In January 1948, the Department of Research and Analysis at the Naval War College in Newport finished a painstaking study of the Battle of Midway. Captain Richard Bates, who had served on fleet staffs through the Philippines and Okinawa, oversaw the work. His team produced hundreds of pages of typescript reconstructing the battle hour by hour, laid against track charts and plotting sheets. The study was classified confidential and never printed as a book.
Copies passed hand to hand inside the service as photosats of the typed original, and the classification held for another twenty years. The text admitted that complete information from all sources was not available, especially regarding the enemy, and that orders appeared to have been issued after the operation to strike references to the Midway defeat from Japanese war diaries. That study became the quiet foundation for the books most Americans would ever open about Midway. Samuel Eliot Morison drew on it for his naval history volume the following year, and Walter Lord used it for his 1967 bestseller.
Out of all those pages, one window of about six minutes came to carry the entire American understanding of the battle. It runs from 10:20 on the morning of June 4, 1942, to about 10:26, when dive bombers from Enterprise and Yorktown came down on the Japanese striking force and set three of its four carriers ablaze. What sat on those enemy flight decks in that window became the most repeated image in the American memory of the Pacific War. The image did not come from Newport.
It came from Annapolis seven years later, in a book published in 1955 by the United States Naval Institute. The book was called Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan, written by two Japanese naval officers, Mitsuo Fuchida and Masatake Okumiya, and edited into English by Clark Kawakami and Roger Pineau. Fuchida was the name that carried it. He had led the first wave over Pearl Harbor.
At Midway, he was aboard the flagship Akagi, grounded by an emergency appendectomy performed at sea a few days before the battle, watching from her bridge. The volume had appeared in Japan four years earlier and was the first account most Japanese civilians ever had of how badly their navy had been beaten. In the chapter that made it famous, Fuchida describes aircraft lifted from the hangars and arranged along Akagi’s flight deck, the order to launch given at 10:20, engines turning over, the ship swinging her head round to bring the airflow straight down the deck. Within five minutes, he wrote, all her planes would be launched.
At 10:24, the first fighter gathered speed and lifted away. And at that instant, a lookout screamed a warning about aircraft falling on them out of the sun. That scene settles the battle in a particular direction. Four carriers were not lost because anyone on that bridge misjudged the situation, nor because the machine those men were operating was slower than they believed it to be.
They were lost because the American bombers arrived three hundred seconds too soon. For a Japanese readership in 1951, the passage turned a catastrophe into a coin toss. Four years later in Annapolis, it turned a victory into a gift handed to men who had earned one at the last possible instant. Whether any of it happened is a question the paperwork can answer, and the answer begins with the deck itself.
A carrier deck in the Imperial Navy was not run the way an American one was. American carriers parked aircraft topside as a matter of course, warmed engines below in the hangar, and could bring a machine up and send it off in short order. Japanese carriers did almost none of that. Their hangars were sealed, boxed in by workshops and storerooms with no natural ventilation, so an engine could never be started below decks.
Aircraft were struck down between operations rather than left standing about, and arming and fueling happened in the hangar. Everything that had to be done in the open air had to be done on a deck that could only do one thing at a time: bring machines up, send them off, or take them aboard. Lifting a strike to the deck ran at about sixty seconds per aircraft, one elevator at a time, then spotting them and unfolding wings and chalking wheels, briefing aircrew at the blackboard on the side of the island, getting men into cockpits, running final checks, and above all warming radial engines that would destroy themselves under full power if they went up cold. Fifteen minutes minimum for the warm-up alone, and no way to shorten it.
Added together, a strike of about twenty machines needed something near forty minutes on deck before the first one moved, and five to ten more to get them all away. Japan’s own official war history in the Midway volume published in 1971 gives the figure as no less than forty. To attack the American carriers, Admiral Chuichi Nagumo needed a clear, unbroken three-quarters of an hour on all four of his flight decks at once, and he never got twenty. The morning of June 4 ran as one attack rolling into the next with almost nothing between them.
Six Avengers came out from the island under Lieutenant Langdon Fieberling, and five were shot down. The sixth got home shot to pieces with its gunner dead. Army medium bombers came in with torpedoes. Marine dive bombers came in.
Army heavy bombers came over high and photographed what they were bombing. Then, from about a quarter past nine, the carrier squadrons arrived, one behind another with no coordination at all because they had been flown off in a hurry and had lost each other on the way out. Fifteen Devastators of Torpedo Squadron Eight went in from Hornet under John Waldron. All fifteen were shot down, and one man out of thirty came out of the water alive.
Torpedo Squadron Six from Enterprise under Eugene Lindsey chased Kaga and lost nine of fourteen. Torpedo Squadron Three from Yorktown under Lance Massey got two machines away from its attack. None of the torpedoes hit a thing. In the accounting a navy makes afterwards, the entire morning up to the dive bomber attack produced no damage whatsoever to any Japanese ship.
