On this day in 1942, an ordinary American cargo ship with a single old gun ran into a heavily armed German warship in the middle of the ocean, refused to surrender, and sank it. It is the only time in the entire war that a United States merchant ship destroyed a German surface warship, and the way it happened is almost beyond belief. This is the SS Stephen Hopkins. The Stephen Hopkins was a Liberty ship, one of the plain, mass produced freighters churned out by American shipyards to haul cargo across the oceans. She was not built to fight. Her only real weapon was a single four inch gun mounted on her stern, an old gun manned by a small crew of Navy armed guards and merchant sailors, meant for desperate self defense and nothing more. On the morning of September 27, in the South Atlantic, the Hopkins came out of a curtain of fog and rain and found herself almost on top of two German ships. One was the Stier, a purpose built commerce raider, a warship in disguise bristling with six large guns and torpedo tubes, each of her shells many times the weight of anything the Hopkins could throw. The other was her supply ship. The Germans signaled the American freighter to stop and surrender. Captain Paul Buck refused. He ordered his crew to battle stations and told his single gun to open fire. What followed was a brutal, point blank slugging match between a warship and a cargo ship that had no business fighting one. The Stier's heavy guns tore the Hopkins apart, smashing her engines, setting her ablaze, killing men all across the ship. But the Hopkins gave it back. Her lone four inch gun hammered the German raider again and again, scoring hit after hit low on the hull near the waterline, wrecking the Stier's steering and engine room and starting fires the Germans could not control. Then came the moment that made the fight a legend. The Hopkins's gun crew was cut down, killed and wounded around their weapon. An eighteen year old engine room cadet named Edwin O'Hara, who had escaped the burning engine spaces and knew a little about the gun, ran aft to the shattered, undermanned weapon. With five shells left in the ready box, O'Hara loaded and fired them himself, one after another, single handedly, slamming his last rounds into the German raider. He was mortally wounded doing it. Both ships were doomed. The Stephen Hopkins, blazing and broken, finally went down. But the Stier was hurt even worse. So badly damaged she could not be saved, the German raider was scuttled by her own crew less than two hours later. The little Liberty ship had killed her. The cost was terrible. Most of the Hopkins's crew died, including Captain Buck and young O'Hara. Only fifteen men got away in a lifeboat, and they drifted across the open Atlantic for about a month before finally reaching the coast of Brazil to tell the story. Captain Buck and Cadet O'Hara were honored for their gallantry, and the Stephen Hopkins was enshrined as a gallant ship, the humble freighter that took on a German warship gun to gun and sent it to the bottom on this day in 1942.

Japan's biggest naval mistake of WW2 wasn't losing four carriers at Midway. It happened six months earlier, on the morning of December 7th, 1941, and it came down to one decision: go home. To understand why it mattered, you have to understand why Japan attacked at all. It was about oil. In the summer of 1941 the United States cut off oil exports to Japan, and Japan imported the vast majority of its oil. The Imperial Navy was burning through its reserves just sitting in port. Admiral Yamamoto's plan was to knock the U.S. Pacific Fleet out long enough for Japan to seize the oil fields of the Dutch East Indies and dig in. Six carriers. 353 aircraft in two waves. It worked better than almost anyone in Tokyo expected. Eight battleships hit, four sunk or capsized. Nearly 200 American aircraft destroyed, most of them caught on the ground. Over 2,400 Americans killed. Japan lost 29 planes. Then Admiral Nagumo made his call. He didn't know where the American carriers were. The defenders were fully alert now, and the second wave had taken most of Japan's losses. His own ships were running on thin fuel margins a long way from home. He'd won a stunning victory without losing a single major ship, and he wasn't going to gamble it. The fleet turned around. No third wave. That's defensible if you're thinking about the next 48 hours. It's a disaster if you're thinking about the next four years. Because of what he left standing. The fuel. Roughly 4.5 million barrels of oil sat in above-ground tanks within sight of the harbor, every drop shipped across 2,000 miles of open ocean. Burn it and the Pacific Fleet can't operate out of Hawaii. It pulls back to the West Coast and the war in the Pacific stalls for a year or more. Nimitz later reportedly said losing it would have prolonged the war by two years. A nation that went to war over oil flew right past the biggest oil target in the Pacific. The dry docks and repair yards. The machine shops. The cranes. The workforce. Of the eight battleships hit, six came back. West Virginia and California were both sunk at their moorings, raised out of the mud, and rebuilt. In October 1944 they were steaming in a line at Surigao Strait with three other Pearl Harbor survivors, crossing the T on a Japanese battleship force in the last battleship-vs-battleship fight in history. The ships Japan "destroyed" helped finish its navy. The submarine base. Barely touched. American submarines went on to sink more than half of Japan's entire merchant fleet. Oil tankers, troop transports, cargo ships. For an island empire that lived on imports, that was slow strangulation. And in a windowless basement a short walk from Battleship Row, a team of Navy codebreakers under Commander Joseph Rochefort went right back to work. They called themselves Station HYPO. By May 1942 they were reading enough of Japan's naval code to know a major attack was coming against a target labeled "AF." They suspected Midway. So Midway sent out a fake message saying its water plant had broken down. Days later, Japanese traffic reported that AF was short of water. Nimitz now knew where, and roughly when. Then every piece Japan ignored clicked into place at once. Yorktown limped into Pearl badly damaged after the Coral Sea. The Japanese believed she'd been sunk. Navy engineers estimated she needed around three months of repairs. Nimitz gave them three days. Around 1,400 workers swarmed her in the dry dock Japan never bothered to hit, working around the clock. About 72 hours later she was headed out to sea. She met up with Enterprise, which had been at sea returning from Wake Island on December 7th, and Hornet, which had still been in the Atlantic when the bombs fell. They were running on fuel from the tanks Japan left standing, and they were waiting exactly where the codebreakers said the enemy would come. On June 4th, 1942, in about six minutes of dive bombing, three Japanese carriers were turned into burning wrecks. The fourth went down the next morning. Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, Hiryu. Every one of them had launched planes against Pearl Harbor. Hundreds of veteran Japanese aviators and irreplaceable aircraft mechanics were lost with them, and Japan's training pipeline never caught up. The other two Pearl Harbor carriers didn't survive either. Shokaku was sunk by a U.S. submarine in 1944. Zuikaku went down at Leyte Gulf four months later. All six carriers that attacked Pearl Harbor ended up on the bottom of the Pacific. Japan didn't lose the war at Midway. Midway is just where the bill came due. They lost it on December 7th, when they hit everything that made headlines and nothing that actually mattered.