Following the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the US suffered one humiliating defeat after another at the hands of the Japanese. Wake Island and Guam were captured in December following Pearl Harbor. The defenders of the Bataan Peninsula surrendered in April 1942, followed by the Bataan Death March which forced the 76,000 prisoners to march 60 miles to a POW camp. Eleven thousand died or were murdered along the way. Corregidor was forced to surrender in May 1942.
The only positive turn in the months following Pearl Harbor was the success of the largely symbolic Doolittle bombing raid on Japan in April 1942, which did little damage but shook the belief that the Japanese homeland and the Emperor's palace were safe from attack. Doolittle’s raid stunned Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto, Commander in Chief of the Combined Japanese Fleet. These were two-engine B-25 medium bombers. Many on the Japanese Imperial Staff believed they had to have been based on Midway Island instead of launched as they were from the US carrier Hornet 650 nautical miles from Japan.
Admiral Yamamoto had studied at Harvard University, and as Captain Yamamoto, he was the Naval Attaché to the US between 1925 and 1928. He understood the American mind and knew that American industry and ingenuity would inevitably produce an insurmountable military machine as the war wore on. He had told the Japanese Prime Minister, “In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.”
Therefore, Yamamoto began immediately to develop plans for a major naval battle that he thought would effectively destroy the American navy and set its war plans back at least a year – enough for Japan to secure a strong Pacific foothold that would be difficult and costly for the Americans to dislodge. He chose Midway Island, 1,000 miles from Honolulu, as the site of a decisive battle.
Complete surprise would be necessary for the attack on Midway as it had been in Yamamoto’s plan for the Pearl Harbor attack. He was unaware, however, that the Japanese naval cipher code named JN-25 had been broken before the war by Commander Joseph P. Rochefort and his team of trained mathematicians, communications experts, and cryptologists. They had been able read at least 10% of the Japanese Navy's radio transmissions, which doesn’t seem like much useful information, but Rochefort was a very talented intelligence expert when it came to examining the value of the intercepted information.
Rochefort's men had become aware of an increase in Japanese radio traffic and guessed that a new operation was being planned, which would combine all fleet units that the Japanese could muster. Initially, they didn’t know the target of the Japanese plan but noticed frequent references to a code name “AF” in the traffic. As a picture began to emerge, Rochefort and his team were convinced that “AF” was Midway. Unfortunately, no one else among their superiors at Navy Communications in Washington, D.C. agreed with them. Navy Communications thought the only target that justified the assembly of a Japanese fleet of this size would be Hawaii.
In the minds of the Navy brass, why would the Japanese make Midway the site for a major battle? After all, it is only an atoll consisting of two small sand spit islets surrounded by a coral reef. Eastern Island, the main and smallest of the two islands, had a landing field which took up most of its 334 acres. Sand Island, the other of the two, had a longer landing field on its 1300 acres.
Therefore, Rochefort decided to put his theory that “AF” was Midway to a test. He asked Midway to bury a mundane message in an uncoded routine communication saying that its desalinization plant was out of order. The Japanese picked it up and reported in a coded message that "AF has problems with its de-salting plant".
Yamamoto’s plan called for the entire force of the Combined Fleet to be sent across the Pacific to give battle to the US Pacific Fleet in the waters around Midway and to attack and take the island. Toward that goal, his order of battle included almost every Japanese fighting unit that was not needed in tasks around the Empire – over 100 warships including four carriers. Yamamoto was betting all his chips on this battle.
The battle plan included a diversionary attack on the Aleutian Islands, and in one of war’s ironies, one of the Zeros assigned to this diversion would be disabled by US anti-aircraft fire and would attempt an emergency landing on Akutan Island. The pilot was fooled by what he thought was a field of grass but was in fact a bog. He landed wheels down causing the plane to flip over, killing him on impact.
