[dramatic music playing]
[Phillips] Midway is one of those honest events
where we do not know the result ahead of time.
[Timothy] These pilots all say to themselves
"We're gonna do it,
we're gonna risk a lonely death out on the ocean"
and all they can do is shake hands and tear up.
[Jonathan] There's a lot of drama til the very last moment.
Things are really on a knife’s edge.
[plane engine whirring]
[Craig] Rarely in history does one naval force
annihilate the other naval force
and almost never do you find the tipping of history itself
turned more swiftly and more completely
than the Battle of Midway.
[narrator] The Battle of Midway is one of the most dramatic events
of World War Two.
Now, rare footage from around the world
expertly restored in full color
tells the story as you've never seen it before.
[suspenseful music playing]
[narrator] December 1941.
Japan's devastating surprise attack on the US Pacific Fleet
of Pearl Harbor
has brought the United States into the war against the Axis powers.
Caught cold and unprepared,
the American military is reeling.
Eight Pacific Fleet Battleships have been critically damaged or sunk.
[Craig] I think the Americans were stunned to figure out
how efficient the Japanese were.
The characteristic stereotypes that Americans had of Japanese
as being little tiny people with buck teeth
who were not very clever was washed away pretty quickly
after Pearl Harbor.
So the Japanese had superiority when the war began,
both in terms of numbers and in terms of quality.
[Timothy] The US was not a big military powerhouse
in the years prior to World War Two.
It had the 17th largest army in the world when World War Two broke out,
and there was even a great question as to whether
our navy was kind of even a practical weapon of war so,
for the United States, they were kind of starting
in a hole as it were.
[narrator] After the humiliation of the Pearl Harbor attack,
a new man has been put in charge of what remains of the Pacific Fleet.
His name is Chester W. Nimitz.
[Geoffrey] Nimitz comes out to take command of the Pacific Fleet
after Pearl Harbor and he sees this smoking harbor.
He's in hip boots, wading around in these damaged ships
trying to get them repaired
and the Americans are barely hanging on.
[Craig] Everybody just felt kinda bad.
We should've been ready, and expected it,
we should've fought back better, this is awful.
And then Nimitz comes
and there was something about his ability to inspire,
not in a pound the podium way, but in a quiet,
I'm on your side, we're a team kind of way.
At the same time he was a risk taker by instinct
and a hard charging, hard driving warrior.
[narrator] Fleet Admiral Nimitz has an incredibly difficult task
in front of him.
[fire blazing]
[narrator] The Japanese are currently roaming the Pacific unchecked,
taking territory almost at will.
And Nimitz currently has only four effective ships
to try and stop them.
The aircraft carriers Lexington,
Hornet, Enterprise and Yorktown.
Nimitz's big issue is that
he can't let the Japanese run wild anymore.
So he's got to keep the Japanese at bay,
but also protect the assets that he has, he can't afford to lose warships
or he certainly can't afford to lose warships
unless he extracts a higher toll from the Japanese.
So this is the sort of balancing game that he has to play.
[narrator] But Nimitz's bosses in Washington
have little sympathy for his predicament.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt wants a headline grabbing operation
as soon as possible.
[Phillips] Franklin Roosevelt is a domestic politician.
He has been commander in chief when Pearl Harbor was attacked.
The last thing he can do is therefore, we cannot reply.
He does not want the US Armed Forces to look to be hiding,
he doesn't want them to look to be passive.
Supposedly, Roosevelt said
"Tell Nimitz to get the hell out to Pearl Harbor
and don't come back 'til the war is won."
[suspenseful music playing]
[narrator] The plan cooked up in Washington
is a bombing raid on Japan's capital, Tokyo.
Led by Colonel James Doolittle.
But Doolittle's planes can only be launched inside
Japanese waters,
from one of Admiral Nimitz's few remaining aircraft carriers.
Nimitz knows the raid is purely symbolic and risky.
Doolittle's heavy bombers are not even designed
for carrier runways.
[Timothy] Nimitz I think was directed to send this operation forward
whether he liked it or not.
I guess a betting person might have wondered whether or not
it can even have been attempted.
It will be a one-way mission for these crew men.
They were gonna basically fly off a carrier deck,
bomb Tokyo and then land in safe airfields in China,
that's the plan.
So it is an extremely bold operation.
