Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku stood on the bridge of the battleship Yamato in late May 1942, reviewing intelligence reports that made him smile.
American carrier strength in the Pacific.
Two, maybe three flattops.
Japanese carrier strength.
11 fleet carriers, the finest naval aviators in the world.
Veterans who’ burned Pearl Harbor and crushed the British at Salon.
His staff officers assured him the Americans were still reeling, still confused, still months away from mounting serious resistance.
Japanese naval intelligence estimated the enemy would need until 1943 to rebuild.
They were planning an operation for June 4th, 1942.
The Americans wouldn’t even see it coming.
Vice Admiral Nagumo Chuichi, commander of the first airfleet, read the battle plan with satisfaction.
His four carriers, Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiru, carried 248 aircraft flown by pilots who averaged 800 flight hours each.
They’d struck Pearl Harbor, devastated Darwin, driven the Royal Navy from the Indian Ocean.
American pilots were barely trained kids with maybe 200 hours in the cockpit.
Japanese torpedoes ran true at 49 knots.
American torpedoes, intelligence reported, didn’t work half the time.
The math was simple.
The outcome inevitable.
Radio Tokyo broadcast to the home islands that Admiral Yamamoto was about to deliver a decisive blow that would force American surrender.
Newspapers in Tokyo ran maps showing Midway as the stepping stone to Hawaii, to the West Coast to final victory.
In officers clubs from Yokosuka to Tru Lagoon, toasts celebrated the coming annihilation of what remained of American naval power.
6 months into the war, Japan had lost exactly one major warship.
The United States had lost most of its Pacific battleship fleet.
Japanese war planners calculated they had 18 months, maybe two years, before American industrial capacity became a problem.
They intended to win the war in 12.
What Yamamoto didn’t know, what none of them knew, was that Lieutenant Commander Joseph Rofort sat in a basement at Pearl Harbor reading their mail.
Station Hypo, the basement codereing unit at Pearl Harbor, occupied a space that smelled of sweat, cigarette smoke, and mimograph ink.
Roshfort worked in a bathrobe because the air conditioning ran too cold, hunched over intercepts that shouldn’t have been readable.
Japanese naval code JN25 was supposed to be unbreakable, but Rofort’s team had cracked enough of it, maybe 40%, to see patterns.
A massive operation.
Carrier force.
Target designated AF.
Messages about water supplies.
Seplane reconnaissance.
A date June 4th or 5th.
Roshfort told Admiral Chester Nimmits the target was Midway.
Nimttz, who’ taken command of the Pacific Fleet when it was still pulling bodies from the oil sllicked harbor, made a decision that would have gotten him court marshaled.
If he was wrong, he recalled carriers from the South Pacific.
He positioned them northeast of Midway, exactly where Japanese planning assumed no American carriers could be.
He scraped together every flyable aircraft within a thousand miles.
And he waited.
The Japanese plan was elegant in its complexity, catastrophic in its arrogance.
Nagumo’s four carriers would strike Midways airfield at dawn, suppressing American land-based aircraft.
Then the invasion force would land 5,000 troops to seize the atole.
Yamamoto’s main battle fleet, including the Yamato with her 18-inch guns, would wait 300 miles northwest, ready to annihilate any American ships foolish enough to respond.
It was a trap designed to finish what Pearl Harbor started.
The Americans were expected to react exactly as Japanese war games predicted, too late, with too little in confused desperation.
But on the morning of June 3rd, 1942, three American carriers already sat in ambush.
USS Enterprise, USS Hornet, and USS Yorktown, the latter barely operational after the Battle of Coral Sea, patched with wood and prayers by Pearl Harbor shipyard workers who’d worked 72-hour shifts to make her seaorthy.
Yorktown should have needed three months of repairs.
She got three days.
Her captain, Elliot Buckmaster, reported her ready for action, knowing damage control teams were still welding below decks.
Admiral Raymond Spruent commanded Enterprise and a Hornet from Enterprises flag bridge.
He was a battleship admiral commanding carriers, promoted to the job 5 days earlier when Admiral Hally came down with shingles.
Spruent had never commanded a carrier in combat.
Japanese intelligence didn’t even know his name.
He studied the position reports, calculated distances and fuel consumption, and made the kind of cold mathematical decision that wins wars.
