THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY
PIVOTAL MOMENTS IN AMERICAN HISTORY
Series Editors
David Hackett Fischer
James M. McPherson
David Greenberg
* * *
James T. Patterson
Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil
Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy
Maury Klein
Rainbow’s End: The Crash of 1929
James McPherson
Crossroads of Freedom:
The Battle of Antietam
Glenn C. Altschuler
All Shook Up: How Rock ’n’ Roll
Changed America
David Hackett Fischer
Washington’s Crossing
John Ferling
Adams vs. Jefferson:
The Tumultuous Election of 1800
Joel H. Silbey
Storm over Texas: The Annexation
Controversy and the Road to Civil War
Raymond Arsenault
Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle
for Racial Justice
Colin G. Calloway
The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the
Transformation of North America
Richard Labunski
James Madison and the
Struggle for the Bill of Rights
Sally McMillen
Seneca Falls and the Origins of the
Women’s Rights Movement
Howard Jones
The Bay of Pigs
Elliott West
The Last Indian War:
The Nez Perce Story
Lynn Hudson Parsons
The Birth of Modern Politics:
Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams,
and the Election of 1828
Glenn C. Altschuler and
Stuart M. Blumin
The GI Bill: A New Deal for Veterans
Richard Archer
As If an Enemy’s Country: The British
Occupation of Boston and the Origins of
Revolution
Thomas Kessner
The Flight of the Century: Charles
Lindbergh and the Rise of American
Aviation
CRAIG L. SYMONDS
THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY
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Copyright © 2011 by Craig L. Symonds
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Symonds, Craig L.
The Battle of Midway / Craig L. Symonds.
p. cm.—(Pivotal moments in American history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-539793-2
1. Midway, Battle of, 1942.
2. World War, 1939–1945—Naval operations, American.
3. World War, 1939–1945—Naval operations, Japanese. I. Title.
D774.M5S93 2011
940.54’26699—dc22 2011010648
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For my grandson,
Will Symonds
CONTENTS
Maps
Editor’s Note
Introduction
1 CinCPac
2 The Kidō Butai
3 The Brown Shoe Navy
4 American Counterstrike
5 Seeking the Decisive Battle
6 Pete and Jimmy
7 The Code Breakers
8 The Battle of the Coral Sea
9 The Eve of Battle
10 Opening Act
11 Nagumo’s Dilemma (4:00 a.m. to 8:30 a.m.)
12 The Flight to Nowhere (7:00 a.m. to 11:20 a.m.)
13 Attack of the Torpedo Squadrons (8:30 a.m. to 10:20 a.m.)
14 The Tipping Point (7:00 a.m. to 10:30 a.m.)
15 The Japanese Counterstrike (11:00a.m.to 6:00 p.m.)
16 Denouement
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
APPENDIX A American and Japanese Aircraft Carriers
APPENDIX B American and Japanese Aircraft
APPENDIX C American Order of Battle at Midway
APPENDIX D Japanese Order of Battle at Midway
APPENDIX E How Much Did the U.S. Know of Japanese Plans?
APPENDIX F The Flight to Nowhere
Notes
A Note on Sources
Bibliography
Index
MAPS
1. American Counterattack, February 1, 1942
2. The Kidō Butai in the Indian Ocean, April 3–10, 1942
3. Japanese Strategic Options, Spring, 1942
4. The Battle of the Coral Sea, May 7–8, 1942
5. The Aleutians, June 3–5, 1942
6. Operation K, March 2–5, 1942
7. The Japanese Search Pattern, June 4, 1942, 4:30–8:00 a.m.
8. The Attack on Midway and the American Counterattack, June 4, 1942, 7:00–9:00 a.m.
9. The Flight to Nowhere, June 4, 1942, 8:00–11:00 a.m.
10. Attack of the Torpedo Squadrons, June 4, 1942, 9:30–9:45 a.m.
11. The Tipping Point, June 4, 1942, 10:20–10:30 a.m.
12. Attack on the Yorktown, june 4, 1942, 12:00–2:40 p.m.
13. Death of the Kidō Butai, June 4, 1942, 3:45–6:00 p.m.
EDITOR’S NOTE
In a matter of eight minutes on the morning of June 4, 1942, three of the four aircraft carriers in Japan’s principal striking force were mortally wounded by American dive bombers. The fourth would follow later that day. The Japanese Navy never recovered from this blow. These pivotal minutes—the most dramatic in World War II, indeed perhaps in all of American history—reversed the seemingly irresistible momentum toward Japanese victory and started the long comeback of American forces from the disasters at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines six months earlier.
