Soryu was the thoroughbred. Unlike Akagi and Kaga, both converted from treaty-doomed battleship hulls, she was designed as a carrier from the keel up, and at 34.5 knots she was one of the fastest carriers ever built. With her sister Hiryu, she formed Carrier Division 2 under Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi, the most aggressive carrier commander in the Japanese navy. She had launched planes against Pearl Harbor, Wake Island, Darwin, and Ceylon without a scratch.
On the morning of June 4, she was caught in the same trap as her sisters: hangars full of fueled, armed aircraft, fighter cover dragged down to sea level by the doomed American torpedo squadrons.
Her executioners came from the Yorktown. Thirteen Dauntlesses of Bombing Three, led by Lt. Cmdr. Max Leslie, arrived overhead at almost the same moment the Enterprise bombers found Akagi and Kaga, completing the most lethal coincidence in naval history. Leslie himself had nothing to drop. A faulty electrical arming switch had accidentally jettisoned his bomb into the sea on the flight out, along with three other planes' bombs. He led the dive anyway, strafing all the way down to draw fire for the men behind him.
It took three minutes. Three 1,000-pound bombs walked down her flight deck: one forward of the forward elevator, two more around the amidships elevator, plunging into the hangars among the armed planes. Fire reached her gasoline systems and munition rooms almost instantly. Within twenty minutes of the first hit she was a furnace from end to end, and the order to abandon ship came at 10:45, the fastest death of any carrier that morning.
Captain Ryusaku Yanagimoto refused to leave the bridge. He was so beloved by his crew that they decided to save him against his will, and chose Chief Petty Officer Abe, a navy wrestling champion, to physically carry him off. Abe climbed to the burning bridge and found his captain standing motionless, sword in hand, staring toward the bow. He stepped forward to grab him, and stopped. By every account, the sheer force of the man's will would not allow it. Abe turned away in tears. As he climbed down, he heard Yanagimoto calmly singing Kimigayo, the national anthem, alone on the bridge of his burning ship.
Soryu burned through the afternoon. At 19:13, as her survivors watched from the decks of the destroyers Hamakaze and Isokaze, she slipped under, taking more than 700 of her crew and her captain with her. She sank within minutes of Kaga, two funeral pyres going down almost together.
Of the four carriers lost at Midway, Soryu remains one of the ghosts. The 2019 expeditions that found Kaga and Akagi never located her. She is still out there, somewhere under three miles of Pacific.