Richard Tregaskis, the USS Hornet, and the Battle of Midway

From his perch on the second level of the bridge on the USS Hornet on June 4, 1942, correspondent Richard Tregaskis of the International News Service could see below him the carrier’s Air Group 8—Grumman F4F Wildcat fighters, Douglas SBD Dauntless dive-bombers, and Douglas TBD Devastator torpedo bombers—warming up on the flight deck. The “shimmering arcs of their propellers mingled amidst a disorderly pile of wings and fuselages, punctuated by the blue flame and spitting smokes of exhausts,” he recalled.

With the roar of the engines reaching their peak, a deck-operations officer, clutching a “ridiculously small checkered flag in his hand,” staggered out against the multiple gales of propeller slipstreams to send the aircraft hurtling off the flight deck into their first clash against the Kido Butai, Japan’s combined carrier battle group.

As the first plane—its motor roaring full force—began to waddle forward, Tregaskis tried to detect the expression on the pilot’s face as he swept by, gaining momentum. Even equipped with field glasses, however, the reporter could make out only the pilot’s goggles “trained fixedly forward, his drawn, intense cheek, his hands aptly busy with the controls. The roar of his motor reached a peak of sound as he swept by, an unpleasant rough-throated gargle rising to a shout—and then he was near the end of the deck, his wheels lifting a thin distance off the boards, then sweeping off over the blue water.”

Tregaskis kept trying to pick out the faces of the men he had come to know while on the ship as they roared by, but they appeared to him merely as parts of their machines, “indistinguishable faceless men, one like the other, going out on a job of death.” The Hornet airmen were on their way to make their mark on one of the turning points in the war in the Pacific—the Battle ofMidway.

Shortly after the Hornet left Pearl Harbor on May 28, its crew heard from its commander, Marc Mitscher, that the Japanese were approaching “for an attempt to seize the island of Midway. We are going to prevent them from taking Midway if possible. Be ready and keep on the alert.” With a battle imminent, the pilots tried as best they could to deal with the news. Some of them had to fulfill rigorous schedules for patrol flights seeking enemy air and surface craft. In the evenings, however, instead of going straight to bed, they relaxed by engaging in numerous “bull sessions” that were full of talk usually involving either their families or the women they knew in civilian life, Tregaskis noted.

Lieutenant William J. “Gus” Widhelm, executive officer for one of the scouting squadrons, provided plenty of diversion from the strain of waiting by playing records on a phonograph he had brought onboard. Pilots with idle moments drifted in, night or day, to Widhelm’s cabin, located in the ship’s forecastle, to pick out their favorite popular music from his “ample collection,” said Tregaskis, adding that Widhelm, “one of the lustiest recounters of personal experiences of all sorts, entertained in intervals.”

A frequent visitor to Widhelm’s quarters was Lieutenant Commander Samuel G. “Pat” Mitchell, who commanded Fighter Squadron 8. Mitchell particularly enjoyed the song “(There’ll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover,” playing it again and again, as its singer crooned the tune’s haunting lyrics, “I’ll never forget the people I met braving those angry skies / I remember well as the shadows fell, the light of hope in their eyes.” Tregaskis found something touching in Mitchell’s fondness for the tune, “with its nostalgic longing for days of peace.”

Tregaskis tried to get the pilots to talk about the dangers they seemed sure to face, but most did not want to discuss the subject. “Some of them, I believe,” he noted, “never considered the possibility of dying and had thus resolved no particular attitude towards the subject. This was for them a job and the risks were only incidental fixtures in their everyday lives.”

On the morning of June 3 Tregaskis reported that the ship’s radios had picked up a plain-language message from a navy operator in Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands that the naval and army bases there were under attack by Japanese aircraft. He and others wondered if the American fleet had been outsmarted by the enemy, “if they were going to slam a wedge of landing forces into Alaska and menace our coast, now that the bulk of our Pacific naval strength hovered near Midway.” Later that day came another dispatch indicating that the Midway Defense Forces had sent a squadron of B-17 Flying Fortress bombers to hit enemy warships and transports.