When Colonel Doolittle's first bomber heads off the flight deck,
there is this moment where it just dips below the bow
and it looks like it's about to plunge into the ocean too heavy
with its own bomb load.
Then it just barely gets aloft and then rises up above the horizon.
[plane engine whirring]
[narrator] Nimitz is relieved to hear that Colonel Doolittle has launched.
And the carriers have turned back safely towards Hawaii.
What he doesn't realize is the raid will make his carriers
a priority target for the enemy.
When the bombers unleash a small shock raid on Tokyo,
they have scored a publicity victory for the American people
but the attack enrages Japan.
Several of the bombs land in the grounds
of the emperor's palace.
[dramatic music playing]
This is unbelievable, this is something that
every right-thinking Japanese is appalled by.
Emperors are divine, they're not like presidents,
you can just sort of get another one.
He's divine so if through your oversight as a military man the emperor is killed,
the mass suicide of the entire Japanese high command
would have followed instantly.
[Sayuri] Doolittle's raid was a great shock
to the Japanese populace because this was at the time
still in the early stage of the war that they were told
that Japan was winning.
Assaulting the Imperial Palace, there was lots of outrage.
[narrator] But one senior Japanese military man
sees the outrage as an opportunity.
Ever since Pearl Harbor,
the commander in chief of the combined fleet,
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto
has argued that the American carrier fleet
needs to be attacked again
and completely finished off.
[Andrew] Yamamoto is fighting a battle,
a bureaucratic institutional resource battle
to continue the offensive naval war, to finish off the American fleet.
Now he's got the evidence.
The Americans have proved his point.
[Sayuri] The fact that the Doolittle raids
were launched from the aircraft carriers off the coast of Japan,
that really fortified Yamamoto's argument
that the American Pacific Fleet has to be completely destroyed
for Japan to be safe.
[Andrew] We have to remember that men like Yamamoto
are from the first generation of post Samurai Japan,
so they're related to the warrior leaders of a medieval country.
He's not somebody who thinks that just beating them is enough,
he wants to wipe them out.
He wants to make sure they cannot do anything else.
[narrator] The entire Japanese Military is now galvanized
behind Admiral Yamamoto.
His plan is to lure the American aircraft carriers
out of their base in Pearl Harbor
for a decisive naval battle
that will finish off Nimitz's Pacific Fleet completely.
[dramatic music playing]
And to entice them into battle,
he decides to invade a tiny US held Atoll island,
halfway across the Pacific.
Midway is a valuable forward airfield
and refueling base for the Americans.
The Japanese see their attack on midway as bait.
They will bait the Americans into sending the carriers
from Pearl Harbor,
so when the Americans steam in to defend Midway,
they'll be caught by surprise by this much bigger Japanese fleet.
So at Midway, they are laying a trap
and it's a very potent trap.
[narrator] But before Yamamoto can even initiate his Midway plan,
an unexpected opportunity comes his way.
Two of his carriers are supporting an assault on Port Moresby
in Allied held Guinea.
When they encounter the USS Lexington and Yorktown.
Out of nowhere, Yamamoto has an early shot
at destroying half of Nimitz's carrier fleet.
And for the first time in history, two fleets fight
without ever seeing each other.
While a battleship is limited by its speed
and the reach of its guns,
a carrier's dive and torpedo bombers can strike across hundreds of miles.
[Geoffrey] Now we're beyond visible range, over the horizon.
Radar technology very primitive, long range reconnaissance quite spotty,
the ability to then coordinate reconnaissance
with the guys on the flight deck.
So you're groping around in the dark
looking for an enemy that you can't always find.
[narrator] Amid the mayhem in the Coral Sea,
the Japanese are confident they've scored a key victory.
Two of their carriers are damaged,
but the US Lexington is ripped apart by explosions and sinks.
And the USS Yorktown
is a smoldering wreck and surely doomed.
Two of the United States' four carriers are down,
before the Midway assault has even begun.
[Andrew] The Japanese start the war, thinking
"I'm not sure we can do this," by Midway, they think they can
and there's a degree of contempt creeping in.
They know the Americans, they're big and strong
but they're not very clever.
[narrator] An increasingly confident Admiral Yamamoto
calls his senior commanders together on a battleship
to run through the top-secret details of his surprise attack on Midway.
