American History Hit - Battle of Midway

Episode Date: September 29, 2022

The Battle of Midway took place between the US and Japan in June 1942. The US victory, after 4 days of fighting in the air and sea around the Pacific island of Midway, is widely seen as a turning point in the Pacific War in World War 2. Craig L. Symonds tells Don about the key decisions made by both sides and the important role played by American code breakers in discovering what was meant to be Japan’s surprise attack.Produced by Benjie Guy. Mixed by Anisha Deva. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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It's the 18th of October 2019, and using sonar, an autonomous underwater vehicle has discovered the wreck. Two days later, it will discover another Japanese aircraft carrier, the Akaji. They are two of the four carriers sunk by the United States in the Battle of Midway in June 1942. The U.S. victory, after four days of fierce fighting in the air and sea, is widely seen as a turning point in the Pacific War in World War II. But things could have turned out very differently. Had American codebreakers not discovered the date and time of what was meant to be Japan's

initial surprise attack. Hi there, I'm Don Wildman, and this is American History Hit. Welcome to the podcast. 80 years ago this summer, official anniversary is June 3rd through 6th. A single naval battle between two great navies took place in the Pacific. It would prove to be a pivotal, defining moment of World War II. I'm talking, of course, about the Battle of Midway between the United States and Japan. And today we have the author of one of the seminal works about this conflict.

It's called The Battle of Midway, and its esteemed author is with us today. Welcome Craig Simons to American History Hit. Very glad you could join us. Thank you, Don. Happy to be here. World War II was a global conflict full of massive campaigns and gigantic turning points, but none looms larger than the Battle of Midway. Why was that? What was at stake at this particular time in war? Well, I think what makes the Battle of Midway so transformational is that until that moment, until really the 4th of June, 1942, the Japanese, quite frankly, were winning the war in the Pacific.

They had everything their way. They were obviously taking over the Philippines. They were gobbling up British, possessions as well. It looked like their naval steamroller, to use a mixed metaphor, was going to achieve all that they had hoped to achieve when they went to war in December of 1941. And Midway stopped that. It didn't mean the Americans would win the war, but it meant the Americans had gained the initiative in that war. Up until June 4th, 1942, the Japanese decided where the next battle would be fought, with what forces it would be fought. After Midway, it was the Americans who were making those decisions. There would still be three long years of war to follow, but the initiative shifted so dramatically

at a very specific moment at the Battle of Midway. Also, this is a staging ground for a new kind of warfare, really. I mean, this is a moment when the aircraft carrier has emerged as the most important element of the navies. It used to be the battleship back in the Dreadnought era, back in World War I and before, but air power has made the carrier the super weapon at sea. Well, not only at sea, but on land as well, in the Pacific at least. Is that right? Yeah, and I think that became evident about a month before Midway. There was a battle prior to Midway, the Battle of the Coral Sea, which hinted

at this transformation. Battle of the Coral Sea in May, the first week of May, 1942, one month ahead of Midway, is the first naval battle in world history in which the opposing fleets never sighted one another. There were no guns fired one ship to another ship. All of the attacks, all of the defense took place from carrier launch to airplanes. So that probably is the moment that looking back, we can now say, aha, this is where it's evident that the battleship has been superseded by the carrier. Now, naval experts knew this. They knew it was coming. This was not a complete shock to anyone, but the Battle of the Coral Sea demonstrated that was true. And, of course, at the Battle of Midway, that was completely transformational. That's always been interesting

me, the chicken egg aspect of the emergence of aviation in naval warfare, but you're saying it was completely calculated that way. They saw the potential for this new kind of warfare to be used. I think that became evident really in the 1930s, particularly between the Japanese and the Americans who understood that the carrier was no longer an auxiliary to the battleship, but the battleship was auxiliary to the carrier. The carrier could not operate alone. It didn't have enough anti-air protection, anti-submarine protection. It had to travel with a curtain of destroyers and cruisers to provide protection for it.

