The end of the Battle of Midway

At dawn on 7 June 1942, at about five in the morning Midway time, the aircraft carrier Yorktown rolled over onto her port side and sank. She had been hit three days earlier by aircraft from the Japanese carrier Hiryū and torpedoed by a submarine the day before. Her loss brought the Battle of Midway to a close. In four days Japan had lost four fleet carriers, a heavy cruiser, some 250 aircraft and more than three thousand men; the United States had lost one carrier, one destroyer, some 150 aircraft and more than three hundred men. The issue had been decided on 4 June, when American dive bombers destroyed Nagumo’s carriers. The battle, which had begun on 3 June with the first contacts with the Japanese invasion force, went on for three more days, taken up by the Japanese retreat, the American pursuit and the struggle to save Yorktown.

Popular chronologies sum it up thus: the battle came to an end, Yorktown sank, four Japanese carriers and a cruiser were sunk, and the battle is regarded as the turning point of the war in the Pacific. All of this is correct, although, as more recent research shows, the “turning point” verdict needs some qualification. All times are Midway local time; Japanese records, kept in Tokyo time, date the same events a day later.

The night of 4–5 June: Yamamoto gives up

On the evening of 4 June Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, sailing with the battleships several hundred miles behind the carrier force, already knew that Akagi, Kaga and Sōryū were ablaze and that the last serviceable carrier, Hiryū, had also been hit. At first he still tried to salvage the operation. He ordered the forces of Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondō and what remained of Chūichi Nagumo’s force to seek out the American fleet and force it into a night surface action, the kind of fighting in which the Japanese navy felt strongest. The four heavy cruisers of Rear Admiral Takeo Kurita’s 7th Cruiser Division were to bombard Midway during the night.

There was no night battle, because the American carriers withdrew. Rear Admiral Raymond Spruance, who had taken over command in the afternoon of 4 June from Frank Jack Fletcher when the latter had to leave the stricken Yorktown, decided not to risk an encounter in the dark with Japanese battleships. After nightfall he turned east, and only around midnight did he bring his force back westward so as to be near Midway at dawn. It was a cautious decision, later criticised by some naval aviators, but most historians consider it sound: in a night encounter with Yamato and Kondō’s cruisers the American carriers could have been destroyed.

When it became clear that the Americans could not be reached before dawn, and that at dawn their aircraft would strike again, Yamamoto gave up. At about three in the morning of 5 June he cancelled the bombardment and occupation of Midway and ordered a general withdrawal westward. According to members of his staff, when officers were wondering how to explain the defeat, he said that he alone would apologise to the Emperor. Before dawn, on his orders, Japanese destroyers sank the drifting wreck of Akagi with torpedoes; Kaga and Sōryū had gone down the previous evening. On the morning of 5 June, after a destroyer had tried to scuttle her, Hiryū sank as well. Remaining aboard her were the commander of the 2nd Carrier Division, Rear Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi, regarded as one of the ablest Japanese admirals, and her captain, Tomeo Kaku.

Mikuma and Mogami

The order cancelling the bombardment reached Kurita’s cruisers when they were already close to Midway. As they turned away they sighted the American submarine Tambor. In the confusion caused by sharp evasive turns the heavy cruiser Mogami rammed her sister ship Mikuma and crushed her own bow. Kurita made off with the two undamaged cruisers, while Mogami and Mikuma, escorted by two destroyers, limped westward at about twelve knots, trailing a slick of fuel oil.

On the morning of 5 June aircraft from Midway caught up with them: B-17s and Marine Corps dive bombers. The heavy bombers’ bombs missed. Captain Richard Fleming, leading a flight of obsolete Vindicators, was killed diving on Mikuma; his burning aircraft crashed right beside the ship and, according to some accounts, struck her after turret. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. The cruisers sailed on.

Throughout 5 June Spruance searched the west for the remnants of Nagumo’s force and for supposedly damaged battleships. In the afternoon he launched several dozen dive bombers from Enterprise and Hornet, which found only the lone destroyer Tanikaze; she dodged every bomb and shot down one aircraft. The airmen returned after dark, and Spruance, against blackout rules, ordered the flight-deck lights switched on so that they could land.

On the morning of 6 June reconnaissance aircraft located both Japanese cruisers. Aircraft from Hornet and Enterprise attacked them three times. Mogami, hit by several bombs, survived because her crew had earlier jettisoned her torpedoes; Mikuma, whose own torpedoes exploded, became a blazing wreck and sank in the evening. Some seven hundred men died aboard her; the two escorting destroyers, Asashio and Arashio, also suffered casualties. After the last strike, with his destroyers low on fuel and his airmen exhausted, Spruance broke off the pursuit and turned east. Further west Yamamoto’s battleships were waiting, as was the range of aircraft based on Wake Island.

The death of Yorktown

Yorktown had been abandoned in the afternoon of 4 June, after the second strike from Hiryū, when two torpedoes left her dead in the water with a heavy list. Yet the ship did not sink. On 5 June the minesweeper Vireo took her in tow, barely able to move her, and on the morning of 6 June a salvage party returned aboard: her captain, Elliott Buckmaster, and some 170 officers and men. The destroyer Hammann made fast alongside the carrier and supplied power for the pumps. Fires were fought, and guns and aircraft on the port side were thrown overboard to reduce the list, which after several hours had eased by two degrees. The salvage party was optimistic.

