Historically High - The Battle of Midway

Episode Date: August 17, 2022

WW2 has a few key moments you can point to and say "Yep, that was the moment our victory was decided." In Europe it was the Normandy Invasion. In the Pacific against the Empire of Japan, that turning point was the Battle of Midway. Just 6 months after the Attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan was set to lure our remaining Aircraft Carriers into an ambush and establish total control in the pacific. What stood in their way was a team of American Codebreakers and Intelligence Officers,  3 Aircraft Carriers, and what could only amount to pure heroism and some luck during the course of the battle.  Support the show Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Check. Okay, I think they're working. There was a point in time when I was writing some of the Japanese names down that I literally just had to do it phonetically for me. Like the one ship, the Shukaku, it's just literally Shikaku. Yeah. It's either Shikaku or Shokaka. It depends on, I guess, who you. Oh, I see where you actually wrote it. Right. The Shikai.

That was, I wrote some of them. Why does it say she cock on your board? Like, it's for pronunciation. It's a Japanese ship, God damn it. Oh. Do you have anything you would like to discuss before getting into this? I mean, I found out this week that I'm the Black Angel of Death for horses. Yeah, you mentioned that.

Go, please elaborate on that. Are you going to be allowed going forward to purchase steak in any type of equine-related activities? So it was just the weirdest thing ever Because the first one Got the the twirlies or whatever they called it Do horses have like a yips? Do they call it the twirlies? No, it's called the wobbles

Like as they walk But is it like the yips? The yips is more like they just get too excited at the gate You can't put them in the shoot for a Oh, I meant like is it akin to like professional sports yips Like it's just something like It's not mental, it's a physical thing This one, the first one

that is out to pasture now, hopefully. It was just called the wobbles, and it's like a central nervous thing where they're running. The equilibrium's not on. Yeah, you know how like you can try to keep your pace with two feet? Yeah, like you're already putting weight on one foot

when that one's way. Like how you're able to shift. It's things that you probably don't notice your body doing that keeps you upright, yeah. So that's what ended the first one's career, which was nice because I got... They got the speed wobbles. It was too fast.

Yeah. So I got 80% of that money back, which, was great, I guess. And then used that to buy into a bigger horse that was more expensive, a decent amount more expensive. So what percentage of this horse did you own? Not a lot.

I think it was 1%. Do they tell you were on the horse you owned? No, we already went through that. I understand that. I just think it's funny to think about that. Yeah. So what was this? I think it was Wednesday.

I get an update. saying your new horse, show your cards. This was at 416. This morning, Show Your Cards was discovered in an uncomfortable state when the barn was going through

its routine morning check with the two-year-old only being in light training at the moment, it leads the barn to believe he got a cast in his stall. So like he was laying too close to the wall

during the night and he went to, get up and he couldn't like stretch his legs out. So he kicked a wall and shattered his fibula. And so, so that was the, there's probably no give to those walls. No, they're probably just big,

strong, oh, probably like railroad ties. Yeah. And granted horses are very strong, but a railroad tie can hold up against that. But it's not going to, yeah,

it's not going to give. So that was 416 p.m. 7.01. Show your cards was transported, got its x. who sends you these messages? The website that you do the microchairs through. Doctors express significant concerns stating that there is a life-threatening injury due to the weight-bearingness.

The humorous is what he broke. We were exploring all options to save show your cards with both Dr. Dada, Dr. Dada, and we'll do everything we can, but ultimately we have to do what's in the best interest of the horse. First one is 4 o'clock. This one is 701. Um, 836. It is a sadness in our hearts that under the advice from both veterinarians and the equine hospital, show your cards was humanely euthanized. They said they were going to explore all options.

It took them an hour in 35 minutes to be like, eh, maybe we would just shoot them. Okay, I got, I got a few horse-related questions here. And I, I have been to horse races and everything, but I have no idea about, like, I guess the value ratio, whatever you want to call it. So a horse in that situation, are horses not able to have their bones reset or like legs put in casts or anything like that?

Is it just if a horse breaks any part of its leg or something, it's done? Yeah. Because a horse, well, it depends. I mean that across the board for like if someone has a horse in a, like at a farm that they ride.

If that horse breaks its leg, is it, Or is this just a racehorse thing? I would have to assume that it has to be everybody. Because I get, like, their bones are obviously much thicker than human beings and all that kind of stuff. And it's their only mode of trance is to, you know, get around. Yeah, they can't limp, you can't put them on crutches. Yeah, but I've seen, like, you know, you can get someone with a broken leg put in a hard cast and they're able to move on.

It's not a comfortable. No, but an average horse, an adult horse, weighs 660 pounds. And that's just an average horse. That's not a thoroughbred. That's not a race horse. That's a lot of weight you're putting on your only mode of transportation. Okay, other question. So horses have four legs, right?

Are all of their bones, both rear legs and front legs, are those referred to as leg bones like tibia, fibia. What is it in your leg? It's your femur. It's your big one. Your tibia and your fibia are your chin. I think so. For your arm, it's your radius and your humorous.

You're humorous and your ulna? I think that's, yeah. And then what's this one called? I'm not going on the oldest. And then radius and like something. Okay, yeah. So on a horse, though, is it called that on both sets? Fibia, tibia, I don't know about the back one.

I would assume it would have had to have been the front one. Just because, well, I don't know. I guess it could have been a back one. No, no, but what I'm saying is that, yeah. Do they call all four, all of the bones in each set? because of the bones all pretty similar. I mean, they're different, of course, they're different lengths and everything,

but do they refer to all four legs? I don't think so, because they would consider it a shoulder and then a hip. That's what I'm saying. So horses have tibia and a radius and an ulna? That's a great question. I guess they do kind of have arms and legs in that sense. But not really.

We're getting into evolution here. I know, because it's a four-legged animal. Do you see what I'm getting at here? Yeah, we used to be, though. yeah that's true that's why we have tailbones that is what we all tailbones do you have anything this week

no I'm so fucking excited about this like I just all my energy is into this I was about to segue I was about to say speaking of tail bones I'm telling you about my dead horse and you're just over there like I'm fucking chomping at the bit

I'm sorry about your horse man but your horse is dead well hopefully not all of the money that I invested in him is dead as well they'll get They'll get insurance pay on them,

be able to pay the people for insurance, right? Yeah, but it's insurance minus, like, all the fees that you've already paid. So, like, for hay and storage and all that shit. So I'll say this. I don't think you have the black hand of death yet. I think if you go three for three on these horses, then we probably just don't do horses anymore. So I've got to get a third?

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. You can't be, you can't, listen, one is a bad luck. Two, coincidence. three, there's something that falling you around. I might not be legally able to own a fourth after that. That's true. They might just go through the list and they probably keep track of people's ownership and what happened to the horse.

They're like, yeah, hey, man, we're going to recommend maybe a greyhound or something like that. Different, different type of racing. Okay, anyway. This one is my, this one I told you is like OJ for you. I'm so happy for you because I remember how much I enjoyed that. All right. So today, I was going to segue and say, do you know, who didn't, or who did tailbone tuck tail after this battle and ran? We're talking about midway today.

I, along with most people consider to be probably the most pivotal point in World War II during the war in the Pacific. Different things happened over in the war in Europe and everything like that. but this was kind of the point in which the Japanese Navy who had been from Pearl Harbor completely just dominating and being able to kind of impose their will, this was the first time that they actually lost and received a loss severe enough that it actually changed, completely changed the course of the rest of the war for Japan and for the United States. I have a question and then a comment.

Do you think there's something kind of poetically cool about the Battle of the Midway being like the midway point when the tide started to really turn in that Pacific theater. I think it is kind of cool and it was just something called Midway because honestly it was like midway between

I want to say like Hawaii, no, it was only 1,100 miles off Hawaii, which they refer to and they say it was just 1100 miles from Hawaii because it was at the very, Hawaii is what they consider like a, what do they call an archipelago? Yeah, a chain of islands.

Yeah, it's just a huge one. So midway, they still consider it to be at the tail end. So 1,100 miles is the tail end. But it was midway, I think they want to say midway between maybe the United States and Japan or. Or it could have been like Hawaii and the Philippines or another base that they had out there. Yeah. I mean, here's what you got to remember is, man, this is the Pacific Ocean. It's the largest ocean.

And it was just this like, this wasn't like, you know, there wasn't satellites to track enemy fleets and everything like this. This was all either by the Americans, and I'll talk about the kind of advantages and disadvantages, but the Japanese didn't have radar. Which shocked me. But then I kind of have to remember, like, every time I go through something like this or every time we talk about World War II, it's, it makes me think like the last 20 years of our lives and like inventions and different technologies has just been warp speed. Back then, when they hit radar, it's like, oh my God, we found radar. That's the only thing, or one of the only things that saved England during the Battle of Britain and everything, was the fact that they, and during like the Blitz when they were getting bombed by the Germans, is they, the British, I think, are the ones that had been in radar.

It might have been with some help from America, but I want to say that it was the British at a necessity, and they would have radar stations on the coast, be able to detect these huge waves of bombers coming from France, German bombers. And that way they would be able to launch the RAF pilot. the Royal Air Force, fighters and intercepts so many. I mean, they still took a ton of damage, but it allowed them a ton of time. And do you know the saying that carrots

were really good for your eyesight? Is that a saying or is that a doctor thing? It's not a doctor thing. Are you serious? Yes, it came from World War. So the Germans were trying to figure out how the British were able to spot their planes so far out. And the British made up this thing

about they eat their carrots, which improves their vision. It's just like they were dropping on them during the last one that we did in that theater. The Ghost Army. Yes. Yeah. They were just running talking shit on pirate radio. Yes.

So, okay, so what was your other part? Oh, my comment? Yes. I love that these are called theaters. How cool is that that you have like the... A theater of war? Yeah. And it's not cool because it is war and it is terrible.

But it's just kind of the perfect. encapsulation of like when you go to the theater the theaters where all the action happens. It's so crazy to think that there was a war in which there had to be separate theaters because it was literally a world war. You had the Pacific theater. You had the European theater. I don't know if they considered it the Russian theater because the allies, it was just Russia, technically the allies, but it wasn't the like Americans and British and everything together. You had the African or South, wait, North African theater, which was, and then like the Mediterranean Theater.

It's just so cool that you can break it down. Arguably it sucks because there shouldn't be that much war going on once. But you can encapsulate just an area where they had their own, all of these theaters had like remarkable battles, wars, fights. And the Pacific theater was enormous. I mean, think of it. I don't think anything really happened between the continental U.S. and Hawaii. But the Pacific theater that actually saw action, it was all. the way up to the Aleutian,

Aleutian island chain, which is that big, long island chain that comes off stretching out into the Pacific from Alaska. Yeah. So then that's going to come into play on this. In a very dumb way. Yeah.

So it was all the way up there and then literally all the way down to... Australia, wasn't it? Australia, New Zealand, because Japan essentially had established itself kind of their thing... Okay, sorry, we'll go back. What was your comment?

Was your comment just about the theater thing? Yeah. It's so awesome that we figured out a word that fits it so cool. Like the juxtaposition of war in theater seems to be very big, but it just fits. Yeah. It's such a cool word to use. So I'm kind of, because we'll talk about this, hopefully in like another topic if I have my way. But I'll just kind of lead up to what leads up to Midway.

So as everyone knows or should know, December 7, 1941, that's when Japan attacks Pearl Harbor. and their main plan on this, and I see you have that written up, was to basically try to neutralize as much of the American Pacific fleet, which would then allow them pretty much free, whether they call that carte blanche freedom, freedom to do anything within the Pacific and establish anything they needed to for supply chains without interference. Because then the only people they were really fighting against were the British had sent, because they were trying to. because they were trying to protect at that point like the Dutch East Indies, things like that. I think British government still had a hand in India, Australia, obviously, New Zealand.

Yeah. The Philippines, I think, were the French, weren't they? Maybe not. French Polynesia, are you thinking? Could be. Yeah, it might have just been the English. But yeah, the Philippines were huge in that area too because that was...

The entire Pacific battle was just island hopping. That's all it was. It was either a few sea battles or island hopping. And so, I mean, there was a huge area. So you had some British Navy helping with, like, Australia and in the, kind of the Indian Ocean area. So, but for the most part in the Pacific, it was either Japan or was the United States. And so Japan figured if they took out the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, it would basically force the United States to either come to them for a treaty, except that all of the land they had claimed at that point was then going to be theirs by right. and Japan wanted to create this thing.

They called it the Eastern Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. They had a really nice signing name for it because they wanted everybody that they had taken over to feel like it was all in their best interest. It was the prosperity sphere for everybody. Yeah, everybody was going to share the co-prosperity. So when they launched their attack on Pearl Harbor, it wasn't just us that got hit.

We got hit with the brunt, the largest proportion of the force. It was called the Kita Bhutai. six aircraft carriers super advanced too they had the most advanced carriers and were they at that time probably the most able naval force in the world

had America been able to focus solely on the Pacific and not have to also have because you're free you know a lot of people remember at this time that there was a ton of United States naval resources being used to transport so many goods across the Atlantic They had all their destroyers guarding convoys of ships going through.

