All language subtitles for [English] How 50 Dive Bombers Shattered Japan’s Carrier Fleet at Midway [DownSub.com]

50 American dive bombers came down on

the Japanese carrier fleet at 22 minutes

past 10:00 in the morning. Three of the

four carriers below them were finished.

Japan never rebuilt the force that died

there, and the men it could not replace

were not the pilots.

For 60 years, what Americans pictured on

those flight decks came from one

Japanese officer's memoir. Japan's own

war records say it did not happen that

way. He described decks packed with

aircraft, engines running, bombs and

torpedoes hanging, a strike moments from

launching when the American bombs

arrived. It has been painted, filmed,

and reprinted so many times that it has

become the picture almost everyone

carries. When the Imperial Navy's

official war history was finally

published, it showed something else

entirely, and it took decades for that

to cross the Pacific.

This is the 4th of June, 1942,

reconstructed from the Japanese

operational records. What the Americans

did, in what order, and what the men on

those flight decks were actually doing

when the bombs came through.

Those records sat untranslated while the

legend hardened. If you want history

built out of the documents, rather than

out of the legend, hit like. One like,

nothing more, and we carry on.

By the spring of 1942, the Imperial

Japanese Navy had won everything it set

out to win, and had solved nothing. The

perimeter it now held ran from the

Aleutians to the Solomons, and from the

Marshalls to the Bay of Bengal. On a

map, it looked like an empire. In

practice, it was a fence with no one

standing along most of it. Japan did not

have the ships, the aircraft, or the

fuel to garrison that much ocean, and

every mile of it was open to an enemy

who could choose where and when to

arrive. The Doolittle Raid in April had

made that point in public, and it

settled an argument that had been

running inside the Naval General Staff

for months.

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto's answer was

not to hold the fence. It was to destroy

the thing that could come through it.

He did not particularly want Midway

Atoll, which was 2 square miles of sand

and coral with an airstrip on it and no

fresh water to speak of. He wanted the

American aircraft carriers, and he

believed that if he threatened Midway,

the carriers would have to come out and

fight for it.

The reasoning was sound as far as it

went. The execution required Yamamoto to

sail most of the Imperial Japanese Navy

several thousand miles from its bases to

the far end of its own supply lines in

order to attack a defended position held

by a force he believed to be weaker, but

could not see. It is the oldest error in

the book, and it has been made by

commanders far less capable than

Yamamoto, usually for the same reason.

He had won every engagement he had

fought so far, and he had begun to

assume the enemy would keep behaving the

way the enemy had behaved. The

assumption was written into the

operations order itself. The commander's

estimate of the situation, the document

that framed how the battle was expected

to unfold, stated plainly that the enemy

lacked the will to fight.

That sentence is the whole battle in

miniature. Everything the Japanese did

over the following 6 weeks proceeded

from it, and it was wrong on the morning

it was written.

The Americans were not guessing.

In a windowless basement in the

administration building at Pearl Harbor,

a unit of cryptanalysts under Commander

Joseph Rochefort had been working on the

Imperial Navy's principal operational

code since before the war started. They

did not read it cleanly. Nobody in that

basement ever saw a Japanese message the

way you are reading this sentence. What

they saw were fragments, recovered code

groups, repeated addresses, patterns of

traffic volume, and long gaps where the

meaning simply did not come.

Out of that, they built a picture.

Through the spring of 1942, the traffic

began to concentrate around an objective

the Japanese identified by a two-letter

designator, AF. Rochefort's unit

believed AF was Midway.

Washington was not convinced, and the

disagreement mattered enormously because

if AF was somewhere else, then Admiral

Chester Nimitz would be moving his

entire remaining carrier strength to the

wrong piece of ocean.

The way the argument was settled has

become the most repeated story in the

history of American signals

intelligence. And it is repeated because

it is genuinely elegant. Midway was

instructed, over a cable the Japanese

could not read, to broadcast in the

clear that its water distillation plant

had failed. Shortly afterward, Japanese

traffic reported that AF was short of

fresh water.

That is the sort of thing that sounds

like invention and was not.

It gave Nimitz the location.

Further work gave him the approximate

date, the composition of the striking

force, and the axis along which it would

approach.

