NINE

Individualism

Midway, June 4–8, 1942

Now where men are not their own masters and independent, but are ruled by despots, they are not really militarily capable, but only appear to be warlike. . . . For men’s souls are enslaved and they refuse to run risks readily and recklessly to increase the power of somebody else. But independent people, taking risks on their own behalf and not on behalf of others, are willing and eager to go into danger, for they themselves enjoy the prize of victory. So institutions contribute a great deal to military valor.

—HIPPOCRATES, Airs, Waters, Places (16, 23)

FLOATING INFERNOS

THERE WERE TWO deadly places to be on the morning of June 4, 1942, during the first day of the battle of Midway—at that point the greatest aircraft carrier battle in the history of naval warfare. The first was on four Japanese aircraft carriers under aerial attack from American dive-bombers. All had their planes parked on their decks being refueled and rearmed when they were unexpectedly attacked. Gasoline tanks, high explosives, and ammunition were recklessly exposed to a shower of American 500- and 1,000-pound bombs. The hangar decks below were also littered promiscuously with munitions and torpedoes. Frantic crews tried in vain to switch their armaments from a planned land attack on Midway to a sudden impromptu assault on the newly located American carrier fleet a little less than two hundred miles to the east.

Under those rare circumstances of carrier vulnerability, a single 1,000-pound bomb that hit the targeted deck full of gassed and armed planes might trigger a series of explosions that could incinerate the entire ship and send it to the bottom in minutes—1,000 pounds of explosives ruining in a minute or two what five years of labor and 60 million pounds of steel had created. During the battle of Midway, three of the imperial Japanese prized fleet carriers—the Akagi, Kaga, and Soryu, all veterans of an unbroken string of Japanese successes during the prior six months— were precisely in that rare state of absolute defenselessness when American dive-bombers began their headlong plunges from as high as 20,000 feet, entirely unseen from below. In less than six minutes—from 10:22 to 10:28 A.M. on June 4, 1942—the pride of the Japanese carrier fleet was set aflame and the course of World War II in the Pacific radically altered. Unlike the great naval battles of the past—Artemisium (480 B.C.), Salamis (480 B.C.), Actium (31 B.C.), Lepanto (1571), Trafalgar (1805), and Jutland (1916)—Midway was fought in the open seas: once sailors lost their platform of safety, unscathed and burned orphaned crewmen alike would find neither shore nor small boats to pick them up.

The 33,000-ton Kaga (“Increased Joy”), with its arsenal of seventy-two bombers and fighters, was probably attacked first by twenty-five American SBD Dauntless dive-bombers of squadrons VB-6 and VS-6, led by the skilled pilot Wade McClusky from the American carrier Enterprise. Nine of McClusky’s planes made it through the horrendous antiaircraft defenses. All dived toward the carrier at more than 250 mph. Four bombs hit their target. Within seconds Japanese planes, gassed, armed, and ready for takeoff, instead began exploding, causing gaping holes in the flight deck and killing almost anyone in their general vicinity. Anything metal on deck—wrenches, pipes, fittings—simply became deadly shrapnel that shredded all flesh in its path. Two subsequent American bombs ripped apart the ship’s elevator and ignited all the armed planes waiting below on the hangar deck. One bomb blew apart the carrier’s island, killing all the officers on the bridge, including the captain of the Kaga.

Almost immediately, power went out. The Kaga stopped dead in the water and began exploding. Carriers seldom broke in two and sank quickly. They were not often caught and targeted by the huge shells of battleships and were among the most seaworthy of capital ships even when torpedoed—which was rare, given their protective net of cruisers and destroyers. Nevertheless, in minutes eight hundred of the Kaga’s crew were burned alive, dismembered, or vaporized into nothingness. Ship-to-ship air warfare, with its lethal combination of bomb, torpedo, machine-gun fire, and aviation fuel, even without the horrific shelling of sixteen-inch naval guns, could be an ungodly experience. Whereas the Japanese had done precisely the same thing to American battleships half a year earlier at Pearl Harbor, their own blazing carriers now were not at dock, but on the high seas, hundreds of miles from Japanese-held territory. Their slight hope of rescue and medical attention lay only with other Japanese ships, themselves under aerial attack and thus wary of approaching too close to the exploding and flaming carriers. A few officers chose to go down with their vessels, out of shame of disappointing their emperor.

At nearly the same time the Kaga was struck, her sister ship the 34,000-ton Akagi (“Red Castle”)—Admiral Nagumo’s flagship—with most of its sixty-three planes, was caught in exactly the same manner by Dick Best and at least five SBD dive-bombers of the 1st Division of Bombing Squadron VB-6, also from the carrier Enterprise. While this smaller group of airborne attackers had only 5,000 pounds of ordnance among them, the Akagi was likewise in the midst of launching at least forty fully gassed and armed planes heading out to demolish the Yorktown. At least two and maybe three of the Americans’ bombs hit the carrier. The explosions incinerated the Japanese planes as they were taking off and blasted holes throughout the deck before reaching the volatile fuel tanks and magazines below. Rear Admiral Kusaka recorded that the deck was on fire and anti-aircraft and machine guns were firing automatically, having been set off by the fire aboard ship. Bodies were all over the place, and it was not possible to tell what would be shot up next. . . . I had my hands and feet burned—a pretty serious burn on one foot. That is eventually the way we abandoned the Akagi—helter-skelter, no order of any kind. (W. Smith, Midway, 111)

Unlike those who are attacked in land warfare, men shelled and bombed on carriers at sea have little avenue of flight, their escape limited by the small perimeter of the flight deck. An infantryman subject to the hellish shelling on Guadalcanal might run, dig, or find shelter; a Japanese sailor on an exploding carrier at Midway had to choose from among being burned alive, suffocating inside the ship, being strafed and engulfed on a red-hot flight deck, or jumping overboard to drown, be burned on the high seas, or on occasion be attacked by sharks in the warm waters of the Pacific. The best hope of a Japanese man in the water was to be rescued by American ships, which meant life and safety in a prisoner-of-war camp in the United States. The worst nightmare of an American sailor or airman in the seas of Midway was capture by the Japanese navy, which spelled a quick interrogation, followed by either beheading or being thrown overboard bound with weights.

As for the attackers, unlike high-altitude “precision” bombing by multiengine aircraft at 20,000 feet and above, naval dive-bombers were far more likely to hit the target—if the pilots were not themselves engulfed by their own explosions, shot down, or simply unable to pull out of a dive that brought them within feet of the enemy deck. At Midway a single Dauntless dive-bomber closing to a thousand feet above the target with a 500-pound bomb would prove more lethal than an entire squadron of fifteen B-17s three or four miles above, despite each dropping 8,500 pounds of explosives.

One such bomb from one of the American dive-bombers plowed into the hangar and ignited the Akagi’s stored torpedoes, which immediately began to rip the ship open from the inside out. Unlike British aircraft carriers, neither the faster and more agile Japanese nor the American flattops had armored decks. Their wooden runways offered poor protection for the fuel, planes, and bombs in storage below—and themselves were easily ignited along with the planes preparing for takeoff. More than two hundred men from theAkagi were either killed or lost in seconds. A Japanese naval officer and celebrated pilot, Mitsuo Fuchida, on the Akagi recalled the general calamity inside the carrier:

I staggered down a ladder and into the ready room. It was already jammed with badly burned victims from the hangar deck. A new explosion was followed quickly by several more, each causing the bridge structure to tremble. Smoke from the burning hangar gushed through passageways and into the bridge and ready room, forcing us to seek other refuge. Climbing back to the bridge I could see that Kaga and Soryu had also been hit and were giving off heavy columns of black smoke. The scene was horrible to behold. (M. Fuchida and M. Okimiya, Midway, the Battle That Doomed Japan, 179)

The best naval pilots of the imperial fleet were being slaughtered in a matter of minutes. Just as important was the loss of the most skilled flight crews in the Japanese navy, the rare and irreplaceable experts who had mastered with long experience the difficult arts of rapidly arming, maintaining, and fueling aircraft on a bobbing carrier.

In this incredible six-minute period a third Japanese carrier, the 18,000-ton Soryu (“Green Dragon”), was about to experience the same inferno inflicted on her two sister ships. This time the damage was done by Max Leslie and his Bombing Squadron 3 from the American aircraft carrierYorktown, itself now little more than a hundred miles away. Of Soryu’s crew, 718 were soon incinerated. None of the ordnance from the American dive-bombers were effective armor-piercing weapons, which under most circumstances was a clear drawback, as such ordnance were often unable to smash unimpeded through even the wooden flight decks to explode among the interior magazines, engines, and fuel tanks below. Given the absolute failure of forty-one American torpedo planes minutes earlier, there seemed little chance to reach the vulnerable insides to sink the carriers through the Dauntlesses’ small bombs alone. But, as in the case of the Akagi and Kaga, for once the lighter American bombs had an unexpected windfall: since all three carriers were caught preparing planes for takeoff, the most vulnerable targets on the Japanese carriers at 10:22 A.M. were in fact their wooden decks. The explosions of the exposed and loaded Japanese bombers and fighters would send the blasts from their own fiery gasoline and bombs downward right into their own ships. One American bomb under these rare conditions might set off dozens more on deck.

When hit, Soryu was about ten to twelve miles north and east of two other burning carriers, likewise about to launch planes for a massive air strike against the three American fleet carriers. Leslie’s thirteen dive-bombers came in from more than 14,000 feet unnoticed—the Japanese fighters were too busy at sea level finishing their slaughter of Lem Massey’s last few lumbering American torpedo bombers to patrol the clouds above. At least three bombs from the Yorktown’s pilots hit the Soryu—1,000-pound ordnance released from little more than 1,500 feet—quickly turning the smaller carrier into an inferno, as the blasts from the bombs themselves, exploding Japanese planes, gas lines, and ammunition tore the ship to pieces. Within seconds she lost power entirely. After thirty minutes the call went out to abandon ship. The captain of the Soryu, Admiral Yanagimoto, was last seen yelling “Banzai” on the engulfed bridge. The last four planes in Leslie’s attack squadron felt that further bombing of the wrecked Soryu was redundant and so altered their dives to focus on a battleship and destroyer. Belowdecks Tatsuya Otawa, one of the Soryu pilots, saw that “everything was blowing up—planes, bombs, gas tanks” (W. Lord, Incredible Victory, 174)—before he, too, was blasted over the side of the ship into the sea.

The fourth and last Japanese carrier, the more modern 20,000-ton Hiryu (“Flying Dragon”), which had gradually drifted to the southeast during the morning attacks from army and marine bombers based on Midway, largely escaped the first morning wave of American carrier divebombers.

Within minutes Hiryu was able to launch her own devastating attack on the Yorktown, which contributed to the eventual sinking of the American carrier. However, late in the day of June 4, a returning formation of American dive-bombers without fighter escort from the Enterprise and Yorktown finally found her too. At a little before 4:00 P.M. twenty-four SBDs from the Enterprise, ten of them orphaned from the disabled and listing Yorktown, led by Lieutenants Earl Gallagher, Dick Best, and Dewitt W. Shumway, dived unnoticed from the clouds. Four bombs were direct hits, and once more the Americans ignited Japanese fighters and bombers that were ready for takeoff. The Hiryu’s plane elevator was blown out of the deck and against the bridge. Almost all of the dead were caught below the deck and engulfed in raging fires—more than four hundred perished. The Hiryu’s captain, Rear Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi, one of the brightest and most aggressive commanders in the Japanese navy, remained on the bridge and went down with his ship—an irreplaceable loss, since he was believed by many to be groomed as the successor to Admiral Yamamoto himself, Commander in Chief of the imperial fleet. When told by an aide that there was still money in the ship’s safe that might be saved, Yamaguchi ordered it left alone. “We’ll need money for a square meal in hell,” he murmured (W. Lord, Incredible Victory, 251).

In less than twelve hours 2,155 Japanese seamen were dead, four fleet aircraft carriers were wrecked and soon to sink, and more than 332 aircraft, along with their most skilled pilots, were gone. Before the battle was over, a heavy cruiser was sunk, and another heavily damaged. The Akagi,Kaga, Hiryu, and Soryu, the pride of the imperial fleet, veterans of campaigning against the Chinese, British, and Americans, were resting at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. In six minutes the momentum in the Pacific naval war had swung for good to the Americans as the worst fears of the Japanese admiralty of massive American retaliation were realized after only six months of fighting.

