The Battle of Midway
By Craig L. Symonds
(Oxford University Press, 464 pages, $27.95)
As Branch Rickey famously put it, “Luck is the residue of
design.” In The Battle of Midway, Craig Symonds, who
teaches American Naval History at the U.S. Naval Academy, shows how
that resounding American victory during World War II was the
product of design and its residue, which historians might call
contingency.
Symonds’ book is another in Oxford’s series on “pivotal
moments in American history.” In an introductory note for an
earlier entrant in that series, Washington’s Crossing, by
David Hackett Fischer, James McPherson explained that such pivotal
events were the product of “decisions and actions by people who had
opportunities to choose and act otherwise,” and that opportunity
“introduces a dynamic tension into the story of the past.” Properly
addressing the “dynamic tension of contingency and choice” calls
for a combination of new scholarship “with old ideas of history as
narrative art and traditional standards of sound scholarship,
mature judgment, and good writing.”
Symonds book succeeds on all counts. The battle of Midway
is a remarkable story, and Symonds tells it well. On June 4, 1942,
“in little more than five minutes,” aided by heroic but
unsuccessful attacks by American torpedo bombers, American dive
bombers destroyed three Japanese aircraft carriers. Later that day,
they followed up by putting four bombs onto the flight deck of the
fourth. The Americans lost the carrier Yorktown and a
destroyer, aircraft, and brave pilots and sailors, but victory was
complete. Symonds doesn’t just tell the story, he also describes
the culture and equipment of the American and Japanese pilots and
naval personnel, showing how the differences worked in
context.
Nineteen forty-two started badly for the United States and
its Pacific allies, much the way 1941 ended. The Japanese attacked
Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and, while they inflicted great
damage on the American battle fleet, they missed the American
aircraft carriers. Before 1941 was over, the Japanese had taken
Hong Kong and Wake Island and invaded the Philippines. By mid-April
1942, they had taken Singapore, bombed Darwin, Australia, raided
British bases on Ceylon, sinking a number of warships, and forced
the surrender of the American forces on Bataan. That “dizzying
string” of successes “fed what historians later labeled ‘victory
disease’ in Japan.”
After the American forces in the Philippines retreated to
Bataan, the Americans began to fight back. In January, American
carriers raided Japanese bases in the Marshall and Gilbert Islands,
inflicting “little more than a pinprick,” while sinking a transport
and a sub chaser, damaging six other vessels including a cruiser,
and destroying a number of aircraft. In March, American carrier
aircraft attacked Japanese shipping off Lae and Salamaua on New
Guinea with greater success, “savag[ing] Japanese sealift
capability” in that area. Finally, in April, B-25s under the
command of Colonel Jimmy Doolittle took off from the
Hornet and bombed mainland Japan.
In early May, the Americans achieved what historians view
as a strategic victory even if it was a tactical success for the
Japanese at the Battle of the Coral Sea. The Americans went into
battle knowing “more about the Japanese movements than they did
about” ours because we had made progress in breaking the Japanese
naval code. Symonds explains that this gave Admiral Fletcher, the
American commander, “an indisputable advantage” but didn’t
guarantee success. In the fighting, the Lexington was sunk
and the Yorktown damaged. The Japanese lost only a small
carrier, but the larger Shōkaku was damaged, and it and
the Zuikaku lost a sufficient number of aircraft and
experienced pilots that neither could participate in the upcoming
Midway operation. The “complex timetable” of the Japanese
operations was “irredeemably wrecked.”
The battle of Midway in June 1942 resulted from design, in
that both the Japanese and the Americans planned for conflict. The
Japanese plan was complicated; four “different and independent”
groups of ships sailed independently in the direction of Midway
with the goals of taking the island and luring the American
aircraft carriers into a decisive battle. (The Japanese fleet that
headed for the Aleutian Islands in the Northern Pacific off Alaska
was a “separate initiative unrelated to the Midway Operation apart
from its timing.”) The Japanese planned to use six large carriers
to both establish air superiority over and support the landings on
Midway and engage the American carriers, an arrangement that
“created the opportunity for confusion and uncertainty.” The Battle
of the Coral Sea intervened, however, depriving Admiral Yamamoto of
two of those aircraft carriers.
