The Marauder at Wave-Top Height: How One B-26 Crew Survived Midway’s Deadliest Run
At 7:10 a.m. on June 4, 1942, the Pacific Ocean looked deceptively calm—flat water, pale light, and the long, empty horizon that normally makes distance feel harmless. For First Lieutenant James Murie, it was the most dangerous kind of calm: the kind you see seconds before everything starts trying to kill you.
Murie was 23 years old. It was his first combat mission. And he was flying a Martin B-26 Marauder—an aircraft that had already earned a reputation as unforgiving even in training. The Marauder was fast and powerful, but its small wing and high landing speed punished hesitation. New crews called it the “Widowmaker.” Some called it worse. And on that morning, someone had hung a torpedo beneath it and told Murie to do a job nobody had truly prepared him for.
Ahead, roughly 150 miles northwest of Midway Atoll, Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo’s carrier striking force—four fleet carriers supported by battleships, cruisers, and destroyers—was steaming through open ocean. Those flat-tops weren’t just ships. They were the nerve centers of Japan’s Pacific momentum, the core of the force that had struck Pearl Harbor and dominated the early months of the war. They also carried something more immediate: fighter cover—fast, aggressive Mitsubishi A6M Zeros piloted by men who had spent years refining the art of aerial ambush.
Murie’s B-26, nicknamed Susie Q, was about to meet them at wave-top height.
A Mission Built on Improvisation
Midway’s defenders were throwing everything they had at the approaching fleet. The plan, if it could be called that, was urgency. Aircraft launched as quickly as crews could start engines and taxi. Four B-26 Marauders were ordered out with torpedoes—an unusual pairing of platform and task. The B-26 was not designed as a torpedo bomber. It did not train like one. It didn’t fly like one. And its crews, by Murie’s own circumstances, were almost completely new to the concept.
Between the four crews, torpedo practice amounted to a handful of attempts—some airmen having dropped none, others having dropped one. Combat experience was effectively zero. Yet there they were, racing toward the most heavily protected naval formation in the Pacific.
Murie’s crew was a cross-section of young men carrying responsibilities far beyond their preparation: a co-pilot, a bombardier, a navigator, and gunners stationed through the aircraft. They had practiced procedures. They had memorized checklists. But no checklist tells you what to do when fighters dive out of the sun while shipboard guns fill the air with tracers.
Thirty Zeros, Four Marauders
When the B-26s reached the Japanese carriers, the numbers made the outcome feel pre-written. Murie counted roughly 30 Zeros diving toward them from above. These fighters were faster, more agile, and accustomed to finishing torpedo aircraft quickly. A torpedo run demands straight, predictable flight at low altitude. Against disciplined fighter cover, it becomes a test of survival as much as accuracy.
Murie dropped lower—down toward the surface until the aircraft was skimming the waves. Salt spray streaked the windscreen. The ocean’s texture rushed beneath the nose like a moving roadway. At that height, there’s no room to recover from a mistake. A slight dip, a gust, a momentary lapse—any of it can end in water.
And still he pressed in.
Ahead, the carrier Akagi grew larger—its bow cutting a clean line through the sea, its deck crowded with equipment and personnel, its anti-aircraft batteries already alive with fire. The torpedo release point approached in seconds measured by shouted ranges and mental math.
Murie’s aircraft shuddered. Hits tore into metal. Smoke began to seep through the fuselage. The torpedo was released—heavy weight dropping away, changing the aircraft’s balance in an instant.
The run should have ended there: drop, turn out, escape.
But escape wasn’t available.
The Split-Second Choice That Saved Them
After releasing the torpedo, Murie realized he had a problem that went beyond damage. The guns had found him. Every ship in the formation seemed to be tracking the Marauder. Turning away exposed the bomber’s broad side to concentrated fire. Staying level meant being cut apart in seconds.
So he did something that sounds irrational until you picture the geometry: he turned toward the carrier.
Not into it—over it.
At extreme low altitude, he drove the damaged B-26 toward Akagi’s bow. The flight deck rose ahead like a wall. Sailors on deck saw it coming. Some dropped flat. Others froze. A few kept firing, but even disciplined gun crews hesitate when an aircraft is suddenly inside their minimum engagement angles.
