Book Review: 'The Battle of Midway'
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| © 2011 Oxford University Press. Cover photo, US Navy |
The naval Battle of Midway (June 4-6, 1942) has long been considered to be one of the most important naval battles of the Second World War. Almost six months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, almost 200 Japanese ships, including four of the six carriers that had launched planes against Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941, and the super-battleship Yamato, sortied from several naval bases scattered throughout the Japanese Empire. Divided into several groups, each with a specific mission tasked, the various units had one goal in mind: to lure the remnants of America's Pacific Fleet - including its aircraft carriers - out to sea and destroy them in one decisive naval engagement.
The architect of this grandiose campaign was none other than Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander in Chief of Japan's Combined Fleet. Brilliant, ambitious, and a firm believer in naval aviation, Yamamoto was also the man behind the Pearl Harbor raid, a plan that he had practically blackmailed his more conservative Naval General Staff superiors into accepting.
The complex campaign to use the coordinated invasions of Midway Island in the Central Pacific and the islands of Attu and Kiska in the Aleutian chain off the coast of Alaska was also something Yamamoto had bullied his bosses in Tokyo into accepting. In the spring of 1942, Japanese propaganda, as well as the nation's string of victories against the Allies in the first five months of the Pacific War, had transformed Yamamoto into a national hero. The admiral was politically astute enough to recognize this - he received fan mail even from young children every day - and threatened to resign if his plan was not approved.
Sure of the Japanese Navy's invincibility and of the Americans' inability to marshal a large enough fleet of warships and aircraft to stop the Combined Fleet, Yamamoto and his staff cobbled together a plan that was too convoluted for its own good and dispersed its forces too wide apart to be mutually supporting. Overconfident and trusting too much on their own propaganda, the Japanese admirals sent out their finest asset - the Kido Butai - into battle without bothering to do refresher training for flight crews, draw up a sensible scouting plan for the fleet's reconnaissance planes, or even take into account what the American fleet could do to them if the plan somehow went awry.
There are few moments in American history in which the course of events tipped so suddenly and so dramatically as at the Battle of Midway. At dawn of June 4, 1942, a rampaging Japanese navy ruled the Pacific. By sunset, their vaunted carrier force (the Kido Butai) had been sunk and their grip on the Pacific had been loosened forever.
In this absolutely riveting account of a key moment in the history of World War II, one of America's leading naval historians, Craig L. Symonds paints an unforgettable portrait of ingenuity, courage, and sacrifice. Symonds begins with the arrival of Admiral Chester A. Nimitz at Pearl Harbor after the devastating Japanese attack, and describes the key events leading to the climactic battle, including both Coral Sea--the first battle in history against opposing carrier forces--and Jimmy Doolittle's daring raid of Tokyo. He focuses throughout on the people involved, offering telling portraits of Admirals Nimitz, Halsey, Spruance and numerous other Americans, as well as the leading Japanese figures, including the poker-loving Admiral Yamamoto. Indeed, Symonds sheds much light on the aspects of Japanese culture--such as their single-minded devotion to combat, which led to poorly armored planes and inadequate fire-safety measures on their ships--that contributed to their defeat. The author's account of the battle itself is masterful, weaving together the many disparate threads of attack--attacks which failed in the early going--that ultimately created a five-minute window in which three of the four Japanese carriers were mortally wounded, changing the course of the Pacific war in an eye-blink. - Publisher's dust jacket blurb, The Battle of Midway
My Take
If you're a World War II history buff, chances are that you have read at least one of the classic 20th Century accounts of the Battle of Midway, including Mitsuo Fuchida and Masatake Okumiya's Midway: The Battle that Doomed Japan, Walter Lord's Incredible Victory, and Gordon W. Prange's posthumously-published Miracle at Midway. This trio of books forms the core of the narrative of Midway, and many other books refer to them as if they were infallible and authoritative.
However, with the passage of time, new generations of historians have delved deeply into the archives of both Japan and the U.S. and such arcane areas as Japanese ship design and naval doctrine. What they have discovered, thanks to dedicated investigation and in-depth interviews with Japanese survivors and historians, is that Fuchida, the naval officer who led the attack on Pearl Harbor, created some of the Japanese myths about Midway to distort the truth and absolve the Japanese Navy of its sins of omission by attributing the American victory to the fickle fingers of Fate.
The influence of the Fuchida-Okumiya book on American writers is obvious' from the titles of Lord and Prange's books, which depict the victory at Midway as "incredible" and "miraculous." This, argue authors Jonathan Parshall and Antony Tully in their 2005 book Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway, is the result of the American authors' tendency to rely on Midway: The Battle that Doomed Japan as a primary source of the Japanese side of the story, and in Prange's case, a personal friendship with Fuchida himself.
As a result, it wasn't until relatively recently that books like Shattered Sword began to give readers a clearer and more nuanced picture of the Battle of Midway, especially the real story of what happened to Kido Butai on June 4, 1942. and why.
Because Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway tells the story of Midway mostly from the Japanese perspective, it became clear to Craig L. Symonds that a U.S.-focused counterpart needed to be written. The Battle of Midway is thar book.
Symonds, a Professor Emeritus of naval history at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, gives us a crisply written and authoritative book that covers not just the three-day Battle of Midway but also the six-month period that preceded the war's second carrier battle. Starting with Admiral Chester W. Nimitz's arrival at Pearl Harbor in mid-December 1941. The Battle of Midway examines the commanders, the sailors, the airmen, the planes, the warships, and the submarines that were used by the American Pacific Fleet to such good use in the lead up to the battle and beyond.
Although The Battle of Midway doesn't get to its eponymous engagement until page 242, Symonds' book is the ideal counterpart to Parshall and Tully's Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway. It is a finely constructed story. written in a vivid and riveting style that makes the oft-told story of the Japanese Navy's first major defeat in 350 years seem fresh and suspenseful. This is historical revisionism of the best kind; The Battle of Midway does not distort the narrative to deceive modern readers (which is what bad revisionists like David Irving seek to accomplish). Rather, it corrects errors and distortions that appear in earlier works and have become "gospel" because it's easier to accept the mythology than to delve into Japanese archives or parse American pilots' exaggerated wartime claims made in the heat of battle.
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