Pursuit and the Last Blows, 5–7 June: Spruance Turns East, Mikuma and the Loss of Yorktown

The heavy cruiser Mikuma, wrecked and burning, photographed from an Enterprise SBD-3 in the afternoon of 6 June 1942 after the day’s dive-bomber attacks. U.S. Navy photograph 80-G-457861, National Archives, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Battle of Midway · Chapter 7 of 9

Pursuit and the Last Blows, 5–7 June: Spruance Turns East, Mikuma and the Loss of Yorktown

After the carriers burned, Spruance chose caution, Yamamoto called off the invasion, Mikuma was hunted down, and a lone Japanese submarine finished Yorktown.

4–7 June 1942West of Midway · Yorktown’s drift area · Dutch Harbor · Kiska · Attu~25 min read

By sunset on 4 June 1942 the central fact of the Battle of Midway had been settled. Four Japanese fleet carriers, Akagi, Kaga, Soryu and Hiryu, were burning or sinking northwest of the atoll, and the carrier striking force that had ranged from Pearl Harbor to the Indian Ocean in six months no longer existed as a fighting formation. On the American side, Yorktown lay dead in the water and abandoned, listing heavily to port, while Enterprise and Hornet recovered what was left of their air groups. What the day had not settled was what came next: whether the Japanese would press on with surface ships and night action, whether the Americans would chase them, and whether the damaged carrier could be saved.

The three days that followed are the least remembered part of the battle and some of the most instructive. They contain a command decision by Rear Admiral Raymond A. Spruance that has been argued over ever since; the cancellation of Operation MI by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto; a collision between two Japanese heavy cruisers caused by an American submarine that never fired a torpedo; the death of Captain Richard E. Fleming, USMCR, the only man to receive the Medal of Honor for Midway; the destruction of the heavy cruiser Mikuma; and the patient attempt to tow Yorktown home, ended by four torpedoes from the submarine I-168.

This chapter follows those events from the evening of 4 June to the morning of 7 June, when Yorktown rolled over and sank. It also gathers the northern thread of the Japanese plan, the Aleutian operation, which went ahead while the Midway operation collapsed. The preceding chapter, Hiryu Strikes Back, tells how Yorktown was hit and how Hiryu was found; the next, The Human Cost, takes up the dead, the rescued and the prisoners.

A word on clocks. American and Japanese records of these days are kept in different time zones, and even American sources are not always consistent with one another. The U.S. Navy narratives used local time; Japanese records were generally kept on Tokyo time; and some reconstructions mix the two. Where sources give different times for the same event, this chapter gives both and says which source each comes from, rather than forcing them into agreement.

The night of 4 June: Spruance turns east

When Yorktown was knocked out in the afternoon of 4 June, Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, the senior officer afloat, had already shifted his flag to the heavy cruiser Astoria. A carrier admiral without a carrier, he left the conduct of air operations to Spruance, whose Task Force 16 still had two undamaged flight decks. The Naval History and Heritage Command’s account of the battle describes this as a delegation of tactical command, and it was exercised for the rest of the battle by Spruance from Enterprise.

Spruance’s problem at dusk was what he did not know. His aviators had seen four carriers burning, but not all four had sunk, and he could not be sure how many more carriers the Japanese had in the area. He knew there were Japanese battleships and cruisers somewhere to the west, he knew they outgunned his cruisers and destroyers, and he knew that at night his aircraft were nearly useless while Japanese surface forces were trained above all for night fighting. Continuing west in darkness would carry Task Force 16 toward exactly the kind of engagement the Japanese wanted.

He turned east. The ONI Combat Narrative of 1943 records that after sunset the force held an easterly course until midnight, then turned north (course 000°). A radar contact at about 0044 on 5 June caused unscheduled movements east and then south. At 0200 the task force came round to course 270°, back toward the west, and at 0420 it steadied on 230° and increased to 25 knots to close Midway. Before leaving the area he detached the destroyer Hughes to stand by the abandoned Yorktown, with orders, per NHHC, to torpedo her if Japanese ships approached.