Murie pulled up at the last possible instant and cleared the bow by only a handful of feet. The Marauder surged forward—so low and fast that it effectively crossed the carrier’s deck at masthead height.
For a few seconds, the battle’s usual order inverted. The carrier—the dominant platform—was the object being flown over, not the object controlling the air. The B-26’s prop wash rocked equipment. Men scrambled for cover. A gun position took hits from forward-firing weapons. The deck became a corridor of noise and panic.
And then, just as suddenly, Susie Q was past the stern and back down at wave height, disappearing into the chaos where the fleet’s own guns could not safely fire without risking their flagship.
It wasn’t victory. It wasn’t even a successful torpedo attack. But it was survival—acquired by a maneuver so audacious that it forced hesitation in a system built on precision.
The Long Flight Home
Once clear of the immediate killing zone, Susie Q was still a wounded aircraft over open ocean. Systems were failing. A fire smoldered inside. Several crewmen were hurt. The defensive guns were damaged or out of ammunition. One turret jammed. The tail position could not be manned effectively.
Murie and his co-pilot watched their engine instruments sink into danger ranges. One engine began to fail. Then, later, it quit entirely.
Midway was still miles away.
As the aircraft limped home, Japanese planes returning from their own strike appeared on the horizon, and several fighters briefly moved to investigate. Murie forced what remained of his power into speed, pushing the aircraft beyond what was reasonable, because the alternative was being overtaken in a bomber that could no longer defend itself.
The fighters eventually broke off—fuel considerations mattered even in war.
But the threat had been real enough to keep every man on board locked into a single idea: stay airborne until land appears.
Landing a Broken Aircraft on a Damaged Runway
Approaching Midway brought its own dangers. The island’s runway had already been hit earlier in the day. Wreckage littered the margins. Smoke drifted across sections of coral and packed sand. And Murie’s aircraft had a new problem: landing gear trouble and severe battle damage.
With hydraulics compromised, the crew resorted to manual gear extension—a grueling, hand-cranked process even under ideal conditions. Under damage, it became a physical contest with bent mechanisms and time.
At the last moment, the wheels finally dropped. But one main tire had been destroyed. A landing on a bare rim meant sparks, violent pull, and the constant risk of ground loop or collapse.
Murie brought Susie Q in too fast—because flying slow in a Marauder was its own kind of danger. The aircraft slammed onto the runway, scraped, sparked, swerved, and fought to stay straight. Propeller tips struck. The bomber lurched. And then—finally—it rolled to a stop with runway remaining.
The sudden quiet after engine shutdown can feel unreal. Survivors often describe it not as relief but as disbelief: the mind catching up to the fact that you’re alive.
The Damage Count That Became the Story
Ground crews swarmed the aircraft and began counting impacts. Not a quick glance—an actual tally of holes and damage points. They counted methodically.
The final number told the story better than any speech:
506 holes.
An aircraft riddled to the point of absurdity had still brought seven men back.
Captain James Collins’ B-26 returned as well, damaged nearly beyond recognition. Two other Marauders did not return. In strictly tactical terms, the mission achieved no confirmed ship hits and suffered heavy losses.
And yet, war is not only a ledger of direct impacts. Sometimes it turns on pressure—on what an action forces the enemy to do next.
The Larger Effect Nobody Could Measure in the Moment
The Midway battle’s decisive blows would be delivered later by dive bombers, arriving at the moment Japanese carriers were vulnerable in ways that are still debated by historians. What is not debated is that Nagumo’s force had been under persistent attack from multiple directions. These attacks—however costly and however unsuccessful in direct hits—created urgency, confusion, and a sense that Midway’s defenses remained aggressive.
An attack like Murie’s did not need to sink a carrier to matter. It needed to force reactions, consume time, and shape decision-making.
In war, “failed” missions sometimes contribute to conditions that allow the next mission to succeed.
Murie and his crew survived. They were treated. They were questioned in detail. They were recognized for extraordinary courage under conditions that offered almost no room for survival. And Susie Q—the battered Marauder that crossed Akagi’s deck—never flew again. Its nameplate was preserved. The rest of the aircraft was pushed away and eventually lost to the ocean.
But the story remained: a young pilot, in an aircraft never meant for that job, flying at the edge of the possible—and bringing his crew home.
