The Battle of Midway (19 page)

Midway was an unlikely objective. A barren, sandy outpost in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, it was quite literally a thousand miles from anywhere: Pearl Harbor was 1,135 nautical miles in one direction, and Wake Island was 1,185 nautical miles in the other. Like every other atoll in the Pacific, Midway was essentially a circular coral reef that enclosed a small lagoon. On the southern edge of that lagoon, two small sandy islands barely broke the surface of the sea. The larger of them, appropriately named Sand Island, was less than two miles long; the other, Eastern Island, was even smaller. For hundreds of years, the chief inhabitant of those two tiny islands was the Laysan Albatross, whose odd mating dance provoked visitors to dub them “gooney birds.” So remote was Midway that there is no record of its having been “discovered” until 1859, though whalers and others had certainly stopped there intermittently before that. The United States established a coaling station there after the Civil War, and two years later, in 1869, the U.S. Navy began dredging a channel between the two islands in order to provide access to the sheltered lagoon, though the project ran out of money before it could be completed.
²⁰

After the war with Spain in 1898, which expanded American interest in the Pacific, President Theodore Roosevelt placed Midway under the control of the Navy Department, and that same year the United States established a telegraph cable station on Sand Island, connecting it to Hawaii. The outpost was further developed in the 1930s when Pan American Airlines used it as a seaplane base for its trans-Pacific Clippers and even built a small hotel there for its passengers. In 1940, as war with Japan loomed, the Navy finally completed the ship channel into the lagoon, which made Midway a sheltered anchorage, principally for seaplanes and the occasional submarine. And in the summer of 1941, four months before Pearl Harbor, the Navy completed an airfield on Eastern Island that made it a kind of unsinkable—though also immobile—aircraft carrier.

Thus, small as it was, Midway’s isolation made it an important outpost in the American defense line. Taking off from its protected lagoon, broad winged PBY Catalina seaplanes could scour the ocean out to a thousand miles, and from that same lagoon, American submarines could initiate patrols to the very shores of Japan itself. From the new airfield on Eastern Island, bombers and fighters could guard the northern approach to Hawaii. In their communications to one another, King and Nimitz both acknowledged the importance of the “Midway-Hawaii line.” Yamamoto calculated that Midway was important enough to the Americans that a threat to it would compel them to sortie from Oahu with their carriers to contest an invasion. When that happened, the Kid
ō
Butai would pounce on them and send them to the bottom.
²¹

An aerial photograph of Midway Atoll in 1942. Eastern Island, with its airfield, is in the foreground. The ship channel into the central lagoon and the channel from the lagoon to the Eastern Island dock are clearly visible. (U.S. Naval Institute)

In February, Yamamoto ordered his staff to put together an operational plan for the invasion and occupation of Midway. The Kid
ō
Butai would approach Midway from the north (as it had the previous December) and launch a strike on its airfield, in order to destroy whatever American air assets were on the island. Meanwhile, a powerful (but not too powerful) surface force would approach Midway from the west to attract the attention of the Americans. The American carriers would presumably sortie from Pearl Harbor in response to either the bombardment of Midway or the appearance of this modest surface force, or both. When they did, a prepositioned group of Japanese submarines would inflict as much damage on them as possible as they moved toward the decisive battle. Then the Kid
ō
Butai would steam southward to engage. The six carriers of the Kid
ō
Butai should have little trouble with the two or three surviving American carriers, but just in case, Yamamoto himself—with several heavy battleships, including the giant
Yamato
—would back up the Kid
ō
Butai to finish off any survivors.
Despite his early advocacy of carriers, and his criticism of depending too much on battleships, Yamamoto felt obligated to find a role in this decisive engagement for the new and expensive heavy battleships.

For all its boldness, the plan was not a complete departure from traditional Japanese strategy, for it was essentially a tactical version of the strategic plan that had been part of Japanese thinking for more than a decade: submarines and airplanes would whittle down the American striking force as it moved toward the decisive confrontation. Here was the same plan in miniature. A critical difference, however, was that this decisive engagement would take place 2,500 miles from Japanese home waters. Indeed, by targeting Midway, Yamamoto was granting to the Americans all the advantages that the Japanese had counted on in their own defense of the Pacific: shorter logistic lines, proximity to repair facilities, and land-based air cover.
²²

It is noteworthy that this plan divided Japanese naval assets into four different and independent groups. If this seemed more complicated than it needed to be, it was because Yamamoto was more concerned that the Americans would refuse to take the bait than that they might actually pose a serious threat to his armada. If he put all six carriers of the Kid
ō
Butai
and
the battle fleet into one mighty armada, it would unquestionably dominate the Pacific, but it might also intimidate the Americans to the point that they would refuse to come out to contest it, and the opportunity to sink the American carriers would be lost. As a result, in translating Yamamoto’s vision into an operational plan, the staff planners of the Combined Fleet divided up the available forces into at least four distinct groups that would sail independently.

