumo’s staff had barely posed these questions when one more unexpected development occurred. Still another group of American planes—the fifth that morning—was sighted flying toward them.

IT ALL seemed remote and unreal to Lieutenant Ringblom, approaching at 13,000 feet with Major Norris’s group of 11 Marine Vindicators. Just out of flight school, fresh from the states, it was hard to believe that here he was, flying against a real enemy. He was too inexperienced to appreciate his predicament either, pitting this ancient plane against the First Carrier Striking Force.

But his education was beginning. At 8:17 he sighted the Japanese ships through the broken clouds, and almost immediately three Zeros turned up. They seemed to be toying with the Vindicators as they nonchalantly did vertical rolls right through the formation.

Getting down to business, one of them poured a few bursts into Lieutenant Daniel Cummings’s plane, last in the Marine group. Cummings heard his gunner stop firing and called to him, but there was no answer. Nor could one have been expected. Private Henry I. Starks of Springfield, Illinois, was really a mechanic, not a gunner. But during the great buildup Colonel Kimes had run out of gunners, and Starks had volunteered. When he climbed into Cummings’s plane that morning, he had never fired a machine gun in the air, and had only been in the plane three times. He had no chance to learn to be a good shot, or even protect himself, but he died, giving his best.

As more Zeros arrived, Major Norris led his men on a fast shallow dive toward some clouds. On the far side was a line of ships—no one could say what type. Sweeping down into the overcast, he radioed his order to attack and calmly instructed every one that the way home would be 140°; expect to get there around 9:00.

Bursting out of the clouds at 2,000 feet, Norris found a battleship and cruiser directly below. There was also a carrier on the horizon, but the Japs were throwing everything at him, and he figured he could never reach it. Picking the battleship instead, he peeled off into a much steeper dive. Everyone else followed.

Plunging down, Lieutenant Ringblom had a fleeting impression of orange gun flashes all over the ship. Tracers whipped by; balls of black smoke everywhere. To his astonishment, he saw identical round holes, about six inches in diameter, appear in each of his ailerons. Some enemy gunner had fused the shells for the wrong altitude, and they had passed right through without exploding.

One after another the Marines released at 500 feet, then skimmed away, hugging the water for protection. Pulling out, Lieutenant Sumner Whitten found himself between two lines of Japanese ships. All were firing hard, some aiming their main batteries at the sea to make a wall of water that might slap down low-flying planes. To his gunner, Sergeant Frank Zelnis, Whitten was staying around much too long—he seemed to be almost sight-seeing. Zelnis finally called out, “You dropped your bombs; let’s get the hell out of here before we get hit.”

Still sticking close to the water, the Marines headed for home. For 20 minutes Lieutenant Ringblom was never higher than 50 feet above the sea. A Zero trailed behind, making occasional passes, but Ringblom somehow escaped. Certainly it must have been luck, for he tried no tactics at all. He flew a straight steady line all the way. He was now much better educated in war, but still too scared and ignorant as a pilot to even look back.

CAPTAIN Tamotsu Takama handled the Haruna beautifully. The Americans pressed home their attack, yet the old battleship managed to dodge everything. Two near-misses were logged at 8:29, but the damage control officer Lieutenant Commander Yoshino reported they were nothing to worry about.

On the Akagi’s bridge, Admiral Kusaka once again felt a surge of relief. For the fifth time they had come safely through an American attack. And what a variety! Torpedo planes, B-26s. B-17s, those curious glide bombers. And as if these weren’t enough, a submarine was reported to be poking around too. It all made Kusaka think of Hiruko-Daikokuten, the legendary Japanese demon with three heads and six arms.

It was hard to concentrate on other matters, but a new message from the Tone’s No. 4 plane made it more imperative than ever to do something about that American carrier lurking to the east. At 8:30 the search pilot reported two more cruisers a little to the west of the ships sighted earlier, and trailing them by perhaps 20 miles. It suggested the possibility of an additional enemy task force. Yet most of the second wave were still equipped with land bombs; the torpedo planes were still belowdecks; Tomonaga’s force was still waiting to come in; the fighters were still low on fuel. What was best to do?

“Consider it advisable to launch attack force immediately,” signaled Rear Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi from the Hiryu shortly after 8:30. Yamaguchi was leading the Second Carrier Division (Hiryu and Soryu), and he found it incredible that Nagumo had done nothing yet. He knew what he would do: strike immediately with everything that would fly. Whether they carried the right kind of bombs, whether they had torpedoes or not, whether they had fighters or no fighters—nothing meant as much as getting in that first blow.

His reaction was predictable. Yamaguchi was one of those aggressive young leaders who embodied the new spirit of the Imperial Navy. Hand-picked from the start, he had been carefully brought along every inch of his career—including duty in Washington and graduate courses at an American university (in his case, Princeton). Now gossip had him someday succeeding the great Yamamoto as Chief of the Combined Fleet. Even so, in the strait-laced Japanese Navy it took a rare degree of independence—and exasperation—to indicate so openly his impatience with his chief.

He was willing to take that risk too. Flashed by the Hiryu’s blinker, his message was quickly picked up by the destroyer Nowaki … relayed to the Akagi … and delivered to the Chief of Staff Admiral Kusaka.

No, thought Kusaka, it would just be throwing away planes to follow Yamaguchi’s advice. Launching an attack immediately meant sending the bombers alone, for the fighters had all been used up protecting the carriers, and to send bombers without fighter support was really inviting disaster. Look what had happened to the unescorted American planes during the past hour and a half.

Instead of going off half-cocked, it would be far wiser, he felt, to delay a little and do the job right. First, recover both Tomonaga’s planes and the second-attack-wave fighters that had been diverted to combat air patrol … next, rearm and refuel them all. And while that was going on, they could also be switching the second wave back to torpedoes and armor-piercing bombs. With proper coordination, they could then launch everything at once for an all-out assault on the U.S. task force. This was his recommendation to Admiral Nagumo.

In the end, as always, Nagumo turned to Commander Genda. What did he think? Genda was most concerned about the planes just back from Midway, now orbiting above the carriers. They had been in the air four hours—all were nearly out of gas. They should be recovered before anything else was done—and that included launching this new attack.

If Tomonaga’s planes splashed with empty tanks, scores of top pilots would be lost, affecting not only Midway but the whole schedule of operations planned for the months ahead. On the other hand, it would delay matters only 30 minutes to recover this force. Then they could go ahead with the second attack, supported by such fighters as might be ready at that time. So he too was against Yamaguchi’s recommendation.

As usual when Genda spoke, there was no dissent.

“Here we go again,” laughed Commander Shogo Masuda, air officer on the Akagi, as orders came to clear the flight deck and rearm once more. On all four carriers the hangar deck crews, in T-shirts and shorts, swarmed over the planes, unloading the bombs they had just put on. Dollies rolled up with the torpedoes and armor-piercing bombs again, and the job began of shackling them back in place. There was no time for routine procedures—or even precautions. As the land bombs were taken off, nobody took them back to the magazines. They were simply rolled out of the way and left lying on the deck.

With the flight decks cleared, the four carriers turned into the wind. At 8:37 signal flags flew from every mast, telling Tomanaga’s planes to start coming in. On the Hiryu a bomber wobbled down to a one-wheeled landing, the pilot passing out as it rolled to a stop. Though shot in the leg by an American fighter, Lieutenant Hiroharu Kadano had somehow managed to keep formation, make his run and get back anyhow.

Another bomber circled the Kaga, its landing gear still up. The crew waved red flags, everything, at the pilot, but he seemed so slow to understand. Finally he did get the point, lowered his wheels and came on in. When the plane stopped, they found Air Petty Officer Tanaka half-conscious and shot in the head. Spirit alone must have carried him back.

And, of course, there were those who didn’t get back at all—11 altogether.

Climbing down from his bomber on the Soryu, CPO Juzo Mori joined the other pilots on the flight deck just below the bridge. They stood around swapping experiences, while the division commander Lieutenant Abe went up to report to Captain Yanagimoto.

Nobody had time to listen. All the officers were busy preparing to attack the American carrier. The Midway report could wait. On the Soryu the air officer simply told CWO Tatsuya Otawa that he’d better get something to eat right away … he’d be needed again soon enough. Even Lieutenant Tomonaga, commanding the whole attack, found it hard to make his report. Going to the Hiryu’s bridge with Lieutenant Hashimoto, he found both Captain Kaku and Admiral Yamaguchi absorbed in plans for the new strike. Shrugging off Nagumo’s blunt rejection of his advice, Yamaguchi was now trying to get the Hiryu’s and Soryu’s horizontal bombers (just back from Midway) reloaded with torpedoes. They could then serve as still another attack wave against the U.S. task force.

It was no time to listen to a battle report. He quickly drafted Tomonaga and Hashimoto into the new project, and they rushed off to set the wheels in motion. Hopefully they could have the planes rearmed, refueled and ready to go again by 11:00.

On the Akagi, Admiral Nagumo breathed more easily. The box formation was tightening up again, gradually releasing the extra fighters from air cover duty. They were now being refueled and resupplied with ammunition. The shift back to torpedoes was well under way. The Midway strike planes were coming in smoothly. The Chikuma was going to send out four search planes to replace the Tone’s No. 4 plane, and thus keep a firm eye on the enemy.

Meanwhile the Tone’s pilot was still on the job. At 8:55 he radioed, “Ten enemy torpedo planes heading toward you,” but this made little impression. Nagumo was too busy planning his own next step. At the same moment the Akagi’s blinker was flashing a confident message from the Admiral to the rest of the Striking Force; “After completing homing operations, proceed northward. We plan to contact and destroy the enemy task force.”

Nagumo also radioed his intentions to Admiral Yamamoto, coming on with the Main Force about 450 miles to the rear. Telescoping his exchanges with the Tone’s plane into one over-simplified paragraph, Nagumo reported: “Enemy composed of 1 carrier, 5 cruisers, and 5 destroyers sighted at 8 A.M. in position bearing 10 degrees; distance 240 miles from AF. We are heading for it.”

Everything was falling into place. Shortly after 9:00 the last of Tomonaga’s planes were recovered, and at 9:17 the Striking Force made a 70° change in course to the northeast. To save time the ships did not turn in formation, but swung left in their tracks—thus the “box” of carriers now found the Hiryu leading the Akagi on the right side, the Soryu leading the Kaga on the left.

Admiral Nagumo was nearly ready. All ships had reported; everything was set. The second wave would conform to Organization No. 4: 18 torpedo planes from the Akagi, 27 from the Kaga; 36 dive bombers from the Hiryu and Soryu; 12 fighters from all four ships—3 from each. He would have preferred a few more Zeros, but overall this promised the “grand scale air attack” he wanted. He would launch promptly at 10:30. Yamaguchi might fret, but it was so much better to take a little longer and do the job right.

Suddenly at 9:18 a destroyer near the Tone began laying a smoke screen. Then the Tone herself did the same. Plane-sighting signals fluttered from one ship after another. Engine room telegraph bells rang for maximum battle speed. Along the eastern horizon, about 20 miles away, the Chikuma’s lookout counted 16 torpedo planes. He was one off—there were 15—but his confusion was understandable: there wasn’t much time to count. These planes were coming straight in—without splitting or swerving—hurtling themselves directly at the First Carrier Striking Force.

CHAPTER 7

“Pilots, Man Your Planes!”

SWEEPING TOWARD THE Japanese ships, Ensign George Gay watched their sharp turns, the smoke pouring out, and decided they must already be under attack. It looked as if the 15 planes of Torpedo 8 were late.

They were far from late. Yet Gay’s fears were natural. It had been a morning full of tense waiting, false starts, and finally a late launching from the Hornet. Yet this too was understandable, for the top command was still groping for the right decisions on the skimpiest information.

Racing southwest at 6:30, Task Force 16 had nothing to go on except those first contact reports—growing colder every minute. Spruance’s staff could listen to the PBY traffic, but there was nothing in since 6:02. The other best source—Midway itself—they couldn’t pick up at all. The fleet and the base were on entirely different frequencies, so there was no direct way to get anything reported by Midway’s Army and Marine pilots. Everything had to be relayed by Pearl—a slow, hit-or-miss process. Nor could Task Force 16 ask any questions—radio silence limited the fleet’s efforts at self-help to eavesdropping.

But cold information is better than none, and assuming the Japanese would continue to close Midway as last reported, Spruance’s chief of staff, Captain Miles Browning, urged that the attack be launched at 7:00 A.M. Browning, inherited from Halsey, was a difficult man—almost impossible to get along with—but there was no doubt about his mind. He calculated that Nagumo would then be 155 miles away—just within effective striking range. That meant a long flight to the target—practically no safety margin—but it was all-important to attack at the earliest possible moment. The key to everything was surprise … to hit the Japanese before they discovered the U.S. force.

Spruance understood. Originally his own inclination was to launch at 9:00. Task Force 16 would then be about 100 miles away, and this would allow a certain margin of error for the planes to find the enemy, strike and get back home. But Browning was his man on this, and if the chief of staff said 7:00, he would follow that advice.

Still, it was a tough decision. The fighters had a combat range of only 175 miles, the torpedo planes not much more. There would be little leeway for maneuvering, even less for fooling around in case of navigational errors. Many of the planes were bound to splash—hopefully the destroyers could rescue the crews—it was a risk that had to be taken.

At the same time, Spruance took another risk, equally daring: he would hit the Japanese with everything he had. It was a temptation to hold something back, for the contact reports mentioned only two of the four enemy carriers meant to be present. Perhaps the others were lurking somewhere else. But CINCPAC’s intelligence said they were bunched together, and it was all-important to hit hard. Spruance decided to take his chances.

The Enterprise would attack with 33 dive bombers, 15 torpedo planes, 10 fighters; the Hornet with 35 dive bombers, 15 torpedo planes, 10 fighters—everything available. Only a handful of scouts and fighters were left to fly antisub and combat air patrols. That too was cutting it thin, but here again was a risk that had to be taken.

Meanwhile the pilots waited restlessly in various squadron ready rooms. Five hours had passed since that 1:30 breakfast, and nobody’s disposition was noticeably improved. Nor did it help to have two false alarms that sent everyone trooping up to the flight deck, only to be ordered back below.

But on one of these false alarms an odd thing happened. As the members of Scouting 6 stood up to go, they unaccountably shook hands all around. They were quite surprised at themselves, for studied casualness was an unwritten law. Maybe this time was different after all.

Things seemed more normal when the order was canceled, and they trooped back to the ready room, griping about the bridge. More waiting, more fidgeting… .

Then around 6:45 the teletype machines began clacking again. Once more the men got out their pencils as the “talkers” went to the blackboards and chalked up a new set of data: enemy position based on 6:02 contact report … heading … speed … Point Option where their own carrier could be found again. The pilots busily scribbled away, hunched over their plotting boards like schoolboys taking a final exam.

“Hope you’re ready,” a flier on the Hornet said to Gus Widhelm, one of Scouting 8’s jauntier characters. “I’m ready,” Widhelm replied, “I only hope the Japs are.”

On the Enterprise many of the fighter pilots added an extra twist to getting ready—they were lining up at the water cooler. The theory was to drink up now; if shot down, they could last that much longer before thirst became a problem.

“Pilots, man your planes,” for the third time this morning the traditional summons came over the loudspeakers. On the flight decks of both the Hornet and the Enterprise the starters whined, the motors sputtered and roared, the blue exhaust smoke washed back in the light morning breeze. The two carriers veered apart—the Hornet and its escorts falling out of line, the Enterprise group continuing on course. Then at 7:00 both ships swung sharply into the wind (this morning not enough and from the wrong direction), and the launching began.

The fighters and bombers were already taking off when the men of Torpedo 8 left their ready room. As they zipped up their flight jackets, tightened their yellow Mae Wests, and pulled on their helmets, Commander Waldron gave them a few final words. He said he thought the Japanese ships would swing around once they discovered U.S. carriers present; they would not go on to Midway as everyone seemed to think. So don’t worry about navigation; he knew where he was going. “Just follow me. I’ll take you to ‘em.”

Climbing the ladder to the flight deck he turned to his young navigator Ensign Gay, reminding him to “keep on my tail.” Then up to the bridge for final instructions, stopping by the chart house long enough to assure his friend Commander Frank Akers that he’d take the squadron all the way in. His exchange with Captain Mitscher was very brief—neither was given to oratory. As the Commander promised to “get hits,” Mitscher gently put his hand on Waldron’s shoulder.

Across the water the Enterprise planes were taking off too; the plan was to rendezvous above the carrier, then fly out together in a single, coordinated strike. The dive bombers left first at 7:06—climbing, circling, forming into ever larger groups. Taking off like that, a flier’s heart always thumped a little faster, but it also had its secret pleasures. As one pilot has remarked, “To get off a carrier deck, one does have a lot of mechanical preparation on deck and a never-failing audience, which means that the beginning of every strike involves fulfillment of Walter Mitty dreams. I’d say the actual takeoff forced one into some self-confidence and bravado, unlike the infantry situation where no one was watching.”

Orbiting high above the Enterprise, Lieutenant Commander Wade McClusky, leading the carrier’s whole Air Group, waited for his torpedo planes and fighter escorts. Fifteen minutes … a half-hour went by, and still no sign of them. Impatiently he studied the flight deck far below: “Action seemed to come to a standstill.” Meanwhile, he was using up desperately needed gas, just circling and waiting.

There were many reasons for the delay. Spruance’s decision to throw a “full load” at the enemy had its price—no more than half the planes could be on the flight deck at once. Also, there was a last-minute change in the bomb load on some of the planes; that took time too. In addition, a torpedo plane broke down. But above all, there was the problem of inexperience. Carrier operations might be an old story to the Japanese, but the Americans were still just feeling their way. Confusions of all sorts were bound to occur while the U.S. Navy got “on-the-job training” in this new business of carrier warfare.

At 7:28 there was a new complication. Spruance’s radar picked up something suspicious; then the Enterprise’s forward gun director, with its powerful range finder, sighted it for certain—a Japanese seaplane lurking on the southern horizon. It hung there much too long to hope it had missed them. No doubt about it: they had been spotted.

The chance for surprise seemed gone—with the planes only half launched. Still, there was no thought of calling off the operation. As Miles Browning pointed out, the Japanese would be locked in their present course at least till they recovered their Midway strike. But it was more important than ever to get going fast.

By 7:45 Spruance felt he could wait no longer. The Enterprise’s fighters and torpedo planes were still on deck, but the launching had dragged on long enough. He’d just have to give up the plan for a coordinated strike and send out what he had—the rest could follow. The ship’s blinker flashed to McClusky, “Proceed on mission assigned.”

As the dive bombers headed southwest, Lieutenant Jim Gray’s Fighting 6 was already taking off. Then it was Torpedo 6’s turn. The injured Gene Lindsey hobbled over to his borrowed TBD. The plane captain had to help him climb in, but the skipper was as determined as ever to lead his squadron. They left at 8:06.

On the Hornet John Waldron’s Torpedo 8 was leaving about the same time. For George Gay and the other “boot” ensigns it was all a brand-new experience. They wondered how hard it would be taking off with that “pickle,” as they invariably called the torpedo. Not only had they never done it before, they had never even seen it done. For all that, it turned out to be easy, and they too were heading out at 8:06.

But if this suggested that the Hornet’s and Enterprise’s air operations were in any way coordinated, that would be misleading. This was another art America had yet to learn. Here, neither Air Group knew what the other was doing, much less what the Yorktown’s planes were up to. And while the two torpedo squadrons were indeed leaving at the same time, the circumstances were entirely different. The Enterprise’s Torpedo 6 was chasing after its dive bombers; while the Hornet’s Torpedo 8, although last off, was actually leading its group.

Captain Mitscher’s idea was to send his slow torpedo planes ahead, while the faster bombers and fighters were climbing to rendezvous high above the ship. These could then catch up en route, and all would attack together. Fine in theory, but risky too. With the torpedo planes below a thousand feet and the rest of the squadron at 19,000, it would be easy to miss connections.

So now Torpedo 6 and Torpedo 8 were each heading out alone—separately yet close together—with very little to choose between them. One difference lay in the courses they took. Torpedo 6—under the meticulously correct Gene Lindsey— was flying exactly as prescribed. His course was 240°, or generally southwest. Torpedo 8, on the other hand, was veering off to the right, flying a more westerly course. The unorthodox John Waldron had said to forget navigation—just follow him—and he meant it. Another difference lay in the number of planes. Torpedo 6, short one TBD, had only 14; while Torpedo 8 was at full strength with all 15 on hand.

Looking down from above, Lieutenant Jim Gray watched 15 torpedo planes join up and set out with no escort. As skipper of Fighting 6 it was his job to protect Torpedo 6. Not knowing the squadron was short a plane, he decided these unescorted TBDs must be his. He took station over them and continued to climb.

This was in line with an arrangement he had with Lieutenant Art Ely, operations officer of Torpedo 6. Shortly before take-off, they had agreed that Gray would fly high enough to protect not only the torpedo planes but the dive bombers too. After all, it was the bombers that took the big beating at Coral Sea. But the torpedo planes weren’t neglected; if they needed any help, Ely was to radio, “Come on down, Jim.”

As they continued on, Gray noticed another torpedo squadron flying behind him and heading more to the southwest. For a while he tried to cover them too, but the gap grew steadily wider. Finally he gave up and concentrated on those below. He didn’t realize it, but the others were the 14 planes of Torpedo 6—the squadron he was meant to cover.

Directly below, the 15 planes of Torpedo 8 lumbered on—oblivious of the fighters above, of navigation, of everything except the determined man who led them. Waldron had his planes flying in two rough Vs; there were six sections of two and one section of three bringing up the rear. He, of course, was leading; Ensign Gay was flying the last plane in the last section.

Around 9:00 Waldron opened up on the intercom to warn they were being watched. Gay looked up and saw a Japanese seaplane trailing them in the distance. It finally broke off and Torpedo 8 continued on, wondering what sort of reception committee the seaplane’s radio might recruit. At the moment, there was nothing in sight—Torpedo 8 was all alone between the empty blue sea and the broken white clouds.

High above the clouds, and a little to the south, the Hornet’s 35 dive bombers and 10 fighters overtook Waldron’s squadron and continued on to the southwest. Whether it was due more to the clouds or the diverging course no one would ever know, but the rendezvous had failed. Torpedo 8 continued on alone.

About this time Waldron put his planes into a long scouting line. It was nearly time they sighted something, and this might make it easier. Soon, over his right wing, he saw two columns of smoke rising from beyond the horizon. He swung to the right, waggling his wings for the others to join up again. By 9:20 they were there, skimming the waves, going full throttle toward Nagumo’s outer screen of cruisers and destroyers. “He went just as straight to the Jap fleet as if he’d had a string tied to them,” George Gay later recalled. Pardonable license. If the enemy forces weren’t exactly where Waldron expected to find them, they were close enough. But there’s a limit to Sioux intuition, and the Commander’s reasoning was somewhat off. Nagumo had indeed turned north, but only a minute or so before Waldron got there. There was a different reason why the Japanese were far short of the position estimated by Spruance’s staff. Nagumo was short because he had spent so much of the past two hours dodging the planes from Midway.

In any case, Waldron had found them, and as Torpedo 8 roared closer he could soon make out three carriers already turning in evasion moves. Picking out the one to his left— southernmost of the three—he drove on in. The carrier threw out a curtain of antiaircraft fire. Waldron then shifted to the central carrier instead—it was smaller but looked easier to reach.

The rest of Torpedo 8 swung with him—Ensign Grant Teats, the lumberjack … Ensign Harold Ellison, the insurance man … Ensign Bill Evans, the Wesleyan intellectual … all of them. Outnumbered amateurs, they never faltered, but they had so far to go—the carrier was still nine miles off.

Without warning 10, 20, no one knew how many Zeros came raging down at them from somewhere high above. These fighters knew their business—they concentrated on the leading planes of Torpedo 8. The very first Zero picked off a TBD on the far left. Waldron came on the radio, asking his rear-seat man Horace Dobbs whether it was “ours or theirs.” Gay, who had all too good a view of the proceedings from his position at the rear, broke in to say it was a TBD.

Torpedo 8 continued on, with the Zeros diving again and again. The rear seat men did their best to fight back, but even the new twin mounts were no match for the Japanese. The Zeros were just too fast, the TBDs just too slow. Waldron again opened up on his radio, trying to reach Commander Stanhope Ring, leading the rest of the Hornet’s planes: “Stanhope, from Johnny one, answer.” But there was no answer.

The Zeros kept pounding, and more planes fell. Yet Waldron had one satisfaction: he was at last ramming home an attack, right down the enemy’s throat. It was what everything had been leading to all these months—all that training, all that psychology—it was what his whole life was all about. Now that the big moment had come, there was a touch of fervor in the broken phrases that crackled over his radio: “Watch those fighters … See that splash! … How am I doing, Dobbs? … Attack immediately … I’d give a million to know who did that.”

Then he got it too. A burst of flame—a brief glimpse of him standing up in the blazing cockpit—and he was gone. Then another went, and another. It was always the same: that sheet of flame, the blur of erupting smoke and water, the debris swirling by to the rear. Watching planes fall in these early battles, young Americans often thought of the old war movies they had seen. But this wasn’t like those movies at all. George Gay could only think of the time he was a boy and tossed out orange peels from the back of a speeding motor-boat.

Soon there were only three TBDs left—Gay and two others. Next instant the others were down and there was only Gay. Bullets slashed into his plane and rattled against the armored back of his seat. His gunner Bob Huntington was hit, and Gay felt a sharp pain above his left elbow. He fumbled with his torn sleeve; the bullet was spent, and he easily pressed it out. Not knowing what else to do with it, he put it in his mouth.

Incredibly the plane was still flying. And now he was by the destroyer screen, heading straight for the carrier. He was coming in on her starboard side, and as he drew near, she turned hard toward him, hoping to offer less of a target. Instinctively (or, more accurately, thanks to all those blackboard sessions), Gay pulled out to the right, cut across the carrier’s box, and swung back to the left. Now he was coming in on her port side.

All the ship’s guns were firing. The air around him was black with antiaircraft bursts, but Gay kept boring in.

At 800 yards he pressed the release button. Nothing happened—the electric connections had long since been shot away. He couldn’t use his left hand, so he jammed the stick between his knees and yanked at the manual release. The plane gave a welcome surge; the “pickle” was on its way.

Now to clear out. He was much too close to turn away. Those guns would pour into the plane’s belly at point-blank range. So he did the only other thing he could do. He kept on coming.

Flying “right down the gun barrel” of a big pompom up forward, he hopped across the flight deck, did a flipper turn and flew aft along the starboard side. It was a wild moment as he swung by the island below bridge level— “I could see the little Jap captain up there jumping up and down raising hell.”

Scooting by the afterpart of the flight deck, he had a glimpse of a sight that made him yearn for a heavy machine gun up forward. The deck was full of planes, clearly being rearmed and refueled. Gas hoses were scattered all over the place, and a few incendiary bullets could have started an inferno.

For a split second he felt an urge to crash into the whole mess, but then he decided things weren’t that bad. The plane was still flying; he felt pretty good. Maybe he could get out of this, come back and hit them again someday. He dropped down close to the water and headed astern of the carrier.

The Zeros weren’t about to let him get away a second time. A string of them poured down from above, and the second or third one caught him. An explosive shell carried away his left rudder control, flash-burning his leg. Nothing worked any more, and Gay pancaked hard into the ocean. The fifteenth and last plane of Torpedo 8 was gone.

Circling high above, Lieutenant Jim Gray was having a comparatively uneventful morning. Fighting 6 had little trouble following those 15 torpedo planes most of the way. Like most fighter pilots, he left the course to the planes he escorted; after all, they had an extra man. So now he just “followed the crowd,” which he still assumed to be Torpedo 6.

As the time drew near when they should be sighting the Japanese, Gray began to worry about Zeros. It would be hard to protect both McClusky’s dive bombers (whenever they appeared) and those torpedo planes far below. Then, as if in answer to a prayer, he saw a low-lying cloud bank directly ahead. Fine. The torpedo planes could use this for cover, as they did at Coral Sea, and he could concentrate on keeping the upper area safe for the dive bombers. If anything went wrong below, there was always the prearranged signal with Torpedo 6 that would bring him rushing down.

Shortly after 9:00 the 15 torpedo planes disappeared under the clouds and Gray saw them no more. But it was easy to guess they must have made contact, for soon afterward he sighted the white feathers of the Japanese wakes at the far edge of the overcast. Fighting 6 began circling above, watching for Zeros, wondering where McClusky was, occasionally catching a glimpse of the ships below. The torpedo attack must be going well; no one called the magic words, “Come on down, Jim.”

As ENSIGN Gay’s TBD smacked into the sea, the right wing snapped off, and the canopy hood above his head slammed shut with the impact. The plane began filling with water. Gay desperately tugged at the hood. He was scared. The Japanese were one thing, drowning was another.

Somehow he finally yanked it open. Climbing out, his first thoughts were for his rear-seat man Bob Huntington—there had been no word from him since he said he was hit. The plane was sinking fast, but Gay made a dive anyhow to try and pull him out. The wreckage sank too soon.

Gay inflated his Mae West and looked around. The plane’s rubber boat bobbed up, deflated and in its bag … then the black cushion Huntington used to kneel on while working. Gay tucked the boat under his arm, and recalling stories of Zeros strafing helpless pilots in the water, he pulled the cushion over his head and kept as low as possible. From this unusual vantage point, he settled down to a front-row view of the First Carrier Striking Force in action.

AT9:36 the Akagi ordered cease-fire; the fighters were bringing down the last of the U.S. torpedo planes. They had given the Soryu quite a scare, but beyond that nothing. To the critical eye of the experts on the Striking Force, the American tactics were very primitive. Surprisingly, they had no fighter escorts. Nor. did they split their attack, as the Japanese had learned to do. They foolishly kept in a single unit and simply hurled themselves at the Soryu. Bunched together, they were easy to shoot down. Their torpedoes (the men on the Soryu thought they saw four) passed harmlessly by the carrier.

So a sixth American attack had been beaten off. But there was little time for self-congratulation, for at 9:38—just two minutes after the Akagi’s cease-fire—a new enemy flight of 14 torpedo planes was sighted, steadily boring in from the south.

THE smoke, the distant wakes were farther north than Gene Lindsey expected. Fortunately, Torpedo 6 was flying at 1,500 feet—below the clouds yet high enough to catch those first telltale traces 30 miles away.

Lindsey signaled, and the 14 planes made a wide swing right so that they approached the target from about due south. The Japanese were heading west at the moment, and their formation was extremely loose—they were apparently under, or had just been under, a heavy torpedo plane attack by somebody.

But where were all the Enterprise’s own planes? Jim Gray’s fighters were meant to be on hand, yet no one had seen them all the way out. And the disappearance of Wade McClusky’s dive bombers was even more baffling. They left first, were faster, should be here waiting. But they too were nowhere in sight. Gene Lindsey just didn’t have the gas to wait around. He would have to go it alone. Picking the closest carrier, he began his approach about 9:40. He was off his target’s port bow—an excellent position—and at 20 miles he split his planes, seven and seven, hoping to come in on both sides.

There was only one thing wrong with his theory: the planes were TBDs. The manual might say they went 134 knots, but 100 was closer to the mark these days. With the carriers going 25-30 knots, it took a long, long while to close the gap. All the more so, since the Japanese skipper cleverly kept his stern to the planes, forcing them into an ever wider arc to get in a bow shot. And this was necessary because a 30-knot ship could easily dodge a 33-knot torpedo at any other angle. It all added up to a 20-minute approach.

The Zeros made good use of the time. Starting about 15 miles out, 25 of them swept down, making pass after pass at Torpedo 6.The rear-seat men fired back as best they could; the pilots just hunched low and hoped. They couldn’t dodge; they couldn’t maneuver; everything depended on keeping course. Pablo Riley … Tom Eversole … Gene Lindsey himself went down one after another in flaming cartwheels. Others went too, but the rest kept coming—slowly, ever so slowly, edging around toward the bow of the turning carrier.

The antiaircraft was there too; they had a 15-minute dose of it. As usual, it caused little actual damage, but it did have a jarring effect. It forced the planes out a little more, making that long circuitous journey that much longer.

They never did reach a decent launching position, but that didn’t keep them from trying. At 9:58 the remaining TBDs finally turned in and began a desperate run on the carrier’s port quarter. The big ship—so far away for so long—suddenly seemed overwhelmingly near. Lieutenant Ed Laub found he could make out the planes on her flight deck … next instant he could even see their propellers turning.

And that was close enough. At 500-800 yards he released, felt that lift to his plane, and raced to get clear. Three other TBDs did the same; the remaining ten were gone.

It was all over soon after 10:00 A.M. For more than 20 minutes the men of Torpedo 6 had pitted themselves against the entire First Carrier Striking Force. They had, of course, their prearranged signal for help— “Come on down, Jim”— but there’s no sign it was ever used. Perhaps it was sent but never received; perhaps Art Ely was shot down too soon; perhaps Gene Lindsey didn’t know about it; or perhaps, having seen no sign of Fighting 6 all the way out, he just assumed there was nobody up there.

High above the broken clouds, Fighting 6 restlessly orbited at 20,000 feet. Still no sign of the torpedo planes, but if they needed help, they’d call. Meanwhile Jim Gray was more and more worried about McClusky’s dive bombers. Where were they anyhow? He circled, looking to the south; no luck. He tried a few radio calls; no answer.

He glanced at his gas gauge—and got a shock. It stood about half where it normally did after two hours’ flying. This meant Fighting 6 couldn’t do much even if the dive bombers came. They no longer had the gas to mix it up with the Zeros!

At 9:52 Gray again tried to contact McClusky. He reported he was over the target, but running short of fuel and would soon have to go back to the ship. No answer. At 10:00 he tried again, this time summing up the situation as far as he could see it: the enemy fleet had eight destroyers, two battleships, two carriers … course north … no combat patrol. Still no answer.

By now he had little gas left for anything at all. Maybe he should strafe the Japanese carrier he could see clear of the clouds. On the other hand, that would take him down too low to use the Enterprise’s homing device to return to the ship. All things considered, the gains from a strafing run just didn’t seem worth the risk of running out of gas. As Admiral Halsey once said, the fighters’ first job was to protect the fleet.

Gray decided the sensible thing to do was go back for more fuel. A few minutes after 10:00—just about the time Torpedo 6 was making its final, lonely dash at the First Carrier Striking Fleet—Fighting 6 headed for home.

IT TOOK all Captain Okada’s skill to keep the Kaga’s stern to this new group of American planes. At one point he had to use hard-left rudder to avoid some torpedoes on his starboard quarter, then go immediately to hard-right rudder to dodge another set to port.

But the job was done. By 10:00 everything seemed under control, and the Striking Force hurried northeast at 24 knots. Admiral Nagumo still planned to strike the American carrier at 10:30, and the time had come to close the enemy.

Nagumo also sent a new message to Admiral Yamamoto, reviewing the morning’s events. He briefly reported his attack on Midway, the futile attacks on him by shore-based planes. He again told how a U.S. task force, complete with carrier, had been found. “After destroying this,” he reported, “we plan to resume our AF attack.”

He didn’t mention the two TBD strikes he had just received, or perhaps he assumed they were shore-based too: After all, what did it matter? He had hurled back seven separate American attacks. Admiral Nagumo was more than satisfied.

ENSIGN Thomas Wood was beginning to realize he might have to eat his words. Back in the wardroom he had boasted that he, personally, would sink the Akagi, but the Hornet’s 35 dive bombers and 10 fighters had been searching for an hour now, and it looked more and more as if they might not find the Japanese fleet at all, much less sink the flagship.

It was all very baffling. Commander Stan Ring had led his planes exactly as directed—239°, 155 miles—but nothing had gone quite right. First, they didn’t link up with Torpedo 8 on the way out. Topping that, when they reached the interception point around 9:30, there were no ships in sight.

Yet they must be somewhere. Were they to the right, off to the north? This would be the case if they had unexpectedly changed course—and carriers had a way of doing that. Or were they to the left? Had they already passed by the interception point and were now between the Hornet’s planes and Midway? Maybe not as likely, but a far more harrowing thought. The whole point of the battle was to defend the base. Stan Ring swung left and headed south. Scouting 8, Bombing 8, Fighting 8 all followed along.

By the time they reached Kure—the tiny atoll 60 miles west of Midway—it was clear there were no Japs in this direction. But they had made their choice, and now they were stuck with it. They milled around, hoping for some helpful word over their silent radios, while their gas dropped ever lower.

Finally Ring decided it was useless. They would have to return to the Hornet. There they could refuel and start all over again. The group broke up, and each squadron headed back on its own. It would be up to others to stop Nagumo this morning.

ENSIGN Bill Pitman was getting more and more worried. The Enterprise dive bombers had been out more than two hours—and still no sign of the Japs. By now his gas gauge was touching the halfway point, yet here was Wade McClusky continuing to lead them “all over the Pacific.”

Pitman, a young pilot in Scouting 6, was flying wing on McClusky. Across the way Dick Jaccard was flying the other wing, and behind these three, stepped at various levels, followed the other 28 SBDs of Scouting 6 and Bombing 6. They were all still there with two exceptions—both forced to drop out with engine trouble. Tony Schneider looked as if he might be the next to go—his engine was smoking badly, eating up gas. Yet he kept perfect formation, as though he had all the fuel in the world.

Ensign Pittman figured they were almost at the end of their rope. He glanced across at Dick Jaccard, who was also wondering when—or if—the “old man” would ever turn back.

Wade McClusky flew on, sure he had made all the right decisions, yet understandably wondering why nothing better had come of them. Just as instructed, they flew out on 240°, distance 155 miles—yet when they reached the interception point at 9:20 the sea was empty. Not a ship in sight. He checked his navigation; no mistake there.

Nor could it have been the weather. The day was beautiful. Just a few puffy clouds below—certainly nothing that could hide the whole Japanese fleet. And all the way out he used his binoculars; he couldn’t have passed them unsighted.

Yet they must be somewhere. To the left, between himself and Midway? No: allowing for a maximum advance at 25 knots, McClusky felt certain they hadn’t already passed. Then they must be to his right—gone off to the east or west, or most likely, turned around.

He decided to fly a “box” search, covering as much of this area to the right as he could. First he kept on to the southwest for another 15 minutes. The other pilots dutifully followed, wondering what the skipper was up to. Radio silence made it all a guessing game.

At 35 miles there were still no signs of the Japanese. McClusky was convinced they couldn’t be any farther down this way. So he turned right, to the northwest, and began flying the reverse of Nagumo’s course. The rest of the planes turned too, the pilots still wondering.

Now McClusky’s big problem was how far he could go. The planes had been in the air a long time. They had climbed, heavily loaded, to 20,000 feet. The less experienced pilots were probably using more gas than himself—and he was using plenty. He decided to keep flying northwest until 10:00, then turn northeast before making the final, dreary decision to give up the hunt and go back to the Enterprise.

The 31 planes flew on. No sign of anything, left or right. The gas gauge in Tony Schneider’s plane dropped toward empty.

WHILE the dive bombers from the Hornet and Enterprise searched in vain, Admiral Fletcher on the Yorktown was by no means idle. He had sent Task Force 16 on ahead, while he picked up his planes scouting to the north. But by 6:45 they were recovered and the Yorktown was pounding after the Enterprise and Hornet.

Fletcher’s problem was how best to support the other two carriers. Should he throw everything at the same target they were attacking? Or should he hold something back? He was still bothered by the fact that the PBYs had reported only two enemy carriers. There should be four; that meant two others were somewhere. The Yorktown’s planes were all he had left to get them. He decided to hold back for a while, hoping time might throw a little more light on the situation.

But time revealed nothing. There was no further news from the PBYs, and if anyone else was sending reports, the information was not getting through. Around 7:00 word came that the Enterprise and Hornet were launching; the Yorktown’s pilots grew more and more restless.

The squadron leaders got together for a final conference. They quickly reviewed how they could carry out their attack, whenever and wherever it happened. It would be a coordinated job, with Fighting 3 going in first to strafe; then Bombing 3 and Scouting 5; and finally Torpedo 3. Hopefully the early planes would cripple the target enough for the slow-moving torpedoes to do their job. As for when they could start, the key decision lay in Commander Thach’s lap—his fighters had the shortest range. Thach said he was willing to go at 175 miles, which Leslie felt was “really giving a lot.” It left practically no safety margin at all.

To save as much fuel as possible, the Yorktown Air Group commander, Oscar Pederson, suggested an arrangement somewhat like that on the Hornet. He proposed that the squadrons rendezvous along the way. The torpedo planes would go first; the rest would catch up.

The discussion turned to the interception point. According to the last contact report, Nagumo was heading straight into the wind for Midway. This was ideal for air operations, and he’d probably stick to this course as long as possible. At the same time, the contact report was now very stale, and the Yorktown’s air officer, Commander Murr Arnold, felt the Japanese wouldn’t get too close on their first strike. He and Pederson decided to allow for a maximum enemy advance; then if the planes found nothing at the interception point, they’d turn northwest and fly the reverse of the Japanese course.

Meanwhile Admiral Fletcher fretted on the bridge, hoping in vain for some new report pinpointing those missing enemy carriers. Finally at 8:38 he decided he could wait no longer. After all, he was a target too. The Japanese now knew the Americans were around, and any moment their dive bombers might come screaming down from the sky. He certainly didn’t want to get caught with all his own planes on deck.

Yet the missing carriers still bothered him. Only a month ago at Coral Sea he had been fooled in a situation like this. Acting on a bad contact report, he had thrown his whole Air Group at the little escort carrier Shoho, while the big Zuikaku and Shokaku lay undiscovered within range. It was just luck they hadn’t clobbered him. He didn’t want to run that risk again. As always, a battle remained this eternal business of groping.

In the end he decided he could have it both ways. He’d send off Bombing 3, Torpedo 3 and six planes from Fighting 3. But as an ace in the hole, he’d hang on to Scouting 5 and the rest of the fighters. The stay-at-homes didn’t take it easily, but Fletcher was firm.

While the brass debated—and the pilots fidgeted—the rear seat men once more checked the planes spotted on the flight deck. This was now an old story to Radioman Bill Gallagher, who rode with Max Leslie, skipper of Bombing 3. When the time came, the “old man” would tell him everything he needed to know, and sometimes a little bit more.

This morning he went to the plane as usual when general quarters sounded. He knew the Yorktown was out here on serious business, but he didn’t know of any plans for attack this particular day. That wasn’t his job. But he checked and rechecked everything (that was his job) and stood by while the plane captain warmed up the motor. Then more waiting. Sooner or later they’d either secure, or Mr. Leslie would come up from the ready room. This time they didn’t secure. At 8:40 the loudspeakers blared the familiar call, “Pilots, man your planes.”

As the pilots poured out on deck, Gallagher climbed into the plane, and in a few seconds Leslie joined him. Swinging aboard, the skipper said something about a “Jap contact.” But he didn’t mention carriers, and Gallagher still had no idea exactly what they were gunning for. Yet after years of service, a man could smell out situations, and he certainly sensed that this was “it.”

At 8:45 Lem Massey’s 12 torpedo planes roared into the sky. Then Max Leslie led his 17 dive bombers off. Lieutenant (j.g.) Paul Holmberg, following right behind the skipper, caught his slipstream and almost spun into the water. An added difficulty was the big 1,000-pound bomb, he carried— it was the first time he had ever taken off with such a load.

For 12 minutes the bombers climbed and circled high above the Yorktown, then started off after the torpedo planes. Finally at 9:05 Jimmy Thach’s six fighters followed. As they pulled out, the men on the ships of Task Force 17 waved them on, and the cruiser Astoria’s blinker signaled a parting salute: “Good hunting, and a safe return.”

Less than five minutes out, Jimmy Thach was startled by an enormous explosion erupting in the water just ahead of Fighting 3. There were no ships around; it could only come from a bomb accidentally released by somebody “upstairs.”

High above, Commander Max Leslie shook his fist in wild frustration. He had just signaled the squadron to arm their bombs, but when he threw the new electric arming switch in his own cockpit, some faulty connection released the bomb instead.

He banged on the side of the plane—his standard method of signaling Bill Gallagher in the rear seat—and wondered aloud whether they had time to go back and reload. Gallagher, with an enlisted man’s healthy distrust of brass, said they’d probably be kept on the ship if they did. Leslie said he certainly didn’t want that, so on they flew.

A few minutes later a second bomb went, as another pilot tried to throw the electric switch. This was too much. Leslie now committed the dangerous sin of breaking radio silence long enough to warn all pilots not to use the new device—go back to the old manual way instead. For his own peace of mind, happily he didn’t know at the time that two more pilots had lost their bombs the same way. Bombing 3 still boasted 17 planes, but only 13 of them now had anything to drop on the enemy.

For Leslie, the leader, it seemed especially ironic. The others were mostly young reservists, but he had studied and practiced for twenty years for just this climactic moment—and now this: he was en route to the enemy without a bomb.

Yet it never occurred to him to drop out. A dive bombing squadron is an intricate mechanism, requiring split-second timing to do its job properly. Bombing 3 was used to Leslie and his way of operating. No matter how skillful, another man taking over now might upset their coordination just enough to throw everything off. So Leslie was determined to lead his squadron anyhow; he would be the first to dive, just as though he still had his 1,000-pound bomb.

Far below, Jimmy Thach flew on—his aplomb mildly upset by those four explosions that rocked the sea around him. About 9:30 he caught the reassuring sight of Lem Massey’s torpedo planes flying directly ahead. Fifteen minutes later Leslie’s SBDs caught up with them too.

