Richard Freeman - Midway: The Battle That Made the Modern World

CONTENTS

A fleet in peril: 4 June 1942

Admiral Chester Nimitz looked at the clock. The time was 10.18 am on 4 June 1942. At his command base in Hawaii he was brooding on the disastrous news from Midway over 1000 miles distant. His three carriers Enterprise , Hornet and Yorktown had launched their torpedo planes against three Japanese carriers and had barely scratched them. None of Hornet s planes had returned, while four limped back to Enterprise and two to Yorktown . Defeat seemed imminent.

The road to Midway: 1931-1942

Japan had begun to expand beyond her borders at the turn of the nineteenth century. After successfully backing the winning side in the First World War, she invaded Manchuria in 1931 and China in 1937. America took no action. It was Japans invasion of Indo-China in 1940 which finally provoked America to act with an embargo on oil exports to Japan in 1941. With no oil of her own, Japan decided to take control of the oil-rich Dutch East Indies. For this and for access to the rest of her growing empire, she needed domination of the Pacific Ocean.

To this end Japan first attempted to destroy the United States Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941 so pushing America into war. The damage inflicted by the raid was massive, including sinking four battleships, destroying 188 aircraft and damaging 159 other planes. By chance, though, the American aircraft carriers were absent. For all the Japanese success, the American Pacific Fleet remained a severe threat to any hopes of Japanese expansion in the Pacific. Naval Marshall General Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander-in-Chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet, would be forced to fight another day. The Americans could be sure that when the brains behind Pearl Harbour returned to sea they would face a formidable opponent.

In the months following Pearl Harbour the American Pacific Fleet limited itself to minor raids on ill-defended targets. These raids both bought time for the Fleet to regain its strength and helped to keep the airmen and sailors in trim. One of these minor raids produced an unexpected outcome. In April 1942 the aircraft carrier Hornet was dispatched to stand off Japan and mount an air raid on Tokyo with sixteen B-25 bombers, led by Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle. After successfully dropping their bomb loads the planes flew on to China, where they were to land and refuel. The landing arrangements all went awry and the planes had to ditch or crash land. All in all the raid seemed a pointless disaster, yet it produced a striking reaction from the Japanese. The official Japanese view that Japan was invulnerable to attack had been successfully challenged. One minor American bombing raid provoked the Japanese into a fearsome retaliation.

Having failed to eliminate the American threat on its home territory, the Japanese decided to take possession of Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea and so prevent the allies from using Australia as a base for Pacific operations. Yamamotos invasion force landed unopposed on 3 May 1942 but, unknown to him, American intelligence had discovered his intentions. While Yamamoto congratulated himself on the landing, two American carrier forces were closing in. After a vicious series of actions spread over four days the result was more or less a draw, although the Japanese had succeeded in sinking the American carrier Lexington . Critically, though, they had failed to occupy Moresby, so leaving dominance of the Pacific a still open contest. But, even while the battle was in progress, the Chief of the Naval General Staff, Admiral Osami Nagano, had issued the order to invade Midway.

Japan faced a fundamental problem in 1942: how could she inflict any major damage on her powerful enemy? Americas mainland territory was untouchable, yet few other significant targets were available. Japan needed to find one that was vital to the Americans yet not beyond the possibility of successful attack. It also needed to be feasible to hold once taken.

Positioned halfway across the Pacific Ocean, the Midway Atoll was an important refuelling post for American aircraft and a highly valued base for naval vessels. The Eastern Island held the airstrip, while all other facilities were on Sand Island. These included aircraft hangers, repair facilities, fuel and ammunition stores, a radio station, plus all the paraphernalia to support service life. If Japan could take the atoll she would seriously weaken Americas capacity to interfere with her oil tankers and other vessels plying between the East Indies and Japan.

For Yamamoto Japans possession of Midway would further enhance her capacity to wage war in the Pacific. As he saw it, no military objective could simultaneously deliver greater gain to Japan and greater loss to America. All he needed was a good plan and surprise. Unfortunately these two essentials were to elude him.

Implementation fell to Vice Admiral Chichi Nagumo, commander of the Kido Butai (the carrier strike force). Although Nagumo was amongst those who doubted the wisdom of the Midway plan, he was in no position to resist it. His opinion was worth little given that he had opposed the Pearl Harbour venture. A torpedo expert, he was considered to be passive but prone to panicking. When the Midway operation reached its climax he would be paralysed by an inability to improvise when changes to the plan were urgently needed. But he had got the job by seniority and, whatever reservations Yamamoto had about him, he was there to stay.

Plans and counter-plans: February-May 1942

The idea for a Japanese attack on Midway dated back to early 1942, but the plan had not been activated because it was both controversial and complex. The initial Yamamoto plan had been relatively straightforward, but to get it accepted he had had to agree to accretions that he contested without success. The final operation, once the politics of the planners had done its worst, was to consist of two simultaneous but independent actions: an air attack on the Aleutian Islands in Alaska (Operation AL) and the Midway action (Operation AM). This latter undertaking fell into two parts: the invasion of Midway and the sinking of the American carriers. For years the Western World has assumed that operation AL was a feint to draw American attention away from Midway. More recent academic research has shown that the Japanese planners saw the two actions as unconnected. But, taken together, the two operations defied one of the fundamental principles of war: the need for the decisive concentration of forces.

The core of Yamamotos plan was his attack on Midway. This would lure the American carriers out of Pearl Harbour (or wherever they might be hiding) and bring them within range of his carriers. His scheme assumed that Midway would have been taken a day before the American carriers had reached the scene. Yamamoto had such a low opinion of the Pacific Fleet that he thought it would not come out to fight his four carriers. His intention was to hide the carriers in the hope that the Americans would take on his less powerful invasion force, which would be well to the south of the Japanese carriers. Convinced that two American carriers had been sunk at Coral Sea, Yamamoto assumed that his four carriers would swoop in to claim an easy victory.

It was a conquest that Yamamoto felt was sorely needed since, as he said, the success or failure of our entire strategy in the Pacific will be determined by whether or not we succeed in destroying the United States fleet, more particularly its carrier task forces. Yet Yamamoto had to threaten resignation before his plan was accepted.