1022 AM — Three Bombers Found Japan’s “Invincible” Akagi, but Only One Bomb Hit

[00:00:00]If you had a father or a grandpa already came home from the Pacific, this is the morning that let him come home. 6 minutes, three airplanes, one bomb, and a quiet man from New Jersey. Most Americans have never heard of. This is the story your history books left out.

[00:00:21]10:22 in the morning, June 4th, 1942.

[00:00:26]Somewhere over the empty blue of the central Pacific, >> three American dive bombers knobed Shay.

[00:00:33]Dozen bombers push their noses toward the sea. Below them begins to mix to sharpen through the haze. A long dark rectangle of steel. The largest aircraft carrier the Empire of Japan has ever sent to war. Her name is Akagi. In Japanese, it means red castle. For six months she has been the s any wonder said now prays for say six month and in six month and lime it's five minutes she will begin in fear from lefime mean to die but to understand how a ship becomes a legend and how a legend becomes a wreck at the bottom of the ocean we cannot start at 10:22 we have to go back back to the shipyard at Curi where a battle cruiser was cut in half and reborn as something the world had never seen before lieutenant in New Jersey he does not yet does not yet know is stained. And back to an admiral standing on a bridge staring at a message he does not yet know will destroy him. This is the story of the death of a kagi. But first of the death of a kagi. But first [music] it is the story of the men who did not know each other. The men whose lives were about to collide at 4,000 m above the sea. Akagi was never supposed to be an aircraft carrier. She was laid down in 1920 as a battle cruiser, a fast, heavily armored gunplawn platform. But the world was changing.

[00:02:05]>> That in 1922, the great naval powers signed the Washington treaty and battle cruisers became forbidden fruit.

[00:02:14]So >> the Japanese did what the Japanese would do again and again in the years that followed.

[00:02:20]>> They adapted.

[00:02:22]They cut her open.

[00:02:24]>> They flattened her upper decks.

[00:02:26]>> They ma her. They gave her a hanger, an elevator, a flight deck. And when they were done in 1927, they had built something sheps. The world had barely imagined. A capital ship whose weapons were not guns, but airplanes.

[00:02:45]>> Jerro, she was 1935.

[00:02:48]before 1938.

[00:02:50]This time the Japanese gave her a single uninterrupted flight deck stretching the full length of the ship. She could carry up the full length of aircraft with 66 typically operational fighters, dive bombers, torpedo bombers.

[00:03:08]>> 36 edge.

[00:03:10]>> She displaced 36,000 500 tons. She could sustain 31 knots and on the 7th of December 1941 she led the way to Pearl Harbor.

[00:03:23]>> That's so captured judge. So swear meture jadmichi jagumo >> ch from her flight deck. The first wave of the attack lifted into the pre-dawn darkness. Zero fighters, Kate torpedo bombers, Val dive bombers. They flew east into a sun that had not yet risen.

[00:03:46]They flew east into a shashalt that had not yet risen or had no idea they were.

[00:03:51]By the time the sun set on December 7th, the United States Pacific Fleet lay burning in the mud of Pearl Harbor.

[00:04:00]>> Uh 2400 American sailors were dead and a Kogi turned ser undefeated. For the next 6 months she went where she pleased. Rabal Darwin where her bombers destroyed the port so thoroughly so thoroughly that Australia trembled. Columbbo Trinka.

[00:04:23]She sank the British aircraft carrier Hermes. Every enemy she met she destroyed. Her sailors began to believe something they should never have believed.

[00:04:32]>> The Jan cells.

[00:04:35]>> But an aircraft carrier is is not lose.

[00:04:39]An aircraft carrier is the man who commands. And here we first we come to the first uncomfortable truth of our story. The man who commanded Akagi and through her the entire first air fleet, the kido Bhai was a 55 years old vice ice admiral named Shuichi Nagumo. He was a professional and a patriot. He had graduated from the Naval Academy in 1908. He had spent his career mastering torpedoes and destroyals, destroyers, and submarines. He was by every account a competent officer. He was also completely unqualified to command the most powerful aircraft carrier force.

[00:05:26][music] Sis Nagumo had never flown an aircraft.

[00:05:31]He had never planned an air strike.

[00:05:34]>> Germanant bachis.

[00:05:37]He had never studied aviation tactics.

[00:05:40]When he was given command of the Kido Bhutai in April 1941, it was because he was senior enough for the job. Two men, more than any others, understood it.

[00:05:51]Commander Manoru Jenda, his air operations officer, was the true tactical brain behind Pearl Harbor. And commander Mitsuo Fuida, the strike leader who had radioed the code words Torah, Torah, Torah over Pearl Harbor, was the man who flew the plans into battle.

[00:06:13]>> Jenna on the mean.

[00:06:15]>> Of June 4th, Jenna was down with influenza.

[00:06:20]Fucha, two days out from an emergency appendecttomy, could barely stand. The two men closest to the tactical brain of the keto butai [music] were on the day everything would be decided in seconds.

[00:06:32]Both unfit for the cockpit. Nagumo did not know that yet. Nagumo that morning was confident.

[00:06:42]>> He had reason to be. He had he had never lost.

[00:06:48]>> This is the twist most people don't expect. the invincible carrier fleet of the Empire of Japaned at Midway by a man who did not understand aircraft carriers. And the two aviators who might have advised him best were that morning in [music and clears throat] six sectors, >> 6,000 km to the east in an office in the basement of the 14th Naval District Administration building at Pearl Harbor.

[00:07:16]Another man was already changing the war. Jolaf O. Per his name was Joseph Rofort.

[00:07:25]He was 42-year lieutenant commander in the United States Snazzy and he had not slept free navy. He wore a red smoking jacket over he over his uniform and slippers on his feet and he lived on coffee and cold sandwiches. He rarely came up to the surface. He and his team were reading Japanese mail. Japan all teary hell >> tion. The Japanese Navy used a code called JN25.

[00:07:54]It was a good code. Ros Ro code was supposed to be unbreakable of station Hypo had spent months tearing it apart, one intercepted transmission at a time.

[00:08:05]Ole.