And the original assumption when the carriers emerged in the 1920s was that their function was to send out long-range scout planes so that the battleship fleets could find each other. By the mid to late 1930s, it was evident that that had flipped that the battleships and the cruisers and certainly the destroyers were now auxiliaries to the carrier because they had the longer reach and the bigger punch.

That's fascinating. Okay, so it's the winter of 1942. The Japanese have ambushed us at Pearl Harbor, a major blow, but not it turns out a mortal one. Nevertheless, the Japanese are free to roam the Pacific. Pearl Harbor was only one of several actions the Japanese took at the end of 41 and 42. Can we go through a little bit more of the lead-up to Midway? Yeah, absolutely.

And I think for Americans in particular, Pearl Harbor seemed to be such a dramatic and traumatic moment that it overshadows much of the other things that were happening in the Pacific. But in fact, the Japanese objective in launching this attack was only partially to take the American battleship fleet off the chess board. Their real goal was to conquer the assets, the resources of French, Indochina, British, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. The Japanese, admired in this interminable war in China, needed resources. They needed the tin, the rubber, and especially the oil of the South Pacific. And to get those things is why they went to war in December of 1941. But to get to them and to get those resources back to Japan, they had to pass

the American occupied Philippines. So recognizing that the Americans might still be able to interfere with their acquisition of the resources they needed, they decided they needed to take the American battleship fleet off the board for six months or so while they consolidated those resources. So for Americans, the attack on Pearl Harbor seemed like the target, but the real target were the resources of South Asia, and the attack on Pearl Harbor was to clear the way so the Japanese could occupy and obtain those resources. Did they expect to find the aircraft carriers at Pearl Harbor? They did. In fact, for Admiral Yamamoto Isiroko, who was the commander of the Japanese

combined fleet, their top naval commander. The American carriers were really primary target. Taking out the battleship fleet was nice. That's a good thing. But the carriers were the real target, and he knew that. He had commanded a Japanese carrier task force and understood, as we were just discussing, that carriers had supplanted battleships as the primary weapon of naval warfare. So he wanted this strike force to take out the carriers. But, as it happened, there were no carriers at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Now, it's possible, if you're a conspiracy theorist, to think that, oh, well, the Americans knew they were coming and got the carriers out of the way. That is absolutely not true. What's going on here is that a couple of weeks before the Japanese

attack, the Americans who were reading just enough of the Japanese diplomatic code to figure out something was up, had sent a war warning to all Pacific commanders. And the war warning received in Hawaii was that the Japanese could strike any time now. Look out for your outposts. So Admiral Kimmel, who was the U.S. Navy commander at Pearl Harbor, sent the two carriers he had there, one to Midway and one to Wake Island with reinforcement airplanes for their defensive airfields there. So that's why neither of those carriers were in Pearl Harbor on December 7th. A huge advantage, it turns out, an incredible mishap on the part of the Japanese. Let's talk about the cast of characters of the story.

On the Japanese side, you have Admiral Yamamoto Isaruko, Japanese Marshal-in-Chief, the commander-in-chief of the combined fleet. He was the architect of Pearl Harbor and quite a character, right, known to be a gambler. Well, he's a very interesting man, obviously very intelligent and not physically pre-possessed, he was relatively short, but his brilliance just absolutely shone through. And people actually feared him for his brilliance. And he was an individual who liked games of skill, but also games of chance. He would play American poker all night long. He would play the Japanese game of Goh, well into the dark hours of the night. So there's some suspicion that he enjoyed the idea of taking a chance, taking a risk,

