The Battle of Midway begins

At about nine in the morning, Midway time, on 3 June 1942, a Catalina flying boat of patrol squadron VP-44, flown by Ensign Jack Reid, sighted a long column of Japanese ships west of Midway Atoll. Reid reported the enemy’s “main body”. It was the first contact of a battle which the American command had foreseen in advance thanks to the work of its cryptanalysts, and which the Japanese command began convinced that it would take its opponent by surprise. Nothing was decided that day. Bombers from Midway attacked the Japanese transports without result, during the night flying boats hit a tanker with a torpedo, and Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo’s four carriers sailed undetected all day under cover of fog and cloud. Both sides were preparing for a clash the next morning.

Many lists state that the battle began with ineffective attacks by American B-17s on the “approaching Japanese fleet”, and that Nagumo, unable to find the American carriers, decided to strike Midway’s air defences the next morning. This needs to be made more precise. The B-17s attacked not the carrier force but a convoy of transports carrying the landing troops, which was several hundred miles south-west of Nagumo. Nagumo, for his part, did not search for American carriers on 3 June, because he was convinced there were none nearby, and the strike on Midway at dawn on 4 June was not an improvised decision of his but a fixed element of the plan from the outset.

It is also worth bearing in mind the time difference. American reports and most studies give local Midway time, whereas the Japanese used Tokyo time, almost a full day ahead. In Japanese documents the events of 3 June are dated 4 June, and the decisive carrier battle, dated 4 June in Western accounts, is dated 5 June in Japanese ones.

Two fleets before the battle

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s plan, drawn up during the preparations for the battle, divided the Japanese forces into several groups hundreds of miles apart. In the lead, from the north-west, came Nagumo’s Kidō Butai with the carriers Akagi, Kaga, Sōryū and Hiryū, two battleships, two heavy cruisers, a light cruiser and more than a dozen destroyers. His aircraft were to destroy the atoll’s aircraft and defences on 4 June, and two days later troops were to land on Midway. From the west and south-west came the transports of Rear Admiral Raizō Tanaka with some five thousand soldiers, screened by cruisers and by the forces of Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondō. Several hundred miles behind Nagumo sailed the battleships of Yamamoto himself, with the super-battleship Yamato.

On the morning of the same day aircraft from Rear Admiral Kakuji Kakuta’s two light carriers bombed the base at Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians. This strike, which the older literature regarded as a diversion intended to draw the Americans north, was according to more recent research part of a parallel operation, Operation AL. It had no effect on the course of events at Midway: Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet, knew from intercepted signals that the main blow would fall on Midway, and did not send a single carrier north.

Japanese reconnaissance had already failed before the battle. The submarine cordon that was to detect American ships on their way from Hawaii took up its positions late, when they were already further north. A planned reconnaissance of Pearl Harbor by flying boats, a repeat of Operation K, did not take place, because American ships were lying in the lagoon at French Frigate Shoals, where submarines were to refuel the aircraft. Nagumo therefore had no information at all about the American carriers. From 2 June his force sailed in thick fog, which made it hard to keep formation but at the same time hid it from American patrols.

On the other side, three American carriers had been waiting since 2 June north-east of Midway, at a position called “Point Luck”. Task Force 16, with Enterprise and Hornet, was led by Rear Admiral Raymond Spruance; Task Force 17, with the hastily repaired Yorktown, by Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, who as the senior officer was in overall command. They were to stay beyond the range of Japanese reconnaissance and strike from the flank when the Japanese aircraft attacked the atoll.

Midway waits

In June 1942 the atoll itself was crammed with aircraft. According to an American study of 1943, on 3 June there were, besides the Marine fighters and dive-bombers, 30 Catalina flying boats, 17 Army B-17 bombers and 4 B-26 bombers, and six of the navy’s new Avenger torpedo bombers. On Nimitz’s orders they were all placed under the commander of the naval air station, Captain Cyril Simard. Ground defence was in the hands of Lieutenant Colonel Harold Shannon’s 6th Marine Defense Battalion, reinforced with anti-aircraft guns, tanks and companies of the 2nd Raider Battalion. The beaches were mined and surrounded by underwater obstacles, and more than a dozen submarines were stationed around the atoll.

The crews were working at the limit of endurance. Every day at about 4.15 a.m. the flying boats took off to search out to 700 miles, and the B-17s took off right behind them so as not to be caught on the ground, circling in the air for several hours. Some of the bomber crews, flown in from Hawaii on 30 and 31 May, had spent around 30 hours in the air over the previous two days. The atoll’s command expected the Japanese carriers to emerge in the morning from the belt of bad weather to the north-west and strike at about six. The next day this estimate proved accurate to within a quarter of an hour.