Yamamoto has devised a carefully choreographed ambush.
Timing will be critical.
The Japanese had a love of intricate battle plans
with multiple forces that are all moving and clockwork
and then they all come together
at exactly the right place and exactly the right time.
[narrator] First, the powerful Japanese carrier fleet
will launch a surprise attack on Midway.
Its airplanes will decimate the island's defenses
and clear the way for a ground invasion.
The attack will trigger the American fleet to scramble from Pearl Harbor,
and sail over a thousand miles into a trap.
Admiral Yamamoto himself will hold a large battleship fleet
away from the island, in reserve.
By the time the American carriers arrive,
the Japanese will have secured Midway's airfields
and control of the skies.
The Japanese carrier fleet will then be in a powerful position
to overwhelm and destroy the Americans.
[tense music playing]
The man in charge of this vital carrier force
is Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo.
Nagumo should have a good three or four days
before he's gonna be faced with those American carriers.
And that's gonna give him time to put Midway out of business,
invade Midway, turn it into an advance base for the Japanese
and then he will turn and face the next threat that is coming,
which should be the American Navy.
But the interesting thing here is that Yamamoto and Nagumo
really don't like each other.
These two guys don't get along at all
and yet by the reasons of seniority he ends up getting placed
in command of the world's foremost carrier force.
And he really didn't have a good feel for this weapon system,
he didn't really know how to operate it.
Admiral Nagumo is a classic surface warfare procedure-based officer,
he does exactly what the doctrine says,
he does what he's been told to do
and he does it according to the manual.
And Nagumo is not the man to be left
with a great deal of initiative.
[narrator] But if the Japanese battle plan relies
on secrecy and surprise,
it's already under threat.
In Hawaii, a United States cryptography unit called Hypo
is trying to decipher encoded Japanese radio traffic.
Leading the team at Hypo is the eccentric
captain Joseph Rochefort.
[Geoffrey] Rochefort is someone who is viewed
with extreme suspicion by conventional naval officers
who see him as way too much of an irreverent egghead.
He works in this workshop where he sets up these massive tables
with saw horses and planks and he spreads out the Japanese codes
and he shuffles around them wearing a smoking jacket
and carpet slippers.
He was a bit of a fellow who worked off the reservation.
He had spent time in Japan.
And therefore, had learned not just the Japanese language
but a lot about Japanese culture and, therefore,
they looked at code messages not just for what they said
in terms of language
but for what they implied in terms of meaning.
[Timothy] But even so, the cryptanalysts
at Hypo could really only crack about 20% of the Japanese code,
the rest of it had to be kind of determined through guesswork.
[narrator] That May,
Rochefort starts to pick up on numerous Japanese communiqués
about operations against a target code named AF.
Spinning back through his photographic memory,
Rochefort thinks he knows what AF stands for.
[Timothy] And he remembered
an intercept from March 1942
of a Japanese patrol plane
saying that it was passing by a target that is designated AF.
And the only American possession that it could possibly have been
passing was Midway Island.
[narrator] Rochefort is convinced an attack on Midway
is little more than a week away,
so he quickly files a report with his superiors in Washington,
but his report is dismissed.
[Craig] In Washington, the chief of naval intelligence,
he would say, "Well, I'm not really sure, how do you know this?"
He says, "Well I can tell".
"Well no, you can't tell,
that could be anything, that could be Seattle
for all you know or San Francisco,
how do you know AF is Midway?"
Chain of command was skeptical.
[narrator] Daybreak, the 4th of June.
The Japanese carrier fleet has moved to within 250 miles of Midway.
Its commander, Admiral Nagumo,
is now in position to initiate the attack on the island.
[Geoffrey] If you were looking at this encroaching Japanese fleet
at Midway Island,
you'd have to say that they have the upper hand.
They've got four carriers loaded with advanced aircraft.
The air crews are highly trained,
they've been in action at Pearl Harbor and the coral sea,
and this is gonna be a very formidable opponent
for the US to come up against.
[narrator] All four Japanese carriers
coordinate the mass launch of attack planes.
[tense music playing]
And at 6:20,
the Japanese squadrons appear as a swarm over Midway.
[gunfire]
[narrator] The renowned film director, John Ford,
is stationed on the island
and manages to capture the attack.
This is the only footage that will survive
the battle of Midway.
