VMF-221 at Midway: The Marine Fighters and the Atoll’s Gunners, 4 June 1942

A damaged, partially disassembled VMF-221 F4F-3 Wildcat (BuNo 4006) on Sand Island, 24 June 1942. Only two of the squadron’s fighters were fit to fly after the interception of 4 June. U.S. Navy photograph 80-G-11636, National Archives, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Special Units · The Battle of Midway, 1942

VMF-221 at Midway: The Marine Fighters and the Atoll’s Gunners, 4 June 1942

Twenty-five or so obsolescent Marine fighters against Tomonaga’s strike, and the antiaircraft gunners who met the raid when it reached the atoll.

Marine Fighting Squadron 221 fought one engagement at Midway, and it lasted only minutes. At about 0616 on 4 June 1942, some thirty miles northwest of the atoll, the squadron’s Brewster F2A-3 Buffaloes and Grumman F4F-3 Wildcats met the 108-plane Japanese carrier strike led by Lt. Joichi Tomonaga. They went for the bombers, as they had been told to, and the escorting Zero fighters came down on them from above. By the time the raid had passed, the squadron had effectively ceased to exist as a fighting unit: of the aircraft that came back, only two were fit to fly again, and its commanding officer, Maj. Floyd B. Parks, was among the missing.

On the ground, the Marines of the 6th Defense Battalion and its attached units manned the antiaircraft guns that met the raid when it reached Sand and Eastern Islands at 0630. They had dug in, wired and mined the beaches for an invasion that never came, and for half an hour that morning they fought the only battle the Japanese brought to them. This page covers both: the fighter squadron in the air and the gunners below it. The sequence of the raid and the atoll’s counterattacks is told in full in Chapter 3.

The numbers in this story have always been contested. The pilots’ claims in 1942 were enormous; the Japanese record is much smaller; and even the American sources do not agree on how many fighters got into the air. The account below rests on Heinl’s Marines at Midway (1948), the 1958 Marine Corps history, the ONI Combat Narrative (1943), NHHC’s H-Gram 006 and the 2024 Naval History reassessment, and gives their figures side by side.

From the Wake relief to Midway

VMF-221 reached Midway by accident of war. In December 1941 its Buffaloes were embarked in Saratoga as part of the force sent to relieve Wake Island. When that expedition was recalled on 22 December, the day before Wake fell, the fighters were flown off to Midway instead. Pacific Wrecks records that fourteen F2A-3s took off from Saratoga on 25 December 1941 and landed on the atoll, the first fighters based there. The squadron spent the next five months as Midway’s only fighter defense, flying patrols from the Eastern Island airfield. The Wake Island collection covers the defense the squadron had been meant to reinforce.

By the end of May the squadron had 21 F2A-3s and seven F4F-3s, by Heinl’s count. The Buffalo was outclassed by the Japanese Type 0 fighter in climb, turn and speed, and the handful of Wildcats, though better, could not change the balance. The 2024 Naval History study adds two points about readiness. Fewer than 30 percent of the squadron’s missions between December and May had been devoted to improving its fighting skills, and a shortage of .50-caliber ammunition often limited gunnery practice to dummy runs. And like the bomber squadron beside it, VMF-221 had absorbed many brand-new pilots in the last days of May: of the 57 Marine aviators who flew on 4 June, 35 were second lieutenants, and 17 had arrived from flight school on 27 May.

The interception

Midway’s radar had the incoming raid at about 0555, and the alarm sent every aircraft that could fly into the air. Heinl reports that 26 of the squadron’s 28 fighters were operational that morning and that one F2A-3 turned back with engine trouble, so that 25 may be the correct number engaged. The ONI narrative refers to 27 fighters; NHHC’s H-Gram says 21 F2As and seven F4Fs launched and notes that the sources conflict on how many got airborne; the 2024 study says all but one of each type were ready and flew. The fighter direction center on the atoll sent them out in two groups. Parks led eight F2A-3s and five F4F-3s; Capt. Kirk Armistead followed about ten minutes behind with twelve F2A-3s and one F4F-3.

Parks’s group made contact at about 0616, some 30 miles out, at around 12,000 feet. Capt. John F. Carey called the “Tally-ho.” The Marines had the advantage of height and went straight for the bombers, and at first they did not see the escort. The Zeros, above and behind, overtook the slower American fighters almost at once. A Midway outpost reported at 0619 “two planes falling in flames,” by the ONI narrative. Of the twelve pilots in Parks’s group, Heinl records, three survived: Carey, who was wounded; Capt. Marion E. Carl; and 2d Lt. Clayton M. Canfield. Armistead’s group attacked the second wave of bombers and was also badly cut up. Armistead’s own plane was hit, and he returned to base.

What the Marine fighters accomplished is best stated modestly. NHHC credits them with shooting down or damaging three of the Type 97 carrier attack planes before the escort turned the fight. The 2024 study concludes that the squadron “probably shot down just three aircraft outright,” including two Kates, and that Capt. Marion Carl was the only Marine to shoot down a Zero over Midway. It also argues that the losses the Marines inflicted on Hiryu‘s air group in this fight helped reduce what that carrier could send against Yorktown later in the day. Some of the damage to the Japanese strike, as the next section shows, was done by the guns.

