February 1, 1942.
Central Pacific Ocean.
The USS Enterprise was running for her life.
Just 8 weeks after Pearl Harbor turned America’s Pacific fleet into twisted metal and burning oil, the Big E had struck back, launching the first offensive carrier raid of the war against Japanese bases in the Marshall Islands.
Now, as she retreated at flank speed, five twin engine Mitsubishi G3M bombers were screaming toward her at 10,000 ft.
Every anti-aircraft gun on the ship opened up.
Tracers stitched the sky.
Four of the bombers dropped their payloads, all misses and peeled away, heading for home.
But the fifth bomber didn’t turn.
Lieutenant Kazuo Nikai’s plane was already dying.
F4F Wildcats had torn into it during the approach and smoke poured from the fuselage.
Mikai knew he’d never make it back to base, so he made a decision that wouldn’t become common for another 2 years.
He aimed his burning aircraft directly at the Enterprises flight deck.
On the catwalk below, a 25-year-old aviation machinist named Bruno Gaido watched the bomber grow larger with each passing second.
Every gun on the ship was firing, but the plane kept coming close enough now that Gaido could see the flames licking from the engine cowling.
The anti-aircraft fire wasn’t working.
In about 10 seconds, that bomber would crash into the flight deck, and the Enterprise, America’s most valuable warship in the Pacific, would burn.
Bruno Gaido did the only thing he could think of.
He ran, not away from the danger, toward it.
Gaido sprinted across the open flight deck directly into the path of the incoming kamicazi and scrambled into the rear seat of a parked SBD dauntless dive bomber.
He grabbed the twin 30 caliber machine guns, swung them toward the approaching inferno, and opened fire.
What happened next would become one of the most extraordinary acts of individual bravery in naval aviation history.
But Bruno Gaido’s story was only beginning.
Bruno wanted to join the Navy immediately.
The military offered steady pay, three meals a day, and something more valuable to a young man from a workingclass family purpose.
But his father said no.
John Gaido thought his son was too young, just 18.
He’d seen enough of the world to know what military service could do to a man, and he wanted Bruno to wait.
For six long years, Bruno bounced between odd jobs on farms and in a brewery, watching the news from Europe and Asia grow darker month after month.
Germany rearming Japan on the march.
By 1940, even his cautious father knew war was coming.
In October that year, he finally relented and Bruno enlisted in the Navy.
After boot camp, Gaido was assigned to Naval Air Station Pearl Harbor on Fort Island, the heart of the Pacific Fleet aviation operations.
There he began training as an aviation machinist, learning to maintain the complex engines that kept Navy aircraft in the sky.
In July 1941, he was temporarily assigned to scouting squadron 6, which flew Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bombers from the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise.
The assignment was supposed to be temporary, just long enough to learn the basics of carrier aviation.
But Bruno Gaido had a way of making himself indispensable.
The Dauntless was a two-seat aircraft.
The pilot sat up front, controlling the dive bomber during its near vertical attacks on enemy ships.
The radio man gunner sat in the rear, operating the radio and manning the twin 30 caliber machine guns that provided rear defense against enemy fighters.
As a machinist, Gaido’s job was to keep the planes flying, but he also qualified as a rear seat gunner and quickly developed a reputation for something the Navy valued above almost everything else.
Toughness.
One incident in particular became legend among the Enterprises air group.
In June 1941, a newly reported pilot named Lieutenant Norman Clyice climbed into his SBD Dauntless to make his first carrier landing.
This was one of the most dangerous maneuvers in naval aviation, trying to drop a heavy aircraft onto a pitching deck barely 800 ft long, snagging one of the arresting wires with a tail hook while approaching at over 70 mph.
Standard procedure for carrier qualification flights was to fly solo with sandbags in the rear seat to simulate the weight of a gunner.
That way, if something went wrong, if the pilot missed the wires and went over the side or slammed into the crash barrier or spun off the deck, only one man would die instead of two.
When Clyice climbed into his cockpit, he expected to find sandbags.
Instead, he found Bruno Gaido.
Gaido was already strapped in, manning the rear guns, a slight grin on his face.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Cly demanded.
“This is my quall flight.
Get out.
” Gaido didn’t move.
