In the first four days of May 1942, senior officers of the Japanese Combined Fleet gathered aboard the battleship Yamato to rehearse a battle that had not yet happened. They used dice to decide who would be hit. One roll gave the Americans nine hits—enough, under the rules, to sink two Japanese carriers before the operation even sailed. Admiral Matome Ugaki, who ran the exercise as chief umpire, would not accept the result.
He reduced it to three hits. Akagi stayed afloat on the game board. The sinking of Kaga was allowed to stand, then reappeared days later in a different game covering an operation that never took place. Only one officer in that war room left a detailed account of what he saw Ugaki do.
Mitsuo Fuchida was a commander in the Imperial Japanese Navy, the air group leader on the carrier Akagi, and by May 1942 the most famous pilot in the fleet—the man who had issued the order to attack Pearl Harbor five months earlier. He attended all four days of the war game. He later wrote that Ugaki’s real concern was ensuring the results matched the prearranged plan, and that everyone outside Combined Fleet headquarters left the room astonished at how successful the invasion of Midway appeared on paper. No written record of that war game survives.
No photographs were taken. What exists is Fuchida’s own account, written years later, and it is the reason anyone remembers the dice at all. A month later, the rehearsal became reality. The Combined Fleet sailed from Hashirajima on May 27, with Akagi leading four carriers toward an atoll two thousand miles from Japan.
Fuchida sailed with them, carrying the rank and reputation the war game had helped prepare him for. He had flown in the attack on Pearl Harbor, against Darwin, and against British ships in the Indian Ocean, and by his own reckoning he had logged more flight hours than any other pilot in the navy. On June 4, he was not among the pilots in the air. A bout of appendicitis had put him in the infirmary days earlier, and the senior doctor on Akagi would not allow him back into the cockpit.
He remained on board in hospital clothes and climbed to the bridge to watch. One thing had already gone wrong that morning. Yamamoto had pushed for this specific battle partly because of the Doolittle Raid six weeks earlier. Sixteen army bombers launched from a navy carrier had struck Tokyo itself, proving the home islands were not as safe as the navy had promised the Emperor.
Destroying the remaining American carriers at Midway would close that door permanently. Midway-based bombers and torpedo planes attacked Nagumo’s carriers before eight in the morning without scoring a hit. His forces that had struck the island radioed that the mission required a second wave. A scout plane from the cruiser Tone, launched late and flying further than planned, reported an American task force to the north—after deck crews had already begun rearming reserve aircraft for the second attack on Midway, unloading bombs and mounting torpedoes, working against a deadline no one had told them had started running out.
Then came the correction. There were carriers among the ships the Tone plane had spotted. Nagumo reversed the order a second time. Remove the torpedoes and reinstall the bombs within the hour.
Munitions crews worked across four different flight decks during that changeover at maximum speed. At 10:20 the order came to launch. Akagi turned into the wind. On her flight deck, fighters were already moving with engines running, and the air officer was signaling the first one to go.
Nine American torpedo planes from Midway and a full squadron from the carrier Hornet had attacked the same fleet at low altitude and been destroyed completely by Japanese fighters and anti-aircraft fire without scoring a single hit twenty minutes earlier. Fuchida watched part of that from the bridge and thought it approached suicide. Direct attacks at wave level against a wall of gunfire. What the Americans gained—though no one was handing out credit that morning—was keeping all the Japanese fighters down low, chasing slow targets near the water, with no altitude and no extra minutes when aircraft began arriving from a different direction.
A lookout shouted a warning. Dive bombers were dropping through the patchy clouds that had hidden them until they were already beginning their dives. Three black shapes, then more behind them. Fuchida had time to see that much before he flattened himself behind the command center armor on the bridge.
The first bomb hit before Akagi’s gunners could fire more than a few panicked bursts. It was 10:22. Wade McClusky, leading 33 dive bombers from Enterprise, had reached the point where the Japanese carriers were supposed to be at 9:20 that morning and found only open ocean. With fuel running low and the options reduced to turning back or landing at Midway, he flew for another quarter hour on the hunch that the enemy fleet had turned back, and at 9:55 he spotted a single Japanese destroyer, Arashi, steaming northeast at full speed.
