Wade McClusky was in charge of a squadron of 32 dive-bombers on June 4, 1942, and they had been given the mission to strike the aircraft carriers of the Imperial Japanese Navy. The fleet, however, was not where it was expected to be.
Wade McClusky, a US Navy dive-bomber pilot, changed the outcome of the Battle of Midway on June 4, 1942, proving himself as one of the country’s best combat leaders and pilots.
McClusky was in charge of a squadron of 32 dive-bombers at 10 a.m. that morning with orders to strike the aircraft carriers of the Imperial Japanese Navy. However, the fleet was not at the expected location. McClusky instead noticed the Japanese destroyer Arashi heading northeast as his air group’s fuel ran low. He made the deliberate choice to defy orders and follow the Arashi because he assumed she must be trailing the main fleet.
According to David Rigby in his book Wade McClusky and the Battle of Midway, when McClusky discovered that the interception coordinates he had been given were incorrect, he did not break the radio silence to seek guidance. This was fortunate because Adm Spruance and his staff on the Enterprise were still unaware of the change in the course made by Adm Nagumo’s carrier striking force, which had led the Japanese fleet away from the interception point in a nor’easter.
McClusky was nearly certain to discover the enemy on his own by the time Jim Gray, who had taken over McClusky’s former position as the commander of Fighting Six, very belatedly radioed in a contact report at roughly 10:00 am. Gray also appears to have simply said in his contact report that he was departing the area around the enemy fleet because of a fuel problem. It appears that Gray omitted to provide Nagumo’s coordinates. Because there was a remote possibility that Nagumo might have turned west or that the Japanese approach track into Midway was further west than he had anticipated, McClusky continued southwest for an additional 15 minutes after the planned interception position.
One of the most crucial choices made by an American military leader during World War 2 came next. Wade McClusky now exhibited that sixth sense, the intuition that many great military leaders possess to have a gut feeling about what the enemy was truly doing, even when the enemy was not in sight. In this instance, the gut feeling proved to be dead-on accurate. It would have been reasonable to assume that the Japanese were moving more quickly than anticipated, had passed McClusky, and were now heading south. It was counterintuitive but absolutely true that McClusky was certain that this was not the case.
He felt the truth: that Nagumo had been forced to alter his course due to repeated American air strikes from Midway-based aircraft and carrier-based torpedo planes as well as a Japanese cruiser floatplane spotting one of the American task forces. The early adjustments were evasive maneuvers meant to dodge bombs and torpedoes dropped by American aircraft engaged in combat. Nagumo’s movement southeast was hindered by these maneuvers.
In order to get near the American surface ships and make a strike against them with his own dive-bombers and torpedo planes, Nagumo turned 90 degrees to port and headed northeast at 9:17 a.m. While McClusky was unsure of all the details at the time, he was convinced that the Japanese had been held up for some reason and that the Kido Butai carriers were to the north of him.
McClusky himself never thought it was intuition or guesswork that guided him during the battle. After the war, he always bristled if he read an account of the Battle of Midway that claimed that he had made a lucky guess in turning north. There was no guesswork involved, Wade assured his family. Wade McClusky, according to Phil McClusky, always said that if the Japanese carriers had gotten past the interception point and had been to the south, out to McClusky’s left, “he would have heard about it” on the few occasions the fight was brought up in conversation.
He was apparently referring to the fact that he knew that Midway-based Catalina PBY flying boats were out on patrol and that they would have reported any large body of ships nearing the atoll.
His instincts paid off, though, and the bombers were directed straight at the Japanese carriers Kaga and Akagi, which they rapidly sank. A squadron from Yorktown arrived at the same moment and bombed the Soryu, another carrier. Three of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s main carriers were destroyed in a matter of minutes, seriously weakening it.
At 10 am on Jun. 4, 1942, after six months of the war, the U.S. was losing the war in the Pacific. Half an hour later, at 10.30 am, they were winning.
Wade McClusky and the Battle of Midway is published by Osprey Publishing and is available to order here.
Photo by U.S. Navy
