4 miles above the Pacific, Lieutenant Commander Richard Best pushed his Dauntless into a near vertical dive.
Below him, a Japanese carrier turned hard, her deck crawling with aircraft.
His squadron had just peeled away toward the wrong target.
He was alone now, one pilot, one bomb.
And in the chaos of this single morning, he would do something no American aviator had ever done before or would ever do again.
The morning of June 4th, 1942 began in darkness.
Aboard the aircraft carrier Enterprise, men moved through passageways lit by dim red bulbs.
The ship rolled gently beneath them, cutting through swells that caught the first gray hint of dawn somewhere beyond the eastern horizon.
In the ready rooms, pilots sat in leather chairs bolted to the deck, their faces drawn, their flight suits already damp with the humid Pacific air.
They had been waiting for this moment for 6 months.
Since December 7th, 1941, the United States Navy had absorbed blow after blow.
Pearl Harbor, Wake Island, the fall of the Philippines.
The Japanese advance had seemed unstoppable.
A wave rolling across the Pacific with terrifying momentum.
American carriers had struck back where they could.
Raids on the Marshals, the dittle attack on Tokyo.
But these were pin pricks against an empire that had swallowed half an ocean.
Now intelligence had delivered something precious.
Code breakers at station Hypo in Hawaii had pieced together fragments of intercepted Japanese radio traffic.
They knew the enemy was coming.
They knew where and they knew roughly when.
Midway at two small islands at the northwestern end of the Hawaiian chain.
a refueling station, an airirst strip, a distant outpost that if captured would extend Japanese reach toward Hawaii itself.
The enemy planned to seize it and in doing so draw out what remained of the American carrier fleet for destruction.
Admiral Chester Nimttz had decided to accept the invitation on his own terms.
Three American carriers now waited northeast of Midway, hidden beyond the horizon, their presence unknown to the approaching Japanese Armada.
Enterprise and Hornet sailed together as Task Force 16 under Rear Admiral Raymond Spruent.
Yorktown, still bearing wounds from the Battle of the Coral Sea, had been patched together in a miraculous 72 hours at Pearl Harbor and now steamed as task force.
17 under Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher.
Against them came four Japanese fleet carriers, Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiru, veterans of Pearl Harbor, the Indian Ocean, and a halfozen victories.
Their air groupoups were experienced, confident, and numerous.
Their escorting battleships, cruisers, and destroyers formed a screen of steel and fire that had never been penetrated.
The Americans were outnumbered, outgunned, operating at the edge of their fuel and their endurance.
But they had surprise.
In the ready room of bombing squadron 6, the men listened to the final briefing.
Lieutenant Commander Richard Best sat among them, though he did not sit still.
As commander of VB6, he was responsible for 18 SBD dauntless dive bombers and the men who flew them.
He had checked the charts, reviewed the expected positions, calculated fuel consumption and attack angles until the numbers lived behind his eyes.
The target was simple to describe and almost impossible to reach.
Four Japanese carriers somewhere northwest of Midway, protected by fighters and anti-aircraft guns and the vast indifference of the Pacific Ocean.
The attack would require flying more than 150 m over open water, finding the enemy fleet, diving through defensive fire, releasing bombs, and then somehow making it back to a ship that would itself be moving, evading, perhaps fighting for its own survival.
The mathematics of fuel were unforgiving.
The SBD Dauntless had a combat radius that left little margin for error.
If the Japanese were not where intelligence predicted, if the flight took longer than expected, if battle damage slowed the return, pilots would simply run out of fuel over empty ocean.
There would be no rescue.
The Pacific was too vast, the distances too great, the resources too thin.
Every man in that ready room understood the stakes.
Some wrote letters home that morning, sealing them in envelopes to be delivered only if they did not return.
Others prayed or pretended not to.
A few managed to eat breakfast.
At 0500, the first search planes launched from midway itself.
PBY Catalinas lumbering into the pre-dawn darkness to find the enemy fleet.
An hour later, one of them did.
The contact report crackled across radio frequencies picked up by American ships and commanders who had been waiting, planning, hoping.
The Japanese carriers had been found, but the situation was already more complicated than anyone had anticipated.
The enemy fleet was not where it was supposed to be.
The position reported placed it closer to Midway than expected, and the carriers appeared to be launching an attack against the atole itself.
Japanese aircraft were already in the air headed for the American base.
Aboard Enterprise, Admiral Spruent faced a decision that would define the battle.
Launch now while the Japanese were occupied with Midway and accept that his aircraft would be operating at extreme range or wait for better information, better positioning and risk losing the element of surprise.
