Dan Snow's History Hit - The Battle of Midway

Episode Date: September 25, 2023

On the 4th of June 1942, the US Navy took on the might of Japan's Imperial Navy in the battle of Midway. It was America's Trafalgar! At the end of the fighting devastating losses had been inflicted on the Japanese and the entire strategic position in the Pacific was upended in favour of the Allies. Never again would Japan be able to project power across the ocean as it had done at Pearl Harbour. In this explainer episode, Dan takes you through this key turning point in the Pacific War. He examines the key intelligence that allowed the American Navy to turn the tables on the Japanese fleet, a blow-by-blow account of the battle itself, the terrible human cost of the fighting and the aftermath of this decisive American victory.Edited by Dougal PatmoreDiscover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.PLEASE VOTE NOW! for Dan Snow's History Hit in the British Podcast Awards Listener's Choice category here. Every vote counts, thank you!We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit, folks. This is the story of a battle that took place on the 4th of June, 1942. It is the story of America's Trafalgar. But actually, it's more than Trafalgar. Trafalgar confirmed British naval domination of the world's oceans, confirmed that the British Navy was superior to the French and Spanish fleets. What this battle does is it upends the existing strategic balance. In the space of 10 minutes, in those 10 minutes,

the entire military situation in the Pacific was transformed. This is more a Salamis, a Tsushima, the great Japanese victory, ironically, over the Russians. This, I think, is the most extraordinary, the most decisive naval battle in modern history. This is a podcast about the Battle of Midway. I'm going to be talking you through, I'm going to be giving you a blow-by-blow account of this extraordinary battle. It's the single most remarkable story you will ever have heard in history. So stay tuned, folks. Here's me on Midway. war with one another again. And liftoff, and the shuttle has cleared the tower.

So the story of Midway starts on the evening of the 7th of December 1941. You'll have heard the podcast that I released on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. We talked some veterans of Pearl Harbor. I gave a description of a day that will live in infamy. And by the evening of that day, the 7th of December 1941, the Pearl Harbor Naval Base in Hawaii, in Oahu, was a vision of hell. The superstructure of mighty battleships poked out from the oil-strewn sea. Their hulls, penetrated by bombs and torpedoes, lay below on the seabed. Other mighty castles of steel had driven themselves towards the shore, beached themselves to avoid them sinking as well. Black smoke belched from twisted dashes in the hulls of ships. Corpses were floating on the waters of the harbour. The Japanese empire had done the unthinkable. The Japanese had attacked

the United States of America, one of the world's largest countries, the largest and most dynamic economy on earth. They had taken a terrible gamble. And in attacking Pearl Harbor, it was not designed as a precursor to some kind of invasion. They were not looking to land on the west coast of the United States and march all the way to Washington. They were doing something more specific. They needed to destroy the American Pacific fleet. With that fleet out of the way, there was nothing that could stand in their path as they carved out a new empire in Southeast Asia. I talked about the Japanese in the outbreak of World War II podcast last September, but you'll remember that they were engaged in a gigantic war in China in order to control raw materials.

While the war in China was costing them so many raw materials, they had to launch a second giant offensive lunge into Southeast Asia to capture the rubber plantations of the Malayan Peninsula and islands of Southeast Asia, particularly the oil in the Dutch East Indies, what is now Indonesia. So as well as fighting the Chinese, they had to go to war with the European powers and the USA to get the raw materials they needed to fight in China, which was a war designed to secure raw materials. There's a lesson here, folks. There's a lesson. In a disturbing parallel to what dictatorships have always thought of liberal democracies, the Japanese were sure that countries like the USA did not have the stomach

for a fight, for prolonged conflict. Autocracies look at us democracies and think we're lazy and we like spending our money on gadgets and looking after our own material well-being and comfort. We lack the martial spirit of these autocracies with their goose-stepping parades and aggressive indoctrination campaigns. So the Japanese, wrongly, thought a short, sharp, bold, offensive action. Destroy the American Pacific fleet, then seize all the territories they want, dig in, and wait for the Americans to come to a kind of negotiated peace. They're not fighting all-out war for islands a long way away from the USA, of which they know little. It sounds depressingly familiar. So the Japanese did just that. After Pearl Harbor, they went wild. They attacked the British and the Indian Ocean. They pushed towards

Australia. You'll have heard a podcast on the fall of Singapore earlier this year, the 80th anniversary of that. They pushed down the Malayan Peninsula. They sank two mighty British battleships, destroying the British naval presence in the Pacific. They pushed the Dutch Malayan Peninsula. They sank two mighty British battleships, destroying the British naval presence in the Pacific. They pushed the Dutch out of Indonesia. They did, in short, seize this giant empire on the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific. But the Japanese underestimated the Americans. They'd also done something else.

