Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (53 page)

He [Nimitz] must have every available flattop, hence the drive and urgency behind his pressure to put the crippled
Yorktown
in fighting trim. This was a tremendous performance and a dramatic preliminary victory. In contrast, the Japanese dawdled over the repair of
Shokaku
and in replenishing
Zuikaku,
secure in their confidence that they could lick the hell out of the U.S. Pacific Fleet without the help of those two Pearl Harbor veterans. (G. Prange,
Miracle at Midway,
384)

Had the roles been reversed—innovative command and repair crews being turned loose at Kure, not Pearl Harbor—then Admiral Nagumo would have faced two, not three, American carriers with
six
flattops, not four. In that scenario it is difficult to see how the
Enterprise
and
Hornet
could have escaped sinking.

We know of the brilliance of the American command that insisted on the
Yorktown
’s sudden repair. But what is mostly lost to the historical record are the hundreds of individual decisions and impromptu ingenuity of American welders, riveters, electricians, carpenters, and supply officers who on their own and without written orders turned a nearly ruined ship into a floating arsenal that would help sink the 1st Mobile Carrier Striking Force of Admiral Nagumo.

Flexibility
in
Command

Admiral Yamamoto’s grand tactical plan at Midway was inflexible. Few, if any, of his more astute subordinates made any sustained effort to convince their admiral that the imperial fleet’s assets would be far too widely dispersed, that precious planes and ships would be wasted in the Aleutian operations, and that the entire contradictory strategy of destroying the American fleet while taking islands a thousand miles distant was absurd. A long tradition of deference to superiors, coupled with Yamamoto’s reputation after Pearl Harbor, precluded any serious give-and-take that might have resulted in at least some alterations. Admiral Nagumo’s chief of staff, Rear Admiral Kusaka, noted of many senior officers’ private reservations about Yamamoto’s formula, “The fact was that the plan had already been decided by the Combined Fleet headquarters and we were forced to accept it as it had been planned” (G. Prange,
Miracle at Midway,
28).

Yamamoto’s intractable strategic framework nearly ensured tactical problems, which similarly reflected an institutional hierarchy within the Japanese imperial command that discouraged initiative and independent thinking. Critics of the Japanese leadership at Midway usually focus on Admiral Nagumo’s key decisions on the morning of June 4: (1) his orders to send most of the fleet’s protective cover of fighter planes along with the bombers to attack Midway; (2) his decision also to send all four carriers’ bombers at once against Midway, without keeping a reserve in case of the sudden appearance of American carriers; and (3) his critical determination not to launch his planes immediately when he learned of the presence of the American carriers, but instead ordering them to be refitted from bombs to naval torpedoes. In all three instances Nagumo—who committed suicide in an underground bunker on Saipan in June 1944— simply followed the standard procedure of the Japanese navy, without realizing how different the fight with the Americans might be from the past experience of easy victories over surprised, outnumbered, and inexperienced adversaries.

As for the attacks against Midway itself, it was traditional Japanese fleet protocol that all bombing sorties were to be accompanied by massive fighter escorts. But two conditions in the skies over Midway immediately made that doctrinaire approach subject to alteration on June 4: the Midway fighter defenses were not effective, meaning the bombers could hit their targets well enough with only minimal fighter cover; and second, the Japanese inability to locate the American fleet suggested that it was critical to retain a massive fighter reserve over Nagumo’s carriers against possible American naval attack. Yet neither Nagumo nor his officers saw the need to alter long-held beliefs to fit the circumstances at hand.

Nagumo devoted nearly his entire air arm to a target that was not mobile and did not have a fighter or bomber force capable of seriously endangering the Japanese fleet or its planes. The immovable Midway could not become lost to Nagumo’s intelligence, nor, as the morning’s continuously unsuccessful bombing sorties proved, could it ruin his carriers. In contrast, the mobile and undetected
Enterprise, Hornet,
and
Yorktown
could surely do both.