Spruent chose to launch.
The order went out at 0700.
Enterprise and Hornet would send everything they had.
Dive bombers, torpedo planes, fighters in a masked strike against the Japanese carriers.
The attack would be uncoordinated.
The squadrons launching at different times and flying at different speeds.
But there was no time for elegance.
The window of opportunity was measured in hours, perhaps minutes.
On the flight deck of Enterprise, the SBDs of Bombing Squadron 6 were already spotted, their engines turning over, their propellers catching the morning light.
Richard Best climbed into his cockpit and ran through his checklist with the automatic precision of a man who had done this hundreds of times.
His rear seat gunner, aviation radio man first class James Murray, settled into his position behind the pilot, checking his twin 30 caliber machine guns and the radio equipment that would be their only link to the ship.
The Dauntless was not a glamorous aircraft.
It was slow by fighter standards with a maximum speed barely exceeding 250 mph.
Its fixed landing gear created drag that more modern designs had eliminated.
Its cockpit was cramped, its instruments basic, its armor minimal, but it could dive.
The SBD had been designed around a single capability, the ability to plunge from high altitude in a near vertical attack, holding steady through forces that would tear apart lesser aircraft and deliver a bomb with precision that level bombing could never match.
Its perforated dive brakes, split flaps that opened like petals on the trailing edge of each wing, allowed it to control its descent, to aim not just at a ship, but at a specific point on that ship’s deck.
In the hands of a skilled pilot, the Dauntless was a scalpel.
Richard Best was such a pilot.
He had been flying dive bombers since the late 1930s, refining his technique through countless practice runs, endless repetitions of the same punishing maneuver.
He knew exactly how the aircraft behaved at the edge of its envelope, how the controls stiffened in a dive, how the altimeter unwound with sickening speed, how the target grew from a speck to a shape to a ship to a deck that filled the entire world.
At 0752, Enterprise turned into the wind and began launching aircraft.
The SBDs rolled down the deck one by one, heavy with fuel and ordinance.
their engines straining against gravity and momentum until they clawed into the air and banked away to join the growing formation.
Best led his squadron into the morning sky, climbing toward the assembly altitude, watching as the other aircraft found their places in the formation.
Below, Enterprise shrank to a gray sliver against the blue, then disappeared entirely as the squadron turned northwest toward the enemy.
They flew for more than an hour.
The Pacific stretched beneath them, endless and empty, offering no landmarks, no reference points, nothing but the compass heading and the calculations that said the Japanese fleet should be somewhere ahead.
The sun climbed higher, burning away the morning haze, turning the ocean into a sheet of hammered silver that hurt the eyes.
Fuel gauges crept downward.
Pilots watched them.
did the mental arithmetic, tried not to think about what the numbers meant, and then just past 1000, they found the enemy, or rather they found part of the enemy.
The Japanese fleet was not concentrated as expected, but scattered across miles of ocean, the carriers maneuvering independently to recover their own aircraft returning from the midway strike.
Smoke rose from at least one ship.
damage from an earlier attack by Midway based aircraft that had been brave and costly and ultimately ineffective.
Best studied the scene below trying to make sense of the chaos.
He could see carriers, multiple carriers, but which was which at 20,000 ft with the sun in his eyes and the ships twisting through their wakes.
Identification was nearly impossible.
He was looking for targets, priorities, a sequence of attack that would maximize damage and minimize exposure.
The doctrine was clear.
Scouting squadron 6, the other SBD unit from Enterprise, would take the nearest carrier.
Bombing squadron 6 would take the next one.
Divide the targets, concentrate the attacks, overwhelm the defenses.
But doctrine dissolved the moment Lieutenant Commander Clarence Wade McCcluskey, leading the entire Enterprise Air Group pushed over into his dive.
Best watched in disbelief as Mccclusk’s aircraft plunged toward the nearest carrier.
The same carrier that VSS6 was already attacking.
The two squadrons were converging on a single target, leaving the other carriers untouched, splitting their concentrated firepower in a way that violated every principle of coordinated attack.
In that instant, Richard Best made a decision that would change the course of the battle.
He pulled his section out of the dive.
Three aircraft, his own and two wingmen, separated from the formation, fighting the momentum of their descent, clawing back altitude while the rest of VB6 followed McCcluskey down toward KGA.
Best had seen another carrier further away, turning hard to escape.
No one was attacking her.
No one was even heading for her.
He would.
Best radioed his wingmen, told them they were changing targets.
told them to follow him.