In those early days of the war, the Zero was one of Japan’s “secret weapons.” Therefore, the wingman circling above had orders to destroy the plane to prevent its capture. Fearing the pilot was alive and unconscious, he disobeyed and returned to his carrier. Later, intelligence analysts recovered and repaired the plane so it could be flown in simulated dog fights to learn its strengths and weaknesses. What was learned would save the lives of many American pilots who had to outmaneuver a Zero on their tail.
Yamamoto would personally lead the main body of the attack – the battleships Yamato, Nagato and Mutsu, the most powerful of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Support would come from the light carrier Hosho whose eight attack planes would be used for anti-submarine work. Destroyers would screen the force.
The First Air Fleet was under command of Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo. His striking force was comprised of four fleet carriers – Akagi, Nagumo’s flag ship, Kaga, Hiryu, and Soryu – and supporting ships. Nagumo was assigned the dual mission of bombing the military facilities on Midway Island and destroying any US fleets that attempted to oppose an amphibious landing. The military objective was to put Japanese troops ashore by June 7.
Over on the American side, the senior commander was Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander-in-Chief, Pacific. He assembled his fleet consisting of Task Force 16 with the carriers Enterprise and Hornet under the command of Rear Admiral Ray Spruance and Task Force 17 with the carrier Yorktown under the command of Rear Admiral Jack Fletcher. Unlike Yamamoto, Nimitz did not personally lead the fleet. Operational command of the battle fell to Fletcher.
At first light on the morning of June 4, Nagumo launched a bombing raid on Midway Island with fighter support. At the same time seaplanes from Midway were out looking for the Japanese fleet. One of the seaplanes spotted the Japanese carrier force at about 5:30 a.m. It also reported incoming Japanese aircraft headed for the atoll. Marine Corps planes from Midway scrambled to intercept the attack formation, but the Marines were hopelessly outnumbered and their planes were no match for the Japanese Zero fighters. Marine pilots shot down a few of the enemy bombers but suffered great losses themselves. PT torpedo boats and anti-aircraft fire from Midway's guns were more successful in disrupting the Japanese attack.
One hundred and eight Japanese planes hit Midway's two islands at 6:30 a.m. Twenty minutes of bombing and machine gun fire knocked out some of Eastern Island’s facilities, but the Japanese attack did not make the destruction of the airfield its principal objective. This would later prove to be a strategic error. Sand Island's oil tanks, seaplane hangar, and other buildings were set afire. The commander of the Japanese attack radioed that another air strike was required to soften up Midway's defenses against the landing.
Because the air fields remained intact, the Japanese carriers received several counterstrikes from Midway's torpedo planes and bombers, including B-17s. However, the American attacks were uncoordinated, and facing withering opposition from the Japanese fighters, the Americans suffered terrible losses without hitting anything but seawater around the maneuvering ships.
While these attacks were in progress, a Japanese scout plane reported that it had found the US fleet including a carrier. This put the Japanese commander Nagumo on the horns of a dilemma. Spotting his fighters – i.e. arming, fueling, running up propeller power, and staging the launch – had been underway for 30 to 45 minutes. However, the spotting was for the planes armed for a second strike land attack – not to fend off an American carrier air strike or to counterattack the carriers, which required torpedoes, not bombs. Nagumo decided to wait for his fighters to return from Midway when he would then rearm them for an attack against the US fleet. It was a fatal decision.
American carrier aircraft were launched from the Hornet, but once in the air, they began looking for the Japanese fleet along the wrong compass heading and missed the fleet. However, Torpedo Squadron 8 led by Lieutenant Commander John C. Waldron broke formation and followed what he believed to be the correct heading. Finding the fleet, he put it under attack. But without fighter escort, all fifteen of Waldron’s squadron were shot down without being able to inflict any damage. Only pilot Ensign George H. Gay, Jr. survived his plane’s crash, and he watched the entire battle in his life vest from the water.
Other torpedo and bomber squadrons fared similarly – failing to inflict damage but dropping enough bombs and torpedoes to force Japanese ship captains to make evasive maneuvers. This had the unplanned good fortune of keeping Nagumo from launching a counterstrike and it prevented Zeros, which were running out of fuel and ammunition from landing. The appearance of another American torpedo squadron drew off the overhead Japanese combat air patrol, leaving Nagumo’s fleet unprotected – a tactical error that would prove lethal.
