Why Midway Should Have Been a Japanese Victory

In the last week of May, 1942, the most powerful naval striking force on Earth put to sea from Japan’s Inland Sea. Four fleet carriers, seven battleships, 15 cruisers, more than 40 destroyers, over 100 warships in all, steaming east toward a tiny American atoll called Midway.

 At the center of the formation, sailed Yamato, the largest battleship ever built, flying the flag of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. Against this armada, the United States could send three carriers, eight cruisers, and 15 destroyers. Not a single battleship. On paper, it was one of the most lopsided match-ups in the history of naval warfare. 10 days later, all four Japanese carriers were on the bottom of the Pacific.

 To understand how that happened, you have to understand what the Japanese believed on the morning of June 4, and how much of it was wrong. Six months earlier, before the war began, Yamamoto had told Japan’s premier, “In the first 6 to 12 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.” He had kept the first half of that promise. Since Pearl Harbor, his carrier force, the Kido Butai, had ranged from Hawaii to Ceylon without losing a ship. In April 1942, it sank the British carrier Hermes and two heavy cruisers in the Indian Ocean.

 Its aviators were the best-trained naval airmen in the world. Many of them veterans of every strike since December. The Zero fighter outclassed anything the Americans could put in the air against it. The Japanese Type 91 aerial torpedo worked. The American Mark 13 was slow, unreliable, and had to be dropped low and close to have any chance at all.

 And 1 month before Midway, at the Battle of the Coral Sea, Japanese aviators reported sinking two American carriers. One of those reports was true. The carrier Lexington went down. The other, Yorktown, had taken a bomb deep into her hull and limped back toward Pearl Harbor. Japanese intelligence wrote her off for months.

 So, as the fleet sailed for Midway, Tokyo credited the US Pacific Fleet with at most two operational carriers, and expected to find them where they belonged, tied up at Pearl Harbor, 1,200 mi from the target. That was the plan. Seize Midway, draw the surprised American fleet out from Hawaii, and destroy it when it came. Every part of it depended on surprise.

The surprise had already been lost before the fleet left Japan. In a windowless basement at Pearl Harbor, a code-breaking unit called Station Hypo had partially cracked the Japanese fleet code JN-25. Its commander, Joseph Rochefort, worked marathon shifts in a red smoking jacket and carpet slippers.

 And by May, his team was reading fragments of Japanese traffic describing a major operation against an objective they called AF. Rochefort was convinced AF meant Midway. Washington was not. So, one of his officers, Captain Wilfrid Holmes, devised a test. Midway transmitted an uncoded message reporting that its water distillation plant had broken down.

 Within 2 days, Hypo decrypted a Japanese signal reporting that AF was short of water. Admiral Chester Nimitz now knew the target. He knew the approximate date, June 4. He knew the direction of approach, from the northwest and he knew the composition of the force coming at him. He also had a carrier the Japanese thought was gone.

 When Yorktown reached Pearl Harbor on May 27th, the estimate for repairing her Coral Sea damage was 90 days. Nimitz put on hip waders, walked the floor of Drydock number one, inspected the hull himself, and told the yard he needed the ship back in 3 days. Around 1400 shipyard workers swarmed her around the clock, welding arcs burning through the night.

 72 hours later, Yorktown sailed with a patched hull and a borrowed air group. Japan’s plan assumed two American carriers at most. Three would be waiting. The Japanese had two mechanisms designed to catch exactly this. A flying boat reconnaissance of Pearl Harbor, staged through a refueling stop at French Frigate Shoals, was aborted on May 30th because American ships were sitting at the shoals.

 And the submarine picket lines meant to detect American carriers leaving Pearl Harbor arrived on station late after the American task forces had already passed through. Both tripwires produced silence. And in Yamamoto’s fleet, silence was read as confirmation.  The enemy was still in port. The plan was working.

 By June 2nd, Admirals Frank Fletcher and Raymond Spruance were holding station at a spot on the chart called Point Luck, 325 miles northeast of Midway, sitting on the flank of the Japanese approach. Nimitz’s written orders told them to be governed by the principle of calculated risk, to strike only when they could inflict more damage than they received.

 There was one more problem the Japanese carried with them and this one was self-inflicted. Yamamoto had overwhelming force and he scattered it across thousands of miles of ocean. Two carriers went north with an invasion force to the Aleutians. The Midway invasion convoy approached from the southwest. Yamamoto’s own battleships, including Yamato, trailed 300 miles behind the carriers under radio silence, where their guns could contribute nothing.

And two fleet carriers were not there at all. Shokaku had been bombed at Coral Sea. Zuikaku’s air group had been gutted. The Americans pooled surviving aviators to keep Yorktown fighting. The Japanese made no such effort for Zuikaku, and left a third of their carrier strength at home.

 So, at the actual point of contact, Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo’s four carriers faced three American carriers plus an island airfield that could not be sunk. The tenfold superiority existed on the map. It did not exist where the fight would happen. At 4:30 in the morning on June 4, under scattered clouds and calm seas, Nagumo launched 108 aircraft against Midway.

 At the same time, seven search planes fanned out to scout the surrounding ocean. Seven aircraft flying single lines through empty sea to cover the entire threat sector. One of them, the number four float plane from the cruiser Tone, launched half an hour late at 5:30, an American PBY flying boat found the Japanese carriers.

 Midway launched everything it had, and the American carriers began turning into the wind. The Midway strike hit the atoll at 6:20. Its leader radioed back that a second attack was needed. Then, starting around 7:00, land-based aircraft from Midway began attacking the Japanese fleet in waves. Army B-26s, Navy torpedo bombers, Marine dive bombers, B-17s bombing from high altitude, every single attack failed.

