On June 4, 1942, the first day of the battle of Midway, the U.S. Navy sank four Japanese aircraft carriers for the loss of one of its own. This tore the heart out of Kido Butai, the enemy striking force, and changed the whole dynamic of the War in the Pacific where the Americans had been on the retreat since the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor six months earlier. It would take another three hard years to defeat Japan, which was still on the advance in the Solomons further south, but it was clear that the tide had turned. This epic victory came down to many things, including excellent U.S. intelligence and the strategic genius of Admiral Chester Nimitz, the Commander of the Pacific Fleet, but above all it was the achievement of a small number of highly-skilled dive-bomber pilots and their plane, the Douglas Dauntless. It was they who set the four Japanese carriers ablaze.
Today, the order that these men helped to create is once again under threat, and it is not clear that the U.S. would win a second battle of Midway. For the first time since World War II, the West faces a serious naval challenge in the Pacific. The People’s Republic of China—a communist dictatorship—poses both an ideological threat and a strategic one. It has built a large oceangoing navy with a growing carrier capability; the first domestically built aircraft carrier is expected to enter service in 2023. In fact, according to a U.S. Department of Defense report in 2020, the PRC now boasts “the largest navy in the world with an overall battle force of approximately 350 ships.” It menaces Taiwan directly and has established a massive military presence in the contested South China Sea. Beyond this, Beijing’s “Belt and Road Initiative,” which seeks to transform the whole of Eurasia, and the maritime “String of Pearls” concept, which attempts something similar in the Indo-Pacific, shows the PRC’s vaulting ambition.
