As you saw in the previous slide, Midway is literally midway between nowhere and nowhere. It is the most remote operation I have ever conducted in my life on this planet. You can’t get further from lines of support than going to Midway and then leaving this island in a boat and then steaming 200 miles [320 kilometers] north to a stretch of north Pacific Ocean that is 17, 000 feet [5,200 meters] deep. And that was where this play was acted out. But the prize of that engagement was this tiny atoll and its two islands on the Midway Atoll over this airstrip.

Now, the code breaker, Comdr. Joseph Rochefort, was the head of the decoding team, and it was their brilliance in intercepting the messages, their brilliance in sending the fake message, that really gave us the advanced warning way ahead of the Japanese attack that Midway was the target. It gave Nimitz an opportunity to go to Midway, begin reinforcing the island, and begin assembling his commanders, Commander Fletcher and Commander Spruance—which was a big gamble with Commander Spruance. He was not an Airedale: He was used to fighting with cruisers; he was not experienced in Naval air warfare. Unfortunately, Admiral Halsey was debilitated at the time and could not go into the field, and Spruance was their joint selection, and he really did carry the day. He did an incredible job of assembling the force with Fletcher and began to then deploy toward their counteroffensive.

And so they left Pearl Harbor, first with the Hornet and the Enterprise, and I think that it was the next day—the Yorktown had been turned around in miraculous fashion in the yards of Pearl, and in fact the Yorktown, put to sea on the 30th of May. And at the same time we began probing, trying to find out where the Japanese force were that we knew was bearing down on Midway. The marines dug in and prepared for what was going to be quite a pounding that they were going to receive from that attack force.

This is more than you can look at, more than you can digest, but just to give you a battlefield view, here is Midway [points]. This is Midway. You can see the Japanese force moving in. This is the occupation force, two different forces moving in a pincher, but it was really the aircraft carriers Kaga, Hiryu, Soryu, and Akagi—the carriers that participated in the attack on Pearl Harbor—that were the central players in this battle. And it was on the 4th of June at, as I said, 5 minutes from now, 56 years ago the Japanese began to prepare 26 Kate [torpedo] bombers, 36 Val dive-bombers, and 36 Zero fighters to make that initial attack on Midway.

At the same time that they were doing that, they were probing. They were sending out spotter planes, trying to find if there was a carrier fleet in the area. They wanted to draw it out. They felt they didn’t know if it was in the field at that moment, but they were deploying search planes from their various ships, their cruisers, and their aircraft carriers, searching. And through a pure quirk of fate, one of the planes off the heavy cruiser Tone, the seaplane, was delayed by 30 minutes in getting off. And that 30-minute delay would prove to be the most critical mistake that seaplane ever made in its life, because its area was overlapping the area in which the U.S. forces were deployed. And had he been on time getting off that cruiser, it might have been a very different outcome. But anyway, the strike force came in on Midway, attacking it. But to their surprise, when they arrived, all the airplanes were gone.

Their major goal was to annihilate the air force that was there, the assembled airplanes that were there, and they were all airborne. Although they were very successful in shooting down a lot of them up into the air, their initial objective was not met, and they met a stiff resistance. And when they finished their first strike, they realized they had not finished the job.

We were still able to use the airstrip, still able to put planes into the air, and it became clear that a second strike was necessary. And it was that need for the second strike that would play out so essential that day. Although they attacked, you can see the damage done. Fortunately, a very famous photographer was on the island, a man by the name of John Ford. He’d been sent to document the battle, and National Geographic now has access of all his color footage that documented the attack, which will be certainly integrated into the show.

But then our moment came, and I don’t want to go into the long, long history, because I’d use up the whole briefing time to tell you how we caught them on the deck changing out their weapons, the fatal mistakes they made that led us, and then the harassing activities, the sacrifices by our torpedo planes being annihilated wave after wave after wave, the countless American pilots dying with not injuring the Japanese forces at all. And it was sort of sad to read attack wave after attack wave where they would just annihilate us, and in many cases no one returned. In other cases only one would return, badly shot up, and it was bravery, because they were going in against superior planes and against incredibly trained pilots. But fortunately our Dauntless dive-bombers, who arrived later in the scene that day, found an airspace high up, where all the Zeros were preoccupied having a turkey shoot at low altitude, permitting our Dauntless dive-bombers those critical moments to catch the carriers, who were maneuvering. And in just a matter of moments we were able to successfully attack and disable three of their carriers, and then later their fourth carrier.