In strictly military terms the number of dead at Midway was not large—fewer than 4,000 in the two fleets. The losses were a mere fraction of what the Romans suffered at Cannae, or the Persians at Gaugamela, and much less costly than the bloodbaths of the great sea battles of Salamis, Lepanto, Trafalgar, and Jutland—or the Japanese slaughter to come at Leyte Gulf. But the sinking of the carriers represented an irreplaceable investment of millions of days of precious skilled labor, and even scarcer capital—and the only capability of the Japanese to destroy both the American fleet and Pacific bases. More than one hundred of the best carrier pilots perished in one day, equal to the entire graduating class of naval aviators that Japan could turn out in a single year. Never had the Japanese military lost so dramatically when technology, matériel, experience, and manpower were so decidedly in its favor. Back in Washington, D.C., Admiral Ernest J. King, chief of all U.S. naval operations, concluded of the action of June 4 that the battle of Midway had been the first decisive defeat of the Japanese navy in 350 years and had restored the balance of naval power in the Pacific.

Again, the carriers themselves were irreplaceable. During the entire course of World War II the Japanese launched only seven more of such enormous ships; the Americans in contrast would commission more than one hundred fleet, light, and escort carriers by war’s end. The Americans would also build or repair twenty-four battleships—despite losing nearly the entire fleet of the latter at Pearl Harbor—and a countless number of heavy and light cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and support ships. During the four years of the war the Americans constructed sixteen major warships for every one the Japanese built.

Worse still for the Japanese, the highest monthly production of all models of Japanese navy and army aircraft rarely exceeded 1,000 planes, and by summer 1945 the sum was scarcely half that due to American bombing, the need for factory dispersal, and matériel and manpower shortages. In contrast, the Americans soon turned out a sophisticated B-24 heavy bomber of some 100,000 parts every sixty-three minutes; American aircraft workers, who vastly outnumbered the Japanese, were also four times more productive than their individual enemy counterparts. By August 1945, in less than four years after the war had begun, the United States had produced nearly 300,000 aircraft and 87,620 warships. Even as early as mid-1944, American industry was building entire new fleets every six months, replete with naval aircraft comparable in size to the entire American force at Midway. After 1943, both American ships and airplanes—sixteen new Essex-class carriers outfitted with Helldiver dive-bombers, Corsair and Hellcat fighters, and Avenger torpedo bombers— were qualitatively and quantitatively superior to anything in the Japanese military. The modern Iowa-class battleships that appeared in the latter half of the war were better in speed, armament, range, and defensive protection than anything commissioned in the Japanese navy and were far more effective warships than even the monstrous Yamato and Mushasi. Within a few months after Midway, not only had the United States naval and air armies made up all the losses from Midway, but its entire armed forces were growing at geometric rates, while the Japanese navy actually began to shrink as outmoded and often bombed-out factories could not even replace obsolete ships and planes lost to American guns, let alone manufacture additional ones. This was the Arsenal of Venice and Cannae’s aftermath all over again.

Still, the American bombing on the morning of June 4 had been costly. The Hornet had lost eleven of her twelve Wildcat fighters, the Yorktown five dive-bombers and fighters, and the Enterprise fourteen dive-bombers and a fighter. But these losses were tolerable compared to the near complete massacre of the American torpedo bombers minutes earlier.

THE ANNIHILATION OF THE DEVASTATORS

The battle of Midway can be understood by two inextricably connected events: the destruction of an entire American air arm by Japanese fighter pilots which moments later led directly to the demise of Japan’s own carriers. Just as deadly a predicament as being on the Japanese carriers at the battle of Midway was the piloting of lumbering obsolete TBD Devastator torpedo bombers, which early in the morning of June 4 had inaugurated the American carrier attack. In some sense, their annihilation by the Japanese Zero fighters, together with the dogfighting of a few American Wildcat fighters, allowed their unseen dive-bombing comrades the opportunity to attack unmolested. All the American torpedo bombers would make gallant approaches against the Japanese fleet; none would hit their targets; and almost all, with their two-man crews, would be shot down. Out of the eighty-two men who headed for the Japanese carriers in the TBDs, only thirteen survived. Yet one of the two Japanese air commanders at Midway, Mitsuo Fuchida, scoffed in his official report on the eve of the battle that the Americans lacked the will to fight.

Commissioned in the mid-1930s, the TBD Devastators were by the outbreak of the war incapable of devastating anything; in reality, they were little more than flying coffins for both pilot and rear gunner. When loaded with their sole 1,000-pound obsolete torpedo—itself unreliable and as likely to plow harmlessly beneath the target as to fail to explode even when it did hit—the planes themselves could barely manage a hundred mph. Fully loaded, they had a combat range of only 175 miles. When attacking ships that were headed in the opposite direction at thirty knots, the TBDs were forced to hug the sea to ensure a proper launching approach as they narrowed the gap at real speeds of less than sixty mph—if there were no head winds. The loaded planes could scarcely climb. Such agonizingly long and exposed runs made them easy targets for Japanese Zero fighters, which sometimes at Midway were swarming in masses of forty or more and diving from far above at three hundred miles an hour. In contrast to the Americans’ obsolete craft, Japanese torpedo planes by 1941 could dive at nearly three hundred mph and carry a far heavier and more effective torpedo at greater range.

Thirty-five of forty-one Devastators on June 4 were shot down attacking the Japanese carriers—a fact today scarcely comprehensible under the protocols of contemporary American military practice, in which troops enjoying overwhelming technological, material, and numerical superiority are sometimes not committed to battle out of fear of losing a handful of combatants. Most of the Devastator crews had never taken off armed with a torpedo from the deck of an aircraft carrier—and now they were sent on a mission in their decrepit aircraft, with scarcely enough fuel to return home, against a mostly unknown and unlocated target. The American military was later aghast over the use of Japanese kamikaze planes in the last year of the war; but the orders for the Devastator attacks at Midway were themselves little more than suicidal.

Midway was the last major battle in which the obsolete torpedo bombers were used; on Midway itself a few marine pilots were already flying a small number of the new replacement Grumman TBF Avengers, which, armed with new torpedoes, by war’s end would compile a formidable record of low-level attacks on the Japanese fleet. The Avengers could nearly double the speed of the Devastators, carried twice as much armament, and could take far more punishment. But none had yet replaced the ancient TBDs on any of the carriers at Midway—indeed, nineteen of the replacement Avengers arrived from Norfolk, Virginia, at Pearl Harbor on May 29, one day after the Hornet had sailed out to Midway. Only six were ferried to the marines at Midway. Had the Avengers replaced the Devastators on all three carriers, the American tally of sunken ships might have been even greater, and the loss of pilots surely less—although, as we shall see, the ultimate decision of Midway, in some sense, rested with the sheer vulnerability of the obsolete planes, which drew in the greedy Zeros in droves, when the real danger to the Japanese fleet was high, not low, in the skies. In any case, the naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison, in remarks reminiscent of Livy’s summation of Cannae, entitled an entire section of his narrative “The Slaughter of the Torpedo-Bombers.” Abject slaughter it was.

On the morning of June 5 Lieutenant Commander John C. “Jack” Waldron, commander of the VT-8 torpedo squadron on the Hornet, distributed copies of his final message to his crews shortly before takeoff. The mimeographed papers ended on a melancholy note:

MY GREATEST HOPE IS THAT WE ENCOUNTER A FAVORABLE TACTICAL SITUATION, BUT IF WE DON’T AND WORST COMES TO WORST, I WANT EACH ONE OF US TO DO HIS UTMOST TO DESTROY OUR ENEMIES. IF THERE IS ONLY ONE PLANE LEFT TO MAKE A FINAL RUN-IN, I WANT THAT MAN TO GO IN AND GET A HIT. MAY GOD BE WITH US ALL. GOOD LUCK, HAPPY LANDINGS, AND GIVE ’EM HELL! (G. Prange, Miracle at Midway, 240)

Jack Waldron took off for the last flight of his life from the Hornet at 8:06 A.M. to lead fifteen Devastators against the Japanese fleet. Problems arose almost immediately after launching. The Hornet’s accompanying thirty-five dive-bombers and ten Wildcat fighters, obscured by cloud cover, quickly overflew the lumbering Devastators. Waldron was left to find and attack the carriers himself—an almost impossible task, since there would be neither Wildcats to ward off the attacking Zeros nor highflying Dauntless dive-bombers to divert the antiaircraft fire of the imperial fleet. Instead, the entire air and sea defenses of the Japanese ships would be trained on Waldron’s slow planes coming in over the water at one hundred mph. The Hornet’s dive-bombers fared even worse, never finding the Japanese fleet at all and thus not dropping a single bomb. The failure of theHornet’s fighters and dive-bombers to find their targets was perhaps not as baffling an event as some historians note, when we remember that the individual planes had neither effective radar nor advanced navigation instruments and were mostly piloted by inexperienced airmen—none of theHornet ’s pilots had ever seen action—who flew over a nondescript endless Pacific looking for tiny dots below.

Because of the numerous diversionary maneuvers to avoid early morning air attacks from Midway, the Japanese carriers under Admiral Nagumo were not exactly cruising where the American staff had calculated their position to be when the American fleet’s bombers and fighters were scheduled to arrive. Instinctively, Waldron anticipated the enemy’s change in course; he immediately veered to the north and so commanded the first American naval air squadron to find the Japanese fleet.

Without fighter cover or friendly bombers above, realizing that he was the first American carrier pilot to attack, and reconciled that after torpedoing the Japanese fleet his planes would not have enough gasoline to reach their home carrier even if they survived their bombing runs, Waldron radioed his intention to the Hornet that he was pressing ahead anyway. Captain Marc Mitscher recalled that Waldron “promised he would press through against all obstacles, well knowing his squadron was doomed to destruction with no chance whatever of returning safely to the carrier” (S. Morison, Coral Sea, Midway, and Submarine Actions, May 1942–August 1942, 117).

The first incoming Zero shot down one of Waldron’s TBDs, and for the next few minutes fourteen planes of Torpedo 8 in succession were also riddled with machine-gun and cannon bursts. The few planes that closed to drop their torpedoes missed the Akagi and the Soryu entirely. Those crippled Devastators that did not explode through machine-gun fire disintegrated when they hit the sea, clipping the waves and cartwheeling at one hundred mph. Waldron himself was last seen standing upright in his blazing cockpit. His intuition and navigational skill had at last led Torpedo 8 directly to the Japanese carriers, but unfortunately the Hornet’s supporting bombers and fighters were still behind him, mostly lost, and spread far distant above—and he was flying a TBD Devastator.

Infantry battle in modern warfare is brutal and terrifying, but the wounds of naval pilots are often even more savage and the chances of survival virtually nil. Usually, we imagine that the aircraft’s metal skin, glass canopy, and armored seat below the pilot deflected gun bursts and gave the targeted occupant a modicum of protection. In fact, since planes often hit a spray of bullets at high speed, the combined force of bullet and streaking target at the point of entry more often literally tore the pilot apart. Moreover, the naval airman in World War II sat atop thousands of pounds of fuel and high explosives inches from his feet, ready to vaporize him the instant enemy cannon fire and tracers ignited the lethal mixture.

Flying a loaded Devastator at Midway would be similar to driving a Ford Pinto in the slow lane, with its trunk and seats loaded with dynamite, as other, far faster drivers shot at it with machine guns as they passed by. Unlike the care of the wounded in land warfare, even ostensibly non-fatal injuries could not be quickly treated, as the pilot could not be evacuated to the rear. Being shot was the beginning, not the end, of the misery—the same gunfire that drew blood also damaged or destroyed the plane itself, promising in a few seconds an even worse crash and ensuing fireball of exploded gasoline. Even in peacetime the site of a downed passenger plane at sea is littered with tiny scraps of aircraft metal—the far more fragile bodies of the occupants often pulverized or burned beyond recognition by the force of impact and ensuing fire.

