August 11, 2025 • 30 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, after Pearl Harbor, American morale was low. The Doolittle Raid, led by Jimmy Doolittle himself, wasn’t expected to do much damage, but it proved to the country and the world that the U.S. could strike back. Six months later, the Japanese navy launched a major offensive in the Pacific, hoping to knock America out for good. The result was the Battle of Midway, one of the most important naval victories of the war. Historian Stephen Ambrose explains how these two moments, linked by timing and strategy, helped shift the course of World War II.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is our American Stories, and we love to tell
stories about our nation's history. Stephen Ambrose was one of
America's leading historians. At the core of his success was
his belief that history is biography, that history is about people.
Ambrose passed away in two thousand and two, but his
storytelling accounts can now be heard here in Our American Stories,
(00:31):
thanks to those who run his estate. Here's Ambrose telling
the story of America's payback for Pearl Harbor, Jimmy Doolittle's
raid on Tokyo, and the Japanese response the Battle of Midway.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
The first good news to come to the American people,
the first good news produced by the American armed forces,
came on April eighteenth, nineteen forty two, almost five months
into the war, before there was any kind of an
America and counter strike against the Japanese. It came on
April eighteenth, and it came in the form of Jimmy
(01:06):
Doolittle's famous raid over Tokyo. But it was a very
risky operations for the Americans to mount again using that
what were now was now becoming recognized as the wholly
new weapon of war at sea, the aircraft carrier and
(01:27):
the aircraft carriers that we had, the Hornet and the Enterprise,
and the Lexington and New York Town, the only ones
we had in the fleet had escaped Pearl Harbor because
they weren't there. They were used to mount this raid,
which meant they had to sail pretty close to Tokyo,
within about three hundred miles, which is for them a
(01:51):
very high risk operation in order to carry out a
raid that had no meaning to it other than the
moral and morale and psychological aspect to it. What they
did was to mount a operation. Under the command of
the Army Air Force's most famous pilot, General James Doolittle.
(02:13):
He'd been training his men for a couple of months
for this how to take B twenty five's off of
the deck of an aircraft carrier. It seemed impossible to
Kate to get a big two engine bomber fully loaded
with fuel and bombs off of the aircraft carrier. But
they practiced down in Florida and got pretty good at it,
and then practiced at See and got so they could
do it. And on April eighteenth, they launched too far
(02:34):
away from the target, but the carriers had been spotted
by a Japanese fishing boat that had been blown out
of the water, but you couldn't be sure they hadn't
gotten a radio message off already. So the decision was
made to launch do a little way too far away,
and then they were gonna have to come over to
Tokyo drop their bombs, and then too far to fly
(02:54):
back to the carriers, so they'd have to continue on
into China to try to get to as fire in
the China as the unoccupied parts and make their landings. Well,
it isn't the best way to go into action, to
be told, go hit your target and then fly on
as far as you can and pray God that you
can get to friendly territory, and then pray God you
can find a place to land when you get there.
(03:17):
In fact, it worked out pretty well. The raid itself
caused some fires in Tokyo and did some damage, by
no means enough to justify even the expenditure of fuel
that had gone into this raid. Better to cause some
physical damage. Some pilots were shot down over Japan. Others
(03:37):
were not able to make it to chen kaishex China.
They came down and occupied China. These pilots were put
on trial by the Japanese and executed, which infuriated the
American people as much as the Baton Death March did.
The majority of the pilots, however, did get into unoccupied
(03:58):
China and eventually got the war, including Doolittle himself who
was on the raid. But for all that, the raid
was terribly expensive and a big diversion of resources and
a major portion of the resources available in the Pacific
at the time, and did so little damage as to
be just negligible. Oh, it was a great triumph. It
lifted spirits in the United States as nothing else could do.
(04:22):
It was the perfect time that it was the perfect
act to help American morale at a time when you
desperately needed some kind of a lift where we struck back.
It also had a terrific psychological effect on Yamamato and
the Japanese leadership in general, because Yamamato had promised the
emperor that no American bombs would ever fall in Japan,
(04:48):
and it had a big effect. This little pinprick raid
had a big effect on the strategy of the war
because it was in response to the disgrace of American
planes having bombed Tokyo that Yamamato and his staff began
(05:09):
working on the plans for what was to become the
Battle of Midway, a battle that Yamamado sought in order
to drive the Americans further east in the Pacific so
that they could never again launch a carrier based rate
against Tokyo. And let's take a look at the Japanese
Empire at its peak. At the beginning of May of
(05:31):
nineteen forty two, most of Burma was in Japanese hands.
Thailand was a neutral but supporting Japan and somewhat the
same relationship to Japan as Franco and Spain were to
Hitler Indo. China, of course, had been occupied by the Japanese.
(05:52):
The eastern two fifths of China was in Japanese hands,
as was Manchuria, as was Korea to the south, the
Dutch East Indies today's Indonesia, British Malaya, the Great Fortress
of Singapore, all of the Philippines, most of New Guinea,
(06:19):
the Solomon Islands and out here to the Gilberts and
the Marshalls, and the Carolines had all been taken by
the Japanese. The Americans had managed to hold onto Wake
Island through to Christmas time of nineteen forty one, and
then had lost the little tiny island called called Wake,
(06:40):
so that the Japanese lining extent ad all the way
to Midway Island, which is a pretty grand sounding name
for what's actually a very small little island without much
in the way of capacity at all. And eventually the
Japanese were to take some American territory up here at
the westernmost tip of Alaska in the Lucian Islands at
(07:00):
too in Kisko. So this is an enormous area that
Japan had overrun more than Japan was capable of defending.
