The Battle of Midway
Monday, July 6, 2020
If one were to fly from North America to Asia along a certain route, one would pass over an island that is equidistant from both continents. This is the aptly named Midway Atoll, actually part of the Hawaiian archipelago but not incorporated into the state of that name.
As I have written elsewhere, on December 7, 1941, which American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (or "FDR") characterized as "a date which will live in infamy," the Japanese attacked within seven hours not only Pearl Harbor on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, but also Malaya (now Malaysia), Singapore, and Hong Kong, all possessions of Great Britain at that time; and the American possessions of Guam, the Philippine Islands, Wake Island, and Midway.
Shortly thereafter, they had occupied the Philippines, Malaya, Singapore, and what is now Indonesia, and were moving into the second phase of their plan: to neutralize American naval power in the Pacific, especially the aircraft carriers from which bombing raids had been launched on Japan itself.
And so, six months after Pearl Harbor, on June 4-7, 1942, the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked Midway, a sort of "Second Pearl harbor" meant to draw out the American fleet, thus exposing it to annihilation.
The plan backfired spectacularly, for one simple reason: American cryptographers had decoded Japanese communications and determined the date and place of the attacks, allowing the U.S. Navy to prepare an ambush of its own. All four of the aircraft carriers sent by Japan were sunk; the Americans lost only one. The damage to the Japanese fleet proved irreparable.
The Battle of Midway is generally considered an early turning point in the Pacific War, along with the Battle of Guadalcanal, a campaign fought from August 7, 1942, to February 9, 1943, in the Solomon Islands (nearly 5,000 kilometers south-southwest of Midway).
One American historian called Midway "the most stunning and decisive blow in the history of naval warfare"; another called it "one of the most consequential naval engagements in world history."