At 9:55 on the morning of June 4, 1942, Lieutenant Commander Clarence Wade McClusky was looking down at almost nothing.
Below his formation stretched the Pacific Ocean.
Blue water.
White clouds.
No Japanese carriers.
No battleships.
No columns of smoke revealing an enemy fleet.
No wakes large enough to identify a carrier task force maneuvering below.
The aircraft around him were Douglas SBD Dauntless dive-bombers from USS Enterprise.
They had already flown farther than the situation was supposed to require.
Their fuel gauges were moving in the wrong direction.
Some of the pilots had been airborne long enough that the question was no longer simply whether they would find the Japanese fleet.
The question was whether they would have enough gasoline left to return to an American carrier afterward.
McClusky had led them toward the location where intelligence and earlier reports suggested Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo's carrier force should be.
The ocean had answered with emptiness.
For a carrier commander, an empty sea could be more frightening than enemy gunfire.
Gunfire meant the enemy had been found.
Empty water meant every remaining decision was based on uncertainty.
McClusky had two broad choices.
He could turn back.
That decision was rational.
His crews were valuable.
His aircraft were valuable.
The Enterprise was hundreds of miles from Pearl Harbor in the middle of a battle the United States could not afford to lose.
Sending dozens of aircraft into the Pacific until their fuel tanks emptied would accomplish nothing.
A commander responsible for those men had every reason to preserve them.
The other choice was to continue searching.
That decision carried a different danger.
Some aircraft might never reach the carrier again.
Pilots could end up ditching at sea.
The entire strike might disappear without attacking anything.
There was no guarantee the Japanese carriers lay just beyond the horizon.
They could be twenty miles away.
They could be fifty miles away.
They could have changed course completely.
Yet McClusky understood something that mattered even more than the fuel remaining in his aircraft.
The Japanese carriers had to be somewhere.
And if the Americans did not find them soon, the battle might be decided in Japan's favor before another opportunity appeared.
He kept looking.
Then he noticed one ship.
It was not a carrier.
It was not even close to the size of the targets he wanted.
A Japanese destroyer was moving quickly across the ocean below.
To an exhausted pilot hunting an entire carrier fleet, one destroyer could have seemed irrelevant.
Destroyers operated far from carriers for many reasons.
They screened formations.
They hunted submarines.
They rescued aviators.
They carried messages.
They investigated contacts.
The ship itself was not worth risking the fuel of more than thirty dive-bombers.
McClusky did not attack it.
Instead, he asked a more important question.
Why was that destroyer moving so fast?
And where was it going?
The ship below was Arashi.
Earlier that morning, it had been left behind by the Japanese carrier force while dealing with an American submarine.
Now it was racing to rejoin Nagumo.
The destroyer's commander knew exactly where the carriers were.
McClusky did not.
For a few moments, the destroyer's wake became something more valuable than any radio message.
It became an arrow.
McClusky turned his bombers onto the ship's general course.
The American aircraft followed.
What happened next would become one of the most consequential sequences in the history of naval aviation.
But the decision only makes sense when viewed against everything that had already gone wrong that morning.
Because by the time McClusky saw Arashi, the Battle of Midway did not look like an American victory waiting to happen.
It looked like an American attack coming apart.
The Battle Had Begun Before the Fleets Could See Each Other
Midway was a tiny atoll in the central Pacific.
Its physical size did not explain its importance.
Its location did.
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Pacific balance had shifted violently.
Japanese forces moved across Southeast Asia and the western Pacific with extraordinary speed.
The Philippines came under attack.
British positions fell.
The Netherlands East Indies were invaded.
Japanese carrier aviation appeared capable of striking almost anywhere.
Then, in April 1942, American B-25 bombers launched from USS Hornet and bombed Japan in the Doolittle Raid.
The physical destruction was limited.
The psychological effect was much larger.
Japan's home islands had been reached.
For Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, one problem stood behind that embarrassment.
American aircraft carriers remained alive.
The battleships at Pearl Harbor had been devastated, but the American carriers had not been present during the December attack.
Those carriers now represented a mobile threat Japan had not eliminated.
Yamamoto wanted a battle that would finish the problem.
Midway offered bait.
Japanese forces would attack and occupy the atoll.
The Americans, forced to defend an important outpost relatively close to Hawaii, would send their carriers.
Japanese forces would destroy them.
At least, that was the expectation.
The plan was elaborate.
Too elaborate.
Japanese forces were spread across enormous distances.
A diversionary operation would take place in the Aleutians.
