Original subtitles

Midway is one of those honest events

where we do not know the result ahead of time.

These pilots all say to themselves

"We're gonna do it,

we're gonna risk a lonely death out on the ocean"

and all they can do is shake hands and tear up.

There's a lot of drama til the very last moment.

Things are really on a knife’s edge.

Rarely in history does one naval force

annihilate the other naval force

and almost never do you find the tipping of history itself

turned more swiftly and more completely

than the Battle of Midway.

The Battle of Midway is one of the most dramatic events

of World War Two.

Now, rare footage from around the world

expertly restored in full color

tells the story as you've never seen it before.

December 1941.

Japan's devastating surprise attack on the US Pacific Fleet

of Pearl Harbor

has brought the United States into the war against the Axis powers.

Caught cold and unprepared,

the American military is reeling.

Eight Pacific Fleet Battleships have been critically damaged or sunk.

I think the Americans were stunned to figure out

how efficient the Japanese were.

The characteristic stereotypes that Americans had of Japanese

as being little tiny people with buck teeth

who were not very clever was washed away pretty quickly

after Pearl Harbor.

So the Japanese had superiority when the war began,

both in terms of numbers and in terms of quality.

The US was not a big military powerhouse

in the years prior to World War Two.

It had the 17th largest army in the world when World War Two broke out,

and there was even a great question as to whether

our navy was kind of even a practical weapon of war so,

for the United States, they were kind of starting

in a hole as it were.

After the humiliation of the Pearl Harbor attack,

a new man has been put in charge of what remains of the Pacific Fleet.

His name is Chester W. Nimitz.

Nimitz comes out to take command of the Pacific Fleet

after Pearl Harbor and he sees this smoking harbor.

He's in hip boots, wading around in these damaged ships

trying to get them repaired

and the Americans are barely hanging on.

Everybody just felt kinda bad.

We should've been ready, and expected it,

we should've fought back better, this is awful.

And then Nimitz comes

and there was something about his ability to inspire,

not in a pound the podium way, but in a quiet,

I'm on your side, we're a team kind of way.

At the same time he was a risk taker by instinct

and a hard charging, hard driving warrior.

Fleet Admiral Nimitz has an incredibly difficult task

in front of him.

The Japanese are currently roaming the Pacific unchecked,

taking territory almost at will.

And Nimitz currently has only four effective ships

to try and stop them.

The aircraft carriers Lexington,

Hornet, Enterprise and Yorktown.

Nimitz's big issue is that

he can't let the Japanese run wild anymore.

So he's got to keep the Japanese at bay,

but also protect the assets that he has, he can't afford to lose warships

or he certainly can't afford to lose warships

unless he extracts a higher toll from the Japanese.

So this is the sort of balancing game that he has to play.

But Nimitz's bosses in Washington

have little sympathy for his predicament.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt wants a headline grabbing operation

as soon as possible.

Franklin Roosevelt is a domestic politician.

He has been commander in chief when Pearl Harbor was attacked.

The last thing he can do is therefore, we cannot reply.

He does not want the US Armed Forces to look to be hiding,

he doesn't want them to look to be passive.

Supposedly, Roosevelt said

"Tell Nimitz to get the hell out to Pearl Harbor

and don't come back 'til the war is won."

The plan cooked up in Washington

is a bombing raid on Japan's capital, Tokyo.

Led by Colonel James Doolittle.

But Doolittle's planes can only be launched inside

Japanese waters,

from one of Admiral Nimitz's few remaining aircraft carriers.

Nimitz knows the raid is purely symbolic and risky.

Doolittle's heavy bombers are not even designed

for carrier runways.

Nimitz I think was directed to send this operation forward

whether he liked it or not.

I guess a betting person might have wondered whether or not

it can even have been attempted.

It will be a one-way mission for these crew men.

They were gonna basically fly off a carrier deck,

bomb Tokyo and then land in safe airfields in China,

that's the plan.

So it is an extremely bold operation.

