The American Carrier That Lost Her Planes At Pearl Harbor — Then Hunted Down Three Of The Carriers That Did It

June the fourth, nineteen forty-two. Twenty-two minutes past ten in the morning. Lieutenant Clarence Dickinson rolls his Dauntless dive bomber over and points its nose at the biggest ship he has ever seen. Below him, the Japanese carrier Kaga is turning into the wind, her deck crowded with aircraft. Dickinson later wrote that she was enormous, and that the target was utterly satisfying.

Six months earlier, Dickinson had been shot out of the sky over Pearl Harbor. His gunner died in the seat behind him. The ship that launched him that morning was the carrier Enterprise. And the ship below him now was one of the six carriers that had attacked Pearl Harbor.

This is the story of how Enterprise lost her planes on the first morning of the war, and how, six months later, her bombers found three of the carriers that did it. It is told from the pilots' own accounts, the Navy's action reports, and the Japanese records that historians Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully pieced together decades later. It runs from a Sunday morning over Oahu, through six months of hitting back with almost nothing, to one morning at Midway.

Enterprise should have been inside Pearl Harbor that weekend. She had just delivered a squadron of Marine fighters to Wake Island, more than two thousand miles to the west, and she was due back in port. Heavy weather slowed her task force down. At dawn on December the seventh, she was still about two hundred and fifteen nautical miles west of Oahu.

So she did what carriers did when they came home. She sent her aircraft ahead. Eighteen Dauntless dive bombers launched at first light to search the sea in pairs and then land at Ford Island, in the middle of Pearl Harbor.

One of those pilots was Clarence Dickinson. His radioman and rear gunner was William Miller, a North Carolina boy whose four-year enlistment ran out in a few days. Miller was going home to get married. Standing on the wing before takeoff, he told Dickinson something that was bothering him. Of the twenty-one men in his radio school class, he said, he was the only one who had never crashed into the water. Then he added, "I hope you won't get me wet today, sir."

Dickinson told him to stick with him. They would be on the Ford Island runway before he knew it.

The pair flew in toward Oahu around eight in the morning. Dickinson noticed smoke over the island and thought nothing of it. Farmers burned their fields that time of year. Then he saw shell splashes in the water near the shore, and he assumed some Army gun battery had gone mad. Only when he was three minutes from land did he understand. The black puffs filling the sky were anti-aircraft bursts. Pearl Harbor was under attack.

Japanese fighters came out of the smoke. They shot down the plane beside him first. Then five of them settled onto Dickinson's tail. Miller fired back and called out calmly that he had been hit once, but he thought he had got one of them. A Zero fell away burning. Moments later, Miller reported that he had fired all six cans of his ammunition. Then he screamed, and he never answered again.

Fire spread from the fuel tank in Dickinson's left wing. His controls were shot away. At less than a thousand feet, the bomber fell into a spin, and Dickinson jumped. His parachute opened just before he hit a freshly graded dirt road west of Ewa Field. His plane exploded nearby, with Miller still in it.

He was not the only one. Enterprise's search planes arrived over Pearl Harbor in pairs, right into the middle of the attack. They were caught between Japanese fighters and American gunners who were firing at everything in the sky. Seven of the eighteen Dauntlesses were shot down. Eight of her airmen were killed.

That evening it got worse. Enterprise sent six of her Wildcat fighters to land on Oahu. Everyone had been warned they were coming. But when they appeared in the night sky over a harbor still burning, the gunners below opened fire. Three of the fighters were shot down and their pilots killed. A fourth ran out of fuel and its pilot bailed out.

Enterprise had lost her planes to the enemy and to her own side on the same day. And the Japanese had come looking for her too. Torpedo planes from the carrier Hiryū had been sent against the carrier berths on the far side of Ford Island. The berths were empty. The carriers they wanted were at sea.

