Editor’s note: As the
only survivor among the torpedo bomber aircrews who launched from the USS Hornet
(CV-8) during the Battle of Midway, the testimony of Ensign George H. Gay
as to exactly what happened to his squadron and to himself on that day has been
of significant interest to most students of the battle. Gay’s recollections of those events are
found primarily in his book, Sole Survivor, and in various interviews in
which he participated over the years, most notably his lengthy Navy
Department interview in October 1943.
While it may seem futile to dispute the
recollections of a “sole survivor,” that is exactly what has happened on the
Battle of Midway Roundtable to a great extent.
Certain elements of Gay’s account have proven vulnerable when compared
against Japanese records of the battle.
A detailed discussion of some of his more controversial statements can
be found in No Right to Win, pages 198-204.
Review and criticism of Gay’s claims began
in earnest on the Roundtable in 2004.
The matter was summarized in No Right to Win in 2006, but it
surfaced once again late in 2007 when a member offered a possible
rationalization for Gay’s principal claim of seeing three Japanese carriers
burning (which seems unlikely given their location relative to him and to each
other). The discussion continued in
several issues of the Roundtable Forum newsletter, culminating in the
following analysis by Jon Parshall, co-author of Shattered Sword. In this report, Jon brings a level of
detail to the debate far beyond anything previously seen. Whether it settles the matter with finality
is for each reader to decide.
Note that Jon’s narrative is aided by four
new charts that he made especially for this presentation. They are adapted from the charts found in Shattered
Sword. You can open each one in
your browser by clicking the provided link in the text below. (If you use the latest version of either
Internet Explorer or the Firefox browser, right-click each link in order to
open it in a separate tab.)
You might also find it advantageous to
download the charts (they are JPEG files) in order to view them in detail in an
image program.
21 December 2007
From: Jon
Parshall
I sat down this week and tried to take a
rigorous approach to figuring out where Ensign Gay ended up in relation to the
Japanese carrier striking force. My thought was that if I could figure
that out, it would be possible to deduce what he saw, and what portions of his
account might be credible. I
confess that I was initially skeptical at the notion that Gay landed anywhere
near enough to Kido Butai to have seen much of the subsequent
dive-bomber attack. However, having
examined the evidence at hand, I've had to rein in at least some of my
skepticism. When you really start
digging into it, Gay's account is maddeningly difficult to pull apart, and
seems to contain a mixture of fact and fiction. So, I apologize in advance for the length of this, but I want to
lay out my reasoning to the knowledgeable folks on the Roundtable because they
may have other pieces of information that I don't have.
My analysis is mainly based on the
derived course track information we have for Kido Butai. Akagi's course changes and speed are in the
Nagumo Report entries, if you know how to ferret them out. And from those entries it's possible to
roughly deduce what the rest of the carrier formation was doing as well. Those of you who have Shattered Sword
should refer to the map on page 218, because that's the Akagi track
course that I used for my exercise.
I've also included some illustrations based on that map that show the
likely positions of the Japanese carriers during VT-8's attack.
Chart 1: VT-8 begins its attack, 0917
There are a number of things we have to
remember as we embark on this exercise:
One final thing to remember is that we
have very little information about VT-8's attack. Even regarding Gay's own attack, strictly speaking, we have no
evidence about his actions except what he told us. He might not even have attacked at all. I'm not saying that he didn't.
But from a strict evidentiary standpoint we need to remember that we
don't really know if he did or if he didn't. We have no way of checking on that. All we know from the Japanese side is that some of
the American planes did attack. Whether Gay's was one of those
planes is unknown. I don't say this to
besmirch Gay's memory or anything, but as an historian you have to understand
that I'm not supposed to take first-person accounts at face value if I can help
it. I'd like to have some corroborating evidence. But we don't have that.
Given that, we just have to assume that
he did attack and that his attack occurred roughly as he stated. Gay believed that he was the last plane to
attack, and that none of his squadron mates made it close enough to attack
with him. That statement is mildly
contradicted by the Japanese sources.
The attack diagrams in the Nagumo Report indicate that Soryu was
attacked by two torpedo planes (or had to dodge two torpedoes). Common sense would tend to indicate that if
there were a pair of torpedo aircraft that attacked Soryu, that Gay's
was one of these. Likewise, common
sense would also indicate that his was one of the last, if not the last
aircraft to attack and subsequently to be shot down.
