The American aircraft carrier USS Yorktown was no stranger to pain and suffering. She had been officially “sunk” by the Japanese three times in the last month – once with the “Lady Lex” in the Coral Sea, but against all expectations, she managed to limp back to Pearl for repairs. And twice more the day before after the Japanese got over their initial surprise at her appearance north of Midway. Admiral Yamaguchi and the planes from the Hiryu were sure they “sunk” her in their first counterattack after the devastating American attack that sank the Akagi, Kaga, and Soryu. However the repair crews did such a good job that when the Japanese returned, they mistook her for the Enterprise and “sunk” her again. Each time her repair crews and damage control parties brought her back from the brink of death to fight another day. And they were determined to do so again.

On 3 June 1942, Japanese planes from the light carrier Ryugo strafed and bombed Dutch Harbor on the island of Unalaska in the Aleutian Islands. The Japanese hoped to lure the American carriers into the open with the attack on American soil. As the American carriers respond to the attack on Alaska, they were to be destroyed by the four carriers of Admiral Nagumo’s Kido Butai which was fast approaching the island of Midway.

However the Americans were already there and waiting. On 2 June 1942, Admiral Fletcher’s Task Force 17 rendezvoused with Admiral Spruance’s TF 16 at “Point Luck” 325 miles north east of Midway. The next day, 3 June 1942, aircraft from Midway Island spotted the Japanese invasion fleet and the three American carriers, the USS Hornet, the USS Enterprise, and the USS Yorktown, began steaming west to engage the Japanese.

In the early morning hours of 4 June 1942, Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, the Victor of Pearl Harbor, assumed that the greatest threat to his aircraft carriers, the Kaga, Akagi, Hiryu and Soryu, were the land based bombers on Midway Island. He had no idea that three American carriers were lurking nearby.

Nagumo’s first strike on Midway Island did extensive damage to the airfield but a second strike was needed. While he was arming for a second land attack, one of his reconnaissance planes radioed that they had spotted an American carrier. With the first strike’s planes returning and low on fuel, he sent his second strike back below decks to rearm for a naval attack while he recovered the first strike. Unknown to him, an American attack was on its way.

Due to confusion on the American carriers, navigation errors in the search, and haste to launch the attack, the Americans were not synchronized. The coordination between Admiral Fletcher’s aircraft from the Yorktown, and Admiral Spruance’s aircraft from the Enterprise and Hornet was poor at best. Moreover, the attacks were supposed to be integrated: with torpedo bombers, dive bombers, and escorting fighters all arriving over the target simultaneously. This would have dispersed defending Japanese fighters and anti-aircraft fire, but some squadrons couldn’t find their compatriots, some squadrons didn’t wait around, and some waited in the wrong spot. To make matters worse, Nagumo’s carriers made a slight course correction, and many planes flew to the wrong spot only to find empty ocean. The Battle of Midway looked to be a repeat of the Battle of the Coral Sea.

Fortunately, individual squadrons found the Japanese on their own. The first were the torpedo bombers of LtCdr “Lem” Massey’s Torpedo Squadron Three (VT-3), followed shortly by LtCdr John Waldron’s Torpedo Squadron Eight (VT-8). As the Japanese planes were being recovered, the American torpedo bombers attacked and the defending Japanese Zeros made short work of the low and slow flying TBD Devastators. The six fighters of LtCdr Jim Thach’s Fighter Squadron Three couldn’t adequately protect their vulnerable wards and the TBs suffered almost 100% casualties. Of the twenty seven torpedo bombers that attacked, only two from Waldron’s squadron returned, and only one man from VT-8 survived: wounded and floating in the ocean was a young ensign, George Gay. As the historian Samuel Elliot Morrison pointed out, “For about 100 seconds, the Japanese thought they had won the Battle of Midway, and the war.”

They could not have been more wrong.

