When One Pilot Destroyed 2 Japanese Carriers — His Own Plane Killed Him JJ

June 4th, 1942 0706. Lieutenant Dick Best climbed into his SBD Dauntless on the flight deck of USS Enterprise and watched the torpedo bombers launch ahead of him. One squadron after another, heading for four Japanese carriers northwest of Midway Atoll. 32 with a decade of carrier landings behind him. The best dive bomber pilot in the Pacific Fleet and he knew it. Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo had brought the Kido Bhutai, four fleet carriers, Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiryu with 248 combat aircraft to seize Midway

and crush whatever the Americans sent to stop him. The Americans had three carriers left in the entire Pacific, Enterprise, Hornet, and Yorktown. so badly damaged at the Battle of the Coral Sea that repair crews at Pearl Harbor had worked 72 straight hours to make her seaorthy. Three against four. If these carriers went down, nothing stood between Japan and Hawaii. But Navy codereers under Commander Joseph Rofort had cracked the Japanese naval code. Admiral Chester Nimttz knew where Naguma would strike and when he would arrive.

For the first time since Pearl Harbor, the Americans had set the trap. The problem was springing it. Throughout the morning, American aircraft attacked the Japanese fleet in wave after wave. Land-based bombers from Midway scored zero hits. Marine dive bombers lost half their planes. Army B26 Marauders armed with torpedoes missed everything. The Zero fighters tore them apart. Then the carrier torpedo squadrons came in low and slow. Torpedo 8 from Hornet went first. 15 TBD Devastators. No fighter

escort. Every single aircraft was shot down. Of 30 crewmen, one survived. Enson George Gay floating in the ocean as the battle raged above him. Torpedo 6 from Enterprise lost 10 of 14. Torpedo 3 from Yorktown lost 10 of 12. Of 41 torpedo bombers launched from American carriers that morning, only six returned. Not one torpedo hit a Japanese ship, but their sacrifice dragged every Zero fighter down to sea level. The sky at 20,000 ft above the Japanese carriers was empty, and three squadrons of SBD

Dauntless dive bombers were closing in from that altitude undetected. Dick Best led one of them. What happens next changed the entire Pacific War. Please hit that like button. It helps more people find stories like this one. Subscribe if you haven’t already. Now 01022 over the Pacific. Bombing 6 had been airborne for over 2 hours. Fuel was critical. Three pilots had already turned back with engine trouble. Lieutenant Commander WDE McCcluskey, the air group commander, was a fighter pilot leading dive bombers for the first time

in combat. He had spent over an hour searching empty ocean for the Japanese fleet. Then he found them. McCluskey pushed into his dive, scouting. Six followed, and all 31 Dauntlesses aimed at the same carrier, Kaga. The Akagi, the carrier that had led the attack on Pearl Harbor, Nagumo’s own flagship, steamed 5 miles away, untouched. Her hanger deck was loaded with 18 fueled and armed torpedo bombers. Dick Best pulled out of his dive, climbed back to altitude, and turned toward Akagi with two wingmen. Three planes against the

most important ship in the Japanese Navy, three bombs, and not a single zero between them and the flight deck. Dick Best had done the math in his head before he rolled into the dive. Three dauntlesses against the fleet carrier. No margin for error. His wingmen were Lieutenant Junior Grade Edwin Kroger on his left and Enson Frederick Weber on his right. Both were solid pilots. Neither had ever attacked a ship this large. The SBD Dauntless was built for exactly this moment. Its perforated split flap slowed the aircraft in a near

vertical dive to 240 knots, stable enough for a pilot to hold his aim on a moving target. A displacement gear swung the 1,000lb bomb clear of the propeller arc at release. The bomb site was a three power telescope mounted on the left side of the cockpit. At 70° nose down, the pilot lined up his target through that scope and held the dive until the altimeter unwound past 1500 ft. Then he pulled the manual release, felt the aircraft lurch upward as the bomb dropped free, and hauled back on the stick through five or six G’s to

level off above the water. The kill window was about 4 seconds. If the pilot released too early, the bomb drifted long, too late, and he would not have enough altitude to pull out. The Japanese carrier steamed at 30 knots and could turn sharply, which meant the aim point shifted throughout the dive. Everything depended on the pilot’s eye, his nerve, and his ability to correct in real time. During the long search at 20,000 ft that morning, several pilots in bombing six had reported trouble breathing. The rebreather system in the