Arashi had fallen behind while chasing the submarine Nautilus and was now hurrying to rejoin the main force. McClusky guessed that a ship in a hurry was trying to catch up with something bigger, and he altered course to follow her wake. It led him directly to the carriers. At almost the same moment, Lieutenant Commander Maxwell Leslie’s squadron from Yorktown arrived from a different direction, with no planning and neither aware of the other until both were in their dives.
Kaga took the first hits. Nine planes dove on her within seconds of Akagi turning into the wind. Most were near misses, but four bombs struck the flight deck within a few breaths. Akagi took two bombs, one behind the midship elevator and one on the port edge of the deck itself.
Neither alone was enough to sink a carrier of her size. What finished her was what those bombs fell on. Aircraft lined wingtip to wingtip across the deck and packed into the hangars below. Fuel lines charged, bombs and torpedoes stacked and partially connected between one rearming order and the next.
Three minutes after Akagi and Kaga were hit at 10:25, thirteen dive bombers from Yorktown found the carrier Soryu from a third direction and hit her with three bombs in the same brief window. Fuchida rose in time to see the flight deck he had been standing on folded back like torn metal. The midship elevator had fallen into the hangar below. Fire was already running along both sides of the ship.
He climbed back to the bridge and from there could see Kaga and Soryu burning too. Black columns rising at intervals across a horizon that minutes earlier had been only empty ocean. Three carriers burning. Three of Japan’s four carriers struck within roughly six minutes of one another, none of them salvageable, though none would sink for hours.
The fourth, Hiryu, survived that attack and would not be found and bombed until later that evening. By that time, Fuchida had left any ship close enough to watch what happened. Akagi’s fires cut the passageways below deck almost immediately. What began as a fire became, within an hour, an argument over whether Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo would leave his flagship.
His chief of staff, Ryunosuke Kusaka, pressed him to transfer his flag to the light cruiser Nagara while there was still a way off the ship. Nagumo did not answer. The captain, Taijiro Aoki, told him the crew would take care of the ship and the fleet needed him alive to command from elsewhere. Only then did Nagumo agree, and by then the only way down was a rope dangling from a bridge window to the anchor deck.
Fuchida took the same route shortly after, lowered through the window on a rope that was already beginning to burn. He was still ten feet above the deck when the rope ended. He jumped. Another explosion went off in the hangar while he was falling, and it knocked him unconscious for a moment.
When he came to and tried to stand, he found both ankles broken. Sailors carried him to the anchor deck, strapped him to a bamboo stretcher, and lowered him into a boat bound for Nagara. Akagi was left behind that way, on his back, unable to walk, while the men still fighting the fire around him had no boat waiting at all. Kaga’s morning was worse in nearly every detail.
The bomb that hit closest to her bow landed beside the bridge and detonated a small gasoline truck parked there, killing the captain, Jisaku Okada, and most of the officers around him instantly. Command passed to the air officer, Commander Takahisa Amagai, who spent the rest of the day trying to save a ship whose bridge no longer existed. In midafternoon, a periscope appeared, and minutes later three torpedoes ran straight at the hull. Two missed.
The third hit but, by chance rather than any defect in the weapon that fired it, failed to explode, breaking apart instead and leaving its floating tail section nearby, which many Kaga men already in the water used to stay afloat until help arrived. Soryu’s captain, Ryusaku Yanagimoto, did not leave his ship either. He was, according to the accounts of the men who served under him, more beloved than any other captain in the fleet, the kind of officer sailors gathered early just to hear speak. When the order came to abandon ship, a petty officer and navy wrestling champion named Abe climbed back to the bridge to bring him down, by force if necessary.
He found him standing motionless with sword drawn, facing the bow, and received no reply to anything he said. Abe left without him and said afterward he could still hear his captain singing the national anthem as he descended alone. Soryu went down that night with 718 men, Yanagimoto among them. Akagi took longer to die than the other two.
Her engines kept running for hours after the bridge lost all communication with the engine room below, because as long as the shafts turned, the men down there had no order telling them otherwise. One messenger managed to carry a stop order through most of the burning decks before the fire consumed him, and it never reached the bottom. Not one man from the engine rooms survived. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, hearing Captain Aoki’s request to scuttle the ship, delayed the order for hours rather than issuing it hastily, then sent it once further resistance could make no difference.
At 3:50 the next morning, four Japanese destroyers fired torpedoes at the carrier that had led the attack on Pearl Harbor six months earlier. She sank just before dawn. Two hundred sixty-seven of her crew never came home. Hiryu was bombed that same afternoon in an attack Fuchida did not witness, hearing of it secondhand aboard Nagara, and the fourth carrier added several hundred more names to the list by the following day.
