 I'm going to talk about midway. There's a lot I have to talk about. I can't do everything, but I'll try to hit some points and hope that that's of interest to you. If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them. Although I'd like to have you wait till the end to ask me the questions. I'll try to get through the presentations as quickly as I can. Notice my first slide, operational intelligence combined with tactical skill and a lot of luck. Gave the US Navy a very great victory. These are some of the kinds of dive bombers that were used against the Japanese in that battle, especially on the 4th of June, where they were the key to tactical success. This is what the Japanese Navy expected to fight in the first six months of World War II. They wanted the Grand Battle, a decisive and dramatic fleet battle, like the one they had fought against the Russians at Shushima in 1905. This is a pre-war postcard that I found that was printed up in Japan, and it is actually very revealing. Here are the battleships in line, battle flags flying, guns blazing away, and what was supposed to be the remnant of the US fleet because what the Japanese wanted to do was attack US forces at night on the surface and do as much damage as possible that way then the next day, bring in their battleships to clean up and achieve that decisive victory. But you can also see other things, you see those little, sort of almost dots, those little airplanes in the upper right-hand corner, those airplanes are flying cover for the spotting aircraft launched by the battleships. If you look over here, you see airplanes laying a smoke screen. And both navies knew how to do that and used their aircraft for that. There was a time in the late 1920s and early 1930s when navies were worried about the use of poison gas in naval engagements. And then that concern kind of went away because it was difficult to lay down enough of this poison gas to do enough damage. And finally, what do you see here? These are the heavy cruisers of the Imperial Japanese Navy and they'll pick up any American stragglers, they'll penetrate the American battle line with its battleships and they have these very heavy torpedoes which they can use to knock out large ships. This is what they expected, this is what they wanted. And they wanted to do it as early in the war as possible. The target was the American fleet. That was their target, if you will, their center of gravity in the Pacific. But the real target, the hidden target, was the morale of the American people. And the Japanese military leaders felt if they achieved a decisive victory at sea, then that morale would sink. And the Japanese government would be able to reach a kind of armistice with the United States. I'll talk more about that later. That was their hope, didn't work out that way because what did they get? This, too, is a pre-World War II like a postcard, a print, put together by an artist who was looking at the newer United States Navy aircraft carriers like Enterprise or Town of Wasp. What they got was an ambush by US military aviation. And I say military aviation, not just naval aviation, because the Army played a role in the Battle of Midway with its bombers, B-26s and B-17s. What were the goals of the two navies? Let me make sure I have my notes. Because at my age it's easy to forget things. Oh, yes, I meant to say something about that preceding slide, I wanna do that. Just to set it up. There was a very intelligent, very professional admiral in the United States Navy in the 1930s, Joseph Reeves. And he said, one thing about carrier aviation which the aviators, the senior aviators in both navies believed, and that was timing as everything. Because in the 1930s it was difficult to detect an incoming strike on a carrier, right? No radar then. There's no radar, any aircraft gunner, he's not very good. You can put up a combat air patrol of your own fighters but you can't carry that many and how do you get them out to shoot down the approaching enemy aircraft? So timing was everything. And the US Navy and the Japanese Navy in the 1930s discovered in exercises that the aircraft carrier that could find its opponents first was the one who usually got the victory. It was all or nothing, you rolled the dice. If the airplanes came out of nowhere, that was it. The carrier was either so damaged that it couldn't operate or it was sunk. So timing was everything. And especially on the American side, this is extremely well understood. Now let me go on to the next one. These are the goals of the two navies. That's pretty clear. At the strategic level, the Japanese wanted to get this empire of theirs. They wanted to build a defensive perimeter around it so they could consolidate it and use it. They also wanted an armistice or some kind of settlement with the United States. After all, there was a war in Europe as well because after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in the United States declared war on Japan, Germany declared war on the United States. So the hope on the Japanese side was that US forces would face Europe. They would go to Europe first and give the Japanese time to consolidate their gains in Asia. Also something that's forgotten almost completely today and that was to isolate China. The Japanese had been at war with China since 1937. Serious war, you know, where you have thousands of troops on both sides. And what they were hoping to