The diagram I am including for 0917 [link
above] indicates the rough positions of the Japanese carriers as VT-8 begins
its attack. VT-8 was spotted very far
out, and the CAP apparently started making kills while Waldron, et al were
still well away from the formation.
Just when Gay made his attack on Soryu is open to question. Some of the diagrams in the Nagumo report
indicate that she was attacked at precisely 0930. But the log entries seem to indicate that one or more American
aircraft were still attacking as late as 0936 or so. The Japanese indicate that the last torpedo plane was shot down
at 0942, that is, a minute after VT-6 has been detected coming in from
the south, and the Japanese are already turning to the northwest to begin running
away from them.
The question is, then, where did Gay
likely come down? And depending on the
answer to that first question, what could Gay have seen of the subsequent
events of the morning and afternoon? To
my mind, there are two scenarios that illustrate the spectrum of
possibilities. We'll explore each of
them in turn.
The first scenario posits that Gay
attacks Soryu at 0930 (i.e. relatively early in the sequence of events)
and then gets shot down very soon (i.e. almost immediately) after attacking
her. Prange's rendition of Gay's
attack, as well as Gay's own
account would tend to support the notion that he ditched very
quickly. So, if we assume that (1) the
attack on Soryu came at the earliest time indicated in the Nagumo
Report, and (2) that Gay makes that attack, and (3) that Gay goes down
immediately thereafter, then Gay will drop into the water very near Soryu's
position as of 0930 [see Chart 2]. And
if that's the case, he will have a very difficult time observing the subsequent
activities of the morning.
If you take a look on the map, you can
see a little triangle at 1026. That is where Akagi gets
bombed by Dick Best, almost an hour after George Gay hits the water. Akagi is the closest carrier he could
have seen, because Kaga was located several miles further west of Akagi
at this time. CarDiv 2 (Hiryu
and Soryu) are approximately ten miles further north and running to the
northwest at high speed. So, if Scenario One is correct, the closest
carrier Gay could have seen at 1026 (Akagi) is a minimum of 12
nautical miles (and more likely 13 nm) away at this time. The question then becomes, how far away can
George Gay see Akagi?
The formula for finding one's visual
horizon is d = square root of (13 x h), where h = height of target in meters,
and d = distance in kilometers.
Technically, when you do this sort of thing, you have to calculate the
visual horizon of both targets, and add them together. But George Gay, floating in his life ring,
was essentially at height = zero, so I'm going to ignore his own visual
horizon—it was very limited. What matters here was Akagi's visual
horizon, since she was the tallest thing Gay could have seen. The top of Akagi's gun director on
her island is almost exactly 100 feet, or 31 meters, above the waterline. Grinding the formula, we get d = sqrt of (13
x 31), which is sqrt of essentially 400, which is (conveniently) 20. That's 20 kilometers, or 10.7 nautical (not
statute) miles (remember, my diagram is in nautical miles.)
Likewise, grinding the formula again for Akagi's flight deck (which
was 63 feet above water), you get a visual horizon of 8.5 nautical miles.
What does this mean? It means that if we buy into Scenario
One, at 1026 it is very unlikely that George Gay was able to see
any portion of Akagi at all.
He certainly could not have seen her flight deck. If he could see Akagi, it would only
have been fleeting glimpses of a very small black dot on the horizon where
her island was. Beyond almost any
doubt, with waves and all that, he wouldn't have been able to see any portion
of her.
Likewise, under this scenario, could he
have seen the American aircraft attacking something to the north? I don't know. My gut is to say that 13 nm is a long way away for a guy paddling
in the water to have seen a diving Dauntless going after a target he couldn't
even see. We painted our planes blue for a reason, after all—to avoid
being seen. We know that the cloud
cover was intermittent, and that the Japanese (obviously) didn't see those same
aircraft until they were practically on top of them (except in the case of Hiryu,
which noted American dive-bombers and tried to relay a warning to Kaga
just before the final attack.) Gay had
no idea what to look for, no intimation that the attack was coming, and no
ability to gauge where the Japanese carriers were over the horizon. So if Scenario One is correct, I doubt
that he witnessed any of the particulars of the 1020 attack. Even if he did see some American
dive-bombers, he would not have been able to see what was being bombed.
