What Japanese Admirals Said as Their Carriers Went Down

[00:00:00]Hashirajima Anchorage, May 26, 1942, dawn. The mist has not lifted yet from the water. Somewhere behind it, four gray shapes are moving. Slow, deliberate, silent as thought, Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, Hiryu, the four fleet carriers of the Kidō Butai, the First Air Fleet, the striking arm of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Together, they have crossed the Pacific like a weather system. Pearl Harbor, Rabaul, Darwin, Colombo. Two British capital ships sent to the bottom in a single afternoon. Six months of continuous operations, six months without losing a single flight deck. On the morning they leave Hashirajima, they are the most powerful naval formation in the world. In nine days, all four will be burning wrecks at the bottom of the North Pacific. None of the men on their bridges knows this.

[00:00:46]That is the point of the story. That is what makes it a tragedy rather than a battle. Because if you had asked any of them that morning whether Japan could lose, they would have looked at you the way a doctor looks at a patient who has misunderstood a diagnosis. Politely, with something akin to pity. On the flag bridge of Akagi stands the man who commands them, Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, 55 years old, compact build, gray at the temples, a face that has forgotten how to smile. He has been a naval officer since the last century, since the days when a Japanese battleship was still a strange new thing. He is a torpedo specialist by training, a surface warfare man. He knows the language of guns and steel. He does not know the language of aircraft.

[00:01:29]Not really. Not the way the young pilots below him know it, but he holds the seniority, and in the Imperial Japanese Navy, seniority commands. At Pearl Harbor, six months earlier, Nagumo had made a decision that already haunted him. When his pilots pleaded for a third strike to hit the fuel tanks and the dry docks that would take years to rebuild, he refused. He turned the fleet home. It was, by every doctrine, the correct decision, and every man who has studied the war since has argued it was the wrong one. Now Nagumo sails toward Midway carrying the memory of that hesitation, carrying the quiet suspicion that boldness might this time be required. 300 nautical miles behind him on the super battleship Yamato sits the man who put him there, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, 58 years old, missing the index and middle fingers of his left hand torn away when a gun burst aboard the cruiser Nisshin at Tsushima in 1905.

[00:02:24]Commander-in-chief of the Combined Fleet, the most famous naval officer in Asia, Yamamoto has lived in America. He studied at Harvard from 1919 to 1921, then served as naval attaché in Washington from 1925 to 1927.

[00:02:40]He has traveled across the American heartland. He has seen the oil fields of Oklahoma and Texas. He has walked through the automobile plants of Detroit and the endless steel mills of Pennsylvania. He has stood inside factories where a completed engine block rolls off an assembly line every 90 seconds. Before the war, he told the prime minister the truth about what he had seen. He said, "For 6 months, perhaps a year, I can run wild. After that, I have no expectation of success."

[00:03:08]The prime minister ordered the attack anyway. Yamamoto planned it. He hit Pearl Harbor because he was ordered to.

[00:03:14]And now 6 months later, his self-imposed clock is running out. Midway is his answer. Draw the American carriers out.

[00:03:21]Destroy them in one decisive engagement.

[00:03:24]Force Washington to the negotiating table before the factories catch up. It is a beautiful plan on paper. It depends entirely on surprise. To Nagumo's east on the smaller carrier Hiryu, a third admiral watches the sea with different eyes. Rear Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi, 49 years old, broad-shouldered, restless.

[00:03:42]He studied at Princeton in the early 1920s, spoke English well enough to argue you in it, and had, like Yamamoto, seen the American industrial base up close. But Yamaguchi drew the opposite conclusion. He believed Japan could win if it struck hard enough, fast enough, and never gave the enemy a moment to breathe. Aggression, he was known to say, is a form of prudence. Within the officer corps, he was considered the natural successor to Yamamoto. The next generation, the future. He would not see the end of this week. These three men are the architects of what is about to happen. Their decisions, their hesitations, their beliefs about what the enemy could and could not do. And on the morning of the 26th of May, as the Kido Butai slips out of the Inland Sea into open ocean, all three of them believe the same thing. They believe they know where the Americans are. They are wrong. 2,300 mi east, in the basement of an unremarkable building on the naval base at Pearl Harbor, a man in a red smoking jacket and carpet slippers is drinking coffee that has gone cold hours ago. Commander Joseph J.

[00:04:46]Rochefort, 42 years old, officer in charge of Station Hypo, the Navy's cryptographic unit for the Pacific Fleet. He has not slept properly in weeks. His desk is buried under intercept sheets. His team is a collection of misfits, former bandsmen, Japanese linguists, mathematical eccentrics that the regular Navy did not know what to do with. They have been reading Japanese naval traffic, not all of it, not cleanly, but enough. They know an operation is coming. Coded designator AF, they believe AF is Midway. Washington disagrees. Washington thinks AF is the West Coast of the United States, or maybe Hawaii itself.

