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Essay on Battle of Midway
Just at daybreak on June 3rd, when the Yorktown, at the end of her furious journey, was running fast along the chain of reefs that stretches from Hawaii to Midway, there came a radio flash from Nimitz to the fleet: "Enemy planes attack Dutch Harbor." Twelve hundred miles from the ship and the Admiral who were to be the central figures in it, the Battle of Midway had begun. The Japanese who made that attack on Dutch Harbor were one of the normal invasion groups that had previously climbed down the ladder of the South Pacific islands. They had two or three cruisers, eight destroyers, a pair of seaplane tenders, and two carriers -- one of them a regular navy ship, the other a converted merchant job. They had transports; and they had ridden without detection thus far along the Aleutian chain, more than half its length, under a fog which probably lay along the eastern edge of a great weather front which was covering their advance toward Midway far to the south.
In Dutch Harbor lay a Coast Guard cutter, an Army transport, three of the old four-piper destroyers, and a minesweeper. At least one of the destroyers had been converted to a tender for the PBY flying scouts by removal of half her boilers to make space for the food, ammunition, and men of her attached air squadron. Possibly the minesweeper had been converted also; many of them are.
All the PBY's but one were out quartering the mist for the Japanese, whose appearance, in the restrained words of the communiqué, "was not entirely unexpected." That remaining plane was on the water near the tender, about to take off for the States with a load of mail. The anitiaircraft stations were manned, the ships all had steam up, when three Mitsubishis stuck their noses through the low frosty clouds round Mount Ballyhou and dived to attack.......
