June 4, 1942. Japan has the best carrier force on earth, and it is about to lose four of them in a single day. Six months earlier those same carriers hit Pearl Harbor. Now Admiral Yamamoto wants to finish the job. Take Midway, draw out the American carriers, and destroy them. There's one problem. The Americans already know. At Pearl Harbor, Commander Joseph Rochefort's codebreakers had been reading pieces of Japanese naval traffic for weeks. They kept seeing a target called "AF" and were pretty sure it was Midway. To prove it, Midway sent out a fake message saying its water plant had broken down. Days later the Japanese reported that AF was short of water. So instead of springing a trap, the Japanese were sailing into one. Yamamoto made it worse himself. His plan split the fleet across thousands of miles of ocean. A diversion to the Aleutians. An invasion force. And Yamamoto himself, sitting hundreds of miles behind the carriers with Yamato and the battleships, too far back to matter. On the morning of the 4th, Admiral Nagumo sends planes to hit Midway. The strike leader radios back that the island needs a second attack. Nagumo has a reserve of planes armed to sink ships, waiting in case American carriers show up. His scouts haven't found any. So he orders them rearmed with bombs for land targets. Then a scout plane from the cruiser Tone, launched half an hour late, reports American ships to the northeast. Eventually it mentions a carrier. Now Nagumo has to decide. Launch what he has, with the wrong weapons and no fighter escort, or wait, recover his returning Midway strike, rearm everything properly, and hit the Americans with one big blow. He waits. Crews start swapping the bombs back to torpedoes. In the rush, ordnance gets stacked in the hangars instead of sent back to the magazines. Meanwhile American planes keep coming in, wave after wave, and almost all of them get slaughtered. Torpedo Squadron 8 attacks with 15 planes. Every one is shot down. Ensign George Gay is the only man of 30 who survives, floating in the water and watching what comes next. Those suicidal low-level attacks pull the Japanese fighters down to the waves. At about 10:20, dive bombers from Enterprise and Yorktown arrive overhead almost at the same moment. Lieutenant Commander Wade McClusky had found the Japanese fleet by following a lone destroyer racing to catch up with it. Nobody is up high to stop them. In about five minutes, Akagi, Kaga, and Soryu are burning wrecks. Hangars full of fueled planes and loose bombs turn each one into a bomb. The fourth carrier, Hiryu, hits back hard enough to cripple Yorktown, then gets caught that afternoon and sinks the next morning. Four carriers that hit Pearl Harbor, gone. Now the myth. For decades the story was that Nagumo's decks were packed with planes about to launch, and Japan lost the war by five minutes. That came largely from a Japanese officer's postwar account, and later research tore it apart. The strike wasn't anywhere near ready. The flight decks were mostly clear because they were busy fighting off attacks and launching fighters. Japan didn't lose Midway in five minutes. It lost months before, when its codes were broken, and that morning, when a plan built on surprise ran into an enemy who already knew where to look.