Word: midways
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...merely won a great battle in the Pacific and averted a great disaster: The U.S. had proved its skill and might in a new form of warfare at sea. For, in the Battle of Midway, U.S. forces met and drove back the first full battle fleet, organized on the grand scale for modern war, which any nation has yet put to sea." So said TIME (June 15, 1942), sizing up a naval battle just fought off Midway Island in the Pacific. This week, on the 18th anniversary of the battle, TIME takes another look, adds Midway to the list...
...fateful meeting was the Battle of Midway, fought 15 years ago this week. It was one of the decisive battles of history, a fight no less monumental than Salamis, or Lepanto, or Trafalgar. Japan's Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, architect of victory at Pearl Harbor, had flung a vast armada of 200 ships and 700 planes across the Pacific to Wake Island and to the Aleutians, with the spearhead pointing toward a remote, strategic atoll called Midway (see map). His plan was to seize Midway, "sentry for Hawaii," draw out what was left of the U.S. fleet...
Specifically, Nimitz swung his three carriers-Enterprise, Hornet, Yorktown- around to the northeast of Midway to take the Japanese by surprise from the flank. "You will be governed by the principle of calculated risk," Nimitz told his task force commanders, Rear Admirals Raymond A. Spruance and Frank Jack Fletcher, who well knew that the three carriers were about all that stood between the Japanese and California. Not far away, gliding serenely through a fog bank amid their great escort, the Japanese carriers Akagi, Kaga, Soryu and Hiryu prepared for their strike...
Thus ended the decisive phase of the decisive Battle of Midway. For two more days Yamamoto planned samurai slashes with his battleships against the U.S. carriers, but he had lost his air power and he could not connect. Raymond Spruance, with Enterprise and Hornet, badgered Japanese surface vessels, sank a cruiser, but he dared not get too close to the outsize guns of the Japanese battle force or the land-based Japanese bombers on Wake Island (a trap Yamamoto hoped to the end that Spruance would fall into). The central fact was that without naval air power Yamamoto had lost...
...Midway in his soul-saving New York crusade, Evangelist Billy Graham will go on TV. This Saturday (8-9 p.m., E.D.T.) on the ABC network, straight from Madison Square Garden, a Graham meeting will be telecast for the first time in the U.S. Cost of the program: $300,000, underwritten by Billy's current campaign backers. After that, muses Graham hopefully, he would like to launch a 26-week religious TV extravaganza. Its sponsors would have to be content with institutional plugs, no hard sell. Though one of the hottest salesmen ever to push intangibles, Billy admits: "It would...