They'd failed to destroy the aircraft carriers during the Pearl Harbor strike. The United States Pacific Fleet had three big aircraft carriers, floating runways on which planes can land and take off and then strike at targets way over the horizon. They, for various reasons, were not in Pearl Harbor at the time of the Japanese attack. And now Yamamoto, who was the Japanese naval supremo, was laser focused on them. They were the key chess pieces in this board stretching across the Pacific. Not the tens of thousands of British, Australian, American allied troops that were scattered in garrisons on islands and peninsulas across the Pacific, but those carriers. islands and peninsulas across the Pacific. But those carriers, with the aircraft on board them,

they could bring massive, focused violence to targets across a vast area. And they could move, so they could strike when and where they wanted. As Admiral Nimitz, who we'll meet in a second, the US command in the Pacific, said, naval forces are able, without resorting to diplomatic channels, to establish offshore anywhere in the world, airfields completely equipped with machine shops, ammunition dumps, tank farms, warehouses, together with quarters and all types of accommodations for personnel. If the Japanese could obliterate those carriers, there'd be no real opposition to them that they feared in the Pacific. Japanese ships could move anywhere untroubled, and allied garrisons would be starved out, isolated, battered, destroyed. Like all the Toxies, there was a fantastic

dysfunction within the Japanese Empire. Army and Navy all do various things. They all hate each other and deeply competitive. So there were various different ideas of what to do next. But Yamamoto came up with a plan to deal with the carriers, and that idea won out when those carriers did really just what he'd been fearing. On the 18th of February 1942, the Americans had the temerity, the chutzpah, the desperate audacity to strike straight at the capital of the Japanese empire itself at Tokyo. There are no air bases near enough to strike at Tokyo. So the planners of this raid came up with the idea of sticking long-range army bombers with lightened loads, everything that wasn't necessary, ripped out, stick them on aircraft carriers and launch them off these

very short runways to go and strike the Japanese homeland itself. It was the Doolittle Raid, and it was a stunning psychological success for the Americans. I've done a podcast on that too, so you can go back and search Doolittle Raid if you like. The Japanese got terribly upset by this, the invulnerability of the home islands. The Americans even threatened the life of the emperor himself. This was unacceptable. So Yamamoto won around the necessary stakeholders, I guess, for his plan to isolate and destroy the American carriers, to make sure the Americans wouldn't be able to conduct another raid like this. And in doing so, they would push out their defensive perimeter. They'd seize more of these islands to make sure that American forces were

kept further and further from the Japanese homeland. Yamamoto had a plan to do both these things at once. Some were pushing to attack Pearl Harbor again, to finish the job, go back to Hawaii. But the Americans had flooded the islands with land-based aircraft. The airfields around Pearl Harbor and Naval Base were now full of more modern aircraft from all over the USA and elsewhere. Any raid would have much less surprise in the first raid and there'd be much stiffer opposition. So instead, Yamamoto's glance fell on a little scrap of land, an atoll midway across the Pacific, at the very western end of this remarkable island chain of which the Hawaiian islands are a part. It was called Midway Island, a thousand miles west of Hawaii. If the Japanese could seize Midway,

it would allow them to launch further strikes at Pearl Harbor, if they wished, to shore up their own boundary, to create a sort of fortified point, making it hard for the Americans to strike deeper into the Pacific. But most importantly, it was considered to create a sort of fortified point, making it hard for the Americans to strike deeper into the Pacific. But most importantly, it was considered to be a prize so precious to the Americans that it would lure the remnant of the US fleet, these all-important aircraft carriers, out of Pearl Harbor and allow them to be destroyed by superior Japanese forces. In particular, a deadly ambush of submarines that would sit and wait for the American to leave harbour, and any survivors could be finished off by the mighty Japanese

naval air force. What Pearl Harbour had begun, the Midway campaign would finish. As ever with these clever plans, there was a problem. The Japanese hadn't just missed the carriers when they'd struck Pearl Harbor. They'd missed other assets too, for example, the fuel dump, which if they'd destroyed would have hampered US Pacific fleet operations for months, if not years.

And they'd also missed some rather nondescript looking buildings on the quayside. These dockside huts in which the intelligence branch were working. And those intelligence operatives had enjoyed a striking recent success. They'd broken the Japanese naval code. The Americans had been reading decoded messages and realised that the Japanese were launching an operation. The objective was said to be AF, Alpha Foxtrot. The Americans didn't unfortunately know where AF

was. so what they did was they got the American garrison on Midway to send out an uncoded radio message, just a radio message that anyone could hear, saying that the water purification system had broken down and they were running short on water. Then they sat back and listened as Japanese communications went bonkers. Everyone was being told that AF Alpha Foxtrot was running short of water. The Americans worked out that the target of this Japanese attack was Midway Island. So this time, unlike Pearl Harbor, the Americans knew exactly what to expect and also when to expect it. The Pacific Fleet cryptographic intelligence team worked out the attack would fall on the 4th or

5th of June. This presented the Americans with opportunity. Could they ambush the ambushers? In a state of naive bliss, the Japanese continued planning for this operation. They came up with the most unspeakably complicated plan, which I will not bore you with. But suffice it to say, for reasons of surprise and speed, the Japanese fleet was split up into a galaxy of little fleets. The main carrier force would surge towards Midway. Slower surface ships, cruisers and big battleships, which had vital anti-aircraft guns on board, and scout planes could be launched and then land on the sea and be winched back onto deck. Those were left way behind. They also sent a fleet up north to invade the tip of Alaska,

which is pretty bonkers in retrospect. The carrier strike force was the main event. The Kido Butai, or mobile force in English. It was the most potent naval strike force ever assembled on the world's oceans. Six aircraft carriers had been in the Kido Butai when it attacked Pearl Harbour. It was the largest carrier force ever assembled in history. But its strength had now been eroded. Because a month before, in the first week of May 1942, the Americans and the Japanese had clashed off Papua New Guinea at the Battle of Coral Sea.