Six carriers had made the attack. Akagi, the flagship, whose torpedo planes struck the battleships Oklahoma, West Virginia and California. Kaga, the largest. Hiryū, whose high-level bombers are credited with the hit that set off Arizona's forward magazine and killed more than eleven hundred men. Sōryū, Shōkaku and Zuikaku. Together they were the most powerful carrier force in the world, and for the next six months nothing stopped them.

Enterprise came into Pearl Harbor at dusk on December the eighth and saw what was left of the fleet. She took on fuel, bombs and ammunition in seven hours, a job that normally took a full day, and went straight back out. Two days later, her planes caught the Japanese submarine I seventy on the surface north of Hawaii and sank her. It was the first enemy warship sunk by an American ship in the war.

Then came the raids. In February, Enterprise struck Japanese bases in the Marshall Islands. In the weeks after, she hit Wake Island and Marcus Island. In April, she sailed as escort for the carrier Hornet while sixteen Army bombers took off from Hornet's deck to strike Tokyo. These were pinpricks. A few ships damaged, some aircraft destroyed on the ground. But for six months, while the Japanese carriers rolled across the Pacific and into the Indian Ocean, these raids were almost the only blows the United States Navy could land.

In May, American codebreakers worked out where the Japanese carriers were going next. Midway Atoll, about thirteen hundred miles northwest of Pearl Harbor. Four of the six carriers from Pearl Harbor would be there. Akagi, Kaga, Hiryū and Sōryū.

Enterprise sailed on May the twenty-eighth as the flagship of Rear Admiral Raymond Spruance. Her usual admiral, William Halsey, was in the hospital. With her went the carrier Hornet, and two days later the patched-up Yorktown followed.

On the morning of June the fourth, the American carriers found the Japanese first. At about seven o'clock, Enterprise and Hornet began launching everything they had. It took them more than an hour. The air groups set off in pieces, and the pieces did not arrive together.

The torpedo planes got there first. Enterprise's Torpedo Squadron Six, led by Lieutenant Commander Eugene Lindsey, flew slow Devastator torpedo bombers into a sky full of Zero fighters, with no fighter cover of their own. Fourteen went in. Nine were shot down, and another ditched on the way home. Hornet's Torpedo Squadron Eight lost all fifteen of its planes. One man out of thirty survived. Yorktown's torpedo squadron lost ten of its twelve. Not one American torpedo hit a Japanese carrier.

But they did something no one had planned. Every Zero over the Japanese fleet had dived down to sea level to chase them. When the next American planes arrived, there was almost nothing above them.

Those next planes were Enterprise's dive bombers, and they nearly did not arrive at all. They had flown to where the Japanese carriers were supposed to be and found empty ocean. Their fuel was running low. Some would never make it home. The air group commander, Lieutenant Commander Wade McClusky, decided to keep searching anyway. Then he spotted a single Japanese destroyer, the Arashi, racing north at full speed to rejoin her fleet. McClusky followed the line of her wake. It led him straight to the carriers.

Admiral Chester Nimitz later said that McClusky's decision decided the fate of the battle.

At twenty-two minutes past ten, the Enterprise bombers tipped over from nearly three miles up. The plan was for one squadron to take Kaga and the other to take Akagi. In the confusion, both squadrons went for Kaga.

Clarence Dickinson was the ninth man to dive. He described what he saw on the way down. A bomb struck just behind his aiming point, and the flight deck rippled and curled back, exposing the hangar beneath it. Then his own bomb hit right beside the carrier's island.

Kaga took at least three direct hits. One landed on or just in front of her bridge and killed her captain and most of her senior officers. Her hangars were full of fueled and armed aircraft, with bombs and torpedoes stacked beside them. Within minutes she was burning from end to end.

Lieutenant Dick Best, commanding the bombing squadron, saw what had happened. He pulled out of his dive with his two wingmen, judged that Kaga was finished, and turned toward Akagi.

On Akagi's deck that morning was Mitsuo Fuchida, the aviator who had led the attack on Pearl Harbor six months before. He could only watch. Fuchida remembered a lookout screaming "Hell-Divers!" He looked up and saw three black planes plummeting toward the ship.

