On June 19, 1942, the seaplane tender USS Ballard came alongside a small boat hundreds of miles from Midway and found 35 Japanese men alive inside. All of them had come from the engine rooms of the aircraft carrier Hiryu. Four days earlier, their own fleet commander’s battle report had already listed them as dead. The report belonged to Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, dated June 15, 1942.
Nagumo had commanded all four Japanese carriers at the Battle of Midway. In its section on the Hiryu, the report stated that the telephone line to her engine rooms stayed open to the end, and that from the chief engineer down to the last man, the engine room crew carried on in the face of death. The Japanese battle report counted 417 dead from the Hiryu, beginning with Rear Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi, who went down with the ship. Carrier historian Anthony Tully puts the figure at 418 from Japanese lists.
Either way, 34 of those names belonged to men who were already in American hands by the end of June. The escape began on the afternoon of June 4, 1942. By then, the Hiryu was the only Japanese carrier at Midway still able to fight. Her planes had hit the Yorktown twice.
Then dive bombers from the USS Enterprise found her, and four bombs struck her flight deck in a tight group. One bomb threw the forward elevator up against the island structure. The hangar below caught fire, and the fire had fuel and bombs to feed on. Deep in the hull, the machinery survived.
Japanese accounts say all four turbines were sound and five of her eight boilers were still lit, enough for the engineers to report she could make 30 knots. For a while, she did run west away from the American carriers with her flight deck burning. What failed was the link to the bridge. The telephone down to the engineering spaces ran off the same power supply as the emergency steering.
When the motor that turned her rudder stopped and the Hiryu switched to battery power, the telephone went dead with it. From that point on, nobody above could hear the engineers, and the engineers could hear nobody above. Messages could not get through either. Ensign Hisao Mandai, an assistant to the chief engineer, said decades later that the crew had stacked bales of rice to the ceiling in the passages above the machinery.
The rice was meant for the Japanese garrison that was to hold Midway once taken. Now the bales were burning, and nobody could pass through. The heat drove the engineers out of the starboard engine room, so they moved across to the port side and kept the port engines turning. Before the line died, a staff engineer up top made one last call down, asking whether there was anything the men wished to leave behind.
Those who heard it said later that it stunned them. On the bridge, the officers took the silence from below as an answer. Captain Tamio Kaku received word that his engineers were all dead and decided the ship was lost. In the small hours, the battle flag came down.
Yamaguchi and Kaku spoke to the crew, and the order went out to abandon ship. The destroyers Kazagumo and Makigumo took the survivors off. The admiral and the captain stayed aboard. Before dawn on June 5, the Makigumo fired torpedoes into the Hiryu to finish her.
One ran under the hull. The other struck home. The destroyers then pulled away to the west without waiting to watch her sink. She did not sink.
Below decks, with no word coming down from above, the engine room crews began working their way up through the ship. Mandai put the number who tried at about 100. When the first of them came out into the open, the destroyers were gone. Not everyone agrees on that part.
Tully puts the number of men left aboard lower, at about 70. A summary by the Naval History and Heritage Command says the destroyer commander on the scene knew engineers had reached the deck and chose to leave them behind. The Japanese accounts have the destroyers gone before anyone came up. After sunrise, a biplane from the light carrier Hosho flew over the Hiryu and photographed her still afloat with men on her deck.
The plane’s crew reported two figures waving their caps. For years, the story in Japan was that those two men were Yamaguchi and Kaku saying goodbye. Survivors later named them as Petty Officer Keiichi Ikeda of the engine room and a junior maintenance rating named Isakichi Okada. The photograph survives and is the best-known picture of the Hiryu’s last morning.
Nagumo sent the destroyer Tanikaze to deal with the carrier and pick up anyone still aboard. American aircraft caught the Tanikaze on the way, about 50 of them by Nagumo’s count, and she never found the Hiryu or anyone from her. Nagumo’s report settles the matter in a single sentence: since nobody could sight the ship, it was assumed that she had sunk. Nobody looked again.
Of the men who came up from below, 39 found a cutter, one of the Hiryu’s open boats, still aboard. Japanese accounts say they loaded it with food and water, got it into the sea, and took the ship’s battle flag with them. About four hours after the Makigumo’s torpedo, by Japanese timings, the Hiryu rolled to port and went under forward end first. The escape is told differently in Jasper Holmes’s 1979 memoir.
