The American Guts and Grit That Sank Japan at Midway
The American Guts and Grit That Sank Japan at Midway by Robert R. Garnett, Wall Street Journal
Seventy-five years ago this Sunday, some 150 Japanese warships, 250 warplanes and 25 admirals were steaming toward a small atoll 1,300 miles northwest of Oahu. Imminent was the most crucial naval battle of World War II—Midway.
Aboard the Yamato, the world’s largest battleship, Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto retired to his quarters each evening to play chess. He had spent his final nights in port with his geisha, Kawai Chiyoko. Departing, he sent her verses: “Today too I ache for you / Calling your name / Again and again / And pressing kisses / Upon your picture.”
His present concerns were less sentimental. For six months, Japan’s navy had battered Allied forces across 8,000 miles of ocean, from Pearl Harbor to Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka). Still, Yamamoto worried that the American fleet was wounded but still dangerous. “We have scorched the snake,” as Macbeth had put it, “not killed it.”
His American counterpart, Adm. Chester Nimitz, relaxed by pitching horseshoes. Steady, calm, old-school—his most violent oath was “Now see here!”—Nimitz marshaled his forces for battle, waiting for the unsuspecting Japanese.
Weeks earlier, with strikes expected toward Australia, Washington had ordered Nimitz’s aircraft carriers to the far South Pacific. Others feared assaults on Hawaii, perhaps San Francisco or San Diego. Or the Panama Canal, Alaska . . . even Siberia.
But in a windowless basement near the fleet’s Pearl Harbor headquarters, codebreakers under Cmdr. Joe Rochefort pored over intercepted Japanese radio traffic. Independent, impolitic, single-minded, Rochefort “left the basement only to bathe, change clothes, or get an occasional meal to supplement a steady diet of coffee and sandwiches,” one officer recalled. “For weeks the only sleep he got was on a field cot pushed into a crowded corner.”
Rochefort’s team could decode about one-eighth of an average message, filling in the gaps by educated intuition. For example, the messages called the proximate Japanese objective “AF.” But where was “AF”? Midway, Rochefort concluded. The authorities in Washington scoffed. Why would Japan dispatch a massive armada to seize a tiny atoll?
Nimitz, responsible for millions of square miles of ocean, had scant means to repel the Japanese anywhere, let alone everywhere. With his fleet, and perhaps the entire Pacific war, at stake, “I had to do a bit of hard thinking,” he would recall.
As the Navy’s heavyweights vacillated, Nimitz decided to gamble on the out-of-step Rochefort. He recalled his three carriers from the South Pacific to defend Midway. Time was short. The USS Yorktown had been damaged in the Battle of the Coral Sea and had recently returned to Pearl Harbor trailing a 10-mile oil slick. Repair estimates ranged up to three months…
It was my understanding that Midway was won before it began, by codebreakers: by American cleverness and sneakiness. Even then, it was a close-run thing. Yet a loss at Midway would not have been as devastating for the U.S.
To add to this discussion, I have always been fascinated by the campaigns in the Pacific theater but I’m sure part of that is due to growing up around Navy and Marine types in my family. My grandfather’s older brother spent several years in the Pacific (Army infantry type) and while fortunate to ‘survive’ the war, came back with malaria and a severe drinking problem (clearly suffering PTSD symptoms but back then it the significance of this issue, let alone treatment, was completely lacking) that led to an early death just a few years after the war ended.
I highly recommend the book “Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of Midway” by Parshall and Tully. It dispels a lot of the Western myths around the Midway campaign and also does a deep dive into some technical and doctrine issues that played a factor in the outcome of this campaign (such as IJN air defense doctrine, USN damage control doctrine, design of carriers, etc.).
Link to description:
http://www.shatteredswordbook.com/
Also, the authors maintain a website in the IJN called combinedfleet.com which has a lot of useful data and articles on the IJN. Here is a link to an article on combinedfleet about the Commanders of Midway, Spruance and Nagumo. Very interesting stuff.
http://www.combinedfleet.com/prinob_f.htm
Long story short, the outcome of the campaign was a tragedy for the IJN and a stunning success for the USN, helmed by a very competent Spruance. It also set the stage for American offensive campaigns and left the IJN to assume a defensive posture. It also sheds light on many Western myths of this campaign while doing a deep dive into technical aspects and doctrine that also had a key role in the outcome of this campaign.