In an ideal carrier attack, the Devastators were to come in last, after the SBD Dauntless dive-bombers first screamed down from 15,000 feet, with their faster Wildcat fighters descending from even higher above to cover their assault. Then once the enemy ships and planes were occupied, the lumbering torpedo planes in theory might sneak into the melee unmolested at sea level to launch their torpedoes. But given the American mix-up in navigation, all of Waldron’s Devastators bore the full brunt of the Japanese antiaircraft and air attack. Not a single plane of Torpedo 8 survived. Of thirty crewmen who left the Hornet at eight that morning, only Ensign George H. Gay outlived the massacre; though wounded, he somehow crawled free once his Devastator hit the sea, and then floated unnoticed by the Japanese ships until picked up in the water by an American rescue plane the next afternoon. The fate of Torpedo 8 was only the first of the three slaughters of the torpedo squadrons on June 4, but we have only Gay’s later account to learn what transpired in the last minutes of the lives of his twenty-nine squadron members.

As the deadly Zeros returned periodically to the carriers to refuel and rearm during the morning turkey shoot, an observer on the Akagi noted that the “service crews cheered the returning pilots, patted them on the shoulder, and shouted words of encouragement. As soon as a plane was ready again the pilot nodded, pushed forward the throttle, and roared back into the sky. This scene was repeated time and again as the desperate air struggle continued” (M. Fuchida and M. Okimiya, Midway, the Battle That Doomed Japan, 176). American pilots would find little chance of recovery even if they survived being shot down by these Zeros; most who climbed out of their sinking bombers were strafed in the water. The two naval pilots known to be taken prisoner at Midway were interrogated, then shortly afterward bound, weighted, and thrown overboard. Standard orders for Japanese patrolling ships were to question prisoners to learn of the enemy’s situation and then “dispose of them suitably.”

General morale on the Japanese carriers was sky-high and bordered on arrogance. And why not? As of yet the fleet had not suffered a real defeat and had nothing but contempt for the fighting potential of American sailors, infantrymen, and pilots. From the outbreak of the war on December 7, 1941, the Japanese carrier forces alone had sunk or disabled eight battleships and two cruisers (Pearl Harbor, December 7) and bombed and sunk the British battleships Repulse and Prince of Wales (off Kuantan, December 10), the cruisers Houston and Marblehead (north of Java, February 4, 1942), the British cruisers Exeter, Cornwall, and Dorsetshire (February 27 off Tjilatjap and April 5 near Colombo). They sent to the bottom or severely damaged three allied aircraft carriers (HMSHermes near Trincomalee on April 9 and the Lexington and Yorktown [damaged] at the battle of Coral Sea, May 8)—all at a cost of a few destroyers and a single light aircraft carrier. For the preparations for Midway, the United States had one battleship and only three carriers in its entire Pacific fleet. The Americans had not yet sunk a single Japanese capital ship. Former pilot Masatake Okumiya and aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi summed up this remarkable record of Japanese naval-air victories in the first half-year of the war:

The tally of enemy and Japanese ships lost in the first six months of the war was a literal realization of the Navy’s concept of “ideal combat conditions,” to “wage a decisive sea battle only under air control.” For the ten years prior to the Pacific War we had trained our airmen implicitly to believe that sea battles fought under our command of the air could result only in our victories. The initial phases of the Pacific War dramatically upheld this belief. (M. Okumiya and J. Horikoshi, Zero! , 153)

This confidence often accounted for the gratuitous cruelty shown toward captured soldiers, who were considered cowardly for surrendering. During the earlier Wake Island campaign immediately following Pearl Harbor, Japanese sailors had brutalized captured American marines and routinely clubbed them before shipping them off to camps in Japan and China. At least five Americans were ceremoniously beheaded on one transport’s deck, then their bodies mutilated to cheers from Japanese sailors before being dumped overboard. From the beginning of the Pacific War there was a savagery—arising partly from innate racial animosity, partly out of the perversion of the ancient Bushido code of military protocol by Japanese militarists in the 1930s, partly from pent-up anger over the long European colonial presence in Asia—in the Japanese approach to battle that would soon draw retaliation from the Anglo-American forces. That mutual hatred explains much of the tension and spirit of the combatants at Midway.

Almost as a general rule, Japanese soldiers, well after the killing on the battlefield had ceased, would go on to butcher and torture surrendering and unarmed captives—in China, the Philippines, and the Pacific—with far more frequency than either the British or the Americans. The Allies had nothing comparable to Japanese concentration camps, where macabre medical experiments and routine shootings were not unusual. True, the Americans would eventually engage in brutality on a far greater scale, as the firebombing of the Japanese cities and the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki attest. But in American eyes—and this was entirely characteristic of the Western way of war that had originated on the daylight killing fields of ancient Greece and evolved into the Roman, medieval, and Christian concept of a just war (ius in bello)—its indiscriminate carpet bombing was far different from murdering prisoners.

The Allies killed on a massive scale, but almost exclusively through open and direct assault, with veritable notification of intent, often in reprisal, and under hostile fire—not customarily in camps or after the firing had stopped. Japanese antiaircraft and fighters attempted to shoot down parachuting bombing crews, who were usually executed upon forced landing in enemy territory. To Americans, the Japanese were “free” in open combat to prevent bomber attacks on their urban and industrial sites. They knew the American planes were coming, and they should expect retaliation for starting the war and waging it in China and the Pacific in a most beastly and cruel manner. The Americans further reasoned that as long as they were killing during the actual exchange of gunfire, and doing so as part of an effort to wreck the military-industrial base of imperial Japan, all was more or less fair in pitched battle. In contrast, the Japanese simply counted the dead, and figured that hundreds of thousands more of their own innocent civilians had died from American bombs than American captives tortured and executed by their camp interrogators and guards.

This dichotomy was true enough of all East-West engagements in the history of warfare: Westerners decried summary executions and torture of their captured defenseless combatants, while their own far better-armed and -equipped forces openly and “fairly” butchered thousands during the fighting. Non-Westerners saw such machine-gunning, artillery barrages, and carpet bombing against their own relatively ill equipped soldiers and even more vulnerable civilians as barbaric—even as they often mutilated and executed prisoners of war. In that sense, for example, Hernán Cortés and Lord Chelmsford were outraged when Aztecs and Zulus tortured and killed captives, but themselves thought nothing of riding down and spearing from the rear thousands of poorly protected Native Americans and Zulus in the heat of battle. The British were horrified over the beheading and desecration of their dead at Isandhlwana, but assumed that the machine-gunning of hundreds of spear-carrying Zulu warriors at the battle of Ulundi was fair play. To the Americans, firebombing and the incineration of nearly 200,000 Japanese soldiers, workers, and civilians in a single week over Tokyo during March 1945, while sending Japanese captives to relatively humane prisoner-of-war camps in the American heartland, made perfect military sense; to the Japanese, the murder of downed B-29 pilots, often by summary beheading, was small recompense for the cremation of hundreds of thousands of their kin.

At about the same time that Waldron’s Torpedo 8 was being annihilated in its doomed attack on the Soryu, another group of Devastators— Lieutenant Commander Eugene E. Lindsey’s fourteen torpedo planes from Torpedo 6 of the carrier Enterprise—flew over the Akagi and headed for theKaga. Although the Enterprise’s torpedo planes had more experience than Waldron’s Devastators—some had fought during the recent Marshall and Wake Islands campaigns—like the Hornet planes, Lindsey’s TBDs came in without fighter escort and unaided by dive-bombers, which were still high in the clouds. The original miscalculations in finding the Japanese fleet, the cloud cover, and great variance in altitudes between torpedo bombers, fighters, and dive-bombers meant that this batch of Devastators also lost contact early on with the other Enterprise fighter escorts. The latter never did find its carrier’s torpedo or dive-bombers and returned to their carrier without firing a shot.

This complete absence of supporting aircraft ensured that the slaughter of Torpedo 6 was inevitable. But the ease with which the Japanese brought down this second wave of torpedo planes gave a false sense of security to the naval gunners of the imperial fleet—some officers felt that they could shoot down the entire American naval force itself, without even attacking their home carriers by air. Air Commander Genda on the Akagi rightly likened the Devastators to tired mules. After a few hours of knocking down the land-based bombers and the carrier torpedo planes, the crewmen of the imperial fleet found the Americans surprisingly brave, but amateurish and inexperienced, with antiquated planes and substandard torpedoes. Their assessment was generally right on nearly all counts.

Twenty-five Zeros from the targeted carriers screeched down from their high-flying air patrol to blast apart Torpedo 6, miles from the Japanese fleet. For fifteen minutes antiaircraft and fighters shredded the lumbering Devastators, which split off to form an attack from both sides of the Kaga.Lindsey’s plane was one of the first to be hit and quickly incinerated. Finally, at 9:58 A.M., almost two hours after they had taken off from the Enterprise, four surviving TBDs got close enough to launch their torpedoes at the Kaga.None found their mark. These were the only planes of the fourteen of this second attack to return. Another twenty crewmen from the Americans’ torpedo planes had disappeared into the sea. The slaughter of the TBDs continued.

Three American carriers were launching air squadrons against the Japanese fleet at Midway at about 8:00 A.M. on June 4, and now the final torpedo plane attack—Lem Massey’s twelve Devastators from Torpedo 3 of the Yorktown—reached the Soryu just about the time the Hornet and Enterprise TBDs were falling into the sea. Like the other fated torpedo planes, Massey’s came in without fighter escort, drawing the full attention of the Japanese antiaircraft and aerial defense. Only five TBDs even got close enough to launch torpedoes against the Hiryu. Three of these were shot down far short of the target. From six to ten Zeros followed the remnants of Torpedo 3 all the way to the carrier, forcing the plodding American planes down to little more than 150 feet above the sea.

Massey, like Waldron and Lindsey earlier, did not survive the morning. Neither skill nor courage meant anything when piloting an obsolete Devastator. The few crewmen of Torpedo 3 who made it back reported that Massey was one of the first to be hit and was last seen standing on the wing of his plane, after crawling out of a flaming cockpit. The Yorktown’s tiny and outmanned fighter escort under Jimmy Thatch was valiantly fighting off still more Zeros miles above Massey and could offer no help to his Torpedo 3. Again, through an unfortunate mixture of bad luck, general incompetence, and faulty staff procedure, the entire dive-bombing and fighter arm of the third American carrier, Hornet, played absolutely no role in the initial attacks on the Japanese fleet. All of Hornet’s Wildcats and Dauntlesses either turned back to the carrier, made emergency landings at Midway itself, or crashed into the sea out of fuel. Only Waldron’s torpedo planes found the enemy, and without exception they were shot down.

By the time the Japanese had beaten off the third American torpedo attack, the protective cover of the fleet’s Zeros was in disarray and near sea level, not at the required height far above the fleet, in formation scouting for dive-bombers. Many Japanese fighters after the morning shooting were landing to refuel and rearm, and the entire attention of the fleet’s antiaircraft arsenal was focused on blasting away at sea level the last of the doomed torpedo planes. Miraculously, at nearly the exact time as the third and final TBD attack was repulsed, dozens of the high-flying Dauntless bombers from the Enterprise and Yorktown finally arrived as if on cue. The first 102 American carrier planes had either been shot down or become lost, but there were still 50 dive-bombers left—less than a third of the original force—to begin the attack. Now to their utter amazement they dived untouched from 15,000 feet to ignite the Akagi, Kaga, and Soryu.

To the modern American at the millennium, these carrier pilots of more than a half century ago—Massey, Waldron, and Lindsey last seen fighting to free themselves in a sea of flames as their planes were blasted apart by Zeros—now appear as superhuman exemplars of what constituted heroism in the bleak months after World War II. Even their names seem almost caricatures of an earlier stalwart American manhood—Max Leslie, Lem Massey, Wade McClusky, Jack Waldron—doomed fighters who were not all young eighteen-year-old conscripts, but often married and with children, enthusiastic rather than merely willing to fly their decrepit planes into a fiery end above the Japanese fleet, in a few seconds to orphan their families if need be to defend all that they held dear. One wonders if an America of suburban, video-playing Nicoles, Ashleys, and Jasons shall ever see their like again.