Spruance explained his reasoning publicly in a foreword he wrote in 1955 for the American edition of Mitsuo Fuchida and Masatake Okumiya’s book on Midway. He wrote that he had retired eastward to avoid what he called “a night action with superior forces,” and planned to come back west during the night so that at daylight his ships would be within air-supporting distance of Midway if the Japanese attacked the atoll. The turn east was not a flight from the battle but a way of being in the right place at dawn without blundering into the enemy’s strength in the dark.

The decision drew criticism at the time and afterward. Some aviators and some later writers argued that a more aggressive commander would have closed the Japanese overnight to strike them at first light, while they were still disorganized and in range. Others, including the official historian Samuel Eliot Morison, judged that Spruance had read the situation correctly. Japanese sources examined after the war support the second view on the narrow point of what lay to the west: the Japanese were actively seeking a night surface action, and the most likely outcome of an American night pursuit would have been precisely that.

Yamamoto’s night hopes and the cancellation of MI

On the Japanese side, Yamamoto’s first reaction to the loss of three carriers in the morning, and of Hiryu in the afternoon, was to try to recover the battle with the forces he still had. His Main Body, built around the battleship Yamato, was several hundred miles behind Nagumo’s carriers. Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondo’s Invasion Force, with battleships and heavy cruisers, was to the southwest. Nagumo himself, now in the light cruiser Nagara after leaving the burning Akagi, still had the fast battleships Haruna and Kirishima, the heavy cruisers Tone and Chikuma, and his destroyers.

NHHC’s account summarizes the Japanese night plan this way: Nagumo steamed east at high speed with his two battleships, two heavy cruisers and destroyers to find the American carriers; Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita’s Cruiser Division 7, the four heavy cruisers Kumano, Suzuya, Mikuma and Mogami, was ordered to close Midway and bombard its airfield during the night; and the submarine I-168, already off the atoll, was ordered to shell it. All of this depended on finding the Americans in darkness. They were not there to be found, because Spruance had turned away.

As the night wore on, the Japanese commanders recognized that if they kept pressing east they would be within range of American carrier aircraft at daybreak with no carriers of their own to protect them. NHHC records that Nagumo and Yamamoto both reached that judgment; Nagumo withdrew to the northwest and Kurita’s cruisers were recalled. Yamamoto then cancelled Operation MI altogether in the early hours of 5 June. Parshall and Tully, in Shattered Sword, place the cancellation order at 0255 on 5 June. Combinedfleet.com’s reconstruction from Japanese records puts the earlier recall of the Midway bombardment at 2120 the previous evening.

One of the last views of a Japanese carrier at Midway comes from this retreat. At sunrise on 5 June a Yokosuka B4Y biplane from the small carrier Hosho, sent out from the Main Body, found Hiryu still afloat and burning and photographed her. The pictures, now in the NHHC collection, show that the carrier her own escorts had been ordered to scuttle was still on the surface hours later, a reminder that the end of the Japanese carriers was neither as quick nor as certain as their commanders believed. The story of Hiryu’s last hours and of the engineers who survived her is told in the previous chapter and in the next.

Cancellation of MI did not mean an end to Japanese hopes of hurting the Americans. Over the next two days Yamamoto shifted his heavy ships and considered drawing the American carriers west within range of land-based aircraft on Wake Island. But the invasion of Midway was over. The transports of the Occupation Force, with Colonel Kiyonao Ichiki’s detachment and the naval landing forces aboard, turned for home without having seen the atoll.

Tambor’s contact and the Mikuma–Mogami collision

The recall of Cruiser Division 7 reached Kurita when he was, according to most accounts, about 90 miles from Midway. His four heavy cruisers and two destroyers reversed course at high speed. Shortly afterward a lookout aboard the flagship Kumano sighted a surfaced submarine. It was USS Tambor, one of the boats Nimitz had stationed around the approaches to Midway. Kurita ordered an emergency turn to avoid a possible torpedo attack.