At the same time the torpedo squadron was sighted, two squadrons of American dive bombers from the carriers Enterprise and Yorktown were searching for the Japanese fleet. The commander of one squadron was tailing the wake of the Japanese destroyer Arashi, which was steaming at full speed, obviously to rejoin Nagumo's carrier force.
Despite being low on fuel, the American planes stayed their course and arrived at the perfect time. Armed Japanese strike aircraft filled the hangar decks, fuel hoses snaked across the decks as refueling operations were being completed, and the change of ordnance meant bombs and torpedoes were stacked around the hangars, rather than stowed safely in the magazines, making the Japanese carriers even more vulnerable than they were absent overhead air cover.
An attack was launched by the Enterprise pilots in two waves, one scoring four or five hits on the carrier Kaga and the other hitting the carrier Akagi with but one bomb. But that bomb fell on the upper hangar deck and exploded among the armed and fueled aircraft there. Another bomb exploded underwater very close astern, causing a geyser that bent the Akagi flight deck upward and damaged the ship’s rudder, making steering virtually impossible. The Yorktown squadron scored three hits on the Soryu hanger deck. The fourth carrier in the fleet, Hiryu, was sandwiched between Soryu, Kaga, and Akagi, and received no hits, but three of the four Japanese carriers were now out of action and were eventually abandoned and scuttled.
Only Hiryu remained operational. Shortly before 11 a.m. she launched 18 dive bombers which found the Yorktown around noon. As the Japanese bombers approached Yorktown, they were intercepted and 11 were shot down. But the seven that got through hit Yorktown with three bombs and stopped her ability to maneuver.
The Yorktown crew repaired the damage and got the carrier underway, but two more groups launched by Hiryu managed to coordinate a torpedo attack that stopped Yorktown again. Dead in the water, the Yorktown began to list and the order to abandon ship was given. Planes from other American carriers found and bombed Hiryu, which sank the next day. But on June 6 a Japanese submarine located the crippled Yorktown and the destroyer which was helping her return to Pearl Harbor. The submarine torpedoed both vessels, sinking the destroyer immediately. Yorktown finally sank the next morning. These were the only two American ships lost in the battle.
The American losses in the Battle of Midway were 150 aircraft and 307 men. The Japanese lost four irreplaceable aircraft carriers and a cruiser, 248 aircraft, 3,057 men including 200 of their most experienced pilots. The losses shocked Yamamoto. Though the war with Japan would wear on for another three years, Midway was the high water mark of the Japanese Pacific offensive. True to Yamamoto’s prediction, Japan’s military might would wane and America’s would become superior.
If the Japanese had won the Battle of Midway, the Americans almost certainly would not have invaded Guadalcanal two months later, if ever. Guadalcanal would take the life of Admiral Yamamoto. The Japanese would most likely have renewed their effort to occupy Australia. That threat would have forced the recall of Aussie troops from North Africa where they were fighting Rommel’s attempt to capture the Suez Canal, the loss of which would have been incalculable. Any substantial occupation of Australia by the Japanese would have deprived McArthur of his staging base to retake the Philippines and cost US submarines the crucial bases that allowed them to harass Japanese war ships in the South Pacific. A Japanese armed force on Midway Island would have threatened the American west coast, weakened American ability, if not its resolve, to retake France on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Absent an American presence in Western Europe after the defeat of Hitler, the Soviets would have overrun the continent and possibly the UK.
That’s how important the American victory at Midway would prove to be.
Ensign George H. Gay, Jr., the sole survivor of Waldron’s torpedo squadron, was picked up after the battle. He had spent 30 hours in the water literally watching the US Navy win World War II in the Pacific. He went on to fight in the Battle of Guadalcanal, and after the war, he was a pilot for TWA. Gay retired in Marietta, Georgia where he died of a heart attack in October 1994.
