The Battle of Midway (77 page)

6
. The orders intended for Kurita’s CruDiv7 were sent first to CruDiv8. This may have been a simple error in transmission, but Watanabe admitted in a postwar interview that he was deliberately slow in forwarding the orders to retreat. Parshall and Tully,
Shattered Sword
, 344; Prange interview of Watanabe (Nov. 24, 1964), Prange Papers, UMD, box 17.

7
. Robert Schultz and James Shell, “Strange Fortune,”
World War II
, May/June 2010, 61–62; War Diary, Third War Patrol, USS
Tambor
(SS-198), Office of Naval Records and History (also available at
www.hnsa.org/doc/subreports.htm
).

8
. War Diary, Third War Patrol, USS
Tambor
(SS-198), Office of Naval Records and History.

9
. Ibid.

10
. Parshall and Tully,
Shattered Sword
, 345–47.

11
. Ibid., 346–48.

12
. Ibid., 362–63.

13
. Ibid., 361.

14
. Prange interview with McClusky (June 30, 1966), Prange Papers, UMD, box 17. See also John B. Lundstrom,
Black Shoe Carrier Admiral: Frank Jack Fletcher at Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal
(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2006), 285.

15
. Ibid.; Robert J. Cressman et al.,
“A Glorious Page in Our History”: The Battle of Midway, 4–6 June 1942
(Missoula, MT: Pictorial Histories, 1990), 149.

16
. Shumway’s Report of Action, June 10, 1942, and the Report of Bombing Squadron Five, June 7, 1942, both in Action Reports, reel 3 (also available at
www.midway42.org/reports.html
); Bruce R. Linder, “Lost Letter of Midway,”
U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings
125, no. 8 (August 1999), 33.

17
. Katsumi is quoted by the
Tanikaze’s
lookout, Masashi Shibato, in Clayton E. Fisher,
Hooked: Tales and Adventures of a Tailhook Warrior
(Denver: Outskirts, Inc., 2009), 96; Ring is quoted in Linder, “Lost Letter of Midway,” 33.

18
. Fisher,
Hooked
, 97; Stuart D. Ludlum,
They Turned the War Around at Coral Sea and Midway
(Bennington, VT: Merriam, 2000), 127.

19
. One plane ditched in the water near the task force, but its crew was recovered. Parshall and Tully,
Shattered Sword
, 365; Cressman et al.,
Glorious Page
, 34.

20
. Cressman et al.,
Glorious Page
, 151.

21
. Samuel Eliot Morison,
History of United States Naval Operations in World War II
, vol. 4,
Coral Sea, Midway, and Submarine Actions, May 1942–August 1942
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1949), 153–54; Lundstrom,
Black Shoe Carrier Admiral
, 288.

22
. Interview of Francis Fabian (Feb. 6, 2009), 17–18, NWC; Parshall and Tully,
Shattered Sword
, 361; Cressman et al.,
Glorious Page
, 153. Samuel Eliot Morison is critical of Buckmaster for prematurely ordering abandon ship and for not attempting a salvage operation sooner, though such judgments are easy enough to make after the fact. Morison,
Coral Sea, Midway, and Submarine Actions
, 153–54.

23
. Fletcher to Nimitz, and Nimitz to Fletcher, both June 5, 1942, Nimitz Papers, NHHC, box 8; Joseph M. Worthington oral history (June 7, 1972) U.S. Naval Institute Oral History Collection, USNA, 185.

24
. Worthington oral history (June 7, 1972), 186; interview of William P. Burford by Prange (Aug. 18, 1964), Prange Papers, UMD, box 20.

25
. The
Hammann’s
captain, Commander Arnold E. True, reported that “all depth charges had been set on safe when
Hammann
went alongside
Yorktown”
and he speculated that the subsequent underwater explosion may have been caused by one of the
Hammann’s
torpedoes being set off by the initial explosion. Another possibility is that, in anticipation of imminent antisubmarine efforts, the depthcharge officer, Ensign C. C. Elmes, pulled the safety forks when the torpedo wakes were first spotted but did not have time to replace them all after the
Hammann
was hit. See CDR True to Nimitz, June 16, 1942, Action Reports, reel 3 (also available at
www.midway42.org/reports.html
); interview of William P. Burford by Prange (Aug. 18, 1964), Prange Papers, UMD, box 20; Fabian interview (Feb. 6, 2009), NWC, 20; Cressman et al.,
Glorious Page
, 157.

