But the trajectory was set on June 4th, 1942 when American dive bombers found the Japanese carriers with their decks full of armed aircraft and in 5 minutes destroyed the foundation of Japanese naval power.

Yamamoto understood this better than anyone.

In April 1943, while flying to inspect bases in the Solomons, his plane was intercepted by American fighters who had been waiting for him, guided by decoded Japanese communications.

As his plane fell toward the jungle, burning, Yamamoto may have thought back to that day in June, to the radio reports crackling in Yamato’s operations room, to the moment when he knew the operation had failed.

He had warned before the war that Japan could run wild for 6 months or a year, but could not win a long war against America.

Midway had ended the running wild.

Everything after was the long war he had predicted and feared.

The four carriers, Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, Hiru, lay on the bottom of the Pacific, 3 mi down.

Their hulls broken, their hanger decks collapsed, their aircraft scattered across the ocean floor.

With them lay 3,000 men, including the pilots who had been Japan’s elite, the men who had trained for years to master the art of carrier warfare.

Those men, those ships, that expertise could not be replaced.

The Japanese Navy fought on for three more years, but it fought without the advantage it had possessed on December 7th, 1941.

It fought knowing what its admirals had learned at Midway, that American intelligence could find them, that American dive bombers could destroy them, that American industrial power could overwhelm them.

What did Japanese admirals say when they saw the losses after Midway? Publicly, they said nothing.

The battle was classified.

The casualties concealed, the defeat transformed into a victory in official reports.

But privately in staff meetings and diaries and quiet conversations, they said what Ugaki had written, that they had lost more than ships, that they had lost the belief in victory, that everything had changed.

They said what Nagumo had asked on Nagara’s bridge.

With what am I to attack? They said what Yamamoto had shown through his silence that the war they had started with such confidence was now a war they might not win.

And in the years that followed as the American fleet grew larger and Japan’s grew smaller as the battles moved closer to Japan itself as the losses mounted beyond anything imagined in June 1942.

Those admirals learned the full meaning of what had happened at Midway.

They learned that five minutes could decide a war, that intelligence could matter more than courage, that industrial capacity could overcome tactical brilliance.

They learned, as Yamamoto had warned, that Japan could not win a long war against America.

And they learned it all from four burning carriers sinking into the Pacific, taking with them not just ships and men, but Japan’s hope of victory.

 

« Prev