Counting the losses and the claims

At 0715 the fighters still airborne were ordered to land. The ONI narrative counted 15 Marine fighters missing, 13 F2A-3s and two F4F-3s, and seven more severely damaged. The 1958 Marine Corps history says only ten fighters came back and only two of those were fit to fly again. NHHC’s H-Gram gives 13 F2As and three F4Fs shot down; the 2024 study gives 15 shot down and nine severely damaged, leaving one Buffalo and one Wildcat flyable. Four of the squadron’s ordnance men were killed on the ground when a bomb struck their rearming area. Heinl gives Marine Aircraft Group 22’s losses for the whole battle, both squadrons together, as 7 killed, 35 missing and presumed dead, and 25 wounded.

The claims went the other way. Drawing on the surviving pilots’ reports, the 1943 narrative credited the fighters with at least 43 Japanese aircraft, a figure Heinl breaks down as 25 Type 99 dive bombers and 18 Zeros, plus an unknown number shot down by pilots who did not return. The Japanese record does not support that. The 1958 history notes that Japanese authorities admitted only six aircraft failing to return from the raid. NHHC’s H-Gram, drawing on modern research, gives 11 aircraft shot down, 14 severely damaged and 29 others hit for the strike as a whole, to fighters and guns together. The difference is not dishonesty but the nature of a fight in which a dozen pilots saw the same falling aircraft from different angles.

The gunners of the 6th Defense Battalion

The ground defense of Midway belonged to Col. Harold D. Shannon’s 6th Defense Battalion. Its own armament included 5-inch seacoast guns, 3-inch antiaircraft batteries, 7-inch and 3-inch naval guns emplaced for coast defense, searchlights and many .50-caliber machine guns. In the last days of May it was heavily reinforced. Heinl records that a 37-mm battery from the 3d Defense Battalion arrived on 25–26 May with Companies C and D of the 2d Raider Battalion, and that a 3d Defense Battalion 3-inch group and a platoon of light tanks came in aboard the transport Kittyhawk. Three 3-inch batteries, a 37-mm battery and a 20-mm battery were attached to Shannon’s command.

At 0629, Heinl records, the enemy was eight miles out. At 0630 Shannon gave the order to “open fire when targets are in range,” and at 0631 every antiaircraft battery on the atoll opened up. The 1958 history describes the first wave of level bombers coming over at about 14,000 feet, with the guns knocking down two of them before the bombs fell, and a wave of dive bombers following. Admiral Nimitz credited the batteries with ten Japanese aircraft, Heinl writes, and he quotes Nagumo’s own report on the “vicious AA fire.” The 3-inch guns fired continuously; one battery lost its heightfinder.

The bombs did heavy damage above ground. On Sand Island they set the seaplane hangar and fuel tanks on fire; on Eastern Island they all but destroyed the powerhouse and hit the command post, killing Maj. William W. Benson, the sector commander. Heinl gives the battalion’s casualties as seven killed, three officers and four enlisted men, and 28 wounded; the 1958 history puts total casualties among the ground defenders at 24, counting differently. What the bombs did not do was knock out the guns or the runways, and that, together with the empty airfield, is why Tomonaga signaled shortly before 0700 that a second strike was needed.

The battalion’s guns fired once more in the battle. In the early hours of 5 June the Japanese submarine I-168 surfaced off the atoll and shelled Sand Island. Searchlights caught her, and two 3-inch batteries and a 5-inch battery answered; Heinl counts eight rounds from the submarine, all in the lagoon, against about 42 rounds of 3-inch and three of 5-inch from the defenders. The submarine dived undamaged and two days later sank Yorktown, as told in Chapter 7. The battalion and its attached units received the Navy Unit Commendation “for outstanding heroism in support of military operations prior to and during the Battle of Midway, June 1942.”

Afterward

The survivors were withdrawn to Hawaii within weeks. An NHHC photograph dated 22 June 1942 shows a group of Marine aviators, most of them members of VMF-221, in front of a transport at Ewa. The squadron was rebuilt and went to the Solomons. Pacific Wrecks records that one of its pilots, 1st Lt. James E. Swett, flying a Wildcat over Guadalcanal on 7 April 1943, claimed seven Japanese dive bombers and later received the Medal of Honor. The F4F-3 photographed on Sand Island on 24 June, damaged and partly dismantled, is a fair picture of what the morning of 4 June had left.

The squadron’s sacrifice is easy to describe and harder to measure. It flew aircraft it knew to be inferior into a fight it could not win, in order to give the guns fewer bombers to shoot at, and lost most of its pilots doing it. The record now credits it with only a handful of aircraft. But the strike it met was itself badly hurt by the combination of fighters and guns, and the raid’s failure to destroy Midway’s aircraft on the ground, or its defenses, fed directly into the decisions on Nagumo’s flagship that are examined in Chapter 5. Marine Aircraft Group 22, VMF-221 included, received the Presidential Unit Citation.