[00:05:22]So, Rochefort designs a trap. He arranges for Midway to broadcast in the clear that its water distillation plant has broken down. Within 48 hours, Japanese naval traffic reports that AF is short of fresh water. Now they know.

[00:05:36]Now Admiral Chester Nimitz knows. Nimitz orders three carriers to a point northeast of Midway, Enterprise, Hornet, and, impossibly, Yorktown. The Yorktown that had been so badly damaged at the Coral Sea that Japanese intelligence had confidently reported her sunk. In Pearl Harbor's dry docks, 1,400 workers had swarmed her hull for 72 straight hours, welding, riveting, repairing. She sailed on the 29th of May, patches still hot, and headed for the ambush point Nimitz called Point Luck. Three American carriers waiting, silent, radio blackout. Nagumo does not know any of this. He believes he is sailing toward a lightly defended island garrison. He believes the Americans have at most two operational carriers, both somewhere near the Solomons. He believes he holds the element of surprise. He believes he is the hunter. He is the prey. And on his own flagship, at the very moment when he most needs the sharpest air minds in the Imperial Navy at his elbow, both of them are unavailable. In a small cabin below the flag bridge, Commander Minoru Genda lies in a narrow bunk staring at the ceiling. 37 years old.

[00:06:43]The man who planned the Pearl Harbor attack, the most brilliant carrier tactician in the Japanese officer corps.

[00:06:50]He is running a fever. A bad case of bronchitis has been draining him for days. He can still make it to the bridge when the situation demands. But he is not the man he was a week ago. His judgment is slowed. His voice is weak.

[00:07:03]And when the decisions come at Nagumo in the space of minutes, Genda will be there, but not fully there. Two cabins away, another officer sits with a heating pad pressed against his abdomen, Commander Mitsuo Fuchida. 39 years old.

[00:07:16]The pilot who led the Pearl Harbor strike, who radioed the code words Tora!

[00:07:20]Tora! Tora! into history. Three days before sailing, his appendix ruptured.

[00:07:25]He was operated on aboard ship. The incision is still healing. He can walk, barely, but he cannot fly, and he will not lead the strike he was born to lead.

[00:07:34]Two of the most important air officers in the fleet, both effectively out of the fight. Nagumo does not have Genda's instincts to lean on. He does not have Fuchida's eye for a strike package. He has doctrine. He has his own careful torpedo officer mind. And he has the quiet weight of Pearl Harbor's third strike still hanging on his shoulders.

[00:07:52]June 3rd, sunset. The Kido Butai turns onto its final approach heading. Weather closes in from the northwest, a low gray overcast that hides the ships from prying American search planes. Nagumo allows himself something close to relief. The weather is on his side.

[00:08:09]Surprises on his side. The plan is on his side. Below decks in the hangars of all four carriers, ordnance crews begin the long night's work of readying aircraft for the dawn strike. Torpedoes are cradled onto trolleys. Bombs are stacked. Aviation fuel is topped off in the tanks. On Akagi's hangar deck, 93 reserve aircraft sit armed with torpedoes and armor-piercing bombs, held back in case in the unlikely case American carriers should appear. They will appear. They are already there.

[00:08:38]At 4:30 in the morning on the 4th of June, 108 Japanese aircraft roar off the four flight decks into the last dark before sunrise. Lieutenant Joichi Tomonaga, 30 years old, leads them west toward Midway. On the bridge of Akagi, Nagumo watches the strike vanish into the pre-dawn sky. His face reveals nothing. His hands folded behind his back do not tremble. Somewhere out there in the darkness northeast of him, three American flight decks are turning into the wind. Over the next 3 hours, Chuichi Nagumo will make four decisions. Each of them taken alone will look defensible.

[00:09:13]Taken together, they will destroy the Imperial Japanese Navy. He does not know that yet. None of them do. The sun begins to rise. 04:30. The sun is not yet visible, but the eastern sky is beginning to bleed pale gray along the horizon. On the flight deck of the heavy cruiser Tone, steaming 5,000 yd astern of Akagi, a young petty officer named Hisashi Amari climbs into the rear cockpit of a type zero reconnaissance floatplane. He is 24 years old, reliable, unremarkable, the kind of pilot the navy assigns to routine scout missions because he does not make mistakes. He is scheduled to launch at 04:30 sharp, sector five, northeast search leg, 300 nautical miles out, 60 across back to the fleet. The catapult officer signals ready. The steam pressure builds. Then something inside the mechanism refuses to release, a hydraulic fault. A jammed valve. The engineers cannot say for certain. They swarm across the launching gear with wrenches, cursing in low voices so as not to be heard on the bridge. Amari sits in his cockpit with the engine idling. 5 minutes, 10, 20, 30. He launches at 5:02, 32 minutes late. No one on Akagi is told, not immediately.

