How did the US Navy win the Battle of Midway?

today we'll be covering the climactic Battle of Midway I'll be providing the maps and visuals as usual but we've got a special guest who'll be narrating the experience I'll let him take it away hello I'm Craig Simon's I'm the Ernest J King professor of maritime history at the u.s. Naval War College the Battle of Midway takes place in early June of 1942 and it's a critical moment because in the first six months of that war in the Pacific the Japanese have been having everything their own way Philippines of course had fallen they'd conquered the Dutch

East Indies things looked desperate for the Allied cause and Midway was critical because it turned that around it changed the momentum of the war the Japanese plan from the beginning was to conquer the resource base they needed to get the raw materials that would keep their industrial machinery working in Japan they were very low on iron and tungsten and oil in particular so having conquered that area in the South Pacific they wanted to set up a defensive perimeter that would force the United States to fight its way across the Pacific but to do that they

needed to get rid of the American carriers and the Japanese plan Yamamoto splen in particular was to create a strategic plan that would draw the American carriers out of Hawaii where they could be pounced upon and sunk by the Japanese carriers in deepwater where they could never be recovered that would give the Japanese an opportunity to solidify their resource base and defy the Americans to try to fight their way back across the ocean the Japanese had a very complicated plan for the Battle of Midway they divided their forces into at least five battle groups one

consisted of the submarines that were supposed to ambush the American carriers as they move their way north another consisted of the invasion force it was to land on Midway another consisted of the battleships but the critical aspect of it was the carrier group the four large carriers known as the Kido butai that was the key and Admiral Chester Nimitz knew it and therefore his goal was to ambush the Japanese carriers just as it was the Japanese goal to ambush the American carriers and what made the difference was the contribution of the America code breakers who

were able to tell Nimitz that this was likely to happen at about this time with about this many forces and about where it would happen the most secret organization in the United States Navy in 1942 was known as stationed hypo it was a group of rooms in the basement beneath the eleventh naval district headquarters building in on Oahu in Hawaii and it was run by a lieutenant commander named Joe Rochefort and their job was to get the raw data that was intercepted from the ether radio messages from the Japanese and attempt to Winkle some pieces

of useful intelligence and information out of those now a lot of people are aware that the Americans had broken the Japanese code by June of 1942 but that's a bit misleading because what we really were able to do was get just pieces of information the occasional word just glimpses of what might happen and it depended heavily on the analysis by Joe Rochefort and his team as to what that meant and they were able to tell Chester Nimitz in late May of 1942 that the Japanese seemed to be targeting Midway that they would be coming with

four possibly five aircraft carriers that they plan to capture the island and use it as a base perhaps as a bargaining chip and subsequent negotiations but because Nimitz knew they were coming he was able to organize his forces in such a way as to surprise the Japanese instead of the Japanese surprising the Americans the Americans would surprise the Japanese and it was the code breaking that did that maybe the most famous story about code breaking in the Battle of Midway is that Joe Rochefort was pretty certain that he knew what the target was that it

was the [ __ ] of Midway and he told Chester Nimitz that but he got pushback from Washington the bosses his intelligence bosses in Washington said well how sure are you it could be elsewhere it could be Samoa it could be New Caledonian it could be the west coast of the United States and what Rochefort sought to do was prove to them not to himself because he was pretty certain but he had to prove to them that Midway was the target and so what he did was by subterranean cable tell the people at Midway to

send a raid Oh signal back to Hawaii saying our saltwater distillers have broken down implying that we're running out of fresh water and then he waited and sure enough the Japanese intercepted that message and reported to Tokyo that Midway AAF the symbol for Midway was running short of water now Rushford had a smoking gun to prove that Midway was indeed the target knowing that the Japanese coming was critical but it was not entirely clear what Nimitz should do about that remember that the overall strategic plan for world war two was that the Allies would focus

on Germany first in addition to which a lot of the new construction combatant ships would not become available in the Pacific until 1943 so one option for Nimitz was simply to say well how important is Midway after all the carriers are far more important I don't want to risk my scarce carriers against a superior force I'm gonna let the Japanese have Midway and then later on when we're stronger we can take it back from them but he decided not to do that he believed that having the advanced information that they would come in and knowing