“You got wings, don’t you?” he said.
Clyice tried to argue, tried to explain the danger, tried to order Gaido out of the aircraft, but Gaido just sat there completely calm, completely confident, waiting for the pilot to stop talking and start flying.
Cly would later say that Gaido’s confidence transformed his own mindset.
If this machinist believed in him enough to risk his life on a qualification flight, then maybe Clyice could believe in himself, too.
He made six perfect landings that day.
Dusty Clyice would go on to become one of the most decorated dive bomber pilots of World War II.
The only pilot to score direct hits on three different Japanese ships at the Battle of Midway, all of which sank.
He received the Navy Cross and lived to be 100 years old.
But he never forgot the machinist who believed in him when it mattered most.
On the morning of December 7th, 1941, Bruno Gaido was not at Pearl Harbor.
He was 200 m away aboard the USS Enterprise, returning from a mission to deliver Marine fighter planes to Wake Island.
The carrier had been scheduled to arrive in Pearl Harbor on December 6th, but heavy weather had delayed her by one day.
That delay saved the enterprise and possibly changed the course of the war.
When news of the attack reached the Big E, her aircraft launched immediately, searching for the Japanese fleet, they didn’t find it.
The six Japanese carriers had already disappeared into the vast Pacific, leaving behind the burning wreckage of battleship Row.
Enterprise scout planes arrived over Pearl Harbor during the attack itself, and several were shot down, some by Japanese zeros, others by friendly fire from panicked American gunners who shot at anything in the sky.
That evening, the Enterprise crept into Pearl Harbor in darkness.
Her crew saw what the Japanese had done.
The Arizona still burning, the Oklahoma capsized, the fleet they’d trained with for years reduced to twisted steel and floating oil.
Where in hell were you? Angry voices called from the docks.
You’d better get the hell out of here before the Japs come back and nail you, too.
They refueled in the shadow of burning ships, working through the night, and by 0600 the next morning, Enterprise had cleared the harbor channel and returned to the vast Pacific.
It was December 9th, 1941.
America was at war and the Enterprise, one of only three operational carriers in the Pacific, was the tip of the American spear.
The weeks after Pearl Harbor were brutal, one outpost after another.
Wake the Philippines, Hong Kong, much of Southeast Asia fell to Japan in rapid succession.
With the battleships wrecked at Pearl Harbor, only a handful of carriers stood between Japan and the rest of the Pacific.
Admiral Chester Nimttz knew he couldn’t change the whole war overnight, but he could hit back, if only to show America it could still fight.
On January 11th, 1942, Enterprise departed Pearl Harbor as part of Task Force 8 under the command of Vice Admiral William Bullhally, one of the most aggressive naval commanders in American history.
their target, the Marshall Islands, where Japan had established air and naval bases that threatened American shipping lanes.
Commander Thomas Jeter, the Enterprises executive officer, summed up the crew’s mood in the ship’s plan of the day.
An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
This Sunday, it’s our turn to shoot.
The raid was scheduled for February 1st, 1942.
A Sunday just like Pearl Harbor.
It would be America’s first offensive action of the Pacific War.
The raid on the Marshall Islands began before dawn.
Enterprise launched 36 SBD Dauntless dive bombers against Quaselene Wii and Maloella bat atoles.
The attacks caught the Japanese by surprise, destroying aircraft on the ground, sinking ships in the harbors and wrecking shore installations.
It was payback.
Small payback, but payback nonetheless.
But the Japanese struck back.
At approximately 1:40 p.
m.
as Enterprise retired from the area at high speed, five Mitsubishi G3M Nell bombers found her.
They had flown from Roy airfield on Quasilane, tracking the American carrier through a combination of luck and determination.
The bombers approached from the starboard bow at 10,000 ft.
Enterprises anti-aircraft batteries opened up, throwing up a curtain of steel.
F4F Wildcats from the Combat Air Patrol dove on the attackers.
The Nells went into a shallow power dive, each dropping three bombs.
Captain George Murray threw the Enterprise into hard maneuvers, and all 15 bombs missed the nearest splashing into the water about 50 ft off the port quarter.
Four of the bombers turned for home.
The fifth did not.