The US Navy honored his request to rejoin his squadron and scattered his ashes over the site where all of the pilots of the attack he survived lost their lives.
The only positive turn in the months following Pearl Harbor was the success of the largely symbolic Doolittle bombing raid on Japan in April 1942, which did little damage but shook the belief that the Japanese homeland and the Emperor's palace were safe from attack. Doolittle’s raid stunned Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto, Commander in Chief of the Combined Japanese Fleet. These were two-engine B-25 medium bombers. Many on the Japanese Imperial Staff believed they had to have been based on Midway Island instead of launched as they were from the US carrier Hornet 650 nautical miles from Japan.
Admiral Yamamoto had studied at Harvard University, and as Captain Yamamoto, he was the Naval Attaché to the US between 1925 and 1928. He understood the American mind and knew that American industry and ingenuity would inevitably produce an insurmountable military machine as the war wore on. He had told the Japanese Prime Minister, “In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.”
Therefore, Yamamoto began immediately to develop plans for a major naval battle that he thought would effectively destroy the American navy and set its war plans back at least a year – enough for Japan to secure a strong Pacific foothold that would be difficult and costly for the Americans to dislodge. He chose Midway Island, 1,000 miles from Honolulu, as the site of a decisive battle.
Complete surprise would be necessary for the attack on Midway as it had been in Yamamoto’s plan for the Pearl Harbor attack. He was unaware, however, that the Japanese naval cipher code named JN-25 had been broken before the war by Commander Joseph P. Rochefort and his team of trained mathematicians, communications experts, and cryptologists. They had been able read at least 10% of the Japanese Navy's radio transmissions, which doesn’t seem like much useful information, but Rochefort was a very talented intelligence expert when it came to examining the value of the intercepted information.
Rochefort's men had become aware of an increase in Japanese radio traffic and guessed that a new operation was being planned, which would combine all fleet units that the Japanese could muster. Initially, they didn’t know the target of the Japanese plan but noticed frequent references to a code name “AF” in the traffic. As a picture began to emerge, Rochefort and his team were convinced that “AF” was Midway. Unfortunately, no one else among their superiors at Navy Communications in Washington, D.C. agreed with them. Navy Communications thought the only target that justified the assembly of a Japanese fleet of this size would be Hawaii.
In the minds of the Navy brass, why would the Japanese make Midway the site for a major battle? After all, it is only an atoll consisting of two small sand spit islets surrounded by a coral reef. Eastern Island, the main and smallest of the two islands, had a landing field which took up most of its 334 acres. Sand Island, the other of the two, had a longer landing field on its 1300 acres.
Therefore, Rochefort decided to put his theory that “AF” was Midway to a test. He asked Midway to bury a mundane message in an uncoded routine communication saying that its desalinization plant was out of order. The Japanese picked it up and reported in a coded message that "AF has problems with its de-salting plant".
Yamamoto’s plan called for the entire force of the Combined Fleet to be sent across the Pacific to give battle to the US Pacific Fleet in the waters around Midway and to attack and take the island. Toward that goal, his order of battle included almost every Japanese fighting unit that was not needed in tasks around the Empire – over 100 warships including four carriers. Yamamoto was betting all his chips on this battle.
The battle plan included a diversionary attack on the Aleutian Islands, and in one of war’s ironies, one of the Zeros assigned to this diversion would be disabled by US anti-aircraft fire and would attempt an emergency landing on Akutan Island. The pilot was fooled by what he thought was a field of grass but was in fact a bog. He landed wheels down causing the plane to flip over, killing him on impact.
In those early days of the war, the Zero was one of Japan’s “secret weapons.” Therefore, the wingman circling above had orders to destroy the plane to prevent its capture. Fearing the pilot was alive and unconscious, he disobeyed and returned to his carrier. Later, intelligence analysts recovered and repaired the plane so it could be flown in simulated dog fights to learn its strengths and weaknesses. What was learned would save the lives of many American pilots who had to outmaneuver a Zero on their tail.