The first of these was the so-called Midway Invasion Group, which was actually a surface force under Vice Admiral Kond
ō
Nabutake, consisting of two battleships, five cruisers, and seven destroyers, plus the new light carrier
Zuiho
, which was capable of carrying two dozen torpedo planes and fighters. As Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully point out in their detailed study of Japanese operations at Midway, “Kond
ō
was the bait.” Combined Fleet planners hoped that when the Americans discovered this force approaching Midway, they would see it as powerful enough to be tempting and yet not so large as to be intimidating. That would encourage them to come out of Pearl Harbor to contest its advance.
²³

Kond
ō
’s force would screen the actual invasion force (called the “Transport Group”) that would carry the five thousand naval infantry and the construction battalion that would occupy Midway and turn it into a Japanese base. Carried in twelve large transport ships escorted by a light cruiser and ten destroyers, it would also approach Midway from the west. In close support would be four heavy cruisers and two destroyers under Vice Admiral Kurita Takeo.

While Kond
ō
and Kurita approached from the west, the Kid
ō
Butai would approach Midway from the northwest. If Kond
ō
’s surface force did not draw out the Americans, the first strike by planes from the Kid
ō
Butai against Midway surely would. Once again Nagumo Ch
ū
ichi would command this key element of the fleet. His main purpose, as Yamamoto saw it, was the destruction of the American carrier force, but assigning him responsibility to soften up Midway for the invasion and to cover the landing also created the opportunity for confusion and uncertainty, especially with a literal-minded commander like Nagumo.

Yamamoto himself would lead what was called the “Main Body,” composed of three heavy battleships, including the enormous
Yamato
, accompanied by a screen of one light cruiser and eight destroyers. This force would trail Kond
ō
’s invasion force by several hundred miles, not only to remain beyond the range of American search planes but also to enable Yamamoto to support whichever of the other two advances turned out to be the focus of the American sortie. It would be the first time in the war that the commander in chief of the Combined Fleet personally accompanied an operation. Subsequent critics cited this as a grave error, since Yamamoto would have to maintain radio silence while at sea, preventing him from exerting any active supervision over the operation. Had he remained ashore, as Chester Nimitz did, he could have listened in on the radio net and sent out orders as necessary to ensure that his command vision was fulfilled.

But passive command from a distance was unappealing to a man with Yamamoto’s worldview. Though the early victories of the Japanese Navy had made him a national hero and won him many official decorations, he had not yet smelled the smoke of battle or even put himself in harm’s way.
He confessed to a friend that the accolades that poured into his headquarters after the first victories left him “intolerably embarrassed.” Moreover, Yamamoto may have had a political objective in mind as well. The historian Hugh Bicheno speculates that Yamamoto went to sea during the Midway campaign so that he could return to Tokyo with a decisive victory in hand and use his elevated prestige to depose T
ō
j
ō
’s government and open negotiations for an end to the war. Whether or not that was part of his grand strategy, Yamamoto’s gambler’s instinct was evident in every part of the Midway plan. Just as he had contrived the Pearl Harbor strike as a dramatic alternative to the thrust southward the previous fall, so now did he prepare a dramatic alternative to the Naval General Staff’s notion of consolidating Japan’s defense perimeter in the South Pacific and the Aleutians. If there was also a political element in play, that only raised the stakes for this nautical gambler.
²⁴

With the plan fleshed out, Yamamoto sent a representative from his staff to Tokyo on April 2 to present it to the Naval General Staff. The man he sent was Commander Watanabe Yasuji, his logistics officer and frequent
shogi
partner. Watanabe was not only a great admirer of his boss, he had also played an active role in developing the plan and therefore had a proprietary interest in its adoption. Watanabe flew to Tokyo by seaplane and reported to the two-story brick building near the Imperial Palace that housed the Naval General Staff. As he laid out the particulars, it soon became evident that the plan would monopolize virtually all the assets of the Imperial Navy and require the postponement of all other plans, including the move to Port Moresby and the seizure of Fiji-Samoa.