by Ian W. Toll
Years later, after he had retired from the navy, Rochefort was asked to comment on the affair. He steadfastly refused to do so. Whether he deserved a medal for his efforts, he said, was beside the point. “We felt that we had earned our pay, because we felt that we had done the job,” he said. “We would have preferred to be on ships, but this was the job to which we had been assigned and the job that we seemed to be best fitted for, so therefore we did the best we could.” When the interviewer pressed him to elaborate, he demurred. “This would be a very sad and disappointing story, and I would not think that anything would be gained by going into it now.” Pressed further, Rochefort grew testy. “That’s history. I’m not going to discuss this matter any longer with you.”
NEWS OF THE ABYSMAL DEFEAT filtered into Japan. At the Imperial Headquarters in Tokyo, a witness recalled, the staff officers muttered to one another, “This is terrible. A disaster.” At Nagasaki, at the dockyard where the Musashi had been built, navy personnel “seemed strangely confused, standing silently with their arms folded.” The emperor was informed of the loss of the four carriers by an officer of the Naval General Staff. He was badly shaken, but managed to keep his chin up. “I had presumed the news of the terrible losses sustained by the naval air force would have caused him untold anxiety,” wrote Lord Privy Seal Koichi Kido on June 8, “yet when I saw him he was as calm as usual and his countenance showed not the least change. He said he told the navy chief of staff that the loss was regrettable but to take care that the navy not lose its fighting spirit. He ordered him to ensure that future operations continue bold and aggressive.”
On June 10, in a meeting of the liaison conference, navy officers discussed the battle but omitted the tally of Japanese losses. Even General Tojo, who as prime minister of Japan might have expected prompt and unadulterated reports from the battle fronts, did not learn of the full extent of the navy’s losses until a week after the fact. Hirohito took a direct hand in the cover-up. He named an army general to oversee the process of disseminating the truth to military planners, in hopes of limiting the circle to a bare minimum. The emperor also directed that the returning wounded be sequestered in hospitals and naval bases until they could be reassigned to a departing ship or sent to a forward combat area.
The initial Japanese press reports were risibly exaggerated even when compared to the official results released later by the Imperial General Headquarters. On June 6, the English-language broadcasts of Radio Tokyo announced that “Six carriers of the United States Navy, which is very deficient in carriers, were sunk in a single smashing blow. Our fleet broke down the pitiful opposition of the United States fleet, bombarded the defenses of Midway and captured the islands with insignificant losses on our part. An attack has been started on Pearl Harbor and Honolulu. Honolulu is still holding out.”
Subsequent Japanese news reports dwelled on the aerial bombing of Midway and Dutch Harbor, the successful occupation of the two Aleutian islands, and the shelling of Sydney, Australia, by a Japanese submarine (the incident had occurred the same week). Newspapers and magazines published lavish photo spreads that appeared to substantiate the triumphant headlines. Soldiers stood to attention as the Japanese flag was raised over the island of Kiska. In pictures taken from the air over Midway and Dutch Harbor, one could see warehouses, hangars, and oil tanks burning fiercely. A column of soldiers on Attu, grinning broadly for the camera, pulled a machine gun on a bobsled over a snowfield; in an adjoining photo, they slid down an icy hill on their bottoms. They laughed merrily, as if on a winter holiday.
“It is curious that the enemy was unable to prevent the Japanese army and naval units from landing and occupying . . . his own territory,” said Captain Hideo Hiraide, an Imperial Headquarters spokesman. “Naval operations have crossed the International dateline and entered the Eastern Pacific area, while the occupation of western Aleutians islands has pointed a sword at the enemy’s throat.”
Rear Admiral Tanetsugu Sosa, writing in the Nichi Nichi, explained that the next stage of the war would take the Japanese navy to California. “Now that America’s northern attack route against our country and the most important enemy base in the Pacific Ocean have been crushed by the Imperial Navy in the recent battles of Dutch Harbor and Midway, Japan can now concentrate on attacking the mainland of the United States,” he wrote. “With its east coast constantly menaced by German and Italian warcraft and its west coast fully exposed to the possible attack by Japan, the United States has been driven between the devil and the deep sea.”
