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40 Fascinating But Lesser Known Facts About WWII

Khalid Elhassan January 5, 2019 25 min

World War II - European theatre of World War II — Raising the Red Banner over the Reichstag. Anarkismo

11. Japan Might Have Had the Worst 5 Minutes In the History of Warfare, at the Battle of Midway

At 10:25AM, June 4th, 1942, Japan was mistress of the Pacific, possessed the world’s most powerful aircraft carrier force, and was dictating the terms of the war. By 10:30AM, Japan had effectively lost WWII. It came about because of a chain of unlikely events, too dramatic for fiction because they seem so unrealistic, but which nonetheless happened in real life. They occurred at the Battle of Midway, which the Japanese had attacked in the hopes of luring the US Navy into a decisive battle of annihilation, after which Japan would dictate peace terms to the Americans.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.