[Timothy] For the Americans who are on Midway, on the ground,
is a fearsome scene, it's like Pearl Harbor come again
because they're being attacked from above and they have very little
to defend themselves. All that are on the ground
just a few scattered anti-aircraft guns.
[narrator] But as the Japanese airplanes
light up an inferno beneath them,
they notice something unusual.
One of their key targets,
the island's bomber planes,
are nowhere to be seen on the airfields below.
[Craig] There's almost no airplanes there.
They're not on the airfield and the Japanese are curious about that.
Why has that happened?
The American airplanes must be in the air somewhere.
[narrator] Earlier that morning, John Ford's cameras
capture the moment the American bombers scrambled.
And now they appear
directly over the Japanese carrier fleet.
Nagumo's plan for total surprise
seems to have been compromised.
[Jonathan] That must have been quite a sight.
And that is a problem for Nagumo.
Midway doesn't seem to be as quiet an area as he might have supposed.
[narrator] Amongst the counter offensive are high altitude B17 bombers,
untested in naval warfare.
The Japanese skippers realized that it takes a long time for the bomb
to make it from 20,000 feet down to where your ship is
and so what they would do is they would watch the aircraft
and as soon as the bombs were dropped they would then
put the ship into a hard turn.
The results from the photographs are quite dramatic
that all around these Japanese ships are, you know,
huge columns of water from sticks of eight or ten bombs
landing in the drink.
[narrator] The Japanese fleet launches dozens of fighter planes
called Zeros to defend against the attack.
If one group of fighters sees an enemy strike coming in,
all of the fighters will sort of follow them,
almost like white blood cells,
they'll just follow them into this attack vector.
[Timothy] The Japanese used this incredible fighter called the Zero.
And it is incredible in terms of its speeds,
maneuverability and its climb.
In the hands of a veteran aviator
can be a death dealing weapon of war.
[narrator] The veteran Zero pilots are soon on top
of the rookie flyers from Midway.
[Albert K. Earnest] I saw one flying over my head,
it seems I could reach up and touch him and before I knew it
he was back onto my tail.
They were the most maneuverable airplane I think I've ever seen.
[narrator] The island's counter strike, over 50 aircraft strong,
fails to land a single blow on the Japanese carriers.
[narrator] But one attack very nearly kills Admiral Nagumo.
Towards the end, a B17 gets shot down
and as it comes diving down the pilot seems
to have set a course to crash into the flagship
and comes within a pretty short compass
of running straight into him and his command team.
Nagumo had probably not expected much in the way of American resistance at all,
so for the Americans to be throwing
basically the kitchen sink at him,
his blood is up at this point, the adrenaline is pumping.
[narrator] Rattled, Nagumo wants to hit Midway again
and destroy its defenses.
But the remaining bombers he has on board
are armed with torpedoes for attacking ships.
So Nagumo orders them to switch to ground attack weapons,
but he will have to wait some time before the attack can begin.
This is not a spot sort of thing that just magically happens,
it's gonna be 90 minutes to two hours’ worth of effort to make the switchover
from naval attack weapons to land attack weapons.
He's not gonna have a strike force available to go for some hours
so once Nagumo gives that order, he's committed.
[dramatic music playing]
[narrator] But just under 30 minutes later
a message crackles over the radio on the bridge of Nagumo's flagship.
It's from one of his search planes.
[Andrew] The news arrives back late
and it's very bad news.
[narrator] US Navy ships of unspecified type
spotted near Midway.
When that radio message comes in from his scout plane at 07:40,
there has gotta be a real sinking feeling in Nagumo's stomach.
[Andrew] The search was sent to confirm a negative,
there are no Americans waiting to ambush me.
And it confirms a positive which is the very thing
that he's not factored into all of his decisions
because they're not meant to be there.
[Jonathan] He's already committed to hitting Midway again.
His aircraft down in the hangars
are halfway re-armed at this point,
so he's totally wrong footed.
And there shouldn't be American ships out there at all.
The plan says that the Americans aren't gonna show up
for another three or four days.
Why are there American ships here?
[Phillips] Sometimes in the history of war,
intelligence is vastly overrated
and we love making mountains out of molehills.
This is not the case going in to Midway.
[narrator] Turned away by his immediate superiors,
cryptologist Joseph Rochefort
was not deterred.