Then he pushed his dauntless over into a dive aimed not at Kaga but at Akagi, the flagship of the Japanese carrier striking force, the ship carrying Vice Admiral Tuichi Nagumo himself.
The dive lasted seconds that felt like hours.
Akagi filled his gunsite, growing larger with every heartbeat, her deck crowded with aircraft that had just landed from the midway strike.
Her fuel lines exposed, her magazines open as crews rearmed for the next mission.
The ship was a bomb waiting for a spark.
Best held steady, fighting the G-forces, watching his altimeter spin, waiting for the precise moment when geometry and physics and training all aligned into a single point of release.
He toggled the bomb release at approximately 1,500 ft, felt the dauntless lurch as the thousand-p weapon separated, then pulled hard on the stick to escape the blast radius.
The G forces crushed him into his seat, grayed his vision, squeezed the air from his lungs.
Behind him, his bomb fell.
It struck Akagi’s flight deck amidst the parked aircraft.
The exposed ordinance, the volatile fuel.
The explosion was catastrophic.
Fire erupted instantly, spreading through the hangar deck, igniting torpedoes and bombs that had been staged for loading.
Secondary explosions ripped through the ship, each one feeding the next in a chain reaction of destruction.
By the time best pulled his dauntless level and looked back, a kagi was burning from stem to stern.
One carrier down, but the battle was not over.
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To understand what Richard Best did on June 4th, 1942, it is necessary to understand who he was before that morning and why he was the kind of pilot who could make a split-second decision that changed a battle while diving at terminal velocity toward a ship trying to kill him.
He was born in Bayon, New Jersey in 1910, the son of a transit company employee.
There was nothing particularly military about his upbringing.
No family tradition of naval service.
No childhood fascination with ships or aircraft that destined him for the cockpit of a dive bomber.
He was simply a young man of the depression era, intelligent and restless, looking for a path that offered both stability and purpose.
The Naval Academy at Annapapolis provided both.
Best entered in 1928, one of roughly 400 young men who began the grueling 4-year program that would transform them into naval officers.
The curriculum was demanding engineering, navigation, seammanship, leadership, the whole vast body of knowledge required to command vessels that were becoming ever more complex.
The discipline was absolute.
The expectations were high.
He graduated in 1932, commissioned as an enen, and began the rotation of shipboard duties that every new officer experienced.
He served on battleships and cruisers, learned the rhythms of naval life, developed the professional competence expected of a junior officer.
But it was aviation that captured him.
The 1930s were a transitional era for naval air power.
Aircraft carriers were still viewed by many senior officers as auxiliary vessels, useful for scouting and perhaps harassing enemy formations, but not capable of decisive independent action.
The battleship remained supreme in doctrine and budget and prestige.
Yet, a younger generation of aviators was beginning to understand something different.
They saw that the aircraft carrier represented a new kind of weapon, one that could project power across hundreds of miles, strike without warning, and disappear before a response could be mounted.
They saw that dive bombing, in particular, offered accuracy that horizontal bombing from high altitude could never achieve.
Best was drawn to this emerging specialty.
He applied for flight training and was accepted, reporting to Naval Air Station Pensacola in 1934 to begin the transformation from surface officer to aviator.
Flight training in that era was dangerous in ways that are difficult to imagine today.
Aircraft were less reliable, instruments were primitive, and the margin for error was razor thin.
Training accidents claimed lives regularly.
Those who survived emerged not just as pilots, but as members of an elite fraternity, bound together by shared risk and hard one skill.
Best earned his wings and was assigned to dive bombing.
The technique was still being refined when he entered the specialty.
Pilots experimented with different approach angles, different release altitudes, different methods for steadying the aircraft during the plunge.
The physics were unforgiving.
A dive that was too steep risked over speeding and structural failure, while a dive that was too shallow sacrificed accuracy.
The pull out at the bottom subjected pilot and aircraft to G forces that could cause blackout or worse.
best practiced constantly flying training mission after training mission, dropping practice bombs on target sleds towed behind ships or on bull’s eyes painted on remote islands.
He developed a feel for the aircraft that went beyond conscious thought, an intuitive understanding of how the controls responded, how the wind affected the dive, how the target moved and turned beneath him.
By the late 1930s, he had become one of the Navy’s most skilled dive bomber pilots.
His accuracy was exceptional.
His airmanship was flawless.
His ability to remain calm under extreme stress had been proven in countless training exercises.
He was also developing a reputation for independence.
Best was not a man who accepted doctrine blindly.
He questioned procedures that seemed inefficient, challenged assumptions that had hardened into unexamined tradition, pushed for better tactics and better training.