Craig Symonds begins the riveting story of the Battle of Midway with the arrival of Admiral Chester Nimitz at Pearl Harbor on Christmas Day, 1941, to start the planning for the counteroffensive that led to those climactic moments near Midway Atoll, a thousand miles west of Hawaii. American aircraft carriers had been absent from Pearl Harbor when the Japanese struck on December 7, 1941. That fortuitous absence seemed to make little difference at the time, for in the ensuing four months Japanese forces advanced from one triumph to the next until they had conquered Malaya and Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, and Indochina. Japan thereby created its Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere, which stretched from
China to the mid-Pacific and almost from the borders of Alaska to Australia. So easy were these conquests that they led to an overweening disdain for their enemies—especially the United States—which Japanese historians subsequently and ruefully labeled “the victory disease.”
One Japanese leader who did not suffer from this disease was Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, commander in chief of Japan’s combined fleet and the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack. The survival of America’s small fleet of carriers enabled the United States to begin a series of counterthrusts in early 1942, including the Doolittle raid over Tokyo, culminating in the Battle of Coral Sea in May. Yamamoto was determined, in Symonds’ words, “to eliminate the threat of more carrier raids by engineering a climactic naval battle somewhere in the Central Pacific that would destroy those carriers once and for all.” He designed a campaign by Japan’s large striking force of four carriers and numerous battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and submarines, designated the Kidō Butai, to draw out the American carriers (only three were available) defending the outpost on Midway Atoll. Yamamoto planned for his superior force to pounce and sink them.
In the event, however, it was the Americans who did the pouncing and sinking. This victory is often described as “the miracle at Midway,” a success that depended on the lucky timing of the dive-bomber attack that screamed down from the sky at precisely the moment when Japanese fighter planes (the famous Zeroes) were preoccupied with shooting down the hapless American torpedo planes, whose only accomplishment—though it was a crucial one—was to distract the fighters. Symonds makes clear that while luck played a part, the American victory was mainly the result of careful planning, the effective use of radar (which the Japanese did not have), and superior intelligence. The Americans had partially broken the Japanese naval operations code, which gave them timely intelligence of Japanese intentions and actions. Symonds gives much credit to Joseph Rochefort, an unsung hero of the battle, who as head of the Combat Intelligence Unit was principally responsible for decoding and interpreting Japanese communications.
One of the many great strengths of this book is its emphasis on the important “decisions made and actions taken by individuals who found themselves at the nexus of history at a decisive moment.” Symonds’ vivid word portraits of these individuals—Japanese as well as Americans—their personalities, their foibles and virtues, are an outstanding feature of The Battle of Midway. Readers will come away not only with a better understanding of the strategies, operational details, and tactics of this pivotal battle but with greater appreciation for the men whose decisions and actions made it happen.
James M. McPherson
THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY
INTRODUCTION
In a series that focuses on historical contingency, it is appropriate, perhaps even essential, to include the Battle of Midway, for there are few moments in American history in which the course of events tipped so suddenly and so dramatically as it did on June 4, 1942. At ten o’clock that morning, the Axis powers were winning the Second World War. Though the Red Army had counterattacked the Wehrmacht outside Moscow in December, the German Army remained deep inside the Soviet Union, and one element of it was marching toward the oil fields of the Caucasus. In the Atlantic, German U-boats ravaged Allied shipping and threatened to cut the supply line between the United States and Great Britain. In the Pacific, Japan had just completed a triumphant six-month rampage, attacking and wrecking Allied bases from the Indian Ocean to the mid-Pacific following the crippling of the U.S. battle fleet at Pearl Harbor. Japan’s Mobile Striking Force (the Kidō Butai) was at that moment on the verge of consolidating command of the Pacific by eliminating what the strike at Pearl Harbor had missed: America’s aircraft carriers. The outcome of the war balanced on a knife-edge, but clearly leaned toward the Axis powers.
An hour later, the balance had shifted the other way. By 11:00 a.m., three Japanese aircraft carriers were on fire and sinking. A fourth was launching a counterstrike, yet before the day was over, it too would be located and mortally wounded. The Japanese thrust was turned back. Though the war had three more years to run, the Imperial Japanese Navy would never again initiate a strategic offensive. Later that summer the battle for Stalingrad began. The Atlantic sea lanes remained dangerous, but the convoys continued, and Britain survived. The war had turned.