He used a back channel to reach Admiral Nimitz.
Rochefort lays out his hunch that the Japanese fleet
are preparing to attack a place codenamed AF.
Nimitz listens, but needs confirmation
that the target is Midway.
[Edward] Admiral Nimitz naturally wanted to know
positive and beyond doubt what place AF represented.
Since we had no proof, Joe and I agreed
that we should entice the enemy by radio deception
to furnish such proof if possible.
[narrator] Midway Island sends a false emergency message,
saying that their water system is broken.
Later that same day, American intelligence
intercepts a Japanese message saying,
that AF is low on water.
Rochefort had proof
that AF was Midway.
And it's like wow, eureka, we've got it.
Now they can bait their own trap
for the Japanese at Midway.
[Edward] You can imagine Admiral Nimitz's delight
when I showed him the above decrypted transmitted message
and allowed him to prepare his warm reception
for those visitors in early June.
[Craig] You can almost see him metaphorically stroking his chin
and saying, "I'm game, let's go."
[narrator] The morning of the attack, Nimitz's fleet
is laying in wait near Midway,
ready to ambush the Japanese.
The tables have been turned
and the Americans have not two carriers,
but three.
The USS Yorktown, the ship the Japanese were convinced
was destroyed in the Coral Sea,
is steaming through the ocean.
Against all odds,
the burning hulk had made it back
to Pearl Harbor for repairs.
[Craig] The naval architects say it's gonna take three to six months
to get this in shape, just ready to go to sea.
And Nimitz looks at him coolly
and says "You can have three days.
I've gotta have it battle ready in three days,"
and by golly, it was.
[narrator] Nimitz now has three carriers
and the island itself, an unsinkable carrier,
to take on the Japanese.
And the advantage of surprise
means he'll be able to strike first.
[Jack] Every time we had steak and eggs on the aircraft carrier,
you knew that was gonna be a rough, rough day.
And that morning, they gave us steak and eggs.
[narrator] At 7:00 a.m. that morning,
under the command of Rear Admiral Raymond Spruance...
[man] Start the engines.
[narrator] ...two of US Navy's three carriers,
Enterprise and Hornet,
launched their strike on the Japanese fleet.
[plane engines revving]
[narrator] Squadrons of torpedo bombers and then dive bombers
take to the air.
Meanwhile, Admiral Nagumo
is still grappling with the news
that an American fleet
is already at Midway.
[Jonathan] Now the question is what do you do?
The plan may not be going according to plan anymore.
[Craig] Remember, the primary objective
in the entire campaign was to sink the American carriers.
Midway is the bait, carriers are the target.
So now, he's gotta rethink his entire plan,
"Wait a minute, maybe instead of a second strike on Midway,
I should use those planes to attack the carrier."
[narrator] Despite his previous order to attack Midway Island,
there are still some planes on board,
armed to strike ships.
But according to Japanese doctrine, you should only attack
with a fully coordinated group of planes
and Nagumo is a strictly by-the-book commander.
So instead of sending what he has,
he decides to wait until all his planes
have switched from bombs back to torpedoes.
It'll be at least another two hours
before they're ready to launch an attack.
He has to do something outside the parameters of the rule book
and he's not prepared to do that.
So he's made a mistake and now,
he's insisting on unmaking that mistake
in a position where he has not got the time to do that.
[Jonathan] Down in the hanger decks,
chaos reigns
because the order comes down from Nagumo
that we have to re-arm these planes again.
And in the helter skelter
hubbub of the hangars now,
we have a situation where there's no time
to stow those land attack weapons properly.
They're just shoved up against the bulkheads.
You've got ordnance scattered all over the place,
these planes are also being fueled,
meaning that the hangars now are a tinder box.
[narrator] Nagumo's carrier fleet is still re-arming
when, at 9:20 a.m.,
planes from Nimitz's carriers appeared in the sky.
But as the squadron draws close,
it's clearly alone
and unprotected by fighter planes.
The United States may have had
the advantage of surprise,
but they've squandered it.
The problem for the Americans at this stage of the war
is that they're not nearly as good
as the Japanese are
at coordinating the activities
of multiple flight decks.
Enterprise and Hornet's launches are just miserable affairs
and they end up with multiple squadrons in the air
that are flying in different directions completely unsupported
and none of them know where each other even is.