But he wasn't just a gambler. I think it would be unfair to assume, well, here's a guy who'd just like to take chances. He was a very clever and calculating individual. And the reason he had insisted on the attack on Pearl Harbor was that he had lived in the United States for a number of years. He understood the deep industrial capability of the United States and argued that a war against the United States was unwinnable. The only chance we have, he argued. is to take out their fleet on day one, to buy the time needed, to secure that resource base in the South Pacific, and then set up a defensive perimeter and hope the Americans run out of patience before they kill all of us. So in a way, that's why he argued for the attack on Pearl Harbor and why also he argued for the attack on Midway. I loved in your book, you noted Chester Nimitz's favorite game was cribbage,

which I thought was a perfect comparison between Yamamoto and Nimitz. Well, Chester Nimitz, too, it's an interesting guy. I think it's worth exploring his willingness to be bold as well. And that's particularly true in talking about the Battle of Midway. Cribbage is the long game. It's the careful planning down the road. And that's, in a way, a fair estimate of who Chester Nimitz was. But at moments of decisive turning points,

he could be as bold as any commander in the war on either side, including Yamamoto. Part of the success of the six months before Midway is the notion of the Quito Boutai, the strike force of their fleet. Can you explain that strategy they had? Yeah, I can. It's kind of interesting. You know, the carrier, as we were talking earlier, as the center of this circular formation, being protected by cruisers and destroyers, is such an important asset that the Americans tended to put one carrier, half a dozen destroyers, and an oiler to keep everybody full of fuel, and call that

a task force. But what the Japanese did with the Kido Butai was take all six of their large deck aircraft carriers and put them in a single formation. That's the formation that attacked Pearl Harbor. It's the formation that, in a slightly modified way, went after Midway as well, six months later. And it follows the philosophical leanings of the American naval theorist, Alfred Thiermahan, who argued that a true naval power would group its principal assets into a major fleet that could command the sea. And that's what this collection of large deck Japanese aircraft carriers was. And the name they gave to it was the Kido Butai. So wherever the Kido Butai, this group of carriers went, they dominated tactically and operationally.

They dominated that area. So it was the grouping of carriers into a single formation that made that unique. There's a significant difference between American naval tactics and Japanese naval tactics at this point. Fair to say? Well, there is, and it's not just tactics. I argued in the book, as I suspect you saw, that there's a lot of culture behind this as well. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Part of that culture is the Japanese owe fealty to their emperor and their duty as a warrior

was to strike the foe, to take the initiative, to dominate the foe and kill him. Therefore, they put less emphasis on defense. Their airplanes tended to have much less armor. You don't armor the cockpit. You make the enemy armor his cockpit. Their planes were lighter. They therefore had a greater range. they had a greater offensive impact, but they had much less defensive capability.

They didn't have self-sealing fuel tanks, for example. They didn't have armor around the cockpit. So that when they lost an airplane, they also usually lost the pilot. Now, the Americans spent a lot of time not only armoring their airplanes and protecting the pilots, but then making sure if the pilot had to ditch or bail out that they would rescue him later. So the tactics that emerge from these two quite different cultural perspectives also affected the way battles were fought. The Japanese were offensive. The Americans could be offensive, obviously, and at Midway they were, but also paid a lot of attention to the defense.

Part of the idea of Midway, as I understand it, and you explain, was kind of a mop-up job, right? Yamamoto and his vice-admiral Nagumo needed to come back and get those characters. They were aware that they had missed them at Pearl Harbor. Big part of the subject? Yeah, in fact, that's really the principal goal of this entire operation. There's a tendency to think, ah, well, Midway, tiny isolated atoll in the middle of the Pacific is strategically located, but it is not so important as to be existential to the idea that two major combat fleets of the two greatest naval powers in the world would focus on this tiny, tiny island occupied moment. mostly by the Gooney Birds, just seems odd. But the reason it's important is because it was important

enough to require the Americans to defend it. And the Japanese assumed that they would attack Midway. The Americans would get a report from Midway. Oh, we're under attack. We need help. The Americans would then send out those two carriers that had been missed at Pearl Harbor, and the Japanese would pounce on them and sink them, and that would buy them, another six months to dominate the Western Pacific, to do whatever they needed to do to secure their resource base. So that's the way this developed. Midway is not really the target here. Midway is the bait. It's also a race against time for the Japanese. They know that there are, I think it was 11. You said 11 carriers in production back on the mainland for the United States, right?