[00:08:06]>> By May of 1942, they were reading enough of it to be dangerous. They saw the plan take shape. Dratriffins >> massive Japanese operation four aircraft carriers an invasion force and a diversion in the illutions the target was identified in code as AF Rofort was certain AF was Midway Washington was not certain. So Roshfort ran a trick said >> he had the garrison at Midway send an unencrypted radio message complaining that their water distillation plant had broken. Two days later, Japanese intelligence transmitted a coded report to Tokyo.

[00:08:48]or AF is short on fresh water.

[00:08:52]Washington believed in Nimmits, Admiral, chest commander and chief of the Pacific Fleet had a gift. He knew roughly how were going to attack. The trap had one problem. He needed a third carrier.

[00:09:07]Yorktown had been badly damaged at the Battle of the Coral Sea a month earlier.

[00:09:12]>> The ship >> if yard at Pearl Harbor said she needed 3 months in dry dock.

[00:09:17]>> Uh Semit told them they had 72 hours sanity.

[00:09:23]72 hours later, Yorktown steamed out of Pearl Harbor. Her hull was patched, not repaired. Welders could launch aircraft and that was all that mattered. The Japanese did not know she was coming.

[00:09:36]dead.

[00:09:36]>> In their planning, Yorktown was still at Coral Seam.

[00:09:41]>> Say they believed she was dead. They were sailing toward Midway, confident they would they would face three. The greatest naval Americans confident. The greatest naval trap of the war had already been the men on a Kagi's bridge did not even know they were the ones inside it. We meet him now because in a few pages he is going to change history.

[00:10:07]Richard Hollyy best. Everyone called him Dick. He was 32 years old that spring.

[00:10:13]He had been born in Bayion, New Jersey in 1910. He had graduated from the United States Naval Academy at Annapapolis in 1932.

[00:10:24]and had chosen aviation because it was the future and because he was by temperament a man who wanted to fly.

[00:10:34]>> He was he was >> slight. He was quiet. He wore glasses when he was nonofficer of bombing squadron the cockpit. He was the commanding officers of the ex squadron 6 VB6 the dive bombers of the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise. His pilots respected him. His superiors considered him one of the finest dive bomber pilots in the United States Navy. His wife Doris and his young daughter Barbara Anne lived in a small house in there been there on the 7th of December. Came on the 7th Batana M of December when the Japanese planes came out of the sunrise.

[00:11:18]Best had been at sea that morning. He had come home to a Pearl Harbor covered in oil and ash. He was not on the night of June 3rd thinking about revenge.

[00:11:31]He was thinking about his aircraft breast mass.

[00:11:35]>> He carried a small photograph. Doris on their wedding day in 1932. Barbara Anne, still a small child >> holding a stuffed toy.

[00:11:45]>> He always flew with them. Every [music] mission, every time he walked the flight deck of Enterprise in the darkness, checking each SBD Dauntless dive bomber one by one. Fuel >> bombs, >> oxygen, >> oxygen, especially oxygen >> flew high above 6,000 m when it climbed to attack above sim that above that altitude. A pilot without oxygen would lose consciousness in minutes. He tested his own oxygen mask. It smelled clean.

[00:12:19]He nodded to the ground. To the ground crew, he went below to sleep. Somewhere in the mask's canister, in the chemical bed of soda lime that was supposed to scrub carbon dioxide from his breath, something was very wrong. The poyard etches, >> the pilot who would kill a kaggi and who would earn a place in history that almost no other American pilot would ever equal was already breathing poison on the morning he would become a legend.

[00:12:49]His lungs were beginning to burn. He did not know the his crew did not know.

[00:12:56]Nobody knew. It would take military hospitals in Hawaii and Colorado more than two years and one surgically collapsed lung to piece the story together.

[00:13:06]>> But by then the war would be over oh 4:30 in the morning June 4th.

[00:13:14]>> The Pacific in June before dawn is cold.

[00:13:19]The wind carries the sharp bite of the open ocean and the deck plates of a warship at that hour are wet with dew that smells like salt and metal and old paint. On Enterprise, the coffee in the pilot's ready room was cold.

[00:13:34]>> It always was.

[00:13:36]>> The mess had run out of sugar 3 days earlier. Best his black and watched the stars go out one by one over the eastern horizon. Somewhere out there in the dark was a Japanese fleet that thought it was hunting him.

[00:13:49]He knew because Nimttz had told him that it was the other way around.

[00:13:53]>> The two fleets do not know exactly where the other is, >> but they know the other is somewhere close. The keto but steams 28 knots through a light southeasterly breeze. A kaggi leads Kaga to her port side. Soar you and hear you ahead in a second column. Around them, a screen of battleships, cruisers, and destroyers.

[00:14:18]The four carriers turn into the wind.

[00:14:20]>> Deck Joe Derew stand ready. Engines cough into life. Propellers become invisible circles of light. At 4:30 exactly, see the first zero its brakes and roars down the flight deck of a kagi. It lifts, wobbles, climbs. Another follows another. Within 15 minutes, 108 Japanese aircraft are in the air heading southeast toward the tiny atal called Midway. From Akagi alone, 36 aircraft launch. The best pilots in the Imperial Japanese Navy. Men who have flown over Pearl Harbor and Darwin and son and come back victorious. Every time they fly toward the sunrise, >> 200 dozen km >> 240 km ons to the northeast on the flight deck of USS Enterprise. Dick Best sits in the cockpit of his dauntless.

[00:15:19]>> Jeep's major pals.

[00:15:22]>> He has not yet been ordered to launch.

[00:15:24]He does not yet know exactly where the Japanese are. He rests his hand on the throttle. He puts on his mask. He breathes. The sun climbs into the eastern sky.

[00:15:35]And the clock, invisible and merciless, begins to count down toward 10:22.

[00:15:41]6:20 in the morning. Over the little atal called midway, the sky fills with the sound of engines.

[00:15:47]>> Gillette 108 Japanese aircraft.

[00:15:52]Bombs fall on the fuel tanks on the sea plane hanger on the power on the power station. Black smoke climbs a,000 ft into the still Pacific air.

