Lexington’s SBD Dauntless dive bombers and Devastator torpedo bombers sink the Japanese carrier Shóhó in Robert Taylor’s dramatic painting, “Battle of the Coral Sea.”

The Opening Clashes

To Claude Miller, the ship was the biggest thing he had ever seen. More than 800 feet long and displacing nearly 20,000 tons, the USS Yorktown did indeed inspire awe. “I had a tendency to wonder if it was going to stay afloat,” recalls the electrician’s mate third class from Trenton, Mo. “Being a small town boy, I was quite amazed.” Commissioned at Newport News, Va., in 1937, the Yorktown boasted a crew of more than 2,300 men—many right out of high school—and a complement of some 80 planes.

The Yorktown had been operating under wartime readiness since the spring of 1941—first in the Atlantic against German U-boats, and now against the Japanese. As part of Task Force 17 under Rear Admiral Frank Fletcher, she spent two-and-a-half months raiding enemy bases throughout the South Pacific. By May 1942, though, supplies were running low, and it was apparent that both crew and ship needed a break. “We had not had a good stay in a yard since 1939,” says Machinist’s Mate First Class John D. Miller from Fishersville, Va. “A ship is just like a car. You’ve got to maintain things or it plain wears out.”

But Miller and the others aboard the Yorktown had time for only a brief respite at the island of Tongatabu. They were being pushed, and pushed hard, by Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, the tall, quiet Texan commanding the U.S. Pacific fleet. And with good reason. Nimitz’s intelligence men had deciphered enough of the Japanese naval code to guess what the enemy fleet was planning to do next. The prospects were chilling. Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto, Japan’s leading naval strategist, wanted to isolate Australia by invading Port Moresby, New Guinea, and then occupy Midway. Ringed by a coral atoll, the island offered a good jumping off point for another attack on Hawaii. Not only that, Yamamoto reasoned, the threat to Midway would certainly draw the American carriers into a decisive fight.

For Nimitz, the scenario offered little choice. He ordered Task Force 17—then in the Coral Sea, east of Australia—to protect Port Moresby and blunt the Japanese attack. Task Force 11, built around the USS Lexington and commanded by Rear Admiral Aubrey W. Fitch, was dispatched as well. The other carriers available to Nimitz—Enterprise and Hornet—were still several days away. So it fell to the Yorktown to take the lead.

On May 3, the carrier launched F4F Wildcat fighters, SBD Dauntless dive bombers and TBD Devastator torpedo bombers to disrupt troop landings in the Solomon Islands. Meanwhile, Admiral Takeo Takagi’s force, spearheaded by the heavy carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku, headed south to find the Americans. Fletcher and Fitch went north to meet them.

The Shokaku is also attacked and set on fire during the battle.

Two bombs struck the water, one on each side of the ship. Shrapnel damaged the hull. Men on the starboard side were wounded, and one later died from his injuries. The explosion off the ship’s port side damaged the hull and ruptured an aviation fuel tank. A third Val dropped an 800-pound bomb that hit the flight deck, near the ship’s centerline, smashing into a pilots’ ready room below. Glancing off a steel safe, it tore through the gallery deck, the hangar space, then through the first, second and third decks.

On the third deck was the ship’s soda fountain, or “Gedunk,” where a man could go to relax, maybe get a Coke or a pack of cigarettes. Repair Party Number Five was in the compartment when the bomb smashed through the overhead, then through the deck below. It struck the armored fourth deck, above the forward engine room, and exploded. The explosion tore hatches off their mounts, warped bulkheads, shattered pipes and sent up a tower of shrapnel and fire. Forty men in the Gedunk died. Twenty-six more were hurt. Flames consumed the paint on the bulkheads, clothes in a nearby laundry storeroom and anything else that would burn. Fires in two of the boilers were blown out, but Buckmaster maintained the ship’s speed of 24 knots and escaped further damage. By noon, the surviving attackers had fled.

John Miller (second from left) and fellow shipmates clear away debris from a bomb that hit the Yorktown’s third deck.

Meanwhile, Claude Miller and his friends had secured the hazardous wires. The compartment was a nightmare. “We moved the bodies out, and put them in the aft mess deck. We went in later to eat. Our friends were still lying on the deck, covered with a tarp. I can’t believe now that we were able to eat there, with them laying behind us.”

Coral Sea looked like a Japanese victory. But the Shokaku was heavily damaged, and the Zuikaku had lost many planes and pilots. Takagi withdrew north, canceling the Port Moresby invasion. Nimitz ordered his forces to “expedite return.” The Yorktown left Tongatabu and followed at her best speed—15 knots. More than anything, the crew wanted—needed—a break. Bremerton Navy Yard was the place for it, half a world away.

The Tallest Order

On May 27, the Yorktown arrived in Pearl Harbor to undergo repairs. Fletcher went to see Nimitz and learned that the Japanese carriers, under Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, would hit Midway the first week of June. The Enterprise and the Hornet were going out to meet them. So was the Yorktown. The following day, she entered Dry Dock Number One and “just barely fit,” according to John Miller.

Admiral Fitch’s estimate of the time needed for repair was 90 days. The Navy Yard inspectors figured two weeks. Nimitz, though, had the final say. “This ship must be ready in three days,” he declared in his mild Texas drawl. The men with him stared at each other. They were accustomed to “tall orders,” but this was crazy. Still, he was “the Old Man,” the commander-in-chief. And if he wanted it done in three days, that’s the way it would be. One of those standing nearby finally broke the silence with a simple, “Yes, sir!”