The turn went wrong. Combinedfleet.com’s chronology, drawn from Japanese records, says Mikuma made a 90° turn when the formation turned 45°, and Mogami, following, rammed her on the port side below the bridge. Mogami’s bow was crushed back almost to her forward turret; NHHC gives the length of bow sheared off as about 40 feet. Her speed fell sharply. Mikuma suffered relatively little structural damage but ruptured port fuel tanks and began trailing oil. Kurita took Kumano and Suzuya on toward safety and left Mikuma and the destroyers Asashio and Arashio to escort the damaged Mogami.

The timing of these events is a good example of how hard it is to align the two sides’ records. NHHC places the encounter just after midnight on 5 June. The ONI Combat Narrative records Tambor’s first report, of “many unidentified ships” about 90 miles west of Midway, at 0215. Combinedfleet.com gives Kumano’s sighting of the submarine at 2138. The differences come from different time zones and different record-keeping; the order of events is the same in every account.

Tambor’s report caused a stir at Midway and at Pearl Harbor. With no identification of the ships, it was read for a time as a possible landing force, and the American submarines were moved in closer to the atoll. Not until 0600 did Tambor report two Mogami-class cruisers 115 miles west of Midway heading west. By then the damage was done, though Tambor herself had not attacked. Her commander, Lieutenant Commander John W. Murphy, was later criticized for the vagueness of his first report. His boat had nonetheless caused the most important Japanese surface casualty of the battle’s final phase, without firing a shot.

Midway in the night: Norris lost and I-168’s shells

Midway Atoll spent the night of 4/5 June expecting to be attacked. Its Marine dive-bomber squadron, VMSB-241, had been shattered in the morning attack on the Japanese carriers, in which its commander, Major Lofton R. Henderson, was killed. At about 1900 on 4 June the surviving SBD and SB2U crews took off to attack a burning carrier reported about 200 miles away. Heinl’s Marines at Midway records that they could not find it in the dark under low cloud. Major Benjamin W. Norris, who had succeeded to command of the squadron, did not return; he was last seen diving into the overcast. The others found their way home by steering for Midway’s oil fires and its antiaircraft searchlights.

That night I-168 carried out her orders to shell the atoll. Heinl records that a submarine surfaced at 2154 about 4,500 yards east of Battery B on the eastern tip of Eastern Island, was tracked without being fired on, and moved off until it was lost at 2221. At about 0120 on 5 June, gunfire was seen southeast of Sand Island, and a submarine was reported shelling the island. Searchlights caught it; by 0125 two 3-inch batteries and a 5-inch battery of the 6th Defense Battalion were firing. Heinl counts eight rounds from the submarine, all falling in the lagoon, against about 42 rounds of 3-inch and three of 5-inch from the defenders. The submarine submerged at 0128, undamaged. The same boat would reappear two days later in a far more serious role.

The episode shows the state of the defense at that point. Midway was ready to fight off a landing, but it had no means of hitting a submarine a few thousand yards offshore in darkness, and its air strength was largely spent. What it still had, the remaining Marine dive bombers, the Army B-17s and the Navy PBYs of Patrol Wing 2, went out at dawn on 5 June to look for the ships Tambor had reported.

5 June: Fleming and the last attack of VMSB-241

A Midway PBY found the oil-trailing cruisers at about 0630 on 5 June. The contact report, like many that week, called them battleships, with a note that they might be Mogami-class cruisers. At 0700 the Marines sent twelve aircraft: six SBD-2 Dauntlesses under Captain Marshall A. Tyler and six older SB2U-3 Vindicators under Captain Richard E. Fleming. Heinl records that after about 45 minutes the pilots picked up the oil slick and followed it to the ships, which they reached at 0805, about 170 miles west of Midway. These were not battleships but Mogami and Mikuma, with their two destroyers.

Tyler’s SBDs dove from 10,000 feet on Mogami and, according to Heinl, bracketed her with six very near misses that caused heavy damage topside. Fleming led the Vindicators in a glide-bombing attack on Mikuma through heavy and accurate antiaircraft fire. His aircraft was hit during the glide and began trailing smoke from the engine. He held his course, released his bomb, and his plane burst into flames as he pulled out and went into the sea. His gunner that morning was Private First Class George A. Toms, who had replaced Fleming’s wounded radioman-gunner of the previous day, Corporal Eugene Card. Neither man was recovered. No bomb from the Marine attack hit either cruiser; Japanese records describe only near misses.

