On the morning of June 4, 1942, a US Navy pilot strapped into his dive bomber, took a breath from his oxygen canister, and inhaled caustic soda fumes.
The canister was defective. His lungs were already burning.
He flew the mission anyway.
By sunset, Dick Best had done something no pilot in history has done before or since. And he paid for it with everything.
Best was 31, commander of Bombing Squadron Six aboard USS Enterprise. Six months after Pearl Harbor, America was losing the Pacific. Four Japanese carriers, the same fleet that had attacked Hawaii, were steaming toward Midway to finish the US Navy for good.
His air group launched that morning and found nothing but empty ocean. Fuel running low, the formation was minutes from turning back when group commander Wade McClusky spotted a lone Japanese destroyer racing north at full speed. He made a gut call: follow it.
The destroyer led them straight to the entire Japanese fleet.
Then came the mistake that almost ruined everything. Doctrine said McClusky's group should take the far carrier and Best's squadron the near one. Instead, nearly all 30 dive bombers poured down on the same ship, Kaga.
Best watched his own squadron dive past him onto the wrong target. So he pulled out, signaled his two wingmen, and went after the other carrier with 3 planes instead of 15.
That carrier was Akagi. The flagship. The ship that had launched the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Best rolled into his dive through anti-aircraft fire and put a 1,000 lb bomb through the flight deck near the midship elevator. It exploded in the hangar below, packed with fueled and armed torpedo planes. The blast set off a chain reaction that no one aboard could stop.
One bomb. One hit. Akagi was finished.
In roughly five minutes that morning, three of Japan's four carriers were burning wrecks. Historians call it the most decisive five minutes of the entire war.
But one carrier was left. That afternoon, coughing and getting worse, Best climbed back into his cockpit and flew again. His squadron found Hiryu at dusk and sent her to the bottom too.
Two carriers in one day. The only pilot ever to do it.
That night, Best was coughing blood. The caustic fumes had activated latent tuberculosis in his ruined lungs. He spent 32 months in hospitals and never flew again.
June 4, 1942 was his last flight.
Japan never recovered. The empire that had been undefeated for centuries lost the initiative in a single morning and spent the rest of the war in retreat.
And the most consequential single bomb dropped before Hiroshima was delivered by a man who was slowly suffocating as he aimed it.
84 years ago today.
@VoicesofWW2 via X
Fly navy!!👍👍
