The Battle of Midway

FactsBattle fact sheet

Move 1The opening: a plan built to hide, not to support

After the American air raid on Tokyo on 18 April 1942, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto imposed his operation on the high command: take Midway, the atoll at the far northwestern end of Hawaii, and force the American carriers that had escaped Pearl Harbor to come out and defend it, where they would be destroyed. At the same time, another force would attack the Aleutians, in Alaska.

So as not to scare off the opponent, Yamamoto divided the fleet into groups hundreds of miles apart, with the battleships well behind the carriers. The price was that no group could support another. Around Chūichi Nagumo's four carriers — Akagi, Kaga, Hiryū and Sōryū — there were only two fast battleships, three cruisers and twelve destroyers. The Shōkaku and the Zuikaku were missing, one damaged and the other short of aircraft after the Battle of the Coral Sea, a month earlier.

And the plan rested on two wrong premises: that the Yorktown had sunk in the Coral Sea and that the Americans knew nothing. Japan committed almost its entire operational fleet. At the point of decision, however, there were four carriers with 248 aircraft, against three American carriers with 233 aircraft and an island with 127 more. In the weapon that would decide the battle, the dive bomber, the NHHC speaks of rough parity.

Move 2The reading: what the broken code gave, and what it did not

The Japanese Navy's operational code, JN-25B, was only partly broken. According to Samuel Cox, of the NHHC, the Americans intercepted about 60% of the messages and actually read 10% to 15%, often in fragments. Nimitz himself wrote on 26 May that 40% of the copied messages were being decoded. There was no copy of the Japanese operations order at Pearl Harbor. There were fragments, traffic analysis and the experience of two officers who spoke Japanese, Joseph Rochefort, head of the cryptanalysis group, and Edwin Layton, of fleet intelligence.

Since March the digraph AF had been appearing in the messages as an objective, and at Pearl Harbor AF was read as Midway. Washington had doubts. Between 15 and 21 May, the analysts there spoke of Samoa, the West Coast, even Hawaii itself. It was for them, and not for Nimitz, that the trick was set up: by undersea cable, Midway was ordered to transmit in the clear that its freshwater distillation plant had broken down. Shortly afterward the Americans read a Japanese message reporting that the AF air unit had water for only two weeks. The idea is attributed to Jasper Holmes, of Rochefort's group; some credit it to Rochefort himself.

On 25 May Rochefort's group broke the date cipher and predicted the Aleutians for 3 June and Midway for 4 June. Nimitz adopted the dates, left the battleships on the West Coast, reinforced the island and sent his three carriers to an ambush northeast of it. The Yorktown, which the Japanese believed sunk, was repaired at Pearl Harbor in about three days and sailed on 30 May. On the Japanese side, the submarine cordon between Hawaii and Midway arrived late, when the American carriers had already passed.

Move 3Nagumo's move: attacking the island with the reserve in the hangar

At 04:30 on 4 June, Nagumo launches 108 aircraft against Midway and seven search planes to cover a sector of about 200 degrees — little for so much sea, and with clouds to the northeast, exactly where the Americans were. The strike on the island does damage, but loses 11 aircraft and has another 14 badly damaged, and the leader asks for a second strike. Between 07:10 and 08:30 the attacks by the island-based aircraft arrive one after another: no hits, heavy losses.

At 07:15, against Yamamoto's order to keep the reserve armed against ships, Nagumo orders it rearmed with bombs for land targets. At 07:40 a floatplane from the cruiser Tone reports American ships to the northeast; Nagumo suspends the rearming and, around 08:20, learns there is a carrier among them. He then decides to recover first the aircraft returning from the island, so as not to lose them in the sea, and then launch a full strike, with torpedoes and escort, as Japanese doctrine required. The aircraft go down to the hangar to be armed and refueled.

The classic version calls this hesitation. Cox, of the NHHC, says the opposite: Nagumo acted aggressively and according to doctrine, and had already lost the game at 04:30, when he launched the strike against the island without knowing there were American carriers nearby. Spruance had begun launching at 07:00, at extreme range. By the time Nagumo got the news, the aircraft that would decide the battle were already in the air.