roughly where they would be gave him an opportunity he didn't want to let pass so he took his two available carriers and sent them up to a position interestingly enough called point luck to wait for the Japanese arrival and then his third carrier the Yorktown which had come limping back from the Battle of the Coral Sea trailing a 10-mile oil slick behind it with serious damage from the Battle of the Coral Sea he would patch that up quickly using scotch tape and baling wire just to hold it together long enough until I could get out

two-point luck and join those two carriers so we'd have three carriers against the Japanese four but he also had the island of Midway which is a fourth airplane platform so in his mind it was kind of even odds and having advance information and his belief in the superiority of American fighting man in American pilots that would make the difference because the Japanese did not know that the Americans were aware of their approach they believe that their attack on Midway Island their air attack on Midway Island would be the first time the Americans figured out that

there was a Japanese carrier force in the vicinity would make the American carriers leave Pearl Harbor and head north and they would be ambushed first by submarines then by carriers and then finished off by battleships but of course they didn't know that the Americans were already out of Pearl Harbor and north of the island of Midway so as treaty Nagumo the commander of the four carrier task force of the Japanese approached Midway he was waiting for the American carriers to come out he did send out search planes to look for them but didn't expect to

find them because he thought he knew where they were so he sent his planes to attack Midway surprisingly there were very few planes on Midway because they had already flown out to attack Nagumo's strike force because the primary target of this whole operation was to get the American carriers Midway being the bait not the object the carriers were the real object Nagumo's sent only half of his airplanes off to attack Midway Island keeping half of them back for when the American carriers showed up well the Japanese planes arrived over Midway and they bombed it pretty

badly but they reported back that a second strike would be useful so Nagumo's dilemma is how should he manage this should he launched his other half airplanes immediately to bomb Midway again and then recover the first strike coming back or should he wait and recover the first strike coming back and then send them off again and in the midst of trying to decide what to do about this he got a report from one of his search airplanes that there were Americans surface forces to the north of him well they didn't say what kind of surface

forces so the first thing Nagumo asks his pilot is ascertain ship types and he waited a rather critical 10 minutes for the answer to come back well it's cruisers and destroyers okay not too bad no carriers but he should have asked himself why were cruded and destroyers in an unusual position north of Midway Island if they weren't there to guard carrier which in fact they were it was a Yorktown carrier group and once he figured that out once he knew in a subsequent report from his scow plain that there was indeed a carrier out there

now his dilemma becomes even more complicated because his planes are returning from Midway the first strike group he's got the second strike group that has been armed with fragmentation bombs for a second strike on Midway and what he needs to attack carriers are armor-piercing weapons so does he take one kind of weapon off and put it on the plane does he wait and recover those planes and the third problem is his combat Air Patrol his fighter planes that have been protecting the task force they're getting low on fuel they need to land and Nagumo made

a critical decision this is what it was rather than go off half-cocked and send off some now and some later Japanese doctrine compelled him to hit them with the biggest hammer he had and that meant recovering the planes returning from Midway refueling rearming them with armor-piercing ammunition and then sending everything off the torpedo planes the bombers the fighters all in a coordinated strike to get those American carriers but making the decision and making the changeover took enough time so the by the moment they were ready it was already too late all this time while Nagumo

was making up his mind about how to respond to the news that there was an American carrier north of him he was under attack from the land-based planes that the Americans had sent out from Midway Island a total of 90 of them of various types of indicator bombers and some New Avengers and also very eclectic attack group and they were not very effective to be perfectly candid that very few of them could get close enough to launch their torpedoes the bombs missed by hundreds of yards the Japanese zeroes shot down most of them but what

it did mean was that his Task Force had to maneuver and navigate and change direction to avoid torpedoes and try to avoid those bombs they did all that successfully but it delayed the transformation of the attack group from a land-based fragmentation bombs to carrier targeted armor-piercing bombs and again that delay played a crucial role there are three kinds of airplanes on every carrier there are dive bombers torpedo bombers and fighter planes the fighter planes exist to protect the Bombers and the torpedo planes from enemy fighters but the the hammer is the the dive bomber which

comes streaking down from 20,000 feet at about a 70 degree angle using the airplane itself as an aiming device and then releasing their bomb when they're about 2,000 feet up 1,500 feet depending on how daring the pilot wants to be and then pulling out of the dive the torpedo bombers have to come in very low only about a hundred feet off the surface because if you drop your torpedo from too great a height it'll break up upon entering the water so they came in low and they came in slow so the torpedo bombers are the