26
. Ernest Eller oral history (Aug. 25, 1977) U.S. Naval Institute Oral History Collection, USNA, 542; Jeff Nesmith,
No Higher Honor: The U.S.S. Yorktown at the Battle of Midway
(Atlanta: Longstreet, 1999), 253.

27
. Fletcher to Nimitz, June 7, 1942, Nimitz Papers, NHHC, box 8:118; Cressman et al.,
Glorious Page
, 161.

28
. Interview of Oral Moore in Ronald W. Russell,
Veterans’ Biographies
(San Francisco, 2007). I am grateful to Ron Russell for sharing this information. See also Parshall and Tully,
Shattered Sword
, 367; Lundstrom,
Black Shoe Carrier Admiral
, 290.

29
. Cressman et al.,
Glorious Page
, 154.

30
. Linder, “Lost Letter of Midway,” 34.

31
. Linder, “Lost Letter of Midway,” 34; Cressman et al.,
Glorious Page
, 155; Parshall and Tully,
Shattered Sword
, 369.

32
. Quoted in Cressman et al.,
Glorious Page
, 155.

33
. Ludlum,
They Turned the War Around
, 128–29; Enclosure C, Action Report, Commander in Chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet, June 28, 1942, Action Reports, reel 3.

34
. Message traffic is from Action Reports, reel 3.

35
. Linder, “Lost Letter of Midway,” 35.

36
. Cressman et al.,
Glorious Page
, 162.

37
. Ludlum,
They Turned the War Around
, 129–30.

38
. Cressman et al.,
Glorious Page
, 162–63.

39
. Worthington oral history (June 7, 1972), 202–4. Spruance’s remarks are from his foreword to the American edition of Mitsuo Fuchida and Masatake Okumiya,
Midway: The Battle that Doomed Japan, the Japanese Navy’s Story
(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1955).

1
. In addition to four carriers, the Japanese also lost the
Mikuma
, which sank not long after she was photographed by Lieutenant Junior Grade Dobson on June 6. The
Mogami
, on the other hand, survived. Though she was hit by five bombs, her captain’s decision to jettison her torpedoes almost certainly saved her. Repaired at Truk, she returned to Japan, where her two rear turrets were removed and replaced with a short flight deck that could carry eleven reconnaissance planes. She finally sank in Surigao Strait during the Battle of Leyte Gulf on October 25, 1944.

2
. Robert Theobald, “Memorandum for Whom it May Concern,”July 2,1942, NHHC, King Papers, Series I, box 2.

3
. FDR to Stalin, June 6, 1942, quoted in Robert E. Sherwood,
Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History
, rev. ed. (New York: Enigma Books, 2001), 455.

4
. King to Marshall, June 25, 1942, King Papers, NHHC, series I, box 2.

5
. MacArthur to Joint Chiefs, June 8, 1942, Nimitz Papers, NHHC, 1:557; FDR Memorandum, July 16, 1942, quoted in Sherwood,
Roosevelt and Hopkins
, 473.

6
. King to Marshall and Marshall to King, both June 26, 1942, and King to Nimitz, June 25, 1942, all in King Papers, NHHC, series I, box 2. See also Thomas B. Buell,
Master of Sea Power: A Biography of Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 207–8.

7
. Prange interview of Genda (Nov. 28, 1949), Prange Papers, UMD, box 19.

Though the historical significance of the Battle of Midway was evident almost from the moment of the battle, there have been a number of milestone studies in the seventy years since that have further illuminated the story. The declassification of intelligence files in the 1960s and ’70s exposed the crucial role of code breaking in the Pacific War, and especially at Midway, and thereby added a whole new perspective to the understanding of what happened there. Memoirs by Edwin Layton, Jasper Holmes, and others spawned a cottage industry in rewriting the history of the Battle of Midway. The story about how the cryptanalysts at Hypo duped the Japanese into revealing the meaning of “AF” became a classic and is now part of every account of the battle. Indeed, in many cases there has been a tendency to exaggerate the level of detail that was gleaned by the cryptanalysts, and to suggest that the Americans had a full blueprint of the Japanese plan for the Midway operation. Such a suggestion is a disservice to the American operational commanders, for as important as code breaking was to eventual victory, the decision makers did not have a complete copy of the enemy’s playbook in their hands and therefore had to make a number of crucial decisions based on other factors (see
appendix E
).