The main carrier strike force would approach Midway.
An invasion force would follow.
Yamamoto's main body remained farther behind.
The plan assumed surprise.
That assumption failed before the first Japanese bomb struck Midway.
American naval intelligence had been reading portions of Japanese naval communications.
Cryptanalysts associated with Station HYPO in Hawaii, under Commander Joseph Rochefort and others, had concluded that the target identified in Japanese messages as "AF" was Midway.
To confirm the assessment, Midway transmitted an uncoded message reporting a problem with its water supply.
Japanese traffic soon referred to AF suffering a water shortage.
The identification was effectively confirmed.
Admiral Chester Nimitz now possessed something almost impossible to purchase in war.
Foreknowledge.
He knew the Japanese were coming.
He knew roughly what they intended.
He knew when the danger would arrive.
But intelligence is not victory.
Knowing that someone plans to punch you does not guarantee you can avoid the fist.
Nimitz still had fewer carrier resources than he wanted.
USS Lexington had been lost at the Battle of the Coral Sea.
USS Yorktown had been damaged there.
Repair estimates suggested significant work.
Nimitz did not have the luxury of significant time.
Pearl Harbor repair crews performed extraordinary work.
Yorktown returned to sea.
She joined Enterprise and Hornet northeast of Midway.
Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher commanded the overall American carrier force from Yorktown.
Rear Admiral Raymond Spruance commanded the group centered on Enterprise and Hornet.
Spruance was not the officer originally expected to command those carriers.
Vice Admiral William Halsey was ill.
Halsey recommended Spruance.
The decision placed a cruiser officer at the center of one of the largest carrier battles yet fought.
The Americans knew approximately where the Japanese should appear.
The Japanese believed the Americans would react after Midway was attacked.
That difference gave the United States a chance.
Only a chance.
Nagumo's Carriers Arrived With Experience the Americans Feared
The Japanese carrier force approaching Midway was formidable.
Four fleet carriers formed its core.
Akagi.
Kaga.
Soryu.
Hiryu.
These were not inexperienced ships with newly assembled air groups.
Their aviators included veterans of the attack on Pearl Harbor and months of operations across the Pacific and Indian Ocean.
Japanese carrier doctrine was sophisticated.
Aircraft were trained to launch coordinated strikes.
Fighters, dive-bombers, and torpedo aircraft could work together with devastating effectiveness.
The Mitsubishi A6M Zero had gained a fearsome reputation.
Its maneuverability could overwhelm older American fighters when pilots tried to fight on Japanese terms.
Nagumo had confidence for reasons grounded in recent experience.
Japanese carrier forces had repeatedly struck opponents before those opponents could respond effectively.
Midway seemed likely to follow the same pattern.
Before dawn on June 4, Nagumo launched a major strike against Midway.
More than one hundred Japanese aircraft headed toward the atoll.
Their mission was to destroy American aircraft and defenses sufficiently to prepare the island for invasion.
Midway's radar detected the incoming raid.
American fighters rose.
Bombers stationed on the island began taking off.
The Japanese attacked.
Buildings were damaged.
Fuel installations and defensive positions were struck.
But Midway was not neutralized.
The commander of the returning Japanese strike reported that another attack would be necessary.
That report placed Nagumo inside the decision cycle that would define the morning.
He had kept reserve aircraft available aboard his carriers.
Some were intended for use against American ships if those ships appeared.
Now Midway required another strike.
Nagumo had to decide what weapons his waiting aircraft should carry.
Aircraft meant for attacks against ships required torpedoes or appropriate armor-piercing bombs.
Aircraft intended for another attack against Midway required different ordnance.
Changing weapons aboard a carrier is not instant.
Bombs and torpedoes must be moved.
Aircraft must be fueled.
Crews must prepare them.
The flight deck must remain available for launches and recoveries.
Then new information arrived.
American ships had been sighted.
The enemy carriers might be nearby.
The tactical problem changed again.
Weapons needed to be appropriate for ships.
Nagumo's crews worked through repeated changes as the morning developed.
Later retellings often describe the Japanese hangar decks as impossibly crowded with bombs and torpedoes lying loose everywhere, creating a simple explanation for why the carriers burned so catastrophically.
The reality was more complicated.
Japanese carriers were vulnerable because they were conducting intense flight operations, aircraft were being fueled and armed in the normal violence of carrier warfare, and American bombs eventually reached them at the worst possible time.
The important point is not a cartoon image of decks covered casually with explosives.
The important point is tempo.