This did not always endear him to his superiors.
The Navy valued conformity and chain of command.
Officers who stood out too sharply could find their careers stalled.
But Best was good enough that his independence was tolerated.
More than tolerated, it was increasingly recognized as an asset.
As war clouds gathered over Europe and Asia, the Navy needed pilots who could think independently, adapt quickly, and make decisions under conditions that no training manual could anticipate.
In 1940, Best was assigned to bombing squadron 6 aboard Enterprise.
By early 1941, he had been promoted to command the squadron as its executive officer.
And when the commanding officer rotated out shortly before Pearl Harbor best stepped into the role, he was 31 years old, physically fit, technically brilliant, and possessed of the kind of quiet confidence that men follow into danger.
He had flown more divebombing practice runs than almost any pilot in the Navy.
He had thought deeply about the tactical problems of carrier warfare, about how to find and attack enemy fleets, about how to survive in an environment where death waited in every cloud and every anti-aircraft burst.
What he had not done was lead men into actual combat.
That changed on December 7th, 1941.
Best and his squadron were returning to Pearl Harbor that morning.
Having been at sea for several days, delivering aircraft to Wake Island, they approached Aahu to find smoke rising from the harbor, ships burning, the world they had known transformed in a single hour.
Enterprise launched her aircraft to search for the Japanese fleet, but the enemy carriers had already withdrawn.
Best and his men spent the day flying fruitless searches over empty ocean while Pearl Harbor counted its dead.
In the months that followed, Best flew combat missions against Japanese-held islands, raids on the marshals and Gilberts, the attack on Marcus Island, building the combat experience he had lacked, and testing the skills he had developed in peacetime training against an enemy that shot back.
He learned that combat was different from practice in ways both subtle and profound.
The stress was real.
The consequences were permanent.
The enemy was not a towed target but a thinking opponent who adapted and evolved.
And the chaos of battle, the smoke, the confusion, the partial information made decisions far more difficult than any training scenario.
But he also learned that his training held.
The thousands of hours of practice had built reflexes that worked even when his conscious mind was overwhelmed.
The discipline of the dive, the precision of the release, the instinctive feel for the aircraft, all of it translated into combat effectiveness.
By June 1942, when Enterprise sailed to intercept the Japanese fleet at Midway, Richard Best was arguably the most skilled dive bomber pilot in the United States Navy.
He had the experience, the training, the temperament, and the judgment to operate at the edge of what was possible.
He would need all of it.
The problem facing American naval aviation at Midway was not simply finding the Japanese fleet.
it was surviving long enough to attack it.
Every pilot who launched that morning understood that the odds were against them.
The Japanese carriers were protected by combat air patrols of zero fighters, aircraft that outperformed every American fighter then in service.
The ships themselves bristled with anti-aircraft guns that would fill the sky with steel.
And even if an attack succeeded, the return flight required crossing more than 150 mi of empty ocean with damaged aircraft and dwindling fuel.
The torpedo squadrons faced the worst of it.
The Douglas TBD Devastator was obsolete even before the war began.
Slow, poorly armed, and unable to climb away from danger after releasing its torpedo, the Devastator required its pilot to fly a long, straight approach at low altitude, precisely the profile that made an aircraft most vulnerable to both fighters and anti-aircraft fire.
Torpedo Squadron 8 from Hornet attacked first.
Led by Lieutenant Commander John Waldron, the squadron found the Japanese fleet and pressed home their attack without fighter cover, without coordination, without hope.
Zero fighters fell on them like wolves on sheep.
Anti-aircraft guns shredded the survivors.
Of 15 aircraft in torpedo 8, none survived.
Of 30 men, only one, Enson George Gay, lived through the morning, floating in his life jacket amid the debris, watching the battle unfold around him.
Torpedo Squadron 6 from Enterprise attacked next.
They too found the Japanese fleet.
They too were intercepted by zeros.
Of 14 aircraft, only four returned.
Torpedo Squadron 3 from Yorktown followed.
Of 12 aircraft, only two made it back.
In less than an hour, the American torpedo squadrons had been effectively destroyed.
They had scored no hits.
They had barely disrupted the Japanese formation.
They had died for nothing, or so it seemed.
But their sacrifice had accomplished something that no planning could have anticipated.
The lowaltitude attacks had drawn the Japanese combat air patrol down to sea level, where the Zeros burned fuel and lost the altitude advantage they needed to intercept high-flying dive bombers.
The frantic maneuvering had disrupted Japanese flight deck operations, delaying the launch of their own strike against the American carriers.
When the dive bombers arrived, the Zeros were out of position.
