On the morning of June 4, 1942, Lieutenant Commander John C. Waldron looked ahead from the cockpit of his TBD Devastator and saw something the rest of his carrier air group had failed to find.
Japanese carriers.
Far below and ahead, dark shapes moved across the Pacific surrounded by escorts.
Above them, Mitsubishi Zero fighters patrolled the sky.
Around them, destroyers and cruisers formed a defensive screen.
The Japanese fleet was not surprised by the sight of American aircraft anymore.
It had already been attacked several times that morning by planes from Midway Atoll.
None of those attacks had seriously damaged the carriers.
Now another group was coming.
Fifteen American torpedo bombers.
They were flying low.
They were flying slowly.
They had no fighter escort.
And they were approaching one of the most heavily defended naval formations in the world.
Waldron understood what that meant.
The TBD Devastator had once been considered an advanced aircraft.
By June 1942, combat had exposed how vulnerable it had become.
A torpedo attack required the airplane to descend close to the ocean, line up on a moving ship, maintain a relatively steady approach, and release its weapon under conditions that made evasive maneuvering extremely difficult.
The Japanese Zero was faster.
Far more maneuverable.
And positioned above the Americans with the enormous advantage of altitude.
Once the fighters began diving, the TBD crews would have few places to go.
Turning hard could ruin the torpedo attack.
Climbing was useless.
Running was impossible.
The Devastators simply were not fast enough.
Waldron's squadron, Torpedo Squadron Eight from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet, had begun the morning with thirty men in fifteen aircraft.
One pilot and one radioman-gunner in each bomber.
They had expected fighter cover.
They did not have it.
They had expected the other elements of Hornet's air group to be somewhere nearby.
They were not.
They had expected, at minimum, that their torpedoes might give them a reasonable chance of crippling an enemy carrier if they could fight their way close enough to release them.
Even that assumption was uncertain.
The American Mark 13 aerial torpedo had serious reliability problems.
Some ran too deep.
Some failed to run properly after entering the water.
Some did not detonate when they should.
Torpedo bomber crews could survive a nearly suicidal approach, release perfectly, and still watch their weapon fail.
Yet Waldron did not turn away.
He had argued before launch about where the Japanese fleet would be.
Now he had found it.
He ordered his squadron into the attack.
The fifteen Devastators began descending toward the ships.
Japanese fighters turned toward them almost immediately.
What followed lasted only minutes.
One TBD fell.
Then another.
Then another.
Aircraft were hit before they ever reached a useful torpedo position.
Others pressed forward through machine-gun fire and anti-aircraft bursts.
Some managed to release.
None scored a confirmed torpedo hit.
Japanese fighters continued cutting through the formation until Torpedo Squadron Eight effectively ceased to exist in the air.
All fifteen Devastators were destroyed.
Thirty men entered the attack.
Twenty-nine were killed.
Only Ensign George Gay survived.
Yet what happened to Torpedo Squadron Eight was not simply a tragic side story to the Battle of Midway.
Nor was it accurate to reduce the squadron to a group of men who knowingly sacrificed themselves so that dive bombers could arrive later.
They had not launched as decoys.
They had expected to attack and damage Japanese carriers.
They had expected coordination that never materialized.
They had expected their weapons to work better than experience had given them reason to believe.
Their attack failed tactically.
No carrier was hit by their torpedoes.
Their squadron was annihilated.
And yet the morning was still unfolding.
More American torpedo bombers were coming.
More Japanese fighters would be pulled into repeated low-altitude defensive battles.
The Japanese combat air patrol would continue reacting to threats arriving from different directions at different times.
And less than an hour after the first Devastators of Torpedo Squadron Eight went down, American dive bombers would appear high above the Japanese carriers at the worst possible moment for the fleet below.
Within minutes, three Japanese carriers would be burning.
The destruction of Torpedo Squadron Eight was therefore neither meaningless nor the simple heroic mechanism later legend sometimes made it.
Its real story is harder.
The men did not know what would happen after they died.
They did not know dive bombers would arrive.
They did not know Midway would become one of the decisive naval battles of the Pacific War.
They knew only that the enemy carriers were in front of them.
Their job was to attack.
And there was almost no chance of getting through.
Six Months Earlier, the Pacific War Had Begun With American Battleships Burning
To understand why fifteen obsolete torpedo bombers were flying toward the Japanese fleet on June 4, it is necessary to return to December 7, 1941.
Pearl Harbor.
Japanese carrier aircraft appeared over Hawaii and struck the U.S. Pacific Fleet with devastating surprise.
Battleships burned.
Aircraft were destroyed on the ground.
Thousands of Americans were killed or wounded.
The attack was a tactical success for Japan, although crucial American aircraft carriers were absent.
In the following months, Japanese forces advanced across an enormous portion of the Pacific and Southeast Asia.
The Philippines.
Malaya.
Singapore.
The Dutch East Indies.
Island bases stretching across the Pacific.
To many people watching events early in 1942, Japan seemed almost impossible to stop.
Its naval aviation arm was among the most experienced and effective in the world.
Japanese carrier pilots had trained intensively before the war.
Their aircraft were excellent.
Their carrier doctrine was sophisticated.
And the strike force that had attacked Pearl Harbor remained largely intact.
The United States, by contrast, was still learning how to fight a carrier war under real combat conditions.
The American Navy had powerful carriers and talented pilots, but it lacked Japan's depth of recent combat experience.
The Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942 became an important early test.
It stopped a Japanese seaborne attempt against Port Moresby and inflicted losses on both sides.
The American carrier Lexington was lost.
Yorktown was damaged.
Japan lost the light carrier Shōhō, while Shōkaku was damaged and Zuikaku's air group suffered substantial losses.
Neither Shōkaku nor Zuikaku would participate in the coming Midway operation.
That mattered enormously.
Japan still possessed four powerful fleet carriers for the Midway strike.
Akagi.
Kaga.
Sōryū.
Hiryū.
They had been part of the force that struck Pearl Harbor.
Their crews were experienced.
Their air groups were dangerous.
They were about to sail into an American ambush without knowing it.
Midway Was a Tiny Atoll With an Enormous Strategic Importance
Midway Atoll lies northwest of Hawaii.
It looks insignificant on a map.
A small group of islands surrounded by ocean.
Yet location can make small places strategically enormous.
If Japan seized Midway, the island could extend Japanese reconnaissance and defensive reach.
It might threaten Hawaii more directly.
Japanese planners also hoped the operation would draw the remaining American carriers into battle.
The Japanese Navy wanted a decisive engagement.
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto believed he could destroy the American carrier force and make the Pacific defense far more difficult.
The Japanese plan was complicated.
Forces were spread across enormous distances.
A diversionary operation toward the Aleutian Islands was included.
The carrier striking force under Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo would attack Midway.
An invasion force would follow.