And in this and at about the same time it
happened with Hitler who in nineteen forty two launched another
offensive into the Soviet Union. They had conquered more than
(07:22):
they could defend, but they had caught in both cases
the victory disease, that is, having won a long string
of victories, they figured these would go on until they
had taken the whole world. The Japanese also had the
problem of every time they would take a new position,
say the Gilberts for example, or or Wake Island, then
(07:44):
they would think, well, we ought to go just a
little bit further east and take that next island group
out there in order to defend this one. And they
had taken that one in the first place in order
to defend this one, so that the whole logic of
events kept them expanding time when they should have been
contracting and digging their trenches. So it was what they
(08:06):
didn't have was peace of the United States, and they
had the United States very angry, very determined to press
on with this war. So the Japanese thought, we got
to take the rest of New Guinea, we got to
take part moresbyed and then we got to go down
and take Australia. And once we've got Australia, the Americans
are going to be so far away, and it's such
(08:29):
distances to get to any part of our empire that
they're going to have to give up the war. So
they began to gather another task for us to come
down down here between New Guinea and the Solomon Islands
and to come on down into Australia and take Australia.
(08:51):
The naval forces that were preceding this invasion force came
through on May fifth of nineteen forty two into the
Coral See and on May eighth were found by American
carrier based planes and the Battle of the Coil Sea
that ensued the first battle in history. No one in
(09:14):
the opposing fleet saw each other. It was entirely an
aircraft battle between carrier based planes from the Japanese and
from the Americans. The battle was tactically a draw. The
Japanese sank the Lexington, which is twenty five percent of
(09:37):
America's carrier strength in the Pacific, and they very badly
damaged the York Town. But the Japanese lost a carrier themselves.
More important, they lost their momentum. They had been checked.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
And you're listening to the great Stephen Ambrose, and now
you know why I call him great. This is our
American stories. More with Steven Ambrose after these messages, and
(10:09):
we continue with our American stories and with Stephen Ambrose.
We just heard how the Doolittle raid on Tokyo checked
the Japanese and forced them into, let's face it, some
unforced errors. Let's continue with Stephen Ambrose.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
The Japanese, who had up until this time looked as
much like supermen in Asia as the Germans that looked
like supermen in Europe until the Battle of Moscow in
December of nineteen forty one. The Japanese now suddenly looked
vulnerable human people who made mistakes, people who overreached themselves.
(10:46):
And this all leads us up to the Battle of Midway.
Yar Motto, as I said, was a man who had
lost face because of the Doolittle raid. It was determined
to make that up. I wouldn't want to make it
(11:07):
quite that personal. This battle in Midway is one that
the two fleets, the Japanese and American, have been planning
really since nineteen nineteen. This great naval battle was going
to take place in the Central Pacific that was going
to decide the fate of the Pacific. Yamamado decided this
was a pretty good thing on his part to draw
(11:28):
the Americans out into this all out battle before the
Americans could repair the damage done at Pearl Harbor, and
certainly before the Americans, who were now in a feverish
building program in the States, could produce a new fleet.
The Americans would never be weaker, japan would never be stronger,
was a young Motto's attitude. If we can draw them
(11:48):
into this great climactic battle, now we'll win it, and
then we can take Hawaii, and then we can dare
the man take Australia and New Zealand, and we can
dare Americans to try to come back. The plan that
he came up with was exceedingly complex and called for
(12:09):
the whole of the Japanese fleet to be involved in it.
He called Japanese cruisers and destroyers and aircraft carriers back
from Japan's far flung frontier to gather together in the
Home Islands to get ready for the movement out to
Midway Island. He sent one part of this and then
(12:29):
he divided his fleet up. He's been much criticized for this,
and maybe rightly so. So many little things went wrong
for Yama motto in this battle. You really have to
give him a lot of credit for what he was
able to accomplish. And wonder if maybe God, I mean,
just keep this in mind as I talk about this battle,
maybe God doesn't sometimes really does take sides, because this
(12:51):
American victory at Midway in some ways was just dumb luck. Anyway,
Yama model has been much criticized for way too complex
a plan. One group with destroyers and an aircraft carrier
going up here to the Aleutians, to carry out a
bombing attack on Dutch Harbor up here at un Alaska
(13:12):
and to actually occupy the islands of Attu and Kiska.
This was a diversionary attack designed to make the Americans
think that there was a serious threat to Alaska or
the possibility that this was a staging operation for an
attack into Siberia. Meanwhile, three different task force would come
(13:34):
out of the Home Islands headed for Midway. The first
would be the main carrier task force, four carriers strong.
Then would come a battleship aircraft carrier mixed task force
with one full size and two small aircraft carriers in it.
And then finally the main battle fleet, and that second
(13:56):
task force would carry I don't know a dozen more transports,
a few thousand men who were going to occupy Midway
Island army troops. And then the main task force under
Yamamado himself, which would have the most of the battleships,
and another and yet another aircraft carrier following along behind,
and submarines spread all across the Pacific to watch for
(14:18):
the American fleet spread out between Midway and Honolulu in
a semi circle, so that these subway and also flying
reconnaissance missions from the aircraft carriers in this area to
watch the American fleet, which yam Motto assumed was in
Hawaii and on receiving news in an attack, and the
(14:42):
Midway was underway, which Yamamato thought they would never get
until the attack actually started, the Americans would have to
come out to defend Midway, and he could have his
whole fleet there to meet him, battleships with fourteen inch guns,
six aircraft carriers, all of these cruisers and destroyers to
meet this American fleet that was really down to three
aircraft carriers and a few destroyers, and American seapower and
(15:04):
Pacific would be gone at the conclusion of the day.