Lieutenant Kasuo Nikkai’s bomber was finished.
Wildcat fighters had riddled it during the approach and flames were now visible streaming from the engines.
The plane was dying and Nikai knew he would die with it.
So he made a choice.
Instead of trying to nurse his crippled aircraft back to base, a journey he would never complete.
Nikkai turned sharply left and aimed his bomber directly at the Enterprise.
This was something new.
The term kamakaz wouldn’t be coined for another 2 and a half years when Japan would make suicide attacks official policy.
But Lieutenant Kazu Nakai in the first weeks of the war had independently arrived at the same conclusion that would later consume an entire generation of Japanese pilots.
If he was going to die anyway, he would take as many Americans with him as possible.
On the Enterprise, every gun that could bear opened fire.
Tracers stre toward the approaching plane.
Shells burst around it.
But the nail kept coming lower now.
Flames streaming, guns still firing.
The anti-aircraft fire wasn’t stopping it.
From his position in the catwalk, a narrow walkway along the edge of the flight deck.
Aviation machinists made thirdclass Bruno Gaido watched the bomber grow larger.
He had seconds to act.
Bruno Gaido’s battle station was in the catwalk, not in an aircraft.
His job during combat was to stay put, stay safe, and wait for the shooting to stop so he could return to his real work, keeping the dive bombers in the air.
But Bruno Gaido had never been very good at staying put.
As the burning bomber closed in, Gaido did something that made absolutely no sense by any rational calculation.
He climbed out of the protected catwalk, ran across the exposed flight deck directly toward the incoming aircraft, and scrambled into the rear seat of a parked SBD Dauntless dive bomber.
It was aircraft 6S5, one of the Dauntlesses from scouting squadron 6.
Gaido’s normal position when this plane was airborne, but right now it was just a parked aircraft with a tank full of aviation fuel and bombs still mounted under its wings.
If the Japanese bomber hit the flight deck, this aircraft would explode.
Gaido knew this.
He didn’t care.
He grabbed the twin 30 caliber machine guns, swiveled them toward the approaching bomber, and opened fire.
From Admiral Haly’s position on the bridge, the scene was surreal.
Amid the chaos of anti-aircraft fire and maneuvering, one man had run toward the danger instead of away from it.
Now he was standing in the rear seat of a parked dive bomber, firing point blank at a burning Japanese aircraft that was about to crash into the ship.
Witnesses would later describe it as a personal duel.
The Japanese pilot and the American machinist trading fire in the final seconds before impact.
Gaido stood to depress his guns, aiming down into the low-flying bombers’s cockpit.
Tracers poured from his weapons directly into the glass and metal of Nikkai’s aircraft.
At the last moment, Captain Murray ordered another hard turn to starboard.
The combination of the ship’s maneuver and Gaido’s fire pouring rounds directly into the cockpit caused the bomber to lose control.
Instead of slamming into the flight deck, the Nell’s right wing clipped the tail of Gaido’s SBD.
The impact sheared the tail clean off 3 ft from where Gaido was still firing.
The broken Dauntless spun toward the edge of the flight deck.
The Japanese bomber’s wing separated from the fuselage and skidded into the port catwalk.
Fuel from its ruptured tanks drenching the ship forward to the island superructure.
Lieutenant Nikai’s aircraft, finally done, plunged into the sea off Enterprises port quarter and disappeared beneath the waves.
But Bruno Gaido wasn’t finished.
Still in the rear seat of his wrecked aircraft, which was now teetering on the edge of the flight deck, Gaido kept firing into the wreckage of the bomber as it settled into the sea.
Then, when there was nothing left to shoot at, he calmly grabbed the SBD’s fire extinguisher and used it to put out a pool of burning aviation fuel that the Japanese plane had left on the deck.
Only then did he climb out of the shattered aircraft and then Bruno Gaido did something that in retrospect was completely in character.
He disappeared.
As soon as the immediate crisis was over, Bruno Gaido slipped into the ship’s interior and vanished into the maze of compartments and passageways that made up the Enterprises lower decks.
He wasn’t looking for congratulations.
He was hiding.
Gaido was convinced he was going to be in trouble.
He had abandoned his assigned battle station.
