USS Yorktown (CV-5) at Midway: The Ship, Her Air Group and Her Crew

On Yorktown’s deck shortly after the three bomb hits, 4 June 1942; photograph by PH2c William G. Roy. U.S. Navy photograph, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Special Units · The Battle of Midway, 1942

USS Yorktown (CV-5) at Midway: The Ship, Her Air Group and Her Crew

From the Coral Sea repair to I-168’s torpedoes: the carrier whose squadrons hit two Japanese carriers and whose crew nearly saved her.

USS Yorktown (CV-5) came to Midway damaged, with an air group assembled from three different ships, after three days in a Pearl Harbor dry dock. In the next four days her dive bombers wrecked the Japanese carrier Soryu, her scouts found Hiryu, and her homeless bombers made up more than half of the strike that destroyed Hiryu that afternoon. She also drew both of Hiryu‘s counterstrikes. Hit by three bombs and two aerial torpedoes on 4 June, abandoned, reboarded, and torpedoed again by the submarine I-168 on 6 June, she rolled over and sank shortly after dawn on 7 June, the only American carrier lost in the battle.

This page treats the ship, her air group and her crew as one unit. The bomb and torpedo attacks of 4 June are told hour by hour in Chapter 6, her squadrons’ morning strike in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5, and the salvage attempt and her sinking in Chapter 7. Times here are local Midway time; the ship’s own action report, and some Navy pages drawn from it, use a clock two hours later.

From the Coral Sea to Dry Dock No. 1

Yorktown was commissioned at Norfolk, Virginia, on 30 September 1937, with Captain Ernest D. McWhorter in command. Buckmaster took command on 5 February 1941. By the spring of 1942 she was one of the most experienced carriers in the Pacific. Her aircraft struck Jaluit, Makin and Mili in the Gilberts and Marshalls on 31 January, where bad weather cost six aircraft, and on 10 March, with Lexington, attacked Japanese shipping at Lae and Salamaua on New Guinea, losing one aircraft of 104 launched. At the Coral Sea on 8 May a bomb penetrated her flight deck and exploded below, killing or seriously injuring 66 men; she dodged eight torpedoes. Near misses opened seams in her hull and ruptured fuel tanks.

Repair estimates spoke of about three months. She reached Pearl Harbor on 27 May, trailing oil, and went straight into Dry Dock No. 1, where Admiral Chester W. Nimitz inspected her hull in person. Yard workers, about 1,400 of them by most accounts, worked around the clock on essential repairs only, patching rather than restoring. The 1943 Office of Naval Intelligence Combat Narrative recorded that it proved possible to restore her and her planes to fighting condition in three days. She sailed on 30 May as the center of Task Force 17, fit to fight but not fully repaired, a fact that mattered when she was hit again.

A borrowed air group

The air group was rebuilt as fast as the ship. Yorktown‘s own fighter and torpedo squadrons had been worn down at the Coral Sea, and Saratoga, still on the West Coast after a torpedo hit in January, had squadrons to spare. NHHC summarizes the result as Yorktown sailing with “a new air group formerly belonging to Saratoga.” Her action report lists it under Lieutenant Commander Oscar Pederson as Bombing Three (VB-3), 18 SBDs under Leslie; Torpedo Three (VT-3), 12 TBDs under Massey; Fighting Three (VF-3), 25 F4F-4 Wildcats under Thach, its pilots drawn from VF-3 and from Yorktown‘s own Fighting 42; and Scouting Five (VS-5), 18 SBDs under Lieutenant W. C. Short, formed largely from the pilots of Yorktown‘s Bombing Five.

That improvisation stands in contrast to the Japanese side, where Zuikaku, undamaged at the Coral Sea, stayed home because her air group was depleted and the Imperial Navy kept air groups bound to their own ships. The Americans mixed and matched. The cost was that men who had not trained together had days, not weeks, to become one air group, and VF-3 flew the new F4F-4 with folding wings, which Buckmaster’s report would later call “even more sluggish and slow than the F4F-3.”

The morning strike: Soryu

Fletcher, in overall tactical command, held Yorktown‘s group back until his dawn scouts were recovered and began launching at 0838: seventeen SBDs of VB-3, twelve TBDs of VT-3 and six F4F-4s of VF-3. He kept VS-5 on deck as a reserve in case more Japanese carriers appeared. Launched later and flying a more direct course, Yorktown‘s was the only one of the three carrier strikes to arrive with torpedo planes, dive bombers and fighters at about the same time. On the way out, an electrical fault in a newly installed arming switch dropped the bombs of four VB-3 aircraft, Leslie’s among them.

Massey’s VT-3 reached the Kido Butai at about 1000 and went in low after Hiryu. The Japanese combat air patrol fell on the torpedo planes and on Thach’s six fighters. Massey was shot down in flames, and ten of the twelve TBDs were lost over the target; the two survivors ditched near the task force. Ensign Wesley Osmus, shot down in the attack, was pulled from the water by the destroyer Arashi and later killed by his captors. No torpedo hit was recorded. But the fight drew a large part of the Japanese fighters down to low altitude just before 1020.

Leslie led VB-3 against Carrier Division 2 and took Soryu, arriving at almost the same moment as the Enterprise dive bombers diving on Kaga and Akagi, by coincidence rather than plan. At most thirteen of his seventeen SBDs carried a bomb. The Japanese summary records three hits on Soryu at 1025, 1026 and 1028; Parshall describes them as spaced evenly along her length, one reaching the lower hangar and stopping her engines. She was abandoned within about twenty minutes and sank that evening with 711 of her men. Out of fuel on the way back, Leslie ditched beside the cruiser Astoria and was picked up.

