“Can we fly?” Doolittle asked.
Haskins’s voice trembled. “God, Colonel, Floyd’s all over the place. It’s awful.”
“But can we fly?” Doolittle repeated.
Haskins paused. This time his voice was a little firmer. “Yes, if you don’t mind a large hole in the fuselage. I would recommend flying slowly and at low altitude.”
“Okay,” Doolittle said gently, “now you take care of the wounded as best you can.”
“Yes, sir.”
Doolittle ordered his other surviving plane to head directly back to California. She too had been hit a number of times, and he wondered if she would make it. Then he gained altitude for a look at the damage they’d wrought and was dismayed. There were no large fires, and no explosions. There were several small ones, but they looked like they could be contained. He may have added a little to what damage had been done earlier, but it was hard to tell.
It was bravely done, he thought, but was it worth it? Assuming he made it home, he would get his brigadier’s star, but for what? He’d slapped the Japs across the face, but that was all.
“For Christ’s sake,” said Haskins through the intercom. “Will you look at that?”
Doolittle turned and looked out over the harbor. Meagher’s plane had arrived and was beginning its run. But he was high, much too high.
Without the others to guide him, Meagher had flown at a higher altitude than planned. This, he’d hoped, would make it easier to find the islands by widening his scope of vision. That and good navigation had worked. Oahu was dead ahead.
As he put the plane in a gentle dive toward optimum bombing height, he noted the absence of serious smoke and fire, the total lack of Japanese aircraft and antiaircraft fire. For a fleeting second he wondered if his was the first plane, but then he saw a few small fires burning and knew that the others had preceded him. They didn’t appear to have accomplished a lot, he thought.
But he wasn’t late by much, he exulted. And all the Jap gunners were tracking the two flying boats he could now see off in the distance. Nobody was looking for Tail-end Charlie.
“Pick a target,” he yelled at Tomanelli.
His copilot swallowed and tried to control his terror. The entire Jap navy was on review before them. “That carrier on the move,” he said. “Its decks are full of planes.”
“Good thinking,” Meagher responded. Most of the others had only a few planes on their decks, while this one was loaded for bear.
Meagher lined up his plane. He would cross the carrier on a stern-to-bow run and then fly out over the ocean and to safety.
Then the Jap gunners saw them and opened fire. The plane shuddered from minor hits and near misses as the Japanese frantically tried to get them in their sights.
Meagher was just about to order bombs away when a four-inch shell from a destroyer ripped through the front of the pilot’s cabin and blew him to bloody pieces before it exited the top of the plane.
Tomanelli was knocked unconscious by the blast and the impact of Meagher’s body parts striking him. The copilot’s body slumped forward on the controls, and the plane dropped more sharply as it rapidly approached the carrier.
At first, it looked like the crippled flying boat would pass over the Akagi, but then it dropped more quickly and fell onto the flight deck, about a hundred feet from the stern. To the astonished Japanese, it looked like the flying boat had attempted a landing on the carrier.
Still moving forward, the massive Boeing plowed through the parked planes, knocking several of them overboard like they were toys. The flying boat was slowed by the wreckage and finally stopped as its massive wing collided with the carrier’s superstructure. For a second, it sat there, a dead plane on the flight deck of a Japanese carrier. Then the fuel exploded, and, an instant later, that set off the bombs still in its hull. The crash landing on the Akagi had ruptured fuel tanks on the Japanese planes, and they too exploded almost immediately. In seconds, the carrier’s entire flight deck and superstructure were engulfed in a cloud of flames that was punctuated by explosions as Japanese bombs and shells were lit off.
The Akagi was now a moving torch, with torrents of flame dripping down her sides and crewmen hurling themselves off her and into the safety of the harbor. Without apparent guidance, she continued inexorably on in the last direction that had been ordered. There was no one alive on her decks or on the bridge to order a change of course as she headed toward the side of the channel.
The officers and men in the Monkfish had spent a restless night. The explosions in the harbor resonated through the water and caused the sub to vibrate. Despite the obvious danger, Lieutenant Commander Fargo had recognized the necessity to keep the air changed and the electric engines charged. Thus, they had spent a good deal of the night with the conning tower barely visible.
The sub’s crew were gaunt, unshaven, and filthy, and those not actually on duty were condemned to spend their time in their bunks as a means of conserving energy and oxygen.
While on the surface, they caught the tail end of the fireworks display that had marked Magruder’s attack on the fleet. By the time Doolittle’s planes had arrived, the sub was snugly back under the water. Fargo was confident that Japanese radar was crummy and their sonar even worse, but there was nothing wrong with their eyeballs.
Now, as gunfire reverberated for the second time, the men were at their battle stations, where they tried to pretend they weren’t scared to death.
“This is it,” Fargo proclaimed unnecessarily. Even the village idiot knew that tonight was the reason they’d waited so long in the Pearl Harbor channel.
His chief of boats announced that he thought he could hear screws approaching through the clutter. Fargo accepted the assessment. It was said that the chief could hear a mouse pissing ten miles away. If Flannery said a ship was coming, it was coming.
Fargo peered through the binoculars at where the channel turned slightly. At first there was nothing, and then the bulk of a large ship came into view.
“Carrier,” he said, and then incredulously, “and she’s burning. Oh my God.”
The ship that filled his view was aflame from bow to stern, and he saw people jumping off the crippled vessel from wherever they could. For a moment Fargo wondered, if this ship was already badly damaged, should he wait for another one?
Then he realized that the carrier was out of control. With a lurch, the ship ground into the side of the channel and began to swing away as her screws continued to churn up the water. In a few seconds, she would be broadside to him, and Fargo fully understood what he had to do.
“Fire one,” he ordered, and the sub vibrated as the torpedo sped on its way. It was virtually point-blank range. The enemy ship was so close, there had been only the need to point the sub and shoot. Nor had there been any thought of firing under the ship and using her magnetic field to detonate the torpedoes. These would be impact hits. “Fire two. Fire three. Fire four.”
The men of the Monkfish held their breath and waited for Fargo’s report. Seconds passed, and there was nothing. The first torpedo had been a dud.
“Damn it,” snarled Fargo. As he said it, the second torpedo struck the side of the carrier and exploded, sending a column of water high above the burning flight deck, but not as high as the flames that billowed from it.
Torpedoes three and four exploded seconds later, and the crew exulted. While the forward tubes were being reloaded, Fargo carefully turned the ship around so that the stern tubes faced the stricken carrier. These were fired, and both exploded against the hull of the dying carrier.