[suspenseful music playing]
[narrator] The first squadron to arrive are torpedo bombers.
[Jonathan] These torpedo planes are slow, they are under armed,
and they are up against zeros
that in many cases have an advantage and speed
of over 200 miles an hour.
It's like they were hanging on a string
and just having these fighters go past them and take runs.
This is one of the most horrific portions
of the battle for the Americans.
[narrator] Worse still,
the lumbering planes are armed with a faulty weapon.
The problem that they have with this plane is it has a highly dysfunctional torpedo
and this torpedo generally fails to detonate
90% of the time.
They had tested it in prewar gunnery tests
and it only went off 10% of the time.
The American admirals decided to chance it anyway
and send these three torpedo squadrons into the fray.
-[plane engines revving] -[gunfire]
[Albert K Earnest] They were all pretty terrifying,
I was hit by a piece of shrapnel.
I had blood all over the place.
I didn't know how badly I was hit
but I [indistinct] fired for a while
and then he stopped firing and I guess he had just been killed.
The torpedo pilots, I think,
are some of the bravest individuals at this battle
because they sort of go into the fight
knowing that really all they are going to be used for
is as fodder on the off chance
that maybe one of the torpedoes might go off
and do some damage.
The morning of the battle, a dive bomber pilot told the story
that his best friend was a torpedo bomber pilot
and they basically have a final farewell
and they know at that point
that chances of coming back are not good
because they can't say goodbye,
they can't say sorry, "This has happened to you,"
all they can do is shake hands and tear up.
[dramatic music playing]
These deaths are not easy things
because, you know, when these planes are hit,
they explode in these enormous balls of fire.
Aviation gas spreads over, so it is not a pleasant way to go out.
To have courage like that to face death
knowing that, you know, you have little chance of success
is just a human quality that is just difficult to imagine.
[emotive music playing]
[narrator] From the first torpedo squadron,
only one man survives.
And the next two squadrons are massacred as well.
In the end, just four planes make it back.
[emotive music playing]
[narrator] America's hopes now rest solely
on their dive bombers.
But so far,
they've been nowhere to be seen.
Sent off in the wrong direction,
they are hopelessly lost and running low on fuel.
[Lewis] We get to where they're supposed to be, they're not there.
Nothing, I mean, just ocean as far as you can see.
And at this point in time we were just about as far as we should be
if we wanted to get back to the carrier.
They've got a compass,
they've got a pencil and that's how they're gonna navigate
over three or four hundred miles of open ocean.
There is no GPS,
there is no satellite communications.
You're completely blind
and you're flying over this completely featureless seascape.
They're pretty much on their own out there.
Middle of the ocean, just trying to figure out
where, if they were the Japanese fleet,
you would go.
Which direction you'd head in
and hoping that you can find something
to lead you to those ships.
[narrator] Admiral Nagumo sees the battle
swing dramatically back in his favor.
Critically for Nagumo, the torpedo threat,
the one that really would have spoiled his morning
has gone away, they've been massacred.
Now they can get on with the job in hand.
They can finish getting that strike ready
and finish off the Americans.
Brilliant, the Americans have failed.
[narrator] Nagumo’s strike planes will shortly all be armed with torpedoes
and all four carriers can launch a concentrated attack
on the Americans.
Having wasted its advantage,
Nimitz's Pacific carrier Fleet
is facing total destruction.
[Geoffrey] This is the US Navy, there is no reserve.
If you lose at Midway,
this is really America's last shot
to kind of check the Japanese and prevent them
from making their position indomitable.
[narrator] But there will be a final twist
in the Battle of Midway.
At 10:25 in the morning, on June 4th 1942,
the Japanese were winning the Pacific War.
And five minutes later,
the pendulum had shifted completely to the other side.
Almost never in history
do you find the tipping of history itself
so swift and so decisive in such a tiny moment.
[narrator] The battle turns on an incredible slice of luck.
Far out at sea,
the leader of a lost American dive bomber squadron
spots something unusual in the distance.
[Timothy] On the horizon, the American pilots
see a giant rainbow coursing through the air.
Now what it is, it is a spectrum of color
coming through the water spout of a lone Japanese destroyer, the Arashi.
[narrator] The Japanese destroyer is on its own
with no carriers in sight.
