The Battle of Midway
THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY
PIVOTAL MOMENTS IN AMERICAN HISTORY
Series Editors
David Hackett Fischer
James M. McPherson
David Greenberg
James T. Patterson
Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil
Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy
Maury Klein
Rainbow’s End: The Crash of 1929
James McPherson
Crossroads of Freedom:
The Battle of Antietam
Glenn C. Altschuler
All Shook Up: How Rock ’n’ Roll
Changed America
David Hackett Fischer
Washington’s Crossing
John Ferling
Adams vs. Jefferson:
The Tumultuous Election of 1800
Joel H. Silbey
Storm over Texas: The Annexation
Controversy and the Road to Civil War
Raymond Arsenault
Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle
for Racial Justice
Colin G. Calloway
The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the
Transformation of North America
Richard Labunski
James Madison and the
Struggle for the Bill of Rights
Sally McMillen
Seneca Falls and the Origins of the
Women’s Rights Movement
Howard Jones
The Bay of Pigs
Elliott West
The Last Indian War:
The Nez Perce Story
Lynn Hudson Parsons
The Birth of Modern Politics:
Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams,
and the Election of 1828
Glenn C. Altschuler and
Stuart M. Blumin
The GI Bill: A New Deal for Veterans
Richard Archer
As If an Enemy’s Country: The British
Occupation of Boston and the Origins of
Revolution
Thomas Kessner
The Flight of the Century: Charles
Lindbergh and the Rise of American
Aviation
CRAIG L. SYMONDS
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Copyright © 2011 by Craig L. Symonds
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Symonds, Craig L.
The Battle of Midway / Craig L. Symonds.
p. cm.—(Pivotal moments in American history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-539793-2
1. Midway, Battle of, 1942.
2. World War, 1939–1945—Naval operations, American.
3. World War, 1939–1945—Naval operations, Japanese. I. Title.
D774.M5S93 2011
940.54’26699—dc22 2011010648
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For my grandson,
Will Symonds
11
Nagumo’s Dilemma (4:00 a.m. to 8:30 a.m.)
12
The Flight to Nowhere (7:00 a.m. to 11:20 a.m.)
13
Attack of the Torpedo Squadrons (8:30 a.m. to 10:20 a.m.)
14
The Tipping Point (7:00 a.m. to 10:30 a.m.)
15
The Japanese Counterstrike (11:00a.m.to 6:00 p.m.)
APPENDIX A American and Japanese Aircraft Carriers
APPENDIX B American and Japanese Aircraft
APPENDIX C American Order of Battle at Midway
APPENDIX D Japanese Order of Battle at Midway
APPENDIX E How Much Did the U.S. Know of Japanese Plans?
APPENDIX F The Flight to Nowhere
1. American Counterattack, February 1, 1942
2. The Kid
ō
Butai in the Indian Ocean, April 3–10, 1942
3. Japanese Strategic Options, Spring, 1942
4. The Battle of the Coral Sea, May 7–8, 1942
5. The Aleutians, June 3–5, 1942
6. Operation K, March 2–5, 1942
7. The Japanese Search Pattern, June 4, 1942, 4:30–8:00 a.m.
8. The Attack on Midway and the American Counterattack, June 4, 1942, 7:00–9:00 a.m.
9. The Flight to Nowhere, June 4, 1942, 8:00–11:00 a.m.
10. Attack of the Torpedo Squadrons, June 4, 1942, 9:30–9:45 a.m.
11. The Tipping Point, June 4, 1942, 10:20–10:30 a.m.
12. Attack on the
Yorktown,
june 4, 1942, 12:00–2:40 p.m.
13. Death of the Kid
ō
Butai, June 4, 1942, 3:45–6:00 p.m.
I
n a matter of eight minutes on the morning of June 4, 1942, three of the four aircraft carriers in Japan’s principal striking force were mortally wounded by American dive bombers. The fourth would follow later that day. The Japanese Navy never recovered from this blow. These pivotal minutes—the most dramatic in World War II, indeed perhaps in all of American history—reversed the seemingly irresistible momentum toward Japanese victory and started the long comeback of American forces from the disasters at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines six months earlier.
