Naval Heritage | Jonathan Parshall: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway

[0:00] Well, good afternoon, Naval War College. It's great to see Admiral Hogg here with us, Ambassador Peters. And we're really thrilled and privileged to have probably one of the nation's most renowned authors on the battle of Midway, as each and every one of us here at the Naval War College and across the entire United States Navy begin to commemorate and celebrate one of our greatest naval battles in our history, the Battle of Midway.

[0:38] Jonathan Partial, the author of Shattered Sword, the Untold Story of the Battle of Midway. He's a native from Minneapolis, Minnesota, and he's probably the United States expert on the Imperial Japanese Navy. He's been studying it since his childhood and he admits it's a little bit more than just a passing fancy. He's written for the United States Naval War College Review. He's written for the Naval Institute Proceedings and the World War II Magazine. He's contributed to several books on the topic.

[1:10] In 1995, and try to remember 1995, the Internet was at its infancy, he created a website called www.combinedfleet.com. And as we were talking over lunch, he was telling me how rudimentary it was, pretty much two pages and a picture of his dog. And today it's the foremost Internet site on the Imperial Navy with over 50,000 visitors monthly. He was a member of the 1999 expedition by Nauticus Corporation and the Naval Oceanographic Office that discovered wreckage from the Caria Caga, sunk at Midway.

[1:45] He's a graduate of Carleton College and the Carlson School of Management, and he works in senior management at the Minnesota Software Company. And as I mentioned, he lives in Minneapolis with his wife, Margaret, children, Anna, and Derek. And catch this, he has cats named Hear You and Soar You. So this is something that is quite normal in their household. So we're really excited to have Jonathan with us. He's going to come up and give us some of his thoughts. And I should mention he brought a good friend of his, Mark Horan, who came here, a math teacher who's also been a contributor to the book, so we're honored to have both of them here.

[2:21] But please give a warm welcome to Jonathan Parshall. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. I have no doubt that there are probably some faculty members here, at least, who are thinking to themselves, you know, this guy again? because I've been here, this will be the third time now in the last eight years that I have stood on this stage to talk about Midway. And I guess all that I can say is that that is a testament to just how shallow the pool of Midway scholars must be, that they keep having me back.

[2:58] But, you know, nevertheless, here I am. And probably, too, some of you have noticed the title slide and are thinking, you know, what's with the question mark? You know, turning point in the Pacific? We're here to commemorate the most important naval victory in U.S. history, and that doesn't look very triumphal. You know, it shouldn't be a big exclamation point of some sort. And I guess what I would say is that this battle, like all great battles, has had a lot of hyperbole thrown out regarding it over the years, and we use phrases like turning point and kind of just casually toss those out there.

[3:33] out there. But what does turning point really mean in the context of a war as big and complex as World War II And another word that we use decisive often gets thrown out regarding Midway But what does decisive really mean in the context of a war like the Pacific War So those are sort of underlying themes that I want to explore today in the course of my talk and just keep that in the back of your mind. So three things that I want to do. I want to give you a little context for the battle. Where did the battle come from? Why did we end up fighting over Midway?

[4:03] And I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on that. If you're interested in a good book on that, I can recommend one. But I'm just going to talk about that briefly. Then I want to tell you three stories about the Battle of Midway itself, each of which I think are sort of little turning points within the battle. Two of them I think are still pretty poorly understood even to this day, and one of them actually has a plot twist that I only learned about about a month and a half ago, which sort of illustrates that the scholarship on the battle continues to advance. And then finally, I want to zoom back up to the big picture again and examine Midway, talk about its meaning within the wider context of the Pacific War.

[4:41] So without further ado, I think it's difficult for us to remember 72 years on just what an incredibly grim, dark time the beginning of 1942 really was. that if you were a kid sitting around the dinner table listening to your parents talking at this point in time, you would have been hearing a lot of dark mutterings and place names that you'd probably never heard of before, you know, Bataan, Corregidor, Malaya, Singapore.

[5:14] The war had been going absolutely disastrously for the Allies up to this point. And in the course of that, the Japanese had been triumphant everywhere they had gone. a lot of very valuable Allied naval hardware had gone glub, glub, glub. And I think that that's sort of analogous for the nation's feeling at this time, that we had taken some real body blows. This had been a humiliating rout for us. And if there was not a sense of desperation, there certainly were a lot of very tense moments, and people were really wondering, how is this war going to end up?

[5:48] Because in the course of just a few short months, the Japanese had launched a series of attacks across the Western Pacific and into Southeast Asia that had secured for themselves one of the largest empires in the history of mankind, and they had done it at trivial cost to themselves. The problem then for the Japanese becomes, well, what's next? And they begin turning to this issue in the March-April timeframe of 1942, and the driver of that conversation in Japan is this gentleman.