Now, this was only about 500 miles off the Queensland coast of Australia, so it shows just how wide an expanse of ocean these nations are fighting across now. This was the first battle in the history of naval warfare, I think, in which the ships of both sides did not see a single enemy ship during the battle. The whole thing was conducted by carrier airstrike. And the Japanese Shikaku was very, very badly damaged. Three American bombs hit the Shikaku and it went straight to dry dock back in Japan for months of repair. Now, there was another carrier they had, the Zukaku, that escaped the battle without damage, except many of its planes and their crews had been shot down. So rather than keep the ship in operation, surge in some new crews, she sat in port waiting for new ones to be trained up and join the ship's company.

As this battle of Papua New Guinea implies, the Japanese were pretty knackered. Their ships were knackered, their crews knackered. They'd been constantly, constantly fighting and moving since the strike on Pearl Harbor on the 7th of December 1941. They'd just raided the Australian coast, they'd dropped bombs on Darwin. They'd actually attacked Sri Lanka. The British Indian Ocean Fleet had to run away from Kido Butai. And Colombo, in what is now Sri Lanka, was struck by Japanese naval aircraft. Now they travel thousands of miles for an assault in the Central Pacific. But they were missing their two aircraft carriers, as I said, and they had probably 250 aircraft on board. As I said in the Pearl Harbor episode, don't forget, these aircraft are different kinds. Some of them are torpedo bombers, designed to fly at wave top

height and drop a torpedo into the water, then continues straight along into the side of an enemy ship. Some of them are dive bombers, which sit at altitude and then dive down using a sharp angle of descent to aim their bomb when they release it. And some of them are fighters, light aircraft, which don't carry bombs at all. They carry one pilot and they zoom about like a Spitfire, Hurricane, Messerschmitt, trying to shoot down bombers to protect their own bombing force and to protect the ships below from enemy bombers. It was this last group, this group of fighters protect the ships below from enemy bombers. It was this last group, this group of fighters that Japanese were deficient in. They didn't

have enough fighters. They had too high a ratio of bombers to fighters. That could reflect the fact they didn't really respect American naval air power at this time. They were more interested in projecting force and they weren't protecting their own ships and own aircrafts. They weren't too worried about the number of fighters at that point. The ships also lacked radar, so they didn't have a great early warning system. And they had poor radio communications between the aircraft carriers and the fighters that were guarding them above, the so-called combat air patrol, who would sit like a buzzing swarm of bees above the aircraft carriers, ready to pounce on the enemy bombers that came close. So the Kido Butai was still a potent naval weapon, but it had weaknesses.

The commander of Kido Butai was Admiral Tuichi Nagumo. He was a lifelong professional naval officer, and he'd studied, in fact, naval warfare in the United States as a young officer. The year before, he'd been the commandant of the Naval War College. He had a wonderful CV. The only thing he didn't have in his CV was anything to do with naval aviation. But despite this, because of his seniority, he was made commander-in-chief of this carrier battle group. He was in his 50s. He was suffering from arthritis. He was seen as a cautious, steady officer who liked to take his time before making up his mind and time was the one

thing he would have little of when midway began. Landing up against the Japanese was the new commander-in-chief of the US Pacific Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz. He was a Texan of German extraction his grandpa had been a German merchant mariner and fought for the Confederacy during the US Civil War his grandfather had given him lots of homespun wisdom about the sea, but she always carried them for the rest of his life. As a young commander, very embarrassingly, he grounded his destroyer on a mudflat in the Philippines and reprimanded, but let off, luckily, for the United States of America. He was immediately sent to Palhalla after the attack and made commander-in-chief of the Pacific

Fleet. And he is one of the outstanding naval commanders in world history, certainly one of the outstanding commanders of the Second World War. He had three carriers at his disposal, kind of three carriers. Admiral Fletcher's USS Yorktown had been damaged in that battle, the Coral Sea that I mentioned, and it was estimated she'd require several months of repairs on the west coast of the United States. But her elevators were intact, her flight deck was largely intact, so they could get planes up from the hangars below onto the flight deck and therefore get them to take off. So the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard worked around the clock, and in 72 hours she was said to be battle ready. It's amazing what you can do in wartime. Nimitz also had USS Enterprise and USS Hornet. Their admiral, Halsey, was on the verge

of collapse, so he was sent to hospital to recuperate, and Raymond Spruance was given command. Nimitz thought that thanks to the intelligence picture, he would now have the element of surprise. He had three aircraft carriers against Nogumo's fort, but he also had Midway Island. Don't forget the atoll itself. There's an airfield on there. And he could push lots of planes onto that airfield. So it could act as a, if you like, a kind of fourth aircraft carrier. So that gave him rough parity with Nagumo's four carriers. So he decided to take on the Japanese fleet. He would accept their offer of battle, but he would fight it on his own terms. The Japanese, bear in mind, all this time are very unaware of their opponent's true strength. Even after the battle begins, they don't really know how many enemy ships are present,

who exactly they're fighting. They were sure the Yorktown, for example, the aircraft carrier, had been sunk at the Battle of Coral Sea. They were not expecting to see it again. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. There's more to come. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga.