The carriers were turning, recovering aircraft caught in the most vulnerable moment of their operational cycle.
This was the situation best encountered when he pushed over into his dive, but he could not have known any of it.
From 20,000 ft, the tactical picture was invisible.
He could not see the wreckage of the torpedo squadrons.
He could not see the Zeros climbing desperately to intercept.
He could not see the Japanese crews racing to rearm and refuel their aircraft.
All he could see was carriers maneuvering below him and the chaotic reality of an air group that had already begun to fragment.
The problem was not courage.
Every pilot in that formation was prepared to die if necessary.
The problem was coordination, the impossibility of maintaining organized attack in conditions of extreme stress, poor communication, and conflicting information.
American carrier doctrine in 1942 called for coordinated strikes in which fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo planes would attack simultaneously from different altitudes and directions, overwhelming enemy defenses through sheer complexity.
In practice, this coordination almost never worked.
The different aircraft types flew at different speeds and different altitudes.
Radio communications were unreliable.
Formations drifted apart over long distances.
What was supposed to be a synchronized hammer blow became a series of peacemeal attacks, each one facing the full weight of Japanese defenses.
This was the institutional failure that Best confronted in the seconds before his dive.
The Enterprise Air Group had been specifically briefed to divide its targets.
Scouting six would take one carrier, bombing six would take another.
But when McCcluskey pushed over toward Kaga, the plan collapsed.
Two squadrons converged on a single target while the other carriers went unmolested.
Best saw what was happening and understood immediately what it meant.
If all the dive bombers attacked Kaga, they might sink her, but the other carriers would survive and their aircraft would exact a terrible revenge.
The American fleet was operating with only three carriers against four.
Every Japanese carrier that survived the morning would be one more threat to Enterprise, Hornet, and Yorktown.
The solution was obvious.
Someone had to attack the other carrier.
But solutions that are obvious in retrospect are not obvious in the moment.
Best was in a diving aircraft committed to an attack following his air groupoup commander toward the designated target.
Every instinct, every element of training, every principle of military discipline demanded that he continue the attack as briefed.
He chose differently.
The decision took perhaps two seconds.
He pulled his aircraft out of the dive, radioed his section to follow, and pointed his nose toward a carrier that no one else was attacking.
It was the kind of decision that could end a career if it failed.
Abandoning an attack in progress, separating from his formation, targeting an objective on his own initiative, any of these could be construed as insubordination, as cowardice, as a breakdown of discipline.
If his bomb missed, if his wingmen were shot down, if the attack accomplished nothing, he would have to answer for his choice.
But Best was not thinking about his career.
He was thinking about the battle.
He was thinking about what would happen if the Japanese carriers survived to launch their aircraft.
He was thinking about Enterprise and the men aboard her.
He was thinking, in other words, like a commander rather than a subordinate.
The carrier best turned toward was a kaggi.
He could not have known her identity with certainty.
From his altitude, the Japanese carriers looked similar.
Flat decks, island superructures, wakes churning behind them as they maneuvered.
But he could see that she was large, that she was turning hard, that her deck appeared crowded with aircraft.
He would learn only later that Akagi was the flagship of the Japanese carrier striking force, the ship from which Vice Admiral Nagumo commanded the fleet.
He would learn that she had just recovered her aircraft from the midway strike and was preparing to launch a counter strike against the American carriers.
He would learn that her decks were covered with fueled and armed aircraft, her hangers filled with ordinance, her crew racing against time to get their strike in the air.
In the moment, he knew only that she was a target, and that no one else was attacking her.
Three aircraft, three bombs against a ship that stretched more than 800 ft from bow to stern, displacing more than 30,000 tons.
best assigned targets verbally over the radio, dividing the ship into thirds, each pilot responsible for a section.
Then he pushed over into his dive.
The angle was steep approximately 70°, turning the world into a tilted nightmare of sky and sea and ship.
The dive brakes deployed, slowing his descent just enough to maintain control, filling the air with the howling rush of displaced atmosphere.
The altimeter unwound with terrifying speed, 15,000, 12,000, 10,000 ft, each,000 a second or less.
As gravity pulled him toward the target, Akagi grew in his gun sight.
He could see details now.
the yellow flight deck, the island structure, the aircraft parked with wings folded.
He could see the wakes of escorting ships, the flashes of anti-aircraft fire beginning to reach for him.
The key to accurate dive bombing was holding steady.
Every twitch, every correction, every moment of indecision translated into error at the point of impact.
The pilot had to fix his aim, trust his calculations, and hold the aircraft motionless relative to the target while the world screamed past him.