Won't the bad plant, But things began to go wrong
even before it got started. The first thing that went
wrong goes back to this business of the Japanese that
conquered more than was good for them. Their empire had
(15:25):
become so large that it was very hard to communicate
between Tokyo and the outer most fringes of their empire's frontier.
That meant, for example, very practical, very small thing. Nations
in the period of the radio of the wireless transmission
have learned to make codes because obviously you send out
(15:50):
a message over the radio, anybody can pick it up,
so you put it in code so that anybody who
picks it up can't read it. Anybody can break code.
I mean, if you can make a code, you can
break a code. Never been a code yet that can't
be broken. Germans thought they had one, turned out they didn't.
Japanese thought they had one. They're so called purple code.
(16:11):
They thought was unbreakable, especially if you take proper precautions,
one part of which is you change the code every month,
change your settings, so that the crypto analysis teams that
are looking at this stuff have to start as almost
brand new each month. The Japanese Empire had gotten so
(16:32):
big they couldn't get the new code books out to
the units out on the edge of the empire in time,
so that the code change it should have come on
April first, nineteen forty two, was not put into effect.
And that meant that all the work that the American
(16:55):
code breakers in Hawaii had been putting in on the
Japanese code in March didn't just come to an end
at the end of March. They could go right on
into April because the Japanese were still using the same code. Now.
It was obvious from the flow of traffic after the
Coral Sea Battle that the Japanese fleet was concentrating the
(17:17):
younger model was bringing him in from everywhere and putting
the whole of his fleet together, and it was much
bigger than anything the Americans had in the Pacific. The
question was where are they going to attack? The code
breakers were reading. It depended and in some cases you
could read even half of a message, and other cases
(17:37):
all you could make out was that a message had
been since very very seldom that you could read as
much as ninety percent in a message. But you put
the whole thing together. This is in extremely difficult work.
You put it all together and you can come up
with some patterns and some hard information. The patterns and
(17:58):
hard information they came up with. Whereas I've said that
the fleet is gathering, now where is it going to strike?
They even knew what the target was. X Y was
the Japanese designation of the target. They just didn't know
where x Y was. The man in charge of code
breaking in Hawaii, a naval officer named Rochefort, said, I
(18:21):
think it's midway that they're after, but his sappiors, it
can't be Midway. They can't be bringing their whole fleet
together for so small an objective as that. It's got
to be something bigger. They must be after Hawaii itself,
And therefore we ought to prepare the defenses in Hawaii
(18:41):
and forget about Midway.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
And you're listening to Steven Ambrose tell one heck of
a story, one of the great naval battles in history,
certainly the turning point in World War Two. And now
we're hearing the stories of these remarkable code breakers and
what a job that was, what a responsibility? Without that information?
(19:04):
How do we act? How do we know what to do?
And to have our best and brightest going to work
every day to try and out smart their best and brightest.
It does not get better than this, the great Stephen
Ambrose taking us home after these commercial messages. This is
our American stories, and we continue with our American stories.
(19:40):
And when we last left off, Stephen Ambrose was telling
the story of naval Commander Joseph Rochfort's code breaking prediction
that Japan's next attack would be on a small Pacific
island called Midway. Is Superiors thought the Japanese would try
to invade the Hawaiian islands. Let's return to Ambroo.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
Roche Fort was certain that he was right, and he
came up with an ingenious way of proving it. He
persuaded his bosses to have the garrison on Midway Island
send out a low level coded message saying that they
were out of fresh water and their desolenization plan had
(20:23):
broken down and they needed fresh water. And then, sure enough,
doesn't Rochfort pick up a message three or four days
later from Tokyo to Yamamado's fleet saying, X, Y is
out of fresh water. You better put some more water
on those transports, and he had them. So the Americans
(20:44):
had an advantage that the defense that almost never has
in battle the side of the offense always has this
great advantage. They know where and when the battle is
going to be fought. Ah, but this time we knew too,
even better, admits knew, and Yamamato didn't know that he knew.
So Yamamato and the Japanese admirals proceeded with their plans
(21:08):
on the assumption that surprise was going to be achieved,
and after all, they had done it so well at
Pearl Harbor. They were the experts at this Bull Halsey
was commander of the American aircraft carriers. He was one
of the legendary heroes of the war. But he came
down with a severe attack of shingles at this time,
(21:30):
and so Admiral Nimants had to replace him with Admiral Spruans,
who took command then for the Battle of Midway. Spruans
had three aircraft carriers, or really two and a half.
He had the Enterprise, the Hornet, and the York Town. Now,
the York Town had been so badly damaged, and Carl
c that the Japanese had listed it as sunk, and
in fact it had been towed back to Honolulu and
(21:54):
arrived in Honolulu at the very end of May. The
naval officers who went on board to look at the
damage to the York Town, which was put into dry dock,
estimated that we can have this baby fixed up and
ready to go to sea again in ninety days. Balan said,
(22:14):
you got three You got three days for the next
three days, and they worked twenty four hours a day
through all precautions to the winds, turned on the floodlights
at night. The welders worked twenty four hours a day.
Three days later, the Yorktown sailed on the third of June,
(22:36):
with still a lot of carpenters and welders and civilians
on board who were not at all happy to be
going into a middle of a battle. But they got
the York Town there and got her out in time.
