Nagumo was trying to solve several problems simultaneously.
Recover the Midway strike.
Prepare another strike.
Maintain fighter protection.
Respond to reports of American ships.
Identify whether carriers were actually present.
Launch against them.
All while American attacks were already beginning to arrive.
The First American Attacks Did Almost Nothing to the Carriers
American aircraft from Midway reached the Japanese force before McClusky's strike.
They attacked aggressively.
They did not sink a carrier.
Army B-26 Marauders attempted torpedo attacks.
Navy torpedo bombers from Midway attacked.
Marine aircraft attacked.
High-altitude bombers tried to hit maneuvering ships.
The Japanese carrier force survived.
For Nagumo, these attacks were alarming but manageable.
Japanese combat air patrol fighters intercepted attackers.
Anti-aircraft guns fired.
Ships maneuvered.
American bombs fell into the sea.
American torpedoes failed to produce the desired results.
From the Japanese perspective, the enemy appeared courageous but tactically ineffective.
That impression would continue for much of the morning.
It was reinforced when American carrier torpedo squadrons arrived.
The men flying those aircraft were about to pay one of the most terrible prices of the battle.
The TBD Devastator Was Already Obsolete
The Douglas TBD Devastator had once represented modern naval aviation.
By June 1942, the war had moved beyond it.
The aircraft was slow.
When carrying a torpedo, it became even more vulnerable.
Effective torpedo attack required approaching at low altitude and relatively low speed.
That meant flying toward warships protected by fighters and anti-aircraft guns while remaining inside a predictable attack profile.
American torpedoes themselves had serious reliability problems.
This created an almost impossible combination.
The crews had to survive intense defenses in order to deliver a weapon that might still fail after release.
Yet the torpedo squadrons went.
From USS Hornet, Torpedo Squadron Eight under Lieutenant Commander John Waldron became separated from much of the rest of the carrier's strike.
Waldron believed the Japanese carriers were in a different direction from that being followed by the main formation.
He turned toward where he believed they would be.
His judgment brought his squadron to the Japanese fleet.
Almost alone.
Fifteen Devastators attacked.
Japanese Zero fighters descended.
The American aircraft had little fighter protection.
One by one, they were shot down.
All fifteen were lost.
Ensign George Gay became the only surviving pilot from the squadron attack.
He ended up in the water beneath the Japanese fleet, hiding as best he could while watching the battle continue around him.
His squadron had not scored the hit that would sink a carrier.
In conventional terms, the attack had failed completely.
Then Torpedo Squadron Six from Enterprise arrived.
It suffered terrible losses.
Then Torpedo Squadron Three from Yorktown came in.
It too encountered the Japanese fighters.
The Devastators pressed their low-altitude runs.
Aircraft fell.
Torpedoes missed or failed.
The Japanese carriers remained afloat.
If a historian freezes the battle at that moment and evaluates only immediate damage, the American torpedo attacks appear catastrophic.
Aircraft lost.
Crews killed.
No carriers sunk.
Yet war is shaped by interactions that are not always visible to the people creating them.
The Japanese fighters defending the fleet had been drawn down.
Again and again, they had descended to attack low-flying torpedo planes.
The combat air patrol was working.
It was also being pulled toward sea level.
Fighters consumed ammunition and fuel.
Pilots concentrated on threats below.
Japanese ships maneuvered constantly to avoid torpedoes.
The entire formation was reacting horizontally.
Almost nobody below knew that a different kind of American attack was approaching from thousands of feet above.
McClusky Had Already Been Searching Too Long
The dive-bombers from Enterprise had launched that morning as part of a strike intended to find the Japanese carriers.
Wade McClusky, the air group commander, was an experienced naval aviator.
His aircraft and the squadrons around him climbed and moved toward the expected enemy position.
Their search was complicated by incomplete information.
Carrier warfare in 1942 contained an almost primitive uncertainty compared with later eras.
There were no satellites displaying the ocean.
No airborne warning aircraft orbiting high above the fleet with modern radar.
No digital data links showing every formation.
Scouting reports arrived with coordinates that could be delayed, incomplete, or incorrect.
Ships moved while messages traveled.
Even a perfectly accurate contact report became increasingly wrong with every minute if the enemy maintained speed and direction.
McClusky arrived where the Japanese were expected to be.
Nothing.
Pilots around him knew the fuel situation.
An SBD carried only so much gasoline.