It would have been an innovative and unorthodox move for Nagumo to keep back half his bomber strength, ready to attack at a minute’s notice the American fleet, while retaining fighters at full strength over the carriers. That way he could still always send in much smaller, regular sorties against Midway, as he probed for the American naval presence. Launching everything at once in naval warfare was sometimes a sound strategy—the American admirals would do just that against Nagumo in the minutes to come—but only as a preventative against fast-moving carriers, whose dive-bombers were deadly; it made little sense against islands whose aircraft was obsolete and demonstrably unable to hit a ship at sea. Nagumo—and here Admiral Yamamoto’s grand plan deserves much of the blame—was concentrating on the wrong objective that could do him little harm, while neglecting the very target that could send his ships to the bottom.

Even more critical was the decision to rearm his bombers before sending them off instantaneously against the newly discovered American carriers. The undeniable advantage the planes would reap from carrying torpedoes rather than bombs was immediately offset by having all four Japanese carriers at once exposed with a scrambled mess of gasoline, armed planes, and bombs on their flight decks. Nagumo was also worried about sending off his bombers immediately without fighter escort—the latter pilots were exhausted from the Midway raid, involved in air cover, and also refueling. Yet his unescorted dive-bombers would have at least sighted the American fleet; some would have made it through the defenses and inflicted damage. It was the desire to destroy the enemy at all costs, and to keep planes away from a targeted flight deck, that made Admiral Spruance later in the afternoon launch every available dive-bomber of the
Enterprise
and
Yorktown
against the
Hiryu.
Despite having no fighter support, the Americans blasted the Japanese carrier to pieces.

It was good policy to attack land facilities with bombs, and ships with excellent Japanese torpedoes; but battle rarely gives allowance for good policy and instead demands instantaneous adaptation. In carrier war a fleet’s planes should be up in the air defending the ships and far away hunting down the enemy. As Fuchida and Okumiya point out, “Nagumo chose what seemed to him the orthodox and safe course, and from that moment his carriers were doomed” (
Midway, the Battle That Doomed
Japan
, 237). Even Admiral Kusaka later admitted that it was a wise insurance policy to hold back substantial numbers of planes ready and armed to take off immediately once enemy carriers were sighted, but conceded that caution seemed needless at Midway: “It was almost intolerable for the commander at the front to keep its half strength in readiness indefinitely only for an enemy force which might not be in the area after all” (G. Prange,
Miracle at Midway,
215).

Finally, there was an institutional, indeed fossilized approach to the Japanese use of carriers and battleships that did not adapt to the highly volatile and constantly changing battle realities of the Pacific theater. Battleships in the war against the Americans were no longer vehicles of national prestige whose primary mission was to fire away at other battleships and atomize cruisers and destroyers. Rather, they were most effective in screening far more valuable aircraft carriers—adding their enormous antiaircraft arsenal to the protection of the irreplaceable flattops, ringing the carriers to ensure that submarines and approaching planes might first dilute their attack (battleships in general were enticing to pilots, but harder to hit from the air, better armored, and less vulnerable to torpedoes), while protecting troop transports as they softened up shore targets with their enormous sixteen- and eighteen-inch guns.

Had all Yamamoto’s battleships ringed Nagumo’s carriers and then at night sailed off to blast away the runways at Midway itself, there is a good likelihood that more American bombers would have been shot down, that many more of both land- and sea-based planes would have diverted their attacks from the Japanese carriers to these impressive capital ships, and that there would not have been the dire necessity to launch naval planes against Midway once it was under constant naval shelling by the bulk of Yamamoto’s battleships. Instead, the battleships saw no action. For most of the war, Japan’s massive
Yamato
and
Musashi,
and other battleships like them, were completely wasted assets, which were rarely properly deployed in any of Japan’s engagements in the Pacific. The Americans, in contrast, after the disaster at Pearl Harbor and the later sinking of the British
Prince
of Wales
and
Repulse
and numerous heavy cruisers by Japanese naval bombers, quickly crafted an entirely new role for battleships. From now on, the navy’s behemoths would be attached whenever possible to carriers, as at Okinawa, where they could protect and draw off fire, or, as in the Philippines or at Normandy Beach, shell enemy ground forces.