Reported Japanese losses were suspiciously vague and inconsistent. On the 10th, the Navy Ministry notified all commands that the official tally would be cited as one carrier sunk, one carrier and one cruiser damaged, and thirty-five airplanes lost. The next day, a well-known civilian naval expert reported in a radio broadcast that two Japanese carriers had been sunk. Not until June 21 did the navy promulgate its official story about the fate of Kido Butai. Two carriers, Kaga and Soryu, would be “taken off the ship’s register when there is suitable opportunity”—i.e., the navy would tacitly admit that they were gone, but quietly and in the most enigmatic manner possible. The Akagi and Hiryu would remain on the register, “but will not be manned”—in other words, the navy would concede that they had been damaged, but maintain the fiction that they had returned safely to Japan and were undergoing repairs. It was essential that “secrecy will be maintained . . . and discretion manfully exerted.”
Had these accounts been intended to mislead the Americans, they might have had a valid military purpose. (Indeed, the Americans had suppressed news of the sinking of the Lexington after the Battle of the Coral Sea.) But the Japanese also claimed that the U.S. Navy had lost a San Francisco–class cruiser, a submarine, and 150 planes—assertions the enemy could not be expected to believe. Mitsuo Fuchida observed that the Americans had “promptly announced to the whole world the damage inflicted on the Japanese, accurately naming the ships damaged and sunk. Thus it was clear that our efforts to conceal the truth were aimed at maintaining morale at home rather than at keeping valuable knowledge from the enemy.”
The Japanese fleet put into Hashirajima on June 14, through Bungo Strait waters shrouded in a gray fog. Returning crewmen were shuttled from ships to bases to overseas posts, where their eyewitness accounts of the battle could not seep out into civilian society. Many were confined to base, while others received brief liberty passes but were warned not to travel to Tokyo on penalty of arrest. Wounded men were carried off their ships in the dead of night, sheets drawn up over their faces as if they were dead, and quarantined in isolated medical wards. Though he was not seriously injured, Fuchida was put in a secure ward at the Yokosuka Naval Base. “My room was placed in complete isolation,” he recorded. “No nurses or corpsmen were allowed entry, and I could not communicate with the outside. In such manner were those wounded at Midway cut off from the rest of the world. It was really confinement in the guise of medical treatment, and I sometimes had the feeling of being a prisoner of war.”
Nagumo and the top surviving officers of the First Air Fleet staff met on the battleship Kirishima. There was much discussion of needed changes—better plane-handling, armored flight decks, better damage control and firefighting procedures, a larger complement of Zeros to fly combat air patrol over the carriers. Many Japanese officers blamed the defeat on inadequate reconnaissance flights. Air officer Minoru Genda later gave his opinion that a lack of emphasis on patrol flights and reconnaissance was “the vital cause of defeat.” The Japanese were “fully aware” of the importance of reconnaissance, and yet, in spite of that, “we esteemed attack forces too highly.” Admiral Nobutake Kondo agreed: “We met with fiasco because we did not get any sign of the existence of an American task force near Midway Island. The need of high-speed, long-range reconnaissance planes was badly felt. It was our great regret that we lacked sufficient measures in establishing guard screens by means of submarines both ahead and to the sides of our fleet, as well as the fact that w
e failed to have some submarines go to Midway Island beforehand to get some information.”
Japan’s two remaining fleet carriers, Shokaku and Zuikaku, were organized as Carrier Division 1. They would remain under the command of Admiral Nagumo. (Many in the fleet blamed Nagumo for flaccid decision making in the desperate hours of the morning of June 4, but Yamamoto refused to allow his subordinate to take the blame.) Now, somewhat belatedly, the Japanese navy acknowledged the primacy of carriers over battleships and other surface units. Hulls that had originally been laid down as battleships were converted on the stocks to new carriers.