do was to just get the Chinese to give up to sort of retire and stop fighting so that that would not be a drain on Japanese resources in China. The US goals at the strategic level were there. Stop the Japanese from achieving these goals and coordinating with the Germans. I'll talk about that in a moment. That again is something that I don't think is well understood today. Operational, that's the theater level. The goal for the Japanese was to create and these are their words an invincible strategic position. On the US side, it was to take the operational initiative against the Japanese. Don't give them time to consolidate. Attack, attack, attack. At the tactical level, there it is. Strike first, strike by surprise. The first shot was usually fired by the winner in carrier warfare. You wanted to hit the other person by surprise, the other fleet by surprise and destroy it. Here's the Imperial Natives offensive. This starts in December, 1941, runs into April, 1942. Look at this. There's Pearl Harbor, right? Not close to Japan. Next, that's Rebaul in New Britain, right? So you have a carrier force that sets out from Japan, does the mission of attacking the US fleet in Pearl Harbor, steams down into the South Pacific to support the assault of Rebaul, then goes on to attack Darwin in Australia, then goes into Southeast Asia and eventually goes all the way over to the Bay of Bengal. To Indian territory, to what is now Sri Lanka, what was then Salon. This is a huge sweep, we're talking about what? Over a third of the Earth's surface. This carrier task force of the Japanese, built on six modern aircraft carriers or at least modernized aircraft carriers, and you can see the sweep of all their activity. Now, here's the one I want to stress. This is Franklin Roosevelt's nightmare. He's President of the United States, for those of you who don't know much history, he's the commander-in-chief. He has a nightmare, it's the same one Winston Churchill has. And here it is. The Germans coming down through the Caucasus, in what was then the Soviet Union, coming across North Africa, heading for the Suez Canal. The Japanese, leaving the Bay of Bengal, here, going up into the Arabian Sea, the two nations combining forces to isolate the Soviet Union, they would have isolated China from help from the United States, isolate the Soviet Union from help from Great Britain and the United States, cut off the Suez Canal, isolating the Mediterranean. That's the nightmare. And again, because of the way the war turned out, because this nightmare didn't happen, people tend to forget that it was a nightmare. But if you go back and look at the documents, the ones that are in the Roosevelt, I'm trying to, where is it in New York? Hide Park. Help me, hide park. You see the President's worried about this kind of thing. Now, today you look back on it, say, it's fantastic. They couldn't do this logistically. I mean, how are you gonna support a fleet that's that far from Japan? How are you gonna support the German army? I mean, the logistics of it are daunting. Actually impossible for that time. But people don't know that. They don't know. I mean, the Germans seem to be able to do amazing things with their military forces, and the Japanese seem to be unstoppable in the first couple of months in 1942. Here are the Japanese forces at Midway. I wanna say a little bit more than the chart says. This is the striking heart of the Japanese fleet. And of course, as you know, if you know anything about the battle, the Japanese divided their forces. They not only had divided forces going to Midway, and an invasion force, the first air fleet, the carriers, and then the main body under the commander-in-chief, Admiral Yamamoto. They not only did that, they were also trying to achieve a victory up in the Aleutians. They wanted something up there as a base so that they could stop attacks on Japan, air attacks. You may have heard of Jimmy Doolittle, right? And the raid in April, early April, 1942. These B-25 bombers are put on an aircraft carrier. That's amazing. Put them on an aircraft carrier, steam toward Japan, and bomb Tokyo. Well, Admiral Yamamoto had promised the Emperor, the Americans will get close enough to bomb Tokyo. And the Japanese army came back and said, wait a minute, what about Alaska? So there was an invasion in Alaska as well. It was thought at the time by many to be a diversion. It was not. It was meant actually to put a forward base there to keep the United States from building airfields in the Aleutians and using those airfields to launch air attacks against Japanese territory. But here it is. This is a very, very powerful force. Let me give you a preview of the outcome of the battle. The Japanese lost all four of those aircraft carriers. Their total casualties were about 3,000 sailors and aviators killed. And what's really important as you get into 1942 and 1943 is that when these ships, these big aircraft carriers, were bombed and they were on fire and then they sank. A lot of the folks who took care of airplanes on them were killed or badly injured. So when you look at an air wing, there's a tendency to say, oh, it's the airplanes, right? So a US air wing would have 18 fighters, 36 dive bombers and 18 torpedo bombers. The Japanese had their own air wings. But you have to think, not only of the pilots in the airplanes, you have to think of the ordnance folks, the mechanics, all those people