[00:16:05]But the runways the American Marines on the ground fight back with anti-aircraft guns. They knock down a handful of the attackers. The Japanese pilots do their job, drop their bombs, and turn back toward the fleet. Leading them home is a young lieutenant named Joichi Tomaga.

[00:16:26]He is 28 years old. He is a good pilot and he has already made a decision that will help kill Akagi because >> as he banks his toward the northwest he lifts a microphone to his lips and radios back to the fleet.

[00:16:43]>> There is need for a second attack wave.

[00:16:46]12 12 words. That is all it takes. On the bridge of Akagi, Admiral Nagumo hears the message.

[00:16:58][music] He turns to his officers. The plan had been to hold 93 aircraft in reserve, armed with torpedoes and valot.

[00:17:07][music] It's ready to strike American warships the moment any were cited.

[00:17:11]>> But there are no American warships in sight. No prejudice. Cheshious.

[00:17:18]>> And Midway needs another hit. At 7:15 in the morning, Nagumo gives the order.

[00:17:24]change the weapons. On the hangar decks of Akagi and the other three carriers, an army of sailors begins the process of unbolting torpedoes from the bellies of the Kate bombers and rolling out land attack bombs to replace them. It is heavy, slow, careful work. The men work fast.

[00:17:45]>> They are are proud. They are good to do not know that they have just begun to lose the war because 13 minutes later because 13 minutes later at 7:28 in the morning a single reconnaissance aircraft flying 200 nautical miles to the northeast breaks silence. The pilot is a warrant officer named Amari from the heavy cruiser tone. The war cassette should >> been in the air an hour earlier, but the catapult on tone had malfunctioned.

[00:18:18]His takeoff was delayed by 30 minutes.

[00:18:21]30 minutes. Remember that number. Amari radios back a message so short it would fit on a matchbook. Enemy fleet cighted.

[00:18:31]That is all. He does not say what kind of ships. He does not say how many. He does not say whether there is an aircraft carrier among them on Akagi's bridge. Nagumo waits. He needs to know.

[00:18:46]He has 93 aircraft on the hanger decks being disarmed of anti-ship weapons. And now there might be American ships out there.

[00:18:56]>> He orders Amari to give more details.

[00:18:58]The reply is slow. It takes 40 minutes to come.

[00:19:02]>> 36 dinor ashet. Amari finally reports the composition.

[00:19:09]Y >> five cruisers, five destroyers, cruisers and destroyers. That is a raid, not a battle. Nagumo can handle that with the aircraft he already has. He orders the rearming to continue. Bombs, not torpedoes. [music] Bombs. Midway remains the target. But 1 minute later, at 8:11, a second message arrives from Amari. [sighs] And this one, Nagumo does not want to read. Enemy force appears to be accompanied by what looks like an aircraft carrier. If the catapult on tone had worked properly, if Amari had launched 30 minutes earlier, >> do that. if his message had reached Nagumo. Nagumo >> before hundreds of men were sweating in the hangers on bullshant tankers.

[00:20:03]Nanchis un unbolting torpedoes and reloading with bombs. Then everything that follows might never have happened.

[00:20:10]>> 30 ever.

[00:20:14]>> 30 minutes decided the Pacific War.

[00:20:16]Nagumo now faces the worst kind of decision, a moving one. His aircraft are half armed with the wrong weapons. His pilots on America are on their way home, low on fuel. And there is an American aircraft carrier somewhere. He gives a new order. Reverse theing.

[00:20:35]Take the bombs off.

[00:20:36]>> Put the torpedoes back on.

[00:20:38]>> On the hangar decks, exhausted sailors curse under their breath and begin the whole process again. In truth, the hangar decks of Akagi were never the chaos of legend. For decades, a myth persisted that bombs and torpedoes had been left scattered across the hangar floor. Reuben list of slacks, ready to explode at the first spark. The best modern research drawing on Japanese damage reports tells us that the ordinance was mostly returned to the proper magazines as it was removed.

[00:21:14]But this does not save Akagi because what remained on the hanger decks was in some ways worse. Aircraft with fuel lines open.

[00:21:24]>> Aircraft being refueled between rearmoring cycles.

[00:21:29]>> Aircraft with warheads freshly attached and safety pins not yet reinserted.

[00:21:36]Aircraft parked wings to wing.

[00:21:39]Engine to engine. Wooden propellers touching wooden propellers. a single spark ever reached the hangar deck, the fire would not need bombs on the floor to feed it.

[00:21:49]>> You would have gasoline.

[00:21:51]>> It would have fuel vapor. It would have hundreds of tons of aviation fuel inside the machines themselves.

[00:22:00]It would have everything it needed.

[00:22:02]Around 9:20 in the morning, down close to the water. So close to the salt, spray flex his windshield, Lieutenant Commander John Waldron leads to Squadron 8 of USS Hornet toward the Japanese fleet.

[00:22:19]>> J, he is 41 years old. He has a Sue grandmother. He has told his pilots the night before that if only one of them survives, he wants that man to fight all the way in and get a hit. He has 15 aircraft. Old TBD Devastators.

[00:22:36]Slow, blunt, obsolete before the war even started. Top speed with a torpedo underneath. Barely 200 kmh.

[00:22:46]>> Dan's all >> below him and around him. There are no American the clouds. He knows. He knows what is going to happen. He turns his aircraft directly at the Japanese fleet and begins his run. The Japanese Zero fighters see them from 20,000 ft up.

[00:23:06]They pull Z roll see them. What follows is not a battle. Whoa.

[00:23:12]It is butchery.

[00:23:14]>> The first Devastator explodes into pieces before it can drop knob its torpedo.

[00:23:20]>> Then a second. Then a third.

[00:23:24]Waldron's aircraft is hit again and again. Witnesses on the Japanese ships see him fly the Ranjon Kaga. Still trying cartwheels into the sea. 15 aircraft launched from Hornet. 15 aircraft shot down.

[00:23:37]>> Japan.

[00:23:40]Oh, chapter man.

[00:23:42]>> 29 of 30 men killed. He is 25 >> years old. He is from Waco, Texas. He is a mother of Texas who will spend the next 30 hours believing he is dead. His plane is on fire when he releases his torpedo. It hits the water and misses.

[00:24:02]He crashes seconds later.