They flew on together, in a sort of vertical formation. At the bottom, of course, were the torpedo planes sticking to 1,500 feet … next the fighters, keeping low enough to cover them … and finally the dive bombers—a wedge of tiny specks at 16,000 feet. Except for some cumulus along the horizon, most of the clouds had now disappeared. Just occasional white tufts in a world of sparkling blue.

At 10:00 the sharp eyes of Lem Massey picked up three columns of smoke rising from beyond the northwest horizon, some 30-40 miles away. Torpedo 3 immediately turned right, climbing a little to get a better look. Fighting 3 and Bombing 3 swung too, although neither yet knew what Massey had seen.

Max Leslie again risked breaking radio silence, asked Massey in code if he had sighted the enemy. No answer. They flew on, and at 10:05 Leslie found out for himself. First the smoke; then Bill Gallagher pointed out the wakes of ships perhaps 35 miles dead ahead.

About 10:15 Leslie lost track of the torpedo planes. They were somewhat ahead, 14,000 feet below, and between the distance and some scattered clouds, he could no longer see them. But he now could hear them all too well. Massey had opened up on his radio and was frantically calling for fighter support.

Torpedo 3 had almost reached the outer screen—they were 14-18 miles from the carriers—when the first two Zeros hit. They came without warning, from above and to the left, and before CAP Wilhelm Esders knew what was happening, bullets tore through his cockpit, exploding a C0_2 bottle tucked between his feet.

Gas was everywhere—he couldn’t see—he couldn’t imagine what had happened. For a moment he thought the plane was on fire. Then realizing it was the CO_2, he yanked back the canopy and gulped in the fresh air.

Massey nosed down, trying to reap as much advantage as he could from speed and low altitude. Esders was keeping alongside him, while Machinist Harry Corl flew the other wing. Together they made up the lead section of Torpedo 3. The rest of the planes were following, stacked down in sections of three.

They were over the screen now, beginning their approach. At ten miles, two more Zeros hit, then several more. Six to eight were constantly on them, making pass after pass, while the rear-seat men did their best to shoot back. They dropped down to 150 feet, and that was the limit; from here on, Torpedo 3 would just have to take it.

Massey picked out the lead carrier—the one farthest north—and the squadron split into two divisions of six. The first would take the starboard side, the other the port. As they bore in, the ship’s guns opened up too. Generally the antiaircraft fire was wild, but the Zeros were never in better form.

Someone shot away Corl’s elevator controls, and his plane headed for the water. Seeing he was about to crash, he released his torpedo. Free of the weight, he discovered he could get his nose up again by using the tab control. He moved back into position, hoping he could at least help fight off the Zeros.

Then came the moment that overwhelmed all the rest. About a mile from the carrier, Lem Massey’s plane was hit and caught fire. Still flying alongside, Esders watched the skipper climb out on the stub wing as the TBD, now engulfed in flames, headed down for the sea. Massey never had a chance.

Watching him go, it dawned on Esders that he was now the head of the squadron. Things were so critical it just wasn’t possible to turn the lead over, as customary, to the next senior man. Although the junior pilot present, he must lead the attack the rest of the way.

As he took over, he glanced at the scene around him. It was a weird and terrible sight: “Any direction I was able to look, I could see five, six, seven or more aircraft on fire, spinning down, or simply out of control and flying around crazily.”

Seeing Esders begin his final run, Corl turned north to get clear of the fleet. He had done all he could; now even his guns were jammed. His rear-seat man Lloyd Fred Childers, though wounded in both legs, kept popping away with a .45 pistol.

Esders barreled in, as his own rear-seat man Mike Brazier came on the intercom. He had just been hit, Brazier explained, and would no longer be able to help. Nevertheless, he managed for quite a while to call out whenever the Zeros got on their tail.

At 600-800 yards Esders finally dropped his torpedo, turned sharply to the right, cleared the carrier by several hundred yards. Four other TBDs dropped too, one of them crashing just off the ship’s bow. Esders never saw what happened to the rest, but whatever it was, they didn’t escape. By the end of their attack, 10 of Lem Massey’s 12 planes were gone; only Esders and Cod were left, and they still had to get home.

A thousand feet up, there was little that Jimmy Thach could do. He heard Massey’s call for help, all right, but a horde of Zeros hurled themselves on Fighting 3 at the same time. “It was like the inside of a beehive,” he later recalled, and it was all his men could do to stay alive.

“Skipper, there’s a Zero on my tail, get him off,” Thach’s wing man Ram Dibb sang out at one point. Leading the Japanese around to the front, Dibb gave Thach a perfect target. He opened up, and the Zero reeled down toward the sea. But none of this helped Lem Massey below. There just weren’t enough fighters to do the job. Torpedo 3 had to face Nagumo alone.

RAITA OGAWA, flying combat air patrol over the Akagi, felt these last two torpedo attacks were the most troublesome of the morning. The planes maneuvered better than the earlier bombers and it took longer to shoot them down. Also, they had a way of hanging around after delivering their attacks; this was annoying because it meant still more time had to be wasted chasing after them.

This new strike was a good example of Okawa’s problem. Coming in from the southeast around 10:10, there were only 12 TBDs, plus a few fighters, yet they caused no end of trouble. It took the air cover from all four carriers to handle them properly. Meanwhile there was nobody left to patrol up high.

By now the carrier formation was a shambles again. On the Akagi Captain Aoki could no longer even see the Hiryu—she was somewhere in the smoke to the north. The Kaga and Soryu were still around, but the distance had widened from the prescribed 1,300 to 4,500 or 6,000 yards. At 10:10 the Striking Force had been ordered to head east, but within a minute the Akagi was turning hard to the northwest, trying to keep her stern to the 12 TBDs. In the end they passed on north toward the Hiryu, but who could have guessed that? The formation ended up all the more jumbled.

Nor did it help to have an enemy submarine poking around. The destroyer Arashi gave the first warning when she saw some torpedo tracks coming her way around 9:10. She immediately countered with depth charges and stayed behind when the rest of the Striking Force turned northeast. The Arashi was still back there somewhere, hopefully sitting on the sub, but one never knew.

For all that, it had been a good morning. By 10:15 the latest batch of torpedo planes was going the way of the others. This would make eight attacks thrown back in three hours. Meanwhile all that work below deck was about to pay off—93 planes had been rearmed or refueled, and at this very moment were being spotted on the flight decks. The First Carrier Striking Force had suffered enough indignities; the all-out attack on the American fleet would be launched, as scheduled, at 10:30.

At 10:20, even before the enemy torpedo attack had been completely throttled, Admiral Nagumo gave the order to launch when ready. Maybe a little ahead of schedule, but the Akagi’s planes were already in place, a flight of Zeros spotted first. The ship began turning into the wind. The other three carriers caught Nagumo’s signal and did the same.

On the Kaga CWO Morinaga was standing with a group of pilots in the center of the flight deck, just aft of the second elevator. They were all slated to go on the coming strike, and while they waited to man their planes, they had orders from the bridge to stand by as extra lookouts. Now they were scanning the sky—mostly clear, but studded here and there with clouds.

No one can say who spotted them first. All the pilots were shouting at once. But there was no doubt what they saw, pouring down from the blue like tiny black beads falling loose from a string. With one voice, they yelled up to the bridge, “Enemy dive bombers!”

CHAPTER 8

“Don’t Let This Carrier Escape”

TONY SCHNEIDER’S GAS WAS almost gone … Bill Pittman’s tank was getting low … and nearly everyone’s nerves were on edge, but Wade McClusky flew stubbornly on. He was sure the Japanese were up this way, even though he saw nothing so far. Now it was 9:55, and the Enterprise’s, dive bombers were nearing the northern end of their search pattern. If they found nothing within the next five minutes, McClusky would have to lead them back east—or they would never get home at all.

Suddenly, far below, he spied a lone warship going full speed toward the northeast. Anything kicking up that much wake must be on urgent business. He decided she might be some kind of liaison vessel between the occupation group and Nagumo’s Striking Force. He altered his course to that of the ship; the rest of the dive bombers followed.

Actually, the ship was no courier; she was the destroyer Arashi, part of Nagumo’s screen. Detached to deal with the American submarine, she had dropped a few depth charges and was now trying to catch up with the fleet. But if McClusky’s reasoning was a little off, his hunch was 100% right—her course would take him straight to the carriers.

At 10:05, Ensign Pittman—flying wing with one eye on his gas gauge—saw the skipper motion ahead. There, about 35 miles away and a little to port, he spotted the first wakes. Flying farther to the rear, Lieutenant Bill Roberts saw them too—at first just some “curved white slashes on a blue carpet,” then suddenly ships everywhere—he never saw so many at the same time in his life.

For Ensign Schneider, they were an especially welcome sight. He was just about out of gas, and he assumed they were friendly. Certainly it seemed logical: the Enterprise’s planes had been in the air three hours now; they were flying east; unable to find the enemy, Commander McClusky must be bringing them home.

At this point his engine gave a final gasp and quit. Starting a long glide down toward the fleet below, he was surprised to see a battleship there. The U.S. didn’t have any around. Tony Schneider needed no more hints. He veered sharply south, now hoping to land as far away from these ships as possible.

Ensign John McCarthy was another who first thought the “old man” had brought them all back to the Enterprise. Now his rear-seat man E. E. Howell asked tentatively, “Do you think we’re home?”

McCarthy took a closer look—the squirming wakes, the pagoda masts, the long yellow flight decks. “No,” he told Howell, “that’s not home.”

Wade McClusky could see them pretty well now. They seemed to be in a sort of big circle—the four carriers rather loosely spaced in the center. Two of them were fairly close … another to the east … the fourth, far off on the northern horizon. His binoculars were practically glued to his eyes, but they didn’t explain what impressed him the most: nobody was shooting at him. No fighters; no antiaircraft. Yet most of the ships were frantically turning. Too far down to see, but they must be dodging some torpedo attack going on below. Meanwhile the sky up here was empty, the target wide open.

Not a moment to lose. McClusky now broke radio silence, reporting his contact to the Enterprise and assigning targets to his two squadrons. Earl Gallaher’s Scouting 6 was flying right up with him; Dick Best’s Bombing 6 was a little below and behind.

Approaching from the southwest, McClusky picked the first two carriers in his line of advance. The nearer of these—the one on the left—he gave to Gallaher and himself. The other —farther off to the right—he gave to Dick Best.

Somehow Best never got the word. As the trailing squadron in the formation, he assumed that his group would take the nearer target—the usual practice. In fact, after radio silence was broken he opened up saying he planned to do this. But now it was McClusky’s turn not to get a radio message. The two squadrons roared on toward the attack point—both planning to hit the same carrier.

Best was almost ready now. He carefully strung out the planes in his own division, checked the position of the rest of his squadron. All were in place—a division on either side of him. He opened his flaps, about to push over and lead the way down.

Then without warning a series of blurs streaked down from above. McClusky and Scouting 6 were diving by him. To Best, they were taking his target—but there was nothing he could do about it. He closed his flaps, signaled Bombing 6 to close up again—they’d have to go on to the next carrier, farther to the east.

Dick Best wasn’t the only pilot surprised by McClusky’s dive. The skippers own wing man, Ensign Bill Pittman, was equally taken aback. Pittman had the squadron’s camera, and since he was to take pictures, he assumed that McClusky would be the last to dive, allowing a better chance to photograph the bombing.

Not at all. McClusky wasn’t about to follow anybody else down. At 10:22 he suddenly pushed over, leaving Pittman too astonished to do anything for a moment. As he hesitated, McClusky’s other wing man, Dick Jaccard, took Pittman’s place and also dived. But Jaccard must have been a little nervous himself. Instead of opening his diving flaps, he grabbed the wrong handle and let down his wheels.

Next, Pittman pushed over too. He remembered to switch on his camera, but that was all. He took pictures of nothing but sky and horizon.

Now Scouting 6 pushed over, Earl Gallaher leading the way. Then, unexpectedly, the second and third divisions of Bombing 6 too. Some of Best’s pilots didn’t see that he had moved on to the next carrier; they just dived where originally planned. Others followed Lieutenant Joe Penland, leader of the second division. He wasn’t sure of what Best wanted; he saw a lot of near-misses on the carrier below; so he used his discretion and joined McClusky. In all, some 25 dive bombers were hurtling down.

For incredible seconds the carrier seemed oblivious of them. Earlier she had been turning, but now she was heading into the wind getting ready to launch. Wade McClusky was half-way down before anybody saw him. Then she fired a few antiaircraft bursts, but that was all.

At 1,800 feet he reached for the handle on his left, pulled the bomb release, and cleared out as fast as he could. One after another the 25 planes did the same, as the whole world seemed to erupt beneath them. A ball of fire, flying debris, a brief glimpse of a Zero blown to bits—each pilot came away with his own impression, the way it was when he dropped his particular bomb. By the time the next man reached the same point, another explosion had rearranged the scene completely. Nobody saw the whole thing; no two men even saw it the same way.

Wade McClusky, leading the group, had a picture of a clean hardwood deck, an untouched island on the starboard side, some planes tuning up toward the stern. Earl Gallaher, coming in fourth, saw fountains of water from two near-misses, the blinding flash of his own bomb landing among the parked planes. Dusty Kleiss, seventh to dive, found the after end of the ship a sea of flames, the painted red circle up forward still untouched—then his own bomb changed that. And so it went until Ensign George Goldsmith, the 25th and last man down, had his turn too. By now the carrier was a blazing wreck, swinging hard to the right in a desperate effort to ward off further blows. Goldsmith kept her in his sights.

In the rear seat, Radioman James Patterson called off the altitude as they plunged down. During dive bombing practice they normally released at about 2,200 feet. This time 2,000 spun past the altimeter, and they were still going straight down. Then 1,500 and finally Goldsmith pulled the release. Patterson watched the results with amazement: “He had been the world’s worst dive bomber pilot during the practice hops I’d flown with him previously, but that day Ensign Goldsmith earned every dime invested in him as he put our bomb right through the flight deck, just aft of amidships.”

At 15,000 feet Dick Best turned right and headed for the next carrier farther east. Having missed McClusky’s instructions, he felt the skipper had “pre-empted” his target, but far worse than that, most of Bombing 6 had joined the others. He only had the five planes of his own division left to make his attack. Very well, they would have to do.

“Don’t let this carrier escape,” he called over his radio as they approached the new target. Still farther east, he could see a third flattop, and well north of that a fourth one too. He had a fleeting impression that the third carrier was just coming under attack, but at the moment he was concentrating all his attention on the second one below.

Now they were right over her. Incredibly, McClusky’s attack—well within sight—hadn’t stirred her up at all. There was no antiaircraft, and she too was holding course, heading into the wind, getting ready to launch. Best again strung out his other planes, opened his flaps, and this time he really dived… .

He could hardly believe it. For months he had pictured this moment, and here it was at last—the yellow flight deck, the big red circle, everything just the way he imagined. He always knew that this was a real war, that out there somewhere was a real enemy, that he would be sent on real missions to hunt and be hunted. Even so, it never seemed truly real until now—this moment—when he was actually doing it.

He coolly examined the Japanese flight deck through his sights, aiming the three-power telescope at a point just ahead of the bridge and in the center of the ship. At 3,000 feet a plane passed across the lens—it was a fighter taking off. Good: it still looked like business as usual down there.

Behind him streaked his other four planes, and it was not an easy job. All the pilots agreed that no one dived more suddenly or more steeply than Dick Best. But on they came, wondering whether the skipper would ever pull out. Apparently deciding that he never would, one of the planes released too soon, but the others hung on. If he could do it, they could. Best himself kept diving until he was good and ready; then at the last second he pulled his bomb release handle.

But even now he wasn’t leaving. He hadn’t trained all these years to miss the sight of his first bomb hit. He pulled back sharply, literally laid his plane on its side and tail, and sat there watching from his improvised front-row seat.

His bomb hit squarely abreast of the bridge. Two others seemed to land back toward the fantail. All three blew the carrier’s planes into a blazing heap; their gas tanks began going off like a string of firecrackers.

It was a fantastic sight. Yet here again no two men saw it quite the same way. In the excitement of the moment the eye played all kinds of tricks, even with respect to the simplest details. Dick Best saw “very clearly and unmistakably” that the carrier’s island was on the starboard side; his extremely capable No. 5 man, Bill Roberts, was equally sure it was to port.

Finally pulling away, Best was surprised to see a torpedo plane formation heading in on an opposite course. They were apparently some “tail-end Charlies” from the earlier TBD attack. Then he caught sight of that third carrier, farther to the east, that he had noticed just before diving. It was now taking a dreadful beating—any number of bomb bursts flaring through a wall of smoke. Somebody was doing a thorough job of gutting it.

COMMANDER Max Leslie banged on the side of his SBD, attracting the attention of Bill Gallagher in the rear seat. Gallagher looked down to where the skipper was pointing, and 15,000 feet below he spotted an aircraft carrier. The Yorktown’s planes had now been approaching the Japanese fleet for 15 minutes, but this was Gallagher’s first glimpse of the actual target Leslie had picked out for Bombing 3. She was the most easterly of three carriers he could see in the area.

Nothing ever looked bigger, especially the huge red circle painted on the deck up front. Until this moment Gallagher had been sitting facing forward—an informal arrangement the skipper often tolerated—but now he swung around to handle his gun.

Leslie was still trying to get Lem Massey on the radio to coordinate the attack. But he could no longer hear Torpedo 3 at all. There was just static and silence.

At 10:23 Gallagher, keeping an eye on the carrier, signaled that she was starting to launch planes. This was bad news, for until now the upper sky had been free of fighters. Leslie tried once again to reach Massey—still only silence. There was no more time to lose; he must attack alone.

It was just 10:25 when he patted his head—the standard signal for “follow me“—and pushed over from 14,500 feet. He picked up the target right away, and as he roared down there was no doubt in his mind: this was the best dive he had ever made. It seemed more ironic than ever that he had already dropped his bomb on the way out.

Well, he still had his guns. At 10,000 feet he opened fire with his fixed mount, raking the carrier’s bridge. Then at 4,000 feet his guns jammed. With his bomb already gone, he now had nothing at all to throw at the enemy. He kept diving anyhow.

Commander Max Leslie took his men down all the way. Only when completely satisfied that he could do no more, did he pull out and leave the squadron to deliver their bombs.

Lieutenant Lefty Holmberg, flying No. 2, now took over. Studying the carrier, he decided the red circle painted on her flight deck made a good aiming point, and he set his sights on it.

She was still holding course, but he began to see little lights sparkling around the periphery of her flight deck. They reminded him of candles on a birthday cake back home. Then shrapnel began rattling off his plane. No doubt about it: they were shooting at him and getting close.

At 2,500 feet he pressed the electrical bomb release button, then pulled the hand release just to make sure. As he flattened out from his dive, his rear-seat man G. A. LaPlant practically blew his earphones off, yelling with joy, shouting that it was a hit, urging him to see for himself. Holmberg made a shallow turn to the left, and did take a look. A huge column of orange, black and dirty gray smoke was billowing up from the center of the ship.

One after another, the members of Bombing 3 pushed over, dived, released, pulled out. And one after another they caught their own little vignettes of the scene below. So alike yet so different, depending on the exact instant when each man’s eye stopped the action long enough to record his picture.

For Joseph Godfrey, rear-seat man in No. 5 plane, there was the Zero that belatedly turned up just as the squadron pushed over: “So close I felt I could have spit in the pilot’s eye.” For Lieutenant Dave Shumway there was the fighter plane blown over the carrier’s side by the blast from Holmberg’s bomb. For Ensign Charles Lane it was the pullout after the dive—yanking on the stick with both hands and thinking he would never make it. For Ensign Philip Cobb there were the chunks of flight deck and planes thrown into the air. If he ever got back to the Yorktown, he knew this was one Japanese ship he wouldn’t have to worry about for the rest of the battle.

The last four men to dive thought so too. The carrier was now a mass of flames, and it seemed a waste to drop any more bombs on her. So Ensigns Elder and Cooner picked out a nearby “cruiser” (actually a destroyer), while Lieutenant Wiseman and Ensign Butler went after a battleship. All had the satisfaction of seeing smoke and flames around the stern of their new targets.

Max Leslie was clearing out now. Going to the squadron rendezvous just over to the southeast, he circled for five or ten minutes waiting for other planes to show up. Only Ensign Alden Hanson appeared; the rest were probably going home on their own. But while he waited, Leslie watched with satisfaction as explosions continued to rock the carrier attacked by Bombing 8. Then he saw other huge explosions erupting from two ships some 10-12 miles to the west. They looked like carriers too and somebody was thoroughly wrecking them.

The dive bomber pilots from the Enterprise and the Yorktown would long argue who struck the first blow at Midway. Coming in from different directions—unaware that anyone else was there—each group told very much the same story. Each found Nagumo’s carriers untouched. Each attacked in the same six-minute span. Pulling out, each suddenly noticed the other at work. And, it might be added, there were enough unprovable claims to remove any fears that the debate might end. No one would ever really know.

TAKAYOSHI MORINAOA could see it coming. The first three bombs were near-misses just off the Kaga’s port bow, but there was no doubt about this fourth one. It was heading right at the flight deck … in fact, right at him.

He threw himself down on the deck, closed his eyes, held his hands over his ears. It landed with a splintering crash by the after elevator. Raising his head, Morinaga looked around: only three of the large group standing with him were still alive.

Captain Jisaku Okada probably never even knew about it At almost the same instant he was killed by another bomb landing just forward of the bridge. It happened to hit a fuel cart, temporarily parked there to service the planes back from Midway. The whole thing exploded in a ball of fire, drenching the bridge with flaming gasoline. Nobody up there escaped.

Standing a little aft in the air command post, Commander Amagai ducked the torrent of fire. He didn’t know about the fuel cart and assumed the whole inferno came from an “awful new kind of Yankee bomb.”

More hits were coming. As Petty Officer Yokochi tried to reach his plane; one blast stunned him, then another hurled him over the side of the ship like a ball. He came to seconds later, bobbing about in the water.

Commander Yamasaki, the Koga’s chief maintenance officer, wasn’t so lucky. As he raced for cover across, the flight deck, a bomb seemed to land right on top of him. He simply disappeared in the flash—not a trace of him left. Watching from the air command post, Commander Amagai had a curiously philosophical reaction: “Those who vanish like the dew will surely be quite happy.”

There was such an element of fate about it all, Amagai no longer felt frightened. With resignation he now looked unconcernedly at the falling bombs, even thought he could distinguish colors painted on them.

To some it seemed forever, but actually it was all over in a couple of minutes. As the last of those dark blue planes pulled out, the Kaga had been squarely hit by at least four bombs, and probably more, for in the chaos of exploding planes and ammunition nobody could really make a careful count.

On the Akagi Teiichi Makishima ground away with his movie camera. As the only newsreel man brought along, he had the run of the flagship, and now he was out on the air command post catching every dreadful detail of the Koga’s agony. The censors would have something to say about it later, but at the moment he was taking everything.

At first he thought the Kaga might somehow survive. The towering columns of water from those early near-misses looked hopeful. But then came the terrible moment when the whole front of her bridge turned yellow with flame, and he found himself muttering aloud, “She is beaten at last.”

It was at this dramatic point that he ran out of film. Ducking into the chart room, he spent the next two or three minutes frantically threading a new cartridge. Then back on deck just in time to hear the Akagi’s own lookout scream, “Dive bombers!”

Incredibly, they were all caught by surprise. Admiral Kusaka was watching the Akagi’s first fighter take off for the coming attack on the U.S. fleet—that was still his chief concern. Captain Aoki was concentrating on the last of the American torpedo planes—a few were still hovering about. On the battleship Kirishima, some 5,000 yards away, they even saw the planes above the Akagi. The executive officer grabbed the radiophone, but by the time he got through it was too late.

Teiichi Makishima gamely swung his camera on the planes he saw hurtling down. He could make out three of them, getting bigger every second. Then he had enough—he was a landlubber cameraman, not a sailor—and he hit the deck.

Commander Fuchida watched a little longer. Suddenly he saw some black objects fall from the bombers’ wings. Then he too had enough and scrambled behind a protective mattress.

A blinding flash—the whole ship shuddered—as a bomb ripped through the radio aerial and exploded only five yards off the port side forward. A mighty column of filthy black water rose twice as high as the bridge, cascaded down on the officers huddled there. For a brief, terrifying second Nagumo’s navigation officer, Commander Sasabe, gazed at this water column and thought he saw his mother’s face.

Right afterward—some say just before—a second bomb landed on the flight deck opposite the bridge. This time the shock wasn’t so bad—but only because it cut so easily through the elevator amid ships and exploded on the hangar deck below. There it set everything off—planes, gas tanks, bombs, torpedoes. Flames gushed up, spreading to the planes spotted on the flight deck.

Then a third bomb smashed the very stern of the ship, hurling the planes parked there into a jumbled heap. Worse, it jammed the ship’s rudder so she could no longer steer.

That was all. Seconds later the planes were gone, and for a brief moment, anyhow, there was no sound but the crackling flames. Looking down at the blazing wreckage, Mitsuo Fuchida began to cry.

At about the same time Teiichi Makishima was taking his movies, Commander Hisashi Ohara stood on the navigation bridge of the Soryu, also watching the Kaga under attack. Bombs were hitting her, and he could see the fires breaking out. Then a sudden yell from the lookout on his own ship: “Enemy dive bombers—hole in the clouds!”

He looked up in time to see about a dozen planes screaming down on the Soryu. Next instant the first bomb hit the port side of the flight deck by the forward elevator … then another right in front of the bridge. The blast blew Ohara backward about five yards. It didn’t particularly hurt—felt rather like being tossed in a steam bath. It wasn’t until he returned to his post and everyone began throwing towels over his face that he realized how badly burned he must be.

By now a third bomb had landed aft, and the whole flight deck was blazing. There may have been other hits too, but it was hard to tell—planes and ammunition were exploding all over the ship. Within three minutes she was obviously gone, and some of the U.S. dive bombers shifted to the screening vessels. The destroyer Isokaze took a near miss off her stern.

It all happened so quickly many on the Soryu had no warning at all. Juzo Mori was down in the ready room with the other pilots from the Midway strike. They couldn’t get anybody to hear their report, and now they were lounging in the big leather chairs, munching rice balls and griping about the mysterious ways of the bridge. Then the battle bugle blew, and a voice came over the loudspeaker saying the Kaga was under attack.

Some of the younger pilots rushed out to watch, but the debonair Mori preferred to take it easy. They’d call when they needed him. He was still relaxing with about a dozen others when, without warning, there was a frightful jar. The ship heeled violently to starboard, apparently in an emergency turn to port. Next instant the whole wall of the ready room split with a crash, and flames poured in.

The pilots made a mad dash for the single door. Mori happened to be last, but he remembered his Rugby—a game he enjoyed—and by the time they emerged, he was first.

Tatsuya Otawa, another of the pilots in the group, stumbled onto the flight deck to find it already a mass of flames. Everything was blowing up—planes, bombs, gas tanks. He had time for only the briefest glance. Then a roaring explosion blasted him over the side of the ship. Still perfectly conscious, he had the presence of mind to tuck his legs up under him and clasp his hands under his knees. He sailed into the water “cannonball-style.”

On the Hiryu Lieutenants Tomonaga and Hashimoto had spent a busy hour getting ready for the coming strike against the U.S. fleet. Now everything seemed under control, and Hashimoto was catching a breather in the torpedo squadron ready room. A few minutes later Lieutenant Yasuhiro Shigematsu, leader of the Hiryu’s fighters, came bursting in: “Hey, the Akagi’s damaged; the Kaga and Soryu are burning—we’re the only ship that hasn’t been hit!”

Hashimoto could hardly believe it. He hurried to the flight deck and looked around. It was hard to see much: during the morning’s maneuvering the Hiryu had somehow drawn steadily ahead of the other three carriers. Now they were perhaps 10,000 yards astern. But they weren’t so far off that Lieutenant Hashimoto missed the towering smoke and three separate fires on the horizon.

The Hiryu’s executive officer, Commander Kanoe, saw it all from the bridge. It was awful the way everything seemed to happen at once. As he watched those mounting columns of smoke, he was completely heartsick. He could only whisper to himself, “What will become of us?”

LEFTY HOLMBERG didn’t care what happened now. Even if they never got back to the Yorktown, they had accomplished their mission. So when oil began to spatter all over his cockpit, it didn’t make too much difference. He assumed the AA fire had cut his oil line, and he’d soon crash. Never mind. He still had gotten that hit. At worst, he felt like a football player who breaks his leg scoring the winning touchdown.

He waited for the engine to sputter and stop, but it kept running smoothly, the gauges all normal. Finally he realized there was nothing wrong with his engine after all; it was only hydraulic fluid from the system that worked his landing gear and flaps.

He flew on, safely dodging the Japanese destroyer screen. Soon he fell in with other planes from Bombing 3, and together they headed back for the Yorktown. The whole time he kept his eyes peeled for Zeros, but never saw a single one. Others found them all too easily. Down low, working over the torpedo planes, the Zeros couldn’t break up the dive-bombing attack, but they were in a perfect position to strike the bombers pulling out. Goaded by the three blazing carriers, they tried hard for revenge.

A stream of tracer bullets chopped the water around Wade McClusky’s plane. Two Zeros began taking turns, diving on him. They were so much faster, McClusky could think of only one thing to do. Every time one dived, he’d turn sharply toward it. This at least gave the Jap a tougher target and his own gunner Chochalousek a chance to try out the skills he had recently picked up at gunnery school.

Back and forth the three planes went for maybe five minutes. Then a Japanese burst caught McClusky’s plane. The left side of the cockpit was shattered, and he felt as though his left shoulder had been hit with a sledge hammer. He was sure it was the end; he was a goner.

The gunfire died away. Did they get Chochalousek too? McClusky called out over the intercom, but there was no answer. His shoulder was killing him, but he managed to turn around. Chochalousek was still there—unharmed, facing aft, guns at the ready. He had finally picked off one Zero, and the other called it quits.

The SBD flew on, boasting numerous souvenirs of the duel. The plane had been hit 55 times, not counting a few extras contributed by Chochalousek. Noting that the twin barrels on his gun were about eight inches apart, he saw no reason why he couldn’t shoot straight back on both sides of the rudder at the same time. Fortunately, there was enough of the rudder left to get them home.

Machinist’s Mate F. D. Adkins, the rear-seat man in Ensign Pittman’s plane, had a different kind of adventure with his twin gun mount. It broke loose from its rack during Pittman’s dive, but Adkins managed to grab and hang on to it. Then, as they pulled out, a Zero attacked. Steadying the gun on the fuselage, Adkins opened fire and somehow shot down the fighter. No one ever knew how he did it: the gun weighed 175 pounds, and he was a very slight young man who couldn’t even lift the gun when they later got back to the Enterprise.

And, of course, there were those who couldn’t get clear at all. A Zero riddled Lieutenant Penland’s tanks, forcing him down 30 uncomfortable miles from the Japanese. Others simply vanished—sometimes without a word, sometimes with a brief radio call to say they were going down. But for those who did get clear—who dodged the flaming guns of the carriers, who broke through the hail of fire from the screen, who escaped the last snarling Zero—there was a new lift to life as they headed safely home. Men like John Snowden, gunner in Dusty Kleiss’s plane, felt a sudden glow of gratitude — “a good feeling that it was warm and sunny; that the airplane was apparently all in one piece and we had come through it alive.”

FOR Stan Ring, leader of the Hornet’s Air Group, there was only dark disappointment. His fruitless search to the south had yielded nothing; now he was heading back to the ship, all bombs still neatly tucked under the wings of his planes.

To make matters worse, most of Bombing 8 couldn’t pick up the Hornet’s homing signal and were groping around using up what little gas they had left. Fortunately Midway itself was only 60-70 miles away; so the skipper, Lieutenant Commander Ruff Johnson, decided to gas up there before flying on.

Even this was too late for three of the planes. Ensign Guillory’s tank went dry 40 miles out … then Ensign Wood went down 10 miles out … and finally Ensign Auman in the lagoon itself. The remaining eleven planes came gingerly in, rightly suspecting that Midway’s garrison was more than trigger-happy.

They jettisoned their bombs on the reef, hoping this would be interpreted as a friendly gesture—but it almost had the opposite effect. It was one of Colonel Shannon’s favorite theories that the invasion force would begin operations by blasting a hole in the reef, and this certainly looked like it. A few scattered bursts of AA fire nicked three of the planes; then some sharp eyes detected the familiar dumpy silhouette of the SBD.

Lieutenant Stan Ruehlow, leading Fighting 8 back toward the Hornet, wasn’t about to try Midway. It was an easy hop—and he knew the squadron could never make it to the ship—but that big column of smoke over the atoll just looked too dangerous. It could mean almost anything—even that the invasion was on.

Far better to play it safe and get as close to the Hornet as possible. His radio wasn’t working, and the YE-ZB homing device was on the blink, but if he got close enough, maybe the ship could somehow catch his call.

So they all flew on. The minutes passed, the tanks drained lower, and finally the first fighter fell. Then a second. Ruehlow watched them go one after another—some singles, some pairs—till finally there was only the skipper Pat Mitchell, Ensign Dick Gray and himself left. Then Mitchell and Gray went too.

Now Ruehlow was all alone. In a few minutes he’d be down anyway; so deciding there was strength in numbers, he pulled around and slapped heavily into the sea near Mitchell and Gray. By 11:00 A.M. all the planes of Fighting 8 were gone.

There was only one consolation. About half an hour earlier Ruehlow had looked to the north and seen in the distance what he had spent all morning searching for: the Japanese fleet. As frustrating as it must have been to find them only now—when Fighting 8’s tanks were almost dry—it was “a beautiful sight” to see those three carriers burning.

Five other American spectators had a much closer view. Tony Schneider of Bombing 6 now knew all too well that he had run out of gas over the Japanese, not the U.S. fleet. Gliding down as far away as he could, he watched the dive bombers strike. He was proud of the boys and chagrined at himself that he hadn’t done a better job of managing his fuel. His glide finally carried him to a dead-stick landing beyond the sight of the Japanese. But he was close enough to see the smoke and sometimes, he thought, hear the highly satisfying sound of explosions in the distance.

Three other Americans were less fortunate. A pilot and his gunner from Scouting 6 were fished out of the water by the Japanese destroyer Makigumo, and a young ensign from Torpedo 3 was picked up by the Arashi. Little is known about what followed, but it could not have been very pleasant. By now Nagumo’s hopes and ships were shattered; chances are that the interrogation was less than polite. In any case, the men began to talk.

There was still one other American witness left. Peeping from beneath the black cushion that bobbed harmlessly amid the floating debris, Ensign George Gay of Torpedo 8 was very much alive and free.

Until the dive bombers came, he spent most of his time watching a nearby carrier with almost clinical interest. It was engaged in landing Zero fighters, and Gay carefully noted that the approaches were made from far and high (about 1,000-1,500 feet altitude) and coming in from straight astern. The landing intervals were longer than the American, but he was most impressed by the arresting gear.

His studies were somewhat interrupted when a screening cruiser passed within 500 yards of him. She didn’t see him, and he continued his observations.

Then the dive bombers arrived. Gay watched these too with professional interest, and they never looked better. The SBDs seemed to dive faster and lower than he had ever seen them do in practice. He found himself cheering and hollering with every hit

CAPTAIN Ryusaku Yanagimoto fought to get the Soryu under control. Three hits had knocked out the voice tubes, the bridge telephones, the engine room telegraph—there was no way to give orders at all.

Although badly burned, Commander Ohara took over the fire-fighting job. With the bridge communications out, he went down a deck to the air command post, hoping it might be easier to operate from here. No use—all the fire mains were out. He retreated down to the flight deck, where he finally fainted from his burns. At this point he either fell or was blown over the side of the ship. When he came to, he was in the water. A pharmacist’s mate was swimming alongside him, slapping his face to keep him from fainting again and drowning.

By 10:40 both engines had stopped and the whole ship was in flames. The fire reached the torpedo storage room, and the blast almost tore the Soryu apart. At 10:45 a badly injured Captain Yanagimoto shouted orders to abandon ship.

When the order came, CPO Mori was with the rest of the pilots from the ready room, jammed into a small corner of the boat deck below the bridge. They were so tightly packed together they couldn’t even raise their arms. As still more men crammed in, they began climbing on each other’s shoulders to make more room. All the time the flames crept closer.

Somebody tried to lower a cutter; it stuck in the davits, one end dropping. Soon many of the men were jumping. Mori himself hung on; the distance down just looked too far. Finally he noticed that the long Pacific swell occasionally brought the sea within safer reach. Timing himself carefully, he leaped clear of the deck and grabbed the fall of an empty davit, hoping to lower himself into the water. But nothing was attached to the other end of the line; it simply shot through the pulley, and Mori plummeted straight down.

He bobbed to the surface and cleared the ship. Next instant a boat, loosened from somewhere, plunged into the water nearby. It landed upside down, but Mori helped some men right it, and he baled it out with his flying boot. They all climbed in and began paddling away. This proved a slow business, for they only had one oar.

CWO Otawa didn’t even have that, as he treaded water some distance away. But he had something else, maybe better. In the pocket of his flight jacket he still carried his lucky talisman from the Narita Shrine near Tokyo.

He continued swimming—alone yet not alone. Every, time the swell lifted him up, he could look “downhill” and see hundreds of heads dotting the water all around. In the distance he could see the Soryu, and farther off the burning Kaga.

The fire was now so hot on the Kaga that Commander Amagai could no longer hang on at the air command post. No one was around to give any orders, so on his own initiative he led a working party to a lower deck to try and organize the fire-fighting.

Huge explosions were ripping through the side of the ship, hurling out men and chunks of planes like projectiles. Amagai couldn’t reach the hangar deck, where the fire was worst, but it looked like an inferno.

Indeed it was. Hearing shouts that the hangar deck was on fire, CWO Morinaga had rushed there right after the bombing, but the situation was already hopeless. None of the fire mains was working. In desperation Morinaga organized a bucket brigade, using the latrines alongside the deck. The results were as pitiful as might be expected. Then he tried throwing “combustibles” overboard—but on a carrier almost everything is combustible. The fires and explosions steadily spread, finally cornering him on a small open deck right under the bridge.

Above, everything was in flames. Below, he still had a chance if he could only get down to the next deck. The ladder was red-hot, but there was a cutter lashed to the side of the ship. The canvas lashing was taut, but he clutched at it and lowered himself by his fingers. Painfully he worked his way down the outside of the boat, finally swinging onto the deck below. He still wonders how he did it.

At last he was safe for a moment—better than that, with friends. Commander Amagai was here, along with many of the other pilots. The Kaga’s air officer had given up any hope of stopping the fire; he was now mainly concerned with saving his pilots for some better day. He heard no orders to abandon ship, but what difference did it make? On his own initiative he told his men, “Jump into the sea.”

Moringaga yanked off his summer flying suit, his flight boots, even his senim bari. Stripped to his shorts, he leaped out as far as he could. A few of the new conscripts said they didn’t know how to swim, but Amagai had them jump anyhow—it was better than staying here. Only the assistant air officer Lieutenant Ogawa didn’t go. He was just too badly hurt by one of the first bomb hits. He said good-bye to Amagai and hobbled back toward the fire.

In the water Amagai pulled away from the ship, using a stately breast stroke that was rather out of keeping with his reputation as one of Nagumo’s more dashing airmen. He was none too soon. He looked back and could see the paint on the Kaga’s starboard side was starting to burn. Ahead in the distance, he noticed for the first time that the Akagi was on fire too.

“Anybody who isn’t working, get below!” Commander Masuda shouted above the general confusion on the Akagi’s bridge. The fire was bad enough without a lot of bystanders in the way. Commander Fuchida, still too weak from appendicitis to be of much use, went down to the ready room. So did a thoroughly shaken Teiichi Makishima, who had stopped taking his newsreel shots.

But the ready room was no place to be. Already jammed with burn cases, it quickly filled with smoke and heat, driving both Fuchida and Makishima back to the air command post Clearly the fire was spreading fast.

No one knew it better than the Akagi’s damage control officer Commander Dobashi. He strung out his hoses, but the power was out and the pumps didn’t work. He tried flooding the ammunition storage rooms, but the valves were too badly damaged in the all-important after areas. In helpless rage he buckled on his samurai sword; if he could do nothing else, he’d at least go down in the ancient tradition.

On the bridge the Akagi’s navigator, Commander Miura, found it impossible to steer the ship. The bomb that landed by the fantail jammed her rudder 20° to port, and her speed was falling off. She was going around in circles. He rang the telegraph to stop engines, but nothing happened. Since the voice tube and phones were all out, he finally sent a man below to find out what was wrong.

The machinery was all right, but it turned out that every man in the starboard engine room was dead—suffocated by fire sucked down through the exhaust system. The engines themselves were still running in eerie fashion, completely unattended.

Miura did the only thing he could do. With his rudder jammed and half the engineers gone, at 10:42 he shut off the boilers and stopped the ship.

As the Akagi lost headway, the flames roared forward. At 10:43 Zero parked right below the bridge caught fire, and the blaze quickly spread to the bridge itself. Flames licked into the windows, and the heat was unbearable.

It was clear to Admiral Kusaka that the Akagi could no longer serve as flagship. She couldn’t steer; the fires were spreading; the radio was out, and it was impossible to direct the battle, by semaphores and signal flags from a burning bridge. He urged Admiral Nagumo to transfer to some other ship.

“It’s not time yet,” Nagumo muttered, standing transfixed near the compass.

Captain Aoki came over. Tears in his eyes, he begged, “Leave the Akagi to me; you must shift the flag.”

Nagumo still refused.

It was too much for the pragmatic Kusaka. The samurai spirit was all very well, but a burning flagship was no place to run a fleet. “You are Commander in Chief of the First Carrier Striking Force as well as the Akagi,” he scolded the Admiral. “It’s your duty to carry on the battle… .”

A long silence; then with a barely perceptible nod, Nagumo agreed to go.

No time to lose. The destroyer Nowaki was hovering close by; they would go there. Kusaka had a signalman semaphore the decision and ordered her to send a boat. At the same time, he told the flag secretary Commander Nishibayashi to scout around, find the best way out of this furnace. Nishibayashi soon came running back: all the passages below were on fire.

The only escape was by window. At 10:46 they opened one on the leeward side, tossed out a couple of lines, and began to leave that way. Nagumo went first. An expert in judo, he landed lightly on the flight deck. Kusaka went next, using the other line. Plump and anything but agile, it was too much for him. He lost his grip and fell heavily to the deck, spraining both ankles.

At the moment, he didn’t even notice it. Ammunition was exploding, bullets were flying about, and worst of all, he had lost his left shoe. It flew off as he landed, ending up on a part of the deck that was burning. Would it hurt more trying to retrieve it, or running after the others over a red-hot deck with one shoe off?

He hesitated interminable seconds while the rest of the staff—now waiting on the anchor deck—yelled at him to hurry up. In the end he dashed after them … half-running, half-hopping, burning his foot as expected.

The Nowaki’s launch was alongside, and they all piled in. But instead of going to the destroyer, they headed for the light cruiser Nagara. She had also come up, was bigger and much better equipped. But wherever they went, it couldn’t remove the sting. As they shoved off from the blazing Akagi— every second wracked by some new explosion—Commander Chuichi Yoshioka felt as if he’d left his heart behind.

At 11:30 the Nagara dropped her Jacob’s ladder, and Nagumo climbed aboard with his staff. They were met on the quarterdeck by Rear Admiral Susumu Kimura, who commanded Destroyer Squadron 10 and used the cruiser as his flagship.

“Kimura, do you think the Nagara could tow the Akagi?” were Nagumo’s first words.

“It may be difficult,” Kimura replied, choosing his words tactfully, “in view of the actual circumstances of the Akagi.”

Kusaka went immediately to the bridge to break out a vice admiral’s flag for Nagumo. It turned out there was none on board, so he took the flag Kimura flew as a rear admiral. It looked the same except for a red strip across the bottom. This was ripped off, and the remains hoisted to the yardarm. The effect was a bit tattered, but certainly no worse than the fleet.

ADMIRAL Isoroku Yamamoto was apparently feeling much better. Under the weather the day before, he had his usual breakfast this morning—boiled rice, miso soup, eggs and dried fish. His touch of vanity seemed to be thriving too. Most of the staff were dressed in fatigues or their regular blues (a few dandies wore British-type shorts), but the Commander in Chief—along with his chief of staff and Captain Takayanagi—was resplendent in starched whites. Yamamoto even wore his gloves.

Now he stood on the navigation bridge of the great Yamato, receiving reports, searching the seas, casually watching the 18 ships of the Main Body. It was just 7:00 A.M. and they were steaming along some 450 miles behind Nagumo’s carriers.

So far there was not much excitement. Nagumo was still operating under radio silence, and on the Yamato they only knew what they could pick up by monitoring the planes. They learned that a PBY had found the carriers … that Tomonaga wanted a second strike … that the Midway-based planes were attacking. And at 7:28 they heard the Tone’s No. 4 plane report that U.S. ships were already on the scene.

Considering that all their planning had been based on completely the opposite assumption, the Admiral and his staff adjusted to the new situation with surprising ease. Far from being alarmed, they were delighted. If the American fleet was already out, they’d polish it off that much sooner. And when the Tone’s plane reported “what appears to be a carrier,” they grew even more excited. Captain Kuroshima assured everyone that Nagumo had a reserve wave of torpedo planes with just this contingency in view.

“It all turned out just as we wanted,” thought Commander Watanabe of the operations staff. Nothing that happened during the next two hours changed his opinion. By now, Nagumo had opened up his radio, and while he was in direct touch with Yamamoto only twice, the gist was completely reassuring: he had taken many blows; he had suffered no damage; he was hot after the enemy fleet.