[6:21] Yamamoto Isoroku, who is the Commander-in-Chief of Japan's Combined Fleet. He reasons that the only important American naval asset that is left in the Pacific at this point is our aircraft carriers, and he is determined to destroy those aircraft carriers if at all possible. At the same time, he would very much like to be able to occupy the Hawaiian Islands if he can make that happen, because if he can actually have those islands as a hostage, that could be a very important bargaining chip for end of war negotiations with the Americans.

[6:58] So he's looking for some battle site somewhere in the Central Pacific that is close enough to Pearl Harbor that he can lure those carriers out to come to the fight, but far enough away from the organic air power that is on Oahu that that can't get tangled up in the battle that he wants to create. Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, we have Chester Nimitz, who is the Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet. And Nimitz is not desperately but certainly very urgently trying to figure out how he is going to turn around this train wreck of a war Nimitz too is very clear on the fact that he's still got four carriers on his roster and those have got to be his main offensive assets.

[7:40] And he very much wants to figure out a way to bring the Japanese carrier force to battle and destroy it, if at all possible. His big trump card is, of course, we have broken Japan's operational codes. And we are reading enough of their signal traffic at this point to get wind of the fact, starting in late April, May-ish time frame, that something very big is planned in the Central Pacific. And that, in a nutshell, is why we end up fighting a major sea battle over two insignificant specks of coral sitting out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

[8:15] So let's talk a little bit about Midway, what actually happened at Midway. Let me give you some stories. And the first one actually happens a little bit before Midway. It's called Operation K. Operation K was a mission by the Japanese to ascertain the whereabouts of the American aircraft carriers just prior to the battle. So the basic deal was they were going to use two of these gentlemen, the Kawanishi Emily, which was I think arguably the finest flying boat of the war and certainly the longest range recon asset that the Japanese had.

[8:46] And they were going to take these guys off from Wotji. They were going to fly the 2,000 miles up to Pearl Harbor and they were going to take a look around and see if the American carriers were in Pearl Harbor. After that, they were going to hop a little bit further up the Hawaiian Island change and plop themselves down here at French Frigate Shoals, which is an uninhabited atoll. Reason being that the Emily, long-ranged as it is, does not have the legs to go out and back in one hop. So the game plan would be that they would meet this gentleman, who would top off the fuel tanks, and then they would fly the rest of the way back to their operational base at Wake.

[9:21] They had actually done this mission once before in March, and it had come off relatively well, at least as far as the refueling arrangements were concerned. Well, the Americans in the intel community were very, very interested in how it was that the Japanese had actually managed to get flying boats over at the top of Pearl Harbor. And they started putting two and two together and thought to themselves, you know, French frigate shoals might be a place that they were using as a refueling point. Slow and cold on May 30th, when the Japanese submarine shows up to French Frigate, who does she find anchored there but the seaplane tender Ballard?

[9:56] And the skipper from the sub sends his message up the pipeline to a six-fleeted quadulane and says, you know, I've got a little problem here, and he's advised to wait overnight, and hopefully the Ballard will go away. Unfortunately, the next morning when he raises his periscope, not only is the Ballard still there, but she's been joined by her sister ship, the Thornton, and now there's a couple of PBYs anchored in the lagoon as well. So this is obviously a place that is under observation, and Kwajalein at that point scrubs the mission. Well, down through the years, you know, this has been one of those fascinating what-ifs about the battle, and the counterfactual history people have just loved this one and have gotten their teeth into it.

[10:35] And it is sort of a fascinating question. You know, what would have happened if those seaplane had gone over the top of Pearl Harbor? They would not have seen any American carriers there because those carriers had already sortied for the Midway battle site. And I've seen numerous scenarios during this time that, oh, well, you know, the Japanese would have been tipped off and Naguma would have gotten word and, you know, he would have changed his reconnaissance plan. The Japanese would have won the battle. The Japanese would have gone on to win the war and Neil Armstrong would never have landed on the moon.

[11:07] So what's interesting about this, though, is what the Japanese actually have to say about Operation K And just about two months ago I stumbled across a translation of a section of the Japanese official war history series called Senshi Sosho, talking about Operation K. And it was done by this gentleman, Edwin Layton, who was one of the Midway codebreakers, and he must have translated this sometime towards the end of his life, because Senshi Sosho didn't come out until the early 1970s. But here's what the Japanese have to say about Operation K.

[11:40] that even if they had launched this mission as planned and had gone over Pearl Harbor and found no aircraft carriers there, that would, in their minds, have confirmed their belief at the time that the American carriers were still operating in the South Pacific in the wake of the Battle of Coral Sea, which had just happened a month prior. In other words, there would have been no tip-off. Nagumo would not have changed anything, and presumably the battle would have gone forward just as it basically did.

