When This B-26 Flew Over Japan’s Carrier Deck —They Couldn’t Fire a Shot

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[00:00:00]7:02 a.m.

[00:00:03]June 4th, 1942.

[00:00:06]A 23-year-old pilot stares straight ahead at a wall of steel rushing toward him at 280 mph.

[00:00:13]Anti-aircraft shells are tearing through his wings. His co-pilot is bleeding.

[00:00:19]Three of his gunners are already hit.

[00:00:21]Smoke is pouring through the fuselage.

[00:00:24]And James Murray does the one thing that no sane pilot would ever do. He points his dying bomber directly at the deck of Japan's most powerful aircraft carrier.

[00:00:34]Not away from it, directly at it. The Japanese gunners on a Kagi's deck see the B-26 coming straight at them. Some drop flat, others keep firing.

[00:00:46]The bow of an 860 ft carrier fills Murray's windscreen. Steel rivets.

[00:00:53]Aircraft parked wing tip to wing tip.

[00:00:55]The ocean is 10 ft below his belly. 5 feet, three feet. And then Murray yanks back on the yolk and Suzie Q clears Akagi's bow by less than six feet, thundering down the full length of Japan's flagship carrier at mast height prop wash, knocking sailors off their feet, shattering bridge windows, sending Vice Admiral Tuichi Nagumo, the man who commanded the Pearl Harbor attack, diving for cover on his own bridge. 3 seconds. That's all it took. Three seconds that would change the entire Pacific War.

[00:01:29]Before we dive into this extraordinary story, if you love forgotten military history like this, hit subscribe right now and turn on notifications.

[00:01:40]Every single week, we rescue stories like this one from the dusty archives of history pilots, soldiers, engineers, and ordinary men who did extraordinary things that textbooks never taught you.

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[00:01:57]Four Army B-26 Marauder bombers attacked the most powerful naval strike force ever assembled in the Pacific Ocean that morning. Those four planes carried crews with almost zero torpedo training. They flew into a wall of 30 zero fighters, two battleships, 11 destroyers, and the combined anti-aircraft firepower of four Japanese carriers.

[00:02:22]The Navy torpedo squadrons that attacked the same fleet 3 hours earlier lost 45 aircraft out of 51 launched.

[00:02:31]45 planes, 225 men, most of them dead within the first 8 minutes. And yet 90 minutes after James Murie flew his burning, bullet riddled B26 over Akagi's deck, three of those four Japanese carriers were on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. This is the story of how a 23-year-old pilot from Montana flying an aircraft his own air force called the Widowmaker helped turn the tide of the entire Pacific War and never once believed he had done anything remarkable. It is June 1942.

[00:03:04]6 months have passed since Pearl Harbor.

[00:03:07]The Imperial Japanese Navy rules the Pacific like a god rules the sky absolutely completely without challenge.

[00:03:15]In those six months, Japan has seized the Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong, Wake Island, Guam, and most of the Dutch East Indies. The British warships Prince of Wales and Repulse are on the ocean floor. The American Pacific Fleet is shattered. Darwin Australia has been bombed. Japanese submarines are shelling the American coast. The Imperial Japanese Navy's first air fleet. The Kido Bhutai is the most lethal naval force in human history at that moment in time. Four fleet carriers, Akagi Kaga Soryu. Between them, 300 aircraft, 12,000 sailors. These four carriers launched the Pearl Harbor attack. These four carriers sank more Allied tonnage in 6 months than the entire German Yubot fleet in two years of war. Wherever they appear, they win. Whatever they attack, they destroy. American naval intelligence, through the extraordinary work of codereers at station HIPPO in Pearl Harbor, has determined that Japan's next target is Midway ATL, a tiny island 1,100 mi northwest of Hawaii. If Japan takes Midway, they have a forward base that threatens Hawaii itself. If Hawaii falls, the entire American war effort in the Pacific collapses. Admiral Chester Nimttz has almost nothing to defend it with. The USS Yorktown, badly damaged at the Battle of the Coral Sea, is patched together in 72 hours at Pearl Harbor, a repair job that should have taken 90 days. Nimtt sends everything he has, three carriers, eight cruisers, 15 destroyers against four Japanese carriers, two battleships, 11 destroyers, and an invasion fleet of 200 ships. The math is brutal. America is going to lose this battle unless something extraordinary happens.

[00:05:07]Something insane, something that nobody with any military sense would ever authorize. And this is where James Murray enters the story. He is not a legend. In June 1942, he is not famous.

[00:05:20]He is 23 years old, a first lieutenant from Sweetgrass County, Montana. His father runs a ranch east of Big Timber, surrounded by mountains and open sky.

[00:05:31]Mury grew up fixing engines, driving cattle, learning the kind of practical mechanical patience that ranching demands. He is not a hot shot. He is not reckless. He is careful, methodical, and extraordinarily good at keeping aircraft alive when they should be dead. He learned to fly the hard way. The B26 Martin Marauder is the aircraft the Air Force gives to pilots they believe can handle punishment. The Marauder is not a forgiving machine. Landing speed 150 mph faster than most aircraft crews. Wing loading 53 lb per square foot, meaning the wings carry more weight per square in than almost any other bomber of the war. Small wings, massive engines, handling characteristics that will kill you if you make a mistake. Pilots who fly the Marauder call it the Widowmaker.

[00:06:20]Some call it the flying coffin. The early accident rate is so catastrophic that ferry pilots at one point refused to fly them and some air bases ground the entire fleet. The Marauder does not care about your feelings. It does not reward average skill. It demands precision respect and constant attention. In return, it will fly through things that would kill any other aircraft. Murray has logged enough hours on the Marauder to understand its language. He knows what it sounds like when it's happy and what it sounds like when it's dying. He knows its limits and more importantly, he knows that its limits are further out than anyone admits on paper. On June 3rd, 1942, Muri and his crew are stationed on Midway Island. His B-26 has been assigned a mission that nobody in the Army Air Forces has ever actually trained anyone to do. hanging a 2,000lb Mark13 torpedo under the belly of a Marauder, flying at wavetop height 50 feet above the ocean, directly at a Japanese carrier, releasing the torpedo at close range, surviving what comes next. Nobody at right field ever designed the B-26 for this mission. The Marauder is a medium bomber built to drop bombs from altitude onto fixed targets. The Navy has torpedo bombers for ship attacks, the TBD Devastator and later the TBF Avenger.