What Nimitz did with that is the part

that matters, and it is worth being

precise about because it is where the

battle was actually decided. He was not

handed a victory. He was handed a piece

of information that would be worth

nothing at all unless he acted on it

faster than the enemy could change the

plan it described. Intelligence has an

expiry date, and Nimitz had perhaps 3

weeks.

He spent them arranging to be in the

right place with more aircraft than the

enemy expected him to have. That is not

luck. That is a man reading a document

correctly and then doing something

difficult about it. The Japanese plan

was called Operation MI, and its central

weakness was visible on the chart before

a single ship sailed. Yamamoto did not

send one fleet to Midway.

He sent five separate forces spread

across thousands of miles of the

Pacific, each with its own commander,

its own objective, and its own

timetable.

There was the carrier striking force

under Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo with

four fleet carriers. There was an

invasion convoy carrying the troops

meant to occupy the atoll. There was

Yamamoto's own main body built around

the largest battleships in the world

positioned hundreds of miles behind the

carriers where it could neither see the

battle nor influence it. There was a

separate operation running

simultaneously in the Aleutians far to

the north involving carriers and

cruisers and troops that were not

available anywhere else.

The dispersal was deliberate. Japanese

naval planning had long favored complex

schemes involving multiple detachments

converging from multiple directions on

the theory that an enemy confronted with

several threats at once would be unable

to concentrate against any of them. It

looks impressive drawn out on a plotting

board. It requires a standard of

communication and timing that radio

silence, weather, and battle damage make

impossible, and it guarantees that at

the decisive moment most of your

strength will be 100 miles from the

fighting.

That is exactly what happened. When the

fighting started on the morning of the

4th of June, none of the remainder of

that enormous force was in a position to

affect the outcome. The battleships

never fired. The invasion convoy never

landed. The Aleutians force fought its

own small separate war 1,000 miles north

and had no bearing on anything.

Four Japanese carriers went into that

battle. Everything else Japan brought to

the Central Pacific that week was, in

operational terms, decoration. Against

those four carriers, Nimitz put three

and an island.

Tactical command at sea belonged to Rear

Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher in Task

Force 17, flying his flag in the

Yorktown. Rear Admiral Raymond Spruance

had Task Force 16 with the Enterprise

and the Hornet, having taken it over at

short notice when Vice Admiral William

Halsey was hospitalized.

Spruance had never commanded carriers.

He was a cruiser officer and he

inherited Halsey's staff along with

Halsey's ships, which turned out to

matter.

The Yorktown should not have been there

at all.

She had been badly damaged at the Coral

Sea a month earlier and the estimates

for putting her right ran into months.

She went into dry dock at Pearl Harbor

and came out again in a matter of days,

patched rather than repaired, with

civilian yard workers still aboard as

she sailed.

Add Midway's own airstrip to the two

task forces and the arithmetic comes out

as follows. Nagumo's four carriers

embarked somewhat under 250 aircraft

between them. The Americans had 360

available to throw at him, counting

everything based on the atoll,

the atoll could not be sunk. That is not

a rhetorical flourish. It is the

operative military fact of the entire

battle.

Nagumo had to neutralize an airfield

that would still be there no matter how

many bombs he put on it

while operating within range of it.

While also finding and destroying a

carrier force he did not know was

waiting for him.

Nimitz had arranged for his enemy to

arrive at a specific patch of ocean on a

specific morning, outnumbered in

aircraft, and obliged to attack a target

that could not be removed. He did that

with a fragment of code, 3 weeks, and a

shipyard working around the clock.

The Japanese strike went off before dawn

on the 4th of June. 108 aircraft, drawn

from all four carriers, tasked with

destroying Midway's defenses ahead of

the landing.

They found the atoll awake. American

search aircraft had been flying wide

patterns for days, and the incoming raid

was picked up early enough that by the

time it arrived, every serviceable

aircraft on Midway was airborne and

gone. There was nothing on the ground to

destroy except installations, and

installations on a coral atoll are

cheap. The strike did its work. It

cratered the runway, burned fuel

storage, wrecked buildings, and killed

men on the ground.

Then it turned for home.

A little after half past 5:00 in the

morning, a patrol aircraft out of Midway

reported two Japanese carriers and their

escorts with a bearing, a distance, and

a course.

