Word: kaga
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...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...
...Minutes. It was the U.S. fleet that had achieved the surprise. Caught with most of its planes aboard, the Akagi exploded and burned. So did two sister carriers, the Kaga and Soryu (Hiryu, the fourth, survived to be wrecked by an evening raid). In two minutes the whole course of the Pacific war changed. That night, its air striking power destroyed, the Japanese invasion armada turned in "emptiness, cheerlessness and chagrin" and limped for home. (The U.S. Navy lost the Yorktown, one of the three carriers that it was able to muster for the great battle...
...full carrier-and-battleship fleet of Japan might have won. But the task force sent by the pennywise, pound-foolish admirals was defeated by a U.S. task force which, though inferior in quantity, was superior in quality. The enemy lost the pride of his carrier fleet: the big Kaga and Akagi, the smaller Hiryu and Soryu...
Three Victims. One of her biggest successes came in the desperate Battle of Midway when her dive-bombers, torpedo planes and fighters roared in with four separate attacks on the big Jap invasion fleet. Eight bombs smashed into the enemy carrier Kaga, three more on the Akagi; additional hits in a later attack, sent both to the bottom. On the same day 17 dive-bombers helped spike the carrier Soryu with six hits and plumped two more on a battleship; the Soryu burned cheerily and slipped beneath the surface with the polite hissing noise characteristic of Japanese etiquette...
Furthermore, U.S. carriers are bigger, have more hitting power than their Japanese counterparts. Example: the Lexington had 90 planes, almost as many as the Kaga and Akagi combined. Thus, while the loss of a single carrier may hit the U.S. harder than a similar loss hits Japan, three or four U.S. carriers in the Pacific would outweigh the known remainder of the Japanese fleet in plane power...