was fought on this date in 1942.
From Rear Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison, esteemed historian and author of History of United States Naval Operation in World War II, a brief summary of the Battle of Midway from The Oxford History of the American People:
In the next and more vital Japanese offensive, Yamamoto went all-out. Personally assuming command, he brought with him almost every capital ship of the Japanese navy except the carriers damaged in the Coral Sea. His first objective was to capture Midway, a tiny atoll at the tip end of the Hawaiian chain, 1134 miles northwest of Pearl Harbor, where the United States had an advanced naval and air base. Yamamoto wanted Midway as a staging point for air raids to render Pearl Harbor untenable by the American Pacific Fleet. Minor objectives were Attu and Kiska, two barren islands in the western Aleutians which he wanted as the northern anchor of the new ribbon defense. Yamamoto’s dearest object, however, was to force Nimitz to give battle with his numerically inferior Pacific Fleet. He had his wish, but this time the battle did not go to the strong.
Nimitz guessed what Yamamoto was up to, but had only a small fleet to stop him. First, he reinforced Midway with planes to the saturation point. Next, he sent out Rear Admiral Raymond A. Spruance to command carriers Enterprise and Hornet with their attendant cruisers and destroyers; Rear Admiral Fletcher in carrier Yorktown (damaged in the Coral Sea but promptly repaired) hastened to join. On 4 June 1942, the Japanese four. carrier force, advancing undetected under a foul-weather front, was near enough Midway to batter the air base. A brave group of twenty-six obsolete marine fighter planes, together with anti-aircraft guns on the island, disposed of about one-third of the enemy attackers. The rest bombed Midway severely but not lethally.
Admiral Nagumo, the Japanese carrier-force commander, had a painful surprise on the morning of 4 June, when he learned from a reconnaissance plane that American flattops were approaching. Nagumo then made the fatal decision of the battle. He ordered his reserve attack group, then arming for a second strike on Midway, to be rearmed with the different sort of bombs used against ships, and turned his prows northeastward to close with the American carriers. Spruance and Fletcher already had several flights of torpedo- and dive-bombers flying toward the Japanese; and, owing to Nagumo’s mistake, they had the good fortune to catch three of his four carriers in the vulnerable situation of rearming and refueling planes. But the carrier-plane battle opened ill for the Americans. Nagumo’s combat air patrol of fast fighter planes shot down 35 of the 41 slow torpedo-bombers that came in first. Minutes later, the American dive-bombers hit three carriers and left them exploding and burning. The fourth Japanese carrier, Hiryu, unseen by the American fliers, got off two plane strikes, which found and disabled Yorktown. Fletcher’s flagship, however, was promptly avenged, for an attack group from her deck and from Enterprise jumped Hiryu that afternoon and put her down. A lucky shot by a Japanese submarine later sank Yorktown as she was under tow.
Yamamoto, having lost his four best carriers, ordered a general retirement of his vast fleet. He had sustained the first defeat to the Japanese navy in modern times. The carriers and their air groups were wiped out, and the Stars and Stripes stilI flew over Midway. Only Kiska and Attu – consolation prizes – had been taken by a Japanese task group. The ambitious plans for capturing New Caledonia, the Fijis, and Samoa, had to be scrapped; and the Japanese high command was forced into an unaccustomed defensive position.
This glorious Battle of Midway on 4 June 1942, marked a clean-cut ending to the defensive phase in the Pacific war. For two months there was an ominous pause, each contestant licking his wounds. There then broke out a bloody and desperate six months’ campaign over two focal points – Buna-Gona in New Guinea, and Guadalcanal.