But despite being dangerously low on fuel,
the squadron leader decides to go with his gut
and follow the ship's wake.
When your skipper, McClusky,
turns the plane and extends the search,
you know what he's asking of you.
He's asking you to keep flying with him,
to risk not coming back at all and landing out on the ocean,
all on the off chance you're gonna find
the Japanese fleet and do something important.
[narrator] Then, 10 minutes later,
at 10:05 a.m.,
a miracle.
The US dive bombers
find the entire Japanese carrier fleet.
It must have been an incredible sight.
To be 15,000 feet up and you've got these carriers
spread out underneath you.
[Timothy] One pilot who survived and lived into his 90s
said that he could close his eyes
and the one thing he could remember vivid, clear as day,
was the sight of the Japanese fleet out on the horizon.
[Jonathan] The Japanese have just recently painted
huge Hinomaru,
a big red meatball if you will,
on the front of every one of their flight decks
and of course the American dive bomber pilots
are looking at this like,
"Well, that's a perfect aiming point."
-[suspenseful music playing] -[plane engines revving]
[narrator] Incredibly,
a squadron of dive bombers from the resurrected USS Yorktown
comes across the Japanese at the same time.
By sheer luck, we're now gonna have a situation
where we have four squadrons of attack planes
attacking the Japanese from two different directions
and from multiple altitudes.
Japanese fighters have scattered
because they are chasing away a final torpedo squadron.
And so, though the American torpedo bomber attacks
were something of a horrible waste of life,
when the dive bombers show up, there is nothing there to stop them.
The higher altitudes
are virtually fighterless.
[Craig] Now, the Japanese do not have radar
and it's a lookout on the Japanese flagship
who's looking up and all of a sudden sees the American dive bombers
and he yells out, "[speaks Japanese] dive bombers."
A witness said it looked like this silver cascade
coming down over the top.
[Timothy] They roll into their dives and go down towards their targets,
and dive bombing is a death-defying tactic
and they plunge downward
at about an 80-degree angle towards the earth
with the hood open, which means the wind
is roaring into the cockpit, the whole thing is jarring.
Anti-aircraft bursts are puffing around you.
[gunfire]
[Craig] And then pull out as low as you can go,
that gives you the best chance of finding a hit.
So, it's almost like playing Russian roulette
with the surface of the sea.
Pilots have trained for a year before the Battle of Midway
so that they can prove what their dive bombers are capable of,
that they can sink these Japanese ships
and that's not about luck, that's about training.
[narrator] The veteran US dive bombers are incredibly accurate.
-[suspenseful music playing] -[explosions]
[narrator] In just five minutes,
they land direct hits on three Japanese carriers.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Jonathan] Soryu is hit by three bombs,
Kaga is hit by so many bombs
that the Japanese lose track
of how many bombs hit her, they simply can't count.
Akagi, on the other hand, is only hit by one bomb
and it's put in just absolutely the perfect position
to do maximal damage to the flagship.
[narrator] To make matters worse,
Admiral Nagumo's squadrons are trapped below decks,
switching between bombs and torpedoes.
[Jonathan] Just consider for a moment,
it's a metal box that is full of fueled aircraft,
there are bombs lying all around the perimeter of this box
and now, a thousand pounds of high explosive
comes slicing through a wooden flight deck
and detonates.
It must have been like the sun exploding.
Japanese deck crewmen
scythed down by the dozens,
immediately those decks are covered
with burning fuel.
It's an absolute holocaust.
[narrator] Three of the four Japanese carriers,
the powerhouse of the imperial navy,
are ripped apart by fire and explosions.
[Jack] Even when I got 10 or 20 miles away,
I could see items of the ship blowing up in the air
a thousand feet high,
they were like a haystack on fire.
[explosions]
[narrator] In a matter of minutes,
the Battle of Midway has been utterly turned on its head.
A stunned Admiral Nagumo is forced to abandon
his burning carrier flagship...
and zero fighters are forced to ditch in the sea.
But despite the destruction, the Japanese do not give up.
They have a final throw of the dice.
Their only remaining carrier, the Hiryu,
launches an attack.
[Andrew] The strike leader taking off from Hiryu
knows that his plane is damaged,
he doesn't have enough fuel on board
to hit the Americans and get back,
but he takes off anyway.