Well, what happened in 1940 when France fell? The Americans realized, oh my God, this war is going to come here somehow. If the Germans win, we will have to protect ourselves. Otherwise, we have to come to the aid of our putative allies, particularly the British, and we'll need a bigger fleet to do that. Only days after the fall of France, they pass a gigantic naval expansion bill, a two-ocean Navy Act, and it actually authorized 18 new large-deck aircraft carriers. Well, that's six times as many as they had. I mean, that's an enormous. And those would be coming off the building ways in the middle of 1943.

The Japanese knew that. They knew that if they don't get this thing done now in 1942, by the middle of 1943, the Americans will have overwhelming superiority and Lord knows what we can do. This has always confused me about both sides, about Germany and Japan. Both of them knew they would not be able to cope with the industrial powerhouse that was the United States.

States once it was fully online. And yet they went to war, you know, full out. It was really a matter to get us to the table. Well, I think that's true for the Japanese. We don't need to talk about what's going on in Hitler's mind. That's another conversation. But for the Japanese, certainly, in making the decision to go to war with the United States, I think they kind of counted on a superior morale, a superior ability to stick to the object, a superior ability to take losses and carry on. Their view of the Americans with it, they were rich, and yes, they had this huge industrial capacity, but they used it to build luxury cars and eat hamburgers. And I mean, they were just not the kind of warrior people that Japanese believed were capable of fighting a war

for three, four, five, six years. At some point, those Americans would say, oh, this is too hard, we quit. Yeah. Let's talk about the battle. So about this time in June, they're coming off the Battle of Coral Sea, which has not gone too well for either side, really. It was a sort of a draw, right? Back in May? Yes. You could say it's a draw, but in a way, it's a win of a different kind for each side. The Japanese won tactically. They sank one of America's, America only has four aircraft carriers now, and one of them has just gone down, the Lexington, the biggest one, has been sunk in the Battle of the Coral Sea. And the Japanese believe they have sunk the other one, the Yorktown, which survives, but it was rather badly damaged. The Japanese also sank a major

fleet oiler, which hurts American logistics and a destroyer. The Americans sank one small Japanese aircraft carrier. So if you balance up the two sides in terms of who sunk what, the Japanese have the better of it. But in terms of who achieves the source. strategic objective for which the battle is fought, the Americans win that because the Japanese invasion fleet for Port Moresby, which is the target of all this fighting, the Japanese invasion fleet turned around and went back. So the usual explanation is the Japanese won a tactical victory, but the Americans won a strategic victory at the Coral Sea. So there's something for each side to feel good about and something for each side to feel disappointed.

And it sets the stage for the Battle of Midway. I have to tell you, I have always been confused by the various aspects of this battle. Your book has made it very clear to me. It was a very clearly drawn account that I finally understand. This really depended on the element of surprise on both sides. The Japanese were coming in. They had the idea, or Yamamoto had the idea of splitting his force. Is that right?

Well, the Japanese did particularly like complex, very clever, sometimes too clever, operational plans. And in the Battle of Midway, they had about six or seven different operational groups. There was an invasion fleet and a strike fleet and a covering fleet and all this other business. They probably didn't need to do that. They did have superiority in terms of available assets. So they were a bit too clever there. That's true. But what really is going on is, and I'm sure you're going to get to this, but I'll bring it up anyway.

The Japanese expected that the Americans would not know they were coming until they struck at the island of Midway. That would provoke the Americans to send out their carriers and the Japanese could ambush the Americans. But, in fact, as we know now, the Americans did know they were coming. And because of that, the Americans were able to preposition their carriers in a place where the Japanese could not imagine. that they would be. And so instead of the Japanese ambushing the Americans, the Americans were able to ambush the Japanese. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. This is an intelligence coup, the Battle of Midway.

