The Battle of Midway (2 page)

An hour later, the balance had shifted the other way. By 11:00 a.m., three Japanese aircraft carriers were on fire and sinking. A fourth was launching a counterstrike, yet before the day was over, it too would be located and mortally wounded. The Japanese thrust was turned back. Though the war had three more years to run, the Imperial Japanese Navy would never again initiate a strategic offensive. Later that summer the battle for Stalingrad began. The Atlantic sea lanes remained dangerous, but the convoys continued, and Britain survived. The war had turned.

In 1967, a quarter century after Midway, Walter Lord published a history of that battle entitled
Incredible Victory.
The title’s assumption is that the odds against the Americans at Midway were so long that their ultimate triumph defied comprehension. So dominant was this perception that when the national memorial to the Second World War was unveiled in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 2004, a sentence from Lord’s book was chiseled into its marble façade in letters six inches high: “THEY HAD NO RIGHT TO WIN, YET THEY DID, AND IN DOING SO THEY CHANGED THE COURSE OF THE WAR.” Similarly, when Gordon Prange’s long-awaited book on Midway came out in 1982, brought to press by two of his former graduate students after his death, it bore the title
Miracle at Midway.
Once again, the implication was unmistakable.

Embedded in these books’ titles, and in their conclusions as well, is the supposition that the American victory at Midway was the product of fate, or chance, or luck, or even divine will. In fact, sixty years after the battle, when a group of Midway veterans conducted a survey asking who had played the most decisive role on the American side, one veteran insisted that, as in the days of the ancient Greeks, this improbable earthly event could be explained only as the result of divine intervention.
¹

In
War and Peace
, Leo Tolstoy argues that great historical events, including (maybe even especially) great military events, are the product of historical forces only dimly understood. The great drama of the Napoleonic Wars, Tolstoy wrote, “came about step by step, incident by incident, moment by moment, emerging from an infinitely varied set of unimaginably different
circumstances, and was perceived in its entirety only when it became a reality, a past event.” To him, individuals were not the prime movers of history but its victims, subject to “a boundless variety of infinitesimally small forces”—little more than chaff blown by a storm.
²

Certainly chance—or luck—played a role at Midway, but the outcome of the battle was primarily the result of decisions made and actions taken by individuals who found themselves at the nexus of history at a decisive moment. In short, the Battle of Midway is best explained and understood by focusing on the people involved. Tolstoy insists that
chance
determines events, but it is
people
who make history, and this book is about the individuals who made history in that perilous spring of 1942. The list is a long one. A Japanese admiral (Yamamoto Isoroku) decided that a battle must be fought and not only initiated the planning but insisted that it go forward in spite of—indeed, almost because of—considerable opposition within his own service. An American admiral (Chester Nimitz) decided that the gauntlet that had been thrown down must be picked up, and he devised a plan of his own. A group of dedicated code breakers, and in particular Lieutenant Commander Joseph Rochefort, supplied the information that ended up giving the Americans a crucial edge. And combatants on both sides—admirals and captains, commanders and lieutenants, petty officers and enlisted men—determined the timing, the course, and ultimately the outcome of the fight. Midway might have ended differently. That it didn’t was the result of these men and the decisions they made.

Essential to understanding those decisions is an appreciation of the culture that informed these individuals, for while they were free agents, they were also products of their society, and their actions were shaped and constrained by the world in which they operated. For that reason, a history of what is perhaps the most pivotal naval battle in American history necessarily must explore the culture of both the U.S. Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy, as well as the politics and technology of the age. It does not detract from the drama of the event, nor diminish its significance, to acknowledge that in light of these factors, the outcome of the Battle of Midway was less incredible and less miraculous than it has often been portrayed.