He had climbed into an aircraft without orders.
He had done exactly what a good sailor was never supposed to do.
Act on his own initiative without authorization from his superiors.
In the pre-war Navy, that kind of thing could get you court marshaled.
But Vice Admiral William Bullhally was not a pre-war admiral.
Hollyy had watched the entire incident from the bridge.
He’d seen the machinist run across the deck, climb into the parked aircraft, and pour fire into the approaching bomber.
He’d seen the tail get sheared off 3 ft from where Gaido was standing.
He’d seen the young man calmly extinguish the fire and then disappear into the ship.
Who was that man? Hally demanded.
No one on the bridge knew.
Find him, Hollyy ordered.
And bring him to me.
A search party was dispatched into the ship.
It took them a while to find Gaido.
He’d hidden himself well, but eventually they tracked him down and brought him to the bridge.
Gaido stood at attention before the admiral, certain he was about to be punished.
Instead, Hollyy smiled.
“Consider yourself promoted,” the admiral said on the spot.
Without paperwork or formal ceremony, Bruno Gaido was advanced from aviation machinists mate third class to aviation machinists mate first class, a promotion that would normally take years of service and multiple evaluations.
Hollyy did it with a handshake.
The entire crew of the Enterprise credited Gaido with saving the ship.
If that bomber had hit the flight deck loaded with aircraft, fuel and ammunition, the resulting explosion and fire could have been catastrophic.
The Big E might have been lost, and with her, hundreds of American lives.
Bruno Gaido also received a commendation from Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, citing his extraordinary courage and disregard for his own safety.
But Gaido being Gaido, he probably would have preferred to skip all the attention.
He just wanted to get back to work.
The months after the Marshall Islands raid were busy ones for the Enterprise and her crew and her crew.
In late February, the Big E struck Wake Island, the same island where Marines had fought desperately before being overwhelmed by the Japanese.
In March, she attacked Marcus Island just 1,000 mi from Tokyo.
In April, she provided cover for the dittle raid, escorting the USS Hornet close enough to Japan to launch 16 B-25 bombers against Tokyo itself.
The raids didn’t change the strategic situation.
Japan was still winning everywhere.
But they proved that America could strike back and they made Bruno Gaido a minor celebrity among the Enterprises crew.
Everyone on the ship knew the story of the machinist who had run toward the kamicazi, but Gaido didn’t let the attention change him.
He continued his work as a machinist and gunner, flying missions whenever VS6 needed him.
His reputation for toughness only grew.
Then came Midway.
In late May 1942, American codereakers uncovered Japan’s next move, a massive strike against tiny Midway atole using the same four carriers that had hit Pearl Harbor, Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiryu.
If Midway fell, Hawaii itself could be threatened.
Admiral Nimttz decided to gamble everything.
He rushed Enterprise Hornet and the hastily repaired Yorktown to a point northeast of Midway, hoping to ambush the Japanese fleet.
On the morning of June 4th, 1942, Bruno Gaido climbed into the rear seat of an SBD Dauntless piloted by Enson Frank Woodro Flareity.
Their target was the Japanese carrier Kaga, one of the largest and most powerful warships in the world.
The morning of June 4th, 1942 began with disaster for the Americans.
Wave after wave of American aircraft attacked the Japanese fleet.
Torpedo bombers from all three carriers, marine dive bombers from Midway itself, even Army B7s.
Almost all of them were destroyed.
Torpedo squadron 8 from the USS Hornet was completely wiped out.
Of 30 men, only one survived.
But the sacrifice of the torpedo bombers served a purpose.
Their attacks drew the Japanese combat air patrol down to sea level, leaving the sky above the carriers undefended.
At 10:20 a.
m.
, dive bombers from Enterprise and Yorktown arrived over the Japanese fleet at 20,000 ft.
The Japanese carriers were caught at the worst possible moment.
Their flight decks were crowded with aircraft being fueled and armed for a counter strike.
Bombs and torpedoes lay exposed.
Aviation fuel lines snaked across the decks.
The American pilots pushed over into their dives.
Bruno Gaido felt the dauntless pitch forward into a nearly vertical descent.
The horizon tilted crazily as Olarity aimed their aircraft at the Kaga below.