slowest of the American airplanes and yet at Midway curiously it was the torpedo bombers that arrived first and there's several reasons for that the three American carriers were operating in two groups one group of two that would ordinarily have been commanded by William Halsey but Halsey had a terrible skin disease and had been ordered into the hospital so his subordinate Admiral Raymond Spruance who was not ordinarily a carrier commander he was a cruiser destroyer man but he was in charge of that two carrier group the overall American commander was Frank Jack Fletcher who was with

the Yorktown group and because they were maneuvering independently to launch and recover carriers have to turn into the wind to do either of those things those two groups became further and further separated during the morning so that when they dispatch their attack squadrons they flew independently to the target the most controversial aspect of this was the airplane group from the Hornet which went completely in the wrong way heading west probably because Admiral mature Admirals select Pete mature believed that two of the Japanese carriers were operating 80 to a hundred miles behind the other two he

was incorrect in that but he didn't want them to get away and sent his air group to attack that non-existent carrier group so they flew themselves right out of the battle in the lore of the history of the Battle of Midway this is known as the flight to nowhere none of those planes dropped a bomb or a torpedo in anger and returned with all their ordnance already still on the plane the first torpedo squadron torpedo eight commanded by Lieutenant Commander Jack Waldron arrived first because he broke away from his flight group and independently flew to

where he was convinced the Japanese carriers would be and he was right but he arrived there without any supporting fighters or any cooperating bombers so his 15 planes went in unassisted they made no hits whatsoever and then soon afterward the torpedo bombing squadrons from the other two carriers also arrived and they made no hits and all of those torpedo planes were savaged by the Japanese zeroes the advantage for the Americans and it's hard to find a silver lining here but if there is one here it is and that is that the Japanese fighters came down

to their altitude about a thousand feet five hundred feet in order to shoot down all those torpedo planes which meant that when the American dive bombers arrived at 20,000 feet ten or fifteen minutes later there were no Japanese zeros to harass them as they lined up for their dive attack but the other carrier the enterprise was was the critical group it flew directly toward the coordinates that had been calculated that morning but they only found empty ocean there because the Japanese had turned north at 9:17 that morning and the commander Wade McCluskey did not know

that but even though he was already low on fuel he began a box search and in the process of that search he saw one ship a Japanese destroyer speeding northward of 33 knots leaving a bright white fantail behind it and he used that as a guide to direct him to where he thought the Japanese carriers must be and he was right and he arrived over the Japanese carriers at about 10:20 in the morning just after the Japanese fighters had shot down all those American torpedo planes you could not have figured this out better if you

had planned it it wasn't planned it was inadvertent and it was accidental so when McCluskey arrives over the Japanese carrier force he can see three of them in his immediate view they're two steaming more or less together one a little further off to the right and then one just out in the distance on the horizon so he's going to target the first two he comes to and he gives orders for one of his two squadrons to attack the carrier on the left and one to attack the carrier on the right but that information never got

past airplane to airplane and the result of that was at 27 of the 30 airplanes aldo vaughn the same carrier the kaga the biggest of the Japanese carriers built on the hull of a battleship a gigantic 40,000 ton aircraft carrier bad thing about that is that the other carrier the ACOG II which was actually a Japanese flagship would not have been attacked at all had not lieutenant Richard best recognized what was happening signaled his two wingman to stay with him and peeled out from that squadron and those three loan airplanes went after the ACOG II

ordinarily three airplanes would not have been enough but they were this time for very specific reasons one Richard best landed his thousand-pound bomb square in the middle of the flight deck of the ACOG II it penetrated the flight deck and exploded on the hangar deck and that was important because it was on the hangar deck that all the Japanese planes were being refueled had taken off one kind of ordnance and stacked it to one side and we're bringing up another kind of ordnance and putting that on the airplane so here are bombs and torpedoes and

aviation fuel aplenty on the Japanese hangar deck and when bests bomb exploded it set off a series of subsequent concussions that ended up sinking the acog II so both the kaga and the ACOG II were lost due to the dive bombing squadron from the USS Enterprise the third Japanese carrier the soryu watching this the sailors horrified to see these two ships burning so badly were under attack simultaneously from the dive bombers from the Yorktown Frank Jack Fletcher's carrier and again they arrived at about the same time not because it was a coordinated plan but because