The Americans are listening to the Japanese and they figure out that, well, you tell the story. It's a complex one and it's amazing. Yeah, it is amazing. But I think everybody needs to be careful in thinking about this. There's a kind of simplistic view in some quarters that, well, the Americans were reading the Japanese mail. They were reading their messages, and therefore we knew all about it, so the American victory at Midway was foreordained because we knew everything they were doing. It is far more complex than that. The Americans were intercepting Japanese radio messages, but of course those messages were all encoded in a very

complex and difficult code, so complex that the Japanese assumed no one could possibly break them. Well, in a way, their assumption was correct. The Americans never did completely break the Japanese code, but by working at it, by comparing, by spending long nights, by dedicated crypt analysts, including famously Lieutenant Commander Joe Rochefort, they were able to get just bits and pieces and hints and ideas about what might be going on and then interpolate, based on their understanding of Japanese culture and Japanese views, what that might mean, suggesting to Admiral Nimitz what they believed was likely to be coming down the pike, and then Admiral Nimitz had to make his decision. So it is an intelligence coup. It is,

intelligence and code breaking is absolutely a critical part of this whole story, and it cannot be overlooked. But it also can be over-emphasized by assuming that we were reading all of it. We were reading just scraps of it and making decisions, bold decisions, based on those scraps. It could have gone all wrong, but of course it didn't. Joseph Rochford, I think this is a fascinating man, and he actually served years in Japan as an attache on the diplomatic corps, right? He did. In fact, there's two characters that need to be named here in this story. One is Chewerechrist. Mr. Nimitz's intelligence officer. Now, this is an officer who's on his personal staff, so there's 60 or so people. It's a big group. They do logistics and planning and all this stuff.

And among them is an intelligence officer, and his intelligence officer is Edwin, Eddie Layton. Eddie Layton works for Admiral Nimitz. And Nimitz told him, I want you to come in here to my office every morning at 8 o'clock and brief me on what we think we know about what's going on. So that's one element of it. The other is Joe Rochefort. Joe Rochefort, who runs the code-breaking cryptanalysis unit in the basement of the 14th Naval District headquarters in Hawaii, actually reports to his boss in Washington, D.C., the head of codes and code breaking. But Layton and Rochefort were friends. Both of them had gone to Japan in the late 1920s, spent three years there to learn the Japanese language and significantly, in my opinion, to learn what they could about Japanese culture.

Because as Rochefort himself once said, even if you know the words that they use, understanding the meaning of those words requires an appreciation of Japanese culture because there is some circumlocution, there's nuance in what they say and what they mean. So the role that these two guys played, Rochefort in breaking the codes or breaking enough of them to provide information, sharing that with Leighton, who then took it to Chester Nimitz, that was the way the information got to the decision maker prior to the Battle of Midway. There's a famous trick they pull, which enables them to understand exactly where the Japanese

are going. Tell me about that. It's not that we didn't know where they were going. Rochefort knew. Midway is going to be their target. I have figured this out. Layton absolutely believed him. The problem was that Rochefort's bosses in Washington were skeptical. They didn't have Rochefort's nuanced understanding of Japanese culture. So when they read the evidence, it looked, gee, they could be coming to Alaska. They could be attacking Samoa. They could be attacking the Panama Canal. We just don't know. Well, Rochefort said, well, I know, but I've got to prove it to you. So this is the gambit he used. There was a guy on his staff, Jasper Holmes, who had been an engineer. And it was

Holmes ID said, listen, why don't we do this? Why don't we send a message via the underground cable so it doesn't go out as a radio message to Midway and tell them to send us a message by radio that says their saltwater condenser has broken down and they're running out of fresh water? Then we'll see how the Japanese react to that. Well, sure enough, this message goes out and the codebreakers to Hypo are listening in on the traffic and here comes a Japanese message saying Midway, Am I, the code for Midway, is running short of fresh water.