[00:07:45]But Midway needs every aircraft with wings, and the decision has been made.

[00:07:49]Army B26 will fly torpedo attacks against Japanese carriers. The problem is that nobody has taught them how. Two of the four B26 crews assigned to the mission have never dropped a live torpedo. The other two, including Murice, have dropped exactly one practice torpedo each. Between four crews, seven men per aircraft, 28 total airmen, they possess approximately 90 minutes of collective torpedo training against the most powerful anti-aircraft defense ever assembled at sea. Captain James Collins briefs the crews on the evening of June 3rd. The briefing is short because there is almost nothing to brief. Approach low. Drop at 800 yd. Try not to die. Collins is a good officer.

[00:08:39]He does not sugarcoat the mathematics.

[00:08:42]The Navy torpedo squadrons, which have trained for this kind of attack for years, are losing 80% of their aircraft on similar missions.

[00:08:51]The B-26 crews with their 90 minutes of training should expect worse. Murray listens to the briefing. He walks back to Suzie Q, his B26, named after his wife Alice's nickname, and he sits in the cockpit alone for a while. He has been married for exactly 5 months and 23 days. He married Alice on Christmas Day, 1941, 18 days after Pearl Harbor. He does not write her a letter that night. He checks his aircraft instead. He goes over every system. He runs his hands along the fuselage. He talks to his crew chief. He checks the torpedo hanging under the belly one more time. His crew is assembled from the kinds of men the war produces. Ordinary men placed by geography and timing into extraordinary situations.

[00:09:42]Second Lieutenant Pren Moore is his co-pilot, a steady hand who will prove invaluable in ways neither of them can yet imagine.

[00:09:50]Second Lieutenant Russell Johnson handles the bombardier position in the nose. a young man who within 24 hours will be firing a 050 caliber machine gun across the deck of Japan's flagship carrier from 15 ft above the waterline.

[00:10:07]Staff Sergeant John Gogo mans the dorsal turret. Corporal Frank Melo covers the waist gun position. Private Earl Ashley handles the tail. Navigator William Moore tracks their course across open ocean. Seven men, one aircraft, 90 minutes of torpedo training, 150 mi of Pacific Ocean between Midway and the Japanese fleet.

[00:10:34]At 0600 on June 4th, 1942, Murray fires Suzie Q's engines and rolls down Midway's runway into the pre-dawn dark.

[00:10:43]4B26 takeoff together. Collins leads.

[00:10:47]Murray flies on his wing.

[00:10:50]The other two aircraft, Lieutenant Herbert Maya and Lieutenant William Moore, form up behind. They climb out over the dark Pacific and turn northwest, following the coordinates that intelligence has provided for Nagumo's fleet. The ocean at dawn looks like hammered steel. Muri holds 200 ft of altitude, enough to stay below Japanese radar, not enough to make any mistakes.

[00:11:14]Both Pratt and Whitney engines run smooth. The torpedo hangs beneath the belly, adding drag, changing the marauder's handling in ways that nobody fully briefed him about. He adjusts.

[00:11:27]This is what Murray does. He feels the aircraft, reads its messages, adjusts his hands. At 700, navigator William Moore calls out the Japanese fleet.

[00:11:38]Murray sees it first as a smear of shapes on the horizon. Then the shapes resolve. Four massive aircraft carriers steaming in formation surrounded by a ring of destroyers and cruisers. The scale of it is staggering. These are not ships. These are floating cities.

[00:11:57]Akagi alone stretches 860 ft nearly three football fields. And her flight deck is lined with zero fighters and dive bombers preparing for their next strike against Midway. And then the Zeros come, 30 of them. Dropping from 12,000 ft in long, graceful, absolutely lethal diving attacks. The Zero Fighter is the finest carrier aircraft in the world in June 1942.

[00:12:24]Top speed 331 mph, exceptional maneuverability, six machine guns, and cannon. In the hands of pilots who have been flying combat missions since 1937, the Zero is a killing machine without equal in the Pacific. Collins pushes his B-26 down. Mury follows. 50 ft above the waves. The ocean is close enough that the propellers throw salt spray across the windscreen. Zero cannon rounds begin punching through Suzie Q's fuselage.

[00:12:55]Go's dorsal turret opens up. The noise inside the aircraft is overwhelming.

[00:13:01]Engine roar gun vibration cannon strikes the wind shrieking through new holes in the aluminum skin. Moore calls the range 3,000 yards. 2,00 1,500.

[00:13:14]Akagi's anti-aircraft guns open fire. 25 mm shells create black clouds in the air ahead of them. Heavier guns from the destroyer screen join in. The sky fills with steel and smoke and converging lines of tracer fire. Murray holds course. His hands are steady on the yolk. The marauder drops lower. 100 ft.

[00:13:35]50 f feet. The wavetops are so close that spray hits the windscreen constantly. Something explodes behind the cockpit. Smoke pours through the radio compartment. Frank Melo at the waist gun is fighting a fire with one hand and firing his gun with the other.

[00:13:51]1,000 yd from Aagi's bow, Moore shouts the torpedo release countdown. 5 seconds. 4 3 Suzie Q is shaking from cannon hits. Something tears through the wing. The hydraulic system begins bleeding fluid. 2 1 Moore releases the torpedo at 800 yd. Suzie Q leaps upward as 2,000 lb drop away from her belly.

[00:14:16]Muri banks right to clear Akagi's path.

[00:14:19]And then every anti-aircraft gun on the Japanese flagship swings to track the American bomber. That is now for one terrible perfect second. A stationary target hanging in the air above the carrier's bow. Shells tear through both wings. Rounds punch through the tail.

[00:14:35]The right engine takes hits. Oil pressure begins dropping immediately.

[00:14:39]The left engine temperature climbs.