Scenario Two posits that (1) Gay's attack
occurred later in the sequence of VT-8's attack (i.e. around 0936) and (2) he
managed to stay aloft long enough to reach the outer ring of escorts before
he's shot down at about 0942 (the latest time indicated by the Japanese
records). If this is true, Gay's attack
occurs when Soryu is as shown in Chart 3. The outer ring of escorts is indicated by the edge of the big
light blue circle. This scenario is
easier to analyze, in a sense, because the unknowns are so great that the
answer to where Gay ended up is largely indeterminate. Frankly, with his plane moving 1.6
nm/minute, 6 minutes of flying time could put him up to 10 nautical
miles in any direction from where Soryu was attacked. That's a circle 20 miles across comprising
more than 300 square miles of ocean. He
could be anywhere in there.
However, IF you believe that George Gay
turned away to the north or northwest to try to exit the fleet AND IF he was
able to stay aloft for six minutes before being pancaked, well, that makes
his subsequent story potentially more credible. Given that Soryu was somewhat north and east of Akagi
during the beginning of VT-8's attack, it's conceivable that Gay could have ended
up in the water relatively close to where Akagi and Kaga would be
bombed an hour later. And if that's
true, he could have seen the 1020 dive-bombing attack in some detail.
I'm not enough of a scholar on VT-8’s attack to opine as to how quickly Gay went into the water. Someone like Mark Horan would be better informed on that matter. However, most of what I've seen would tend to indicate that he actually splashed fairly quickly after attacking Soryu, due to his rudder and ailerons being shot away by Zeros. You'll note that his account given during the war says the following:
"...so I
pulled up and went over them, dropped back down next to the water, just after I
passed over the fantail [of Soryu]
and then I heard the torpedo go off. Just a little bit after that, then
anti-aircraft fire hadn't picked up anymore, but the Zeros jumped on me and I
was trying to get out of the fleet.
Before I got away from them, though, the five Zeros dived right down on
me in a line and about the second or third one shot my rudder control and
ailerons out and I pancaked into the ocean."
In other words, he was trying to get out from the center of the fleet, but he didn't make it. And in fact, it would appear that he crashed very shortly after his attack on Soryu. Given that, I would tend to think that Scenario One is the more likely of the two. However, he then goes on to say a mixture of things, some of which ring true for me, others of which don't. The first is his comment on watching one of the carriers steam past him while landing aircraft:
“By the
way, that was an interesting operation.
The Zeros were coming aboard and they'd circle way back behind the ship,
have 1500 or 1000 feet altitude above her and coming straight in on their low
gliding approach, coming in straight and they weren't landing planes nearly as
fast as we do. It seemed to be a slow
operation. I don't know what kind of
arresting gear they had aboard ships; it seemed to stop them pretty well as
soon as they hit the deck; must have had a number of wires because when they
landed in all kinds of different places it would stop right off, but I was a
little bit interested in watching that, but I didn't care to do it at such
close hand.”
The fact that he was able to comment on
the relatively low speed of aircraft recovery is interesting, because
everything I know about Japanese carrier deck ops suggests that he's probably
right on that point—the Japanese were somewhat slower in taking aircraft
aboard, because sometimes they stowed their aircraft below deck serially,
rather than using a deck park and then stowing them below en masse. In the case of CAP Zeros, I think that's
more likely, to be honest—it doesn't take that much longer to stow three
aircraft one at a time. So that
resonates.
This passage is doubly interesting,
though, for another reason. Only two
Japanese aircraft carriers recovered aircraft during the 0930 to 1025 time
frame: Soryu and Akagi. Soryu
brought down three fighters at 0930, i.e. immediately before or during the
climax of VT-8's attack. Akagi
brought down two fighters at 0951, and then a trio at 1010. So, IF Gay actually witnessed recovery
operations, he had to have been looking at either Soryu or Akagi. Given that it seems most likely that Gay
should have gone in the water after 0930, that means he had to have been
looking at Akagi. This is
interesting, though, in that Gay makes it seem like he saw these flight
operations immediately after exiting his sinking aircraft. Yet, by all rights he should have been in
the water by 0942 at the latest, i.e. at least ten minutes prior to Akagi's
0951 recovery. I've noted over the
years that veteran accounts of these sorts of events often get telescoped in
time—that is, the sequence of events seems much shorter than it actually
was. That may be what's going on here.