Move 4The sacrifice of the torpedo bombers and McClusky's search

The American attacks arrived piecemeal. The Hornet's air group did not find the Japanese, and its fighters went into the sea out of fuel. Only John Waldron's torpedo squadron VT-8 found the target: at 09:20 it attacked alone, and all 15 aircraft were shot down without a hit. George Gay was the only survivor of the 30 crewmen. The Enterprise's VT-6 lost 9 of 14; the Yorktown's VT-3, 10 of 12. No torpedo exploded against a carrier.

They were not useless. For almost three hours, the Japanese carriers maneuvered and launched and recovered fighters nonstop, unable to get the strike against the American fleet onto the deck. And VT-3, which arrived at about 10:00, pulled the Japanese fighter patrol down and to the southeast — at exactly the moment it mattered.

Meanwhile, the Enterprise's bomber group, led by Wade McClusky, was lost and at the limit of its fuel. At 09:55 McClusky spotted a lone Japanese destroyer, racing northeast: it was the Arashi, which had stayed behind hunting the American submarine Nautilus. McClusky bet that it was heading to the rest of the force, and followed it. Nimitz would later say that this decision sealed the fate of the battle.

Move 5Five minutes: 10:22 to 10:26

At around 10:20, from different directions, the Enterprise's two dive-bomber squadrons arrive, along with the Yorktown's, which had taken off an hour later and flown straight in. No one planned the coincidence. The Japanese fighters were low, after the torpedo bombers, and the clouds hid the bombers until it was too late.

The Enterprise's two squadrons both dived on the Kaga, because of a target-assignment error that the sources attribute sometimes to McClusky, sometimes to Richard Best. The Kaga took at least four bombs; one killed the captain on the bridge. Best noticed the error, pulled out of the dive with his two wingmen and attacked the Akagi. A single bomb, generally attributed to him, went through the deck and exploded in the hangar, among fueled and armed aircraft. At the same time, Maxwell Leslie's squadron from the Yorktown landed three bombs on the Sōryū.

So little was enough because the hangars were full of fueled aircraft, with bombs and torpedoes out of the magazines because of the change of armament, and because the Japanese carriers had exposed fuel lines and fought fires only with water. At 10:46 Nagumo left the Akagi for the cruiser Nagara. In about five minutes, three carriers had become burning wrecks.

Move 6The Hiryū's counterblow and the end

The Hiryū, farther north, came through intact. At around 11:00 — 10:40 by Cox's account, close to 11:00 by the NHHC's — she launched 18 dive bombers and 6 fighters. Only seven bombers got past the American fighters, and they landed three bombs on the Yorktown. Repaired, the carrier got under way again at about 19 knots. At 13:30 the second wave went out, 10 torpedo bombers and 6 fighters, under Joichi Tomonaga, whose aircraft did not have the fuel to return. The pilots thought they were attacking another, undamaged carrier, and hit the Yorktown with two torpedoes; she was abandoned.

At around 17:00, bombers from the Enterprise, with Yorktown aircraft that had landed on her, hit the Hiryū with four bombs. At night, Spruance withdrew eastward, so as not to be drawn into a night action with Yamamoto's battleships. The four Japanese carriers were scuttled by torpedoes from their own escorts: Kaga and Sōryū on the night of 4 June, Akagi and Hiryū on the morning of the 5th. Yamaguchi went down with the Hiryū.

On 6 June, dive bombers sank the heavy cruiser Mikuma, damaged in a collision. The same day the submarine I-168 torpedoed the Yorktown, which was under tow, and sank the destroyer Hammann alongside her. The Yorktown sank on the morning of 7 June.

Not all the American dead fell in combat. Three airmen shot down on the 4th were picked up from the sea by Japanese destroyers and interrogated. Wesley Osmus, a Yorktown torpedo-bomber pilot, was killed aboard the Arashi: according to witnesses heard by the U.S. Navy's postwar investigation, he was struck with a fire axe on the stern and thrown into the sea. Frank O'Flaherty and Bruno Gaido, of the Enterprise, were held aboard the Makigumo and, days later, thrown into the sea with weights tied to their feet. The three are among the American dead of the battle.

VerdictWhy it ended the way it did

MythsWhat is told and what the record shows

• What is told

  The Japanese were five minutes from launching their counterstrike, with the deck full of armed and fueled aircraft, when the bombs fell.