Reassured that the navy had won another spectacular victory, the Japanese public had no reason to expect heads to roll, and no senior officer lost his post. Yamamoto remained one of the most prominent and beloved figures in Japanese public life. But it was he who bore the greatest share of responsibility for the Japanese defeat. His plan had dispersed the fleet too widely, forfeiting the possibilities of mutual support. It had violated Mahan’s most fundamental tenet—concentration of forces—and for no good reason. It allowed the American fleet to isolate and destroy Nagumo’s carriers before any support could be rendered by the other elements of the Japanese fleet.
ON JUNE 10, the New York Times quoted an unnamed Japanese admiral who had commented in a Tokyo newspaper on the result at Midway. Though the admiral had not revealed details of Japanese losses, he did hint that the Japanese navy now anticipated a prolonged war of attrition in the Pacific. He maintained that Japan’s superior endurance and fighting spirit would prevail in such a struggle. “If the war should be protracted, both sides would be greatly exhausted,” he said. “Hence, in the long run that side would lose that first tired of the struggle and the losses entailed by it.” Two days earlier, the New York Times had quoted Admiral King, who emphasized the importance of American material superiority. In a war of attrition, said King, the Japanese would be gravely disadvantaged, because “their capacity to replace their losses is all too obviously not equal to our capacity.”
Here, neatly encapsulated in these two remarks, were the two combatants’ strategic paradigms for the remaining war. Japan’s transcendent “fighting spirit” was to be pitted against America’s overwhelming industrial-military might.
For the three years of war to come, the Japanese acclaimed their unique “Yamato spirit,” and willed themselves to believe that it must deliver ultimate victory. They believed themselves to be a race like no other—a family of 100 million (the figure was about 30 million too high), racially pure and homogenous, descended from the gods, and united under the benevolent guidance of a father-emperor. The ideology was reinforced and disseminated by official slogans: “100 million advancing like a ball of flame”; “Think as one, act as one”; “Extravagance is the enemy.” Fired with overriding spirit, the Japanese at home and on the front lines would endure privations and hardships that the enemy could never withstand—they would work harder, eat less, and face death with samurai-like indifference. The new ethic was derived from traditional samurai and Zen ideas; at the same time it was a monstrous perversion of those ideas.
Military production and the relative size of the American and Japanese economies meant nothing, as one commentator said—for “true combat power is arms multiplied by fighting spirit. If one of them is infinitely strong, you will succeed.” As a corollary to that equation, it followed that nothing was impossible; every failure was, in essence, a failure of will. The answer to any military problem was to exhort the soldiers, sailors, and airmen to strive harder, to find the motivation to overcome whatever difficulties they encountered. They must abhor retreat or surrender. As the war grew more desperate in 1944 and 1945, many Japanese servicemen resolved to seek death for death’s sake, “to die as one of the emperor’s limbs”—for death in combat was a kind of ritual purification, and to spill one’s own blood was akin to the Shinto “ablution with water.”
For all its industrial-military power, the Japanese militarists calmly asserted, the United States lacked the requisite intangible spiritual qualities to prevail over Japan. A mongrel people, hopelessly individualistic and democratic, pitted against one another in bitter capitalist competition, the Americans would soon tire of the fight and go home. American women, whose excessive political influence was symbolized by the prominence of Eleanor Roosevelt, would not tolerate the loss of so many husbands, sons, and brothers. They would demand an end to the bloodshed before the war ever reached Japanese shores. Therefore it followed that the harder and more brutally the Japanese waged the conflict, the more quickly American resolve would wither. So it was said.
If the premise had been correct, Japan’s “fighting spirit” paradigm would undoubtedly have won the war. Latent industrial-military strength would count for little if the American people did not consent to fight. But from the day Nagumo’s carriers attacked Pearl Harbor, there was never any realistic prospect that the United States would fail to conquer and subjugate Japan. The American conception of “fighting spirit” was very different from that of the Japanese, but once fully aroused it was sufficient to the task, and sufficiently resilient. Bob Sherwood, the playwright–turned–presidential speechwriter, offered a very wise and provocative observation on this topic. Writing shortly after the war, he concluded that the American people’s collective morale “did not become a vital consideration. Morale was never particularly good nor alarmingly bad. There was a minimum of flag waving and parades. It was the first war in American history in which the general disillusionment preceded the firing of the first shot. It has been called, from the American point of view, ‘the most unpopular war in history’; but that could be taken as proof that the people for once were not misled as to the terrible nature and extent of the task that confronted them.”
