National Geographic: The Battle for Midway Page #2

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called ATV

equipped with lights and video cameras

Will Ballard finally, after years

of planning and enormous effort,

be able to find the downed Yorktown?

For the veterans,

the ATV is a time machine

carrying them back to a distant world

of fury and fire.

All stations, deploying the vehicle

into the water now.

I remember walking up and down those

decks and 56 years after the fact,

I'm gonna look at those decks again.

And it'll bring back memories.

The ATV has now traveled over two miles

and almost five decades.

The ocean bottom is getting close.

Twelve thousand feet

The depth Ballard found Titanic.

All stations...

past the one-five-thousand feet.

Passing one-five thousand feet, aye.

Approaching 16,000, the depth Ballard

found the battleship Bismarck.

Nearing the sea floor, deeper than

Ballard has ever gone before.

Under the relentless pressure

of the ocean depths,

key equipment on the ATV has imploded.

It has collapsed into itself,

reducing metal and glass to rubble.

The ATV is crippled.

Just how badly no one yet knows.

It's a disaster that may mean the end

of the expedition.

June 3, 1942

The white sands of Midway

are now heavily defended

by hundreds of

young American servicemen

and dozens of bombers,

fighters, torpedo planes.

The battle is less than 24 hours away.

Among those waiting is a small

six-plane torpedo bomber squadron.

Both the planes and their young crews

are untested in combat,

but the young pilots are eager

to face the Japanese.

Seventeen-year-old Harry Ferrier

served as a radioman and gunner.

You don't think about the fact

that people do get killed, you know,

as a teenager, which I really was.

You think you're immortal.

And we had what we thought were

the best airplanes

that the Navy had come up with

and we would really give

the Japanese the hell,

I guess you'd say, and come back.

And it didn't work that way.

Dawn, June 4th nearly six months

to the day since Pearl Harbor.

Two hundred-forty miles from Midway,

Admiral Chuichi Nagumo readies

his attack.

He is supremely confident

of the final outcome

and utterly unaware of the American

aircraft carriers slowly closing in.

My spirits were, well, up to then,

we had won ever battle we fought,

so we thought we would win again.

Now is the moment of attack.

Six a.m.

With Japanese aircraft bearing down,

the American planes on Midway scramble

into the air.

With them is the torpedo bomber

carrying Harry Ferrier,

Bert Earnest and the third member

of their crew,

Jay Manning, the turret gunner.

They're going after

the Japanese carriers.

Earnest, Ferrier and

Manning clear the island just minutes

before enemy planes hit Midway.

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