Launch everything at maximum range.
If the Japanese carriers were where Rofort said they’d be, American dive bombers would arrive with maybe 10 minutes of fuel to spare.
If Rofort was wrong, every American aircraft would ditch in the ocean and the carriers would be defenseless.
At 0430 hours on June 4th, Nagumo’s carriers turned into the wind 240 miles northwest of Midway.
Flight decks swarmed with armorers loading 550lb bombs onto Nakajima B5N bombers.
The first wave, 108 aircraft, launched into darkness, forming up as the sky turned purple, then pink.
Lieutenant Joi Tomaga led them southeast.
His orders: destroy Midway’s airfield.
Suppress defensive aircraft.
Prepare the way for invasion.
Below him, mechanics already armed the second wave with torpedoes for ship attacks.
Standard doctrine.
Carriers hold one strike ready for land targets, one for ships.
The Americans had no carriers in the area anyway.
Midway’s radar picked them up at 0553 hours, 93 miles out.
Every flyable aircraft on the atal scrambled.
26 Brewster F2A Buffaloos and Grumman F4F Wildcats.
Obsolete fighters flown by pilots too green for carrier duty.
27 dive bombers.
Four B-26 Marauders rigged with torpedoes.
11 B17 flying fortresses.
The Marines on Midway knew what was coming.
Most of them had never seen combat.
They climbed into their planes anyway.
The Japanese strike hit midway at 0630 hours with textbook precision.
Zeros shredded the Marine fighters.
17 shot down in minutes.
The Buffaloos couldn’t match the Zero’s climb rate or maneuverability.
American pilots died learning that lesson.
But the Marines on the ground had dug in.
Anti-aircraft fire filled the sky.
Tomga’s bombers hit the powerhouse, the fuel tanks, the messaul.
But the runways remained operational.
The defenses were still firing.
At 0700 hours, Tomaga radioed Nagumo.
There is need for a second attack.
Nagumo faced a decision.
His second wave carried torpedoes for anti-ship work.
Changing ordinance meant bringing every aircraft below, unloading torpedoes, loading bombs, returning aircraft to the flight deck, 90 minutes minimum.
But Tomga said Midway needed another strike.
And Japanese doctrine said midway had to be neutralized before the invasion.
At 0715 hours, Nagumo gave the order, “Rearm for a second Midway strike.
Flight deck crews swarmed the second wave aircraft.
They removed Type 91 torpedoes, the ones that worked, unlike American Mark13s that ran too deep or broke apart on impact.
They rolled them to the hangers, stacked them against bulkheads, and began hauling up 550lb bombs.
It was dangerous work done quickly under pressure.
Standard procedure in the Japanese Navy.
They’d done it dozens of times.
At 0728 hours, a PBY Catalina radioed a message that changed everything.
Enemy carriers.
The float plane had spotted the American task force 200 m northeast.
The report was confused.
Maybe one carrier, maybe more.
But carriers meant an immediate threat.
Nagumo’s staff erupted in controlled chaos.
They had to recover Tomaga’s strike wave returning from midway.
They had aircraft below decks, half rearmed.
They had torpedoes stacked in the hangers, and somewhere to the northeast, American carriers launched strikes that were already inbound.
Nagumo made his second decision.
Recover the midway strike first.
They were low on fuel, circling overhead.
Then launch immediately against the American carriers.
The crews below decks received new orders.
Stoploading bombs.
Reload torpedoes.
They’d already spent 45 minutes swapping ordinance.
Now they reversed course.
Torpedoes came back out.
Bombs went back down.
And both sat in the hangers, armed, unstacked, ready to explode if anything went wrong.
300 miles away, Spruent had launched his strike at 0700 hours, 156 aircraft from Enterprise and Hornet, every flyable plane.
At 0800 hours, Yorktown added 35 more.
The American formations were ragged, poorly coordinated.
Different squadrons flew different courses.
The torpedo bombers flew slow and low.
The dive bombers flew high but couldn’t find the Japanese fleet on their initial heading.
The fighters burned fuel trying to escort bombers that flew at different speeds and altitudes.
It was exactly the kind of uncoordinated mess Japanese war games assumed American attacks would be.