McCluskey had gone too far south and had to rotate to get north but the Yorktown pilots who launched later went directly to the target so they arrived simultaneously that meant that the Soria too was hit by several bombs and within minutes was burning and the consequence of all this is that between about 10 25 and 10 29 on the morning of June 4th 1942 three Japanese carriers were mortally wounded by dive bombers from the American carriers the Japanese were no doubt depressed by the fact that they lost three carriers in about a five minute period

but they immediately launched a counter-attack the Japanese mind was focused on offensive action and so they launched an attack against the carrier that they could find which was Fletcher's Yorktown the attack by the dive bombers was pretty effective had did some serious damage the Yorktown was smoking and burning when the pilots the Japanese pilots returned to their carrier and they reported that they had sunk an American carrier well they had not they had damaged it badly but the damage control teams on the Yorktown patched the holes got the engines working and within an hour the

Yorktown was steaming again at sufficient speeds to launch and recover aircraft so that when the second attack of the Japanese came torpedo planes they found a fully operational carrier under way thinking that one had already been sunk they attacked that one put two torpedoes into it again more damage to the poor Yorktown it had been hit in the Battle of the Coral Sea it had been hit by the dive bombers now was hit by torpedo bombers it proved to be pretty much too much and the captain had to order abandon ship later on he would

try to recover that ship but it matters to the Japanese because those pilots went back and said we sunk two American aircraft carriers well they hadn't they hadn't even sunk one yet although the Yorktown would eventually go down but that led them to believe it might be possible to continue the battle even though they'd lost three of their carriers that afternoon the Americans launched another attack the planes come back to refueled rearmed and sent out again to find the fourth Japanese carrier that's to hear you and they do and again bombs land square on the

flight deck the whole four part forward part of the ship is is just dug out like a giant ice cream scoop had taken out the four part of the ship it's clearly fatal damage to the here you and eventually we would go down though the Americans don't learn about that until well after the battle is over in fact the the fact that the Battle of Midway it was as decisive as it was does not become clear for several days and even weeks yamamoto who's in charge of this whole thing whose plan all this had been

is riding the giant japanese battleship yamato several hundred miles behind the carrier force the japanese idea being that after the carrier battle the battleships would come in and clean up whatever wrecked american ships were still afloat so he's not there to witness this and he gets the report first that two carriers have been sunk and then that a third carrier has been sunk and then that a fourth carrier has been damaged and even then he plays with the idea of trying to continue this at night if they can get close enough with their big battleships

maybe they can still snatch victory from defeat but when the fourth carrier is lost he realizes that's the game is up and he finally gives the order to turn around and head back to japan raymond Spruance is in charge of the two carrier group that would have been bill halls ease under ordinarily circumstances but because they were operating separately Fletcher who's York Township had now been mortally wounded turned over to Spruance the tactical command of the force that's left and Spruance sent out yet another strike trying to find some of the supporting Japanese ships they

find two heavy carriers the mikuma and the Mogami attacked both of those pretty much destroy them as well so in addition to the four carriers it's two heavy cruisers and of course a lot of important Japanese pilots which are going to be Eirik for the Japanese but here's another thing that Spruance does it's interesting when night falls instead of continuing the pursuit which some of his subordinates urged he turned around and headed back toward Hawaii the reason being he knew the Japanese might be sinking seeking a night engagement and he wanted absolutely no part of

that and he was cool enough in his decision-making that having made that decision pretty sure that he had done the right thing he went to bed the Battle of Midway does not decide the outcome of the war but it dramatically changes the trajectory of the war in the first six months of that conflict a Japanese were on the offensive they were the aggressors they made the decisions about what would be attacked and when and the Americans were responding to that aggression after the morning of June 4th 1942 the Japanese were on the defensive trying to

protect what they had and the Americans would go on the offensive in fact just a month later they would land on the island of Guadalcanal to begin the offense of the would cross the Pacific and end in Tokyo Harbor in 1945 I wanted to thank Craig Simons for his fantastic narration of the battle if you want to learn more definitely check out his book the Battle of Midway which is one of the best materials on the subject at hand anyways thanks again for watching and see you on the next one