The signal reached Fletcher in the

Yorktown within minutes.

Fletcher had a decision to make about a

fleet he still could not see in full.

The report gave him two carriers.

Intelligence had told him to expect

four. Committing his strike against two

while the other two were somewhere

unaccounted for was the kind of thing

that had caused Admirals their fleets in

this ocean already. He did it anyway in

stages. He detached Spruance with Task

Force 16 and ordered him to attack while

the Yorktown held back to recover her

own morning search aircraft and keep

something in hand against the two

carriers still unaccounted for. Dividing

a force is generally an error. Here it

produced the single most valuable

accident of the day because when the

Yorktown finally launched an hour behind

Task Force 16, her aircraft reached the

target at a different moment and on a

different bearing from the Enterprise

group.

The next decision was Spruance's and it

came out of the staff he had inherited.

Standard practice was to close the range

before launching because a strike sent

off at extreme distance arrives with

less fuel, less time over the target,

and a marginal prospect of getting home.

Halsey's Chief of Staff, Captain Miles

Browning, argued for launching early and

long anyway on the reasoning that

Japanese carriers caught in the middle

of recovering their Midway strike would

be worth far more than Japanese carriers

caught comfortably.

Spruance had commanded carriers for four

days. He took the advice and sent his

aircraft off at a range that put them

near the limit of their endurance.

The judgment was correct. A number of

his pilots paid for it by coming down in

the water on the way home.

At about the hour Task Force 16 began

putting aircraft into the air, the

officer leading the Japanese strike back

from Midway sent Nagumo a signal that

would shape everything after it. A

second attack on the atoll was

necessary. The assessment was accurate.

It was also the beginning of Nagumo's

problem because the aircraft still

aboard his carriers were armed for a

different mission entirely.

Japanese practice held roughly half the

air group in reserve against the

appearance of enemy warships. Those

aircraft were configured for ships,

torpedoes on the attack bombers,

armor-piercing bombs on the dive

bombers. Ordnance suited to sinking a

carrier is not ordnance suited to

cratering a runway. And converting from

one to the other is not a matter of

minutes.

So, Nagumo had to decide whether to

strip his reserve and rearm it for the

island while holding a defensive posture

against an enemy fleet his own

reconnaissance had not found.

While the American strike was forming

up, Nagumo was still looking for the

ships it had come from.

Why he could not find them is a matter

of how the Imperial Japanese Navy

searched the sea.

The Imperial Navy treated reconnaissance

as a secondary function. The strike

aircraft were the point of a carrier.

Searching was work for cruiser

floatplanes and for whatever could be

spared. A search pattern flown by a

small number of single-engine aircraft,

each sweeping outward along a single leg

and then returning, covers an area

shaped like a fan with enormous empty

spaces between the spokes. The further

out you go, the wider the gaps become. A

fleet sitting in one of those gaps is

invisible, and it stays invisible for as

long as it stays there.

The Americans had built their scouting

differently. Carrier scouting squadrons

flew search missions as a primary task

in numbers, and the atoll itself

launched long-range patrol aircraft that

swept hundreds of miles in every

direction every day. Midway's search

aircraft found the Japanese carriers on

the morning of the 4th of June. Nagumo's

search aircraft did not find the

Americans until the battle was already

underway.

When the report finally came in, it came

from a float plane off the cruiser Tone,

and it came in badly. The first message

reported ships. It did not say what

kind. Nagumo asked for clarification and

waited. The follow-up, when it came,

mentioned a carrier.

So, he now knew there was an American

carrier within striking distance,

somewhere on a bearing he could not fix

precisely, belonging to a force he had

been assured would not come out.

While Nagumo was waiting to hear what

his scout had actually found, the

attacks began, and for the next 2 hours

they did not stop. The Americans threw

everything within reach at the Japanese

carriers in wave after separate wave,

and none of it worked. Midway's own

aircraft went first. Marine dive bombers

flying obsolete machines, Army heavy

bombers releasing from altitude, torpedo

bombers going in at wave height without

escort.

They achieved nothing. Not one bomb, not

one torpedo, found a Japanese ship. The

heavy bombers dropping from 20,000 ft at

ships making 30 knots were never going

to hit anything, and the men who flew

the low attacks were shot to pieces by a

fighter screen they had no answer to.