But mess and desperation can look like tactical genius if you squint.
Hornets Torpedo Squadron 8 VT8 15 Douglas TBD Devastators led by Lieutenant Commander John Waldron found the Japanese carriers at 09 18 hours flying alone without fighter escort.
Waldron’s pilots could see all four carriers in a box formation, flight decks crowded with aircraft, destroyers churning wakes and protective screen.
They could also see 30 zeros climbing to intercept them.
The TBD Devastator cruised at 115 knots, turned like a truck, and carried one torpedo that ran at 33 knots, if it ran at all.
The Zero climbed at 3,000 ft per minute, and carried two 20 mm cannons.
Waldron pushed over into his attack run.
Anyway, the Zeros hit them from above and behind.
Enson George Gay, flying tail end position, watched the plane ahead of him explode.
Then another, then another.
The Devastators couldn’t maneuver, couldn’t run, couldn’t defend themselves.
They flew straight into the wall of fire because that’s what torpedoes required.
Steady course, low altitude, close range.
Zero pilots shot them into the water methodically.
At 0925 hours, Gay’s aircraft took cannon fire through the left wing.
His gunner stopped returning fire, dead in his seat.
Gay held course until he was 800 yardds from the carrier Soryu, dropped his torpedo, and pulled up as his plane disintegrated around him.
He splashed into the water.
Behind him, 14 other TBD Devastators burned on the ocean surface.
15 planes launched.
One pilot survived.
The torpedo missed.
At 0940 hours, Enterprises VT6 arrived from a different direction.
14 Devastators led by Lieutenant Commander Eugene Lindseay.
They’d found the Japanese fleet by following the cruiser’s wakes.
Same story.
Zeros swarmed them.
Lindsay took a 20 mm round through the cockpit 2 minutes into his run and kept flying.
The TBDs dropped torpedoes from minimum range.
Most of them never pulled out of their runs.
Shot down before they could climb.
Lindsay made it 200 yd before his plane hit the water.
10 of 14 Devastators destroyed.
Every torpedo missed or malfunctioned.
At 1,000 hours, Yorktown’s VT3 came in.
12 more Devastators.
They at least had six Wildcat fighters for escort.
Didn’t matter.
The Zeros killed the Wildcats first, then methodically destroyed 10 of 12 torpedo bombers.
The two survivors limped away with shredded airframes.
Another 12 torpedoes in the water.
Maybe one ran true.
It missed.
In 40 minutes, three American torpedo squadrons ceased to exist.
41 aircraft launched, six returned.
The Japanese carriers didn’t have a scratch.
They’d shot down the attackers the way their doctrine said they would, easily, efficiently, with minimal effort.
On Akagi’s bridge, Nagumo’s staff allowed themselves brief satisfaction.
The Americans were brave, but incompetent.
Their torpedoes didn’t work.
Their tactics were suicidal.
Their coordination was non-existent.
Below decks, Japanese crews finally finished rearming for the carrier strike.
Nakajima B5N bombers now carried type 91 torpedoes.
ID3A dive bombers carried 550lb bombs.
Zeros topped off fuel tanks.
The strike was ready.
Tomaga’s midway wave had landed and been struck below.
The flight decks were clearing.
They needed five more minutes to position the strike aircraft.
warm engines and launch.
At 1020 hours, Nagumo ordered the carriers to turn into the wind.
20,000 ft above them, Lieutenant Commander Wade McCcluskey circled Enterprises dive bomber group, 33 SBD Dauntlesses, nearly out of fuel.
He’d flown the course navigation gave him and found empty ocean.
He turned southwest on a hunch, following a lone Japanese destroyer steaming northeast at flank speed.
The destroyer was racing to rejoin the carrier force.
McCcluskey followed her wake like a highway in the sky.
At 10:22 hours, he saw them.
Four carriers in a rough box, two miles between ships.
White wakes cutting the blue Pacific.
Flight decks crowded with aircraft, wings folded, engines warming.
Every carrier was turning into the wind for launch.
McCcluskey radioed, “Enemy carriers.” He split his force without hesitation.
He’d take one squadron against the nearest carrier, Kaga.
Lieutenant Richard Best would take the other against the second carrier, a Kogi.