Well, there it is. There's a smoking gun. It wasn't to find out what the target was. It was to convince the skeptics in Washington that they knew what the target was. And, of course, they were right. Okay, let's go to battle. June 4, 1942, 4.30 a.m.

Nagumo, who is the Vice Admiral, is in charge of the... Explain the commanders involved here. Okay. Well, I mentioned earlier that the Japanese had this predilection toward complicated battle plans, and one of them is that the strike force, the Kido Butai, the four large deck carriers, surrounded by a screen of battleships, cruisers, and destroyers, that's the one that's going to attack midway.

And the idea is that it will draw out the American carriers and then that's the real target, the American carriers. The commander of that strike force is this Admiral Chiuqi Nagu. Nogumo is the guy who had commanded the strike force at Pearl Harbor, so he's an experienced carrier group commander. Behind him by several hundred miles is Yamamoto with the battleship force. The idea is if the Americans have anything left after Nogumo's carriers have shattered the American fleet, Yamamoto will then sweep in with the battleships and clean things up

and just wipe out the American Pacific Fleet entirely. There's also an invasion force, which is separate. There's another force going up to the Aleutians and so on. So they've got these forces spread out all over the map. But the key to all of it is the key to Boutai. It's those four big carriers surrounded by a screen, and that's the real target. And Chester Nimitz knows this, and he has told his commanders, you know, don't worry about those other guys.

They won't be able to do anything if we take care of their strike force. The carriers are the target. So Yamamoto is an overall command, but the carrier force is commanded by Nagumo, and that's the one that matters. And because of the intelligence, the Americans were able to get their carriers to the area before the Japanese thought they would arrive. Yeah, that's true, and that's absolutely crucial. Having this advance notice of when they're coming, what Nimitz does, he takes the two fully operational carriers that he has. these are the two carriers that had conducted the Doolittle raid, the bombing of Tokyo in April. He sends them to a position well north of Midway. Now, Midway is north of Hawaii, and the

Japanese are coming in from the northwest. So by sending these two carriers north of Midway, they're completely away from anywhere the Japanese expect them to be. They expect the American carriers to be coming up from the south, but they're positioned to the north. And the third American carrier. The Yorktown limping into port, severe damage below the water line. Nimitz orders 24 hours around the clock, get this thing fixed up, get it out to sea, and it manages to join the other two just in time for the Americans to have three carriers north of Midway while the Japanese are sweeping in from the west with four and looking to the south. Their first, the Japanese first move is to bomb the island of Midway. They want to take that base out of action, right?

It has two goals. Take the base out of action. There's an airfield on Midway. So in a way, if you think about who has the most airplane platforms in this, the Japanese have four carriers, the Americans have three, but also the island of Midway. So yes, they want to take out the airfield at Midway so that it can't be a threat to the Japanese carriers. But in addition to that, The idea of bombing Midway is that this is going to alert the Americans that we're here. This is what's going to draw out the American carriers for us to ambush. Well, of course, that bird has already flown. This whole battle happens in just a matter of hours.

Ultimately, the Japanese are caught out because they're stuck with their planes on the aircraft carrier. This has always confused me. Can you take me through how the minute-by-minute situation occurs? The Japanese decide that they're going to attack Midway, and they send half of their airplanes to go do that. But they keep half of them on the carriers, because remember, their real target is the American aircraft carriers. So they're holding back half of their strike force in case those carriers show up. Well, the half that attack Midway do so. They inflict some pretty serious damage.

But on the way back, the commander of that group says, you know what, we really really. didn't destroy the airfield completely. It's going to take a second strike. So Nagumo thinks, well, okay, a second strike on Midway. How do I do this? I've got half of my airplanes still here. I'll send those out to do the second strike on Midway and then recover the ones coming back from the first strike and rearm those and then they'll be ready in case the American carriers show up. But in the midst of this, he gets a report from a scout plane, hey, there's a carrier north of you. Holy mackerel, a carrier. That's the real target.