[00:10:24]It is a small failure, a mechanical hiccup on a supporting ship. The kind of thing that happens on every operation, in every navy, on every ocean. 32 minutes, remember that number. At 07:15, Vice Admiral Nagumo faces his first real decision of the day. Lieutenant Tomonaga's strike group is returning from Midway. Their attack, by their own report, has been only partially successful. The runways are damaged, but usable. The anti-aircraft positions are still active. American land-based bombers are already in the air, hunting for the Japanese carriers, and their attacks, though clumsy and ineffective, are becoming a nuisance. Tomonaga's voice comes over the radio, tight and professional. Second strike necessary.

[00:11:07]Nagumo weighs it. The 93 reserve aircraft in his hangars are armed with torpedoes and armor-piercing bombs, weapons designed to kill warships, not weapons designed to crater airfields. To hit Midway a second time, the aircraft must be rearmed with land bombs. He gives the order. Torpedoes come off, land bombs go on. In the hangar decks of Akagi and Kaga, ordnance crews begin the slow, heavy, physical work of swapping weapons on aircraft that are not designed to be rearmed quickly.

[00:11:35]Torpedoes weigh close to a ton each.

[00:11:38]They must be lowered, wheeled aside, secured. Land bombs must be brought up from the magazines, lifted, mounted.

[00:11:44]There is no time to send the torpedoes back down to the ammunition rooms deep in the ship's belly. They are left on the hangar deck, stacked against bulkheads, rolled into corners. The hangar decks of two of the most powerful warships in the world begin to fill with loose ordnance. At 07:28, a radio message arrives at the flag bridge. "10 ships, apparently enemy, bearing 010 degrees. Distance 240 miles from Midway.

[00:12:10]Course 150. Speed over 20 knots." Amari has finally seen something. Nagumo reads the message once, then again. The officers around him fall silent. He looks up slowly and speaks to no one in particular. "Where are their carriers?"

[00:12:24]No one answers, because no one knows.

[00:12:27]The report does not identify ship types.

[00:12:29]Amari, who launched 32 minutes late, has arrived at the search limit only now, and the ships he sees are still too distant to distinguish clearly.

[00:12:38]"Cruisers, destroyers, something larger." He cannot tell. If he had launched on time, he would have found them 32 minutes earlier, before the rearming order was given, before torpedoes came off aircraft, before the hangar decks began to fill with loose bombs. But he launched late, and now Nagumo must decide what to do with the report that tells him only that something is out there. He orders the scout to identify ship types, maintain contact, report again. The rearming continues. At 07:45, Nagumo issues a second order. "Halt the rearming." The bomb crews stop where they are. Some aircraft are half converted, some still carry torpedoes, some now have land bombs mounted. The hangars are a mess of ordnance, none of it stowed properly, all of it lying wherever it was set down. He waits. At 0800, a new message.

[00:13:27]"The enemy force is composed of five cruisers and five destroyers. Relief moves across the bridge like a released breath. No carriers. Cruisers and destroyers. A surface intercept force probably rushing to defend Midway.

[00:13:40]Manageable, killable, but killable only with torpedoes and armor-piercing bombs, not with land bombs. Nagumo reverses himself. Rearm with torpedoes. The ordnance crews, who have spent the last 45 minutes taking torpedoes off and putting land bombs now begin taking land bombs off and putting torpedoes back on.

[00:13:59]In the hangars, chaos deepens. Now there are two kinds of ordnance sitting loose on the deck. Torpedoes, bombs. Fuel lines snake between them. Aviation gasoline drips from disconnected fittings. It is not yet 9:00 in the morning. Nagumo has already changed his mind twice about how to arm the same aircraft. At 0820, Amari's third message arrives. The enemy force appears to be accompanied by what looks like a carrier. Appears to be, looks like, not confirmed, not identified, just a shape at extreme distance. That might be a flight deck. Nagumo stares at the paper.

[00:14:32]Captain Taijiro Aoki, commanding officer of Akagi, steps closer to him. He is 50 years old. A career officer, careful with his words in the presence of a superior admiral. If there is a carrier out there, we should launch immediately.

[00:14:46]Nagumo does not look up. With what? He gestures at the flight deck below the bridge windows. To Managa's returning strike aircraft are beginning to appear on the horizon. Low on fuel, some damaged, they must be landed. The deck cannot launch and recover at the same time. And the reserve aircraft, the ones in the hangars are here, are in the middle of being rearmed for the second time this morning. We launch a partial strike with whatever is ready, or we wait 1 hour, recover all aircraft, complete the rearming, and launch as a full coordinated strike. He decides, wait, recover, rearm properly, launch as one. It is the doctrinally correct decision. It is what the manuals teach.