Search longer and the return journey becomes questionable.
Every extra mile outbound must eventually be paid for.
The ocean gave no indication that four Japanese carriers were nearby.
A less aggressive decision would have been understandable.
Turn east.
Return to Enterprise.
Refuel.
Try again if time remained.
McClusky instead conducted a search pattern.
He reasoned that the Japanese force had probably changed course.
He continued.
This was the moment before the famous destroyer sighting, but it is important not to treat the decision as though McClusky possessed secret knowledge.
He did not know he was minutes away from history.
He knew only that the enemy had not been where expected.
He had to infer movement from incomplete information.
Then he saw the destroyer.
Arashi Had Been Delayed by an American Submarine
USS Nautilus had been operating beneath the same battle.
American submarines did not play the decisive offensive role at Midway that planners might have hoped, but Nautilus created one extraordinary side effect.
The submarine had attacked Japanese ships and repeatedly attracted attention.
Japanese destroyers responded with depth charges.
One of the ships involved was Arashi.
The destroyer spent time dealing with the submarine while Nagumo's main formation continued moving.
Eventually, Arashi had to catch up.
A destroyer separated from a carrier task force does not rejoin by wandering.
Its commander knows the fleet's course and speed.
The ship accelerates.
The wake becomes long and obvious.
From high above, McClusky saw exactly that.
A single ship making speed northeast.
He could have assumed the destroyer was independent.
Instead, he connected its behavior to the fleet he was hunting.
A destroyer racing somewhere with purpose was probably going toward something important.
McClusky changed course.
His dive-bombers followed.
The decision consumed more fuel.
It also turned the destroyer into an involuntary guide.
Arashi had no idea it was leading American bombers toward the center of the Japanese carrier force.
The destroyer's crew was trying to return to protection.
By moving directly toward the fleet, they helped reveal it.
This was not the kind of intelligence that appears in a code room.
No intercepted radio transmission was necessary.
McClusky read behavior.
A ship moving at speed had told him something simply by moving.
Minutes passed.
Then the ocean changed.
Dark shapes appeared ahead.
Wakes.
Large ships.
Escorts.
And then the unmistakable long decks of carriers.
McClusky had found Kido Butai.
The fuel problem remained.
Now it no longer mattered in the same way.
A pilot low on gasoline can still attack.
He only has to worry about the return afterward.
The Japanese carriers were below.
The Enterprise dive-bombers began positioning for attack.
And at almost exactly that moment, another group of American dive-bombers was approaching from a different direction.
Max Leslie's Yorktown Bombers Arrived From Another Piece of the Battle
USS Yorktown had launched its own strike.
Its dive-bombing group included Bombing Squadron Three under Lieutenant Commander Maxwell Leslie.
Like the Enterprise aircraft, the Yorktown bombers faced confusion in locating targets and coordinating arrival.
Carrier strikes rarely appeared over the target in one perfect cinematic formation.
Aircraft became separated.
Fighters missed rendezvous.
Squadrons followed different contact reports.
Fuel altered decisions.
Clouds concealed formations.
The American attack reaching Nagumo therefore arrived in fragments.
For much of the morning, that fragmentation had seemed disastrous.
The torpedo squadrons arrived separately and were mauled separately.
Fighter coordination failed.
Different groups searched empty ocean.
But now fragmentation produced an unexpected form of convergence.
McClusky's Enterprise dive-bombers approached from above.
Leslie's Yorktown dive-bombers appeared around the same time.
Below them, Japanese attention had been concentrated on low-level torpedo attacks.
The sky at high altitude was not empty of defenders by design.
It had become unusually vulnerable because the combat air patrol had spent the morning being dragged downward.
Timing transformed everything.
If the dive-bombers had arrived twenty minutes earlier, more Zeros might have been waiting high.
If they had arrived twenty minutes later, Japanese carriers might have launched a strike against the American fleet.
If McClusky had turned back at the empty search point, his aircraft would never have appeared.
If Arashi had returned by a different route, the American bombers might have continued searching.
If the torpedo squadrons had not attacked when they did, Japanese fighters might have remained higher.
No single factor created the opportunity.
The opportunity formed from several independent events that none of the participants fully controlled.
That is one reason Midway is so often described as a battle of extraordinary timing.
The Japanese Lookouts Saw the Dive-Bombers Too Late
Dive-bombing required altitude.
The SBDs approached high above the carrier formation.