On the morning of June 4, 1942, seventeen dive bombers lifted off the deck of the carrier Yorktown, one after another, using the wind over the bow to climb into a sky that did not belong to them. The men in the cockpits were not part of that ship. Their own carrier sat in a dry dock three thousand miles away. The entire squadron had been borrowed and placed aboard a damaged carrier they had never seen before, just three days earlier.

The landing signal officer was a stranger. The ready room belonged to someone else. The ordnance crews who hung the bombs under their wings were not the men who had done it before. Everything about the ship was different except the mission.

Somewhere beyond the horizon, four Japanese carriers were steaming toward Midway. These seventeen aircraft were about to change the course of the Pacific War, and none of the pilots knew it yet. At that moment, Lieutenant Commander Maxwell Leslie was leading Bombing Squadron Three. He was thirty-nine years old, a graduate of the Naval Academy, a steady and highly regarded dive bomber commander.

His squadron belonged to the carrier Saratoga, but Saratoga was in a shipyard in Puget Sound, crippled by a Japanese torpedo off Hawaii five months earlier. The torpedo had killed six men and flooded three engine rooms, but the ship made it back to Oahu under her own power. The damage was severe enough to require months of repairs on the West Coast. Her air groups did not go with her.

The pilots stayed in Hawaii, flying from island airfields, waiting for a ship that would not return soon. Bombing Squadron Three flew the Douglas SBD Dauntless, a sturdy two-seat dive bomber. It was not built for speed, not built for dogfighting, but in trained hands it was the most accurate ship-killing weapon the Navy possessed. The pilots could push the nose over at nearly seventy degrees and put a thousand-pound bomb where they aimed it.

The squadron had trained for years, logging hundreds of hours, practicing the dive until it was muscle memory. What they lacked in May 1942 was a home. They were a carrier squadron without a carrier, sleeping in barracks, eating in mess halls, flying over Oahu while the war continued without them. Then Yorktown came back from the Coral Sea.

She had been in near-constant combat since late January, striking targets from the Marshalls to the Solomons, and finally fighting the two-day Battle of the Coral Sea, which cost the Navy the carrier Lexington and left Yorktown damaged by a bomb that penetrated several decks before exploding. She reached Pearl Harbor on May 27, limping, with a damaged flight deck and an exhausted air group. The men at Pearl Harbor performed a miracle. Welders worked around the clock, replacing steel plates, patching the damage.

The repair was supposed to take ninety days. They did it in seventy-two hours, and she put to sea again on May 30. But fixing the hull was only half the problem. Her squadrons were worn out.

There was no time to rebuild an air group from scratch. The Navy needed planes, so they borrowed the Dauntlesses of Bombing Three. The squadron flew out over the water and trapped aboard Yorktown one by one. Each plane caught a wire and stopped abruptly on a deck none of their crews had ever used.

The landing signal officer was unfamiliar. The ready room was unfamiliar. The deck handling procedures were different from Saratoga. The ordnance men who hung the bombs were not the same men.

Everything was different except the mission. Torpedo Squadron Three, also from Saratoga, came aboard too, flying slow, obsolete Devastators under Lieutenant Commander Lance Massey. The fighter squadron had been rebuilt around Lieutenant Commander John Thach, drawing pilots from two different units, some of whom did not know each other, flying Grumman Wildcats that could absorb punishment a lighter Zero could not survive. Before launch on the morning of June 4, the three squadron commanders met to solve a problem with no satisfactory answer.

Thach wanted eight fighters to escort the torpedo planes. He got six. There were twelve slow torpedo aircraft that had to fly straight and level toward the enemy fleet, and Leslie’s dive bombers above them, and six fighters to cover it all. Thach believed the Wildcats should stay with the torpedo planes, which would have to approach at wave-top height directly into the teeth of every gun in the Japanese fleet.

Massey disagreed. In the Coral Sea, he told Thach, Japanese fighters had stayed high where the dive bombers flew. That was where the escort belonged. The math was brutal.

Six fighters could not cover two groups at different altitudes. One group would go unprotected. In the end, the six Wildcats accompanied Massey’s torpedo planes. The dive bombers would fly toward the Japanese fleet with no fighter escort at all.

Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, the senior American officer on the scene, was cautious by nature and by experience. At dawn he sent ten Dauntlesses on a short scouting mission north to make sure no Japanese carrier lurked near Yorktown. That cost precious time. Enterprise and Hornet began launching at seven a.

m. Midway time. Yorktown did not begin launching her strike until 8:38, nearly an hour and a half behind the other two carriers. Fletcher also kept Yorktown’s own scout squadron on deck, ready to launch in case a fifth Japanese carrier appeared.

Leslie expected that squadron to follow and join the attack. The second launch was canceled. The strike would go in with what was available. No one told Leslie he would fly the entire mission believing another dive bomber squadron was somewhere behind him.

It was not. Three squadrons flew northwest toward the Japanese fleet. Seventeen Dauntlesses, twelve Devastators, six Wildcats. The torpedo planes launched first.

The dive bombers orbited for twelve minutes, then climbed out to pass the slower torpedo planes. The fighters launched last, carrying the smallest fuel tanks in the formation. According to Navy doctrine, the dive bombers were supposed to arrive over the enemy just before the torpedo planes, forcing the carriers to maneuver against bombs from above while torpedoes came in at wave height from another direction. Theory said it would be a coordinated attack.

Nothing that morning went according to plan. Over the open water, with Yorktown falling behind and the horizon empty in every direction, Leslie reached for the new electric arming switch mounted in his cockpit. A bomb that was not armed might hit a ship and never explode. The Navy had recently introduced an electric switch to replace the old manual procedure.

Beneath Leslie’s Dauntless hung a thousand-pound general purpose bomb. He pressed the switch. The bomb fell. It plunged into the Pacific and sent up a plume of white water on an empty sea.

There was no enemy ship for miles. A fault in the newly installed electric release system had dropped the bomb the moment Leslie tried to arm it. He was now flying a dive bomber whose primary purpose was to deliver a bomb, and the bomb was at the bottom of the ocean. Behind him, within minutes, three other pilots in the squadron reached for the same kind of switch.

Three more bombs fell into the Pacific. Four of the seventeen dive bombers had lost their weapons over the open ocean. The squadron operations report would later record the loss as an unintended release due to faulty electric release linkages. Each of those four men faced the same choice in the next minutes.

They could turn back. Yorktown was behind them. They could land. No one would blame them, because a dive bomber without a bomb had no weapon of value against a warship.

Each still had a pair of forward-firing . 50 caliber machine guns and twin . 30s in the rear seat. They could strafe.

They could draw fire. They could hold formation and lead the armed planes to the target. None of the four turned back. They continued in radio silence, holding their positions, four empty planes among thirteen that still carried the weapon they were designed to deliver.

Most accounts of that morning mention only Leslie’s name. The other three men appear in squadron records, their names in after-action reports, and then they vanish from popular accounts. The squadron flew toward a patch of ocean where the Japanese carriers were supposed to be. The horizon remained empty.

Leslie held his position at the front of the formation. Behind him the seventeen Dauntlesses flew in loose formation, engines thrumming, the ocean below gray and featureless. The radio operators sat facing backward, watching the sky behind the formation for fighters that had not appeared. In the far northwest, the Japanese carriers had endured a long and violent morning.

Since dawn, attacks had come from Midway itself. Six Navy Avenger torpedo planes went first; five were shot down. Four Army B-26 Marauders followed; two were destroyed. Marine dive bombers attacked in two separate groups and lost more than half their number without hitting a ship.

Fifteen Army B-17s dropped their loads from twenty thousand feet and hit only water. No bomb or torpedo from any of these attacks struck a Japanese ship. The Japanese fighters had destroyed everything thrown at them. The four carriers were untouched.

Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo had reason for confidence. Then the American carrier planes began to arrive, and the nature of the battle changed. Torpedo Squadron Eight from Hornet arrived first, alone, without fighter cover. Its commander, Lieutenant Commander John Waldron, had broken away from the Hornet air group on a course of his own choosing, convinced he knew where the Japanese were.

He was right about the location. He was wrong about what would happen when he arrived alone. All fifteen of his Devastators were shot down. Only one man survived.