The American fleet, the three carriers got up to the
(22:57):
north to the west of Midway. When the Japanese began
the attack on Midway on the morning of June fourth,
with their dive bombers and their fighter aircraft. They did
considerable damage to the facilities at Midway, but they didn't
(23:17):
put the airfield out of operation, and they took some
pretty heavy losses themselves. Through the rest of the morning
and on into the afternoon, the various airplanes on Midway
undertook strikes against this Japanese carrier fleet that, as I said,
was out in front. B seventeens went after him, B
twenty fours went after him. Marine fighter planes went after
(23:40):
Marine dive bombers went after him, and not a single
hit was scored, not one. This was primarily because the
Japanese had a very effective air cover over their carriers,
and the zero was just a much better plane than
anything the United States had. It was fast, stir and
more maneuverable and could obtain higher altitudes. So the attempt
(24:08):
on the part of the people on Midway to defend
themselves failed utterly. However, the pilots came back and said,
we need to hit Midway again. That airfield is still usable.
They still got strength on Midway. We need to hit
it again now. The Japanese admirals were worried about where
are the American carriers. Oh, that was always their biggest worry,
(24:30):
where are the American carriers. They had sent scout planes
out towards Hawaii to watch for the American carriers, expecting
them to come out. That never occurred to the American
carriers were laying out there north of Midway Island. The plane,
although they were cautious enough to ascent planes in every direction,
(24:51):
the plane that was going in this direction, which would
have taken them right over the top of the American
carrier fleet, developed engine trouble and was an hour late
getting off, so that the Japanese didn't know if the
American carriers were in the area. Now the call came
for let's hit Midway again. Japanese planes had landed. The
(25:17):
lead pilot had gone up onto the deck of the
carrier and talked to the admirals up there and said,
we need to hit them again now. At this time,
the Japanese were reloading their planes with torpedoes for the
torpedo planes and putting iron bombs on their bombers. They're
light one engine bombers, putting on armor piercing bombs. Thinking
(25:42):
now we've hit Midway, we've knocked it out. Now the
Americans are going to attack us sooner or later, probably sooner.
When they do, they'll have revealed their positions or we'll
find them, and we're going after those carriers. And we're
going to go after those carriers whore torpedoes and armor
piercing bombs. Now they change their mind, we're gonna go
back and hit MIID again. So it was unload all
(26:02):
those torpedoes and unload all those armor piercing bombs and
load them up with bombs that are appropriate to hit
the airfield at midway. This process took about an hour,
and it left the Japanese for some period of time
without any fighter air cover, which would jih Modo quickly
made up for by getting some zeros down and gasped
(26:25):
up and re new loads of ammunition and got those
zeros up for fighter cover again. Meanwhile, Admostpruance now had
word as to where the Japanese were, and although he
was at the extreme limits of the range of his fighters,
he ordered everyone that could fly into the air and
go out after that Japanese fleet and put it in
(26:47):
the bottom of the ocean. Some planes never did find
the Japanese fleet. The torpedo planes did, and they came in,
two squadrons of them, and they took the first squadron
one hundred percent losses, the next ninety percent losses, and
were unable to score any hits at all. Probably that
was because those torpedoes ran too deep. That is, there
(27:08):
were pilots who did everything right and then had to
walk helplessly as the torpedoes just went underneath the Japanese
aircraft carriers. A squadron from the York Town carrying bombs
dive bombers, the last in the air that had any
chance at all of inflicting any damage whatsoever. In the
Japanese fleet was just about at the absolute limit of
(27:31):
its range. We're gonna have to turn around and fly
back to the aircraft carriers that there's gonna be any
hope at all of recovery that day at McCluskey was
the guy's name was half Indian, the squadron leader, and
the Tim McCluskey was just about to give the order
when there was breaking the clouset. He looked down and
here were the four Japanese carriers, all of them at
(27:52):
this time intact. I wait, the United States is done
everything it had at him from Midway and from the
other carriers, and hadn't done the slightest damage. And here
they were, the four carriers down there. Let's go, he said,
and these dive bombers began coming down on him. The
Japanese zeros were all down at water level fighting off
torpedo bombers unmolested. These dive bombers came in and dropped
(28:15):
their bombs right down the stacks of the Japanese carriers,
and within five minutes the Japanese fleet was gone, not
quite literally, one aircraft carrier was still afloat, but in
those five minutes the history of the Pacific was changed forever.
That was the Great Battle of the Pacific that for
(28:35):
fifty years people had been on both sides, been anticipating
and looking forward to, and it was just went that quick.
Three carriers to the bottom. That fourth carrier, the plane
that had gone out on the search mission for Yorktown
and Hornet Enterprise, finally did get off, finally found him,
sent backward that he had found him, gave the coordinates
(28:55):
the Japanese off their last remaining carrier able to get
a flight out, that went out and sank Yorktown. That
carrier itself was caught the next day by American planes
and was sunk, so that the NSCAR was four Japanese
carriers gone, one American carrier gone, and the Japanese had
been turned back. This was the end of the Japanese
offensive in World War Two. They were never again to
(29:18):
undertake a serious offensive by sea. The Japanese Navy hadn't
quite ceased to exist. The boy it was nothing like
what it had been five minutes before McCluskey broke through
that cloud barrier.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
And you've been listening to Steven Ambrose tell the story
of Midway, the backstory, the whole story, and a special
thanks to Greg Hangler, and a special thanks to the
Ambrose Estate for allowing us to keep these stories coming. Regrettably,
they're not taught in school anymore, and they should, because,
my goodness, would young boys and girls be riveted to
this story. People close to their age, if they're in
(29:58):
high school. We're doing these things. They were running these missions.