Then, just before 10:30, an unexpected message came up from the radio room. Watanabe caught it over the voice tube —there was nothing formal about it—just something monitored over the air that the radio room thought the bridge should know right away. A hurried voice reported, “The Akagi is on fire!” Watanabe rushed to the battle command post and passed the word directly to Admiral Yamamoto. The Admiral asked Captain Kuroshima whether it might not be wise to confirm that the carriers had actually launched their torpedo strike at the U.S. fleet. If this hadn’t been done, it could mean trouble.

No need to do that, said Kuroshima. Of course the attack had been launched. It was all in his plan.

More traffic was monitored—a fire on the Kaga, on the Soryu too. Still, Yamamoto’s staff refused to get too worried. No reason to suppose the damage was serious … ships were bound to get hit in action … the Hiryu was going strong … the real battle was just beginning.

At 10:50 the Yamato’s communications officer hurried up to the bridge, handed a new message to Yamamoto’s signal officer Commander Wada. He took a look, silently gave it to the chief of staff, Admiral Ugaki. He also looked and just as silently handed it to the Commander in Chief.

It was from Rear Admiral Hiroaki Abe on the Tone. Second in command of the Striking Force, he had automatically taken over while Nagumo was shifting his flag to the Nagara. Abe pulled no punches:

Fires are raging aboard the Kaga, Soryu, and Akagi resulting from attacks carried out by land-based and carrier-based attack planes. We plan to have the Hiryu engage the enemy carriers. In the meantime, we are temporarily retiring to the north, and assembling our forces… .

Yamamoto handed it back without a word. He seemed stunned. Searching his face for some kind of clue, Yeoman Noda felt it was utterly “frozen”—not even an eyebrow moved.

AT THE same time that Admiral Abe radioed the Commander in Chief, he also sent a message to Admiral Yamaguchi On the Hiryu, now almost out of sight to the north. “Attack enemy carriers,” he ordered.

Yamaguchi didn’t need to be told. That was what he had wanted to do all morning. After taking one look at the billowing smoke far astern, he had already given the orders. He simply blinkered back to Abe: “All our planes are taking off now for the purpose of destroying the enemy carriers.”

Men raced about the Hiryu’s decks getting ready. If there was anyone in the crew who failed to appreciate the crisis, he soon got the word. The loudspeaker tersely described the damage to the other three carriers and announced it was “now up to the Hiryu to carry on the fight for the glory of greater Japan.”

The air officer, Commander Kawaguchi, hammered out the plan of attack. Ideally, of course, both dive bombers and torpedo planes should go together on a coordinated strike. But it would take an hour to put torpedoes on the planes back from Midway, and the time had passed for games like that. The dive bombers were ready; they’d go at once. The torpedo planes would follow later. The all-important thing was to launch an attack—any kind of attack—as soon as possible.

Lieutenant Michio Kobayashi understood all this well. He would be leading the dive bombers, and he was a good choice. A veteran of Pearl Harbor, he had been flying missions since the earliest days. Tall and taciturn, he had a kind of quiet drive that Kawaguchi could trust. Trouble was, he had only 18 dive bombers in his little force.

They were even worse off for fighter escort. They had used up too many trying to cover the carriers during the morning attacks. Now the best that Kawaguchi could do was scrape together six Zeros.

By 10:50 all was set. The dive bomber pilots poured out of the ready room as always, but then came an unusual step. Before manning their planes, they were assembled on the flight deck under the bridge, and Admiral Yamaguchi addressed them. He pointed out they all knew how “critical” the situation was—they were all that was left—hence everything depended on their efforts. But for this very reason, he stressed, they mustn’t be reckless. It would be a temptation to do something foolhardy, but Japan’s hopes depended on their coolness and skill.

The little group broke up, and the 18 men made for their planes as the motors began turning over. On impulse Commander Kawaguchi rushed up to his Academy classmate Lieutenant Takenori Kondo, leader of a bomber section. They shook hands as Kawaguchi urged his friend on. “I’ll do my best,” Kondo smiled. Then with a wave he was off.

At 10:54 the first Zeros roared off the deck, and by 10:58 the whole force was in the air. They wasted no time in climbing and circling; every minute counted as they quickly headed east.

Watching them go from the air command post, Commander Kawaguchi prayed for revenge.

CHAPTER 9

Dead in the Water

ONLY TWO HOURS HAD passed since Wade McClusky left with the Enterprise’s dive bombers, yet it seemed an eternity to Commander Leonard Dow. As Spruance’s communications officer, “Ham” Dow would know the results of the strike as soon as anyone, yet he knew nothing—except that McClusky was long overdue. He should have reached the Japanese at 9:20; now it was 10:00, and still no word from him.

To make matters worse, radio reception was bad—lots of static and fading—and some fool in the Aleutians kept sending inconsequential messages, which CINCPAC dutifully relayed for the Enterprise’s information. Dow finally asked Pearl to stop. If he couldn’t hear McClusky, at least he could be spared this useless stuff.

The tension seeped over the whole ship—in fact, the whole task force—affecting all ranks. Lieutenant Commander Bromfield Nichol, Spruance’s operations officer, felt the “terrific anxiety” of a man who had been deeply involved in the planning. Lieutenant (j.g.) Wilmer Rawie, a young pilot not assigned to the strike, had the empty feeling that comes from not being with friends in trouble.

On the screening destroyer Monaghan a very green ensign named Robert Gillette stood nervous and fidgeting like the rest. Then he noticed the skipper, Lieutenant Commander Bill Burford, deeply engrossed in a book. Burford had a knack of being in the thick of things (he had rammed a midget sub at Pearl Harbor), and Gillette assumed he must now be doing some last-minute brushing up on tactics. Closer inspection revealed that the Commander, imperturbable as ever, was poring over a “girlie” joke book.

At 10:05 the long wait ended. Through the static-filled air came a message from McClusky indicating that he was at last in contact with the enemy. But beyond that, it was anybody’s guess. More long minutes of static. At 10:08 a frantic Miles Browning shouted over the radio, “Attack immediately!” More static.

On the screening destroyer Balch Captain Edward P. Sauer was listening too. Reception varied so much from ship to ship that he never caught McClusky’s contact report at all. His first clue that the Commander had found the enemy was an unmistakably American voice that suddenly burst over the circuit, “Wow! Look at that bastard burn!”

In the radio room of the cruiser Astoria a similar group was tuned in on Max Leslie and the dive bombers from the Yorktown. If Leslie sent a contact report, they never caught it, but they too got occasional hints that a lot was going on. Once through the static they heard an especially jubilant voice cry, “How we doin’, Doc?”

More long minutes of waiting. Then, around 11:00, some specks in the western sky. But they turned out to be Jim Gray’s Fighting 6—deeply disappointed men who never linked up with the SBDs and could shed no light on the attack.

Finally around 11:50 the Enterprise’s dive bombers began coming in. Not in proud formations, the way they went out, but in twos and threes … and sometimes alone. Wade McClusky led this straggling parade, and it had been a rough trip back for the air group’s skipper. First, he was shot up by the Japs … next the ship was 60 miles from Point Option, where he was meant to find her … then he almost landed on the Yorktown by mistake. But now at last he was dropping down—with only five gallons of gas left.

At this point he was waved off by the landing signal officer Lieutenant (j.g.) Robin Lindsey. It seemed another plane was still in the landing area. But McClusky wasn’t about to stay up any longer. He playfully thumbed his nose at Lindsey and came in anyhow.

Rushing to Flag Plot, he reported to Admiral Spruance: three carriers hit and burning; a fourth one hadn’t been touched. He was still giving his account when the Enterprise’s executive officer Commander W. F. Boone suddenly broke in: “My God, Mac, you’ve been shot!” McClusky had forgotten to mention it, but blood was indeed trickling from his jacket sleeve to the deck. He was hustled off to sick bay with five different wounds in his left arm and shoulder.

In the confusion, his news of the fourth carrier was apparently overlooked. So was a similar report by Dick Best when he landed a few minutes later and checked in with Miles Browning.

On deck, anxious eyes carefully counted the planes from each squadron as they sputtered in. The task was anything but cheerful. Apart from the frightful losses of Torpedo 6, so many of the dive bombers were gone too—18 out of 32 altogether.

Most of them ran out of gas on the way back. Partly it was that long, relentless search for the enemy; partly the Enterprise’s miscalculation in estimating where she could be found again. At that, some of the pilots almost made it—Lieutenant Dickinson was picked up only ten miles from the ship. But others were gone for good. Lieutenant Charles Ware brilliantly guided his division through the attack and two melees with the Zeros … then vanished, choosing a course home that could lead only into the empty sea.

The Hornet’s fliers had an even rougher time. Stan Ring led Scouting 8 safely back after their wild-goose chase south; a plane from Bombing 8 came with them; then nothing. When Clayton Fisher, the returnee from Bombing 8, went down to the squadron ready room, the unassigned pilots crowded around him in anguish: “Fisher, you’re the only pilot in our squadron to get back; and nobody has come in from Fighting 8 and Torpedo 8!”

Ultimately three more SBDs from Bombing 8 did turn up, but that was it. The minutes dragged by with no sign of the rest. Thirty-nine planes had vanished. The only other arrival was a fighter from the Yorktown, badly mauled by Zeros. Returning from the strike, its wounded pilot picked the Hornet as the first U.S. carrier he saw. Thumping down heavily on the flight deck, his guns went off and raked the island structure, killing several men. A shaken crew went back to their vigil.

The shipboard members of Torpedo 8 refused to give up hope. The personnel officer, Lieutenant George Flinn, knew the planes could keep flying five hours and 20 minutes at the most, but long after that deadline he still searched the skies. Some miracle just might bring them home. Even when everyone else had given up, he kept chicken dinners ready for them all.

At least the wait was shorter on the Yorktown. Her planes had been launched an hour later, and except for the fighter that crash-landed on the Hornet, they had no trouble finding their way back. The ship was just where Commander Arnold said she would be. By 11:15 Max Leslie’s dive bombers were overhead, but at the last minute it was decided not to land them until Fighting 3 returned—Jimmy Thach’s men would be lower on gas.

So the bombers orbited, but their good news wouldn’t keep any longer. One of them signaled by Aldis lamp that they had sunk an enemy carrier. Cheers rippled through Task Force 17, and scuttlebutt quickly took over. It was said that the Japanese fliers, having lost their ship, were landing at Midway and surrendering to the Navy.

Admiral Fletcher wasn’t yet ready to celebrate. There were supposed to be four carriers out there, and he still knew of only two. He had heard nothing from the PBYs for five hours, and so far it was impossible to get a clear picture from his own planes now circling above. Were there really two other carriers? If so, where were they?

He decided to have another look to the northwest. At 11:20 he sent off Lieutenant Wally Short with 10 of the 17 dive bombers he had been holding in reserve all morning.

Meanwhile, Jimmy Thach had returned, and after another interruption while the Combat Air Patrol was relieved and strengthened, the fighters began landing about 11:45. Once again the crew went through the agonizing business of counting. It was better than it might have been: four out of six came home.

Thach hurried to Flag Plot, reported to Admiral Fletcher: three carriers definitely out of action, the battle seemed to be “going our way.” Well, that cleared up part of the mystery. Fletcher now knew there was at least a third carrier out there. What about a fourth? Thach couldn’t say. He saw only the three that were burning. He didn’t know whether there was still another one or not.

At this moment the Yorktown’s air-raid alarm began sounding: bogeys, lots of them, coming in from the west. Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher now knew definitely—beyond any doubt whatsoever—that there was indeed a fourth Japanese carrier around.

“Bogeys, 32 miles, closing,” the Yorktown’s radar officer, Radio Electrician V. M. Bennett, reported at 11:52. They were also climbing, which ruled out friendly planes and the possibility of a torpedo attack. It all added up to enemy dive bombers, and since the Yorktown was first in their line of approach, she would clearly be the target.

The screening destroyers moved in close, the cruisers Astoria and Portland stood off to starboard, putting themselves between the carrier and the coming storm. The Yorktown herself turned southwest, showing her stern to the attackers. She cranked up her speed from 25 to 30.5 knots.

She was all buttoned up. Fuel lines were drained and filled with carbon dioxide. A portable gasoline tank on the flight deck was pitched overboard. Repair parties were at their posts, doctors and medics at every dressing station. Her guns were manned, all pointing west.

And no carrier boasted more fire power. The Yorktown’s gunnery officer Lieutenant Commander Ernest J. Davis had a simple theory that if you put enough bullets in the direction of attacking aircraft, eventually some plane would run into one. Carrying out this idea, he even borrowed all the spare machine guns from the planes in the hangar and lashed them to the catwalk rails.

But the Yorktown’s first line of defense lay in her Combat Air Patrol—12 fighters orbiting restlessly above the ship. As soon as the alarm sounded, Lieutenant Commander Pederson moved into action, vectoring them out toward the approaching bogeys. Now they were converging on a point 10,000 feet up, some 15-20 miles to the west. Flying his F4F, Lieutenant (j.g.) Scott McCuskey peered ahead. There coming straight toward him was a group of 18 planes. He felt butterflies deep inside—like playing football, just before, the opening whistle… .

LIEUTENANT Yasuhiro Shigematsu couldn’t resist the temptation. His six Zeros were meant to escort the Hiryu’s dive bombers now winging toward the American fleet. But there, right below, was a group of U.S. planes heading home for their carriers. They looked like torpedo planes (actually they were SBDs), but whatever the type, they were perfect targets. He decided he could pick these off and get back on station before Lieutenant Kobayashi’s bombers ever reached the enemy force.

The Zeros roared down on the SBDs, but they proved far more battle-wise than expected. Shigematsu got none of them, and they shot up two of his planes so badly they limped back home. Thoroughly mauled, he broke off and rejoined Kobayashi. The fighters were back in plenty of time, but there were now only four of them to protect the bombers.

The formation flew on. The Chikuma’s No. 4 and No. 5 search planes had been ordered to point the way, but Kobayashi now had some far better guides. The planes Shigematsu attacked were not the only Americans going home. The air was full of them, all heading back from the Japanese carriers. Kobayashi slipped behind one group and tagged along.

Just before noon, 30 miles ahead, he saw what he wanted. There, beyond a bank of clouds and surrounded by bristling cruisers and destroyers, steamed a great carrier. He opened up on his radio and ordered the rest of his 18 dive bombers, “Form up for attack.”

Then it happened. From somewhere above—and with no warning whatsoever—a dozen U.S. fighters hurtled down on Kobayashi’s little formation, ripping it apart, and dropping six planes almost simultaneously into the sea.

THE burning planes reminded Lieutenant John Greenbacker of falling leaves as he watched from the Yorktown on the horizon. The fighter-director radio crackled with the excited voices of pilots swarming in for the kill: “1202: all Scarlet planes, bandits 8 miles, 255° … 1204: planes still on course … 1204: OK, break ‘em up, Scarlet 19; going to attack about 3 enemy bombers about 5 miles … 1205: TALLY-HO! Join up on me … Scarlet 19, get those bombers on my right wing. Let’s go!”

Lieutenant Greenbacker felt sure that none of the Japanese would escape, but eight somehow broke through. On they came toward the Yorktown, fanned out in a wide arc, one behind the other. They were still out of antiaircraft range, and the wait seemed interminable as the men of Task Force 17 braced themselves for the blow.

“What the hell am I doing out here?” wondered Donat Houle, a young seaman on the destroyer Hughes, and it was indeed a long way from home in New Hampshire. On the Yorktown herself Machinist’s Mate Worth Hare waited silently in Repair 5, down on the third deck. It was dark, and he was deep inside the ship. A feeling of fear burned in his stomach. At the battle dressing stations, the medics lay down in their flashproof clothing, covered their faces with their arms. Out on deck the British observer, Commander Michael B. Laing produced a small black notebook and began jotting down impressions to send back to London.

Captain Buckmaster moved out on the navigation bridge. He was supposed to stay in the forward conning tower when the ship was in action, but he couldn’t maneuver from there. So he kept his exec under cover instead, ready to take over if anything happened. Buckmaster himself stood out in the open, yelling instructions through the narrow slits in the side of the tower.

On the flag bridge Admiral Fletcher still worked at his charts. A staff officer entered and politely reported, “The attack is coming in, sir.”

“Well,” said Fletcher cheerfully, “I’ve got on my tin hat. I can’t do anything else now.”

In these last, suspenseful moments there were, oddly enough, a few men present who didn’t have the faintest idea that the enemy was about to strike. Circling above the Yorktown, Max Leslie and his squadron of dive bombers had waited while the fighters landed; now they were about to come in themselves. Intent on their instruments, watching the carrier’s movements, none of them noticed the air battle erupting to the northwest. Nor could they hope to know the tension and turmoil on the ships below.

Leslie led the way into the landing pattern. Lieutenant Lefty Holmberg followed close behind, concentrating on the job of getting his wheels and flaps down, his propeller in high rpm. He noticed that the skipper was in a nice position to get aboard; he was pleased to see that his own plane was just the right distance behind. Suddenly the landing signal officer gave Leslie a “wave-off.” Strange—Leslie always made it the first try. Holmberg turned to land himself. He too was waved off. Puzzled, he passed close along the port side of the flight deck, trying to see why they didn’t let him land.

He was just opposite the after gun gallery when the four 5-inchers opened up. Smoke, fire, blast scared him half out of the cockpit. Thoroughly frightened, he darted away from the ship and joined up with Leslie. The Yorktown’s radio crackled a belated warning: “Get clear—we are being attacked.”

Gun bursts peppered the sky, but the Japanese planes kept coming. Soon they were easy to see, even without binoculars. A burst caught one; it flared up and fell; the other seven flew on. Now they were almost over the Yorktown.

Signalman William Martin watched them all the way. He was assigned to a searchlight mounted on the Yorktown’s smokestack: his job was to challenge approaching aircraft. He knew perfectly well who these were, but as a good signalman he flashed the challenge anyhow. He got his answer soon enough: the lead plane flipped over and began to dive. Unfazed, Martin opened the searchlight shutters wide, hoping to blind the pilot and spoil his aim.

No one would ever know whether it worked. At the same moment Commander Davis’s whole arsenal of automatic guns opened up with a roar. No less than 28 different guns were firing from the starboard side alone. A rain of bullets and shells chopped the bomber in two. But even as it disintegrated, its bomb tumbled free and down toward the Yorktown. Captain Buckmaster caught a brief but vivid impression—it looked oddly like a small keg of nails coming down.

It exploded with a brilliant red-yellow flash, 60 feet high, as it landed on the flight deck aft of the island. Shrapnel swept the area, mowing down the men at the nearest 1.1 guns: 19 out of 20 at mount No. 3, 16 more at No. 4. Ripping through the deck, the blast also set fire to three planes in the hangar below—one of them armed with a 1,000-pound bomb. The hangar deck officer, Lieutenant A. C. Emerson, yanked open the sprinkler system; a curtain of water smothered the flames.

At the 1.1 mounts, a dazed Ensign John d’Arc Lorenz scrambled to his feet, miraculously unhurt. Rallying three other survivors, he somehow managed to get one of the guns going again. Their firing was a little uneven, but four men— two of them wounded—were doing the work of twenty.

Whatever they could do, it would help. The rest of the Japanese were diving now, and it was easy to see (as one man put it) that this was their “varsity.” They were a far cry from the rather sloppy bunch the Yorktown met at Coral Sea—certainly sharper than most American pilots. While the Navy fliers normally released at 2,000 feet, these planes plunged below 1,000, then pulled out barely at mast top. Leading Seaman George Weise watched one come right at him. Manning a machine gun on the side of the smokestack near Signalman Martin’s searchlight, he fired at it all the way down. But it came on anyhow, dropping a bomb that slanted through the flight deck … through the hangar deck … through the second deck … finally exploding in the uptakes of the stack deep inside the ship.

Down in Emergency Boiler Control, Lieutenant (j.g.) Charles Cundiff never understood what premonition made him shout at this instant, “Hit the deck!” But he did, and as his men went flat, white-hot shrapnel ripped across his station from somewhere forward, passing on through the bulkhead aft. None of the men was even scratched.

But this bomb really hurt. Flames and smoke were everywhere—the boiler rooms … the exec’s office … the photo lab … the personnel files … the laundry … the oil and water test laboratories … the officers’ galley … the wardroom annex … the radar room … a whole cross-section of all the things that go into a modern warship. A roaring blast of heat swept up the smokestack, setting the paint on fire and jarring everything loose.

Signalman Martin was hurled from his searchlight platform. He had an odd feeling of floating lazily through the air, high enough to see the whole task force. He was sure he was dead and decided that dying wasn’t so hard after all. He came to seconds later, hanging halfway over the rail two levels below his light. Incredibly, he was unhurt.

Seaman Weise wasn’t as lucky. Legend says he was hurled so high he brushed the wing of the plunging Jap plane. Wherever he went, he ended up on the flight deck unconscious and with a fractured skull.

Heavy black smoke poured from the Yorktown; her speed fell off to barely six knots. Then another Japanese plane dived, this time from the starboard side forward. It was the first to come in that way, and almost made it unnoticed. There was a startled burst of antiaircraft fire, but the bomb was already on the way. It plunged through the forward elevator, exploding 50 feet down in the rag stowage space. The whole area flared up in a tough, persistent fire; but what really worried damage control was not the rag locker, but all the gasoline and 5-inch shells stored next to it

As the bombers pulled out, skimming across the water, the destroyers and cruisers blazed away with everything they had. There was something intoxicating about seeing the enemy right there. Men noticed the most minute details—a yellow stripe on some rudder, two red bands around somebody’s fuselage—and they fired away with abandon. On the destroyer Hughes Ensign John Chase’s 20 mm. battery followed one plane right over the ship; only the gun stop kept them from shooting up their own bridge. Even so, the skipper, Lieutenant Commander Donald Ramsey, was startled enough to rush to the rail and shake his fist at them all.

The Astoria gunners were yelling like wild men, slamming in shells as fast as they could—they fired 204 5-inchers in ten minutes. Chaplain Matthew Bouterse found himself passing cans of 1.1 ammunition to the ready room aft. It was perhaps an odd thing for a chaplain to be doing, but he thought of Pearl Harbor and Chaplain Forgy’s famous words, “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.”

Pulling out of its dive, one Japanese plane turned right toward the Astoria, flying not much more than bridge height. The machine guns went to work, began chopping the plane to pieces … but still it kept coming. As it passed along the starboard side, the pilot turned—waved—and slanted down into the sea just astern. His mission completed, he apparently wanted a look at his enemy before he died.

Some 15-20 miles to the southeast the men on the Enterprise, Hornet and the rest of Task Force 16 strained to see how the battle was going. There were few clues—just the black puffs of antiaircraft fire in the distance, an occasional plane streaking into the sea. Then a heavy smudge of smoke appeared. It didn’t drift away like gun bursts; it clung to the horizon, steady and black. Admiral Spruance judged right away that the Yorktown had been hit.

He detached cruisers Pensacola and Vincennes, the destroyers Benham and Balch, to go over and help. But for most of Task Force 16 there was only frustration. The Yorktown was getting it—just 15 or 20 miles away—and there was nothing they could do.

It was especially frustrating for the men flying air cover over the Enterprise and Hornet. Unlike the rest of the force, they could do something—and right away. When the dive bombers broke through the Yorktown’s fighter defenses, Lieutenant Roger Mehle requested permission to lead his 12 fighters to the rescue. He was told to stay where he was— his job was to protect the Enterprise. But he stretched his orbit (and his orders) anyhow, circling over closer toward the Yorktown.

He finally got a go-ahead and raced over—just too late to intercept. The enemy planes were already in their dives. Adding agony to agony, his guns jammed as he led his flight down on the end of the Japanese column. He disengaged and pulled away, turning the attack over to the next section leader.

In the end they never accomplished much, and the Hornet fighters even less. Still, there were some satisfactions. Ensigns Provost and Halford ganged up on one dive bomber just as he pulled out and started for home. Making a high side attack, they quickly sent him spinning into the sea.

Suddenly it was over. Men blinked, shook their heads, unable to believe the silence. The firing seemed to have gone on forever, yet it was just 12:16—11 minutes since the first ships opened up.

On the Yorktown Admiral Fletcher and his staff stood around on the flight deck, driven from Flag Plot by the fire in the island structure. For the moment Radio Electrician Bennett was about the only person working up there in all the fire and smoke. Normally a dapper little man, he now sat rumpled and grimy, wearing a gas mask, desperately trying to get his radar going again. Down in the galley an old chief spotted another chief—his good friend—lying dead on the deck. He broke down and cried like a child.

Commander Laing stood quietly on deck, as imperturbable as a Royal Naval officer should be. Later he missed his little black notebook—and it was never found. He finally decided it was blown out of his hands when one of the bombs landed. He shrugged off the loss, observing with a delicacy that was entirely unnecessary in the U.S. Navy: “Those Jap baskets came rather a long way to ruin my month’s work.”

The hard statistics, at least, required no notebook to be remembered. Only 7 of the 18 Japanese bombers managed to dive, but 3 of the 7 had scored clean hits—a remarkable performance for so few planes. And even the near-misses took their toll. One landed just astern, killing and wounding many men on the fantail. Another came in so close that it sent Admiral Fletcher diving for cover. He cut his head on something, went back to work, dripping blood on his charts. He finally got a medic to slap on a bandage, and the next time he thought about it was long afterward when, to his astonishment, he got a Purple Heart.

So much for the losses they took. They gave plenty too. The men in Task Force 17 would long argue over who shot down what, but on one thing most were agreed: none of the Japanese escaped. Of the seven that dived, the men said there was not one who lived to tell the tale.

“ENEMY carrier is burning,” radioed one of the Hiryu pilots at 12:45. His plane was now back at the rendezvous area, waiting to join up with any other dive bombers leaving the scene.

Spirits soared on the Hiryu. Lieutenant Hashimoto felt there was only one thing wrong with the message. It didn’t come from Lieutenant Kobayashi … it didn’t even come from a section leader like Lieutenant Kondo. It came, in fact, from a lowly petty officer (even now no one can remember his name) who flew the No. 3 plane in the second group. That meant all the senior pilots were killed; the toll must be very high.

He was right—but more escaped than any of the Americans believed. In the end five dive bombers and one fighter managed to scoot away from the blazing guns of Task Force 17. They escaped singly, in no particular order—just as their wits and luck happened to take them—but by 12:45 all six were heading back to the Hiryu.

Meanwhile preparations raced ahead for the torpedo strike. Commander Kawaguchi had been working on this ever since the dive bombers left. Now he was almost ready. It would be a patchwork affair: nine torpedo planes from the Hiryu, plus an orphan from the Akagi; four fighter escorts from the Hiryu, and one transferred from the burning Kaga.

Anything more would take longer, and Admiral Yamaguchi couldn’t afford the time. Intelligence still said there was only one U.S. carrier, but he now doubted it. No single ship could have done all that to the Akagi, Kaga and Soryu. There must be a second one out there somewhere. Even so, that left it one to one; and the Hiryu would fight on these terms any day. One of the U.S. carriers, anyhow, was now burning—it would be out of action for a long, long time.

COMMANDER Clarence Aldrich seemed everywhere at once. As the Yorktown’s damage control officer he had his work cut out for him—three separate hits, four serious fires belowdecks. Somehow he managed to tackle them all.

There was not a moment to lose—especially with the burning rag locker up forward, next to all that gasoline and ammunition. Aldrich had the magazine flooded with sea water, the gas tank filled with C0_2. Other fire fighters smothered the flames in the island structure, while repair parties went to work on the holes in the flight deck. The big one aft—12 feet wide—called for extra ingenuity. Wooden beams were laid across … a quarter-inch steel plate put over them … then more steel plates tacked down on top of that. In 20 minutes the Yorktown’s flight deck was again open for business.

And all the time the work went on of clearing the dead, caring for the wounded. They were all kinds. There was George Weise, still unconscious from his fall, carried below to the main sick bay. There was the young boy, physically untouched but scared literally speechless. There was Boatswain’s Mate Plyburn, raked across the stomach by a strafing machine gun. He had $500 in his pockets—saved for the day he planned to marry. Now he was dying and he knew it. He begged his friends to take the money and have a good time with it.

Far below, the engineers struggled to get the Yorktown going again. The bomb that exploded in the stack had wrecked two boilers and blown out the fires in the others. Heavy black smoke poured into the firerooms, choking the men at their posts.

Water Tender Charles Kliensmith, the short rough-tough sailor in charge of boiler No. 1, hung on anyhow. The hit had knocked down most of his boiler’s interior brickwork, but otherwise did little perceptible damage. He and his men relit the fires.

None of the other boilers would relight at all. More smoke poured through the forced-draft intakes, smothering the fires. Kliensmith’s gang kept working, although the place was now stifling, and the bare casing glowed red-hot. They knew they were the only source of power for the pumps and auxiliaries needed to keep the Yorktown alive.

But their boiler was not enough to run the ship, and the engine room was clamoring for steam to get the uninjured turbines running again. The boiler division officer Lieutenant Cundiff had been painfully burned, but something had to be done right away. Bandages and all, he crawled into the uptake-intake space, full of the pipes that normally draw the smoke up the stack and bring new air back down again.

A quick look around, and it was all too clear what had happened. The bomb had ruptured the uptake on Kliensmith’s boiler, the intake on the others that could still give steam. Instead of continuing up the stack, Kleinsmith’s smoke was being drawn back down and into the other boiler rooms. Kliensmith was ordered to reduce his fires to the bare minimum necessary to keep the auxiliaries running, while repairs were made and the other boilers relit. In time they’d again build up enough steam to get the Yorktown moving.

Admiral Fletcher couldn’t wait. He had a fleet to run, and a ship dead in the water was no place to do it. Besides, his radio was out, and smoke still billowed up, making flag hoists and the blinkers impractical. About 12:30 he decided to transfer to the Astoria and signaled her for one of her boats.

By 1:00 the Astoria’s No. 2 whaleboat was alongside. Knotted lines were dropped down from the Yorktown’s flight deck, and several staff officers lowered themselves hand over hand. Fletcher was about to go the same way, then thought better of it. After all, he was 56 years old. “Hell,” he said to himself, “I can’t do that sort of thing any more.” So they rigged a line with a bowline in it and lowered the Admiral in style.

They shoved off at 1:13—Fletcher, part of his staff, several enlisted men, including the Admiral’s yeoman Frank Boo. The trip took only 11 minutes, but that seemed plenty to Boo. The sea was calm—no enemy in sight—but he felt sure they’d be strafed if a new Japanese attack caught them there. A whaleboat just didn’t go from one ship to another in mid-Pacific, unless it was important.

To make matters worse, countless 5-inch shell cases bobbed up and down in the water—all looking like submarine periscopes. The Astoria’s crew were especially sensitive about these, for they too felt like sitting ducks while they waited for their Admiral. When he finally climbed aboard at 1:24, everyone breathed more easily.

The Yorktown’s planes also had to transfer. Even with the flight deck repaired, they couldn’t use it while the ship was standing still. Max Leslie’s 17 dive bombers had been ordered to stay clear during the Japanese attack. Now they were told to land and refuel on the Hornet or Enterprise. They’d fly from there until the Yorktown got going again.

It was a relief to have someplace to go. For most of the SBDs it had been a nerve-racking noon hour—part of it spent in dodging bullets from both sides. As one Japanese pilot pulled out of his dive on the Yorktown, he made right for them with all guns blazing. A U.S. fighter appeared from nowhere and shot him down. But next minute it was a “friendly” pilot that attacked them. He veered away at the last second as somebody yelled over the radio, “You silly bastard! Can’t you see these white stars?”

His confusion was understandable. Apart from the problem of split-second identification, everything was getting more and more mixed up: planes from one carrier plopping down on another … combat air patrols overlapping each other’s sector … relays of fighters called in and taking off.

Radio traffic filled the air—a jumble of orders, questions and remarks tossed back and forth in airman’s jargon. Tuned in on the Enterprise’s fighter-director circuit, an enemy eavesdropper heard “Ham” Dow call in a three-plane section for refueling. This gave the Japanese an inspiration: why not clear the sky of every American fighter? Breaking in, he called in English, “All planes return to base, all planes return to base.”

“That was a Jap!” Dow yelled. “Disregard that order to return to base—that was a Jap!”

The Japanese repeated his order.

“The bastards are using our frequency,” Dow cried, and that was the mildest thing he said. This was the first time during the Pacific War that anybody had used radio deception. Later it would be an old story on both sides, but right now it fitted perfectly the standard Western conception of the crafty Oriental. It was also fitting that Americans should see through the trick, and as Dow cursed away, the pilots listened with enjoyment and ever-increasing respect for the wide range of his vocabulary.

Max Leslie had a different kind of problem. Like the rest of his Yorktown dive bombers, he was about to shift over to the Enterprise or Hornet, when Bill Gallagher in the rear seat spotted something in the water maybe eight or ten miles away. They flew over to investigate, with Lefty Holmberg tagging along. It turned out to be a swamped U.S. torpedo plane; its crew were nearby in a rubber raft. Leslie alerted the destroyer Hammann, went back to the carrier to get a new bearing on Task Force 16. By the time he was squared away, he was nearly out of gas, and Holmberg was even lower. They’d probably never make the Enterprise; far better to play it safe and splash beside the Astoria directly below.

The men in Bombing 3 always considered Max Leslie the most methodical pilot in the world, and according to squadron legend, he landed so close to the Astoria he simply walked the wing to the ship’s ladder. It was almost that good. He came down about 50 yards off the cruiser, but as Bill Gallagher launched the rubber boat, he noticed that Leslie was still in the cockpit, apparently slumped over his instruments. Thinking the skipper was stunned by the landing, Gallagher scrambled alongside to lift him out. But there was nothing wrong. The methodical Leslie was just flicking every button on the instrument panel to an “off” position before abandoning his sinking SBD.

It wasn’t as easy for CAP Esders, pilot of the swamped torpedo plane Leslie had spotted. Flying one of the two TBDs in Torpedo 3 to escape the Japanese, Esders started home with a leaking gas tank and his rear-seat man Mike Brazier desperately wounded. Then Machinist Corl joined up with the squadron’s other surviving plane, and for a while the two flew together in the general direction of the U.S. fleet.

Esders asked Brazier if he could possibly change the coils on the radio so he could pick up the Yorktown’s homing device. Brazier answered weakly that he was in very bad shape and didn’t think he could.

“Very well,” Esders replied, writing that hope off. But ten minutes later Brazier called and said he had managed to change the coils after all. By now Corl had drifted off (he later splashed safely near the Enterprise), but thanks to Brazier’s supreme effort, Esders eventually caught the Yorktown’s signal and came on in. Ten miles short of the carrier, he finally ran out of gas and glided down to a water landing.

It was only then that he saw how badly off Brazier really was. Both legs were terribly wounded, and he had been shot seven times in the back. Helped into their rubber raft, Brazier knew very well this was the end. Still, he conversed intelligently, saying he was sorry that he couldn’t do more, He also said he was sorry that he would never see his family again. He finally drifted into a coma, as Wilhelm Esders did the only thing left to do: “I said a prayer to the Almighty, requesting that He receive such brave and gallant men into the Kingdom, and that He bless those that he left behind.”

LIEUTENANT Raita Ogawa aimlessly circled the blazing Akagi. Flying air cover, he was running out of gas with no place to land. The three carriers below were wrecks, and the Hiryu was now too far north to reach.

He looked at his gas gauge. He was down to five gallons. A few minutes more, and he’d be in the ocean. He headed for the cruiser Chikuma, hurrying north after the Hiryu. The other two planes in his section followed along; they were in the same fix.

Circling low, he signaled the Chikuma that he was about to come down by waggling his wings. It turned out that her business was too urgent; she semaphored back, “Can’t pick you up.” But she did hoist her wind-sock and turned briefly into the wind to make a smooth wake to land on.

At 11:50 Raita Ogawa splashed down, sustained by the thought that he was originally trained as a seaplane pilot. He made it easily, and so did the two pilots with him. They scrambled out of their sinking planes—three more swimmers in the ever-growing number that dotted the ocean.

Dozens of men struggled in the water alongside the burning Soryu. Some had been blown there by internal explosions; others jumped when trapped by the fire. Far above them Captain Yanagimoto suddenly appeared, limping onto the semaphore platform off the starboard side of the bridge. He yelled encouragement to the men below, and cried “Long live the Emperor!” About 30 men, swimming directly beneath the bridge, took up the cheer as Yanagimoto disappeared in the flames and smoke.

A crowd of survivors jammed the anchor deck forward, still free of the fire. Some were tossing lines to the men in the water, hauling them back on board to this small corner of safety. Among those brought back was Executive Officer Ohara, faint from his burns. Now he lay on deck, little caring what happened. Dimly he heard the gunnery officer order a signalman to wigwag the Akagi: say the captain was dead, the exec unconscious, what should they do?

The Akagi never answered. She had too many troubles of her own. After Nagumo left, Captain Aoki and several of his officers stuck it out on the bridge as long as they could, but by 11:20 the heat was too much. They lowered themselves to the flight deck and went all the way forward on the windward side. Here they stood in a little group, uncertain what to do next.

They longed to smoke, but had only two cigarettes between them. In the end, they passed these back and forth, and it reminded Commander Miura of the popular song “Senyu” (“War Comrades”), which had a mawkish line about “sharing a cigarette in harmony.” He quoted it, and it was good for a brief, grim laugh.

About 11:35 the torpedo and bomb storage rooms went up, and the fire surged forward. It soon forced Captain Aoki’s group to retreat to the anchor deck, where they found a crowd of survivors already gathered. They were standing around together, when at 12:03 the engines unexpectedly started up and the Akagi began turning to starboard. It was hard to imagine what made this happen, and Ensign Akiyama was sent to try and find out. But no one would ever know what did it. The remaining engineers had all suffocated and were dead at their posts.

Captain Aoki still hoped to save his ship—he sent Nagumo an optimistic message around noon—but certainly the fire was spreading. By 1:38 the situation was bad enough to take a very grave step. He had the Emperor’s portrait transferred to the destroyer Nowaki.

The same step had just been taken on the Kaga, where it had been a losing fight against the fires all morning. For a while the assistant damage control officer, Lieutenant Commander Yoshio Kunisada, felt he was making some progress on the hangar deck; but then the paint began to burn, spreading a thick, oily smoke that nearly suffocated his men. He had the portholes opened, but that was no answer. The draft only fanned the flames. The ports were slammed shut again, but soon Kunisada was back where he started—his men in more danger than ever.

There was nothing to do but leave. The exits were all blocked, so once again the portholes were opened, and about seven of the men, including Kunisada, squeezed through. They found themselves on a narrow bulge that ran along the side of the ship, perhaps 20 feet above the water. It had been built into the Kaga as a stabilizing device when she was originally laid down as a battleship; now it served as a ledge that just might spell safety. It was only a foot and a half wide and slanted down slightly, but they could stand up on it, bracing their backs against the side of the ship.

Still, they felt anything but safe. It was easy to slip off into the water, and stray shots were flying about as the antiaircraft guns on the destroyer screen occasionally opened up on some imaginary target. Soon there were about 20 men out there, all thoroughly frightened. On the way out Kunisada had grabbed a carton of cigarettes from the chief warrant officers’ room, and now he handed the packs around, hoping to cheer the group up. He suggested a smoke might calm their nerves, and he made a great show of his own composure by lighting up in the most casual manner. Hardly anybody followed suit.

“Torpedo, right quarter!” somebody suddenly yelled, and there sure enough, was a white torpedo wake streaking toward the Kaga about 1,000 yards away. It passed just forward of the ship. A brief interval, then another white wake; this one passed just astern. Another interval, then a third wake … and Kunisada saw right away that this one would hit.

BILL BROCKMAN ordered Lieutenant Hogan to take her down. It was 2:05 P.M., and the U.S. submarine Nautilus had just fired her third torpedo at the shattered Japanese carrier 2,700 yards away. For Brockman and the 92 men on the Nautilus it was the climax of six hours and 55 minutes of infinitely careful stalking.

The hunt really began much earlier, on May 28, when the Nautilus took her place in the fan-shaped screen of submarines west of Midway. She was there, of course, in plenty of time; so she just loafed the first few days, while her crew got the feel of things. It was the first war cruise for them all, and for Brockman it was his first command. He was more than up to it. A big burly man, he had a great zest for combat.

On the morning of the 4th the Nautilus submerged at her station just before dawn. She was tuned in on the PBY circuit, and at 5:44, Lieutenant Chase’s plain-English flash came through loud and clear: “Many planes heading Midway.” The position was on the edge of the Nautilus’s sector; she started there right away.

At 7:10 Brockman—glued to the periscope—saw smoke and antiaircraft bursts beyond the horizon. He adjusted his course, and the Nautilus went to battle stations. At 7:55 he saw the tops of masts dead ahead. Soon he was in the enemy screen—strafed by Zeros, depth-bombed by a cruiser. He lay low for five minutes, then popped back to periscope depth for another look around.

He was right in the middle of the Japanese fleet. Ships were on all sides, moving by at high speed, circling violently to avoid him. Flag hoists were up; a battleship was firing her whole starboard broadside battery at him.

At 8:25 he fired two torpedoes at the battleship. Or rather, he thought he did, but almost immediately he discovered his No. 1 tube hadn’t fired. The battleship dodged the other torpedo, a cruiser came racing over, and the Nautilus plopped down to 150 feet.

Now the depth bombing began in earnest. The charges this morning were the first anyone in the Nautilus had ever heard from inside a submarine, and the experience was anything but soothing. Mixed with the hammer blows and thunderclaps were occasional shrill whistles and an odd sound that reminded Radioman I. E. Wetmore of a boy dragging a stick along a picket fence.

To make matters worse, one of the Nautilus’s deck tube torpedoes was leaking air. A thin trail of bubbles rose to the surface, neatly marking the sub’s position. More thunderclaps, then the explosions gradually died away. Brockman began sneaking looks again. Around 9:00 he saw a carrier for the first time. She was dodging and firing her antiaircraft guns, but he had only a glimpse, for his old friend the cruiser saw the periscope and came charging back.

Down again. More depth bombing. Closer than ever before. The sonarman tracking the cruiser’s movements kept up a running patter, like Graham McNamee calling a horse race. A mess attendant promised Brockman that if the Nautilus ever got out of this, he’d write a sermon every day. Then this attack, too, slowly died away.

At 10:29 Brockman was up again, poking around with his periscope. The ships had now vanished, except for some distant masts, but clouds of gray smoke poured up from the horizon. He headed for the scene, and by 11:45 could clearly make out a burning carrier about eight miles away.

The approach was a long, slow business. Even cranked up to two-thirds speed (the most Brockman dared with his batteries running down), the Nautilus only moved at four knots—about as fast as a man might walk. And it was a hot eight-mile “walk” too. To cut noise, all ventilating machinery was off. The sweat dripped into Lieutenant Dick Lynch’s shoes, and his feet “sort of scrunched” as he moved about.

By 12:53 they were near enough to make out some details. Two “cruisers” were hovering near the carrier; her fires seemed to have died down; men could be seen working on the foredeck; it looked as if they might be planning to pass a towing hawser. On the Nautilus Brockman and his exec, Lieutenant Roy Benson, thumbed through their recognition books trying to identify her. There was always the dread of torpedoing a friendly carrier by mistake. No, this one was Japanese, all right; they believed it was the Soryu.

Brockman now faced a classic command decision: try for the undamaged escorts first, or go all-out for the damaged but “high-priority” carrier. He decided to make sure of the carrier.

At 1:59, he fired his first torpedo … then a second … then at 2:05 a third. Brockman—in fact all five officers in the conning tower—felt sure of hits. Fires were again breaking out all over the ship. Satisfied, he dived to 300 feet to sit out the new round of depth bombs that was sure to come.

“JUMP in the water!” Lieutenant Commander Kunisada shouted, as that third torpedo streaked toward the Kaga. But the men standing with him on the bulge wouldn’t move. So he jumped himself, and called the others to join him. They finally did, and all frantically swam to get clear of the ship. Somebody called out that the torpedo was a hit, and Kunisada steeled himself for the concussion—but nothing happened.

Miraculously, it was a dud. Slamming into the Kaga at an oblique angle, the warhead broke off and sank. The buoyant air flask bobbed to the surface not far from Kunisada. Some of the Kaga’s crew paddled over. One or two tried using it as a raft, but most were wild with rage. It was at least a symbol of their troubles, and they rained blows upon it with their fists. “Konchkusho!” they cursed, “Konchkusho! Konchkusho!”

Their best hope of revenge lay some miles to the north. The Hiryu was still very much in the fight. Her dive bombers had struck at noon; by 12:45 her ten torpedo planes were ready too. They would go in two five-plane sections—the first led by Lieutenant Tomonaga, the second by Lieutenant Hashimoto. Normally they flew together—Hashimoto as observer—but they were the only two Academy men left. They might get more mileage if each led a section.

The stocky, taciturn Tomonaga would lead the attack. Hashimoto, still flying observer, would go with Petty Officer Toshio Takahashi. All this settled, they headed for the flight deck.

It was then they discovered Lieutenant Tomonaga’s plane wasn’t ready. The mechanics hadn’t yet repaired the left-wing gas tank, damaged while they were bombing Midway. Tomonaga shrugged it off: “All right, don’t worry. Leave the left tank as it is and fill up the other.”

Hashimoto urged him to take a different plane. No, said Tomonaga, at this stage of the game they needed everything that would fly. To leave even one plane behind would seriously weaken the attack. As for swapping with someone else, he wouldn’t think of it. Everything would work out; the enemy was near; he could get by on one tank.