[00:24:04]>> Oh. He crawls out of the sinking wreckage, hides under a floating cushion. So that chapy ship for the next 30 hours machine gun him and lies there for the next 30 hours watching the battle. and I was watching the Pacific War being decided over his head. Then minutes later comes Torpedo 6 from Enterprise.

[00:24:31]14 aircraft 10 shot down. Then torpedo three from Yorktown, 12 aircraft, 10 shot down.

[00:24:42]>> 41 American torpedo bombers in the water in less than an hour. Not a single torpedo hits a Japanese ship. Those 41 aircraft were flown by American boys.

[00:24:52]>> Boys, boys >> who had grown up on farms in Iowa in in Miltowns in Pennsylvania in the Sunday afternoon quiet of the small town south.

[00:25:03]Their mothers had watched them walk to school. Their fathers had taught them to hunt. They had enlisted after Pearl Harbor because it was the thing to do and because they had believed with the whole strength of young men that they could make a difference. In the space of an hour, most of them were dead. On the flight deck of Akagi, sailors cheer, >> wretch.

[00:25:28]>> They pump their fists at the sky. They believe they are watching a slaughter.

[00:25:35]Slaughter. They believe they are winning. They are in fact >> act to sell.

[00:25:41]>> They just do not know it yet. Here is something the Japanese Navy would not understand for months. The greatest suicide charge of the Pacific War was not a suicide charge. It was the reason America won the >> because to attack those slow low-flying torpedo bombers, every single J Japanese Zero fighter had come down.

[00:26:05]>> Chappelle >> down to 200 m down to 100 m. They had emptied their ammunition. They had wavetops. They had exhausted their fuel.

[00:26:16]They had chased the American torpedo planes into the sea. And now they were low, out of position and looking the wrong way.

[00:26:26]>> Dre.

[00:26:27]>> The sky above the Japanese fleet at high altitude was empty. The men of torpedo 8 died so that other men whose names they would never know could live. John Waldron knew. He had said as much the night before. He had chosen to lead his men in anyway. Remember that name, Waldron. He will not appear again in this story. Waldron, >> but without him.

[00:26:54]Uh, this story has a different ending.

[00:26:57]>> At 4,000 m above the ocean, Lieutenant Commander Clarence Wade McCcluskey is running out of time. He is 39 years old old. He commands the entire air group of USS Enterprise.

[00:27:11]He has been in the air for over 2 hours.

[00:27:14]32 dauntless dive bombers including Dick Best and the men of bombing six have flown to the point where the Japanese fleet is supposed to be >> the Spencer the jet stenc the Japanese fleet is not there Nagumo has changed course mcclus he's after burning fuel some of them will not make it back to enterprise if his pilots are watching their gauges Every minute costs them another chance of survival. He has a decision to make.

[00:27:49]Turn back and save his men or press on and possibly kill them all.

[00:27:55]>> Dresses.

[00:27:57]Dolresence on.

[00:28:00]>> He turns his squadron in a wide search pattern across the empty ocean. Then 4,000 m below, he sees a single Japanese destroyer. She is running Japanese at flank speed. She's leaving a long white wake across the blue. McCluskey is a smart man. He asks himself a question.

[00:28:18]>> Where is that destroyer going in such a hurry? The answer must be. She also the wake. 20 minutes later at 10:20 in the morning, McCcluskey looks down and sees beneath his wings the entire keto bai. Four aircraft carriers in a loose diamond, unescorted at high altitude.

[00:28:43]Their decks packed with aircraft being refueled and rearmed.

[00:28:46]>> He cannot believe his luck.

[00:28:48]>> The destroyer he had followed was named Arashi, and she had led 32 American dive bombers straight to the beating heart of the Japanese Navy. McCluskey lifts his microphone. He gives the attack order over the radio. And here one of the most consequential misunderstandings of the 20th century occurs. The standard doctrine taught to every American dive bomber pilot was this clear. When two squadrons attacked two enemy ships, the trailing squadron went after the near ship and the leading squadron continued on to the far ship. McCcluskey squadron sting six was leading >> Dick Best's squadron bombing six was trailing. That meant Best would attack the near carrier which was a Kagi. McCcluskey and scouting six would go after the far carrier which was Kaga. That was the doctrine. That was what best expected.

[00:29:52]But Mcccluskey was not a dive bomber pilot by original training.

[00:29:58]He was a fighter pilot who had recently taken command of the air group.

[00:30:04]>> And in the confusion of the moment, staring down at four Japanese carriers appearing out of nowhere, he gave an order that was slightly wrong, he led scouting six down toward Kaga, which was the near carrier, which was where Best was supposed to attack. Best watched from above >> Jerser >> as the entire American air group began to dive on the same target >> gear.

[00:30:33]>> He watched 30 aircraft rolling into their bomb runs one after another all pointing at Kaga. Akagi, the flagship, the carrier that had led the attack on Pearl Harbor was going to be missed. Was already how on his own release lever. He best already had his hand on his release lever. He was 2 seconds from beginning his zones dive.

[00:30:55]He looked at a kagi a mile to the north >> there.

[00:30:59]>> He looked at his two wingmen behind him and >> he did something that almost other other pilot in the world would have done. He pushed his throttle forward, lifted his nose, and pulled out of his dive. To pull out of a dive at that moment, saut at that air speed with a,000lb bomb still hanging under your aircraft is to invite death.

[00:31:24]>> This the chatis.

[00:31:28]>> But best did it. Lieutenant Edwin Kroger and Nsign Frederick Weber and signaled them to follow and signaled them to follow.

[00:31:38]They did. and [music] three dive bombers out of the entire American strike peeled OJ from Kaga and turned north. They turned toward a the death of the greatest ship in the Imperial Japanese Navy was not decided by strategy or by planning or or by the wisdom of admirals.

[00:32:00]>> Chapter it was decided by one man in one second. now at flagshit looking down at a flagship he had almost let live pulling his aircraft up into the sky to try again shortly after 10 10:22 in the morning as Dick Best pushed the stick forward he was 32 years old he had a wife in Honolulu he had a daughter learning her letters >> Jlette >> he was in that moment the age his own father had been when exactly the age his own father ended the photograph of Doris and Barbara anne was in his pocket pocket best rolls. His Barbara Anne was in his back. He pushes his forward on the stick. Will tilts the horizon disappears is a cogi. All that is left in his windshield. Growing growing Jirro's O septa sets. Oh.

