The gallant but little-known role of a six-plane all-volunteer TBF detachment, of which the author and his pilot were members, adds further to the record of the terrible, yet triumphant, sacrifices made during the Battle of Midway.
Much has been told of the heroic sacrifice of Torpedo Squadron Eight at the Battle of Midway. The gallantry of its officers and men in the face of overwhelming odds is indelibly inscribed in the history of the U. S. Navy. The fame of Torpedo Eight has rested on the actions of the main body of the squadron based on board the USS Hornet (CV-8). Yet, there is another chapter to this story which has received little mention and which I think deserves telling before memories have faded beyond recall.
Torpedo Squadron Eight was commissioned at Norfolk, Virginia, in the late summer of 1941 as an element of carrier Air Group Eight, better known then as the Hornet Air Group. The ceremony took place in front of an old World War I hangar at Chambers Field on the Naval Air Station. East Field, which is now the operating portion of NAS, Norfolk, had not been completed. The first commanding officer of Torpedo Eight, who also led the squadron in their fateful flight, was Lieutenant Commander John C. Waldron, U. S. Navy, a veteran of more than 20 years of naval service.
The first aircraft assigned to the squadron were SBN-1s. These planes were a mid-wing design of the Brewster Aircraft Company, manufactured by the Naval Aircraft Factory, Philadelphia. They were used to provide pilot training for our newly commissioned squadron as there was a shortage of TBD-1 Douglas Devastators and the TBF-1 Grumman Avenger had not yet reached the production stage. The rest of the Air Group was little better equipped; the bombing and scouting squadrons were assigned SBC-4s, a mid-1930 biplane scout bomber built by the Curtiss Aircraft Company.
I first reported to the squadron on 7 September 1941, a green but enthusiastic radioman striker fresh from the Aviation Radio School at NAS, Jacksonville, Florida. My first flight involved an attempt to locate a mobile direction finder station which was somewhere in the Dismal Swamp area. We then had only manual direction finders which required some skill to operate. Since the pilot and I were both new at this challenging exercise our success was something less than spectacular. It was not long, however, before gunnery, torpedo tactics, bombing, and Field Carrier Landing Practice were familiar and meaningful terms to me.
Our training was progressing satisfactorily, and finally, in October, we received a few TBD-1 aircraft. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that December and our immediate entry into a state of war caused a rapid acceleration of training, culminated by a month-long shakedown cruise by the Hornet and her embarked air group in January 1942.
Shortly after our return to Norfolk, it was decided to form a detachment of approximately 80 officers and men who would remain in Norfolk and take delivery of the first TBF-1s. The Hornet, with the main portion of the squadron, left immediately thereafter for the Pacific. In March 1942, members of our detachment were sent to the Grumman factory on Long Island to learn as much as possible about the airplane from the engineers and builders-this was in the days before the Naval Air Technical Training Command mobile trainers and the Fleet Indoctrination Program. It was an interesting experience, but the knowledge we gained was very limited.
In the latter part of March we received and flew our first of 21 shiny new Grumman Avengers. (Actually, the Avenger tag was given to the airplane after the Battle of Midway to exemplify the mission and dedication of all torpedo squadrons-to avenge the heroic sacrifice of their predecessors.) We were all impressed with the Avengers' speed, maneuverability, and ruggedness.
At Quonset Point, Rhode Island, we made our first high-speed torpedo drops of a newly designed torpedo which was capable of surviving drop speeds of 125 knots and 125-150 feet of altitude. This, we knew, would give us an advantage over the TBDs and their 100-knot, 100-foot attack capability. After only a few days of the test program had been completed, we were recalled to Norfolk and told to fly our planes across the country and join the Hornet and our shipmates in the Pacific.
After an uneventful crossing from San Diego to Pearl Harbor in the USS Kitty Hawk (AKV-1), a converted railroad car transport, we unloaded our TBFs at Ford Island and started preparing them for shipboard duty. The Hornet was then at sea. Within hours after our arrival a call went out for volunteers to fly six planes to Midway Island. The mission was not stated, but there was little doubt that some action was in the offing. There was no difficulty in obtaining volunteers, and I counted myself lucky to have been one of those chosen.
