The Miracle at Midway

Sixty-five years ago today, the United States Navy gained the greatest victory in its history. Against overwhelming odds, it won the American equivalent of the defeat of the Spanish Armada and decisively reversed the strategic situation in the Pacific in a single day.

The Japanese government and military were fully aware that Japan, with an economy a tenth the size of America’s, could not hope to beat the United States in a long war of attrition. Instead, it planned a series of blows that would make any interference with Japanese freedom of action in the Pacific prohibitively costly. First, it would destroy the U.S. Pacific fleet, making Japan the only major naval power in the region. Second, it would seize the “southern resource zone” of Indochina, the Philippines, and the Dutch East Indies, securing the oil and other resources it would need. Third, it would establish a distant and impregnable defensive perimeter along a series of islands (“unsinkable aircraft carriers”) that would make any attack on the home islands difficult if not impossible.

The attack on Pearl Harbor implemented the first part of the plan. Of the eight battleships moored there on December 7, 1941, three were sunk, one capsized, and four severely damaged. Much of America’s military air strength in Hawaii was also destroyed. However, the fuel storage depots and the dry docks were spared, a very serious failing that allowed Pearl Harbor to continue to function as the main American naval base in the Pacific and to repair much of the damage to the battle fleet. Five of the eight battleships were back in service by the end of the war.

Though American naval strength in the Pacific had been devastated by Pearl Harbor, it had not been eliminated. Providentially, the three American aircraft carriers in the Pacific, the Enterprise, Lexington, and Saratoga, had been at sea and thus escaped certain destruction. Pearl Harbor, therefore, was a brilliant tactical success but a strategic failure.

In April 1942 James Doolittle led a squadron of B-25 bombers, flying off the USS Hornet, in a raid against Tokyo and other Japanese cities. The physical effect of the raid on the targets was trivial, but the psychological effect on the Japanese high command—deeply embarrassed by it—was profound. The Battle of the Coral Sea on May 7 and 8, 1942, further showed that American naval power was still a strategic factor in the Pacific. The battle itself was a draw, with the American carrier Lexingtonsunk and one Japanese carrier sunk. But it was a strategic victory for the allies, as it halted Japan’s pending assault on Port Moresby in New Guinea, which was supposed to be a major part of the defensive perimeter and a base from which to threaten Australia.

The Japanese admiral who had planned Pearl Harbor, Isoroku Yamamoto, knew that American naval power had to be eliminated. To do so, he now planned to attack and occupy Midway Island, near the northwestern end of the Hawaiian island chain. Midway was intended to be an outpost in Japan’s defensive perimeter, making raids such as Doolittle’s far more difficult to carry out, and a place from which to harass and eventually attack Hawaii proper. But just as important, Yamamoto intended to draw what was left of the U.S. fleet into a decisive battle in which, with his overwhelming superiority, he would destroy it.

He deployed his forces—165 warships altogether—in no fewer than four battle groups. The Northern Area Force was to attack the Aleutians as a diversion. The First Air Fleet, with Japan’s four operational fleet carriers (two were not yet available after the fighting at the Coral Sea), was to attack and destroy the defenses on Midway and then destroy the American fleet when it came to the defense of the island. The Midway Occupation Force was to seize Midway after carrier-based planes had rendered it defenseless. Yamamoto’s main body, with seven battleships, one light carrier, four cruisers, and twelve destroyers, was to sweep in after the American carriers were put out of action and destroy what was left of American naval power. Furthermore, 18 submarines were deployed to report on American movements and attack targets of opportunity.

Against this vast armada, Adm. Chester Nimitz could deploy only 76 warships, with no battleships and just three carriers, six cruisers, and 15 destroyers. The Yorktown, badly knocked about in the Battle of the Coral Sea, needed several months in dry dock to be once again ready to fight. Nimitz gave the repair crews three days. Somehow they got the job done, at least well enough to make her battleworthy. She sailed from Pearl Harbor on May 30 with hundreds of workmen still aboard.