They were going into battle. What a time to be
young and old to be living through something like this,
for better and for worse, the battle for Midway and beyond.
Here on our American stories
This is our American Stories, and we love to tell
stories about our nation's history. Stephen Ambrose was one of
America's leading historians. At the core of his success was
his belief that history is biography, that history is about people.
Ambrose passed away in two thousand and two, but his
storytelling accounts can now be heard here in Our American Stories,
(00:31):
thanks to those who run his estate. Here's Ambrose telling
the story of America's payback for Pearl Harbor, Jimmy Doolittle's
raid on Tokyo, and the Japanese response the Battle of Midway.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
The first good news to come to the American people,
the first good news produced by the American armed forces,
came on April eighteenth, nineteen forty two, almost five months
into the war, before there was any kind of an
America and counter strike against the Japanese. It came on
April eighteenth, and it came in the form of Jimmy
(01:06):
Doolittle's famous raid over Tokyo. But it was a very
risky operations for the Americans to mount again using that
what were now was now becoming recognized as the wholly
new weapon of war at sea, the aircraft carrier and
(01:27):
the aircraft carriers that we had, the Hornet and the Enterprise,
and the Lexington and New York Town, the only ones
we had in the fleet had escaped Pearl Harbor because
they weren't there. They were used to mount this raid,
which meant they had to sail pretty close to Tokyo,
within about three hundred miles, which is for them a
(01:51):
very high risk operation in order to carry out a
raid that had no meaning to it other than the
moral and morale and psychological aspect to it. What they
did was to mount a operation. Under the command of
the Army Air Force's most famous pilot, General James Doolittle.
(02:13):
He'd been training his men for a couple of months
for this how to take B twenty five's off of
the deck of an aircraft carrier. It seemed impossible to
Kate to get a big two engine bomber fully loaded
with fuel and bombs off of the aircraft carrier. But
they practiced down in Florida and got pretty good at it,
and then practiced at See and got so they could
do it. And on April eighteenth, they launched too far
(02:34):
away from the target, but the carriers had been spotted
by a Japanese fishing boat that had been blown out
of the water, but you couldn't be sure they hadn't
gotten a radio message off already. So the decision was
made to launch do a little way too far away,
and then they were gonna have to come over to
Tokyo drop their bombs, and then too far to fly
(02:54):
back to the carriers, so they'd have to continue on
into China to try to get to as fire in
the China as the unoccupied parts and make their landings. Well,
it isn't the best way to go into action, to
be told, go hit your target and then fly on
as far as you can and pray God that you
can get to friendly territory, and then pray God you
can find a place to land when you get there.
(03:17):
In fact, it worked out pretty well. The raid itself
caused some fires in Tokyo and did some damage, by
no means enough to justify even the expenditure of fuel
that had gone into this raid. Better to cause some
physical damage. Some pilots were shot down over Japan. Others
(03:37):
were not able to make it to chen kaishex China.
They came down and occupied China. These pilots were put
on trial by the Japanese and executed, which infuriated the
American people as much as the Baton Death March did.
The majority of the pilots, however, did get into unoccupied
(03:58):
China and eventually got the war, including Doolittle himself who
was on the raid. But for all that, the raid
was terribly expensive and a big diversion of resources and
a major portion of the resources available in the Pacific
at the time, and did so little damage as to
be just negligible. Oh, it was a great triumph. It
lifted spirits in the United States as nothing else could do.
(04:22):
It was the perfect time that it was the perfect
act to help American morale at a time when you
desperately needed some kind of a lift where we struck back.
It also had a terrific psychological effect on Yamamato and
the Japanese leadership in general, because Yamamato had promised the
emperor that no American bombs would ever fall in Japan,
(04:48):
and it had a big effect. This little pinprick raid
had a big effect on the strategy of the war
because it was in response to the disgrace of American
planes having bombed Tokyo that Yamamato and his staff began
(05:09):
working on the plans for what was to become the
Battle of Midway, a battle that Yamamado sought in order
to drive the Americans further east in the Pacific so
that they could never again launch a carrier based rate
against Tokyo. And let's take a look at the Japanese
Empire at its peak. At the beginning of May of
(05:31):
nineteen forty two, most of Burma was in Japanese hands.
Thailand was a neutral but supporting Japan and somewhat the
same relationship to Japan as Franco and Spain were to
Hitler Indo. China, of course, had been occupied by the Japanese.
(05:52):
The eastern two fifths of China was in Japanese hands,
as was Manchuria, as was Korea to the south, the
Dutch East Indies today's Indonesia, British Malaya, the Great Fortress
of Singapore, all of the Philippines, most of New Guinea,
(06:19):
the Solomon Islands and out here to the Gilberts and
the Marshalls, and the Carolines had all been taken by
the Japanese. The Americans had managed to hold onto Wake
Island through to Christmas time of nineteen forty one, and
then had lost the little tiny island called called Wake,
(06:40):
so that the Japanese lining extent ad all the way
to Midway Island, which is a pretty grand sounding name
for what's actually a very small little island without much
in the way of capacity at all. And eventually the
Japanese were to take some American territory up here at
the westernmost tip of Alaska in the Lucian Islands at
(07:00):
too in Kisko. So this is an enormous area that
Japan had overrun more than Japan was capable of defending.