[00:15:24]It is what will destroy him. Across the water on the flag bridge of Hiryu, Rear Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi has been reading the same signals. He does not have Nagumo's caution. He does not have Nagumo's ghosts. He watches the returning Midway strikes settle onto Akagi and Kaga's decks. Watches the sun climb. Watches the enemy reporting shift from 10 ships to cruisers to possibly a carrier and something in him tightens.

[00:15:48]He picks up a signal lamp. The message he sends is short, 15 characters in Japanese formal, restrained. A subordinate does not order a superior.

[00:15:57]Considered advisable to launch attack immediately. Nagumo receives the signal.

[00:16:01]His staff sees him read it. He does not respond. On Hiryu's bridge, Yamaguchi waits. Then he waits longer. He watches Akagi's sick signal lamp for a reply that does not come. He turns away from the rail and does not look at his signal officer again for several minutes. The Kidō Butai continues on course. The recovery continues. The rearming continues. Two more times Amari's floatplane reports contact. The carrier is still out there. Then a second American carrier appears on his radio.

[00:16:29]By 0900, Nagumo knows he is facing at least two American flight decks, possibly three. He also knows that his own flight decks are full of aircraft either landing or being fueled. His hangars are full of loose bombs and torpedoes. His combat air patrol of zero fighters is up watching the sky. And somewhere out there, the Americans have launched. At 0918, the first of them arrive. They are not the dive bombers Nagumo has been dreading. They are torpedo planes, slow, ancient Douglas TBD Devastators from the carrier Hornet, designation Torpedo Squadron 8. 15 aircraft, no fighter escort. Their commander is Lieutenant Commander John C. Waldron, 42 years old, part Oglala Lakota on his mother's side, raised on the plains of South Dakota. A man who has told his squadron, "If only one aircraft is left, I want that man to press home the attack." The Devastator was already obsolete when the war began.

[00:17:24]It cruises at 100 knots. Its torpedoes must be dropped from low altitude, straight and level, within a few hundred yards of the target, and even then half of them will fail to detonate. Against a modern warship with combat-ready anti-aircraft batteries and zero fighters overhead, it is a coffin.

[00:17:41]Waldron leads them in anyway. The zeros above the fleet see them coming and dive from 20,000 ft like knives falling out of the sky. The Devastators do not scatter. They do not turn away. They hold formation and press for their release points. They are annihilated. 15 aircraft, 14 shot down. The last Ensign George H. Gay, 25 years old, releases his torpedo, watches it porpoise and miss, is shot down himself, and crawls out of his sinking aircraft into open water. He hides beneath a floating black seat cushion for hours, refusing to inflate his yellow life raft until darkness falls, because a yellow raft in daylight will draw a strafing run. He will spend the rest of the day watching the battle from the middle of it. Not a single torpedo hits. Six minutes later, torpedo squadron six from Enterprise arrives. 14 aircraft, 10 shot down, no hits. 15 minutes after that, torpedo squadron three from Yorktown arrives. 12 aircraft, 10 shot down, no hits. 41 aircraft launched, 35 destroyed, zero hits. On the bridge of Akagi, Nagumo watches the last of the Devastators cartwheel into the sea and allows himself at last something close to a smile. "American aircraft, poor coordination, ineffective. It is the truth, and it is the trap." Every zero fighter in the combat air patrol is now down at wave top height, hunting the low, slow torpedo planes, chasing them across the water, killing them one at a time. The Japanese pilots are exhilarated. The gunners on the escorting cruisers and destroyers are watching sea level, tracking the last surviving devastators as they turn away.

[00:19:16]No one is looking up. 60 mi to the northeast, Lieutenant Commander Clarence Wade McClusky, 40 years old, commanding the Enterprise air group, is running out of fuel. He has 33 SBD Dauntless dive bombers with him, half from Bombing Six, half from Scouting Six. He has been searching for the Japanese carriers for an hour and a half. He has flown to the point where they should have been. They are not there. He is at the ragged edge of his fuel range. In another 20 minutes, he will have to turn for home, and his aircraft will begin ditching in the ocean one by one. He looks down.

[00:19:50]Below him, alone on a wide empty patch of sea, a single Japanese destroyer is racing north at flank speed. A white wake trailing behind her like chalk. Her name is Arashi.

[00:20:01]10 minutes earlier, she was hunting the American submarine Nautilus, which had approached Japanese formation and released torpedoes at Kaga. Arashi dropped depth charges, drove the submarine off, and is now hurrying to rejoin the main body of the Kidō Butai before her absence is noticed. She does not know she is being watched from 20,000 ft. McClusky follows her. At the same moment, 20 mi south, Lieutenant Commander Maxwell Leslie, 39 years old, commanding Bombing Three from Yorktown, has taken a different route and finds himself directly over the Japanese fleet by accident, at the correct altitude with 17 dive bombers behind him and no one shooting at him yet. For a period of perhaps 90 seconds, at 10:22 in the morning on the 4th of June, 1942, three American strike groups converge on the four Japanese carriers from three different directions, and every Japanese Zero fighter is a mile and a half below them, chasing devastators across the whitecaps. On the bridge of Akagi, a lookout suddenly screams, "Dive bombers!" Nagumo turns. He looks up. He sees dark shapes tumbling out of the sun, growing larger with a speed that is beyond comprehension. What he says in that moment is not recorded. Perhaps he says nothing. Perhaps there is nothing to say. McClusky's Dauntlesses roll into their dives from 14,000 ft at an angle of 70°.