Eight Army B-17s under Major Blakey attacked the same two cruisers from high altitude at about 0830, the Combat Narrative records. The bomber crews reported near misses and possible hits; Japanese records show none. Later in the day other B-17 flights went out after the retreating Japanese and claimed hits on cruisers that cannot be matched to Japanese damage. One of them, it was later established, had bombed the American submarine Grayling on 6 June, which dove and was unharmed. Two B-17s were lost on 5 June, one after jettisoning its bomb-bay fuel tank and the other after running out of fuel at sea; the Combat Narrative notes these were the only B-17 losses of the battle.

Fleming’s citation covers both days. It describes him as acting with “extraordinary heroism and conspicuous intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty” as flight officer of VMSB-241 on 4 and 5 June. For the first day it records that when his squadron commander was shot down, he led the rest of the division and dove “to the perilously low altitude of 400 feet” before releasing his bomb, his aircraft “riddled by 179 hits,” and that he came out with two minor wounds. It notes that he brought his plane back safely that night despite weather and darkness, when the squadron commander, Norris, became separated and was lost.

For 5 June, the citation states that after less than four hours’ sleep he led the second division of the squadron in “a coordinated glide-bombing and dive-bombing assault upon a Japanese battleship.” Struck and set afire in his approach, it says, “he grimly pressed home his attack to an altitude of 500 feet,” scored “a near miss on the stern of his target,” and “crashed to the sea in flames.” The citation, written in 1942, calls the target a battleship, following the contemporary identification. It also says plainly that he crashed into the sea, which matters for the legend discussed below.

The legend of the after turret

For decades after the war it was often written that Fleming, his plane mortally hit, deliberately crashed into Mikuma’s after turret, and that this started the fires that eventually destroyed her. The story has two sources. The first is the photographs taken of Mikuma on 6 June, which show wreckage draped over the top of her after 8-inch turret. The second is a statement attributed to Captain Akira Soji of Mogami in a postwar interrogation, quoted by Heinl: “I saw a dive bomber dive in to the last turret (of the Mikuma) and start fires. He was very brave.”

Heinl presented the turret crash as likely but not proven. Later research has rejected it. The 1943 Combat Narrative, written from the Marines’ own reports, says Fleming’s plane crashed on its pull-out. His citation says he crashed into the sea. Combinedfleet.com’s chronology, drawn from Japanese records, states that he did not crash into Mikuma and identifies the wreckage on her No. 4 turret as most likely part of her own mainmast, brought down by bomb damage on 6 June. NHHC’s H-Gram on Midway says the same thing: the wreckage often photographed on Mikuma’s turret was not Fleming’s plane. Soji’s recollection, made years later, may describe another aircraft, a near miss, or a memory reshaped by the American story.

5 June: the long chase and the destroyer Tanikaze

Task Force 16 spent most of 5 June closing the area west of Midway and trying to make sense of contact reports. Spruance’s main target was the burning carrier his aviators had left the previous evening, which he hoped to finish, and the “battleships” reported by Midway’s scouts. At 1100 the task force turned to course 300° to close the enemy. In the afternoon there was a dispute between Spruance’s chief of staff, Captain Miles Browning, and the air group leaders over how far out to launch and how heavily to load the bombers; according to most accounts, the strike was delayed and the bomb load reduced from 1,000 to 500 pounds to give the aircraft enough range.

At 1500 Enterprise began launching 32 scout bombers and at 1512 Hornet followed with 26, according to the Combat Narrative. By then Hiryu had sunk. The bombers found nothing larger than a single destroyer, Tanikaze, which had been sent back to confirm Hiryu’s sinking. Commander Motoi Katsumi handled her so well that NHHC records she avoided every bomb dropped on her, though splinters from a near miss killed six men in her after gun mount. B-17s also attacked her without result. One SBD was lost to her antiaircraft fire. The Combat Narrative records that the Hornet group attacked about 1804 and the Enterprise group about 1830, identifying their target as a light cruiser.

