The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History)

by Craig L. Symonds

  From the beginning, the Japanese had never imagined that they would be able to conquer the United States and dictate peace terms to the White House.* Rather, their goal was to demonstrate that it would be equally impossible for the Americans to conquer Japan. When the Americans launched their inevitable counterattack and attempted to fight their way westward across the Pacific, the Japanese planned to make their progress so painful that the Yankees would eventually decide that the cost of subduing them—in both blood and treasure—was unacceptable. Once that happened, a negotiated settlement was the only possible outcome, and in the course of those negotiations the Japanese would argue that they should be allowed to keep their Southeast Asian conquests. Their assumption that their Anglo-American opponents could be brought to the negotiating table after suffering reversals at sea was based in part on their experience in the war against Russia in 1904–5, when the Russians had accepted negotiations because they feared internal unrest at home more than defeat abroad. Such an assumption did not apply to the British or the Americans, however, especially after Pearl Harbor.2

  There was general agreement in Japan that to bring about the kind of stalemate that they hoped would trigger negotiations, at some point it would be necessary to establish a defensive perimeter around her new possessions and dare the Americans to assail it. The question was, where? Initially they assumed that this defensive barrier would run from the Kuriles in the northern home islands, through captured Wake Island (which the Japanese renamed Ōtorijima) in the central Pacific, then south to the Marshalls and Gilberts. But after the easy triumphs of January to March of 1942, they considered an expanded perimeter that might include Australia, Hawaii, or the Aleutians—or all three. There was also discussion about Japan’s obligations to Germany under the Tripartite Pact. The Army in particular pondered both the wisdom and the timing of an attack on the Soviet Union. And finally, there was Yamamoto’s determination to eliminate the threat of more American carrier raids by engineering a climactic naval battle somewhere in the central Pacific that would destroy those carriers once and for all. All of these options were contemplated by a Japanese decision-making architecture that depended less on clear lines of hierarchy and authority than on subtle and constantly shifting political and personal relationships between power centers, relationships that were frequently jealous and competitive.3

  In theory at least, the principal decision-making body in the Imperial Japanese Navy was the Naval General Staff. Until 1933, it had been subordinate to the Navy Ministry, but a “reform” that year—in effect a coup by the fleet faction—elevated the Naval General Staff to a position of de facto superiority, giving its members responsibility for armament, education, training, personnel, and command. The head of the staff was Admiral Nagano Osami, a 61-year-old career officer who had preceded Yamamoto in command of the Combined Fleet. Nagano was a battleship-and-cruiser man, a stolid, taciturn officer who had graduated from Eta Jima in 1900 and had been a staff officer in the Russo-Japanese War. Physically, Nagano (whose nickname was “The Elephant”) could hardly have been more different from the diminutive Yamamoto, but their career tracks were strikingly similar. Both men had served tours of duty in the United States and attended Harvard—in Nagano’s case, Harvard Law School. Both had been members of the treaty faction before the war and participated in the 1922 Washington conference and the 1930 London conference. They had both opposed Japan’s adherence to the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy. After that, however, Nagano adjusted his outlook. By April of 1941, when he became chief of staff, he had concluded that war had become inevitable. In light of this fact, Nagano actively supported a thrust southward to occupy the Dutch East Indies and British Malaya, at least in part to prevent the Army from dominating the decision-making process.4

  Admiral Nagano Osami (nicknamed “the Elephant”) headed the Naval General Staff in the spring of 1942. At a series of meetings in April, he and the rest of the staff capitulated to Yamamoto’s insistence on conducting Operation MI. (U.S. Naval Institute)

