84 years ago today, the most important Japanese admiral in the Pacific sailed into a fog bank he could not see out of, carrying secret orders he believed were known to no one on earth.
The Americans had read them three weeks ago.
In May 1942, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto had a plan to end the war in the Pacific in 30 days. He would draw the surviving US Navy carriers into a trap near a tiny atoll called Midway, 1,300 miles northwest of Hawaii, and destroy them with the largest naval force ever assembled. 200 ships. 700 aircraft. 100,000 men. Four heavy carriers under Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo would lead the strike. The American fleet, which had only three serviceable carriers left after the Coral Sea, would be annihilated. Then Hawaii would fall. Then the US would sue for peace.
In a basement in Pearl Harbor, a small team of cryptanalysts under Commander Joseph Rochefort had broken the Japanese naval cipher JN-25 in the spring of 1942. They were reading roughly 20 percent of every Japanese signal in real time, and educated guesswork filled in the rest. By mid-May they knew the target was somewhere referred to only as "AF." But where was AF?
Rochefort had a hunch. He sent a signal in the clear from Midway saying their water distillation plant had broken down. Two days later, Japanese intercepts mentioned that "AF" was running short of fresh water. Bingo.
By May 27 Admiral Chester Nimitz knew the date of the Japanese attack, the composition of the Japanese force, the route Nagumo would take, and roughly the time he would launch his first strike. He pulled every American carrier to a point northeast of Midway called "Point Luck" and waited. The trap had been set for him. He set a trap inside the trap.
On June 2, Nagumo's four carriers approached Midway through the worst fog any of them had ever seen. Visibility dropped below 600 yards. His ships could barely see each other. He held radio silence to protect his approach. He believed he had complete surprise. He believed the American carriers were thousands of miles away in the South Pacific. He believed he was about to win the war.
Yamamoto, on the battleship Yamato 600 miles behind him, had intelligence that the American carriers might in fact be at sea. He chose not to break radio silence to warn Nagumo. He assumed Nagumo had the same intelligence. Nagumo did not.
At 4:30 AM on June 4, Nagumo launched 108 aircraft against Midway from a position the Americans had been waiting for him to reach.
By sunset, three of his four carriers were burning hulks. The fourth would sink the next morning. Japan lost 3,057 men, 248 aircraft, and the four best carriers of the Pacific War in a single day. Japanese naval aviation never recovered. The war was decided in six minutes between 10:22 and 10:28 AM on June 4.
The whole disaster traced back to one decision on June 2: a Japanese admiral sailing into fog, trusting that nobody knew where he was going.
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