[12:12] And to me, what that points out, first of all, is that the vast majority of counterfactual history out there is just utter and complete nonsense. And a lot of this stuff gets trolled out by forum know-it-alls and other people who want to impress you with their intelligence, but actually none of our crystal balls are really all that good when it comes to prognosticating on futures past where we have no real information. And so that's one thing that I'm convinced of.

[12:43] More pertinently, what it points to is the incredible power of preconceived notions. And the reason I throw that out here is that it's perfectly conceivable that somebody in this room is going to go on to command a carrier battle group, say, and is going to have to be evaluating very squishy source of intelligence based on very sketchy information. And given the Japanese mindset before the Battle of Midway, a null data point, like a non-sighting, was not going to overturn anybody's mental apple car to make them change their activities.

[13:23] And so what that says is that if you have a piece of null data, you must treat it very, very carefully. It could confirm your pet hypothesis, but it might not. You know, null data is neither good nor bad, black nor white, yes nor no. What null data urges us to do is to widen our set of potential scenarios to accommodate that data point. In the Japanese case, a null data point might have meant that those carriers were still operating in the South Pacific, but really what it meant is those carriers could be practically anywhere, and one of those potential anywheres was potentially off the island of Midway, which is what turned out to be true.

[14:01] So that ends my contractually mandated teaching moment for this talk. We can move on now. The second thing I want to talk about is the story of the sacrifice of squadrons 8 and 6, which from the American perspective is one of the most poignant and tragic episodes during this entire battle. The tactical situation at about 0900 is as follows. Nugumo, the commander of Kido Butai, the Japanese carrier force, is aware now that there are American aircraft carriers operating off of the island of Midway, and he's determined to close the range on them and launch some sort of a counter-strike.

[14:41] Before he can do that, though, he's got to bring down the aircraft from the counter-strike, or the strike that he launched against the island of Midway that morning. And so that's what he begins turning his attention to at about 0830 or so, and that is going to take about 45 minutes. As soon as the last of those aircraft lands on his flight day, It's pretty certain that he would want to go and start spotting his own flight decks with his reserve strike planes then to go after those American carriers. But lo and behold, at that very moment, out of the northeast comes Torpedo Squadron 8 from the Hornet.

[15:16] VT-8 is immediately set upon by the combat air patrol of the Japanese, and they are annihilated. Fifteen planes in, fifteen planes shot down, just one guy left alone alive in the water. And that takes about 20 minutes or so. As soon as that attack is over, lo and behold, in from the south comes Torpedo Squadron 6 from the Enterprise. And Nagumo again is obligated to turn his tail and run off to the north while his combat air patrol deals with VT-6, which they do in a similarly rough manner.

[15:50] And so at the end of this 40 to 45 minutes worth of slaughter, what you've got is two American squadrons totally destroyed, 37 dead aviators and not a blessed thing to show for it. It's an absolute disaster. Well, down through the years, the conventional interpretation of these events has always been, well, yes, the sacrifice of those squadrons was tragic, but they served a purpose in that they brought the Japanese combat air patrol zeros down to sea level, which basically prevented them from getting in the way of the American dive bomber attack that was going to start materializing here in the not too distant future.

[16:31] And this is a lovely story except that it's also complete nonsense. And the reason it's nonsense has to do with the performance characteristics of this particular plane, the Mitsubishi Zero, which can climb from sea level to 15,000 feet in about five minutes flat. So it doesn't take much in the way of mathematical ability to figure out that a VT-8 is totally destroyed by 0937 and VT-6 has been driven out of the area by 10 o'clock And those American dive bombers are not going to be showing up until around 1020.

[17:02] The Zeros had all the time they needed to get back up to altitude and most of them probably did. And we all understand why it is that we create mythology around these sorts of events, particularly sacrificial events if you will. Because none of us wants to have to look somebody in the eye and say your son or your husband died to no effect. These were American war heroes. They attacked gallantly and they deserved better than they got. And so we create mythology around that attack to try to give it meaning.

[17:36] It turns out that their attack did have meaning, but it's not the one that we typically associate with the books that we've read. I mean, in simple terms, in football parlance, if you will, VT-8 and VT-6 took 40 minutes off the clock, which is almost precisely the amount of time that Admiral Nagumo would have needed to spot his flight decks with aircraft and get them ready to launch. And we still don't know whether or not all of those aircraft were actually ready to go. There's a lot of debate over whether the torpedo planes were ready to go. But the dive bombers certainly would have been.

[18:07] And I think it's fair to say that had not VT-6 and VT-8 come in and attacked, ineffectual as those attacks were, Nagumo probably would have launched a counter strike some before the hammer actually came down on him. So now let's talk about the hammer coming down, the decisive attack. And this attack is decisive in every sense of the word because it ends up deciding the outcome of the battle in about a five minute time span or so.