who make an air wing effective. And the Japanese lost a lot of those people at the Battle of Midway. And it was difficult to get them back. You have to train these people. You don't just take them in and get them ready in 60 days or 90 days. It takes a long time to get them ready. As a consequence of the battle, the Japanese lost all of their carrier planes, plus about 10 aircraft catapulted off of cruisers. So they lost about 110 pilots. And as I said, over 700 mechanics and others who took care of the airplanes on the carriers. US forces. Task forces 60 and 17, commanded by rear admirals, Fletcher and Spruance. And again, those names should be familiar to you because they're just part of the lore of the United States Navy. But you can also think of Midway as a stationary aircraft carrier. And it's got a lot of planes on the 4th of June, 1942. 27 Marine Corps fighters, 27 Marine Corps bombers, four Army B-26s, equipped with torpedoes. The B-26 was designed as a bomber, high-speed level bomber for low-level attack. They put torpedoes on them. I've seen, there's one photograph I've seen with the B-26 flying with a torpedo. Oh, I mean, it's Rube Goldberg. Yeah, oh, let's try this. Maybe it'll work. And of course, because pilots are young, they'll do almost anything. In fact, you couldn't have had effective pilots at this time unless they were young. Older people get sense in their heads. They do. You're gonna go through, if you're, there comes a time when you're about 30 or early 30s where you go, God, what was I doing riding my motorcycle? Why was I doing riding my bike? What was I doing trying to become a pilot? The Army also had 19 B-17s. And I'll talk about them in a little bit. The Navy had 32 patrol bombers and also six modern torpedo planes. The trouble is, these were all stuffed into Midway. And there wasn't any overall plan today the armed forces have something called the Joint Force Air Component Commander, or JFAC, you know, the Pentagon were great at acronyms. There was no JFAC. So you have a Navy captain who's trying to deal with the Marines and the Navy aircraft. And then you have the B-17s and Army aircraft under an Army Major General. And they're all stuffed into Midway. If you look at, there's just a few pictures of Midway at this time. But if you look at the one island has the airfield, it's just covered with aircraft. Now, the other thing here, rear admiral English, here he's shown as a captain, not as a rear admiral. He's a command of 19 submarines based at Pearl Harbor. I have to say that only one of these submarines really did well. It was the older submarine USS Nautilus, which was designed as a cruiser submarine. Now what does that mean? A big submarine carried two six inch guns. Okay, anybody ever seen a six inch gun? Right? How much does a shell weigh? About. How much of the shell fired by a six inch gun weigh? About. 100 pounds. Yeah, over 100 pounds. So these submarines were designed to cut off the Japanese merchant marine in the event of war. They would steam mostly on the surface. They would intercept transports and cargo ships, sink them with the six inch guns and then go on looking for other targets. They were big. If you have a big submarine at that time, it's unwieldy underwater and it takes time to dive. So one of these older submarines is sort of a hero of midway. Nautilus made two attacks, was heavily depth charged, but stayed in the battle and stayed active. Now, the United States armed forces lost about 150 aircraft destroyed during the battle and lost about 300 dead sailors, army, air, people and marines. But look at those numbers here. You have 233 carrier planes. Out of all of these right here, based on midway, 56 of them are strike aircraft. That is they drop bombs or torpedoes. So if you add 233 to 56, you get 289. And that's actually more strike aircraft or effective strike aircraft than Japanese had. One more thing. Where are the Navy battleships at midway? Navy had seven in the Pacific, had seven. Any idea? They're on the west coast of the United States. Admiral Nimitz doesn't want them. Admiral King says, you ought to have them if the Japanese show up with air battleships. You ought to have your battleships. Admiral Nimitz says, no. Can you guess why? Okay, they're useless, but why are they useless? Yeah, they're too slow to keep up with the carriers and they eat up fuel and fuel is scarce. So Nimitz says, I don't want them. Now, if you're Admiral Nimitz, how do you deal with Admiral King? Did you know anything about Admiral King, Ernest King, commander-in-chief of the United States Fleet? Right? Yes. He, I'm hearing all sorts of words. None of them complimentary. He had a strong temper. The story in Washington was that if he wanted to talk to somebody in New York, he didn't need a telephone. Okay? So here is an aggressive officer who spent his whole life preparing for this war. He wants to do nothing more than smash the Japanese fleet. So he wants to push stuff to Admiral Nimitz. Admiral Nimitz is in command in the theater and he goes, don't want all that stuff. I don't want it all. And Nimitz understands what his problem is. Find out when the Japanese are coming, find out what they're gonna be like generally, then position his forces so his forces can catch them by surprise. He understands what he has to do. And in fact, he doesn't. On the way to Midway is the Japanese carrier force commanded by this