MIDWAY

“IN THOSE SEVEN MINUTES EVERYTHING CHANGED IN WHAT WAS REALLY THE AMERICAN TRAFALGAR AND WHICH SAW THE IMPERIAL JAPANESE FLEET ANNIHILATED”

At 10.20am on the morning of 4 June 1942, the United States was losing the war in the Pacific. At 10.27am, it was winning. In those seven minutes everything changed in what was really the American Trafalgar and which saw the Imperial Japanese Fleet annihilated in a spectacular confrontation that was dramatically unexpected. It’s an incredible story and it’s no wonder it has become the subject of a new movie.

When the Japanese entered the war with their assault on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on the morning of 7 December 1941, it’s important to understand what it was they were trying to achieve. There was certainly no grand plan to conquer the United States and take over the White House. Rather, it was about creating time; the idea was to cripple the US in a dramatic single strike to buy them perhaps six months or more – time in which they would conquer the resource base they would need to continue their war in China. By the 1930s, Japan was rapidly modernising, its cities growing, and yet it did not have the resources or access to resources to support this growth. China, on the other hand, most certainly did, and so its increasingly nationalistic and militaristic leadership invaded in 1937. It did not all go to plan, however, and they soon became bogged down in an attritional conflict that quickly began to cost them a lot more than they were gaining.

All around southeast Asia, however, were all the resources they needed, but these territories were owned by the British, the Dutch and the Americans. Already, in 1940, following the fall of France to the Germans, the Japanese moved