[18:37] The tactical situation around 10 o'clock, just as VT is being driven out of the area is that now Kido Butai has been sighted by two separate formations of American aircraft neither of whom knows that the other formation is even out there From the southeast, you've got coming in a package from the carrier Yorktown comprising their dive bomber squadron, their torpedo squadron, and a group of six Wildcats that are riding herd on the torpedo planes. And then up from the southwest, you have two dive bomber squadrons from the Enterprise who are famously following one of the Japanese destroyers back to the main formation.

[19:15] This destroyer had been holding the head of an American submarine down long enough for that carrier formation to move past it and is now rejoining Kido Butai and VB-6 and VS-6 basically follow that guy back home. So this is what begins developing at about 10 in the morning and what you see happening is VB-3 from Yorktown sort of loops way around to the north and is going to attack Soryu. The Enterprise people are coming in from the southwest.

[19:47] The formation that the Japanese focus on and see first is VT-3. And if you want to talk about climactic torpedo bomber attacks that really distort the Japanese combat air patrol, this is the one. Because what we see happening very quickly is that the whole southeast threat vector just fills full of Zeros as they first pry off the Wildcat escorts from VT-3 and then go about dissecting the torpedo bomber attack. So that is the attack that actually pulls the majority of those Zeros out of position and leaves the door open for the dive bombers to come in and do their thing.

[20:22] So if we take a look at Enterprise's attack coming in from the southwest, it's being run by these two gentlemen. Lieutenant Commander Wade McCluskey, who's the newly minted commander of Enterprise Air Group. He just took it over a month prior. And he is leading a three-plane command element that is heading up Scouting Squadron 6. And then behind him comes Lieutenant Richard Best, who is the commanding officer of VB-6. The way things should go, if everything goes by the book, if you've got two squadrons of dive bombers and you've got two fleet carrier targets, you want to dedicate one squadron apiece to each of those targets.

[20:58] And furthermore, you want to use your leading squadron, which in this case is Scouting 6, to go after the further target, which in this case is a Kagi, and lead the trailing squadron to deal with the closer target, which would be Kaga. Reason being, if I can dive on those ships more nearly simultaneously, I hopefully attain surprise on both of those vessels. They don't have the time to maneuver or generate defensive fire, and I put more ordnance on target. Unfortunately, something ends up happening, and we're still, to this day, I don't think, completely clear on what went down.

[21:31] It may have been that both Best and McCluskey were talking at the same time over the single comm circuit that was being used by these squadrons, and they just didn't hear each other. But the result is that McCluskey leads VS-6 against CAGA as well and spoils Dick Best's dive in VB-6. So what's shaping up is that CAGA is going to get both barrels here, and Akagi is going to get off scot-free. At least that's what it's looking like. And that is a very, very bad thing.

[22:02] The reason it's a bad thing has mostly to do with this gentleman, Lieutenant Commander Murata Shigahara, who is universally acknowledged as the leading torpedo attack practitioner in the Imperial Navy. He was the attack leader for the torpedo units at Pearl Harbor. It is his men who devastated Battleship Row. His squadron on Akagi is composed of 100 Pearl Harbor veterans And it not much of a stretch to say that this is you know the finest torpedo plane squadron on the planet at this point If Akagi gets off the hook, Murata gets off the hook.

[22:39] And at about 11 o'clock, his squadron is going to go out with Hiryu's dive bomber squadron and they're going to go looking for the American carriers. And now, yes, we've just established the counterfactual history is mostly a bunch of malarkey, but hear me out. If those two squadrons go after Yorktown and they catch her, the odds are that they're going to sink her outright. And at that point, you know, the battle's kind of a crapshoot. It's up in the air. I got two carriers on each side. I don't know who wins. You know, conceivable the Japanese might walk away with something approaching a victory.

[23:13] You know, three carriers to two. If something like that ends up happening, there are going to be people like me standing on the stage 70 years down the road pointing the finger of blame at Wade McCluskey and saying, that's the guy who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory because he could not set up an attack according to doctrine. You know, he'd be the goat. But fortunately for everybody, that's not what ends up happening. Dick Best has just had his dive spoiled by McCluskey's onset, and he manages to pull out in time.

[23:44] He manages to grab two other guys from his squadron. The rest of his squadron follows McCluskey down, and they just, you know, destroy Akagi. But Dick Best has now got three airplanes, and he very quickly assesses that I can't let Akagi get away, and he hustles off to the north with his little three-plane element, and they attack Akagi. And the planes come down, the bombs come down, and one bomb ends up landing about where you see those zeros parked on Akagi's flight deck.