A
n hour after dawn on Christmas morning in 1941, a lone PB2Y-2 Coronado flying boat circled slowly over the fleet anchorage at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, at the end of a seventeen-hour flight from San Diego. From inside her fuselage, 56-year-old Admiral Chester Nimitz peered out the window at the devastation below. Even dressed as he was in civilian clothes, he would have prompted a second look from strangers on the street, for his face had been weathered by years at sea and he had snow-white hair, which led a few of his young staffers to call him “cottontail”—but only behind his back. His most arresting feature, however, was his startling light-blue eyes, eyes that now scanned the scene below him. As the four-engine Coronado approached the harbor, its pilot, Lieutenant Bowen McLeod, invited Nimitz to come up and take the copilot’s seat to get a better view. Through a steady rain that added to the pall of gloom, Nimitz saw that the surface of the water was covered with black fuel oil. From that oily surface, the rounded bottoms of the battleship
Oklahoma
and the older
Utah
protruded like small islands. Another, the
Nevada
, was aground bow first near the main entrance
channel. Other battleships rested on the mud, with only their shattered and fallen superstructures extending above the water. Here was the U.S. Navy’s vaunted battle fleet that Nimitz had been sent halfway around the world to command.
¹

Nimitz made no comment, only shaking his head and making a soft clucking sound with his tongue. While en route by rail from Washington to San Diego on the Santa Fe “Chief” to catch the flight to Hawaii, he had studied the reports of the devastation that had been wrought by the Japanese in their attack three weeks earlier on December 7. The reports could not convey the extent of the destruction. Even the photograph he had seen of the battleship
Arizona
engulfed in black smoke did not prepare him for the scene that now met his eyes. The seaplane splashed down and slowed to a stop on the oily surface of the roadstead. The doors were thrown open and the powerful odor of fuel oil, charred wood, and rotting flesh hit him like a fist. It was the smell of war.
²

The reserve that Nimitz normally displayed in moments of crisis had earned him a reputation as unemotional; at least one officer described him as “coldly impersonal.” Nimitz was certainly undemonstrative, able to maintain an astonishing coolness under pressure. Even as a midshipman, his quiet reserve impressed classmates, who described him in the Naval Academy yearbook, the
Lucky Bag
, as one who “possesses that calm and steady-going Dutch way that gets at the bottom of things.” As an example of that, a quarter century later, during his command of the heavy cruiser
Augusta
, he had directed Ensign O. D. Waters (inevitably nicknamed “Muddy”) to “bring the ship to anchor.” Perhaps nervous with the captain’s eyes on him, Waters brought the big cruiser into the anchorage too fast, overshot the mark, and had to order the engines full astern while paying out ninety fathoms of anchor cable before the ship finally came to a stop. Nimitz remained silent throughout. Only when the
Augusta
was securely at anchor did he remark, “Waters, you know what you did wrong, don’t you?” Waters responded: “Yes, sir, I certainly do.” To which Nimitz replied, “That’s fine.” While Nimitz was not cold—he was a great teller of jokes and fond of terrible puns—he did keep his emotions under control, rarely betraying them to others. His most confrontational response was generally “Now see here.”
That ability to remain calm under pressure would be severely tested over the next six months, and indeed throughout the Pacific war.
³

Before he stepped out of the flying boat and into the launch that had come out to greet him, Nimitz turned and shook hands with every member of the seaplane’s crew, apologizing for keeping them from their families on Christmas Day. His first question to the officer on the launch was about Wake Island, a tiny outpost of coral and sand two thousand nautical miles to the west. When he had left California, Wake’s small Marine garrison was still holding out against a Japanese invasion, and an American relief force was steaming toward it at best speed. Told now that Wake Island had surrendered and that the relief expedition had been recalled, Nimitz said nothing, staring out silently over the rain-spattered surface of the harbor for several minutes, his expression unreadable. As the launch headed for shore, he could see several small boats moving about the roadstead. They were fishing the bodies of dead servicemen from the water.
⁴