Yamamoto would personally lead the main body of the attack – the battleships Yamato, Nagato and Mutsu, the most powerful of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Support would come from the light carrier Hosho whose eight attack planes would be used for anti-submarine work. Destroyers would screen the force.
The First Air Fleet was under command of Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo. His striking force was comprised of four fleet carriers – Akagi, Nagumo’s flag ship, Kaga, Hiryu, and Soryu – and supporting ships. Nagumo was assigned the dual mission of bombing the military facilities on Midway Island and destroying any US fleets that attempted to oppose an amphibious landing. The military objective was to put Japanese troops ashore by June 7.
Over on the American side, the senior commander was Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander-in-Chief, Pacific. He assembled his fleet consisting of Task Force 16 with the carriers Enterprise and Hornet under the command of Rear Admiral Ray Spruance and Task Force 17 with the carrier Yorktown under the command of Rear Admiral Jack Fletcher. Unlike Yamamoto, Nimitz did not personally lead the fleet. Operational command of the battle fell to Fletcher.
At first light on the morning of June 4, Nagumo launched a bombing raid on Midway Island with fighter support. At the same time seaplanes from Midway were out looking for the Japanese fleet. One of the seaplanes spotted the Japanese carrier force at about 5:30 a.m. It also reported incoming Japanese aircraft headed for the atoll. Marine Corps planes from Midway scrambled to intercept the attack formation, but the Marines were hopelessly outnumbered and their planes were no match for the Japanese Zero fighters. Marine pilots shot down a few of the enemy bombers but suffered great losses themselves. PT torpedo boats and anti-aircraft fire from Midway's guns were more successful in disrupting the Japanese attack.
One hundred and eight Japanese planes hit Midway's two islands at 6:30 a.m. Twenty minutes of bombing and machine gun fire knocked out some of Eastern Island’s facilities, but the Japanese attack did not make the destruction of the airfield its principal objective. This would later prove to be a strategic error. Sand Island's oil tanks, seaplane hangar, and other buildings were set afire. The commander of the Japanese attack radioed that another air strike was required to soften up Midway's defenses against the landing.
Because the air fields remained intact, the Japanese carriers received several counterstrikes from Midway's torpedo planes and bombers, including B-17s. However, the American attacks were uncoordinated, and facing withering opposition from the Japanese fighters, the Americans suffered terrible losses without hitting anything but seawater around the maneuvering ships.
While these attacks were in progress, a Japanese scout plane reported that it had found the US fleet including a carrier. This put the Japanese commander Nagumo on the horns of a dilemma. Spotting his fighters – i.e. arming, fueling, running up propeller power, and staging the launch – had been underway for 30 to 45 minutes. However, the spotting was for the planes armed for a second strike land attack – not to fend off an American carrier air strike or to counterattack the carriers, which required torpedoes, not bombs. Nagumo decided to wait for his fighters to return from Midway when he would then rearm them for an attack against the US fleet. It was a fatal decision.
American carrier aircraft were launched from the Hornet, but once in the air, they began looking for the Japanese fleet along the wrong compass heading and missed the fleet. However, Torpedo Squadron 8 led by Lieutenant Commander John C. Waldron broke formation and followed what he believed to be the correct heading. Finding the fleet, he put it under attack. But without fighter escort, all fifteen of Waldron’s squadron were shot down without being able to inflict any damage. Only pilot Ensign George H. Gay, Jr. survived his plane’s crash, and he watched the entire battle in his life vest from the water.
Other torpedo and bomber squadrons fared similarly – failing to inflict damage but dropping enough bombs and torpedoes to force Japanese ship captains to make evasive maneuvers. This had the unplanned good fortune of keeping Nagumo from launching a counterstrike and it prevented Zeros, which were running out of fuel and ammunition from landing. The appearance of another American torpedo squadron drew off the overhead Japanese combat air patrol, leaving Nagumo’s fleet unprotected – a tactical error that would prove lethal.