Two squadrons of Dauntless dive bombers approached almost simultaneously. The first, Max Leslie’s Bombing Three (VB-3) was the last squadron to take off from the aircraft carriers, and was actually the only squadron to have an accurate idea of where the Japanese were. The second squadron, Bombing Six (VB-6) was escorted by LtCdr Wade McCluskey’s Fighting Six (VF-6). Initially, they couldn’t find the Japanese ships. But, McClusky, low on fuel, decided not turn back even though he knew most of his planes would have to ditch in the ocean. His persistence paid off when he spotted a lone Japanese destroyer sailing at flank speed. He decided to follow it, and it led his planes directly to Nagumo. Adm Nimitz would credit McClusky’s decision, that of a relatively junior field grade officer, as one of the most important of the war; “It decided the fate of carrier task force and our forces at Midway…”

The suicidal torpedo runs by VT’s 3 and 8 were not in vain. They forced the defending Japanese Zeroes near sea level to chase the slow TBs and left the sky above the Japanese carriers free of air protection. The American dive bombers took advantage of the clear approaches to their targets.

In four minutes, from 10:22 to 10:26 am on 4 June 1942, VB-6 from the USS Enterprise screamed out of the sun and scored direct hits on the Kaga and Akagi, while VB-3 from the USS Yorktown pounded the Soryu. The Japanese carriers had decks packed with bomb and fuel laden planes, and the American dive bombers turned them into exploding infernos. Only the Hiryu escaped complete and catastrophic destruction.

The Hiryu responded and launched two counterattacks which severely damaged the Yorktown later that morning. That afternoon, planes from the Enterprise, including ten originally from the Yorktown, so damaged the Hiryu that she had to be scuttled. Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi, probably the best Japanese carrier admiral of the war, chose to go down with the ship in shame.

Without air cover, Admiral Yamamoto turned his battleships and the invasion fleet around. By the evening of 4 June 1942, the Japanese lost four carriers, all of their aircraft, most of their experienced pilots, and incalculable crew and staff experience in carrier operations. They would never recover from the loss. The dreaded Kido Butai, the most powerful and feared fleet in history, was no more. The massacre of the torpedo bombers during the Battle of Midway was the Japanese high water mark. There were still three long years left in the Pacific fight but initiative was now with the Americans and would stay that way for the rest of the war.

On 27 May 1942, the battered USS Yorktown limped into Pearl Harbor from the Coral Sea, and Admiral Frank Fletcher did quite the same from the harbor into his boss’s office, the Commander in Chief Pacific Fleet, Admiral Nimitz. Fletcher wanted to ask Nimitz for permission to continue on to the West Coast for much needed repairs.

The Yorktown suffered tremendous damage at the Battle of the Coral Sea. From the executive summary of report sent to Nimitz the day before, “A 551-pound armor-piercing bomb had plunged through the flight deck 15 feet inboard of her island and penetrated fifty feet into the ship before exploding above the forward engine room. Six compartments were destroyed, as were the lighting systems on three decks and across 24 frames. The gears controlling the No. 2 elevator were damaged. She had lost her radar and refrigeration system. Near misses by eight bombs had opened seams in her hull from frames 100 to 130 and ruptured the fuel-oil compartments…”

Fletcher told Nimitz that with the San Diego facilities the Yorktown could be operational in a month but would need three months to do the job right. Admiral Nimitz looked him in the eye and said,

“Frank, you have three days.”

Admiral Spruance, “Bull” Halsey’s replacement (Halsey was in the hospital with a bad skin rash), was due to leave for Midway in two days with the carriers USS Hornet and USS Enterprise to intercept the Japanese. If Fletcher left any later than two days after that, he would miss the upcoming battle.

Nimitz himself was one of the first to wade into the dry dock to inspect the damage, and he personally waived hundreds of safety regulations preventing the timely, albeit slightly more dangerous, repairs. In order to accommodate the massive power needs of the repair parties to work around the clock, the mayor of Honolulu diverted power to Pearl Harbor causing rolling blackouts across the city. Less than a dozen people within a hundred miles of Pearl Harbor knew of the Japanese plan to attack Midway, but Fletcher’s call for help in immediately repairing the Yorktown could only mean one thing: the Japanese were close. In countless feats of ingenuity, initiative, professionalism, competence, and old fashioned hard work, the workmen and maintenance personnel of the island of Oahu surged on the USS Yorktown. Navy, Army, Marine, and civilian mechanics, engineers, electricians, yard workers, pipefitters, welders, sailors, maintenance techs, cabin boys, and deck swabbers from all walks of life worked day and night to get the Yorktown prepared for the coming battle.