Broadly united behind the war, the United States nonetheless remained a fractious democracy. There was no sudden scarcity of partisan acrimony, scandalmongering, electioneering, labor strife, violent crime, war profiteering, bid-rigging, ration-dodging, race riots, black marketeering, and bureaucratic turf-skirmishing. The hard-core isolationists had professed to fall in line behind the war, but they generally continued to hate the president and his circle of advisers no less ardently than they had before Pearl Harbor. Influential voices in Congress and the press demanded that the great weight of American power be turned away from Europe toward the Pacific. Roosevelt’s critics suggested that the president should relinquish his constitutional powers as commander in chief and confer them upon a properly qualified military authority, perhaps in the person of General MacArthur. CBS broadcaster Elmer Davis famously quipped: “There are some patriotic citizens who sincerely hope that America will win the war—but they also hope that Russia will lose it; and there are some who hope that America will win the war, but that England will lose it; and there are some who hope that America will win the war, but that Roosevelt will lose it!”
Even so, the retooling of the American economy for war was accomplished in remarkably little time. In April 1942, the U.S. War Production Board announced that the United States was already outproducing the Axis. The swift mobilization was overseen by an “alphabet soup” of new federal agencies—OPA, OPM, DPC, WPB, WRB, and SPAB.* It was not enough to write new federal contracts for ships, airplanes, and tanks. To effect an overnight militarization of the American economy, it was thought necessary to control the allocation of vital materials, and even to ban private industry from serving consumer markets. William Knudsen, chief of the Office of Production Management (OPM), refused to allow scarce raw materials to be fed into Detroit’s automobile assembly lines. The nation could no longer afford to manufacture automobiles for non-military uses, he said, because there was not enough rubber for the tires. The factories would manufacture weapons of war or they would not manufacture at all. The intrusion of federal power into the private economy was unprecedented in all of American history, up to that time and ever since, but the effort succeeded in spectacular fashion.
Betw
een 1940 and 1943, Britain tripled its war production; Germany and Russia doubled theirs; and Japan increased its war production fourfold. In that three-year period, the United States multiplied its war production by twenty-five times. U.S. aircraft production had stood at 5,856 units in 1939; in 1942, the figure reached 25,436. In the year 1944 alone, the United States would produce 96,318 aircraft, more than Japan’s total production between 1939 and 1945. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt approved a proposal to augment the 1940 naval expansion bill to build an additional 8 aircraft carriers, 24 cruisers, 102 destroyers, and 54 submarines—a total of 900,000 tons. The keels would all be laid by 1944. But even these plans were not sufficiently grand. In January 1942, the General Board of the Navy envisioned a fleet composed of 34 battleships, 24 carriers, 12 battle cruisers, 104 other cruisers, 379 destroyers, and 207 submarines. Since the nation’s shipyards were already producing at capacity, there were only so many new keels that could be laid right away. By 1945, however, the U.S. Navy would be larger (as measured either by number of ships or tonnage) than the combined fleets of every other navy in the world.
New recruits flooded into navy boot camps, where they had their hair sheared off—“leaving only an inch on top, bare on the sides.” They were assigned to two-story barracks where (they were firmly informed) there were no floors, no stairs, no elevators, no walls, no beds, and no bathrooms. (This being the navy, there were decks, ladders, hoists, bulkheads, bunks, and heads.) Dressed in dungaress, leggings, and round white hats, they drilled and marched for hours each day on blacktop parade grounds, “under arms, back and forth, up and down, on the oblique, to the rear rear rear harch.” Each crack of dawn they were rudely awakened with the shouted order: “Let go of your cocks and grab your socks.” Then they were off on trains and buses to distant regions of the country, and if they were sailors they were probably headed west, to San Diego or San Francisco or Puget Sound, the great staging and transshipment centers of the Pacific War.