And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. now we come to the day itself the 4th of june 1942 the most decisive day in the history of naval warfare admiral de numo was in position with kido butai at 0430 he launched his strike

against midway. There were 100 planes, a mixture of dive bombers, torpedo bombers, and fighters in equal numbers. He also launched seven Reki aircraft, Rekinoita aircraft. It was far too few. They couldn't hope to comprehensively cover all of the ocean around Kido Butai. But remember, Nagumo thought he was ambushing the Americans. He did not expect American capital ships to be anywhere near Midway Island. The plan was capture the island and then pounce on the Americans when they tried to come and relieve it.

At 0530, scout planes from Midway, The Americans were taking no shortcuts when it came to reconnoitering. Scout planes spotted the Japanese carriers. And immediately, the garrison of Midway launched their land-based planes to strike at the carriers. At 06.30, there was a clash above Midway Island. American interceptors tried to get at the Japanese before they could strike the shore facilities. Very, very brave American marine pilots flying outdated planes were brushed aside. Of 24 fighters that went up to meet the Japanese raid, only two made it back undamaged. The Japanese battered the island. They burned hangars. They tried to hold the runway.

But Midway was not put out of action. Midway was still a usable airfield. And the Japanese suffered 11 of their 100 planes destroyed, 14 badly damaged and 25 slightly damaged. It was pretty high cost. Now Nagumo had one of his many decisions that he had to make that day. He had one of them now. Should he order another strike against Midway? He'd been told not to by his commander Yamamoto, the naval supremo for the Japanese Empire in the Pacific. He'd been told to save the rest of his planes just in case the Americans showed up so he'd have the ability to strike at them. But he decided the Americans were

nowhere near. His scout planes hadn't reported any Americans present. He would strike Midway a second time, batter it, make it unusable by the Americans. So all the reserve aircrafts in his hangar decks, they were armed with anti-ship missiles, things like torpedoes and anti-ship bombs. Instead, he gave orders that those bombs were to be taken off and replaced with 800 kilogram bombs that would be used against land targets on Midway. His crews went to work feverishly. Meanwhile, the garrison of Midway had launched their own planes against the carriers as soon as they'd been spotted. And so just after eight o'clock, they arrived over the Japanese carriers. The second battle of the day was about to take place. It was brave, but it was

hopeless by the Americans. Men like Lofton R. Henderson commanded a mixed unit of nearly obsolete Vindicator bombers, airmen with some experience called the Vindicators Vibrators or Wind Indicators, and also Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bombers as well. The crews renamed the SBDs Slow But Deadly. The thing about dive bombers is they dive from a very high altitude. They use their aircraft trajectory to aim their bomb, which makes them fairly easy to intercept if you're a fighter, because they can't swerve around. They can't duck and dive. So this mixed force were annihilated by the Japanese. Lofton R. Henderson, when he was last seen, his wing was

on fire, but he held his nerve, plunging towards the Japanese carriers. He never came home, nor did he score a hit. One American bomber, possibly by design, plunged straight at the bridge of the Akagi, one of the Japanese carriers, and came very close to smashing into the bridge of the Akagi, which would have decapitated this Japanese strike force. And perhaps that was further encouragement to Nagumo to order his planes in reserve to launch another strike on Midway. The Midway aircraft hadn't done any damage to his fleet, but they'd come pretty close and they'd been pretty scary. Now, around the same time, this is important, around the same time, a lone US submarine, USS Nautilus, surfaced and found itself very near the Japanese. It fired a torpedo at a battleship, it missed and it dived. And one

Japanese ship, the Arashi, circled back and tried to hunt the Nautilus, dropping depth charges. Just past eight o'clock now, the Japanese have struck Midway, but Midway is still operational. The planes based on Midway have struck at the Japanese fleet and scored zero hits. And Nagumo is therefore confident that he'd rearm his reserve aircraft to go and have another go at Midway Island. But now everything changes. Minutes after those attacks by those Midway best aeroplanes, Nagumo finally received a message from one of his scout planes. The scout simply reported back that a fleet had been spotted. Now that fleet could only be the Americans.

There were no Italians or Germans knocking about in the Central Pacific. The Americans were at sea, and they were much closer than the Japanese had expected them. But frustratingly, no further details were given. 30 minutes later, another message from that scout plane came through that must have made Nagumo's blood run cold. Quote, the enemy is accompanied by what appears to be a carrier. The US carriers were at sea. Nagumo had to make a terrible decision. His decks were chaos. There were planes being moved around. There were planes being armed. There were planes coming back from Midway. There were fighters refuelling and taking off again to provide the protection for his ships.

