Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (48 page)

In less than twelve hours 2,155 Japanese seamen were dead, four fleet aircraft carriers were wrecked and soon to sink, and more than 332 aircraft, along with their most skilled pilots, were gone. Before the battle was over, a heavy cruiser was sunk, and another heavily damaged. The
Akagi,
Kaga, Hiryu,
and
Soryu,
the pride of the imperial fleet, veterans of campaigning against the Chinese, British, and Americans, were resting at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. In six minutes the momentum in the Pacific naval war had swung for good to the Americans as the worst fears of the Japanese admiralty of massive American retaliation were realized after only six months of fighting.

In strictly military terms the number of dead at Midway was not large—fewer than 4,000 in the two fleets. The losses were a mere fraction of what the Romans suffered at Cannae, or the Persians at Gaugamela, and much less costly than the bloodbaths of the great sea battles of Salamis, Lepanto, Trafalgar, and Jutland—or the Japanese slaughter to come at Leyte Gulf. But the sinking of the carriers represented an irreplaceable investment of millions of days of precious skilled labor, and even scarcer capital—and the only capability of the Japanese to destroy both the American fleet and Pacific bases. More than one hundred of the best carrier pilots perished in one day, equal to the entire graduating class of naval aviators that Japan could turn out in a single year. Never had the Japanese military lost so dramatically when technology, matériel, experience, and manpower were so decidedly in its favor. Back in Washington, D.C., Admiral Ernest J. King, chief of all U.S. naval operations, concluded of the action of June 4 that the battle of Midway had been the first decisive defeat of the Japanese navy in 350 years and had restored the balance of naval power in the Pacific.

Again, the carriers themselves were irreplaceable. During the entire course of World War II the Japanese launched only seven more of such enormous ships; the Americans in contrast would commission more than one hundred fleet, light, and escort carriers by war’s end. The Americans would also build or repair twenty-four battleships—despite losing nearly the entire fleet of the latter at Pearl Harbor—and a countless number of heavy and light cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and support ships. During the four years of the war the Americans constructed sixteen major warships for every one the Japanese built.

Worse still for the Japanese, the highest monthly production of all models of Japanese navy and army aircraft rarely exceeded 1,000 planes, and by summer 1945 the sum was scarcely half that due to American bombing, the need for factory dispersal, and matériel and manpower shortages. In contrast, the Americans soon turned out a sophisticated B-24 heavy bomber of some 100,000 parts every sixty-three minutes; American aircraft workers, who vastly outnumbered the Japanese, were also four times more productive than their individual enemy counterparts. By August 1945, in less than four years after the war had begun, the United States had produced nearly 300,000 aircraft and 87,620 warships. Even as early as mid-1944, American industry was building entire new fleets every six months, replete with naval aircraft comparable in size to the entire American force at Midway. After 1943, both American ships and airplanes—sixteen new
Essex-
class carriers outfitted with Helldiver dive-bombers, Corsair and Hellcat fighters, and Avenger torpedo bombers— were qualitatively and quantitatively superior to anything in the Japanese military. The modern
Iowa-
class battleships that appeared in the latter half of the war were better in speed, armament, range, and defensive protection than anything commissioned in the Japanese navy and were far more effective warships than even the monstrous
Yamato
and
Mushasi.
Within a few months after Midway, not only had the United States naval and air armies made up all the losses from Midway, but its entire armed forces were growing at geometric rates, while the Japanese navy actually began to shrink as outmoded and often bombed-out factories could not even replace obsolete ships and planes lost to American guns, let alone manufacture additional ones. This was the Arsenal of Venice and Cannae’s aftermath all over again.

Still, the American bombing on the morning of June 4 had been costly. The
Hornet
had lost eleven of her twelve Wildcat fighters, the
Yorktown
five dive-bombers and fighters, and the
Enterprise
fourteen dive-bombers and a fighter. But these losses were tolerable compared to the near complete massacre of the American torpedo bombers minutes earlier.