Two American squadrons diving from the sun against the most powerful carrier force in the world.
The Japanese were looking down, watching for more torpedo attacks.
Their combat air patrol orbited at 10,000 ft, low altitude, where the torpedo bombers attacked.
Nobody looked up.
At 10:25 hours, McCluskey pushed over.
The SBD dauntless dove at 240 knots, angle near vertical, pilot fighting the stick as air pressure built.
The bomb site was a simple circle of wire.
You put the target in the circle, calculated wind and dive angle by instinct, and released at 2,000 ft.
Then you pulled out hard enough to gray your vision, and prayed the 500lb bomb went where you aimed it.
Japanese carriers presented huge targets over 800 feet long, but at terminal velocity from 20,000 feet, you had maybe four seconds to aim.
McCluskeyy’s bomb hit Kaga amid ships at 1026 hours.
500 lb of composition B explosive punched through the flight deck into the upper hanger where torpedoes sat stacked, where aviation fuel lines ran, where armed aircraft sat with engines running.
The explosion blew a hole 30 ft across.
Fires erupted instantly.
10 seconds later, another bomb hit Kagga aft, then another forward.
Three hits in 30 seconds.
Best’s squadron dove on a Kogi simultaneously.
Lieutenant Dick Best himself, leading three aircraft, put his bomb through a Kaggi’s flight deck just aft of the midship elevator.
The explosion detonated in the upper hanger among 18 armed aircraft being positioned for launch.
The bombers’s fuel tanks ruptured, their torpedoes cooked off.
The 550lb bombs stacked in the hanger from the aborted rearmament went up in sympathetic detonation.
Akagi’s flight deck heaved upward like a steel wave.
On Akagi’s bridge, Nagumo felt the deck shutter.
Smoke poured from the hangar.
The ship’s executive officer reported fires on three decks, ammunition detonating, flooding in the engine spaces.
At 10:27 hours, 3 minutes after McCluskeyy’s dive, Akagi was done as a fighting ship.
She’d taken one bomb, one perfectly placed bomb into a hanger full of armed ordinance and aviation fuel.
3 mi south, Kaga burned from four bomb hits.
Her crew fought fires in the hangers where torpedoes and bombs cooked off in rolling explosions.
Flight deck crews tried to push burning aircraft overboard, but the deck itself was warping from heat.
At 10:30 hours, the forward bomb magazine detonated.
The explosion blew the bow section open to the sea.
At precisely 10:27 hours, the same minute a kagi and Kaga took mortal wounds, Yorktown’s dive bombers arrived over the third carrier, Soryu.
Lieutenant Commander Maxwell Leslie led 17 SBDs down from 14,500 ft.
They’d launched later than Enterprise and Hornets groups, flown a more direct course, and arrived by pure chance at the perfect moment.
Three American dive bomber groups from three carriers launched at different times on different headings.
All arrived over the Japanese fleet in a 6-minute window.
Leslie’s first three bombs hit Soryu forward amid ships and aft.
Same result, hanger fires, ordinance explosions, aviation fuel igniting in rivers of flame that ran through the ship.
At 10:30 hours, Soru’s captain ordered abandoned ship.
The carrier had been combat ready 3 minutes earlier.
Now she was an inferno, listing 7° and accelerating, magazines detonating below decks.
In 6 minutes, three of the four Japanese carriers had been destroyed.
Not damaged, destroyed.
The carriers that burned Pearl Harbor that drove the British from the Indian Ocean that made Japan master of the Pacific for 6 months.
The finest carrier force ever assembled.
The ships that were supposed to be untouchable.
Three of them burning, exploding, dying.
One remained.
Hiru steamed north of the other three, separated by enough distance that the American dive bombers didn’t spot her initially.
Her captain, Tomoko Kaku, watched smoke pillars rise from his sister ships and made an instant decision.
He didn’t wait for orders from Nagumo, who was being evacuated from Akagi’s burning bridge.
He didn’t coordinate with the battleship fleet 300 m away.
He launched everything he had at the American carriers.
At 1040 hours, 18 dive bombers and six fighters roared off Hiru’s deck.
At 12:45 hours, 10 torpedo bombers followed.
Hiru’s strike commander, Lieutenant Mishio Kobayashi, followed the American aircraft back toward their carriers.