Torpedo Squadron Six from Enterprise attacked next and lost ten of fourteen planes. No torpedo hit anything. The Japanese fighters chased the torpedo planes down to wave height and stayed there, refueling and rearming between sorties, stacked up low where the slow targets flew. Every wave of torpedo planes was destroyed or driven off without scoring a hit.

The fighter pilots were skilled, but they had developed a pattern. Every threat so far had come from low or medium altitude. The torpedo planes came in at wave height. The Marine dive bombers had been intercepted on the way down.

High overhead, the B-17s were no concern. The combat air patrol was spread across the formation, responding to threats from multiple directions, but concentrated toward the sectors where the recent attacks had come from. Massey brought his twelve Devastators down to about 150 feet above the water, low enough that spray was visible beneath them, too low for any fighter to attack from below. With him were Thach’s six Wildcats, the only American fighters that would reach the Japanese fleet that morning.

Six planes against an estimated thirty or forty Zeros in the air, perhaps more. About fourteen miles from the nearest carrier, the Zeros found them. Thach had developed a defensive maneuver for exactly this kind of fight. Two Wildcats flying side by side, close enough to turn toward each other.

When a Zero locked onto the tail of one Wildcat, both turned inward at the same time. The Zero was forced to fly straight through the guns of the other Wildcat. Then the two Americans reversed course and repeated the process. It would become known as the Thach Weave.

Midway was the first time it was used in combat. It worked. The Zeros could not stay behind a Wildcat long enough to deliver a killing blow before the other Wildcat swept their path with gunfire. But for every Zero Thach shot down, two more took its place.

His fuel was running out, his ammunition was going fast, and below him the torpedo planes were being torn apart. Six Wildcats could not hold off dozens of Zeros and protect twelve torpedo planes at once. Below Thach, Massey led Torpedo Squadron Three toward the nearest carrier, Hiryu. About a mile out, Massey turned to begin his torpedo run, but a Zero shot him down.

He was killed before he could release his torpedo. The rest of the squadron pressed on through the gunfire, each pilot holding his course long enough to drop. Of the twelve Devastators launched from Yorktown that morning, ten were shot down. Only two returned.

No torpedo hit anything. The three American torpedo squadrons that attacked the Japanese fleet lost thirty-five of forty-one planes and scored no hits at all. By any measure of immediate results, the torpedo attacks were catastrophic failures. But something else happened while the torpedo planes were being destroyed.

The Japanese defenses had been drawn down toward the ocean surface and scattered across multiple threat sectors. The constant attacks had forced the combat air patrol to respond again and again to low-altitude threats coming from different directions. The approach of Torpedo Three from the southeast had pulled most of the remaining fighters toward that sector at the very moment the American dive bombers were approaching from other directions. Thach would later conclude that the torpedo planes had not died in vain.

Their sacrifice had cleared the sky above the Japanese fleet. The dive bombers arrived high over the Japanese fleet at an altitude where no fighter could intercept them. From the southwest came the Enterprise group under Lieutenant Commander Wade McClusky, whose long, fuel-consuming search had ended when he spotted a Japanese destroyer steering north and followed it to the fleet. McClusky found two carriers to the south, Kaga and Akagi.

He never saw Soryu. She and Hiryu were miles to the north, hidden by haze, distance, and low clouds. From where Leslie’s group flew, high above the northern part of the fleet, only two carriers were visible below. Hiryu was closer, turning hard to avoid the last of Massey’s torpedo planes, her wake tracing a white arc across the water.

Soryu was farther north, steaming what appeared to be a steady course. She had not yet been attacked by any American dive bomber or torpedo plane. Her flight deck was intact. Her anti-aircraft guns were manned, but the fighters that should have been above her were not there.

In her hangars, armed aircraft, exposed fuel, and ammunition had created an extremely dangerous environment. She was a floating bomb waiting for a detonator. She needed only someone to provide the spark. Leslie knew the rule.

Every dive bomber commander in the Navy knew it. When a single squadron encounters two carriers, the leader takes the farther target. The trailing planes separate and take the closer one if they can, or follow the leader if the group stays together. The purpose was simple.