THE ANNIHILATION OF THE DEVASTATORS

The battle of Midway can be understood by two inextricably connected events: the destruction of an entire American air arm by Japanese fighter pilots which moments later led directly to the demise of Japan’s own carriers. Just as deadly a predicament as being on the Japanese carriers at the battle of Midway was the piloting of lumbering obsolete TBD Devastator torpedo bombers, which early in the morning of June 4 had inaugurated the American carrier attack. In some sense, their annihilation by the Japanese Zero fighters, together with the dogfighting of a few American Wildcat fighters, allowed their unseen dive-bombing comrades the opportunity to attack unmolested. All the American torpedo bombers would make gallant approaches against the Japanese fleet; none would hit their targets; and almost all, with their two-man crews, would be shot down. Out of the eighty-two men who headed for the Japanese carriers in the TBDs, only thirteen survived. Yet one of the two Japanese air commanders at Midway, Mitsuo Fuchida, scoffed in his official report on the eve of the battle that the Americans lacked the will to fight.

Commissioned in the mid-1930s, the TBD Devastators were by the outbreak of the war incapable of devastating anything; in reality, they were little more than flying coffins for both pilot and rear gunner. When loaded with their sole 1,000-pound obsolete torpedo—itself unreliable and as likely to plow harmlessly beneath the target as to fail to explode even when it did hit—the planes themselves could barely manage a hundred mph. Fully loaded, they had a combat range of only 175 miles. When attacking ships that were headed in the opposite direction at thirty knots, the TBDs were forced to hug the sea to ensure a proper launching approach as they narrowed the gap at real speeds of less than sixty mph—if there were no head winds. The loaded planes could scarcely climb. Such agonizingly long and exposed runs made them easy targets for Japanese Zero fighters, which sometimes at Midway were swarming in masses of forty or more and diving from far above at three hundred miles an hour. In contrast to the Americans’ obsolete craft, Japanese torpedo planes by 1941 could dive at nearly three hundred mph and carry a far heavier and more effective torpedo at greater range.

Thirty-five of forty-one Devastators on June 4 were shot down attacking the Japanese carriers—a fact today scarcely comprehensible under the protocols of contemporary American military practice, in which troops enjoying overwhelming technological, material, and numerical superiority are sometimes not committed to battle out of fear of losing a handful of combatants. Most of the Devastator crews had never taken off armed with a torpedo from the deck of an aircraft carrier—and now they were sent on a mission in their decrepit aircraft, with scarcely enough fuel to return home, against a mostly unknown and unlocated target. The American military was later aghast over the use of Japanese kamikaze planes in the last year of the war; but the orders for the Devastator attacks at Midway were themselves little more than suicidal.

Midway was the last major battle in which the obsolete torpedo bombers were used; on Midway itself a few marine pilots were already flying a small number of the new replacement Grumman TBF Avengers, which, armed with new torpedoes, by war’s end would compile a formidable record of low-level attacks on the Japanese fleet. The Avengers could nearly double the speed of the Devastators, carried twice as much armament, and could take far more punishment. But none had yet replaced the ancient TBDs on any of the carriers at Midway—indeed, nineteen of the replacement Avengers arrived from Norfolk, Virginia, at Pearl Harbor on May 29, one day
after
the
Hornet
had sailed out to Midway. Only six were ferried to the marines at Midway. Had the Avengers replaced the Devastators on all three carriers, the American tally of sunken ships might have been even greater, and the loss of pilots surely less—although, as we shall see, the ultimate decision of Midway, in some sense, rested with the sheer vulnerability of the obsolete planes, which drew in the greedy Zeros in droves, when the real danger to the Japanese fleet was high, not low, in the skies. In any case, the naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison, in remarks reminiscent of Livy’s summation of Cannae, entitled an entire section of his narrative “The Slaughter of the Torpedo-Bombers.” Abject slaughter it was.

On the morning of June 5 Lieutenant Commander John C. “Jack” Waldron, commander of the VT-8 torpedo squadron on the
Hornet,
distributed copies of his final message to his crews shortly before takeoff. The mimeographed papers ended on a melancholy note:

MY GREATEST HOPE IS THAT WE ENCOUNTER A FAVORABLE TACTICAL SITUATION, BUT IF WE DON’T AND WORST COMES TO WORST, I WANT EACH ONE OF US TO DO HIS UTMOST TO DESTROY OUR ENEMIES. IF THERE IS ONLY ONE PLANE LEFT TO MAKE A FINAL RUN-IN, I WANT THAT MAN TO GO IN AND GET A HIT. MAY GOD BE WITH US ALL. GOOD LUCK, HAPPY LANDINGS, AND GIVE ’EM HELL! (G. Prange,
Miracle at Midway,
240)