Then, the carrier torpedo squadrons

arrived, and what happened to them has

been argued about ever since.

They came in without fighter escort in

obsolete devastators that were slow

enough that Japanese pilots described

attacking them as a straightforward

matter. The Devastator had been a modern

aircraft in 1937.

By 1942, it was slower than the fighters

defending the target. It carried a

torpedo that had to be dropped low,

level, and straight to have any chance

of running properly, and its crews knew

all of this.

Torpedo Squadron 8 from the Hornet found

the Japanese fleet by flying a course

its commander, Lieutenant Commander John

Waldron, had chosen against the one his

air group had been given.

He was right about where the enemy was.

He arrived with 15 aircraft, no escort,

and no other American squadron in sight,

and he attacked. The squadron was

destroyed. One man came out of the water

alive. Torpedo Squadron 6 from the

Enterprise pursued the Kaga and lost all

but five of its 14 aircraft. Torpedo

Squadron 3 from the Yorktown attacked

the Soryu, and of that squadron, only

five aircraft got close enough to

release. Every torpedo missed. Across

three squadrons and more than 40

aircraft, the Americans put nothing into

a Japanese hull.

For two generations, American accounts

explained this with a consoling logic.

The torpedo squadrons had drawn the

Japanese fighter cover down to sea

level, clearing the sky above for the

dive bombers that arrived shortly

afterward. Their deaths had bought the

victory.

The Japanese records do not support

that. What pulled the fighter cover out

of position was the fighter cover

itself. Japanese pilot discipline in the

air over the carriers was poor.

Individual sections chased targets

rather than holding assigned altitudes,

and the Kido Butai's system for

controlling its own combat air patrol

was inadequate to the job of managing a

defense at multiple levels

simultaneously.

The torpedo squadrons did not pull the

zeros down. The zeros went down because

that was how they were being flown.

This does not diminish the men who flew

those aircraft. It changes what their

courage was for. They took off knowing

the odds. They flew into a defended

fleet without escort, and not one of

them turned away. Torpedo Squadron 3 was

still fighting for its life when the

dive bombers came over the top. The

phases of that morning were not

sequential. They overlapped, and they

were still overlapping when the battle

ended.

At 17 minutes past 9:00, Nagumo made the

decision that every account of this

battle turns on.

He is usually described as choosing

between an immediate partial strike with

whatever was ready, and a properly

assembled coordinated attack, and

faulted for taking the second. The

choice as described was not available to

him, and the reason lies in how his navy

had decided a carrier should fight.

Imperial Japanese Navy carrier doctrine

was built around the coordinated full

deck load strike. Attack bombers, dive

bombers, and fighters went out together,

arrived together, and attacked together

because a fraction of an air group

arriving alone against a defended enemy

achieves very little, and is destroyed

doing it. The Japanese had learned that

in China, and had built their entire

carrier procedure around avoiding it.

Aircraft were spotted on deck as a

complete strike package, or they were

not spotted at all. There was no

established method for launching a

partial strike, no doctrine for it, no

practice at it.

Nagumo also had a returning Midway

strike overhead running low on fuel that

It to be recovered before anything could

be spotted because a carrier can land

aircraft or launch them, but not both.

Refusing to recover them meant putting

100 aircraft and their crews into the

sea in order to send off a fragment of a

strike that his own doctrine said would

be destroyed on arrival.

Measured against the procedures he and

his air staff had trained in for a

decade, one course of action was open to

him. Recover the returning aircraft,

complete the ordinance change, put a

full coordinated strike into the air as

a single package, and then go and find

the American carrier with everything at

once.

He gave that order. It was correct under

the doctrine he had, and the doctrine

was the problem.

Three American dive bomber groups

launched that morning to find the

Japanese carriers. Only two of them

arrived.

The Hornet's dive bombers, 30-odd

aircraft, flew a course that took them

past the enemy without ever making

contact. They searched, ran short of

fuel, and turned for home. Some reached

the ship, some came down in the water,

some diverted to Midway. They played no

part in the battle at all. This is why

the number of American dive bombers over

the Japanese fleet that morning was 50

rather than 80-odd. And it is worth

saying plainly because the arithmetic of

what those 50 aircraft achieved only

makes sense once you know that a third

of the striking force never got there.