Craig Symonds begins the riveting story of the Battle of Midway with the arrival of Admiral Chester Nimitz at Pearl Harbor on Christmas Day, 1941, to start the planning for the counteroffensive that led to those climactic moments near Midway Atoll, a thousand miles west of Hawaii. American aircraft carriers had been absent from Pearl Harbor when the Japanese struck on December 7, 1941. That fortuitous absence seemed to make little difference at the time, for in the ensuing four months Japanese forces advanced from one triumph to the next until they had conquered Malaya and Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, and Indochina. Japan thereby created its Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere, which stretched from China to the mid-Pacific and almost from the borders of Alaska to Australia. So easy were these conquests that they led to an overweening disdain for their enemies—especially the United States—which Japanese historians subsequently and ruefully labeled “the victory disease.”
One Japanese leader who did not suffer from this disease was Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, commander in chief of Japan’s combined fleet and the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack. The survival of America’s small fleet
of carriers enabled the United States to begin a series of counterthrusts in early 1942, including the Doolittle raid over Tokyo, culminating in the Battle of Coral Sea in May. Yamamoto was determined, in Symonds’ words, “to eliminate the threat of more carrier raids by engineering a climactic naval battle somewhere in the Central Pacific that would destroy those carriers once and for all.” He designed a campaign by Japan’s large striking force of four carriers and numerous battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and submarines, designated the Kid
ō
Butai, to draw out the American carriers (only three were available) defending the outpost on Midway Atoll. Yamamoto planned for his superior force to pounce and sink them.
In the event, however, it was the Americans who did the pouncing and sinking. This victory is often described as “the miracle at Midway,” a success that depended on the lucky timing of the dive-bomber attack that screamed down from the sky at precisely the moment when Japanese fighter planes (the famous Zeroes) were preoccupied with shooting down the hapless American torpedo planes, whose only accomplishment—though it was a crucial one—was to distract the fighters. Symonds makes clear that while luck played a part, the American victory was mainly the result of careful planning, the effective use of radar (which the Japanese did not have), and superior intelligence. The Americans had partially broken the Japanese naval operations code, which gave them timely intelligence of Japanese intentions and actions. Symonds gives much credit to Joseph Rochefort, an unsung hero of the battle, who as head of the Combat Intelligence Unit was principally responsible for decoding and interpreting Japanese communications.
One of the many great strengths of this book is its emphasis on the important “decisions made and actions taken by individuals who found themselves at the nexus of history at a decisive moment.” Symonds’ vivid word portraits of these individuals—Japanese as well as Americans—their personalities, their foibles and virtues, are an outstanding feature of
The Battle of Midway.
Readers will come away not only with a better understanding of the strategies, operational details, and tactics of this pivotal battle but with greater appreciation for the men whose decisions and actions made it happen.
James M. McPherson
THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY
I
n a series that focuses on historical contingency, it is appropriate, perhaps even essential, to include the Battle of Midway, for there are few moments in American history in which the course of events tipped so suddenly and so dramatically as it did on June 4, 1942. At ten o’clock that morning, the Axis powers were winning the Second World War. Though the Red Army had counterattacked the Wehrmacht outside Moscow in December, the German Army remained deep inside the Soviet Union, and one element of it was marching toward the oil fields of the Caucasus. In the Atlantic, German U-boats ravaged Allied shipping and threatened to cut the supply line between the United States and Great Britain. In the Pacific, Japan had just completed a triumphant six-month rampage, attacking and wrecking Allied bases from the Indian Ocean to the mid-Pacific following the crippling of the U.S. battle fleet at Pearl Harbor. Japan’s Mobile Striking Force (the Kid
ō
Butai) was at that moment on the verge of consolidating command of the Pacific by eliminating what the strike at Pearl Harbor had missed: America’s aircraft carriers. The
outcome of the war balanced on a knife-edge, but clearly leaned toward the Axis powers.
