http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/06/70-years-since-we-won-the-battle-of-midway/print/
THIS WONDERFUL COLUMN REMINDS US OF THE LAST TIME AMERICA FOUGHT TO WIN……RSK
It was this week, seventy years go, that the battle of Midway – by common consent, one of the three most decisive battles of the Second World War – took place.
A great deal rode on this battle, shaped so profoundly by resourcefulness, ingenuity, sacrificial bravery, chance and unexpected turns of fate such that the battle’s outcome might have been diametrically opposite.
Fought over three days, Midway’s decisive moment actually encompassed a mere few minutes in which the fortunes of Imperial Japan and the United States it had assaulted six months earlier at Pearl Harbor were reversed. The all-conquering Japanese, who in those six months had swept through south-east Asia and the western Pacific like a juggernaut, were spectacularly brought to heel. From that day on, the path ahead would be horrific and tortuous, but Japan’s defeat was assured.
Why assured? The Japanese ambition to knock the U.S. out of the Pacific and establish a “Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” – a Japanese empire free of Western influence – always partook of lunacy: the massive industrial might of the U.S. and its ability to husband enormous resources should have foretold Prime Minister Hideki Tojo’s regime that, no matter how stunning and destructive the first, Samurai-like blow inflicted on the Americans, the U.S. would in time recover and overwhelm it with outraged and righteous might. Yet, the awareness in Tokyo of American might (Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy, had spent years in America and seen with his own eyes the dreaded portent of Japan’s fate contained in the gigantic factories of Detroit) only gave the spur to exaggerated Japanese reliance on knock-out blows. And the great intended knock-out blow at Pearl Harbor – which did indeed eliminate for a time the U.S. Navy’s arsenal of battleships – fatefully missed the most important targets of all: the three American aircraft carriers in the Pacific at the time: Enterprise, Lexington and Saratoga. All three were at sea when Admiral Chuichi Nagumo’s Kido Butai, the 1st Carrier Fleet, a strike force of six carriers – the Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu, Soryu, Shokaku and Zuikaku – unleashed their destructive power on December 7, 1941.