When Colonel Doolittle's first bomber heads off the flight deck,

there is this moment where it just dips below the bow

and it looks like it's about to plunge into the ocean too heavy

with its own bomb load.

Then it just barely gets aloft and then rises up above the horizon.

Nimitz is relieved to hear that Colonel Doolittle has launched.

And the carriers have turned back safely towards Hawaii.

What he doesn't realize is the raid will make his carriers

a priority target for the enemy.

When the bombers unleash a small shock raid on Tokyo,

they have scored a publicity victory for the American people

but the attack enrages Japan.

Several of the bombs land in the grounds

of the emperor's palace.

This is unbelievable, this is something that

every right-thinking Japanese is appalled by.

Emperors are divine, they're not like presidents,

you can just sort of get another one.

He's divine so if through your oversight as a military man the emperor is killed,

the mass suicide of the entire Japanese high command

would have followed instantly.

Doolittle's raid was a great shock

to the Japanese populace because this was at the time

still in the early stage of the war that they were told

that Japan was winning.

Assaulting the Imperial Palace, there was lots of outrage.

But one senior Japanese military man

sees the outrage as an opportunity.

Ever since Pearl Harbor,

the commander in chief of the combined fleet,

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto

has argued that the American carrier fleet

needs to be attacked again

and completely finished off.

Yamamoto is fighting a battle,

a bureaucratic institutional resource battle

to continue the offensive naval war, to finish off the American fleet.

Now he's got the evidence.

The Americans have proved his point.

The fact that the Doolittle raids

were launched from the aircraft carriers off the coast of Japan,

that really fortified Yamamoto's argument

that the American Pacific Fleet has to be completely destroyed

for Japan to be safe.

We have to remember that men like Yamamoto

are from the first generation of post Samurai Japan,

so they're related to the warrior leaders of a medieval country.

He's not somebody who thinks that just beating them is enough,

he wants to wipe them out.

He wants to make sure they cannot do anything else.

The entire Japanese Military is now galvanized

behind Admiral Yamamoto.

His plan is to lure the American aircraft carriers

out of their base in Pearl Harbor

for a decisive naval battle

that will finish off Nimitz's Pacific Fleet completely.

And to entice them into battle,

he decides to invade a tiny US held Atoll island,

halfway across the Pacific.

Midway is a valuable forward airfield

and refueling base for the Americans.

The Japanese see their attack on midway as bait.

They will bait the Americans into sending the carriers

from Pearl Harbor,

so when the Americans steam in to defend Midway,

they'll be caught by surprise by this much bigger Japanese fleet.

So at Midway, they are laying a trap

and it's a very potent trap.

But before Yamamoto can even initiate his Midway plan,

an unexpected opportunity comes his way.

Two of his carriers are supporting an assault on Port Moresby

in Allied held Guinea.

When they encounter the USS Lexington and Yorktown.

Out of nowhere, Yamamoto has an early shot

at destroying half of Nimitz's carrier fleet.

And for the first time in history, two fleets fight

without ever seeing each other.

While a battleship is limited by its speed

and the reach of its guns,

a carrier's dive and torpedo bombers can strike across hundreds of miles.

Now we're beyond visible range, over the horizon.

Radar technology very primitive, long range reconnaissance quite spotty,

the ability to then coordinate reconnaissance

with the guys on the flight deck.

So you're groping around in the dark

looking for an enemy that you can't always find.

Amid the mayhem in the Coral Sea,

the Japanese are confident they've scored a key victory.

Two of their carriers are damaged,

but the US Lexington is ripped apart by explosions and sinks.

And the USS Yorktown

is a smoldering wreck and surely doomed.

Two of the United States' four carriers are down,

before the Midway assault has even begun.

The Japanese start the war, thinking

"I'm not sure we can do this," by Midway, they think they can

and there's a degree of contempt creeping in.

They know the Americans, they're big and strong

but they're not very clever.

An increasingly confident Admiral Yamamoto

calls his senior commanders together on a battleship

to run through the top-secret details of his surprise attack on Midway.