[00:32:59]>> He dives at 70°. The air speed climbs >> 300 km.

[00:33:06]380.

[00:33:08]The wind screams past the canopy. The dive brakes on his wings are open. He is falling out of the sun. Beneath him on Akagi's flight deck, sailors are pushing another Kate bomber into position for la. A crew chief is checking a fuel line.

[00:33:25]>> Bian.

[00:33:28]A young officer is holding a clipboard.

[00:33:30]None of them are looking up because for the last hour they have been told over and [music] over that the American torpedo planes are dead, that the Zeros are victorious, that the sky belongs to them. At 550 m, best pulls the release toggle, the bomb drops.

[00:33:50]>> 1,000 lb. Deletcher Bashness >> 454 >> kg [music] and high explosive.

[00:34:00]>> Kroger drops next. His bomb misses close alongside near the island super strucker high enough to soak the men on the port catwalks.

[00:34:09]Weber drops last. His bomb strikes the sea just off Akagi's stern. That near mis cracks Akagi's rudder. It jams.

[00:34:17]>> Jetus. In this instant, the flaxenth flagship of the Imperial Japanese Navy has lost the ability to steer. But it is Best's bomb that matters. It falls through the empty air. It punches through the wooden flight deck near the aft elevator. It passes down into the hangar deck. And there, in the ninth of a second before [music] it detonates, it finds the worst place on the ship to explode. Right in the middle of the aircraft being armed, right beside the fuel lines, right in the heart of a cogi. Then it goes off. The explosion is not at first the explosion that kills the shipl.

[00:35:04]>> The bomb itself throws a fireball 20 m wide through the hanger. It kills every man within 30 ft. It rips the wooden deck above it into splinters. Jills.

[00:35:16]Upward from below, it bulges the flight deck into a bubble, warping the Sakagi's ability to launch or recover aircraft forever. But that is only the first explosion. The fireball hits the aviation gasoline sprays into the air and ignites. It hits the fully fueled Kates and VS crowded in the hangar and their tanks rupture. Jetus.

[00:35:43]>> It hits torpedoes freshly attached to the Kates and the warheads begin to cook off. Within 30 seconds, there is no hanger deck anymore. There is only fire.

[00:35:55]The fire climbs up through the elevator shafts. Won't enter shafts. It roars out through the hole in the flight deck. It travels along the ceiling of the hanger, seeking oxygen. Some compartments the temperature reaches over 1,000° C dra and >> aluminum melts. Steel glows red hot.

[00:36:19]Boils off the walls before the flames even touch them. In the middle of it all, Commander Mitsuo Fuida, the man who had led the aircraft over Pearl Harbor 6 months earlier, is trying to get out of the Burning Island superructure. He had appendix surgery 2 days ago. He is weak.

[00:36:36]He climbs down a rope from the bridge to the flight deck.

[00:36:40]>> BLM blime wasn't lime crawls alive toward the bow. For 50 years, the the legend of Midway said that Fua broke both legs when the bomb struck. He wrote it himself. In his post-war memoir in 1951, he said he was thrown from the bridge. He said the Japanese Navy came within 5 minutes of winning the battle.

[00:37:08]>> J modern historianized records chol have shown that almost none of this is true. Fua sprained his ankle climbing down a rope. The Japanese story of bombs stacked on the hangar deck and the story of where winning came from him too. The truth is grimmer than the legend. The Japanese Navy was not defeated by a lucky 5-minute window. Jur.

[00:37:33]>> It was defeated by one American pilot and by every American pilot who had died in the hour before and by a code broken in a Pearl Harbor base minute and by a catapult that had failed on the wrong day. On the bridge of Akagi, Admiral Nagumo does not move. He stares at the flames. He stares at the smoke rising from his flight deck.

[00:37:56]>> This officers, >> he does not answer. His chief atnau of staff, Rear Admiral Ryunosuk Kusaka, steps closer. He speaks quietly. The bridge is filling with smoke. Their radios are burning. The fleet cannot be commanded from here. They must transfer the flag to another ship. Nagumo does not want to go. To leave Akagi is to admit she is dying. Fans osc.

[00:38:38]He does not speak a rope. He simply lets him sight of the burning bridge because the ladders below are already impassible. He climbs down hand over hand. An admiral of the Empire of Japan escaping his own flagship on a length of hemp. Just before 11 in the morning, Nagumo is lowered into a launch and taken across the water to the light cruiser Nagara.

[00:39:01]>> Captain Taiiro Aoki, 50 years old, watches the launch pull away. Then he turns back to his ship. He will not follow down inside Akagi. The fight to save her is already impossible, and the men fighting it do not know that yet.

[00:39:19]Dur Edge >> damage control parties enter the hangar deck from both ends. Connie hoses that were never uniforms and canvas gloves.

[00:39:29]They carry hoses that were never designed for temperatures like this. The water they spray turns to steam before it reaches the flames. The steam scalds them. Their skin blisters. Their skin eyes swell shut. They keep the chief engineer leads a party toward the after magazines.

[00:39:49]>> Dr. >> If those magazines If those magazines cook off, the ship will break in half.

[00:39:55]They open the seox. They flood the compartments with ocean water. It boils on contact, but it works. The magazines are drowned before they explode. At 10:46, a secondary magazine near the hanger deck reaches critical temperature. Thousands of 25 mm anti-aircraft shells cook off in a single chain reaction.

[00:40:22]>> The shells fly out through the ship's steel bulkheads like a swarm of hornets. Some go up, >> some go down, some fly along the length of the hanger and finish off the men who had been fighting the fire from the bow.

[00:40:36]The fight continues.

[00:40:38]The dying continues. The ship burns. The names of the men who killed Akagi are known. Best, Kroger, Weber, McCcluskey, Waldrin. They are engraved on plaques and written in history books. The names of the men who died on Akagi are for the most part gone. 267 men were killed on the ship that day.