At Midway, the Americans “knew what was coming, where it
was coming from, and more or less when it was coming.” Admiral
Nimitz, the American naval commander in the Pacific, planned to
meet the Japanese with two or three carriers. In the end, Nimitz
had three after the Yorktown, which had been hit by one
bomb and damaged by several near misses, was repaired in a
remarkable three day round-the-clock blitz. While “eager to
confront the Japanese,” Nimitz “was not a gambler.” Rather, he
“reviewed all the available information, weighed the odds
carefully, and planned accordingly.”
Nimitz stationed the American carriers to the northwest of
Midway Island, where they lay in wait, hoping to hit the Japanese
carriers before they were found. Significantly, in the war games
conducted by the Japanese in preparation for the operation, Admiral
Ugaki, the chief judge, ruled “that such a move by the Americans
was so improbable that it could not be allowed.” Ugaki also
overruled a roll of the dice that had two Japanese carriers
sinking, holding that one was damaged, not sunk, and the other
removed from the table to return later. Symonds concludes that the
war game exercises were “all but useless.”
On the fateful day, the Japanese began by sending 108
bombers, torpedo planes armed with bombs, and fighter cover drawn
from all four carriers to attack the facilities at Midway. When
those planes were gone, the crews began outfitting the next wave
for attacks on the American carriers. At about 7:00, Admiral
Nagumo, the commander of the carrier group, received word that
another attack on Midway was needed. Nagumo ordered that the planes
held in anticipation of an attack on the American carriers be
rearmed with fragmentation bombs for that second attack. As Symonds
notes, arming and rearming the planes was a labor intensive task;
the Japanese had to lower the torpedoes from the planes onto bomb
carts with a hand crank and lift them by hand onto holding racks on
the bulkheads.
Nagumo learned of the presence of American ships, then an
American carrier by about 8:20, and ordered the dive bombers on the
Hiryū and Sōryū to prepare for that attack. He
was unable to send those planes off, though, for several reasons.
First, American aircraft based on Midway attacked his carriers in a
“haphazard,” uncoordinated way. Even though Nagumo’s carriers were
unharmed, they had to maneuver to avoid the attacks, making it
impossible to rearm the planes for an attack on the carriers.
Second, Nagumo also put all of his remaining fighters aloft to
defend against the attacks. He needed to recover and rearm those
fighters, as well as the Midway strike force which was returning.
He decided to do that and send his entire strike force against what
he thought was one carrier.
In the meantime, American torpedo planes, followed by dive
bombers, arrived. The torpedo planes were all but annihilated, but
they pulled the Japanese combat air patrol and antiaircraft
weaponry down to sea level. When the dive bombers arrived, they put
bombs on the Akagi, the Kaga, and the
Sōryū, turning each into an inferno as the bombs found
hangar decks full of Japanese aircraft gassed up and bombs and
torpedoes in the process of changeover. While the Japanese later
found the Yorktown, and the Americans got the
Hiryū, the “tipping point” had been reached.
It wasn’t just big decisions, like those of Nimitz, which
contributed to the outcome. Symonds tells the story of an American
submarine, the Nautilus, which was in the right place at
the right time and sparked a duel with a Japanese destroyer, the
Arashi. The Arashi kept the Nautilus
underwater until the carrier group passed, then hustled to catch up
with the other Japanese ships. American dive bombers from the
Enterprise spotted the Arashi’s bow wave and
followed its line to the Japanese carriers. As Symonds notes, the
inconclusive duel between the Arashi and the
Nautilus had a “profound effect” on the outcome,
illustrating the way in which decisions, big and small, can affect
history.
Symonds concludes, “June 7 was a Sunday morning, and it
dawned on a changed world.” Six months after Pearl Harbor, the
“instrument” of the Japanese attack “had been smashed beyond
recovery.” A long and difficult slog remained, but the battle of
Midway was the hinge on which the war in the Pacific turned. Its
story deserves retelling, and Symonds’ book does a wonderful job of
it.
