Battle of Midway
The Battle of Midway was a major naval battle in the Pacific Theater of World War II that took place 4–7 June 1942, six months after the Empire of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and one month after the Battle of the Coral Sea.[7][8][9] The U.S. Navy under Admirals Chester W. Nimitz, Frank J. Fletcher, and Raymond A. Spruance defeated an attacking fleet of the Imperial Japanese Navy under Admirals Isoroku Yamamoto, Chūichi Nagumo, and Nobutake Kondō north of Midway Atoll, inflicting devastating damage on the Japanese fleet. Military historian John Keegan called it "the most stunning and decisive blow in the history of naval warfare",[10] while naval historian Craig Symonds called it "one of the most consequential naval engagements in world history, ranking alongside Salamis, Trafalgar, and Tsushima Strait, as both tactically decisive and strategically influential."[11]
This article is about the 1942 battle. For other uses, see Battle of Midway (disambiguation).
In response to the Doolittle air raid on Tokyo, the Japanese leadership planned a "barrier" strategy to extend Japan's defensive perimeter. They hoped to lure the American aircraft carriers into a trap, clearing the seas for Japanese attacks on Midway, Fiji, Samoa, and Hawaii. The plan was undermined by faulty Japanese anticipations of the American reaction and poor initial dispositions. Crucially, U.S. cryptographers were able to determine the date and location of the planned attack, enabling the forewarned United States Navy to prepare its own ambush.
Four Japanese and three American aircraft carriers participated in the battle. The Japanese fleet carriers—Akagi, Kaga, Sōryū, and Hiryū, part of the six-carrier force that had attacked Pearl Harbor six months earlier—were sunk, as was the heavy cruiser Mikuma. The United States lost the carrier Yorktown and the destroyer Hammann, while the carriers USS Enterprise and USS Hornet survived the battle fully intact.
After Midway and the exhausting attrition of the Solomon Islands campaign, Japan's capacity to replace its losses in materiel (particularly aircraft carriers) and men (especially well-trained pilots and maintenance crewmen) rapidly became insufficient to cope with mounting casualties, while the United States' massive industrial and training capabilities made losses far easier to replace. The Battle of Midway, along with the Guadalcanal campaign, is widely considered a turning point in the Pacific War.
Discovery of sunken vessels[edit]
Because of the extreme depth of the ocean in the area of the battle (more than 17,000 ft or 5,200 m), researching the battlefield has presented extraordinary difficulties. On 19 May 1998, Robert Ballard and a team of scientists and Midway veterans from both sides located and photographed Yorktown, which was located 16,650 ft (5,070 m) deep. The ship was remarkably intact for a vessel that had sunk in 1942; much of the original equipment and even the original paint scheme were still visible.[203] Ballard's subsequent search for the Japanese carriers was unsuccessful.
In September 1999, a joint expedition between Nauticos Corp. and the U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office searched for the Japanese aircraft carriers. Using advanced renavigation techniques in conjunction with the ship's log of the submarine USS Nautilus, the expedition located a large piece of wreckage, subsequently identified as having come from the upper hangar deck of Kaga.
The crew of the research vessel RV Petrel, in conjunction with the U.S. Navy, announced on 18 October 2019 that it had found the Japanese carrier Kaga lying 17,700 ft (5,400 m) beneath the waves. The crew of Petrel confirmed the discovery of another Japanese carrier, the Akagi, on 21 October 2019. The Akagi was found in the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument resting in nearly 18,010 ft (5,490 m) of water.