THE IMPERIAL FLEET MOVES OUT

Midway was one of the largest sea battles of World War II and, like the battle of Leyte Gulf two years later, one of the most complex and decisive engagements in the history of naval warfare. Fought over three days across the international date line, it involved a theater more than 1,000 miles wide. The battle saw Japanese carrier attacks against Midway, carrier-to-carrier torpedo and dive-bombing, aerial dogfights between Zeros and both land- and carrier-based American fighters, submarine torpedoing and destroyer counter-depth-charging, sorties by American army high-altitude and marine dive and torpedo bombers based on Midway, and futile efforts by Japanese battleships and heavy cruisers to engage the American carriers and cruisers in naval gunfire. Men above, on, and under the vast Pacific the first week of June 1942 were fervently trying to blow each other up.

Admiral Yamamoto, the architect of the successful Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, assembled for the Midway-Aleutian offensive nearly two hundred warships—carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and troop carriers—whose combined displacement exceeded 1.5 million tons, manned by more than 100,000 sailors and pilots, and commanded by 20 admirals. Eighty-six of the ships would be engaged in the Midway theater alone. The scale of the clash with the American fleet would thus approximate the enormous numbers of combatants present at the gargantuan East-West sea battles of the past at Salamis (150,000 to 250,000) or Lepanto (180,000 to 200,000). The Japanese fleet that steamed out to Midway was the largest and most powerful flotilla in the history of naval warfare—until the Americans themselves collected an even larger and more deadly armada a little over two years later at the battle of Leyte Gulf.

The fliers on the carriers Akagi, Kagi, Hiryu, and Soryu were among Japan’s best airmen and had far more years of experience than their green counterparts in the American fleet. The entire armada boasted a potential air arm of nearly seven hundred naval and land-based planes on carriers and transports, and more than three hundred near Midway alone. So confident were the Japanese of victory at Midway—“the sentry of Hawaii”— that they envisioned the campaign as a prelude to even more vast operations that would ideally send their undefeated carrier forces against New Caledonia and Fiji in early July 1942, then later that month on to bomb Sydney and Allied bases in southern Australia, before assembling the entire fleet for a knockout blow against Hawaii in early August.

By early fall 1942 Yamamoto’s dream of a lightning-fast offensive against the bewildered and unprepared Americans would be complete with the occupation of Midway. After the loss of all its Pacific bases, supply lines to Australia cut, and the Pacific fleet sunk, the United States would surely ask for a negotiated peace—one that ratified Japanese control of Asia and demarcated in the Pacific clear limits to American influence. The April 18 surprise bombing attack on Tokyo by carrier-based B-25 medium bombers had only convinced the Japanese high command to hasten its summer final plans to rid the Pacific of the American nuisance.

Scholars have often faulted the various components of Yamamoto’s plan, which would prove to be overly sophisticated, poorly coordinated, and possessed of too many aims: the conquest of Midway, occupation of some of the western Aleutian islands, and destruction of the American carrier fleet were difficult to obtain in unison and at times even antithetical objectives. The Japanese fleet was therefore fragmented into a series of disconnected striking forces—five at least with their own various subgroups—that were so dispersed and often without communication that the Japanese were never able to focus their vast numerical superiority at any one place.

Ideally, Yamamoto’s ships would inaugurate hostilities by dispatching more than fifteen submarines east of Midway to detect the early approach of the American fleet from either Hawaii or the West Coast. The submarines could fuel marine search planes, as well as send advance notice to the main fleet concerning the size and number of the approaching enemy before torpedoing the capital ships in transit. But because of superb American intelligence concerning the entire Japanese mode of attack, nearly all the submarines arrived too late. They gave Yamamoto no information about the Americans’ progress. For most of the early battle they lagged far behind most of the U.S. fleet, without a clue that the Americans were in fact already off Midway and waiting for the Japanese carriers.

Next, a northern force under Vice Admiral Moshiro Hosogaya would lead two light carriers, six heavy and light cruisers, twelve destroyers, six submarines, and other assorted ships, along with 2,500 troops to occupy the Aleutians—an assault that would turn out tactically successful, but without any strategic advantage to the Japanese. Whereas the occupation of Midway could lead to attacks on Hawaii and the headquarters of the American fleet, no one in the Japanese admiralty could ever explain the long-term significance of occupying one or two frigid islands in the Bering Sea, the site of few American troops and no industry—and far from both Hawaii and the West Coast of the United States.

Against Midway itself, the Japanese would send Admiral Nagumo’s 1st Carrier Striking Force, with the Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu, and Soryu, supported by subgroups of two battleships, three cruisers, and eleven destroyers. After the carriers’ planes softened up the island through repeated bombing sorties, Rear Admiral Raizo Tanaka would arrive with twelve transports and three destroyer transports carrying 5,000 troops to occupy Midway. If the occupation force needed cover, or should the American fleet take the bait and attempt to contest the invasion, Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita would then provide further firepower for the assault with four heavy cruisers and two destroyers—to be joined with Admiral Kondo’s even larger force of two battleships, four heavy cruisers, a light cruiser, eight destroyers, and a light carrier. The Japanese envisioned a late-arriving, crippled, and naïve American navy, desperate to attack a succession of decoy ships, to be pounced on in turn by ever larger and more deadly imperial carriers and battleships in waiting.

Rear Admiral Ruitaro Fujita would follow up with two seaplane carriers and two small ships to occupy nearby tiny Kure Island, in hopes of establishing a land-based air force to aid in reconnaissance over Midway and attacks on the American fleet. In a surface engagement the Americans had nothing comparable to match the Japanese heavy guns, and should the carriers lose their protective air screen or find themselves too near the quick Japanese fleet, there was nothing in their arsenal to prevent the battleships from blasting the American ships out of the sea.

The heart of the Japanese armada was elsewhere. Four battleships, two light cruisers, and twelve destroyers were far to the north of Midway under Vice Admiral Takasu, in conjunction with Admiral Yamamoto’s main force of three battleships—including the monstrous 64,000-ton Yamato,whose 18.1-inch guns could throw enormous shells over twentyfive miles—a light cruiser, nine destroyers, and three light carriers. This northern force would cover the flanks of the Aleutian assaults, and in theory be positioned to return southwest to Midway should the Americans contest the invasion there. In Yamamoto’s thinking he had created an iron chain of interlocking naval forces, spanning a thousand-mile gap from the Aleutians to Midway, which would bar all westward movement to the Americans, ensuring that there would never again be an American bombing attack on the Japanese mainland. For all its complexity, there was a certain simple logic to the Japanese plan: by blockading the northern Pacific between the Aleutians and Midway itself, Yamamoto guaranteed that either his northern or his southern forces would flush out the vastly outnumbered and bewildered Americans. The latter would either have to fight or see their islands both north and south lost. How odd that the sacrifice of fewer than a hundred green American torpedo pilots would ruin all of Yamamoto’s elaborate ideas of annihilating the American Pacific fleet.

The vast distance between the two groups also meant that the numerically inferior Americans could not simultaneously protect both. Yamamoto’s battleships and the carriers would act as a sort of roving reserve that would rush to the point of American counterattack, while the Aleutian and Midway assault forces and accompanying battleship and cruiser fleets completed their invasions. It was unlikely that the timid Americans would show up until the Aleutians and Midway were occupied—and then they would be met by land-based bombers from those newly acquired bases and naval planes freed from protecting vulnerable troop transports. Since the Japanese fleet was hitherto undefeated and qualitatively superior, it should not require its combined strength anyway to blast away a weak and inexperienced American challenge.

The only ostensible problem for the Japanese was that they assumed the vastly outnumbered Americans would be complacent and surprised, rather than tipped-off and waiting. Admiral Nagumo’s intelligence report concluded on the eve of the battle: “Although the enemy lacks the will to fight, it is likely that he will counterattack if our occupation operations progress satisfactorily.” Yamamoto apparently could not conceive that the previously beaten Americans might anticipate the landings at Midway— much less that they might arrive there first with three carriers to concentrate on the Japanese carrier force under Nagumo. But the Americans had radar on their ships and on Midway itself, which in effect would serve as an unsinkable aircraft carrier.

In the American scenario of a carrier war deliberately waged in close proximity to Midway, the match was about even—four Japanese to the American three flattops, the latter aided by auxiliary air support from the island. In Napoleonic fashion Admiral Chester Nimitz would deal with segments of Yamamoto’s chain, destroying links in isolation until the odds were more even: first sink the carriers, the heart of the Japanese fleet, then prevent the more strategically important Midway landings, and finally turn to an airborne assault on Yamamoto’s battleships and cruisers if need be.

Just assembling the colossal fleet had meant that the Japanese ships left ports 1,800 miles apart, and even when arriving at their destinations some ships would remain a thousand miles distant. If radio silence were to be maintained, there was little likelihood that all the components of the armada could preserve communications—critical, when a key element of the cumbersome plan was to draw out the American outnumbered fleet, to be swarmed on cue by superior forces converging from the north and south.

To oppose these forces, the Americans could scarcely scrape up three carriers—including the heavily damaged Yorktown, which had just limped in nearly wrecked from the battle of Coral Sea. A tiny contingent under Rear Admiral Robert Theobald was sent to the Aleutians with two heavy cruisers, three light cruisers, and ten destroyers, but was poorly deployed and played no role in preventing the Japanese from landing or attacking enemy ships. There were no American battleships in Hawaii to deploy to Midway. Instead, Admiral Nimitz hastily gathered what he had—a mere eight cruisers and fifteen destroyers. Nineteen submarines were patrolling from Midway to Pearl Harbor.

The Japanese plan was unwieldy but not in itself doomed to failure, given the imperial fleet’s vast numerical superiority in every category of ship and its far more experienced crews. But as we shall see, at critical stages during the planning, fighting, and aftermath of the battle, American military personnel at all ranks were unusually innovative, even eccentric, and always unpredictable. Most were unafraid to take the initiative to craft policy when orders from superiors were either vague or nonexistent—in a fashion completely antithetical to the protocols of operations in the imperial fleet, which in turn mirrored much of the prevailing values and attitudes inherent in Japanese society. The result was that Americans improvised when plans went awry, resorted to new and innovative methods of attack when orthodoxy was unproductive—not unlike the Christians’ sawing off their galley prows at Lepanto to increase cannon accuracy or Cortés sending his men into a volcano to replenish their stores of gunpowder.

WESTERN AND NON-WESTERN JAPAN

At Midway the Americans enjoyed a technological edge only in radar and communications. Their frontline carrier planes—Wildcat fighters, Devastator torpedo planes, and Dauntless dive-bombers—were uniformly inferior to Japanese models, which possessed superior speed, maneuverability, and more reliable ordnance. By 1942 Japanese torpedoes were the best in the world, American arguably the worst. The Zero fighter—light, fast, and easy to construct—was a product of engineering genius. There was nothing like it in the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1941. The four Japanese carriers themselves were every bit as modern as British and American models. Japan had built battleships that were the largest on the seas: the Yamato and soon-to-be-launched Musashi, whose gross tonnages and armaments were far superior to any surface ship in either the British or the American navy at the outbreak of the war.

Clearly, the American victory at Midway was not due—as alleged by some postbellum Japanese observers—to the superiority of Western technology. Indeed, for well over half a century Japan had adopted many of the tenets of European military organization and methods of armament, as part of a massive revolution in Japanese society to embrace Western science and industrial production. By the beginning of the twentieth century, a state with few natural resources had become a veritable world power largely through its embrace of the Western way of warfare. Japanese ships at Midway were the embodiment of Western, not Asian, military science.

Japan had never been colonized or conquered by Westerners until 1945. Its distance from Europe, proximity to an isolationist and inward-looking nineteenth-century America, absence of inviting land and plentiful resources, and enormous hungry population made it unattractive to would-be Western conquistadors. Yet in its initial, belated encounters with the West, nineteenth-century Japan had consciously decided to emulate and improve on, rather than reject, Western methods of industrial production and technological research. Whereas the airplane was invented in America, the self-propelled ironclad battleship and aircraft carrier in Britain and America, and the entire notion of a seagoing, oil-burning navy entirely a European development, the Japanese by 1941 had matched, and in some cases outpaced, both the British and the Americans in naval and aerial designs. Unlike other Asian countries—China especially stands out—Japan in the latter nineteenth century had gradually begun to ignore its innate cultural inhibitions to adapting wholesale Western ideas of capitalism, industrial development, and military operations. Even its cultural conservatives conceded that Western barbarians and devils could never be resisted simply by superior courage and samurai vigor. Japan’s survival would be found through the adoption of European weapons and methods of mass production—with Japanese ingenuity at each step of the way ready to improve where warranted.