You had battleships helping over in the European kind of theater or at least escorting troop transports and everything. So there was a good chunk. And you also had a lot of like naval shipyards being on the East Coast. So for ships to come through, they had to either come through, I want to say, was Penwell Canel done at this point? We got to do an episode on that because that's fascinating too. So this isn't going to be a huge, if I'm really, if I'm really, wrong or if I'm writing this scenario. They would either have to go all the way down around the Strait of Magellan or Panama Canal. Which still takes a long time. Correct. So a lot of the ships

would have to, you know, aircraft carriers and not. They did have shipyards in Seattle in the Puget Sound. And then Pearl Harbor could do repairs, but it wasn't a manufacturing facility. They weren't building ships there. And I wonder if they had the naval base down in San Diego on. I believe they did. Yeah. Yeah. So basically the Japanese Japanese plan is they're hoping to catch not only all of the battleships, but also the American carriers. Because I think Japan had kind of realized before we did that it was going to be naval air superiority, which dictated the result of battles going forward for naval fighting. World War I didn't have aircraft carriers.

And they may have had one, but it was for like biplanes, or maybe that even happened with the British and World War II, that they were taken off biplanes on it. they don't take their lightweight, they would strap a torpedo on it, they could take off from a short distance. That's how they actually sunk the Bismarck, the German, the big, the German battle ship was with biplanes. So, can, that, that's so crazy that, like, we went from a war in which airplanes were first introduced in World War I. And now in World War II, we're already, like, we're fucking putting these on planes or on ships now. Well, and in the span of, what, two decades? Yep.

airplane technology advanced so much to where now you had long-range bombers that could travel hundreds, if not thousands of miles to bomb another country and then fly back. You had fighters and bombers and torpedo bombers that could take off of a ship and land on a ship.

And it could, you know, can you imagine the tests for that? The time to build the ship even, the time to build the elevators that lifts them up. The research in itself, you're like, how much room do you need to take off? So we need to design a ship because a lot of these, especially on the Japanese side, they would, they started building up their naval forces long in advance. Being surrounded by water and having such little land to protect, you would want. They're already in naval.

They're already used to being in naval power. And their biggest thing was they had to take over other countries for resources because Japan wasn't going to be able to be self-sufficient for resources. That's half the reason they went into China. They took over like the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines. There was a ton of oil in that area. So they were sending crude oil back for fuel for their fleet and everything. And then raw materials to keep building the planes, keep building the ships. And a lot of the carriers or some of the carriers that the Japanese had started out as battleships.

Yeah. And before they had the tops put on them, they then turned them into carriers because they're like, hold on a second. Carriers or battleships were the superpower during World War I. It was gun, big guns, the bigger the guns you could get on the ship, the better. And it was a lot of just like, you could see the enemy, but, you know, that's why you had the lookouts up high so they could see over the horizon. You put the bridge up way high. And it was literally just naval gun battles. So that was like naval doctrine at that point.

So you still had countries that hadn't kind of taken the hint or kind of seen the writing on the wall. Germany had a ton of, like, not a ton, but they had a pretty sizable Navy. but they focused on battleships. I think they had like one carrier. Well, and they were more focused on like U-boats and submarines. Yes, because they were so much easier to manufacture and they could do a ton of them. And also they're at the time when they're having before they could like conquer France,

before they had taken over France, Germany doesn't have like huge access to the sea. Everything was built up river on the Rhine River in shipyards sailed up and then out into the open ocean. So it still had to be small enough to go down the river to get out to the ocean? You could build a huge, they built some of the biggest battleships in World War II, and they still made them. And they got them down the Rhine River? It's a huge river, man.

And the shipyards weren't far from it. It was a large section. Think of like the Columbia River or something like that. I mean, you could get a huge boat up there. So I'll talk about the leading up a little bit, because there's a lot just in the battle itself. But so they would make these battleships. They started to convert some of them into aircraft carriers before they were done. So their carrier strength, they kind of knew that we're a landlock, you know, we're a small island country.

We need to be able to have places where we can launch air superiority from. They were very rigid about like their naval doctrine. And that's going to come into play during the battle and be one of like the turning points during the battles, how rigid they were. It's, you kind of touched on a little bit with like Japanese culture and everything. So they were super innovative as far as they're like, they're, they had the biggest. battle ship that ever existed, the largest gun that ever existed on a ship. Their carriers were huge. They were the biggest carriers.

The planes that they had, like the zero fighter, their main fighter. The Mitsubishi's. Yep, Mitsubishi Zero. The same thing that made one of the most superior, like, defense planes, I guess you would call it? Mm-hmm. Also made the Mitsubishi Eclipse. Yeah. It's crazy how many of these, how many of like the companies,

in Japan still exist. Just staying power for days. They just changed gears and went another direction after the war. So the zero was the premier Pacific fighter. It's speed,

its power, it could turn like none of the Americans could. It was super agile. And so if you were in a one-on-one fight against an American plane, which were a little bit,

could absorb more damage, were sturdier, but not as fast, the advantage was to the zero. Now, because of this, it was kind of a, and I'll touch back on this, it gets referenced again, the zero was kind of a glass jaw fighter. It couldn't take a lot of hits, but it was so nimble and agile that you would have to really land hits on it to be able to, you'd have to be able to almost counter

every maneuver to get a shot off. Yep. So each, each force here is going to have three different types of planes. They're either going to be a torpedo bomber, a die bomber, or a fighter. Each side has those. The Japanese ones were just, they were of such high quality. The other thing too is that they had been training these air crews and these air crews have gotten, you know, they would all work. Like if you were on, let's just say one of the carriers was the Caga. The air crew and pilots for that ship were assigned to that ship, trained on that ship. And but if something happened, or let's say that that ship got put out of commission was in for repairs, you couldn't take the flight crews and move them to another carrier that may have been completely operational, but their flight crew was diminished. They couldn't mix. There was no, like they didn't fall into a role.

They fell into a role on a ship. They had to be with that crew. There was no flexibility. The Americans were completely different. They could take squadrons from different aircraft carriers and just put them on a different carrier. It was so energetic. changeable, they were able to fill losses a lot easier that way. They were able to bring up people who were, and what that also allowed is that because you had that ability to interchange, you could always have each of your carriers of full strength. Not like, they call them air wings. So your air wing wasn't diminished. So if you're dry docking a ship, if you're dry docking a carrier, all those guys that work on

that carrier can then move out. Yep, not doing anything. Which I think not to foreshadow anything, but I think is kind of one of their, big downfalls of the Japanese fleet is not only that, but their training that they would go through was so regimented and they were so on top of everything to get on a ship that they didn't have a lot of other people that they could just throw on the ships. And the other thing that it sounds like is the way that they set them up,

I wonder if that helped out the Americans that they could build them after and the Japanese kind of retrofitted some of theirs. Because if you have things in different positions, or you have different, like, knowledge of where you need to store different things on them. Well, and it comes into play here, like the Japanese Navy in their process for launching fires, capturing fighters,

it was like a, it's like the difference between, it seems like the comparison that I can make is, you ever watch an F1 pit stop? Yeah. It's like 2.7 seconds, like good ones, 2.9, under three seconds. It's just a ballet.

Now compare it to a NASCAR pit stop, which I think is around 10 to 12 seconds. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, so those are Those are longer. Sorry if I'm offending. I'm not right on the NASS. But I think that that's a good comparison.

I don't think we get a lot of NASCAR crossover. You don't want to discriminate. So that was like the difference though. Between the two is like the Americans were like a NASCAR pick crew in launching, rearming, refueling, and then recovering planes, that kind of stuff. So the Japanese Navy had a ton of advantages going in here. Okay, get back to Pearl Harbor. Sorry, I'll stop going off in attendance.

Pearl Harbor happens the very early morning of December 7, 1941. Six Japanese carriers had set off from northern Japan, and they were parked, I want to say, somewhere between 500 to 600 miles off Pearl. The distances here are kind of like, if you're thinking, you're like, fuck, 500 to 600 miles. Yeah, it's 500 to 600 miles, but keep in mind that these planes are traveling like 250 miles an hour, maybe a little faster. You would cruise at a certain speed to conserve fuel,

so you're not going to run it full clip. Well, the other beautiful engineering feat of having carriers is Japan knew that they only had so much fuel space in these airplanes. So if you can move the runway closer to where your destination is, it's going to pay off big because you don't have to have these massive fuel tanks and you can put more bombs or anything else on them because they don't have to fly. 100%. trying to sink the other enemy ships. But the most useful thing about this was you could pull up to an island or pull up to, you know, the piece of land that you're trying to invade the beach or whatever. You could literally have your carrier-based aircraft fly over and take out all of the defenses,

both on the beach inland and completely clear that way of any type of like enemy presence. Clear a parking spot, basically. Without taking hardly any losses. Then when you land your invasion force, they're able to establish a beachhead and it's much easier, bringing supplies and everything. So with Pearl Harbor, so they launched like, man, it was like 300 plus planes at Pearl.

So that tells you what they could launch off of six aircraft carriers. And just how many they could hold. Yeah. And that's what was on there. They had spare planes in the hangers below deck. All of these had like elevators that brought planes up, planes below deck and everything.

That's where they kept all the armaments, spare plane parts and everything. Like 300 plus planes come into Pearl. And we'll do it on. its own thing on Pearl Harbor, so I'm just going to touch on it. It's going to be a long one. As luck would have it, none of our carriers were in Pearl. They were all out doing maneuvers, just practice and everything.

So the thing that was there, we had our entire fleet of Pacific battleships there, destroyers, things like that. Eight of our battleships were hit and sunk. All but three were actually raised, repaired, and took place in World War II. The Arizona, I think, was the one. I can't remember. That's the one that I think blew almost in half and where the Pearl Harbor Memorial is actually over right now. Sorry, I don't have the, I can't remember, recall the other two, but we'll touch on that Pearl Harbor.

When we get in Pearl Harbor, we'll get out. So basically, but what they also did is they took out airfields. Pearl was basically a feast for the Japanese, and it was the worst situation for the Americans. because we knew there were reports that the Japanese Pacific fleet, their fleet had moved out. We received reports, and so all stations in the Pacific were on high alert. We did have bases in the Philippines and everything at this point. So there was a high alert. And so in order to protect against the threat was considered not to be an air attack because we had radar and we could detect them.

See it coming in. Yep. The threat was from espionage and from sabotage. So what they did is at Pearl, they took all the airplanes, and they put them all close together, all within the same airfields to keep an eye on them, to minimize the chance of sabotage. Well, what happens if you line up planes wingtip to wing tip

down an entire runway on all your runaways? Japanese just run over and strife it. And they took out a ton of, just the amount of materials men that lost their lives and everything, it was insane for Pearl. Anyway, they missed the carriers. And they fucked up two other things. didn't hit the fuel station.

Yep. And probably the most important thing. Dry dock. Second most important thing in this was they didn't hit the intelligence branch. They didn't hit the intel. And they didn't hit the dry dock. So basically Pearl had all of its fuel, could start pulling ships into dry dock and start doing repairs right away. They were actually, Japan, I think they were going to launch a second.

They were getting ready to recover some planes and launch another strike against Pearl Harbor. But because they didn't have the carriers that they confirmed were hit, the Japanese didn't know where the carriers were. So if one of the carriers just happened upon the Japanese fleet and taken out a couple of them by chance and everything, their losses wouldn't have come out to what they were. But basically, they decimated the American Pacific Fleet at that point with the exception of the carriers. Now, keep in mind, your carriers are your biggest ships. They're your most protected ships. If you're in a battle, they're at the center. Everything else is spread out around them protecting them.

this is usually where your command structure is also located. So these things were the most protected. And at this point now, with all the battleships being out of commission, American power in the Pacific was basically our four carriers. It was the Lexington Enterprise Hornet in Yorktown. The Hornet? Yeah. I didn't hear about that one.

That's a sweet name. So the Enterprise is also probably like one of the most famous ones. Is that where Star Trek Enterprise comes from? I think it is actually. I think it's where Gene Roddenberry got that from. There's been enterprises throughout history, too. Some of our wooden man-of-war ships was like an enterprise, and that's one of those ones that made it.

Really? Huh. Yeah. And the car company that OJ didn't do that advertisement for. The better rental car company. So one of the things, do you, the do little radius, you have that good. You're going to have to interrupt me, too, because I'm just going to, I'm in the zone now. You're cooking and it's great.

All this is just awesome information. So American morale at this point, we declare war on Japan shortly after. I think we declare war on Germany because then in response to us, declaring war on Japan, Germany declares war on us. And so everyone's at war now. Just a different aside. I know that we weren't boots on the ground in the theater over with Germany and all that.

But were we still sending aid to like... Absolutely, 100%. It was called the Len Lease Act. So when you were talking about the carriers in the Atlantic that were the warships that were protecting the... We were sending planes. We were sending tanks. We were sending everything except people. And in fact, we had American pilots that were able to volunteer neutrally to go participate with the RAF to go over there and fight.

That's... Didn't know that. Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, we were definitely supplying them with a ton of stuff. So at this point, though, American morale. is like, people were given the right, you know, you're going to kind of find this later in the story, but some countries were more honest with their citizens about how the war was going. So I mean, this was in all the newspapers and everything. Everyone knew, for the most part, the extent of

the damage. America morale was pretty low. And so the Navy came up with the plan. I think it was actually part of the, it might have been part of the Air Force, maybe Army Air Force, because I think Army Air Force was one, the Navy was its own thing at this point, too. That they were going to attack Tokyo. It was going to be a small, it was going to be basically not an attack, but what they considered a raid. And it was to boost American morale. And it needed to show that the Japanese homeland wasn't untouchable.

Yeah, they got us. Now it's time to get a little blood back. And so what they did was Colonel James, he might have been a colonel at the time, but James Jimmy Doolittle, he selected a group of pilots and they trained to take Mitchell B. I don't hate me on misquoting this, but I want to say B-17s or B-25s. It's a double-engine plane. It's a bomber that's supposed to take off on a runway. They modified these things and trained their pilots.