If the leader dove on the nearest ship, the entire formation would pile up on her and the second ship would escape untouched. By targeting the farther carrier, the leader spread the formation across both targets. The rule assumed a second squadron or trailing units would handle the closer ship. Leslie looked at the two ships.

Hiryu was closer. Soryu was farther. Leslie flew over Hiryu without pushing over, holding his course steadily, and aimed his formation at Soryu. His pilots followed.

The entire squadron passed over one perfectly good target to reach the one beyond it. This was not a flash of genius or a moment of heroic instinct. It was routine procedure. The Navy had trained dive bomber commanders to do exactly this.

There was no second squadron behind him to take Hiryu. But Leslie did not know that. He followed the doctrine as if the second squadron existed, because following the doctrine was what he had been trained to do. Instinct would have sent him at the nearest ship.

Training said take the farthest. Leslie took the farthest. At about 10:20 Midway time, Leslie pushed over. His Dauntless nosed down into the dive, falling toward Soryu at an angle near seventy degrees.

The flight deck of the carrier spread before him, a long narrow rectangle marked with a white rising sun circle. There was nothing beneath his plane. The bomb rack was empty. He had only his two forward .

50 caliber machine guns. He aimed at the flight deck and pressed the trigger. The tracers arched down in two converging streams, stitching across the wooden deck and into gun positions along the ship. He held the trigger as long as he could, expending his ammunition belts while the flight deck rushed toward him.

Behind him, the three bomb-laden planes from his division began their dives. The anti-aircraft guns on Soryu and her escorts opened fire, filling the air with black bursts. But in the crucial moment, there were no fighters at altitude to stop the attack. The squadron operations report would note they encountered no fighter opposition during the dive.

Leslie pulled out low over the water, both guns empty, the flight deck of Soryu falling behind him. He had done what he could. He had strafed the ship during his approach, drawing the attention of every anti-aircraft gunner aboard. His radioman in the rear seat, facing backward, fired his twin guns at the ship’s gun positions as they flashed past.

The Japanese gunners tracked Leslie’s plane for a few seconds. Some of them were not tracking the planes that followed. Paul Holmberg was next in. He was Leslie’s wingman, twenty-seven years old, from Stanberry, Missouri, flying directly behind his squadron commander, diving at nearly seventy degrees with Soryu centered in his bomb sight.

At the bottom of his dive he released his thousand-pound bomb and hauled back on the stick before his Dauntless hit the ocean. The bomb left the rack, fell past the displacement yoke, and accelerated downward toward Soryu. It struck the forward flight deck near the bow. It smashed through the wooden planks, through the steel plates below, and continued into the ship before the fuze detonated.

The explosion blasted upward through the flight deck and downward into the hangar where Soryu’s aircraft sat, tanks full, ordnance on their racks. That was the first bomb ever dropped on Soryu. It was released by a pilot flying as wingman to a man who had nothing left to drop. The pilots behind Holmberg came down one after another, each pushing over from high altitude, each using dive brakes to descend through the flak, each aiming at the long rectangle of the flight deck.

A second bomb struck Soryu amidships, punching through the center of the deck and exploding in the hangar below. A third fell aft. With smoke and fire already pouring from the carrier, four of the later pilots shifted their aim to nearby Japanese warships rather than adding bombs to a ship already burning. Modern reconstruction indicates Soryu took three direct hits.

Of the thirteen bomb-carrying planes, roughly nine bombs were aimed at the carrier, making the hit rate close to one in three. Three confirmed hits was an extremely effective attack by a squadron operating from an unfamiliar carrier in its first battle as an integrated unit. The three bombs did more than damage Soryu. They ignited a chain of secondary explosions that made the damage irreversible.

The armed and fueled aircraft, the exposed aviation fuel, and the ordnance in the hangars turned the carrier into a catastrophe waiting to happen. The fires swept through the hangar deck and erupted through the holes in the flight deck. The ship’s own weapons and fuel destroyed her from the inside out. Within minutes the fires were beyond the ability of the damage control parties to contain.

Smoke rose from Soryu in a column visible for miles. She was finished as a warship. No aircraft would ever launch from her again. The flight deck that had been intact five minutes earlier was now torn open in three places.

