The Battle Of Midway: Turning Point In The Pacific War

Synopsis The Battle of Midway is well known as the turning point in the Pacific war. However, if not for the Battle of the Coral Sea a month earlier, the three American carriers at Midway would have faced six Japanese carriers of the type that had devastated Pearl Harbor five months prior, instead of only four — and the Battle of Midway might have ended differently.Coral Sea was the world’s first all-carrier battle, and the first sea battle in which neither side could see the other. Both the U.S. and the Japanese navies thought they understood how to fight using carriers. Both discovered they were wrong. At the end of this painful learning experience, the United States had lost the 41,000-ton carrier Lexington, while Japan had lost only the 11,000-ton carrier Shoho.The battle was a
might have been able to destroy the Japanese fleet. But Enterprise and Hornet needed refitting after the Doolittle raid of April 18, 1942, and could not get there in time for the fight (Parshall and Tully).On May 4, 1942, Japan’s Tulagi invasion force landed and began to build a seaplane base (Bennett). The next morning, Yorktown’s air group hit Tulagi (Hearn). This attack should have alerted the Japanese to U.S. carriers in the area, but it did not — nor did a sighting of the U.S. fleet by a Japanese reconnaissance bomber because the covering force was never notified (Hearn).Balancing this, a U.S. Army Air Forces patrol bomber spotted the Port Moresby invasion force, but the USAAF failed to notify the Navy (Hearn). For the next two days, bad weather kept the two forces from finding each other, despite the fact that they were only about 70 miles apart (Bennett).This four-day World War II skirmish in May 1942 marked the first air-sea battle in history. The Japanese were seeking to control the Coral Sea with an invasion of Port Moresby in southeast New Guinea, but their plans were intercepted by Allied