The Battle of Midway

Station HYPO had been reading enough of the Japanese fleet code to know a major operation was coming against a target the signals called AF. Washington thought AF was somewhere else. Commander Joseph Rochefort's team proposed a test: have Midway transmit in the clear that its fresh water distillation plant had broken down.

Nimitz accepted HYPO's estimate against contrary advice from Washington and ordered his carriers to a position north-east of Midway that the Japanese plan assumed would be empty. It was designated Point Luck.

Yorktown came into Pearl Harbor down by the stern and leaking oil after Coral Sea, with damage the yard estimated at three months. She was dry-docked, patched, shored and back at sea in seventy-two hours with fourteen hundred workmen still aboard as she sailed.

The First Air Fleet left Hiroshima Bay with Akagi, Kaga, Sōryū and Hiryū. Two of the six carriers that had struck Pearl Harbor were absent, one damaged and one short of aircrew after Coral Sea, so the strike force went to sea at two thirds strength.

Carrier aircraft struck Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians, and Japanese troops occupied Attu and Kiska. It is usually described as a diversion intended to draw the American fleet north.

A PBY Catalina flying a search arc out of Midway reported the invasion transport group approaching from the west. B-17s attacked from Midway that afternoon and hit nothing, which was the first of many attacks from the atoll that hit nothing.

One hundred and eight aircraft left the four carriers for Midway. At the same time seven scouting aircraft went out to search the sectors to the east, where the Americans would be if they were anywhere.

The strike hit the atoll, destroying installations and shooting down most of the obsolete Marine fighters sent up against it. The runway was left usable, which was the one thing that mattered.

Every flyable aircraft on Midway went at the Japanese carriers in a series of uncoordinated attacks: Marine dive bombers, Army B-26s carrying torpedoes, B-17s bombing from high level. They lost heavily and did not score a single hit.

The reserve strike aircraft had been held ready with torpedoes and armour-piercing bombs in case American ships appeared. With no ships reported and Midway needing a second blow, Nagumo ordered them rearmed with land attack bombs.

The late scout reported ten American ships to the east. It gave no composition, and Nagumo spent the next fifty minutes not knowing whether he was facing cruisers or carriers.

Nagumo chose to land the returning Midway strike before launching anything at the American ships, rather than send a partial and unescorted attack. The alternative was to leave a hundred aircraft to ditch in the sea.

Fifteen TBD Devastators from Hornet found the carriers without fighter escort and attacked. Every aircraft was shot down. Of thirty crew, one survived: Ensign George Gay, who spent the rest of the day in the water under a seat cushion watching the battle.

Fourteen aircraft from Enterprise attacked next. Ten were shot down. No hits.

Twelve aircraft from Yorktown made the third attack in forty minutes. Ten were lost. Again no hits. Three squadrons had now attacked, forty-one aircraft had been committed, and the score against four carriers was nothing.

Lieutenant Commander Wade McClusky, leading Enterprise's dive bombers, reached the expected position and found empty ocean. Low on fuel, he chose to continue searching rather than turn back, spotted the destroyer Arashi hurrying north after depth-charging a submarine, and followed her wake.

McClusky's Dauntlesses fell on Kaga out of a clear sky with no fighters above her. Four bombs hit, one on the bridge killing the captain and most of the command staff, others among fuelled and armed aircraft on the hangar deck.

Yorktown's dive bombers under Lieutenant Commander Maxwell Leslie arrived at almost the same minute from a different bearing, having navigated to the fleet independently. Three bombs hit Sōryū and she was ablaze within minutes.

A single bomb from a section of McClusky's group hit Akagi near the middle lift, among armed aircraft. A second was a near miss that jammed her rudder. The flagship of the Pearl Harbor strike was out of the battle within minutes and scuttled the following morning.

The famous account has the Japanese carriers minutes from launching a fully armed counterstrike when the bombs arrived, so that the battle turned on five minutes. It comes from a 1955 memoir and it dominated the English language literature for fifty years.

Hiryū, undamaged and now alone, launched eighteen dive bombers under Rear Admiral Yamaguchi. They found Yorktown, and three bombs got through, stopping her engines and leaving her dead in the water.

Hiryū's second strike, ten torpedo bombers, put two torpedoes into Yorktown's port side. She lost power, took on a heavy list and was abandoned that evening.

Enterprise launched a mixed group including Yorktown's orphaned dive bombers. They found Hiryū in the late afternoon and hit her four times forward, wrecking the flight deck and starting fires that could not be contained.

Yamamoto briefly considered pressing on with a night surface action, then accepted that with no carriers and no air cover a battleship force in daylight within range of Midway was a liability. The occupation was cancelled and the fleet turned west.

Spruance turned east during the night rather than chase a defeated but numerically superior surface fleet into the dark, where Japanese night gunnery and torpedoes would have been decisive.

Two heavy cruisers had collided while manoeuvring to avoid a submarine in the dark. Aircraft from Enterprise and Hornet found them and reduced Mikuma to a burning wreck. She sank that evening; Mogami survived and reached Truk.

The submarine I-168 penetrated the destroyer screen and put two torpedoes into Yorktown and one into the destroyer Hammann, lying alongside to supply power to the salvage party. Hammann broke in half and sank in four minutes.

Japan lost four fleet carriers, a heavy cruiser, around 248 aircraft and about 3,057 men. The United States lost one carrier, one destroyer, around 150 aircraft and about 362 men.

Nimitz recommended Joseph Rochefort for the Distinguished Service Medal. Washington blocked it. The naval communications establishment in the capital, which had backed the wrong estimate, took the credit for the Midway intelligence, and Rochefort was reassigned in late 1942 to command a floating dry dock in San Francisco.

Midway ended the Japanese offensive phase and removed the striking force that had run unchecked from Hawaii to Ceylon in six months. After it, Japan never again mounted a carrier operation of that weight, and the initiative in the Pacific passed permanently to the United States.