SBD used sodium hydroxide canisters to scrub carbon dioxide from exhaled air and recycle the remaining oxygen. On a normal mission, it worked. But this flight had been airborne far longer than planned. The canisters had overheated. Best ordered the squadron to descend to 15,000 ft where the thinner air was still breathable without the mask. He had pulled his own mask off and snorted out the acurate fumes. His throat burned, but there was no time to think about it. The Japanese fleet was below now. Bess rolled his dauntless into the

dive above Akagi. The carrier had just turned into the wind. Her flight deck stretched 780 ft below him, tancoled with a red circle painted near amidships. Around her, escort destroyers opened fire. Black puffs of anti-aircraft flack dotted the sky. Best ignored them. He fixed his scope on the rising sun painted at the center of the deck and held. The altimeter spun 12,000 8,000 4,000. The flight deck filled his telescope. He could see individual crewmen running. At 1500 ft, Best pulled the manual release handle. The 1,000lb

bomb swung clear of the propeller and dropped. He slammed the stick back and felt the blood drain from his head as the Dauntless pulled through six G’s and leveled off 50 ft above the water. Behind him, his rear gunner, aviation chief James Murray, braced against the force and watched the bomb fall. It struck the flight deck just after of the Amidship’s elevator and punched straight through into the upper hanger. The detonation ripped through fueled aircraft packed wing to wing. A column

of fire erupted through the hole in the deck. Secondary explosions followed within seconds as armed bombs and torpedoes cooked off one after another. Akagi was burning from the inside out. Kroger’s bomb had struck the water near the bridge. Webers had hit the sea near the stern, jamming Akagi’s rudder. Three planes had attacked, one direct hit, and Akagi would never launch another aircraft. Within 5 minutes, three of Nagumo’s four carriers were burning. While Best had put his bomb into Akagi, scouting six

and the rest of Bombing Six had smashed Kaga with at least four direct hits. Simultaneously, 17 Dauntlesses from Yorktown’s Bombing 3 had caught Soryu and planted three bombs along her flight deck. By 10:31 on the morning of June 4th, the most powerful carrier strike force in the world had been gutted. But here you survived. She had been steaming several miles north of the other three carriers, hidden by scattered cloud cover. Not a single American pilot had seen her. And Rear Admiral Tamon

Yamaguchi, commanding carrier division 2 from Hiru’s bridge, was already scrambling a counter strike. Best pulled his battered dauntless back toward Enterprise. The flight deck of the Big E was chaos. Nearly half the SBDs that had launched that morning were missing. Some had been shot down. Most had simply run out of fuel somewhere over the Pacific. McCluskey had made it back, bleeding from five shrapnel wounds in his arms and shoulders. He would not fly again that day. Lieutenant Earl Gallagher,

commander of Scouting 6, was now the senior dive bomber pilot on Enterprise. Best climbed out of his cockpit and felt something wrong in his chest. a dull ache below his ribs, a rawness in his throat that had not been there before takeoff. He coughed once hard and tasted something metallic. He said nothing. At 1100, here you launched her first counter strike. 18 I dive bombers escorted by six zeros guided to Yorktown by a float plane from the cruiser Chikuma. Yorktown’s combat air patrol intercepted them 12 mi out and destroyed

11. The remaining seven pushed through. Three bombs hit Yorktown. One penetrated the flight deck and exploded in the uptakes, snuffing out five of her six boilers. Yorktown slowed to a crawl and went dead in the water. 2 and 1/2 hours later, here you struck again. 10 Nakajima torpedo bombers slipped through Yorktown’s weakened defenses and put two torpedoes into her port side. The carrier listed 23° and was abandoned. Of the three American carriers that had started the morning, only Enterprise and

Hornet remained operational. One Japanese carrier was still fighting, and she had already crippled one of theirs. At 14:45, one of Yorktown’s airborne scouts radioed a contact report. One carrier, two battleships, three cruisers, four destroyers bearing northwest. Hear you. Admiral Raymond Spruent aboard Enterprise ordered an immediate strike. Every flyable dive bomber on the ship would go. Gallagher would lead 25 dauntlesses, six from scouting six, three from Best’s Bombing Six, and 14 orphaned aircraft from

