Japan Tried to Hit U.S. Carriers at Midway - BIG MISTAKE

Japan Tried to Hit U.S. Carriers at Midway - BIG MISTAKE
At ten-twenty in the morning local time, thirty-three United States Navy S-B-D Dauntless dive bombers appeared over Japan's main carrier force. The sky was clear, visibility unlimited. The Pacific stretched endlessly blue beneath scattered clouds at three thousand feet. In five minutes they set three fleet carriers — Akagi, Kaga, and Soryu — ablaze with thousand-pound armor-piercing bombs. Hours later Hiryu joined them beneath the waves. Japan lost four carriers, two hundred forty-eight aircraft, and three thousand fifty-seven men — nearly its entire front-line naval air arm. This statistical collapse — sixty percent of carrier power erased in three hundred seconds — altered the course of the Pacific War. Commanders in Tokyo had expected quick victory within forty-eight hours. The reports that arrived instead showed burning hulks and scattered survivors clinging to wreckage. From this moment began the story that reshaped the balance of power across the world's largest ocean.
The planning began in Tokyo four months earlier, in the aftermath of the Doolittle Raid. Inside the Navy General Staff building on sixteen April nineteen forty-two, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto presented Operation M-I to his senior officers. The plan was direct and aggressive: destroy America's remaining aircraft carriers by luring them to defend Midway Atoll, a small coral island two thousand kilometers northwest of Hawaii. Yamamoto believed speed was essential. The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor seven December nineteen forty-one had damaged the United States Pacific Fleet's battleships, but the carriers had escaped. Enterprise, Lexington, and Saratoga were at sea during the attack. Those carriers now represented America's only offensive capability in the Pacific theater.

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