Not one bomb or torpedo hit. But for 2 hours, they kept Nagumo’s ships maneuvering violently and his fighters cycling up and down off the decks. At 7:15, still believing no American ships were within 1,000 miles, Nagumo ordered his reserve aircraft rearmed. Torpedoes off, land bombs on for a second strike against Midway.

 His crews began hauling ordnance in the enclosed hangar decks. At 7:28, Tone’s late scout plane reported 10 enemy ships to the northeast. No mention of carriers. Nagumo suspended the rearming and waited for clarification. It came at 8:20. The enemy appeared to be accompanied by a carrier.

 Every assumption underneath the operation had now failed. The enemy knew he was coming. The enemy was at sea, not in port. The enemy had three carriers, not two, and one of them was a ship the Japanese navy had already reported sunk. Nagumo had planned to fight one battle. He was standing in a different one. He faced a choice.

 Launch immediately with whatever was ready, a partial strike without proper fighter escort, or recover his returning Midway strike, rearm properly, and launch a massed coordinated attack the way Japanese doctrine demanded. He chose to recover and rearm. By his navy’s own rules, it was the correct decision. It also meant his hangar decks were now crammed with aircraft being fueled and rearmed, with bombs and torpedoes stacked in the open instead of struck down to the magazines.

The American strikes were already inbound, and they arrived in pieces. First came the torpedo squadrons unescorted. Torpedo Squadron 8 from Hornet attacked alone and was annihilated. 15 planes, 30 men, one survivor, Ensign George Gay, who watched the rest of the battle from the water clinging to debris. The squadrons from Enterprise and Yorktown fared little better.

 In all, 41 torpedo bombers attacked that morning. 35 were shot down. They scored zero hits. But for a full hour their attacks dragged the Japanese fighter  cover down to wave top height and kept every deck locked in defensive cycling. And overhead, the sky was about to fill. Lieutenant Commander Wade McClusky, leading Enterprise’s dive bombers, had reached the predicted intercept point and found empty ocean.

 His fuel was running out. Instead of turning back, he pressed the search and spotted a lone Japanese destroyer Arashi racing northeast at high speed to rejoin the fleet after depth charging an American submarine. McClusky followed her wake like an arrow. Nimitz later wrote that the decision decided the fate of the American carriers and the battle.

 At 10:20, McClusky’s bombers pushed over on Kaga and Akagi at almost the same moment Yorktown’s dive bombers, arriving by pure coincidence from another direction, pushed over on Soryu. The Japanese fighters were down low finishing off torpedo planes. The dive bombers came out of the scattered clouds nearly unopposed. Kaga took four bombs.

 Soryu took three. Akagi, Nagumo’s flagship, took one. A single bomb, delivered by Lieutenant Richard Best’s three-plane section, punched into the hangar deck where fueled aircraft, open fuel lines, and stacked ordnance were waiting.  On all three ships, the hangars turned into chain reaction infernos that no damage  control could touch.

 In roughly 6 minutes, three of the four carriers that had attacked Pearl Harbor were burning from bow to stern. For decades, the story was told that the Japanese strike was on deck, minutes from launching, when the bombs hit. Five fateful minutes between defeat and victory. Japanese records show it was not true.

The flight decks were nearly empty. The strike aircraft were below, mid rearm, at least half an hour from launching. Japan was not 5 minutes from winning that morning. The ordnance stacked in those hangers is what killed the ships. And it was there because of how the Japanese Navy fought, not because of when the Americans arrived.

 One carrier remained. Hiryu, alone, showed what the Kidō Butai could do. Her aviators found Yorktown and hit her with three bombs. Yorktown’s crew patched the deck and got her moving again. So well that Hiryu’s second strike mistook her for an undamaged carrier  and put two torpedoes into her.

 Her pilots reported sinking two American carriers that afternoon. It was the same ship twice. One Japanese carrier had knocked an American carrier out of the war twice in a single afternoon. A glimpse of what four coordinated decks might have done to three American carriers caught unaware. At 5:00, Enterprise dive bombers, including orphans from  Yorktown, found Hiryu and hit her with four bombs.

Rear Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi and her captain  chose to stay aboard. She went down the next morning. Yamamoto, 300 miles behind with the most powerful battleships on Earth, tried briefly to force  a night surface action, then turned for home. The abandoned Yorktown was torpedoed under salvage by a Japanese submarine and sank at dawn on June 7th.

 Japan lost four fleet carriers, a heavy cruiser, 248 aircraft, and just over 3,000 men.  Among the dead were more than 700 of the fleet’s irreplaceable mechanics and flight deck specialists, the trained hands no shipyard could rebuild. The United States lost Yorktown, one destroyer, and 307 men. Japan should have won at Midway by every calculation made in Tokyo, but the calculations were built on an intelligence picture that was fiction before the fleet sailed, a plan that scattered its own superiority across half an ocean, and a way of

fighting that turned a single bomb hit into the loss of a ship. The Americans still needed skill and luck. McClusky’s turn, Best’s one bomb, three squadrons converging by accident at the same 10 minutes. The margin was thin. The outcome was not. In Japan, the defeat was buried. Wounded sailors were quarantined in hospitals.

 Survivors were shipped to distant garrisons. The public was told Midway was a victory, and even parts of the army were kept in the dark for months. Nagumo was never court-martialed. He died at Saipan two years later. Yamamoto died in April 1943 when American code breakers, reading his travel itinerary in the same broken code, put fighter planes over his transport at Bougainville.

 And Joseph Rochefort, the man in the smoking jacket whose basement unit made the whole thing possible, was denied the Distinguished Service Medal after rivals in Washington claimed the credit. He received it in 1986,  10 years after his death.