T hat's speculation, though.
In this same passage, he mentions that
the Japanese carriers...
“...went right by me about 500 yards to
the west of me and the cruiser that was with her was only a thousand yards,
screen and I presume, went by about 500 yards to the east of me headed north
and they circled back.”
At first glance, that doesn't ring
true, because the course information we have indicates clearly that the
Japanese force didn't do any "circling back" to the south. From the time of VT-6’s attack at 0940 up
until the end, all the carriers were headed consistently north-ish: either NW
away from VT-6, then NE to close the enemy at around 1000, then NW again at
1010 to avoid VT-3. I am much more inclined to rely on the Japanese
information regarding their ship movements than what George Gay thought he saw
in the water—these were, after all, Japanese ships, and their records must be
given precedence.
The only thing I can figure here is
that Gay was close enough to see Kido Butai make a turn
of some sort, and then interpreted that as "circling
back." If you look at the course track I've provided [Chart 3], if I
had to make a guess, and IF we believe Scenario Two (which I'm still up in the
air about), I would say he might have been sitting near the 1010 marker on
Akagi's course track. Maybe he's
a bit east of there. We know Akagi
turned briefly into the wind at 1010 to recover three fighters (which might
also have been the recovery operation that Gay witnessed, although his own
account would make the 0951 recovery seem more likely) and then immediately
turned around and ran to the NW to avoid VT-3’s incoming attack. That might appear to Gay as if they were
circling back, but I don't know.
His later details of the burning carriers
are interesting:
“The carriers during the day resembled a
very large oil field fire, if you've ever seen one. The fire coming out of the forward and aft end of the ship looked
like a blow torch, just roaring white flame and the oil burning, the crude oil,
boil up, I don't know how high, and just billowing big red flames belch out of
this black smoke. The dive bombers told
me they saw this smoke at 18,000 feet that day and really did make a nice fire
and they'd burn for awhile and blow up for awhile and I was sitting in the
water hollering ‘Hooray, Hooray.’ I was
in a funny position to be cheering for the thing, but I was really tickled to
see the dive bombers really pasting them even though they were in pretty bad
shape."
Being from
Texas, Gay may well have seen some oil field fires. And that corroborates
pretty well with what the carriers would have looked like. If you've ever seen footage of aviation
gasoline fires, that's what they look like—incredibly dense, choking black
smoke with red fires seemingly buried within.
Likewise, we also know that the fires aboard the Japanese carriers were
pretty well burned out by the late afternoon.
Everything we know about how big avgas fires on carriers go (taken from
the damage analyses of Princeton and Franklin, for instance)
suggests that most of the larger ordnance would have "cooked off"
within a one to four hour window of time from the initial attack. Within a few hours the avgas would be pretty
much spent as well. This left the fires
feeding on secondary materials within the ships—papers, cooking oil, bedding,
furniture, and so on, meaning that the fires would most likely have diminished
in apparent intensity to an observer like Gay.
And yet,
later in the same passage, we find this:
“...the larger one close to me there, the Akagi,
sank just after dark, the cruisers raked her with fire, finished her off...”
This is untrue,
as Akagi didn't sink until the following morning, and the sources we
have are universal that no gunfire was involved. Likewise:
“... the other two, the Kaga and
the Soryu, burned all night, but they didn't necessarily explode. As a matter of fact, the Japs were there
trying to put the fires out. I could
seem them playing around, searchlights, picking up people and trying, I think
they were trying to salvage these two ships; but the explosions that I heard
the next morning turned out to be our submarines putting torpedoes into these
things and they finished them off. That
was early the next morning just as dawn was cracking.”
There are a number of problems with
this. Even if we believe that Scenario
Two is what happened, I'm fairly confident that the only carrier Gay would
have been in a position to observe after the dive-bomber attack would have been
Akagi. And even Akagi
would have ended up pretty far away from Gay after the attack.
