The Battle of Midway (68 page)

Another important correction to the record is that the extent of the detail about Japanese plans contained in these messages has been significantly exaggerated. Though the messages did indicate the presence of four carriers, they did not, for example, specify that they would be operating as a single unit, which had important consequences for the battle. If the Hypo analysts had been able to provide such information, it might have avoided the calamitous “flight to nowhere” on the morning of June 4. Nor did those messages show that Yamamoto himself was at sea with the “Main Body” including the massive battleship
Yamato
. Though the code breakers at Hypo and Belconnen made a signal and significant contribution to American victory at Midway, they did not provide a detailed blueprint of the enemy’s operational plans, as is sometimes asserted. The decrypts of May 20 were not the equivalent, for example, to the discovery of Robert E. Lee’s famous War Order No. 191, at Frederick, Maryland, on the eve of the Battle of Antietam during the Civil War.

None of this detracts from the crucial contributions of the code breakers, but it does remind us that the subsequent decisions made by the commanders on the scene were more complex and open-ended than might otherwise be assumed. The Battle of Midway was not won by the code breakers alone but by the analysts, the decision makers who trusted them, and finally by the men who drove the ships, manned the guns, and flew the planes at the point of contact. Certainly there is enough glory for all of them.

*
This includes my own own book,
Decision at Sea: Five Naval Battles that Shaped American History
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), which acknowledges that the May 20 intercept was a “series of recently intercepted Japanese messages” but attributes to them far more specificity than they actually contained (p. 210).

The Flight to Nowhere

For nearly fifty years after the Battle of Midway, historians accepted Marc Mitscher’s official report on Midway more or less at face value. After all, by 1944 he had become the much-celebrated commander of the Fast Carrier Task Force that fought its way from the Marianas to the shores of Japan, and, in the words of his biographer, the “Magnificent Mitscher.” At the Naval Academy, Mitscher Hall stands directly across from the sprawling dormitory of Bancroft Hall, and any subsequent challenge to Mitscher’s veracity seemed nearly unpatriotic. Even at the time, however, there were doubts about the accuracy of his Midway report. In his own report on the battle, Raymond Spruance wrote, “Where discrepancies exist between
Enterprise
and
Hornet
reports, the
Enterprise
report should be taken as more accurate.” This was an astonishing statement to make in an official report, and it comes close to asserting that Mitscher’s report was not to be trusted. Alas, since neither Stanhope Ring nor any of the four squadron commanders filed a report at all, Mitscher’s was very nearly the only official source on the role of the
Hornet’s
air group in the battle. As a result, most twentieth-century accounts of the Battle of Midway dutifully recorded the
Hornet’s
air group as proceeding along a course of 239 or 240 degrees, and maps depicting the battle show the same thing—including the map that Mitscher submitted with his report, which is duplicated as part of map 9 in this book (p. 257). Whatever doubts there were, there was no evidence that what Mitscher reported was not, in fact, what had happened.

Mitscher’s story began to unravel when compared with Japanese records, for Mitscher had asserted (or at least he signed the report that asserted) that Stanhope Ring and his air group had flown a course of 239 degrees, and that it had missed the Kid
ō
Butai because Nagumo had turned north instead of continuing toward Midway. The problem was that Nagumo did not turn north until 9:17 a.m. (something Mitscher did not know at the time he signed the report), which meant that if Ring had flown a course of239, he very likely would have intercepted the Kid
ō
Butai either before it turned north or just as it did so. Waldron found the Kid
ō
Butai at 9:18, and he commanded the last launched and the slowest flying element of the
Hornet
air group. Consequently, if Ring
had
flown a course 239 or 240 degrees, he might well have found the Kid
ō
Butai too.

In the 1980s, a lawyer and retired Marine major named Bowen Weisheit began looking into the death of one of Pat Mitchell’s Wildcat pilots. The pilot was a former
all-American lacrosse player from the University of Maryland named Mark Kelly, a close friend of Weisheit. When Weisheit learned that Kelly’s empty life raft had been recovered in a position utterly inconsistent with Mitscher’s report, he decided to interview each of the surviving members of Mitchell’s squadron to ask them what had happened. What he found was that with one or two exceptions, the pilots themselves remembered that they had flown not to the southwest at 239 or 240 degrees, but “westerly,” “almost due west,” or, more precisely, “at 265 degrees.” One, Troy Guillory, initially said that they flew “westerly.” When Weisheit suggested that it must have been to the southwest at 239 degrees, Guillory said no: “We went the wrong way to start with,” and finally, pointing to the chart, he said “to the 265 line.” Ensign Ben Tappan stated simply, “We were going west,” and Ensign John McInerny stated that “Commander Ring was 35 degrees off” Even the commander of Scouting Eight, Lieutenant Commander (later Rear Admiral) Walt Rodee stated bluntly: “We took the bearing and the course they gave us. It was about 265 It was almost due west.” Rodee never had an opportunity to make a similar statement in an official after-action report, but he did write it down in his flight log, which he kept. Finally, the radar operator on board the
Hornet
recalled tracking the air group as it flew away from the task force, and he stated that as far as the CXAM radar would reach, the
Hornet
air group had flown on a course of 265 degrees. The transcripts of all these interviews are in the Nimitz Library at the U.S. Naval Academy, and Wesiheit’s conclusions are in his book
The Last Flight of C. Markland Kelly
.

Not every veteran agreed. Clayton Fisher, who flew as Ring’s wing man until the very end of the Flight to Nowhere, remained convinced his whole life that “we flew a southwest course of about 235 to 240,” and that “we were between Midway and the enemy force”—that is, south of the Kid
ō
Butai.