The strike returned after dark, short of fuel, and recovered on the carriers after nightfall; the Combat Narrative records one plane landing out of fuel near Enterprise, its crew rescued by the destroyer Aylwin. The day had been a disappointment: more than fifty dive bombers sent against one destroyer, with no hits. But it had kept the Japanese moving west and had placed Task Force 16 where it could find the cruisers in the morning. The destroyers of the screen were now critically short of fuel after days of high-speed steaming, and fuel would soon decide how long the pursuit could go on.

6 June: three strikes and the sinking of Mikuma

Spruance opened 6 June with a search. At 0502 Enterprise launched 18 scout bombers, each carrying a 500-pound bomb, to search 200 miles to the west. At 0645 one of them reported an enemy force heading west; through an error in the voice transmission, the Combat Narrative says, “BB” was received as “CV,” and the force was first reported as containing a carrier. About 0730 a second plane reported two heavy cruisers and two destroyers some 50 miles to the southeast of the first group. These were Mogami, Mikuma, Asashio and Arashio, still limping west at reduced speed because of Mogami’s bow.

Hornet struck first. She launched 26 scout bombers with eight fighters at 0757, and the attack went in at about 0950. Her pilots reported hits on a “battleship” and a heavy cruiser and claimed a destroyer sunk; in fact, Japanese records indicate hits on Mogami and a near miss on Mikuma, and no destroyer was sunk. The Combat Narrative records one bomber shot down by antiaircraft fire; NHHC’s H-Gram gives two SBDs lost in this attack. The difference is unresolved in the sources consulted.

The second strike was the decisive one. Between 1045 and 1115, Enterprise launched 31 scout bombers, each with a 1,000-pound bomb, along with 12 fighters and three torpedo bombers of Torpedo Squadron 6. The bombers included pilots of Yorktown’s squadrons who had landed on Enterprise after their own ship was disabled. The torpedo planes were ordered to stay clear unless the antiaircraft fire was suppressed, and they did not attack. The dive bombers struck between about 1150 and 1300. Combinedfleet.com credits the Enterprise attack with five direct hits and two near misses on Mikuma. Her captain, Captain Shakao Sakiyama, was badly wounded and her executive officer, Commander Hideo Takashima, took the conn.

The bombs started fires that reached Mikuma’s torpedoes. NHHC’s account notes that Mogami had jettisoned her torpedoes after the collision and Mikuma had not; Japan’s powerful Type 93 torpedoes, carried on deck, had already destroyed or nearly destroyed several Japanese cruisers when hit. Combinedfleet.com records that several torpedoes exploded and Takashima ordered the ship abandoned. Mogami was hit as well but stayed under way. Arashio and Mogami came alongside to take off survivors.

Hornet launched a second strike of 24 scout bombers at 1330, and it attacked in the afternoon; the Combat Narrative gives the time once as 1445 and once as 1645, and Combinedfleet.com places it around 1500. Its pilots reported a heavy cruiser “completely gutted by fire” and abandoned. Japanese records show a further hit on Mikuma that killed Takashima and others, another hit on Mogami, and a hit on Arashio that killed some of the Mikuma survivors she had taken aboard. By about 1525, Combinedfleet.com records, roughly 240 men had been taken off Mikuma.

At 1553 Enterprise sent two scout bombers to photograph the damaged ship. Their pictures of the stopped and burning Mikuma became some of the best-known photographs of the Pacific war. Mikuma capsized and sank later that day; Combinedfleet.com gives the time as about 1930 and the position as 29°28′N, 173°11′E. About 700 of her crew died, according to the same source; NHHC describes most of the roughly 888 aboard as lost. Captain Sakiyama died of his wounds aboard Suzuya on 13 June. On 9 June the American submarine Trout picked up two survivors, Chief Radioman Katsuichi Yoshida and Fireman 3rd Class Kenichi Ishikawa, from a hatch cover; they became prisoners of war.

Mogami escaped with the two destroyers. She had been hit by several bombs, had lost her bow and had suffered heavy casualties, but she reached Truk and was later rebuilt in Japan. Mikuma was the first Japanese heavy cruiser lost in the war.