They stripped everything out of these planes. Lightened them as much as possible took out tailgunners, tailguns, all the other. guns except the forward facing guns. It was one of the bombers that would have a guy in the front manning machine gun, two pilots, a guy in the back running the bombs, and maybe another guy running the tail gunner. So take out as much weight, armor, everything, still be able to carry bombs and additional fuel. And the plan was to get a carrier close to, close enough to the Japanese island, to launch,

bomb Tokyo and a couple other targets, but most of it was Tokyo. and then continue flying on and land in Chinese controlled China because there was a ton of it that was controlled by Japan at this point too. That was kind of their first push in the war was to go after China. Yeah, we'll talk. We'll do an entire topic on this, but the war between Japan and China. Ugly. Dude, the fucking atrocities.

Yeah. It was. So anyway, this raid goes off. What ends up happening with the raid, just a quick overview is, uh, Japanese boat picks them up, sees them further out than they would have liked to have launched. They're launching off of,

I want to say the, I want to say it was the Hornet that they're launching off of. So they have to launch early. So basically they're trying to pass out cans of gas and loading up more cans of gas in these planes. Because they didn't, because they're another, they're a few hundred miles further.

So now they're trying to figure out, do we have enough fuel even to get to, uh, China or we're going to have to ditch in the South China Sea or whatever they end up taking off all the planes I think but one actually end up making it because one of them had an engine failure. As soon as

they're off the fucking aircraft there was two carriers there. They launched off of one. The battle group turned around and hauled ass back for Pearl Harbor. They didn't want to be caught out in the open and everything. Plains are off. They end bombing Tokyo. The damage was minimal

I mean in the scope of things but what it was is it let Tokyo know that their island wasn't safe, that they weren't safe, that the carriers were still a threat. So what this did and why this ties into Midway is it determines how Japan looked at this battle and what they needed to do. Yeah. Not always, you're not casualty count damage isn't always the main thing. It was a psychological thing. Because like Japan, the difference is, is Japan's media and that kind of stuff was all controlled by the state.

the emperor and everything. So the only information that came out to the public, the populace, was what filtered through the government. It wasn't like America where you had reporters reporting to independent news

that still came out. I mean, that existed. The New York Times, all those companies. So they had independent reporters radioing back, you know, from Hawaii that knew the damage about this stuff.

You know, we're getting old recording clips that are making it onto the nightly news. Exactly. So I'm trying to figure out where I was going with this. Oh, so. What they did was they downplayed to the public what the raid was,

but the public saw it happen. Yeah. It wasn't a battle in which they lost carriers. No, they saw this happen. And so word spread that we're not, you know, that was Japan's a big thing. We're keeping you safe. You're safe here. Well, you're not safe now, technically.

So the key players in this, and this guy is, this guy's kind of like, you know, I think this guy's like the Eisenhower of our military. That guy that everyone knows. Yamamoto? Yamamoto. Okay. So Admiral Isuruu Yamamoto. So this guy was like the admiral.

He controlled basically the entire Navy. Of course, you had to report to the emperor and then also the emperor maybe had his own counsel and everything. But this guy had so much pull that at certain points he threatened to resign if he didn't get his way and they turned around and gave him his way because they needed to keep him in this position. So he is the admiral in charge of. of everything. In this specific battle, Vice Admiral Nagumo, he's in charge of the carrier force for Midway. The Kyoto Butai? They didn't call it the Quito Boutai on this one for the technicality that it only had four of the carriers. And I'll go back in... Yeah, we'll go back and touch on that with the quarrel. You then had Vice Admiral Condo and he led the invasion force. So I'm going to talk about

the order of battle and kind of the setup here in a second. So basically, what Yamamoto, his sole goal for Midway, is he knew that he had to force a decisive battle with the United States carriers, take them out to establish full power in the Pacific. That was what this entire thing was about. Midway was insignificant. What it is is it's a tiny 2.2.7 square mile island. No resources on it because it's so small. But basically what it is is it's a place that because it's so close to Pearl Harbor, and it's, and it's, ours, we had to protect it because it would have given them technically almost a staging ground to hit Pearl. Yeah. We still had, yes. And we had started to build up our, you know, we still had fully functional base on Pearl that we needed that.

So he needed to draw out the American carriers, but he couldn't make it seem like he had to do it in a sneak attack to make sure he didn't lose any of his at the same time. So I thought about this a lot last night. at this point once we because we were already kind of in war production mode trying to support Europe as soon as they bombed Pearl

everything got switched to war production and if there's one thing that America does the best as bad as this is hands down yes it's making war shit so as soon as this happened construction on more aircraft carrier started and we were cranking

them out faster than anyone else. And when I say cranking these things out, these are huge ships and they were getting cranked out multiple, multiple ships per year. I think at the end of World War 2, we had like 21 carriers. We have four at this point, Pearl Harbor. That's what I'm saying. The American War Machine is insane. Scary. It's scary how good it is. Well, and I mean, it was all those women that were volunteering. Hell yeah. What was the chick that had the flet? Rosie. Yeah, Rosie the Riveter. Hell, yeah. Yeah, she's hot. Yeah, she's hot.

Didn't want to tangle with her and wrestle with her anything like that. So America had prior to after Pearl Harbor and before and after the Dooler, but before Midway, which takes place in between June 4th and June 7th of 42. So not long after, I mean, this is what six months, maybe seven months after Pearl. Between that time, we had sent carriers to carriers. It was the York 10. and I'm trying to remember what the other one was. Hang on a second.

Coral? Yeah. Lexington. Lexington. Yep. Down to support down in like the Philippines. New Guinea. New Guinea. Thank you.

You're going to be doing this a lot. So I'm glad you got that on lockdown. New Guinea and the Battle of the Coral Sea happened. And this was the first time that American carrier-based aircraft and Japanese-based aircraft had fought. And I want to say it may have been the first naval battle in history. which the enemy forces never laid eyes on each other. Correct. Yeah, they said that it was the first time ever that they could fight at such a distance where

there wasn't ever any ship to ship. Ships to ship combat. And so that lets you know right there that kind of the age of the battleship is over. So what ends up happening Battle of Coral Sea is the Yorktown takes damage to the point where the Japanese thinks she's been sunk or is irreparable. And then the Lexington actually gets sunk. So we've got four carriers and one of them gets sunk and one of them, they believe, is sunk and is horribly damaged. But very big positive because when they took the, when they thought the Yorktown went down, we got it back to ship or we've got it back to port.

Correct. And so, and I'll touch on that here in a second. The other thing is it gave also the first experience of ship to ship combat. So you had some air crews that then had that experience. of how that goes. And then also, for the American benefit, what they actually did is they damaged. They sunk one of the Japanese carriers,

but they damaged another one. The one they damaged was one of the newest ones. It was like the most advanced one. And so what we were talking about earlier, what happened is that one had to go back to, I don't know if it was the Japanese home islands, because one of the things they did that was amazing is Japan established all of these bases across the Pacific.

on these islands that they didn't have to bring ships all the way back. They had dry docks and everything like that. They had these, yeah, these huge, like, one of them was called, like, truck. You guys can look it up. It's T, R, U.K. It's a almost, um, looks like a giant chain of islands been in the form of, like, a crescent, even maybe more so. It was a natural harbor.

Oh, so they didn't have to build anything. Defensible from tons of positions. They had this thing. Sorry, I'm going to cough here. Just give me a sec. Sorry about that. So, yeah, natural defenses, and then they just put aircraft, anti-aircraft guns all around in.

It was protected. But anyway, so they had to be sent back for a pair. Like we talked. Go ahead. Through the Coral Sea, we lost Lexington, so U.S. was down one. Yorktown was damaged. So technically we were down one and a half. It was equal during the battle.

Japan, each damaged and then. We lost, or the Japanese lost the Chicago. and Zukeki, I think was the other one, Zukaku. Shikaku and Zukkah, yeah, it was like, yeah. That had to go back. Now here's the thing that we were talking about earlier. She still had a carrier group, like an air group. Yeah.

But that couldn't be transferred. So you had, and there was one carrier that in itself at another point was down half strength, but the carrier was functional. they couldn't take that from the damage one and move it over because they could have had a fifth carrier. But their engineering and how they created their naval doctrine didn't allow that to happen. So they had to go in with four,

which is still, you know, they thought at this point the Americans only had two. So the Yorktown gets pulled back. So the Battle of the Coral Sea, that was a month before Midway. So they got Yorktown back to Pearl. they got the yorktown back to pearl on like june first and i'll come back to that in just a second so i'm up to on the date so one of the things that you kind of touched on earlier was the um code breaking station

station it was called station hypo and the guy that ran this was his name was commander josephurt and this guy he kind of an eccentric guy he would sometimes work in like his slippers and his bathrobe over on top of his khaki you know military uniform

okay yeah that's that's exactly these guys were basically in a basement somewhere and they had broken a huge chunk of the Japanese Imperial Navy's code and they called it the in what was it the uh the IGN code was

I can't remember something 25 IG 25 or something like that but they'd broken it a huge portion of it not it not completely enough to read a lot of the stuff and this guy's team if if kind of the information is to be believed but he would assemble this team of people that weren't necessarily code breakers but he had people that were musicians and artists and stuff people that can recognize patterns different brains and and it was very effective so after um after Pearl

Chester Nimitz gets brought in to lead the Pacific Fleet and he knows this, I'm trying to think of the guy's name shit. Oh, how can I not? John Nash?

No. Beautiful mind? Oh, I don't know how. This guy is one of my favorite guys. I don't know how I'm not remembering his name, but he was the guy that trusted Rochefort. So it was, let's see, midway.

I'm sorry, guys, I'm having to Google something real quick. So I know what this guy's name is, Battle of Midway. This is one of the things that I always really appreciate whenever we look into something like this is it reinforces to me so much of, we always celebrate the brute force, the boots on the ground that are fighting. But these people that are in these bunkers basements like you're talking about, the intelligence branches, they play such a crucial and vital role because without having them,

we don't know where to go. We don't know, I mean, without the invention of radar, radar is great if you have it, but unless you have the people there that know how to set it up, know how to make sure

that it's all functional, accurate. The people that come up with the idea of, hey, we're going to bounce, we're going to throw sound waves way out there, and it's going to bounce off something

and come back, and then we're going to calculate the time it came back, and that's going to tell us where and when they are and how far out there. Like, someone's mind,

to work that way and then to apply it and know, be like, go for it. That sounds useful. And that guy's never going to pick up a gun, but he's just as important to the war, if not more important. If not more. It's like you have people that their skills are in creating the tactical layout of stuff, and they're just brilliant at it. So his name is commander, lieutenant commander, Edward Layton.

So Layton's the guy. He's an intelligence officer. So he works directly with Rochefort and the codebreaking. So Nimitz actually has heard of him. This Layton guy had actually spent time pre-war. with the Japanese Navy and the Japanese Admiralty. It was part of like an exchange program because right up until they bombed us to Pearl Harbor,

they were trying to talk to us about treaties and truces. And the whole reason that they also bombed us at Pearl Harbor was because we had cut off supplies to them because they had started invading China and all these other areas. So they knew that the writing was on the wall. They had to go and get their own materials. So after like talks broke down, of course, you know,

this wasn't super close to Pearl, but they pulled all of their military attaches out of each other's countries and everything. There was kind of a one for one because there was that guy that was with the Japanese Navy over there that came to America. And then wasn't the guy under Yamamoto, didn't he train in America too?

He went to like Harvard or something. But he had been through part of the Naval Academy here, so he had a little bit of insider knowledge as to how we do things too. So there was a familiarity a little bit, kind of with our strategy. I'm sure it was supposed to be in good faith. It's like an olive branch and everything,

but most of it was like, you're there to learn about them. Yeah. So if we, because of war was going to happen. So Nimitz goes to this guy and to Layton. And Layton's like, listen, we got this station. They're breaking these codes. Nimitz is like, we need to hit these guys. We need to do something.

Like, I need you to give me some information that gives us an advantage because right now we're down ships. It's not looking good. So basically what they end up determining is that Rochefort and his team have been able to decipher enough of this plan on the Japanese side called, the Japanese called it Operation, and they never addressed it like this in their codes, but they called it Operation MI, which is easy to determine as Midway Island. So basically their plan bring out the American carriers And it was supposed to be It wasn't supposed to look to the Americans Like they're trying to draw our carriers out Basically it was to look like

Hey they're trying to snag midway So they have a launching point to Pearl So what the battle plan was on the Japanese side Is you had Nagumo leading the four carrier group Now this isn't just like four carriers out in the middle of the ocean A carrier group consists of the carriers and then each carrier has ships assigned to it. Those ships are usually either battleships or heavy cruisers,

light cruisers, and then destroyers, and maybe even a couple submarines. And basically everyone's job within that battle group is to protect the aircraft carrier. So they set up what they call picket screens. So basically you'll have your aircraft carrier, then it weighs out from your aircraft carrier. You'll have your heavier ships,

and those usually have the most weaponry on it in an aircraft guns, things like that. Out further than that, you have your destroyers, which are lighter on weapons, but they're also just trying to keep an eye out to either shoot down enemies or radio the interior circle that they're coming. Submarines, anything that they can.