Yamamoto has devised a carefully choreographed ambush.

Timing will be critical.

The Japanese had a love of intricate battle plans

with multiple forces that are all moving and clockwork

and then they all come together

at exactly the right place and exactly the right time.

First, the powerful Japanese carrier fleet

will launch a surprise attack on Midway.

Its airplanes will decimate the island's defenses

and clear the way for a ground invasion.

The attack will trigger the American fleet to scramble from Pearl Harbor,

and sail over a thousand miles into a trap.

Admiral Yamamoto himself will hold a large battleship fleet

away from the island, in reserve.

By the time the American carriers arrive,

the Japanese will have secured Midway's airfields

and control of the skies.

The Japanese carrier fleet will then be in a powerful position

to overwhelm and destroy the Americans.

The man in charge of this vital carrier force

is Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo.

Nagumo should have a good three or four days

before he's gonna be faced with those American carriers.

And that's gonna give him time to put Midway out of business,

invade Midway, turn it into an advance base for the Japanese

and then he will turn and face the next threat that is coming,

which should be the American Navy.

But the interesting thing here is that Yamamoto and Nagumo

really don't like each other.

These two guys don't get along at all

and yet by the reasons of seniority he ends up getting placed

in command of the world's foremost carrier force.

And he really didn't have a good feel for this weapon system,

he didn't really know how to operate it.

Admiral Nagumo is a classic surface warfare procedure-based officer,

he does exactly what the doctrine says,

he does what he's been told to do

and he does it according to the manual.

And Nagumo is not the man to be left

with a great deal of initiative.

But if the Japanese battle plan relies

on secrecy and surprise,

it's already under threat.

In Hawaii, a United States cryptography unit called Hypo

is trying to decipher encoded Japanese radio traffic.

Leading the team at Hypo is the eccentric

captain Joseph Rochefort.

Rochefort is someone who is viewed

with extreme suspicion by conventional naval officers

who see him as way too much of an irreverent egghead.

He works in this workshop where he sets up these massive tables

with saw horses and planks and he spreads out the Japanese codes

and he shuffles around them wearing a smoking jacket

and carpet slippers.

He was a bit of a fellow who worked off the reservation.

He had spent time in Japan.

And therefore, had learned not just the Japanese language

but a lot about Japanese culture and, therefore,

they looked at code messages not just for what they said

in terms of language

but for what they implied in terms of meaning.

But even so, the cryptanalysts

at Hypo could really only crack about 20% of the Japanese code,

the rest of it had to be kind of determined through guesswork.

That May,

Rochefort starts to pick up on numerous Japanese communiqués

about operations against a target code named AF.

Spinning back through his photographic memory,

Rochefort thinks he knows what AF stands for.

And he remembered

an intercept from March 1942

of a Japanese patrol plane

saying that it was passing by a target that is designated AF.

And the only American possession that it could possibly have been

passing was Midway Island.

Rochefort is convinced an attack on Midway

is little more than a week away,

so he quickly files a report with his superiors in Washington,

but his report is dismissed.

In Washington, the chief of naval intelligence,

he would say, "Well, I'm not really sure, how do you know this?"

He says, "Well I can tell".

"Well no, you can't tell,

that could be anything, that could be Seattle

for all you know or San Francisco,

how do you know AF is Midway?"

Chain of command was skeptical.

Daybreak, the 4th of June.

The Japanese carrier fleet has moved to within 250 miles of Midway.

Its commander, Admiral Nagumo,

is now in position to initiate the attack on the island.

If you were looking at this encroaching Japanese fleet

at Midway Island,

you'd have to say that they have the upper hand.

They've got four carriers loaded with advanced aircraft.

The air crews are highly trained,

they've been in action at Pearl Harbor and the coral sea,

and this is gonna be a very formidable opponent

for the US to come up against.

All four Japanese carriers

coordinate the mass launch of attack planes.

And at 6:20,

the Japanese squadrons appear as a swarm over Midway.

The renowned film director, John Ford,

is stationed on the island

and manages to capture the attack.