Evening of 6 June: Spruance turns back again

By the evening of 6 June, Task Force 16 had been at sea and steaming hard for more than a week. The Combat Narrative records that the destroyers’ fuel was very low; two of them, Maury and Worden, had to be detached to refuel from the oiler Cimarron, leaving only four destroyers to screen two carriers. The task force was also approaching the range of Japanese land-based aircraft from Wake Island, and there were reports of Japanese submarines. Spruance turned the force about and retired to the northeast.

Yamamoto had in fact been gathering his heavy ships in the hope that the Americans would follow the cruisers west. In his 1955 foreword, Spruance wrote that “Had we continued on to the westward during the night of 6-7 June,” his force “would probably have run foul of Admiral Yamamoto and his superior Japanese forces the next morning.” He wrote that he turned back because fuel was low and because he felt he had pushed his luck far enough to the west. Whether a meeting would have taken place is unknowable, but the Japanese had the surface strength to make it very costly if it had.

The two decisions to withdraw, on 4 June and 6 June, were what Nimitz’s instructions before the battle had asked for. Nimitz had told Fletcher and Spruance to be governed by the principle of calculated risk, meaning that they should not expose their force to attack by superior enemy forces without good prospect of inflicting greater damage. Spruance followed that principle literally. Critics who argue that he let damaged Japanese ships escape are correct that some did, but the carriers he brought home were the core of American naval air strength in the Pacific, and keeping them intact was worth more than another cruiser.

Saving Yorktown: Buckmaster’s salvage party

While Spruance pursued the Japanese, a separate effort was under way to the northeast of Midway to save Yorktown. She had been abandoned in the afternoon of 4 June after Hiryu’s torpedo planes hit her twice on the port side, and her captain, Captain Elliott Buckmaster, had left her believing she might capsize at any moment. She did not. Through the night of 4/5 June she drifted with a heavy list, watched by the destroyer Hughes, and on the morning of 5 June it was clear that she might yet be towed home.

Nimitz sent the minesweeper Vireo from French Frigate Shoals and ordered tugs out from Pearl Harbor. The Combat Narrative records that Vireo arrived at 1135 on 5 June and had Yorktown in tow by 1308, heading for Pearl Harbor at about three knots. NHHC’s history of Vireo describes the tow as laboring along at less than three knots, with the small minesweeper’s rudder and engines barely able to keep the big carrier’s head into the wind. In the afternoon the destroyers Gwin and Monaghan joined, and Gwin put a salvage party aboard, which left before dark.

Buckmaster organized a salvage party of volunteers from Yorktown’s crew. At about 0200 on 6 June the destroyers Hammann, Balch and Benham joined the screen circling the carrier. The Combat Narrative records that at about 0415 Hammann went alongside and put aboard Buckmaster with 29 officers and 130 men. At 0600 Hammann was told to take station off the starboard bow, but could not hold position there, so she was made fast alongside Yorktown’s starboard side forward to supply hoses, water and electric power for the pumps.

The work went well through the morning and early afternoon. A fire was put out, water levels were reduced, and one of the port 5-inch guns was cut loose and dropped over the side, along with other weight on the port side. The list was reduced by about two degrees. The salvage party and Buckmaster believed she could be saved if the weather held. NHHC’s H-Gram, which describes the effort as having some success, takes the same view.

I-168 finds Yorktown, and Hammann’s last four minutes

The Japanese had not forgotten Yorktown. Floatplane reports had placed a damaged American carrier northeast of Midway, and I-168, the submarine that had shelled Midway two nights earlier, was ordered to find and sink her. NHHC’s H-Gram records that her commander, Lieutenant Commander Yahachi Tanabe, sighted Yorktown before dawn on 6 June and spent most of the morning working his way past the five destroyers screening her. The destroyers were circling the carrier and listening, but conditions favored the submarine and none of them detected her.

Tanabe fired four torpedoes in a tight spread from Yorktown’s starboard side. The time is given differently in different sources. The Combat Narrative records the wakes being sighted at 1335; NHHC’s history of Vireo says about 1400; NHHC’s history of Hammann says simply that the attack came after noon; the collection notes give about 1330. The Combat Narrative records that four torpedo wakes were seen approaching from starboard, that Yorktown signaled a torpedo attack, and that Hammann sounded general quarters. There was no time to cast off the destroyer.