Exactly. I mean, the whole report is to report back to the carrier and protect them. So they have four groups of this. So that's under the command of Nagumo. His, if you're looking at Midway, and I'm going to refer to things like if you're looking at a clock, midway's in the center of the clock. Nagumo's forces kind of coming in from like the 10 o'clock,

11 o'clock position from that direction, and they're about 500 miles off midway. Son of a bitch. I was thinking of it the exact opposite way before you just said that, but Japan coming over would be coming from the left side instead of the right side. Huh. Okay. So you have Yamamoto is in charge of what he called.

He was phase three. Nagumo was phase one, the attack with the planes. Phase two, I don't know. I'm skipping around. I'm sorry. phase two, sorry, was Vice Admiral Kondo, his invasion force. So he had landing ships along with like some battleships and other stuff. After Nagumo's force bombed their plan, because they didn't know anything on the American side that it had been broken, their code had been broken.

Their plan was to launch the planes, bomb midway, take out all the defenses. After that, what they would do is the invasion force would come up and the invasion force was stationed. And think of like 7 o'clock. Okay. Another about 500 miles away that direction. Coming up more from the south, though. Exactly. A different plane that they're going to be on.

Well, they're not, they're coming in just with boats to land. And they had 5,000 soldiers to land on Midway to take it out, take it over. Yamamoto was at like the 9 o'clock position, even back a little further. What was going to happen was, Pearl was going to get notified the Midway was being bombed. They were going to have to scramble their carriages. They were going to have to bring their carriers in. And during this time, they would have bombed Midway. Invasion Force would have came in and taken over Midway, which meant the airfield and everything,

because there were three airfields on Midway. They kind of crossed each other. It's cool. And if you guys have a chance real quick, pull up your phones, Google Midway Island. Two little islands separated. One of them is literally three airfields. And the other one just looks like it's some buildings. It's kind of crazy.

It's just out in the middle of the ocean. Well, and them coming in from like the 7 o'clock, too, they put basically the barrier of midway between them and Pearl Harbor. So anybody coming to Pearl Harbor? Midway was more like Pearl was almost like at a 4 o'clock position from Midway. But almost directly with the island

between them, kind of? Kind of. I mean, it would be there, but I mean, like the position, they would still have the advantage of being able to see the American Force coming because they would have scout planes. Yeah, but as far as Pearl Harbor coming directly in, they're coming in from their side. They're not circling the island to get to where they've invaded.

Correct, yes. So they were going to land and what would happen at that point is Pearl would launch the carriers, carriers would come out, and what would end up happening is at that point, Yama Mota was going to come in with the battleships, and they would be able to have a carrier to carrier battle. At the same time, Yama Mota would be able to take the information from where the American fleet was, from the pilots,

get his battleships in position, and take out the carriers, if the planes didn't do it. Basically, they were looking to just completely wipe out the whole, force. Finish off what they tried to do at Coral. So his was phase three. So one of the things that, again, this is going back to the Japanese naval doctrine, when they went on some of these like missions, as soon as they launched these three groups, they were so far away from each other, they couldn't support each other. Even with planes flying 250 miles an hour, two hours is too far, especially considering that the battleships and everyone in Yamamoto's group didn't even have airplanes. They would have to try to steam, you know, get their ships, which would take hours upon hours upon hours. So these three different navies that they had couldn't support one another. The other thing, too, is because this whole thing was secret, they couldn't, they had to maintain radio silence between all of the, I mean, the ships could probably communicate because they could probably see each other to a degree or pass messages. Sorry.

You still couldn't put anything on the airwaves, though, because they would be monitored. And they had suspected, kind of suspected that the Americans were reading their radio traffic, but they really didn't have any idea. So while they're getting into position, what they don't realize is that prior to this, while they're planning Operation M.I. Rochefort is listening in to all this radio traffic and knows of this operation, huge operation is being planned. They're picking up all these clues. We've been having foreplay around this for a little bit. I hope we're getting the finish because this is, I love this part. This is as important as the battle itself.

This right here is what gave the battle even a chance to succeed. This is like my whole outlook on this is I'm not against like American ingenuity or anything like that, but the sheer amount of things that had to go right for the United States and the amount of luck and prep that we had to do, it had to all come together perfectly. This was like 75% intelligent thought, 25% just flat up gamble though. Like it was, this was, in order to get the information that they were going to get from this, it was 100% of gamble to put it out the way they do. Oh, yeah. So they're picking up all this radio traffic at Station Hippo about this attack from the Japanese at AF.

And they couldn't figure out what AF was. And so he's giving this information to Layton. Layton's giving it to Nimitz. Nimitz is trying to go ahead and tell the war department back in Washington because this isn't just like, hey, This is them launching their remaining carriers. Yeah. Everything that they have left in the Pacific. Everything.

They're committing everything for this. So he's like, Nemitz is basically like, I can't take this and convince them. You got to give me more info. I can't do this on a hunch. Now, Rochefort thought almost from the get-code the AF was Midway. He just had a feeling about it. He's like, I got to make a definitive. So Layton's like, do what you have to do, make this definitive.

So they send a signal to Midway. and this boggles my mind. They have a cable, a secured cable from Hawaii to Midway. It's 1,100 miles. It's underground or underwater. How do you have an 1100 mile cable? I might not, does it go to a buoy,

and then the buoy sends the signal close? I don't know. I think it's got to be lower because you don't want a ship clipping it is it's coming by. So it's got to lay on the ocean floor. So it's way longer than 1100 miles. That's nuts.

So they send a Rochefort's team, sends a command to Midway, and they're like, over open air, send a signal back to Pearl, and say your guys is like water distillation, your freshwater filter and everything like that is broken. Because there's no natural resources on this island. Exactly. They're surrounded by ocean.

So tell us it broke. So they report this back over open air signals, and then all of a sudden they intercept a Japanese signal that says AF is running short on potable water. And that was their confirmation right there. The Japanese just confirmed that that's what Midway was. So he sends it to Leighton. Leighton tells Nimitz, Nimitz convinces the war department or the naval department.

And they have the... It wasn't even in code either. It was just tell us this in plain English that you're running low. Do not make... Make it as easy as possible for the Japanese to hear this and get giddy that this is happening. And let them... But at the same time, thinking they're just broadcasting this completely open air, no coding, no nothing. And they...

You're not suspect of why they... This is coming through at all. And so what they were able to do, and I'm jumping back now to leading up to the days before the attack or the American set sail. So the Yorktown gets into Pearl on June 1st. It needs to go back to Puget Sound in Seattle. And it needs to have at least, I want to say they said like a month. Three weeks at least.

At very minimum three weeks. Nimitz is like, nope, fuck that. I need this thing ready in 72 hours. They pull it into dry dock and they just start going to work on. this. Now thankfully, the elevators were intact, so it could still launch planes. The whole flight deck was mostly intact or almost completely intact.

So what they're basically doing is they've gone in, they're taking out damage sections, cutting out entire support structures, re-welting them back in. They got this thing, sea-worthy and battle-ready in 72 hours. In fact, there were still teams on the ship welding and

getting stuff together as they set out. There was like a mechanic... They used to have mechanic ships that would just trail right next to it. hooked up to a supply power, and they were sitting there working on it, even as it set off. So they turned around, and I think they got it battle ready. They said, yeah, it'll last for two to three weeks, battle ready, and then it needs its extensive repairs. But that's all you need. So now, not only do the Americans have the element of surprise on the guys trying to surprise us,

the Japanese think that our carrier strength is only two. Now we have three. what they also didn't realize that when we broke this code, we didn't just break the code and know where it was going to happen. They were able to calculate the day that it was going to happen. They were able to calculate the enemy strength and almost their entire battle plan to know a good general area. Again, we're talking about hundreds and hundreds of miles of open ocean,

but they had an idea of where these guys were going to be, where the Japanese fleet was going to be. so the Americans American forces again they set out they split the three carriers up into what they call task forces so just to make it simple

I know one of them was like Task Force 15 and one of them was like Task Force 17 I'm just going to say one and two just to make it easier for this Task Force one was only one carrier and that was the Yorktown by itself. That was commanded by Frank Fletcher. He had tactical command of the entire battle.

Raymond's Fruence was actually in commanding the task force two, and that was the Enterprise and the Hornet. And actually, when they came in, when the Enterprise came in, it wasn't damaged or anything like that, but its commander was William Bull Halsey. Bull was his nickname. Nice. He actually got some type of like skin rash or something like horrible skin rash. and like debilitating. And so they had to pull him off of the enterprise. And that's how Raymond's Fruance actually got in there. He got replaced.

So the guy that was going to be running the whole operation. No, no, no. Fletcher was always going to be the one running it. But the two other carriers. Bull was Enterprise. But I mean, if something would have happened to Fletcher, it goes to the next guy. But I mean, Spruance was, he was a known commodity. And Nimitz got to kind of pick his own command structure when he came in.

So they were his guys. anything up to this point i'm going to keep going no it's this is we're like right on the tipping point we played just the tip the whole time now it's war time okay i got to go on what page am i on now let me see let's see okay so the american task groups where they set up is um oh also because they wanted to try to be on par aircraft strength-wise they sent a whole bunch of planes to midway because Midway was basically like an unsinkable aircraft carrier. It was a fourth carrier. Yeah.

But I mean, even if the carrier base plane's gotten into trouble and had to come back because the U.S. Navy, we positioned our fleets and task groups almost at the 1 o'clock and then like the 2 o'clock position from Midway. And so they were kind of north of Midway just a little bit, in line, kind of in the same line of where the carrier group for the Japanese were. Because that's what the whole goal was, was if we could take out the Japanese carriers, we can get our strength back in the Pacific. Well, and going back to what you were talking about

with the three launch points off of midway, the three runways that they had going to different directions. Those were there, basically. The reason that there were three launch points there is because when you, it's kind of like an airport when they have you approach from a different direction. It's so they could launch planes

if the winds were different. Well, but with the three facing different directions, you're going to be able to fire off in one of those directions. And they're harder to damage. If someone's trying to bomb a runway, You got two other ones that are trying to get planes and everything. And you're not going to be able to, or you're not going to have to worry about launching just off a one. You have two other options.

Oh, yeah. You can get more planes in the air, definitely. So the kind of the board set at this point, the pieces are there. We're going to get into the timeline for the battle when this finally does go down. One thing, too, just to kind of, I'm going to go over American advantages before this starts. I know I've kind of touched on that, but also kind of the Japanese disadvantages. So one of them I already talked about was the air group. being required to train together.

The Japanese for this battle had 248 aircraft. That's a lot of planes. And again, between those is fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo bombers. Before we get into that, maybe not everybody's as dumb as I am, but I had no idea what in the world a torpedo bomber was, because I just always figured torpedoes were underwater. But a torpedo bomber is actually a plane that will swoop down, drop a torpedo from its hold into the water,

and that torpedo will then hit the side of a ship or whatever it's aiming for. Yeah. I just assume that it was like dropping torpedoes before we realized we can put them in the water. No. And one of the things that they kind of start finding out, so if you're thinking about trying to sink a ship and you're just someone like at the war department and trying to figure out new ways to do battle against ships because, you know, we need to sink these things. The first thing you're going to think about is what sinks a ship? what's the best way to sink a ship? And at that point, it was, it seemed like it was torpedoes.

That's how subsink ships and everything like that. You hit blow the water line. It's going to fill. Exactly. So there was this big emphasis, and I firmly believe based on this and everything else I've read, torpedo bombing was not the way to go about this. And the reason was, first of all, you had to be able to, okay, first of all, American torpedoes up to this point for America were horrible. Really?

There was something about these types of torpedoes that they made that the Pacific was using. I don't know about the Atlantic, but there were so many situations when American subs and planes got hits. And all that would happen is the torpedo would hit, break apart, and fall in the wall and sink. Just duds. And I mean, they missed numerous opportunities to go ahead and destroy ships because of this. Well, and even in this battle, it seems like there were some missed opportunities. Yeah. And the other thing, too, is you got to be able to, here's the huge, my huge drawback for,

torpedo bombers is you couldn't dive down and pull up right along the water and then drop your torpedo. You had to go low to the water and slow down because if you dropped your torpedo too fast, the torpedo might break up and break apart. So you basically had to approach these carriers, which were in the middle of these circles of death firing at you. You had to stay low, like maybe like 20 feet off the water, maybe 30. You're right in the sight line of, every ship firing at you. Anti-aircraft guns on these were... And you're having to go so slow that the combat air patrol,

so the fighters, their job was to sometimes escort bombers. One of the fighters' primary rules for these carriers was they would launch squadrons of fighters that were called CAP, combat air patrol. All they would do would circle the carrier groups, and when they saw bombers come in, bombers are a lot slower because they're having to carry bombs in their heavier planes.

Wait, yeah. So when you have these torpedo bombers trying to go down low and approach these, you know, it's line of sight. You're firing a torpedo at line of sight. You have to either get close enough to where the ship can't move and close enough to where the torpedo's not going to run out of steam to get there. And you're having to do it slow. These things got torn apart.

The American torpedo bombers got decimated during this battle. Well, and you know if you have to be in, or if the ship has to be in your line of sight, that means that you are in their line of sight. Not just their line of sight, too. You're in everybody else's line of sight as you're trying to. to fly through these pickets of ships firing at you. Yeah, it's undoubtedly the most dangerous way to do it.

And you have two guys per plane too. So you're losing pilots and planes in this. So they had 248 aircraft. Luckily the Japanese did something very good with their paint jobs that helped us figure out how to drop these things. Yes. Yes, they did. They wouldn't have thought about that to begin with, but they ended up doing us a favor. kind of another one of the Japanese disadvantage is going in here is because their carriers and carrier groups were this entire time in constant operation because not only were they fighting like toward Hawaii in the Pacific like that all these carriers were going down and helping against Australia, Philippines, New Guinea, all of those islands and everything.