Best held steady.
He released at approximately 1,500 ft, felt the,000 lb bomb separate from the aircraft, then pulled back on the stick with every ounce of strength he possessed.
The G forces slammed him into his seat.
Four, five, six times the force of gravity, graying his vision, compressing his spine, testing the limits of his body and his aircraft.
The Dauntless leveled out just above the water, screaming over the waves at maximum speed, putting distance between itself and the target.
Behind him, his bomb fell.
The weapon was a 1,000 lb generalurpose bomb designed to penetrate light armor before detonating.
It struck a Kagi’s flight deck near the midship’s elevator, punching through the wooden planking and exploding among the aircraft parked below.
The effect was catastrophic.
Japanese carriers in 1942 did not have armored flight decks.
The wooden planking was designed to be lightweight, not resistant.
When Best’s bomb detonated in the hangar, it ignited aircraft that were fully fueled and armed for the counter strike against the American fleet.
Aviation gasoline burned at temperatures that warped steel.
Torpedoes and bombs cooked off in their racks, each explosion feeding the next.
Within minutes, Akagi was engulfed in flames that her damage control teams could not contain.
best did not see most of this.
He was too busy surviving, evading anti-aircraft fire, dodging the Japanese destroyers that tried to shoot him down, nursing his aircraft toward the rendevous point where the surviving dive bombers would reform for the flight back to Enterprise.
He knew only that his bomb had hit.
What he did not know, what no American pilot knew in those chaotic minutes was that the attack had succeeded beyond anything they could have hoped.
In approximately 5 minutes of diving attacks, American SBDs had mortally wounded three Japanese fleet carriers.
Kaga, the target Mccclusky’s pilots had converged upon, was hit by at least four bombs.
She too caught fire, the flames spreading through her hangers with the same unstoppable fury that consumed Akagi.
Soryu, attacked by dive bombers from Yorktown, who arrived at almost the same moment as the Enterprise aircraft, was hit by at least three bombs.
She exploded almost immediately, her crew abandoning ship within 20 minutes.
Three carriers burning.
three carriers that would never launch another aircraft against the American fleet.
Only here remained.
The morning attack should have been the end of Richard Best’s combat flying for the day.
He had led a successful strike, made an extraordinary independent decision under fire, scored a direct hit on an enemy fleet carrier, and survived a gauntlet of anti-aircraft fire and maneuvering combat.
His aircraft was damaged, not critically, but enough to warrant concern.
His fuel was low.
His body was exhausted from the physical punishment of divebombing and the mental strain of command.
Under normal circumstances, he would have been stood down for rest while other pilots took the next mission, but circumstances were not normal.
Here you the surviving Japanese carrier had not been passive while her sisters burned.
Before the American dive bombers even returned to their ships, her aircraft were in the air, striking back at the fleet that had dealt such a devastating blow.
Yorktown took the first hit.
Japanese dive bombers found her just before noon, putting three bombs into her flight deck and setting fires that forced her to halt flight operations.
Damage control parties fought the blazes with desperate courage, and within 2 hours she was moving again, launching aircraft once more.
Then the torpedo planes came.
Hiu’s second strike found Yorktown around 2:30 in the afternoon putting two torpedoes into her port side.
The old carrier, already wounded from the Coral Sea, could not absorb the damage.
She listed heavily, lost power, and was ordered abandoned.
Enterprise and Hornet remained untouched, but the threat was clear.
As long as Hiru survived, she could continue to strike at the American fleet.
She had to be destroyed.
The problem was finding her.
Scout aircraft reported the surviving carrier maneuvering northwest of the burning wrecks of her sisters, but her exact position was uncertain.
The distances were extreme, even further than the morning strike, and the available aircraft were diminished by the losses and damage of the earlier attack.
Enterprise scrambled what she had.
24 dive bombers from both bombing six and scouting six, including several aircraft that had been patched together by maintenance crews working at furious speed.
Among the pilots assigned to the strike was Lieutenant Commander Richard Best.
He should not have flown.
The morning attack had taken a toll beyond normal fatigue.
During his dive on Akagi, Best had inhaled fumes from a faulty oxygen system.
a malfunction in the breathing apparatus that supplied pilots at high altitude.
The cause was a recent change in the chemical composition of the absorbent material used to scrub carbon dioxide from the system.
The new compound released costic fumes when it became saturated with moisture.
Best had breathed those fumes during the most physically demanding moments of his attack when his body was already stressed by G forces and adrenaline.
He did not feel the damage immediately.
