Midway: The True Story of the Battle That Broke the Japanese Fleet: How American Codebreakers and Outnumbered Dive Bombers Turned the Pacific War in Five Minutes

Five minutes changed the Pacific War forever — and almost no one alive that morning expected it.

What if the empire that had never lost a naval battle was about to be destroyed by a handful of exhausted pilots running on fumes? What if the entire hinge of World War II turned not on battleships or bravado, but on codebreakers hunched in a windowless basement, gambling everything on three letters: "AF"?

Midway is the gripping, meticulously researched account of the four days in June 1942 that shattered Japan's Imperial Navy and rewrote the course of the war. Dominic Haynes takes you from the cryptanalysts of Station HYPO — dismissed, doubted, and denied credit for years afterward — to the flight decks of American carriers launching outnumbered, poorly coordinated squadrons into near-certain death. What followed was one of history's great reversals of fortune: in the space of five catastrophic minutes, four Japanese fleet carriers and the irreplaceable veteran aircrews aboard them were consigned to the bottom of the sea.

Inside, you'll discover: - How a single intercepted message and a manufactured decoy exposed Japan's entire battle plan - The desperate, uncoordinated American torpedo attacks that were slaughtered — yet set up the killing blow - The harrowing dive-bombing run that found the Kido Butai at its most vulnerable moment - The bitter postwar fates of the men who won the battle and were denied the credit they earned

You know the outcome. You don't yet know how narrowly, and how strangely, it was won — through fragments of code, a destroyer's wake, and pilots who pressed their dives past the point of prudence.

Press play — and relive the five minutes that broke the Japanese fleet.