They had there wasn't it a secret alliance with Italy up to that point and then a strong alliance with. Germany. All three of them were in the axis, so they were all on, I think, on equal footing. I mean, you didn't see, like, because of the distance, you didn't see, like, Japanese soldiers fighting in Europe. And you didn't see German or Italian soldiers fighting in the Pacific. But they would help contain. Yes, they were strategically trying to say, like, this is yours. If we take this, then maybe that'll help you take this. I mean, there was mutual cooperation there, definitely. But because these carriers and flight groups were in constant operations, equipment wears down. Replacements, you know, you're still working on getting your infrastructure

for supplies. Replacements were a little more scarce than everything, harder to acquire. And then the Japanese carrier force had what was called the, I said this before, a glass jaw, they called it. And so it was super strong on the attack, but its defense was weak. And up to this point, you know, the Americans had already sunk one of their, they knew that they could do it. They already damaged another one. And by Glassjaw, this is kind of what led into their strength or weaknesses on the defensive. So they had two few combat air patrol aircraft, two few fighters patrolling around the area. The screening ships that were way outspaced apart, they didn't have like a screen set up.

There were too many holes in the net. The ships didn't have adequate anti-aircraft guns to set a proper screen. the carriers themselves, although they were super advanced, their fire control systems were really bad. Dog shit. Horrible. Which leads into what you were talking about at the Glass Jaw

because they're great offensive machines, but as soon as they take fire, they're not prepared for the... Boil it down to what those things actually are, a battleship or a carrier. A carrier is basically a mobile airfield. And what do you have in an airfield? If you have to cram it all in one area, you have to have fuel for the ship,

fuel for the aircraft, which aircraft fuel is also higher octane than regular fuel, and you have everything that these ships have to carry to bomb with. So all of their armaments. So basically these carriers themselves, they're not heavily armored, and they're basically floating gas in magazine storages. Another thing that I was kind of surprised by, too,

is they had different munitions for different targets. Like they had different bombs if they were going after land as opposed to different bombs that they were going after ships, which I guess sort of makes sense because it's a different material. But you'd think if you had a bomb that could blow up a ship, it could probably do some decent damage to land too. But they would have to take time in between on these raids, whether they were going after ships or whether they're going after land. I'm wondering, too, because I think what happens is when you had the land-based bombs too. so the point of the ship bombs is they were armor piercing for use against battleships so they would have to go down below decks break through the steel through and get down low to detonate so they were armor piercing the ones that hit like land were probably like cheaper just like

regular burst bombs they would hit the ground as soon as they hit the ground they were blown up just destruction on the surface and that's going to come into play too man they having to switch between all that stuff trying to try to lay that in there trying to tease the stupidity coming The Japanese had this big submarine screening force That they were actually gonna send out to kind of like almost surround Midway So they would be able to detect when the American force came in Well, because the American force came in early The subs were late and they missed the American force coming in so they had no idea that the American force was there

That there was a American carrier group there also played another role in this again no radar so they couldn't detect incoming planes Yamamoto actually received a report that carriers could be at Midway after they had set sail, but he chose to maintain radio silence just for the surprise. Chose to maintain ignorance. Yep. Already said the fleets were too far apart to support each other. And then they also had this doctrine that it was kind of how Pearl Harbor happened. Part of carrier doctrine for Japan was that they didn't launch strike,

piecemeal. So they wouldn't launch like five to ten planes. They would wait until they got their entire carrier force. All the planes landed refueled and would launch these huge waves like they did at Pearl Harbor just to try to overwhelm and decimate the enemy. But what that allowed, it took so much longer to have your planes up in the air. Whereas the Americans, as soon as they had their planes ready, they would launch five and six squads, five and six like plane squads. And I'll tell you kind of how that comes back in for how this battle turns out. But that's going to be a huge disadvantage for the Japanese. So American advantages is they basically

know about as much about the battles as they can. They have the element of surprise. 100%. They loaded up midway with additional planes. They had the Yorktown, which the Japanese thought was gone. And yeah. So

at this point, kind of the battle is set. And on the morning of June 3rd, a The P.B.Y. Catalina. So have you ever, it's a float plane. Was it the third or the fourth? The third.

The fourth is when the actual battle happens. The third. P.B.Y. Catalina, it's the float plane that America would use for like, and it had a huge range and everything like that. They would use it for like a search. Huh. I didn't know about that. So it spots the Japanese fleet at 9.25 a.m. on June 3rd. So early in the day.

Yeah. It actually headed from Midway, like the 7 o'clock position. So it actually spots the invasion force. But these Catalinas are so high. And they don't get close because what's going to happen is if they thought it was the carrier invasion force, all the carrier would have to do is launch a couple of fighters and it could chase down this Catalina and shoot it down. So they get close enough to report. They say, we see some ships.

We know they're not our ships in this. area. We try to count the ships. We're not going to get close enough to tell you what they are. We're just going to report back. So at this point, I think the Americans think that this is the carrier group. So what they do is they launch nine bombers, the military launches, or midway launches nine bombers to go after this invasion force. And of course, the bombers have to bomb from super fucking high. And hitting a moving ship is not easy. So they score no hits on this invasion fleet. You have to stay above the security circle at that point, so you're not seen. So they're not.

Yeah, because they could only fire anti-aircraft guns up so high. And I'm sure those zeros could only go up so high. Yeah, and by the time, you know, the bombers could take off. It would take them too long to get up and probably chase them anyway. But even after the invasion force gets bombed, they still don't open radio communications. So at this point, they know now that they've been spotted, they don't know who's been spotted. still maintain radio silence. So the other two groups have no idea that the American are aware of what's going on.

And nothing happens for the rest of that day. I think everyone was kind of getting into their positions. So early early morning on June 4th, 15B17's launch basically to search and attack enemy targets. So they kind of fly out from Midway to search there. And because Midway is their target. and the Japanese know exactly where Midway is because it's not a ship and it doesn't move. They know exactly where it is.

So right after those B-17s get launched, Nagumo launches 108 aircraft to go bomb midway. 108. Yeah. And these are just loaded with, you know, the bomb, you know, he sends fighters. He does send some torpedo bombers in case there's ships around Midway.

And then just the regular dive bombers with the land bombs. The land bombs, yeah. That's what we'll just call them. So they do that. the Americans at this point launched four right after this. They launched four groups of aircraft to attack the Japanese from Midway. So these aren't even the carrier fighters yet. These are just launching four groups from Midway again.

At 6 a.m., that's when the Japanese air attack hits Midway. American fighters, they're pretty ineffective. They were using a lot of like the American planes didn't get up on in dogfighting with the Japanese until like pretty late in the war. It was just our ability to make so many things and replace our losses is really what our key to victory was. And so the American planes go up. They're kind of outdated.

They're from early on in the war, if not pre-war a little bit. And they just kind of get decimated by the fighters. If you can put enough of them up into the air, though, if you can put enough targets up there, it's sad to say because of we're humans flying them, but if you give them enough targets and there's enough out there. Sometimes the mass amount is... Yeah, and at the same time, I mean, you're wasting their fuel in dog

fights, you're trying to waste their ammunition. That's all stuff that they have to go back to the carrier to land and resupply on and everything like that. You're basically just trying to inflict as many losses as you can and keep them kind of busy. So that whole attack on Midway, they end up bombing mostly all of the infrastructure, like the power plant, hangers,

pretty much anything of value aside from the runway, the Midway has, they bomb. And it's 27-minute attack. So on the way back, a Japanese pilot breaks radio silence and tells Nagumo, you know, we're going to need another wave of attack on the, on midway to neutralize it before the invasion force can move in. So he basically, he kind of has a dilemma at this point. He didn't expect it to take two attacks to neutralize it.

And he feels like he has to kind of start getting ready for, the American response fleet, but like he still has to try to neutralize the airfield. Well, they said that he had, it was the planes coming back and they could either get them refueled, reloaded,

and sent back in a matter of like 15 or 20 minutes. Didn't take them long. Or it would take them an hour to refuel and get ready for the ships. Was that right? Yeah, they would have to, basically what his dilemma was, was is because of the time it took to switch ordinance because you're having to switch like bombs move them on to carts move the carts out of the way stack the bombs try to put them in a safe

place refuel bring out the new bombs bring them from below deck yeah it wasn't a quick process to rearm and refuel and everything but what ended up happening is right as he's trying to make the decision like do i do another wave of attack or do i get ready for the ship battle that's eventually going to happen when the shit he didn't know the ships were already there when the ships end up making their way up. Part of the element of surprise was the U.S. parked their stuff closer to Midway than just Pearl Harbor. Yeah.

And at that time, bombers that were launched from Midway arrive over the carrier group and start bombing. They don't score any hits or anything like that. But basically he's like, okay, the only place these planes are going to be coming from is Midway. These bombers came from Midway. They're going to keep coming at us. I need to neutralize it.

So he can't figure out how these. American aircraft are also finding him so fast. He's like, they shouldn't know where we're at. I mean, we just launched, I don't know if they're falling us back or whatnot, because, you know, they literally followed some of his planes back in. And some of his planes haven't even arrived back yet from Midway. So he ends up deciding, oh, and also the USS Nautilus, one of the subs we had in the area, ends up surfacing like back behind his battle group.

This is fantastic. And so now he's like, oh, shit, like, now I got subs around me. So he's like, okay, we got a bomb the, we got a, we got a, rearm and try to bond the airfield. Well, when the Nautilus popped up and it fired the torpedo, it actually distracted them enough that they sent one of their carriers back

after the... Not a carrier, it was a destroyer. Or a destroyer back after the submarine... You've got to chase this thing off. And that's going to come into play huge. So he decides to launch another strike against Midway. Well, 13 minutes after he makes that decision, a Japanese scout plan

that they launched, finds 10 American ships. He finds task force one. So I think that is, that's Yorktown. I'm gonna fucking cough again. So we had Midway launched their first attack

and now we've just spotted the Strike Force 1. So Midway was kind of Strike Force Zero. Now they've seen Strike Force 1. We have more coming. Yes. So basically he's like,

okay, fuck, I just got report. There's a carrier in the area now. He's like, stop arming the bombs, launch anything that's currently carrying a torpedo. Anything that's currently able to go and ship to ship combat, launch that.

And he also never gave them how many boats there were too, right? He said a group of 10 ships, which was probably the, it was probably the Yorktown and then its carrier force. So it's, you know, cruisers or whatever surrounding it, because they're in like one battle group.

And the Japanese didn't count on Yorktown being back out there. No, but they didn't get close. enough to know it was Yorktown. They would only know, like, the only time that they would find out what ships there are is if someone could get close enough. Because some of the ships, like the Japanese ships, they were pretty similar the way they looked, but size-wise, and they would have different markings or structure. They could tell from a distance what that might be. But for American aircraft carriers, you know, you've always seen, like the big numbers on the side or on the flight deck.

That's how the Japanese would keep track. So they didn't get close enough at this point to tell that was Yorktown. and they also, as soon as he saw that, I don't know if he turned back or not, but they didn't see Task Force 2, which would be the other two carriers. So they just thought it was one at this point. Yeah, they had no idea that we got the Yorktown back in.

So the two carriers that he saw, he thought those were the only two carriers. Yeah. So at this point, too, Task Force 2, Enterprise and Hornet, they launch 116 planes, combination of fighters. They have their combat air patrol as well, staying over the carriers,

torpedo bombers and dive bombers. and then the Yorktown's kind of getting ready to prepare hers to launch. So you know I was telling you about the pit crew thing? So the Japanese were able to launch 108 planes in seven minutes. 1807 minutes. It took the Enterprise and Yorktown an hour to launch her about the same amount. So that just tells you how the discrepancy between how quickly these operations are run. But one of them was much cleaner than the other one.

Correct. As far as like safety precautions. Yes, 100%. Japanese decided that as they were switching things out, they weren't stacking their bombs back to where they needed to be in their safe arms. Back in the armored magazines and everything like that. Everything just got left on the flight decks when they were doing all this. So all the explosive stuff is left in open air.

Fuel hoses all over the decks. So Nagumo gets confirmation at this point. Again, Nagumo is the leader of the carrier force. So he gets confirmation at this point of at least one U.S. carrier in the area. but he can't do anything until he has his bombers on their way back from Midway. So he can't do anything because he has to keep the flight decks clear to retrieve the bombers before he can then push out die bombers and fighters and stuff to go after. So 820 is when he gets confirmation.

He hasn't received his bombers back until 917. which probably felt like forever. Oh my God. Now, also Yamamoto, again, he's like 500 miles back. Yeah, he gets the same... Third wave. Yeah. And he's allowing everything to play out and everything.

He doesn't communicate with Nagumo or anything like that, but he gets the same report of the U.S. carrier. So he knows that shit, they already had something here in the... Like, right when our attack happened, they knew about this. But he's like... Our doctrine states to do this. this and this and this. I think they trusted that so much that, you know, I kind of wonder if their

military style or their naval style was set up that they were like, this is rigid and practiced so much that the likelihood of failure is so small that we're not going to make any consideration to change or tweak ideas. There's no plan B. There's no plan B because plan A is so effective, but what happens is if someone finds if your plan is then overlaid with the enemy plan that you didn't know about, I think that's where it crumbled. Yeah, well, if you only have Plan A and somehow you accidentally told them what Plan A was, you're just going to have to keep leaning into Plan A. And hope that your Plan A is stronger than their Plan A, which in this situation, you know, comes to be it wasn't.