At 1330 hours, he found Yorktown.
The carrier that shouldn’t have been there, that Navy intelligence reported sunk at Coral Sea, that had been repaired in 3 days instead of 3 months.
She stood out.
Different island structure than Enterprise and Hornet.
Kobayashi radioed his bombers.
Attack the one on the left.
Yorktown’s radar picked them up at 1335 hours, 47 mi out.
Combat air patrol scrambled.
12 Wildcats climbed to intercept.
The Japanese came in at 18,000 ft, higher than the torpedo bombers.
The Wildcats got seven of them.
The remaining 11 pushed over into dives.
Yorktown’s anti-aircraft batteries opened up.
5-in guns, 40mm bowors, 20 millimeter orlicons.
The sky filled with black bursts and tracer streams.
At 1342 hours, the first bomb hit Yorktown’s flight deck.
It punched through to the fourth deck and detonated in the uptakes, killing the fires in five of her nine boilers.
Yorktown slowed from 30 knots to six.
The second bomb hit 40 seconds later, exploding in the smoke stack and showering the deck with burning debris.
The third bomb penetrated the flight deck and exploded in the rag storage compartment.
Fires erupted.
Damage control parties flooded magazines and fought fires.
Within 12 minutes, Chief Engineer Jack Delaney had three boilers back online.
Yorktown accelerated to 20 knots.
Her crew thought they might save her.
At 14:30 hours, here’s torpedo bombers arrived.
10 Nakajima B5Ns came in low from four directions simultaneously.
The kind of coordinated attack American torpedo squadrons couldn’t manage.
Yorktown turned hard to port to comb the wakes, reducing her profile.
She dodged three torpedoes.
The fourth one, launched from 500 yards by a pilot who held his course through a wall of anti-aircraft fire hit Yorktown amid ships on the port side.
The type 91 warhead designed to kill battleships, blew a hole 40 ft across below the water line.
The explosion ruptured fuel tanks, shattered the bulkheads, and knocked out the electrical grid.
Yorktown listed 11° immediately.
Seawater poured into the engine rooms.
At 1500 hours, Captain Buckmaster ordered abandoned ship.
The crew filed off in good order.
No panic.
Textbook evacuation.
Destroyers pulled 2,270 men from the water.
Buckmaster was the last man off, saluting the flag before stepping onto the destroyer’s deck.
200 m west, Spruent received the report.
Yorktown hit, probably sinking.
Here you still operational.
He calculated distances, fuel states, and aircraft availability.
Enterprise and Hornet still had dive bombers ready.
He knew Hiru’s approximate location from Yorktown’s last contact report.
At 15:30 hours, he launched a second strike.
24 SBDs from Enterprise, including 10 orphaned Yorktown aircraft that had landed on Enterprise after the first strike.
Lieutenant Earl Gallagher led them to Hiru’s last known position.
They didn’t find her.
He expanded the search pattern, burning fuel he couldn’t afford to waste.
At 1700 hours, a scout bomber radioed coordinates.
Carrier located course northwest.
Speed 25 knots.
Gallagher turned his formation toward the contact.
Hiru’s lookout spotted the American dive bombers at 1701 hours.
Zeros scrambled to intercept, but too late.
The SBDs were already in their dives.
At 1703 hours, the first bomb hit heru’s flight deck forward.
The second hit 20 seconds later am a midship.
The third and fourth bombs hit within 45 seconds.
Four bombs.
Four hits.
Same result as her sister ships.
Hiru’s hanger became an inferno.
Her crew fought the fires for 9 hours, but the forward magazines cooked off at 0230 hours on June 5th.
The explosion broke her keel.
At 0510 hours, Captain Kaku ordered abandon ship.
At 0900 hours, Japanese destroyers fired torpedoes into Hiru’s hull to scuttle her.
She rolled over and sank Sternfirst, taking 416 men with her.
Captain Kaku went down with his ship, standing on the bridge as the water rose.
By dawn on June 5th, all four of Nagumo’s carriers were gone.
Akagi scuttled by Japanese destroyers at 0500 hours after burning all night.
Kaga sank at 1925 hours on June 4th, magazines exploding as she went down.