[00:21:22]The airframes shudder, dive brakes extend. The bombs are 1,000 lb each.

[00:21:27]They are released at about 1,500 ft.

[00:21:29]Then the aircraft pull out groaning and climb away. Akagi takes one direct hit and one damaging near miss. The near miss explodes close along her side throwing up a wall of water and jamming her rudder. The direct hit strikes near the amidships elevator, punches through the flight deck, and detonates inside the upper hangar. Kaga takes four direct hits in quick succession. Her flight deck disintegrates. Her bridge is engulfed in fire in the first minute.

[00:21:55]Captain Jisaku Okada, 52 years old, does not survive that first minute. Soryu, hit by Leslie's group from Yorktown, takes three bombs down a center line.

[00:22:05]Her hangar erupts. Her flight deck peels open like a tin can. Three carriers, six minutes. And here the myth diverges from the truth. For decades after the war, one story dominated the telling of this moment. It came from Commander Fuchida writing in 1955. He said the Japanese flight decks were crowded edge to edge with fully armed and fueled aircraft ready to launch and that the American bombs arrived 5 minutes before takeoff.

[00:22:31]The five fatal minutes. It is not true.

[00:22:34]The archives of the Imperial Japanese Navy opened after the war show that no strike was ready to launch at 10:22. The reserve aircraft was still in the hangars. Some armed with torpedoes, some with land bombs, some with nothing at all. The five minutes never existed.

[00:22:49]What existed was worse. What existed was three hangar decks piled with loose ordnance that had never been properly stowed because Nagumo had changed his mind twice and there had been no time.

[00:23:00]Torpedoes on trolleys, bombs stacked against bulkheads, fuel lines still connected to aircraft, aviation gasoline pooled on steel plates. When the American bombs punched through the flight decks and detonated inside the hangars, they set off a chain reaction of secondary explosions that no damage control party on earth could have stopped. The torpedoes cooked off. The stacked bombs went sympathetic. Aviation fuel ignited in sheets. Within seconds, the interiors of the three carriers became furnaces as hot as a steel foundry. The five fatal minutes were a lie. The four fatal decisions were real.

[00:23:35]On Akagi's bridge, Nagumo feels the deck shudder under his feet. Smoke pours up through the elevator shafts. A telephone talker, his face already blackened, shouts damage reports that the admiral does not seem to hear. Fire main pressure failing. Hangar deck out of control. Aircraft on the flight deck burning. Captain Aoki appears at Nagumo's elbow. His uniform is torn.

[00:23:57]There is blood on his sleeve, not his own. Admiral, "The ship is lost. You must transfer your flag." Nagumo does not move. Aoki tries again more sharply, "Admiral, you cannot direct the battle from here." Nagumo looks at him. His face is empty. Not stunned, not frightened, empty. As if the man who commanded the Kido Butai has already left the body that still stands on the bridge. Chief of Staff Ryūnosuke Kusaka, 49 years old, takes Nagumo's arm firmly without ceremony. "Sir, we go now." They climb down from the bridge through smoke that is beginning to thicken into something that a man cannot breathe. On the flight deck, aircraft are burning where they stood. Deck crews are running with hoses that have no water pressure.

[00:24:39]Some men are already jumping over the side. The destroyer Nowaki has come alongside. A line is passed. Nagumo, Vice Admiral of the Imperial Japanese Navy, commander of the strike force that hit Pearl Harbor, is lowered hand over hand across open water to the deck of a destroyer while his flagship burns behind him. On Nagumo, he stands at the rail. He does not go below. He watches Akagi burn. An officer standing near him will remember decades later that the admiral said nothing for a very long time. 300 miles west on Yamato, Admiral Yamamoto receives the first fragmentary reports at 1100 hours. A radio officer hands him a slip of paper. He reads it.

[00:25:18]He removes his glasses. He folds them carefully and places them on the chart table. All carriers. Three confirmed heavily damaged. Akagi, Kaga, Soryu.

[00:25:27]Hiryu is unaccounted for. Yamamoto is silent for a long moment. His chief of staff, Rear Admiral Matome Ugaki, 52 years old, is standing at his side.

[00:25:35]Ugaki keeps a diary, a habit he has maintained for years, and everything he sees on Yamamoto's face in that moment, he will write down that night in careful vertical characters. He will write that the admiral appeared to age 10 years in 10 seconds. Yamamoto does not sit down.