  The first open split between Nagano and Yamamoto came over the wisdom of striking at Pearl Harbor. Nagano believed that it would be possible to seize the British and Dutch possessions in the South Pacific without drawing the United States into the war. He argued that the Pearl Harbor gambit was unnecessary and risky, and that it would pull resources away from the all-important strike southward. Yamamoto saw this as timidity. He opined to an associate that Nagano was “the kind of man who thinks he’s a genius, even though he’s not,” and told another, “Nagano’s a dead loss.” In the end, Yamamoto got his way concerning Pearl Harbor by threatening to resign unless his plan was accepted. It was a particularly audacious piece of extortion, and Yamamoto was bold enough to tell Nagano “not to interfere too much and thus set a bad precedent in the Navy.” It is unimaginable that Chester Nimitz would have made such a suggestion to Ernie King, or that he would have kept his job if he had. A bad precedent was indeed set: a fleet commander could make strategic plans on his own and force those plans onto his putative superiors by threatening to resign. In the months after Pearl Harbor, the rampage of the Kidō Butai elevated Yamamoto’s prestige higher, though the admiral himself had remained aboard his flagship in Hashirajima Harbor near Hiroshima.5

  Now in March, with most of the war’s goals already achieved, Nagano and the Naval General Staff considered the next step. Their first instinct was to look southward. Nagano believed that when the Americans began their inevitable counteroffensive, they would use Australia as their base, and that could be forestalled at the outset by occupying the continent. Despite a successful raid by the Kidō Butai on the Australian naval base at Darwin in February, the Japanese Army was appalled by the notion of invading Australia. Because General Tōjō Hideki was both war minister and prime minister, the Army had a virtual veto over any plan that called for the participation of ground troops, and the Army had no interest in such an open-ended commitment. Australia was sparsely defended, as most of her soldiers had been sent to other theaters of war, but it would nonetheless take a minimum of ten divisions—some 200,000 men—to seize and hold just the northern coast, and Japan did not have ten divisions to spare, or the ships to transport and supply them.6

  Nor was the Army interested in another proposal of the Naval General Staff: the invasion and occupation of Ceylon in the Indian Ocean. The expectation was that such a move would provoke an uprising by the restive native population of India and threaten the British Empire where its stability was most precarious. According to one member of the Naval General Staff, a principal purpose of the operation was to “carry out Indian independence.” In addition, a move across the Indian Ocean toward the Persian Gulf offered the possibility of linking up with Axis forces, as well as access to the oil fields of the Middle East. Though the conquest of Ceylon would require only two divisions rather than ten, the Army was not interested. Its main concern continued to be the festering conflict in China, where four-fifths of its active divisions were concentrated. If the Army looked anywhere for new fields to conquer, it was to the north rather than the south or the west. In the late fall and early winter of 1941, as the Wehrmacht drove toward Moscow, many Japanese generals anticipated the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union, and they did not want to miss out on the spoils when that happened. They concluded that it was necessary to hold troops in readiness “to share a victory when the Germans succeed.”7

  The Army’s obstructionism bred resentment not only within the Naval General Staff in Tokyo but at Combined Fleet Headquarters on board Yamamoto’s flagship, where one of his staff officers complained: “We want to invade Ceylon; we are not allowed to! We want to invade Australia; we cannot! We want to attack Hawaii; we cannot do that either! All because the Army will not agree to release the necessary forces.” Yamamoto’s logistics officer recalled that, “since the Army-Navy could not come up with a common agreement of effort on the second phase operations, the Navy looked more and more toward what it could do alone.”8
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  Faced with the Army’s refusal to support invasions, Nagano and the General Staff fell back on their plans to send the Kidō Butai on a hit-and-run raid against British bases in Ceylon. In late March, Nagumo took five carriers and their escorts westward, south of Sumatra, and into the Indian Ocean. (The Kaga, having struck a submerged reef, went to Sasebo, near Nagasaki, for repairs.)

  Thanks to a warning from Allied intelligence, the British knew they were coming. In anticipation of the Japanese strike, Admiral Sir James Somerville mobilized his fleet, which included four old and slow battleships, but also two modern carriers—the Indomitable and the Formidable—and took up a position south of Ceylon, from where he hoped to threaten the flank of the Japanese fleet as it approached. He knew he could not slug it out toe-to-toe with the Kidō Butai; he hoped he might be able to inflict some damage with night torpedo attacks. For three days he waited. When the Kidō Butai didn’t appear, he sent two heavy cruisers—Dorsetshire and Cornwall—to the naval base at Colombo on Ceylon’s western coast, and withdrew the rest of the fleet to Addu Atoll in the Maldives, six hundred miles southwest of Ceylon, to refuel.

