Unbeknownst to Spruance, the Hornet Air Group commander, Commander Stanhope Ring, with the concurrence of Hornet’s skipper, Captain Marc “Pete” Mitscher, had decided to take his strike on a course that would take them well north of the reported Japanese position. Anyway, one of the challenges of reading different accounts of battles is sometimes wondering if the authors were actually writing about the same battle.) However, some of those same folks have no problem criticizing Fletcher for tactical error in where he positioned the carrier task groups and Spruance for holding the Enterprise dive-bombers overhead too long waiting for the torpedo bombers to launch (both of which criticisms are arguably true). There also some who object to the “flight to nowhere” on the grounds that, if true, it impugns the reputation of the revered Pete Mitscher. However, I would characterize it more as a hypothesis than fact. In my view, the “flight to nowhere” dovetails better with Japanese reports and makes more sense to me as an explanation for why Hornet’s dive-bombers and fighters completely missed the Japanese. Without looking at original primary sources and notes, I can’t really make a determination. There are also some questions regarding the interviews of some of the sources upon which the “flight to nowhere” is based. This would not have been possible had they flown the 265 course of the “flight to nowhere” school instead of the 240 course of the “traditional” school.
The most compelling argument against it, in my view, are reports from two Hornet fighter pilots that state they saw Kure Atoll during the flight. (2019 update: It should be noted that although the “flight to nowhere” by the Hornet Air Group as I describe below has generally been accepted by contemporary historians, it differs from the traditional view and provokes heated dissent from some historians. (2019: Spruance would be criticized for waiting as long as he did.) Meanwhile, Enterprise escort fighters mistakenly followed Hornet’s torpedo bombers, so neither Enterprise’s dive-bombers nor torpedo bombers had fighter escort. However, the second launch from Enterprise, which included the torpedo bombers, took so long that Spruance ordered the dive-bombers to depart without waiting for them. Hornet’s two launches went relatively normally (i.e., slowly). The coordination of the American strike began to break down almost immediately. carrier required two deck spots, and could take almost an hour to launch the first deck load, then bring up the next deck load from the hangar and launch it, too. strike aircraft would not have to fly so far back to recover. Spruance’s intent was to hit the Japanese while they were in the middle of recovering their aircraft that had just struck Midway Island, and he intended to close the range to the Japanese so the U.S.
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When the first contact reports on the Japanese carriers were received, Rear Admiral Spruance, in command of TF 16, embarked on Enterprise, made the aggressive decision to launch full strikes from both Enterprise and Hornet commencing at 0700, while the Japanese force was still at close to maximum range for his strike aircraft.
However, with only one dive-bomber squadron and the torpedo bomber squadron, the size of the Yorktown strike was well within the numbers that the Japanese fighters had already proven they were able to handle. Yorktown’s (CV-5) air group, minus the scout bomber squadron (VS-5) that Rear Admiral Fletcher held back, was launched almost an hour later, but was on a direct course to the Japanese carriers. Meanwhile, the air group from Enterprise (CV-6) was on a course to completely miss the Japanese carriers to the south.
As wave after wave of uncoordinated attacks by Navy and USAAF torpedo bombers and Marine Corps dive-bombers were slaughtered one after the other without a single hit, the air group from Hornet (CV-8) was on a course to completely miss the Japanese carriers to the north (2019: or by original counts to the south). Forty-five minutes to an hour minutes earlier, the “incredible victory” and “miracle at Midway” was shaping up to be an unmitigated disaster for the Americans. dive-bomber squadrons overhead the Japanese carriers at 1020 on 4 June 1942 was a total fluke. The near simultaneous arrival of three U.S.
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