If he launched now, immediately, with everything he had available, it would be bits and bobs leaving as and when they were able to. It would also mean any returning aircraft from the Midway Raid would run out of fuel and have to ditch in the sea. Or if he waited a bit longer, he could recover that first wave, get them back on deck, get them rearmed with the right weapons, anti-ship weapons to attack the Americans, and launch a massive, overwhelming, well-organised assault. Now, fascinating, the geography of this is really interesting to me.

On the American ships, there are admirals bridges, and there aren't British and American ships today, where admirals can go and be separated from the humdrum business of running the ship, people steering and reports from the engine room, stuff like that. That means the admirals can gather with their staff, their clever young people around them, and they can show indecision, they can debate. They can think about it. They can hear different points of view. But Nagumo was on the bridge of the Japanese ships, which didn't have that kind of

separation. All the ship's officers that I look at, junior navigators and flight coordinators, engineers, they're all doing their jobs. They're all thinking, there's the admiral. What's he going to do about this? And particularly in Japanese naval culture, but frankly, anywhere, if you're a leader, you want to be seen to be in control of the situation, make good decisions, not have to sit around scratching your head with all your advisors. Nagumo was unable to take advice from his staff. Everyone was looking at him. And the decision he made was that he would wait. He made the cautious decision. He would wait, he would recover his first wave, he would rearm them, and he would

send them against the Americans. That was the decision he took. But in many ways, his fate had already been decided, because the Americans had launched their aircraft. Vengeance was aloft. Three American aircraft carriers had launched their aircraft, beginning at about 7am. It should have been a big coordinated attack, the whole air element of these aircraft carriers, all their aircraft, beginning at about 7am. It should have been a big coordinated attack. The whole air element of these aircraft guys, all the planes, torpedo bombers flying at 1,500 feet, dive bombers up at around 20,000 feet, fighters hovering around just above them, protecting them. But instead, it was taking so long that the admirals, like Spruance, just said, get out of here, go for it, do not wait. So in the end, three separate, quite straggling groups,

all left, all going, for quite complicated reasons, in slightly different directions. So this would lessen the effectiveness of the attack, but the Americans thought it was worth it, just to get in the fight. One young American, George Henry Gay Jr., had known there was a war coming up, and throughout 1941, he'd tried to leave his studies at Texas A&M University to join up. He failed a medical for the Army Air Corps, but the Navy took him and he found himself aboard USS Hornet. His was the very first plane to take off that moment. It was a devastator. First flew in 1935. Remember, this is a period of rapidly changing technology, so it's pretty much obsolete. And the torpedo dangled

beneath it was deficient. Almost certainly wouldn't go off if it hit the side of a Japanese ship. In the rush to get to Japanese, he and his fellow torpedo bombers got separated from their fighter protection, but they bravely launched the first attack. It was 9.20 a.m. The torpedo bombers lumbered into the attack. His was shot up. He was wounded. His radio man was badly wounded. He dropped a torpedo in turn for home. He was pounced on by Japanese fighters, these Japanese zeros. His plane was shot down. He bailed out and he floated for the next 30 hours. And he had an astonishing view of what was to come next, one of the most remarkable views in the history of naval warfare, just floating, surrounded by Japanese aircraft carriers. And he had front row seats on the catastrophe that was about to befall. He was

the only survivor, the 15 devastators with which he'd flown and 30 crew. Other devastator attacks, the other aircraft carriers, torpedo bombers, had equally hopeless results. 10 of the 12 from Yorktown were destroyed too. And the Devastator would never fly again in combat. Their torpedoes either missed, they failed to detonate, and zeros tore through their lumbering formations. It was an ill-coordinated disaster, a slaughter. Fushida, who you might remember from my episode on Pearl Harbor, he was one of the key airmen on the attack on Pearl Harbor. He was aboard one of the aircraft carriers and he describes these devastator attacks. The distant wings flashed in the sun. Occasionally one of the specks burst into a spark

of flame and trailed black smoke as it fell into the water. Our fighters were on the job and the enemy again seemed to be without fighter protection. So, a hopeless showing from the Americans. Again, the attacks from Midway Island hadn't worked. Now, these first carrier-borne torpedo bomber attacks hadn't worked either. But despite their failure to score any hits, the American torpedo attacks had performed three fascinating tasks. One is they kept the Japanese carriers off balance. They kept them swerving around, not able to go steady and straight and launch and recover aircraft, and also meant that the crews were busy on anti-aircraft guns and stuff. They weren't able to concentrate on launching their own strikes. So they were a

distraction. Secondly, they had brought down all of the, what we call the combat air patrol, all the Japanese fighters, these nimble, light, machine gun carrying aircraft, had been dragged down from flying around above the carriers to pouncing and destroying this raid of torpedo bombers. They were drawn away from the aircraft carriers. And now it meant that those Zeros had run out of ammunition and were running low on fuel. And the scene was set for the most dramatic five minutes in the history of naval warfare. The Japanese carriers swerving around, distracted by this torpedo bomber attack. The Japanese fighters running out of fuel, thinking of heading back to the carriers,

dealing with these torpedo bombers attack. And no one looked high, high into the blue sky above the carriers. Because there, high in the sky sky was Nemesis. Clarence Wade McCluskey Jr. had had a tough childhood in Buffalo, New York. He hated the name Clarence. He called himself C. Wade McCluskey. His family had struggled. He had to drop out of studies, leave school to work.

