Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (54 page)

In comparison, Admiral Nimitz at Pearl Harbor had an almost instantaneous appreciation of the events of June 1942 as they transpired and so kept up a constant advisory dialogue with his admirals. In fact, Nimitz in his office at Pearl Harbor was closer to the action at Midway, both concretely and electronically, than Yamamoto was in his battleship at sea. The Japanese tradition of the supreme commander being in the foremost ship in the fleet (and in a battleship during a carrier war!), the readiness for an experienced carrier commander to go down with his vessel, and the unquestioning acceptance of a tactical blueprint from on high were disciplined and soldierly, but not necessarily militarily efficacious, practices. Like some exalted warlord, Yamamoto drew up his formal plan, ordered his subordinates to follow it, and then in relative isolation and silence cruised out to battle in the huge, ostentatious—and mostly irrelevant
—Yamato.

Unfortunately, his adversaries paid little heed to the samurai tradition, but were in constant electronic communication and ad hoc consultations as they drew up new contingency plans and on occasion traded command. American admirals preferred to supervise the complete abandonment of their sinking ships—and characteristically thereby lost fewer of their men when their vessels sank. They were more eager to obtain a new warship than go down with the old, learning from, rather than being consumed in, defeat. When thousands of their sailors were trying to find salvation in a sinking ship’s last moments, they cared little whether President Roosevelt’s photograph might soon rest at the bottom of the Pacific.

Not all naval battles call for imagination and adaptation. Eccentric, pugnacious, and independent American admirals like Halsey and Fletcher could at times—as during the battles of Coral Sea, the engagements off Guadalcanal, and the victory in Leyte Gulf—nearly endanger their fleets through their very aggressiveness. But in general, it is a truism of carrier war and of battle itself that there is a fog in armed conflict, that set plans are often obsolete the minute the shooting starts, and that reaction, innovation, and initiative more often than not outweigh the merits of method, consensus, and adherence to hierarchy and protocol. In that regard, it is advantageous on the battlefield to have soldiers more independent than predictable, with officers who look to what works at the moment, rather than adhere to what is accepted as conventional.

The
Initiative
of
the
Pilots

The Americans had outdated airplanes, often unskilled pilots, and little experience in carrier war. They did, however, launch repeated aerial attacks, in which highly individualistic aircrews employed unpredictable sorties and unorthodox methods of attack that had the effect of disrupting the Japanese carrier fleet and making possible its final destruction. Japanese observers on the carriers shook their heads over the amateurish-ness of the first eight futile shore and naval American air attacks—and then were aghast when the ninth wave of dive-bombers came out of nowhere to destroy their fleet.

Scholars often remark that the Midway-based army bombers and marine pilots—flying obsolete Brewster Buffaloes, Vaught Vindicators, new Avenger torpedo bombers, outclassed navy SBD dive-bombers, Wildcat fighters, B-26 Marauder light bombers, and B-17 Flying Fortresses— failed to do any real damage to the Japanese fleet. Yet their repeated attacks, if uncoordinated, spontaneous, and unskilled, were nearly constant and so had the effect of keeping the Japanese off guard, and their critical fighters engaged, soon worn out, and often in need of fuel and ammunition. Before the carriers were finally set ablaze, no fewer than five sorties flew out from Midway itself, often on the initiative of the pilots themselves.

Before the day of the decisive battle, at a little after noon on June 3, nine army B-17s left Midway to attack the incoming Japanese fleet when it was still six hundred miles away. The pilots had no combat experience and carried less than eleven tons of bombs between them. They scored no hits. As the B-17s returned to Midway hours later, a motley group of PBY scout planes—scarcely able to reach speeds of one hundred mph—took off. Each was jury-rigged to carry a single torpedo and headed out for the Japanese fleet and another surprise nighttime attack. Other than some slight damage to a tanker, this second and even more bizarre sortie had little success.

The next morning at 7:00 as the Japanese carrier planes were off hitting Midway, American torpedo bombers and B-26s from the islands once more zoomed toward Admiral Nagumo’s carrier fleet. There was no real flight plan, much less any integrated tactics between the squadrons. Lieutenant Ogawa on the
Akagi
thought the entire morning attack inept—a judgment confirmed when the imperial fleet’s Zeros shot down most of the Avengers and one of the four B-26s. The Americans again scored no hits.