First contact

On the morning of 3 June the patrols took off at dawn as usual. A few minutes after nine one of the flying boats reported two Japanese vessels that had fired on it with anti-aircraft guns. Shortly afterwards Reid, who had flown almost to the limit of his sector, sent a report of the “main body” in column, heading towards Midway; according to an early American study of 1943 it was about 700 miles from the atoll, according to later calculations somewhat closer. Reid shadowed the enemy for a long time, hiding in the clouds, and reported that he could see eleven ships steaming east. Then, with his fuel running out, he was ordered to return.

In reality this was not the main body but Tanaka’s transport group and its escort. Admiral Nimitz at Pearl Harbor judged this correctly at once. According to an account cited by Gordon Prange, he warned Fletcher that the ships sighted were the landing force, not the striking force that would attack from the north-west at dawn the next day. Fletcher came to the same conclusion. He refused to be drawn west, and in the evening turned both task forces south-west so as to be some 200 miles north of Midway at dawn on 4 June, on the flank of the expected Japanese approach.

B-17s over the transports

On Midway the atoll commander hesitated over whether to send the bombers against a target that might not be the most important one. The carriers had still not been found, and the B-17s had just returned from their morning flight and needed to refuel. But when Reid’s amplifying report came in, nine B-17s under Lieutenant Colonel Walter Sweeney took off at 12.30 p.m. with extra fuel tanks and half bomb loads. After three hours in the air, at about 4.20 p.m., they found the transport group some 570 miles west of Midway and attacked it in three flights from heights of 8,000 to 12,000 feet, that is, about 2,400 to 3,600 metres.

The anti-aircraft fire was heavy, and the airmen did not stay to observe the results. On their return they reported hits on a heavy cruiser and a transport and a probable hit on a second cruiser. Japanese documents confirm none of these hits. A high-altitude attack on manoeuvring ships had almost no chance of success, and so it would prove in the following days too: at Midway the B-17s attacked Japanese ships several more times and hit none, although Army airmen and the press credited them with great successes at the time.

The Catalinas’ night attack

In the evening a mission set out from Midway of a kind the US Navy had never yet carried out. At 9.15 p.m. four Catalinas of VP-44 took off, each with a single Mark 13 torpedo, led by Lieutenant William Richards. Their crews, all volunteers, had flown in from Pearl Harbor that same afternoon after a ten-hour flight. In the clouds two of the flying boats became separated from the formation; one of them found the target on its own, the other turned back.

At about one in the morning on 4 June the leading Catalina’s radar detected Japanese ships, and two columns of vessels appeared in the moonlight. The flying boats came down to a height of a few dozen metres and dropped their torpedoes from a few hundred metres. One hit the tanker Akebono Maru, which, despite the damage, kept her place in the formation; about ten men were killed aboard her. It was the only successful hit by an American aerial torpedo in the entire battle. None of the Catalinas was lost, although on the way back they learned by radio that Midway was under attack and landed at other islands; one, out of fuel, came down on the open sea, and its crew was picked up only after more than two days.

Nagumo in the fog

By the evening of 3 June, then, the Japanese knew that the transport group had been sighted and attacked. They did not, however, change the plan. Nagumo, several hundred miles to the north, acted in accordance with his orders: he was to destroy the aircraft on Midway before the landing and only then, if the American fleet came out, give battle to it. In the estimate of the situation preserved in his later report, he stated that the enemy was unaware of Japanese intentions and that there was no strong carrier force in the vicinity. He relied on the assumption, shared throughout the Japanese navy, that after the Coral Sea the Americans had at most two serviceable carriers in the Pacific and were keeping them far away, perhaps in the area of the Solomon Islands.

Yet there were signs that this was not so. In the preceding days Japanese radio intelligence had noted increased American radio traffic and submarine activity around Hawaii. Yamamoto, sailing under radio silence in Yamato, did not pass this information on to Nagumo, assuming he had received it from Tokyo; Nagumo, whose flagship, according to some studies, had weaker receiving aerials, did not get it. He therefore planned to send half his aircraft against Midway on the morning of 4 June and to hold the other half, armed for an attack on ships, in reserve just in case. To search the direction from which the real danger threatened he assigned a mere seven aircraft. In the evening the Kidō Butai increased speed and steamed through the darkness towards its launch point, about 240 miles north-west of Midway.

Place in the war

The events of 3 June were only a prelude, but they showed what the battle would turn on. The Americans knew where and when the enemy would appear, had placed their carriers where he did not expect them, and were not misled by the first contact with the wrong target. The Japanese were following a rigid, dispersed plan based on the false assumption that they would achieve surprise, and did not change it when the sighting of their landing force proved that surprise was gone. Both sides were let down in one respect: American land-based aircraft – heavy bombers and torpedo planes – proved almost powerless against ships under way, as the crews from Midway learned painfully the next day.

On the morning of 4 June, at 4.30 a.m., more than a hundred aircraft took off from the Japanese carriers against Midway. A few hours later American dive-bombers set Akagi, Kaga and Sōryū ablaze, and Hiryū in the afternoon. Six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the force that had carried it out ceased to exist, and the Pacific War entered a new phase in which the initiative began to pass to the Americans.