It was June 4th: The Battle of Midway, a turning point in the Pacific War

On June 4, 1942, off Midway Atoll in the heart of the Pacific Ocean, squadrons of American dive bombers attacked the Japanese fleet and sank three aircraft carriers in a matter of minutes. This was the decisive moment in a battle that would last from June 3 to 6 and end with the total loss of all four Japanese carriers—the Akagi, the Kaga, the Sōryū, and the Hiryū—against only one American carrier, the Yorktown. For the first time in naval history, two fleets clashed without ever seeing each other, without any surface ships exchanging a single shot: the battle was decided solely by carrier-based aircraft. Midway brutally ended six months of lightning-fast Japanese expansion in the Pacific and marked the beginning of an irreversible reversal.

A trap set by the Americans

To understand Midway, one must go back to the strategy of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of the Japanese fleet. After the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Japan had conquered the Philippines, Malaya, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies in just a few months. But the American aircraft carriers, absent from Pearl Harbor during the raid, remained intact and constituted a constant threat, as demonstrated by the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in April 1942. Yamamoto decided to lure them out and destroy them by launching an offensive against Midway Atoll, which he believed the Americans would defend at all costs. To this end, he assembled a colossal fleet of approximately 200 ships, including four attack carriers. What Yamamoto didn't know was that American cryptanalysts had cracked the Japanese navy's secret code: Admiral Chester Nimitz knew the details and timing of the operation even before it began. He positioned his three aircraft carriers—the Enterprise, the Hornet, and the Yorktown, which had been hastily repaired in 72 hours at Pearl Harbor when it should have required several months of work—in ambush northeast of the atoll. The Japanese, convinced that the Yorktown had been destroyed during the Battle of the Coral Sea in May, expected to encounter only two of them. On June 3, an American reconnaissance seaplane spotted the Japanese invasion fleet. The trap was set.

Three minutes that changed the war

At dawn on June 4, Japanese aircraft pounded the Midway facilities, leaving the base ablaze. But Admiral Nagumo, commanding the four Japanese aircraft carriers, received conflicting information: should his planes be rearmed for a second strike on Midway, or kept with their torpedoes to attack an enemy fleet? This fatal hesitation led him to change his aircraft's armament twice at the very moment when his ships' decks were crowded with planes, fuel, and ammunition. It was in this moment of maximum vulnerability that the Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bombers from the Enterprise and the Yorktown swooped down on the Japanese fleet. In less than five minutes, the Kaga, the Akagi, and the Sōryū were ablaze. The only Japanese aircraft carrier still intact, the Hiryū, returned fire and managed to severely damage the Yorktown, which was finally sunk on June 6 by a Japanese submarine. But the Dauntless bombers located the Hiryū that afternoon and sank it as well. Yamamoto, horrified by the scale of the disaster, ordered a retreat. In three days, Japan had lost its four best aircraft carriers, a heavy cruiser, 248 aircraft, and more than 3,000 men, including many of its best and most irreplaceable pilots. The United States, whose industrial superiority would allow it to build up its fleet of aircraft carriers in the following months, now held the initiative in the Pacific. The Empire of the Rising Sun, which had defied American power, was now doomed to inevitable defeat.