This didn’t fool anyone. One tank could never get him home again. But it was useless to argue; he had made up his mind. Tomonaga now went to the bridge with Hashimoto and Lieutenant Shigeru Mori, who would lead the fighters. Here they had a final briefing from Admiral Yamaguchi.

The Admiral had some astounding news. A special reconnaissance plane, sent out by the Soryu earlier in the morning, had just returned to report there were not one, or even two, but three U.S. carriers. In addition to the one just bombed, two others were lurking nearby. The Soryu’s pilot discovered them at 11:30, but his radio was out. Hurrying back, he found his own ship in flames and reached the Hiryu at 12:50. He had just made a message drop.

If any confirmation was needed, it came at 1:00. The captured Yorktown pilot was talking. Captain Ariga, commanding Destroyer Division 4, radioed the gist: the carriers involved were the Yorktown, Enterprise and Hornet … they had six cruisers and about ten destroyers with them … the Yorktown was operating independently with two cruisers and three destroyers.

This changed everything. Until now Admiral Yamaguchi assumed that, with one American carrier knocked out, the Hiryu was at least fighting on even terms. But it was two to one against her. Worse, the Hiryu was down to her last planes. Go for the carriers that hadn’t been hit, he stressed, go for the ones that hadn’t been hit.

Again the pilots were assembled on the flight deck right under the bridge. Again Yamaguchi addressed them. They were the very last hope, he said, they must do their utmost for Japan. Then he noticed Tomonaga among the crowd and came down for a last good-bye. Like everyone else, he knew the Lieutenant was flying a plane that could never come back. Shaking Tomonaga’s hand, he thanked him for all he’d done and said, “I’ll gladly follow you.”

The pilots were in their cockpits—the engines warming up—when fresh excitement rippled through the ship. The first planes were coming back from the dive-bombing attack on the U.S. carrier. They couldn’t land until the torpedo strike took off, but Petty Officer Satsuo Tange swooped low over the flight deck, dropping a message in a weighted tube.

It was a new position for the U.S. force—more to the south than given at the briefing. Knowing that Hashimoto was usually Tomonaga’s navigator—and forgetting they were in separate planes this time—Lieutenant Commander Kawaguchi rushed the information to Hashimoto. Before the mix-up could be straightened out, the planes began thundering off the Hiryu’s flight deck.

They left at 1:31—Tomonaga leading the way, Hashimoto trailing with the latest U.S. position in his pocket. As they turned and headed east, a silent Admiral Yamaguchi—alone with his thoughts—stood motionless, watching them go.

CHAPTER 10

Abandon Ship

SRGNALMAN PETER KARETKA LET out a loud, long cheer. Stationed on the signal bridge of the destroyer Hughes, he was watching the motionless Yorktown when at 2:02 her yellow breakdown flag came down; up instead went a new hoist — “My speed 5.”

On the Yorktown it meant that the battle of the boiler rooms had been won. Lieutenant Cundiff’s diagnosis was correct. By cutting No. 1 down to a bare minimum, Lieutenant Commander Jack Delaney was able to get Nos. 4, 5 and 6 going again by 1:40, and 20 minutes later the ship was under way. With a little time Delaney thought he could work her up to 20 knots—enough to launch planes and get back into action.

Meanwhile there were other welcome developments. The cruisers Peisacola and Vincennes, the destroyers Batch and Benham, had appeared from the southeast—sent over by Spruance to beef up the screen. On the Yorktown, Commander Aldrich had the fires under control; by 1:50 it was safe enough to start refueling the fighters then on deck.

Solid evidence of recovery, but what gave the men their biggest lift was something less tangible. Captain Buckmaster—as good a psychologist as he was a sailor—chose this moment to break out a huge new American flag from the Yorktown’s foremast. No man who saw it will ever forget. To Ensign John d’Arc Lorenz, who had just been through the carnage at the 1.1 guns, it was an incalculable inspiration: “I shall always remember seeing it flutter in the breeze and what it meant to me at this critical time. It was new … bright colors, beautiful in the sunlight. For the first time I realized what the flag meant: all of us—a million faces—all our effort—a whisper of encouragement.”

They needed it at 2:10 when the radar first picked up a new wave of bogeys to the northwest. “Stand by to repel air attack,” the TBS intership radio blared. The screen moved in close, forming “disposition Victor” in a tight, protective circle. The Yorktown strained to build up her speed; by 2:18 she was making eight knots.

Then 10 knots … 12 knots … 15 knots by 2:28. But the Balch radar reported the bogeys were now only 37 miles away. Once again Worth Hare felt fear burning inside, and Signalman Donat Houle wondered what the hell he was doing out here. On the Benham an Ivy League ensign nervously chattered about debutantes he had known in better times.

LIEUTENANT Hashimoto knew they must be getting close. It was 2:28—about an hour since they left the Hiryu—the American ships should be coming into sight. He picked up his seven-power binoculars and scanned the sea to his right. That’s where they would be according to the new position handed him just before they left.

Two minutes later he saw them—tiny white wakes, 80° to starboard, 30 miles away. A tight circle of ships, with a carrier in the middle. And she looked in perfect shape. The last message from the dive bombers said the carrier they hit was “burning furiously”; so this must be a different one. No burning ship could recover that fast.

Speeding up alongside Lieutenant Tomonaga, Hashimoto pointed to the ships, then dropped back to his regular position. Tomonaga swung sharply southeast, and at 2:32 ordered his planes to form up for attack.

They broke into two groups, planning to hit from both sides. They would make their approach together; then Tomonaga would take the port side, Hashimoto the starboard. Like a pair of tongs, they would grab the carrier squarely between them. If she tried to turn from one group, the other would get her.

About ten miles out the U.S. fighters struck. Roaring down from above, they made a pass, got one of Tomonaga’s section. Then Lieutenant Mori’s six Zeros tore into the Americans, and a wild melee developed. But at last the torpedo planes slipped through, and they swept toward the carrier from her port side astern.

At 2:40 all the ships in the screen opened up. It was much worse than Hashimoto expected—machine guns, pompoms, 5-inchers, everything. He hunched low, feeling like a man leaving a warm house in the winter, stepping out into driving sleet. Shrapnel clattered on his wings—the way the hail used to do on a zinc roof back home.

The carrier veered hard to the right, and Hashimoto suddenly found himself on her port side, instead of her starboard as planned. It was even worse for Tomonaga. He was now left well astern. His formation broke up, with the planes trying singly to get into some sort of firing position. The cruisers and destroyers ripped into them.

For Hashimoto it was the wrong side, but he decided to make a run anyhow. He’d never get a better shot than this. He turned and headed for the carrier. The rest of his group moved into position. On they came, flying a loose V formation 150 feet above the water. The carrier’s port side—ablaze with gunfire—lay directly ahead. At 800 yards Hashimoto released… .

CAPTAIN Buckmaster watched the streaks of white foam race toward the Yorktown—and yearned for just a little more steam. At Coral Sea he had dodged other Japanese torpedoes—manipulating his 19,000 tons of steel with a grace that filled the crew with admiration—but then he had 30 knots to work with. Now he had only 19, and that was quite different. Still, he managed to dodge the first two streaks.

As the planes dropped, they veered away close alongside the ship. Watching from his searchlight platform, Signalman Martin wondered about the two flickering orange lights he could see in the rear cockpit. Suddenly he realized this was machine gun fire. He ducked behind a canvas wind screen and felt entirely different about the war. Bombs and torpedoes were impersonal, but this strafing was aimed at him. For the first time he felt really angry with the Japanese.

There were angry Japanese too. After dropping, one plane turned and flew along the Yorktown’s port side not 50 yards from the ship. As it went by, the rear-seat man stood up in his cockpit and shook his fist in defiance. The plane disintegrated in a hail of fire—everybody claimed it. For Gunner’s Mate Jefferson Vick it was “the only time I smiled during the battle.”

At 2:44 another streak of white foam appeared in the water, this time heading directly for the port side, just forward of amidships. Standing on the port catwalk, Yeoman Joseph Adams watched it come right at him. He grabbed a door and braced himself.

The jolt was appalling. Like a cat shaking a rat, like shaking out a rug—the men searched their peacetime memories for something similar … and found nothing to compare. Paint flew off the deck and into their faces; the catwalk rolled up like fencing; fuel oil gushed out; a yellow haze settled over the port side.

For 30 seconds Captain Buckmaster felt they just might pull through. The ship was listing 6° to port, but she still had headway. In damage control, CWT George Vavrek talked over his headphones, telling the men in the forward generator room where to transfer oil to correct the list.

Then a second torpedo hit—killing the man Vavrek was talking to … killing everybody in the generator room … knocking out all power, communications, even emergency lighting. The rudder jammed at 15° to port; a mushroom of gray-white smoke billowed up; the Yorktown stopped, listing 17° to port.

A sickening feeling came over Ensign Walter Beckham as he watched from the cruiser Portland. All antiaircraft guns were firing; 5-inch bursts blackened the sky; tracers crisscrossed in crazy patterns. Even the cruiser’s 8-inch batteries were firing, in hopes that the splash would bring somebody down. The noise and clouds of smoke were bewildering, and there was something terrifying about those planes—the way they hung there in spite of all efforts to blot them out. Nothing worked, and they swept in “looking like some giant birds who were not to be foiled in their search for prey.”

More planes kept coming. The Astoria’s gunners were again yelling like wild men. On the Benham a sailor named Lytells loaded 54 5-inch projectiles in a minute and 45 seconds—and each shell weighed 57 pounds. A 20 mm. crew on the Russell kept firing even after another destroyer fouled the range; skipper Roy Hartwig had to throw his tin hat at the gun to stop it. When the Portland’s 8-inchers let go, Marine Captain Donohoo—still recovering from the mumps—was knocked clear out of his bunk. Mumps or no, he rushed topside to his station. On the Hughes Signalman Houle no longer wondered what the hell he was doing here. He now stood on a corner of the bridge, blazing away with a Thompson .45 submachine gun.

Occasionally they got one. There was the plane that never had a chance to make a run at all. As it broke through the screen, a freak shot (probably from the Pensacola) struck its torpedo. A blinding flash, and it simply vanished. Another made its drop, pulled across the Yorktown’s bow, and headed straight for the Vincennes. Captain F. L. Riefkohl saw it just in time, put his rudder hard right. Riddled from gunfire, the plane crashed 50 yards off the cruiser’s bow, catapulting the pilot out of his cockpit. Still another—crowded out of position during its run—circled wide to the left and tried again. Second time around, it also opened up on the destroyer Batch, which happened to be in its line of sight. The Batch replied with everything it had; the plane disintegrated into the sea.

The U.S. fighters were there too, braving their own fleet’s fire in a desperate effort to ward off the blow. Planes from the Enterprise and Hornet pitched in, but the greatest contribution came from the Yorktown herself. Even as the alarm sounded, she began launching the ten fighters refueling on deck; she was still at it when the Japanese began their final runs. Eighth and last man off was Ensign Milton Tootle, Jr., who had been on carrier duty just six days. Making his first nontraining flight, Tootle took off, turned hard left, tangled with a Japanese plane, shot it down, got hit himself by “friendly” fire, baled out, took a swim and was picked up by the Anderson—all within 15 minutes.

While the battle raged above, the men deep inside the ships waited and listened and sweated it out. In the glow of red battle lights, the members of Repair II on the Pensacola crouched in the darkened mess hall. They could feel the ship lurch heavily as the torpedoes slammed into the Yorktown—but at the time no one knew what had happened. Wondering—and not being able to shoot back—often made it harder to be below decks than above.

In the engine room of the Astoria Lieutenant Commander John Hayes developed a sort of ascending scale, based on the sound of gunfire, that he felt kept him pretty well informed. The dull boom of the 5-inchers meant “Maybe they’re not after us”; the surging rhythm of the 1.1 mounts meant “Here they come”; the steady, angry clatter of the 50-caliber machine guns meant “Hit the floor plates!” Now he heard it all at once.

Then silence. As quickly as the Japanese appeared, they were gone again. At 2:52 the Portland was the last ship to cease fire—just 12 minutes after she was the first to open up. It was incredible that it all happened so quickly—and equally incredible that it all seemed so long. The men slumped by their guns in exhaustion. The elation of battle vanished; now there was utter weariness. Tears, too, as the gunners looked over at the Yorktown. She lay there, listing more than 20° now, wallowing in the gentle swell.

They had only one consolation. They had made the enemy pay a stiff price. Most were sure that none of the Japanese planes escaped.

“HEAD for the bow!” Lieutenant Hashimoto yelled as his torpedo sped on its way. Petty Officer Takahashi dropped even lower and skidded across the sea directly in front of the U.S. carrier. They drew little fire; Hashimoto thought the antiaircraft guns just couldn’t get down that low.

“Did we get a hit?” Takahashi called. Hashimoto turned, but saw no sign of an explosion for a long, long time. Then suddenly a great geyser shot up so high he could see it clearly from the far side of the carrier. Without really meaning to, he let out a yelp of joy.

But his joy was interrupted. Looking around, he caught sight of CPO Nakane’s plane and was horrified to see it still had its torpedo. Nakane was the “orphan” from the Akagi—maybe he was confused—but nothing excused this. “You fool,” Hashimoto said to himself, “what did you come here for anyhow?”

He yanked back his canopy, attracted the attention of Nakane’s rear-seat man, and pointed violently at the torpedo. The rear-seat man waved—yes, he understood—and jettisoned it into the sea. Hashimoto could only curse harder than ever.

Now he was back at the rendezvous point, waiting for Lieutenant Tomonaga’s section to join up, but none of them ever appeared. Perhaps they were thrown off by the carrier’s last-second maneuvering; perhaps Tomonaga took impossible risks. After all, he did know he could never get home on one gas tank. In any case, he and his five planes were gone.

But all five of Hashimoto’s planes came through, and so did three of Lieutenant Mori’s six fighters, and together they limped back toward the Hiryu, three of the torpedo planes too badly riddled ever to fly again. But they had done their job. Hashimoto was absolutely certain he got a different carrier from the one hit by the dive bombers. As he neared home, he radioed ahead the glad tidings: “Two certain torpedo hits on an Enterprise class carrier. Not the same one as reported bombed.”

WATCHING the Enterprise and Hornet untouched on the horizon was too much for Seaman Ed Forbes. “When are those two over there going to get into the fight?” he asked aloud to anyone who would listen. It was small of him and he knew it, but he was scared. As a gunner on the Anderson, desperately trying to protect the Yorktown, all he wanted at the moment was another big target to attract the Japs’ attention.

Certainly the Yorktown had taken her share. Five minutes after the attack the clinometer on the bridge showed she was listing 26°. Captain Buckmaster checked below over the sound-powered phone, but heard only bad news. Lieutenant Commander Delaney reported from the engine room that all fires were out—no hope for any power. The auxiliary generator snapped on, but with all circuits out, it made no difference. Lieutenant Commander Aldrich, down in central station, said that without power there was no way he could pump, counterflood, shift fuel, or do anything else to correct the list. On the bridge, it looked as though the Yorktown might roll over.

Captain Buckmaster paced up and down in agony for several minutes. To no one in particular, he remarked aloud that he hated to give the order to abandon ship. The officers standing around gaped at him mutely. It was one of those moments that give true meaning to the loneliness of command.

Finally he said there was nothing else to do—they must abandon. The Yorktown seemed doomed, and as he later put it, “I didn’t see any sense in drowning 2,000 men just to stick with the ship.”

At 2:55 the order went out—by flag hoist to the screen, by word of mouth and sound-powered phone to the men below. From the engine room, the sick bay, the repair stations, the message center a stream of men stumbled through darkened passageways, up oil-slick ladders, working their way clumsily topside.

The list, the darkness, the oil all made it difficult. No abandon-ship drill was ever like this. In the confusion most of the men ignored or forgot the usual procedures. The rough log was left on the bridge. The code room personnel left the safe open, code books and secret message files lying around. The airmen were just as hurried: some 70 sets of air contact codes lay scattered about the squadron ready rooms.

Down in the sick bay the doctors and corpsmen worked with flashlights, trying to get some 50-60 wounded men to the flight deck. Nothing was tougher than carrying those stretchers up the swinging, ladders, across the oil-smeared deck plates. In the operating room the senior medical officer Captain W. D. Davis and his chief surgeon Lieutenant Commander French continued treating a wounded sailor. No one even told them the ship was being abandoned.

Hundreds of men milled around the flight deck, not knowing, quite what to do. Some waited patiently at their regular stations by the motor launches—forgetting there was no power to lower the boats. Others were throwing life rafts overboard—sometimes still bundled together. Some walked sadly up and down the slanting deck, heart-heavy at the thought of leaving the ship. Others laughed and joked, and if the laughter seemed a little forced—well, everybody understood that.

Not that there weren’t sour notes. One commander—obviously in a state of shock, his face dirty and tear-streaked—found out that Radioman James Patterson was in the last SBD that landed before the attack. “You led them here!” he screamed, trying to hit Patterson.

Now it was after 3:00. The destroyers moved in reassuringly close, and the men finally began to go. Commander Ralph Arnold knew just how to do it; he had talked with survivors from the Lexington. He carried a knife, took some gloves, and he was especially careful to keep on his shoes: when picked up, he’d have something to wear.

Most of the crew were more like Machinist’s Mate George Bateman. He carefully arranged a neat pile on the deck consisting of his shoes, shirt, gloves, hat and flashlight. Gradually, in fact, pairs of shoes lined the whole deck, all meticulously placed with the toes pointing out.

At first a trickle, soon a steady stream of men were pouring down the starboard side. Dozens of knotted ropes hung from the rails, and Lieutenant William Crenshaw felt this would be the perfect time to use the knowledge he gained at the Naval Academy on climbing and descending ropes. One should go down carefully hand over hand, the instructor said, but when Crenshaw tried it, he plummeted straight down into the sea. The difference between this rope and the one at Annapolis was oil—it was everywhere, making a good grip next to impossible.

Others had the same trouble. Worth Hare burned his hands sliding down. Seaman Melvin Frantz was making it all right; then the man above slipped, came down on Frantz’s shoulders, and they both plunged into the sea. Boatswain C. E. Briggs lost his grip too, and felt it took forever to come to the surface. He forgot he had given his life jacket away and was wearing shoes, sweater, pistol, two clips of ammunition, plus all his regular clothing. The wonder was he ever came up at all.

Occasionally a man did it right. Yeoman William Lancaster put on a turtleneck sweater, tightened his life jacket, and carefully lowered himself down one of the lines. When he reached the end, he did not let go. To his own great surprise, he stopped, held on to the line, and instinctively stuck his foot down to test the temperature of the water.

Some added a dash all their own. Commander “Jug” Ray went down clenching his inevitable brier pipe. Chief Radioman Grew gave his famous waxed mustache a farewell twirl. A young fireman asked Radio Electrician Bennett’s permission to dive from the flight deck—he had wanted to do it ever since coming on board. Permission granted.

For the swimmers there was now a new hazard. The oil from the ripped port side had worked around to starboard, making a thick film that gradually spread out from the ship. Men retched and vomited as they struggled toward the clear water farther off. Watching from the flight deck, it reminded Yeoman Adams of a large group of turtles or crawfish swimming in a half-dried pond of mud and muck.

The nonswimmers posed a special problem. The more knowledgeable men gave up their own life jackets to help, but few took as decisive action as Radioman Patterson. As he pushed away from the ship, a sailor grabbed his shoulder, saying he couldn’t swim. Patterson gave the man a 30-second course in dogpaddling—not a word wasted—and the two moved off together.

Another special problem was the sailor trapped when the torpedo struck and curled up the port catwalk. The wire mesh pinned him against the side of the Yorktown in his own private prison. It was on the low side of the ship, “leading to all sorts of unpleasant possibilities if she rolled over. His buddies worked on anyhow, trying to pry him out. They finally succeeded, but all the time he was there he kept begging his friends to leave him and save themselves.

Down in the operating room, Captain Davis and Lieutenant Commander French still worked over their wounded man, oblivious of everything else. Finally finished, Davis went out and called for a corpsman to move the patient. Nobody answered the call. He asked some sailor with a walkie-talkie where the corpsman was.

“Oh,” explained the sailor, “they passed the word some time ago for all hands to abandon ship.” He added he was about to leave himself.

Davis and French carried their man to the flight deck; then Davis went down to check again. He looked around and called, but couldn’t hear anyone. Finally satisfied, he climbed back to the deck.

By now most of the swimmers, boats and rafts were all clear of the Yorktown. Looking around, Davis couldn’t see anyone else still aboard—just a vast, empty stretch of flight deck. He hung his gun on the lifeline and like so many before him, carefully placed his shoes at the edge of the deck. Then he inflated his life jacket and climbed down a rope ladder into the sea, feeling sure he was the last man off.

Captain Buckmaster watched him go, as did his executive officer Dixie Kiefer. Both men were standing on the starboard wing of the bridge—Buckmaster waiting to play out the old tradition that the captain be the last to leave his ship. Now it was Kiefer’s turn to go. He swung over the side and started down a line toward the water. But he had burned his hands earlier and, like so many others, he lost his grip. Falling, he caromed off the ship’s armor belt, breaking his ankle in the process. It took more than that to stop the ebullient Kiefer; he bobbed to the surface and swam for the rescue ships in the distance.

Buckmaster began a final tour of the Yorktown alone. First along the starboard catwalk all the way to the 5-inch gun platforms. Then back to the flight deck by No. 1 crane … down through Dressing Station No. 1 …forward through Flag Country and to the captain’s cabin … across to the port side … down the ladder to the hangar deck.

Now it was really dark. There were a few emergency lamps in the island structure, but absolutely nothing down here—just yards and yards of empty blackness. He didn’t even have a flashlight—someone had swiped that long ago.

He groped through a labyrinth of passageways and compartments, trying to walk with the list, keep his footing on the oil-slick deck. He banged into hatches, stumbled over bodies, slashed his leg on some jagged piece of steel. On he went—always searching for any sign of life, shouting from time to time into the darkness.

No answer, except great belching sounds of air bursting out of compartments as one more bulkhead gave way and the water rushed in. Or sometimes a clanking door or a grating of steel, as the ship rose and fell in the gentle swell. He went as deep as he dared. Finding no one, he felt his way topside again and walked aft to the very stern. A brief pause for a last look at his ship; then Elliott Buckmaster swung over the taffrail, caught a line, and dropped to the sea. “Well, there goes 20 years’ sermon notes,” sighed one of the Yorktown’s chaplains as his raft moved clear of the ship. Captain Buckmaster also found a raft, loaded with wounded, and hung onto the ratlines. A launch came up, tossed over a line and began to pull. As the line jerked taut, a mess attendant lost his grip and drifted astern. He went under twice, yelling for help. A figure darted over and saved him. It was Buckmaster.

Dr. Davis had nothing to cling to. He was still swimming by himself, which perhaps made him all the more apprehensive when he glanced around and thought he saw the snout of a large fish. He turned the other way, but it followed him. Steeling his nerve, he made a grab—and came up with his own wallet.

Lieutenant Commander Hartwig could hardly believe his eyes. His destroyer Russell had been picking up scores of men—they came aboard in every conceivable way—but never anything like this. One of his launches was approaching the ship crowded to the gunwhales with perhaps three times its supposed capacity; it was towing a life raft so loaded with men it was invisible; and the raft in turn was towing a long manila line to which scores of men were clinging like bees; and as if all this wasn’t enough, at the very end of the line was the Yorktown’s supply officer Commander Ralph Arnold, holding aloft his hat. Arnold, it later turned out, had just made commander; his wife had sent him a brand-new scrambled-eggs cap, and he wasn’t about to ruin it in the oily water. At the moment Hartwig simply yelled down to him that no Yorktown sailor would ever have to tip his hat to get aboard the Russell.

Off to port Lieutenant Commander Harold Tiemroth on the Balch was putting into practice all the rescue plans he so carefully made after Coral Sea. His men tossed over the specially prepared cargo nets and were soon hauling in scores of oil-soaked men. His hand-picked rescue swimmers Seaman Lewis and Fireman Prideaux went after those too exhausted to reach the ship. Ensign Weber took the motor whaleboat on trip after trip, sometimes gathering in 50 men at a time.

It was much the same on all seven destroyers. The Benham alone picked up 721. By 4:46, when the Balch completed a final swing around the scene, the little flotilla had rescued a grand total of 2,270 men. But the real meaning of this lay not in statistics, but in the human beings themselves. There was the Yorktown cook who gave up his life jacket, swam a thousand yards to the Benham, then asked as he scrambled aboard, “Where’s the galley? The cooks are going to need all the help they can get tonight.” There was Commander Laing, Royal Navy; now dripping with oil; he reached the deck of the Morris, put on his British cap, saluted the colors and said, “God bless the King; God bless the U.S. Navy.” There was the injured seaman—also on the Morris—who climbed aboard unassisted, saying, “Help some of those other poor guys that are really hurt.” He had lost his own leg at the knee.

ON THE Astoria Admiral Fletcher had watched the Japanese torpedo planes wing in. He never felt more frustrated. They certainly knew how to find the Yorktown—but he was still in the dark about them. Where was that fourth carrier? Three hours had passed since he sent out Scouting 5 to search the northwest, but still no word at all.

Turning to Rear Admiral “Poco” Smith—his host on the Astoria—Fletcher told him to rush two cruiser seaplanes to Midway and tell the CO there, “For God’s sake send a search and find out where this other carrier is.”

If Fletcher sounded anguished, he had a right to be, but actually the answer was already on the way. Even before the first torpedo slammed into the Yorktown’s side, one of the scouting planes solved the riddle.

Lieutenant Sam Adams had gone out with the rest of Scouting 5, leading a two-plane section assigned to the most westerly sector. Like the others in the group, he found nothing but ocean for three long hours. By 2:30 he was heading back—nearly halfway home—when he suddenly saw those revealing white wakes.

He counted carefully. Ten of them down there. The two SBDs edged closer; Adams could now make out four destroyers, three cruisers, two battleships … and yes, there was the carrier. They were all heading north, 20 knots. He worked out the position, reported it by voice, told his rear-seat man Karrol to send it by dot-dash too.

“Just a minute, Mr. Adams. I have a Zero to take care of first.”

Adams had been so absorbed in identifying ships that he missed the fighter completely. Somehow he and the other SBD dodged clear, and at 2:37 they turned for home.

The report reached the Yorktown just as the torpedo attack was breaking. There was a rush to relay it to Task Force 16 by TBS radio, but it didn’t get off before the power failed. It was then blinkered to the Astoria to be relayed on, and Admiral Fletcher knew at last that his search for the fourth carrier was over.

Shortly after 3:00 Admiral Spruance had the message on the Enterprise, and his staff slapped together what strength they could: no torpedo planes, no fighters, bits and pieces from three different dive bombing squadrons. Bombing 6 and Scouting 6 had only 11 planes left between them, but Bombing 3 contributed 14 refugees from the Yorktown, and they made up for a lot. Lieutenant Earl Gallaher of Scouting 6 would lead the attack.

Down in the ready rooms the pilots restlessly waited. By now the excitement of the morning strike had worn off; most of the men were terribly tired, and they couldn’t help looking at the empty chairs of those who failed to come back.

Then about 3:15 the teletype machines began clacking; the talkers moved into action; the rooms stirred to life. Out came the plotting boards; the men once again bent low, working away at their navigation.

“Pilots, man your planes.” At 3:30 the Enterprise turned into the wind, and Gallaher led his mixed group off. One of them had engine trouble, returned almost right away. But the rest continued on, 24 planes heading into the afternoon sum

Even as they left, a miracle was taking place on the Hornet. By 3:00 the crew had given up hope for her missing squadrons. Then, unexpectedly, planes were spotted coming in from the south. Japs? No, these were SBDs. Gloom turned to joy and relief as 11 lost planes from Bombing 8 began landing at 3:27. Lieutenant Commander Ruff Johnson had refueled his squadron at Midway and returned to the ship to get back in the fight.

They were gassed up and on their way out again by 4:03. Adding a few extra planes in shape to fly, the Hornet launched 16 dive bombers altogether. The Enterprise planes had half an hour’s head start, but this didn’t bother the green young ensigns who filled out the Hornet’s group. Led by a reserve lieutenant named Edgar Stebbins, they’d get in on as much of the show as they could.

“TF 16 air groups are now striking the carrier which your search plane reported,” Admiral Spruance radioed Admiral Fletcher as the dive bombers headed out. Then he added, “Have you any instructions for me?”

“None. Will conform to your movements.” To Fletcher this was the only sensible thing to do. He was the over-all commander, but he trusted Spruance and Spruance’s staff. They would do things the way he would himself. They had two carriers; he had none. So he bowed out, and from now on the battle was squarely in the hands of Raymond A. Spruance.

“IT’S still possible to win this battle,” thought Commander Kanoe, the Hiryu’s executive officer. “It’s an even game at worst.” Admiral Yamaguchi thought so too: with one U.S. carrier bombed out, a “second” torpedoed, it was again one-to-one. He quickly put Lieutenant Hashimoto—just back from the torpedo attack—in charge of a third strike at the U.S. force.

Trouble was, he had so little left. At best, only five dive bombers and four torpedo planes were in shape to go. No fighters were available—the six remaining Zeros had to protect the Hiryu. All the officer pilots were gone except Hashimoto and Lieutenant Shigematsu. Everybody was dead tired; Hashimoto, for instance, had been flying since dawn—this would be his third big mission of the day.

Still, it had to be done, and no time to lose. All would be lost if the Americans hit first. Yamaguchi decided the strike must leave right away—at 4:30—and once again the fliers lined up beneath the bridge. This time it was Captain Kaku who spoke. He told them he trusted them completely, but as he walked down the line, patting each man on the shoulder, he could see how exhausted they were.

He finally sent a mechanic running down to sick bay for some stay-awake pills. The man came back in a few minutes with a bottle cryptically marked “Aviation Tablet A.” Commander Kawaguchi suggested they just might be sleeping tablets instead, and the very thought threw Captain Kaku into a rage. He turned on the mechanic, called him a fool and threatened the direst punishment. A quick phone call to sick bay straightened everything out—no mistake, these were indeed the stimulants. The storm blew over, but the incident suggested the pilots weren’t the only ones whose nerves were frayed.

It was so clear, in fact, that everyone was exhausted, Admiral Yamaguchi decided to postpone the strike until 6:00 P.M. They’d lose 90 valuable minutes, but the gains should be worth it. The crew could get something to eat—no one had been given anything since breakfast. The change also meant they’d now hit the enemy at dusk; this gave the small handful of Japanese planes a much better chance against the U.S. defenses.

Down in the engine room the phone rang: send up a couple of men to bring back battle meals for the rest. Ensign Mandai watched them go—he could almost taste the rice balls coming, In the ready room, Lieutenant Hashimoto was too tired even to eat. He lay down on one of the brown leather sofas to catch a few minutes’ rest. On the flight deck most of the mechanics took a break too, but a few kept working, tuning up the Soryu’s Type 13 experimental reconnaissance plane; it would go ahead of the rest to pinpoint the American position. In the air command post Lieutenant Commander Kawaguchi was just popping a rice ball into his mouth… .

It was exactly 5:03 when a startled lookout shouted the words all dreaded the most: “Enemy dive bomber’s directly overhead!”

CHAPTER 11

The Emperor’s Portrait

THIS TIME THEY WERE easy to find. Around 4:45 Lieutenant Earl Gallaher sighted the telltale white wakes about 30 miles to the northwest. Several minutes later he could make out a carrier, half a dozen other ships, scurrying along on a westerly course. Gradually climbing to 19,000 feet, he circled around the Japanese fleet so as to attack from out of the sun. Far below, the ships steamed on, blissfully unaware.

At 4:58 all was ready. Neatly stacked down by divisions and sections, the dive bombers began a high-speed run-in. As they roared toward the target, Gallaher opened up on his radio: Enterprise planes would take the carrier, the Yorktown group the nearer battleship. Then a sharp, quick warning: Zeros, ahead and above.

They struck with that breath-taking rush the American pilots were getting to know so well. Some said there were 6, some 12; but they were everywhere at once and it was hard to tell. One pounced on Ensign F. T. Weber, lagging behind the rest of Bombing 6. Straggling was always fatal when Zeros were around, and this time was no exception.

Earl Gallaher almost collided with another as he pulled up out of the formation to start his dive. For a split second they squarely faced each other; then the Zero vanished as Gallaher pushed over. Next instant he was screeching down, leading his makeshift squadron against the last of Nagumo’s operating carriers.

Finally catching on, the ship twisted hard to port in a desperate evasion maneuver. It was too late for Gallaher to correct his dive; so he pulled up sharply just before release, hoping to lob his bomb at the vessel. The trick occasionally worked, but not this time. First Gallaher, then several other Scouting 6 pilots dropped near-misses just astern.

Seeing it happen, Lieutenant Dave Shumway made a fast decision. His Yorktown planes had been ordered to hit the battleship, but now he shifted to the carrier too. His first section swept past Dick Best’s Bombing 6, just getting ready for their own pushover. Best dived on schedule anyhow, his little group from the Enterprise all mixed up with the Yorktown crowd. It was another of those moments that would have given fits to the instructor back at Pensacola.

The Zeros tore at the group all the way down. Their last flight deck was at stake, and they knew it. They performed amazing stunts. One fighter made a pass on Ensign Cobb, pulled out, then made another—all while Cobb was in the same dive. Another turned himself into a “falling leaf” to keep Lieutenant Harold Bottomley in his sights.

Lieutenant Wiseman crashed, then Ensign Johnny Butler. In the Yorktown wardroom Butler had always said how much he wanted to be a fighter pilot and tangle with the Zeros. He got his chance—but in an SBD. It wasn’t nearly enough.

At first it looked as if the carrier might escape. Her sharp turn, the Zeros, a sudden dose of antiaircraft fire, all seemed to throw the dive bombers off. Ensign Hanson saw several misses ahead of him, then watched with dismay as his own bomb missed too. Disgusted, he looked back—and saw a sight that blotted out his disappointment. One, two, three bombs landed on the ship in quick succession.

They all claimed her. Scouting 6 probably got one hit … Bombing 3 certainly two … Bombing 6 another—but it was hard to tell. Toward the end everyone was diving at once, and in all that smoke the hits and misses looked pretty much alike. In any case, it was a thorough job. So much so that two of the last planes from Bombing 3 switched back to the battleship originally assigned. It seemed a waste to drop anything more on the carrier—her flight deck was a shambles.

GLASS showered down on Captain Kaku, navigator Cho, everyone else in the Hiryu’s wheelhouse. The first hit had landed squarely on the forward elevator platform, hurling it back against the island structure, breaking every window on the bridge. The blast blew Commander Kawaguchi clear off the air command post, down to the flight deck. Miraculously unhurt, he picked himself up just in time to be knocked down again by three more hits in the bridge area.

Down in the engineroom Ensign Mandai heard a bugle start sounding the antiaircraft alert over the loudspeaker system. It was still blowing when he felt a hard jolt, then two or three more. His heart sank. He could tell a miss because the shock always came from one side or the other; this time it came from directly above.

The lights went out, then came on again as the engineers switched over to emergency power. Other troubles weren’t so easily solved. Smoke poured down through the air ducts; the two men sent up for food came scrambling back through an open hatch—smoke and flames swept in after them.

In the ready room Lieutenant Hashimoto lay dozing on his sofa when a sudden “hammer blow” slammed into his back. He awoke with a start, stumbled onto the blazing flight deck, Winked at the incredible sight of the elevator platform leaning against the front of the bridge.

Captain Kaku, of course, could see nothing. The engines were all right—the ship still raced along at 30 knots—but with his view completely blocked it was impossible to maneuver. Anyhow, they could keep moving and go to work on the fires. Commander Kanoe ordered the magazines flooded; damage control parties tackled the flames from the only fire main still working.

Commander Kawaguchi stood near the island structure, watching the men battle the blaze. There was very little left for an air officer to do—the forward third of the deck was one big crater. Then, as he stood there, several big geysers of water shot up perhaps 50 yards off the ship. He looked up in astonishment. As if they didn’t have enough trouble already, B-17s were bombing them too.

IT WAS a tough assignment for Major George Blakey, leading his six B-17s from Hawaii to Midway. They were coming to beef up the base’s tiny force of heavy bombers—had been flying for over seven hours—and now, when almost in sight of Eastern Island, Midway was ordering them to attack the Japanese fleet before landing. Gas was low; the men were tired. It was a hard job under any circumstances, and even harder for men who had never been in combat before.

The flight leaders conferred by voice radio. Did they have enough gas? Midway said the Japs were 170 miles to the northwest—out and back meant perhaps 400 more miles of flying. They figured they could just about make it if they stuck to their present altitude of 3,600 feet. This was absurdly low (Colonel Sweeney’s Midway group was operating at 20,000 feet), but it had to be this or nothing. Blakey radioed they were on their way.

Shortly after 6:00 Captain Narce Whitaker, leading one of the three-plane nights, spotted a column of smoke on the horizon ahead. Drawing near, he could make out a burning carrier, surrounded by a milling swarm of cruisers and destroyers. But in the compartmentalized way of war, even now there were those who didn’t grasp the picture. Lieutenant Charles Crowell, a young officer in one of the B-17s, had no idea the Japanese were below. When the order came to prepare for the bomb run, he assumed the plane was lost and had to lighten its load.

At this point he learned. As the little squadron turned toward the carrier, all the ships in the screen opened up. Zeros swarmed around, and as one of the pilots put it, “With no place to land, these characters were really hopped up.” A shell burst in the wing of one plane; shrapnel smashed through the nose of another, sending the bombardier sprawling. Yet the B-17s had a way of coming through. Shaking off the fighters, they thundered in, dropped their bombs, and burst clear on the other side still intact. One of them, unable to release on the carrier, dropped instead on an unsuspecting destroyer.

Untried, a year or so out of school, it was a weird experience for most of the men. A dozen disconnected impressions raced through their minds: the sudden fright … how busy they were … the overwhelming thirst when it was all over—and then not being able to swallow a drop of water.

For those lucky or unlucky enough to peer outside, the sight was breath-taking. Major Blakey was fascinated by the way the shells and small-arms fire whipped the sea like an angry storm. All of a sudden some splashes shot up far bigger than the rest. “My Lord,” Blakey thought, “those are really big shells.” It never occurred to him that still another group of B-17s, completely unknown to himself, was bombing the Japanese fleet from a point directly above.

But it was so. The Midway-based planes were back on the job. First, Colonel Sweeney arrived at 5:30 with a group of four. The carrier below looked finished; so he settled on a heavy cruiser. Then Carl Wuertele turned up with two more B-17s from Midway. The carrier was still burning, but he took it anyhow, while his wingman picked a battleship. They were the ones who were causing the commotion when Major Blakey appeared on the scene.

Meanwhile Stebbins had arrived with the Hornet’s dive bombers. He too decided the carrier was through and went instead for two ships in the screen … one of them the same target Sweeney was bombing.

Mass confusion, but by now it didn’t matter. The strike was a picnic. Attacked from all sides—the Zeros finally used up—the Japanese had little left to put up a fight. When the American fliers finally headed home, their estimates matched the rosy glow of the Pacific sunset. Bombing 8 claimed three hits on a battleship, two on a cruiser. The B-17s were just as confident—hits on the burning carrier, a battleship, a cruiser; a destroyer sunk; plus an assortment of lethal near-misses.

CAPTAIN Michiso Tsutsumi, executive officer of the battleship Haruna, watched two dive bombers hurtle down toward the bridge. One of them looked as if it would never pull out—Tsutsumi could see the pilot’s face clearly. Then at the last second it zoomed safely away, still so low that its trailing antenna caught that of the Haruna.

Somehow the bombs missed, landing with huge explosions just astern. For the next hour much of the fleet endured the same thing: 5:30, dive bombers on the Tone … 5:46, B-17s on the Haruna … 5:40, dive bombers on the Chikuma … 6:15, B-17s on the Hiryu… .

It seemed to go on forever. But finally at 6:32 some weary yeoman on the Chikuma’s bridge noted that the last of the attackers were retiring, and the fleet had a chance to take stock. Incredibly, none of the ships had been hit by these final blows. The near-miss off the Haruna’s stern bent a few plates and jammed the main battery range finder, but repairs would be easy. The only other damage came when one of those low-flying B-17s strafed the Hiryu’s shattered flight deck, knocking out an antiaircraft battery and killing several gunners.

One antiaircraft gun, more or less, made little difference to the Hiryu now. Captain Kaku knew his only hope was to get clear of the battle area. Once beyond range of the U.S. planes, maybe the ship could lick her wounds and somehow make it back to Japan. The phone still worked, and Kaku called his chief engineer, Commander Kunizo Aiso. He urged the chief to keep giving him 30 knots.

Aiso was optimistic. The master control room was in good shape, and the flash fire in Engine Room No. 4 was out. He couldn’t get to the other three engine rooms—all hatches were blocked—but he could call them, and they said everything still was running. Their chief complaint seemed to be the fumes and smoke that steadily poured through the air ducts.

Soon they all noticed something else. Engine rooms were always hot, but now it was far hotter than usual … far hotter than it ought to be. In No. 4 Ensign Mandai looked up at the steel overhead and noticed that the white paint was starting to melt. It began dripping down on the engineers as they worked, burning them, causing little fires to flare up in the machinery. As the paint disappeared from the overhead, the bare steel began to glow. Finally it was bright red. Nobody mentioned it, but every man in the room knew they were now trapped beneath the fires raging above.

A few hundred yards off the burning carrier, the battleship Kirishima plowed along in the gathering dusk. She had been ordered to stand by for towing in case the Hiryu closed down her engines. As night fell, it became an increasingly unpleasant assignment. The fires on the Hiryu blazed up from time to time, offering a perfect beacon for enemy submarines. Finally the battleship’s skipper Captain Iwabuchi radioed Nagumo, describing the situation, pointing out the danger to his ship.

At 6:37 Nagumo radioed back the welcome word to break off and rejoin the Nagara. The Kirishima turned northwest, and as she slowly drew off, her executive officer Captain Honda thoughtfully looked back at the Hiryu. She stood black against the evening sky, fires twinkling in every port. From a distance the little pinpoints of flame reminded him of lanterns—hundreds of them—strung to mark some happier occasion at home.

LOOKING back at the Yorktown, listing heavily and silhouetted alone in the twilight, Commander Hartwig could barely stand the sight. For two years his destroyer Russell had been the carrier’s guard ship. He felt almost a part of her. Now he was steaming away. With the survivors rescued, Admiral Fletcher had ordered the ships in the screen to head east and join up with Admiral Spruance. Orders were orders, but it wasn’t easy to leave that sagging, lonely hulk. One thought, paraphrased from Hamlet, kept running through Hartwig’s mind: “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew her well.”

There were many others who felt, as they left the scene, that “it didn’t seem right” to abandon the Yorktown. She was holding her own—the fires were contained, her list was no greater—and the Portland stood rigged to give her a tow. But there were other factors too, and Frank Jack Fletcher had to consider them all. It was getting dark … Japanese snoopers were about … Yamamoto’s heavy ships were somewhere … enemy subs might turn up … a task force guarding a derelict carrier made an ideal target.

Once again war turned into a matter of “groping around.” Fletcher weighed his chances, finally decided the odds were too dangerous. At 5:38 he issued his orders sending everybody east. For the next 35 minutes the Yorktown wallowed alone in the dusk; then at 6:13 new orders went out, detaching the destroyer Hughes to stand by her.

The rest of Task Force 17 continued on toward Spruance, who was just recovering his planes from the afternoon strike. Once again anxious faces turned skyward, counting the SBDs, searching for signs of damage or casualties. But this time there was much less tension than during the morning attack. The radio had seen to that. No one who listened could miss the note of jubilation as the pilots talked back and forth: “Hey, they’re throwing everything at us except the kitchen sink … oops, here comes the kitchen sink.”

Still, the Japanese had given some of them a bad time. Besides the three planes lost, several were badly damaged. Three Zeros teamed up on Lieutenant Shumway, wounding his gunner and smashing the right side of his plane. He managed to get it home, but it was certainly ready for the junk heap. Ensigns Cooner and Merrill had much the same experience.

Earl Gallaher, leading the Enterprise group, had a different kind of problem, but the way he felt, he would have traded it for Zeros. Pulling out from his dive, he started up an old back injury, and now the pain was killing him. He couldn’t even reach down to drop his landing hook. Yet he couldn’t come in without it, nor could he land in the water. With his back this way, he’d never get out of the cockpit.

He turned the lead over to his wing man and let everyone else land while he kept trying to get the hook down. There was no easy way, and in desperation he reached over anyhow. He got it, all right, but almost passed out from the pain. Finally set, he bounced down to a shaky landing at 6:34; the last of the Enterprise group was home.

EVERYTHING was falling apart on Admiral Nagumo’s temporary flagship Nagara. The Admiral had drifted back to his destroyer days and talked vaguely of night torpedo attacks. His chief of staff Kusaka was in agony with his badly sprained ankles. He finally retired to a small cabin at the stern, where a medical officer tried to give him first aid. (“But you are a dentist,” complained Kusaka. “I know,” the man said cheerfully, “but a dentist is really a doctor.”)

Most of the time Kusaka lay on a cot, but occasionally he was needed on the bridge. Then a sailor would carry him there piggyback. It was a ludicrous sight, somehow symbolizing the helpless plight of Nagumo’s whole fleet.

Far to the rear, Admiral Yamamoto sensed the chaos. In the small operations room on the Yamato’s bridge, he worked with his staff on plans to save the day.