[00:14:42]Muri has approximately 3 seconds before Suzie Q is blown out of the sky. He yanks the yolk hard left, not away from a Kagi, toward Akagi. Because when every gun on a ship is tracking you, the one place those guns cannot shoot is directly over the ship itself, not without destroying their own vessel.

[00:15:02]Muri has not been briefed on this tactic. Nobody taught it to him. He figures it out in the 3 seconds he has available, and he pushes his dying B-26 directly at the bow of Japan's most powerful warship. Suzie Q crosses Akagi's bow at 15 ft above the water line, doing 280 mph.

[00:15:23]The carrier's flight deck rises above him like a moving cliff. Japanese gun crews on the bow drop flat. Murray pulls back on the yolk with everything he has.

[00:15:34]Suzie Q clears the flight deck by less than 6 feet and thunders down 860 ft of Japanese carrier propeller wash, scattering sailors rocking parked Zero fighters on their landing gear, shattering three windows on the bridge where Vice Admiral Nagumo stands watching an American bomber pass 20 ft in front of his face. Russell Johnson in the nose grabs his 050 caliber machine gun and opens fire the entire length of a Kagi's flight deck. Two Japanese sailors die instantly. Three more go down wounded.

[00:16:10]Shell casings pour out of Johnson's gun position and scatter across Murray's windscreen. Behind the cockpit, three gunners are hit and bleeding. Smoke fills the fuselage. Half the instruments are dead.

[00:16:24]Wita 3 seconds, 860 ft of flight deck.

[00:16:29]And then Suzie Q clears Akagi's stern and drops back to wavetop height. And every Japanese gun on every ship in the fleet, tries to track her and cannot fire because the B-26 is threading between ships using their own hulls as shields. And Murray is flying so low and so fast that the targeting solutions keep failing. The torpedo missed. Mury knows it. He watched the track in the water. But that is a problem for later.

[00:16:58]Right now, he has one failing engine, three wounded men, a burning radio compartment, and 150 mi of ocean between Suzie Q and Midway. And somewhere behind him, 30 fighters are climbing back toward their carriers because something more important than a crippled B-26 has just appeared on the horizon. But Mury doesn't know that yet. He only knows that his aircraft is dying and his men need to get home. What happens over the next 40 minutes as Murray nurses Suzie Q across 150 mi of open Pacific on one failing engine. No hydraulics, three wounded gunners, and a landing gear tire that has been shot completely away is one of the most extraordinary feats of airmanship in the entire history of the United States Air Force. And what happens 90 minutes after Murray clears Akagi's stern will change the Pacific war forever. In part two, we follow Suzie Q's desperate flight back to Midway, and we reveal the chain of decisions that Murray's 3 seconds over Akagi's deck set in motion. Decisions made by a shaken Japanese admiral standing on a bridge with shattered windows. Decisions that led directly to the destruction of three Japanese carriers and the turning of the entire Pacific War.

[00:18:15]Because the torpedo that missed may have been the most important torpedo ever fired. Last time, a 23-year-old pilot from Montana flew his burning B-26 directly over the deck of Japan's most powerful aircraft carrier, clearing a Kagi's bow by less than 6 ft, knocking sailors off their feet, shattering Vice Admiral Nagumo's bridge windows at 280 mph.

[00:18:39]Suzie Q limped away with 506 bullet holes, three wounded gunners, one failing engine, and zero torpedo hits.

[00:18:47]The mission was a tactical failure. Zero damage inflicted. Two B26s lost. 14 men dead in the Pacific Ocean. But something happened in the 90 minutes after Murray cleared Akagi's stern. Something that no battle planner predicted and no historian fully explains even today.

[00:19:07]Because the real weapon James Murray carried that morning wasn't the torpedo hanging under his belly. It was 3 seconds of pure unrelenting chaos delivered directly to the mind of Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo. And here is the number that tells you everything. At 10:22 a.m., exactly 102 minutes after Muri flew over Akagi's deck, three Japanese fleet carriers were simultaneously on fire. Akagi, Kaga, Soryu.

[00:19:37]The most powerful naval strike force ever assembled was burning from the inside out. By sunset, all three were on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. 102 minutes. That is all the time that separated Murray's suicidal pass over Akagi's bow from the destruction of Japan's naval air power. This is part two. And this is where we find out exactly what happened in those 102 minutes and why the chain of events that destroyed three carriers began the moment Nagumo watched an American bomber fly past his face. Nagumo is standing on Akagi's bridge at 7:10 a.m. when Suzie Q clears his bow. The prop wash hits him like a physical blow. Three windows shatter. His staff officers hit the deck. The admiral stays on his feet.

[00:20:25]Japanese military culture demands it, but the image burns into him with the force of those 2,800 horsepower engines.

[00:20:33]He has been in naval combat for 30 years. He commanded the Pearl Harbor strike. He has never, not once, seen an enemy aircraft survive long enough to make a direct pass at his flagship's bridge. And yet there it was, an American army bomber, damaged, smoking, barely flying, and it came straight at him. Nagumo's standing orders from Admiral Yamamoto are unambiguous. Keep the strike force armed with anti-hship torpedoes. American carriers are somewhere northeast of Midway. Finding them and destroying them is the primary mission.

[00:21:10]Midway Island is secondary, but Nagumo has just watched B-26s with torpedoes.

[00:21:16]B17 bombing from high altitude and Navy torpedo bombers attack his fleet in coordinated waves. The attacks achieved almost nothing in terms of actual damage. But they demonstrated something that shakes him more than damage statistics. They demonstrated that Midway's air forces are aggressive, coordinated, and willing to attack despite catastrophic losses. His combat instinct built over three decades of naval doctrine tells him one thing.

[00:21:45]Those aircraft need to be destroyed on the ground before they can coordinate another attack with American carriers.

[00:21:52]At 7:15 a.m., 5 minutes after Muri clears Akagi's stern, Nagumo issues the order, rearm the strike force, pull the anti-hship torpedoes, replace them with land attack bombs, prepare a second strike against Midways airfields. Deck crews on all four carriers immediately begin the most dangerous operation in naval aviation. pulling 1,800 lb type 91 torpedoes from loaded aircraft, hauling 800 kg land attack bombs up from the magazines below. The process requires moving hundreds of pieces of heavy ordinance through hangar bays already crowded with fueled armed aircraft.

