Book Review: 'Incredible Victory: The Battle of Midway'
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| ©2013 Burford Books |
In the spring of 1942, the Japanese Empire was at the height of its power. In the first five months after the devastating attack on the U.S. base at Pearl Harbor, Japan had defeated American, British, Dutch, and Australian forces in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. Burma, Malaya, Borneo, Wake Island, Guam, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and vast areas of the Central and South Pacific were under Japanese control. Parts of New Guinea and the Solomon Islands were also occupied by Emperor Hirohito's soldiers. Australia, New Zealand, New Caledonia, Fiji, and Hawaii could be next.
In April, Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, the commander-in-chief of Japan's Combined Fleet practically blackmailed his nominal superiors on the Naval General Staff into approving Operation MI. This was a scheme whereby Yamamoto would lure the remaining aircraft carriers of the U.S. Pacific Fleet into a "Decisive Battle" by invading the small American-held atoll called Midway. Yamamoto believed that his American counterpart, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, could not afford to let Japan seize the strategically-important base at the farthest end of the Hawaiian Island chain, which was located 1313 miles away from Oahu, where Pearl Harbor is located.
Although Operation MI was green-lit by the Naval General Staff in early April, the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo and other Japanese cities (April 18, 1942) reinforced Yamamoto's determination to invade Midway and destroy America's carrier fleet. Accepting Tokyo's insistence on a simultaneous invasion of the Aleutian Islands to forestall U.S. attacks on Japan from that part of the Pacific, Yamamoto demanded that Operation MI be carried out as soon as possible. Even when the First Mobile Striking Force's Fifth Carrier Division limped back to Japan after encountering Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher's Task Force 16 at the Coral Sea (the carrier Shokaku was damaged, while the Zuikaku's air group suffered heavy losses), Yamamoto did not wait till the two carriers could be made whole again.
Instead, at the end of May, several Japanese task forces, widely separated and unable to give each other mutual support, set sail from various ports in Japan and the Central Pacific to attack the Aleutians and Midway Atoll. Altogether, nearly 200 Japanese warships and transports were involved in Operations AL and MI.
The key component of Operation MI was the carrier force that Lord refers to here as the First Mobile Striking Force, commanded by Vice Admiral Nagumo Chuichi. A career battleship man and highly conservative by nature, Nagumo had commanded this task force in its various operations from Pearl Harbor onwards. Although he was by no means a timid commander, he was not as aggressive as Yamamoto would have liked. Yet, his carrier force had dominated the air and sea whenever it had struck at the Allies, so even though he was only sailing to battle with four of his six carriers - Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu, and Soryu, Nagumo accepted his orders manfully, believing that his naval aviators would defeat their American counterparts.
A week after setting out on what the Japanese expected to be another triumph over a depleted American fleet, Nagumo, Yamamoto, and the other senior commanders of the Japanese Navy saw their hopes turn to ashes. Instead of luring the Americans out of Pearl Harbor after a successful invasion of Midway, the Japanese were caught in a carefully-set ambush made possible by American naval codebreakers who "cracked" Japan's JN-25 code. On the morning of June 4, dive bombers from three U.S. carriers scored fatal bomb hits on Akagi, Kaga, and Soryu; Nagumo's remaining carrier, Hiryu, temporarily escaped and struck back with its depleted air group and avenged her sisters by seriously damaging the USS Yorktown. But by late afternoon on the 4th, Hiryu, too, was bombed by American planes and was damaged so badly that she had to be scuttled the next day.
They had no right to win. Yet they did, and in doing so they changed the course of a war. More than that, they added a name - Midway - to that small list that inspires men by shining example. Like Marathon, the Armada, the Marne, a few others, Midway showed that every once in a while "what must be" need not be at all. Even against the greatest of odds, there is something in the human spirit - a magic blend of skill, faith, and valor - that can lift men from certain defeat to incredible victory. - Walter Lord, in his foreword, Incredible Victory.
My Take
Written a quarter-century after the Battle of Midway, Walter Lord's 1967 book was one of the two authoritative accounts of Operation MI until the early 21st Century. Along with Gordon Prange's Miracle at Midway, Incredible Victory was held up by many American historians and readers as the most accurate and readable books published about Japan's first naval defeat in over 300 years and the battle which turned the tide of the war in the Pacific.
Based on hundreds of interviews with American and Japanese veterans of Midway, Lord's "you-are-there" book is still one of the best documentary-style works on the battle, especially from the American side. As he did in 1955's A Night to Remember, his best-selling account of the sinking of RMS Titanic, Lord focuses on the human side of the battle and tries hard to recreate the complex story of Midway in a fair and balanced manner.
Written in Lord's inimitable style that places the reader in the midst of the action, Incredible Victory succeeds brilliantly in recording the U.S. side of Midway, particularly when it discusses the breaking of the Japanese JN-25 code and the desperate efforts to repair the Yorktown - which had been damaged and reported sunk by the Japanese at the Battle of Coral Sea - in time to send her off to Midway.
The Americans' experiences of the battle itself are also nicely recreated, although Lord perpetuates some of the now-debunked myths about the Battle of Midway, especially those that are based on Fuchida Mitsuo's Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan.
To be fair to Lord, I doubt that he suspected that Fuchida's best-selling book about the Japanese perspective about the battle was riddled with errors and deliberate misstatements of fact. Partly because Lord was not a Japanese speaker, but mostly because Japan's official history of the war had not yet been published, he and his contemporaries (including Gordon Prange) took Fuchida at his word, especially when it came to the reasons why Japan lost the Battle of Midway.
Obviously, the language barrier was a big part of why Lord and other Western historians perpetuated the story that the Japanese carriers were just five minutes away from launching a devastating strike on the U.S. fleet when American dive bombers dove out of the clouds and struck crippling bomb hits on three carriers. The author of Incredible Victory probably figured that since Fuchida was present and been privy to many of the operational details of the Pacific War, he was a reliable source.
But as Anthony Tully and Jon Parshall (younger historians who were generously assisted by Lord in his later years until his death in 2002) point out, many of the details about Midway that appear in Incredible Victory and some of its conclusions about how and why Japan was defeated are simply wrong. In Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway, Tully and Parshall correct many of the myths that Lord unwittingly helped to promote, particularly Fuchida's fanciful account of "the fateful five minutes."
Nevertheless, Incredible Victory is still a well-written, awe-inspiring, and entertaining book. I first read it in hardcover when I was in fifth grade, and in 1976, I bought the Ballantine Books paperback edition that was issued to coincide with the movie release of Universal Pictures' epic war movie, Midway. Despite Lord's overreliance on Fuchida's Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan, Incredible Victory is highly readable, especially if you want the human side of the three-day battle. Just be sure to read later works, including Shattered Sword and Craig L. Symonds The Battle of Midway for a more complete understanding of Operation MI.
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