  What the record shows

  The version is Mitsuo Fuchida's, who was aboard the Akagi, in a 1951 book and a 1955 article. The 1971 Japanese official history says there were no strike aircraft on the flight deck at the moment of the attack. Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully show from the ships' logs that the Akagi landed three fighters at 10:10, with the deck clear, and that preparing a strike took about 40 minutes; the Hiryū, intact, only launched hers at around 11:00. The NHHC speaks of more than 45 minutes. What is true: the hangars were full of fueled and armed aircraft — and that is what fed the fires.

• What is told

  Midway was a miracle: an American victory against overwhelming odds.

  What the record shows

  Japan had many more ships at sea, but at the point of decision it was 4 carriers and 248 aircraft against 3 carriers, 233 aircraft and the island with 127 more. The NHHC speaks of rough parity in dive bombers and says it was not a miracle — it attributes the victory to intelligence, the commanders' decisions, the courage of the crews and more than a little luck.

• What is told

  The Americans had broken the code and knew the entire Japanese plan.

  What the record shows

  They read 10% to 15% of the messages, according to the NHHC, often in fragments. They knew the target, the date and a good part of Nagumo's forces, but did not detect Yamamoto's battleship group before the battle. The trick of the water shortage at Midway did not serve to convince Nimitz, who was already convinced, but Washington.

• What is told

  The attack on the Aleutians was a decoy to draw the American fleet away from Pearl Harbor.

  What the record shows

  The sources differ. Parshall and Tully treat it as a parallel operation, decided by internal politics, and point out that a decoy would have started earlier, to give the fleet time to react; it began one day before Midway. The NHHC still speaks of a feint. From the code, Nimitz knew the Aleutians were not the main effort.

QuestionsFrequently asked questions

SourcesSources

1. Samuel J. Cox, H-Gram 006: Battle of Midway 75th Anniversary, Naval History and Heritage Command, 2017. — history.navy.mil
2. Frederick D. Parker, A Priceless Advantage: U.S. Navy Communications Intelligence and the Battles of Coral Sea, Midway, and the Aleutians, National Security Agency, Center for Cryptologic History, 1993. — history.navy.mil
3. Naval History and Heritage Command, Battle of Midway, 4–7 June 1942. — history.navy.mil
4. Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully, Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway, 2005 (as quoted).
5. Jonathan Parshall, "Reflecting on Fuchida, or 'A Tale of Three Whoppers'", Naval War College Review 63:2, 2010. — digital-commons.usnwc.edu
6. Jonathan Parshall, reply to Martin Bennett on Fuchida's account, combinedfleet.com. — combinedfleet.com
7. Craig L. Symonds, The Battle of Midway, Oxford University Press, 2011 (via reviews).
8. The National WWII Museum, "The Battle of Midway". — nationalww2museum.org
9. Battle of Midway — English Wikipedia. — en.wikipedia.org
10. Mitsuo Fuchida — English Wikipedia. — en.wikipedia.org

Images

• Fig. 01 — The carrier Hiryū maneuvers to escape bombs from U.S. Army B-17s on the morning of 4 June 1942, photographed from one of the bombers. None of the B-17s' bombs hit a Japanese ship that day.: Unidentified photographer, U.S. Army Air Forces · U.S. Navy, USAF 3725 · Public domain
• Fig. 02 — Midway Atoll on 24 November 1941: Eastern Island, with the airstrip, in front, and Sand Island, with the seaplane base, in the background. In June 1942 there were 127 American aircraft on the island.: Unidentified photographer · U.S. Navy, NARA 80-G-451086 · Public domain
• Fig. 03 — Douglas TBD Devastator torpedo bombers of squadron VT-6 ready to take off from the Enterprise at around 07:30 on 4 June 1942. The squadron lost 9 of its 14 aircraft in the attack, without landing a single torpedo.: Unidentified photographer · U.S. Navy, NARA 80-G-41686 · Public domain
• Fig. 04 — The Yorktown's flight deck just after the three bombs of the Hiryū's first attack, on 4 June 1942. The smoke comes from the damaged funnel uptakes; on the right, a sailor covers a bomb hole. Repaired, the ship got under way again before the second attack.: William G. Roy, U.S. Navy photographer · NARA 80-G-312018 · Public domain
• Fig. 05 — The Hiryū adrift and burning at sunrise on 5 June 1942, photographed by an aircraft from the Japanese carrier Hōshō. The front of the flight deck was destroyed by the bombs of the previous late afternoon. The ship sank a few hours later.: Oniwa Kiyoshi, Imperial Japanese Navy · U.S. Navy, NH 73065 · Public domain