A little more than an hour later, fifteen B-17s arrived again over the Japanese fleet to begin a fourth American bombing attack. Dropping their ordnance from nearly 20,000 feet, the Fortresses got close with only a few bombs—they would later make fantastic claims of damage—but again they scored no hits. A few minutes later eleven decrepit marine Vindicators arrived and began old-fashioned glide-bombing attacks from as low as 500 feet. They scored no hits either.

All five attacks from Midway were spontaneous, involving marine, army, and navy pilots, in a strange assortment of at least five different types of bombers, attacking from 500 to 20,000 feet, with inadequate preparation, defective torpedoes, and bombs that could not seriously damage modern armored ships. When they were done, all the Japanese ships were intact, half of Midway’s planes were gone, but the fleet was left frazzled and tired from hours of constant vigilance and shooting—just as the three doomed waves of Devastators from the
Enterprise, Hornet,
and
Yorktown
now appeared on the horizon to begin their own equally unproductive torpedo runs. Captain Fuchida and Commander Okumiya summed up the Midway attacks, with special emphasis on how busy the Japanese were repelling the first five American aerial sorties:

It was our general conclusion that we had little to fear from the enemy’s offensive tactics. But, paradoxically, the very ineffectiveness of the enemy attacks up to this time contributed in no small measure to the ultimate American triumph. We neglected certain obvious precautions, which had they been taken, might have prevented the fiasco that followed a few hours later. The apparently futile sacrifices made by the enemy’s shore-based planes were, after all, not in vain. (
Midway, the Battle That Doomed Japan
, 163)

The torpedo pilots from the three American carriers, as we have seen, were just as innovative, if soon subject to much of the same fate, given their inferior equipment and lack of experience. But by any fair measure, few naval pilots should have located the Japanese fleet at all. The
Hornet
’s fighters and dive-bombers did not; 45 planes, or almost one-third of the initial 152 planes of the first American strike, never even saw the enemy. Radio contact with Midway was difficult, and no updated reports were forwarded to the pilots after takeoff to indicate that the Japanese had radically altered course away from Midway and were headed in the near-opposite direction. In the hour or more it took the Americans to reach the Japanese, the enemy carriers would be thirty or forty miles to the north from their last reported position, and thus in theory safe from the incoming bombers, which were at their limit of operations, low on fuel, and headed in the wrong direction.

A number of American air commanders ignored standard operational orders and thereby found the Japanese through their own initiative. Jack Waldron,
Hornet
air commander of the Devastators, told his squadron, “Just follow me. I’ll take you to ’em” (W. Smith, Midway, 102). And he did, and to their deaths—rightly surmising that Nagumo would change course once he got reports of the American carriers. Waldron’s ingenuity ensured that he found the Japanese, that all his planes would therefore be shot down, and that the Japanese fighter cover would, in the process of the American slaughter, be ignorant of the dive-bomber peril far above. Had Waldron not changed course, he would never have found the enemy fleet, and thus it was likely that the Japanese would have much more easily beat off the other attacks and have been waiting for the SBDs.

Similarly, when Wade McClusky, leading the dive-bombers of the
Enterprise,
arrived at the anticipated interception point 155 miles distant, his planes likewise found no Japanese fleet. Instinctively, he, too, made an instantaneous judgment that Nagumo’s carriers had changed course (he was helped by the wake of the Japanese destroyer
Arashi,
which was steaming to catch up to Nagumo’s force) and thus began making a long sweeping search north to the Japanese carriers, which he found at the limit of his bombers’ fuel reserves. Had McClusky not guessed, and guessed rightly—or had he circled while trying to radio for orders
—
Enterprise
’s bombers, like
Hornet
’s, would have played no role in the fighting. Both the
Akagi
and
Kaga
would have escaped, and surely either the
Enterprise
or the
Hornet
would have quickly felt their wrath. No wonder that the captain of the
Enterprise,
George Murray, called McClusky’s initiative “the most important decision of the entire action” (G. Prange,
Miracle at Midway,
260).