Soryu sank at 1913 hours the same day, burning for 7 hours before the sea claimed her.
With them went 248 aircraft, the best pilots in the Imperial Japanese Navy and 6 months of unchallenged victory.
The mathematics of the loss staggered the imagination.
Japan had started the war with 10 fleet carriers.
She’d lost four in one day.
Training a carrier pilot required 18 months in aviation fuel Japan couldn’t spare.
Building a fleet carrier required three years and steel Japan didn’t have.
The Americans were launching Essexclass carriers every 6 months from shipyards that could build them faster than Japan could sink them.
Yamamoto aboard Yamato 500 miles northwest received the reports in stages, each worse than the last.
At 1050 hours, three carriers burning.
At 1330 hours, here you counterattacking.
At 1,800 hours, here you hit, sinking.
He’d planned to annihilate the American carriers with his battleship force, but his battleships never got within 300 m of an enemy ship.
The decisive battle he’d engineered had been decided by dive bombers, dropping 500 lb bombs from four miles up.
His battleship’s 18-in guns were irrelevant.
The Americans never came close enough for surface action.
At 0255 hours on June 5th, Yamamoto canled the midway operation and ordered a general withdrawal.
The invasion force, 5,000 troops crammed into transport ships, turned west without ever seeing the objective.
The battleship fleet, most powerful surface force in the Pacific, retreated without firing a shot.
The submarine cordon positioned to intercept American reinforcements found empty ocean.
The entire operation, weeks of planning, dozens of ships, thousands of men, collapsed because four American dive bomber squadrons hit four carriers in 6 minutes.
Japanese search planes found Yorktown still afloat on the morning of June 5th, listing but not sinking.
At 1331 hours, Japanese submarine the Var RAM 168 put two torpedoes into her hull and one into the destroyer Hammond alongside.
Hammond sank in 4 minutes, depth charges detonating as she went down, killing 81 men.
Yorktown finally rolled over at 07001 hours on June 7th and sank in 3,000 fathoms.
She’d taken seven bombs, two torpedoes, and three days to die.
Even in death, she tied down Japanese resources, hunting her.
The Battle of Midway cost the United States one carrier, one destroyer, 150 aircraft, and 307 men.
Japan lost four carriers, one heavy cruiser, 248 aircraft, and 3,57 men.
The numbers told the story, but the strategic implications went deeper.
Japan had lost the carriers that gave her offensive reach.
She’d lost the pilots who couldn’t be replaced.
She’d lost the initiative she’d held since Pearl Harbor.
Most critically, she’d lost the six-month window to force a negotiated peace before American industry became unstoppable.
In Tokyo, the naval general staff suppressed news of the defeat.
Newspapers reported a great victory at Midway.
Wounded survivors from the carriers were isolated in hospitals, forbidden to speak about what happened.
The crews of returning ships were scattered to different units.
Imperial headquarters announced the destruction of two American carriers, Enterprise and Hornet, both of which were actually fine and minimal Japanese losses.
The civilian population never learned the truth.
But the officers planning Japan’s war strategy knew they’d lost.
American intelligence intercepted Japanese damage reports that confirmed the scale of the disaster.
Four fleet carriers sunk.
The carrier force that attacked Pearl Harbor destroyed in one battle.
Rofort’s code breakers read Japanese naval communications describing the losses, the shock, the desperate attempts to maintain secrecy.
The intercepts revealed something else.
Japan had no strategic reserve.
Her carrier force was gutted.
Her pilot training program couldn’t replace the losses.
Her ship building capacity couldn’t match American production.
Admiral Spruent received the Medal of Honor recommendation after the battle, but characteristically declined, saying his staff deserved the credit.
He’d made the essential decisions.
Trust Roshfort’s intelligence, position the carriers in ambush, launch at maximum range despite the risks, and pursue aggressively when Hiru remained operational.
He’d commanded carriers for the first time in combat, and orchestrated the most decisive naval battle in the Pacific War.
The Japanese had expected confusion and panic.
They got cold calculation and aggressive execution.
The torpedo squadrons that died in the first attacks, VT8, VT6, VT3, never knew they’d succeeded.
Their sacrifice pulled the Japanese combat air patrol down to low altitude, left the carriers vulnerable from above, and disrupted Nagumo’s launch cycle at the critical moment.