Explaining this obvious discrepancy is difficult, and the story will always retain a certain amount of mystery, but if the
Hornet
air group did indeed fly north of the Kid
ō
Butai on a course of 265, as most of the evidence suggests, the possible explanations of how this may have happened fall into three categories: technological, computational, and conspiratorial.

Attributing Ring’s course to flawed technology is the simplest explanation, but also the least likely. Some have suggested that the
Hornet’s
magnetic compass was off by 15 or 20 degrees that day, and that her radar was malfunctioning (she did get a new radar set after the battle). It is an appealing solution, for it absolves all the decision makers of error. The problem is that the pilots in both Mitchell’s fighter squadron and Walt Rodee’s bomber squadron did not
think
they were flying at 239 degrees and accidentally find themselves going the wrong way. They knew
at the time
that they were flying at 265 degrees. It was not, therefore, an error with the ship’s compass that sent Ring’s air group in the “wrong” direction.

The second possibility is that Stanhope Ring was such a bad navigator that his calculation was 25 degrees off, and that Mitscher accepted his flawed solution in order to support his air group commander. The problem with this explanation is that it assumes that Marc Mitscher, the most experienced and confident pilot on board, would have neglected to compute his own solution to the target and that he simply took Ring’s word for it. Such a scenario is utterly inconsistent with Mitscher’s character. And even if this is what happened, it still casts both Mitscher and Ring in the role of conspirators for
agreeing to suppress the actual course in the subsequent report, and pretending that the air group had flown 240 degrees when it had not.

The only explanation that fits both the circumstances and the personalities of the principal decision makers is that Mitscher himself decided it was his duty to find the two “missing” Japanese carriers that had not yet been reported by any of the scouts. Like Fletcher and Spruance, Mitscher did not learn that all four Japanese carriers were operating together until the afternoon. He knew that the air group from
Enterprise
was going after the two carriers that had been sighted, and he very likely calculated that a course of 265 was most likely to lead his air group to the other two carriers that were presumably operating separately behind the first two. By the time Mitscher learned that all four enemy carriers were operating together, he also knew the details of the various mutinies that had taken place during the Flight to Nowhere. A truthful and complete report of that flight would not only have exposed his own error in sending the
Hornet
air group the wrong way, but it would also have compelled him to consider pressing formal charges against Waldron, McInerny, Mitchell, Johnson, Rodee, and perhaps others for abandoning the group commander. That was hardly the kind of press the Navy wanted after the Battle of Midway. So instead of court-martialing his squadron commanders, he recommended all of them for medals. Of the mutiny by Waldron’s Torpedo Eight, Mitscher (or someone on his staff) wrote: “Torpedo Squadron Eight, flying low, beneath the broken clouds, became separated from the remainder of the group, which flew at higher levels. They found the enemy carriers, those at high altitude did not.” Technically, each word of that is true, but it is also deliberately misleading.

At the time, at least, the squadron commanders went along with this solution. Certainly they knew they had a responsibility to complete a report. The form itself declared that it was “to be filled out by unit commanders immediately upon landing after each action or operation,” and specifically enjoined each recipient: “Do not ‘gun deck’ this report.” Perhaps they each filed a report and Mitscher’s staff suppressed them, or more likely Mitscher told the squadron commanders that he (or his staff) would write the report and not to bother writing one themselves. In any case, it is clear that at some point Mitscher decided that only one report would be submitted by the
Hornet
, that he assigned his staff to write it, and that he signed it knowing it was misleading. It is hard to argue, even now, that he made the wrong decision. With victory in hand, what was to be gained by acknowledging the confusion, insubordination, and failure of the Flight to Nowhere?

1
. Several Midway veterans make the case for divine intervention, among them Bryan Crisman, who was the disbursing officer on the USS
Yorktown
, and Stanford Linzey, who wrote a book entitled
God Was at Midway: The Sinking of the USS Yorktown (CV-5) and the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway
(San Diego, CA: Black Forest, 1996). See also Ronald W. Russell,
No Right to Win: A Continuing Dialogue with Veterans of the Battle of Midway
(New York: iUniverse, 2006), 172.

2
. Leo Tolstoy,
War and Peace
, trans. Anthony Briggs (London: Penguin, 2006), 1098.

1
. Frank DeLorenzo, “Admiral Nimitz Arrives at Pearl Harbor,” BOMRT; E. B. Potter,
Nimitz
(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1976), 16.

2
. DeLorenzo, “Admiral Nimitz Arrives”; Potter,
Nimitz
, 16.

3
. Joseph Rochefort oral history (Oct. 5, 1969), U.S. Naval Institute Oral History Collection, USNA, 1:223; 1905
Lucky Bag
, USNA; Potter,
Nimitz
, 156.

4
. Potter,
Nimitz
, 16; John B. Lundstrom,
Black Shoe Carrier Admiral: Frank Jack Fletcher at Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal
(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2006), 45.

5
.
Annual Report of the Secretary of the Navy, 1941
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1941), 1; Bruce Catton,
The War Lords of Washington
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948), 9–12.

6
. George H. Lobdell, “Frank Knox,” in
American Secretaries of the Navy
, ed. Paolo E. Coletta (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1980), 2:677–81; Harold L. Ickes,
The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1953–54), 2:718 (diary entry of Sept. 9, 1939); Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy,
On Active Service in Peace and War
(New York: Harper, 1948), 323–24.