Tregaskis slept “only intermittently through the night,” thinking he was about to witness his first great sea battle, but also suspecting that it might be another of “those imminent battles which faded like mirages; making the mental reservation, to ward off possible disappointment, that after all it might never happen and might be instead only another near miss like our venture into the Coral Sea. In the flashes of anxiety which come and go often, like swift shadows in such times, the thought that the anticipated battle might not develop into a fight was comforting.” He said his predominant feeling was “anxiousness that the excitement should begin.”

That evening, gathered in Ready Room Number 4, the members of Torpedo 8 were handed a mimeographed message from their commander, John C. Waldron. The message read: "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 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 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!"

As his squadron read his message, Waldron spoke, warning them that the approaching battle promised to be the biggest of the war, and could also be a turning point for the American cause in the Pacific. “It will be an historical and, I hope, a glorious event,” Waldron told them.

Ensign George H. Gay Jr.’s logbook for the day indicated that he had checked his plane until he knew “every bolt on it. It’s in the pink, . . . . Things are oiled and ready.” He remained nervous, however, because the Midway mission would mark the first time he “had ever carried a torpedo on an aircraft and was the first time I had ever taken a torpedo off a ship, had never even seen it done. None of the other Ensigns in the squadron had either.” Of course, Gay noted, he and the others had a few months earlier watched as Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle and his army pilots, who had never seen a carrier before, all took off safely in their B-25B Mitchell bombers from the Hornet, so “we figured if they could do it, well we could do it too.”

Although nervous, not unlike the feeling one had before a big football game, Gay said, the squadron had full confidence in its commander. “We could almost look at the back of Comdr. Waldron’s head and know what he was thinking,” Gay recalled, “because he had told us so many times over and over just what we should do under all conditions.” The torpedo plane pilots knew they were at a disadvantage in combat because of their outdated Douglas TBD Devastators. Their aircraft could not climb to the same altitude as the fighters and dive-bombers, so they expected to be on their own. “We didn’t expect to run into the trouble that we found of course,” Gay said, “but we knew that if we had any trouble we’d probably have to fight our way out of it ourselves.”

Tregaskis joined the other Hornet pilots as they gathered in their ready rooms on the morning of June 4. In one room he found the men draped as usual in relaxed postures in their overstuffed chairs, responding quickly to any message that came in over the teletype. Their eyes remained fixed on the growing lines of letters until the words made sense. The early messages were innocuous—“wind 18,” “weather fair,” or identification signals. Then came a radio message from Midway that Japanese bombers were swarming on them in large numbers. “The black letters of type popped onto the teletype screens to spell out the position, distance, course and composition of the Japanese forces, which included four carriers. This was not going to be easy,” Tregaskis realized.

Finally, the Hornet flyers, who had never flown in combat, were ordered: “Pilots, man your planes.” Tregaskis watched them as they pulled open the heavy, watertight hatch and ran out to their aircraft. “I heard the shout, ‘Stand clear of propellers’ relayed along the deck by hoarse, excited voices,” he said. “Then, ‘Stand by to start all engines.’ And after that, the hiss and sputter of the start, the rough raucous sound of the engine catching and shouting out the rowdy, disordered sound of its horsepower. The mounting of the sound of engine upon engine left the deck shaking with the power of it.”

The Hornet sent out fifty-nine aircraft for its first mission—ten Wildcat fighters, thirty-four Dauntless dive-bombers, and fifteen Devastator torpedo bombers to find the four large carriers of the Japanese striking force—the Kaga, Akagi, Soryu, and Hiryu. Before leaving the Hornet, Waldron, according to Mitscher, has stressed to his captain that Torpedo 8 was “well trained and ready and that he would strike his blow at the enemy regardless of consequences.” When the last plane was gone, the carrier became strangely quiet. Gun crews stood at alert, scanning the skies for any Japanese planes that might “fleck the blue horizon at any moment, and in a few seconds grow into diving animals pregnant with bombs and torpedoes,” remembered Tregaskis.

