Enterprise’s Dive Bombers at Midway: Scouting Six and Bombing Six

Pilots of Scouting Squadron Six aboard Enterprise, 12 May 1942. U.S. Navy photograph, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Special Units · The Battle of Midway, 1942

Enterprise’s Dive Bombers at Midway: Scouting Six and Bombing Six

Two veteran SBD squadrons from Enterprise put Kaga and Akagi out of the war in minutes and returned that afternoon for Hiryu.

Two squadrons of Douglas SBD-3 Dauntless dive bombers from USS Enterprise (CV-6), Scouting Squadron Six (VS-6) and Bombing Squadron Six (VB-6), did more damage to the Imperial Japanese Navy on 4 June 1942 than any other American units of the war had done to that point. Led by the Enterprise Air Group commander, Lieutenant Commander C. Wade McClusky, thirty-odd of their aircraft dived on the Japanese carriers Kaga and Akagi at about 1022 and set both fatally afire. That afternoon a smaller group from the same squadrons, joined by Yorktown‘s homeless Bombing Three, wrecked Hiryu. Two days later they helped sink the heavy cruiser Mikuma.

The cost was high, and most of it came not over the targets but on the way home, from fighters and from empty fuel tanks. This page follows the two squadrons as units: their leaders and their experience before Midway, the long search that brought them to the Kido Butai, the confusion over targets that put most of their weight on one carrier, their losses, and how their record has been assessed. The minute-by-minute account of 1020–1028 is in Chapter 5, and the strike on Hiryu in Chapter 6. Times are local Midway time; Enterprise‘s own action report uses a clock two hours later.

Veteran squadrons

Unlike Hornet‘s air group, which went into its first battle at Midway, the Enterprise squadrons had been at war since its first morning. VS-6 aircraft flying ahead of the carrier into Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 ran into the Japanese attack, and Lieutenant Clarence E. Dickinson of VS-6 was shot down over Oahu that day and survived. On 1 February 1942 the squadrons flew in the Marshall Islands raid, the Navy’s first carrier strike of the war; during it Aviation Machinist’s Mate Bruno Gaido of VS-6 climbed into the rear cockpit of a parked SBD and fired into a damaged Japanese bomber trying to crash the ship. In April Enterprise escorted Hornet on the Doolittle Raid, then raced south too late for the Coral Sea. She entered Pearl Harbor on 26 May and sailed with Task Force 16 two days later.

The two squadrons flew the same aircraft and differed mainly in mission and load. Scouting squadrons were trained to search as well as bomb; at Midway, Parshall writes, VS-6 carried 500-pound bombs and VB-6 1,000-pounders. Both were led by experienced lieutenants. Gallaher commanded VS-6. Best, a 1932 Naval Academy graduate who had flown fighters before choosing dive bombers, had joined VB-6 in 1940 and commanded it at Midway. Above them was McClusky, a former fighter pilot who had commanded Enterprise‘s fighting squadron before taking over the air group. He was the air group’s senior officer, flying with its dive bombers.

The launch and the search

Rear Admiral Raymond A. Spruance began launching from Enterprise and Hornet at about 0700, with the Japanese near the limit of range. The ship’s report lists the attack group as 33 scout bombers, 14 torpedo planes and 10 fighters. The dive bombers went up first and circled, burning fuel, while the torpedo planes were brought up. At about 0745 Spruance ordered McClusky to go ahead without them, and the SBDs took departure shortly before 0800. That order, sensible in itself, meant that Enterprise‘s strike arrived in pieces and that its dive bombers flew without fighters, since Enterprise‘s ten Wildcats attached themselves by mistake to Hornet‘s torpedo squadron.

McClusky flew toward the point where the Japanese should have been if they had held their course toward Midway. They had not; after recovering the Midway strike, Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo had turned northeast. Finding nothing, McClusky turned northwest and continued the search with his aircraft already short of fuel. At 0955 he saw a single destroyer running at high speed to the northeast. She was Arashi, left behind to depth-charge the submarine Nautilus and now racing to rejoin the carriers. McClusky followed her wake. About ten minutes later, according to the VS-6 crews whose recollections the National WWII Museum’s Seth Paridon draws on, the group saw the Japanese fleet. No Zeros attacked the dive bombers on the way in; the combat air patrol was low, fighting the torpedo squadrons.

Over Kaga and Akagi

Below the Enterprise group were two large carriers, Kaga nearer and Akagi beyond; cloud hid Carrier Division 2 to the north. Doctrine of the time had the lead squadron take the far target and the trailing squadron the near one. McClusky, flying with the lead squadron, VS-6, ordered it onto Kaga and expected VB-6 to take Akagi. The order did not reach Best, or reached him garbled, and VB-6 followed VS-6 onto Kaga. NHHC estimates that about 28 SBDs dived on Kaga and only three on Akagi. Kaga‘s antiaircraft fire shot down one SBD, which NHHC identifies as the only American plane lost to carrier antiaircraft fire in the battle.