  Two days later, on April 5, Easter Sunday morning, 315 planes from the Kidō Butai struck Colombo. The British commander there, Vice Admiral Sir Geoffrey Layton, had sent most of the shipping to the north to get it out of harm’s way, and the two heavy cruisers sent to him by Somerville headed back for Addu Atoll. Layton also ordered out a squadron of Hawker Hurricane fighter planes—older cousins of the more famous Spitfire—plus half a dozen Fairey Swordfish biplanes armed with torpedoes for a counterattack. The Swordfish had performed well during a Royal Navy torpedo attack on the Italian naval base at Taranto the previous November, but they were helpless against the nimble Zeros. The Hurricanes, too, got much the worst of the encounter. In barely half an hour, the British lost twenty-seven aircraft, including fifteen Hurricanes, while the Japanese lost only seven bombers. The rest of the Japanese strike force, piloted by their superbly trained enlisted pilots, flew through the intercept and attacked the naval base, dropping their bombs on ships and yard facilities. They sank three British warships and wrecked the repair shops and the rail yard (something they had neglected to do at Pearl Harbor). The Kidō Butai was never threatened. It was not as decisive a blow as the one against the Americans, but once again the Japanese had demonstrated their air superiority over the West.9

  Worse was to come. The two heavy cruisers Layton had sent back toward Addu Atoll were en route there on April 6 when a Japanese search plane found them and radioed their location back to the Kidō Butai. Within twenty minutes, Nagumo had eighty-eight planes in the air winging their way toward the reported coordinates.10

  The cruisers never had a chance. Like the Prince of Wales and Repulse the previous December, they had no air cover and were therefore sitting ducks. Gun crews on the cruisers threw up all the antiaircraft fire they could muster, and the ships twisted and turned in the hope of confusing the dive-bombers, but with so many planes attacking—and from different directions at that—it was hopeless. The Dorsetshire went down first. Hit by ten bombs and concussed by several near misses, she sank in minutes. The Cornwall, hit by nine bombs, followed her a few minutes later. Once again, aircraft had proved their dominance over surface warships.11

  The Kidō Butai was not finished. Three days later, on April 9, the Japanese struck again, this time at the British naval base at Trincomalee on Ceylon’s east coast. Again, the British put up all the planes they had—twenty-three altogether, including seventeen Hurricane fighters—but they were brushed aside or sent spinning toward the sea in flames by the Zeros. The British also sent nine land-based Blenheim bombers to attack the Japanese carriers. Five were shot down over the target by the patrolling Zeros; the others limped back with serious damage. None scored a hit.

  As he had at Colombo, Layton sent most of his ships to sea to get them out of the way. The small aircraft carrier Hermes, with an escort of one destroyer, steamed southward along the coast. The Japanese found her nonetheless, and Nagumo sent ninety planes to the attack. The Val dive-bombers blanketed her with bombs, and the Hermes virtually disappeared under a rainstorm of hits and near misses. Within ten minutes, she and her escorting destroyer were dead in the water and sinking. After that, Somerville decided to send part of his force to Kenya on the east coast of Africa and took the rest, including the two carriers, north to Bombay, effectively surrendering the eastern Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal to the Japanese. “I am convinced,” he wrote, “that it is not good policy to take excessive chances with the Eastern Fleet for the sake of Ceylon.” Having secured Japan’s southern flank, Nagumo turned the Kidō Butai back toward the Pacific.12

  Even as the big carriers and their escorts steamed through the Straits of Malacca back into the South China Sea, the Japanese high command feuded over their next assignment. One option was to complete the isolation of Australia by seizing the islands of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Samoa—exactly what Ernie King and Franklin Roosevelt feared they would do. Even Japanese Army leaders supported these limited moves because they required fewer troops than the proposed alternatives.