Yorktown’s bombing three. No torpedo bombers, no fighter escort. The surviving TBDs were grounded. The Wildcats were needed for fleet defense. Best had three aircraft left from the 16 he had launched that morning. His chest burned with every breath. The metallic taste had not gone away. He strapped into his dauntless anyway. Chief Murray settled into the rear seat behind him. At 15:30, Enterprise turned into the wind. One by one, 25 dauntlesses rolled down her deck and climbed toward Hiru, the last Japanese carrier afloat. The

pilot who had hit a kagi 6 hours earlier was going back for another. The 25 dauntlesses flew northwest in a loose formation at 13,000 ft. Below them, three columns of black smoke rose from the ocean where Akagi, Kaga, and Soryu drifted and burned. The pilots could see the glow of fires even from altitude. Somewhere beyond those pers, Hiru was still making 30 knots. Best flew with two wingmen. Kroger again on his left and Inenlu Hopkins replacing Weber whose aircraft had taken damage during the morning attack. Three planes

from bombing six, the same number he had taken against Akagi. His chest felt heavier now. Each breath pulled against something deep in his lungs, a tightness that had not been there 6 hours earlier. The sodium hydroxide fumes from the faulty rebreather had done their work during the long morning search, and the damage was compounding with every hour he stayed in the air. Bess gripped the stick and focused on the horizon. At 16:45, Gallagher spotted the target. A single carrier with escort ships spread

across several miles of ocean. Here you was heading north. Her flight deck was intact. On it, ground crews were frantically arming the last nine operational aircraft for a desperate third strike against the Americans. Five dive bombers and four torpedo planes. Everything here had left. Gallagher ordered the attack. He would lead scouting six down first, aiming for hereu. He assigned Lieutenant Dwit Shamway’s 14 Yorktown bombers from bombing three to the battleship Haruna steaming nearby. Best and his three

bombing six aircraft would follow Gallagher onto the carrier. The approach was textbook. The Dauntlesses had climbed to 19,000 ft and position themselves up sun. Unlike the morning attack, there was no confusion, no miscommunication, no wrong target. The cruiser Chukuma spotted them first and fired anti-aircraft guns skyward to alert the combat air patrol. 140 scrambled upward, but they were already too late. Gallagher tipped over and dove. His first two bombs missed as Here you healed hard to port. Shame, watching

from altitude, saw the misses and made a split-second decision. He abandoned Haruna and redirected bombing three onto the carrier. The sky above here filled with diving dauntlesses from two squadrons converging from different angles. Zeros clawed at them on the way down, harassing pilots through their dives and throwing off aim. The attack was chaotic, overlapping, and relentless. The first direct hit landed near the forward elevator. The blast was so powerful it threw the steel platform upward and slammed it against the

carrier’s bridge. A second bomb struck the flight deck amid ships. Then a third, then a fourth. Fire swept across Hiu’s forward hanger deck. The armed aircraft waiting for launch exploded one after another. Hiu’s ability to fight was gone in under 90 seconds. One of those four hits belonged to Dick Best. For the second time in a single day, his 1,000lb bomb had found a Japanese carrier’s flight deck. No other pilot in the history of naval warfare had ever done what Best had just done. struck two

enemy fleet carriers with direct bomb hits in the same battle on the same day, flying the same aircraft. But as Best pulled out of his dive and leveled off above the water, he coughed hard into his oxygen mask. When he pulled the mask away, it was spattered with red. Best nursed his Dauntless back to Enterprise on fumes. The fuel gauge had been hovering near empty for the last 20 minutes of the return flight. Every few minutes he coughed, and every cough brought more red into the mask. Behind him, Chief Murray watched the back of

his pilot’s head and said nothing. There was nothing to say at 13,000 ft over open ocean with the nearest friendly deck 40 mi east. He landed hard. The tail hook caught the third wire and the Dauntless jerked to a stop on Enterprise’s flight deck. Best sat in the cockpit for a long moment before unstrapping. when he pulled himself over the side and dropped onto the deck, his knees buckled. A plane handler grabbed his arm. Best waved him off, walked to the island, and reported to the air

officer. Two carriers hit. Two confirmed strikes. Mission complete. Then he coughed again hard enough to double over, and the flight deck crew saw the blood on his flight suit. The flight surgeon examined him that evening. temperature 103°, rattling sounds in the right lung, blood in every cough. Best was grounded immediately. He would not fly the next day or the day after or any day for the rest of the war. June 4th, 1942 was the last day Dick Best ever sat in the cockpit of a military aircraft. 700 m to

the west, Admiral Isuroku Yamamoto was trying to salvage a disaster. From the bridge of the battleship Yamato, he had received fragmentaryary reports throughout the day. Three carriers burning, then four. He ordered Vice Admiral Nouake Kondo to assemble a surface force of battleships and cruisers and close for a night engagement. If Japanese guns could find the American carriers in the dark, the battle might still be won. But Admiral Spruent refused the bait. He turned Task Force 16 east at midnight, opening the