The Japanese report counts four hits among the bombs aimed at Kaga; one near the island killed Captain Okada Jisaku and the senior officers on the bridge, and others set the upper hangar deck on fire among fueled aircraft. Gallaher is credited in Paridon’s account with a hit near the after elevator, and Ensign Norman “Dusty” Kleiss and James Dexter of VS-6 with others. Dickinson, who published an account of his dive in The Flying Guns (1942), was among those who believed they had hit her. These are claims made by men diving through smoke at a ship taking several hits at once; they show that many bombs struck Kaga, not whose bomb went where.

Best had started his own dive on Kaga when he saw VS-6 already going down on her. He pulled out and climbed back, and only his two wingmen, Lieutenant (junior grade) Edward J. Kroeger and Ensign Frederick T. Weber, stayed with him. With three aircraft he turned toward Akagi and dived at about 1026. Two bombs missed, one of them close enough astern to jam her rudder. The third, which NHHC and Parshall attribute to Best, struck near the amidships elevator and burst in the upper hangar, where torpedo planes were being armed for a strike on the American carriers. The Japanese log records induced explosions of torpedoes in her hangars at 1029. One bomb, in the right place, wrecked Nagumo’s flagship.

The way home, and two men who did not come back

The squadrons had flown farther than planned and had little fuel left. NHHC’s H-Gram states that “about half the SBDs from Enterprise were forced to ditch due to battle damage or running out of fuel.” Zeros caught some on the retirement. Some of those that reached the task forces found Yorktown first and landed aboard her; a VB-6 SBD photographed on her deck at about 1140 is one of them. McClusky came back wounded. Best returned having breathed from a defective oxygen canister that, NHHC records, burned his lungs and activated latent tuberculosis; he never flew in combat again.

Among the crews who ditched short of the task force were Ensign Frank O’Flaherty and Gaido of VS-6, whose SBD had been holed by Zeros and was losing fuel. They were picked up by a Japanese destroyer, questioned, and later killed by being weighted and thrown into the sea, according to Japanese accounts summarized by NHHC. None of the responsible officers survived the war. Their story, with that of Ensign Wesley Osmus of Yorktown‘s VT-3, is told in Chapter 8.

Hiryu and Mikuma

When a Yorktown scout located Hiryu at about 1430, the survivors of the morning were the core of the American answer. Enterprise‘s action report records a second attack group of 24 scout bombers, eleven with 1,000-pound bombs and thirteen with 500-pound bombs, launched at 1530 local; H-Gram 006 gives 1525 and 26 aircraft. Gallaher led it. Breakdowns that follow Parshall and Tully and John Lundstrom give six SBDs of VS-6, four of VB-6 including Best, and fourteen of Yorktown‘s VB-3 under Lieutenant DeWitt W. Shumway, flying from Enterprise because their own deck was out of action. There were no fighters.

The first bombs missed as Hiryu turned hard. Shumway’s VB-3, assigned to a battleship, switched to the carrier, and four 1,000-pound bombs struck her forward flight deck at about 1701–1705. The forward deck collapsed into the hangar and her aircraft caught fire. Best was among the pilots credited with a hit, his second carrier of the day; Kleiss, by H-Gram 006’s account, also hit Hiryu. Enterprise‘s report records three aircraft of the group not returning. Hiryu burned through the night and sank on the morning of 5 June.

On 6 June, with the Japanese retreating, Enterprise launched 31 scout bombers against the cruisers Mikuma and Mogami, crippled by their collision the night before. The bombers included Yorktown pilots still aboard. Combinedfleet.com credits the Enterprise attack with five direct hits and two near misses on Mikuma, which sank that day; H-Gram 006 names Kleiss among those who hit her. Chapter 7 tells that pursuit.

Assessing the two squadrons

The morning attack has been told both as luck and as competence, and both are documented. The Arashi wake, the cloud that hid Carrier Division 2, the order that did not reach Best and the pilot who pulled out and found another target were all chance. But the squadrons were there to profit from chance because McClusky kept searching with fuel running low, and they hit maneuvering carriers from about 20,000 feet because they were trained to. The weight of the attack was badly distributed: nine-tenths of it fell on one carrier, which was hit far more often than she needed to be, while three aircraft attacked the flagship. Had Best stayed in his dive on Kaga, Akagi might not have been hit at all.

Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully’s reconstruction from Japanese records, published in Shattered Sword (2005), also changed what the squadrons were understood to have hit. Wartime claims and the profiles written from them credited more hits than the Japanese report records, and the Japanese side settled which carrier had been struck by whom. What did not change was the result. In about six minutes, by Akagi‘s log, Enterprise‘s squadrons and Yorktown‘s VB-3 put three of Japan’s six fleet carriers out of the war, and that afternoon the two Enterprise squadrons and VB-3 finished the fourth.