During the actual bombing runs, individual American pilots made snap decisions to redirect their attacks contrary to their last orders, when they saw that crippled ships needed more attention or felt that their bombs might be better dropped on fresh targets. Improvisation ensured that the
Hiryu
was sunk and the heavy cruiser
Mogami
seriously damaged, both suffering devastating hits from American bombers that had been ordered elsewhere.

Such freethinking American pilots in their recklessness and infectious enthusiasm could often be ineffective, if not downright dangerous, as we have seen in the failed shore-based attacks from Midway. A number of impromptu B-17 sorties were foolhardy, and one even attacked an American submarine. An unwise effort of B-24s on June 6 to fly at night to bomb Wake Island resulted in abject failure—the planes did not find the island and the mission’s commander, Major General Clarence Tinker, was never heard from again. Nevertheless, comparison between the Japanese and American scouting, fighter, and bomber pilots reveals far more capacity for initiative and adaptation among the Americans. At Midway, as would be true throughout the Pacific War, that autonomy paid off.

INDIVIDUALISM IN WESTERN WARFARE

The Americans would lose dozens of carriers, battleships, and cruisers in the three years following Midway to brave and brilliant Japanese sailors and pilots, as the United States sought to ruin Japan, rather than remove the threat of the Japanese military. On Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and in a number of naval actions off the Solomon Islands, thousands of Americans of all services would be slaughtered by well-planned and organized Japanese assaults. Yet the astounding fact remains: in less than four years, after being surprised and caught in a state of virtual unpreparedness, the United States—while devoting the majority of its forces to the European theater of operations, and without banzai charges, kamikaze attacks, or ritual suicides—not only defeated an enormous and seasoned Japanese military but destroyed the Japanese nation itself, ending its half-century existence as a formidable military power and indeed a modern industrial state. Japan’s navy, army, and air force had not merely lost the Pacific War but ceased to exist in the process.

The result was that by August 1945 the Japanese nation was in far worse shape than it had been a century earlier in 1853 when Commander Perry arrived in Tokyo Bay and helped spur the original Westernization of Japan. A century of Westernization without liberalization had brought Japan not parity with, but destruction by, Western powers. Critical to that unprecedented and brutal American military achievement of some fortyfive months was a long tradition of reliance on individual initiative, which was in sharp contrast to a venerable Eastern emphasis on group consensus, obeisance to imperial or divine authority, and the subjugation of the individual to society. The beginning of the end for the Japanese was Midway, where they lost their best airmen and irreplaceable aircrews and the core of their carrier fleet—and, most important, in a mere three days had their confidence shattered to such a degree that they would now fear, rather than look eagerly to, engaging American ships on the horizon.

Individualism had long played a role in Western military efficacy and usually manifested itself on the battlefield at three levels: from supreme command to the soldiers themselves to the larger society that fielded and armed its combatants. All cultures are capable of creating brilliant and highly idiosyncratic military leaders who exercise independence and intuition. Rome met a number of such gifted tribal commanders and Eastern monarchs—Jugurtha, Vercingetorix, Boudicca, Mithradates—whose skill often led to battlefield victories. But their individualism, and that of others to follow like them, was not characteristic of their cultures at large, but prominent only to the degree that they enjoyed absolute power. Thus, after their deaths—and all enemies of Rome usually died in battle or committed suicide—their wars of liberation collapsed, suggesting that their brand of monarchy, theocracy, or tyranny could rarely produce a succession of gifted military leaders, much less a nation of followers who could rely on their own initiative and autonomy to wage war.

The same holds true of dynasts such as the pharaohs, the New World potentates in Mexico and Peru, and the Chinese emperors and Ottoman sultans, who likewise centralized military authority into their own hands and discouraged initiative on the part of their subjects, ensuring that the chance of victory lay not in military improvisation, but only in their own—often flawed—judgment. In contrast, generals like Themistocles, the Spartan genius Lysander, Scipio Africanus, the brilliant Byzantine Belisarius, Cortés, and moderns like George Patton and Curtis LeMay were at odds with their own state, surrounded by equally independent-thinking subordinates, and keen to exploit the initiative rather than merely the discipline of their own troops.