I have to hit those guys. What will I do? I could send off the planes I have, but here come the planes back from Midway. And what he decides to do is strike his planes below decks, recover the ones coming back from Midway, because you can't recover airplanes with other airplanes on the deck. You need the deck to recover those planes, and then I'll rearm all my planes and will send them off to attack this carrier, which is my primary objective. So he has half his planes below deck. He's got half trying to land and are changing ordinance from explosive bombs, which would be used for Midway, to armor piercing bombs, which is what you'd use to attack ships. So you've got ordinance piled over here against the wall and some on the floor, and they're being refueled with gasoline lines snaking across the deck.

And at that moment, the American bombers show up. Is that just luck? Or did they time it accordingly? How did the Americans handle this? That really is a great question. You know, there have been other quite good books about the Battle of Midway. Some of them were published before we knew as much as we know now about code breaking. But they're thoughtful analyses of the battle anyway.

And if you look at the title of them, it's interesting. One of them is called Miracle at Midway. The notion being that, wow, boy, weren't the Americans lucky here? They arrived at just a precise moment to be able to do maximum damage to the enemy. But I push back a little bit against that. There is luck involved in every battle ever fought by anyone anywhere. and you can find examples of luck. Oh, the battle all turned on, you know, for the lack of a nail, a horse shoe was lost, and for the lack of a shoe, a horse was lost, and so on. So yes, there's luck

involved, without a doubt. I'm not trying to say that isn't the case. But I also argue that this sequence of events is the product of thoughtful men making decisions, some of them, risky decisions, bold decisions, thoughtful decisions. One of the most important, of course, is the American commander of the air group from the USS Enterprise who arrives at the area where intelligence has told him this is where the Japanese are and he looks down and there's nothing there. Well, that's bad luck. The Japanese, as it turns out, have turned north. As soon as Nagumo found out, there was a carrier out there. So there are no Japanese carriers for him to attack. So he flies around in a search pattern looking for something, anything. Meanwhile, his fuel gauge

is running lower and lower, and now there's a chance he might not even get back. But he spots a destroyer. Just one lone destroyer, but it's speeding north as fast as it can go, creating a bright, white wake in its stern, and he figures out, hey, I'll bet that destroyer got left behind. It's speeding to catch up with the Japanese fleet. I'm going to go in that direction and see what I find. And that's how the American bombers arrived over the Japanese carriers exactly when they did. Now, is that luck? Maybe. But it's also Wade McCluskey, who made that decision and found him. It's been called Divine Interested. There are four Japanese aircraft carriers. Are they hit all at once?

What's the timing of these different attacks? Well, three of them are hit almost at the same time. When McCluskey's group arrives over the Japanese carriers, and they're all four operating together in a diamond pattern, and he's going to attack the two that are closest to him. So he divides up his squadron, and there's some misunderstanding between him and his subordinates about which one to attack, and it turns out that most of the

that most of his airplanes, all but three, all attack the same carrier. Now, if that one carrier had become the target of all the American airplanes, three Japanese carriers would have been left for a counterattack. But as it turns out, three American airplanes, just three, led by Lieutenant Richard Best, pull out of that dive and decide to attack a different Japanese carrier. And his 1,000-pound bomb lands square in the center of the Japanese flagship, the Akagi, and turns out to be enough to be fatal. Meanwhile, all those other airplanes attack another Japanese carrier, the Kagga. So those two ships are hit nearly simultaneously and hit hard. They'll both eventually sink, not right away, one later that afternoon and one that night, but

they'll both go down. So that's half of the Japanese force. Now the third carrier that has hit at almost the same time is the Soryu. It's a little bit further north of the other two, and it's hit by airplanes from the American carrier Yorktown. This is the one that had been damaged in the Coral Sea, was patched up quickly, and then sent out at the last minute. Its planes found and sunk the Sourou. So arguably, from about 1025 in the morning till 10.30, in those five minutes, three Japanese carriers are rendered in operational. All three will eventually sink, but there's still a fourth out there. And that fourth Japanese carrier counterattacks the Americans. And they hit at the Yorktown, which does not go well