[00:41:05]The majority were not pilots. Pilots die in the air.

[00:41:09]>> Yeah. and their bodies fall into the sea and someone tells someone >> the d the burl d >> the men on a kaggi died differently duh >> they died in engine rooms sealed shut by fire they dawn temperature climbed where the ventilation had failed and the temperature climbed until the air itself became a weapon they died in compartments and for hours or days or ever they were young And most of them were between 18 and 22 years old.

[00:41:43]>> They were the same age your father was when he's >> when he shipped out 18. They had families in Yokosuka and Hosaka and the small farming villages of Hawkaido and Kagashima.

[00:41:59]They had written letters home in careful handwriting. Their mothers kept those letters in wooden boxes for the rest of their lives. If you have ever known someone who died alone at sea in a war on a morning that started ordinary, you understand what this part of the story is.

[00:42:18]>> This, oh less, >> this is the part they never got to tell.

[00:42:23]By the afternoon on a clear blue Pacific day in June of 1942, Akagi was 1942. Akagi's flight deck. Her hanger was a furnace. Her hammer roll a furnace. Her steering was gone. Her captain had abandoned her and she was still somehow floating. 6:00 in the >> June 4th, the sun's is beginning to slide. The Pacific, it is calm. The wind is light. Under other circumstances, it would be a beautiful evening. A kagi drifts in the middle of it, burning. She is no longer a warship. She is a broken thing that once was a warship. Her flight deck is torn open like a wound.

[00:43:09]Black smoke rises from her middle in a column so tall that lookouts on distant destroyers see it against the sunset from 30 m away. Ch.

[00:43:20]>> Her steel plating glows a dull red in the places where the fires below have been burning hottest, but she is still floating. Around her, four destroyers hold position. Arashi, Noaki, Hagakaz, Mikaz. They circle their dying ship the way a family circles a hospital bed.

[00:43:41]>> There to protect her.

[00:43:43]>> They are there to take off her wounded.

[00:43:46]They are there because none of them can bring themselves to leave. On board Akagi, [music] Captain Tairo Aoki gives the order to evacuate everyone not needed to keep the ship afloat. Boats are lowered.

[00:44:00]>> Men climb down cargo nets on the ship's side. Their faces stre with soot, their uniforms burned to black rags.

[00:44:09]>> Many are wounded.

[00:44:11]>> Some can barely by rope friends. They are pulled onto the destroyer saw by sailors who do not ask any questions, who simply hand them water and blankets and pulled the next one aboard. What Aayoki did that night, the truth of it is quieter than the legend that later grew around it. There is no reliable record of Aoki tying himself to himself anything. What the surviving officers remembered was simpler. He stayed. He stayed on the burning deck of his ship long after any sensible any sensible man would have left her. He sat at times on the platform outside his cap near the island outside his cabin. These island superructure.

[00:44:53]He walked the flight deck inspecting the damage speaking quietly to the last men still.

[00:44:58]>> He was a captain >> doing the thing captains have done for 4,000 years.

[00:45:03]>> He was staying with his ship. He was staying was mouse to the northeast.

[00:45:08]Another decision was being made because here you the last undamaged Japanese carrier >> had already launched her counter strike.

[00:45:17]>> Her dive bombers and torpedo planes had found the American fleet. And by evening they had struck USS Yorktown [music] twice. First with bombs, then with torpedoes. Yorktown was listing.

[00:45:33]Yorktown was burning for a few hours on the afternoon of June 4th. The Japanese believed they might still salvage him from the disaster, but they had hurt an American carrier.

[00:45:45]Perhaps the arithmetic was not so bad.

[00:45:48]>> Then at 5 in the afternoon, American dive bombers found Hiu. Among the pilots who attacked her was Dick Best. He had flown back to Enterprise after his attack on a Kaggi.

[00:46:03]>> He had landed.

[00:46:05]>> He had climbed out of his cockpit coughing. He uh eaten drunk water and when Enterprise he had drunk water, her second strike of the day. And Best had climbed back into a fresh aircraft with a fresh thousand bomb with a fresh mom.

[00:46:24]and he had flown back out into the sky just after 5 in the evening. He he dove on hereu.

[00:46:33]>> His bomb struck her flight if they near the forward elevator. It set off this had [music] already killed her sir.

[00:46:41]>> Three sisters.

[00:46:42]>> Sure.

[00:46:43]>> He's is one of the very few American pilots in the entire war credited with fatally damaging two enemy aircraft carriers in a single day. One one quiet lieutenant commander from Bayon, New Jersey with poisoned lungs he did not yet know were poisoned by nightfall on June 4th. All four Japa Japanese carriers that had led the attack on Pearl Harbor were destroyed or dying. 6 months earlier on a Sunday morning, the Japanese Navy had come out of the sun over Pearl Harbor and killed 2400 Americans. that is separate.

[00:47:25]>> Six 6 months for a young man from New Jerseys and a codereaker in a basement and 41 torpedo bar in a pilot's month. 6 months for all of them together wanted to answer. [music] It would never Sunday morning. The war had turned. It would never turn back. Midnight Akagi drifts in the Black Pacific. her fires foam sullen Fred Kelmer's >> elsewhere they still leap lump into the darkness casting the shadows of her superructure across long seen wavering shapes from a distance she looks like a great candle burning slowly down Captain Aoki is still aboard he has [music] not slept >> he has walked the length of the ship as the fires will allow He has counted his dead. He has knelt beside wounded men and spoken with them. He has watched in the darkness as ammunition below decks continues to cook off in small muffled explosions that no one can reach and and no one can stop. Around 3:00 in the morning, a launch approaches from one of the destroyers. A senior staff officer climbs aboard.

[00:48:46]>> He carries an order.

[00:48:48]The >> the order does not come from Iayokazi's own adrenumo on the light cruiser Nagara [music] is the order comes from higher up from Admiral Isuroku Yamamoto himself 600 Iceund miles to the west on the bridge of the super battleship Yamato.

[00:49:05]>> But for all his rank for all his tradition was not permitted to die with his ship.

[00:49:12]The staff officer told him what Yamamoto had commanded.