After the first contact in the mid-sixteenth century with the Portuguese, from whom they learned to fabricate firearms, the Japanese within a few decades were equipping entire armies with improved cannon and muskets—and in the process threatened the samurai hierarchy, whose martial capital hinged on a spiritual, antitechnological, xenophobic, and antimodern foundation. In reaction to such new technology, feudal lords gradually disarmed the population and prevented the further importation of arms as part of a general ban against all foreign influence. The result was that by the early seventeenth century nearly all trade outside of Japan was outlawed. Oceangoing vessels were prohibited. Christianity was made illegal and most foreigners deported. By 1635 Japan was once again closed off from any contact whatsoever with “big-nosed, smelly” barbarians, a situation that was to remain static until Admiral Matthew Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay in 1853 with an armada of formidable American warships. By then Japanese technological progress had all but stagnated, and there remained only a few antiquated gunpowder weapons in the entire national arsenal with which to oppose the Americans.

Perry’s cannon and explosive shells, his steam-powered fleet, and his rifle-carrying marines convinced the Japanese to admit foreign ships. By 1854 when Perry returned to Japan from China, the Japanese formally signed treaties allowing American ships access to their waters and free sailing in the surrounding seas. Several European nations followed suit and began trading with Japan and interfering throughout the entire Asian subcontinent. But from such humiliation came radical change. In contrast to Eastern resentment in China and Southeast Asia, the Japanese reaction against foreign encroachment was to get even rather than merely angry, as they recognized the folly of an imperial power’s rejection of Western science. After a few futile efforts at resistance, Japanese culture in a sweeping and unprecedented revolution, in both the ideological and the material sense, began to adopt Western manufacturing and banking practices at full scale.

By the last quarter of the nineteenth century the power of the Japanese warlords was at an end. In 1877 in Satsuma a last-ditch uprising of samurai warriors, armed with traditional swords and matchlock muskets, was soundly defeated by a conscripted army, outfitted and drilled in the European style, proving to the Japanese that the Western way of war trumped class, tradition, and national heritage and was insidiously effective in its allegiance solely to battlefield utility. The samurai clans were now mere curiosities, and the population united behind an emperor and the new effort to emulate the modern European nation-state:

Orders for rifles and cannon went to France. . . . When Germany defeated France in 1871, the Japanese quickly switched to the victors. Soon Japanese soldiers were goose-stepping and following Prussian infantry tactics. Japanese naval officers, most of whom were samurai from the once rebellious Satsuma clan, learned from the British Royal Navy, often after years at sea aboard British ships. Japan’s new ships would be built in England, too, for Britain ruled the sea and the Japanese wished to learn from the best. Japan’s Westernization was not confined to military matters. Western arts, literature, science, music, and fashion also flourished. University students feasted on anything Western . . . as samurai became industrialists, railroad magnates, and bankers. (R. Edgerton,Warriors of the Rising Sun, 44)

The result was that by 1894 the Japanese had driven China out of Korea—thanks to a completely Westernized military that was better organized and armed than any force in Asia. Whereas the Chinese had only haphazardly imported European guns and ships, and then generally resisted the infrastructure necessary to fabricate their own modern arms industry, the Japanese army and navy were employing the fruits of Japan’s own nascent but burgeoning arms production and adopting the latest European tactical doctrine, with their own innovative efforts such as night attacks and mass assaults at perceived weak points.

During the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, Japanese expeditionary forces proved to be among the best armed, disciplined, and organized of all the European-led contingents that marched in relief to Peking. And when the Russo-Japanese War broke out in 1904, the Japanese, although vastly outnumbered, quickly proved not only that their naval and land forces were better structured and disciplined than the much larger Russian contingents but that their guns, ships, ammunition, and modern methods of supply were vastly superior as well. Their naval gunfire was especially deadly, and applied with far better accuracy and rates of fire and at greater distances than the Russians’.

In one of the most remarkable revolutions in the history of arms, Japan found herself in more than a quarter century (1870–1904) the near military equal of the best of European powers. Although lacking the population and natural resources of its immediate neighbors Russia and China, Japan had proved that with a topflight Westernized military it could defeat forces far greater in number. Japan is thus the classic refutation of the now popular idea that topography, resources such as iron and coal deposits, or genetic susceptibility to disease and other natural factors largely determine cultural dynamism and military prowess. The Japanese mainland was unchanging—before, during, and after its miraculous century-long military ascendancy—but what was not static was its radical nineteenth-century emulation of elements of the Western tradition completely foreign to its native heritage.

Not only were Japanese admirals and generals dressed and titled like their European counterparts, their ships and guns were nearly identical as well. Unfortunately for their Asian adversaries, the Westernized Japanese military was not a mere passing phase. Japan envisioned Western arms and tactics not as an auxiliary to centuries-long Japanese military doctrines or as a veneer of ostentation, but as a radical, fundamental, and permanent restructuring of Japan’s armed forces that would lead to hegemony in Asia.

Yet the Japanese wide-scale adoption of Western technology was also not always what it seemed at first glance. There remained stubborn Japanese cultural traditions that would resurface to hamper a truly un-blinkered Western approach to scientific research and weapons development. The Japanese had always entertained an ambiguous attitude about their own breakneck efforts at Westernization:

After the visit of Perry, the Japanese had to admit that Western technology, if not all other aspects of Western culture, was also far superior to her own. Admissions like these would be unsettling for any people, and they were especially galling for the Japanese because, more than most peoples on earth, they were imbued with a sense of the greatness, the inherent superiority, even the divinity of their own “Yamato” race. The ambivalence of the Japanese about their worthiness was palpably painful. Because many felt inferior, they came to fear and hate Westerners as they had earlier feared and hated the Chinese. When Westerners later proved to be vulnerable, the temptation to destroy them grew. (R. Edgerton, Warriors of the Rising Sun, 306)

Most unfortunate was the official stance of the Japanese government that slowly sought to form a systematic apology for the admitted incongruity of a country adopting wholesale the technology and industrial processes of an entirely different—and purportedly corrupt and barbaric—culture. The eventual answer that emerged was framed in mostly racist and chauvinist terms: Europeans were derided not merely as decadent, ugly, smelly, and self-centered but also as innately spoiled, pampered, and soft—lazy men who triumphed only through clever inventions and machines rather than the inherent courage of their manhood.

Already by the early twentieth century, a sophisticated Japanese exegesis was crystallizing about the entire relationship between European technology and Japanese culture: Japan’s was a superior warrior race that had merely grafted ideas from abroad to allow its more heroic fighters to compete on a level playing field. Thus, while industrialists and research scientists would proceed with modernizing the Japanese economy and military along European lines, the populace at large would remain a largely hierarchical, autocratic, and Asian society—notions of Western liberalism were to be rejected as vehemently as European science was to be emulated.

Japan would continue to be governed by arcane notions of shame that dictated every aspect of public behavior, delineating how the average Japanese might express emotion, act in public, and spend money on housing and material goods. Devotion to the emperor would be absolute. Individualism in the decadent Western sense would not follow on the heels of the importation of European technology. The military would enjoy almost total control of the government. Thus, the classic paradox immediately arose: could modern and rapidly evolving Western arms and military organization be integrated into a static Japanese culture without the accompanying political and cultural baggage of individualism, consensual government, laissez-faire capitalism, and free expression? It is one argument of this book that the Western way of war is grounded not merely in technological supremacy but in an entire array of political, social, and cultural institutions that are responsible for military advantages well beyond the possession of sophisticated weapons. Superior technology cannot merely be imported; if it is not to become immediately static and therefore obsolete, the accompanying practices of free inquiry, the scientific method, unfettered research, and capitalist production must be adopted as well.

The absence of large reservoirs of natural resources inside Japan, the rise of fascism in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s, the history of racism by European colonists, and the discrimination against Asian immigrants to America helped to solidify the position of Japanese nationalists and right-wing militarists before World War II. For a small country like Japan, without either land or material reserves, but strapped with a large population, surrounded by a European colonial presence in Hong Kong, Singapore, Macao, the Philippines, and Southeast Asia, and confronted with a strong American military in the Pacific, it was natural that ancestral veins of samurai bravery should be reworked for new ore. The old chivalric code of Bushido, the Shinto idea of a chosen Japanese people, and the traditional exultation of the warrior might be transmogrified into a harsh and patently racist idea in the industrial age that foreigners were weak and cowardly and therefore fair game for the worst sort of atrocities when the inevitable war broke out.

There were at least two primary foundations of prewar Japanese military thought. The first was the state religion of Shinto—unbroken imperial sovereignty of the living god, the emperor, the divine origin of the Japanese race, and the manifest destiny of Japan. In this regard, the blending of political and religious authority was not unlike that of the Achaemenids, Arabs, Aztecs, and Ottomans and entirely antithetical to their respective Western adversaries. Second was the ancestral and feudal samurai code that was reinterpreted and refashioned as Bushido by nineteenth-century militarists—the idea that the warrior values of a medieval elite could be superimposed upon the entire new nation-state of modern Japan.

This other strain in Japanese culture—the lingering suspicion of things foreign—and the outbreak of hostilities with China in 1931 made the importation of the most recent technological innovations from abroad more difficult. The more a bellicose Japan sought a nationalist but Westernized military, the less likely America and Britain were to extend it easy financial credits, the latest technology, and imported resources. At home the more Japan sought the most recent designs in foreign military hardware, the more its own hypocrisy would become apparent. After all, it was again borrowing superior science from a society it ostensibly dismissed as corrupt and inferior, and yet it refused to undergo the radical political and cultural restructuring along Western lines that would ensure sustainable technological parity. The same paradox would plague much of the Third World for the rest of the twentieth century: buying Western technology is not the same as maintaining it, adapting it, fabricating it, and training a citizenry to use and improve upon it. Japan, for example, had even better planes than the Americans at Midway, but notions of individualism, freedom, and politics quite different from Western cultures. The rise of Japanese military governments, with their insistence on emperor worship, continued to stifle free debate, individualism, and popular dissent—at the moment when such an enlightened approach to research and industrial policy was most critical for the continued growth and innovation of Japan’s arms industry. This combination of Western hostility toward Japanese militarism, and Japan’s own reluctance to embrace an open and free society, resulted in a general stagnation of technological innovation—and an occasional inability to make use of even native genius.

While the Japanese navy was technologically the equal of, or perhaps superior to, the Americans at Midway in June 1942, such parity could not last once the American government, private industry, and the citizenry at large mobilized for war. In fact, within a mere year and a half after Pearl Harbor, not only were Japanese forces numerically inferior to the American military, but in key areas such as aeronautical design, artillery, tanks, radar, nuclear research, medicine, food supply, base construction, and the mass production of matériel, they were far behind as well. By 1944 the Japanese air force, army, and navy were more or less using the same equipment with which they had started the war, while their American counterparts were producing planes, ships, and vehicles scarcely imaginable in 1941.

About the only reason for American weapons inferiority at Midway was a general complacence following World War I, fueled by the country’s utopian ideas of world peace, by its isolationism, and by an economic depression. By late 1941 the Americans were still awakening from nearly two decades of abject neglect of military preparedness and were not free from sluggish economic growth and high unemployment. In contrast, the Japanese for nearly ten years had devoted a much larger percentage of their much smaller national product to defense expenditure, and had amassed far more firsthand empirical research from the battlefields of China. At Midway—for perhaps the last moment in the war—the Japanese had both better and more numerous planes and ships.