Another critical element of the struggle that was long overlooked was the Japanese side of the story. The logs of the Japanese ships and other primary-source materials went down with the carriers of the Kid
ō
Butai. In addition, most Western scholars did not read Japanese and relied on
translated documents and memoirs to flesh out the Japanese side of the narrative. Both Walter Lord and Gordon Prange conducted a number of interviews with Japanese survivors of the battle (often using intermediaries) and incorporated their views in their excellent histories. But among the sources in translation, the most influential was a memoir by Mitsuo Fuchida (with Masatake Okumiya) published in America as
Midway: The Battle that Doomed Japan, the Japanese Navy’s Story
(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1955). Fuchida, a naval aviator who had led the attack on Pearl Harbor, was also to have led the air attack on Midway, and would have done so but for an untimely attack of appendicitis. Because of that, he was instead an interested and knowledgeable spectator on the bridge of the flagship
Akagi
during the battle. Because of the dearth of Japanese sources, and because of the persuasiveness of Fuchida’s firsthand account, it had a tremendous influence on Western narratives of the battle. Alas, as Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully demonstrate in their book
Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway
(Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2005), Fuchida had an agenda of his own, which was to suggest just how close the Japanese had come to delivering a coup de grâce against the Americans, and as a result, not everything in his book can be taken at face value. Parshall has charged that “it is doubtful that any one person has had a more deleterious long-term impact on the study of the Pacific War than Mitsuo Fuchida.” (Parshall, “Reflecting on Fuchida, or ‘A Tale of Three Whoppers,’”
Naval War College Review
63, no. 2 (Spring 2010) 127–38.) Whatever the merits of that statement, Parshall and Tully made an immeasurable contribution to the historiography of the Battle of Midway by delving into the Japanese accounts and analyzing the battle from the perspective of the Imperial Japanese Navy.

Another individual who helped illuminate the Japanese side of the story is Dallas Woodbury Isom in his 2007 book
Midway Inquest: Why the Japanese Lost the Battle of Midway
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). An attorney, Isom conducted his investigation like a trial lawyer (hence the title) and renders a “not guilty” verdict for Vice Admiral Nagumo, who is blamed by many in both Japan and America for poor leadership decisions at Midway. Isom concludes that Nagumo’s decisions were entirely logical
on the morning of June 4, and that the principal blame for Japanese failure belongs to Yamamoto.

The official sources for the Battle of Midway are voluminous, but two are especially important. The first is the secret and confidential naval message traffic between Ernest King and Chester Nimitz, and between Nimitz and his commanders. It is included in the papers of FADM Chester W. Nimitz in the Operational Archives at the Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC) in the Washington Navy Yard in Washington, D.C. These messages, along with a “Running Summary” of daily events kept by Nimitz’s staff, and occasional “Situation Reports,” were all bound together in a series of eight thick volumes. These volumes make up boxes 1–8 of the Nimitz Papers. Volume 1 covers the period between December 7, 1941, and the end of June 1942; volume 8 is a collection of messages pertinent to the Battle of Midway and duplicates some of the material in volume 1. Over the years, scholars have often referred to this source as the “Gray Book” (even though the binding is navy blue) and cited it that way in their footnotes. In 2010, the American Naval Records Society scanned these volumes and made them available electronically at
http://www.ibiblio.org/anrs/graybook.html
. This version was not available as I prepared this book. I therefore cited these letters and documents as part of the FADM Chester W. Nimitz Papers. In the footnotes, I indicate author, recipient, date, and the box number (there is one volume in each box) and page number where the letter may be found. In Volume 8, the page numbers begin at 500 and then stop at 550. Then, after several hundred unnumbered pages, the numbers begin again at 1. For messages on the unnumbered pages, I cited the date/time group—a six-digit code in which the first two numbers indicate the date and the last four the time (in twenty-four-hour military time).

The other official source of special note is the microfilmed collection of after-action reports from combatants in the field. Throughout the war, every unit commander was required to submit a postaction report. This included not only the fleet and ship commanders but squadron commanders as well. These were collected and microfilmed after the war, and the entire sixteen-reel collection is available from University Microfilms. Most of the reports from the Battle of Midway are on reel 3. This source is largely
complete, with one notable exception. One of the great mysteries of the Battle of Midway is what happened to the after-action reports of the air group commander and the squadron commanders on the USS
Hornet
for the action on June 4. Marc Mitscher submitted various enclosures with his own report (a list of casualties, recommendations for awards, etc.) but the only squadron commander report was the one from John S. “Jimmy” Thach (VF-3) who flew off the
Yorktown
, not the
Hornet
, on June 4. The requirement to produce such reports makes it extraordinary that none of the other squadron commanders, nor the CHAG (commander,
Hornet
air group) submitted a report. For a discussion of this, see
appendix F
.