Jack Waldron took off for the last flight of his life from the
Hornet
at 8:06 A.M. to lead fifteen Devastators against the Japanese fleet. Problems arose almost immediately after launching. The
Hornet
’s accompanying thirty-five dive-bombers and ten Wildcat fighters, obscured by cloud cover, quickly overflew the lumbering Devastators. Waldron was left to find and attack the carriers himself—an almost impossible task, since there would be neither Wildcats to ward off the attacking Zeros nor highflying Dauntless dive-bombers to divert the antiaircraft fire of the imperial fleet. Instead, the entire air and sea defenses of the Japanese ships would be trained on Waldron’s slow planes coming in over the water at one hundred mph. The
Hornet
’s dive-bombers fared even worse, never finding the Japanese fleet at all and thus not dropping a single bomb. The failure of the
Hornet
’s fighters and dive-bombers to find their targets was perhaps not as baffling an event as some historians note, when we remember that the individual planes had neither effective radar nor advanced navigation instruments and were mostly piloted by inexperienced airmen—none of the
Hornet
’s pilots had ever seen action—who flew over a nondescript endless Pacific looking for tiny dots below.

Because of the numerous diversionary maneuvers to avoid early morning air attacks from Midway, the Japanese carriers under Admiral Nagumo were not exactly cruising where the American staff had calculated their position to be when the American fleet’s bombers and fighters were scheduled to arrive. Instinctively, Waldron anticipated the enemy’s change in course; he immediately veered to the north and so commanded the first American naval air squadron to find the Japanese fleet.

Without fighter cover or friendly bombers above, realizing that he was the first American carrier pilot to attack, and reconciled that after torpedoing the Japanese fleet his planes would not have enough gasoline to reach their home carrier even if they survived their bombing runs, Waldron radioed his intention to the
Hornet
that he was pressing ahead anyway. Captain Marc Mitscher recalled that Waldron “promised he would press through against all obstacles, well knowing his squadron was doomed to destruction with no chance whatever of returning safely to the carrier” (S. Morison, Coral Sea, Midway, and Submarine Actions, May
1942–August 1942
, 117).

The first incoming Zero shot down one of Waldron’s TBDs, and for the next few minutes fourteen planes of Torpedo 8 in succession were also riddled with machine-gun and cannon bursts. The few planes that closed to drop their torpedoes missed the
Akagi
and the
Soryu
entirely. Those crippled Devastators that did not explode through machine-gun fire disintegrated when they hit the sea, clipping the waves and cartwheeling at one hundred mph. Waldron himself was last seen standing upright in his blazing cockpit. His intuition and navigational skill had at last led Torpedo 8 directly to the Japanese carriers, but unfortunately the
Hornet
’s supporting bombers and fighters were still behind him, mostly lost, and spread far distant above—and he was flying a TBD Devastator.

Infantry battle in modern warfare is brutal and terrifying, but the wounds of naval pilots are often even more savage and the chances of survival virtually nil. Usually, we imagine that the aircraft’s metal skin, glass canopy, and armored seat below the pilot deflected gun bursts and gave the targeted occupant a modicum of protection. In fact, since planes often hit a spray of bullets at high speed, the combined force of bullet and streaking target at the point of entry more often literally tore the pilot apart. Moreover, the naval airman in World War II sat atop thousands of pounds of fuel and high explosives inches from his feet, ready to vaporize him the instant enemy cannon fire and tracers ignited the lethal mixture.

Flying a loaded Devastator at Midway would be similar to driving a Ford Pinto in the slow lane, with its trunk and seats loaded with dynamite, as other, far faster drivers shot at it with machine guns as they passed by. Unlike the care of the wounded in land warfare, even ostensibly non-fatal injuries could not be quickly treated, as the pilot could not be evacuated to the rear. Being shot was the beginning, not the end, of the misery—the same gunfire that drew blood also damaged or destroyed the plane itself, promising in a few seconds an even worse crash and ensuing fireball of exploded gasoline. Even in peacetime the site of a downed passenger plane at sea is littered with tiny scraps of aircraft metal—the far more fragile bodies of the occupants often pulverized or burned beyond recognition by the force of impact and ensuing fire.