The Japanese, however, knew where Yorktown was. A reconnaissance aircraft from the cruiser Chikuma had spotted her, and the submarine I-168, under Lieutenant Commander Yahachi Tanabe, was sent to the spot. At 1.35 p.m. on 6 June, having slipped through the destroyer screen, she fired four torpedoes. One hit Hammann and broke her in two; two others struck Yorktown’s side. The destroyer sank in three or four minutes, and her depth charges exploded underwater, killing many of the sailors swimming in the sea. Some eighty of Hammann’s men died. I-168 escaped despite the hunt for her.

The salvage party left the carrier. Yorktown stayed afloat through the night, but towards morning her list began to increase rapidly, and at dawn on 7 June she capsized and went to the bottom. The crews of the escorting ships paid their respects with flags at half-mast. Her wreck was found only in 1998, more than five kilometres below the surface.

That same day Major General Clarence Tinker, commander of the Seventh Air Force in Hawaii, was killed; he had personally led a raid by heavy bombers against the Japanese base on Wake Island, and his aircraft disappeared over the sea near Midway. At the other end of the operation, in the Aleutians, the Japanese, who had not abandoned Operation AL, landed unopposed on Kiska and Attu on 7 June.

The toll

According to the tally by Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully, based on Japanese records, 3,057 Japanese died in the battle, about 2,200 of them aboard the four carriers and some 700 aboard Mikuma. Japan lost four of the six large carriers with which she had begun the war, together with all the aircraft aboard them, some 250 machines. The United States lost Yorktown and Hammann, some 145–150 aircraft and 307 dead, most of them airmen.

These figures need comment. For decades it was repeated that the elite of Japanese naval aviation perished at Midway. Parshall and Tully calculated that about 110 carrier aircrew were killed, less than a quarter of those embarked; more painful was the loss of many highly trained mechanics and deck crews, and of the whole organisational experience of four ships’ companies. Japanese naval aviation was truly bled white only in the following months, in the fighting for the Solomon Islands.

The battle also had a dark side. The Japanese fished three American airmen out of the sea: Yorktown pilot Ensign Wesley Osmus, and Enterprise pilot Ensign Frank O’Flaherty with his gunner, Bruno Gaido. After interrogation all three were murdered aboard Japanese ships, and Nagumo’s report noted merely that Osmus had “died” and been buried at sea. On the Japanese side, American ships picked up two sailors from Mikuma in the following days and, on 19 June, several dozen survivors from Hiryū who had drifted in a boat for two weeks.

The American task forces cruised north of Midway for several more days to make sure the Japanese were not coming back. On 8 June Fletcher transferred his flag to the carrier Saratoga, which had brought replacement aircraft, and in mid-June the ships returned to Pearl Harbor. The Japanese fleet reached the Hashirajima anchorage on 14 June.

Victory and silence

On 6 June Admiral Chester Nimitz announced in a communiqué that Pearl Harbor had been “partially avenged” and that vengeance would not be complete until Japanese sea power had been reduced to impotence; he added wryly that the Americans were already about “midway” there. American newspapers wrote of a great victory, though in the first days they greatly overstated the part played by the Army’s bombers. On Sunday 7 June the Chicago Tribune published an article by its correspondent Stanley Johnston which made it plain that the Navy had known the composition of the Japanese fleet in advance. It was a dangerous indiscretion, since it could have revealed that the Americans were reading Japanese codes. The government considered prosecuting the paper, but the case was dropped, and the Japanese, it seems, overlooked the article.

In Japan silence descended. On 10 June Imperial General Headquarters announced a victory: according to the communiqué, two American carriers had been sunk, while Japan’s own losses amounted to one carrier sunk and one damaged. The wounded from the sunken ships were isolated in hospitals as “secret patients”, and surviving sailors were dispersed to distant units without leave to visit their families. Only the Emperor and the navy’s high command knew the full truth; for a time even the army did not know how great the defeat had been. Neither Yamamoto nor Nagumo was relieved of command.

A turning point?

The Battle of Midway is called the turning point of the war in the Pacific, and there is much truth in that. Japan lost the core of the carrier fleet that had given her the upper hand since Pearl Harbor, and she never again mounted a great strategic offensive in the Pacific. Plans to seize New Caledonia, Fiji and Samoa were postponed and then abandoned. Two months later, in August 1942, the Americans landed on Guadalcanal and went over to the offensive.

It should be remembered, however, that after Midway the forces at sea remained evenly matched for many months. Japan still had Shōkaku and Zuikaku as well as several smaller carriers, and in the fighting for Guadalcanal in the autumn of 1942 the Americans lost Wasp and Hornet; for a time they had only one serviceable carrier in the Pacific. Final supremacy was decided above all by industrial imbalance: while Japan managed to build a handful of fleet carriers, American shipyards commissioned several dozen carriers of various classes. Midway did not by itself decide the outcome of the war, but it ended the period of Japanese victories and gave the United States the time it needed to bring that superiority to bear.