Stopping in at the air-plot office, Tregaskis noticed a group of officers sitting on a leather-upholstered couch and standing between the map boards and bank of radio equipment awaiting word from the Hornet squadrons. “No one spoke, and the radio speaker, except for a few cackles of static, made no sound,” he recalled.

Checking in again later at the air-plot office, Tregaskis discovered the listeners gathered there in a state of tense excitement—they had finally received word of the first contact with the Japanese fleet. They had heard Waldron’s voice shouting something about “Zeros,” the dangerous Japanese fighters, and asking “Stanhope,” Commander Stanhope Ring, commander of the Hornet’s air group, for help as the enemy latched on to his aircraft. Also heard over the communication gear was Waldron’s sharp order to his squadron to immediately attack.

The messages, however, were garbled by distance and distorted by the crackle of static, which only served to confuse those listening in on the Hornet. Tregaskis had plenty of questions: “What had happened? Had our attack been pressed home successfully? Had our people all been shot down? Why didn’t they come back? They were overdue, for it was past noon. What had happened to John Waldron and the Zeros? Where was our dive-bomber force? Most important, where were our fighters, whose gasoline should be running out at just about this time?” Finally, he wondered, “where were the Japanese?”

Early that afternoon Tregaskis had some of the answers to his questions when a few dive-bombers returned to the Hornet. Climbing down from their planes, Ring and Walter Rodee, who led the scouting squadron of Dauntless aircraft, wore “forlorn faces,” said Tregaskis. They had missed the enemy fleet and, with their fuel exhausted, had barley managed to make it back to the carrier. Tregaskis also learned that the Wildcat fighters could not find their way back, had run out of gas, and crashed into the sea (eight of the ten pilots were eventually found and rescued by Consolidated PBY Catalina patrol planes from Midway). “What about John Waldron’s TBD’s?” the reporter asked.

One of the radioman/gunner on a returned Dauntless indicated that his group had lost track of them, but he believed the torpedo squadron had found its way to the Japanese fleet. “He [Waldron] said he was being jumped by Zeros and asked for fighter protection,” the crewman told Tregaskis. The grim news was received “with a noticeable deflation among all present,” remembered the correspondent. “One could see our morale sinking.”

Down in one of the ready rooms Tregaskis came across a fighter pilot who always seemed to complain the most among the crew. The young officer was not happy, saying, with his voice rising and quivering: “Same old snafu business. Everything all f----- up. Why don’t they get rid of the old fuds running this war? They won’t win anything until they do.”

The officer’s mood would not have improved if he knew the full story of what came to be known as the Hornet aircrew’s “flight to nowhere” that morning. Air Group 8 had set its course for due west, 265 degrees, with the forty-four fighters and dive-bombers flying at an altitude of 20,000 feet, while the fifteen torpedo planes were far below at 1,500 feet. Although they were supposed to observe radio silence, Waldron, believing they were taking the wrong course, could no longer contain himself, yelling at Ring that he was leading the squadron the wrong way if he wanted to find the Japanese carriers. “I’m leading this flight,” Ring responded. “You fly with us right here.”

A frustrated Waldron, disobeying his superior’s orders, radioed, “I know where the damned Jap fleet is,” and led his squadron to the southwest. Before leaving the carrier, Waldron had told his squadron not to worry about their navigation, but to follow him, “as he knew where he was going,” said Gay, who also noted that his commander had been able to fly straight to the Japanese fleet “as if he’d had a string tied to them.”

A short while later, the Wildcat pilots, with their fuel beginning to run low, also abandoned Ring and attempted a return to the Hornet. Radiomen on the dive-bombers eventually heard snatches of messages from Waldron, trying to reach Ring, as well as the warning, “Watch those fighters!” and the order, “Attack immediately!”

