The Battle for Midway: The Discovery of the U.S.S.Yorktown

Midway today.

Two Japanese and two American veterans of the battle are on the island.

They are going to join Robert Ballard in his search for the five aircraft carriers sunk during the battle.

The video goes into the history of what had been happening up until Midway.

May 8th , 1942, fighting in the Coral Sea.

The carrier Lexington is sunk.

Damage belowdecks from a Japanese delayed-action bomb on the Yorktown. Only four of 54 men survived when the bomb exploded.

The Yorktown limps into Pearl Harbor. Code breakers have learned that the Japanese plan to attack Midway in about a month.

The men who will repair Yorktown are given three days to do twelve-weeks worth of work.

The video then goes into the search and how it is carried out. This is a sonar device being lowered into the water.

The four veterans on the boat go over their personal histories.

The Japanese commander Nagumo leads his ships into battle. It's the same group that bombed Pearl Harbor.

A remote-controlled craft is lowered into the water. It will descend about three miles to check out one possible site. Some of the cameras are destroyed by the water pressure and the device has to be brought back up.

John Ford, who directed The Grapes of Wrath, is one the island to make a movie about the battle.

June 4th, the Japanese launch their attack.

A Japanese plane is shot down.

Film taken during the actual attack.

The video describes the early U.S. attacks on the Japanese carriers and how wave after wave of U.S. planes were shot down.

While the undersea robotic craft is repaired, Ballard goes hunting the Kaga.

Back to the battle as the Enterprise launches its planes. The torpedo squadrons are decimated by the Japanese Zeros. All these losses for the U.S., while there were no hits on the Japanese carriers at all.

American dive bombers hit the carriers from high up. The Zeros are still fighting the remainder of the torpedo bombers.

Within a space of five minutes, three of the Japanese carriers are destroyed.

Planes from the Hiryu, the last Japanese carrier, launch in a counter-strike.

They attack the Yorktown.

In a counter-counter-strike, American planes destroy the Hiryu.

A Japanese sub torpedoes the Yorktown.

Three miles down, they start to find debris from the Yorktown.

Then they find the Yorktown itself.

One of the surviving Japanese pilots tells how the news of their defeat was kept secret. The pilots, he says, were treated like prisoners-of-war and were not allowed outside contact.

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