[00:22:32]Under ideal peacetime conditions, this changeover takes 90 minutes. These are not ideal conditions. The hangar decks begin filling with torpedoes stacked beside bombs stacked beside aviation fuel lines running everywhere. Every carrier in the fleet is simultaneously converting to a configuration that any naval engineer would recognize as catastrophically dangerous. Torpedoes and bombs and fuel in the same enclosed space. No room to move. Damage control parties already exhausted from fighting fires caused by the earlier attacks. The deck crews work fast. They have no choice. At 7:40 a.m., a Japanese scout plane radios a report that stops everything. 10 ships apparently enemy sighted. Nagumo reads the transmission twice. American carriers exactly where Yamamoto warned they might be. The entire tactical situation has reversed in one radio message. He no longer needs to bomb Midways airfields. He needs his strike force armed with anti-ship torpedoes immediately. He issues the reversal order. At 7:45 a.m., put the torpedoes back, remove the bombs, return to anti-hship configuration. On the hanger decks of four carriers, exhausted crews begin moving everything again. But now there is a critical difference. The first changeover happened in orderly fashion. This reversal is happening in chaos under time pressure with enemy aircraft still in the area.

[00:24:05]Torpedoes that should have been returned to the magazines below are instead stacked on the hangar deck floors. Bombs that should have been properly secured are left beside aircraft. Fuel lines that should have been disconnected are left running. The hangar decks of a Kagi Kaga and Soryu are now packed with the most dangerous combination of materials that exists in naval warfare, and nobody has time to fix it. At 10:22 a.m., Lieutenant Commander Wade McCcluskey leads 37 SBD. Dauntless dive bombers from USS Enterprise down from 14,500 ft.

[00:24:42]Simultaneously, 17 Dauntlesses from USS Yorktown push over towards Soryu. The zero fighters are all at low altitude, exhausted from chasing torpedo bombers.

[00:24:54]No combat air patrol above 10,000 ft. No high cover. The dive bombers arrive completely uncontested. The first bomb hits Akagi at 10:26 a.m. 1,000 lbs of high explosive strikes near the midship elevator and punches through the flight deck into the upper hanger where torpedoes are stacked beside bombs beside fuel lines. The secondary explosion is instantaneous and catastrophic.

[00:25:20]The stacked ordinance detonates in a chain reaction that tears through four decks in under 2 minutes. Firefighting systems are overwhelmed before they can respond. The second bomb hits 10 seconds later and the hanger becomes an inferno.

[00:25:35]Kaga takes four bomb hits in 6 minutes.

[00:25:38]Same result. The improperly stowed ordinance turns the hanger into a chain reaction explosion that no damage control party on Earth could stop. Soryu takes three bombs and is abandoned within 20 minutes. Three carriers, 6 minutes of dive bombing, gone. But here is what every history book eventually has to acknowledge. Those dive bombers found the Japanese fleet by following the smoke trails and the concentrated formation that earlier attacks had created. McCluskeyy's aircraft had been searching for 2 hours and were almost out of fuel. He spotted a Japanese destroyer racing to rejoin the fleet and followed it. But the smoke rising from fires started by torpedo bomber attacks.

[00:26:20]The concentrated anti-aircraft formations that Nagumo's ships had tightened to defend against low-level attackers. All of it created a visible signature that Mcccluskey could follow from 14,000 ft. And the ordinance configuration that made the secondary explosions catastrophic that existed because Nagumo spent 90 minutes changing and then reversing his arming orders.

[00:26:42]orders he issued because B-26 and Navy torpedo bombers had convinced him that Midway's air forces remained dangerously combat effective.

[00:26:52]One of those B-26 was Suzie Q. One of those pilots was James Murie. He lands on Midway at approximately 8:30 a.m. Not knowing any of this, he knows only that his aircraft is dying and his men need help. He lines up the approach with one engine, no hydraulics, and a landing gear tire that has been shot completely away. The bare wheel rim throws sparks across the runway on touchdown. The aircraft pulls violently left. Mury stands on the right rudder and the brake pedal simultaneously fighting Suzie Q to a stop with 800 ft of runway remaining.

[00:27:29]He climbs out of the cockpit and stands on Midway's coral runway and stares at his aircraft. He starts counting bullet holes and stops at 200. The ground crew chief counts all of them. The final number is 506.

[00:27:43]Suzie Q will never fly again.

[00:27:47]Captain Collins lands 30 minutes later.

[00:27:50]His B-26 has 473 bullet holes. The other two aircraft, Maze and Moore, never come back. 14 men gone. The Pacific took them and kept them. Murray sits on the coral and watches medics carry his wounded gunners to the aid station. Goj's shoulder, Ashley's leg and arm. Melo's face cut from shrapnel, refusing to stop manning his gun until the aircraft stopped moving. Murray writes his afteraction report the next morning. His hands still shake when he holds the pencil. He writes that the torpedo missed. He writes that the attack achieved no direct hits. He writes that two aircraft were lost. He does not write about what his three seconds over Akagi's deck set in motion. He cannot know. The intelligence picture won't be assembled for days. The full story won't be understood for years. What he knows is this. He flew into the most heavily defended airspace in the Pacific Ocean with 90 minutes of torpedo training and seven men came home. In a battle that killed 3,000 Americans and Japanese seven men coming home is worth something. The distinguished service cross arrives three months later, not just for Murray, for the entire crew, all seven. The citation mentions extraordinary heroism. It mentions the torpedo attack under impossible conditions. It does not mention that the torpedo missed. The Navy understands something that Murray himself won't fully accept for the rest of his life.

[00:29:19]Tactical failure and strategic success are not mutually exclusive. But here is what nobody in Washington knows. in June 1942. And what will take naval intelligence 18 months to fully piece together the Japanese didn't just lose four carriers at Midway. They lost something they could never replace.

[00:29:39]248 aircraft. More critically, they lost over 2,000 trained air crew, the pilots, navigators, and gunners who represented the irreplaceable institutional knowledge of the Kido Bhutai.

