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World War II was the most savage war ever fought, and it was a "very close run thing" for quite a long time. It's generally accepted that there were three major battles which, collectively, represented the turning points. First was the Second Battle of El Alamein, when Montgomery broke a fixed German position and begin the final campaign across Northern Africa which eventually, when combined with a landing by American forces, kicked the Germans and Italians completely off the continent. That lead to the invasion of Sicily, of Italy itself, and ultimately to Normandy. Second was Stalingrad, where the Russians dug in and fought; a line was drawn in the sand. The result was to bog down the German advance, slow down the pace of battle, and let Zhukov form up reserves for an encircling counter attack leading to the Battle of Kursk which surrounded a large German force. After that, the trend of the war on the Eastern Front was generally back in the direction of Germany. Both of those were won because the British and Russians respectively finally had the time to build up the logistics and forces necessary, and their attacks were made with serious force advantages. Thus the odds were in their favor. That's not the case for the third and in many ways most remarkable one: Midway. Midway stopped the Japanese advance. Until that point, the Japanese had been ascendant in the Pacific, seemingly able to go whereever they wanted. After Midway their navy was crippled, and a few months later the Americans went onto the offensive. Most of the story of Midway is well known (the code break, Nimitz's guts in committing his three carriers against four Japanese ones, and so on) but there's one aspect of it which is not well known. Nagumo, the Japanese commander, didn't completely rely on the plan's assumption that the American carriers wold only move after the attack began, and he did order scout planes out to look for them. And one of them did find USS Yorktown. USS Enterprise and USS Hornet were operating separately and were never found by the Japanese, but Yorktown was located. Large Japanese capital ships carried scout planes. These were launched with a catapault, landed with pontoons, and were recovered with a crane. The scouting was done by floatplanes launched from several of the cruisers which accompanied Nagumo's fleet. The first airstrike had just hit Midway itself, doing damage but not enough, and the flight leader had radioed back asking for a second strike. Nagumo was in process of preparing for one when one of the scoutplanes spotted Yorktown, and this obviously required a change of strategy. Midway itself was much less dangerous than Yorktown and Nagumo had to change targets. But many of his planes were armed wrong for fleet action. (They were carrying high explosive bombs in anticipation for a second attack on Midway instead of armor-piercing bombs or torpedoes which would be much more effective against ships.) So Nagumo ordered them to be rearmed, and as this began the strike from Midway arrived and needed to land. Then there were attacks by two American torpedo squadrons which got completely butchered but also pulled Japanese fighter cover down to wavetop level. Just when that was completed, before the Japanese fighters could climb back up to patrol altitude, the American dive bombers appeared over the Japanese fleet and in the next few minutes destroyed three of their four carriers. The American SBD was a very good plane, and its weapon (a 1000 pound bomb) was quite reliable. But with an average of 2-4 hits per carrier, that should not have been enough to actually destroy them. It would have removed them from the battle but they should have recovered. However, the carriers had their flight decks covered with planes (loaded with fuel) and there were bombs and torpedoes all over on the flight deck and hanger deck, and the American bombs set off secondary fires and explosions which doomed all three ships. The attack came at exactly the best possible time: there was a window of about twenty minutes which was absolutely ideal and that's when they struck. Twenty minutes earlier or later and the Japanese fighter cover would have at altitude and the dive bombing attack would have been much less effective. Two hours earlier or later and the planes and bombs would not have been present on the Japanese carriers in such quantities and there would have been much less secondary damage. The Americans couldn't have timed the divebombing attack better if they'd actually planned that way. And that's were it gets creepy: the scout which spotted Yorktown was launched from Tone (TOE-nay) and that cruiser, alone of all those who launched scout planes, had problems with its catapault and launched its scout two hours late. If it had launched its scout on time, Yorktown would have been spotted two hours sooner, there would have been no confusion about targets at the Japanese fleet, the Japanese would have launched an attack on Yorktown before the American dive bombers showed up, which would have mean 
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