[24:16] And if you do the forensics on the attack, three planes in in a rough V formation. The bombs also come down in a rough V formation. The one in the center is the one that delivers the fatal hit. It's pretty clear that Dick Best is the guy who delivers that bomb. So at the end of this attack, we've got three carriers out of commission at this point. And by the end of the afternoon, we're going to go out and we're going to find the hear you, and we're going to put her under as well. And that's pretty much the battle as far as that's concerned.

[24:48] Game over. The things that this illustrates to me, first of all, you absolutely have to have smart people in your command billets. I don't want this to be taken as John ragging on Wade McCluskey. Wade McCluskey made some absolutely sterling command decisions to put his two squadrons in a position where they could actually deliver that attack. You know, well done, Wade McCluskey. But at the same time, command decisions in and of themselves do not put ordinance on target.

[25:19] You've got to have operators. And so Dick Best makes what I think is the single most important tactical decision of that morning in assessing that we have a problem here that needs to be fixed and then having the incredibly good airmanship to come in and put the bomb where it needs to go. So these two guys really are sort of, you know, two sides of the same coin, if you will. And, you know, they are both going to walk away with the Navy Cross, and Wade McCluskey is going to retire a rear admiral, so good on them.

[25:51] But again, for our future flag-rank people, remember the value of having good subordinates underneath, because in many cases these people can pull your fat out of the fire. So now I want to talk a little bit about the big picture. zoom back up to the big picture, and examine how Midway fits into the scheme of things with respect to the Pacific War Because down through the years Midway has been trotted out as an example of a decisive naval battle along with battles like Salamis or Lepanto or the Battle of Tsushima But really, how does it stack up in that sense?

[26:28] If you sort of take a look at the short-term effects, obviously this was a very bad day at the office for the Japanese. You know, four carriers sunk, 3,000 guys, KIA, 250 planes. Not a good day at all. But what does that really mean? One way to evaluate that is to sort of take a look at what I call the carrier scorecard up to this point of the war. When the war starts, both sides have got six big flight decks, although two of ours are out in the Atlantic. The Japanese have also got five light carriers that they're going to be using for their operations.

[27:00] So it's pretty clear that the Japanese have got a little bit of an advantage here in terms of the number of flight decks. By the time we get up to the eve of Midway, we've lost the carrier Lexington sunk at Coral Sea. Saratoga has a nasty habit of running across enemy submarine torpedoes, so she's in the shop. Shokaku and Zuikaku are likewise in the shop as a result of the Battle of Coral Sea, and they've written off the carrier Shoho, and they've gotten the Junyo, which is a relatively mediocre converted carrier. You walk out of Midway, ouch.

[27:33] you've just lost two-thirds of your big flight decks in an afternoon, and frankly, the foremost capable of those flight decks in an afternoon. This is tantamount to a national catastrophe. And if we then forward project what's going to happen over the remainder of the war and start factoring in the carrier building programs of these two combatants, nothing much is going to change in 1942. You know, the Japanese are going to get Junyo's equally mediocre sister Hiyo into the mix, and we're going to launch the first of our Essex class carriers at the very end of 1942.

[28:06] But then take a look at what happens middle of 1943, end of 1943, middle of 1944, end of 1944. And it's really not until about September of 44 that the Japanese replaced their midway losses on a unit by unit basis. Middle of 1945, oh and by the way we built about 124 Jeep carriers as well. So here's where you can see that throwing away that trump card of theirs where they had that advantage in flight decks, throwing that away, once it's gone they could never, ever get it back because our industrial power just guaranteed that.

[28:48] And they really threw that card away probably a year to 18 months before they really even needed to do so. That's a big ouch. Short-term effect number two then is by throwing away that trump card, they've created a condition of parity in flight decks in the Pacific Ocean. And we live in a day and age where the U.S. Navy has been essentially unchallengeable at sea for the last 70 years or so. And so, you know, clawing your way back to parity does not sound like a very exciting thing.

[29:21] I'm here to tell you, in the dark days of 1942, being able to get back to parity was electrifying. It was wonderful. because what it allowed us to do was get out of this reactive mode where we're constantly being on the defensive and reacting to Japanese blows and we can now begin thinking about how can we take the battle and the war to the enemy. So if you think really big picture, I think any discussion of strategy in World War II is predicated to a large extent on this graph which shows us the GDP of the major combatant nations and in particular If you look at U.S. versus Japan, what you see is we came into this war with a GDP that is five and a half times larger than Japan's, and we're going to exit the war with an economy that's eight times larger.

[30:12] And not only that, but in terms of population and automobile manufacturing and raw material production, you know, coal, steel, bauxite, anything you'd care to name, we've got it just all over the Japanese. We have a crushing superiority. And that, I think, gives us the ability to then evaluate whether or not this battle is decisive. Because in our minds, the image of a decisive battle is that it is also going to decide the course of the larger conflict.