Lieutenant Commander Wade McClusky,

leading the Enterprise group, reached

the position where the Japanese were

supposed to be and found empty ocean.

He was the air group commander, he was

new to the job, and his fuel state was

already marginal. The correct and

expected decision was to turn for the

carrier. He began a box search instead,

flying outward along a new leg into

water where nothing at all had been

reported.

On that second leg, he sighted a single

Japanese destroyer, the Arashi, running

north at high speed. She had been

detached to hold down an American

submarine and was now hurrying to rejoin

the fleet. McClusky turned to follow her

course.

At 22 minutes past 10:00, 33 Dauntlesses

from the Enterprise came over the

Japanese carriers from the southwest,

and within moments, 17 more from the

Yorktown arrived from a different

bearing entirely.

Neither group knew the other was coming.

What followed immediately was a mistake.

American doctrine for two squadrons

attacking two targets was

straightforward. The trailing squadron

takes the near ship, the leading

squadron takes the far one. Lieutenant

Richard Best, commanding Bombing Six,

had positioned himself accordingly and

was beginning his approach on the near

carrier, the Akagi, expecting Scouting

Six to go past him to the Kaga.

Instead, McClusky, leading from Scouting

Six, took his own squadron down onto the

near ship, and most of Best's squadron

followed the aircraft in front of them.

The result was that the Kaga received an

entire air group's worth of bombs. She

was hit so many times in so short a span

that the Japanese lost count of the

hits, and no reliable figure has ever

been established.

Best broke off his dive.

He had two wingmen with him and nobody

else, and he took those two aircraft

across to the Akagi and attacked her

with three bombs against a ship of

40,000 tons. That is what killed the

flagship of the Pearl Harbor strike

force.

Off to the northeast, Lieutenant

Commander Maxwell Leslie brought bombing

three down on the Soryu. Four of his 17

aircraft, including his own, had lost

their bombs into the sea on the way out

when faulty electric arming switches

released them. Leslie dived anyway

without a bomb ahead of the 13 aircraft

that still had theirs, using his machine

guns against the ship's anti-aircraft

positions to make the runs behind him a

fraction easier. The first bomb struck

the flight deck squarely on the painted

rising sun.

Now the part the memoir got wrong.

There were no flight decks packed with

fueled and armed aircraft waiting to

take off.

The Japanese official history is

explicit about it, and Japanese naval

records confirm it. Not one of Nagumo's

carriers had a strike ranged on deck.

The aircraft were below in the hangers

in the middle of an ordnance change with

the previous load of weapons not yet

struck down to the magazines because the

crews were working against the clock,

and stowing ordnance properly takes time

nobody had.

That is why three carriers died from a

handful of bombs. The bombs went through

the flight decks and detonated inside

enclosed hanger spaces containing

aircraft, fuel lines, and loose

ordnance.

What followed was not a fire on a ship.

It was a fire inside a sealed box full

of explosives.

American and Japanese carriers were

built on opposite philosophies, and at

Midway, the difference decided who

survived being hit.

Japanese fleet carriers used enclosed

hangers structurally integrated into the

hull, sealed against the weather. It is

an efficient arrangement. It gives you

strength, it protects your aircraft, and

it lets you service them in any

conditions.

It also means that when a bomb detonates

inside one, the blast has nowhere to go

but along the hangar, through the ship,

and up through the elevators, and the

pressure cannot be vented because there

is nothing to vent it through.

American carriers used open hangar

sides. The hangar deck was a covered

space with roll-up shutters open to the

air. In a fire, the sides could be

opened and the blast and the smoke could

go out over the water. Aircraft could be

pushed over the side. Fuel lines were

drained and filled with inert gas as

standard practice before action.

Japanese damage control training was

also thinner.

Fire parties were smaller, less

thoroughly drilled, and the equipment

was not as good. Men died at their posts

on all four of those ships fighting

fires that could not be fought, and the

reason they could not be fought had been

settled years earlier in budget meetings

by men who never went to sea in these

ships.

Underneath that sits a difference about

what a navy thinks a carrier is for. The

Imperial Japanese Navy treated the

carrier as a weapon of the first strike.