In an ideal carrier attack, the Devastators were to come in last, after the SBD Dauntless dive-bombers first screamed down from 15,000 feet, with their faster Wildcat fighters descending from even higher above to cover their assault. Then once the enemy ships and planes were occupied, the lumbering torpedo planes in theory might sneak into the melee unmolested at sea level to launch their torpedoes. But given the American mix-up in navigation, all of Waldron’s Devastators bore the full brunt of the Japanese antiaircraft and air attack. Not a single plane of Torpedo 8 survived. Of thirty crewmen who left the
Hornet
at eight that morning, only Ensign George H. Gay outlived the massacre; though wounded, he somehow crawled free once his Devastator hit the sea, and then floated unnoticed by the Japanese ships until picked up in the water by an American rescue plane the next afternoon. The fate of Torpedo 8 was only the first of the three slaughters of the torpedo squadrons on June 4, but we have only Gay’s later account to learn what transpired in the last minutes of the lives of his twenty-nine squadron members.

As the deadly Zeros returned periodically to the carriers to refuel and rearm during the morning turkey shoot, an observer on the
Akagi
noted that the “service crews cheered the returning pilots, patted them on the shoulder, and shouted words of encouragement. As soon as a plane was ready again the pilot nodded, pushed forward the throttle, and roared back into the sky. This scene was repeated time and again as the desperate air struggle continued” (M. Fuchida and M. Okimiya,
Midway, the Battle
That Doomed Japan
, 176). American pilots would find little chance of recovery even if they survived being shot down by these Zeros; most who climbed out of their sinking bombers were strafed in the water. The two naval pilots known to be taken prisoner at Midway were interrogated, then shortly afterward bound, weighted, and thrown overboard. Standard orders for Japanese patrolling ships were to question prisoners to learn of the enemy’s situation and then “dispose of them suitably.”

General morale on the Japanese carriers was sky-high and bordered on arrogance. And why not? As of yet the fleet had not suffered a real defeat and had nothing but contempt for the fighting potential of American sailors, infantrymen, and pilots. From the outbreak of the war on December 7, 1941, the Japanese carrier forces alone had sunk or disabled eight battleships and two cruisers (Pearl Harbor, December 7) and bombed and sunk the British battleships
Repulse
and
Prince of Wales
(off Kuantan, December 10), the cruisers
Houston
and
Marblehead
(north of Java, February 4, 1942), the British cruisers
Exeter, Cornwall,
and
Dorsetshire
(February 27 off Tjilatjap and April 5 near Colombo). They sent to the bottom or severely damaged three allied aircraft carriers (HMS
Hermes
near Trincomalee on April 9 and the
Lexington
and
Yorktown
[damaged] at the battle of Coral Sea, May 8)—all at a cost of a few destroyers and a single light aircraft carrier. For the preparations for Midway, the United States had one battleship and only three carriers in its entire Pacific fleet. The Americans had not yet sunk a single Japanese capital ship. Former pilot Masatake Okumiya and aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi summed up this remarkable record of Japanese naval-air victories in the first half-year of the war:

The tally of enemy and Japanese ships lost in the first six months of the war was a literal realization of the Navy’s concept of “ideal combat conditions,” to “wage a decisive sea battle only under air control.” For the ten years prior to the Pacific War we had trained our airmen implicitly to believe that sea battles fought under our command of the air could result only in our victories. The initial phases of the Pacific War dramatically upheld this belief. (M. Okumiya and J. Horikoshi,
Zero!
, 153)

This confidence often accounted for the gratuitous cruelty shown toward captured soldiers, who were considered cowardly for surrendering. During the earlier Wake Island campaign immediately following Pearl Harbor, Japanese sailors had brutalized captured American marines and routinely clubbed them before shipping them off to camps in Japan and China. At least five Americans were ceremoniously beheaded on one transport’s deck, then their bodies mutilated to cheers from Japanese sailors before being dumped overboard. From the beginning of the Pacific War there was a savagery—arising partly from innate racial animosity, partly out of the perversion of the ancient Bushido code of military protocol by Japanese militarists in the 1930s, partly from pent-up anger over the long European colonial presence in Asia—in the Japanese approach to battle that would soon draw retaliation from the Anglo-American forces. That mutual hatred explains much of the tension and spirit of the combatants at Midway.