Holmes, an American intelligence officer at Pearl Harbor, wrote that the men swam clear as the ship went down and happened to find an empty life raft floating nearby. Navy photographs taken at Midway later that month show a cutter. For nine days, nobody saw them. On June 14, a Catalina flying boat from Midway’s patrol squadrons spotted a small boat hundreds of miles out and then lost it again.
On June 19, a patrol plane found it a second time, and the Ballard was sent to get it. The Ballard was an old four-stack destroyer rebuilt in 1940 to tend flying boats. She had been launched in Massachusetts on December 7, 1918, 23 years to the day before Pearl Harbor. Her crew found 35 men alive and four dead in the boat.
The Ballard buried the dead at sea and took the 35 aboard as prisoners of war. One more died before she reached Midway and was buried at sea as well. By Japanese accounts, the battle flag was already gone. The men had dropped it over the side before they were taken prisoner.
The cutter had drifted almost 300 miles from the spot where the carrier went down. The count of the dead does not agree either. Mandai told his interviewer in 2000 that two of his shipmates died in the boat. The American side figures work out to four dead in the boat and a fifth after the rescue, and some Japanese sources give five for the whole drift.
One Navy summary puts the rescue on June 17 with 34 men. The Ballard’s own logs say the 19th. The Americans noticed what the Japanese had to float in. Writer Saichi Nakata, who examined the American interrogation files, says the report on the rescue remarked on the Hiryu’s shortage of lifeboats and life-saving gear and called it a disregard for human life on a national scale.
The Ballard landed the prisoners at Midway on June 20. Navy photographers took pictures while they waited under guard. In one, a prisoner sits with a copy of Life magazine, the issue dated November 24, 1941, two weeks before Pearl Harbor. On June 23, the men were loaded aboard the cargo ship Sirius, and on July 1, they arrived at Pearl Harbor.
Until then, the United States had held only a handful of Japanese prisoners, among them two sailors from the cruiser Mikuma whom the submarine Trout had pulled off a raft on June 9. Holmes wrote that 35 arriving together overwhelmed interrogation resources, though he never says what the engineers told the interrogators. In Tokyo that summer, the Navy kept the Hiryu alive on paper. On July 14, 1942, she and the Akagi were listed as attached to the newly formed Third Fleet, a move the Japanese official history describes as a way of keeping the losses secret.
The Hiryu was not struck from the Navy list until September 25. For more than three months, Japan carried a sunken carrier as a ship in service and 34 living engineers as dead. The prisoners went on to camps on the American mainland. At Camp Livingston in Louisiana, they met Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki, the submarine officer captured at Pearl Harbor, the first Japanese prisoner of the war.
His own Navy had already dealt with him the same way. When it announced the other nine men of the midget submarine attack as war heroes in March 1942, it simply left his name off. In an account of Sakamaki’s captivity by writer Naoki Kudachi, there were 36 Hiryu engineers at Livingston, two more than the American figure, and the sources do not reconcile the two numbers. Chief Engineer Kunizo Iso and eight of the others were later moved to a secret interrogation center in California known as Camp Tracy, where they were held alongside survivors of the heavy cruiser Furutaka and the battleship Kirishima.
After Tracy, the English-language sources lose the chief engineer entirely. None of them says when he went home or what he did once he got there. Hisao Mandai did go home. In 1998, 56 years after the battle, he set foot on Midway and wrote about it for the naval magazine Maru.
Two years later, interviewed by the editors of the history magazine Rekishi Kaido, he kept coming back to one thing: damage control. The Hiryu’s engines had been sound, he said, and if the bridge had been able to reach them, she could have made it home. He named three things American carriers had that his ship did not: a nozzle that could put out oil fires, breathing gear that let a man work where there was no air, and a telephone that needed no battery. That last item was standard equipment in the American Navy, a sound-powered telephone that turns the speaker’s own voice into the electric current that carries it, working even when a ship loses all power.
The Hiryu’s engineers lost their only line because it shared its current with a steering motor, and the men on the bridge decided their fate without hearing a word from below. The Ballard went back to tending flying boats. On November 20, 1942, five months after she found the Hiryu’s engineers, she pulled two more men out of the water, sailors from the American light cruiser Juneau, which a Japanese submarine had sunk off Guadalcanal a week earlier. Of the Juneau’s whole crew, rescuers found only ten men alive.
The Ballard earned two battle stars and left service in December 1945, and the Navy sold her for scrap on May 23, 1946. One of the Navy’s photographs from Midway shows the Hiryu’s cutter hanging from the Ballard’s starboard davits with two patrol torpedo boats in the background. What the Navy did with that boat afterward, none of the published files say.