The Battle of Midway
December 6th, 2006 | by Todd W |
Midway: The Incredible Victory
Midway: The Battle that Doomed Japan
Time has a way of plastering over history with what comes to be known as conventional wisdom. Today, the American victory in the Pacific has an aura of inevitability to most people - how could a nation the size of California hope to beat the United States in a war?
And there is truth to that view. Even Admiral Yamamoto, leader of the Imperial Japanese Navy, understood the futility of a protracted war with the US. Asked by Prime Minister Konoe about a war with the US, Yamamoto responded: “I will run wild for six months or a year, but after that I have utterly no confidence.”
The Japanese strike at Pearl Harbor, and the intended smashing of the remaining US fleet at the Battle of the Coral Sea and later, Midway, was to be followed by overtures of peace. The Japanese calculated that Americans, after such losses, would have no stomach for a protracted fight under disadvantageous terms, and would be willing to accept major concessions in the Pacific in exchange for peace. Japan would secure a position as masters of the Pacific, and super-power status at the expense of a weakened America.
And the battle of Midway could have easily left the US powerless.
The inevitability of the American victory in the Pacific was secured by Midway, but there was certainly no inevitability to a victory at Midway.
For that, the efforts of the American seaman and aviator must be honored.
In Midway: The Incredible Victory, Walter Lord places things in perspective immediately on the opening page:
By any ordinary standards, they were hopelessly outclassed.
They had no battleships, the enemy eleven. They had eight cruisers, the enemy twenty-three. They had three carriers (one of them crippled); the enemy had eight. Their shore defenses included guns from the turn of the century.
They knew little of war. None of the Navy pilots on one of the carriers had ever been in combat. Nor had any of the army fliers. Of the Marines, 17 of 21 new pilots were just out of flight school - some with less than four hours’ flying time since then. Their enemy was brilliant, experienced and all-conquering.
They were tired, dead tired. The patrol plane crews, for instance, had been flying 15 hours a day, servicing their own planes, getting perhaps three hours’ sleep at night.
They had equipment problems. Some of their dive bombers couldn’t dive - the fabric came off the wings. Their torpedoes were slow and unreliable; the torpedo planes even worse. Yet they were up against the finest fighting plane in the world.
They took crushing losses - 15 out of 15 in one torpedo squadron…21 out of 27 in a group of fighters… many, many more.
They had no right to win. Yet they did, and in doing so they changed the course of the war. More than that, they added a new name - Midway - to the small list that inspires men by shining example. Like Marathon, the Armada, the Marne, a few others, Midway showed that every once in a while “what must be” need not be at all. Even against the greatest of odds, there is something in the human spirit - a magic blend of skill, faith and valor - that can lift men from certain defeat to incredible victory.
The losses in men and material on both sides were astounding. Entire carrier wings were wiped out to the last pilot. Whole squadrons flew beyond their fuel range and splashed in the ocean searching for the enemy fleet, but not before dropping their bombs and extracting a price for their sacrifice. Seamen remained at their posts in the bowels of burning carriers, keeping the boilers lit and making knots for their captains, keeping the ships in the fight for as long as possible.
And there was the heroism of the men of USS Yorktown. The Japanese were certain they sunk her at the Battle of the Coral Sea. Crippled, she limped back to Pearl Harbor needing three months of repairs to restore her to service. The fleet didn’t have three months, so in three days she sailed to engage the Japanese at Midway. During the battle, Yorktown took three bombs and a Japanese plane on her flight deck, inflicting tremendous damage and leaving her dead in the water. Within a couple of hours, the crew restored flight operations and a second wave of Japanese aircraft identified her as an ‘undamaged’ carrier. They hit Yorktown again, thinking the damaged carrier from earlier had sunk. The second wave put a torpedo into her, leaving her dead in the water and listing 26 degrees. She was finally abandoned, but remained afloat overnight. The next day, salvage parties returned to see if she could be saved until a Japanese submarine put another torpedo into her. She floated for another day before finally going under.
Six months later, a new USS Yorktown entered service as an Essex-class carrier.
Walter Lord’s book is a great mixture of personal anecdotes and tactics, capturing the facts of the battle along with the impressions of the participants on the American side. Those with a deeper interest in the historical details will find plenty here, while others who enjoy a lighter read might not even notice the things they learn.
Mitsuo Fuchida led the raid on Pearl Harbor and was stationed on the Akagi for Midway. Unfortunately for him, and fortunately for historians, he came down with appendicitis and watched the battle from the bridge, surviving the sinking of the Akagi and going on to write the definitive account of the battle from the Japanese perspective in Midway: The Battle that Doomed Japan.
Fuchida pulls no punches in dissecting the Japanese failures. After obliterating the American battleships at Pearl, the Japanese naval leadership ignored the American carriers because conventional wisdom dictated the superiority of battleships…completely ignoring the utter devastation wrought by their own carrier aircraft! The traditional view belittled the role of naval air power, despite the utter refutation of Pearl Harbor. As a result, the Japanese squandered valuable time in the Indian ocean against the British while America began to mobilize and recover from Pearl.
Fuchida captures the horror of the Japanese as they lose three carriers in a remarkable six minutes, with the fourth carrier gone by the end of the day. He recounts the utter shock at finding the American fleet swarming with more carriers than seemed possible (with Yorktown being counted two or even three times thanks to the miracles of damage control parties). He bears witness to squadron after squadron of American bombers being utterly annihilated without adequate fighter cover, delivering their bombs with no hope of survival.
And he writes of the respect the Japanese felt as they learned the measure of courage in an enemy they had previously seen as lacking the stomach for combat.
As a set, the two books, both readable in a couple of days, are a definitive examination of arguably the most critical engagement in the Pacific War. It isn’t often when both sides can tell the story without distortion or jingoism. I can’t recommend these books enough.
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