And in this and at about the same time it
happened with Hitler who in nineteen forty two launched another
offensive into the Soviet Union. They had conquered more than
(07:22):
they could defend, but they had caught in both cases
the victory disease, that is, having won a long string
of victories, they figured these would go on until they
had taken the whole world. The Japanese also had the
problem of every time they would take a new position,
say the Gilberts for example, or or Wake Island, then
(07:44):
they would think, well, we ought to go just a
little bit further east and take that next island group
out there in order to defend this one. And they
had taken that one in the first place in order
to defend this one, so that the whole logic of
events kept them expanding time when they should have been
contracting and digging their trenches. So it was what they
(08:06):
didn't have was peace of the United States, and they
had the United States very angry, very determined to press
on with this war. So the Japanese thought, we got
to take the rest of New Guinea, we got to
take part moresbyed and then we got to go down
and take Australia. And once we've got Australia, the Americans
are going to be so far away, and it's such
(08:29):
distances to get to any part of our empire that
they're going to have to give up the war. So
they began to gather another task for us to come
down down here between New Guinea and the Solomon Islands
and to come on down into Australia and take Australia.
(08:51):
The naval forces that were preceding this invasion force came
through on May fifth of nineteen forty two into the
Coral See and on May eighth were found by American
carrier based planes and the Battle of the Coil Sea
that ensued the first battle in history. No one in
(09:14):
the opposing fleet saw each other. It was entirely an
aircraft battle between carrier based planes from the Japanese and
from the Americans. The battle was tactically a draw. The
Japanese sank the Lexington, which is twenty five percent of
(09:37):
America's carrier strength in the Pacific, and they very badly
damaged the York Town. But the Japanese lost a carrier themselves.
More important, they lost their momentum. They had been checked.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
And you're listening to the great Stephen Ambrose, and now
you know why I call him great. This is our
American stories. More with Steven Ambrose after these messages, and
(10:09):
we continue with our American stories and with Stephen Ambrose.
We just heard how the Doolittle raid on Tokyo checked
the Japanese and forced them into, let's face it, some
unforced errors. Let's continue with Stephen Ambrose.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
The Japanese, who had up until this time looked as
much like supermen in Asia as the Germans that looked
like supermen in Europe until the Battle of Moscow in
December of nineteen forty one. The Japanese now suddenly looked
vulnerable human people who made mistakes, people who overreached themselves.
(10:46):
And this all leads us up to the Battle of Midway.
Yar Motto, as I said, was a man who had
lost face because of the Doolittle raid. It was determined
to make that up. I wouldn't want to make it
(11:07):
quite that personal. This battle in Midway is one that
the two fleets, the Japanese and American, have been planning
really since nineteen nineteen. This great naval battle was going
to take place in the Central Pacific that was going
to decide the fate of the Pacific. Yamamado decided this
was a pretty good thing on his part to draw
(11:28):
the Americans out into this all out battle before the
Americans could repair the damage done at Pearl Harbor, and
certainly before the Americans, who were now in a feverish
building program in the States, could produce a new fleet.
The Americans would never be weaker, japan would never be stronger,
was a young Motto's attitude. If we can draw them
(11:48):
into this great climactic battle, now we'll win it, and
then we can take Hawaii, and then we can dare
the man take Australia and New Zealand, and we can
dare Americans to try to come back. The plan that
he came up with was exceedingly complex and called for
(12:09):
the whole of the Japanese fleet to be involved in it.
He called Japanese cruisers and destroyers and aircraft carriers back
from Japan's far flung frontier to gather together in the
Home Islands to get ready for the movement out to
Midway Island. He sent one part of this and then
(12:29):
he divided his fleet up. He's been much criticized for this,
and maybe rightly so. So many little things went wrong
for Yama motto in this battle. You really have to
give him a lot of credit for what he was
able to accomplish. And wonder if maybe God, I mean,
just keep this in mind as I talk about this battle,
maybe God doesn't sometimes really does take sides, because this
(12:51):
American victory at Midway in some ways was just dumb luck. Anyway,
Yama model has been much criticized for way too complex
a plan. One group with destroyers and an aircraft carrier
going up here to the Aleutians, to carry out a
bombing attack on Dutch Harbor up here at un Alaska
(13:12):
and to actually occupy the islands of Attu and Kiska.
This was a diversionary attack designed to make the Americans
think that there was a serious threat to Alaska or
the possibility that this was a staging operation for an
attack into Siberia. Meanwhile, three different task force would come
(13:34):
out of the Home Islands headed for Midway. The first
would be the main carrier task force, four carriers strong.
Then would come a battleship aircraft carrier mixed task force
with one full size and two small aircraft carriers in it.
And then finally the main battle fleet, and that second
(13:56):
task force would carry I don't know a dozen more transports,
a few thousand men who were going to occupy Midway
Island army troops. And then the main task force under
Yamamado himself, which would have the most of the battleships,
and another and yet another aircraft carrier following along behind,
and submarines spread all across the Pacific to watch for
(14:18):
the American fleet spread out between Midway and Honolulu in
a semi circle, so that these subway and also flying
reconnaissance missions from the aircraft carriers in this area to
watch the American fleet, which yam Motto assumed was in
Hawaii and on receiving news in an attack, and the
(14:42):
Midway was underway, which Yamamato thought they would never get
until the attack actually started, the Americans would have to
come out to defend Midway, and he could have his
whole fleet there to meet him, battleships with fourteen inch guns,
six aircraft carriers, all of these cruisers and destroyers to
meet this American fleet that was really down to three
aircraft carriers and a few destroyers, and American seapower and
(15:04):
Pacific would be gone at the conclusion of the day.
