Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power

by Victor Davis Hanson

  Yamamoto’s intractable strategic framework nearly ensured tactical problems, which similarly reflected an institutional hierarchy within the Japanese imperial command that discouraged initiative and independent thinking. Critics of the Japanese leadership at Midway usually focus on Admiral Nagumo’s key decisions on the morning of June 4: (1) his orders to send most of the fleet’s protective cover of fighter planes along with the bombers to attack Midway; (2) his decision also to send all four carriers’ bombers at once against Midway, without keeping a reserve in case of the sudden appearance of American carriers; and (3) his critical determination not to launch his planes immediately when he learned of the presence of the American carriers, but instead ordering them to be refitted from bombs to naval torpedoes. In all three instances Nagumo—who committed suicide in an underground bunker on Saipan in June 1944— simply followed the standard procedure of the Japanese navy, without realizing how different the fight with the Americans might be from the past experience of easy victories over surprised, outnumbered, and inexperienced adversaries.

  As for the attacks against Midway itself, it was traditional Japanese fleet protocol that all bombing sorties were to be accompanied by massive fighter escorts. But two conditions in the skies over Midway immediately made that doctrinaire approach subject to alteration on June 4: the Midway fighter defenses were not effective, meaning the bombers could hit their targets well enough with only minimal fighter cover; and second, the Japanese inability to locate the American fleet suggested that it was critical to retain a massive fighter reserve over Nagumo’s carriers against possible American naval attack. Yet neither Nagumo nor his officers saw the need to alter long-held beliefs to fit the circumstances at hand.

  Nagumo devoted nearly his entire air arm to a target that was not mobile and did not have a fighter or bomber force capable of seriously endangering the Japanese fleet or its planes. The immovable Midway could not become lost to Nagumo’s intelligence, nor, as the morning’s continuously unsuccessful bombing sorties proved, could it ruin his carriers. In contrast, the mobile and undetected Enterprise, Hornet, and Yorktown could surely do both.

  It would have been an innovative and unorthodox move for Nagumo to keep back half his bomber strength, ready to attack at a minute’s notice the American fleet, while retaining fighters at full strength over the carriers. That way he could still always send in much smaller, regular sorties against Midway, as he probed for the American naval presence. Launching everything at once in naval warfare was sometimes a sound strategy—the American admirals would do just that against Nagumo in the minutes to come—but only as a preventative against fast-moving carriers, whose dive-bombers were deadly; it made little sense against islands whose aircraft was obsolete and demonstrably unable to hit a ship at sea. Nagumo—and here Admiral Yamamoto’s grand plan deserves much of the blame—was concentrating on the wrong objective that could do him little harm, while neglecting the very target that could send his ships to the bottom.

  Even more critical was the decision to rearm his bombers before sending them off instantaneously against the newly discovered American carriers. The undeniable advantage the planes would reap from carrying torpedoes rather than bombs was immediately offset by having all four Japanese carriers at once exposed with a scrambled mess of gasoline, armed planes, and bombs on their flight decks. Nagumo was also worried about sending off his bombers immediately without fighter escort—the latter pilots were exhausted from the Midway raid, involved in air cover, and also refueling. Yet his unescorted dive-bombers would have at least sighted the American fleet; some would have made it through the defenses and inflicted damage. It was the desire to destroy the enemy at all costs, and to keep planes away from a targeted flight deck, that made Admiral Spruance later in the afternoon launch every available dive-bomber of the Enterprise and Yorktown against the Hiryu. Despite having no fighter support, the Americans blasted the Japanese carrier to pieces.

  It was good policy to attack land facilities with bombs, and ships with excellent Japanese torpedoes; but battle rarely gives allowance for good policy and instead demands instantaneous adaptation. In carrier war a fleet’s planes should be up in the air defending the ships and far away hunting down the enemy. As Fuchida and Okumiya point out, “Nagumo chose what seemed to him the orthodox and safe course, and from that moment his carriers were doomed” (Midway, the Battle That Doomed Japan, 237). Even Admiral Kusaka later admitted that it was a wise insurance policy to hold back substantial numbers of planes ready and armed to take off immediately once enemy carriers were sighted, but conceded that caution seemed needless at Midway: “It was almost intolerable for the commander at the front to keep its half strength in readiness indefinitely only for an enemy force which might not be in the area after all” (G. Prange, Miracle at Midway, 215).