[00:49:15]>> Okay. Well, all >> Oki was to leave a kagi. Oki. Oki was to live before an inquiry so that the Imperial Navy could understand what had happened so that the lessons of Midway could be studied and perhaps yes someday used to fight another battle. Dead captain would take his knowledge to the bottom of the ocean with him. Though the Nuke a living captain could be questioned, Oki hesitated.

[00:49:46]Then he obeyed. He was a naval office to obey. He climbed down into the launch.

[00:49:52]He did not look back. He would survive the war. He was never formally disgraced, though he never again commanded a great ship. He served out the rest of the war in shore assignments and lesser commands.

[00:50:04]>> No, no, >> he didn't. The war ended, he went home.

[00:50:10]>> He did not write a memoir. He spent his last war. He squent years quietly. an old man in a country that had lost everything and he took most of what he knew about that night to his grave. B at the thesome hour, Miles on the flag bridge making a decision he had another old man was making a decision he had never imagined he would have to make.

[00:50:32]>> Joe addresses >> Yamamoto was 58 years old. He had spent his life in the Imperial Navy. He had studied at Harvard. He had served as naval ataché in Washington. He had known better than almost any other Japanese officer what the United States could do when it was fully awake. He had warned his own government before Pearl Harbor that a war against America could not be won past the first 6 months.

[00:51:01]>> Uh uh >> he had been right. Now in the darkness of June 5th, the reports were coming in.

[00:51:09]Akagi mortally damaged unable to be saved. Kaga sunk earlier in the evening.

[00:51:17]Soryu sunk. Heru burning four aircraft carriers 23,000craft gone in a single day. His chief of [music] staff, Vice Admiral Lugaki, kept a diary.

[00:51:34]>> Just art punis.

[00:51:36]in it. He wrote only that Yamamoto to retreated. Tess >> spike.

[00:51:43]>> The admiral finally emerged. The admiral finally emerged. He gave the order that no Japanese naval commander had ever given before and that no Japanese naval commander should not ever have to give.

[00:51:54]Scuttle Akagi.

[00:51:57]Sink her before the Americans of her secrets can be salvaged from the sea. Sink her with the torpedoes of her own escorts and let her go down beneath a Japanese flag. The order reached the four destroyers just before 5 in the morning. 5:00 in the morning, June 5th.

[00:52:23]The eastern horizon is beginning to gray. Direct at >> akagi still burns. The poor destroyers take up positions in line about 1,500 m off her starboard beam. On each destroyer, torpedo crews go through the drill. They have practiced 1,000 [music] times. They train the tubes. They set the depth. They arm the warheads. The type 93 torpedo was at that time the finest weapon of its kind in the world.

[00:52:57]>> The Americans would later call it the long lance.

[00:53:02]>> It was more than 29 ft long. It carried a warhead of high explosive weighing nearly 1,000 lb.

[00:53:11]>> Is about when it doesn't without does one tecton American battleships. It had been designed to sink bend.

[00:53:19]On this on the destroyers, sailors stand at attention. Many are weeping openly.

[00:53:25]>> Some salute. Oh. Oh, praise.

[00:53:30]Oh, venture. Fire.

[00:53:33]The commanders give the order. Fire.

[00:53:36][music] Four Type 93 torpedoes leap from their tubes. They enter the water almost silently, leaving thin white trails across the black surface of the sea.

[00:53:47]They run straight and true and they cross the 1500 m in less than a minute.

[00:53:52]The first torpedo strikes Akagi's starboard side near the bow.

[00:53:59]>> The explosion lifts a column of water higher than her flight deck. The ship shutters like a wounded animal. Then the second torpedo hits a midship that hurt >> and the third and fourth strike the stern almost together. Akagi's damage control system has been gone for hours.

[00:54:18]There is no one left inside. To close it, the sea rushes in.

[00:54:23]>> Then Sledger. She begins to list slowly at first, then faster. 10° 20 20 30. The water floods her hanger deck.

[00:54:38]And for the first time in more than 18 hours, the fires inside her are extinguished. Not by her men, not by hoses, by the Pacific itself, pouring in through the wounds her own escorts have given her. At 20 5 in the morning on the 5th of June, on the 5th of June, 1942, a Kaggi rolls onto her side. Bernie shields, >> her flight deck, the flight deck that had launched the attack on Pearl Harbor disappears under the sea. The bow dips.

[00:55:10]The stern rises. For one long moment, her twin propellers point at the brightening sky. Then, slowly, majestically, she slides beneath the surface. There is no great noise. There is a hiss of steam. There is a slow gurgle of water displacing air. There is a spreading circle of oil and floating debris. And then nothing.

[00:55:37]She falls in the darkness for nearly 10 minutes. She sinks upside down through the cold layers of the ocean. Past the depth where light gives way. Past the depth. Past the depth where sound behaves strangely.

[00:55:53]Past [music] every depth at which a human being could survive. She comes to rest at 5,490 m below the surface on the abyssal plane of the North Pacific.

[00:56:05]Jebus >> Durus >> on the four baktas that four destroyers the men stand silently. Some of them later said they did not remember the ride back back to Japan. They remembered that morning, that moment, the flight deck going under. There was one thing about that morning the Japanese Empire would not admit for another 40 years.

[00:56:29]Something so painful they hid it even from their own people. The rested the war.

[00:56:36]The rest war.

[00:56:38]>> Newspapers reported a great victory.

[00:56:41]Official commune spoke of Japanese triumphs. The surviving sailors of Akagi and her three sister ships were treated as if they carried a disease. They were separated from their families. They were sent to isolated garrisons, to distant island postings, to units where they would not be able to speak with anyone who had not also been there. Some of them did not see their wives or their children for 2 years >> or huh >> or three or ever again. [music] the Fresos. A few were quietly transferred, sent to the Solomons and to New Guinea and to Saipan, where the odds of returning were low and where the truth of what they knew would be safely buried. 2 years and a month after the death of Akagi in July of 1944 on the island of Saipon, Vice Sag Sadmiral Chuichi Nagumo, the man who had once commanded the invincible Keo Bhai put a pistol to his own head.