And that accounting is wrong for reasons the enemy wrote down himself. Akagi’s flight log for that morning survives, and it reads as one continuous emergency. Fighters up at 4:45, more at 5:43, more at 6:55, three taken back aboard four minutes after that. Five up at 7:10, then singles and pairs coming down at 7:20, 7:26, 7:36, 7:50.
Three more went up at 8:00 and four more at 8:32. The Midway strike force came home just before 9 and had to be taken aboard. Five fighters up just after 9, three more at 9:45, two down at 9:51, three down at 10:00. Every one of those entries is a deck committed to something other than a strike.
The argument ends at 10:00, and it ends on seamanship rather than on interpretation. A machine coming aboard needs the after part of the deck clear because a spotted strike stands in the spot where a landing aircraft has to touch down. At 10:00, Akagi’s deck aft was empty. Fifteen minutes later, she was burning, and fifteen minutes will not lift twenty-one aircraft up an elevator, never mind spot them, brief the aircrew, and warm the engines.
Akagi and Kaga carried the older and slower lifts of the four, and Kaga had the largest torpedo squadron in the force to bring up through hers. The Japanese official history says the same thing in plain words: at the moment of the American attack, every carrier in the force had its strike aircraft below in the hangars, and what sat topside were fighters of the standing patrol, with a few more going up from Soryu to reinforce it. That has been in print in Japan since 1971. Stories do not survive because they are true.
They survive because they get repeated more often than the corrections do. The Americans held their own corroboration and never touched it. Army heavy bombers had come over the enemy formation between 8:00 and a quarter past, and their photographs are the only images anybody has of those carriers that morning. The pictures show Soryu, Hiryu, and Akagi with no strike aircraft on their decks at all, only a handful of fighters.
There is also Richard Best, who took the dive bombers down onto Akagi and lived. Asked about it decades afterwards, Best said the aircraft on that deck as he came down were Zeros, six or seven of them, that they were taking up most of the deck for runoff room, and that one was in the act of taking off as he attacked. His description and the flight log agree. Both of them disagree with the book.
The Office of Naval Intelligence had already published the whole thing in English. In June 1947, on the fifth anniversary of the battle, the Navy printed a full translation of Admiral Nagumo’s own action report, sealed and dated June 15, 1942. Part four of the document, the war diary, was already missing when the Americans got it. What the rest of it carries is the fleet talking to itself.
There is the reply from the First Carrier Division that its torpedo aircraft would be ready to take off at 10:00, and from the Second Carrier Division that its own would be ready somewhere between 10:00 and 11:00. Those were the numbers the Japanese were working to, sent at 5:59 that morning before the carrier torpedo squadrons had even found them. The report states that the induced explosions aboard Akagi came from torpedoes stored in her hangars. It also contains, in a passage about how little flying training the aircrew had been given before sailing, the admiral’s own summary of the whole affair: they had gone into it with meager training and without knowing the enemy.
It went on sale through the Government Printing Office for thirty cents. Eight years before the Naval Institute published Fuchida, an American reader could buy the Japanese admiral’s own account of the battle for pocket change. The book beat it anyway and kept beating it for fifty years. Fuchida’s version came in English, carried the name of a man everybody had heard of, and told a story shaped like the ones Americans already liked.
The report ran to staff prose in translation, arranged as tables of signals, and told no story at all. In 1992, the Naval Institute added the book to its Classics of Naval Literature series. As late as 2009, a Navy history page describing the dive bomber attack still said that flight decks were crowded with armed, fueled planes. The correction arrived in 2005 in a book called Shattered Sword by Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully, which went at the battle through Japanese operational documents rather than Japanese memoirs.
The argument that followed was sharp and is not finished. If the Japanese were never five minutes from launching, something was stopping them, and that something was American. For four hours on the morning of June 4, American aircraft came at the Japanese carriers in a loose, uncoordinated, almost continuous stream. Nine different groups in five distinct attacks flown by aircrew who had lost each other, in machines that were already obsolete, carrying torpedoes that did not work.
They achieved nothing in the columns of an ordnance officer. What they did instead was hold four flight decks hostage for the entire morning. Every fighter Nagumo put up carried sixty rounds for each of its two cannons and shot itself dry within minutes, which meant landing, rearming, and going back up, which meant a deck kept clear aft, which meant the strike stayed below. At least seventeen Japanese fighters that morning came down after an hour or less in the air.
The torpedo squadrons failed to hit anything, and that failure is what made the hit possible. There is one more number, and it belongs to the enemy. Hiryu was not touched in the attack at 10:20. She had three burning sisters in plain sight, and every reason on earth to get aircraft into the air that instant.
Her first counterstrike, six fighters and eighteen dive bombers, left her deck at 10:58, thirty-two minutes with the whole battle already lost and not one American aircraft interrupting her.