What Admiral Yamamoto did not know was that the Americans had partially broken the Japanese top secret naval code. These forces were intended to leave American commanders uncertain of what objectives the Japanese would strike at. Battle of Midway deployment map (WikiCommons)Īs part of the operation, Japan’s Admiral Yamamoto and his colleagues dispatched coordinated forces across thousands of miles of the Pacific, extending as far as Alaska. A Japanese landing there would thus deliver a crippling blow - and perhaps pave the way for an invasion of Hawaii itself. hands - and the first vital link in the chain of bases that the U.S. Midway Island, some 1,500 miles west of Hawaii, was the last outpost west of Hawaii that was still in U.S. Instead, thanks to American codebreakers and information analysts, it was the Japanese navy that was taken by surprise and defeated. naval strength that had begun at Pearl Harbor. The Japanese high command had devised a complex plan intended to catch the Americans by surprise and complete the elimination of U.S. Navy)īut even before the first airstrikes were launched, as Mark Munson reports at, the Battle of Midway also demonstrated the decisive role of the information battlefield in modern warfare. The burning Japanese heavy cruiser Mikuma (National Museum of The U.S.
Navy fought a Japanese task force to a draw. Indeed, it was only the second battle between carriers - the first was just a month earlier, the Battle of the Coral Sea, in which the U.S. Today, as recounted by Alan Taylor in Atlantic magazine, Midway is most remembered as the first great, full-scale clash between fleets of aircraft carriers. The initiative in the Pacific War shifted relentlessly toward U.S. Four of the six Japanese aircraft carriers that had struck at Pearl Harbor went to the bottom of the ocean, compared with just one American carrier lost. and other Allies to accept domination of the western Pacific and Southeast Asia.īut a Japanese plan to round out its successes led instead to a decisive defeat of the Japanese navy at the Battle of Midway. The goal was to clear such a vast region of sea around Japan that no counterattack would be practical, forcing the U.S. It sank dozens of American, British and other Allied ships, often in one-sided victories. In the first six months after its attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Japanese navy swept the Pacific and Indian Oceans from Hawaii to Ceylon. C4ISR cybersecurity defense technology Military and Defense
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