distance. Spruent understood what Yamamoto wanted. He would not risk two irreplaceable carriers in a night gun battle against a fleet that still had 11 battleships. The American admiral would wait for daylight and let his pilots finished the job. There was nothing left to finish. Kaga sank at 1915 that evening, taking 800 crewmen with her. Soryu went under 20 minutes later with 718 dead. Akagi burned through the night. At dawn on June 5th, her own destroyers torpedoed her to hasten the sinking. She went down

with 267 of her crew. Nagumo had transferred his flag to the cruiser Nagara hours earlier. The admiral who had commanded the attack on Pearl Harbor had watched his flagship burn from a destroyer’s deck. Here you lasted longest. She burned through the night and into the morning, her fires visible for miles. Captain Tomoku and Rear Admiral Yamaguchi refused to leave. Both men chose to go down with the ship. At 0900 on June 5th, Hiru finally slipped beneath the surface. 392 of her crew died with her. Four Japanese fleet

carriers sunk in a single battle. 3,57 Japanese dead. 248 aircraft destroyed. The Kido Bhutai, the most feared naval strike force on Earth, had ceased to exist. And the pilot who had personally helped sink two of those four carriers, was lying in a bunk aboard Enterprise, coughing blood into a towel. Enterprise docked at Pearl Harbor on June 8th. Best was carried off the ship on a stretcher. He had spent the 4-day voyage in his bunk, his fever climbing, the coughing growing worse. Doctors at Pearl Harbor Hospital admitted him on

the same day and ordered a chest X-ray. The film showed an infiltrate spreading across the upper lobe of his right lung. Increased modeling extended outward from the hilum, the junction where the bronchial tubes and blood vessels enter the lung tissue. The diagnosis came within 48 hours. Chemical pneumminitis caused by inhaled sodium hydroxide fumes and something far worse, active pulmonary tuberculosis. Best had carried latent tuberculosis for years without knowing it. The bacteria had walled themselves off inside a tiny

granuloma deep in his lung, dormant and harmless. The costic sodaf fumes he had inhaled at 20,000 ft that morning had burned through the granuloma’s wall like acid through paper. The dormant bacteria were now active, multiplying, destroying lung tissue from the inside. The very breath that had kept him alive long enough to sink two carriers was now killing him. He was not alone. During the debrief after midway, Navy investigators discovered that half the pilots in bombing six had reported problems with their oxygen systems

during the morning flight. The rebreather canisters had overheated on multiple aircraft during the unusually long search. Other pilots had experienced burning throats and nausea, but none of them carried the latent tuberculosis that made the exposure lethal. Best had drawn the worst possible hand, a mechanical defect in an oxygen canister combined with a medical condition no one had ever tested him for. The treatment in 1942 was brutal and slow. No antibiotics existed for tuberculosis. Doctors collapsed sections

of the infected lung to starve the bacteria of air, a procedure called therapeutic pneumothorax. Best lay in a hospital bed while the war he had helped turn raged on without him. Yorktown had not survived midway either. On June 6th, salvage crews had reboarded the listing carrier and were fighting to save her when the Japanese submarine I168 found her. Two torpedoes struck Yorktown starboard side. The destroyer Hammond lashed alongside for support, took a torpedo amidship, and broke in half, sinking in 4 minutes with 81 of

her crew. Yorktown held on through the night, but capsized and sank at dawn on June 7th. The Americans had lost one carrier and one destroyer. 307 Americans had died in the battle, but the strategic math was devastating for Japan. The trained air groups that had operated from those carriers, pilots who had spent years mastering carrier landings, torpedo runs, and coordinated strikes, were irreplaceable. Japan’s naval aviation training pipeline could not produce experienced carrier pilots fast enough to replace the ones lost at

Midway. The Kid Bhutai had taken a decade to build. It was destroyed in a single afternoon. For the rest of the war, the Imperial Japanese Navy would fight on the defensive. Midway had not just been a battle. It had been the hinge. And the man who had struck the blow that broke that hinge, one bomb into a kagi, one bomb into Hiru, lay in a hospital bed at Pearl Harbor, watching his lungs slowly fail. Dick Best spent 32 months in that hospital through the summer of 1942 while the Marines landed on Guadal Canal. through the fall, while