Bright and early on the morning of 1 June we took off from Ford Island on our eight-hour, 1,300-mile flight to Midway—a little dot in the ocean, northwest of Hawaii. We were guided by two navigators from Patrol Squadron 44, since none of us had ever been to Midway before, and our flight out was uneventful to the point of monotony. The detachment was led by Lieutenant Langdon K. Fieberling, U. S. Navy. I was assigned to fly with Ensign Albert K. Earnest, U. S. Naval Reserve as his radioman and tunnel gunner; our turret gunner was J. D. Manning, AMM3. We flew wing on Lieutenant Fieberling in the first section of three airplanes.
As soon as we arrived we could feel a tension in the air. We were all sure that a meeting with the enemy was not far off. Many planes of all types were in evidence—Brewster F2As, Grumman F4Fs, Douglas SBDs, and Chance Vought SB2Us, all flown by Marines; and Boeing B-17s, Consolidated B-24s and Martin B-26s being flown by the Army Air Corps. Incidentally, the B-26s were equipped as torpedo planes, carrying their "fish" externally below the bomb bay. And, of course, the venerable Consolidated PBYs were present.
We quickly prepared our planes for combat, which included loading six of the new type of torpedoes which we had been testing so recently. They had been flown to Midway under the wings of the PBYs. We all felt exhilarated at the prospect of meeting the enemy. I'm not sure now why we did it, but we put patches of masking tape on the leading edges of our wings and painted black circles on them to simulate gun ports. I know we were not particularly impressed with the effectiveness of the single .30-caliber machine gun which was synchronized to fire through the propeller arc. We had much greater confidence in the .50-caliber gun turret, and .30-caliber tunnel gun which covered our rear.
That evening Lieutenant Fieberling called us all together and quickly confirmed our suspicions that something momentous was about to happen. He said the Navy believed that a Japanese thrust in the direction of Hawaii was imminent and that Midway Island was most certainly a target of that thrust. We were also told that the Navy expected the Japanese to attack the Aleutian Islands but that this attack would be merely a diversionary tactic to draw our ships away from the sea around Midway and Hawaii.
For the next two mornings, we were up at 0400, warming up our engines and then standing by in an alert status until 0700. The rest of the time was spent in exploring the island and chasing the Gooney birds. We were camped on Eastern Island which was then nothing more than a long, low strip of sand, with the runway taking up almost its entirety. What little space remained was occupied by aircraft parking revetments, tents and a scattered collection of wooden buildings.
On the morning of 4 June, we were up and manning our planes at 0400, as usual. About an hour after we had shut down, a Marine officer came running to our plane and told us to start our engine. He stated that unknown planes had been sighted about 100 miles away by a patrol plane. We started up and joined the other planes of our group taxiing out to the take-off spot.
Immediately after taking off, we joined up with the others in two sections of three planes each, climbed to 2,000 feet, and headed out on a course of 320 degrees True at 160 knots. Very shortly after the take-off, a single pass was made at us by two or three Japanese planes, one of which Ensign Earnest tentatively identified as a Messerschmitt-109, a plane which was reputedly being flown by the Japanese. In all probability, the enemy planes were Zeros or Vals from the force that was heading in to attack Midway. After this brief encounter, we climbed to 4,000 feet and continued on our original course.
We sighted the enemy carrier force at approximately 0700 about 15 miles away. In his post-battle report Ensign Earnest had reckoned their numbers at ten ships. In reality there were 21 ships in the formation, including four carriers. Almost simultaneously with our sighting of the enemy we were attacked by their combat air patrol.
It was evident at once that we were outnumbered.
The pilots immediately pushed over into a dive and applied full throttle to the engines. On the second firing pass of the attacking Zeros, the turret gunner, Manning, was hit and his turret put out of action. I remember looking over my shoulder to see why he had stopped firing. The sight of his slumped and lifeless body startled me. Quite suddenly, I was a scared, mature old man at 18. I had never seen death before, and here in one awesome moment my friends and I were face to face with it. I lost all sense of time and direction but huddled by my gun hoping for a chance to shoot back.