[30:43] That the loser of that battle is going to lose the war, the winner of that battle is going to win the war. And yet, I think you can see from the foregoing that even if America had lost at Midway, as horrible as that would have been, we are still going to win this war. That by late 1944 we are going to come out with our brand new navy and we are going to crush the Japanese. And there's just nothing that they can really do about that. So I think it's very difficult to reconcile the concept of a decisive battle within the context of a war whose outcome is kind of preordained.

[31:19] And I'm not the first guy to say this. You know, H.P. Wilmot points out that the American victory in the Pacific might have been inevitable. The American victory at Midway might have been decisive, but not both of these statements can be true. And so I'm very much in the camp that says that given the economic disparities that were functioning here, we're going to win this war. So great, we're going to win this war. But here we are in the middle of 1942 and, you know, just being able to whip out our checkbooks and saying, well, we have a larger checkbook, that does not mean that we get to win.

[31:53] We actually have to fight these guys. And up until this point, this war has actually been relatively episodic in nature for us. Yes, there's been some ground combat going on in the Philippines. We've had a couple of naval battles. They haven't been terribly large. We've launched some carrier raids around the perimeter. But we're not in a position at this point where we are in constant contact with the Japanese. And at the beginning of the war, that was good for us because we were so horribly disorganized that, you know, We didn't want this war to be an intensive war.

[32:25] We wanted to just buy some time that we could start reorganizing. But now, in the middle of 1942, the productive spigots are beginning to turn on. And if you're the bigger, more powerful opponent, you want, as much as possible, to get your smaller, weaker opponent in a position where you can begin using attrition on them. The metaphor I use is a sausage grinder. I want to be someplace in the Pacific where every single day I am killing Japanese soldiers. I am shooting down their airplanes.

[32:56] I've got a high probability of damaging or destroying some of their naval vessels. Because even despite the economic disparity here, Japan is still a large, powerful, modern, industrialized nation. And the only way to beat a country like that is to subject it to tremendous levels of cumulative attrition that just grind up and destroy their military. That's what you have to do to win this war. And so really, you know, our to-do list for 42 is really very simple. You know, get the Japanese the headlock somewhere, and it doesn't even really matter where, and just start giving them the business.

[33:30] That's what we need to do. And lo and behold, the Japanese give that to us in not one place, but two within two months of our having won at Midway. The first is that they land troops on the northern shore of New Guinea and begin marching across the Owen Stanley Mountains to try to lay siege to the port of Port Moresby on the southern coast of New Guinea And that's going to bring the Australians in very quickly, and pretty soon there will be an American division in there as well, and that's going to kick off a campaign in New Guinea that basically lasts to the end of the war.

[34:08] More importantly, right at about at the same time that Midway was going down, we became aware that the Japanese were intending on moving forces down through the Solomon Islands so that they could begin threatening the supply lines that run through places like Fiji and Samoa and down into the eastern coast of Australia. Australia is very, very important to us. And not surprisingly, we reacted to that very vigorously. and at the beginning of August of 1942, we put a division of Marines into Guadalcanal to take away that airfield, and that's going to kick off a campaign that's going to last for the better part of five months.

[34:45] And it is here, off Guadalcanal, in this constant series of naval battles that develop over time, and also a number of fairly big land battles as well, this is the sausage grinder. This is exactly what the U.S. needed in order to really start stoking up attrition. Because in the course of this campaign, the Japanese are going to lose hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of airplanes.

[35:16] They're going to lose tens of thousands of soldiers. Dozens of ships sunk, dozens more damaged. This is exactly the sort of attritional warfare model that we needed to be applying to the Japanese in order to win that war. So when I look at Midway, I very much would agree that Midway is the most important single naval battle in the Pacific, not because it was decisive in an outright sense, but because what it did to our short-term military options.

[35:46] It very much was a turning point because it ended one phase of the war, brought the curtain down on that, and then led us into the next phase of the war that lets us create the kind of war we need in order to beat the Japanese. Last thing I'd like to do is just spend a couple minutes talking about the human dimension here. I have no doubt that there are a number of people in the audience who are quite familiar with the cockpit of an aircraft like the F-18.

[36:18] And just for a few moments, think about what it would be like to go into battle in the cockpit of an airplane like a Dauntless dive bomber. You know, we live in a day and age where I imagine a lot of us probably can't get to the grocery store and back without our phone whispering sweet nothings in our ear and telling us how to get there. You know, there was none of that in 1942. There's no satellites. There's barely any radar on the ship, certainly none in the planes.