[00:57:46]>> The Americans >> The Americans were closing in. The last defenses were falling. He was 57 years old. He died in a cave. His body was found after the battle identified by his uniform. He left no long letter, no great speech. He simply chose the end.

[00:58:06]In a hospital ward on Oahu and later in a military hospital in Aurora, Colorado, a young lieutenant commander was coughing steadily.

[00:58:16]>> Dick Best had come back from Midway, a national hero. Though no one yet knew quite how much of a hero he had received the Navy Cross twice for a single Dave of combat in the war. His name had been printed in the papers. His face had smiled from wire service photographs.

[00:58:37]But something was wrong with him. The cough he had shrugged off on the night of June 4th was not going away. Got worse.

[00:58:46]it off. By the end of the month, blood doctors examined him at Pearl Harbor.

[00:58:53]Then they sent to Fitz Simmons General Hospital, high in the dry Colorado air, where the army sent its worst tuberculosis cases. The story, as it emerged, was this. The the soda lime cartridge in his oxygen mask had been defective. When he had gone up to altitude on the morning of June 4th and drawn breath through his mask he had inhaled costic material into his lungs, the chemical burn was slow to reveal itself. But but it had done something worse than direct damage.

[00:59:24]>> Chud, >> it had awakened in the deep tissue of his lungs. A case of tuberculosis just that had been dormant since he was a boy.

[00:59:33]>> Best >> best would spend more than two years in military hospitals. His left lung was surgically collapsed to give the disease a chance to burn itself out. He was retired from active duty in 1944.

[00:59:46]He was still under 35 years old. He never flew a combat mission years old.

[00:59:52]He recovered [music] eventual again. He moved to California.

[00:59:56]He went to work at the Rand Corporation.

[00:59:58]He was a good employee, a quiet family man, a father who watched his daughter Barbara Anne grow up. He watched her graduate Barbara Anne grow up. He watched her graduate from high school.

[01:00:10]He watched her get married. He watched her have children of her own. Somewhere in California in 1960s, an old pilot uh who had ended an empire was helping his grandson tie his shoes.

[01:00:24]>> Jo decal officer knew. But for most Americans, Dick Best was simply an unfamiliar name in a footnote. The pilot who the pilot who had killed a kaggi in the morning and hear you in the afternoon lived for the rest of his life in the anonymity of an ordinary suburb. Then in the 1990s 19 new generation of historians began to look again at Midway. They pieced together the afteraction reports. They read the Japanese after the Japanese damage records. They understood at last what man on aircraft had done of a single day best was still alive. Eight, I did not embellish jets.

[01:01:17]>> He did not claim to have known at 10:22 on the morning of June 4th that he was changing the course of the war. He said more than once that he had been doing his job. He said that many men had done more and died. He seemed genuinely puzzled by the attention. He died in October of 2001.

[01:01:39]>> Dr. Chartell Duran a jam.

[01:01:46]He was dishonor as a matter result of arithmetic or to an American of a certain age that any American of a certain age already knows in his bones. Four Japanese aircraft carriers destroyed, 248 aircraft lost.

[01:02:04]>> Jedard, >> over 3,000 men killed, including irreplaceable pilots, mechanics, and technicians whose training had taken years and whom Japan had no way to replace before the end of the war. Uh from that morning, Japan defense uh defensive in the Pacific 2 months later would land on an island called Guadal Canal. From there, the road would run through Tarowa and Saipon and Ewima and Okinawa until the road ended in a bay in Tokyo on the deck of a battleship on a September morning in 1945.

[01:02:47]Jalace.

[01:02:49]But the road began at 10:22 in the morning on June 4th, 1942 when a slight quiet man from New Jersey pulled a lever in the cockpit of a diving airplane and a bomb fell out of the sky onto the flight deck of a ship called Red Castle. For 77 years, Akagi lay in the darkness. She rested upside down on the abyssal plane of the North Pacific in cold that never varied [music] and pressure that never eased. The sea life that grew on all her chipped so slowly.

[01:03:28]She kept her secrets.

[01:03:31]She kept her dead. In October of 2019, the Petrell, funded by the estate of the late Paul Allen, was working the waters northwest of Midway. Her sonar caught the silhouette of a great ship on the seafloor. Her remotely operated submersible descended into the black.

[01:03:50]>> The image that came back was almost un damaged. The flight deck was there. All the great hanger spaces were there. Fish moved slowly in and out of the wound where Dick Best's bomb had gone in. 77 years of silence had left her almost her almost intact. A steel monument to a morning that had ended one empire and begun another.

[01:04:16]>> She had killed thousands chapters being killed.

[01:04:23]>> In her turn, she had begun as a symbol of imperial pride and had [music] ended in ' 67. So of them boss who had never learned to hate anyone. She lies there still in a place no living human being will ever walk.

[01:04:40]>> She is now a war grave. Uh she belongs to those who went down with her.

[01:04:47]>> She belongs to the young engineers >> who died in the sealed compartments no one could reach. Shiblesh.

[01:04:55]>> She belongs to the last men who cheered on her flight deck at 10:20 on the morning of June 4th and who never saw 1023.

[01:05:04]>> Three aircraft, one bomb.

[01:05:08]>> 6 minutes. That was all it took to end the reign of the greatest carrier the Empire of Japan had ever built. The sun still rises over that patch of the Pacific every day. The wind still moves the water above her grave. If you flew over it now, you would see nothing but blue.

[01:05:29]>> But something enormous happened there on a June morning long ago. Dur and oh pretjudice >> war. And every American whose son or father or gone to suffer or grandfather did not come home is connected by an invisible line to the moment that a young man named Dick Best pushed his stick forward and dove. He did not know what he was doing was going to matter for 80 years and counting.

[01:06:00]>> He was just trying to hit the ship. He did.

[01:06:03]>> If you are watching this is father, thank your father. Thank your grandfather.

[01:06:10]Thank the uncle who never talked about the Pacific and the neighbor who lost his hearing on a destroyer. Nobody remembers.

[01:06:18]>> Jer them dozen. Prejudice. Thank the mother of Iowa who received a telegram June and 42 and kept his of mantelpiece.

[01:06:30]Dick best flew into that dive so they could come home. And most of them did.

[01:06:36]And America remembers.