Moored in dry dock, the damaged Yorktown undergoes repairs BY Navy Year workers.

Overnight, more than 1,400 workers swarmed aboard the stricken ship. Civilian contractors and Navy technicians dragged miles of electrical cable. Other men on scaffolds patched the hull. Carpenters shored up the decks with wooden beams or cut wooden templates of bulkheads. Steel plates were dropped over the holes in the deck and welded down. Indeed, acetylene torches burned everywhere, sending temperatures in the smoke-filled compartments soaring over 120 degrees.

John Miller’s machine shop made parts to fix valves, pipes and conduits. “Our crew was busy all the time,” he recalls. “I worked around the clock. They brought a cot in for me and set it in place where it wouldn’t be in the way of the machines.”

The work on the Yorktown had become one of the most intensive repair jobs the Navy had ever undertaken, rivaling its efforts to salvage the ships sunk on December 7. The requirement for electricity alone became so great that districts in Honolulu endured shortages so that the yard could get the extra power it needed. Being in the water for more than two years, the ship’s hull had to be cleaned of an impressive layer of barnacles and slime, then painted. Using only a 3-inch scraper and dangling on a window washer’s rig, Emmett McLaughlin, a signalman first class from White Plains, N.Y., wondered if the Marines hadn’t offered a better deal after all.

Shipmate Claude Miller’s job—helping to attach new degaussing cables to the hull to protect it against mines—wasn’t nearly so sedentary. Twelve inches of cable weighed 35 pounds, and moving hundreds of yards of it called for some serious muscle. “Imagine 200 men, chest to back, picking up a python at the same time” is how he describes it.

Planes and crew from the Saratoga—then undergoing repairs on the West Coast for torpedo damage—were assigned to the Yorktown, augmenting VF-42, and replacing two of the bomber squadrons. The Saratoga’s fighter squadron, VF-3, absorbed many of the men from VF-42.

Task Force 16, under the command of Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, left Pearl on May 29. Task Force 17 was to follow and rendezvous with Spruance’s ships northeast of Midway. There, they would set an ambush for Nagumo’s carriers.

On May 30, Nimitz came aboard the Yorktown and apologized to Captain Buckmaster and his staff for sending them back out. He promised that the men would have a long rest when the crisis was over. Nimitz then left the ship, and the ship left Pearl. It was then that the crew got the news. Surgi remembers that, “the ship’s exec came on the P.A. and said, ‘The next stop for this ship is Bremerton.’” A huge cheer went up throughout the ship. “‘But.’ he continued, ‘first, we gotta go to Midway Island to back up the Enterprise and the Hornet.’” The cheer faded as Task Force 17 headed west again.

An aerial torpedo rocked the Yorktown on June 4, 1942, leaving the carrier crippled and a target for a submarine attack two days later that also sunk her escort, the destroyer USS Hammann.

The Decisive Struggle

The Battle of Midway marked a turning point in the war, and the events of those three days in June 1942 have been well documented. Nimitz’s bold stroke with Task Force 16 and 17 had clearly caught the Japanese off guard as the opposing fleets squared off against one another northwest of Midway on June 4. While the island itself was being bombed by Nagumo’s raiders, American torpedo squadrons took aim at his carriers. Their losses were horrendous, but Dauntlesses from the Enterprise sunk both the Akagi and the Kaga, while the Yorktown’s SBD’s sank the Soryu. Later in the day, planes from both U.S. carriers teamed up to sink the Hiryu as well.

But the Hiryu’s planes had also found their own mark—the Yorktown. Three Vals scored bomb hits that knocked out the carrier’s engines. Then attacking Kates sent two torpedoes into her port side. As she listed frighteningly, Buckmaster gave the order to abandon ship. The next day, though, a salvage crew was able to start correcting the Yorktown’s list with counter-flooding, and things looked good for towing her back to Pearl.

But it was not to be. On June 6, a Japanese submarine torpedoed the Yorktown, forcing Buckmaster to once again give the order to abandon ship. She sank at dawn the next morning.

To some observers, it was as if the gallant ship knew she’d done enough and finally let go. “She went like a lady,” recounts Pete Montalvo, then a 17-year-old aviation ordnanceman from New York City. “And that’s the way I’ll always remember her.”

Mike McLaughlin is a Boston-based freelance writer.

Haunting Discovery For more than 50 years, the USS Yorktown lay undetected on the ocean floor. Then, in May 1998, underwater explorer Robert Ballard, working with the U.S. Navy, began in earnest to search for her and the four Japanese carriers that went down in the waters off Midway Island. Armed with only the sketchiest of information regarding their final locations, Ballard knew that finding any of these ships would be a challenge. After 17 days, though, his team finally uncovered the Yorktown. She was more than three miles down—far deeper than the Titanic or Bismarck, which he had discovered years earlier. Witnessing the May 19 event with Bill Surgi were three other Midway veterans who were instantly taken back in time—torpedo bomber pilot Harry Ferrier and Japanese Imperial Navy fliers Yuji Akamatsu and Haruo Yoshino. The Japanese carriers were never found, but for Ballard, this great oceanic battlefield remains one of his most meaningful explorations. “Maybe part of what we do by bringing deep shipwrecks to light is to hold up a mirror to the present,” he states, “a mirror whose reflection shows us ourselves in the past—and shows us the past in the present.” —Kristin Laliberté

Painting of USS Yorktown (CV-5) by Ken Marschall. Reprinted with permission from Return to Midway © 1999 Madison Publishing, Inc.