72 hours after Nimitz’ challenge, Admiral Fletcher and the Yorktown steamed out of Pearl Harbor to join the Hornet and Enterprise north of Midway Island with a full complement of fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo planes. The people of Oahu came together at a moment’s notice for the Yorktown, not in survival and recovery as they had after Pearl Harbor, but with the can-do attitude that only comes when you’re finally given a chance to strike back. They did three months’ work in as many days.

With the addition of the Yorktown and a report that two Japanese fleet carriers were spotted in Japanese home waters (the Shokaku and Zuiakaku), America now had three carriers to the Japanese four instead of the two to six they were expecting to fight the battle with less than a week before. Furthermore, because the American carriers were larger, they had near parity in planes. The Americans had a fighting chance in what Admiral Nimitz knew, one way or another, would be the most decisive naval battle in American history: The upcoming Battle of Midway.

After the fall of France in June of 1940, France’s overseas colonies declared for either De Gaulle’s Free French or Germany’s puppet Vichy Regime. The large island of Madagascar off the East African coast declared for the Vichy.

The island sat astride the Mozambique Channel, through which vital shipping transited that the Allied forces in India, Egypt, and the Western Desert depended upon. Though the Vichy were technically German allies, the French on Madagascar left the British and American convoys that passed by alone. However, British codebreakers discovered that the Japanese were in negotiations with the French to use one of the many ports in Madagascar as a secret submarine base, if not seizing one outright. The largest of which was the port of Diego Suarez on the very northern tip of the island. After the Japanese raids into the Indian Ocean in April 1942, the possibility of Japanese submarines severing the Eighth Army’s lifeline through the Mozambique Channel was too likely to ignore.

Just seven weeks after its first proposal, a joint Combined Operations’ Commonwealth/British task force arrived off of Diego Suarez. Such importance was given to the operation, codenamed Ironclad, that the invasion force consisted of ships and troops urgently needed in the Mediterranean, Western Desert, or Burma. The large force sailed from Britain in late March and assembled along the way in Sierra Leone and South Africa. It consisted of the old battleship Ramilles, the carriers Indomitable and Illustrious, an almost excessive assortment of support ships, and carried three British infantry brigades and the No 5 Commando to take on the 8000 odd Vichy French defenders, mostly Senegalese and Malagasy tirailleurs.

Utilizing copious amounts of South African photo reconnaissance, the landing craft expertly navigated the coral reefs and disgorged their troops on shore about ten miles from the port in the early hours of 5 May 1942. The landings were generally unopposed, but just inland the brigades ran into tenacious and well planned French resistance which lasted all day and into the next. Despite advantages in almost every category, including airpower, the British advance was stopped cold by the French and the tirailleurs. The deadlock was only broken when the old destroyer HMS Anthony pulled alongside the Ramillies and embarked its compliment of fifty Royal Marines who until then were destined to listen to the fighting on shore in between watches on the big ship. That evening, the Anthony sailed around to the east end of the island and approached Diego Suarez from behind, past French defenses completely surprised by the audacious maneuver. Despite heavy incoming fire, the destroyer pulled up to the quay with guns blazing and the fifty Royal Marines swarmed ashore. They rushed into the port and created a “disturbance in the town out of all proportion to their numbers”. They stormed the French commandant’s house and headquarters, the naval barracks, and rounded up and captured every Frenchman they could find. When news of the naval commandant and garrison commander’s surrender reached the front lines and fighting some miles away to the west, the French resistance crumbled. However, their surrender only affected the fixed French fortifications around the port, and the French governor maintained control of most of the tirailleurs. They withdrew into the interior of the large island where they would continue resistance for another six months. The governor only surrendered after receiving news of the Vichy French capitulation in North Africa after the Operation Torch landings in November.

Operation Ironclad was the first successful large scale Allied amphibious invasion of the Second World War. After the disaster of the invasion of Norway in 1940, the Allies came a long way in amphibious operational competency, mainly through the tactics, techniques, procedures, and specialized craft and equipment employed and improved upon by Lord Mountbatten’s Combined Operations and commandos. The lessons learned during the planning, preparation, and execution of Ironclad paved the way for larger and more successful (and not so successful) operations in 1942, such as the Raid on Dieppe, the Watchtower landings on Guadalcanal, and the Torch landings in North Africa.