In six minutes of dive-bombing, three Japanese carriers are ablaze; a fourth burns by afternoon
Six months after Pearl Harbor, Japan's carrier fleet was the most feared naval force on earth — and its commanders believed it still was. On 4–7 June 1942, near a tiny atoll 1,300 miles northwest of Oahu, Admiral Chester Nimitz sprang an ambush built on broken codes: U.S. cryptanalysts had cracked Japan's JN-25b cipher and determined the date, location, and order of battle of the attack. In roughly six minutes of dive-bombing on the morning of June 4, American SBDs set three Japanese fleet carriers — Akagi, Kaga, and Sōryū — simultaneously ablaze; Hiryū, the sole survivor, was fatally struck that same afternoon. The heavy cruiser Mikuma was sunk two days later. The U.S. lost the carrier Yorktown and the destroyer Hammann, but the Imperial Japanese Navy's elite carrier striking force — the Kidō Butai — never recovered.
Midway was the first major American naval offensive victory of the Pacific War and the direct product of a U.S. intelligence triumph: Commander Joseph Rochefort's Station HYPO team broke enough of Japan's naval code to hand Nimitz a complete order of battle. The battle ended Japan's ability to project offensive carrier power and handed the United States the strategic initiative it would never relinquish. By war's end, the U.S. Navy commissioned more than two dozen fleet and light carriers to replace the ships lost — Japan could not come close to matching that output.
QHow did a fake water shortage help America win the Battle of Midway?
U.S. cryptanalysts at Station HYPO had determined that Japan's target — code-named 'AF' — was Midway, but needed confirmation. Commander Joseph Rochefort and Captain Wilfred Holmes devised a simple trap: they had Midway broadcast an uncoded radio message reporting that its water purification system had broken down. Within 24 hours, Japanese intercepts reported that 'AF was short on water.' The Japanese seemed unconcerned that a major naval installation near their planned attack zone was broadcasting an unencoded shortage report — which handed Nimitz not just the target's identity but a complete Japanese order of battle, including the attack date. The ambush was set before a single Japanese ship had moved.
QWhy was the Yorktown able to fight at Midway at all — and why did that confuse Japanese pilots during the battle?
Yorktown took a 250-kilogram bomb hit at the Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942 that Navy Yard inspectors estimated would require at least two weeks to repair. Pearl Harbor's shipyard workers completed enough repairs in 72 hours for her to sortie. Her damaged superheater boilers were left untouched, limiting her top speed, but her flight deck and elevators worked. The hasty repairs had an unintended tactical consequence at Midway: when Hiryū's second strike wave arrived and found Yorktown already underway at 19 knots after damage control crews had patched her from the first attack, the Japanese pilots assumed she must be a different, undamaged carrier — and attacked her again anyway, finishing the job.
QWhat did Lieutenant Commander Wade McClusky follow across the ocean to find the Japanese carriers — and why did it matter?
With his Enterprise dive-bomber group running dangerously low on fuel after searching along a calculated intercept course that found empty ocean, Air Group Commander C. Wade McClusky spotted the wake of a single Japanese destroyer, Arashi, steaming at full speed to rejoin the fleet after having spent considerable time chasing the U.S. submarine Nautilus. McClusky followed Arashi's wake straight to the Kidō Butai. Admiral Nimitz later wrote that McClusky's decision to persist with the search 'decided the fate of our carrier task force and our forces at Midway.' Some bombers ran out of fuel before the attack commenced, but the three squadrons arrived over the Japanese carriers at the precise moment their flight decks were most vulnerable — crowded with armed, fueled aircraft and a fighter cover that had been drawn down to the wavetops by the torpedo attacks.