While Nimitz was critically short of ships, he had one inestimable advantage. Naval Intelligence had broken the Japanese naval code, called JN-25 by the Americans. He knew the Japanese were coming, and he knew when. The question was where. The Japanese radio traffic just referred to the target as “AF.” Nimitz was sure it was Midway, but others thought it might be Pearl Harbor or even San Francisco.

Cdr. Joseph Rochefort, of Naval Intelligence, sent Midway a message by secure undersea cable telling it to report, in a plain-language radio message, that there had been an explosion in its desalinization plant, so water was needed. The Japanese promptly passed word that AF was short of water. Nimitz deployed his three carriers and supporting ships northeast of Midway, to lie in wait.

Yamamoto’s intelligence was both far scantier and, in important respects, wrong. He believed the Yorktown had been sunk at the Battle of the Coral Sea, leaving Nimitz with only two carriers. And his submarine screen arrived too late to sight the American fleet’s deployment, so the Japanese thought it was still in Pearl Harbor. Thus the Americans would enjoy the advantage of surprise, the most valuable nonmaterial asset one can have in war.

On June 4 the Japanese launched a strike against Midway but failed to damage the defenses enough to make invasion easy. The commander of the air strike radioed the Japanese admiral in charge of the carrier force, Chuichi Nagumo, that another strike was needed. Nagumo ordered his reserve planes, which had been loaded with torpedoes and armor-piercing bombs in case the American fleet appeared, to be rearmed with contact bombs for operations against Midway. Shortly after the rearming began, however, a scout plane reported the presence of a sizable American fleet to the northeast.

Nagumo was in a quandary. If he launched immediately, his planes would have the wrong ordnance for maximum effect against the fleet. And his returning planes from Midway, low in fuel and bearing wounded crewmen, would need to land immediately, so the flight deck needed to be clear for them. Nagumo decided to follow Japanese carrier doctrine and land his planes first while he rearmed his second strike on the hangar deck below.

His carriers, therefore, were at their most vulnerable when the planes launched from the American carriers showed up. Ordnance was piled on the flight and hangar decks instead of stored in the magazines, and fuel hoses snaked everywhere.

The initial American attacks, with obsolete torpedo planes, were ineffective, as the superb Japanese Zero fighter planes, flying combat air patrol over the carriers, were easily able to shoot them down. But while the Zeroes focused on the torpedo planes, which were nearly at sea level, three squadrons of Dauntless dive bombers flew in high overhead. Within six minutes, three of the Japanese carriers were flaming wrecks.

The one surviving Japanese carrier, the Hiryu, launched its planes against the American fleet, and they were able to cripple the Yorktown, which had to be abandoned. But when American scouts located the Hiryu, she, too, was soon hopelessly ablaze. All four Japanese carriers sank or were scuttled. The next day a Japanese submarine torpedoed the Yorktown, then under tow, and sank her, along with an American destroyer, while the Americans mauled two Japanese heavy cruisers, sinking one of them.

The death toll tells the extent of the American victory: 307 American died at Midway; more than 3,000 Japanese lost their lives. In a few hours, the strategic situation in the Pacific was transformed. Japan’s temporary naval superiority vanished with its four fleet carriers, which could not be easily or quickly replaced. Indeed, the four carriers would not be replaced until early in 1945, and by then the United States had launched fifteen fleet carriers and nine light fleet carriers to Japan’s two, gaining total naval supremacy.

Yamamoto had said that the Japanese forces would “run wild” in the Pacific for six months after Pearl Harbor but that he couldn’t promise more than that, given the overwhelming industrial superiority of the United States. He was right. After Pearl Harbor, the Japanese swept through south Asia, taking the Philippines, Hong Kong, Thailand, Burma, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, and much of New Guinea, as well as American and British island possessions in the Pacific. Then Midway was fought, almost exactly half a year after the attack on Pearl Harbor. And Japan could never again take the strategic offensive. Midway had forced it into the very war of attrition it knew it could not win.