  Another claimant on the Kidō Butai was Vice Admiral Inoue Shigeyoshi, commander of the South Seas Force. Inoue until recently had been head of the Naval Aviation Division, and he was a ferocious advocate of air power, especially land-based air. For most of his career, he had insisted that airplanes had made much of the Navy obsolete. “The days of the battleship are gone,” he had declared in 1937. “It has been replaced by the aircraft.” Inoue even argued that the effectiveness of long-range land-based airplanes made carriers obsolete. If that were not sufficiently heretical, he had declared in January of 1941 that it was “impossible … for Japan to defeat America,” and that the United States could “wipe out Japanese forces.” After that bit of apostasy, he was dispatched to the South Seas command, with his headquarters on the isolated island of Truk in the Carolines. In part, his reassignment was an aspect of the reshuffling of commands in anticipation of war, but in addition, like Yamamoto, he was banished to sea duty for his unwelcome ideas and his unwillingness to keep quiet about them.13

  It was Inoue’s Fourth Fleet, with support from the Kidō Butai, that had seized Rabaul back in January. He had been shocked on February 20 when only two of the seventeen bombers he had sent out against Wilson Brown’s Lexington task force had returned. After all, the ability of land-based aircraft to defend the perimeter of the empire was at the heart of his strategic vision and the foundation of Japan’s entire defensive strategy. Inoue’s shock turned to alarm after the Allied raid on Lae and Salamaua left him without enough shipping to continue the campaign. He notified both the Naval General Staff (Nagano) and Combined Fleet (Yamamoto) that before he advanced any further, he would need carrier support. He requested two carriers, but, given that the Kidō Butai was still in the Indian Ocean when he submitted this request, he declared that he would settle for the damaged Kaga, then undergoing repairs in Sasebo.14

  Another demand on the Kidō Butai soon arose in connection with a plan to occupy at least some of the Aleutians, the long chain of frozen rocky islands that trailed out from Alaska across much of the North Pacific. The westernmost of those islands was within theoretical bombing range of the northernmost of Japan’s home islands; the occupation of at least some of them would serve as an early-warning system in Japan’s defensive perimeter and also prevent the Americans from using them to stage air raids against the homeland. Thus by the end of March, even before the Kidō Butai had returned from the Indian Ocean, Japan’s naval leaders were considering two separate initiatives that would require its participation: one to break communications between Hawaii and Australia by seizing Port Moresby, the Australian base on the south coast of New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands, followed by an attack on Fiji and Samoa; and another to extend the defensive perimeter of the empire and protect Japan’s northern flank by seizing the westernmost of the Aleutian Islands.15

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p; Complicated as this was, it would soon get much more so, for none of this took Yamamoto into account. The apparent success of his calculated gamble at Pearl Harbor and the string of naval victories that followed had added greatly to his prestige and had given him unprecedented informal authority in crafting Japanese strategy for the “Second Operational Phase.” Once the Kidō Butai returned from the Indian Ocean, Yamamoto knew exactly what he wanted to do with it, and it did not involve Australia, New Guinea, or the Aleutians. He wanted to finish the job that Nagumo had left uncompleted at Pearl Harbor.

  Even before the Americans began their series of carrier-based raids on Japanese bases in the Marshall Islands and elsewhere, Yamamoto had concluded that it was essential to eliminate the danger of such raids by finding and sinking the American flattops. Though the Japanese public had celebrated Pearl Harbor as a great victory, Yamamoto himself, as noted above, had been hugely disappointed that Nagumo had not remained in the area long enough to wreck the base or to find and sink the American carriers. Nagumo had seen the American battle fleet as his most important target, and once that had been dispensed with he had broken off the raid. At the time, the young and aggressive commander of the Second Carrier Division, Rear Admiral Yamaguchi Tamon, blinkered Nagumo a signal that he had “completed preparations” for another attack, a not-so-subtle hint that there was more work to be done. But Nagumo was immune to such suggestions. Once he had recovered his airplanes, he turned the Kidō Butai around and headed for home. Had he launched a third strike, he might have destroyed the repair facilities on Oahu and especially the oil tank farm, which would have crippled the Americans far more than the loss of their battle fleet.16