His dad was killed in a car crash. For him, the military, like so many other young men, was a ladder. He made it to the U.S. Naval Academy, and there he became an aviator. And he was the USS Enterprise's air group commander on that day. Like the torpedo bombers, he experienced confusion when they took off. There was no coordination. Like other planes and other carriers, he was just told, get on with it. Don't wait for your fighter protection.

Get out there and find the carriers. They headed off on the wrong course, it turned out. He'd been given the wrong coordinates. So when he arrived, he found open blue sea, a broad expanse of sparkling sea below him. He didn't have much fuel to play with now, so he made a snap decision. And it turned out to be the right one. He turned to the west, started searching. After a bit, he altered course and then he spotted something. A white ribbon of disturbed water in the sea below. It was the wake of a ship. He followed it and soon found a Japanese destroyer. Remember I mentioned the Arashi, which you'll remember would stay behind

to deal with the US submarine, the USS Nautilus. It had dropped a few depth charges. It was now steaming north at full speed. McCluskey saw it and made a guess. Hot in his flying helmet, dazed by the glare of the sun, reaching into his fuel over the massive Pacific, he guessed that that ship was steaming to rejoin the main fleet. He changed his course and headed on the same compass bearing. He guessed correctly. Minutes later, he found Kido Butai. He wrote later, peering through my binoculars, which were practically glued to my eyes,

I saw dead ahead, about 35 miles distance, the welcome sight of the Jap carrier striking force. Chester Nimitz, the US commander in the Pacific, said of McCluskey that day that he made the right calls, which, quote, decided the fate of our carrier task force and our forces at Midway. McCluskey, high, high above the carrier, so high no one noticed them, gave the order to attack. gave the order to attack. Both squadrons of 31 aircraft pounced on the closest carrier, which was Kaga, McCluskey wrote. One remarkable fact stood out as we approached. Not a Jap fighter plane was there to molest us. We attributed this to the Japs' fear of the torpedo plane. That's why the fighters were all low dealing with the torpedo attack.

Lieutenant Richard Best commanded the other squadron of dive bombers, and he realised that they were both heading all towards the Akaga. He pulled out, two of his wingmen followed him, and he went off to attack the Akagi. Meanwhile, Roklosky reports later, I started the attack, rolling in a half roll and coming to a steep 70 degree dive. About halfway down, anti-aircraft fire began booming around us, our approach being a complete surprise up to that point. As we hit the bomb dropping point, another stroke of luck met our eyes. Both enemy carriers had their decks full of planes, which had just returned from the attack on Midway. The decks of the Japanese carriers were chaotic. There were desperate knackered crews re-arming the planes with the correct bombs to attack American ships.

They'd been given several contradictory orders that morning. There were fuel hoses all over the place. Discarded bombs sat in piles next to the aircraft. Lieutenant Clarence Dickinson, part of McCluskey's group, recalled, We were coming down in all directions, on the port side of the carrier. I recognised her as the cagger. She was enormous. The target was utterly satisfying.

The pilots of the dive bomb were just before they pushed over, just before they went to the dive. They'd increased their revs, their RPM to high. And then as the target, the aircraft carrier, disappeared. But just as it disappeared beneath the aircraft's nose and went beneath the feet of the pilot, he pushed the stick well forward and began his steep dive. They came down

almost vertically at 250 knots. In peacetime, they'd been trained to release their bomb or pickle at around 2,000 feet above the target and then pull out. But in war, they would go lower to make absolutely sure that bomb hit the target. As they screamed down at 250 knots, they would put their throttle back to idle, just use the speed of the aircraft, just use gravity. And then they would lean forward so they could see the bomb site in the forward windshield and keep an eye on the altitude, of course, the altimeter, which was whirring down. They had to release the bomb at exactly the right time. They had to ignore the anti-aircraft fire coming from the ship. And they had to choose a specific place on the ship to hit. The Japanese made it

easy. They painted a large rising sun, the great red sun of the Japanese empire, right on the decks of the aircraft carriers and the pilots aimed for the middle of that sun. With the bomb sight on that target and the altimeter telling him exactly the right height, the pilot reached for the bomb release lever with his left hand and gave it a hard pull. Then he had to pull the stick back hard, raise in the dive flaps and bash the throttle in for full power. You needed to avoid getting blown up by your own bomb. Bomb fragments flew out to about 500 feet. It would take around 200 feet to come out of the bottom of your dive and back into level flying. So if you dropped at 700 feet, you risked getting bomb fragments in the bottom of your dive and back into level flying. So if you dropped at 700 feet,