The symptoms would take hours to develop, hours during which he would continue to fly, to fight, to lead.
But as the afternoon strike prepared to launch, he was already suffering.
A cough that would not stop, a tightness in his chest that made each breath harder than the last, the sensation of something wrong deep inside his lungs.
He flew anyway.
The strike launched at approximately 3:30 in the afternoon.
The SBDs climbed to altitude and headed northwest, chasing the scout reports that placed here somewhere ahead.
They found her just before 5:00.
The carrier was running, making high speed toward the northwest.
Her wake a white slash against the blue.
She was not burning, not damaged, not visibly impaired.
Her flight deck appeared clear.
She had already launched her aircraft against Yorktown and was preparing to recover them.
But she was alone now.
Her sisters were gone.
Her escorts were scattered.
and above her 24 American dive bombers were beginning their attack.
Best led the assault.
He pushed over into his dive for the second time that day, fighting through anti-aircraft fire that seemed heavier than the morning, holding steady as Hiu grew in his gunsight.
His wingmen followed, each pilot picking his aim point, each one trusting the training that had brought them this far.
the release, the pull out, the crushing G forces, and behind him, his bomb falling toward the enemy carrier.
Best’s weapon struck Hiryu forward near the bow, penetrating the flight deck and exploding among the aircraft that were being spotted for the next mission.
Other bombs followed, four hits in total, each one adding to the destruction.
Fire spread through the ship with the same unstoppable fury that had consumed her sisters.
Hiru was mortally wounded.
She would burn through the night, her crew finally abandoning her the following morning.
Japanese destroyers would torpedo her to prevent capture, sending the last of the Keo Bhutai’s carriers to the bottom.
Richard Best had done what no other American pilot would ever do.
He had scored killing hits on two enemy fleet carriers in a single day of battle.
But the cost was already being measured in his own body.
The flight back to Enterprise was agony.
Each breath brought the cough.
Each cough brought blood.
By the time he landed, he could barely stand.
His rear seat gunner helped him from the cockpit, and he collapsed on the flight deck.
The flight surgeon diagnosed tuberculosis, not a new infection, but a dormant case that had been activated and accelerated by the costic fumes he had inhaled.
The damage to his lungs was severe, perhaps irreversible.
The most decorated dive bomber pilot in the American Navy would never fly combat again.
The Battle of Midway ended on June 7th, 1942 when the last Japanese forces withdrew toward the west.
The accounting was stark.
Japan had lost four fleet carriers, Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiryu along with a heavy cruiser and approximately 290 aircraft.
More than 3,000 Japanese sailors and airmen were dead, including many of the most experienced aviators in the Imperial Navy.
The United States had lost one carrier, Yorktown, sunk by a Japanese submarine 2 days after she was abandoned.
One destroyer was also lost and approximately 150 aircraft were destroyed or damaged beyond repair.
307 Americans died.
By any measure, it was an overwhelming American victory.
The decisive naval battle of the Pacific War, the moment when the tide turned from Japanese advance to Japanese retreat.
The strategic implications unfolded over months and years.
Without their fleet carriers, the Japanese could not maintain the offensive momentum that had carried them across half the Pacific.
The battle of the Coral Sea the previous month had already cost them two carriers.
Midway eliminated four more.
Of the six fleet carriers that had attacked Pearl Harbor, five were now gone.
American shipyards were building new carriers at a rate the Japanese could not match.
American pilot training programs were producing aviators faster than combat could consume them.
American industrial capacity was just beginning to reach its wartime peak.
Midway did not win the war.
Two and a half years of brutal combat remained.
Guadal Canal, Terawa, the Maranas, Lady Gulf, Ewima, Okinawa.
Thousands more Americans would die before the surrender was signed in Tokyo Bay.
But Midway ensured that the war would end in American victory rather than a negotiated stalemate.
It removed the instruments of Japanese aggression and forced the enemy onto the defensive.
It proved that American pilots and American aircraft and American courage could prevail against an enemy that had seemed invincible.
And in the narrowest possible terms, it was won by approximately 30 dive bomber pilots who arrived over the Japanese fleet at exactly the right moment and delivered their bombs with extraordinary precision.
Richard Best accounted for two of the four carriers destroyed that day.
His bomb hit a Kaggi.
His bomb hit hereu.
No other pilot in American history has matched that record.
The recognition came quickly.
Best was awarded the Navy Cross, then a gold star in lie of a second Navy Cross.
Citations that praised his skill, his leadership, and his willingness to make an independent tactical decision at the critical moment of the battle.
But he received the awards from a hospital bed.
