Battle of Midway, 4-7 June 1942

The Battle of Midway, fought between 4 and 7 June 1942 near the tiny American base at Midway Atoll, marks the strategic high-water point of Japan's advance across the Pacific. Before the battle, Japan held general naval superiority and could usually choose where and when to attack; afterward, the two fleets were roughly equal in carrier strength, and the United States began moving onto the offensive. Six months after Pearl Harbor and one month after the Battle of the Coral Sea, the United States Navy destroyed four Japanese fleet carriers for the loss of one of its own, a result the military historian John Keegan called "the most stunning and decisive blow in the history of naval warfare".

Strategic Background: Yamamoto's Plan for a Decisive Battle

Japanese naval doctrine before the war rested on kantai kessen, the idea of a single decisive fleet battle in which a smaller but better-trained Imperial Navy would destroy an approaching American fleet the way it had crushed the Russians at Tsushima in 1905. The mid-April Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, launched from carriers the Japanese had believed were far from home waters, and the inconclusive carrier duel at Coral Sea a month later convinced Combined Fleet commander Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto that a fight for Midway Atoll, at the far western end of the Hawaiian chain, would draw the U.S. Pacific Fleet's surviving carriers into the open where his own carrier air groups could finish them.

Operation MI was elaborate rather than simple. A diversionary attack on the Aleutian Islands, Operation AL, was meant to pull American attention north, while Yamamoto's main force split into Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo's First Carrier Striking Force, a separate invasion convoy, and a battleship main body that trailed Nagumo by several hundred miles and could not reinforce him quickly if the plan went wrong. The scheme also rested on the assumption that only two American carriers, Enterprise and Hornet, remained in the Pacific; Yorktown, badly damaged at Coral Sea, was believed to need weeks or months in dry dock.

Codebreaking and the "AF" Deception

Yamamoto's surprise was undone by superior American communications intelligence. Navy cryptanalysts at Station HYPO in Hawaii, under Commander Joseph Rochefort, had broken enough of the Japanese JN-25 naval code to identify Midway as the target and to establish the approximate date and axis of the Japanese attack. That intelligence let Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, position his carriers in ambush northeast of Midway before the Japanese task force arrived, rather than reacting to it.

Rochefort's team still needed to confirm that the Japanese designator "AF" referred to Midway rather than some other Pacific location. Station HYPO had Midway's garrison send an uncoded radio message reporting a fake shortage of fresh water; when Japanese intercepts shortly afterward referred to "AF" having a water shortage, HYPO had its confirmation, and Nimitz committed his three available carriers to the ambush with confidence in the target and the date.

Repairing Yorktown in Three Days

Yorktown herself was only available for the battle because of an extraordinary repair effort. She limped into Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard on 27 May 1942, badly holed and burned from the Coral Sea action three weeks earlier; yard inspectors' first look at the damage put the repair at two weeks or more. Working around the clock, yard crews instead had her patched, watertight and fit to fight within three days, though her damaged superheater boilers were left untouched and capped her top speed below normal. She sailed on 30 May with Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher's task force, reaching the ambush position northeast of Midway alongside Enterprise and Hornet in time for the battle.

Order of Battle

U.S. Pacific Fleet (Admiral Chester W. Nimitz)

Imperial Japanese Navy (Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto)

4 June: The Japanese Strike on Midway

At 04:30 on 4 June 1942, some 240 miles northwest of Midway, Nagumo's four carriers began launching 108 aircraft against the American base. Unknown to Nagumo, three American carriers were steaming only 215 miles to his east. Both sides launched search aircraft that morning, the Americans to pinpoint an enemy they knew was near and the Japanese as routine precaution. A Midway-based PBY Catalina sighted and reported the Japanese carrier force at about 05:30.

The same Catalina also reported the inbound Japanese strike, confirmed shortly afterward by radar, and Midway scrambled its own aircraft. Marine Fighting Squadron 221 intercepted the Japanese formation at about 06:15 but was overwhelmed by escorting A6M Zero fighters, shooting down only a handful of bombers while suffering heavy losses of its own. The Japanese strike hit Midway's two islands at 06:30; twenty minutes of bombing and strafing damaged installations on Eastern Island without disabling the airfield, and set fire to Sand Island's fuel tanks and seaplane hangar. As the Japanese aircraft turned back, strike leader Lieutenant Joichi Tomonaga radioed Nagumo that a second strike on Midway was needed to finish the job.

American Counterattacks and Nagumo's Fatal Delay

While Tomonaga's aircraft returned, Nagumo's carriers absorbed a string of uncoordinated counterattacks launched from Midway itself. Against overwhelming fighter cover these attacks achieved nothing but heavy losses: six Navy TBF Avengers and four Army Air Forces B-26 Marauders made torpedo runs shortly after 07:00, followed between 07:55 and 08:20 by Marine dive bombers and a formation of Army B-17 Flying Fortresses. The only useful result was a set of photographs of three Japanese carriers taken by the high-flying B-17s, the sole surviving images of that day's American attacks on Nagumo's force.