He had taken the first step at 12:20, 90 minutes after learning of the debacle. At that time he radioed a crisp set of instructions to the rest of the fleet. The transports were to retire temporarily. The submarines were to take position on a line to the west. Admiral Kakuta was to leave the Aleutians and hurry south with the light carriers Ryujo and Junyo. No need to give any orders to Admiral Kondo; he was already racing north with his battleships, the carrier Zuiho, in fact, everything he had. Yamamoto himself was churning east through a dense fog, bringing the mighty Yamato, two other battleships and the carrier Hosho.

With any luck these various units, including four small carriers, would converge on Nagumo within a day or so. Kondo was especially promising. Only 300 miles away, he should arrive by 3:00 next morning.

Built around the Hiryu and the hard-hitting Yamaguchi, this makeshift fleet could, Yamamoto hoped, still take care of the U.S. Navy. But there remained Midway, the original objective. With the greater part of the Imperial Combined Fleet now steaming into range, could the Americans turn the base into an “unsinkable carrier”? Captain Kuroshima, “the God of Operations,” thought so. He persuaded Yamamoto that the base must be neutralized, even at the expense of some of the gathering strength. The Admiral agreed, and at 1:10 P.M. radioed Admiral Kondo, “The Invasion Force will assign a portion of its force to shell and destroy enemy air bases on AF. The occupation of AF and AO are temporarily postponed.”

The Aleutian phase (AO) was soon revived, but Midway remained tabled, at least until Kondo could soften up the place. That should come soon enough. He was sending the cruisers Kumano, Suzuya, Mikuma and Mogami to do the job. They were the newest, fastest heavy cruisers in the Japanese Navy, perfect for the assignment. With Admiral Takeo Kurita commanding, they raced northeast at 32 knots.

A good start, but planning would be a lot easier if they knew a little more about conditions on Midway. Nagumo had yet to send a single message describing the morning raid. Of course, the man had his problems, but Combined Fleet really needed to know. At 4:55 a new message was fired off, needling Nagumo for some sort of progress report. It was never even acknowledged, perhaps because it arrived at a most inconvenient time: The U.S. dive bombers were just swooping down on the Hiryu.

Yamamoto remained unaware. He had heard nothing directly from Nagumo since 11:30 A.M.—almost six hours ago. He restlessly wandered to the front of the bridge, absent-mindedly raised his binoculars and peered east—as though that could possibly do any good.

The ax fell at 5:30.

“Hiryu burning as a result of bomb hits,” Nagumo radioed. Yamamoto sank down heavily on a chair in the center of the battle command post. He said nothing. Lost in his own private thoughts, for minutes he sat motionless as a rock.

On the Nagara Admiral Nagumo continued to tinker with the idea of a night surface engagement. His scheme at the moment was to retire west, then reverse course in the dark and catch the Americans by surprise. Studying Nagumo’s expression, Commander Yoshioka thought the old sea dog looked cheerful for the first time since morning.

Then at 6:30 the Chikuma blinkered a message which blasted every hope: “The No. 2 plane of this ship sighted 4 enemy carriers, 6 cruisers, and 15 destroyers in position 30 miles east of the burning and listing enemy carrier at 5:13. This enemy force was westward bound… .”

That changed everything. Previously Nagumo had assumed the Americans were badly hurt too. Now it appeared he had knocked out only one carrier, that four others were steaming straight for him. An old-fashioned sea battle was one thing, but neither Nagumo nor his staff had any appetite for this sort of aerial avalanche.

Nor did they doubt the news. Stunned by the unexpected American assault, they were now ready to believe anything. Nobody even bothered to double-check. Had they done so, they might have been far more skeptical. The information was based on two supposedly separate sightings by the Chikuma’s plane—but the second “sighting” was clearly the pilot trying to correct and amplify his original flash.

But Nagumo’s officers were no longer in a mood to analyze contact reports. Their only reaction was to run for it. At 7:05 the remnants of the Striking Force turned tail and fled northwest.

Admiral Yamamoto sensed there might be a morale problem. He had been shocked himself by these stunning blows, but resiliency was one of the Admiral’s fighting qualities. Soon he was ready to jump into the fight, but he wasn’t so sure about his unit commanders. Maybe they needed something to buck them up until he could get there and take over himself. At 7:15 he radioed all commands:

1. The enemy fleet, which has practically been destroyed, is retiring to the east.

2. Combined Fleet units in the vicinity are preparing to pursue the remnants and at the same time, to occupy AF.

3. The Main Body is scheduled to reach 32° 08’ N, 175° 45’ E at 0300 on the 5th. Course 90°; speed 20.

4. The First Carrier Striking Force, Invasion Force (less Cruiser Division 7) and Submarine Force will immediately contact and destroy the enemy.

Admiral Nagumo must have found it bitterly ironical: at the same moment he received another message reporting that the Soryu had gone down.

All afternoon she had smoldered away, racked by occasional explosions, while the stand-by destroyers circled helplessly about. Toward sunset the fires died down enough to send Chief Petty Officer Abe aboard in an attempt to rescue Captain Yanagimoto. Abe was a Navy wrestling champion, and his orders were to bring Yanagimoto off by force. But the Captain refused to budge, and Abe couldn’t bring himself to lay hands on his skipper. He returned from the carrier in tears and alone.

The Soryu wallowed lower in the water. On the Makigumo, standing by, somebody began singing the Japanese national anthem “Kimigayo.” Others took it up. As the strains pealed out over the water, the Soryu’s stern dipped under, her bow rose high—paused for a second—and at 7:13 she was gone.

Twelve minutes later it was the Kaga’s turn. She had been drifting all afternoon, while a small bucket brigade remained aboard fighting the flames. It was a hopeless battle, and around sunset the destroyer Hagikaze sent a cutter over to get the men off. They merely sent it back for a hand pump. The cutter went over again, this time with a written order for the men to return. They now obeyed, but it was hard. As one old warrant officer climbed aboard the Hagikaze, he kept looking back at his burning ship. Tears streamed down his cheeks, even running down his beautifully trimmed mustache. Shortly afterward two mighty explosions ripped the dusk, and at 7:25 the Kaga too was gone.

At this same moment a few miles away, Captain Aoki of the Akagi summoned all hands to the anchor deck. Hope was gone for saving the carrier, and now Aoki praised the men’s courage, bade them farewell, and ordered all to abandon ship. The destroyers Nowaki and Arashi moved near, and at 8:00 a flotilla of small boats began transferring the survivors.

A message was sent to Admiral Nagumo, asking permission to scuttle her. Nagumo never answered, but Yamamoto did. The Commander in Chief monitored the request and at 10:25 radioed a brief order not to sink the ship. Partly it was Yamatomo’s fighting spirit, but partly it was sentiment too. The Akagi was a great favorite of his—in younger days he had served on her for years—now he was determined to tow her back if he could.

The Akagi’s navigator Commander Miura got Yamamoto’s message on the Nowaki, where he was directing the rescue operations. He quickly took a launch over to the Akagi, found Captain Aoki waiting to go down with his command (some say tied to the anchor). Miura was a great talker, and he used all his art now. Instead of mournful pleading—which might have been expected—he scolded Aoki, told him he was making a nuisance of himself, above all pointed to Yamamoto’s order not to scuttle the ship. It would be far more useful, Miura observed, to come over to the Nowaki, and help save her.

Aoki remained utterly dispirited (he would for the rest of his life), but he nodded and dropped down into the Nowaki’s launch. The party shoved off, leaving behind the black, silent Akagi—now truly abandoned—lying helpless in the moonlit sea.

A few scattered swimmers remained—combat air patrol pilots who had run out of gas, occasional crewmen from the three carriers. All afternoon and into the evening destroyers scurried about, picking them up: Raita Ogawa, the Zero pilot from the Akagi, treading water in his life jacket … Tatsuya Otawa from the Soryu, hugging a piece of timber … Takayoshi Morinaga of the Kaga, clinging to a floating hammock … a handful of others. At first there was a good deal of shouting to attract attention, but as evening drew near the cries grew thinner. At last all was silent; the darkened destroyers ended their search and rushed northwest to rejoin the fleet.

ENSIGN George Gay was all alone under the mid-Pacific stars. He had been anything but that during most of the afternoon. Once a patrolling destroyer came so close he could see white-clad sailors moving about the decks. (“If there had been anybody on board that I knew I could have recognized them.”) Gay tried to make himself smaller than ever as he hid in the water under his black cushion.

His burned leg hurt dreadfully … his hand was bleeding … he began to think of sharks. Then he had a comforting thought. He had heard somewhere that sharks didn’t like explosions—well, there’d been plenty of those. In the distance he could still see ships, but he didn’t look very often. The salt water hurt his eyes so much he could hardly see anything. He finally kept them shut most of the time, opening them only occasionally for a quick glance around the horizon. He noticed that the Japanese were gradually moving out of the area.

As darkness fell— “maybe a little earlier than was wise”—he broke out his yellow life raft, inflated it and scrambled in. His eyes felt better now, and at last he could rest. He lay back exhausted—sometimes dozing, sometimes watching the glow of’ searchlights far to the north, where the Japanese still struggled to salvage something from their wreck.

COMMANDER Yoshida eased his destroyer Kazagumo alongside the blazing Hiryu. His men worked fast in the night, unloading fire-fighting equipment and a rather grim supper of hardtack and water for the carrier’s crew. The destroyer Yugumo headed over too, bringing extra fire hose picked up from the Chikuma. Two other destroyers hovered nearby, ready to help if needed.

The Hiryu herself lay dead in the water. She had finally lost power around nine o’clock. The phones still worked, though faintly, and down in Engine Room No. 4 Commander Aiso eventually got a call from the bridge. Someone up there wanted to know whether the engineers could get out. Aiso glanced up at the red hot steel overhead and said no. A long pause … then the bridge asked if the men had any last messages.

This infuriated Aiso. He knew the situation was bad, but surely not hopeless. The Hiryu seemed in no danger of sinking, and once the fires were out, he felt they could somehow get her back to Japan. With the passion of a man trapped far below, he urged the bridge not to give up. He never knew whether they heard. The phone faded and went dead.

Whatever the actual situation at the time of this exchange, it became all too clear at 11:58. At this moment something touched off a great blast. The fires—which had begun to die down—flared up again, spreading everywhere out of control.

This new crisis posed an important decision for Ensign Sandanori Kawakami. He was a young paymaster on the Hiryu, but tonight he had a far greater responsibility. He was also custodian of the Emperor’s portrait. Normally it hung in the captain’s cabin, but at Midway certain precautions had been taken. When general quarters sounded, Kawakami placed it in a special wooden box, and a petty officer carried it by rucksack down to the chronometer room below the armored deck. Here it should be safe. But that was as far as planning went. No one dreamed it might have to leave the ship.

Now Kawakami had to act on his own. He couldn’t raise the bridge, and there was no time to lose. The petty officer again buckled on his rucksack, and guarding their treasure, the two men fought their way forward through the flames. They broke out onto the anchor deck, where Kawakami tenderly transferred the portrait to the destroyer Kazagumo.

None too soon. The Hiryu was listing 15°—shipping water constantly—and there was serious question how long she could last. At 2:30 A.M. on June 5 Captain Kaku finally turned to Admiral Yamaguchi and said, “We’re going to have to abandon ship, sir.”

Yamaguchi nodded, sent a message to Admiral Nagumo reporting that he was ordering off the Hiryu’s crew. Then he directed Kaku to summon all hands to the port quarter of the flight deck. Some 800 survivors reported, crowding around their two leaders in the flickering glare of the flames.

The Captain spoke first. “This war is yet to be fought,” Kaku declared, and he urged them to carry on the struggle. They must live and serve as the nucleus of an ever stronger navy.

Now it was Yamaguchi’s turn. He told the men how much he admired their bravery—how proud he was of their achievements in the battles they had fought together. As for this time, “I am fully and solely responsible for the loss of the Hiryu and Soryu. I shall remain on board to the end. I command all of you to leave the ship and continue your loyal service to His Majesty, the Emperor.”

With that, they all faced toward Tokyo, and Yamaguchi led them in three cheers for the Emperor. Then they solemnly lowered the national ensign, followed by the Admiral’s own flag. As the Rising Sun fluttered down from the yardarm, a flourish of bugles rang out in the night. They were playing the national anthem, “Kimigayo.”

As the men began leaving, Captain Kaku turned to Admiral Yamaguchi: “I am going to share the fate of the ship, sir.”

The Admiral understood. He repeated that he too planned to stay till the end. Then they drifted off into a colloquy that meant little outside Japan. “Let us enjoy the beauty of the moon,” Yamaguchi remarked.

“How bright it shines,” Kaku agreed. “It must be in its twenty-first day… .”

Oddly enough, this sort of talk was not unusual between two close Japanese friends. By itself, it had no connotation of death. Rather, it was a traditional, almost ceremonial way of saying that they shared much in common.

But tonight that certainly included going down with the Hiryu; and overhearing their talk, the executive officer Commander Kanoe felt that the principal officers should also remain. He put the matter to them, and all agreed. Captain Kaku couldn’t have been less sympathetic. He said he alone would stay and flatly ordered them, “All of you—leave the ship.”

Then Admiral Yamaguchi’s senior staff officer, Commander Seiroku Ito, proposed the same thing on behalf of the Admiral’s staff. Yamaguchi too rejected the idea.

From time to time, other officers also came up—there were countless details to attend to. “There’s a lot of money in the ship’s safe,” the chief paymaster reported. “What shall I do with it?”

That one was easy. “Leave the money as it is,” Captain Kaku ordered, “we’ll need it to cross the River Styx.”

Yamaguchi joined in the joke: “That’s right. And we’ll need money for a square meal in hell.”

Now it was time for parting. Ito confirmed the Admiral’s decision to stay, then asked if he had any last messages. Yamaguchi said yes, he had two. The first was for Admiral Nagumo: “I have no words to apologize for what has happened. I only wish for a stronger Japanese Navy—and revenge.” The second was for Captain Toshio Abe, commanding Destroyer Division 10 on the nearby flagship Kazagumo. This one was crisp and to the point: “Scuttle the Hiryu with your torpedoes.”

Finally, a farewell toast. Someone noticed a cask sent over earlier by the Kazagumo. Taking the lid, they filled it with water and silently passed it from one to another. That was all, except as Commander Ito left, Yamaguchi handed him his cap as a keepsake for his family.

It was 4:30—the first light of dawn glowed in the east—when the transfer of the Hiryu’s crew was complete. Commander Kanoe was last off, and as the cutter carried him away he could see Yamaguchi and Kaku waving from the bridge.

At 5:10 Captain Abe carried out his final orders. The destroyer Makigumo turned toward the Hiryu and fired two torpedoes. One missed; the other exploded with a roar. Losing no more time, Abe turned his destroyers northwest and hurried off after the fleeing Admiral Nagumo.

It had been a bad night for Nagumo too. It took more than a hearty message from the Commander in Chief to steady his nerves. At 9:30 he radioed Yamamoto the grim news about all those American carriers steaming toward him. He added that he himself was now retiring northwest at 18 knots. No answer, so at 10:50 he sent the report again, in slightly modified form.

This time he got an answer in five minutes. Yamamoto removed him from command, replacing him with the aggressive Admiral Kondo, rushing up from the south with his battleships and cruisers. As Chief of Staff Ugaki put it, Nagumo seemed to have “no stomach” for the work.

Nagumo took it without comment. Not so his staff. In the excitement of battle—even while going down to defeat—there hadn’t been much time to think. Now there was plenty. During the evening the senior staff officer Captain Oishi visited Admiral Kusaka. “Sir, we staff officers have all decided to commit suicide to fulfill our own responsibility for what has happened. Would you please inform Admiral Nagumo?”

The pragmatic Kusaka saw it differently. Summoning the whole staff, he scolded, “How can you do such a thing? You go into raptures over any piece of good news; then say you’re going to commit suicide the first time anything goes wrong. It’s absurd!”

He went immediately to Nagumo and reported the incident. It turned out the Admiral was toying with the same idea himself. “What you say is certainly reasonable,” he remarked, “but things are different when it’s a question of the chief.”

“Not at all,” Kusaka said. And then once again he launched into his lecture: it was nothing but weakness to commit hara-kiri right now. The thing to do was to come back and avenge the defeat.

Nagumo finally agreed, and the First Carrier Striking Force—now bereft of all four of its carriers—raced on through the night, ever farther away from the scene of the day’s disaster.

CHAPTER 12

Winners and Losers

MIDWAY COULDN’T BELIEVE IT was over. The morning raid was just a softener. The Japanese would be back.

Anticipating a heavy surface bombardment by sunset, Captain Simard dispersed his PBYs, evacuated all nonessential staff, warned the FT boats to be ready for a night attack. Colonel Sweeney sent seven of his B-17s back to Hickam; he didn’t want them caught on the ground. On Eastern Island an old Marine took the bankroll he won at craps and hurled it into the surf—he’d rather lose it this way than let the Japs get it.

Actually, by early afternoon the only seaborne “invaders” still heading for Midway were two men in a rubber boat about 10 miles out. Ensign Thomas Wood and his gunner belonged to Bombing 8, the Hornet squadron that came in to refuel, but their own tank went dry just short of the base. Ditching, they launched their boat and began paddling toward the smoke they saw in the distance.

It was dark by the time they reached the Midway reef. Once across they still had a five-mile paddle to solid ground, but at least they’d be in the calm waters of the lagoon. All they had to do was get across the reef.

But that was just the trouble. There was only one easy place to cross, and guarding it was a huge bull sea lion. He refused to budge and ignored all shouts and threats. Finally Wood sloshed up to him and delivered several solid kicks in the rear. Thus persuaded, the sea lion flopped into the water, but he didn’t give up that easily. As the two men rested on the coral after getting their boat across, he swam around the reef, barking at them and generally showing displeasure.

Ultimately they reached shore safely, to find Midway scared and discouraged. The remaining Marine dive bombers had staged an evening attack but couldn’t locate the Japanese. They finally returned minus their new skipper Major Norris—apparently a victim of vertigo. Meanwhile the B-17s were coming in from their afternoon strike … some of them with hair-raising stories of Zeros. These might be orphans (actually the case) or just possibly from a fifth carrier somewhere. Then there were all those ships to the west und southwest—latest reports said they were still advancing.

Around 9:54 a Marine at Battery B saw a submarine cautiously surface about two miles off Eastern Island. Midway held its fire, not knowing what to expect. Colonel Shannon didn’t want to give away his gun positions yet. By the light of a half-hidden moon, the men watched the sub silently glide along the shore, working its way west and south. Then at 10:21 it slipped out of sight in the dark.

The suspense grew. On Sand Island Ensign Leon Grabowsky cleaned up his M-l and .45 for the landings he felt sure to come. On Eastern Island Lieutenant Jim Muri and his B-26 crew loaded themselves with all the weapons they could scavenge. Then they bedded down in the sand by their plane, restlessly watching a cloud-swept sky flecked by occasional stars.

PEARL HARBOR couldn’t believe it was over either. Workers still manned the rooftop guns in the Navy Yard. At Hickam Captain D. E. Ridings, skipper of the 73d Bombardment Squadron, got a hurry call at 10:00 P.M.: Collect all the B-17s available and get over to Midway. He was off before dawn. On Ford Island the pilots of Detached Torpedo 8 manned their planes at 4:00 A.M.—ready for anything.

It was much the same on the West Coast. All radio stations went off the air at 9:00 P.M. on orders from the Fourth Fighter Command. The Seattle waterfront was closed to all but “official and legitimate” traffic. California’s Attorney General Earl Warren warned that the state stood “in imminent danger” of attack.

At sea the destroyer Hughes stood lonely guard on the deserted Yorktown. As Commander Ramsey saw the situation, he could expect the Japs to send one or two surface ships to finish her off during the night. He could also expect submarines, and perhaps an air attack after dawn. He had orders to sink the carrier to prevent capture or if serious fires developed—in any case, sink her before he got sunk.

All through the night he steamed an unpredictable course around the hulk. In the dark the Yorktown was an eerie sight. There were what appeared to be flickering lights, and members of the crew thought they could even hear voices and strange noises when the destroyer was close. Ramsey considered boarding to check—then thought better of it. That would mean stopping, lowering a boat, using lights. He would be just inviting trouble on a night like this. So the Hughes continued her nervous vigil.

It was a restless, worried night on Task Force 16 too. The pilots were too tired to think, but in the Hornet wardroom nobody could overlook those 29 empty chairs. On the Enterprise Ensign Charles Lane, an orphan from the Yorktown, was assigned the room of a Torpedo 6 pilot who didn’t come back. Walking in, the first things Lane saw were the man’s family pictures and a Bible lying on his desk. It was almost too much to bear.

Down in the enlisted men’s quarters Radioman Snowden of Scouting 6 stared at the empty bunks all around. He felt overwhelmingly depressed. He wasn’t questioning why they were there, or the reason for war. He just had a feeling of deep, personal emptiness at the thought of losing so many good friends… .

Topside, the officers on watch searched the night. But not for the Japanese. After recovering the Hiryu strike, Task Force 16 swung east at 7:09 and was now heading away from the enemy.

Many of Halsey’s old staff were dismayed. He would never have done it that way, they said. It seemed such a perfect opportunity to polish off the rest of Nagumo’s fleet. The Japs’ air power was obviously gone—every pilot swore to that. This, then, was the time for all-out pursuit. Perhaps a night torpedo attack; or the dive bombers could deliver the coup de grâce at dawn. That was all it would take. Why couldn’t Spruance see it?

Spruance could. It was a great temptation, but there were other factors too. He was all Nimitz had, and at this point no one knew what the Japanese might do. Yamamoto still had his great collection of battleships and cruisers, maybe even another carrier somewhere out there. Certainly the enemy had strength enough to blast him out of the ocean … enough still to take Midway if the cards fell right. As he later wrote in his report to Nimitz:

I did not feel justified in risking a night encounter with possibly superior enemy forces, but on the other hand, I did not want to be too far away from Midway next morning. I wished to be in a position from which either to follow up retreating enemy forces, or to break up a landing attack on Midway… .

So east it was. Fifteen knots due east until midnight … then north for 45 minutes … then back south … then west again. In this way Spruance cautiously kept his distance. He didn’t want to be trapped; those big Jap battleships and cruisers might be steaming toward him right now.

THE heavy ships of Admiral Kondo’s Invasion Force raced northeast in the dark. At 11:40 the Admiral radioed his plans: he expected to be in position at 3:00 A.M… . then he would search east, hoping to trap the Americans into a night engagement.

At midnight he was back on the air, handing out specific assignments. Briefly, his force would form a line and sweep northeast at 24 knots, combing the sea for the U.S. fleet. It would be a “comb” with plenty of “teeth”—21 ships spaced less than four miles apart. These would be his cruisers and destroyers. Behind them would come his battleships Kongo and Hiei, ready to rush where needed. It all added up to a line about 75 miles long—certainly enough to turn up something.

Yamamoto couldn’t have asked for more. Trouble was, he finally realized the time had passed for this sort of show. Five hours earlier, yes; but by now he knew all four of Nagumo’s carriers were lost, and Kondo couldn’t even get in position until 3 A.M. That left little more than an hour to find the Americans and fight his night engagement. Once daylight came, those U.S. carrier planes would be at his throat.

Nor could Admiral Kurita’s four sleek cruisers—previously sent to shell Midway—do any good. They had been ordered to open fire at 2 A.M., but here was another miscalculation. They couldn’t arrive until nearly dawn. Then they too would be wide open to air attack.

The staff babbled with alternatives. All were hopelessly hare-brained, and the chief of staff Admiral Ugaki plainly showed his contempt. Yamamoto didn’t even deign to comment. Finally somebody asked a little hysterically, “But how can we apologize to His Majesty for this defeat?”

“Leave that to me,” Yamamoto broke in coldly. “I am the only one who must apologize to His Majesty.”

At 12:15 A.M. on the 5th the Commander in Chief suspended the plans for a night engagement, ordered Kondo, Nagumo and Kurita to rendezvous with himself instead. He would be at a given point some 350 miles northwest of Midway at 9:00 A.M. Five minutes later he followed this up with another message, specifically for Kurita, canceling the 2:00 A.M. bombardment of the base, and again ordering him to rendezvous.

In the confusion Yamamoto forgot that he had also ordered the submarine I-168 to shell Midway. Commander Tanabe had been poking around the atoll for several days now, in perfect position to help out. Under the plan, he was to open the show and keep firing until Kurita took over at 2:00. All very well, but when the cruisers were called off, nothing went out to Tanabe. Now he lay on the surface, antenna up, listening in vain for any further instructions. Around 1:20 he quietly glided into firing position.

A FLASH to the south—a sharp crack in the night— punctured the uneasy silence on Midway. A shell screamed overhead and landed in the lagoon. Then another. At Jim Muri’s B-26, the crew jumped up with a start, grabbed their BARs and dived for a slit trench. It was the same everywhere—men racing for rifles and shelter. Most of the aviators had done plenty of bombing, but they had never heard a shell before. The sound was anything but pleasant.

At 1:23 Battery C began firing star shells … 1:24, searchlight No. 102 picked up the sub,’ bearing 110° … 1:25, Batteries B, D and E thundered into action.

For three minutes the duel continued. The Marine guns belted out 42 rounds; the sub rather casually lobbed eight shells into the lagoon. Then at 1:28 it submerged as unexpectedly as it had opened fire. On Sand Island a sailor sighed with relief and swore he’d take back everything he had ever said about the Marines.

ADMIRAL Kurita’s four big cruisers were less than 80 miles from Midway when he got the message to cancel the bombardment and rendezvous with Yamamoto instead. In many ways it was a relief. The whole business looked more and more like suicide. Yet some were still eager; a squad of volunteers stood ready to sneak ashore and blow up installations.

But now they were heading back, steaming northwest at 28 knots in the dim moonlight. The flagship Kumano led, then the Suzuya, the Mikuma, and finally the Mogami. A pair of destroyers—the Arashio and Asashio—panted along in the rear.

It was 2:15 when the Kumano spotted a surfaced submarine just off her starboard bow. Using her low-powered directional signal lamp, she flashed “Red! Red!”—meaning a 45° emergency turn to port. On the bridge of the Mogami the navigator, Lieutenant Commander Masaki Yamauchi, elbowed the officer on duty aside, took over this tricky maneuver himself. As he turned, he thought he saw too much distance between himself and the Mikuma, next up the line. He adjusted course a little to starboard. Suddenly, to his horror, he saw he wasn’t looking at the Mikuma at all, but at the Suzuya, two ships up the line. The Mikuma lay in between, directly ahead.

“Port the helm … hard a-port … Full astern!” The commands came in quick succession, but it was all too late. With a shower of sparks the Mogami’s bow ground into the Mikuma’s port quarter. The two ships shuddered, then drifted apart. The Mikuma got off lightly—only a ruptured fuel tank —but the Mogami lost 40 feet of her bow. Everything back to the first turret was bent to port at right angles. Painfully she inched up to 12 knots again.

That wasn’t enough for Admiral Kurita. He had an appointment with Yamamoto. He detached the Mikuma and both destroyers to provide escort, then hurried on northwest with the Kurnano and Suzuya.

To Admiral Yamamoto, steaming east toward the rendezvous point, the collision must have seemed a relatively minor matter. Nothing could compare with the step he took at 2:55 A.M. For it was then that he finally faced the inevitable and radioed all commands, “Occupation of AF is canceled.” He had reached the end of the line as far as invading Midway was concerned. When Commander Watanabe sought to query him, he simply answered, “Sashi sugi”—roughly meaning, “The price is too high.”

Before sunrise he made another decision almost as hard. At 4:50 he again faced the facts and ordered the hulk of his beloved Akagi scuttled. After this night he was ready for anything—even the fiasco of having two of his finest cruisers lumber together in this clumsy fashion.

LIEUTENANT COMMANDER John W. Murphy, skipper of the submarine Tambor, adjusted his periscope and carefully studied the two cruisers he had been shadowing. It was 5:00 A.M. now, and he could see them much better. One of them had lost about 40 feet of her bow.

Murphy had been playing hide-and-seek with these ships, along with several others, for nearly three hours. He was part of Admiral English’s submarine screen, and he was patrolling on the surface when he first saw them at 2:15A.M. They were 89 miles from Midway and heading away from the base.

But that was all he could tell. They might be Japs—or U.S. ships chasing Nagumo. He ordered right rudder and began following a parallel course. The minutes ticked by, and still he couldn’t figure them out. At 3:00 he finally sent a contact report anyhow, calling them simply “many unidentified ships.”

Daylight solved his problem. He could see only two of them now, but at 4:12 he definitely made out the truncated stacks of Japanese warships. Next moment he thought he was spotted and made an emergency dive. He lay low for 25 minutes, then popped up for a look with his periscope. By now he could see they were Mogami-type cruisers, and he radioed this news too. It was at this point he noticed that one had a damaged bow. And that was about all he saw, for they were steaming west, moving faster than he could follow.

MIDWAY was ready to believe the worst. The Tambor’s contact report didn’t say which way the “many unidentified ships” were going, but “89 miles” was mighty close. It seemed all too likely that the invasion was still on. At 4:30 A.M. Brooke Allen led eight B-17s to counter the threat. But the early morning weather was so thick they saw nothing. By 6:00 they were aimlessly circling Kure.

It was a PBY that produced the first hot information. At 6:30 it reported “two battleships streaming oil,” heading west about 125 miles west of Midway. Clearly they were retiring; a surge of relief swept the base.

The first Marine dive bombers roared off in pursuit at 7:00. VMSB-241 was now down to 12 planes; Captain Marshall Tyler was the squadron’s third skipper in two days; but the men were as aggressive as ever.

Forty-five minutes out they picked up the oil slick—a broad inviting avenue leading straight west. Twenty minutes later they were there. Dead ahead, already tossing up antiaircraft shells, were two big warships—one of them trailing the oil, the other with a smashed bow. A couple of destroyers hovered nearby.

The Marines began attacking at 8:08. First Tyler dived with the six remaining SBDs, but no hits were scored. Then Captain Fleming arrived with the Vindicators, slanting down in a glide-bombing run. No hits here either, but on the way in, Fleming’s plane began to burn. Somehow he kept his lead, made his run, dropped his bomb. Then—a blazing comet—he plunged into the after turret of his target.

“VERY brave,” thought Captain Akira Soji of the Mogami, watching the U.S. bomber crash into the Mikuma’s turret. His own ship took a handful of near-misses, one about 10 yards away. Splinters riddled the bridge and stack, but no serious damage.

The Mikuma fared worse. The crash dive started a fire that soon spread to the intake of the starboard engine room. Flames were sucked down, and the fumes suffocated the engineers.

The two cruisers continued plodding westward at 12 knots. But the Mikuma was no longer just keeping the Mogami company. Thanks to that American flier, she now couldn’t do any better herself.

ADMIRAL Spruance, too, had his eye on these Japanese cruisers. The Tambor’s first report reached him a little after 4:00, relayed from CINCPAC. Like nearly everyone else, he felt the invasion might be still on. At 4:20 he turned southwest and raced toward Midway at 25 knots.

By 9:30 it was clear his fears were groundless. Spruance now eased off to the west, in good position either to attack these damaged ships or go after what was left of Nagumo. Important information was coming from that direction too. At 8:00 a PBY had reported a burning carrier trailing two battleships, three cruisers and four destroyers. For some reason the message didn’t reach Task Force 16 till late in the morning, but once Spruance had it he made his choice. The carrier was 275 miles away, the contact was cold, but it was still the “prime target.” At 11:15 he turned northwest and began a long stern chase. If a carrier was up there at 8:00 A.M., he’d take a chance on it now.

COMMANDER Aiso decided it was high time to leave the Hiryu’s engine room. He felt it was about 8:00 A.M.—hours since his last contact with the bridge. Meanwhile the fires had died down, a torpedo had slammed into the ship, and now Ensign Mandai—up on the next deck battling a blaze in some rice sacks—was yelling down to get out: the Hiryu was beginning to sink.

Aiso led some 50 men up through a hatch, where they joined Mandai and his fire-fighting party. They found themselves on the port side of the ship, in a long steel corridor that led nowhere. The one exit was sealed, and the only other opening was a tiny pinhole in the inboard wall of the corridor—apparently a flaw in the weld. Here they could peek out onto the hangar deck, empty and strangely flooded with sunshine.

Aiso decided that their only hope was to break through the wall by the peephole. Here the steel was very thin, and the daylight spelled escape. They found a hammer and chisel and went to work. Gradually they punched through a hole about a yard wide—just big enough for one man at a time.

Squeezing through, they emerged on the deserted hangar deck. The forward end was wide open—the result of the hit that blasted the forward elevator—hence the sunlight streaming through. The men now worked their way up to the flight deck and found that deserted too. Looking up at the mast, they saw even the flag was gone. The halyard flapped loosely in the morning breeze. To Ensign Mandai it said more eloquently than words that the ship had been abandoned.

Mandai idly looked into the hole where the forward elevator had been. Sea water was swirling onto the hangar deck—covering the spot they just left. He alerted Commander Aiso, who called the men together. Aiso told them the situation looked hopeless and he simply wanted to thank them for doing their duty so well.

Most of the men slumped down on the flight deck—that was as good a place as any to await the end. Mandai dozed off—then was awakened by a kick in the ribs. To his amazement several other survivors had now appeared from the quarterdeck—an aircraft mechanic, four or five firemen. They had escaped from below a good deal earlier, and they brought exciting news.

It seemed that when they first reached deck a destroyer was just leaving. They frantically signaled her, and she blinkered back. Nobody understood code, but it might mean help later. Even more exciting: around 6:30 a Japanese plane flew over—a plane with wheels. It could only have come from the carrier Hosho … which must mean Yamamoto was near. Suddenly it was worth trying to stay alive.

Aiso led all hands aft and down to the boat deck. Here he found two launches, plus a 30-foot cutter already, lying in the water just astern. Perhaps they could float around in these until help came. But the Hiryu was now sinking fast by the bow, and he soon realized they could never get the launches off before she went down. He hastily divided the men into two groups, told them to jump from the stern and make for the cutter.

Ensign Mandai leaped as far out as he could, grabbed at a dangling line. It was attached to nothing, and he plummeted into the sea. Popping up, he turned and looked back at the Hiryu. There, high above him, were the carrier’s great bronze propellers, dripping and gleaming in the sun. He swam for dear life … heard a great detonation … turned again and saw only the empty sea.

When the men looked at their watches afterward (one of them a Mickey Mouse watch), they found that all had stopped between 9:07 and 9:15—thus fixing the time when the Hiryu finally sank. But right now their only concern was to get to the cutter still floating nearby. Thirty-nine of them made it, including Commander Aiso and Ensign Mandai. Aiso took charge, announced that they would wait right here till help came. The plane with the wheels would alert the fleet; Admiral Yamamoto himself was on the way.

Actually, Yamamoto had no intention of coming. He was, in fact, shocked by the report from the plane with the wheels. It looked as though somebody had botched the job of scuttling the Hiryu, and what could be worse than to have her fall into American hands? He radioed Admiral Nagumo to make sure she was sunk.

Meanwhile another derelict was occupying Yamamoto’s attention. At 6:52—just a few minutes before the report on the Hiryu—an intriguing message came in from the Chikuma’s No. 4 plane, off to the east scouting the U.S. fleet: “Sight an enemy Yorktown class carrier listing to starboard [sic] and drifting in position bearing 111° distance 240 miles from my take-off point. One destroyer is in the vicinity.”

The I-168, still patrolling off Midway, was immediately ordered to leave station and destroy this target. Commander Tanabe pulled out his charts and began his calculations. He figured that the carrier was only 150 miles away—no trouble reaching her. The real trick was the approach. He wanted to come in from the west at dawn. Then the carrier would be nicely silhouetted while he remained hidden in the dark. He carefully plotted the course and speed that would do just that, then turned the I-168 away from Midway and headed north-northeast.

No ONE on the destroyer Hughes actually saw the Japanese search plane. It was just a blip on the radar, picked up at 6:26 A.M. as the ship continued her lonely job of guarding the Yorktown. Commander Ramsey ordered the crew to stand by to repel air attack, but no one ever came. The blip just hovered there, 20 miles to the west, for about ten minutes. Then it gradually faded away.

The incident made the men all the more nervous when at 7:41 machine-gun bullets began cutting the water off the port side of the Yorktown. At first Signalman Peter Karetka was sure some Jap had sneaked in for a strafing run, but when no plane appeared, he knew it couldn’t be that. Commander Ramsey thought it might be a gun going off, overheated by a smoldering fire somewhere.

More splashes, and the men suddenly realized it could only be somebody still alive on the Yorktown, trying to attract attention. The Hughes stood in close. There, sure enough, was a man waving from the port side of the hangar deck. Ramsey lowered his motor whaleboat, and the boarding party soon found Seaman Norman Pichette, now slumped unconscious beside his gun. He had a bad stomach wound and was wrapped in a sheet. They were all back on the Hughes by 8:35, and moments later the ship’s doctor was cutting away the sheet. This seemed to rouse Pichette, who came to long enough to mumble there was still another man alive, lying in the Yorktown’s sick bay.

Again the whaleboat chugged over. This time it returned with Seaman George Weise, who had fractured his skull when blown off the smokestack. Weise never knew how he got to sick bay; he just remembered dimly hearing the alarm and the call to abandon ship. It was dark; the Yorktown was listing heavily; the ladder topside hung loose at a crazy angle. In the blur of shapes and shadows trying to get the wounded out, he recalled someone coming over to help him. Then he heard, or thought he heard, a voice say, “Leave him and let’s go—he’s done for anyway.”

The last thing he remembered was sitting up in his bunk and swearing a blue streak … but by then everyone was gone. For hours he lay helpless in the dark, semiconscious and never able to move. Finally he became vaguely aware that Pichette was in the room too, also left behind in some fashion. Pichette was very badly off, but at least he could move. In the end it was he who found the strength to get up, wrap himself in his sheet, and stagger up three decks for help.

Were there any others? The men in the motor whaleboat thought so. They reported strange tapping sounds from deep inside the carrier, suggesting men trapped below. Ramsey sent the boat back again—this time with orders to explore everywhere. They found important code materials but no human beings. The tapping, it turned out, was just the sound of creaking steel as the Yorktown wallowed in the swell. No one else was alive on the ship.

But someone was very much alive in the water. While the whaleboat was off exploring the Yorktown, the men on the Hughes were amazed to see a man in a yellow rubber raft paddling furiously toward them. He turned out to be Ensign Harry Gibbs of Fighting 3. Gibbs had been shot down defending the Yorktown the day before. He spent a long night in his raft, then sighted the carrier at sunrise. He paddled six miles to get back to his ship.

Around 10:00 the mine sweeper Vireo turned up, and Ramsey arranged for a tow. A line was rigged, and by early afternoon they were under way, heading east at about two knots. The Yorktown yawed dreadfully. She seemed unwilling to leave the scene of battle. At times, in fact, she appeared to be pulling the Vireo backward.

Other destroyers began turning up—the Gwin, the Monaghan. With more muscle on hand, a jettisoning party went over to the Yorktown, began dropping loose gear overboard to help straighten her up. During the afternoon Ramsey also sent a message to CINCPAC, urging the organization of a salvage party. The carrier was holding her own; he was sure she could be saved.

Admiral Fletcher and Captain Buckmaster needed no prodding from CINCPAC. They were working hard on their own to save the Yorktown. But it wasn’t a simple matter. By the morning of the 5th, Task Force 17 was 150 miles east of the carrier, and over 2,000 survivors were scattered among six different destroyers. It would take time to cull out the specialists needed for a proper salvage party and then get them back to the scene.

One by one the destroyers came alongside the Astoria, and the men needed were transferred by breeches buoy to the cruiser. Here they were organized, briefed, and transferred again to the destroyer Hammann, which would take them back. They were mostly engineers and technicians, but there was no lack of volunteers among the cooks and yeomen. Everybody wanted to go. Finally guards had to be placed at the highlines to keep useless personnel from sneaking over in their determination to get back to the “Old Lady.”

Midafternoon, and the Hammann started off. On board were Captain Buckmaster and a crack salvage team which, with the addition of a few from the Hughes, totaled 29 officers and 141 men. Escorted by the destroyers Balch and Benham, they reached the Yorktown shortly after 2:00 A.M. on the 6th.

Far to the west Spruance continued his pursuit of the Japanese fleet, but it had been a discouraging day for Task Force 16. The trail was cold, the chase long, and when the strike was finally launched at 3:00 P.M., the distance was still 230 miles. On the hopeful side, the attack packed a powerful punch: 32 dive bombers from the Enterprise, 26 from the Hornet.

Two hours passed, but they saw nothing below. Three hours—still nothing. Gas was low … it was getting dark … the fliers were tired and hungry. Over the radio a voice kept saying, “Let’s go home.”

Finally at 6:20 someone spotted the wake of a single ship hurrying westward in the gathering darkness. Not much of a target, but it was this or nothing. With Dave Shumway leading the way, the 58 dive bombers poured down on their lone quarry.

It should have been an unequal fight, but it wasn’t. The ship, which turned out to be a destroyer, twisted and squirmed with fantastic skill. Fifty-eight bombs rained down—but not one hit. Worse than that, a blast of antiaircraft fire caught Lieutenant Sam Adams’s plane. He plunged into the sea.

As the rest headed home, the big trouble began. It was really dark now, and the pilots knew little about night carrier landings. On the Enterprise Captain George Murray turned on his deck lights to help. Robin Lindsey, the landing signal officer, switched from paddles to illuminated wands. He nursed down plane after plane, until it seemed the parade would never end. Finally he turned to his signalman and asked how many more. “I’ll be damned if I know,” answered the sailor, “we’ve got more than we’re supposed to have already.”

It turned out that five of the Hornet’s planes had come in too. Completely green, their pilots were happy to land on the first carrier they saw. In return, one Enterprise plane came down on the Hornet.

Lieutenant Ruff Johnson, leading Bombing 8, couldn’t find any carrier at all. His homing signal was out; his tanks were all but drained. He called his rear-seat man McCoy and asked if he could swim. McCoy answered “negative,” so the skipper told him to get out his survival book and learn quickly. Then at the last minute they sighted the task force, and Johnson asked the Hornet to blink her side lights.

Marc Mitscher did better than that. These were dangerous waters—enemy subs might be lurking—but fliers were sacred to Mitscher, and he didn’t hesitate a minute. Two searchlight beams shot into the sky. Johnson landed without even enough gas to taxi down the flight deck. As he rolled to a stop his chief mechanic leaped on his wing with joy: “Captain, you S.O.B., are we glad to see you—oh, I beg your pardon.”

It was also a fruitless day for the B-17s. During the morning Colonel Allen’s eight bombers finally located the two damaged ships west of Midway. Arriving at 8:30, they dropped a total of 39 bombs from 20,000 feet, but even the communiqué writers found little to cheer about. The fliers themselves, one of them later recalled, considered the attack “a terrible disappointment.”

Undeterred, the B-17s went out again in the afternoon. First Colonel Allen’s group, then a separate bunch under Captain Ridings took off after the same “burning carrier” Spruance was chasing. They had no better luck than the Admiral. Like the Navy planes, they searched in vain far to the northwest. And also like the Navy planes, they finally settled for that lone destroyer. Attacking at various levels from 9,000 to 16,000 feet, they aimed 79 more bombs at the target. The Jap skipper proved as elusive as ever.

COMMANDER Motomi Katsumi was one of the best in the business; he maneuvered the destroyer Tanikaze with enviable skill as the American bombs rained down from above. For Katsumi it was the climax of a wasted day. Early in the morning Nagumo had sent him to check the reports that the Hiryu was still afloat. He found nothing and was returning to rejoin the fleet when he was hit by both dive bombers and B-17s.

All those bombs on one destroyer. Yet Katsumi managed to dodge everything. The only damage came from a fragment of a near-miss that slashed through his No. 3 turret: it set off an explosion that killed all six men inside. The Tanikaze continued on, linking up with the fleet shortly after sunset.

It turned out that the other ships too had spent some anxious moments. Around 2:30 P.M. radio intelligence had warned of enemy aircraft high overhead. A false alarm, but no less nerve-racking. Then at 5:25 the Nagara detected some heavy bombers heading west. These planes were real indeed, but friendly clouds intervened, and the fleet was never discovered.

It was a curious scene the Americans missed. Most of Yamamoto’s great armada had now rendezvoused 350 miles northwest of Midway, and dozens of ships lay motionless on the gray sea as a stream of cutters shuttled back and forth, transferring survivors from the stand-by destroyers to the battleships Haruna, Kirishima, Mutsu and Nagato.

All through the afternoon and into the evening the fleet lay licking its wounds. During the night Yamamoto steamed still farther west out of carrier range. Early on the 6th Admiral Kurita joined up with the cruisers Kumano and Suzuya. That meant every major element in the fleet was now safe, except for the damaged Mogami and Mikuma, left behind with a couple of destroyers. They would have to fend for themselves.

ALL through the night of June 5, and the predawn hours of the 6th, Admiral Spruance steamed west at a conservative 15 knots. Having failed to overtake the ships to the northwest, he didn’t want to overrun the cripples to the southwest.

At 5:10 A.M. the Enterprise sent 18 scouts on a 200-mile sweep to the west, and around 6:45 two separate contacts were made. The Hornet launched the first strike—26 dive bombers, 8 fighters—and by 9:30 they could see the Japs ahead. There were two big cruisers and two destroyers trying to screen them. At 9:50 Stan Ring called, “Attack when ready,” and Gus Widhelm replied with his favorite battle cry: “Widhelm is ready; prepare the Japs!”

Down they screeched, getting hits on both cruisers and a destroyer. But the Japanese fought back hard, and heavy antiaircraft fire knocked down one of the SBDs. The Hornet group headed home for more bombs.