The first bomb missed. The third exploded in the water close astern and jammed Akagi's rudder. The second, almost certainly Best's, struck the edge of the midships elevator and burst in the hangar among the armed and fueled planes. It was the only bomb to hit Akagi, and it was enough. Within minutes the fires were beyond control. At ten forty-six, Admiral Nagumo, the man who had commanded the Pearl Harbor attack, abandoned his flagship.

At the same moment, Yorktown's dive bombers set Sōryū on fire. In roughly six minutes, three of the four Japanese carriers had been wrecked. Two of those three belonged to Enterprise.

One was left. Hiryū had escaped the morning attack. Her admiral, Tamon Yamaguchi, struck back at once. Two waves of his aircraft found Yorktown and left her crippled and listing. Then a scout plane from Yorktown found Hiryū.

That afternoon, Enterprise launched her last strike of the day. Twenty-four dive bombers. Ten of her own, and fourteen from Yorktown whose carrier could no longer take them back. Dick Best flew again. So did Ensign Norman "Dusty" Kleiss, who had already hit Kaga that morning.

They found Hiryū at about five in the afternoon, guarded by a dozen fighters, and dived. At least four bombs hit her. Kleiss's bomb struck her bow. Best's gunner was certain he saw his pilot's bomb hit amidships. If he was right, Dick Best became the first pilot to bomb two carriers in a single day.

Hiryū burned through the night. Kaga had already gone down that evening, scuttled by Japanese torpedoes. Before dawn, Admiral Yamamoto gave the order to sink Akagi. He told his staff that he had once been her captain, and that he gave the order with heartfelt regret. Hiryū sank at about twelve minutes past nine on the morning of June the fifth. Admiral Yamaguchi and her captain, Tomeo Kaku, chose to go down with her.

The three carriers that Enterprise's bombers struck had carried the men who torpedoed Oklahoma and West Virginia, and the bomb that destroyed Arizona. Six months after Pearl Harbor, all three were at the bottom of the Pacific.

The men who did it paid for it too. Clarence Dickinson pulled out of his dive with almost no fuel left. He nursed his bomber toward the American fleet alone and finally put it down in the sea beside a destroyer. Of all the ships in the Pacific, it was the Phelps, the destroyer he had served on for more than two years before he earned his wings. He and his gunner were pulled from the water. He became the first man to receive three Navy Crosses.

Dick Best never flew for the Navy again. During the long search that morning, his oxygen system had filled his mask with caustic fumes. They woke a dormant tuberculosis in his lungs. Soon after he landed, he was coughing blood. He spent more than a year in hospital and retired from the Navy in nineteen forty-four.

The cost on the other side was heavier still. Eight hundred and eleven men died aboard Kaga. Two hundred and sixty-seven aboard Akagi. Three hundred and ninety-two aboard Hiryū. More than three thousand Japanese died at Midway in all.

For decades, the most famous account of that morning came from Fuchida himself. He wrote that the Japanese carriers were just five minutes from launching their own strike when the dive bombers arrived, and that only bad luck had beaten them. Generations of Americans grew up believing that Midway was won by a few minutes and a lot of luck. When Parshall and Tully went through the Japanese records, they found the story did not hold up. The five fateful minutes were largely Fuchida's invention. Midway was not luck. It was codebreaking, a decision to keep searching on empty tanks, and torpedo crews who died pulling the enemy's fighters down to the sea.

Enterprise went on to fight in almost every major carrier battle of the Pacific War. Three times, Japan announced that she had been sunk. Her crew took to calling her the Grey Ghost. She earned twenty battle stars, more than any other American warship of the Second World War. In nineteen fifty-eight she was sold for scrap.

And William Miller, the gunner who did not want to get wet that Sunday morning, was not forgotten. In nineteen forty-three, the Navy named a new destroyer escort the William C. Miller. She spent the rest of the war in the Pacific, hunting the enemy that had killed him.