  Finally, there was an institutional, indeed fossilized approach to the Japanese use of carriers and battleships that did not adapt to the highly volatile and constantly changing battle realities of the Pacific theater. Battleships in the war against the Americans were no longer vehicles of national prestige whose primary mission was to fire away at other battleships and atomize cruisers and destroyers. Rather, they were most effective in screening far more valuable aircraft carriers—adding their enormous antiaircraft arsenal to the protection of the irreplaceable flattops, ringing the carriers to ensure that submarines and approaching planes might first dilute their attack (battleships in general were enticing to pilots, but harder to hit from the air, better armored, and less vulnerable to torpedoes), while protecting troop transports as they softened up shore targets with their enormous sixteen- and eighteen-inch guns.

  Had all Yamamoto’s battleships ringed Nagumo’s carriers and then at night sailed off to blast away the runways at Midway itself, there is a good likelihood that more American bombers would have been shot down, that many more of both land- and sea-based planes would have diverted their attacks from the Japanese carriers to these impressive capital ships, and that there would not have been the dire necessity to launch naval planes against Midway once it was under constant naval shelling by the bulk of Yamamoto’s battleships. Instead, the battleships saw no action. For most of the war, Japan’s massive Yamato and Musashi, and other battleships like them, were completely wasted assets, which were rarely properly deployed in any of Japan’s engagements in the Pacific. The Americans, in contrast, after the disaster at Pearl Harbor and the later sinking of the British Prince of Wales and Repulse and numerous heavy cruisers by Japanese naval bombers, quickly crafted an entirely new role for battleships. From now on, the navy’s behemoths would be attached whenever possible to carriers, as at Okinawa, where they could protect and draw off fire, or, as in the Philippines or at Normandy Beach, shell enemy ground forces.

  Ideally, carrier groups should also steam in staggered formations to disperse airborne attack. Unfortunately, the Japanese approached Midway in just the opposite fashion: they clustered their four carriers in close proximity even as their critical battleships were far distant. Far better it would have been for them to form two, or even three, carrier task forces, all within fifty miles of each other to coordinate aerial attacks from the four dispersed flattops. That way they could dilute incoming bombers, such as the American practice of the dual Task Forces 16 and 17 that resulted in the previously damaged Yorktown absorbing all the Japanese bombs, freeing the distant Enterprise and Hornet from any attack at all. One can only imagine what would have transpired at Midway had the fiery and singularly combative Admiral Yamaguchi been posted fifty miles distant from the Kaga and Akagi, with direct control of the air resources of the Hiryu and Soryu—a dozen or so Japanese battleships ringing both carrier task forces. But, then, that tactic would have required real decentralization and a lateral, elastic supreme command, rather than an enormously layered hierarchy under the absolute power of an admiral who was virtually incommunicado.

  The American system of command was far more flexible and the fleet’s orders
inherently broad enough to allow for alteration as the battle for Midway unfolded. Nimitz essentially directed Admiral Frank J. Fletcher and Admiral Spruance to make use of American intelligence by cruising in at the flank of the superior Japanese fleet, to hit it hard with everything they had, and then to withdraw when Japanese surface ships rushed to the rescue. The details of the American proposed attack—indeed, the nature of the deployment of the ships themselves—were left up to the commanders, Fletcher and Spruance. Nimitz’s orders directed both “to inflict maximum damage on the enemy by employing strong attrition tactics.” Their attacks were to “be governed by the principle of calculated risk, which you shall interpret to mean the avoidance of exposure of your force to attack by superior enemy forces without good prospect of inflicting, as a result of such exposure, greater damage on the enemy” (G. Prange, Miracle at Midway, 99–100).