[36:49] You know, two guys climbed into the cockpit of this thing and were basically told, you know, fly over that away. We think they're over there someplace. Go find the Japanese fleet and bomb them. And their navigational aids were a ruler, a compass, and a little paper chart that was small enough that you could fit on a clipboard. A lot of them didn't have training even on the high frequency radio homing devices that they were supposed to use to get back to their own carriers. They didn't know how to use the equipment. And not surprisingly, a lot of these guys didn't get back.

[37:23] That took real courage to make that happen And so you know as we leave today and go off to our comfortable homes and our refreshing malted beverages you know please remember to raise your glass this evening to the men of the United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps and the United States Army Air Forces whose skill and bravery and willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice, have called upon, won for us the great victory that we remember 72 years today.

[38:00] Thank you so much. Do we want to do any Q&A? All right, I'm up for it. If anybody wants to ask anything, I don't know how I'm going to possibly hear you. Sir? Lieutenant Commander Rob Riley, Seminar 2. You had the question mark up there about the Battle of Midway. Is that in reference to the current activities that are happening around the world drawing us to the Pacific?

[38:35] No, no, that was more meant to just, I wanted to make people stop and think about the phrase turning point. It's one of those phrases that we just kind of toss out there without even thinking. And so the basic goal was to just make you think about, was this really a turning point? And I hope I have answered that, yeah, Midway really was a turning point in the Pacific War. Sir? What new information did you have as a stimulus to want to write this book?

[39:06] The question is, what new information did Tony and I have as a stimulus to write this book? The basic deal is that for the first 65 years, the history of this battle has been told mostly from American sources, and there was a trio of Japanese sources that had been translated into English over that time. One of them was the captured battle report of Admiral Nogumo. The second was a series of interviews that were done by Japanese officers after the war.

[39:37] The third was a book written by a guy named Mitsuo Fuchida, who was the attack leader at Pearl Harbor. He was also at Midway. He wrote a book called Midway, the Battle that Doomed Japan. Those three sources sort of formed the canon, if you will, of the Japanese source material that had been translated into English. It turns out that Fuchida was not telling the truth about some of the things that happened at Midway. And Tony and I, my co-author, became aware of some of these things when we started looking at some of the newer translations of the Japanese air group records, which had just become available in English.

[40:17] And one of the things we noticed was that the Japanese air group records are telling us that, man, there's an awful lot of CAP activity going on in these flight decks leading up to the climactic dive bomber attack at 1020. Fuchida's story is that, well, you know, at the time that the Americans attacked us, we were this close to being ready to go. That our flight decks were festooned with aircraft that were just minutes away from being ready to take off and counter-strike the Americans.

[40:47] And, oh, my God, you know, the gods of war sweep down and they take it away from us. It turns out that that's not true, that actually all of those attack planes were still in the hangars at that point in time. And the reason they were in the hangars is because the flight decks were busy with CAP evolutions. These were straight-deck carriers. They didn't have an angled flight deck. And so you could only be doing one thing at a time. You could be landing aircraft, you could be spotting aircraft, you could be launching aircraft And if I recovering aircraft I know that the fantail of my carrier has got to be shut down for recovery operations If therefore I can show you that at 10 10 minutes before she gets bombed, Akagi has recovered a trio of fighters, I can make some pretty definite conclusions that, you know what, those attack planes were no way spotted on the fantail of Akagi because I know she was bringing down aircraft.

[41:35] So the big picture answer is there were some new Japanese sources that had become available that we were very interested in and they ended up telling an entirely different story. Anybody else? Sir? You mentioned that the U.S. victory was seemingly inevitable. Could you conceive of any way the Japanese could have won? Or was their net assessment so long that the victory wasn't possible?

[42:05] Yeah, that's, the question is, was there any way for the the Japanese to really play their hand in such a way that they could come out with a win in the Pacific War. Obviously, technically, it's unknowable. I was just at a dinner last night, and I shared some other slides with some people of the naval order. And it's interesting, if you look at some of the quotes from Admiral Yamamoto during the planning operations, this would be about the April-May time frame, it's clear that even though the Japanese are riding a tide of victory, Yamamoto is very nervous, and he says to his staff officers before this set of war games, it's important for you guys to understand that we're not going to get any more surprise operations, or rather that the enemy is going to be alerted to us.

[42:52] It's going to be a much tougher fight. You have to understand that America has five to ten times our armaments capability, and that therefore the only way we can win this war is to play a very up-tempo game, keep our ops tempo high and just keep hitting them as hard as we can, as often as we can. I think what he's going there for is our morale. That's the only lever that he can see that if we potentially will throw in the towel soon enough, if we just beat the Americans up bad enough that they just say, oh, screw it, I don't care about the Dutch East Indies, take it, fine.