In 1967, a quarter century after Midway, Walter Lord published a history of that battle entitled Incredible Victory. The title’s assumption is that the odds against the Americans at Midway were so long that their ultimate triumph defied comprehension. So dominant was this perception that when the national memorial to the Second World War was unveiled in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 2004, a sentence from Lord’s book was chiseled into its marble façade in letters six inches high: “THEY HAD NO RIGHT TO WIN, YET THEY DID, AND IN DOING SO THEY CHANGED THE COURSE OF THE WAR.” Similarly, when Gordon Prange’s long-awaited book on Midway came out in 1982, brought to press by two of his former graduate students after his death, it bore the title Miracle at Midway. Once again, the implication was unmistakable.
Embedded in these books’ titles, and in their conclusions as well, is the supposition that the American victory at Midway was the product of fate, or chance, or luck, or even divine will. In fact, sixty years after the battle, when a group of Midway veterans conducted a survey asking who had played the most decisive role on the American side, one veteran insisted that, as in the days of the ancient Greeks, this improbable earthly event could be explained only as the result of divine intervention.1
In War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy argues that great historical events, including (maybe even especially) great military events, are the product of historical forces only dimly understood. The great drama of the Napoleonic Wars, Tolstoy wrote, “came about step by step, incident by incident, moment by moment, emerging from an infinitely varied set of unimaginably different circumstances, and was perceived in its entirety only when it became a reality, a past event.” To him, individuals were not the prime movers of history but its victims, subject to “a boundless variety of infinitesimally small forces”—little more than chaff blown by a storm.2
Certainly chance—or luck—played a role at Midway, but the outcome of the battle was primarily the result of decisions made and actions taken by individuals who found themselves at the nexus of history at a decisive moment. In short, the Battle of Midway is best explained and understood by focusing on the people involved. Tolstoy insists that chance determines events, but it is people who make history, and this book is about the individuals who made history in that perilous spring of 1942. The list is a long one. A Japanese admiral (Yamamoto Isoroku) decided that a battle must be fought and not only initiated the planning but insisted that it go forward in spite of—indeed, almost because of—considerable opposition within his own service. An American admiral (Chester Nimitz) decided that the gauntlet that had been thrown down must be picked up, and he devised a plan of his own. A group of dedicated code breakers, and in particular Lieutenant Commander Joseph Rochefort, supplied the information that ended up giving the Americans a crucial edge. And combatants on both sides—admirals and captains, commanders and lieutenants, petty officers and enlisted men—determined the timing, the course, and ultimately the outcome of the fight. Midway might have ended differently. That it didn’t was the result of these men and the decisions they made.
Essential to understanding those decisions is an appreciation of the culture that informed these individuals, for while they were free agents, they were also products of their society, and their actions were shaped and constrained by the world in which they operated. For that reason, a history of what is perhaps the most pivotal naval battle in American history necessarily must explore the culture of both the U.S. Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy, as well as the politics and technology of the age. It does not detract from the drama of the event, nor diminish its significance, to acknowledge that in light of these factors, the outcome of the Battle of Midway was less incre
dible and less miraculous than it has often been portrayed.
1
CinCPac
An hour after dawn on Christmas morning in 1941, a lone PB2Y-2 Coronado flying boat circled slowly over the fleet anchorage at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, at the end of a seventeen-hour flight from San Diego. From inside her fuselage, 56-year-old Admiral Chester Nimitz peered out the window at the devastation below. Even dressed as he was in civilian clothes, he would have prompted a second look from strangers on the street, for his face had been weathered by years at sea and he had snow-white hair, which led a few of his young staffers to call him “cottontail”—but only behind his back. His most arresting feature, however, was his startling light-blue eyes, eyes that now scanned the scene below him. As the four-engine Coronado approached the harbor, its pilot, Lieutenant Bowen McLeod, invited Nimitz to come up and take the copilot’s seat to get a better view. Through a steady rain that added to the pall of gloom, Nimitz saw that the surface of the water was covered with black fuel oil. From that oily surface, the rounded bottoms of the battleship Oklahoma and the older Utah protruded like small islands. Another, the Nevada, was aground bow first near the main entrance channel. Other battleships rested on the mud, with only their shattered and fallen superstructures extending above the water. Here was the U.S. Navy’s vaunted battle fleet that Nimitz had been sent halfway around the world to command.1
Nimitz made no comment, only shaking his head and making a soft clucking sound with his tongue. While en route by rail from Washington to San Diego on the Santa Fe “Chief” to catch the flight to Hawaii, he had studied the reports of the devastation that had been wrought by the Japanese in their attack three weeks earlier on December 7. The reports could not convey the extent of the destruction. Even the photograph he had seen of the battleship Arizona engulfed in black smoke did not prepare him for the scene that now met his eyes. The seaplane splashed down and slowed to a stop on the oily surface of the roadstead. The doors were thrown open and the powerful odor of fuel oil, charred wood, and rotting flesh hit him like a fist. It was the smell of war.2
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