officer, Admiral Nogumu. He's a Vice Admiral on the Imperial Japanese Navy. Very experienced officer. But remember, he's been in command of this force for months. They've gone all the way from Japan to Pearl Harbor down into the Southwest Pacific, off into the Indian Ocean, back home. He's been busy. And he's not young anymore. Yesterday, how many of you voted yesterday in Virginia residents vote? Right, I was an election judge. Do you know how long the election judges work on election day in Virginia? From 5 a.m. in the morning to about 8.30 or 9 at night. I did it. I got home. I said, I'm gonna die. Where's the bottle? And it was like being in a Pentagon again. I mean, the Pentagon has to have caused a lot of alcoholism. Oh, yeah. And it's fun to laugh at now, but I had days. Remember 2001, September 11th? That was on a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Each day was 16 hours for me. And for a lot of folks in the Pentagon. There were people who were sneaking in sleeping bags and sleeping in the building. Which is a very bad idea. Let me try sleeping in the Pentagon. All right. Now, let's look at him. By the way, he and his staff made a plan, an operations plan. Here are their assumptions. The enemy is not aware of our plans. Wrong. The enemy was aware of their plans. Not in great detail, but enough to know what was about to happen. That's the key. Second assumption. It is not believed that the enemy has any powerful unit with carriers as its nucleus in the vicinity. Wrong. All right. The Japanese needed to scout Pearl Harbor. But Pearl Harbor's a long way from any Japanese territory. They had used long range sea planes to do that. But the sea planes couldn't make the round trip. They had to stop somewhere and refuel from a submarine. I don't know if you've ever seen any photographs of the submarines refueling aircraft sea planes. And they wanted to do it again just before midway so that they could find out if there were any US carriers in the vicinity and if so where they were. But the US Navy was clever and it kept their submarines from surfacing. It put armed ships where those submarines would have surfaced to refuel those long range sea planes. So this Admiral did not get the reconnaissance that he wanted and he knew he didn't get it. He knew he wanted it but okay, this is the operation. We're gonna go through with it. We have the best carrier force on earth. Let's do it. But he didn't know that the United States Navy had the intelligence advantage. Now what about the forces? Let me see a little more about that. I've got photographs. I love them. You can learn a lot from photographs. I have a big collection of them that I've obtained on my own. This is a carrier enterprise in Task Force 16. This is the task force with two carriers commanded by Rear Admiral Raymond Spruance who by the way was not an aviator. They knew a lot about aviation and it showed in this battle. And here are the airplanes. This is a Dauntless Dive Bomber. It's carrying two bombs, two light bombs. This is for anti-submarine patrol. And notice how it's, see these funny looking things? Dive breaks. Look, you put the airplane into a dive, right? For dive bombing. What don't you want to have happen? Well, you don't want your wings to fall off, right? You don't want to be going so fast that you stress the airframe too much. So what do you have? Breaks. If you ever get a chance to go down to the Naval Aviation Museum that's in Pensacola, Florida on the base there, go to it. It's just chuck full of these fascinating airplanes. And notice the red and white stripes. You can't see it, it's not in color, but there were red and white stripes on the tail. That went away after midway. Why? What did the Japanese put as insignia on their airplanes? The rising sun, which is orange. Orange-red, so that went away. And behind them are these devastator torpedo aircraft, which were modern when they first entered the fleet in about 1938. But by 1942, they're obsolete, they're too slow. And they have to go down too low to the water to drop their torpedoes. What you'd really like in a torpedo plane in 1942 is a fast airplane, an airplane has a lot of range, and an airplane can drop a torpedo from say 200 feet in the air, get it down. But of course you gotta have a torpedo that can withstand that shock and will go on to the target. The US Navy didn't have it. So they're fielding these older aircraft, because the new ones haven't come on yet, and you can see one, two, three, five of them back there. They also have small bombs, because they're gonna go out on any submarine patrol. If you're an aircraft carrier commander, the one thing that ruins your day is to get torpedoed by a submarine. That's it, you're done, you're finished, you're out. And it was obvious to both navies that the waters around Midway would contain Japanese and American submarines. So both navies continued their anti-submarine patrols. Again, it's not talked about very much, but it took aviators, time and energy. It kept the carriers busy constantly because they're worried not only about submarines, but about attack by enemy air forces. It's sort of the hidden background. It's the tempo, it sets the tempo for these operations. And the tempo is high. Look at all these folks on the deck. What are they doing? Yeah, they're setting up the airplanes. Getting ready, getting the airplanes off. Look, look how many of them. Okay, now, when