But so he ends up, so Nagumo gets all his bombers back at 917, and he points his fleet, all four aircraft carriers. They start kind of moving toward the mayor. They move a little bit. So they start moving toward like the American, where they think the American fleet is. And American die bombers from Hornet appear over the Japanese fleet, and all 15 of them are shot down.

Just torn apart again. Yes, because it's fifth, it's not like, and this is the advantage and disadvantage, you launch a fleet like the Japanese do, you have so many planes that they overwhelm the combat air patrol and the inner aircraft and something slips by. All they need is one or two planes

to slip by to sink. carrier. Yeah, you can point it 15 planes at once. If there's 20 planes, that's five other planes that are going to be laying seed. And then all of a sudden you send in just 16 planes and every fighter escort with that carrier group is like on those 16 planes and for you to even get a chance you get through them now what's your chance of getting through the inner aircraft fire? So all of those guys get shot down and I'm losing my place here. There we go. Oh, sorry, all 15 of those guys are shot down. Two more American groups.

I can't remember the amount of the planes. They find the fleet and only six planes return. So I think if it was two groups and you figure maybe like 10, 10 or 15 apiece, still only six guys make it back from there. No hits. 1020, the Japanese fleet. So two hours after he gets confirmation about the carrier, the Japanese fleets refueled, rearmed with ship to ship stuff.

At this point, too, Japanese. plan A still stronger than America's new plan. Yeah, I mean, at this, at this point, the Japanese were like, nothing has even touched us. We've made it through, like, we've been at our most vulnerable right now without any planes launched and they haven't gotten anything through. As much as those guys didn't do any, those three squadrons, the 15 that were all shot down and then the other two groups were only six made it back. What they did, though, can't go and notice because once you get attack planes coming

in, the ships have to start taking evasive maneuvers and moving and turning side to side to avoid bombs, torpedoes, things like that. Well, you can't launch or be on the flight deck trying to do stuff if your ship is rocking back and forth. So once you're engaged, you're engaged. And that's why it also took him so long, you know, two hours from the time he gets confirmation. These ships are all getting shot down and aren't scoring hits, but they're keeping this fleet off balance and not being on to launch or retrieve planes and refuel and rearm. So it's buying additional time. well, just as all of these planes are on the flight deck ready to launch toward the American group, 26 die bombers come over in surprise attack. Now, these 26 were the first group launched off of Enterprise at 7 o'clock that morning.

So three and a half hours later almost, they find the group. Is that C Wade? That was Wade McCluskey. So Wade McCluskey was the commander of this air group from the Enterprise. and they went on a bearing. If you're looking at it for like a clock, basically they went, you know, if they're coming straight across at nine o'clock

to go after the carrier fleet, they kind of went at like a eight o'clock. Sort of right direction, just coordinate. They had a bad bearing, or they might have had the bearing before the fleet turned toward the American fleet and started going. So they're running low on gas.

And when they say they're running low on fuel, what I mean is their fuel, when they say we're running low on fuel, it means we've factored in, how much fuel we need to make it back and land on the carrier. So we're getting low to the point of we need either shit or get off the pot. Almost a half. Yep.

And while they're looking around, they're seeing nothing but open water. And Wade McCluskey's like, let's turn a little bit. Let's keep doing a little bit of search. This is so awesome. And as fucking luck would have it, they spot one destroyer. And it's the destroyer that had to hang back from the fucking carrier group and try to get rid of the Nautilus and scare it off, which the not, they unsuccessfully. No, they still didn't hit the submarine.

Nope, they tried to, I think they tried to depth charge it and they unsuccessfully. Yeah. So they catch this destroyer who, after scaring the suboff is like, I got to get back to the action and fucking haul's ass toward the carrier fleet. All McCluskey's group does is they're like, let's follow this and see where it leads. They follow this guy right into the Japanese carrier fleet, catch them completely off guard him because they're coming. from a different direction. They're almost coming from like, at this point, south, almost kind of a little southwest.

You're sneaking up on them. Coming from behind. Well, what happened is all these combat air patrol planes that got sent out to take on these groups, these three other groups that came in, they were all coming in kind of like from the east. So you had them going out to try to meet them. All these planes were out of position

when these 26 guys show up. Yeah. So between these 26 planes, McCluskey and his like two or three wingman or his air group. It was more than two or three guys. They end up going on Caga and dropping nine bombs on Caga. One of them hits a fuel truck right near the bridge and takes out the entire command staff and that the nine hits completely takes the Cogga out of commission.

The things on fire from, that's one thing. These things catch on fire. And because of all the gas and the weapons and everything that's stored in the flight deck below, the main launch deck, all that stuff explodes. And everything that they didn't get off the launch deck, all explodes even easier. And not to mention, the Japanese were so, I guess, proud of their heritage that they painted the rising sun on it. It wasn't the flight deck where they had painted it.

It was. It was the flight deck. I thought it was more towards the bridge. No, there was a couple of them because I'll talk about Richard Best here in a second. So I think where they usually put it was like If you were divide the flight deck up into thirds It would have been in the last third down the flight deck But they might have had one on both sides

But basically think of it this way The whole point of With the die bombers Is these things are up high altitude And when they come down to dive at the carriers It's not vertical It's damn near vertical To the point where

You know I don't know if this really happens but like I've seen stuff like in movies and media. It's kind of cool to see these guys cruising along in these planes at high altitude with the fucking canopy slid back. Yeah. And then all of a sudden, dive bomb time, canopy goes forward and it's literally stick goes all the way forward. And these things almost go. Altimeter just starts spinning.

Yep. And the whole point of the dive bombing was the fighters couldn't go with them. Yeah. The fighters couldn't dive to chase them to take them on. Also, if you're shooting up trying to shoot. it's something. The chances of you passing the round on the way down or passing through it's so much harder to hit. Yeah. Because

you're shooting at a straight on surface as opposed to a flat surface. Or trying to lead it or something like that. There's no way to really lead it. And so McCluskey's air group, nine of them I think dive on Caga, terror up. And then

part of his other group Dick Best and his two wingmen, they see, they were all going to go at Caga, the whole air group. There wasn't really need. There wasn't good communication. They see McCluskey's group go after it, peel off, and they end up going after a coggy. And out of Best and his two wingmen, best hits it. And one hit, if you can get the right hit, we'll do all you need.

Tons of damage. So he ends up hitting it, and he drops his bomb through. He catches either the seam of the elevator or part of a weak part of the elevator, drops the bomb through the elevator into the hangar where it's just completely surrounded with armed and refueled aircraft waiting to launch. And it just creates explosion, tears the ship apart. The thing is, too, is like, with all of their fuel hoses, the gas vapor just builds up. It may not be on fire at that point, but all it takes is a sparker to travel.

And their fire suppression systems just couldn't handle it. They got overwhelmed. They ended up, it was like a bucket brigade at the end where guys were getting burned because they were trying to put it out that way. Yeah, just the whole idea of them painting the rising sun so close, it was just almost like they were giving you a target to hit when you're coming in from the top. And so I think it was best that they were talking about. He was looking directly down.

It might have been McCluskey. But one of them had said they were looking straight down with their binoculars, and they saw an explosion hit like 20 or 30 feet before the rising sun that was painted on there. And he just decided that it was good enough. Like he literally almost hit the target that they had laid out on there, but it was just mass destruction where it hit. Oh, yeah. And so ends up also the Soryu, so the four carriers,

I didn't go through the carrier name, sorry. The four carriers there for the Japanese are the Akagi, the Kaga, the Hirae, and the Sauru. So the Sour You also ends up taking about three dive bomb hits when fighter and bombers from the Yorktown actually arrive. this is in the quarter from the time that the Dauntless is first come over at McCluskey's group

it's about five to ten minutes it's just so fast and what you said it was about two hours that he was waiting for the planes to get back before he could launch again launch and then refuel and get them ready to launch again as the full strength wave so how precious is that two hours

when this is all happening in a matter of five minutes like the guys that came through and ended up getting shot down and everything like that, they got no hits, they were still setting them back every time they would come through and those ships had to go into evasive maneuvers. That was the time that it bought,

McCluskey's group to find it, the Yorktown's other group to come in. And the other thing too is when McCluskey's group came in and Dick Best, you know, went off to go ahead and bomb the Kagi, all those fighters then had to abandon that section where the Yorktown's fighters or bombers were coming in, try to get McCluskey's group off.

And it just, it was the, they said it was, the combination of three different groups coming in from three different altitudes from three different directions, it was the most perfect thing that could have happened during this battle. If you think about it, kind of the way that I broke it down was it's almost like you have these beehives as these carriers and you have these rogue bees that are out trying to defend the hive from one side and then another faction of murder hornets or whatever is coming in from the other side.

So then you have to switch it. but the bees that are all flying around as the planes have to keep trying to protect the different ships and the different carriers and hides and where the other murder horns keep shown up from other different directions and everything so at this point three of the four japanese carriers are completely on fire and inoperable that's so awesome the only one that's still left is to hear you and because the akagi was nagumo's flagship and it was out of commission another one of the ships in his carrier group comes up he transfers his command flag over to it and he um radios yamamoto about the situation so he has to call yamemoto and be like hey um no i haven't talked to you in a bit just a heads up three of our carriers are down status report yeah exactly so at this point i want to say yamamoto turns toward nogumos fleet and tries to haul ass toward nigumos fleet because at this point he knows that there's a carrier group and i think really his only saving grace at this this point is he's like, I have to try to get there. I don't know if he expects to get there before the hear you gets hit, but his position is, I can't let this be a total bust. I need to try to at least take out the carrier that's taking out mine. If we can say the here you, at least we save one. Yeah, that or I think on the other side of it, he's like, even if they take that out,

if I can go take out the one or now, maybe they're aware that there's multiple because of all the planes. Maybe they're aware that there's multiple carriers. He's like, I got at least take out some of this because the whole point of you know i think in his mind he knew because he had also i think yama moored also studied in america for for a brief period he he knew the industrial capacity of the united states and his whole point of trying to go ahead and take out the american carrier group was he knew that it wasn't going to you know be the end-all be all for american carriers he knew that other ones we were going to get more carriers in the area what he was basically trying to do is say, if we can take theirs out

and we still have our 6 or whatever, we can keep building ours, but at the same time, we have so much strength that we can reinforce all our positions that by the time American forces get back up to strengthen the Pacific, we're already so fortified that they can't challenge us. They have to come to us with a treaty

to try to keep it. That's exactly what it was. And so the here you is the only carrier left and launches like 18 die bombers, six fighters, and they're met by American fighters coming on the way out, they end up taking out 10, which seems pretty good. Yeah. Yeah, out of the 24 that are there, they take out 10.

So 14, though, get through. They get through the Yorktown's screening force, and they end up hitting, I think, Yorktown once or twice. Die bombers do. They were pretty big hits, though, weren't they? It was damaged, but they said it was still functional. Like the Yorktown, it was, I'm trying to remember. I don't know if they, there was something about the Yorktown for legend is just like it just wouldn't die.

Yeah. Because what ended up happening is the Yorktown gets damaged. The exact same thing happens just a little while later where planes from the hear you come through. They're met with an American screening force. They take out a few. And they come in and hit the Yorktown again. But what happened is the reason they hit the Yorktown again is the fucking, they weren't fire crews. they were the like the C-Bs, the engineer,

the engineering corps that would help repair stuff and everything like that. They were so fucking good. They got the Yorktown, all the fires out and got it back up to like speed, no list or anything like that, and made it look like it was a fully operational carrier again. So when the Japanese came over and didn't see it on fire or anything like that, they're like, fuck, it's another carrier. We got to hit it.

Well, not to interrupt, but I think this was the one that they were talking about where they had such good technology that when they were filling planes they could actually cut off the flow of fuel to the different parts of the ship where they would do the refueling.

So if they... Or like the fire control systems for like the Americans, yes. So if they were to bomb an area where they would be like fueling station. They could pump like gas into other tanks like fuel even to counterbalance the shift and everything. The American like the control systems for like fire support and fire. They were really

good for the Americans. They just weren't as big as the Japanese ones. So if you could cut off the source of fuel for fires and things like that, obviously you can control. And not even that. That was, that was the whole thing that was standard procedure. Is like once you were done refueling, all of that stuff went back away. That's just what the Japanese at this point, they were in such a rush to launch. They had to thought about it. That stuff all fell kind of by the wayside of the rush. They were trying to launch before they got everything clear. And that just leaves tender to any fire that's going to be sad. Exactly. Yeah. So the Yorktown ends up taking two torpedoes. Pito hits and at that point the ship starts listing and I was trying to put my like close my eyes

and kind of imagine this. They said it started listing so much that the flight deck was almost touching the water and all I'm thinking of is like you're out in the middle of the ocean. You're a dude like it takes a special breed person I think to be a sailor or to be in the Navy just to be like I have this weird thing about open water. I don't like it. No. It scares me. But to be out there in the middle of the ocean and you're sitting on a ship where it's tilting so much that it's almost touching the water. And you're just like, so this thing's sinking? Like, what are we doing here?

While you're still trying to do your job. Oh, yeah. And so the order is issued at that point to abandon ship. Now, abandoned ship, kind of contrary maybe to some belief, doesn't mean that the ship is just like doomed and they're just leaving it. What they're basically doing is they're getting one, everyone off the ship that they have to, like flight crews, everyone that can't assist it.

