Honolulu – Six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a weakened and outnumbered U.S. fleet limped north to confront a flotilla of Japanese ships advancing on the remote Pacific atoll of Midway.
A Japanese victory would have cost the U.S. a strategically critical scrap of land between Hawaii and Japan, and could have decimated U.S. naval forces. Instead, the U.S. sank four Japanese aircraft carriers and snatched the military advantage from Tokyo.
Today marks the 65th anniversary of the start of the three-day battle that changed the course of World War II. Three Midway veterans in their 80s and 90s and the current Pacific Fleet commander will visit the island 1,300 miles northwest of Honolulu for a ceremony hosted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which today runs a nature reserve on the atoll.
The victory came after a string of U.S. setbacks in the Pacific. By targeting Midway, the Japanese navy aimed to take control of the U.S. patrol-plane base there and destroy what was left of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
George Chockley, one of the veterans visiting Midway today, was a 22-year-old chief petty officer on the USS Enterprise.
“I was just a young kid. I didn’t have sense enough to be afraid,” he said from his son’s home in North Carolina. Chockley, 87, of Mebane, N.C., ran the aircraft carrier’s public-address system and maintained its navigational instruments.
The Navy’s intelligence experts deciphered encrypted Japanese communications, thus giving Adm. Chester Nimitz, the U.S. Pacific Fleet commander, the precise time of the planned assault and the route Japan’s ships would travel to Midway.
