San Francisco Examiner
June 4, 2000

Hero Of The Defining Battle In Pacific Recalls Fateful Day

Midway Memories -- 'It's a tough situation, playing God, I'll tell you'

By Michael Dougan of The Examiner Staff

On a hot, hellish day nearly six decades back, 19-year-old Art Lewis dived into Pacific waters - a roiling death stew of oil, sharp-edged debris, subsurface sharks and the corpses of his comrades - and swam toward a big sinking ship.

He hauled a rope behind him so that desperate men who had leaped from that burning boat up ahead could be towed to his craft. Lewis, a simple seaman, saved 35 lives that day. By all accounts, he should have lost his own, but somehow he was still breathing when darkness fell on the soon-to-be-famous Battle of Midway.

This year, for the first time, the U.S. Navy is treating the Battle of Midway as one of its two most important historical dates (after Oct. 13, 1775 - the day the Navy was born). Around the world, the event will be remembered Sunday.

Lewis, who lives in Yountville, is one of 15 "Battle of Midway Heroes" in the Bay Area who will participate in ceremonies at 11 a.m. on the USS Hornet Historic Shop and Museum at the former Naval Air Station in Alameda.

Lewis felt no overwhelming emotion at the time - or during any of the other sea battles with names that echo in the memories of a certain generation: Guadalcanal, the Solomon Islands, the Marquesas, Wake.

Now he thinks about all that and he chokes up a bit.

He cries, for example, at the thought of his father - a tough man who showed no love to his sons - waiting for the mail every day for three months, not knowing whether Art was dead or alive.

And he gulps down a sharp hiccup of sentiment when he rereads a 2-year-old proclamation from the Yountville City Council that begins with these words: "Whereas Art Lewis, American hero . . ."

Lewis, now a 78-year-old resident of the California Veterans' Home near Yountville, said he never thought about heroism when his destroyer, the USS Balch, steamed toward the center of the Pacific in the first week of June 1942. Only six months earlier, Japanese warplanes had sunk two battleships and killed more than 2,000 military personnel in a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

"We knew we were going to have a big battle in two or three days," recalled Lewis, who has Parkinson's disease, as he rode his wheelchair across the well-tended grounds of the veterans' home on a recent morning.

As a lowly bosun's mate, he did not know they were going up against the four Japanese carriers that had launched the raid on Pearl Harbor.

Contact was made June 4 - 58 years ago this Sunday. Within three days, American forces would sink those carriers and permanently turn the tide in the battle for Pacific dominance. Though less well-remembered today, the Battle of Midway was as crucial to Allied forces as D-day - and much less certain to succeed.

The fact that Americans have forgotten how important Midway was to their eventual victory against Japan has long rankled some in the military establishment.

"It's a sad thing because the Battle of Midway (anniversary) comes in the wake of Memorial Day, and many news organizations don't cover it as well as they should," said Fred Gorell, a retired Navy public information officer and current vice president of the San Francisco Navy League, best known for its annual co-sponsorship of Fleet Week.

"It was the defining sea battle in the Pacific, and historians call it one of the greatest sea battles of all times," he said. "The Battle of Midway was psychologically and strategically huge in value, because one day the Japanese had the pride of their fleet steaming toward Midway to occupy the island, to take it over, to make it a base from which they could further attack, and the next day they had three aircraft carriers sunk and the next morning a fourth. They lost their power in the Pacific and it stunned them."

The Battle of Midway has not been implanted in the American consciousness like D-day, in part, because it took place at sea, said Navy Capt. Jim Kudla, spokesman for Adm. Jay Johnson, chief of naval operations in Washington, D.C.

"With armed battles, fought on land, there is a place you can go to," said Kudla. "You can go to the cemeteries where people who fought and died are buried. With naval battles, by their very nature, everything is gone."

In May 1998, famed undersea explorer Robert Ballard - who had discovered and photographed the Titanic - managed to send remote-control operated submarines to the site of the Yorktown, 1,650 feet deep. The Yorktown was the only American aircraft carrier to sink in the Battle of Midway.

It was Yorktown sailors whom Lewis saved. He and another sailor - who Lewis believes was taken by sharks - volunteered to swim out from their own ship with ropes to pull escaping Yorktown sailors to safety.

"I was the only one young

enough and dumb enough," he said. "If I was a year older, I never would have gone in there. But I did."

Nobody who knows Lewis believes that. His stories of the day do not involve risk to himself. Instead, he talks about the men he saved - and those he didn't.

"If they were too far gone (with injuries), I'd leave them," he said. "It's a tough situation, playing God, I'll tell you."

Once more, his face scrunched with pain and his voice momentarily thickened.

The Battle of Midway consisted almost entirely of airplanes attacking ships and other airplanes. The carriers were so far apart those aboard couldn't see each other, noted Gorell.

He said it was Jimmy Doolittle's famous air raid on Tokyo the previous month that inspired the Japanese to direct the bulk of their Pacific fleet toward Midway, an American-held island 2,100 miles east of Tokyo and 1,135 west of Hawaii. They apparently believed that Doolittle's bombers had been launched from the remote atoll. (In fact, they had come off the decks of aircraft carriers.)

In a remarkable bit of intelligence work, American cryptographers had broken the Japanese military code and were able to send a fleet, vastly inferior in size, to intercept the Midway invasion force. Luck played a part when American attack planes caught the Japanese carriers with most of their aircraft on deck, being armed and fueled. In a matter of minutes, three of Japan's carriers were slipping beneath the waves.

Only one Japanese carrier, the Hiryu, remained operational. A few hours later, its planes hit the

Yorktown, which was subsequently sunk by torpedoes. The Hiryu was later destroyed.

In a massive rescue effort, including Lewis' daring swim through treacherous seas, 2,270 American sailors were saved.

Adm. Chester Nimitz, in charge of the Midway forces, wrote at the time that Lewis had distinguished himself in the water, but it was not until 1996 - after a campaign by those who knew him - that Lewis was awarded a Bronze Star with a Combat "V" for valor.

The Japanese forces were much greater in size and number, and so were their losses. In the end, the Japanese had four carriers, one heavy cruiser and 253 planes destroyed. About 2,300 of their men died.

American casualties were set at 307 men. They lost one destroyer and 147 airplanes.

USS Hornet Historic Shop and Museum Museum spokesman Bob Rogers said the public is encouraged to come for the memorial service Sunday.

He said the Midway veterans will be seated at tables beginning at 12:45 so visitors "can go up and talk to them face-to-face. They can talk to these men about their experiences."