Get the aircraft off, hit first, hit

hardest, and settle the engagement

before the enemy can reply. A ship built

around that idea prioritizes how many

aircraft it carries and how fast it can

put them into the air. Armor over the

hangar deck, redundant fire mains,

compartmentalization that makes the

hangar awkward to work in, all of it

competes with those two things, and all

of it was trimmed.

The United States Navy had gone the

other way, largely because of fleet

exercises through the 1930s in which

carriers repeatedly demonstrated how

easy they were to find and how quickly

they died once found. American carriers

were designed on the assumption that

they would be hit and the design brief

treated surviving the hit as part of the

ship's job rather than a failure of it.

The Kaga, the Soryu, and the Akagi were

finished by a weight of bombs that would

not have stopped an American carrier of

the same generation. Those were not

badly built ships. They were built for a

war in which they would always be the

ones striking first. And on the 4th of

June, they were not. The first two sank

that afternoon. The Akagi burned through

the night and was scuttled before dawn.

The officer who wrote the memoir was

Mitsuo Fuchida, who had led the attack

on Pearl Harbor and who was aboard the

Akagi at Midway, unable to fly after an

operation.

His book was published in English in the

1950s and became the foundation of the

American understanding of the Japanese

side of this battle. Two generations of

historians built on it. It supplied the

packed flight decks, the five minutes,

and the specific cinematic detail that

made the scene so easy to picture and so

hard to dislodge.

Japanese historians have been

considerably blunter about Fuchida than

American ones and the scholarly

assessment now is that his account is

unreliable in its particulars and

invented in places. Nagumo's own battle

report, meanwhile, was written by men

with an obvious interest in how the loss

of four carriers would be read in Tokyo.

I find it worth sitting with the fact

that the most widely believed account of

the most studied battle in the Pacific

War rested for half a century on the

testimony of one man who had every

reason to shape it and that the

correction came not from any new

discovery, but simply from reading what

the Japanese Navy had written down at

the time.

One Japanese carrier was still

undamaged. The Hiryu had been operating

somewhat apart from the other three, and

at midday she launched. Her first strike

was dive bombers, and they found the

Yorktown.

Three bombs hit. One went down the

funnel and put out the boilers, and the

ship came to a stop with smoke pouring

out of her, dead in the water in the

middle of an ocean where being stopped

is a death sentence.

The Yorktown's damage control parties

then did something that deserves to be

better known than it is. Working in a

ship that was on fire and had no power,

they patched the flight deck, restored

steam to the boilers, and had her

underway again inside an hour, making

better than 15 knots.

When the second Japanese strike arrived,

torpedo bombers this time, the Yorktown

was moving and fighting, and her

attackers reported her as an undamaged

carrier.

They believed they had found a second

ship, which meant the Japanese now

thought the Americans had three carriers

in the area rather than two.

The torpedoes did what the bombs had

not. Two hit on the port side, the ship

lost power again, and she took on a list

steep enough that Fletcher ordered her

abandoned. She stayed afloat for two

more days before a Japanese submarine

finished her.

The Hiryu had put one American carrier

out of the battle with two strikes in an

afternoon, having been left alone

against a fleet that outnumbered her.

Her air group did that with aircraft and

crews that had already flown a full

mission that morning.

The Yorktown's own scout aircraft found

the Hiryu shortly after the second

strike went in.

Spruance launched from the Enterprise at

a little after 3:00 in the afternoon,

two dozen dive bombers, most of them

survivors of the morning attack, several

of them flown by pilots who had already

been shot at over this same fleet 6

hours earlier and had come back and been

rearmed and gone out again. Lieutenant

Earl Gallagher led them and Best flew

with them on what was his second attack

on a Japanese carrier in a single day.

They came in out of the sun at 5:00. The

Hiryu's fighter cover was up but out of

position and four bombs went into her

forward flight deck. The forward

elevator was blown out of its well and

thrown against the bridge. She burned

through the night and was scuttled the

next morning. Four Japanese fleet

carriers had been sunk in a single day

by aircraft flying from three American

ones. The exchange rate came down to

three things: where the aircraft were

stowed when the bombs arrived, how the

ships were built to absorb a hit, and

which admiral had known in advance where

the other fleet would be.