things really get hot, as they do on the 4th of June, 1942, these folks are working from before dawn until after dusk. And a lot of the airplanes are moved not with some jiffy little device like we have on carriers now, but with human beings, right? Push the airplane. I'll show you this in a minute. And so you get tired. And it's easy when you're tired to make a mistake. This is Hornet, also in Task Force 16, also commanded the full task force by rear Admiral Spruance. And here you have the folks. Now, this is not Midway. I couldn't find a good picture of an airplane on Hornet's deck at Midway. This is later. This is before I think the battle of Santa Cruz near Guadalcanal. But the picture shows you things. Look at these. See, in the previous picture, nobody's wearing helmets. All right, nobody's wearing life jackets. Now they are, they've learned. Bomb comes down, yeah. Bomb comes down, hits the deck. What's the deck made of? It's made of teak with a steel frame. And wood, when you hit wood with something like that, what happens? Fist, blitters. And so Yorktown was hit by three bombs on June 4th, 1942. Two gun crews for the 1.1 inch anti-aircraft guns were just almost completely wiped out by the splinters and the bombs. And so you wear helmets. You get people to dress for battle to reduce the casualties. And also, look what they're carrying. They're ready for it. They're ready in case the ship sinks, as indeed Hornet did. Next. Yorktown, this is important because it was taken. Bob, it's in your book. In your book. And you can see here, there's two things I want to show you here. First, this is the strike. Yorktown has about 72 aircraft. But they're different. The fighters, right, don't need the takeoff run that the torpedo planes and the dive bombers need. So you set your strike up because you want to send every airplane out at once. You want to saturate the Japanese defenses. You want a Japanese officer on a carrier, especially the captain, to look up and go, oh, hell, you know, they're all here. They've all shown up and they're just gonna overwhelm me. So upfront are the fighters. They take off first. They expend a lot of gas waiting for everybody else. Fighters come off, then the dive bombers, then the torpedo planes. The Japanese understood this problem. So what they would do is operate carriers and groups, in this case four, and each carrier will launch half a strike. Not a full strike, but half a strike. You can get half of them off quicker than it takes to get all 72. You can get 36 off pretty quick. So that's what the Japanese did. So just so you see it, look at all these airplanes lined up here. And these folks don't have much room to take off. They got to get up in the air before the carrier runs over them. Which carriers would do? They still will, if you let them. And up there is a patrol bomber, a reconnaissance aircraft essentially. And it was essential to know where the Japanese were. The side that found the other side first was gonna win. That was it. Assuming the attacks went off as planned. But of course, it's war so, do things always work as planned? No, quite the reverse. They rarely work as planned. But you gotta plan anyway. I used to teach planning. And younger officers would say, why do you teach us all this stuff if it doesn't work? And I would say, because it just might. Now, Task Force 17 was only one carrier, Yorktown, commanded by rear admiral Fletcher. Now I've got another, see what else I've got here. Here are the Marine aircraft. The vindicator dive bomber was obsolete by May, June 1942. These airplanes were called wind indicators by Marine pilots, and they were no match for Japanese zeroes, Japanese fighters. But on the 4th of June, when the folks at Midway picked up information about the approaching Japanese and their radar, even before their radar picked them up, they launched all their airplanes. Everything they had. This was it. You had to do it. This is the Buffalo fighter. In early 1942, markings again, you see the tail and the red spot inside the star. That all changed after Midway. These were small, agile fighters, but they were completely outclassed by zero. So the Marines, any Marines? Okay, what do you do when you're told to do something? Once upon a time, I did, yeah. Yeah, well, what do you do if you're a Marine? If you get a command, what do you do? You do what you got. Yeah, you do what you got. Exactly. Maybe I'll just give you a crap. I'll just give you a crap. I'll just give you a crap. I'll just give you a crap. Watch out. I used to work for the Naval Assistance Command and we got you the V-22. Yeah, what's that a page? Wow. Hey, this is what makes work in this field so exciting. You meet all these nice people who are instantly your friends. But, so that's it. So there are a bunch of these Marine aircraft. They are basically thrown against the Japanese fleet. So what happens is, is the Japanese aircraft are coming into Bomb Midway at 6.30 in the morning. These airplanes are going out to attack the Japanese carrier force. And they do, but they don't do much. These stayed around Midway to try to defend it. They didn't do much either. And it's very sad, it's a good lesson. You don't want to take young people, our young people, and put them in obsolete systems because then they're just targets. I mean, this is what works in aviation. There's, I've heard people say quantity has a quality on its own in