Six months after Pearl Harbor, Admiral Yamamoto’s Operation MI aimed to lure and destroy the remaining American carriers by attacking Midway Atoll. His plan scattered battle groups across hundreds of miles of ocean, built on the assumption that American morale was shattered. Meanwhile Commander Joseph Rochefort’s team at Station HYPO had partially broken the JN-25B code and suspected the target designated AF was Midway. A fake uncoded broadcast about a broken water purification plant confirmed it within 24 hours, giving Admiral Nimitz the date, target and order of battle.

This episode follows the 72-hour repair of the battered USS Yorktown by 1,400 workers, the failure of Japanese reconnaissance at French Frigate Shoals and the late picket submarines, and the design flaws of the Akagi, Kaga, Soryu and Hiryu: enclosed hangars, wood floors, fuel lines in the ceilings and no fire-suppressing foam. It then reconstructs Admiral Nagumo’s agonising rearming dilemma, the sacrifice of Torpedo Squadron 8 that pulled the Zeros down to sea level, and the five minutes in which American dive bombers turned three carriers into infernos. We close on the Hiryu’s counterattack, the loss of the Yorktown, and why the death of 3,000 irreplaceable Japanese technicians mattered more than the ships.

• How traffic analysis and the AF water ruse gave Nimitz total information asymmetry
• Why Yamamoto’s sprawling deception plan prevented his forces from supporting each other
• The structural vulnerabilities of Japanese carriers and the chaos of swapping torpedoes for bombs
• How a failed torpedo attack accidentally cleared the sky for the dive bombers
• Victory disease and the loss of human capital that Japan could never rebuild