NHHC’s H-Gram describes what the four torpedoes did. One missed astern. One struck Hammann amidships and broke her in two. Two passed under the destroyer and hit Yorktown on the starboard side. Hammann sank in three to four minutes. About a minute after she went down, there was a large explosion under water, which the Combat Narrative says may have been one of her own torpedoes or her depth charges; most later accounts attribute it to Hammann’s depth charges. The shock killed many of the men who had gone into the water and injured men aboard Yorktown, breaking legs and ankles among the salvage party, according to NHHC.

The Combat Narrative singles out Torpedoman First Class B. M. Kimbrel, who went back to check that Hammann’s depth charges were set on safe and helped stunned shipmates over the side; he was probably killed in the underwater explosion. Hammann lost 81 of the 251 men aboard, according to NHHC’s H-Gram; NHHC’s ship history says over 80. Survivors were taken aboard Benham and Balch. Vireo, wrenched by the explosion, cut her towline with an acetylene torch and turned back to pick up men from the water and from the carrier.

The destroyers of the screen counterattacked. NHHC records that Tanabe took I-168 under Yorktown, where the destroyers could not easily attack him, and that the boat survived 61 depth charges. With her batteries nearly exhausted and chlorine gas leaking into the boat, I-168 surfaced later, laid smoke and escaped at dark. The Combat Narrative records that at 1845 a submarine surfaced on the horizon and that Monaghan and Hughes went after it at full speed, but found only an oil slick. The Americans believed the submarine had been damaged. She returned to Japan.

Dawn, 7 June: Yorktown goes down

The two new torpedo hits were on Yorktown’s starboard side, opposite the earlier hits from Hiryu’s planes, and the Combat Narrative notes that her list actually decreased, to about 17°. But she was now much lower in the water, and the salvage party was taken off. The tugs Navajo and Seminole were on the way but had not arrived. The destroyers circled her through the night. At 0330 on 7 June her list was seen to be increasing.

At 0501, the Combat Narrative records, Yorktown rolled over to port and sank in about 3,000 fathoms at 30°46′N, 167°24′W. The photographs of her last minutes were taken from one of the destroyers standing by. She was the second American carrier lost in a month, after Lexington at the Coral Sea, and the only American carrier lost at Midway. Her wreck was found in 1998, upright on the bottom at a depth of more than three miles, a story told in chapter 9.

Whether she could have been saved is still debated. Her own damage-control record at the Coral Sea and on 4 June had been very good, and she survived two aerial torpedoes and two submarine torpedoes before sinking. The criticism usually made is that the salvage effort was slow to begin, that she was abandoned too readily on 4 June, and that the destroyer screen of five ships, though not small, was not able to keep out a determined submarine. Defenders of Buckmaster point out that the decision to abandon was made with a list that seemed to threaten capsizing, and that once the salvage began it nearly succeeded. Both are fair readings of the record.

The Yorktown survivors, picked up on 4 June by the destroyers and transferred to the cruiser Portland, were shifted to the submarine tender Fulton on 7 June and landed at Pearl Harbor on 8 June. Hammann’s survivors came ashore from Benham on 9 June. Their story, and the totals of American and Japanese dead, are the subject of chapter 8.

1. Dusk · 4 JunSpruance turns Task Force 16 east to avoid a night action; Hughes is left to guard Yorktown.
2. About 1900 · 4 JunVMSB-241’s remaining bombers fly a night search; Maj. Benjamin Norris is lost.
3. Night · 4/5 JunKurita’s bombardment of Midway is called off; turning away, Mogami rams Mikuma after Kumano sights Tambor.
4. 0120–0128 · 5 JunI-168 shells Sand Island; eight rounds fall in the lagoon (Heinl).
5. Early hours · 5 JunYamamoto cancels Operation MI (0255 per Parshall and Tully).
6. 0805 · 5 JunVMSB-241 attacks Mogami and Mikuma; Capt. Richard Fleming is shot down.
7. 1308 · 5 JunVireo takes Yorktown in tow at under three knots.
8. 1500 · 5 JunEnterprise and Hornet launch 58 SBDs; they find only the destroyer Tanikaze and score no hits.
9. 0415 · 6 JunHammann puts Buckmaster and 159 men aboard Yorktown.
10. 0950–1500 · 6 JunThree carrier strikes hit Mogami and destroy Mikuma.
11. 1335 · 6 JunI-168’s four torpedoes hit Hammann and Yorktown (time per Combat Narrative; about 1400 per NHHC Vireo history).
12. Evening · 6 JunSpruance turns back east, low on fuel and nearing Wake’s air range.
13. 0501 · 7 JunYorktown capsizes to port and sinks.
14. 6–7 JunJapanese forces land on Kiska and Attu in the Aleutians.