aviation. Yes and no, because good pilots, if you put one good pilot and one very good airplane up against 10 mediocre pilots or even good pilots with very obsolete aircraft, they're just all targets. It's target practice. And that's what it was for the Japanese. So you have to get into the swing of this battle. The Japanese attack Midway with half of their striking force. They keep the others down inside the hangar decks of their carriers. As those airplanes are attacking Midway, Midway's airplanes are showing up to attack the Japanese. V-17s from 20,000 feet. The V-26s with the torpedo slung underneath. These vindicators coming in to try to bomb the Japanese carriers. And there were even some Navy torpedo planes on Midway that went out to try to find the Japanese carriers as well. These strikes are not coordinated. They come in helter-skelter and the Japanese combat air patrols with their very excellent pilots and zero aircraft, they mow most of these people down. See if I can find some numbers for you. Maybe I have them on this slide. Oh yeah, here. First phase, I divide the battle into two phases, but that's arbitrary. That's not how the people saw it at the time. Have any of these aircraft carrier hit Midway? As I said, their carriers launch half strikes. You got four carriers. You really got two full strikes, but you get a half strike from each of the four. They keep the others down in the hangar armed, gassed up, ready to go, because they suspect there are American carriers out there. They're waiting to get accurate information and as soon as they get it, they're gonna launch those other strike aircraft. The Midway planes attack the Japanese carrier before the Japanese planes return to their carriers at about the same time the US carriers also launch their own strike aircraft, their torpedo bombers and dive bombers against the Japanese. But look at this, US carrier torpedo bombers attack the Japanese separately as it turns out. The idea was to have them all attack together. You have the torpedo bombers come in low, the dive bombers come in from the top and they're escorted by a couple of fighters and the idea is they overwhelm the defenses. It didn't work that way. They got broken up of the 42 torpedo bombers that went out from the US carriers. 38 of them were lost. Wow, that's a terrible loss figure. I mean, that's almost it. Almost everything's gone. Boom, and nothing to show for it. Not one Japanese carrier torpedo. But the Japanese brought their combat air patrol in closer to their carriers. In fact, these pilots were so well trained you didn't need to tell them what to do. They would collect around their carriers to get rid of these aircraft, these attack aircraft. And while they're doing that, boom, the US carrier dive bombers from two of the carriers show up and in about 10 minutes, they bomb three of the Japanese carriers and put them out of action. It's an amazing morning. This is where the luck comes in. You have two groups of dive bombers, American dive bombers from two different carriers. They haven't been coordinating with one another because you're gonna coordinate what you have to do. Get on the radio. What's happening? Everybody's listening. On the Japanese side and the American side, you have people understand the other guys' language and they are listening for those broadcasts. I mean, they're doing it in real time. So you coordinate without talking. And in this case, the coordination turned out to be perfect. And that was not necessarily what could have happened. This is where the luck comes in. Second phase. No, three Japanese carriers are burning. And I mean, they burned. Why? They got their half strikes in their hangar decks. And the decks are made of wood. So what happens to a 500, 1,000-pound bomb? Goes right through. So there you are, a mechanic on one of the Japanese carriers servicing an airplane, getting it ready for the strike because now the Japanese know the Americans are out there. They're getting reconnaissance reports. You're getting ready for a strike and all of a sudden, literally, the roof falls in. And your airplanes are armed and they have gasoline, high-octane gasoline. We don't use high-octane gasoline in automobiles anymore. Is anybody old enough like I am to remember it? It's extremely dangerous. I thought I was gonna get killed one day. Well, you know, I saved myself. I was stupid when you were young. The two things are kind of equivalent. Working around high-octane gasoline and the darned stuff is incredibly volatile. So anyway, the Japanese carriers, just like the American carriers, are floating volcanoes. I mean, that's it. If you hit them right and at the right time, you're gonna get terrible fires and that's what happens to three of the Japanese carriers, but there's one left. The carrier here you launches two attacks. First, it doesn't wait to launch a coordinated strike. The admiral there says, this is it, guys, this is it. The other three have been damaged. You gotta make up for it. So they launch dive bombers at carrier Yorktown. They strike her at noon, hit her three times, three bombs. She stops, dead in the water, and there's a lot of smoke. And people thought that she might not get underway again. But the engineering crew, right, they're trained and she gets underway. But the Japanese from here you send another strike. Torpedo planes this time and they get her at about 2.45 in the afternoon and