Between the four carriers and the cruiser Mikuma, lost while covering their retreat, Japan’s dead at Midway reached nearly three thousand men. The vast majority were mechanics, munitions workers, and engine room crews who had never come near a gun. None of this reached the Japanese public for a long time, and little reached the families of the wounded men themselves. When the fleet returned to Hashirajima on June 14, the survivors of the four lost carriers were reclassified as secret patients held in isolated wards, and in some cases forbidden to write home or receive visitors for more than a year, so the scale of the defeat could not leak beyond the narrow circle of officers who already knew.
Radio Tokyo told the country a great victory had been achieved. In private navy records, Akagi and Hiryu remained officially listed as active unmanned ships for months after they had already settled on the ocean floor. Fuchida survived his ankle injuries and survived the rest of the war. In 1955, he published, with former staff officer Masatake Okumiya, the account that would define the battle for the next fifty years.
He wrote that at the moment the American dive bombers appeared, Akagi’s strike was minutes from launching, her flight deck and hangars loaded with armed and fully fueled aircraft for the counterattack Nagumo had just ordered. “The Five Fateful Minutes,” he called it in the book’s chapter title, and he asked who could have dreamed that the war would turn in so short a time, in so brief a window. It was a masterful story. An overwhelming Japanese striking force, an impossible American moment of timing.
Disaster by inches, not by any failure of naval skill. Western historians, with nothing else to rely on from the Japanese side, accepted his account as established fact, and it became the standard version in book after book and documentary after documentary for two full generations. The correction came from Japan’s own paper records, not from an American historian looking for controversy. Researchers Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully spent years examining deck logs, operation reports, and testimony the Japanese side had already begun reviewing internally, in some cases decades before the two men published a word.
Their 2005 book, Shattered Sword, devotes an entire chapter to Fuchida’s five minutes, titled plainly “The Five Mistaken Minutes. ” Japanese carrier flight records showed the strike aircraft were still in the hangars when the American dive bombers arrived, not lined up and fueled on the flight decks as Fuchida described. Some aircraft had not even finished rearming. The clean cinematic picture of decks crowded with armed, fueled planes, the one that made the American attack look like sheer temporal luck rather than combat skill, did not hold up against the Japanese navy’s own documents.
Fuchida’s account has other problems unrelated to flight decks. He claimed for years to have been present at the formal Japanese surrender ceremony aboard the battleship Missouri. He was not. No second living witness to the Yamato war game has ever surfaced either, and Ugaki was in no position to confirm or deny anything by the time Fuchida’s book was printed, having flown an unauthorized one-man suicide mission from Kyushu on August 15, 1945, hours after the Emperor’s radio address announcing surrender, his body found on a beach near Okinawa a full decade before Fuchida published his version of the war game that brought them together.
No other officer’s record, diary, or postwar testimony confirms any part of it. Perhaps it happened the way he wrote it. Perhaps it was embellished a little by a man who spent the rest of his life writing and lecturing about a defeat he had watched from a stretcher. None of this cost the Americans anything.
McClusky’s decision to keep following a destroyer while nearly out of fuel and Leslie’s squadron arriving at the same fleet from a different direction within minutes, neither aware of the other in the air, remains as heroic an act of naval aviation as it was before Fuchida’s account was checked against the records. The historical record does not need five fateful minutes and a deck full of fueled bombers to make the American attack impressive. It was impressive on its own. A late scout report, a rearming order reversed twice under pressure, two American squadrons converging on the same fleet from two directions within three minutes without knowing the other existed—that would be an exceptional morning in any navy in any war.
The wreck of Kaga was not found and identified until 1999. Akagi’s wreck was not found until 2019, at a depth of more than five thousand meters, inside a national marine monument that did not exist when she sank. Fuchida never flew in combat again after Midway. He became a Christian missionary who preached across the United States for two decades, and by any account he was the sole witness to a naval battle he had watched mostly from a stretcher and a hospital bed on a cruiser sailing away from it.
Whether Admiral Ugaki looked at a board with nine hits against his forces in May 1942 and decided on his personal authority that the Americans could not fight that well, or an injured man later invented that moment because war needs clear portents to explain what happened a month later, is a question with only one witness and no way to verify his account against anyone else.