Ideally, carrier groups should also steam in staggered formations to disperse airborne attack. Unfortunately, the Japanese approached Midway in just the opposite fashion: they clustered their four carriers in close proximity even as their critical battleships were far distant. Far better it would have been for them to form two, or even three, carrier task forces, all within fifty miles of each other to coordinate aerial attacks from the four dispersed flattops. That way they could dilute incoming bombers, such as the American practice of the dual Task Forces 16 and 17 that resulted in the previously damaged
Yorktown
absorbing all the Japanese bombs, freeing the distant
Enterprise
and
Hornet
from any attack at all. One can only imagine what would have transpired at Midway had the fiery and singularly combative Admiral Yamaguchi been posted fifty miles distant from the
Kaga
and
Akagi,
with direct control of the air resources of the
Hiryu
and
Soryu—
a dozen or so Japanese battleships ringing both carrier task forces. But, then, that tactic would have required real decentralization and a lateral, elastic supreme command, rather than an enormously layered hierarchy under the absolute power of an admiral who was virtually incommunicado.

The American system of command was far more flexible and the fleet’s orders inherently broad enough to allow for alteration as the battle for Midway unfolded. Nimitz essentially directed Admiral Frank J. Fletcher and Admiral Spruance to make use of American intelligence by cruising in at the flank of the superior Japanese fleet, to hit it hard with everything they had, and then to withdraw when Japanese surface ships rushed to the rescue. The details of the American proposed attack—indeed, the nature of the deployment of the ships themselves—were left up to the commanders, Fletcher and Spruance. Nimitz’s orders directed both “to inflict maximum damage on the enemy by employing strong attrition tactics.” Their attacks were to “be governed by the principle of calculated risk, which you shall interpret to mean the avoidance of exposure of your force to attack by superior enemy forces without good prospect of inflicting, as a result of such exposure, greater damage on the enemy” (G. Prange,
Miracle at Midway,
99–100).

In contrast, Admiral Nagumo felt duty-bound to launch an attack in the “right” way, as Admirals Spruance and Fletcher, entirely on their own, sent almost the entire American air arm after the Japanese at the first opportunity. Such actions by Spruance and Fletcher may have been precipitous, but they were grounded in the wisdom that in carrier war the first strike is often the most critical, since it can wipe out the enemy’s ability to retaliate and can obliterate the platform itself for hundreds of planes in the air.

When there were rare disagreements among the high echelons of the Japanese admiralty, such tension often manifested itself in counterproductive and strangely formalistic ways: offers to resign or even commit suicide, rival efforts to accept rather than allot blame, determination to go down with the ship to atone for tactical blunders—even an earlier wrestling match during the Pearl Harbor campaign between Admirals Nagumo and Yamaguchi over deployment of the latter’s carriers. How different was the informal and relaxed American system. Admiral Fletcher on the damaged
Yorktown
transferred to Admiral Spruance key decisions for launching the fleet’s planes—without rancor or worry about the honor of command:

He [Fletcher] knew well that the admiral who led his ships to the major American sea victory of World War II would be a popular hero, assured of his place in history. Yet, when he realized that he could no longer command his air striking units at top efficiency, he turned the reins over to Spruance. This was an act of selfless integrity and patriotism in action. The reputations of Nimitz and Spruance have overshadowed Fletcher, but he was the link between the two, a man of talent who had the brains and character to give a free hand to a man of genius. (G. Prange,
Miracle at Midway,
386)

Both the Japanese and the American military traditions prized supreme command from the field—a hallmark of Western military practice since the culture of hoplite generals fighting in the front rank of the Greek phalanx—but the Americans were far more ready to abandon form for function in a complex battle theater of the magnitude of Midway. Admiral Yamamoto, who had dreamed up the entire unworkable plan, was on the
Yamato
itself. But since the Japanese were observing radio silence, and the admiral’s flagship was sailing far from the scene of the carrier war, there was almost no chance of direct and instant communications between officers in battle and the Japanese high command. Yamamoto was about as in control of Midway as Xerxes was on his imperial throne perched on the hills above Salamis—but the former with far less firsthand information of the battle’s progress.