Who was famous in the Battle of Midway?

Answer 1

On the American side there were two Task Forces in the Battle, one being commanded by Raymond A. Spruance. Spruance was not a flier, and not a carrier man, but was recommended by Bull Halsey to be Halsey's replacement just before the Battle, when Halsey was hospitalized in Hawaii. So on practically no notice Spruance sailed from Pearl Harbor on the mission, and straight into the Battle, which he handled masterfully. Spruance and Halsey then alternated in command of the US fighting ships in the Pacific for the rest of the war - when Spruance was in command they were the Third Fleet, and when Halsey was in command they were the Fifth Fleet. One admiral would go out and complete an operation while the other with his staff was in Hawaii planning the next one. Spruance was in command again in the last great carrier battle in June of 1944, the Battle of the Philippine Sea, also sometimes called "The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot", which completely destroyed the last of Japan's sea-going air power. Spruance's biographer called him "The Quiet Warrior", which was an apt description, and he has never been given the adulation that was poured on Halsey. At the end of the war when a few officers of both the Army and Navy were made the first five star officers ever in American history, Halsey got five stars, but Spruance did not.

The overall US Naval Commander in the Pacific from just after Pearl Harbor through to the end was Chester Nimitz, who also got five stars. Nimitz was the one who made the decision to believe in what the intelligence people were telling him, and to stake all the slender resources remaining to the US Navy on the defense of Midway. Nimitz directed the Central Pacific, Northern Pacific and South Pacific efforts from Hawaii.

The other Task Force commander at Midway was Frank Jack Fletcher. Fletcher was senior to Spruance and was in overall command of the American ships in the Battle. Many of his papers were lost when his ship was sunk during the war, and he refused to be interviewed by the influential naval historian Samuel Elliot Morrison at the end of the war, so Morrison snubbed Fletcher in his writing on the Pacific War, and later historians have largely followed suit, so that you have to be pretty well informed on the Battle to even know that Fletcher was there, let alone in command in this smashing victory. Fletcher was in command in the North Pacific for the rest of the war, and, needless to say, like Spruance, never got five stars.

Maybe the most famous regular guy was Ensign George Gay, who got no grief over his name, because "Gay" was not coopted to be a synonym for homosexual until he was a pretty old fellow. But as a young Naval aviator Ensign Gay was the sole Survivor of the attack of Torpedo Squadron Eight on the Japanese Fleet. There were three types of carrier planes - fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo bombers, with torpedo bombers being the biggest, with a three man crew - pilot, rear gunner and radio operator. They carried a torpedo, just like the ones launched by submarines, and had to fly in low and straight over the water and drop the torpedo within a mile of the enemy ship they were hoping the torpedo would hit, which made them large, slow targets. At the time of Midway the US had a new generation of dive bombers and fighters, but the new torpedo bombers were not yet with the fleet, meaning the old torpedo bombers were extremely slow targets. The plan had been for the dive bombers and torpedo bombers to hit at the same time, but the torpedo planes got there ahead and went on in. They were slaughtered, by both shipboard anti-aircraft fire and defending Japanese fighter planes. Few of them even managed to get close enough to release their torpedoes, and they scored no hits. But this was not in vain, as they drew all the umbrella of Japanese fighter planes after them, and when the dive bombers appeared overhead just as the last of Torpedo Squadron Eight was going down in flames, there was nothing to stop the dive bombers, who proceeded to sink three Japanese carriers in the next ten minutes. Ensign Gay had a ringside seat for this, floating in the middle of the Japanese Fleet in his life vest. He was rescued a day or two after the Battle by a flying boat, and lived to be an old man.

On the Japanese side, the most famous was Admiral Yamamoto, who would be dead within a year, shot down as a result of more code-breaking by American intelligence, and Admiral Nagumo, who up until Midway had led the Jap carriers whereever and whenever they wanted to go, until they had become overconfident.