The tuberculosis that had flared in his lungs required immediate treatment, rest, medication, the slow and uncertain process of healing damaged tissue.
The Navy sent him to a sanatorium in California, then to other facilities as the years passed, and his condition stabilized, but never fully resolved.
He never flew combat again.
He never led another squadron into battle.
The career that had seemed destined for flag rank and fleet command ended at 31 years of age, terminated by a malfunction in an oxygen system that no one had thought to test properly.
Best remained in the Navy as long as he could, serving in administrative and training roles, sharing his hard one knowledge with the pilots who would carry the war forward.
But his body would not permit the physical demands of flight.
and in 1944 he was medically retired from active service.
He was 34 years old.
Richard Best lived for nearly six decades after Midway.
He settled in California, built a career in business, raised a family, and watched from civilian life as the Navy he had served evolved through the jet age and the nuclear age and the satellite age.
He gave interviews occasionally, spoke at reunions, corrected the historical record when it drifted too far from what he remembered.
He was not a bitter man.
Those who knew him described someone who had made peace with what fate had dealt him, who understood that his contribution to victory had been made in a single morning of extraordinary clarity and skill, and that no amount of subsequent service could have added to what he accomplished on June 4th, 1942.
The Navy named a building after him at Naval Air Station Lamore, the Richard H.
best building, a training facility where new generations of naval aviators learned the skills he had mastered.
His story entered the curriculum at the Naval War College, studied as an example of tactical initiative and the importance of independent judgment in combat.
When he died in October 2001 at 91 years of age, the obituaries called him one of the most consequential naval aviators in American history.
They noted that his two carrier kills remained unmatched, that his decision to break formation and attack a Kagi had been vindicated by the outcome, that his sacrifice of health for victory exemplified the toll that war exacts even from its survivors.
But the larger lesson of Richard Best’s story lies not in the statistics or the citations, but in the nature of the decision he made at 20,000 ft above the Japanese fleet.
He was a man who had trained for years to follow orders, to maintain formation, to trust the judgment of his superiors.
The entire structure of military discipline is built on the assumption that subordinates will execute the plans of their commanders.
That individual initiative must be subordinated to coordinated action that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
And yet when the plan failed, when the coordination collapsed and the squadrons converged on a single target, Best chose to think rather than to follow.
He assessed the situation, recognized the error, and acted on his own judgment within the span of a few heartbeats.
This is the hardest kind of military decision, not the choice to be brave, which many men can make, but the choice to be independent when independence conflicts with obedience.
It requires confidence in one’s own assessment, willingness to accept responsibility for the outcome, and the moral courage to act when action might later be judged as insubordination.
Best possessed all of these qualities.
They had been built through years of training, years of practice, years of developing the professional competence that allowed him to trust his own judgment even in extremis.
The dive bombers who attacked the Japanese fleet at Midway were not supermen.
They were ordinary Americans who had been given extraordinary training and who rose to an extraordinary moment.
Many of them died that day, shot down by zeros, hit by anti-aircraft fire, lost over empty ocean when their fuel ran out.
Those who survived did so partly through skill and partly through the randomness that governs all combat.
But Richard Best’s survival and his success were not random.
They were the product of preparation, meeting opportunity, of a man who had done the work required to be ready for a moment that could not be predicted or planned.
The oxygen system that destroyed his lungs was a bitter irony.
a mechanical failure that ended his career at the height of his powers.
He had survived the enemy only to be struck down by his own equipment.
The war would go on without him, won by other men in other battles, while he watched from the sidelines, and counted the cost of his service in the blood he coughed into his handkerchief.
And yet, two carriers, one morning, one pilot.
The math of Midway cannot be recalculated without him.
If Akagi had survived the morning attack, her aircraft might have found Enterprise or Hornet.
If Hiru had escaped the afternoon strike, she might have continued to strike at the American fleet.
The margins of victory were thin enough that individual actions mattered, that single bombs falling through the Pacific sky could shift the balance of an entire war.
Richard Best shifted that balance.
He did it through skill, through courage, through the willingness to make a decision that no one had authorized and accept responsibility for its consequences.
The last fleet carrier he ever saw was burning beneath his wings as he pulled away from hereu on June 4th, 1942.
He carried that image for the rest of his life.
The fire, the smoke, the knowledge that his war was over, even as victory was being secured.
Some victories cannot be celebrated.
They can only be remembered, honored, and passed forward to generations who will never fully understand what they cost.
He flew twice when others flew once.
He hit twice when hitting once would have been enough.
And he paid for both with everything that followed.
That is the measure of the