that stops her. They hit her twice with two torpedoes and she lives heavily and is abandoned. There are pictures you see all over in all the history books showing Yorktown like this. And the captain was afraid she was gonna roll over. So he ordered everybody off. She didn't roll over. She stayed like that through the night. And the next day there was an effort made to save her. It didn't work. It didn't work because the Japanese submarine found her and torpedoed her again. And so she finally sank. And by the way, she's been found. Yorktown has been found. It's on the bottom, out there near Midway Island. On the bottom, sitting right side up. Yeah, just sitting there. It's absolutely fascinating. Who's the guy who did that? The one who found Titanic. Ballard, yeah, Ballard had a team out there and took photographs and had people make drawings of it. And so she's been found. Enterprise and Hornet launch strikes against Hiryu. They get airplanes back. They get them rearmed, refueled. They bomb and cripple her at about five o'clock in the afternoon. Just as Hiryu was about to launch another strike at the US force. I cannot tell you how, what's the word I want? How under pressure the crews were of these carriers because their airplanes come back. First they got to get them aboard, right? Not an easy thing to do. Pilots may be tired, right? They may be wounded. The airplane may be damaged. You got to get the airplanes on board. Then you've got to give them fuel. You got to arm them again. They've got the pilots have to know where they're going, right? They have to get necessary information and off they go again. So the pressure was intense on both sides. And this was it. They all knew this was turning into a very big important engagement they had to win. And as it turns out, the Japanese lose because in one day they lose these four carriers. Now Hiryu was still floating. She was still floating the next day and the day after that. But she was a wreck. And the Japanese decided to torpedo her to keep her from being captured by the United States Navy. As if the US Navy had anything that could do that at the time. But they just didn't want it to fall into enemy hands. And that's basically the battle. There's more to come. There were other things that happened. But that's the heart of it right there. Four carriers against three plus midway against the stationary carrier. So it's sort of four against four. But who gets the strike in first? The US. So it turns out to be four losses for the Japanese and one carrier lost for the United States Navy. And in fact, Admiral King, remember him? He was angry that Yorktown was lost. He thought the ship could have been saved and should have been. His standards for performance were very high. If you didn't meet them, that was the end of your career. Yeah. And in fact, I have worked, oh boy, with Navy officers who had equivalent standards. And you had to be very good or you didn't stick around. OK. Now, what's the point? The point is that the Japanese timetable, the Japanese plan is totally upset in midway. They want to force the United States Navy and the Army and the Marine on the defensive, right? Because midway is for June. What happened in April in the Philippines? American forces there finally surrender. So it looked to sort of look to the Japanese like they could really achieve their objectives. Midway throws that off completely. You lose four carriers. You lose pilots, you lose airplanes, you lose carriers. You lose the crews on at least one of the aircraft carriers. I think it was a Coggy. The engine room crews stayed at work. They kept trying to get power to the engines, despite the damage to the ship. I mean, that's the amazing thing. These are guys down below, right? I mean, if the ship rolls over or if it blows up, they're gone. Do they run away? Of course, where do you run? Let's see. But they don't run away. And they stick to it. That's the amazing thing about this battle to me. On both sides, so many young people, young men, they stick to what they're supposed to do. If they're flying an airplane, they go attack, right? They do it. Even when they know, they may not come back from the mission. If they're down there in the engine room, they keep working. If the ship's been torpedoed, they try to repair the damage. It's an extraordinary example of how professional these two navies work. All right, so now the Japanese have a problem. See if we can do that. This is no longer feasible. Japanese army didn't want to do it either. But the Japanese Navy can't go into the Indian Ocean anymore. They can't do it. And the United States Navy takes the offensive. Admiral King understands. In this war, you don't let anybody sit. You take the offensive. I mean, he's very offensively. I guess I could take that two ways. He's very offensively minded, but he's absolutely right. So he says, what is it we have to do? What is our strategic goal? It is to keep the link between the United States and Australia firm. Keep it solid. Keep it safe, because that's where all the supplies are going. It's where the supply ships are moving. So the Japanese decide they're going to build an airfield. They're going to move in this direction to cut that link. And Admiral King understands that you respond to that kind of threat with the threat of your own. So you go back on the offensive. And at the time, it was a high risk, right? The Marines hadn't