Now it was the Enterprise’s turn. At 10:45 she launched 31 dive bombers, 12 fighters and 3 torpedo planes, all led by Lieutenant Wally Short. They found the cruisers easily, but wasted half an hour searching for a nonexistent battleship 40 miles farther on. By 12:30 they were more than willing to settle for what they had. Cocky from past triumphs, hungry for a kill, and free at last of the deadly Zeros, they tore into the Japanese with fierce elation. Their radios told the story:

This is Wally pushing over on the rear ship now.

Close up on me.

Hey, any of you fellows got any bombs? There is a Mogi class cruiser in the rear.

Oh baby, did we put that God-damn can on fire.

Looks like that battleship blew up too… .

Get the sons-of-bitches again. OK, that’s fine.

Hit em again—give em hell.

They will never get that fire out.

Put all of them smack on the bottom.

That one blew up too. Good hit. Good hit.

Boy that’s swell. Boy, oh boy. You son of a gun,

You’re going up … wish I had a camera along.

Tojo, you son-of-a-bitch, you’ll not get your

laundry this week.

And if all this wasn’t enough, the Hornet planes were back with a second load at 2:45 P.M. By now both cruisers were a shambles, and one of them was being abandoned. A destroyer stood alongside, taking men off, when the bombers began to dive. As she tried to pull clear, Lieutenant Clayton Fisher plastered her too.

The Hornet’s eight fighters came next. There was no antiaircraft fire now, so they swooped low, ripping into one of the cruisers with their machine guns. As Lieutenant J. F. Sutherland whipped by, he noticed a mass of people huddled on the stern, shaking their fists in futile rage. His reaction was one of sudden sympathy for their helplessness, and he flew back to the Hornet contemplating how quickly a hated enemy could become a pitied human being.

One final touch. In the late afternoon the Enterprise launched two camera planes to record the day’s handiwork. Reaching the scene, Lieutenant Cleo Dobson, leading the flight, found the abandoned cruiser still burning and dead in the water. Men were swimming all around her. He dropped to 100 feet and took his time. His crystal-clear pictures froze the ship in all her agony—her amidships torn and smoldering, a sailor climbing down a rope ladder, another in a small raft by the stern.

Off to the west he sighted the other cruiser and the two destroyers crawling away as fast as possible. In a magnificent golden sunset he headed back to the Enterprise thinking of the small difference that separates the winners from losers. That night he confided in his diary, “I keep thinking to myself how I would hate to be in the place of those fellows in the water. I offered a prayer to God that I be spared their fate.”

FIREMAN Kenichi Ishikawa could make out several hundred other men swimming in the water; so he was all the luckier to reach this raft. Scrambling aboard, he lay exhausted and looked back at the sinking Mikuma. She was going fast now—though not as fast as the setting sun. It was dusk when she finally rolled over on her port side and disappeared into the Pacific.

Even so, she lived up to her reputation as one of Japan’s toughest big cruisers. The very first attack knocked out her bridge, fatally wounding Captain Sakiyama, yet the exec Commander Takagi took over and fought on. The second attack finished her—five hits and then her torpedo supply exploded.

Takagi ordered abandon ship. As the men poured over the side, Lieutenant Nasao Koyama drew his sword and committed hara-kiri on the forward turret. The destroyer Arashio moved in and was picking up survivors when the third attack came in. Scores were killed when a bomb landed squarely on the destroyer’s stern.

It was almost as bad on the Mogami. She took five hits altogether, the last exploding amidships, where it permanently sealed a number of men in the engine room. A near miss also honeycombed her port side—someone later counted 800 holes. About 90 men were lost altogether. But Captain Soji and his leading officers came through, and Lieutenant Saruwatari did a superb job at damage control. By sunset the fires were out and the bulkheads holding. Escorted by the two damaged destroyers, she limped away toward Truk and safety.

SAFETY for the Yorktown meant Pearl Harbor, and by the dawn of June 6 the chances seemed better than ever of getting her there. Sunrise found the battered carrier still holding her own in a calm and dazzling sea.

Captain Buckmaster led the salvage party aboard. With a small burial party he first climbed to the sharply canted flight deck, where many of the dead still lay at their posts. Chief Pharmacist’s Mate James Wilson turned to give some instructions, but the Captain silenced him with a wave of the hand. Uncovering, he addressed himself in prayer, gave thanks for the victory, and recited verbatim the beautiful but seldom used service for Burial of the Dead at Sea.

This moment of reverie soon gave way to the clatter of hammers and the sputter of acetylene torches. Working parties started cutting away loose gear to lighten the ship. Others pitched two stranded planes, all live bombs and torpedoes into the sea. Lieutenant Greenbacker began collecting the classified papers strewn about.

The Hammann nudged up to the starboard side to provide power, portable pumps and fire hoses. Down below, men attacked the blaze still smoldering in the rag locker and began the important work of counterflooding. A high moment came when the first 5-inch gun on the port side was cut loose and dropped overboard. Free of the weight, the whole ship shook … and seemed to straighten up a little in relief.

By 1:00 P.M. they had worked 2° off the Yorktown’s list. It was time for a break, and the Hammann sent over fruit and sandwiches. Some distance out, the other five destroyers slowly circled the carrier. They were listening for submarines, but it was hard to tell. Echo-ranging conditions were poor due to what destroyer men call a “thermal barrier.” Yet this was often the case on calm days, and there was no hint of real trouble. It was just 1:30, and on the Yorktown the men were about to go back to work. …

COMMANDER Tanabe raised his periscope for a last look. The carrier was now about 1,300 yards away. She was still under tow, but barely moving. The destroyer was still alongside. The others were still circling slowly—no sign they suspected. The hydrophone man said he couldn’t even hear the enemy’s sound detection system working. Tanabe made a mild joke about the Americans all being out to lunch.

The I-168 had worked hard for this perfect chance. Nearly eight hours had passed since the lookout’s cry of a “black object” on the horizon. It was, of course, the crippled U.S. carrier, just where Tanabe expected to find her at dawn.

It was only 5:30, and for the first 10 or 20 minutes he stayed on the surface. Approaching from the west, he was still sheltered by darkness. Then it got too light for that, and he submerged, poking up his periscope every 15 minutes.

By 7:00 the I-168 was about six miles off, and Tanabe had a much better picture of the situation. For the first time he could see the destroyers guarding the carrier. To make detection harder, he now cut his speed to three knots and raised his periscope only once or twice an hour.

Ever so carefully, he stole closer. To get a sure kill, he decided to fire his four torpedoes with a spread of only 2°, instead of the usual 6°. This meant a bigger punch amidships, but it also required getting as near as possible.

He dived still lower, hoping to get through the destroyer screen. Next time he looked he was safely through, but now he was too close. The carrier loomed like a mountain only 700 yards away. He needed that much for the torpedo to run true. Slowly he curled in a wide circle to starboard, coming around to try again. This time everything was perfect… .

“HEY, look, porpoises!” CPO Joseph Kisela heard somebody call, pointing off the starboard side of the Yorktown. A couple of men stared out to sea. “Porpoises, hell!” a sailor snorted.

A machine gun on the bridge began firing. This was the prearranged signal in case of danger. There was a wild scramble topside. Coming up from the engine room, Lieutenant Cundiff looked to starboard and saw four white torpedo streaks heading straight for the ship. An avid photographer, he gasped. “What a once-in-a-lifetime shot, and no camera!”

Lieutenant Greenbacker, about to transfer some files to the Hammann, fled “downhill” to the port side of the quarterdeck. Then the thought occurred that torpedoes might be coming from that side too. He worked his way back “uphill” to the center of the ship—as close to neutral ground as he could get. Here he waited for the torpedoes to hit, and that seemed to take forever.

One missed … one struck the Hammann … the other two passed under the destroyer and crashed into the Yorktown amidships. Once again there was that teeth-rattling jar that came only from torpedoes. It whipped the tripod mast, shearing off most of the rivets at the base. It knocked down the ship’s bell, shattering it completely. It bowled over the damage control officer, Commander Aldrich, breaking his left arm. It hurled Commander Davis, cutting loose the 5-inchers, right into the sea. It almost made Commander Ray bite off the stem of his pipe.

Seeing it was about to happen, Chief Electrician W. E. Wright made a wild leap to the deck of the Hammann. But this was no solution, for she was hit at almost the same instant. Wright was blown high in the air, landing in the water.

Commander Arnold True was desperately trying to back the Hammann clear when the torpedoes hit. To the end his gunners were firing at the streaks, hoping to explode the warheads. The crash hurled True across the bridge and into a chart desk, breaking two ribs and knocking out his wind. He couldn’t speak for several minutes.

Few words were needed. The Hammann’s fate was clearly sealed. The concussion from the two hits on the Yorktown stove in her plates, and the direct hit snapped her almost in two. She looked like a toy ship that had been dropped from a great height—upright but broken.

Within two minutes the foredeck was awash, and the executive officer Lieutenant Ralph Elden ordered abandon ship. As the bow went under, most of the crew swam off. Chief Torpedoman Berlyn Kimbrell, however, remained on the rising stern, trying to put the depth charges on “safe” and handing out life jackets. When Boilermaker Raymond Fitzgibbon went over the side, Kimbrell shook hands with him and gave him the Churchill “Victory” sign.

Then she was gone, but the worst was yet to come. The depth charges—though presumably set on “safe”—went off anyhow. (There are a dozen theories.) An immense explosion erupted under the water, right where everyone was swimming. The concussion was fantastic: one sailor’s metal cigarette lighter was mashed absolutely flat in his pocket The effect on a man’s body could be far worse than that.

The destroyers Benham and Balch left the screen, rescuing the lucky ones who escaped, plus several from the Yorktown too. One man swam up to the Benham and climbed aboard unassisted. It was the same ship’s cook they had saved on the 4th, who wanted only to help in the galley. This time he simply said, “I know where the galley is, I’ll go get to work.”

Long after everyone else was picked up, the Balch spotted a lone swimmer among the debris. He was desperately trying to hold the faces of two other men out of the water. It was the Hammann’s skipper Commander True. Barely conscious himself, he had struggled alone for nearly three hours to keep two of his dying men alive.

On the Yorktown it was time to leave again. The two new hits on the starboard side had the effect of straightening her up, but that was deceiving. She was definitely lower in the water. The Vireo pulled along the starboard side, and the salvage party swung down the lines to safety.

When everyone else seemed to be off, Captain Buckmaster came down hand over hand. Then at the last minute Commander Delaney and one of his engineers appeared from a final inspection below and also left the ship. Deprived of the privilege of being the last to leave, Buckmaster was enormously upset. He even wanted to swing back up the line and touch the Yorktown again, but the Vireo cast off before he could make it.

While the rescue work went on, the Gwin, Hughes and Monaghan charged here and there looking for the submarine. The three destroyers dropped numerous depth charges, but for five hours there was no evidence of success. Then at 6:45 the Hughes suddenly saw smoke on the horizon. A check with the glasses showed a sub on the surface about 13 miles away. Its diesels were smoking, and it was racing west, trying to get clear of the area.

The Hughes and Monaghan set off in pursuit, and at 7:05 they opened fire. Bracketed by shell explosions, the submarine soon disappeared into the sea. On the Monaghan Fireman Edward Creighton was sure they got her. That night he wrote in his diary, “We had a 15 or 20 minute gun battle, and she finally went down. There were no survivors.”

COMMANDER Tanabe had one last trick up his sleeve. He dived into his own smoke and went right under the destroyers that were chasing him. They throbbed by overhead, and the crisis was passed.

He breathed easily for the first time since torpedoing the carrier. Except for a brief moment of exhilaration—the banzais, the touching gift of cider from all hands—the whole afternoon had been hell. Lieutenant Tomita counted 61 depth bombs altogether. The I-168 finally had to break surface at 6:30, but happily the American destroyers were now far astern. They gave chase soon enough, but Tanabe stayed up as long as he dared, gulping in air and recharging his batteries. He also took the occasion to radio Yamamoto the good news about the carrier.

On the Yamato the Admiral now had bigger game in mind. All morning his radio had crackled with the troubles of the Mogami and Mikuma. Apparently the U.S. force was moving steadily west, farther and farther from home. Perhaps he could trap it yet. Around noon he sent Admiral Kondo south with the carrier Zuiho, six cruisers and eight destroyers. They were to join up with the Mogami and Mikuma and lure the Americans into a night battle.

At 3:50 P.M. Yamamoto broadened this plan into an all-out effort. The Yamato was also ordered south with the Main Body and what was left of Nagumo’s fleet. Land bombers were ordered up from the Marshalls and put on Wake. These plus his own scattering of planes would give him real air power again. His heavy ships would do the rest. All that remained was for the Americans to walk into the trap.

ADMIRAL Spruance had a feeling (“an intuition perhaps”) that he had pushed his luck far enough to the west. He was over 400 miles from Midway, and he was determined to keep out of the range of Japanese planes based on Wake. Besides, he was low on fuel, short on destroyers, and had lost a lot of good pilots. From his long walks on the flight deck, he also sensed how weary the others were.

Shortly after 7:00 P.M.—as soon as the two planes returned from photographing the dying Mikuma—Task Force 16 turned and headed back east. Astern lay the remnants of Japanese hopes; ahead lay good things like oil, sleep and ultimately home.

For Midway, too, it was over. A final flight of B-17s on the afternoon of the 6th reported sinking an enemy “cruiser” in 15 seconds; but this turned out to be the U.S. submarine Grayling, crash-diving to escape the bombs. During the evening Major General Clarence L. Tinker—just in from Hawaii—led four Liberators in a long-range attempt to neutralize Wake, but the effort was in vain. The bombers never found the target, and Tinker himself was lost.

By dawn on the 7th, all was quiet again on Midway.

“MY GOD, she’s going right on over, isn’t she?” Boatswain Forest Lunsford gasped to Ensign J. T. Andrews, as they stood on the Benham watching the Yorktown in the first light of day, June 7. For the men in the destroyer screen, the sight of the carrier at dawn ended any hope they still had of saving her.

Some time during the night the Yorktown had heeled back heavily to port, and by 4:30 her flight deck slanted into the water. Great bubbles were foaming up, and loud cracking noises came from somewhere inside her. From the halyards her last signal hoist hung straight down— “My speed, 15.” Captain Buckmaster’s American flag was still flying, but it almost touched the sea.

At 4:43 she lay on her port side, revealing a huge hole in her starboard bilge—the result of yesterday’s submarine attack. The end was near, and at 4:54 all ships half-masted their colors; all hands uncovered and came to attention. Two patrolling PBYs appeared overhead and dipped their wings in salute.

At 5:01, well down at the stern, the Yorktown slowly sank from sight. There were the usual noises, the veil of smoke and steam, but to most of the men she went quietly and with enormous dignity— “like the great lady she was,” as one of them put it.

On the Hughes Signalman Karetka fought to hold back his tears. He was very young and wanted to appear grown up. Then he saw that even the old-timers were crying, so he didn’t feel too badly when he wept too.

CHAPTER 13

Home Again

ONLY THE LITTER OF battle was left: the empty shell cases … the oil slicks … mattresses … the black rubber rafts of the Japanese, the yellow of the Americans. And occasionally—not too often, but sometimes—a bedraggled, sunburned figure, hoping and waiting.

Right from the start Captain Simard had his PT boats and PBYs looking for survivors. By noon on June 4 PT 20 had already picked up three of the Marine pilots. On the 5th Lieutenant “Pappy” Cole put his PBY down on the open sea and scooped up Ensign Gay, none the worse for his day with Nagumo. On the 6th Lieutenant Norman Brady brought back some of his own kind: four survivors from the only PBY caught by the Japanese. They had been shot down, strafed, and spent 58 hours bailing out a leaky raft. Brady spotted them some 400 miles west of Midway.

But a man in the ocean is hard to see, and sometimes those adrift thought help would never come. It wasn’t so bad at first for Pat Mitchell, Stan Ruehlow and Dick Gray. When Fighting 8 ran out of gas, they managed to land close to each other. Mitchell didn’t salvage his raft, but the other two did, and they tied them together about 12 feet apart. For food they had pemmican, malted milk tablets and a canteen of water. Planes were flying all around, and they felt sure they’d soon be picked up. They settled back and waited that night and all the next day.

It was the second night when the shark came. He nudged the raft where Gray was sleeping—that brought a yell—then headed for the one shared by Ruehlow and Mitchell. His dorsal fin knifed through the bottom, dumping them both into the water. Ruehlow, in fact, came down on the shark’s back, slashing his hand on the fin. He set a new swimming record getting to Gray’s raft, while Mitchell scrambled back into the one just attacked. It was now half-swamped, and he lay sprawled across it, his legs dangling in the water. Ruehlow wrote him off as a goner, but for some reason the shark swam off.

In the morning they patched the raft with a tube of cement and managed to get it reasonably seaworthy again. Then they went back to their waiting. June 6 … June 7, and still no rescue. Occasionally planes flew overhead, and once they saw a destroyer in the distance, beautifully silhouetted against a line squall. As always, they flashed their hand mirror, but again no one spotted them. To keep their spirits up, they played “Ghosts.” Ruehlow’s favorite word “syzygy” served him as well in mid-Pacific as it ever did at home.

June 8 started like the other days. Then a PBY appeared, and this time it came directly overhead. They waved wildly, and their hearts almost stopped when it seemed to fly by. But at the last minute it circled back, and the pilot, Lieutenant Frank Fisler, brought it down to a beautiful landing. He taxied over, and three more fliers were saved.

And so it went. In ten days the PBYs picked up 27 airmen altogether, and on June 9 the submarine Trout added to the collection a pair of Japanese from the Mikuma. Fireman Kenichi Ishikawa and Chief Radioman Katsuichi Yoshida were all that were left of the 19 originally on their raft.

There remained the men in the Hiryu’s cutter. Commander Aiso had long since given up waiting for Admiral Yamamoto. When the great battleships failed to appear, he decided to head for Wake instead. He had no maps, charts or compass—only the sun and the stars—but with six good oars and a blanket for a sail, they could get there just the same. To sustain and encourage them they also had a little food and 48 bottles of beer.

Day after day they saw nothing but ocean. Mostly it was calm, but they had three storms—wild, violent affairs in which four men had to hold an oar at right angles to keep the boat from rolling over. Then it would be calm again, brilliant and blazing hot. During the nights they wrangled over food; Aiso was far from generous with the rations. During the day the men talked of home, good times and milk shakes. Ensign Mandai promised to treat all hands after they got back to their home port, Sasebo. The milk shakes at Sasebo Naval Base were the best in the world, something worth living for.

The tenth day, June 14, a man died of exhaustion. They said a prayer for him and gently lowered him over the side. Eventually four men went the same way.

On the twelfth day they sighted a big patrol plane, and another on the thirteenth. They were overjoyed, certain that these planes were Japanese. Next afternoon one flew very close. It circled, and to their dismay they saw painted on the side a large white star.

Finally on the fifteenth day a ship appeared. She was a four-stack U.S. warship, and as she drew near, the men in the cutter debated whether to surrender or not. They finally talked themselves into it. Maybe, they agreed, they could capture the ship. Fantasy, perhaps, but it made the decision easier. The vessel, which was the seaplane tender Ballard, came alongside. A sailor tossed them a line, and their war was over.

Speaking to interrogators later, they said politely but firmly that they did not wish to return to Japan under the circumstances; that they did not wish Tokyo to be informed of their capture; and that they preferred to have it believed that they sank with the Hiryu.

IT WAS hard to imagine anything worse than going home this way. Admiral Yamamoto had finally given up the game early on June 7, then promptly took to his bed. Chief Steward Omi brought a tray of rice gruel, but the Admiral really wasn’t hungry.

On the 9th there was an interruption—one of those moments everybody dreaded but had to face. Admiral Kusaka was coming over to the Yamato to make a report. About 11:00 A.M. a launch bobbed alongside, and a crane hoisted a bamboo stretcher aboard.

Kusaka was still in his battle-stained uniform, limping badly from his injuries. Accompanied by Captain Oishi and Commander Genda, he hobbled to the bridge, where he faced Yamamoto and his staff. To Yeoman Noda, quietly watching in the background, Kusaka looked like a suitor who had just lost his best girl.

Yamamoto was most considerate. He patted Kusaka on the shoulder and thanked him for his efforts. He urged that everything possible be done to restore the men’s morale; he arranged for cakes, pocket money and even fresh underwear to be sent to the survivors.

Kusaka then asked for a word in private. In a small room just off the bridge he told Yamamoto how personally crushed Nagumo’s staff felt—there was all this talk of suicide—and he begged the Commander in Chief to reorganize the carrier fleet and give them all another chance. Yamamoto’s eyes filled with tears; he answered simply, “I understand.”

This ordeal over, the fleet continued its gloomy retreat. The operations room on the Yamato was like a wake. The air officer, Commander Sasaki, sat in a daze at the back of the flag bridge. He was said to be drinking far too much sake.

On the Nagara Admiral Nagumo turned morose again. Word was passed to keep an eye on him, see he didn’t do anything foolish. Admiral Kusaka dreamed of revenge; Commander Sasabe felt utterly drained of energy; the staff surgeon brooded over all the valuables he could have saved but left behind. Listening in the background, Commander Genda grunted to himself, “It’s no use talking about might-have-beens now.”

He could have added a few: if only the Tone’s No. 4 plane had gotten off on time, they would have discovered the U.S. fleet before rearming for that second attack on Midway … if only the enemy dive bombers had attacked a few minutes later, Nagumo’s own strike would have been launched … if only they had attacked the American carriers right away, as Yamaguchi wanted, instead of holding back until all the planes were ready… .

There were deeper weaknesses too. In the last analysis the whole Midway plan depended too much on the U.S. fleet reacting exactly the way the Japanese expected. It frittered away Yamamoto’s great strength all over the Pacific, instead of concentrating his ships where needed. And finally it reeked of overconfidence—of a dangerous contempt for the enemy—that the Japanese perhaps best described as “victory disease.” It would have been so easy to have had a better submarine cordon, a stronger air search, an extra carrier on the scene. But these post-mortems lay in the future. Right now the problem was how to handle this stunning defeat. As Yamamoto turned homeward, he radioed a full summary to Admiral Nagano, Chief of Naval General Staff. Nagano contacted Army General Staff, and a small top-drawer meeting convened on Monday, June 8. It was here that they broke the news to Prime Minister Tojo. He had only three comments to make: no one was to criticize the Navy; materials would be made available at once to replace the losses; and finally, the facts of this disaster must not go beyond the doors of the room.

June 10, a blare of trumpets and the now familiar strains of the “Navy March” told Tokyo radio listeners to get ready for another great naval victory. And great it was: two American carriers sunk … 120 planes downed … landings in the Aleutians … heavy damage to American installations at Midway. Japanese losses amounted to a carrier sunk, another carrier and a cruiser damaged, 35 planes down.

Next day Masanori Ito, Japan’s leading military commentator, examined the victory. “The brilliant war results obtained are beyond all imagination,” he declared. In another analysis Captain Hideo Hiraide, chief of the naval press section at Imperial Headquarters, ventured an interesting thought: the enormous success in the Aleutians was made possible by the diversion at Midway.

“You may not go back to Tokyo. If you dare to return, you’ll be arrested by the military police,” newsreel man Teiichi Makishima was told after the Nagara reached Kure on June 14. For weeks he languished in what he called a “stragglers’ camp”; then he was packed off to sea again. The carrier crews were isolated at Saheki or Kanoya Air Base, and Yeoman Noda wasn’t allowed ashore at all when the Yamato returned to Hashirajima. He couldn’t even get a day to see his girl in Kure.

It was hardest on the wounded. Commander Ohara spent ten weeks in the hospital recovering from his burns on the Soryu, but during the entire time he was never allowed a visitor, or even to see the other patients. When Commander Fuchida was carried ashore, he was handled like a victim of some medieval plague. He was landed at night, carried to the hospital on a covered stretcher, and whisked inside through the back door.

THE ambulances waited in the afternoon sunshine, lined up in neat rows at Pearl Harbor. Admiral Nimitz was there too, standing on the pier with some of his staff. The destroyer Benham was coming in—the first ship back that had been in the battle, arriving on June 9 with most of the Hammann’s injured.

As she glided toward her berth, the other ships dipped their flags in salute. The men on the Benham felt self-conscious but infinitely proud of the shrapnel holes in her hull, the antenna loose and hanging.

As the ship tied up, Admiral Nimitz came aboard. He greeted the skipper, Lieutenant Commander Joseph Worthington, then turned to the men standing on the deck. He shook hands with them individually, thanking them for what they had done. The work of unloading the injured began—50 stretchers transferred to the ambulances and off to the Navy Hospital.

The Enterprise and the rest of Task Force 16 filed in on June 13, flying their largest flags from the main. Navy Yard workers, ships’ crews, everybody who could make it lined the piers and decks. It was a quiet crowd—no bands, no cheering—and one man on the Pensacola wondered whether something was “wrong.” He needn’t have worried. Pearl Harbor’s appreciation was too deep to express.

A little later there was a smaller welcome in Admiral Nimitz’s office. Captain Simard was on his way home from Midway—reassigned to new responsibilities—and had dropped by to pay his respects. Nimitz thanked him and congratulated him on the spot promotion sent out on the eve of battle. Pointing to Simard’s new silver eagles, the Admiral observed, “I sent you the flowers before the funeral.”

Some time during this period—the exact date is uncertain —another visitor turned up at CINCPAC with a special mission to perform. It was the Army’s General Emmons, who solemnly presented the Admiral with a magnum of champagne, decorated with ribbons of Navy blue and gold. He just wanted to say, the General announced, that he had been wrong and the Navy right in the crucial planning before the battle. Now he wanted all to know it.

Someone thought of Joe Rochefort down in the basement where all that solid-gold intelligence came from, and Nimitz sent a message to get him. As usual, Rochefort was deep in his files and scratchwork, puttering about in his smoking jacket and carpet slippers. By the time he straightened up, it was like his last appointment with the Admiral: he was again half an hour late. But today the Admiral didn’t bawl him out. Before the assembled staff, Nimitz declared that the victory was due to the great work done by Rochefort’s Combat Intelligence Unit. Rochefort said something about just doing what they were paid to do—he was never much at this sort of fancy exchange.

The initial glow would wear off. The Army and Navy pilots soon fought a pitched battle at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel over who deserved the most credit. Men from the Enterprise and Yorktown wrangled over the first day’s honors. The intelligence outfits went back to their Byzantine infighting. The high-level and dive-bombing enthusiasts sniped at each other. (It only became clear after the war that the B-17s dropped 322 bombs, yet failed to score a hit.)

The second-guessers were soon at it too. Strategists argued, perhaps correctly, that the submarines were badly deployed … that the scouting was poor … that communications were slow and overly complicated … that there wasn’t enough coordination between the Task Forces … that the Yorktown might have been saved … that Task Force 16 was too slow in following up the first day’s success;

In ticking off the things that weren’t done, it was easy to forget the big thing that was done. Against overwhelming odds, with the most meager resources, and often at fearful self-sacrifice, a few determined men reversed the course of the war in the Pacific. Japan would never again take the offensive. Yet the margin was thin—so narrow that almost any man there could say with pride that he personally helped turn the tide at Midway. It was indeed, as General Marshall said in Washington, “the closest squeak and the greatest victory.”

None knew this narrow margin better than Commander Brockman, skipper of the submarine Nautilus, as he approached Midway on June 5. He had been called in to patrol offshore, and at this point he had no idea how the battle turned out … whether Midway was still in U.S. hands or not. The place looked the same, but it always did—the swooping birds, the pale blue lagoon, the white surf pounding on dazzling sand. His periscope swept the atoll, and then at last he knew. There, high above the Sand Island command post, still flew the American flag.

The Riddles of Midway

AS THE JAPANESE BOMBS rained down on Midway a Marine sergeant named Anderson was hit on the bridge of his nose by a flying can of beans, nuts or tomato juice—depending on who tells the story. Anderson has never been located, and the incident remains one of the minor riddles of Midway.

There are many more. The excitement and confusion of battle always breed conflicts on numbers, distances, hits and misses, the time things happened. Added to these, Midway has a built-in problem of its own: it was fought back and forth over the international date line. The log of one PBY showed that it took off on June 3, made an attack June 5 and landed June 4. To complicate matters further, the Japanese always used Tokyo time. In this account, local time is followed during the preparations, but once the fleets are at sea, everything has been translated into Midway time.

Beyond these minor problems, two major riddles remain. They will never be solved for certain. Like the skill and courage of the men who unconsciously propounded them, they are now a living part of the incredible victory at Midway… .

The Riddle of the Dive Bombing Attack

At 10:22 A.M. on Thursday the 4th of June 1942, the crack Japanese carriers Akagi, Kaga and Soryu were heading proudly for the battle that was to finish the U.S. Pacific Fleet. By 10:28 all three were blazing wrecks. The job was done by three squadrons of American dive bombers—two from the Enterprise, one from the Yorktown. Each attacked a different carrier, but to this day the debate has continued over who got which ship,

If the squadron action reports are taken at face value, everybody hit the Akagi or the Kaga. Nobody claims the Soryu—she presumably got back to Japan. Yet if the specific recollections of the three attack leaders are accepted, nobody got the Akagi. Each is convinced his target had its island on the starboard side—yet the Akagi’s island was to port.

It’s the very similarity of impressions and experiences that makes the problem so baffling. Approaching at nearly right angles (the Enterprise planes from the southwest, the Yorktown’s from the southeast), both groups sighted the Japanese force a few minutes after 10:00. In both cases the enemy carriers appeared as yet untouched. Both groups selected as targets what appeared to be the larger carriers in the formation. Pulling out, both leaders had the same experience: each saw the other attacking for the first time.

The problem is compounded by a common misconception as to what the Japanese carriers looked like. The pilots’ recognition cards were absurdly outdated, assuming those used by one Enterprise squadron are a fair example. The Akagi was depicted as of 1936, before she was given a full-length flight deck, and there was no silhouette at all of the Soryu. It’s ironic that the writer sitting in the Yale Law School had better information through Jane’s Fighting Ships than the fliers who depended on these silhouettes that morning.

Also, the Soryu was much bigger than she was thought to be. Even today it’s generally assumed she was around 10,000 tons, and more than one pilot has indignantly protested, “You can’t tell me I got the small one.” Actually she was about 18,000 tons and roughly comparable to the Enterprise and Yorktown.

Despite all this, there do remain clues that suggest what really happened. First is the Japanese formation at the time of the attack. During the southeasterly approach to Midway the carriers steamed in a box: the Akagi leading the Kaga on the southwesterly side, the Hiryu leading the Soryu on the northeasterly side. (See Fig. 1.)

Then at 9:17 an important turn took place as Nagumo swung northeast to meet the new threat of the U.S. carriers. In making this change in course, the Japanese did not turn in formation, as is often supposed; rather, the individual ships turned in their tracks. Both Admiral Kusaka, Nagumo’s chief of staff, and Commander Sasabe, his staff officer for navigation, have been interviewed at length on this, and both are firm that this is the way it was done. The result left the carriers still in box formation, with their position changed relative to each other but remaining the same in terms of the compass. That is, the Akagi and Kaga were still to the southwest, the Hiryu and Soryu still to the northeast. (See Fig. 2.)

About 10:00 Nagumo made a further change in course, still more to the northeast, and again each ship individually turned in its tracks. But by now the situation was complicated by American torpedo plane attacks. The box was loose, and the distances between the ships much greater. Judging from the accounts of Japanese survivors, the Akagi and the Kaga were still fairly close together, but the Soryu had pulled ahead, and the Hiryu even more so. (She was now almost on their horizon.) But the basic situation remained the same: the Akagi and Kaga lay to the southwest, the Hiryu and Soryu to the northeast.

Another clue to bear in mind lies in the position of the three carriers when they finally sank. They did not move much after the bombing. The Akagi’s engines worked erratically from time to time, but the Kaga and Soryu soon went dead in the water and finally sank toward evening within a few minutes of each other. Their relative position when they sank strongly suggests their relative position when hit: the Kaga lay to the southwest, the Soryu to the northeast. (See Fig. 3.)

The next clue lies in the position of the ships as seen by the approaching U.S. dive bombers. Both the Enterprise and Yorktown pilots seem agreed that the three carriers lay in a rough row, running from southwest to northeast, or as the leader of Bombing 3 saw it, more from west to east. In either case, the two Enterprise squadrons took the two westerly carriers, while the Yorktown squadron took the easterly one.

Moving to the actual bombing, another clue emerges. Of the two attacking units from the Enterprise, Dick Best and the 1st Division of Bombing 6 certainly dived after Wade McClusky’s mixed group. This happened when McClusky dived on the carrier Best planned to take. Best made a quick shift to the next one up the line but inevitably lost, several minutes in the process.

This becomes important when considered in terms of what was happening below. Japanese accounts differ on many things about this attack, but there’s marked agreement that the Kaga was hit first. Seven witnesses on six different ships are sure of this. Assuming it is so, it means that whatever, else occurred, Dick Best did not hit the Kaga.

What then did happen? It’s a rash man who sets himself up as final arbiter on those six fantastic minutes, but based on the known facts, and other more murky clues, here are the probabilities… .

1. Dick Best and the 1st Division of Bombing 6 attacked the AKAGI.

He approached from the southwest, and that’s where the Akagi was. The Soryu, on the other hand, was to the north and east. He attacked with five planes, which comes closest to the Japanese estimate that the Akagi was bombed by three planes. Certainly it’s hard to square this estimate with McClusky’s 25 or Max Leslie’s 13 from the Yorktown. (Leslie had 17, but four dived on other ships.) Conversely, Best’s five don’t fit the 12-13 bombers that the Japanese say attacked the Soryu.

Other reasons: Best spotted a Zero taking off as he dived, and the Akagi launched one just before the first hit. Best saw a group of TBDs coming in as he was pulling out, and the Akagi reported torpedo planes at just this time. Best’s men recall damage concentrated on planes parked aft on the flight deck—just where the Akagi was hardest hit. In contrast, the Soryu was hit hardest up forward.

The time also fits. Best recalls a third carrier (in addition to McClusky’s) just coming under attack farther east as he was pushing over. This would make his carrier the last one hit. Japanese sources indicate the Akagi was bombed at 10:26—i.e., the last of the three.

Against all this are two major stumbling blocks. Best and at least one other pilot in his group are certain his bomb was a hit, while most Japanese sources say the first bomb dropped on the Akagi was a near-miss, just off the bridge. But the Japanese evidence is not conclusive: the near-miss and the first hit came so close together it was hard to tell. Also, one of the planes following Best down released its bomb before he did—and that might have been the near-miss.

The other hitch concerns the location of the Akagi’s island structure. Best has always felt the island on his target was on the starboard side, yet the Akagi’s island was to port. On the other hand, one of Best’s pilots, Bill Roberts, is certain that the target’s island was indeed to port; he says he especially noticed this because it was the opposite of U.S. practice. If so, the target, would have to be the Akagi, since both the Kaga and Soryu had the usual starboard-side islands.

2. Wade McClusky and the rest of the ENTERPRISE planes attacked the KAGA.

As the other carrier to the southwest, she too was a logical target for the Enterprise planes approaching from that direction. Again, the Soryu was to the north and east—farthest off in the line of advance. McClusky dived with 25 planes, and that seems to fit with the deluge that poured down on the Kaga. Her air officer says she was attacked by 30 planes; Nagumo’s antiaircraft records indicate 18; his battle report says nine; but all agree she took at least four hits and five near-misses. Leslie’s planes from the Yorktown were also capable of delivering this kind of punishment, but they were approaching from the southeast, while the Kaga was the most westerly of the three carriers.

The pattern laid down by McClusky’s group also fits the Kaga’s experience. The first three bombs dropped were near-misses; so were the first three that fell on the Kaga. The fourth bomb, according to the Scouting 6 action report, hit the center of the flight deck about 200 feet from the stern. This roughly corresponds to the best information on the Kaga. Later bombs hit up forward; the same was true with the Kaga. There’s some evidence, although inconclusive, that McClusky’s target had only a few planes on the flight deck; this would match the recollection of the only Kaga survivor to comment on this point.

The time also fits. Radio traffic monitored on the Enterprise indicates McClusky pushed over between 10:21 and 10:23. Nagumo’s battle report says the Kaga was dive-bombed at 10:22.

3. Max Leslie and Bombing 3 attacked the SORYU.

This is more than a matter of elimination. It’s backed by positive evidence. Approaching on a northwest course, Leslie took the first carrier he came to—the most easterly or northeasterly of the three attacked. The Soryu was to the north and east of the Akagi and Kaga.

Also: Leslie’s, target had many planes on the flight deck; the same was true of the Soryu. Leslie dived with 13 planes; some 12-13 attacked the Soryu. Leslie’s last four planes shifted to other nearby targets; the Soryu’s screening destroyer Isokaze was bombed at this time. None of the other squadrons attacked the screening ships, and the only screening destroyer bombed was assigned to the Soryu.

The pattern of hits likewise suggests the Soryu, although there is nothing conclusive here. In his action report, the acting squadron commander, Dave Shumway, says the first bomb landed in the midst of planes spotted on the flight deck, but most accounts—including Shumway’s in a later Navy interview—say it landed amidships forward. According to most Japanese sources, this is also where the first hit landed on the Soryu. In any event, Bombing 3’s recollections tend to rule out the Kaga. There’s emphatic agreement that the squadron’s first bomb was a hit, while Japanese sources indicate that the first three bombs on the Kaga were near-misses.

Finally, the time of Bombing 3’s attack fits the Soryu best. Leslie’s action report says the Yorktown planes pushed over at about 10:25. He also recalls glancing at his instrument panel clock in pulling out, and that it said between 10:25 and 10:26. Nagumo’s battle report says that the Soryu was first hit at 10:25.

The Riddle of the Submarine Attack

After three and a half hours of the most patient stalking, the U.S. submarine Nautilus fired three torpedoes at a stationary burning Japanese carrier in the early afternoon of June 4. The Nautilus’s skipper, Lieutenant Commander Bill Brockman, was sure the torpedoes hit: the fire on the carrier, which appeared to be under control, suddenly erupted anew. All five officers in the sub’s conning tower had a chance to view the results of the attack.

From the recognition materials available, they identified the carrier as the Soryu, and the Navy has always credited the Nautilus with delivering the coup de grâce that finally sent her to the bottom. Yet most Japanese sources maintain that the Kaga was the only carrier attacked by a submarine, and that the torpedo that struck her was a dud. It would appear these sources are right:

1. The carrier’s position fits the Kaga far better than the Soryu. The Nautilus’s action report says the target she attacked lay in latitude 30° 13’ N, longitude 179° 17’ W. According to Nagumo’s battle report, the Kaga sank in 30° 20’ N, 179° 17’ W, while the Soryu sank in 30° 42’ N, 178° 37’ W.

2. The Nautilus approached from the south, and the Kaga sank farthest to the south of the three wrecked carriers. She should have been the first one the Nautilus encountered. In contrast, the Soryu sank farthest to the north.

3. The Nautilus action report says she fired her torpedoes between 1:59 and 2:05 P.M. Nagumo’s action chart indicates a submarine attacked the Kaga at 2:10 P.M. No Japanese records mention any other carriers receiving an attack; no U.S. records mention any other submarine delivering an attack.

4. Survivors from the Kaga remember a submarine attack, but none is recalled by those from the Soryu. Her executive officer, Commander Ohara, is quoted as saying there was one in a U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey interrogation right after the war, but he has since maintained that this was not so.

5. Only one other Japanese has been quoted as saying the Soryu was attacked by submarine. This is Rear Admiral Komura, captain of the screening cruiser Chikuma. In another USSBS interrogation he recalled the torpedoing, said he attacked the sub and sent a boat over to help the Soryu. But in a recent interview he denied ever seeing the Soryu attacked—he merely recalled a sub warning while he was trying to help the carrier. Moreover, Nagumo’s radio log shows that Komura sent his boat over at 11:12 A.M.—after the dive bombing—and by the time the Nautilus attacked her target, he had rejoined the Hiryu far to the north.

6. The Nautilus fired three torpedoes at the starboard side of the carrier she was attacking. According to Lieutenant Commander Kunisada, damage control officer of the Kaga, the sub attacking her also fired three torpedoes at the starboard side. He saw them all. The first passed across the bow, the second just astern, the third hit amidships but was a dud.

Nothing is certain, but in view of all this it would seem that the Nautilus mistook the Kaga for the Soryu. They looked fairly similar, and certainly the opportunities for study were fleeting and difficult. Mistakes were easy—it’s interesting to note that the Nautilus also identified two stand-by destroyers as cruisers. As for the “hits,” it’s suggested they were one or two more of the internal explosions that occasionally racked the Kaga throughout the afternoon until she finally sank at dusk. Duds, incidentally, were no novelty to attacking American submarines in these early days of the war.

None of this should detract from the Nautilus’s glory, or the magnificent work of her crew. She remains the only U.S. submarine to have struck a blow at Midway.

l. The Japanese carriers approach Midway, early June 4. Akagi and Hiryu lead the box formation. Course 140°. Distance between ships roughly 1,300 yards. The screening battleships, cruisers and destroyers (not shown) are deployed in a rough circle around the carriers.

2. Nagumo changes course at 9:17A.M. Carriers turn individually, not in formation. New course 70^0, later adjusted to 30^0. Distance between ships still 1,300 yards, but lengthens as U.S. torpedo attacks begin. Screen still in rough circle around carriers.

3. Positions of the Japanese carriers when they finally sank, according to Nagumo’s battle report. Akagi: 30°30’N, 178°40’W; Kaga: 30°20’N, 179°17’W; Soryu: 30°42’N, 178°37’W. The Hiryu, which escaped the first U.S. carrier strike, was caught later and finally sank at 31°27’N, 179°23’W.

Acknowledgments

“AFTER 24 YEARS, I can still feel like weeping with pride, admiration, and humility when I recall the courage those men displayed,” writes Daniel Grace, then a Marine Pfc stationed on Midway. He was referring to the American fliers, but judging from the correspondence, it could have been almost anyone speaking of almost anyone else at the Battle of Midway.

Perhaps because it was such a close thing … perhaps because the sacrifices were so great … perhaps because the war was so young and the warriors so impressionable—whatever the reason, the men of Midway have a generosity all their own. They show it in viewing each other, in sharing their triumphs, in understanding the other man’s problem when something went wrong. They are deeply reflective about this battle and what it meant to them.

Happily their spirit has overflowed on this book. Some 350 American participants have contributed their recollections, and there has seemed no limit to their willingness to help. “Deacon” Arnold takes the evening off to explain how he made all those booby traps; Doug Rollow borrows time from a hectic business trip to talk about VMSB-241. Don Kundinger writes 16 pages on flying with, the B-17s; John Greenbacker tops him with 19 on the Yorktown. Admiral Fletcher patiently discusses the uncertainties of war; Admiral Spruance even throws in one of his famous walks.

A number of these participants have generously made available various letters, notes and journals written at the time. I’m especially grateful to Aaron Bagley, Burdick H. Brittin, Eugene Card, Edward Creighton, Cleo Dobson, Alden W. Hanson, and Joseph Love in this connection. Likewise Mrs. John C. Waldron has kindly given me permission to quote from the touching letter sent her by her gallant husband just before the battle.

Gradually some of these contributors came to be regarded as “specialists” on particular areas, and I’m afraid I imposed upon them unmercifully: Howard Ady on the PBYs … Ham Dow on communications … Eddie Layton on CINCPAC … Bob McGlashan on anything to do with the Marines … Joe Rochefort on radio intelligence … Bob Russell on the screening destroyers … Dick Best and Max Leslie on air operations in general, vintage 1942. Jasper Holmes was a gold mine on contemporary Honolulu and Pearl Harbor.

Sometimes a particular point gave special trouble, and a number of participants would be drafted in an effort to solve it. Here too they gave willingly, although the result usually meant that somebody had to be wrong. There was the question, for instance, of what ship Captain Buckmaster was on when the Yorktown finally sank. Buckmaster himself thought he watched from the tug Vireo, but was not sure. Others recalled seeing him on the destroyer Balch; still others on the destroyer Gwin.

These conflicting viewpoints just couldn’t be reconciled, so finally it was “back to the archives.” By piecing together several obscure reports, it gradually became clear that Buckmaster had gone first to the Vireo … then transferred to the Balch later on June 6 … and finally transferred again to the Gwin at 7:20 A.M. on June 7, shortly after the Yorktown sank. So he watched from the Balch—just as Admiral Tiemroth had been saying all along.

The Japanese participants were just as patient and helpful. Many vivid pictures still come to mind: Takayoshi Morinaga acting out his escape from the Kaga’s blazing hangar deck … Mitsuharu Noda sipping Johnny Walker as he recalled with relish his extracurricular assignments for Admiral Yamamoto … Admiral Kusaka thoughtfully maneuvering a matchstick “fleet” about the polished top of a bamboo table, showing me exactly how Nagumo’s force made its famous turn to the northeast on June 4.

Here too several participants were sometimes drafted to help clear up a particular point. From interviews with Admiral Kusaka and Susumu Kawaguchi, for instance, it became clear that not only the torpedo planes but also the dive bombers had to be rearmed when Nagumo made his fateful decision to strike Midway again.

In addition to these personal recollections—both American and Japanese—I’ve relied on much written material about Midway. The U.S. Navy’s Classified Operational Archives offer a treasury of unpublished action reports, war diaries, debriefings, interviews, analyses, interrogations of Japanese prisoners. The material is all there—and so are the people to help. Nothing was too much trouble for Dean Allard and his fine staff. A special vote of thanks must go to Mrs. Mildred Mayeux, who bore the brunt of so many of my problems.

