The Battle of Midway: Turning the Tide in the Pacific

A Teaching with Historic Places lesson from the National Park Service, written by Kathleen Hunter and edited by Marilyn Harper, Fay Metcalf and the program's staff, from the National Historic Landmark file "World War II Facilities at Midway" and historical accounts of the campaign.

Thousands of albatrosses nest on the low islands of Midway Atoll; the men stationed there in World War II called them "gooney birds", forever underfoot and fouling runways and engines.

In early summer 1942 the Imperial Japanese Navy and the U.S. Pacific Fleet fought for it. The American victory ended Japan's seemingly unstoppable advance across the Pacific and began a U.S. offensive that ended three years later at Japan's doorstep.

Students will: find out why Midway mattered; describe the battle; analyse participants' accounts; examine how technology changes warfare; and research war memorials at home. Materials: two maps, three readings and six photographs.

Inquiry question: what caused this damage? Midway after the Japanese air attack, June 4, 1942. National Archives and Records Administration.

Setting the stage

Seeking territory and resources, Japan had by the late 1930s occupied Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria and parts of China. In 1940 it signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, and Germany's conquests left French and Dutch colonies in Southeast Asia exposed. The United States and Britain answered with sanctions; in July 1941 President Roosevelt froze Japanese assets, cutting off vital oil. On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

Map 1: Japan's offensive, December 1941–April 1942. By early May Japan held Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, Wake, Guam and much of South Asia, with its oil, tin, rubber and quinine.

Map 2: Midway Atoll — a ring of coral on a sunken volcano, flat, nearly treeless and without fresh water. Central Intelligence Agency.

Reading 1: Out of obscurity

A U.S. possession since 1867, Midway had a cable station from 1903 and a Pan American seaplane stop from 1935; after a 1938–39 defence study the Navy built a seaplane base on Sand Island and an airfield on Eastern Island.

Japan planned, once South Asia was secure, to take Midway and the Aleutian Islands. Two Japanese destroyers shelled Midway on December 7, 1941. By spring 1942, flush with victories, Japan meant to seize Midway as an air base for invading Hawaii, and to lure what was left of the U.S. fleet into a decisive battle. After Wake Island fell, Midway was America's westernmost outpost in the central Pacific, and its defences grew.

Breaking the code. Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, commander of the Pacific Fleet, inspected Midway in early May 1942 and believed an attack was coming. Japan's navy communicated in complex radio codes, and a code change due in early 1942 had been delayed. Codebreakers in Washington and Hawaii, working around the clock, noticed the abbreviation "AF" in messages about a powerful long-range strike, and Navy intelligence in Hawaii persuaded Nimitz it meant Midway. Senior officers in Washington doubted Japan would send a huge fleet after a tiny atoll. So Lt. Cmdr. Jasper Holmes had Midway, which depended on desalinated water, report by undersea cable and then in an uncoded radio message that its water plant had broken down. Days later Japan reported that AF was short of water. Midway was the target.

Asked whether he could hold Midway against a major landing if he got everything he needed, Marine Col. Harold D. Shannon answered, "Yes, sir." Within a week guns and planes poured in; the islands bristled with barbed wire and guns, beaches and waters were mined, eleven torpedo boats patrolled, and nineteen submarines guarded the approaches. By June 4, 1942, Midway was as ready as it could be.

Reading 2: The battle

Japan's plan had three parts: carriers from the northwest to smash Midway's defences, the Second Fleet from the west and southwest to invade, and Admiral Yamamoto's battleships waiting 300 miles west for the U.S. fleet. Thanks to the codebreakers, the Americans knew his target, forces and schedule by mid-May, and had three carriers waiting in ambush 200 miles east of Midway.