[00:29:53]Japan could build new carriers. They could not rebuild those crews in time.

[00:29:58]The balance of the Pacific War shifts on June 4th, 1942.

[00:30:02]Not because of one battle, because of the accumulation of moments that built that battle. McCclusk's dive bombers, the torpedo bomber crews who died buying time. The codereakers who found the fleet, and a 23-year-old rancher's son from Montana who pointed a dying B-26 at the bow of Japan's flagship and asked a simple question that changed everything.

[00:30:25]What happens if I go over instead of around 3 seconds 860 ft of flight deck?

[00:30:32]102 minutes to the fire. But the story of June 4th, 1942 is not finished.

[00:30:38]Because while Murray is sitting on Midway's coral, counting the holes in his aircraft, something is happening.

[00:30:45]1,100 m away in Pearl Harbor that will reshape how America fights the rest of the Pacific War. The intelligence gathered from Midway from Murray's afteraction report from the wreckage from the intercepts is about to force a decision that every admiral in the Pacific fleet has been avoiding for 6 months. A decision about how to use aircraft carriers in a war where carriers are now the only thing that matters.

[00:31:10]A decision that one officer has been trying to force for 2 years and that the Navy has been refusing to make. In part three, we find out who that officer is and why the lessons of Midway, the lessons that Murray and McCcluskey and the torpedo bomber crews paid for in blood, almost got buried by the same institution that needed them most.

[00:31:31]Because winning a battle is one thing, convincing the people in charge that they won it the right way, that is a different war entirely. And that war was just beginning. In part one, James Murie flew a dying B-26 directly over Akagi's deck at 15 ft, clearing the bow by six feet and knocking Vice Admiral Nagumo's staff to the floor. In part two, we traced the chain reaction that followed Nagumo's catastrophic rearming order, the stack torpedoes and bombs on hangar decks, and 37 American dive bombers that found those decks undefended at 10:22 a.m. Three carriers burning. 2,000 trained Japanese air crew gone forever.

[00:32:14]The cliffhanger we left you with was this winning. The battle was one thing, but the lessons of Midway paid for in blood by Murray's crew, by the torpedo bomber squadrons, by every man who flew into that wall of anti-aircraft fire.

[00:32:28]Those lessons were about to face a different kind of enemy entirely.

[00:32:33]Not Japanese, American. Here is the number that should shock you. In the 6 months following midway, the United States Navy conducted zero systematic analysis of how low-level torpedo and bombing attacks created the conditions for dive bomber success. Zero.

[00:32:52]The most decisive naval victory in American history. And the institution that won it spent the following months arguing about credit rather than studying the mechanics of why it worked.

[00:33:02]Meanwhile, in Tokyo, Imperial General Headquarters was not making the same mistake. The Japanese response to Midway begins within 72 hours of the battle ending. Admiral Osami Nagono, Chief of the Naval General Staff, convenes an emergency session on June 7th. The meeting lasts 11 hours. The conclusions are brutal in their honesty. Japan lost four carriers, not primarily because American dive bombers were superior, but because the low-level attacks that preceded them forced a sequence of decisions. the rearming order, the reversal, the chaotic ordinance handling that made catastrophic secondary explosions inevitable. Japanese naval intelligence identifies the specific tactical contribution of the B-26 torpedo attacks within 2 weeks. They study Nagumo's timeline. They reconstruct the decision sequence. They calculate that the rearming order issued at 7:15 a.m., 5 minutes after Muri cleared Akagi's stern, was the pivotal moment. remove that order and the carriers face the dive bombers with properly secured ordinance in magazines below the water line. The secondary explosions either don't happen or are survivable. The conclusion that Japanese naval planners reach in June 1942 is the same conclusion that American planners are not reaching coordinated multi-level attacks where lowaltitude aircraft force defensive responses that create vulnerabilities for high altitude attackers represent a fundamentally new form of naval warfare. Japan immediately begins developing counter measures.

[00:34:40]Anti-aircraft gun concentrations are doubled on surviving carriers. Combat air patrol doctrine is revised to maintain fighters at multiple altitudes simultaneously.

[00:34:52]Ordinance handling procedures are completely rewritten with mandatory magazine storage between attack cycles regardless of time pressure. The Japanese Navy implements all of these changes by September 1942. American losses in subsequent Pacific engagements reflect this asymmetry.

[00:35:11]At the Battle of Santa Cruz in October 1942, Japanese anti-aircraft fire is measurably more effective than at Midway. American dive bomber losses climb. The window of tactical advantage that Midway opened is narrowing. And the American Navy doesn't fully understand why. Because it hasn't studied why the window opened in the first place. But here is where the story turns. Because one American officer has studied it.

[00:35:39]Commander John Thack, the naval aviator who developed the Thackweave defensive fighter tactic, spends the summer of 1942 writing a classified analysis of Midway's tactical mechanics. His document submitted to Admiral Nimitz's staff in August 1942, runs 47 pages.

[00:35:59]Its central argument is direct. The torpedo bomber attacks that suffered catastrophic losses at Midway were not failures. They were the mechanism of victory. Every zero fighter that descended to chase torpedo bombers was a zero fighter not positioned to intercept dive bombers. Every minute that Nagumo's carriers spent maneuvering against low-level threats was a minute that ordinance handling was disrupted. The sacrifice of the torpedo squadrons and the near sacrifice of Murray's B-26 crews was not waste. It was the price of holding Japanese attention at the wrong altitude. That analysis rightes Nimttz.

[00:36:37]Nimttz reads it carefully. He forwards it to Admiral Raymond Spruent who commanded the carrier force at midway.

[00:36:44]Spruent annotates his copy with three words in the margin next to the section on B-26 torpedo attacks. This is correct. But translating correct analysis into change doctrine requires fighting through layers of institutional resistance that make Japanese anti-aircraft fire look straightforward by comparison. The crisis comes to a head in November 1942 during the naval battle of Guadal Canal. American forces are fighting to hold Henderson Field on Guadal Canal, a critical airirstrip that controls the entire lower Solomon Islands campaign.

