Midway, June 1942
Five minutes on the morning of 4 June 1942 decided the Pacific war. These are the machines that were there.
Six months after Pearl Harbor, Japan’s carrier fleet — the Kidō Butai — steamed toward a tiny atoll named Midway, intending to finish the US Pacific Fleet. American codebreakers read the plan, and three carriers were waiting: Enterprise, Hornet, and a Yorktown patched back to life in seventy-two hours.
The torpedo squadrons attacked first and were massacred — but they pulled the defending fighters down to the waves. At about 10:22, the Dauntless dive bombers arrived overhead almost unopposed, and in roughly six minutes Akagi, Kaga and Sōryū were burning. Hiryū followed that afternoon. Japan never regained the initiative — and the giants of Yamamoto’s Main Body, hundreds of miles astern, never fired a shot.