And then they get mechanics and people in there to start pumping out water in sealing breaches to try to save the ship. And that's exactly what they do. They pull up a ship next to the Yorktown. I think they almost start immediately in trying to repair it after the torpedo hits and they get the crew to abandon ship. So because, though, the Yorktown was the flagship for Spruance, what he ended up doing is he transfers over to another ship in his and he actually passes on command to Fletcher.

I think at that point, his determination to do that was he was no longer in charge of the air groups because now his fighters and planes from Yorktown they were going to have to come back and land on Enterprise. Yeah, he couldn't land or launch off of Yorktown. So he was like, you're going to take over because you got a better seat for this. You can command it a lot

better. So at that point Fletcher's like, fuck yeah, we're taking out the last carrier and he basically rounds up and says, hey, anybody want to, any of you dive bombers want to go out and take another crack at this. And so guys that had just come back, made it back through all that shit and everything like

that, they get 26 dudes to go back out. I'm sure they're adrenaline at that point. Oh, sorry, not, no, no, no, sorry, not 26. 40 dudes. Okay, yeah, that's, that's more. Oh, sorry, my bad. 80 dudes, two per plane. But still, that's 80 guys that are like, we're volunteering to go back out, and we just made it through hell. That's 80 raging boners that are all getting back on planes. Because you saw what you just did. Could you

imagine just the rush of adrenaline that you would have at that point? Especially any of the guys, any of the guys that were like, had hit a previous carrier, like, I get to try to hit another one. Yeah. Like, when has this ever happened? This has never happened in the history of the world. Your dopamine sensors are going crazy. You're looking for that next thing because you just saw the kind of destruction you did.

So the other kicker was this. They told them they're like, just so you guys know, you're also going without fighters. We're not sending fighters with you because we're keeping all our fighters here to protect the carriers. So there's no cover. No cover. So they're like, okay, fire them up. They launched these 40 cover or 40 dauntless dive bombers without fighters. They find an attack the horror or hear you.

And Dick Bess scores another hit to put the carrier out. And this is the one I think they were saying that he hits. He describes. And there's an awesome book. I can't remember what the name of it is. It's on my phone. I was an audio book I listen to. They talk it.

They also have information from the Japanese perspective. And they talk about the guys that were on the deck of the hear you. And he's like, we were trying to get planes landed, get them ready and everything. And all of a sudden you hear the engine wind up sound. And one of the guys, he's like, one of the lookout screamed hell divers, because that's what they used to call the dauntless is. They called them hell divers. And he's like, we looked up and someone yelled hell divers. And he's like, we saw three.

Oh, actually, this, sorry, I might be misquoting. This is from when Dick Best hit the first one. Hit the Akagi. Hiz the Akagi. And he's like, we shouted hell divers. And he's like, we knew there was nothing we could do. They were screaming down at us. And he's like, and then the most eerie thing happened is we saw these little black things float from underneath the belly of the airplane and just floated gently in the air.

And as the airplane pulled up, you saw just go through the flight deck and explode. But it's so crazy just to hear from that perspective. We're feeling in the world. You're listening to the best broadcasts of them hitting. and knowing it from your angle, and then you're listening to the absolute, like, horrible nature of knowing that this bomb is just hitting you

and there's nothing you can do. I know. So he's the only guy in history to ever score two hits on a carrier. I don't know if that's during... I would imagine probably during... No, I mean, I'm sure somebody else hit different carriers, but during one battle.

He's the first guy to hit. And kind of a... A sad note on that for what he did during that mission, during Midway. flown before he'd been a successful pilot before but he got a bad batch of um oxygen because you know they had their flight mask and they had oxygen yeah but what happened is something about like co2 scrubbers or something like that or they were using you know it was back in world war two so they're using

dangerous chemicals to try to do something that they thought was useful something about like it ended up creating in his filtration system something called caustic fumes and so he was breathing in almost toxic stuff so he was like coughing as a lot as a lot of He was just burning his lungs. And he still, and so he got medically retired actually after midway. So that was his last, what a fucking way to go out.

Well, and our other guy, McCluskey, the one that followed the destroyer, when he got back, he said that they were taking fire and didn't know. Was he shot?

He got shot through the shoulder. That's right. He went head to head. I think he was going to head to head with the zero shooting directly at each other going straight. And he took one through the shoulder, yeah.

And that's why he, that's why he couldn't go out with the 40 group. When they landed the plane, they counted 55 bullet holes in his plane. That's what I'm saying, man, is the American planes, especially like the dive bombers, they were slow and everything,

but that's what they were made to do. The zeros were so fast because they were so light, but they were so fragile. But these things, I mean, they got reports of, like, guys coming back missing, like half of a wing or, like, tail rudders and so like that. They said some of these things were just tanks

and they would just absorb punishment, get people home sick. That's why I love these guys. even though they complained about like getting like, you know, being slow and everything like that. They're like these things are just bullet sponges. Yeah. If a plane can get shot 55 times and one of the crew can be shot like that and still make it home and make it back alive. It sucks that.

You got it 55 times, but you're still alive. Yeah. And in his situation, he got hit 55 times and only got hit himself one time. All right, man. I got to go pee, but I still got some stuff on this. Yeah, me too. all right back at it all right do you have anything before i close my eyes and zone back out no my i got one guy that i kind of want to talk about please please do okay so we were talking about

how great best was and just the fact that he had those two hits and just how awesome it was what do you before you go into that what do you think i think we lose especially people that have never, you know, served or been in combat or anything like that or, but like, I'm trying to think how best to, I guess best to say this, but really, it probably also helps when you've been smoking to think about this, but you're, you're in like a completely mechanical device that you're flying a plane, you know, like those planes at those times. You're flying out just over complete open ocean and all you're flying by a sight. That's how you have to find the enemy first of all is by sight.

At that point then, your job is to get high as fuck, get over an aircraft carrier, and then point your nose down and speed toward this thing as fast as your plane will go without breaking up. And then you have to get like, here's the thing, these are not like guided torpedoes or guided, you know, bombs or anything like that. They are. They're human guided, though. That's what I mean. It is literally just something that you drop and all it has on it is fins to.

stabilize and make sure that the boom part gets pointed down, you have to get so close to these carriers. And these things are not just sitting still in the water, hoping for you, you know, waiting for you to go ahead and drop on top of it. These things are going side to side, take an evasive action as you speed toward this at hundreds of miles an hour. And you have to wait for the right second, pull a lever, pull the thing up to hit it, and then crank the shit out of the stick to try to level off. And then guess what? Your job's not done

because guess where you're at? You're in the middle of this convoy where there's still fighters around. They're still ship shooting at you and you have to try to even after that point get out of there. Well, one thing that I found

just really interesting was I think it was McCluskey that was talking about. It may have been somebody else. But they said during peacetime training, they would be able to drop on these dives. And I think they said that their drop point was 1,500 feet going straight down.

They would drop 1,500 feet above where they were. But in wartime, they were going down to 1,000 feet. Now, granted, going that fast, 500 feet doesn't seem like a whole lot. It's nothing. But when it's a third of the distance that you're supposed to be dropping at, you have 500 less feet to be able to then pull the yoke and pull it all the way back to pull out of that dive. If they're dropping at a thousand, that requires you to be positioned in that situation at a thousand feet. They're not pulling up and then launching at the same time.

And then think of how tall also you're subtracting the amount if you're flying from the back of the carrier. Their preferred method, but I assume would go from the back of the carrier to the front because then they have more of a width to hit. You have more room to play with it. Yeah, exactly. So take into account the height of the height of the carrier. carrier too if you're trying to pull up over the carrier or something like that it's just the G's too that they're this helped me explain G's now I understand what it means when somebody says geez G's just the nether earths one G is like the double amount of body weight yeah you have at that time

so if you're pulling three Gs you have to be able to pull back on that yoke hard enough and and hope to God that all of the mechanical shit in there is going to take the stress of the wind trying to in the force trying to pull your fucking plane up. And if you got shot 50 times before that, you have to count on each one of those bullet holes, not hitting something crucial. A cable or something like that. Yep. Or your fuel tank and hoping you have enough fuel to get home and you're not ditching in the water.

It's just such a wild, we talked about like the, uh, the kamikaze pilots. This was basically kamikaze minus the not living to see the end of it. This was kamikaze up until a thousand feet and then you had to pull back as hard as you could. Dude, I had the exact same thought. When I was trying to figure this out, I was like, that's exactly, that's the only difference. These dive bombers were the Comacazis just went a thousand feet too much. That was their goal. These guys were basically doing the exact same thing at Kamikaze.

They were just pulling up and living to tell about it. Praying to whatever you believed in. So who was the guy you were talking about? So this guy, out of all the seats, they did the Midway movie and all that. And you could sit in the theater, I'm sure, in IMAX and watch it. It was probably the best seat in the house. This man had the best seat in maybe all of history. So this guy named George H.G. Jr. was a pilot in the first attack, one of the failures.

He was shot down and he abandoned plane and landed in the Pacific and sat there and floated in the middle of the battlefield and watched overhead as all these planes came in to attack the Japanese fleet. he sat in the water and survived watching all these bombings happen and all the Japanese carriers getting hit and then live to tell about it what do you fuck I'm trying to like I want to throw myself into that mindset so bad and even try to feel what that's like you have to be fucking terrified

oh yeah just sitting in the middle of not only the middle of the fucking ocean tread and water he I think they probably had life jack yeah but like but you're floating there in the middle of the enemy fleet, but like when you see your guys, you have to feel terrified because you just got shot down and you're probably like, this is hopeless. But then all of a sudden, within the course of like a few minutes, everything around you is just exploding and it's the good stuff that's exploding. Like the can, like what are you scared? But

all of a sudden you just have the like, you're the happiest you've ever been. I would assume you probably realize at some point that you're out of the, anti-aircraft fire because you're below the waterline. You're not a threat. But everybody else that's firing from above coming down, you're still just a sitting duck sitting there because you have all the dog fights that are going on in the air. So you could catch an air bullet at any time. At the same time, you get to see exactly like the Japanese guy was talking about on the plane, seeing that, what'd you call him the death? Hell divers. Hell divers. You're seeing it happen, but you're seeing it happen from a vantage point to where you're seeing it happen over the

ships and not over you. And those are all your boys that are dropping those bombs. I know. Just imagine you're sitting there and you're facing one carrier. And again, they're pretty, these carriers are pretty spaced out. Yeah. But I think at this point, too, they were probably, you could probably catch sight on the horizon. You have a full field of vision.

Yeah. So imagine you're focused on something going on one and you see flames and explosions happen. And you're just cheering. And then all of a sudden you hear sound behind you, you turn around and there's another explosion going on. And then you turn around in another direction. And there's a third one. And you're just like, thank God somebody hit him.

Yeah. You're just so excited seeing all this happen around you while still knowing that there's a minute chance, but there's still a good chance that you're going to catch an errant bullet or something that's going to end your day. Well, what ends up happening? And he ends up living? He lived through it. I'm pretty sure he lived through it. I would love to do. Does he have a book?

Even if he just wrote like a little short story about just what that was like sitting in the water. I mean it doesn't have his death so maybe oh yeah no he died yeah he died in 1994 so he lived through it so he yeah he had to have a book all right while you're looking at tons of awards he got the purple heart presidential citations god that story alone yeah dude you could sell a million bucks all right so what ends up happening as a result so the guys that ended up successfully uh bombing to hear you they come back i think at this point it's actually getting kind of dark And so what ends up happening is Fletcher orders his carriers. Because he knows that his planes are also going to be coming in low on fuel,

he orders his carriers forward to be able to retreat them easier. I think he even turns on his searchlights, which is a huge no-no. Because at night, you're basically just advertising where you are, yeah. And you can't see enemies come. Well, I mean, radar will pick them up, but you can't see them. But also the big thing, too, is that how Yamamoto would start bringing its battleships up, the Japanese were famous for night fighting. They were the experts at ship.

to ship nighttime fighting. And so Fletcher's like, he knows they just put four aircraft carriers out of commission. I think the quote was, we won a great victory today. I'm not going to do anything to ruin it. So as soon as he's able to retrieve his planes,

he ends up hauling ass out of there with the Hornet and the Enterprise. The Yorktown at that point, they had kept her and reduced her list, and they were getting ready to tow her, another destroyer pulled up next to us to plug in and supply her power. And they were getting ready, I think, to pull her.

A Japanese submarine got through the picket line while all this was going on and launched a torpedo. And I want to say the torpedo hit the destroyer because it broke the destroyer in half. So it would have had to hit that side. And then damaged the Yorktown enough that it had to be scuttled and left and it sunk the. It served its purpose. And I'm sure hopefully they got as many people off of it by then as possible. Everyone had already been off of it. And by that time, it didn't go down quick.

They just determined that, like, the damage that received from that set back enough for the repairs that they didn't have time to re-repair it. Well, and it was just a shield at that point. So good that it hit that, that one. The fact that it hit that and that sub didn't try to get the, you know, try to find the Hornet or the Enterprise. I mean, that pretty much was the shield for the entire fleet. Use that.

But so kind of the end result of what ends up happening is the Americans pull out of the system, not the system, it's not Star Wars. They end up pulling out of the area. I've been watched a lot of Star Wars. I'm sorry. They end up pulling out of the area. And yeah, so Yamamoto comes into where I think the carriers were, or maybe he gets close. Enough ships from the carrier groups for the Japanese were all picking up survivors and everything like that. Did the, did your boy get picked up and held captive by the Japanese or did the Americans find him? Um, because I know they probably did a lot of, uh, scout, scouting flights after that from Midway, once the Japanese had left the area to search for down pilots. Look that up. I'm going to go in a little bit more. Just the end result. Okay. Okay. Okay. End result happens. Four Japanese carriers sunk. 2,900 Japanese casualties and 294 planes were lost compared to the Americans. One carrier, the Yorktown.