Yamamoto held the fleet in the area

overnight hoping to draw the Americans

into a surface action where his

battleships would matter. Spruance

declined, kept his distance, and gave

him nothing.

Two Japanese heavy cruisers, the Mikuma

and the Mogami, collided while

maneuvering to avoid an American

submarine during the withdrawal and were

caught by carrier aircraft the following

day. The Mikuma was destroyed. Yamamoto

ordered the operation canceled and the

fleet withdrawn on the 5th of June. The

most durable belief about Midway is that

it destroyed Japan's irreplaceable body

of elite naval aviators and that

Japanese carrier aviation never

recovered because the men were gone.

The numbers do not say that. Japanese

air crew losses at Midway were around

110, which is roughly a quarter of the

air crew embarked in the four carriers,

and it is a considerably smaller figure

than most people expect. Japan's carrier

aviator corps was gutted, but it was

gutted the following year in the

grinding attrition of the Solomons

campaign, not in one morning in June.

What Japan lost in numbers at Midway was

something less visible and much harder

to replace.

Four aircraft carriers went down with

their entire ships companies of aircraft

maintenance personnel. The mechanics,

the armorers, the electricians, the

ordnance handlers, the men who kept a

hundred aircraft serviceable in a steel

hangar in the middle of an ocean. Those

men were trained over years. They

existed in finite numbers, and Japan had

no system for producing them in

quantity. Aircraft could be built.

Pilots could be trained, badly and

quickly, and were. The technical core

that kept carrier aviation functioning

could not be reconstituted at all.

For the rest of the war, Japanese

carrier air groups suffered from

serviceability rates that a 1942 air

group would not have recognized. A

squadron with 30 aircraft on paper might

put 18 into the air, and the 18 would be

the ones that happened to be working

that week. Engines went unrebuilt.

Radios went unrepaired. Damage that a

first-rate maintenance section would

have turned around overnight took days

or was simply written off and the

aircraft pushed aside.

None of that shows up in an order of

battle.

A staff officer counting hulls and

airframes would have concluded that

Japanese carrier aviation had

substantially recovered by 1943.

What he could not count was the number

of men aboard who genuinely knew how to

keep a carrier air group flying at sea,

and that number never came back. That

was the wound, and it was inflicted by

American bombs falling into hangar decks

full of the men who worked there.

3,057

Japanese sailors and airmen were killed

in the operation. Set the aviator figure

against that total, and the shape of the

loss becomes clear. The overwhelming

majority of the dead had never flown

anything. They were ships' companies,

and inside the ships' companies of those

four carriers was the entire embarked

technical establishment of the Imperial

Navy's first carrier division.

Yamamoto had come to Midway in order to

force a decisive engagement while the

balance still favored him. He got his

decisive engagement. What he had

actually gambled was not four ships, but

the trained core of an arm that Japan

had spent 15 years assembling. And it

went down inside the hulls in a single

afternoon.

Four reasons, and every one of them was

in place before the first aircraft took

off.

Japan divided its force across thousands

of miles, so that at the decisive moment

four carriers fought alone while the

rest of the fleet was elsewhere.

Japanese carrier doctrine required a

full coordinated strike and made no

provision for launching a partial one,

which put the aircraft below decks at

the moment the American dive bombers

arrived. Japanese carrier design used

enclosed hangars, and Japanese damage

control was less well resourced, so that

a small number of hits produced fires

that could not be contained. And

Yamamoto attacked a numerically superior

force at the far end of his own supply

lines on the strength of an operations

order that had already decided the enemy

would not fight.

The Americans, for their part, read the

mail, arranged to be in the right place,

and sent everything they had. 307

Americans were killed at Midway.

They died in cockpits, in engine rooms,

on an atoll under bombardment, and in

the water alongside a sinking destroyer

2 days after the Japanese carriers had

gone down.

A great many of the air crew among them

were lost in the first 2 hours of the

4th of June, flying obsolete machines

without escort, and achieving nothing

that showed on any chart that day.

If your father or your grandfather

served in the Pacific, on a flight deck,

in a hangar, in an engine room, in a

squadron that nobody has written a book

about, leave his name in the comments.

Leave his unit. Leave whatever part of

his story you still carry.

This is a good place for it.