This is the only footage that will survive

the battle of Midway.

For the Americans who are on Midway, on the ground,

is a fearsome scene, it's like Pearl Harbor come again

because they're being attacked from above and they have very little

to defend themselves. All that are on the ground

just a few scattered anti-aircraft guns.

But as the Japanese airplanes

light up an inferno beneath them,

they notice something unusual.

One of their key targets,

the island's bomber planes,

are nowhere to be seen on the airfields below.

There's almost no airplanes there.

They're not on the airfield and the Japanese are curious about that.

Why has that happened?

The American airplanes must be in the air somewhere.

Earlier that morning, John Ford's cameras

capture the moment the American bombers scrambled.

And now they appear

directly over the Japanese carrier fleet.

Nagumo's plan for total surprise

seems to have been compromised.

That must have been quite a sight.

And that is a problem for Nagumo.

Midway doesn't seem to be as quiet an area as he might have supposed.

Amongst the counter offensive are high altitude B17 bombers,

untested in naval warfare.

The Japanese skippers realized that it takes a long time for the bomb

to make it from 20,000 feet down to where your ship is

and so what they would do is they would watch the aircraft

and as soon as the bombs were dropped they would then

put the ship into a hard turn.

The results from the photographs are quite dramatic

that all around these Japanese ships are, you know,

huge columns of water from sticks of eight or ten bombs

landing in the drink.

The Japanese fleet launches dozens of fighter planes

called Zeros to defend against the attack.

If one group of fighters sees an enemy strike coming in,

all of the fighters will sort of follow them,

almost like white blood cells,

they'll just follow them into this attack vector.

The Japanese used this incredible fighter called the Zero.

And it is incredible in terms of its speeds,

maneuverability and its climb.

In the hands of a veteran aviator

can be a death dealing weapon of war.

The veteran Zero pilots are soon on top

of the rookie flyers from Midway.

I saw one flying over my head,

it seems I could reach up and touch him and before I knew it

he was back onto my tail.

They were the most maneuverable airplane I think I've ever seen.

The island's counter strike, over 50 aircraft strong,

fails to land a single blow on the Japanese carriers.

But one attack very nearly kills Admiral Nagumo.

Towards the end, a B17 gets shot down

and as it comes diving down the pilot seems

to have set a course to crash into the flagship

and comes within a pretty short compass

of running straight into him and his command team.

Nagumo had probably not expected much in the way of American resistance at all,

so for the Americans to be throwing

basically the kitchen sink at him,

his blood is up at this point, the adrenaline is pumping.

Rattled, Nagumo wants to hit Midway again

and destroy its defenses.

But the remaining bombers he has on board

are armed with torpedoes for attacking ships.

So Nagumo orders them to switch to ground attack weapons,

but he will have to wait some time before the attack can begin.

This is not a spot sort of thing that just magically happens,

it's gonna be 90 minutes to two hours’ worth of effort to make the switchover

from naval attack weapons to land attack weapons.

He's not gonna have a strike force available to go for some hours

so once Nagumo gives that order, he's committed.

But just under 30 minutes later

a message crackles over the radio on the bridge of Nagumo's flagship.

It's from one of his search planes.

The news arrives back late

and it's very bad news.

US Navy ships of unspecified type

spotted near Midway.

When that radio message comes in from his scout plane at 07:40,

there has gotta be a real sinking feeling in Nagumo's stomach.

The search was sent to confirm a negative,

there are no Americans waiting to ambush me.

And it confirms a positive which is the very thing

that he's not factored into all of his decisions

because they're not meant to be there.

He's already committed to hitting Midway again.

His aircraft down in the hangars

are halfway re-armed at this point,

so he's totally wrong footed.

And there shouldn't be American ships out there at all.

The plan says that the Americans aren't gonna show up

for another three or four days.

Why are there American ships here?

Sometimes in the history of war,

intelligence is vastly overrated

and we love making mountains out of molehills.

This is not the case going in to Midway.