Enterprise fought the battles of the Eastern Solomons and Santa Cruz. Through 1943, while new Essexclass carriers slid down the ways at shipyards in Virginia and New Jersey through the spring of 1944, while the fleet he had helped save at Midway grew into the largest naval armada in history, Best watched it all from a bed at the Naval Hospital in Seattle. The Navy awarded him the Navy Cross, the highest decoration for valor the service could bestow, second only to the Medal of Honor. The citation described

extraordinary heroism during the air battle of Midway. It noted that he had led divebombing assaults against Japanese naval units under concentrated anti-aircraft fire and powerful fighter opposition. dive bombing was a deathdeying ride of terror. ; That he had flown at distances from his own forces that made return unlikely due to fuel exhaustion, that he had pressed home his attacks with extreme disregard for his own personal safety. The citation did not mention that his own aircraft’s oxygen system had ended his

career. He also received the Distinguished Flying Cross for his earlier strikes against the Marshall Islands. Two of the Navy’s highest awards for a pilot who would never touch a flight stick again. In March 1944, Best was medically retired with the rank of Lieutenant Commander and a full disability rating. He was 33 years old. 10 months earlier, streptomyosin had entered clinical trials. Had his tuberculosis activated a year later, the antibiotic might have saved his lungs. The timing was as cruel as the

malfunction that caused it. The Navy never told Best exactly what had gone wrong with the rebreather canisters. Maintenance logs from Enterprises Air Department for June 1942 were incomplete. ; So, we have a copy of his log book page that shows him making really what amounted to the final landing for this aircraft, the final successful uh landing of the airplane. ; The investigation into the oxygen failures across bombing six produced no public report. Best knew only what the doctors told him

and that no one would ever be held accountable for the malfunction. After discharge from the hospital, Best moved to Santa Monica, California. He took a position with a small research division at Douglas Aircraft Corporation, the company that had built the Dauntless he had flown at Midway. In December 1948, that division was absorbed into a new independent organization, the Rand Corporation. Best became head of RAND’s security department. He spent the next 27 years there protecting classified

Cold War research at one of the most secretive think tanks in the country. The pilot who had helped win the Pacific War spent the Cold War making sure Soviet intelligence never reached the documents that defined American nuclear strategy. He rarely spoke about Midway. For decades, his role in the battle received little public attention. Histories of the engagement focused on McCcluskkeyy’s decision to continue searching for the Japanese fleet, on the sacrifice of the torpedo squadrons, on the codereers who had made the ambush

possible. Best’s name appeared in footnotes and appendices, not in chapter titles. The man who had hit two fleet carriers in 6 hours had become a classified footnote himself. Then in 1976, a phone call came. Hollywood was making a film about Midway. The producers wanted technical consultants who had been there. Dick Best picked up the phone. Best served as a technical consultant on the 1976 film Midway alongside Joseph Roachfort, the codereaker whose team had cracked the Japanese naval cipher. On

set, Best met George Gay, the sole survivor of torpedo 8 for the first time. two men who had lived through opposite ends of the same battle. Gay had watched from the ocean as best squadron dove on the carriers above him. They had never spoken before that day. The film brought a brief wave of recognition, but it faded. Best returned to his quiet life in Santa Monica. He had retired from Rand the year before. He tended his garden. He attended occasional reunions of Enterprise veterans. He did not seek attention.

When historians visited, he answered their questions precisely and without embellishment. He corrected errors in published accounts when he found them. He did not exaggerate his role or diminish anyone else’s. In 1998, Admiral Thomas Moore, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Vice Admiral William Hower launched a formal campaign to upgrade best Navy Cross to the Medal of Honor. Their argument was straightforward. No other pilot in history had struck two enemy fleet carriers in a single day and the action

had directly changed the outcome of the most important naval battle of the 20th century. The campaign failed. The Navy declined the upgrade. No reason was made public. Richard Hollyy Best died on October 28th, 2001 at the age of 91 in Santa Monica. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, section 54, site 3192, full military honors. A flag folded 13 times and handed to his family. A headstone among thousands, marking a man who had changed the course of a war in 6 hours and spent the next 59 years

watching from the ground. In 2019, director Roland Emer released a second film about the battle. Actor Ed Scrin played Dick Best. On October 28th of that year, the 18th anniversary of Best’s death, Screen visited Arlington and stood at the grave of the man he had portrayed. He had studied Best’s combat reports, watched archival footage, and read every interview the pilot had ever given. Screen laid a wreath and stood in silence. The SBD Dauntless that Best flew survives in memory, but not in

metal. No individual aircraft from bombing six at Midway has been recovered, but the Dauntless itself, the dive bomber that sank more enemy shipping than any other Allied aircraft in the war, stands preserved in the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida. Walk past the display and read the placard. It does not mention Dick Best by name. Dick Best never got his Medal of Honor, but you can make sure his story keeps going. Hit that like button. It is the single fastest way to keep this story moving.

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