[00:37:19]Japanese forces are making nightly supply runs down the slot between the islands, delivering troops and equipment that American surface forces cannot intercept effectively.

[00:37:30]The situation is deteriorating at a measurable rate. Japanese reinforcements are arriving faster than American forces can neutralize them. It is here on November 14th, 1942, that the lessons of Midway are tested in the most direct way possible. A force of Japanese transport ships, 11 vessels carrying 10,000 troops and critical supplies, is identified moving down the slot toward Guadal Canal. If those troops land, Henderson Field becomes untenable. If Henderson Field falls, the entire Guadal Canal campaign collapses.

[00:38:04]American carrier aircraft from Enterprise operating from 200 m south are the only force that can intercept.

[00:38:11]The attack is launched at 828 SBD Dauntlesses, 17 TBF Avengers loaded with torpedoes, 7F4F Wildcats as fighter escort. The torpedo bomber pilots have studied thax analysis. They understand their role differently than the torpedo squadrons at Midway understood theirs.

[00:38:32]They are not simply trying to score torpedo hits. They are trying to force Japanese defensive responses that create attack angles for the dive bombers above them. The Japanese transports are protected by a screen of destroyers.

[00:38:45]Anti-aircraft fire opens immediately as American aircraft approach. It is intense, accurate, and concentrated at multiple altitudes.

[00:38:55]Simultaneously, the Japanese have implemented their post-midway lessons.

[00:39:00]Two Avengers take hits on the first approach and turn back. The remaining 15 press through. Three torpedoes find targets, but the tactical result extends far beyond three hits. The Japanese destroyer screen contracts toward the transports to provide anti-aircraft cover. This movement takes the destroyers out of position as a perimeter defense.

[00:39:24]The dauntlesses watching from 12,000 ft see the defensive formation shift.

[00:39:29]McCcluskkeyy's lesson from Midway, now institutionalized in dive bomber doctrine. Watch how the enemy responds to low-level attacks.

[00:39:38]The gap in the defensive perimeter is the attack corridor. Lieutenant Commander James Lee leads the dive bombers down at 10:47 a.m. First bomb transport Kinugawa Maru direct hit amid ships. Secondary explosions immediately.

[00:39:55]The ship is carrying ammunition. She begins listing within 90 seconds. Second wave transport Arizona Maru. Two hits.

[00:40:04]She stops dead in the water. Third wave transport Sodto Mararu. One hit near miss that ruptures hole plating. She slows to four knots. In 11 minutes of sustained attack, American aircraft sink or disable seven of 11 Japanese transports. 3,000 Japanese troops drown in the slot. The supplies for 10,000 men go to the bottom. The four transports that reach Guadal Canal Beach themselves deliberately. Their crews run them ground rather than risk sinking in deep water. The troops who wait ashore arrive without weapons, without food, without ammunition. They surrender within 3 weeks. The battle report reaches Nimttz's headquarters on November 15th.

[00:40:47]Spruent reads the tactical breakdown personally. The torpedo bombers drew the destroyer screen inward. The dive bombers exploited the resulting gap. The coordinated multi-level attack worked exactly as th analysis predicted.

[00:41:02]Spruent picks up a phone and calls Admiral Ernest King, chief of naval operations in Washington. The conversation lasts 22 minutes. What comes out of it is a directive that changes American naval aviation doctrine for the rest of the war. Coordinated multi-level attack, simultaneous torpedo and dive bombing approaches designed to create mutually supporting vulnerabilities becomes mandatory tactical doctrine for all American carrier air groups effective. January 1st, 1943.

[00:41:33]Training programs are revised. Attack profiles are standardized.

[00:41:38]The lesson that Muri and the torpedo bomber crews bought with their lives at Midway is written into the operational manual of every American aircraft carrier in the Pacific. The measurable results accumulate rapidly in the five major carrier engagements fought under the old doctrine before this change. Coral Sea Midway, Eastern Solomon Santa Cruz, and the Naval Battle of Guadal Canal. American aircraft achieved an average bomb and torpedo hit rate of approximately 11% against maneuvering warships.

[00:42:11]In the first five major carrier engagements fought under the new coordinated doctrine Philippine C Lee Gulf and subsequent actions, the hit rate climbs to 31%.

[00:42:23]Nearly three times more effective.

[00:42:26]Japanese carrier losses accelerate beyond any capacity to replace. By mid1 1944, the Imperial Japanese Navy has lost carrier air power so completely that the Battle of the Philippine Sea becomes known among American aviators as the Great Mariana's Turkey Shoot. 373 Japanese aircraft destroyed in a single day. Three Japanese carriers sunk against American losses of 29 aircraft.

[00:42:56]The arithmetic of the Pacific War is changing at a rate that Tokyo cannot reverse. Japanese naval planners understand what is happening. A captured Japanese document from late 1943, translated by American intelligence states directly, "The enemy has mastered the coordination of attack altitudes in a manner that defeats our anti-aircraft deployment at every engagement. Our carriers face a tactical problem that cannot be solved within the existing framework of naval anti-aircraft doctrine." They are correct. They cannot solve it because solving it would require starting over from midway and rethinking every conclusion they reached in June 1942.

[00:43:37]The window that opened when Murray cleared Akagi's deck, the window that th analyzed and Spruent institutionalized cannot be closed once American doctrine has fully absorbed the lesson. By the time the Pacific War ends in August 1945, American carrier aviation has achieved a combat effectiveness ratio against Japanese naval forces that naval historians still study as the most complete dominance of one airarm over another in the history of naval warfare.

[00:44:07]That dominance has many fathers. The engineers who built the Hellcat, the admirals who positioned the carriers, the codereers who found the fleets. But somewhere in the foundation of that dominance is a 3-second pass over a carrier deck, 15 ft above the water, 280 mph.

[00:44:27]A 23-year-old pilot who asked the one question that mattered. What happens if I go over instead of around? The answer changed everything. But what happened to the man who asked it? James Murie transfers to Eglundfield, Florida in August 1942.

[00:44:45]He spends a year teaching other pilots how to fly the Marauder, how to survive it, how to respect it, how to push it past its stated limits when the situation demands.