A tardy Japanese scout plane finally spotted the American fleet just as Midway's counterattacks were ending, reporting a carrier present. Japanese doctrine called for launching fully formed, escorted strikes rather than sending aircraft up piecemeal, so Nagumo, who had begun rearming his reserve strike aircraft with bombs for a second attack on Midway, now had to reverse that order, rearm for a strike against ships, recover his returning Midway strike aircraft and respot his flight decks, all in sequence rather than at once. He came within minutes of having enough time to launch before the American carrier aircraft arrived overhead.

The Dive-Bomber Attack, 10:22–10:26

Starting around 09:30, torpedo squadrons from USS Hornet (CV-8), USS Enterprise (CV-6) and USS Yorktown attacked in succession, and were nearly annihilated without scoring a single hit; their sacrifice nonetheless pulled the Japanese combat air patrol down to low altitude and disrupted Nagumo's launch preparations. That left the skies above the Japanese carriers clear when, beginning at 10:22 and lasting only a few minutes, dive bombers from Enterprise and Yorktown arrived almost unopposed. By 10:26, squadrons led by Lieutenant Commander Clarence Wade McClusky had put Akagi and Kaga out of action, while Yorktown's dive bombers under Lieutenant Commander Maxwell Leslie hit Soryu; all three carriers, their decks crowded with fully armed and fuelled aircraft for the abandoned second strike, were ablaze within minutes.

Hiryu's Counterstrikes and the Loss of Yorktown

Of Nagumo's four carriers, only Hiryu remained operational, and Rear Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi used her aggressively rather than withdrawing. At 10:54 she launched eighteen dive bombers with a Zero escort; only seven survived Yorktown's fighters and flak long enough to attack, but three direct hits set her ablaze, and she lay dead in the water by 14:40. Damage-control teams worked fast enough that her engineers had her making twenty knots again within the hour, and Captain Elliott Buckmaster ran up a fresh, oversized battle ensign to signal she was still in the fight.

Believing Yorktown sunk, Yamaguchi launched a second wave of ten torpedo bombers at 13:30. Finding her instead patched up and underway, the Japanese pilots attacked anyway; two torpedoes struck her port side within minutes of each other around 16:20, jamming her rudder and flooding her engineering spaces. As the list reached 26 degrees, Buckmaster ordered the crew to abandon ship. Search planes from Enterprise found Hiryu at 16:45, and dive bombers put four bombs into her forward flight deck and hangar at 16:56, setting fires no damage-control party could put out. Yamaguchi and Hiryu's captain, Kaku, chose to stay aboard when a Japanese destroyer scuttled her before dawn on 5 June; Akagi, equally beyond saving, was scuttled by four destroyers at 05:20 the same morning, having cost only 267 lives, the lightest toll of the four Japanese carriers lost. Deprived of carrier air cover and after hours of indecision, Yamamoto called off the Midway invasion and ordered a general retirement.

Pursuit, 5–7 June

Withdrawing overnight, the heavy cruisers Mikuma and Mogami of Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita's Close Support Group turned hard to avoid a reported American submarine and collided with each other; Mogami's bow crushed into Mikuma's port side, and Mikuma's ruptured fuel tanks left an oil slick that guided American search planes to her the next day. On 6 June, dive bombers from Hornet and Enterprise found the crippled pair; Hornet's aircraft hit Mogami twice, and Enterprise's put two bombs into Mikuma, one of which touched off her own stored torpedoes in a chain of explosions that tore the ship apart. She rolled over and sank that evening, the first Japanese cruiser lost in the Pacific War; escorting destroyers pulled 239 survivors from the water before withdrawing. Mogami, her bow crushed and her deck bombed, nonetheless made it back to Japan under her own power for rebuilding.

Yorktown, still afloat after being abandoned on 4 June, was reboarded on 6 June by a salvage party under Commander Clarence Kiefer while the fleet tug USS Vireo took her under tow. That afternoon the Japanese submarine I-168 slipped through the destroyer screen and fired four torpedoes: one broke the destroyer USS Hammann in two, killing 80 of her crew as she sank in about four minutes, and two more struck Yorktown. She stayed afloat through the night, but her list grew steadily, and at 07:01 on 7 June she rolled over and sank stern-first, the second American fleet carrier lost in the war after Lexington at Coral Sea.