you risked getting bomb fragments in the belly of your aircraft. Also, the lower you come out of your dive, the more G you're going to have to pull. In peacetime, you train for a 4G recovery, but veterans say that they would go low, they'd fly as low as they can, they'd pull out at maybe 900, 800 feet, and then they'd pull a 7 or 8G recovery. That means

your body weighs 7 or 8 times its weight at 0G. Every part of your body, your arms, your legs, weigh 7 or 8 times their normal weight. It is exhausting keeping your arms on the stick. It is almost impossible to keep the blood rushing out of your head and down into your legs. You have to tense your stomach muscles, tense your muscles to try and prevent that blood rushing away and you black out. But that's what these men did. They left it to the last moment, they pulled out at the last moment, and they went screaming at deck height over the ships, their bombs smashing into the decks behind them. Lieutenant Clarence E. Dickinson again said, I saw a bomb hit just behind where I was aiming. I saw the deck rippling and curling back in all directions, exposing a great section of the hangar below. I saw my 500 pound bomb hit

right abreast of the carrier's island. That's the aircraft carrier's superstructure, where the big sticky-up bits are the flight deck, which is where the carrier's command centre is. It's what the brain is. CAGA came under the onslaught of almost two full squadrons of aircraft. Its captain hurled the rudder over to port and starboard, desperately trying to twist, but to no avail. Perhaps three or four or five bombs smashed into the flight deck, causing terrible damage. Multiple fires started. One of the bombs landed right in front

of the bridge, killing Captain Okada and most of the ship's senior officers. The navigator aboard Hiryu, the other carrier, looked across and said simply it was like a horrible dream. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Richard Best, he remembered, peeled off at the last minute. He and his two mates had gone to strike a caggy. Fushida, who I mentioned, the Pearl Harbor veteran, was on the caggy. He said he was watching the torpedo bombers be destroyed when suddenly he said, a lookout screamed, hell divers. I looked up to see three black enemy planes plummeting towards our ship. Some of our machine guns managed to fire a few frantic bursts at them, but it was too late.

The plump silhouettes of the American Dauntless dive bombers quickly grew larger, and the number of black objects suddenly floated eerily from their wings. They were bombs, aimed at a Kagi. In fact, only one of them made a direct hit, probably the one dropped by Lieutenant Best. It proved to be a fatal blow. The bomb smashed into the edge of the midship deck elevator. That's the elevator that carries the planes up and down between the hangar deck and the flight deck, the runway. It penetrated the upper deck and it exploded, bang, straight in the middle of the armed and fuelled aircraft parked up around it. Nogumo's chief of staff, Kusaka, wrote, A terrible fire. Bodies all over the place. Planes stood tail up, belching livid flames and jet black smoke,

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Fushida agreed. Looking about, I was horrified that the structure had been wrought in a matter of seconds. There was a huge hole in the flight deck just behind the midship elevator. The elevator itself, twitted like molten glass, was grouping into the hangar. Deck plates reeled upwards in grotesque configurations. Planes stood tail up, belching livid flame and jet black smoke. Tears streamed down my cheeks as I watched the fires spread. I was terrified at the prospect of induced explosions, which would surely doom the ship. He was right. Now McCluskey had pulled out of his dive. He wrote, our bombs began to hit home. I leveled off at masthead height, picked the widest opening near screen and dropped to deck level, figuring any anti-aircraft fire aimed at me would be aimed at their own ships. I was through the screen of

destroyers before I noted bursting shells creeping behind. A stream of tracer bullets started chopping the water around me. A Jap Zero zoomed out of range ahead of me. Another one was a thousand feet above, to the left and stern. I was twenty feet above the water. I waited until the attacking plane was well into his dive, then rapped my plane a steep turn towards him. Suddenly, a burst from the Jap seemed to envelop the whole plane. The left side of my cockpit was shattered. I felt my left shoulder had been hit with a sledgehammer. Naturally enough, it seemed like the end. We were sure we were goners.

In fact, McCluskey's machine gunner had managed to shoot down one of the Zeros and the other had decided to leave him alone. They limped back to the aircraft carrier. He was shot through the shoulder. And when they landed, by some miracle, back on USS Enterprise, he discovered his plane had been hit 55 times. Kaga and a Kagi were smashed, floating wrecks, but McCluskey's attack wasn't alone. This is the incredible thing. Extraordinarily three dive bomber squadrons,

two from the Enterprise and one from Yorktown, which had taken a completely different route, had arrived simultaneously at exactly the same time. As Kaga and Akagi were being pounced on, the Yorktown's pilots were pounding Soriyu. Three bombs slammed into her in the same way, fuel was ignited and inferno resulted on the hangar deck. The Japanese hadn't given much thought to damage control before the one. Like the Americans, the hangar deck was enclosed so it was like a pressure cooker. Bombs were exploding down the hangar deck now. The fire suppression system had been knocked out. There was a pathetic bucket change of terribly brave Japanese crew members