Won't the bad plant, But things began to go wrong
even before it got started. The first thing that went
wrong goes back to this business of the Japanese that
conquered more than was good for them. Their empire had
(15:25):
become so large that it was very hard to communicate
between Tokyo and the outer most fringes of their empire's frontier.
That meant, for example, very practical, very small thing. Nations
in the period of the radio of the wireless transmission
have learned to make codes because obviously you send out
(15:50):
a message over the radio, anybody can pick it up,
so you put it in code so that anybody who
picks it up can't read it. Anybody can break code.
I mean, if you can make a code, you can
break a code. Never been a code yet that can't
be broken. Germans thought they had one, turned out they didn't.
Japanese thought they had one. They're so called purple code.
(16:11):
They thought was unbreakable, especially if you take proper precautions,
one part of which is you change the code every month,
change your settings, so that the crypto analysis teams that
are looking at this stuff have to start as almost
brand new each month. The Japanese Empire had gotten so
(16:32):
big they couldn't get the new code books out to
the units out on the edge of the empire in time,
so that the code change it should have come on
April first, nineteen forty two, was not put into effect.
And that meant that all the work that the American
(16:55):
code breakers in Hawaii had been putting in on the
Japanese code in March didn't just come to an end
at the end of March. They could go right on
into April because the Japanese were still using the same code. Now.
It was obvious from the flow of traffic after the
Coral Sea Battle that the Japanese fleet was concentrating the
(17:17):
younger model was bringing him in from everywhere and putting
the whole of his fleet together, and it was much
bigger than anything the Americans had in the Pacific. The
question was where are they going to attack? The code
breakers were reading. It depended and in some cases you
could read even half of a message, and other cases
(17:37):
all you could make out was that a message had
been since very very seldom that you could read as
much as ninety percent in a message. But you put
the whole thing together. This is in extremely difficult work.
You put it all together and you can come up
with some patterns and some hard information. The patterns and
(17:58):
hard information they came up with. Whereas I've said that
the fleet is gathering, now where is it going to strike?
They even knew what the target was. X Y was
the Japanese designation of the target. They just didn't know
where x Y was. The man in charge of code
breaking in Hawaii, a naval officer named Rochefort, said, I
(18:21):
think it's midway that they're after, but his sappiors, it
can't be Midway. They can't be bringing their whole fleet
together for so small an objective as that. It's got
to be something bigger. They must be after Hawaii itself,
And therefore we ought to prepare the defenses in Hawaii
(18:41):
and forget about Midway.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
And you're listening to Steven Ambrose tell one heck of
a story, one of the great naval battles in history,
certainly the turning point in World War Two. And now
we're hearing the stories of these remarkable code breakers and
what a job that was, what a responsibility? Without that information?
(19:04):
How do we act? How do we know what to do?
And to have our best and brightest going to work
every day to try and out smart their best and brightest.
It does not get better than this, the great Stephen
Ambrose taking us home after these commercial messages. This is
our American stories, and we continue with our American stories.
(19:40):
And when we last left off, Stephen Ambrose was telling
the story of naval Commander Joseph Rochfort's code breaking prediction
that Japan's next attack would be on a small Pacific
island called Midway. Is Superiors thought the Japanese would try
to invade the Hawaiian islands. Let's return to Ambroo.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
Roche Fort was certain that he was right, and he
came up with an ingenious way of proving it. He
persuaded his bosses to have the garrison on Midway Island
send out a low level coded message saying that they
were out of fresh water and their desolenization plan had
(20:23):
broken down and they needed fresh water. And then, sure enough,
doesn't Rochfort pick up a message three or four days
later from Tokyo to Yamamado's fleet saying, X, Y is
out of fresh water. You better put some more water
on those transports, and he had them. So the Americans
(20:44):
had an advantage that the defense that almost never has
in battle the side of the offense always has this
great advantage. They know where and when the battle is
going to be fought. Ah, but this time we knew too,
even better, admits knew, and Yamamato didn't know that he knew.
So Yamamato and the Japanese admirals proceeded with their plans
(21:08):
on the assumption that surprise was going to be achieved,
and after all, they had done it so well at
Pearl Harbor. They were the experts at this Bull Halsey
was commander of the American aircraft carriers. He was one
of the legendary heroes of the war. But he came
down with a severe attack of shingles at this time,
(21:30):
and so Admiral Nimants had to replace him with Admiral Spruans,
who took command then for the Battle of Midway. Spruans
had three aircraft carriers, or really two and a half.
He had the Enterprise, the Hornet, and the York Town. Now,
the York Town had been so badly damaged, and Carl
c that the Japanese had listed it as sunk, and
in fact it had been towed back to Honolulu and
(21:54):
arrived in Honolulu at the very end of May. The
naval officers who went on board to look at the
damage to the York Town, which was put into dry dock,
estimated that we can have this baby fixed up and
ready to go to sea again in ninety days. Balan said,
(22:14):
you got three You got three days for the next
three days, and they worked twenty four hours a day
through all precautions to the winds, turned on the floodlights
at night. The welders worked twenty four hours a day.
Three days later, the Yorktown sailed on the third of June,
(22:36):
with still a lot of carpenters and welders and civilians
on board who were not at all happy to be
going into a middle of a battle. But they got
the York Town there and got her out in time.