[43:27] That might get us to throw in the towel, but it's got to happen really fast. Personally, though, given the way that the Japanese began the war with a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, you know, anytime you see an image of the battleship Arizona, you know, burning, that is the image that is seared on every American's consciousness during this portion of the war. They want revenge on Japan. And I think that the Japanese have absolutely guaranteed for themselves that the political will is going to be there for the duration, just by the way that they started off that war.

[44:06] So I don't really see a lot of opportunities for Japan to win this war. I think you could make a very credible argument that the Japanese lost this war as soon as the first bomb fell on Pearl Harbor. That's it. We're going to crush you. So, anybody else? Sir? Good afternoon, sir. Commander Stavridis, Royal Australian Navy. In your book, do you cover Chester Nimitz's decision, which I think is quite a brave decision, to take on the superior Kido Butai force when his strategic guidance from FDR was certainly Atlantic first and not to get into any decisive battles?

[44:49] I'm sorry, I didn't understand the question at the end. Chester Nimitz's strategic guidance from FDR, as I understand it, was not to get into any decisive battles and certainly not to get into any decisive battles. Especially with Midway, where he was certainly the weaker force, his decision to actually go ahead. Yeah, let me talk about that. Admiral King actually issues some instructions to Nimitz, who then issues them to his carrier commanders, Fletcher and Spruance. What Nimitz tells his task force commanders is as follows.

[45:20] He says, "This battle has got to be fought according to the principle of calculated risk. You are not to expose your carrier forces to, the enemy unless you think you can do disproportionate damage to those forces in return. And the underlying context there is, hey, you know what? If you guys get yourselves in a bad situation and you don't think you can win this thing, do not fight down to the last bloody rowboat. pull out, go back home and let the Marines face up to an invasion. I guess that's what we always do to Marines, right?

[45:55] And so I think Nimitz had a very fine appreciation for the odds there. One of the things about this battle in terms of, hagiography or the mythology. The two most popular books on this battle, I would argue, are Walter Lord's Incredible Victory and Prang's Miracle at Midway. And the titles of both of those books tell you a lot about the American mindset around the odds that faced us during this battle. Little known fact, but Nimitz was actually willing to go into that battle with only two carriers. If he had not been able to repair Yorktown and get her back into service, even though his intel people are telling him that the Japanese may bring as many as five to the party, 30.

[46:34] He was still willing to go after them with two. That's pretty darn aggressive. But again, he's given his carrier commanders the ability to make their own decision as to what their odds are of inflicting good damage. If the odds were not good, Bring those carriers home. We've got other usages for them. And that stands in marked contrast, I think, to Admiral Yamaguchi who, during the afternoon, the Japanese have lost those first three carriers. They've only got Hiryu left at this point, right? Well, if you were an American commander and it just -- you know, seen three quarters of your fleet blown apart, yes, you would probably have counterattacked, but you would have placed, here you, at the extreme edge of her operational air range.

[47:20] Because you know that her air power is going to go down into a downward cycle at some point, right? I want to hit these guys, I'm going to hit them as long as I can hit them, but as soon as I don't have any offensive firepower, man, I'm going to head for the exit, so I'm going to bring that ship home. That is not what Admiral Yamaguchi did. He closed the range on the Americans the entire afternoon. And that speaks, I think, to two very different mindsets between the Americans and the Japanese in this battle is how they approached it. Thank you. Anybody else? Sir?

[47:53] prior questions. Thank you. Could the Japanese have attained their political aims without attacking Pearl Harbor? That is one of those, again, unknowable, Um... questions. There's a really interesting book that just came out by a woman named Eri Hota. who writes about the Japanese, decisions in the higher policy making circles of Japan leading up to the war.

[48:24] Because-- Counterfactually, one of the favorite scenarios that gets trotted out a lot is, well, why did you guys declare war on America at all? Just leave the Philippines alone. Don't attack Pearl Harbor. Go after the British and the Dutch and take away their stuff and leave the Americans alone. Because that obviously would have created a real political problem for FDR. How do I get a declaration of war against these guys if they haven't actually attacked me? And domestic opinion certainly doesn't want to be seen as, you know, supporting British colonialism.

[48:56] going to defend Singapore if we haven't been attacked. The problem is that, you know, it's not really politicians that are calling the shots in Japan at this point in time. It's military leaders, and no classically trained military leader is going to leave the Philippines unreduced in the event of a war because it's like a knife pointed at your supply lines running back from the southern resource area. So as soon as you make the determination, well, the Philippines have got to go, well, now you're in a war against America and that then gives Yamamoto the opportunity to say, well, if we were going to fight the Americans, for absolutely sure want to attack Pearl Harbor to take the Pacific fleet out of the equation.

[49:33] Again, I don't know that they could have done that just because the wrong people were kind of calling the shots in Japan at the time. So. Thank you guys so much for your time and attention. I really appreciate it.