from the latrines of the Kaga to the fires trying to throw buckets on screaming fires. Puddles of fuel now caused a vast explosion. The witnesses said they couldn't believe anyone on the Kaga survived. It was like an explosion. It went from one end of the ship to another. Men crawled in all three carriers towards the flames to try and fight the fires with no breathing apparatus, just urine-soaked rags as ventilators. Shoes were melting on the decks. Some of the wounded were so tormented that they apparently hurled themselves into the flames. Admiral Nagumo went into shock. In the space of five minutes, the greatest, most potent strike force of carriers in the history of the world had been annihilated. He refused to leave initially. He was stunned. Eventually,

he was pretty much manhandled off. He had to climb down a rope, tears running down his cheeks. He got into a small launch. The commander of Kido Butai, now commanding from a little tugboat. Captain Yanagimoto of the Sori refused to leave as well. His men also sent someone, actually, they sent the ship's wrestling champion to go and get him off the ship. He climbed the bridge, sent someone, actually they sent the ship's wrestling champion to go and get him off the ship. He climbed the bridge, but one look from the captain froze him in his tracks and he simply saluted. He left the captain where he was and the last he saw of him, he was singing the national anthem. The captain would go down with his ship. 600 miles away, the hitherto brilliant Admiral Yamamoto, commander-in-Chief of the Japanese forces,

was with the battleships, lurking back, ready to pounce on the Americans when they eventually showed up. That was the plan anyway. At this point he received a message. He simply groaned and sat staring out to sea in silence. The Japanese had one carrier left, the Hiryu. The Japanese had one carrier left, the Hiryu. Everything now depended on its aircraft. Could they snatch some kind of, if not victory, some kind of strategic draw from the chaos of flame and destruction? 30 minutes after the other three carriers had been overwhelmed, Hiryu launched her strike. It was sadly reduced from the mighty strike planned by Nagumo. 18 aircraft with just six fighter escorts. This sorry little band headed towards the Americans. They did find Yorktown. They hit her three times, but superior American damage control meant the

ship limped on. Of that wave, 13 of the 18 bombers and three fighters were lost. Later, Hiryu launched a second wave. Ten bombers this time, and six fighters. This tiny force, all that Kido Butai had left. They found an American carrier. It was Yorktown again, but they couldn't believe that Yorktown would still be steaming, still operating, and they assumed this was a second carrier, so they attacked it again. Two torpedoes smashed home this time. Yorktown lost all power. She listed to port, water pouring in. Yorktown, the ship that had taken so much punishment at the Coral Sea, then brief bit of dry docking, brief bit of repairs, and then had been struck in two different waves, was now mortally wounded. Late in the afternoon, the American scout plane located

Hiryu, the Japanese carrier. Enterprise was able to launch a strike of 24 dive bombers. Hiryu was defended by a dozen Zero fighters, but the attack from Enterprise was successful. Four bombs hit Hiryu. One bomb hit her bow section, and there's an extraordinary picture of it, tore the deck up like the opening of a tin can, or one American pilot described it as a taco. Soon Hiryu-2 was an inferno. There was more skirmishing in the Battle of Midway. It would go on for a couple of days, but the decisive phase was over. Yorktown was listing, taking on water, but was towed towards Hawaii and might have made it actually if it wasn't for a submarine attack, which smashed a torpedo into her below the waterline on the 7th of June. She'd taken extraordinary punishment and eventually succumbed, eventually sank.

The Japanese had lost four mighty carriers. Whereas one of Nagumo's staff said to another as they were clambering off their stricken carrier, the outcome of this will surely determine the fate of Japan. And he wasn't wrong. It was a catastrophe, a catastrophe for Japan. The Japanese obviously announced a great victory. Only Emperor Hirohito and the very highest navy command personnel were accurately informed of the losses to their carriers and pilots. The Imperial Japanese Army, for example, was not told for at least a short time. They believed their fleet was in good condition. Historians have estimated that perhaps a quarter, perhaps a third of the air crew that was embarked on the four carriers were lost, all of them veterans. Not in itself crippling, but you've got to remember they'd

been on operations now for months. They were just using up their best air crew, simple as that. It was devastating. They kept their veterans on the front line. They were now paying a terrible price. An even greater loss, perhaps, was that they'd lost around half of the mechanics, the technicians, the ground crew, the engineers, the armourers. That was essential knowledge, which was effectively irreplaceable. It was a terribly heavy blow to the Japanese carriers. The Japanese did have some industrial base. They were able to build three more carriers. In that time, though, the American Navy commissioned 24 fleet carriers and light carriers, and even more numerous escort carriers.

So carriers that were not designed to fight in great battles, but designed to escort convoys. 24 carriers. The balance of industry, of military might, suggests that the Americans would eventually have defeated the Japanese in the Pacific, but Midway made it a certainty, not in the long term or even the medium term, but in the relatively short term. The Japanese were no longer capable of launching further strikes on Hawaii, of threatening the British position in India, in Australia. The Japanese were now firmly on the defensive. Nimitz allowed himself a bit of a joke in a pithy communique after the battle. He said, Pearl Harbor has now been partially avenged. Vengeance will not be complete until Japanese

sea power has been reduced to impotence. We have made substantial progress in that direction. Perhaps we will be forgiven if we claim that we are about midway to our objective. Thank you for listening to this episode of Midway. See you next time. you