Men in the engine rooms were forced out by heat and smoke as the ventilation system sucked the fires down through the ship. The ship lost power and stopped, burning from bow to stern. The flight deck buckled and split from the explosions below. On the destroyers watching, men could see flames licking through the gaps in her hull plates.

The paint on her sides was blistering and cracking from the heat. At almost the same moment, the same thing was happening to two other Japanese carriers a few miles to the south. McClusky’s dive bombers from Enterprise had dropped their bombs on Kaga and Akagi. Kaga was burning from bow to stern.

Akagi had taken fewer hits, but fires were spreading through the same type of armed and fueled aircraft that were burning on Soryu. Three of the four carriers in the Japanese strike force had been dealt fatal blows within about five minutes. The strike force that had attacked Pearl Harbor, raided Darwin and Colombo, and swept across the Pacific without significant defeat had just lost three quarters of its carrier strength in the time it takes water to boil. The fourth carrier, Hiryu, was undamaged and still dangerous.

Captain Ryusaku Yanagimoto commanded Soryu. He was forty-nine, a veteran naval officer who had led the carrier at Pearl Harbor and in every battle since. As the fires spread and the explosions continued below decks, he ordered the crew to abandon ship. Men jumped into the water where escorting destroyers would pick them up.

Yanagimoto did not leave. He remained on the bridge. According to accounts that survived the war, an officer was sent to try to persuade him to come down. Yanagimoto refused.

One account says he was last seen standing on the bridge facing forward as the fire closed in around him. He stayed with his carrier as she burned. Soryu sank that evening in the waters north of Midway. Of her crew of roughly 1,100 men, more than 700 were killed.

She went down with her aircraft, her ammunition, and her commander. Leslie did not make it back to Yorktown after the attack. With the carrier under attack by Japanese bombers, and with Leslie and Holmberg temporarily unable to recover their aircraft, their fuel was nearly gone. The two men ditched their Dauntlesses near the heavy cruiser Astoria, and their crews were picked up from the water.

Both survived the war. Both received the Navy Cross for what they did above Soryu that morning. After Leslie left, command of Bombing Squadron Three passed to his executive officer, Lieutenant Dewitt Shumway. Shumway spent the day reorganizing what was left of the squadron, sorting out which pilots had returned, rearming refueling his surviving aircraft aboard Enterprise after Yorktown was knocked out of action, and preparing for whatever came next.

He did not have to wait long. Hiryu responded within hours. Lieutenant Michio Kobayashi led eighteen Val dive bombers toward the American fleet, guided by a scout plane that had spotted Yorktown. They broke through Yorktown’s combat air patrol and the flak barrage.

Kobayashi was killed in the attack. His dive bombers put three bombs into Yorktown, knocking out her boilers and starting fires on her flight deck. The damage control parties aboard Yorktown did exceptional work. They put out the fires, repaired the flight deck, and got the ship back into service.

The work was so good that when Hiryu’s torpedo bombers arrived an hour and a half later, the flight deck looked so clean the Japanese pilots thought they were attacking a different, undamaged carrier. They reported hitting a second American carrier, not realizing it was the same ship. Two torpedoes struck Yorktown on her port side, flooding her engine rooms and heeling her sharply. The list was too severe to correct.

The order to abandon ship was given, and the crew went into the sea. Salvage teams later returned and tried to save her, but on June 6 the Japanese submarine I-168 torpedoed the carrier and sank the destroyer Hammann alongside her. Yorktown capsized and sank in the early hours of June 7. Before she sank, the Americans found Hiryu.

That afternoon, Shumway led the fourteen available aircraft of Bombing Three in a combined attack launched from Enterprise. The strike group included aircraft from Scout Squadron Six and Bombing Squadron Six, with the commander of Scout Six leading the attack. The combined strike found Hiryu steaming alone, the only operational Japanese carrier left. Coming in behind Scout Six’s attack, Bombing Three under Shumway pressed home its run.

The squadron operations report claimed four direct hits. The generally accepted total for the attack was four bomb hits on Hiryu. The ship burned through the night. Her crew was evacuated and she was scuttled on the morning of June 5.