Casualties and Losses

By the time the battle ended, the four sunk Japanese carriers accounted for most of the 3,057 Japanese dead: Akagi lost 267 men, Kaga 811, Hiryu 392 and Soryu 711, a combined 2,181. The heavy cruisers Mikuma, sunk, and Mogami, badly damaged in the same collision-and-air-attack sequence during the retreat, together lost about 792 men. The destroyers Arashio and Asashio, hit while escorting the two cruisers, lost 35 and 21 men respectively, and further losses were suffered aboard the cruisers Chikuma and Tone (floatplanes lost) and the destroyers Tanikaze, Arashi and Kazagumo and the oiler Akebono Maru. On the American side, most of the 307 dead were lost with Yorktown or, in the last hours of the battle, aboard Hammann, whose 80 casualties came in the roughly four minutes it took the destroyer to sink.

Why Japan Lost

Several structural weaknesses, not just bad luck, decided the battle. Japanese reconnaissance was thin from the outset: a submarine picket line meant to detect any American sortie from Pearl Harbor reached its stations late, so Fletcher's and Spruance's task forces crossed undetected, and a planned long-range flying-boat reconnaissance of Pearl Harbor, Operation K, failed outright when its refuelling point at French Frigate Shoals turned out to be occupied by American ships. Nagumo went into the battle with too few search aircraft assigned to cover his own flanks.

Doctrine compounded the problem. Japanese carrier strikes were meant to go out fully formed and escorted rather than in small waves, which is why Nagumo could not simply launch whatever mix of bombs and torpedoes he had loaded the moment an American carrier was reported; rearming, respotting and recovering the Midway strike all had to happen in sequence, and that sequence consumed the hour that decided the battle. His four carriers also steamed close together rather than dispersed, so McClusky's and Leslie's dive bombers found three of them in the same patch of ocean within the same few minutes.

Japanese carrier construction and firefighting practice turned that hour into a catastrophe. Aviation fuel lines ran exposed through the hangar decks, armed and fuelled aircraft for the abandoned second strike crowded the flight and hangar decks, and damage-control parties had no firefighting foam, only water and hand-hauled hoses. American carriers, hit just as hard in places, had better compartmentalization, foam systems and trained repair parties, which is why Yorktown's engineers could restore twenty knots within an hour of the attack that eventually sank her.

Secrecy and the Cost of Defeat

On 10 June, the Japanese Navy gave the military liaison conference only an incomplete account of the battle's results. Nagumo's full report, submitted on 15 June, was restricted to the highest levels of the Navy and government and guarded closely for the rest of the war; it noted his own staff's mistaken confidence that "the enemy is not aware of our plans", when in fact Allied codebreaking had compromised the operation from the start. The Japanese public was told of a great victory, and only Emperor Hirohito and the most senior naval officers were informed accurately of the carrier and pilot losses, so much so that the Imperial Japanese Army continued for a time to believe the fleet remained in good condition.

When the fleet returned to Hashirajima on 14 June, the wounded were placed in isolation as "secret patients", cut off from their own families to keep the scale of the defeat hidden, while surviving officers and men were quietly dispersed to other units, many of them later killed in the fighting in the South Pacific. No flag officer or staff member of the Combined Fleet was penalised; Nagumo himself was later given command of the rebuilt carrier force.

The Japanese Navy drew some operational lessons from Midway, refuelling and rearming aircraft on the flight deck rather than in the hangars and adopting stricter fuel-line draining procedures; new carriers under construction were redesigned with fewer flight-deck elevators and better firefighting equipment, and more crew were trained in damage control. The losses later in the war of the carriers Shokaku, Hiyo and especially Taiho suggest these fixes only went so far. A shortage of experienced aircrew proved just as damaging: replacement pilots were pushed through abbreviated training to meet the fleet's short-term needs, producing a marked decline in quality even as the surviving Midway veterans were worked harder rather than rotated to rest, and Japanese naval air groups deteriorated in relative quality for the rest of the war while their American counterparts kept improving.

Consequences: The Road to Guadalcanal

Midway did not end the Pacific war, but it ended Japan's ability to dictate its course. Four of the Imperial Navy's finest fleet carriers were gone in a single morning, along with trained aircrew who could not be replaced quickly. American shipyards, meanwhile, already had the first of what would grow into twenty-four Essex-class fleet carriers under construction; the lead ship, USS Essex, was commissioned that December, and by mid-1943 the class was reaching the Pacific in numbers Japan had no way to match.

The shift in initiative showed within weeks. American forces landed on Guadalcanal in the southern Solomon Islands on 7 August 1942, opening a six-month campaign that turned into a grinding contest of attrition on land, at sea and in the air, one that Japan, its carrier strength broken at Midway, could no longer expect to win outright.

Midway followed directly from the carrier duel at the Battle of the Coral Sea a month earlier, and the detailed unit-by-unit order of battle is also catalogued separately on the Midway order of battle reference. The wider Pacific campaign continued through the Guadalcanal campaign, the Battle of the Philippine Sea, and the amphibious assaults on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Yamamoto's earlier surprise attack on the U.S. fleet is covered on the Pearl Harbor overview, and the carriers and aircraft that fought at Midway are detailed on the list of aircraft carriers and the US Navy WW2 fighters page.

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