703 casualties and 103 planes lost. Did you find it? Yeah. So this ties in so great to what you talked about. So it says, as he was exiting his aircraft and floating in the ocean, he hid underneath his seat cushion for hours to avoid Japanese strafing attacks

and witness subsequent dive bombing and attacks just like we talked about and the sinking of three of the four Japanese aircraft. After dark, Gay felt it was safe to inflate his life raft. He was then ready to. rescued by a Navy consolidated Catalina. Yeah, those things were bad. As somebody looked that up, it's cool.

The plane, it, yeah. He spent over 30 hours in the water. Gay was later flown to the USS Vincenis, bad pronunciation, I'm sure, for being transferred home. The squadron's 30 pilots and radio man, Gay was the only survivor. That's so cool.

So some longerstanding things. again, from this battle, this is the turning point. Literally, for me, there might be, you know, there might be other differing opinions, but for me, this is literally the turning point of the Pacific War. It was a midway point. It was the tied turning.

And what ended up happening is, kind of as an end result of this, and what led to the decline also, because the Japanese never had carrier strength like this again, and part of the reason for that is they got to a point also where they used their carriers almost as decoys or bait just to try to draw enemy forces out to sink them.

They didn't really have any strength to them or anything like that. And the reason for that is, is the Japanese lost a ton. Not just of pilots, but the air crews and the mechanics. They were all on these ships that died in explosions and everything like that. A lot of guys made it off these carriers, but I mean, when you see like the numbers of casualties, these are all guys that just got torsster incinerated

during these explosions that got copular decks. And not to mention all the pilots in the air that launched off of these carriers, the carriers weren't there to receive them again. So they had nowhere else to land.

There were two light carriers in someone's fleet. Oh, okay. And so I think they could probably retrieve some planes and everything like that. I think at the same time if the Japanese,

it was practiced and I don't know this had to been terrifying doing it. I don't think it was actually practiced, but I think there was instruction on how to do it. planes knew how to land in the water and ditch. And so I think they would get close to like a ship

and planes would just have a designated area to lay down in the water and then bail out. Come and get picked up. Exactly. I think that happened quite a bit. But they still couldn't replace the losses of all those. I mean, four of those carriers had so many pilots and air crews that trying to then replace those,

they didn't have the training capabilities to do that. No, and it was such a, like we talked about, in the beginning. It was such a regimented training program that they went through if you didn't have the means of planes to train new people or any sort of... Well, now you also don't have experienced pilots

to teach incoming pilots their skills. Now you have experienced American pilots going up against inexperienced. It's a complete flip-flop. It used to be during the very start you would have experienced pilots going against inexperienced American pilots. And it flipped to the point where during kind of some of the later engagements, there's

one that's the Battle of the Mariana Trench and they called it, no, what was it called? Battle of the Philippine Sea, sorry. And it was near the Mariana Trench, I think is why they called it, but they called it the great Mariana Turkey shoot because the losses for the Japanese for pilots,

it ended up coming out to like five to one on the American losses. The pilots were so inexperienced that the Americans said one of the guys was like, it's just like a good old-fashioned turkey shoot back home. They were just knocking these guys out of the air. So, you know, I think that was, you know, definitely in my opinion, the turning point for it. Well, not a whole lot of this account of Madeway really made it back to the Japanese mainland, did it?

No, I think the Japanese, I'm wondering if they called it, I don't know if they went full North Korea and called it a victory. But I think they maybe said that they had, they reported on the American carriers. sunk, maybe one of theirs damaged or something like that. But no, for the most part, for the out the entire war, the main Japanese populace had no idea. They knew if it was going good. And I don't think they ever received any indication it was going poor. So they believed it was going well the entire time, regardless of if their families kept getting asked to recruit or people getting pulled out of it and constricted in the service. Jesus.

But like, yeah, like, I don't know, man. Like that's that's all like the facts and the story and just all the pieces that had to come together, the luck. And I don't, I don't know. This kind of just sounds completely counter to what I'm about to say. But I don't necessarily really believe in coincidence. I don't necessarily really believe in a higher power guiding things. I don't necessarily believe in fate or karma or anything like that. but I 100% agree that dumb luck is just a thing.

Oh, yeah. Like, there may not be so many forces at work. Ghosts, not, you know, not real big on that. But there is something to life when you just see so many of these different things that happen just out of happenstance, just out of, the guys that you were talking about, the stars. The stars align for you. Yeah. The intelligence branch putting out just a plan. as day in English no encodement or anything like that saying hey we're running low on potable water here in the midway and the Japanese jumping on it and not thinking this could be some sort of a trap like they've been sending coded messages left and right but somehow this one comes through clear as day like the luck that it takes for that to happen because if they didn't know I mean I'm sure they probably would have sent probably more cover for midway even if they weren't sure that AF was midway.

But just the sheer luck of the confirmation that they got is the reason why they were ready for this whole entire thing. Well, and, you know, the Japanese even tried to kind of back themselves up on this. And it's something that I miss talking about in the beginning. But they had this whole plan set up at the very beginning of this that they were going to, they launched an attack actually a smaller force on the Aleutian Islands up in Alaska, that Alaska island. And what their plan was is they were going to launch that. Yeah, they launched that.

And it was supposed to be, it was a completely diversionary force. So it was supposed to draw some of the American forces up there. And then what would happen is when it drew them up there, they could engage and do whatever and try to weaken the American forces. And then that would even weaken them more so for Midway. But because they knew that the Aleutian Island campaign from the Japanese was part of their diversion, they sent just a like a smaller force that was just able to. to kind of keep them busy. Well, not to sound culturally inappropriate, but what in the fuck are a bunch of Japanese people going to do in the Aleutian Island?

They thought that it would be strategically important because if they could be in that position, it would give them some type of range to either hit like mainland Alaska, like Juneau in that area, or they could even actually come down and maybe hit Seattle. There's just nothing there, though. There's a base. But it's so cold. I know. And if they don't get that foothold with one carrier,

I know. But the whole thing is, I don't know if they even really intended to stay there. Maybe it was just them thinking, like, we can attack here because maybe the Americans think that this is important and they'll send some people up. It was their diversionary. It was, but it was a god-awful diversionary tactic. And who knows, having another carrier. It might be good if you don't know about it.

But when somebody knows about it, it kind of loses its effect. I just figure if, because I don't know how far away the Aleutian Islands are away from Hawaii or Pearl Harbor or anything like that. that, but it was just so far out into right field that it just didn't seem like it was going to do much. Like, oh, they're up in Alaska with one carrier. I know. What's going to happen? I know.

But at that point, maybe they thought we were so, because that's another thing, too. They thought that American morale was super low and we were, like, insanely desperate. Well, they misunderstood that everyone was just pissed off. Yeah. And ready to do something. Low morale, it was just desperation to. Well, that's what they thought it was. They thought we were going to be so desperate to try to.

to take out one of their carriers or do something, we would overcommit forces to do things. But again, this all goes back to the brains in the room and just understanding that, you know, the whole thing is, is this was won by literally everybody, everybody doing a little something outside the box. Rochefort and his team being able to have something in their brain that clicked and put those codes together to be able to decipher this. Rocheford being ballsy and sending out the signal the midway and determining what it was. McCluskey being like, you know what, guys, let's hold on for a few more minutes. I know it's risky.

We might run out of fuel, but what's that? Is that a fucking ship? Yeah, dude. Look, you're seeing just the water being parted. Not only that, but McCluskey had to be in that position at that time, and the Nautilus had to evade them for that amount of time to keep the ship in that area. And the Nautilus even had to be in that position to keep the ship. Like, everything, just falling into place.

And then being the first group in to cause the distraction to allow the other group to come in to go ahead and finish off the carrier. Like, yeah. All dumb fucking luck. And it's great that it turned out this way. Luckily, there's a lot of stories in America's history where it seems like luck was on our side. I'm sure there are. Somehow through all the not great things that America has done.

This is, they created as much of their own luck in this situation as possible and still got just some blind luck in this scenario. And we're able to win. If you set yourself up to be able to receive the luck that you get, you're going to be in just a far better situation. Yep. all right man you got anything else on it no i i know that this one was yours and i just kind of set back and let you go but it it's such an exciting story that and it's like i texted you earlier

in the week like this is the excitement in this whole thing is just tailor made for the plot of a movie i know it is they don't have to add shit i know they made that movie a couple years ago and it was one of those roland emmerich like disaster movies i think he did like day after tomorrow and And he always does like the worldwide disaster ones. But like I was thinking about this this morning before I came over. I was like this thing is so I wish there was more. I know there is interest in this. They always joke that like once you reach a certain age,

you got to have two interests. It's either World War II history or smoking meets. Have you heard that? No. Once you meet a certain age, those are your choices. But, you know, because a lot of these, for the most part, most of these people are gone, I think the scope and importance of this kind of history

definitely gets backseated to more, I don't know, just like, entertaining, entertaining, like, you know, topics. But the whole thing is, if they made a movie about this, like, it's like a fucking, it starts out as like a fucking underdog story. You know, we got punched in the teeth and, you know, Pearl Harbor. Then it becomes like a spy thriller about this guy who used to be in Japan. And then he came over and he's using his skills in the intelligence division.

And they crack the code. And then it becomes, in the third act, this huge action piece with just the battle and, you know, Dick Best flying in the second time to finish it and all these heroes. And fuck man, like,

why don't you have, there's no focus on the movie of the guy in the water. I think they might show a guy in a water at one point. Yeah. But just like, that guy, show from his point of view of those. You have a whole movie just in and of itself

right there. I know. It's just, it needs to be remade. It needs to be remade. It needs to be remade. Right. Or, man, This itself deserves a miniseries.

Yeah. Leading up to it and everything. Unfortunately, now I feel like the way that history is going to get passed on eventually, and this is just, I don't want to do a soapbox about the dumbing down of society or anything like that, but there's going to be a lot of this stuff moving forward away from World War I and World War II that some of the better accounts of historical accuracy is going to come from movies, and movies just aren't historically accurate. And it's a bummer that it happens that way.

I know. But it's because like situations like, what is this not entertaining enough? Yeah. Like I knew the Midway movie. It does focus on this and it does the code break and everything. But then they like shoehorn, you know,

you got a shoehorn, sure, eh, shoehorn the love story in there for some reason, even though it's not big, but like, this in itself, you don't need to embellish this.

This thing has everything. Yeah. How are you going to get a ship that was damaged? It was going to take three. plus weeks to fix up and running in 72 hours just to go out there as a skeleton of itself. I don't know what percent complete it was, but in 72 hours for that thing to be floatable and to be able to launch off again. And it led to, you know, one of the groups ended up destroying one of the Japanese aircraft

cars. Yeah, there's no hyperbole needed in that whole entire part of that. It's just, it's right there. Do you move on the Yorkdown. I, yeah, this whole thing was just awesome. There's some of the, obviously you're more gear towards a lot of World War II stuff. And I appreciate it because there's a lot of this stuff that flies kind of not within my radar. And so when you bring it up and I get to look into it, I'm just immediately like the first 10 minutes into a book, first 10 minutes into another podcast, the first 10 minutes into just a little bit of research or documentary.

I'm just immediately like, oh, shit, this is why he's into this. This makes total sense to me. and where you bring a lot of this stuff in, I feel like my brain works in a little bit different way towards like killers and cults and different things like that. I totally understand why you lock in on this stuff. Same thing. Like when we did the Library of Alexandria,

I've heard about it, I had known about it, but until I actually dove into it myself and really got the feeling for what it was, it just immediately becomes like, this is notable, this needs to be talked about, and it needs to be,

encapsulated in a better way than just a movie done by Christopher Nolan or anything like that. I think that's why I have so much fun with this. And I'm not going to say why we're so successful. I was going to say why this is for us, though. Like, I think the reason that, like, I enjoy doing this so much is that you have, like, a knowledge set that differs from mine. But when I start to study the stuff that you bring up and want to talk about, I'm like, yes, I can instantly see why this is interesting.

It just never, you know, you have your life. lanes and everything. And I'm like, I just never put my blinker on and turned it into this lane. But now that I'm in this lane, like, I want to talk about this and see how interesting this stuff is. So I think it's, I'd like the fact that we do compliment each other in that way. Yeah. Just away from this, I was thinking about it the other day. And we've known each other for 12 years at this point. And we still learn about each other almost every single week that we do this because of the things that we go into and the things that we check into. Like, it's just, it's a new way to see something completely different that you never would have thought of.

We're building our friendship. Absolutely. All right, guys. Hope you enjoyed the episode and hit us up and join us next week. Peace. All right, guys. Hey, thank you so much for making it through another episode and sticking with us. If you want to kind of follow up on the next upcoming episodes, get some teasers.

Adam, can they get us on the Twitter? You can get us on the Twitter. Our Twitter handle is historically high. That's historically H-I. Nice. And on the Instagram. Our Instagram is historically high pod. That's historically high P-O-D.

And what happens if your social media inept? If you have any issues where you can't figure out social media, our email is historically high podcast at gmail.com. We set up a landline. Just in case. You guys can go ahead and shoot us any question. comments or even maybe suggestions for future episodes, something you guys want to hear. Yeah, high thoughts, questions, anything like that.

We're always open. We'll always get back to you. Hell yeah, guys. See you on the next episode. Peace.