Japan Thought USS Yorktown Was Gone—Then It Appeared at Midway

World War Legacy and 6 more "In May 1942, the USS Yorktown limped into Pearl Harbor after being bombed at the Battle of the Coral Sea. Japanese intelligence declared her sunk. Senior American officers said she would need three months in drydock to be ready again.

Admiral Chester Nimitz gave the shipyard seventy-two hours. This is the story of how fourteen hundred workers — welders, electricians, shipfitters, and exhausted men who had already lived through December 7 — performed one of the most impossible repairs in naval history so that a "dead" carrier could sail to Midway and help change the course of the Pacific War. From the flooded drydock where Yorktown was patched with scabs of steel and runway cement, to the skies above the Japanese fleet where dive bombers arrived at the exact moment history demanded it, this is how ordinary Americans refused to accept what the enemy believed was impossible."