What’s often left out of this story is why the Japanese were refueling and rearming at that moment. An hour earlier, three U.S. squadrons of torpedo bombers had attacked the Japanese carriers. Flying Devastator bombers, they were picked apart by the much faster Japanese Zero fighters; of the 41 Devastators that took off that morning, only six survived. But their attack forced the Japanese to delay refueling and rearming — without the torpedo bombers’ doomed sortie, the dive bombers would almost certainly have been less successful, and the course of the war in the Pacific might have been very different.
What makes the sacrifice even more noble is that the Devastator — slow, not very maneuverable and only lightly armored — was known to be obsolete. The torpedo pilots and gunners knew they were sitting ducks. And yet they took off that June morning, unfazed.
The night before the battle, a small group of men of the carrier Yorktown’s torpedo bomber squadron passed the time together. “They talked about the weather, dinner — how the food was — nothing about the battle,” said a junior deck officer who was in the room: my grandfather John W. Crawford. “None of them came back.” On the 75th anniversary of the battle, we should pause and remember not just one of the great victories in U.S. history, but the brave aircrews who gave their lives for it.