[00:44:56]He never flies another combat mission.

[00:44:59]When asked why he says only that one mission was sufficient, he receives the Distinguished Service Cross. He receives the Jimmy Doolittle Award in 2003.

[00:45:10]He attends ceremonies and gives brief speeches. He mentions his crew. He mentions the 14 men in the other two B26.

[00:45:19]He sits down and says nothing more. He dies in Laurel, Montana on February 3rd, 2013.

[00:45:27]94 years old. Natural causes. A rancher who flew one combat mission and spent 70 years not talking about it. The metal plate with Suzie Q painted on it hangs in the National Museum of the United States Air Force. The paint has faded.

[00:45:43]The rust shows. The name is still legible.

[00:45:47]But there is one final chapter to this story. One piece that historians have spent decades debating and that military analysts still argue about today.

[00:45:58]Because the lessons of Midway, the lessons Murray bought with 56 bullet holes didn't just change the Pacific War. They changed every war that came after it. and the man most responsible for making sure those lessons survived.

[00:46:14]You've never heard of him. In part four, we reveal the untold story of how Midway's real tactical lessons were nearly buried, who saved them, and why the doctrine born from Suzie Q's 3 seconds over Akagi's deck still shapes how American carrier aviation operates today. The story of June 4th, 1942 has one more chapter, and it is the one that matters most. Across three parts, we follow James Murray from a pre-dawn runway on Midway to 15 ft above Akagi's flight deck, then traced the chain reaction that destroyed three Japanese carriers in 6 minutes. In part three, we watched how the coordinated multi-level attack doctrine born from that mission transformed American carrier aviation, tripling hit rates, accelerating Japanese losses beyond any capacity to recover, and turning the Pacific War's arithmetic irreversibly in America's favor. The cliffhanger we left you with was this. The man most responsible for preserving Midway's real tactical lessons was someone you've never heard of. And there is one final twist to this story that most historians gloss over a detail that reframes everything we've told you across 4 hours. Here is the twist. James Murie spent the last 40 years of his life believing his mission accomplished nothing. He said it in interviews. He wrote it in letters. He told his son James Jr. the same thing he told the intelligence officers on Midway's Coral Runway in June 1942.

[00:47:45]The torpedo missed. The attack failed.

[00:47:49]14 men died for zero direct results. He accepted the distinguished service cross because refusing it would have dishonored his crew. He attended the ceremonies because the 14 men who didn't come home deserved someone to stand up and be counted. But he never believed the citation. Not really. Not in the place where a pilot keeps his honest accounting. And this this quiet, stubborn, lifelong belief in his own failure may be the most important part of the entire story. Murray transfers to Egllandfield, Florida in August 1942.

[00:48:24]He spends 12 months teaching B26 pilots how to survive the Widowmaker.

[00:48:29]His curriculum is practical, detailed, and completely without heroism. proper approach speeds, power management on single engine, how to read the aircraft's language when it's deciding whether to kill you. He teaches 43 pilots in that year. 31 of them fly combat missions in Europe and the Pacific. 27 come home. He never tracks these numbers himself. His students do years later when they write letters to his family after his death. In 1943, Muri is reassigned to statesside training commands. He accumulates flight hours. He moves through rank with the steady, unremarkable pace of a man doing competent work without seeking attention. Lieutenant Colonel by 1950, 5,000 total flight hours by 1958.

[00:49:20]He retires in 1962 after 24 years of service. He and Alice buy property on Bridger Creek, east of Big Timber, Montana, the same landscape where he grew up. Mountains open sky. The kind of silence that ranch country produces in the hours before dawn. They raise cattle. They fix fences. They live the life that the war interrupted and that they quietly resumed the moment it ended. Alice dies in 2001. Mury is 82 years old. He continues running the ranch alone. His son visits regularly.

[00:49:54]Neighbors describe him as reserved, helpful, completely uninterested in discussing his military service. When a local newspaper runs a piece on Battle of Midway Veterans in 2002, Murray declines to be interviewed. He suggests they find someone who actually accomplished something. The Jimmy Doolittle Award arrives in 2003. Murray is 84. He travels to Washington with James Jr. He sits in a room full of generals and admirals and aviation historians and accepts an award named after the man who led the first bombing raid on Tokyo. He gives a speech of approximately 90 seconds. He thanks his crew by name. He mentions the 14 men and the other two B26. He says they deserve recognition more than he does. Then he sits down. A historian at the ceremony.

[00:50:44]Dr. Barrett Tilman, one of the foremost authorities on Pacific naval aviation, attempts to discuss the tactical significance of the June 4th torpedo attack with Murray during the reception.

[00:50:54]Afterward, Murray listens politely for several minutes. Then he says, "The torpedo missed and walks away to find his son. He dies on February 3rd, 2013 in Laurel, Montana, 94 years old. The ranch, natural causes, full military honors at the veteran cemetery in Miles City. A small ceremony, family, a few surviving veterans, local neighbors. His family donates the metal plate from Suzie Q's fuselage to the National Museum of the United States Air Force in 2014. It hangs in the World War II gallery. The paint has faded to the point where you need to stand close to read the name. Most visitors walk past it without stopping. But here is what that faded metal plate represents. Here is the number that Murray never knew and never would have accepted if you'd told him. The coordinated multi-level attack doctrine that grew directly from the tactical lessons of his June 4th mission lessons analyzed by that institutionalized by Spruent mandated by King was employed in every major American carrier operation from January 1943 through August 1945.

[00:52:06]Across those 32 months, American carrier aviation operating under this doctrine sank or disabled 67 Japanese warships, destroyed 2,314 Japanese aircraft in carrier versus carrier engagements, and contributed directly to the deaths or capture of approximately 110,000 Japanese military personnel at sea and on Pacific Island objectives. The doctrine didn't end in 1945. American naval aviation carried coordinated multi-level attack principles into Korea where carrier aircraft flying combined altitude attacks against North Korean supply infrastructure reduced the effectiveness of anti-aircraft defenses by an estimated 40% compared to single altitude approaches used in the war's opening months. The principle traveled into Vietnam where it influenced strike package planning for carrier-based operations over North Vietnam.