There is also no real evidence that the Westernized Japanese military was reluctant to engage in decisive battle in the fashion of head-on Western practice. Ostensibly, the Japanese navy was every bit as aggressive as the American. Its nineteenth-century adaptation of German tactics of frontal charges and mass assault would prove disastrous against American army machine guns, automatic rifles, and field artillery. Its huge battleships were proof that its navy envisioned using superior firepower to blast enemy surface ships to pieces in set artillery duels, as had happened against the Russians in 1904. While it is true that the indigenous military traditions of samurai warfare had strong ritual elements that could elevate form over function—firearms although known since the sixteenth century were more or less outlawed for the next two hundred years—by 1941 the Japanese navy was aggressive and often as willing as the Americans to enter in a head-to-head battle to the death. Along with the importation of Western arms had come the Western idea of frontal assault.

Where the Japanese were at a distinct disadvantage in their approach to Western battle practice was in the failure to use such decisive tactical engagements to wage a relentless war of total annihilation—a ghastly practice that was mostly outside their samurai traditions. The Japanese were not comfortable with the rather different Western notion of seeking out the enemy without deception, to engage in bitter shock collision, one whose deadliness would prove decisive for the side with the greater firepower, discipline, and numbers.

Instead, against the Russians in 1904–5, and the Chinese from 1931 to 1937, the Japanese military fought a succession of brilliant battles, but such victories in themselves were often left incomplete and not necessarily seen as part of an overall strategic plan of destroying the enemy outright until he lost the ability to wage war. The Japanese knew plenty about killing thousands of combatants on the battlefield, and they were willing to sacrifice even more of their own in suicidal and heroic frontal assaults against entrenched positions, but such martial ferocity was not the same as the Western desire for continual and sustained shock encounters until one side was victorious or annihilated. In the Japanese as in the Islamic way of war, surprise, sudden attack, battlefield calamity, and disgrace should force an opponent to the bargaining table to discuss concessions.

In the case of the Pacific War the Japanese preference for diversion and surprise at the expense of a series of frontal actions meant that often key opportunities were lost. After a brilliant unexpected attack on Pearl Harbor that left the Americans defenseless, there was no follow-up plan to keep bombing the island into submission, followed perhaps by raiding the West Coast ports to destroy the last home of the Pacific carrier fleet. Instead, Admiral Nagumo’s carriers immediately sailed away from Hawaii after the initial Sunday morning attacks of December 7, leaving the critical American fuel tanks that supplied the entire Pacific fleet unscathed— and the American carriers undiscovered and untouched. At the battle of Coral Sea in the weeks before Midway, a tactical Japanese victory led to a strategic defeat when the Japanese, stunned by the fierce American resistance and the loss of dozens of their best carrier pilots, postponed the invasion of Port Moresby. Both the battle of Midway and the later monumental engagement of Leyte Gulf saw Japanese tactics fail largely through the dispersion of their forces in the naïve belief that the enemy could be deceived rather than encountered and blasted apart:

They overvalued surprise, which had worked so well at the beginning and always assumed they could get it. They loved diversionary tactics—forces popping up at odd places to confuse the enemy and pull him off base. They believed that the pattern for decisive battle was the same at sea as on the land—lure the enemy into an unfavorable tactical situation, cut off his retreat, drive into the flanks, and then concentrate for the kill. (S. Morison, Coral Sea, Midway, and Submarine Actions, May 1942–August 1942, 78)

Japanese mobility and ruse were reflected not just in Admiral Yamamoto’s famous dictum about the relative industrial capacity of the two belligerents—that he could raise hell in the Pacific for six months but could promise nothing after that. Rather, almost all serious strategists in the Japanese military also acknowledged their discomfort with a quite novel situation of all-out warfare with the Americans and British that would require continual head-on confrontations with the Anglo-American fleet. In 1941 no one in the Japanese high command seemed aware that a surprise attack on the Americans would in Western eyes lead to total war, in which the United States would either destroy its adversary or face annihilation in the attempt. But, then, it was a historic error of non-Westerners, beginning with Xerxes’ invasion of Greece, to assume that democracies were somehow weak and timid. Although slow to anger, Western constitutional governments usually preferred wars of annihilation—wiping the Melians off the map of the Aegean, sowing the ground of Carthage with salt, turning Ireland into a near wasteland, wasting Jerusalem before reoccupying it, driving an entire culture of Native Americans onto reservations, atomizing Japanese cities—and were far more deadly adversaries than military dynasts and autocrats. Despite occasional brilliant adaptation of trickery and surprise, and the clear record of success in “the indirect approach” to war—Epaminondas’s great raid into Messenia (369 B.C.) and Sherman’s March to the Sea (1864) are notable examples—Western militaries continued to believe that the most economic way of waging war was to find the enemy, collect sufficient forces to overwhelm him, and then advance directly and openly to annihilate him on the battlefield—all part of a cultural tradition to end hostilities quickly, decisively, and utterly. To read of American naval operations in World War II is to catalog a series of continual efforts to advance westward toward Japan, discover and devastate the Japanese fleet, and physically wrest away all territory belonging to the Japanese government until reaching the homeland itself. The American sailors at Midway were also the first wave of an enormous draft that would mobilize more than 12 million citizens into the armed forces. In the manner of the Romans after Cannae or the democracies in World War I, American political representatives had voted for war with Japan. Polls revealed near unanimous public approval for a ghastly conflict of annihilation against the perpetrators of Pearl Harbor. The United States would also continue to hold elections throughout the conflict as the elected government crafted one of the most radical industrial and cultural revolutions in the history of the Republic in turning the country into a huge arms-producing camp.

The Japanese, in contrast, had only sporadically adopted nineteenth-century European ideas of constitutional government and civic militarism—and both had been discredited by military regimes of the 1930s. Japanese military thinkers believed that a far superior method of fielding large and spirited armies—and one more in line with their own cultural traditions—lay in inculcating the entire population with a fanatical devotion to the emperor and a shared belief in the inevitable rule of the Japanese people. A few wise and all-knowing military officers alone could appreciate the Japanese warrior spirit, and most of them saw little need for the public to debate the wisdom of attacking the largest industrial power in the world:

What Westerners did not realize was that underneath the veneer of modernity and westernization, Japan was still Oriental and that her plunge from feudalism to imperialism had come so precipitously that her leaders, who were interested solely in Western methods, not Western values, had neither the time nor inclination to develop liberalism and humanitarianism. (J. Toland, The Rising Sun, vol. 1, 74)

After the battle of Midway, the magnitude of the disaster was kept from the Japanese people—even the wounded were kept in isolation— who were told only of a great “victory” in the Aleutians. In sharp contrast, the American electorate not only received intimate details of the battle but could actually read in a major newspaper the vital information that Japanese codes had been cracked before the shooting even began. Individualism was subsumed in Japanese group consensus:

Because it [the Japanese leadership] was imbued with the national ideology it was difficult if not impossible for it to analyze the military situation in a coldly realistic, scientific manner. Japanese military training emphasized “spiritual mobilization”—Seishin Kyoiku— as the most important aspect of preparing troops for battle. Essentially, this was indoctrination in the spirit and principles of the Japanese national ideology: the identification of the individual with the nation and his subordination to the will of the Emperor. It was the continuation of a process which had begun much earlier in the schools. One reason for conscription in Japan was the opportunity presented for the military to train virtually the entire male population in the ideals of Bushido and the Kodo (the Imperial Way). (S. Huntington, The Soldier and the State, 128)

The result was that for most of the war Japan deployed large forces and highly motivated troops—at Midway there were far more Japanese men under arms than American, and they were clearly as spirited and eager for battle. But the absence of civic militarism—the idea of a free citizenry voting to craft the conditions of its own military service through consensual government—would also mean a different kind of warrior: the often-stereotyped fanaticism rather than contractual obligation, spirit rather than cold reason, uniformity over individuality, the embrace of suicide in addition to sacrifice, and official praise of anonymous national spirit in lieu of individual citation and personal honorific decree. These more subtle cultural differences would clearly be manifest at Midway— and they would also help explain why a numerically superior foe was so soundly defeated.

Much is made of Japan’s seemingly marked disadvantage in natural resources, its smaller population, and its tiny landmass. But at Midway, Japan had access from its newly acquired empire to plenty of oil for its ships and food for its sailors, who vastly outnumbered the Americans. We should remember that Japan’s population was nearly half that of the United States. Its burgeoning empire in the Pacific brought it a rich supply of strategic metals, rubber, and oil, and it had a good decade head start in equipping its military. For all practical purposes, with the Russian border almost silent by 1941, and large parts of occupied Manchuria relatively dormant for most of 1941–42, Japan was fighting a single adversary in the Anglo-American Pacific military—quite unlike the United States, which was devoting the majority of its equipment and most of its armed forces to defeating the Germans and Italians and supplying the British, Chinese, and Soviets thousands of miles away. America, not Japan, was in the unenviable and unwise predicament of fighting a two-front war with deadly adversaries and poorer allies. Whereas America clearly adopted a policy of defeating the Nazis first, nearly all of Japan’s resources were devoted to attacking the Anglo-Americans in Asia and the Pacific. The Japanese for well over a half century had made critical transferences of Western economic and military practices in creating a modern navy and a sophisticated industrial economy. At least for a brief period of a year or two, this long-standing adaptation of European technology had allowed it to compete with any Western military power, as its stunning naval victories in the first six months of World War II attested. Once the conflict began, Japan had secure sources of raw products and an entire energized military nursed on the religion of Japanese racial superiority, martial values, and imperial destiny.

Religious fervor, Bushido, hari-kari, going down with the ship, and the kamikazes lent the Japanese a sense of arrogance in victory—and fanaticism and fatalism in defeat. But such practices often had negative ramifications in the mundane practice of war itself and would prove no substitute for the freewheeling individualism of a “decadent” foe. Brilliant admirals are still needed after their ships blow up. Seasoned pilots are more valuable as instructors than as suicide bombers. Junior officers who are vocal rather than silent are critical assets; assessing rather than accepting blame may be shameful, but it is often indispensable in war; and the expertise of skilled generals is lost when they disembowel themselves. By the same token, ingenious Japanese sailors have hands-on experience that admirals should freely hear about. War planners need to fear an informed and aroused electorate; and arguing with an emperor over strategy is often a more fruitful exercise than bowing in his presence.

Despite claims of creating a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere among conquered fellow Orientals in Korea, Southeast Asia, China, and the Pacific islands, Japan possessed no sustained tradition of a free voting citizenry or the idea that non-Japanese Asians would wish to join the Japanese army in the hopes of someday receiving the same constitutional guarantees and freedoms as the Japanese themselves. Japan would live and die by the race card—defining (and demonizing) America as “white” and thus Japan as a kindred but clearly superior “yellow” people. Inside Japan itself during the battle of Midway, there were no free press, no elections, and a military dictatorship that functioned ostensibly at the beck and call of an emperor-king. The result was the fascinating anomaly that whereas the Asian countries surrounding Japan had been subjected to decades of onerous French, Dutch, German, British, and American racism and imperialism, indigenous populations, after initial celebrations greeting their Asian liberators, were more likely to aid the “white” Americans than their brethren Asian Japanese. After all, the elected government of the former might at some distant time extend independence to its subjects and satellites; the dictatorship of the latter—self-defined as a race rather than an idea—spelled only economic exploitation with no chance of parity at any future date. The hearts of men in a democracy are more likely to change and evolve than the will of the emperor.

Whereas in theory the Americans could be a culture rather than a race (although blacks, for example, were still shamefully denied the vote in many American states and fought in the Pacific in segregated roles, and often as cooks and orderlies), the entire creed of Japanese militarism rested on the implicit assumption of innate Japanese racial superiority over its “inferior” Asian subject peoples. Had Japan embraced a Western democratic tradition and a cultural shift to individualism and self-expression, it might well have been able to galvanize the entire Asian subcontinent against the grasping Europeans—but, then, under that scenario there might well have been no need for World War II.

If the absence of such liberal institutions hampered the overall Japanese war effort on June 4, 1942, it was the regimentation of the Japanese military culture itself, seen mostly in the sheer absence of individuality, that would prove so critical in such a fast-moving and far-ranging battle like Midway. Close examination of the battle suggests that the Americans’ intrinsic faith in individualism, a product itself of a long tradition of consensual government and free expression, at every turn of the encounter proved decisive. Far better than luck, surprise, or accident, the power of the individual himself explains the Americans’ incredible victory.