The northern thread: Dutch Harbor, Kiska and Attu

Operation AL, the Japanese attack on the Aleutian Islands, was planned alongside Operation MI and went ahead even as the Midway operation fell apart. Rear Admiral Kakuji Kakuta’s Second Carrier Striking Force, with the light carriers Ryujo and Junyo, attacked the U.S. Navy base at Dutch Harbor, on Unalaska Island, on 3 June, the day before the carrier battle at Midway, and again on 4 June. American codebreaking had warned of the attack, and there were U.S. forces in the area, but bad weather and the great distances of the North Pacific limited what they could do.

The National Park Service’s Aleutian World War II National Historic Area records 43 Americans killed and 50 wounded in the Dutch Harbor raids. The beached ship Northwestern, used to house civilian workers, was set on fire and destroyed, and four new fuel tanks holding 22,000 barrels of oil, about a month’s supply, were destroyed. A Zero that crash-landed on Akutan Island during these attacks was found by the Americans in July and became the first nearly intact example of the fighter to be studied in the United States.

With Midway abandoned, the Japanese went ahead with the landings in the western Aleutians. According to the Park Service, they occupied Kiska on 6 June and Attu on 7 June 1942. On Kiska they captured a small U.S. Navy weather detachment. On Attu they took the island’s Unangax̂ (Aleut) residents, who were carried to Japan as prisoners and held for about three years; nearly half of them died in captivity. The occupation of American territory had a large effect on American public opinion and led to a campaign that lasted until the recapture of Attu in May 1943 and the Japanese evacuation of Kiska in July 1943.

The Aleutian operation has sometimes been called a diversion meant to draw the American carriers north. Japanese planning documents and later scholarship, including Parshall and Tully, treat it more as a simultaneous operation with objectives of its own, poorly coordinated with MI and drawing off two carriers that might have made a difference at Midway. Thanks to codebreaking, Nimitz was not misled into moving his carriers north. The Japanese gained two remote islands at the cost of taking Ryujo and Junyo away from the main battle.

Assessing the pursuit

The last three days of the battle added relatively little to the outcome decided on 4 June, but they shaped how the victory looked. The Japanese lost a heavy cruiser sunk and another badly damaged, and the Combined Fleet went home with its invasion cancelled. The Americans lost Yorktown and Hammann to a submarine attack that was skillfully carried out. In the final phase alone, the Americans lost more tonnage than they sank. In terms of what each side could do next, it was not: the United States still had Enterprise, Hornet and Saratoga, while the Japanese had lost four of the six fleet carriers that had attacked Pearl Harbor.

The record of the pursuit also shows how much uncertainty the commanders worked under. American pilots reported battleships and carriers that were not there; a submarine’s first report was too vague to act on; B-17 crews reported hits on ships that were never hit and once bombed an American submarine. Spruance’s caution makes more sense against this background. He was acting on reports that he knew to be unreliable, against an enemy whose strength he could not see.

For the Marines on Midway the pursuit was the end of a costly week. Heinl gives total Marine losses for the battle as 49 killed and 53 wounded, most of them aviators of Marine Aircraft Group 22. Of VMSB-241’s three commanders on 4 and 5 June, Henderson, Norris and Fleming, none survived. Henderson’s name went to the airfield the Marines captured on Guadalcanal two months later, and Fleming’s Medal of Honor stands for the squadron’s sacrifice as a whole.