THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY: The Five Minutes That Broke Japans Pacific War Machine

At 10:22 a.m. on June 4th, 1942, the Imperial Japanese Navy commanded unchallenged mastery of the Central Pacific — four aircraft carriers whose combined air power had, in six months, swept away every obstacle between Japan and total domination of an ocean stretching from California to India. By 10:30 that same morning, three of those carriers were burning wrecks. Japan had lost the war in less time than it takes to read this description.

This is the true story of how that happened: the codebreakers working in a windowless Pearl Harbor basement who correctly guessed Japan's next target through nothing more than a faked radio message about a broken water pump, the aircraft carrier patched together in seventy-two frantic hours when engineers said it needed months, the entire squadron of American torpedo pilots who flew to near-certain death and unknowingly cleared the sky for what came next, and the five minutes when three Japanese carriers — decks crowded with fully fueled, armed aircraft — were caught with almost no fighter cover at the single worst possible moment of the entire war.

Narrated with vivid, grounded detail and drawn from American and Japanese accounts alike, this is the real history behind the battle that turned the tide of the Pacific War.