At the same time the torpedo squadron was sighted, two squadrons of American dive bombers from the carriers Enterprise and Yorktown were searching for the Japanese fleet. The commander of one squadron was tailing the wake of the Japanese destroyer Arashi, which was steaming at full speed, obviously to rejoin Nagumo's carrier force.
Despite being low on fuel, the American planes stayed their course and arrived at the perfect time. Armed Japanese strike aircraft filled the hangar decks, fuel hoses snaked across the decks as refueling operations were being completed, and the change of ordnance meant bombs and torpedoes were stacked around the hangars, rather than stowed safely in the magazines, making the Japanese carriers even more vulnerable than they were absent overhead air cover.
An attack was launched by the Enterprise pilots in two waves, one scoring four or five hits on the carrier Kaga and the other hitting the carrier Akagi with but one bomb. But that bomb fell on the upper hangar deck and exploded among the armed and fueled aircraft there. Another bomb exploded underwater very close astern, causing a geyser that bent the Akagi flight deck upward and damaged the ship’s rudder, making steering virtually impossible. The Yorktown squadron scored three hits on the Soryu hanger deck. The fourth carrier in the fleet, Hiryu, was sandwiched between Soryu, Kaga, and Akagi, and received no hits, but three of the four Japanese carriers were now out of action and were eventually abandoned and scuttled.
Only Hiryu remained operational. Shortly before 11 a.m. she launched 18 dive bombers which found the Yorktown around noon. As the Japanese bombers approached Yorktown, they were intercepted and 11 were shot down. But the seven that got through hit Yorktown with three bombs and stopped her ability to maneuver.
The Yorktown crew repaired the damage and got the carrier underway, but two more groups launched by Hiryu managed to coordinate a torpedo attack that stopped Yorktown again. Dead in the water, the Yorktown began to list and the order to abandon ship was given. Planes from other American carriers found and bombed Hiryu, which sank the next day. But on June 6 a Japanese submarine located the crippled Yorktown and the destroyer which was helping her return to Pearl Harbor. The submarine torpedoed both vessels, sinking the destroyer immediately. Yorktown finally sank the next morning. These were the only two American ships lost in the battle.
The American losses in the Battle of Midway were 150 aircraft and 307 men. The Japanese lost four irreplaceable aircraft carriers and a cruiser, 248 aircraft, 3,057 men including 200 of their most experienced pilots. The losses shocked Yamamoto. Though the war with Japan would wear on for another three years, Midway was the high water mark of the Japanese Pacific offensive. True to Yamamoto’s prediction, Japan’s military might would wane and America’s would become superior.
If the Japanese had won the Battle of Midway, the Americans almost certainly would not have invaded Guadalcanal two months later, if ever. Guadalcanal would take the life of Admiral Yamamoto. The Japanese would most likely have renewed their effort to occupy Australia. That threat would have forced the recall of Aussie troops from North Africa where they were fighting Rommel’s attempt to capture the Suez Canal, the loss of which would have been incalculable. Any substantial occupation of Australia by the Japanese would have deprived McArthur of his staging base to retake the Philippines and cost US submarines the crucial bases that allowed them to harass Japanese war ships in the South Pacific. A Japanese armed force on Midway Island would have threatened the American west coast, weakened American ability, if not its resolve, to retake France on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Absent an American presence in Western Europe after the defeat of Hitler, the Soviets would have overrun the continent and possibly the UK.
That’s how important the American victory at Midway would prove to be.
Ensign George H. Gay, Jr., the sole survivor of Waldron’s torpedo squadron, was picked up after the battle. He had spent 30 hours in the water literally watching the US Navy win World War II in the Pacific. He went on to fight in the Battle of Guadalcanal, and after the war, he was a pilot for TWA. Gay retired in Marietta, Georgia where he died of a heart attack in October 1994.
The US Navy honored his request to rejoin his squadron and scattered his ashes over the site where all of the pilots of the attack he survived lost their lives.
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