Gaido couldn’t see forward.
He was facing backward, scanning for Japanese fighters.
But he could feel the gravity pressing him into his seat as they plummeted toward the enemy carrier.
At 1500 ft, of released their bomb.
It was a near miss.
The bomb exploded close to the carrier, but didn’t hit directly, but other pilots weren’t so unlucky.
Four bombs struck Kaga’s flight deck, detonating among the armed and fueled aircraft.
Within seconds, the carrier was an inferno.
In just 5 minutes, three of Japan’s four carriers, Akagi, Kaga, and Soryu, were mortally wounded, burning uncontrollably.
The fourth, Hiu, would be hit that afternoon.
It was the most decisive naval victory in American history.
But for Bruno Gaido, the battle was just beginning.
After the attack on Kaga, Olarity and Gaido joined a group of six SBDs led by Lieutenant Charles Wear heading back toward the Enterprise.
But they weren’t alone.
Six Japanese Zero fighters from Hiru spotted the small formation and attacked.
The Zeros had been escorting a dive bomber strike against the USS Yorktown, but they couldn’t resist the temptation of six slow, vulnerable dauntlesses.
Lieutenant Wear had developed a defensive tactic for exactly this situation.
As each Zero made a firing pass from behind, Wear would turn his formation toward the attacker, creating an arc that allowed all six rear gunners to concentrate their fire on the lead fighter.
Bruno Gaido and the other gunners poured fire into the attacking zeros.
Two of the Japanese fighters were so badly damaged they had to break off.
One ditched on the way back to Hiyu and the other barely made it to the carrier.
But the fight had taken its toll on Flarity and Gaido’s aircraft.
Their SBD had been hold during either the bomb run or the dog fight with the Zeros.
Fuel was streaming from the damaged tanks.
The engine was drinking gas faster than it should, and there wasn’t enough left to reach the Enterprise.
Olarity had no choice.
As the other SBDs continued toward home, he put the Dauntless down in the open sea about 20 m from the burning Japanese carriers.
The ditching was successful.
Ofarity and Gaido scrambled out of the sinking aircraft and inflated their life raft and James McCarthy flying in another SBD watched them climb into the raft and noted their position before continuing toward Enterprise.
help would be sent, but help never came.
The Japanese destroyer Makagumo found them first.
Makugumo was a Yugumo class destroyer, part of the screen protecting the Japanese carriers.
Her crew had watched three of those carriers burn and sink that morning.
They had watched hundreds of their comrades die in flames.
When lookouts spotted the two American airmen in their tiny raft floating in the debris field of the destroyed Japanese fleet, the Makagumo altered course to pick them up.
Enson Franco Flareity and aviation machinists mate Firstclass Bruno Gaido became prisoners of the Imperial Japanese Navy.
What happened next was kept secret for 3 years.
The Americans didn’t know.
The families didn’t know.
Ofarity and Gaido were simply listed as missing in action, one of thousands of such designations in the chaos of the Pacific War.
It wasn’t until after Japan’s surrender in 1945 that American investigators gained access to Japanese naval records and learned what had happened aboard the Makigumo.
For 11 days, Olyahertie and Gaido were held aboard the Makigumo.
They were interrogated intensely according to Japanese records.
The Japanese wanted to know everything.
The strength of the American carrier force, the disposition of ships, the defenses of Midway Island.
The Japanese claimed that Gaido provided useful information about Midway’s defenses, but this was almost certainly false.
Bruno Gaido had never been to Midway Island.
He was a carrier-based machinist and gunner.
He had no knowledge of the island’s defenses, troop strengths, or fortifications.
Neither did Flagerty.
Rear Admiral Samuel J.
Cox, the director of the Naval History and Heritage Command, later assessed what probably happened.
My assessment is that of Flarity and Gaido, possibly under torture, gave up plausible but phony information.
Certainly, everyone who knew Gaido adamantly believed that he would not have cracked.
That was Bruno Gaido.
The man who had run toward a kamicazi.
The man who had climbed into a parked aircraft to fight a duel with a suicide bomber.
The man who had told a nervous pilot, “You got wings, don’t you?” He wasn’t the type to break.