The Marine Archives, too, couldn’t have been more helpful. Rowland Gill runs a superb shop. Here, incidentally, are copies of most of the Army Air Force reports, so important in piecing together any account of Midway.

On the Japanese side, Colonel Susumu Nishiura opened wide the doors of his War History Office at the Defense Agency in Tokyo. He even put up with my French. A special word of gratitude is owed to Commander Tsunoda, the office’s expert on Midway. Thanks largely to his efforts, new light is shown on the Aleutian phase, which appears to have been more a sop to the Japanese Naval General Staff than an attempt to divert the U.S. fleet.

There’s also valuable printed material on Midway. Some of the best comes from government sources. The ONI pamphlet The Japanese Story of the Battle of Midway (1947) translates Nagumo’s Battle Report. It has its shortcomings (sometimes due to translation difficulties), but it helps pin down the time many incidents happened, and it remains the only source for some of the communications between the Japanese commanders. The USSBS’s Interrogations of Japanese Officials (1946) includes interviews with 18 participants. Admiral Raymond A. Spruance (1966) is a useful biography by E. P. Forrestel. Marines at Midway (1948) is a superb account by Robert D. Heinl, Jr., happily free of “officialese.” Scot MacDonald’s Evolution of Aircraft Carriers (1964) is full of useful information on all the carriers involved—both sides. The Pearl Harbor hearings contain nuggets on the organization of the Combat Intelligence Unit and the Japanese code JN-25.

Unofficially, much useful material has also been published. On the battle as a whole, Thaddeus V. Tuleja’s Climax at Midway (Norton, 1960) is a stimulating treatment. William Ward Smith’s Midway: Turning Point of the Pacific (Crowell, 1966) contributes firsthand experience and a fine seaman’s eye. In a class by itself is Samuel E. Morison’s account in Volume IV of his History of United States Naval Operations in World War II (Little, Brown, 1949). On some points my own conclusions stray from Admiral Morison’s findings, but there can be no doubt about my indebtedness. His three magnificent chapters on Midway were what fired my desire to do a whole book on the subject.

Other works throw valuable light on particular parts of the story: The Ragged, Rugged Warriors by Martin Caidin (Dutton, 1966) covers the B-26s … Torpedo Junction by Robert J. Casey (Bobbs-Merrill, 1942) conveys the suspense in Task Force 16 … The Flying Guns by C. E. Dickinson (Scribner, 1942) describes flying with Scouting 6 … Undersea Victory by W. J. Holmes (Doubleday, 1966) handles the submarines … The Wild Blue by John F. Loosbrock and Richard M. Skinner (Putnam, 1960) includes Colonel Walter Sweeney’s firsthand account of the B-17s … The Sky Is My Witness by Thomas Moore, Jr. (Putnam, 1943) tells the experiences of a Marine dive bomber pilot … United States Submarine Operations in World War II by Theodore Roscoe (Naval Institute, 1948) discusses the Nautilus and the Tambor … The Magnificent Mitscher by Theodore Taylor (Norton, 1954) views Midway through the eyes of the Hornet’s famous skipper.

In addition, there are useful, appropriately loyal ship’s histories on all three of the U.S. carriers. For the Yorktown there is Pat Frank and Joseph D. Harrington’s Rendezvous at Midway (John Day, 1967); for the Hornet there is Alexander Griffith’s A Ship to Remember (Howell, Soskin, 1943); and for the Enterprise there is Edward P. Stafford’s The Big E (Random House, 1962).

From time to time interesting magazine articles have also appeared. To name a few of the best: J. Bryan Ill’s beautifully organized “Never a Battle Like Midway” in the March 26, 1949, issue of the Saturday Evening Post … Joseph M. Worthington’s firsthand account of the Benham’s role in the January 1965 issue of Shipmate … Frank D. Morris’s description of the PBY torpedo attack in the July 21, 1942, issue of Collier’s … John S. Thach’s fine account of Fighting 3 in the December 12, 1942, issue of the same magazine.

Sydney L. James’s story of Torpedo 8 in the August 31, 1942, issue of Life remains a classic of war reporting. For fuller treatment of Commander Waldron’s men, there’s the series of nine articles by Lloyd Wendt with George Gay in the Grafic Magazine of the Chicago Tribune, starting May 30, 1948. Still another important source on Torpedo 8 is H. H. Ferrier’s “Torpedo Squadron Eight, the Other Chapter” in the October 1964 issue of the Naval Institute Proceedings.

Newspaper coverage was necessarily limited because of censorship and the limited availability of information in wartime. Nevertheless, there are good accounts of the attack on the Yorktown (without naming her) by Foster Hailey in the New York Times on June 22 and 23, 1942; and another by Wendell Webb in the New York Herald Tribune on June 22, 1942. Hometown papers eventually caught up with many of the survivors; for instance, see the interview with William England in the Davenport, Iowa, Democrat on September 20, 1942; or that with Hawey Wilder in the Atlanta Journal on September 16, 1942.

The B-17 fliers had a field day in the Honolulu Advertiser on June 12, 1942. The claims of hits and sinkings are mistaken, but the interviews are no less interesting for the picture they give of these spirited young men flying their first combat missions.

On the Japanese side, the traditional authority has long been Mitsuo Fuchida and Masatake Okumiya’s Midway—the Battle That Doomed Japan (Naval Institute, 1955). This remains an indispensable work, but other less familiar sources can fill in gaps and contribute a fresh viewpoint. Teiichi Makishima’s The Tragic Battle of Midway (1956) benefits from the eye of a trained journalist … Juzo Mori’s Torpedo Plane Strike (1956) depicts the battle as seen from the Soryu … Hiroyuki Agawa’s Isoroku Yamamoto (1966) throws much new light on the Admiral. The same is true of Kota Hoketsu’s article, “Memories of Isoroku Yamamdto” in the April 1, 1966, issue of the magazine Zaikai. For the mood in Tokyo at the time of the battle, the back files of the Japan Times and Advertiser make fascinating reading—especially the period May 26-June 16, 1942.

There’s useful material on this side of the Pacific too. In addition to Fuchida’s Midway, three books especially come to mind: The End of the Imperial Japanese Navy by Masanori Ito (Norton, 1962); Death of a Navy by Andrieu D’Albas (Devin-Adair, 1957); and Zero! by Masatake Okumiya and Jiro Horikoshi with Martin Caidin (Dutton, 1956). Also, John Toland’s But Not in Shame (Random House, 1961) contains a valuable interview with Minoru Genda—generally considered the “brains” of Nagumo’s fleet.

Several helpful articles have also appeared in the Naval Institute Proceedings. In the October 1949 issue James A. Field, Jr. analyzes Admiral Yamamoto’s attitude toward America. In the May 1953 issue Edwin T. Layton offers an intriguing theory on Operation K—and is vigorously rebutted by W. J. Holmes three months later. In the May 1963 issue Commander Yahachi Tanabe (with an assist from Joseph D. Harrington) gives his version of how his submarine sank the Yorktown.

In researching this book, scores of helpful people have paved my way. The trail really began in Washington, where Rear Admiral E. M. Eller made available the marvelous resources of his Office of Naval History. Better than that, he gave freely of his wisdom and encouragement. The same can be said of Colonel C. V. Glines, Chief of the Magazine and Book Branch at the Defense Department’s Directorate for Information Service. Special thanks go to Lieutenant Commander Dan Dagle in that office, who did so much in helping locate participants.

The Marines were there too. Colonel F. C. Caldwell, head of the Historical Branch, met every request. At National Archives Mrs. J. Coleman turned the place upside down to find the right pictures, and as my deadline neared, the Navy’s Lieutenant Commander George P. Bienstadt worked like a Trojan to get them processed.

At the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard in Hawaii, Doris Obata made the project her own. She was indefatigable in turning up some of the old hands who won that famous race to get the Yorktown ready in time. Getting to Midway itself turned out to be a combined operation, and I’m grateful to all concerned—especially Lieutenant Colonel Jim Sunderman of the Air Force and Lieutenant Commander Bill Stierman of the Navy. On Midway Captain James Savacool proved a perfect host, and Chaplain Robert H. Warren outdid himself to be helpful. Incredibly, he found six people there today who had also been in the battle that fateful June of 1942.

In Japan there were any number of people who took the neophyte in hand and made his visit fruitful. To name a few: Hiroyuki Agawa, Kazushige Hirasawa, Kiyoaki Murata, Walter Nichols, George Saito, Douglas Wada.

Back in Washington again, I descended on Rear Admiral Arthur McCollum along with the year’s biggest blizzard. It didn’t seem to faze him at all: he gave me the full benefit of his great insight on both the Japanese and the Washington end of things. Vice Admiral George Dyer, one of the few survivors of the early days at COMINCH, helped me pin down numerous dates and times. Adrian Van Wyen, CNO Air Historian, filled me in on many technical details about the planes. A visit to Norfolk found Charles S. Hiles immensely helpful on the intelligence preliminaries.

Throughout my research other Midway writers have been immensely generous. Roger Pineau freely shared his broad knowledge of Japan and the Japanese. Robert D. Heinl, Jr., is a human encyclopedia on the Marines. J. Bryan III, Richard Newcomb, and Thaddeus V. Tuleja lent me valuable papers. Ladislas Farago, Joe Harrington, John and Toshiko Toland were all hard-pressed working on their own new books, but there was always time for a helping hand.

Finally there are those who lived with the project from day to day. Yuzuru Sanematsu was a tower of strength in Tokyo. Maria Look performed wonders on research. Anne Barker valiantly pulled together the index. Evan Thomas contributed his deft editorial touch—plus the free services of his daughter Louisa, who came up with such a fine title. Florence Gallagher rounded out her twentieth year of typing my scribbled foolscap.

But all these individuals—helpful as they were—would not have been enough without the generous assistance of the 388 participants listed on the following pages. In the end, a battle consists of people, and these are the people of Midway. Like everyone else listed in this acknowledgment section, they share no responsibility for my findings—no blame for my failings—but all the credit in the world for any new light this book may throw on what was truly a great moment in our national experience.

List of Contributors

THIS BOOK REPRESENTS THE combined efforts of both Americans and Japanese, so it seems appropriate that they should be listed together, without regard to nationality. Each name is followed by the participant’s vantage point, rather than rank or position at the time of the battle. Where supplied, present rank is also included.

John O. Adams—PBYs, Midway

Capt. Howard P. Ady, Jr., USN (Ret.)—PBYs, Midway

Rear Adm. Frank Akers, USN (Ret.)—Hornet

Cdr. Gene L. Alair, USNR—Astoria

Rear Adm. Clarence E. Aldrich, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Maj. Gen. Brooke E. Allen, USAF (Ret.)—B-17s, Midway

Riley Allen—Honolulu

CWO John G. Almand, USN—Russell

Takahisa Amagai—Kuga

Cdr. Bernard L. Amman, USNR (Ret.)—PBYs, Midway

Brig. Gen. Kirk Armistead, USMC (Ret.)—VMF-221, Midway

Capt. Warren W. Armstrong, USN (Ret.)—Maury

Maj. Dorn E. Arnold, USMC (Ret.)—6th Def. Batn., Midway

Rear Adm. Murr E. Arnold, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Rear Adm. Ralph J. Arnold, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Rear Adm. William H. Ashford, Jr., USN (Ret.)—Enterprise

Lieut. A. M. Bagley, USN—New Orleans

Lt. Cdr. George M. K. Baker, Jr., USN (Ret.)—Astoria

Lt. Cdr. Thomas W. Baker, USNR (Ret.)—Astoria

Lt. J. Clark Barrett, USNR (Ret.)—VB-8, Hornet

CWO George E. Bateman, USN—Yorktown

Lt. Col. Robert J. Bear, USMC (Ret.)— VMSB-241, Midway

Capt. Walter H. Beckham, SC USNR—Portland

Lea Bell, USMC (Ret.)—Carlson’s Raiders, Midway

Lt. Col. William M. Bell, USMCR (Ret.)—6th Def. Batn., Midway

Lieut, (j.g.) Foyd H. Bennett, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Lt. Robert H. Bennett, USN (Ret.)—NAS, Midway

Capt. Vane M. Bennett, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

William Bennett—Shipyard, Pearl Harbor

Rear Adm. Roy Stanley Benson, USN—Nautilus

William H. Berlin, Jr., USMC (Ret.)—6th Def. Batn., Midway

Capt. Arthur H. Berndtson, USN—Enterprise

Lt. Cdr. Richard H. Best, USN (Ret.)—VB-6, Enterprise

Cdr. Daniel T. Birtwell, Jr., USN (Ret.)—Portland

Read Adm. Worthington S. Bitler, USN (Ret.)—Pensacola

Cdr. W. P. Blackmore, USN (Ret.)—tug Keosauqua, Pearl Harbor

Cdr. Carl M. Blackstock, USNR (Ret.)—PT boats, Midway

Col. George A. Blakey, USAF (Ret.)—B-17s, Midway

Capt. Ben Ward Blee, USN—Pensacola

E. E. Blythe, USN (Ret.)—Phelps

CWO Jule C. Bode, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

CWO Frank W. Boo, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Col. Alfred L. Booth, USMC (Ret.)—6th Def. Batn., Midway

Capt. Harold S. Bottomley, Jr., USN—VB-3, Yorktown

Cdr. Matthew J. Bouterse, CHC USN (Ret.)—Astoria

Cdr. James C. Boyden, USNR—PBYs, Midway

Sgt. Gail B. Brackeen, USMC (Ret.)—6th Def. Batn., Midway

Eugene K. Braun, USN (Ret.)—VB-6, Enterprise

Capt. Chester E. Briggs, Jr., USN—Yorktown

Capt. Burdick H. Brittin, USN (Ret.)—Aylwin

Rear Adm. William H. Brockman, Jr., USN (Ret.)—Nautilus

Rear Adm. Charles B. Brooks, Jr., USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Capt. James A. Brown, MC USNR (Ret.)—Astoria

Cdr. Robert G. Brown, USN (Ret.)—Russell

Vice Adm. Elliot Buckmaster, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Col. Jean H. Buckner, USMC (Ret.)—6th Def. Batn., Midway

Capt. George S. Bullen, USN (Ret.)—Pensacola

Rear Adm. William H. Buracker, USN (Ret.)—Enterprise

Rear Adm. William P. Burford, USN (Ret.)—Monaghan

Cdr. Arthur T. Burke, USNR (Ret.)—Enterprise

S. I. Burke, Jr., USN (Ret.)—Benham

Capt. Noel A. Burkey, Jr., USNR—Astoria

Rear Adm. Sherman E. Burroughs, USN (Ret.)—Enterprise

Lt. Cdr. Nathaniel T. Burwell, USN (Ret.)—Ballard

Capt. Norwood A. Campbell, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Capt. Stanley Caplan, USNR—Aylwin Maj. Eugene T. Card, USMC (Ret.)—VMSB-241, Midway

Col. John F. Carey, USMC (Ret.)—VMF-221, Midway

Cdr. Conrad H. Carlson, USN (Ret.)—Astoria

Capt. Charles M. Cassel, Jr., USN—Anderson

Lt. Cdr. John K. Chase, USN (Ret.)—Hughes

Lt. Cdr. James W. Christie, Jr., USNR (Ret.)—Hornet

Ellis Clanton—Shipyard, Pearl Harbor

Philip R. Clark, USMC (Ret.)—3rd Def. Batn., Midway

Cdr. Philip W. Cobb, USN—VB-3, Yorktown

Capt. Oliver D. Compton, USN—Benham

Capt. Donald E. Cooksey, DC USN—6th Def. Batn., Midway

Lt. Col. Jack Cosley, USMC (Ret.)—VMSB-241, Midway

Rear Adm. William R. Cox, USN (Ret.)— Gwin

Capt. Russell F. Craig, USN—Pensacola

Rear Adm. Richard S. Craighill, USN—Blue

Carl V. Cramer, USN (Ret.)—Vincennes

Rear Adm. Edward P. Creehan, USN (Ret.)—Hornet

Edward G. Creighton—Monaghan

Capt. Russell S. Crenshaw, Jr., USN—Maury

Capt. W. R. Crenshaw, USN—Yorktown

Lt. Cdr. Edmund B. Crosby, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Cdr. Robert B. Crowell, USN (Ret.)—Benham

Capt. Arthur A. Cumberledge, USN (Ret.)—Hornet

Lt. Col. Daniel L. Cummings USMC (Ret.)—VMSB-241, Midway

Rear Adm. Charles R. Cundiff, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Vice Adm. John C. Daniel, USN (Ret.)— Phelps

Cdr. Douglas C. Davis, USN—PBYs, Midway

Sgt. George F. Davis, USMC (Ret.)—6th Def. Batn., Midway

Capt. Ray Davis, USN (Ret.)—VS-8, Hornet

WO Raymond C. Davis, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Rear Adm. W. Dalton Davis, MC USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Rear Adm. John F. Delaney, Jr., USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Vice Adm. Walter S. Delany, USN (Ret.)—C1NCPAC, Pearl Harbor

Lt. Cdr. Stephen Dewey, USN (Ret.)—Hornet

Cdr. Cleo J. Dobson, USN (Ret.)—Enterprise

Capt. Donald G. Dockum, USN (Ret.)—Ellet

Rear Adm. Oscar H. Qodson, USN (Ret.)—Hornet

Col. MalcomO. Donohoo, USMC (Ret.)—Portland

Rear Adm. Leonard J. Dow, USN (Ret.)—Enterprise

Adm. Laurance T. DuBose, USN (Ret.)—Portland

Rear Adm. Claren.E. Duke, USN (Ret.)—Grouper

Vice Adm. Ralph Earle, Jr., USN (Ret.)—Ralph Talbot

Capt. Albert K. Earnest, USN—VT-8 (Det.), Midway

Roger Eaton, USMC (Ret.)—6th Def. Batn., Midway

Cdr. Edwin H. Edgerton, USN (Ret.)—Astoria

Rear Adm. John E. Edwards, USN (Ret.)—Phelps

Cdr. Roy T. Elder, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

BMC Stanley J. Engels, USN (Ret.)—tug Tamaha, Midway

Cdr. Wilhelm G. Esders, USN (Ret.),—VT-3, Yorktown

Lt. Cdr. William Evans, USN (Ret.)—Vincennes

Jean I. Everest, USN (Ret.)—PT boats, Midway

Capt. Edward T. Farley, USN (Ret.)—Morris

Lt. H. H. Ferrier, USN—VT-8 (Det.), Midway

Cdr. Clayton E. Fisher, USN (Ret.)—VB-8, Hornet

Cdr. William A. Fisher, Jr., USN (Ret.)—VS-8, Hornet

BTC Raymond J. Fitzgibbon, USN—Hammann

Cdr. R. E. Flack, USN—VF-6, Enterprise

Rear Adm. Allan F. Fleming, USN—Hornet

Adm. Frank Jack Fletcher, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Capt. George H. Flinn, USNR (Ret.)—VT-8, Hornet

GMCS Edward T. Forbes, USN—Anderson

Rear Adm. John G. Foster, USN (Ret.)—Hornet

Vice Adm. Charles W. Fox, SC USN (Ret.)—Enterprise

Melvin Frantz, USNR (Ret.)—Yorktown

Cdr. George R. Fraser, USN (Ret.)—NAS, Midway

Capt. Lawrence C. French, USN (Ret.)—VF-8, Hornet

Capt. Harold E. Fry, USN. (Ret.)—Astoria

Cdr. Louis Funkenstein, Jr., USN (Ret.)—Thornton

Kenneth E. Gaebler, USN (Ret.)—Enterprise

CWO William E. Gallagher, USN (Ret.)—VB-3, Yorktown

Rear Adm. W. Earl Gallaher, USN (Ret.)—VS-6, Enterprise

Rear Adm. Francis H. Gardner, USN (Ret.)—Ellet

Gen. Minoru Genda—Akagi

Capt. Harry B. Gibbs, USN—VF-3, Yorktown

Capt. Robert W. Gillette, USN (Ret.)—Monaghan

Cdr. Harold J. Gilpin, USN (Ret.)—Pensacola

Cdr. John W. Gilpin, USN (Ret.)—Monaghan

Rear Adm. John K. B. Ginder, USN (Ret.)—Anderson

Lt Cdr. Joseph V. Godfrey, USN (Ret.)—VB-3, Yorktown

Lt. Cdr. Edgar E. Gold, USN (Ret.)—Hornet

Cdr. George H. Goldsmith, USN—VB-6, Enterprise

Capt. Leon Grabowsky, USN—NAS, Midway

Daniel Grace, USMC (Ret.)—6th Def. Batn., Midway

Capt. James S. Gray, Jr., USN (Ret.)—VF-6, Enterprise

Cdr. Richard Gray, USN (Ret.)—VF-8, Hornet

Capt. John E. Greenbacker, USN—Yorktown

CG William M. Gross, USN (Ret.)—PBYs, Pearl Harbor

Capt. Troy T. Guillory, USN—VB-8, Hornet

Capt. Donald C. Gumz, USN (Ret.)—PBYs, Midway

Rear Adm. Harry A. Guthrie, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Capt. James W. Haggard, USN (Ret.)—Enterprise

Cdr. John E. Halter, Jr., USNR (Ret.)—Ellet

Alden W. Hanson, USN (Ret.)—VB-3, Yorktown

Capt. Eugene R. Hanson, USN—VT-8 (Det.), Pearl Harbor

WT G. S. Hardon, USN (Ret.)—Monaghan

ENCS. W. E. Hare, USN—Yorktown

Capt. Charles S. Hart, USN—Russell

Rear Adm. Paul E. Hartmann, USN—NAS, Midway

Rear Adm. Glenn R. Hartwig, USN (Ret.)—Russell

Col. Toshio Hashimoto—Hiryu

Herman Hastrup—shipyard, Pearl Harbor

Rear Adm. John D. Hayes, USN (Ret.)—Astoria

Robert M. Haynes, USMC (Ret.)—6th Def. Batn., Midway

Capt. Vincent P. Healey, USN—Astoria

Rear Adm., George L. Heath, USN (Ret.)—Portland

Capt. John A. Heath, USN (Ret.)—Mustin

Capt. Frank M. Hertel, USN (Ret.)—Vincennes

Rear Adm. John M. Higgins, USN (Ret.)—Gwin

Capt. Thomas W. Hogan, USN (Ret.)—Nautilus

Cdr. Don C. Holcomb, USNR (Ret.)—Ballard

Robert V. Hollison—shipyard, Pearl Harbor

Rear. Adm. Paul A. Holmberg, USN—VB-3, Yorktown

Lt. (j.g.) Pressley E. Holmes, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Capt. W. J. Holmes, USN (Ret.)—14th Naval District, Pearl

Harbor Brig. Gen. Robert E. Hommel, USMC (Ret.)—6th Def. Batn., Midway

Jinjiro Honda—Kirishima ,

Rear Adm. Gilbert C. Hoover, USN (Ret.)—Morris

Cdr. Harvey Hop, USN (Ret.)—PBYs, Midway

Capt. Lewis A. Hopkins, USN—VB-6, Enterprise

Naoaki Hoshiko—Tanikaze

Donat G. Houle, USN (Ret.)—Hughes

Cdr. Ralph B. Hovind, USN (Ret.)—VS-8, Hornet

J. E. Hoy, USN (Ret.)—Hornet.

Cdr. Richard Z. Hughes, USN (Ret.)—VF-8, Hornet

Col. William C. Humberd, USMC (Ret.)—VMF-221, Midway

Col. Gavin C. Humphrey, USMC (Ret.)—Vincennes

Capt. Elgin B. Hurlbert, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Floyd M. Hurley, USN (Ret.)—Hammann

Capt. Roy M. Isaman, USN—VB-3, Yorktown

Cdr. Edmond M. Jacoby, USN (Ret.)—NAS, Midway

Capt. Norman D. Johnson, USN (Ret.)—Minneapolis

Rear Adm. Robert Ruffin Johnson, USN (Ret.)—VB-8, Hornet

E. G. Johnston, USN—Enterprise

Takashi Kanoe—Hiryu

SIC Peter Karetka, USNR—Hughes

Susumu Kawaguchi—Hiryu

Virgil E. Keeney, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Theodore E. Kimmell, USN (Ret.)—PBYs, Midway

Susumu Kimura—Nagara

Cdr. Joseph Kisela, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Capt. Norman J. Kleiss, USN (Ret.)—VS-6, Enterprise

Jay W. Koch, USMC (Ret.)—6th Def. Batn., Midway

Magotaro Koga—Nowaki

Keizo Komura—Chikuma

Cdr. Rubin H. Konig, USN (Ret.)—VT-3, Kaneohe

Arthur Kozak, USMC (Ret.)—6th Def. Batn., Midway

ACCM J. S. Kuhn, USN—PT boats, Midway

Don J. Kundinger, USAF (Ret.)—B-17s, Midway

Yoshio Kunisada—Kaga

Stan Kurka, USN—Hornet

Ryunosuke Kusaka—Akagi

EMC Thomas Blair Kuykendall, USN (Ret.)—Hornet

Cdr. William W. Lancaster, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Lt. Cdr. Charles S. Lane, USN (Ret.)—VB-3, Yorktown

Capt Harvey P. Lanham, USN—VB-6, Enterprise

Rear Adm. Robert E. Laub, USN (Ret.)—VT-6, Enterprise

Fred H. Laughter, USN—Hornet

Rear Adm. Edwin T. Layton, USN (Ret.)—C1NCPAC, Pearl Harbor

Albert Lee—shipyard, Pearl Harbor

Lt. Col. Steve Lesko, USMC (Ret.)—Kittyhawk

Rear Adm. Maxwell F. Leslie, USN (Ret.)—VB-3, Yorktown

Capt. Robin M. Lindsey, USN (Ret.)—Enterprise

Cdr. Stan Linzey, CHC USN—Yorktown

Col. John W. Livingston, USAF—B-17s, Midway

Lt. Cdr. John D. Lorenz, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

GY Sgt. Joseph E. Love, USMC (Ret.)—3rd Def. Batn., Midway

William R. Lucius, USMC (Ret.)—MAG 22, Midway

CWO Forest E. Lunsford, USN (Ret.)—Benham

Rear Adm. Richard B. Lynch, USN—Nautilus

Rear Adm. John B. Lyon, USN (Ret.)—Enterprise

Capt. John R. McCarthy, USN (Ret.)—VS-6, Enterprise

Rear Adm. C. Wade McClusky, USN (Ret.)—EAG, Enterprise

Morris W. McCoy, USMC (Ret.)—6th Def. Batn., Midway

Capt. William P. McGirr, USN (Ret.)—Enterprise

Col. Robert C. McGlashan, USMC (Ret.)—6th Def. Batn.,

Midway Capt. Clinton McKellar, Jr., USN—PT boats, Midway

Lt. Cdr. Boyd M. McKenzie, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Cdr. Philip N. MacDonald, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Hisao Mandai—Hiryu Teiichi Makishima—Akagi

Col. Ernest R. Manierre, USAF—B-17s, Midway CWO

Lester L. Marshall, USMC (Ret.)—VMF-221, Midway

QMCM William C. Martin, USN—Yorktown

Vice Adm. Charles P. Mason, USN (Ret.)—Hornet

Lt. Cdr. Stuart J. Mason, USN—VB-6, Enterprise

Shogo Masuda—Akagi

Rear Adm. Roger W. Mehle, USN—VF-6, Enterprise

Cdr. Milford A. Merrill, USN (Ret.)—VB-3, Yorktown

Cdr. Robert S. Merritt, USN (Ret.)—VF-8, Hornet Lt.

Col. George E. Metzenthin, USMCR (Ret.)—22nd Prov. Marines, Midway

Capt. Vernon L. Micheel, USN—VS-6, Enterprise

Cdr. Edwin B. Miller, MC USN—NAS, Midway

Brig. Gen. Ronald K. Miller USMC (Ret.)—3rd Def. Batn., Midway

Gishiro Miura—Akagi

Maj. Neil W. Mold, USA—Carlson’s Raiders, Midway

MG Sgt. Otto M. Moore, USMC (Ret.)—VMSB-241, Midway

Lt. Col. Pete L. Moore, USAF (Ret.)—B-26s, Midway

Cdr. Corwin F. Morgan, USN (Ret.)— VT-8 (Det.), Pearl Harbor

Juzo Mori—Soryu

Takayoshi Morinaga—Kaga

Cdr. J. S. Morris, USNR (Ret.)—VT-6, Enterprise

Cdr. William B. Mosle, USNR (Ret.)—VT-3, Yorktown

Capt Elias B. Mott, USN (Ret.)—Enterprise

Rear Adm. Horace D. Moulton, USN (Ret.)—Enterprise

Lt. Col. James P. Muri, USAF (Ret.)—B-26s, Midway

WO Meade E. Murphy, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Cdr. James F. Murray, USN (Ret.)—VB-6, Enterprise

Robert K. Nelson, USMC (Ret.)—Yorktown

Lt. Cdr. Denny A. Newberry, USN (Ret.)—Enterprise

Capt. Robert J. Ney, USN—PBYs, Midway

Rear Adm. Bromfield B. Nichol, USN (Ret.)—Enterprise

Paul E. Nichols, USN (Ret.)—Morris

Susumu Nishiura—Imperial Headquarters, Tokyo

Mitsuharu Noda—Yamaio

John Ross Nugent, USAF—Midway

Raita Ogawa—Akagi

Hisashi Ohara—Soryu

RM1 Lawson Oliphant, USN (Ret.) Hughes

Heijiro Omi—Yamato

Tatsuya Otawa—Soryu

Capt. Frank A. Patriarca, USN—VS-6, Enterprise

Lt. Cdr. James W. Patterson, Jr., USN—VB-6, Enterprise

Cdr, Ralph E. Patterson, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Rear Adm. Oscar Pederson, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Capt. Joe R. Penland, USN (Ret.)—VB-6, Enterprise

Rear Adm. Henry S. Persons, USN—Enterprise

Capt. William R. Pittman, USN—VS-6, Enterprise

Joe Poffenberger, USN (Ret.)—Hornet

Lt. Col. Bruce Prosser, USMC (Ret.)—VMSB-241, Midway

Rear Adm. Donald J. Ramsey, USN (Ret.)—Hughes

Capt. Wilmer E. Rawie, USN (Ret.)—VF-6, Enterprise

Rear Adm. Clarence C. Ray, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

John A. Reece, USN (Ret.)—PBYs, Midway

ABCM H. J. Reese, USN—VT-3, Yorktown

EMC Thomas W. Reese, USN (Ret.)—Hornet

CWO George W. Reeves, USNR—YP 349

Cdr. Paul T. Rennell, USN (Ret.)—PT boats, Midway

Lt. Col. Donald E. Ridings, USAF (Ret.)—B-17s, Midway

Rear Adm. Frederick L. Riefkohl, USN (Ret)—Vincennes

Lt. Col. Allan H. Ringblom, USMC—VMSB-241, Midway

Rear Adm. Wilbur E. Roberts, USN (Ret.)—VB-6, Enterprise

Capt. Joseph J. Rochefort, USN (Ret.)—14th Naval District, Pearl Harbor

Cdr. Eldor E. Rodenburg, USN (Ret.)—VS-6, Enterprise

Fred Rodin—shipyard, Pearl Harbor

BMC E. W. Rollman, USN (Ret.)—Enterprise

Maj. J. D. Rollow, Jr., USMCR (Ret.)—VMSB-241, Midway

Cdr. Joseph C. Roper, USN (Ret.)—Enterprise

Cdr. Allan Rothenberg, USN (Ret.)—PBYs, Midway

Vice Adm. Richard W. Ruble, USN (Ret.)—Enterprise

Capt. Stanley E. Ruehlow, USN (Ret.)—VF-8, Hornet

Louis Rulli, USN (Ret.)—Yorkkown

Cdr. Robert B. Russell, USNR (Ret.)—Russell

Goro Sakagami—Akagi Capt.

Carl A. Sander, Jr., USN—Astoria

Toshisaburo Sasabe—Akagi

Rear Adm. Edward P. Sauer, USN (Ret.)—Balch

Vice Adm. Walter G. Schindler, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Cdr. William J. Schleis, USN—NAS, Midway

Capt. Tony F. Schneider, USN—VB-6, Enterprise

Clester R. Scotten, Jr., USMC (Ret.)—6th Def. Batn., Midway

Lt. Col. Charles J. Seibert, USMC (Ret.)—3rd Def. Batn., Midway

Benjamin L. Serna, USMC (Ret.)—6th Def. Batn., Midway

Rear Adm. Elliott W. Shanklin, USN (Ret.)—Portland

Edward Sheehan—shipyard, Pearl Harbor

Rear Adm. Cyril T. Simard, USN (Ret.)—NAS, Midway

Capt. W. B. Simmons, USMC (Ret.)—Pensacola

Capt. Hilliard C. Smathers, USN (Ret.)—PBYs, Midway

Capt Bert Smith, SC USN (Ret.)—Hammann

Lt. Edward B. Smolenski, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Lt. Cdr. John W. Snowden, USN (Ret.)— VS-6, Enterprise

Adm. Raymond A. Spruance, USN (Ret.)—Enterprise

Col. Edward A. Steedman, USAF (Ret.)—B-17s, Midway

James Stevens, SC USN (Ret.)—Hornet

Maj. James E. Stone, USMC (Ret.)—MAG 22, Midway

Rear Adm. Hubert E. Strange, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

J. F. Sutherland, USN (Ret.)—VF-8, Hornet

Lt. Marvin Sutliff, USMC (Ret.)—6th Def. Batn., Midway

Yahachi Tanabe—I-168

Adm. John S. Thach, USN—VF-3, Yorktown

ADC Allen J. Thompson, USN (Ret.)—PBYs, Midway

Lt. Oliver C. Thore, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Rear Adm. Alexander C. Thorington, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Capt. Theodore. S. Thueson, USN (Ret.)—PBYs, Midway

Rear Adm. Harold H. Tiemroth, USN (Ret.)—Balch

Col. Charles T. Tingle, USMCR (Ret.)—6th Def. Batn., Midway

Lt. Cdr. Kengo Tominaga—Navy Department, Tokyo

BTC Norman R. Touve, USNFR (Ret.)—Astoria

Yasumi Toyama—Jintsu

Shunichi Toyoshima—Isokaze

Capt. Ignatius N. Tripi, SC USN (Ret.)—Portland

Rear Adm. Arnold E. True, USN (Ret.)—Hammann

Brig. Gen. Marshall A. Tyler, USMC (Ret)—VMSB-241, Midway

Kazuomi Uchida—Yamato

CWO George Vavrek, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Gunner Jefferson M. Vick, USN (Rel.) —Yorktown

Lt. Col. Harold R. Warner, Jr., USMC (Ret.)—6th Def. Batn., Midway Col. Jo Kyle Warner, USAF—7th A.F. liaison, Midway

Yasuji Watanabe—Yamato

Capt. William G. Weber, USN—Balch

Sgt. Maj. Edwin Wehinger, USMC—Carlson’s Raiders, Midway

George K. Weise, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Capt. D. E. Weissenborn, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

CWO Joseph O. Weist, USMC—6th Def. Batn., Midway

Col. E. C. Wessman, USAF (Ret)—B-17s, Midway

Col. Narce Whitaker, USAF—B-17s, Midway

Cyril D. Williams—shipyard, Pearl Harbor

Lt. James E. Wilson, MC USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Newton Harry Wilson, USN (Ret.)—NAS, Midway

James M. Winants, USMC (Ret.)—VMSB-241, Midway Cdr.

Leonard A. Wingo, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Master Sgt. Edward D. Winslow, USMC (Ret.)—NAS, Midway

Rear Adm. Theodore R. Wirth, USN (Ret.)—Portland

Joseph Y. Wisener, USMC (Ret.)—Yorktown

Cdr. Maurice E. Witting, USN (Ret.)—Yorktown

Cdr. Thomas J. Wood, USN—VB-8, Hornet Col.

Willard G. Woodbury, USAF (Ret.)—B-17s, Midway

Rear Adm. Joseph M. Worthington, USN (Ret.)—Benham

Alfred Wright, Jr., USNR (Ret.)—Saratoga

Maj. Carl E. Wuertele, USAF (Ret.)—B-17s, Midway

Masaki Yamauchi—Mogami

Shiro Yonai—Argentina Maru

Chuichi Yoshioka—Akagi

Frank E. Zelnis, USMC (Ret.)—VMSB-241, Midway

Index

A  |  B  |  C  |  D  |  E

F  |  G  |  H  |  I  |  J

K  |  L  |  M  |  N  |  O

P  |  R  |  S  |  T

U  |  V  |  W  |  Y  |  Z

Abe, Lt. Heijiro, 118

Abe, Rear Admiral Hiroaki, 164-165

Abe, Chief Petty Officer, 218

Abe, Capt. Toshio, 223

Abercrombie, Ens. William W., 77

Adams, Yeoman Joseph H., 195, 201

Adams, Lt. Samuel, 204, 239

Adams, Lt. William, 61, 111

Adkins, AMM2c Floyd D., 155-156

Ady, Lt. Cdr. A. E., 93, 97

Ady, Lt. Howard, 70, 84

“AF,” 8, 14, 18, 20, 134, 216, 231

Aiso, Cdr. Kunizo, 213, 221, 233-234, 250-251

Akagi, 8, 9-11, 37-39, 49-50, 56, 68-69, 75, 80-81, 91, 95, 99-100, 110, 113-114, 116-118, 119-120, 131, 134, 142-143, 152, 180, 197; attacked by Midway planes, 104-105; attacked by Navy carrier planes, 152-155, 259-266; burning, 161-166, 184-186; ordered abandoned, 219-220; scuttled, 231

Akebono Maru, 12, 67

Akers, Cdr. Frank, 123

Akiyama, Ens., 186

“AL,” 18

Alaska, 18

Aldrich, Cdr. Clarence E., 180, 192, 198, 246

Aleutian Screening Force (Japanese), 14, 68

Aleutians, 5, 6, 7, 18, 22, 38, 46, 68, 168, 216, 254. See also “AO,” Attu, Dutch Harbor, Kiska

Allen, Lt. Col. Brooke E., 113, 232, 239-240

Amagai, Cdr. Takahisa, 50, 69, 110, 152, 160-161

Amman, Ens. Bernard L., 66

Anderson, 196, 198

Anderson, Sgt., 259

Andrews, Ens. J. T., 249

Andrews, 1st Lt. Robert B., 63

“AO,” 8, 14, 18, 216. See also Aleutians

“AOB,” see “AO”

Aoki, Capt. Taijiro, 50, 105, 113, 142, 153, 163, 185-186, 219

Arashi, 143, 144, 159, 219

Arashio, 230, 243

Argentina Maru, 62, 67

Ariga, Capt., 190

Armistead, Capt. Kirk, 72, 86, 90

Arnold, Gunner Dora E. (Deacon), 41, 42-43, 57, 94

Arnold, Cdr. Murr E., 137, 171

Arnold, Cdr. Ralph J., 200, 203

Asashio, 230

Ashford, Lt. Cdr. William H., 26

Ashley, Pfc, 103

Astoria, 138, 169, 172, 177, 182-185, 195-197, 204-205, 238

Attu, 12; See also Aleutians,

“AO” Auman, Ens. F. C, 157

Australia, 2, 4, 17, 18, 45

Aylwin, 28, 51, 55

B-17s, 22, 47-48, 57-58, 64, 67, 73, 97, 102, 116, 210-211, 225, 226, 256; June 3 strike, 60-63; June 4 strikes, 86, Hill 3, 210-213; June 5 strikes, 232, 239-240; June 6 strike, 248

B-25s, 5

B-26s, 45-47, 73, 87, 103-105, 116; June 4 strike, 102-105

Bagley, Seaman A. M., 51

Balch, 26, 169, 178, 192-193, 196, 203, 238, 246

Ballard, 252

Barbers Point, 31

Bataan, 2

Bateman, MMlc George E., 200

Bear, Lt. Robert J., 45

Beckham, Ens. Walter, 195

Bell, Capt. W. M., 86

Bellinger, Rear Admiral Patrick, 23, 25, 46

Benham, 178, 192-193, 196, 203, 238, 246, 249, 255

Bennett, Radio Elec. Vane M., 172, 178-179, 201

Bennett, William, 32-33

Benson, Lt. Roy, 189

Benson, Major William W., 87, 93

Beppu, 80

Best, Lt. Richard H., 52, 77, 82, 145-149, 170, 209, 261-265

Billecheck, Pfc, 94

Blain, Capt. Richard L., 108

Blakey, Major George A., 211-212

Bombing, high-level, see B-17s

Bombing Squadron 3, 33, 74, 83; June 4, first strike, 137-140, 149-151, 156, 174-175, 182-183, 266; June 4, second strike, 205, 208; June 5 strike, 238-239; June 6 strike, 241

Bombing Squadron 6, 26, 34, 83; June 4, first strike, 124-125, 135-136, 144-149, 158, 264-266; June 4, second strike, 205, 208-209; June 5 strike, 238-239; June 6 strike, 241-242

Bombing Squadron 8: June 4, first strike, 125, 126, 134, 157-158, 170, 225-226; June 4, second strike, 205-206, 212; June 5 strike, 238-239; June 6 strike, 241-242

Boo, Ylc Frank W., 182

Boone, Cdr. Walter F., 170

Bottomley, Lt. Harold S., Jr., 209

Bouterse, Chaplain Matthew, 177

Boyden, Ens. James C, 64

Brady, Lt. Norman, 250

Brannon, Ens. Charles E., 100

Brazier, ARM2c R. B. (Mike), 141, 184

Briggs, Boatswain Chester E., Jr., 200

Brittin, Lt. Burdick H., 51, 55

Brixner,. Lt. Cdr. Robert, 57

Brockman, Lt. Cdr. William H., 23, 187-189, 257, 267

Brooks, Lt. William, 90-91

Browning, Capt. Miles, 121-122, 124-125, 169-170

Buckmaster, Capt. Elliott, 33-34, 54-55, 174-175, 192, 194-195, 198-199, 202-203, 238, 243-244, 247, 249

Buckner, Capt. Jean H., 92-93

Buffalo (fighter plane), 44, 72, 91, 94-95, 96. See also VMF-221

Bungo Strait, 11, 13

Burford, Lt. Cdr. William P., 168-169

Burns, Capt. Robert R., 86

Butler, Ens. John C, 151, 209

Campbell, Lt. Norwood A., 33

Canfield, 2nd Lt. Clayton, 90, 94

Card, Corp. Eugene T., 72, 107-109

Carey, Capt. John F., 89-90, 94

Cart, Capt. Marion, 90

Carlson, Maj. Evans F., 44

Carlson’s Raiders, 44, 57, 71

“Cash,” Station, 15, 17

Ceylon, 4, 16

Chase, Ens. John, 177

Chase, Lt. William, 84, 187

Chihaya, Lt., 81

Chikuma, 11, 119, 173, 184-185, 213, 217, 221, 235, 254, 267

Childers, ARM3c Lloyd F., 141

Chilose, 12 Cho, Navigator, 210

Chochalousek, ARMIc W. G., 83, 156

CINCPAC, 14, 21-22, 24, 26-27, 30-31, 34, 36, 42, 48, 57-58, 74, 79, 122, 168, 233, 237-238, 255

Clanton, Ellis, 32

Clark, Pfc Philip, 91

Cobb, Ens. Philip W., 151, 209

Code-breaking, 15-20, 21-22, 23-25, 256

Cole, Lt. S.O. (“Pappy”), 250

Collins, Capt. James, 45, 87, 102

Collins, Steward, 82

Colombo, 2 Combat Air Patrol (Japanese), 111, 114, 119, 206. See also Ogawa Combat Air Patrol (U.S.), 171-172, 173-174, 178, 182-183, 196 Combat Intelligence Unit, 15-16, 19-20, 21-22, 23-25, 256

Combined Fleet (Japanese), 10-13, 216

Combined Fleet Headquarters (Japanese), 4, 7, 9, 10, 13, 217

COMINCH, 16, 19

Cook, Ens. James F., 76

Cooksey, Lt. Donald, 85-86

Cooner, Ens. B. R., 151, 215

Coral Sea, 2, 10, 17, 19-20, 30, 126, 130, 137, 176, 194, 203

Corl, Mach. Harry L., 140-142, 184

Cosley, 2nd Lt. Jack, 45

Coughlin, Father Charles E., 3

Creehan, Cdr. Edward P., 26, 83

Creighton, Fireman Edward, 247

Crenshaw, Lt. William, 200

Crowell, Lt. Charles, 211

Cummings, 2nd Lt. Daniel, 115

Cundiff, Lt. (j.g.) Charles R., 176, 181, 192, 245

Currie, Corp. Osa, 92

Davis, Capt. A. C, 23, 25

Davis, Lt. (j.g.) Douglas C, 65, 66

Davis, Lt. Cdr. Ernest J., 172, 175, 246

Davis, Capt. W. Dalton, 199, 201-203

Delaney, Lt. Cdr. John F., Jr., 192, 198, 247

Destroyer Squadron 10 (Japanese), 164, 223

Dibb, Ens. Ram, 142

Dickinson, Lt. Clarence E., Jr.; 27, 77, 170

Diego-Suarez, Madagascar, 68

Dobashi, Cdr., 162

Dobbs, Radioman Horace, 127-128

Dobson, Lt. (j.g.) Cleo J., 242

Donohoo, Capt. Malcolm O., 55, 196

Doolittle, Lt. Col. Jimmy, 5, 33

Dorsey, Tommy, 51

Dow, Cdr. Leonard (Ham), 168, 183

Drydock No. 1, Pearl Harbor, 29, 32

Dyer, Lt. Cdr. Thomas H., 21

Dutch Harbor, 68, 70, 73

Earnest, Ens. A. K., 49, 72-73, 100-102

Eastern Island, 17, 40-45, 47, 61, 63, 71-73, 85-86, 87-88, 91, 94-97, 211, 225-226

