The Battle of Midway

The Battle of Midway turned on a lie about drinking water.

Commander Joseph Rochefort's codebreakers at Pearl Harbor had read enough of Japan's naval traffic to know an attack was coming at a place the Japanese called AF. To prove it was Midway, the island's garrison radioed, uncoded, that its water-distilling plant had broken down. Within a day, Japan reported that AF was short of water. Admiral Nimitz put three carriers, Enterprise, Hornet and Yorktown, northeast of the island before the Japanese fleet arrived.

On the morning of June 4, 1942, dive bombers from Enterprise and Yorktown reached the Japanese carriers at about 10:22. In roughly five minutes Akagi, Kaga and Soryu were burning. Hiryu was caught that afternoon and sank the next morning. Four carriers were gone, every one of them a veteran of Pearl Harbor. The Americans lost Yorktown and the destroyer Hammann.

In the picture, a blue-gray navy plane banks steeply over a sea streaked white with wakes. Dark bursts of flak hang in the air around it, a second plane follows, and below, a carrier burns, orange flame under a column of black smoke.