The American fleet, the three carriers got up to the
(22:57):
north to the west of Midway. When the Japanese began
the attack on Midway on the morning of June fourth,
with their dive bombers and their fighter aircraft. They did
considerable damage to the facilities at Midway, but they didn't
(23:17):
put the airfield out of operation, and they took some
pretty heavy losses themselves. Through the rest of the morning
and on into the afternoon, the various airplanes on Midway
undertook strikes against this Japanese carrier fleet that, as I said,
was out in front. B seventeens went after him, B
twenty fours went after him. Marine fighter planes went after
(23:40):
Marine dive bombers went after him, and not a single
hit was scored, not one. This was primarily because the
Japanese had a very effective air cover over their carriers,
and the zero was just a much better plane than
anything the United States had. It was fast, stir and
more maneuverable and could obtain higher altitudes. So the attempt
(24:08):
on the part of the people on Midway to defend
themselves failed utterly. However, the pilots came back and said,
we need to hit Midway again. That airfield is still usable.
They still got strength on Midway. We need to hit
it again now. The Japanese admirals were worried about where
are the American carriers. Oh, that was always their biggest worry,
(24:30):
where are the American carriers. They had sent scout planes
out towards Hawaii to watch for the American carriers, expecting
them to come out. That never occurred to the American
carriers were laying out there north of Midway Island. The plane,
although they were cautious enough to ascent planes in every direction,
(24:51):
the plane that was going in this direction, which would
have taken them right over the top of the American
carrier fleet, developed engine trouble and was an hour late
getting off, so that the Japanese didn't know if the
American carriers were in the area. Now the call came
for let's hit Midway again. Japanese planes had landed. The
(25:17):
lead pilot had gone up onto the deck of the
carrier and talked to the admirals up there and said,
we need to hit them again now. At this time,
the Japanese were reloading their planes with torpedoes for the
torpedo planes and putting iron bombs on their bombers. They're
light one engine bombers, putting on armor piercing bombs. Thinking
(25:42):
now we've hit Midway, we've knocked it out. Now the
Americans are going to attack us sooner or later, probably sooner.
When they do, they'll have revealed their positions or we'll
find them, and we're going after those carriers. And we're
going to go after those carriers whore torpedoes and armor
piercing bombs. Now they change their mind, we're gonna go
back and hit MIID again. So it was unload all
(26:02):
those torpedoes and unload all those armor piercing bombs and
load them up with bombs that are appropriate to hit
the airfield at midway. This process took about an hour,
and it left the Japanese for some period of time
without any fighter air cover, which would jih Modo quickly
made up for by getting some zeros down and gasped
(26:25):
up and re new loads of ammunition and got those
zeros up for fighter cover again. Meanwhile, Admostpruance now had
word as to where the Japanese were, and although he
was at the extreme limits of the range of his fighters,
he ordered everyone that could fly into the air and
go out after that Japanese fleet and put it in
(26:47):
the bottom of the ocean. Some planes never did find
the Japanese fleet. The torpedo planes did, and they came in,
two squadrons of them, and they took the first squadron
one hundred percent losses, the next ninety percent losses, and
were unable to score any hits at all. Probably that
was because those torpedoes ran too deep. That is, there
(27:08):
were pilots who did everything right and then had to
walk helplessly as the torpedoes just went underneath the Japanese
aircraft carriers. A squadron from the York Town carrying bombs
dive bombers, the last in the air that had any
chance at all of inflicting any damage whatsoever. In the
Japanese fleet was just about at the absolute limit of
(27:31):
its range. We're gonna have to turn around and fly
back to the aircraft carriers that there's gonna be any
hope at all of recovery that day at McCluskey was
the guy's name was half Indian, the squadron leader, and
the Tim McCluskey was just about to give the order
when there was breaking the clouset. He looked down and
here were the four Japanese carriers, all of them at
(27:52):
this time intact. I wait, the United States is done
everything it had at him from Midway and from the
other carriers, and hadn't done the slightest damage. And here
they were, the four carriers down there. Let's go, he said,
and these dive bombers began coming down on him. The
Japanese zeros were all down at water level fighting off
torpedo bombers unmolested. These dive bombers came in and dropped
(28:15):
their bombs right down the stacks of the Japanese carriers,
and within five minutes the Japanese fleet was gone, not
quite literally, one aircraft carrier was still afloat, but in
those five minutes the history of the Pacific was changed forever.
That was the Great Battle of the Pacific that for
(28:35):
fifty years people had been on both sides, been anticipating
and looking forward to, and it was just went that quick.
Three carriers to the bottom. That fourth carrier, the plane
that had gone out on the search mission for Yorktown
and Hornet Enterprise, finally did get off, finally found him,
sent backward that he had found him, gave the coordinates
(28:55):
the Japanese off their last remaining carrier able to get
a flight out, that went out and sank Yorktown. That
carrier itself was caught the next day by American planes
and was sunk, so that the NSCAR was four Japanese
carriers gone, one American carrier gone, and the Japanese had
been turned back. This was the end of the Japanese
offensive in World War Two. They were never again to
(29:18):
undertake a serious offensive by sea. The Japanese Navy hadn't
quite ceased to exist. The boy it was nothing like
what it had been five minutes before McCluskey broke through
that cloud barrier.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
And you've been listening to Steven Ambrose tell the story
of Midway, the backstory, the whole story, and a special
thanks to Greg Hangler, and a special thanks to the
Ambrose Estate for allowing us to keep these stories coming. Regrettably,
they're not taught in school anymore, and they should, because,
my goodness, would young boys and girls be riveted to
this story. People close to their age, if they're in
(29:58):
high school. We're doing these things. They were running these missions.
They were going into battle. What a time to be
young and old to be living through something like this,
for better and for worse, the battle for Midway and beyond.
Here on our American stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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