The Battle of Midway was a naval battle between the United States and Japan around and over the island of Midway, about 1,300 miles west of Hawaii. It was a clear US victory, sinking multiple of Japan’s capital ships, including 4 of the 6 Japanese aircraft carriers used in the Pearl Harbor attacks. It put a stop to the Japanese offensive plans and forced them to focus on defense as the United States would begin its island-hopping campaign.
The most decisive naval battle of World War 2, it was a result of Japan’s decisive battle doctrine – winning in a single, large battle rather than combat raids throughout the Pacific – and Japan’s low fuel reserves. Isoroku Yamamoto led the Japanese fleet and had drawn up insanely detailed and intricate plans for the assault on Midway. Despite his complicated plans designed to defeat the US forces and outmanuver them, there was one major flaw: the US had broken Japan’s cipher. They knew exactly what ships were part of which forces and what the plan was for the invasion. The US even knew when the battle was going to happen. So the US had a major advantage, and Japan had no idea that the US had the faintest idea of what was going to happen.
The battle was marked by mostly aircraft bombers taking out enemy capital ships. While the Japanese airfleet would launch in one large wave, the US favored sending piecemeal attacks, in hopes that the bombers would hold off the full Japanese waves from launching. While the number of ships were roughly equal, American bombers were sent out without fighter support or any cover, which led to heavy casualties from the air teams. Bombs and torpedoes dropped were also critically faulty, with many of the bombs hitting the ships would just hit the ship with a *clunk*, no explosion. The bombs that did explode, though, would prove to be fatal.
The Japanese navy saw many of their major ships damaged beyond repair and had to be scuttled. 6 capital ships were destroyed and two destroyers, as compared to the US losing one fleet carrier and one destroyer. This was a definitive US victory and Midway would continue to be a major refueling station for submarines attacking Japanese shipping lines. Japan’s loss at Midway was kept under wraps by the government and many of the Japanese survivors were redeployed in order to conceal the defeat.
I’m looking at this after reading a bogus blog on objectivity in art, and I am so thankful that you are dealing with historical FACTS. Beautiful. That being said, while I am a sucker for the British air force in Africa, the battles between Japan and the United States are also pretty cool. It’s interesting to see sea battles like this and it’s great to see what big a win this was for the U.S.
I find this post really interesting, especially after watching Midway somewhat recently and you highlight a really interesting point about the changes to war around WWII. WWII was the first time when cryptography and discovering enemy plans through intelligence operations became significantly more important as simply knowing what was going to happen led to military groups being highly reactive as changes happened, something that would become extremely important as the pace of war increased substantially during this time due to newer technology available at the time. WWII is a fascinating time to view all of the different methods developed both to make and crack encrypted messaging.
All I can really think while reading this is thank goodness we intercepted whatever plans they had. I think the Japanese probably could have won if instead of relying on their plans being unreadable, they could have just made sure they were secure! It’s so interesting to me, because there are like “war rules” to keep things humane but then everything else is just fair game suddenly, it’s almost kind of silly but whatever. I guess the big take away is that the Japanese should really have done a better job hiding their plans because any code could be cracked but we couldn’t just guess the plans!