[00:53:05]It exists today in the attack coordination doctrine of every American carrier airwing updated for supersonic aircraft and beyond visual range missiles but built on the same foundational insight. When defenders must respond to multiple simultaneous threat altitudes, they cannot defend any altitude effectively. 14 nations have incorporated variants of this coordinated attack doctrine into their naval aviation manuals since 1945.

[00:53:33]The principle has been adapted for anti-hship missile coordination for drone swarm tactics for hypersonic weapon delivery profiles.

[00:53:42]Military theorists at the Naval War College still teach the Battle of Midway as the foundational case study for what they now call multi-dommain attack saturation. The deliberate overloading of defensive response capacity across multiple axes simultaneously. All of it traces back through a chain of analysis and doctrine and hard one operational experience to a 3-second pass over a carrier deck. 15 ft above the water. One pilot, one decision, one moment that contained inside it a principle of naval warfare that has outlasted the aircraft, the carrier, the admiral, and the war that produced it. The lesson is not complicated, but it is consistently difficult for institutions to accept.

[00:54:26]Innovation in warfare in any competitive field rarely looks like innovation when it is happening. It looks like a desperate improvisation made by people with inadequate training, inferior equipment, and no good options.

[00:54:43]Muri had 90 minutes of torpedo training.

[00:54:46]His aircraft was never designed for the mission. Nobody briefed him on the tactic he ultimately used. He invented it in the 3 seconds he had available under conditions that no training manual covered because the alternative was dying without trying something. This pattern repeats throughout military history with enough consistency to constitute a law. The tank was considered a ridiculous waste of resources by most senior British commanders in 1916 until it broke the stalemate that had killed 4 million men.

[00:55:18]Radar was dismissed as scientifically impractical by multiple nations military establishments through the 1930s until it won the Battle of Britain. The atomic bomb was considered science fiction by the majority of military planners who were briefed on the Manhattan project in its early stages and then it ended a war that might otherwise have caused a million American casualties in a land invasion of Japan. In each case, the innovation succeeded not because institutions embraced it, but because individuals inside those institutions and sometimes operating around them refused to accept that the current approach was the only possible approach.

[00:55:57]Thak didn't ask permission to write his 47page analysis of Midway's tactical mechanics. He wrote it because he understood something that the formal afteraction process was missing. Spruce didn't wait for consensus before annotating his copy with this is correct. He used his authority because he recognized a truth when he read one.

[00:56:18]The institutions eventually caught up.

[00:56:21]They always do, but only after individuals have already paid the price for the insight. Now, here is the detail that most histories of Midway omit. The detail that provides the final twist to this story. Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo survived the Battle of Midway. He survived the loss of four carriers, the death of 2,000 air crew, the destruction of Japan's offensive naval capability.

[00:56:46]He was not court marshaled. He was not retired. He was reassigned to command the third fleet, then the CBO Naval District, then the Central Pacific Area Fleet. He continued to hold positions of significant authority in the Imperial Japanese Navy for 2 years after Midway.

[00:57:04]He was on Saipan in July 1944 when American forces invaded. His command was destroyed within 2 weeks.

[00:57:13]On July 6th, 1944 with American troops advancing on his final defensive position, Nagumo died by suicide. He was 60 years old. The official Japanese record of his final hours is incomplete, but a document recovered from Saipan and translated by American intelligence in August 1944, a handwritten page found among Nagumo's personal effects, contains a passage that stops every historian who reads it. The translation is approximate and contested, but the substance is consistent across multiple translations.

[00:57:48]Nagumo wrote that the moment he could not stop thinking about the moment he returned to again and again across the two years after Midway was not the dive bombers that destroyed his carriers. It was the American bomber that flew down Akagi's deck at dawn. The one that came from nowhere and went everywhere at once. The one his guns could not track because it was already past them before they could respond. He wrote that he never fully understood how one aircraft already dying made him change everything. The intelligence officer who read that document in Pearl Harbor in August 1944 was a naval aviator named Commander John Levelheaded Thack. The same who had written the 47page analysis. The same whose memo Spruent had annotated with three words. Thak read Nagumo's final reflection. He sat with it for a long time. Then he filed it in the intelligence archive where it remained classified for 31 years until 1975 when it was released as part of a broader declassification of Pacific War documents.

[00:58:54]By 1975, James Murray was 56 years old, running his ranch on Bridger Creek, still telling anyone who asked that his torpedo missed and his mission failed.

[00:59:04]Nobody sent him the document. Nobody translated it for him. Nobody connected the dots in a way that reached him in Sweetg Grass County, Montana, where a retired lieutenant colonel was fixing fences and declining newspaper interviews and carrying his honest accounting of June 4th, 1942 with the same quiet stubbornness he had carried everything else across a long life. He never knew that the man he almost killed had spent 2 years unable to stop thinking about him. From a rancher's son with 90 minutes of torpedo training and a plane his own air force called the Widowmaker to a doctrine of naval warfare that shaped every carrier operation in every conflict America has fought for 80 years.

[00:59:47]This is what one decision made in 3 seconds at 15 ft above the Pacific Ocean looks like across the full span of its consequences.

[00:59:57]Muri spent his life believing the torpedo missed. What he never accepted was that the weapon that mattered was never the torpedo.

[01:00:06]Seven men came home in a battle that killed 3,000.

[01:00:10]Three carriers burned 90 minutes after Suzie Q cleared Akagi's stern. And the principle that made it possible is still flying today in aircraft. Murray never imagined over oceans. He never sailed.

[01:00:22]If this story moved you, share it. Leave a comment telling us where you're watching from and whether someone in your family served. Every person who hears this story is one more person who knows that James Murie and the crew of Suzie Q did not disappear into silence.

[01:00:40]There are hundreds of stories like this one buried in the archives of World War II ordinary men who made decisions that history almost forgot.

[01:00:48]Subscribe, turn on notifications, and we will find them for you. Because the most important battles in history were not always won by the weapons that hit their targets. Sometimes they were won by the ones that didn't and by the men who flew them home anyway.