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The Most Decisive Battle In The War In The Pacific
One of the greatest naval victories in human history
On April 18th, 1942, sixteen B-25B Mitchell medium bombers took off from the US carrier Hornet bound for Japan. Through engineering and daring, the Americans managed to launch medium bombers from the deck of a carrier, something that it was never designed to do. The goal was to have these bombers hit targets on the Japanese mainland in response to the attacks on Pearl Harbor six months earlier. The attack would become known as the Doolittle Raid. The bombers did not inflict any serious damage on Japanese industry, but they dealt a major psychological blow to the Japanese and set in motion events that led to the most decisive military victory of the war.
After seeing American planes in their airspace, the Japanese reacted strongly. They believed that they needed to push out the outer boundary of their empire to put American planes out of range of the home islands permanently. In order to achieve this, the Japanese hatched an elaborate plan that required coordination between multiple battlegroups across a line a thousand miles long. The Japanese intended to do battle all the way from the Aleutian Island Chain near Alaska to tiny Midway Atoll in the Central Pacific. The goal was to lure the American fleet into a trap and destroy it. With the…
