Book Review: 'Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway'

© 2005 Potomac Books

On November 1, 2005, Potomac Books published Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway. Co-written by Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully, this was the first major book about the pivotal naval engagement that ended the Imperial Japanese Navy's offensive phase in the Pacific War since Gordon W. Prange's Miracle at Midway (1982). Based on extensive research of Japan's military and naval archives, as well as re-examining many American accounts of the battle, Shattered Sword not only tells the story of Midway from the perspective of the Japanese, but it also endeavors to bust myths about the 1942 battle that ended Japan's six-month-long string of victories over the Allies and began to see the balance of power shift to the U.S. Navy.

Even though 78 years have passed since the Battle of Midway (June 4-7, 1942), it is still considered one of history's most important naval battles. When Japan's fearsome Combined Fleet set out to sea in late May of 1942 and headed across the vast Pacific toward the small atoll at the far end of the Hawaiian Islands, many Japanese naval officers and sailors thought another great victory was in the offing. When the battle ended on June 7, the core of the Imperial Japanese Navy's carrier force - four aircraft carriers of the dreaded Kido Butai (Mobile Force) that had raided Pearl Harbor six months earlier lay at the bottom of the Pacific, along with one heavy cruiser and many trained sailors, officers, pilots.  and aircraft maintenance crew members. In exchange, the U.S. Navy lost the carrier USS Yorktown, the destroyer USS Hammann, 150 aircraft, and 307 sailors, Marines, and aviators, a reminder that victories in war are always paid in blood and material.

The battle was initiated by Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, commander in chief of Japan's Combined Fleet. Yamamoto, bitterly regretting the absence of the U.S. Navy's fleet carriers at Pearl Harbor, and stung by the famous Doolittle Raid against Tokyo in April 1942, was determined to annihilate his opponents in a decisive battle somewhere in the central Pacific. The location he selected was the tiny atoll of Midway, some 1,100nm northwest of Oahu. By attacking this apparently strategic outpost of Hawaii, he hoped to lure the American carriers to battle, and then crush them.

In the event, Yamamoto got rather more than he bargained for. The Americans, having broken Japan's naval codes, were able to discern enough of Japanese intentions that they had time to organize a hasty defense. Adm. Yamamoto's counterpart, the savvy, aggressive Admiral Chester Nimitz, was determined to fight, not from desperation, but in a cooly calculated bid to destroy Japan's carrier force (known as Kido Butai). As a result, three American flattops — Yorktown, Enterprise, and Hornet — were waiting for Kido Butai when it appeared off Midway on the morning of 4 June.

The resulting battle, through many twists and turns, eventually saw the tactical initiative pass from the Japanese to the Americans. And despite the latter's inability to conduct air operations with anything like the level of coordination of the Japanese, three of their dive-bomber squadrons succeeded (with a healthy dose of luck) in finding and attacking three of Japan's four carriers at around 1020AM on the 4th. Within minutes, Akagi, Kaga, and Soryu had been rendered inoperational, doomed to sink. And while Japanese counterstrikes from Hiryu damaged the Yorktown heavily, Japan's last carrier, too, was smashed by the Americans later in the day. Thus, despite Yorktown's eventual demise at the hands of a Japanese submarine a couple days later, the battle was a dramatic triumph for the U.S. — the first clear-cut victory after months of defeat at the hands of the Japanese.- From the Shattered Sword website

My Take

The Battle of Midway is one of the most fascinating events in American history. Maybe it's because the events of June 4, 1942 - the first day of the battle - were so dramatic that many authors and filmmakers have created many books, documentaries, and even a few Hollywood movies to tell the story of the U.S. Pacific Fleet's well-conceived ambush on a theoretically superior Japanese force.

The stunning reversal of fortunes that befell Japan's Kido Butai at Midway was for many years considered to be "incredible" and even "miraculous." Indeed, the two seminal American books about the battle dip deep into that view of Midway, starting with Walter Lord's 1967 Incredible Victory and Gordon W. Prange's Miracle at Midway, the 1982 followup to the author's At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor.  

Both of these works are extremely well-written and, at least regarding the American side of the battle, carefully researched and based on primary sources and in-depth interviews with Midway veterans. For the most part, Prange and Lord's books reflect an honest effort to tell their post-World War II audiences what happened at the Battle of Midway based on the historical record and eyewitness accounts. And as far as the American narrative is concerned, Incredible Victory and Miracle at Midway are still the seminal books on the topic.

That being said, Lord and Prange unwittingly helped perpetuate some of the widely-held myths about Midway, some of which can be traced to the earnest but flawed after-action reports made by U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Army Air Forces pilots about damage inflicted on the Japanese fleet, and some of which can be attributed to Japanese myths created by the vanquished enemy at the end of the war and after. The most prominent Japanese mythmaker was none other than Capt. Fuchida Mitsuo, the flight leader on the carrier Akagi and the man who led the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

I''m not going to delve too deeply into the myths that have become part of the "common wisdom" regarding the Battle of Midway here. Suffice it to say, however, that since Fuchida's Midway: The Battle that Doomed Japan was cited by both Lord and Prange in their books, many of the mental images Western readers have about the engagement - especially those of four Japanese aircraft carriers, their flight decks full of fueled and armed planes five minutes away from launching a devastating counterstrike against the American carriers being suddenly subjected to a hail of U.S. bombs by Dauntless dive bombers  - are based on Fuchida's distortions of the events.

Now, Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway does not deny that the U.S. Navy defeated Kido Butai or engages in David Irving-style revisionism of the worst kind. The basic account of the battle is not in dispute here, after all.

What Anthony Tully and Jonathan Parshall set out to do in their 640-page opus is to re-examine the Japanese side of the Battle of Midway and dispel once and for all the mythology and misinterpretation of history that was innocently perpetuated by the early chroniclers of Midway, including the respected duo of Walter Lord and Gordon W. Ptange and persist in the works of other authors in the West.

Most of those factual errors and misconceptions, say Parshall and Tully, stem from basic misunderstandings about how the Japanese carried out naval operations. In most books about the Pacific War, there is much discussion about how Japanese military culture extolled offensive warfare but paid little heed to defensive measures. This is reflected in any description of the Japanese fighter plane known by its nickname "Zero" and the Type 95 "Long Lance" torpedo,  as well as Japan's overall military strategy.

What Shattered Sword does - in contrast to Incredible Victory and Miracle at Midway - is to delve more in detail at the differences in how the Japanese handled carrier operations vis a vis the U.S. Navy. The two navies were not mirrored images of each other, after all,  and although the Japanese Imperial Navy borrowed many of its traditions from Britain's Royal Navy, as far as carrier design, construction, and tactical use were concerned, the Japanese went their own way.

The cultural and doctrinal differences between the two navies that clashed in the Pacific might seem trivial to the average Western reader, but they played a crucial role at every stage of the Battle of Midway and the other campaigns that followed.

As I have said before, Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway centers more on the Japanese experience of the battle because, aside from a few cosmetic details based on fallible eyewitness accounts, there are few controversies on the U.S. side. That's not to say that there aren't any; the inexplicably incompetent actions of the USS Hornet's air group that led to the infamous "Flight to Nowhere" are chronicled here in some detail. But since Operation MI was Admiral Yamamoto's plan, and because Japanese planning and decision-making led up to the "battle that doomed Japan," Shattered Sword rightly focuses on those aspects rather than the more familiar narrative from the victorious side.

Fittingly, Shattered Sword earned not just critical acclaim, but it also won the 2005 John Lyman Book Award for the "Best Book in U.S. Naval History." It is a well-written and fascinating work that is destined to become the standard history of the Battle of Midway for many years in the future.