The 41 crews who flew into certain death created the conditions for the dive bomber success.
Enson George Gay, only survivor of VT8, floated in the water and watched the Japanese carriers burn from a raft.
He was rescued 30 hours later by a PBY Catalina.
15 men in his squadron died so he could see the smoke pillars rising from Kaga’s shattered hull.
Captain Buckmaster returned to Yorktown on June 6th with a salvage party trying to save his ship.
They pumped compartments, corrected the list, rigged tow lines.
For 24 hours, they thought they might bring her home.
Then I 168’s torpedoes ended that hope.
Buckmaster watched her sink from a destroyer’s deck, the ship he’d commanded for 18 months, disappearing beneath the Pacific.
She’d fought at Coral Sea, been repaired in three days, fought again at Midway, and absorbed punishment that should have killed her three times over.
Her crew saved over 2,200 men from the water.
Her aircraft sank two Japanese carriers.
She’d done her job.
Nagumo survived the battle, but never commanded carriers again.
He’d lost the first airfleet through a combination of bad luck, poor intelligence, and doctrine that assumed Japanese superiority would overcome any American response.
The decision to rearm the second wave for a land attack, then reverse that order when carriers appeared left his ships vulnerable at precisely the wrong moment.
But the fundamental error was strategic, the assumption that Americans would react slowly, incompetently, and predictably.
They’d done none of those things.
In 6 months, Japan had gone from master of the Pacific to strategic defense.
She’d hold islands and fight delaying actions and inflict casualties.
But the mathematical reality was settled on June 4th, 1942.
The United States would build 24 Essexclass carriers before the war ended.
Japan would build two fleet carriers total.
The Americans would train 60,000 naval aviators.
Japan couldn’t replace the 110 elite pilots who died at midway.
The battle wasn’t just a tactical victory.
It was the moment the inevitable became visible.
The pilots who attacked the Japanese carriers flew obsolete aircraft.
The SBD Dauntless was already being phased out in favor of newer designs with minimal training and coordination that fell apart as soon as formations launched.
They had still found the enemy, pressed attacks through fighter defenses and anti-aircraft fire, and hit four moving targets from four miles up while diving at terminal velocity.
The Japanese expected American incompetence.
They got American adaptability, aggression, and enough skill to capitalize on one perfect moment of opportunity.
At 10:26 hours on June 4th, 1942, the war turned.
Three carriers burning.
The fourth doomed three hours later.
The crews who’d attacked Pearl Harbor dying in burning hangers.
The pilots who’d driven the British from Salon floating in oil sllicked water.
The doctrine that assumed Japanese superiority proven fatally wrong.
The Americans weren’t supposed to be there.
Weren’t supposed to find the carriers.
Weren’t supposed to coordinate attacks from three separate task forces at the exact moment the Japanese were most vulnerable.
But they were.
And they did.
And the Empire of the Rising Sun discovered that the sun sets on everyone.
Eventually, Admiral Yamamoto stood on Yamato’s bridge as dawn broke on June 5th, receiving confirmation reports.
Four carriers gone, the invasion canled, the decisive battle lost.
He’d warned the naval general staff before Pearl Harbor that Japan could run wild for 6 months, maybe a year.
After that, American industrial capacity would overwhelm them.
The clock had been ticking since December 7th, 1941.
At midway, it ran out.
The men who flew from Enterprise, Hornet, and Yorktown that day weren’t the elite pilots Japan assumed would crumble under pressure.
They were kids from Iowa farms and Texas oil fields and New York tenementss who’d learned to fly dive bombers and torpedo planes and obsolete fighters because their country needed them to.
41 of them flew into anti-aircraft fire and zero interceptors knowing they probably wouldn’t come back.
They bought six minutes for the dive bombers with their lives.
That’s not propaganda.
That’s documented in afteraction reports and Japanese records and the coordinates where their aircraft hit the water.
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that arrogance meets reality eventually and that the Americans the Japanese dismissed as soft, incompetent, and broken in 1942 destroyed four fleet carriers in 6 minutes because they did the math better.
The 72 men of Torpedo Squadron 8 earned the Navy Cross for their final attack.
Only one survived to receive it.
Remember them.