I recall that, at one point in the battle, I glanced out of the small window on my left and saw an airplane streak by on fire and enter a cloud. The glance was so fleeting that I had no chance to identify it. Unfortunately, it later proved to have been one of ours.
The attacking fighters outnumbered us by at least three to one and it soon became evident that they did not intend that any of us should survive. Another pass and I was out of the fight—our hydraulic system had been hit and the tail wheel was now blocking the field of fire of my gun. My left arm felt a searing pain as a bullet grazed my wrist. It was shortly after this that I was struck a stunning blow on the head and lost consciousness. I shall always remember corning to and viewing through bleary eyes a stream of blood that was rapidly coloring my gun an ugly red. Gingerly I fingered my scalp. After some moments I decided that maybe I was not going to die after all, but I was still unable to contribute anything to the battle.
I was never aware of just how precarious our position was until after the battle. Some few miles short of the enemy carriers, our elevator control cables were severed, and our plane began rapidly plunging toward the water. With foresight, Ensign Earnest had opened the bomb bay doors at the first attack. Thinking that we were now out of control, he released our torpedo in the direction of a light cruiser and hoped for the best.
Just before we hit the water, he regained altitude control by using the trim tab. Our salvation was by no means assured as two Zeros continued to press home their attacks. About ten minutes later, apparently having run out of ammunition, our two tormenters finally turned away and returned to their carrier. As he glanced back towards the force, Ensign Earnest was unable to see any damage to the Japanese ships, as indeed there was none. Ours was the first of many futile attacks by a total of 51 torpedo planes. Only nine of these planes survived the suicidal assaults.
There still remained the problem of returning to Midway which had not been made any easier by the loss of our compass system as well as the previously recounted control difficulties. No provisions had been made for a standby compass. Ensign Earnest's sole means of navigation now was the sun, and the knowledge that we had departed from Midway on a generally westerly course.
Some time later when we were heading back towards Midway I crawled up over the bomb bay compartment and sat in the seat immediately behind the pilot. Much later I saw a huge column of black oil smoke seemingly rising from the sea. This proved to be Midway Island with the fuel dump ablaze. It was a most welcome sight to us.
Compared to the battle, our landing was fairly smooth even though it was made on only one main wheel without flaps, the bomb-bay doors open, and only limited elevator control available. At least we were able to walk away from it. A TBF-1 had survived its baptism of fire and had proved itself a rugged, worthy replacement for the TBDs which had been almost completely eliminated from the Navy inventory on the day of the battle. I have made a deliberate effort to remember the Bureau number of the plane in which I saw so much of this battle. It was TBF-1 BUNO 00380, the first plane delivered to the squadron; it bore the side number 8-T-1. I have often wondered since then if our attackers made any greater effort to get us because of our side number, or if they were aware of it and its significance.
Our TBF-1 had been the only plane of the detachment to survive the battle. But the ordeal was not yet ended for us, since we still had to accept the irrefutable loss of our companions. It was our sad task to take inventory and pack their few personal possessions, a treasured book of poems, letters and pictures of sweethearts and families—all of them mirrored somehow their owners.
We did not know until much later just how terrible, yet triumphant, the sacrifices had been that day. The futile attacks of Torpedo Squadrons Three, Six and Eight, and the work of the four Army Air Corps B-26s had unalterably sealed the fate of the Japanese carriers. Our fellow fliers in the bombing and scouting squadrons were thereby enabled to attack the Japanese when they were most vulnerable—while rearming and refueling their aircraft.
Following his assignment to Torpedo Squadron Eight (1941 -1942), Lieutenant Ferrier served briefly in Torpedo Squadron Three and then, for 16 months, in Bombing Squadron Five on board the USS Yorktown. Commissioned as an ensign in January 1945, he was assigned to Composite Squadron 33 at the war's end. He was attached to the Field Command, Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, Albuquerque, N. M., from 1952 to 1955. Selected for permanent commission as a Limited Duty Officer in June 1955, he served in Heavy Attack Squadrons Six (1955 to 1957) and 123 (1959 to 1962) and in Heavy Attack Wing Two (1957 to 1959). He is now V-3 Division Officer in the USS Princeton (LPH-5).