Midway

8 Pages 1962 Words

At 10.26am on 4 June 1942 the course of World War Two in the Pacific changed utterly. At that moment 37 Douglas Dauntless bombers from the USS Enterprise peeled off into a dive attack on two Japanese aircraft carriers. Within minutes both ships were ablaze, their death throes punctuated by the explosion of fuel lines, and badly stowed ordnance and aircraft petrol tanks. Within six hours the other two carriers in their fleet had also been destroyed. The force that had dominated the Pacific for six months was in ruins, extinguishing the hopes of an empire. Midway was a truly decisive battle.
After their success at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy's six large aircraft carriers, operating over 400 aircraft, had rampaged around the Pacific, sinking British warships in the Indian Ocean and hammering Darwin in Northern Australia. They were finally halted in early May 1942 at the Battle of Coral Sea, when two of them were damaged in an inconclusive battle with American carriers. By this stage of the war the whole force was exhausted, and desperately needed a refit.
The American 'Doolittle' raid, an air attack on Tokyo launched from the carrier USS Hornet, prompted Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto to plan a final showdown with the remnants of the American fleet before letting his forces rest. The raid had been an insult because it had threatened the life of the Emperor Hirohito the sacred leader of Japan (although the government of Japan was under military control led by Prime Minister Hideki Tojo the Emperor was still held in high regard). Yamamoto was confident that he had the advantage in numbers and quality, so he prepared to destroy the American carrier fleet. He planned to confuse the enemy with a diversionary attack on the Alaskan coast and the Aleutian Islands, drawing the Americans north, only to launch his main attack on Midway Island the following day, which would see the Americans hurrying south, into an ...