[00:25:52]He walks slowly to the chart of the Central Pacific spread on the table. He stares at the small pencil marks that show where his carriers should be. He does not speak for several minutes. Then very quietly he asks, "What is Nagumo's situation?" Ugaki tells him, "The flag has been transferred. Nagumo is now aboard the light cruiser Nagara. He is attempting to reorganize what remains of the striking force." Yamamoto nods once.

[00:26:16]He orders the main body to continue closing on Midway. He orders Hiryu to launch a counterattack. He does the things a commander in chief is supposed to do. But Ugaki, watching him, knows a the war has turned. And on the last surviving Japanese flight deck, 40 miles east of the burning wrecks of Akagi and Kaga and Soryu, Rear Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi has already given the order.

[00:26:38]Launch everything.

[00:26:39]>> [music] >> At 10:54 in the morning, 18 Val dive bombers and six zero fighters roar off the deck of Hiryu. Their leader is Lieutenant Michio Kobayashi, around 30 years old, one of the finest dive bomber pilots in the Imperial Navy, he is flying toward the American carrier Yorktown. He does not know that he will not be coming back. 12:05 in the afternoon, 200 mi east of the burning wrecks of Akagi and Kaga and Soryu, USS Yorktown steams through calm water at flank speed, 29 knots. Her wake white and straight behind her. On her bridge, Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, 57 years old, task force commander, is reading damage reports from earlier in the morning when a lookout at the sky.

[00:27:22]Aircraft, high coming in. They are Lieutenant Kobayashi's dive bombers. 18 when they left Hiryu, only seven have survived the American combat air patrol and the wall of anti-aircraft fire thrown up by Yorktown's escorts. Seven aircraft, but seven aircraft flown by men who know they are the last strike Japan may ever launch from a carrier deck and who intend to make it count.

[00:27:44]Kobayashi rolls into his dive from 12,000 ft. Behind him, six others follow. Three of them strike Yorktown.

[00:27:51]One punches through her flight deck and ignites fires below. One kills the boilers on the starboard side. One explodes in a stack, showering the boiler rooms with hot fragments that burst steam lines and drive the black gang from their stations. Yorktown loses power. Her wake widens then dissolves.

[00:28:08]She drifts. Kobayashi does not see this.

[00:28:11]He is dead. His aircraft, hit by anti-aircraft fire seconds after his release, has already spiraled into the sea. By the time the survivors limp home, 13 of the 18 valves will be at the bottom of the Pacific. Three of the six zeros are gone. Only eight aircraft out of the 24 that launched from Hiryu at 10:54 will land back on her deck. And the finest dive bomber leader in the Imperial Navy is not among them. On Hiryu's bridge, Rear Admiral Yamaguchi receives the pilots' reports. One American carrier stopped dead, burning, damaged badly enough to be finished. He allows himself a small nod. Then he orders the second strike. At 13:30, 10 torpedo bombers and six fighters lift off. Their leader is Lieutenant Joichi Tomonaga, the same Tomonaga who led the dawn strike on Midway. The same Tomonaga whose left-wing fuel tank was holed by machine gun fire that morning and never repaired because there was no time and no parts. He knows it. His crew chief knows it. Everyone on the flight deck knows it. Tomonaga has just enough fuel to reach Yorktown. He does not have enough fuel to come home. He waves to his ground crew as he taxies to the launch position. He does not speak.

[00:29:21]There is nothing to say that has not already been understood. At 14:43, Tomonaga's aircraft breaks through the American fighter screen at 300 ft above the water. He drops his torpedo at close range. Yorktown, still limping under jury-rigged power, takes two torpedo hits amidships in rapid succession. She heals 7° to port, then 11, then 17.

[00:29:43]Steam lines burst inside her again. The order to abandon ship is passed a few minutes later. Tomonaga does not survive the run. His fuel-starved aircraft is hit multiple times pulling out. It goes into the sea a mile beyond the carrier he crippled. The surviving Japanese pilots return to Hiryu believing they have sunk two American carriers because they saw one burning ship in the morning and another burning ship in the afternoon and they did not realize it was the same one. For perhaps 20 minutes on the afternoon of the 4th of June, 1942, the men on the bridge of Hiryu believe they have turned the battle around. They are wrong. The Americans still have Enterprise. They still have Hornet. And on Enterprise at that very moment, deck crews are arming 24 Dauntless dive bombers, some of them refugees from the abandoned Yorktown, for a strike against the fourth Japanese carrier that Nimitz's staff now knows must exist. At 17:01 that afternoon, they find her.

[00:30:41]Yamaguchi is standing on Hiryu's bridge when the lookout screams the same word Nagumo's lookout screamed 7 hours earlier, "Dive bombers!" He looks up, he does not move. Four 1,000-lb bombs strike Hiryu in the space of 90 seconds.