• 5:30 a.m., June 4. A Midway seaplane spotted the Japanese carriers and planes heading for the atoll. Outnumbered Marine fighters were no match for Japan's Zeros.
• 6:30. One hundred and eight Japanese planes hit Midway, setting fire to Sand Island's oil tanks and seaplane hangar but not disabling Eastern Island's airfield. The Japanese commander radioed for a second strike.
• Counterattacks from Midway, uncoordinated and overwhelmed, suffered severe losses and hit nothing.
• A change of plan. A Japanese scout reported a U.S. carrier. Admiral Nagumo, already loading bombs for another strike on Midway, decided to recover his returning planes and rearm them all with torpedoes. He almost had enough time.
• From 9:30 torpedo planes from Hornet, Enterprise and Yorktown attacked and were almost wiped out, scoring no hits.
• About 10:25 everything changed. Three squadrons of dive-bombers, two from Enterprise and one from Yorktown, fell almost at once on three carriers whose decks were crowded with armed, fuelled planes. By 10:30 Akagi, Kaga and Soryu were ablaze.
• Hiryu, the last carrier, struck back: of 18 dive-bombers, seven got through and hit Yorktown with three bombs. Her crew got her moving again, but Hiryu's torpedo planes — taking her for a second carrier — stopped her, and she was abandoned. U.S. planes found and bombed Hiryu that evening; she sank next day. Two days later a Japanese submarine torpedoed Yorktown and the destroyer Hammann, helping tow her home: Hammann sank at once, Yorktown the next morning.

Skill, sacrifice and a great deal of luck cost Japan four irreplaceable carriers against one American, along with 332 aircraft and more than 200 of its most experienced pilots. Yamamoto called off the operation. Six months after it began, Japan's great offensive was over; for the rest of the war the Americans attacked.

The carrier Yorktown under attack, 1942. National Archives and Records Administration.

Reading 3: Voices from Midway

• Cmdr. John Thach, leading Yorktown's fighters escorting the torpedo planes, recalled a sky swarming with Zeros "like a beehive" — he was sure none of them would get back — until he saw a glint like "a beautiful silver waterfall": the dive-bombers. Afterward he watched three carriers burning, flames as high as the ships were long. Defending Yorktown later, he set a torpedo plane on fire, yet its pilot held on long enough to drop the torpedo that hit the ship. In determination, he said, you could hardly tell Japanese from American carrier pilots.
• Mitsuo Fuchida, recovering from an appendectomy aboard Akagi, described the first fighter taking off at 10:24 — then a lookout's scream of "Hell-divers!", bombs falling straight at him, and within seconds planes standing on their tails, burning, as torpedoes exploded across the deck and he wept. The dive-bombers got through, he wrote, because Japan's fighters were still low after chasing the torpedo planes, whose sacrifice made the victory possible.
• Admiral Nimitz's report of June 28, 1942, credited the Navy, Marine Corps and Army, with carrier planes as "the spearhead of the attack", with frustrating an enemy move "that was undoubtedly the keystone of larger plans."

Dive-bombers attacking a Japanese cruiser, 1942. These planes were about 32 feet long, with a pilot and a rear gunner in open cockpits. National Archives and Records Administration.

After the battle

• Aircraft carriers, still untried, decided the battle; with so many battleships lost at Pearl Harbor, Nimitz had had to rely on them.
• The damage was repaired by July 1942; by mid-1943 Midway had longer runways and 5,000 people.
• The albatrosses damaged hundreds of planes. The Navy tried smoke, noise and shipping 2,000 chicks to an island 250 miles off, but the birds came back, and the Navy gave up.

A surviving ammunition magazine on Midway, with albatrosses. NPS photo by E. N. Thompson.

Activities

1. Victory or defeat? One historian credits the victory to intelligence, strategy, tactics and luck. Which mattered most?
2. Technology and warfare. Groups compare pairs of attack and defence — swords and shields, aircraft and radar, missiles and anti-missiles — and discuss how weapons have changed war.
3. Remembering Midway. Midway became the Battle of Midway National Memorial on September 13, 2000, run by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service within the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge. How do you commemorate a battle fought at sea? Students write a 100-word marker for a memorial closer to home.

Sources

• National Park Service, Teaching with Historic Places, "The Battle of Midway: Turning the Tide in the Pacific," by Kathleen Hunter. https://www.nps.gov/articles/the-battle-of-midway-turning-the-tide-in-the-pacific-teaching-with-historic-places.htm
• The lesson draws on Erwin N. Thompson, "World War II Facilities at Midway," National Historic Landmark documentation (1986); Prange, Goldstein and Dillon, Miracle at Midway (1982); Edmund L. Castillo, Midway: Battle for the Pacific (1989); Layton, Pineau and Costello, And I Was There (1985); John T. Mason, ed., The Pacific War Remembered (1986); David C. Evans, ed., The Japanese Navy in World War II (1986); and the Naval History and Heritage Command.
• The original spells the intelligence officer's name "Jasper Homes"; he was Jasper Holmes.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.