Waldron had found the enemy, but, with no fighter protection, his squadron, flying low and slow to launch their white-nosed torpedoes, proved easy prey for the Mitsubishi A6M Zeros protecting their carriers. “Zeros were coming in from all angles and from both sides at once,” said Gay. “They would come in from abeam, pass each other just over our heads, and turn around to make another attack, . . . . The planes of Torpedo Eight were falling at irregular intervals. Some were on fire, and some did a half-roll and crashed on their backs, completely out of control.”

Waldron had been shot down early on during the attack. Gay saw his commander’s Devastator burst into flame and watched as Waldron tried to stand up out of the fire, putting his right leg outside of his cockpit before his plane hit the water and disappeared.

Gay heard his radioman/gunner, Bob Huntington, call out that he had been hit and then heard no more from him. With his gunner out of action, Gay no longer had to fly straight and level to provide him a solid firing platform from which to shoot, so he could dodge the incoming Zeros. With his plane “pitching like a bronco,” Gay believed he had been able to drop his torpedo, aiming it to strike the Soryu, but could not tell for sure, as he had never done it before. His electrical release system had been knocked out by enemy fire, so he had to release his torpedo manually, flying right at the carrier, “balls to the wall,” as he described it, trying to present the smallest target possible. He never knew what happened to his torpedo, if it ran true and hit the Japanese carrier, dived down and hit the bottom of the ocean, or if it turned around and headed for Pearl Harbor. “What I know for sure is I tried,” Gay said.

Flying over the carrier, he could see action on its bridge, including an officer “waving his arms. I could even see a pair of binoculars in one hand and a Samurai sword in the other. He was pointing at me like they couldn’t see me.” With his Devastator shot to pieces, the ensign had to ditch it in the Pacific. Gay survived, but the other twenty-nine members of his squadron had been annihilated. Mitsuo Fuchida, an officer on the Akagi, observed the slaughter and noted that nearly fifty Zeros had intercepted the “unprotected enemy formation! Small wonder that it did not get through.”

On the Hornet, the spirits of Tregaskis and others had been cheered somewhat as they could see the Enterprise recovering its fighters, dive-bombers, and even a “few straggling torpedo planes” it had launched earlier. The correspondent learned that planes from the USS Enterprise had found and hit the Japanese carriers. “No further details for the moment, but the critical ensign must have been gratified,” said Tregaskis. The forty-one torpedo planes launched from the Hornet, Enterprise, and USS Yorktown had been badly mauled, with only four surviving to return home and none scoring any hits.

American dive-bombers, however, had far better luck, delivering fatal blows to the Kaga, Akagi, and Soryu. Lieutenant Commander John S. “Jimmy” Thach, who commanded the Yorktown’s fighter planes, had a tough time with the Zeros, remembering that the air “was like a bee hive, and I wasn’t sure at that moment that anything would work” to counteract the enemy’s attacks. “I was utterly convinced then that we weren’t coming back,” he recalled.

Suddenly, Thach saw a “glint in the sun—it looked like a beautiful silver waterfall—these were the dive bombers coming down. I could see them very well, because that’s the direction the Zeros were, too. They were above me but close, not anywhere near the altitude of the dive bombers. I’d never seen such superb dive bombing. It looked to me like almost every bomb hit. Of course, there were some near misses. There weren’t any wild ones.”

The one large Japanese carrier left undamaged, the Hiryu, responded, launching its dive-bombers and torpedo planes against the Americans, eventually tracking down the Yorktown. Tregaskis remembered that the Hornet had been maneuvering normally on the bright, sunlit sea, when everyone began to move and talk fast and the ship put on a sudden burst of speed and began a sharp turn, “heeling over on her beam ends, so that one had to brace against the slope.” He looked around and could see the ships in Task Force 16 making full speed and turning in several different directions. “Our wakes must have looked like crazy scrawls on a blackboard, from the air,” he noted.