[00:30:55]The forward elevator is blown into the air and lands nearly vertically against the island, a slab of steel three stories tall standing on end like a gravestone. Fires ignite in the forward hangar. The bridge fills with smoke. By sundown, Hiryu is burning from stem to stern. By midnight, her engines have died. Her rudder is jammed. She drifts in circles in a dark sea while her crew fights fires they cannot control with hoses that have no water. Around 2:00 in the morning on the 5th of June, Rear Admiral Yamaguchi calls his surviving officers together on the flight deck.

[00:31:28]What remains of the crew is assembled below, perhaps 800 men. They have been fighting fires for 9 hours. They're exhausted and burned and quiet.

[00:31:38]Yamaguchi stands at the head of the ladder. Beside him is Captain Tomeo Kaku, 48 years old, Hiryu's commanding officer. Kaku has already made his own decision. He will not leave the ship.

[00:31:48]Yamaguchi speaks briefly. He tells them that the ship is lost. He tells them they must transfer to the escorting destroyers. He tells them the fault for what has happened is his, not theirs. He apologizes for not bringing them home.

[00:32:02]Then, he does something that will be remembered. He unbuckles his admiral's cap from its chin strap and holds it out to a young officer of the flying group, Commander Susumu Kawaguchi. He asks Kawaguchi to take the cap back to Tokyo and to give it to his family in Kojimachi. Kawaguchi tries to refuse.

[00:32:19]Yamaguchi says nothing. He simply keeps his hand out until the younger man takes the cap. That is all. That is the whole ceremony, a cap passed from one man's hand to another. Then, the transfer begins. The crew climbs down cargo nets to the destroyers Kazagumo and Makigumo standing off in the darkness. Yamaguchi and Kaku remain on the flight deck. Some of the officers try one last time to convince the admiral to leave. He shakes his head. He does not argue with them.

[00:32:46]He simply stops responding. Just before dawn, Makigumo is ordered to sink Hiryu with torpedoes. The order comes directly from Yamaguchi, relayed by signal lamp before the transfer party left him. He does not want the ship captured. He does not want the ship photographed by American reconnaissance. He wants her gone. Makigumo fires her torpedoes just before dawn. Hiryu rolls slowly onto her port side and settles by the bow. She takes several hours to disappear. When she finally goes down at 9:12 in the morning on the 5th of June, the sun is already high. The last men to see Yamaguchi and Kaku describe them standing on the sloping flight deck.

[00:33:25]They had lashed themselves to something.

[00:33:27]A stanchion? A mast? It was not clear in the darkness. What was clear was that they did not intend to be found floating. The sun rises on the 5th of June, and the four carriers of the Kido Butai are all beneath the sea. 300 miles west on the flag bridge of Yamato, Admiral Yamamoto has not slept. Rear Admiral Ugaki watches him. He watches him for hours. He watches him weigh whether to press the attack with the remaining battleships and cruisers, whether to close on Midway in the darkness and try to shell the airfield into ruin, whether there is anything left to salvage from a plan that has failed at every level of its execution.

[00:34:04]At 2:55 in the morning, Yamamoto gives the order. Occupation of Midway is canceled. All forces will withdraw to the west. Ugaki writes in his diary that night, "The admiral looked like a man signing a death warrant, and in a sense, he was. Not his own. Not yet. But the death warrant of the strategy he had spent his career building. The death warrant of the six months of running wild that he had promised the prime minister and delivered. From this morning forward, Japan would be on the defensive. From this morning forward, the industrial arithmetic of America would begin to eat him alive. Later that day, alone in his day cabin, Yamamoto asks his flag secretary, Commander Yasuji Watana to bring the shogi board.

[00:34:46]They play in silence. Ugaki, walking past the cabin, sees the two men at the small lacquered table. Yamamoto is studying the pieces the way a man studies a wound. Watanabe does not speak. The staff does not disturb them.

[00:34:58]This will continue on and off for most of the following day. It is the only visible sign of what has happened inside the mind of the man who planned Pearl Harbor. He does not weep. He does not shout. He plays a slow game of shogi with a subordinate who has known him for 15 years, and he does not lift his eyes from the board. Ugaki writes it down that night. It is the reason we know. In Tokyo, the news of what has happened is not made public. Yamamoto himself gives the order. The wounded survivors, when they eventually reach Japan, are hospitalized in isolation wards. They are forbidden to speak to their families. Their mail is censored.

