On the morning of June 4, 1942, Ensign George Gay climbed into his TBD Devastator torpedo bomber and flew toward the largest concentration of Japanese naval power ever assembled.
He knew exactly what he was flying into.
Torpedo Squadron 8 had 15 planes and 30 men. Their aircraft were slow, outdated, and completely unescorted. No fighter cover. Command had promised them protection. It never showed. The flight leader, Lieutenant Commander John Waldron, had written a farewell letter to his wife before takeoff. He knew.
Waldron found the Japanese fleet first. Before the attack, he got on the radio one last time: "My greatest hope is that we encounter a favorable tactical situation, but if we don't, and the worst comes to worst, I want each one of us to do his utmost to destroy our enemies. If there is only one plane left to make a final run in, I want that man to go in and get a hit."
Then they dove.
The Japanese Combat Air Patrol fell on them like wolves. Dozens of Zeros. The Devastators had no altitude, no speed, and no cover. They had to fly low and straight to line up torpedo shots, which meant they couldn't evade. They could only absorb fire and keep flying.
One by one, the planes went down.
Gay watched them fall around him. Friends. Bunkmates. Men he had trained with, eaten with, played cards with. Going into the water one after another. No parachutes. No survivors.
His gunner, Robert Huntington, was hit. Dying in the backseat as Gay flew forward.
Gay himself took a 20mm cannon round. His left hand was hit. The plane was on fire.
He kept flying.
He lined up on the Japanese carrier Soryu and dropped his torpedo at point-blank range, closer than doctrine called for, because he had no other choice. He watched it run toward the ship.
Soryu turned. The torpedo missed.
Then his plane was hit again and went in.
As the nose of the Devastator knifed into the Pacific, Gay forced the canopy open against the rushing water pressure and pulled himself free. He surfaced surrounded by burning fuel and wreckage, wounded, alone, in the middle of the Japanese fleet.
He had one Mae West life vest. One seat cushion. That was it.
The Japanese destroyers were close enough that he could see sailors moving on their decks. He knew if they spotted him, they would not rescue him. So he did the only thing he could do.
He held the seat cushion over his head and floated.
Every time a Japanese aircraft flew low over the water, he pushed himself under and pressed the cushion above him to break his silhouette. For hours he did this. Treading water. Hiding. Bleeding. Watching his friends' planes burn on the surface around him.
He was the last man. Every single other pilot and gunner in Torpedo Squadron 8 from the Hornet was dead. All 29 of them.
And then, from high altitude, the American dive bombers arrived.
SBD Dauntlesses. They had found the fleet almost by accident, following the wake of a Japanese destroyer. And when they arrived, the sky above the carriers was empty.
Here is the part that will haunt you.
VT-8's attack had looked like a catastrophic failure. But it wasn't. By flying low, slow, and straight into the teeth of the Japanese fleet, they had pulled every single Zero in the Combat Air Patrol down to sea level to kill them. For those few critical minutes, the carriers below had nothing above them. No protection. No altitude cover.
The dive bombers came straight down out of the sun.
Akagi: hit. Fires reached the torpedo magazine. Gone.
Kaga: hit. Fuel ignited. Gone.
Soryu, the same carrier Gay had attacked alone minutes before: hit. Gone.
Three of Japan's six fleet carriers, the core of the force that had attacked Pearl Harbor, were mortally wounded in under five minutes.
George Gay watched all of it.
From fifty yards away, treading water with a shot-up life vest and a seat cushion over his head, he watched three Japanese aircraft carriers burn to the waterline. He watched the explosions. He watched the smoke columns rise so high they could be seen for miles. He watched the fleet that had seemed invincible that morning begin to die.
He floated there for thirty hours total. When darkness finally fell, he inflated the life raft. It was full of bullet holes but held enough CO2 to keep him on the surface through the night.
A Navy PBY Catalina patrol plane found him the next morning and pulled him out.
He later met with Admiral Chester Nimitz personally and confirmed what he had seen: three carriers destroyed. His eyewitness account was among the first human confirmation that the battle had turned.
He was 26 years old.
He was awarded the Navy Cross. He recovered from his wounds. He went back to flying, eventually spending 30 years as a commercial pilot for Trans World Airlines, carrying passengers on routes across America. He never made a big show of what he had done. He gave interviews when asked. He wrote a book. He went to reunions.
He died in 1994 in Marietta, Georgia.
His name was Ensign George Henry Gay Jr. He is, to this day, the only known combatant in history to survive a major naval battle by floating in the middle of it while it happened around him.
He flew in with 29 men. He came home alone. And the battle those men died in changed the course of the entire war.
Today is the 84th anniversary of the Battle of Midway.
Remember his name.
82 years ago today, eight American sailors jumped onto a sinking Nazi submarine in the middle of the Atlantic.
What they pulled out of it changed the war. And the Navy buried the whole story for years.
First, you need to know that U-505 was already cursed. German sailors called her the unluckiest boat in the fleet. In October 1943, during a brutal British depth-charge attack, her own captain shot himself in the head in the control room, in front of his crew. He remains the only submarine commander in history known to have killed himself underwater in combat. His second-in-command calmly took over, rode out the attack, and sailed her home.
Eight months later, her luck ran out completely.
June 4, 1944. Two days before D-Day. Captain Daniel Gallery's hunter-killer group, built around the escort carrier USS Guadalcanal, had been stalking U-boats off West Africa. Gallery had an idea his superiors considered borderline insane: don't sink the next one. Capture it. No US Navy crew had boarded and taken an enemy warship on the high seas since 1815.
The destroyer escort USS Chatelain caught U-505 on sonar and fired a salvo of hedgehog bombs. The U-boat broke the surface 700 yards away. Gunfire raked the conning tower, wounding her captain. He gave the order to abandon ship.
The Germans rushed out so fast they botched the scuttling. The sub was flooding, but her engines were still running. She was circling the battle at six knots, empty, sinking, and very possibly rigged with demolition charges.
So Lt. Albert David and eight men from USS Pillsbury chased her down in a whaleboat, leaped aboard, and climbed down the hatch into a dark, flooding submarine that could explode or go under at any second. They shut the scuttling valves, disarmed the charges, and stopped the flooding.
Down there they found the prize: Enigma cipher machines and roughly 900 pounds of codebooks and charts. Current settings. The keys to the German navy's secret communications.
But here's the catch. The treasure was only valuable if Germany never found out. One leak and Berlin changes every code overnight.
So the Navy ran one of the great cover-ups of the war. The sub was towed 1,700 miles to Bermuda and given a fake American name: USS Nemo. Around 3,000 sailors were sworn to total silence. The 58 captured German crewmen vanished into a POW camp in rural Louisiana, hidden even from the Red Cross. Germany declared U-505 lost with all hands and notified the families. The dead men were alive in Louisiana, and their boat was working for the US Navy.
The secret held until the war ended.
Lt. David received the Medal of Honor, the only one awarded in the Atlantic Fleet in all of WWII.
And the submarine? In 1954, Chicagoans raised $250,000 to bring her home. She was towed across Lake Michigan and dragged through the streets of Chicago to the Museum of Science and Industry.
She's still sitting there right now. You can walk through her.
🎬 For decades, film rolls containing more than 2,000 photos documenting the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy movement had been shut inside a metal box, never known to the world.
These photos, taken by a Chinese state media photographer and having survived the ensuing political purge campaigns after the massacre, eventually made their way to the United States, and were recently entrusted to The Epoch Times.
Now, The Epoch Times is making the photos public for the first time. ⬇️