For the moment, let's accept Scenario Two
and decide to deposit Gay in the water somewhere near (and maybe a bit east of)
Akagi's 1010 marker, so that he gets a good look at Akagi
recovering her final shotai of fighters at 1010. I've included a map to show this hypothesis
[Chart 5]. The orange dot shows where
we'll say Gay went down. It's about
7.5nm NW of where he attacked Soryu (and about 5 minutes flying
time). This is absolutely the farthest
point he could have to, ditched, and then still have been in a position to
observe aircraft recovery operations aboard any Japanese carrier from
close at hand. The purple lines show
the distance outward from Gay's position in the water in nautical
miles. The Japanese carriers are marked
in green to show where they were during Gay's attack on Soryu at 0936 or
so. They are marked in blue to indicate
their positions at the beginning of the 1020 dive bomber attack. They are marked in red to indicate
where Akagi, Kaga, and Soryu came to a stopping point.
If we run with this hypothesis,
then Gay would have been about four miles southeast of where Akagi gets
bombed, and could certainly have witnessed the attack on her. After she's
bombed, though, she heads N/NE at 24 knots for another twenty minutes before
her rudder gives out at 1042. That
means she would have wound up about 7-8 nautical miles due north of Gay
before she goes dead in the water. From
there she would have been almost hull down.
We can see her flight deck from a distance of 8.5 nm, you'll
recall. So he could probably have seen
her flight deck, barely. He would have
seen her fires. But he would not have
been able to see much else in the way of any details.
As for the other two carriers, we know
that Kaga was probably initially bombed at least eight miles to the
W-NW of Akagi's 1010 marker.
After that, she limped off to the north-northwest for two and
a half hours before finally going dead in the water around 1:00PM. She was making perhaps 2-3 knots during that
time. So she probably ended up five to
seven miles or so away from where she was attacked—but a minimum of five. That means that she probably would have been
well away to the NW from where Gay is—probably 12-13 nm at minimum. If that's true, Kaga is over the
horizon from Gay.
Likewise, when she gets hit at 1025, Soryu
was probably as much as ten miles further N-NE of Akagi. Soryu
goes dead in the water almost immediately after being bombed and drifts to a
stop, perhaps heading west. That means
that even if Gay had managed to make it to Akagi's 1010 marker (i.e. about 10
nm NW of where he attacked Soryu), Soryu still would
probably have been bombed some 13 miles beyond where he splashed
down, and again would be over the horizon to a man floating in the water.
In my opinion, the most Gay would
have seen of either Kaga or Soryu after the attack would have
been smoke columns. In other words,
even if we accept Scenario Two and then put Gay in an advantageous position to
observe Akagi's flight operations, this whole business of Gay watching
salvage operations and whatnot aboard multiple Japanese carriers, particularly
at night, is, in my opinion, complete nonsense. He couldn't have been anywhere near any of the ships, and was
over the horizon from at least two of them.
Conversely, if he was far enough north to
have watched the carriers fight their fires during the afternoon (i.e. he
somehow made it somewhere in the vicinity of Akagi's final stopping
point at 1042), then he absolutely would not have been able to witness
Akagi recovering aircraft eight miles south of him at 1010. Not only that, but he would have had to fly
about 16 nm from the point where he attacked Soryu, or 10 minutes flight
time. That seems too long to me. Not only that, but the details of the
Japanese carrier recovering aircraft ring the truest of any elements of his
account. If I had to accept any
elements of his account, it would be those recovery details, meaning he had to
be close to either Akagi's 0951 or 1010 positions. Similarly, as for the sinking details Gay
relates to us, Kaga and Soryu were both scuttled with torpedoes,
not gunfire, and they were both scuttled around sunset on the 4th. Akagi, of course, didn't go down
until the following morning. So this
whole preceding passage of Gay's really puts me off and makes me think he
either didn't see either the afternoon's fire-fighting operations or the
sinking details of the carriers, or he was simply making stuff up based on
accounts he might have read immediately after the battle.
While on the surface Gay's account seems
fairly straightforward and internally consistent from what one might call a
layperson's point of view, it is actually very confusing and internally
inconsistent, even for a fairly knowledgeable historian trying to pick it apart
and figure out where he must have been sitting to see Details X, Y, and Z. I personally don't think Gay saw everything
he says he saw. I think it's possible he may have made it some
distance to the north away from Soryu before splashing, and thereafter
witnessed some elements of the dive-bomber attack. He may also have been able to see Akagi burning some
miles away. But I don't think he could have seen everything he claims to
have seen. And I think that some of his
details could have been garnered from post-battle accounts. In other
words, his account is a decidedly mixed bag, and not the sort of thing a
historian should accept at face value—dramatic though it is.
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