practiced these assaults. There hadn't been enough Marine-Navy coordination for an amphibious operation. You know, all that stuff was kind of new. And King said, do it anyway. And so the Navy and Marines did. The Japanese are there. That's the next big battle. That's the real meat grinder around the Solomon's. And it is a meat grinder. Admiral Halsey was put in command here, eventually. Do you know what message he sent out to his forces? Have you ever heard it? Yes, kill jabs. Kill jabs, kill more jabs. Now, what does that tell you if you're a commander, Navy or Marine Corps? What does it tell you? This is a war of attrition, folks. This is meat grinder time. You're going to take a lot of young men and force them to fight one another. In circumstances that might not be ideal, you're going to suffer a lot of casualties. You're going to lose a lot of ships, airplanes. You're going to have a lot of people die. This is it. Halsey understood. It's attrition, boys. Go in there and fight them out, day in and day out. And they did. If you study the whole campaign down here, it's agonizing. It's brutal. And it's a bad place to fight anyway. And it has left a lingering memory of suffering in the United States and, you know, and understandably. But the point is, the Japanese now are on the defensive. That's it. They're on the defensive, and they never get the offensive back for the rest of the war in the Pacific. And that was Admiral King's goal. And Admiral Nimitz shared it. So let me see. Is there anything else I need to say? Yes, one more thing. I haven't talked too much about the code breaking. This is the consequence of midway, very important. Because it was important in Europe as well. Because what happens in 1942? What happens in the fall and winter of 42? In Russia? On a graph. So 42 is that year when the Allies are on the edge. And they go over to the offensive, and it works. And from that time on, the Axis, I mean, it's it. They're on the defensive. There's one more thing I want to say. There's an interesting book about the code breaking, especially about Commander Joseph Rochefort and his team in the 14th Naval District there in Hawaii. And it's by Elliot Carlson. And it's called Joe Rochefort's War. If you get a chance to look at it, take a look. Elliot Carlson gets down into the details of communications intelligence. And it's really kind of eye-opening if you don't know anything about it. I mean, it's well-written and interesting because of the history, but you get down into the nitty-gritty of the work and of the internal politics of these communications and intelligence organizations. OK, made it. That's it. Any questions? Yes? Oh, sure. The problem for a carrier is that if it turns on lights at night, what happens? Yeah, it's a target. It's a target, yeah. And so there were airplanes returning from strikes. Remember that last strike from Enterprise and Hornet going out after Hear You? They're going out later in the day. They're coming back late. Turn on lights. It was highly controversial. You're taking a great risk. What if there's a Japanese submarine right there? Taking great risks. But victory is not won in a situation like this without tremendous risks. They're just huge risks on both sides. That's what naval battles are about. Does that answer it? Yeah, it was controversial, but it was done. Way back right there. Japanese understood that you're Japanese. I'm not sure I understand the question. Read Elliott Carlson's book. They weren't so careless. But again, when you're planning an operation as large as Midway, plus the Aleutians, right? You had those three forces. Remember those forces going to Midway? Let's go back. Quick, quick, quick, quick. Whoop. That one. Look at this. And this ignores the infrastructure you have to have to support all this. All this has to be coordinated. And the American side, the code breakers, the intercept operators and code breakers, got an advantage because the Japanese had to do a lot of communicating for this operation and for others. So they had more material to work with. The problem for the Japanese was, if you change your code books, what happens? Your own folks have to learn. You've got to prepare your own folks. I mean, I don't know, let's see. Anybody involved in military training of any type? Anybody been a victim of it? OK, no, but I mean, you have to get stuff ready. I was an acquisition guy in the Navy. We can't just produce a missile. Oh, here's a harpoon missile. Here, shoot it. No, no. I mean, one of the things I did was edit the harpoon tactical manual. The introductory sentence I put in the front got taken out because it said, the purpose of this manual is to enable you to kill the other son of a bitch before he kills you. And I was told the Navy doesn't talk that way. OK, so the purpose of the manual is enable you to shoot the missile effectively. OK, well, we'll buy that. What's the point of shooting the missile effectively? Hit another ship. Kill a bunch of sailors. That's what this business is all about. So the Japanese have a problem, which is that they change the code too fast. Folks can't keep up. And they don't. They fall behind. They have a schedule, right? They want to keep, because that's what you do in wartime, keep changing your codes. They had a schedule. They couldn't meet it. They couldn't meet it because of the scope of this operation. And the United States Navy took advantage of it.