Why was the Battle of Midway considered the turning point of the war in the Pacific?
1 Answer
It was the battle where the USA went from being on defence onto offence in the Pacific theatre.
Explanation:
Japanese expansion into the Pacific had begun long before the US entered WW2 (the late 1930s for the Japanese whereas it wasn't until 1941 that the US entered the war, primarily due to Japan's attack on Pearl Harbour). They had two reasons for this expansion: to collect necessary resources for their continuing war effort, and to create a large defensible boundary by occupying and fortifying islands.
Phase 1 of that strategy was completed relatively easily - the US wasn't in the war yet and seemed to show little signs of getting ready to do so (although it was helping its allies England, France, and Russia in their wars against Japan's allies - the Axis powers - of Germany and Italy) and also was helping in China's efforts to resist Japan's invasion.
As Japan continued to expand further and further into the Pacific, it wanted certainty that the US would be unable to interfere with its plans, and so it attacked Pearl Harbour. In that attack, a big part of the US fleet was destroyed (including essentially all of their battleships). Japan continued expanding, the US entered the war, and the Pacific Fleet, or what was left of it, began trying to prevent further Japanese expansion.
One side note response (and on the surface quite foolhardy) to the attack on Pearly Harbour that turned out to be quite important was a raid by James "Jimmy" Doolittle in April 1942. Sixteen medium bombers set off to bomb Tokyo with no fighter escort, not enough fuel to get home, and no real plan to do so. It was, in essence, a suicide mission that was designed to be a morale boost for the US by bombing a city thought unreachable by bombers. Doolittle did indeed bomb Japan (the raid did little more than minor damage) with his 16 bombers - 15 of which crashed in China and the 16th that successfully landed in Russia (where the crew was immediately interned and the aircraft confiscated). Fourteen complete crews made it back to the US.
The reason why this raid was so important was for its symbolic meaning - the US could bomb Japan, something the Japanese populace had not thought possible. And so demands grew for an extended zone of protection so that bombers would never again reach Japan.
The Japanese decided to set a trap for the remaining American fleet at Midway. The plan itself was pretty straightforward - send bombers from the four Japanese carriers to bomb the island. The Americans, who consider the island strategically critical, would rush up to defend it. Then other elements of the Japanese navy, that were scattered a few hundreds of miles away, would swoop in and destroy what Japanese air power couldn't.
Simple. Except for a couple of things. One was that the battle plan was written as an enormously complex plan that depended on hundreds of little details going exactly right. Another was that ships and men were fatigued from years of fighting. Yet another was that the plan was rushed so that parts of the plan didn't even have a chance to work right.
The last thing, and perhaps the biggest thing, was that the Americans had figured out a part of the Japanese code - meaning that, in this case, they knew there was going to be an ambush somewhere (known only as location AF) but they didn't know where AF was. A member of the intelligence team guessed it was Midway and a plan was put together to confirm. The team broadcast through an unsecured radio channel on Midway that the water purifiers were broken - and the Japanese began chatting about it on secured channels that location AF was out of water.
The Americans knew where and when the ambush was going to be. Now all they needed was luck. Which they got in the form of weather.
The battle spread over June 4-7, 1942 and it was cloudy at the start. The Japanese sent half their aircraft to bomb Midway and the other half were left on deck, ready to attach the American navy, and a few scout planes were sent to look for the Americans - but they never got a good look.
The Americans, for their part, also couldn't find the Japanese fleet despite have many scouts looking. The launch of aircraft off the carriers was slow and inefficient and meant that different aircraft types, instead of flying together and helping each other, were flying separately and many were easy targets of Japanese fighters. But luck played a part - an American scout plane found the Japanese fleet and radioed it in.
Wave after wave of American planes flew in to attack the Japanese - the first waves being easily picked off by Japanese fighters. But as the strike aircraft made their way back to land on Japanese carriers and to refuel and rearm (with gas lines full of fuel on deck and armaments stacked up on deck), with Japanese fighters out of position and low on fuel, waves of torpedo bombers destroyed three Japanese carriers.
The Japanese counterattacked and the Americans counterattacked that, but the real damage was done in that first big part of the battle.
The loss was a blow and an embarrassment to the Japanese - only the High Command knew about the extent of the loss and the public was told it was a great victory. Japanese tactics changed from being very aggressive and confident in their military engagements to trying to minimize their losses - so that their big ships would run rather than fight big battles.
The Americans gained new confidence in their naval air power and developed tactics that enhanced this focus and they also developed new training programs to make air more flexible and faster at dealing with threats.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Midway
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Pearl_Harbor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doolittle_Raid