Turned away by his immediate superiors,

cryptologist Joseph Rochefort

was not deterred.

He used a back channel to reach Admiral Nimitz.

Rochefort lays out his hunch that the Japanese fleet

are preparing to attack a place codenamed AF.

Nimitz listens, but needs confirmation

that the target is Midway.

Admiral Nimitz naturally wanted to know

positive and beyond doubt what place AF represented.

Since we had no proof, Joe and I agreed

that we should entice the enemy by radio deception

to furnish such proof if possible.

Midway Island sends a false emergency message,

saying that their water system is broken.

Later that same day, American intelligence

intercepts a Japanese message saying,

that AF is low on water.

Rochefort had proof

that AF was Midway.

And it's like wow, eureka, we've got it.

Now they can bait their own trap

for the Japanese at Midway.

You can imagine Admiral Nimitz's delight

when I showed him the above decrypted transmitted message

and allowed him to prepare his warm reception

for those visitors in early June.

You can almost see him metaphorically stroking his chin

and saying, "I'm game, let's go."

The morning of the attack, Nimitz's fleet

is laying in wait near Midway,

ready to ambush the Japanese.

The tables have been turned

and the Americans have not two carriers,

but three.

The USS Yorktown, the ship the Japanese were convinced

was destroyed in the Coral Sea,

is steaming through the ocean.

Against all odds,

the burning hulk had made it back

to Pearl Harbor for repairs.

The naval architects say it's gonna take three to six months

to get this in shape, just ready to go to sea.

And Nimitz looks at him coolly

and says "You can have three days.

I've gotta have it battle ready in three days,"

and by golly, it was.

Nimitz now has three carriers

and the island itself, an unsinkable carrier,

to take on the Japanese.

And the advantage of surprise

means he'll be able to strike first.

Every time we had steak and eggs on the aircraft carrier,

you knew that was gonna be a rough, rough day.

And that morning, they gave us steak and eggs.

At 7:00 a.m. that morning,

under the command of Rear Admiral Raymond Spruance…

Start the engines.

…two of US Navy's three carriers,

Enterprise and Hornet,

launched their strike on the Japanese fleet.

Squadrons of torpedo bombers and then dive bombers

take to the air.

Meanwhile, Admiral Nagumo

is still grappling with the news

that an American fleet

is already at Midway.

Now the question is what do you do?

The plan may not be going according to plan anymore.

Remember, the primary objective

in the entire campaign was to sink the American carriers.

Midway is the bait, carriers are the target.

So now, he's gotta rethink his entire plan,

"Wait a minute, maybe instead of a second strike on Midway,

I should use those planes to attack the carrier."

Despite his previous order to attack Midway Island,

there are still some planes on board,

armed to strike ships.

But according to Japanese doctrine, you should only attack

with a fully coordinated group of planes

and Nagumo is a strictly by-the-book commander.

So instead of sending what he has,

he decides to wait until all his planes

have switched from bombs back to torpedoes.

It'll be at least another two hours

before they're ready to launch an attack.

He has to do something outside the parameters of the rule book

and he's not prepared to do that.

So he's made a mistake and now,

he's insisting on unmaking that mistake

in a position where he has not got the time to do that.

Down in the hanger decks,

chaos reigns

because the order comes down from Nagumo

that we have to re-arm these planes again.

And in the helter skelter

hubbub of the hangars now,

we have a situation where there's no time

to stow those land attack weapons properly.

They're just shoved up against the bulkheads.

You've got ordnance scattered all over the place,

these planes are also being fueled,

meaning that the hangars now are a tinder box.

Nagumo's carrier fleet is still re-arming

when, at 9:20 a.m.,

planes from Nimitz's carriers appeared in the sky.

But as the squadron draws close,

it's clearly alone

and unprotected by fighter planes.

The United States may have had

the advantage of surprise,

but they've squandered it.

The problem for the Americans at this stage of the war

is that they're not nearly as good

as the Japanese are

at coordinating the activities

of multiple flight decks.

