Prior to the battle of Midway on June 4th, 1942, Torpedo Squadron Eight included 15 Douglas Devastators which would be manned by 30 men, pilots and crew, and 6 Grumman Avengers which would be manned by 18 men, pilots and crew. The Devastators would fly off the carrier Hornet, and the Avengers would fly off the island of Midway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Northwest of Midway Atoll Torpedo Eight Detachment 0655<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The six Avengers of Torpedo Eight flew northwest across an empty cobalt sea. Lieutenant Fieberling never deviated from his base course of 320 degrees.They remained at an altitude of four thousand feet. The Marine back at Midway had said the reported distance to the enemy fleet was one hundred fifty miles. At their cruising speed of one hundred sixty knots, they should have sighted it already. Maybe someone had made a mistake. From his position at the far left of the formation Bert suddenly spotted the wake of a ship dead ahead of him. the ship was moving southeast, almost directly toward them. Bert had studied the recognition profiles of Japanese warships. This was no warship. It looked more like a transport. A piece of cake<\/em>, he thought. Then he looked past the transport to the northeast. Japanese warships covered the whole expanse of ocean as far as he could see. Bert had never seen a fleet before, not even an American one. This looked like the whole goddamned Japanese navy. A battleship was in the first group. The damn thing was so huge it couldn’t be anything else. Beyond the battleship was a big aircraft carrier. A second carrier was steaming along right beside it. They were surrounded by a phalanx of cruisers and destroyers. Fieberling had led them straight to the enemy. Six torpedo planes against the whole Japanese striking force. “Enemy fighters!” Jay Manning called out on the intercom from his turret gun. Suddenly the Zeroes were all around them, too many to count. Bert watched them hurtling past from every direction, high and low. They were astonishingly manueverable, and so many that they seemed to get in each other’s way. A Zero skidded into his field of fire as it attacked Fieberling’s Avenger. Bert pressed the firing button on his thirty-caliber nose gun. It didn’t fire. He tried again. Nothing happened. Behind him, he heard Jay Manning open fire with his fifty-caliber machine gun, raking the first flight of Zeroes as they made darting passes between the six torpedo planes. Underneath the tail, Harry Ferrier clutched the hand grips on the thirty-caliber tunnel gun and waited for a target. Through the Plexiglas window, he could see Zeroes flying above and below the three Avengers behind them, firing quick bursts as they sped into range. Bullets started to hit the metal skin of the fuselage on both sides of him. As Harry waited for a chance to fire, his left hand was knocked free from the machine gun. The grazing bullet felt like a red-hot iron on his wrist. Ignoring the pain, he gripped the handle again. A few seconds later, Jay Manning stopped firing up in the turret. Harry turned around to glance back up into the fuselage. The automatic turret had stowed itself, which always happens when the gunner’s hands were no longer gripping the machine gun. A”dead man’s switch” automatically brought the turret gun to its position facing aft, from which it offered the least air resistance. Jay was hanging limp in his safety harness. A twenty millimeter cannon round had hit him squarely in the chest and blown him apart. Until Harry saw the crimson river flowing down into the radio compartment, he had no idea how much blood there was in a man’s body. Through the tiny side window, he watched another plane overtaking and passing them. It was on fire, It happened so fast he had no way of knowing whether it was a Zero or one of the Avengers. Bert watched Langdon Fieberling put his nose over and begin to dive. Opening his own throttle to full power, Bert went after him. Still in tight formation, the Avengers hurtled downward at three hundred miles an hour toward the surface of the sea. As if they were part of the American formation, the Japanese Zeroes pursued them all the way down. Fieberling pulled out of the screaming dive at two hundred feet and headed directly for the first of the Japanese carriers. When he opened his bomb bay doors, the rest of them did, too. It cut down on speed, but in the event of a hydraulic failure , they would still be able to drop their torpedoes. Bert was on the left, Charlie on the right. Glancing back, Bert saw that the other three were still in the same tight formation behind them. Lieutenant Commander Waldron would have been proud. Then the air was filled with tracer bullets again, constant flashes, and Bert’s plane started taking more hits from the maneuvering Zeroes. He could feel the dull thump of machine gun bullets slamming into the armor plating that protected his back. A cannon shell exploded behind the cockpit and shrapnel suddenly burst through the side of the windshield. He felt a fierce rush of air swirl around his face and blood began spurting from his neck, quickly coating the instrument panel with a shiny red film. A Zero slid into attack position behind him again, and the pilot fired a long burst with his machine guns. Kneeling backwards in the tunnel, Harry was about to fire at the Zero when the tail wheel of the Avenger dropped in front of him, blocking his field of fire and making his gun useless. He immediately realized that the plane’s hydraulic system had been shot out, causing the wheel to drop. Harry could hear the bullets from the Zero behind them tearing through the metal skin of the tail compartment. He felt a hot stab of pain in his head, and fell away. Although Bert was holding the control stick steady, the Avenger began to drop out of the formation. He attempted to regain altitude by pulling back on the control stick, but it was limp in his hand. The cables to the elevator controls had obviously been shot away. A spread of machine gun bullets shattered his instrument panel, and one more red ball of fire burst on his left wing. They were going down. With his hydraulics gone and the elevator cables severed, there was no way the plane could stay up in the air. Veering out of formation, he took a quick glimpse back at the others. They were all still there, Charlie Branson, Ozzie Gaynier, Darrel, and Vic. Lieutenant Fieberling was leading them straight toward the nearest carrier.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n Excerpted from “A DAWN LIKE THUNDER”, author Robert J. Mrazek. Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, Hachette Book Group. 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To be continued: Islander.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Prior to the battle of Midway on June 4th, 1942, Torpedo Squadron Eight included 15 Douglas Devastators which would be manned by 30 men, pilots and crew, and 6 Grumman Avengers which would be manned by 18 men, pilots and crew. 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