Nimitz had been ordered to Pearl Harbor as commander in chief, Pacific (CinCPac), because Washington had concluded that keeping Admiral Husband Kimmel in charge after the disaster of December 7 was politically impossible. On December 9, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox had left Washington for Pearl Harbor to assess things for himself. Arriving two days later, the wreckage still smoldering, Knox was appalled by what he saw. He was also appalled that no one seemed able to explain to him why the Japanese had achieved such complete surprise. His annual report, issued the previous summer, had asserted that “the American people may feel fully confident in their navy.” Just three days before the attack, Knox had spoken at a small dinner party in Washington in honor of Vice President Henry Wallace. “War may begin in the Pacific at any moment,” he had warned the assembled guests. “But I want you to know that no matter what happens, the United States Navy is ready. Every man is at his post, every ship is at its station. The Navy is ready. Whatever happens, the Navy is not going to be caught napping.” Yet within seventy-two hours of those assurances, the Navy was caught almost literally napping. Little wonder that Knox was furious.
⁵

The 66-year-old Knox had been an unlikely choice as secretary of the navy. A lifelong newspaperman, he was also a lifelong Republican, and had been Alf Landon’s running mate on the Republican presidential ticket in the 1936 election. In that role he had been a virulent critic of President Roosevelt and the New Deal. Despite that, after Germany’s invasion of Poland and the onset of war, Roosevelt sought to build a bipartisan administration dedicated to rearmament by naming several prominent Republicans to the cabinet. His first thought was to ask both Landon and Knox, the defeated Republican ticket, to join the cabinet, with Landon as commerce secretary and Knox as navy secretary. Landon, however, insisted on a pledge that Roosevelt would not seek a third term as a condition of his acceptance, so Roosevelt instead picked another Republican, 73-year-old Henry L. Stimson, who had been secretary of state under Hoover, to head the War Department. He did, however, ask Knox to take over the Navy Department, announcing both appointments on June 20, 1940, two days before France formally surrendered to the Nazis.
⁶

FDR may have been attracted to Knox because the jowly, round-faced newspaperman had been a Rough Rider under Franklin’s “Uncle Teddy” in the Spanish-American War. For his part, Knox remained suspicious of the New Deal, but he was foursquare behind FDR on the question of national preparedness, and he admired Roosevelt’s get-tough policies toward Hitler’s regime. He was also a man of quick decision. As publisher of the
Chicago Daily News
, he had a hardnosed management style, guided by facts and deadlines, that made him impatient with delay or uncertainty. (“All my life I have been fighting against time,” he declared during his confirmation hearing.) Roosevelt’s deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes thought him “impetuous” and “inclined to think off the top of his head.” That impetuosity was evident as the grim-faced Knox toured the wreckage of the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 11. When he got back to Washington, he reported to Roosevelt that the Japanese had achieved surprise at Pearl Harbor because of “a lack of a state of readiness,” and the blame for that, in his view, fell squarely on the shoulders of the commanding officers, Lieutenant General Walter C. Short of the Army and Admiral Husband Kimmel of the Navy. Eventually a lengthy investigation headed by Supreme Court
justice Owen Roberts would come to a similar conclusion and declare that Short and Kimmel were guilty of “a dereliction of duty.” However fair or unfair that conclusion, the political reality was that neither man could be retained in his position.
⁷

Once it was clear that Kimmel would have to go, Roosevelt and Knox discussed who should replace him. On December 15, they sent for Admiral Ernest J. King, the talented but abrasive commander of the Atlantic Fleet. While King had compiled an impressive service record during his forty-one years in the Navy, his personality was notorious. He tended to be abrupt and dismissive when dealing with subordinates, and he did not suffer fools gladly, whatever their status. When introducing himself to a group of young officers in Hawaii, he declared, “I’m Ernest King. You all know who I am. I’m a self-appointed son of a bitch.” He asserted his privileges of rank as a matter of course. One officer recalled, “You could be halfway through a haircut and he decided that he wanted a shave. You got out of the barber chair and waited until he was shaved.” His personal life was notorious. Though he foreswore drinking during the war, he had a well-earned reputation as a heavy drinker and womanizer. What FDR and Knox wanted now, however, was not a role model but a warrior, and King was arguably the most aggressive senior officer in the Navy. When King arrived in Washington on December 16, Knox told him that the president wanted him not merely for the Pacific command but for the more powerful position of commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet (CinCUS), with authority over both the Atlantic and Pacific and all Navy commands worldwide.
⁸