SPONTANEITY AND INDIVIDUAL INITIATIVE AT MIDWAY

It would be a caricature of the complex relationship of soldier to state to suggest that Americans at Midway were individualists whereas Japanese sailors and pilots were unthinking automatons. Obedience is the nature of military life in nearly every culture. Without a chain of command, orders and military discipline cannot exist. The American navy was highly disciplined at Midway, and there were thousands of imaginative and brilliant Japanese soldiers who did give their best ad hoc efforts to remedy the disaster on June 4.

That being said, individualism was a different notion in the traditional culture of Japan, whose citizenry for centuries had seen little need to elect representatives, freely to write and say what they wished, or to demonstrate spontaneously for a redress of grievances:

A willingness to subordinate the individual to the group, to sacrifice individual interests for the good of the family, for the good of the village, and for the good of the nation (it being understood that in the case of incompatibility of these goods, the good of the larger group must come first), combined with a stress on harmony in the family, in the village, and in the nation which held that any threat to unity was morally wrong, and he who created conflict by a challenge to the status quo was necessarily the wrong-doer. (R. Dore,Land Reform in Japan, 393)

Even those scholars who resent the stereotypical and Eurocentric view that the Japanese put little premium on individualism—and thus consensual government itself—have conceded that the Japanese notion of the individual evolved differently from the practice in the West:

To the Western reader, even to one who lived through the 1930s in Germany, the Japanese military’s authoritarian pyramid of support, based on these stratified hamlets, must seem suffocating and restrictive. How many of us would have been willing to subordinate our individuality completely to family, village, and nation? And yet there is no reason to conclude that Japanese who did not belong to the prominent stratum of this organic society believed that they were being suffocated, or dictated to, or if they did, minded it. (R. Smethurst, A Social Basis for Prewar Japanese Militarism, 182)

We do not wish to suggest that highly motivated and disciplined Japanese troops, who were uniformly courageous and without exception willing to die for their emperor, were therein less capable warriors than the Americans. Rather, in a complex and drawn-out battle like Midway, and even more so during the Pacific War in general, there were numerous opportunities lost to the imperial fleet due to a lack of initiative endemic within the Japanese military—and this was typical rather than exceptional of Japanese society at large. Mitsuo Fuchida and Masatake Okumiya, high-ranking veterans of the Japanese navy, offer a near Thucydidean analysis of their imperial navy’s defeat at Midway:

In the final analysis, the root cause of Japan’s defeat, not alone in the Battle of Midway but in the entire war, lies deep in the Japanese national character. There is an irrationality and impulsiveness about our people which results in actions that are haphazard and often contradictory. A tradition of provincialism makes us narrow-minded and dogmatic, reluctant to discard prejudices and slow to adopt even necessary improvements if they require a new concept. Indecisive and vacillating, we succumb readily to conceit, which in turn makes us disdainful of others. Opportunistic but lacking in a spirit of daring and independence, we are wont to place reliance on others and to truckle to superiors. (M. Fuchida and M. Okumiya, Midway, the Battle That Doomed Japan, 247)

In at least four critical ways—the breaking of the Japanese naval codes, the repair of the carrier Yorktown, the nature of the U.S. naval command, and the behavior of American pilots—the American faith in individuality rather than group consensus, spontaneity rather than rote, and informality rather than hierarchy proved decisive at Midway.

The Code Breakers

The most obvious contrast was in the critical sphere of intelligence gathering, which may have decided the battle before it had begun. The deciphering of constantly altered encoded messages, as opposed to behind-the-lines espionage and covert intelligence gathering in general, is a fine art. It combines complex mathematical skills, a sophisticated knowledge of linguistics, a social and historical awareness of the context in which secret messages are transmitted, familiarity with the mechanics of radio transmission, and a commonsense appraisal of what is likely rather than what is absolutely proved to be transmitted. The example of the brilliant British efforts at cracking top-secret German codes—the Bletchley Park decrypts of Wehrmacht telegraphed messages collectively known as ULTRA—illustrates that the best code breakers are individualistic, often eccentric thinkers, from all walks of life, though often overrepresented by those formerly ensconced in university mathematics and language departments.

Such highly creative minds function best when given autonomy and a general relaxation from protocols of military discipline. The persona of the decipherer is often not merely ill suited but antithetical to military regimentation. The American navy’s cryptanalysts, in their informality and nonconformity, seem similar to the unorthodox renegades who created the computer revolution forty years later in the Silicon Valley of California. It is surely no accident that of all the belligerents in World War II, the British and the Americans, with formal military branches of crypt-analysis dating back to World War I and completely autonomous universities, were the most accomplished code breakers—and the Japanese the most dismal.

Before the Japanese fleet arrived anywhere near Midway, the American high command knew approximately the general location, direction, timetable, and objectives of Yamamoto’s armada. The frantic American efforts to fortify and equip the once mostly neglected Midway with planes, artillery, and troops; the rapid mustering of the American naval counterresponse; the failure of the Japanese submarines to find, much less attack, the American fleet; and the safe transit of the American carriers to a strategic point to lie in wait for the arriving Japanese ships were all due to the American navy’s breaking of Japanese encoded telegraphed messages. By mid-May 1942 Midway was suddenly bristling with guns, planes, and defenders, and it is hard to imagine that the Japanese invasion force could have easily taken the main island, even had their fleet knocked out the American carriers.

The men generally credited with pioneering the American navy’s effort at cracking the critical top Japanese naval code—known as JN-25 of some 45,000 five-digit numbers—were Commanders Joseph J. Rochefort and Laurence Safford. “I didn’t keep very good files,” Rochefort confessed of his work. “I carried it all in my head” (G. Prange, Miracle at Midway, 20). In slippers and smoking jacket, Rochefort ran an unusually autonomous Pacific Fleet Combat Intelligence Unit (known as HYPO), which was more or less given free rein by Safford in a windowless basement office at Pearl Harbor to decipher Japanese transmissions as it saw best:

It is difficult to determine which of the two was the more eccentric. Safford, who graduated from the Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1916, was one of those people who are the despair of uniform tailors as well as orderly organizations. He wore his hair in the “mad-professor” style and talked disjointedly because his mouth could not keep up with his mind; his forte was pure mathematics. Rochefort was mild-mannered, dedicated, and serious but also persistent, energetic, and impatient of hierarchies and bureaucracy, his mind unfettered by orthodox officer training. (D. van der Vat, The Pacific Campaign, World War II, 88–89)

Rochefort’s tight-knit group received the full support of the traditional Admiral Nimitz, who was not in the least fazed by his men’s appearance or the manner in which HYPO was run. True, the freethinking, strange-looking assortment of unmilitary types raised eyebrows elsewhere in the American high command—Admiral King was unimpressed with their operation. But it is impossible to imagine their counterparts in the Japanese navy, in which such informality, neglect of protocol, queer dress and appearance, failure to keep meticulous records, and a general disdain for military life could not be excused on the premise that a collection of intellectuals and assorted oddballs needed such freedom and exemption to further the war effort.

Most serious students of Midway have no hesitation in attributing much of the American victory to Rochefort’s effort. Samuel Eliot Morison concluded that Midway “was a victory of intelligence, bravely and wisely applied” (Coral Sea, Midway, and Submarine Actions, May 1942–August 1942, 158). The Japanese veterans and historians Fuchida and Okumiya concur in their analysis of the first major naval defeat of the Japanese in modern times:

[I]t is beyond the slightest possibility of doubt that the advance discovery of the Japanese plan to attack was the foremost single and immediate cause of Japan’s defeat. Viewed from the Japanese side, this success of the enemy’s intelligence translated itself into a failure on our part—a failure to take adequate precautions for guarding the secrecy of our plans. . . . But it was a victory of American intelligence in a much broader sense than this. Equally as important as the positive achievements of the enemy’s intelligence on this occasion was the negatively bad and ineffective functioning of Japanese intelligence. (Midway, the Battle That Doomed Japan, 232)

The individualism of Rochefort and his group—and their ability and freedom to function successfully within the American military—were representative of a long Western emphasis on self-expression and initiative that were dividends of constitutional government, market capitalism, and personal freedom. Hundreds of brave Japanese sailors would be cremated at Midway because an officer working in his slippers knew they were coming.

The Repair of the Yorktown

If intelligence gave the Americans prior warning of the Japanese plan of attack, the amazing restoration of the damaged aircraft carrier Yorktown ensured that there would be three, not two, American carriers to meet Admiral Nagumo’s four. Without the vital role of the Yorktown’s air squadrons in sinking the Japanese carriers, and the carrier’s drawing the entire Japanese counteroffensive away from the Enterprise and Hornet, the battle could easily have been lost. The constant dogfighting of Jimmy Thatch’s Wildcat fighters, the superb dive-bombing of Max Leslie’s SBDs, and the sacrifice of Lem Massey’s Devastators would not have been possible were it not for the innovative repair work on their mother ship done a few days earlier at Pearl Harbor.

The Yorktown had suffered major damage less than a month before Midway, receiving at least one direct bomb hit and numerous near misses on May 8 during the battle of Coral Sea. Japanese naval bombers had ruined the flight deck, destroyed galleries and bulkheads deep inside the ship, lowered her speed to twenty-five knots, and cracked her armor belt. Several near misses had acted like depth charges and cracked apart her fuel lines, resulting in massive oil slicks. She limped back into Pearl Harbor on May 27, with interior electrical cables and fuel tanks ruined. Her air squadrons were decimated from losses to Japanese planes and antiaircraft fire. The Japanese at any rate were convinced that Yorktown had sunk in the Coral Sea. Most professional American estimates forecast that a thorough repair job would require at least three months, and possibly six to make her perfectly seaworthy.

Instead, work began minutes after Yorktown had reached the Pearl Harbor dry dock. Before the water had even drained completely from the yard, engineers, maintenance technicians, and assorted fabricators, accompanied by Admiral Nimitz himself, were walking around the huge ship in hip boots, inspecting the damage and jotting down needed materials. Thousands of individual agendas were immediately set into motion:

Over 1,400 men—shipfitters, shipwrights, machinists, welders, electricians—poured in, over and under the ship; they and the yard shopmen worked in shifts the rest of that day and the next and during the whole of two nights, making the bulkhead stanchions and deck plates necessary to restore the ship’s structural strength, and replacing the wiring, instruments and fixtures damaged in the blast. (S. Morison, Coral Sea, Midway, and Submarine Actions, May 1942–August 1942, 81)

Local residents complained of power outages as hundreds of electric arc welders drained the island’s power grid. Much of the work was done ad hoc without blueprints or formal instruction:

There was no time for plans or sketches. The men worked directly with the steel beams and bars brought on the ship. Coming to a damaged frame, burners would take out the worst of it; fitters would line up a new section, cut it to match the contour of the damage; riggers and welders would move in, “tacking” the new piece in place. Then on to the next job. . . . (W. Lord, Incredible Victory, 36–37)

The result was that less than sixty-eight hours after she had arrived, on Saturday morning, May 30, Yorktown, with electricians and mechanics still on board, outfitted with new planes and replacement pilots, left dry dock. The last repairmen left by motor launch as the carrier headed out of port to meet Admiral Nagumo’s carriers. In celebration of the amazing feat, the band of the carrier that was heading farther west, not back east as once promised, ironically played “California, Here I Come” on the patched-together flight deck.

Far different was the Japanese reaction to damage done to and loss of pilots of their two newest and most deadly carriers, Shokaku and Zuikaku, when the latter returned from the same battle of Coral Sea. Of the Shokaku, which sailed into the Kure naval base (ten days earlier than Yorktownarrived at Pearl Harbor, and with far less structural damage), the fleet’s air commander, Captain Yoshitake Miwa, concluded that its damage was not serious but nevertheless might require three months of repair work. Her sister carrier, theZuikaku, although utterly untouched by the Americans, had lost 40 percent of her aircrews at Coral Sea; thus, she sat in port in excellent condition during the entire battle of Midway waiting for replacement planes and pilots. The contrast between the American and Japanese responses to repairing the respective damage from the Coral Sea engagement was undeniable:

He [Nimitz] must have every available flattop, hence the drive and urgency behind his pressure to put the crippled Yorktown in fighting trim. This was a tremendous performance and a dramatic preliminary victory. In contrast, the Japanese dawdled over the repair of Shokaku and in replenishing Zuikaku, secure in their confidence that they could lick the hell out of the U.S. Pacific Fleet without the help of those two Pearl Harbor veterans. (G. Prange, Miracle at Midway, 384)

Had the roles been reversed—innovative command and repair crews being turned loose at Kure, not Pearl Harbor—then Admiral Nagumo would have faced two, not three, American carriers with six flattops, not four. In that scenario it is difficult to see how theEnterprise and Hornet could have escaped sinking.