Two strikes, one ship

Hiryu‘s first strike, eighteen dive bombers under Lieutenant Michio Kobayashi with six Zeros, followed VB-3’s returning aircraft home. Yorktown‘s CXAM radar detected it at 1159, 46 miles out, and VF-3’s Wildcats met it short of the ships. About seven bombers got through. Three bombs hit: one aft of the No. 2 elevator, one through the stack uptakes that put out the fires in all boilers but No. 1, and one that went down to the fourth deck near a magazine. By about 1215 the ship was dead in the water and pouring smoke. A single hit on an antiaircraft mount, NHHC notes, killed almost its whole crew.

The crew’s response is one of the best-documented damage-control efforts of the early war. The flight-deck hole was covered with timber and steel plate in under half an hour; a hangar sprinkler system kept the fire below from spreading. In the No. 1 fireroom Chief Water Tender Charles Kleinsmith, appointed chief only three days before, kept the one lit boiler steaming while the uptakes were patched. By 1350 Yorktown was making about 20 knots and refueling fighters. Fletcher had meanwhile shifted his flag to Astoria, and tactical direction of the carrier battle passed in practice to Rear Admiral Raymond A. Spruance in Enterprise.

Hiryu‘s second strike, ten torpedo planes under Lieutenant Joichi Tomonaga with six Zeros, was detected by the cruiser Pensacola‘s radar at 1427. Its crews were looking for an undamaged carrier and took Yorktown, moving at 20 knots with no fires showing, for a second ship. Yorktown launched eight partly fueled Wildcats, Thach’s among them. Two Type 91 torpedoes struck her port side amidships about 30 seconds apart at about 1445, and the ship lost all power. Without power the list could not be corrected, and it reached about 26 degrees. Buckmaster, after consulting his executive officer, Commander Dixie Kiefer, and his chief engineer, ordered abandon ship at about 1455. The destroyers moved in; Benham alone took aboard 720 survivors.

The air group went on fighting from other decks. At about 1430 two VS-5 SBDs flown by Lieutenant Samuel Adams and Lieutenant Harlan R. Dickson, among ten Yorktown had launched around 1130 to search, found Hiryu and reported her at 31°15′ North, 179°05′ West. VB-3’s aircraft, which had landed on Enterprise during the noon attack, were rearmed, and fourteen of them under Lieutenant DeWitt W. Shumway flew in the strike Lieutenant Wilmer Earl Gallaher led against Hiryu. They switched from a battleship to the carrier when the first bombs missed, and four 1,000-pound bombs wrecked her forward flight deck at about 1701–1705. Yorktown‘s squadrons had a share in two of the four Japanese carriers sunk.

Salvage, I-168 and the end

Yorktown did not capsize. She drifted through the night, watched by the destroyer Hughes, and on 5 June the minesweeper Vireo took her in tow toward Pearl Harbor at under three knots. At about 0415 on 6 June the destroyer Hammann put Buckmaster and a salvage party of volunteers aboard; the Combat Narrative counts 29 officers and 130 men, the ship’s report 29 officers and 141 enlisted men. Hammann was made fast alongside to supply power and water. The party put out a fire, reduced flooding and jettisoned weight from the port side, including a 5-inch gun, and reduced the list by about two degrees. They believed she could be saved.

The submarine I-168, under Lieutenant Commander Yahachi Tanabe, had been sent to find her. Tanabe worked his way through the destroyer screen and fired four torpedoes at about 1335. One missed; one broke Hammann in two; two passed under the destroyer and hit Yorktown‘s starboard side. Hammann sank in three to four minutes, and the explosion of her depth charges killed many of the men in the water and broke legs and ankles among Yorktown‘s salvage party. She lost 81 of the 251 men aboard. The new hits on the starboard side actually reduced Yorktown‘s list, to about 17 degrees, but she was much lower in the water, and the salvage party was taken off.

At 0330 on 7 June her list was seen to be increasing. At 0501, by the Combat Narrative’s time, she rolled over to port and sank in about 3,000 fathoms at 30°46’N, 167°24’W. Her survivors, moved from the destroyers to the cruiser Portland and then to the submarine tender Fulton, landed at Pearl Harbor on 8 June. Whether she could have been saved is still argued: critics point to an abandonment that proved premature, a slow start to salvage and a screen that could not keep out one determined submarine; defenders note the list that seemed to threaten capsizing and the recent example of Lexington, lost to internal explosions at the Coral Sea.

Lessons, honors and the wreck

Buckmaster’s action report was blunt about equipment. It attributed the loss of his ship to “the fact that all attacking enemy planes were not shot down,” asked that the remaining TBDs “be immediately replaced by TBF’s,” and asked that the Navy be given “a fighter that is at least equal of the Zero fighter.” The torpedo plane request had already been overtaken: the TBD never flew in another carrier strike. NHHC credits Yorktown with three battle stars for her World War II service. Leslie received the Navy Cross for the attack on Soryu; Massey, killed leading VT-3 that morning, and Kleinsmith, listed missing after the afternoon attack, received it posthumously.

The wreck lay undisturbed for almost 56 years. In May 1998 an expedition led by Robert Ballard with the Navy and National Geographic found her upright on the bottom, a little over three miles down; Ballard reported a depth of 16,650 feet. In September 2023 the exploration vessel Nautilus of the Ocean Exploration Trust filmed her in detail along with Kaga and Akagi. That story is told in Chapter 9.