  In contrast, Admiral Nagumo felt duty-bound to launch an attack in the “right” way, as Admirals Spruance and Fletcher, entirely on their own, sent almost the entire American air arm after the Japanese at the first opportunity. Such actions by Spruance and Fletcher may have been precipitous, but they were grounded in the wisdom that in carrier war the first strike is often the most critical, since it can wipe out the enemy’s ability to retaliate and can obliterate the platform itself for hundreds of planes in the air.

  When there were rare disagreements among the high echelons of the Japanese admiralty, such tension often manifested itself in counterproductive and strangely formalistic ways: offers to resign or even commit suicide, rival efforts to accept rather than allot blame, determination to go down with the ship to atone for tactical blunders—even an earlier wrestling match during the Pearl Harbor campaign between Admirals Nagumo and Yamaguchi over deployment of the latter’s carriers. How different was the informal and relaxed American system. Admiral Fletcher on the damaged Yorktown transferred to Admiral Spruance key decisions for launching the fleet’s planes—without rancor or worry about the honor of command:

  He [Fletcher] knew well that the admiral who led his ships to the major American sea victory of World War II would be a popular hero, assured of his place in history. Yet, when he realized that he could no longer command his air striking units at top efficiency, he turned the reins over to Spruance. This was an act of selfless integrity and patriotism in action. The reputations of Nimitz and Spruance have overshadowed Fletcher, but he was the link between the two, a man of talent who had the brains and character to give a free hand to a man of genius. (G. Prange, Miracle at Midway, 386)

  Both the Japanese and the American military traditions prized supreme command from the field—a hallmark of Western military practice since the culture of hoplite generals fighting in the front rank of the Greek phalanx—but the Americans were far more ready to abandon form for function in a complex battle theater of the magnitude of Midway. Admiral Yamamoto, who had dreamed up the entire unworkable plan, was on the Yamato itself. But since the Japanese were observing radio silence, and the admiral’s flagship was sailing far from the scene of the carrier war, there was almost no chance of direct and instant communications between officers in battle and the Japanese high command. Yamamoto was about as in control of Midway as Xerxes was on his imperial throne perched on the hills above Salamis—but the former with far less firsthand information of the battle’s progress.

  In comparison, Admiral Nimitz at Pearl Harbor had an almost instantaneous appreciation of the events of June 1942 as they transpired and so kept up a constant advisory dialogue with his admirals. In fact, Nimitz in his office at Pearl Harbor was closer to the action at Midway, both concretely and electronically, than Yamamoto was in his battleship at sea. The Japanese tradition of the supreme commander being in the foremost ship in the fleet (and in a battleship during a carrier war!), the readiness for an experienced carrier commander to go down with his vessel, and the unquestioning acceptance of a tactical blueprint from on high were disciplined and soldierly, but not necessarily militarily efficacious, practices. Like some exalted warlord, Yamamoto drew up his formal plan, ordered his subordinates to follow it, and then in relative isolation and silence cruised out to battle in the huge, ostentatious—and mostly irrelevant—Yamato.

  Unfortunately, his adversaries paid little heed to the samurai tradition, but were in constant electronic communication and ad hoc consultations as they drew up new contingency plans and on occasion traded command. American admirals preferred to supervise the complete abandonment of their sinking ships—and characteristically thereby lost fewer of their men when their vessels sank. They were more eager to obtain a new warship than go down with the old, learning from, rather than being consumed in, defeat. When thousands of their sailors were trying to find salvation in a sinking ship’s last moments, they cared little whether President Roosevelt’s photograph might soon rest at the bottom of the Pacific.

  Not all naval battles call for imagination and adaptation. Eccentric, pugnacious, and independent American admirals like Halsey and Fletcher could at times—as during the battles of Coral Sea, the engagements off Guadalcanal, and the victory in Leyte Gulf—nearly endanger their fleets through their very aggressiveness. But in general, it is a truism of carrier war and of battle itself that there is a fog in armed conflict, that set plans are often obsolete the minute the shooting starts, and that reaction, innovation, and initiative more often than not outweigh the merits of method, consensus, and adherence to hierarchy and protocol. In that regard, it is advantageous on the battlefield to have soldiers more independent than predictable, with officers who look to what works at the moment, rather than adhere to what is accepted as conventional.