Enterprise and Hornet's launches are just miserable affairs

and they end up with multiple squadrons in the air

that are flying in different directions completely unsupported

and none of them know where each other even is.

The first squadron to arrive are torpedo bombers.

These torpedo planes are slow, they are under armed,

and they are up against zeros

that in many cases have an advantage and speed

of over 200 miles an hour.

It's like they were hanging on a string

and just having these fighters go past them and take runs.

This is one of the most horrific portions

of the battle for the Americans.

Worse still,

the lumbering planes are armed with a faulty weapon.

The problem that they have with this plane is it has a highly dysfunctional torpedo

and this torpedo generally fails to detonate

90% of the time.

They had tested it in prewar gunnery tests

and it only went off 10% of the time.

The American admirals decided to chance it anyway

and send these three torpedo squadrons into the fray.

They were all pretty terrifying,

I was hit by a piece of shrapnel.

I had blood all over the place.

I didn't know how badly I was hit

but I fired for a while

and then he stopped firing and I guess he had just been killed.

The torpedo pilots, I think,

are some of the bravest individuals at this battle

because they sort of go into the fight

knowing that really all they are going to be used for

is as fodder on the off chance

that maybe one of the torpedoes might go off

and do some damage.

The morning of the battle, a dive bomber pilot told the story

that his best friend was a torpedo bomber pilot

and they basically have a final farewell

and they know at that point

that chances of coming back are not good

because they can't say goodbye,

they can't say sorry, "This has happened to you,"

all they can do is shake hands and tear up.

These deaths are not easy things

because, you know, when these planes are hit,

they explode in these enormous balls of fire.

Aviation gas spreads over, so it is not a pleasant way to go out.

To have courage like that to face death

knowing that, you know, you have little chance of success

is just a human quality that is just difficult to imagine.

From the first torpedo squadron,

only one man survives.

And the next two squadrons are massacred as well.

In the end, just four planes make it back.

America's hopes now rest solely

on their dive bombers.

But so far,

they've been nowhere to be seen.

Sent off in the wrong direction,

they are hopelessly lost and running low on fuel.

We get to where they're supposed to be, they're not there.

Nothing, I mean, just ocean as far as you can see.

And at this point in time we were just about as far as we should be

if we wanted to get back to the carrier.

They've got a compass,

they've got a pencil and that's how they're gonna navigate

over three or four hundred miles of open ocean.

There is no GPS,

there is no satellite communications.

You're completely blind

and you're flying over this completely featureless seascape.

They're pretty much on their own out there.

Middle of the ocean, just trying to figure out

where, if they were the Japanese fleet,

you would go.

Which direction you'd head in

and hoping that you can find something

to lead you to those ships.

Admiral Nagumo sees the battle

swing dramatically back in his favor.

Critically for Nagumo, the torpedo threat,

the one that really would have spoiled his morning

has gone away, they've been massacred.

Now they can get on with the job in hand.

They can finish getting that strike ready

and finish off the Americans.

Brilliant, the Americans have failed.

Nagumo’s strike planes will shortly all be armed with torpedoes

and all four carriers can launch a concentrated attack

on the Americans.

Having wasted its advantage,

Nimitz's Pacific carrier Fleet

is facing total destruction.

This is the US Navy, there is no reserve.

If you lose at Midway,

this is really America's last shot

to kind of check the Japanese and prevent them

from making their position indomitable.

But there will be a final twist

in the Battle of Midway.

At 10:25 in the morning, on June 4th 1942,

the Japanese were winning the Pacific War.

And five minutes later,

the pendulum had shifted completely to the other side.

Almost never in history

do you find the tipping of history itself

so swift and so decisive in such a tiny moment.

The battle turns on an incredible slice of luck.

Far out at sea,

the leader of a lost American dive bomber squadron

spots something unusual in the distance.

On the horizon, the American pilots

see a giant rainbow coursing through the air.

Now what it is, it is a spectrum of color

coming through the water spout of a lone Japanese destroyer, the Arashi.

