Battle of Midway

Six months after Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Japanese Navy believed it still held the initiative in the Pacific. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto dispatched a massive fleet toward Midway Atoll in early June 1942, hoping to lure out and destroy what remained of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Instead, American codebreakers had penetrated enough of the Japanese naval cipher to know exactly where and when the attack was coming. What followed was the most decisive naval engagement of the Pacific War — and arguably of the entire Second World War.

Over four days beginning June 4, U.S. carrier-based dive bombers caught three Japanese carriers with their flight decks loaded with fueled and armed aircraft and sent all three to the bottom within minutes of each other. A fourth Japanese carrier was sunk later that day. Japan lost four fleet carriers, approximately 250 aircraft, and nearly 3,000 men — including a generation of its most experienced naval aviators, an irreplaceable loss. The United States lost one carrier, USS Yorktown, and 307 men. The exchange was catastrophic for Japan in every measure that mattered.

Midway shifted the strategic initiative in the Pacific permanently. Japan never again mounted a major offensive operation. The battle demonstrated the primacy of the aircraft carrier over the battleship, validated the enormous American investment in naval intelligence, and gave the United States the breathing room to build the industrial war machine that would eventually overwhelm its adversary. Admiral Chester Nimitz called it "the most crucial battle of the Pacific War" — a judgment that has not been seriously challenged.