We know of the brilliance of the American command that insisted on the Yorktown’s sudden repair. But what is mostly lost to the historical record are the hundreds of individual decisions and impromptu ingenuity of American welders, riveters, electricians, carpenters, and supply officers who on their own and without written orders turned a nearly ruined ship into a floating arsenal that would help sink the 1st Mobile Carrier Striking Force of Admiral Nagumo.

Flexibility in Command

Admiral Yamamoto’s grand tactical plan at Midway was inflexible. Few, if any, of his more astute subordinates made any sustained effort to convince their admiral that the imperial fleet’s assets would be far too widely dispersed, that precious planes and ships would be wasted in the Aleutian operations, and that the entire contradictory strategy of destroying the American fleet while taking islands a thousand miles distant was absurd. A long tradition of deference to superiors, coupled with Yamamoto’s reputation after Pearl Harbor, precluded any serious give-and-take that might have resulted in at least some alterations. Admiral Nagumo’s chief of staff, Rear Admiral Kusaka, noted of many senior officers’ private reservations about Yamamoto’s formula, “The fact was that the plan had already been decided by the Combined Fleet headquarters and we were forced to accept it as it had been planned” (G. Prange, Miracle at Midway, 28).

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 BritishPrince 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 theKaga 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 damagedYorktown 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 little 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)

The torpedo pilots from the three American carriers, as we have seen, were just as innovative, if soon subject to much of the same fate, given their inferior equipment and lack of experience. But by any fair measure, few naval pilots should have located the Japanese fleet at all. The Hornet ’s fighters and dive-bombers did not; 45 planes, or almost one-third of the initial 152 planes of the first American strike, never even saw the enemy. Radio contact with Midway was difficult, and no updated reports were forwarded to the pilots after takeoff to indicate that the Japanese had radically altered course away from Midway and were headed in the near-opposite direction. In the hour or more it took the Americans to reach the Japanese, the enemy carriers would be thirty or forty miles to the north from their last reported position, and thus in theory safe from the incoming bombers, which were at their limit of operations, low on fuel, and headed in the wrong direction.

A number of American air commanders ignored standard operational orders and thereby found the Japanese through their own initiative. Jack Waldron, Hornet air commander of the Devastators, told his squadron, “Just follow me. I’ll take you to ’em” (W. Smith, Midway, 102). And he did, and to their deaths—rightly surmising that Nagumo would change course once he got reports of the American carriers. Waldron’s ingenuity ensured that he found the Japanese, that all his planes would therefore be shot down, and that the Japanese fighter cover would, in the process of the American slaughter, be ignorant of the dive-bomber peril far above. Had Waldron not changed course, he would never have found the enemy fleet, and thus it was likely that the Japanese would have much more easily beat off the other attacks and have been waiting for the SBDs.

Similarly, when Wade McClusky, leading the dive-bombers of the Enterprise, arrived at the anticipated interception point 155 miles distant, his planes likewise found no Japanese fleet. Instinctively, he, too, made an instantaneous judgment that Nagumo’s carriers had changed course (he was helped by the wake of the Japanese destroyer Arashi, which was steaming to catch up to Nagumo’s force) and thus began making a long sweeping search north to the Japanese carriers, which he found at the limit of his bombers’ fuel reserves. Had McClusky not guessed, and guessed rightly—or had he circled while trying to radio for orders — Enterprise’s bombers, like Hornet’s, would have played no role in the fighting. Both the Akagi and Kaga would have escaped, and surely either theEnterprise or the Hornet would have quickly felt their wrath. No wonder that the captain of theEnterprise, George Murray, called McClusky’s initiative “the most important decision of the entire action” (G. Prange, Miracle at Midway, 260).

During the actual bombing runs, individual American pilots made snap decisions to redirect their attacks contrary to their last orders, when they saw that crippled ships needed more attention or felt that their bombs might be better dropped on fresh targets. Improvisation ensured that the Hiryuwas sunk and the heavy cruiser Mogami seriously damaged, both suffering devastating hits from American bombers that had been ordered elsewhere.

Such freethinking American pilots in their recklessness and infectious enthusiasm could often be ineffective, if not downright dangerous, as we have seen in the failed shore-based attacks from Midway. A number of impromptu B-17 sorties were foolhardy, and one even attacked an American submarine. An unwise effort of B-24s on June 6 to fly at night to bomb Wake Island resulted in abject failure—the planes did not find the island and the mission’s commander, Major General Clarence Tinker, was never heard from again. Nevertheless, comparison between the Japanese and American scouting, fighter, and bomber pilots reveals far more capacity for initiative and adaptation among the Americans. At Midway, as would be true throughout the Pacific War, that autonomy paid off.

INDIVIDUALISM IN WESTERN WARFARE

The Americans would lose dozens of carriers, battleships, and cruisers in the three years following Midway to brave and brilliant Japanese sailors and pilots, as the United States sought to ruin Japan, rather than remove the threat of the Japanese military. On Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and in a number of naval actions off the Solomon Islands, thousands of Americans of all services would be slaughtered by well-planned and organized Japanese assaults. Yet the astounding fact remains: in less than four years, after being surprised and caught in a state of virtual unpreparedness, the United States—while devoting the majority of its forces to the European theater of operations, and without banzai charges, kamikaze attacks, or ritual suicides—not only defeated an enormous and seasoned Japanese military but destroyed the Japanese nation itself, ending its half-century existence as a formidable military power and indeed a modern industrial state. Japan’s navy, army, and air force had not merely lost the Pacific War but ceased to exist in the process.

The result was that by August 1945 the Japanese nation was in far worse shape than it had been a century earlier in 1853 when Commander Perry arrived in Tokyo Bay and helped spur the original Westernization of Japan. A century of Westernization without liberalization had brought Japan not parity with, but destruction by, Western powers. Critical to that unprecedented and brutal American military achievement of some fortyfive months was a long tradition of reliance on individual initiative, which was in sharp contrast to a venerable Eastern emphasis on group consensus, obeisance to imperial or divine authority, and the subjugation of the individual to society. The beginning of the end for the Japanese was Midway, where they lost their best airmen and irreplaceable aircrews and the core of their carrier fleet—and, most important, in a mere three days had their confidence shattered to such a degree that they would now fear, rather than look eagerly to, engaging American ships on the horizon.

Individualism had long played a role in Western military efficacy and usually manifested itself on the battlefield at three levels: from supreme command to the soldiers themselves to the larger society that fielded and armed its combatants. All cultures are capable of creating brilliant and highly idiosyncratic military leaders who exercise independence and intuition. Rome met a number of such gifted tribal commanders and Eastern monarchs—Jugurtha, Vercingetorix, Boudicca, Mithradates—whose skill often led to battlefield victories. But their individualism, and that of others to follow like them, was not characteristic of their cultures at large, but prominent only to the degree that they enjoyed absolute power. Thus, after their deaths—and all enemies of Rome usually died in battle or committed suicide—their wars of liberation collapsed, suggesting that their brand of monarchy, theocracy, or tyranny could rarely produce a succession of gifted military leaders, much less a nation of followers who could rely on their own initiative and autonomy to wage war.

The same holds true of dynasts such as the pharaohs, the New World potentates in Mexico and Peru, and the Chinese emperors and Ottoman sultans, who likewise centralized military authority into their own hands and discouraged initiative on the part of their subjects, ensuring that the chance of victory lay not in military improvisation, but only in their own—often flawed—judgment. In contrast, generals like Themistocles, the Spartan genius Lysander, Scipio Africanus, the brilliant Byzantine Belisarius, Cortés, and moderns like George Patton and Curtis LeMay were at odds with their own state, surrounded by equally independent-thinking subordinates, and keen to exploit the initiative rather than merely the discipline of their own troops.

Soldiers in the ranks of Western armies often exercised an independence of judgment not found in other societies. Here one thinks of the “old man” at the battle of Mantinea (418 B.C.) who stopped the battle to warn the Spartan high command of its unwise deployment; the brutal give-and-take among Xenophon’s Ten Thousand in Asia Minor (401 B.C.), who were as much a mobile democracy-in-arms as a hired band of killers; the various eccentric bands of Frankish aristocracy who bickered as much as they fought the enemy during the Crusades; the fractious admirals before Lepanto or career British soldiers in India and Africa during the nineteenth century, whose skill and imagination brought success despite mediocre higher command.

All people at times act as individuals, and as humans prize their freedom and independence. But the formal and often legal recognition of a person’s sovereign sphere of individual action—social, political, and cultural—is a uniquely Western concept, one that frightens, sometimes rightly so, most of the non-Western world. Individualism, unlike consensual government and constitutional recognition of political freedom, is a cultural, rather than political, entity. It is the dividend of Western politics and economics, which give freedom in the abstract and concrete sense to individuals and in the process foster personal curiosity and initiative unknown among societies where there are no true citizens and neither government nor markets are free.

As we have seen in the case of Salamis and Cannae, an insidious individualism grows out of the larger Western traditions of freedom, constitutional government, property rights, and civic miliarism. The Athenian ekklēsia voted for the disastrous expedition to Sicily (415–413 B.C.) and then adopted decisive and heroic measures to keep Athens in the war for another nine years—in much the same way as the British Parliament in the nineteenth century or the American Congress during the twentieth authorized all sorts of political and economic policies that turned the war effort over to thousands of autonomous and freethinking citizens. From the assertion of the fifth-century sophist Protagoras that “man is the measure of all things” to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948 and drafted by Western jurists (“the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women . . .”), there is a 2,500-year tradition of personal liberty and innate trust in the individual, rather than the political or religious collective, unparalleled in the non-West. For good or evil, few Westerners believe that a sacred cow is more important than a human, that the emperor is superior to the individual person, that a religious pilgrimage is the fulfillment of a human’s life, that in war a suicidal charge is often required for an individual’s excellency, or that a combatant must risk his or her life to save the emperor’s picture.

In contrast, Japan, in lieu of independent supreme commanders, innovative soldiers, and a sovereign legislature, relied on ironclad obedience, as have most Western adversaries of the past two and a half millennia. Rigid hierarchy and complete submission of the individual to the divinity of the Japanese emperor meant that the wisdom of a small cadre of militarists shaped policy largely without ratification or even knowledge of the Japanese people, who were never envisioned as free persons with unique rights that were natural at birth and protected by the state. Like the enormous armies of the ancient imperial East, all that centralized control and mass ideology led to a wonderfully trained, large, and spirited military, but one vulnerable to the counterattacks of a nation-in-arms, drawing on the collective wisdom of thousands of freethinking individuals.

With the end of the Pacific War, the ruin of Japanese society, and the disgrace of the militarists, the final century-old roadblock to full implementation of Western-style parliamentary democracy and all that accompanied it was removed. The postwar introduction of constitutional government brought land redistribution. Freedom of the press and dissent, the emancipation of women, and the creation of a middling consumer class were also dividends of the American occupation. The result—if not a radical Japanese reinterpretation of the role of the individual and society—was at least that at the millennium Japan has one of the most well led, innovative, and technologically advanced militaries in the world—under the complete control of an elected legislature and chief executive and subject to civilian audit.

If its past partial embrace of Western military research and development brought Japan near technological parity with European and American military forces at the turn of the century, its current far more comprehensive adaptation of Western political and social institutions has ensured it a military that is, at least tactically, the near equal of any in Europe today. In the next century Japan’s scientific progress in arms will not hinge entirely on foreign emulation, but be powered by the engine of its own free and liberal society—if it continues to encourage individual talent and initiative to a degree unknown at any time in its long and warlike past.