The Japanese destroyer is on its own

with no carriers in sight.

But despite being dangerously low on fuel,

the squadron leader decides to go with his gut

and follow the ship's wake.

When your skipper, McClusky,

turns the plane and extends the search,

you know what he's asking of you.

He's asking you to keep flying with him,

to risk not coming back at all and landing out on the ocean,

all on the off chance you're gonna find

the Japanese fleet and do something important.

Then, 10 minutes later,

at 10:05 a.m.,

a miracle.

The US dive bombers

find the entire Japanese carrier fleet.

It must have been an incredible sight.

To be 15,000 feet up and you've got these carriers

spread out underneath you.

One pilot who survived and lived into his 90s

said that he could close his eyes

and the one thing he could remember vivid, clear as day,

was the sight of the Japanese fleet out on the horizon.

The Japanese have just recently painted

huge Hinomaru,

a big red meatball if you will,

on the front of every one of their flight decks

and of course the American dive bomber pilots

are looking at this like,

"Well, that's a perfect aiming point."

Incredibly,

a squadron of dive bombers from the resurrected USS Yorktown

comes across the Japanese at the same time.

By sheer luck, we're now gonna have a situation

where we have four squadrons of attack planes

attacking the Japanese from two different directions

and from multiple altitudes.

Japanese fighters have scattered

because they are chasing away a final torpedo squadron.

And so, though the American torpedo bomber attacks

were something of a horrible waste of life,

when the dive bombers show up, there is nothing there to stop them.

The higher altitudes

are virtually fighterless.

Now, the Japanese do not have radar

and it's a lookout on the Japanese flagship

who's looking up and all of a sudden sees the American dive bombers

and he yells out, "dive bombers."

A witness said it looked like this silver cascade

coming down over the top.

They roll into their dives and go down towards their targets,

and dive bombing is a death-defying tactic

and they plunge downward

at about an 80-degree angle towards the earth

with the hood open, which means the wind

is roaring into the cockpit, the whole thing is jarring.

Anti-aircraft bursts are puffing around you.

And then pull out as low as you can go,

that gives you the best chance of finding a hit.

So, it's almost like playing Russian roulette

with the surface of the sea.

Pilots have trained for a year before the Battle of Midway

so that they can prove what their dive bombers are capable of,

that they can sink these Japanese ships

and that's not about luck, that's about training.

The veteran US dive bombers are incredibly accurate.

In just five minutes,

they land direct hits on three Japanese carriers.

Soryu is hit by three bombs,

Kaga is hit by so many bombs

that the Japanese lose track

of how many bombs hit her, they simply can't count.

Akagi, on the other hand, is only hit by one bomb

and it's put in just absolutely the perfect position

to do maximal damage to the flagship.

To make matters worse,

Admiral Nagumo's squadrons are trapped below decks,

switching between bombs and torpedoes.

Just consider for a moment,

it's a metal box that is full of fueled aircraft,

there are bombs lying all around the perimeter of this box

and now, a thousand pounds of high explosive

comes slicing through a wooden flight deck

and detonates.

It must have been like the sun exploding.

Japanese deck crewmen

scythed down by the dozens,

immediately those decks are covered

with burning fuel.

It's an absolute holocaust.

Three of the four Japanese carriers,

the powerhouse of the imperial navy,

are ripped apart by fire and explosions.

Even when I got 10 or 20 miles away,

I could see items of the ship blowing up in the air

a thousand feet high,

they were like a haystack on fire.

In a matter of minutes,

the Battle of Midway has been utterly turned on its head.

A stunned Admiral Nagumo is forced to abandon

his burning carrier flagship…

and zero fighters are forced to ditch in the sea.

But despite the destruction, the Japanese do not give up.

They have a final throw of the dice.

Their only remaining carrier, the Hiryu,

launches an attack.

The strike leader taking off from Hiryu

knows that his plane is damaged,

he doesn't have enough fuel on board

to hit the Americans and get back,

but he takes off anyway.