Tregaskis did not know what was happening from his position at sky control. He remembered thinking at the time that if he had been a more seasoned correspondent, he might have tried to run to the bridge or the communication office to overhear the latest information from the task force’s commander. Being new to his job, however, he labored “under the delusion that a sea battle could be understood if it was merely watched. I believed I could see everything; and with some commonsense, I felt that the moment I ducked below, Jap aircraft would surely come in, attack, and be gone before I could catch a glimpse of the action.”

The correspondent could see, on the Hornet’s port side, astern, a mushroom-shaped black geyser that grew fatter and taller as he watched. “What had happened?” he wondered. “Everyone about me seemed to be too busy to be bothered. I wondered if this could be a Japanese ship, which our planes had hit. Or one of ours? How about the carrier Yorktown, which was working with us, but over the horizon somewhere[?] Could this be the Yorktown?” It was; the carrier had been hit by bombs from three Japanese Val dive-bombers, with one bomb landing forward, one amidships, and one astern. With the carrier badly damaged, Fletcher had to transfer his command to a nearby cruiser, the USS Astoria, and planes that had been stationed on the carrier had to look elsewhere to land.

One of the Yorktown fighter planes, a Wildcat, flown by Ensign Dan Sheedy, tried to find sanctuary on the Hornet after protecting a squadron of torpedo planes from his carrier from the deadly Zeros. The Hornet turned into the wind and a LSO took his place at the stern to wave Sheedy in for a landing. Tregaskis could see, however, that the stubby Wildcat did not “swing in the conventional wide landing circle. Instead, it cut a swift, ragged half circle directly towards the side of the ship, skidded sharply in with one wing low. A wounded pilot? We waited for the crash.”

Sheedy had been wounded in the shoulder and ankle, and his plane had suffered damage severe enough to knock out the safety mechanism for his six .50-caliber Browning machine guns that were supposed to be switched off when landing. Instead, the guns were ready to fire. “I watched one wheel and wing crumple under the impact, and then machine guns chattered and stopped and chattered again,” said Tregaskis, “and I saw the wings of the crashed plane smoking. Her guns going off.” At almost at the same instant, he saw a  figure jump from the Wildcat’s cockpit and take a few limping steps across the fight deck before being aided by deck crewmen.

When the fighter’s guns finally stopped firing their steel-jacketed rounds, Hornet emergency personnel ran to the after end of the island, as there were reports that men had been injured and killed. “I felt in the air the sickening shock that comes after a terrible accident, and hesitated about going aft,” Tregaskis remembered.

Finally, Tregaskis screwed up his courage and went over to peer into the circular shield of an antiaircraft gun position. He saw, inside the ring around the gun, four bodies “looking sodden and heavy, like rough piles of gray sandbags. Next to the ring, outside of it, sprawled a dead marine, arms streched out, legs stretched out in the middle of a circular red sheet of gore. The gray face looked straight up. There was no top to the head, for the head became red above the eyebrows and melted into the pool of gore.” An officer informed Tregaskis that five men had been killed and twenty more seriously wounded. “I gulped. Well, the accidents of war . . . bound to happen . . . lucky it hadn’t happened to me . . . yesterday I had stood here to watch the planes landing . . . oh well,” he thought to himself.

Tregaskis visited Sheedy in one of the ready rooms, where the pilot had been taken, given a sandwich, and had his injured leg propped up awaiting medical attention. The correspondent looked at the pilot’s face to see how he had reacted to the accident, but could see that the ensign was too shocked to know anything:

“His words rolled over each other: ‘Plane’s shot up like a sieve . . . the Zeros riddled the hell out of me. . . . I shot one down. . . . I followed him down to the water and he fell off one wing and went right in . . . then they shot me up . . . through my cockpit . . . all around me . . . hit me in the ankle. . . . I just made that landing . . . plane no good for anything . . . they threw it overboard.”