All four Japanese carriers of the Midway strike force had been destroyed. Soryu sank on the evening of June 4. Kaga sank the same night. Akagi and Hiryu were scuttled after the decisive air attacks.

The strike force that had dominated the Pacific for six months was gone. The pilots who had attacked Pearl Harbor, who had sunk Hermes and Dorsetshire, who had never lost a battle, were dead or scattered. The four flight decks that had extended Japanese naval power across a third of the globe lay at the bottom of the ocean. The balance of the Pacific War turned in five minutes on a Tuesday morning, and a borrowed dive bomber squadron from Saratoga played a role almost no one would remember.

Bombing Three dropped the first bombs on Soryu that morning and helped finish off Hiryu that afternoon. It was a squadron that had been aboard Yorktown for only days. Its commander lost his bomb over open water and dove on the enemy armed only with machine guns. His wingman, a twenty-seven-year-old lieutenant rarely mentioned in popular accounts, dropped the first bomb that hit.

The executive officer took command and led the squadron in the afternoon attack that destroyed the last Japanese carrier. In books and films, Bombing Three is treated as a footnote. In the actual battle, this squadron destroyed one carrier in the morning and contributed to the destruction of another in the afternoon. No other squadron at Midway did that.

The Navy credited Bombing Three with the destruction of Soryu and participation in the destruction of Hiryu. Leslie received the Navy Cross for leading the attack on Soryu without a bomb, diving into the anti-aircraft fire with only machine guns, drawing fire for the pilots behind him. Holmberg received the Navy Cross for dropping the first bomb on Soryu. Shumway received the Navy Cross for reorganizing the squadron and leading the second strike that afternoon.

In the public memory of Midway, the story belongs to McClusky and Enterprise. Soryu remains the least mentioned of the four Japanese carriers lost that day. She appears in most accounts as a name on a list of ships sunk in the same attack that sank Kaga and Akagi, as if all three were part of a single strike. They were not.

McClusky’s pilots never saw her. She was attacked by a completely separate squadron, coming from a different direction, led by a man who had lost his weapon and attacked anyway. The timing was simultaneous, but the attacks were independent. Two groups of Americans, unknown to each other, struck the Japanese fleet from two directions at the same moment, and together destroyed the core of Japanese naval aviation in five minutes.

The question of why Soryu was hit has an answer, and the answer is not luck. It is a chain, and every link in the chain has a name. In January, a Japanese submarine torpedoed Saratoga, leaving Bombing Three without a ship. Yorktown returned from the Coral Sea exhausted, and the Navy put Bombing Three aboard her because there was no one else.

Fletcher launched Yorktown’s strike late and held the second dive bomber squadron back, meaning Leslie had only seventeen planes with no support. A faulty electrical connection dropped four bombs into the ocean, and none of the pilots who lost their weapons turned back. Lance Massey and Torpedo Three flew into the Japanese fighters at wave height, drawing the combat air patrol toward them, and most of them died doing it. Jimmy Thach and his six Wildcats fought above them long enough to scatter the Japanese defenses.

There was no Japanese fighter formation waiting at altitude when Bombing Three arrived. Max Leslie saw two carriers below him, knew the rule, and took the farther one. He dove without a bomb and strafed to draw fire. Paul Holmberg followed and put a thousand-pound bomb through Soryu’s deck.

That is the chain. Every link was made by a man who made a decision under circumstances that left little room for error. Some of those decisions were heroic. Some were routine, the kind an officer makes because the Navy taught him to.

Some were simply refusals to give up when giving up was the easier and safer choice. No single man in that chain could have sunk Soryu alone. The submarine commander who torpedoed Saratoga did not know he was setting Soryu’s fate in motion five months later. Fletcher did not know that a five-scout delay would leave Hiryu untouched for four more hours.

Massey did not know that his death at wave height was clearing the way for men he could not see. Leslie did not know that the rule he followed would steer his squadron toward the one carrier no one else could reach. Holmberg did not know his bomb would be the first on a ship that had survived every attack since dawn. None of them could see the whole chain.

Each saw only the link in front of him, and each held his place. Soryu remained untouched at Midway until seventeen borrowed dive bombers found her. Thirteen of them had something to drop.

Three of them hit.