Two separate waves of Japanese planes

attack the USS Yorktown,

crippling the ship.

But this hardy vessel known as The Fighting Lady

still has the final say in the battle.

Its dive bombers hunt down and devastate

the last remaining Japanese carrier,

the Hiryu.

Stranded over 300 miles away,

in a slow battleship, powerless to influence the battle,

Admiral Yamamoto eventually hears of the American ambush.

And ultimately, that all four

of his carriers have been hit.

His plan has horribly backfired,

the vital heart of the Japanese Navy

is destroyed.

This must have been an absolutely devastating personal blow

because he is the guy

who led to the creation of this carrier force,

he understands its value to the nation.

And so to have, you know, half of that force

being ripped to pieces within a space of just a few hours,

he understands what a horrendous blow this is

to Japan's chances in this war.

These ships are now on fire, stem to stern,

they've been burning for hours.

And yet you, as an engine crewman,

have to stay at your post.

So, these guys are trapped below decks and eventually,

the decks turned red above them as the fires

inexorably work their way down through the ship

and many of these men are roasted alive.

There's no way out of these spaces.

As the two navies retire from the monumental Battle of Midway,

the true enormity and human cost of the battle

starts to become clear.

More than 3,000 Japanese and American serviceman

have been killed in the space of one day.

It all began to sink in

to the members of the other squadrons

that have to look at the empty ready rooms

where their buddies had once been

and to see all their friends' clothing just hanging quietly on hooks.

That's kind of the real kicker

that exists in the squadron ready rooms and after this fight is over.

For the rival American and Japanese admirals,

there is much soul searching to be done.

Nimitz understood had it not been

for a fortuitous series of events

more than halfway through the battle,

he could have been running back to Pearl Harbor

with his tail between his legs.

Nagumo and his staff officers, as they're making their way practically

as refugees back towards Tokyo,

obviously there's gonna be a little explaining that has to be done.

How did you lose four carriers in one day?

The Japanese begin spreading disinformation about this battle.

They don't tell the Japanese public

that they've lost this battle.

There's a huge cover up that goes on.

And so, in that context, you've got a guy like Yamamoto

who is really the naval equivalent of a rock star,

you can't get rid of him without people noticing.

This is a guy that spends a lot of his time

answering letters from school children.

So, just 'cause you've lost the battle,

doesn't mean that you can get rid of Yamamoto, he's kept in place.

And in fact, a lot of the officers

that are responsible for this disaster are kept in place

and it's all part of the cover up to the Japanese people.

On the other hand, the American victory at Midway

was great news in the United States, banner headlines.

The euphoria that followed that victory was important

because America got up off the mat,

all the news had been bad

from December 1941 all the way through May.

As for Nimitz,

I think this was definitely proof enough that he was the man capable

of leading the United States the rest of the way across the Pacific.

He came in, he listened to the people

who were telling him the right thing

and ultimately,

to win the victory the United States needed.

But, just two months later,

Nimitz's marines are involved

in brutal ground combat,

trying to retake Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands

from the Japanese.

Staring the Americans in the face after Midway

is all these fortified island chains,

the Gilberts, the Carolines, the Marshalls, the Marianas.

So, Nimitz looks at these strategic predicament after Midway

and it's every bit as thorny as it was after Pearl Harbor.

Somehow, you're gonna have to get to Japan

and impose America's will on Japan

and yet how to do this?

America pours its huge industrial resources into the war effort.

By 1943,

the United States is producing

a new state-of-the-art aircraft carrier

every month,

creating a fleet of over 90.

Their military might is overwhelming.

Admiral Yamamoto is hunted down

and killed by American fighter planes.

And Vice Admiral Nagumo oversees another defeat,

this time in Saipan.

He kills himself in shame.

But the bloodiest battles in the Pacific War

are still to come.

And a new terror will be unleashed.

Manned planes pouring into a wall of anti-aircraft fire,

bomb and gas flame the most terrible weapon.

A kamikaze.

Re-sync & redact: BLU DUAINE blu.duaine@protonmail.com