Eaton, Pfc Roger, 94

Egusa, Lt. Takashige, 81

Eke, Lt., 45

Elden, Lt. Ralph W., 246

Elder, Ens. Robert M., 151

11th Air Fleet (Japanese), 35

Ellison, Ens. Harold J., 127

Ely, Lt. Art, 126, 132

Emerson, Lt. A. C, 176

Emmons, Maj. Gen. Delos, 20-22, 79, 255-256

Engels, BMC Stanley, 88

English, Rear Adm. Robert H., 231

Enterprise: May 15-26, recalled to Pearl Harbor, 20-21, 26; May 26-28, preparations, 26-28, 31; May 28-June 4, en route, 31, 51-53, 55, 74-75, 77-78, 82-83, 84-85; June 4, attacking Nagumo, 121-123, 124-126, 128-129, 131-133, 135-137, 144-149, 151, 156-157, 158-159, 168-170, 205, 208-209, 215, 227, 260-265; during attacks on Yorktown, 177-178, 182, 184, 196, 198; June 5, maneuver and pursuit, 227-228, 233, 238-239; June 6, attacking Mogami and Mikuma, 241-242; post-battle, 255, 256

Esders, CAP Wilhelm G., 140-142, 184

Evans, Ens. W. R., 127

Eversole, Lt. (j.g.) Thomas, 132

Evitts, Sgt., 92

F4F (fighter plane), 44, 48, 54, 72, 91, 94, 172. See also Fighting Squadrons 3, 6, 8; VMF-221

Fadick, Sgt. Carl, 93

Faulkner, Capt. Cecil L., 112-113

Feigenbutz, Leading Chief V. J., 74

Ferrier, RM3c Harold H., 101-102

Fieberling, Lt. Langdon K., 49, 86, 100-101

5th Air Squadron (Japanese), 10, 55

Fighting Squadron 3, 32-33, 54, 137, 138-140, 142, 171, 237

Fighting Squadron 6, 77, 125-126, 129-130, 133, 169

Fighting Squadron 8, 134-135, 158, 170, 250

Fiji, 4

1st Air Squadron (Japanese), 10

First Carrier Striking Force (Japanese), 6, 9-10, 11, 13-14, 17, 21, 24, 37, 49-50, 55-56, 68-69, 79-82, 91, 97-99, 104, 106, 110-111, 113-114, 119-120, 127, 131, 132-134, 142-143, 144, 151, 162-163, 164-166, 208-209, 215-216, 217-218, 224, 227-229, 248; disposition of ships during battle, 99-100, 119-120, 260-261, 262

Fisher, Ens. Clayton E., 170, 242

Fisler, Lt. Francis, 251

Fitzgibbon, BTC Raymond, 246

“Fleet Opposed Invasion,” state of, 20, 22

Fleming, Capt. Richard, 72, 107-110, 232

Fletcher, Rear Adm. Frank Jack, 20, 28-30, 34, 53-55, 73-74, 77-78, 84-85, 137-138, 171-172, 174, 178-179, 181-182, 204-206, 214, 238

Flinn, Lt. George, 171

Forbes, Seaman Edward T., 198

Ford, John, 70-71, 88, 92

Ford Island, 26, 63, 226

Forgy, Chaplain Howell, 177

Fort Ord, 78

Foster, Navigator J. I., 66

14th Naval District, 16

Fourth Army, 78

Fourth Fighter Command, 226

Fox, Cdr. Charles W., 74, 82

Frantz, Seaman Melvin, 78, 200

Fraser, Ens. George E., 48

French, Lt. Cdr. A. M., 199, 201

French Frigate Shoals, 18, 35-36, 86

Fuchida, Cdr. Mitsuo, 37, 80, 110, 153-154, 162, 254-255

Fukusaki, Cdr. Noboru, 1

Fuso, 13

Gallagher, Radioman W. E., 33-34, 138-140, 149, 183-184

Gallaher, Lt. W. Earl, 33, 145-147, 205, 208-209, 215

Gay, Ens. George, 76-77, 121, 123-125, 126-131, 159, 220, 250

Genda, Cdr. Minoru, 80, 82, 111, 117-118, 252-253

Gibbs, Ens. Harry B., 237

Gillette, Capt. Claude Sexton, 29

Gillette, Ens. Robert W., 168-169

Glidden, Capt. Elmer G., 108

Godfrey, ARM3c Joseph V., 150

Gogoj, Tech. Sgt., 103

Goldsmith, Ens. George H., 147

“Gooney birds,” 45, 96

Goshu Maru, 21

Goto, Vice Adm. Aritomo, 35

Grabowsky, Ens. Leon, 226

Gray, Lt. James S., Jr., 77, 82, 125-126, 129-130, 131-133, 169

Gray, Lt (j.g.) Richard, 158, 250-251

Grayling, 248

Greenbacker, Lt. (j.g.) JohnE., 30, 173-174, 244, 245

Grew, Chief Radioman, 200-201

Guam, 12-13, 48

Guillory, Ens. Troy T., 157

Gwin, 237, 247

Hagikaze, 219

Hale, Brig, Gen. Willis, 47-48

Halford, Ens. J. A., 178

Halsey, Vice Adm. William F., 20, 25-27, 30, 53, 121, 133, 227

Hammann, 183, 238, 244-247, 255

Hanson, Ens. Alden W., 151, 209

Hardeman, Ens., 59

Hare, Mach. Mate Worth E., 174, 193, 200

Harp, Chaplain Edward B., Jr., 51

Hartwig, Lt. Cdr. G. Roy, 196, 203, 214

Haruna, 11, 116, 212-213, 240

Harvard University, 3

Hashimoto, Lt. Toshio, 38, 89, 91, 95, 119, 155, 179, 189-191, 193-194, 197-198, 206-207, 210

Hashirajima, 1, 2, 9-13, 254

Hawaii, 6, 18-19, 21-24, 27, 31, 38-39, 43, 47, 49, 54, 55, 73, 78-79, 211, 248

Hawaiian Electric Company, 33

Hayes, Lt. Cdr. John D., 197

Henderson, Maj. Lofton R. (Joe), 45, 72, 87, 107-108, 112

Herchey, Seaman John, 54

Hermes, 2

Hibberd, Lt (j.g.) Charles, 64-66

Hickam Field, 45, 225-226

Hicks, Leslie, 33

Hiei, 228

Hightower, Capt. David P., 26

Hiraide, Capt. Hideo, 254

Hirohito, Emperor, 2, 222, 229

Hiryu, 10-11, 37, 50, 79-80, 81, 89, 91, 95, 99, 105, 116-117, 118-120, 155, 165, 184, 216, 217, 227, 235, 240, 251, 252, 260-261, 268; attack on Yorktown, 166-167, 173, 179-180, 189-191, 193-194, 197-198; attacked by Midway planes, 104, 110, 113-114, 213; attacked by Navy carrier planes, 142-143, 208-211; burning, 213-214, 220-221; ordered abandoned, 222-223; scuttled, 223; sinks, 235; trapped engineers escape, 233-235, 251-252

Hogan, Lt Thomas W., 187

Holmberg Lt. (j.g.) Paul A. (Lefty), 138, 150, 155-156, 175, 183

Holmes, Lt. Cdr. W. J. (Jasper), 21

Hommel, Maj. Robert, 42, 71

Honda, Capt. Jinjiro, 214

Hong Kong, 2

Honolulu, 33, 78-79 Hopkins, Ens. Lewis, 26

Hornet, May 15-26, recalled to Pearl Harbor, 20-21, 25-26, May 26-28, preparations, 28; May 28-June 4, en route, 31, 48-49, 51-52, 55, 75, 76-77, 83, 85; June 4, attacking Nagumo, 121-124, 125-131, 134-135, 136-137, 157-159, 170-171, 205-206, 212, 225-226, 227; during attacks on Yorktown, 178, 182-183, 196, 198; June 5, maneuver and pursuit, 238-239; June 6, attacking Mogami and Mikuma, 241-242

Hosho, 13, 216

Hosogaya, Vice Adm. Moshiro, 6, 68

Houle, Seaman Donat, 174, 193, 196

Howell, RM2c E. E., 145

Hoy, Machinist’s Mate J. E., 28

Huber, Pfc Charles, 108

Hughes, 174, 177, 192, 196, 214, 227, 236-237, 238, 247, 249

Hughes, Lt. Charles, 91

Hughes, Cdr. Massie, 57, 69-70

Hull, Cordell, 2

Humberd, Capt. William, 90

Huntington, Radioman Robert, 128, 130

“Hypo,” Station, 15-16

Hyuga, 68

I-121, 35

I-122, 35

I-123, 34-35

I-166, 55

I-168, 8, 39-40, 97, 229, 234-235, 244-246, 247-248

Ichiki, Col. Kiyonao, 8-9

Ikemoto, Seaman Takeo, 13

Imperial Headquarters, 7-8, 254

Imperial General Order No. 94, 13

Indian Ocean, 2, 7, 17

Inland Sea, 9, 11

Intelligence, Japanese on U.S. movements, 8, 38-40, 54-55

Intelligence, U.S. on Japanese movements, 14, 15 ff, 41, 43, 52, 69-70, 73-74

Invasion Force (Japanese), 6, 12, 14, 38, 74, 216, 218, 228. See also Transport Group (Japanese)

Irwin, 2nd Lt. Darrell, 90

Ishikawa, Fireman Kenichi, 243, 251

Isokaze, 154, 266

Ito, Cdr. Seiroku, 223

Ito, Masanori, 254

Iverson, 1st Lt. Daniel, 107, 109

Iwabuchi, Capt. Sanji, 214

Jaccard, Ens. Richard A., 135, 146

Jacoby, Ens. Edmond, 46, 73, 96

Japan Times and Advertiser, 3

“JFU” (“Jap Fouler-Upper”), 97

Jintsu, 12, 38, 59, 62, 67

JN-25 (Japanese code), 15-16, 25. See also code-breaking

Johnson, Lt. Russ, 103

Johnson, Lt. Cdr. Robert R. (Ruff), 157, 205, 239

Junyo, 11, 216

Kadano, Lt. Hiroharu, 118

Kaga, 7, 7-11, 38, 50, 69, 80-81, 91, 95, 99, 105, 118-120, 142-143, 154-155, 165-166, 180; attacked by Midway planes, 110; attacked by Navy carrier planes, 133-134, 143, 151-152, 152-153, 154, 259-267; burning, 160-161, 186-187, 189; sinks, 218-219 Kahala, 33

Kaku, Capt. Tomeo, 79, 110, 119, 206-207, 210, 213, 221-222

Kakuta, Rear Adm. Kakuji, 216

Kameyama Shrine, 40

Kamikawa Maru, 12, 20

Kaneohe, 33

Kanoe, Cdr. Takashi, 79-80, 155, 206, 210, 222-223

Kanoya Air Base, 254

Karetka, Signalman Peter, 192, 236, 249

Karrol, Radioman J. J., 204

Katsumi, Cdr. Motomi, 240

Kawaguchi, Lt. Cdr. Susumu, 79, 166-167, 180, 191, 206-207, 210

Kawai, Chiyoko, 12

Kawakami, Ens. Sandanori, 221

“K” Operation, 8, 34-36, 37, 39, 56

Kazagumo, 220-221, 223

Kiefer, Cdr. Dixie, 33, 202

Kikuchi, Lt. Rokuro, 95

Kimbrell, Ch. Torpedoman Berlyn, 246

Kimes, Lt. Col. Ira E., 49, 64, 71, 87, 96-97, 115

“Kimigayo” (Japanese national anthem), 218, 222

Kimmel, Adm. Husband E., 19

Kimmel, Machinist’s Mate T. E., 66

Kimura, Rear Adm. Susumu, 164

King, Adm. Ernest J., 16, 18

Kiozumi Maru, 67

“Kirameku Seizrt” (Japanese song), 37, 50 Kirishima, 11, 153, 213-214, 240

Kisela, CPO Joseph, 245

Kiska, 12

Kittyhawk, 23, 44

Kleiss, Lt. (j.g.) Norman J. (Dusty), 147, 157

Kliensmith, WTlc Charles, 181

Kobayashi, Lt Michio, 167, 173, 179

Koch, Sgt. Jay, 92

Koga, Cdr. Magotaro, 37

Komura, Rear Adm. Keizo, 267-268

Kondo, Vice Adm. Nobutake, 6-7, 11, 12-13, 17, 216, 224, 228-229, 248

Kondo, Lt. Takenori, 167, 179

Kongo,

228 Konoye, Prime Minister Fumimaro, 3

Korjus, Miliza, 75

Koyama, Lt. Nasao, 243

Kumano, 12, 216, 230-231, 241

Kundinger, Capt. Don, 112

Kunisada, Lt. Cdr. Yoshio, 186-187, 189, 268

Kure (Japanese base), 9-10, 254

Kure Island, 12, 134, 232

Kuriles, 13

Kurita, Rear Adm. Takeo, 12, 216, 229-231, 240-241

Kurka, Seaman Stan, 55

Kuroshima, Capt. Kamato, 6, 8, 39, 67-68, 165, 216

Kusaka, Rear Adm. Rynnosuke, 9, 56, 69, 99, 105-106, 111, 114, 116-117, 153, 162-164, 215-216, 224, 252-253, 261

Kwajalein, 35

Laing, Cdr. Michael B., 54, 174, 179, 204

Lancaster, Y2c William W., 200

Lane, Ens. Charles, 75, 83, 150-151, 227

Lane, RM2c John Udell, 75

LaPlant, AMM2c G. A., 150

Laub, Lt. (j.g.) Robert E. (Ed), 132

Layton, Lt. Cdr. Edwin T., 19-20, 21-22, 24, 36, 79

Leslie, Lt. Cdr. Maxwell F., 33-34, 137-140, 149-151, 169, 171, 174-175, 182-184, 262, 265-266

Lewis, Seaman, 203

Lexington, 200

Liberators, 249

Lindsey, Lt. Cdr. Eugene E., 82-83, 125-126, 131, 132-133

Lindsey, Lt. (j.g.) Robin M., 239

London Naval Treaty, 10

Lorenz, Ens. John d’Arc, 176, 192-193

Love, Pvt. Joseph E., 71, 85

Lovelace, Lt. Cdr. Donald A., 54

Lucius, WO William R., 87, 92-93

Lunsford, BM2c Forest E., 249

Lyle, Lt. (j.g.) J. P. O., 58

Lynch, Lt. Richard B., 188

Lyon, Capt. John B., 28

Lyon, Ens. J. J., 49

Lytells, Seaman, 196

McCarthy, Ens. John R., 145

McCormick, Capt. L. D., 19-20

McClusky, Lt. Cdr. C. Wade, 82-83, 124-125, 130, 131, 133, 135-136, 144-148, 156, 168-170, 262, 264-266

McCoy, Pfc Morris, 94, 239

McCuskey, Lt. (j.g.) Scott, 172

McFeeley, Cpl. Gordon R., 108

McGlashan, Capt. Robert C, 42-43, 56, 71, 94

McKellar, Lt. Clinton, 87

McNamee, Graham, 188

Madagascar, 8, 68

“Main Body,” see Main Force. (Technically a component, but terms often used interchangeably.)

Main Force (Japanese), 6, 12-13, 34, 38, 64, 68, 73, 119, 164, 214, 218, 240-241, 248

Makigumo, 159, 218, 223

Makishima, Teiichi, 110, 152-154, 162, 254

Mandai, Ens. Hisao, 110, 207, 210, 213, 234-235, 252

Manila, 2

Manning, AMM3c James D., 100-101

Marine Air Group 22, 71-72. See also VMF-221, VMSB-241

Marshall, Gen. George C, 256

Marshall Islands, 21, 248

Martin, Signalman William, 175-177, 194-195

Mason, Capt. Charles Perry, 28

Massey, Lt. Cdr. Lance E. (Lem), 33, 75, 138, 139-142, 149

Masuda, Cdr. Shogo, 81, 162

Mayes, Lt. Herbert, 103

Mehle, Lt. Roger W., 28, 178

“Meiji Restoration,” 3

Mello, Cpl., 103

Merrill, Capt. Herbert, 90

Merrill, Ens. Milford A., 215

Midway, 4-5, 17, 256-257; May 2, Nimitz visits, 17, 40; May 15-June 3, preparations on, 40-49, 56-59, 70-72; June 4, attack on, 85-88, 89 ff; June 5, shelled by submarine, 229-230. See also under various individuals and units engaged.

Mikuma, 12, 216, 230-231, 233, 241, 243, 248, 251

Miller, Pharmacist’s Mate E. B., 41, 88, 91-93

Miller, Glenn, 51

Miller, Capt. Ronald K., 44

“MI Operation,” 8

Mitchell, Lt. Cdr. S. G. (Pat), 158, 250-251

Mito, 5

Mitscher, Capt. Marc A., 26, 28, 52, 123-124, 125, 239

Miura, Cdr. Gishiro, 50, 162, 185, 219

Mochizuki, Ens., 40

Mogami, 12, 216, 230-231, 233, 241-243, 248

Monaghan. 168, 237, 247

Moore, Lt. Pete, 102-103

Moore, 2nd Lt. Thomas F., Jr., 108-109

Moore, Ens. Ulbert M. (Whitey), 83

Morgan, Ens. Cbrwin F., 76

Mori, CPO Juzo, 38, 69, 80, 89, 95-96, 118, 154-155, 160

Mori, Lt. Shigeru, 190, 194, 198

Morinaga, CWO Takayoshi, 9, 10, 38, 80, 143, 151-152, 161, 220

Morris, 204 Mott, Lt. E. B., 78

Muri, 1st Lt. James, 45, 73, 87, 102-104, 226, 229

Murray, Capt. George D., 239

Murphy, Lt. Cdr. John W., 231-232

Mutsu, 240

Muzejka, Seaman F. Z., 51

“My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” 51

Nagano, Adm. Osami, 19, 254

Nagara, 11, 100, 163-164, 166, 214, 215-216, 217, 240, 253, 254

Nagato, 240

Nagumo, Vice Adm. Chuichi, 6, 7, 9, 37-39, 49-50, 55-56, 68-69, 74, 80, 81-82, 122, 127, 134-136, 137, 142, 143-144, 151, 159, 161, 165-166, 185-186, 214, 216-217, 219, 222, 227, 229, 235, 240; June 4, deciding on second attack, 99, 105-107, 111, 114, 116- 117, 119-120; June 4, flag shifted, 162-164; June 4, planning night engagement, 215-216, 217; June 4, retiring, 217-218, 223-224; June 7, returning to Japan, 253. See also First Carrier Striking Force

Nakane, CPO, 197-198

Narita Shrine, 160

Nautilus, 23, 187-189, 256-257, 266-268

Naval General Staff (Japanese), 5, 254

Naval Hospital, Pearl Harbor, 31, 255

Naval War College (Newport, R.I.), 24

Navy Yard, Pearl Harbor, 32-33, 79, 226, 255. See also

Yorktown, repairs on

“Negat,” Station, 15-16

New Caledonia, 4

New Orleans, 51

Nichol, Lt. Cdr. Bromfield, 168

Nimitz, Adm. Chester W., 3-4, 17-30, 31, 34, 35, 40-42, 43-44, 47-48, 54, 67, 70, 73-74, 228, 255-256

Nira Luckenbach, 47

Nishibayashi, Cdr., 163

Noda, Yeoman Mitsuharu, 166, 253, 254

Norfolk, 48, 76

Norris, Maj. Benjamin, 87, 107, 114-115, 226

Northampton, 26-27

Northern Force (Japanese), 6, 11, 68, 216

Norton, Seaman Bill, 54

Nowaki, 37, 117, 163, 186, 219

Nuuanu Valley, 33

Occupation Force (Japanese), see Invasion Force

Ogawa, Lt. (Assistant Air Officer on the Kaga), 161

Ogawa, Lt. Raita, 37, 104-105, 142, 184-185, 220

O’Halloran, Maj. James S., 87

Ohara, Cdr. Hirashi, 154, 159, 185, 254, 267

Oishi, Capt., 50, 224, 252

Okada, Capt. Jisaku, 133, 152

Oliver, Lt. Robert J., 27.

Olivier, Boatswain, 87-88

Ominato, 11, 12

Omi, Petty Officer Heijiro, 1, 5, 12, 252

Ono, Cdr., 111

Operation “K,” see “K” Operation

Operation Plan No. 29-42, 30-31

Osterloh, Cdr. Erwin H. (Sam), 51

Ota, Capt. Minoru, 8

Otawa, CWO Tatsuya, 119, 155, 160, 220

Oto, Capt. Masanao, 68

Parks, Maj. Floyd B. (Red), 72, 86, 90

Patrol Squadron 23, see PBYs

Patrol Squadron 24, see PBYs

Patrol Squadron 44, see PBYs

Patrol Squadron 51, see PBYs

Patterson, ARM3c James W., Jr., 147, 200, 201

Payne, Capt. Paul, 62-63, 112-113

PBYs, 23, 35, 249, 259; May 30-June 2, search operations, 25, 39-40, 46-47, 49; June 3, Invasion Force located, 25, 39-40, 46-47, 49; June 3, Invasion Force located, 57-59, 61, 62; June 3-4, night torpedo attack, 63-67, 69-70, 77; June 4, Striking Force located, 69-70, 84-85, 86, 100, 104, 121, 136, 164, 171, 187; June 5, search operations, 225, 232-233; June 5-21, rescue work, 250-251

Pearl Harbor, 1-2, 3-4, 8, 9, 10, 13, 14-16, 17-18, 19, 20-24, 26-28, 31, 34-36, 37, 38, 46, 48, 50, 54, 55-56, 63, 79-80, 121, 167-169, 177, 226, 243, 255-256

Pederson, Cdr. Oscar, 137, 172

Penland, Lt. Joe, 146, 157

Pensacola, 209

Pensacola, 178, 192, 196, 255

Pfingstag, Lt. Cdr. H. J., 29

Pichette, Seaman Norman, 236-237

Pittman, Ens. William R., 135, 144, 146, 156-157

Planning, Japanese, 4 ff, 165

Planning, U.S., 20, 22-23, 24-25, 27, 30-31

Plyburn, Boatswain’s Mate, 180

“Point Luck,” 34, 54-55, 73

“Point Option,” 83, 123, 169

Portland SS, 172, 195-196, 214

Port Moresby, 17

Prideau, Fireman, 203

Prince of Wales, 2

Princeton University, 117

Propst, Ens. Gaylord D., 64-66

Provost, Ens. T. C, 178

PT Boats, 23, 71, 73, 87, 95, 225, 250

PT 20, 250

PT 23, 93

Rabaul, 17

Ramsey, Lt. Cdr. Donald J., 177, 227, 236-238

Ramsey, Cdr. Logan C, 46, 48, 64, 69-70, 73, 88, 92

Ramsey, Pfc Reed T., 108-109

Rawie, Lt. (j.g.) Wilmer, 168

Ray, Lt. Cdr. Clarence C. (Jug), 200, 246

Raymond, Sgt. Elza, 107

Reid, Ens. Jewell H. (Jack), 58-61, 73

Repulse, 2

Richards, Lt. W. L., 64-66

Ridings, Capt. Donald E., 226, 240

Riefkohl, Capt. Frederick L,. 196

Riley, Lt. P. J. (Pablo), 132

Ring, Cdr. Stanhope C, 128, 134-135, 157, 170

Ringblom, 2nd Lt. Allan, 46, 114-116

Roberts, Lt. (j.g.) Wilbur E. (Bill), 52, 55, 75, 144-145, 149, 265

Rochefort, Cdr. Joseph J., Jr., 15-22, 23-25, 36, 256

Rodin, Fred, 34

Rollow, 2nd Lt. J. Douglas, 108-109

Rommel, Gen. Erwin, 4

“Rosie the Riveter,” 2

Rothenberg, Ens. Allan, 63-65, 67

Royal Hawaiian Hotel, 256

Ruble, Cdr. Richard, 20-21, 31

Ruehlow, Lt. Stanley E., 158, 250-251

Rulli, Seaman Louis, 54

Russell, 196, 203, 214

Ryujo, 11, 68, 216

Safford, Laurence F., 15

Saheki, 254

St. Louis, 43-44

Saipan, 9, 11-12, 14, 17-18, 21

Sakiyama, Capt. Shakao, 243

Samoa, 4

Sand Island, 17, 40-42, 43-44, 47-48, 56-57, 70-71, 85-86, 87-88, 91-92, 94, 95, 97, 226, 230, 257

San Francisco, 2-3, 18, 24, 78

Saratoga, 33

Saruwatari, Lt. Masayuki, 243

Sasabe, Cdr. Toshisaburo, 2, 153, 261

Sasaki, Cdr. Akira, 6, 253

Sasebo Naval Base, 252

Sauer, Capt. Edward P., 169

SBD (dive bomber), 44-45, 87, 107-109, 135, 139-140, 149, 156, 159, 169-170, 173, 182, 184, 200, 204, 205, 209, 212-213, 215, 232, 241. See also Bombing Squadrons 3, 6, 8; Scouting Squadrons 5, 6, 8; VMSB-241

Schleis, CM William J., 92-93

Schlendering, 2nd Lt. Harold G., 108, 109

Schneider, Ens. Tony F., 135-136, 144-145, 158

Scotten, Pfc Clester, 95

Scouting Squadron 5, 84, 137, 138, 171, 204-205

Scouting Squadron 6, 77, 122-123; June 4, first strike, 135-136, 144-147, 159, 262-266; June 4, second strike, 205, 208-209, 215; June 5 strike, 238-239; June 6 strike, 241-242

Scouting Squadron 8, 123; June 4, first strike, 134-135, 170; June 4, second strike, 205, 212; June 5 strike, 238-239; June 6 strike, 241-242

Search operations, Japanese, 81-82; 217, 253. See also Tone, No. 4 plane

Search operations, U.S., 77-78, 136, 171-172, 204-205. See also PBYs

Seattle, Washington, 226

2nd Air Squadron (Japanese), 10

2nd Carrier Division (Japanese), 116

Second Fleet (Japanese), 6. See also Kondo, Vice Admiral Nobutake

2nd Raider Battalion, see Carlson’s Raiders

“Senyu” (Japanese song), 185

Seventh Air Force (U.S.), 22, 25

73rd Bomb. Squadron (U.S.), 226

Shannon, Col. Harold D., 17, 40-43, 56-57, 71, 85-86, 88, 93, 97, 157-158, 226

Sheehan, Ed, 32

Shigematsu, Lt. Yasuhiro, 155, 173, 206

Shindo, Lt., Ill

Shirane, Lt., 81

Shoho, 137

Shokaku, 10, 137

Short, Lt. Wallace C, Jr. (Wally), 171, 241-242

Shumway, Lt. DeWitt Wood (Dave), 150, 209, 215, 238-239, 266

Simard, Capt. Cyril T., 17, 40-42, 43, 46-48, 60, 70-71, 86, 88, 92, 94, 96, 225, 249, 255

Singapore, 2, 7

6th Defense Battalion (U.S. Marines), 40 ff, 71-72, 85-88, 89 ff, 225-226, 230. See also Shannon, Cpl. Harold D.

Smith, Rear Adm. . William Ward (“Poco”), 204

Snowden, RM3c John W., 157, 227

Soji, Capt. Akira, 233, 243

Solomon Islands, 13, 20, 26, 39

Soryu, 1, 10-11, 38, 50, 69, 80-81, 89, 91, 95, 99, 105, 107, 116, 118-120, 142, 165-166, 180, 189, 190, 207, 220, 222, 254; attacked by Midway planes, 113-114; attacked by Navy carrier planes, 131, 154-155, 185, 259-267; burning, 159-160; ordered abandoned, 160; sinks, 218

Spencer, Capt. William P., 41

Spruance, Rear Adm. Raymond Ames, 30, 31, 34, 52-54, 84, 121-122, 124-125, 127, 168, 170, 178, 192, 205-206, 214-215, 233, 238-241; appointed commander, Task Force 16, 26-27; June 4, decision to retire east, 228; June 6, decision to withdraw, 248

Starks, Pfc Henry I., 115

Stebbins, Lt. Edgar, 206, 212

Steedman, 1st LL Edward A., 61

Steele, Capt. J. M., 22

Submarine cordon, Japanese, 6, 8, 39, 55-56, 254

Submarines, deployment of U.S., 22, 23, 231-232, 256-257. See also Nautilus

Suganami, Lt., 91

Sutherland, Lt. (j.g.) J. J., 242

Suzuya, 12, 216, 230-231, 241

Sweeney, Lt. Col. Walter C, Jr., 47, 57, 60-63, 86, 111-112, 113, 211-212, 225

Sydney, 8, 68

Takagi, Cdr., 243

Takahashi, Petty Officer Toshio, 190, 197

Takama, Capt.

Tamotsu, 116

Takasu, Vice Adm. Shiro, 68

Takayanagi, Capt. Gihachi, 164

Takeda, Lt., 82

Tamaha, 88

Tamai, Lt. Cdr. Asaichi, 81

Tambor, 231-233

Tanaka, Air Petty Officer, 118

Tanabe, Lt. Cdr. Yahachi, 8, 39-40, 97, 229, 235, 244-245, 247-248

Tanaka, Rear Adm. Raizo, 67

Tanbo, Cdr. Yoshibumi, 68

Tange, Petty Officer Satsuo, 191

Tanikaze, 240

Task Force 16, 20-21, 25-26, 31, 51-52, 53-55, 74, 85, 121-122, 136-137, 178, 183, 205, 206, 227-228, 233, 238-239, 248, 255-256

Task Force 17, 20, 28-30, 54, 74, 85, 138, 171, 174, 179, 204-205, 214-215, 237-238

TBD (torpedo plane), 75, 125, 128, 132, 134, 141-143, 149, 264. See also: Torpedo Squadrons 3, 6, and 8

TBF (torpedo plane), 48-49. See also Torpedo Squadron 8 (Detached)

TBS radio, 193, 205

Teats, Ens. G. W., 127

Thach, Lt. Cdr. John S. (Jimmy), 33, 54, 137-139, 142, 171-172

3rd Defense Battalion (U.S. Marines), 44, See also 6th Defense Battalion

Throneson, Lt. Harold, 57

Tiemroth, Lt. Cdr. Harold R, 26, 203

Tinker, Maj. Gen. Clarence L., 25, 248-249

Togo, Adm. Heihachiro, 3, 11

Tojo, Prime Minister Hideki, 5, 242, 254

Tokarz, Capt. Clemence, 63

Tokyo, 12, 16, 19, 31, 38-39, 48, 160, 222, 252, 254; Tokyo time: 38, 259

Tomita, Lt. Rikichi, 248

Tomonaga, Lt. Joichi, 80, 89, 95, 97-99, 105-106, 113-114, 116-119, 155, 164, 189-191, 193-194, 198

Tone, 11, 69, 82, 100, 106, 111, 119-120, 165, 213; No. 4 plane, 82, 99, 105-106, 111, 114, 116, 119, 165

Tongatabu, 20

Tootle, Ens. Milton, Jr., 196

Torpedo Squadron 3, 33, 75, 137, 138, 140-142, 149, 159, 184

Torpedo Squadron 6, 75, 82-83, 125-126, 130-133, 170, 227

Torpedo Squadron 8, 28, 48-49, 72, 83, 121, 123-130, 134, 159, 170-171

Torpedo Squadron 8 (Detached), 48-49, 86-87, 100-101, 105, 226

Toyama, Cdr. Yasurai, 8, 38, 59, 62-67

Transport Group (Japanese), 38, 60, 62-63, 70. See also Invasion Force (Japanese) Trincomalee, 2

Trout, 251

True, Cdr. Arnold E., 246-247

Tsukahara, Vice Adm. Nishizo, 35

Tsushima, 3, 11

Tsutsumi, Cdr. Michiso, 212

Tweedy, 2nd Lt. Al, 107

Tyler, Capt. Marshall, 232

Ueno, Lt. Cdr. Toshitake, 34-35

Ugaki, Rear Adm. Matome, 7, 165, 224, 229

Umphrey, Ens. R. V., 49

United States Naval Academy, 200

University of Illinois, 62

Vavreck, CWT George, 195

Vick, Gunner’s Mate Jefferson, 32, 195

Vincennes, 178, 192, 196

Vindicator (dive bomber), 44-45, 87, 107, 114-116, 232.

See also VMSB-241 Vireo, 237, 247

VMF-221, 44, 71-72, 86-87, 89-91, 96-97

VMSB-241, 45, 72, 86-87, 107-110, 114-116, 232

Wada, Cdr. Yoshiro, 6, 165

Wake Island, 11, 38, 47, 49, 52, 71, 243, 248-249, 251

Waldron, Lt. Cdr. John C, 28, 76-77, 83, 123-128

Waldron, Mrs. John C. (Adelaide), 76-77

Ware, Lt. Charles R., 170

Warner, Maj. Jo K., 87, 96

Warren, Attorney General Earl, 226-227

Washington, D.C., 14, 15-16, 17, 18, 24, 29-30, 117, 256

Watanabe, Cdr. Yasuji, 6, 165, 231

Weber, Ens. F. T., 208

Weber, Ens. William G., 203

Weise, Seaman George K., 176-177, 180, 236-237

Wesleyan University, 127

Wessman, 1st Lt. Everett, 47, 61-62, 113

West Coast, 18, 22, 27, 29, 34, 49, 54, 78, 226

Western Defense Command, 78

Western Sea Frontier, 78

Wetmore, CRM Irving E., 188

Whitaker, Capt. Narce, 211

White, Capt. Philip, 96

Whitten, 2nd Lt. Sumner, 115-116

Widhelm, Lt William J. (Gus), 123, 241

Williams, Cyril, 29

Wilson, Chief Pharmacist’s Mate James, 243-244

Winslow, Pfc Edward D., 88

Wiseman, Lt. (j.g.) Osborne B., 151, 209

Wood, Ens. Thomas J., 75, 134, 157, 225-226

Woodbury, Capt. Willard G., 63

Worthington, Lt. Cdr. Joseph M., 255

Wright, Lt. Cdr. W. A. (Ham), 21

Wright, CEM William E., 246

Wuertele, Capt. Carl, 112-113, 212

Yamaguchi, Rear Adm. Tamon, 116-119, 120, 166-167, 180, 190-191, 206-207, 216, 222-223, 253

Yamamoto, Adm. Isoroku, 1-7, 9, 11-13, 19, 34, 35, 38, 39, 53, 67, 68, 117, 119, 134, 164-166, 214-219, 223-224, 228-231, 235, 240, 248, 251, 252-254

Yamasaki, Cdr., 152

Yamato, 1, 5, 7, 9, 11-13, 38-39, 67, 164-165, 216, 248, 252-253, 254

Yamauchi, Lt. Cdr. Masaki, 230

Yanagimoto, Capt. Ryusaku, 1, 118, 159-160, 185, 218

Yankee Doodle, 62, 112

Yokochi, Petty Officer, 152

Yokosuka Naval Base, 10

Yonai, Cdr. Shiro, 9, 67

Yorktown, at Coral Sea, 10, 20; May 15-27, recalled to Pearl Harbor, 20, 22, 28; May 27-29, repairs on, 29-30, 32-34; May 30-June 4, en route, 53-55, 73-75, 77-78, 83-85, 125, 136-138; June 4, attack on Nagumo, 138-142, 149-151, 155-156, 159, 169, 170-172, 174-175, 182-184, 190, 204-205, 208-209, 214-215, 260-266; attacked by dive bombers, 172-182, 192-193; attacked by torpedo planes, 193-199; ordered abandoned, 199-204, 214; June 5-6, attempt to salvage, 214, 227, 235-238, 243-244; June 6, attacked by submarine, 235-236, 244-247; June 7, sinking of, 249, 256

Yoshida, Chief Radioman Katsuichi, 251

Yoshida, Cdr., 220

Yoshimatsu, Lt. Cdr. Tamori, 55

Yoshino, Lt. Cdr., 116

Yoshioka, Lt. Cdr. Chuichi, 164, 217

Yugumo, 221

Yunoki, Lt. S., 62

Zelnis, Sgt. Frank, 115-116

Zero (fighter plane), 90-91, 147, 264; attacking Midway, 81, 89 ff; defending own force, 101-102, 104, 108-110, 130, 133, 141-142, 145, 150, 156, 159, 170, 187, 204-205, 206, 226, 241; escorting strikes against U.S. fleet, 120, 143, 167, 173, 190, 194

Zuiho, 12, 216, 248

Zuikaku, 10, 24, 137

Navy Department

Courtesy of Shizuo Fukui

The target. Midway Islands, looking west, as seen just before the war. Eastern Island lies in the foreground; Sand Island to the rear. Although the whole atoll amounted to only three square miles of dry land, its capture was the goal of one of the mightiest fleets ever assembled. The Japanese armada totaled some 190 ships altogether.

Author’s collection

Navy Department

The Japanese commanders. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto (left) was the brilliant Commander in Chief of the Imperial Combined Fleet. A daring gambler, he wanted Midway partly to strengthen Japan’s defenses, but mainly to lure the weakened U.S. fleet into all-out battle. Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo (above) would provide the spearhead of the thrust. Everything depended on his Striking Force of four powerful carriers.

Navy Department

Navy Department

The U.S. commanders. Admiral Chester W. Nimitz (above, left) guided the destiny of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, based at Pearl Harbor. Standing with him is Rear Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, who led Task Force 16. Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher (right) handled Task Force 17 and was in tactical command during the battle.

Author’s collection

The Akagi (above) was flagship of Admiral Nagumo’s powerful Striking Force. She and the Kaga (below) were huge, unwieldy ships, originally laid down as battle cruisers. Their horizontal funnel arrangement made for miserable living conditions; smoke was constantly seeping into the crew’s quarters. They were, nevertheless, great sentimental favorites within the fleet.

Author’s collection

Author’s collection

The Hiryu (above) and Soryu (below) rounded out Nagumo’s force. Although somewhat smaller than the other two carriers, they were faster, more powerful, and much larger than generally thought. On all four ships the pilots played shogi, wrote letters, and relaxed in utter confidence as the fleet pounded steadily closer to Midway.

Courtesy of Shizuo Fukui

Courtesy of M. W. McCoy

Thanks to a brilliant job of code-breaking, the American high command was thoroughly aware of the Japanese plans. Reinforcements were rushed to Midway, and the Marine defenders dug in for a last-ditch fight. Here a sun-baked gun crew at E Battery, 6th Defense Battalion, practices during the tense wait before the attack.

Army B-17s were an important addition to Midway’s defenses. It was hoped these tough, long-range bombers would give Midway a striking power of its own. Bearing jaunty names like Yankee Doodle and Knucklehead, they reflected the exuberance of the young men who flew them. Here one is taking off from Eastern Island.

National Archives

Navy Department

At sea the U.S. fleet quietly waited in ambush. First on the scene was Task Force 16, led by the carrier Enterprise. This view (not taken at Midway) was snapped from a dive bomber just taking off.

The other carrier in Task Force 16 was the Hornet, new and with an air group not yet tried in combat. These ships were soon joined by the Yorktown at a rendezvous symbolically called “Point Luck.” Navy Department

Navy Department

Navy Department

June 4, 1942. The Japanese carriers have been located, and on the Enterprise Torpedo 6 prepares to take off. Only four of these planes ever came back. The Hornet and Yorktown torpedo squadrons took even greater losses during the morning’s action.

The Hornet’s, Torpedo 8 was virtually wiped out: all 15 planes lost, 29 of 30 men. Of the pilots in this squadron picture, only one survived: Ensign George Gay, fourth from left, front row.

United Press International

Navy Department

Lieutenant Commander John C. Waldron, skipper of Torpedo 8, typified the fierce determination of all the torpedo pilots at Midway. Against the heaviest odds, they recklessly drove home their attacks. Including those based on the atoll, 42 out of 51 torpedo planes were lost in strikes against Nagumo’s carriers.

National Archives

The day’s fighting began with the Japanese attack, on Midway itself. As over 100 planes bombed and strafed the base, famed movie director John Ford filmed the action. The above shot is taken from the superb documentary that resulted. Below is the destruction on Sand Island photographed immediately after the attack.

Navy Department

U.S. Air Force Photo

Meanwhile the Japanese carriers were coming under heavy attack. Here one of them (probably the Hiryu) dodges bombs dropped by the B-17s. Close-up shows her flight deck, including two Zeros by the portside island. Later the U.S. Navy dive bombers struck, knocking out three carriers within an incredible six minutes.

Navy Department

The U.S. fleet was soon attacked too. Around noon the Yorktown was hit by dive bombers from the Hiryu, only Japanese carrier to escape the morning holocaust.

Navy Department

The Yorktown survived the dive bombers but not a second attack, this time by the Hiryu’s torpedo planes. Hit twice, she lost all power and listed 26° to port. Revenge was swift—the Hiryu soon paid the price—but not before the Yorktown was abandoned and out of the fight.

Navy Department

On the morning of June 5 the Yorktown was still afloat. Efforts to salvage her failed the following day when the Japanese submarine I-168 pumped two more torpedoes into her hull.

At 5:00 A.M. June 7 the Yorktown finally rolled over and sank. This picture of the end, believed never before published, was taken by her boiler division officer, Lieutenant (j.g.) Charles Cundiff, from one of the stand-by destroyers.

Courtesy of Charles R. Cundiff

Navy Department

All through June 5-6 the U.S. fleet pursued the fleeing Japanese. Above, Navy dive bombers attack the heavy cruisers Mogami and Mikuma. Below, the shattered Mikuma, photographed by Lieutenant (j.g.) Cleo J. Dobson shortly before she sank on the 6th.

Navy Department

Courtesy of Shizuo Fukui

The wreckage of Japanese hopes. The smoldering hulk of the Hiryu wallows in a calm sea in the early hours of June 5. These pictures were taken from a Japanese scout plane sent by Admiral Yamamoto to investigate the situation. The lower photo clearly shows how the carrier’s forward elevator was hurled against the front of the bridge.

About the Author

Walter Lord (1917–2002) was an acclaimed and bestselling author of literary nonfiction best known for his gripping and meticulously researched accounts of watershed historical events. Born in Baltimore, Lord went to work for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. After the war’s end, Lord joined a New York advertising firm, and began writing nonfiction in his spare time. His first book was The Fremantle Diary (1954), a volume of Civil War diaries that became a surprising success. But it was Lord’s next book, A Night to Remember (1955), that made him famous. The bestseller caused a new flurry of interest in the Titanic and inspired the 1958 film of the same name. Lord went on to use the book’s interview-heavy format as a template for most of his following works, which included detailed reconstructions of the Pearl Harbor attack in Day of Infamy (1957), the battle of Midway in Incredible Victory (1967), and the integration of the University of Mississippi in The Past That Would Not Die (1965). In all, he published a dozen books.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

The Miracle of Dunkirk copyright © 1982 by Walter Lord, 1998 by Wordsworth Editions Limited

Day of Infamy copyright © 1957 by Walter Lord, renewed 1985 by Walter Lord

The lyrics to “Three Little Fishes,” are reprinted by permission of the copyright owner, Joy Music Inc., New York, NY

Incredible Victory copyright © 1967 by Walter Lord

Maps by Paul J. Pugliese

Cover designs by Connie Gabbert

978-1-4532-3850-9

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Contents

The Miracle of Dunkirk

Title Page

Dedication

Contents

Foreword

1 The Closing Trap

2 No. 17 Turns Up

3 “Operation Dynamo”

4 Buying Time

5 “Plenty Troops, Few Boats”

6 The Gap

7 Torpedoes in the Night

8 Assault from the Sky

9 The Little Ships

10 “Bras-Dessus, Bras-Dessus!”

11 Holding the Perimeter

12 “I Have Never Prayed So Hard Before”

13 “BEF Evacuated”

14 The Last Night

15 Deliverance

Written Source Material

Acknowledgements

List of Contributors

Index

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

Y

Z

Image Gallery

Day of Infamy

Title Page

Dedication

Contents

Foreword

Chapter I. “Isn’t That a Beautiful Sight?”

Chapter II. “A Dream Come True!”

Chapter III. “Gate Open—White Lights”

Chapter IV. “You’d Be Surprised What Goes On Around Here.”

Chapter V. “Well, Don’t Worry About It”

Chapter VI. “Joe, This One Is for the Tourist!”

Chapter VII. “I Didn’t Even Know They Were Sore at Us”

Chapter VIII. “I Can’t Keep Throwing Things At Them”

Chapter IX. “You Don’t Wear a Tie to War”

Chapter X. “I Want Three Volunteers: You, You, and You”

Chapter XI. “Chief, My Mother and Dad Gave Me This Sword”

Chapter XII. “We’re Leaving Now—Explode Gloriously!”

Facts About the Attack

Acknowledgements

List of Contributors

Index

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

Y

Z

Image Gallery

Incredible Victory

Title Page

Dedication

Contents

Foreword

1. A Single Stroke

2. The Code and the Target

3. Ready

4. “Many Planes Heading Midway”

5. “Hawks at Angels 12”

6. The Target Attacks

7. “Pilots, Man Your Planes!”

8. “Don’t Let This Carrier Escape”

9. Dead in the Water

10. Abandon Ship

11. The Emperor’s Portrait

12. Winners and Losers

13. Home Again

The Riddles of Midway

Acknowledgments

List of Contributors

Illustrations

Index

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

R

S

T

U

V

W

Y

Z

About the Author

Copyright