What strategies and tactics they use during the Midway battle?

Answer 1

There was a brilliant US Naval officer at Pearl Harbor, a cryptographer, Joseph Rochefort. He had a lot of success breaking Japanese codes. Radio messages were sent in Morse Code over the radio. These messages were in Japanese, of course, and encrypted in a secret code. The Navy had radio operators listening and intercepting the radio messages the Japanese sent. Then the secret code had to be broken and the message translated into English. This was, of course, exceedingly difficult. The US was not able to decipher every bit of every message, and problems with translation into English could make the meaning difficult to grasp. But Rochefort and his secret section of codebreakers was getting a substantial amount right. Rochefort began to suspect that the Japanese had an operation underway to attack Midway. There was nothing concrete, just a sum of some hints he thought he read in the Japanese message traffic. He came up with a plan to confirm this suspicion. He got Admiral Nimitz to help put his plan into operation. The Japanese in their messages were referring to the target of their next operation, whatever that target might be, by a code name, I think it might have been "cactus". Rochefort suspected that "cactus" was Midway. He got Admiral Nimitz to have the US radio operators on Midway send a message, unencoded, ("in the clear"), to Pearl Harbor that they were having trouble with their water evaporators, which produced the drinking water on the island. This was a fairly routine type of message, something that might be sent without bothering to put it into code, so as not to arouse Japanese suspicion that it was a planted message. Then they waited. Sure enough, soon Rochefort's section intercepted, decoded and translated a Japanese message that "cactus" was short of fresh water. This confirmed that the objective of the next Japanese attack was Midway.

The US had only three aircraft carriers in the Pacific, and one of them, the Yorktown, had been badly damaged a couple of weeks before at the Battle of the Coral Sea. Normally this damage might have taken two months to repair. The Yorktown spent two days in drydock in Pearl Harbor, with shipyard workers frantically working around the clock to try to patch her up enough to put to sea in a condition to operate her aircraft. She then sailed, with the yardbirds still aboard hammering and welding, to rendezvous with the other two carriers.

The US ships lurked northeast of Midway and waited for the Japanese to appear. They sent out search planes toward the direction the Japanese were expected to come from, each plane to go out as far as it could, about two hundred and fifty miles, and search and arc of five degrees. By the time the Japanese fleet was located, the Japanese had already launched a raid on Midway. The Americans made ready to launch their planes and got off a powerful strike toward the Japanese fleet. Meanwhile, a Japanese search plane had also spotted the American fleet. The Japanese planes had returned to their ships from the raid on Midway, and were being refueled and rearmed to make another attack on Midway when word came in from the search plane that the American fleet was in the area. Many planes had already been armed with bombs for the next attack. The Japanese admiral ordered the bombs removed from the heavy torpedo planes, and replaced with torpedoes, for an attack on ships instead of a land target. This took time. A carrier was at its most vulnerable when refueling and rearming. The ship would be full of highly explosive aviation gasoline fumes, which could be ignited by a single spark. And highly explosive ordnance, bombs and torpedoes, would be all over the hanger deck as planes were armed, or in this case, having their armament changed. The Japanese were in this very vulnerable state when the American attack arrived.

There were three types of carrier planes - torpedo bombers, dive bombers, and fighters. Torpedo bombers came in low, just off the water, and dropped a torpedo, of the same type that was fired by submarines. This was the Sunday punch, the big weapon, that could really do harm and sink big ships. Dive bombers came over the target at a few thousand feet and went into a very steep dive, nearly straight down, and dropped a bomb onto the target ship. Fighters were along to protect the bombers from enemy fighters.

US torpedo bombers at that stage of the war were very slow. So, they had been launched first and started for the Japanese Fleet. The faster dive bombers were launched next, to catch up to the torpedo bombers on the way, and then the fastest planes, the fighters. The plan was to have the torpedo bombers and the dive bombers arrive over the Japanese Fleet at the same time and deliver their attacks together. This would divide the Japanese defensive Combat Air Patrol, fighter planes kept over the Fleet when the enemy was near.

But the torpedo bombers got there first. The attack had been launched late in the day, at the extreme limit of the range of the American planes, so it was not certain they would have enough fuel to get back to their ships, or if they could get back and find their carriers before dark. Just deciding to launch the attack under these circumstances was an agonizing decision. The torpedo bombers could not wait around. They bored in, low and slow. They had to fly straight and level to have any hope of making a hit with their torpedoes. The entire Japanese Combat Air Patrol came down on the torpedo bombers, and every anti-aircraft gun which could be brought to bear on them from the Japanese Fleet opened up on the excellent target they made. Every single US torpedo plane was shot down, and they scored no hits at all. Only one man survived, and he was in the water in the midst of the Japanese Fleet. But what he saw next was unforgettable.

The US dive bombers arrived overhead as the last of the torpedo bombers was splashing into the ocean. The dive bombers nosed over into their attack. There were no Japanese planes to bother them, because they had all gone down to help shoot down the torpedo planes just over the water. The dive bombers unleashed their bombs into the gasoline fume filled Japanese carriers, full of bombs, and within ten minutes three of the four Japanese carriers were burning, exploding and sinking. Those ten minutes literally changed the course of the war. The Japanese could not replace those ships, while the US was building dozens of new carriers.

The fourth Japanese carrier was hidden by a rain squall and the American pilots did not spot it. They started back for their carriers, but many ran out of fuel on the way, and had to ditch in the ocean. For a week after the battle search planes scoured the area, looking for these men floating in their life rafts. Many were picked up, including the sole Survivor of the attack of the torpedo planes, who died just a few years ago. Many more were never found though. During wartime, warships are completely blacked out at night, showing no lights whatsoever, to make a difficult target for submarines. Despite numerous Japanese submarines known to be in the area, the American admiral ordered all the lights of the ships turned on, to make it possible for his pilots to find the ships when they got back after dark.

The next day, the remaining Japanese carrier got off an attack that mortally wounded the Yorktown. While that attack was in the air heading for the American Fleet, an American attack was going the other way, and sank this last carrier too.