But on June 15th, 1942, 11 days after the Battle of Midway, the Japanese decided their prisoners were no longer useful.
Commander Isamu Fuja, the captain of the Makigumo, received orders to dispose of the prisoners.
According to Japanese accounts assembled from interrogations of surviving crew members after the war, Fuja asked for volunteers to carry out the execution.
The crew refused.
Even after watching three carriers burn, even after the humiliation of Japan’s first major defeat of the war, the sailors of the Makagumo would not volunteer to murder two helpless prisoners.
No one stepped forward.
The disposal was postponed.
But later that night in the midnight hours, a small group of men were ordered, not asked, ordered, to carry out the execution.
and Franco Flareity and aviation machinists made first class Bruno Gaido were bound with ropes tied to weighted fuel cans and thrown overboard into the Pacific Ocean.
They drowned in darkness somewhere in the vast waters where their dive bomber had helped destroy the pride of the Japanese Navy.
Japanese accounts state that both men met their end with stoic and dignified defiance.
The crew of the Makagumo would have expected nothing less from Bruno Gaido.
Bruno Gaido’s fate remained unknown for 3 years.
He was declared missing in action on July 4th, 1942 and presumed dead on June 5, 1943, the first anniversary of Midway in Milwaukee.
His mother, Clementina, received the telegram that every parent dreaded her son was missing.
He might be alive.
he might be dead.
No one knew.
She never recovered.
Clementina Gaido died less than two months after Bruno was reported missing.
The family later said the stress of not knowing what had happened to her son had killed her.
In April 1943, Bruno Gaido was postumously awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
The citation read, “With heroic and meritorious devotion to duty, he rendered valuable assistance to his pilot by detailing continuous, specific, and comprehensive information concerning the disposition and movements of enemy Japanese units.
His courage and cool determination in carrying out this vital task in the face of furious and repeated attacks were in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.
It wasn’t until after the war that the full story emerged.
American investigators reviewing Japanese naval records and interrogating surviving crew members from the Makagumo pieced together what had happened to Oality and Gaido.
The execution was classified as a war crime, but there would be no prosecution.
Commander Isamu Fuja and most of the officers responsible for the execution did not survive the war.
The Makagumo herself was sunk on February 1st, 1943, exactly one year to the day after Bruno Gaido had saved the enterprise when she struck a mine during the evacuation of Guadal Canal.
Justice of a sort had been served.
Bruno Peter Gaido was 26 years old when he died.
He served in the United States Navy for just 20 months from October 1940 to June 1942.
In that short time, he participated in the first offensive operation of the Pacific War, saved America’s most important aircraft carrier from a kamicazi attack, and helped sink a Japanese carrier at the Battle of Midway.
His body was never recovered.
His name is inscribed on the courts of the missing at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu.
One of thousands of names representing those who gave their lives in the Pacific and whose remains were never found.
In 1996, Bruno Gaido became the first inductee into the enlisted combat air crew role of honor established aboard the USS Yorktown Museum in Charleston, South Carolina.
No ship has ever been named after him, but his story lives on.
Dusty Clyice, the pilot who made his first carrier landings with Gaido in the rear seat, went on to become one of the most decorated aviators of the war.
He scored hits on three Japanese ships at Midway, all of which sank.
He received the Navy Cross.
He lived to be 100 years old, passing away in 2016.
Before he died, Clyice wrote a memoir called Never Call Me a Hero.
In it, he devoted several pages to Bruno Gaido, the machinist who believed in him when it mattered most.
You got wings, don’t you? That was Bruno Gaido, a young man from Milwaukee who wanted to serve his country.
A machinist who kept the dive bombers flying.
A gunner who ran toward danger when everyone else ran away.
He didn’t live to see the end of the war.
He didn’t live to see Japan’s surrender or the parades or the celebrations.
He died in darkness, bound and waited, thrown into the same ocean where he had helped change the course of history.
But in that one moment on February 1th, 1942, when he climbed out of safety and ran across the flight deck toward a burning kamicazi, Bruno Gaido showed what one person could do when they decided to act.
He saved a ship.
He saved hundreds of lives and he proved that courage isn’t about not being afraid.
It’s about being afraid and jumping anyway.