  The Initiative of the Pilots

  The Americans had outdated airplanes, often unskilled pilots, and little experience in carrier war. They did, however, launch repeated aerial attacks, in which highly individualistic aircrews employed unpredictable sorties and unorthodox methods of attack that had the effect of disrupting the Japanese carrier fleet and making possible its final destruction. Japanese observers on the carriers shook their heads over the amateurish-ness of the first eight futile shore and naval American air attacks—and then were aghast when the ninth wave of dive-bombers came out of nowhere to destroy their fleet.

  Scholars often remark that the Midway-based army bombers and marine pilots—flying obsolete Brewster Buffaloes, Vaught Vindicators, new Avenger torpedo bombers, outclassed navy SBD dive-bombers, Wildcat fighters, B-26 Marauder light bombers, and B-17 Flying Fortresses— failed to do any real damage to the Japanese fleet. Yet their repeated attacks, if uncoordinated, spontaneous, and unskilled, were nearly constant and so had the effect of keeping the Japanese off guard, and their critical fighters engaged, soon worn out, and often in need of fuel and ammunition. Before the carriers were finally set ablaze, no fewer than five sorties flew out from Midway itself, often on the initiative of the pilots themselves.

  Before the day of the decisive battle, at a little after noon on June 3, nine army B-17s left Midway to attack the incoming Japanese fleet when it was still six hundred miles away. The pilots had no combat experience and carried less than eleven tons of bombs between them. They scored no hits. As the B-17s returned to Midway hours later, a motley group of PBY scout planes—scarcely able to reach speeds of one hundred mph—took off. Each was jury-rigged to carry a single torpedo and headed out for the Japanese fleet and another surprise nighttime attack. Other than some slight damage to a tanker, this second and even more bizarre sortie had little success.

  The next morning at 7:00 as the Japanese carrier planes were off hitting Midway, American torpedo bombers and B-26s from the islands once more zoomed toward Admiral Nagumo’s carrier fleet. There was no real flight plan, much less any integrated tactics between the squadrons. Lieutenant Ogawa on the Akagi thought the entire morning attack inept—a judgment confirmed when the imperial fleet’s Zeros shot down most of the Avengers and one of the four B-26s. The Americans again scored no hits.

  A l
ittle more than an hour later, fifteen B-17s arrived again over the Japanese fleet to begin a fourth American bombing attack. Dropping their ordnance from nearly 20,000 feet, the Fortresses got close with only a few bombs—they would later make fantastic claims of damage—but again they scored no hits. A few minutes later eleven decrepit marine Vindicators arrived and began old-fashioned glide-bombing attacks from as low as 500 feet. They scored no hits either.

  All five attacks from Midway were spontaneous, involving marine, army, and navy pilots, in a strange assortment of at least five different types of bombers, attacking from 500 to 20,000 feet, with inadequate preparation, defective torpedoes, and bombs that could not seriously damage modern armored ships. When they were done, all the Japanese ships were intact, half of Midway’s planes were gone, but the fleet was left frazzled and tired from hours of constant vigilance and shooting—just as the three doomed waves of Devastators from the Enterprise, Hornet, and Yorktown now appeared on the horizon to begin their own equally unproductive torpedo runs. Captain Fuchida and Commander Okumiya summed up the Midway attacks, with special emphasis on how busy the Japanese were repelling the first five American aerial sorties:

  It was our general conclusion that we had little to fear from the enemy’s offensive tactics. But, paradoxically, the very ineffectiveness of the enemy attacks up to this time contributed in no small measure to the ultimate American triumph. We neglected certain obvious precautions, which had they been taken, might have prevented the fiasco that followed a few hours later. The apparently futile sacrifices made by the enemy’s shore-based planes were, after all, not in vain. (Midway, the Battle That Doomed Japan , 163)