Tregaskis asked Sheedy how he came to land on the Hornet instead of his own carrier, and finally received confirmation that the Yorktown had been hit and was on fire. “No one asked the pilot then if he had left his gun switches on when his plane crashed on our deck,” Tregaskis noted. “Any anger we might have felt about those killed, was put aside . . . accidents, bound to happen, even in the best organized war.”

Repair crews patched the Hornet’s flight deck so air operations could resume and planes set off to find the surviving Japanese carrier, the Hiryu, which had been spotted by search planes from the Yorktown. About a half hour after the Enterprise had sent off twenty-five Dauntlesses, including some from the Yorktown, the Hornet launched sixteen dive-bombers to find the Hiryu. “I tried to get more specific information on what had happened, but none was available,” said Tregaskis.

Again the Hornet began to maneuver erratically, with the wakes of the ships in Task Force 16 crossing and crisscrossing and men scanning the skies for the enemy. On this occasion, Tregaskis could see the bump of a ship on the horizon, probably, he thought, the Yorktown. Suddenly, the sky above the ship became spotted with specks of black breaking out like a rash, spreading, smudging, and growing larger, with other flecks—antiaircraft fire—also visible. “The anti-aircraft fire continued to burst on the horizon, where the sky was already smudged, and now I saw a spot of light flash among the bursts,” Tregaskis noted. “It seemed like a small electric bulb, rather high in the sky. It was a bright yellow color. While I watched, fascinated, knowing it was a plane falling in flames, the little bright light sank slowly to the horizon, then disappeared against the blue.”

A nearby crewman exclaimed, “Flamers! Three down! I saw three!” Tregaskis had seen only one plane fall, but the excitement was so great among those on the carrier that he could not be sure who was right. Six months before Midway, Tregaskis would not have believed it was normal to be confused during a battle. “Now, I knew that confusion is unavoidable,” he mused.

After some more wild maneuvers by the Hornet, Tregaskis spied the shape of a ship on the horizon with the box-like shape of a carrier. “Then everything I had seen became clearer to me,” he said. “The ship was the Yorktown. She had been hit in the earlier afternoon attack, and now she had been hit again. She was dead in the water. Listing. She must be badly hit.”

Tregaskis could not know from such a distance, but Japanese planes had penetrated Task Force 17’s defenses and slammed two torpedoes into the Yorktown’s side. Some of the carrier’s pilots achieved a measure of revenge by working with Enterprise dive-bombers to hit and set afire the Hiryu, the fourth Japanese carrier put out of action by the Americans that day. Coming onto the scene, a pilot from the Hornet reported that the enemy carrier was “burning throughout its entire length.”

Anxious to catch up on the latest information, Tregaskis hurried to one of the fighter ready rooms, which were already filled with pilots, including several from the Yorktown. The shock of their first contact with the enemy affected the rookie Hornet fliers “as variously as alcohol intoxication,” Tregaskis remembered.

Ensign George Formanek had been greatly depressed by the experience of shooting down an enemy plane, with his face dark and despairing as he told the correspondent: “That was terrible! I saw him explode . . . a big ball of flames! He burned.” Ensign Morrill Cook, who had downed two Japanese torpedo planes, had quite the opposite reaction. Cook, said Tregaskis, smiled happily at the memory “as he might after having tasted some pleasant dish at the table.” Ensign Warren Ford also “spoke with an exaltation that was almost defiant, as he told about knocking down one of the attackers.”

The pilots from the Yorktown seemed calmer, which was natural, said Tregaskis, as they had seen action at the Battle of the Coral Sea. Lieutenant Arthur Brassfield, a former high-school principal from Browning, Missouri, told the reporter in a matter-of-fact, humorous manner about how he had shot down four Japanese. “It’s a rough game,” Brassfield said with a smile. “If they don’t knock it off pretty soon, somebody’s going to get hurt.”