for the Yorktown. Yeah, that's true. The Yorktown's the one that's already been hit hard, and it's patched up with not quite bailing wire and scotch tape, but it's not at 100%. And now it turns out to be the one the Japanese find first, and they attack it twice, well, three times if you count attacks by Japanese submarines. So the Yorktown absorbs the full fury of the entire Japanese fleet. Meanwhile, the other two carriers, the Hornet and the Enterprise, are completely unbothered by the Japanese, so they are able to concentrate on the original attack in the morning and the follow-up attack in the afternoon to find and sink that fourth Japanese carrier,

the Hiriu, which they do that afternoon. Meanwhile, the poor Yorktown is absorbing all this punishment from the Japanese. In a matter of hours, I mean really a short matter of hours, the Japanese lose four aircraft carriers. Help me with these pronunciations, the Akaji, Hiro you, Suryu, Kaga, two destroyers, the Mikyuma, which is the destroyer, I guess, numerous aircraft, and 3,000 men. The Americans, one carrier, one destroyer, something like 300 men, 137 aircraft.

It's a clear victory. It's just got to be one of the most amazingly ironic circumstances in military history ever. Well, there's irony, I think, involved in the idea that the Japanese wanted to ambush the Americans, those foolish Americans who won't know we're coming, and of course the Americans utterly turn the tables there. But the original point that you make that all four, not just two out of four or even three out of four, which would have been a tremendous victory, but all four the Japanese carriers are sunk. This means Midway ranks alongside the Battle of Trafalgar, for example, as a battle in which one enemy utterly overwhelms and virtually destroys its opponent.

There are very few such battles in naval history. You win a battle by driving your enemy away or by sinking half his fleet. You can say a fleet was decimated, which technically means 10%. What's the term for sinking 100% of your enemy? There is no such term. So Midway, I think, stands almost alone. among a handful of great naval battles in history that are strategically decisive in that it shifted the momentum in the war, the initiative in the war from one side to the other, and was tactically overwhelming

by utterly destroying the enemy strike fleet. I think the term you're looking for is catastrophe. It was a catastrophe for the Japanese. They were never the same after this. How come they just couldn't build more ships? Well, the Japanese were a society that had become a modern society only in the previous hundred years. The revolution that took place really in the 19th century that modernized Japan and turned it into a modern great power,

they simply lacked the resources, industrial and raw materials, to build the kind of fleet that the United States could. I mentioned earlier this 1940 Two Ocean Naval Act in which the United States authorized the construction of 18 carriers, a dozen battleships, a hundred and 50 destroyers, thousands of airplanes, and after the war started, that only accelerated. So the ability of the United States to construct, man, and send out to the fighting front, unimaginable numbers of major combat units is something that Japanese simply couldn't match. And in their minds, they thought, well, quality will outdo quantity. This business of, you know, one Japanese can defeat five Americans,

yada, yada, yada. I mean, that kind of attitude, I think, contributed to what we call eubris, victory disease, whatever term you want to give it, the assumption that our qualitative ability to do things they can't will overcome their numbers. Sometimes that's true, but quite frankly, usually it's not. The old line that I attributed to Napoleon, God is on the side of the bigger battalions. That's usually the case, and it was certainly the case here. For the rest of the war, would be on the defensive, and it enabled the island warfare that proceeded over the next four years. It's not like they had no battle left in them. That was certainly not the case. But the lack of those aircraft carriers was a fundamental fact of the war, and it would never be the same.

They would be fighting on the defensive for the rest of the time. Thank you very much, Craig. Your book, Battle of Midway, clarifies something that all Americans need to understand about this war and how pivotal these moments are, both in preparation and execution. It's an amazing. amazing fact of American military history all the way through. Thank you very much. You're welcome, Don. I had a really nice time chatting with you. I appreciate it. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.