-[suspenseful music playing] -[gunfire]
[narrator] Two separate waves of Japanese planes
attack the USS Yorktown,
crippling the ship.
[gunfire]
[narrator] But this hardy vessel known as The Fighting Lady
still has the final say in the battle.
Its dive bombers hunt down and devastate
the last remaining Japanese carrier,
the Hiryu.
Stranded over 300 miles away,
in a slow battleship, powerless to influence the battle,
Admiral Yamamoto eventually hears of the American ambush.
And ultimately, that all four
of his carriers have been hit.
His plan has horribly backfired,
the vital heart of the Japanese Navy
is destroyed.
[Jonathan] This must have been an absolutely devastating personal blow
because he is the guy
who led to the creation of this carrier force,
he understands its value to the nation.
And so to have, you know, half of that force
being ripped to pieces within a space of just a few hours,
he understands what a horrendous blow this is
to Japan's chances in this war.
These ships are now on fire, stem to stern,
they've been burning for hours.
And yet you, as an engine crewman,
have to stay at your post.
So, these guys are trapped below decks and eventually,
the decks turned red above them as the fires
inexorably work their way down through the ship
and many of these men are roasted alive.
There's no way out of these spaces.
[gunfire]
[narrator] As the two navies retire from the monumental Battle of Midway,
the true enormity and human cost of the battle
starts to become clear.
More than 3,000 Japanese and American serviceman
have been killed in the space of one day.
[Timothy] It all began to sink in
to the members of the other squadrons
that have to look at the empty ready rooms
where their buddies had once been
and to see all their friends' clothing just hanging quietly on hooks.
That's kind of the real kicker
that exists in the squadron ready rooms and after this fight is over.
[narrator] For the rival American and Japanese admirals,
there is much soul searching to be done.
[Phillips] Nimitz understood had it not been
for a fortuitous series of events
more than halfway through the battle,
he could have been running back to Pearl Harbor
with his tail between his legs.
[Jonathan] Nagumo and his staff officers, as they're making their way practically
as refugees back towards Tokyo,
obviously there's gonna be a little explaining that has to be done.
How did you lose four carriers in one day?
The Japanese begin spreading disinformation about this battle.
They don't tell the Japanese public
that they've lost this battle.
There's a huge cover up that goes on.
And so, in that context, you've got a guy like Yamamoto
who is really the naval equivalent of a rock star,
you can't get rid of him without people noticing.
This is a guy that spends a lot of his time
answering letters from school children.
So, just 'cause you've lost the battle,
doesn't mean that you can get rid of Yamamoto, he's kept in place.
And in fact, a lot of the officers
that are responsible for this disaster are kept in place
and it's all part of the cover up to the Japanese people.
[Craig] On the other hand, the American victory at Midway
was great news in the United States, banner headlines.
The euphoria that followed that victory was important
because America got up off the mat,
all the news had been bad
from December 1941 all the way through May.
[Timothy] As for Nimitz,
I think this was definitely proof enough that he was the man capable
of leading the United States the rest of the way across the Pacific.
He came in, he listened to the people
who were telling him the right thing
and ultimately,
to win the victory the United States needed.
[narrator] But, just two months later,
Nimitz's marines are involved
in brutal ground combat,
trying to retake Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands
from the Japanese.
[Geoffrey] Staring the Americans in the face after Midway
is all these fortified island chains,
the Gilberts, the Carolines, the Marshalls, the Marianas.
So, Nimitz looks at these strategic predicament after Midway
and it's every bit as thorny as it was after Pearl Harbor.
Somehow, you're gonna have to get to Japan
and impose America's will on Japan
and yet how to do this?
[narrator] America pours its huge industrial resources into the war effort.
By 1943,
the United States is producing
a new state-of-the-art aircraft carrier
every month,
creating a fleet of over 90.
Their military might is overwhelming.
Admiral Yamamoto is hunted down
and killed by American fighter planes.
And Vice Admiral Nagumo oversees another defeat,
this time in Saipan.
He kills himself in shame.
But the bloodiest battles in the Pacific War
are still to come.
And a new terror will be unleashed.
[Norman] Manned planes pouring into a wall of anti-aircraft fire,
bomb and gas flame the most terrible weapon.
A kamikaze.
[suspenseful music playing]