Soldiers in the ranks of Western armies often exercised an independence of judgment not found in other societies. Here one thinks of the “old man” at the battle of Mantinea (418 B.C.) who stopped the battle to warn the Spartan high command of its unwise deployment; the brutal give-and-take among Xenophon’s Ten Thousand in Asia Minor (401 B.C.), who were as much a mobile democracy-in-arms as a hired band of killers; the various eccentric bands of Frankish aristocracy who bickered as much as they fought the enemy during the Crusades; the fractious admirals before Lepanto or career British soldiers in India and Africa during the nineteenth century, whose skill and imagination brought success despite mediocre higher command.

All people at times act as individuals, and as humans prize their freedom and independence. But the formal and often legal recognition of a person’s sovereign sphere of individual action—social, political, and cultural—is a uniquely Western concept, one that frightens, sometimes rightly so, most of the non-Western world. Individualism, unlike consensual government and constitutional recognition of political freedom, is a cultural, rather than political, entity. It is the dividend of Western politics and economics, which give freedom in the abstract and concrete sense to individuals and in the process foster personal curiosity and initiative unknown among societies where there are no true citizens and neither government nor markets are free.

As we have seen in the case of Salamis and Cannae, an insidious individualism grows out of the larger Western traditions of freedom, constitutional government, property rights, and civic miliarism. The Athenian ekklēsia voted for the disastrous expedition to Sicily (415–413 B.C.) and then adopted decisive and heroic measures to keep Athens in the war for another nine years—in much the same way as the British Parliament in the nineteenth century or the American Congress during the twentieth authorized all sorts of political and economic policies that turned the war effort over to thousands of autonomous and freethinking citizens. From the assertion of the fifth-century sophist Protagoras that “man is the measure of all things” to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948 and drafted by Western jurists (“the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women . . .”), there is a 2,500-year tradition of personal liberty and innate trust in the individual, rather than the political or religious collective, unparalleled in the non-West. For good or evil, few Westerners believe that a sacred cow is more important than a human, that the emperor is superior to the individual person, that a religious pilgrimage is the fulfillment of a human’s life, that in war a suicidal charge is often required for an individual’s excellency, or that a combatant must risk his or her life to save the emperor’s picture.

In contrast, Japan, in lieu of independent supreme commanders, innovative soldiers, and a sovereign legislature, relied on ironclad obedience, as have most Western adversaries of the past two and a half millennia. Rigid hierarchy and complete submission of the individual to the divinity of the Japanese emperor meant that the wisdom of a small cadre of militarists shaped policy largely without ratification or even knowledge of the Japanese people, who were never envisioned as free persons with unique rights that were natural at birth and protected by the state. Like the enormous armies of the ancient imperial East, all that centralized control and mass ideology led to a wonderfully trained, large, and spirited military, but one vulnerable to the counterattacks of a nation-in-arms, drawing on the collective wisdom of thousands of freethinking individuals.

With the end of the Pacific War, the ruin of Japanese society, and the disgrace of the militarists, the final century-old roadblock to full implementation of Western-style parliamentary democracy and all that accompanied it was removed. The postwar introduction of constitutional government brought land redistribution. Freedom of the press and dissent, the emancipation of women, and the creation of a middling consumer class were also dividends of the American occupation. The result—if not a radical Japanese reinterpretation of the role of the individual and society—was at least that at the millennium Japan has one of the most well led, innovative, and technologically advanced militaries in the world—under the complete control of an elected legislature and chief executive and subject to civilian audit.

If its past partial embrace of Western military research and development brought Japan near technological parity with European and American military forces at the turn of the century, its current far more comprehensive adaptation of Western political and social institutions has ensured it a military that is, at least tactically, the near equal of any in Europe today. In the next century Japan’s scientific progress in arms will not hinge entirely on foreign emulation, but be powered by the engine of its own free and liberal society—if it continues to encourage individual talent and initiative to a degree unknown at any time in its long and warlike past.