[00:35:35]Officers are transferred to remote postings where they cannot be interviewed by their peers. Even the Emperor Hirohito is initially given a filtered account. Radio Tokyo announces a great victory. Two American carriers sunk, one Japanese carrier lost. The Japanese public will believe this until the war is nearly over. The greatest naval defeat in the modern history of Japan becomes a state secret. It is a strange thing to sit with, if you think about it. A defeat this total, hidden this thoroughly by a country that will spend the next 3 years bleeding out on islands most of its people cannot find on a map. Because the truth of what happened on one morning in June 1942 was more than the leadership could allow itself to say out loud. Two years and 1 month later, on the 6th of July 1944, on the island of Saipan, Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo takes his own life. He is 57 years old. The American Marines are within a few hundred yards of his command post. He shoots himself with a service pistol. He leaves no long farewell letter. If he left any note at all, it was never made public. What he was thinking in his last minutes, whether Midway ran through his mind as the rifle fire drew closer, whether he thought of Akagi burning beneath him, or of the four decisions he made between 7:15 and 8:20 on that June morning, no one will ever know. He simply chose not to speak, and then he simply did not exist anymore. Yamamoto himself does not last that long. On the 18th of April, 1943, 10 10 months and 2 weeks after Midway, 16 American P-38 Lightning fighters intercept his transport aircraft over the jungle of Bougainville. The interception is made possible by American cryptographers reading exactly the same kind of Japanese naval traffic that told Nimitz where to be at Midway. Yamamoto had ordered the codes changed after Midway.

[00:37:26]His staff had failed to complete the changeover.

[00:37:29]Someone somewhere decided one more week would be fine. His body is found the next morning by a search party led by Lieutenant Hamazuna of the Imperial Army. The Betty bomber has come down in the jungle clearing. Yamamoto is discovered upright, still seated in his passenger chair thrown clear of the fuselage, a white gloved hand still resting on the hilt of his sword. Or so the search party will later say. Some of the details of that morning have been questioned by historians since. What is not questioned is that the man who had told the prime minister he could run wild for 6 months and no longer died just under 17 months after Pearl Harbor.

[00:38:06]Yamaguchi is remembered in Japan as the officer who chose the death that his rank required of him. His name is carved into the enshrinement rolls at Yasukuni.

[00:38:16]His cap, the one Kawaguchi carried back through the war, was returned to his family in Tokyo and preserved. Whether Kawaguchi himself survived, and if he did, whether he ever spoke of that night on the flight deck, is not clearly recorded. Genda survives the war. He becomes a general in the postwar Japan Air Self-Defense Force. He never publicly discusses in detail what he saw from the bridge of Akagi that morning.

[00:38:39]Feverish, weakened, and unable to give Nagumo the sharp counsel the moment demanded. Fuchida survives, too. He becomes a Christian evangelist and travels the United States giving lectures. His 1955 book, the one that will invent the five fatal minutes and mislead two generations of historians, becomes an international bestseller. It will take 50 years and the patient archival work of two American writers, Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully, to demonstrate from the Japanese Navy's own records that Fuchida's most famous claim was not true. That the flight decks were not crowded with fully armed strike aircraft at 10:22. That the story of a five-minute miracle stolen by American bombs was, in the end, a comforting narrative told after the fact by a man who wanted the defeat to have been closer than it was. The truth was worse.

[00:39:29]The truth was that the Imperial Japanese Navy had lost the war on a morning when everything they thought they controlled turned out to belong to the other side.

[00:39:37]The scout plane launched late. The rearming orders reversed twice. The signal lamp message from Hiryu that Nagumo did not answer. The destroyer Arashi racing north across a patch of empty ocean where a hungry American commander happened to be looking down.

[00:39:52]None of it was destiny. All of it was arithmetic. Small errors compounding. A machine of interlocking assumptions coming apart one bolt at a time. Years after the war, Captain Taijiro Aoki, who had commanded Akagi and survived her sinking, was interviewed by a Japanese journalist. He was an old man by then.

[00:40:11]He had lived through everything that came after Midway. He had watched his country burn. The journalist asked him what he remembered most about the 4th of June. Aoki thought for a long time, then he said, "The silence after the bombs.

[00:40:24]There was a moment when no one on the bridge spoke. We looked at each other because there was nothing left to say.

[00:40:30]We had just watched our entire strategy burn." He was quiet for a while, then he said, "We did not know it yet, but we already knew it. That was Midway. Not the drama, not the speeches, not the doomed torpedo squadrons, though God knows they deserved their poems, not the dive bombers falling out of the sun.

[00:40:48]The moment of Midway was a silence on the bridge of a burning ship 4,000 mi from home when three admirals in three different places all understood the same thing at the same time and did not yet have a word for it. They had been winning a war. Now they were not. And nothing they did for the next 3 years, none of the fleets they rebuilt, none of the pilots they trained too fast, none of the desperate courage of the men who would die at Guadalcanal and the Philippine Sea and Leyte Gulf and finally in the water of Okinawa in the last great sortie of Yamato herself, could never bring back the morning of the 3rd of June when they were still the most powerful naval formation in the world. The sun set on the 5th of June 1942.

[00:41:31]And the empire that Yamamoto had warned against and Nagumo had served and Yamaguchi had died for was already ending. They just could not say it out loud yet.