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(Sunday, June 7, 1942, 7:10 a.m. local time/12:40 p.m. Eastern War Time) — The Battle of Midway,  a major naval battle in the Pacific Theater of World War II that began on June 4, 1942, ended today in a decisive U.S. victory despite the sinking of the USS Yorktown, which had been torpedoed the previous day.

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In the four-day sea and air battle, the outnumbered U.S. Pacific Fleet succeeded in destroying four Japanese aircraft carriers with the loss of only one of its own, the Yorktown, thus reversing the tide against the previously invincible Japanese navy.

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Japan had intended to lure American aircraft carriers into a trap and occupy Midway Islands as part of an overall “barrier” strategy to extend its defensive perimeter, in response to the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in Apr. 1942, which itself was in response to the Dec. 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

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This operation was also considered preparatory for further attacks against Fiji, Samoa, and Hawaii itself.

The plan was undermined by faulty Japanese assumptions of the American reaction and poor initial dispositions. Most significantly, American cryptographers were able to determine the date and location of the planned attack, enabling the forewarned U.S. Navy to prepare its own ambush.

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Four Japanese and three American aircraft carriers participated in the battle. The four Japanese fleet carriers — Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiryu, part of the six-carrier force that had attacked Pearl Harbor six months earlier—were sunk, as was the heavy cruiser Mikuma.

The U.S. lost the carrier Yorktown and the destroyer Hammann, while the carriers USS Enterprise and USS Hornet survived the battle fully intact.

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After Midway and the exhausting attrition of the Solomon Islands campaign, Japan’s capacity to replace its losses in materiel (particularly aircraft carriers) and men (especially well-trained pilots and maintenance crewmen) rapidly became insufficient to cope with mounting casualties, while the United States’ massive industrial and training capabilities made losses far easier to replace.

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The Battle of Midway, along with the Guadalcanal campaign, is widely considered a turning point in the Pacific War. Military historian John Keegan called it “the most stunning and decisive blow in the history of naval warfare,”  while naval historian Craig Symonds called it “one of the most consequential naval engagements in world history, ranking alongside Salamis, Trafalgar, and Tsushima Strait, as both tactically decisive and strategically influential.”